• President Joe Biden pushed his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan during a meeting between administration officials and corporate leaders about the global semiconductor shortage, saying that “we need to build the infrastructure of today, not repair the one of yesterday.” The plan calls for $50 billion to invest in semiconductor manufacturing and research. (The Associated Press)
• Intel Corp. Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said following his meeting with the White House that Intel is talking with companies that create chips for automakers about setting up shop in Intel’s factory networks to help alleviate the semiconductor shortage plaguing automotive factories, with the goal of having chip production up and running within nine months. (Reuters)
• Former acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf confirmed during a Heritage Foundation event that his email was targeted by suspected Russian hackers as part of a monthslong breach of the U.S. government. Wolf said the hackers’ knowledge of his day-to-day schedule wasn’t “that big of a deal at the end of the day, but the overall access was.” (CyberScoop)

Google Has a Secret Blocklist that Hides YouTube Hate Videos from Advertisers—But It’s Full of Holes
The Markup

Momentum builds for US laws to protect children from Big Tech

Kiran Stacey and Hannah Murphy, Financial Times

Washington united in wanting to regulate how social media groups target and collect data on young users.

Revealed: the Facebook loophole that lets world leaders deceive and harass their citizens

Julia Carrie Wong, The Guardian

Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing. The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff.

‘Master,’ ‘Slave’ and the Fight Over Offensive Terms in Computing

Kate Conger, The New York Times

Anyone who joined a video call during the pandemic probably has a global volunteer organization called the Internet Engineering Task Force to thank for making the technology work. The group, which helped create the technical foundations of the internet, designed the language that allows most video to run smoothly online.

Domino’s is launching a pizza delivery robot car

Alexis Benveniste, CNN

The robots are coming, and they’re bringing pizza. This week, Domino’s is rolling out a robot car delivery service to select customers in Houston. For those who opt in, their pies will arrive in a fully autonomous vehicle made by Nuro.

Microsoft takes advantage of antitrust spotlight on rivals to go hunting for large acquisitions

Alex Sherman, CNBC

Twenty years ago, the United States government filed suit against Microsoft for abusing its market power. Today, Microsoft is empire building because the country’s regulatory focus is on its biggest rivals.

The FCC wants you to test your internet speeds with its new app

Makena Kelly, The Verge

The Federal Communications Commission has released a new speed test app to help measure internet speeds across the country, available on both Android and iOS.

Charter must pay $19 million for tricking customers into switching ISPs

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica

A judge has ordered Charter Communications to pay $19.2 million to Windstream for lying to customers in order to trick them into switching from Windstream to Charter’s Spectrum Internet service. Charter also faces a $5,279 penalty for shutting off service to hundreds of Windstream’s resale customers.

T-Mobile Nominates First Woman of Color to Board of Directors

Scott Moritz, Bloomberg

T-Mobile US Inc. nominated retired Boeing Co. accounting executive Bavan Holloway to its board of directors. She’ll stand for election at the June 3 annual meeting.

As schools experiment to close the homework gap, will new E-rate funding help?

Issie Lapowsky and Penelope Blackwell, Protocol

Utah’s Murray City School District was relatively lucky when COVID-19 forced students across the country to begin learning from home. Every one of its more than 6,000 students already had their own personal Chromebooks, sparing them from last spring and summer’s mad rush for computing devices that had suddenly grown scarce amid global supply chain disruptions.

Is broadband infrastructure? Republicans used to think so

Dean DeChiaro, Roll Call

The debate in Congress over President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion-plus infrastructure plan has featured a clean, simple attack line from Republicans: Most of the money wouldn’t really go to infrastructure. Of course, that depends entirely on how you define infrastructure. For their purposes, Republicans are opting for a classic definition, seeking to limit the scope to things like roads and bridges.

China’s Huawei blames global chip shortage on U.S. sanctions

Sam Shead, CNBC

Huawei said Monday that U.S. sanctions on the company are partly to blame for the ongoing global chip shortage that’s the subject of a White House conference on Monday. Eric Xu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, said the sanctions imposed over the last two years on the Chinese tech company are, “hurting the global semiconductor industry” because they have “disrupted the trusted relationship in the semiconductor industry.”

Nvidia Plans New Chip to Compete With Intel in Data-Center Market

Paul Ziobro, The Wall Street Journal

Graphics-chip giant Nvidia Corp. is increasing the competitive pressure on Intel Corp. with plans to start selling central-processing units to serve the booming data-center market. Nvidia said Monday its first processor for data centers would operate 10 times faster than existing chips.

Why the president can’t quickly solve the computer chip shortage

Steven Overly, Politico

President Joe Biden faces an inconvenient reality as he tackles the political and economic headaches caused by a global shortage of chips needed to build computers, medical devices and automobiles: There’s no immediate fix. Biden on Monday told CEOs gathered virtually at the White House for a meeting on the problem that he has bipartisan support to boost funding for U.S. semiconductor manufacturing.

Bipartisan lawmakers signal support for Biden cybersecurity picks

Maggie Miller, The Hill

Key lawmakers on Monday expressed support for President Biden’s picks to lead federal efforts on securing the nation against cyber threats. 

GOP senators seek FBI investigation into Biden Pentagon nominee

Brett Samuels, The Hill

A group of 18 Republican senators on Tuesday wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray seeking an investigation into President Biden’s nominee for a top role in the Pentagon over whether he disclosed or solicited classified information after leaving his government job in the Obama administration.

Facebook Faces German Bid to Halt Collection of WhatsApp Data

Stephanie Bodoni, Bloomberg

One of Germany’s toughest data regulators is seeking an administrative order that would stop Facebook Inc. from collecting user data from its WhatsApp unit. The regulator in the city of Hamburg is seeking an “immediately enforceable order” before May 15 over concerns that policy changes could lead to the use of such data for wider marketing and advertising purposes.

Parents were at the end of their chain — then ransomware hit their kids’ schools

Kevin Collier, NBC News

The ransomware attack on her daughter’s school was the last thing Glynnis Sanders needed. Like most parents, Sanders has been performing a daily juggling act. When she’s not teaching special education classes at Buffalo Public Schools, she and her husband are usually making sure their three kids are attending their remote classes.

Facebook’s New Target in the Misinformation War: Climate Lies

Kurt Wagner, Bloomberg

In the midst of the heated U.S. presidential race last summer, with hypercharged scrutiny of partisan propaganda on social media, Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg received a letter from a group of U.S. senators led by Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren that had nothing to do with elections. They were angry about a year-old piece of climate news.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s social-media site Frank is now set to launch on April 20

Grace Dean, Insider

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has said that his social-media site Frank is launching on April 20 after a series of delays.

DeSantis attacks YouTube for yanking his pandemic video

Terry Spencer, The Associated Press

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attacked YouTube and its parent company Google on Monday, accusing the tech giant of censorship for its decision last week to remove from its platform video of a coronavirus discussion he organized where his panel criticized lockdowns and some mask wearing as ineffective.

Amazon drivers describe the paranoia of working under the watchful eyes of new truck cameras that monitor them constantly and fire off ‘rage-inducing’ alerts if they make a wrong move

Avery Hartmans and Kate Taylor, Insider

Many Amazon drivers say the solitude and the independence of working on the road are big draws of the job. But those perks are under threat since Amazon started installing surveillance cameras in delivery vans that monitor workers’ driving, hand movements, and even facial expressions.

Labor advocates float new strategies after Amazon’s victory

Chris Mills Rodrigo and Rebecca Klar, The Hill

Amazon’s defeat of a union in Bessemer, Ala., is the latest in a string of victories for Big Tech companies over labor that may force groups to rethink their organizing efforts. The wide margin of victory, which is expected to be challenged by the union, has dealt a setback to organizers who had hoped a win in Alabama would galvanize similar efforts elsewhere.

AI companies are enabling genocide in China

Michael Chertoff and N. MacDonnell Ulsch, The Washington Post

The Chinese Communist Party’s persecution of the Uyghur people will go down in history as one of the worst human rights tragedies of our time — not just for the abject horror of targeting a population of 11 million for genocide, but also for the advanced technologies that enabled it.

As Apple and Facebook Clash Over Ads, Mom-and-Pop Shops Fear They’ll Be the Victims

Christopher Mims, The Wall Street Journal

If Apple is King Kong and Facebook is Godzilla, mom-and-pop online merchants are worried they’re the screaming, scattering citizens who are about to get stomped as these two giants battle it out. What’s at issue is a seemingly small change to the iPhone and iPad operating system that upends the past decade of the online ad industry, by prompting users to choose whether or not they’d like to be tracked by the apps they use.

Antitrust and Privacy Are on a Collision Course

Gilad Edelman, Wired

Facebook is being sued for weakening data protections. Google is being sued for strengthening them. Can that paradox be resolved?