Comment on Five things to know for Wednesday, July 15

Enlarge (credit: FT/Getty Images) TikTok’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance tightened its grip over its US operations over the past two years, according to company insiders, even as momentum to ban the short-video app grew in Washington. The US government passed legislation this week aimed at forcing TikTok to divest from its parent or face a countrywide ban, but prising the viral video app from its $268 billion parent company would present a formidable challenge. More than two dozen current and former employees told the Financial Times that TikTok has only become more deeply interwoven with ByteDance as tensions over the app’s ownership escalated.

Enlarge / The author tries not to crash a lunar rover. (credit: Eric Berger) As a SpaceX engineer working on the Starship program about five years ago, Jaret Matthews could see the future of spaceflight quite clearly and began to imagine the possibilities. For decades everything that went to space had to be carefully measured, optimized for mass, and serve an extremely specialized purpose.

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm) Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series of chips promises to be the company’s first that can go toe-to-toe with Apple Silicon, and the PC ecosystem is reacting accordingly. Microsoft reportedly plans for the Arm version of its next Surface tablet to be the flagship, and major apps like Chrome and Dropbox have recently released Arm-native Windows versions for the first time. Ahead of the chips' launch late this year, Qualcomm announced a new lower-end model destined for cheaper devices.

Colorado lawmakers have passed new legislation in a years-long effort to curb foreclosures by homeowners associations and metropolitan districts that are based on unpaid fines and fees. The reform bills — including one for metro districts that’s already been signed into law — have aimed to create new regulations for HOAs and metro districts by restricting foreclosure filings of the kind that hit thousands of homeowners in recent years.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) “Gadgets aren’t fun anymore,” sighed my wife, watching me tap away on my Palm Zire 72 as she sat on the couch with her MacBook Air, an iPhone, and an Apple Watch. And it’s true: The smartphone has all but eliminated entire classes of gadgets, from point-and-shoot cameras to MP3 players, GPS maps, and even flashlights.

By WYATTE GRANTHAM-PHILIPS (AP Business Writer) NEW YORK (AP) — Legislation forcing TikTok’s parent company to sell the video-sharing platform or face a ban in the U. S. received President Joe Biden’s official signoff Wednesday. But the newly minted law could be in for an uphill battle in court. Critics of the sell-or-be-banned ultimatum argue it violates TikTok users’ First Amendment rights.