A class action lawsuit filed in Chicago has accused John Deere of running an illegal repair monopoly. The lawsuit alleged that John Deere has used software locks and restricted access to repair documentation and tools, making it very difficult for farmers to fix their own agricultural equipment, a problem that Motherboard has documented for years and that lawmakers, the FTC, and even the Biden administration have acknowledged.
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The situation is so bad that it’s created a boom in the secondary market. Used tractors are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, in part, because they’re easier to repair than modern machines.
Forest River Farms, a farming corporation in North Dakota, filed the recent antitrust lawsuit against John Deere, alleging that “Deere’s network of highly-consolidated independent dealerships is not permitted through their agreements with Deere to provide farmers or repair shops with access to the same software and repair tools the Dealerships have.”
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Last year, President Biden signed an executive order aimed at making it easier for everyone to fix their own stuff. He also directed the FTC to formally adopt a pro right-to-repair platform. Legislation has been introduced in congress that would enshrine the right-to-repair and similar laws are working their way through various statehouses across the country. Microsoft’s shareholders have pressed the company to do more for repair and even Apple is backing away from its monopolistic repair practices.
The alleged 2017 deal between Google and Facebook to kill header bidding, a way for multiple ad exchanges to compete fairly in automated ad auctions, was negotiated by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and endorsed by both Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (now with Meta) and Google CEO Sundar Pichai, according to an updated complaint filed in the Texas-led antitrust lawsuit against Google.
Texas, 14 other US states, and the Commonwealths of Kentucky and Puerto Rico accused Google of unlawfully monopolizing the online ad market and rigging ad auctions in a December, 2020, lawsuit. The plaintiffs subsequently filed an amendment complaint in October, 2021, that includes details previously redacted.
The fortified filing adds additional information about previous revelations and extends the scope of concern to cover in-app advertising in greater detail.
Presently, there are three other US government-backed unfair competition claims against Google ongoing: a federal antitrust lawsuit from the US Justice Department, a challenge from Colorado and 38 other State Attorneys General (filed around the same time as the Texas-led complaint), as well as a competition claim focused on Android and the Google Play Store filed last July.
The third amendment complaint delves into more detail about how Google allegedly worked “to kill header bidding,”
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The deal, referred to as “Jedi Blue” internally and eventually as “Open Bidding” when discussed publicly, allegedly allowed Facebook to win ad auctions even when outbid by competitors.
The third amended complaint explains, “Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer [REDACTED] was explicit that ‘[t]his is a big deal strategically’ in an email thread that included Facebook CEO [REDACTED].
[…]
The expanded filing includes new allegations about how Google used Accelerated Mobile Pages to hinder header bidding.
Google first created Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”), a framework for developing mobile webpages, and made AMP compatible with Google’s ad server but substantially hindered compatibility with header bidding. Specifically, Google made AMP unable to execute JavaScript in the header, which frustrated publishers’ use of header bidding.
[…]
What’s more, the revised filing adds support for the claim that a Google ad program called Dynamic Revenue Share or DRS cheated to help Google win more valuable ad impressions.
“DRS manipulated Google’s exchange fee after soliciting bids in the auction and after peeking at rival exchanges’ bids to win impressions it would have otherwise lost,” the revised complaint says.
And the complaint now contends that Google personnel admitted the unfairness of the DRS system: “Google internally acknowledged that DRS made its auction untruthful: ‘One known issue with the current DRS is that it makes the auction untruthful as we determine the AdX revshare after seeing buyers’ bids and use winner’s bid to price itself (first-pricing)….'”
Apple will grudgingly allow dating app developers in the Netherlands to use alternative payment methods in the App Store, but it doesn’t like it, and the score hasn’t been settled yet.
In an update on its developers’ blog on Friday, Apple said dating app developers will have two new optional “entitlements” in the App Store, which sounds strangely medieval, but OK. Besides using Apple’s in-app payment system—which nearly all developers worldwide are obligated to use, with someexceptions—they will also be able to include an in-app link directing users to their website to make a purchase or use a third-party payment system in the app.
According to Apple, developers can choose only one of the two entitlements and have to request it from Apple. For those who want to continue using Apple’s in-app payment system, where the company takes between a 15% and 30% cut of every purchase, no action is needed.
Thieves operating for the North Korean government made off with almost $400m in digicash last year in a concerted attack to steal and launder as much currency as they could.
A report from blockchain biz Chainalysis found that attackers were going after investment houses and currency exchanges in a bid to purloin funds and send them back to the Glorious Leader’s coffers. They then use mixing software to make masses of micropayments to new wallets, before consolidating them all again into a new account and moving the funds.
Bitcoin used to be a top target but Ether is now the most stolen currency, say the researchers, accounting for 58 per cent of the funds filched. Bitcoin accounted for just 20 per cent, a fall of more than 50 per cent since 2019 – although part of the reason might be that they are now so valuable people are taking more care with them.
Yet another developer of open source software has tired of companies utilizing the code he helps maintain without giving anything back to support the project.
On Tuesday, Christofer Dutz, creator of Apache PLC4X, said he will stop providing community support for the software if corporate users fail to step up and open their wallets.
“The industry seems to like using PLC4X and open-source in general, but doesn’t seem to be willing to support the people working on it,” he wrote in a post to GitHub. “So, I will stop providing free community support for PLC4X.”
Dutz is one of six listed maintainers of Apache PLC4X, a set of libraries for communicating with programmable logic controllers – industry-specific devices involved in the automation of various manufacturing tasks. His demand for support exists outside his involvement with the Apache Foundation; he maintains a separate IT consultancy called c-ware to help companies design and implement PLC4X software to suit their respective businesses.
C-ware has launched several crowdfunding initiatives to adapt Apache PLC4X to Python, Rust, and TypeScript, among other enhancements, but these have barely attracted any funding commitments.
With log4j fresh in memory it’s pretty clear that this widespread use of FOSS without any money going the way of the non-university funded maintainers is not sustainable
The Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust complaint that Facebook, er, Meta operates as a monopoly will be heard by the courts after the US watchdog’s initial lawsuit was dismissed.
In December 2020, the FTC accused Meta of “illegally maintaining its personal social networking (PSN) monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct.” It threatened to break up the mega-corporation and undo its acquisitions Instagram and Whatsapp.
This legal challenge fell flat, however, when judges threw the case out six months later. Evidence supporting the idea it unlawfully dominated social media was said to be lacking though the regulator was given another chance to file an amended lawsuit. A federal judge has now agreed to hear the case this time.
“First, the FTC has now alleged enough facts to plausibly establish that Facebook exercises monopoly power in the market for PSN services,” Judge James Boasberg ruled [PDF] this week.
“Second, it has adequately alleged that the company’s dominant market share is protected by barriers to entry into that market. Third, the agency has also explained that Facebook not only possesses monopoly power, but that it has willfully maintained that power through anticompetitive conduct — specifically, the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.”
The amended lawsuit brings up pretty much the same allegations as the first lawsuit. It claims Meta has been operating as a monopoly for years with Instagram and Whatsapp under its belt, and that it has enforced anticompetitive practices to deter or thwart rivals.
White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has invited major tech firms to discuss ways that the cybersecurity of open-source software can be improved, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.
According to Bloomberg, the tech firms include “major software companies and developers.” Cloud providers are also reportedly among the invited companies.
Anne Neuberger, deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, will reportedly host a one-day discussion in January with representatives of the invited tech companies. The discussion will involve “company officials responsible for open-source projects and security,” according to Reuters.
The White House’s invitation to tech companies comes a few weeks after the discovery of a critical vulnerability in Log4j, a widely used open-source tool. In a letter to the invited tech firms, Sullivan reportedly stated that the popularity of open-source software projects and the fact that they’re maintained by volunteers is a “combination that is a key national security concern, as we are experiencing with the Log4j vulnerability.”
A real problem is that due to rabid insistence by hard core FOSS advocates who are usually tenured at a university and thus have a good salary, Open source maintainers are not really allowed to make any money, whilst uptake and complexity of their software has grown massively, making it an uphill slog maintaining the software for no renumeration whatsoever.
A Russian court fined Alphabet Inc.’s Google 7.2 billion rubles ($98 million) and Meta Platforms Inc. 2 billion rubles Friday for failing to remove banned content, the largest such penalties yet, as the authorities escalate a crackdown on foreign technology companies.
The fines were due to the companies’ repeated failure to comply with orders to take down content and based on a percentage of their annual earnings in Russia, the federal communications watchdog said in a statement. Google and Meta could face more fines if they don’t remove the material, it said.
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The government is also pushing tech companies to comply with its increasingly strict laws on localizing data storage. This year, Google and Apple Inc. removed a protest-voting app from their Russian stores during parliamentary elections after the authorities threatened to imprison their local staff.
Until the latest rulings, however, fines for failure to remove content were generally insignificant. In September, Russia’s federal communications watchdog said companies that did not delete content could face fines of 5% to 20% of their annual local revenue.
Google earned revenues in Russia of about 85 billion rubles in 2020, according to the Spark-Interfax database.
“For some reason, the company fulfills decisions of American and European courts unquestioningly,” Anton Gorelkin, a ruling party deputy in the lower house of parliament who sits on the Information Policy committee, wrote on Telegram after the Google ruling was announced Friday. “If the turnover fine doesn’t bring Google to its senses, I’m afraid that some very unpleasant measures will be taken.”
The Dutch antitrust authority has found that Apple’s rules requiring software developers to use its in-app payment system are anti-competitive and ordered it to make changes, four people familiar with the matter said, in the latest regulatory setback for the iPhone maker.
Apple’s app-store payment policies, in particular its requirement that app developers exclusively use its payment system where commissions range between 15% and 30%, have long drawn complaints from developers.
[…]
The Netherlands’ Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) last month informed the U.S. technology giant of its decision, making it the first antitrust regulator to make a finding the company has abused market power in the app store, though Apple is facing challenges in multiple countries.
ACM has not levied a fine against Apple, but demanded changes to the in-app payment system, the people said. The decision has not been seen by Reuters.
An ACM spokesperson declined to comment, saying that the matter is currently under legal review. The regulator has previously said it expects to publish its decision this year.
Game-making platform and fledgling metaverse Roblox made the news yesterday as the focus of a New York Times report about a ‘90s era tax cut that’s spun out of control. Originally created to foster investment in small businesses, the Qualified Small Business Stock, or Q.S.B.S., exemption has transformed into a way for ultra-wealthy businesses to avoid paying taxes on huge amounts of profits.
I’d say it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it really wasn’t. Launched in 1993, the Qualified Small Business Stock exemption was presented as a means to get more people investing in start-ups by shielding some of a company’s profits from taxation. Originally the exemption meant an investor would be shielded from paying taxes on half of profits up to 10 million dollars, but that was eventually changed to exempt the entire 10 million
[…]
the U.S. tax system for voting into being a loophole-laden exemption that would eventually be so abused that participating in it would be considered a right-of-passage for Silicon Valley’s ultra-wealthy. The problem with the Q.S.B.S. exemption is that it can be cloned. All it takes is gifting stock to friends and family. Though they haven’t invested in the company, they nevertheless still qualify for the exemption, so you can ensure that large chunks of money stay within close orbit of your control without needing to pay taxes on said cash.
According to financial reports and the New York Times’ sources, Roblox founder David Baszucki has been able to multiply the exemption 12 times over, gifting stock to his wife, his four children, and various other relatives. In the fall of 2020, months before Roblox went public, Baszucki’s mother-in-law started giving away shares to relatives. Since they were gifted, those shares also qualified for the exemption. In March of 2021, Robloxwent public, valued at 45 billion.
While this all sounds horrible and super-cheaty, there’s nothing at all illegal about this practice. It has a name, stacking, but is also known as peanut-buttering
Norton antivirus’s inbuilt cryptominer has re-entered the public consciousness after a random Twitter bod expressed annoyance at how difficult it is to uninstall.
The addition of Ncrypt.exe, Norton 360’s signed cryptocurrency-mining binary, to installations of Norton antivirus isn’t new – but it seems to have taken the non-techie world a few months to realise what’s going on.
Back in June, NortonLifeLock, owner of the unloved PC antivirus product, declared it was offering Ethereum mining as part of its antivirus suite. NortonLifeLock’s pitch, as we reported, was that people dabbling in cryptocurrency mining probably weren’t paying attention to security – so what better way than to take up a cryptocurrency miner than installing one from a trusted consumer security brand?
In return for you installing their cryptominer on your home PC, NortonLifeLock skims off a mere 15 per cent of whatever digital currency you generate. While this compares well to the 100 per cent takings that criminals covertly deploying cryptominers help themselves to, some might say it’s a bit excessive for minimal effort on Norton’s part.
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“If you have turned on Norton Crypto, but you no longer want to use the feature, you can disable it through your Norton Crypto dashboard,” says the FAQ on Norton’s website.
Uninstalling it altogether takes a bit more persistence, it appears, with users needing to disable Norton Product Tamper Protection (intended to protect the antivirus product from being disabled or deleted by malware) before going through the usual Windows uninstallation steps.
Norton isn’t alone: last year a maker of Wi-Fi routers offered to mine cryptocurrency on users’ devices if they supplied connectivity to the general public.
Google and Facebook have come a little unstuck in the cookie department as French watchdog Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) slapped the pair with a €150m and €60m fine respectively.
The CNIL kicked off its investigations after receiving complaints regarding the way cookies can be refused on facebook.com, youtube.com and google.fr. The crux of the matter is that while there is a button to permit immediate acceptance of cookies, there is not the equivalent to refuse them as easily. “Several clicks are required to refuse all cookies, against a single one to accept them,” explained the CNIL.
“The restricted committee,” it went on, “considered that this process affects the freedom of consent: since, on the internet, the user expects to be able to quickly consult a website, the fact that they cannot refuse the cookies as easily as they can accept them influences their choice in favor of consent. This constitutes an infringement of Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act.”
Electric- and hydrogen-powered truck startup Nikola has agreed to a $125 million settlement over charges that it defrauded investors after misleading them about its products, technical advances and financial prospects.
Nikola violated the antifraud and disclosure control provisions of the federal securities laws, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday.
In July the founder and one-time chair of Nikola, Trevor Milton, was freed on $100 million bail after pleading not guilty to charges alleging he lied about the company.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, New York, charged Milton, 39, with two counts of securities fraud and wire fraud. He resigned as chairman in September.
The SEC said in its order that Milton embarked on a public-relations campaign aimed at inflating and maintaining Nikola’s stock price before the company had produced a vehicle.
The SEC also found that Milton misled investors about Nikola’s technological advancements, in-house production capabilities, hydrogen production, truck reservations and orders, and financial outlook. In addition, it found that Nikola misled investors by misrepresenting or omitting information about the refueling time of its prototype vehicles, as well as the economic risks and benefits associated with a potential partnership with General Motors.
According to court documents, Ishii switched the transfer address for a Sony Life transaction to use a Silvergate Bank account under his control..
Ishii later converted the stolen funds into more than 3879 bitcoins via A Coinbase set up to automatically transfer all added funds to an offline cryptocurrency cold wallet with a Bitcoin address of bc1q7rhc02dvhmlfu8smywr9mayhdph85jlpf6paqu.
After converting the money to cryptocurrency, Ishii also tried persuading his supervisor and several Sony Life executives not to help investigators by emailing them a ransom note typed in English and Japanese.
“If you accept the settlement, we will return the funds back. If you are going to file criminal charges, it will be impossible to recover the funds,” the note read.
“We might go down behind all of this, but one thing is for sure, you are going to be right there next to us. We strongly recommend to stop communicate (sic) with any third parties including law enforcement.”
Cryptocurrency seized following FBI investigation
However, on December 1, following an investigation in collaboration with Japanese law enforcement authorities, the FBI seized the 3879.16242937 BTC in Ishii’s wallet after obtaining the private key, which made it possible to transfer all the bitcoins to the FBI’s bitcoin wallet.
“Sony and Citibank immediately contacted and cooperated with law enforcement as soon as the theft was detected, and the FBI worked in partnership with both to locate the funds,” explained FBI Special Agent in Charge Suzanne Turner.
“Second, the FBI’s footprint internationally through our Legal Attaché offices and the pre-existing relationships we have established in foreign countries – in this instance with Japan – enabled law enforcement to coordinate and identify the subject.”
Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department arrested the 32-year-old Ishii the same day and criminally charged him on suspicion of obtaining $154 million dollars following fraudulent money transfers from mid-May.
First, come up with a catchy name for a cryptocurrency project. Next, convince the credulous to buy associated digital tokens. Finally, abandon the project and keep investors’ funds.
This “rug pulling” scam lacks sophistication but evidently it works. According to Chainalysis, a blockchain data biz, separating cryptocoin buyers from their money in this manner has become particularly popular in the DeFi (decentralized finance) ecosystem and has contributed to a scam surge.
In a post previewing the company’s 2022 Crypto Crime Report, Chainalysis said scams constituted the largest form of cryptocurrency-based crime, as measured by transaction volume. Cryptocurrency investors – if that’s the right term – lost over $7.7bn worth of digital whatever in 2021.
That’s up 81 per cent from 2020, but 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, was an unusual year. This year was not quite as bad as 2019, which was close to $10bn worth of scams. But there were more scams overall (3,300 in 2021, up from 2,052 in 2020), albeit with shorter lifespans (~70 days in 2021, compared to ~192 in 2020 and to around ~2,369 in 2013).
Take-the-money-and-run gambits should not to be confused with losses attributable to security shortcomings at DeFi services that let hackers steal funds, like the recent theft of some $120m in tokens from BadgerDAO or the $31m taken from MonoX. That’s a separate dumpster fire.
new research detailed in The Wall Street Journal suggests its inequality problems are worse than the United States’ disgraceful performance under the dollar. An incredible feat considering income inequality in 2020 America was the highest of all G7 nations according to data from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development viewed by Pew Research.
That illustration, of a vanishingly small bitcoin financial elite, was revealed in a new National Bureau of Economic Research study written by professors from the MIT Sloan School of Management and London School of Economics. It found that of the 19 million bitcoin currently in circulation, just 0.01% of buyers control around 27% of the total supply. That 27% percent figure amounts to around 5 million bitcoins, which in turn comes out to about $232 billion USD. The top 1% wealthiest U.S. individuals, by comparison, control “only” about a third of all the country’s wealth, the Journal notes.
The professors conducted their research by, for the first time, mapping out and analyzing every single bitcoin transaction over its 13 years of existence.
[…]
there have been experts and academics sounding their own alarm bells around bitcoin’s potential inequality-inducing tendencies. In an interview with CNBC Cornell University, economics professor and author of The Future of Money Eswar Prasad granted cryptocurrencies may make digital payments more accessible but said that doesn’t guarantee any lessening of inequality.
“Because of existing inequalities in digital access and financial literacy, they [cryptocurrencies] could end up worsening inequality,
[…]
Despite all of this, mentions of “decentralization” and “democracy” and “independence” in relation to crypto abound as a new wave of Web3 investors and enthusiasts spend millions locking in NFTs and forming DAOs to make collective purchases.
In the latest hack targeting cryptocurrency investors, hackers stole around $135 million from users of the blockchain gaming company VulcanForge, according to the company.
The hackers stole the private keys to access 96 wallets, siphoning off 4.5 million PYR, which is VulcanForge’s token that can be used across its ecosystem, the company said in a series of tweets on Sunday and Monday. VulcanForge’s main business involves creating games such as VulcanVerse, which it describes as an “MMORPG,” and a card game called Berserk. Both titles, like pretty much all blockchain games, appear chiefly designed as vehicles to buy and sell in-game items linked to NFTs using PYR.
The VulcanForge hack is notable because, like many new tokens, PYR trades on decentralized exchanges. Decentralized exchanges run on smart contracts, and because there’s no centralized order book, investors trade against “liquidity pools” with funds contributed by users who earn a “staking” reward in return. It also means there’s no central authority to blocklist a malicious account trying to cash out stolen funds.
Since the hack, VulcanForge has advised users to remove their liquidity in order to make it difficult or impossible for the attacker to cash out. As The Block reported, the hacker has so far managed to cash out most of the tokens by trading small amounts at a time, although not without sending PYR’s price into a downward spiral due to the sell pressure. On Discord, a bot message has been asking users every half hour: “Anyone that has LP in uniswap or quickswap remove it ASAP.”
Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, became the subject of a federal review this fall after a group of 21 current and former employees co-signed an essay that raised serious questions about the safety of the company’s rockets — including the rocket making headlines for flying Bezos and other celebrities to space.
But that review was hamstrung by a lack of legal protections for whistleblowers in the commercial spaceflight industry, according to emails from Federal Aviation Administration investigators that were obtained by CNN Business.
The FAA also confirmed in a statement Friday that its Blue Origin review is now closed, saying the “FAA investigated the safety allegations made against Blue Origin’s human spaceflight program” and “found no specific safety issues.”
The emails obtained by CNN Business, however, reveal that investigators were not able to speak with any of the engineers who signed the letter anonymously. Investigators also were not able to go to Blue Origin and ask for documents or interviews with current employees or management, according to the FAA.
The situation highlights how commercial spaceflight companies like Blue Origin are operating in a regulatory bubble, insulated from much of the scrutiny other industries are put under. There are no federal whistleblower statues that would protect employees in the commercial space industry if they aid FAA investigators, according to the agency.
Italy’s antitrust authority (AGCM) has fined Amazon €1.13 billion ($1.28 billion) for “abuse of dominant position,” the second penalty it has imposed on Amazon over the last month. Amazon holds a position of “absolute dominance” in the Italian brokerage services market, “which has allowed it to promote its own logistics service, called Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA),” the authority wrote in a (Google translated) press release.
According to the AGCM, companies must use Amazon’s FBA service if they want access to key benefits like the Prime label, which in turn allows them to participate in Black Friday sales and other key events. “Amazon has thus prevented third-party sellers from associating the Prime label with offers not managed with FBA,” it said.
The authority said access to those functions are “crucial” for seller success. It also noted that third-party sellers using FBA are not subject to the same stringent performance requirements as non-FBA sellers. As such, they’re less likely to be suspended from the platform if they fail to meet certain goals. Finally, it noted that sellers using Amazon’s logistics services are discouraged from offering their products on other online platforms, at least to the same extent they do on Amazon.
Spotify took down the work of hundreds of comedians, including big names like John Mulaney, Jim Gaffigan, and Kevin Hart, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. Mulaney, Gaffigan, Hart, and other comedians are represented by Spoken Giants, a global rights company that’s leading the fight to get radio and digital platforms, such as Spotify, SiriusXM, Pandora, and YouTube, to pay comedians royalty payments on the copyright for their written work.
According to the outlet, the streaming giant been in negotiations with Spoken Giants but couldn’t reach an agreement. On Thanksgiving, Spotify informed Spoken Giants that would pull all work by comedians represented by the organization until they could come to an understanding.
[…]
“In music, songwriter royalties are a very basic revenue stream, so this is not an unfamiliar concept and our work is based on established precedents and clear copyright language,” King said. “With this take-down, individual comedians are now being penalized for collectively requesting the same compensation songwriters receive.”
The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched an investigation into whether Tesla failed to tell investors and customers about the fire risks of its faulty solar panels.
Whistleblower and ex-employee, Steven Henkes, accused the company of flouting safety issues in a complaint with the SEC in 2019. He filed a freedom of information request to regulators and asked to see records relating to the case in September, earlier this year. An SEC official declined to hand over documents, and confirmed its probe into the company is still in progress.
[…]
Tesla started selling and installing solar panels after it acquired SolarCity for $2.6bn in 2016. But its goal of becoming a renewable energy company hasn’t been smooth. Several fires have erupted from Tesla’s solar panels installed on the roofs of Walmart stores, Amazon warehouses, and people’s homes.
In fact, Walmart sued the company in 2019 after seven of its supermarkets in the US caught fire. The lawsuit accused Tesla of “utter incompetence or callousness, or both.” Walmart later dropped its claims, and settled the matter privately.
Before Walmart’s lawsuit, however, Steven Henkes, who was employed as a field quality manager by Tesla after the acquisition, said he attempted to raise concerns about fire risks with managers. He claimed in a lawsuit [PDF] filed last year in November that he was wrongfully terminated after he was fired in August, last year. Henkes claimed his concerns about defects in the company’s solar panels and electrical connectors were repeatedly ignored, and after he filed initial whistleblower complaints with the SEC and the US Consumer Protection Safety Commission (CPSC).
Over 60,000 people as well as over 500 commercial consumers could have been potentially affected by fire risks from Tesla’s faulty solar panels, the lawsuit said. Tesla started replacing and reimbursing defective components in 2019, Business Insider reported. The CPSC has also been investigating the company, too. Tesla did not respond to The Register’s questions.
The 2022 World Inequality Report, a huge undertaking coordinated by economic and inequality experts Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, was the product of four years of research and produced an unprecedented data set on just how wealth is distributed.
“The world is marked by a very high level of income inequality and an extreme level of wealth inequality,” the authors wrote.
The data serves as a complete rebuke of the trickle-down economic theory, which posits that cutting taxes on the rich will “trickle down” to those below, with the cuts eventually benefiting everyone. In America, trickle-down was exemplified by President Ronald Reagan’s tax slashes. It’s a theory that persists today, even though most research has shown that 50 years of tax cuts benefits the wealthy and worsens inequality.
[…]
Piketty, who was Zucman’s doctoral adviser, wrote the tome “Capital in the 21st Century” which used an unprecedented data set going back to the French Revolution to expose how centuries of growing wealth inequality was a feature of capitalism, not a bug. The World Inequality Report was his effort to do the same for recent history.
They argue in the new report that the last two decades of wealth data show that “inequality is a political choice, not an inevitability.”
For instance, when it comes to wealth, which accounts for the values of assets people hold, researchers found that the “poorest half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all.” That bottom half owns just 2% of total wealth. That means that the top half of the world holds 98% of the world’s wealth, and that gets even more concentrated the wealthier you get.
Indeed, the richest 10% of the world’s population hold 76%, or two-thirds of all wealth. That means the 517 million people who make up the top hold vastly more than the 2.5 billion who make up the bottom. The world’s policy choices have led to wealth trickling up rather than down.
[…]
Billionaires now hold a 3% share of global wealth, up from 1% in 1995
The report notes that “2020 marked the steepest increase in global billionaires’ share of wealth on record.” Broadly, the number of billionaires rose to a record-number in 2020, with Wealth-X finding that there are now over 3,000 members of the three-comma club.
Ministers have agreed a secrecy clause in any dispute with the drugs manufacturer Pfizer over Britain’s Covid vaccine supply. Large portions of the government’s contracts with the company over the supply of 189m vaccine doses have been redacted and any arbitration proceedings will be kept secret.
The revelation comes as Pfizer is accused by a former senior US health official of “war profiteering’’ during the pandemic. In a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation to be broadcast this week, Tom Frieden, who was director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Barack Obama, said: “If you’re just focusing on maximising your profits and you’re a vaccine manufacturer … you are war profiteering.”
Zain Rizvi, research director at Public Citizen, a US consumer advocacy organisation which has examined Pfizer’s global vaccine contracts, said: “There is a wall of secrecy surrounding these contracts and it’s unacceptable, particularly in a public health crisis.”
Rizvi said the UK needed to explain why it had agreed to secret arbitration proceedings. He said: “It’s the only high-income country we have seen that has agreed to this provision. It allows pharmaceutical companies to bypass domestic legal processes.
“The UK government has allowed the drug firms to call the shots. How did we end up in a situation where a handful of drug firms were able to exert so much control over the most powerful governments in the world? It points to a broken system.”
Pfizer has won plaudits for its vaccine delivery programme, but the US multinational faces growing scrutiny over the scale of its profits and the proportion of doses it has delivered to low-income countries.
While AstraZeneca agreed to sell its vaccine at cost during the pandemic, Pfizer wanted to secure its profits. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which now has the brand name Comirnaty, will be one of the most lucrative drugs in pharmaceutical history.
The Channel 4 investigation reveals analysis by one biological engineering expert claiming the Pfizer vaccine costs just 76p to manufacture for each shot. It is reportedly being sold for £22 a dose to the UK government.
The estimated manufacturing costs do not include research, distribution and other costs, but Pfizer says its profit margin as a percentage before tax are in the “high-20s”. Pfizer expects to deliver 2.3bn vaccines this year with predicted revenues of $36bn (£26.3bn).
One biological engineering expert claims the Pfizer vaccine costs just 76p to manufacture for each shot. Photograph: Rafiq Maqbool/AP
A report last month by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of organisations including aid charities, said Pfizer and other drug firms have sold the majority of doses to rich countries, leaving low-income countries “out in the cold” . Only 2% of people in low-income countries had been fully vaccinated against coronavirus. Drug firms should suspend intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines, tests, treatments and other medical tools.
Pfizer has faced increased scrutiny allegations of excessive global profits after its partner, the biotechnology company BioNTech, announced in September 2020 it was to receive up to €375m (£320m) from the German government to fund vaccine development.
Anna Marriott, Oxfam’s health policy manager said: “It is deplorable that billions of people around the world are being denied vaccines so that pharmaceutical companies can make obscene profits. Given that public investment was crucial to vaccine development, it’s incomprehensible that pharma monopolies are being prioritised over people’s lives.”
As rumored, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has ordered Meta (Facebook) to sell Giphy, saying the deal “could harm social media users and UK advertisers.” It found that the deal would boost Meta’s already prodigious market power by limiting other platforms’ access to Giphy GIFs, “driving more traffic to Facebook owned sites — Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.”
The CMA said that Meta’s sites dominated social media user time to the tune of 73 percent and that it could further muscle out rivals like TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat by leveraging Giphy. It added that prior to the merger, Giphy launched “innovative advertising services” used by brands like Dunkin’ Donuts and Pepsi that it could have brought to the UK.
“Facebook terminated Giphy’s advertising services at the time of the merger, removing an important source of potential competition,” the regulator wrote. “The CMA considers this particularly concerning given that Facebook controls nearly half of the £7 billion display advertising market in the UK.”
SpaceX employees received a nightmare email over the holiday weekend from CEO Elon Musk, warning them of a brewing crisis with its Raptor engine production that, if unsolved, could result in the company’s bankruptcy. The email, obtained by SpaceExplored, CNBC, and The Verge, urged employees to work over the weekend in a desperate attempt to increase production of the engine meant to power its next-generation Starship launch vehicle.
“Unfortunately, the Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago,” Musk reportedly wrote. “As we have dug into the issues following exiting prior senior management, they have unfortunately turned out to be far more severe than was reported. There is no way to sugarcoat this.”
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In his email, Musk advised workers to cut their holiday weekend short and called for an “all hands on deck to recover from what is, quite frankly, a disaster.” Summing up the problem, Musk warned the company could face bankruptcy if it could not get Starship flights running once every two weeks in 2022. If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because Musk has previously spoken publicly about times where both SpaceX and Tesla were on the verge of bankruptcy in their early years. More recently Musk claimed Tesla came within “single digits” of bankruptcy as recent as 2018.
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The alarming news comes near the close of what’s been an otherwise stellar year for SpaceX. In 11 months SpaceX managed to launch 25 successful Falcon 9 missions, sent a dozen astronauts to space and drew a roadmap to mass commercialization with its Starlink satellite internet service.
