Schlagwort: 039

Tim Cook On Apple's 10th-Anniversary (Red) Campaign Against AIDS

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It was 2006 when Apple joined the (Red) campaign, an effort to rally the private sector in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now, 10 years after it fielded its first (Product) Red device — a special edition iPod nano — Apple has emerged as field marshal of sorts for (Red), using its marketing heft and considerable retail reach to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS as an ongoing global health crisis. In the process, it’s raised from the proceeds of (Red)-branded Apple products more than $120 million of the $360 million (Red) CEO Deborah Dugan says the organization has generated to date. That makes Apple the world’s largest corporate contributor to the Global Fund, a nonprofit partnership dedicated to the eradication of HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.

“Part of being a great company is leaving the world better than you found it.”

Beginning today, Apple is marking World AIDS Day and the 10th anniversary of its support for (Red) with an expansive campaign that CEO Tim Cook says was “designed to reach people via all the different ways in which a customer might touch us.” That means custom (Red) content on the App Store; up to $1 million in $1 (Red) donations for every Apple Pay purchase made at the Apple Store (online and off); an iTunes-exclusive holiday album from the Killers, the full US proceeds of which will go to the Global Fund; four new additions to Apple’s year-round (Product) Red portfolio, including a pair of Beats Solo3 wireless headphones; and (Red) branding — largely via red-tinted Apple logos — at some 420 Apple Stores across five continents.

For Cook, whose tenure as CEO of Apple has been defined in part by principled stands on human rights and calls for social progress, the company’s ongoing participation in efforts like (Red) is driven by a strongly held belief in corporate social responsibility.

“My view on this — which I recognize is different from that of some others — is that just as people have values, so too should corporations,” Cook told BuzzFeed News. “One of ours at Apple is the idea that part of being a great company is leaving the world better than you found it.”

And through its involvement in (Red), Apple is working to do just that. According to the World Health Organization, HIV has killed some 35 million people since the epidemic began. But thanks to greater availability of antiretroviral (ARV) medications like those (Red) helps purchase — some 18 million people are currently on ARV medications, largely thanks to (Red) — fewer HIV-positive mothers are passing the virus to their unborn children. “Over 400 kids with HIV are born every day,” Cook said. “That’s down from 1,200 a decade ago, so there’s been significant progress. 400 a day is obviously still 400 too many, but we are on target to have an AIDS-free generation in 2020.”

Apple’s effort on behalf of (Red) is textbook creative capitalism, an estuary of altruism and consumerism that Cook believes dovetails nicely with Apple’s core competencies.

“We look for ways we think we can uniquely contribute to the world in which we live,” Cook said. “And we’ll always touch more people through our products than anything else. … It’s that area — an area in which we have expertise — where we think we can make a contribution that multiplies well beyond simply writing a check. We want to advocate for human rights in a way that people can look at what we’re doing and say 'you know, I could be a part of something like that’ — ‘I could do something like that.’ For us this is critically important.”

“I think we can all agree that the right to live is perhaps the ultimate human right.”

The 10th anniversary of Apple’s support of (Red) and its efforts to eradicate HIV/AIDS come amid growing unease over US President-elect Donald Trump’s repeated pledges to repeal the Affordable Care Act upon taking office in January, a move that could herald dire consequences for the uninsured/underinsured persons living with HIV who’ve come to rely on it. Asked if there might be heightened sense of urgency around this year’s (Red) campaign given Trump’s remarks, Cook observed that ridding the planet of preventable disease is a bipartisan issue.

“I don’t see this as a political issue at all,” Cook said. “This is about people living — it’s about giving people the gift of life. Regardless of people’s political beliefs or backgrounds, I think we can all agree that the right to live is perhaps the ultimate human right.”

Quelle: <a href="Tim Cook On Apple&039;s 10th-Anniversary (Red) Campaign Against AIDS“>BuzzFeed

Corrupt Law Enforcement Sold Information To Silk Road Mastermind, Lawyers Say

Ross Ulbricht

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A person with inside knowledge of law enforcement’s investigation into dark-web drug bazaar Silk Road sold information to the site’s mastermind, according to lawyers for Ross Ulbricht, the man convicted over the site and sentenced to life in prison.

Attorneys for Ulbricht, who was convicted last year of seven drug crimes, said Tuesday that a user named &#039;notwonderful&039; communicated with the Silk Road boss’s Dread Pirate Roberts account on the site&039;s forum in the summer of 2013.

According to the defense attorneys, notwonderful asked DPR to pay him or her an $8,000 down payment, with subsequent payments of $500 per month, in exchange for information on the authorities&039; investigation into Silk Road.

After DPR was said to have agreed, notwonderful allegedly set up an account on the Silk Road marketplace under the name albertpacino in order to receive the payments in bitcoins.

Ulbricht’s attorneys believe that between $10,000 and $11,000 was paid by DPR to the albertpacino account. The last payment was made in September 2013 just weeks before Ulbricht’s arrest inside a California library, where his laptop was still logged-in to the DPR account.

Ulbricht’s lawyers said that the information “kept DPR one step ahead” of the investigation.

Ulbricht’s lead attorney, Joshua Dratel, said that his team found the communications between notwonderful and DPR while examining an administrator version of the forum they just discovered this past summer during their persistent review of the massive amount of digital data — an estimated five to six terabytes — from the Silk Road.

However, in a puzzling twist, Dratel said that the communications were missing from previous versions of the forum that were turned over to the defense during the course of the case by the government. In fact, all forum data from July and August 2013 is missing from those government versions, Dratel said.

“Why was it wiped? Because somebody didn’t want it to be found,” Dratel said.

Silk Road

According to Ulbricht’s attorneys, notwonderful told DPR that they were working as a law enforcement analyst and had access to the same intel as field agents. The notwonderful user allegedly told DPR that he was “in it for the money” and thought the Silk Road was “interesting” and “in a fantasy world I might be doing this myself.”

Ulbricht’s attorneys said that they reviewed the investigation information that notwonderful provided to DPR and that the timing and substance of communications align with information that agents testified to during the case, further leading them to believe that the person operating notwonderful was a corrupt law enforcement agent.

However, Dratel said that they had reason to believe notwonderful is not one of the two former law enforcement agents who were convicted of corruption related to their investigation into Silk Road, DEA agent Carl Mark Force and Treasury Department special agent Shaun Bridges.

Force and Bridge were caught extorting hundreds of thousands of dollar in bitcoin from site admins that they transferred to personal accounts.

Dratel said that during the investigations of Force and Bridges all of their electronic devices were seized and investigated by the government, and neither albertpacino or notwonderful came up. If one of the corrupt agents had operated under these aliases, Dratel said, “We would have seen it in hundreds of pages.”

However, the albertpacino handle was referenced in the Force case at least one time during the investigation, according to a recently unsealed 2014 letter in which Department of Justice officials discussed their probe of agency corruption:

Department of Justice

However, the albertpacino handle was never officially mentioned again in the case.

“This is someone else,” Dratel maintained.

Ulbricht’s team said that they sent a letter requesting additional discovery to prosecutors handling the case against the corrupt agents in the District of Maryland. They hope to gain more information about notwonderful and albertpacino and determine why exactly the forum communications were wiped from versions of the site that the government turned over to the defense.

“If they have investigated, we should be apprised of the results,” Dratel said. “If they haven’t, the government is derelict.”

Ulbricht is currently appealing his life sentence in the Second Circuit. At the appeal arguments in October, the judges indicated some apprehension, calling the life sentence for Ulbricht “unusual” and “quite a leap” given his lack of a criminal history.

The judges also asked whether allowing the impact statements of families whose loved ones died after buying drugs from the Silk Road and overdosing created “enormous emotional overload” at sentencing.

During his argument at the appeal, Dratel told the panel of judges that corrupt agents had administrative privileges and hijacked user accounts. “They were inside the guts of the website,” Dratel said.

Ulbricht’s attorneys said that this new evidence would not have direct immediate impact on the appeal. However, Dratel said that this new information “amplifies our defense that the investigation lacked integrity.”

They also said they would not ask the Second Circuit to put the appeal aside while they continue to investigate. However, they said they were not ruling out using this new information about notwonderful selling information to DPR as the subject of a new trial motion at some point.

LINK: Judges Question Whether Life Sentence For Silk Road Founder Is Unfair

Quelle: <a href="Corrupt Law Enforcement Sold Information To Silk Road Mastermind, Lawyers Say“>BuzzFeed

Trump’s Transportation Secretary May Be Friendly To Uber and Lyft

Former US Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao arrives at Trump Tower on a day of meetings scheduled with President-elect Donald Trump on November 21 in New York.

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez / AFP / Getty Images

Uber and Lyft cheered President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Transportation pick, Elaine Chao, after her appointment today.

“Ms. Chao&#039;s knowledge of transportation issues is extensive and we look forward to working closely with her,” Niki Christoff, head of federal affairs at Uber, said in a statement.

Lyft spokesman Adrian Durbin said the company looks forward to working with Chao and has the “utmost respect” for her.

The admiration is mutual. As recently as November, 2015, Chao expressed general support for ride-hail — and skepticism of regulation thereof — arguing in a speech to the American Action Forum Panel that “at a minimum, government policies must not stifle the innovation that has made this sector such an explosive driver of job growth and opportunity.”

Chao was deputy secretary of the DOT under President George H.W. Bush, and labor secretary under the second Bush. She is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a connection that could help as Trump looks to push forward an ambitious infrastructure plan. Her appointment comes at a time when the transportation industry faces a crucial turning point: cash-strapped local agencies across the US are outsourcing public transit to private companies, and the tech and auto industries are racing to put self-driving cars and trucks on the road, threatening millions of jobs.

Local governments with strained budgets are increasingly subsidizing Uber and Lyft rides for their residents as an alternative to adding bus routes and building parking structures. In August, DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx told BuzzFeed News he expects public transportation to continue to be outsourced to private companies.

But Uber and Lyft, which employ their drivers as independent contractors, are also facing legal battles in courts across the country with drivers who say they should receive benefits such as reimbursement for expenses.

On Tuesday, the same day President-elect Trump announced Chao’s appointment, Uber drivers joined nationwide protests for $15 minimum wages. BuzzFeed News reported in June that Uber drivers in three major US markets — Denver, Detroit, and Houston — earned less than $13.25 an hour after expenses in late 2015.

A report by the Government Accountability Office, a watchdog agency, found in 2008 that Chao’s labor department “inadequately investigated complaints from low-wage and minimum wage workers alleging that employers failed to pay the federal minimum wage, required overtime, and failed to issue a last paycheck.”

In a statement today, Jim Conigliaro Jr., founder of the Independent Drivers Guild, which represents over 45,000 Uber drivers in New York City, said, “As Labor Secretary, Chao failed to stand up for workers and safety.”

“At a time when the transportation industry is being transformed by companies like Uber that want to put driverless vehicles on our roads, we need leadership that puts safety first,” Conigliaro said. “Chao&039;s hands-off approach could be dangerous for America&039;s roads.”

Chao’s administration will also likely have a heavy hand in determining the regulation of autonomous vehicles. The agency released guidelines for self-driving vehicles in September. It may fall to the next transportation department to finalize those rules. Where Chao stands on self-driving vehicles is unclear, but her department’s actions could influence the livelihoods of millions of truck and ride hail drivers.

In October, Otto, the self-driving truck company owned by Uber, demonstrated its first delivery for Anheuser-Busch.

Chris Spear, President and CEO of the American Trucking Associations, the largest trade group for that industry, said in a statement that Trump “could not have picked a more qualified, experienced and dedicated individual to serve in this important role.”

“I had the privilege of serving with and working closely with Secretary Chao during my time at the Department of Labor, and I am extremely pleased that she will be taking on this new challenge,” Spear said.

Quelle: <a href="Trump’s Transportation Secretary May Be Friendly To Uber and Lyft“>BuzzFeed