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California Lawmakers Asked Tesla To Loosen Its Confidentiality Agreement With Factory Workers

Tesla vehicles are being assembled by robots at Tesla Motors Inc factory in Fremont, California, U.S. on July 25, 2016. REUTERS/Joseph White/File Photo GLOBAL BUSINESS WEEK AHEAD PACKAGE Ð SEARCH ÒBUSINESS WEEK AHEAD 3 OCTÓ FOR ALL IMAGES

Jim Tanner / Reuters

California lawmakers sent a letter to Tesla last month asking the company to loosen its employee confidentiality agreement. Signed by five state assembly members, the letter expressed concerns that Tesla’s policy might violate state and federal labor laws by preventing workers from communicating about wages and working conditions.

“We are concerned that over-broad language in the confidentiality agreement violates these provisions and has resulted in a chilling effect on workers' ability to engage in protected activity,” the assembly members’ letter to Tesla, dated Jan. 10, reads. “As we are confident that this was not your intention, we respectfully request that Tesla revise this policy to protect employee rights and comply with the law, and immediately communicate this clarification to all workers.”

The letter comes as comes amid ongoing unionization talk by employees at Tesla’s Fremont auto factory. Employees have been communicating with United Auto Workers union officials for nearly a year, according to reports. United Auto Workers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a Jan. 17 response to the assembly members, Tesla’s general counsel said the company reminded employees about their confidentiality agreement after “a rash of unauthorized leaks to the press and social media.” Tesla included an “acknowledgement” in the letter to employees that “unless otherwise allowed by law,” workers would be held to the confidentiality contract. Todd Maron, Tesla’s general counsel, said the National Labor Relations Act would fall into that category.

“Rather than overwhelm them with a complicated legal document that is incomprehensible to lay people, we set out to use plain language, writing in a brief, plain-spoken manner that is respectful of the legal rights of our employees and fully compliant with state and federal laws,” Maron wrote. “Note that the Acknowledgement is clearly not intended to prohibit employees from discussing concerns about wages or working conditions whether amongst themselves or with third parties.”

Here’s what the acknowledgement said, according to Maron’s letter: “Unless otherwise allowed by law…you must not, for example, discuss confidential information with anyone outside of Tesla, take or post photos or make video or audio recordings inside Tesla facilities, forward work emails outside of Tesla or to a personal email account, or write about your work in any social media, blog, or book.”

On Thursday, a man claiming to work in Tesla’s Fremont factory — where the company is gearing up to begin production on the $35,000 Model 3 — published a Medium post called “Time for Tesla to Listen.” In it, he wrote that he and other workers had begun conversations with United Auto Workers about unionizing, “but at the same time, management actions are feeding workers’ fears about speaking out.”

“I often feel like I am working for a company of the future under working conditions of the past,” Jose Moran wrote. “Most of my 5,000-plus coworkers work well over 40 hours a week, including excessive mandatory overtime…We need better organization in the plant, and I, along with many of my coworkers, believe we can achieve that by coming together and forming a union.”

In a statement provided to BuzzFeed News, Tesla said, “As California’s largest manufacturing employer and a company that has created thousands of quality jobs here in the Bay Area, this is not the first time we have been the target of a professional union organizing effort such as this. The safety and job satisfaction of our employees here at Tesla has always been extremely important to us. We have a long history of engaging directly with our employees on the issues that matter to them, and we will continue to do so because it’s the right thing to do.”

Quelle: <a href="California Lawmakers Asked Tesla To Loosen Its Confidentiality Agreement With Factory Workers“>BuzzFeed

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The Viral Anti-Trump Movement Is Here — And It's A Huge Target

In the 20 days since the inauguration, public acts of opposition to the Trump administration and its supporters have started to go viral. An online consumer movement — DeleteUber — spread so wildly that it may have played a role in Uber’s decision to drop out of the President’s business advisory council. A video of a masked man punching white separatist leader Richard Spencer was transmogrified into thousands of memes. And most significantly, a series of protests, some violent, have been broadcast via smartphone to the social feeds of a rapt nation.

Together, these acts have been taken by media across the political spectrum as the first stirrings of a new kind of mass resistance that leverages the scale and speed of the social internet. Writing in the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo made the case that these events constitute unignorable counterprogramming to a President who has an estranged relationship with the truth:

“…there are crowds on every screen and every feed. The people aren’t saying nice things about [Trump]. And there’s something worse than that, too: They’ve stolen the limelight for themselves.”

It’s a powerful vision: Dissenting citizens empowered by the internet, forcing the nation’s attention on themselves, demanding to be heard. But while moments like these might hearten the opposition to Donald Trump in the short term, they also provide an enormous and permanent target for an equally sophisticated internet movement that supports the American president and is well equipped to use the viral tools of the opposition against individuals.

“One of the great strengths of social networks like Twitter is that they allow communities to be visible that have been invisible,” said Aimée Morrison, a professor of New Media studies at the University of Waterloo. “There’s a winning and losing that comes from greater visibility. There is political power… As a group that’s great, but individual people can become very vulnerable.”

In 2017, the limelight is a strange and lingering thing. Almost as soon as they happen, viral political moments pass through the prisms of unprecedentedly partisan filter bubbles, into the obsessive digital netherworlds of internet investigation and conspiratorial media, where they&#039;re used and re-used in contexts often dramatically different from the ones from which they came. And, crucially, they leave residue — images, words, video — along the way. The video of, for example, Spencer&039;s assault, now exists in numerous forms and lives in thousands or tens of thousands of different places online. Like any meme, it is everywhere. And now, the anti-anti-Trump internet is rabidly searching for the identity of the masked man who punched Spencer, the subject of a $5000 “bounty” on the right-wing crowd-sourced investigations site WeSearchr.

Last week, another right-wing news site, GotNews, obtained and published the names, ages and hometowns of 231 people arrested during Inauguration Day protests in Washington, DC. Other fringe right-wing news sites followed. And almost immediately, a network of Twitter accounts and white nationalist forums began poring over the information and linking the names to social media accounts, and in some cases outing the arrestees.

A Virginia man who was arrested at the inauguration and who asked not to be identified told BuzzFeed News that his name and information were posted to Twitter by the white nationalist writer Andrew Joyce. Though Joyce’s account was suspended, the man said someone posted a screenshot of the Tweet to Facebook page of a business he runs out of his home, along with a warning not to patronize it.

“I was afraid to go outside that night,” he said. “I went to smoke a cigarette and I thought, what if someone comes and shoots me?” The man said he has since taken down the Facebook page.

“I was afraid to go outside that night. I went to smoke a cigarette and I thought, what if someone comes and shoots me?”

Charles Johnson, the owner of GotNews and founder of WeSearchr, told BuzzFeed News that the public had a right to know the names of the protestors.

“It&039;s journalism bro,” he wrote in an email. “These are criminals and the public deserves to know who they are. In my opinion it&039;s racist that the mug shots aren&039;t being released. We always get the mug shots of black criminals. Why not hipster rioters from Brooklyn? We have several cash bounties against the antifa and are actively working with federal and local law enforcement to see them brought to justice. It won&039;t be long now.”

The anti-anti-Trump internet hardly limits its efforts to black bloc anti-fascists and overzealous protesters. Last month, immigration activists warned that trolls were monitoring and promoting the popular #undocumentedandunafraid Twitter hashtag in an effort to catalogue and report undocumented workers.

Acts of political resistance spread on social media, followed by personal retribution: This is a familiar pattern. In 2011, journalists, politicians, and technologists hailed the role that social networks played in toppling a succession of dictators in the Middle East. In the years that followed, the same people watched in despair as revanchist authoritarians scoured the very same social networks to target the activists and organizers who had used them, they thought, to gain their political freedom. The great technological lesson of the Arab Spring was that social platforms are not inherently democratic; rather, they can just as easily oppress people as express their will.

To be sure, the next anti-administration activist the pro-Trump, alt-right internet manages to get thrown in jail will be the first. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the anti-anti-Trump internet as simply conspiracy mongers or attention-seeking opportunists. While the alt-right may not be able to turn out in great numbers to a street protest, they’ve shown themselves since the nascent days of Gamergate to be remarkably adept at fomenting information campaigns against individual and corporate targets, from Brianna Wu and Intel to Comet Ping Pong and John Podesta. (Earlier this week. the alt-right came up with its own answer to #DeleteUber: #NoNetflix, a response to the site releasing a television expansion of the 2014 campus satire Dear White People, which the Twitter user @BakedAlaska, a hero of the pro-Trump internet said “promotes white genocide.”) Meanwhile, the sheer number of new, Trump-loyal outlets trading in conspiracy and confirmation bias suggests that any and all information surfaced by the same churning engine that produced #Pizzagate will be spread further and faster than ever.

And maybe higher. Charles Johnson worked for Steve Bannon, the president’s powerful chief strategist, at Breitbart, and was reported by Forbes to be advising the Trump transition team. While there is no evidence to suggest that the Trump administration is actively monitoring social media campaigns in order to target private individuals, federal law enforcement has used social media as a tool to impose the President’s since-stayed executive order on immigration. Last week, BBC reporter Ali Hamedani announced that a customs agent seized his phone and read his tweets during his detention at Chicago’s O’Hare airport:

It’s a reminder that, for all the excitement that viral Trump resistance has produced on the left, every unit of that virality — whether it’s a face on a Periscope stream, a tweet, or a Facebook group — is a piece of information that can be seized, decontextualized, and ultimately used against the opposition. And that when it comes to social media’s ability to effect change, proximity to power and access to force matter just as much — if not more — than a majority.

Quelle: <a href="The Viral Anti-Trump Movement Is Here — And It&039;s A Huge Target“>BuzzFeed

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10 GitHub samples with Azure DocumentDB you shouldn’t miss!

Azure DocumentDB is a fully managed, multi-model, scalable, queryable, schema-free NoSQL database service built for modern applications: mobile, web, IoT, bots, AI, etc. Recently, I went on GitHub and have found a lot of useful material and links to step-by-step tutorials and examples. Below are the top 10 that anyone starting to build an app backed by planet-scale NoSQL should know about. There is lots more. So head on over and learn about this cool new NoSQL planet-scale database service.

1. Azure/azure-documentdb-dotnet

In this repo, you can find the samples and utilities relating to Azure DocumentDB and the .NET SDK and how to use them. The samples demonstrate how to use every method and operation of the .NET SDK, and searchabletodo is a sample ASP.NET MVC web application that shows how to build an ASP.NET MVC web application with DocumentDB and then further enrich it with Azure Search. Another great example in this repo is a Xamarin sample which illustrates how to use DocumentDB built-in authorization engine to implement per-user data pattern for a Xamarin mobile app. It is a simple multi-user ToDo list app allowing users to login using Facebook Auth and manage their to do items. After playing with this sample, you can then go further with Xamarin and build any IoS or Android app on top of DocumentDB.

The samples will walk you through how to best interact with the service using Client SDK. Specifically:

CollectionManagement – shows CRUD operations on DocumentCollection resources.
DatabaseManagent – shows CRUD operations on Database resources.
DocumentManagement – shows CRUD operations on Document resources.
IndexManagement – shows samples on how to customize the Indexing Policy for a Collection should you need to.
Partitioning – included samples for common partitioning scenarios using the .NET SDK.
Queries –  shows how to query using LINQ and SQL.
ServerSideScripts – shows how to create and execute Stored Procedures, Triggers and User Defined Functions.
UserManagement – shows CRUD operations on User and Permission resources.
Spatial – shows how to work with GeoJSON and DocumentDB geospatial capabilities.

After walking through these samples, you should have a good idea of how to get going and how to make use of the various APIs interacting with the NoSQL service in Azure.

2. mingaliu/DocumentDBStudio

This repo contains DocumentDBStudio –  a client management viewer/explorer for DocumentDB service. Currently it supports:

Easy browsing of DocumentDB resources, which enables you to learn DocumentDB resource model very quickly.
Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) and Query operations for every DocumentDB resources and resource feed.
Support of SQL or UDF query. You can execute Javascript stored procedure or trigger right from DocumentDBStudio.
Inspection of headers (for quota, usage, RG charge, etc.) for every request operation. It also supports three connection modes: TCP, HTTPDirect, and Gateway.
Support of various RequestOptions (for pre/post trigger, sessionToken, consistency model etc), FeedOptions(for paging, enableScanforQuery etc), IndexingPolicy (for indexingMode, indexingType, indexingPath etc).
PrettyPrint the output JSON.
Bulk import of JSON files.

It is simply a “good IDE” for the “natives” of DocumentDB. Give it a try.

3. Azure/azure-documentdb-node

This repo provides a Node.js module that makes it easy to interact with Azure DocumentDB using Node.js – an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment suited for developing a diverse variety of tools and applications. Node.js aims to optimize throughput and scalability in Web applications with many input/output operations, as well as for real-time Web applications (e.g., real-time communication programs and browser games). Combining it with DocumentDB service gives you a really powerful combination and agility in building up an app and then scaling it up very quickly.

If you are developing using Node.js and combining it with DocumentDB, see Node.js Developer Center and the Microsoft Azure DocumentDB Node.js SDK Documentation. Also, to get started, watch this YouTube video. The samples in the repo were built using the Node.js Tools for Visual Studio and include njsproj files accordingly. However, you do not need Visual Studio to run these samples. Just ignore the nsjprof files, if you wish, and open the app.js in your choice of editor such as Visual Studio Code, or even a text editor, such as Sublime. The choice is yours!

4. Azure/azure-documentdb-datamigrationtool

This repo contains the DocumentDB Data Migration Tool – an open source solution to import data to DocumentDB from a variety of sources with ease and simplicity. The migration tool supports migration of data from the following sources:

Azure Tables
JSON files
MongoDB
SQL Server
CSV files
RavenDB
Amazon DynamoDB
HBase
DocumentDB collections

While the import tool includes a graphical user interface (dtui.exe), it can also be driven from the command line (dt.exe). In fact, there is an option to output the associated command after setting up an import through the UI. Tabular source data (e.g. SQL Server or CSV files) can be transformed such that hierarchical relationships (sub-documents) can be created during import. Check it out to learn more about data source options, sample command lines to import from each source, target options, and viewing import results.

5. Azure/azure-documentdb-python

This repo contains Python sample solutions showing common operations on Azure DocumentDB. You will learn how to use Azure DocumentDB to store and access data from a Python web application hosted on Azure and presumes that you have some prior experience using Python and Azure websites. Another good tutorial to follow up with is Python Flask Web Application Development with DocumentDB, where you will build a simple voting application that allows you to vote for a poll using Python against DocumentDB.

6. Azure/azure-documentdb-node-q

This repo has DocumentDB Node.js Q promises wrapper. If you don’t know anything about Q promises, read Promises in Javascript With Q. The repo project provides a “Hello world example code using Q promises” that makes it very easy to interact with Azure DocumentDB. You will seriously witness here that DocumentDB is built with a deep commitment to the JSON and JavaScript. This approach of “JavaScript as a modern day T-SQL” frees application developers from the complexities of type system mismatches and object-relational mapping technologies. The samples in this repo will help you get going with the JavaScript SDK to interact with the Azure DocumentDB service.

7. Azure/azure-documentdb-js-server

Before you head to this repo, maybe watch this video first – to get a brief introduction to Azure DocumentDB&#039;s server-side programming model. You will learn how DocumentDB’s language integrated, transactional execution of JavaScript lets developers write stored procedures, triggers and user defined functions (UDFs) natively in JavaScript. This allows developers to write application logic which can be shipped and executed directly on the database storage partitions.

8. Azure/azure-documentdb-java

This project provides a client library in Java that makes it easy to interact with Azure DocumentDB. In this repo, you will find a number of Java code samples working with DocumentDB. If you feel comfortable and up to it, you can build the entire Java web application using DocumentDB in just a few steps. For documentation please see the Microsoft Azure Java Developer Center and the JavaDocs.

9. Azure/azure-documentdb-hadoop

This repo provides a client library in Java that allows Microsoft Azure DocumentDB to act as an input source or output sink for Hadoop MapReduce, Hive and Pig jobs. This tutorial shows you how to run Apache Hive, Apache Pig, and Apache Hadoop MR jobs on Azure HDInsight with DocumentDB&039;s Hadoop connector. DocumentDB&039;s Hadoop connector allows DocumentDB to act as both a source and sink for Hive, Pig, and MapReduce jobs. This tutorial uses DocumentDB as both the data source and destination for Hadoop jobs, and shows how to do it. I recommend getting started by watching the following video, where we run through a Hive job using DocumentDB and HDInsight.

Hive, Pig, and MapReduce jobs. This tutorial uses DocumentDB as both the data source and destination for Hadoop jobs, and shows how to do it. I recommend getting started by watching the following video, where we run through a Hive job using DocumentDB and HDInsight.

10. Azure-Samples/documentdb-node-todo-app

Finally, this repo contains the source code for a complete application. The sample shows how to use the Microsoft Azure DocumentDB service to store and access data from a Node.js Express application hosted on Azure Websites.

For a complete end-to-end walk-through of creating this application, please read the full tutorial on the Azure documentation page. The code included in this sample is intended to get you going with a simple Node.js Express application that connects to Azure DocumentDB and showing how to interact with DocumentDB using the documentdb npm package. It is not intended to be a set of best practices on how to build scalable enterprise grade web applications, but it’s a great start.

@rimmanehme

P.S. If you’ve never even heard the word “NoSQL”, first of all – wow! You are at the end of the blog, and still paying attention. That’s awesome! Second, a quick way to learn about DocumentDB and see it in action is to follow these three steps:

Watch the two minute What is DocumentDB? video, which introduces the benefits of using DocumentDB.
Watch the three minute Create DocumentDB on Azure video, which highlights how to get started with DocumentDB by using the Azure Portal.
Visit the Query Playground, where you can walk through different activities to learn about the rich querying functionality available in DocumentDB. Then, head over to the Sandbox tab and run your own custom SQL queries and experiment with DocumentDB.

Quelle: Azure

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Zenefits Is Laying Off Almost Half Its Employees

Matt Chase for BuzzFeed News

Zenefits will lay off 45% of its employees in an effort to slash costs, according to an internal memo this morning that was obtained by BuzzFeed News, a stark acknowledgment by the embattled human resources startup that its onetime expectations for growth were vastly inflated.

Roughly 430 workers will be cut, including 250 in Zenefits&#039; San Francisco headquarters and 150 in its office in Tempe, Arizona, leaving the company with about 500 employees, according to the memo and a person briefed on the matter. That&039;s about a third of the size it was a year ago, when it ousted its founding CEO, Parker Conrad, over revelations that it flouted state regulations for selling health insurance.

Thursday&039;s announcement, coming on the morning after the one-year anniversary of Conrad&039;s departure, is the third round of layoffs — and the largest — to hit the company since the crisis began.

Zenefits, which is both a software maker and a health insurance broker, will turn to staffing agencies for seasonal workers during the fall and winter months, a busy period when customers are enrolling in benefits. In addition, after upgrades in its software, Zenefits has less need for workers to help with tasks like customer enrollment, the person briefed on the matter said.

Jay Fulcher, the newly appointed CEO, informed employees of the layoffs this morning; the person briefed on the matter, insisting on anonymity, provided additional details. Fulcher took the helm a week ago from David Sacks, who succeeded Conrad as CEO and was forced to clean up the company&039;s regulatory mess.

“This isn&039;t how any CEO would choose to spend his first week on the job,” Fulcher said in the email to staff, “but I strongly believe these difficult decisions are essential in setting Zenefits up for success.”

A Zenefits spokesperson, Jessica Hoffman, said in an emailed statement to BuzzFeed News: “This has been planned for some time and is the result of a lot of hard work over the past year to improve our products and service and make the operations of the company more efficient.”

Even in a town built on hype, Zenefits turned heads for its rapid ascent to elite “unicorn” status, gaining a $4.5 billion valuation just after its second birthday. Conrad, its leader at the time, said the company was on track to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2015, and he aggressively staffed up in anticipation of that milestone.

But the reality fell short. By the middle of 2016, annual recurring revenue was around $60 million, and Zenefits had slashed its valuation to $2 billion. More detailed financial information obtained by BuzzFeed News showed that Zenefits lost $100 million in the six months from February through July 2016, on revenue of $35.3 million. During that period, the company burned through $97.1 million of cash, a rate that put it on track to run out of cash by the end of 2017.

As a result of the latest layoffs, Hoffman said in the statement, “we have a dramatically improved cost structure, the ability to deliver a market-leading product roadmap that exceeds customer expectations, and enough cash to fund our operations for years to come.”

In part, the layoffs reflect recent improvements in Zenefits&039; software that have made the administration of benefits more automated, the person briefed on the matter said. Before a software overhaul led by Sacks last year, core Zenefits functions were heavily reliant on manual work by staff, leading to seemingly careless errors, BuzzFeed News has reported.

In the wake of Conrad&039;s departure last year, Zenefits shed hundreds of employees, including many on the sales team, through a combination of layoffs and an offer to take severance pay and quit. The latest layoffs fall more heavily on the operations department and other areas outside of sales, though they touch every department.

Fulcher said in the memo that Zenefits would consolidate its operations group in its Arizona office, while expanding its product and engineering groups in Vancouver and Bangalore to supplement its San Francisco team.

“The Bay Area is an expensive place to do business,” Hoffman said in the statement.

Fulcher, whose appointment was announced earlier this week, was formerly the CEO of Ooyala, a video tech startup that was acquired by the Australian telecom company Telstra.

Quelle: <a href="Zenefits Is Laying Off Almost Half Its Employees“>BuzzFeed

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Twitter's Algorithmic Timeline Is Working

Drew Angerer / Getty Images

There&#039;s a subtle change happening on Twitter that&039;s so nondescript it&039;s easy to miss. But it&039;s helping the company in a very noticeable way.

For the past year, Twitter has moved away (slightly) from the orthodox adherence to reverse-chronological order that once defined its stream. It’s prioritized relevance over recency, at least in spurts. And by all indications, its algorithmic reordering of some tweets in the timeline appears to be working.

Twitter has taken its lumps over the past year. It’s tried to sell itself and failed, for instance, and it’s admitted it was too slow to tackle a harassment problem which it has yet to solve. But the company seems to be slowly building momentum.

In Twitter’s most recent earnings call, held last October, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was quick to point out the algorithm&039;s positive influence on Twitter’s business. Asked what Twitter product changes were leading to revenue and engagement growth, Dorsey’s first point was the timeline update. “We made a change earlier in the year to make sure that we&039;re not just sorting by recency but also by relevance,” Dorsey explained. “We&039;re showing the most important tweets and the tweets that you really need to see faster and higher up in your timeline.” A year after it was introduced, less than 2% of people have opted out of the algorithm, a number that remains consistent from when it was first announced last year, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed.

Twitter’s stock price is 4 points higher than at this point last year (but still disappointing overall), and it’s slowly picked up user growth, adding 4 million monthly active users last quarter. And now, even some analysts are coming around. “We are upgrading Twitter to BUY,” Rich Greenfield of BITG research wrote in a note Wednesday. “Our upgrade of TWTR is premised on the belief that Twitter’s daily active user (DAU) growth is accelerating, particularly in the US, which has a disproportionate impact on Twitter’s revenues and profits.” Tomorrow, we’ll get another update as Twitter reports its fourth quarter earnings.

(The ascendance of Donald Trump to the presidency hasn’t saved the platform, but it hasn’t hurt either. Twitter will remain central to the global conversation at least as long as Trump remains president and continues to tweet regularly.)

When Twitter rolled out the algorithm last year, it did so almost abashedly. After a large #RIPTwitter protest, Dorsey promised Twitter’s users he wasn’t going to reorder their timelines (adding the key caveat: “next week”), and since then he’s stayed away from the very word “algorithm,” using “enhanced timeline” instead. The algorithm is so hard to pick out, you have to stare at the timestamps affixed to the top of tweets as they tick off out of order in subtle grey to notice it.

But Twitter doesn’t need to make a big show about the algorithm, or put it in a big “This Might Be Interesting” box. What’s important is that it’s working.

Quelle: <a href="Twitter&039;s Algorithmic Timeline Is Working“>BuzzFeed

A Samsung Battery Factory Exploded Because 2017

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A Samsung Battery Factory Exploded Because 2017

A section of Samsung SDI&#039;s battery manufacturing facility in Tianjin, China exploded on Wednesday morning, Reuters reports. Of course it did.

A photo of the smoking Samsung SDI factory posted to the Chinese social network Weibo

Weibo / Via tech.sina.com.cn

It was the part of the factory that deals with waste from the battery-making process. Faulty lithium ion batteries caught fire, according to the local fire department, which sent 110 firefighters and 19 trucks to the factory. There were no casualties, and the factory&039;s operations weren&039;t significantly impacted, according to Reuters.

Of course it did. Because 2017. It wasn&039;t enough to have exploding phones in 2016. Now this devil year is blowing up the places where Samsung makes its phones.

Samsung has blamed its battery manufacturing partners, Samsung SDI and Amperex, for the problems that dogged its Galaxy Note7 smartphone.

Another photo of the Samsung SDI factory posted to Weibo.

Weibo / Via tech.sina.com.cn

This isn&039;t Samsung&039;s first explosion. Oh no. You may have heard about the Samsung Galaxy Note7, the phone that was the mascot of 2016.

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled 2.5 million Note7s in September 2016 for fire hazards posed by the lithium ion battery — the same type of battery linked to the fire in the Tianjin factory on Wednesday. Samsung entirely halted global production of the Note7 over similar concerns after replacement phones also caught fire.

In case you blacked out 2016 (understandable), here&039;s a video of the Note7 smoking in an unsuspecting person&039;s home.

youtube.com

There&039;s also the small matter of the 2.8 million exploding washing machines Samsung later recalled.

The factory explosion might not help Samsung&039;s image in China, where consumers aren&039;t happy about how it handled the whole Note7 debacle. After the official recall in the US, Samsung told Chinese consumers that their Galaxy Note7s, which were manufactured by a different company than phones sold elsewhere, were fine. But these phones were exploding too. Eventually, Samsung got around to recalling the phone globally.

Smoke from the Samsung SDI factory as faulty batteries burned.

Weibo / Via tech.sina.com.cn

Overall, though, the factory fire probably won&039;t hurt Samsung&039;s profits.

The quarter after the Note7 recall, the Korean conglomerate posted its highest profits in three years.

Quelle: <a href="A Samsung Battery Factory Exploded Because 2017“>BuzzFeed

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Netflix May Soon Sell New Merch For Hit Shows Like “Stranger Things”

Netflix

Barb from Netflix&#039;s hit series Stranger Things may be the new Barbie. Netflix seems to be considering making toys and other merchandise based on its original shows and movies.

According to a job posting on its website, Netflix is searching for a senior manager of “Licensing, Merchandising and Promotion,” who will “own licensing of our content across the category landscape (eg. books, comics, gaming toys, collectibles, soundtrack and apparel) including ownership of relationship with retailers and suppliers across geographies.” The job listing says that the new manager will bring the merchandise to online and physical markets.

Netflix currently sells “Stranger Things” merchandise through Hot Topic, but the hiring of a senior manager of merchandise may indicate it&039;s looking to expand production and sales of clothes, toys, and other branded goods based on its content.

Bloomberg reports that Netflix has also asked its partner studios, such as Trigger Street Productions and Lionsgate Television, which have made popular series like House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, respectively, to share revenue from licensed merchandise. Stranger Things was one of Netflix&039;s first hits made at its own studios. The company has also produced the family sitcom “The Ranch” and the talk show “Chelsea” with Chelsea Handler in-house, and it plans to release the self-explanatory “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” this year. Netflix has said it will release 1,000 hours of original content, produced in-house and by partners, in 2017.

The streaming company would be following in the steps of major studios like Disney and 20th Century Fox by stepping up its merchandising efforts. According to Bloomberg, Disney&039;s consumer division — which administers the studio&039;s theme parks, toys, clothes, and other products — had sales of $1.5 billion in Q4 2016. It&039;s not a new approach, either: Variety reported in 2013 that merchandise from The Simpsons alone had earned 20th Century Fox $4.6 billion during its 25-year lifespan.

Netflix might not be looking solely for revenue with licensed goods, though. In the merchandising manager job description, the company wrote, “We want licensed merchandise to help promote our titles so they become part of the zeitgeist for longer periods of time.” A t-shirt is a walking advertisement, after all.

Netflix did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Quelle: <a href="Netflix May Soon Sell New Merch For Hit Shows Like “Stranger Things”“>BuzzFeed

When The Senate Silenced Elizabeth Warren Last Night It Gave Her A Massive Day On Social

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When The Senate Silenced Elizabeth Warren Last Night It Gave Her A Massive Day On Social

Sen. Elizabeth Warren was forced to stop talking in the Senate yesterday, but her voice is now booming on social media.

Over the past 24 hours, the Senator has been discussed more on social media than she had been in any single day since at least June 16 2015, according to the social analytics firm SocialFlow.

The data shows that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell&#039;s use of a rule to silence Warren instead sent her words booming across the internet. McConnell invoked the rule, against assailing the “conduct or motive” of a senator, as Warren argued against Sen. Jeff Sessions in his nomination to be attorney general.

“When you look at a typical day in the social media life of Elizabeth Warren and look at what happened over the past 24 hours, she went through the roof,” SocialFlow spokesperson Mark White said in an interview. “It made her a superstar.”

Discussion of Elizabeth Warren spikes following her Senate showdown with Mitch McConnell

SocialFlow

SocialFlow, software that many publishers use to manage their social media presence, said 1,124 articles about Warren were posted to the social platforms it tracks on Wednesday.

Still, Warren has a long way to go to catch up to President Trump. In January, SocialFlow registered more than 2 million posts to social media platforms, and Trump, White said, is regularly the subject of many thousands of them each day.

Warren also went live on Facebook after walking out of the Senate chamber, reading the anti-Sessions letter penned by Coretta Scott King decades ago that she was prevented from reading on the Senate floor. That video has been viewed nearly 9 million times.

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LINK: Why Mitch McConnell Used A Senate Rule To Silence Elizabeth Warren

Quelle: <a href="When The Senate Silenced Elizabeth Warren Last Night It Gave Her A Massive Day On Social“>BuzzFeed

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Oracle Employees Are Asking The Company To Oppose Trump’s Immigration Order

Oracle CEO Safra Catz is seen in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, NY, USA on December 14, 2016. Credit: Albin Lohr-Jones / Pool via CNP /MediaPunch/IPX

Albin Lohr-jones / Albin Lohr-Jones/MediaPunch/IPx

Oracle employees concerned about the company&#039;s silence on President Trump’s executive order on immigration are circulating a petition on the issue. So far, 366 individuals have signed the letter, asking Oracle — whose CEO, Safra Catz, served as an advisor on Trump’s transition team — to add its name to an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit against the order by Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson.

“We want them to stand with the other leaders in tech that have taken a firm stance on this,” said Oracle employee Irene Scher, who posted the petition to Coworker.org. “Oracle has been built on the backs of many immigrants. The company is incredibly diverse. That’s one of my favorite things about it, and I think it makes sense for them to get involved as others have.”

Neither Oracle nor IBM — whose CEO serves on Trump’s economic advisory council — has signed on with a coalition of 130 tech companies opposing President Trump’s immigration order, which is currently on hold as its legality is debated in appellate court.

Employees at both IBM and Oracle have resigned over ties between their CEOs and Trump.

Created by Oracle employees Rachel Kane, Irene Scher and Lara Beers, the petition currently has just 377 signatures — small compared to the over 1,800 that have amassed beneath the IBM petition, and minuscule compared to Oracle’s global staff of 140,000. But the three are hopeful that it will gather momentum and carry concerns about Trump’s immigration order to management’s ears.

The Oracle petition, which is being circulated internally and on Coworker.org, is gaining momentum among employees who&039;ve been trying to send a similar message of concern to the company’s leadership. “What I&039;ve heard from other employees is, because we have people in leadership who are immigrants themselves, it’s an opportunity for Oracle to be a leader to stand up and talk about this executive order being so far reaching and broad,” Beers said.

The petition’s authors cited Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk as an example of a tech leader who agreed to advise Trump, but has nonetheless added Tesla and SpaceX to the list of tech companies that oppose the immigration order. “It was inspiring to see that Elon Musk, despite being on the transition team, signed on behalf his companies. So we’re hopeful Oracle will take a similar stance,” Scher said.

Even if the company doesn’t take a stance, Beers hopes the petition will at least elicit greater transparency between management and employees. “I think it would be great to know why they aren’t joining our peers,” she said, “why Oracle feels we shouldn’t be joining them and standing against the executive order.”

Oracle did not respond to a request for comment.

Quelle: <a href="Oracle Employees Are Asking The Company To Oppose Trump’s Immigration Order“>BuzzFeed

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Alongside Trump, Intel Reannounces Arizona Factory It Promised To Create During Obama Years

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich visited President Trump at the White House Wednesday and announced a $7 billion investment in a semiconductor factor in Chandler, Arizona that he claims will employ 3,000 high-wage workers at the height of production.

Dubbed Fab 42, Intel&#039;s Chandler factory will build some of “the most advanced 7-nanometer semiconductor chips on the planet,” Krzanich said, adding that the company&039;s investment in the factory is also an investment in American manufacturing. Intel — which announced layoffs of some 12,000 employees in 2016 — said the facility will create “approximately 3,000 high-tech, high-wage jobs” and “more than 10,000 total long-term jobs in Arizona.”

“We&039;re very happy and I can tell you the people of Arizona are very happy,” President Trump said of Intel&039;s factory announcement.

Today marks the second time Intel has announced Fab 42 alongside a sitting US President. In February of 2011, the company announced Fab 42 during a visit to an Intel facility by President Obama. At that time it said the facility would “create thousands of construction and permanent manufacturing jobs,” with a scheduled completion date in 2013.

Asked about the timing of Intel&039;s investment at the White House Wednesday, Krzanich said that Intel held back on “doing this investment until now.” Asked why Intel chose to make the announcement at the White House, he said, “It&039;s really in support of the tax and regulatory policies that we see the administration pushing forward,” according to the pool report.

In an email to Intel employees, Krzanich explained the company&039;s rationale for the Chandler factory investment. “We’ve maintained this U.S.-based manufacturing even
though approximately 80 percent of our product is sold outside the United States —we’re one of the top 5 exporters and top 2 R&D spenders in the U.S. — and despite the fact that from a tax and regulatory position we have been disadvantaged relative to the rest of the world where we compete,” Krzanich wrote.

Last summer, Krzanich scheduled a political event in the bay area with then-candidate Donald Trump, but claims he cancelled it once it became a campaign fundraiser. Krzanich is also one of the few tech industry leaders who advises the president. Along with Elon Musk and Michael Dell, Krzanich is a member of the president&039;s manufacturing council.

And while Intel&039;s chief appears to be an ally in promoting Trump&039;s job-centric agenda, Intel is one of 130 technology companies who have joined a friend-of-the-court brief opposing the president&039;s refugee and travel ban.

Intel has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Quelle: <a href="Alongside Trump, Intel Reannounces Arizona Factory It Promised To Create During Obama Years“>BuzzFeed