Warner Media, the content company created when AT&T acquired Time Warner last year, announced Tuesday that it would be calling its new direct-to-consumer subscription streaming service "HBO Max."
Driving the news: It unveiled a new slate of programming that would debut on the service next year, include the entire "Friends" catalog, which had previously been made available on Netflix.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that President Trump violated the Constitution in blocking critics of his viewpoints on Twitter.
Why it matters: This is a huge win for free speech advocates. The ruling sets a precedent that any elected official — from a local mayor to the president — who blocks a constituent on Twitter could be found guilty of violating that constituent's First Amendment rights.
In advance of VidCon later this week, an annual conference for video creators, Facebook is stepping up its efforts to offer creators tools to monetize their content.
The big picture: It's doing so amid increased competition to win over the hearts of creators from other big tech companies, like YouTube and TikTok, as well as platforms that are designed specifically for creative business management, like Patreon.
Apple updated its MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro lines, offering lower prices on the former and including the small touchscreen TouchBar on the latter. It is also discontinuing its lightest model, the 12-inch MacBook.
Why it matters: The new models come ahead of the back-to-school season, a key time for new laptop purchases.
Digital rights group Fight For the Future is calling on Congress to ban government use of facial recognition. The announcement, to be made Tuesday, comes in the wake of weekend reports that federal authorities used facial recognition on millions of driver's license photos.
Our thought bubble: An all-out ban is unlikely, but the position makes for a strong opening salvo in the looming fight over regulating facial-recognition tech.
The White House's Thursday "social media summit," gathering conservative critics of social media platforms, will also highlight how Trump-era politics have split the right on tech issues.
Why it matters: As with trade, tech is an area where Trump's ascendancy has scrambled traditional power dynamics and policy positions. Free-market thinkers who drove the conservative side of the conversation for years have lost ground to social media personalities who are more open to government intervention against Big Tech — and have the ear of people in power.
For a century and longer, the individualist quality in U.S. workers has been falling away as Americans have moved to the city and labor become more about big companies and playing well in the sandbox. Now, some of the last loner purists are being forced to conform, too.
The transformation of some of the few surviving archetypal individualists — doctors, farmers, and now truck drivers — is powered in part by three of the most potent forces today: automation, monopoly capitalism and the new surveillance economy.
The FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been using driver’s license photos for facial recognition searches without their owners' knowledge or consent, the Washington Post first reported Sunday.
Why it matters: This is the "first known instance of ICE using facial recognition technology to scan state driver’s license databases, including photos of legal residents and citizens," notes the New York Times, which reviewed the details that Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology obtained via public records requests.
