Pivot: Interview with Caleb Scharf on Space Exploration
By: Pivot June 15, 2021 Kara and Scott discuss how Apple unknowingly handed over phone data of two Democratic congressmen to the Trump Administration. Then, they discuss how the pay gap between workers and CEOs grew even wider during the pandemic. In Friend of Pivot, Caleb Scharf, the Director of Astrobiology at Columbia University and […]
Ikea Fined €1.1m by French Court For Spying on Staff
By: Guardian June 15, 2021 The home furnishings group Ikea has been ordered to pay €1.1m (£861,000) in fines and damages by a French court after being found guilty of spying on staff. Two former Ikea France executives were also convicted and fined over an elaborate scheme to gather information on hundreds of employees, job applicants and […]
Jeff Bezos Reportedly Didn’t Pay Any In-come Taxes For at Least 2 Years Between 2006 and 2018
By: Business Insider June 8, 2021 In 2007, and again in 2011, billionaire Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reportedly paid nothing in federal income taxes. That’s according to confidential tax documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service obtained by ProPublica, which were revealed in a bombshell new report on some of the world’s wealthiest people. […]
Nigerian Broadcasters Ordered to Stop Using ‘Unpatriotic’ Twitter
By: Guardian June 7, 2021 Nigeria’s media regulator has directed all TV and radio stations to delete their Twitter accounts and described its use as unpatriotic, escalating a widely condemned clampdown on social media. The country’s National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) said all stations were to “suspend the patronage of Twitter immediately,” days after Nigeria’s government indefinitely suspended the […]
Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is Neither Artificial Nor Intelligent’
By: Guardian June 6, 2021 The AI researcher on how natural resources and human labour drive machine learning and the regressive stereotypes that are baked into its algorithm. Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of […]
No One is Policing Corporate America, and White-Collar Crime is on The Rise. What Comes Next Could be a Full-Scale Financial Meltdown
By: Business Insider June 6, 2021 The coronavirus pandemic hit the Cheesecake Factory hard. Like millions of restaurants, the company watched as most of its business disappeared overnight. By April 2020 the chain — with over 220 restaurants and 46,000 employees — was near death. The company was losing $6 million a week with just 16 […]
India and Israel Inflame Facebook’s Fights With Its Own Employees
By: New York Times June 4, 2021 SAN FRANCISCO — When India’s government ordered Facebook and other tech companies to take down posts critical of its handling of the coronavirus pandemic in April, the social network complied on some posts. But once it did, its employees flocked to online chat rooms to ask why Facebook […]
Amazon US Customers Have One Week To Opt Out Of Mass Wireless Sharing
By: The Guardian June 1, 2021 Amazon customers have one week to opt out of a plan that would turn every Echo speaker and Ring security camera in the US into a shared wireless network, as part of the company’s plan to fix connection problems for its smart home devices. The proposal, called […]
‘Silicon Six’ Tech Giants Accused Of Inflating Tax Payments By Almost $100bn
By: The Guardian May 31, 2021 The giant US tech firms known as the “Silicon Six” have been accused of inflating their stated tax payments by almost $100bn (£70bn) over the past decade. As Chancellor Rishi Sunak called on world leaders to back a new tech tax ahead of next week’s G7 summit in the […]