Several organizations in Russia have found themselves locked out of their Slack accounts without notice, according to Axios. The Salesforce-owned business messaging app has started cutting off Russian users from its platform to comply with international sanctions against the country, as well as with the policies its parent company implemented following the invasion of Ukraine. Axios said it was mostly organizations directly affected by the sanctions that were locked out and that the terms of the restrictions against them require an immediate cutoff.
Since Slack serves as companies’ main internal form of communication and can also be used to share files within organizations, it typically hosts a lot of important data for its customers. The organizations that suddenly lost access to their accounts may have also lost the chance to download their data, unless they’d prepared for the possibility of getting locked out.
Salesforce published a statement earlier this month that it’s exiting business in Russia, after all. The company said that it has a very small number of customers in the country and that it had already started exiting those relationships the week before. In a statement, Slack told Axios:
“Slack is required to take action to comply with sanctions regulations in the U.S. and other countries where we operate, including in some circumstances suspending accounts without prior notice, as mandated by law. We are in contact with affected customers regarding the impact of these actions on their account status, where permitted by law.”
While Slack isn’t deleting data owned by the Russian customers it suspended, the sanctioned organizations also won’t have access to their data until the sanctions affecting them are lifted.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission has fined Meta €17 million ($18.6 million) over 12 data breaches. It said the company violated several articles of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by failing “to have in place appropriate technical and organizational measures which would enable it to readily demonstrate the security measures that it implemented in practice to protect EU users’ data.”
The DPC received the data breach notifications from Meta between June and December 2018. Before announcing the fine, it consulted with other European authorities under GDPR guidelines, as the investigation was related to “cross-border” processing.
“This fine is about record keeping practices from 2018 that we have since updated, not a failure to protect people’s information,” a Meta spokesperson told Engadget. “We take our obligations under the GDPR seriously, and will carefully consider this decision as our processes continue to evolve.”
The fine is a drop in the ocean for Meta, which raked in $32.6 billion in ad revenue last quarter alone. The penalty pales in comparison with a $267 million fine the DPC imposed last year after it determined Meta app WhatsApp failed to comply with GDPR transparency rules. The regulator has investigated Meta over other data-related issues.
Americans pay two and a half times more for their prescription drugs than residents of any other nation on Earth. Though generic versions of popular compounds accounted for 84 percent of America’s annual sales volume in 2021, they only generated 12 percent of the actual dollars spent. The rest of the money pays for branded drugs — Lipitor, Zestril, Accuneb, Vicodin, Prozac — and we have the Reagan Administration in part to thank for that. In the excerpt below from Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines, a fascinating look at the long, infuriating history of public research being exploited for private profit, author Alexander Zaitchik recounts former President Reagan’s court-packing antics from the early 1980s that helped cement lucrative monopolies on name-brand drugs.
When Estes Kefauver died in 1963, he was writing a book about monopoly power called In a Few Hands. Early into Reagan’s first term, the industry must have been tempted to publish a gloating retort titled In a Few Years. Between 1979 and 1981, the drug companies did more than break the stalemate of the 1960s and ’70s — they smashed it wide open. Stevenson-Wydler and Bayh-Dole replaced the Kennedy policy with a functioning framework for the high-speed transfer of public science into private hands. As the full machinery was built out, the industry-funded echo chamber piped a constant flow of memes into the culture: patents alone drive innovation… R&D requires monopoly pricing… progress and American competitiveness depend on it… there is no other way…
In December 1981, the drug companies celebrated another long-sought victory when Congress created a federal court devoted to settling patent disputes. Previously, patent disputes were heard in the districts where they originated. The problem, from industry’s perspective, was the presence of so many staunch New Deal judges in key regions like New York’s Second Circuit. These lifetime judges often understood patent challenges not as threats to property rights, but as opportunities to enforce antitrust law. Local circuit judges appointed by Republicans could also be dangerously old-fashioned in their interpretations of the “novelty” standard. By contrast, the judges on the new patent court, named the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, were appointed by the president. Reagan stuffed its bench with corporate patent lawyers and conservative legal scholars influenced by the Johnny Appleseed of the Law and Economics movement, Robert Bork. Prior to 1982, federal district judges rejected around two-thirds of patent claims; the Court of Appeals has since decided two-thirds of all cases in favor of patent claims. Reagan’s first appointee, Pauline Newman, was the former lead patent counsel for the chemical firm FMC.
The Supreme Court also contributed to the industry’s 1979–1981 run of wins. When Reagan entered office, one of the great scientific-legal unknowns involved the patentability of modified genes. Similar to the uncertainty around the postwar antibiotics market—settled in the industry’s favor by the 1952 Patents Act — the uncertainty threatened the monopoly dreams of the emergent biotechnology sector. The U.S. Patent Office was against patenting modified genes. In 1979, its officers twice rejected an attempt by a General Electric microbiologist to patent a modified bacterium invented to assist in oil spill cleanups. The GE scientist, Ananda Chakrabarty, sued the Patent Office, and in the winter of 1980 Diamond v. Chakrabarty landed before the Supreme Court. In a 5–4 decision written by Warren Burger, the Court overruled the U.S. Patent Office and ruled that modified genes were patentable, as was “anything under the sun that is made by man.” The decision was greeted with audible exhales by the players in the Bayh-Dole alliance. “Chakrabarty was the game changer that provided academic entrepreneurs and venture capitalists the protection they were waiting for,” says economist Öner Tulum. “It paved the way for a more expansive commercialization of science.”
But the industry knew better than to relax. It understood that political victories could be impermanent and fragile, and it had the scar tissue to prove it. Uniquely profitable, uniquely hated, and thus uniquely vulnerable — the companies could not afford to forget that their fantastic postwar wealth and power depended on the maintenance of artificial monopolies resting on dubious if not indefensible ethical and economic arguments that were rejected by every other country on earth. In the United States, home to their biggest profit margins, danger lurked behind every corner in the form of the next crusading senator eager to train years of unwanted attention on these facts. Not even Bayh-Dole, that precious newborn legislation, could be taken for granted. This mode of permanent crisis was validated by the return of a familiar menace in the early 1980s. Of all things, it was the generics industry, an old but weak enemy of the patent-based drug companies, that reappeared and threatened to ruin their celebration of achieving dominance over every corner of medical research and the billions of public dollars flowing through it.
***
As late as the 1930s, there was no “generic” drug industry to speak of. There were only big drug companies and small ones, some with stature, others obscure. They both sold products that were, in the parlance of ethical medicine, “nonproprietary.” To be listed in the United States Pharmacopeia and National Formulary, the official bibles of prescribable medicines, drugs could only carry scientific names; the essential properties of a good scientific name, according to the first edition of the Pharmacopeia, were “expressiveness, brevity, and dissimilarity.” The naming of drugs and medicines formed the other half of the patent taboo: branding a drug evidenced the same knavishness and greed as monopolizing one. The rules of “ethical marketing” did permit products to include an institutional affiliation—Parke-Davis Cannabis Indica Extract, or Squibb Digitalis Tincture—but the names of the medicines themselves (cannabis, digitalis) did not vary. “The generic name emerged as a parallel form of social property belonging to all that resisted commodification and thereby came to occupy a central place in debates about monopoly rights,” writes Joseph Gabriel.
As with patents on scientific medicine, the Germans gave the U.S. drug industry early instruction in the use of trademarks to entrench market control. Hoechst and Bayer broke every rule of so-called ethical marketing, aggressively advertising their breakthrough drugs under trademarks like Aspirin, Heroin, and Novocain. The idea was to twine these names and the things they described in the public mind so tightly, the brand name would secure a de facto monopoly long after the patent expired.
The strategy worked, but the German firms did not reap the benefits. The wartime Office of Alien Property redistributed the German patents and trademarks among domestic firms who produced competing versions of aspirin, creating the first “branded generic.” During the patent taboo’s extended death rattle of the interwar years, more U.S. companies waded into the use of original trademarks to suppress competition. As they experimented with German tactics to avoid “genericide” — the loss of markets after patent expiration — they were enabled by court decisions that transformed trademarks into forms of hard property, similar to the way patents were reconceived in the 1830s.
After World War II, branding and monopoly formed the two-valve heart of a post-ethical growth strategy. The industry’s incredible postwar success — between 1939 and 1959, drug profits soared from $300 million to $2.3 billion — was fueled in large part by expanding the German playbook. While branding monopolies with trade names, the industry initiated campaigns to ruin the reputations of scientifically identical but competing products. The goal was the “scandalization” of generic drugs, writes historian Jeremy Greene. The drug companies “worked methodically to moralize and sensationalize generic dispensing as a dangerous and subversive practice. Dispensing a non-branded product in place of a brand-name product was cast as ‘counterfeiting’; the act of substituting a cheaper version of a drug at the pharmacy was described as ‘beguilement,’ ‘connivance,’ ‘misrepresentation,’ ‘fraudulent,’ ‘unethical’ and ‘immoral.’”
As with patenting, it was the drug companies that dragged organized medicine with them into the post-ethical future. As late as 1955, the AMA’s Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry maintained a ban on advertisements for branded products in its Journal. That changed the year Equanil hit the market, opening the age of branded prescription drugs as a leading source of income for medical journals and associations. “Clinical journals and newer ‘throwaway’ promotional media now teemed with advertisements for Terramycin, Premarin, and Diuril rather than oxytetracycline (Pfizer), conjugated equine estrogens (Wyeth) or chlorothiazide (Merck),” writes Greene. In 1909, only one in ten prescription drugs carried a brand name. By 1969, the ratio had flipped, with only one in ten marketed under its scientific name. In another echo of the patent controversy, the rise of marketing and branded drugs produced division and resistance. By the mid-1950s, an alliance of so-called nomenclature reformers arose to decry trademarks as unscientific handmaidens of monopoly and call for a return to the use of scientific names. These reformers — doctors, pharmacists, labor leaders — made regular appearances before the Kefauver committee beginning in 1959. Their testimony on how the industry used trademarks to suppress competition informed a section in Kefauver’s original bill requiring doctors to use scientific names in all prescriptions. The proposed law reflected the norms that reigned during ethical medicine’s heyday, and would have allowed doctors to recommend firms, but not their branded products. Like most of Kefauver’s core proposals, however, the generic clause was excised. The only trademark-related reform in the final Kefauver-Harris Amendments placed limits on companies’ ability to rebrand and market old medicines as new breakthroughs.
Meta employees scheduled to return to the office on March 28th will have to find another place to take their dirty laundry. Facebook’s parent company is cutting its free laundry and dry-cleaning service and pushing back dinnertime to a later hour, repo…
The European Commission and UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) have launched an antitrust investigation into the advertising deal between Google and Meta (formerly Facebook) codenamed “Jedi Blue.” In particular, the organizations are looking into whether the tech giants colluded to hinder competition “in markets for online display advertising.” The US Justice Department, backed by several states, is also investigating the deal between the two companies.
As the commission explains, Google provides an ad technology service that auctions off online display advertising space on websites and apps as part of its Open Bidding program. Meanwhile, Meta’s Audience Network participates in those kinds of auctions for ad spaces facilitated by Google and rival services. CMA Chief Executive Andrea Coscelli said the organization is “concerned that Google may have teamed up with Meta to put obstacles in the way of competitors who provide important online display advertising services to publishers.”
Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, told The Financial Times that the commission suspects there may have been an agreement between the companies to “only to use Google services and not competing services.” Vestager also told the publication, however, that the commission is investigating the possibility that Meta was unaware of the agreement’s repercussions and that Google acted alone. “We have not concluded yet if it’s a Google thing alone or if they were in it together. It’s not a given that Meta was conscious of the effects of the deal and that’s what we have to investigate,” the commissioner said.
In addition to opening a probe into the Jedi Blue deal, the CMA is also scrutinizing Google’s conduct as a whole in relation to ad bidding. The watchdog is investigating whether the tech giant abused its dominant position to gain an advantage over competitors offering bidding services.
Google previously denied that it colluded with Meta in a court filing, and a spokesperson echoed that in a statement sent to Engadget:
“The allegations made about this agreement are false. This is a publicly documented, procompetitive agreement that enables Facebook Audience Network (FAN) to participate in our Open Bidding program, along with dozens of other companies. FAN’s involvement is not exclusive and they don’t receive advantages that help them win auctions. The goal of this program is to work with a range of ad networks and exchanges to increase demand for publishers’ ad space, which helps those publishers earn more revenue. Facebook’s participation helps that. We’re happy to answer any questions the Commission or the CMA have.”
A Meta spokesperson also told us that the deal with Google is non-exclusive:
“Meta’s non-exclusive bidding agreement with Google and the similar agreements we have with other bidding platforms, have helped to increase competition for ad placements. These business relationships enable Meta to deliver more value to advertisers and publishers, resulting in better outcomes for all. We will cooperate with both inquiries.”
If the CMA finds that the companies had violated competition law, they could be slapped with fines equivalent to 10 percent of their global revenues. As The Financial Times notes, though, the process could take years to complete.
In November, former PlayStation IT security analyst Emma Majo filed a lawsuit against Sony, claiming the company discriminated against women at an institutional level. Majo alleged she was fired because she spoke up about gender bias at the studio, noting she was terminated shortly after submitting a signed statement to management detailing sexism she experienced there.
Majo later filed the paperwork to turn her case into a class-action lawsuit, and just last month Sony attempted to have the whole thing thrown out, claiming her allegations were too vague to stand up to legal scrutiny. Plus, Sony’s lawyers said, no other women were stepping forward with similar claims.
Today, eight additional women joined the lawsuit against Sony. The new plaintiffs are current and former employees, and only one of them has chosen to remain anonymous. One plaintiff, Marie Harrington, worked at Sony for 17 years and eventually became a senior director of program management and chief of staff to senior VP of engineering George Cacciopo.
“When I left Sony, I told the SVP and the Director of HR Rachel Ghadban in the Rancho Bernardo office that the reason I was leaving was systemic sexism against females,” Harrington said in a court statement. “The Director of HR simply said, ‘I understand.’ She did not ask for any more information. I had spoken with the Director of HR many times before about sexism against females.”
Harrington claimed women were overlooked for promotions, and said that during annual review sessions, Sony Interactive Entertainment engineering leaders rarely discussed female employees as potential “high performers.” She said that in their April 2019 session, only four of the 70 employees under review were women, and while all of the men in this group were marked as high performers, just two of the women were.
“Further, when two of the females were discussed, managers spent time discussing the fact that they have families,” Harrington’s statement reads. “Family status was never discussed for any males.”
The remaining women shared similar stories in their statements, with the common theme being a lack of opportunity for female employees to advance and systemic favoritism toward male employees. The plaintiffs claimed male leaders at Sony made derogatory comments including, “you just need to marry rich,” and, “I find that in general, women can’t take criticism.”
One plaintiff alleged that while on a work trip to E3, her superior tricked her into having drinks with him at the hotel bar, hit on her even after she declined, and told other employees that “he was going to try to ‘hit that.'” Another plaintiff shared a story about a gender equality meeting at Sony that had a five-person panel, all of them men.
The lawsuit against Sony comes at a time of reckoning for many major video game studios, including Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft and Riot Games. Activision Blizzard is facing a lawsuit and multiple investigations into claims of institutional sexism, sexual harassment and gender discrimination, while Ubisoft has long faced similar allegations from former and current employees. Riot Games paid $100 million in December to settle a class-action lawsuit over workplace sexual harassment and discrimination.
Sony has not yet responded to the latest movement in the class-action lawsuit, though it denies Majo’s claims of gender discrimination. The company has requested the lawsuit be dismissed, and that will be decided in a hearing in April.
While not nearly as much of a mess as Texas’ energy infrastructure, California’s power grid has seen its fair share of brownouts, rolling blackouts, and power outages caused by wildfires caused by PG&E. To help mitigate the economic impact of those disruptions, this summer General Motors and Northern California’s energy provider will team up to test out using the automaker’s electric vehicles as roving, backup battery packs for the state’s power grid.
The pilot program announced by GM CEO Mary Barra on CNBC Tuesday morning is premised on birectional charging technology, wherein power can both flow from the grid to a vehicle (G2V charging) and from a vehicle back to the grid (V2G), allowing the vehicle to act as an on-demand power source. GM plans to offer this capability as part of its Ultium battery platform on more than a million of its EVs by 2025. Currently the Nissan Leaf and the Nissan e-NV200 offer V2G charging, though Volkswagen announced in 2021 that its ID line will offer it later this year and the the Ford F-150 Lightning will as well.
This summer’s pilot will initially investigate, “the use of bidirectional hardware coupled with software-defined communications protocols that will enable power to flow from a charged EV into a customer’s home, automatically coordinating between the EV, home and PG&E’s electric supply,” according to a statement from the companies. Should the initial tests prove fruitful, the program will expand first to a small group of PG&E customers before scaling up to “larger customer trials” by the end of 2022.
“Imagine a future in which there’s an EV in every garage that functions as a backup power source whenever it’s needed,” GM spokesperson Rick Spina said during a press call on Monday.
“We see this expansion as being the catalyst for what could be the most transformative time for for two industries, both utilities and the auto automotive industry” PG&E spokesperson Aaron August added. “This is a huge shift in the way we’re thinking about electric vehicles, and personal vehicles overall. Really, it’s not just about getting from point A to point B anymore. It’s about getting from point A to point B with the ability to provide power.”
Technically, like from a hardware standpoint, GM vehicles can provide bidirectional charging as they are currently being sold, Spina noted during the call. The current challenge, and what this pilot program is designed to address, is developing the software and UX infrastructure needed to ensure that PG&E customers can easily use the system day-to-day. “The good news there is, it’s nothing different from what’s already industry standard for connectors, software protocols,” August said. “The industry is moving towards ISO 15118-20.”
The length of time that an EV will be able to run the household it’s tethered to will depend on a number of factors — from the size of the vehicle’s battery to the home’s power consumption to the prevailing weather — but August estimates that for an average California home using 20 kWh daily, a fully-charged Chevy Bolt would have enough juice to power the house for around 3 days. This pilot program comes as automakers and utilities alike work out how to most effectively respond to the state’s recent directive banning the sale of internal combustion vehicles starting in 2035.
A number of Amazon’s Chinese suppliers are linked to forced Uyghur labor camps from China’s Xinjiang region, according to a new report from the Tech Transparency Project. The organization found that five of Amazon’s suppliers have been directly accused by watchdog groups and journalists of relying on workers from China’s many “reeducation centers”, which it uses to detain Uyghur Muslims, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities. The suppliers produce Amazon devices and Amazon-branded products, such as the Amazon Basics line of home goods and tech accessories.
“The findings raise questions about Amazon’s exposure to China’s repression of minority Uyghurs in Xinjiang—and the extent to which the e-commerce giant is adequately vetting its supplier relationships,” wrote the authors of the report. “Amazon says that its suppliers ‘must not use forced labor’ and that it ‘does not tolerate suppliers that traffic workers or in any other way exploit workers by means of threat, force, coercion, abduction, or fraud.’ But its supplier list tells a different story.”
Two of the suppliers named in the report—Luxshare Precision Industry and AcBel Polytech—were also used by Apple, according to an investigation last year from The Information. Both Amazon and Apple have denied working with forced labor suppliers, despite evidence that suggests otherwise.
“Amazon complies with the laws and regulations in all jurisdictions in which it operates, and expects suppliers to adhere to our Supply Chain Standards. We take allegations of human rights abuses seriously, including those related to the use or export of forced labor. Whenever we find or receive proof of forced labor, we take action,” Amazon spokesperson Erika Reynoso said in a statement to NBC.
The Australian Institute of Strategic Policies found that many major global brands deployed forced labor from China, including Adidas, Gap, H&M, Microsoft, Nike, Sony, Victoria’s Secret and Zara. Amnesty International estimates that China is currently holding roughly 1 million prisoners in internment camps, where they are reportedly forced to renounce their religion and subject to hard labor in factories. The camps are mostly in the Western China region of Xinjiang, and have been in place since 2017.
Both the US and the EU imposed sanctions on China in 2021, barring any imports from Xinjiang until businesses can prove that they no longer use forced labor. But the report found that many Amazon-branded products are still produced in the Xinjiang region. For example, the report found that a couple of towel brands still listed on Amazon advertise using “China-long staple cotton” from the Xinjiang region.
“Amazon’s continued use of companies with well-documented ties to forced labor in Xinjiang cast doubt on the tech giant’s stated intolerance of human rights abuses in its supply chain,” wrote the report’s authors.
Rivian is quickly backtracking on its steep EV price hikes. The Vergereports Rivian has reversed the price increases for R1T pickup and R1S SUV pre-order customers. Anyone who ordered one of the vehicles before March 1st will pay the original prices, and those who cancelled orders in response can reinstate their orders without affecting their prices or delivery timing. Orders for affected configurations made from March 1st onward will still cost more.
Company chief RJ Scaringe said the higher prices “broke the trust” of customers, and that the automaker didn’t properly communicate the reasons for the hikes. While the new prices were meant to reflect higher manufacturing costs (hence maintaining prices for new buyers), Rivian “wrongly” applied those increases to existing customers, according to Scaringe. It also incorrectly presumed customers wouldn’t mind buying the lower-end dual-motor and standard battery models if the quad-motor option was suddenly too expensive.
The price change angered more than a few customers. Quad-motor buyers faced prices between $12,000 to $20,000 above what they’d expected. Some accused Rivian of bait-and-switch tactics, while others cancelled (or threatened to cancel) orders in response. Tesla, a key competitor, has historically honored pre-order prices regardless of any changes between the order and delivery.
The incident is poorly timed, at least. Rivian is still in the early stages of ramping up R1T deliveries, and has yet to fulfill R1S orders. The automaker’s reputation is still young and delicate — it risks driving business to Tesla, Ford and others with comparable EVs. While reversing the price hike will likely be painful to Rivian, it might be worthwhile if it fosters goodwill and leads to more sales in the long run.
