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Amazon’s Latest Purchases Are a Surveillance Nightmare + More
Amazon’s Latest Purchases Are a Surveillance Nightmare
On Friday, Politico reported that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Amazon’s agreement to acquire two companies that would help the tech giant become an even bigger hoarder of people’s personal information.
Yes, Amazon is making a play to own even more private data. These acquisitions would add to an already huge arsenal of surveillance devices in Amazon’s portfolio. The company currently owns Alexa, a “virtual assistant” for your home that already gobbles up troves of personal data whenever people speak into enabled devices. And Amazon also owns Ring, the company that sells doorbell cameras that can record a disturbing amount of audio and video, a fact evident by the historic amount of data that Ring has turned over to the federal government.
It’ll be important to keep an eye on the FTC’s investigation as it unfolds, as well as keep a close watch on other large companies making plays for our personal data. Books like Jaron Lanier’s “Who Owns the Future?” have predicted our current era, in which the companies that possess the most user information tend to be the most powerful.
We know personal data can be used maliciously, and Amazon is not to be taken at its word that it has no plans to do so. And we certainly can’t assume Amazon won’t pass off personal data to third parties that do plan to use it maliciously.
Hochul Drops Mask Mandate for New York Transit Riders as New COVID Booster Shots Become Available
New York transit riders are allowed to uncover their faces for the first time in more than two years.
Gov. Hochul on Wednesday dropped the mask requirement that’s been in effect for the state’s public transportation systems since April 2020, when former Gov. Andrew Cuomo launched a mandate in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Masks will still be required in hospitals, nursing homes and adult care facilities, Hochul said. The governor said her decision to drop the mandate was due to the launch of new vaccines targeted at the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus.
New York kept its mandate even after the Centers for Disease Control lifted its rule requiring masks on public transit in April when a Florida federal judge struck it down as unconstitutional.
Judge Orders Biden Admin to Turn Over Fauci, Jean-Pierre ‘Misinformation’ Emails Sent to Social Media Giants
A federal judge in Louisiana ruled Tuesday that the Biden administration has 21 days to turn over all relevant emails sent by White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Dr. Anthony Fauci to social media platforms regarding alleged misinformation and the censorship of social media content.
The decision by Judge Terry Doughty, who was appointed by former President Trump, came as part of a lawsuit filed in May by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, accusing the Biden administration of suppressing the constitutionally protected right to free speech on elections, the COVID-19 lab leak theory, coronavirus-related lockdowns and other issues.
The Justice Department objected to the handing over of the email correspondence under executive privilege and presidential communications privilege, but Doughty decided, “This Court believes Plaintiffs are entitled to external communications by Jean-Pierre and Dr. Fauci in their capacities as White House Press Secretary and Chief Medical Advisor to the President to third-party social media platforms.”
Staten Island Officials Call on NYC to Toss Remaining COVID Vaccine Requirements for Public School Students
Staten Island elected officials are calling for an end to New York City’s requirement of the coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine for public school students participating in extracurricular and sports programs deemed “high-risk,” as well as parents and visitors entering school buildings.
Borough President Vito J. Fossella and other officials sent a letter last week to Department of Education (DOE) Chancellor David Banks and Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan requesting the agencies reconsider the COVID-19 guidance ahead of the new school year.
Additionally, a COVID-19 vaccination requirement applies to students participating in high-risk after-school extracurricular activities like chorus, musical theater, dance/dance team, band/orchestra (with concern for woodwinds), marching band and cheerleading/step team/flag team.
DC’s Vaccine Mandate for Students Will Unravel a Decade of Progress. Mayor Bowser: Reconsider
When the Council of the District of Columbia passed a COVID-19 vaccination mandate for in-person learning, I along with many others was concerned about the negative impact this would have on the unvaccinated. I presumed that the legislation, passed in March, would be amended given updates in the CDC guidance issued in August. But it seems that the “no-learning” option is still on the table for DC students who aren’t vaccinated.
DC’s official position mandates that by January 2023, students 12 years and older be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition for returning to in-person learning, and there is no virtual learning option. Among the impacts of this policy, it will almost certainly broaden racial educational gaps, given that the vaccination rate for 12-to-17-year-old Black students is under 60%.
And this would be an absolute disaster.
If the current policy holds and near-universal compliance is not achieved by the time students return from winter break, a significant number of students and families will either continue to refuse vaccination and therefore be refused schooling, or they will capitulate despite persistent and significant reservations.
‘Freedom Convoy’ Organizers Ask Judge to Unfreeze $450,000 in Donations to Fund Legal Fees, Appearance at Federal Inquiry Into Emergencies Act
“Freedom Convoy” leaders are asking the court to release hundreds of thousands of dollars in frozen donations to pay for their appearance at the federal inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act.
The funds, donations made to the “Freedom Convoy” and later frozen by court order, were placed into escrow — an arrangement where a third party holds the funds until certain conditions are met — awaiting the conclusion of a proposed class action lawsuit against the “Freedom Convoy” leaders.
In a notice of motion filed Friday, a group of defendants in that class action suit said they needed access to $450,000 from the escrow account to pay for their legal representation at the Public Order Emergency Commission, the federal inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act.
Judge Rules Anti-Vaccine Mandate Protester Outside Boston Mayor Wu’s Home ‘Wrongfully Arrested,’ Drops Charges
A judge ruled the first protester criminally charged for picketing against coronavirus-related mandates outside Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s home was “wrongfully arrested” months ago.
Wu, a Democrat, had advocated for an ordinance restricting picketing outside private residences from 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. after months of demonstrations outside of her home in Roslindale voicing opposition to the mayor’s proposals for mask mandates in public places and vaccination requirements.
Shannon Llewellyn was the first protester to be arrested outside Wu’s home in April at approximately 7:45 a.m. after the picketing ban took effect, the Boston Herald reported.
But Judge Steven Key, of the Roxbury Division of Boston Municipal Court, decided last week, that “this should not have been a criminal complaint at all” under the ordinance passed by City Council along a 9-4 vote. Key dropped the charge against Llewellyn in the April arrest and ordered it expunged from her record.
As China’s Economy Slows, One Industry Is Seeing Record Profits: COVID Testing
China’s zero-COVID strategy of endless testing and lockdowns has hammered its economy and taken a toll on company profits, but it has delivered a windfall for test makers.
Twelve of China’s top COVID testing firms have recently posted huge increases in both revenues and net profits for the first half of this year.
Andon Health, which supplies COVID test kits both at home and abroad, reported that its net profit skyrocketed by 27,728% in the first six months of 2022, reaching 15.24 billion yuan ($2.2 billion). It was the biggest increase recorded by any listed company in mainland China. Meanwhile, its revenue surged by 3,989%.
The company benefits not only from China’s aggressive testing campaign at home but also from huge demand in the United States, as its iHealth Lab had recently won U.S. government contracts for supplying antigen rapid tests.
Beijing’s Plan to Control the World’s Data: Out-Google Google
The rise of Big Data — the vast digital output of daily life, including data Google and Facebook collect from their users and convert into advertising dollars — is now a matter of national security, according to some policymakers.
The fear is that China is vacuuming up data about the U.S. and its citizens not just to steal secrets from U.S. companies or to influence citizens but also to build the foundation of technological hegemony in the not-too-distant future.
Data — lots of it, the more the better — has, along with the rise of artificial intelligence, taken on strategic importance.
In recent months, some of the more hawkish national security mavens in Washington, DC, have warned that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is aggressively moving to control all the data that flows through the country — even data that originate from American and other Western firms working in China.
UN Education Agency Launches War on ‘Conspiracy Theories’
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, better known by its acronym, UNESCO, is escalating its global war on ideas and information it considers to be “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories.”
According to the Paris-based U.N. education agency, which released a major report on the subject for educators this summer, conspiracy theories cause “significant harm” and form “the backbone of many populist movements.”
“There are plenty of crazy thoughts on the Internet, many of which are patently false,” explained Citizens for Free Speech Director Patrick Wood. “The only thoughts being ‘corrected’ are those contrary to the globalist narrative. This proves that the focus is on protecting their own narratives and nothing else.”
“UNESCO joins a censorship cartel that now includes the European Union, the U.S. government, the World Economic Forum, social media giants like Facebook and Twitter and notably, Google,” Wood told The Epoch Times. “Anyone who does not parrot the globalist narrative is by default considered to be a ‘conspiracy theorist.’”
‘One of the Biggest Problems Confronting Medicine Today’: University of Chicago Offers Class on Misinformation
Chicago Tribune via MSN reported:
Patients have long been told to turn to their doctors for accurate, trusted health information. But in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors’ voices have sometimes been drowned out by social media users who blast misinformation across the globe, leading patients to make questionable, and sometimes dangerous, choices about their health.
Now, a Chicago medical school is offering a new class aimed at better equipping doctors and other medical professionals to be heard: a course on how to battle medical misinformation. The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine began offering the class to medical students last year and recently developed a condensed version for nurses studying for their doctorates, pharmacy residents and senior medical students.
The class is one of the first of its kind at a U.S. medical school. Though it grew out of the pandemic, Dr. Vineet Arora, who teaches the class with Serritella, said misinformation in medicine extends far beyond COVID-19.
Judge Rules That Elon Musk Can Use Twitter Whistleblower Claims
A Delaware court on Wednesday ruled that Elon Musk will be allowed to introduce claims from Twitter whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko into his countersuit against the social media company. It also denied Musk’s request to delay the October trial.
Why it matters: The whistleblower’s claims, which include that Twitter violated a 2011 consent decree with the U.S. government, introduce a new legal wrinkle into Musk’s attempt to back out of his $44 billion takeover offer for the social media company.
CDC Gave Facebook Misinformation About COVID Vaccines + More
CDC Gave Facebook Misinformation About COVID Vaccines, Emails Show
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) passed misinformation to Facebook as the partners worked to combat misinformation, according to newly released emails, in the most recent example of CDC officials making false or misleading claims.
In a June 3 message, a Facebook official said the CDC had helped the company “debunk claims about COVID vaccines and children,” and asked for assistance addressing claims about the vaccines for babies and toddlers, including the claim that the vaccines were not effective.
“COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States are effective at protecting people, including children ages 6 months to 4 years, from getting seriously ill, being hospitalized and even dying,” the CDC official wrote.
There’s no evidence that the vaccines are effective against severe illness and death in young children.
Ireland Fines Instagram 405 Million Euros for Failing to Protect Children’s Data
Ireland’s data regulator has fined Instagram 405 million euros for violating the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and failing to safeguard children’s information.
The fine from the Data Protection Commission followed a two-year investigation into the Meta-owned social media platform. The investigation covered complaints that Instagram defaulted the accounts of all users, including those under the age of 18, to public settings. It also related to how the contact information of children using business accounts on the platform was publicly available.
Instagram, which allows users over the age of 13, said the fine related to old settings that were updated more than a year ago. It said it had released features to keep teenagers’ information private, including automatically setting children’s accounts to private when they sign up since July last year.
Meta was fined 17 million euros in March by the Irish regulator following an investigation into data breach notifications on Facebook. Last year, it was fined 225 million euros for violating privacy laws on WhatsApp. Meta is appealing against the WhatsApp ruling but has accepted the Facebook decision.
Amazon’s Latest Robotics, Healthcare Buys Have the FTC Asking More Questions
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is investigating Amazon’s plans to acquire robot vacuum maker iRobot and the 1Life healthcare company behind One Medical, according to reports from Politico and The Wall Street Journal. Amazon announced a $3.9 billion deal to buy One Medical in July and said it would acquire iRobot for $1.7 billion just weeks later.
One Medical serves as a sort of Netflix-for-healthcare subscription service that gives customers access to in-person and virtual appointments at 125 clinics across the U.S. for $199 per year. Meanwhile, iRobot’s known for its line of Roomba robot vacuums that have only grown more adept at understanding users’ homes and their habits with the rollout of iRobot OS.
The acquisitions of both companies align with Amazon’s long-term goals of carving out its own lane in the healthcare industry, as well as collecting more data about its customers, something Amazon could do with Roomba’s home-mapping capabilities.
The FTC’s investigations could slow — or potentially stop — Amazon’s acquisition of both companies. FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan has been a vocal critic of Amazon and its practices.
Outcry as Chinese Lockdown Traps Residents During Earthquake
Footage showing that some residents in the earthquake-hit Chinese city of Chengdu were stopped from fleeing their compounds due to a COVID lockdown has sparked anger and disbelief online.
Some in Chengdu say they were told to stay inside through a 6.6-magnitude earthquake on Monday that has killed at least 65 people.
Those that ran out say they found the exits shut due to COVID restrictions. Chengdu, home to 21 million people, is currently under strict lockdown rules.
Germany to Drop COVID Mask Requirement on Flights
Germany will soon drop mask requirements on commercial flights introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said on Tuesday, after flagship airline Lufthansa (LHAG.DE) complained that the rule was no longer enforceable.
Authorities will focus instead on making sure people wear face-and-mouth coverings on public transport in Germany, Lauterbach said in Berlin, after the coalition government agreed to axe the measure.
CVS Beats Amazon and Rivals for Signify Health With Winning $8 Billion Bid
CVS Health will acquire home care company Signify Health for $8 billion as retail drugstores add more primary care and in-home medical services.
CVS apparently beat out other healthcare and retail companies including Amazon and UnitedHealth Group’s Optum medical care provider business that had reportedly been interested in Signify Health or at least looked into the potential of adding the home care company.
But CVS announced on Monday afternoon that the drugstore giant has “entered into a definitive agreement under which CVS Health will acquire Signify Health for $30.50 per share in cash, representing a total transaction value of approximately $8 billion.”
In buying Signify Health, CVS Health will add to its growing menu of healthcare services that includes more than 9,000 retail drugstores, 1,100 MinuteClinics staffed by nurse practitioners and the nation’s third-largest health insurer, Aetna.
Iranian Authorities Plan to Use Facial Recognition to Enforce New Hijab Law
The Iranian government is planning to use facial recognition technology on public transport to identify women who are not complying with a strict new law on wearing the hijab, as the regime continues its increasingly punitive crackdown on women’s dress.
The secretary of Iran’s Headquarters for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice, Mohammad Saleh Hashemi Golpayegani, announced in a recent interview that the government was planning to use surveillance technology against women in public places following a new decree signed by the country’s hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi, on restricting women’s clothing.
AI Is Making It Easier Than Ever for Students to Cheat
Look out, educators. You’re about to confront a pernicious new challenge that is spreading, kudzu-like, into your student writing assignments: papers augmented with artificial intelligence.
The first online article generator debuted in 2005. Now, AI-generated text can now be found in novels, fake news articles and real news articles, marketing campaigns and dozens of other written products. The tech is either free or cheap to use, which places it in the hands of anyone. And it’s probably already burrowing into America’s classrooms right now.
Using an AI program is not “plagiarism” in the traditional sense — there’s no previous work for the student to copy, and thus no original for teachers’ plagiarism detectors to catch. Instead, a student first feeds text from either a single or multiple sources into the program to begin the process.
The program then generates content by using a set of parameters on a topic, which then can be personalized to the writer’s specifications. With a little bit of practice, a student can use AI to write his or her paper in a fraction of the time that it would normally take to write an essay.
Doomscrolling Linked to Poor Physical and Mental Health, Study Finds
There’s no shortage of bad news in the media to “doomscroll”, from a global pandemic to the war in Ukraine and an impending climate crisis, but new research suggests the compulsive urge to surf the web can lead to poor mental and physical health outcomes.
Doomscrolling is the tendency to “continue to surf or scroll through bad news, even though that news is saddening, disheartening or depressing”, a practice researchers found has boomed since the onset of the pandemic.
The study, published in the journal Health Communication, found that 16.5% of about 1,100 people surveyed showed signs of “severely problematic” news consumption, leading to greater levels of stress, anxiety and poor health.
Metaversity Is in Session as Meta and Iowa’s VictoryXR Open 10 Virtual Campuses
“Teaching in the metaverse is like being able to leave your physical reality and immerse yourself in a complete, digitally simulated environment. It can be anywhere in the world, in any timeline,” said Muhsinah Morris, principal investigator of the Morehouse in the Metaverse project. The historically Black college in Atlanta is one of 10 so-called metaversities that offers classes via VR headsets in a virtual classroom.
Colleges and universities have flirted with using virtual reality as a teaching tool for years, but until recently, few institutions invested in the technology. The headsets were bulky and expensive, and even with the hardware in hand, creating engaging, effective virtual teaching spaces is costly and requires skilled engineers.
This fall, 10 universities get a free ticket for entry; as part of its $150 million Meta Immersive Learning project, Meta — Facebook’s parent company — is bringing colleges into their metaverse.
Amazon’s Next Healthcare Venture May Be in Japan
Amazon is considering partnering with pharmacies in Japan to deliver medications starting in 2023, according to a report from Nikkei.
The plan is for Amazon to build a platform where patients can get information about the drugs they’ve been prescribed and also sign up to get those drugs delivered, Nikkei reported, based on interviews with unnamed sources involved with the project. Amazon would not operate pharmacies itself — just provide the online system.
Amazon has been involved in the pharmacy business in the U.S. since 2018 when it acquired prescription delivery company PillPack. It launched its own pharmacy, Amazon Pharmacy, in 2020.
How AI Could Accidentally Extinguish Humankind + More
How AI Could Accidentally Extinguish Humankind
People are bad at predicting the future. Where are our flying cars? Why are there no robot butlers? And why can’t I take a vacation on Mars?
But we haven’t just been wrong about things we thought would come to pass; humanity also has a long history of incorrectly assuring ourselves that certain now-inescapable realities wouldn’t. The day before Leo Szilard devised the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, the great physicist Ernest Rutherford proclaimed that anyone who propounded atomic power was “talking moonshine.” Even computer industry pioneer Ken Olsen in 1977 supposedly said he didn’t foresee individuals having any use for a computer in their home.
Obviously, we live in a nuclear world, and you probably have a computer or two within arm’s reach right now. In fact, it’s those computers — and the exponential advances in computing generally — that are now the subject of some of society’s most high-stakes forecasting.
The conventional expectation is that ever-growing computing power will be a boon for humanity. But what if we’re wrong again? Could artificial superintelligence instead cause us great harm? Our extinction? As history teaches, never say never.
California Passes Bill Requiring Social Media Companies to Consider Children’s Mental Health
California’s legislature has passed legislation that will require social media companies to consider the physical and mental health of minors who use their platforms.
Senate Bill AB 2273 passed in the state’s Senate chamber in a 75-0 vote on Tuesday. The proposed legislation is headed to the desk of California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), though it is unclear whether Newsom will sign the legislation into law, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The California Age-Appropriate Design Code Act’s requirements include configuring all default privacy settings offered by the social media platform unless the platform can demonstrate a reason why its setting is suited for children and provide information about privacy information, terms and conditions, policies and community standards, all using clear language suited to the age of children likely to access their platform.
The proposed bill will also prohibit social media platforms from using the child user’s information for any purpose other than intended and ban platforms that use children’s information that could be detrimental to their health.
Social media platforms that violate the rules in the bill will be fined up to $2,500 per affected child for each violation and more than $7,500 per affected child for each intentional violation, the bill’s text said.
Over 50 Biden Administration Employees, 12 U.S. Agencies Involved in Social Media Censorship Push: Documents
Over 50 officials in President Joe Biden’s administration across a dozen agencies have been involved with efforts to pressure Big Tech companies to crack down on alleged misinformation, according to documents released on Sept. 1.
Senior officials in the U.S. government, including White House lawyer Dana Remus, deputy assistant to the president Rob Flaherty, and onetime White House senior COVID-19 adviser Andy Slavitt, have been in touch with one or more major social media companies to try to get the companies to tighten rules on allegedly false and misleading information on COVID-19, and take action against users who violate the rules, the documents show.
The documents were part of a preliminary production in a lawsuit levied against the government by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, later joined by experts maligned by federal officials. Plaintiffs said the massive pressure campaign amounted to a “Censorship Enterprise” because it involved so many officials and agencies.
Meta has disclosed that at least 32 federal officials, including top officials at the White House and the Food and Drug Administration, were in communication with it about content moderation. Many of the officials were not identified in the response by the government.
Tech Tool Offers Police ‘Mass Surveillance on a Budget’
Local law enforcement agencies from suburban Southern California to rural North Carolina have been using an obscure cellphone tracking tool, at times without search warrants, that gives them the power to follow people’s movements months back in time, according to public records and internal emails obtained by The Associated Press.
Police have used “Fog Reveal” to search hundreds of billions of records from 250 million mobile devices, and harnessed the data to create location analyses known among law enforcement as “patterns of life,” according to thousands of pages of records about the company.
The company was developed by two former high-ranking Department of Homeland Security officials under ex-President George W. Bush. It relies on advertising identification numbers, which Fog officials say are culled from popular cellphone apps such as Waze, Starbucks and hundreds of others that target ads based on a person’s movements and interests, according to police emails. That information is then sold to companies like Fog.
“It’s sort of a mass surveillance program on a budget,” said Bennett Cyphers, a special advisor at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights advocacy group.
Dissenting Voices Must Speak out to Extricate Society From the Grip of Mass Formation: Clinical Psychologist
Speaking out to articulate sincere and honest belief is the best way to break the social phenomenon known as mass formation, whereby many individuals believe in an unreasonable narrative but are unable to think critically of it, said Mattias Desmet, a professor of clinical psychology at Ghent University in Belgium.
The phenomenon of mass formation has existed in society since ancient times and manifested itself in the Crusades, the French Revolution, and on a large scale in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, said Desmet, a leading expert on mass formation.
The first time a worldwide mass formation emerged was during the coronavirus crisis, Desmet said. “That’s never happened before in history.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, two new groups emerged in the society: the mass and a group of people that do not go along with the masses, he continued.
COVID Vaccine Drive for Youngest Kids off to Underwhelming Start, Data Shows
Ten weeks after the FDA and CDC opened the door for children under 5 years old to receive COVID-19 vaccines, the national drive to get the youngest children protected is off to an underwhelming and uneven start.
Just over 5% of eligible babies and toddlers nationwide have received their first dose at this point, a significantly slower pace than older kids and teenagers, CDC data shows. And there’s a growing political divide, including a swath of Republican-controlled states hovering at less than 2% even as concerns mount that there may be a COVID infection surge this fall.
But even in the most enthusiastic states, the vast majority of young children have not yet received their first dose. A mix of parental hesitance, more limited opportunities for vaccine administration and unique logistical challenges for the youngest age group have slowed the flow of shots to a trickle.
In some ways, this slower launch was by design. Unlike previous vaccination drives, the federal government’s strategy focused more narrowly on getting most doses into the hands of pediatricians and family doctors. Officials hope that encouraging parents to have conversations with medical providers they already trust will build confidence over time, convincing more parents to get their kids vaccinated.
Google Releases Details on How It Will Combat Misinformation in Advance of Midterm Elections
Google is preparing for a wave of misinformation surrounding the U.S. midterm elections by elevating trustworthy information and displaying it more prominently across services including search and YouTube, the company said Thursday.
As part of the effort, Google plans to launch a new tool in the coming weeks that highlights local and regional journalism about campaigns and races, the company said in a blog post. Searches for “how to vote,” in both English and Spanish, will soon return highlighted information sourced from state election officials, including important dates and deadlines based on users’ location as well as instructions on acceptable ways to cast a ballot.
Meanwhile, YouTube said it will highlight mainstream news sources and show labels beneath videos in English and Spanish that provide accurate election information. YouTube said it is also working to prevent “harmful election misinformation” from being recommended to viewers algorithmically.
Chengdu Locks Down 21.2 Million as Chinese Cities Battle COVID
The southwestern Chinese metropolis of Chengdu announced a lockdown of its 21.2 million residents as it launched four days of citywide COVID-19 testing, as some of the country’s most populous and economically important cities battle outbreaks.
Residents of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, were ordered to stay home from 6 p.m. on Thursday, with households allowed to send one person per day to shop for necessities, the city government said in a statement.
Chengdu, which reported 157 domestically transmitted infections on Wednesday, is the largest Chinese city to be locked down since Shanghai in April and May. It remained unclear whether the lockdown would be lifted after the mass testing ends on Sunday.
Tech’s Newest Giant Is Also an Outcast
The phenomenal and speedy rise of TikTok has made the short-video-sharing platform the latest and most likely-to-succeed front-runner in the race to join tech’s inner corporate circle.
Why it matters: TikTok’s vast pool of users, fine-tuned content algorithm and accelerating cash machine have made it the upstart that most spooks Facebook, which started copycatting TikTok’s format in 2020.
Yes, but: Tiktok’s arrival as a competitive challenger to tech’s incumbent giants comes with a colossal asterisk — it’s owned by a private Chinese company, ByteDance.
TikTok surpassed 1 billion users in just over 5 years last year, achieving that milestone many years faster than Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. TikTok was once again the most downloaded app globally last quarter, the eighth quarter in a row it’s held that position, per Sensor Tower, an apps analytics firm.
U.S. Export Ban on Some Advanced AI Chips to Hit China Tech Majors
A U.S. order to ban exports of some advanced chips to China is likely to hit almost any major tech company running public clouds or advanced artificial intelligence training modules in the country, experts said.
Chip designer Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O) said on Wednesday that U.S. officials told it to stop exporting two top computing chips for AI work to China.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) also said it had received new license requirements that will stop its advanced AI chip called MI250 from being exported to China.
The orders underscore deepening U.S.-China tensions over access to advanced chip technology.
Twitter Starts Testing an Edit Button, but You Have to Pay for It
Twitter is now testing its highly requested Edit Tweet feature. After years of memes and jokes, editable tweets will be available to some Twitter Blue subscribers later this month. The feature is currently undergoing “internal testing” and appears to mimic Facebook in its edit style, with a linked edit history for tweets that we saw in leaks earlier this year.
“Tweets will be able to be edited a few times in the 30 minutes following their publication,” according to a Twitter blog post. “Edited Tweets will appear with an icon, timestamp, and label so it’s clear to readers that the original Tweet has been modified.”
Twitter is only talking about editable tweets for its Blue subscription, which recently raised its price in the U.S. to $4.99 per month from $2.99. That means we probably won’t see an edit button for regular users any time soon.
Google Workers Protest $1.2 Billion Project Nimbus Contract With Israeli Military
A group of Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim and Arab Google employees is speaking out against the tech giant’s Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract involving Google, Amazon and the Israeli government and military.
According to a report from The Intercept, Google is offering advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to the Israeli government, which could augment the country’s use of digital surveillance in occupied Palestinian territories. The contract also reportedly prevents Google from denying services to specific Israeli government entities, such as the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).
Unvaccinated NBA Players, Staff Must Test Weekly for COVID + More
Unvaccinated NBA Players, Staff Must Test Weekly for COVID
Unvaccinated NBA players and team personnel must submit to weekly COVID-19 testing this season, the league told its clubs in a memo Tuesday.
There will be certain exceptions to that mandate, the league said, such as when the unvaccinated person is considered to have been “recently recovered” from COVID-19.
But for all others, testing will not be required except when “directed by their team physician or a league physician or government authority,” the league said. Facemasks also will not be required, though they will be recommended for use indoors in markets where coronavirus levels are classified by government officials as high.
Goldman Sachs Lifts COVID Vaccine and Testing Mandate for Many Employees
Goldman Sachs will no longer require its non-New York City-based employees to get vaccinated for COVID-19, according to a memo obtained by CNN.
The Wall Street investment bank told staff in a memo on Tuesday that effective Sept. 6, all employees can enter its offices in the Americas, “regardless of vaccination status,” with no requirement to participate in regular testing or wear face coverings.
The new Goldman Sachs COVID policy, first reported by the New York Post, does not apply to New York City, which has a vaccine mandate in place. Goldman Sachs, whose headquarters is in Lower Manhattan, said NYC employees without an approved exemption should continue to work remotely.
Contractors in ‘Uncharted Water’ With Narrowed Vaccine Mandate
An Eleventh Circuit order allowing President Joe Biden to enforce his COVID-19 vaccination mandate for federal contractors in some states is likely to sow further confusion among businesses with government pacts.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit handed the administration a partial victory on Aug. 26, narrowing a nationwide injunction from a federal court in Georgia last year blocking the mandate. The ruling, and a patchwork of previous injunctions blocking the mandate in more than two dozen states, have put contractors on edge as they await the government’s response to the Eleventh Circuit decision.
The appeals court agreed that Biden’s vaccine rule, which applied to roughly a quarter of the U.S. workforce and affected companies that do business with the federal government, is too broad. It said the administration likely overreached its statutory authority in regulating contracts under federal procurement law.
If the administration enforces the mandate in states not covered by ongoing litigation, attorneys said it would cause chaos and compliance headaches for contractors, because courts have either blocked enforcement in certain states or nationwide. The mixed rulings would also make it tricky for the government to enforce the mandate, they added.
Unvaccinated Cadets Ordered off Coast Guard Academy Campus
The Coast Guard Academy is disenrolling seven cadets for failing to comply with the military’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate after their requests for religious exemptions were denied and they were ordered to leave campus.
The academy in New London, Connecticut, confirmed the disenrollments Tuesday, The Day newspaper reported. A lawyer for several of the cadets said they were told on Aug. 18 that they had to leave campus by 4 p.m. the next day.
“They were escorted to the gate like they were criminals or something,” the lawyer, Michael Rose, told the newspaper. Rose said two of the seven cadets had no homes to return to.
The cadets’ names have not been released. Rose said academy officials were “particularly mean-spirited” and could have waited until pending lawsuits challenging the military’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement were concluded.
Queensland Government to Make ‘Discriminatory’ Pay Cut to Unvaccinated School Staff
Nearly 1,000 school staff in Queensland, including teachers, aides, administration and cleaners, will have a portion of their salaries cut for 18 weeks as a disciplinary measure for not being vaccinated against COVID-19.
Mandates were handed to teachers, prison staff and airport staff in Nov. 2021. Those who failed to comply or provide evidence as to why they should be exempt from having had the first jab by Dec. 17 and the second by Jan. 23, 2022, were suspended without pay.
The requirement ended in June 2022, and staff has been allowed to return to work.
The new pay docking would be the second time the teachers are penalized financially after already being stood down without pay.
China Places Millions Into COVID Lockdown Again as Economy Continues to Struggle
China has placed millions of its citizens under renewed lockdown after fresh outbreaks of COVID-19 as the government persists in its hardline policy on containing the virus in the face of more evidence that it is suffocating the economy.
The measures affected cities from the southern cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou to the northern port city of Dalian, and from the western metropolis of Chengdu to Shijiazhuang in central Hebei province.
The lockdown in Dalian was expected to affect about half of its six million residents and was due to last five days, although authorities have in the past extended restrictions depending on the number of new cases.
Australia Orders Tech Giants Apple, Microsoft, Snap and Meta to Step up Actions Against Child Abuse Material
Australian authorities have ordered global tech giants to report on the actions they have taken to stop the spread of child sexual exploitation materials on their platforms and will impose penalties on non-compliant companies.
Among the companies receiving legal notices from the eSafety Commissioner are Apple, Microsoft, Snap, Omegle and Meta, which owns WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.
The move is in accordance with the Online Safety Act 2021, which eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant described as a “world-leading tool.” The act includes basic online safety expectations detailing minimum requirements that tech companies have to meet if they want to operate in Australia.
For instance, online service providers are expected to minimize harmful materials or activities on their platforms proactively. And if they use encryption, they need to develop and implement processes to detect and address child abuse materials.
To Trace Big Tech Competition, Follow the Money
The best way to understand the ways that Big Tech companies do and don’t compete with one another is to use the old Watergate adage: Follow the money.
Why it matters: How Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft make their revenue today shapes the battles they will fight tomorrow.
Like wealthy families that have run a town for decades, these companies share a vast web of dependencies and grudges — as in the recent privacy war between Facebook and Apple, or Apple’s slow and steady effort to wrest the mobile maps market out of Google’s control.
Here’s what you find when you “follow the money” for each of tech’s Big 5:
Twitter Isn’t a Public Square. It’s a Coliseum.
Social media has been compared to a public square so often that it has become cliché. Members of Congress, academics, the U.S. Supreme Court, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey have all called social media the modern “public square.”
The idea is even at the heart of Elon Musk‘s bid for Twitter: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy,” the acquisition announcement reads, “and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
Are they right? Is social media a place where everyone comes together to see what’s happening and talk about today’s important ideas?
For the past several years, our organization has been tracking how voters feel about today’s most important policy issues around tech platforms, social media and free speech online. The data points to similarities between social media and a very different type of public space: a coliseum.
Snap Cuts 20% of Staff Amid Major Restructuring
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel announced this morning that the company behind Snapchat will reduce its staff by 20% as part of a larger restructuring.
Snap has struggled financially for months. In May, Spiegel wrote in an internal memo that the company would miss its revenue goals for the second quarter of the year. Sure enough, even though revenue for the quarter was $1.11 billion, up 13% year over year, the company badly missed its previous guidance of 20% to 25% growth.