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Senators Want to Know Amazon Retaliated Against Coronavirus Whistle-Blowers

Democratic senators on Thursday questioned whether Amazon retaliated against whistle-blowers when it fired four employees who raised concerns about the spread of coronavirus in the company’s warehouses.In a letter sent to Amazon, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a frequent critic of the e-commerce giant, and eight other senators asked Amazon to provide more information about its policies for firing employees.“In order to understand how the termination of employees that raised concerns about health and safety conditions did not constitute retaliation for whistle-blowing, we are requesting information about Amazon’s policies regarding grounds for employee discipline and termination,” the letter said.The letter was also signed by Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, as well as Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Kirsten Gillibrand, Edward J. Markey, Richard Blumenthal, Kamala Harris and Tammy Baldwin. It asked Amazon if it tracked unionization efforts in its warehouses and whether it tracked employees who participated in protests or spoke to the news media.The letter increased pressure on Amazon and its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, who has been called to testify before Congress in an antitrust investigation and has been a frequent target for criticism from President Trump. A number of senators and representatives have already written to Mr. Bezos expressing concern about warehouse safety.An Amazon spokeswoman said: “These individuals were not terminated for talking publicly about working conditions or safety but, rather, for violating — often repeatedly — policies, such as intimidation, physical distancing and more.”She added that while Amazon supported employees’ right to criticize or protest working conditions, “that does not come with blanket immunity against any and all internal policies.”“We look forward to explaining in more detail in our response to the senators’ letter,” the spokeswoman said.Cases of the coronavirus have been reported in more than 100 Amazon warehouses, and several workers have died. State and local officials in Kentucky and New Jersey have asked Amazon to close facilities where workers have fallen sick.Despite the sophistication of Amazon’s vast e-commerce business, it depends on warehouse workers to keep shipments flowing, and many of those workers fear their warehouses are contaminated by the coronavirus.Mr. Bezos said during a call with Amazon investors last week that the company expected to spend $4 billion on safety measures and other expenses related to the coronavirus during the current quarter.In March, Amazon fired Chris Smalls, a worker in its Staten Island facility who had organized a protest to demand stronger safety protocols there. Amazon said Mr. Smalls had violated a quarantine order to attend the protest.In an email to other Amazon executives, the company’s top lawyer, David Zapolsky, called Mr. Smalls “not smart or articulate.” Mr. Zapolsky, who also suggested that Amazon portray Mr. Smalls as the leader of a movement to unionize Amazon workers, apologized for the remarks after they were published by Vice News.Two weeks later, Amazon fired two designers, Maren Costa and Emily Cunningham. Ms. Costa and Ms. Cunningham had pressed the company to reduce its carbon footprint, and had announced an internal event for warehouse workers to speak to tech employees about their workplace conditions shortly before they were fired. Amazon said the two employees had repeatedly violated corporate policies.“Warehouse workers have been under incredible threat,” Ms. Cunningham said in an interview Wednesday evening. “We wanted to give space for warehouse workers to be able to talk openly and honestly about the conditions they were facing and why they felt so unsafe.”In late April, Amazon fired Bashir Mohamed, a warehouse worker in Shakopee, Minn. Mr. Mohamed said he had raised concerns about workers’ inability to remain socially distant inside the warehouse. Amazon said Mr. Mohamed had violated several policies, including one that required workers to follow social distancing guidelines. Read the full article

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Vallejo Official's Removal Is Sought After He Throws Cat During Zoom Meeting

The city Planning Commission meeting in Vallejo, Calif., last week followed the same humdrum pattern of so many municipal meetings: There was the Pledge of Allegiance and a roll call, followed by various reports.That posed the usual challenges: Commissioners with microphones muted when they were trying to be heard, some of them appearing half offscreen at times or talking over one another.But things took an unexpected turn about 2 hours and 24 minutes into the session after one of the commissioners, Chris Platzer, was asked if he had any comments after reviewing a project application.“Yes, this is the section where you can, Commissioner Platzer,” the commission’s chairman said.The cat meowed loudly again. “OK, first, I’d like to introduce my cat,” Mr. Platzer said, lifting it close to the camera and then, with two hands, tossing it off screen.The cat squeaked as it was being thrown, and a thud could be heard.One commissioner on the videoconference put his hands to his forehead and covered his eyes in response.The meeting concluded 26 minutes later, but that was hardly the end of it.Bob Sampayan, the mayor of Vallejo, which is about 30 miles north of San Francisco, and Robert McConnell, a City Council member and the liaison to the commission, have asked for the council to consider Mr. Platzer’s immediate removal at a meeting on Tuesday, a city spokeswoman, Christina Lee, said on Monday.“The city does not condone the behavior that Vallejo Planning Commissioner Chris Platzer exhibited during the April 20th Planning Commission meeting,” she said. “This type of behavior does not model the core values of the City of Vallejo.”After the planning meeting adjourned, Mr. Platzer was heard using expletives, she said, adding that the mayor and Mr. McConnell discussed his behavior immediately after the episode and called for his removal within 48 hours.Stephanie Bell, senior director of cruelty casework for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the group was prepared to place the cat “in an understanding, loving home” if Mr. Platzer’s “lack of patience or understanding” made cat guardianship inappropriate.“The cats in our care rely on us for everything, including food, respect and affection, and no one should ever punish them for seeking our attention,” she said. “While cats are known for agility, this cat was thrown and could have slammed into furniture, the wall or the ground.”As of Monday morning, the city had not received a formal resignation from Mr. Platzer, Ms. Lee said; however, The Times-Herald of Vallejo reported on Saturday that it had received an email from him suggesting that he was stepping down.Mr. Platzer, who could not be reached on Monday, was appointed to the volunteer position in August 2016 and his term was set to expire in June.“I did not conduct myself in the Zoom meeting in a manner befitting of a planning commissioner and apologize for any harm I may have inflicted,” he wrote in the email, The Times-Herald reported. “I serve at the pleasure of the council and no longer have that trust and backing.”He added, “We are all living in uncertain times and I certainly, like many of you, am adjusting to a new normalcy.”The Zoom episode was one of the latest to surface as officials adjust to remote working. In Florida, a judge this month admonished lawyers for getting too lax in their dress during their videoconference court appearances. Read the full article

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An Official’s Removal Is Sought After He Throws Cat During Zoom Meeting

The city Planning Commission meeting in Vallejo, Calif., last week followed the same humdrum pattern of so many municipal meetings: There was the Pledge of Allegiance and a roll call, followed by various reports.That posed the usual challenges: Commissioners with microphones muted when they were trying to be heard, some of them appearing half offscreen at times or talking over one another.But things took an unexpected turn about 2 hours and 24 minutes into the session after one of the commissioners, Chris Platzer, was asked if he had any comments after reviewing a project application.“Yes, this is the section where you can, Commissioner Platzer,” the commission’s chairman said.The cat meowed loudly again. “OK, first, I’d like to introduce my cat,” Mr. Platzer said, lifting it close to the camera and then, with two hands, tossing it off screen.The cat squeaked as it was being thrown, and a thud could be heard.One commissioner on the videoconference put his hands to his forehead and covered his eyes in response.The meeting concluded 26 minutes later, but that was hardly the end of it.Bob Sampayan, the mayor of Vallejo, which is about 30 miles north of San Francisco, and Robert McConnell, a City Council member and the liaison to the commission, have asked for the council to consider Mr. Platzer’s immediate removal at a meeting on Tuesday, a city spokeswoman, Christina Lee, said on Monday.“The city does not condone the behavior that Vallejo Planning Commissioner Chris Platzer exhibited during the April 20th Planning Commission meeting,” she said. “This type of behavior does not model the core values of the City of Vallejo.”After the planning meeting adjourned, Mr. Platzer was heard using expletives, she said, adding that the mayor and Mr. McConnell discussed his behavior immediately after the episode and called for his removal within 48 hours.Stephanie Bell, senior director of cruelty casework for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the group was prepared to place the cat “in an understanding, loving home” if Mr. Platzer’s “lack of patience or understanding” made cat guardianship inappropriate.“The cats in our care rely on us for everything, including food, respect and affection, and no one should ever punish them for seeking our attention,” she said. “While cats are known for agility, this cat was thrown and could have slammed into furniture, the wall or the ground.”As of Monday morning, the city had not received a formal resignation from Mr. Platzer, Ms. Lee said; however, The Times-Herald of Vallejo reported on Saturday that it had received an email from him suggesting that he was stepping down.Mr. Platzer, who could not be reached on Monday, was appointed to the volunteer position in August 2016 and his term was set to expire in June.“I did not conduct myself in the Zoom meeting in a manner befitting of a planning commissioner and apologize for any harm I may have inflicted,” he wrote in the email, The Times-Herald reported. “I serve at the pleasure of the council and no longer have that trust and backing.”He added, “We are all living in uncertain times and I certainly, like many of you, am adjusting to a new normalcy.”The Zoom episode was one of the latest to surface as officials adjust to remote working. In Florida, a judge this month admonished lawyers for getting too lax in their dress during their videoconference court appearances. Read the full article

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True Tales of Quarantined Socializing

Digital dance raves. Streaming soundbaths. Book readings by phone. Now we’ve gotta get creative. Read the full article

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Amazon Bans, Then Reinstates, Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’

SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon quietly banned Adolf Hitler's manifesto “Mein Kampf” late last week, part of its accelerating efforts to remove Nazi and other hate-filled material from its bookstore, before quickly reversing itself.The retailer, which controls the majority of the book market in the United States, is caught between two demands that cannot be reconciled. Amazon is under pressure to keep hate literature off its vast platform at a moment when extremist impulses seem on the rise. But the company does not want to be seen as the arbiter of what people are allowed to read, which is traditionally the hallmark of repressive regimes.Booksellers that sell on Amazon say the retailer has no coherent philosophy about what it decides to prohibit, and seems largely guided by public complaints. Over the last 18 months, it has dropped books by Nazis, the Nation of Islam and the American neo-Nazis David Duke and George Lincoln Rockwell. But it has also allowed many equally offensive books to continue to be sold.An Amazon spokeswoman said in a statement on Tuesday that the platform provides “customers with access to a variety of viewpoints” and noted that “all retailers make decisions about what selection they choose to offer.”“Mein Kampf” was first issued in Germany in 1925 and is the foundational text of Nazism. The Houghton Mifflin edition of “Mein Kampf,” continuously available in the United States since 1943, was dropped by Amazon on Friday.“We cannot offer this book for sale,” the retailer told booksellers that had been selling the title, according to emails reviewed by The New York Times.After disappearing for a few days, “Mein Kampf” is once again being sold directly by Amazon. But secondhand copies and those from third-party merchants appear to be still prohibited, a distinction that sellers said made no sense.But on Amazon’s subsidiary AbeBooks, which operates largely independently, hundreds of new and used copies of “Mein Kampf” are available.“It’s ridiculous how the greatest e-commerce company in the world has such lousy control of their platforms,” said Scott Brown, a California bookseller who sells on Amazon. “They somehow can’t prevent price gouging and they can’t prevent people from selling counterfeit goods and they can’t manage to — or don’t want to — effectively implement a Nazi ban.”For years, Amazon took the attitude that it would sell even the most objectionable books. Nazi books garnered a following and accumulated good reviews. That led to increased sales and prominence on the platform, which in turn prompted increasing demands from Holocaust memorial associations and other groups that the books be dropped.Amazon has also been under pressure for how it depicts Nazis. In February, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum criticized “Hunters,” an Amazon series showing a deadly human chess game at a concentration camp. The memorial said the fictional scene “welcomes future deniers.” The creator of the drama, David Weil, responded that he employed fiction because he did not want to trivialize reality.Amazon also prohibited last week all editions of “The International Jew,” the anti-Semitic propaganda published by the automaker Henry Ford in the early 1920s, as well as editions of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the notorious fabrication from the early 20th century describing a plan for Jewish domination.Karen Pollock of the Holocaust Educational Trust, a group that works with students, school and communities in Britain, said Amazon should go further. She welcomed the dropping of “Mein Kampf” but tweeted that “surely @AmazonUK should also remove books by Himmler, Goebbels and Rosenberg too?”On an Amazon sellers forum devoted to the topic, quite a few merchants expressed queasiness about the retailer’s latest actions.“When companies decide what you can and can’t read,” wrote one, “the population is in for real trouble.”Another said the wrong books were being dropped.“What I’d really like to see them ban are the books that are really hurting people, like ‘Stop seeing your doctor and cure your cancer the NATURAL way.’ ”Perhaps it was the attention, or perhaps “Mein Kampf” is something people want to read as they hunker down around the country, but its sales rank on Amazon rose to 3,115 on Tuesday from about 50,000 a few weeks ago. Read the full article

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The Week in Tech: Gigs at Home, but Not What Start-Ups Intended

Each week, we review the week’s news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry.Hello from our new market-melting, social-distancing, work-from-home reality. This is Erin Griffith, a start-ups and venture capital reporter in San Francisco. I hope you are staying sane while staying inside.I’m calling this past week The Tom Hanks Awakening. Seemingly from the moment news broke Wednesday evening that Mr. Hanks, our American treasure, had tested positive for the coronavirus, conversations about the virus shifted from half-measures and are-we-overreacting Twitter debates to blanket cancellations and true fear. A number of prominent tech companies, like Twitter, shifted from recommending that employees work from home to issuing mandatory policies.(Not to diminish the power of Mr. Hanks, but the rapid spread of the virus across the country and the World Health Organization’s declaration of a pandemic may have also nudged things along.)For the tech industry, that means more fallout and some opportunity. Every business, from small start-ups to the largest tech companies in the world, is preparing for a challenging year.For many large, unprofitable start-ups, this will be the first true test of whether their businesses can withstand a downturn. Many of the industry’s most prominent start-up “unicorns,” including Uber, Airbnb and WeWork, have long boasted that they were born in the recession of 2008-09. They capitalized on the moment by giving people who were laid off in the downturn flexible “gig economy” work and office space. Therefore, the thinking goes, they can survive the next one.But their businesses are now global, with tens of thousands of employees and delicate networks of millions of customers, drivers, home-rental operators — and, in WeWork’s case, potentially germ-laden office spaces. This is a whole new kind of test for their business models.For example, many Airbnb hosts have seen their bookings fall off a cliff as the company grapples with travel cancellations. This past week, the company made its refund policy more flexible to encourage people to book travel. It even set up a small fund to keep Chinese hosts afloat during the outbreak. Tracey Northcott, a full-time Airbnb host in Japan whom I interviewed for an article, said she had lost $40,000 worth of bookings for April. She is trying to stay upbeat, joking that she may need to start selling off her supplies of toilet paper to make ends meet.The newly announced ban on European travel to the United States only adds to the blow.Drivers for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates petitioned those gig-economy companies for better protections for those affected by the virus. The companies responded by proposing a fund that would pay drivers who have been quarantined or infected. It’s a small gesture of support for the workers, many of whom have no other safety net. But it further strains these money-losing businesses when they’re already under pressure to show investors they can turn a profit.Some companies are set up to thrive in this moment. Digital-learning services are in demand as schools close. The stock prices of remote-working tools like Zoom surged. Telemedicine is growing. Fitness fanatics are flocking to at-home workout systems like Peloton. Teenagers are turning to Instagram memes to get their virus news. Streaming and video-game companies like Netflix and Activision Blizzard and delivery services like Amazon and GrubHub have been added to stock-picker lists. Criminals and scammers are also thriving: Hackers are using misinformation about the virus to set digital traps and steal personal data from people, Sheera Frenkel, Davey Alba and Raymond Zhong reported.Some creative Airbnb hosts are even advertising “corona-free” getaways stocked with doomsday prepper supplies. Capitalism.

Some stories you shouldn’t miss

Oh, right, the election. The fight over what constitutes free speech online has continued to escalate, most recently with a manipulated video of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Twitter, Cecilia Kang reported.The much-buzzed-about Samsung Galaxy flip phone is a dud, Brian Chen determined. Brian tested out the phone’s purported attention-grabbing abilities by conspicuously flipping it open at several bars. “Not a single person noticed or commented on my nonconformist Z Flip,” he wrote, noting that he got more attention for dyeing his hair blue in high school.Outdoor Voices, a prominent e-commerce start-up selling workout clothes to millennial women, recently imploded, pushing out its founder and slashing its valuation by more than half, Sapna Maheshwari and I reported. The blowup revealed the business challenges facing many “direct to consumer” brands backed by venture capital, and the generational challenges between young disrupters and the experienced executives needed to help them mature.How are we doing?We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to bits_newsletter@nytimes.com.Like this email?Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here. Read the full article

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High-Flying Trading App Robinhood Goes Down at the Wrong Time

“This is a huge black eye for them and they really need to do something to earn back the trust of their clients,” said Ben Carlson, the director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management in New York and the author of the blog, A Wealth of Common Sense. “I can’t recall another time when an entire platform was down all day like this.”During the market turbulence, other trading firms that cater to small investors have also experienced difficulties. The website for mutual fund giant Vanguard experienced “sporadic unavailability” on Friday because of heavy trading volumes, a spokesman said. TD Ameritrade also said trade confirmations were slow to process on Friday. But none were down as long as Robinhood, which has made it particularly easy to buy and sell not only traditional stocks, but also riskier investment products like cryptocurrencies and options, a contract that makes it possible to bet on stocks going up or down.Many Robinhood customers nursing losses on Monday, when markets rose, had purchased options contracts to bet that the markets would fall. When markets instead surged, they were unable to get out of the contracts because the app was down.Taylor Dalton, 29, said he had recently decided to invest roughly $8,000 in stocks and option contracts through Robinhood, including “put” contracts on airline stocks, which would give him the opportunity to profit if their shares declined.“Yesterday, I had plans to close out all of my options and take a profit,” said Mr. Dalton, who co-owns a cupcake and coffee bar franchise. “Now I am in the red,” he added, referring to his gains that have been erased, “and I am not sure what to do.”As for Robinhood, he said, “I am definitely never using them again.”Nathaniel Popper reported from San Francisco and Tara Siegel Bernard from New York. Read the full article

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Cloud Computing Is Not the Energy Hog That Had Been Feared

The computer engine rooms that power the digital economy have become surprisingly energy efficient.A new study of data centers globally found that while their computing output jumped sixfold from 2010 to 2018, their energy consumption rose only 6 percent. The scientists’ findings suggest concerns that the rise of mammoth data centers would generate a surge in electricity demand and pollution have been greatly overstated.The major force behind the improving efficiency is the shift to cloud computing. In the cloud model, businesses and individuals consume computing over the internet as services, from raw calculation and data storage to search and social networks.The largest cloud data centers, sometimes the size of football fields, are owned and operated by big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.Each of these sprawling digital factories, housing hundreds of thousands of computers, rack upon rack, is an energy-hungry behemoth. Some have been built near the Arctic for natural cooling and others beside huge hydroelectric plants in the Pacific Northwest.Still, they are the standard setters in terms of the amount of electricity needed for a computing task. “The public thinks these massive data centers are energy bad guys,” said Eric Masanet, the lead author of the study. “But those data centers are the most efficient in the world.”The study findings were published on Thursday in an article in the journal Science. It was a collaboration of five scientists at Northwestern University, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and an independent research firm. The project was funded by the Department of Energy and by a grant from a Northwestern alumnus who is an environmental philanthropistThe new research is a stark contrast to often-cited predictions that energy consumption in the world’s data centers is on a runaway path, perhaps set to triple or more over the next decade. Those worrying projections, the study authors say, are simplistic extrapolations and what-if scenarios that focus mainly on the rising demand for data center computing.By contrast, the new research is a bottom-up analysis that compiles information on data center processors, storage, software, networking and cooling from a range of sources to estimate actual electricity use. Enormous efficiency improvements, they conclude, have allowed computing output to increase sharply while power consumption has been essentially flat.“We’re hopeful that this research will reset people’s intuitions about data centers and energy use,” said Jonathan Koomey, a former scientist at the Berkeley lab who is an independent researcher.Over the years, data center electricity consumption has been a story of economic incentives and technology advances combining to tackle a problem.From 2000 to 2005, energy use in computer centers doubled. In 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency forecast another doubling of power consumed by data centers from 2005 to 2010.In 2011, at the request of The New York Times, Mr. Koomey made an assessment of how much data center electricity consumption actually did increase between 2005 and 2010. He estimated the global increase at 56 percent, far less than previously expected. The recession after the 2008 financial crisis played a role, but so did gains in efficiency. The new study, with added data, lowered that 2005 to 2010 estimate further.But the big improvements have come in recent years. Since 2010, the study authors write in Science, “the data center landscape has changed dramatically.”The tectonic shift has been to the cloud. In 2010, the researchers estimated that 79 percent of data center computing was done in smaller traditional computer centers, largely owned and run by non-tech companies. By 2018, 89 percent of data center computing took place in larger, utility-style cloud data centers.The big cloud data centers use tailored chips, high-density storage, so-called virtual-machine software, ultrafast networking and customized airflow systems — all to increase computing firepower with the least electricity.“The big tech companies eke out every bit of efficiency for every dollar they spend,” said Mr. Masanet, who left Northwestern last month to join the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara.Google is at the forefront. Its data centers on average generate seven times more computing power than they did just five years ago, using no more electricity, according to Urs Hölzle, a senior vice president who oversees Google’s data center technology.In 2018, data centers consumed about 1 percent of the world’s electricity output. That is the energy-consumption equivalent of 17 million American households, a sizable amount of energy use — but barely growing.The trend of efficiency gains largely offsetting rising demand should hold for three or four years, the researchers conclude. But beyond a few years, they say, the outlook is uncertain.In the Science article, they recommend steps including more investment in energy-saving research and improved measurement and information sharing by data center operators worldwide.The next few years, they write, will be “a critical transition phase to ensure a low-carbon and energy-efficient future.” Read the full article

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The Political Pundits of the Future Are on TikTok

As Twitter and Facebook continue to dominate conversations about social media and the 2020 presidential election, TikTok is quietly becoming a political force.Teenagers in America — many of them too young to vote — are forming political coalitions on TikTok to campaign for their chosen candidates, post news updates and fact check opponents. They are sharing real-time commentary for an audience that is far more likely to watch YouTube videos than turn on a cable news channel.In a sense, these TikTok users are building short-form TV networks, each with a cast of talking heads. On TikTok they’re called hype houses, named after the high-powered influencer collab house in Los Angeles. These political houses are not physical homes, but virtual, ideological ones represented by group accounts.There are conservative-leaning houses (@conservativehypehouse, @theconservativehypehouse, @TikTokrepublicans and @therepublicanhypehouse, which amassed more than 217,000 followers in under a month) and liberal ones (@liberalhypehouse, @leftist.hype.house). There are also bipartisan houses, for users who love discourse, and undecided houses, for those who aren’t sure what or whom they love. “I do feel like TikTok is cable news for young people,” said Sterling Cade Lewis, 19, who has nearly 100,000 followers. “CNN and Fox and big-name news media, those are all geared toward people who have honestly grown up with a longer attention span.”TikToks, on the other hand, run a maximum of 60 seconds; most videos are as short as 15. “Being able to make shorter videos and educational clips, it’s easier to connect with a younger generation who’s just swiping through their phones 24/7,” Mr. Lewis said.In recent months, content on TikTok has been getting more political. Before the general election in Britain in December, TikTok users there voiced their opinions on Brexit through popular formats, including lip syncs, skits and “checks” (self-assessments, essentially). In the United States, political videos have revolved around the Trump administration, the Democratic presidential primary and the general presidential election in November.The nickname “Mayo Pete,” for example, was popularized on TikTok, as was a popular meme about Mike Pence, suggesting that he is in favor of gay conversion therapy. (Vice President Pence is opposed to same-sex marriage, but he has never voiced support for conversion therapy.). Political hype houses were born out of this enthusiasm for election-related content.Political TikToks often rely on popular trends and dances. In one video, Kyndal, 14 and a member of @liberalhypehouse, does a dance as she points to statistics about President Trump’s history of racist comments.For the most part, these videos revolve around two candidates: Bernie Sanders and Mr. Trump. “The Republican hype houses all root for Trump, and the liberal hype houses all root for Bernie,” said Javon Fonville, 19, the founder of the progressive hype house (handle: @votebernie2020).Many users are campaigning hard, especially because they may not be of voting age in time for Nov. 3. “I feel like I am making an impact on the election even though I can’t vote,” Izzy, 17, said of her pro-Sanders TikToks.Many of these creators look up to YouTube’s political commentators and have sought to replicate their success on TikTok, where growth can happen rapidly. Benjamin Williams, 19, said the platform is ideal for the kind of videos he wants to make and the audience he hopes to reach. “A lot of political stuff is on Facebook and Twitter, but Gen Z isn’t really into that stuff,” he said. “With TikTok you can put politics into comedy and have someone their age talking like they’re a friend.”Mr. Williams said he is inspired by YouTubers like Steven Crowder, Tim Pool and Paul Joseph Watson, a prominent far-right personality and Infowars contributor who is known for spreading conspiracy theories.Speaking of which: TikTok has struggled to prevent conspiracy theories from spreading across the app. Media Matters, a nonprofit, recently issued a report on the platform’s role in spreading false information on the coronavirus.“It worries me a lot that some of these videos have one million views,” Kyndal, of @liberalhypehouse, said, referring to the misinformation on the platform. “Knowing that one million impressionable teens have seen this video and chosen to believe or not believe it.”A TikTok spokeswoman wrote in an email: “We encourage our users to have respectful conversations about the subjects that matter to them. However, our Community Guidelines do not permit misinformation that could cause harm to our community or the larger public.”For many members of political hype houses, tamping down on misinformation is a top concern. When various accounts began citing the claim that Mr. Sanders intended to tax Americans making more than $29,000 a year at a rate higher than 50 percent, Jordan Tirona, 19, responded with a video debunking it.Though they disagree on major issues, members of different political groups frequently engage with each other. Their videos often go viral when they “duet” on major issues. (Duetting is a feature on TikTok that allows users to respond to videos with videos of their own and post them side by side.)The @republicanhypehouse and @liberalhypehouse accounts frequently duet over health care reform and corporate tax rates. TikTokers across the partisan divide also take part in live-streamed debates on TikTok.Cam Higby, 20, the founder of the bipartisan hype house who also posts under @republicanism, said that ultimately he wants to build a platform on TikTok where anyone can promote their opinions, whether they’re on the right or left. He live-streams himself for hours, debating people on TikTok and Discord.Many members of Gen Z will be voting for the first time in the 2020 presidential election. Those who can’t have been taking political action in other ways, especially on social media.“I think it’s cool when you have people who are like 14 trying to get involved in politics and educate themselves,” Mr. Higby said. “Those are the people — they’re not voting this year, but they’ll be voting within the next term.” Read the full article

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Judge Halts Work on Microsoft’s JEDI Contract, a Victory for Amazon

A federal judge in Washington ordered Microsoft on Thursday to halt all work on a $10 billion cloud-computing contract for the Pentagon, in a victory for Amazon, which had challenged the awarding of the contract.In a sealed opinion, the judge, Patricia E. Campbell-Smith of the Court of Federal Claims, ordered work to stop on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, known as JEDI, until Amazon’s legal challenge was resolved. The 10-year contract was one of the largest tech contracts from the Pentagon, and Microsoft was set to begin work on it this month.The decision adds to the acrimony surrounding the lucrative deal, which was a major prize in the technology industry, and ratchets up the legal battle around the transformation of the military’s cloud-computing systems. Amazon had been seen as a front-runner to win the JEDI contract, but the Department of Defense awarded it to Microsoft in October.Amazon protested and said the process had been unfair. The internet giant claimed that President Trump had interfered in the bidding for the contract because of his feud with Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive and owner of The Washington Post. The Post has aggressively covered the Trump administration, and the president has referred to the newspaper as the “Amazon Washington Post” and accused it of spreading “fake news.”“This is all setting the stage for a major court fight between Amazon and Microsoft, with the D.O.D. caught in between,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities who has been tracking the JEDI contract. “It’s a political football that’s being kicked around.”Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s vice president of communications, said in a statement on Thursday that the company was “disappointed with the additional delay” but that it believed “we will ultimately be able to move forward with the work to make sure those who serve our country can access the new technology they urgently require.”“We believe the facts will show they ran a detailed, thorough and fair process in determining the needs of the warfighter were best met by Microsoft,” he added.Lt. Col. Robert Carver, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was disappointed by the decision, which has “unnecessarily delayed implementing D.O.D.’s modernization strategy and deprived our warfighters of a set of capabilities they urgently need.” He added that the Defense Department was “confident in our award.”Amazon did not return a request for comment.When Microsoft was awarded the contract, the Defense Department was explicit that the bidding process had been correctly executed. “The acquisition process was conducted in accordance with applicable laws and regulations,” it said at the time. “All offerors were treated fairly and evaluated consistently with the solicitation’s stated evaluation criteria.”In public, Mr. Trump has said there were other “great companies” that should have a chance at the contract. But a speechwriter for former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in a recent book that Mr. Trump had wanted to foil Amazon and give the contract to another company.In December, Amazon filed its legal challenge against the awarding of JEDI, saying that Mr. Trump used “improper pressure” on the Pentagon at its expense. The company also argued that its cloud-computing services were superior to Microsoft’s and that it was better situated to fulfill the contract’s technical requirements.Since then, Amazon has escalated the battle. The company asked the court this week to let it depose Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Amazon argued that hearing from them was crucial to determine if they had intervened against it in the contract. Mr. Esper had recused himself from the contract award decision in October, citing his son’s employment at IBM, one of the early bidders on the JEDI contract.“The question is whether the president of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of the D.O.D. to pursue his own personal and political ends,” an Amazon spokesman said at the time.The Pentagon said it was strongly opposed to Amazon’s deposition request. Microsoft said Amazon “only provided the speculation of bias, with nothing approaching the ‘hard facts’ necessary” to demand them.In another court filing this month, Amazon argued that an injunction was necessary to prevent it from losing the profit it could earn from the contract.JEDI “will transform D.O.D.’s cloud architecture and define enterprise cloud for years to come,” wrote Kevin Mullen, an attorney representing Amazon in the case.The JEDI contract has also been in the spotlight because it is viewed as crucial to the Pentagon’s efforts to modernize its technology. Much of the military operates on computer systems from the 1980s and ’90s, and the Defense Department has spent billions of dollars trying to make them talk to one another.Mr. Ives, the analyst, has said that landing the JEDI contract put Microsoft in a position to earn the roughly $40 billion that the federal government is expected to spend on cloud computing over the next several years.On Thursday, Judge Campbell-Smith also required that Amazon pay a $42 million deposit that the court will hold in case it later determines that the injunction was wrongfully issued and that Microsoft is owed damages. Amazon must submit a plan for offering the money to the court by next Thursday, and it must agree to redactions to the judge’s order no later than Feb. 27 so that it can be made public.The preliminary injunction was a “prudent decision” given the complexities of the deal and the monetary stakes, Mr. Ives said, and the $42 million demanded from Amazon would not be a burden for the company.“It’s less than a rounding error relative to their treasure chest,” he said. He added that he expected Microsoft to prevail in the deal.Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting. Read the full article

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Her Blog Post About Uber Upended Big Tech. Now She’s Written a Memoir.

WHISTLEBLOWER My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber By Susan Fowler In December 2015, Susan Fowler was settling into a new job as a software engineer at the technology-transportation company Uber when her boss sent her a series of disturbing chat messages. After asking how her work was going, Fowler’s manager, “Jake,” began complaining about inequities in his relationship with his girlfriend. “It is an open relationship, but it’s a little more open on vacations haha,” he wrote, to Fowler’s bewilderment. “She can go and have sex any day of the week. … It takes a herculean effort for me to do the same.” It became clear to Fowler that Jake was propositioning her. She saved screenshots of the conversation and sent them to Uber’s human resources department so that he could be appropriately sanctioned. Instead, they told her that Jake was a “high performer,” and that it was his first offense, so they “didn’t feel comfortable giving him anything more than a stern talking-to.” It was up to Fowler to move to a different team within the company to get away from him. Both the inappropriate comments and the company brushoff are the kinds of experiences that women at all levels of the income spectrum have come to accept as inherent to the professional world. Rather than quietly tolerate it, though, Fowler, who was 25 at the time, decided to make a fuss. What happened next received abundant news coverage: In 2017, Fowler published a blog post describing the harassment she experienced at Uber, including multiple incidents of discrimination and corporate bullying. The post went viral and the company started an investigation. Suddenly Uber, one of the fastest growing and most valuable companies in Silicon Valley, found itself at the center of several ethical and legal scandals, culminating in the departure of the company’s co-founder and C.E.O., Travis Kalanick. Image

Fowler’s revelations came eight months before The New York Times and The New Yorker published explosive allegations about Harvey Weinstein’s serial abuse of women, and helped catalyze the #MeToo movement. What is less well known is the remarkable back story that came before Fowler found herself at the center of these newsworthy events. “I wasn’t supposed to be a software engineer,” she writes in “Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber,” her sharp and engrossing memoir. “I wasn’t supposed to be a writer, or a whistle-blower, or even a college graduate, for that matter. If, 10 years ago, you had told me that I would someday be all of those things — if you had shown me where life would take me, and the very public role I would end up playing in the world — I wouldn’t have believed you.” Read the full article

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Silicon Valley Heads to Europe, Nervous About New Rules

In an interview, Ms. Vestager said artificial intelligence was one of the world’s most promising technologies, but it presents many dangers because it requires trusting complex algorithms to make decisions based on vast amounts of data. She said there must be privacy protections, rules to prevent the technology from causing discrimination, and requirements that ensure companies using the systems can explain how they work, she said.She raised particular concerns about the expanding use of facial recognition technology and said new restrictions might be needed before it was “everywhere.”Ms. Vestager said she was looking forward to Mr. Zuckerberg’s visit. While she was curious to hear his ideas about artificial intelligence and digital policy, she said, Europe was not going to wait to act.“We will do our best to avoid unintended consequences,” she said. “But, obviously, there will be intended consequences.”Facebook declined to comment.Europe is working on the artificial intelligence policy at the direction of Ursula von der Leyen, the new head of the European Commission, which is the executive branch for the 27-nation bloc. Ms. von der Leyen, who took office in November, immediately gave Ms. Vestager a 100-day deadline to release an initial proposal about artificial intelligence.The tight time frame has raised concerns that the rules are being rushed. Artificial intelligence is not monolithic and its use varies depending on the field where it is being applied. Its effectiveness largely relies on data pulled from different sources. Overly broad regulations could stand in the way of the benefits, such as diagnosing disease, building self-driving vehicles or creating more efficient energy grids, some in the tech industry warned.“There is an opportunity for leadership, but it cannot just be regulatory work,” said Ian Hogarth, a London-based angel investor who focuses on artificial intelligence. “Just looking at this through the lens of regulations makes it hard to push the frontiers of what’s possible.” Read the full article

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Activate This ‘Bracelet of Silence,’ and Alexa Can’t Eavesdrop

By design, smart speakers have microphones that are always on, listening for so-called wake words like “Alexa,” “Hey, Siri,” or “O.K., Google.” Only after hearing that cue are they supposed to start recording. But contractors hired by device makers to review recordings for quality reasons report hearing clips that were most likely captured unintentionally, including drug deals and sex.Two Northeastern University researchers, David Choffnes and Daniel Dubois, recently played 120 hours of television for an audience of smart speakers to see what activates the devices. They found that the machines woke up dozens of times and started recording after hearing phrases similar to their wake words.“People fear that these devices are constantly listening and recording you. They’re not,” Mr. Choffnes said. “But they do wake up and record you at times when they shouldn’t.”Rick Osterloh, Google’s head of hardware, recently said homeowners should disclose the presence of smart speakers to their guests. “I would, and do, when someone enters into my home, and it’s probably something that the products themselves should try to indicate,” he told the BBC last year.Welcome mats might one day be swapped out for warning mats. Or perhaps the tech companies will engineer their products to introduce themselves when they hear a new voice or see a new face. Of course, that could also lead to uncomfortable situations, like having the Alexa in your bedside Echo Dot suddenly introduce herself to your one-night stand.

‘No Longer Shunned as Loonies’

The “bracelet of silence” is not the first device invented by researchers to stuff up digital assistants’ ears. In 2018, two designers created Project Alias, an appendage that can be placed over a smart speaker to deafen it. But Ms. Zheng argues that a jammer should be portable to protect people as they move through different environments, given that you don’t always know where a microphone is lurking.At this point, the bracelet is just a prototype. The researchers say that they could manufacture it for as little as $20, and that a handful of investors have asked them about commercializing it. Read the full article

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Jeff Bezos Buying $165 Million Estate, a California Record

The national housing market has cooled, but in Los Angeles the ultrarich are still shattering price records. An heiress to the Formula One racing empire sold her home for $119.75 million last July. In December, Lachlan Murdoch paid $150 million for a home in Bel Air.The latest buyer at the top: Jeff Bezos, the Amazon chief and world’s richest person.Setting a new high for a home sold in California, Mr. Bezos is paying $165 million for a Beverly Hills estate owned by David Geffen, the media mogul and co-founder of DreamWorks, according to two people familiar with the purchase.That wasn’t all. In a separate transaction, Bezos Expeditions, which oversees The Washington Post and Mr. Bezos’ charitable foundation, is buying 120 undeveloped acres in Beverly Hills for $90 million, the two people said. The land was put on the market for $150 million in 2018 by the estate of Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, who died that year. Most recently, the asking price was $110 million.Both deals are in the contract stage and not yet final.The superrich are spending huge amounts for some of California’s premier properties. Mr. Murdoch, chief executive of the Fox Corporation, bought Chartwell, which TV viewers of a certain age may remember as the Clampetts’ home in “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Petra Ecclestone, whose father, Bernie Ecclestone, ran Formula One for more than 40 years, sold the Manor. The television producer Aaron Spelling had built the mansion, in the city’s Holmby Hills neighborhood, in 1988.For Mr. Bezos, it was the Warner Estate, which was designed in the 1930s for Jack Warner, the president of the Warner Bros. film studio. The roughly 13,000-square-foot home is considered one of the premier mansions built during Hollywood’s golden era.It wasn’t the first home Warner built on the nine-acre property. When he married his second wife, Ann, she demanded that he tear down the first home and replace it with a new one, according to “The Legendary Estates of Beverly Hills,” by Jeffrey Hyland, a longtime luxury real estate agent in Los Angeles.Warner spent over a decade building the mansion and, unlike other movie moguls of the era, didn’t give it a fancy name to emulate European aristocracy. He simply named it after himself. The Georgian Revival-style estate was designed for hosting the Warners’ elaborate parties, with guests like Albert Einstein and Howard Hughes.The property also included a nine-hole golf course, which Mr. Geffen removed when he renovated the grounds, Mr. Hyland said in an interview. A home next door also had a nine-hole course, allowing the Warners and their neighbors to play 18 holes right in the middle of Beverly Hills.“The property is magnificent,” said David Parnes of the Agency, a luxury real estate brokerage in Beverly Hills, who wasn’t involved in the Warner Estate deal. “It’s the land. It’s the history. It’s the whole experience.”Warner died in 1978, but Ann Warner kept the estate largely intact and lived there until 1990, when Mr. Geffen paid $47.5 million for it — a record at the time for a Los Angeles-area home. Mr. Geffen recently bought a $30 million lot in the Trousdale Estates section of Beverly Hills, where he plans to build a new house, according to a source familiar with that deal.The Warner estate never officially hit the market, but one of the people familiar with the deal said it had been shopped around quietly for $225 million. The Warner Estate, whose sale to Mr. Bezos was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, stands out from the speculatively built glass-box homes that have flooded the local market. Listed in the $100 million-plus range, they have often taken years to sell or required steep price cuts.“Everybody today would like to see classical architecture,” Mr. Hyland said. “They want substance. They want acreage.” He said he and his business partner, Rick Hilton, had the most expensive current listing in the area, the $225 million Conrad Hilton estate, which is on eight and a half acres in Bel Air.Stephen Shapiro, an agent with the Westside Estate Agency in Beverly Hills, said that the Bezos purchase was likely to boost confidence in the market but that too many homes were still being built on speculation.“The spec houses being built are equivalent to too many condos being built in New York,” he said. The houses fetching record prices “are one-of-a-kind, bespoke houses.” Read the full article

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Foldable Phones Are Here. Do We Really Want Them?

To make gadgets bend, you have to sacrifice some hardness. The flexible displays of foldables are generally covered by a plastic layer, which can be scratched up or penetrated more easily than the tough glass protecting traditional phone displays. (Samsung said its Z Flip uses an ultrathin, foldable glass that would let you fold and unfold your phone 200,000 times.)“If you take a ballpoint pen and you push really hard on the iPhone screen, it’ll be fine,” said Kyle Wiens, the chief executive of iFixit, a company that provides instructions and parts to repair gadgets. “If you do the same thing on the foldable displays, you’ll kill it.”In theory, the clamshell designs of the Z Flip and the Razr offer a partial solution to the durability problem. That’s because the main screens are not exposed when folded up. Yet if you drop the phones while using them — say, when you are walking and texting and trip over something — you will have a problem.“There’s no protecting the foldable display in a real-world environment the way that consumers treat their smartphones,” said Raymond Soneira, the founder of DisplayMate, who advises tech companies on screen technology.Foldables also have a design flaw. In general, when they are unfolded, the screen has a visible crease — an eyesore compared with the seamless displays on our smartphones and tablets.Last but not least, it remains to be seen whether the mechanical hinges of folding phones will survive the test of time. There are early reports of potential problems with the hinge on the Razr: Some reviewers said the hinge is extremely tight, making it cumbersome to fold and flip open the phone. CNET, the tech reviews site, said the hinge of its Razr test unit broke after 27,000 cycles using a robot.Motorola said in a statement that it was confident in the durability of Razr, adding that CNET’s test method put undue stress on the hinge. Read the full article

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North Korea’s Internet Use Surges, Thwarting Sanctions and Fueling Theft

Ms. Moriuchi, who left the National Security Agency in 2017, began tracking the internet use of the North Korean elite two and a half years ago, a period that encompassed Mr. Trump’s confrontational approach to the North, the country’s missile launches and then the stalled diplomacy that has followed the president’s three meetings with Mr. Kim.In 2017, Ms. Moriuchi could easily see the content of the North Korean elite’s searches, most of which appeared to be for leisure: While ordinary North Koreans have access only to a restricted, in-country version of the internet, the country’s leaders and their families downloaded movies, shopped and browsed the web on nights and weekends.But that has changed. Internet use has surged during office hours, suggesting the leadership is now using its internal networks the same way the West does: conducting daily government and private business. Now the country has developed its own version of a “virtual private network,” a technique to tunnel through the internet securely that has long been used by Western businesses to secure their transactions.Meanwhile, the country’s efforts to encrypt data and hide its activities on the web have become far more sophisticated. And through a network of students, many in China and India, the North has learned how to exploit data that could improve its nuclear and missile programs.The largely home-built effort to hide traffic, the report concluded, was being used to steal “data from the networks of unsuspecting targets, or as a means of circumventing government-imposed content controls.” Such methods have long been used by Chinese and Russian hackers, often working for intelligence agencies.The North has managed to surprise the world before with its digital savvy: In November 2014, its devastating cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment in an effort to kill “The Interview,” a comedy about two bumbling journalists sent by the C.I.A. to kill Mr. Kim, exposed American digital vulnerabilities. That was followed by a bold effort to steal nearly $1 billion from the Bangladesh central bank through the international financial settlement system called SWIFT. Other central bank attacks followed.North Korea’s most famous cyberattack, using code called WannaCry, disabled the British health care system for days and created havoc elsewhere. It was based on vulnerabilities that had been stolen from the National Security Agency, and published by a group that called itself the Shadow Brokers. American officials have never publicly acknowledged their inadvertent role in fueling the attacks. Read the full article