An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Tech workers at The New York Times have formed a union under the NewsGuild of New York, and they are demanding voluntary recognition from the paper's management. The new union, called the Tech Times Guild, represents more than 650 workers from the digital side of the company, including software engineers, designers, and data analysts. Those employees are not included in the editorial union of The New York Times, which represents more than 3,000 reporters and media professionals at the newspaper and is also organized under NewsGuild. The editorial union has historically excluded employees on the digital side of the paper, even as the company has expanded into more ambitious data and digital work. As a result, the Tech Times Guild is seeking a separate bargaining unit, which would negotiate separately with the Times management. "As of now, we face a number of challenges," the Tech Times Guild said in a statement on Twitter, "including sudden or unexplained termination, opaque promotion processes, unpaid overtime, and underinvestment in diverse representation. Without a union, we lack the data or bargaining rights to address these issues."

The Times has not formally responded to the union's request for recognition. "Voluntary recognition is a significant decision," The New York Times Company said in a statement. "We have heard questions from colleagues such as what a union would mean for staff, who might be included in the union, and how colleagues would have a say in who might represent them. We want to make sure all voices are heard."

Twitter on Monday filed a lawsuit against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R), saying that his office launched an investigation into the social media giant because it banned former President Trump from its platform. From a report: Twitter is seeking to halt an investigation launched by Paxton into moderation practices by Big Tech firms including Twitter for what he called "the seemingly coordinated de-platforming of the President," days after they banned him following the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. In the suit, filed in a Northern California court, Twitter said "Paxton made clear that he will use the full weight of his office, including his expansive investigatory powers, to retaliate against Twitter for having made editorial decisions with which he disagrees." Twitter said it has rights under the First Amendment "to make decisions about what content to disseminate through its platform," including "the discretion to remove or otherwise restrict access to Tweets, profiles, or other content posted to Twitter." The company added in an emailed statement that in this case, "the Texas Attorney General is misusing the powers of his office to infringe on Twitter's First Amendment rights and attempt to silence free speech."

President Biden on Friday named Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor, to the National Economic Council on Friday as a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, putting one of the most outspoken critics of Big Tech's power into the administration. From a report: The appointment of Mr. Wu, 48, who is widely supported by progressive Democrats and antimonopoly groups, suggests that the administration plans to take on the size and influence of companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, including working with Congress on legislation to strengthen antitrust laws. During his campaign, Mr. Biden said he would be open to breaking up tech companies. That confrontational approach toward the tech industry would be a continuation of the one taken by the Trump administration. Late last year, federal and state regulators sued Facebook and Google, accusing them of antitrust violations. The regulators continue to investigate claims that Amazon and Apple unfairly squash competition.

Mr. Biden has also expressed skepticism toward social media companies and the legal shield known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. He told The New York Times editorial board in January 2020 that Section 230 "should be revoked, immediately." The tech companies have fought vigorously against new antitrust laws and regulations, building out some of the most potent lobbying forces in Washington to push back. Mr. Wu has warned about the consequences of too much power in the hands of a few companies and said the nation's economy resembled the Gilded Age of the late 1800s. "Extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding the appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership," Mr. Wu wrote in his 2018 book, "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age." "Most visible in our daily lives is the great power of the tech platforms, especially Google, Facebook and Amazon," he added. Wu is best known for advocacy against powerful telecom companies and for coining the term "net neutrality," the regulatory philosophy that consumers should get equal access to all content on the internet.

"Catching the coronavirus from surfaces is rare. The World Health Organization and national public-health agencies need to clarify their advice," urges an editorial in Nature (shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo): A year into the pandemic, the evidence is now clear. The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is transmitted predominantly through the air — by people talking and breathing out large droplets and small particles called aerosols.

Catching the virus from surfaces — although plausible — seems to be rare. Despite this, some public-health agencies still emphasize that surfaces pose a threat and should be disinfected frequently. The result is a confusing public message when clear guidance is needed on how to prioritize efforts to prevent the virus spreading... People and organizations continue to prioritize costly disinfection efforts, when they could be putting more resources into emphasizing the importance of masks, and investigating measures to improve ventilation. The latter will be more complex but could make more of a difference.

Now that it is agreed that the virus transmits through the air, in both large and small droplets, efforts to prevent spread should focus on improving ventilation or installing rigorously tested air purifiers. People must also be reminded to wear masks and maintain a safe distance. At the same time, agencies such as the WHO and the CDC need to update their guidance on the basis of current knowledge. Research on the virus and on COVID-19 moves quickly, so public-health agencies have a responsibility to present clear, up-to-date information that provides what people need to keep themselves and others safe.

"The same legalese that can ban Donald Trump from Twitter can bar users from joining class-action lawsuits," warns the official Editorial Board of the New York Times, urging "It's time to fix the fine print." [Alternate URL here] [M]ost people have no idea what is signed away when they click "agree" to binding terms of service contracts — again and again on phones, laptops, tablets, watches, e-readers and televisions. Agreeing often means allowing personal data to be resold or waiving the right to sue or join a class-action lawsuit... Because corporations and their lawyers know most consumers don't have the time or wherewithal to study their new terms, which can stretch to 20,000 words — about the length of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" — they stuff them with opaque provisions and lengthy legalistic explanations meant to confuse or obfuscate. Understanding a typical company's terms, according to one study, requires 14 years of education, which is beyond the level most Americans attain. A 2012 Carnegie Mellon study found that the average American would have to devote 76 work days just to read over tech companies' policies. That number would probably be much higher today.

At its core, the arrangement is unbalanced, putting the burden on consumers to read through voluminous, nonnegotiable documents, written to benefit corporations in exchange for access to their services. It's hard to imagine, by contrast, being asked to sign a 60-page printed contract before entering a bowling alley or a florist shop... Though courts have held terms of service contracts to be binding, there is generally no legal requirement that companies make them comprehensible. It is understandable, then, that companies may feel emboldened to insert terms that advantage them at their customers' expense.

That includes provisions that most consumers wouldn't knowingly agree to: an inability to delete one's own account, granting companies the right to claim credit for or alter their creative work, letting companies retain content even after a user deletes it, letting them gain access to a user's full browsing history and giving them blanket indemnity. More often than not, there is a clause (including for The New York Times's website) that the terms can be updated at any time without prior notice. Some terms approach the absurd. Food and ride-share companies, like DoorDash and Lyft, ask users to agree that the companies are not delivery or transportation businesses, a sleight of hand designed to give the companies license to treat their contract drivers as employees while also sheltering the companies from liability for whatever may happen on a ride or delivery. Handy, an on-demand housecleaning service, once sought in its terms of service to put customers on the hook for future tax liabilities should their contract workers' job classification be changed to employee...

"This is one of the tools used by corporations to assert themselves over their customers and whittle away their rights," said Nancy Kim, a California Western School of Law professor who studies online contracts. "With their constant updates to terms and conditions, it amounts to a massive bait-and-switch...."

"We have become so beaten down by this that we just accept it," said Woodrow Hartzog, a Northeastern University law professor. "The idea that anyone should be expected to read these terms of service is preposterous — they are written to discourage people from reading them...."
The Board urges the U.S. Congress to consider requiring greater transparency about terms and their changes — as well as simpler explanations. "If a company's online service is open to 13-year-olds, as many are, then the terms of use need to be written so an eighth grader can understand them."

The Boston Globe is starting a new program by which people who feel an article at the newspaper is harmful to their reputation can ask that it be updated or anonymized. From a report: It's reminiscent of the E.U.'s "right to be forgotten," though potentially less controversial, since it concerns only one editorial outlet and not a content-agnostic search engine. The "Fresh Start" initiative isn't for removing bad restaurant reviews or coverage of serious crimes, but rather for more commonplace crime desk reporting: a hundred words saying so-and-so was arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, perhaps with a mugshot.

Such stories do serve a purpose, of course, in informing readers of crime in their area. But as the Globe's editor, Brian McGrory points out: "It was never our intent to have a short and relatively inconsequential Globe story affect the futures of the ordinary people who might be the subjects. Our sense, given the criminal justice system, is that this has had a disproportionate impact on people of color. The idea behind the program is to start addressing it."

Bloomberg Editorial Board: Amid raging wildfires, rolling blackouts and a worsening coronavirus outbreak, it has not been a great year for California. Unfortunately, the state is also reeling from a manmade disaster: an exodus of thriving companies to other states. In just the past few months, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said it was leaving for Houston. Oracle said it would decamp for Austin. Palantir, Charles Schwab and McKesson are all bound for greener pastures. No less an information-age avatar than Elon Musk has had enough. He thinks regulators have grown "complacent" and "entitled" about the state's world-class tech companies. No doubt, he has a point. Silicon Valley's high-tech cluster has been the envy of the world for decades, but there's nothing inevitable about its success. As many cities have found in recent years, building such agglomerations is exceedingly hard, as much art as science. Low taxes, modest regulation, sound infrastructure and good education systems all help, but aren't always sufficient. Once squandered, moreover, such dynamism can't easily be revived. With competition rising across the U.S., the area's policy makers need to recognize the dangers ahead.

In recent years, San Francisco has seemed to be begging for companies to leave. In addition to familiar failures of governance -- widespread homelessness, inadequate transit, soaring property crime -- it has also imposed more idiosyncratic hindrances. Far from welcoming experimentation, it has sought to undermine or stamp out home-rental services, food-delivery apps, ride-hailing firms, electric-scooter companies, facial-recognition technology, delivery robots and more, even as the pioneers in each of those fields attempted to set up shop in the city. It tried to ban corporate cafeterias -- a major tech-industry perk -- on the not-so-sound theory that this would protect local restaurants. It created an "Office of Emerging Technology" that will only grant permission to test new products if they're deemed, in a city bureaucrat's view, to provide a "net common good." Whatever the merits of such meddling, it's hardly a formula for unbounded inventiveness.

These two traits -- poor governance and animosity toward business -- have collided calamitously with respect to the city's housing market. Even as officials offered tax breaks for tech companies to headquarter themselves downtown, they mostly refused to lift residential height limits, modify zoning rules or allow significant new construction to accommodate the influx of new workers. They then expressed shock that rents and home prices were soaring -- and blamed the tech companies. California's legislature has only made matters worse. A bill it enacted in 2019, ostensibly intended to protect gig workers, threatened to undo the business models of some of the state's biggest tech companies until voters granted them a reprieve in a November referendum. A new privacy law has imposed immense compliance burdens -- amounting to as much as 1.8% of state output in 2018 -- while conferring almost no consumer benefits. An 8.8% state corporate tax rate and 13.3% top income-tax rate (the nation's highest) haven't helped.

Apple has picked "Code Switch" as the best audio show of the year, marking the first time the company has recognized a single podcast in this way. Engadget reports: Code Switch is NPR's weekly discussion on race. While the series has been on the air for the better part of seven years, it became significantly more popular over the summer as people across the US took to protest the death of George Floyd and other instances of racial injustice.

As in past years, the company also shared a selection of the most popular audio shows people listened to through Apple Podcasts. Few surprises here as old favorites like Stuff You Should Know, This American Life and The Daily came out as the most popular shows in the US. When it comes to shows new to 2020, Unlocking Us, Nice White Parents and CounterClock made the top three for the year. Apple's editorial team had their say as well. They picked California Love, Canary by the Washington Post and Dying for Sex as their favorites of 2020. If you're looking for something new to listen to, all three lists are a good place to start.

Former U.S. President Barack Obama said that the extent to which social media companies claim they "are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic" is not "tenable," he told the publication in an interview published Monday. From a report "They are making editorial choices, whether they've buried them in algorithms or not," the former president said in the interview. "The First Amendment doesn't require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there. At the end of the day, we're going to have to find a combination of government regulations and corporate practices that address this, because it's going to get worse. If you can perpetrate crazy lies and conspiracy theories just with texts, imagine what you can do when you can make it look like you or me saying anything on video. We're pretty close to that now." Obama's statement that social media platforms should be considered more like publishers than public utilities would have significant implications on how the companies are regulated.

Long-time Slashdot reader imAck writes: Glenn Greenwald announced via Twitter recently that he has resigned from The Intercept (and First Look Media), the former being a media outlet that he co-founded [in February 2014]. Purportedly, a recent attempt to constrain his editorial freedom was the incident that pushed him to make the decision. "Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication," an anonymous Slashdot reader quotes him as saying.

As The New York Times notes, Mr. Greenwald is "best known for his role in making public the National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013," which Slashdot covered extensively. "For now, Mr. Greenwald will be part of a growing number of journalists who have left major media outlets to try their luck at Substack, a group that includes Andrew Sullivan, formerly of New York Magazine, and Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone."

Betsy Reed, Editor-in-Chief of The Intercept, responded to Greenwald's departure, saying there's a "fundamental disagreement over the role of editors in the production of journalism and the nature of censorship."

The Verge's senior news editor complains that without permission, Windows 10 restarted to install "unsolicited, unwanted web app versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook onto my computer." OK, it's not as bad as when my entire computer screen got taken over by an unwanted copy of Microsoft Edge. That was truly egregious. No, this time Microsoft is merely sneaking unwanted web apps onto my PC — and using my Windows 10 Start Menu as free advertising space. Did I mention that icons for Microsoft Office apps have magically appeared in my Start Menu, even though I've never once installed Office on this computer?

These aren't full free copies of Office, by the way. They're just shortcuts to the web version you could already access in any web browser of your choice, which double as advertisements to pay for a more fully featured copy... They're the latest proof that Microsoft doesn't respect your ownership of your own PC, the latest example of Microsoft installing anything it likes in a Windows update up to and including bloatware, and the latest example of Microsoft caring more about the bottom line than whether a few people might lose their work when Windows suddenly shuts down their PC. Luckily, I didn't lose any work today, but a friend of mine recently did...

Microsoft seems to think our computers are free advertising space, a place where it can selfishly promote its other products — even though they were told roundly in the '90s that even bundling a web browser was not OK. Now, they're bundling a browser you can't uninstall, and a set of PWA web apps that launch in that same browser. (Yes, they fire up Edge even if you've set a different browser as default.)

BishopBerkeley writes: In another first, the editors of the The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) endorse Joe Biden by stating that the current government needs to be fired. Although they don't mention any names, the editors of the NEJM state in shockingly forceful and accusatory language that the current administration is totally incompetent and does not deserve to keep its job. The editorial, somberly titled "Dying in a Leadership Vacuum" bases its opinion on some dispiriting statistics:

"The magnitude of this failure is astonishing. According to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering, the United States leads the world in Covid-19 cases and in deaths due to the disease, far exceeding the numbers in much larger countries, such as China. The death rate in this country is more than double that of Canada, exceeds that of Japan, a country with a vulnerable and elderly population, by a factor of almost 50, and even dwarfs the rates in lower-middle-income countries, such as Vietnam, by a factor of almost 2000. Covid-19 is an overwhelming challenge, and many factors contribute to its severity. But the one we can control is how we behave. And in the United States we have consistently behaved poorly."

The Administration's extreme rhetoric and extreme actions are earning extreme reactions. Last month, Scientific American broke a 175-year tradition of not endorsing a presidential candidate by throwing their support behind Joe Biden. "We'd love to stay out of politics, but this president has been so anti-science that we can't ignore it," editor in chief, Laura Helmuth told The Washington Post.

The editor in chief of Science Magazine also denounced Trump, but stopped short of endorsing presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google plans to pay $1 billion to publishers globally for their news over the next three years, its CEO said on Thursday. The move could help it win over a powerful group amid heightened regulatory scrutiny worldwide. CEO Sundar Pichai said the new product called Google News Showcase will launch first in Germany, where it has signed up German newspapers including Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, and in Brazil with Folha de S.Paulo, Band and Infobae. It will be rolled out in Belgium, India, the Netherlands and other countries. About 200 publishers in Argentina, Australia, Britain, Brazil, Canada and Germany have signed up to the product.

"This financial commitment -- our biggest to date -- will pay publishers to create and curate high-quality content for a different kind of online news experience," Pichai said in a blog post. The product, which allows publishers to pick and present their stories, will launch on Google News on Android devices and eventually on Apple devices. "This approach is distinct from our other news products because it leans on the editorial choices individual publishers make about which stories to show readers and how to present them," Pichai said. The product builds on a licensing deal with media groups in Australia, Brazil and Germany in June, which also drew a lukewarm response from the European Publishers Council. Google is negotiating with French publishers, among its most vocal critics, while Australia wants to force it and Facebook to share advertising revenue with local media groups.

The September 20 deadline for a purported TikTok sale has already passed, but the parties involved have yet to settle terms on the deal. ByteDance and TikTok's bidders Oracle and Walmart presented conflicting messages on the future ownership of the app, confusing investors and users. Meanwhile, Beijing's discontent with the TikTok sale is increasingly obvious. From a report: China has no reason to approve the "dirty" and "unfair" deal that allows Oracle and Walmart to effectively take over TikTok based on "bullying and extortion," slammed an editorial published Wednesday in China Daily, an official English-language newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party. The editorial argued that TikTok's success -- a projected revenue of about a billion dollars by the end of 2020 -- "has apparently made Washington feel uneasy" and prompted the U.S. to use "national security as the pretext to ban the short video sharing app." The official message might stir mixed feelings within ByteDance, which has along the way tried to prove its disassociation from the Chinese authority, a precondition for the companies' products to operate freely in Western countries.

goombah99 shares a report from The Washington Post: Four years ago, the magazine flagged Donald Trump's disdain for science as "frightening" but did not go so far as to endorse his rival, Hillary Clinton. This year, its editors came to a different conclusion. "A 175-year tradition is not something you break lightly," editor in chief, Laura Helmuth told The Washington Post on Tuesday. "We'd love to stay out of politics, but this president has been so anti-science that we can't ignore it." In a nod to Trump's embrace of anti-science conspiracy theories, Scientific American editors compared the people each candidate turns to for expertise and insight. Biden's panel of public health advisers "does not include physicians who believe in aliens and debunked virus therapies, one of whom Trump has called 'very respected' and 'spectacular,'" the editors write. The editor in chief of Science Magazine, the "apex predator of academic publishing," according to Wired, also denounced Trump but stopped short of endorsing presidential candidate Joe Biden. goombah99 writes: "This may be the most shameful moment in the history of U.S. science policy," writes H. Holden Thorp, a chemist and longtime university administrator. The editorial's key point is that it was negligence but more like malice. "As he was playing down the virus to the public, Trump was not confused or inadequately briefed: He flat-out lied, repeatedly, about science to the American people. These lies demoralized the scientific community and cost countless lives in the United States." This follows on an august issue's lament over the dangerous policies of the unqualified presidential coronavirus advisor Scott Atlas: "Although Atlas may be capable of neurological imaging, he's not an expert in infectious diseases or public health -- and it shows. He's spreading scientific misinformation in a clear attempt to placate the president and push his narrative that COVID-19 is not an emergency." Thorp concludes his article in this prestige journal with a searing indictment "Trump was not clueless, and he was not ignoring the briefings. Listen to his own words. Trump lied, plain and simple."

AmiMoJo quotes SlashGear: Remember the Pebble smartwatch? Despite being officially discontinued and several years old at this point, there are still some diehard fans out there keeping the hardware alive, and a team called Rebble Alliance plays an important part in this.

Whereas the web services for Pebble watches used to come from Pebble Technology Corp., they now come (unofficially) from Rebble, which has announced a new initiative called Rebble Grants... Rebble Alliance is, as explained by iFixit in an editorial last year, a group of former Pebble employees like Katharine Berry, as well as enthusiasts who are working hard to keep the defunct hardware operational. Key to this is the Rebble web services, which includes a replacement cloud infrastructure that was coded by Berry over the course of a couple of weeks...

The team says they've been saving some of the funds received from running the Rebble web services and that they plan to invest $25,000 into a variety of Pebble-centric projects.

America's House of Representatives proposed a new structure for the U.S. Space Force in what's being called "the Starfleet amendment". Space News reports: Before the House passed the so-called "Starfleet" amendment, Space Force officials had been internally debating a new rank structure to set the space branch apart from its parent service the U.S. Air Force. The amendment in the House version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act requires the Space Force to use the Navy's rank structure. The proposal will be debated later this year in a House and Senate conference. The Senate would have to support the amendment for it to become law.
The amendment was introduced by a former Navy SEAL (now a Republican congressman from Texas), the article reports. But more importantly, the amendment "got a prominent endorsement from the Starfleet captain himself, William Shatner." In a special editorial in Military Times, Shatner wrote: It's been captains throughout entertainment history that have gone into space and been the heroes that saved the day, the planet, the galaxy and the universe. Where in any of this rich history of inspired heroes travelling into space was there a...colonel...?

"Star Trek" has borrowed so much of its iconic rank symbols from the U.S. military and NASA. When you unveiled the Space Force logo, many immediately saw it as an homage to "Star Trek" (even though our Delta was an homage to the previous military space insignias). Why not borrow back from "Star Trek" and adopt our ranks as well? We took them from the Navy for good reason, even though Gene Roddenberry was a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps. They made better sense when talking about a (space) ship.

So wrapping this up, I'm going to say that if you want the public to believe in heroes, that you should adopt the Navy ranks as they are the ones the public is most used to being heroes. So please reconsider and name the Space Force ranks after the U.S. Navy.
Space News reports that officials from Space Force "declined to comment on Shatner's article, or on whether his views might carry any weight with lawmakers." But the site's source said there's polarized feelings inside real-world Space Force about the Starfleet amendment.

"Some view the prospect of using naval ranks as an insult that would permanently turn the service into a Star Trek punchline."

Long-time Slashdot readers 93 Escort Wagon and schwit1 both shared the news that U.S. President Trump is "considering" a pardon for Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor who "leaked a trove of secret files in 2013 to news organizations that revealed vast domestic and international surveillance operations" carried out by the agency, according to Reuters: U.S. authorities for years have wanted Snowden returned to the United States to face a criminal trial on espionage charges brought in 2013. Snowden fled the United States and was given asylum in Russia... Trump's softening stance toward Snowden represents a sharp reversal. Shortly after the leaks, Trump expressed hostility toward Snowden, calling him "a spy who should be executed..."

Some civil libertarians have praised Snowden for revealing the extraordinary scope of America's digital espionage operations including domestic spying programs that senior U.S. officials had publicly insisted did not exist. But such a move would horrify many in the U.S. intelligence community, some of whose most important secrets were exposed.
In 2015 a petition with 100,000 signatures was submitted to the U.S. government seeking a pardon. But then-president Obama's Advisor on Homeland Security and Counterterrorism responded that "Mr. Snowden's dangerous decision to steal and disclose classified information had severe consequences for the security of our country and the people who work day in and day out to protect it," also arguing that Mr. Snowden had failed to accept the consequences of his actions. "He should come home to the United States, and be judged by a jury of his peers — not hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime."

In 2016, then-president Obama insisted "I can't pardon somebody who hasn't gone before a court and presented themselves... I think that Mr. Snowden raised some legitimate concerns. How he did it was something that did not follow the procedures and practices of our intelligence community." But the New York Times disagreed. "Snowden told The Washington Post that he did report his misgivings to two superiors at the agency, showing them the volume of data collected by the NSA, and that they took no action," the Times wrote in an editorial pushing for clemency.

Others pushing for a pardon include Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, the American Civil Liberties Union, one million people who eventually signed another petition which was submitted to the White House — and Edward Snowden.

Tim Cook didn't reveal anything new during his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. But emails his company shared with the committee spoke volumes. These internal discussions reveal that what looks like Apple's united front against Right to Repair is really an internal debate, rife with uncertainty. From a report: The New York Times editorial in favor of Right to Repair last April set off a fire alarm inside Apple's public relations team. When Binyamin Appelbaum reached out to research the issue, Apple's VP of communications said in an internal email that "We should get him on the phone with [Apple VP Greg] Joz [Joswiak] or [Senior VP] Phil [Schiller]." That spawned an instant debate. "The larger issue is that our strategy around all of this is unclear. Right now we're talking out of both sides of our mouth and no one is clear on where we're headed."

The emails show the high profile of Right to Repair inside Apple as leaders debate how to respond to a request for comment on an upcoming column. "The piece is using [Senator] Warren's new right to repair for agriculture to talk about the broader right to repair effort and plans to use Apple as a symbol in that fight. We're meeting with everyone shortly about the overall strategy and then I'll connect with [Greg 'Joz' Joswiak]." The email goes on, "Appelbaum has, of course, talked with iFixIt [sic] and others." They're right about that! The conversation resulted in a set of talking points that Kaiann Drance, VP of Marketing, talked through with Appelbaum. Afterwards, Apple PR wrote, "Kaiann did a great job and emphasized the need for a thoughtful approach to repair policy because of how important it is to balance customer safety with access to more convenient repairs." Apple was less convincing than they hoped. The editorial, carrying the weight of the Times' entire Editorial Board, came out forcefully in favor of Right to Repair. Of Apple specifically, the Times remarked, "The company is welcome to persuade people to patronize its own repair facilities, or to buy new iPhones. But there ought to be a law against forcing the issue."

Ubisoft Chief Executive Officer Yves Guillemot said in a statement moments ago that the company faces "a very serious challenge following the recent allegations and accusations of misconduct and inappropriate behavior within our Group. I am determined to make profound changes in order to improve and strengthen our corporate culture." From a report: The company said that a confidential third-party "listening and alert" platform has been put in place for employees to anonymously report inappropriate behavior and that some of team leaders' bonuses will be linked to "their ability to create a positive and inclusive workplace environment." Ubisoft will appoint a head of workplace culture and head of diversity and inclusion who will report to the CEO and the company will start a harassment awareness campaign. Guillemot said he plans to "personally oversee a complete overhaul" of Ubisoft's creative editorial team, in an internal message to employees that was reviewed by Bloomberg News.