Author: azeeadmin

Weeks after reaching a settlement, Samsung issued an apology over factory conditions leading to the illness and death of workers. “We offer our sincere apology to our workers who have suffered with illnesses and their families,” executive Kinam Kim said during a press conference late last week.

The apology is the result of longstanding health complaints levied against the company’s LCD and chip manufacturing lines, resulting in dozens of employees suffering illnesses including brain tumors and leukemia, according to The Associated Press.

An advocacy group had been fighting on behalf of workers after the 2007 death of one employee from leukemia. In addition to the public apology, Samsung will pay up to ~$133,000 per employee, for illness contracted from working conditions, including miscarriages and cancers in workers’ children.

In its apology, Samsung called previous efforts “insufficient,” promising improve working conditions going forward. The electronics giant has promised to issue compensation for workers by 2028.

A broken US Postal Service API exposed from over 60 million users and allowed a researcher to pull millions of rows of data by sending wildcard requests to the server. The resulting security hole has been patched after repeated requests to the USPS.

The USPS service, called InformedDelivery, allows you to view your mail before it arrives at your home and offered an API to allow users to connect their mail to specialized services like CRMs. We profiled in the service in 2017.

The anonymous researcher showed that the service accepted wildcards for many searches, allowing any user to see any other users on the site. Brian Krebs has a copy of the API on his site.

The USPS told Krebs that it had investigated the hack and that:

“Computer networks are constantly under attack from criminals who try to exploit vulnerabilities to illegally obtain information. Similar to other companies, the Postal Service’s Information Security program and the Inspection Service uses industry best practices to constantly monitor our network for suspicious activity.”

“Any information suggesting criminals have tried to exploit potential vulnerabilities in our network is taken very seriously. Out of an abundance of caution, the Postal Service is further investigating to ensure that anyone who may have sought to access our systems inappropriately is pursued to the fullest extent of the law.”

Krebs also reported that identity thieves are misusing the service to see what mail is arriving at users homes on which days, allowing them to grab important documents and checks at will. The API hole is currently patched but there is no telling what other mishandled features will crop up in this powerful tool.

News of the world’s first ever gene-edited human babies being born in China caused a huge stir on Monday after the MIT Technology Review and the Associated Press brought the project to light. People in and outside China rushed to question the ethical implications of the scientific breakthrough, reportedly the fruit of a Chinese researcher named He Jiankui from a university in Shenzhen.

There’s another twist to the story.

According to the AP, He had sought and received approval from Shenzhen HarMoniCare Women’s and Children’s Hospital to kick off the experiment. The MIT Technology Review’s report also linked to documents stating that He’s research received the green light from HarMoniCare’s medical ethics committee.

When contacted by TechCrunch, however, a HarMoniCare spokesperson said she was not aware of He’s genetic test and that the hospital is probing the validity of the circulated documents. TechCrunch will update when the case makes progress.

“What we can say for sure is that the gene editing process did not take place at our hospital. The babies were not born here either,” the spokesperson said of He’s project.

He, who studied at Rice and Stanford Universities, led a research team at Southern University of Science and Technology which set out to eliminate the gene associated with HIV, smallpox, and cholera by utilizing the CRISPR gene-editing tool, according to the MIT Technology Review. The technology is ethically fraught because changes to the embryo will pass on to future generations. He’s daring initiative is set to cause debate at the upcoming Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong, which he will attend.

It’s also noteworthy that HarMoniCare belongs to the vast Putian network, a fold of 8,000 private healthcare providers originated from Putian, Fujian province. That’s according to a list compiled by DXY.cn, a Chinese online community for healthcare professionals. Putian hospitals expanded across China quickly over the years with little government oversight until the death of a college student. In 2016, 21-year-old Wei Zexi died of cancer after receiving dubious treatment from a Putian hospital. The incident also provoked a public outcry over China’s largest search engine Baidu, which counted Putian hospitals as a major online advertiser.

Disrupt Berlin 2018 kicks off in just three days, the holidays are upon us, and we here at TechCrunch are feelin’ the season. What better way to celebrate both events than to share the spirit of entrepreneurism and gift-giving with a Cyber Monday special.

Today — and today only — when you buy any pass to Disrupt Berlin 2018 (excluding student and government passes) you’ll get to select a gift (up to a $200 USD value not including tax or shipping) from the TechCrunch Holiday Gift Guide. It’s our annual, curated list of all the really good stuff.

Whatever puts you in the holiday mood, we’ve got you covered. STEM gifts for the kids, podcast tools, something for the frequent flyer in your life or maybe a little tchotchke just for you (we won’t tell).

Gifts are great — especially the $200 variety. But the coolest gift you can give yourself this year is a ticket to Disrupt Berlin 2018. Talk about a gift that keeps on giving.

It’s the gift of opportunity — network and connect with founders, investors, developers and more — every stripe of tech enthusiast imaginable. Find future partners and customers. Explore hundreds of early-stage companies exhibiting in Startup Alley, hear from top tech and investment leaders, enjoy the thrill ride that is Startup Battlefield.

No matter where you roam or who you want to meet at Disrupt Berlin, we’ve made networking easier than ever by making our free business match-matching service, CrunchMatch, available to all attendees.

Go buy your pass to Disrupt Berlin 2018, and then we’ll be in touch the week of 3 December to coordinate your something sweet from our awesome gift guide. We can’t wait to see you in Berlin!

In a dramatic development for CRISPR research, a Chinese scientist from a university in Shenzhen claims he has succeeded in helping create the world’s first genetically-edited babies. Dr. Jiankui He told the Associated Press that twin girls were born earlier this month after he edited their embryos using CRISPR technology to remove the CCR5 gene, which plays a critical role in enabling many forms of the HIV virus to infect cells.

The AP’s interview comes after the MIT Technology Review reported earlier today that He’s team at the Southern University of Science and Technology wants to use CRISPR technology to eliminate the CCR5 gene and create children with resistance to HIV. The news also comes the day before the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing is set to begin in Hong Kong.

According to the Technology Review, the summit’s organizers were apparently not notified of He’s plans for the study, though the AP reports that He informed them today. (It is important to note that there is still no independent confirmation of He’s claim and that it has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.)

During his interview with the AP, He, who studied at Rice and Stanford before returning to China, said he felt “a strong responsibility that it’s not just to make a first, but also make it an example” and that “society will decide what to do next.”

According to documents linked by the Technology Review, the study was approved by the Medical Ethics Committee of Shenzhen HOME Women’s and Children’s Hospital. The summary on the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry also says the study’s execution time is between March 7, 2017 to March 7, 2019, and that was seeking married couples living in China who meet its health and age requirements and are willing to undergo IVF therapy. The research team wrote that their goal is to “obtain healthy children to avoid HIV providing new insights for the future elimination of major genetic diseases in early human embryos.”

A table attached to the trial’s listing on the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry said genetic tests have already been carried out on fetuses of 12, 19, and 24 weeks of gestational age, though it is unclear if those pregnancies included the one that resulted in the birth of the twin girls, whose parents wish to remain anonymous.

“I believe this is going to help the families and their children,” He told the AP, adding that if the study causes harm, “I would feel the same pain as they do and it’s going to be my own responsibility.”

Chinese scientists at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou first edited the genes of a human embryo using CRISPR technology (the acronym stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), which enables the removal of specific genes by acting as a very precise pair of “genetic scissors,” in 2015. Though other scientists, including in the United States, have conducted similar research since then, the Southern University of Science and Technology’s study is considered especially radical because many scientists are wary of the ethical implications of CRISPR, which they fear may be used to perpetuate eugenics or create “designer babies” if carried out on embryos meant to be carried to term.

As in the United States and many European countries, using a genetically-engineered embryo in a pregnancy is already prohibited in China, though the Technology Review points out that this guideline, which was issued to IVF clinics in 2003, may not carry the weight of the law.

In 2015, shortly after the Sun Yat-sen University experiment (which was conducted on embryos that were unviable because of chromosomal effects) became known, a meeting called by several groups, including the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the Institute of Medicine, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London, called for a moratorium on making inheritable changes to the human genome.

In addition to ethical concerns, Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing scientist and associate director of the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences, a nonprofit in Seattle, told the technology Review that He’s study is cause for “regret and concern” because it may also overshadow progress in gene-editing research currently being carried out on adults with HIV.

TechCrunch has contacted He for comment at his university email.

Google paid £4,000 to settle a discrimination lawsuit that claims it did not do enough to protect a contractor from being racially profiled while working on an undercover project for Google Maps in shopping malls, reports the Guardian. The contractor, a UK citizen of Moroccan descent, said he was subjected to frequent harassment, including being asked if he was a terrorist, while gathering information about wi-fi signals inside stores, and the situation was exacerbated because he was instructed not to disclose that he was conducting research for Google.

Ahmed Rashid (not his real name) contracted with Google last year to work on Expedite, a project meant to help with indoor mapping within shopping centers. Rashid told the Guardian he sued the company when an offer for a new contract was withdrawn after he complained about being harassed while carrying out his duties. Google denied wrongdoing, but paid to settle the case. Rashid agreed to sign a non-disclosure agreement, but decided to speak out after the global walkout by Google employees to protest sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination.

“There was a complete disregard for the safety and interest of contractors. This research was being conducted in secret at the expense of the security of Google contractors that fit a stereotypically Muslim/Arab profile,” Rashid said, adding that he believes Google did not think about how researchers of Arab background would be treated because “there weren’t any Arabs on the board designing this project.”

Rashid says his team members walked around stores in intervals of six, eight, or 12 minutes, while recording information about the strength and range of their wi-fi signals through a private Google app installed onto their phones. Rashid’s claims that he was frequently targeted for racial profiling and harassment were corroborated by a white team member who also spoke to the Guardian despite signing an NDA about the project.

“It would have been helpful to all of us to have ID because we all got stopped, but a lot of us didn’t have problems because we were white. Google could have done more to help him,” the team member said.

Rashid said he asked Google to let him wear a badge in order to avoid harassment, but was ignored until he complained about being followed by security at a shopping center in London last September. Rashid claims a new contract he had been promised was withdrawn later the same day.

While Google’s policies regarding sexual harassment, including forced arbitration (which the company announced after the walkouts that it would end), have been under scrutiny, Rashid believes the company needs to address other issues as well. “We need to address sexual misconduct, but nobody is talking about intersectional issues, like institutional discrimination and racism,” he said. Other employees have also made similar calls, including the walkout’s organizers, who wrote that “the company must address issues of systemic racism and discrimination, including pay equity and rates of promotion, and not just sexual harassment alone.”

TechCrunch has contacted Google for comment. In a statement to the Guardian, the company said: “We often work with service providers to measure wi-fi signal strength, which helps us improve Google’s mapping products. All employees and contractors are provided with clear guidelines that outline the details of their project and role, and they’re instructed to be forthright about the fact that they’re working on behalf of Google.”

In a statement issued today, Logitech International said that while it had engaged in discussions with Plantronics about a potential transaction, it had terminated the negotiations.

Over the weekend we picked up a Reuters report that the two companies were in talks for a potential $2.2 billion merger.

The company declined to comment further.

 

A true apology consists of a sincere acknowledgement of wrong-doing, a show of empathic remorse for why you wronged and the harm it caused, and a promise of restitution by improving ones actions to make things right. Without the follow-through, saying sorry isn’t an apology, it’s a hollow ploy for forgiveness.

That’s the kind of “sorry” we’re getting from tech giants — an attempt to quell bad PR and placate the afflicted, often without the systemic change necessary to prevent repeated problems. Sometimes it’s delivered in a blog post. Sometimes it’s in an executive apology tour of media interviews. But rarely is it in the form of change to the underlying structures of a business that caused the issue.

Intractable Revenue

Unfortunately, tech company business models often conflict with the way we wish they would act. We want more privacy but they thrive on targeting and personalization data. We want control of our attention but they subsist on stealing as much of it as possible with distraction while showing us ads. We want safe, ethically built devices that don’t spy on us but they make their margins by manufacturing them wherever’s cheap with questionable standards of labor and oversight. We want groundbreaking technologies to be responsibly applied, but juicy government contracts and the allure of China’s enormous population compromise their morals. And we want to stick to what we need and what’s best for us, but they monetize our craving for the latest status symbol or content through planned obsolescence and locking us into their platforms.

The result is that even if their leaders earnestly wanted to impart meaningful change to provide restitution for their wrongs, their hands are tied by entrenched business models and the short-term focus of the quarterly earnings cycle. They apologize and go right back to problematic behavior. The Washington Post recently chronicled a dozen times Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologized, yet the social network keeps experiencing fiasco after fiasco. Tech giants won’t improve enough on their own.

Addiction To Utility

The threat of us abandoning ship should theoretically hold the captains in line. But tech giants have evolved into fundamental utilities that many have a hard time imagining living without. How would you connect with friends? Find what you needed? Get work done? Spend your time? What hardware or software would you cuddle up with in the moments you feel lonely? We live our lives through tech, have become addicted to its utility, and fear the withdrawal.

If there were principled alternatives to switch to, perhaps we could hold the giants accountable. But the scalability, network effects, and aggregation of supply by distributors has led to near monopolies in these core utilities. The second-place solution is often distant. What’s the next best social network that serves as an identity and login platform that isn’t owned by Facebook? The next best premium mobile and PC maker behind Apple? The next best mobile operating system for the developing world beyond Google’s Android? The next best ecommerce hub that’s not Amazon? The next best search engine? Photo feed? Web hosting service? Global chat app? Spreadsheet?

One of the few tech backlashes that led to real flight was #DeleteUber. Workplace discrimination, shady business protocols, exploitative pricing and more combined to spur the movement to ditch the ridehailing app. But what was different here is that US Uber users did have a principled alternative to switch to without much hassle: Lyft. The result was that “Lyft benefitted tremendously from Uber’s troubles in 2018” eMarketer’s forecasting director Shelleen Shum told the USA Today in May. Uber missed eMarketer’s projections while Lyft exceeded them, narrowing the gap between the car services. And meanwhile, Uber’s CEO stepped down as it tried to overhaul its internal policies.

But in the absence of viable alternatives to the giants, leaving these mainstays is inconvenient. After all, they’re the ones that made us practically allergic to friction. Even after massive scandals, data breaches, toxic cultures, and unfair practices, we largely stick with them to avoid the uncertainty of life without them. Even Facebook added 1 million monthly users in the US and Canada last quarter despite seemingly every possible source of unrest. Tech users are not voting with their feet. We’ve proven we can harbor ill will towards the giants while begrudgingly buying and using their products. Our leverage to improve their behavior is vastly weakened by our loyalty.

Inadequate Oversight

Regulators have failed to adequately step up either. This year’s congressional hearings about Facebook and social media often devolved into inane and uninformed questioning like how does Facebook earn money if its doesn’t charge? “Senator, we run ads” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said with a smirk. Other times, politicians were so intent on scoring partisan points by grandstanding or advancing conspiracy theories about bias that they were unable to make any real progress. A recent survey commissioned by Axios found that “In the past year, there has been a 15-point spike in the number of people who fear the federal government won’t do enough to regulate big tech companies — with 55% now sharing this concern.”

When regulators do step in, their attempts can backfire. GDPR was supposed to help tamp down on the dominance of Google and Facebook by limiting how they could collect user data and making them more transparent. But the high cost of compliance simply hindered smaller players or drove them out of the market while the giants had ample cash to spend on jumping through government hoops. Google actually gained ad tech market share and Facebook saw the littlest loss while smaller ad tech firms lost 20 or 30 percent of their business.

Even the Honest Ads act, which was designed to bring political campaign transparency to internet platforms following election interference in 2016, has yet to be passed even despite support from Facebook and Twitter. There’s hasn’t been meaningful discussion of blocking social networks from acquiring their competitors in the future, let alone actually breaking Instagram and WhatsApp off of Facebook. Governments like the U.K. that just forcibly seized documents related to Facebook’s machinations surrounding the Cambridge Analytica debacle provide some indication of willpower. But clumsy regulation could deepen the moats of the incumbents, and prevent disruptors from gaining a foothold. We can’t depend on regulators to sufficiently protect us from tech giants right now.

Our Hope On The Inside

The best bet for change will come from the rank and file of these monolithic companies. With the war for talent raging, rock star employees able to have huge impact on products, and compensation costs to keep them around rising, tech giants are vulnerable to the opinions of their own staff. It’s simply too expensive and disjointing to have to recruit new high-skilled workers to replace those that flee.

Google declined to renew a contract with the government after 4000 employees petitioned and a few resigned over Project Maven’s artificial intelligence being used to target lethal drone strikes. Change can even flow across company lines. Many tech giants including Facebook and Airbnb have removed their forced arbitration rules for harassment disputes after Google did the same in response to 20,000 of its employees walking out in protest.

Facebook is desperately pushing an internal communications campaign to reassure staffers it’s improving in the wake of damning press reports from the New York Times and others. TechCrunch published an internal memo from Facebook’s outgoing VP of communications Elliot Schrage in which he took the blame for recent issues, encouraged employees to avoid finger-pointing, and COO Sheryl Sandberg tried to reassure employees that “I know this has been a distraction at a time when you’re all working hard to close out the year — and I am sorry.” These internal apologizes could come with much more contrition and real change than those paraded for the public.

And so after years of us relying on these tech workers to build the product we use every day, we must now rely that will save us from them. It’s a weighty responsibility to move their talents where the impact is positive, or commit to standing up against the business imperatives of their employers. We as the public and media must in turn celebrate when they do what’s right for society, even when it reduces value for shareholders. And we must accept that shaping the future for the collective good may be inconvenient for the individual.

For more on this topic:

Starting Monday, businesses in Ohio will be able to pay their taxes in bitcoin — making the state that’s high in the middle and round on both ends the first in the nation to accept cryptocurrency officially.

Companies who want to take part in the program simply need to go to OhioCrypto.com and register to pay whatever taxes their corporate hearts desire in crypto. It could be anything from cigarette sales taxes to employee withholding taxes, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, which first noted the initiative.

Other states around the country in the southeast, southwest and midwest also considered accepting bitcoin for taxes, but those initiatives in places like Arizona, Georgia, and Illinois never got past state legislatures.

The state is working with the cryptocurrency payment startup BitPay to handle its payments, which will convert the bitcoin to dollars.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg may yet regret underestimating a UK parliamentary committee that’s been investigating the democracy-denting impact of online disinformation for the best part of this year — and whose repeat requests for facetime he’s just as repeatedly snubbed.

In the latest high gear change, reported in yesterday’s Observer, the committee has used parliamentary powers to seize a cache of documents pertaining to a US lawsuit to further its attempt to hold Facebook to account for misuse of user data.

Facebook’s oversight — or rather lack of it — where user data is concerned has been a major focus for the committee, as its enquiry into disinformation and data misuse has unfolded and scaled over the course of this year, ballooning in scope and visibility since the Cambridge Analytica story blew up into a global scandal this April.

The internal documents now in the committee’s possession are alleged to contain significant revelations about decisions made by Facebook senior management vis-a-vis data and privacy controls — including confidential emails between senior executives and correspondence with Zuckerberg himself.

This has been a key line of enquiry for parliamentarians. And an equally frustrating one — with committee members accusing Facebook of being deliberately misleading and concealing key details from it.

The seized files pertain to a US lawsuit that predates mainstream publicity around political misuse of Facebook data, with the suit filed in 2015, by a US startup called Six4Three, after Facebook removed developer access to friend data. (As we’ve previously reported Facebook was actually being warned about data risks related to its app permissions as far back as 2011 — yet it didn’t full shut down the friends data API until May 2015.)

The core complaint is an allegation that Facebook enticed developers to create apps for its platform by implying they would get long-term access to user data in return. So by later cutting data access the claim is that Facebook was effectively defrauding developers.

Since lodging the complaint, the plaintiffs have seized on the Cambridge Analytica saga to try to bolster their case.

And in a legal motion filed in May Six4Three’s lawyers claimed evidence they had uncovered demonstrated that “the Cambridge Analytica scandal was not the result of mere negligence on Facebook’s part but was rather the direct consequence of the malicious and fraudulent scheme Zuckerberg designed in 2012 to cover up his failure to anticipate the world’s transition to smartphones”.

The startup used legal powers to obtain the cache of documents — which remain under seal on order of a California court. But the UK parliament used its own powers to swoop in and seize the files from the founder of Six4Three during a business trip to London when he came under the jurisdiction of UK law, compelling him to hand them over.

According to the Observer, parliament sent a serjeant at arms to the founder’s hotel — giving him a final warning and a two-hour deadline to comply with its order.

“When the software firm founder failed to do so, it’s understood he was escorted to parliament. He was told he risked fines and even imprisonment if he didn’t hand over the documents,” it adds, apparently revealing how Facebook lost control over some more data (albeit, its own this time).

In comments to the newspaper yesterday, DCMS committee chair Damian Collins said: “We are in uncharted territory. This is an unprecedented move but it’s an unprecedented situation. We’ve failed to get answers from Facebook and we believe the documents contain information of very high public interest.”

Collins later tweeted the Observer’s report on the seizure, teasing “more next week” — likely a reference to the grand committee hearing in parliament already scheduled for November 27.

But it could also be a hint the committee intends to reveal and/or make use of information locked up in the documents, as it puts questions to Facebook’s VP of policy solutions…

That said, the documents are subject to the Californian superior court’s seal order, so — as the Observer points out — cannot be shared or made public without risk of being found in contempt of court.

A spokesperson for Facebook made the same point, telling the newspaper: “The materials obtained by the DCMS committee are subject to a protective order of the San Mateo Superior Court restricting their disclosure. We have asked the DCMS committee to refrain from reviewing them and to return them to counsel or to Facebook. We have no further comment.”

Facebook’s spokesperson added that Six4Three’s “claims have no merit”, further asserting: “We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously.”

And, well, the irony of Facebook asking for its data to remain private also shouldn’t be lost on anyone at this point…

Another irony: In July, the Guardian reported that as part of Facebook’s defence against Six4Three’s suit the company had argued in court that it is a publisher — seeking to have what it couched as ‘editorial decisions’ about data access protected by the US’ first amendment.

Which is — to put it mildly — quite the contradiction, given Facebook’s long-standing public characterization of its business as just a distribution platform, never a media company.

So expect plenty of fireworks at next week’s public hearing as parliamentarians once again question Facebook over its various contradictory claims.

It’s also possible the committee will have been sent an internal email distribution list by then, detailing who at Facebook knew about the Cambridge Analytica breach in the earliest instance.

This list was obtained by the UK’s data watchdog, over the course of its own investigation into the data misuse saga. And earlier this month information commissioner Elizabeth Denham confirmed the ICO has the list and said it would pass it to the committee.

The accountability net does look to be closing in on Facebook management.

Even as Facebook continues to deny international parliaments any face-time with its founder and CEO (the EU parliament remains the sole exception).

Last week the company refused to even have Zuckerberg do a video call to take the committee’s questions — offering its VP of policy solutions, Richard Allan, to go before what’s now a grand committee comprised of representatives from seven international parliaments instead.

The grand committee hearing will take place in London on Tuesday morning, British time — followed by a press conference in which parliamentarians representing Facebook users from across the world will sign a set of ‘International Principles for the Law Governing the Internet’, making “a declaration on future action”.

So it’s also ‘watch this space’ where international social media regulation is concerned.

As noted above, Allan is just the latest stand-in for Zuckerberg. Back in April the DCMS committee spend the best part of five hours trying to extract answers from Facebook CTO, Mike Schroepfer.

“You are doing your best but the buck doesn’t stop with you does it? Where does the buck stop?” one committee member asked him then.

“It stops with Mark,” replied Schroepfer.

But Zuckerberg definitely won’t be stopping by on Tuesday.