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For more than a year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a point of stoking fears about China. He’s told U.S. lawmakers that China “steals” American technology and played up nationalist concerns about threats from Chinese-owned rival TikTok.

Meta has a growing problem: The social media service wants to transform itself into a powerhouse in hardware, and it makes virtually all of it in China.So the company is racing to get out.

Facebook has hit walls, say three people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.

The world’s next great space telescope is falling behind.The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s successor to the famed Hubble, is at risk of experiencing significant delays in development, according to a new report from a government agency that audits federal programs.

Webb is an $8.8 billion project two decades in the making. Last September, NASA announced it was delaying the telescope’s launch by at least five months, from October 2018 to between March and June 2019. At the time, NASA officials said the change wasn’t due to any problems with the hardware, but because assembling the telescope’s many complex parts was “taking longer than expected.”

This is a disheartening forecast for many parties, including NASA; Northrop Grumman, the telescope’s main contractor; and the European and Canadian space agencies, contributors to the telescope’s design and construction. There’s no question that the Webb will launch. After 20 years of development and construction, most of the money has already been spent and the hardware rigorously tested. But the road to the launchpad may be bumpier than everyone expected.

have we run out of things to say and write that actually are about technology and the companies behind them? Or do we feel compelled to fill the white space between what matters? Sort of like talk radio?

There have been three big innovation narratives in the last few years that complicate, but don't invalidate, my thesis. The first -- The Rise of the Cloud -- was essentially a rebranding of having data on the Internet, which is, well ... what the Internet has always been about. Though I think it has made the lives of some IT managers easier and I do like Rdio. The second, Big Data, has lots of potential applications. But, as Tim Berners-Lee noted today, the people benefiting from more sophisticated machine learning techniques are the people buying consumer data, not the consumers themselves. How many Big Data startups might help people see their lives in different ways? Perhaps the personal genomics companies, but so far, they've kept their efforts focused quite narrowly. And third, we have the daily deal phenomenon. Groupon and its 600 clones may or may not be good companies, but they are barely technology companies. Really, they look like retail sales operations with tons of sales people and marketing expenses.

we've reached a point in this technology cycle where the old thing has run its course. I think the hardware, cellular bandwidth, and the business model of this tottering tower of technology are pushing companies to play on one small corner of a huge field.

Fresh evidence shows that military hardware that was supplied to US allies has been distributed in contravention of arms deals to militia groups, including UAE-backed separatists. They are now using it to fight the Saudi-supported forces of the internationally recognized government, who are also armed with US weapons.

These new findings follow an exclusive investigation by CNN in February which traced US-made equipment that was sold to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The weapons were being passed to non-state fighters on the ground in Yemen, including al Qaeda-linked fighters, hardline Salafi militias and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, the report found, in violation of arms sales law.

Saudi Arabia has led a coalition, in close partnership with the UAE and including various militia groups, to fight Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen since 2015. But, in a clear break with its Saudi partners, the UAE said in July that it was reducing its forces in the country, and fighting escalated between separatists and government forces on the ground in August. The UAE has since thrown its support behind the separatist movement.

When Google arrived in the late 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people were instantly captivated by its knack for taking them wherever they wanted to go on the internet. Developed by the company’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the algorithm that drove the site seemed to work like magic.

as the internet search engine expanded its reach to billions of people over the next decade, it was driven by another major technological advance that was less discussed, though no less important: the redesign of Google’s giant computer data centers.

Led by a Brazilian named Luiz Barroso, a small team of engineers rebuilt the warehouse-size centers so that they behaved like a single machine — a technological shift that would change the way the entire internet was built, allowing any site to reach billions of people almost instantly and much more consistently.

In many ways mobile devices belong more to the dying PC model than to the real future of computing.

I’m talking about a diffuse and invisible network embedded in our surroundings. Chips and sensors are finding their way into clothing, personal accessories, and more

The next wave of computing devices will be different because they won’t wait for our instructions. They will feel more like natural extensions of what we do in our lives. The hardware and software technologies behind this ubiquitous-computing model will become the focus of a radically changed computing industry.

hen Prime was introduced, in 2005, Amazon was relatively small, and still known mostly for books. As the company’s former director of ordering, Vijay Ravindran, told Recode’s Jason Del Rey in 2019, Prime “was brilliant. It made Amazon the default.”

It created incentives for users to be loyal to Amazon, so they could recoup the cost of membership, then $79 for unlimited two-day shipping. It also enabled Amazon to better track the products they buy and, when video streaming was added as a perk in 2011, the shows they watch, in order to make more things that the data indicated people would want to buy and watch, and to surface the things they were most likely to buy and watch at the very top of the page.

And most important, Prime habituated consumers to a degree of convenience, speed, and selection that, while unheard-of just years before, was made standard virtually overnight.

the tech ethos has escaped the bounds of hardware and software. Tech is turning into a culture and a style, one that has spread into new foods and clothing, and all other kinds of nonelectronic goods. Tech has become a lifestyle brand.

Because it draws a critical mass of tech-conversant people to a small space, SXSW has also made a reputation as a catalyst for new social networking ideas.

there is a sense of ennui in the world of tech conferences. What is the purpose of a conference in an age of instant online collaboration?

“A nation has the right to determine what it should do to defend itself,” Mr. Olmert said at a conference held in a Manhattan hotel by The Jerusalem Post. “But when at the same time we ask the United States and other countries to provide us with the means to do it, no one is entirely independent to act, irrespective of the positions and attitudes and policies of other countries.”

Mr. Olmert said he was expressing legitimate concerns shared by most people in the Israeli security establishment, “present and past,” including many who have not spoken publicly.

Mr. Olmert warned that Mr. Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, having likened Iran to Nazi Germany, may find themselves unable to back down from military action. “They talk too much, they talk too loud,” he said in the interview. “They are creating an atmosphere and a momentum that may go out of their control.

pay a fine next week

military weapons from Cuba onboard

Chong Chon Gang

Value added by the information technology and communications industries — mostly hardware and software — has remained stuck at around 4 percent of the nation’s economic output for the last quarter century.

News organizations that take advantage of computers to let go of journalists, secretaries and research assistants will show up in the economic statistics as more productive, making more with less. But statisticians have no way to value more thorough, useful, fact-dense articles.

What’s more, gross domestic product only values the goods and services people pay for. It does not capture the value to consumers of economic improvements that are given away free. And until recently this is what news media organizations like The New York Times were doing online.

Meant to run on hardware already in the field, like Blackberry devices, RapidFTR can add a child to the system with only scant bits of information. If a child cannot give their full name, or is too young or too scared speak, a photo alone can begin the process. The app works both with and without a wireless connection, by syncing to a server later, if needed.

His earlier projects in the N.Y.U. program were more whimsical. He created things like automated telephone pranks, but the child reunification app became his master’s thesis, and he later joined UNICEF as an employee. With the assistance of some pro-bono engineering from the software company Thoughtworks, he was able to get the program going and then recruited an army of volunteers to build RapidFTR

Today the program is entirely open-source and driven by volunteers. Mr. Just, too, has now become a volunteer for his own app, in addition to teaching the “Design for UNICEF” class that he was once a student in.

The rancor is due, perhaps, to a fundamental confusion about what crowdfunding really is. On one hand, a backer is not a customer, because the product does not exist yet and may never

On the other hand, though, neither is a backer an investor, even if many of ZPM’s backers insisted they be treated as such. A Kickstarter pledge does not buy a portion of a company. Backers do not sit on the board; they are not enfranchised to review the company’s audited financials. Investors’ interests, at least ideally, are aligned with those of the company, whereas nothing in the crowdfunding relationship ties a backer to the company for the long term. Moreover, the last thing Kickstarter wants to deal with is S.E.C. regulations.

Kickstarter’s founders hardly imagined that a situation like this would arise. Neither was a technologist — Perry Chen, now 38, was an artist and gallerist, and Yancey Strickler, 36, was a music journalist — and although several of their recent hires have engineering backgrounds, they continue to see Kickstarter as something of an arts institution

In the biggest tech deal of all time, Dell announced Monday that it has agreed to buy corporate software, storage and security giant EMC for $67 billion.

The deal completes Dell's transformation from a consumer PC business to an IT solutions provider for companies. That process began when Dell bought Perot Systems for $4 billion in 2009 and went full throttle in 2013 when company founder Michael Dell took the business private.

EMC is a behemoth of a corporate IT business. It is among the largest providers of storage hardware in the world. It also makes servers and owns security company RSA, which is known for its hard-to-crack SecurID tokens. And its most prized possession is its 81% stake in VMware -- the company that rules the world of virtualization software that allows businesses to run various operating systems on their devices.

One of Britain’s highest-ranking intelligence officials on Tuesday castigated the giant American companies that dominate the Internet for providing the “command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals” and challenged the companies to find a better balance between privacy and security.

the accusation went beyond what United States officials have said about Apple, Google and others that are now moving toward sophisticated encryption of more and more data on phones and email systems.

companies like his “will move to strengthen encryption,” and require governments to get court orders if they want data.

Fifty years ago, on April 19, 1965, chemist and reluctant entrepreneur Gordon E. Moore set out to graph the rapid rate of improvement in semiconductor-chip performance—and ended up discovering the heartbeat of the modern world. That discovery is what became known as “Moore’s Law,” which is the observation that performance (speed, price, size) of integrated circuits, aka microchips, regularly doubled every 18 months.

it has proved to be the most effective predictive tool of new chip generations, technology innovation and even social and cultural changes of the last half-century.

If some of the recent breakthroughs in atomic-level transistors, nanotechnology and biological computers prove fruitful, Moore’s Law could again accelerate, or at least continue to rule, for decades to come. It now seems more likely than ever that a thousand years from now, what will be remembered most about our time will be its stunning efflorescence of innovation and entrepreneurship. By then Moore’s Law will have become Moore’s Era.

After the first airstrike hit near a hospital in eastern Idlib, Syria, no one was injured, according to one local man.

Activists say the incident was a "double-tap." That's when attackers strike, wait for first responders to arrive and then hit the same spot.

The Syrian-American Medical Society, which runs the hospital, says the strikes were launched by Russian warplanes.

Boston’s struggle with income segregation

In a region known for its searing struggles with racial division, another once-secondary form of segregation — income segregation — has become a defining force.

The surge in affluence in some areas and poverty in others has wiped out scores of mixed-income neighborhoods. In 1970, 7 in 10 families lived in these places. Now it’s just 4 in 10.

A World War I cannon was stolen from outside a Veterans of Foreign Wars building in Michigan, and an official is concerned it could be sold for scrap metal.

The vintage piece of military hardware was hauled away earlier this week from outside VFW Post 1137 in Benton Township in southwestern Michigan, The Herald-Palladium of St. Joseph reported (http://bit.ly/1NXqHgd ) Thursday.

The 12- to 14-foot-long cannon has a heavy metal barrel, wooden wheel spokes and sat on a concrete slab. It had been displayed since 1976 at the post. The non-working cannon doesn't have a firing pin.

now online shopping is muddy and suspicious in a different way—you never really know what you’re buying, or when it will arrive, or why it costs what it does, or even what options might be available to purchase. The problem isn’t the Dash button, but the way online shopping works in general, especially at the Everything Store.

The company appears to give people what they want, including correcting problems when they arise.But a customer-service orientation masks how Amazon has changed consumer expectations and standards as they relate to retail purchases.

That brings us to Germany’s Dash-button ban: It’s difficult to know exactly what the product costs when you press the button to order it. Prices on Amazon sway up and down in mysterious ways, driven by computational pricing models that consumers can never see or understand. If configured to do so, pressing the Dash button can send a notification to the account holder’s smartphone, which can be followed to confirm pricing and cancel the order if desired.