China’s regulatory crackdown is forcing two tech giants to lay off potentially 15% of their workforces.
Tencent and Alibaba are both set to cut up to 15% of their workforces.
Two of China’s biggest tech companies, Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, are preparing to lay off tens of thousands of employees combined this year as the country continues its regulatory crackdown, sources told Reuters.
This would amount to potentially 15% of Alibaba’s workforce, or 39,000 people in China’s biggest ecommerce company. For Tencent, which owns WeChat, the cuts could amount to 10% to 15% of its 94,000 workers, specifically within the video-streaming and search unit.
In light of antitrust and cybersecurity concerns, Chinese regulators have started taking a more heavy-handed approach toward reining in the growth of the country’s tech giants in the world’s second-largest economy. Despite the crackdown, WeChat experienced stunning daily user growth in 2021.
These cuts come as Alibaba was already in the process of laying off workers in its consumer services division, which includes food and grocery delivery and mapping.
Alibaba has been in hot water since 2020, when founder Jack Ma publicly criticized Chinese regulators.
Michelle Ma (@himichellema) is a reporter at Protocol covering climate. Previously, she was a news editor of live journalism and special coverage for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she worked as a staff writer at Wirecutter. She can be reached at mma@protocol.com.
The turbulent beginnings of a global payments system may soon be fodder for TV’s voracious content factory, if author Jimmy Soni and showrunner Mark Goffman’s plans to give PayPal the Hollywood treatment come to fruition.
As PayPal veterans celebrated the 20th anniversary of the company’s audacious 2002 IPO at Peter Thiel’s mansion in Los Angeles over the weekend, a crew filmed interviews with some attendees, according to multiple people present for the event.
Attendees for the weekend bash included co-founders Elon Musk and Max Levchin, sources said, as well as early PayPal employees like Deb Liu, now the CEO of Ancestry. Party entertainment included a band, a magician and photo booths, alongside a spread of lobster.
On the day of PayPal’s IPO, Thiel celebrated by playing multiple simultaneous games of chess against his employees. The anniversary party also featured chess sets, but attendees seemed to prefer networking.
The project is based on Soni’s book “The Founders,” a history of PayPal’s early days that digs deep into the company’s origins and highlights untold stories of how the company was built. A team of producers including Goffman has acquired the rights to the book, according to a message Soni sent. The on-camera interviews were meant to be part of a pitch for the series. Goffman is an accomplished writer and producer whose credits include the CBS series “Bull.”
Daniel Brunt, chief of staff to David Sacks of Craft Ventures, is also involved, according to a message Goffman sent. His role is not clear, but he is credited as a co-producer along with Sacks on the 2005 comedy “Thank You For Smoking,” Sacks’ first venture into Hollywood.
Sacks, Soni and Goffman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Streaming series and cable networks have shown an appetite for stories about Silicon Valley recently, from Apple TV+’s “WeCrashed,” about the fall of WeWork, to Showtime’s “Super Pumped,” adapted from Mike Isaac’s book about Uber.
The Federal Reserve’s FedNow real-time payments systems will launch between May and July 2023, Fed vice chair Lael Brainard said Monday.
The Fed has previously given vague timelines for the launch of the service, which will mark the Fed’s first new payment rails in decades and allow bill payments, paychecks and other money transfers to move instantaneously.
“The FedNow Service will transform the way everyday payments are made throughout the economy, bringing substantial gains to households and businesses through the ability to send instant payments at any time on any day,” Brainard said at a workshop for early FedNow adopters.
FedNow will be competing with the RTP network launched by large banks, as well as services such as Venmo and Cash App.
There are more than 120 organizations already testing the service through a pilot program, including U.S. Bank, Exchange Bank and payment processors such as Alacriti, according to the Fed.
Even after its launch, Brainard said wider buy-in will be necessary to make real-time payments more common in the U.S.
“The shift to real-time payment infrastructure requires a focused effort, but the shift is inevitable,” she said. “The time is now for all key stakeholders — financial institutions, core service providers, software companies and application developers — to devote the resources necessary to support instant payments.”
Despite the size of the U.S. economy and its well-developed financial sector, the country has been behind others in the move to real-time payments. India’s UPI, Australia’s New Payments Platform and Brazil’s Pix are among the real-time payments systems that have launched in recent years, lowering costs and speeding up transactions for a broad range of consumers and businesses in those countries.
Geoff Ralston is stepping down as president and CEO of Y Combinator, a position he’s held since 2019, he announced Monday. Garry Tan, founder and managing partner at Initialized Capital, will take over for him after Ralston’s year-end departure.
“My goal has been to cement YC as an institution that will endure for decades — not only through organizational changes but by leading a team that has scaled the community we bring together, the products and capital we provide to startups, and the software we build,” Ralston wrote in a blog post. “Garry, the visionary hacker, designer and builder who has described how YC is ‘engraved on his heart’ believes in this future and is precisely the right person to take over as YC’s chief executive.”
Tan, the 10th employee at Palantir, was a YC founder in 2008 and co-founded the blogging platform Posterous before selling it to Twitter. He joined YC as a partner in 2010, writing some of the core software the accelerator still uses internally, Ralston said. Tan left YC in 2015 to focus on Initialized.
Initialized president Jen Wolf and general partner Brett Gibson are taking over as managing partners of Initialized effective immediately, according to a blog post on the firm’s website. Tan will remain at Initialized as founder and partner until leaving for YC early next year.
Correction: This story was updated Aug. 29, 2022, to correct how many years Geoff Ralston had been the president of YC.
Shares of Affirm tumbled Thursday after the “buy now, pay later” company reported a weaker-than-expected outlook that underlined an “uncertain macroeconomic backdrop.” Affirm’s stock, which gained about 3% in regular trades, plunged 13% after hours.
The company reported a loss of 65 cents a share, which was wider than the consensus estimate of 59 cents a share. Affirm posted revenue of $364.1 million, beating Wall Street’s expectation of $354.8 million.
But Affirm said that for the current quarter, the company expects revenue of $345 million to $365 million, weaker than Wall Street’s expectation of $386 million.
“In light of the uncertain macroeconomic backdrop, we are approaching our next fiscal year prudently while maintaining our focus on driving responsible growth and continuing to invest in strengthening our leadership position,” Chief Financial Officer Michael Linford said in a statement.
Affirm’s outlook will likely highlight growing concern about the impact of the economic downturn on consumer spending and on the “buy now, pay later” market which the company pioneered.
CEO Max Levchin has argued that Affirm is in a good position to weather the storm because “buy now, pay later” offers “more cash-flow flexibility” compared to credit cards, which the company considers its main competitor.
Levchin reaffirmed that belief on Thursday as he noted how “the growth of online commerce is falling back to pre-COVID levels.”
“The secular trend toward adopting honest financial products is gaining momentum,” he said in a statement. “Not only does this make our mission more important but it also plays directly into Affirm’s strengths.”
Affirm also highlighted key gains. The company said its total number of active consumers jumped 96% year-over-year to 14 million. The number of transactions per active consumer also rose 31% to three.
Affirm’s gross merchandise volume, which measures the total value of its sales, climbed 77% to $4.4 billion.
China conceded that its solar manufacturers are hoarding materials, exacerbating the problems facing installers and utilities in the U.S.
The Chinese Industrial Ministry called out hoarding, saying in a notice issued Wednesday that the practice is “strictly prohibited” and that there is an “urgent need to deepen industry management” in what is the world’s largest solar manufacturing market.
This appears to confirm the suspicions of the utility NextEra, whose chief financial officer Kirk Crews said on an earnings call in April that Chinese multinational companies in Southeast Asia were withholding shipments of both solar modules and the cells that comprise them. The reason: a Commerce Department probe into solar suppliers in the region that’s ongoing.
That probe, which has inspired the ire of both the public and the private sector, is examining whether solar companies operating out of Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are evading long-standing U.S. tariffs by building panels in Southeast Asia using Chinese materials. These four countries supply roughly 80% of the panels in the U.S., and the uncertainty has placed utilities in a bind.
The hoarding may have had the desired effect. In June, the Biden administration agreed to wave tariffs on solar panels from the four countries caught up in the probe for two years, a major win for the Chinese industry. While the warning from Beijing may lead to some blowback, it’s unclear what the consequences might be.
In its statement, the ministry encouraged solar companies to establish backup reserves of polysilicon and other materials. Doing so could help balance the supply chain and smooth out fluctuations in panel prices, which have seen wild swings recently.
Eight of the 10 largest solar companies in the world are Chinese, and the country controls much of the industry’s supply of raw materials. The Biden administration is trying to bolster the American solar industry, including invoking the Defense Production Act for panels manufactured in the U.S. earlier this year. American solar developers have also agreed to pony up $6 billion for panels made in the U.S. For now, though, China still holds most of the cards.
Government agencies in the U.S. and China are working on a deal that would prevent hundreds of Chinese companies from being kicked off of U.S. stock exchanges. Unnamed sources told the Wall Street Journal that an agreement could be reached as early as September, allowing the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to scrutinize the financial audits of Chinese companies.
Audits would occur on-site in Hong Kong. The China Securities Regulatory Commission has already started preparing some domestic accounting firms for the possible deal, sources told the Wall Street Journal.
The U.S. authorities will reportedly only allow the deal to go through if the PCAOB has full access to audit materials. SEC commissioner Gary Gensler indicated as much in a July speech, where he maintained that inspectors would not be “sent to China and Hong Kong unless there is an agreement on a framework allowing the PCAOB to inspect and investigate audit firms completely.” He also said that, while important, an audit framework would be “merely a step in the process.”
China faced pressure to come to an auditing agreement beginning in late 2020, when then-President Donald Trump signed into law the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act. That legislation required any foreign security issuer to submit to an audit by the PCAOB, disclosing whether government entities held a controlling financial interest. The law came in response to concerns that Chinese companies failed to fully disclose ties to the CCP. It effectively set a 2024 deadline for the U.S. and China to strike an agreement to avoid delistings.
For Chinese companies, losing access to U.S. exchanges would come at an enormous cost. Since Chinese firms took to U.S. exchanges in 1999, over 400 companies have been able to raise more than $100 billion from investors. The STAR Market, which was launched in 2019 as a China-based alternative to U.S. equity markets, failed to gain much traction.
The beneficiaries of U.S. equities markets include many of China’s biggest technology players, including Alibaba, Baidu and JD.com. Shares of those companies rose more than 8% on Thursday, when news of the potential agreement broke.
China had previously moved to make it more difficult for domestic companies to share information abroad. A Data Security Law passed in June 2021 made it illegal for companies to share data with overseas regulators without explicit permission from Beijing.
Chinese officials contended that they never prohibited or prevented accounting firms from providing audit papers to overseas regulators. In 2021, the China Securities Regulatory Commission called the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act “obviously discriminatory.”
If an agreement isn’t reached, U.S. stock exchanges and Wall Street banks stand to lose out considerably too. Around 300 China- or Hong Kong-based businesses are listed on U.S. exchanges, representing over $2.4 trillion in market value. The looming delisting threat cooled the appetite for Chinese companies to pursue U.S. IPOs, and several of China’s largest state-owned enterprises already initiated the delisting process.
Though the potential audit agreement is a big deal, it’s also only a first step. Tensions between the U.S. and China are as high as ever, as evidenced by the high-stakes cat-and-mouse game being played around Taiwan. U.S. investors will likely remain leery as well of China’s more aggressive regulatory stance towards its domestic tech giants. These tensions were on full display when Beijing intervened in DiDi’s New York Stock Exchange debut, in part over concerns that the U.S. could obtain sensitive data through the process.
Google has changed the way it calculates the climate impact of air travel in a way that dramatically undercounts key factors in aviation’s contribution to climate change.
Reporting from the BBC revealed that the company started excluding all global warming impacts of flying besides carbon dioxide from its climate calculator tool as of July.
That might not sound like a big change, but as a result, estimates of carbon emissions per passenger are now drastically lower than they were before the change. That’s because non-carbon dioxide emissions and effects like contrail formation contribute to more than half of the real impact of flying on the climate. Google itself acknowledged the issue when it quietly announced the change on GitHub last month, saying that non-carbon dioxide “factors are critical to include in the model, given the emphasis on them” in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
“Google has airbrushed a huge chunk of the aviation industry’s climate impacts from its pages” Doug Parr, chief scientist of Greenpeace, told the BBC.
Contrails are the wisps of ice crystals that form in the wake of a plane. They’re also a huge contributor to the climate impact of flying and are responsible for more than half of flights’ climate impact and up to 2% of total global warming. That’s a big number, and one that academics and some in the aviation industry are working on cutting down.
Being able to accurately estimate and predict the climate impact of contrails is still a difficult task given the time of day, temperature and altitude of a flight can all play a role in how severe the impact is. Yet Google has chosen to exclude the factor entirely from its flight emissions calculator.
Public knowledge of the climate impact of contrails is already low. But the new changes by Google to its flight calculator put them further out of sight, out of mind. The calculator’s reach spreads beyond Google’s pages; the BBC notes that it’s used by Skyscanner, Expedia and other major travel sites.
The decision to remove contrails from Google’s calculations is particularly worrisome for the climate because, unlike reducing carbon dioxide emissions, cutting down on contrails and their warming impact could have immediate benefits. That’s because while carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries, contrails’ warming impact is fairly short term. Reducing them would cut down on climate damage in the near term, even as the aviation industry works to cut carbon emissions over the long haul.
Sources familiar with the company’s work told Protocol in April that Google was working with industry experts on better integrating contrails into its carbon calculator. As recently as last October, the page stated that Google Flight’s emissions estimates include both carbon dioxide emissions and non-carbon dioxide effects, including contrails, using estimates based on “lower bounds from scientific research,” citing a 2018 Nature paper.
Any mention of contrails has since been removed from the page. In last month’s GitHub announcement, Google said it’s working with researchers and other partners to improve modeling non-carbon dioxide factors, and that it would be “sharing updates at a later date.”
“We strongly believe that non-CO2 effects should be included in the model, but not at the expense of accuracy for individual flight estimates,” a Google spokesperson said in an email noting that the company is working “on soon-to-be-published research” on the topic.
Update: A comment from Google was added to this story on Aug. 25, 2022.
Sony is taking an unprecedented step to combat global economic pressures by raising the price of its flagship PlayStation 5 game console in dozens of major markets, though notably not in the U.S. The company announced the price hike in a blog post published Thursday.
“We’re seeing high global inflation rates, as well as adverse currency trends, impacting consumers and creating pressure on many industries,” wrote PlayStation chief Jim Ryan. “Based on these challenging economic conditions, SIE has made the difficult decision to increase the recommended retail price (RRP) of PlayStation 5 in select markets across Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), Asia-Pacific (APAC), Latin America (LATAM), as well as Canada. There will be no price increase in the United States.”
The PS5 launched as both a digital-only console without a disc drive and a slightly more expensive standard edition with a Blu-ray drive. In the U.S., where competition with Microsoft’s Xbox is arguably most fierce, the PS5 will still retail for $399 for the digital edition and $499 for the standard. In Europe, however, Sony is raising the price by 10% to 549.99 euros (a nearly equal value in U.S. dollars) for the standard version and 449.99 euros for the digital version. There are similar price hikes in Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Mexico and the U.K.
Sony is estimated to have sold 21 million consoles so far, coming in below the preceding PlayStation 4 at the same time in the two devices’ life cycles. That’s because of ongoing supply shortages. Though Sony is still leading the current generation of hardware, Microsoft’s Xbox is beginning to catch up. As of last month, the Xbox Series X and Series S devices were the best-selling consoles in the U.S. for the past three quarters, and market research firm Ampere Analysis estimates Microsoft has sold close to 14 million units.
Competition with Xbox is likely one reason why Sony is skipping over the U.S. with its price hike. Another reason is, as Ryan noted in his blog post, “adverse currency trends.” Much of the consumer electronics supply chain is pegged to the U.S. dollar, and with the economic downturn being felt worldwide, the dollar has grown much stronger in recent months relative to foreign currencies.
“However, with inflation and price increases being felt through the component supply chain, much of that priced in US dollars, alongside continued high costs in distribution, Sony has now had to pass on some of those cost increases to try and maintain its hardware profitability targets,” wrote Ampere Analysis researcher Piers Harding-Rolls. “Price increases will take place in at least 45 markets globally, but not in the US, due again to the strength of US dollar currency. The US is the biggest console market globally, and where Sony competes with Microsoft most closely for market share.”
Harding-Rolls predicted that Sony won’t see a substantial drop in sales given sky-high demand for the PS5 and weak supply since the product launched in the fall of 2020. “[T]he high pent up demand for Sony’s device means that this price increase of around 10% across most markets will have minimal impact on sales of the console,” he wrote. “We expect Sony’s sales forecast for the PS5 to remain unchanged.”
Sony said in July it still expects to sell 18 million PS5s in the current fiscal year, which would put the console close to 40 million units sold by 2023.
California is on the brink of dealing another blow to the future of the internal combustion engine.
The California Air Resources Board is expected to adopt a rule as soon as Thursday that would ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035. The state will also set interim targets requiring 35% of the new vehicles sold be emissions-free by 2026, and 68% by 2030, ensuring a smooth transition. (Today, emissions-free vehicles account for 12% of new vehicle sales in the state.)
“California will now be the only government in the world that mandates zero-emission vehicles,” Margo Oge, who led the Environmental Protection Agency’s transportation emissions program under three separate administrations, told the New York Times.
But the state may soon have company, if history is any indication. California has long been a trendsetter in cleaning up transportation, creating tailpipe emissions standards that are stricter than those of the federal government and setting aggressive zero-emission vehicle sales goals even before this latest development. More than a dozen states have adopted California’s standards.
This led to a firestorm when the Trump administration challenged the state’s ability to set its own standards and led to a protracted legal battle. In a decision backed by 19 other states and the District of Columbia, though, the Biden administration reinstated California’s ability to set its own vehicle standards in May.
At least 12 states could adopt California’s new mandate in the near future, and several more are likely to follow suit in the next year, according to the Times. That would mean roughly one-third of the U.S. auto market would end the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035. That could speed up the electric vehicle transition currently underway.
Most of the large automakers that initially supported the Trump administration’s challenge have also pivoted to recognize the state’s authority since the former president left office. Toyota became the latest when the company’s North America chief administrative officer Christopher Reynolds wrote in a letter to CARB and Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday that “[a]lthough we have shared challenges before us, we are committed to emission reductions and vehicle introductions consistent with CARB’s programs.”
The transportation sector represents the largest share of emissions in the U.S. California’s rule could have a major effect on reducing those emissions, especially if adopted more widely. (For comparison, it’s much more aggressive than President Joe Biden’s executive order calling for half of all new vehicles sold in the U.S. to be electric or plug-in hybrid by 2030.)
However, an association representing large U.S. and foreign automakers expressed skepticism about the news. John Bozzella, president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, told the New York Times that meeting the mandate would be “extremely challenging” due in large part to factors outside automakers’ control, such as “inflation, charging and fuel infrastructure, supply chains, labor, critical mineral availability and pricing, and the ongoing semiconductor shortage.”
Still, a growing number of automakers are setting aggressive electrification goals and investing in charging infrastructure, which could up the Golden State’s odds of success.
While California may be ahead of national policy, efforts by the Biden administration and Congress could put the state’s target even more within reach. The Inflation Reduction Act includes tax incentives for EVs and the bipartisan infrastructure law has $7.5 billion set aside for EV charging infrastructure. The administration also released new charging standards to help standardize the nation’s growing network and encourage drivers to buy EVs free of range anxiety.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated when the Biden administration reinstated California’s ability to set its own vehicle standards. This story was updated on Aug. 24, 2022.
Makeup retailer Sephora will pay $1.2 million to resolve a complaint by the California attorney general that the company sold customers’ data obtained through its app and website despite claiming not to.
The settlement, announced on Wednesday by state Attorney General Rob Bonta, also included allegations that Sephora ignored requests from consumers who used a mechanism to opt out of all sales of their data with a single click rather than having to go to each individual website that might be interested in their information.
The complaint shows that the state is escalating enforcement of its landmark privacy law, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and getting more aggressive in pursuing action against retailers that fail to honor such global opt-outs.
“Today isn’t only about Sephora,” Bonta told reporters. “Today’s settlement sends a strong message to businesses about the California DOJ’s ongoing efforts to enforce the CCPA.”
The complaint suggested that, while Sephora didn’t get paid by third parties that had access to location data and other information about customers, the nationwide chain received other benefits in violation of CCPA’s definition of sale, which goes beyond the exchange of money. In Sephora’s case, the company received analytics or “the opportunity to purchase online ads targeting specific consumers” from unnamed third parties. The company in turn frequently kept the data and used it “for the benefit of other businesses, without the knowledge or consent of the consumer.”
Bonta said Sephora was one of several businesses that received notice about its practices, but it did not fix them within 30 days. The attorney general also announced an “investigative sweep” of additional, unnamed companies that might not be honoring the all-in-one opt-out requests, which use a technology called Global Privacy Control and often operate at the browser level.
California’s enforcement of CCPA requires companies to honor GPC signals, and Bonta has looked to global opt-outs as a way to broaden consumer rights, calling them “powerful tools” on Wednesday. Many companies, however, treated a similar approach as non-binding in the years before CCPA, and according to Bonta, some still ignore the state’s interpretation of the law.
Those businesses still have 30 days to comply without facing action from Bonta’s office, he noted, but the “notice and cure” approach expires at the end of the year.
“The kid gloves are coming off,” he said.
In response to the settlement, Sephora said it was not admitting wrongdoing and lamented that CCPA’s definition of “‘sale’ includes common, industry-wide technology practices such as cookies.” The company said it has “allowed consumers to opt-out of the sale of personal info, including via the Global Privacy Control” since last November.
This article was updated Aug. 24 to include a statement from Sephora.
Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said he’s confident in the progress his company is making with regulators on getting the landmark $70 billion Activision Blizzard deal closed, according to a new interview with Bloomberg.
“I feel good about the progress that we’ve been making,” Spencer said, “but I go into the process supportive of people who maybe aren’t as close to the gaming industry asking good, hard questions about ‘what is our intent? What does this mean? If you play it out over five years, is this constricting a market? Is it growing a market?'”
The Activision deal, announced in January amid ongoing lawsuits alleging a pervasive culture of sexual harassment and discrimination at Activision Blizzard, is the largest in the history of the game industry by a wide margin. The deal has raised many questions about whether Microsoft could harm competition by owning the Xbox hardware ecosystem, a fast-growing internal division of game development studios and, if the deal passes, major video game franchises like Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Diablo, Overwatch and World of Warcraft.
Spencer’s comments are among the most robust public statements regarding the deal from a Microsoft executive since shortly after it was announced. In recent regulatory filings in Brazil and elsewhere, Microsoft and Sony have butted heads over the potential ripple effects of the deal and what it could mean for the game console market, the game industry at large and lucrative game series like Call of Duty. While Saudi Arabia became the first country to formally approve the acquisition, Microsoft’s biggest hurdles remain clearing the deal with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the E.U.’s European Commission and the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority.
Spencer told Bloomberg he believes Activision leadership is capable of fixing the company’s broken culture. “I believe they’re committed to that,” Spencer said. “When I look at the work that they’re doing now — there’s always more that can be done — but I believe from the studio leaders there that I know very well, some of them former Xbox members, that they’re committed to this journey. And I applaud that regardless of the deal.”
Spencer also touched on subjects related to the deal that have struck a nerve with the larger game community, including a growing unionization movement both inside Activision and beyond and concerns Microsoft may use its ownership of Activision to withhold products from its primary competitor, Sony.
“I’ve never run an organization that has unions in it, but what I can say in working through this is we recognize workers’ needs to feel safe and heard and compensated fairly in order to do great work,” Spencer said. “We definitely see a need to support the workers in the outcomes that they want to have.” Activision-owned studio Raven Software became the first major video game studio to unionize earlier this year after workers were victorious in their National Labor Relations Board election.
The union, consisting of more than two dozen quality assurance testers, has since inspired similar efforts at Activision studio Blizzard Albany. Though despite Microsoft’s pledge not to fight unions and an unprecedented agreement with the Communications Workers of America, Activision leadership has insisted on deploying union-busting tactics against Blizzard Albany in a manner similar to its failed attempts to undermine the union at Raven, according to CWA representatives and members of Game Workers Alliance Albany group who are organizing the union.
On the subject of Call of Duty, Spencer echoed comments he and Microsoft made back when the Activision deal was first announced, including commitments to keep the popular shooter series on the PlayStation console both through existing agreements with Sony over the next few years and beyond that. Spencer said a new game release made exclusive to one hardware platform “is something we’re just going to see less and less of” over time, though Microsoft is making upcoming Bethesda releases it took ownership of, as part of its 2020 acquisition of ZeniMax Media, exclusive to its Xbox and Game Pass platforms.
“Maybe you happen in your household to buy an Xbox and I buy a PlayStation and our kids want to play together and they can’t because we bought the wrong piece of plastic to plug into our television,” Spencer said. “We really love to be able to bring more players in reducing friction, making people feel safe, secure when they’re playing, allowing them to find their friends, play with their friends, regardless of what device — I think in the long run that is good for this industry. And maybe in the short run, there’s some people in some companies that don’t love it. But I think as we get over the hump and see where this industry can continue to grow, it proves out to be true.”
The Inflation Reduction Act isn’t just poised to cut carbon pollution. It could also save up to $1.9 trillion over the next three decades.
The Office of Management and Budget assessed the bill’s benefits, releasing the analysis on Tuesday. The analysis is based on modeling from Princeton University, Rhodium Group and Energy Innovation, all of which have found the bill could cut carbon by roughly 40% by 2030.
The OMB analysis runs out to 2050, though, and assumes that the rate of emissions reductions modeled by the three groups in 2030 would continue for the next 20 years. It then looks at what those continued emissions cuts could mean for public health, property and other livelihoods that would otherwise be put at risk by the climate crisis. This is the OMB’s first published estimate of avoided climate-related damage as a result of legislation.
The report uses what’s known as the social cost of carbon, an economic metric that puts a dollar price per ton on the benefits of not emitting carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. Lowering carbon dioxide emissions will slow climate impacts like extreme heat and sea level rise, and it will also result in a drop in air pollution tied to burning fossil fuels.
Previous estimates of what climate change could cost the federal government range between $25 billion to $128 billion annually. Those costs come from addressing climate change-fueled distasters after they happen and include disaster relief, flood and crop insurance, health care spending and wildfire management.
OMB said in the report that there are likely “significant underestimates of the full public benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” since it only focuses on domestic emissions reductions and excludes other potential impacts like ocean acidification. The law could very well spur more aggressive climate action abroad, which is vital since the U.S. is only responsible for roughly 14% of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. (Though, it should be noted, the country is the largest historical carbon polluter.)
Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School, agreed, telling Axios that the OMB analysis doesn’t include assumptions about potentially unquantifiable climate damages or how the law will speed up research and deployment of clean energy and all-electric technology. Bringing down the costs of those technologies here could again have knock-on effects by making them cheaper around the world, further spurring their adoption.
The Inflation Reduction Act “will help ease the burden that climate change imposes on the American public, strengthen our economy, and reduce future financial risks to the Federal Government and to taxpayers,” wrote OMB associate director for Climate, Energy, Environment and Science Candace Vahlsing in a briefing.
Apple employees launched a petition Monday pushing back on the company’s return-to-office policy, saying workers have “performed exceptional work” inside and outside traditional office environments.
Apple Together, the group of workers behind the #AppleToo movement, is urging the company to allow each employee to work directly with their manager to determine what kind of work arrangement is best for them. Employees also ask that work arrangements not require “higher level approvals, complex procedures,” or the providing of private information.
The petition is a response to CEO Tim Cook’s memo last week that tells employees to return to the office at least three days a week beginning Sept. 5. Workers are required to be in the office on Tuesdays, Thursdays and a third day to be determined by their team.
Apple Together organizers wrote in the petition that the policy doesn’t consider “the unique demands of each job role nor the diversity of individuals.” They added that workers have several reasons and circumstances for wanting flexible work arrangements, from disabilities to “just plain being happier and more productive.”
“We believe that Apple should encourage, not prohibit, flexible work to build a more diverse and successful company where we can feel comfortable to ‘think different’ together,” organizers wrote in the petition.
Apple did not immediately return a request for comment. Apple Together organizers are reportedly collecting signatures this week and plan to send the petition to company executives, according to The Guardian. About 100 people had signed the petition as of Monday morning.
After an aborted effort to enter the server chip market about five years ago, Qualcomm has decided to make another attempt, according to Bloomberg News.
Qualcomm has elected to build a new server chip from within its Nuvia unit, and is courting AWS as a potential client as it is searching for buyers, according to the report. The details are light, however, and it wasn’t clear whether Qualcomm planned to use an Arm-based core design for the chip, or even what type of data-center chip the company was aiming to produce.
Qualcomm and AWS declined to comment.
Nuvia was founded by several former Apple and Google chip engineers in 2019, and was developing a line of Arm-based server chips when Qualcomm acquired it in 2021 for over $1 billion. AWS uses Arm designs for its in-house Graviton chips, and startups such as Ampere have built server chips based on Arm tech that aim to break into the server-processor market, which has been dominated by Intel and AMD for years.
In a recent interview with Protocol, Arm CEO Rene Haas estimated that its technology makes up 5% to 10% of the data center market at this point. Chips based on the company’s designs have a reputation for using energy more judiciously than rival x86 processors, and those chips — including ones made by Qualcomm — are already used extensively inside smartphones and tablets.
Arm declined to comment about Qualcomm’s possible server chips.
Qualcomm’s last attempt to make a server chip launched in 2017, and several cloud computing providers such as Microsoft and Cloudflare expressed interest in adopting the design, which was called the Centriq 2400. Ultimately, the company shut down the project less than a year after its announcement, and former Intel veteran Anand Chandrasekher, who led the effort, departed Qualcomm.
Under the leadership of CEO Christiano Amon, Qualcomm has attempted to broaden its business beyond smartphones and wireless chips. The diversification efforts include a greater push into automotive and industrial chips, and PC chips based on Arm designs that aim to compete with Intel and AMD.
In recent months, the market for chips in consumer devices such as smartphones and PCs has softened considerably as inflation has led consumers to hold off on new purchases.
Some of the most popular reproductive health apps lack strong privacy labels and security practices, according to a report published by Mozilla Wednesday.
Mozilla gave 18 out of 25 reproductive health and fertility apps a “Privacy Not Included” warning label, meaning that these apps collect tons of personal data and then share it widely. Jen Caltrider, the lead at Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included project, said she hopes the report serves as a wake-up call for users who allow these apps to collect health data that could be used against them in a post-Roe world.
“There’s going to be a tipping point where it just becomes bad enough that people realize, ‘This is a problem that I need to take more seriously,'” Caltrider told Protocol. “Is this a tipping point where people start to realize that our privacy is gone, and it’s starting to have real-world harms?”
The organization looked at period-tracking apps, including Flo, Ovia and Glow, and found that the data that most of these apps collect includes phone numbers, IP addresses and app activity like cycle length, date of last menstrual period and pregnancy due date. The data is used to target ads toward pregnant people and expecting families. It’s also shared with third-party businesses, research institutions and sometimes even employers. Just one app, Euki, earned Mozilla’s “Best Of” badge. The app stores data locally on devices, meaning only the user has access to the information. It also has a two-entry passcode requirement.
Caltrider said the most worrying part of these apps’ data collection practices is that the information can be subpoenaed by law enforcement in abortion-related cases, which is a concern that privacy advocates have raised for some time now. Mozilla found that most apps have “vague boilerplate statements” on when and how much user data could be handed over to officers. “It is so gray right now, what can be shared [with law enforcement],” Caltrider said.
Just last week, Facebook gave Nebraska police private chats in an abortion-related case. (Facebook expanded its end-to-end encryption on Messenger shortly after; the company said that it was unrelated to the case.) Caltrider said there are other ways this data could be used. Anti-abortion protesters could hypothetically get the information from a data broker and harass individual users, she said.
Caltrider added that some companies may not have the legal resources needed to protect the data if it does get subpoenaed by law enforcement in abortion-related cases. Others, like Sprout Pregnancy, don’t even list a privacy policy on their website. “Those things feel like red flags to me,” she said.
Microsoft has finally broken its silence on a sales figure secret its kept close to its chest for more than half a decade.
In a regulatory filing in Brazil related to its Activision Blizzard acquisition — a proceeding that’s already revealed some explosive details related to the console gaming market — Microsoft finally admitted how badly the Xbox One lost to Sony’s PlayStation 4.
“Sony has surpassed Microsoft in terms of console sales and installed base, having sold more than twice as many Xbox in the last generation,” admits Microsoft, as translated from Portuguese (via The Verge). Gaming news site Game Luster was first to report the filing. With its March 2022 final tally at 117.2 million units (Sony no longer reports PS4 sales), the PS4 ranks as one of the best-selling consoles of all time, while the Xbox One has sold fewer than 58.5 million units.
Microsoft hasn’t reported sales figures of its Xbox hardware since 2016, at which point it was clear the sales gap between Sony’s new console and the Xbox One, both released in 2013, had grown dire. Instead, Microsoft chose to focus on the number of Xbox Live accounts and spent the next few years focusing its efforts on building a more powerful Xbox, its Game Pass subscription platform and, eventually, the new Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles.
Of course, Microsoft is in a much better position now than it was in the aftermath of the messy Xbox One launch and its years spent playing catchup to the PS4. Under Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer, who took charge of the Xbox division starting in 2014, Microsoft has grown Game Pass to more than 25 million monthly subscribers, acquired dozens of new studios and invested heavily in forward-thinking initiatives such as cloud gaming and cross-platform play. New Xbox hardware is also performing much better and even outpacing sales of Sony’s PlayStation 5 due to ongoing production shortages.
But for years now, players and analysts have wondered, how far behind did Xbox fall during the seventh console generation that spanned 2013 to 2020? Some analysts using independent data had estimated Xbox One sales to be around 50 million units, and now we know just how accurate those estimates were.
The U.S. Commerce Department has implemented an export control on advanced chip design software that’s necessary to produce next-generation processors, expanding on existing controls that target chipmaking tools with the goal of hampering Chinese efforts to build the most complex chips domestically.
The new export restrictions targets electronic design automation, or EDA, software produced by the likes of Cadence and Synopsys. The goal is to hamper Chinese companies pursuing AI applications and prevent them from building chips with an emerging technology called gate all around, according to a person familiar with the Biden Administration’s plans. The advanced design tools are necessary to make chips with gate-all-around designs that are capable of delivering substantially more computing horsepower with far less energy than today’s chips.
The Commerce Department issued the new rule Friday, though Protocol first reported on the pending plan to block advanced EDA software exports earlier this month.
China’s effort to manufacture the most-advanced chips has roughly stalled at the 14-nanometer level, a process that the likes of TSMC, Samsung and Intel perfected about eight years ago. In recent weeks, a report emerged that China had successfully made a 7-nanometer chip, though experts in some corners of the industry were skeptical of the claims.
Nanometer naming conventions can be misleading, however. At one point they referred to the size of a specific feature on a chip but today mostly amount to marketing terminology.
In addition to blocking advanced design software, officials said the U.S. would restrict gallium oxide and diamond, materials that are used to make chips work under extreme temperature or energy conditions that are often useful for the military.
The Commerce Department said it is implementing the chip-related restrictions that were agreed upon in December by the 42 countries who participate in the Wassenaar Arrangement, an international arms control agreement.
What was supposed to be a blockbuster crypto merger has morphed into a legal brawl. Galaxy Digital said Monday that it has terminated its $1.2 billion bid to buy BitGo, which it accused of failing to produce “audited financial statements.”
BitGo quickly hit back, announcing that it plans to sue the crypto financial services company for “its improper decision to terminate the merger agreement.”
Galaxy Digital said it had “exercised its right to terminate” the deal, originally struck in May 2021, after BitGo failed to deliver 2021 financial records “that comply with the requirements of our agreement.” The company also said no termination fee has to be paid.
BitGo denied Galaxy Digital’s claim. R. Brian Timmons, a partner with Quinn Emanuel, which represents BitGo, said the company has “honored its obligations thus far, including the delivery of its audited financials.”
“The attempt by [Galaxy Digital CEO] Mike Novogratz and Galaxy Digital to blame the termination on BitGo is absurd,” Timmons said in a statement.
BitGo said it would seek more than $100 million in damages. BitGo said Galaxy Digital had promised to pay a $100 million “reverse break fee” in March when it tried “to induce BitGo to extend the merger agreement.”
Timmons suggested that Galaxy Digital wanted to end the deal because of recent business troubles. “It is public knowledge that Galaxy reported a $550 million loss this past quarter, that its stock is performing poorly, and that both Galaxy and Mr. Novogratz have been distracted by the luna fiasco,” he said, referring to the failed cryptocurrency whose failure in May hit Galaxy’s stock price.
He said Galaxy Digital must pay the termination fee “or it has been acting in bad faith and faces damages of that much or more.”
Novogratz, who is also Galaxy Digital’s founder, said in a statement that it still hopes to “list in the U.S.” and transform the company into “a one-stop shop for institutions.”
Andreessen Horowitz is betting big on Adam Neumann’s return to the real estate startup game.
A16z co-founder Marc Andreessen wrote in a Monday blog post that the firm would partner with Neumann on a new startup called Flow, which is focused on the residential real estate market. Neumann was famously pushed out as leader of WeWork in 2019 after the firm pulled its IPO plans, and his personal and professional antics — padding around barefoot, investing in a wave-pool startup — have provided fodder for books and an Apple TV+ series.
“We think it is natural,” Andreessen wrote, “that for his first venture since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes. Residential real estate — the world’s largest asset class — is ready for exactly this change.”
While the blog post did not disclose the size of the investment, The New York Times reported it at $350 million at a $1 billion valuation. That deal is the largest individual check a16z has written to a startup, according to the Times. Andreessen will also join Flow’s board.
Despite that big check, details on Neumann’s new company are sparse. Its website says only “Live life in flow. Coming 2023,” with an email sign-up link. Andreessen’s blog post hinted that the company’s vision is “rethinking the entire value chain, from the way buildings are purchased and owned to the way residents interact with their buildings to the way value is distributed among stakeholders.”
Neumann has been “quietly acquiring majority stakes in more than 4,000 apartments valued at more than $1 billion in Miami, Atlanta, Nashville, Tenn., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and other U.S. cities,” The Wall Street Journal reported in January.
Andreessen wrote that the nation’s housing is in crisis. “In a world where limited access to home ownership continues to be a driving force behind inequality and anxiety, giving renters a sense of security, community, and genuine ownership has transformative power for our society.”
That pronouncement comes a week after The Atlantic first reported that Andreessen had contacted officials in the ultra-wealthy Bay Area town of Atherton opposing a plan to add multifamily housing. Andreessen was among a list of Silicon Valley luminaries fighting against the plan, The New York Times reported.
The size of the check from a16z is sure to raise some eyebrows, especially given Neumann’s history. He was ousted from WeWork — which investors once valued at $47 billion — after the firm’s failed IPO put his leadership decisions and the company’s huge losses under the microscope. WeWork has since gone public through a SPAC and is valued around $4 billion.
A16z earlier this year invested in Flowcarbon, a startup co-founded (but not directly managed) by Neumann that plans to use blockchain technology to track carbon credits.
“We understand how difficult it is to build something like this and we love seeing repeat-founders build on past successes by growing from lessons learned,” Andreessen wrote.
Unity rejected AppLovin’s offer to buy the company in an all-stock deal valued at $20 billion and instead will move forward with a plan to buy ad tech and monetization software company ironSource, the company said Monday.
AppLovin offered to buy Unity last week under the condition that Unity give up its $4.4 billion deal with ironSource. The merger with AppLovin would have given Unity 55% of the company’s shares but only 49% of the voting rights, and CEO John Riccitiello would have kept the same role.
But Unity said AppLovin’s offer wasn’t good enough to edge out a deal with ironSource. The company said the deal would not be in the interest of shareholders and “would not reasonably be expected to result in a ‘Superior Proposal’ as defined in Unity’s merger agreement with ironSource.”
“The Board continues to believe that the ironSource transaction is compelling and will deliver an opportunity to generate long-term value,” Riccitiello said in a statement. “We remain committed to and enthusiastic about Unity’s agreement with ironSource and the substantial benefits it will create for our shareholders and Unity creators.”
Unity expects the combined company will produce a run rate of $1 billion in adjusted EBITDA by the end of 2024. The company will also authorize a 24-month share buyback program of up to $2.5 billion once the deal with ironSource closes.
Unity’s transaction with ironSource puts AppLovin at a disadvantage in the digital advertising and gaming markets. AppLovin had been working on a proposal to buy Unity ever since the company announced a deal with ironSource, having hired advisers to work on a bid last month.
Marqeta shares fell about 25% Thursday after the company revealed a weak outlook and founder Jason Gardner said he would step down.
Gardner announced his plan to step down as CEO during the company’s earnings call Wednesday. He also told investors chief operating officer Vidya Peters is leaving.
Those changes and a “cautious” outlook in the wake of a slump in the fintech market triggered a selloff in Marqeta shares.
Gardner, who founded the company in 2010, said it was time to hand the reins of the company to a new leader.
“I always knew this time would come,” he told analysts. “When we went public in 2021, I promised to hand leadership to the best person at the appropriate time. After thoughtful consideration of what the next phase of growth will require, I’ve concluded that now is the time to begin the search for this person.”
He said the company will look for “a CEO with deep experience scaling an innovative, high-growth business.” Gardner said he would take on the role of executive chairman once his successor takes over.
Gardner said Simon Khalaf, who recently joined Marqeta as chief product officer, will take over Peters’ responsibilities temporarily. Marqeta is looking to hire a chief revenue officer, he said.
Gardner’s exit will mark the end of an era for a pioneering payments-infrastructure company that simplified issuing debit and prepaid cards for other fintech companies.
Marqeta has played a critical role in the rapid growth of the fintech industry, providing payments technologies to companies like Affirm, Expensify and Square as well as Wall Street giants like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. Customers include Block, Coinbase and Affirm.
“The world is changing rapidly, especially around financial services,” Gardner told Protocol in a 2021 interview. “We see this great opportunity. And we’re in the right place at the right time with our platform.”
Marqeta went public in June 2021, and its stock rallied 13% to $30.52 on its first day of trading. But the market has changed dramatically since then. Marqeta has felt the impact of the downturn keenly as fintech companies have struggled with sluggish growth and hurdles to raising capital. Since Marqeta serves other fintechs, smaller firms’ struggles affect its growth prospects.
Chief financial officer Mike Milotich told analysts Wednesday that “many fintechs are being less aggressive about their investments in expansion.”
“Given the current macroeconomic uncertainty as well as fintech-specific challenges with significant declines in valuation and increasing difficulties in raising capital, we feel it is prudent to be cautious about the next several months,” he said.
Atlantic states may have a head start in the offshore wind game, but California has a plan to catch up — and even surpass — them.
On Wednesday, the California Energy Commission adopted the goal of developing between 3 and 5 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030 on its way to reaching 25 gigawatts by 2045. The latter target would generate enough electricity to meet the demands of 25 million homes.
“These ambitious yet achievable goals are an important signal of how committed California is to bringing the offshore wind industry to our state,” said CEC Chair David Hochschild in a statement.
This comes as the first step of the commission’s creation of a strategic plan for offshore wind development, as mandated by a law put in place last September. That law tasked the commission with determining the maximum offshore wind capacity that the state could conceivably build out by 2030 and 2045. Now, it seems, we have an answer.
Next, the CEC has to submit its complete offshore wind plan to the legislature by June 2023. The state will study the potential economic benefits of offshore wind development, as well as put together a plan for wind farm and transmission permitting together.
Assuming the goal comes to fruition, California is setting itself up to become the leader in offshore wind development. No other state has been as ambitious in its long-term offshore wind plans so far, even though the industry is relatively nascent in California. The state’s offshore geography may pose a challenge to meeting the goals as well. Because the Pacific Ocean’s floor is so deep off the coast of California, building the infrastructure will require the use of floating turbines, which have not yet been widely adopted aside from at a few sites in Scotland and Portugal.
The Biden administration set the national goal of 30 gigawatts of power from offshore wind by 2030. Much of the progress toward this target has so far happened in the Atlantic, with two commercial-scale offshore wind projects already approved off the coast of New England and more in the works.
However, in May, the Interior Department proposed the country’s first lease sale off the coast of California, pinpointing several areas off the coast of both central and northern California as promising.
But the U.S. still lags well behind Europe in both deployment and ambition. Denmark, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, for example, recently committed to upping their combined offshore wind capacity to 150 gigawatts by 2050. This represents a tenfold increase from the 15 gigawatts of offshore capacity that the group contributes to the continent’s energy mix at present. That would be enough to power roughly 230 million European households.
The Federal Trade Commission has officially begun the long-awaited process of regulating digital data by reining in “surveillance” and lax security in a move that could have sweeping consequences for Big Tech and industries far beyond.
The FTC on Thursday launched the notice of potential rule-making and began seeking comments on a long list of detailed questions, kicking off an effort to protect consumers that will doubtless spur furious opposition from business groups.
“The growing digitization of our economy — coupled with business models that can incentivize endless hoovering up of sensitive user data and a vast expansion of how this data is used — means that potentially unlawful practices may be prevalent,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement.
While Khan stressed that the FTC is asking whether it even should regulate in particular areas, Khan has long made clear her interest in issuing rules about data and her skepticism of Big Tech’s advertising machine in particular. In June, she told Protocol, “[T]he behavioral ad-based business model creates a certain set of incentives that are not always aligned with people’s privacy protections.”
The FTC put out dozens of questions in the 44-page notice, on areas ranging from digital ads and security of consumer information to biometrics, psychological harms, corporate structure, the protection of kids and teens, algorithmic discrimination and accuracy, and the adequacy of existing guardrails, with queries bringing up practices in health care, finance, and other industries.
For example, the FTC asked, “To what extent, if at all, should the Commission limit companies that provide any specifically enumerated services (e.g., finance, healthcare, search, or social media) from owning or operating a business that engages in any specific commercial surveillance practices like personalized or targeted advertising?”
Khan’s effort comes just weeks after the House advanced a major data protection bill out of committee — the furthest any such measure has so far gotten in Congress, although it still faces stiff headwinds. Khan told Protocol in that June interview that the FTC would likely proceed despite the efforts of lawmakers. Those efforts are slowly gaining support from consumer groups and civil rights advocates, some of whom also celebrated the FTC’s move on Thursday. Despite the support for the legislative proposal, even though it also makes concessions that seem to be appealing to some corporate interests, Sen. Maria Cantwell is holding up the effort.
Overall, industry would vastly prefer for Congress, where lawmakers need some compromise to pass bills, to determine how privacy looks in the U.S., rather than the three Democrats on the five-member commission.
In speaking to reporters on Thursday, the three Democratic commissioners repeatedly emphasized that, however broad their questions right now, they would comply with the law’s requirements that they only try to regulate specific “unfair or deceptive acts” that are shown to be prevalent. The three also praised the congressional efforts and suggested if lawmakers succeed in passing the current privacy bill, it would alter the commission’s priorities.
“I hope it passes soon,” Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya, a longtime privacy expert, said. “This process is not going to interfere with that effort. Should the [bill] pass, I will not vote for any rule that overlaps with it.”
Still, the process ahead is likely to be bumpy. The FTC must follow even more steps and offer greater opportunities for feedback from the public and businesses than most other federal agencies, which often spend months or years crafting their regulations. In addition, business groups, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have promised to fight Khan’s agenda as hard as they can, including in court. They may also find allies in the judiciary, after a Supreme Court decision earlier this year signaled federal courts should take a deeply skeptical view of extensive rules.
This article was updated Aug. 11 to include new comments from FTC commissioners.
Meta announced it is expanding end-to-end encryption in Messenger, just days after news broke that the company gave Nebraska law enforcement Messenger chats between a 17-year-old girl and her mother discussing a medical abortion. Meta told Wired the announcement and the Nebraska case are unrelated, however, Meta would not have been able to access the chats if the girl and mother had used end-to-end encryption.
Meta has been testing and rolling out more privacy features within Messenger for a while now, including “Vanish Mode” and end-to-end encrypted group calls. Using end-to-end encryption is optional for users right now. But Meta announced in its blog post that it will start introducing end-to-end encrypted chats by default in a test group. The company is also testing secure storage of end-to-end encrypted chats, and removing Vanish Mode.
“We’ve had this date in the diary for months, but the short notice is because Messenger product teams have been finalizing the tests that are going live,” Meta spokesperson Alex Dziedzan told Wired. “These tests will start Thursday. We want people to hear about these tests from us before they see changes in the app.”
Law enforcement served Meta a search warrant in June requesting private data to help with its investigation. Meta said in a blog post that the warrant did not mention abortion, and was served before the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. Still, the Messenger chats helped law enforcement prosecute the girl for allegedly inducing a miscarriage after the state’s 20-week abortion limit.
Coinbase said the SEC is looking into different aspects of the crypto company’s business, including “existing and intended future products,” according to a regulatory filing.
Coinbase said it has received “investigative subpoenas and requests from the SEC for documents and information” about company operations and programs.
CEO Brian Armstrong had mentioned the SEC probe during the company’s earnings call on Tuesday, saying Coinbase received “a voluntary request for information, including about our asset listings process.”
“We do not yet know if this inquiry will become a formal investigation,” Armstrong told analysts. “We’re committed to a productive discussion with the SEC around digital assets and securities regulation.”
The latest disclosure confirms earlier reports that the SEC has launched an investigation focused on whether Coinbase offers crypto currencies and other digital assets that should be registered as securities. Coinbase has maintained that it does not list securities.
Coinbase said in the filing that the SEC was interested in its “processes for listing assets, the classification of certain listed assets, its staking programs, and its stablecoin and yield-generating products.”
The probe comes at a time when Coinbase is grappling with the impact of the crypto crash, which has shed $2 trillion in value over the last eight months.
Coinbase on Tuesday reported weak quarterly results, including a $1.1 billion loss and big drop in revenue. The company has been forced to slash expenses and recently reduced its workforce by 18%.
Goldman Sachs analysts on Wednesday told clients that while Coinbase management “has navigated the turbulence in crypto markets well,” they expect the company’s stock to “underperform as long as retail engagement with crypto remains weak and regulatory uncertainty in the U.S. remains.”