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Yesterday, it was reported that Charter Communications could lose its license in New York because of its failure to meet merger-related broadband deployment commitments. Today, according to Ars Technica, the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) voted to revoke its approval of Charter Communications' 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable (TWC). "The PSC said it is ordering Charter to sell the former TWC system that it purchased in New York, and it's 'bring[ing] an enforcement action in State Supreme Court to seek additional penalties for Charter's past failures and ongoing non-compliance," reports Ars. From the report: Charter has repeatedly failed to meet deadlines for broadband expansions that were required in exchange for merger approval, state officials said. The PSC has steadily increased the pressure on Charter with fines and threats, but Charter never agreed to changes demanded by state officials. As a result of today's vote, "Charter is ordered to file within 60 days a plan with the Commission to ensure an orderly transition to a successor provider(s)," the PSC's announcement said. "During the transition process, Charter must continue to comply with all local franchises it holds in New York State and all obligations under the Public Service Law and the Commission regulations. Charter must ensure no interruption in service is experienced by customers, and, in the event that Charter does not do so, the Commission will take further steps, including seeking injunctive relief in Supreme Court in order to protect New York consumers." The five types of misconduct that the commission cited to support its decision include: the company's repeated failures to meet deadlines; Charter's attempts to skirt obligations to serve rural communities; unsafe practices in the field; its failure to fully commit to its obligations under the 2016 merger agreement; and the company's purposeful obfuscation of its performance and compliance obligations to the Commission and its customers.

Popular movie-ticked subscription service MoviePass experienced an outage on Thursday, still ongoing for some, which the company attributed to "technical issues with our card-based check-in process," on its Twitter feed. But its SEC filing Thursday indicated that the problem was really cash flow. From a report: The filing by its parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, explained an emergency loan the company had taken out: The $5.0 million cash proceeds received from the Demand Note will be used by the Company to pay the Company's merchant and fulfillment processors. If the Company is unable to make required payments to its merchant and fulfillment processors, the merchant and fulfillment processors may cease processing payments for MoviePass. ("MoviePass"), which would cause a MoviePass service interruption. Such a service interruption occurred on July 26, 2018. Such service interruptions could have a material adverse effect on MoviePass' ability to retain its subscribers.

Atlassian is selling its corporate chat software to rival Slack Technologies and taking a small stake in the startup, as they face greater competition from Microsoft. From a report: Slack will pay an undisclosed amount over the next three years to acquire Atlassian's HipChat and Stride products, chief executives from both companies said. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield described both the payment and the investment by Atlassian in his company as "nominal" in financial terms but important strategically. He declined to elaborate on the former. The deal gives Slack, valued at north of $5 billion, more customers, most of whom pay a monthly service fee, and allows Atlassian to exit a business that failed to generate as much demand as expected. Combining the two businesses bolsters Slack at a time when Microsoft is pushing a rival product called Teams to some 135 million Office cloud customers. Microsoft introduced a free version of Teams this month in a bid to lure people who don't subscribe to Office 365.

hackingbear writes from a report via CNBC: After dragging their feet for months and requesting help from the Trump administration, all three major U.S. airlines -- American, Delta and United -- decided to change how they refer to Taiwan airports on their websites to avoid Chinese penalties right before the Wednesday deadline. Earlier this year, China demanded that foreign firms, and airlines in particular, not refer to Taiwan as a non-Chinese territory on their websites, as such practice violates Chinese laws. The White House in May slammed the demand as "Orwellian nonsense." Numerous non-U.S. airlines including Air Canada, Lufthansa, and British Airways had already made changes to their websites. The airlines "now only list Taipei's airport code and city, but not the name Taiwan," reports CNBC. It was unclear how China might punish airlines that don't comply, but it did add a clause saying regulators could change a company's permit if it did not meet "the demand of public interest." An American Airlines spokeswoman said in a statement: "Air travel is global business, and we abide by the rules in countries where we operate."

Toronto's tech scene is so hot the city created more jobs than the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle and Washington, D.C., combined last year, while leapfrogging New York in a ranking of "talent markets." From a report: Toronto was the fastest-growing tech-jobs market in 2017, according to CBRE Group's latest annual survey, released Tuesday. The city saw 28,900 tech jobs created, 14 percent more than in 2016, for a total of more than 241,000 workers, up 52 percent over the past five years, CBRE said. Downtown, tech accounted for more than a third of demand for office space. Canada's biggest city took fourth place in "tech talent," a broad measure of competitiveness, pushing New York down a notch and coming in just after the Bay Area, Seattle and the U.S. capital. CBRE ranked 50 markets across North America, using measures such as talent supply, concentration, education and cost as well as outlooks for job and rent growth for both offices and apartments. The real estate services firm cited some 5 million technology workers in the U.S. and more than 830,000 in Canada, across all sectors.

Seven o'clock in the evening is a global sweet spot for wanting to order take-away food, says an international study of internet traffic. From a report: Academics have examined patterns of looking for food online, such as pizza or Chinese meals, across the UK, US, Canada, Australia and India. They found that a similar "twin peaks" pattern appeared in all countries - at 7pm in the evening and then at 2am. The study suggests ancient "foraging" behaviour has now switched online. This big data research from biologists at the University of Aberdeen, to be published by the Royal Society, has tracked how the search for food takes place online. You can find the study here.

The British government broke the law by allowing spy agencies to amass data on UK citizens without proper oversight from the Foreign Office, an independent tribunal has ruled. From a report: GCHQ, the UK's electronic surveillance agency, was given vastly increased powers to obtain and analyze citizens' data after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, on the condition that it agreed to strict oversight from the foreign secretary. But according to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent court that was set up by the government to investigate unlawful intrusion by public bodies in the UK, the Foreign Office on several occasions gave GCHQ an effective "carte blanche" to demand data from telecoms and internet companies [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], which could include visited websites, location information and email contacts. In a judgment published on Monday, the tribunal said: "In cases in which ... the foreign secretary made a general direction which applied to all communications through the networks operated by the [communications service provider], there had been an unlawful delegation of the power. "The lack of legal control on the discretion of [GCHQ] is compounded in those cases where the specific requirement was not communicated in writing."

Amazon's Prime Day shopping event last week was riddled with glitches. Roughly 15 minutes into the sale, the landing page stopped working. Some users saw an error page featuring the "dogs of Amazon" and were never able to enter the site; others got caught in a loop of pages urging them to "Shop all deals." According to internal documents obtained by CNBC, it appears that Amazon failed to secure enough servers to handle the traffic surge, causing it to launch a scaled-down backup front page and temporarily kill off all international traffic. From the report: The e-commerce giant also had to add servers manually to meet the traffic demand, indicating its auto-scaling feature may have failed to work properly leading up to the crash, according to external experts who reviewed the documents. "Currently out of capacity for scaling," one of the updates said about the status of Amazon's servers, roughly an hour after Prime Day's launch. "Looking at scavenging hardware." A breakdown in an internal system called Sable, which Amazon uses to provide computation and storage services to its retail and digital businesses, caused a series of glitches across other services that depend on it, including Prime, authentication and video playback, the documents show.

Amazon chose not to shut off its site. Instead, it manually added servers so it could improve the site performance gradually, according to the documents. One person wrote in a status update that he was adding 50 to 150 "hosts," or virtual servers, because of the extra traffic. Caesar says the root cause of the problem may have to do with a failure in Amazon's auto-scaling feature, which automatically detects traffic fluctuations and adjusts server capacity accordingly. The fact that Amazon cut off international traffic first, rather than increase the number of servers immediately, and added server power manually instead of automatically, is an indication of a breakdown in auto-scaling, a critical component when dealing with unexpected traffic spikes, he said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As WhatsApp scrambles to figure out technology solutions to address some of the problems its service has inadvertently caused in developing markets, India's government has proposed one of its own: bring traceability to the platform so false information can be traced to its source. But WhatsApp indicated to VentureBeat over the weekend that complying with that request would undermine the service's core value of protecting user privacy. "We remain deeply committed to people's privacy and security, which is why we will continue to maintain end-to-end encryption for all of our users," the company said.

The request for traceability, which came from India's Ministry of Electronics & IT last week, was more than a suggestion. The Ministry said Facebook-owned WhatsApp would face legal actions if it failed to deliver. "When rumours and fake news get propagated by mischief mongers, the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility and accountability. If they remain mute spectators they are liable to be treated as abettors and thereafter face consequent legal action," the government said. India is WhatsApp's largest market, with more than 250 million users. The country is struggling to contain the spread of fake news on digital platforms. Hoax messages and videos on the platform have incited multiple riots, costing more than two dozen lives in the country this year alone. Allowing message tracing, though, would likely undo the privacy and security that WhatsApp's one billion users worldwide expect from the service. Bringing traceability and accountability to WhatsApp would mean breaking end-to-end encryption on the platform, the company told VentureBeat.

Amazon's Prime Day shopping spree offers free, fast shipping -- but experts say there's a hidden environmental cost that doesn't show up on the checkout page. From a report: Expedited shipping means your packages may not be as consolidated as they could be, leading to more cars and trucks required to deliver them, and an increase in packaging waste, which researchers have found is adding more congestion to our cities, pollutants to our air, and cardboard to our landfills. Free and fast shipping has always been a Prime membership's marquee perk -- one that's drawn in over 100 million subscribers who pay $119 annually. A 2017 study by UPS found that nearly all (96%) US customers had made a purchase on a marketplace like Amazon or Walmart, and over half (55%) said free or discounted shipping was the primary reason.

[...] That convenience is encouraging people in the US to buy more, and to make more individual purchases rather than placing a single order for several items. "There are more sales in lower-price products online than there have been in stores," Marshal Cohen, chief industry advisor at the NPD Group, told BuzzFeed News. And all of those transactions are negatively impacting our planet, according to Miguel Jaller, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Davis: "People are consuming more. There's more demand created by the availability of these cheap products and cheap delivery options."

The Economist argues that Guido Van Rossum resembled the reluctant Messiah in Monty Python's Life of Brian. An anonymous reader quotes their report: "I certainly didn't set out to create a language that was intended for mass consumption," he explains. But in the past 12 months Google users in America have searched for Python more often than for Kim Kardashian, a reality-TV star. The rate of queries has trebled since 2010, while inquiries after other programming languages have been flat or declining. The language's popularity has grown not merely among professional developers -- nearly 40% of whom use it, with a further 25% wishing to do so, according to Stack Overflow, a programming forum -- but also with ordinary folk. Codecademy, a website that has taught 45 million novices how to use various languages, says that by far the biggest increase in demand is from those wishing to learn Python. It is thus bringing coding to the fingertips of those once baffled by the subject. Pythonistas, as aficionados are known, have helped by adding more than 145,000 packages to the Cheese Shop, covering everything from astronomy to game development....

Python was already the most popular introductory language at American universities in 2014, but the teaching of it is generally limited to those studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics. A more radical proposal is to catch 'em young by offering computer science to all, and in primary schools. Hadi Partovi, the boss of Code.org, a charity, notes that 40% of American schools now offer such lessons, up from 10% in 2013. Around two-thirds of 10- to 12-year-olds have an account on Code.org's website. Perhaps unnerved by a future filled with automated jobs, 90% of American parents want their children to study computer science.
"The CIA has employed Python for hacking, Pixar for producing films, Google for crawling web pages and Spotify for recommending songs," notes the Economist.

Though Van Rossum was Python's Benevolent Dictator For Life, "I'm uncomfortable with that fame," he tells the magazine. "Sometimes I feel like everything I say or do is seen as a very powerful force."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The national security of the United States relies on a healthy airline industry. That requires modern reliable airplanes -- and highly skilled pilots to operate them. However, the United States has a shortage of pilots right now, particularly at the regional airline levels. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, there were about 827,000 pilots in America in 1987. Over the past three decades, that number has decreased by 30%. Meanwhile, during this period, there has been a tremendous increase in the demand for air travel. The International Air Transport Association predicts that, over the next 20 years, air travel will double.

This is a classic case of low supply and high demand. This mismatch has created a perfect storm that could wreak havoc on the US airline industry over the next decade. The somber news is this shortage is going to get much worse. I have not only studied and researched the airline industry since 1978, but I also was a pilot for 19 years, before going back to academia in 2006.

In the 1970s, when most of today's airline pilots like myself were growing up, piloting for an airline was considered a prestigious career. The job offered not only high salaries and nice schedules with many days off, but also a respected position in society. In the early 1990s, pilot salaries approached $300,000 in today's dollars for some international pilots. What's more, during this time, the military had a steady and consistent demand for pilots. A young aspiring aviator could go into the military to receive all of his or her flight training. Once these pilots had fulfilled their military commitment, they were almost guaranteed a good job flying for a major airline. Today, this is no longer the case. The career of the airline pilot has lost its luster.

FCC boss Ajit Pai says the agency will finally take steps to shore up the security of the FCC's public comment system after being widely criticized for turning a blind eye to routine fraud and abuse. From a report: If you'll recall, more than 22 million Americans voiced their thoughts on the Trump FCC's attack on net neutrality last fall via the agency's website. The vast majority of comments opposed the move, closely reflecting surveys that show widespread, bipartisan support for the rules. [...] Not a single one of your comments was cited in the FCC's 218 page justification for its decision.

[...] Back in May, Senators Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) fired off a letter to Pai demanding he actually do something about the abuse of FCC systems. [...] In a response letter this week provided to the Wall Street Journal, Pai says the agency is finally taking steps to address the problem, while acknowledging his own identity was hijacked during the comment process. "It is troubling that some bad actors submitted comments using false names," Mr. Pai said. "Indeed, like you, comments were submitted in my name and my wife's name that reflect viewpoints we do not hold." Pai's letter, which wasn't publicly shared, states that the FCC hopes to eventually "rebuild and re-engineer" the commission's electronic comment system "to institute appropriate safeguards against abusive conduct." It also states that Pai will approach Congress for funding for the overhaul, something Pai likely knows may not actually happen.

Beardydog writes: An article currently on Ars Technica examines comments about net neutrality issues by recent Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh not only rejects the FCC's reclassification of ISPs under Title II, but seems to also support a broad First Amendment right to "editorial control," allowing ISPs to selectively block, filter, or modify transmitted data.

Kavanaugh compares ISPs to cable TV operators, rather than phone companies. "Deciding whether and how to transmit ESPN and deciding whether and how to transmit ESPN.com are not meaningfully different for First Amendment purposes." Here's what Ars Technica had to say about Kavanaugh's argument, which did not address the business differences between cable TV and internet service: "Cable TV providers generally have to pay programmers for the right to carry their channels, and cable TV providers have to fit all the channels they carry into a limited amount of bandwidth. At least for now, major internet providers don't offer a set package of websites -- they just route users to whichever sites the users are requesting. ISPs also don't have to pay those websites for the right to 'transmit' them, but ISPs have argued that they should be able to demand fees from websites."

The report also mentions Kavanaugh's support of NSA surveillance: "In November 2015, Kavanaugh was part of a unanimous decision when the DC Circuit denied a petition to rehear a challenge to the NSA's bulk collection of telephone metadata. Kavanaugh was the only judge to issue a written statement, which said that '[t]he Government's collection of telephony metadata from a third party such as a telecommunications service provider is not considered a search under the Fourth Amendment.' Even if this form of surveillance constituted a search, it wouldn't be an 'unreasonable' search and therefore it would be legal, Kavanaugh also wrote."

At Rise Conference in Hong Kong on Tuesday, Abacus executive producer Ravi Hiranand, South China Morning Post technology editor Chua Kong Ho, and 500 Startups partner Edith Yeung presented China Internet Report 2018, highlighting the big names and wider trends shaping China's technology. The takeaway: China has nearly 3 times the number of internet users as the United States, and the gap will only widen: China has 772 million internet users, vastly more than the 292 million in the US. And there's still plenty of room to grow -- internet penetration is only at 55% in China, while in the US, it's 89%.

Beijing is China's unicorn capital: Some of China's biggest tech giants may have started in Shenzhen, but Beijing leads the way with 31 tech unicorns. (Shenzhen has just 11!)

China's internet giants are doing everything: From streaming video to self-driving cars, the big three (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) are present in almost every tech sector, either by investing in startups or by building it themselves.

Government policy continue to actively shape China's tech industry.

China's online shopping giants are going offline.

China loves short videos.

WeChat's mini-programs are cementing its place as China's virtual mobile operating system: Mini-programs, which are no bigger than 10 megabytes and running in the WeChat app are gaining ground -- WeChat now hosts 1 million mini-apps, and the number of people who use them daily is expected to reach 400 million.

China lags behind the US in AI, but the government wants to catch up -- soon.

China is making smart speakers but Chinese users aren't buying them: There are now over 100 smart speaker developers in the country (including all of the tech giants), but demand isn't there yet -- in 2017, only 350,000 smart speakers were sold in China, compared to 25 million in the US.

China is now the world's biggest gaming market: It accounts for more than aquarter of the world's total gaming revenue (the US is close behind in second). And it's dominated by two players: Tencent and NetEase, who jointly have over 60% market share in China.

According to Bloomberg, Samsung opened the world's largest mobile phone factory today in Noida, a satellite city of the Indian capital Delhi. The factory will reportedly "double Samsung's Noida unit capacity for mobile phones to 120 million units a year from 68 million units a year." From the report: "The opportunity is just massive," said Faisal Kawoosa, who heads new initiatives at researcher CMR Pvt. "Such a large facility will help Samsung cater to the huge demand in a country of 1.3 billion people where there are only 425 million smartphone users. The Samsung factory will make everything from low-end smartphones that cost under $100 to its flagship S9 model, according to the company. Earlier this year, China's Xiaomi displaced Samsung from the No. 1 smartphone spot in the country, breaking its long-held dominance.

Victorien Erussard, an experienced ocean racer from the city of Saint-Malo in the north of France, was halfway through a dash across the Atlantic when he lost all power. Never again, he thought. "I came up with the idea to create a ship that uses different sources of energy," he says. The plan was bolstered by the pollution-happy cargo ships he saw while crossing the oceans. "These are a threat to humanity because they use heavy fuel oil." Five years on, that idea has taken physical form in the Energy Observer, a catamaran that runs on renewables. From a report: In a mission reminiscent of the Solar Impulse 2, the solar-powered plane that Bertrand Picard and Andre Borschberg flew around the world a few years back, Erussard and teammate Jerome Delafosse are planning to sail around the planet, without using any fossil fuel. Instead, they'll make the fuel they need from sea water, the wind, and the sun.

The Energy Observer started life as a racing boat but now would make a decent space battle cruiser prop in a movie. Almost every horizontal surface on the white catamaran is covered with solar panels (1,400 square feet of them in all), which curve gently to fit the aerodynamic contours. Some, on a suspended deck that extends to the sides of the vessel, are bi-facial panels, generating power from direct sunlight as well as light reflected off the water below. The rear is flanked by two vertical, egg whisk-style wind turbines, which add to the power production. Propulsion comes from two electric motors, driven by all that generated electrical energy, but it's the way that's stored that's clever. The Energy Observer uses just 106-kWh (about equivalent to a top-end Tesla) of batteries, for immediate, buffer, storage and energy demands. It stores the bulk of the excess electricity generated when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing as hydrogen gas.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Chinese smartphone giant ZTE has completely replaced its corporate leadership, naming new people to be CEO, CTO, CFO, and several vice presidents. The new CEO of ZTE will be Xu Ziyang, a former head of ZTE's German operations who has worked at the company for two decades. The move comes a week after ZTE named a new board of directors. The U.S. government demanded that ZTE make these changes as a condition of lifting a crippling export ban against the company.

MoviePass is rolling out peak pricing, its own version of surge pricing that will charge customers more to see popular movies during what the company considers "high demand" times. Quartz reports: MoviePass is a subscription movie ticket service that typically costs $9.95 a month to see up to one movie in U.S. theaters per day. The company has been hemorrhaging cash to subsidize these monthly subscriptions, which can cost less than a single movie ticket in some U.S. cities. The company is looking to raise another $1.2 billion by selling stock and debt. But if MoviePass wants to survive, it also needs to start losing less money on its subscribers, and fast. That's where peak pricing comes in. "Peak Pricing goes into effect when there's high demand for a movie or showtime," MoviePass wrote in its email. "You may be asked to pay a small additional fee depending on the level of demand." Movies currently experiencing peak pricing will be marked with a red circle containing a white lightening bolt; movies growing in demand that "could enter Peak Pricing soon" will get a gray version of the icon. MoviePass doesn't say how much the "small additional fee" will be, but we can expect it to be $2 or more. In the example MoviePass emailed to users today, the extra fee is $3.43. "Note: the actual Peak Pricing surcharge will vary based on showtime and movie title," the email adds.

Greg LeRoy and Maryann Feldman from The Guardian discuss some alternative strategies for cities that want large tech companies like Amazon and Apple to invest locally but don't want to offer huge subsidies. They advise against using "old economy" incentives for "new economy" firms, which are more susceptible to disruption, because it can be costly and counterproductive. Unfortunately, many politicians continue to mismatch incentives "especially because some tech companies have become very aggressive about demanding big tax breaks," reports The Guardian. From the report: Here are two proven alternative strategies. The first could be called "back to basics." A regional government inventories existing small- and medium-sized firms, the backbone of many local communities. Typically family-owned and located in micropolitan and rural areas, these firms are often neglected by policymakers and shortchanged by incentive programs. A regional government asks: which industry sectors are we already comparatively good at? Which of those sectors have the best futures? How can our public systems help those promising firms grow? Do they need export assistance? Customized training? Technology diffusion? More engineering-school graduates? There are some simple fixes that could go a long way.

The second alternative takes this same approach and applies it to very young companies and to emerging technologies with more speculative prospects. This was North Carolina's successful strategy from the 1950s until the mid-1990s. Making no big bets on any one company, the state invested in all levels of education, created its community college system and upgraded the state universities. It also focused on highway upgrades and other infrastructure investments. [...] Austin, Texas, currently the hottest tech-led economy in the U.S., provides a model: there, local entrepreneurs became local champions, creating early incubators, reinvesting their gains and working with local government.