Category: Technology

Last month, around 80 Google Help subcontractors employed by Accenture — who recently voted to unionize with the Alphabet Workers Union-Communications Workers of America (AWU-CWA) — found out that they will be laid off. Now, the union has filed a complaint against Alphabet and Accenture with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleging retaliatory layoffs in violation of labor laws, the AWU-CWA wrote in a press release. 

“When my coworkers and I announced our union with overwhelming support, Google and Accenture management refused to acknowledge us,” said general writer at Accenture and Google, Anjail Muhammad, in a statement. “A few short weeks later they announced their response — that they would be laying off dozens of employees. These jobs aren’t going away though, we’re just being asked to train our replacements abroad.” 

Alphabet effectively washed its hands of the issue when the layoffs were first announced, saying that “Google does not control [the contractor’s] employment terms or working conditions” and that the situation was “a matter between them and their employer, Accenture.” It reiterated that position to Fortune, adding that the layoffs were for savings and efficiency and no other reason, and that it “chooses its partners and staffing agencies carefully and reviews their compliance with its Supplier Code of Conduct.”

In their original union application, workers listed Google and Accenture as joint employers “due to the direct role both companies play in shaping working conditions,” they said in the original unionization announcement. “We had exercised our right to organize as members of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA in order to bring both Google and Accenture, a Google subcontractor, to the bargaining table to negotiate on several key demands, including layoff protections,” said senior writer and union member Julia Nagatsu Granstrom back in July. 

The team, which largely works in content creation, will be reduced from 130 people to around 40. They were reportedly instructed to train replacements working from India and the Philippines. Since 2018, the majority of Google employees have been contractors.

In April, YouTube Music contractors voted unanimously to unionize, after winning a landmark legal victory with the NLRB forcing Google to the bargaining table to ratify their union contract. However, Alphabet indicated that it would still not negotiate with workers, saying it doesn’t consider them as employees — meaning the issue is likely to wind up in a federal court. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-contract-workers-accuse-alphabet-and-accenture-of-violating-labor-laws-085100869.html?src=rss 

Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, the couple who were arrested last year for the massive 2016 Bitfinex hack involving billions of dollars of cryptocurrency, have pleaded guilty in court. Lichtenstein has admitted that he used multiple advanced hacking tools and techniques to gain entry into the cryptocurrency exchange’s network. He then authorized 2,000 transactions to move 119,754 bitcoins to wallets he controlled. To cover his tracks, he said he deleted access credentials, logs and other digital breadcrumbs that could give him away. Morgan, his wife, helped him move and launder the stolen funds. 

If you’ll recall, the Justice Department seized 95,000 of the stolen bitcoins at the time of their arrest. Back then, that digital coin hoard was worth a whopping $3.6 billion and was the largest financial seizure in the agency’s history. Authorities were able to trace more of the stolen funds after that to recover an additional $475 million worth of cryptocurrency.

According to the DOJ, Lichtenstein and Morgan used false identities to set up online accounts on darknet markets and cryptocurrency exchanges. They then withdrew the funds and distributed the bitcoins from there by converting them into other forms of cryptocurrency and keeping them in crypto mixing services. By doing so, they obfuscated the coins’ sources and made them harder to trace. The couple also set up businesses in the US to make their banking activities look legitimate — Morgan had a TikTok where she talked about establishing a “multimillion dollar business” with “zero outside funding” — and they apparently used the stolen money to purchase physical gold coins that Morgan then buried. 

To be precise, Lichtenstein pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering and could spend up to 20 years in prison. Meanwhile, Morgan pleaded guilty to one count of money laundering conspiracy and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States. Each one carries a maximum prison sentence of five years. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/bitfinex-hackers-who-stole-billions-in-cryptocurrency-plead-guilty-051317291.html?src=rss 

Apple’s financials continue to be in an ever-so-slight slump. Just as we saw the last two quarters, the company suffered minor declines in revenue in its fiscal Q3 2023 — but these are minor blips for a company that is still raking in absurd amounts of money every quarter. 

As has often been the case, revenue that Apple made from its Services segment (things like paid iCloud plans, Apple Music, AppleCare, the App Store and numerous other offerings) hit an all-time high of $21.2 billion. That’s the company’s second-largest product category behind the iPhone, and it grew eight percent year-over-year. But iPhone, Mac and iPad revenue all declined compared to a year ago, the same as it did last quarter.

In the case of the iPhone, that decline was slight: revenue of $39.7 billion in the quarter was down about two percent compared to a year ago. iPad (down 19.8 percent) and Mac (down 7.3 percent) sales declined more significantly. But given the fact that Apple hasn’t refreshed any iPad hardware since last fall, it’s not too surprising to see a drop there. Wearables (like the Apple Watch and AirPods) and accessories were another bright spot, as revenues grew a little over two percent, the only product category besides Services to do so. 

Overall, revenues of $81.8 billion represented a less than two percent drop year over year, while profits actually increased about two percent to $19.9 billion. 

As usual, Apple is holding a call with CEO Tim Cook at 5PM ET, and there’s more to discuss this quarter than usual. Beyond Apple’s normal product categories, this is the first earnings since the ambitious and wildly expensive Vision Pro headset was announced, so it’s likely investors may want to hear about how that new product is progressing. And there’s the ever-present talk of potential AI-related projects hanging out in the background, too. We’ll be updating this post with any details Cook shares on the call. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apple-services-are-making-more-cash-than-ever-but-revenue-shrank-for-the-third-quarter-in-a-row-205545482.html?src=rss 

While the jury is still out on whether Meta’s new Threads will be a Twitter killer, the app could still upend how we think of social networks. Not because of how many users it has, but because of Meta’s promise to integrate ActivityPub, the decentralized protocol that powers Mastodon and other fediverse apps, into Threads.

Though that functionality hasn’t been built yet, there are hints about it sprinkled throughout the service. For now, the most prominent clue is the “threads.net” URL at the top of each user’s profile. It currently links to a brief message that hints at what’s coming. “Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon,” it reads.

For close watchers of the fediverse — the collection of decentralized services that run on ActivityPub — those 15 words could be the start of one of the most consequential moments for the technology. While interest in the fediverse has been growing over the last year, it’s still not widely understood, even by some who are active on places like Mastodon. But Meta’s entry into the space could expose a lot more people to the power, and perils, of decentralized social networks.

What even is decentralized social media?

For enthusiasts, the rise of decentralized platforms represents an opportunity for a more open web — a chance to tear down some of the walled gardens that have become the norm on mainstream social media platforms. “It reminds me of the early, heady days of the Internet, when the web was happening,” Mike McCue, a former Netscape executive and current CEO of Flipboard said. “I believe that this is where the entire social media space will go.”

Because they are open source and not controlled by a single entity, ActivityPub and other protocols allow users to interact with each other’s content, regardless of where it originated. The concept is often compared to email, which also relies on foundational protocols that most people don’t think much about.

“I can email somebody with a random .com address from my .edu address and it just works, the servers talk to each other and the email is delivered,” explains Ross Schulman, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s decentralization fellow. Decentralized social media promises a similar experience, he says. “Instead of exchanging little short messages that we call emails, they exchange little short messages that we call social media, or images or likes, or replies.”

Right now, this kind of experience is limited to Mastodon and other, more niche services that make up the current fediverse. That’s not starting to change as larger and more mainstream platforms begin to experiment with ActivityPub.

Tumblr has said it plans to support ActivityPub. Blogging platform Medium started its own Mastodon instance last year, and now offers membership as a premium “perk” to paying subscribers. Mozilla has also started its own Mastodon instance, calling it a “long-term investment” in the future of social media. The BBC recently announced the start of a six-month experiment with Mastodon. News aggregator Flipboard is even more invested. The company has started its own Mastodon instance, promised to adopt ActivityPub and added integrations with Bluesky, another decentralized platform that uses its own protocol.

Why now?

Despite the recent surge in interest, the idea of the fediverse and decentralized, protocol-based social media is far from new. The ActivityPub protocol was officially established in 2018, but the idea of federated platforms is even older.

“ActivityPub is another instantiation of the basic idea of the internet … every node should be able to talk with any other node at the simplest level,” says Sorin Matei, communications professor and associate dean at Purdue University.

Though Mastodon gained some notoriety in 2017, much of the fediverse remained relatively obscure — until Elon Musk announced his plan to take over Twitter. The acquisition represented a “tectonic shift” for decentralized social media, Matei tells Engadget. New users began to flood Mastodon in the days immediately after his bid was announced, and there have been regular surges that coincide with controversial decisions he’s made since. The service currently has just over 2 million active users, according to founder Eugen Rochko.

Bluesky, another decentralized platform, has also notched early success. The service, which began as an offshoot of Twitter but severed all ties with the company last year, has racked up hundreds of thousands of users in its closed beta. Unlike Mastodon, the team behind Bluesky is developing its own federated protocol, the AT Protocol. For now, the only instance of Bluesky is the closed beta, but the company has said it plans to start testing federation.

And while the AT Protocol and ActivityPub are separate standards, the visions behind them are similar. Already, there are projects to “bridge” the two, and some fediverse enthusiasts suspect the distinction between the two will matter less as both Mastodon and Bluesky mature. “The most important thing is the first principles built around both these protocols are identical,” McCue told Engadget. “The most important thing is there’s an open protocol — actually two — to build the federated social web.”

For now, the number of people using the federated social web, though, is still small compared with more established platforms. Yet smaller and mid-size companies are investing in the protocols and the platforms they power because they see the surging interest as an opportunity to bolster their own communities. “They think it will actually create a better experience for their users,” Schulman told Engadget. “Whether that’s the promise of an even larger reader pool or access to more people to follow.”

Meta, which already operates some of the most dominant social networks, may have different motivations. While Zuckerberg has championed “interoperability” in the past, Meta hasn’t historically been welcoming to potential competing networks. Yet the company has talked glowingly about the promise of the fediverse. “Our vision is that people using compatible apps will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account, and vice versa, ushering in a new era of diverse and interconnected networks,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing Threads.

Schulman notes that Meta may have more self-serving motivations. “They’re trying to portray themselves as not anti-competitive,” Schulman said, pointing to recent regulatory scrutiny.

It’s still unclear how long it will take Meta to actually add ActivitySupport for Threads. Instagram’s top exec has cautioned it will take time. In addition to technical complications involved, there are also serious moderation issues associated with the fediverse, where communities are responsible for setting their own rules and norms. Researchers have recently flagged the prevalence of CSAM on some servers. Bluesky, which does currently have centralized moderation, has also dealt with some controversies surrounding its handling of trust and safety. Meta will need to ensure that Threads, which has the same content policies as Instagram, is interoperable with the fediverse while keeping out content that doesn’t align with its rules.

The stricter approach may also explain why some fediverse backers were not excited about the prospect of Meta joining their ranks, even tangentially. Some Mastodon servers have pledged to block Threads in order to wall off their users from the Facebook owner. Mastodon’s Rochko alluded to the discontent in a blog post after Threads’ launch, assuring users that Meta won’t be able to serve ads or access the data of Mastodon users. But he made clear he was broadly supportive of Meta’s efforts.

“We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years,” he wrote shortly. “The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/is-decentralization-the-future-of-social-media-194554192.html?src=rss 

Researchers say they have found a hardware exploit with Tesla’s infotainment system that could unlock paid upgrades for free, including Full Self-Driving (FSD) and heated rear seats. They used a technique called voltage glitching, which involves tinkering with the supply voltage of the infotainment system’s processor.

“If we do it at the right moment, we can trick the CPU into doing something else,” Christian Werling told TechCrunch. “It has a hiccup, skips an instruction and accepts our manipulated code. That’s basically what we do in a nutshell.”

Werling is one of three doctoral students at the Technical University of Berlin who found the exploit with the help of an independent researcher. The team will present its work at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference next week.

Since it’s a hardware exploit, the process requires physical access to a Tesla vehicle. The jailbreak could enable FSD and certain other features, including in regions where Tesla has not yet made them available, the researchers claim. However, they noted that more work would be needed to test those possibilities.

Still, the researchers claim to have obtained the encryption key that authenticates the car over Tesla’s network, which could lead to them being able to unlock more features. They noted that they were able to obtain personal information from the test car too, including its recent GPS locations, contacts, call logs and calendar appointments.

For several years, hackers have been attempting to unlock paywalled Tesla features, and some efforts have been successful. More recently, one discovered a so-called “Elon Mode” for hands-free FSD operations. Tesla has been playing a game of cat and mouse with these hackers for years.

However, it would be much more difficult for Tesla to revoke this exploit, according to the researchers, given that it’s a hardware-based approach. They claim the company would need physical access to the car. Tesla does not have a communications department that can be reached for comment.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/researchers-reveal-tesla-jailbreak-that-could-unlock-full-self-driving-for-free-190431645.html?src=rss 

Patreon said today it has fixed the root cause of a problem that led to creators and patrons seeing widespread rejected payments this week, and it’s still working to solve the larger problem. The funding platform confirmed to Engadget that financial institutions have flagged “a slightly higher-than-normal number of patron payments” as fraudulent. In addition, some creators said they’re unable to access their funds, which Patreon describes as an unrelated problem stemming from a partner update.

The company describes the inability to access payouts as only affecting “creators using a single payment partner,” which its system status page identifies as Payoneer. It says it’s working “actively with Payoneer to restore payouts” and expects to see the transactions restored today.

The problem gained attention after various Patreon users posted on social channels about losing supporters en masse. Many reported that Patreon’s billing information appeared to have recently shifted to Dublin, which some users speculated was the root cause of banks flagging the transactions as fraudulent. “I just checked and have lost 80% of my patrons,” Dr. Brooke Magnanti, author of Secret Diary of a London Call Girl, posted on Bluesky today. “Awesome.”

Meanwhile, Reddit user u/Competitive_Fruit901 wrote on Wednesday that they lost 300 patrons. “Billing messed up way more than usual this month,” u/Koratl replied. “A lot of people’s cards flagged Patreon as fraudulent.” Redditor u/arzen 353 chimed in, “Not only that, there’s no way to re-try payment once you authorize it with your bank. People can’t re-subscribe even if they want to. Apparently you just have to wait for patreon to un-fuck itself.”

Patreon tells Engadget that the Dublin billing location is likely related to a recent upgrade. “We made a required upgrade with one of our payment processing partners,” company spokesperson Ellen Satterwhite wrote in an email response. “That may have changed the descriptors people are used to seeing in their statements. We are working closely with this payment processing partner to resolve the issue.” Patreon doesn’t expect the flagged payments to be a long-term issue. “As a matter of course, when payment declines happen for various reasons, and payments are retried, those patron relationships are restored,” the company told Engadget.

The company added that it didn’t want to speculate about a timeline or specific actions for flagged transactions until it’s fully rolled out a fix. However, it expects to restore the payout issue today.

We’ll update this article as we receive more information. You can also check on Patreon’s status blog and its X (formerly Twitter) support account for updates.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/patreon-is-fixing-canceled-payments-and-inaccessible-funds-for-creators-175319787.html?src=rss