Tesla CEO Elon Musk listens as President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with technology industry leaders at Trump Tower in New York, Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2016. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Evan Vucci / AP

In a lengthy Thursday night email to Tesla employees, CEO Elon Musk defended his record as an employer, and appealed to workers not to join the United Auto Workers union.

In the message, first leaked to Electrek.co and later obtained in full by BuzzFeed News, Musk took direct aim at claims made earlier this month in a Medium post by factory worker Jose Moran. Moran alleged that long hours of physical labor once forced six of his eight team members to take medical leave simultaneously. Musk disputed this allegation, claiming a Tesla investigation has proven it to be false. “After looking into this claim, not only was it untrue for this individual’s team, it was untrue for any of the hundreds of teams in the factory,” he wrote.

“The forces arrayed against us are many and incredibly powerful. This is David vs Goliath if David were six inches tall!”

The Tesla CEO also lambasted the efforts of the United Auto Workers union to unionize Tesla employees at the company's Fremont, CA factory, calling the organization&039;s tactics for doing so “disingenuous or outright false.” Musk alleged that the UAW&039;s “true allegiance is to the giant car companies, where the money they take from employees in dues is vastly more than they could ever make from Tesla.”

“The forces arrayed against us are many and incredibly powerful,” Musk wrote. “This is David vs Goliath if David were six inches tall&033; Only by being smarter, faster and working well as a tightly integrated team do we have any chance of success.”

Moran&039;s post — which was later followed by a press conference and a Facebook video — detailed how low pay, long hours, and difficult working conditions are making life difficult for Tesla employees. Moran argued that unionizing would improve the factory workers&039; situation.

Musk immediately swung back at Moran, telling Gizmodo that he was a union plant; earlier this week, during a Tesla earnings call, Musk told investors that the unionization “isn&039;t likely to occur.”

Moran denied Musk&039;s claims that he&039;s paid by the UAW to lead unionization efforts. His communications team, Storefront Political, declined comment on Musk&039;s email.

Musk&039;s email includes a point-by-point rebuttal of a number of Moran&039;s claims. Regarding long hours, Musk said overtime has actually decreased by 50% in the last year, and that the average employee worked 43 hours a week. Regarding compensation, he noted that Tesla factory workers earn equity, and therefore, over a four year period, earned “between $70,000 and $100,000 more in total compensation than the employees at other US auto companies.” On issues of safety, Musk said Tesla&039;s incident rate is less than half the industry average, and noted that the goal is to be “as close to zero injuries as possible.”

“There will also be little things that come along like free frozen yogurt stands scattered around the factory.”

In addition to defending Tesla&039;s record as an employer, Musk told workers that he plans to improve life at the Tesla factory, which is currently in the process of switching over its lines for production of the Model 3. For example, when the Model 3 reaches “volume production,” Musk said he&039;ll throw them “a really amazing party.”

“There will also be little things that come along like free frozen yogurt stands scattered around the factory and my personal favorite: a Tesla electric pod car roller coaster (with an optional loop the loop route, of course&033;) that will allow fast and fun travel throughout our Fremont campus, dipping in and out of the factory and connecting all the parking lots,” Musk wrote. “It’s going to get crazy good.”

Tesla declined comment. The full text of Musk&039;s email is below.

If you have information on working conditions or unionization efforts at Tesla, please contact the author directly, or tip us anonymously via contact.buzzfeed.com.

For Tesla to become and remain one of the great companies of the 21st century, we must have an environment that is as safe, fair and fun as possible. It is incredibly important to me that you look forward to coming to work every day. For that, we must be a fair and just company – the only kind worth creating.

This is vital to succeed in our mission to accelerate the advent of a clean, sustainable energy future. The forces arrayed against us are many and incredibly powerful. This is David vs Goliath if David were six inches tall&033; Only by being smarter, faster and working well as a tightly integrated team do we have any chance of success. We should never forget the history of car startups originating in the United States: dozens have gone bankrupt and only two, Tesla and Ford, have not. Despite the odds being strongly against us, my faith in you is why I am confident that we will succeed.

That is why I was so distraught when I read the recent blog post promoting the UAW, which does not share our mission and whose true allegiance is to the giant car companies, where the money they take from employees in dues is vastly more than they could ever make from Tesla.

The tactics they have resorted to are disingenuous or outright false. I will address their underhanded attacks below. While this discussion focuses on Fremont, these same principles apply to every Tesla facility worldwide.

Safety First

The workplace issue that comes before any other is safety. If you do not have your health, then nothing else matters. Simply due to size and bad luck, there will always be some injuries in a company with over 30,000 employees, but our goal is simple: to have as close to zero injuries as possible and be the safest factory in the auto industry by far. The Tesla executive team and I are absolutely committed to this goal.

That is why I was particularly troubled by the safety claim in last week’s blog post, which said: “A few months ago, six out of eight people in my work team were out on medical leave at the same time due to various work-related injuries. I hear the ergonomics are even more severe in other areas of the factory.”

Obviously, this cannot be true: if three quarters of his team suddenly went on medical leave, we would not be able to operate that part of the factory. Furthermore, if things were really even worse in other departments, that would mean something like 80% or more of the factory would be out on injury, production would drop to virtually nothing and the parking lot would be almost empty. As you know firsthand, we have the *opposite* problem – there is never enough room to park&033; In fact, we are working at top speed to build more parking. Also, hopefully our darn BART train station will open before all hell freezes over&033;

After looking into this claim, not only was it untrue for this individual’s team, it was untrue for any of the hundreds of teams in the factory.

That said, reducing excess overtime and improving safety are extremely important. This is why we hired thousands of additional team members to create a third shift, which has reduced the burden on everyone. Moreover, since the beginning of Tesla production at Fremont five years ago, there have been dedicated health and safety experts covering the factory and we hold regular safety meetings with operations leaders. Since the majority of the injuries in the factory are ergonomic in nature, we have an ergonomics department focused exclusively on this issue.

The net result is that since January 1st, our total recordable incident rate (TRIR) is under 3.3, which is less than half the industry average of 6.7.

Of course, the goal is to have as close to zero injuries as humanly possible, so we need to keep improving. If you have a safety concern or an idea on how to make things better, please let your manager, safety representative or HR partner know. You can also send an anonymous note through the Integrity Hotline (this applies broadly to any problems you notice at our company) or you can email.

Compensation

At Tesla, we believe it is important for everyone to be an owner of the company. This is your company. That is why, unlike other car companies, everyone is awarded shares and you get to buy stock at a discount compared to the public through the employee stock purchase program. Last year, stock equity grants were increased significantly and it will happen again later this year once Model 3 achieves high volume.

The chart below contrasts the total comp received by a Tesla production team member who started on January 1, 2013 against the total comp received over the same period at GM, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler. A four year period is used because that’s the vesting length of a new hire equity grant. I believe the equity gain over the next four years will be similar. As shown below, a Tesla team member earned between $70,000 and $100,000 more in total compensation than the employees at other US auto companies&033;

Work Hours

Another issue raised in the UAW blog was hours worked. First, I want to recognize how hard you worked to make our company successful. Those hours mattered to you, to your family and to our company, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate them.

However, the pace needs to be sustainable. This is why the third shift was established and why we created alternate work schedules based on feedback from various teams in the factory.

These changes have had a big impact. The average amount of hours worked by production team members this year is about 43 hours per week. The percentage of overtime hours has declined by almost 50% since the super tough time we had last year achieving rate on the Model X, which is probably the hardest car to build in history. What an amazing accomplishment&033; It is also a lesson learned, which is why Model 3 is designed to be dramatically easier to manufacture.

Fun

As we get closer to being a profitable company, we will be able to afford more and more fun things. For example, as I mentioned at the last company talk, we are going to hold a really amazing party once Model 3 reaches volume production later this year. There will also be little things that come along like free frozen yogurt stands scattered around the factory and my personal favorite: a Tesla electric pod car roller coaster (with an optional loop the loop route, of course&033;) that will allow fast and fun travel throughout our Fremont campus, dipping in and out of the factory and connecting all the parking lots. It’s going to get crazy good

Thanks again for all your effort and I look forward to working alongside you to create an amazing future&033;

Elon

Quelle: <a href="Elon Musk Slams Union Drive At Tesla Factory“>BuzzFeed

25. Februar 201725. Februar 2017

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Palantir Has Been Dumped By Another Blue-Chip Client

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Palantir Technologies, the secretive Silicon Valley data analysis firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, has lost a marquee cybersecurity client, BuzzFeed News has learned, continuing a string of defections by corporate customers.

Home Depot, which hired Palantir after its major credit card hack in 2014, ended the relationship in December over concerns that Palantir’s services weren’t worth the price, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The retailer concluded that it could accomplish much of the same work on its own, one of the people said.

In addition, Home Depot was rankled when Palantir staff sought to drum up additional business in other parts of the company, on time paid for by the cybersecurity department, one of the people said.

The cancellation means one of the world’s largest retailers has joined a list of blue-chip companies that have stopped doing business with Palantir since 2015. Others, including Coca-Cola, American Express, and Nasdaq, also balked at Palantir’s price tag, BuzzFeed News reported last year, or raised doubts about its usefulness. Home Depot’s exit also illustrates how a metric called “bookings,” which Palantir uses to measure deal size — and which it has given out publicly when describing the size of its overall business — can fail to translate into actual revenue.

At the time it was signed, the Home Depot contract was considered Palantir’s biggest ever cybersecurity deal, and Palantir executives immediately started citing it in pitch conversations with potential new customers, according to internal emails reviewed by BuzzFeed News. Now, Palantir will end up collecting significantly less than the booking value it promoted internally, according to the emails and the people familiar with the matter.

If you have information or tips, you can contact this reporter over an encrypted chat service such as Signal or WhatsApp, at 310-617-1302. You can also send an encrypted email to will.alden@buzzfeed.com, using the PGP key found here.

Home Depot paid Palantir about $5 million a year, excluding cloud storage costs, during the two years of the relationship, according to someone with direct knowledge of the matter. But Palantir’s internal calculus appeared to reflect an expectation that the price would rise over time — and that the deal would last longer.

In one internal email from December 2014, when contract talks were held, Melody Hildebrandt, a senior Palantir executive, said the two sides had reached a five-and-a-half-year agreement, worth a total of $37.5 million in bookings. Later, in a January 2015 memo to staff, the total deal size was cited as $60 million. (Both emails described the deal as Palantir’s largest ever in cybersecurity.)

A Home Depot spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, “We aren’t going to publicly discuss our cybersecurity operations.” A Palantir spokesperson declined to comment.

Chaired by Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who is now advising President Donald Trump, Palantir works for government agencies and major corporations, making highly customized software to analyze and visualize data. Its work, by Silicon Valley standards, is labor-intensive, with teams of “forward deployed engineers” working onsite at client offices.

But Palantir, which started in 2004 and took early capital from the CIA, has generated considerable mystique in Washington and in corporate board rooms. It has garnered a $20 billion valuation, making it among the largest “unicorn” startups in Silicon Valley, and its CEO hinted last fall that it could soon pursue an IPO.

Though Palantir is not primarily a cybersecurity company, it has made cybersecurity an important part of its business development strategy. With a number of corporate customers, Palantir got its initial foothold through cybersecurity services, aiming to eventually add new data-crunching work to the customer’s tab.

Palantir even has a job category called “leverage,” which includes pushing customers to sign up for more of its services, according to former employees. As one former employee put it, “They try to find a specific problem the customer is trying to solve, and use that as a fishing expedition to leverage that into a bigger scope of work.”

At Home Depot — which once had the codename “Sherlock” inside Palantir — cybersecurity was supposed to be just the first service among many.

“The door is open for additional use case talks after we crush Q2 in cyber,” a Palantir business development engineer, Sam Jones, told colleagues in an April 2015 email.

The Pinehurst golf resort in North Carolina, where Palantir and Home Depot staffers mingled during a charity event.

David Cannon / Getty Images

Palantir’s relationship with Home Depot was forged during a crisis. With the retailer reeling in 2014 from one of the largest cyber attacks ever unleashed on a U.S. corporation, Palantir quickly delivered its expert analysis, calculating, for example, the scope of the attack — that 56 million credit or debit card accounts had been compromised. By early 2015, once the initial work had evolved into an annual contract, Palantir engineers were pursuing three different strategies to investigate abnormal activity on the Home Depot network, with detailed findings, a slide deck shows.

Around that time, Daniel Grider, Home Depot’s vice president of information technology, described the Silicon Valley data wranglers as “awesome,” according to a Palantir email. When Jamil Farshchi, Home Depot’s newly hired chief information security officer, raised questions about Palantir’s price, “Grider told him not to worry about that much and just let us do our thing,” Palantir’s Jones told colleagues in 2015.

By 2016, however, Home Depot had taken a dimmer view of Palantir’s services. When the company first threatened to cancel, Palantir offered to lower its price, a person familiar with the matter said. But by then the retailer had determined it could rely on its own employees for the work Palantir engineers were doing.

Palantir had kept close tabs on Home Depot, even discussing juicy tidbits about its leadership. Before Farshchi was hired, Palantir employees discussed Home Depot’s search for a chief information security officer and even cited the salary level of the position. (The source of this information, according to one internal email, was a Palantir employee’s significant other, who worked for a headhunting firm.)

At a Home Depot charity event in April 2015, “it became even more clear the level of respect the entire IT department has for Palantir and that we are also in the ‘inner circle,'” Jones told colleagues soon after. Over several days, Palantir employees joined Home Depot brass in building homes for military veterans, partying until the wee hours, and golfing at the Pinehurst resort in North Carolina.

The Palantir employees learned, via a presentation from a Home Depot executive, about the IT department’s goals for 2015 — useful information as Palantir sought to expand its role. They also accomplished some important schmoozing, Jones said: “We ticked some middle management off a few weeks ago escalating requests, and after drinking with a few of them we were invited to Austin to go hunting.”

Over drinks and cigars, the Palantir employees joined Home Depot executives for hold ‘em poker one night at a nearby condo. (They had to decamp to the condo because “North Carolina has some law about gambling and drinking in the same establishment,” Jones said.) Matt Carey, Home Depot’s executive vice president and chief information officer, was knocked out of the poker tournament three times by a Palantir employee, according to Jones.

“Matt joked with everyone else at our table how smart we were and that we were going to take everyone’s money,” Jones said.

If you have information or tips, you can contact this reporter over an encrypted chat service such as Signal or WhatsApp, at 310-617-1302. You can also send an encrypted email to will.alden@buzzfeed.com, using the PGP key found here.

Quelle: <a href="Palantir Has Been Dumped By Another Blue-Chip Client“>BuzzFeed

25. Februar 201725. Februar 2017

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Which Messaging App Should You Use?

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY?!

There are so many ways to send a message these days. Google Voice recently added texts, group messaging, and transcribed voicemail after not updating their app for *five years,* bringing the number of Google's messaging apps to four (including Hangouts, Allo, and Duo). Facebook&039;s got two apps (WhatsApp and Messenger). Microsoft&039;s got two apps (GroupMe and Skype). Apple also kind of has two apps (iMessage and FaceTime).

That doesn&039;t include all of the other, independent messaging apps out there like Viber, WeChat, LINE, Telegram, and Kakaotalk, to name a few.

It&039;s true. We live in a time of TOO MANY messaging apps. So if you&039;re feeling lost in this ~brave new world~ of online communication, here&039;s a guide to the best platforms.

Christopher Furlong / Getty Images

The ~ultimate~ cross-platform messaging app is WhatsApp.

WhatsApp (free, iOS, Android, Windows phone and web) is the Ultimate Messaging App. It has a giant user base, is super fast, works on many different devices (even Blackberry!), has an easy-to-understand interface, and provides end-to-end encryption.

Plus, the Facebook-owned app has over one billion users on its platform, so it&039;s likely that some of your friends already using it.

WhatsApp offers free text messaging, group messaging, voice, and video calls over cellular data or Wi-Fi. It has a simple, easy-to-understand interface, without the overwhelming bells and whistles of the Viber and Line apps. The app is also fast. Multimedia (like photos, videos, audio messages and files up to 100MB) are compressed automatically by the app, so they send quickly even when connection is poor.

One of my favorite features is the ability to “star” messages with important reference information and access all of those starred messages in one, convenient place.

You can send and receive WhatsApp text messages from your mobile phone or the web. There is, unfortunately, no native desktop app and you can&039;t voice or video call from the web.

The app is encrypted end-to-end by default, but it can record metadata like the date, timestamp, and phone numbers associated with a message, according to a recently revised privacy policy. The app also announced last year that it was going to start sharing user information with Facebook, though it did let users opt out before agreeing to the updated terms of service. If you didn&039;t opt out before updating, you got an additional 30 days to make your choice.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

If you – and most of your contacts – have iPhones, it’s a no brainer: use iMessage.

For iPhone users, iMessage ticks all the boxes.

You don&039;t have to sign up for anything. It&039;s the default messaging app on all iPhones, unlike on some Android devices, where there can be up to four messaging apps to choose from (Hangouts? Allo? Duo? The cell carrier&039;s own messaging app?).

It works seamlessly with FaceTime video and audio calling over data or a cell connection. It&039;s encrypted end-to-end (although, only when you message other iPhone users). It works on your phone, it works on your Mac, and it works on your iPad. It lets you send lasers to your friends. It automatically sends texts via iMessage when it&039;s appropriate, and regular SMS to those outside the “blue bubble.” It can handle all kinds of media: GIFs, contacts, location, links, photos, videos, and voice memos.

You can use Siri to check messages or send new messages, and install integrations from the new iMessage app store. You can also access Yelp, Venmo, and Dropbox without ever leaving the Messages app.

Sure, there&039;s still room for improvement. Namely, lack of compatibility with ANY OTHER PLATFORMS (ugh). Apple can also collect some metadata, like the numbers you enter into iMessage, which are sent to Apple servers to determine whether or not the message should be sent through iMessage or SMS. Apple retains that data for up to 30 days, and can be compelled to hand it over to law enforcement with a subpoena or court order.

If iMessage were cross-platform, it might be the Perfect Messaging App. But until then, it&039;s the best option for those with iPhones to communicate with other peeps with iPhones.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

If you prefer features over security, plus texting, audio, and video chat, here are some options.

In addition to WhatsApp (read above), Facebook Messenger and Hangouts are some other apps to consider.

Facebook Messenger is more feature-rich, but doesn&039;t have as many privacy and security settings.

The messaging app by WhatsApp&039;s parent company, Facebook Messenger (free, iOS, Android, the web), has some pretty killer features, like being able to use high-definition video and audio calling on mobile or web. Messenger is unique because you can send money directly through the app in the US. There are also bots built into Messenger that can help you diagnose that weird rash or shop for you. One thing to note: users know when you&039;ve read their messages (and vice versa) and there&039;s no straightforward way to disable read receipts, sadly.

The app recently rolled out a new, fully encrypted feature called “Secret Conversations,” which ensures that the message&039;s content can&039;t be read by law enforcement or the company itself. The reason why Messenger is only for the ~moderately paranoid~ is because the encryption feature is opt-in, and needs to be turned on for every conversation, unlike WhatsApp, which automatically encrypts every chat by default. Additionally, “Secret Conversations” only encrypts text messages, photos, and videos sent in the thread, but it doesn&039;t protect audio and video calls.

Google Hangouts is fine, but isn&039;t as secure.

Hangouts (free, iOS, Android, and web) puts text messaging, audio calling, and video calling in one place – but it does not offer full encryption, so Google can wiretap conversations at the request of law enforcement. You&039;ll need to use Google Allo&039;s incognito mode for messaging and Google Duo for video chatting with end-to-end encryption.

And unlike WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, which allow you to sign up with just your phone number and without a Facebook account, Hangouts requires a Google account.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

View Entire List ›

Quelle: <a href="Which Messaging App Should You Use?“>BuzzFeed

24. Februar 201724. Februar 2017

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Uber Women To CEO Travis Kalanick: We Have A Systemic Problem

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Uber CEO Travis Kalanick joined a group of more than 100 female engineers on Thursday to discuss the explosive allegations of sexual harassment and sexism recently leveled against the ride-hailing company. During an hour-long meeting, the engineers grilled Kalanick on what they say is a systemic problem at the company and urged him to begin “listening to your own people,” according to an audio recording of obtained by BuzzFeed News.

“In a situation where many women have experienced this kind of thing, the onus is on us to earn credibility,” Kalanick said. “Part of how we get to that place where there’s more optimism is by taking it and apologizing, understanding and doing everything we can to get to the bottom of it.”

Held four days after the publication of a damning essay penned by former Uber engineer Susan Fowler Rigetti, the meeting revealed a company scrambling to address an ugly crisis, with a contrite and emotional Kalanick promising “credible, thorough justice” via an internal investigation by former attorney general Eric Holder and Uber board member Arianna Huffington.

“There are people in this room who have experienced things that are incredibly unjust.”

“I think that we should kind of address the elephant in the room … which is that everyone who’s in these rooms now … believes that there is a systemic problem here. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t,” one engineer told Kalanick. “I do not think that we need [Eric Holder’s] help in admitting to ourselves as a company that we have a systemic problem.”

“Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough,” Kalanick replied. “I understand.”

Circling back to the same question later in the meeting, Kalanick added, “There are people in this room who have experienced things that are incredibly unjust. I want to root out the injustice. I want to get at the people who are making this place a bad place. And you have my commitment. I understand that this is bigger than the Susan situation and I want you to know that I’m all about rooting this out and being very aggressive about that, while also being supportive and empathetic and trying to build that support and empathy throughout the organization.”

Kalanick’s meeting with Uber’s “Lady Eng” group caps a week of upset and declining morale at the ride-hail company which is still bruised from last month’s viral deleteUber campaign. Rigetti's essay inspired a flood of criticism and media scrutiny, that Kalanick&039;s apology to Uber employees during a Tuesday company-wide meeting has done little to temper. On Wednesday, the New York Times published a scathing account of the company’s work culture, citing an incident in which a manager groped a female employee, and another case in which a different manager threatened to beat an underperforming employee with a baseball bat. A day later, Uber investors Mitch and Freada Kapor published an open letter to Uber&039;s board and investors decrying “toxic patterns” at the company and criticizing it for choosing “a team of insiders” to investigate its destructive culture and make recommendations for change.”

“Eric Holder has been working on behalf of Uber since at least last June, when he and his firm were hired to advocate on behalf of Uber to lawmakers concerning using fingerprints as part of background checks on drivers,” the Kapors explained. “Arianna Huffington has held a board seat for about a year and is deeply invested in the company weathering the PR crisis.”

Kalanick did his best to rebut this criticism during the Lady Eng meeting. “There are very few law firms in the world that we haven’t worked with in some way,” he said. “The amount of fees that have gone to Eric Holder is as close to 0 as you can get to date.”

Liane Hornsey, Uber’s chief human resources officer, also attended the meeting and urged employees to trust that the company is working to address its aggressive workplace culture. “I know many people are in pain, and I know there’s many things we have to go through together,” she said. “But at some point, we just have to shift into something that is more positive and assumes trust, and tries to believe that we’re doing the right thing.”

Another engineer asked Kalanick what he thought of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s comments two years ago that women should trust that “the system will actually give you the right raises,” despite low diversity at technology companies.

“I believe that first the trust must be earned,” Kalanick said. “But i also understand that we’re operating here in a system that hasn&039;t earned that trust. … God-willing, we will earn it. But we still need to do that.”

Uber declined comment.

Quelle: <a href="Uber Women To CEO Travis Kalanick: We Have A Systemic Problem“>BuzzFeed

24. Februar 201724. Februar 2017

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Amazon Says Your Alexa Recordings Are Protected By The First Amendment

Staff / Reuters

Amazon is turning to the First Amendment to support its refusal to give law enforcement recordings and responses captured by the Alexa voice assistant on an Amazon Echo speaker that may help police solve a murder case.

After James Bates was charged with murdering his colleague Victor Collins in Walmart&039;s hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas in November 2015, police issued a search warrant for the contents of Bates' Echo speaker. But Amazon has fired back with a 90-page brief contending that the records Alexa collected are protected free speech. Forbes has reproduced the document in full.

Bates also owned an LG Nexus cell phone, which, as Amazon noted in its brief, could contain his Echo&039;s recording if he had downloaded the Alexa app. Amazon has already handed over Bates’ purchase history and account information to law enforcement, but it has declined to release his speaker’s records.

In its brief, Amazon argued, “Such government demands inevitably chill users from exercising their First Amendment rights to seek and receive information and expressive content in the privacy of their own home, conduct which lies at the core of the Constitution.”

As the Echo becomes more popular — the company sold out of the speaker during the 2016 holidays despite increase production — Bates&039; case holds implications for a growing number of American homes. If Amazon loses its fight and is forced to give police Bates&039; Alexa recordings, it will set a significant precedent. Knowledge that the government and police may gain access to consumers&039; Echo recordings could damage trust in Alexa, a product so beloved that people sometimes propose to the AI voice assistant.

Amazon cited Riley v. California, a 2014 US Supreme Court case ruling that warrantless searches of electronic devices and digital records are unconstitutional, to say, “searching Alexa’s recordings is not the same as searching a drawer, a pocket, or a glove compartment. Like cell phones, such modern &039;smart&039; electronic devices contain a multitude of data that can &039;reveal much more in combination than any isolated record,&039; allowing those with access to it to reconstruct &039;[t]he sum of an individual’s private life.&039;”

Amazon&039;s legal team also argued, “At the heart of that First Amendment protection is the right to browse and purchase expressive materials anonymously, without fear of government discovery.”

Amazon is attempting to classify Alexa&039;s recordings, responses, and transcripts as equivalent to the purchase or viewing of “expressive materials” — things like books, music, and podcasts — under the law. The team cited the high-profile inquiry into former president Bill Clinton during his impeachment to make its case: Investigators demanded that a bookstore hand over records of purchases made by Monica Lewinsky, but courts ruled that her “freedom of inquiry,” protected by her right to freedom of speech, required law enforcement demonstrate that they really, truly needed those records.

Lewinsky eventually provided the records willingly, but the precedent for “heightened demonstration of need” stood. It&039;s a rule that demands that law enforcement show a “compelling need” for the information and that there is a “&039;sufficient nexus&039; between the information sought and the underlying inquiry of the investigation.”

Amazon also argued that Alexa&039;s speech should be heard as coming from Amazon itself: “the response constitutes Amazon&039;s First Amendment-protected speech.” It equated Alexa&039;s speech to Baidu&039;s search results, which a US judge ruled were editorial judgments and therefore protected free speech in Zhaing v. Baidu, where New York residents sued Baidu for censoring articles about China&039;s democracy movement. A New York judge declined to hear the case.

(The warrant for the Echo recordings, issued December 4, 2015, has actually expired under Arkansas law. But Amazon has chosen not to challenge it under that law, favoring the First Amendment approach.)

Neither Amazon nor the Bentonville police immediately responded to request for comment.

Quelle: <a href="Amazon Says Your Alexa Recordings Are Protected By The First Amendment“>BuzzFeed

24. Februar 201724. Februar 2017

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Facebook Is Trying To Smooth Over Relationships With The Media

Brad Barket / Getty Images

Facebook’s new head of news partnerships, Campbell Brown, is seeking to mend the company’s relationship with the media through a series of off-the-record get-togethers at her Tribeca home.

Over food and drinks on Jan. 24, Brown hosted a roundtable of top editors and executives at prominent US news outlets, including the New Yorker’s David Remnick, the New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin, Vox’s Melissa Bell, and USA Today’s Joanne Lipman.

At the meeting, Brown and Facebook Chief Product Officer Chris Cox defended the company’s handling of the “fake news” phenomenon and discussed Facebook's huge clout in the media industry, according to Remnick and others familiar with the meeting.

“They are this enormous player in the news business, and they don&039;t yet know how to think about their own role and near hegemony,” Remnick said. He said Cox did most of the talking, while “Campbell had clearly done the inviting.”

Bell and Sorkin declined to comment. Lipman did not return requests for comment. Remnick said he wasn&039;t aware the event was off the record.

A Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed statement: “Since joining Facebook a month ago, Campbell has been reaching out to publishers, reporters, and editors from all kinds of publications. She and her team are continuing to hold one-on-ones, roundtables, and small group meetings both in the U.S. and abroad. As we build the Facebook Journalism Project, it is important to step up our partnerships with news organizations and keep open lines of communication both ways.”

BuzzFeed News’ head of US news, Shani Hilton, who was also present, declined to comment. BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith was invited but didn’t attend, according to a person familiar with the matter. Smith declined to comment.

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, Facebook has faced considerable backlash over its inability to stop the spread of misinformation on its platform. While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially downplayed the notion that widespread fake political news stories could have swayed voters, the company eventually instituted a handful of measures to stem “fake news” and hired Brown — a former CNN host and controversial education activist — to rebuild trust with the media.

“Clearly Facebook feels some combination of responsibility, confusion, and determination to do something about it,” Remnick said. “It was receptive and encouraging. We’ll see what comes of it.”

Facebook has long had a tense relationship with the press, but over the past few years, as outlets have become increasingly reliant on the company to drive a huge number of people to their content, that relationship has become more acrimonious.

Now a series of mishaps like the “fake news” saga and reports last year that the company’s trending news team suppressed stories from conservative news sites has pushed Facebook to confront its fraught role in the news industry. And Brown’s hiring and the subsequent meetings demonstrate the company is trying to pacify top editors at outlets who work with, and have aggressively covered, the company.

One attendee said the room also discussed Facebook&039;s plans for helping publishers begin to draw in significant advertising revenue from the videos they are producing for the platform.

Brown’s public relations campaign is just getting started. She will host another set of media types at her home next week, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Quelle: <a href="Facebook Is Trying To Smooth Over Relationships With The Media“>BuzzFeed

24. Februar 201724. Februar 2017

da Agency

Announcing new Azure Functions capabilities to accelerate development of serverless applications

Ever since the introduction of Azure Functions, we have seen customers build interesting and impactful solutions using it. The serverless architecture, ability to easily integrate with other solutions, streamlined development experience and on-demand scaling enabled by Azure Functions continue to find great use in multiple scenarios.

Today we are happy to announce preview support for some new capabilities that will accelerate development of serverless applications using Azure Functions.

Integration with Serverless Framework

Today we’re announcing preview support for Azure Functions integration with the Serverless Framework. The Serverless Framework is a popular open source tool which simplifies the deployment and monitoring of serverless applications in any cloud. It helps abstract away the details of the serverless resources and lets developers focus on the important part – their applications. This integration is powered by a provider plugin, that now makes Azure Functions a first-class participant in the serverless framework experience. Contributing to this community effort was a very natural choice, given the origin of Azure Functions was in the open-source Azure WebJobs SDK.

You can learn more about the plugin in the Azure Functions Serverless Framework documentation and in the Azure Functions Serverless Framework blog post.

Azure Functions Proxies

Functions provide a fantastic way to quickly express actions that need to be performed in response to some triggers (events). That sounds an awfully lot like an API, which is what several customers are already using Functions for. We’re also seeing customers starting to use Functions for microservices architectures, with a need for deployment isolation between individual components.

Today, we are pleased to announce the preview of Azure Functions Proxies, a new capability that makes it easier to develop APIs using Azure Functions. Proxies let you define a single API surface for multiple function apps. Any function app can now define an endpoint that serves as a reverse proxy to another API, be that another function app, an API app, or anything else.

You can learn more about Azure Functions Proxies by going to our documentation page and in the Azure Functions Proxies public preview blog post. The feature is free while in preview, but standard Functions billing applies to proxy executions. See the Azure Functions pricing page for more information.

Integration with PowerApps and Flow

PowerApps and Flow are services that enable business users within an organization to turn their knowledge of business processes into solutions. Without writing any code, users can easily create apps and custom automated workflows that interact with a variety of enterprise data and services. While they can leverage a wide variety of built-in SaaS integrations, users often find the need to incorporate company-specific business processes. Such custom logic has traditionally been built by professional developers, but it is now possible for business users building apps to consume such logic in their workflows.

Azure App Service and Azure Functions are both great for building organizational APIs that express important business logic needed by many apps and activities. We've now extended the API Definition feature of App Service and Azure Functions to include an "Export to PowerApps and Microsoft Flow" gesture. This walks you through all the steps needed to make any API in App Service or Azure Functions available to PowerApps and Flow users. To learn more, see our documentation and read the APIs for PowerApps and Flow blog post.

We are excited to bring these new capabilities into your hands and look forward to hearing from you through our forums, StackOverFlow, or Uservoice.
Quelle: Azure

If you have information or tips, you can contact this reporter over an encrypted chat service such as Signal or WhatsApp, at 310-617-1302. You can also send an encrypted email to will.alden@buzzfeed.com, using the PGP key found here.

If you have information or tips, you can contact this reporter over an encrypted chat service such as Signal or WhatsApp, at 310-617-1302. You can also send an encrypted email to will.alden@buzzfeed.com, using the PGP key found here.

The ~*ultimate*~ cross-platform messaging app is WhatsApp.

If you – and most of your contacts – have iPhones, it’s a no brainer: use iMessage.

If you prefer features over security, plus texting, audio, *and* video chat, here are some options.

The ~ultimate~ cross-platform messaging app is WhatsApp.

If you prefer features over security, plus texting, audio, and video chat, here are some options.