T-Mobile won the lion's share of spectrum licenses in the latest Federal Communications Commission auction, helping it fill rural network gaps that evoked comparisons to Swiss cheese. T-Mobile's winning bids totaled $304.3 million, letting it obtain 7,156 licenses out of 7,872 that were sold, the FCC announced yesterday. From a report: T-Mobile's licenses are spread across 2,724 counties (out of 3,143 total in the US). The second-highest bidder in dollar terms was PTI Pacifica, which spent $17.7 million on nine licenses in five counties. "With most of the available spectrum in the 2.5 GHz band located in rural areas, this auction provides vital spectrum resources to support wireless services in rural communities," the FCC said. The auction provided up to three blocks of spectrum, totaling 117.5MHz in each county. In terms of the number of licenses won, the second-place finisher was the North American Catholic Educational Programming Fund. Its winning bids totaled $7.8 million and cover 107 licenses in 84 counties. There were 63 winning bidders overall, and the auction raised $427.8 million. Small entities and rural service providers were given discounts on the license costs. The 2.5 GHz spectrum was originally set aside for educational institutions but has been repurposed for commercial service.

Earlier this week, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines announced it will be adding Starlink to its whole fleet, "after a pilot service on one of its ships got rave reviews," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The test deployment aboard the Freedom of the Seas "received tremendous positive feedback," and if you've ever been on one of these boats, you can probably guess why. Current satellite at sea options aren't great: expensive and slow, having enjoyed a market with little competition or innovation for the last couple decades. Starlink Maritime will be a real kick in the pants for existing providers, considering how quickly a huge customer like Royal Caribbean decided to buy in to the new satellite on the block. Even though its coverage is limited to coastal waters for now, the speed is way better and will probably pay for itself with onboard "premium Wi-Fi" charges in the first month.

The service costs the company roughly $5,000 monthly and has at least a $10,000 upfront hardware fee for the special terminals you'll need to use it. That's a rounding error in the rolling costs of running vessels as large as modern cruise ships. (An image provided by Celebrity Cruises suggests additional dishes will be used -- I've asked for more information.) Although the Starlink constellation doesn't yet work mid-ocean (such as on container ships), the plan is to provide that capability in the northern hemisphere by the end of the year and the southern hemisphere in early 2023.

The dishes will be added to all vessels in the Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises and Silversea Cruises fleets, in case you're planning a trip. No specific dates yet, but the company says they should have the service on all ships by the end of Q1 2023.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The US National Security Agency (NSA) tried to persuade its British counterpart to stop the Guardian publishing revelations about secret mass data collection from the NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, according to a new book. Sir Iain Lobban, the head of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), was reportedly called with the request in the early hours of June 6, 2013 but rebuffed the suggestion that his agency should act as a censor on behalf of its US partner in electronic spying.

The late-night call and the British refusal to shut down publication of the leaks was the first of several episodes in which the Snowden affair caused rifts within the Five Eyes signals intelligence coalition, recounted in a new book to be published on Thursday, The Secret History of Five Eyes, by film-maker and investigative journalist Richard Kerbaj. According to Kerbaj, Lobban was aware of the importance of the particularly special relationship between the US and UK intelligence agencies but thought "the proposition of urging a newspaper to spike the article for the sake of the NSA seemed a step too far." "It was neither the purpose of his agency nor his own to deal with the NSA's public relations," Kerbaj writes.

In October 2013, the then prime minister, David Cameron, later threatened the use of injunctions or other "tougher measures" to stop further publication of Snowden's leaks about the mass collection of phone and internet communications by the NSA and GCHQ. However, the DA-Notice committee, the body which alerts the UK media to the potential damage a story might cause to national security, told the Guardian at the time that nothing it had published had put British lives at risk. In the new book, Kerbaj reports that the US-UK intelligence relationship was further strained when the head of the NSA, Gen Keith Alexander, failed to inform Lobban that the Americans had identified Snowden, a Hawaii-based government contractor, as the source of the stories, leaving the British agency investigating its own ranks in the search for the leaker. GCHQ did not discover Snowden's identity until he went public in a Guardian interview. "It was a chilling reminder of how important you are, or how important you're not," a senior British intelligence insider is quoted as saying in the book. The book also alleges that members of Five Eyes were outraged by the revelations but weren't prepared to challenge the Americans "out of anxiety that they could be cut off from the flow of intelligence," reports the Guardian. Only the British representatives openly questioned U.S. practices, although they too "decided to bite their tongues when it came to frustration with their U.S. counterparts..."

Sir Kim Darroch, the former UK national security adviser, is quoted in the book as saying: "The US give us more than we give them so we just have to basically get on with it."

ArsTechnica reports: In mid-August, the Federal Communications Commission succeeded in its long-held plan to reallocate a portion of the spectrum from car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication (known as V2X) to Wi-Fi instead. However, the FCC didn't reassign that entire region of bandwidth -- 30 MHz remains set aside for "intelligent transportation systems." And the FCC should grant automakers a waiver to allow them to start deploying cellular-based V2X (C-V2X) safety systems, said the National Transportation Safety Board in a letter it sent the FCC on Monday. The saga of V2X is a long-running one. The FCC originally saved the spectrum around 5.9 GHz for use with V2X in 1999, but despite keen interest from some automakers and industry groups like the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) and the Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America), the technology still has not been deployed.

Seeing that failure, the FCC decided in 2020 to reallocate some of the bandwidth to Wi-Fi, leaving the frequencies between 5.895 and 5.925 GHz for V2X. ITS America and AASHTO sued the FCC to prevent this, but the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the FCC in August, allowing the commission to go through with its plan. This has dismayed the NTSB, which has written to the FCC as part of the commission's public comment period as it considers a waiver requested by automakers to deploy C-V2X technology. Conceptually, C-V2X works the same as the older V2X -- direct vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure communication but using cellular radio protocols instead of the dedicated short-range radio communication protocol. The FCC should grant this waiver, said the NTSB, which notes in its letter that it has recommended that the nation adopt wireless-based collision-avoidance technology since 1995. Connected vehicle technology would reduce the ever-escalating carnage on US roads, said the NTSB, and the agency also urged the FCC to make sure that Wi-Fi devices don't encroach on the remaining 30 MHz of intelligent transportation system frequencies.

The rise and catastrophic fall of what was once Canada's most valuable company is set for the big screen. CBC.ca reports: Blackberry will tell the story of Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion (RIM), creators of the titular device, which for a time was the world's most popular smartphone. The film stars Canadian actor Jay Baruchel as company co-founder Mike Lazaridis and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Glenn Howerton as co-CEO Jim Balsillie. The film was adapted from the 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry, by Sean Silcoff and Jacquie McNish. Toronto's Matt Johnson directs and also appears in the film as RIM's other co-founder, Doug Fregin. The cast also includes Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek and Michael Ironside.

RIM was founded in 1984 by business partners Lazaridis and Fregin, who had previously worked together on a failed LED sign business. After a decade of dabbling in various other technology projects, they turned their attention to the two-way communications systems that would become the foundation for the BlackBerry device.

A group of hackers managed to impersonate Binance chief communications officer (CCO) Patrick Hillmann in a series of video calls with several representatives of cryptocurrency projects. The attackers used what Hillman described as an AI hologram, a deepfake of his image for this objective, and managed to fool some representatives of these projects, making them think Hillmann was helping them get listed on the exchange. From a report: Hackers and scammers are refining their methods by including more technological tools in their schemes. Binance chief communications officer (CCO), Patrick Hillmann, reported last week about a new and sophisticated way in which attackers have used his image to perform a listing scam operation. Hillmann stated that hackers managed to program an AI (artificial intelligence) hologram of him, a kind of deepfake that was used to scam representatives of several cryptocurrency projects in Zoom calls. The hologram was able to fool these projects into believing that they were being considered for listing on Binance and that Hillmann was part of this operation. The listing scheme was discovered when these members contacted Hillmann to thank him for his help in the alleged listing opportunities. However, he had no knowledge of these meetings because he is not part of the listing process at Binance.

A new privacy class action claim (PDF) in the U.S. alleges Oracle's "worldwide surveillance machine" has amassed detailed dossiers on some five billion people, "accusing the company and its adtech and advertising subsidiaries of violating the privacy of the majority of the people on Earth," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The suit has three class representatives: Dr Johnny Ryan, senior fellow of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL); Michael Katz-Lacabe, director of research at The Center for Human Rights and Privacy; and Dr Jennifer Golbeck, a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland -- who say they are "acting on behalf of worldwide Internet users who have been subject to Oracle's privacy violations." The litigants are represented by the San Francisco-headquartered law firm, Lieff Cabraser, which they note has run significant privacy cases against Big Tech. The key point here is there is no comprehensive federal privacy law in the U.S. -- so the litigation is certainly facing a hostile environment to make a privacy case -- hence the complaint references multiple federal, constitutional, tort and state laws, alleging violations of the Federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Constitution of the State of California, the California Invasion of Privacy Act, as well as competition law, and the common law.

It remains to be seen whether this "patchwork" approach to a tricky legal environment will prevail -- for an expert snap analysis of the complaint and some key challenges this whole thread is highly recommended. But the substance of the complaint hinges on allegations that Oracle collects vast amounts of data from unwitting Internet users, i.e. without their consent, and uses this surveillance intelligence to profile individuals, further enriching profiles via its data marketplace and threatening people's privacy on a vast scale -- including, per the allegations, by the use of proxies for sensitive data to circumvent privacy controls.

Vietnam's Ministry of Information and Communications updated cybersecurity laws this week to mandate Big Tech and telecoms companies store user data locally, and control that data with local entities. The Register reports: The data affected goes beyond the basics of name, email, credit card information, phone number and IP address, and extends into social elements -- including groups of which users are members, or the friends with whom they digitally interact. "Data of all internet users ranging from financial records and biometric data to information on people's ethnicity and political views, or any data created by users while surfing the internet must be to stored domestically," read the decree (PDF) issued Wednesday, as translated by Reuters. The decree applies to a wide swath of businesses including those providing telecom services, storing and sharing data in cyberspace, providing national or international domain names for users in Vietnam, e-commerce, online payments, payment intermediaries, transport connection services operating in cyberspace, social media, online video games, messaging services, and voice or video calls.

According to Article 26 of the government's Decree 53, the new rules go into effect October 1, 2022 -- around seven weeks from the date of its announcement. However, foreign companies have an entire 12 months in which to comply -- beginning when they receive instructions from the Minister of Public Security. The companies are then required to store the data in Vietnam for a minimum of 24 months. System logs will need to be stored for 12 months. After this grace period, authorities reserve the right to make sure affected companies are following the law through investigations and data collection requests, as well as content removal orders. Further reading: Vietnam To Make Apple Watch, MacBook For First Time Ever

Several readers have shared this report: In February, when the Def Con hacker conference released its annual transparency report, the public learned that one of the most prominent figures in the field of social engineering had been permanently banned from attending. For years, Chris Hadnagy had enjoyed a high-profile role as the leader of the conference's social engineering village. But Def Con's transparency report stated that there had been multiple reports of him violating the conference's code of conduct. In response, Def Con banned Hadnagy from the conference for life; in 2022, the social engineering village would be run by an entirely new team. Now, Hadnagy has filed a lawsuit against the conference alleging defamation and infringement of contractual relations. The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on August 3rd and names Hadnagy as the plaintiff, with Def Con Communications and the conference founder, Jeff Moss, also known as "The Dark Tangent," as defendants. Moss was reportedly served papers in Las Vegas while coordinating the conference this year.

There are few public details about the incidents that caused Hadnagy's ban, as is common in harassment cases. In the transparency report announcing the permanent ban, Def Con organizers were deliberately vague about the reported behavior. "After conversations with the reporting parties and Chris, we are confident the severity of the transgressions merits a ban from DEF CON," organizers wrote in their post-conference transparency report following the previous year's conference. Def Con's Code of Conduct is minimal, focusing almost entirely on a "no-harassment" policy. "Harassment includes deliberate intimidation and targeting individuals in a manner that makes them feel uncomfortable, unwelcome, or afraid," the text reads. "Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately. We reserve the right to respond to harassment in the manner we deem appropriate."

The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Friday upheld the FCC's decision to reallocate part of the 5.9 GHz band for unlicensed use -- rather than the dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) it was originally allocated for. "This is part of the spectrum that in 1999 was set aside exclusively for the auto industry to use for DSCR to improve auto safety," notes Fierce Wireless. "At that time, the full amount set aside was 75 megahertz." From the report: After about 20 years, nothing ever really came of DSRC, and in 2020, the FCC divvied up the 75 megahertz, making 45 megahertz available for unlicensed use with the remaining 30 megahertz designated for auto safety. Specifically, the auto safety spectrum was reallocated for Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) technology, a more modern tech than DSRC. The Intelligent Transportation Society of America and American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials didn't like the FCC's decision and appealed, arguing that it violated the Transportation Equity Act. They also said the FCC unlawfully revoked or modified FCC licenses. But Circuit Court Judge Justin Walker said it did not violate the act and said the court disagreed with the transportation officials' arguments "on all fronts."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA), a new federal privacy bill that has actually a chance of becoming law, is designed to introduce new privacy protections for Americans. But it may also have the side effect of wiping out $200 million worth of fines proposed against some of the country's biggest telecommunications companies as part of a major location-data selling scandal in which the firms sold customer data that ended up in the hands of bounty hunters and other parties. The issue centers around the ADPPA's shift of enforcement for privacy related matters from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which proposed the fines, to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The news highlights the complex push and pulls when developing privacy legislation, and some of the pitfalls along the way.

The FCC proposed the $200 million fines in February 2020. The fines came after Motherboard revealed that the carriers sold phone location data to a complex supply chain of companies which then provided it to hundreds of bounty hunters and other third parties, including someone that allowed Motherboard to track a phone for just $300. The fines also came after The New York Times and the office of Sen. Ron Wyden found that the carriers sold location data in a similar method to a company called Securus, which allowed law enforcement officials to track the location of phones without a warrant. A former sheriff abused the tool to spy on judges and other officials. The offending telecoms -- AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon -- said they stopped the sale of location data at varying points in time in response to the investigations. The FCC then found that the carriers broke the law by selling such data.

FCC Press Secretary Paloma Perez told Motherboard in an emailed statement that "our real-time location information is some of the most sensitive data there is about us, and it deserves the highest level of privacy protection. That is why the FCC has proposed more than $200 million in fines against the nation's largest wireless carriers for selling their customers' location data. Through our continued oversight we have ensured that these carriers are no longer monetizing their consumers' real-time location in this way, and we are continuing our investigation into these practices and expect to reach a conclusion very soon." In July FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel sent letters to a host of U.S. telecommunications, tech, and retail companies to ask about their use of location data.

AT&T workers are pushing to keep working from home as an option, citing "long commutes to and from work, exorbitant childcare costs, ongoing concerns over exposure to COVID-19 variants and now monkeybox," reports The Guardian. From the report: At AT&T, the world's largest telecommunication company, workers represented by the Communications Workers of America agreed to a work from home extension until the end of March 2023, but workers say the company is forcing many workers to return to the office much sooner than that, while other departments had already been forced back to the office by their managers. [...] AT&T workers have started a petition demanding the company makes working from home a permanent option for workers. [...] Val Williams, an AT&T worker and union steward for the Communications Workers of America in Houston, Texas, was forced to return to work in the office in April 2022. She criticized the push to bring workers back into the office after she said workers had been praised for productivity while working from home.

Williams criticized the pushback to return to the office given AT&T is a communications company with the technology and resources to make working from home a seamless option. "Our revenue has increased over the last two years while we were working from home. Our job descriptions state we are capable of working with little to minimum management and that's what we've been doing," she said. She also argued it was unfair how the push to return workers to the office has been enforced, with some departments being brought back while others are still working from home. "We don't feel like anybody's health is greater than any others. Because everybody has their own health issues, or they may have family members that have health issues that they have to return home to," she added. [...] A spokesperson for AT&T did not provide data on how many workers at the company are still working from home, but claimed it was never the company's intention to make working from home indefinite. "The health and safety of our employees continues to be our priority," said the spokesperson in an email. "As we have throughout the pandemic, we adhere to guidance from the medical community, including implementing safety protocols to help protect our employees' wellbeing. And now that we are a largely vaccinated workforce, we believe it's safe for employees to return to the workplace. We do our best work when we're together."

The government's $42.5 billion plan to expand internet service to underserved communities is stuck in a holding pattern nearly nine months after approval, largely because authorities still don't know where gaps need to be filled. From a report: The broadband plan, part of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill signed by President Biden last November, stipulates that money to improve service can't be doled out until the Federal Communications Commission completes new maps showing where homes and businesses lack fast service. Lawmakers demanded new maps after flawed data in past subsidy programs caused construction projects across the country to bypass many of the Americans that they were supposed to serve. Officials warn, however, that getting the mapping right will take time.

"We understand the urgency of getting broadband out there to everyone quickly," said Alan Davidson, chief of the Department of Commerce office in charge of allocating the broadband funding. "We also know that we get one shot at this and we want to make sure we do it right." That could mean a delay in the expansion of service to people who have long struggled with slow internet. Internet providers including AT&T, Charter Communications, Comcast and Verizon have yet to include any of the 2021 infrastructure law's broadband funding in their public financial projections for the coming years. "The maps are not going to be issued from the FCC until a little bit later this year, and until that happens, the money really can't start to flow at the state level," AT&T Chief Executive John Stankey told analysts on a July conference call.

In June Netflix launched Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies, and the Internet, a true-crime series. It began with an episode documenting the 2017 death of a 28-year-old Kansas man named Andrew Finch after California gamer Tyler Barriss faked an emergency call from Finch's home to the Wichita, Kansas police department.

So where are they now? Barriss is now serving a 20-year prison sentence, Bustle reports. "Barriss, a resident of Los Angeles, California, pled guilty to a total of 51 charges, all having to do with hoax emergency calls he'd made, including the call that resulted in Finch's murder." Barriss received as 12-and-a-half year sentence for the Kansas call, and then another 8-and-a-half-year sentence for all the other illegal calls placed between 2015 and 2017 to 17 different U.S. states. "He also received another five years of supervised release in Washington, D.C., for phoning in bomb threats to the FBI and Federal Communications Commission in 2017."

And the 19-year-old who'd hired Barriss "received a 15-month prison sentence in 2019 after pleading guilty to obstruction of justice."

Meanwhile, Andrew Finch's surviving family members filed legal actions against the police department responsible for Finch's death. And while police officers normally receive "qualified immunity" protecting them from lawsuits over the performance of their duties, there was an update last month: An officer with the Wichita Police Department will face a civil trial in connection with the December 2017 swatting incident... Justin Rapp was the officer who shot the unarmed man. A U.S. appeals court sided with the Kansas district court in denying Officer Rapp qualified immunity in Finch's death. The court said a reasonable jury could believe Finch was unarmed and unthreatening when Rapp fired the shot that killed him.

Finch's family brought the excessive force civil suit. Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett declined to prosecute Rapp for fatally shooting Finch. The Wichita Police Department conclude Rapp didn't violate department policy....

Along with its conclusion that the civil case against Rapp can move forward, the appellate court also affirmed the district court's summary judgment on liability claims against the City of Wichita. This decision essentially maintained the city and the WPD as a whole weren't liable in Finch's death. The court of appeals dismissed arguments saying, in sum, "[the lawsuit from Finch's family] has failed to show any deliberately indifferent policies or customs that caused Rapp to use excessive lethal force."

Facebook announced on Thursday it will begin testing end-to-end encryption as the default option for some users of its Messenger app on Android and iOS. The Guardian reports: Facebook messenger users currently have to opt in to make their messages end-to-end encrypted (E2E), a mechanism that theoretically allows only the sender and recipient of a message to access its content. Facebook spokesperson Alex Dziedzan said on Thursday that E2E encryption is a complex feature to implement and that the test is limited to a couple of hundred users for now so that the company can ensure the system is working properly. Dziedzan also said the move was "not a response to any law enforcement requests." Meta, Facebook's parent company, said it had planned to roll out the test for months. The company had previously announced plans to make E2E encryption the default in 2022 but pushed the date back to 2023. "The only way for companies like Facebook to meaningfully protect people is for them to ensure that they do not have access to user data or communications when a law enforcement agency comes knocking," Evan Greer, the director of the digital rights group Fight for the Future, said. "Expanding end-to-end encryption by default is a part of that, but companies like Facebook also need to stop collecting and retaining so much intimate information about us in the first place."

Communications giant Twilio has confirmed hackers accessed customer data after successfully tricking employees into handing over their corporate login credentials. From a report: The San Francisco-based company, which allows users to build voice and SMS capabilities -- such as two-factor authentication (2FA) -- into applications, said in a blog post published Monday that it became aware that someone gained "unauthorized access" to information related to some Twilio customer accounts on August 4. Twilio has more than 150,000 customers, including Facebook and Uber. According to the company, the as-yet-unidentified threat actor convinced multiple Twilio employees into handing over their credentials, which allowed access to the company's internal systems. The attack used SMS phishing messages that purported to come from Twilio's IT department, suggesting that the employees' password had expired or that their schedule had changed, and advised the target to log in using a spoofed web address that the attacker controls.

"No one imagined commercial space tourism taking hold, no one believed crowd-funded satellites and mega constellations at low earth orbit were possible, and no one could have conceived of the sheer popularity of space entrepreneurship," reads a statement Friday from the chair of America's Federal Communications Commission. "But it's all happening...."

And Reuters reports on what happens next: With Earth's orbit growing more crowded with satellites, a U.S. government agency on Friday said it would begin revising decades-old rules on getting rid of space junk and on other issues such as satellite refueling and inspecting and repairing in-orbit spacecraft. "We believe the new space age needs new rules," Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said after the 4-0 FCC vote, adding that current rules "were largely built for another era."

Rosenworcel said the FCC needs "to make sure our rules are prepared for the proliferation of satellites in orbit and new activities in our higher altitudes."

The FCC also plans to look at "new ways to clean up orbital debris. After all, there are thousands of metric tons of junk in space," Rosenworcel added. The FCC will look at "the potential for orbital debris remediation and removal functions that offer the prospect of improvement in the orbital debris environment....."

"The FCC remains the only agency to license virtually every commercial space mission that touches the United States," FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said. "With that power comes the responsibility to understand the missions we authorize, and to create an enabling regulatory environment that opens new doors while still protecting against new risks."
A statement from the FCC describes their new policy review as a "modernization effort."

And it made a point of acknowledging that in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing has "the potential to build entire industries, create new jobs, mitigate climate change, and advance America's economic, scientific, technological, and national security interests."

About two-thirds of Americans now say they support unions, reports CNBC, "the highest approval rating since 1965." And suddenly in the last few months, "workers have been organizing at a pace this country hasn't seen since the Great Depression." Amazon has captured headlines for union drives at its warehouses, including a successful effort on New York's Staten Island. But activity is picking up elsewhere in retail and tech at big companies that are generally viewed as progressive, with no history of labor unions. As of Wednesday, 209 Starbucks stores have officially voted to unionize according to the National Labor Relations Board. First-ever unions have also formed at an Apple store in Maryland, a Google Fiber contractor, REI, Trader Joe's, Kickstarter and Activision Blizzard....

The union movement at Apple stores is progressing at a slower pace. The first union win among Apple's 270-plus U.S. stores happened on June 18, when workers in Towson, Maryland, voted 65 to 33 to join the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. No other stores have held a vote.... Three other stores have taken steps to unionize, although one in Atlanta withdrew its election petition in May. That same month, a memo was leaked showing Apple's anti-union talking points, instructing store managers to tell workers they could lose benefits and career opportunities if they organized....

Communications Workers of America, which has about 700,000 members, helped organize the Atlanta Apple store, as well as workers at Google. In March, Google Fiber contractors in Kansas City held an NLRB election, becoming the first to officially unionize under what's known as the Alphabet Workers Union. Nearly 1,000 other Google workers have also signed cards to join the AWU, but because the employees haven't officially held an NLRB election, their group is known as a minority union. "There's a lot of research that shows that most Americans want unions," said Sara Steffens, secretary-treasurer of Communications Workers of America. "They just don't want to go through this scary union-busting process...."

Google has also been accused of fighting back. The NLRB found that the company "arguably violated" labor law when it fired employees for speaking up. The Google Fiber contractors faced additional anti-union messaging in a letter from the contractor, which said "everyone will be stuck with the union and forced to pay dues."
The article points out that union workers earn 16.6% more than nonunion workers on average — roughly $10,000 a year. "Workers are looking at how well their employers are performing and wondering why they're not getting rewarded equally. For example, Google parent Alphabet recorded its fastest revenue growth rate since 2007 last year. Apple's margin has been steadily rising and the company closed 2021 with its biggest quarter ever for sales, at almost $124 billion....

The article also notes that official figures from October 1, 2021 through June 30 showed a 58% increase in official attempts to unionize. "Whether the organizing momentum spreads more widely across the economy may depend on how vocal and successful workers are at Starbucks, Apple and elsewhere."

"Nineteen new GNU releases in the last month," reads a "July GNU Spotlight" announcement from the Free Software Foundation.

Here's (edited and condensed) descriptions of some of the highlights:

• GNU Datamash (version 1.8) — a command-line program performing basic numeric, textual, and statistical operations on input textual data files (designed to work within standard pipelines).

• GNUnet (version 0.17.2) — a framework for secure peer-to-peer networking. "The high-level goal is to provide a strong foundation of free software for a global, distributed network that provides security and privacy. GNUnet in that sense aims to replace the current internet protocol stack. Along with an application for secure publication of files, it has grown to include all kinds of basic applications for the foundation of a GNU internet."

• GnuTLS (version 3.7.7) — A secure communications library implementing the SSL, TLS and DTLS protocols, provided in the form of a C library.

• Jami (version 20220726.1515.da8d1da) — a GNU package for universal communication that respects the freedom and privacy of its users, using distributed hash tables for establishing communication. ("This avoids keeping centralized registries of users and storing personal data.")

• LibreJS (version 7.21.0) — an add-on for GNU Icecat and other Firefox-based browsers that detects non-trivial and non-free JavaScript code from being loaded without your consent when you browse the web. "JavaScript code that is free or trivial is allowed to be loaded."

• GNU Nettle (version 3.8.1) — a low-level cryptographic library. It is designed to fit in easily in almost any context. It can be easily included in cryptographic toolkits for object-oriented languages or in applications themselves.

• GNU Octave (version 7.2.0) — a high-level interpreted language specialized for numerical computations, for both linear and non-linear applications and with great support for visualizing results.

• R (version 4.2.1) — a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics, along with robust support for producing publication-quality data plots. "A large amount of 3rd-party packages are available, greatly increasing its breadth and scope."

• TRAMP (version 2.5.3) — a GNU Emacs package allowing you to access files on remote machines as though they were local files. "This includes editing files, performing version control tasks and modifying directory contents with dired. Access is performed via ssh, rsh, rlogin, telnet or other similar methods."

Click here to see the other new releases and download information.

The FSF announcement adds that "A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Charter Communications has agreed to settle piracy lawsuits filed by the major record labels, which accused the cable Internet provider of failing to terminate the accounts of subscribers who illegally download copyrighted songs. Sony, Universal, Warner, and their various subsidiaries sued Charter in US District Court in Colorado in March 2019 in a suit that claimed the ISP helps subscribers pirate music by selling packages with higher Internet speeds. They filed another lawsuit against Charter in the same court in August 2021.

Both cases were settled. The record labels and Charter told the court of their settlements on Tuesday in filings (PDF) that said (PDF), "The Parties hereby notify the Court that they have resolved the above-captioned action." Upon the settlements, the court vacated the pending trials and asked the parties to submit dismissal papers within 28 days. Charter subsidiary Bright House Networks also settled (PDF) a similar lawsuit in US District Court for the Middle District of Florida this week. The record labels' case in Florida was settled one day before a scheduled trial, as TorrentFreak reported Tuesday. The case was dismissed with prejudice (PDF) after the settlement.

No details on any of the settlements were given in the documents notifying the courts. A three-week jury trial in one of the Colorado cases was scheduled to begin in June 2023 but is no longer needed. The question for Internet users is whether the settlements mean that Charter will be more aggressive in terminating subscribers who illegally download copyrighted material. Charter declined to comment today when we asked if it agreed to increase account terminations of subscribers accused of piracy. "Even if the settlements have no specific provision on terminating subscribers, Charter presumably has to pay the record labels to settle the claims," adds Ars' Jon Brodkin. "That could make the country's second-biggest ISP more likely to terminate subscribers accused of piracy in order to prevent future lawsuits."