An unusual day is one where It's almost 6PM and I haven't posted anything to the blog. This is one of those days. I think I actually have to update at least once a day for the nightly mail app. Not sure what it would do if midnight came and there was nothing new. I don't really want to find out. Everything's fine, in the middle of a pretty heavy bit of development so my focus is there. See you tomorrow! ;-)

A federal judge tossed a $506.2 million damages award against Apple after ruling the iPhone maker should have been able to argue that patent owner Optis Wireless Technology was making unfair royalty demands, though he refused to throw out the liability finding. From a report: Optis and its partners in the case, PanOptis Patent Management and Unwired Planet, claimed that Apple's smartphones, watches, and tablets that operate over the LTE cellular standard were using its patented technology. U.S. District Court Judge Rodney Gilstrap said the jury should have been allowed to consider whether the royalty demand was consistent with a requirement that standard-essential patents be licensed on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory," or FRAND, terms. The patent trial in August, one of the few held during the pandemic, was part of an unusual sweep of verdicts in Texas that collectively resulted in $3.7 billion in damages against tech companies like Apple and Intel Corp. Apple was also hit with damages awards of $502.8 million in a decade-long battle over security communications technology, and $308.5 million in a case over digital rights management.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: On November 7, 2018, Leong Sze Hian, a financial advisor and blogger, shared an article on his Facebook page, without comment. The article, published by Malaysian website The Coverage, alleged that Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had become a target of ongoing investigations in the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal, a massive case of graft in Malaysia that drew in banks in Singapore, Hollywood stars, and Saudi royalty. The article claimed that Malaysia, under former Prime Minister Najib Razak, had signed unfair deals with Singapore in return for help to launder stolen funds. These were serious allegations, particularly in Singapore, where the government is ultra-sensitive to any suggestion of corruption. The response, unsurprisingly, was strong and swift: the law and home affairs minister issued a clear rebuttal, Singapore's High Commission in Kuala Lumpur described the article as libelous, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore lodged a police report against the author of a similar article published in the States Times Review, a website run by a Singaporean in Australia who is highly critical of Singapore's ruling People's Action Party. The Infocomm Media Development Authority, Singapore's media regulator, told Leong to remove the link from his Facebook page; he did. But it was already too late to save him from trouble. Two days later, he found out that Prime Minister Lee was going to sue him for defamation. Last month, the High Court ruled that Leong did defame Lee and ordered him to pay almost $100,000 (133,000 Singapore dollars) in damages. It's an extraordinary sum for a simple Facebook link that stayed up for only three days. But there's a particular legal precedent in Singapore: public leaders are usually awarded higher damages when they win defamation suits related to their character or integrity. In his judgment, Justice Aedit Abdullah quoted a previous case in which the courts stated that public "leaders are generally entitled to higher damages also because of their standing in Singapore society and devotion to public service."

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An anonymous reader writes: Charles Schwab is suing one of its former customers after the retail brokerage allegedly sent more than $1.2 million to an account of the Louisiana woman and then could not get the money back. Schwab meant to send $82.56 to Kelyn Spadoni's Fidelity Brokerage Services account in February, but a computer glitch caused it to erroneously transfer more than $1.2 million, according to the lawsuit. Schwab tried to get the money back, but repeated calls and texts to Spadoni, who lives in a suburb of New Orleans, were not returned, the brokerage said in the lawsuit. "We are fully cooperating with authorities in an effort to resolve this issue," Schwab said in a statement on Tuesday. Fidelity declined comment. After receiving the money in her account, Spadoni transferred a quarter of the money to another account, after which she bought a house and a car using the funds, Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office spokesman Captain Jason Rivarde said in an interview on Tuesday. "Obviously you are not planning to give the money back if you spent it," he said. When Spadoni signed up with Schwab in January, the agreement she signed included a section that said any overpayment of funds must be returned, said the lawsuit, filed March 30.

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Scientists confirm they have made "chimera" embryos from long-tailed macaques and humans.

How many years will the ongoing chip shortage affect technology firms across the world? This week, multiple tech executives offered their own dismal estimates as part of their usual public financial disclosures, with the worst one coming in at "a couple of years." From a report: That nasty estimate comes from Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who offered that vague timeframe to The Washington Post in an interview on Tuesday. He clarified that was an estimate for how long it would take the company to "build capacity" to potentially address supply shortages. The conversation came as Intel offered to step up for two supply chains particularly pinched by the silicon drought: medical supplies and in-car computer systems. In previous statements, Gelsinger pointed to Intel's current $20 billion plan to build a pair of factories in Arizona, and this week's interview added praise for President Joe Biden's proposed $50 billion chip-production infrastructure plan -- though Gelsinger indicated that Biden should be ready to spend more than that. TSMC CEO C.C. Wei offered a similarly dire estimate to investors on Thursday, saying that the Taiwan-based company hoped to "offer more capacity" for meeting retail and manufacturing demand "in 2023." TSMC, coincidentally, is moving forward with a manufacturing plant of its own in Arizona, which Bloomberg claims could cost "up to $12 billion," despite the company clarifying that it intends to prioritize research, development, and production in its home nation.

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Apple on Thursday announced it's launching a $200 million "Restore Fund" that will "make investments in forestry projects to remove carbon from the atmosphere while generating a financial return for investors." From a report: The move is the latest step by the world's largest tech companies to invest in climate initiatives, including a number of efforts to finance technologies and methods to not only cut emissions, but remove atmospheric CO2.

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The Japanese government has been forced to quickly retire an animated character it had hoped would win support for its decision this week to release more than 1m tonnes of contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the sea. From a report: Although the water will be treated before being discharged, it will still contain tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope represented on a government website by a cute fish-like creature with rosy cheeks. The character's appearance in an online flyer and video on the reconstruction agency's website angered Fukushima residents. "It seems the government's desire to release the water into the sea takes priority over everything," Katsuo Watanabe, an 82-year-old Fukushima fisher, told the Kyodo news agency. "The gap between the gravity of the problems we face and the levity of the character is huge." Riken Komatsu, a local writer, tweeted: "If the government thinks it can get the general public to understand just by creating a cute character, it is making a mockery of risk communication." Social media users named the character Tritium-kun -- or Little Mr Tritium -- an apparent reference to Pluto-kun, who appeared in the mid-1990s to soften the image of plutonium on behalf of Japan's nuclear industry. The reconstruction agency, which oversees recovery efforts in the region destroyed by the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, removed the promotional material on Wednesday, a day after it first appeared. Experts say tritium is harmful to humans only in large doses, and that with dilution the treated water poses no scientifically detectable risk.

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Google Earth has partnered with NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service, and Carnegie Mellon University's CREATE Lab to bring users time-lapse images of the planet's surface -- 24 million satellite photos taken over 37 years. Together they offer photographic evidence of a planet changing faster than at any time in millennia. Shorelines creep in. Cities blossom. Trees fall. Water reservoirs shrink. Glaciers melt and fracture. From a report: "We can objectively see global warming with our own eyes," said Rebecca Moore, director of Google Earth. "We hope that this can ground everyone in an objective, common understanding of what's actually happening on the planet, and inspire action." Timelapse, the name of the new Google Earth feature, is the largest video on the planet, according to a statement from the company, requiring 2 million hours to process in cloud computers, and the equivalent of 530,000 high-resolution videos. The tool stitches together nearly 50 years of imagery from the U.S.'s Landsat program, which is run by NASA and the USGS. When combined with images from complementary European Sentinel-2 satellites, Landsat provides the equivalent of complete coverage of the Earth's surface every two days. Google Earth is expected to update Timelapse about once a year.

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Satellite images collected over 37 years are combined to show how Earth in a new way.

Social-media companies play a central role in disseminating the messaging of domestic violent extremists in the U.S., FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday, likening the role platforms play in the spread of extremist thought to foreign-backed online political disinformation. From a report: "Social media has become, in many ways, the key amplifier to domestic violent extremism just as it has for malign foreign influence," Mr. Wray said in an annual worldwide-threats hearing held by the Senate Intelligence Committee. "The same things that attract people to it for good reasons are also capable of causing all kinds of harms that we are entrusted with trying to protect the American people against." Mr. Wray's comments came as the Biden administration jump-starts efforts to combat domestic terrorism, which took on greater urgency after supporters of former President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 claiming falsely that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. Mr. Wray's remarks were among the most strident comments from a senior U.S. intelligence official about how social media fuels the problem. Mr. Wray stopped short of blaming Silicon Valley companies for aiding domestic extremism, instead urging Americans "to understand better what the information is that they are reading" and approach it with a "greater level of discerning skepticism." The nature of social media -- an "echo chamber" in which like-minded people rarely hear from outside voices and are isolated because of the Covid-19 pandemic -- has contributed to the problem, he said.

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Social-media companies play a central role in disseminating the messaging of domestic violent extremists in the U.S., FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday, likening the role platforms play in the spread of extremist thought to foreign-backed online political disinformation. From a report: "Social media has become, in many ways, the key amplifier to domestic violent extremism just as it has for malign foreign influence," Mr. Wray said in an annual worldwide-threats hearing held by the Senate Intelligence Committee. "The same things that attract people to it for good reasons are also capable of causing all kinds of harms that we are entrusted with trying to protect the American people against." Mr. Wray's comments came as the Biden administration jump-starts efforts to combat domestic terrorism, which took on greater urgency after supporters of former President Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 claiming falsely that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. Mr. Wray's remarks were among the most strident comments from a senior U.S. intelligence official about how social media fuels the problem. Mr. Wray stopped short of blaming Silicon Valley companies for aiding domestic extremism, instead urging Americans "to understand better what the information is that they are reading" and approach it with a "greater level of discerning skepticism." The nature of social media -- an "echo chamber" in which like-minded people rarely hear from outside voices and are isolated because of the Covid-19 pandemic -- has contributed to the problem, he said.

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Dell has announced the long-expected spinoff of VMware, the computing virtualization company it has majority-owned since it bought then-owner EMC Corp. in 2016. From a report: The computing giant said it will spin off its 81% equity ownership in VMware, creating two standalone companies when the move is completed in the fourth quarter of this year. That timing depends on conditions such as a favorable Internal Revenue Service opinion that the transaction qualifies for tax-free status for Dell shareholders. The idea is to simplify the companies' capital structures, since arguably investors have valued both companies' stocks lower than they might have because of the uncertainties related to the complex capital structures. Dell's shares rose about 9% in after-hours trading, while VMwareâ(TM)s shares rose about 1.6% in late trading. Under the spinoff, which Dell had signaled last year, VMware will distribute a cash dividend of about $11.5 billion to $12 billion to shareholders, which of course include publicly held Dell itself. Chairman and Chief Executive Michael Dell, along with financial partner Silver Lake Partners, own 60% of Dell shares. Dell will get $9.3 billion to $9.7 billion of that dividend, which the company said will help it get more investment-grade ratings and enable it to pay down debt it has gradually been reducing since buying EMC.

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Facebook said Thursday that since 2020, all its operations have been fully supported by renewable energy, hitting a goal the social media giant set in 2018 to combat climate change. From a report: The social network made the announcement ahead of Earth Day, an annual event on April 22 that focuses on environmental protection. The milestone shows what tech firms are doing to offset the harmful impacts they have on the environment as they make new devices and power data centers amid a growing appetite for tech products. For years, environmental groups such as Greenpeace have been putting increasing pressure on businesses like Facebook to become more eco-friendly. Facebook also said its operations reached "net zero emissions," which the company says means "removing the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere as we emit." These emissions contribute to some pollution and a warmer climate, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. The social network said in the last three years, it cut down on its greenhouse gas emissions by 94%, surpassing its 75% reduction goal. Some of the emissions Facebook reduced came from its data centers, offices and other buildings the company leases.

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Chamber of Progress, a new tech industry group funded by giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google, is announcing its support for a corporate tax increase like the one President Joe Biden proposed to fund his $2 trillion infrastructure plan. From a report: The move sets Chamber of Progress, a new center-left group, apart from other business organizations that have opposed Biden's tax hike, like the Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce. While the group's endorsement does not reflect the individual views of each company that funds it, it does send a signal that the tech industry is open to higher tax rates and supports greater infrastructure investment. Chamber of Progress launched late last month and is an industry coalition focused on a range of economic, social and consumer issues, including creating a social safety net and tackling income inequality. Biden proposed raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% to help fund his American Jobs Plan, which includes infrastructure proposals that span the entire economy. The plan includes money to expand broadband availability, which is key to the success of internet businesses, and other priorities the tech industry has emphasized, like clean energy.

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