Nikola founder Trevor Milton became a billionaire by lying to investors about the most important aspects of his low-emission vehicle company, a prosecutor told jurors as Milton's fraud trial began on Tuesday. Reuters: Prosecutors have said Milton sought to deceive investors about the electric- and hydrogen-powered truck maker's technology starting in November 2019. He left the company in September 2020 after a report by short seller Hindenburg Research called the company a "fraud." "He lied to dupe innocent investors into buying his company's stock," Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos said in U.S. District Court in New York. "On the backs of those innocent investors taken in by his lies, he became a billionaire virtually overnight." Milton, 40, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud. Milton's attorney Marc Mukasey on Tuesday called the case "prosecution by distortion" and said the entrepreneur sought to express a vision about the future of trucking, not mislead investors.

SWIFT, the messaging system used by financial institutions globally to convey instructions on tens of millions of transactions each day, is testing out blockchain. From a report: The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or SWIFT for short, is piloting a project with fintech company Symbiont, according to a post seen by Bloomberg. The collaboration, which includes Citigroup, Vanguard and Northern Trust, is aimed at driving "efficiencies in communicating significant corporate events," like dividend payments and mergers, SWIFT said in its post. As a global financial artery, SWIFT delivers secure messages among 11,000 companies in over 200 countries and territories, directing trillions of dollars in transactions. The operation gained much attention earlier this year as war broke out in Ukraine following Russia's invasion. The US and Europe cut a number of Russian banks from SWIFT, hurting their efforts to move money and operate globally.

Amazon unveiled enhanced versions of its Kindle and Kindle Kids e-readers on Tuesday, the first time the tech giant has upgraded its flagship e-reader in nearly three years. From a report: The upgraded Kindle will now include a battery life of up to six weeks, USB-C charging and 16GB of storage. The Kindle Kids version will also come with a one-year subscription to Amazon Kids+. The Kindle will cost $99.99, up from the previous price of $89.99. The Kindle Kids model will cost $119.99, up from $109.99.

The Linux Foundation has announced plans for a new collaborative initiative designed to support interoperability across digital wallets, built on an open source bedrock. From a report: The OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), as the new effort is called, is the brainchild of Daniel Goldscheider, CEO of open banking startup Yes.com, though today's announcement reveals a broad gamut of buy-ins from multiple industry players including Okta, Ping Identity, Accenture, CVS Health, OpenID Foundation, among several other public and private bodies. With the Linux Foundation serving as the project's host, this gives OWF sizeable clout as it strives to enable what Goldscheider calls a "plurarity of wallets based on a common core," according to a press release. The news also comes as regulatory bodies across the globe are moving to support competition through enforcing interoperability across systems, including Europe which is currently trying to make messaging interoperability a thing.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: As Motherboard and The Verge note, YouTuber Yannic Kilcher trained an AI language model using three years of content from 4chan's Politically Incorrect (/pol/) board, a place infamous for its racism and other forms of bigotry. After implementing the model in ten bots, Kilcher set the AI loose on the board -- and it unsurprisingly created a wave of hate. In the space of 24 hours, the bots wrote 15,000 posts that frequently included or interacted with racist content. They represented more than 10 percent of posts on /pol/ that day, Kilcher claimed.

Nicknamed GPT-4chan (after OpenAI's GPT-3), the model learned to not only pick up the words used in /pol/ posts, but an overall tone that Kilcher said blended "offensiveness, nihilism, trolling and deep distrust." The video creator took care to dodge 4chan's defenses against proxies and VPNs, and even used a VPN to make it look like the bot posts originated from the Seychelles. The AI made a few mistakes, such as blank posts, but was convincing enough that it took roughly two days for many users to realize something was amiss. Many forum members only noticed one of the bots, according to Kilcher, and the model created enough wariness that people accused each other of being bots days after Kilcher deactivated them. "It's a reminder that trained AI is only as good as its source material," concludes the report.

Extreme heat in California has left Twitter without one of its key data centers, and a company executive warned in an internal memo obtained by CNN that another outage elsewhere could result in the service going dark for some of its users. CNN reports: "On September 5th, Twitter experienced the loss of its Sacramento (SMF) datacenter region due to extreme weather. The unprecedented event resulted in the total shutdown of physical equipment in SMF," Carrie Fernandez, the company's vice president of engineering, said in an internal message to Twitter engineers on Friday. Major tech companies usually have multiple data centers, in part to ensure their service can stay online if one center fails; this is known as redundancy.

As a result of the outage in Sacramento, Twitter is in a "non-redundant state," according to Fernandez's Friday memo. She explained that Twitter's data centers in Atlanta and Portland are still operational but warned, "If we lose one of those remaining datacenters, we may not be able to serve traffic to all Twitter's users." The memo goes on to prohibit non-critical updates to Twitter's product until the company can fully restore its Sacramento data center services. "All production changes, including deployments and releases to mobile platforms, are blocked with the exception of those changes required to address service continuity or other urgent operational needs," Fernandez wrote. In a statement about the Sacramento outage, a Twitter spokesperson told CNN, "There have been no disruptions impacting the ability for people to access and use Twitter at this time. Our teams remain equipped with the tools and resources they need to ship updates and will continue working to provide a seamless Twitter experience."

Autonomous tech developer Nuro is teaming up with Uber Eats in a long-awaited partnership that will see the company's latest robot take over the delivery of food to app users. Autoweek reports: The two companies signed a 10-year contract just a few days ago, paving the way for a wider rollout of Nuro's driverless delivery robots, which have been operating on a limited scale in several cities. The partnership will kick off slowly, with Nuro deploying its robots to Houston and Mountain View, California, as a start, before the service makes a wider debut in the Bay Area.

Perhaps more importantly, Nuro's delivery robots will allow Uber Eats to not have to pay a human driver, which is something that company has been working toward for years as part of its primary business as well. However, the lagging development of Level 4 and Level 5 autonomy, once widely expected to arrive around 2020, had stalled ambitions for Uber, which has struggled with profitability through normal operations with independent contractor drivers. Nuro delivery robots enjoyed renewed interest from business partners in the early months of the pandemic, but the company's technology is now being viewed as a cost saver for operators rather than a method of more sanitary delivery.

Of course, a limited rollout in two cities plus plans to launch in the Bay Area won't transform Uber Eats' business model overnight. This could take years even with an unlimited supply of Nuro delivery robots -- with regulatory approval still being the major impediment. That's because commercial driverless permits are granted on a state-by-state basis, in addition to city and county approvals, which were hard enough for Nuro to obtain in the Bay Area, where Level 4 robotaxis are being tested. Nuro will need to focus its efforts in those areas where traffic is suitable for its robots.

Inside Google, a team of techies has been working behind the scenes on software for high-speed communications networks that extend from land to space. Codenamed "Minkowski" within Google, the secret project is being unveiled to the public on Monday as a new spinout called Aalyria. CNBC reports: While Google declined to offer details about Aalyria, such as how long it's been working on the technology and how many employees are joining the startup, Aalyria said in a news release that its mission is to manage "hyper fast, ultra-secure, and highly complex communications networks that span land, sea, air, near space, and deep space." The company says it has a laser communications technology "on an exponentially greater scale and speed than anything that exists today." Aalyria's software platform has been used in multiple aerospace networking projects for Google.

Aalyria (pronounced ah-Leer-eeh-ah) said it has an $8.7 million commercial contract with the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit. The company will be led by CEO Chris Taylor, a national security expert who has led other companies that have worked with the government. Taylor's LinkedIn profile says he's the CEO of a company in stealth mode that he founded in November. Aalyria's board of advisors includes several previous Google employees and executives as well as Vint Cerf, Google's chief internet evangelist who's known as one of the fathers of the web. Google will retain a minority stake in Aalyria but declined to say how much it owns and how much outside funding the company has raised. Google said that earlier this year it transferred nearly a decade's worth of intellectual property, patents and physical assets, including office space, to Aalyria. Aalyria's light laser technology, which it calls "Tightbeam," claims to keep data "intact through the atmosphere and weather and offers connectivity where no supporting infrastructure exists."

"Tightbeam radically improves satellite communications, Wi-Fi on planes and ships, and cellular connectivity everywhere," the company said.

Google has canceled the next version of its Pixelbook laptop and dissolved the team responsible for building it. The device was far along in development and expected to debut next year, The Verge reported Monday, citing a person familiar with the matter, but the project was cut as part of recent cost-cutting measures inside of Google. Members of the team have been transferred elsewhere inside the company. The Verge: As recently as a few months ago, Google was planning to keep the Pixelbook going. Ahead of its annual I/O developer conference, Google hardware chief Rick Osterloh told The Verge that "we are going to do Pixelbooks in the future." But he also acknowledged that the Chromebook market has changed since 2017 when the original (and best) Pixelbook launched. "What's nice about the category is that it has matured," Osterloh said. "You can expect them to last a long time." One way Google might be thinking about the ChromeOS market is that it simply doesn't need Google the way it once did. Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, has been saying for months that he intends to slow down hiring and cut some projects across the company. "In some cases, that means consolidating where investments overlap and streamlining processes," he wrote in a July memo. "In other cases, that means pausing development and re-deploying resources to higher priority areas." The Pixelbook team and the Pixelbook itself were casualties of that consolidation and redeployment.

Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is betting the social-media giant's near-term future on Instagram Reels, the short-video feature he is touting as the company's answer to TikTok. The company's internal research shows that Meta has a lot of catching up to do. From a report: Instagram users cumulatively are spending 17.6 million hours a day watching Reels, less than one-tenth of the 197.8 million hours TikTok users spend each day on that platform, according to a document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that summarizes internal Meta research. The document, titled "Creators x Reels State of the Union 2022," was published internally in August. It said that Reels engagement had been falling -- down 13.6% over the previous four weeks -- and that "most Reels users have no engagement whatsoever." One reason is that Instagram has struggled to recruit people to make content. Roughly 11 million creators are on the platform in the U.S., but only about 2.3 million of them, or 20.7%, post on that platform each month, the document said.

Tom's Hardware reports: We're here in Israel for Intel's Technology Tour 2022, where the company is sharing new information about its latest products, much of it under embargo until a later date. However, the company did share a slide touting that Raptor Lake is capable of operating at 6GHz at stock settings and that it has set a world overclocking record at 8GHz - obviously with liquid nitrogen (here's our deep dive on the 13th-Gen Intel processors). Intel also shared impressive performance projections for single- and multi-thread performance.

Notably, the peak of 6 GHz is 300 MHz faster than the 5.7 GHz for AMD's Ryzen 7000 processors, but Intel hasn't announced which product will hit that peak speed. We also aren't sure if a 6GHz chip will arrive with the first wave of chips or be a special edition 'KS' model. Intel also claimed that Raptor Lake will have a 15% gain in single-threaded performance and a 41% gain in multi-threaded, as measured by SPECintrate_2017 and compared to Alder Lake, and an overall '40% performance scaling.'

Images and, later, a video of a "Meta Quest Pro" virtual reality (VR) headset surfaced online, posted on Facebook by Ramiro Cardenas, who claims the device was left in a hotel room. From a report: The device shown resembles the Project Cambria headset Meta has been publicly teasing since late last year and looks like the one spotted in leaked setup videos. The video shows Cardenas removing the device from its packaging, revealing a black headset and controller with what looks like an updated design. While the headset has three cameras on its front, the controllers feature a design that drops the hollowed-out loop design that houses the sensors for something more solid. The packaging has the "Meta Quest Pro" label stamped in the top-left corner and a graphic showing the VR headset and controllers. Cardenas also provided a closeup of the label stuck to the box, which says "Not for resale - engineering sample," and told The Verge that the person who stayed in the room has since claimed the headsets.

CNBC reports that former Tesla CFO Deepak Ahuja (now at Alphabet's Verily Life Sciences) will join the leadership team at Zipline, a Silicon Valley-based company providing drone deliveries: It initially focused on medical supplies, but is expanding into e-commerce and food delivery. The company has previously partnered with the Rwandan government to deliver medical supplies and handled Covid-19 vaccine distribution in Ghana, and has expanded operations from three to seven countries over the last two years, according to a release....

"Rarely do I see this level of disruption and impact paired with the world-class technology that Zipline's team is building," Ahuja said in a release. "It's an exciting time for Zipline, and I'm thrilled to join the team as we keep building to offer these solutions at a massive scale."
The move comes "as the drone delivery and logistics startup accelerates its global expansion in Africa, the United States and other regions," reports TechCrunch, noting that Ahuja will be the company's first chief business and financial officer: Zipline also operates in Japan and in the United States, including Arkansas and North Carolina. The company is expanding to Utah later this year through a partnership with Intermountain Health and announced plans to begin operations with Multicare Health System in Washington starting in 2024.

Ahuja will focus on building Zipline's business in the United States and other regions globally, the company told TechCrunch.... His appointment signals Zipline's growing aspirations fueled by partnerships and $250 million in venture capital it raised last year. (The company has raised $486 million to date.) The company, founded in 2014, has developed the entire ecosystem from the drones and logistics software to launch and landing system....

It also recently received FAA Part 135 approval for its long-range drone delivery service in the United States.... Zipline has partnerships with Toyota Group and UPS, it delivers medical equipment and personal protective gear for Novant Health in North Carolina and health and wellness products for Walmart.

Where did the internet come from? When students are asked that by an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, some mention ARPANET or Silicon Valley — and "no fewer than four students have simply written, 'Bill Gates....'"

But even beyond that, "The best-known histories describe an internet that hasn't existed since 1994..." argues Kevin Driscoll "the intersection of hundreds of regional, national, commercial, and cooperative networks." So in an excerpt from his new book, Driscoll describes exactly how "a mixture of commercial online services, university networks, and local community networks mutated into something bigger, more commercial, and more accessible to the general public..."

And what's often left out is the pre-web "modem world": Whereas ARPANET was created by professional researchers in university and government labs, the modem world was driven by community-oriented amateurs and entrepreneurs — hobby radio groups, computer clubs, software pirates, and activist organizations. Despite their shared interest in computer networking, these were, with rare exception, distinct spheres of social and technical activity. The predominant form of PC networking was the bulletin board system, or BBS.... The ARPANET family of networks ran on a fundamentally different infrastructure from consumer-oriented BBS networks, and relatively few people were expert users of both. BBSs were not so much ignored by institutions of power as they were overlooked....

Between 1994 and 1995, the World Wide Web — and not the BBS — became the public face of cyberspace. On television and in print, journalists touted graphical browsers like NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator as the internet's future. As hype mounted, investment capital flooded the data communications industry. But instead of BBSs, the money and attention flowed to firms linked to the nascent Web. Finally, when a moral panic over "cyberporn" threatened to burst the dot-com bubble, BBSs provided a convenient scapegoat. BBSs were old and dirty; the Web was new, clean, and safe for commerce. To avoid the stigma, enterprising BBS operators quietly rebranded. Seemingly overnight, thousands of dial-up BBSs vanished, replaced by brand-new "internet service providers." In the United States, the term BBS fell out of use.

The people who built the modem world in the 1980s laid the groundwork for millions of others who would bring their lives online in the 1990s and beyond. Along with writing code and running up their phone bills, BBS operators developed novel forms of community moderation, governance, and commercialization. When internet access finally came to the public, former BBS users carried the experience of grassroots networking into the social Web. Over time, countless social media platforms have reproduced the social and technical innovations of the BBS community.

Forgetting has high stakes. As the internet becomes the compulsory infrastructure of everyday life, the stories we tell about its origins are more important than ever. Recovering the history of the modem world helps us to imagine a world beyond — or perhaps after — commercial social media, mass surveillance, and platform monopolies. Endlessly modifiable, each BBS represented an idiosyncratic dream of what cyberspace could be, a glimpse of the future written in code and accessible from your local telephone jack. Immersing ourselves in this period of experimentation and play makes the internet seem strange again. By changing how we remember the internet's past, we can change our expectations for its future.

Comcast says it's "evolving its entire network architecture" (along with its equipment and customer devices) -- and it's not just a multi-gig network. They're calling it America's fastest -- and its largest. It's being rolled out "immediately" to millions of homes and business, "combined with up to 5x-to-10x faster upload speeds."

"Comcast plans on bringing multi-gig internet speeds to 34 cities across the U.S. by the end of this year," reports the Verge, "and will later expand its reach to more than 50 million households by the end of 2025." According to a press release, the company has already started rolling out 2-gig speeds over its broadband network in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Augusta, Georgia; Panama City Beach, Florida; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Customers in these cities will also get to take advantage of upload speeds that Comcast says are five to 10 times faster than what it currently offers. The upload speeds appear to max out at 200Mbps, even with the new Gigabit x2 plan, but Comcast intends to change that. It's launching multi-gig symmetrical speeds next year, which will enable multi-gig speeds for both downloads and uploads.
"As part of this initiative, Comcast is accelerating the transformation of its network to a virtualized cloud-based architecture that is fully prepared for 10G and DOCSIS 4.0..." explains the press release, "which will deliver multi-gig symmetrical speeds over the connections already installed in tens of millions of homes and businesses."

The big advantage of digital network technology is "rather than maintaining, updating, and replacing traditional analog network appliances by hand -- which can take days or even weeks -- Comcast engineers can reliably maintain, troubleshoot, and upgrade core network components almost instantly, with a few keystrokes on a laptop or mobile app. This also makes the network much more energy efficient and is an important element of Comcast's plan to become carbon neutral by 2035."

Editor's note: An earlier version of the story said Comcast was offering 2-gigabyte download speeds when it should have said 2-gigabit. We regret the error.

"The GNOME desktop environment is one of the most popular user interfaces and suites of apps available for desktop Linux distributions," writes Liliputing.

"Now a team of developers have been working to bring GNOME to mobile devices running Linux-based operating systems." GNOME Shell for mobile provides a touch-friendly user interface optimized for smartphones and tablets. And while it looks a bit like Android or iOS at first glance, there are a few key differences. The GNOME team have outlined some of them in an article about recent updates to GNOME Shell on mobile.

Like other modern mobile user interfaces, you interact with GNOME shell using taps, swipes, and other gesture-based navigation. What's different is that Android has three different views for navigation: a home screen, app drawer, and multitasking view. iOS has two: home screen and multitasking. But GNOME Shell has a single screen that allows you to view and launch apps and switch between running apps using gestures. There's no need to wait for a new screen to load. In a nutshell, you can swipe up from the bottom of the any screen to view a list of installed apps, thumbnail images showing all currently running apps, and a search box. You can tap an app icon to launch a new app, enter a term in the search box to find an app, or swipe between running apps to switch which app runs in the foreground.

You can also keep swiping upward to shrink the multitasking thumbnails and provide more room for app icons. And you can flick thumbnail previews upward to remove an app from the multitasking section. Typing in the search box will bring up relevant results including apps and settings.
"One interesting new feature here is that notifications can be swiped away horizontally to close, and notification bubbles can be swiped up to hide them..." the developers point out. "While the current version is definitely still work in progress, it's quite usable overall, so we feel it would make sense to start having experimental GNOME OS Nightly images with it."

But Liliputing also notes that it's not the only GNOME-based UI for mobile devices. There's also Purism's Phosh UI — the default UI for the PureOS on its Librem 5 smartphone (and available for other mobile Linux distros including Debian).

And Purism recently bragged that its smartphone is now also "the first mobile computer with a truly convergent OS" — meaning it can run on multiple hardware platforms, with apps adapting to their hardware. The Librem 5 [smartphone] uses the same convergent PureOS as our Librem 14 laptop and Mini PCs, with the same adaptive applications that make the Librem 5 more than merely a phone, it's a mobile computer in your pocket that can shape shift into a laptop, tablet, desktop, or even a server.... Scale your Librem 5 up to be a full laptop by attaching the Nexdock. Because our core apps are adaptive, they are ready to run on whatever screen you have....

With phosh-mobile-settings installed, you can flip the nexdock around and use the big screen just like a tablet.... Don't have a laptop dock? The Librem 5 can also act like a desktop computer when connected to a screen, keyboard, and mouse using our USB-C dock. Using the beta phom virtual mouse app, you can turn your Librem 5 into a touchpad mouse while it's connected to the big screen.

With the Librem 5, you can keep your desktop computer in your pocket and connect to a bigger screen at home or at the office and use the same apps on the bigger screen without restarting....

With the Librem 5 phone, you're getting much more than smartphone to run mobile-only apps; you're getting a laptop, tablet, desktop, all running software that respects your privacy and freedom.

China remains the world's largest lithium processor, reports Reuters. But Tesla "is considering setting up a lithium refinery on the gulf coast of Texas, as it looks to secure supply of the key component used in batteries amid surging demand for electric vehicles." The potential battery-grade lithium hydroxide refining facility, which Tesla touted as the first of its kind in North America, will process "raw ore material into a usable state for battery production", the company said in an application filed with the Texas Comptroller's Office.

A decision to invest in Texas will also be based on the ability to obtain relief on local property taxes, Tesla said.

Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has previously said that Tesla may have to enter the mining and refining industry directly at scale as lithium prices surge. Musk has also been vocal about the need for more players in the lithium refining industry.... Securing a steady supply of battery components is seen critical for Tesla as it faces fierce competition in the fast-growing market for electric cars. If approved, construction could begin in the fourth quarter of 2022 and would reach commercial production by the end of 2024, Tesla said in the application dated Aug. 22....

If Tesla's plan goes ahead, the carmaker could become the first in the sector to invest directly in lithium refining as automakers scramble to stitch up deals with miners and refiners.
In addition, the article points out, Tesla "also said it would use less hazardous reagents and create usable byproducts, compared with the conventional process."

"A vital offsite electricity supply to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has been destroyed by shelling," the Guardian reported Friday, "and there is little likelihood a reliable supply will be re-established, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog chief has said." Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said shelling had destroyed the switchyard of a nearby thermal power plant. The plant has supplied power to the nuclear facility each time its normal supply lines had been cut over the past three weeks.

The thermal plant was also supplying the surrounding area, which was plunged into darkness. Local Ukrainian officials said work was under way to restore the connection, which has been cut multiple times this week....

When the thermal supply has been cut the plant has relied on its only remaining operating reactor for the power needed for cooling and other safety functions. This method is designed to provide power only for a few hours at a time. Diesel generators are used as a last resort. The constant destruction of thermal power supply has led Ukraine to consider shutting down the remaining operating reactor, said Grossi. Ukraine "no longer [has] confidence in the restoration of offsite power", he said.

Grossi said that if Ukraine decided not to restore the offsite supply the entire power plant would be reliant on emergency diesel generators to ensure supplies for the nuclear safety and security functions.

"As a consequence, the operator would not be able to restart the reactors unless offsite power was reliably re-established," he said.
NPR provides some context: Normally, the plant holds a 10-day reserve of diesel fuel, the agency says, and currently has approximately 2,250 tonnes of fuel available. If that fuel is depleted, or the generators are damaged in further fighting, it could trigger a meltdown.

But Steven Nesbit, a nuclear engineer and member of the American Nuclear Society's rapid response taskforce, which is tracking the current crisis, says that doesn't necessarily mean there would be a Chernobyl-like catastrophe. The meltdown at Chernobyl was due to a unique mix of design flaws and operator error that would be essentially impossible to replicate at Zaporizhzhia. And unlike the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, some of the reactors at Zaporizhzhia have already been shut down for a while, allowing the nuclear fuel to cool somewhat, Nesbit says. Even in the worst case scenario, the reactors at Zaporizhzhia are a modern design surrounded by a heavy "containment" building, Nesbit says. "It's reinforced concrete, typically about three to four feet of that; it's designed to withstand very high internal pressures." That could allow it to hold in any radioactive material.

But the world's nuclear agency doesn't want to test any of this.
Meanwhile, the French international news agency AFP reports on what's been happening at the plant since it was captured by Russian troops in March: Russian forces controlling Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant have killed two staff at the facility and detained and abused dozens of others, the head of Ukraine's nuclear energy agency told AFP on Friday.

"We do not know where about ten people are now," Petro Kotin said. "They were taken (by the Russians) and after that we have no information about their whereabouts," Kotin said, adding about 200 people had been detained. He described the current situation at the plant as "very difficult," citing "torture" of staff and "beatings" of personnel. "The Russians look for pro-Ukrainian people and persecute them. People are psychologically broken," he said in an interview with AFP reporters in his office in Kyiv... "Two people on the territory of the plant were wounded during shelling — a woman and a man — on separate occasions," Kotin, clad in a military-style jacket, said.

"But people understand that the nuclear safety of the plant depends on them, so the employees return to Energodar and continue working at the facility," he added.

This week as America celebrated Labor Day, the Washington Post told the story of how 4,000 cafeteria workers at Google quietly unionized during the pandemic: Google is famous for its cafeterias, which serve its legions of programmers and product managers everything from vegan poke to gourmet tacos — free. But the cooks and servers behind those meals are generally contractors who work for other companies, and do not get the generous perks and benefits reserved for Google employees. So over the past few years, thousands of them have unionized, securing higher wages, retirement benefits and free platinum health care coverage.

Unite Here, a 300,000-member union of hotel and food service workers, has been steadily working to unionize Silicon Valley cafeteria workers since 2018, experiencing the most success at Google. Employed by the contract companies Compass and Guckenheimer, those unionized now make up about 90 percent of total food services workers at Google, according to the union. Workers have unionized at 23 Google offices nationwide, including in Seattle and San Jose.

Now, the union is tackling new territory: the South.... Google workers in Atlanta employed by a different cafeteria company — Sodexo — presented their manager with a list of demands and said they plan to unionize.... [Last week] Sodexo and the union reached an agreement: Should a majority of workers choose to unionize, Sodexo would not try to block it.
The article notes that more than 230 Starbucks locations have also voted to unionize since last year. But Google offers a case study in the difference it can make, according to the Post's summary of observations from D. Taylor, the president of Unite Here.

"The average unionized worker at a Google cafeteria makes $24 an hour, pays little to nothing for health insurance and has access to a pension plan. At Sodexo-run Google cafeterias, workers make $15 an hour and pay premiums in the hundreds of dollars, Taylor said."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for sharing the story.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A group of independent movie companies has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AT&T. The Internet provider, which has over 80 million subscribers in the US, faces far-reaching demands. In addition to millions in damages, the filmmakers want the ISP to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers and block access to sites such as The Pirate Bay and YTS. [...] In a complaint (PDF) filed at a federal court in Texas, Voltage Pictures and its affiliates, known for films such as "After We Collided," "Dallas Buyers Club," "Room 203," and "The Bird Catcher", accuse the ISP of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.

"For years, AT&T has knowingly allowed AT&T users to engage in online piracy, the illegal distribution and downloading of copyrighted materials, including films. AT&T provides the IP addresses used for piracy, makes the connections needed to share and download pirated films, and transmits the pirated films," they write. The ISP allegedly turned a blind eye to pirating subscribers, facilitating mass online piracy. The filmmakers say they sent tens of thousands of notices to the company, reporting alleged copyright infringements. In some cases, hundreds of notices were sent for a single IP address without any visible response from the Internet provider.

In the United States, the law requires Internet providers to adopt a policy that provides for the termination of accounts of repeat infringers, under appropriate circumstances. AT&T references this in its terms but according to the filmmakers' complaint, this policy is not sufficient. The lawsuit specifically claims that AT&T willingly keeps repeat infringers on board because that adds tens of millions of dollars to AT&T's bottom line. [...] To compensate for all piracy-related losses, the plaintiffs request actual or statutory damages, which can run into millions of dollars. In addition, they also want AT&T to terminate repeat infringers under appropriate circumstances. Finally, and of particular interest, the movie companies also want the Internet provider to block foreign pirate sites. They include YTS, The Pirate Bay, RARBG, 1337x, and others that have been called out in the US Trade Representative's annual overview of notorious markets.