Pocket Casts has a new owner. Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and recently purchased Tumblr, announced today that it's acquired Pocket Casts, the well-regarded podcast app. The blog post announcing the purchase didn't offer much in the way of a preview, but it did tease potential future integrations. From a report: "As part of Automattic, Pocket Casts will continue to provide you with the features needed to enjoy your favorite podcasts (or find something new)," the post states. "We will explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts, making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts." Pocket Casts launched in 2010 and sold to NPR and a group of other public media groups eight years later. It's been well-received, particularly from sites like The Verge, because it's available across platforms. It started monetizing through a program called Pocket Casts Plus, which charges users a monthly subscription fee for features like desktop app access and a standalone Apple Watch app, in 2019.

New submitter labloke11 shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: Intel is exploring a deal to buy GlobalFoundries (source paywalled; alternative source), according to people familiar with the matter, in a move that would turbocharge the semiconductor giant's plans to make more chips for other tech companies and rate as its largest acquisition ever. A deal could value GlobalFoundries at around $30 billion, the people said. It isn't guaranteed one will come together, and GlobalFoundries could proceed with a planned initial public offering. GlobalFoundries is owned by Mubadala Investment Co., an investment arm of the Abu Dhabi government, but based in the U.S. Any talks don't appear to include GlobalFoundries itself as a spokeswoman for the company said it isn't in discussions with Intel.

Intel's new Chief Executive, Pat Gelsinger, in March said the company would launch a major push to become a chip manufacturer for others, a market dominated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Intel, with a market value of around $225 billion, this year pledged more than $20 billion in investments to expand chip-making facilities in the U.S. and Mr. Gelsinger has said more commitments domestically and abroad are in the works.

A Facebook engineer abused employee access to user data to track down a woman who had left him after they fought, a new book said. Business Insider reports: Between January 2014 and August 2015, the company fired 52 employees over exploiting user data for personal means, said an advance copy of "An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination" that Insider obtained. The engineer, who is unnamed, tapped into the data to "confront" a woman with whom he had been vacationing in Europe after she left the hotel room they had been sharing, the book said. He was able to figure out her location at a different hotel.

Another Facebook engineer used his employee access to dig up information on a woman with whom he had gone on a date after she stopped responding to his messages. In the company's systems, he had access to "years of private conversations with friends over Facebook messenger, events attended, photographs uploaded (including those she had deleted), and posts she had commented or clicked on," the book said. Through the Facebook app the woman had installed on her phone, the book said, the engineer was also able to see her location in real time. Facebook employees were granted user data access in order to "cut away the red tape that slowed down engineers," the book said.

"There was nothing but the goodwill of the employees themselves to stop them from abusing their access to users' private information," wrote Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, the book's authors. They added that most of the employees who abused their employee privileges to access user data only looked up information, although a few didn't stop there. Most of the engineers who took advantage of access to user data were "men who looked up the Facebook profiles of women they were interested in," the book said. Facebook told Insider it fired employees found to have accessed user data for nonbusiness purposes.

phalse phace shares a report from Reuters: During an analyst call for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd's quarterly earnings, TSMC chairman Mark Liu signaled that they are looking into building new factories in the United States and Japan. "TSMC said it will expand production capacity in China and does not rule out the possibility of a 'second phase' expansion at its $12 billion factory in the U.S. state of Arizona." Furthermore, "the CEO on Thursday revealed TSMC is currently conducting 'due diligence' on whether to build a fab in Japan, which would mark a strategically important geographic expansion for the chipmaker. Any Japan fab will be for "specialty technology" -- a term that usually refers to mature node chips that serve specific or niche markets, Liu said, adding that there is no final decision yet."

Critics said the pandemic would make the industry flee San Francisco and its southern neighbor, Silicon Valley. But tech can't seem to quit its gravitational center. New York Times: The pandemic was supposed to lead to a great tech diaspora. Freed of their offices and after-work klatches, the Bay Area's tech workers were said to be roaming America, searching for a better life in cities like Miami and Austin, Texas -- where the weather is warmer, the homes are cheaper and state income taxes don't exist. But dire warnings over the past year that tech was done with the Bay Area because of a high cost of living, homelessness, crowding and crime are looking overheated. Mr. Osuri [Editor's note: anecdote in the story who is the chief executive of Akash Network] is one of a growing number of industry workers already trickling back as a healthy local rate of coronavirus vaccinations makes fall return-to-office dates for many companies look likely.

Bumper-to-bumper traffic has returned to the region's bridges and freeways. Tech commuter buses are reappearing on the roads. Rents are spiking, especially in San Francisco neighborhoods where tech employees often live. And on Monday, Twitter reopened its office, becoming one of the first big tech companies to welcome more than skeleton crews of employees back to the workplace. Twitter employees wearing backpacks and puffy jackets on a cold San Francisco summer morning greeted old friends and explored a space redesigned to accommodate social-distancing measures.

Pepper, SoftBank's robot, malfunctioned during scripture readings, took breaks in exercise class and couldn't recognize the faces of family members. From a report: Having a robot read scripture to mourners seemed like a cost-effective idea to the people at Nissei Eco, a plastics manufacturer with a sideline in the funeral business. The company hired child-sized robot Pepper, clothed it in the vestments of Buddhist clergy and programmed it to chant several sutras, or Buddhist scriptures, depending on the sect of the deceased. Alas, the robot, made by SoftBank Group, kept breaking down during practice runs. "What if it refused to operate in the middle of a ceremony?" said funeral-business manager Osamu Funaki. "It would be such a disaster." Pepper was fired. The company ended its lease of the robot and sent it back to the manufacturer. After a rash of similar mishaps across Japan, in which Pepper botched its job at a nursing home and gave baseball fans a creepy feeling, some people are saying the humanoid itself will need a funeral soon.

"Because it has the shape of a person, people expect the intelligence of a human," said Takayuki Furuta, head of the Future Robotics Technology Center at Chiba Institute of Technology, which wasn't involved in Pepper's development. "The level of the technology completely falls short of that. It's like the difference between a toy car and an actual car." The robotics unit of SoftBank, a Tokyo-based technology investor, said in late June that it halted production of Pepper last year and was planning to restructure its global robotics teams, including a French unit involved in Pepper's development. Still, the company says the machine shouldn't be sent to the product graveyard. Spokeswoman Ai Kitamura said Pepper is SoftBank's icon and still doing good work as a teacher and a temperature taker at hospitals. She declined to comment on any of its individual mishaps.

SoftBank introduced the humanoid to the world in 2014 and started selling it the next year. "Today might become a day that people 100, 200 or 300 years later would remember as a historic day," SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said at the introduction. SoftBank sold the robots to individuals for about $2,000, plus monthly fees for subscription services, and rented them to businesses starting at $550 a month. Japan has had a love affair with humanlike robots going back to Astro Boy, a robot featured in a 1960s animated television series, but there have also been breakups. Honda Motor's Asimo once kicked a soccer ball to then-President Barack Obama. Toshiba's Aiko Chihira, an android with a woman's name and appearance, briefly worked as a department store receptionist. After a while, both disappeared. More recently, a Japanese hotel chain created a robot-operated hotel, with dinosaur-shaped robots handling front-desk duties, only to reverse course after the plan failed to save money and created more work for humans.

Employees are waiting to hear whether their remote work plans will be approved. From a report: Google software engineers reported something in a recent survey that surprised higher-ups: they felt as productive working from home as they did before the pandemic. Internal research at the Alphabet unit also showed that employees want more "collaboration and social connections" at work, according to Brian Welle, a human resources vice president. Welle declined to provide exact figures but said "more than 75%" of surveyed employees answered this way. Most staff also specifically craved physical proximity when working on new projects. "There's something about innovative work -- when you need that spark," Welle said in an interview. "Our employees feel like those moments happen better when they're together."

That's partially why, despite the rebound in productivity, the technology giant is sticking with its plan to bring most employees back to offices this fall. As Google deliberates which individual employees will get to continue working full time from home and who will need to come in, some staff are increasingly frustrated by the lack of clear direction and uneven enforcement of the policy. Internal message boards lit up this month when a senior Google executive announced he was going to work from New Zealand. Meanwhile, most lower-level staff are waiting to learn if they can relocate, or have to come into the office.

London-listed cybersecurity firm Avast is in advanced talks with U.S. rival NortonLifeLock about a merger that would create a clear leader in consumer security software. From a report: Both companies confirmed the talks late on Wednesday, with Avast saying an offer would be in cash and shares, although it added there was no certainty a deal will be agreed. Avast, which was founded and based in Prague, Czech Republic, is a pioneer of "freemium" software, whereby basic applications are free and subscribers pay for premium features. Its Avast and AVG branded desktop and mobile software had more than 435 million active users at the end of 2020, of which 16.5 million are paying. The shift to home working during COVID-19 spurred demand for its desktop products like antivirus software, and it recorded 7.1% organic growth in adjusted billings to $922 million last year.

The company's research into a consumer mind-reading device is over, for now. Some scientists said it was never possible anyway. From a report: The spring of 2017 may be remembered as the coming-out party for Big Tech's campaign to get inside your head. That was when news broke of Elon Musk's new brain-interface company, Neuralink, which is working on how to stitch thousands of electrodes into people's brains. Days later, Facebook joined the quest when it announced that its secretive skunkworks, named Building 8, was attempting to build a headset or headband that would allow people to send text messages by thinking -- tapping them out at 100 words per minute. The company's goal was a hands-free interface anyone could use in virtual reality. "What if you could type directly from your brain?" asked Regina Dugan, a former DARPA officer who was then head of the Building 8 hardware dvision. "It sounds impossible, but it's closer than you realize."

Now the answer is in -- and it's not close at all. Four years after announcing a "crazy amazing" project to build a "silent speech" interface using optical technology to read thoughts, Facebook is shelving the project, saying consumer brain-reading still remains very far off. In a blog post, Facebook said it is discontinuing the project and will instead focus on an experimental wrist controller for virtual reality that reads muscle signals in the arm. "While we still believe in the long-term potential of head-mounted optical [brain-computer interface] technologies, we've decided to focus our immediate efforts on a different neural interface approach that has a nearer-term path to market," the company said. Facebook's brain-typing project had led it into uncharted territory -- including funding brain surgeries at a California hospital and building prototype helmets that could shoot light through the skull -- and into tough debates around whether tech companies should access private brain information. Ultimately, though, the company appears to have decided the research simply won't lead to a product soon enough.

WindBourne writes: EU is going to put a slowly increasing carbon tax on their own goods (source paywalled; alternative source) and is now applying that tax to a limited number of imported items, with more to come. It is expected to have an initial impact on goods from China, India, and Russia, but as this expands, it will likely hit other nations. All of these nations are saying that they will protest at the WTO. While the EU is not as large of an importer as say America, this will have an impact on the globe, hopefully, pushing all nations to at least stop increasing -- if not drop -- their emissions. The tax on imports will apply to carbon-intensive steel, aluminum, cement, fertilizers and electricity and will be phased in from 2026.

"Under the proposal, a transitional phase from 2023-25 will require importers, including those importing electricity, to monitor and report their emissions," reports Reuters. "Importers will be required to buy digital certificates representing the tonnage of carbon dioxide emissions embedded in the goods they import. The price of the certificates will be based on the average price of permits auctioned each week in the EU carbon market."

"If importers can prove, based on verified information from third country producers, that a carbon price has already been paid during the production of the imported goods, the corresponding amount can be deducted from their final bill," the Commission said in a factsheet outlining the policy.

Executives at the social network have clashed over CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned data tool that revealed users' high engagement levels with right-wing media sources. From a report: One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits. Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle's co-founder and chief executive, assembled dozens of employees on a video call to tell them that they were being broken up. CrowdTangle, which had been running quasi-independently inside Facebook since being acquired in 2016, was being moved under the social network's integrity team, the group trying to rid the platform of misinformation and hate speech. Some CrowdTangle employees were being reassigned to other divisions, and Mr. Silverman would no longer be managing the team day to day. The announcement, which left CrowdTangle's employees in stunned silence, was the result of a yearlong battle among Facebook executives over data transparency, and how much the social network should reveal about its inner workings. On one side were executives, including Mr. Silverman and Brian Boland, a Facebook vice president in charge of partnerships strategy, who argued that Facebook should publicly share as much information as possible about what happens on its platform -- good, bad or ugly.

On the other side were executives, including the company's chief marketing officer and vice president of analytics, Alex Schultz, who worried that Facebook was already giving away too much. They argued that journalists and researchers were using CrowdTangle, a kind of turbocharged search engine that allows users to analyze Facebook trends and measure post performance, to dig up information they considered unhelpful -- showing, for example, that right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino were getting much more engagement on their Facebook pages than mainstream news outlets. These executives argued that Facebook should selectively disclose its own data in the form of carefully curated reports, rather than handing outsiders the tools to discover it themselves. Team Selective Disclosure won, and CrowdTangle and its supporters lost. An internal battle over data transparency might seem low on the list of worthy Facebook investigations. But the CrowdTangle story is important, because it illustrates the way that Facebook's obsession with managing its reputation often gets in the way of its attempts to clean up its platform. And it gets to the heart of one of the central tensions confronting Facebook in the post-Trump era. The company, blamed for everything from election interference to vaccine hesitancy, badly wants to rebuild trust with a skeptical public. But the more it shares about what happens on its platform, the more it risks exposing uncomfortable truths that could further damage its image.

Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman, writing on the company blog: Over the last 14 years, we have worked diligently to keep our costs low and pass our savings on to customers. We've invested in deduplication, compression, and other technologies to continually optimize our storage platform and drive our costs down -- savings which we pass on to our customers in the form of storing more data for the same price.

However, the average backup size stored by Computer Backup customers has spiked 15% over just the last two years. Additionally, not only have component prices not fallen at traditional rates, but recently electronic components that we rely on to provide our services have actually increased in price.

The combination of these two trends, along with our desire to continue investing in providing a great service, is driving the need to modestly increase our prices. The new monthly plan now costs $7, while the yearly plan will set you back by $70.

Unite -- the UK's largest trade union, with some 1.4 million members -- has accused Amazon of inflating prices for items such as hand sanitiser and other health products during the pandemic. From a report: Working with competition lawyers Preiskel & Co LLP, Unite has submitted a formal complaint to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) over alleged "abuse of its market position in relation to price gouging at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic." Unite claims that the price hikes hit vulnerable and older people, who had no choice but to stay at home and minimise their risk of infection. It has called on Amazon to "repay the overcharges." It claims to have uncovered 50 different items -- including soap, antibacterial spray, face masks, and toilet paper -- that were sold on Amazon "for at least double their usual price at the height of the pandemic last year."

The race to develop satellite internet includes some pretty big players like SpaceX, Amazon, Softbank and Facebook. However, Facebook has now essentially thrown in the towel in that business, selling its internet satellite team to Amazon, The Information has reported. From a report: For Amazon, it's a significant step in its effort to develop its Project Kuiper satellite network and catch up with SpaceX's Starlink broadband constellation. Like Starlink, Project Kuiper is designed to provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to users around the world. Amazon aims to have a 3,236-satellite constellation in orbit by 2029, with half of it launched by 2026. It also plans to build 12 ground stations around the world to transmit data to and from the satellites.

Facebook filed a petition Wednesday to have Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan recused from the ongoing antitrust lawsuit the agency brought against the company. From a report: Facebook argued in its petition that Khan "has consistently made public statements" accusing the company of bad conduct that constitutes a violation of antitrust law. The company said her past work has made clear Khan has already made up her mind on Facebook's liability in the pending antitrust case, which should be grounds for recusal. The FTC must decide in the coming weeks whether to file an amended complaint in its antitrust case against Facebook in federal court after a judge dismissed its initial claims. Alternatively, the FTC could decide to try the case internally before its administrative law judge. Facebook's petition follows a similar move by Amazon, which sought Khan's recusal from antitrust probes into its business based on her past criticism of its power. Khan rose to scholarly fame after publishing "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" in the Yale Law Journal while a student in 2017.

William Lazonick and Matt Hopkins, writing at Institute for New Economic Thinking: Why has Intel fallen behind TSMC and SEC in semiconductor fabrication, and why is it unlikely to catch up? The problem is that Intel is engaged in two types of competition, one with companies like TSMC and SEC in cutting-edge fabrication technology and the other within Intel itself between innovation and financialization. The Asian companies have governance structures that vaccinate them from an economic virus known as "maximizing shareholder value" (MSV). Intel caught the virus over two decades ago. As we shall see, with the sudden appointment of Gelsinger as CEO this past winter, Intel sent out a weak signal that it recognizes that it has the disease.

In the years 2011-2015, Intel was in the running, along with TSMC and SEC, to be the fabricator of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod chips that Apple designed. While Intel spent $50b. on P&E and $53b. on R&D over those five years, it also lavished shareholders with $36b. in stock buybacks and $22b. in cash dividends, which together absorbed 102% of Intel's net income. From 2016 through 2020, Intel spent $67b. on P&E and $66b. on R&D, but also distributed almost $27b. as dividends and another $45b. as buybacks. Intel's ample dividends have provided an income yield to shareholders for, as the name says, holding Intel shares. In contrast, the funds spent on buybacks have rewarded sharesellers, including senior Intel executives with their stock-based pay, for executing well-timed sales of their Intel shares to realize gains from buyback-manipulated stock prices.

Apple is working on a new service that will let consumers pay for any Apple Pay purchase in installments over time, rivaling the "buy now, pay later" offerings popularized by services from Affirm and PayPal. From a report: The upcoming service, known internally as Apple Pay Later, will use Goldman Sachs Group as the lender for the loans needed for the installment offerings, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Goldman Sachs has been Apple's partner for the Apple Card credit card since 2019, but the new offering isn't tied to the Apple Card and doesn't require the use of one, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing unannounced products. The buy now, pay later system could help drive Apple Pay adoption and convince more users to use their iPhone to pay for items instead of standard credit cards. Apple receives a percentage of transactions made with Apple Pay, driving additional revenue to the company's more than $50 billion per year services business.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Microsoft updated its Teams communication app with a more sophisticated way to give PowerPoint presentations in January, the company published a 500-word blog post on the feature. People could read the blog post and try to figure out how to use it, or they could consult YouTube. On the video service owned by arch-rival Google, a former Microsoft employee named Kevin Stratvert published a video on Presenter Mode to his more than 800,000 subscribers, garnering more than 180,000 views and hundreds of comments. Microsoft itself had not published a video on the topic. "I've built a Microsoft audience," Stratvert said in an interview with CNBC. "Microsoft content drives a lot more viewership than non-Microsoft content. I've done Gmail and a few others, but they haven't done quite as well."

[...] Historically, developing and maintaining products has been the core of Microsoft. Today nearly 50% of employees work in engineering. Marketing is a considerably smaller part of the business, and employees work on ads, materials for Microsoft's website, events and other methods of promotion. In the past few years, a group inside Microsoft began focusing more on YouTube. "On YouTube specifically, we're starting to explore the concept of what it looks like to do something native to YouTube," Sonia Atchison, a market research lead who worked on the Microsoft Creators Program, said on a podcast last year. People often turn to YouTube when they want to get a better understanding of Microsoft software, and while Microsoft has plenty of its own videos available on YouTube, they don't always come up at the top of the site's search results, Atchison said. Videos from outsiders can receive higher rankings. Sometimes a video from a Microsoft employee might be there. The company does have employees with large audiences, including Mike Tholfsen, a 26-year company veteran whose videos show how teachers and students can use Teams and other applications.

A notorious group of cybercriminals whose operations were almost totally dismantled last year seems to be back in business -- in yet another example of the seemingly intractable nature of cybercrime. Gizmodo reports: The Russian-speaking group known as "Trickbot" (which is also the name of the malware that they're responsible for creating and distributing), has built up its infrastructure and seems to be preparing for some nefarious new campaign, The Daily Beast first reported. The group, which has been connected to ransomware attacks and widespread theft of financial information, is an outgrowth of an older, Russia-based cybercrime group called "Dyre." After Dyre was initially broken up by Russian authorities back in 2015, the remaining members regrouped, creating new malware tools and working to employ them in even more expansive criminal enterprises. Trickbot, which today operates out of numerous places in Eastern Europe -- including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and others -- is perhaps best known for running one of the world's largest botnets. Botnets are large networks of "zombie" devices -- computers that have been infected with special kinds of malware that allow them to be collectively controlled by a hacker, typically for malicious purposes. In Trickbot's case, the group has used its million-plus botnet for an assortment of sordid activities, including helping to launch ransomware attacks throughout the world.

Last fall, the Pentagon's Cyber Command attempted to debilitate Trickbot, fearing that hackers connected to the group might attempt to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. CYBERCOM launched a series of "coordinated attacks" against Trickbot's servers, ultimately succeeding in disrupting its operations. However, it was clear that federal officials did not expect their efforts to be a long-term deterrent, with anonymous sources telling the Washington Post that the action was "not expected to permanently dismantle the network." Around the same time, Microsoft launched its own campaign that was also targeted at dismantling the group. The company tracked and analyzed the servers that were involved in operating the botnet, subsequently garnering a court order that allowed them to disable the IP addresses connected to those servers. Microsoft's operation even involved working together with ISPs to reportedly go "door to door" in Latin America, where they helped to replace routers that had been compromised by the criminal group. However, as is often the case with cybercrime, few of the culprits behind the malware's distribution were ever tracked down or faced charges.

Indeed, a recent report from security firm Fortinet seems to show that the group has allegedly helped create a new strain of ransomware, dubbed "Diavol." On top of this, another report from BitDefender shows that the group has built back up its infrastructure and that it has recently been seen gearing up for new attacks and malicious activity, with the firm ultimately noting that "Trickbot shows no sign of slowing down."

Foxconn and TSMC have agreed to buy 10 million COVID-19 vaccine doses for the island of Taiwan. "The two companies will be paying up to $35 a dose of the BioNTech vaccine and donating them to the government; each company has pledged to spend $175 million," reports The Verge. From the report: BioNTech is partnered with Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Co. to distribute its mRNA-based vaccine, which was co-developed with Pfizer, within China. Taiwan claims that the Chinese government blocked an attempt to secure a supply of vaccines from BioNTech, and later refused an offer of vaccine donations from the mainland. With the new arrangement, however, BioNTech and Fosun are being allowed to deal with private companies rather than the Taiwanese government, which Beijing views as illegitimate.

"Since we proposed the vaccine donation and started negotiating for the purchase, there had been no guidance or interference from Beijing over the acquisition," Foxconn founder Terry Gou wrote on Facebook, in remarks translated by Nikkei. "We appreciate that the negotiation was allowed to go through as a business matter." [...] TSMC and Foxconn say the newly secured BioNTech doses will be shipped from its factories in Germany and should start to arrive in Taiwan from late September.