Two planeloads of Eastern European farmhands arrived Thursday in Berlin and Duesseldorf amid strict precautions to protect the country from the new coronavirus, as an ambitious German program to import thousands of seasonal agricultural workers got underway. Seasonal workers had been caught up in the country’s ban on travel after the outbreak of the coronavirus. Read more about Germany Flies in Seasonal Farm Workers Amid COVID-19 Efforts – yeah I thought they wanted to keep out the immigrants or something?[…]

A study by economists Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck and Emil Verner suggests that the best way to save your economy is to save your people. The authors looked at the economic impact of the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 on different U.S. cities. They concluded that the earlier, more forcefully and longer cities responded, the Read more about Pandemic Shutdowns Will Help the Economy, Too[…]

Jeffrey Sprecher, the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, sold $3.5 million in stock on February 26, a month after his wife, Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, received a closed-door briefing about the covid-19 threat. According to SEC filings, Sprecher sold $15.3 million more in stock on March 11, at the beginning of the Read more about New York Stock Exchange Chairman Sold Millions in Stock Before Crash and after wife had been briefed about Covid-19 secretly[…]

Senator Richard Burr is a real piece of work. In 2012 he was one of only three Senators to vote against the STOCK Act. This was a law put in place following a 60 Minutes expose about how Congress was getting filthy stinkin’ rich off of insider trading, since Congress was exempt from insider trading Read more about Two Senators Dumped Stock After Being Briefed About COVID-19; While Telling The World Things Were Going To Be Fine[…]

NASA needs 215 more petabytes of storage by the year 2025, and expects Amazon Web Services to provide the bulk of that capacity. However, the space agency didn’t realize this would cost it plenty in cloud egress charges. As in, it will have to pay as scientists download its data. That omission alone has left Read more about NASA to launch 247 petabytes of data into AWS – but forgot about eye-watering cloudy egress costs before lift-off[…]

Electric car company Tesla asked employees to show up to work on Wednesday despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, including at its sprawling Fremont, California, production facility, according to emails obtained by CNBC. […] According to CNBC, in an email to workers on Wednesday, Tesla North America HR leader Valerie Workman wrote the company had received Read more about Tesla Told Employees to Show Up for Work on Wednesday Despite Shelter-in-Place Order[…]

Last month we reported about Tesla’s occasional practice of removing features like Autopilot and Ludicrous mode from used cars after they’d been purchased by people who bought the cars with those features enabled. While Tesla eventually restored the removed features to the subject of the original story, I’ve been in touch with a number of Read more about Tesla’s Removal Of Features On Used Cars Appears To Be In Violation Of Its Own Rules[…]

KPN and VodafoneZiggo do not have to open their networks to third parties. That is what the Board of Appeal for Business has decided today. This means that providers without their own network cannot enforce access to those networks for the provision of services. The ACM had stipulated that KPN and VodafoneZiggo should both open Read more about High Court in NL likes monopolies and destroys cusomter oversight decision to open KPN and VodafoneZiggo networks (copper and cable) to 3rd parties[…]

Research Brief: Ad Tech Fuels Disinformation Sites in Europe – The Numbers and Players The report shows how adverts for high street brands are inadvertently funding some of the most well-known sites for spreading disinformation in Europe. Five companies account for 97% of ad revenues paid to EU disinformation sites: Google, Criteo, OpenX, Taboola and Read more about Fake News sites pull in around $72m over the EU in advertising[…]

With the spreading coronavirus pandemic forcing movie theaters to close, Comcast is breaking with tradition and making a number of new movies available to watch at home. Universal’s “Trolls World Tour” will be the first movie it will simultaneously debut online and in theaters on April 10. Other films that are currently in theaters, like “The Invisible Read more about Universal to release movies online while they are in theaters, starting with ‘Trolls World Tour’[…]

Apple has been hit with a record-breaking fine for antitrust practices. French competition authority Autorité de la Concurrence has found Apple and its wholesale distribution partners Ingram Micro and Tech Data guilty of running a cartel for Apple products, and has fined the companies €1.1 billion ($1.2 billion), €62.9 million ($70.2 million) and €76.1 million Read more about Apple hit with record-breaking $1.2 billion antitrust price fixing fine in France together with Ingram Micro ($79.2m) and Tech Data ($85m)[…]

Apple – which banked $55bn profit in its 2019 fiscal year – is willing to pay up to $500m to settle US claims that the company secretly slowed certain iPhone models to preserve battery life, according to a proposed class action settlement. That’s about 18x more than the i-thing maker agreed to pay a month Read more about Apple pays piffling $500m to settle their performance decreases in old devices[…]

PostNL will raise prices during SinterKlaas, Christmas and Black Friday. They claim that the package post infrastructure is not sufficient to cope with this raise in demand at those periods and so someone – the webshops, the consumers – have to pay for this spike. PostNL increased turnover with 32m to 471m in the last Read more about Dutch package post will raise prices during gift season and Black Friday[…]

An American biz watchdog has stepped up its probe into possible market abuse by Big Tech – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft – by demanding information on all acquisitions not reported to antitrust authorities in the past decade. The FTC issued “special orders” to the big five on Tuesday requesting “the terms, scope, structure, Read more about FTC finally wakes up: American watchdog to probe decade of Big Tech takeovers[…]

Pricing is being tweaked upwards where software is licensed on a per CPU basis. If the chip has more than 32 cores like, say, a 64 core AMD EPYC, then users will need to fork out for two CPU licences. Both AMD and Intel will cheerfully sell punters chips with more than the requisite 32 Read more about VMWare starts pricing more for CPU with > 32 cores[…]

The Mozilla Foundation announced today that it was moving the Thunderbird email client to a new subsidiary named the MZLA Technologies Corporation. Mozilla said that Thunderbird will continue to remain free and open source, but by moving the project away from its foundation into a corporate entity they will be able to monetize the product Read more about Mozilla moves to monetize Thunderbird, transfers project to new subsidiary[…]

Count GE in on the “screw your customers” bandwagon. Twitter user @ShaneMorris tweeted: “My fridge has an RFID chip in the water filter, which means the generic water filter I ordered for $19 doesn’t work. My fridge will literally not dispense ice, or water. I have to pay General Electric $55 for a water filter Read more about GE Fridges Won’t Dispense Ice Or Water Unless Your Water Filter ‘Authenticates’ Via RFID Chip on their rip off expensive water filter[…]

It’s no secret that Opera isn’t doing so well in the era of Chrome dominance. According to a report published by Hindenburg Research, the company’s losses in browser revenue have apparently led it to create multiple loan apps with short payment windows and interest rates of ~365-876%, which are in violation of new Play Store Read more about Opera reportedly has multiple predatory loan apps in the Play Store with interest rates of up to 876%[…]

Amazon has a “bullying” problem. So insisted PopSockets CEO and inventor David Barnett today while describing his company’s relationship with the e-commerce and logistics giant. Barnett was addressing members of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law and, over the course of the hearing, laid out how the Jeff Bezos-helmed corporate behemoth had Read more about PopSockets CEO calls out Amazon’s ‘bullying with a smile’ tactics, shows how monopolies are bad for competition[…]

In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-generating products as the reason for why it needed to take this action. The overall number may still be higher, though, as Mozilla is still looking into how this decision will affect workers in the Read more about Mozilla (Firefox) lays off 70 as it waits for new products to generate revenue[…]