As the coronavirus pandemic has spread around the world, with millions infected and thousands dead, billionaire Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates has pledged a quarter billion dollars to combat the disease through his foundation.
In a letter published to his blog, Bill Gates is once again sounding the alarm for emergency preparedness: "As awful as this pandemic is, climate change could be worse," Gates said. "If you want to understand the kind of damage that climate change will inflict, look at COVID-19 and spread the pain out over a much longer period of time."
Gates has been an advocate for pandemic preparedness for years, and his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is contributing financing to several coronavirus vaccine initiatives.
He also famously gave a 2015 TED talk warning of the potential devastation caused by — and urged readiness for — a worldwide pandemic.
Bill Gates has advocated for pandemic preparedness for years, and famously gave a TED talk in 2015 that warned of the potentially staggering death toll a worldwide pandemic could create.
Now, Gates is once again urging preparedness for a potentially devastating emergency.
"As awful as this pandemic is, climate change could be worse," Gates said in a blog published on Tuesday. "If you want to understand the kind of damage that climate change will inflict, look at COVID-19 and spread the pain out over a much longer period of time. The loss of life and economic misery caused by this pandemic are on par with what will happen regularly if we do not eliminate the world's carbon emissions."
Gates compared the mortality rate of coronavirus — approximately 14 deaths per 100,000 — to the expected increase in mortality rate due to rising global temperatures.
"Within the next 40 years, increases in global temperatures are projected to raise global mortality rates by the same amount — 14 deaths per 100,000," he said. "By the end of the century, if emissions growth stays high, climate change could be responsible for 73 extra deaths per 100,000 people. In a lower emissions scenario, the death rate drops to 10 per 100,000."
In either projection, Gates said, the mortality rate is either similar to current coronavirus death rates, or far higher.
"By 2060, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19," he said, "and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly."
The economic impact could be similarly dire, Gates said, with the equivalent expenditure and financial pain from the pandemic occurring "every ten years" as governments are forced to spend more of GDP dealing with the effects of climate change. "And by the end of the century, it will be much worse if the world remains on its current emissions path," he said.
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It will finally be slightly easier to share files, images, links, and other content between Android devices. Google is launching a new Android feature called “Nearby Share” that enables direct sharing between any device running Android 6 and up. Nearby Share is already available on some Pixel and Samsung phones, and Google says it’ll arrive on other devices “over the next few weeks.”
Nearby Share works very much like Apple’s AirDrop feature for the iPhone: you simply select the Nearby Share button on the share menu and then wait for a nearby phone to appear. Then whatever thing you’re sharing is sent directly over your transfer method of choice to the other phone.
As with AirDrop, you can set your preferred visibility for Nearby Share...
Graham Clark, the 17-year-old charged with orchestrating a massive Twitter hack last month, reportedly has a history of scamming people with Bitcoin.
Clark faces 30 felony charges in Florida, where he is accused of taking over dozens of verified Twitter accounts, including those of Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Kim Kardashian, to trick people into handing over money.
Legal records show that Clark was previously suspected of being involved in the theft of $856,000 at age 16 but was never charged.
He also reportedly built a reputation in Minecraft communities as a grifter who would frequently scam people out of their money.
New details are surfacing about the 17-year-old accused of "masterminding" last month's massive Twitter hack — and they reveal a pattern of scams dating back years.
Last year, Graham Ivan Clark was the subject of a criminal investigation in which Florida prosecutors seized $15,000 and 400 Bitcoin, his lawyer said.
Prosecutors ultimately did not charge Clark last year and returned the cash and 300 Bitcoin to him, worth over $3 million. The victim in that case told The New York Times that prosecutors didn't charge Clark at the time because he was still a minor.
In the years before that, Clark reportedly built a reputation as a frequent scammer online, including in the online video game Minecraft. Clark's former friends told The New York Times that he would regularly demand money in exchange for in-game items, only to keep the items for himself after receiving payment.
Social media posts from Clark's now-deleted Instagram account, @error, reportedly showed Clark posing with designer sneakers and a Rolex watch in recent months.
Clark faces 30 felony charges in Tampa, Florida, for his purported involvement in the Twitter hack, which compromised more than 100 accounts, including those belonging to Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Kim Kardashian, and posted messages encouraging people to send Bitcoin to a scammer's address.
Clark's bail has been set at $725,000, the Tampa Bay Times reported Sunday.
Clark is accused of collaborating with others on the Twitter hack — Mason Sheppard, 19, who lives in the United Kingdom and goes by "Chaewon," and Nima Fazeli, 22, of Orlando, Florida, who goes by "Rolex," were both arrested in connection with the hack, the Department of Justice said.
Dish has acquired Ting Mobile, a small cell service provider, in its latest step toward becoming a major nationwide carrier. Ting launched in 2012 and had 286,000 subscribers as of July 2018, making it downright tiny. Since Ting relied on other carriers’ wireless networks, the acquisition really only gives Dish the branding and customers.
The bigger piece of this deal is something that most people won’t see: Ting’s parent company, the internet services company Tucows, will provide backend mobile services for the nationwide network Dish is building out. That includes core functions like customer billing, phone activation, and network provisioning — services that Dish needs in place before it can launch a truly independent wireless...
Fitness brand Garmin paid millions of dollars in ransom after an attack took many of its products and services offline last month, Sky News reports. The payment was reportedly made through a ransomware negotiation company called Arete IR, in order for Garmin to recover data held hostage as a result of the attack.
BleepingComputer reported last week that Garmin had received a decryption key to access data encrypted by the virus, and that the initial ransom demand was for $10 million.
The attack itself began on July 23rd, and put Garmin’s wearables, apps, website, and even its call centers offline for several days. Garmin confirmed that it had been the victim of a cyberattack on July 27th, as many of its services were starting to come...
Bryan Tintes used to defend the post office. For the last eight years, he has run a small business based out of Madison, Wisconsin that ships key replacements around the country. His entire business is predicated on fast, reliable service, because people need their key replacements quickly. When he first launched the company in 2013, he used all the major carriers for shipping, but quickly found the United States Postal Service was the best. Not only was it the cheapest service, but it was also the most reliable. Over the years, he structured his entire business around the post office, down to making sure his office is located next to a USPS drop-off location.
“So many of our customers are shocked that we exclusively use USPS that we had to create a blog,” Tintes wrote to Motherboard in an email. For years, Tintes has shipped about 400 packages a week around the country. About 97 percent would arrive on time and the rest perhaps a day later. The blog explaining why he used USPS, which was published in May of 2019, was titled “NEW AND IMPROVED—NOT YOUR OLD POST OFFICE.”
But in recent weeks, Tintes can no longer defend the post office. He estimates one in five packages are not reaching their destination on time. And they are not delayed by a day or two like before. Entire batches of packages go missing for weeks inside a USPS distribution facility or are routed to the wrong part of the country. On Monday, Tintes received a package from a customer in Miami sent via priority mail (typical delivery time of 2-3 days) that was three weeks late. Express mail, which used to take a day to get delivered, can now take a week or more.
“Currently, I think my biggest concern is being able to maintain the super fast processing my company is known for,” Tintes wrote. “If we lose the ability to quickly process orders we will lose customers very quickly.”
Tintes is hardly alone. Small business owners around the country rely on the post office because it is much cheaper, especially for packages, than their private sector competitors like FedEx and UPS. A 2019 report by the USPS Office of the Investigator General found that 70 percent of microbusinesses—defined as any business with fewer than 10 employees—used the post office within the last six months, spending on average $359 per month on shipping, and more than half of them said they ship with the post office most frequently.
But these small business owners are increasingly being let down by the post office.
The coronavirus pandemic has been tough on the USPS, which receives no government subsidy and is funded entirely through user fees. The pandemic exacerbated staffing issues at facilities around the country as the post office continued its decade-plus effort to trim its workforce and cut costs in order to stay financially solvent because a Congressional mandate that it pre-fund health care benefits for current and future employees made it practically impossible for the post office to remain solvent.
While this trimming of the workforce by some 77,000 employees left the post office in a poor position to deal with staffing issues during the pandemic and resulted in some slowed service, the impact was not nearly as bad as it is now, thanks to new policies instituted by postmaster general and Trump donor Louis DeJoy.
According to emails from and interviews with dozens of current USPS employees from around the country, all of whom requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation for speaking to the media, DeJoy has instituted new policies—ostensibly about cutting costs and operating more efficiently—that have handcuffed the post office from being able to process the surge in packages (regular mail like letters, magazines, and newspapers are also impacted, although its volume has significantly reduced during the pandemic because of the decline in marketing mail). Overtime has been heavily restricted, which employees say they need to sort and deliver all of the packages that have flooded into the system sustaining a holiday season-esque surge for months. As a result, employees at processing and distribution facilities can no longer work more hours in order to handle the increased package load. Likewise, trucks from one facility to another must leave at their pre-scheduled time whether all the mail is on it or not and they cannot send extra trucks if the packages don’t fit in one. The longer the policy has been in effect, the worse the backlog gets.
Plus, per the new overtime policy, carriers who deliver the mail now must come to work later and are restricted to spending a mere half hour sorting and loading their trucks in the morning, a task that previously took at least two hours, according to multiple letter carriers around the country. Anything that doesn’t get loaded is left behind for another day.
Do you work for the post office? Know something about the mail delays? We’d love to hear from you. Email Aaron Gordon at aaron.gordon@vice.com.
“We have taken immediate steps to better adhere to our existing operating plans, which were developed precisely to ensure that we meet our present service standards in an efficient and effective manner,” Partenheimer said. “Of course we acknowledge that temporary service impacts can occur as we redouble our efforts to conform to the current operating plans, but any such impacts will be monitored and temporary as the root causes of any issues will be addressed as necessary and corrected as appropriate.”
To mask the delays, at least some post office managers have resorted to scanning packages as having attempted delivery when they never left the facility. It’s not clear how common this practice is, but it was confirmed by a postal worker in Wisconsin who said they witnessed their manager scanning packages as having the “delivery attempted” while in the office to fudge the numbers.
Tintes confirmed this pattern, telling Motherboard he has seen it happen occasionally over the years but it has ramped up significantly in recent weeks along with the delays. “Sometimes the package is marked ‘Scanned into facility X’ then ‘Delivery Attempted’ within just a few minutes of each other,” he told Motherboard. Tintes even had a few customers tell him they got the “delivery attempted” status update even though their building has a doorman.
Combined with the longstanding staffing shortages exacerbated by coronavirus, the USPS is in an impossible position, attempting to deliver too many packages with too few employees on a schedule that is far too short.
“Our hands are tied,” one letter carrier from Wilmington, Delaware told Motherboard, “and we are constantly set up for failure.”
Small business owners have noticed. Forums for sellers on Amazon and eBay have been flooded with comments about shipping delays and angry customers.
And customers aren’t always forgiving. “As a small business, I can’t afford to have my shipments late or lost,” one smaller business owner based in Florida who didn’t want to use their name because they fear having their business politicized told Motherboard. “Customers don’t care that it isn’t my fault. And because this hasn’t hit national news to any degree, people don’t know this is happening so they expect their orders.”
For his part, Tintes is now contemplating switching to UPS, which would be worse for both Tintes and the post office. Tintes would have to pay upwards of a dollar more per package, costing him more than $1,200 a month in shipping costs, not to mention the costs of reworking the back end of the order process for UPS’s systems instead of USPS.
As for the post office, small businesses like Tintes taking their business elsewhere would only exacerbate its financial crisis. UPS (as well as FedEx and Amazon for that matter) still use USPS to complete the so-called “last mile” of delivery for many packages, particularly in rural areas where FedEx and UPS don’t serve but the post office is legally mandated to.
As a result, the private shipping companies lean on USPS to deliver packages when they don’t have the capacity to do so. Two postal workers at separate USPS processing and distribution facilities told Motherboard they have seen a huge surge of UPS and Amazon packages recently. So USPS would lose out on most of Tintes’s business, but still get handed responsibility for the most unprofitable part of the shipping process.
In a statement published on the post office’s website on July 27, DeJoy said these changes were necessary and “it is imperative for the Postal Service to operate efficiently and effectively. Indeed, there are alternatives to every product that we offer, and the only way that the Postal Service can continue to provide prompt, reliable, and affordable universal postal services for all Americans over the long-term is by vigorously focusing on the efficiency of our operations.”
But the small business owners Motherboard spoke to aren’t buying it. “The postal service is part of our nation’s infrastructure and was never designed to be profitable,” said the small business owner from Florida. “If we lose the postal service, I will lose a substantial part of my business and so will millions of other small businesses that rely on the postal service.” This person added that they are a Republican and voted for Trump, but now regrets it.
WhatsApp, the popular, Facebook-owned messaging app, is rolling out a feature that helps users fact-check information forwarded in message chains.
A magnifying glass icon now appears in the chat, which can redirect users to search the web for sources of information on the topic discussed in the message.
The feature is the company's latest attempt to help curb the spread of misinformation.
In early April, WhatsApp set a limit for how many times a message can be forwarded at one time in response to a rise in misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
WhatsApp rolled out a feature allowing users to fact-check content contained in forwarded message chains.
A magnifying glass will now appear alongside messages that have been forwarded to five people or more, according to a company blog post published Monday. Users can click the icon and be redirected to the web to search for news results that shed more light on the topic discussed in the messages.
Per the blog post, users can upload the message directly into their web browser to more easily search for other sources of information, and WhatsApp does not see the message itself.
The feature, dubbed "Search the web," rolled out to users in the US, the UK, Brazil, and other locales on Monday. WhatsApp did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
WhatsApp is one of the many social media firms tasked with combatting misinformation on their platforms, and this new feature is the company's latest attempt to do so.
WhatsApp set a 5-person limit for the number of times a message can be forwarded at one time in early April in response to a rise in misinformation and conspiracy theories pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic. A company spokesperson told Business Insider in late April that WhatsApp indeed saw a 70% drop in the number of messages frequently forwarded to users. WhatsApp does not view the messages, but sharing private messages en masse is one way in which misinformation can more easily spread.
A double-arrow symbol also appears next to a forwarded message a user receives if it was written by someone they do not know.
Facebook acquired WhatsApp in early 2014 for $19 billion.
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott had vowed that the tech giant would not resort to layoffs as the COVID crisis battered the tech industry earlier this year.
Not only has ServiceNow kept that promise, but the tech giant has expanded its workforce by 20% to meet stronger demand due to the sudden shift to remote work during the COVID crisis.
"Not only are we not doing layoffs, we've hired 20% more people," he told Business Insider. "We're a 20% bigger company. We're adding jobs left, right and center."
ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott vowed that the cloud software company would not resort to layoffs as the COVID crisis was upending the tech industry four months ago.
The tech giant, which has about 12,000 employees, not only kept that promise, it has even gone on a hiring binge as the crisis ended up boosting demand for the cloud platform that helps businesses automate their workflow and operations.
ServiceNow says the Silicon Valley company has added 1,500 full time employees, including about 300 tech interns, since the crisis began.
"I told you no layoffs," McDermott told Business Insider. "Not only are we not doing layoffs, we've hired 20% more people. We're a 20% bigger company. We're adding jobs left, right and center."
The coronavirus crisis led to a big spike in demand for cloud-based enterprise software applications — including ServiceNow — that businesses needed to adapt to the sudden shift to remote work.
"In March, there was the shock of, 'What does it all mean?'" McDermott said. "Now, I think that it has become the normal operating environment albeit obviously a very abnormal situation."
ServiceNow's second-quarter results, which it reported last week, underlined its market momentum. The company beat Wall Street estimates as it recorded a 30% jump in subscription revenue.
In fact, McDermott said ServiceNow is expanding its workforce because it anticipates even stronger demand for its cloud services and tools in the next few years.
"You have to take the medium and long-term view when it comes to human capital," he said. "We're absolutely convinced that what we do now will be mission critical to what happens in 2021, 2022 and 2023."
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We've mentioned at great length how Trump's executive order to more heavily "regulate" social media is an unworkable joke. It attempts to tackle a problem that doesn't exist ("Conservative censorship") by attacking a law that actually protects free speech (Section 230), all to be enforced by agencies (like the FCC) that don't actually have the authority to do anything of the sort. You can't overrule the law by executive order or regulatory fiat, nor can you ignore the Constitution. The EO is a dumb joke by folks who don't understand how any of this works, and it should be treated as such.
Instead, most press coverage of the move is still somehow framed as "very serious adult policy," despite being little more than a glorified brain fart.
The FCC also knows the order is unworkable garbage that flies directly in the face of years of espoused (government hands off) ideology by Ajit Pai, Brendan Carr and friends. And yet, terrified of upsetting dear leader, Pai issued a totally feckless statement on Monday stating the EO would be pushed through the rule-making process, pretending as if this was all just ordinary, sensible tech policy:
Today, the @FCC's Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau will invite public input on the petition for rulemaking recently filed by @CommerceGov regarding #Section230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. My statement is below. pic.twitter.com/RSwm5suq9z
This is, you'll recall, the same guy who spent the last eight years insisting that fairly modest consumer protections governing telecom monopolies (net neutrality, privacy) was a vile example of "government run amok." It's the same guy whose entire policy platform revolves around the idea that hands off, limited government oversight universally results in near-mystical outcomes. The order to have the FCC regulate social media giants runs in stark contrast to nearly everything Pai professes to believe, including his adoration of free speech (since eliminating 230 would all but guarantee less of it). And yet he's completely unwilling to make so much as a cautiously critical peep.
Even if Pai's worried that he'll just be replaced by Carr (whose somehow even worse about intellectual consistency) for showing the slightest shred of backbone, there are ways that Pai could express his disdain for this order without upsetting King Donald (perhaps just use big words). But Pai does nothing of the sort. He's completely selling out everything he believes in to make Donald happy. Not only that, he attempts to frame the idea that we should shut down an idiotic assault on free speech before wasting everybody's time as itself an attack on free speech.
As a result we're wasting agency time and taxpayer resources (during a pandemic no less when 42 million Americans lack broadband, something actually under FCC authority) to pursue an inherently dumb and dangerous idea.
Now we move on to the next step in pretending this is real policy: opening the FCC comment system to 45 day of public comments. Except as we saw with the net neutrality repeal (in which the telecom industry used fake and dead people to support terrible and unpopular policy), the FCC doesn't actually do much to prevent fraud or abuse. So anybody eager to see Silicon Valley saddled with additional regulatory oversight (like its ad competitors in telecom or K Street political operatives) are going to stuff the ballot box with nonsense, taking us further down the rabbit hole of pretending Trump's EO is serious adult policy making.
In short we've got a garbage, unworkable proposal being shuffled through elaborate NTIA and FCC policy making system at taxpayer expense during a crisis, all "supported" by people too afraid of Donald Trump to show even the faintest hint of consistency or backbone. In other words, just another ordinary Monday in Washington.
Zoom is halting direct sales of its video conferencing products in mainland China and will only sell there through third party partners.
This move comes as Zoom relationship with China has been questioned by lawmakers and users over the last few months, though Zoom doesn't cite that as the reason for the change.
The change will take effect on August 23, and users in mainland China will still be able to join Zoom meetings as participants, a company spokesperson told Business Insider.
In recent months, Zoom mistakenly routed user data through China and shut down activist accounts at the request of the Chinese government, leading to increased scrutiny over its ties to the country.
Zoom will halt direct sales of its video conferencing products in mainland China, and will instead only offer its technology through a few third party partners, the company announced on its website in China on Monday.
The move comes as Zoom's surge in popularity has led to scrutiny of its ties to China, though Zoom doesn't cite any reason for the change.
Zoom's online video conferencing technology will now be embedded in services from partners like Bizconf Communications, Suirui Zhumu Video Conference, and Systec Umeet, and no longer sold as a standalone product, though users in mainland China will still be able to join regular Zoom meetings as participants. The change will take effect on August 23, a Zoom spokesperson told Business Insider. CNBC first reported the change.
"Our go-to-market model in Mainland China has included direct sales, online subscription, and sales through partners. We are now shifting to a partner-only model with Zoom technology embedded in partner offerings, which will provide better local support to users in Mainland China," Zoom said in a statement.
This move follows changes Zoom made in May to suspend new free user registrations in Mainland China and only allow corporate customers to sign up for Zoom accounts.
Zoom is a US-based company, headquartered and founded in San Jose, California, and its CEO Eric Yuan is a US citizen who immigrated from China in the 1990s. However, a large portion of its development team is based in China, according to a company regulatory filing from March.
A few incidents this year have put the company under scrutiny from lawmakers and users for its ties to China. In April, the company admitted that it mistakenly routed some meetings through data servers in China. Zoom then added a feature to give paid Zoom users control over which data centers are used to route their calls, and free users outside of China would no longer never have their calls routed through the country.
Then, in June, Zoom shut down the account of activists who hosted events commemorating the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests at the request of the Chinese government.In a subsequent blog post, Zoom said it had shut down the host's accounts and meetings because it did not have the capability to block users individually by country and in the future would "not allow requests from the Chinese government to impact anyone outside of mainland China.
Recently, Senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking it to investigate Zoom and TikTok, citing concerns over potential security threats from ties to the Chinese government.
Zoom's move comes as TikTok is under scrutiny in the US because it is owned by Chinese company Bytedance. Lawmakers have accused the app of sending American user data to China, and though TikTok has denied those allegations, the Trump administration has threatened to ban the app unless it is sold to a US company. Microsoft has expressed interest in buying it.
While Zoom distances itself from China, it is expanding its presence in India. The company plans to open a technology center in Bangalore, and is recruiting DevOps engineers, and IT, Security, and Business Operations personnel in India, according to a late July blog post. It already has offices and data centers in Mumbai and Hyderabad.
Montblanc has released new smart headphones. It marks the heritage brand's first major foray into new technology.
The company also released a smartwatch collection.
In a new interview with Business Insider, Felix Obschonka, Montblanc's director of new technologies, spoke about designing new products and how the company plans to continue its expansion in tech.
This is part of Business Insider's "The Style Series," highlighting fashion entrepreneurs around the world.
Headphones have arguably become the most important accessory of the modern era.
People listen more than ever now — to music, while playing video games, as they edit movies, and when watching TV shows. And of course, they're taking more Zoom calls from home now in the era of remote work prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.
Montblanc, a heritage brand founded in Germany in 1906 and best known for its high-end pens and leather goods, has pivoted its offerings to meet the more modern needs of its customer. The company launched its MB O1 headphones and smartwatch collections earlier this year.
In an interview with Business Insider, Montblanc's director of new technologies Felix Obschonka explains the process of developing Montblanc's new tech and why the company decided to expand into a new sector.
Editor's note: The below interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
"The headphones are our most travel-focused product, in the new tech line up that we have."
When we ask our customers, 'what is the tool or technology that is most important for you for traveling' — noise-canceling headphones are coming quite high in the list, because it gives them silence from the outside world. They actually can shut out all the noise and stress they have and really focus either on their work or actually relax.
"We took a well-experienced design partner, who helped us get the right angles when thinking about the function of the headphones."
We also got a lot of experts from the sound industry who helped us in optimizing the sound. Overall, designing the headphones took us half a year or so. And then the total process of building a pair of headphones is usually between a year and a year and a half.
"We're also building mechanical watches. We wanted to have a watch that was true to watch design codes."
The watch really looks like a fine Swiss watch, that people would love to wear because they think it's fashionable and good looking. But it spurs with the latest technology. This one can actually comparatively connect to a network without the need for a phone. It was important that we have this connection between the latest technology and the best in design.
"It's very crucial [for Montblanc] to design products that are known for quality, craftsmanship, and fine materials. "
We see sometimes, a lot of products are, let's say, cost-driven — where people actually say, 'okay, for sure I could do this with nice fine leather material, but if I do it out of another material, I would save costs.' That's something we would never do.
"Technology has become such an integral part of our life … So technology products become important."
Consumers have an expectation for brands to touch every aspect of their life, or a lot more of their life than ever before.
A lot of our consumers expect us to give them a holistic experience — meaning that you're not only getting your duffle bag, your writing instrument, and the watch, but you get the full experience from the brand.
Microsoft plans to begin reopening its offices on January 19, 2021, the company confirmed to Business Insider.
The company sent an email to employees on July 30 informing them of a new "hybrid workplace strategy," and extending the option to work remotely through at least January 19.
"We continue to review the situation on a local basis in each region/country/state where we work and will continue to adjust dates by country as needed,"a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to Business Insider.
Microsoft told employees that it's planning a six-stage hybrid workplace transition back to the office, as first reported by The Verge. Employees are currently at stage two: "mandatory working from home." The next four stages go from, "working from home strongly encouraged" to slowly reopening offices, with restrictions.
Microsoft began closing its offices in Redmond, Washington and the San Francisco Bay Area back in March when the coronavirus spread across West coast. It announced in May that offices would reopen in October.
While some companies like Twitter and Spotify have decided to allow employees to work from home indefinitely, others have grappled with when and how to slowly reopen their offices. Amazon plans on reopening offices in early January, while Salesforce is opening its 160 offices slowly and instituting temperature scans.
Google, meanwhile, announced employees will continue to work from home until July 2021, shuttering their offices for more than a year.
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Citrix disclosed its amended cloud deal in a regulatory filing today following an announcement this month that it was expanding its partnership with Microsoft Azure, which will be ‘a preferred cloud platform’ for the solution provider.
Google parent company Alphabet warned in last quarter that it was expecting to see the impact of coronavirus in the second quarter results, and it was: the company saw its first revenue decline in its history. But it managed to beat Wall Street’s revenue expectations.
Total revenue for the quarter was $38.3 billion, versus the $37.4 billion expected, but that marks a 2 percent decline from the second quarter of 2019. Net income dropped from $9.9 billion a year ago, to $6.9 billion. Revenue for Search was $21.3 billion, down from $23.6 billion.
One bright spot was YouTube, where advertising revenue rose from $3.6 billion last year, to $3.81 billion this year. Google’s Cloud division saw rising revenue as well.
Silicon Valley's reputation as the world's leading tech hub could be in jeopardy because of the United States' restrictive immigration laws.
Tens of thousands of immigrant tech workers have flocked to Toronto in the past few years, making it the fastest growing tech hub in North America.
Many of them are deliberately avoiding the US as the Trump administration clamps down on immigration. In June, President Donald Trump temporarily suspended visas known as H-1B visas, which are awarded to thousands of skilled immigrant workers each year.
The visa suspension is prompting some immigrants, like former Silicon Valley product manager Asim Fayaz, to move north to Canada.
"There is a whole world out there, and you are probably better off going somewhere else because you'd be treated more human," said Fayaz, a Pakistani immigrant who now runs an online restaurant business in Toronto. "You don't need to be, like, pleading for your existence all the time."
Every year, the US government reserves 85,000 H-1B visas for skilled foreign professionals — people like Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa and started companies such as Tesla and SpaceX in the US.
Fayaz came to the US to attend the University of California, and landed a job after graduating with a master's degree in 2016. As an immigrant, trying to find work in the US was tough — he needed an American employer to not just hire him, but also sponsor his H-1B work visa.
This year, immigration laws suddenly changed as Trump suspended the program, citing "an unusual threat to the employment of American workers" during the coronavirus pandemic. The move left thousands in limbo.
"We have over 100,000 people immigrate to the Toronto region each year, which is twice as many as San Francisco Bay Area," Jason Goldlist, cofounder of TechToronto, said. And we don't just attract the quantity. It's also quality because a fifth of these immigrants already have a STEM degree before they even arrive here.
Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify is trying to capitalize on the opportunity. Following Trump's announcement, CEO Tobias Lutke — himself an immigrant from Germany — tweeted, "If this affects your plans consider coming to Canada instead."
Sandeep Anand, the company's senior mobility lead, echoed Lutke's call for talent: "Whether they're already in Canada, whether they're globally present, we're looking to really expand our diverse workforce. And in some cases it does mean that we would need to relocate and provide immigration support, which we're happy to do," she told Business Insider Today.
According to a 2016 study, 25% of Canada's workforce are immigrants. And in the tech space, that number is even higher — 40%, or 350,000 workers.
And there's still room for more, says Ilya Brotzky, the founder & CEO of VanHack, a Canadian firm that helps place global talent in tech jobs across North America. Brotzky cited Canada's 3% unemployment rate in the tech sector, well below its overall unemployment rate.
"It's not like there's a bunch of Canadians waiting to take these jobs," Brotzky said. "The unemployment rate is really, really low. We can't find the people."
Brotzky argues it makes economic sense for US companies to open offices in Canada, as well.
"You have these people that can basically work in the same time zone, quick flight from you, really easy laws, super fast to set up, and you have the benefit of Canadian dollar salaries," he told Business Insider Today. "But more importantly, you have access to the global talent pool. So you can bring in any developer from around the world that's good."
That's why Canada is trying to attract highly skilled foreign professionals through visa programs like the Global Talent Stream, launched in 2017. Immigration experts say it is like the H-1B program, but a lot better.
"It's a very fast processing time. It takes anywhere from roughly around two weeks to complete the first stage. And then the second stage, which is the work permit stage. It takes another two weeks. So you could be in Canada as quickly as a month," Blayne Kumar, founder of the immigration services company Bright Immigration, said.
For Fayaz, the decision to move from the US to Canada came after he was laid off from his Silicon Valley company, when he and his wife became fed up with constantly worrying about their legal status.
"It's not even like in 10 years, I will get it," he said. "It's like maybe, maybe not. Who knows, who cares. We don't need you in this country."
And the recent suspension of the H-1B visa program only confirmed his worst fears.
"You know that scene in movies where the actor is leaving the scene and the world is blowing up behind you, right? I feel like that — that I kind of managed to exit the scene somehow, magically," he said. "And I look back and the US is just blowing up."
"So many of my friends, people that I worked with, went to school with, they're all impacted. And whenever I get a phone call, I just feel so sorry for all those people."
Before Android, before the iPhone, and before GoPro became a known brand, the Flip Video camcorder took the world by storm, allowing millions to shoot digital home videos one-handed and easily save, share, and upload them to a nascent YouTube, thanks to an iconic flip-out USB port.
What you probably didn’t know: the Flip Video was almost a Google-branded camera, internal Google emails revealed by the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust sub-committee show. It would have been Google’s first camera and perhaps the first piece of Google-branded hardware as well.
What we know
In January 2006, a year and a half before the first Flip Video went on sale, Google Video product manager Peter Chane tried to convince his colleagues that they...
While travel bans limit unnecessary travel during the pandemic, they also require "sweethearts," or estranged unmarried couples from different countries or states, to endure months of separation.
Social media campaigns are connecting thousands of these couples in solidarity, spawning a Facebook group with over 10,000 members, two Twitter threads, an Instagram campaign, and a US petition.
Even with some countries relaxing travel bans, passengers are facing obstacles like obtaining D Visas or signing a declaration that they've been in a relationship with their partner for at least three months.
The pushback for exemptions from unmarried couples has motivated some government officials to rethink and expand the definition of partnerships, but places like the US are still refusing to budge.
"This is a travesty and no family should have to endure it," said Texas-based Corsi Crumpler, who gave birth to her son while her fiancé was 4,000 miles away in Ireland.
On July 22, Corsi Crumpler endured a harrowing 24-hour labor, giving birth without her fiancé, Sean Donovan, by her side. He was on FaceTime, 4,463 miles away in Dublin, Ireland, while she was in Wichita Falls, Texas.
The two met in 2018 when Crumpler spotted him in a pub while on a day off from her job as a flight attendant. They never went more than six weeks without seeing each other.
Crumpler found out she was pregnant in November 2019. She last saw Donovan on March 8, 2020.
"He never heard the baby kick," Crumpler said. "I have gone through what should be the happiest time of my life completely alone, stressed, and terrified."
"We have already missed out on many experiences together, which is something we won't get back," Donovan added.
A social media movement gains traction to reunite couples
Crumpler and Donovan are among the thousands of unmarried couples separated due to travel bans. To prevent the further spread of COVID-19, numerous countries, including the US, have instituted travel bans barring entry of travelers from certain countries. Exceptions are provided for some types of travelers, including spouses, but not unmarried couples.
Pining from not seeing her boyfriend, an artist living in Israel, since early March, Eva Hoornaert, who lives in Belgium, realized as she scrolled through social media that she was not alone. So she started a Facebook group, "Love Is Not Tourism," to bring affected couples from all over the world together to lobby for exceptions to the travel bans.
The group is a source of solidarity for the members, who share their stories of separation as well as unification when some travel restrictions are lifted. They also update each other on changes that permit travel to and from different countries as well as participate in discussions around what the experience is like at the borders of different countries. The end goal is to get unmarried couples in a committed relationship to be considered essential travelers and consequently not subject to travel bans.
Hoornaert told Business Insider that the tagline is intended to emphasize that the estranged couples — so-called "sweethearts" — aren't in the same category as those wanting to tour the country. She's heard from countless separated couples who relay stories of heartache like Crumpler's.
What started as a simple concept to unite those enduring such separations has turned into a major social media movement. The Facebook group now has over 10,000 members and has spawned other groups focused on individual countries. There are also two Twitter threads, #LoveisNotTourism and #LoveIsEssential, and an Instagram campaign. A petition allowing non-EU citizens involved in an international partnership to enter the EU and associated states along with other permitted essential individuals has garnered over 20,000 signatures.
Separated by borders, enduring heartache
Hoornaert explained that many of the couples she's interacted with on social media are at a point in their lives where they can't afford to live together.
"It's a temporary situation that got interrupted," she said.
Maggie Foster, who started the #LoveIsNotTourism movement on Twitter and launched the Facebook group, "Couples Separated by Travel Bans," similar to Hoornaert's group but focused on the US and the EU, pointed out that there are exemptions for professional athletes and other groups, like certain business travelers. Yet, she said a member of her group was denied an exemption to see her partner with stage four cancer; he died on July 19.
"It's extremely frustrating," said Foster, who lives in New Jersey and has a partner in France.
Hoornaert and Foster both said that there's a recognition among their groups of the importance of minimizing the spread of COVID-19, especially to areas like the EU where rates are lower. They argue that safeguards can be put in place, with travelers getting tested and quarantining upon arrival.
"We just want to be reunited with the people that are most important to us," Foster said. "As restaurants, clubs, and other venues open, our lives are still on hold indefinitely"
Some countries begin to reopen
The social media push is already having an impact. Denmark was the first to open up its borders to sweethearts living in different countries on June 27, according to Sanne Jakobsen, who was involved in the effort and is the administrator of another Facebook group with the tag #GlobalLove. Norway, the Netherlands, Austria, and Iceland have also opened their borders, according to a website that keeps a running tally.
Moritz Korner, a member of the European Parliament, has been one of the group's greatest champions. He began receiving a barrage of messages from those affected beginning at the end of June.
"I thought this was really unfair. My definition of family is broader than just married couples," he said. He wrote letters to the 27 heads of EU governments urging them to follow the model of Denmark. He only received two responses, one from the Hungarian government saying it intends to keep the exemptions limited only to family, and the other from the Czech Republic, which has decided to open.
The European Commission has issued a formal recommendation to lift travel restrictions from some countries, though it's not binding. In two tweets on July 2, EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johannson urged the state authorities to apply as wide a definition of partnerships as possible and argued that the "sweetheart" in a durable relationship with an EU citizen or legal resident should be exempt from EU travel restrictions on nonessential travel.
Korner said Johannson's support was a breakthrough, but that with the Parliament heading on summer break, he's not optimistic that there will be any changes soon. Hoornaert added that even if the EU and the US open their borders to unmarried couples, many more countries have yet to do so. Love Is Not Tourism continues to work with these countries, including the Philippines and Japan.
"We won't stop until all countries have applied our requests," she said.
Even with open borders, obstacles to entry remain
Even when a country opens its borders, there's no guarantee that travelers will be allowed to fly there.
Izabelly Santos, who lives in Santa Cruz, California, booked a flight to Vienna to see her partner and thought she had all the necessary paperwork, including a signed form with permission to enter Austria.
But when she got to the San Francisco airport on July 18, she wasn't allowed to board and was told she needed to be married and was lacking a D Visa.
"D Visas are visas for people who want to spend more than 90 days in Europe," she said. "I know about the D visa, but I am not planning to stay more than 90 days in Europe. I know I can fly to Austria because of the new regulation allowing unmarried couples. I bought my ticket online, the airlines don't even ask your passport when you purchase it. I was confident I was allowed to board."
She believes it was a miscommunication between the Austrian government and the airline.
"I went crazy. I just wanted to get on the plane," she said.
Martina Mauritsch, who lives in Salzburg, Austria, said that her partner can't fly from Mexico to visit her since connecting airports won't allow him to enter and there are very few direct flights to Austria.
Foster said that while the EU has at least acknowledged the movement, her group hasn't received any response from the US government.
Celeste McLeod, who manages the Twitter campaign for Foster's Facebook group, said that she's been disappointed by the lack of focused attention and the "nonsensical" remarks from the administration. She cites a statement by White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany in a July 13 press briefing. Asked about the rationale for banning travelers from the EU and the UK when they have a fraction of the cases as the US, McEnany said, "The argument is we will always put America first." (Business Insider contacted the White House for a comment, who referred a request for comment to the Department of Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.)
Donovan was finally allowed to travel from Ireland to the US and met his son, Taos, on July 23. Crumpler explained that the executive order Trump signed when he put the EU travel ban in place exempts spouses and/or parents of any US citizen under the age of 21.
"He just broke down with tears," she said. "He immediately picked him up and just stared at him. We were just both so happy to be reunited as a family. It was silence, tears, laughter, joy, relief."
She hopes exemptions are made to spare others the pain she suffered. "This is a travesty and no family should have to endure it."
Chinese tech giant Huawei shipped more phones than any other company in Q2 2020, according to research firm Canalys.
That makes it the first time in nine years that a company other than Samsung or Apple led the quarter, the report says.
Huawei's dominance was largely fueled by its growth in China, which has seen better recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic than other markets like the US'.
But Canalys warns that Huawei's spot at the top might be short lived, as growth in China likely won't be enough to remain the market leader once the global economy recovers.
Chinese tech giant Huawei shipped more smartphones than any other company in the second quarter of 2020, making it the first quarter in which a company other than Samsung or Apple led the market in nine years, according to a new report from research firm Canalys.
Huawei shipped 55.8 million devices in the quarter, which is down 5% year-over-year but still enough to beat Samsung, which shipped 53.7 million smartphones in Q2. For Samsung, that's a decrease of 30% compared to Q2 2019, the report says.
A key driver behind Huawei's success has been its growth in China, which has seen its economy start to recover from the coronavirus pandemic as COVID-19 case numbers have spiked in other markets like the United States and Europe. Huawei has largely relied on sales in China after US trade restrictions have barred the phone maker from loadings its phones with Google's popular apps.
The restrictions have damaged Huawei's international sales, as domestic shipments were down 27% in the second quarter. But the company is a dominant player in China, as it now sells more than 70% of its phones in mainland China, reports Canalys.
The COVID-19 pandemic has decimated the global smartphone market overall, with the International Data Corporation forecasting that the market could decline by 11.9% year-over-year in 2020. But Huawei's reliance on the China market has given it a boost, reports Canalys.
"This is a remarkable result that few people would have predicted a year ago," Ben Stanton, a senior analyst at Canalys, wrote in a statement announcing the report's findings. "If it wasn't for COVID-19, it wouldn't have happened. Huawei has taken full advantage of the Chinese economic recovery to reignite its smartphone business."
Samsung, however, has a small presence in China according to Canalys, which reports that the South Korean electronics giant accounts for less than 1% of the market share. The report did not mention Apple, but China is the iPhone maker's third-largest market according to its most recent earnings report, coming after the United States and Europe.
But Huawei's spot at the top could be limited; the report notes that dominance in the Chinese market won't be enough to sustain Huawei over the long term as the global economy recovers from COVID-19.
The report also comes just as Samsung and Apple have been leaning into selling cheaper devices to combat a global slowdown across the industry as consumers have held onto their devices for longer periods of time. Both companies are also expected to launch new high-end devices in the coming weeks and months, and rumors suggest Samsung could debut a new version of its Galaxy Note next month.
The Microsoft store is seen on April 30, 2020 in New York City. | Photo by Eduardo MunozAlvarez/VIEWpress via Getty Images
The company plans to wipe out all of its carbon emissions — and keep going.
You could be forgiven for missing it, given the surplus of news, but the last few years have seen a profusion of climate change commitments from big tech companies. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple have all promised to shrink their climate footprints, each attempting to outdo the others.
Climate advocates are naturally leery of these commitments. Those who lived through the faddish interest in climate in the mid-2000s, around the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, will recall the endless torrent of breathless corporate announcements. NBC had a “green week,” big corporations bought cheap offsets to become “carbon neutral,” automakers sold SUVs with vegan leather seats, and dozens of companies sold “sustainable” coffee cups, T-shirts, and tchotchkes. It was a greenwashing parade.
But times really have changed. The steps tech companies are taking these days represent a sea change in engagement. Climate change has moved out of the public relations department, into the C-suite, and down to the shop floor.
To explore the strength of recent corporate climate commitments (and their limits), I want to focus in on Microsoft, a widely acknowledged leader in the field. Earlier this year, it committed not just to reducing its emissions, but to going carbon negative, wiping out all the carbon the company and its suppliers have emitted since its founding in 1975. In recent weeks, Microsoft has released a flurry of announcements updating its progress, so now seems like a propitious time to take a close look.
Brian Smale/MSFTMicrosoft President Brad Smith, Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood and CEO Satya Nadella preparing to announce Microsoft’s plan to be carbon negative by 2030.
Over the last week, I’ve been talking to corporate sustainability experts and people who have worked with, and at, Microsoft. I tried to piece together how big a deal its work on climate is — how seriously to take it, what influence it may have, and where it might fall short.
To spoil the ending: It is a big deal. The company is setting new standards, especially in the rigor and transparency it is applying to the effort, and it is deliberately attempting to bring other companies, both suppliers and competitors, along with it into a world of shared metrics and data. There is more it could do, but it is earning its good climate reputation.
I’ll dig in to what Microsoft is doing and what makes it unusual. But first, some background.
A quick note on kinds of emissions
In the carbon world, the emissions of a company (or person, city, or country) can be divided into three buckets:
Scope 1 emissions come directly from resources the business owns or controls, like furnaces or delivery vehicles;
Scope 2 emissions come from the power plants that generate the electricity the business uses;
Scope 3 emissions are indirect, “embedded” in the materials and services the business uses, representing the emissions of the full supply chain. (Business travel is a common example — there are carbon emissions embedded in every plane ticket.)
In the early days of corporate climate engagement, companies typically measured and reduced only their direct energy emissions (scope 1 and 2). But in the last several years, in part thanks to the example set by companies like Dow, Unilever, Apple, and Microsoft, measuring and taking responsibility for scope 3 emissions has become the new norm.
This is significant, because for most companies, including Microsoft, scope 3 emissions are substantially larger than scope 1 and 2 combined.
“At Microsoft, we expect to emit 16 million metric tons of carbon this year,” president Brad Smith wrote in a January blog post. “Of this total, about 100,000 are scope 1 emissions and about 4 million are scope 2 emissions. The remaining 12 million tons all fall into scope 3. Given the wide range of scope 3 activities, this higher percentage of the total is probably typical for most organizations.”
Microsoft has a recent history as a sustainability leader
On Monday, Microsoft announced it has completed the largest-ever test running data-center servers on hydrogen fuel cells, which can be powered by zero-carbon hydrogen generated from renewable energy. Currently, even if they run entirely on renewables, data centers have diesel generators on site for long-term backup in case of an outage.
Power Innovations
Power Innovations built a 250-kilowatt fuel cell system to help Microsoft explore the potential of using a hydrogen fuel cells for backup power generation at data centers. In a proof of concept, the system powered a row of servers for 48 consecutive hours.
With 160 data centers worldwide and multiple generators per data center, that adds up to a lot of diesel generators. The company has pledged to phase them all out by 2030. That’s why it is testing fuel cells as backup power.
It is the latest in a string of climate initiatives that go back almost a decade. The company has been 100 percent carbon neutral, through the purchase of carbon offsets, since 2012. In 2013, it implemented an internal carbon tax on the scope 1 and 2 emissions of all divisions, with the revenue going toward sustainability improvements. It created a business unit focused on climate solutions, which produces things like AI for Earth. It recently succeeded in buying enough renewable energy to account for all US domestic operations.
“We’ve seen them as a leader since 2013,” says Nicolette Bartlett, climate change director at the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a global clearinghouse of corporate sustainability data. The CDP has a scorecard, which takes into account hundreds of sustainability and transparency metrics, and Microsoft has consistently gotten an A. “It really matters to them,” Bartlett says.
In recent years, thanks to the IPCC report and pressure from investors and employees, concern over climate change has risen to the highest levels of the company. Josh Henretig, who spent 12 years on the company’s global sustainability team, rising to Senior Director before leaving in February, says he witnessed the shift from his team pushing to his team being pulled. “We started to almost stumble under the full weight and examination that the executive team imposed on us around the question: what’s really required?” he says.
“At this stage,” says Verena Radulovic, director of corporate engagement at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, “Microsoft has enough experience with reducing its own emissions, and support from its leadership to keep doing so, that it is able to take its climate commitment to a more ambitious level.”
And that’s what it did in January.
Microsoft will go carbon negative and wipe out all the carbon it has ever emitted
In January, Microsoft made a startling announcement: Not only will it reduce its scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions by 55 percent, it will continue beyond that and go carbon-negative, drawing down more carbon than it emits, by 2030. By 2050, it will draw down enough carbon to account for all the company’s emissions since its founding in 1975.
“It set a new bar for what is considered climate leadership,” says Radulovic.
As you can see on the graph below, the target represents a radical acceleration of Microsoft’s carbon reduction efforts.
MicrosoftMicrosoft’s net emissions reached a peak in recent years, and would need to continue a steady decline to reach zero by 2030.
The January announcement, which came from the company’s president Brad Smith, backed by CFO Amy Hood and CEO Satya Nadella, laid out a set of principles that would guide the company’s approach:
Grounding in science and math.
Taking responsibility for our carbon footprint.
Investing for new carbon reduction and removal technology.
Empowering customers around the world.
Ensuring effective transparency.
Using our voice on carbon-related public policy issues.
Enlisting our employees.
The post goes into detail on each. I’ll just hit some highlights.
Nos. 1 and 2 are about proper measurement, scope 1-3 emissions, and historical emissions. “While we at Microsoft have worked hard to be ‘carbon neutral’ since 2012,” Smith writes, “our recent work has led us to conclude that this is an area where we’re far better served by humility than pride.”
“We had some very heartwarming, but also uncomfortable, conversations,” says Henretig.
Through these discussions, the company concluded that voluntary offsets are insufficient. It is now moving to a model where it directly contracts with renewable projects through power purchase agreements, (PPAs) — it is aiming to hit net-zero for its scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2025 — and will compensate for what it can’t directly reduce with negative emissions.
In this area, especially, Microsoft is showing real leadership.
As for No. 3, the company announced it will establish an investment fund that will target early-stage clean-energy technologies, aiming to spend $1 billion over the next four years.
Some critics have argued that the venture-capital model, built around big bets with potentially big returns, is a narrow way to approach the needs of the energy sector. Just recently, for instance, the International Energy Agency argued that crucial early-stage technologies need enabling infrastructure to continue developing.
“I think it’s a missed opportunity,” says consultant and former corporate social responsibility (CSR) executive Lindsay Baker. “There are opportunities to invest in infrastructure and other types of projects that have a market rate of return, more in line with just getting your money back — I would really like to see corporations making more of those kinds of investments.”
Baker also notes that there are “plenty of opportunities for charitable giving that will help move the needle on climate,” including in lab-stage research or companies still in product development. A company like Microsoft, with well over $100 billion in the bank, could put some money toward these other areas as well, or at least divert a portion of its $1 billion to them.
Nonetheless, a billion dollars in VC money is nothing to sneeze at. Nor is the signal Microsoft has sent to other companies by committing to a goal it admits it does not yet have the technology to achieve. It says going carbon negative will require “negative emission technologies (NET) potentially including afforestation and reforestation, soil carbon sequestration, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), and direct air capture (DAC).”
Some of those technologies don’t exist at meaningful scale yet, and Microsoft is making a concerted effort to accelerate them. Especially if it can inspire other companies to make similar investments — Amazon announced a $2 billion climate fund in June — the spillover effects will help boost the entire sector.
“While much of Microsoft’s focus is on technologies that will help it reduce its own footprint,” says Radulovic, “the hope and vision is that these technologies will scale and others can use them.”
No. 4 is about products and services Microsoft will design that will enable its clients to reduce their own emissions. We will return to No. 4 in a bit, since some of the biggest controversies reside here.
No. 5, transparency, is another area where the company is showing leadership. Every year, Microsoft will publish a sustainability report, breaking down its emissions and progress against its goals. It has had its targets verified by the Science Based Targets Initiative as being in line with a pathway to limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C. In reporting its emissions, it is following the World Resources Institute’s Greenhouse Gas Protocol. And it is sharing its data with the CDP. In short, it is modeling best practices in transparency.
MSFT
Microsoft’s 2018 greenhouse gas emissions, by sector.
No. 6 is also interesting, but we’ll come back to that later as well.
The company just announced its first concrete steps toward its target
First, Microsoft is joining with nine other large companies — A.P. Moller-Maersk, Danone, Mercedes-Benz, AG, Natura & Co, NIKE, Starbucks, Unilever, and Wipro, along with the Environmental Defense Fund — in Transform to Net Zero, “a cross-sector initiative to accelerate the transition to a net zero global economy.” It will run on much the same principles that Microsoft laid out for itself, including science-based measurement and transparency, with a commitment to knowledge sharing and norm-setting.
“When you look at the reach of these initial eight companies, as well as the supply and value chains of those companies, you start to get a pretty big market share,” says Jenn Crider, senior director of communications at Microsoft. It will exert a pull on other companies to use “a common and standardized approach to the math, the language, and the accounting,” she says.
Second, Microsoft debuted a sustainability calculator that will help its cloud clients calculate and reduce their carbon footprint. Third, it pledged to be completely free of diesel fuel and diesel generators by 2030. Fourth, it raised its internal carbon tax and broadened it to encompass scope 3 emissions. Fifth, it updated its Supplier Code of Conduct to require suppliers to calculate and report their full emissions.
Sixth and perhaps most intriguingly, it has issued a request for proposals (RFP) seeking, for this fiscal year, a million metric tons of “carbon removal from a range of nature- and technology-based solutions that are net negative and verified to a high degree of scientific integrity.” It recognizes that these technologies are not fully developed, acknowledges that it will make mistakes, and says it is explicitly “using this RFP to harvest and share best available science and market intelligence on carbon removal,” to make things easier for other companies that want to follow suit.
“Someday, CO2 removal will be fully commoditized,” says Julio Friedmann, a carbon researcher at the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, who has helped advise Microsoft on its RFP. “These actions help put us on that course.”
It will be extremely interesting to see which and what type of carbon-removal projects Microsoft ends up choosing through its RFP.
Carbon EngineeringA mockup of a direct air capture (DAC) machine from Carbon Engineering.
Seventh, Microsoft announced the first investment from its $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund: $50 million will go to Energy Impact Partners, “a leading venture capital firm focused on decarbonized, decentralized energy industry transition that shares learnings among partners and facilitates collaboration.”
Eighth and finally, the company is taking action on environmental justice, partnering with renewables developer Sol Systems on 500 megawatts of distributed solar energy projects “in under-resourced communities, working with local leaders and prioritizing minority and women-owned businesses.” Given that the average residential rooftop solar system is a bit over 5 kW and commercial solar rooftop systems around 100 kW, that’s a lot of solar projects, representing the “single largest renewable energy portfolio investment Microsoft has ever made.”
Alongside those projects, the company will provide $50 million in “community-led grants and investments that support educational programs, job and career training, habitat restoration and programs that support access to clean energy and energy efficiency.”
So that’s one big target, seven principles, and eight initiatives. What should we make of it?
Microsoft is earning kudos for its climate efforts
I’ve talked with numerous experts in corporate sustainability to wrap my head around how to judge Microsoft’s efforts. Without exception, they praised Microsoft as a leader on climate change. Its commitment to good science, shared metrics, transparent reporting, and full carbon responsibility (not relying on offsets) is already setting a good example.
“In Microsoft being among the first large companies to set such an ambitious target,” says Radulovic, “it allowed others, especially in non-tech sectors with more risk averse or less innovative cultures, a safe space to do the same.”
It is difficult to trace direct causal lines between Microsoft’s announcements those of other companies. Major corporate initiatives take years to develop. Their true effects will be measured by how many companies they pull into their wake in years to come. This was a common theme from experts in the field: Microsoft will have its biggest impact through the partnerships and collaborations it forms to spread its tools and ambitions.
Another notable feature of Microsoft’s efforts is the clear support from the top of the company. “All the big environmental announcements come from the CEO himself, which means there’s C-suite buy-in for everything they are doing,” says Jen Boynton, who works in corporate social responsibility at Cisco. “He’s making the commitment, he’s accountable, and there is financial and investor skin in the game.”
You could think of this as the evolution of corporate climate engagement, both within individual companies and across sectors: It begins in public relations, moves to the “environmental department,” and then gets taken up by top leadership, who look to their engineers to figure it out.
“The sustainability guys tend to think inside of a box,” says Bartlett, “but as soon as the shop floor gets hold of it, it becomes part of the DNA of the organization.”
Brian Janous, general manager of energy and sustainability at Microsoft, recalls the effect at the company when carbon reporting was expanded from scope 1 and 2 (energy) to scope 3 (supply chain, materials, and everything else): “Suddenly everyone is coming out of the woodwork. ‘Oh, we have to solve this, we have to solve that. We have to think about the amount of electricity being used to manufacture Xboxes. We have to think about the electricity being consumed by the people that use Xboxes.’”
It brought designers and engineers from every division to the task, people whose lives revolve around solving problems within resource parameters. Microsoft has made carbon a parameter for every team of engineers in the company now, and they are going to work on it.
And there’s one other feature worth celebrating. “The thing about Microsoft’s work that I love, love, love is the investment in climate equity and environmental justice,” says Alison Murphy, who has directed sustainability and social impact work at companies like Lime and Lululemon. “This has been missing from the corporate dialogue. More companies should take this kind of intersectional lens.”
As much as Microsoft is doing, though, this is climate change, which means it’s never enough. Climate advocates and activists are not going to stop pushing for more. What would more look like?
As I’ve asked around, the areas where Microsoft’s efforts could be critiqued fall into roughly four buckets.
Microsoft could go even further by requiring suppliers to reduce emissions
The same day Microsoft published its updates on progress, Apple announced that it would aim to be “carbon neutral across its entire business, manufacturing supply chain, and product life cycle by 2030,” an astonishing goal for a company that manufactures, ships, and disposes of so many devices.
“Apple has said their suppliers will all run on renewable energy,” says Bartlett. “It set targets for them.”
AppleSince 2014, Apple has purchased enough renewable energy to offset the usage of all its data centers.
So far, Microsoft — which deals more in software and thus has a smaller scope 3 footprint — has only said that its suppliers must measure and report their full emissions. “Right now I read it to say, ‘we’re working with suppliers to find efficiencies’,” says Elizabeth Jardim, a corporate campaigner at Greenpeace USA. “And efficiency is important. But it only gets you so far.”
Apple will not simply cut off suppliers, Bartlett says, but will work with them to build their capacity to reduce emissions. “It’s not going to be every company in your supply chain” that needs special attention, she says. “It’s the 80/20 rule — go for the big ones first.”
There are signs Microsoft is heading in the same direction. In its commitments thus far, “you see a forecasting of where we’re going,” says Crider. “The first step is reporting requirements; the next steps will be reduction. You can make the assumption that there will be requirements on that reduction over time.”
For now, Apple is setting the bar on supply chain reductions, but it’s a close race.
It could stop selling products to companies that use them to dig up fossil fuels
Microsoft says it will develop products and services that will help its clients reduce their emissions, which is laudable. But there remains the question of how its other products are used.
In particular, attention has recently focused on contracts for cloud and AI services between big tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft and some of the world’s largest oil and gas companies. Journalist Brian Merchant had a great exposéon this at Gizmodo last year. The services in question “are explicitly aimed at streamlining, improving, and rendering oil and gas extraction operations more profitable,” he wrote.
In May, Greenpeace issued a report looking closer at “how tech companies are helping big oil profit from climate destruction.” It found, among other things, that “Microsoft’s contract with ExxonMobil alone could lead to emissions greater than 20% of Microsoft’s annual carbon footprint.”
“Right now, the emissions from those contracts are not included in [Microsoft’s] carbon footprint,” says Jardim. “They’re not even tracking it.”
Microsoft has made a pledge to be carbon negative by 2030. Its approach has won praise from climate scientists, but the company also counts some of the worst emitters — oil and gas giants such as Chevron and Exxon Mobil — among its customers. https://t.co/j9x0DQIuLs
In response to the Greenpeace report (which followed on the heels of years of criticism from tech workers, investors, and politicians), Google announced that it will no longer “build custom [artificial intelligence or machine learning] algorithms to facilitate upstream extraction in the oil and gas industry.”
In Microsoft’s January announcement, Smith writes that the company is “committed to continuing to work with all our customers, including those in the oil and gas business.” Because a prosperous future will require more energy, he says, “it’s imperative that we enable energy companies to transition.” (The company issued a response to the Greenpeace report which says much the same thing.)
“Another acceptable path forward would be to show us how Microsoft’s machine learning technology is actually scaling up renewables or scaling down fossil fuel production,” says Jardim. “Right now their contracts are not doing that.” Improving fossil fuel extraction projects doesn’t do much to help fossil fuel companies transition away from fossil fuel extraction.
The oil company contracts are “a revolving debate within the company right now,” Henretig says. “It’s one of the areas a lot of employees are feeling conflicted about.”
If they want to stay ahead of the pack, Microsoft and Amazon should listen to their employees and follow Google’s lead.
It could throw some elbows on public policy
Microsoft says that it will use its voice to advocate for public policy in four areas: more public research, “the removal of regulatory barriers” to clean energy, market-based mechanisms, and universal standards for measuring the carbon content of consumer goods.
That is, relative to the breadth and specificity of its other commitments, fairly weak tea. It sounds like a devotion to incremental, bipartisan policy, which is not only inadequate, but has proven nearly impossible to achieve in practice.
“It’s great to see Microsoft and others stepping up in ways that clearly acknowledge the urgency of the climate crisis,” says Bill Wiehl, founder of ClimateVoice, a nonprofit working to organize tech workers behind climate ambition. “Now we need them to step up their lobbying for a broad range of public policies to address climate change, everywhere they operate.”
Microsoft could speak up for clean energy money in the next stimulus bill, call out denialist politicians, push back on state-level conservative efforts to block electric vehicles or prop up coal plants, or help push a national clean electricity standard or tightened fuel economy standards. There’s a whole lot of policy needed to get where Microsoft says the world needs to go.
Microsoft isn’t fully throwing around its weight. “We do have a PAC, the PAC does make investments,” says Crider, “but not at a level that sways an election in one direction or the other.”
A more vigorous form of power politics is called for in an age of climate crisis.
It could clearly pledge to eliminate its own emissions
Microsoft aims to reduce its full emissions by 55 percent by 2030, with negative emissions technology soaking up the rest. While it has said it will draw down enough carbon to account for all its historic emissions, it has not said how fast, or even whether, its own emissions will reach zero after 2030.
While carbon-negative is an admirable and standard-setting target, it is, in the end, a way of buying time. Every sector and business that possibly can hit true zero — run on 100 percent carbon-free energy — must ultimately do so. Pushing for negative emissions is not a license to ease up on the broader goal.
Microsoft should make clear that true zero emissions, as fast as possible, is still its long-term target. “Its voice saying that we need to get to zero is really powerful,” Bartlett says. “Ultimately, you need a business model that will flourish in a zero world, right?”
True zero emissions is a bit of a moonshot for Microsoft, but if Apple can do it, Microsoft can too. And there are reasons to think it will try.
“Obviously, the first thing we want to do is reduce emissions,” says Janous. “The goal is, get our scope 3 emissions down to as close as possible to zero. The commitment we made, 55 percent reduction — I think we’re going to do better than that.”
Zhou You/VCG via Getty Images
Can this be done sustainably? (Above, a Microsoft Xbox exhibit at a July event in Shanghai, China.)
Microsoft is doing what it can within the bounds of capitalism
Most of Microsoft’s emissions are from energy and will ultimately be eliminated by a cleaner, more robust electricity grid. Janous says the company is experimenting with using its data centers to provide backup and other ancillary services to grids, in pursuit of a “holistic solution” to grid issues, but to get there, “markets need to evolve to create more opportunities for flexibility.”
While Microsoft is working on a better energy grid, its peers will be approaching the problem from other angles. “It’s not like we’re all going to solve electricity, right?” says Janous. “Amazon’s going to work on transportation; Apple is going to work on materials and inputs. I’m excited about the breadth of impact we’re going to have as an industry, because we are all going to attack this thing a little bit differently.”
It is difficult to predict anything in today’s world, but there’s every reason to expect that large, well-established companies like Microsoft, Dow, Apple, Unilever, and Amazon committing to net zero will reverberate.
It’s not just that the target could become the expected norm in the business world (though that appears to be happening faster than anyone expected). It’s that all the people working in those companies, and all the people who interact with those companies, will see that reducing emissions produces a torrent of innovation. They will see that the process draws top talent to these companies and gives their young, diverse workforces focus and motivation.
They will see that common purpose brings out the best in people and that decarbonization is not a hair shirt or a sacrifice, but a chance to design and build a better world. They will take what they’ve seen to the voting booth.
It is the nature of climate change that virtually nothing that is possible today amounts to enough, and that’s true of Microsoft’s climate efforts. Within the conventional boundaries of US consumer capitalism, the company is unquestionably a leader, but if climate is a crisis, it may call for pushing at those boundaries: throwing some political elbows, cutting off some clients, perhaps even questioning the imperative for continuous growth.
Microsoft has shown what can happen when engineers get ahold of the carbon problem. Now its leaders should trust its engineers and move farther, faster.
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By Dave Michels Shining a light on real-time policy enforcement, zero-trust identity management, AI-based compliance, and end-to-end encryption for UC and collaboration
As the coronavirus pandemic has spread around the world, with millions infected and thousands dead, billionaire Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Bill Gates has pledged a quarter billion dollars to combat the disease through his foundation.
Gates criticized social media giants on Tuesday for enabling the spread of coronavirus misinformation and conspiracy theories. "When you let people communicate, you have to deal with the fact that certain incorrect things that are very titillating can spread very rapidly compared to the truth," Gates said in a CNBC interview.
"Social media can make that even worse," Gates said. "The degree to which these media companies can see what's being said on their platform, and take things that are absolutely wrong and get rid of those things or slow those things down – that's very tough."
Billionaire Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Bill Gates has advocated for pandemic preparedness for years, and famously gave a TED talk in 2015 that warned of the potentially staggering death toll a worldwide pandemic could create.
As the coronavirus pandemic has spread around the world, Gates has pledged $250 million to fight the disease and create a vaccine, and he's emerged as a leader in the worldwide pandemic response.
Beyond dealing with the spread of the disease itself, another critical vector has emerged in the fight: Misinformation and conspiracy theories.
And it's social media, Gates said in a new interview, that's helping to spread both.
"When you let people communicate, you have to deal with the fact that certain incorrect things that are very titillating can spread very rapidly compared to the truth," Gates said in a CNBC interview. "Social media can make that even worse."
Look no further for evidence backing up Gates' claim that the viral spread of "Plandemic," a documentary with dangerous misinformation about coronavirus – including false claims that vaccines are ineffective, and stay-at-home orders suppress the immune system. "Plandemic" had over 8 million views by the time YouTube and Facebook removed it, and that damage is hard to undo.
"The degree to which these media companies can see what's being said on their platform, and take things that are absolutely wrong and get rid of those things or slow those things down – that's very tough," Gates said.
You can see the full interview from CNBC's Squawk Box right here:
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies virtually before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law on Online Platforms and Market Power in Washington, DC, on July 29, 2020. | Mandel Ngan/Getty Images
At a historic antitrust hearing, many conservatives focused on political drama instead of asking big tech CEOs questions about their market power.
Wednesday’s congressional antitrust hearing was a historic occasion, offering Congress a chance to grill four of the most powerful men in the world, who control four companies — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google — each so massive that they rival nation-states in their power. Observers have grown increasingly concerned about the unprecedented and outsized impact of these companies on the economy, the millions of American citizens who use their products, and the thousands of smaller businesses that try, often unsuccessfully, to compete with them.
But the Republican members of the hearing instead primarily focused on one specific thing: unfounded claims that tech companies are biased against conservatives.
“I will just cut to the chase. Big tech is out to get conservatives. That’s not a suspicion, that’s not a hunch, that’s a fact,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who from the onset of the hearing led Republicans on the committee in questions about anti-conservative bias. At one point, he repeatedly yelled at a Democratic colleague, Rep. Mary Scanlon, interrupting her allotted questioning time because he took offense to her implication that his focus on anti-conservative bias was promoting “fringe conspiracy theories.”
It’s not surprising that many Republican committee members chose to focus on supposed tech bias. But it is a significant distraction from what really matters: whether tech companies have used their power to crush their competition and exploit users’ online behavior and data in a manner that hurts Americans of all political persuasions.
Allegations that social media platforms have an anti-conservative bias has for years been a rallying cry of President Trump and the Republican party. And leading up to Wednesday, Republicans attacked the focus of the Democrat-run House Judiciary subcommittee hearing — calling on it to focus more on anti-conservative bias and for Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to appear. Twitter is a small company compared to, say, Facebook, but it has recently taken measures to moderate President Trump’s posts for violating policies around misinformation and hate speech, enraging Republicans.
Democrats, meanwhile, tried to steer the conversation back to issues more directly relevant to antitrust, like if and how these companies intimidate their competition, such as when Facebook acquired its then-rival Instagram in 2012; or whether these companies exploit their users’ privacy, like how Google tracks individuals’ online browsing across the web with cookies; or if Apple is shutting out its competitors by taking an unreasonable cut of profits coming in from independent app developers in its App Store.
What really matters here is whether these companies’ business practices are ultimately harming consumers, most of whom have no choice but to use Big Tech in one way or another if they want to do basic things online like search the web, order goods, or stay in touch with their friends.
In an earlier era, Republicans and Democrats on the committee might have come together to try to focus on what’s been seen as an area of relative bipartisan agreement: protecting the free market. That didn’t happen at today’s hearing. Instead, it was a display of partisan divides.
While it’s true that many rank-and-file corporate employees at Facebook, Google, and Apple — who tend to be college-educated individuals living in major metropolitan areas — identify as politically liberal, like many others in their demographic, there’s no definitive proof that Facebook, YouTube, Google, or any other major tech platform discriminates against conservative content.
In their testimony, Republicans at Wednesday’s hearing cited investigations from right-wing news outlets and groups, like Project Veritas and Breitbart News, but at most, these sources seem to indicate that many Big Tech employees hold liberal political beliefs — a phenomenon that is neither illegal nor inherently conspiratorial.
Historically, the types of content and pages that consistently perform well on Facebook are often right-leaning news and pundit pages, like Breitbart News and Ben Shapiro. And as my colleague Peter Kafka wrote this spring, these same tech companies often face criticism from Democrats over how their platforms incentivize users to post polarizing and politically extreme content because their algorithms prioritize engagement — and polarizing content is good at getting users to engage with it.
After Jordan used his initial allotted round of time for questioning Google CEO Sundar Pichai about alleged anti-conservative bias (based on leaked emails from a former Google marketing executive which said the company used its products to reach Latinos with voting information in the 2016 presidential election), he twice interrupted Democratic colleague Rep. Mary Scanlon (D-PA) to yell at her across the floor — initiating a screaming match with Democratic subcommittee chairman David Cicilline, who tried to maintain order.
Jordan reacted this way after Scanlon said she would like to focus her questioning back on antitrust issues instead of what she called “fringe conspiracy theories.” After Cicilline’s repeated calls for order — and after another person on the congressional floor, unidentifiable from the livestream, yelled at Jordan to “put your mask on!” — Jordan let up and let Scanlon continue questioning Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with her allotted time.
The entire debacle was another reminder that today’s hearing is mostly a political spectacle, a moment primed for soundbites, and many Republicans at the hearing chose to use their time with these powerful company leaders to promote their own political agendas. Congressional hearings like this one aren’t expected to directly lead to antitrust action, but they can help set the stage for that when politicians strategically use their time to extract answers from leaders with pointed — and unified — lines of questioning.
Ranking Republican James Sensenbrenner did offer a narrow window of measured optimism for bipartisan cooperation toward the end of the hearing. He said that antitrust probes hold a meaningful and historic place in American government but that, in the case of tech, regulators need to revisit old decisions and step up enforcement of existing laws rather than write a whole new set of rules.
But largely, Sensenbrenner’s Republican colleagues were uninterested in discussing antitrust issues, under new or existing laws alike. As one Democratic congressional staffer told Recode, Republicans seemed more interested in creating explosive confrontations by decrying alleged “liberal bias” that are made-for-replay on conservative cable TV (indeed, Jordan’s clips have already been a subject of discussion on Fox News). Today’s hearing was a sign that in the current hyper-polarized political climate, it’s unlikely Congress will lead any real, meaningful, bipartisan legislative effort to rein in Big Tech anytime soon.
Support Vox’s explanatory journalism
Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.
The Garmin ransomware attack that took down the GPS company’s fitness tracking apps, customer service infrastructure, and most of its services, was a devastating attack that should worry anyone who uses a smartwatch or other wearables.
The attack, which encrypted much of Garmin’s data, demonstrates that companies that collect and use highly sensitive GPS, health, and fitness data are targets for hackers and that Garmin—one of the giants in this space—did not take cybersecurity seriously. Garmin’s “Connect” app was down for days. The company has not been terribly forthcoming about the hack or what was affected, offering only a vague statement. Garmin devices are used by people to track their workouts, but are also used by the U.S. military and by boat captains who rely on the company’s technology to avoid being lost at sea, for example. There is currently no indication that boat or military systems were affected.
Still, the hack is devastating.
“For consumers, Garmin clearly represents a repository of really detailed information. You turn on your thing when you leave your residence, and you turn it off when you get home. Sometimes, you take a jog in the middle of the day and you're trying to collect steps at work. These are all things that speak of who you are and what you do and where you live, and can all be quickly turned into identifying information,” John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, told Motherboard.
“A couple of years ago, I coined the term fit leaking to describe what happens when fitness tracking is used for intelligence gathering,” he added.
While most Garmin smartwatches do not connect to the internet natively and store workout information on the devices themselves, the Garmin Connect app does not allow users to transfer their workout information to the app without storing it on Garmin’s servers. Garmin allows users to “Opt Out” of sharing workout information with the company, but opting out makes the app essentially useless: “our apps and websites can still be used to manage device settings and notifications [if you opt out],” the company says, but no workout data will be displayed.
In 2018, the Guardian reported that fitness tracking app Strava gave away the location of secret U.S. army bases by releasing a data visualization map that detailed the activity of Strava users. The data visualization map could be used to identify U.S. bases by mapping the activity of military personnel using the app, which became apparent in places like Afghanistan and Syria where it appeared the app was almost exclusively used by those in the military.
Scott-Railton also noted that while many consumers may know Garmin for its wearable smartwatches and sports and fitness tracking systems, the company also has a full fleet of navigational products which are used both in marine navigation and aviation. It is not clear to what extent these were affected in the attack. The BBC reported that pilots who use flyGarmin, which is used for navigational support, were unable to download up-to-date aviation databases. Various outlets have attributed the hack to a Russian hacking group, but Motherboard has not independently verified this.
“What's interesting is that this is one of those cases where something that's actually really critical to safety also has a consumer dimension,” Scott-Railton said.
“We immediately began to assess the nature of the attack and started remediation,” the company said in its press release. “We have no indication that any customer data, including payment information from Garmin Pay™, was accessed, lost or stolen.”
Some of the services the company did list as affected include website functions, customer support, customer facing applications, and company communications. The company said affected systems are being restored and should return to normal over the next few days.
Though not confirmed by Garmin, reports suggest the company was the victim of ransomware called WastedLocker, which the cyber security software provider Symantec, a division of Broadcom, said had been deployed against dozens of U.S. companies.
“The end goal of these attacks is to cripple the victim’s IT infrastructure by encrypting most of their computers and servers in order to demand a multimillion dollar ransom,” Symantec wrote in a recent blog post.
Scott-Railton, who has been following the Garmin incident as it unfolded, said he expects cyberattacks on companies to continue.
“I think everyone would tell you that the tempo of attacks is going up, and that this is also a period of time where IT teams are uniquely stretched, and large chunks of the workforce are operating remotely and based on VPN, and that just massively expands the threat surface for your organization,” Scott-Railton said. “Especially when it comes to things like attacks that focus on targeting specific users.”
Drugstore chain Rite Aid secretly deployed facial recognition software across a network of security cameras in hundreds of locations in the US, according to a new investigation from Reuters published on Tuesday. The company had been doing so for more than eight years, and it only recently stopped using the technology, it told Reuters, following a “larger industry conversation” around facial recognition and the grave concern over privacy risks and racial discrimination it presents.
Yet, Reuters says Rite Aid initially defended its use of facial recognition as a deterrent against theft and violent crime, having nothing to do with race. The investigation found that not to be entirely true. “In areas where people of color, including Black...
A Swiss developer has pulled source code from 50 high-profile companies, including Microsoft and Nintendo, and published it in a public online repository on GitLab.
The leak of mounds of original code behind Nintendo's classic games has specifically been dubbed "Gigaleak" online.
According to a report from tech site Bleeping Computer, the developer was able to collect the code thanks to misconfigured tools used by the companies that leave proprietary information exposed, and some firms may not even be aware of the massive leak yet.
Published source code gives people an inside look at certain company products, but it can also provide cyber attackers and bad actors an easier route for collecting confidential company information.
Internal software source code from more than 50 high-profile companies across tech, finance, retail, and other sectors has been leaked online.
Originally reported by the tech site Bleeping Computer, a Swiss developer named Tillie Kottmann was able to pull source code from the likes of Microsoft, Nintendo, Disney, Motorola, and others because of insecure DevOps applications that leave proprietary company information exposed. Kottmann posted the code on the online repository manager GitLab, which anyone can access, tagged under "exconfidential" and "Confidential & Proprietary." The developer posted a link to the online repository on their Twitter account.
The leaked Nintendo code especially gained attention from the gaming world — it gives an inside look at the source code behind some of the company's most classic games, as Polygon reports. The leaked Nintendo code has been dubbed the "GigaLeak" online.
Making the source code available for public viewing could allow cyber attackers to more easily scrounge for confidential company information, as security specialist Jake Moore told tech blog Tom's Guide.
"Losing control of the source code on the internet is like handing the blueprints of a bank to robbers," Moore told the site.
According to Bleeping Computer, Kottmann is responsive to requests from the companies to take down their source code. A leak that had previously revealed code from Daimler, the parent company to Mercedez-Benz, is no longer listed in the online repository. But some firms, according to the report, may not even notice that their source code has been published online. And even when they are made aware, they may not care — developers at one company simply wanted to know how Kottmann was able to pull the code collection off, per the report, and said to have "a lot of fun."
Kottmann told Bleeping Computer that they attempt to remove hardcoded credentials, which are embedded credentials generally used to create backdoors, from the companies' source code before publishing it to avoid an even more robust security breach.
"I try to do my best to prevent any major things resulting directly from my releases," the developer told the outlet.
Kottmann's Twitter account bio in part reads "probably leaking your source code right now." The account's pinned tweet is a crowdsourcing post asking for "any confidentiality, documents, binaries or source code, which you think should be made available to the public..."
Screenshot: Garmin
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
And there's still room for more, says Ilya Brotzky, the founder & CEO of VanHack, a Canadian firm that helps place global talent in tech jobs across North America. Brotzky cited Canada's 3% unemployment rate in the tech sector, well below its overall unemployment rate. 
The Microsoft store is seen on April 30, 2020 in New York City. | Photo by Eduardo MunozAlvarez/VIEWpress via Getty Images
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies virtually before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law on Online Platforms and Market Power in Washington, DC, on July 29, 2020. | Mandel Ngan/Getty Images
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
