Davemichels

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The Department of Justice has released a proposal for changing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, urging Congress to pass a dramatic reduction in the law’s scope and expose services like apps and websites to greater legal liability. The proposal creates new categories of “egregious content” that wouldn’t be covered, makes it potentially easier to sue for content removal, and denies protection if a service “purposefully facilitates or solicits third-party content” that’s illegal.

The new rules draw on a workshop the Justice Department held early this year, and cover several disparate complaints about Section 230. The proposal suggests allowing lawsuits against sites when users upload child abuse and exploitation, terrorism, or...

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Makers of industrial robots and AI for robotics are featured on our list of notable startups in the sector.

Hikaru Nakamura in 2017. | Photo by Andrew Halseid-Budd / Getty Images

One of the fastest-growing games on Twitch is also one of the oldest. Over the past few months, the ancient board game chess has become a mainstay on the streaming platform, thanks to a combination of popular streamers and big-name chess champions playing online. According to SullyGnome, a partner at analytics firm StreamElements, the hours watched on Twitch for chess have nearly doubled every month this year; in May, the number topped more than 8 million hours watched.

The surge has been led by Hikaru Nakamura, a five-time US chess champion and the youngest American to ever achieve the grandmaster title. Nakamura has seen particular success coaching popular streamers like Felix “xQc” Lengyel, Faze Clan’s Nate Hill, and League of Legends...

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Zoom says it will begin allowing users of its videoconferencing software to enable end-to-end encryption of calls starting with a beta next month, the company announced on Wednesday. The feature won’t be restricted to paid enterprise users, either. It’s coming to both free and paid users, Zoom says, and it will be a toggle switch any call admin can turn on or disable, in the event they want to allow traditional phone lines or older conference room phones to join.

The company said as recently as early June that it might not be able to enable end-to-end encryption for free users out of concern that the app could be used for unlawful activity. Strong encryption would make it difficult for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to...

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• The theft of highly classified cyberweapons from the CIA in 2016 resulted from the agency's elite hacking unit's failure to secure its own systems from intruders, according to an internal report obtained by The Washington Post.
• The CIA discovered the breach when the radical pro-transparency group WikiLeaks published the information in a release dubbed "Vault 7." US officials say the breach was the largest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in CIA history.
• Security protocol within the hacking unit that developed the cyberweapons, housed within the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence, was "woefully lax," the report found.
• Moreover, the CIA may never have discovered the breach in the first place if WikiLeaks hadn't published the documents or if a hostile foreign power had gotten a hold of the information first, according to the report.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The Central Intelligence Agency's elite hacking team "prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems," according to an internal agency report prepared for then-CIA director Mike Pompeo and his deputy, Gina Haspel, who is now the agency's director.

The Washington Post first reported on the document, which said the hacking unit's failure to secure the CIA's systems resulted in the theft of highly classified cyberweapons in 2016.

In March 2017, US officials discovered the breach when the radical pro-transparency group WikiLeaks published troves of documents detailing the CIA's electronic surveillance and cyberwarfare capabilities. WikiLeaks dubbed the series of documents "Vault 7," and officials say it was the biggest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in the agency's history.

The internal report was introduced in criminal proceedings against former CIA employee Joshua Schulte, who was charged with swiping the hacking tools and handing them over to WikiLeaks.

The government brought in witnesses who prosecutors said showed, through forensic analysis, that Schulte's work computer accessed an old file that matched some of the documents WikiLeaks posted. 

Schulte's lawyers, meanwhile, pointed to the internal report as proof that the CIA's internal network was so insecure that any employee or contractor could have accessed the information Schulte is accused of stealing.

A New York jury failed to reach a verdict in the case in March after the jurors told Judge Paul Crotty that they were "extremely deadlocked" on many of the most serious charges, though he was convicted on two counts of contempt of court and making false statements to the FBI.

Crotty subsequently declared a mistrial, and prosecutors said they intended to try Schulte again later this year.

The report was compiled in October 2017 by the CIA's WikiLeaks Task Force, and it found that security protocol within the hacking unit that developed the cyberweapons, housed within the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence, was "woefully lax," according to the Post.

The outlet reported that the CIA may never have discovered the breach in the first place if WikiLeaks hadn't published the documents or if a hostile foreign power had gotten a hold of the information first.

"Had the data been stolen for the benefit of a state adversary and not published, we might still be unaware of the loss," the internal report said.

It also faulted the CIA for moving "too slowly" to implement safety measures "that we knew were necessary given successive breaches to other U.S. Government agencies." Moreover, most of the CIA's sensitive cyberweapons "were not compartmented, users shared systems administrator-level passwords, there were no effective removable media [thumb drive] controls, and historical data was available to users indefinitely," the report said.

The Center for Cyber Intelligence also did not monitor who used its network, so the task force could not determine the size of the breach. However, it determined that the employee who accessed the intelligence stole about 2.2 billion pages — or 34 terabytes — of information, the Post reported.

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NOW WATCH: Tax Day is now July 15 — this is what it's like to do your own taxes for the very first time

"Ultimately, our enterprise customers come to us because we are stable, secure, and there when they need us," Cisco's vice president and general manager of the collaboration segment, told CRN.

By Dana Casielles
Fleshes out management capabilities, adds new integrations, and expands security pack.

Photo by Dante D’Orazio / The Verge

If you’ve been wondering what could knock out one of the United States’ three big cellular carriers’ ability to deliver calls and text messages — and keep it that way for most of an entire day — T-Mobile now has a partial answer that pertains to its extensive nationwide outage Monday.

The company issued an apology late Tuesday that you can read in its entirety below, and on Thursday, CTO Neville Ray provided a further explanation you’ll find at the bottom of this post.

The short version, if we’re reading this correctly: a fiber-optic circuit failed, and its backup circuit also failed, which caused a chain reaction that strained the network to the point that many calls and texts couldn’t make it through.

The longer version:

June 16th,...

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Image: Logitech

Logitech announced today that it plans to put labels communicating the carbon impact of products on all product packaging and on its website. The company says it expects labels will appear first on its gaming products later this year. The goal is to include labels across its full product portfolio by 2025, Logitech tells The Verge.

“Just like calories went on the packaging in the food industry years ago, we believe that carbon content level should be a choice factor for the consumers who are interested in it,” said Logitech’s CEO Bracken Darrell in an interview with The Verge.

The number you’ll see on the label represents the total carbon life cycle of the product. That indicates the amount of carbon emitted in the entire life of the...

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Facebook’s new political information center will give users information on how and where to vote. | Image: Facebook

Critics say Facebook is actively enabling the spread of political misinformation online, but the social network has now come up with its own idiosyncratic solution: shift responsibility to the public at large by letting users “turn off” political ads they don’t like.

Facebook announced the feature as part of a campaign ahead of the 2020 US elections, which it hopes will increase voter turnout. The company is launching a new “Voting Information Center” that will tell people how and where to vote, as well as offering information on how to register to vote and how to vote by mail. Users can also turn on alerts that will remind them to vote and direct them to polling places come November.

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In the wake of a raging pandemic, the Internet Archive has been working overtime to preserve internet history and expand the public’s access to digital library collections. That recently culminated in the creation of a National Emergency Library that made 1.4 million ebooks available to the public at a time when traditional libraries pose a health risk.

Increasingly, the organization’s reward has been a parade of headaches. Both from the entertainment industry and their loyal allies in Congress.

Last week, the archive’s emergency library was forced to dramatically scale back the effort thanks to a publisher lawsuit and political pressure from politicians like North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, who accused the organization of violating the country’s often draconian—and frequently ridiculous—copyright laws.

Now Tillis is taking aim at another Internet Archive effort, the Great 78 Project.

The Great 78 Project is a communal effort geared towards the preservation, research and discovery of the 3 million 78rpm discs produced between 1898 and 1950. Often made from far more fragile shellac than the resin commonly used today, many of these recordings are fragile, and the digitization effort has created a historical archive of some amazing work.

The organization’s overall album preservation effort was buoyed by the Internet Archive’s recent purchase of the entire 500,000 album catalog of Bop Street Records, one of Seattle’s oldest and most beloved record stores—forced to close due to the COVID-19 crisis.

Enter Tillis, who in a new letter complains that both the Great 78 Project and the acquisition of the Bop Street collection could potentially run afoul of America’s aggressive copyright laws.

“It is clear that these sound recordings were very recently for sale in a commercial record shop and likely contain many sound recordings that retain significant commercial value,” Tillis said. “This raises serious alarms about copyright infringement.”

Tillis also complained that the Great 78 Project potentially violated the Orrin G. Hatch-Bob Goodlatte Music Modernization Act (MMA), passed in 2018 to help modernize U.S. copyright laws for the internet streaming era. In his letter, Tillis demands that the Archive provide detailed evidence it isn’t violating copyright by July 10.

But copyright experts approached by Motherboard aren’t quite sure what the fuss is about.

“The statement about MMA not allowing for ‘streaming or downloading’ is very odd,” John Bergmeyer, Legal Director at consumer group Public Knowledge told Motherboard.

“The MMA specifically allows for non-commercial ‘use’ of pre-72 sound recordings,” he said. “The ‘covered activities’ that MMA creates new liability for, but exempts noncommercial use from, specifically includes ‘permanent download, limited download, or interactive stream.’”

In short, Bergmeyer noted that while there could be some thorny and minor flaws in the Archive’s implementation, the law specifically carves out exemptions for such efforts.

Even if it didn’t, that’s a flaw with U.S. copyright law, not the Internet Archive’s proposal, copyright expert and Techdirt.com founder Mike Masnick told Motherboard.

“It's in that murky space where it's unclear whether or not some of it violates copyright law, but if it does, it would highlight yet another fundamental problem with copyright law in working against culture, rather than in support of it,” Masnick said. “Indeed, if anything, Tillis should work on fixing the law and rolling back copyright term extension that makes this so murky.”

With the country facing record levels of unemployment, massive protests against racial injustice, and a raging pandemic, it’s unclear why Tillis’ top priority appears to be badgering a good faith internet preservation effort. His office did not respond to a request for comment as to whether Congressional resources would be better spent elsewhere.

It's worth noting the RIAA originally alerted Motherboard Tillis' letter, but declined to comment on it.

Masnick noted this is part of a broader effort by Tillis to expand the nation’s already controversial patent and copyright laws, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

“In Tillis' short time atop the Senate Judiciary Committee's IP Subcommittee, he has shown himself to be strongly aligned with legacy ‘maximalist’ interests on both copyright and patent law,” Masnick said. “He is seeking to rewrite the DMCA to make it even more in favor of legacy copyright interests and also introduced laws to expand patent eligibility massively.”

With the nation reeling from an historic pandemic and the DMCA routinely under fire for already being an over-aggressive mess, copyright experts say Tillis’ priorities don’t really make a whole lot of sense.

• T-Mobile has shared more information behind the cause of Monday's outage, saying the problems were the result of a circuit failure from a third-party provider in the Southeast.
• The carrier is working with vendors to "add permanent additional safeguards" that would prevent such an issue from happening again, according to Neville Ray, T-Mobile's president of technology.
• T-Mobile customers across the US experienced outages on Monday that lasted throughout the afternoon and evening.
• Customers on other carrier networks also reported issues during the outage period, although AT&T and Verizon had said their networks were operating normally on Monday.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

T-Mobile has shared more information behind what caused the massive outage that disrupted service across the United States on Monday, saying that the issue stems from a fiber circuit failure in the Southeast.

"Our engineers worked through the night to understand the root cause of yesterday's issues, address it and prevent it from happening again," Neville Ray, T-Mobile's president of technology, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday evening. "The trigger event is known to be a leased fiber circuit failure from a third-party provider in the Southeast."

Ray said T-Mobile's existing safeguards that are meant to ensure such circuit failures won't impact customers had failed and resulted in an "overload situation." That overload caused what Ray described as an "IP traffic storm" that spread from the Southeast to create capacity issues across the network that supports T-Mobile's voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) calls.

Ray says the carrier has worked with its vendors to "add permanent additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again" and is "continuing to work on determining the cause of the initial overload failure."

T-Mobile's service was restored around 1 a.m. ET on Tuesday after outages had affected the network across the United States for much of the afternoon and evening on Monday. The website Downdetector, which tracks outages across popular services and websites, indicated that the issue seemed to peak at around 3 p.m. on Monday, with more than 93,000 reports of issues on the network. 

Ray said in his latest blog post that "data connections continued to work" during the outage, although on Monday he tweeted that T-Mobile's engineers were working to "resolve a voice and data issue."

Customers on other carriers had reported problems with service as well, according to Downdetector, but both AT&T and Verizon had said their networks were operating normally on Monday. Ray also said that Sprint customers were unaffected by the service disruptions.

The mishap has brought scrutiny from the Federal Communications Commission, as chairman Ajit Pai tweeted on Monday that the outage was "unacceptable" and that the commission would be launching an investigation.

"We're demanding answers — and so are American customers," Pai tweeted.

SEE ALSO: AT&T is laying off thousands of workers and shutting down at least 250 stores

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NOW WATCH: We tested a machine that brews beer at the push of a button

Cloud computing startups attracting attention range from a CloudOps software provider selected as a launch partner for the AWS Partner Network Global Startup Program to companies built around open source projects to the creator of CockroachDB.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

AT&T has confirmed that it’s cutting thousands of jobs and closing hundreds of stores, Axios reports. While the company has not confirmed the total number of jobs affected, the cuts reportedly include 3,400 technician and clerical jobs as well as managerial and executive roles. And 250 retail locations will be closed, including both AT&T and Cricket Wireless branded stores, the Communication Workers of America confirmed — although AT&T said most of these employees will be offered alternative jobs at the company.

Although AT&T said that the store closures had been planned previously, the pandemic has reportedly caused it to bring these plans forward. The company also blamed “changed customer behaviors” for its decision in a statement...

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• Swiss researchers have developed a clear face mask designed to make the interaction between healthcare workers and their patients more personal.
• The mask may enter the market as early as 2021 and will be sold to the medical community first, with the possibility of eventually being available to the general public.
• As the coronavirus disease has resulted in millions adapting to covering their faces in public, communicating with others has also become more difficult, especially for those in the deaf community. 
• A clear face mask would make it easier to both cover your face and connect with people.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions have adapted to wearing masks in public, communicating with people by using only half of our faces.

But researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) have developed a transparent mask that could allow people to cover their faces to help in curbing the spread of the disease and also make it easier to connect with others.

Dubbed HelloMasks, the biodegradable clear mask is designed to replace the typical tri-fold surgical masks worn by healthcare workers. It's also made of a material that prevents the wearer's breath from fogging the masks.

The concept has been in the works for the past two years, and the team has created a startup — HMCARE — to market the design. HMCARE has raised $1 million in funding and is slated to introduce the mask to the market in early 2021.

They may eventually be able to be worn by anyone, but they were developed specifically to make the interaction between medical professionals and patients more personal, according to the researchers. The masks will be sold to the medical community first.

As masks have become more deeply ingrained in our daily lives, other innovations have also sprouted up to make covering our faces easier in public. As Business Insider's Mary Meisenzahl reported, an Israeli company developed a face mask that can be worn while you eat and is controlled remotely via a lever.

Masks have also proven to be a problem for those in the deaf community as the face coverings make speechreading difficult, but a clear mask could be a solution.

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NOW WATCH: Pathologists debunk 13 coronavirus myths

Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

Google is partnering with Parallels to bring native Microsoft Office applications and other legacy enterprise Windows applications to Chromebooks. Google revealed the new partnership in a blog post looking at the future of Chrome OS for enterprises.

While Chrome OS has long supported Windows desktop apps that are streamed via the cloud through a Parallels Remote Application Server, this new partnership means the apps will run virtualized on Chromebooks instead. The new feature is set to be available this fall for Chrome Enterprise customers.

Parallels Desktop will be integrated natively into Chrome OS, improving performance and enabling offline access for these applications on Chromebooks. It’s a surprising, but welcome move that will...

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Only a couple months after the merger between T-Mobile and Sprint was completed, the enormous combined telecom company has now announced layoffs affecting hundreds of Sprint employees. TechCrunch obtained audio of a conference call that took place yesterday between T-Mobile VP James Kirby and the people who are losing their jobs. It was just one of “several calls held by T-Mobile leadership throughout the day to lay off staff across the organization.” The layoffs are said to have largely impacted Sprint workers rather than those on the T-Mobile side.

Kirby relayed the news that T-Mobile is “eliminating Sprint’s inside sales unit (BISO), a sales division that focuses on small businesses across the United States,” according to TechCrunch....

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Triumph, the premium British motorcycle brand most preferred by James Bond, is out with a new two-wheeler of a different sort. The Trekker GT is the world-famous motorcycle maker’s first electric bicycle, and, at first glance, it appears to be a highly capable commuter model. It won’t be cheap, though: the bike will be going on sale in Europe, the UK, and the US for £2,950 ($3,318).

The bike has a minimalist design, with much of the battery, wiring, and drivetrain tucked inside the hydro-formed, lightweight aluminum frame. Triumph says the Trekker GT is “perfect all-road choice for commuting, fitness and everyday riding fun” — although we’d have to test it before we could agree.

Triumph outfitted its first e-bike...

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On Monday afternoon, several people in the United States reported that they couldn’t use their smartphone for its original purpose: calling and texting people. According to aggregated data on a site that tracks outages and some complaints on Twitter that went viral, something was afoot with T-Mobile, maybe all American cellphone providers, and perhaps even other services like Twitch or Instagram.

It didn't take long for panic and misinformation to spread. Was it a nation-wide outage of all cellphone providers? Perhaps caused by a cyberattack? A massive one that takes down the whole internet? The answer, it turns out, is no. What we saw was simply a failure of T-Mobile's network, but network infrastructure is complicated, and widely followed Twitter accounts shared information that made the event seem more nefarious than it actually was.

For @YourAnonCentral, a Twitter account with 6.5 million followers that’s trying to become the “official” voice of the ever-fluid Anonymous hacking collective, it was definitely a “major” Distributed Denial of Service (better known as DDoS) attack on the whole United States of America.

The tweet, which went viral, shows a screenshot of Digital Attack Map, which presents data gathered by Arbor Networks, a cybersecurity company specialized in DDoS mitigation. This kind of map, ironically referred to as “pew pew” maps by infosec professionals, attempts to visualize unusual internet traffic across the internet and DDoS attacks. Unfortunately these maps are often taken as a live and accurate representation of DDoS attacks, even though they are not . The site was made by Jigsaw, a division of Google that’s supposed to create tools to protect marginalized communities on the internet.

Matthew Prince, the CEO of CloudFlare, a company that has visibility into large swaths of internet traffic and can track DDoS attacks, explained on Twitter that the reality of the outage is “far more boring” than what some were led to believe. He blamed it on “some changes to [T-Mobile’s] network configurations today.”

In other words, it looks like T-Mobile caused the problem itself. We asked T-Mobile about it, and will update the piece if and when they get back.

The National Capital Region Threat Intelligence Consortium, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, warned telecom companies to be cautious, claiming this was a DDoS, according to a story by CyberScoop.

If you check the Digital Attack Map website right now without understanding what you're looking at you might also think that the U.S. was under a "major DDoS attack."

“While the data represented in the Digital Attack Map is sourced from one of the most complete data sets available,” as an FAQ on the site itself puts it, “it is an incomplete picture. The data may misidentify or exclude attack activity.”

Those lines, moreover, are not meant to be read as an indication of who is attacking who. They show “anonymous network traffic and attack statistics” from some of the largest internet service providers in the world, according to Digital Attack Map. The source of an attack can also be forged easily, as the site notes, and the site doesn’t show live information on the actual targets.

And yet, the @YourAnonCentral tweet led to some news coverage all over the world, including a debunking.

T-Mobile’s President of Technology wrote that this was all due to “a voice and data issue.” The company’s official statement on the outage said that it was caused by “an IP traffic related issue that has created significant capacity issues in the network core throughout the day.”

As many grapple with a new reality in which Anonymous may be relevant again, I for one understand the allure of nostalgia—of the days when young, intrepid, hackers were not only causing major trouble online. One thing Anonymous Twitter accounts almost never were, however, was a reliable source of information. That, alas, has not changed.

Subscribe to our new cybersecurity podcast, CYBER.

• Microsoft employees would rather work from dedicated workspaces in physical offices with good network connectivity than work from home, CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday at a conference for computer vision researchers. 
• Companies should always have the option of allowing remote work, Nadella said, but they shouldn't replace "one dogma with another."
• Microsoft is one of the biggest winners from the pandemic-forced shift to remote work.  Its Teams work chat app, for example, grew from 44 million to 75 million daily active users in less than two months.
• Are you a current or former Microsoft or 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.

Microsoft is one of the biggest winners in the shift to remote work during the coronavirus crisis, but the company's CEO and employees apparently aren't sold on making it permanent.

Microsoft employees, according to CEO Satya Nadella, have made it clear that they want dedicated workspaces in physical offices with good network connectivity. 

"In the Seattle region, where we have sent a lot of people home, we're realizing people would rather have workspace at work once the COVID-19 crisis goes away," Nadella said during Tuesday's CVPR 2020, a conference for computer vision researchers. 

While employees may be getting fed up with such a long stretch of Wi-Fi and bandwidth issues at home, Nadella envisions a future of more flexibility. Remote work should always be an option, he said.

"At a core level, we will always want to have this capability of remitting every function inside of our enterprise: whether it's remote sales, remote operations, remote support — remote work at scale," Nadella said."It's going to be foundational to business continuity and resilience."

Instead of making the shift to remote work permanent and "replacing one dogma with another," Nadella painted a picture of a post-COVID-19 crisis world in which companies evaluate the effectiveness of remote work for different roles and business functions, and leave physical space for employees.

As of now, Microsoft has told employees they can work from home until October, unless they're required to be on-site. The company is still in the middle of a multibillion-dollar headquarters renovation intended to make space for 8,000 additional employees. 

While Microsoft faced some challenges during the pandemic, such as capacity issues for its cloud business and supply chain constraints, the shift to remote work has in many ways become a boon for the company. Microsoft beat Wall Street expectations in its most recent quarter and its work chat app Teams grew from 44 million to 75 million daily active users in less than two months. The crisis also forced Microsoft to speed up projects and make decisions more quickly.

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.

SEE ALSO: 100 days that changed Microsoft: How Satya Nadella led the $1.4 trillion tech giant through the coronavirus pandemic

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

Image: NBC

Consumer electronics have replaced studios during the pandemic

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Photo by David Bush / The Verge

The Tesla Model S Long Range Plus now has an EPA-rated range of 402 miles, making it the first electric vehicle to receive a rating of over 400 miles from the agency. The new rating applies to all North American Model S vehicles with the “Long Range Plus” name, which Tesla introduced back in February to replace the “Long Range” version of the car.

“All Model S cars made since late Jan have 402 mile range,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a tweet. “This is just making it official.” The Model S Long Range Plus has a starting price of $74,990 following a price reduction last month.

Until...

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Amazon, which is currently being sued for allegedly failing to protect workers from COVID-19, has unveiled a new AI tool it says will help employees follow social distancing rules.

The company’s “Distance Assistant” combines a TV screen, depth sensors, and AI-enabled camera to track employees’ movements and give them feedback in real time. When workers come closer than six feet to one another, circles around their feet flash red on the TV, indicating to employees that they should move to a safe distance apart. The devices are self-contained, meaning they can be deployed quickly where needed and moved about.

Amazon compares the system to radar speed checks which give drivers instant feedback on their driving. The assistants have been...

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T customers were mystified on Monday when their calls stopped going through, in what turned out to be a nationwide outage for T-Mobile’s network, specifically, that lasted most of the day. Around 1AM Tuesday, the company tweeted that voice calls and text messaging services had been fully restored.

According to reports on Downdetector and on social media, reports spiking around 2:20 PM ET Monday. While AT&T told The Verge that its network was “operating normally” and Verizon said its network was “performing well,” T-Mobile confirmed that it’ was working to fix “a voice and data issue that has been affecting customers around the country.”

Verizon also said it was not to blame: “We’re aware that another carrier is...

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• Mark Cuban has been critical of the US government's response to the coronavirus-induced recession. 
• The Shark Tank judge and investor is urging companies to help fill the void by rethinking compensation and ownership structures. 
• "NOW is the time to re-evaluate your comp and reward structures and look at bottom up rather than top down reward structures & to give equity to everyone," he said. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

There's never been a better time for executives to consider more employee-ownership of a company, says Mark Cuban.

The NBA owner and Shark Tank judge has been vocal about how companies, economies, and governments can recover form the coronavirus pandemic. Over the weekend, his focused turned to leadership.

"If you are the CEO/Director of a public company, or investment fund, NOW is the time to re-evaluate your comp and reward structures and look at bottom up rather than top down reward structures & to give equity to everyone," Cuban said on Twitter. "Otherwise your brand and business could get CRUSHED."

Cuban has been critical of the US government's response to the coronavirus-induced recession, especially of its botched rollout of the Paycheck Protection Program, which offers forgivable loans to businesses.

Employee ownership, while still a minuscule movement among American business, has clear benefits, researchers have found. Giving workers options of buying stock at a reduced cost can increase how invested employees feel — both financially and morally — in the business, thereby helping to up productivity, Harvard Business Review found in 2018.

At that time, only about 12% of the US workforce was employed by worker-owned enterprises. And they aren't all tiny shops either; large agricultural names like Land O'Lakes and Ocean spray count employees among their largest shareholders. Publix Super Markets, a chain with more than 200,000 workers, also runs a robust employee stock ownership, or ESOP, plan.

In 2014, Rutgers University researchers found that employee ownership can help boost profits by as much as 14%.

"Give them stock in a meaningful way," Cuban said on a podcast earlier this year. "You're going to need them to grow your company. We all are going to need them to grow this country in a world back to where it was economically."

"You will get more from your employees, and they will be more committed if you share equity immediately in a meaningful way, so that everybody rises up," he said. "No entrepreneur can do this alone. You need every single employee committed to helping you get through this, so recognize that. Reward them for it."

SEE ALSO: Mark Cuban explains how entrepreneurs can build 'America 2.0' using a strategy from his early startup days

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NOW WATCH: We tested a machine that brews beer at the push of a button

• Howard Boville, IBM's senior vice president of cloud, told Business Insider the tech giant sees a $1 trillion business opportunity in helping large enterprises finally adopt the public cloud.
• Boville spent eight years at Bank of America, most recently serving as chief technology officer, before joining IBM in April. 
• On Monday, IBM announced it had reached a definitive agreement to buy Spanugo, a vendor focused on cybersecurity in public clouds. 
• Sign up here for our Wall Street Insider newsletter.

IBM's newly-hired head of cloud said the there is a $1 trillion opportunity for the tech giant to grow its cloud business by targeting large enterprises that have hesitated to adopt the public cloud.

Howard Boville, who was named IBM's senior vice president of cloud in April after previously serving as Bank of America's chief technology officer, said about 80% of the market has not been addressed yet in terms of cloud-based technology.

That group, the majority of which are large enterprises with older systems in place, represents about $1 trillion in potential business, according to calculations by IBM based on various external analyst reports, Boville said.

"I saw an untapped need in the marketplace," said Boville of joining IBM and the opportunity at hand. "Companies that have legacy environments felt they didn't have a natural partner to work with to help them on that cloud journey."

Read more: Here's how IBM's new CEO helped turn Wall Street's public cloud security fears into an opportunity to work with long-time holdout Bank of America 

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google Cloud are considered three of the top players in the space.

AWS has maintained its first-mover advantage, as it remains the industry leader. However, Microsoft has continued to make up ground in recent years. Google Cloud, meanwhile. has put significant resources towards growing the business. 

IBM has annual revenues of $22 billion for its public-cloud business, Boville said. 

If anyone can appreciate helping large companies transition to a cloud environment, it's Boville. During his eight years at Bank of America he played a key role in leading its transition to a private cloud. The seven-year journey helped reduce the firm's servers from 200,000 to 70,000, data centers from 60 to 23 and savings of $2 billion annually in infrastructure costs. 

Boville is also acutely aware of IBM's offering. In November, IBM announced it was launching a public cloud geared specifically for firms in financial services. Bank of America and Boville were key collaborators of the project and the bank was one of the initial customers to sign on to use it. 

Now Boville will look to leverage that experience to help other large companies finally make the jump to the public cloud. Wall Street will certainly be one industry ripe with potential customers. Boville tagged financial firms' adoption of public cloud at 13%. 

To be sure, it's not just banks and hedge funds IBM is targeting. Airlines, healthcare, pharmaceutical, and the government are among the industries Boville said consist of large enterprises needing help.

"They would all love to be in a place that their company was born five years ago and they'd written all of their lines of code in cloud-native format and therefore it gives them the agility and the time-to-market and the user experience that they would like, but that isn't how many of these companies have grown," he added. "They have to transform themselves."

IBM has faced its own reorganization in recent months. Arvind Krishna, who has focused on IBM's cloud-computing efforts and was a key player in the company's $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, transitioned to CEO in April.

In May, the tech giant began cutting several thousand jobs, according to media reports, the majority of which sit in IBM's technology services division.

Typically, Boville said, applications tied to data centers would run on one of five operating systems: Microsoft Windows, Linux, AIX, IBM, and Quantum Computing. IBM's has ties to four of those, illustrating its experience working with various types of architectures. 

That's such a key piece of the process, Boville said, as older companies are wary of shifting technologies only to have to revisit the issue a few years later. 

IBM has the benefit of having helped companies adapt to the changing times for the past 100-plus years, he added.

"[IBM] understands what it is to work with enterprises. It understands what it is to run mission-critical workloads. It understands the critical business processes that those platforms that IBM has provided serves," Boville said. "And it understands how to serve large customers."

See more: Bank of America's CEO says that it's saved $2 billion per year by ignoring Amazon and Microsoft and building its own cloud instead

One common topic raised when discussing concerns around the public cloud is security. Large institutions still remain cautious, especially when it comes to customer's data. 

On Monday, IBM announced it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire Spanugo, a provider of cybersecurity offerings for the public cloud. Boville said the deal, of which financial terms were no disclosed, points to the theme of needing to automate cyber techniques, especially when it comes to highly-regulated industries like financial services. 

Purchases Spanugo allows IBM to accelerate innovation it was already targeting, he added. 

"This acquisition compliments and enhances the existing capabilities that we already have within our cloud, which is just a further way to actually remove the complexity of a very complex environment that these companies have to operate within," Boville said.

Read more: 

• IBM is ditching a big WeWork office in NYC, revealing the risks of the popular flex-space model as the pandemic prompts Blue Chip companies to rethink real estate
• $12.4 billion startup Snowflake is targeting Wall Street with a new data exchange that's already signed up FactSet and Coatue
• Nasdaq is starting to stream real-time market data to the public cloud as Wall Street demands more flexible access to critical information

SEE ALSO: IBM is ditching a big WeWork office in NYC, revealing the risks of the popular flex-space model as the pandemic prompts Blue Chip companies to rethink real estate

SEE ALSO: Bank of America's CEO says that it's saved $2 billion per year by ignoring Amazon and Microsoft and building its own cloud instead

SEE ALSO: Bank of America's CTO, who played a key part in a private-cloud strategy execs praised for saving billions, has left the bank

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• GitHub, the world's largest site for hosting open-source software, is working to replace the terms "master" and "slave" in code, as the Black Lives Matter movement continues to have a widespread ripple effect.
• In programming speak, "master" refers to the main version of code that controls the "slaves," or the replicas.
• Software companies had already been working to drop such references, but worldwide demonstrations organized to protest systemic racism have introduced a newfound sense of urgency.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The Microsoft-owned coding site GitHub is dropping the term "master" from its systems as the Black Lives Matter movement continues to hold companies accountable.

According to BBC, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman said the company — which is used by 50 million developers — is changing the term to a neutral one. In programming speak, "master" refers to the main version of code that controls other processes, which are known as slaves. Replacements could be "main" for "master" or "replica" for "slave."

As the BBC notes, news of GitHub's change came on Twitter when Friedman replied to Google Chrome developer Una Kravets, who suggested it.

Friedman replied, "It's a great idea and we are already working on this!"

Software companies have been working to distance themselves from such references for years now, but the worldwide protests being held in response to police brutality and systemic racism have ushered in a fresh sense of urgency.

Tech companies especially have long struggled to foster diverse workforces and cultures, a problem that holding onto such terms could exacerbate, as Telegraph notes.

"If it makes even one person feel less isolated and uncomfortable, why not make the change?" Kravets wrote on Twitter. "The tech community is already lacking black and latinx voices."

SEE ALSO: The CEO of Microsoft's GitHub explains why it's adding a new free plan and dropping prices, even though it will 'vaporize millions of dollars in revenue'

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• IBM, Amazon, and Microsoft have all committed to not sell facial recognition to law enforcement at least temporarily.
• While activists have been campaigning for the companies to do this for years, the Black Lives Matter movement appears to have tipped the scale.
• As facial recognition becomes more widely used to catch criminals, illegal immigrants, or terrorists, there is mounting concern about how the technology might be abused.
• Each company has made subtly different promises on their sales bans.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Three of the world's biggest tech companies have backed off selling facial recognition to law enforcement amid ongoing protests against police brutality.

IBM announced on Monday it is halting the sale of "general purpose" facial recognition. Amazon on Wednesday announced it was imposing a one-year suspension on the sale of its facial recognition software to law enforcement. Microsoft followed suit on Thursday, saying it does not sell facial recognition tech to US police forces and will not do so until legislation is passed governing the use of the technology.

It's something of a u-turn, since activists and academics have been advocating for companies not to sell facial recognition to law enforcement on the basis it exacerbates racial injustice for years.

Facial recognition is becoming an increasingly popular tool for government agencies and law enforcement to track down criminals, terrorists, or illegal immigrants. But with the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping across the world in the wake of George Floyd's death, there are now fresh calls for the big tech companies to stop selling the technology to police.

The argument long put forward by civil rights groups and AI experts is that facial recognition disproportionately affects people of color in two ways.

Firstly, like any policing tool operating by systemically racist societies or institutions, it will inevitably be used to target people of color more often.

Secondly, the data used to build facial recognition software ingrains it with racial bias which makes it more likely to misidentify women and people of color, which would in turn lead to more wrongful arrests. This is because the datasets used to train facial recognition algorithms are often predominantly made up of pictures of white men.

Here is a breakdown of exactly what each company has promised:

IBM

IBM was the first of the three companies to announce it was taking its foot off the pedal on facial recognition, and it's also made the most permanent commitment.

CEO Arvind Krishna made the announcement in a letter to members of Congress including Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris on June 8.

"IBM no longer offers general purpose IBM facial recognition or analysis software," Krishna wrote. "IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms."

He added that IBM hoped to start a "national dialogue" on the use of facial recognition by law enforcement.

The announcement was welcomed by many, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Tweet Embed:
//twitter.com/mims/statuses/1270848998249771009?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Shout out to @IBM for halting dev on technology shown to harm society.

Facial recognition is a horrifying, inaccurate tool that fuels racial profiling + mass surveillance. It regularly falsely ID's Black + Brown people as criminal.

It shouldn't be anywhere near law enforcement. https://t.co/SOU670yRVc

Experts Business Insider spoke to said it was a move in the right direction, but that the language IBM had used in its announcement gave it some room to potentially keep selling facial recognition tech in future.

Eva Blum-Dumontet, a senior researcher at Privacy International who specializes in IBM, told Business Insider the specification that it would stop selling "general purpose" software gives the firm room to develop custom software for clients.

"We'll have to see what that means in practice. It's worth bearing in mind that a lot of the work IBM does is actually customized work for their customers, so it's possible we're not seeing the end of IBM doing facial recognition at all, they're just changing the label," said Blum-Dumontet.

Amazon

Even if IBM's announcement was cynically motivated or hedged, it was at least the first domino to fall.

Amazon announced on June 10 it was suspending sale of its facial recognition software Rekognition to law enforcement for one year.

"We've advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge. We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested," Amazon said in its announcement.

The ACLU said the one-year break doesn't go far enough. "This surveillance technology's threat to our civil rights and civil liberties will not disappear in a year," Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties director for the ACLU, said in a press statement.

Dr. Nakeema Stefflbauer, an AI ethics policy expert, also told Business Insider that while Amazon's statement is a step in the right direction, it doesn't address what will happen to all the police departments which already have the software. "Far better than suspending further sales would be recalling the software altogether, as is commonly done with other faulty or unreliable products,"said Stefflbauer.

Andy Jassy, Amazon's head of Amazon Web Services, said in a February 2020 interview that the company does not know how many police forces have bought Rekognition.

Rekognition has come under particular scrutiny from activists in the past. In July 2018 the ACLU tested the software on members of congress. During the test Rekognition confused 28 congresspeople of color with people who had been arrested. MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini also published a paper in January 2019 which found Rekognition was consistently worse at identifying faces belonging to women and people of color.

Amazon's response was that the activists and researchers were not paying enough attention to the software's "confidence threshold," a percentage it spits out saying how sure it is it has identified the right person. As it started to sell the tool to police forces however, reports emerged that law enforcement officers weren't paying attention to the tool's confidence threshold either, and were even running composite sketches and photos of celebrities through the system in their hunt for suspects.

Microsoft

Microsoft's president Brad Smith said in an interview with the Washington Post on Thursday, June 11, that Microsoft does not sell facial recognition tech to US police forces, and committed to not sell it until a national law governing its use is brought in.

"The number one point that I would really underscore is this: we need to really use this moment to pursue a strong national law to govern facial recognition that is grounded in the protection of human rights," said Smith.

Tweet Embed:
//twitter.com/mims/statuses/1271116509625020417?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Microsoft president @BradSmi says the company does not sell facial recognition software to police depts. in the U.S. today and will not sell the tools to police until there is a national law in place "grounded in human rights." #postlive pic.twitter.com/lwxBLjrtZL

 

This came two days after more than 250 Microsoft employees published an open letter calling on the firm to sever business relationships with police forces more generally.

Without a legal framework, other companies could rush in to fill the gap.

Smith cautioned that giants like Microsoft, Amazon, IBM stepping back entirely from facial recognition could mean smaller companies rushing in to fill the vacuum.

"If all of the responsible companies in the country cede this market to those that are not prepared to take a stand, we won't necessarily serve the national interest or the lives of the Black and African-American people of this nation well. We need Congress to act, not just tech companies alone," he said.

Dr. Nakeema Stefflbauer voiced similar concerns that less well-known companies could start touting facial recognition to police.

"From a US perspective, these announcements confirm the serious harm that unregulated facial recognition technology in the hands of law enforcement has already caused Black and other [minority] groups to suffer," said Stefflbauer.

Dr. Steffblauer added that smaller vendors such as Clearview, Kairos, and PredPol could continue selling facial recognition tech without new laws, both in the US and the EU.

She added: "In my opinion, this is the moment when US and EU governments must take technology regulation seriously and pass comprehensive legislation: failure to do so is nothing less than giving permission for an unchecked assault on human rights."

In an email to Business Insider Joy Buolamwini, who looked at bias in Amazon's facial recognition tech, also stressed the need for a regulatory framework.

"We cannot rely on self-regulation or hope companies will choose to reign in harmful deployments of the technologies they develop," she said.

"The first step is to press pause, not just company-wide, but nationwide."

This still marks a huge shift in the tech companies' attitudes.

"Scholars and activists like Joy Buolamwini, Dr. Timnit Gebru, and Deb Raji are not alone in their push for fairness and accountability in technology that is deployed at scale. But the turnaround from big tech companies is really stunning, in light of the incredible attacks and attempts to discredit these women that their research was initially met with," said Stefflbauer.

"It should not be the responsibility of members of a discriminated group to prove that a commercial technology used on millions of people is unfairly targeting and victimizing them, but that has so far been the case."

In her email to Business Insider, Joy Buolamwini said the tech giants should throw more of their weight behind promoting racial equality.

"I also call on all companies that substantially profit from AI — including IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Apple— to commit at least $1 million each towards advancing racial justice in the tech industry."

"The money should go directly as unrestricted gifts to support organizations like the Algorithmic Justice League, Black in AI, and Data for Black Lives that have been leading this work for years. Racial justice requires algorithmic justice."

 

Not everyone is convinced the tech firms are acting in good faith.

Activist groups and scholars have largely welcomed the companies' decisions to hit pause on selling their tech to police, although not all are convinced the move is ethically motivated.

"It appears the companies are using this moment to capture goodwill so that they get to write the federal regulations on facial recognition," Jacinta Gonzalez, a senior campaign director at civil rights group Mijente told Business Insider.

"We cannot allow their lobbyists to write these rules in such a way where the companies will be allowed to profit from Black and brown communities. Facial recognition is a very dangerous technology that further oppresses a people who've long been on the receiving end of racist policing in the United States."

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

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