Davemichels

“My former boss at Microsoft [Phil Sorgen] is now the CRO at RingCentral -- so it will be a fun competition out there,” said Nextiva’s new chief revenue officer Eric Martorano.

“Shifting baselines syndrome” means we could quickly get used to climate chaos.

On Thursday, 2,800 Americans died from Covid-19. That is more than died on September 11, 2001 in a horrific attack that sparked a national convulsion and two wars that are still ongoing.

If an accident or attack had violently killed this many US citizens in January of this year, there would have been a reckoning, a demand that authorities bring the full might of the country to bear on finding and addressing the causes. It would have been experienced as an unbearable collective tragedy. The names of the dead would have been carved into a new national monument.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, infections started slowly and grew. There was no line crossed, no sudden trauma that shook us awake, just a creeping death toll spread out over to which we have been incrementally adjusting for nine months.

But now there’s a 9/11 happening every day, and there’s still no real national mobilization. We can’t even get everyone to wear masks. Millions of people traveled for the Thanksgiving holidays, despite expert warnings that the Covid surge is ongoing.

Because the virus crept up on us, we adjusted to it, like we’re adjusting to climate change, like we adjust to everything. It’s called “shifting baselines syndrome” and it’s the theme of a piece I first published back in July. It is, unfortunately, at relevant as ever.

---

For as long as I’ve followed global warming, advocates and activists have shared a certain faith: When the impacts get really bad, people will act.

Maybe it will be an especially destructive hurricane, heat wave, or flood. Maybe it will be multiple disasters at once. But at some point, the severity of the problem will become self-evident, sweeping away any remaining doubt or hesitation and prompting a wave of action.

From this perspective, the scary possibility is that the moment of reckoning will come too late. There’s a time lag in climate change — the effects being felt now trace back to gases emitted decades ago. By the time things get bad enough, many further devastating and irreversible changes will already be “baked in” by past emissions. We might not wake up in time.

That is indeed a scary possibility. But there is a scarier possibility, in many ways more plausible: We never really wake up at all.

No moment of reckoning arrives. The atmosphere becomes progressively more unstable, but it never does so fast enough, dramatically enough, to command the sustained attention of any particular generation of human beings. Instead, it is treated as rising background noise.

The youth climate movement continues agitating, some of the more progressive countries are roused to (inadequate) action, and eventually, all political parties are forced to at least acknowledge the problem — all outcomes that are foreseeable on our current trajectory — but the necessary global about-face never comes. We continue to take slow, inadequate steps to address the problem and suffer immeasurably as a result.

NurPhoto via Getty Images

David Wallace-Wells, author of the popular and terrifying climate change book The Uninhabitable Earth, discussed this possibility in a New York Magazine piece written during the apocalyptic fires late last year in Australia. One might have thought that fires consuming hundreds of millions of acres and killing more than a billion animals would be a wake-up call, but instead, Wallace-Wells writes, “a climate disaster of unimaginable horror has been unfolding for almost two full months, and the rest of the world is hardly paying attention.”

Maybe climate chaos, a rising chorus of alarm signals from around the world, will simply become our new normal. Hell, maybe income inequality, political dysfunction, and successive waves of a deadly virus will become our new normal. Maybe we’ll just get used to [waves hands] all this.

Humans often don’t remember what we’ve lost or demand that it be restored. Rather, we adjust to what we’ve got.

Concepts developed in sociology and psychology can help us understand why it happens — and why it is such a danger in an age of accelerating, interlocking crises. Tackling climate change, pandemics, or any of a range of modern global problems means keeping our attention on what’s being lost, not just over our lifetimes, but over generations.

Shifting baselines are a form of generational amnesia

In 1995, fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly published a one-page article in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution titled “Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome in fisheries.” It contained no original experiments, no numbers or equations, but it went on to be the most cited and widely discussed thing he ever wrote.

Pauly had something particular in mind about the transition from pre-scientific (anecdotal) to scientific data, but the conceptual architecture of shifting baselines also proved to be incredibly fruitful in other contexts and went on to be “revolutionary for the field of ecology,” write Jeremy Jackson (an emeritus professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography) and Jennifer Jacquet (an environmental studies professor at New York University). The notion was later introduced to the public by filmmaker Randy Olsen in a 2002 LA Times piece and has since become a subject of much popular discussion.

So what are shifting baselines? Consider a species of fish that is fished to extinction in a region over, say, 100 years. A given generation of fishers becomes conscious of the fish at a particular level of abundance. When those fishers retire, the level is lower. To the generation that enters after them, that diminished level is the new normal, the new baseline. They rarely know the baseline used by the previous generation; it holds little emotional salience relative to their personal experience.

And so it goes, each new generation shifting the baseline downward. By the end, the fishers are operating in a radically degraded ecosystem, but it does not seem that way to them, because their baselines were set at an already low level.

Over time, the fish goes extinct — an enormous, tragic loss — but no fisher experiences the full transition from abundance to desolation. No generation experiences the totality of the loss. It is doled out in portions, over time, no portion quite large enough to spur preventative action. By the time the fish go extinct, the fishers barely notice, because they no longer valued the fish anyway.

“An animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare,” says Pauly in his TED talk on shifting baselines. “So you don’t lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. And therefore, they’re not perceived as a big loss.”

The same phenomenon is sometimes called “generational amnesia,” the tendency of each generation to disregard what has come before and benchmark its own experience of nature as normal.

A 2009 study from researchers at the Imperial College London examined a series of case studies, from “hunters’ perceptions of change in prey species populations in two villages in central Gabon” to “perceptions of bird population trends of 50 participants in a rural village in Yorkshire, UK.” Sure enough, they found evidence of generational amnesia, “where knowledge extinction occurs because younger generations are not aware of past biological conditions.”

It’s easy to see the same thing happening on a larger scale with climate change. Few people are aware, in a conscious way, of how many hot summer days were normal for their parents’ or grandparents’ generation. Recent research shows that “extremely hot summers” are 200 times more likely than they were 50 years ago. Did you know that? Do you feel it?

It’s not just intergenerationally that we forget, either. The Imperial College researchers also demonstrated the existence of another form of shifting baselines syndrome: personal amnesia, “where knowledge extinction occurs as individuals forget their own experience.”

Just as generations forget about ecological loss, so do individuals

It turns out that, over the course of their lives, individuals do just what generations do — periodically reset and readjust to new baselines.

“There is a tremendous amount of research showing that we tend to adapt to circumstances if they are constant over time, even if they are gradually worsening,” says George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon. He cites the London Blitz (during World War II, when bombs were falling on London for months on end) and the intifada (the Palestinian terror campaign in Israel), during which people slowly adjusted to unthinkable circumstances.

“Fear tends to diminish over time when a risk remains constant,” he says, “You can only respond for so long. After a while, it recedes to the background, seemingly no matter how bad it is.”

He notes that big events, or “teachable moments,” can momentarily shock us into willingness to make big changes, but “a teachable moment is only a moment,” he says. “Once the fear is gone, the willingness to take measures is also gone.”

Even those big personal moments fade quickly. One of the most robust findings in modern psychology — made famous by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert — is that we have an incredibly robust “psychological immune system.”

We tend to dramatically overestimate the effect that large events, good or bad, will have on our happiness. We think the death of a family member will make us enduringly less happy, or winning the lottery will make us enduringly happier. In fact, what psychologists find again and again is that we quickly return to our personal happiness equilibrium. A soldier who loses a leg and a soldier who returns home safe to a new baby will generally, a year or two later, be roughly as happy as they were before those events. It’s called “hedonic adaptation.”

Just as we adjust emotionally, we adjust cognitively. We forget what came before; we simply don’t think about it. For the most part, only our recent experience is salient in defining our baselines, our sense of normal.

XKCD

The process of forgetting, of resetting, is almost impossible to resist, even for those acutely aware of it. In 2013, author JB MacKinnon released a book called The Once and Future World, about the extinction crisis and the abundant natural world that Americans are barely aware is draining away.

“Even though I spent several years writing a book about things disappearing from the natural world,” MacKinnon says, “I can’t hold it in my head. I have to go back and reread it in order to refresh my eyes so that when I go out into the natural world, I think, ‘there are things missing here’. Otherwise, I’m just gonna go, ‘What a beautiful day’.”

“I mean, who remembers what the price of coffee was 10 years ago?” he asks.

Humans view the world through the lens of recent experience

UC-Davis environmental economist Frances Moore thought of a clever way to test this phenomenon of short-term salience in the context of weather.

How many times must unusual temperatures be repeated before they cease to be experienced by individuals as unusual? How fast do unusual temperatures become unremarkable? To find out, Moore and colleagues turned to Twitter. In a study published last year, they analyzed Twitter’s massive US database to correlate unusual heat or cold events with chatter about the weather. In this way, they tried to track the “remarkability” of temperature anomalies.

“Something crazy happens, and then the same crazy thing happens the next year, and people are able to realize, ‘Oh, it’s two crazy things’,” Moore says. “Then it starts happening again, and people start to think, ‘I guess this isn’t so notable anymore.” Accordingly, tweets about the weather decline.

How quickly does the effect take hold? “The reference point for normal conditions appears to be based on weather experienced between 2 and 8 years ago,” the study concluded.

“It’s a powerful phenomenon, this normalization or reference-dependent utility,” Moore says. “It’s not super-rational behavior.”

The study’s conclusion about what this portends for climate change is unsettling: “This rapidly shifting normal baseline means warming noticed by the general public may not be clearly distinguishable from zero over the 21st century.”

Let that sink in. Even though atmospheric temperatures are, on a geological time scale, changing at a headlong pace, on a human time scale, they are still changing too slowly to be perceptually or emotionally salient. Put more bluntly: The public may never notice that it’s getting warmer.

Research based on social media in a single country has obvious limitations, and Moore is reticent to speculate about how long the window of salience might be for other kinds of weather, or in other places.

But it stands to reason that something like the same window applies to other natural or even social phenomena. It may be just as likely that the public never notices the increasing intensity of storms or frequency of flooding or regularity of crop failures. However rapidly those phenomena might change, they rarely change fast enough to be dramatically different from conditions two to eight years ago.

The window of experience that humans find emotionally and cognitively salient is simply too narrow to take in long-term changes in ecological systems. What was unthinkable to previous generations — say, regular nuisance flooding in southern Florida — is normal now. What seems unthinkable to us now — say, stay-at-home orders in large swathes of the US Southwest for several weeks a year due to dangerous heat — will be, by the time it rolls around, not that much worse than what came just before it.

We adjust; we can’t help it. If we wait for ecological change to thrust itself into the consciousness of ordinary Americans, we may be waiting forever.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Shifting baselines apply to several other social problems

Once you start thinking in terms of shifting baselines, you start seeing them everywhere, not just in ecology.

What is the unending debate over the “normalization” of Trump but a debate over shifting baselines? President Trump has degraded and discarded longstanding norms of presidential behavior with astonishing speed and recklessness, but it has proven incredibly difficult for the press and the public to assess his record based on pre-Trump baselines. This is why people are always asking, “What if Obama did this?” They are trying to ask, “Why have we shifted our moral and political baselines so quickly?”

Similarly, the US is busy normalizing the grim reality that college graduates will enter a world of high debt, expensive housing, and parlous job prospects. The post-war expectation of a middle-class life with a family-supporting job and a reliable pension might as well be ancient history.

Shifting baselines are evident in the steady erosion of unions, the militarization of police, and the infusion of US politics with dark money. They are even evident, as we’ll discuss in a moment, in our experience with Covid-19.

For the generation of Americans coming of age today, Trump, gridlocked politics, and a rapidly warming planet have become normal. Can the incoming Biden administration convince them that they should expect, and demand, something better?

How to fight shifting baselines and personal amnesia

The human propensity to rapidly adapt is part of our evolved cognitive and emotional machinery. But our ability to heed and remember the past is also shaped by culture.

“I looked at Native Hawaiian culture,” MacKinnon says. “They had individuals within communities who were assigned to have a social relationship with species that were never even given names in English.” North America’s indigenous cultures still carry an enormous amount of accumulated knowledge that can help reveal what’s been lost.

That kind of historical consciousness — a day-to-day awareness of the obligations that come with being a good ancestor — has faded. And modern consumer capitalism might as well be designed to erase it, to lock everyone into an eternal present wherein satisfying the next material desire is the only horizon.

One answer is for journalism and the arts to pull the lens back and try to recenter a richer historical perspective. One ambitious effort to do that is journalist John Sutter’s Baseline 2020 project. He and his team have picked four locations around the world that are particularly vulnerable to climate change — Alaska, Utah, Puerto Rico, and the Marshall Islands — and will visit them every five years until 2050, documenting the changes facing the people who live there. (It is modeled on director Michael Apted’s “Up” documentaries, which check in on the same group of Brits every seven years.)

“Change is invisible in any one moment,” Sutter says. He notes that scientists often do studies that last for years or decades, but “that longitudinal approach just doesn’t happen in journalism.” Taking the long view is one way to make changing conditions salient and emotionally impactful.

In a similar spirit, artist Jonathon Keats has designed a special camera to take a 1,000-year exposure of Lake Tahoe. He calls it a “sort of cognitive prosthesis, a mechanism for us to be able to see ourselves from that far-future perspective.” The Long Now Foundation, established by Stewart Brand in 1996, has been hosting seminars to spur long-term thinking for decades.

“Culture will hang on to knowledge of things that are changing or gone longer,” MacKinnon says, “if those things are the kinds of things that they pay attention to.”

It’s not just about documenting decline, either. There have been long-term victories, too — reductions in poverty, increases in the number of educated young girls, declines in air pollution, and so forth. These also happen incrementally, often beneath our notice. We adjust our baselines upward and do not register what, over time, can be substantial victories. Making those victories more visible can help show that decline is not inevitable.

There is no substitute for leadership and responsive governance

It can not ultimately fall to ordinary people to hold baselines stable. On these matters, as on much else, they take their cues from their leaders. Studying and understanding the long arc of history, considering the experience of previous generations and the welfare of coming generations, making decisions with the long view — those are things leaders are supposed to do.

The most reliable way to stop baselines from shifting is to encode the public’s values and aspirations into law and practice, through politics. They can’t be held steady through acts of collective will. They have to be hardwired into social infrastructure.

Unfortunately, US politics has become almost completely unresponsive, which reinforces rather than ameliorates our slipping baselines. One crucial part of registering a crisis as a crisis is a sense of agency, and Americans increasingly feel that they have no ability to shape national policy.

Negative changes “are normalized more quickly if you feel like there’s nothing you can do about it,” says Moore. “That might be what’s going on with the coronavirus — people don’t feel like they have agency on a collective level, because the government is not doing anything, so their response is to say, ‘well, I gotta live my life’.”

On top of that, it’s just tiring to feel anxious for so long. “The combination of adaptation and fatigue is absolutely deadly in terms of our ability to respond to the virus at this point,” says Loewenstein.

What if Americans simply accommodate themselves to thousands of coronavirus deaths a day? As writer Charlie Warzel noted in a recent column, it’s not that different from the numbness they now feel in the face of gun violence. “Unsure how — or perhaps unable — to process tragedy at scale,” he writes, “we get used to it.”

Biodiversity loss, deforestation, and climate change may make pandemics more common. It is not difficult to imagine Americans forgetting a time when mingling freely was taken for granted. When being in public did not mean constant low-level exposure anxiety. When there weren’t regular waves of infection and death.

“If we keep getting zoonotic disease pandemics, then we’ll just say, ‘well, here comes the winter one, catch you on Zoom until June’,” says MacKinnon. “Our baseline could shift to the point that we don’t remember there was a time when people went most of their lives without hearing the word pandemic.”

Our extraordinary ability to adapt, to get on with it, to not dwell in the past, was enormously useful in our evolutionary history. But it is making it difficult for us to keep our attention focused on how much is being lost — and thus difficult for us to rally around efforts to stem those losses.

And so, little by little, a hotter, more chaotic, and more dangerous world is becoming normal to us, as we sleepwalk toward more tragedies.

• Magic Leap has announced that Microsoft executive Peggy Johnson will join the company as CEO, replacing Rony Abovitz.
• Johnson, who will start work in August, has served as Microsoft's vice president of business development since 2014.
• "I look forward to strategically building enduring relationships that connect Magic Leap's game-changing technology and pipeline to the wide-ranging digital needs of enterprises of all sizes and industries," she said.
• Are you a current or former Magic Leap employee? Contact this reporter using encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 628-228-1836) or email (hlangley@businessinsider.com).
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Magic Leap has found its new CEO.

The company announced that former Microsoft executive Peggy Johnson will be stepping in to lead the spatial-computing startup, which has struggled to take off despite enormous amounts of funding.

Johnson has been Microsoft's vice president of business development since 2014. Before that, she was at Qualcomm for 24 years and served on the company's executive committee. 

Johnson will begin work at Magic Leap this August and replaces founder Rony Abovitz. In May, Abovitz announced he would step down as Magic Leap's CEO but will "continue to provide strategy and vision from a Board level," as per a memo sent to staff at the time.

"As CEO, I look forward to strategically building enduring relationships that connect Magic Leap's game-changing technology and pipeline to the wide-ranging digital needs of enterprises of all sizes and industries," Johnson said in a statement.

"It is with great pride and sincere appreciation to the Magic Leap Board, Rony and the entire team, as well as to Satya Nadella at Microsoft, that I assume the role of leading this visionary business into the future."

Johnson's appointment follows a rocky few months for Magic Leap, which laid off around half of its staff in April and pivoted to enterprise in an effort to sustain its business.

The company raised $350 million in investment after the layoffs, and The New York Times reports that Magic Leap has secured an additional $25 million since. 

Johnson, who has driven some major acquisitions at Microsoft, including LinkedIn, brings many years of experience in building the types of business partnerships that will be critical to Magic Leap's success. 

"As Magic Leap drives towards commercializing spatial computing for enterprise, I can't think of a better and more capable leader than Peggy Johnson to carry our mission forward." said Rony Abovitz.

Are you a current or former Magic Leap employee? Contact this reporter using encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 628-228-1836) or email (hlangley@businessinsider.com).

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why thoroughbred horse semen is the world's most expensive liquid

'Fast-growing, critical industries will be able to accelerate their discoveries with the breakthrough performance of A100 on Google Compute Engine,' Nvidia executive Ian Buck says of Google Cloud's new A100-powered Accelerator-Optimized virtual machine instance.

Programmers have created an interactive map documenting over 500 instances of police brutality nationwide since the 2020 George Floyd protests began.

Grown out of a megathread on the subreddit /r/2020PoliceBrutality, it was made into a Github repository with the goal of "assist[ing] journalists, politicians, prosecutors, activists and concerned citizens who can use the evidence accumulated here for political campaigns, news reporting, public education and prosecution of criminal police officers."

The Github comes with a multitude of ways to visualize or make accessible the hundreds of incidents of police brutality. You can filter the incidents by city or state, organize them based on the video source, track them on a timeline, or view it all as a set of statistical figures,

The interactive site is pretty straight forward: there are hotspots on a map of the United States that show how many incidents have been recorded in each state. You can click on the hotspot and it'll zoom in on the geographic locations where each act of police brutality was documented. Each act comes with the date, a short description, and sources ranging from video recordings to multiple tweets and news reports confirming police violence.

These sorts of efforts have been ongoing since the earliest days of the protests when police first began to violently suppress protests. On May 30, T. Greg Doucette, a criminal defense lawyer, created a Twitter thread to track videos posted online of police brutality. The thread went viral almost immediately and he’s added hundreds of videos to it since.

Federal authorities have been using social media posts to target protesters for a long time, but their attempts to quell dissidence and unrest have only changed some aspects while further accelerating the law enforcement’s crisis of legitimacy. That the police response to protests sparked by police violence has been to respond with more violence is not a coincidence; when faced with accusations of rampant bias in policing, law enforcement responded by using tech that only deepened that discrimination.

With the constant violence done by police this past month, not to mention the violence done by police since their origin, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that this is what the police are meant to do: to brutalize us. When you look at that map and watch those videos, does that seem like a reformable institution? Or one that needs to be abolished and replaced with systems that center care and safety, not violence and control?

Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Google Plus, the company’s failed social network, is officially gone as of today. After Google Plus personal accounts were shut down last year, Google announced that it would be replacing the social network for enterprise users with Google Currents. Currents is generally available starting today, and the Google Plus Android and iOS apps have been rebranded to Google Currents to reflect the change (via 9to5Google).

Currents, given its enterprise focus, is designed to help people within organizations communicate with each other. Users can post and comment on discussions and can see content in a News Feed-like “home stream,” which can be ranked by relevance or chronologically, according to Google. G Suite admins can also moderate...

Continue reading…

Photo by Jacob King/PA Images via Getty Images

The UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has made 746 arrests and dismantled dozens of organized crime groups after intercepting millions of encrypted text messages, BBC reports. The messages were sent through EncroChat, a subscription-based phone system popular among career criminals. The NCA said in a press conference on Thursday that the operation has had “the biggest impact on organized crime gangs it has ever seen.”

European law enforcement agencies appear to have been monitoring these conversations for months. French police first hacked the network, deploying a “technical device” to penetrate EncroChat communications after discovering that some of its servers were hosted in the country. Authorities first cracked EncroChat’s encryption...

Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

T-Mobile has completely shut down Sprint’s 2.5GHz midband 5G network as the company continues its efforts to merge Sprint’s network with its own following the landmark merger of the two companies earlier this year, via Fierce Wireless.

The shutdown marks the end of a process T-Mobile began earlier this year when it started merging Sprint’s 5G spectrum holdings into its existing network, which began when T-Mobile shut down Sprint’s existing 5G deployment in New York and relaunched it as part of T-Mobile’s 5G network in April. T-Mobile also launched a new 2.5GHz 5G network in Philadelphia at that time, a city where Sprint had not yet offered 5G.

T-Mobile also announced on Tuesday that Sprint’s networks in Chicago, Houston, and Los...

Continue reading…

Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge

Despite all of the ills and upheavals that 2020 is bringing, there is at least one thing that we can celebrate: summer is here. And while your favorite sports team may be on hiatus, your vacation trip may be canceled, and your family get-together will have to wait, there are still things to enjoy and ways to relax. The staff of The Verge has gotten together to recommend some of their favorite gadgets, devices, and gizmos to help you have the best summer possible.

Olympus OMD E-M10 Mark II camera

Sitting inside all day means that even the most simple and short visits outside can feel kind of magical and otherworldly. It’s fun for me to bring my camera, Olympus’ E-M10 Mark II, along for walks...

Continue reading…

Garry Kasparov, in an op-ed for CNN:

It’s fair to ask, why bother with the pretense of democracy? Dictatorships are obsessed with the superficial trappings of legitimacy and democracy, both as distraction and to sully the meaning of these terms. And after decades of liquidating the opposition and crushing all dissent, a despot might even enjoy thinking that he’s as popular as the worthless polls, elections and state media say he is.

These sham votes aren’t only to provide Putin with cover in Russia, where civil society barely exists, but to give foreign leaders the pretext of treating Putin like an equal instead of confronting him like the autocrat he is. It also allows foreign media to continue calling him “president,” putting him on par with the leaders of free countries. As with every tyrant before him, Putin thrives partly due to the cowardice of those who could deter him but choose not to.

These aren’t just semantics. It would be awkward, even outrageous, to make deals with dictator Putin, to trust him, or to speak fondly of him the way President Donald Trump does. The title feeds the hypocrisy, and so the myth of Putin the elected, Putin the popular, must be perpetuated.

Part of the de-Trumping of America should be to stop treating Putin as an elected official.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

The UK may reverse its decision to allow Huawei as a supplier for the country’s 5G network buildout after a report concluded that US sanctions would make the Chinese telecom giant’s equipment less safe. The report from GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, leaked by The Telegraph and corroborated by Bloomberg, claims that the restrictions on Huawei’s operations “will force the company to use untrusted technology that could increase the risk to the UK.”

The report “is likely to force Boris Johnson to abandon the company entirely,” according to The Telegraph. A source told Bloomberg that the British prime minister is preparing to phase out Huawei as soon as this year, although the exact timetable is reportedly yet to be confirmed.

Continue reading…

People are planning road trips to national parks or public campgrounds to get out of the house, while still remaining socially distanced from others. | Thomas Barwick/Getty Images

After months indoors, people are renting RVs, cabins, and fancy tents to spend time in nature.

During the first wave of strict coronavirus lockdowns in late March, the only outings most Americans could look forward to with some degree of certainty were cautious trips to the grocery store. Slowly but surely, those fortunate enough to work or quarantine at home began adapting to life indoors: People learned new hobbies, redecorated their homes, dyed their hair, attended lots of virtual events on Zoom, and even planned mini staycations.

Now, as the weather warms up, Americans are eager to get back outdoors as most states at least partially reopen, despite the concerning uptick in coronavirus cases. Tired of the confines of home and its familiarity, many are gravitating toward nature — planning road trips and reserving RVs to visit national parks and campgrounds, or booking short-term stays at tiny cabins and luxury tents away from society. People crave the experience of travel, but there’s an increased interest in private spaces and areas where they can get away from others.

Travelers naturally want a greater sense of control, especially in the midst of a pandemic, said Alan Katz, an epidemiology professor at the University of Hawaii. And as such, many are seeking out socially distant leisure options that appear to prioritize hygiene and overall well-being, while spending time alone or with those in their social cluster.

In recent years, young travelers have been drawn to camping (or, occasionally, luxury camping with added amenities, also known as “glamping”) in greater numbers, but these outdoorsy activities have new appeal in a world where we’re encouraged to remain 6 feet apart.

“Nature allows you to social distance without thinking about it,” said Josh Lesnick, president and COO of Collective Retreats, a luxury camping company. “The ability to be just outdoors surrounded by fresh air in a safe environment, and not too prescribed where you feel like you’re in a bleach box, I think that’s what people are looking for.”

From what health experts know about the coronavirus, outdoor spaces appear to present a much lower risk than indoors in terms of transmission. Plus, being close to nature allows for a refreshing change in pace and scenery for those accustomed to the drudgery of daily work and life.

Since stay-at-home orders started easing in May, tourists have been flocking to national parks in droves, worrying local community members who fear the sudden influx of people could lead to an increase in Covid-19 cases. According to RVshare, a peer-to-peer RV rental company, among the most popular destinations for renters this year are Yellowstone, Zion, and the Grand Canyon. State campgrounds are also anticipating crowds, with some preparing to reach capacity during holiday weekends.

Car rental companies are seeing an uptick in reservations, too, especially in urban hot spots like New York City. RV reservations for the July Fourth weekend skyrocketed, and overall, RVshare has seen “booking levels of three times last summer and a 1,600 percent increase in bookings since early April,” a spokesperson for the company told Vox in an email.

It’s not just RVs and campgrounds that are seeing unprecedented levels of interest. Travel companies in the outdoor hospitality space — which usually caters to more urban, upwardly mobile travelers — are receiving an overwhelming number of bookings. It could be that people are itching to leave dense cities, even if for a brief period of time. Plus, there are simply fewer vacation options available with activities that are socially distant; places like family-friendly resorts and amusement parks have either closed down or could be deemed unsafe for wary travelers. Camping trips, then, seem to be a much safer choice, especially if hotel-like amenities (such as showers, clean tents or cabins, and comfy beds) are involved.

Upon first glance at the Instagram page for Getaway, the travel startup is peak cozycore, featuring a grid of warm, yellow-toned photos, comfy white sheets and blankets, and an expansive view of the great outdoors. The company offers an array of small, cozy cabins in the woods for short-term rentals, located a few hours outside major cities, and appears designed to cater to young professionals in urban areas. Many outposts are close to being sold out in July and August, according to co-founder Jon Staff.

“We saw a huge jump in bookings, about 400 percent, right when Trump announced the Europe travel ban in March,” Staff said. “We did have a bunch of cancellations when the stay-at-home orders came out, but many people did opt for short-term bookings when their vacations or work conferences got canceled, so it was balanced out.”

It “just so happened” that Staff and co-founder Pete Davis created a socially distant business. “We just kind of got lucky that Getaway was well-suited for this moment,” he said. “Our cabins have always been 100 to 150 feet apart. There’s no check-in desk. We have no bar or restaurant.”

Sara Fopiano, who stayed at Getaway’s Boston outpost, told me she was initially hesitant to move forward with the trip during the pandemic, despite booking back in January. However, the socially distant nature of the cabins reassured her. “I really appreciated the fact that the check-in and -out [process] was completely contactless, so we did not cross paths with anyone at the outpost,” Fopiano said.

That choice could be much more reassuring than, say, staying at a typical hotel or an Airbnb, where guests might be more likely to bump into strangers in enclosed spaces. The appearance of openness and isolation could be liberating — and help grant worried guests like Fopiano some peace of mind.

“We don’t have hallways, and our lobbies are like yards,” Collective Retreats’s Lesnick said. Collective Retreats is more geared toward visitors with the means to pay for the luxury of hotel amenities in an outdoor setting. The experience is similar to that of a public campsite but without the shared spaces (like bathrooms), Lesnick said, and the retreats are close enough to travel to by car from a major city.

At the start of the pandemic, experts predicted the coronavirus could fundamentally change travel as we know it — by affecting flight affordability, how we share public and private spaces, and the measures needed to ensure a trip is safe. These predictions also highlighted how people, in search of comfort and security, might pay more for it.

Ideally, spending time in nature should cost you relatively little. But in pandemic times, those who are willing and able to fork over extra money can experience nature with the added comfort and cleanliness you might not get at a regular campground. At Collective Retreats, for example, some locations employ private chefs, and guests are able to order food service from their respective tents.

The broad increase in leisure travel, especially around the Memorial Day and July Fourth weekends, suggests that people are starting to feel confident enough to venture away from home. Plus, those who are traveling likely have disposable income, secure jobs, or vacation benefits. But that doesn’t necessarily means they’re not taking the pandemic seriously, Katz, the epidemiologist, said.

While Katz admits that people “are notoriously bad at assessing risks,” it seems travelers are actively attempting to scope out socially distant options.

“Travel has always been about the reward of the destination,” Katz told me. “If the risk is high in that area and is broadcasted as such, travel to that destination will fall off by both car and air.”

---

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.

Applying scenarios, or "plausible futures," can help enterprise leaders make strategic decisions by understanding how best to react to different possible post-pandemic outcomes.

Drones remind citizens in Seoul, South Korea, to wear masks and observe social distancing guidelines. | Photo: Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport

South Korea has done a remarkably good job of combating the COVID-19 pandemic. But as experts warn of a second wave of infections, the government has organized an unusual way to both thank its frontline medical staff for their hard work and remind citizens to abide by preventative measures: a drone light show over the Han River in the capital of Seoul.

As reported by France 24 and Al Jazeera, the show took place last Friday, July 6th, and featured 300 drones in a 10-minute show. The display was organized by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and was intended to thank frontline health care workers.

It began with messages reminding citizens to wear masks, wash their hands, and...

Continue reading…

Last week, as predicted, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously to replace the original EARN IT Act, with a new one. As part of the markup, they also voted to approve Senator Patrick Leahy's amendment which some might read to say that EARN IT cannot be used to block encryption -- but the reality is a lot more complicated. As I'll explain, this new bill is terrible in a different way than the old bill: it will create a new dilemma in which internet services will either feel compelled to encrypt everything or in which the only way you'll be able to use any internet service is if you hand over a ton of personal information to the service provider -- potentially putting your privacy at extreme risk.

First lets acknowledge an oddity about this new bill. Both bills involve the creation of a commission to come up with "best practices" in trying to stop "child sexual abuse material" or CSAM (the concept formerly known as child porn). In the old bill, if sites didn't follow the commission's best practices, they could lose their Section 230 protections. This resulted in fears that the commission would outlaw encryption as a "best practice." The new bill retains the commission, but for no recognizable purpose. Instead, it does away with the pretense and just says that a bunch of sites should lose Section 230 protections no matter what. It seems quite odd to first say "we need a commission to determine best practices" and then on a second pass say that before the commission has done anything we're just going to make massive changes to Section 230 based on... nothing at all. No evidence saying that this would create better outcomes. No evidence that Section 230 is a problem with regards to CSAM. Just... nothing.

Specifically, the new bill makes a change to Section 230 that looks similar to the change that was made with FOSTA, saying that you don't get 230 protections if you advertise, promote, present, distribute, or solicit CSAM. But here's the thing: CSAM is already a federal crime and all federal crimes are already exempted from Section 230. On top of that, it's not as if there are a bunch of cases anyone can trot out as examples of Section 230 getting in the way of CSAM prosecutions. There's literally no evidence that this is needed or will help -- because it won't.

As we've detailed before, the real scandal in all of this is not that internet companies are facilitating CSAM, but that the DOJ has literally ignored its Congressional mandate to go after those engaged in CSAM production and distribution. Congress tasked the DOJ with tackling CSAM and the DOJ has just not done it. The DOJ was required to compile data and set goals to eliminate CSAM... and has just not done it. That's why it's bizarre that EARN IT is getting all of the attention rather than an alternative bill from Senators Wyden, Gillibrand, Casey and Brown that would tell the DOJ to actually get serious about doing its job with regards to CSAM, rather than blaming everyone else.

But digging into the details, the real problem here is that, as structured, the new EARN IT Act would be a disaster in trying to achieve the goals the sponsors have set out for it. First off, thanks to the addition of Senator Leahy's Amendment, some may see the bill as one that effectively requires encryption to avoid liability for CSAM. Even that's not totally clear, however. While you can read Leahy's amendment to say that encryption is protected, the actual structure of the final bill punts many issues to state law, and that means having to comply with 50 different state laws. Some, like Illinois, have lower standards for the mens rea regarding CSAM, and the worry is that we won't know whether or not offering end-to-end encryption would be seen as violating state laws until long and costly cases go through their lengthy process.

Either way, this weird CSAM carveout from Section 230 is somewhat equivalent to the moderator's dilemma that other attempts to change Section 230 create. Because most of those other reforms put in place a "knowledge" standard, it gives many sites a reason to never look at the content on their platform. In this case, due to the explicit call out saying that encryption isn't impacted, that would effectively say that if you want to keep 230 protections, you should encrypt absolutely everything. Which, ironically, is the exact opposite of what Attorney General Bill Barr has been asking for.

But, as with the moderator's dilemma, there's also a flipside (if you don't want to ignore everything, then you have to greatly restrict what you allow through). Under the new EARN IT, the flipside is that the government more or less says that you are now responsible for being able to track and identify anyone on your service who is not using encryption -- meaning you would need to carefully verify every user of your platform. No more simple signups. No more anonymity. And, incredibly, this would mean that sites would need to collect a ton of data on every user. Want to use this new service? First submit your phone number, driver's license, etc.

At a time when people are saying they trust big internet companies less and less with their data, why would Senators Graham, Blumenthal, Feinstein, and Hawley (HAWLEY!?!?) be encouraging websites to collect even more (and more intrusive) data on all their users?

Since this is somewhat different than the traditional moderator's dilemma, it might be called the "censor's dilemma" or possibly the "middleman's dilemma," in that this is even more tied to the government's demand that websites block certain content entirely, which puts them in the role of a government middleman or censor (which, not coincidentally, would raise serious constitutional issues with the EARN IT Act turning private entities into state censors).

Either way it is difficult to see how these two outcomes are what Congress (or, for that matter, the DOJ) actually wants:

• Much greater encouragement for websites to encrypt everything
• Much greater encouragement for websites to demand much more personal and private information on users.

And yet, thanks to Congress' standard bungling, that's what we have with the current EARN IT Act. And while it might be nice if the law actually did encourage more encryption, don't pin your hopes on that. As noted above, it's not entirely clear that it really does lead to that outcome, and we might not know until after a whole bunch of litigation. Furthermore, if that is is the end result, it will almost certainly lead to a different kind of backlash and support for even worse laws that seek to blow up encryption through other methods.

In short: the EARN IT Act is bad. At best it might encourage more encryption, but it would also create a whole host of unintended consequences, including much less privacy and no more anonymity on many websites. It's difficult to see how that accomplishes any of the goals of the bill's supporters.

The company's retail stores served as a unique showcase for Windows 10 devices but failed to get the sort of traction enjoyed by Apple's popular stores.

Something wasn't right. Starting earlier this year, police kept arresting associates of Mark, a UK-based alleged drug dealer. Mark took the security of his operation seriously, with the gang using code names to discuss business on custom, encrypted phones made by a company called Encrochat. For legal reasons, Motherboard is referring to Mark using a pseudonym.

Because the messages were encrypted on the devices themselves, police couldn't tap the group's phones or intercept messages as authorities normally would. On Encrochat, criminals spoke openly and negotiated their deals in granular detail, with price lists, names of customers, and explicit references to the large quantities of drugs they sold, according to documents obtained by Motherboard from sources in and around the criminal world.

Maybe it was a coincidence, but in the same time frame, police across the UK and Europe busted a wide range of criminals. In mid-June, authorities picked up an alleged member of another drug gang. A few days later, law enforcement seized millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs in Amsterdam. It was as if the police were detaining people from completely unrelated gangs simultaneously.

"[The police] all over it aren't they," the dealer wrote in one of the messages obtained by Motherboard. "My heads still baffled how they got on all my guys."

Unbeknownst to Mark, or the tens of thousands of other alleged Encrochat users, their messages weren't really secure. French authorities had penetrated the Encrochat network, leveraged that access to install a technical tool in what appears to be a mass hacking operation, and had been quietly reading the users' communications for months. Investigators then shared those messages with agencies around Europe.

"I've never seen anything like this."

Only now is the astonishing scale of the operation coming into focus: It represents one of the largest law enforcement infiltrations of a communications network predominantly used by criminals ever, with Encrochat users spreading beyond Europe to the Middle East and elsewhere. French, Dutch, and other European agencies monitored and investigated "more than a hundred million encrypted messages" sent between Encrochat users in real time, leading to arrests in the UK, Norway, Sweden, France, and the Netherlands, a team of international law enforcement agencies announced Thursday.

As dealers planned trades, money launderers washed their proceeds, and even criminals discussed their next murder, officers read their messages and started taking suspects off the street.

The messages "have given insight in an unprecedented large number of serious crimes, including large, international drug shipments and drug labs, murders, thrashing robberies, extortions, robberies, grave assaults and hostage takings. International drug and money laundering corridors have become crystal clear," Dutch law enforcement said.

The documents obtained by Motherboard detail some of the information intercepted by authorities, and lay out not only the actions of one alleged drug dealer, but show just how deeply law enforcement seems to have breached alleged criminal organizations. Codenames are identified as money launderers, ketamine, amphetamine, cannabis, and heroin suppliers, couriers, and customers.

The messages show how gangs allegedly directed members to gather money from customers, how to launder it safely, and where to hide drugs. In meticulous and timestamped sections, the Encrochat messages lay out alleged crime after crime.

"People are fucked," one of the sources who provided the documents to Motherboard said. "People talk about murder, buying kilos, buying guns [...] millions of pills" on the phones, referring to large-scale drug dealing and other crimes.

"They're just lifting people," another source close to criminal users of Encrochat told Motherboard as the arrests started happening. Motherboard granted multiple sources in this story anonymity to protect them from retaliation from law enforcement or violent criminals.

Do you know anything else about Encrochat? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

In the Netherlands alone, "the investigation has so far led to the arrest of more than 100 suspects, the seizure of drugs (more than 8,000 kilo cocaine and 1,200 kilo crystal meth), the dismantling of 19 synthetic drugs labs, the seizure of dozens of (automatic) fire weapons, expensive watches and 25 cars, including vehicles with hidden compartments, and almost EUR 20 million in cash," authorities said in a press release.

"What seems to be possible only in police thrillers and movies has happened before our own eyes," Andy Kraag, head of National Criminal Investigations Department in the Netherlands said in a press conference. "We’ve captured messages that give us a view of daily life in the criminal world."

On one of its related websites, Encrochat says it’s an "end-to-end security solution" that can "guarantee anonymity," and that messaging using Encrochat is "the electronic equivalent of a regular conversation between two people in an empty room" for "worry free communications." It says that "our servers, located offshore in our datacenter, never create, store, or decrypt keys, message conversations or user data." There are many types of people who may want secure communications, including security professionals or lawyers. The site states that Encrochat has resellers in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Madrid, and Dubai, but the firm is highly secretive, and does not operate like a normal technology company.

In a statement sent to Motherboard by someone in control of a company email address, Encrochat positions itself as a legitimate firm with customers in 140 countries, but sources in the criminal underground say that many of Encrochat's customers are criminals. French authorities said they estimated that more than 90 percent of the company's French customers were "engaged in criminal activity."

"We are [a] commercial company offering services to secure communication over mobile devices," the statement reads. "We set out to find the best technology on the market to provide a reliable and secure service for any organization or individual that want to secure their information."

"I've never seen anything like this," the source close to criminal users of Encrochat told Motherboard, describing the law enforcement action.

***

Buying an Encrochat device is not always as simple as walking into a store. One current prison inmate who said they previously used Encrochat devices explained how they bought a phone from a specific contact recommended to them.

"He does have a legit shop but I didn't meet him there. I met him down a side street and it looked like a drug deal," the inmate said of how he got the phone. "I spoke to him by the phone and went to his city and met him."

Encrochat's phones are essentially modified Android devices, with some models using the "BQ Aquaris X2," an Android handset released in 2018 by a Spanish electronics company, according to the leaked documents. Encrochat took the base unit, installed its own encrypted messaging programs which route messages through the firm's own servers, and even physically removed the GPS, camera, and microphone functionality from the phone. Encrochat's phones also had a feature that would quickly wipe the device if the user entered a PIN, and ran two operating systems side-by-side. If a user wanted the device to appear innocuous, they booted into normal Android. If they wanted to return to their sensitive chats, they switched over to the Encrochat system. The company sold the phones on a subscription based model, costing thousands of dollars a year per device.

Encrochat is not the only company offering these sorts of phones. So-called "secure phone" companies often don't have public-facing executives. Instead, they hide their ownership, and some have been caught conspiring with criminals. One company, MPC, was run directly by organized criminals, as Motherboard reported last year. Vincent Ramos, the founder of another secure phone company called Phantom Secure, which started as a legitimate firm, is currently in prison in part for telling undercover agents that he created the device to help with drug trafficking. These companies regularly hire distributors based in different countries or cities, who then help sell the companies' phones directly to customers. Encrochat allegedly had ex-military personnel selling phones to criminals in at least one case.

The industry is highly competitive, with companies constantly spreading rumours about the security of each others' devices and uploading YouTube videos to discredit their rivals. Encrochat previously blocked web domains used by other firms' devices, essentially segmenting their customer base from everyone else. That means dealers often need the same sort of phone as everyone else they're working with, unless they want to be locked out of important conversations.

"Needs a fucking phone," one of the incoming Encrochat messages sent to Mark’s supposed device and obtained by Motherboard reads. "What drug dealer don't have a phone."

Encrochat vendors have also advertised products on crime-focused websites, marketing their wares more directly to a certain type of reader. As Martin Kok, a criminal turned blogger wrote on his site Butterfly Crime in 2015, "I see on various crime sites these things [encrypted phones] are offered for sale because many of their future clients are also criminals. Advertising on a site where bicycles are offered does not make sense for this type of company." (Motherboard previously investigated how MPC orchestrated Kok's assassination).

This is the space Encrochat sat in, controlling a sizable chunk of communications infrastructure for organized crime in Europe and several countries further afield. While a top-level Scottish drug trafficking organization created MPC and Phantom Secure's customers included members of the Sinaloa drug cartel, Encrochat was particularly popular with gangsters across Europe.

A British pair who assassinated another crime leader and an armed robber, with one acting as assassin and another as the lookout, used Encrochat phones. In one of the killings the hitman used a submachine gun. Violent drug gangs across the country also used Encrochat's phones.

"They [became] the 'industry' standard," the inmate told Motherboard.

***

In May, some Encrochat users noticed a problem: the much lauded wipe feature on their phones wasn't working. An Encrochat associate told Motherboard that at the time they believed perhaps either the user had forgotten their reset PIN number, or that the wipe feature wasn't configured properly. Nothing to be alarmed about; users make mistakes. The next month, Encrochat managed to track down one of its particular X2 model devices which had the panic wipe issue, they explained.

This wiping problem wasn't user error though. The Encrochat associate told Motherboard they found malware on the device. The phone had been hacked.

Encrypted phone companies have faced data exposure before. In 2017, someone created a website and uploaded data belonging to users of Ciphr, another firm in the space, which included email addresses and unique IMEI codes linked to the phones. This Encrochat case was different, though. This was malware on the Encrochat device itself, meaning that it could potentially read the messages written and stored on the device before they were encrypted and sent over the internet, a devastating finding for a company whose main mandate is to protect the content of communications for highly sensitive clients.

The associate told Motherboard the malware was specifically created for the X2 model. Besides disrupting the wiping feature, the malware was also designed to conceal itself from detection, record the screen lock password, and clone application data.

Realizing this was an attack, over the next two days Encrochat pushed an update to its X2 models to restore the phone's features and gather information about the malware installed on its devices around the world, the associate said.

"This was done to prevent further damage while we informed affected users," they added. Encrochat put monitoring in place to be able to keep an eye on their devices without having to physically have it in their hands.

But almost immediately after the patch, the attackers struck again, this time seemingly harder. The malware was back and now it could change the lock screen password rather than just record it. The hackers were not stopping; they were escalating.

Going into full-on emergency mode, Encrochat sent a message to its users informing them of the ongoing attack. The company also informed its SIM provider, Dutch telecommunications firm KPN, which then blocked connections to the malicious servers, the associate claimed. Encrochat cut its own SIM service; it had an update scheduled to push to the phones, but it couldn't guarantee whether that update itself wouldn't be carrying malware too. That, and maybe KPN was working with the authorities, Encrochat's statement suggested (KPN declined to comment). Shortly after Encrochat restored SIM service, KPN removed the firewall, allowing the hackers' servers to communicate with the phones once again. Encrochat was trapped.

Encrochat decided to shut itself down entirely.

"We then took the decision to immediately shut down the SIMs and the network," the associate wrote.

Encrochat suspected this wasn't a rival company trying to mess with its infrastructure; this was likely a government.

"Due to the level of sophistication of the attack and the malware code, we can no longer guarantee the security of your device," a message Encrochat sent to its users read. "You are advises [sic] to power off and physically dispose your device immediately," it added.

All of this came too late. Law enforcement had already extracted an extraordinary cache of data from Encrochat devices. Entire multi-million dollar drug empires nakedly laid out in reams of text messages and photos. In a press release published Thursday, French law enforcement, which spear-headed the investigation, did not go into detail about what the operation itself entailed, but said that, "The investigation made it possible to gather elements on the technical functioning of the solution [Encrochat], and led to the establishment of a technical device thanks to which unencrypted communications from users could be obtained."

The French authorities also pointed to the legal mechanism that allows for the capture of computer data by such a tool "without the consent of the interested parties, to access, in any places, computer data, to record it, to keep it and to transmit it."

The authorities had everything. Images of huge piles of narcotics laying on scales. Kilogram blocks of cocaine. Bags packed with ecstasy. Fistfuls of cannabis. Messages about planned drug drops and major deals. Photos of alleged criminals' family members and discussions of their other businesses.

Law enforcement agencies had acted against encrypted phone companies before. In 2018, the FBI arrested the owner of Phantom Secure. The FBI tried to convince the owner to install a backdoor into the communications system—he declined—before shutting the network down itself.

But here, authorities had managed to break in and eavesdrop not only on what criminals were saying, but listen when the criminals felt the most secure.

"Charge him 33'500 each?" one of the messages extracted from the Encrochat device allegedly owned by Mark reads. "Take 4.5 out get 6k," the texts continue, discussing specific large-scale drug deals step-by-step. Other documents mention shipments of drugs in Europe. The messages stretched back months, with some in the documents dating to April, months before Encrochat discovered the malware.

In one Encrochat message rather ironically obtained by investigators, one alleged gang member tells another that iPhones are not safe from police examination.

In the aftermath of Encrochat's message, users of the network started to panic, according to other screenshots of messages obtained by Motherboard. Multiple people tried to determine whether their particular model of Encrochat phone had been impacted.

Law enforcement's quiet coup of Encrochat was over. Over the next several days, the puzzle pieces started to fall into place: The seized shipments, the raids on drug traffickers, the mounting arrests. The common thread among all of them was Encrochat.

The encrypted phone industry source said that after the episode, Encrochat resellers couldn't log into their portal used to manage sales, locking them out of funds.

Right now, the criminal world is in disarray, their main way of communicating ruptured. Paranoid, some people are going offline, unsure of what devices to trust. Others are trying to cross borders before they are detained, the source close to criminal Encrochat users said. The source said that buying drugs in bulk just got a lot harder.

They added, "Everybody's going to ground."

In the press release, French authorities wrote "Despite the findings of the criminal use of Encrochat terminals [phones]," that they hope "users claiming to be of good faith and wishing to have their personal data deleted from the legal proceedings can send their request to the investigation department." They also invited administrators or managers of Encrochat itself to contact them if they wanted to discuss the legality of law enforcement deploying the technical tool to read messages.

Already, other encrypted phone companies are trying to fill the void left by Encrochat. A company called Omerta has been advertising directly to Encrochat's old customers. "ENCROCHAT HACKED, USERS EXPOSED & ARRESTS GALORE - THE KING IS DEAD," a blog post on its site reads. Omerta told Motherboard in an email it has seen a rise in traffic recently.

"Did you narrowly escape the recent Mass Extinction Event? Celebrate with 10 percent off. Join the Omerta family and communicate with impunity."

Subscribe to our cybersecurity podcast, CYBER.

By Dave Michels
The shift from product to service is opening up new opportunities to improve and deliver customer engagement.

• Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has long pitched his company as the anti-Facebook, and it appears to be paying off as some advertisers that have been fleeing Facebook planned to spend more with Snap.
• Ad revenue and the number of users rose 17% in the second quarter of 2020, though user growth was down from a 20% increase in Q1.
• The app positions itself as a more positive platform that's safe for advertisers.
• Some, however, remain skeptical about Snap's ability to siphon ad spending away from Facebook in the long-term.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Evan Spiegel stood on a virtual beach at Snap's 2020 partner summit in June and shared a key number with thousands of marketers: 75%.

That's the share of 13- to 34-year-old Americans who use the app every day, according to the CEO — more than Instagram and Facebook. He also said the company's 100 million total US users is higher than Twitter and TikTok combined.

Just days before some of the world's top advertisers like Coca-Cola, Ford, and Starbucks began boycotting Facebook for not doing more to combat hate speech, Spiegel described Snap as a source for "timely, accurate content" and a place where users can share the "love we have for one another."

During Snap's second-quarter earnings call on July 21, Spiegel and chief business officer Jeremi Gorman said brands have been spending more money even as user growth slowed, with revenue rising 17% to exceed analysts' expectations.

Snap has stuck with its plan to be the anti-Facebook

Snap's stock price has soared by 40% this year, surpassing its March 2017 first trading day price of $24. Its first quarter revenue leapt 44% year over year, to $462 million. Daily active users are growing, too, up 20% year-over-year in the first quarter to 229 million users.

Ad growth has followed. David Roter, Snap's VP of global agency partnerships, recently told Business Insider that advertisers had committed twice as much money to Snap in 2020 as they did in 2019.

"That type of momentum is a tangible sign that we've become a core part of many large advertisers' strategy," Roter said.

According to an executive at a major agency, who is known to Business Insider but requested anonymity to speak openly, Snap executives were readying a pitch for clients during the last week of June in case they decided to boycott Facebook.

Snap has long positioned itself as the anti-Facebook, safe for both teenagers and advertisers, by highlighting the positivity of its user base in an attempt to transcend early reports of explicit content. It has also largely avoided the privacy controversies surrounding platforms like Facebook and TikTok, though reports emerged last year of employees abusing an internal tool to access user data.

Some media executives remain skeptical of Snap's safety claims and its potential to approach Facebook's scale and performance. But the company's work finally seems to be paying off.

"The platform has come a long way in the last 18 months," Duane Brown, founder and head of strategy at e-commerce agency Take Some Risk, recently said. "When we have extra money or we want to move budget off of Facebook and Instagram, it's one of the first places we'll go."

Some Facebook advertisers are putting more money into Snap

Advertisers said Snap stands to benefit from the Facebook boycott after gaining steam with marketers over the past year under Gorman.

"So much of the frustration around Facebook is pent-up anger from years worth of scandals and challenges — we love when there are other platforms that can provide incremental gains," said Mike Mother, CEO of WPromote, a performance ad agency that works with small and midsize marketers.

Snap has evolved its ad pitch over the years. It's long sold direct-response ads that compete with Facebook ads. In its latest effort to capture more e-commerce dollars, the company released an ad product last month that automatically updates product prices and availability.

Michael Levine, senior analyst for the internet and media at Pivotal Research Group, recently said Snap has made two major shifts over the past year and a half: Moving from one-off ad buys to an "always-on scenario" for brands and revealing, during April's first quarter earnings report, that 50% of revenue comes from direct response.

Two executives at holding company-owned media-buying firms, both of whom are known to Business Insider but requested anonymity to speak openly, recently said their clients have been spending more on Snap despite the pandemic and that Snap has moved from many marketers' so-called "experimental buckets" to become a more regular source of spending in the past year.

Savannah Sanchez, an advertising consultant that runs Facebook, Snap and TikTok ads for advertisers like eyelash brand Doe Lashes, recently said that the focus on e-commerce is making Snapchat a bigger buy for advertisers wanting to reach young people.

E-commerce brands that target Snap's young users spend 50% of their budgets on Snapchat and the other 50% on Facebook. For brands targeting older consumers, Snap budgets drop to 10% to 20% of total budgets while Facebook gets a larger share, she said. 

Some ad buyers remain skeptical that Snap can replace Facebook

Ad execs said unlike the Facebook news feed, where it's hard for advertisers to avoid offensive content, Snap's Discover section includes only content approved by Snap's editorial team or from publishing companies.

One executive said there are limits to brand safety on Snap, though, since ads can still run before or after objectionable user content where advertisers are limited in their control over placement.

The exec also said when it comes to scale and targeting, Snap is more comparable to Twitter than to Facebook.

And while Snap is well suited to advertisers aiming at its core user group of young people, advertisers needing to reach a wider audience will find it limiting.

"The nature of Snap limits the amount that they can profit off Facebook's misfortune," said one exec. 

SEE ALSO: Facebook and advertisers are locked in an image war, and advertisers are winning

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: What makes 'Parasite' so shocking is the twist that happens in a 10-minute sequence

'While conditions do vary from state to state, we need to see that the U.S. outlook as a whole is stable before we move forward,' Chris Rackow, Google vice president of global security, wrote in a memo that Bloomberg said it obtained.

• Apple is re-closing an additional 30 stores in the US as coronavirus cases spike across the country, according to CNBC.
• Apple will be re-closing stores in Alabama, California, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, and Oklahoma.
• The decision comes after Apple said it would close stores in Texas, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, and South Carolina.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Apple is re-closing 30 additional stores in the US, a move that comes after the tech giant began re-closing stores in June as COVID-19 cases have spiked throughout the country, according to CNBC. 

The new store closures will occur in Oklahoma, California, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, and Alabama, according to the report. Additional stores in these states will be closing tomorrow, the report says. Apple previously re-closed stores in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Arizona.  

Apple did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

"Due to current COVID-19 conditions in some of the communities we serve, we are temporarily closing stores in these areas," Apple said in a previous statement regarding store closures. "We take this step with an abundance of caution as we closely monitor the situation and we look forward to having our teams and customers back as soon as possible."

The closures come as COVID-19 cases have spiked across the US. According to an analysis by The New York Times, coronavirus cases are increasing in the majority of states, including those in which Apple has decided to re-close its stores. Some of these states were also among the first to ease their sta-at-home restrictions, such as Texas and Florida.

The US set another record for new coronavirus cases on June 30, according to The New York Times, as 48,000 new cases were announced. Eight states, including Alaska, Arizona, California, Georgia, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas, also recorded single-day highs, according to the Times. 

Apple said in May, when it outlined its approach to reopening, that re-closing stores would be an option.

"We look at every available piece of data — including local cases, near and long-term trends, and guidance from national and local health officials," Deirdre O'Brien, Apple's senior vice president of retail and people, said in a letter at the time. "These are not decisions we rush into — and a store opening in no way means that we won't take the preventative step of closing it again should local conditions warrant."   

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A cleaning expert reveals her 3-step method for cleaning your entire home quickly

• Salesforce plans to double the number of Black employees it has in leadership positions within the US, and increase overall representation of Black employees by 50% by the end of 2023.
• Currently 1.5% of Salesforce's leadership team are Black or African American and 2.9% of employees across the company identify as Black or African American, so its goals equate to having 3% of its leadership team and 4.35% of its overall employees be Black. 
• Its part of a series of steps Salesforce announced to address racial equality and justice both inside and outside the company. 
• In addition, Salesforce made some outward facing commitments to support Black businesses and suppliers.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Salesforce is committing to double its number of Black employees in leadership positions within the US by the end of 2023, and increase overall representation of Black employees by 50% by the end of 2023, the company announced Wednesday.

Currently only 1.5% of Salesforce's leadership team — meaning, people at the VP level or above — are Black or African American, so the company's goal equates to getting that number to 3%. Across the company only 2.9% of Salesforce's roughly 49,000 employees identify as Black or African American, which means its goal would be to increase that to about 4.35%. These new commitments build on Salesforce's previous goal to making sure that by 2023 half of its workforce is composed of people who identify as either women, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Multiracial, LGBTQ+, veterans, or people with disabilities. 

The announcement come as part of a series of steps Salesforce is taking to address racial equality and justice both inside and outside the company. It comes as part of a widespread reckoning in the business world over systemic racism and racial injustice in the country, following protests over the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black people killed by police. Microsoft made a similar commitment to increasing Black leadership in late June. 

Earlier this month Salesforce said it put together a task force of executives from its equality, recruiting, philanthropy, procurement and government affairs teams to look at what Salesforce could do to address racial justice and equality. Its announcement lays out a series of steps it will take to increase its representation of Black leaders and employees within the company. 

It plans to add diversity recruiters to focus on hiring from underrepresented minority groups and launch a referral program specifically to recruit candidates from Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities. It is also revamping its promotions process and will provide company-wide unconscious bias and equality training for all employees by the end of the year. Additionally, it will expand a leadership training program to provide more mentorship for Black employees from executives. Earlier this year Salesforce made Tony Prophet head of recruiting in addition to his existing role as chief equality officer. 

In addition, Salesforce made some outward facing commitments to support Black businesses and suppliers. The company said it will spend $100 million with Black-owned businesses over the next three years and increase spending with minority owned businesses by 25% each year. Through its venture capital arm, Salesforce Ventures, it is committing to investing $100 million into companies led by Black and underrepresented minority founders with the goal of tripling the total number of Black and underrepresented minority founders in its portfolio by the end of 2023.

Salesforce says it will also continue to evaluate how its technology is used. It previously came under criticism for its contract with US Customs and Border Patrol in 2018, and subsequently set up an ethical and humane use team that determines if Salesforce's technology is being used ethically and not to harm or racially discriminate

Do you work at Salesforce? Contact this reporter via email at pzaveri@businessinsider.com or Signal at 925-364-4258. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How waste is dealt with on the world's largest cruise ship

Mike Bloomberg at Sun Valley, a conference popular with billionaires. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

The debate over whether the world’s megarich are too rich is really a debate about whether America’s megarich are too rich.

America is now home to almost 800 billionaires, a record high that accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s megarich.

That rise of the billionaire class is made stark in a new report that paints their financial might in the most complete picture yet. It also serves as a vivid snapshot of American income inequality at a time when anti-billionaire sentiment is on the rise and fueling global backlash against ultra-wealthy elites from both the left and the right. So the debate over whether the world’s megarich are too rich is really a debate about whether America’s megarich are too rich.

The number of billionaires in the US reached 788 by the end of 2019, a 12 percent increase from the prior year, according to the report from Wealth-X, which produces the comprehensive annual study. Those American billionaires now control $3.4 trillion in total assets, 14 percent more than they did at the end of 2018.

The country with the next-highest number of billionaires, China, has fewer than half the number of the US. That $3.4 trillion in American billionaires’ net worth is more than the combined total net worths of the billionaires who reside in the next eight countries.

Only three years prior, at the end of 2016, America had 620 billionaires. Those billionaires controlled just $2.6 trillion then. But the rise of Silicon Valley — and its tech giants, which have skyrocketed in value in the years since — has built out the American billionaire class.

The San Francisco area is the third-most-common home for billionaires, up from fifth place in 2016. The other US cities now among the biggest billionaire concentrations are New York (No. 1 overall, with 113) and Los Angeles (No. 7 overall, with 44).

And there are few signs that the tech boom is abating, or at least impacting the bottom line of its billionaire leaders. As the coronavirus wrecks economies around the globe, threatening the lives of low-income and working-class people, the billionaires of the world are doing pretty okay. That’s especially true in the tech sector, where there are 8.4 percent more billionaires around the globe as of May 2020 compared with the end of 2019. That’s the highest uptick of any sector.

That there are more American billionaires than ever helps explain why there is more backlash than we’ve seen in a long time to their war chests and influence. “Billionaire” became an insult in the Democratic presidential primary over the past year, with candidates even debating whether billionaires “should exist.” Conservative populists have lumped in these billionaires as pursuing elite “globalist” policy goals that leave working-class Americans, such as those who voted for Donald Trump, out to dry. And a new chorus of critics have, with some success, flipped one of the assets of billionaires — their commitment to philanthropy — into a liability by turning it into a debate over tax avoidance.

This public interrogation of billionaires is not merely an academic exercise. It’s having an impact. We now feel as negatively about billionaires as we did during the financial crisis in 2009. If America does enter a depression due to the coronavirus, it makes you wonder just how much worse we’ll feel about the ultra-wealthy, especially now that they’re around in record numbers.

---

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.

• Amazon makes new corporate employees sign a noncompete agreement saying they won't work for competitors for 18 months after they leave the company.
• The agreements are controversial: Critics charge that with Amazon involved in everything from retail to cloud computing to shipping logistics, these agreements unfairly limit career options for anybody who leaves the company. 
• That controversy was renewed in June when it was revealed that Amazon filed a lawsuit against a former marketing vice president who took a similar job at Google Cloud.
• Many Amazon employees believe noncompetes will only be enforced at the highest levels of the company, but there are examples to show that's not always the case.
• Ultimately, critics say, Amazon's practice of suing former employees could hurt recruiting, especially in light of this most recent lawsuit. 
• Are you a current or former Amazon Web Services employee? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-425-344-8242) or email (astewart@businessinsider.com).
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

A former Amazon employee thought she was free to work where she wanted — until the company's lawyers came knocking.

The employee, who asked not to be named to protect current and prospective employment, worked as a Level 4 software engineer for the company's Amazon Web Services cloud computing business – the lowest engineering level at Amazon. Her colleagues frequently moved between engineering roles at Amazon and its competitors without incident, she said.

So when she took a job at Microsoft, she didn't expect any issues with her former employers at Amazon. That is, until about a month into her new gig, when she says she was asked to sign an agreement blocking her from performing specific job functions for at least one year — part of a settlement agreement between Amazon and Microsoft.

"They told me I basically didn't have a choice," the former employee, who provided supporting documents for Business Insider to review, said. Amazon did not provide comments in response to inquiries for this story, including about whether the company's lawyers ever sought to block software engineers from certain job functions through settlements with their current employers.

At issue was an agreement the employee signed when she started working for Amazon. It's called a noncompete agreement, and Amazon requires new corporate employees to sign them and agree not to work for a competitor usually for a period of 18 months after leaving the company.

The controversy around noncompete agreements was renewed last month when a lawsuit Amazon filed against a former marketing vice president became public — the third high-profile lawsuit of its type filed by Amazon in recent memory, following the company's lawsuits against a sales executive who took a job at Google Cloud, and a former technology vice president who left to work at Seattle-area collaboration software company Smartsheet.

In this most recent case, Amazon is suing Brian Hall, a former vice president of cloud marketing within its Amazon Web Services unit, over allegations that he violated the terms of a noncompete agreement by taking a similar job at Google Cloud. Hall in court filings said he was led to believe the agreement would not be enforced. On LinkedIn, he now lists his job title as "VP in Purgatory, Google Cloud," barred from getting to work pending resolution of the suit.

These agreements have long been the subject of controversy. Supporters believe they are necessary to protect intellectual property, while critics say they stifle innovation by preventing employees from starting and moving between companies. That's especially true, critics say, because Amazon's growing reach in retail, cloud computing, logistics, and even Hollywood makes it hard to find anybody who isn't competing on some level. Hall previously declined to comment on the lawsuit beyond the court filings, and a representative for Hall has yet to respond to a request for this story.

But beyond arguing the ethics of such noncompetes directly, critics charge Amazon's agreements are too broad, and applied inconsistently and even punitively. Ultimately, these critics say, this practice of suing former employees could hurt Amazon's ability to recruit the talent it needs to stay competitive.

"You can check into the Hotel AWS, but you can never leave," Charles Fitzgerald, a Seattle angel investor, former Microsoft general manager, and critic of noncompetes, said. 

Amazon did not provide comment or information in response to multiple requests for this story. 

Amazon has a history of suing over noncompete concerns.

While California historically does not allow noncompete agreements to be enforced, Washington state — where Amazon and Microsoft are both headquartered — allows companies to enforce them in many cases.

There was an effort in Washington last year to limit such agreements, but the state legislature ultimately voted to allow noncompetes to be enforced for employees who make more than $100,000, following a lobbying effort from Amazon. Many workers in the technology industry make above this threshold, freeing Amazon to enforce noncompete agreements against even lower-level employees. 

Amazon last year sued Philip Moyer, a sales executive who left AWS last summer and took a job at Google Cloud as a vice president. AWS claimed Moyer violated a noncompete agreement with the company and argued the hiring risks Amazon's confidential information. A federal judge ultimately limited Moyer's role at Google for the duration of the noncompete agreement.

Before that, Amazon sued another former vice president, Gene Farrell, who left AWS in June 2017 to take a job at Seattle-area collaboration software company Smartsheet. AWS sued over a noncompete agreement signed by Farrell, but dropped the suit a week later after the companies agreed on undisclosed "temporary restrictions."

Critics say that Amazon applies noncompetes unevenly.

The conventional wisdom in the industry is that these kinds of noncompete agreements are only enforced for people at the highest levels of companies like Amazon, as a way to make sure that top talent sticks around for as long as possible. 

Corey Quinn, a cloud computing industry consultant, wrote a blog post about an offer he said he received from Amazon Web Services in which he claims he was told Amazon would "never enforce it against someone who's not a VP" and "only ever enforced it when someone burns bridges on their way out of the company." Amazon did not respond to a request to confirm or comment on Quinn's claims.

However, Chris DeVore, a prolific investor and fixture in Seattle's tech startup scene — and a staunch opponent of noncompetes — said he believes Amazon enforces the agreements arbitrarily. Whether or not the company chooses to enforce them, DeVore said, "has more to do with the tone in which you leave the organization than a standardized policy."

The software engineer who went from Amazon to Microsoft said she had issues with one of her supervisors at the retail giant, who ultimately didn't agree with her decision to leave. Other software engineers from similar roles at AWS have taken jobs at Microsoft before and since without facing restrictions, she said.

Even in this most recent case, Brian Hall noted that his own former boss at AWS, Ariel Kelman, left to take over as chief marketing officer at Oracle earlier this year — a move that apparently didn't trigger AWS to file a lawsuit against Kelman. To Hall, this reinforced the idea that AWS would not enforce his own noncompete agreement, per the filing.

Kelman is based in California, which generally doesn't recognize noncompetes, but Hall's attorneys in a court filing wrote "if Amazon truly believe Kelman's new role would require him to disclose its confidential information, nothing about California law would have prohibited it from seeking to enjoin that conduct."

Furthermore, AWS CEO Jassy wished Hall "nothing but the best" after learning of his decision to join Google, according to Hall's filing, seemingly indicating that there was no bad blood between them upon his departure.

Hall's case is unique — and it could hurt Amazon's ability to recruit.

What makes Hall's case unique, in Fitzgerald's view, is that Amazon chose to file such a suit after someone in marketing, given that the company is better-known for enforcing noncompetes against former technical talent. Asks Fitzgerald: "If they go after a marketing guy, who won't they go after?"

While technology-focused roles have more exposure to intellectual property, DeVore agrees, it's harder to make the case a marketing exec will have enough insight to topple the $40 billion business that is Amazon Web Services. And making that argument ultimately hurts Amazon's recruiting, he said.

"PSA: AWS claims that it would suffer 'immediate and irreparable harm' if their former employee was allowed to edit slides for the upcoming Google Cloud Next conference," Google Senior Vice President of Engineering Urs Hölzle tweeted about the Hall lawsuit. "clearly, AWS's lead over GCP is hanging on a very thin thread."

Ultimately, the critics say, this kind of approach could scare away potential Amazon recruits, and hurt its ability to recruit the top talent it needs to maintain its lead in the cloud computing market and elsewhere.

Put another way, AWS is an exciting company to work for, Devore says, but if an engineer has otherwise-equivalent offers from AWS and Google, the noncompete may be the deciding factor that pushes them away from Amazon.

"Imagine if you were in that position," DeVore said.

Amazon's noncompetes are overly broad because of all of the company's lines of businesses, critics say.

For those who are bound by them, Amazon's noncompete agreements are unique, critics charge, because the giant is a significant player in so many different industries, from cloud computing to shipping logistics to Hollywood movie production. 

Daniel Vassallo, who worked for AWS as a software development engineer for more than eight years, started working for Amazon in Ireland and transferred to Seattle in 2012. At the time he transferred, he wasn't expecting any changes to his contract, but when arrived in Seattle, he said Amazon told him he had to sign an amended contract with an 18-month noncompete clause. In his telling, Amazon said it couldn't verify his employment unless he signed the new contract. Not signing would risk his work visa, he said. 

"I was in a situation where I would violate my visa," Vassallo told Business Insider. "I realized it was unfair, but I signed."

Vassallo left Amazon in February 2019 to start his own business, and reviewed the agreement he felt pressured to sign. He said it was very broad, so he took a risk of violating it, saying he reasoned it would be "super unlikely" Amazon would enforce noncompete agreements against lower-level employees. Besides, following the letter of the noncompete agreement exactly, he said, would severely limit his career prospects, he said.

"What I realized was anything in the next 18 months would be violating my noncompete if I did anything Amazon was ever doing," Vassallo said. "I just took the risk because I would not be able to do pretty much anything if I followed it to the letter."

That broadness is a major weakness of Amazon's stance on noncompetes, Fitzgerald said.

"It really is the poster child for noncompete overreach," Fitzgerald, the Seattle angel investor and noncompete critic, said. "It's super broad, lasts 18 months, and applies to anything that competes with Amazon." He later added: "You can't go work in the retail business, the logistics business, the technology business — there are no bounds for Amazon's ambitions."

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at astewart@businessinsider.com, message her on Twitter @ashannstew, or send her a secure message through Signal at 425-344-8242.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why thoroughbred horse semen is the world's most expensive liquid

monday.com, a provider of a team management platform that aims to help companies scale while keeping employees “engaged, productive, and happy”, has announced the release of an application framework. The company is hoping that this release will lead to a network of applications that serve both private and public workflows.

Leading technology company, Logitech, recently pledged to be completely transparent about the carbon impact of its products. The company will be including the carbon impact labels on gaming products first, then adding these labels to the entire portfolio.

The pledge will make Logitech the first consumer electronics companies that provides an extensive carbon impact review on all packaging. In following this strategy, the company intends to connect with consumers on a deeper level and help them to make the right purchasing decisions.

Logitech believes in designing for sustainability across all of it’s products. Until recently, consumers haven’t been able to see the carbon impact of each product. However, Logitech’s carbon labelling will now quantify the impact of its tools, communicating it more effectively to consumers.

Reducing Environmental Impact

CEO of Logitech, Bracken Darrell, said that the company recognises the scale of the environmental challenges facing the planet today. The organisation is doubling down on efforts to reduce environmental impact, but Darrel says that the brand needs support. With transparent labelling on all products, consumers can do more for the environment too.

Bracken referred to carbon as the new “calorie”, where people need to be aware of what they’re taking in. Logitech is also inviting other companies to take the same approach to transparent labelling. This new campaign builds upon Logitech’s existing commitment to sustainability. In 2019, the company created a neutralised carbon footprint in the gaming portfolio.

To measure the carbon impact, Logitech will be using a life cycle analysis that highlights a product’s impact throughout its entire lifecycle. This includes the carbon impact of manufacturing and distribution. To ensure the integrity of its internal calculations, Logitech will be joining forces with various third parties, including Natural Capital Partners, and the iPoint Group. These verifiers will ensure that products meet DEKRA standards.

Logitech’s decision to communicate the carbon footprint of its products is voluntary, and it will provide plenty of information on methodology and protocol applied to each item. This should ensure that Logitech meets the standards laid out by ISO 14036 AND 14027.

Becoming a Transparent Brand

According to the Chief Marketing Officer at Natural Capital Partners, Rebecca Fay, increasingly, the company is seeing customers search for more transparent, clear, and credible companies. Logitech’s decision to be transparent about its carbon emissions is an excellent step in the right direction. Natural Capital Partners believes that it proves the company’s commitment to a low carbon transformation.

Creating transparency for carbon footprints in a company is an important step towards reducing greenhouse gasses, according to iPoint Group sustainability strategy, Martina Prox. The company is now looking forward to working alongside Logitech on offering more insight into their carbon footprint.

NOTE: Explanation of Carbon Transparency label above:

1 – Denotes the carbon footprint of the full lifecycle of the product, from materials sourcing and manufacture, distribution, consumer use, and end of life
2 – The product carbon footprint has been verifiably offset, thereby rendering it Carbon Neutral

 

Andy Purdy, chief security officer for Huawei Technologies USA, says that concerns over whether the company can be used by China as a backdoor for spying fail to address the broader issue of governments already spying without permission.

Purdy made the comments during a wide-ranging discussion on Motherboard’s CYBER podcast, during which he commented on geopolitical tensions between China and the United States, the detainment of two Canadian nationals by Chinese authorities, and allegations that data from Huawei products ended up in state hands.

Questions regarding Huawei Technologies and its connection to the Chinese government have been at the center of actions against the company by the Trump administration, as Huawei bids to build 5G telecommunications networks around the world.

“There are at least five nations of the world that have the ability to virtually implant hidden functionality and malware, in hardware and software. So the fact that that's the case, blocking us is not going to address that larger issue,” said Purdy. “That larger issue exists in the global ecosystem.”

When asked what assurances Huawei can give the U.S. government that past instances in which backdoors in Huawei technology were found by security researchers wouldn’t be repeated, Purdy brought up the broader issue of spying done by governments and referenced reports from 2013 that said the National Security Agency had tapped Cisco products .

“The situation about backdoors in Cisco products. The question was, well, did Cisco give them permission? Or did the U.S. government hack in? My point is, I don't know. In a way, it doesn't matter,” Purdy said.

Purdy suggested focusing on managing the risk of backdoors, which could be done by putting in place third party mechanisms with independent monitoring that can demonstrate there are no backdoors in products. He also said there should be continued support for equipment after it is deployed.

When asked to address comments by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt “that information from Huawei routers has ultimately ended up in hands that would appear to be the state,” Purdy demanded Schmidt provide proof.

“Mr. Schmidt, if you have proof that Huawei has done this or doing this, don't you owe it to the rest of the world to provide notice? He’s claiming our routers have these problems, have this fact that this has happened, we're all over the world. Speak up, call it out,” Purdy said.

Purdy also touched briefly on the arrest in Canada of Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies. Subsequent charges of espionage have been brought against two Canadian nationals in China, which Canada believes is direct retaliation for the arrest of Meng.

“Regarding Ms. Meng and the Canadians that were seized, we haven't seen what's happened in terms of the facts or the adjudication or the resolution,” Purdy said. “Some were understandably concerned that I believe the formal charges weren't brought against the two Canadians for a much longer time than we deem acceptable in the United States.”

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Discord on Tuesday announced it’s making a number of changes to expand its service beyond the gaming community. The company says the change is one its users have requested as Discord has become more of a tool for “day-to-day communication.”

“Games are what brought many of you on the platform, and we’ll always be grateful for that,” reads a blog post by Discord CEO Jason Citron and CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy. “As time passed, a lot of you realized, and vocalized, that you simply wanted a place designed to hang out and talk in the comfort of your own communities and friends. You wanted a place to have genuine conversations and spend quality time with people, whether catching up, learning something, or sharing ideas.”

T...

Continue reading…