Axios

Two reporters at Reuters quote an anonymous administration official saying that the White House doesn't think Congress should reform legal provisions related to foreign surveillance while considering whether to re-approve them this year:

"We support the clean reauthorization and the administration believes it's necessary to protect the security of the nation."

Timing is everything: The blind comment comes as the House Judiciary Committee holds an initial hearing on re-approving one of the more prominent elements of the law in question, which is used to justify the surveillance of foreign targets located abroad. A classified session this morning between lawmakers and government officials ran on for hours.

Why it matters: The provision, known as Section 702, is set to expire at the end of the year unless lawmakers act. That means a battle between privacy advocates and surveillance hawks is coming, since civil libertarians believe the law can be too broadly applied. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Facebook is slashing prices on its Oculus virtual reality headset and controller by $100 each as it tries to make the device appeal to more people. With the cut, the combined package sells for $598, substantially cheaper than HTC's $799 Vive and closer in price to Sony's $399 PlayStation VR. The Rift can also be purchased, sans controller, for $499.

Facebook paid more than $2 billion for Oculus back in 2014, but has hit a number of struggles along the way, including shipping delays and a $500 million payout to ZeniMax. Virtual Reality remains in its infancy and high-end systems like Oculus and HTC require a top-line computer in addition to the pricey headset. Mobile options — like Google's Daydream and Samsung's Gear VR (developed with Oculus) — allow people to get a taste of VR with a far smaller investment, and have dominated the still-nascent market.

"We are cutting the price to bring VR to more people, and that's always been our goal," Brendan Iribe, Oculus co-founder, told USA Today. "We've said all along making money on the hardware was not our goal," added Jason Rubin, the company's VP.

While much of the tech industry has signed on to a Supreme Court brief arguing in favor of transgender rights, several big names are not on the final list, including Facebook and Google.

Both companies issued statements supporting transgender rights after President Trump withdrew federal guidance on the subject, but a source says neither is signing on to a Supreme Court brief in the case of Gavin Grimm, a Virginia high school student at the center of a case coming before the court next month.

Also missing from the list, the source said, are all four major carriers. T-Mobile and AT&T have spoken out about LGBT issues in the past and T-Mobile CEO John Legere marched in Seattle's Pride event. However, as with immigration, the carriers have avoided publicly opposing Trump, likely because all have pending business for which they need government approval.

Who is on board: The list includes Apple, Amazon, eBay, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, PayPal, Salesforce, Slack and Yahoo.

Samsung spent 238.9 billion Korean Won ($209 million) for last year's acquisition of Viv Labs, a 30-person voice AI startup from the creators of Apple's Siri. The figure was confirmed in a regulatory filing this week.

Viv's technology, or at least a version of it, is expected to show up in the Galaxy S8, due to be unveiled in New York next month.

Why it matters: While it relies on Google for the Android OS, Samsung isn't willing to defer to the search giant when it comes to the increasingly high stakes area of an AI-powered assistant.

Tech companies are racing to announce new products, research labs and acquisitions in the AI race. Another sign of the the acceleration of the business world's embrace of all things AI is captured by this Bloomberg chart showing the sharp spike of companies mentioning the technology in their earnings calls.

Business-Focus on Artificial Intelligence Rising: {Analysis on Terminal https://t.co/BoEggN4PY4 } pic.twitter.com/MFm4nVMUBM— Michael McDonough (@M_McDonough) February 28, 2017

Early Wednesday morning Facebook announced that it is updating the tools and resources they offer to people thinking about attempting suicide, as well as the support they extend to friends and families of suicide victims. The new features include:

• Integrated suicide prevention tools to help people in real time on Facebook Live: People watching a live video have the option to reach out to the person directly and to report the video. Facebook will also provide resources to the person reporting the live video to assist them in helping their friend.
• Live chat support from crisis support organizations through Messenger: Participating organizations include Crisis Text Line, the National Eating Disorder Association, and the National Suicide Prevention Line.
• Streamlined reporting for suicide, assisted by artificial intelligence: The AI tool will make the option to report a post about "suicide or self injury" more prominent for potentially concerning posts.
• Launch of a new video campaign with partner organizations across the globe to raise awareness about ways to help a friend in need.

Uber on Monday parted ways with Amit Singhal, who had joined the ride-hailing company just weeks earlier as senior vice president of engineering. The reason: He had been accused of sexual harassment at his prior employer, Google.

Singhal allegedly did not tell Uber the real reason he left Google in early 2016, and the company claims it didn't know until being approached by tech site Recode. So assuming this is true, that leaves us with Google—what is the search giant's role here?

On Tuesday, Bloomberg published a video recording showing Uber CEO Travis Kalanick arguing with the driver of his Uber Black ride over the company's pricing strategy. The exchange ended with Kalanick suggesting the driver is blaming others for his financial mistakes before exiting the vehicle.

Later on Tuesday, Kalanick sent the following email to the entire company:

Team -By now I'm sure you've seen the video where I treated an Uber driver disrespectfully. To say that I am ashamed is an extreme understatement. My job as your leader is to lead...and that starts with behaving in a way that makes us all proud. That is not what I did, and it cannot be explained away.It's clear this video is a reflection of me—and the criticism we've received is a stark reminder that I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up. This is the first time I've been willing to admit that I need leadership help and I intend to get it.I want to profoundly apologize to Fawzi, as well as the driver and rider community, and to the Uber team.Travis

Amazon's cloud-based storage service, known as S3, was returning to life Tuesday afternoon following several hours of widespread problems.

As of 1:49 PM PST, we are fully recovered for operations for adding new objects in S3, which was our last operation showing a high error rate. The Amazon S3 service is operating normally.

Things still aren't perfect, though. For example, Isitdownrightnow, which tracks web outages, is still down.

The impact: While clearly a black eye for Amazon, the outage did prove just how ubiquitous Amazon's services are in powering the Internet.

Uber's tense relationship with drivers for its affordable UberX service is well-documented, but even drivers for the company's high-end options are growing disappointed.

In a video recording of CEO Travis Kalanick riding in an high-end Uber Black car published by Bloomberg, the driver confronts Kalanick about the company's fare cuts, which Kalanick disputes. Fawzi Kamel has been driving for Uber since 2011, according to the report, and told Kalanick: "You changed the whole business. You dropped the prices."

One of the big problems with Google Glass was the fact you looked like a dork wearing the things. A newly granted Google patent suggests one potential way to make the camera and computer less visibly jarring — add them into a baseball cap.

The patent describes pairing the hat with a phone for video streaming as well as the use of a personal assistant.

Our patent disclaimer (patent not pending): A patent means someone came up with the idea and the company wanted to protect it, not that there will ever be such a product or feature. And it's worth noting that the patent application was filed back in May 2013, even though it wasn't granted until today.

A significant problem with Amazon Web Services is causing big headaches for Web publishers on Tuesday. Businesses across the Web count on Amazon's cloud to make their sites function (including Axios, which relies on AWS to handle, among other things, the images that go with our stories).

Slack and Medium were among those experiencing issues related to the AWS problem. Amazon described the issue on its status page as "high error rates" with its U.S. East Coast servers.

We're continuing to work to remediate the availability issues for Amazon S3... AWS services and customer applications depending on S3 will continue to experience high error rates as we are actively working to remediate the errors in Amazon S3.

Pinterest, the online bookmarking service, has created Pinterest Labs, a formal unit to house its technology research efforts, the company said on Tuesday.

Pinterest Labs will focus on artificial intelligence areas such as machine learning, image recognition, and data analytics. It will work with top researchers inside and outside the company, including through partnerships with UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC San Diego, and other universities. Pinterest chief scientist Jure Leskovec, whose startup Pinterest acquired in 2015 and a currently an associate professor at Stanford, will lead the new division.

Formalizing research: Despite making its name as an online service for collecting photos of home decor or recipes, Pinterest has been heavily investing in technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, and recommendation algorithms. These technologies are increasingly behind some of the company's new features such as "Lens," a new tool that recognizes the items in a image when the user points their phone's camera at something. In the last few years, the company has also acquired several startups developing such technologies, so a formal division should help it to better focus and coordinate its research.

Comcast on Tuesday announced a deal to buy the remaining 49% stake in Universal Studios Japan that it doesn't already own for $2.27 billion, per Reuters. The transaction would value the Japanese theme park operator at around $7.5 billion, including the assumption of debt.

Sellers include Goldman Sachs and private equity firm MBK Partners. Comcast had acquired a 51% stake back in 2015.

South Korean prosecutors announced Tuesday that they're going to officially charge Jay Y. Lee — the third-generation heir and de facto leader of Samsung — with bribery, embezzlement, and hiding assets overseas. Formal charges were also filed against four other Samsung executives.

Background: Earlier this month, prosecutors arrested Lee, saying he bribed impeached President Park Geun-hye's close friend Choi Soon-sil with millions of dollars in order to gain government support for a 2015 company merger with Cheil Industries that would cement his control over Samsung. Lee, Park and Choi all denied the allegations.

What's next: The charges come ahead of a court ruling on whether to uphold parliament's December impeachment of Park, whose powers were suspended on accusations that she colluded with Choi to pressure big businesses, like Samsung, to make donations to charities that supported the president's policy agenda. "The indictment describes in detail the private conversation between Jay Y. Lee and President Park Geun-hye," said Lee Kyu-chul, a spokesman for the special prosecutor. The special prosecutor's office will deliver a final report on its investigation on March 6.

3,800 executives, analysts, directors, and experts voted. These are the top All-Stars, winning votes from inside and outside their industries:

The WSJ dives into how Snap is different than Twitter and Facebook.

• The office: "[T]he company defiantly operates unlike most Silicon Valley outfits, where collaboration and wide-open office spaces are prized. ... Snap doesn't have a headquarters."
• The founder: "Former employees say often the only way they knew co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel was at work was by seeing his chauffeured SUV. He avoids holding companywide meetings and prefers to dispense information to individuals or small groups, they say."
• And the quotes: "Evan doesn't talk much." ... "For someone of his age, he operates with much more wisdom than anyone else I have seen. I find him to be a very, very clear thinker. ... [H]e gets it right every time."

Google has publicly identified a "high-severity" security flaw that affects several versions of Microsoft's browser and could allow an attacker to execute malicious code.

The disclosure is complicated by the fact that Microsoft has yet to release a patch despite having been notified by Google of the issue last November. Google has a practice of going public with security issues 90 days after privately reporting issues to the software maker in question.

Ivan Fratric, the Google researcher who identified the issue, said he expected Microsoft to fix the issue before the deadline.

"I will not make any further comments on exploitability, at least not until the bug is fixed," he said, according to Ars Technica. "The report has too much info on that as it is (I really didn't expect this one to miss the deadline)."