The courses will cover skills including front-end and back-end development.
Meta is working with Coursera on new professional certificates.
Large tech companies are increasingly chipping in on boot camps and certificate programs to grow the tech talent pool. Meta is the latest, with the company announcing it’s rolling out new entry-level courses covering skills like front-end and back-end development on Wednesday.
Meta is partnering with Coursera to launch courses teaching development for front-end, back-end, iOS and Android as well as a fifth class on database engineering. The courses will be available on Coursera in June and July.
“We’re working to remove barriers, so that anyone regardless of education, background or experience can land a high-growth, in-demand job and grow a rewarding career,” Judy Toland, Meta’s VP of Global Customer Marketing, told Protocol. “People can learn the most up-to-date skills and break into tech more quickly than previously before. It’s one of the ways we’re helping to build a more inclusive and equitable job market.”
Toland said the programs were created by the company’s software engineers. Meta partnered with the online education platform to offer “affordable access” and scholarships to people with financial need so the courses will be as widely available as possible. “These career certificate programs are helping fuel the growth of a new generation of professionals and the fast pace of a career track in tech means more opportunities for upward mobility for all,” she said.
Meta had already introduced career certificate programs in social media marketing and marketing analytics. More than 63,000 people have taken the company’s certificates, and about 70% of people who took those courses reported a “positive impact on their career, life or business,” Toland said.
Meta isn’t the only company working with Coursera on upskilling and reskilling programs. Google designs and sells certificate programs through the education platform, and AWS works with the company to offer cloud training and other services. Coursera also works with IBM, Intuit and others on professional certificates.
Betty Vandenbosch, the chief content officer at Coursera, said the company’s partners are responsible for the content of the courses, meaning Meta will set out the goals, teachers, assignments and more. Vandenbosch said many of these courses are integrated into a university’s degree program (some of Meta’s certificates count toward college credit), which helps put participants on track to pursue a degree in whatever field they’re studying.
“The whole thing is a path to success,” she told Protocol.
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Sarah Roach is a news writer at Protocol (@sarahroach_) and contributes to Source Code. She is a recent graduate of George Washington University, where she studied journalism and mass communication and criminal justice. She previously worked for two years as editor in chief of her school’s independent newspaper, The GW Hatchet.
Cameo, the celebrity video greetings startup, laid off 87 of staffers Wednesday, a move that CEO Steven Galanis described as “right-sizing.” The layoffs also affected some of Cameo’s most senior executives, Protocol has learned. Leadership departures included Cameo CTO Rob Post, top marketing executive Emily Boschwitz, CPO Nundu Janakiram and Chief People Officer Melanie Steinbach, according to a source close to the company.
The team in charge of music partnerships saw big cuts, according to a LinkedIn post first reported by The Information. Also affected by the layoffs were the company’s international operations, including much of its London office, as well as a number of employees in sales and marketing, the source told Protocol. Galanis is said to have announced the layoffs in a staff meeting, during which he told staff that the company was forced to cut costs because it hadn’t met revenue projections.
In a statement to press, Galanis pointed to pandemic-fueled hiring as a reason for the cuts. “We hired a lot of people quickly, and market conditions have rapidly changed since then,” he said. “Accordingly, we have right-sized the business to best reflect the new realities.”
Galanis went on to call the layoffs “a painful but necessary course correction.” Cameo has raised a total of $165 million in funding to date.
Brandon Silverman is a big part of why anyone knows anything about what’s happening on Meta’s platforms: As the co-founder and former CEO of CrowdTangle, he created what was, for a while at least, the most robust real-time look at what’s happening on social media’s biggest platforms at any given time.
Now, that tool is quietly dying, and in his testimony during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing Wednesday, Silverman explained why.
“There were a lot of challenges inside Facebook, but one of them was certainly the question of: Are we putting ourselves out on a limb when others aren’t?” Silverman told the panel of lawmakers. “These companies can do very little, and it doesn’t matter.”
Of the Big Tech giants, Meta has arguably done the most to reveal what’s happening under the hood both through CrowdTangle and through its transparency reports. But far from generating praise, that has often only made the company the subject of more scrutiny. “No matter how much transparency you do,” Silverman said, “you’re rarely going to get credit for it in the public eye.”
Silverman spoke about the challenges of running a product that mostly exists to get its parent company in trouble. “It can be incredibly uncomfortable when your work and the work of your team are constantly fueling criticism — some fair and some not — of the company where you work,” he said. “Those moments take a toll on your team. But they also make it harder to get resources. They make it more difficult to launch new features and add more data. And ultimately, they provide constant ammunition to executives who are skeptical about doing transparency.”
Silverman left the company last fall, and has since been careful in his criticism of his former employer. But his testimony was clear about the end result of all of this tension inside the company. “CrowdTangle is still available, but it’s in maintenance mode,” he said. “Facebook has stopped onboarding new partners. No new features or major updates have been released in two years, and a global partnerships team that used to run it no longer exists.”
That, Silverman argued, should serve as proof that tech companies can’t be trusted to be sufficiently transparent all on their own. “It’s too hard to make progress on these issues at the scale and breadth we need from inside a company,” he said. “And as a result, we’ve seen is that the industry as a whole has simply not made enough progress equal to the responsibilities they have.”
Silverman called on lawmakers to pass the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, which he said would be an “important step in the right direction.” That bipartisan bill would require platforms to provide access to certain data to pre-vetted researchers. Europe’s Digital Services Act includes a similar provision.
But both Silverman and experts on the panel pointed out that transparency must be balanced with user privacy — an easier task to achieve in Europe, which, unlike the U.S., has enshrined privacy rights under the GDPR. “It gives them a baseline to start with in how privacy is supposed to work that then you can build transparency on top of,” Stanford Cyber Policy director Daphne Keller told the senators. “You are in a much more difficult position.”
Visa and Mastercard officials who spoke at a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting Wednesday said credit card issuers are in competition with new financial services.
That may be news to the many neobanks and other fintechs that feast on interchange fees: the money merchants pay for every tap, dip or swipe of a credit or debit card. Many startups are in on the card game, taking a piece of the proceeds. Mastercard and Visa set these fees after consulting with banks, and some antitrust experts argue that behavior is a sign of a duopoly.
“In addition to cash, checks and traditional U.S. payment networks, we also compete today with digital wallets, ‘buy now, pay later’ solutions, fintech and Big Tech, real-time payment systems and cryptocurrency,” said Bill Sheedy, a senior adviser to Visa CEO Al Kelly, at the hearing. “Regulatory interventions focused exclusively on card networks would shift consumer spending away from networks like Visa, and toward more expensive payment methods with more risk, less reliability and fewer protections and security.”
The hearing convened to question executives from credit card companies, banks and retailers, along with consumer advocates, about the potential impacts of regulating credit card interchange fees. Visa and Mastercard have been planning an increase in the fees since 2020, a move delayed by the pandemic and protests from merchants.
The Durbin Amendment, passed in 2011, caps debit card interchange fees at 22 cents plus 0.05% of the transaction fee. However, there are no regulations on credit card interchange fees in the United States. Some Judiciary Committee members were concerned about the impact of high fees, on top of inflation, on everyday consumers and small businesses, while others were wary that limiting what credit card companies can charge for interchange fees may actually decrease competition and consumer options in the market.
There was no clear consensus at the end of the hearing on how or whether Congress should cap interchange fees. However, the question-and-answer session helped illuminate how Congress might regulate a source of revenue critical to an emergent industry.
Most of the senators on the Committee were quick to dismiss Visa and Mastercard’s frequently repeated claims about increased competition from fintech, with Sen. Richard Blumenthal calling it “apples and oranges.” But some of Visa and Mastercard’s other arguments appear to have carried more weight.
Executives said that the fees were reasonable, given the fraud protection, rewards, convenience and increased purchasing power they offer consumers. Fees increased appropriately as cybersecurity risk increased during the pandemic, for example, after issuers said they had to devote more resources to fraud protection. Visa and Mastercard executives also repeatedly referenced a report from the Government Accountability Office which said the Durbin Amendment lowered the availability of financial services for the unbanked, which appears to have caused some senators concern.
Yet consumer advocates and merchants energetically rejected these claims. The GAO study was a flawed “survey” with misleading questions, said Doug Kantor, general counsel for the National Association of Convenience Stores. Laura Shapira Karet, CEO of the grocery store chain Giant Eagle, pointed out that Visa and Mastercard control over 80% of the market and engage in what “walks like” and “talks like” a duopoly by setting blanket interchange fees. Ed Mierzwinski, senior director of the Federal Consumer Program at US-PIRG, quoted Visa’s chief financial officer in a recent earnings call saying that inflation is a “net-net win” for the company, as interchange fees are charged as a portion of total gross receipts.
The most obvious regulatory step would be for Congress to write something akin to the Durbin Amendment for credit card transactions, enacting a cap on transaction fees. But senators made other suggestions, too. Sen. Mazie Hirono, for example, asked whether doing away with the so-called “honor all cards” rule would increase competition. The rule is a part of many credit card issuers’ contracts with merchants, and requires merchants to accept every credit card an issuer offers. That includes premium rewards card with higher fees, on which companies like Visa and Mastercard encourage well-heeled consumers to spend more, to the ultimate benefit of retailers.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar asked if better antitrust enforcement could fix the issue. Consumer advocates said it would help, but that there were also large loopholes with existing legislation. “This is an area where the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice has been active over time, as has the Federal Trade Commission, but there’s a lot more to be done,” said Kantor.
“Very good,” Klobuchar replied.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Ed Mierzwinski’s name and one instance of the Durbin Amendment. This story was updated on May 4, 2022.
Google is cutting back on its rigorous, twice-annual performance reviews after almost half of employees came out against them in surveys, The Information reported Wednesday.
Only 53% of Google employees said they considered the twice-annual reviews “time well spent” in surveys, CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told employees on Wednesday. Starting in May, reviews will now only take place once a year, but promotions will still be possible twice a year.
Google’s performance reviews have historically required an extensive amount of work from employees and managers, including assessments and self-assessments on traits like problem-solving, thought leadership and “Googleyness,” as well as 360-degree feedback from peers.
The new reviews system, which Google is calling Googler Reviews and Development, or GRAD, won’t require as much preparation. Instead, employees will be graded within a new five-point rating system ranging from “transformative impact” to “not enough impact,” with most employees ranking in the middle at “significant impact,” The Information reported. A blog post from Google says that GRAD is meant to “reflect the fact that most Googlers deliver significant impact every day.”
As tech companies worry about hiring and retention, it’s clear that tech workers have more sway than ever — even when it comes to how often their performance is reviewed. And it’s not just Google: Meta also decided last year to cut back to one annual review, The Information pointed out.
The European Commission proposed banning Russian oil and petroleum imports in a move that aims to punish the Kremlin for the invasion of Ukraine. The ban will phase in over the next six months, and take full effect by the end of the year.
“Putin must pay a price, a high price, for his brutal aggression,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said of the proposal.
Representatives of the European Union’s 27 member-states will meet on Wednesday to discuss ratifying the proposal, which will require unanimous agreement. Both Hungary and Slovakia — which are heavily dependent on Russian imports — have been offered 20 months to phase out imports in a concession that speaks to the delicacy of the negotiations. The proposal also makes no mention of Russian gas, even though Moscow stopped the flow of gas to both Poland and Bulgaria last week, and threatened to do so for other European countries as well.
Hungary, for its part, expressed skepticism on Wednesday. Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesperson for Prime Minister Viktor Orban, told CNN that the 20-month wind-down “simply cannot be done as they require,” and that the country needs at least three years.
Officials are reportedly pushing for a final decision by the end of the week.
Europe is a major market for Russia, and the ban could cause the country real pain. While Russia has the option of selling more oil and coal to China and India, doing so will come at a cost. Western sanctions have made it costly to insure Russian tankers, and the steep costs of doing business with the country make importing its fuel relatively unattractive for countries in Asia unless Russia slashes prices. In fact, China’s independent refiners have already begun buying Russian oil at steep discounts, according to the Financial Times.
Germany was particularly vocal in its support of banning Russian oil. “The transition period is sufficiently long that we can take all precautions to create alternatives to Russian oil in Germany,” said economy minister Robert Habeck.
If this happens, it could have major ripple effects, especially throughout a continent that has long relied on its neighbor to the east for energy supplies. Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine has been a salient example of the risks of relying on foreign sources of fossil fuels for energy. The proposal represents the latest evidence that the war in Ukraine has the potential to reshape energy markets. How European countries respond if they indeed cut off Russian oil could chart a course to a more sustainable future, particularly if they turn to renewables. But replacing Russian oil with oil from elsewhere could keep the world on the path to climate danger.
The proposal comes alongside the announcement of sanctions on high-ranking Russian military officials, as well as proposals to kneecap several major Russian banks by taking them off the SWIFT financial-messaging system.
Billionaire venture capitalist John Doerr is funding a new school at Stanford University focused specifically on climate change, calling sustainability the “computer science of our time” in an interview with The New York Times.
The $1.1 billion gift from Doerr and his wife Ann is the largest to fund a new school in Stanford’s history. The new Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability aims to increase impact of climate research amid the “scale and urgency of climate change and other planetary challenges,” the university announced Wednesday.
Along with establishing new academic departments, the donation will support new interdisciplinary institutes, a Sustainability Accelerator aimed at “developing near-term policy and technology solutions” and a facility called the Sustainability Commons, located on the west side of Stanford’s campus.
“The school will absolutely focus on policy issues and on asking what would it take to move the world toward more sustainable practices and better behaviors,” Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne told the Times.
Doerr is a longtime Silicon Valley venture capitalist, currently serving as the chairman of VC firm Kleiner Perkins. At the firm, Doerr has backed tech giants like Amazon, Google and Slack, and has also been investing in clean tech companies since 2006. Ann Doerr is the chair of Khan Academy, and a former board member and current advisory board member of the Environmental Defense Fund.
“This is what the young people want to work on with their lives, for all the right reasons,” John Doerr told the Times.
The couple join the ranks of several billionaires who have made investments in climate change solutions. In 2020, Jeff Bezos announced plans to donate $10 billion to an initiative called the Bezos Earth Fund, and Elon Musk put $100 million toward carbon removal technology. Bill and Melinda Gates have long donated millions to environmental causes, including a $315 million pledge last November towards global agriculture research amid climate threats.
TikTok is rolling out a new advertising program that lets brands put ads next to the top 4% of videos on the platform — and for once, creators get a cut, too.
The short-form video app launched TikTok Pulse on Wednesday. The feature also allows creators with at least 100,000 followers to participate in a revenue-share program, the first ad product of its kind to do so, though it’s unclear how many creators it will approve for the program in its initial stages, TechCrunch reported. To start, only advertisers that have been invited to the program will have access to it, according to TechCrunch, though TikTok plans to roll it out to more brands after launch.
TikTok Pulse gives brands the option to place their ads in 12 different categories of content, including topics like beauty and fashion, cooking and gaming. The program will launch in the U.S. in June, and will open to more markets in the fall.
“TikTok Pulse is designed to give brands the tools and controls to be a part of these everyday moments and trends that engage the community,” the company said in its announcement.
TikTok Pulse is the latest of several monetization features that the app has created. In early December, TikTok announced the Creator Next program, which allows viewers to send gifts and tips to their favorite creators. The app also has its Creator Fund, which pays users who meet minimum follower and view thresholds. However, this fund doesn’t provide too high of a payout for creators, as most make their living from sponsored content. TikTok Pulse could be a signal that the app recognizes that its full-time creators make most of their cash from brand deals — and it wants a piece.
“We’re focused on developing monetization solutions and available markets so that creators feel valued and rewarded on TikTok,” the company said in its announcement. “From the very beginning, we’ve committed to working with our community to bring new features that enrich the TikTok experience.”
California, home to crypto powerhouses like Coinbase and Ripple, is taking Web3 more seriously. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed an executive order to “create a transparent regulatory and business environment for Web3 companies.”
The order signals California’s intention to become more deeply involved in the debates over how to regulate the fast-growing crypto industry amid worries about its impact on the financial system.
“Too often government lags behind technological advancements, so we’re getting ahead of the curve on this, laying the foundation to allow for consumers and business to thrive,” Newsom said in a statement.
The Newsom order “builds on” President Biden’s executive order on crypto, which underlined the importance of crypto innovation while stressing the need to protect consumers, investors and businesses, the governor’s press statement said.
The goal is to “create a transparent and consistent business environment for companies operating in blockchain,” the statement said.
Amid increasingly contentious debates in Washington and on the state level over how to regulate crypto, California hopes to “engage in and encourage regulatory clarity via progress on the processes outlined in the federal executive order, with state agencies coordinating closely with the Washington, D.C. Office of the California Governor.”
The Blockchain Association said it welcomed Newsom’s order, tweeting that the “industry is eager to collaborate with government on common sense rules for industry to allow California — and the United States — to lead in crypto innovation.”
Newsom’s order also underlines California’s heightened focus on fintech. The state recently set up a new Office of Financial Technology and Innovation, which is intended as the main state agency for fintech.
Binance got the go-ahead from France to operate in the country Wednesday, marking the crypto exchange giant’s first major European win after a series of regulatory setbacks.
The country’s Financial Markets Authority granted the crypto exchange a Digital Asset Service Provider registration, a move that is mandatory for all exchanges seeking to operate in France.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao recently confirmed an investment of 100 million euros, or $105 million, into France’s blockchain ecosystem while speaking at Paris Blockchain Week.
Zhao has also touted France as a “progressive” crypto regulator. “They’re very strict, France is a very strict regulator. But they have the advanced understandings to go with that,” he said in an interview with CNBC.
This is Binance’s first regulatory win in the European region after U.K. regulators banned Binance Markets Limited from operating there without prior written consent from the Financial Conduct Authority last June, stating that no other Binance entities were authorized either. Italy and Germany have expressed similar sentiments.
Binance has been on a rapid global expansion, particularly in the Middle East, securing regulatory approvals from Bahrain, Dubai and Abu Dhabi in the past few months. But it continues to struggle in other jurisdictions like Singapore, which has recently imposed stricter crypto regulations.
Small investors will be able to lend out stocks that they own on Robinhood through a new service at the upstart brokerage.
The stock lending service will enable retail investors to earn extra income on shares that they own in a cash account. The lenders get paid when Robinhood finds a borrower of the stock. The lender can sell the stock at any time. Fractional shares and shares held in a margin account can’t be lent out.
The move comes as Robinhood looks for ways to boost revenue as its business has been struggling and revenue from crypto trading has been dropping.
Borrowing and lending stocks is not unusual — short-selling is one way of doing this. Short-sellers will borrow shares from various sources with the aim of later buying the shares back at a lower price. Last January, short-sellers were the target of GameStop and other meme stocks during a famous episode when Robinhood stopped the trading of certain shares amid massive demand.
Stock lending is riskier than traditional stock investing, as Robinhood notes in a disclaimer in its blog post: “There is a risk that Robinhood Securities could default on its obligations to you under the Stock Lending Program and fail to return the securities it has borrowed. If Robinhood Securities defaults and is unable to return loaned securities, you will not be able to trade such securities as usual. ”
The move is also being done as crypto lending has grown as an industry both in traditional fintech and DeFi. Robinhood competitor Coinbase and others enable staking of cryptocurrencies, which earns income for the owner of the tokens, as well as borrowing against cryptocurrencies and other related services.
TurboTax will pay $141 million to residents in every state and Washington D.C. for misleading claims that its tax preparation services are free, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced Wednesday.
Under the agreement, a total of 4.4 million taxpayers who used TurboTax’s free edition for tax years 2016 through 2018 will get a direct payment of approximately $30 for each year. These users were told that they had to pay to file, even though they were eligible to file for free using the IRS Free File program, which the Intuit withdrew from in 2021. In New York, 176,000 residents who were “tricked into paying to file their federal tax return” will receive a total of more than $5.4 million.
TurboTax will also be forced to suspend its “free, free, free” ad campaign as part of the agreement and will need to redesign its product to better inform users when they can file their taxes for free.
“For years, Intuit misled the most vulnerable among us to make a profit,” James said in a statement. “Today, every state in the nation is holding Intuit accountable for scamming millions of taxpayers, and we’re putting millions of dollars back into the pockets of impacted Americans.”
An investigation into the service was first opened after ProPublica reported in 2019 on the company’s deceptive digital tactics targeting low-income users. The investigation found that Intuit, the company that owns TurboTax, engaged in deceptive and unfair trade practices.
Though TurboTax is free for some users, it is only free for those with “simple returns,” though the company pushed in its marketing that the service was free to use. According to the office of the New York attorney general, TurboTax’s free service was only applicable to one-third of U.S. taxpayers, whereas the the IRS Free File products were free to use for 70% of taxpayers.
Intuit has come under fire for its practices from officials in recent months. The Federal Trade Commission accused Intuit of having deceptive and misleading practices in late March, though Intuit denied those claims, saying the commission’s arguments “are simply not credible.” And in mid-April, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, as well as Reps. Katie Porter and Brad Sherman, said in a letter to Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi that TurboTax offers products that “scam American taxpayers into paying for services that should be free.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story said the IRS withdrew from its Free File Program rather than Intuit. This story was updated on May 4, 2022.
New York City has joined the growing list of entities and individuals suing game publisher Activision Blizzard.
The lawsuit, filed last week in Delaware and first reported by Axios on Wednesday, is from the New York City Employees’ Retirement System and various pension funds representing civil servants and city employees, including teachers, firefighters and law enforcement.
The groups own Activision Blizzard stock as part of retirement plans for city employees. They’re now accusing the game company and its CEO, Bobby Kotick, of harming the value of their investments due to the the company’s various sexual harassment and discrimination allegations and the decision to sell the company to Microsoft. The Wall Street Journal reported in November that Kotick was well aware of the misconduct issues at his company, and the article helped spur acquisition talks with Microsoft.
The suit says Kotick rushed to sell the company to Microsoft late last year to as “a means to escape liability for their egregious breaches of fiduciary duty.” While the sale price of $95 a share is above what it was when the Microsoft acquisition was announced in January, the suit argues that’s roughly where the stock was trading before the summer. That’s when California filed its sexual discrimination and harassment lawsuit against the company and kicked off a series of related lawsuits and investigations into the publisher’s treatment of female employees.
“Given Kotick’s personal responsibility and liability for Activision’s broken workplace, it should have been clear to the Board that he was unfit to negotiate a sale of the Company, but it wasn’t,” the suit reads. New York City officials are now demanding Activision Blizzard open its books, including detailing documents and negotiations related to its sale to Microsoft that includes other potential buyers and whether and to what extent Kotick was indeed aware of the scope of the company’s misconduct issues.
Most people have been watching how Elon Musk will treat the bird app, but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is watching how the billionaire is treating real-life birds. And the agency is frankly not impressed, telling SpaceX to take steps to monitor its impact on the environment if it wants to move forward with its Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas.
The documents — obtained by CNBC through a Freedom of Information Act request — confirm concerns that SpaceX’s expansion plans in Texas will negatively impact the surrounding ecosystems and wildlife that call them home. Last month, the Army Corps of Engineers stopped its review of SpaceX’s Starbase plans because the company never provided documentation on how its growth could impact the local ecology. Its planned expansion can’t be approved without those forms.
Documents from the FWS show the piping plover population has declined as a result of SpaceX’s activity. The bird is one of a number of endangered species that call the Texas shoreline home. SpaceX is also cutting down on the amount of energy it plans to generate at the site using a methane gas power plant.
In addition to SpaceX’s impact on the piping plover, FWS found that SpaceX’s expansion could endanger species like the red knot, jaguarundi and ocelot populations. Vehicle traffic, noise, heat, rocket testing and other activity could impact their habitats, but it wouldn’t completely erase those species from the landscape. FWS is asking SpaceX to track these animal populations and limit its construction and launch activity to certain times of the day.
Local residents of Cameron County, Texas, have decidedly mixed feelings about SpaceX’s growth. While the influx of cash is a boon to the local economy, the company’s rocket launches and booster tests are clearly having a negative impact on the surrounding environment.
The Federal Aviation Administration ultimately has the final say in SpaceX’s Starbase plans. It’s preparing a final environmental impact report, which will dictate whether or not the company needs to take further steps to curb its impact on the environment. That release date has been pushed back several times, and it’s now slated to publish on May 31.
SpaceX did not immediately return a request for comment.
GitHub announced that it will require developers who contribute code to the repository to use two-factor authentication by the end of 2023, in a drive to better lock down the security of the software supply chain.
Just 16.5% of GitHub.com users currently use two-factor authentication, considered to be a substantially more secure method of logging in given that it requires more than just a password. The two-factor authentication requirement will affect GitHub.com’s 83 million users, and is being announced well in advance to “make sure we get this right” in terms of the user experience for developers, said Mike Hanley, chief security officer at GitHub.
In an interview with Protocol, Hanley said the move “has a potential to really bolster the overall security of the software ecosystem.” GitHub said that its enterprise customers will also be able to require their developers to use two-factor authentication when accessing their repositories.
The announcement by Microsoft-owned GitHub comes at a time of high anxiety in the enterprise about the potential security risks of open source software components. This is due in part to rising attacks against software supply chains — which jumped by more than 300% in 2021, according to a report from application protection firm Aqua Security.
Countless software development teams depend on the use of open source code from repositories such as GitHub. But the insertion of malicious code into a major open source project — perhaps enabled by a compromised password — can be catastrophic. With widely used open source code, if an adversary has control for even a short time, “it can be downloaded tens of thousands of times or hundreds of thousands of times,” Hanley said.
GitHub has significantly ramped up its investments in security over the past year, Hanley said — and particularly since a supply chain attack in October that targeted a GitHub-owned provider of JavaScript components, npm. The attack resulted from compromised developer accounts that did not have two-factor authentication, according to GitHub.
In terms of the forthcoming requirement for contributors to utilize two-factor authentication with GitHub.com, the will allow for methods including hardware security keys and mobile push notifications that can be approved from the GitHub app, he said.
Twitter is hopping on the close friends bandwagon. The company announced plans for a feature it’s calling Twitter Circle on Tuesday, which will allow users to make certain tweets available only to a “smaller crowd.”
In Twitter’s case, a “smaller crowd” is up to 150 people. Users will be able to add both followers and non-followers to the list of accounts that can see specific tweets, Twitter Safety said in a tweet. The feature is is still in “early stages” and only open to a limited number of users, according to Twitter’s Help Center. For now, Twitter users can only have one Circle, but they’re welcome to cycle members in and out at any point. Users added to a Twitter Circle also aren’t allowed to leave, but they can mute the conversation.
Anyone that’s invited to a Twitter Circle can interact with tweets, and replies are only available to users within the Circle. Though users in Twitter Circles can see tweets sent to the group, they can’t retweet them. The feature allows users to have privacy without needing to make their entire account private.
Allowing for more intimate posts has become a hallmark of social media platforms. Instagram added Close Friends stories in 2018, and Snapchat added private stories in 2019. TikTok also has a friends only option for short-form videos. Facebook offers a variety of ways to parse friends via lists.
The close friends phenomenon followed the era of the “finsta,” or fake Instagram, where users would post more candidly than they would on their public Instagram pages. To adapt, social media companies gave users the ability to post for small groups of followers on their public accounts. On Twitter, the feature will allow users to say what they want to a more intimate group while still maintaining a public account, potentially sparing users from harassment.
Twitter has long been working on its Close Friends clone. Rumors first swirled that Twitter was considering the feature last July, first called “Trusted Friends” then later called “Flock.” Now, it appears to have closed the circle.
Kraken is the latest crypto exchange to join the NFT craze. The crypto marketplace announced Tuesday that it has opened a waitlist for Kraken NFT, where users can buy, sell and store their tokens.
The move follows rival Coinbase’s beta launch last month of its own NFT marketplace, which underlined the growing competition in the fast-growing sector that’s been dominated by OpenSea. The NFT market was estimated to be worth more than $40 billion in 2021.
Like Coinbase, Kraken is touting how it is aiming to make NFT transactions more user-friendly.
“Non-fungible tokens have redefined the concepts of digital expression, culture and ownership for creators and collectors alike,” Kraken said in a blog post. “But the fast-changing, complex ecosystem has made it difficult for many to join in the excitement of the space.”
Kraken said it will not charge transaction fees — known as gas fees when trades are on the Ethereum blockchain — on NFT trades on its marketplace, although it will charge them “when transferring NFTs and other crypto assets on and off” Kraken’s marketplace.
Coinbase does not charge sales fees on NFTs, but gas fees may apply based on “the amount of congestion on the Ethereum network,” Coinbase said.
Kraken said users will also be able to pay with cash or crypto for NFT transactions. Kraken supports more than 120 cryptocurrencies.
Kraken is the fourth-largest crypto marketplace, after Binance, Coinbase and FTX, according to CoinMarketCap. The company said it has more than 9 million clients, and recorded $601 billion in transactions in 2021 and about $112 billion so far this year.
Update: This story was updated on May 3 to include more details on Coinbase’s handling of NFT transaction fees.
Rivian is building a massive factory in Georgia, and the state announced Monday that it’s handing over $1.5 billion in incentives to make that happen. The package is the biggest in state history, according to Bloomberg.
Rivian had to make some promises to get the package, which includes tax credits and subsidies. The company needs to hire 7,500 people, each of which earning an average annual salary of $56,000, by the end of 2028.
Rivian is investing $5 billion in the 2,000-acre “carbon-conscious” campus, planned for near the I-20 corridor east of Atlanta. The incentives package includes both tax credits and subsidies, with state and local incentives coming to a total of $1.28 billion and nearly $200 million in site and road improvements additionally. The company expects to start construction this year, with plans to begin production in 2024.
Rivian first announced its plans for the site in December. The factory will include a co-located battery cell production facility and have a target of producing 400,000 vehicles a year, double the capacity of its facility in Normal, Ill. That will go a long way toward helping Rivian ramp up production of its electric truck and SUV, which have been difficult to produce given the supply chain shortages that are rattling the entire EV industry. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe recently predicted that the supply of EV batteries would become a huge issue in years to come — even bigger than the ongoing chip crunch.
The company said in its 2021 shareholder letter that it chose Georgia for the site due to factors like “sustainable business operations, talent pool, and proximity to supply chain and logistics” — though more than billion dollars in incentives certainly sweetens the pot.
According to Bloomberg, the state of Georgia will rake in about $330 million in tax revenue from Rivian.
Just a year after Facebook began its attempt to pivot to audio — or hang onto Clubhouse’s coattails — the company is pulling the plug on its podcast hub and ditching Soundbites, its TikTok-for-audio feature.
Facebook will stop allowing people to add podcasts to its service starting this week, according to a note sent to partners seen by Bloomberg, and will take down its central audio hub. Facebook is removing podcasts from its platform altogether after June 3. A Meta spokesperson told Bloomberg that it didn’t have a specific date for when the audio hub and Sound Bites features would be shutting down. The news follows Bloomberg reporting last month that Meta was planning on deprioritizing its audio efforts.
Facebook will reportedly not be letting users know that these features are shutting down, and is leaving it up to podcast publishers to let their listeners know, according to the note. Live Audio Rooms, Facebook’s Clubhouse copycat, will be integrated into Facebook Live, giving users the choice to go live via video or audio.
“We’re constantly evaluating the features we offer so we can focus on the most meaningful experiences,” the spokesperson told Bloomberg.
Facebook first went all-in on audio last April, releasing its live audio platform as well as its suite of podcasting tools, but it didn’t last long. Facebook’s audio efforts were attempts to capitalize on the pandemic-induced social audio craze started by Clubhouse and continued by Twitter Spaces. Those social audio products have declined in popularity as COVID-19 restrictions lifted and joining audio chatrooms to hear people talk about bitcoin or whatever became less of a priority.
Facebook also faced an uphill battle in the podcasting space, as giants like Spotify and Apple continue to dominate the market. The company is instead focusing on Reels, which are seeing significant engagement on Instagram (despite the fact that many of the short videos are lifted directly from TikTok) and its metaverse ambitions. RIP, podcasts.
In a heavily editorialized press release, Federal Communications Commission commissioner Nathan Simington shut down any talk of the agency stepping in to block Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. “The FCC cannot, and should not, block this sale,” he said.
First and foremost, Simington argued, the FCC doesn’t have the authority to block Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter. The agency does review certain mergers and acquisitions related to broadcast media and telecommunications to ensure they meet a public interest standard. Twitter, however, neither owns any broadcast licenses nor serves as a communications provider.
Beyond that, Simington dismissed “selective concerns” of media ownership. He noted that Google, YouTube, Facebook, the Washington Post and the New York Times are “each owned or controlled by one or two people or a single family.” Simington said there were “numerous examples” of common ownership of news and broadband services, which he cited to dismiss concerns about Musk controlling both Twitter and the Starlink internet satellite service.
It’s unclear who, exactly, Simington had in mind when addressing the calls by “some” for the FCC to block the deal. In the first place, federal regulators aren’t expected to block the deal. And if any agency were to do so, it almost certainly wouldn’t be the FCC, which has been relatively gridlocked all year with its board of commissioners evenly split along party lines. President Biden hasn’t yet been able to fill the vacant fifth seat.
Simington implied that there’s mounting pressure for the federal government to intervene, not on legal merits, but as a means of restricting free speech. Anticipating an attempted intervention, he wrote: “It would be not only unconstitutional, but plainly un-American, for any arm of the government to act against Twitter or Mr. Musk for such a purpose.”
Several prominent tech figures have likewise suggested that powerful forces are coalescing to thwart the takeover. “Elon’s proposed takeover of Twitter is a profound threat to unfree speech,” Marc Andreessen wrote on Twitter. Responding to one of Andreessen’s threads on the outsized power wielded by professional investment managers such as BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Musk observed that “decisions are being made on behalf of actual shareholders that are contrary to their interests … major problem with index/passive funds.” In a speech at a Miami crypto conference, Peter Thiel — who reportedly encouraged Musk to make a play for Twitter — identified Fink as part of a “financial gerontocracy” that uses ESG as “a factory for naming enemies.”
Several prominent Republicans have espoused a similar narrative. Rep. Darrell Issa of California said, “it’s not a coincidence the White House launched its Minister of Truth immediately after Elon Musk bought Twitter and backed free speech.” Sen. Ted Cruz juxtaposed the Twitter acquisition with the launch of the Disinformation Governance Board, which he called “a brazen attack on free speech.”
All of this is setting up what seems to be a win-win scenario for the Republican and libertarian base, at least in the near-term. If the Twitter acquisition goes through, then Musk succeeded in “enshrining free expression,” as Simington put it. If the deal is blocked — which, again, is unlikely — then it confirms the narrative that the mainstream media, institutional investors and the federal government are working together to thwart free speech.
After 23 members of Congress signed a letter to the EPA imploring the regulatory agency to make sure crypto mining did not violate federal environmental regulations, a group of bitcoin evangelists including Block CEO Jack Dorsey responded in a letter Sunday saying that the lawmakers have all wrong.
The letter, sent by California representative Jared Huffman on April 20, condemned the reopening of coal and gas facilities to power crypto mining. The letter also put the lawmakers on one side of the fiercely fought debate between proof of work and proof of stake consensus mechanisms, saying that proof of work was “inherently inefficient.” It cited bitcoin, ether, monero and zcash as examples of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies which caused them concern.
“Cryptocurrency mining is poisoning our communities,” the letter’s authors asserted, pressuring the EPA to see whether mining operations in the U.S. violate the Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act.
In their much lengthier response, the group of 55 bitcoin industry supporters picked apart Huffman’s letter point by point. The Congressional letter is plagued by “misconceptions about bitcoin and digital asset mining,” the authors said, and confuses emissions from energy generation with the emissions of mining itself. Bitcoin data centers, the authors argue, are no different than those used by Google, Apple or Microsoft.
The letter goes into painstaking detail, illustrating the different use cases for high-performance computing, emphasizing how little of the energy used to mine bitcoin comes from once-closed gas and coal plants (2%), and explaining that the relative emissions per bitcoin transaction will only decrease with time.
After some time in the technical weeds, the letter delivers an argument that isn’t new to crypto: Many companies try to avoid responsibility for, or obscure, Scope 3 emissions, which the EPA defines as emissions which result “from assets not owned or controlled by the reporting organization, but that the organization indirectly impacts in its value chain.” Amazon, for example, does not report emissions incurred in the creation of products sold by third-party sellers.
Here, crypto leaders are attempting to say that they should not be held responsible for emissions created by power generation facilities they use — even if those facilities are, say, a reawakened gas-powered plant that could blow New York state’s climate goals out of the water.
It’s fairly accurate to say Congress isn’t always up to speed on the inner workings of tech, and that many representatives and senators don’t really get all the ins and outs of, say, crypto mining. But shirking responsibility for carbon emissions isn’t going to help the industry, either. Many blockchain professionals understand this, pouring their efforts into carbon offsets or maybe, eventually, executing that long-awaited Ethereum upgrade.
Perceptions of unsustainability, true or not, are clearly generating ill feelings toward the industry among everyone from creators to gamers to politicians. If crypto wants to get on their good side, it’s not clear that letters that lecture Congress about the “education” it requires is the smartest way to go.
A group of Amazon workers in the company’s massive Staten Island warehousing complex just failed to earn enough votes to form a union. Their loss — if certified by the National Labor Relations Board — follows on the heels of a sweeping victory in favor of unionization by a different and much larger group of workers in the same New York City complex.
Out of about 1,500 eligible workers, 380 voted in favor of the union and 618 against, with two ballots void. The group of workers were voting whether or not to join the Amazon Labor Union, which is an independent union unaffiliated with major national groups. The first election, in Amazon’s JFK8 warehouse, represented about 8,000 workers, while the second election, in the LDJ5 facility, represented about 1,500 workers.
“We’re glad that our team at LDJ5 were able to have their voices heard. We look forward to continuing to work directly together as we strive to make every day better for our employees,” Kelly Nantel, Amazon spokesperson, said in a statement to Protocol.
Private sector unionization in the U.S. has hovered at all-time lows over the last few years. Around 6% of all private sector workers are unionized, according to the Department of Labor Statistics. But the Amazon votes and a simultaneous massive wave of unionization efforts sweeping Starbucks stores across the country could signal a shift in that dynamic as workers seek out better wages and benefits.
“These examples could be pretty powerful in terms of causing workers in workplaces around the country to understand that they do have a way to make things,” Paul Clark, the director of the labor and employment relations program at Pennsylvania State University, told Protocol after the first union victory in April.“This is going to send a signal to workers in the private sector all across the country that if you’re dissatisfied with your workplace and your employer, there’s an option for you.”
Amazon has been forced to raise salaries and offer other benefits and incentives in response to the tight labor market over the last few quarters, which has dramatically increased the company’s labor spending, according to its 2021 quarterly fiscal reports. The company announced in its first quarter report that it is no longer battling staffing and capacity issues. A wave of successful unionization could further twist Amazon’s arm to improve wages and benefits, though the loss at the second Staten Island facility could blunt momentum.
There are key differences between the LDJ5 workers who voted against the union and those who voted to unionize in April at the JFK8 facility. The former is smaller and largely part-time while the JFK8 group consists mostly of full-time workers.
The ALU is led by Chris Smalls and Derrick Palmer, activists who formed the group as part of their efforts to protest working conditions at the Staten Island complex of warehouses and delivery facilities. The ALU won the first union election by more than 500 votes, and Amazon is now contesting the results by accusing both the ALU and the NLRB of illegal interference in favor of the union.
The NLRB will hold a hearing on Amazon’s objections to the JFK8 election on May 23, after which an administrative judge will rule on whether those objections are valid and if their validity merits throwing out the results of the election. The hearing will be held in Arizona instead of New York because Amazon is accusing the New York officials of conduct in favor of the union that violated the law.
An ongoing effort to unionize workers in Bessemer, Alabama, currently sits further along in the same process of objections and hearings; after a majority of workers voted not to unionize in 2021, the NLRB ruled in favor of objections filed by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and threw out the results of the election, ordering a new vote that concluded in April 2022. The results of that second election are still pending based on rulings over contested ballots, though it appears likely Amazon will win a second time.
The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has also made organizing Amazon a national priority, advocating for bills on the state level that would force Amazon to be more transparent about productivity expectations in its warehouses and organizing groups of drivers and warehouse workers in the U.S. and Canada. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien applauded the ALU after their Staten Island victory in April and promised that the group would increase its organizing efforts and pressure on Amazon in response. And in Canada, a Teamsters group filed a petition in April for a union election in Alberta and the Northwest Territories for thousands of workers there.
The ALU did not immediately respond to request for comment.
This story was updated with a statement from Amazon.
Perhaps you’ve heard that batteries are in short supply. On Monday, the Biden administration announced that it plans to remedy the ongoing shortfall by providing nearly $3.2 billion in funding devoted to domestic lithium-ion battery manufacturing, processing and recycling.
“This funding announcement will punch above its weight in not only accelerating the transition to a clean transportation future, but also in securing one of the most important supply chains in the U.S. economy,” Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, told reporters.
Most of the advanced batteries that U.S. electric vehicle manufacturers rely on come from outside of the country, with China being a major supplier. This is largely because the U.S. is still lacking a cradle-to-grave battery supply chain, prompting concern that it could become dependent on foreign sources for the long haul. As the wild ride of nickel due to the Russian war against Ukraine shows, that could create a disaster if the supply chain gets too concentrated.
The nearly $3.2 billion in funding — which comes courtesy of the bipartisan infrastructure law passed last year — will be doled out in the form of cost-share grants to private U.S. companies, and require companies to match the federal funds. The minimum grant will be $50 million for existing plants and $100 million for new plants. The White House expects to fund anywhere from 16 to 30 grants in this initial round.
The infrastructure bill also included $7.5 billion for electric vehicle chargers, $5 billion for electric transit buses and $5 billion for clean and electric school buses. All of this money is essentially seed funding for kickstarting a real EV revolution, with the administration setting a goal of 50% of all vehicles sold in the U.S. being electric by 2030.
Deese said that Biden has prioritized the battery supply chain as a part of the administration’s comprehensive review of supply chains over the last year, in part because automakers have had to rely on “uncertain and unreliable” offshore suppliers.
The initial round of funding will not be directed to mining or extraction, though Mitch Landrieu, the White House’s senior adviser responsible for coordinating the law’s implementation, said in a press conference that “we need responsible and sustainable domestic sourcing of the critical materials used to make lithium-ion batteries such as lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite.” In late March, President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act to increase the country’s output of these minerals, requiring companies to prioritize federal rather than foreign contracts.
These steps come as demand for EVs surges at the same time as gas prices skyrocket. Snarled supply chains have added another layer of challenges. While the more than $3 billion won’t immediately fix these issues, it could help smooth what has so far been a bumpy transition.
Calfornia’s last nuclear power plant standing could get a new lease on life. California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he’s looking to score some federal cash that the Biden administration set aside last month to keep the country’s aging nuclear fleet up and running. That would help keep the carbon-free electricity flowing.
The Biden administration is trying to maintain nuclear reactors at risk of shutting down by offering $6 billion in funding approved last year as part of the bipartisan infrastructure law. Diablo Canyon Power Plant is a prime candidate, and Newsom told the Los Angeles Times editorial board last week that he’s looking for a piece of that $6 billion pie to keep it open.
Right now, owner Pacific Gas & Electric is aiming to close it around 2025. The nuclear plant generated nearly 9% of all electricity in the state in 2020. Though its share of electricity generated is smaller than hydropower, wind and solar — all carbon-free forms of energy — the plant still has import in an era where every ton of carbon not dumped in the atmosphere matters.
Newsom said he has a May 19 deadline to draw funds for the plant. “We would be remiss not to put that on the table as an option,” he said.
Nuclear reactors are great for generating clean electricity, but many are approaching the end of their shelf life. They’re also expensive to operate compared to natural gas and renewables. Many utilities across the country have started to close reactors. That’s caused carbon emissions in some states to rise as a result. It happened most recently New York, which shuttered its last nuclear plant in 2021.
If Diablo Canyon closes, the plan could be to replace it with coal-fired power imported from Wyoming, which is even worse for the climate than gas. California has stringent climate goals, including reducing greenhouse emissions 40% below 1990 levels by the end of this decade. Keeping Diablo Canyon up and running could help keep that goal within reach.
Newsom said he’s been wanting to preserve Diablo since the summer of 2020, when a heat wave forced the state’s electric grid to implement blackouts. “Some would say it’s the righteous and right climate decision,” Newsom told the editorial board.
But while preserving existing nuclear power is an important climate buffer, we can only throw money at aging reactors for so long. California — and the world — also needs to double down on wind and solar to avert the worst impacts of climate change.
Lawmakers in both the U.S. and EU are grappling with the realization that Meta might not be able to comply with user data regulations, even if the company wanted to do so.
In a leaked internal document published by Motherboard last week, Facebook privacy engineers wrote that there are “tens-of-thousands of uncontrolled data ingestion points into Ads systems.” The document, which was written in 2021, likened Facebook’s open-data systems to ink poured in a lake of water. “How do you put that ink back in the bottle?” the engineers ask, in what is seemingly a concession that the company can’t trace some user data accessible to third parties.
Meta denied this characterization to Motherboard, however, as a spokesperson said the document “reflects the technical solutions we are building to scale the current measures we have in place to manage data and meet our obligations.”
The document does indeed show that Meta is feeling the effects of new and nascent privacy regulation around the world. The engineers said they anticipate “impactful regulations” in India, Thailand, South Korea, South Africa and Egypt. They also expected U.S. federal privacy regulation, though they correctly guessed that it wouldn’t come in 2021.
U.S. senators on both sides of the aisle didn’t buy Meta’s explanation.
“Facebook has lost control of what they are doing with your data,” Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn wrote on Twitter in response to the leak. “This is reckless and threatens the privacy and security of Americans. We need a national privacy standard.”
Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand wrote: “If Big Tech companies don’t even know how the data they collect on us is used, we can’t rely on them to protect our privacy. We need a Data Protection Agency to hold them accountable and set standards for how our data is collected, protected, and used.”
Across the Atlantic, Dutch EU Parliamentarian Sophie in ‘t Veld called for an immediate investigation, explaining to Motherboard that “if this is true, basically, they’re not remotely compliant with GDPR, not remotely.”
The GDPR stipulates that companies can only collect data for “specified, explicit and legitimate purposes.” The EU legislation also includes a right to be forgotten clause that lets users request the erasure of their data “without undue delay.” In the leaked document, however, Meta engineers said it would take “multiple years” to build a system that effectively allows users to opt out of having their data processed.
The California Consumer Privacy Act also includes a right to be forgotten clause. In the absence of federal privacy regulation, the CCPA serves as the most important piece of online data privacy legislation in the U.S. The leaked document raises questions as to what effect federal regulation would have, if any, given Meta apparent struggles to comply with existing state law. Facebook claims to give California users the ability to exercise their “right to know” or “right to request deletion.”
For Meta shareholders, the document also raises questions about the company’s ability to maintain levels of profitability while restructuring data systems. The leaked document concedes that “there is no obvious solution yet, which doesn’t involve dramatic investment by Ads engineers.”
The engineers wrote that Meta “may allow certain opt-out data to be used in training, but not in ranking or targeting.” The Federal Trade Commission could demand Meta remove or destroy models built using data from users who opt out. The agency did so as part of a settlement with WW International (previously known as Weight Watchers), which was accused of harvesting data from children without parental permission. If Meta indeed faces a multiyear project timeline for building those capabilities, regulators might simply resort to recurring fines — if they even have enforcement capability in the first place.
Google fired Satrajit Chatterjee, an AI researcher in the company’s Brain group who criticized a research paper on computers designing computer chips that was published in the scientific publication Nature last year and involved work from researchers in Google’s chip and Brain teams.
The paper presented a method for automatically generating parts of a computer chip more efficiently than humans. Chatterjee disputed parts of the paper, and was fired in March after Google told his research team that he couldn’t publish a rebuttal of some of the claims made in the paper, sources told The New York Times. Researchers who had worked on a rebuttal argued that Google broke its own AI principles by rejecting the paper.
The company told The New York Times that Chatterjee was “terminated with cause,” but didn’t elaborate.
“We thoroughly vetted the original Nature paper and stand by the peer-reviewed results,” Zoubin Ghahramani, a vice president at Google Research, told The New York Times. Google did not immediately return Protocol’s request for comment. “We also rigorously investigated the technical claims of a subsequent submission, and it did not meet our standards for publication.”
This isn’t Google’s first time firing an AI researcher. Timnit Gebru, an AI ethicist who previously co-led Google’s ethical AI team, was forced out of the research group in late 2020 after expressing frustrations with the company’s diversity promises and questioning an ethics research paper. The company later fired Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the team, for publicly criticizing the way Google handled Gebru’s departure.
Unrest within Google’s AI research team appears to be ongoing. Google ethical AI researcher Alex Hanna published a resignation letter earlier this year describing a “whiteness problem” within Google and other tech companies. Hanna followed software engineer Dylan Baker in joining Gebru’s Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, which launched late last year.
