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Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has made reinstating net neutrality via FCC appointments one of his campaign promises, the Daily Dot reported today. He is far from alone among the Democratic Presidential candidates in supporting the policy, but appears to be the first to make it part of his election campaign.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Senator told the Daily Dot:

When Bernie Sanders is president, he will appoint FCC commissioners who will reinstate net neutrality protections and make sure that giant corporations treat all content and traffic equally.

I’ve contacted the Sanders campaign for confirmation and further information, and will update this post if I hear back.

Sanders has supported net neutrality consistently when it has come up over the years, speaking out for it when it was established in 2015’s Open Internet Order and speaking against the FCC’s order overturning it.

Revamping the FCC’s lineup isn’t something he could do instantly; Commissioners serve 5-year terms, though the newest appointees are the Democrats forming the majority of the 5-person Commission, so the next President will have the ability to choose a new Democratic Commissioner when one of the Republicans leaves. (It’s likely that Chairman Pai would leave his position if a Democrat was elected President.)

Legislation and executive action are other options for addressing the net neutrality issue; Lawmakers are actively pursuing the former, though any bill can be considered dead on arrival in the Senate right now, since Republican legislators are mostly against net neutrality, and it would likely be vetoed even if it passed through Congress.

Among the other Democratic Presidential frontrunners, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) have both been vocal supporters of net neutrality as well.

“Under this administration the FCC has become a puppet for giant internet providers,” said Warren in a speech on the floor last year in favor of a measure that would have rolled back the latest FCC rules. “If the FCC will not stand up for the public interest, it’s up to Congress to do so. But it’ll take this Republican-controlled Congress prying itself free from the grip of giant companies and doing what’s right for the American people.”

Sen. Harris told the FCC in her official comment on Restoring Internet Freedom:

Broadband providers must not be allowed to tilt the competitive playing field by blocking or throttling their competitors, prioritizing their own offerings, or otherwise unreasonably interfering with lawful content. Title II of the Communications Act is currently the only legal basis for establishing those vital protections for America’s consumers and businesses, and so I also urge the Commission to maintain that legal foundation

I won’t list their comments exhaustively, but Andrew Yang, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Pete Buttigieg, and others have been on the record historically or lately as supporting net neutrality and have taken various actions to promote it or voted for legislation to restore it.

The major outlier among all these is Joe Biden, who has spoken against certain forms of net neutrality in the past, but also was present for the Obama-prioritized push to instate it during the duo’s second term. The issue and situation was different in 2006 and 2007, but it’s hard to give the guy a pass just because it was a few years ago — especially when the first thing he did after announcing his Presidency was to hold a fundraiser hosted by a Comcast executive.

While it’s never safe to assume anything, it seems highly likely that any of these candidates, should they be elected, would take the steps Sanders describes. But it’s notable that Sanders is the first to make it official.

Apple hitting its release timelines has become far from certain these days, cough cough AirPower, but the Apple Card will be released during the summer timeframe it was given at launch.

CEO Tim Cook announced on the company’s quarterly earnings call that the Apple Card — which Apple has partnered with Goldman Sachs to rollout — will begin rolling out next month.

“Thousands of Apple employees are using Apple card every day in our beta test, and we plan to begin the rollout of Apple card in August,” Cook said.

Cook’s announcement confirms a Bloomberg report last week that Apple was targeting an early August rollout for the card.

One of the constant refrains about Apple in 2019 is its shift towards services — a trend that’s reflected, once again, in its third quarter earnings release.

In fact, the release trumpets the “all-time high” for services revenue in its headline, while a statement from CEO Tim Cook describes this as “our biggest June quarter ever — driven by all-time record revenue from Services,” as well as sales of wearables, iPads, Macs and iPhones.

Apple’s services business includes its subscription products like iCloud, Apple Music and Apple News+. The category will probably grow even more in the coming months with the launch of Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade.

And the latest numbers do indeed beat last quarter’s services revenue (which also set a record), but it’s pretty close — $11.450 billion in Q2 compared to $11.455 billion in Q3. Also worth noting: Analysts had predicted Apple’s services revenue would come in at $11.68 billion, so this is a relative disappointment.

On the other hand, the growth is more impressive when you look at it year-over-year — in the same quarter last year, Apple reported services earning of $10.17 billion, so this is an increase of 13%. It also looks good compared to the direction of product revenue, which is down year-over-year, to $42.35 billion, due in part to falling iPhone sales.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a planet-seeking satellite that launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket last April, has found three new worlds that orbit a nearby dwarf star which is both smaller and cooler than our own Sun.

The newfound planets range in size and temperature, but are all bigger than Earth and with a higher temp on average – which are calculated only based on their distance from the star they orbit, and its energy output, without factoring in any atmospheric effects since it’s not yet know whether they have atmospheres at all. At the low end, there’s TOI 270 d, which has an average temp of 150 F – almost three times Earth’s own.

Both TOI 270 d, the furthest from its own system’s central star, and TOI 270 c, its nearest neighbor, are thought to be primarily gaseous and most closely resemble Neptune in our own Solar System. These aren’t really equivalent, however, as they’re much smaller, and researchers at NASA say they’re actually more likely new types of planets not seen anywhere in our own local solar backyard.

The planets overall are interesting to researchers because they are all between 1.5 and just over 2 times the size of Earth, which is actually an unusual size for planets to be when considered overall. The TOI 270 system is also pretty much perfectly positioned for study by the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope, so it presents a great opportunity for future research once that space-based observatory gets up and running in 2021.

Apple just released its Q3 earnings and it had a solid June quarter, outperforming analyst expectations. The company reported $53.8 billion in revenue and $2.19 earnings per share. The company’s stock popped 3 percent on the news.

Apple’s June quarter revenue showcases just how much revenue growth has been slowing for the company. The Q3 2019 revenue of $53.8 billion just peeks above the Q3 2018 revenue of $53.3 billion.

iPhone revenue had the biggest year-over-year dip going from $29.5 billion in last year’s Q3 to just $26 billion this most recent quarter. The year-over-year decline in iPhone sales was made up for in a boost in all of the company’s other product categories including a major bump in Wearables sales which crossed $5.5 billion in Q3.

The company hasn’t been sharing device numbers for the last several quarters and has instead focused solely on revenues, a sign of both the stagnating iPhone sales and the spike in the iPhone’s average selling price.

The story for the last several quarters that Cook and Co. have been selling is the spike in Services revenue. This quarter, Services didn’t grow quite as much as analysts hoped but it still reached $11.5 billion.

One of the company’s biggest headlines this quarter came last week when the company announced it was purchasing “most of” Intel’s modem business for $1 billion. There aren’t likely to be too many near-term effects of this deal though Apple aiming to own more of its supply chain has certainly been a decades-long effort for the company.

Updating

Thanks to modern machine learning techniques, text-to-speech engines have made massive strides over the last few years. It used to be incredibly easy to know that it was a computer that was reading a text and not a human being. But that’s changing quickly. Amazon’s AWS cloud computing arm today launched a new number of new neural text-to-speech models, as well as a new newscaster style that is meant to mimic the way… you guessed it… newscasters sound.

“Speech quality is certainly important, but more can be done to make a synthetic voice sound even more realistic and engaging,” the company notes in today’s announcement. “What about style? For sure, human ears can tell the difference between a newscast, a sportscast, a university class and so on; indeed, most humans adopt the right style of speech for the right context, and this certainly helps in getting their message across.”

The new newscaster style is now available in two US voices (Joanna and Matthew) and Amazon is already working with USA Today and Canada’s The Globe and Mail, among a number of other companies, to help them voice their texts.

Have a listen for yourself:

Amazon Polly Newscaster, as the new service is officially called, is the result of years of research on text-to-speech, which AWS is also now making available through its Neural Text-to-Speech engine. This new engine, which isn’t unlike similar neural engines like Google’s WaveNet and others, currently features 11 voices, three for UK English and 8 for US English.

You can hear a few more of these voices here.

In this age of fake news, having life-like robot voices that sound like real newscasters feels a bit problematic at first. For the most part, though, whether a robot or human reads the text doesn’t make all that much of a difference, though. There are plenty of good use cases for the voices and given the examples that AWS provided, you’ll be able to listen to these voices for significantly longer than the old ones before you want to cut your ears off.

As I wrote for TechCrunch recently, immigration is not an issue always associated with tech — not even when thinking about the ethics of technology, as I do here.

So when I was moved to tears a few weeks ago, on seeing footage of groups of 18 Jewish protestors link arms to block the entrances to ICE detention facilities, bearing banners reading “Never Again” in reference to the Holocaust — these mostly young women risking their physical freedom and safety to try to help the children this country’s immigration service is placing in concentration camps today, one of my first thoughts was: I can’t cover that for my TechCrunch column. It’s about ethics of course, but not about tech.

It turns out that wasn’t correct. Immigration is a tech issue. In fact, companies such as Wayfair (furniture), Amazon (web services), and Palantir (the software used to track undocumented immigrants) have borne heavy criticism for their support of and partnership with ICE’s efforts under the current administration.

And as I discussed earlier this month with Jaclyn Friedman, a leading sex ethics expert and one of the ICE protestors arrested in a major demonstration in Boston, social media technology has been instrumental in building and amplifying those protests.

But there’s more. IBM, for example, has an unfortunate and dark history of support for Nazi extermination efforts, and many recent commentators have drawn parallels between what IBM did during the Holocaust and what companies like Palantir are beginning to do now.

Dozens of protestors huddle in the rain outside Palantir HQ.

I say “companies,” plural, with intention: immigrant advocacy organization Mijente recently released news that Anduril, the company founded by Palmer Luckey and composed of Palantir veterans, now has a $13.5 million contract with the Marine corps for their autonomous surveillance “Lattice” towers at four different USMC bases, including one border base. Documents procured via the Freedom of Information Act show the Marines mention “the intrusion dilemma” in their justification for choosing Anduril.

So now it seems the kinds of surveillance tech we know are badly biased at best — facial recognition? Panopticon-style observation? Algorithms of various other kinds — will be put to work by the most powerful fighting force ever designed, for expanded intervention into our immigration system.

Will the Silicon Valley elite say “no”? To what extent will new protests emerge, where the sorts of people likely to be reading this writing might draw a line and make work more difficult for their peers at places like Anduril?

Maybe the problem, however, is that most of us think of immigration ethics as an issue that might touch on a small handful of particularly libertarian-leaning tech companies, but surely it doesn’t go beyond that, right? Can’t the average techie in San Francisco or elsewhere safely and accurately say these problems don’t actually implicate them?

Turns out that’s not right either.

Which is why I had to speak this week with Cornell University historian Louis Hyman. Hyman is a Professor at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and Director of the ILR’s Institute for Workplace Studies, in New York. In our conversation, Hyman and I dig into Silicon Valley’s history with labor rights, startup work structures and the role of immigration in the US tech ecosystem. Beyond that,  I’ll let him introduce himself and his extraordinary work, below.

Louis Hyman. (Image by Jesse Winter)

Greg Epstein: I discovered your work via a piece you wrote in the Washington Post, which drew from your 2018 book, Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary. In it, you wrote, “Undocumented workers have been foundational to the rise of our most vaunted hub of innovative capitalism: Silicon Valley.”

And in the book itself, you write at one point, “To understand the electronics industry is simple: every time someone says “robot,” simply picture a woman of color. Instead of self-aware robots, workers—all women, mostly immigrants, sometimes undocumented—hunched over tables with magnifying glasses assembling parts, sometimes on a factory line and sometimes on a kitchen table. Though it paid a lot of lip service to automation, Silicon Valley truly relied upon a transient workforce of workers outside of traditional labor relations.”

Can you just give us a brief introduction to the historical context behind these kinds of comments?

Louis Hyman: Sure. One of the key questions all of us ask is why is there only one Silicon Valley. There are different answers for that.

A newly released data model and draft implementation guide for providing digital access to historical health insurance claims data directly to patients could mean you have better access to this info from the devices you use everyday. Called the CARIN Blue Button API, it’s a new model developed by private sector partners including consumer organizations, insurance providers, digital health app developers and more, this new draft implementation will be in testing beginning this year, with participating companies including a number of different state-specific BlueCross/BlueShield providers, the State of Washington – and Apple, Google and Microsoft.

The news was announced today at the White House Blue Button Developers Conference in Washington D.C., and builds on the work done last year by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to launch Blue Button 2.0, a new standard aimed at providing Medicare beneficiaries in the U.S. access to all of their historical claims information in one place from whatever application they choose to use.

All of the organizations participating in the draft testing process will perform “real-world testing” of the CARIN model developed by the multi-disciplinary working group, with the aim of preparing for a broad, product launch of the data standard in 2020.

Seeing Apple, Google and Microsoft on that list along with a significant number of health care providers is a good sign, since it should mean more data portability and choice when it comes to how you access your own patient information, rather than it being decided on a platform-by-platform basis.

Apple already built a Health Records section into its own native Health app in iOS at the beginning of last year, and while it works with standards sometimes adopted by health care providers, it’s far from a universal, truly interoperable health care history feature on its own. Apple has been building partnerships with agencies and providers including Veterans’ Affairs and Aetna to flesh out its personal health data offering for users, and Microsoft has its own health records offering called HealthVault.

Ford has agreed to acquire Journey Holding Corporation, a company that has developed vehicle tracking software and app-based technology designed for public transportation, as the automaker seeks to scale up its new mobility business.

Journey Holding will be housed under Ford Smart Mobility, a Ford subsidiary that invests in and builds the automaker’s transportation services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In a separate announcement, Ford said Tuesday it acquired Quantum Signal, a small robotics company and defense contractor known for mobile robotics and real-time simulation.

The acquisition of Journey is part of broader vision laid out by CEO Jim Hackett more than a year ago to create an ecosystem of transportation-related services that people and cities need now and in the future. The Journey acquisition follows Ford’s purchase of Autonomic and Transloc in 2018.

Today, those services might include using an app to find a Ford-owned Spin scooter or schedule a bus or on-demand shuttle. In the future, it might include finding and hailing an autonomous vehicle.

Eventually, Journey will integrate into Transloc, a transit technology business that Ford bought in 2018. Transloc develops software that helps cities manage transit services including on-demand shuttles.

The name of the combined organization will be announced at a later date, Ford said.

Journey Holding Corporation was founded in 2018 through the merger of two companies, Indianapolis -based DoubleMap and Salt Lake City-based Ride Systems. Journey offers software to municipalities, universities and corporations to help manage their fleets. It also has developed apps that lets users schedule or track rides on shuttles, buses and other public transit.

Transloc CEO Doug Kaufman will leave the new company on Aug. 16. Journey Holding CEO Justin Rees, who founded Ride Systems in 2007 with Kelly Rees and Ben Haynie, will lead the new company.

Together, this newly formed company of about 200 people will serve nearly 1,200 cities, universities, corporate campuses and other enterprises with software solutions for fixed route transportation, microtransit on-demand transportation and other related areas.

“The combination of these transit technology companies will accelerate our efforts to help cities deliver more seamless, productive, and accessible transportation solutions to their citizens and visitors,” Brett Wheatley, vice president of Ford Mobility’s marketing and growth division, said in a statement. “It also will be key to connecting customers with the other mobility solutions in our portfolio, such as Spin e-scooters and our GoRide Health service.”

These services should eventually be part the Transportation Mobility Cloud, an open cloud-based platform that Ford developed for cities to use to orchestrate and manage all the disparate transportation modes happening at any given time.

Apple is combining two of long-standing major efforts in a new push, making AR more consumer-friendly and helping portray Apple Stores as civic centers where communities can come together.

The project is called [AR]T Walk and it’s a walking tour through various city centers around the globe aiming to help the digital art works of artists come alive in physical spaces. The tours are taking place in Hong Kong, London, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo through mid-August.

Showcasing digital art in geo-specific locations isn’t a new concept. In 2017, Snapchat debuted a partnership with Jeff Koons in Central Park, though the company had some issues with ensuring the tech worked reliably.

People looking to take part in the AR walking tours can sign up on Apple’s site. The tours seem to last a couple hours and involve a 1.5 mile walk. The artists behind the work are Nick Cave, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, Cao Fei, John Giorno, Carsten Höller and Pipilotti Rist.