Apple said Friday that it will repair the keyboards on recent model laptops when their keys either stick or stop working.
Why it matters: Customers have been complaining of issues almost since the new keyboard design was introduced, and class action lawsuits have been filed.
Legislators in California will try to pass an online consumer privacy law to get ahead of a ballot measure that would allow the electorate to vote directly on the issue.
The bigger picture: Major internet companies have opposed the ballot measure. The bill includes more business-friendly language, reports the Los Angeles Times, and could help digital ad-based giants like Facebook and Google avoid a rebuke of their business model come Election Day.
A new "Investigative Operations Team" at Facebook is hiring former intelligence officers, media-buying experts and other researchers to pressure-test the social network and identify ways of misusing it before malevolent outsiders can exploit them, BuzzFeed reports.
Why it matters: This kind of adversarial testing is more common in cybersecurity work than in consumer online services. Facebook's adoption of the practice suggests that recent controversies, including Russian meddling in the 2016 election and the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, have left it with a harder-nosed view of how its products can be used for ill.
Police officers cannot retrace the location of your cell phone without a warrant, the Supreme Court ruled today — a narrow but critically important victory for privacy advocates as well as giant tech companies.
Why it matters: The court’s precedents have allowed a relatively broad range of warrantless searches, but Silicon Valley warned that if those “analog” rules were applied to modern smartphones, hardly anything we do would ever be private again. And they won.
A new police report investigating the self-driving Uber that fatally struck a pedestrial in Arizona in March revealed that the driver was streaming an episode of "The Voice" at the time of the accident — not watching the road, reports the BBC.
The details: The report found that car operator, Rafaela Vasquez, looked up from her phone screen just half a second before the crash. The car was moving at 44 mph and did not brake before the accident.
Smyte, a San Francisco-based startup tech company that specializes in in stopping online abuse, fraud and spam through an automated labeling system that identifies nefarious activity and flags it for manual review, is being acquired by Twitter.
Why it matters: Twitter has been criticized for not doing enough to control hate speech and misinformation on its platform due to the proliferation of bots that exist. This is a step in its ongoing effort to solve both problems.
A bipartisan group of 2 senators and 3 representatives sent Google a letter on Wednesday calling on the company to reduce its ties with Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei.
What they're saying: The company's "strategic partnership" with the company "could pose a serious risk to national security and American consumers," wrote Sens. Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio, along with Reps. Liz Cheney, Dutch Ruppersberger and Mike Conaway.
