Apple is the latest tech interest to decry new U.S. tariffs related to intellectual property disagreements, and those recently proposed by the Trump administration on Chinese goods (see 1807260024 and 1807240031). Tariffs "show up as a tax on the consumer and wind up resulting in lower economic growth” that can sometimes bring about "significant risk of unintended consequences,” said CEO Tim Cook on a quarterly earnings call Tuesday after regular U.S. markets closed.
Russia export controls and sanctions
The use of export controls and sanctions on Russia has surged since the country's invasion of Crimea in 2014, and especially its invasion of Ukraine in in February 2022. Similar export controls and sanctions have been imposed by U.S. allies, including the EU, U.K. and Japan. The following is a listing of recent articles in Export Compliance Daily on export controls and sanctions imposed on Russia:
Developing an internationally applicable online privacy framework is a major hurdle, given fundamental differences among the U.S., the EU and adversaries like China and Russia, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., told us Tuesday. Industry representatives and a conservative scholar described during a Senate Internet Subcommittee hearing anti-business impacts of EU’s general data protection regulation.
Facebook removed 32 pages and accounts potentially linked to Russian disinformation campaigns from Facebook and Instagram, it announced Tuesday. “Whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency has in the past,” Facebook said, suggesting the alleged bad actors have been trying to circumvent tougher platform rules. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., said removal is “further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation, and I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity.” The company is “acting responsibly” by releasing its findings regarding Russia and the 2016 election Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters. “If they think there are foreign actors” who are attempting influence “our conversations about our elections, then they should do everything they can to make sure that they are policing their platforms and keeping them neutral and clear of that kind of interference.” Lawmakers are “paying very close attention” to what Russia did to influence the 2016 election and what it may do to influence the November elections, so “it's nice to have the cooperation and help of the tech companies in trying to prevent any of that untoward influence from affecting our elections,” Thune said.
Dolby CEO Kevin Yeaman hailed “the combined experience” of Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision on the company’s fiscal Q3 earnings call Wednesday, highlighting the Apple TV 4K as the first digital media adapter (DMA) to support Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision.
The intelligence community provides classified information to social media companies to help counter malicious foreign actors on platforms, said Department of Homeland Security National Protection and Programs Directorate Undersecretary Christopher Krebs Friday. Krebs didn’t specify what information is provided at the Washington Post-Hewlett Packard event on Russian interference. Representatives from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube confirmed to the House Judiciary Committee last week that each of the platforms removed Russian-linked accounts and content related to election interference (see 1807170043).
The FCC is “planning to rebuild and re-engineer” its electronic commenting filing system and has asked the House and Senate Appropriations committees for “the funds necessary,” Chairman Ajit Pai wrote Sens. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa. “We hope they will enable us to make important improvements by approving it soon.” The revamp would come more than a year after the ECFS application programming interface experienced problems during an FCC proceeding on rescinding its 2015 net neutrality rules. The FCC faced pushback over its claim the glitch stemmed from a distributed denial-of-service attack (see 1710130052 and 1806050046). “In addition to being technologically behind the times, the system that this Commission inherited from the prior Administration was designed to make it as easy as possible to file comments,” Pai told Merkley and Toomey. “While facilitating widespread public participation in the rulemaking process is a worthy and important goal, we believe that we can accomplish that goal while at the same time updating our system to minimize the potential for abusive behavior.” Pai said he will make several proposals that reflect the lawmakers' suggestions, including pitching CAPTCHA authentication or similar verification. “We will seek to redesign ECFS to institute appropriate safeguards against abusive conduct,” Pai said. The senators' offices didn't comment Wednesday. The FCC doesn't “have any information regarding whether any 'fake' comments were submitted by foreign governments, nor can we verify the total number of comments that may have originated from bots,” Pai told the senators: More than 7.5 million comments that favored 2015 rules had the same exact sentence and were “associated with only 50,508 unique names and street addresses.” More than 447,000 comments favoring 2015 rules claimed to come from people residing at the same address in Chelyabinsk, Russia, Pai said. Docket 17-108 had 2 million comments that used stolen identities, half a million from Russian email addresses and almost 8 million nearly identical comments from email domains associated with FakeMailGenerator.com (see 1805090076).
Dish Network customers with a Hopper 3 set-top and 4K HDR TV can tune to channel 540 and watch “nearly every” World Cup match in “stunning 4K HDR quality,” blogged the pay-TV service Thursday. The matches will be captured, broadcast and received in HDR10, emailed Dish spokeswoman Chelsea Satkowiak. The World Cup competition opened Thursday in Russia for a monthlong run.
Hisense sees smart TVs becoming “something to play with” and offering a “new way of shopping,” said General Manager Yu Zhitao during a demonstration at CES Asia in Shanghai Wednesday. In the U.S., Hisense launched ULED 4K TVs Tuesday with Android TV and Google Assistant. The set maker also is bowing smart TVs to coincide with Thursday's opening of the World Cup games in Russia. Owners can use a designated button on a TV remote to engage interactive mode, clicking on any of the 1,000 players from 32 World Cup teams to see statistics, videos and background on a participant using Hisense image recognition technology, Zhitao said. This extends to TV actors and celebrities, he said. During the World Cup, users will be able to order a player’s jersey by scanning a QR code with a mobile device scanner in front of the TV, Yu showed. Users can find restaurants nearby, order beer and find content on TV using voice recognition, Yu said.
All lawmakers at Thursday's House Digital Commerce Subcommittee hearing on advertising industry digital data gathering practices agreed problems need to be addressed. There was a partisan divide in tone and tenor of lawmakers' questions to executives and consumer advocates, whose testimony mirrored written remarks (see 1806130074). Lawmakers from both parties frequently referenced the ongoing debate on the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica privacy breach issues (see 1806130057).
Eutelsat’s TV service-provider customers in Russia, Europe and the Americas booked 5,500 hours of HD broadcast capacity for the World Cup, which opens Friday for a monthlong run, said the satellite operator Tuesday.