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Four Democratic US senators today asked the Federal Trade Commission to "investigate Apple and Google for engaging in unfair and deceptive practices by enabling the collection and sale of hundreds of millions of mobile phone users' personal data."

"The FTC should investigate Apple and Google's role in transforming online advertising into an intense system of surveillance that incentivizes and facilitates the unrestrained collection and constant sale of Americans' personal data," they wrote. "These companies have failed to inform consumers of the privacy and security dangers involved in using those products. It is beyond time to bring an end to the privacy harms forced on consumers by these companies."

The letter cited the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, saying that women "seeking abortions and other reproductive healthcare will become particularly vulnerable to privacy harms, including through the collection and sharing of their location data." It continued:

Enlarge / An Aeroflot Boeing 777-300ER aircraft is preparing to land at Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg, in the Russian Federation in June 2022. (credit: SOPA Images | Getty)

An Airbus A320-232 with the tail number YU-APH made its first flight on December 13, 2005. Since then, the aircraft has clocked millions of miles, flying routes for Air Deccan, Kingfisher Airlines, Bingo Airways, and Syphax Airlines before being taken over by Air Serbia, the Eastern European country’s national flag carrier, in 2014.

For eight years, YU-APH flew without any issues—until it landed at 10:37 pm on May 25, 2022, at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport. It had flown in from Belgrade and was due to take off again on a late-night return within the hour. But there was a problem: The pilot had reported an issue with the plane’s engine casing that needed to be fixed. The supplier of the broken part, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Collins Aerospace, reportedly refused to fix the problem, citing sanctions against Russia resulting from its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The plane was stuck. (Collins Aerospace did not respond to a request for comment.)

Enlarge / Scott Atlas, a White House adviser, used his position to advocate for allowing the SARS-CoV-2 virus to spread and tried to block testing for it, which would further that goal. (credit: MANDEL NGAN / Getty Images)

While one congressional committee seems to be grabbing all the headlines recently, other investigations of the Trump administration have continued in the background. One of them is trying to determine how the US's response to the coronavirus pandemic went so wrong that the country ended up with over a million deaths and one of the worst per-capita death rates in the world. In its own words, the committee's goal is "to ensure the American people receive a full accounting of what went wrong and to determine what corrective steps are necessary to ensure our nation is better prepared for any future public health crisis."

In its latest report, released on Tuesday, the committee details the White House career of Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no infectious disease experience. Atlas' hiring by the White House was expected to be so controversial that he was initially instructed to hide his staff ID from the actual government public health experts. Yet he quickly became a driving force for the adoption of policies that would achieve herd immunity by allowing most of the US population to be infected—even as other officials denied that this was the policy.

How’d this guy get here?

Atlas' lack of relevant expertise raises questions as to why he was hired in the first place. The new report details that he wasn't shy about voicing his opinions about the pandemic response, making multiple TV appearances to complain about the policies advocated by actual public health experts. He also directly reached out to a senior government official, calling the US's response “a massive overreaction” to a virus he estimated “would cause about 10,000 deaths.”

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Comcast's NBCUniversal subsidiary and Google are the "top contenders" to serve advertisements on Netflix when the streaming service rolls out its planned ad-supported tier, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. Netflix "is still in the early stages of developing the strategy and has explored a range of tie-ups in recent weeks," the WSJ wrote, citing people familiar with the matter.

A deal with NBCUniversal would likely mean that "Comcast's video ad unit, FreeWheel, would supply technology to help serve up ads, while NBCUniversal's ad-sales team would help sell ads in the US and Europe," the report said. The Alphabet-owned Google, of course, has plenty of experience serving ads, including on its own YouTube and YouTube TV video platforms. Netflix already uses Google's ad-buying tools.

A deal with either NBCUniversal or Google would likely be exclusive, the WSJ report said. Comcast/NBCUniversal and Google aren't the only contenders, as "Roku has also had early talks with Netflix about ad partnerships," the report said. The Information reported last week that Netflix executives recently "met with representatives of both Roku and Comcast to discuss arrangements under which those companies would handle either the ad sales or the technical infrastructure for Netflix's forthcoming ad-supported tier of service."

Broadcom’s $69 billion acquisition of cloud software company VMware is set for a lengthy antitrust investigation in Brussels over regulatory concerns that the deal will harm competition across the global technology industry.

Broadcom is already in preliminary discussions with EU officials who will be looking into worries that the merger may lead to abusive behavior, including potential future price rises by the US chipmaker, three people with direct knowledge of the transaction said.

Many large acquisitions receive similar interrogation, known in EU circles as a “phase 1” investigation, which typically takes a few months to complete.

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A former Tesla worker who won a racial discrimination case against the company has rejected a $15 million payout and will seek a new damages trial.

A jury had awarded plaintiff Owen Diaz $137 million in October 2021, but in April, a federal judge reduced the payout to $15 million. In that ruling, US District Judge William Orrick rejected Tesla's claim that it is not liable for the "disturbing" racist abuse suffered by Diaz, who is Black, but found that the jury overreached in its damages calculation.

Diaz had the option of accepting or rejecting the lower payout, and he rejected it in a court filing on Tuesday. The case is in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Enlarge / Cars parked at the Tesla Fremont Factory in Fremont, California, on February 10, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Josh Edelson)

A lawsuit filed by laid-off Tesla workers accused the company of violating federal law by failing to provide notice before the layoffs and said the former employees are entitled to 60 days of pay and benefits. Tesla's actions violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, claimed the lawsuit filed Sunday in US District Court for the Western District of Texas.

"Pursuant to the WARN Act, Tesla is required to provide Plaintiffs and Class Members with the required sixty (60) days advance written notice of a mass layoff," the lawsuit said. "However, in connection with the recent mass layoffs... Tesla has failed to give Plaintiffs and the Class Members any advance written notice of their terminations."

"Instead, Tesla has simply notified the employees that their terminations would be effective immediately," the lawsuit continued.

Enlarge / Airbus 320 cockpit. (credit: Getty Images | Skyhobo)

The Federal Aviation Administration says it finally has a plan for the industry to replace or retrofit airplane altimeters that can't filter out transmissions from outside their allotted frequencies. The altimeter problem has prevented AT&T and Verizon from fully deploying 5G on the C-Band spectrum licenses the wireless carriers purchased for a combined $69 billion.

The FAA was urging airlines to retrofit or replace altimeters in recent months and now says it has finalized a plan. An FAA statement on Friday said that "airlines and other operators of aircraft equipped with the affected radio altimeters must install filters or other enhancements as soon as possible."

AT&T and Verizon said they will be able to accelerate 5G deployments near airports in the coming months, but the carriers agreed to continue some level of "voluntary mitigations" in the airport areas until July 2023.

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In the city of Woburn, Massachusetts, a suburb just north of Boston, a cadre of engineers and scientists in white coats inspected an orderly stack of brick-sized, gunmetal-gray steel ingots on a desk inside a neon-illuminated lab space.

What they were looking at was a batch of steel created using an innovative manufacturing method, one that Boston Metal, a company that spun out a decade ago from MIT, hopes will dramatically reshape the way the alloy has been made for centuries. By using electricity to separate iron from its ore, the firm claims it can make steel without releasing carbon dioxide, offering a path to cleaning up one of the world’s worst industries for greenhouse gas emissions.

An essential input for engineering and construction, steel is one of the most popular industrial materials in the world, with more than 2 billion tons produced annually. This abundance, however, comes at a steep price for the environment. Steelmaking accounts for 7 to 11 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, making it one of the largest industrial sources of atmospheric pollution. And because production could rise by a third by 2050, this environmental burden could grow.

USB Type-C, the most exciting boring connector in the industry right now. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

After the European Union (EU) announced that numerous consumer tech devices using wired charging would require USB-C by 2024, three US senators are seeking similar legislation.

In a letter sent Thursday [PDF], Senators Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) asked Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo to look toward legislation that would require universal charging standards in consumer tech.

The senators didn't mention USB-C but cited the EU's upcoming policy that will require smartphones, digital cameras, e-readers, headsets, laptops, and some other consumer tech products with wired charging to use USB-C.

Enlarge / SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on April 19, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

SpaceX has reportedly fired at least five employees who circulated a letter that urged company executives to condemn CEO Elon Musk's public behavior.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell explained the firings in an email to staff, according to a New York Times article. "The letter, solicitations and general process made employees feel uncomfortable, intimidated and bullied, and/or angry because the letter pressured them to sign onto something that did not reflect their views," Shotwell wrote, according to the NYT. "We have too much critical work to accomplish and no need for this kind of overreaching activism."

Shotwell's email to staff also said, "Blanketing thousands of people across the company with repeated unsolicited emails and asking them to sign letters and fill out unsponsored surveys during the work day is not acceptable." Shotwell urged employees to "stay focused on the SpaceX mission, and use your time to do your best work. This is how we will get to Mars."

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Although Elon Musk recently banned remote work at both Tesla and SpaceX, he told Twitter employees today that he won't necessarily impose the same policy at the social network. "If someone can only work remotely, and they're exceptional, it wouldn't make sense to fire them," Musk said in a virtual town hall with Twitter staff, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Musk also pointed out that the work at Twitter is different from the work at Tesla. "Tesla makes cars, and you can't make cars remotely," he said, according to CNBC.

While his comments may be promising for those who want to keep working remotely, Musk reportedly did not provide specifics on how he'd handle remote work at Twitter if he completes the $44 billion acquisition. His reference to letting "exceptional" employees work remotely suggests that a Musk-led Twitter might reduce remote work options even if they aren't banned completely.

Enlarge / Elon Musk arrives for the 2022 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 2, 2022, in New York. (credit: Getty Images | Angela Weiss)

SpaceX employees are circulating a letter that urges company executives to condemn CEO Elon Musk's public behavior. The letter was reported today and published in full by The Verge, which said it was shared Wednesday "in an internal SpaceX Microsoft Teams channel with more than 2,600 employees."

The letter says executives should "publicly address and condemn Elon's harmful Twitter behavior."

"SpaceX must swiftly and explicitly separate itself from Elon's personal brand," the letter says. The letter is the result of a collaboration between "employees across the spectra of gender, ethnicity, seniority, and technical roles," it says. The letter also asks for an in-person meeting with executives to discuss the employees' requests.

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A tracking tool installed on many hospitals’ websites has been collecting patients’ sensitive health information—including details about their medical conditions, prescriptions, and doctor’s appointments—and sending it to Facebook.

The Markup tested the websites of Newsweek’s top 100 hospitals in America. On 33 of them we found the tracker, called the Meta Pixel, sending Facebook a packet of data whenever a person clicked a button to schedule a doctor’s appointment. The data is connected to an IP address—an identifier that’s like a computer’s mailing address and can generally be linked to a specific individual or household—creating an intimate receipt of the appointment request for Facebook.

Enlarge / A placard seen being displayed during a 2019 protest against state internet control in Russia. Displaying the placard now would likely land its wielder in prison. (credit: SOPA Images | Getty)

Web pages in the city of Kherson in south Ukraine stopped loading on people’s devices at 2:43 pm on May 30. For the next 59 minutes, anyone connecting to the Internet with KhersonTelecom, known locally as SkyNet, couldn’t call loved ones, find out the latest news, or upload images to Instagram. They were stuck in a communications blackout. When web pages started stuttering back to life at 3:42 pm, everything appeared to be normal. But behind the scenes everything had changed: Now all Internet traffic was passing through a Russian provider and Vladimir Putin’s powerful online censorship machine.

Since the end of May, the 280,000 people living in the occupied port city and its surrounding areas have faced constant online disruptions as Internet service providers are forced to reroute their connections through Russian infrastructure. Multiple Ukrainian ISPs are now forced to switch their services to Russian providers and expose their customers to the country’s vast surveillance and censorship network, according to senior Ukrainian officials and technical analysis viewed by WIRED.

The Internet companies have been told to reroute connections under the watchful eye of Russian occupying forces or shut down their connections entirely, officials say. In addition, new unbranded mobile phone SIM cards using Russian numbers are being circulated in the region, further pushing people towards Russian networks. Grabbing control of the servers, cables, and cell phone towers—all classed as critical infrastructure—which allow people to freely access the web is considered one of the first steps in the “Russification” of occupied areas.

Enlarge / Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) hold a press conference about abortion rights outside the US Capitol building on June 15 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Joe Raedle)

A bill introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) would prohibit data brokers from selling Americans' location and health data, Warren's office said Wednesday.

"Largely unregulated by federal law, data brokers gather intensely personal data such as location data from seemingly innocuous sources including weather apps and prayer apps—oftentimes without the consumer's consent or knowledge," a bill summary said. "Then, brokers turn around and sell the data in bulk to virtually any willing buyer, reaping massive profits."

Citing the draft Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, Warren said "it is more crucial than ever for Congress to protect consumers' sensitive data."

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Late in 2021, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a long-term project that aimed to come to grips with contamination by a class of chemicals called PFAS, for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances. Sometimes termed "forever chemicals," these compounds don't naturally degrade at an appreciable rate, and they show up in everything from food packaging to drinking water. Lab and epidemiological studies have indicated that they carry potential health risks, and the EPA started a program to evaluate the latest research on them.

On Tuesday, the agency announced some of the first results of this effort and is issuing updated drinking-water health advisories on four of the chemicals, one of which tightens exposure risks by a factor of 10,000. In addition, the EPA announced that it is planning to spend a billion dollars of Infrastructure Bill funding in disadvantaged and small communities to help them monitor and reduce PFAS exposures.

Less is better

PFAS are hydrocarbons in which some of the hydrogen atoms have been replaced by fluorine. This makes them chemically inert, allowing them to stick around in the environment for a long time without breaking down—hence the term "forever chemicals." Their stability and tendency to repel water makes them useful for a variety of industrial processes. Their users, however, haven't always been careful about what happens to the chemicals during use. As a result, PFAS have contaminated both soil and drinking water, among other things.

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European telecom regulator BEREC has updated its net neutrality guidelines to include a strict ban on zero-rating practices that exempt specific apps or categories of apps from data caps imposed by Internet service providers.

The document published yesterday provides guidance to national regulatory authorities on their "obligations to closely monitor and ensure compliance with the rules to safeguard equal and non-discriminatory treatment of traffic in the provision of Internet access services and related end-users' rights." BEREC stands for Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications.

"Despite intense lobbying from big carriers and giant platforms, BEREC voted to clearly ban zero-rating offers that benefit select apps or categories of apps by exempting them from people's monthly data caps," Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick wrote. "The ban applies whether the app pays to be included or not, closing a loophole in the draft guidelines."

Enlarge / Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference on May 2, 2022 in Beverly Hills, California. (credit: Getty Images | Patrick T. Fallon )

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is laying off 18 percent of its staff, the company announced today. The layoffs will cut 1,100 workers at the largest crypto exchange in the US, leaving it with about 5,000 employees, Coinbase said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

"In the next hour every employee will receive an email from HR informing if you are affected or unaffected by this layoff," CEO Brian Armstrong wrote in a memo to staff that was posted on the company blog. Laid-off workers "will receive this notification in your personal email, because we made the decision to cut access to Coinbase systems for affected employees."

The immediate cutoff from Coinbase systems was necessary because of "the number of employees who have access to sensitive customer information," Armstrong wrote. This was "the only practical choice, to ensure not even a single person made a rash decision that harmed the business or themselves," he wrote.

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Major cryptocurrencies suffered big losses on Monday. As I write this, bitcoin is down 14 percent over the last 24 hours, while ether is down 16 percent. Other major cryptocurrencies—including solana, dogecoin, and litecoin—are also down by double digits, according to CoinMarketCap.

The cryptocurrency crash is part of a broader market sell-off. The S&P 500 stock market index fell almost 4 percent on Monday amid fears of faster interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve. High interest rates put downward pressure on all assets, including stocks and cryptocurrencies.

Another big factor that may have spooked cryptocurrency traders was the Monday announcement by crypto lender Celsius that it was suspending withdrawals. The company said this was the result of "extreme market conditions."