People at the limit of their patience with spam calls have been emailing the chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission, Jessica Rosenworcel, in a desperate attempt to make the unwanted calls from scammers and robocallers stop. Emails obtained by the transparency site Government Attic under the Freedom of Information Act paint a picture of desperate people who just want the phone to stop ringing.
Robocalls are automated phone calls, usually from telemarketers or scammers, sometimes used to target people for fraud. Spam calls are similar, but there’s a human on the other end. Both types of calls have plagued most people with a phone line in the U.S. for years; recently, the government has passed regulations to try to stop unwanted calls.
The FCC encourages people to report unwanted calls or spoofed phone numbers—“Your complaint provides valuable information that we use to inform policy decisions,” its website says—but that process involves filling out a specific form online, not sending emails directly to the FCC chairwoman’s inbox.
For some people, however, the frustration they’re feeling seems to be sending angry rants and begging into the void.
One elderly person’s plea directly to Rosenworcel frames the problem as a matter of life and death: “I have been continuously harassed with such calls for years and it's only getting worse. I am now 70 years old and live alone. I have a landline and try to answer all incoming calls as one never knows when an emergency or request for assistance is at hand,” they said. “Though I try to hang up when I identify an unwanted call, these calls increase my chance of having a serious ( or fatal) fall with no one present in my home to assist. […] HOW LONG MUST I FEAR BEING SERIOUSLY OR FATALLY INJURED AS A VICTIM OF SPAM/SPOOF PHONE CALLS INTO MY HOME? If I do fall to these criminals, it may never be known that the event was precipitated from an unwanted call.”
Someone wrote to FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks with the subject line “Time to go to work,” asking if he needed “help” accomplishing the goal of ending robocalls. “This doesn't seem difficult. Why are you and your agency failing?”
Some people wrote just to offer their own ideas for how to fix robocalls. “I think we need to create an anatomy of the most common scam setups. Scammers prey on the most vulnerable people in our society. lf we work together, we can stop these time-wasting scammers,” wrote one person, who originally emailed cloud communications company Voyant and then CC’d Rosenworcel, former commissioner Mike O’Rielly, former chairman Ajit Pai, and a slew of other telecom companies.
“Congratulations on your attainment of the Chair, even if it is cunently[sic] acting,” one wrote. “Perhaps your people will be more responsive than they were under Mr. Pai. I never received a response to the filing I made in 2017 which outlined the only way to stop spoofing by robocallers.”
“Good Morning, Ms. Rosenworcel, I have invented a solution that stops Robocalls 100% but since I am not an insider in the communications industry, I am not having an easy time getting to the potential buyers of my product, i.e. Google, Apple, Verizon, T Mobile, AT&T, etc,” another wrote. “Any chance you could help get me in front of the industry leaders?”
Others got straight to the point: “M. Rosenworcel: Why am I still getting robocalls? I thought June 30 was the big day,” someone wrote in September 2021. June 30 was the day when the FCC’s STIR/SHAKEN anti-spoofing standards for authenticating Caller ID information went into effect, which would enable carriers to block spoofed numbers used by spam callers to get around client’s blocks.
“I’m writing out of desperation about the excessive robocalls and unsolicited text messages that I receive on a daily basis,” someone wrote to New Jersey Rep. Tom Malinowski and CC’d Rosenworcel. “Recently, I even started getting these calls and text messages late into the night and on the weekends (a first).”
Others detailed every robocall they had gotten on a day, the purpose of the call, and the time of the call.
“I have had 13 robocalls before noon today,” someone wrote to Rosenworcel. “AT&T says they don't have the technology to do this. If that's the case, they are too incompetent to be in the business. Thanks you.”
“What are you doing to end robocalls to Americans?” wrote another. “Do you need to be replaced? Is there a problem that prevents you from doing your job?”
Gold standard for information security management is highly valued by customers and demonstrates the security, availability and resiliency of the Bandwidth global platform
RALEIGH, NC – July 13, 2022 – Bandwidth Inc. (NASDAQ: BAND), a leading global enterprise cloud communications company, announced today that the company’s global information security management system has met the stringent requirements of the ISO 27001:2013 information security management standard across the entire scope of its global network, APIs, and people and business processes. This certification adds the company’s Voxbone acquisition, which closed in late 2020, to the previously attained ISO 27001 certification for its North American business in 2018. Bandwidth’s information security team reached this milestone in less than two years–a significant achievement.
“At Bandwidth, information security is built-in, so our customers know they can rely on us for their most business-critical communications around the globe,” said Kade Ross, Bandwidth’s Chief Information Officer. “With this ISO certification, we’ve put an umbrella over our entire organization to meet the highest standards in security, availability, resiliency and integrity. It’s part of our ongoing best practices in our mission to create the most hardened and secure global platform in our space. That’s what it takes to be enterprise-grade.”
ISO 27001:2013 is one of the most widely recognized and internationally accepted information security standards. Using a top-down, risk-based approach, ISO 27001 identifies requirements and specifications for establishing, implementing, maintaining and continually improving an information security management system. To achieve the certification, Bandwidth’s compliance was validated by an independent audit firm after demonstrating an ongoing and systematic approach to managing and protecting company and customer data.
Find out more about Bandwidth’s enterprise-grade information security at bandwidth.com/security
About Bandwidth Inc. Bandwidth (NASDAQ: BAND) is a global communications software company that helps enterprises connect people around the world with cloud-ready voice, messaging and emergency services. Backed by a network reaching 60+ countries covering 90 percent of global GDP, companies like Cisco, Google, Microsoft, RingCentral, Uber and Zoom use Bandwidth’s APIs to easily embed communications into software and applications. Bandwidth has more than 20 years in the technology space and was the first Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) provider offering a robust selection of APIs built on our own global network. Our award-winning support teams help businesses around the world solve complex communications challenges every day. More information is available at bandwidth.com.
As cars get more expensive to make and profit margins dwindle, automakers are coming up with new and loathsome ways to squeeze more money out of their customers. Subscription-based access to vehicle features, like heated seats or remote-start key fobs, are the latest attempt to charge people for things their car already came with. The question is whether customers are going to lay down and take it.
Earlier this week, some media outlets noticed that BMW was selling $18-a-month subscriptions to heated seats in a number of countries, including South Korea. The German automaker had previously tried and failed to get customers to pay $80 a month for access to Apple CarPlay and Android Auto — features that are otherwise free in other...
Microsoft is launching a new “Hardwear” clothing collection that includes a Windows XP T-shirt. If you’ve always wanted to wander the streets with the Windows XP bliss wallpaper strapped to your back, now is your time. The famous blue sky and green hill are emblazoned on a mustard or black tee, available for $60.
The nine-piece collection of T-shirts, hats, sweats, jackets, and pants is part of a collaboration between Supervsn founder Gavin Mathieu and Microsoft. It’s Microsoft’s first capsule collection of clothing and merchandise, and the software maker clearly wanted to create a trendy nerd vibe with its collaboration.
Image: Microsoft
Microsoft’s “Hardwear” clothing collection.
The James Webb Space Telescope reveals stellar nurseries and individual stars in the Carina Nebula that had not been seen before. | NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
The JWST can simply see more of the universe than the Hubble Space Telescope could.
Consider this mind blown. NASA has finally revealed its first images from the space-based observatory. These images are decades in the making, and come after years of delays and budgets being blown. But they do not disappoint. Consider this very first image released by the space agency on Monday:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO
The first image released from the Webb space telescope shows a section of the distant universe in detail.
What makes this image so mind-blowing is how small it is, and how large it is, at the same time.
It’s small in the sense that this image represents only a teensy tiny portion of the night sky. Imagine you are holding out a grain of sand at arm’s length. The area of sky that grain covers — that’s the size of the area captured in the above image.
But it’s huge in the sense that nearly every object in this image is a galaxy (besides the bright spiky starbursts, which are stars in the foreground). Think about that: In every pinprick of sky, there are thousands and thousands of galaxies, at least.
And while it appears to us as a flat image, this image reveals the depths of the universe, and is a window through time. The very faintest, smallest blips of light in this photos are images of galaxies as they existed more than 13 billion years ago, near the very beginning of time (that light has been traveling through space ever since). And not only can Webb capture images of galaxies this old; the space telescope can make measurements about what elements those early galaxies are composed of.
An image like this is akin to a core sample of a sedimentary rock. It shows the evolution of the universe over time in its many layers.
And it represents a huge improvement over the capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope, which, until the launch of the Webb, was the largest observatory in space. Hubble’s mirror is an impressive 7.8 feet in diameter. Webb’s beautiful, gold-hued mirrors combine for a diameter of 21.3 feet. Overall, that amounts to more than six times the light-collecting area, and when it comes to telescopes, more light collecting equals more detail.
You can see the improvements Webb brings over the Hubble already. The Hubble Space Telescope previously made similar observations of the same galaxy cluster Webb captured above.
In the below image slider, the Hubble view is on the left. On the right, Webb’s view is more detailed. More of the fainter galaxies in the background are more easily distinguished. You can also more easily see how some galaxies are warped more clearly, the result of their light passing through gravitational lenses of the galaxies that are closer in the foreground. (To note: these images aren’t perfectly aligned, but you’ll still be able to see the stark difference in detail).
The Webb’s other advantage over Hubble is the type of light it collects.
Light comes in a lot of different varieties. The human eye can see only a narrow band known as visible light, but the universe contains lots and lots of light outside this range, including the higher-frequency, higher-energy forms: ultraviolet light and gamma rays. Then there’s the lower-energy light with longer wavelengths: infrared, microwaves, radio.
The Hubble Space Telescope collects visible light, ultraviolet, and a little bit of infrared. The Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, so it sees light that’s in a longer wavelength than our eyes can see. This seems nerdy and technical, but it’s actually what allows Webb to look further back in time than the Hubble.
Infrared light is often very old light, due to a phenomenon called redshifting. When a light source is moving away from a viewer, it gets stretched out, morphing into a longer and longer wavelength, growing redder. It’s similar to what happens to the sound when a siren goes by: The pitch increases as the siren approaches, then decreases as it trails away. Because space is constantly expanding, the farthest things away from us in the universe are moving away from us, their light growing redder and redder before eventually dropping into the infrared spectrum. Infrared is invisible to human eyes, but Webb can capture it in stellar detail.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (Caltech-IPAC)
As the universe expands, it stretches the wavelengths of light along with it, a process called redshift. The farther away an object is, the more the light from it has stretched by the time it reaches us.
On Tuesday, NASA released even more images from Webb, showing off its impressive capabilities. Here, see the Carina Nebula, an area of star formation. Infrared light is less obscured by cosmic dust, and so the Webb telescope can reveal more stars in this region than Hubble could. “Webb reveals emerging stellar nurseries and individual stars that are completely hidden in visible-light pictures,” NASA explains.
NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
The Carina Nebula, seen through the James Webb Space Telescope.
Here, Webb spots a quintet of galaxies. “Webb shows never-before-seen details in this galaxy group,” NASA relays. “Sparkling clusters of millions of young stars and starburst regions of fresh star birth grace the image.”
NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
The Stephan’s Quintet of galaxies, seen through the Webb space telescope.
In another stunning image, Webb observes the remains of a dying star in the Southern Ring Nebula. On the left below, the nebula is captured in near-infrared, and on the right, it is captured in mid-infrared, which each bring out different details in this cataclysm. The dim star in the center has been “sending out rings of gas and dust for thousands of years in all directions,” NASA writes.
NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
The Southern Ring Nebula, seen through the Webb telescope, at left in near-infrared light, and at right in mid-infrared light.
This is just the beginning of the Webb’s scientific mission. In the future, scientists hope to use it to see the very first galaxies, which held the very first stars, and understand a time period called “cosmic dawn,” when the universe became transparent to starlight for the first time.
Before cosmic dawn, the universe was shrouded by a “dense, obscuring fog of primordial gas,” as the National Science Foundation explains. There’s no light that reaches our telescopes from this time, which is called the cosmic dark ages. (There is some background radiation from the Big Bang called the cosmic microwave background, a faint glow that shines to us from before the dark ages. But for the most part, the dark ages is a blank spot in our timeline of the universe.)
Astronomers hope the Webb will help them understand the end of the dark ages and figure out what caused this fog to lift, ushering in the cosmic dawn.
Scientists are also excited to use Webb’s infrared capabilities to study exoplanets, which are planets that orbit stars other than our own. Webb is unlikely to see an exoplanet directly, but what it can do is observe the stars they orbit. When a planet orbits in front of the star, the light from the star passes through the planet’s atmosphere like a filter. Scientists can study the quality of light coming from that filter, and determine the composition of the planet’s atmosphere from it. And the team of scientists working on Webb have already done this. On Tuesday, NASA announced Webb detected water in the atmosphere of a gas giant planet orbiting a Sun-like star.
Advances like the James Webb Space Telescope make me think about how we, humanity, are a part of the universe that looks back upon itself. The Big Bang, the birth of stars, the formation of galaxies... we are just as much a consequence of the physics and evolution of the universe as anything else that exists out there. So when we peer back through the cosmos with a telescope like the Webb, we’re completing a loop. We’re building a tool to make the universe, perhaps, a bit more self-aware.
The Webb, at its most basic function, allows us to see more of the universe, and farther back in time. This is just the beginning. There’s so much more to see.
A Nikon DSLR camera on display at Paris Fashion Week in 2020. | Photo by Edward Berthelot/Getty Images
Optics and imaging giant Nikon will stop making new single lens reflex cameras — once the technological mainstay of professional photography — according to a report from Nikkei.
The death of SLR cameras has been coming for quite some time, as mirrorless alternatives have increased in image quality while offering consumers the option to use lighter and smaller products.
According to Nikkei, Nikon will continue to produce and distribute its existing SLR models, but will focus development of new models entirely on mirrorless. Nikkei notes that Nikon’s SLR cameras were “widely used by professional cameramen for more than 60 years and have come to be seen as synonymous with the Japanese company.”
Photo by Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images
BMW is now selling subscriptions for heated seats in a number of countries — the latest example of the company’s adoption of microtransactions for high-end car features.
A monthly subscription to heat your BMW’s front seats costs roughly $18, with options to subscribe for a year ($180), three years ($300), or pay for “unlimited” access for $415.
It’s not clear exactly when BMW started offering this feature as a subscription, or in which countries, but a number of outlets this week reported spotted its launch in South Korea.
BMW has slowly been putting features behind subscriptions since 2020, and heated seats subs are now available in BMW’s digital stores in countries including the UK, Germany, New Zealand, and South Africa. It doesn’t,...
As companies spend more time in Microsoft Teams as the new “hub” for hybrid work, there’s a growing need for business leaders to rethink compliance policies. The correct policies in your business not only make a difference to your regulatory strategies, but can also improve the work experience for team members, minimising issues like harassment.
Microsoft introduced the “Microsoft Purview” solution for compliance within all Teams, Yammer, and Exchange communications. With this service, companies can establish policies for compliance, using either pre-existing templates suggested by Microsoft, or an intelligent policy builder.
The solution also comes with a workflow builder, and recommended actions to help businesses respond effectively to potential compliance problems according to industry standards.
Part of the compliance solution is the new “Report a Concern” feature in Microsoft Teams.
The “Report a Concern” Feature in Microsoft Teams
Once your policies and permissions in place, your users will see the “Report a Concern” option in Teams chat messages. Availability for user-reported messages addressing communication compliance issues was introduced by Teams in May 2022, However, Microsoft notes this feature may not be available to every organisation until August 31st, 2022.
For companies leveraging communication compliance following July 2022, user-reported messages availability may take up to 30 days from the date when you set up your licensing with communication compliance. Notably, communication compliance is available with the following subscriptions:
Microsoft 365 E5/A5/F5/G5, trial or paid version with the Microsoft Compliance add-on
Microsoft E5/A5/F5/G5 with the Insider Risk Management add-on
Microsoft Office 365 E5 (Trial or paid)
Microsoft Office 365 A5 (Trial or paid)
Provided you have Purview Compliance switched on for your Microsoft Teams instance, the “Report a Concern” option in Teams chat will be available to view for all users by default.
This can be managed via the Teams admin center “messaging policies” section. The admin centre also allows businesses to assign specific policies to individual users or teams, depending on their compliance needs. Notably, users in your Teams environment will be automatically assigned to your “global” policy, unless you create and assign custom policies to individual users.
How to Report a Concern in Microsoft Teams
When the compliance features are enabled in Microsoft Teams, your users will be able to click on the “…” or “more options” section on a Microsoft Teams comment or message. This is the same feature you’d use to reply to, save, or pin a message. The “Report a Concern” option is located underneath the “Share to Outlook” option.
When a user clicks on the “Report a Concern” message, they’ll see a pop-up, with a captured version of the message being reported. They can choose whether to cancel the report, or submit the message for review. When users click on the “report” option, they’ll receive a confirmation of their submission, while other participants in the chat don’t see anything.
The message will be submitted to the users in your team with the “Review” permissions within the compliance section. These are the staff members responsible for tracking potential compliance issues. A dashboard is available within the Compliance section of Teams for tracking incoming reports, and keeping an eye on resolved or pending issues.
When a message is submitted for review, the “Review” members in your team will receive a notification allowing them to immediately remove the message from Teams. Reviewers can see all messages and remove them from view for other users instantly.
Removed content and messages are replaced in Teams with a notification. These notifications explain the message has been removed, and assign a policy for the reason of the removal.
Acting on Inappropriate Messages in Teams
There are various views available for a message reported as “inappropriate” in Microsoft Teams. You can view a comprehensive conversation summary, text-only, and detailed views of communications. You can also view the history of messages sent by a user connected to the reported message. This helps to determine whether previous actions have been taken to remediate the issue.
After a message is removed from Teams, you can send a message to the “sending” user letting them know which policy they have violated. The “notify” feature in Teams provides a warning to the user, along with a highlighted insight to the nature of the policy they have overlooked.
As part of the resolution of an issue, users can tag the detected message as compliant, non-compliant and questionable, to assist future employees in understanding the policies and standards of your organisation. You’ll also be able to escalate the issue to another reviewer.
Within the Communication Compliance dashboard, you can choose who to escalate the message to, and provide additional feedback, context, and information.
Users also have the option to “escalate for investigation”. This means sharing communication compliance policy information and data with other reviewers in the organisation. Escalating a case allows users to transfer the data and management of the case to Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, or the eDiscovery service, and provides a comprehensive workflow for preserving, collecting, and exporting content related to your investigations.
Once an issue has been successfully remediated, users can tag the reported message as “resolved”. It’s also possible to identify a message as “misclassified”, if someone reports something which doesn’t go against your policies.
Monitoring Inappropriate Messages in Teams
Following the report of an inappropriate message, companies can set up monitoring methods to keep track of compliance issues within Teams messages. The automatic alerts offered by Microsoft Teams make it easy to keep track of future instances, and the internal dashboard ensures you can search through previous issues at speed.
To implement the full monitoring and management services of Purview compliance, administrators will need to set up compliance policies for tracking the use of inappropriate text, images, sensitive information, and conflicts of interest.
Machine learning solutions are available for automatically scanning text and content within a message to assist your teams in checking for unreported issues.
A trio of Google Meet features that were previously only available via Google’s business-focused Workspace plans are coming to Google One subscribers, the search giant is announcing today. These include the ability to have group calls lasting up to 24 hours in length (up from a previous limit of one hour), access to Google Meet’s background noise filtering feature, and support for recorded video calls.
These features aren’t coming to every Google One plan. They’ll only be available to users who pay for 2TB of storage or more, which means paying at least $10 a month or $100 a year for a subscription. The features also aren’t rolling out to every 2TB Google One subscriber right away. Google’s announcement says they’ll be available in the...
AIVA Connect™ Studio provides over 2800 integrations, 100 communications channels, and a no-code workflow scenario designed for non-developers and developers alike.
LAS VEGAS, NV – JUNE 29, 2022 – BluIP, a global telecom and software development company that supports over 2000 hotels and delivers vertical cloud communications solutions, is excited to announce an incredible addition to its AIVA Connect™ platform with the introduction of AIVA Connect™ Studio. AIVA Connect™ Studio provides over 2800 integrations, 100 communications channels, and a no-code workflow scenario designed for non-developers and developers alike.
AIVA Connect™ Studio is a platform to help design, build, and automate business tasks and workflow automation quickly and easily, meant to be the perfect no-code solution for many industries including hospitality. With AIVA Connect™ Studio, customers can architect their own custom workflow using a drag and drop, no-code solution to help companies scale easier and faster than ever.
‘’AIVA Connect™ Studio powered by BluIP is the next big thing in workflow automation. This no-code platform makes it easy for businesses of any size to integrate and automate their processes with any platform that supports open API. AIVA Connect™ Studio delivers a game-changing solution that will streamline your operations and make your business more efficient. With this powerful tool, you will be able to achieve greater productivity and better bottom-line results.’’ said Armen Martirosyan, CEO at BluIP.
‘’If you’re looking for a powerful platform to help you rapidly integrate various systems and build innovative hotel solutions, AIVA Connect™ powered by BluIP is the perfect solution. With our easy-to-use Studio tool, you can quickly load almost any APIs and start building no-code apps that will streamline your workflow, save you time, and increase bottom line. Our team of experienced implementation specialists are on hand to help every step of the way, so you can get up and running in no time,’’ Mr. Martirosyan went on to say.
To learn more about BluIP and AIVA Connect™ Studio:
Call: 1-800-GO-BLUIP
Web: aivaconnect.ai or bluip.com
About BluIP
BluIP is a global telecommunications provider and software development company that delivers and supports enterprise solutions for vertical industries such as large enterprise, hospitality, healthcare, finance, retail, and education. Its solution portfolio includes Cloud PBX, Cloud Contact Center, SIP Trunking, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Virtual Agents with Automation Integrations, and Enhanced Cloud Calling Solutions integrating with Microsoft Teams. To learn more, visit http://www.bluip.com.
Unprecedented severe weather is causing damage on a wide scale, making it difficult for FEMA to provide substantial aid to victims of natural disaster.
For years criminal organizations around the world were buying a special phone called Anom. The pitch was that it was completely anonymous and secure, a way for criminals to do business without authorities watching over their shoulder.
It turned out that the whole thing was an elaborate honeypot and that the FBI and law enforcement agencies around the world were listening in. They’d help develop the phones themselves.
The fallout from that revelation is ongoing and, here at Motherboard, we’ve just learned how the phones work. On this episode of Cyber, Motherboard Senior Staff Writer Joseph Cox comes on to discuss the code that powered the Anom phone.
We’re recording CYBER live on Twitch. Watch live during the week. Follow us there to get alerts when we go live. We take questions from the audience and yours might just end up on the show.
Employees had previously used Salesforce Chatter, but a Slack director told UC Today that Slack is transforming the way Salesforce operates internally.
Karl Nicholson, Director, EMEA Executive Programs at Slack, explained that since the acquisition, there has been a learning curve for both companies.
He said: “It is pretty amazing to be part of Salesforce, we’ve moved from a smaller organisation to a much larger one, and I think Salesforce has around 80,000 employees currently.
“We’ve had to learn how to work better with Salesforce, but in terms of Slack specifically, it has been rolled out wall-to-wall at Salesforce, so we at Slack are helping to influence how Salesforce does its day-to-day operations.
“Salesforce internally has turned off Chatter, the chat tool which was part of the Salesforce platform, and replaced it with Slack not only for the Salesforce core functions but also for higher business.
“We have seen a reduction in emails at Salesforce specifically, down 46% across the board, and we at Slack don’t do internal emails, so there is a ton of learning going on.
“It’s huge because of the scale of Salesforce; we are marrying up roles internally, so we’ve changed the way that Salesforce operates, which is incredible.”
The Slack-First Customer 360 platform brings Slack’s collaboration capabilities together with Salesforce’s suite of CRM tools.
Karl also highlighted to UC Today that despite the acquisition by Salesforce, Slack does not feel locked into the software company’s roadmap and stated that the platform will retain the open feeling it has always had.
He added: “One of the things that I really like about the acquisition, and it was a concern that a lot of people had.
“I know that when I first read the news, I thought, gosh, are we going to be locked down just to be operating within the Salesforce platform?
“But Salesforce has given us the room to still be Slack. They want to learn from us, and we want to learn from them, so they’re not dictating the product roadmap.
“They’re not forcing us to change the way we work; they’re just making it better to work with the Salesforce ecosystem.
“But that’s not to say we’re never going to change working with everybody else, we still want to be that engagement layer, and it’s going to be as open as it always has been.”
Dish says SpaceX has been lying to customers about how a plan to expand the use of certain airwaves for 5G could disrupt its Starlink internet-from-space service. SpaceX sent a “manipulated filing” to the Federal Communications Commission in an attempt to prove the expanded 5G usage would lead to substantial interference, writes Dish and a group of other companies known as the 5G for 12 GHz Coalition. They write that SpaceX is conducting “a public misinformation campaign” against 5G.
“This tactic, which is commonly used by Elon Musk, is not only disingenuous, but it promulgates an anti-5G narrative that is harmful to American consumers who deserve greater competition, connectivity options and innovation,” the Coalition writes in a...
In a rarely seen video about robotics optimistically called “The Future is Now,” William Shatner takes viewers through a 19 minute tour of the latest in industrial robotics. It’s got everything one wants in an educational video from 1984: grainy montages, a beep-boop soundtrack, nonsensical vaporwave graphics, and an overall look like it was once rolled into a classroom on a giant TV cart.
The video, a project of educational content company AIMS Media, was uploaded to the Internet Archive in 2016 but received few views. The Computer History Archives Project uploaded it to Youtube on Monday, to similarly little fanfare, but it’s a piece of eighties computing nostalgia that’s worth revisiting.
The video opens with Shatner giving an awkward autograph to a small C3PO-type robot—a little rolling can with a cheery voice that beeps its thanks. Then comes a walkthrough of the capabilities of Cincinnati Milicron’s T3 (for “The Tomorrow Tool”) industrial robot, the first commercially available computer-controlled industrial robot. When Shatner showed off this “steel collar” worker, as he introduces it, it was a feat of cutting-edge engineering. Today, it’s a dinosaur in a museum.
Shatner then takes the viewer on a tour of the National Bureau of Standards, renamed four years later to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, to see vision-equipped robots inspecting gears. Three years earlier, the NBS released a report from a workshop of engineers and researchers that heavily focused on vision-equipped robots and how to make the burgeoning field more commercially appealing. “There was a strong consensus among all participants that simple vision is the first priority for research and development efforts,” they wrote.
“There’s concern today: Do these roots pose some kind of threat to human employment?” Shatner rhetorically asks. “Robotics seem to point the way toward increased production and improved product quality without corresponding increases in manufacturing costs… If that should come to pass, why, there ought to be more employment opportunities in the expanding economy, not less.” In 30 years’ time, we’d find that industrial robots actually do reduce wages and jobs—one “steel collar worker” in a local labor market “coincides with an employment drop of 5.6 workers,” according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. And these robots would be the cause of numerous warehouse worker injuries and hospitalizations, as corporations raced to use them to improve their bottom lines and forced human workers to try to keep up.
At the end of the video, Shatner hints at artificial intelligence as being the next breakthrough on the horizon for robotics. But the Shatner of 1984, who could imagine flying around the galaxy and battling aliens on other planets as Captain James T. Kirk, probably couldn’t imagine what would come in the next 30 years—that he’d eventually upload his memories to an “artificial intelligence” and become the oldest guy in space.
The Marriott International hotel chain has confirmed that it has been hit by yet another data breach that exposed staff and customer information in another unfortunate security incident for a company that was affected by a number of major hacks in recent years.
In the latest incident, first reported by DataBreaches.net, hackers are reported to have stolen around 20GB of data, including confidential business documents and customer payment information, from the BWI Airport Marriott in Baltimore, Maryland. Redacted sample documents published by DataBreaches appear to show credit card authorization forms, which would give an attacker all of the details needed to make fraudulent purchases with a victim’s card.
Amazon Prime subscribers in the US are getting a new benefit as part of their subscription, the company has announced. Today, they’ll be able to redeem a free year of Grubhub Plus, the monthly subscription service that offers free food delivery on orders over $12 from participating restaurants. Grubhub Plus normally costs $9.99 a month.
According to Amazon, free deliveries associated with Grubhub Plus are available from hundreds of thousands of restaurants across over 4,000 cities in the US. After the year is up, Grubhub will automatically start charging $9.99 a month for continued access. Existing Grubhub Plus subscribers can still make use of the promotion, which will be applied at the start of their next billing cycle. Canceling Prime...
Democrats don’t have the votes right now for major Supreme Court reform. But if they pick up seats, they could have many options.
Editor’s note, July 2: The following is an updated version of an article that originally ran in Vox in October 2020. We are republishing it with revisions to reflect the Court’s most recent term.
The Court’s Republican majority isn’t simply handing down bold conservative policy decrees, it is undermining democracy itself.
Indeed, the GOP owes its control of the Court to an anti-democratic system that effectively gives extra votes to Republicans. Only three justices in American history were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote, and confirmed by a block of senators who represent less than half of the country. All three were appointed by Donald Trump, and all three sit on the Court right now.
Neither Congress nor President Joe Biden, however, are powerless against an anti-democratic Supreme Court. The elected branches have broad powers to rein in a rogue judiciary, or to limit the scope of at least some of the Court’s decisions. The greatest of these powers is court-packing — adding additional seats to the Supreme Court to dilute the votes of Trump justices who lack democratic legitimacy.
Realistically, Democrats lack the votes to push that or other meaningful Supreme Court reform through Congress right now. Such a proposal would require changing or abolishing the filibuster, as it’s nigh impossible to imagine 10 Republican senators voting to diminish the power of an institution controlled by Republicans. And at least two members of the Senate’s narrow Democratic majority oppose filibuster reform.
But just because court reform isn’t currently politically viable doesn’t mean it’s not worth considering, especially if Democrats somehow manage to pick up larger majorities in a future Congress. There are several options to deal with an increasingly partisan Supreme Court. Here are 10 of them.
1) Court-packing
Let’s get the biggest weapon in the arsenal of democracy out of the way first. If Congress has the votes, it could simply add more seats to the Supreme Court. President Biden would then name several new justices to fill those vacant seats, who could be confirmed by a Democratic Senate.
Although the Constitution provides that there must be a Supreme Court, it does not say how many justices shall serve on that Court. Over the course of American history, the Court has had as few as five seats and as many as 10. A bill pending in Congress right now would add four seats to the Court, transforming the 6-3 Republican majority into a 7-6 Democratic majority.
That said, there are several good reasons for Democrats to be cautious of packing the court, at least as an initial tactic to rein in the Court’s current majority.
One is that getting a court-packing bill through Congress would probably require extraordinarily high levels of public anger at the Supreme Court. Shortly after President Franklin Roosevelt won his first reelection bid in an historic landslide, he proposed adding seats to the Supreme Court as a solution to reactionary justices who sabotaged many of his New Deal policies. But even at the apex of his political might, Roosevelt struggled to build support for his plan.
The other problem with adding seats to the Court is that, absent a constitutional amendment fixing the number of justices on the bench, Republicans could potentially retaliate if they regain control of Congress and the White House.
Just as a Democratic Congress can transform a nine-member Court with a Republican majority into a 13-member Court with a Democratic majority, a Republican Congress could add any number of seats to the Court if they have the votes to do so — and that new majority might be even more hostile to democracy than the current crop of justices.
Ways to change the makeup of the Supreme Court without giving a clear advantage to one party
Assuming that the next Congress does not have the votes to simply add new seats to the Supreme Court and let a Democratic president fill them, Congress still has several options that could change the makeup of the Court in ways that are less overtly partisan.
2) A “balanced” Court
One of the leading alternatives to simply adding and filling new seats on the Court with Democratic judges is still a form of court-packing. But the aim is to create a politically balanced Court where neither party dominates.
In a 2019 paper, law professors Dan Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman proposed a 15-justice Court made up of five Democrats, five Republicans, and five justices chosen by the other 10. The idea behind this proposal, which now-Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg featured during his bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, is that the balance of power on the Supreme Court would be held by moderate judges acceptable to both political parties.
There are a number of concerns about this proposal. One is that it is likely to be declared unconstitutional. The Constitution gives the president the power to appoint new justices; it does not give that power to a panel of 10 other justices.
A more fundamental problem is that any attempt at court-packing, even an attempt that installs a centrist Supreme Court, is likely to enrage Republicans and invite retaliation if Republicans regain control of the government. And there’s no guarantee that a centrist Court will overrule the Roberts Court’s previous decisions undercutting voting rights. Democrats could wind up triggering all the downsides of packing the Court without gaining the benefits of a more democratic system.
But if there was ever enough energy to make a 13-justice Court with a Democratic supermajority a real possibility, perhaps Republicans will be willing to negotiate a compromise — the kind of compromise that could be written into a constitutional amendment if both parties agree to it. And a balanced Court proposal similar to the one offered by Epps and Sitaraman could potentially be that compromise.
3) The “Supreme Court lottery”
A separate proposal from Epps and Sitaraman would transform the Supreme Court from a permanent panel of nine justices to an ever-changing panel of judges. These judges would briefly rotate onto the Supreme Court before returning to their regular job on a federal appeals court.
The basic idea is that each of the approximately 170 active federal appeals court judges would be appointed as associate justices of the Supreme Court. Then, every two weeks, nine of these judges would be randomly selected to serve on the nation’s highest Court. After two more weeks, a different panel of nine would be selected. (In this system, the current justices could also be eligible to rotate onto a temporary panel of nine, but they would no longer sit permanently on that panel.)
It may seem random, but this is more or less how federal appeals courts already operate. Most appeals court cases are heard by randomly selected panels of three judges, although a larger panel consisting of all the active judges on the court will occasionally hear exceptional cases.
One problem with this proposed lottery system from a Democratic (and democratic) perspective is that the rotating Supreme Court panel would, at least in the short term, more often than not be controlled by Republicans who may share the current Court’s hostility toward voting rights. There are currently 172 active appeals court judges in the United States, and 92 of them were appointed by a Republican president, although Democratic appointees could control a majority of these judgeships by the end of Biden’s current term, if Democrats retain a Senate majority that will confirm Biden’s nominees.
Another risk is that a panel of anti-democratic radicals will be randomly chosen to hear a crucial voting rights case — or that such a panel will resolve a disputed election. Suppose, for example, that a “Supreme panel” that happened to be sitting when Donald Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election included judges like Neomi Rao, Andy Oldham, Edith Jones, Kurt Engelhardt, and Clarence Thomas — all of whom are known for taking extraordinary liberties with the law to advance conservative causes. That panel may very well have handed Trump the presidency.
In the long term, however, a rotating Supreme Court could, in Epps and Sitaraman’s words, “depoliticize the appointments process by making confirmations more numerous and less consequential.” And it would mean that individual justices “would no longer have the ability to shape constitutional law for a generation by strategically timing their retirement” so that their seat is filled by a president of their same party.
4) Term limits
Another way to prevent justices from “strategically timing their retirement” is term limits.
The leading term limits proposal, which has at times enjoyed support from prominent Democrats and Republicans, would require each justice to step down after 18 years. Terms would be staggered so that a justice steps down every two years, meaning that two justices would be replaced during each presidential term, although whoever is president when this proposal is implemented might get to replace more justices depending on how Congress decided to manage the transition to the new system.
If such a proposal had been implemented on the first day of a Biden presidency, Biden might have immediately gotten to replace Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer, both of whom have served more than 18 years. The next justice in line to leave the Court would be Chief Justice John Roberts.
It is far from clear, however, that term limits may be imposed on a sitting justice. The Constitution provides that federal judges “shall hold their offices during good behaviour,” and the particular “office” held by each of the current justices is a seat on the Supreme Court for life. (Future justices could probably be term-limited, on the theory that they are being confirmed to a different “office” that only allows them to sit on the nation’s highest Court for 18 years before they are rotated onto a lower court.)
Moreover, even if there is a constitutional way to impose term limits on sitting justices — Yale Law School’s Jack Balkin has a clever proposal to achieve this goal — the question of whether sitting members of the Supreme Court can be subjected to term limits would be decided by, well, the Supreme Court. And it’s unlikely that a majority of sitting justices would willingly agree to term limits.
Ways to weaken the Supreme Court
As an alternative to changing the personnel on the Supreme Court — or, perhaps, in addition to changing the personnel of the Court — Congress might also enact several reforms that seek to diminish the Supreme Court’s nearly unchecked power to hand down binding interpretations of the Constitution.
The president may also be able to diminish the Court’s authority by refusing to enforce particularly egregious Supreme Court decisions.
5) Jurisdiction stripping
The Constitution gives the Supreme Court power to hear most federal cases on appeal from a lower court, but it may only assert jurisdiction over cases “with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.” Accordingly, Congress has at least some power to tell the Supreme Court that it is not allowed to hear certain cases.
It’s not clear how much power Congress has to limit the Court’s power to hear particular cases. Congress has unlimited power to restrict the jurisdiction of lower federal courts, a power that a Democratic Congress could use to prevent Trump-appointed trial judges from blocking new progressive laws as soon as those laws are enacted. But the Supreme Court’s decisions concerning Congress’s power to limit the high court’s jurisdiction are not a model of clarity.
In Ex parte McCardle (1868), the Supreme Court held that it did not have jurisdiction over a case, brought by a newspaper publisher who claimed that he was wrongly jailed for publishing attacks on Reconstruction, because Congress enacted a law stripping the Court of jurisdiction to hear this case.
McCardle, however, is a very old case. And the opinion in that case does not explain the Court’s reasoning in much detail. In the years since McCardle, many scholars and at least some justices have argued that Congress’s power to limit the Court’s jurisdiction is not unlimited. Concurring in Felker v. Turpin (1996), for example, Justice David Souter suggested that Congress may only be able to prevent the Court from hearing a particular case if there is some other way that the issue presented by that case could reach the justices.
In any event, there are two closely related problems with this tactic — known as “jurisdiction stripping” — as a solution to a partisan Supreme Court. The first is that the question of whether Congress has the power to enact a particular jurisdiction-stripping law will be decided by the Court itself, so the justices may simply strike down an act of Congress that seeks to limit the Court’s jurisdiction.
The other problem is that most federal statutes do not enforce themselves; they need to be applied to individual parties through court orders. Congress might be able to prevent the Supreme Court from striking down the Voting Rights Act, for example, by stripping the Court of jurisdiction to hear voting rights cases. But if voting rights plaintiffs cannot obtain a court order enforcing the Voting Rights Act, then that law ceases to function.
Similarly, jurisdiction stripping would not allow Congress to restore a constitutional right to an abortion. Indeed, if Congress passed a law stripping federal courts of the power to hear abortion cases, that would strip them of their authority to hear a case seeking to reinstate Roe v. Wade.
But jurisdiction stripping could prevent a rogue Court from creating new “rights” — think of early 20th-century decisions inventing a right to pay workers less than the minimum wage, or a right to employ a non-unionized workforce — that implement conservative policy preferences from the bench.
6) Supermajority voting requirements
In a 2021 law review article, law professors Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn propose that Congress could require a supermajority of justices to vote to strike down federal laws. This proposal could potentially be implemented in two different ways: Congress could either impose a universal rule requiring a 7-2 majority on the Supreme Court to strike down a federal law or identify particular laws, such as the Voting Rights Act, which can only be struck down by a supermajority.
Such a law would need to be coupled with provisions stripping the lower courts of the power to strike down such laws, or else judges on the lower courts could potentially block laws that the Supreme Court would be unable to strike down with a bare majority vote.
A supermajority requirement, Doerfler and Moyn argue, “would functionally reallocate decision-making authority to the democratically legitimate branches of government in cases in which a countermajoritarian faction on the Court enjoys only a simple majority.” In effect, the Court’s conservatives would have to convince at least one Democratic appointee to strike down a federal law if Congress imposed a 7-2 supermajority requirement.
This proposal, however, is vulnerable to one of the same problems facing jurisdiction stripping. What happens if a 5-4 Supreme Court strikes down the law imposing a 7-2 supermajority requirement? The result could be a constitutional crisis, as Congress and the Supreme Court would be fundamentally at odds regarding whether particular laws are constitutional, and there would be no clear way to resolve this dispute under the Constitution.
Another problem is that the Supreme Court does not need to declare a federal law unconstitutional in order to sabotage it. If Congress requires a supermajority to strike down the Voting Rights Act, for example, the Court could still interpret the individual provisions of this law so narrowly that they would do very little to protect voting rights.
7) Presidential (or congressional) resistance to the Supreme Court
Abraham Lincoln began his presidency with a broadside against the Supreme Court. Reacting to the Supreme Court’s pro-slavery decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856), Lincoln attacked the very idea that the justices should have the final say on constitutional matters in his first inaugural address:
[I]f the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.
Though Lincoln conceded that Dred Scott was binding upon the particular parties to that litigation, he rejected the idea that the president or Congress is bound by the Court’s understanding of the Constitution. The Lincoln administration issued a passport to a Black man, defying Dred Scott’s holding that Black people cannot be citizens. And Lincoln signed legislation banning slavery in the territories, defying Dred Scott’s conclusion that slaves remained slaves even after entering a free territory.
A similar drama nearly played out in the Franklin Roosevelt administration. During Roosevelt’s first term, many contracts contained “gold clauses” requiring debtors to pay back creditors in gold dollars valued at the time the contract was made. Because of rampant deflation due to the Great Depression, these contracts effectively increased the amount of debt owed under these contracts by as much as 69 percent.
Among other things, these gold clauses drove up the returns railroads owed on their bonds so high that they could have bankrupted most of the railroad industry, potentially shutting down much of the nation’s shipping in the process. And the clauses threatened to ruin homeowners who suddenly owed the equivalent of $1.69 for every dollar they borrowed to buy their house.
Congress declared these gold clauses null and void. But Roosevelt, fearing that the Supreme Court would reinstate the clauses, prepared a speech announcing that he would not obey such a decision. “To stand idly by and to permit the decision of the Supreme Court to be carried through to its logical, inescapable conclusion,” Roosevelt would have said in a speech the Court never forced him to deliver, “would so imperil the economic and political security of this nation that the legislative and executive officers of the Government must look beyond the narrow letter of contractual obligations.”
The theory that each branch of government may decide on its own how to interpret the Constitution, even in defiance of the Supreme Court, is known as “departmentalism.” Under this theory, a president potentially has significant (although not entirely unlimited) power to undermine the judiciary’s determination that a particular law is unconstitutional.
Suppose, for example, that the Court strikes down the Affordable Care Act. A Democratic president could order the US marshals not to enforce this decision. They could order the Treasury to continue to provide subsidies to states and individuals entitled to receive them under Obamacare. And the president could routinely pardon executive branch officials who continue to make these payments, neutralizing a federal law that plausibly could subject these officials to prosecution in a future administration.
Departmentalism would not allow the president to completely neutralize such a Court decision. Lower federal courts would remain bound by the Supreme Court’s decision, so the president would not be able to obtain a court order against states or private insurers who violate their obligations under Obamacare.
Similarly, departmentalism probably could not be used to restore lost abortion rights, because state abortion bans are enforced by state law enforcement officers and not by anyone who answers to the president. But departmentalism would, at the very least, allow the president to mitigate the harm created by a decision that would otherwise strip health coverage from tens of millions of Americans.
8) State resistance to the Supreme Court
Just as the executive or legislative branch might resist a Supreme Court decision through departmentalism, states might invoke a theory known as “interposition” to defy a court order.
The history of interposition, which posits that a state may “interpose” its authority between the Supreme Court and its citizens, is not a happy one. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education(1954) Southern segregationists relied on interposition to justify defying Brown. Martin Luther King Jr. called out segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace, in King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, for “having his lips dripping with the words of ‘interposition’ and ‘nullification.’”
Yet there are constitutional systems where something similar to interposition exists without this same tainted history. Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, for example, contains a provision known as the “notwithstanding clause,” which allows either the national parliament or a provincial legislature to declare that at least some laws shall operate “notwithstanding” a court decision declaring that the law violates Canada’s charter. These overrides, however, automatically expire after five years if they are not renewed.
In the US system, if a state defies a Supreme Court order, the executive branch may use force to enforce that order — think of President Dwight Eisenhower ordering the Army to enforce a desegregation order in Little Rock, Arkansas.
But, as Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, the judiciary “has no influence over either the sword or the purse” and “must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.” If the Supreme Court hands down a decision that a state government deems abhorrent, the Court cannot enforce that order if the president decides it should not be enforced.
Ways to override Supreme Court decisions
As Congress has grown more and more dysfunctional, the Supreme Court has gained a nearly unchecked power to determine the meaning of federal laws. Though Congress lacks the power to overrule a Supreme Court decision interpreting the Constitution, Congress may amend a federal statute if it disagrees with the Court’s reading of that statute.
Yet Congress uses this power far less than it used to, according to a 2012 study by University of California Irvine law professor Rick Hasen. Hasen found that between 1975 and 1990, Congress enacted “an average of twelve overrides of Supreme Court cases in each two-year Congressional term.” Between 2001 and 2012, by contrast, the number of overrides dwindled to a mere 2.8 per two-year term. (Hasen defines the term “override” to include acts of Congress that “overturned, reversed, or modified a Supreme Court statutory interpretation holding.”)
But there’s no reason Congress — especially a filibuster-free Congress controlled by a single party — must continue to defer to the Supreme Court.
9) Omnibus legislation overruling past Supreme Court decisions
One model that Congress could follow is the Civil Rights Act of 1991, a bill signed by President George H.W. Bush back when it was still possible to achieve a bipartisan consensus against discrimination.
In its 1988 term, the Supreme Court handed down five decisions that, in the words of one scholar, “substantially eroded Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which prohibits many forms of employment discrimination. Congress enacted the 1991 civil rights bill to overrule, or, in some cases, modify those five decisions.
Similarly, Congress could enact a Civil Rights Act of 2023 that overrides several Supreme Court decisions at once.
This bill could include, for example, provisions tossing out the Supreme Court’s entire forced arbitration jurisprudence, which allows companies to force their workers and customers into a privatized justice system that favors corporate parties. It could overrule decisions weakening the Voting Rights Act. It could also override less famous decisions such as Vance v. Ball State University (2013), which made it much harder for workers who are sexually harassed by their boss to sue their employer; or Gross v. FBL Financial Services (2009), which weakened protections against age discrimination.
Such an omnibus bill would serve two purposes. It would get rid of Court decisions that weakened laws intended to protect our democracy and halt practices such as discrimination, and it would send a clear message to the justices that there’s a new sheriff in town who is keeping a close eye on them.
10) Expedite legislation seeking to overrule Supreme Court decisions
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) lays out an expedited process that Congress can use to swiftly overrule regulatory decisions by the executive branch. A bill overruling a federal regulation through the CRA still must pass both houses of Congress and be signed by the president, but the CRA’s streamlined process makes it relatively easy for lawmakers who oppose a particular regulation to override it quickly.
In an essay published in the Atlantic, Sitaraman suggests enacting similar legislation allowing Congress to swiftly overrule Supreme Court decisions:
If the Court issued a decision interpreting a statute or regulation, Congress would have 30 days to vote on whether to open a reconsideration process. If Congress voted yes, the speaker of the House, the Senate majority leader, and the minority leaders would appoint a special committee in each chamber (with proportional party membership) to design a legislative fix for the full body to vote on within the next 30 calendar days. The bill would then go to the other house, where it would be voted on within 10 days through a privileged, fast-track process, which would avoid common legislative snags like the filibuster and committee hearings. The president would then sign the law or veto it, as with any ordinary piece of legislation.
Such legislation could create a normalized process whereby Congress routinely reviews the Supreme Court’s decisions and corrects decisions that read federal laws in damaging or implausible ways. It would also act as a complement to an omnibus bill in the vein of the Civil Rights Act of 1991. The omnibus would take care of past decisions that misread federal law, while the review act would prevent new decisions from having much effect.
Democrats will not have much time to decide how to deal with the Supreme Court
Setting aside the more detailed proposals described above, Congress has a great deal of power to restrict a Supreme Court that seems determined to undermine democracy.
In its 2020 budget request, for example, the Supreme Court requested $106.8 million in funding from Congress. Congress could have, if it wanted, drastically reduced these funds (though the Constitution does not permit Congress to reduce a sitting justice’s salary and benefits).
Similarly, Congress could also impose onerous new duties on the justices. For most of the nation’s history until 1911, Supreme Court justices had to spend at least some of their time “riding circuit” — traveling to various parts of the country to hear ordinary federal cases. Congress could revive this practice. Or it could expand the Court’s (currently very limited) mandatory jurisdiction, forcing it to hear thousands of routine cases involving uncontroversial legal issues.
The point isn’t that Congress necessarily should strip the Court of its staff, order the justices to spend half their year flying around to random federal courthouses, or drown them in an ocean of routine appeals. Rather, it’s that Congress has tremendous power to fight back against an anti-democratic Supreme Court.
Realistically, however, if Congress wants to prevent the Supreme Court from entrenching its power to veto federal laws and manipulate voting rights, it’s likely to only have a short window in which to do so. Indeed, that window could already be closing.If there is one lesson from the past two decades, it is that full Democratic control of the elected branches does not happen very often — and even when it does happen, a Democratic majority can be held hostage by its most conservative members.
Supreme Court justices, by contrast, serve for life. They can afford to bide their time, waiting until their party controls at least one house of Congress or the White House to hand down decisions that could entrench that party in power for a very long time.
A remote office taken to the extreme. | Photo by Thomas Ricker / The Verge
58 percent of US workers now have the option to work where they want at least one day a week, while 35 percent can work remotely up to five days a week, according to a new survey conducted by management consulting company McKinsey. The report concludes that flexible work arrangements implemented in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are here to stay.
“After more than two years of observing remote work and predicting that flexible working would endure after the acute phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, we view these data as a confirmation that there has been a major shift in the working world and in society itself,” reads the report.
The survey found that when given the choice, 87 percent of workers embrace the opportunity to work remotely...
Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge
Facebook Groups are about to get some big changes, and if you’ve used Discord, the new approach should seem pretty darn familiar. Meta is testing a new left-aligned sidebar and channels list for Groups, and the changes are giving me some serious Discord vibes. Meta is even evoking Discord with a purple accent color.
Central to the changes is a new sidebar that lists your groups with rounded square icons. Like with Discord and Slack, you’ll be able to pin groups so that they show up first on the list. Individual groups will have a new menu that seems lifted right from Discord. The menu organizes things like channels, Messenger conversations, and events one after another.
Photo by: Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Amazon is limiting customers to three units of emergency contraceptive pills a week in response to a spike in demand after the Supreme Court ended federal abortion rights, the company told CNBC.
Other retailers are also limiting purchases of drugs like Plan B and Aftera — CVS and Rite Aid are likewise limiting customers to three pills per customer. The companies say there is enough supply of the drugs but that they’re trying to keep them on the shelves consistently. The drugs, often called the morning-after pill, can prevent pregnancy if taken after unprotected sex.
On the Amazon website, users can only select up to a quantity of three for Plan B. But as of publication, the website shows an option to select up to 30 units of My Choice,...
Last year, NetSapiens and Crexendo merged, bringing together a core platform and a UCaaS company to build a firm with a diversified portfolio that offers end user facing solutions, while offering two hundred licensees who build their own platform to build their own technology, and now a CCaaS solution. Jon Brinton, Chief Revenue Officer and Anand Buch, Chief Strategy Officer and NetSapiens founder, join Doug Green on a podcast recorded live at MSP EXPO. In this podcast we learn that the merger has to date been a major success, proving that the companies were complimentary and have since been able to build on previous strengths and achievements, now as one firm. Brinton and Buch also discuss how their ability to face several giant markets creates a learning and development “feedback loop”, where hard-won lessons learned at the enterprise level, among the verticals or by the licensed developers, are shared, making the company unique in many respects. Buch and Brinton discuss how Crexendo is working with their customers, community, and partners to offer unique approaches to hybrid working. “We really resonate with that (MSP) audience,” says Brinton, noting that, “…with our platform and the open API approach.” Buch sees the company as an open door to choices. “Pick your path of where you want to enter the UCaaS economy,” says Buch, laying out the case that Crexendo offers a wide range of choices and approaches from wholesaling to very specialized development.
1Password will now let you securely share files and documents with anyone using just a link. The password manager previously started supporting secure password sharing with links last year, and this feature is now being expanded to include documents and files that are stored in 1Password.
Sharing a document or file is as easy as sharing a password from 1Password, and the recipient doesn’t need to even use 1Password to access files. You can share a file with anyone through a link, and you can set an expiry date on the link or even restrict it so people have to verify their email address with a one-time code to view the file.
Image: 1Password
1Password users can share files, documents, passwords, or just sensitive...
The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) added an amendment to the 2023 military budget that would continue to fund the development of sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles. This despite the Navy’s own budget zeroing out the item, saying it didn’t need the nukes, and the Biden White House saying the weapons were unnecessary.
The HASC amendment is $45 million dollars and Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee sees it as a compromise option between people who want the program cut entirely and those who want it bolstered. “We all know there are lots of pros and cons about actually deploying these on attack submarines,” Cooper said, according to Breaking Defense. “No one can tell in an uncertain world what we will need, but it’s important to keep this option available.”
The program would create a nuclear sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N). At the moment, the only U.S. nukes at sea are in submarines. These new cruise missiles could be launched from the decks of ships. It’s not the first time the United States has sailed the seas armed with nuclear cruise missiles, it first deployed them in the mid 1980s. George H.W. Bush ordered the dissolution of the missiles after the end of the Cold War. Obama followed up in 2010 by recommending the missiles be retired entirely, a task the Navy completed in 2013.
In its budget request for the fiscal year of 2023, the Navy zeroed out the line referring to the program, effectively asking to kill it. According to a Congressional Research Service report on the issue, the cancellation would save $2.1 billion over five years. “The Navy indicated that the program was ‘cost prohibitive and the acquisition schedule would have delivered capability late to need,’” the report said.
The Biden Nuclear Posture Review—an official White House report that outlines how an administration plans to develop and deploy nuclear weapons—allegedly supported the decision. The review is complete but hasn’t been publicly released, but people who’ve read it have told journalists that it supported canceling the SLCM-N. “Really this decision came out of the Nuclear Posture Review,” an official told Breaking Defense. “There was direction from the president to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our defense strategy. That [decision to cancel SLCM-N] was a component.
Now the HASC has injected $45 million into the flagging program. The Senate Armed Services Committee also authorized spending $25 million to continue to develop nuclear cruise missiles that the Navy and Biden don’t want. The two groups will come together soon to settle on a final number and there is a chance that they’ll decide to cut the program.
There’s been a push in recent years for the U.S. to develop new and more “tactical” nuclear weapons. This typically means lower-yield weapons that could be, the argument goes, used in al limited nuclear war. The Trump administration actually deployed these lower-yield nukes on submarines in 2020. It’s hard to know if China or Russia would accept the logic that a “low-yield” nuke is less provocative than a typical nuclear weapon.
Unified Communications giant RingCentral have entered a partnership with collaboration specialists Avocor.
The union will see RingCentral Rooms for Touch brought to the market, with a new series of Avocor Collab Touch displays set to be released with the software built-in.
RingCentral Rooms for Touch will allow users to join and end meetings, digital whiteboarding and on-screen annotation all by using a touchscreen.
Jeff Boggess, Senior Product Marketing Manager of RingCentral Rooms, commented that the partnership makes RingCentral’s software even easier to use than before.
He said: “In our hybrid workplaces, meetings are often a mix of in-person and virtual.
“Meeting rooms not only provide a physical space for productive sessions, but also bridge the gaps for in-office and remote participants.
“That’s why we’re excited to announce a new partnership with a leading global provider for touchscreen interactive displays, Avocor, as well as some additional exciting innovations in RingCentral Rooms.
“Our newest partner, Avocor, makes RingCentral Rooms more equitable, inclusive, interactive, and user-friendly than ever before.”
Avocor’s Collab Touch displays feature an edge-to-edge display, Avocor UiQ (a new Smart touch-enabled user interface) and are compatible with Logitech’s Rally Bar, which, according to Avocor, gives the best meeting experience.
A beta for desktop is currently available for RingCentral’s whiteboard feature and is set to be rolled out fully later this summer.
The company has not given a timeframe on when Avocor’s Collab Touch displays and RingCentral Rooms for Touch will be released but stated both will be available soon.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23761963/main_image_deep_field_smacs0723_5mb.jpeg)
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22863863/Redshift_Expansion_v3_1.2021_09_20_09_00_14.gif)
NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (Caltech-IPAC)
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23762022/web_first_images_release.png)
NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23762067/main_image_galaxies_stephans_quintet_sq_nircam_miri_final_5mb.jpeg)
NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23762072/main_image_stellar_death_s_ring_miri_nircam_sidebyside_5mb.jpeg)
NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
