Davemichels

By Sheila McGee-Smith
Three years before Zoom and Five9, Vonage bought contact center provider NewVoiceMedia and created its own combined offering.

And then took credit for “saving” them.

In 1894, notorious poacher Ed Howell was caught in Yellowstone National Park slaughtering bison, which were on the brink of extinction. US Army soldiers patrolling the park brought him into custody, and the story led to the first US federal law protecting wildlife. The soldiers were thought of as heroes for stopping the killer. But in reality, it was the US Army that had been responsible for driving bison to near-extinction in the first place.

In the mid-1800s, a cultural belief known as “manifest destiny” dictated that white settlers were the rightful owners of the entire North American continent — even though Native Americans had inhabited the land for centuries. In order to clear that land for white settlers, the US Army engaged in violent scorched-earth tactics against the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. One big part of that campaign was to eliminate their crucial food source: the bison.

By the end of the 1800s, a combination of commercial and recreational hunting, plus the actions of the US Army, had depleted the bison population to under 1,000, down from tens of millions at the beginning of the century. Around the same time, the US government set aside some of the land once inhabited by the Plains Indians as a national park, and in 1872 Yellowstone was established.

A key mission of Yellowstone was to conserve the land and the animals that roamed there, including the bison. Today, the soldiers who once patrolled the park are celebrated for having “saved” the bison in Yellowstone, obscuring their own violent contribution to the animal’s near-extinction.

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Darkroom is a history and photography series that anchors each episode around a single image. Analyzing what the photo shows (or doesn’t show) provides context that helps unravel a wider story. Watch previous episodes here.

Google’s new Tensor SoC is the heart of its next phone

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Motorola is keeping its return to flagship devices running for the second year in a row with today’s global announcement of the Edge 20 Pro, Edge 20, and Edge 20 Lite. The top-end 20 Pro includes a periscope-style telephoto lens for the first time in a Motorola device and includes a Snapdragon 870 processor.

All three devices support sub-6GHz 5G, offer 108-megapixel rear-facing cameras, and include 6.7-inch OLED screens with fast refresh rates. They’re due to arrive in August in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. While Motorola doesn’t offer specifics, it says that it plans to bring a 5G Edge device to North America this fall.

Image: Motorola

P...

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Bang & Olufsen’s Beoplay EQ are the Danish audio brand’s first pair of noise-canceling true wireless headphones. Two microphones on each earbud handle noise cancellation duties alongside an extra mic for making calls, for a total of six across the two earbuds. They’re releasing globally on August 19th in black and gold.

At $399 (£359 / €399), the Beoplay EQ are around $50 more expensive than B&O’s non-noise-canceling Beoplay E8 earbuds were at launch. They don’t feature the third-generation E8’s formidable battery life, which tops out at 35 hours of total charge from the earbuds and case combined. Instead, the Beoplay EQ can run for around 20 hours when used with the charging case. Battery life from the earbuds themselves is about the...

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A tiny insect is transforming the western US — with a little help from climate change.

This story is part of Down to Earth, a Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.

Extreme drought. Soaring temperatures. Decades of fire suppression. It’s a perfect recipe for the kinds of wildfires now tearing through the West.

But there’s another ingredient that could make fires even more severe, and it’s just the size of a grain of rice: bark beetles.

These tiny insects prey on a large number of tree species, which can make some forests, especially in the American West, more susceptible to severe wildfires. In fact, there’s some indication that beetle-killed trees have helped fuel the Bootleg Fire currently raging in Oregon.

Now climate change stands to add fuel to the problem. Rising temperatures are causing the populations of bark beetles to balloon, while also worsening droughts that make trees more susceptible to beetle attacks. Beetle infestations may in turn be contributing to climate change, by transforming forests from carbon sinks to carbon emitters.

“In the past, outbreaks were more limited in extent or intensity,” said Rebecca Wayman, a forest ecologist at the University of California Davis. “Now that we’ve seen such severe outbreaks with huge proportions of trees being killed, the effect on fire is certainly high on people’s minds.”

Beetles are one of many environmental variables that shape wildfires, forest experts like Wayman said. But their spread is a reminder that these variables — from drought and fire suppression to tiny pests — interact and can amplify one another. Climate change changes the balance, and is helping turn many forests into tinderboxes.

Stormi Greener/Star Tribune via Getty Images

Meet the bizarre bark beetle

Bark beetles aren’t your typical charismatic species, but what they lack in looks they make up for in talent.

Of the roughly 600 species in the US, a dozen or so are known to kill swaths of forests by boring into the wood, disrupting the flow of nutrients into the tree. First, they have to overwhelm the tree’s defense system with a chemical trick. Once a beetle arrives at a tree, it emits a pheromone that functions as a beacon, drawing in tens to hundreds of other beetles for a coordinated attack. Those beetles are also known to carry fungi with them, which some species use to help feed their offspring. Together, the beetles and fungi kill the tree.

Remarkably, once the tree is full of beetles, the insects emit another pheromone that tells other beetles not to join them, according to Chris Fettig, a research entomologist at the US Forest Service who studies bark beetles. “That switches the behavior and functions as a ‘no vacancy’ sign’,” he said.

Bark beetles are native to the US and a natural part of forest ecosystems, but as their numbers have grown, they’ve utterly decimated US forests. In fact, bark beetles have killed more trees in the past three decades than all wildfires in the western US combined, according to a recent Forest Service report that Fettig co-authored. One of the worst years in history was 2009, when bark beetles infested nearly 9 million acres of western forests.

Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

More recent data suggests that bark beetle infestations have killed fewer acres of forest in the past five years, on average, compared to the late 2000s, partly because there are simply fewer host trees for the beetles to infest, Fettig said. But he and other researchers warn that beetle-spurred tree die-offs are worsening in other ways.

“These events are becoming larger and more severe and garnering more attention,” Fettig said. “Many of us are concerned that it’s an indication of what the future is going to look like in several different [eco]systems.”

Climate change and fire suppression help bark beetles kill trees

Climate change will have an enormous effect on animals of all kinds, and these beetles are no exception. In fact, rising temperatures are largely to blame for the recent beetle boom, researchers say.

For one, they mean more of the insects are able to survive winter, Fettig said. Plus, research suggests that hotter summer weather can speed up the time it takes for some species to complete their life cycles, leading to population growth.

Climate change is also making droughts more frequent and severe in some places, so there’s less water available to trees. To avoid drying out, trees close microscopic structures called stomata that absorb carbon dioxide. Without access to the carbon in CO2 — which trees use for their defense system — they have a harder time surviving a beetle attack. “Climatic water stress can have profound effects on tree susceptibility to bark beetle attack,” the authors of the study wrote.

Making matters worse, decades of fire suppression and a lack of forest management have allowed forests to grow dense, so more trees are competing for less water. “We can’t just call this climate change,” Wayman said. “We have to look at the history of how we’ve been managing — or not managing — forests over the last couple of hundred years. That’s also been contributing to this water stress.”

Avalon/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Dead trees can fuel forest fires

When trees are infested with bark beetles, they start to lose water. Research has found that the twigs and needles of lodgepole pine, for example, can lose 80 to 90 percent of their water content within a year of an attack. As you can imagine, dry trees tend to be more flammable and burn hotter than wet ones. Infestations can also reduce the amount of forest canopy cover, allowing fire-spreading winds to more easily whip through the forest.

Some research already supports the idea that bark beetle outbreaks may fuel intense wildfires. Earlier this year, Wayman published a paper analyzing the footprint of two fires in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, including the Rough Fire of 2015 and the Cedar Fire of 2016. They collectively burned more than 70,000 hectares. As she and her co-authors found, a recent bark beetle infestation in the area increased the severity of the two wildfires, as measured by how much vegetation they destroyed within their footprint. (Weather was still a more important factor, she said.)

“There’s an influence of these dead trees on the landscape,” Wayman said. “They did increase the likelihood that live trees in that location would die.”

Bark beetles have also been implicated in some of the most destructive fires of the past decade, including the 2020 Creek Fire — the largest wildfire in California state history — and in the more recent Bootleg Fire in Oregon. As much as 90 percent of the Creek Fire’s fuel was timber killed by bark beetles, USA Today’s Joshua Yeager and Mark Olalde reported in 2020.

Yet it’s too simple to say beetle outbreaks always fuel wildfires, and a lot of research has failed to find a connection.

In some cases, the fire is burning at such a high intensity already, perhaps fueled by extreme weather, that it doesn’t really matter whether the trees are dead before the blazes tear through, Wayman said. “Does [tree mortality] even matter when you have 96-degree temperatures and 50-mile-per-hour winds?”

The role of beetles in fires also depends heavily on how long it’s been since the last outbreak, which affects how much fuel is available, Wayman said. While her study looked at the impact of a recent beetle attack, other studies that assessed fires that burned many years after an infestation have suggested that past outbreaks aren’t as worrying. One explanation is that decay reduces fuel from dead trees, Fettig said.

While the overall role of beetles remains uncertain, it’s clear that they’ve killed a lot of forests and left a lot of fuel behind. “The scale of present tree mortality is so large that greater potential for ‘mass fire’ exists in the coming decades,” Fettig and several other researchers wrote in 2018.

Prescribed burns will help forests survive beetle attacks

So what can we do? Until large-scale climate solutions reduce the likelihood of extreme temperatures and severe droughts, firefighters can try a different approach: burning or thinning forests.

This might sound counterproductive: Why burn forests to save them? But proactive forest management — which can involve prescribed and controlled burns and removing certain tree species from a forest — is the most effective way to reduce bark beetle outbreaks, according to Sharon Hood, a research ecologist at the US Forest Service.

Shanon Bond/Parks Canada

One way we know it works is that Indigenous people used controlled burns to manage forests in the US for thousands of years, shaping the very ecosystems that we’re now racing to save. Understanding “the historical disturbance regime, and looking into the past for things that influenced our forests, can really help guide current and future management,” Hood said.

Prescribed burns, for example, not only lower the risk of wildfires but also reduce the density of trees, and thus the competition for water among them. Hydrated trees have an easier time fighting beetles. Controlled burns can also stimulate trees’ defenses, Hood said.

“With climate change, we know there are a few things that we as individuals can do, but it’s a global problem,” Wayman said. “Whereas on the forest management side, we can act on that. We can’t throw up our hands and say, ‘This is out of our control.’ We can take action.”

Krispy Kreme has created an Xbox doughnut. The fluffy doughnut is a marketing collaboration with Microsoft to celebrate 20 years of Xbox, and will be sold at Krispy Kreme stores, cabinets, and online across the UK and Ireland between August 2nd and August 22nd.

The doughnuts won’t come equipped with CPUs, GPUs, or SSDs, but you might be able to win that type of hardware in the form of an Xbox Series S. As part of this marketing campaign, Krispy Kreme is also giving away Microsoft’s latest mini Xbox. You’ll need to purchase a dozen of the new Xbox doughnuts for a chance to win a console, and Krispy Kreme will include a month of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with every dozen doughnuts bought.

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Zoho Corporation recently announced the release of its Zoho Business Intelligence (BI) Platform. The platform touts AI-driven data analytics and self-service through data preparation and augmented analytics. According to Zoho, the BI platform will enable its customers to “cleanse, unify, and analyze cross-departmental data, obtain an encyclopedic view of the company.”

The solution combines Zoho DataPrep, which automates and simplifies challenges of importing data sources, with an enhanced version of Zoho Analytics 5.0. Users can also launch queries for a deeper understanding of data by using either graphical tools or with Ask Zia, Zoho’s conversational AI platform. The goal is to make it simpler for end users to construct and share analytics featuring pre-built, visual dashboards, data integration, and flexible deployment as well.

A critical part of any business analytics initiatives begins with preparing the data for insights. Bob Sullivan, chief operating officer with digital marketing solutions firm Vector Solutions, had previously relied on home-built data preparation architecture. Zoho’s DataPrep takes out much of the manual work to correct formatting, update fields, and determine missing values automatically. This allows his clients to set up once and save time without relying on cumbersome and sometimes inaccurate spreadsheets. Zoho DataPrep includes auto modeling and Machine Learning-based enrichment and enables users to retrieve data from 250 data sources. Zoho also offers its DataPrep tool as a stand-alone service.

Zoho Analytics 5.0, integrated with enterprise portal builder (Zoho Sites) and presentation software (Zoho Show), enables business users to create a slide deck and seamlessly embed reports and dashboards to make an interactive and immersive presentation. “Ask Zia” enables both technical and non-technical execs to surface data and insights using their own words to form queries.

Access to Predictive Insights
Zia Insights tool automatically surfaces trends and relationships between datasets without requiring an end user to even launch a query. Vector Solutions’ Sullivan said his best clients leverage the Ask Zia conversational piece to track revenue and pull predictive, forecasting trends reports, making it very simple to access business insights.

Connor Nobert, director of Analytics & Technology with Pulse LLC, makers of sales assistance and behavioral change platforms, first started with Zoho CRM. They’ve added the Analytics platform based on very favorable licensing (compared to Tableau) and the option to white-label allowed secure delivery of healthcare info to their clients.

Norbort cites the ability for Zoho to handle large numbers of queries in their system, easing up their own bandwidth, and a nicely designed, professional dashboard as important benefits. Zoho is “clearly investing in the Analytics platforms and pushing the envelope forward in terms of functionality,” says Norbert.

The Zoho BI platform, first introduced in 2009 with 100 users, now has over 13,000 cloud users and is consumable through Zoho Marketplace.

Market Appeal
Zoho is moving to reduce the cost of BI to the point where it becomes accessible to a broader range of organizations. Benefits of this approach include:

• Speedy preparation
• Ongoing hygiene / continuous improvement
• Access to dashboards, predictive insights via Conversational AI and visualization tools
• Reliable at scale
• Value and certainty in pricing/licensing

Bottom Line Impact:
The Zoho BI platform strikes a great balance between automation for data prep and AI for conversational queries and predictive analytics.

Click here to download the Opus Research Impact Brief: Zoho’s BI Platform

The post Zoho Proves That “Business Intelligence” Is Not an Oxymoron appeared first on .

By Dave Michels
Modularization of UCaaS services is emerging as the new best-of-breed opportunity, as evidenced in this latest example of the decoupling of carrier services from UC.

The Biden administration still hasn’t appointed a permanent leader of the nation’s top telecom regulator, worrying consumer advocates who say the delay will likely prove costly for U.S. consumers.

Under the law, control of the FCC is determined by whichever party controls the White House. Win the Presidency, and you’re given a 3-2 Commissioner majority allowing you to implement policies that reflect your agenda.

But while the Biden administration has made a lot of noise about reining in monopolies, it still hasn’t formally chosen a permanent boss to lead the nation’s top telecom regulator nearly six months into Biden’s first term. Biden picked democratic commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel as the interim chairwoman, but the fifth commissioner slot remains vacant. That in turn has left the agency gridlocked at 2-2 commissioners after the rushed fall appointment by Trump of new Commissioner Nathan Simington.

Without its full roster of commissioners and a permanent boss, the Biden FCC can’t reverse most of the controversial and unpopular policies implemented during the Trump administration, whether it’s the attack on net neutrality, the elimination of decades-old media consolidation rules, or the gutting of the FCC’s consumer protection authority.

The lack of action is starting to annoy consumer advocates, who say the administration’s concern about unchecked monopolies isn’t reflected in the lack of urgency when it comes to telecom reform.

“I'm starting to get legitimately concerned that there is some telecom plot afoot, or that the Biden admin is planning to talk a good talk on issues like net neutrality but then let the clock run out by dragging their feet on nominating a 5th commissioner,” Evan Greer, Deputy Director of consumer rights group Fight For The Future told Motherboard.

More than two dozen consumer groups wrote to Biden last month, warning that it could take months to appoint and confirm a new FCC boss. By that point, a full year may have passed before the administration even begins to take steps toward meaningful reform. 

“If we are to reach the goal of having a country where everyone, no matter their address or size of their bank account, has affordable access to high-speed internet, we need a full commission as soon as possible,” the groups wrote.

The delay reflects ongoing policy myopia in DC, where “big tech” consumes most of the policy oxygen in the room, leaving “big telecom” seeing little accountability—despite routinely engaging in the same bad behaviors.

Greer noted that by this point in Trump’s first term, former Verizon lawyer turned FCC boss Ajit Pai was already hard at work stripping away decades-old media consolidation rules, and laying the groundwork for the hugely unpopular repeal of net neutrality. 

“Why isn't Biden moving quickly to reverse that? It would be such an easy win to reinstate a policy that the overwhelming majority of voters from across the political spectrum support,” Greer said. “Biden needs to nominate a 5th commissioner ASAP, and that person should have zero ties to the telecom industry.”

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the net neutrality repeal didn’t just eliminate net neutrality rules. It stripped away much of the FCC’s consumer protection authority, leaving the agency powerless to police everything from Covid-related industry promises to billing fraud. It even attempted to ban states from stepping in and filling the consumer protection void.

Worse, consumer groups have been quick to complain the entire repeal process was not only based on empty promises, it was accompanied by significant fraud—such as the telecom industry’s use of fake and dead Americans to provide the illusion of broad support for the plan.

While a recent Biden executive order urges the FCC to restore net neutrality and several consumer protection initiatives (like requiring ISPs provide a broadband “nutrition label” showing hidden fees and surcharges), the FCC can’t implement these policies without a functioning majority, something the Biden administration seems to be in no rush to provide.

By Irwin Lazar
The “bring your own carrier” model allows UCaaS adopters to separate call control from PSTN connectivity, potentially providing lower costs and improving flexibility.

Want to make your next quarterly Zoom check-up a little more interesting? Feel like aggravating your colleagues at the virtual all-hands? If so, why not turn yourself into a freakish living cartoon, courtesy of Snapchat’s desktop app?

We’ve written about the Snap Camera app before, as it’s fun, free, and easy to use. But Snap seems to have updated it recently with the cartoon filter from its mobile app, which is worth a look in its own right. The filter turns you into a generic DreamWorks / Pixar creation, and is surprisingly fluid. Its ability to capture your full range of expressions is a little limited (it can’t quite do a proper DreamWorks Face, for example) but access through the desktop app means you can now use the filter on your...

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A lagoon in the Patagonia region of Argentina has turned bright pink, stoking longtime concerns of local residents.

According to a report from the Agence France-Presse, environmental engineer and virologist Federico Restrepo said that the color was due to the presence of sodium sulfate, which local fish factories use for preserving prawns for export. The law requires that factories treat the fish waste containing sodium sulfate, which is an antibacterial chemical, before dumping it.

The lagoon has been this color for almost a week now, but locals have been complaining about its foul odor for some time, AFP reported. 

Residents of the neighboring town Rawson recently blocked the roads in protest so trucks carrying processed fish waste couldn’t get through to the treatment plants located in the city’s outskirts. The factories were instead authorized to dump their waste in the lagoon. 

"We get dozens of trucks daily. The residents are getting tired of it," local environmental activist Pablo Lada told AFP. "Those who should be in control are the ones who authorize the poisoning of people.”

According to the news agency, the lake is not used recreationally and this is not the first time the lake has turned pink. 

"The reddish color does not cause damage and will disappear in a few days," environmental control chief Juan Micheloud told AFP. 

Lada told the news agency that the fish factory also has the option of dumping their waste in the treatment plant in Puerto Madryn, around 35 miles away, or even building a new one closer to their factories. Dumping the fish waste in the local lagoon was just the easiest option. 

Activists are concerned about how this could affect other water sources since this lagoon feeds into the Chubut river and several other water sources. Other foreign fishing companies and fish processing plants also depend on these water sources. 

The lagoon was still bright pink as of Sunday.

‘While each company must make its own decision on whether to pay the ransom, Kaseya decided after consultation with experts to not negotiate with the criminals who perpetrated this attack and we have not wavered from that commitment,’ according to a statement on Kaseya’s website.

LeVar Burton is America’s favorite teacher. He’s a natural fit for the long-running game show that Alex Trebek made a cultural institution.

Game shows aren’t exactly known for generating hugely anticipated “event television” viewing — but when LeVar Burton hosts Jeopardy! for five days beginning July 26, he may deliver the rare exception. That’s because Burton’s hosting stint is largely the result of a widespread social media campaign to land him the gig, and many people hope it will be a precursor to his full-time assumption of the role long filled by Alex Trebek.

Burton, who won an episode of Celebrity Jeopardy! in 1995, first expressed interest in hosting Jeopardy! at least a decade ago, long before Trebek’s May 2019 announcement that he had been diagnosed with aggressive pancreatic cancer. At the time, Burton seemed to merely be floating the idea that he might succeed Trebek someday, upon the host’s eventual retirement. In 2020, however, after social media chatter about Burton hosting surfaced a few months before Trebek’s death, Burton restarted the conversation.

Burton is one of a string of guest hosts who have carried the show this year. Beginning in January, public figures and popular Jeopardy! fan favorites, like all-time Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings, have stepped in for weeklong hosting stints which also doubled as potential auditions for the permanent hosting gig. Despite having public and media support, it’s unclear whether Burton will ultimately get the job.

If Burton does wind up becoming Jeopardy!’s new host, his hiring won’t just fulfill his dream as a lifelong fan of the show. It will also be a mark of how fully internet culture can shape the culture at large.

Hosting Jeopardy! would play directly into Burton’s unique and remarkable onscreen career as well as his ongoing second life as a cultural icon. But beyond just offering us a chance to get reacquainted with a cool TV host, Burton’s Jeopardy! quest offers us a deeper understanding of how we think about celebrity, persona, and nostalgia.

LeVar Burton has had an extraordinary career

As a kid growing up in the shadow of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, LeVar Burton learned early on to value education as his best weapon for success. His mother, Erma Gene Christian, was a social worker and teacher who raised Burton and his sisters as a single mother in Sacramento, California. “She told me unequivocally,” Burton said in a 2014 interview. “You are going to grow up and you’re going to inherit a world that will probably be hostile to your presence simply because of the color of your skin, and the best thing you can do, the leveler of the playing field for you, is education.” Burton took that mantra to heart — but not before he made an amazing entrance into his professional acting career.

In 1977, at the age of 19, Burton was an undergraduate studying acting at the University of Southern California — a major change from previously studying for the Catholic priesthood. Burton was preparing for his first lead role ever (in the school production of Oklahoma!) when the drama department recommended him for his first professional audition, where he won the part of Kunta Kinte in the miniseries Roots.

Based on writer Alex Haley’s novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family, the miniseries traced Haley’s own lineage through fictionalized, apocryphal narratives of what happened to his ancestors after they were abducted and sold into slavery in the US. The story followed several generations of Black characters who struggled to survive and maintain their family connections despite ongoing abuse and trauma.

Roots was a major TV landmark. Its eight episodes were viewed by more than 130 million Americans, setting viewership records that still stand today; it made the cover of Time magazine; it received a staggering 37 Emmy nominations, winning nine.

But if Roots was a historic moment for television, it wasn’t without controversy. In retrospect, it’s hard for many not to view the miniseries as a gratuitous display of abuse — a narrative of misery porn that psychologically wounded Burton while filming, and one we would roundly critique today; as critic Frank Rich wryly put it in 2013, “In a day when there were still only three networks to choose from in prime time and home video recording was a novelty, Americans rushed to their sets each night to see how slavery turned out.”

Nonetheless, Roots’ cultural impact was undeniable — and as the show’s main character, the original kidnapped slave who was brought to America from The Gambia, Burton’s Kunta Kinte made perhaps the most indelible impact of all.

Images of Kunta Kinte, bound in chains and an enormous slave collar but still defiant, or tied to a whipping post but refusing to call himself by the slave name given to him, still resonate. When Colin Kaepernick showed up for his widely publicized NFL tryout in 2019, after having been previously shut out of the league for kneeling during the national anthem as a protest against police brutality, he did so wearing a shirt emblazoned with Kunta Kinte’s name. The reference made an apt role model for a man who was refusing to accept the NFL’s ostracism. In Roots, after Kunta repeatedly tries and fails to escape, his captors cut off part of his foot, a scene Kendrick Lamar references in his 2015 hit “King Kunta”: “King Kunta — everybody wanna cut the legs off him / Kunta, Black man taking no loss.”

If Burton had never acted again, we would still be talking about him in 2021 — that’s how important Kunta Kinte was and is. But Burton would go on to hold two long-term roles that would make him even more of a fixture in households across the US: one as Geordi La Forge, the blind lieutenant commander of the starship Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and one as the host of the PBS children’s series Reading Rainbow.

Burton has said that he got a call to audition for The Next Generation in 1986 because producer Bob Justman remembered how much Burton had loved the original Star Trek; the two had previously worked together and Burton had often talked about the series. Justman convinced Burton to consider The Next Generation by noting the involvement of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry in the new spinoff series. (Wesley Snipes also auditioned for the role of Geordi and later hailed Burton as “a greater actor” when Burton got the part instead.) “Gene Roddenberry’s vision was one that really meant a lot to me,” Burton later told NPR. “It said when the future comes, there’s a place for you. Seeing Nichelle Nichols [the Black actress who played Uhura in the original series] on the bridge of that ship meant that when the future got here, there was a place for people who looked like me.”

A blind engineer who was able to pilot the ship thanks to a vision-enhancing device, Geordi inspired legions of sci-fi fans, including fans with disabilities. Even more importantly, Geordi’s identity as a Black character who wasn’t primarily defined by his blackness was hugely important to Burton, who had declared repeatedly early on in his career that he didn’t want to be pigeonholed into playing stereotypes. “I have always said, as an actor, I want to not only recreate life specifically through the black experience, I want to be a human being in the roles that I play,” he told Congress in 1983, “and a black man could be a doctor or a lawyer in any given situation, and not always have to have come specifically from the ghetto.” It’s an idea that has become quite prominent over the last decade of cultural conversation, and Burton was among its pioneers. Burton went on to play Geordi through all seven seasons (1987–1994) of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as in four spinoff films.

Yet Burton’s most influential role was not as the pilot of the Enterprise, but his longtime gig as host of PBS’s Reading Rainbow, an immersive storytelling and education show for kids that premiered in 1983. Each week, Burton built a fun adventure and learning experience around a different children’s book — one week he’d go on a jungle safari, the next he’d don a snorkel and dive among the coral reefs.

During its original run from 1983 to 2006, Reading Rainbow was nominated for two primetime Emmys and won 26 daytime Emmys. Burton himself picked up 15 nominations and two wins as outstanding host of a children’s show. Even more significant was Reading Rainbow’s actual impact on education; a survey conducted by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1997 found that teachers used Reading Rainbow in their classrooms more than any other PBS kids’ show.

Reading Rainbow ended in 2006 due to funding cuts. Across its 21 seasons, the series helped kids develop not only a deeper love of reading, but a better understanding of the world. Crucially, it also provided a powerful positive image of a young, well-educated Black man in an era when such depictions were rare — when criminologists and politicians were instead branding young Black men as “superpredators.”

That positive onscreen image was further strengthened by Burton’s engaging personality. Burton found his calling through Reading Rainbow; he now describes his life’s purpose to the New York Times as “bringing healing ... joy ... information, education, [and] enlightenment through storytelling.”

Meanwhile, the story the public has created about LeVar Burton is just as significant as the many stories he’s been telling us for decades.

Burton is part of a superfecta of wholesomeness that’s led the internet to canonize him as a pop culture saint

When the public considers the next Jeopardy! host, it’s easy to see a link between the public persona of Burton and that of Alex Trebek. They’re both purveyors of erudite wisdom, education, and general positivity. Burton’s role as Reading Rainbow’s host also situates him within a collective of PBS show hosts whose wholesome positive energy and sage curiosity are unblemished in the cultural consciousness. Alongside “happy little cloud” painter Bob Ross and kindly cardigan-wearing neighbor Fred Rogers, the gentle mentorship Burton delivered from afar to countless kids over the decades made him a trusted figure. All three men have become culturally revered and lavished with nostalgic veneration.

Speaking of Rogers to the New York Times, Burton noted that they both trained to enter the clergy, and both shared values of authenticity, service, and self-acceptance long before they became legendary PBS children’s show hosts. “He taught me that it was okay to use television as a ministry,” Burton later recalled to Mo Rocca. “[T]hat it was possible to enlighten while entertaining.”

Burton’s connection to Ross is less direct — Ross hosted the long-running PBS series Joy of Painting, which overlapped with much of Reading Rainbow’s run until Ross’s death from cancer in 1995 — but it might be even more important in understanding Burton’s trajectory toward his current position in the cultural consciousness. With the rise of social media in the early 2010s, Ross’s cultural reputation became elevated to internet sainthood, in a moment of public recognition and collective celebration that would later be repeated for both Rogers and Burton.

Ross’s cultural ascension arguably peaked around 2012, when PBS made and remixed Ross’s soothing, encouraging aphorisms into a viral autotune mashup, “Happy Little Cloud.” That same year, for what would have been Ross’s 70th birthday, he was honored as the subject of a Google Doodle. Ross became a fixture of internet culture as a chill force of positivity and goodness, and the public came to see him as an unsullied paragon of virtue.

Social media was vital to this process, because PBS show hosts of yore weren’t typical celebrities. They didn’t occupy the media limelight or walk red carpets annually; they didn’t exist in the public consciousness the way other celebrities might. So it wasn’t, really, until the internet allowed people to come together to share their appreciation for Ross and similar public figures — people whom we might think of as “soft power celebrities” — that a cultural consensus began to emerge regarding their significance.

Once social media built a narrative about Bob Ross as everyone’s favorite hippie dad artist teacher, other consensuses emerged even more rapidly about similar men (to date, nearly always men) who have filled similar roles: wildlife expert Steve Irwin, Muppets creator Jim Henson, and chef Anthony Bourdain, for example. (It’s notable, perhaps, that LeVar Burton has achieved that categorization while he’s still alive, rather than posthumously.) That cultural conversation started to coalesce for Burton around the same time it was peaking for Bob Ross — as we see in this 2012 episode of Community when Troy (Donald Glover) meets Burton and can’t handle it because he’s afraid of “disappointing” his childhood idol:

In 2015, Burton zoomed back into the cultural spotlight when he launched a Kickstarter to revive Reading Rainbow. The project sought to put more books, teaching, and educational materials into classrooms and on the web for virtual access, with much of the content hosted by Burton. Building off the public’s love and nostalgia for the original Reading Rainbow series, and aiming to expand a Reading Rainbow app that Burton had released the year before, the Kickstarter was a huge success: It surpassed the backer record then held by a campaign to make a Veronica Mars movie, ultimately raising $5.4 million from 105,000 people.

As Adrienne Raphel noted in the New Yorker at the time, “Reading Rainbow’s campaign hits the Internet’s sweet spot: millennial nostalgia; a kitschy, easily parodied theme song; an Upworthy-worthy goal of putting books in every child’s hands nationwide.” Ultimately, Burton’s attempt to bring back the original Reading Rainbow as a TV series seems to have fizzled; thanks to a bevy of disputes with the Buffalo TV station that originally produced the show, Burton wound up diverting most of the Kickstarter funds into a renamed service called Skybrary that offers interactive content to paid subscribers.

Still, despite the dilution of its original goal, the Kickstarter put Burton on a fast track toward pop culture deification, as did the 2017 launch of his podcast Levar Burton Reads, in which Burton reads short stories and other literature intended primarily for adults.

Meanwhile, Fred Rogers, a beloved figure who arguably held a similar pop culture saint status, gained even more veneration in 2018, the year of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood’s 50th anniversary. The occasion saw numerous public tributes to the show and peaked with the release of the biopic Won’t You Be My Neighbor? That same year, someone on Reddit created a meme titled the “Four Horsemen of Wholesomeness” featuring Ross, Rogers, Irwin, and Henson. As the image macro spread, some meme-makers replaced Henson with Burton, perhaps to shore up the educational parallels.

This idea got another boost during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the meme shifted to emphasize their “virtual teaching” styles:

Essentially, Burton benefited from two prominent trends during the 2010s: wholesomeness and increased nostalgia for the ’80s and ’90s. As both trends grew, public affection among Gen X-ers and millennials likewise grew toward many of the TV figures from that era who purveyed positive vibes. Burton was high on that list, and he benefited from his association in the public’s mind with other PBS creatives with pure and gentle reputations.

Those associations ultimately extended to include Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek. Burton’s cultural ascension peaked just as the public was considering not only how beloved and esteemed Trebek was, but thinking about who might be virtuous enough to carry on his formidable legacy.

Jeopardy! and Burton seem perfectly aligned with one another — which says a lot about how we view them both

Though you might not have heard about it until recently, LeVar Burton has wanted to host Jeopardy! for quite a while. Not only did he compete and win Celebrity Jeopardy! in 1995, but he’s tweeted for years about wanting the gig. In 2013, he devoted most of an interview with the blog Serial Optimist to discussing how much he wanted to host Jeopardy!, noting that he’d grown up with the show and believed its legacy should involve a host who had a history with it.

In September 2020, just a few months before Trebek passed away, Burton tweeted, “I feel like I’ve been preparing my whole life to occupy the @Jeopardy host podium when Alex retires.” Then in November, shortly after Trebek’s death, a fan named Joshua Sanders started a Change.org petition to make Burton the new permanent host.

“LeVar Burton has inspired and shaped the minds of several generations of trivia-loving nerds,” Sanders wrote. “This petition is to show [Sony Pictures Television, which produces Jeopardy!] just how much love the public has for Burton, and how much we’d all love to see him as the next host of Jeopardy!”

Within days, the petition had received over 20,000 signatures; it currently stands at more than 250,000. Celebrities like Burton’s Star Trek costar Brent Spiner, late-night TV host Stephen Colbert, and actor Dick Van Dyke stepped up to voice their support for Burton. Countless media outlets, unable to resist “I can go twice as high” quips, covered the push to make Burton the host.

Not all coverage was positive. In an interview with journalist and Jeopardy! expert Claire McNear, NPR’s Weekend Edition host Lulu Garcia-Navarro called the social media campaign “bizarre,” and the two women questioned whether Burton had the “humor” and “quick wit” required for the job. They seemed to view the social media push around Burton as gimmicky.

Their reactions seem a bit misguided. Social media campaigning is now so common, it’s somewhat weird to frame it as weird. Burton’s fans clearly believe his hosting Jeopardy! would be socially significant — and it’s difficult to argue otherwise. For one thing, Black men are rarely afforded such prominent platforms on television or anywhere else, so his landing the gig would be a milestone for onscreen representation. For another, Burton has devoted his existing public platform to promoting education, literacy, and general positivity. What might he do with even more resources and visibility — especially hosting a show that has a reputation that’s nearly as spotless as Burton’s own?

Throughout its decades-long run, Jeopardy!’s biggest controversies have been minor ones — mostly concerning arrogant winners or card-shark contestant James Holzhauer’s unprecedented mathematical gameplay, which many fans saw as ruinous to the game’s spontaneity and fun. Nothing has sullied either the integrity of Trebek or the game. By contrast, controversies have already brewed around other potential replacement hosts, like Jennings and Dr. Oz, after viewers have questioned things they’ve said and done before. Burton may not only be a popular candidate — he may also be one of the few whose public persona is truly squeaky clean. For a show like Jeopardy!, which began as a more honest alternative to the scandal-laden trivia contests of the ’50s before evolving into a cultural staple, having a host with an equally sterling reputation is critical to its legacy.

That reputation might ultimately be an obstacle to Burton’s originally stated goal of portraying his humanity onscreen; after all, being pigeonholed as a saint may be just as limiting as being pigeonholed as a stereotype. Still, one doesn’t choose sainthood. Perhaps that’s a fitting benchmark in the life of a man who once wanted to be the first Black pope. Whatever Burton does next professionally, his role as mentor to the masses seems fully established.

Almost 1.5 million acres of the US are on fire right now.

California’s largest active fire continues to burn Sunday after tearing through a small community overnight.

The Dixie Fire, which started earlier this month and has now burned more than 190,000 acres, forced a new wave of evacuations in Northern California on Saturday before striking the town of Indian Falls the same evening, destroying homes and vehicles.

According to Cal Fire, the blaze is still only 21 percent contained and “continues to display extreme fire behavior.”

It’s just one of several massive fires, supercharged by climate change and extreme drought conditions, that are currently burning across the American West, and it comes as other parts of the world confront their own climate disasters while US climate action hangs in balance in the Senate.

On Thursday, the Dixie Fire became the second fire to reach “megafire” status — burning at least 100,000 acres — in California this year. California’s Sugar Fire was the first to clear that threshold earlier this month, though it’s now 98 percent contained.

In October last year, the August Complex Fire became the first recorded “gigafire” in California history, burning more than 1 million acres.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared a state of emergency for the affected counties in both the Sugar and Dixie Fires — as well as the Tamarack Fire, which is currently burning along the California-Nevada border near Lake Tahoe.

All told, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, at least 86 large fires in 12 states are currently burning in the United States, covering almost 1.5 million acres and casting an oppressive pall of smoke as far away as New York City.

More than 2.77 million acres have burned so far in 2021, about 800,000 more than at the same time last year but less than in 2019 and other previous years.

Of the fires currently burning, the largest by far is Oregon’s Bootleg Fire, a sprawling blaze that has burned nearly 409,000 acres as of Sunday and even began generating its own weather — high winds and lightning — last week.

“The fire is so large and generating so much energy and extreme heat that it’s changing the weather,” Marcus Kauffman, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told New York Times reporter Henry Fountain last week. “Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do. In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do.”

Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images

The Bootleg Fire, which was ignited by a lightning strike on July 6, is the third-largest in Oregon since 1900, according to CNN, as well as being the largest in the country this fire season. As things stand, it’s 46 percent contained — but hotter, drier weather is expected this week, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.

“It is so dry out here on the ground that to be able to extinguish the fire completely, to be able to have what we call full containment of the fire, we are going to need Mother Nature’s help” in the form of a “season-ending weather event,” Katy O’Hara, a spokeswoman on the firefighting effort, told the Washington Post last week. According to the Post, such an event — a substantial rainfall or even snow — may not arrive in Oregon until “late fall” this year.

Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images

Climate change is supercharging wildfire season

Like most of the West, drought conditions in California and Oregon have fueled the Bootleg and Dixie Fires, resulting in a fire season that is far worse than usual, far earlier.

According to the US Drought Monitor, major swaths of Washington, Oregon, California, Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico are all in the midst of a drought, as are other parts of the US.

More than 95 percent of that region is experiencing at least “moderate” drought conditions, according to a map produced by the US Drought Monitor, and about 65 percent is facing “extreme” conditions.

“This is more like what we would typically see in the late fall, at the end of the fire season before the rains come,” Capt. Mitch Matlow, the public information officer for the Dixie Fire, told the Los Angeles Times on Saturday. “The fuels got drier earlier in the season, which leads to more erratic fire behavior.”

Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

As Vox’s Lili Pike reported in April, conditions this year aren’t exactly unexpected. A year plus of hot, dry weather and consecutive underwhelming rainy seasons laid the groundwork for the Dixie Fire long before it ignited in mid-July, and bigger-picture trends are also to blame.

According to Pike,

Scientists say that [the current drought] is part of a megadrought — a decades-long dry spell, punctuated by severe droughts. This current megadrought began around 2000, and the majority of the land in the West has been at some level of drought ever since.

And this striking drought bears the fingerprints of climate change. Using tree ring data, a study published in Science in April 2020 found that “anthropogenic warming was critical for placing 2000–2018 on a trajectory consistent with the most severe past megadroughts,” and that megadrought has extended to today.

This fits in with a grim picture laid out by the latest National Climate Assessment, authored by 13 US federal agencies in 2018. Rising temperatures will increase the likelihood of megadroughts in the Southwest and make droughts more frequent and severe, according to the scientific literature cited.

The devastating effects of climate change have also manifested in other ways this year: In June and July, a series of scorching heat waves shattered all-time temperature records in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, killing hundreds and exacerbating existing drought conditions in the region.

In Portland, Oregon, a new record-high temperature was set three consecutive days in a row, finally landing at 116 degrees Fahrenheit on June 28. In Washington state, Dallesport, a small town near the Oregon border, reached 118 degrees, tying the state’s all-time temperature record. And in Lytton, British Columbia, the temperature hit a new Canadian record of 121 degrees — one day before a wildfire tore through the town, killing two and destroying most of the village.

James MacDonald/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The recent heat dome, which experts say would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change, has only contributed to existing drought conditions in the West, and the result has been an “unprecedented” fire season, Canadian firefighter Brady Highway told Vox’s Benji Jones in an interview this month.

Highway, a member of the Peter Ballantyne Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, has been a firefighter for 25 years and fought “around 250 wildland fires” in his career. This year, he says, fires are already “off the charts.”

“We’ve already surpassed the number of fires we’ve experienced in previous years in Canada. British Columbia just initiated a state of emergency, and I suspect Saskatchewan and Ontario will do the same in a couple of weeks,” Highway said. “When I first started fighting fires, there was a very defined fire season — mostly July and August. Now, these events are happening in early spring.”

It’s not just the US, and it’s not just wildfires

As bad as the climate-fueled US fire season is, it’s just one item on a grim list of climate disasters currently battering the world. Siberia is also on fire, for one, and Germany is flooding. So are parts of Turkey. And China. And India. In Colorado, flooding this year has been made worse by wildfires last year. The list goes on.

Already, the flooding in Germany — which also hit neighboring Belgium and the Netherlands — has killed more than 200 people across western Europe, with more than 150 still unaccounted for.

The floods hit with little notice, according to the AP, wreaking havoc and doing billions of euros in damage. And it’s likely to get worse from here: Climate change means future floods could be far more frequent.

“The rainfall we’ve experienced across Europe over the past few days is extreme weather whose intensity is being strengthened by climate change — and will continue to strengthen further with more warming,” Friederike Otto, the associate director at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, told Deutsche Welle.

It’s a similar story in China. Historic rainfall in the city of Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, saw more than 24 inches of rain fall in a single day, including about eight inches in one hour. More than a million people have been displaced, and at least 33 killed — including 12 people who drowned when subway cars in Zhengzhou flooded, according to the Washington Post.

Conditions in Siberia are also particularly bad, thanks to unusually warm weather and the driest summer in more than a century. Already, according to Guardian reporter Andrew Roth, some 3.7 million acres have burned, blanketing the region in oppressive smog.

“It’s a thick smoke, yellow,” Ivan Nikiforov, a volunteer firefighter from Yakutsk, Russia, told the Guardian. “I don’t know how the locals could stand it. It will probably have health effects for them in the future. People are both depressed and angry. This situation should not have been allowed to take place.”

Democrats want to act — but Joe Manchin and the GOP might not let them

As the toll of climate disasters in the US and elsewhere continues to mount, it’s getting more difficult even for skeptics to deny that climate change is an urgent, immediate crisis — an assessment that has long been the consensus view of climate experts with the UN and elsewhere. With the stakes clearly established, President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are pushing for sweeping action to address the problem, but it’s still unclear how climate change legislation will fare in an upcoming budget reconciliation proposal.

Already, as Vox’s Rebecca Leber and Umair Irfan wrote last month, much of Biden’s climate agenda has been stripped out of the bipartisan infrastructure plan still in the works in the Senate, though some provisions remain.

A proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, however, would do more. The bill — which, as proposed, would also cover everything from health care to immigration and a host of other issues — includes a clean electricity standard aimed at reducing emissions by 50 percent over the next nine years, according to E&E News, as well as new clean energy and vehicle tax credits, money for a Civilian Climate Corps, and a clean energy accelerator program.

As Leah Stokes and Sam Ricketts wrote for Vox in February, “clean electricity standards are proven, practical, and popular” — and potentially transformational:

Clean electricity is the backbone of the energy transition — the critical piece that all the other sectors will slot into. Not only will getting to 100 percent clean electricity directly cut more than a quarter of US carbon pollution, it will also enable large parts of our transportation, building, and industrial sectors to run on clean power. Powering as much of these sectors as we can with carbon-free electricity would allow us to cut US emissions 70 to 80 percent. It would, in short, solve a huge chunk of our climate challenge.

Democrats have committed to advance the reconciliation package alongside the bipartisan infrastructure bill as part of a two-track strategy to keep both bills moving ahead of the chamber’s August recess, which is bearing down.

But while reconciliation bills only require a simple majority to pass the Senate, unlike most other legislation — which is subject to the 60-vote threshold imposed by the filibuster — the current set of climate provisions could run into trouble with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), a frequent holdout in the Senate Democratic caucus.

Earlier this month, Manchin, whose home state of West Virginia produces more coal than any state in the US other than Wyoming, told CNN’s Manu Raju that he was “concerned” about the climate portion of the bill.

“Because if they’re eliminating fossils, and I’m finding out there’s a lot of language in places they’re eliminating fossils, which is very, very disturbing, because if you’re sticking your head in the sand, and saying that fossil (fuel) has to be eliminated in America, and they want to get rid of it, and thinking that’s going to clean up the global climate, it won’t clean it up all,” he said. “If anything, it would be worse.”

As David Roberts, former Vox writer and current author of the Substack newsletter Volts, explained last month, that’s pretty much nonsense.

However, as things stand, Democrats still need Manchin’s vote to get anything done — and so, after a week where wildfire smoke from the West Coast blanketed Washington, DC, thousands of miles away, it’s unclear exactly which climate provisions will make the cut in the Senate.

Amazon is hiring a digital currency and blockchain product lead for its payments team, according to a new job listing. First reported by Insider, the ecommerce giant is looking for an “experienced product leader to develop Amazon’s Digital Currency and Blockchain strategy and product roadmap.” The listing, which Amazon has confirmed is legitimate, continues:

You will leverage your domain expertise in Blockchain, Distributed Ledger, Central Bank Digital Currencies and Cryptocurrency to develop the case for the capabilities which should be developed, drive overall vision and product strategy, and gain leadership buy-in and investment for new capabilities.

Amazon.com doesn’t accept cryptocurrency as payment, but a spokesperson told Insider...

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Every single recreational pilot in the US needs to take it ASAP

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Consumer groups have grown increasingly annoyed at the Biden administration's failure to pick a third Democratic Commissioner and permanent FCC boss six months into his term. After the rushed Trump appointment of unqualified Trump BFF Nathan Simington to the agency (as part of that dumb and now deceased plan to have the FCC regulate social media), the agency now sits gridlocked at 2-2 commissioners under interim FCC head Jessica Rosenworcel.

While the FCC can still putter along tackling its usual work on spectrum and device management, the gridlock means it can't do much of anything controversial, like reversing Trump-era attacks on basic telecom consumer protections, media consolidation rules, or the FCC's authority to hold telecom giants accountable for much of, well, anything. If you're a telecom giant like AT&T or Comcast, a gridlocked agency remains a policy gift.

It will take months to appoint and seat a third commissioner and permanent FCC boss. It will take additional months to get that person settled in place to even start working on serious policy proposals. In other words, by the time the FCC is fully staffed, a full year may have been wasted that could have been spent on tackling the not insubstantial problems in the telecom space. While Biden certainly has been aggressive on other fronts (appointing Lina Khan head of the FTC), fixing the mess in telecom clearly hasn't been a top priority.

What has been more of a priority? Appointing former Comcast lobbyist David Cohen to the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, apparently. Cohen held the very first fundraising dinner for Biden's Presidential campaign back in 2019, and has now been amply rewarded for his loyalty:

"Biden has nominated David Cohen, a former senior executive vice president at NBCUniversal owner Comcast, to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Canada. Cohen is currently a senior advisor to Comcast CEO Brian Roberts."

Comcast historically gets very angry when you call Cohen a lobbyist, despite the fact he spearheaded the company's lobbying and policy efforts for the better part of the last decade. After the U.S. updated its feeble lobbying rules in 2007 to require lobbyists to register if they spent any more than 20% of their time lobbying, Comcast simply called what Cohen did...something else. More specifically the company's "Chief Diversity Officer," despite Cohen's actual lack of any, you know, diversity. Cohen was a huge architect of gaining government approval of Comcast's massive 2011 merger with NBC Universal.

Making an aging telecom retiree and loyal fundraiser happy in his twilight years certainly isn't the end of the world. But it's still not a great look when you've prioritized rewarding telecom lobbyists over properly staffing the agency that oversees telecom.

Previous FCC boss Ajit Pai spent four years studying how the FCC worked as a Commissioner, then when appointed agency Chairman by Trump, set about using that knowledge to ruthlessly dismantle not just consumer protections, but state and federal oversight of telecom in general. Usually, Pai operated in perfect symmetry with large regional telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast, embracing some extremely ruthless behavior along the way. Reversing those policies requires a certain level of urgency from team Biden that so far really hasn't been particularly apparent.

How tough Biden will be on telecom remains an open question. While his executive order contained some interesting promises, most can't be accomplished without a properly staffed FCC, or an agency head with a backbone. I can still see things going either way here. I can see him appointing a tougher, Lina-Khan esque type interested in genuine reform. But I can also see him making a safe pick that chirps all the right notes (5G is great! damn that digital divide!) but, like so many in DC, isn't willing to truly acknowledge monopolization and corruption are the primary causes of U.S. telecom dysfunction.

We've noted repeatedly that while "big tech" has faced intense scrutiny over the last few years, "big telecom" has largely seen the exact opposite. Despite being every bit as problematic as tech giants (worse in some ways given their natural monopolies over broadband access), in the last few years the media and telecom sectors (one in the same when it comes to AT&T and Comcast) managed to effectively lobotomize the FCC, obliterate longstanding (and bipartisan) media consolidation rules, gut countless consumer protections, and generally turn the U.S. government into a giant bobble-headed doll with a rubber stamp.

Such favors didn't come cheap. A new joint study by the top telecom union (CWA) and Common Cause found that during the last Congress alone the telecom lobby spent $234 million lobbying the government, or roughly $320,000 every single day. Comcast of course was the biggest spender at more than $43 million in lobbying expenditure, with AT&T not too far behind at $36 million. Money spent to gut oversight of the telecom sector while these same companies pushed for dramatically expanded oversight of the "big tech" companies whose ad revenues they've long coveted.

Given our lobbying disclosure and campaign finance laws are garbage this tally is likely a dramatic undercount, and doesn't include all the dodgy nonsense the industry uses to influence policy, press coverage, and public discourse. You know, like the fake consumer groups or dead and fake people the telecom industry created to create the illusion of support for the net neutrality repeal. Or the money funneled into DC via so-called "dark money" groups:

"Under Citizens United and its progeny, ISPs, trade associations, and other corporations can make unlimited expenditures in federal elections and unlimited contributions to super PACs and dark money groups to be spent on supporting or opposing federal candidates,” the report said.

In addition to gutting the FCC, killing net neutrality, crushing telecom specific privacy rules, and generally demolishing federal (and state!) consumer protection authority, the report notes how telecom lobbying during the last Congressional period helped dismantle all manner of laws with bipartisan support. Including laws that would have shored up network resiliency in the wake of industry outages after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, laws that would have helped fund community broadband, and laws that would have restored basic consumer protections like net neutrality:

"The groups found that one of the industry’s top targets during the last Congress was the Save the Internet Act, which would have restored net neutrality and the FCC consumer protection authority stripped away during the Trump administration (amidst a flood of empty promises). Telecom lobbyists also fought against the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act, which includes money to help fund local community broadband. And they successfully derailed the RESILIENT Networks Act, proposed as an attempt to shore up Puerto Rico network resiliency after prolonged telecom outages from hurricanes Irma and Maria."

It takes a lot of time and money to keep the U.S. government appropriately feckless and slack-jawed in the face of obvious and rampant regional telecom monopolization. All propped up by a very elaborate ecosystem of think tanks, consultants, economists, academics, and marketing firms hired to pretend there's no actual problem that needs fixing. As such, you really can't fix the U.S. broadband problem (or any of a number of issues, like climate change) until you tackle the underlying corruption that enables it. But if you hadn't noticed, there's no real DC interest in actually doing that, so here we are.

The report recommends shoring up lobbying laws so that lobbyists can't just tap dance around requirements (see Comcast lobbyist David Cohen avoiding requirements by just calling what he did something else). The report also recommends passing the the For the People Act, which includes several provisions shoring up lobbying and campaign finance loopholes. But given the Congressional votes you'd need to pass such laws are compromised by the very lobbying these proposals want to fix, you're stuck with a chicken-and-egg scenario where dysfunction and corruption remains the norm.

We got our first look at Verizon’s Smart Display last month thanks to an FCC filing. Yesterday, Amazon confirmed the device’s existence as part of its Alexa Live presentation. It’s being introduced as part of the Alexa Custom Assistant program that allows third-party device manufacturers to add custom assistants built on top of Alexa technology to their products, and we regret to inform you that it looks just as useless as we first suspected.

Here’s what it offers: standard smart display stuff, like an eight-inch screen, 4GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi connectivity, and of course, Alexa. It also comes with LTE, a spec included in the FCC filing and confirmed to CNET following the announcement. But the purpose of 4G appears...

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Facebook’s CEO on why the social network is becoming ‘a metaverse company’

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Cloud computing giant Salesforce has completed its acquisition of Slack, a $27.7 billion dollar deal that adds the messaging app to its suite of enterprise software without immediately changing Slack’s functionality, branding, or leadership.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement that “Together we’ll define the future of enterprise software, creating the digital HQ that enables every organization to deliver customer and employee success from anywhere.”

While Slack hasn’t quite killed email, it has attracted notice from giants like Microsoft, the company that Slack co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield called “unhealthily preoccupied with killing us” in a conversation with The Verge last year.

“In a different universe where...

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By Ryan Daily
Talks up the idea of the “digital HQ,” leaving details for another day.

Customers are largely unaware that some of their favorite stores are using facial recognition tech.

Some of the US’s most popular stores — including Macy’s and Albertsons — are using facial recognition on their customers, largely without their knowledge, according to the digital rights nonprofit Fight the Future.

On July 14, Fight for the Future helped launch a nationwide campaign to document which of the country’s biggest retailers are deploying facial recognition, and which ones have committed to not use the technology. The campaign, which has the support of more than 35 human rights groups, aims to draw attention to retail stores using facial-scanning algorithms to boost their profits, intensify security systems, and even track their employees.

The campaign comes as a clear reminder that the reach of facial recognition goes far beyond law enforcement and into the private, commercial storefronts we regularly visit. Experts warn that facial recognition in these spaces is particularly concerning because the technology is largely unregulated and undisclosed, meaning both customers and employees may be unaware this software is surveilling and collecting data about them.

“A lot of people would probably be surprised to know how many retailers that they shop in on a regular basis are using this technology in a variety of ways to protect their profits and maximize their profits as well,” Caitlin Seeley George, a campaign director at Fight for the Future, told Recode.

While you may not have heard of it before, stores using facial recognition isn’t a new practice. Last year, Reuters reported that the drug chain Rite Aid had deployed facial recognition in at least 200 stores over nearly a decade (before the company suddenly committed to ditching the software). In fact, facial recognition is just one of several technologies store chains are deploying to enhance their security systems, or to otherwise surveil customers. Some retailers, for instance, have used apps and in-store wifi to track users while they move around physical stores and later target them with online ads.

A handful of popular stores, including the grocery chain Albertsons and Macy’s, are already using facial recognition, according to Fight for the Future’s database. How exactly these retailers are using facial recognition can be unclear, since companies typically aren’t upfront about it.

At the same time, a growing number of technology startups and security firms are looking for opportunities to sell this software to stores. Some of these sellers are already well-known, like Clearview AI, the controversial startup that scraped billions of people’s images from social media. But there are plenty of other facial recognition providers that have attracted less attention, such as firms like AnyVision, which announced it had raised $235 million just last week.

Stores are embracing facial recognition tech because, they claim, it can help them prevent theft. But experts warn this technology raises alarms. Customers rarely know that this technology is in use, leaving them without the opportunity to say no or remove themselves from a store’s facial recognition-based watch list. At the same time, facial recognition algorithms can be inaccurate, and come with built-in racial and gender biases. In 2019, Apple was sued by a New York undergraduate student who alleges that the company uses facial recognition tech for security purposes and that it inaccurately linked him to several thefts at Apple stores that he didn’t commit.

“We’re really concerned about how employees at retailers using facial recognition are impacted in a large part because they don’t really have an option to opt out if it comes to a point where people can either have their job and be under surveillance or not have a job,” George, of Fight for the Future, told Recode. Customers living in areas where there are few options for stores can also end up being coerced into accepting the technology, she added.

One of the main challenges is that facial recognition is mostly unregulated, and many current efforts to rein in the technology primarily focus on its use by government and law enforcement. “The laws are so different it would be probably impossible to write a clean, clearly understood bill regulating both consumer and government,” Brian Hofer, who helped put together the facial recognition ban in San Francisco, told Recode last year.

But there have been attempts to regulate this tech, even when used privately. In 2019, Lowe’s and Home Depot were sued for using facial recognition in violation of Illinois’s biometric privacy law, one of the strongest laws in the country. Just this month, a New York City law finally went into effect that requires stores and businesses to tell customers when they collect their biometric data. And this week, the commission that oversees the Port of Seattle voted to ban biometric tech from its facilities.

While members of Congress have proposed several ideas for giving customers more protection against private companies’ use of facial recognition, there’s yet to be significant regulation at the federal level. “In the vast majority of cities and towns, there are no rules on when private companies can use surveillance tech, and when they can share the information with police, ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], or even private ads,” warns Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.

In the meantime, Fight for the Future is moving forward with its plan to call out companies already using the technology. The group is also collecting information about competing stores that don’t use facial recognition, so people can have the option to avoid this surveillance if they want.

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Correction, July 19, 2021: An earlier version of this story said Ace Hardware uses facial recognition. Ace Hardware said in a statement that the specific store location Fight for the Future cited in its database does not use the technology. Ace Hardware did not clarify whether any other store locations use this tech. Fight for the Future has since updated its database.

On Friday, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) announced that the state plans to invest $700 million in American Rescue Plan funding to reach universal broadband connectivity by 2024. This new investment shaves four years off of the governor’s original plan to connect every household to high-speed broadband.

The pandemic dramatically affected the ways in which people work and attend school — pushing many office-holders to renew efforts to ensure citizens are able to get online. According to Northam, more than 233,000 homes and businesses in Virginia are without broadband access.

“It’s time to close the digital divide in our Commonwealth and treat Internet service like the 21st...

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When you’re using WhatsApp your messages are encrypted end-to-end, which means prying eyes can’t easily see what’s in them as they travel back and forth. However, if you keep a backup stored in the cloud, authorities can use a search warrant to have Google Drive or iCloud hand over access to the data. But WABetaInfo has reported previously that WhatsApp is working on the technology to independently encrypt your backups in the cloud, and says that in the most recent beta update on Android (2.21.15.5), the system has been enabled.

Opting in should keep your chat history and media securely backed up, with the significant caveat that if you forget your passcode / lose the 64-digit recovery key, then they’ll be locked away permanently — even...

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Republicans are less likely to say remote workers labor just as hard as or harder than non-remote workers.

Most Americans approve of letting people work from home. But like many things in the US, that perception depends on one’s politics.

While Republicans are overall positive about remote work, they were less likely to approve of it compared with Democrats (81 percent versus 89 percent), according to a new poll by Vox and Data for Progress.

Additionally, Republicans were less likely to say remote workers labored just as hard or harder than non-remote workers (50 percent versus 75 percent).

Republicans were also less likely than Democrats to say remote workers were equally or more productive than non-remote workers (57 percent versus 71 percent).

The survey of more than 1,000 people was conducted online earlier this month and is weighted to be representative of the US adult population.

Despite the difference between Republicans and Democrats, the high approval rate overall is a good sign for those who would like to continue working from home after the pandemic. Positive perceptions about remote work could help ensure its continuance — especially since workers and their employers have some disagreements about the future of remote work.

More than half of Americans worked from home earlier in the pandemic. And it went surprisingly well, with workers, their managers, and objective studies reporting that employees maintained or increased their levels of productivity.

So it makes sense that over the course of the pandemic, employees’ desire to continue working from home increased, and so did employers’ willingness to let them. But there’s still a gap between what employees want and what employers say they’re going to do, according to data from a study authored in part by Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom. Employees would like to work from home about half the time, while employers plan to let them do so about one day a week.

As the more acute effects of the pandemic are subsiding and the number of people who work remotely is declining, numerous surveys of employers — as well as a giant increase in the number of remote job listings — suggest that many Americans will continue to work from home at least some of the time even when the pandemic ends. What’s less clear is how often that will be.

As for the difference between Republicans and Democrats, it’s possible the survey responses reflect the political makeup of remote workers. The survey sample size wasn’t large enough to accurately look at the political parties of those who worked remotely. However, the responses were equally positive among people who did and didn’t work remotely. That’s consistent with data from Boston Consulting Group that said the majority of people, regardless of whether it was feasible in their industry, wanted to work remotely.

But we also know that states whose voters lean Republican had a lower rate of working from home during the pandemic (30 percent) than Democratic states (35 percent), according to the Bloom study, which measured the overall work from home rate at 33 percent from May 2020 to March 2021. The desire to work from home after Covid-19 was only slightly higher for Democrats (46 percent versus 45 for Republicans).

“Trump aligned the Republican Party to being more working-class and less educated, and these jobs have a far lower ability to work from home,” Bloom told Recode in an email.

Overall, though, working from home is a valuable perk, with the average employee saying it’s worth about 7 percent of their salary, according to Bloom’s study. It’s not worth much more than that. Our survey, which asked whether people would prefer the ability to work from home or to receive a 10 percent pay raise, found that two-thirds of people would go for the raise.

In addition to the 25 percent of employed people whose jobs are currently fully remote, another 30 percent said some of their work could be done remotely. It’s likely more jobs will have remote possibilities as employers use it as a perk to attract workers in what’s a very tight job market.

How commonplace remote work ends up being remains to be seen, but proponents of the practice have public opinion on their side.

Plex, the popular build-your-own streaming service, has added 15 new channels to its ad-supported streaming offering for free TV.

All of the new channels available on Plex’s free Live TV feed arrive on the service today, and most will be available globally (though a spokesperson told The Verge that some are available in Latin America or the US only). Plex originally launched the free TV feature last year as a collection of pre-programmed, continuous channels rather than traditional over-the-air streams. So it’s not quite live TV, but it does offer a similar linear experience if you’re just looking to throw something on.

Of these new channels, some notable additions include MMA TV, USA Today, USA Today Sportswire, and the Tribeca Channel....

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