Critics said the pandemic would make the industry flee San Francisco and its southern neighbor, Silicon Valley. But tech can't seem to quit its gravitational center. New York Times: The pandemic was supposed to lead to a great tech diaspora. Freed of their offices and after-work klatches, the Bay Area's tech workers were said to be roaming America, searching for a better life in cities like Miami and Austin, Texas -- where the weather is warmer, the homes are cheaper and state income taxes don't exist. But dire warnings over the past year that tech was done with the Bay Area because of a high cost of living, homelessness, crowding and crime are looking overheated. Mr. Osuri [Editor's note: anecdote in the story who is the chief executive of Akash Network] is one of a growing number of industry workers already trickling back as a healthy local rate of coronavirus vaccinations makes fall return-to-office dates for many companies look likely. Bumper-to-bumper traffic has returned to the region's bridges and freeways. Tech commuter buses are reappearing on the roads. Rents are spiking, especially in San Francisco neighborhoods where tech employees often live. And on Monday, Twitter reopened its office, becoming one of the first big tech companies to welcome more than skeleton crews of employees back to the workplace. Twitter employees wearing backpacks and puffy jackets on a cold San Francisco summer morning greeted old friends and explored a space redesigned to accommodate social-distancing measures.

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Matt Stoller: Louis Rossmann is an important YouTube personality who talks about, among other things, the fact that big firms block their customers from repairing equipment so they can extract after-market profits with replacement parts. And he's very much noticed the Biden executive order, which calls for agencies to curtail this practice (as well as the FTC report on it). Rossmann did a series of videos on this order, one of which focused on the order calling for the Pentagon to stop contracting with firms that block soldiers from being able to repair equipment. He cited Elle Ekman's New York Times piece from 2019 on the problem. What's even more interesting than the video are the comments on it, from soldiers angry that they keep encountering this problem in the field. I pulled some of them and published them here.

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A new challenger has emerged in the gaming hardware category. Game distribution giant Valve today announced the launch of Steam Deck, a $399 gaming portable designed to take PC games on the go. From a report: The handheld (which has echoes of several portable gaming rigs of years past) features a seven-inch screen and runs on a quad-core Zen 2 CPU, coupled with AMD RDNA 2 graphics and 16GB of RAM. Storage runs 64GB to 512GB, the latter of which bumps the price up to $649. The built-in storage can be augmented via microSD. [...] Flanking the 1280 x 800 touchscreen are a pair of trackpads and thumb sticks. A built-in gyroscope also uses movement to control the gaming experience. There's a single USB-C port for charging, peripherals and connecting to a big screen, while a 40Wh battery promises between 7-8 hours of gameplay, by Valve's numbers.

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The US State Department has announced today its intention to offer rewards of up to $10 million for any information that helps US authorities identify and locate threat actors "acting at the direction or under the control of a foreign government" that carry out malicious cyber activities against US critical infrastructure. From a report: Today's announcement comes after the US has seen an increase in cyber activity targeting its critical infrastructure sectors, including a spike in ransomware incidents. Some of these attacks, such as those on JBS Foods and Colonial Pipeline, impacted US food and fuel supply for days, even creating a small panic among the US population in certain areas. Many cyber-security companies and industry experts have blamed Russia, accusing the Kremlin of tolerating and allowing these gangs to operate from its borders on the condition they don't attack Russian organizations. Other gangs have been seen operating from China, Iran, and North Korea. Through its announcement today, the State Department is looking for proof that these gangs are operating with some sort of help or guidance from local regimes. The reward is offered through the State Department's Rewards for Justice (RFJ) program, the same system through which the US previously offered a $5 million reward for info on North Korean state-sponsored hackers and a $10 million reward for information on any state-sponsored hackers meddling in US elections.

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Oliver Daemen, 18, will become the youngest person to fly to space with the Blue Origin venture.

A new documentary film has harnessed artificial intelligence to artificially voice quotes from its subject, the late Anthony Bourdain. From a report: Details of the dubious decision are outlined in a piece in The New Yorker, and raise a heap of uncomfortable questions about whether or not it's ethical to put words in the mouths of the deceased, whether or not they penned them during their life. The lines appear in filmmaker Morgan Neville's new documentary, Roadrunner, when an email from Bourdain is initially read by the recipient, but the audio then transitions into Bourdain's own voice.

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General Motors is telling owners of some older Chevrolet Bolts to park them outdoors and not to charge them overnight because two of the electric cars caught fire after recall repairs were made. A Slashdot reader shares a report: The company said Wednesday that the request covers 2017 through 2019 Bolts that were part of a group that was recalled earlier due to fires in the batteries. The latest request comes after two Bolts that had gotten recall repairs caught fire, one in Vermont and the other in New Jersey, GM spokesman Kevin Kelly said. Owners should take the steps "out of an abundance of caution," he said. The steps should be continued until GM engineers investigate and develop a repair, he said. The cars should be parked outdoors after charging is complete, GM said in a statement. "We are moving as quickly as we can to investigate this issue," the company said.

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Government hackers from several countries used spyware made by an Israeli company to target victims all over the world, according to new research by digital rights watchdog Citizen Lab and Microsoft. From a report: The spyware leveraged two unknown vulnerabilities -- also known as zero-day exploits -- in Windows. Citizen Lab, which is housed at the University of Toronto's Munk School, and Microsoft worked together on the research, and published reports detailing their findings on Thursday. The company said it detected hacking attempts on more than 100 victims including "politicians, human rights activists, journalists, academics, embassy workers, and political dissidents" in Palestine, Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Spain, UK, and other countries. Citizen Lab said it was able to identify and reach out to a victim who let its researchers analyze their computer and extract the malware. "This was someone who was targeted for their political positions and political beliefs, rather than someone who was the target of a terrorism investigation or something like this," Bill Marczak, one of the researchers at Citizen Lab who worked on the investigations, told Motherboard in a phone call. Citizen Lab concluded that the malware and the zero-days were developed by Candiru, a mysterious Israel-based spyware vendor that offers âoehigh-end cyber intelligence platform dedicated to infiltrate PC computers, networks, mobile handsets," according to a document seen by Haaretz. Candiru was first outed by the Israeli newspaper in 2019, and has since gotten some attention from cybersecurity companies such as Kaspersky Lab. But, until now, no one had published an analysis of Candiru's malware, nor found someone targeted with its spyware.

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Pepper, SoftBank's robot, malfunctioned during scripture readings, took breaks in exercise class and couldn't recognize the faces of family members. From a report: Having a robot read scripture to mourners seemed like a cost-effective idea to the people at Nissei Eco, a plastics manufacturer with a sideline in the funeral business. The company hired child-sized robot Pepper, clothed it in the vestments of Buddhist clergy and programmed it to chant several sutras, or Buddhist scriptures, depending on the sect of the deceased. Alas, the robot, made by SoftBank Group, kept breaking down during practice runs. "What if it refused to operate in the middle of a ceremony?" said funeral-business manager Osamu Funaki. "It would be such a disaster." Pepper was fired. The company ended its lease of the robot and sent it back to the manufacturer. After a rash of similar mishaps across Japan, in which Pepper botched its job at a nursing home and gave baseball fans a creepy feeling, some people are saying the humanoid itself will need a funeral soon. "Because it has the shape of a person, people expect the intelligence of a human," said Takayuki Furuta, head of the Future Robotics Technology Center at Chiba Institute of Technology, which wasn't involved in Pepper's development. "The level of the technology completely falls short of that. It's like the difference between a toy car and an actual car." The robotics unit of SoftBank, a Tokyo-based technology investor, said in late June that it halted production of Pepper last year and was planning to restructure its global robotics teams, including a French unit involved in Pepper's development. Still, the company says the machine shouldn't be sent to the product graveyard. Spokeswoman Ai Kitamura said Pepper is SoftBank's icon and still doing good work as a teacher and a temperature taker at hospitals. She declined to comment on any of its individual mishaps. SoftBank introduced the humanoid to the world in 2014 and started selling it the next year. "Today might become a day that people 100, 200 or 300 years later would remember as a historic day," SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said at the introduction. SoftBank sold the robots to individuals for about $2,000, plus monthly fees for subscription services, and rented them to businesses starting at $550 a month. Japan has had a love affair with humanlike robots going back to Astro Boy, a robot featured in a 1960s animated television series, but there have also been breakups. Honda Motor's Asimo once kicked a soccer ball to then-President Barack Obama. Toshiba's Aiko Chihira, an android with a woman's name and appearance, briefly worked as a department store receptionist. After a while, both disappeared. More recently, a Japanese hotel chain created a robot-operated hotel, with dinosaur-shaped robots handling front-desk duties, only to reverse course after the plan failed to save money and created more work for humans.

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Employees are waiting to hear whether their remote work plans will be approved. From a report: Google software engineers reported something in a recent survey that surprised higher-ups: they felt as productive working from home as they did before the pandemic. Internal research at the Alphabet unit also showed that employees want more "collaboration and social connections" at work, according to Brian Welle, a human resources vice president. Welle declined to provide exact figures but said "more than 75%" of surveyed employees answered this way. Most staff also specifically craved physical proximity when working on new projects. "There's something about innovative work -- when you need that spark," Welle said in an interview. "Our employees feel like those moments happen better when they're together." That's partially why, despite the rebound in productivity, the technology giant is sticking with its plan to bring most employees back to offices this fall. As Google deliberates which individual employees will get to continue working full time from home and who will need to come in, some staff are increasingly frustrated by the lack of clear direction and uneven enforcement of the policy. Internal message boards lit up this month when a senior Google executive announced he was going to work from New Zealand. Meanwhile, most lower-level staff are waiting to learn if they can relocate, or have to come into the office.

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There goes Robert E. Lee.

Podcast: The question we're not willing to discuss. We need new leadership, and it's not the Lincoln Project. Their war is within the Republican Party, which is not the war we're fighting. Our war is whether we go back to slavery, or do we live up to the promise of the country post-Civil War and Great Society. We need black leadership. We need to respond to the slavers very clearly, no, we will not discuss what you want to do. Your only choice is whether you will change or you will crawl back into the hole you came out of. There is no other choice. And we need to expel from Congress every traitor to the Constitution, and there are many of them. No half-steps. Nothing that makes people feel like everything is okay, that our war is winnable with stark advertising. That's not it.

London-listed cybersecurity firm Avast is in advanced talks with U.S. rival NortonLifeLock about a merger that would create a clear leader in consumer security software. From a report: Both companies confirmed the talks late on Wednesday, with Avast saying an offer would be in cash and shares, although it added there was no certainty a deal will be agreed. Avast, which was founded and based in Prague, Czech Republic, is a pioneer of "freemium" software, whereby basic applications are free and subscribers pay for premium features. Its Avast and AVG branded desktop and mobile software had more than 435 million active users at the end of 2020, of which 16.5 million are paying. The shift to home working during COVID-19 spurred demand for its desktop products like antivirus software, and it recorded 7.1% organic growth in adjusted billings to $922 million last year.

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The company's research into a consumer mind-reading device is over, for now. Some scientists said it was never possible anyway. From a report: The spring of 2017 may be remembered as the coming-out party for Big Tech's campaign to get inside your head. That was when news broke of Elon Musk's new brain-interface company, Neuralink, which is working on how to stitch thousands of electrodes into people's brains. Days later, Facebook joined the quest when it announced that its secretive skunkworks, named Building 8, was attempting to build a headset or headband that would allow people to send text messages by thinking -- tapping them out at 100 words per minute. The company's goal was a hands-free interface anyone could use in virtual reality. "What if you could type directly from your brain?" asked Regina Dugan, a former DARPA officer who was then head of the Building 8 hardware dvision. "It sounds impossible, but it's closer than you realize." Now the answer is in -- and it's not close at all. Four years after announcing a "crazy amazing" project to build a "silent speech" interface using optical technology to read thoughts, Facebook is shelving the project, saying consumer brain-reading still remains very far off. In a blog post, Facebook said it is discontinuing the project and will instead focus on an experimental wrist controller for virtual reality that reads muscle signals in the arm. "While we still believe in the long-term potential of head-mounted optical [brain-computer interface] technologies, we've decided to focus our immediate efforts on a different neural interface approach that has a nearer-term path to market," the company said. Facebook's brain-typing project had led it into uncharted territory -- including funding brain surgeries at a California hospital and building prototype helmets that could shoot light through the skull -- and into tough debates around whether tech companies should access private brain information. Ultimately, though, the company appears to have decided the research simply won't lead to a product soon enough.

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We swear allegiance to each other.