Charlotte Henry

Washington has turned its fire on Big Tech in recent months. Big names on the Democratic side have been keen to put forward policy proposals during their runs for the White House. However, a freshman Republican is also making waves. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley gave an interesting interview to Fast Compay on a variety of tech issues, including privacy.

I think we need to be deeply concerned about the level of privacy invasion and violation that we’re seeing from these tech companies. My concern is that it’s baked deeply into their business model of extracting data from consumers without telling them, and then monetizing that data, and then also working to ensure they have very large numbers of people online for large portions of the day so that you can make these ads profitable. I mean, that really is the model for Facebook, for the Google platforms, and for Twitter in many ways.

Dead Cells is now available to pre-order for iOS,  Cult of Mac reported. The popular console game costs $9.99, or $7.99 if you order now.

Dead Cells is a roguelike-metroidvania game that has been incredibly well received by fans and critics. It boats a “very positive” rating on Steam after more than 23,500 reviews, and has sold 1 million copies on the Switch alone. If you haven’t already had a chance to play it, you’ll soon have no excuse. Having Dead Cells in your pocket means you can play it anywhere, at almost any time.

Monzo plans to launch in the U.S. Yahoo Finance reported. It will be the first time the app-only bank has ventured outside of the UK. It could potentially be a challenger to the forthcoming Apple Card as it offers some similar facilities.

“We’ve just crossed 2m customers, our TV ad is going great, we should have a quarter of a million new customers this month, and we’re contribution margin positive here in the UK, so it feels like the UK business is on track to be really successful,” Tom Blomfield, the CEO and founder of Monzo told Yahoo Finance UK. “Now feels like the right time to start thinking about our next market.” Blomfield said sign-up events will be held in LA, San Fransisco, New York, and other major US cities before rolling out online applications.

Telegram said China was behind a massive cyber attack on it during recent protests in Hong Kong.  The firm’s founder Pavel Durov tweeted the accusations, Bloomberg News reported.

The encrypted messaging app said it experienced a powerful distributed denial of service attack after “garbage requests” flooded its servers and disrupted legitimate communications. Most of those queries came from Chinese internet protocol addresses, founder Pavel Durov said in a subsequent Twitter post. This case was not an exception,” he tweeted without elaborating. Hong Kong is in the throes of political unrest as the Beijing-backed government attempts to force through controversial legislation that would for the first time allow extraditions to China, which protesters fear could be used to squelch government opposition.

Twitter co-founder and Medium CEO Ev Williams described preparing to post on the social network he helped create as “armoring up for battle.” He told the Recode Code conference that he misses the day’s when bloggers did not get instant feedback.

“Part of the beautiful thing about blogging was you were always looking for feedback but you didn’t get it as momentarily — things could marinate,” said Williams, who was speaking onstage at Code Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, on Tuesday with Vox founder and editor-at-large Ezra Klein. “Now, there’s an addiction to short-term feedback that is detrimental sometimes to thought.” Williams, who is now leading Medium, compared the mindset of getting ready to post on social media platforms like Twitter as “armoring up for battle.” This isn’t the first time Williams has expressed regret over what some view as the potentially negative effects of Twitter.

Ride-hailing service Bolt is back in London, and ready to take to on Uber. It will find doing so a tough challenge. However, as Wired noted, the service previously known as Taxify has one big advantage – it is much cheaper.

Bolt has spent the last two years going through the licensing process properly, and now it’s ready for action. But it is not new to ride hailing. The company was founded in 2013 by 19-year-old Estonian Markus Villig, and began by targeting markets – such as his home town of Tallinn – where Uber was slow to expand. It now operates in more than 30 countries, and has found particular success in Africa, where it offers rides on mopeds as well as in cars – the continent makes up about half of its revenue. But Uber is already deeply embedded into London’s transport system. It accounts for 80 per cent of all ride-hailing journeys, and is integrated into Google Maps and Citymapper.

Senator Elizabeth Warren said that the Justice Department’s anti-trust chief should recuse himself from investigations into Apple and Google. Senator Warren, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said that Makan Delrahim had previously lobbied for the firms and therefore should not investigate them, Reuters reported.

In a letter to Delrahim, Warren said Alphabet Inc’s Google had hired him in 2007 to lobby federal antitrust officials on behalf of the company’s proposed acquisition of online advertising company DoubleClick Inc, and he had reported an estimated $100,000 in income from Google in that year. She said Apple Inc had hired Delrahim in 2006 and 2007 to lobby the government on its behalf on patent reform issues.

Apple has ended its plans to build a $921m iCloud data center in Denmark, AppleInsider reported. The company told the relevant local authority that it will not be building on the 285 hectares site in Kasso that it acquired in 2017. Apple will proceed with another data center project in the country.

In a “short phone call” to the Aabenraa Municipality, Apple advised it had made the decision to concentrate only on its data center construction taking place in Viborg, a second Danish construction project for the company. Apple also plans to sell the land, with no intention to construct anything else on the property, a statement from the municipality reads. Described as “completely unexpected,” Aabenraa director Stig Isaksen suggests the call was “an overall strategic business decision made in the United States, and that the decision has been taken entirely independently of the circumstances of the Aabenraa Municipality.” Isaksen also claims there has been “much praise” for local partners and the municipality from Apple throughout the project.

Amazon unveiled the developer preview of Alexa Conversations Monday.  The function is powered by deep learning and combines skills with multi-turn dialogue, reported VentureBeat. These can subsequently be connected with other skills to create all-in-one use cases. Organizing a night out is one of the first use cases.

Multi-turn conversations have been available for some time, but Alexa Conversations is designed to help people get more done quickly with the AI assistant’s more than 90,000 Alexa skills. The experience is intended at launch to help people make purchases, so if you order a movie ticket, follow-up questions may put you in touch with the OpenTable skill to make dinner reservations or Uber skill to get a ride. Both Uber and OpenTable are early adopters of Alexa Conversations, along with the Atom Tickets skill for the sale of movie tickets. The ability to string together Alexa skills begins with a night-out use case, Amazon VP of devices David Limp told a gathering of reporters.