President Biden’s administration is urging Congress to ramp up defenses against malicious drones, citing risks to national security, safety, and privacy. The White House on Monday released an action plan to counter increasing threats posed by unmanned aerial vehicles in the U.S. More: - It's "critical" that lawmakers pass legislation to close gaps in current policies and protect the U.S. against "nefarious" drone activity, the administration said.
- The plan asks Congress to give more drone detection powers to state, local, and tribal governments as well as “critical infrastructure owners and operators."
- It supports legislation that would permit some law enforcement agencies to take down or otherwise "mitigate" suspicious drones, for example, by jamming their signals.
- It seeks to expand the number of agencies that are allowed to monitor and track drones within their airspace.
- The administration also wants to create a list of drone detection equipment that's authorized by the U.S. government for agencies to purchase.
- More than 2 million drones are expected to be in circulation in the U.S. by 2024, according to the FAA.
NEWSWEEK 
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Twitter on Monday said it has agreed to sell the company to Elon Musk for $54.20 per share in cash, or roughly $44B. Twitter will maintain its current operations, led by CEO Parag Agrawal, until the transaction closes later on in 2022. More: - It could take up to six months to finalize the deal, Agrawal told employees on Monday.
- In a statement, Musk outlined basic thoughts for the company's future, including plans to make Twitter algorithms open source to "increase trust."
- By taking the company private, Musk said he wants to improve Twitter's product with new features. He expressed plans to defeat "the spam bots" and authenticate "all humans."
- Beyond that, not much is known about Musk's plans for the platform. He did note that "free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated."
- Twitter said that Musk would provide about $21B. The Tesla CEO also secured $25.5 billion of debt and margin loan financing.
- The deal "will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter's stockholders," said Bret Taylor, Twitter's independent board chair.
CNN
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 Ford said it has launched full production of the F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck at its Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn, Michigan. The automaker intends to triple its annual production rate to 150,000 units by late 2023, citing an initial 200,000 reservations for the EV truck. More: - Ford, which began accepting reservations last May, will now start delivering the first Lightning trucks.
- The Lightning version that starts at $50,000 has a 320-mile range, 563 horsepower, and 10,000 pounds of towing capacity.
- At present, it's the only full-size electric pickup truck on the market, and is Ford's second EV after the Mustang Mach-E.
- The automaker now expects to produce 2 million EVs by 2026.
- Overall, EV sales are forecast to reach 650,000 in 2022, an increase of 45% over last year's expected sales, based on AutoPacific forecasts.
CNBC
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Meta Platforms said it will open its first retail store for virtual reality hardware on May 9. Located at Meta's Burlingame, California, campus, the store will sell metaverse-related hardware, including Quest 2 VR headsets and accessories, as well as Portal video chat devices. More: - Meta says customers will be able to try out the headsets as well as devices such as its Ray-Ban smart glasses, which will only be available to buy online.
- The company also introduced a new shopping tab on meta.com featuring the hardware.
- The opening highlights Meta's push toward the metaverse and related hardware. The move to VR hardware sales effectively diversifies Meta's business model.
- Meta could release its next headset, believed to be called the Oculus Quest 2 Pro, in the second half of this year, according to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo.
UPLOADVR
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 Reddit announced a $1M investment for its Community Funds program, which provides financial support to its users for community projects and events. The platform will open up applications to all Redditors in June, awarding between $1,000 to $50,000 per project. More: - Reddit began a pilot run of the concept in October. So far it has funded 13 projects, including a comics tournament, a digital conference for historians, and a musical artist billboard in Times Square.
- The new $1M investment makes Community Funds official, according to Reddit.
- Starting in June, the platform will accept ideas from communities for projects, events, contests, and other ventures and award the funds as it chooses.
- Winners will be selected based on "creativity, feasibility, and community impact," Reddit said. It expects to release more submission details and guidelines soon.
- In December, Reddit filed a draft registration with the SEC to take the company public at a future unknown date. As of August, its platform had 100,000+ active subreddits and ~52 million daily users.
TECHCRUNCH
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Ayar Labs raised $130M from Nvidia, HPE, and other investors, highlighting a continued growth in funding toward silicon photonics startups. The technology, which relies on light rather than electricity to transfer data between chips, is expected to become common in data centers by 2025. More: - In 2021, silicon photonics startups raised more than $750M, up from $18M in 2016.
- Ayar Labs said it secured $130M in Series C funding to accelerate the commercialization of an in-package optical input/output for AI, cloud, aerospace, and other applications.
- Supercomputer startup Luminous, which is developing a light-based rather than electron-based AI accelerator chip, announced a recent $105M funding round that included Bill Gates as an investor.
Zoom-out: - Photonics chips have higher communication speeds but consume less energy than a traditional chip.
- The technology can reduce the world's power consumption while addressing the potential slowdown in Moore's Law, which says that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years.
- Startups are using silicon photonics for connecting transistor chips as well as quantum computers, supercomputers, and autonomous vehicle chips.
REUTERS
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- Google has started rolling out a new safety section in its Play Store, which details what data an app collects and whether that data is secured.
- Instagram is now testing a feature that lets users pin specific posts above the photo grid in their profiles.
- E Ink Holdings said it has introduced its next-generation color electronic paper.
- Microsoft will launch Teams on the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 and 11 in May.
- The release of Nintendo's animated Super Mario Bros. movie has been delayed from December to April. Chris Pratt will voice Mario in the adaption from Universal and Illumination Entertainment.
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 |  | Beth is a writer and analyst at Inside.com covering artificial intelligence and daily tech news. Since starting work at Inside, she has covered various topics including virtual reality, drones, and e-commerce. Prior to that she was a public policy and investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic, where she won a Pulitzer Prize nomination and First Amendment Award for reporting on the rising costs of pensions. Reach her at Beth.Duckett@inside.com. |   | | Editor | Eduardo Garcia is a writer and editor based in New York. He is writing an illustrated book about climate change that will be published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Bylines in The New York Times, The Guardian, Slate, Scientific American, and others. In one of his previous lives, Eduardo worked as a Reuters correspondent in Latin America for nearly a decade. | |
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