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A federal judge has set a date for the first pre-trial hearing between Microsoft and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The two go to court on January 3rd to spar over the fate of Microsoft’s $69 billion bid to buy Call of Duty publisher Activision Blizzard. Microsoft and Activision announced the merger at the start of 2022. At the time, the tech giant said it expected the deal to close no later than June 2023. Last month, the FTC sued Microsoft to block the acquisition from moving forward.

“Microsoft has already shown that it can and will withhold content from its gaming rivals,” FTC Director Holly Vedova said at the time. “Today we seek to stop Microsoft from gaining control over a leading independent game studio and using it to harm competition in multiple dynamic and fast-growing gaming markets.”

The FTC is expected to face an uphill battle trying to convince a judge of the merits of its case. For one, Microsoft isn’t pushing for a “horizontal” merger that would see it take one of its direct competitors out of the picture. Additionally, the company has signaled it’s ready to make concessions to rubberstamp the deal. Should the merger move forward, Microsoft has pledged to release future Call of Duty games on competing platforms for at least 10 years. It also said it would bring the franchise to Nintendo consoles.

“The commission cannot meet its burden of showing that the transaction would leave consumers worse off, because the transaction will allow consumers to play Activision’s games on new platforms and access them in new and more affordable ways," Microsoft wrote in a legal filing last month. The deal also faces regulatory scrutiny from the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority, which recently said it would conduct an “in-depth” investigation of the proposed merger.

California Property Trust, the owner of the building that houses Twitter headquarters, is suing Elon Musk’s social media company for failing to pay $136,250 in rent. According to Bloomberg (via The Verge), the firm notified Twitter on December 16th that it would default on its lease for the 30th floor of the Hartford Building, located at 650 California Street in San Francisco, if it didn’t pay its outstanding rent within five days. In a complaint filed this week with the San Francisco County Superior Court, California Property Trust said Twitter failed to comply with the order.

According to a December 13th New York Times report had "for weeks" stopped paying rent on all of its global offices to save on costs. The company also faces a lawsuit for failing to pay $197,725 for charter flights Musk took during his first week at Twitter. Over that same time period, Musk has reportedly brought over “more than half a dozen” lawyers from SpaceX to bolster Twitter's legal team.

Samsung’s mobile division has a new design chief. On Friday, the company announced the appointment of Hubert H. Lee to head up its Mobile eXperience (MX) Design Team, the unit responsible for designing some of Samsung’s most visible products, including its flagship Galaxy S series phones. Lee joins the electronics giant after a stint as the chief design officer of Mercedes-Benz China, a position that saw him lead the automaker’s design teams in China and the US. “His unique and visionary perspective will help shape the look and feel of Galaxy, building on the distinct design ethos that users know and love,” Samsung said.

It will probably be at least a year before we see Lee start to leave his mark on Samsung’s products. Prelease leaks of the company’s next Galaxy S series phones suggest they’ll look a lot like their Galaxy S22 predecessors. What’s more, with the way smartphone development timelines work, Samsung has likely already settled on a design for its 2024 flagship. Even then, don’t expect dramatic changes; from a design standpoint, phone companies have played it safe for more than a decade. Still, Lee could push for small but meaningful tweaks to Samsung's design formula — much like Evans Hankey did at Apple after Jony Ive's departure. 

The time has come to say goodbye to Dark Sky. Nearly two years after Apple purchased the much-loved weather app, and more than a year after announcing its impending shutdown, Dark Sky is about to stop functioning. Since September, an in-app notification has warned iOS users the software would no longer work come January 1st, 2023. In September, Apple also removed Dark Sky from the App Store (following an earlier delisting from the Play Store).

If you’re looking for an alternative, it’s worth revisiting Apple’s own Weather app before turning to the App Store. Since iOS 14, the company has gradually integrated Dark Sky’s technology into its native offering. For instance, the Weather app now includes next-hour precipitation alerts, which is a feature that was directly inspired by Dark Sky. That said, if you’re set on trying a third-party alternative, a few that are worth checking out include AccuWeather and Carrot Weather.

After advising President Biden on technology and competition policy for nearly two years, net neutrality advocate Tim Wu is leaving the White House. The Biden administration announced the departure this week, noting Wu’s final day at the National Economic Council would fall on January 4th. Wu became a special advisor to the president in March 2021. He held a similar position during the Obama administration.

Wu told The New York Times he’s leaving the federal government to spend more time with his family. His post at the White House had required Wu to commute between New York and Washington DC, leaving his young children without their father for stretches of time. “There’s a time where the burden on family is too much,” he said. “I’ve been feeling the balance has shifted.” Wu told The Times he plans to return to Columbia University, where he was a law professor before his latest government stint.

Wu is leaving the White House at a critical moment during the Biden administration's efforts to rein in Big Tech. Last year, he co-authored the executive order that instructed the Federal Communications Commission to restore net neutrality and promised greater scrutiny of mergers. In July of this year, the Federal Trade Commission sued Meta to block the purchase of VR developer Within. Earlier this month, the agency also moved to prevent Microsoft’s merger with Activision Blizzard. Both cases are currently before the courts and are expected to be tough battles for the FTC. 

Facebook parent company Meta has acquired Luxexcel, a Dutch startup specializing in smart eyewear. News of the purchase was first reported by De Tijd and later confirmed by TechCrunch. “We’re excited that the Luxexcel team has joined Meta, deepening the existing partnership between the two companies,” a Meta spokesperson told the outlet. The company did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.

Founded in 2009, Luxexcel began life as a prescription lens manufacturer. More recently, the company has made a name for itself in the augmented reality space. At the start of 2021, for instance, it partnered with WaveOptics, the display manufacturer Snap paid $500 million later that same year to buy. As TechCrunch points out, there are also rumors Luxexcel previously worked with Meta on the company’s Project Aria AR glasses.

The acquisition comes as Meta faces regulatory scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission over its purchase of Supernatural developer Within. The agency sued Meta in July to block the deal. The social media giant also faces criticism over just how much it's spending to further its metaverse ambitions. In October, a month before the company laid off 11,000 employees, Meta told investors Reality Labs, its virtual and augmented reality unit, lost more than $9 billion in 2022. It went on to predict the division’s operating losses were likely to “grow significantly year-over-year” in 2023.

Grubhub has been ordered to pay $3.5 million to settle the lawsuit filed against the company by the District of Columbia over "deceptive trade practices." Washington DC Attorney General Karl Racine has announced that his office has reached an agreement with the food delivery service "for charging customers hidden fees and using deceptive marketing techniques." If you'll recall, his office sued the company earlier this year, accusing it of charging hidden fees and misrepresenting Grubhub+ subscription's offer of "unlimited free delivery," since customers still have to pay a service fee.

The DC Attorney General's office also accused the company of listing 1,000 restaurants in the area without their permission by using numbers that route to Grubhub workers or creating websites without the eateries' consent. A previous TechCrunch report said the company had already ended those practices. Racine also said at the time that Grubhub ran a promotion called "Supper for Support" at the beginning of the pandemic and then "stuck restaurants with the bill" that cut into their profit margins.

Grubhub called the lawsuit frivolous at the time of its filing and said that the company was "disappointed [the AG's office has] moved forward with [it] because [the service's] practices have always complied with DC law, and in any event, many of the practices at issue have been discontinued."

Under the terms of the settlement, Grubhub will pay affected customers in the DC area a total of $2.7 million. Their cut will be credited to their accounts, and it will be sent to them as a check if it remains unused within 90 days. In addition, the company has to pay $800,000 in civil penalties to the District of Columbia and has to clearly mark additional fees people have to pay with their order going forward.

The National Labor Relations Board has accused Tesla of violating labor law by prohibiting employees in Orlando, Florida from talking about workplace matters. According to Bloomberg, NLRB's Tampa regional director filed a complaint against the automaker in September for breaking the law when it told employees not to discuss their pay with other people and not to talk about the termination of another employee. In addition, based on the filing the news organization obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Tesla management reportedly told employees "not to complain to higher level managers" about their working conditions. 

Tesla has had to face several complaints by the NLRB over the past years. In 2021, the agency found that the automaker had violated US labor laws by firing a union activist and threatening workers' benefits. The NLRB ordered the company to rehire union activist Richard Ortiz and to remove all mentions of disciplinary action from his files. It also ordered Tesla chief Elon Musk to delete a tweet that the court had deemed a threat that employees would be giving up company-paid stock options if they join a union. The tweet in question is still live, and Tesla is appealing the NLRB's ruling in court. 

An agency spokesperson told Bloomberg that a judge will hear the complaint filed by the Tampa regional director in February. As the publication notes, companies can still appeal the agency judges' decision to NLRB members in Washington and then to federal court, so any corrective action may take years to happen.

For the past several months, TikTok has been working on new ways to age-restrict certain types of content as part of a broader push to ramp up safety features for younger users. The app unveiled a new ratings system earlier this year, called Content Levels, to help it identify more “mature” content.

Now, the company has another update on those efforts. In a blog post, the company says that it’s launching a new version of its “borderline suggestive model,” which the company uses to automatically identify “sexually explicit, suggestive, or borderline content.” According to a TikTok spokesperson, the new model is better able to detect so-called “borderline content,” videos that don’t explicitly break the app’s rules, but may not be suitable for younger users.

TikTok isn’t the only platform to filter out this type of content from recommendations. Instagram has long attempted to weed borderline content out of its recommendations as well. But content with more “mature” themes, but that doesn’t contain explicit nudity, has long been more difficult for automated systems to consistently detect. TikTok didn’t offer specifics on how much more accurate the new system is, but it shared that in the last 30 days the company has “prevented teen accounts from viewing over 1 million overtly sexually suggestive videos.”

Elsewhere, the app is also rolling out the ability for creators to restrict their videos to adult viewers. This feature was previously only available for live videos, but will now be enabled for short-form clips as well.

NVIDIA is expected to reveal its GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card at CES next week, but it preemptively leaked the specs. Thanks to new rumors, we have a sense of the GPU's likely price too.

The RTX 4070 Ti is slated to have 12GB of GDDR6X memory with 7,680 Cuda cores that can be boosted to 2.61GHz, as Tom's Hardware notes. NVIDIA seemingly expects the card to deliver 4K gameplay at up to 240Hz, or 8K visuals at 60Hz with DSC and HDR enabled. The company claimed the RTX 4070 Ti will deliver around 3.5 times better performance than the 12GB RTX 3080 in Cyberpunk 2077 when the new RT Overdrive mode is enabled.

It has been widely believed that the latest card would essentially be a rebranded version of the 12GB RTX 4080. In October, NVIDIA reversed plans to release that model and suggested it would rebadge the GPU.

Meanwhile, rumors indicate NVIDIA will sell the RTX 4070 Ti for $799. It was previously expected that the price would be $899, but NVIDIA may have lowered it after the US delayed tariffs on GPUs that were set to resume on January 1st. Based on the RTX 4070 Ti's expected performance, Wccftech ran the numbers and found that, on a teraflop-to-dollar ratio, the GPU will offer 97 percent of the value proposition of the $1,599 RTX 4090.

We should find out official details about the RTX 4070 Ti, perhaps including the release date, very soon. NVIDIA has scheduled a CES edition of its GeForce Beyond event for January 3rd at 11AM ET.