SpaceX made it through its second attempt to launch 46 satellites on Friday (July 22), breaking a record along the way. The launch allowed SpaceX to surpass its 31 record launches of 2021 with a 32nd record launch in 2022, and still counting. Space.com reports: The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, which induced a scrub at T-46 seconds on Thursday (July 21), lifted off successfully from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California Friday. Liftoff took place at 1:40 p.m. EDT (1740 GMT or 10:40 a.m. local time at the launch site) amid severely foggy conditions on the west coast. Falcon 9's first stage also completed its mission, landing atop the "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship in the Pacific Ocean as planned, about 8.5 minutes after launch. The report notes that SpaceX has launched more than 2,800 individual Starlink satellites to orbit as the company seeks to build out its satellite-internet service.

If you have been on Steam, the world's largest PC gaming platform, you might have noticed an anomaly on the chart of the top 20 most popular apps: Wallpaper Engine. The software is pretty cool -- it lets you download animated and interactive wallpapers for your machine's monitor -- but it's hard to explain why an obscure wallpaper app consistently ranks alongside global blockbuster franchises like Counter-Strike or Dota. From a report: The epiphany will come when you begin to read Wallpaper Engine's many reviews. More than 200,000 of them are written in Chinese, stretching from 2016 to 2022. And these reviews almost all talk about one thing: porn. Or more specifically, about using the software as a cloud drive and a video player for exchanging adult-only content.

Online porn is banned in China, so people there have to get creative to access it. Steam is one of the only popular global platforms still available in the country, and its community features, international high-speed servers, and increasingly hands-off approach when it comes to sexual content have made it an inevitable choice. Chinese users now make up at least 40% of Wallpaper Engine's global user base, MIT Technology Review estimates. Last year, users in China suddenly needed to use VPN services to access certain Steam services. As the reviews show, now they are afraid they may soon lose this rare community, either because of platform content moderation or the possibility that China might block Steam altogether.

Tech companies should move ahead with controversial technology that scans for child abuse imagery on users' phones, the technical heads of GCHQ and the UK's National Cybersecurity Centre have said. From a report: So-called "client-side scanning" would involve service providers such as Facebook or Apple building software that monitors communications for suspicious activity without needing to share the contents of messages with a centralised server. Ian Levy, the NCSC's technical director, and Crispin Robinson, the technical director of cryptanalysis -- codebreaking -- at GCHQ, said the technology could protect children and privacy at the same time.

"We've found no reason why client-side scanning techniques cannot be implemented safely in many of the situations one will encounter," they wrote in a discussion paper published on Thursday, which the pair said was "not government policy." They argued that opposition to proposals for client-side scanning -- most famously a plan from Apple, now paused indefinitely, to scan photos before they are uploaded to the company's image-sharing service -- rested on specific flaws, which were fixable in practice. They suggested, for instance, requiring the involvement of multiple child protection NGOs, to guard against any individual government using the scanning apparatus to spy on civilians; and using encryption to ensure that the platform never sees any images that are passed to humans for moderation, instead involving only those same NGOs.

We appear to be entering a period of Windows' development where we can expect new features and tweaks to come to the operating system several times a year. To that end, Microsoft continues to add, remove, and generally experiment with Windows 11's features and user interface via its Insider Preview channels. From a report: The most interesting addition we've seen in a while is rolling out to users on the experimental Dev Channel now: a modified version of the taskbar with much-improved handling of app icon overflow when users have too many apps open at once. Click an ellipsis button on your taskbar, and a new icon overflow menu opens up, allowing you to interact with any of those extra icons the same way you would if they were sitting on the taskbar. This would be a big improvement over the current overflow behavior, which devotes one icon's worth of space to show the icon for the app you last interacted with, leaving the rest inaccessible. That icon will continue to appear on the taskbar alongside the new ellipsis icon. Microsoft says that app icons in the overflow area will be able to show jump lists and other customizable shortcuts the same as any other app icon in the taskbar.

Google's search engine is to be banned in the occupied Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk after pro-Russian authorities there accused the US tech giant of promoting "terrorism and violence against all Russians." From a report: In a statement posted to the social messaging service Telegram, Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), said: "The inhuman propaganda of Ukraine and the west has long crossed all boundaries. There is a real persecution of Russians, the imposition of lies and disinformation." He accused Google's search engine of being at the forefront of this effort, saying it "openly, on the orders of its curators from the US government, promotes terrorism and violence against all Russians, and especially the population of Donbas."

AMD looks to be on the cusp of releasing a competitor to RTX Voice, a feature for Nvidia graphics cards that cancels out background noise when you're on a call or otherwise using your mic. From a report: That's according to a trailer that AMD posted to its YouTube channel (apparently in error), Tom's Hardware reports. Thankfully, a copy of the trailer was downloaded before it was deleted by Reddit user u/zenobian and uploaded to the AMD subreddit. The leaked trailer suggests that AMD's Noise Suppression feature will work very similarly to Nvidia's RTX Voice (which has subsequently been rolled into Nvidia's Broadcast app). It uses "a real-time deep learning algorithm" to offer "two-way noise-reduction" that filters background noise out of both outgoing and incoming microphone audio, and is apparently built into AMD's existing Adrenalin software.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp has likely advanced its production technology by two generations, defying US sanctions intended to halt the rise of China's largest chipmaker. From a report: The Shanghai-based manufacturer is shipping Bitcoin-mining semiconductors built using 7-nanometer technology, industry watcher TechInsights wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. That's well ahead of SMIC's established 14nm technology, a measure of fabrication complexity in which narrower transistor widths help produce faster and more efficient chips. Since late 2020, the US has barred the unlicensed sale to the Chinese firm of equipment that can be used to fabricate semiconductors of 10nm and beyond, infuriating Beijing.

A person familiar with the developments confirmed the report, asking not to be named as they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. SMIC's surprising progress raises questions about how effective export controls have been and whether Washington can indeed thwart China's ambition to foster a world-class chip industry at home and reduce reliance on foreign technologies. It also comes at a time American lawmakers have urged Washington to close loopholes in its Chinese-oriented curbs and ensure Beijing isn't supplying crucial technology to Russia. The restrictions effectively derailed Huawei Technologies's smartphone business by cutting it off from the tools to compete at the cutting edge -- but that company is now quietly staffing up a renewed effort to develop its in-house chipmaking acumen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A video started circulating on Twitter Thursday of a Boston Dynamics-style robot dog firing a submachine gun into targets amid a snowy backdrop. This type of robot dog (it doesn't seem like the robot in the video is a Boston Dynamics Spot, just looks a lot like it) is famous for dancing, but now appears to have fulfilled every warning given by journalists and analysts. It's got a gun and it's ready to kill. A lot of questions remain. First, the robot dog doesn't seem to be able to handle the recoil of the gun well. As it fires its rounds, the barrel trails up and the dog has to take a minute to get its balance back. We also don't know if the dog is firing on its own or if, and this is more likely, someone is off-camera pulling the trigger remotely.

The robot's feet, various ports, and its front are completely different from Boston Dynamics' Spot. There's dozens of knockoffs of the Boston Dynamics dog selling on the international market. The one in the video appears to be a UnitreeYusu "technology dog" selling on AliExpress for about $3,000. The feet, port placement, and joint coverings are all the same. The robot also has strips of Velcro on either of its flanks. The left flank bears a Russian flag and the other appears with a wolf's head. In another video on the channel, a man wears a similar patch on his arm. It appears to be a wolf's head insignia commonly associated with Russian Special Operations Forces or Spetsnaz. That doesn't mean that Spetsnaz is using armed robot dogs, as pretty much anyone can buy a similar patch online in various places.

The gun is also Russian. It appears to be a PP-19 Vityaz, a submachine gun based on the AK-74 design. As the dog wanders around and fires, it sometimes moves in front of an armored personnel carrier with a unique triangular door. That's a BDRM-2, a Russian armored car that's been spotted recently in Ukraine. Finally, there's the account the video originally appeared on. Before making its way to Twitter, the video of the dog was posted to the YouTube account of Alexander Atamov on March 22, 2022. Atamov is listed on his LinkedIn profile as the founder of "HOVERSURF" and his Facebook page lists him as living in Moscow. He posted a picture of the robot dog on March 21. According to Facebook's translation of his post, he called the dog "Skynet."

It appears that a crypto Twitter user named Cobie influenced the FBI into bringing an insider trading case. From a report: The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York is bringing an indictment against a former Coinbase employee, who allegedly tipped his brother and his buddy about which assets were about to list on Coinbase -- leading to $1.5 million in "realized and unrealized gains," according to the indictment. This is the first insider trading case involving cryptocurrency markets, says U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, in a statement.

Ishan Wahi, the Coinbase employee who was charged, was involved in listing new crypto assets on Coinbase's exchange. When Coinbase announces that a new token will be listed, that token often pops in value -- which means that the company told employees to keep silent about Coinbase's listing plans. Wahi started working for Coinbase in October 2020. In August 2021, he was allowed access to a channel where Coinbase employees discussed listing new projects with details like "exact announcement / launch dates + timelines."

Snap announced plans to "substantially reduce" hiring and shake up its strategy as it posted bleak second-quarter results, blaming tough macroeconomic conditions but also stating it was "not satisfied with the resultsâ... regardless of the current headwinds." From a report: The social media company lost about a quarter of its value on Thursday after posting the results, which chief executive Evan Spiegel said "do not reflect our ambition." Revenues at the Los Angeles-based social media company increased 13 per cent to $1.11bn in the three months to the end of June, just shy of analysts' consensus of $1.13bn. Net losses stood at $422mn, a drop of 178 per cent year-on-year and far greater than analyst estimates of losses of $340mn, according to data compiled by S&P Capital IQ.

[...] Spiegel said that Snap planned to focus on product innovation, diversifying revenue and investment in its direct response advertising business in order to address the slowdown. In a letter to investors on Thursday, Snap said that brands were slashing digital advertising budgets due to the wider economic slowdown and inflationary pressures, as well as privacy changes by Apple that have made it harder to target advertising and measure the success of campaigns. It also said business had been hurt by increased competition, as new entrants such as Chinese-owned TikTok take market share.

Hyundai Motor, factory robot builder ABB and Swedish fridge maker Electrolux see the semi-conductor chip shortage easing, executives said Thursday, in a boost for manufacturers after a long struggle for components. From a report: An increased supply of chips will reduce one burden facing an industry that is also battling raw material price inflation, a tight energy market and rising interest rates that are throwing a dampener on consumer demand. Hyundai turned in its best quarterly profit in eight years on Thursday as a weak won currency lifted the value of its earnings abroad and demand stayed strong for the South Korean automaker's high-margin sport utility vehicles (SUVs). The carmaker was also boosted by the easing of a global chip shortage, which helped it resume overtime and weekend shifts at domestic plants. It now plans to step up vehicle production in the second half to meet consumer demand.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: With the addition of the developer-generated Data safety section this year, Google Play removed the old list of app permissions. The Play Store is now reversing this decision in response to user feedback and will have both coexist. In a short thread this morning, Android Developers (@AndroidDev) on Twitter said it "heard your feedback that you find the app permissions section in Google Play useful, and we've decided to reinstate it." It will be "back shortly," but the company did not specify if this will be done through a server-side change or whether a new version of the Play Store app is required: "The Data safety section provides users with a simplified view of how an app collects, shares, & secures user data, but we also want to make app permissions information easily viewable for users to understand an app's ability to access specific restricted data & actions too."

As Google summarizes, the Play permissions list is "based on the install-time permissions that an app declares in its manifest," and "represents an app's ability to access specific data." Data safety is focused on what an app collects and shares with third parties, similar to Apple's App Store. As of July 20, Google is directly warning "non-compliant new app submissions and app updates" that don't completely fill out the Data safety form. Developers have until August 22 to comply or they won't be able to publish new apps or updates. After that, applications might be removed from the Play Store.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has ordered mobile carriers to explain what geolocation data they collect from customers and how they use it. Rosenworcel's probe could be the first step toward stronger action -- but the agency's authority in this area is in peril because Congress is debating a data privacy law that could preempt the FCC from regulating carriers' privacy practices.

Rosenworcel sent letters of inquiry Tuesday "to the top 15 mobile providers," the FCC announced. The chairwoman's letters asked carriers "about their policies around geolocation data, such as how long geolocation data is retained and why and what the current safeguards are to protect this sensitive information," the FCC said. The letters also "probe carriers about their processes for sharing subscriber geolocation data with law enforcement and other third parties' data-sharing agreements. Finally, the letters ask whether and how consumers are notified when their geolocation information is shared with third parties," the FCC said. "Mobile Internet service providers are uniquely situated to capture a trove of data about their own subscribers, including the subscriber's actual identity and personal characteristics, geolocation data, app usage, and web browsing data and habits," the letters say. Under US communications law, carriers are prohibited from using or sharing private information except under specific circumstances. Rosenworcel told carriers to answer the questions by August 3.

[...] Among other things, Rosenworcel's letters ask carriers to describe in detail the geolocation data they collect and retain from customers, to explain why such data is retained for current and former subscribers, how long the data is retained for, a description of safeguards used to protect the data, and what country or countries the geolocation data is stored in. The letters also ask for details regarding how data retention policies are disclosed to subscribers, data deletion policies, and whether subscribers can opt out of data retention. A second list of questions focused on data sharing asks for each carrier's "process and policies for sharing subscriber geolocation data with law enforcement;" for descriptions of "the arrangements, agreements, and circumstances in which [the carrier] shares subscriber geolocation data with third parties that are not law enforcement;" and whether subscribers are "notified of the sharing of their geolocation information with third parties that are not law enforcement." The data-sharing section also probes whether the carriers let customers opt out of programs that share data with third parties. Because geolocation data is highly sensitive and can be combined with other types of data, "the ways in which this data is stored and shared with third parties is of utmost importance to consumer safety and privacy," Rosenworcel told carriers in the letters. Further reading: Homeland Security Records Show 'Shocking' Use of Phone Data, ACLU Says

Microsoft is eliminating many open jobs, including in its Azure cloud business and its security software unit, as the economy continues to weaken. From a report: These hiring cuts will continue for the foreseeable future, Microsoft said, while declining to comment on which departments and businesses are affected. The company said it is honoring job offers that have already been made for open roles and will make some exceptions for critical jobs.

It's an expansion of a hiring slowdown disclosed in May, which mostly affected its Windows, Office and Teams groups. In June, Insider also reported cuts to new headcount in the security business. The latest slowdown, which was communicated by executives in the groups to their teams, impacts the company's cloud crown jewels -- a key source of growth and investor scrutiny -- as well as a newer priority area in security.

Samsung Electronics has floated the prospect of investing nearly $200 billion for 11 new chip-making plants in Texas over the next two decades, a mega splurge that if executed would dramatically boost its semiconductor foothold in the U.S. From a report: The South Korean tech giant's proposed spending was divulged in recent filings submitted to the Texas Comptroller's office and made public Wednesday. One likely motivation is a year-end expiration of a Texas state incentive program offering property tax breaks for 10 years for large investments. The filings don't commit Samsung to invest. The Suwon, South Korea-based company doesn't currently have specific plans to pursue the new factories outlined in the filings, a Samsung spokeswoman said. The spending proposals reflect the company's long-term planning process to evaluate the viability of further U.S. expansion, she added.

Facebook parent Meta Platforms is changing the way it shows users posts and videos on its flagship social network, part of an effort to get people to watch content from accounts they don't already follow and better compete with the video app TikTok. From a report: The main feed on Facebook will now be called "Home," and will be a place for people to "discover new content" that Facebook thinks that they'll like, according to a company blog post. That includes photos and videos selected by software algorithms, which will surface content based on users' interests, from both accounts they follow and those they don't.

The changes will start Thursday, but the majority of the content will still come from accounts users follow, a Meta spokeswoman said. The company plans to increase the new content it shows over time as it improves the recommendation algorithm. A new tab, called "Feeds," will exclusively show posts from friends, family, pages and groups that a person has chosen to follow, with the most recent content at the top. "Your Home tab is uniquely personalized to you," the company explained in its blog. "This system takes into account thousands of signals to help cut through the clutter and rank content in the order we think you will find most valuable."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg will have to provide testimony to a federal court to discuss their alleged involvement in the company's notorious Cambridge Analytica scandal, over half a decade since it first captured the world's attention. [...] Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm that used Facebook user data to target and lobby potential voters ahead of the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump. The ensuing scandal helped trigger an investigation from the Federal Trade Commission that resulted in Facebook agreeing to a record-setting $5 billion settlement over its privacy practices.

A new filing (PDF) in the Northern District of California Tuesday shows Zuckerberg and Sandberg agreed to be deposed for six and five hours respectively in September of this year. This comes as part of a class action lawsuit filed against Meta, claiming the company violated consumer privacy laws when it shared user data with Cambridge Analytica back in 2015. [...] In addition to Zuckerberg and Sandberg, the court's also seeking to depose Meta's newly named CTO Javier Olivan -- who previously served as the company's Chief Growth Officer -- as well as a handful of other "key witnesses." Olivan's deposition is expected to last three hours. According to Tuesday's filing Meta will also hand over 1,200 documents "previously withheld as privileged." Plaintiffs in the case previously accused Meta and the law firm representing it of "stonewalling," during the court's discovery phase.

Up to 8,000 Ford employees could be hit by job cuts, according to a Wednesday report from Bloomberg. The move could be part of a plan to cut $3 billion in operational costs from the company's gasoline-powered business operations in order to boost profit and invest more into Ford's electric-vehicle endeavors. Car and Driver reports: The cuts will reportedly come in the Ford Blue division, which handles production of Ford's internal-combustion-engine vehicles, and primarily come from salaried positions. There are approximately 31,000 salaried workers at Ford currently. Ford CEO Jim Farley announced in March a radical restructuring of Ford called the Ford+ plan, creating the Ford Blue division and the Model e division, which handles electric vehicles. As part of the plan, he also boosted spending on EVs to $50 billion, which he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television was "based on our core automotive operations." Farley also added that "We need [Ford Blue] to be more profitable to fund this."

Previously, in February at a Wolfe Research conference appearance in reference to Ford's ICE operations, Farley said, "We have too many people, we have too much investment, we have too much complexity, and we don't have expertise in transitioning our assets." Ford lost $3.1 billion in the first quarter of 2022, although much of that was driven by a sharp value decline in its stake in EV startup Rivian. Operating profit, meanwhile, was at $2.3 billion, down from $3.9 billion in the first quarter of 2021.

Today, DALL-E 2, OpenAI's AI system that can generate images given a prompt or edit and refine existing images, is becoming more widely available. TechCrunch reports: The company announced in a blog post that it will expedite access for customers on the waitlist with the goal of reaching roughly 1 million people within the next few weeks. With this "beta" launch, DALL-E 2, which had been free to use, will move to a credit-based fee structure. First-time users will get a finite amount of credits that can be put toward generating or editing an image or creating a variation of an image. (Generations return four images, while edits and variations return three.) Credits will refill every month to the tune of 50 in the first month and 15 a month after that, or users can buy additional credits in increments of $15. Artists in need of financial assistance will be able to apply for subsidized access, OpenAI says. Along with new techniques to mitigate bias and toxicity in DALL-E 2's generations, OpenAI says that starting today it's granting users "full usage rights" to commercialize the images they create with the tool, including the right to reprint, sell and merchandise -- including images they generated during the early preview.

A decade after Google Glass, Google is getting back to testing smart glasses in public again. From a report: Google's AR glasses prototype testers are prohibited from using the glasses "in schools, government buildings, health care locations, places of worship, social service locations, areas meant for children (e.g., schools and playgrounds), emergency response locations, rallies or protests and other similar places," or while driving or playing sports. Google hasn't revealed where in the US, specifically, these glasses will be tested. According to Google, "an LED indicator will turn on if image data will be saved for analysis and debugging. If a bystander desires, they can ask the tester to delete the image data and it will be removed from all logs."

The glasses don't take photos or videos, but use image data for its assistive AI. Google promises that "the image data is deleted, except if the image data will be used for analysis and debugging. In that case, the image data is first scrubbed for sensitive content, including faces and license plates. Then it is stored on a secure server, with limited access by a small number of Googlers for analysis and debugging. After 30 days, it is deleted." Field-testing for future smart glasses is an increasing trend, it seems. Meta started testing prototype depth-sensing camera arrays on a pair of glasses called Project Aria two years ago, focusing on how smart sensor-filled glasses could be used responsibly in public places.