Facebook will soon begin testing ads inside its Oculus Quest virtual reality system. In the coming weeks, ads will start appearing inside the Resolution Games title Blaston as well as two other unnamed apps. From a report: Facebook will later expand the system based on user feedback, saying it aims to create a "self-sustaining platform" for VR development. Facebook introduced ads on the Oculus mobile app last month, and it's used limited Oculus data to target Facebook advertising since 2019, but this is its first major foray into putting ads inside the Oculus VR platform itself. "Once we see how this test goes and incorporate feedback from developers and the community, we'll provide more details on when ads may become more broadly available across the Oculus platform and in the Oculus mobile app," the company said in a blog post.

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U.S. President Joe Biden told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday that certain critical infrastructure should be "off-limits" to cyber-attacks, while the two leaders agreed in their summit to start cybersecurity talks. From a report: Biden said the list of organizations that should not be attacked includes the 16 sectors designated by the United States as critical infrastructure. The sectors, based on a description published by the U.S. Homeland Security Department, include telecommunications, healthcare, food and energy. "We agreed to task experts in both our countries to work on specific understandings about what is off-limits," Biden said. "We'll find out whether we have a cybersecurity arrangement that begins to bring some order." In a separate press conference, Putin said he agreed to "begin consultations" on cybersecurity issues. He also said that while the United States had requested information from Russia about recent cyber-attacks, Moscow had similarly asked for information about attacks he said were coming from the U.S. side and had not received a response.

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Three astronauts are set to blast off on China's longest ever human spaceflight mission.

Apple would be prohibited from pre-installing its own apps on Apple devices under antitrust reform legislation introduced last week, said Democratic Representative David Cicilline, who is leading a push to pass new regulations for U.S. technology companies. From a report: Cicilline told reporters Wednesday that a proposal prohibiting tech platforms from giving an advantage to their own products over those of competitors would mean Apple can't ship devices with pre-installed apps on its iOS operating platform. "It would be equally easy to download the other five apps as the Apple one so they're not using their market dominance to favor their own products and services," the Rhode Island Democrat said. The proposal is part of a package of bipartisan bills that would impose significant new constraints on how tech companies operate, restricting acquisitions and forcing them to exit some businesses. The House Judiciary Committee will mark up the five bills in a hearing next week, Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the committee's chairman, said.

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Do NBA players who are vaccinated have to go into the isolation if they are exposed to Covid?

A month ago, Amazon-first gadget brands Aukey and Mpow suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from the giant online retailer's storefront, with almost all their electronics vanishing from Amazon's shelves. Today, popular battery and charger brand RavPower has completely disappeared as well. From a report: All of the company's product listings have disappeared, leaving blank white spaces in RavPower's Amazon storefront. Searches for "RavPower" don't bring up any listings for products made by the company. Existing links to RavPower products either point to Amazon's "Sorry, we couldn't find that page" cute 404 dogs, or listings that read "Currently unavailable." By and large, this is exactly what happened to Aukey, Mpow, and other lesser-known electronics retailers last month -- except here, whoever did this has been a bit more thorough.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook said that he believes a proposed European law known as DMA would "not be in the best interest of users," signaling the iPhone maker's opposition to European legislation that would force it to allow users to install software outside of Apple's App Store. From a report: "I look at the tech regulation that's being discussed, I think there are good parts of it. And I think there are parts of it that are not in the best interests of the user," Cook said on Wednesday through videoconference at the Viva Tech conference in France. The European Union proposed two laws regulating big tech companies, the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act, earlier this year. The DSA focuses on the online ad industry, but the DMA focuses on companies with large numbers of customers -- like Apple, Google and Amazon -- and sets rules requiring them to open up their platforms to competitors. One of Cook's issues with the law is that it would force Apple to permit sideloading apps on the iPhone, which is manually installing software from the internet or a file instead of through an app store. Currently, Apple's App Store is the only way to install apps on an iPhone, which has made it the focus of lawsuits and regulators around the world. Apple has claimed that its control over the App Store ensures high-quality apps and helps prevent malware. Cook noted that the iPhone's market share in France is only 23% and said that permitting sideloading on iPhones would damage both the privacy and security of users, citing increased malware on Android phones versus iPhones. Google's Android allows sideloading. "If you take an example of where I don't think it's in the best interest, that the current DMA language that is being discussed, would force sideloading on the iPhone," Cook said. "And so this would be an alternate way of getting apps onto the iPhone, as we look at that, that would destroy the security of the iPhone."

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For something that was to have been done and thrown away three years ago, NASA's Juno spacecraft has a busy schedule ahead exploring Jupiter and its big moons. From a report: The spacecraft entered orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016, and has survived bombardment from intense radiation at the largest of the solar system's planets. It is now finishing its primary mission, but NASA has granted it a four-year extension and 42 more orbits. Last week, it zipped past Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon. "Basically, we designed and built an armored tank," said Scott J. Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, who is the mission's principal investigator. "And it's worked." Jupiter is essentially a big ball of mostly hydrogen, but it has turned out to be a pretty complicated ball. The mission's discoveries include lightning higher up than thought possible, rings of stable storms at the north and south poles, and winds extending so deep into the interior that they might push around the planet's magnetic fields. "I think this has been a revelation," said David J. Stevenson, a professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology and a co-investigator on the mission. Juno's highly elliptical path, pitched up at almost a 90-degree angle to the orbits of Jupiter's moons, passes over the planet's north and south poles. On each orbit, Juno swoops in, reaching a top speed of 130,000 miles per hour as it passes within a few thousand miles of Jupiter's clouds.

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Google will open its first retail store in New York City, highlighting the internet giant's effort to promote its consumer hardware devices. From a report: The store, in Manhattan's trendy Chelsea neighborhood, will open to the public Thursday, the Mountain View, California-based company said Wednesday in a blog post. The shop, which is a block away from rival Apple's 14th Street store, occupies part of the first floor of Google's New York offices. Alphabet's Google began experimenting with pop-up stores in 2016, the same year it debuted its Pixel smartphone and Nest smart home speaker. In the years since, the company has introduced a plethora of hardware devices and hosted subsequent pop-ups to learn more about what consumers expect from a retail store, said Jason Rosenthal, Google's vice president of direct channels and membership. "It's like walking into a dream," Ivy Ross, vice president of design, user experience and research for design and services, said during a virtual tour. "I hope customers feel the same way. I want them to be happy and inspired, like I am being in here."

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NYT did something interesting: Gift articles. Every subscriber, they say, can share up to 10 articles per month that don't count toward the number of free articles non-subscribers can read. I thought I was giving this a try earlier when I clicked the gift icon, but looking at the link it generated, there's nothing special about it. I'll try again. They don't say on the site when this feature was added, I just heard about it today.

I noticed is that most of the new outliners are dark mode apps. White text on black background.

Until recently it had never occurred to me that my outliner should have a dark mode too, so I've been working on that for Drummer in the last few days. Getting pretty close to having it working, then I have to go back and review everything to see if a bit of color here and there would be nice. I notice that other dark mode apps make use of color in an accenting way. I like that. You almost don't notice it until you look for it.

Dark mode Drummer screen shot.

Let me just say CSS is the most awkward possible way to do this kind of programming. I yearn for QuickDraw, the UI tech we used in the 80s on the Mac. Everything was straightforward and done in a real programming language as opposed to CSS.

Amazon has blamed social media companies for its failure to remove fake reviews from its website, arguing that "bad actors" turn to social networks to buy and sell fake product reviews outside the reach of its own technology. From a report: The company says it removed more than 200m suspected fake reviews before they were seen by customers in 2020 alone, but nonetheless has faced continued criticism for the enormous scale of fake and misleading reviews that make it on to its store. This year a Which? investigation found companies claiming to be able to guarantee "Amazon's Choice" status on products -- an algorithmically assigned badge of quality that can push products to the top of search results -- within two weeks, and others claiming to have armies of reviewers numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Amazon says the blame for those organisations should lie with social media companies, who it says are slow to act when warned that fake reviews are being solicited on their platforms.

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When is journalism going to start asking when the DOJ is going to charge Trump with insurrection? They seem to be stuck, for years, reporting what everyone knows. Trump tried to use the DOJ as if it were his personal lawyer. He didn't accept the results of the election. Had no respect for democracy. We saw and heard the speech he made to the people who would go on to invade the Capitol, there's the smoking gun folks. You can stop looking for it. We keep letting Trump slide, and it keeps getting worse. Unless journalism decides it's time to start asking the obvious question, we're going to stay stuck. The question, on the off chance it isn't obvious is this -- when are you going to make Trump pay for his crimes against the country? Tax evasion is cute, we want to see him pay for trying to overthrow the government.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has said the company's greatest contribution to mankind will be in health. So far, some Apple initiatives aimed at broadly disrupting the healthcare sector have struggled to gain traction, according to people familiar with them and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. From the report: Apple has envisioned an audacious plan for healthcare, offering its own primary-care medical service with Apple-employed doctors at its own clinics, according to people familiar with the plan and documents. To test that and other bold healthcare ideas, it took over clinics that catered to its employees and built a team with scores of clinicians, engineers, product designers and others. Today those ambitions, which aren't widely known, have largely stalled as Apple has shifted the focus of its health unit to something it knows well: Selling devices, specifically the Apple Watch, according to people familiar with its strategy. The new primary-care service hasn't gotten off the ground, people familiar with it say. A digital health app launched quietly this year has struggled to keep users engaged, say people familiar with the app and the documents seen by the Journal. Some employees have raised questions internally about the integrity of health data coming from the company's clinics that has been used to support product development, according to people familiar with their concerns and the documents.

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Microsoft will let Xbox One owners play next-gen Xbox games through its xCloud service. The news was buried in a blog post recapping Microsoft's Xbox + Bethesda showcase, with the company confirming plans to leverage Xbox Cloud Gaming (xCloud) for Xbox One consoles. That means the 2013 hardware will be able to play Xbox Series X exclusive games from 2021 -- extending the lifecycle of what would normally soon be obsolete boxes. From a report: "For the millions of people who play on Xbox One consoles today, we are looking forward to sharing more about how we will bring many of these next-gen games, such as Microsoft Flight Simulator, to your console through Xbox Cloud Gaming, just like we do with mobile devices, tablets, and browsers," says Will Tuttle, editor in chief of Microsoft's Xbox Wire. Until now, Microsoft had only described xCloud on consoles as a way for players to "try [games] before you download," but it's clear the company sees the service as offering much more. Microsoft originally announced Microsoft Flight Simulator as an Xbox One title, before quietly removing references to the Xbox One launch in December. Microsoft recently confirmed Flight Simulator will now launch on Xbox Series X / S consoles on July 27th.

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