Pentagon to reexamine cloud project. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper will reexamine the contract-award process for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure program, known as JEDI, The Wall Street Journal's Ryan Tracy reports. Amazon Web Services, the only cloud vendor with the highest-level Defense Department IT certification, was considered a front-runner for the contract, expected to be valued at up to $10 billion over a decade. Microsoft Corp. was also considered a finalist. The move comes after the process had been questioned by President Trump.
Controversy. Some technology companies have expressed concern that a single award would give the winner an unfair advantage in follow-on work. President Trump said on July 18 he had heard “tremendous complaints” about the process for awarding the JEDI contract and vowed to ask his administration “to look at it very closely.” He cited complaints by Microsoft, Oracle Corp. and International Business Machines Corp.
Ending up on the president's desk... "Oracle Executive Vice President Ken Glueck, who runs the company’s policy shop in Washington, said he created a colorful flow chart labeled 'A Conspiracy To Create A Ten Year DoD Cloud Monopoly' that portrayed connections between Amazon executives, [former Defense Secretary Jim] Mattis and officials from the Obama administration. (Washington Post)
Quiet part loud? President Trump has spoken out often against Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.
FTC antitrust Facebook probe scrutinizes acquisitions. Investigators are looking for evidence on whether Facebook Inc. and founder Mark Zuckerberg purchased startup technology firms to keep them from challenging Facebook’s empire. The company has acquired about 90 companies over roughly the last 15 years. (WSJ)
London is facial-recognition central. Advances in technology are transforming the area's estimated 420,000 CCTV cameras, many in place since the early 1990s, into the world's largest lab for facial recognition outside of China. (FT)
Facebook takes on Saudi propaganda. The social network said it removed 350 accounts and pages linked to a propaganda effort run by Saudi Arabia's government. (Reuters)
Giving an AI system credit. Two U.K.-based scientists and Missouri-based Imagination Engines, creator of the Dabus AI sytem, are teaming up to file patents in the system's name. Among Dabus's inventions: a beverage container based on fractal geometry. (BBC)
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