Itβs Thursday, July 3, 2025, and weβre back with your daily tech funding snapshot of where venture capital is flowing and which startups are shaping the next wave of global tech innovation. Happy 4th of July to our U.S. readers! [β¦]
For the past two years, Apple has been having a tough time in China. Just recently, the U.S. trade war and local incentives from the Chinese government really got in the way of iPhone sales. However, Apple seems to be regaining control of the situation.
The most frequently curated content on the White House Wire, the Trump administration's attempt to aggregate pro-Trump "real news" from across the right-wing media, doesn't come from Truth Social, Breitbart, or even Fox News. It comes from YouTube - notably, from the White House's own channel.
The White House Wire was launched at the end of April on the official WH.gov page, around the time that the Trump comms team began ramping up its war on the mainstream journalists and outlets who covered them critically. At that time, they'd revoked the Associated Press' credentials after the outlet refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf β¦
To celebrate Independence Day, one of the most trusted cloud storage services is making a bold move by slashing the prices of its lifetime plans with a limited-time, exclusive offer.
You want your games to play the smoothest they possibly can - but sometimes, screen technology gets in the way. That's why some of the latest TVs and handhelds feature variable refresh rate (VRR) screens that can compensate when your graphics can't deliver a consistent 60 or 120 frames per second.
The Nintendo Switch 2 has a VRR screen - and originally, Nintendo advertised that the Switch 2 would also work with your VRR-capable TV. But Nintendo soon scrubbed mentions of docked VRR from its website, and on May 16th, it apologized. "Nintendo Switch 2 supports VRR in handheld mode only," the company told Nintendo Life, apologizing for "the in β¦
Newly disclosed records show Attorney General Pam Bondi gave cover to not only Apple and Google, but also several other companies that help TikTok operate in the US.
A Freedom of Information Act request has produced letters that the US Department of Justice sent to Google, Apple, Amazon, and several other companies in order to assuage their concerns about breaking a law that banned US web services from working with TikTok.
The documents βΒ obtained by Zhaocheng Anthony Tan, a Google shareholder who sued for their release earlier this year βΒ show Attorney General Pam Bondi and her predecessor Acting Attorney General James McHenry III promising to release companies from responsibility for violating the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which required US companies to ban TikTok from app stores and other platforms or face hundreds of billions of dollars in fines. The law was intended to force a sale of TikTok from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, due to national security concerns.
Additionally, the letters say the Justice Department will step in to prevent anyone else from attempting to enforce penalties, a promise that includes filing amicus briefs or βintervening in litigation.β McHenry apparently sent the first round of letters on January 30th, ten days after Trump signed an executive order delaying enforcement of the law, which took effect the day before his inauguration. A series of follow-up letters were sent by Bondi, including a round dated April 5th, just after Trump extended the delay on enforcing the law to mid-June.
The lettersβ existence was known, but until now, their text had not been released. The full list of recipients includes the operators of app stores, cloud hosting services, and more:
Apple
Google
Amazon
Microsoft
Akamai Technologies
Digital Realty Trust
Fastly
T-Mobile US
Oracle
LG Electronics USA
Trump has since issued a third extension, which expires in mid-September, while promising a sale of TikTok by ByteDance to a non-Chinese owner remains underway. It is unclear whether any of the orders have a valid basis in law.
IARPA director Rick Muller is departing after just over a year at the R&D unit that invests in emerging technologies of potential interest to agencies like the NSA and the CIA, WIRED has learned.