The FTC has been investigating the company on a number of fronts, and the upcoming case will be one of the highest-profile moves in the Biden administration’s difficult effort to rein in the tech giants.

The trial is expected to take place in August. According to sources, a number of Amazon’s business practices will be challenged during the trial. If won, it could lead to a $1.3 trillion judicial restructuring of the empire and determine the legacy of Federal Trade Commission Chairman Lina Khan.

Khan is notoriously skeptical of big tech, publishing an academic paper back in 2017 defining Amazon as a modern monopolist that needs to be reined in.

Some say the focus will turn to challenging Amazon Prime, Amazon rules that the FTC says block lower prices on competing websites, and policies that the FTC says force merchants to use Amazon’s logistics and advertising services.

Over the past three years, the FTC has collected millions of documents from Amazon and third parties to build its case, and has even questioned CEO Andy Jassy and former CEO Jeff Bezos, according to some people.

Among the potential lawsuits are allegations similar to existing lawsuits already filed by the attorneys general of Washington and California, according to sources. Those lawsuits center on Amazon’s rules that require third-party retailers to offer their lowest prices on Amazon’s platform, thereby cutting off the ability to lower prices elsewhere.

Used by powerhouses like HOK and Gensler, AXYZ’s anima 5 software is one of the fastest ways to bring dynamic 3D/4D people into a visualization. Featuring over 2,500 scanned characters, anima helps designers add high-fidelity digital humans that walk, run, laugh and move to their scenes, giving projects a realistic quality that immerses viewers in a design. With onboard tools for tailoring loops and AI crowds, there’s no better way to bring believable movement into a visual project.

“AXYZ’s state-of-the-art assets give life to projects, so they actually connect with people. Anyone that’s been in architecture for a while knows how impactful digital humans are to the design and marketing process. 4D people is the next step in our journey”, said Christian Lang, Chaos CEO.

Increasing the breadth of digital people has been a top request from customers, particularly in architecture. With the acquisition of anima, Chaos can meet the needs of its customers while setting up new ways to make high-fidelity 3D/4D human character assets more accessible than they’ve ever been. Chaos is currently planning how to integrate the software with existing products like Chaos V-Ray and Chaos Corona, whose users already use anima on a daily basis.

“When it comes to visualization, the Chaos products are unmatched. By combining forces, we can move fast and create the type of products that make designers excited to go to work. The best is yet to come!”, says Diego Gadler, CEO and founder of AXYZ design.

As architects introduce new ways to explore sustainability, biophilic urbanism and more in their designs, giving stakeholders a sense of how different people might use these spaces will only become more important.

Another mistake?

Initial assumptions were that it was a mistake, inherent to Twitter in recent times. But on Saturday, The Information reported that, according to an insider, access was deliberately suspended.

Is Twitter’s act unprofessional? 

Twitter has said nothing on the subject so far, while the developer community has been highly critical of the platform’s actions, describing them as unprofessional. According to the developers, such actions represent an irreparable breach of trust between their community and users.

The key is…

Third-party tools often become key connectors for users in different regions and circumstances, helping to increase usage and engagement. It’s no secret that Twitter has had a difficult relationship with developers, restricting and re-authorising API access over time – something former CEO Jack Dorsey says was a key mistake he tried to fix while he was still in charge.

The reason?

It is possible that Musk sees this kind of access as a competitive problem, which is why he decided to close it.

And perhaps Twitter is also working to add similar functionality to these apps as part of its new “Check for Organizations” subscription package. There are no clear opinions on the platform’s move yet, but Twitter is already urging businesses to sign up for early access to the professional subscription offering, which could include access to more advanced features.

Developers can take advantage of the performance and security capabilities in Rust to create software for IoT devices and other embedded systems that may be the target of botnets and other malware.

The move by tech giant Microsoft, which introduced the idea back in June 2022, coincides with Google’s decision that it will support third-party Rust libraries in its open-source Chronium project. Like Microsoft, Google highlighted the security features in the programming language.

“Rust and Azure Sphere are a good match – a programming language that can improve safety of code with strict compile time safety checks alongside Azure Sphere’s secure identity, update, and end-to-end encrypted communication services for internet-connected devices should provide greater security to the customer applications,”

Akshatha Udayashankar, an embedded software engineer at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.

Azure Sphere includes built-in security features for Internet-connected devices and consists of hardware built on chips from MediaTek and a Linux-based operating system. It also includes cloud-based Azure Sphere Security Services (AS3), which creates a secure connection between devices and the Internet or cloud.

AS3 provides secure boot, device identity authentication, software trust, and device certification that works with trusted code. Thanks to it, Microsoft can securely download updates to the Azure Sphere operating system and apps to devices.

The Microsoft blog explains that Rust strives to make code safe and code fast. Zero-cost abstractions ensure that higher-level features are compiled into low-level code as quickly as code is written by hand. Checks performed by the Rust compiler ensure stability by adding features and refactoring. This contrasts with legacy code in languages without these checks, which is riskier and requires more careful attention, review, and testing.

Like other Azure Sphere applications, those now built in Rust are expected to be fully functional in 2031, regardless of security patches, fixes, and new features added to Azure Sphere OS by then. Rust can be very efficient, but by including many dependencies in the application itself, in some cases it may be necessary to evaluate how a Rust implementation uses memory compared to a C-language application.

Autoclass automatically moves objects into the bucket based on each object’s access pattern, supporting the storage classes standard, nearline, coldline, and archive. The new service manages all new objects, starting in standard storage and moving them to increasingly cold storage classes after 30, 90, and 365 days if they are not accessible.

In exchange for a management fee, the service helps achieve price predictability by eliminating the additional retrieval fees associated with colder storage classes, and is recommended if the data in the bucket has varying access frequencies or if data access patterns are unknown or unpredictable. However, it is not recommended if the data meets the use cases of a particular storage class, such as backups.

Autoclass buckets are charged a monthly management fee of $0.0025 for every 1,000 objects stored, with no charges for retrieval access to an object and early deletion.

Currently, the Autoclass feature must be enabled during bucket creation using the CLI, API or Cloud Console. Support for existing buckets is expected later in 2023. When the feature is disabled, all objects in the bucket remain in their current storage class.

With the release of Android 12 Beta 3, Google revamped the SetupWizard UI to fit better with Material You guidelines. During the setup process, the SetupWizard launches a system app responsible for helping the user restore data from their old phone. That app, called the Data Restore Tool, was recently published to Google Play, and an update to version 1.0.382048734 contains strings hinting that Google wants to help iPhone users switch to Android.

The strings tell the user to download a “Switch to Android” app from the App Store and then go to Wi-Fi settings on your iPhone to connect to your Android phone using a Wi-Fi hotspot. This is similar to how the Move to iOS app works.

It’s not clear what kind of data users will be able to transfer, but we have found additional strings that suggest that the tool will help you transfer your WhatsApp chats among other things.

From what we can tell, it doesn’t look like you’ll be able to actually transfer your WhatsApp chats using the Switch to the Android app itself. Rather, the app will only provide helpful instructions on how to migrate WhatsApp data using WhatsApp’s upcoming “Move Chats to Android” feature.

Finally, some strings point to support for migrating supported apps, but it appears this will only work if your iPhone isn’t encrypted. We surmise that Google will match apps published on Google Play with apps installed on the user’s iPhone, so while this will help migrate the most popular apps available on both platforms, it won’t migrate everything over.

Google currently maintains a page called “Switch to Android” that explains how iPhone users can backup their contacts, photos, videos, and calendar events using the Google Drive app. This is not as convenient or as seamless as what Apple offers for those moving to iOS, so the Switch to Android app might finally close this gap. Searching the App Store yields no results for a “Switch to Android” app from Google LLC, nor does looking at the full app list from the company, so it seems the app hasn’t launched yet.