The White House-backed infrastructure bill now moving toward Senate approval divvies up $65 billion in broadband funding in ways that largely please the big cable and telecom companies. Axios reports: The bipartisan infrastructure bill would devote funding to both broadband deployment and adoption.

The deployment side includes:
- $42.45 billion in grants to states to be used for broadband projects with speeds of at least 100/20 mbps, to be first spent in locations without high-speed internet.
- $2 billion each to support a rural broadband construction program called ReConnect run by USDA and to the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program from NTIA.
- $1 billion in grants to build so-called "middle mile" infrastructure to connect local providers to the larger internet access point.

On the adoption side:
- $14.2 billion to provide a $30-a-month voucher to low-income Americans to pay for internet service, replacing the current $50-a-month Emergency Broadband Benefit program but increasing the number of Americans who will be eligible and giving consumers more choice on how to spend the benefit.
- Requiring that providers who receive money from the state grants offer a low-cost plan, although the bill does not specify a price.
- $2.75 billion for digital inclusion grants, such as projects to improve digital literacy or online skills for seniors.

Why telecom likes it: The bill doesn't include measures that President Biden championed as part of his early infrastructure proposal, the American Jobs Plan. The bill will prioritize funding broadband in areas that lack high-speed service, so existing providers will largely avoid the threat of a government-backed competitor, and the money will be available to a larger pool of providers than just those who offer fiber service. While municipal broadband projects could still receive funding, those networks will not be prioritized when the money is allocated, as Biden's plan originally proposed, and the bill will not eliminate state laws that restrict municipal broadband projects.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday night, the US Senate passed an amendment that would limit the plug-in vehicle federal tax credit. Currently, tax payers are eligible for a tax credit of up to $7,500 based on the size of the vehicle's battery for the first 200,000 plug-in vehicles from a given automaker. But Republican Senator Deb Fischer of Nebraska introduced a non-binding amendment to the $3.5 trillion budget bill that would means-test this tax credit, restricting it to tax payers with incomes below $100,000.

Perhaps more significantly, Sen. Fischer's amendment also restricts the tax credit to EVs that cost less than $40,000. Consequently, the only battery EVs that will still be eligible for the tax credit will be the Hyundai Ioniq Electric ($34,250), Hyundai Kona EV ($38,565), Mini Cooper SE ($30,750), and the Nissan Leaf S Plus ($39,220). Chevrolet's Bolt EV and Bolt EUV are both below the price threshold, but in 2019 the automaker sold its 200,000th plug-in vehicle, at which point the tax credit began to phase out. The amendment passed, 51-48. Senator Fischer took to Twitter to say that "everyday Americans are living paycheck to paycheck because of the sharp rise in costs due to #Bideninflation. We shouldn't be subsidizing luxury vehicles for the rich using money from hard-working taxpayers." (Inflation is mostly being driven by high prices for used cars, which in turn is a result of the chip shortage.)

The New York City Police Department has spent over $159 million on surveillance systems and maintenance since 2007 without public oversight, according to newly released documents. Engadget reports: The Legal Aid Society (LAS) and the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) obtained the documents from the NYPD, which include contracts with vendors. They show that the NYPD has spent millions on facial recognition, predictive policing tech and other surveillance systems. The NYPD made the purchases through a Special Expenses Fund. It didn't need to gain the approval of the NYC Council or other city officials before signing the contracts, as Wired reports.

STOP and other privacy groups lobbied for the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act, which passed last year and requires the NYPD to disclose details about its public surveillance infrastructure. The Special Expenses Fund was shut down after the legislation passed. LAS and STOP threatened legal action if the NYPD didn't detail its surveillance practices. Among the documents are contracts for Palantir, American Science and Engineering (which provides x-ray vans that can detect weapons in vehicles 1,500 feet away) and Idemia Solutions, which provides biometric services such as facial recognition. The NYPD also signed a contract with KeyW Corporation for Stingray cell tower simulators.

Today, Samsung launched the Galaxy Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 4 Classic -- two new wearables that are "the fruits of Samsung's smartwatch collaboration with Google," writes Becca Farsace via The Verge. From the report: The Watch 4 Classic starts at $349 for the Bluetooth model, rising to $399 for the LTE model, while the Watch 4 is a little less expensive with a starting price of $249 (or $299 with LTE). Both are available to preorder today, and ship August 27th. The big difference between the two models is that the Watch 4 Classic has one of those physical rotating bezels that we've liked so much on Samsung's previous smartwatches, while if you opt for the standard Watch 4, there's a touch-sensitive bezel accessible by swiping at the edges of the screen. The Watch 4 Classic is also made of a more premium stainless steel rather than the aluminum you'll find on the Watch 4. On the right of both watches are a pair of control buttons.

External differences aside, internally both watches share a lot of the same specs. They're both powered by the same 5nm Exynos W920 processor Samsung detailed yesterday, paired with 1.5GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. Battery capacity varies between sizes, but Samsung reckons you'll average around 40 hours of battery life regardless of model. There's LTE on select models, but if you were hoping for 5G, you'll be disappointed -- Samsung says it doesn't think it's worth it because the amount of data smartwatches process is too small.

But the biggest departure from Samsung's previous smartwatches is that the Watch 4 and Watch 4 Classic aren't running its own Tizen operating system. Instead, their software is the result of a collaboration between Samsung and Google, which was announced in May. Samsung is branding the watches' operating system as "Wear OS Powered by Samsung" although Google has called it Wear OS 3. But either way, the hope is that it combines the best of Tizen with the best of Wear OS. On Samsung's watches specifically, the interface you're looking at is One UI Watch, which is effectively Samsung's skin sitting on top of Wear OS. Think of it as Samsung's One UI software on phones, which works with Google's Android. It gives the Watch 4's interface a similar look and feel to Samsung's previous Tizen-powered watches. Google has promised its collaboration with Samsung will lead to a host of high-level benefits for Wear OS, like improved battery life, faster loading apps, and smoother animations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A bipartisan trio of senators introduced a bill that would rein in app stores of companies they said exert too much market control, including Apple and Alphabet's Google. Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal and Amy Klobuchar teamed up with Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn to sponsor the bill, which would bar big app stores from requiring app providers to use their payment system. It would also prohibit them from punishing apps that offer different prices or conditions through another app store or payment system.

"I found this predatory abuse of Apple and Google so deeply offensive on so many levels," Blumenthal said in an interview Wednesday. "Their power has reached a point where they are impacting the whole economy in stifling and strangling innovation." Blumenthal said he expected companion legislation in the House of Representatives "very soon."

Google employees based in the same office before the pandemic could see different changes in pay if they switch to working from home permanently, with long commuters hit harder, according to a company pay calculator seen by Reuters. From a report: It is an experiment taking place across Silicon Valley, which often sets trends for other large employers. Facebook and Twitter also cut pay for remote employees who move to less expensive areas, while smaller companies including Reddit and Zillow have shifted to location-agnostic pay models, citing advantages when it comes to hiring, retention and diversity.

Alphabet's Google stands out in offering employees a calculator that allows them to see the effects of a move. But in practice, some remote employees, especially those who commute from long distances, could experience pay cuts without changing their address. "Our compensation packages have always been determined by location, and we always pay at the top of the local market based on where an employee works from," a Google spokesperson said, adding that pay will differ from city to city and state to state. One Google employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, typically commutes to the Seattle office from a nearby county and would likely see their pay cut by about 10% by working from home full-time, according estimates by the company's Work Location Tool launched in June.

Samsung Electronics unveiled its latest high-end foldable smartphones on Wednesday with lower prices than last year's offerings in a push to expand foldable demand beyond niche devices. From a report: The tech giant priced its 5G-enabled Galaxy Z Fold3 with 7.6-inch main screen to start at $1,799.99 in the United States, and clamshell Galaxy Z Flip3 at $999.99 - down from the launch prices of last year's models at $1,999 and $1,380, respectively. The Galaxy Z Fold3 and Z Flip3 will launch on August 27 starting in markets such as the United States and Europe.

"There's definitely demand for bigger screens as people consume more media content, and foldables are the only form that makes big screens very portable... the price hurdle is the issue," said Park Sung-soon, an analyst at Cape Investment & Securities. Foldable phones, with about 8.6 million units expected to be shipped this year, are expected to account for just 0.6% of estimated 1.447 billion smartphones to be shipped. However, that is more than double the 3 million foldables shipped in 2020, and Samsung will lead the market with over 88% market share, according to Counterpoint Research. Besides price drops that analysts said could help capture more demand in the United States and perhaps China, Samsung's foldable unveiled on Wednesday touted lighter, thinner and improved design, durability, and compatibility with a stylus, which could absorb users of Samsung's Galaxy Note phablets whose key feature is the "S Pen".

You may not have heard of "Corporate Memphis," but you've almost certainly seen it. From a report: The illustration style can be found in the trendiest direct-to-consumer subway ads, within the app you use to split restaurant tabs or on the 404 page that attempts to counter your frustration with cutesiness. In fact, Corporate Memphis has become so synonymous with tech marketing that some illustrators simply know it as the "tech aesthetic." But Corporate Memphis has also become a victim of its own success. The once-whimsical, fresh style now feels safe and antiseptic. More conspicuous iterations of it get roasted online, if they get noticed at all; one popular tweet asks, "Why does every website landing page look like this now?" Illustrators are just as often tired of Corporate Memphis, but tech companies continue to commission it.

So why can't tech wean itself off of Corporate Memphis? Part of it has to do with the practical aesthetic considerations that gave rise to the style. But Corporate Memphis has primarily stuck around because tech executives continue to overlook the value of illustration, according to several of the illustrators interviewed for this story. Illustration work is increasingly awarded to the lowest bidder on gig platforms, using tools designed to standardize output. For the few companies that recognize the value of illustration, however, investing in creative talent has paid considerable dividends -- just not in ways that are easily measured.

Though you might assume children are the most tech-savvy generation out there, it turns out there's an area where they're just as behind as adults: passwords. From a report: National Institute of Standards and Technology released research on Wednesday showing that even though kids are taught best practices for creating passwords, they're not following them. NIST surveyed more than 1,500 children, ages 8 to 18, and found that, for example, 87% of high schoolers use the same password for everything. Depending on age group (45% of high schoolers versus 23% of elementary school kids), many share passwords with friends. Researchers suggested that those surveyed don't see password sharing as risky behavior, but rather a matter of building friendships and trust. "The end goal of this research is to better support children and provide recommendations that can be used to provide guidance to them, parents and educators," NIST researcher Yee-Yin Choong said in a statement.

Tim Bray, formerly at Amazon and Google, argues that too many popular consumer app have unexpectedly gotten worse in recent years. In an essay, where he has cited Apple's Photos and Movie apps, Economist app, and MLB as examples, he offers an explanation for why the quality of apps is getting worse: It's obvious. Every high-tech company has people called "Product Managers" (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said "This seems to be working pretty well, let's leave it the way it is." Because that's not bold. That's not visionary. That doesn't get you promoted.

It is the dream of every PM to come up with a bold UX innovation that gets praise, and many believe the gospel that the software is better at figuring out what the customer wants than the customer is. And you get extra points these days for using ML. Also, any time you make any change to a popular product, you've imposed a retraining cost on its users. Unfortunately, in their evaluations, PMs consider the cost of customer retraining time to be zero.

China signaled its push to regulate sweeping parts of the economy, which has jolted markets, will be deep and sustained over the next five years. From a report: In a statement late Wednesday published by the State Council, China said it will "actively" work on legislation in areas including national security, technological innovation as well as anti-monopoly, in order to improve the legal framework "much-needed for governing the country." Law enforcement will be strengthened in sectors ranging from food and drugs to education tutoring where people's immediate interests are at stake, the council said.

WhatsApp users will finally be able to move their entire chat history between mobile operating systems -- something that's been one of users' biggest requests to date. From a report: The company today introduced a feature that will soon become available to users of both iOS and Android devices, allowing them to move their WhatsApp voice notes, photos, and conversations securely between devices when they switch between mobile operating systems.

The feature WhatsApp introduced today works with Samsung devices and Samsung's own transfer tool, known as Smart Switch. Today, Smart Switch helps users transfer contacts, photos, music, messages, notes, calendars, and more to Samsung Galaxy devices. Now, it will transfer WhatsApp chat history, too. WhatsApp showed off the new tool at Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event, and announced Samsung's newest Galaxy foldable devices would get the feature first in the weeks to come. The feature will later roll out to Android more broadly. WhatsApp didn't say when iOS users would gain access.

Ron Miller, writing for TechCrunch: Most people probably don't realize just how much our devices are time driven, whether it's your phone, your laptop or a network server. For the most part, time keeping has been an esoteric chore, taken care of by a limited number of hardware manufacturers. While these devices served their purpose, a couple of Facebook engineers decided there had to be a better way. So they built a new more accurate time keeping device that fits on a PCI Express (PCIe) card, and contributed it to the Open Compute Project as an open source project. At a basic level, says Olag Obleukhov, a production engineer at Facebook, it's simply pinging this time-keeping server to make sure each device is reporting the same time.

"Almost every single electronic device today uses NTP -- Network Time Synchronization Protocol -- which you have on your phone, on your watch, on your laptop, everywhere, and they all connect to these NTP servers where they just go and say, 'what time is it's and the NTP server provides the time," he explained. Before Facebook developed a new way of doing this, there were basically two ways to check the time. If you were a developer, you probably used something like Facebook.com as a time checking mechanism, but a company like Facebook, working at massive scale, needed something that worked even when there wasn't an internet connection.

Companies running data centers have a hardware device called Stratum One, which is a big box that sits in the data center, and has no other job than acting as the time keeper. Because these time-keeping boxes were built by a handful of companies over years, they were solid and worked, but it was hard to get new features. What's more, companies like Facebook couldn't control the boxes because of their proprietary nature. Obleukhov and his colleague research scientist, Ahmad Byagowi began to attack the problem by looking for a way to create these devices by building a PCIe card with off-the-shelf parts that you could stick into any PC with an open slot.

A key House of Representatives panel has pressed for a report to study the use of artificial intelligence to analyze prisoners' phone calls. "But prisoners' advocates and inmates' families say relying on AI to interpret communications opens up the system to mistakes, misunderstandings and racial bias," reports Reuters. From the report: The call for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to further explore the technology, to help prevent violent crime and suicide, accompanies an $81 billion-plus spending bill to fund the DOJ and other federal agencies in 2022 that the Appropriations Committee passed last month. The technology can automatically transcribe inmates' phone calls, analyzing their patterns of communication and flagging certain words or phrases, including slang, that officials pre-program into the system. A House Democratic aide said in an emailed statement they were encouraging the DOJ "to engage with stakeholders in the course of examining the feasibility of utilizing such a system."

Several state and local facilities across the country have already started using the tech, including in Alabama, Georgia and New York. The House panel wants the DOJ to look into potentially leveraging the technology for federal use and to identify gaps or shortcomings in the information it produces. Privacy groups say the technology could amplify racial bias in the justice system and unfairly subject prisoners to unaccountable artificial intelligence. Proponents dispute such criticisms, saying the tech is a vital time-saving tool for law enforcement and does not target specific groups.

MojoKid writes: AMD officially unveiled the Radeon RX 6600 XT in late July but the cards have officially launched today, aimed at 1080p gaming. In a review at HotHardware, PowerColor is offering both a high-end Radeon RX 6600 XT Red Devil and its somewhat more mainstream "Fighter" branded counterpart, for example. Whereas AMD's reference Radeon RX 6600 XT offers a Game clock up to 2359MHz and a Boost clock of 25895MHz, the PowerColor Red Devil peaks at 2428MHz (Game) and 2607MHz (Boost). Those higher GPU clocks result in higher compute performance and fillrate, etc., but the memory configuration and frequency are the same -- so in memory bandwidth constrained situations, performance won't be all that much different.

Performance-wise, with most game titles that use traditional rasterization, the Radeon RX 6600 XT is clearly faster than the GeForce RTX 3060 and previous-gen cards like the Radeon RX 5700 XT or GeForce RTX 2060 Super. However, when you factor ray tracing into the equation, NVIDIA has a distinct and significant advantage still. The Radeon RX 6600 XT Fighter should sell for at or close to its $379 MSRP. PowerColor says that they should be readily available for gamers to purchase today.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A Twitter image-cropping algorithm prefers to show faces that are slimmer, younger and with lighter skin, a researcher has found. Bogdan Kulynyc won $3,500 in a Twitter-organized contest to find biases in its cropping algorithm. Earlier this year, Twitter's own research found the algorithm had a bias towards cropping out black faces. The "saliency algorithm" decided how images would be cropped in Twitter previews, before being clicked on to open at full size. But when two faces were in the same image, users discovered, the preview crop appeared to favor white faces, hiding the black faces until users clicked through. As a result the company revised how images were handled, saying cropping was best done by people.

The "algorithmic-bias bounty competition" was launched in July -- a reference to the widespread practice of companies offering "bug bounties" for researchers who find flaws in code -- with the aim of uncovering other harmful biases. And Mr Kulynyc, a graduate student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne's Security and Privacy Engineering Laboratory, discovered the "saliency" of a face in an image could be increased -- making it less likely to be hidden by the cropping algorithm -- by "making the person's skin lighter or warmer and smoother; and quite often changing the appearance to that of a younger, more slim, and more stereotypically feminine person".

Awarding him first prize, Twitter said his discovery showed beauty filters could be used to game the algorithm and "how algorithmic models amplify real-world biases and societal expectations of beauty." Second prize went to Halt AI, a female-founded University of Toronto start-up Twitter said showed the algorithm could perpetuate marginalization in the way images were cropped. For example, "images of the elderly and disabled were further marginalized", the company said. Taraaz Research founder Roya Pakzad won third prize for an entry that showed the algorithm was more likely to crop out Arabic text than English in memes.

According to a new study, China's video-sharing app TikTok is now the most downloaded app in the world. Nikkei Asia reports: ByteDance launched the international version of TikTok in 2017, and has since overtaken Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger -- all of which are Facebook owned -- in downloads, even in the U.S. Some believe that personal information shared with TikTok is not secure. In 2020, former President Donald Trump called on the company to sell off its U.S. operations or be banned. The app's popularity nevertheless grew during the pandemic, when it became the leading download in Europe, South America and the U.S. Joe Biden, Trump's successor, withdrew the presidential executive order, but uncertainties remain elsewhere. While The Financial Times reported on Sunday that ByteDance has revived plans to go public in the coming months, a spokesperson told Nikkei Asia on Monday that the article was "inaccurate," insisting the company has no current plans for a stock market listing.

Twitter has suspended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's account for one week following another violation of the platform's rules, the company said Tuesday. From a report: Greene tweeted on Monday that the Food and Drug Administration "should not approve the covid vaccines." She also claimed the vaccines were "failing" and that they were ineffective at reducing the virus's spread. In response, Twitter labeled the tweet as misleading and prevented Greene from tweeting for one week. The tweet, a company spokesperson said, "was labeled in line with our COVID-19 misleading information policy. The account will be in read-only mode for a week due to repeated violations of the Twitter Rules."

HP is announcing two new Chrome OS computers for its consumer-focused lineup. From a report: The first is the Chromebase AiO, an all-in-one desktop computer with a screen that can rotate from landscape to portrait. The second is the Chromebook x2 11, a lightweight detachable that can easily shift from laptop to tablet modes. The company is also announcing a new Works With Chromebook-certified 24-inch USB-C monitor. All three new products are designed for students, families, and general consumers. The Chromebase AiO will be available at HP, Amazon, and Best Buy this month, while the Chromebook x2 11 will be available from Best Buy this month and from HP's website in October. Both computers start at $599.99 for base configurations. The M24fd USB-C monitor will be available in October from HP directly for $249.99.

Twitter is now complying with India's new IT rules, New Delhi told a court Tuesday, in a move that is expected to ease months-long tension between the American social media network and the government of the key overseas market. From a report: A lawyer representing the Indian government told the Delhi High Court that Twitter's recent steps -- appointment of chief compliance officer, nodal contact person and resident grievance officer in the country -- have made the social network "prima facie" compliant with the new law. India's new IT rules, which were unveiled in February this year, mandates significant social media firms, among other things, to appoint officials to address on-ground concerns in the country.