Month: September 2020

Enlarge / Former Trump campaign official Michael Caputo arrives at the Hart Senate Office building to be interviewed by Senate Intelligence Committee staffers on May 1, 2018 in Washington, DC. (credit: Mark Wilson / Getty Images)

The Trump administration's more-than-$300-million "public advertising and awareness campaign" on the COVID-19 pandemic is floundering as A-list celebrities back away and staff at the Department of Health and Human Services express opposition, according to reporting by Politico.

The campaign—organized by former Trump campaign official Michael Caputo—was intended to "defeat despair" and bolster confidence in the Trump administration's response to the pandemic. A central feature of the campaign would be video interviews between celebrities and administration officials, who would discuss the pandemic and the federal response.

To pull it off, Caputo and his team requisitioned $300 million that Congress had previously budgeted for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They also made a list of more than 30 big-name celebrities that they hoped to appear in the Health Department's videos, including Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, Lady Gaga, Billy Joel, Britney Spears, Bruno Mars, Bon Jovi, and Madonna.

Enlarge / Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. (credit: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Vanity Fair)

In the last few years, big technology companies have faced growing pressure from employees to become involved in social justice issues. This pressure intensified this summer with the George Floyd protests. But this week, CEO Brian Armstrong of the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase staked out a contrarian stance.

"While I think these efforts are well-intentioned, they have the potential to destroy a lot of value at most companies, both by being a distraction, and by creating internal division," Armstrong wrote in a blog post. "We've seen what internal strife at companies like Google and Facebook can do to productivity. I believe most employees don't want to work in these divisive environments."

Armstrong's post attracted a range of responses from online commentators. Some prominent Silicon Valley figures praised it, while critics argued it was "absolutely laughable" to believe that a company could keep politics out of the workplace.

Enlarge / The Department of Justice seal as seen during a press conference in December 2019. (credit: Samuel Corum | Getty Images)

Federal authorities have accused two men of hacking the email and social media accounts of multiple athletes with the National Football League and the National Basketball Association and either selling or ransoming the credentials for profit.

In one case, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Wednesday, the account compromises resulted in explicit photos of one of the NFL players being posted to his Twitter and Instagram accounts. The complaint didn’t identify the athlete except to call him Victim-1 and to say that he lived in New Jersey and the photos appeared on June 4, 2018.

Based on the information, the player appeared to be New York Giants defensive end Avery Moss, who, according to ESPN, found naked pictures and videos posted to his Twitter timeline shortly after finishing an OTA practice on June 4. Accounts he followed were blocked, most likely in an attempt to delay Moss from learning of the postings. More explicit videos and images appeared later but were subsequently removed within about 30 minutes.

Enlarge (credit: Walter Zerla | Getty Images)

European regulators once again have the behavior of the biggest US tech companies—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google among them—squarely in their sights as they move forward with a proposal to reform how digital marketplaces and data sharing operate.

An early draft of the Digital Services Act, under consideration by the European Parliament, would not only require tech forms to share data with smaller rivals but would also limit the ways companies can use customer data they've already collected, the Financial Times was first to report.

Under the proposal, tech firms with the potential to act as gatekeepers "shall not pre-install exclusively their own applications nor require from any third-party operating system developers or hardware manufacturers to pre-install exclusively gatekeepers' own application," according to Reuters. The draft also mandates that gatekeeper companies will also not be permitted to use data collected on their platforms to target users unless that data is also shared with rival firms.

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  The new Nest Audio. [credit: Google ]

After four years on the market, Google has announced a sequel to the original Google Home. Meet the Google Nest Audio, the company's new mainstream smart speaker. The device is in stores now for $99.99, a price drop over the original $129 Google Home.

There's not much reason to upgrade a speaker, but a big part of the sales pitch here is that this should have better sound than the original Google Home. Google says the new speaker is 75 percent louder than the original Google Home, with 50 percent stronger bass. These speakers are packing some seriously beefy speaker equipment and are over double the weight of the original Google Home.

The speaker is also supposedly pretty smart. Google says "Our Media EQ feature enables Nest Audio to automatically tune itself to whatever you're listening to: music, podcasts, audiobooks, or even a response from Google Assistant. And Ambient IQ lets Nest Audio also adjust the volume of Assistant, news, podcasts, and audiobooks based on the background noise in your home, so you can hear the weather forecast over a noisy dishwasher." Like the Nest Mini, this features a next-gen, onboard version of the Google Assistant that "learns your most common music commands and responds two times faster than the original Google Home."