Facebook Inc. has rebranded itself, now, as Meta, most likely as a means to separate the corporate identity of the social network that has been tied to a myriad of ugly controversies. The name change is meant to highlight the company’s shift to virtual reality and the metaverse.
CEO Zuckerberg spoke at the Facebook’s Connect virtual conference and commented on the name change, “From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.”
The new name change does not affect the company’s share data or corporate structure, however the company will start trading under the new ticker, MVRS starting December 1.
Needless to say, Twitter comments and memes instantly rolled in after the rebrand announcement:
Facebook has named itself Meta, a word that means "please forget about all the leaked internal documents that are currently showing all the horrors of social media"
According to the SEC, Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had material nonpublic information about coronavirus impact. He and his brother-in-law dumped stock before the market dropped in March 2020.
After Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina dumped more than $1.6 million in stocks in February 2020 a week before the coronavirus market crash, he called his brother-in-law, according to a new Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
They talked for 50 seconds.
Burr, according to the SEC, had material nonpublic information regarding the incoming economic impact of coronavirus.
The very next minute, Burr’s brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth, called his broker.
ProPublica previously reported that Fauth, a member of the National Mediation Board, had dumped stock the same day Burr did. But it was previously unknown that Burr and Fauth spoke that day, and that their contact came just before Fauth began the process of dumping stock himself.
The revelations come as part of an effort by the SEC to force Fauth to comply with a subpoena that the agency said he has stonewalled for more than a year, and which was filed not long after ProPublica’s story.
In the filings, the SEC also revealed that there is an ongoing insider trading investigation into both Burr and Fauth’s trades.
It had previously been reported that federal prosecutors had decided not to charge Burr.
Burr’s spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions. Fauth’s lawyer and the SEC did not respond to questions. Fauth hung up on a ProPublica reporter.
According to the SEC, Fauth has cited a medical condition for why he cannot comply with the subpoena, even as he has been healthy enough to continue his duties at the National Mediation Board. In its filings, the SEC accuses Fauth of engaging in “a relentless battle” to dodge the subpoena.
In 2017, President Donald Trump appointed Fauth to the three-person board, a federal agency that facilitates labor-management relations within the nation’s railroad and airline industries. President Joe Biden reappointed him to the board.
On the day he received the call from Burr, Fauth sold between $97,000 and $280,000 worth of shares in six companies — including several that were hit particularly hard in the market swoon and economic downturn. According to the SEC, the first broker he called after hearing from Burr was out of the office, so he immediately called another broker to execute the trades.
In its filings, the SEC also alleges, for the first time, that Burr had material nonpublic information about the economic impact of the coming coronavirus crisis, based on his role at the time as chairman of the intelligence committee, as a member of the health committee and through former staffers who were directing key aspects of the government response to the virus.
The week after the trades, the market began its crash, falling by more than 30% in the subsequent month.
Burr came under scrutiny after ProPublica reported that he sold off a significant percentage of his stocks shortly before the market tanked, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions. The precise amount of his stock sales, more than $1.6 million, is also a new detail from this week’s SEC filings. In his roles on the intelligence and health committees, Burr had access to the government’s most highly classified information about threats to America’s security and public health concerns.
Before his sell-off, Burr had assured the public that the federal government was well prepared to handle the virus. In a Feb. 7 op-ed that he co-authored with another senator, he said “the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus.”
That month, however, according to a recording obtained by NPR, Burr had given a VIP group at an exclusive social club a much more dire preview of the economic impact of the coronavirus, warning it could curtail business travel, cause schools to be closed and result in the military mobilizing to compensate for overwhelmed hospitals.
Burr defended his actions, saying he relied solely on public information, including CNBC reports, to inform his trades and did not rely on information he obtained as a senator.
Alice Fisher, Burr’s attorney, told ProPublica at the time that “Sen. Burr participated in the stock market based on public information and he did not coordinate his decision to trade on Feb. 13 with Mr. Fauth.”
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
The US News And World Report proclaimed the Mediterranean diet the top rated and best overall diet for 2019 and 2020 among the total 41 other popular diets evaluated by a panel of experts in diet, health and nutrition.
A lot of us have been spending much more time at home due to the isolation safety measures and business restrictions due to COVID-19. If you’re like me – that also means you’re eating much more than usual too (easy and fast access to the kitchen, right?). If you are looking for a change in your eating plan that is also heart-healthy, the Mediterranean diet might be right for you.
The diet traditionally has been meant for foods, flavors and cooking methods that are available and readily utilized in the countries that surround the Mediterranean Sea. There isn’t an exact meal plan or recipe that can pinpoint or pay homage to that which is “The Mediterranean Diet”, however most meals are known to be rich in fruits and vegetables, whole grains, beans and nuts, with olive oil used as the primary source of fat.
Meals are therefore more plant-based rather than meat-based; red meat is not eaten often and very infrequent if so, instead, seafood and poultry serve as principal protein sources, and even so in moderation. Dairy of cheese and yogurt are also often eaten daily. Even wine is customary in moderate amounts with each meal.
Mediterranean diet consists of very minimal if any processed foods, utilizing fresh and locally grown sources that are in season, this could be seen as a stark contrast to some of the more Westernize meals where there is access to heavily processed, “fast foods” and imported goods. The Mediterranean diet does leave room for indulgence, so a little piece of cake, or soda isn’t off the table, however the key is in the moderation.
The options for meals are plentiful and never boring, since the emphasis is on fresh, your plate will always be booming with color.
Implementing any type of food program is one parts eating the right foods, but also a big part on one’s mentality and attitude. This isn’t a type of diet where calories have to be counted, nor is overly restrictive in what you can or cannot eat, which can be extremely important for longevity and the desire to keep up healthy eating habits.
There is also a lifestyle element attached to the Mediterranean “diet” that is also strongly associated with all the mental and physical benefits. First, this includes having an active lifestyle, walking is central with many Mediterraneans’, however any daily physical activity will do. In addition, creating social interactions with other is also core, this can mean having a family dinner, or meeting with friends and using meals as an occasion to share and engage with others.
Eat fruits and vegetables daily
Use olive oil for healthy fats
Eat fish and poultry or beans and eggs versus red meat
Incorporate whole grains
Reduce sugar intake
Drink wine instead of beer or other liquor
Add spices to add extra flavor to any dish without the need for too much salt
The Complete Mediterranean Cookbook
Bring the Mediterranean–from Italy and Greece, to Morocco and Egypt, to Turkey and Lebanon–into your kitchen with more than 500 fresh, flavorful recipes. This comprehensive cookbook translates the famously healthy Mediterranean diet for home cooks with a wide range of creative recipes, many fast enough to be made on a weeknight, using ingredients available at your local supermarket.
The structure of the book follows the guidelines of the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid. You’ll find large chapters devoted to Beans and to Vegetables, the Seafood Chapter is larger than Poultry and Meat, and the Fruits and Sweets chapter, while shorter, is packed with recipes you can truly feel good eating.
Recipes include Spiced Baked Rice with Potatoes and Fennel, Tagliatelle with Artichokes and Parmesan, Orzo with Shrimp, Feta, and Lemon, Za’atar-Rubbed Chicken, Greek-Style Braised Pork with Leeks, and Orange Polenta Cake. Also Available on Amazon.
We have all experienced how, in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, it can be very challenging to break away from convenience. When it comes to products and services, many large companies utilize fast, cheap, and easily disposable single-use containers made from plastic.
Sodas bottles are plastic, baristas serve coffee in plastic cups with plastic caps and straws, fast food restaurants prepare orders in single use wrappers with plastic containers for condiments, and the list can go on and on. These products are used and then discarded.
Single use plastic items, as the name indicates, are used only once, yet plastic breaks down extremely slow, with some forms taking hundreds of years to degrade as shown in the tweet below from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF):
Zero Waste as explained by Waste Management, is a philosophy that aims for resources to be reused, recycled or composted, in order to allow for very little to “zero” trash to be sent to landfills or spill into the ocean.
Clearly this issue is important, and getting more so, therefore should be considered a high priority – the reality is that huge amounts of plastic garbage does end up in the ocean and dumped in landfills. This dire state of affairs continues to jeopardize ocean and wildlife as well as our own health.
The organization Eco-Cycle Solutions urges the need for a complete change to our current system. With dwindling natural resources, a compromised ecosystem, and major changes in climate already evident today and with likely more on the way, there is no way the Earth can sustain for much longer and survive for future generations.
The obvious need for large-scale changes at the corporate level, regarding plastic usage, is clear, but we also need to ask ourselves: what can be done on an individual scale?
Here are a few products that can be swapped-out and used instead of single and disposable use options:
Bamboo Toothbrush – both brush and bristles can be composted when time to replace
Lunchbox – making meals at home instead of eating out eliminates containers and can also be an opportunity to eat healthier
Water and Coffee Bottles (aluminum, glass or BPA free bottle) – can be refilled endlessly
Metal or Glass Straws – sturdier than the plastic counterpart and can be used over and over
Shopping Bags (canvas or other fabric) – can be used to carry groceries or any purchases
Cloth Napkins – for drying hands or wiping up around the house
“Using more sustainable products offers many benefits: saving money, eating healthier, all while creating a smaller ecological footprint in the world. While all are positive steps, most importantly, these small individual acts can ultimately help in the fight for the survival of future generations.”
While it may be impossible to free us of all waste, with effort and change, not necessarily perfection (decades of waste cannot be eliminated by a short term solution), small steps can lead to a better tomorrow.
Meet the researchers making science more sustainable.
The lab is quietly bustling with scientists intent on their work. One gestures to an item on her bench – a yellow container, about the size of a novel. It’s almost full to the brim with used plastic pipette tips – the disposable attachments that stop pipettes being cross-contaminated. She stares down at it, despondently. “And this is just from today.”
We’re at the Francis Crick Institute, a towering biomedical research facility in the heart of London. The scientist in question is Marta Rodriguez Martinez, a Postdoctoral Training Fellow. Every day in her lab, pipette tips, petri dishes, bottles and more are used and discarded. The scale of the waste is immense – research by the University of Exeter estimates that labs worldwide generate 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste each year.
Newsletter:
Alongside her research, Rodriguez Martinez doubles as a sustainability rep, tirelessly working to reduce the plastic waste her lab produces. The Crick’s sustainability team consult her about the unique behaviours of scientists. In return, she encourages colleagues to stop using unnecessary plastic and teaches them about sustainable alternatives.
It’s a difficult task, but one she feels passionate about. “We have in our heads that plastic is a one-use material, but it is not. Plastic can be autoclaved, it can be washed. Most plastics we use in the lab could be re-used as efficiently as glass.”
The Crick is taking behaviour change seriously. Alongside reps like Rodriguez Martinez, it offers sustainability workshops and waste training to employees. A pipette-tip audit is underway, which will show which products come with the lowest excess plastic. It’s also developing an interactive dashboard for teams to see how their waste compares to other labs’.
But behaviour change is only the beginning. Rodrigo Ponce-Ortuño oversees the Crick’s contract with an eco-friendly waste-management company. He points out that the journey of plastic lab equipment stretches far beyond its short service on the workbench.
Take media bottles – the plastic containers that hold nutrients to grow cells and bacteria. “It’s just glucose that goes into the bottles,” Ponce-Ortuño explains. The liquid is non-hazardous, but in his experience, recycling companies are wary of the scientific jargon on the labelling.
“If it just said sugar, it would be fine,” he says. Instead, many companies reject the waste because they don’t understand the chemistry. But, by using contractors with the right expertise, the Crick now sends all its media bottles for recycling.
For Rodriguez Martinez, this is a milestone. “I use maybe four media bottles a week, and there are 1,200 scientists here. That we can rinse them and have a contractor recycle them is a big success.”
This tactic – of building companies’ confidence in handling lab equipment – has led to other successes, too. Cooling gel packs, polystyrene boxes and the bulky pallets used to transport products are all collected for re-use. Boxes for pipette tips are also collected – after they’ve been stacked and re-used in the labs themselves.
In fact, the Crick’s labs send no waste at all to landfill. Hazardous waste is safely incinerated, but anything else that can’t be recycled goes through a process called energy-from-waste, where electricity, heat or fuel is harvested from the material as it’s disposed of.
And they’re just as keen to reduce the amount of plastic coming in. The institute recently held a green procurement fair, where suppliers had to meet a set of sustainability criteria to attend. “Normally when you buy a product, you look at the quality and the price,” says Rodriguez Martinez. “We want to add sustainability to that equation.”
The team know that change won’t happen overnight. They need to win people over with practical measures to reduce plastics – without reducing the quality of science. So the institute is discussing best practice with other laboratories, to grow the movement for low-plastic research.
“We’re trying to educate people into a more sustainable science,” says Rodriguez Martinez.
Wellcome, which publishes Mosaic, is one of the six founding partners of the Francis Crick Institute.
The lab is quietly bustling with scientists intent on their work. One gestures to an item on her bench – a yellow container, about the size of a novel. It’s almost full to the brim with used plastic pipette tips – the disposable attachments that stop pipettes being cross-contaminated. She stares down at it, despondently. “And this is just from today.”
We’re at the Francis Crick Institute, a towering biomedical research facility in the heart of London. The scientist in question is Marta Rodriguez Martinez, a Postdoctoral Training Fellow. Every day in her lab, pipette tips, petri dishes, bottles and more are used and discarded. The scale of the waste is immense – research by the University of Exeter estimates that labs worldwide generate 5.5 million tonnes of plastic waste each year. Newsletter:
Alongside her research, Rodriguez Martinez doubles as a sustainability rep, tirelessly working to reduce the plastic waste her lab produces. The Crick’s sustainability team consult her about the unique behaviours of scientists. In return, she encourages colleagues to stop using unnecessary plastic and teaches them about sustainable alternatives.
It’s a difficult task, but one she feels passionate about. “We have in our heads that plastic is a one-use material, but it is not. Plastic can be autoclaved, it can be washed. Most plastics we use in the lab could be re-used as efficiently as glass.”
The Crick is taking behaviour change seriously. Alongside reps like Rodriguez Martinez, it offers sustainability workshops and waste training to employees. A pipette-tip audit is underway, which will show which products come with the lowest excess plastic. It’s also developing an interactive dashboard for teams to see how their waste compares to other labs’.
But behaviour change is only the beginning. Rodrigo Ponce-Ortuño oversees the Crick’s contract with an eco-friendly waste-management company. He points out that the journey of plastic lab equipment stretches far beyond its short service on the workbench.
Take media bottles – the plastic containers that hold nutrients to grow cells and bacteria. “It’s just glucose that goes into the bottles,” Ponce-Ortuño explains. The liquid is non-hazardous, but in his experience, recycling companies are wary of the scientific jargon on the labelling.
“If it just said sugar, it would be fine,” he says. Instead, many companies reject the waste because they don’t understand the chemistry. But, by using contractors with the right expertise, the Crick now sends all its media bottles for recycling.
For Rodriguez Martinez, this is a milestone. “I use maybe four media bottles a week, and there are 1,200 scientists here. That we can rinse them and have a contractor recycle them is a big success.”
This tactic – of building companies’ confidence in handling lab equipment – has led to other successes, too. Cooling gel packs, polystyrene boxes and the bulky pallets used to transport products are all collected for re-use. Boxes for pipette tips are also collected – after they’ve been stacked and re-used in the labs themselves.
In fact, the Crick’s labs send no waste at all to landfill. Hazardous waste is safely incinerated, but anything else that can’t be recycled goes through a process called energy-from-waste, where electricity, heat or fuel is harvested from the material as it’s disposed of.
And they’re just as keen to reduce the amount of plastic coming in. The institute recently held a green procurement fair, where suppliers had to meet a set of sustainability criteria to attend. “Normally when you buy a product, you look at the quality and the price,” says Rodriguez Martinez. “We want to add sustainability to that equation.”
The team know that change won’t happen overnight. They need to win people over with practical measures to reduce plastics – without reducing the quality of science. So the institute is discussing best practice with other laboratories, to grow the movement for low-plastic research.
“We’re trying to educate people into a more sustainable science,” says Rodriguez Martinez.
Wellcome, which publishes Mosaic, is one of the six founding partners of the Francis Crick Institute.
This article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0).
The Verge interview with Adobe’s CPO, has mega details
In a new, extensive, Verge interview podcast with Adobe’s CPO, Scott Belsky, a a ‘Prepare as NFT’ system launch for Photoshop was confirmed for the end of the month.
The idea is to maintain a kind of proof of originality system to help prevent fake NFTs (minting non-fungible tokens) from being minted and sold by imposters. The final choice is in the buyers hands at this stage, but having a way for creators to prove authenticity would be a big step.
Since this week Adobe is also holding its annual conference, called Adobe Max, there are also a bunch of new features arriving for Creative Cloud and a slew of app including Photoshop.
Big news! We've partnered up with @Adobe and @ContentAuth to enhance attribution of NFTs on Rarible. 🔎 Now collectors can see if the wallet used to design an NFT was the same one used to mint it as part of the Content Authenticity Initiative (#CAI) – https://t.co/EnWOAilv5g
Intersecting worlds collide with Adobe in them all…
Adobe has been around, amazingly, since 1982, and millions of digital creatives and content creators use their products.
Photoshop is so entrenched that it has long achieved verb status: if you want to enhance a photo, for example to enlarge your backside or smooth out your skin, just “photoshop it”. And over use is derided as a “photoshopped” persona or image.
Premiere Pro and After Effects, especially the latter, get a lot of pro and semi-pro use for video production. Many, many Pro photographers use Lightroom. The upgrade system for Adobe products and the creative cloud, such as the recent AI and neural engine assisted effects drive change and upgrades at a furious pace.
With the entire content, image and video creation industry becoming more and more vital to networked human communications, tracing and verifying authorship and authenticity are becoming more and more crucial.
Adobe is moving, with caution due to the issues that could arise, into the area on multiple fronts. As per the Verge article;
“With what Adobe is calling Content Credentials, creators will be able to link their Adobe ID with their crypto wallet and mint their work with participating NFT marketplaces. The software company says the feature should be compatible with popular NFT marketplaces including OpenSea, KnownOrigin, SuperRare, and Rarible. A ‘verified certificate’ that comes with minting an NFT with Photoshop’s Content Credentials will prove that the source of the art is authentic.”
“Climate change is no longer a future problem. It is a now problem,” said the UNEP executive director. “The clock is ticking loudly.”
Countries’ current climate pledges put the world “on track for a catastrophic global temperature rise” of about 2.7°C, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned Tuesday, calling a new report released ahead of a key summit “another thundering wake-up call.”
“The era of half-measures and hollow promises must end.”
The Emissions Gap Report 2021, an annual assessment from the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP), comes as world leaders prepare to meet in Glasgow, Scotland on Sunday for COP 26. They are set to discuss efforts to meet the Paris climate agreement, which aims to keep global temperature rise this century “well below” 2°C, preferably limiting it to 1.5°C.
However, countries’ latest Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), along with other commitments made for 2030, suggest the international community will blow past both of those targets without more ambitious action to slash emissions, according to the UNEP report.
🌡️ The Heat Is On. 🚨 The clock is ticking loudly. ⚠️ To stand a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, we have just 8 years to almost halve greenhouse gas emissions.
“The emissions gap is the result of a leadership gap,” Guterres declared in his Tuesday address, noting that the report “shows that countries are squandering a massive opportunity to invest Covid-19 fiscal and recovery resources in sustainable, cost-saving, planet-saving ways.”
“Scientists are clear on the facts. Now leaders need to be just as clear in their actions,” he said. “They need to come to Glasgow with bold, time-bound, front-loaded plans to reach net-zero.”
“To decarbonize every sector—from power, to transport, farming, and forestry. To phase out coal,” the U.N. chief continued. “To end subsidies for fossil fuels and polluting industries. To put a price on carbon, and to channel that back to creating green jobs. And obviously, to provide at least $100 billion each year to the developing world for climate finance.”
“Leaders can still make this a turning point to a greener future instead of a tipping point to climate catastrophe,” said Guterres. “The era of half-measures and hollow promises must end.”
Various assessments released before the summit in Scotland have underscored the necessity of bold and immediate action, including the latestfrom the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as the World Meteorological Organization’s announcement Monday that carbon dioxide concentrations in 2020 hit levels not seen for roughly three million years.
Reflecting “a world of climate promises not yet delivered,” the new UNEP report also serves as a call to action, particularly for rich nations most responsible for the climate emergency.
The report details how parties to the Paris agreement have put forth “insufficient” climate plans. The NDCs for 2030, if continued throughout this century, would still lead to a global temperature rise of 2.7°C beyond pre-industrial levels. Achieving nations’ net-zero pledges “would improve the situation, limiting warming to about 2.2°C” by 2100.
However, Group of 20 (G20) nations—the world’s top economies—”do not have policies in place to achieve even the NDCs,” the report says, and making changes to meet the 2030 commitments would not be enough to put countries on a “clear path towards net-zero.”
The latest @UNEP#EmissionsGap Report finds new and updated Nationally Determined Contributions only take 7.5% off predicted 2030 emissions compared to previous commitments. Reductions of 30% are needed to stay on the least-cost pathway for 2°C and 55% for 1.5°C. (3/n) pic.twitter.com/cO1GyWozku
Meanwhile, this year “thousands of people have been killed or displaced and economic losses are measured in the trillions,” the report highlights, pointing to “extreme weather events around the world—including flooding, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, and heatwaves.”
As Inger Andersen, executive director of UNEP, put it: “Climate change is no longer a future problem. It is a now problem.”
“To stand a chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, we have eight years to almost halve greenhouse gas emissions: eight years to make the plans, put in place the policies, implement them and ultimately deliver the cuts,” Andersen said. “The clock is ticking loudly.”
“The world has to wake up to the imminent peril we face as a species,” she added, calling on countries to urgently implement policies to meet existing commitments. “It is also essential to deliver financial and technological support to developing nations—so that they can both adapt to the impacts of climate change already here and set out on a low-emissions growth path.”
The report factors in new or updated NDCs from 121 parties, responsible for just over half of planet-heating emissions, submitted by the end of September as well as pledges from China, Japan, and South Korea—though countries continue to put forward plans in the lead-up to the summit.
Alok Sharma, incoming COP 26 president, noted Tuesday that previous analyses projected “commitments made in Paris would have capped the rise in temperature to below 4°C.”
“So there has been progress, but not enough,” he said, referencing the new report. “That is why we especially need the biggest emitters, the G20 nations, to come forward with stronger commitments to 2030 if we are to keep 1.5°C in reach over this critical decade.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by JESSICA CORBETT and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
“Institutions around the world must step up now and commit to joining the divest-invest movement before it is too late—for them, for the economy, and for the world.”
Over the past decade, nearly 1,500 investors and institutions controlling almost $40 trillion in assets have committed to divesting from fossil fuels—a remarkable achievement that climate campaigners applauded Tuesday, while warning that further commitments and action remain crucial.
“Divestment has helped rub much of the shine off what was once the planet’s dominant industry. If money talks, $40 trillion makes a lot of noise.”
“Amidst a depressing era in the race against climate change—with killer fires and titanic storms, political stalemate, and corporate greenwashing—the fossil fuel divestment movement is a source for tremendous optimism,” states a new report—entitledInvest-Divest 2021: A Decade of Progress Toward a Just Climate Future—published Tuesday.
“Ten years in, the divestment movement has grown to become a major global influence on energy policy,” the publication continues. “There are now 1,485 institutions publicly committed to at least some form of fossil fuel divestment, representing an enormous $39.2 trillion of assets under management. That’s as if the two biggest economies in the world, the United States and China, combined, chose to divest from fossil fuels.”
The paper—a joint effort between the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Stand.earth, C40, and the Wallace Global Fund—comes on the eve of the United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow, and notes that the divestment movement “has grown so large that it is now helping hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the true cost of their unregulated carbon pollution.”
🚨 Today a new report “Invest-Divest '21: A Decade of Progress Towards a Just Climate Future”. Divestment of €33,7 trillion (!) from fossil fuels, this is more than the economies of the U.S. & China combined. A game-changing new milestone! ➡️https://t.co/j8ISxNUwgw (1/2) #COP26pic.twitter.com/URV3KDfOiD
Since the movement’s first summary report in 2014, the amount of total assets publicly committed to divestment has grown by over 75,000%. The number of institutional commitments to divestment has grown by 720% in that time, including a 49% increase in just the three years since the movement’s most recent report. The true amount of money being pulled out from fossil fuels is almost certainly larger since not all divestment commitments are made public.
The movement has now expanded far beyond its origins as a student-driven effort on college campuses. Divestment campaigners now target cities, states, foundations, banks, investment firms, and any player who participates in the global investment pool.
“Major new divestment commitments from iconic institutions have arrived in a rush over just a few months in late 2021,” the report notes, “including Harvard University, Dutch and Canadian pension fund giants PME and CDPQ, French public bank La Banque Postale, the U.S. city of Baltimore, and the Ford and MacArthur Foundations.”
Underscoring the paper’s assertion, ABP, Europe’s largest pension fund announced Tuesday that it would stop investing in fossil fuel producers.
“Divestment remains a critical strategy for the climate movement,” the publication states. “It must be combined with an accelerated push for investment in a just transition to a clean, renewable energy future if the world is to avoid a future of worsening human injustice and irreversible ecological damage. Financial arguments against divest-invest no longer hold water.”
Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate action group 350.org, wrote in a Tuesday New York Times op-ed that “divestment has helped rub much of the shine off what was once the planet’s dominant industry. If money talks, $40 trillion makes a lot of noise.”
“This movement will keep growing, and keep depriving Big Oil of both its social license and its access to easy capital,” McKibben said in a separate statement introducing the new report.
Huge new report today: Divestment commitments have now hit $39.42 trillion, or more than the combined GDP of US and China. Such thanks to the millions of people who made this happenhttps://t.co/pI0YFmAw93
The report’s authors contend that institutional investors must agree to three principles “if they want to be on the right side of history and humanity”:
Immediately and publicly commit to fully divesting from and stopping all financing of coal, oil, and gas companies and assets;
Immediately invest at least 5% of their assets in climate solutions, doubling to 10% by 2030—including investments in renewable energy systems, universal energy access, and a just transition for communities and workers—while holding companies accountable to respecting Indigenous and other human rights and environmental standards; and
Adopting net-zero plans that both immediately cut investments in fossil fuels and ensure that all other assets in their portfolio develop transition plans that reduce absolute emissions by 50% before 2030.
“Institutional investors everywhere are beginning to come to terms with the danger that fossil fuels pose to their investment portfolios, their communities, and their constituencies,” the report states. “This realization is important but it is not enough. Institutions around the world must step up now and commit to joining the divest-invest movement before it is too late—for them, for the economy, and for the world.”
“Societies, economies, and the climate are all changing,” the paper concludes. “The financial world will have to change with them.”
We went wild when we got our first divestment commitment: Unity College’s $13.5 million endowment.
The idea that the movement has now grown to 1,485 institutions representing $39.2 TRILLION is mind-blowing. https://t.co/mTFxihBKBl
Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and CEO of Hip Hop Caucus, said in a statement that “the climate crisis is here, and so are climate solutions. We know communities of color are disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis here in the U.S. and across the world. In order to create a just future, we must divest from fossil fuels and invest in communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis.”
“It is not enough to divest from only some fossil fuels or with only some of your portfolio—all investors must immediately divest all fossil fuels from all of their portfolio, while investing in climate solutions.”
Yearwood added that “over 10 years the divest-invest movement has become one of the most powerful global forces in a just transition to a clean energy future.”
Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund, said that “the activist-driven divestment movement has yielded unprecedented and historic results in moving tens of trillions of dollars out of the industry driving the climate crises and exposing its failing business model.”
“But investors need to do more,” she argued. “It is not enough to divest from only some fossil fuels or with only some of your portfolio—all investors must immediately divest all fossil fuels from all of their portfolio, while investing in climate solutions with at least 5% of their portfolios, scaling to 10% rapidly.”
“Mission investors have a unique role to play to ensure the energy transition is a just one and that all people have access to safe, clean and affordable energy by 2030,” Dorsey added. “To do anything less does not address the scale or pace of this climate crisis.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
As ProPublica has reported, cybercriminals are flooding the internet with fake job ads and even bogus company hiring websites whose purpose is to steal your identity and use it to commit fraud. It’s a good reminder that you should vet potential employers as closely as they vet you.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Here are ten tips on how to spot such scams:
1. Beware of abnormally high salaries
One of the ways criminals entice people is by advertising unusually generous pay. If the salary being offered in a job ad is way above what you see in other ads for similar positions, be wary. You can get an idea of average weekly earnings by industry using the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages or check out salary calculators on websites such as Glassdoor.
2. Don’t accept jobs you didn’t apply for
Sometimes cybercriminals obtain the contact information of people who have submitted their résumés to job-seeking websites and then email them to say they are preapproved for a job. These are bogus messages whose main purpose is to get people to share additional information, which the scammers will use to commit fraud. The emails may also include malware that can infect your computer. Ignore such messages and don’t open any attachments.
3. Be wary of job ads touting the need to verify your identity at the outset
Ads that demand you share your driver’s license or Social Security number as part of an initial application, or very soon after, are a significant red flag. Legitimate employers rarely request such information until much later in the hiring process.
4. Take the text of the job ad and put it in Google
Cybercriminals sometimes reuse the same job ads over and over, posting them on LinkedIn, Facebook and other online platforms with only slight modifications. If you spot an ad that features virtually identical language to that used by various employers all over the country, it could be a scam.
5. Research the identity of the person posting the ad
Cybercriminals are creating fake profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook meant to resemble individuals at real companies who are posting job ads. One clue: a person claiming to work for a company in the U.S. while showing check-ins at locations in other countries. When in doubt, contact the companies directly to ask if they’re actually recruiting for the positions. If they’re not, report the suspect profiles to LinkedIn and Facebook.
6. Check the spelling and domains of company names
When you vet companies, be aware that cybercriminals sometimes steer potential applicants to fake websites they’ve created that mimic the sites of real companies — except that, say, an extra letter has been added to the company’s name. When job applicants can’t spell a company’s name right in a cover letter, recruiters are apt to toss those applications in the trash. Do the same with any companies that seemingly can’t spell their own names.
7. Avoid text-only interviews
The pandemic has made it necessary for many employers to conduct job interviews remotely via services like Zoom. But be cautious of hiring managers who insist on communicating only by email or text or using messaging platforms such as Telegram to conduct interviews. Sooner or later, a real employer will want to see and interact with a recruit, whether through a video call or in person. Cybercriminals typically don’t want you to hear their voices or see their faces, since it raises the chances you’ll realize they’re not who they say they are.
8. Don’t give out your credit card or phone account login
A real employer doesn’t need to know your credit card number, credit score or phone account login to process your job application. Cybercriminals sometimes ask for such information up front to commandeer your phone and finances, often under the pretense of needing to set you up with a company phone plan or purchase equipment you’ll need to do your job (see next item).
9. Don’t buy things on behalf of a potential employer
Beware of companies that, before you’re hired, offer to send you a check to purchase a computer or other equipment. It’s a variation on an old scam that involves criminals asking marks to send their own money to some third party with the promise that they will reimburse the marks. Inevitably, the reimbursement doesn’t come through, and the mark is left holding the bag.
10. If something feels suspicious, investigate — or walk away
If at any point in the job application or interview stage something feels wrong to you, don’t ignore the feeling. Ask yourself if you see any of the warning signs outlined above. Or pause and ask a trusted friend or relative for a reality check.
“Oil and gas executives have lied to the American people for decades about their industry’s role in causing climate change. It’s time they were held accountable.”
Democratic leaders on the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee sent letters Thursday inviting the heads of key fossil fuel companies and lobbying groups to testify before the panel about the industry’s contributions to climate disinformation in recent decades.
Applauded by advocates of holding polluters and their business partners accountable for fueling the worsening climate emergency, the letters come amid concerns about how corporate lobbyists may influence a bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better package—especially in the wake of a damning exposé on ExxonMobil earlier this summer.
Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who respectively chair the House panel and its Environment Subcommittee, wrote that “we are deeply concerned that the fossil fuel industry has reaped massive profits for decades while contributing to climate change that is devastating American communities, costing taxpayers billions of dollars, and ravaging the natural world.”
“We are also concerned that to protect those profits, the industry has reportedly led a coordinated effort to spread disinformation to mislead the public and prevent crucial action to address climate change,” the pair continued.
They also expressed concern that such “strategies of obfuscation and distraction continue today,” noting that “fossil fuel companies increasingly outsource lobbying to trade groups, obscuring their own roles in disinformation efforts.”
“One of Congress’s top legislative priorities is combating the increasingly urgent crisis of a changing climate,” the lawmakers added. “To do this, Congress must address pollution caused by the fossil fuel industry and curb troubling business practices that lead to disinformation on these issues.”
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, BP America CEO David Lawler, Chevron CEO Michael Wirth, Shell president Gretchen Watkins, American Petroleum Institute (API) president Mike Sommers, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Suzanne Clark (pdfs) now have a week to inform Democrats if they plan to willingly testify at the panel’s October 28 hearing.
This is a historic opportunity to do something about the damage the fossil fuel industry has done to our planet and our health and I intend to make the most of it.
Pointing to industry leaders’ past behavior, Accountable.US president Kyle Herrig said that “these polluters have long proven they’re more concerned with boosting their executives’ bottom lines than with protecting the climate. The only question is: will they defend their harmful actions before Congress? Or will they again refuse to answer to the American people?”
The Democrats also requested information from the firms, including internal communications and memos about climate science and related marketing as well as plans to reduce planet-heating emissions across the industry. If the letter recipients refuse to participate or turn over those materials, the panel’s leaders may issue subpoenas.
Richard Wiles, executive director of the Center for Climate Integrity, celebrated the letters in a statement that acknowledged other efforts to hold the industry accountable, including more than two dozen lawsuits filed by state and local governments in recent years.
“We applaud Chairs Maloney and Khanna for demanding that these executives answer for their history of climate deception,” he said. “Oil and gas executives have lied to the American people for decades about their industry’s role in causing climate change. It’s time they were held accountable. If the executives refuse to testify voluntarily, they should be subpoenaed.”
In a video released earlier this month, Khanna vowed that the panel’s probe of the fossil fuel industry’s role in climate disinformation “will be like the Big Tobacco hearings” of the 1990s.
Harvard University researcher Geoffrey Supran—whose academic publications include the first peer-reviewed analysis of ExxonMobil’s 40-year history of climate communications—said at the time that “it’s no surprise that Big Oil and Big Tobacco have used the same propaganda playbook to confuse the public and undermine political action, because they rely on many of the same PR firms and advertising agencies to do their dirty work.”
Ad and PR agencies are under mounting pressure to ditch fossil fuel clients for good, thanks in part to the Clean Creatives campaign supported by Fossil Free Media, both of which welcomed the letters.
YES! I think this is a landmark day in the climate fight.
These sorts of hearings ended Big Tobacco's stranglehold over our political process. They need to do the same for Big Oil.
“This is a landmark day in the climate fight,” said Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn, noting the impact of the tobacco hearings. “For decades, the fossil fuel industry has polluted our political process along with polluting our atmosphere. Exposing the industry’s disinformation is a critical step in holding it accountable for the damage it has done and clearing the way for meaningful change.”
Clean Creatives campaign director Duncan Meisel suggested that “this investigation is the beginning of the end of misleading fossil fuel advertising and PR in the United States.”
“For too long, this industry has used fake front groups, advanced greenwashing, and straight up deception to delay climate action, every time with the willing help of some of the biggest ad and PR firms in the world,” he said. “Reps. Khanna and Maloney are following in the footsteps of congressional investigations that devastated the reputations of tobacco companies and their advertisers. Fossil fuel companies and their agencies are now on notice that they are next.”
Finally: the whole package – and a convenient way to prove vaccination status
Now that the iOS 15.1 update is available for the general public featuring the ability to add your proof of vaccination status to the Health app and then create a vaccination ID card in Apple Wallet.
Many businesses, venues, restaurants, and more are requiring proof of vaccination for entry. For example California is the first state where proof of COVID vaccination or negative test for indoor events over 1,000 people.
The new feature in iOS 15.1 is made possible by the support Smart Health Cards which are valid for California, Louisiana, New York, Virginia, Hawaii, and some Maryland counties, as do Walmart, Sam’s Club, and CVS Health.
Above: ID in iPhone Wallet
Therefore, using this system you would be able to to look up their information in state databases, if you are in any of the states listed above, but if you were vaccinated through at Walmart or CVS it will also be feasible to add your information to the Health and Wallet.
Once you have gone to the web site for your state, for example in California it would be found at https://myvaccinerecord.cdph.ca.gov where you can type in personal information such as name and date of birth to get access to your records and status.
Though iOS 15 already had the ability to download the information to your Health app, and you could do that since the official launch of iOS 15, the last step, adding an ID to your wallet from the health app has not been possible until the new upgrade to iOS 15.1.
The record is locked to your name and can only be used by you. There will be a QR code that you will first download to your health app on the iPhone, then, once it is in the health app there will be a prompt to allow you to “add to wallet”. By clicking that link a vaccination ID car, with the QR code will be generated and added to your wallet.
iOS 15.1 is available under > General > software update in your phone’s Settings app starting today.
Tap the download link on your iPhone or iPod touch.
Tap Add to Health to add the record to the Health app.
Tap Done.
Once the ID is in the health app a button / prompt appears “add to wallet”.
Small businesses and individuals say that in order to sell their products online in the U.S., they have to be on Amazon and—given the millions of products on its virtual shelves at any moment—they have to get a high ranking from Amazon’s product search engine or buy sponsored listings.
Amazon transitioned from digital retailer to sales platform in 2000, when it took a page from eBay and started allowing individuals and companies to sell through its website. This led to explosive sales growth (though the company reported only small profits overall, choosing to reinvest its profits for most of its existence). Amazon encouraged these “third-party sellers” with add-on services like storage, shipping, and advertising. Third-party sellers now account for 58 percent of sales on Amazon.
Even as sellers saw their revenues grow, they started to suspect that Amazon was using their nonpublic sales information to stock and sell similar products, often for less money.
Indeed, Amazon has been investing in creating products sold under its own brand names since at least 2007. Since 2017, it has dramatically expanded its catalog of private-label brands (which are trademarked by Amazon and its partners) and its list of exclusive products (developed by third-party companies who agree to sell them only on Amazon). The company refers to both as “our brands” in various parts of its website.
We found that Amazon has now registered trademarks for more than 150 private-label brands, and market research firm TJI Research estimated the number of brands developed by others but sold exclusively on Amazon.com at 598 in 2019. Some of its house brand names signal to buyers that they are part of the company—such as Amazon Basics, Amazon Essentials, and Amazon Commercial.
But hundreds of others carry labels that do not clearly indicate that they belong to the online retail giant—including Goodthreads, Lark & Ro, Austin Mill, Whole Paws, Afterthought, Truity, find., Fetch, Mr. Beams, Happy Belly, Mama Bear, Wag, Solimo, and The Portland Plaid Co.
Amazon says it sold $3 billion in private-label goods in 2019, representing just one percent of sales on the platform, but does not specify which brands are included in that estimate. Analysts with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey estimated that Amazon sold five times as much, $15.6 billion of private-label goods in 2019, including brands owned by Whole Foods, and that the figure will reach $31 billion by 2022.
The result is that sellers now not only compete against each other for placement in Amazon search results but also increasingly against Amazon’s own in-house brands and exclusives. According to a to a 2021 report by JungleScout, 50 percent of sellers say Amazon’s products directly compete with theirs.
We sought to investigate how Amazon treats its own products in search results. These are proprietary devices, private labels, and exclusive-to-Amazon brands it considers “our brands.”
To do so, we started by developing a list of 3,492 popular product searches, ran those searches on desktop (without logging in), and analyzed the first page of results.
We found that in searches that contained Amazon brand and exclusive products, the company routinely put them first, above those from competing brands with better ratings and more reviews on Amazon.
Furthermore, we trained supervised machine learning classifiers and found that being an Amazon brand or exclusive was a significantly more important factor in being selected by Amazon for the number one spot than star ratings (a proxy for quality), review quantity (a proxy for sales volume), and any of the other four factors we tested. We did not analyze the potential effect of price on ranking because unit sizes were not standard, affecting price. In addition, similar products can vary by factors that affect price, such as materials and workmanship, for which we also could not control.
Importantly, we found that knowing only whether a product was an Amazon brand or not could predict whether the product got the top spot 70 percent of the time.
In a nationally representative survey we commissioned, only 17 percent of respondents said they expect the determining factor behind whether Amazon places a product first is whether it owns the brand. About half (49 percent) said they thought the products Amazon placed in the number one spot were the best-selling, best-rated, or had the lowest price. The remaining 33 percent said they didn’t know how Amazon ranked products.
We found that Amazon disproportionately placed its own products in the top search result. Despite making up only 5.8 percent of products in our sample, Amazon gave its own products and exclusives the number one spot 19.5 percent of the time overall. By comparison, competing brands (those that are not Amazon brands or exclusive products) were given the number one spot at a nearly identical rate but comprised more than 13 times as many products at 76.9 percent.
Most of the Amazon brand and exclusive products that the company put in the number one spot, but not all—83.9 percent—were labeled “featured from our brands” and carried the phrase “sponsored result” in the source code (as well as being part of a grid labeled “search results” in the source code). They were not marked “sponsored” to shoppers.
In a short, written statement, Amazon spokesperson Nell Rona said that the company does not favor its brands in search results and that it considers “featured from our brands” listings as “merchandising placements” and not “search results,” despite their presence in the search results grid. Rona said these listings are not advertisements, and declined to answer dozens of other questions.
Overall, 37.4 percent of Amazon brand or exclusive products in search results in our sample were neither labeled as “our brands” nor carried a name widely associated with the company, such as AmazonBasics or Whole Foods. That left buyers unaware that they were buying an Amazon brand or exclusive-to-Amazon product.
Nearly nine-in-10 U.S. adults who responded to our survey were unable to identify Amazon’s highest-selling private label brands (Pinzon, Solimo, and Goodthreads), and only 51 percent were aware that Whole Foods is an Amazon-owned brand.
Rona said Amazon identifies its products by including the words “Amazon brand” on the products page, among a list of the item’s features, and sometimes in the listing title. We only found this to be the case in 23 percent of products in our sample that were Amazon-owned brands.
Comparing product pages three months apart, we found that they were less dynamic than they used to be. The default seller among products with multiple merchants only changed in 23.5 percent of products in our data. This was significantly less often than a comparable study from five years ago.
Background
Amazon and third-party sellers have a tense symbiosis. Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos has acknowledged the importance of sellers to the company’s bottom line but also calls them competitors. Amazon provides shipping, inventory management, and other services, he wrote, that “helped independent sellers compete against our first-party business” to begin with. Sellers say Amazon’s fees cut deep into their margins but they can’t get the same volume of sales anywhere else.
Antitrust regulators in Europe, Asia, and North America have been examining Amazon’s treatment of third-party sellers.
The European Commission announced an antitrust investigation in 2019, alleging Amazon used third-party seller data to inform its own sales decisions. The commission also announced a separate investigation in 2020 into whether Amazon gives preference to its own listings and to third-party sellers that use its shipping services over other sellers. Last year, India’s antitrust regulator announced an investigation into alleged anti-competitive practices by Amazon, including preferential treatment for some sellers. And in June 2021, U.S. lawmakers introduced the American Choice and Innovation Online Act, which prohibits large platforms from advantaging themselves in their own marketplaces or using nonpublic data generated by business conducted on their platform. Authorities in Germany and Canada are investigating Amazon’s selling conditions for third-party sellers, and the attorney general for Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit in May 2021 that accuses Amazon of overly restrictive requirements for third-party sellers.
Also last year, U.S. lawmakers pressed Bezos on his treatment of third-party sellers during a congressional hearing that was part of an antitrust investigation into the four major tech companies. Rep. Lucy McBath, a Democrat from Georgia, told Bezos, “We’ve interviewed many small businesses, and they use the words like ‘bullying,’ ‘fear,’ and ‘panic’ to describe their relationship with Amazon.” The resulting report produced by the subcommittee indicated Amazon was well aware of its power over third-party sellers, citing an internal Amazon document that “suggests the company can increase fees to third-party sellers without concern for them switching to another marketplace.”
Journalists and researchers have documented instances of Amazon promoting its house brands over competitors’. In 2016, Capitol Forum, a subscription news service focused on antitrust issues, examined hundreds of listings and found that Amazon “prioritizes its own clothing brands on the promotional carousel labeled ‘Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought’ ” on product pages. Capitol Forum said Amazon did not respond to its request for comment.
A study titled “When the Umpire is also a Player: Bias in Private Label Product Recommendations on E-commerce Marketplaces,” presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in March 2021, examined how Amazon’s private-label brands performed in “related products” recommendations on product pages for backpacks and batteries. The researchers said they found that “sponsored recommendations are significantly more biased toward Amazon private label products compared to organic recommendations.”
In June 2020, ProPublica reported that Amazon was reserving the top spot in search results for its own brands across dozens of search terms, labeling it “featured from our brands” and shutting others out. An Amazon spokesperson told ProPublica at the time that the move was a “normal part of retail that’s happened for decades.”
Our investigation is the first study to use thousands of search queries to test how Amazon’s house brands rank in search results—and to use machine learning classifiers to determine whether sales or quality appeared to be predictive of which products Amazon placed first in search results.
In addition, we used a multipronged approach to identify Amazon house brands and exclusives, building a data set of 137,428 unique products on Amazon, which is available in our GitHub. We were unable to find any such publicly accessible dataset when we began our investigation.
Methodology: Data Collection
Sourcing Product Search Queries
To measure how Amazon’s search engine ranked Amazon’s own products relative to competing brands, we needed a list of common queries that reflect what real people search. We built the dataset from top searches from U.S. e-commerce retailers, using two sources.
The first was autocomplete queries on Amazon.com’s and Walmart.com’s product search bars. We cycled through each letter of the alphabet (A–Z) as well as numbers ranging from 0 to 19 and saved the suggested search queries presented by the autocomplete algorithm. This process yielded 7,696 queries from Amazon.com and 3,806 queries from Walmart.com.
We then gathered the most popular searches reported by Amazon via its Seller Central hub. We collected the top 300 searches between Q1 and Q3 2020 for the Amazon categories “Softlines,” “Grocery,” “Automotive,” “Toys,” “Office Products,” “Beauty,” “Baby,” “Electronics,” and “Amazon.com.” This provided 2,700 unique searches.
Combining the autocomplete queries and seller-central queries resulted in 11,342 unique “top search” queries.
Collecting Search Results
We created a Firefox desktop emulator using Selenium. The emulator visited Amazon.com and made each of the 11,342 searches on Jan. 21, 2021. The search emulator was forwarded through IP addresses in a single location, Washington, D.C., in order to reduce variation in search results (which typically vary by location).
We saved a screenshot of the first page of search results as well as the HTML source code. (Examples of screenshots and source code for search results are available on GitHub.)
In the source code of product search result pages, Amazon titles some listings with the data field “s-search-result.” This is what we are calling search results in our data. Amazon does serve other products on the search results page in advertising and other promotional carousels, including “editorial picks” and “top rated from our brands,” but those do not appear in every result (at most a third of our sample), and they are not part of the grid that Amazon labels search results.
On desktop, the majority of Amazon-labeled “search results” in our data were delivered in uniform 60-product positions (four per column for 15 rows, though Amazon narrows the width to three columns on smaller screens). Some searches returned fewer than 60 products, but none returned more. A minority (about one in 10) of searches in our data returned 22 products or fewer, delivered in a single column, one item per row. This happened for some electronics searches but never in other search categories.
Because we were seeking to analyze how Amazon ranks its own products relative to competing brands’ products, we further limited our analysis to search results that contained Amazon brands and exclusives on the first page. Of the 11,342 top searches, slightly less than three in 10 (30.8 percent) contained this type of product on the first page. We used the resulting 3,492 top searches for our analysis.
Identifying Amazon’s Brands and Exclusives
We were unable to find a public database of Amazon brand and exclusive products, so we had to build one.
We started with the search pages themselves. On many (but not all), Amazon provides a filter on the left-hand side, allowing shoppers to limit the search to “our brands,” which Amazon says lists only its private label products and “a curated selection of brands exclusively sold on Amazon.”
We collected each of those “our brand” results for each query, saving a screenshot and the source code, also on Jan. 21, 2021.
We then discovered an undocumented API that yields all Amazon “our brands” products for any given search. We ran all 11,342 search terms through this API and saved those responses as well. (API responses are available on GitHub.)
Both the search emulator and API requests were forwarded through IP addresses in Washington, D.C.
Strangely, Amazon does not identify proprietary electronics, including Kindle readers and Ring doorbells, when a shopper filters a search result to list only Amazon’s “our brands.” To identify those, we also gathered products Amazon listed as best sellers in the category “Amazon Devices & Accessories.”
Together, all three sources yielded a dataset of 137,428 unique products, identified by their 10-character ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). This dataset of Amazon’s proprietary devices, private label, and exclusive products is available on GitHub.
It is the largest and most comprehensive open access dataset of Amazon brand and Amazon-exclusive products we’ve seen, and yet we know it is not complete. Amazon told Congress in July 2019 that at that time it sold approximately 158,000 products from its own brands.
Collecting Product Pages
In addition to the above, we collected the individual product pages for the 125,769 products that appeared in the first page of our 3,492 top searches in order to analyze the buy box information. The buy box displays the price, return policy, default seller, and default shipper for a product.
To gather the product pages, we used Amazon Web Services and the same Selenium emulator we made for collecting the search result pages. The emulator visited the hyperlink for each product and saved a screenshot and the source code.
We collected these pages on Feb. 3–6 and Feb. 17–18, a few weeks after we scraped the search result pages. To determine the effects of the delay, we analyzed how often a subsample of buy boxes’ default sellers and shippers flipped between Amazon and third parties after a similar lag and found they remained largely unchanged (see more in Limitations).
Product Characteristics
We asked up to four questions of every product listing in order to identify certain characteristics and used this to produce the categories we used in our analysis.
is_sponsored: Is the listing a paid placement?
is_amazon: Is the listing for an Amazon brand or exclusive?
is_shipped_by_amazon: Does the default seller of the product (the “buy box”) use Amazon to ship the listed product?
is_sold_by_amazon: Is the default seller of the product Amazon?
Sponsored products (is_sponsored) are the most straightforward: Amazon labels them “sponsored.” If a product in the Amazon-labeled search results is not sponsored, we consider it “organic.” We only identified products with subsequent features if they were organic.
We identified an organic product as an Amazon brand or exclusive (is_amazon) when it matched one of the 137,428 Amazon ASINs we collected. If it didn’t match, we considered it a “competing brand.”
We identified a product as is_amazon_sold if the “sold by” text in the buy box contained “Amazon,” “Whole Foods,” or “Zappos” (which is owned by Amazon). If it didn’t, we identified the product as “Third-Party Sold.”
We identified a product as is_amazon_shipped if the buy box shipper information contained “Amazon” (including “Amazon Prime,” “Amazon Fresh,” and “Fulfilled by Amazon”), “Whole Foods,” or “Zappos” (which is owned by Amazon). If it didn’t contain Amazon, we identified products as “Third-Party Shipped.”
We use these features to train and evaluate predictive classifiers (see Random Forest Analysis) as well as produce product categories in our ranking analysis (see the following section).
Most of the categories have a direct relationship with the features they are named after.
We categorized products as “Sponsored” if we identified them as is_sponsored. Similarly, we categorized products as “Amazon Brands” and exclusives if they are organic and is_amazon, and “Competing Brands” if the products are organic and not is_amazon.
We categorized organic products as entirely “Unaffiliated” if they did not meet the criteria for is_amazon, is_amazon_sold, and is_amazon_shipped. In other words, these are competing brands that are sold and shipped by third-party sellers.
The features and categories we identified are hierarchical and overlap. Their relationships are summarized in the diagram below.
Data Analysis
Ranking Analysis: Who Comes Out on Top?
We analyzed the rate of products that received the top search result relative to the proportion of products of the same category that appeared in our sample. We found that Amazon brands and exclusives were disproportionately given the number one search result relative to their small proportion among all products.
We used two straightforward measures for our analysis. First, we calculated a population metric using the percentage of products belonging to each category among products from all the search pages. To do this, we divided the number of products per category that occupy search result slots compared to all product slots in our sample. This included duplicates.
We then calculated an incidence rate for how frequently Amazon gave products in each category the coveted first spot in search results. We did this by dividing the number of searches in each category in the top spot by the total number of searches in our sample (with at least one product). (A table of each of these metrics by category appears in our GitHub and in “Supplementary datasets.”)
We chose to focus on that top left spot because Amazon changes the number of items across the first row based on screen size, and some searches return only a single item per row, so the top left spot is the only one to remain the same across all search results in our data.
In a majority of the searches in our data, 59.7 percent, Amazon sold the top spot to a sponsored product (17.3 percent of all product slots). The bulk of our analysis concerns the remaining 40.3 percent.
When we looked at all searches, Amazon gave its own products the number one spot 19.5 percent of the time even though this category made up only 5.8 percent of products in our sample.
Amazon gave competing brands the number one spot at a nearly identical rate (20.8 percent of the time), but these cover more than 13 times the proportion of products in our sample (76.9 percent).
Amazon gave entirely unaffiliated products (competing brands that were sold and shipped by third-party sellers) the top spot 4.2 percent of the time, but these products made up 5.8 percent of all products in our sample.
The only organic (nonsponsored) category that Amazon placed in the number one spot at a rate that was greater than the proportion of its products in the sample was its own brands and exclusives.
About eight in 10 (83.9 percent) of the Amazon brands or exclusives that Amazon placed in the top spot were labeled “featured from our brands.” These are identified as part of Amazon’s “search results” and are not marked “sponsored.” However, the source code for those labeled results contained information that was the same as sponsored product listings (data-component-type=”sp-sponsored-result”). These Amazon brand and exclusive brand products were not labeled as “sponsored” for shoppers.
Where Are Products Placed?
In addition to the top spot, we calculated how often Amazon placed each type of product in each search result position down the page (1–60). All searches have a number one spot but do not always return 60 results, so we always calculated this rate using the number of searches with that product spot as the denominator. Sponsored results that are part of search results are counted in the denominator of the rates.
(As mentioned earlier, we did not include promotional and advertising carousels and modules because these are not part of the grid labeled “search results” in the metadata and none appeared in the same place in a majority of search results.)
Amazon placed its own products and exclusives in the number one spot 3.5 times more frequently than in any other position on the search page.
It placed competing brands (including those it sells itself) everywhere except the top (1) and bottom (15) rows of the search page. Competing brands appeared only sparsely where sponsored products were common in search results (rows 4–5 and 8–9). The company placed entirely unaffiliated products—meaning a competitor’s brand that was both sold and shipped by a third party—primarily in the lower rows (9–13).
In 59.7 percent of searches in our sample, Amazon gave the number one spot to sponsored products. When Amazon returned a 15th row, it always listed sponsored products there, too.
Not Always Labeled
Amazon only identified 42 percent of its brands and exclusives to the shopper with a disclosure label (e.g., “featured from our brands,” “Amazon brand,” or “Amazon exclusive”). Of the Amazon brand and exclusive products in our sample, 28.8 percent were from a brand many people (but not all) would understand to be a private Amazon label, such as “Whole Foods,” “Amazon Basics,” or “Amazon Essentials.” Some were both labeled and from a better-known Amazon brand. For the remaining 37.4 percent, we found that buyers were not informed that they would be purchasing an Amazon brand or exclusive.
When the same product that is an Amazon brand or exclusive appeared more than once in the same search, we considered it labeled if any of the listings were labeled. This gives Amazon the benefit of the doubt by assuming that a customer will understand that the disclaimer applies to duplicate listings. Therefore, our metrics for disclosure are the lower bound.
Duplicates
Amazon gave its own products more than one spot in search results in roughly one in 10 (9.2 percent of) searches, not including other potential duplicates in promotional carousels. It did not give competing brands’ products more than one spot for organic search results.
Survey Results
We commissioned the market research group YouGov to conduct a nationally representative survey of 1,000 U.S. adults on the internet, to contextualize our findings. It revealed that 76 percent of respondents correctly identified Amazon Basics as being owned by Amazon and 51 percent correctly identified Whole Foods.
The vast majority of respondents, however, could not identify the company’s top-selling house brands that did not contain the words “Amazon” or “Whole Foods” in their name. Ninety percent did not recognize Solimo as an Amazon brand, and 89 percent did not know Goodthreads is owned by Amazon. Other top-selling brands, like Daily Ritual, Lark & Ro, and Pinzon were not recognized by 94 percent of respondents as Amazon brands.
We also asked respondents what trait defines the top-ranked products in Amazon search results. Few expected it to be based solely on being an Amazon brand. More than 21 percent of respondents thought the top-ranked product would be “the best seller,” 17 percent thought it was “the best rated,” 11 percent thought it was “the lowest price,” and 33 percent of respondents were “not sure.” Only 17 percent thought the number one listed item was “a product from one of Amazon’s brands.”
Quality and Sales Factors
We compared the star ratings (a rough proxy for quality) and number of reviews (a rough proxy for sales volume) of the Amazon Brands that the company placed in the number one spot on the product search results page with other products on the same page.
We found that in two-thirds (65.3 percent) of the instances where Amazon placed its own products before competitor brands, the products that were Amazon brands and exclusives had lower star ratings than competing brands placed lower in the search results. Half of the time (51.7 percent) that the company placed its own products first, these items had fewer reviews than competing products the company chose to place lower on the search results page.
One in four (28.0 percent of) top-placed Amazon brands had both lower star ratings and fewer reviews than products from competing brands on the same page.
When we evaluated several predictive models, we found that features like star ratings and the number of reviews were not the most predictive features among products Amazon placed in the number one spot.
Random Forest Analysis
We tried to determine which features differentiate the first organic product on search results from the second organic product on the same page.
To do this, we created a categorical dataset of product comparisons and used it to train and evaluate several random forest models.
The product comparisons looked at differences in features that we had access to, and that seemed relevant to product rankings (like stars and reviews). We found that being an Amazon brand or exclusive was by far the most important feature, of the seven we tested, in Amazon’s decision to place a product in the number one versus number two spot in product search results.
How We Created Product Comparisons
We took our original dataset of 3,492 search results with at least one Amazon brand or exclusive, filtered out sponsored products, and generated a dataset of product comparisons. Each product comparison is between the number one product and number two product on the same search page. The random forest used these attributes to predict a yes or no (boolean) category: which product among the pair was given the top search result (placed_higher).
The product comparisons encode the differences in star ratings (stars_delta) and number of reviews (reviews_delta); whether the product appeared among the top three clicked products from one million popular searches in 2020 from Amazon Seller Central (is_top_clicked); and whether the product was sold by Amazon (is_amazon_sold), shipped by Amazon (is_amazon_shipped), or was an Amazon brand or exclusive (is_amazon). We also used a randomly generated number as a control (random_noise). Distributions of each of these features is available on GitHub.
While we had access to price information, we did not analyze its potential effect on ranking because price was not standardized per unit. We also had access to each product’s “best sellers rank” for the time period we collected product pages, but the same product could have various different rankings in different Amazon categories (e.g., #214 in Beauty & Personal Care and #3 in Bath Salts), making consistent comparisons impossible.
This produced a dataset of 1,415 product comparisons. (To see exactly how we created our training and validation dataset, see our GitHub.)
By creating this dataset of product comparisons, we were able to compare two products with one model and control for which features led to higher placement.
Why Random Forest?
A random forest combines many decision tree models, a technique we used in a previous Markup investigation into Allstate’s price increases. Decision trees work well at predicting categories with mixed data types, like those from our product comparisons.
Decision trees can, however, memorize or “overfit” the training data. When this happens, models can’t make good predictions on new data. Random forests are robust against overfitting and work by training a forest full of decision trees with random subsets of the data. The forest makes predictions by having each tree vote.
We used grid search with five-fold cross-validation to determine optimal hyperparameters (parameters we control versus those that arise from learning cycles): 500 decision trees in each forest, and a maximum of three questions each decision tree can ask the data. By asking more questions, each tree becomes deeper. But that also means that the trees are more likely to memorize the data. The more trees we train, the more resources it takes to run our experiment. Grid search trains and evaluates models with an exhaustive list of combinations of these hyperparameters to determine the best configuration.
Evaluating the Models
Our model correctly picked Amazon’s number-one-ranked product 73.2 percent of the time when all seven features were considered.
We systematically removed each feature and retrained and reevaluated the model (called an ablation study) in order to isolate the importance of each individual feature. We used the accuracy of the model trained on all seven features as a baseline to compare each newly evaluated model (see results in Change of Accuracy in table above).
When we did this, we saw that removing information about whether a product was an Amazon brand or exclusive (is_amazon) reduced the model’s ability to pick the right product by 9.7 percentage points (to 63.5 percent). This drop in performance was far greater than any other individual feature, suggesting that being an Amazon brand or exclusive was the most predictive feature among those we tested in determining which products Amazon placed in the first organic spot of search results.
To demonstrate the influence of Amazon brands and exclusives in another way, we trained a model with only is_amazon, and it correctly predicted the number one product 70.7 percent of the time. Every other standalone feature performed significantly worse, only picking the correct product between 49.3 (random_noise) and 61.5 (is_sold_by_amazon) percent of the time.
To a lesser extent, the number of reviews (reviews_delta) were also predictive of a product getting the number one spot. Removing this feature reduced the model’s performance by 3.3 percentage points.
The other six features were less informative when it came to getting the number one spot versus the number two spot. Performance of the random forest for every possible permutation of features is available in our GitHub.
These findings were consistent with ranking the feature importance from the random forest model trained on all features. This third approach also suggests that is_amazon is the most predictive feature for the random forest.
When we compared additional product pairs with the number one spot and those of lower-ranked products beyond just the number two spot, is_amazon remained the most predictive feature out of those we tested (results in our GitHub).
We used predictive models to show that being an Amazon brand or exclusive was the most influential feature among those we tested in determining which products Amazon chose to place at the top of search results.
Limitations
Search Data Limitations
The two datasets we created are small in comparison to the full catalog of products for sale on Amazon.com, for which there are no reliable estimates. However, we sought to examine searches and products that generate significant sales, not every product or every search.
We collected search data on desktop, so our analysis only applies to desktop searches. Amazon’s search results may differ on mobile, desktop, and the Amazon app.
Amazon’s search results can also vary by location. One example is the distance of the closest Whole Foods store and its inventory, which would affect any given person’s search for certain items. We collected the data using I.P. addresses in Washington, D.C., so our results are specific to that city.
And, according to an Amazon-authored report for IEEE Internet Computing, a journal published by a division of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Amazon personalizes offerings to buyers according to similar items they have already purchased or rated (called item-to-item collaborative filtering). Our searches were not made in the same session nor were we logged into an Amazon account with user history, so our results were not personalized. In the absence of personalization, Amazon defaults to “generally popular items.” This also means that we did not capture search results or product pages for Amazon Prime subscribers.
Product Page Data Limitations
Some products that compete with Amazon brand and exclusive products are sold by numerous sellers, including Amazon itself. A 2016 ProPublica investigation revealed that of a sample of 250 products, Amazon took the buy box for itself or gave it to vendors that paid for the “Fulfilled by Amazon” program in 75 percent of cases. The same year, researchers at Northeastern University tracked 1,000 best-selling products over six weeks and found that buy box winners changed for seven out of 10 products in their study.
For our main analysis, we did not seek to analyze which specific seller won the buy box but rather whether the seller or shipper during our snapshot was Amazon or a third party.
We captured product pages and their subsequent buy boxes in a snapshot of time between Feb. 3–6 and 17–18. Due to a technical problem, there was a two- to four-week delay between when we collected the searches and when we collected the product pages. This means that the seller and shipper of those products are only representative of searches made during that time and could have changed from the time we collected the searches to when we collected the product pages.
When we collected product pages in February, about 3.9 percent of them were no longer available or the product had been removed from the Amazon Marketplace altogether since we gathered the search pages in January. We removed these products from any calculations involving the seller or shipper.
To test the reliability of our product page data, we took a random sample, on May 13, 2021, of 2,500 of the 125,769 products we had collected in February 2021 and reran the product page scraper.
Some of the product pages were missing data: 6.1 percent were sold out, 1.6 percent were removed from Amazon’s marketplace, and another 3.4 percent no longer displayed a default seller who won the buy box. In these latter cases, Amazon provided a button to “See All Buying Options.” The missing data did not overall favor or disfavor Amazon but rather was consistent with the proportion of Amazon-sold products (30.2 compared to 27.1 percent) from the sample of products we recollected.
The remaining 2,103 products that had legible buy boxes (the vast majority) were largely unchanged. Only 16.1 percent of products changed default sellers. This included changes between Amazon and third-party sellers.
Product sellers changed from a third party to Amazon in 1.6 ± 0.5 percent of products, and from Amazon to a third party in 3.1 ± 0.7 percent of products (margins of error calculated with 95 percent confidence).
When it came to who shipped the product, the shipper went from a third party to Amazon in 2.9 ± 0.7 percent of products, and from Amazon to a third party in 6.6 ± 1.1 percent of products.
Because the buy box remained largely unchanged during a 12-week gap in this representative subsample of our data, we find that our buy box findings are reliable, despite the three- to four-week gap between when we gathered search results and product pages.
This seemed to signal a change from previous research. So we went further to determine whether the buy box had become more stable since the 2016 Northeastern University study. That study was limited to products with multiple sellers. When we did the same, it brought the sample size down to 1,209. Looking only at products with multiple sellers, we found Amazon changed the buy box seller for only 23.5 percent of products. In addition, among products with multiple sellers, Amazon gave itself the buy box for 40.0 percent of them.
For products with multiple sellers, the winning sellers changed from Amazon to a third party in 2.1 ± 0.8 percent of products and from a third party to Amazon in 4.4 ± 1.1 percent of products. Third-party sellers changed among themselves in 31.4 percent of products sold by third-party sellers. No individual third-party seller won more than 0.06 percent of the products with more than one seller.
Shippers changed from Amazon to a third-party in 2.3 ± 0.8 percent of products and from a third party to Amazon in 7.8 ± 1.5 percent of products.
Reviewing the product pages three months apart, we found that the default seller Amazon chose for the buy box when multiple merchants were available has become significantly less likely to change from five years ago.
Limitations Identifying Amazon Brands and Exclusive Products
Amazon’s “our brands” filter is incomplete. For instance, it listed only 70.3 percent of products that were tagged “featured from our brands” on the search page. In addition, Amazon did not include its proprietary electronics in the “our brands” filtered results when we gathered the data. The company declined to answer questions about why these were not included.
Because of this, we had to use three methods to collect our product database of Amazon brands and exclusives, and it’s possible we missed some products, particularly proprietary electronics.
Black Box Audit
Our investigation is a black box audit. We do not have access to Amazon’s source code or the data that powers Amazon’s search engine. There are likely factors Amazon uses in its ranking algorithm to which we do not have access, including return rates, click-through rates, and sales. We have some data from Amazon’s Seller Central hub about popular products and clicks, but this data is itself limited and did not cover all of the products in our searches.
For these reasons, our investigation focuses on available and clear metrics: how high categories of products are placed compared to their proportion of results, how well users review highly ranked products relative to other products, and how many reviews a product has garnered, which is a crude indication of sales.
Amazon’s Response
Amazon did not take issue with our analysis or data collection and declined to answer dozens of specific questions.
In a short, prepared statement sent via email, spokesperson Nell Rona said that the company considers “featured from our brands” listings as “merchandising placements,” and as such, the company does not consider them “search results.” Rona said these listings are not advertisements, which by law would need to be disclosed to shoppers. We found these listings were identified as “sponsored” in the source code and also part of a grid marked “search results” in the source code.
“We do not favor our store brand products through search,” Rona wrote.
“These merchandising placements are optimized for a customer’s experience and are shown based on a variety of signals,” Rona said. None of these were explained beyond “relevance to the customer’s shopping query.”
Regarding disclosing to customers about Amazon brands, Rona said they are identified as “Amazon brand” on the products page, and some carry that wording in the listing. We found this to be the case in only 23 percent of products that were Amazon-owned brands.
She said brands that are exclusive to Amazon would not carry that wording since they are not owned by Amazon.
Rona supplied a link to an Amazon blog post that mentions that its branded products made up about one percent of sales volume for physical goods and $3 billion of sales revenue in 2019. It is unclear whether brands exclusive to Amazon are included in those figures.
Conclusion
Our investigation revealed that Amazon gives its own products preference in the number one spot in search results even when competitors have more reviews and better star ratings. We also found that reviews and ratings were significantly less predictive of whether a product would get the number one spot than being an Amazon brand or exclusive.
In addition, we found that Amazon placed its own products and exclusives in the top spot in higher proportion than it appeared in the sample, a preference that did not exist for any other category. In fact, it placed its own brands and exclusives in the top spot as often as competing brands—about 20 percent of the time—although the former made up only six percent of the sample and the latter 77 percent.
Almost four in 10 products that we identified as Amazon brands and exclusives in our sample were neither clearly labeled as an Amazon brand nor carried a name that most people recognize as an Amazon-owned brand, such as Whole Foods. In our survey, almost nine-in-10 U.S. adults did not recognize five of Amazon’s largest brands.
We also found that the default seller among products with multiple merchants changed for just three in 10 products over three months, a significantly lower rate of change than a similar study found five years ago.
Amazon’s dominance in online sales—40 percent in the United States—means the effect of giving its own products preference on the search results page is potentially massive, both for its own business as well as the small businesses that seek to earn a living on its platform.
Appendix
Supplementary Search Dataset and Analysis
When first exploring this topic and before hitting on our top searches dataset, we had created a generic dataset that returned similar findings. We replaced it as the main dataset because our top searches dataset was closer to real searches made by users. We include it here as a secondary dataset.
Generic Searches
We created a search dataset from products listed in each of the 18 departments found on Amazon’s “Explore Our Brands” page.
Three annotators looked through 1,626 products listed on those pages and generated between one and three search queries a person might use if searching for that product. These were meant to represent generic searches for which we know Amazon brands are competing against others.
We generated 2,558 search terms. We randomly sampled 1,600 and collected these searches using the same method and during the same time period we used to collect top searches. A quarter of the search results (24 percent) did not contain Amazon Brands, so we discarded them, leaving 1,217 generic searches, our supplementary dataset.
Generic Search Findings
In the generic searches, Amazon Brands constituted a slightly larger percentage of the overall product sample (8.2) than our top searches database (5.8). The percentage of the time Amazon gave its own products the number one spot also increased, to roughly one in four of our generic searches from one in five for our top searches.
Competing brands constituted a similar proportion of products in both of our datasets. However, Amazon placed competing brands in the number one spot even less often (10.8) in these generic searches than it had for top searches (20.8).
Entirely unaffiliated products made up even less of the pool of products in our generic searches (3.0) than top searches (5.8), and Amazon also gave them the top spot even less frequently, 1.5 percent of the time compared to 4.2 percent for top searches.
The results from this additional dataset show a similar pattern to our main dataset, whereby Amazon prioritizes its own products at the top of search results.
Counting Carousels
As mentioned earlier, we did not include sponsored or promotional carousels in our analysis.
If we were to consider sponsored or promotional carousels, the percentage of organic products from top searches would drop from 87 to 68 percent. This also means that sponsored products would increase from 17 percent to 32 percent. There were a total of 49,686 products in these carousels.
Acknowledgements
We thank Christo Wilson of Northeastern University, Juozas “Joe” Kaziukėnas of Marketplace Pulse, Rebecca Goldin of Sense About Science and George Mason University, Kyunghyun Cho of New York University, and Michael Ekstrand of Boise State University for reviewing all or parts of our methodology. We also thank Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College for reviewing our survey design.
Scammers Are Using Fake Job Ads to Steal People’s Identities
It has become a ubiquitous internet ad, with versions popping up everywhere from Facebook and LinkedIn to smaller sites like Jobvertise: Airport shuttle driver wanted, it says, offering a job that involves picking up passengers for 35 hours a week at an appealing weekly pay rate that works out to more than $100,000 a year.
But airports aren’t really dangling six-figure salaries for shuttle drivers amid some sudden resurgence in air travel. Instead, the ads are cybercriminals’ latest attempt to steal people’s identities and use them to commit fraud, according to recent warnings from the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission and cybersecurity firms that monitor such threats. The U.S. Secret Service, which investigates financial crimes, also confirmed that it has seen a “marked increase” in sham job ads seeking to steal people’s personal data, often with the aim of filing bogus unemployment insurance claims.
“These fraudsters, they’re like a virus. They continue to mutate,” said Haywood Talcove, chief executive of the government division of LexisNexis Risk Solutions, one of several contractors helping state and federal agencies combat identity theft. (ProPublica subscribes to public records databases provided by LexisNexis.)
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This particular mutation is an emerging threat, Talcove and others said. The numbers are small so far, but they’re rapidly increasing. In March, LexisNexis detected around 2,900 ads touting unusually generous pay, using suspicious email domains and requiring that one verify one’s identity upfront. The total had grown to 18,400 by July, and then to 36,350 as of this month. Talcove said these figures are based on a small sample of job ads and that the real number is likely much higher.
This form of scam is surging at a moment when targets for job application fraud abound. Millions of Americans are quitting jobs and looking for new ones. An all-time high percentage of workers — 2.9% — quit their jobs in August, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Meanwhile, huge numbers of laid-off workers are still looking for work, making for a historic churn in the labor market.
The ads reflect a tactical adjustment by cybercriminals. A massive wave of unemployment insurance fraud during the pandemic prompted authorities to heighten identity verification requirements. In most U.S. states, cybercriminals can no longer simply input stolen identity information into government websites and frequently collect unemployment insurance aid. Now, applicants whose names are used to apply for unemployment benefits often need to verify on their phones that they’re the ones seeking assistance, a process similar to two-factor authentication.
That means scammers may need help from their victims — and sometimes they go to elaborate lengths to mislead them. Some fraudsters recreate companies’ hiring websites. One fake job application site uses Spirit Airlines’ photos, text, font and color code. The phony site asks applicants to upload a copy of both sides of their driver’s license at the outset of the process and sends them an email seeking more information from a web address that resembles Spirit’s, with an extra “i” (spiiritairline.com). Spirit Airlines did not respond to requests seeking comment.
Other job scams are less elaborate and have more visible signs of inauthenticity. One fake ad for airport shuttle drivers on Facebook was posted by a woman who purported to be working at Denver International Airport. Diligent readers may have noticed that the only location linked from the woman’s Facebook profile was a Nigerian city called Owerri. (A spokesperson for the Denver airport reported the profile to Facebook after an inquiry by ProPublica, and the ad is no longer active.)
In other instances, unsolicited job offers simply land in applicants’ inboxes after they’ve uploaded their résumés to real job search sites, which scammers can access if they pose as potential employers. Jeri-Sue Barron has received a slew of emails since the start of the pandemic informing her that she was preapproved for a variety of jobs she hadn’t even applied for. Barron, a retiree in suburban Dallas, had uploaded her résumé to several job hunting sites in hope of finding some part-time work to supplement her Social Security income. She then received multiple job offers with nary a request for an interview. One email originated from a school in India’s Kerala state; another came from a Croatian website she’d never heard of. “They started coming in from places that were weird,” said Barron. “You almost don’t want to find out the next stage.” She ignored the offers.
As with fake unemployment claims more broadly, the fraud is being facilitated by an underground infrastructure, including online forums where cybercriminals share advice on how to perfect their techniques. A person using the handle “cleverinformation” on a U.K. forum called Carder put together a how-to video that recommends posting fake job ads using a generic job application that can be modified to collect personal data. In September, someone going by “mrdudemanguy” on another forum, known as Dread, offered this advice to a person seeking stolen identities: “Pretend to be a local business and post some job ads. When they send in their résumé, call them and ask some basic job application questions. Make them think they’ve got the job as long as they can do a background check. For the background check request they send you photos or scans of ID documents.”
In response to a query from ProPublica, mrdudemanguy did not answer questions about sharing fake ads and instead focused on explaining the source of his recommended technique and its success. “I have not tried this method myself,” he wrote. “It’s just a method that I know other people do and it does work. It can be done in any part of the world, the country does not matter. As long as the job ad looks legitimate, a person looking for a job will be likely to apply.” Questions sent to cleverinformation yielded a similar response. “It’s effective,” the person said, noting that it’s an underused technique. The person added: “Trying to start a group chat where we share our knowledge.”
The ubiquitous ad for airport shuttle drivers was discussed in a similar forum. One version of it was posted in a Telegram channel of a Nigerian scam group called Yahoo Boys Community, along with instructions on what to tell applicants to get them to share their Social Security number, photographs of their driver’s license and other personal details. The post urged the group’s 5,000 members to ask applicants generic questions via email and offer them the gig — but only if they first shared their personal documents to land the plum job. “Once the client gives you the details, buzz me on WhatsApp and let start work on it Asap,” read the July message, whose initiator could not be identified.
Job application scams have been around in various forms for years. Some entice applicants to buy equipment or software from the scammers in preparation for a nonexistent job. Others try to trick victims into working for free or reshipping goods bought with stolen credit cards. But, according to law enforcement agencies, using fake job ads to steal identities and using them to cash in on government benefits is a new wrinkle.
Alexandra Mateus Vásquez fell for one such scam in December 2020. An aspiring painter, Vásquez was thinking of quitting her sales job at a suburban mall near New York City. She applied for a graphic designer position at the restaurant chain Steak ‘n Shake via the widely used job website Indeed. She was elated when what appeared to be a Steak ‘n Shake representative invited her via Gmail to participate in an email screening test for the job.
Conducting an interview via email initially struck Vásquez as odd, but she proceeded because the questions seemed standard. They included queries like “How do you meet tough deadlines?” according to emails she shared with ProPublica, and she provided earnest answers. Hours later she received an email offering her the job and asking for her address and phone number so a formal offer letter could be dispatched. The offered pay was attractive: $30 per hour. When the letter arrived, it sought her Social Security number, too. Vásquez provided all the requested information.
Soon Vásquez was invited for a background check, via online chat, with a supposed hiring manager. She found herself trading messages with an account that had a blurry photograph of an old man and the name “Iran Coleman” attached to it. (Several other applicants described similar experiences in a discussion about the Steak ‘n Shake job on the hiring site Glassdoor.)
The person claiming to be the Steak ‘n Shake’s hiring manager requested copies of Vásquez’s personal records to verify her identity. She shared photographs of her New York state ID and her green card but grew suspicious when the person asked for her credit card number, too. As Vásquez hesitated, she got a call from ID.me, an identity verification vendor used by 27 states to safeguard their unemployment insurance programs. The company asked if she was applying for jobless aid in California. That’s when she realized she was being scammed. “I was so disappointed,” Vásquez said. “I really believed that that position was real.”
Steak ‘n Shake did not respond to messages seeking comment. (ProPublica was able to reach Iran Coleman, the purported Steak ‘n Shake manager cited in the scam. He said the Louisville Steak ‘n Shake he used to manage is closed and he hasn’t worked there since at least 2014. He said he hadn’t updated his cursory LinkedIn profile, which lists him as a Steak ‘n Shake restaurant manager, in years. Coleman said he now manages three Waffle House restaurants. “I feel for that person,” he said of Vásquez when informed of her experience.)
Vásquez reported the incident to the police and contacted the Social Security Administration, which informed her that it had denied multiple requests to create an account in her name. (A spokesperson for the agency said privacy laws preclude it from discussing individual cases.) She then gave up on her job search. “I started doubting if all the jobs I’m applying for are real,” she said. Vásquez recently launched a website to begin selling paintings online and still hopes to become a design professional.
Blake Hall, chief executive of ID.me, said the company has rolled out language on its systems that informs users when their identities are being used to apply for unemployment insurance benefits and warns them not to proceed if they are being offered a job. Hall said it’s ultimately up to users to heed such warnings. “We will do as much as we can to make it clear that they’ve been scammed,” he said, “but ultimately protecting somebody from themself is a really tall order.” He compared his company to a goalkeeper who also needs help from other members of the team, in this case the job websites where criminals post fake ads.
The Better Business Bureau said in an alert last month that Indeed, LinkedIn and Facebook topped the list of online platforms where users reported spotting fraudulent job advertisements that duped them.
Indeed removes tens of millions of job listings that do not meet its quality guidelines each month, according to a company spokesperson, and it declines to list employers’ jobs if they do not pass those guidelines. In July, the site published a blog post detailing how to spot scam job ads. “Indeed puts job seekers at the heart of everything we do,” the spokesperson said.
LinkedIn removed 10 fake airport shuttle job postings after they were pointed out by ProPublica. A spokesperson said that posting bogus job ads is a “clear violation” of LinkedIn’s terms of service and said the company is investing in new ways of spotting them, such as hiring more human reviewers and expanding a work-email verification system for potential employers.
Facebook took down some of the airport shuttle posts after ProPublica alerted the service, but the company did not respond to questions about its processes for spotting and removing fake ads.
In recent months, the social media platform has also been plagued with fraudulent pages masquerading as state unemployment agencies. Some states complained to the U.S. Department of Labor that Facebook was slow to act on their requests to remove such pages, according to a March email from the department to state workforce agencies disclosed under a public records request. A Department of Labor official said that in March the agency set up a new process for states to report fake unemployment insurance websites to Facebook and that “to date, Facebook has been responsive in taking down fraudulent pages” reported by states.
New ones, however, keep popping up: A fake version of California’s Employment Development Department Facebook page was live as of Oct. 12. The agency confirmed the page was not its own, and it was removed from Facebook shortly after ProPublica’s inquiry.
Even if online platforms clean up their job postings, other identity theft scams are proliferating. On Oct. 15, the FBI issued an alert warning about fake websites that cybercriminals created to resemble the state unemployment websites of Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico and Wisconsin. Criminals use the sites to steal victims’ sensitive personal information, according to the FBI.
The new report has “a stark, scientific message for climate change negotiators at COP 26,” said the head of the World Meteorological Organization.
Carbon dioxide concentrations reached a new record high in 2020, with comparable levels not seen for roughly 3 million years, the United Nations weather agency said Monday.
“There is no time to lose.”
The findings came in the latest edition of the World Meteorological Organization’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, released a week before COP 26—the U.N. climate summit—kicks off in Glasgow.
According to WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas, the report holds “a stark, scientific message for climate change negotiators” headed to the summit.
The bulletin said globally averaged levels of CO2, as well as two other potent greenhouse gases—methane and nitrous oxide—were all up from the previous year.
CO2 reached 413.2 parts per million (ppm) in 2020—149% of the pre-industrial level. The increase from 2019 levels came despite pandemic-triggered lockdowns triggering an approximately 5.6% drop in fossil fuel CO2.
Methane stood at 262% and nitrous oxide at 123% of pre-industrial levels, the report said.
“At the current rate of increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, we will see a temperature increase by the end of this century far in excess of the Paris Agreement targets of 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” he said in a statement, warning, “We are way off track.”
“The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere breached the milestone of 400 parts per million in 2015. And just five years later, it exceeded 413 ppm,” Taalas added. “This is more than just a chemical formula and figures on a graph. It has major negative repercussions for our daily lives and well-being, for the state of our planet, and for the future of our children and grandchildren.”
Greenhouse gas levels are at new records. Again Concentration of CO2 in 2020 was 149% of pre-industrial times Economic slowdown from COVID-19 had no real impact We are set for a 🌡️ increase much higher than #ParisAgreement target of 1.5°C-2°C.https://t.co/LQ5sVilzcE#COP26pic.twitter.com/S0NHxa5jg9
“Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries and in the ocean for even longer,” said Taalas. “The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5 million years ago, when the temperature was 2-3°C warmer and sea level was 10-20 meters higher than now.”
The report also warned that land and oceans’ ability to continue serving as carbon sinks, sucking up about half of CO2 emissions, could be negatively affected by climate crisis-related changes such as wildfires.
Urging countries to turn “commitment into action,” Taalas said, “There is no time to lose.”
Dave Reay, a professor at the University of Edinburgh and director of the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute, also tied the bulletin’s findings to the upcoming U.N climate summit.
“The true success, or failure, of COP 26 will be written in our skies in the form of greenhouse gas concentrations,” he said in a statement. “This new report from the WMO provides a brutally frank assessment of what’s been written there to date.”
“So far,” he said, “it’s an epic fail.”
“Will this 26th COP find success where the previous 25 have fallen short?” Reay asked. “Our atmosphere will bear witness.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by ANDREA GERMANOS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Organizers of the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol say that several congressional Republicans and White House officials helped plan former President Donald Trump’s coup attempt.
In response to new reporting that several congressional Republicans and White House officials were “intimately involved” in planning the January 6 Capitol attack—part of former President Donald Trump’s far-reaching election subversion plot—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday night demanded the expulsion of any lawmaker who aided and abetted the violent assault on U.S. democracy.
“Any member of Congress who helped plot a terrorist attack on our nation’s Capitol must be expelled,” tweeted Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). “This was a terror attack. 138 injured, almost 10 dead. Those responsible remain a danger to our democracy, our country, and human life in the vicinity of our Capitol and beyond.”
Any member of Congress who helped plot a terrorist attack on our nation’s capitol must be expelled.
This was a terror attack. 138 injured, almost 10 dead. Those responsible remain a danger to our democracy, our country, and human life in the vicinity of our Capitol and beyond. https://t.co/D0qLlaFjTh
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) tweeted in response to the Rolling Stone report that her “resolution to investigate and expel the members of Congress who helped incite the deadly insurrection on our Capitol,” House Resolution 25, “is just waiting for a vote.”
My resolution to investigate and expel the Members of Congress who helped incite the deadly insurrection on our Capitol is just waiting for a vote.
On Sunday night, the magazine detailed “explosive allegations” about the January 6 riot, wherein a right-wing mob fueled by Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen stormed the halls of Congress in an attempt to prevent lawmakers from certifying President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
Amid an ongoing probe led by the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, Rolling Stone has spoken with two unnamed individuals who were “involved in organizing the main event aimed at objecting to the electoral certification, which took place at the White House Ellipse,” and who are cooperating with the panel’s investigators. According to the magazine:
These two sources also helped plan a series of demonstrations that took place in multiple states around the country in the weeks between the election and the storming of the Capitol. According to these sources, multiple people associated with the March for Trump and Stop the Steal events that took place during this period communicated with members of Congress throughout this process.
Among other things, the magazine reported that prior to January 6:
The two sources say they engaged in “dozens” of planning conversations, in which Reps. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) participated or “had top staffers join”;
The two sources say they “interacted with members of Trump’s team.” That includes former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “who they describe as having had an opportunity to prevent the violence,” as well as Katrina Pierson, a former member of Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns whom one organizer called “our go-to girl” and “our primary advocate”;
Gosar, “who has been one of the most prominent defenders of the Jan. 6 rioters,” allegedly “dangled the possibility of a ‘blanket pardon’ in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests.”
Both organizers received “several assurances” about the “blanket pardon” from Gosar, one source told Rolling Stone.
“Our impression was that it was a done deal,” said the source, “that he’d spoken to the president about it in the Oval… in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support.”
“I was just going over the list of pardons and we just wanted to tell you guys how much we appreciate all the hard work you’ve been doing,” Gosar said, according to the organizer.
The magazine has separately obtained documentary evidence that on January 6, both organizers were in contact with Boebert and Gosar, whose office is being investigated by the House select committee.
In addition, Rolling Stone reported, “both Brooks and Cawthorn spoke with Trump at the Ellipse on Jan. 6. In his speech at that event, Brooks, who was reportedly wearing body armor, declared, ‘Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.’ Gosar, Greene, and Boebert were all billed as speakers at the ‘Wild Protest,’ which also took place on Jan. 6 at the Capitol.”
One of the leading organizers of the latter event was Ali Alexander, leader of Stop the Steal, a key group promoting efforts to challenge Biden’s victory. In a since-deleted livestream broadcast, Alexander said that Gosar, Brooks, and Biggs helped develop the strategy for the so-called “Wild Protest.”
At a December 2020 Stop the Steal event in Phoenix, Alexander called Gosar, one of the main speakers, “my captain,” and he also heaped praise on Biggs, describing him as “one of the other heroes.”
Both sources maintain that ahead of January 6, “the plan they had discussed with other organizers, Trump allies, and members of Congress was a rally that would solely take place at the Ellipse, where speakers—including the former president—would present ‘evidence’ about issues with the election. This demonstration would take place in conjunction with objections that were being made by Trump allies during the certification on the House floor that day,” Rolling Stonereported.
During his speech at the Ellipse, however, Trump encouraged his supporters to make their way to the Capitol, and before he had finished talking, the barricades were being stormed.
According to the two organizers, Alexander had agreed to not hold his “Wild Protest” at the Capitol, but when it appeared that the event may materialize, Meadows—one of four Trump allies subpoenaed by the House select committee—was made aware of concerns about the potential for violence.
Although there were earlier indications that the Trump administration and members of Congress “played some role in the Jan. 6 events and similar rallies that occurred in the lead-up to that day,” Rolling Stone noted, “the two sources say they can provide new details about the members’ specific roles in these efforts.”
“The sources plan to share that information with congressional investigators right away,” according to the magazine. “While both sources say their communications with the House’s Jan. 6 committee thus far have been informal, they are expecting to testify publicly.”
Just hours after the violent right-wing attack they helped foment through baseless allegations of voter fraud was contained, 147 GOP lawmakers—including more than two-thirds of House Republicans plus several Senate Republicans—voted in the early morning of January 7 to overturn election results in key states, attempting to disenfranchise millions of voters in the process.
Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) on Sunday urged people to “never forget” Trump’s failed coup attempt.
291 days ago terrorists ransacked the US Capitol and *hours later* 138-of-202 (68%) House republicans voted to make trump a dictator. They tried to finish the rioters’ job and end democracy. Never forget it.
Yale historian Timothy Snyder, meanwhile, warned that “a failed coup is a trial run for a successful coup.”
“Instead of just a person who makes a disorganized attempt,” said the expert on authoritarianism, “we now have that person, plus institutional machinery, time to plan, and the Big Lie.”
Since last year’s election, GOP lawmakers at the state level have weaponized lies about electoral fraud to legitimize anti-democratic electoral review mechanisms and a nationwide campaign of voter suppression, prompting University of Pennsylvania political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. to declare in a recent essay that maintaining Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress is necessary to prevent 2022 or 2024 from marking “the end of the proceduralist democracy to which we’ve been accustomed.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by KENNY STANCIL and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The biggest iOS update in years comes with a learning curve to match
According to analytics company mixpanel, the adoption of iOS 15 is much slower than iOS 14 a year ago. Speculation in the media for the cause of the reluctance is a few “bugs” that they also widely reported.
The fear of bugs is a good reason to take a major iOS upgrade at a slower pace, and this is probably a large part of the reason, for most people. On the other hand, after our review of both iOS 15 and iOS 15.1 (beta version) it is also true that this year’s free upgrades have a steeper learning curve than in the past.
Paradoxically, this is due to the fact that both the sheer number of new features, along with the ground breaking and innovative nature they have, are responsible for the cost and the benefit of taking the plunge.
The big 2 year transition to Apple Silicon is driving the pace of software progress
While iOS, iPad OS and macOS gradually converge as they grow (along with the Peripherals like Apple TV, Apple Watch, etc) the new features and upgrades to existing apps and actions are in the midst of an explosion.
Although this is great news, and the productivity improvements are, in some cases remarkable, especially if you use your apple devices for work and business, with so many new features there’s bound to be some reluctance to fight through the brain fog that can come with having to learn new unfamiliar habits.
Perhaps the best known example of this so far is the famous “address bar relocation” backlash that happened as a result of the new feature allowing the address bar to be at the top of the safari page on iPhone, or at the bottom, closer to our thumbs.
Initially there was no opt-out and it was bottom only (while it was still in the beta testing stage) and due to a rumored backlash from users this was upgraded to the current system where this “radical” new design is an option, with the more familiar previous layout also available. (see video below for details on how to switch back to the “old” style).
In the grand scheme of things going backwards is rarely better
This example of resistance to UX change, even by the “elite” beta users is a telling example of just how all pervasive the new software features are in iOS 15, and how much we will all need to learn new “tricks” to get the most out of the changes and added functionality.
It is also a long standing Apple tradition to try to make things, in both hardware and software design, that “just work” and do not require an “owners manual” or how-to guide to figure out.
While this, in the best case, is miraculous and we “get” the new features in an intuitive metaphorical heartbeat, more often recently, there is a frustrated moment of near panic when we find ourselves in a software dead-end, with no obvious back button or option menu to select from.
For this reason, it appears that the usefulness and necessity of how-to videos and guides, the very ones that Apple is in the business of making unnecessary, are more important than ever.
How-To guides get a new lease on life, thanks to Apple
Thankfully, Lynxotic, and others are on the case and we are working overtime to provide the next generation of DIY documentation, both in video and article form for iOS 15.1, macOS 12 Monterey, iPad OS 15.1 and beyond.
It’s great to be able to absorb new features and design upgrades intuitively and without the need for a separate learning project to educate ourselves enough to use the devices we are already using.
However, with the massive and increasingly more powerful potential of the new Apple Silicon fueled software upgrades, proactive learning may be something that is not just a necessary evil.
It is looking, rather, like it will be semi-permanent and highly fruitful activity we will want to add, willingly, to our overburdened existences.
At least for a couple of years during the transition to a much better future in the life of the Apple device & software ecosystem.
“This industry is rotten at its core,” said one critic, “and the clearest proof of that is what it’s doing to our children.”
Internal documents dubbed “The Facebook Papers” were published widely Monday by an international consortium of news outlets who jointly obtained the redacted materials recently made available to the U.S. Congress by company whistleblower Frances Haugen.
“It’s time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it’s inflicted on our democracy.”
The papers were shared among 17 U.S. outlets as well as a separate group of news agencies in Europe, with all the journalists involved sharing the same publication date but performing their own reporting based on the documents.
According to the Financial Times, the “thousands of pages of leaked documents paint a damaging picture of a company that has prioritized growth” over other concerns. And the Washington Postconcluded that the choices made by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as detailed in the revelations, “led to disastrous outcomes” for the social media giant and its users.
From an overview of the documents and the reporting project by the Associated Press:
The papers themselves are redacted versions of disclosures that Haugen has made over several months to the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging Facebook was prioritizing profits over safety and hiding its own research from investors and the public.
These complaints cover a range of topics, from its efforts to continue growing its audience, to how its platforms might harm children, to its alleged role in inciting political violence. The same redacted versions of those filings are being provided to members of Congress as part of its investigation. And that process continues as Haugen’s legal team goes through the process of redacting the SEC filings by removing the names of Facebook users and lower-level employees and turns them over to Congress.
One key revelation highlighted by the Financial Times is that Facebook has been perplexed by its own algorithms and another was that the company “fiddled while the Capitol burned” during the January 6th insurrection staged by loyalists to former President Donald Trump trying to halt the certification of last year’s election.
CNNwarned that the totality of what’s contained in the documents “may be the biggest crisis in the company’s history,” but critics have long said that at the heart of the company’s problem is the business model upon which it was built and the mentality that governs it from the top, namely Zuckerberg himself.
On Friday, following reporting based on a second former employee of the company coming forward after Haugen, Free Press Action co-CEO Jessica J. González said “the latest whistleblower revelations confirm what many of us have been sounding the alarm about for years.”
“Facebook is not fit to govern itself,” said González. “The social-media giant is already trying to minimize the value and impact of these whistleblower exposés, including Frances Haugen’s. The information these brave individuals have brought forth is of immense importance to the public and we are grateful that these and other truth-tellers are stepping up.”
While Zuckerberg has testified multiple times before Congress, González said nothing has changed. “It’s time for Congress and the Biden administration to investigate a Facebook business model that profits from spreading the most extreme hate and disinformation,” she said. “It’s time for immediate action to hold the company accountable for the many harms it’s inflicted on our democracy.”
“Kids don’t stand a chance against the multibillion dollar Facebook machine, primed to feed them content that causes severe harm to mental and physical well being.”
With Haugen set to testify before the U.K. Parliament on Monday, activists in London staged protests against Facebook and Zuckerberg, making clear that the giant social media company should be seen as a global problem.
Flora Rebello Arduini, senior campaigner with the corporate accountability group, was part of a team that erected a large cardboard display of Zuckerberg “surfing a wave of cash” outside of Parliament with a flag that read, “I know we harm kids, but I don’t care”—a rip on a video Zuckerberg posted of himself earlier this year riding a hydrofoil while holding an American flag.
While Zuckerberg refused an invitation to tesify in the U.K. about the company’s activities, including the way it manipulates and potentially harms young users on the platform, critics like Arduini said the giant tech company must be held to account.
“Kids don’t stand a chance against the multibillion dollar Facebook machine, primed to feed them content that causes severe harm to mental and physical well being,” she said. “This industry is rotten at its core and the clearest proof of that is what it’s doing to our children. Lawmakers must urgently step in and pull the tech giants into line.”
Happening now: we are outside UK parliament with a visual protest against Facebook’s treatment of children and its business model which puts profit before public safety. (1/7) #PeopleVsBigTechpic.twitter.com/37UA18PL3r
“Right now, Mark [Zuckerberg] is unaccountable,” Haugen told the Guardian in an interview ahead of her testimony. “He has all the control. He has no oversight, and he has not demonstrated that he is willing to govern the company at the level that is necessary for public safety.”
Correction: This article has been updated to more accurately reflect the context of the comments made by Jessica González of Free Press, who responded to the revelations of a second whistleblower not those of Frances Haugen.
Originally published on Common Dreams by JON QUEALLY and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Many merchants sell the exact same item, including Amazon, which picks a winner–often itself
When you shop on Amazon for a widely available product—a pair of Crocs, say, or Greenies dog treats—Amazon will pick among the merchants that offer the item and give one of them the sale when you hit “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now.”
In e-commerce, this is called winning the buy box. Amazon said its “featured merchant algorithm” picks the winner, instantly weighing available sellers’ past performance, price, delivery speed, and other factors.
Researchers at Northeastern University studying price changes on Amazon found that the merchant that won the buy box—which Amazon calls its “featured offer”—changed for seven in 10 products over a six-week period in 2016.
Five years later, we found that’s no longer the case.
When The Markup compared snapshots of 1,200 popular products 12 weeks apart, we found that the buy box was much less dynamic. The seller changed for fewer than three in 10 products in our sample.
The products we analyzed all appeared on Amazon’s first search results page of popular searches, meaning they receive prominent exposure to customers. We collected the data from an I.P. address in Washington, D.C.
Among the competing sellers for commonly available goods is Amazon itself. And when Amazon gave itself the buy box on products that other merchants also sold, it remained the buy box seller 12 weeks later for 98 percent of those products.
Overall, Amazon dominated the buy box when multiple sellers were available. We found that Amazon chose itself as the winning merchant of the “featured offer” for about 40 percent of products, while the next highest seller got the buy box in just half of one percent of popular products in our sample.
It’s hard to say why Amazon is changing the buy box winner less frequently than five years ago, said Christo Wilson, an associate computer science professor and one of the Northeastern University researchers who completed the 2016 study.
“The negative take,” he said, would be that “the market is becoming less competitive or that it’s easier for an incumbent to just sort of squat and remain stable.”
Amazon spokesperson Nell Rona declined to answer questions for this story. During congressional inquiry Amazon officials said the company doesn’t favor itself in the buy box or consider its profits in that decision.
They did acknowledge, however, that whether a product could be delivered quickly for free to Prime members is a factor in picking the seller for the buy box. Merchants typically pay extra fees for Amazon’s shipping service—Fulfillment by Amazon—to get that designation.
We found that the merchant Amazon selected for the buy box for almost every product—nine-in-10 of them—used Amazon’s shipping service. When we checked again three months later, less than 8 percent of products had changed shippers from Amazon to a third-party or vice versa.
The European Commission announced an investigation last November into whether Amazon’s criteria for the buy box results in preferential treatment for Amazon’s retail offers or sellers that use Amazon’s shipping service, which the commission said would be an abuse of Amazon’s dominant market position under E.U. antitrust rules.
In a May 2021 lawsuit, the Washington, D.C., attorney general wrote that “Amazon’s selection methods for the Buy Box winner consider factors that further reinforce Amazon’s online retail sales market dominance,” such as whether the seller uses Fulfillment by Amazon. In a court filing, Amazon responded that the lawsuit “fails to allege essential elements of an antitrust claim and, in any event, the conduct it attacks has been held by courts to be procompetitive.” The suit is ongoing.
Wilson said automated pricing algorithms may be playing a role in what The Markup found. It may also be a broader shift on the marketplace away from sellers competing to sell the same product to sellers developing their own branded products that only they are allowed to sell.
That shifts the competition away from the buy box to the search rankings, he said.
The Markup also found that Amazon gave its house brands and exclusive products a leg up in search results, above competitors with higher star ratings and more reviews, which are an indication of sales. Wilson reviewed our methodology for this investigation.
It was while testing the accuracy of findings for our main investigation that we discovered the stability of the buy box. There was a two- to four-week delay between when The Markup gathered search results and product pages. We gathered a sub-sample of listings a second time 12 weeks later to examine the effects of the delay and found they were minuscule.
“I would have thought that given that these [are] identical products and given that they are competing with similar costs, that there would be a little bit more turnover,” said Florian Ederer, an associate professor of economics at the Yale School of Management.
Shoppers can click on a link that will allow them to see more offers for a product, in addition to the one featured in the buy box. But e-commerce experts say most don’t bother: They estimate that more than 80 percent of sales on Amazon go through the buy box.
“Amazon talks about its marketplace as though it were a market,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the small business advocacy group Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which has been critical of Amazon’s size and effect on retail competition in the U.S.
“This is not a market,” she added. “This is an artificial environment that Amazon controls, and it’s set up certain parameters that lead to certain outcomes.”
When the iOS 15.1 update drops for the general public (likely soon as it’s already been seeded to beta testers since Monday) it will feature the ability to add your proof of vaccination status to the Health app and then create a vaccination ID card in Apple Wallet.
Many businesses, venues, restaurants, and more are requiring proof of vaccination for entry. For example California is the first state where proof of COVID vaccination or negative test for indoor events over 1,000 people.
The new feature in iOS 15.1 is made possible by the support Smart Health Cards which are valid for California, Louisiana, New York, Virginia, Hawaii, and some Maryland counties, as do Walmart, Sam’s Club, and CVS Health.
Above: ID in iPhone Wallet
Therefore, using this system you would be able to to look up their information in state databases, if you are in any of the states listed above, but if you were vaccinated through at Walmart or CVS it will also be feasible to add your information to the Health and Wallet.
Once you have gone to the web site for your state, for example in California it would be found at https://myvaccinerecord.cdph.ca.gov where you can type in personal information such as name and date of birth to get access to your records and status.
Though iOS 15 already has the ability to download the information to your Health app, and you can do this today, the last step, adding an ID to your wallet from the health app will not be possible until you have upgraded to iOS 15.1.
The record is locked to your name and can only be used by you. There will be a QR code that you will first download to your health app on the iPhone, then, once it is in the health app there will be a prompt to allow you to “add to wallet”. By clicking that link a vaccination ID car, with the QR code will be generated and added to your wallet.
iOS 15.1 is likely to be available under > General > software update in your phone’s Settings app starting today.
Tap the download link on your iPhone or iPod touch.
Tap Add to Health to add the record to the Health app.
Above: Collage by Lynxotic, from photos by various sources
Stunning allegations as revealed to Rolling Stone, including a promise of a “blanket pardon” from the Oval Office…
The Jan. 6th congressional investigations are beginning to yield more explosive results, according to statements made by some of the planners of the pro-Trump rallies, who have communicated with house investigators and have shared new details about the Jan. 6 attacks and what took place when the Trump supporting crowds stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Rolling Stone reports that two of the planners spoke with them extensively in recent weeks and that “explosive allegations” were detailed, stating that multiple members of Congress were “intimately involved” in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss, as well as the violent events at the U.S. Captol on January 6th.
“Rolling Stone separately confirmed a third person involved in the main Jan. 6 rally in D.C. has communicated with the committee. This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses.”
If you can grub up the cash you will want these insanely great machines
Better sell some Crypto, perhaps all your Shiba and Dogecoin, cause the beasts are loose, beefy and pricy.
In the scheduled “unleashed” event today, broadcast virtually from Cupertino, Tim, Craig and the gang managed to surprise, not with the fully expected hardware items unveiled, but with the specs and otherworldly power of what they so aptly dubbed the Beasts.
The event was billed as being about music and creativity, and yes there were new AirPods and HomePod Minis, but without any doubt it was the incredible mac upgrades, in the form of 14” and 16” MacBook Pros that stole the show.
The format was no different than previous recent virtual events, but the details that exposed the extent and depth of the technological leap forward blew the format off it’s own hinges.
Although every spec was touted, from the screen upgrades, to endless new ports, to upgraded battery life, still the focus and excitement returned, again and again, to the Beasts: the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips and the system architecture built for them.
The animal analogy is no flight of zoological fantasy, with, at the high end, the M1 Max having 6x the speed and power of the current M1 – which already blew away reviewers and users with it’s own shocking ability to best what came before.
photo credit / apple
The party is on, but without a doubt, it is also exclusive
There are only two “downside” caveats, both kind of interrelated reverse compliments: There was no Mac Mini announcement, which is extremely sad for the great unwashed (like me!) and the prices are almost more beastly than the machines themselves.
A fully Maxxed out 16” MacBook Pro comes in at a hefty $6099, though that is with 8TB of SSD storage and 64GB of unified memory). Even a more modest configuration, dropping the SSD storage down to 4TB, while retaining the exalted 64GB unified, the toll is still $4299.
These are no everyday machines, but truly in the realm of Pro, in both specs and financial exclusivity.
And, hey, Apple has been here before, so an M1 Max based Mac Mini is likely to be delayed, if for no other reason, than to make sure that as many Pro users drop in for the whole mobile package – rather than building a budget system with money saved on 3rd party monitors and other practical cost cutting tricks.
All in all there’s an excitement in Today’s unleashing that slams into the core of any creative professional’s very being. Beastly power is tantalizingly within reach, all for a mere four to six thousand dollars… Or 1/10th of a BitCoin.
New Zealand officials on Thursday heralded passage of a groundbreaking law requiring financial institutions to disclose climate-related risks.
“This is a landmark day,” Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister David Clark said in a speech to Parliament.
At issue is the Financial Sector (Climate-related Disclosures and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, which had its third reading Thursday.
A summary of the measure from the Business Ministry touts the bill as a step toward making the country’s “financial system more resilient” and reaching New Zealand’s goal of net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. According to the ministry, the goals of the bill are to:
ensure that the effects of climate change are routinely considered in business, investment, lending, and insurance underwriting decisions;
help climate reporting entities better demonstrate responsibility and foresight in their consideration of climate issues; and
lead to more efficient allocation of capital, and help smooth the transition to a more sustainable, low emissions economy.
A joint statement Thursday from Clark and Climate Change Minister James Shaw frames the bill, which will require the annual disclosures starting in 2023, as the first of its kind across the globe.
“This bill will require around 200 of the largest financial market participants in New Zealand to disclose clear, comparable, and consistent information about the risks, and opportunities, climate change presents to their business,” Clark said in the statement. “In doing so, it will promote business certainty, raise expectations, accelerate progress and create a level playing field.”
Shaw, for his part, said the measure would “encourage entities to become more sustainable by factoring the short, medium, and long-term effects of climate change into their business decisions.”
“New Zealand is a world-leader in this area and the first country in the world to introduce mandatory climate-related reporting for the financial sector,” added Shaw. “We have an opportunity to pave the way for other countries to make climate-related disclosures mandatory.”
Originally published on Common Dreams by ANDREA GERMANOS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
