Twitter isn’t about to rush into big content policy changes now that Elon Musk owns the company. Musk has announced that the social network will form a moderation council with members holding “widely diverse viewpoints.” There won’t be any “major” cont…
EU member countries agree to ban sale of gas-powered cars and vans starting in 2035
European lawmakers have gotten the EU’s 27 member states to agree to a plan that effectively bans the sale of gas-powered cars and vans by 2035. They’ve come to an agreement to approve the Commission’s revised reduction targets for passenger cars’ and …
Justice Department alleges Chinese spies tried to disrupt a criminal investigation into Huawei
Two spies from the People’s Republic of China attempted to interfere in a criminal investigation by the US Department of Justice into a prominent Chinese telecommunications company, US Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Monday. The two agent…
Meta threatens to block news content in Canada over media revenue-sharing legislation
Facebook parent company Meta says it may stop Canadians from sharing news content in response to the country’s proposed Bill C-18 legislation. Introduced by the ruling Liberal government earlier this year, The Online News Act seeks to force platforms l…
The Republican National Committee is suing Google over Gmail’s spam filters
The Republican National Committee is suing Google. According to Axios (via The Verge), the organization filed a lawsuit with California’s Eastern District Court on Friday. The complaint accuses Google of sending “millions” of RNC campaign emails to Gma…
Amazon warehouse in Albany votes against unionization
Workers are still struggling to unionize Amazon warehouses in New York State. Staff at the company’s Albany-area ALB1 warehouse have voted 406-206 against joining a union. The 31 challenged ballots aren’t enough to alter the outcome. Don’t expect a repeat of the Alabama vote, where there were enough disputed ballots to potentially alter the results.
As with past votes, Amazon conducted an anti-union campaign that included discouraging posters and displays in prominent locations around the ALB1 facility. While the extent of the campaign isn’t yet known, the company has also been accused at other warehouses of blocking pro-union pamphlets, retaliating against labor organizers and generally interfering with elections. ALB1 employees have been trying to form a union since at least May, and succeeded with an August petition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to hold an election.
Amazon told Engadget it was happy with the vote and felt the absence of a union was the “best arrangement” for both team members and customers. In a statement, the ALU said this was a “sham election” and accused Amazon of violating labor law through tactics that included intimidation and retaliation. While the union didn’t outline its formal response to the vote, it stressed that this “won’t be the end” of the organization at ALB1.
Pro-union forces haven’t had many victories at Amazon buildings. While those at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island voted to unionize, others at the nearby LDJ5 opted against it. That’s on top of the failed Alabama vote and Amazon’s reported attempts to quash labor movements in places like Maryland’s DMD9 facility. While there’s still a mounting labor movement that has prompted walkouts and impromptu strikes, they haven’t had much practical impact.
Amazon has occasionally addressed the concerns of workers by raising wages. It has a history of opposing reforms to working conditions, though. For now, the company is only expected to improve conditions and reinstate fired workers in response to NLRB-linked orders and government legislation.
Elon Musk says SpaceX will keep paying for Ukraine’s access to Starlink
In September, SpaceX sent a letter to the Department of Defense, asking the Pentagon to take over paying for the expenses related to Ukraine’s use of its Starlink satellite internet. According to CNN, SpaceX told the department that continuing to provide the Ukranian government with access to Starlink would cost the company over $120 million for the rest of 2022 and almost $400 million over the next 12 months. “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” the company wrote. Now, company chief Elon Musk seems to have backtracked on the decision to ask the Pentagon for assistance and wrote on Twitter that SpaceX will “keep funding [the] Ukraine [government] for free” even though Starlink is still losing money.
The hell with it … even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 15, 2022
Musk confirmed what he said in his tweet to The Financial Times and added that SpaceX will continue funding Ukraine’s access to Starlink’s satellite internet “indefinitely.”
When news about the letter came out, Musk defended his company’s position and clarified that SpaceX is not asking the Pentagon to pay for previous expenses. He explained that SpaceX simply can’t fund the existing system in Ukraine and regularly send thousands of new terminals to replace the ones routinely destroyed by the Russian forces at the same time. Musk added that the “burn” for keeping the Starlink system running in the country is $20 million a month, since it’s had to “defend against cyberattacks and jamming,” as well.
Earlier this month, The Times reported that Ukrainian troops grappled with Starlink outages that led to “catastrophic” loss of communication on the frontline. Musk responded that the piece “falsely claims that Starlink terminals [and] service were paid for, when only a small percentage have been.” Based on SpaceX’s letter that CNN had obtained, though, around 85 percent of the 20,000 terminals in Ukraine at the time were fully or partially funded by the US, the UK, Poland and other outside sources.
The Pentagon confirmed after knowledge of the letter became public that it’s been discussing payments with SpaceX but that it’s also been looking at potential alternatives. Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon’s deputy press secretary, said in a statement: “There’s not just SpaceX, there are other entities that we can certainly partner with when it comes to providing Ukraine with what they need on the battlefield.”
SpaceX says it needs US government help funding Starlink satellite internet in Ukraine
SpaceX’s donations of Starlink satellite service to Ukraine might not last much longer. CNN says it obtained documents indicating that SpaceX sent a letter to the Defense Department in September claiming the company is “not in a position” to fund Starlink internet in Ukraine as it has without tens of millions of dollars in monthly funding. The company estimated that data access for the Ukranian government and military might cost $124 million for the rest of 2022 and almost $380 million per year, and asked the Pentagon to take over that financing.
Elon Musk elaborated on the reasoning in a tweet on Friday. SpaceX couldn’t afford to fund the current infrastructure “indefinitely” while simultaneously delivering more Starlink terminals and managing data use “100X greater” than typical homes, Musk claimed. The satellite technology has not only been used to coordinate Ukranian military campaigns, but can be used to provide data to cell towers and other civilian networks that serve many people. The executive added that the “burn” was close to $20 million per month and included the cost of defending against Russian “cyberattacks & jamming.”
SpaceX is not asking to recoup past expenses, but also cannot fund the existing system indefinitely *and* send several thousand more terminals that have data usage up to 100X greater than typical households. This is unreasonable.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2022
The documents apparently contradict one of Musk’s earlier claims, however. Where he said last week that only a “small percentage” of Starlink terminals and service received external funding, the letter suggests about 85 percent of the 20,000 Ukraine systems at the time (now 25,000) were at least partly funded by the US, Poland and others. A leak in April indicated that the US had already spent millions to get Starlink hardware to Ukraine. Even so, resources may have been tight. Ukranian commander General Valerii Zaluzhniy directly asked Musk to provide close to 8,000 additional terminals in July, but SpaceX answered by pointing the military leader to the Defense Department.
Word of the letter comes at a bad moment for Musk. He recently drew flak from Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky and diplomat Andrij Melnyk for proposing a peace deal that included conceding the illegally annexed Crimea region to Russia. Musk even half-joked his firm was “just following [Melnyk’s] recommendation” to “fuck off” following the proposal. We’d add that Musk’s net worth of roughly $220 billion is more than Ukraine’s 2021 GDP — there have been numerous calls for the entrepreneur to personally fund Starlink service. There are doubts SpaceX is fully committed to supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia, and the funding request doesn’t help matters.
Labor Department proposal may lead to gig workers gaining employee status
The Department of Labor has issued a proposal that could make it more likely for millions of people to be classified as employees rather than independent contractors. Should the proposal become a formal rule, gig workers (such as Uber and Lyft drivers) would likely gain benefits and protections afforded to employees if they’re reclassified. Those may include a minimum wage, overtime, unemployment insurance contributions and their employer paying a share of Social Security taxes, as The New York Times notes.
Last year, the Department of Labor rescinded a Trump-era rule that made it easier for companies to classify gig workers as contractors. However, a federal court in Texas reinstated that rule in March, as Bloomberg notes.
Under the latest proposal, the Department of Labor plans to implement a test to determine if workers should be classed as employees or contractors. Factors such as how much control workers have over how they carry out tasks and how much bandwidth they have to increase their earnings by offering other services would be assessed. Other considerations include whether workers need to buy their own equipment and if their work is critical to a company’s business. There would be a lower threshold for requiring employee status than the current test.
Even if the proposal does become a final rule, it wouldn’t directly affect the guidelines that states and other federal agencies have for determining employment status. It would have more of a direct impact on laws that the Department of Labor enforces, including the federal minimum wage. However, as the Times points out, many employers, regulators and judges may defer to the agency’s criteria on worker classification.
“While independent contractors have an important role in our economy, we have seen in many cases that employers misclassify their employees as independent contractors, particularly among our nation’s most vulnerable workers,” Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh said in a statement. “Misclassification deprives workers of their federal labor protections, including their right to be paid their full, legally earned wages. The Department of Labor remains committed to addressing the issue of misclassification.”
Some states have attempted to have gig workers classified as employees, but the likes of Uber and Lyft have fought against such requirements. In 2020, California voted to pass a ballot measure backed by ride-hailing and delivery companies. The passage of Proposition 22 stripped app-based drivers of employee protections by classifying them as independent contractors. A judge ruled last year that Prop. 22 was unconstitutional, but that decision has been appealed.
Hackers forced more than a dozen US public airport websites offline
Hackers believed to be based in Russia temporarily forced around 14 public-facing websites for US airports offline on Monday. The LaGuardia, O’Hare and LAX websites were among those targeted, and most are back online. A senior US government official said that air traffic control, internal airport communications and other critical operations were not affected, but travelers looking for security wait times or other information may have been inconvenienced, according to ABC News. An LAX spokesperson affirmed that “no internal airport systems were compromised and there were no operational disruptions.”
“On Monday October 10th, 2022 at approx. 0300 hours there was a denial of service incident lasting 15 minutes that resulted in intermittent delays accessing the LaGuardia airport website,” a Port Authority spokesperson told ABC News. “The Port Authority’s cybersecurity defense system did its job by detecting the incident quickly, addressing the problem in 15 minutes, and enabling us to alert others by notifying federal authorities immediately. There was no operational impact to any Port Authority facilities.”
The incident, said to be the result of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, have been pinned on pro-Russia hacker group Killnet. The hackers are not believed to be government actors, however. There’s no evidence that the Russian government was involved in this incident, a cybersecurity analyst said.
Both the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Transportation Security Administration are monitoring the situation, CNN reports. CISA noted it didn’t have any worries about airport operational disruptions.