Google will reduce the service fee it charges Android developers from 30 per cent to 15 per cent, though only on the first $1m in Google Play revenue.
[…]
Google’s change of heart follows a similarly structured fee abatement by Apple last year and lawsuits filed recently in the US, the UK, and Australia by Epic Games against both Apple and Google over their app store commissions and restrictions.
“Apple and Google demand that game developers use their payment processing service, which charges an exorbitant rate of 30 per cent,” Epic Games said in its announcement of its lawsuit in Australia. “Apple and Google block developers from using more efficient payment methods such as Mastercard (including Apple Card), Visa, and PayPal, which charge rates of 2.5 per cent to 3.5 per cent, and therefore prevent developers from passing the savings on to customers.”
[…]
Google’s Android revenue concession also arrives in the wake of federal and state antitrust lawsuits against the company and iOS app makers banding together to lobby against Apple’s platform limitations. In 2018, the European Union concluded Google had abused its control over the Android platform and fined the company €4.3bn ($5bn) for forcing hardware makers to pre-install Google apps in order to access the Google Play app store.
A PR move – follow the money
Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, dismissed the fee reduction as a public relations ploy.
“It’s a self-serving gambit: the far majority of developers will get this new 15 per cent rate and thus be less inclined to fight, but the far majority of revenue is in apps with the 30 per cent rate,” he said via Twitter. “So Google and Apple can continue to inflate prices and fleece consumers with their app taxes.”
According to app analytics biz Sensor Tower, iOS app makers earnings less than $1m account for 97.5 per cent of publishers but only 4.8 percent of the $59.3bn in the Apple App Store revenue between January 1 and October 31, 2020.
After years of aggressively fighting any efforts to force it to recognize its drivers as employees, on Tuesday Uber performed a U-turn on the streets of Britain and recognized all of its drivers as working for the company rather than serving as freelancers.
The change is the result of a court ruling last month that entitled workers to seek more pay and benefits but resisted classifying them as employees. That decision by the UK’s Supreme Court, making it definitive, was unanimous, and actively rejected Uber’s argument that it was just a technology platform that connected suppliers with customers. The court was having none of that, and decided that since Uber set the prices, connected drivers and passengers, and decided which route the drivers should follow, it was more employer than platform.
The ride-hailing app maker initially downplayed the legal loss, and argued the decision only directly benefited the handful of drivers in that specific case. However, experts pointed out that every other Uber driver in the UK could cite the ruling at a tribunal to demand what was owed to them, and reality has since dawned on Uber.
As such, Uber has complied with the court’s wishes, and said that its 70,000 UK drivers will henceforth be “workers” entitled to a minimum wage – £8.72 ($12.11) an hour – plus vacation pay, and a pension plan. The details are laid out in this filing [PDF] to America’s financial watchdog.
indie developer Jason Rohrer has added a new wrinkle by creating an NFT auction using artwork he commissioned from other people in 2012—long before NFTs were ever created.
NFT is short for “non-fungible token,” a cryptographic token that is, unto itself, one of a kind. NFTs have been tied to images, videos, and even basketball collectibles, with some selling for millions of dollars. The images and videos can exist anywhere—on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, or what have you—and their original creators can still maintain rights to those works. So what people are really paying for is a token that they verifiably own, via blockchain technology. The value of these tokens is derived entirely from artificial scarcity. While NFTs have been around since 2017, they’ve skyrocketed in popularity in recent months, with (mostly) prominent, established artists cashing in on an unregulated speculative market that has attracted wealthy buyers in droves. It is also, as with many things related to the blockchain, an environmental catastrophe that is riddled with scams.
This week, Rohrer, creator of indie standout games like Passage, The Castle Doctrine, and One Hour One Life, debuted an NFT auction called “The Crypto Doctrine.” It’s a Dutch auction, meaning that prices start high and fall over time. It launched with 155 paintings that Rohrer originally commissioned in 2012 for use in The Castle Doctrine, a controversial game about home defense.
“Inside the game world, only one player can own each painting, but paintings can be stolen by other players through in-game burglaries, which are completely legal,” reads The Crypto Doctrine’s description. “In the real world, only one person can own each non-fungible painting token, but tokens can be stolen by other people through real-life burglaries, which are completely illegal. Please acquire your tokens responsibly.”
As of today, there are 145 paintings in the auction. This, Rohrer told Kotaku, is because three artists have gotten in touch with him asking to have their paintings removed, and he has complied.
Artists were surprised to see their works appear in The Crypto Doctrine, and others took umbrage on their behalf in the responses to Rohrer’s tweet about the auction. In an email, Rohrer told Kotaku that he did not ask permission to sell people’s works as NFTs “mostly because having email conversations with 50+ people would exceed my bandwidth as a solo creator.” Rohrer does not believe many of the paintings will sell, though he did say that people have placed bids on two of them. He added that if any works do sell, he will share the resulting windfall with their creators.
Originally, Rohrer obtained these works in 2012 from creators he characterizes as “personal friends and relatives.” For this reason, he says, there were “no written contracts” involved. The page he made requesting artwork at the time informed creators that “your artwork will be auctioned, bought, prized, collected, coveted, stolen, re-stolen, reclaimed by the state, and auctioned again. Over and over, for the effective life of my game.” Granted, this was in reference to in-game actions and auctions—not real-life ones.
When word reached voice actress and writer Ashly Burch, whose work is part of the auction, she had yet to hear of NFTs. After doing some research, however, she was not pleased to learn that her art was being sold in that form.
“I definitely did not consent to him selling the art as an NFT,” she told Kotaku in a DM. “I mean, it was years ago. And the understanding was that it would be a piece of art in the game. That’s it…Definitely did not foresee this particular development.”
“I am not a fan, to put it mildly, but am deeply opposed to the current trend towards artificial scarcity of digital objects, for numerous reasons,” Nealen told Kotaku in an email. “The fact that this selfish, techno-anarchist move is also causing unprecedented environmental damage-in a time when we need the opposite-just solidifies my stance…I couldn’t care less whether Jason ‘claims ownership’ over my (infinitely replicable) digital art. But you can see that, for me, being at all involved with the enormous scam and betrayal of humanity that the blockchain represents, that’s simply a step too far.”
After getting $500 per month for two years without rules on how to spend it, 125 people in California paid off debt, got full-time jobs and reported lower rates of anxiety and depression, according to a study released Wednesday. The program in the Northern California city of Stockton was the highest-profile experiment in the U.S. of a universal basic income, where everyone gets a guaranteed amount per month for free…
Stockton was an ideal place, given its proximity to Silicon Valley and the eagerness of the state’s tech titans to fund the experiment as they grapple with how to prepare for job losses that could come with automation and artificial intelligence. The Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration launched in February 2019, selecting a group of 125 people who lived in census tracts at or below the city’s median household income of $46,033. The program did not use tax dollars, but was financed by private donations, including a nonprofit led by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.
A pair of independent researchers at the University of Tennessee and the University of Pennsylvania reviewed data from the first year of the study, which did not overlap with the pandemic. A second study looking at year two is scheduled to be released next year. When the program started in February 2019, 28% of the people slated to get the free money had full-time jobs. One year later, 40% of those people had full-time jobs. A control group of people who did not get the money saw a 5 percentage point increase in full-time employment over that same time period.
“These numbers were incredible. I hardly believed them myself,” said Stacia West, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee who analyzed the data along with Amy Castro Baker, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Stockton mayor who’d started the program told reporters to “tell your friends, tell your cousins, that guaranteed income did not make people stop working.”
Short sellers lost $664 million on Wednesday as GameStop shares spiked 104% in the final 30 minutes of trading, S3 Partners said.The stock’s 84% intraday gain on Thursday fueled another $1.19 billion in mark-to-market losses.
Uber drivers in the UK should be classified as workers and entitled to both paid vacation time and the minimum wage, according to a ruling Friday by Britain’s Supreme Court. But Uber’s London office is already disputing the scope and relevance of the ruling for its British drivers, insisting that its own rules have changed dramatically since the case was first brought by 25 drivers in 2016.
The UK Supreme Court ruling notes five reasons that Uber drivers should be classified as workers rather than independent entrepreneurs. First, the court pointed out that Uber drivers have no say in the amount charged for each ride—a number set by Uber. If Uber sets the price, how are they not the driver’s real employer?
Second, Uber sets the contract terms between riders and drivers through their app. Third, Uber constrains all drivers in their ability to accept and decline rides at will. Drivers are penalized if they decline too many rides, another point of fact that would make it pretty obvious Uber is an employer who’s holding all the cards in the employment relationship.
Fourth, Uber penalizes or bans drivers who don’t maintain a sufficiently high rating, another act more consistent with an employer-employee relationship. And lastly, Uber restricts the amount of communication between drivers and riders, something that wouldn’t be normalized if Uber drivers were really just working for themselves.
From the UK Supreme Court’s press release on Friday’s ruling:
Taking these factors together, the transportation service performed by drivers and offered to passengers through the Uber app is very tightly defined and controlled by Uber. Drivers are in a position of subordination and dependency in relation to Uber such that they have little or no ability to improve their economic position through professional or entrepreneurial skill. In practice the only way in which they can increase their earnings is by working longer hours while constantly meeting Uber’s measures of performance. The Supreme Court considers that comparisons made by Uber with digital platforms which act as booking agents for hotels and other accommodation and with minicab drivers do not advance its case. The drivers were rightly found to be “workers.”
A judge has ruled that Citibank can’t claw back more than $500m (£360m) it mistakenly paid out after outsourced staff and a senior manager made a nearly billion-dollar (£700m) user-interface blunder.The error occurred on August 11 last year, when Citibank was supposed to wire $7.8m (£5.6m) in interest payments to lenders who are propping up troubled cosmetics giant Revlon. But a worker at outsourcing mega-org Wipro accidentally checked the wrong combination of on-screen boxes, leading to the repayment of not only the interest but also the $894m (£640m) principal from the bank’s funds.Citibank has a “six-eyes” policy on massive money transfers of this type. In the Revlon fiasco, a Wipro worker in India configured the transfer using software called Flexcube, his local manager approved it, and Vincent Fratta – a Citibank senior manager based in Delaware, USA – gave the final OK for the transfer of funds, all believing the settings were correct.Below is a screenshot of the transfer set up by the first Wipro worker. He should have ticked not just the principal field but also the front and fund fields, and set their values to the necessary clearing account number. By leaving those two boxes unchecked and values empty – and wrongly assuming putting the account number in the principal field was a correct move – the entire principal of the loan, which was set to mature in 2023, was handed back to 315 creditors.UIIncomplete … The Flexcube interface for the infamous transfer. Click to enlarge. Source: US courts systemIt wasn’t until the next day that staff noticed the error, and sent out emails asking for the funds be returned – and hundreds of millions of dollars were. However, a group of 10 creditors refused to hand back their share the cash, amounting to more than $500m, leading Citibank to sue them in New York to recover the dosh.This week, the US federal district court judge presiding over that lawsuit sided with the lenders, saying [PDF] they had reasonable grounds to think that the transfer was legitimate and that they had legal grounds to keep their money.angry lego minifig man turns on anxious lego minifig manBarclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a ‘CDN’ for some JavascriptREAD MORE”The non-returning lenders believed, and were justified in believing, that the payments were intentional,” Judge Jesse Furman ruled.”Indeed, to believe otherwise — to believe that Citibank, one of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world, had made a mistake that had never happened before, to the tune of nearly $1bn — would have been borderline irrational.”Since the amount sent back repaid the loaned amounts to the cent and no more, the judge ruled Citibank had no right to reclaim the money.”We are extremely pleased with Judge Furman’s thoughtful, thorough and detailed decision,” Benjamin Finestone, representing two lenders, Brigade and HPS Investment Partners, told CNN.That said, the saga isn’t over yet. The disputed funds are going nowhere, and are held under a temporary restraining order, to give Citibank a chance to challenge the ruling. “We strongly disagree with this decision and intend to appeal,” the mega bank said in a statement. “We believe we are entitled to the funds and will continue to pursue a complete recovery of them.”
Keith Gill, known as ‘Roaring Kitty’ on YouTube, allegedly duped retail investors into buying inflated stocks while hiding his sophisticated financial background.Mr Gill has downplayed his impact and rebutted claims he violated any laws.Separately, he will testify on Thursday to Congress about the “Reddit rally”.”The idea that I used social media to promote GameStop stock to unwitting investors is preposterous,” Mr Gill said in the prepared testimony.”I was abundantly clear that my channel was for educational purposes only, and that my aggressive style of investing was unlikely to be suitable for most folks checking out the channel.” GameStop: What is it and why is it trending? Real Wolf of Wall Street warns of GameStop losses Share buying mistakes ‘on the rise’Mr Gill allegedly bought GameStop shares for $5 (£3.60) and then used social media to drive shares from around $20 in early January to more than $400 in just two weeks.This violated securities laws against manipulating the market, according to the lawsuit filed by Christian Iovin, a Washington state resident who purchased GameStop stock options.Mr Gill said he used publicly available information to determine GameStop was undervalued, and shared this view with a “tiny” following on social media ahead of January’s huge price surge.The lawsuit also names as defendants Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co and its subsidiary MML Investors Services, which employed Mr Gill until 28 January.The company told Massachusetts regulators it was unaware of Mr Gill’s outside activities.Grilling from lawmakersA number of people involved in the so-called “Reddit rally” are due to appear before Congress on Thursday, including Mr Gill.Others called to testify include Wall Street hedge fund Melvin Capital, along with the chief executive of Reddit.media captionGameStop investors on a wild rideThe chief executive of Robinhood, the trading platform that restricted the purchases of GameStop shares to investors during the trading frenzy, is also expected to testify.The GameStop saga was hailed as a victory of the little guys against big Wall Street hedge funds that were betting against video games retailer GameStop and other struggling businesses.But it is unclear what role hedge funds had in the rally as some are reported to have made millions from the GameStop share rally, that was inspired by Reddit users.
The new rules formalise an earlier anti-monopoly draft law released in November and clarify a series of monopolistic practices that regulators plan to crack down on.
The guidelines are expected to put new pressure on the country’s leading internet services, including e-commerce sites such as Alibaba Group’s Taobao and Tmall marketplaces or JD.com. They will also cover payment services like Ant Group’s Alipay or Tencent Holding’s WeChat Pay.
The rules, issued by the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) on its website, bar companies from a range of behaviour, including forcing merchants to choose between the country’s top internet players, a long-time practice in the market.
SAMR said the latest guidelines would “stop monopolistic behaviours in the platform economy and protect fair competition in the market.”
The notice also said it will stop companies from price fixing, restricting technologies and using data and algorithms to manipulate the market.
In a Q&A accompanying the notice, SAMR said reports of internet-related anti-monopoly behaviour had been increasing, and that it was facing challenges regulating the industry.
“The behaviour is more concealed, the use of data, algorithms, platform rules and so on make it more difficult to discover and determine what are monopoly agreements,” it said.
China will set up a new information platform to allow the public to track the emissions of polluting enterprises and help authorities prosecute those that break the rules or try to “evade supervision”, the environment ministry said.
A total of 2.36 million companies, industrial facilities and institutions in China are legally obliged to obtain permits to emit pollutants like sulphur dioxide or wastewater.
But China has struggled to collect the information required to make the system work, and has also faced obstruction and data fraud from some polluting firms.
According to the environment ministry, the new information platform will allow authorities and members of the public to monitor real-time emission levels and check historical data in order to determine whether rules are being breached. It is set to come into effect on March 1.
Late on Wednesday, a moderator of the popular Reddit message board WallStreetBets posted several screenshots on the chat app Discord. They showed that other moderators had quietly started talking among themselves about landing a movie deal.
“What’s our cut?” one of the moderators had asked in a Discord chat, according to the screenshots.
By Thursday morning, that quest for Hollywood riches had exploded into an ugly battle, giving a glimpse into the unruly nature of a suddenly famous Reddit community.
That was when the WallStreetBets moderators who were considering the film deal began booting out other moderators who had questioned them for secretly trying to profit from the forum’s success. Eventually, employees at Reddit weighed in to try to quell the unrest.
“Can you all discuss with me what is going on?” a Reddit employee with the screen name sodypop asked, according to screenshots of the conversation shared with The New York Times.
The WallStreetBets fight is the latest twist in the saga of an online army of investors who have roiled Wall Street over the past 10 days.
[…]
Over the last week, several top moderators, who have administrative control of the message board, met in a private chat room on Discord to discuss the business opportunities arising from their sudden fame.
One moderator said he was in touch with Ben Mezrich, an author of the book that became the movie “The Social Network,” who last week secured deals to write a book and help with a movie about the GameStop saga, according to screenshots from the forum shared with The Times.
“Oof we gotta go fast i think,” another moderator wrote back. “While the studios are competing.”
None of the six moderators The Times interviewed were willing to give their real names, but The Times verified the people were in control of the board’s moderator accounts.
The conversation heated up after Mr. Rogozinski announced that he had sold the rights to his own story to a movie studio this week. Mr. Rogozinski did not respond to requests for comment.
One longtime moderator of the group, known as zjz, saw the conversation and took issue. He posted images of the conversation in a broader chat room for all the moderators.
“We suddenly find out these formerly inactive moderators are trying to *literally* sell the story of how they built the subreddit and undermine us,” zjz wrote in an email to The Times.
In a post to WallStreetBets on Wednesday night, which was quickly removed, zjz also wrote: “We’ve been taken hostage by the top mods. They left for years and came back when they smelled money.”
That led to escalating recriminations and insults that soon went beyond a movie deal. Some began criticizing the top moderators for moves they had made to raise their profile, like creating a Twitter account and hiring a public relations representative. Some also made death threats.
Late Wednesday and early Thursday, the top moderators began removing lower-ranking moderators who were asking questions.
[…]
On Thursday afternoon, Reddit stepped in to remove the top WallStreetBets moderators. They put the moderators who had sided with zjz back in control, though zjz himself was not restored.
Mr. Cormier, who has been unemployed since March when he lost his job in a shop specializing in the game Magic the Gathering, said he was dismayed by the fighting on WallStreetBets.
I was confused, annoyed and sad trying to understand what had happened. I was removed by the senior moderator at r/wallstreetbets who is u/turdled . I messaged him asking for an explanation, but have still not been given one. It was at this same time that several other moderators were removed and getting banned left and right. I had some of my posts removed as well.
I was also starting to receive chat requests and messages from people seeing u/zjz‘s post and asking what was going on, and accusing me of being a rogue/plant mod.
I’ve been looking around the accounts of the mods of the new subreddit and these are indeed the old mods.
NB r/wallstreetbetsnew seems to be the Gamestonk holdout with the memes. r/wallstreetbetstest is where the “real” wsb crowds who aren’t solely obsessed with GME are hanging around.
If you want to know about the dark history and why the founder was kicked out, read here
tl;dr on tl;dr: Founder bad, greedy, got banned for being greedy. Being greedy again with new spotlight on the sub.
tl;dr, in 2020 the original founder (after being gone for years and did nothing to contribute to the sub), along with a couple of mods, attempted to monetize the sub for personal gains. Users and other mods fought back. Hundreds of users got mass banned for speaking out, mods who spoke out got removed as mods. With some help from users, mods found precedent of another sub creator getting banned for trying to monetize a sub and sent plea to Reddit admins. Reddit admins banned offenders and gave sub back to the good mods.
u/SpeaksInBooleans (RIP) investigated the circumstance of the events and made video exposing the offenders:
It’s important to know/remember this now, because the same person that got exiled for being a tyrant is doing a media circus, trying to ride the current spotlight for personal gain, again. Hey CNN and WSJ, stop interviewing that dipshit. The sub has always been about its people, and what you guys wanted to do (as retarded as you are). No single person speaks for the sub and controls its destiny. It is in good hands with u/zjz aka u/SwineFluPandemic
Amazon will pay a $61.7 million fine to settle allegations the company had failed to properly pay out tips to its Flex delivery drivers, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Tuesday. The fine stems from a payment change the company implemented in late 2016. At the time, Amazon said Flex drivers, which use their own cars to deliver packages and groceries for Prime Now and Whole Foods, could earn $18 to $25 per hour, plus tips for their work. That same year, it put into place a new payment policy, which the FTC says Amazon did not properly disclose to drivers, that saw it pay Flex drivers a lower hourly rate. Over a timeframe of two-and-a-half years, it used the tips they earned to make up the difference between the rate it had promised and the one it was actually paying out.
According to the agency, not only did Amazon “intentionally” fail to notify drivers of its policy changes, it actively took steps to obscure them as well and used the tips drivers earned. The entire time it also continued to advertise Flex drivers could earn tips and $18 to $25 per hour. The company only went back to the previous payment model after it became aware of the FTC’s investigation in 2019.
Amazon announced on Tuesday that AWS CEO Andy Jassy will replace Jeff Bezos as CEO during the third quarter of this year. Bezos will transition to executive chair of Amazon’s board. In a statement, Bezos said: I’m excited to announce that this Q3 I’ll transition to Executive Chair of the Amazon Board and Andy Jassy will become CEO. In the Exec Chair role, I intend to focus my energies and attention on new products and early initiatives. Andy is well known inside the company and has been at Amazon almost as long as I have. He will be an outstanding leader, and he has my full confidence. This journey began some 27 years ago. Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. The question I was asked most frequently at that time was, “What’s the internet?” Blessedly, I haven’t had to explain that in a long while. Today, we employ 1.3 million talented, dedicated people, serve hundreds of millions of customers and businesses, and are widely recognized as one of the most successful companies in the world. How did that happen? Invention. Invention is the root of our success. We’ve done crazy things together, and then made them normal. We pioneered customer reviews, 1-Click, personalized recommendations, Prime’s insanely-fast shipping, Just Walk Out shopping, the Climate Pledge, Kindle, Alexa, marketplace, infrastructure cloud computing, Career Choice, and much more. If you get it right, a few years after a surprising invention, the new thing has become normal. People yawn. And that yawn is the greatest compliment an inventor can receive.
Below is from the CNBC website. SLV spiked yesterday and some people will have you believe it’s the Gamestop buying and holding redditors from wallstreetbets that are pushing it. They are not. SLV is being pushed up by Capital Investments, the people the redditors are trying to destroy.
Below is a list of stories from CNBC – explicitly saying that redditors are going after this.
Just search the wallstreetbets subreddit, which is where the GME holders are concentrated
You will see loads of bots with almost no posts mentioning to buy SLV, NOC and others with people deriding them. But the main theme is absolutely to stay away from them and to hold GME, BB and AMC
For a good list of people running the redditors pursuing SLV misinformation (and thus in the pockets of the hedge funds), check out this reddit thread
Many online traders, feeling betrayed by Robinhood’s restrictions, have hit back with critical reviews of the app.
Google has removed tens of thousands of one-star reviews for the widely-used trading app – which had previously had a four-star average.
It says it takes action when it sees “fake ratings”, designed to manipulate a product’s average score.
But more one-star ratings – the minimum possible – have continued to appear.
While Robinhood stopped independent users from buying some shares after the surge in investment by independent traders, they still remained available to large, professional traders elsewhere- leading to accusations that Robinhood was effectively protecting big investors and manipulating the stock market.
Robinhood said that the restrictions were put in place for “risk-management” reasons – and not because it had been told to limit activity by anyone else.
The site reported that more than 100,000 negative reviews had brought the average rating from four stars down to just one.
Hours later, Google intervened to delete roughly 100,000 reviews, according to the review counter, restoring the app’s high rating.
image copyrightGoogle Play
Google rules are designed to prevent so-called “review bombing” – when reviewers co-ordinate to drag down an app’s rating, usually because of some external scandal or political disagreement.
It has not yet responded to requests to comment on its Play Store decision.
‘Unacceptable’
While there had been calls on social media to review Robinhood negatively, many investors feel they have a legitimate grievance.
Some users of the Reddit WallStreetBets community, which is at the centre of the movement, believe they are taking a principled stance against hedge funds short-selling the stocks, hoping the company will fail.
The concern is also reflected by some major US politicians from both parties.
This is unacceptable.
We now need to know more about @RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit.
As a member of the Financial Services Cmte, I’d support a hearing if necessary. https://t.co/4Qyrolgzyt
Democrat congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said Congress should investigate Robinhood, calling the app’s decision to block small traders “unacceptable”.
GameStop’s stock has continued to make big moves, briefly crossing $450 a share on Thursday, fueled by Reddit users collectively taking on the Wall Street establishment. But individual investors looking to make trades have faced multiple issues on trading sites and apps over recent days, with many experiencing service disruptions, according to Bloomberg. The frenzy over GameStop stock has led to TD Ameritrade restricting certain trades, while Robinhood froze any new purchases of particular stocks (GameStop and AMC, among others). It also led to the Wall Street Bets subreddit temporarily getting locked and a Discord server getting shut down for violating terms of service. Watch this: What does GameStop’s skyrocketing stock have to do with…10:15On Thursday morning, Twitter users began posting screenshots of their Robinhood app that showed a message appended to the stocks of GameStop, AMC, Nokia and Bed, Bath and Beyond: “This stock is not supported on Robinhood.”Editors’ top picksSubscribe to CNET Now for the day’s most interesting reviews, news stories and videos.Yes, I also want to receive the CNET Insider newsletter, keeping me up to date with all things CNET.By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time.Robinhood explained the move in a blog post Thursday morning, just before the stock exchanges opened: “In light of recent volatility, we are restricting transactions for certain securities to position closing only, including $AMC, $BB, $BBBY, $EXPR, $GME, $KOSS, $NAKD and $NOK.”The @wsbmod Twitter account (which is tied to the Wall Street Bets subreddit community driving recent trades), responded in a tweet: “Individual investors are being stripped of their ability to trade on [the Robinhood app]. Meanwhile, hedge funds and institutional investors can continue to trade as normal.”
After kicking off a historic rally around GameStop stock that has incited the ire of hedge fund tycoons and the SEC, the r/wallstreetbets channel was banned from Discord on Wednesday over apparent hate speech violations.
While some on Reddit were quick to speculate that the server had been taken down by hackers as part of a covert attempt to disrupt their push to drive the stock’s price higher, a Discord spokesperson told Gizmodo that the channel had been banned “for continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.” On both Discord and Reddit, wallstreetbets users frequently refer to themselves collectively as “retards” and “autists,” and have been known to deploy the kinds of racial slurs and deliberately offensive language that have become commonplace in 4chan-style posting forums.
This is slightly disengenious at the very least. Just saying “shit” somewhere puts you in this category.
Here’s the full statement from Discord:
The server has been on our Trust & Safety team’s radar for some time due to occasional content that violates our Community Guidelines, including hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation. Over the past few months, we have issued multiple warnings to the server admin.
Today, we decided to remove the server and its owner from Discord for continuing to allow hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.
To be clear, we did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks. Discord welcomes a broad variety of personal finance discussions, from investment clubs and day traders to college students and professional financial advisors. We are monitoring this situation and in the event there are allegations of illegal activities, we will cooperate with authorities as appropriate.
Moments after confirmation of the Discord ban surfaced online, the official r/wallstreetbets subreddit was set to private by its moderators, but has since been made public again. In a new post, moderators for r/wallstreetbets argued that the staggering growth of the community in just a few days’ time had made moderating it effectively impossible, and blamed Discord and Reddit’s software for any shortcomings in cracking down on offensive language.
A third class action lawsuit has been filed in Europe against Apple seeking compensation — for what Italy’s Altroconsumo consumer protection agency dubs “planned obsolescence” of a number of iPhone 6 models.The action relates to performance throttling Apple applied several years ago to affected iPhones when the health of the device’s battery had deteriorated — doing so without clearly informing users. It later apologized.The class action suit in Italy is seeking €60 million in compensation — based on at least €60 in average compensation per iPhone owner. Affected devices named in the suit are the iPhone 6, 6s, 6 Plus and 6s Plus, per a press release put out by the umbrella consumer organization Euroconsumers, which counts Altroconsumo as a member.The suit is the third to be filed in the region over the issue — following suits filed in Belgium and Spain last month.A fourth — in Portugal — is slated to be filed shortly.The tech giant settled similar charges in the U.S. last year — where it was accused of intentionally slowing down the performance of older iPhones to encourage customers to buy newer models or fresh batteries — shelling out $500 million, or around $25 per phone, to settle that case (while denying any wrongdoing).“When consumers buy Apple iPhones, they expect sustainable quality products. Unfortunately, that is not what happened with the iPhone 6 series. Not only were consumers defrauded, and did they have to face frustration and financial harm, from an environmental point of view it is also utterly irresponsible,” said Els Bruggeman, Euroconsumers’ head of policy and enforcement, in a statement.
Struggling retailer GameStop’s stock curiously hit an all time high today. But it’s not because Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo suddenly decided to stop selling their games digitally. And it’s not because a new set of Funko Pops has taken the internet’s imagination by storm.
No, the stock price jumped to an all-time high because some institutional investors bet on the company to fail, and a bunch of amateurs on social media decided to call their bluff and try getting rich in the process.
GameStop has struggled to reinvent itself as video games have increasingly gone digital. Now, established investors and Reddit day-traders are going to war over its future, and making the company’s stock price do ridiculous things in the process.
At the beginning of the year, GameStop’s stock was trading at just under $20 a share. In the weeks since, it’s more than tripled in value reaching just over $73 at its highest point today. “GameStop is up 174% in January to date, with its average daily rolling 10-day volatility peaking at the highest level in the nearly two decades the stock has been trading,” Bloomberg reported.
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As Ars Technicareported earlier this week, some investors spent last fall shorting GameStop’s stock, effectively speculating that it was overvalued and would implode, possibly making them a bunch of money in the process.
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Meanwhile, people hanging out on subreddits like Wallstreetbets (self-described as “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal”) and the finance influencer realm of TikTok (nicknamed FinTok) started putting their money behind GameStop’s longevity.
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“[E]ssentially, people on WallStreetBets, along with several YouTube and TikTok investors guessed as long as a year ago that if they bought shares of GameStop at a low price, the short sellers would eventually be forced to cover their short en masse, which would drive the price up,” wrote Vice in another great explainer published this week.
Shorting seemed like a sensible bet considering months of bad news and poor financial reports coming out of GameStop. But then, as Vice pointed out, Reddit finance personalities began musing about how they thought GameStop was actually a great investment opportunity. The logic was based on how many other investors were already short selling it. Just today, CNBC reported that GameStop is “the single most shorted name in the U.S. stock market.”
If someone shorts a stock, i.e. sells it and gives the original owner an IOU, and then that original owner needs the stock back, they need to “cover” the short by buying additional stock. This helps pump up the price of the stock even further, making it more valuable and potentially creating a feedback loop where it just goes up and up and up as everyone scrambles to buy back from the same limited pool of shares.
One of the GameStop short sellers is Andrew Left, called “Wall Street’s Bounty Hunter” by The New York Times because of his reputation for shorting companies he considers weak and following up by publishing research about why the company is going to fail, or, in some cases, alleging outright fraud. Yesterday, Left put out a six and a half minute video on YouTube making his case for why GameStop is doomed. WallStreetBets in turn organized what finance pundit Jim Cramer called “an ambush,” pumping up up GameStop’s stock in a coordinated campaign to “squeeze” Left, forcing him to buy tons of stock of his own to “cover” his position and in turn making their shares worth even more. Jim Cramer is an absolute goon, but if anything fits the bill of “Mad Money” it’s this.
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As with everything on the internet, what may have started as some people trying to (and succeeding at) making a bunch of quick cash has become much more, including a sort of crusade against Left as well as an unlikely source of GameStop fandom.
Earlier this month, GameStop announced Ryan Cohen would be taking a seat on its board. Cohen is formerly the CEO of the pet food website Chewy.com, but he’s already become a golden boy meme in the world of GameStop stocks. Search his name on Twitter and you’ll find people tweeting things like “Papa Cohen will take us all to mars suit up homies it will be a bumpy ride to the [rocket emoji] so u don’t fall off.”
Elastic CEO and co-founder Shay Banon has attacked AWS for what he claims is unacceptable use of the open-source Elasticsearch product and trademark.
Banon’s post is part of the company’s defence of its decision to drop the open-source Apache 2.0 licence for its ElasticSearch and Kibana products and instead use the copyleft SSPL or restrictive Elastic licence – though the plan is to add provisions to mitigate this by having code revert to the Apache 2.0 licence after a period of up to five years.
The new rant makes explicit that the purpose of the licence change is to make it harder for AWS to use Elastic’s code. According to Banon, AWS has been “doing things that we think are just NOT OK since 2015.” Banon said that “we’ve tried every avenue available including going through the courts,” presumably a reference to this lawsuit [PDF], the outcome of which is not yet determined.
Banon wants to prevent “companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us.” The issue is not clear-cut, though, since permissive open-source licences like Apache 2.0 specifically include the right to modify and distribute the product.
Well yes, but the modified bits are supposed to go back into the product, which AWS isn’t doing. They are selling the product and their own addons and not bringing the addons back to the Open Source project and community. Basically they steal the idea and code and then throw more money at it than any FOSS developer can and close that up.
The company has also protected its investment by releasing some features only under the Elastic licence. Elasticsearch is based on Apache Lucene so Elastic itself is vulnerable to accusations of benefiting from open source while now trying to lock down its products for commercial advantage.
And very strange it is that AWS can commercialise but Elasticsearch can’t.
The Elasticsearch trademark is another matter, and Banon also claims that AWS has not been honest with customers about its fork called Open Distro for Elasticsearch, which underlies the Amazon Elasticsearch Service. AWS CTO Werner Vogels announced this on Twitter with a now-deleted tweet calling it “a great partnership between @elastic and AWS.” According to Banon, there was no collaboration.
“Over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists,” Banon said. He also claimed that proprietary features in Elasticsearch are “serving as ‘inspiration’ for Amazon.”
In March 2019, Adrian Cockcroft, Amazon’s VP of cloud architecture strategy, said that the motivation for the Open Distro for Elasticsearch was that “since June 2018, we have witnessed significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base” and complained about “an extreme lack of clarity as to what customers who care about open source are getting and what they can depend on.” According to Cockcroft, AWS offered “significant resources” to support a community version of Elasticsearch but this was refused. “The whole idea of open source is that multiple users and companies can put it to work and everyone can contribute to its improvement,” he said.
So it would nice if AWS actually gave back.
In February 2020, AWS added security features to its Elasticsearch service, in partnership with Floragunn GmbH, whose Search Guard product is a third-party security add-on for Elasticsearch. Floragunn’s product is also subject of litigation [PDF] from Elastic, which claims in the court filing that it is a “knowing and willful infringement of Elastic’s copyright in the source code for Elastic’s X-Pack software.”
Andi Gutmans, VP of analytics and ElastiCache at AWS, said in the same month last year: “We want to make the community aware that AWS performed our own due diligence prior to partnering with Floragunn and found no evidence that Search Guard misappropriated any copyrighted material.” He added that “this kind of behavior is misaligned with the spirit of open source.”
And here come the FOSS fundamentalists
Yestrday, Charlie Hull, co-founder of UK open-source search consultancy Flax, said: “Although Elasticsearch creator Shay Banon is always at pains to point out his personal commitment to ‘open,’ what that means in practice has shifted several times as his company has grown, taken investment and gone public. Elastic’s actions over the years, such as deliberately mixing Apache 2 and Elastic licensed code, have shown it was shifting away from a true open source model.”
According to Hull, Elastic’s new terms are unlikely to affect third-party services that do not directly expose Elasticsearch, such as a library book search. But he did add that “the boundaries of what constitutes a ‘Prohibited SaaS Offering’ are not entirely clear,” and that “those considering Elasticsearch for new projects will have to consider how important they regard the freedoms of a true open source license and perhaps examine alternatives.”
This guy doesn’t code, doesn’t contribute but points people at FOSS products as a ‘consultant’. But he does have an opinion on how people should program for free so he can point them at their products.
Linux developer Drew DeVault said of the licence change: “Elasticsearch belongs to its 1,573 contributors, who retain their copyright, and granted Elastic a license to distribute their work without restriction… Elastic has spit in the face of every single one of 1,573 contributors, and everyone who gave Elastic their trust, loyalty, and patronage. This is an Oracle-level move.”
And another developer who has their salary paid and so doesn’t have to worry about their product being used by everyone on the planet whilst you as programmer of the product are making barely enough to get by whilst working crazy hours and having shit piled on you by self rightous people. It’s a comfortable position to be an idealist from.
I spoke about the problems of FOSS in 2017 and with the importance of the products increasing with the complexity whilst the pay and conditions are miserable makes this still very very relevant
A lengthy antitrust investigation into PC games geo-blocking in the European Union by distribution platform Valve and five games publishers has led to fines totalling €7.8 million (~$9.4 million) after the Commission confirmed today that the bloc’s rules had been breached.The geo-blocking practices investigated since before 2017 concerned around 100 PC video games of different genres, including sports, simulation and action games.In addition to Valve — which has been fined just over €1.6 million — the five sanctioned games publishers are: Bandai Namco (fined €340,000), Capcom (€396,000), Focus Home (€2.8 million), Koch Media (€977,000) and ZeniMax (€1.6 million).The Commission said the fines were reduced by between 10% and 15% owing to cooperation from the companies, with the exception of Valve, which it said chose not to cooperate (a “prohibition Decision” rather than a fine reduction was applied in its case).
In 2017, Facebook said it was testing a new way of selling online advertising that would threaten Google’s control of the digital ad market. But less than two years later, Facebook did an about-face and said it was joining an alliance of companies backing a similar effort by Google.Facebook never said why it pulled back from its project, but evidence presented in an antitrust lawsuit filed by 10 state attorneys general last month indicates that Google had extended to Facebook, its closest rival for digital advertising dollars, a sweetheart deal to be a partner.Details of the agreement, based on documents the Texas attorney general’s office said it had uncovered as part of the multistate suit, were redacted in the complaint filed in federal court in Texas last month. But they were not hidden in a draft version of the complaint reviewed by The New York Times.Executives at six of the more than 20 partners in the alliance told The Times that their agreements with Google did not include many of the same generous terms that Facebook received and that the search giant had handed Facebook a significant advantage over the rest of them.The executives, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their business relationships with Google, also said they had not known that Google had afforded such advantages to Facebook. The clear disparity in how their companies were treated by Google when compared to Facebook has not been previously reported.
Tesla is an oddity in the business landscape. The company’s stock is so stratospheric that Elon Musk has surpassed Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person. Now, we have another mind-blowing metric. At Tesla’s current price-to-earnings ratio, it would take the company almost 1,600 years to make what the stock market says it’s worth.The New Statesman put up a startling comparison. In 2020, Tesla delivered 499,550 vehicles. Yet, its market capitalization shot up to $750 billion dollars. Comparatively, General Motors delivered 2.5 million vehicles in the same year, yet its market value is only $62 billion. Tesla’s price-to-earnings ratio — a comparison of current share price to earnings per share — is roughly 128X (the industry average is 15X), according to Zacks Investment Research. Based on that ratio, it would take Tesla 1,600 years to make the kind of money the stock market says it’s worth.
