Month: July 2019

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | alexsl)

The Justice Department today announced its approval of the T-Mobile/Sprint merger as part of a settlement that requires the merging companies to spin off several assets to Dish Network.

The DOJ decided against filing a lawsuit to block the T-Mobile US purchase of Sprint, even though it reduces the number of major mobile network providers from four to three. In exchange for its approval, the DOJ convinced the companies to sell Dish spectrum licenses, wholesale network access, and Boost Mobile. Boost is Sprint's prepaid wireless subsidiary, and resells Sprint network access instead of operating its own network.

Dish would use its newfound assets to resell T-Mobile/Sprint service and to build its own network. The building-its-own-network part is far more crucial for Dish to effectively replace the competition eliminated by the merger, but this is expected to take several years.

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes on Harvard's campus in 2004, well before Facebook started taking over the world. (credit: Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images)

Facebook cofounder Chris Hughes isn't just idly wondering if regulators might break up the tech behemoth he helped launch. He's going on a personal tour, meeting with state and federal officials to lay out in detail the way he thinks it could be done.

Hughes has met with members of Congress, the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, the Federal Trade Commission, and the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James to make a detailed case arguing Facebook is too big for its own good, according to separate reports from The Washington Post and The New York Times.

The breakup tour went public in May, when Hughes penned a lengthy op-ed in The New York Times saying his former colleague Mark Zuckerberg wielded too much power. "I’m disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders," Hughes wrote at the time. "And I’m worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them."

Enlarge / Moving bubbles.

Sometimes life just isn’t fair. If you play with fluids, you get to use cool camera systems, and every paper fluid researchers write comes with a fancy video of a fluid performing unnatural acts. Then, when you ask about applications, the researchers point to ink jet printers.

This should actually be taken as a warning. If you force a scientist to come up with an application, they will invent the ink jet printer as a form of long-lasting revenge. So, please, don’t ask what bouncing superwalker bubbles might be useful for.

Bubble, bubble, toil and... inkjet?

Way back in the '70s, scientists discovered that if you take a droplet of oil and place it on the surface of an oil bath, it will bounce up and down as long as the surface of the bath is vibrating. About 10 years ago, scientists went a step further and showed that if you chose the vibrational frequency just right, then the droplet would move around the surface. Scientists referred to these perambulatory droplets as walkers—perhaps in a tribute to the fragility of walkers in Star Wars.

Enlarge / Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii). (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard sued Google on Thursday. She argued that the search giant illegally blocked her from buying ads on Google's platform for several hours on June 28—two days after she appeared in the first Democratic primary debate.

"Google plays favorites, with no warning, no tranparency, and no accountability," Gabbard wrote in her lawsuit. "Google's arbitrary and capricious treatment of Gabbard's campaign should raise concerns for policymakers everywhere about the company's ability to use its dominance to impact political discourse."

Google says the brief suspension was triggered by the company's automated anti-fraud algorithms.