The Federal Trade Commission has urged a federal judge in DC to reject Facebook's request to dismiss the FTC's high-stakes antitrust lawsuit. In a 56-page legal brief, the FTC reiterated its arguments that Facebook's profits have come from years of anticompetitive conduct. From a report: "Facebook is one of the largest and most profitable companies in the history of the world," the FTC wrote. "Facebook reaps massive profits from its [social networking] monopoly, not by offering a superior or more innovative product because it has, for nearly a decade, taken anticompetitive actions to neutralize, hinder, or deter would-be competitors." The FTC's case against Facebook focuses on two blockbuster acquisitions that Facebook made early in the last decade. In 2012, Facebook paid $1 billion for the fast-growing startup Instagram. While Instagram the company was still tiny -- it had only about a dozen employees at the time of the acquisition -- it had millions of users and was growing rapidly. Mark Zuckerberg realized it could grow into a serious rival for Facebook, and the FTC alleges Zuckerberg bought the company to prevent that from happening.

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Twitter thread: "These days I see twitter as an essential utility. Largely because the API is so good."

BTW, Drummer will have a collection of built-in Twitter verbs.

Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of the open-source blogging platform WordPress, writes: Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre set of ads. They can't even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried to rip-off of Apple's Mac vs PC ads, but tastelessly personify the WordPress community as an absent, drunken father in a therapy session. I have a lot of empathy for whoever was forced to work on these ads, including the actors, it must have felt bad working on something that's like Encyclopedia Britannica attacking Wikipedia. WordPress is a global movement of hundreds of thousands of volunteers and community members, coming together to make the web a better place. The code, and everything you put into it, belongs to you, and its open source license ensures that you're in complete control, now and forever. WordPress is free, and also gives you freedom. So if we're comparing website builders to abusive relationships, Wix is one that locks you in the basement and doesn't let you leave. I'm surprised consumer protection agencies haven't gone after them. Wix is a for-profit company with a valuation that peaked at around 20 billion dollars, and whose business model is getting customers to pay more and more every year and making it difficult to leave or get a refund. (Don't take my word for it, look at their investor presentations.) They are so insecure that they are also the only website creator I'm aware of that doesn't allow you to export your content, so they're like a roach motel where you can check in but never check out. Once you buy into their proprietary stack you're locked in, which even their support documentation admits.

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Heavy goods vehicles powered by batteries can compete with diesel ones, say researchers.

Charging is a common concern with electric vehicles. But some owners of the brand-new Mustang Mach-E have run into a peculiar problem: their electric SUVs won't start even when the main battery pack is full. From a report: That's because, The Verge has learned, there's a problem with some early Mustang Mach-E SUVs that involves how the much smaller 12-volt battery gets charged. It's the latest in a growing line of small issues that have come to light during the rollout of Ford's first long-range electric car. As is the case in other electric cars, the Mustang Mach-E keeps its 12-volt lead-acid battery topped up by essentially sipping power from the much larger lithium-ion battery pack. Based on owners' accounts across multiple forum threads, including one who spoke to The Verge, the problem is this stops happening whenever the Mustang Mach-E is plugged in to charge up the larger battery pack. That is especially an issue for owners in areas with cold weather, as Ford encourages them to leave their Mustang Mach-Es plugged in so the SUVs can use power from the grid to warm up before driving. The 12-volt battery powers many of the Mustang Mach-E's systems (since the larger battery pack is high-voltage), and so when it dies, the electric SUV cannot be started. When this happens, owners have reported the FordPass app says the vehicle is in "deep sleep" mode. Some forum members have started referring to it as the "electric brick" problem.

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Fallout from Texas' statewide power outages in February continues to spread. Today, the Texas House of Representatives is scheduled to debate a bill that would require power producers to bear the costs of services that help keep the electrical grid stable. From a report: If the bill passes, it would "unfairly shift the cost of ancillary electric services exclusively onto renewable generators rather than all the beneficiaries," according to a letter written by the Partnership for Renewable Energy Finance (PREF), an industry group, and signed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Goldman Sachs, and a number of other firms. Amazon and other big tech firms have invested heavily in renewable power, seeking to spruce up their images while cutting their power bills. Costs for wind and solar have dropped precipitously in recent years, making investments in wind farms and solar plants attractive to power-hungry data center operators like Amazon, Facebook, and Google. "It is important to note that these changes neither enhance electric reliability nor lower consumer costs," the letter states. "They appear to be premised on the assumption that renewable energy was disproportionately responsible for the state's February power outages, a thesis that has been unequivocally discredited." The bill would require the grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), to "directly assign" ancillary service costs to wind and solar power, specifically. The PREF letter counters that not only do all generators utilize ancillary services, but costs for those services have remained flat over the last decade while wind and solar have grown by more than 250 percent.

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Intel is launching an artificial intelligence application that will recognize and redact hate speech in real-time. It's called Bleep, and Intel hopes it'll help with one of gaming's oldest and most intractable problems -- people can be real pieces of shit online. From a report: A video of the app shows that it will allow users to customize what kind and how much hate speech they want to see, including "Racism" and "White Nationalism" sliders that can be set to "none," "some," "most," or "all," and a separate on and off toggle for the "N-word." "While we recognize that solutions like Bleep don't erase the problem, we believe it's a step in the right direction -- giving gamers a tool to control their experience," Roger Chandler, Vice President and General Manager of Intel Client Product Solutions, said during a virtual presentation at 2021's Game Developers Conference. According to Intel Marketing Engineer Craig Raymond, Bleep is "an end-user application that uses AI to detect and redact audio based on your user preferences." In footage of the application, Bleep presented users with a list of sliders so gamers can control the amount of hate and abuse they encounter. The list included ableism and body shaming, LGBTQ+ hate, aggression, misogyny, name-calling, racism and xenophobia, sexually explicit language, swearing, and white nationalism. As Chandler explained, Intel can't "solve" racism or the long-running and well-documented problems in gaming culture (and culture more broadly). At the same time, Bleep is techno-AI solutionism that feels pretty dystopian, pitching racism, xenophobia, and general toxicity as settings that can be tuned up and down as though they were graphics, sound, or control sliders on a video game. It is also a way of admitting defeat: if we can't stop players from being incredibly racist in chat, we can simply filter out what they say and pretend they don't exist.

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Data from 500 million LinkedIn users has been scraped and is for sale online, according to a report from Cyber News. A LinkedIn spokesperson confirmed to Insider that there is a dataset of public information that was scraped from the platform. From a report: "While we're still investigating this issue, the posted dataset appears to include publicly viewable information that was scraped from LinkedIn combined with data aggregated from other websites or companies," a LinkedIn spokesperson told Insider in a statement. "Scraping our members' data from LinkedIn violates our terms of service and we are constantly working to protect our members and their data." LinkedIn has 740 million users, according to its website, so the reported data scraping of 500 million users means about two-thirds of the platform's user base could be affected. The data includes account IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, workplace information, genders, and links to other social media accounts.

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Many companies want to exploit deep sea minerals but campaigners warn it could damage fragile ecosystems.

A second senior Australian government minister has revealed his mobile phone was hacked through the Telegram messaging app, with a media report saying the phishing scam was aimed at revealing contact details of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. From a report: Health Minister Greg Hunt's office said in an emailed statement on Thursday that "a cyber security attempt to impersonate the minister has been referred to the Australian Federal Police and investigations are underway." That follows Monday's statement by Finance Minister Simon Birmingham that he had been targeted. The Australian newspaper reported late Wednesday that the details of pro-democracy Hong Kongers were provided to someone impersonating Birmingham, with one of the recipients being asked: "Do you have any contacts in Hong Kong?" The person handed over details of Hong Kongers without realizing they were speaking to a cyber-hacker, the paper said, citing the person who it didn't identify.

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We take a look at why these unusual clots happen and when they occur.

General Motors is reducing production in some of its North American plants due to a global semiconductor chip shortage. From a report: The chip shortage is affecting automotive companies around the world, with semiconductors functioning as a key component for steering systems, car brakes and other automobile features. GM has temporarily closed some plants, with expected downtimes ranging from a week to several weeks. GM expects the closures will cost them between $1.5 billion and $2 billion in operating profits this year. The chip shortage stems from slowed production and manufacturing in 2020. Semiconductor chips require long lead times due to their complicated technology, resulting in a backlog of demand.

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It would be amazing if all software developers used compatible back-end databases.

Today's song: For the benefit of Mr Kite.