"Facebook Inc. is demanding that a New York University research project cease collecting data about its political-ad targeting practices," reports the Wall Street Journal, "setting up a fight with academics seeking to study the platform without the company's permission." The dispute involves the NYU Ad Observatory, a project launched last month by the university's engineering school that has recruited more than 6,500 volunteers to use a specially designed browser extension to collect data about the political ads Facebook shows them. In a letter sent October 16 to the researchers behind the NYU Ad Observatory, Facebook said the project violates provisions in its terms of service that prohibit bulk data collection from its site. "Scraping tools, no matter how well-intentioned, are not a permissible means of collecting information from us," said the letter, written by a Facebook privacy policy official, Allison Hendrix. If the university doesn't end the project and delete the data it has collected, she wrote, "you may be subject to additional enforcement action...."

Facebook said it already offers more transparency into political advertising than either traditional media or rival social platforms, and that the automated collection of data from users' on-platform activity — even with their permission — poses an unacceptable privacy threat... What limitations on social media data scraping are enforceable has been the subject of litigation in recent years, with platforms arguing they have both a right and responsibility to prevent the unauthorized use of user-generated data.

The NYU project has already collected the targeting data behind more than 200,000 ads. Researchers say it has exposed areas where the publicly available archive of political ads Facebook created after the 2016 election is failing to log advertisements that should be in the system. Facebook said it has appreciated the NYU researchers' efforts to improve the ad library, but won't stand for violations of its rules. Laura Edelson, a researcher at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering who helps oversee the Ad Observatory project, said, "The only thing that would prompt us to stop doing this would be if Facebook would do it themselves, which we have called on them to do...."
The article also includes a reaction from the associate director of Georgetown's Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics. "There's far too much critical information closed up behind Facebook's walled garden. And efforts like the Ad Observatory play a critical role in breaking down those walls."

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have discovered that "gravitational redshift" exists in two stars orbiting each other in our galaxy about 29,000 light years (200,000 trillion miles) away from Earth. Gravitational redshifts, where light is shifted to redder colors because of gravity, "have tangible impacts on modern life, as scientists and engineers must take them into account to enable accurate positions for GPS," reports Phys.Org. From the report: The intriguing system known as 4U 1916-053 contains two stars in a remarkably close orbit. One is the core of a star that has had its outer layers stripped away, leaving a star that is much denser than the Sun. The other is a neutron star, an even denser object created when a massive star collapses in a supernova explosion. The neutron star (grey) is shown in this artist's impression at the center of a disk of hot gas pulled away from its companion (white star on left). These two compact stars are only about 215,000 miles apart, roughly the distance between the Earth and the Moon. While the Moon orbits our planet once a month, the dense companion star in 4U 1916-053 whips around the neutron star and completes a full orbit in only 50 minutes.

In the new work on 4U 1916-053, the team analyzed X-ray spectra -- that is, the amounts of X-rays at different wavelengths -- from Chandra. They found the characteristic signature of the absorption of X-ray light by iron and silicon in the spectra. In three separate observations with Chandra, the data show a sharp drop in the detected amount of X-rays close to the wavelengths where the iron or silicon atoms are expected to absorb the X-rays. One of the spectra showing absorption by iron -- the dips on the left and right -- is included in the main graphic. An additional graphic shows a spectrum with absorption by silicon. In both spectra the data are shown in grey and a computer model in red.

However, the wavelengths of these characteristic signatures of iron and silicon were shifted to longer, or redder wavelengths compared to the laboratory values found here on Earth (shown with the blue, vertical line for each absorption signature). The researchers found that the shift of the absorption features was the same in each of the three Chandra observations, and that it was too large to be explained by motion away from us. Instead they concluded it was caused by gravitational redshift. The article goes on to explain how gravitational redshifts connect with Einstein's General Theory Relativity: "As predicted by Einstein's theory, clocks under the force of gravity run at a slower rate than clocks viewed from a distant region experiencing weaker gravity. This means that clocks on Earth observed from orbiting satellites run at a slower rate. To have the high precision needed for GPS, this effect needs to be taken into account or there will be small differences in time that would add up quickly, calculating inaccurate positions..."

The findings have been published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Just days after US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez played Among Us to an audience of more than 435,000 viewers, InnerSloth, the developer of the popular multiplayer title, is struggling to contain a spam attack that is affecting most of the game's community. Engadget reports: The hack started to spread through the game's userbase on Thursday evening. It causes players to spam their match's text chat with messages that direct people to the YouTube and Discord channels of a person who goes by the pseudonym "Eris Loris," threatening them if they don't subscribe. For good measure, some of the messages also promote President Donald Trump's 2020 campaign.

InnerSloth said it's "super duper aware of the current hacking issue" and that it had planned to roll out an emergency server-side update to address the spam. Forest Willard, one of three developers who make up the InnerSloth team, said they had begun rolling out the update at some point in the middle of the night, but it doesn't seem to have addressed the issue; new reports of spam-filled matches continue to flood Twitter. The studio is advising people to play private games with friends while it works to solve the problem.

As for the hacker, it appears their primary motive in all of this was to troll people. "I was curious to see what would happen, and personally I found it funny," they told Kotaku. "The anger and hatred is the part that makes it funny. If you care about a game and are willing to go and spam dislike some random dude on the internet because you cant [sic] play it for three minutes, it's stupid."

Jahta writes: The GitHub repository for the popular youtube-dl utility is offline after GitHub received a DMCA takedown notice from the RIAA. The notice claims that "The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use." "Whether you're looking to backup contents of your personal YouTube account or download some of your favorite YouTuber's videos for offline use, many turn to youtube-dl as the most reliable and in-depth tool for downloading videos from YouTube -- along with many, many other sites that have videos like Vimeo, CNN, etc," writes Kyle Bradshaw via 9to5Google. "Beyond simple downloading features, youtube-dl is also able to convert your download into nearly any format, including creating an mp3 of just a video's audio track."

"One of the primary bases for the RIAA's claim is that youtube-dl appears to be developed with the explicit intention of enabling the downloading of copyrighted works, with music videos from the likes of Icona Pop, Justin Timberlake, and Taylor Swift being used to test the tool's functionality, a claim which we were able to independently verify." It's now up to the project's creators to file a counterclaim in the hopes of restoring youtube-dl's status on GitHub.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: As a compositor for venerable visual-effects house Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), [Charmaine Chan] has worked on films like The Last Jedi, assembling various digital elements into a beautiful, seamless image. Her job changed while working on The Mandalorian, one of the first shows to use ILM's upgrade for the green screen: LED panels that use the same technology as video game engines to place a realistic-looking world behind the actors.

The result was a huge improvement, as green screens actually have a lot of drawbacks. Removing the green screen is never as quick as VFX artists would hope, and it also casts green light over the set and the actors. Even green-screen substitutes, like projecting an image onto a screen behind the actor, fail to dynamically respond to camera movements the way they would in the real world. ILM's solution fixes a lot of those problems. It also led to creative breakthroughs in which the old Hollywood order of making a TV show or movie -- wherein VFX came last -- was suddenly reversed. Now, artists like Charmaine work alongside actors, set designers, and other crew members during filming. That collaboration means this technology doesn't just eliminate a screen -- it eliminates a creative barrier. Watch the video [here] to see how it happens.

Patreon is the latest tech company to take action on the QAnon conspiracy theory, announcing in a blog post Thursday morning that creators promoting the movement would be banned from the platform. Business Insider reports: Patreon, a membership platform that lets fans support creators and celebrities financially through subscriptions, previously hosted 14 QAnon influencers on the platform, according to a recent report from the progressive media watchdog Media Matters for America (MMFA). QAnon, the baseless far-right conspiracy theory that alleges President Donald Trump is fighting a deep-state cabal of human traffickers, has recently been banned or limited by Facebook, YouTube, Etsy, Spotify, Triller, and several other platforms. While many QAnon followers base their beliefs on "Q drops" from an anonymous "Q" figure on the messageboard 8kun, the movement is now spread by QAnon influencers who analyze and explain the "Q drops" for their followers.

Patreon creators who used the platform to earn money included some of the movement's top influencers, MMFA found, including Patriots Soapbox, Sean Morgan, Praying Medic, and InTheMatrixxx, all of which were already banned from YouTube. As of Thursday morning, soon after the company published its blog post, those four creators were still up and running on Patreon with QAnon references in their profiles. By Thursday afternoon, the four users were taken down from the platform. Patreon said that creators who have been identified by Patreon's Policy and Trust and Safety teams as QAnon-specific will be removed, but those "who have propagated some QAnon content, but are not dedicated to spreading QAnon disinformation, will have the opportunity to bring their campaigns into compliance with our updated guidelines."

An appeals court ruled Thursday evening that an injunction issued against Uber and Lyft over the status of their drivers was an appropriate measure. CNET reports: The injunction was issued in August by Judge Ethan Schulman of the San Francisco Superior Court, who ruled that the ride-hailing companies must start classifying their drivers as employees in the state. The judge allowed the companies 10 days to appeal the ruling, which they did. The First Appellate District court in San Francisco heard arguments from the companies last week and issued its ruling Thursday siding with Schulman. The appeals court said in its 74-page ruling that there was an "overwhelming likelihood" Uber and Lyft are violating California law AB5. That law requires some employers that use independent contractors to reclassify their workers as employees and provide more worker benefits.

The injunction stems from a lawsuit against Uber and Lyft filed by the state of California in May in conjunction with the city attorneys from San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. The suit says the companies "exploited hundreds of thousands of California workers" by classifying drivers as independent contractors and are violating AB5, which took effect in January. As this lawsuit works its way through the courts, Uber, Lyft and other gig economy companies have sponsored a state ballot measure campaign with nearly $200 million to bring the issue to voters. Proposition 22 aims to create an exemption for the companies to AB5 and allow them to continue classifying their workers as independent contractors. The report notes that this latest appeals court ruling "won't have an immediate effect. The court gave the companies at least a 30-day stay without requiring any changes to driver status."

Microsoft has privately told European competition authorities that Slack's antitrust complaint against the tech giant was motivated essentially by sour grapes [Editor's note: the link is paywalled; an alternative source was not available.]. From a report: In a recent confidential filing, Microsoft told the European Commission, which oversees competition regulation, that Slack brought its complaint against Microsoft because the lockdown prompted by the coronavirus pandemic has exposed deficiencies in Slack's messaging product, according to a person who has seen the complaint. In the filing, which runs about 40 pages, Microsoft said the sudden surge in people working from home this year has made more apparent shortcomings in Slack's product, including its handling of videoconferencing, while also benefiting Microsoft's competing Teams software, the person said. [...] Slack declined to comment directly on the "confidential exchange of documents" between Slack, Microsoft and the commission. But the company's vice president of policy and communications, Jonathan Prince, told The Information that Microsoft's argument was the equivalent of a schoolyard taunt. Further reading: Slack CEO: Microsoft is 'Unhealthily Preoccupied With Killing Us.'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission has finished investigating T-Mobile for a network outage that Chairman Ajit Pai called "unacceptable." But instead of punishing the mobile carrier, the FCC is merely issuing a public notice to "remind" phone companies of "industry-accepted best practices" that could have prevented the T-Mobile outage. After the 12-hour nationwide outage on June 15 disrupted texting and calling services, including 911 emergency calls, Pai wrote that "The T-Mobile network outage is unacceptable" and that "the FCC is launching an investigation. We're demanding answers -- and so are American consumers."

Pai has a history of talking tough with carriers and not following up with punishments that might have a greater deterrence effect than sternly worded warnings. That appears to be what happened again yesterday when the FCC announced the findings from its investigation into T-Mobile. Pai said that "T-Mobile's outage was a failure" because the carrier didn't follow best practices that could have prevented or minimized it, but he announced no punishment. The matter appears to be closed based on yesterday's announcement, but we contacted Chairman Pai's office today to ask if any punishment of T-Mobile is forthcoming.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For months, Bui Van Thuan, a chemistry teacher turned crusading blogger in Vietnam, published one scathing Facebook post after another on a land dispute between villagers and the communist government. In a country with no independent media, Facebook provides the only platform where Vietnamese can read about contentious topics such as Dong Tam, a village outside Hanoi where residents were fighting authorities' plans to seize farmland to build a factory. Believing a confrontation was inevitable, the 40-year-old Thuan condemned the country's leaders in a Jan. 7 post. "Your crimes will be engraved on my mind," he wrote. "I know you -- the land robbers -- will do everything, however cruel it is, to grab the people's land." Facebook blocked his account the next day at the government's insistence, preventing 60 million Vietnamese users from seeing his posts. One day later, as Thuan had warned, police stormed Dong Tam with tear gas and grenades. A village leader and three officers were killed.

For three months, Thuan's Facebook account remained suspended. Then the company told him the ban would be permanent. "We have confirmed that you are not eligible to use Facebook," the message read in Vietnamese. Thuan's blacklisting, which the Menlo Park-based social media giant now calls a "mistake," illustrates how willingly the company has acquiesced to censorship demands from an authoritarian government. Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, say the platform protects free expression except in narrow circumstances, such as when it incites violence. But in countries including Cuba, India, Israel, Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey, Facebook routinely restricts posts that governments deem sensitive or off-limits. Nowhere is that truer than in Vietnam. Facebook, whose site was translated into Vietnamese in 2008, now counts more than half the country's people among its account holders. The popular platform has enabled government critics and pro-democracy activists -- in both Vietnam and the United States -- to bypass the communist system's strict controls on the media. But in the last several years, the company has repeatedly censored dissent in Vietnam, trying to placate a repressive government that has threatened to shut Facebook down if it does not comply, The Times found.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has boasted a lot about the AR capabilities of its new LiDAR equipped iPhone 12 Pro. It means that your new iPhone will be able to 'map' the room better to place objects. However, I hadn't found an AR app that I might use regularly -- until now. A few months ago, developer Cyril Diagne showed off a demo of an app called ClipDrop that lets you 'drop' real-life objects to your desktop. Now, the app has entered beta, and I already love it. The concept of the app is cool. You can take a picture of any object and the app with automatically remove the background and convert it into an image. You can then paste the image on your desktop and use it in your applications. In addition to objects and people, you can also extract text from a book or page that you have.

General Motors said it has sold out the first year's worth of its hulking GMC Hummer EV electric pickup truck after a splashy video reveal on Tuesday. Reuters reports: The GMC website showed a "reservations full" banner over the Hummer EV "Edition 1," due to start production in the fall of 2021. The next version of the truck, the $99,995 Hummer EV 3X, is not scheduled to begin production until the fall of 2022. The least expensive Hummer EV, starting at $79,995, is scheduled to go into production in the spring of 2024, GM said.

The Hummer EV was designed and engineered in 18 months, GM officials said during a presentation on Wednesday. The brawny truck can "crab walk" sideways on rough terrain using its four-wheel steering system, and has a "Watts to Freedom" mode that accelerates the truck to 60 miles per hour (97 kph) in 3 seconds. The Hummer EV is in part a response to Tesla's Cybertruck, which has a very different but equally eye-grabbing design and a bevy of extreme performance features. [...] Startups Rivian, Nikola Corp and Lordstown Motors are among other companies that have electric pickups in development. Further reading: GMC Hummer EV vs. Tesla Cybertruck, Bollinger and Rivian

Software engineer Rashiq Zahid debuted a web app today that uses a reverse-engineered version of McDonald's ordering API to query every single McDonald's in the United States. "Assuming a store has correctly indicated that ice cream is unavailable and that its ice cream machine isn't working, it'll show up as a little red dot on the McBroken map," reports Lifehacker. From the report: Zahid even built in a statistics box into McBroken so you can see how various cities compare for ice cream uptime. According to Zahid, his system works by queueing up nearly $20,000 worth of orders each minute. Don't worry; he's not placing them and cancelling them over and over, so no McDonald's worker has yet to dunk their head in the fryer as a result of Zahid's shenanigans.

A number of different users on Twitter and Product Hunt have tested out Zahid's app by heading over to their local McDonald's restaurants and seeing what they can order. For the most part, the app checks out. Of course, there will still be occasional instances where a "working" ice cream machine actually isn't. Or, if you're lucky, you might find that an offline ice cream machine has since been reincarnated and that McDonald's simply forgot to note the change on their end. As for how long this little tool will exist before McDonald's gets wind of it and breaks its functionality, well, I'd place my ice cream order sooner than later.

Uber drivers say the company unlawfully pressured them to support a ballot initiative that would make gig workers independent contractors, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday in San Francisco Superior Court by a proposed class of California drivers. Bloomberg Law reports: The suit alleges Uber used a coercive campaign of misinformation to exert pressure on drivers to advocate and vote for the passage of Proposition 22, which would overturn a California law that makes it difficult for the gig companies to be classified as contractors. If the workers were classified as employees, they would be entitled to overtime, minimum wage and other benefits. According to the complaint Uber, Lyft and other gig economy giants invested nearly $200 million into the campaign "Yes on 22."

The drivers in the lawsuit say they were faced with a "barrage of misinformation" about the ballot initiative through pop-ups on the Uber app, which made misleading representations about driver benefits under Proposition 22 including regarding accident insurance, earnings guarantees, scheduling, and anti-discrimination protections. One such pop-up only provides the opportunity for drivers to select "Yes on Prop. 22" or "OK," to exit, which pressures drivers to accept Uber's political stance, the complaint alleges. The proposed class action claims the company is attempting to direct the political activities of its California drivers with respect to Proposition 22, and threatening their discharge to coerce them to follow a particular political course of action, in direct violation of state law.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: New circuits can get printed directly on human skin to help monitor vital signs, a new study finds. In the new study, researchers developed a way to sinter nanoparticles of silver at room temperature. The key behind this advance is a so-called a sintering aid layer, consisting of a biodegradable polymer paste and additives such as titanium dioxide or calcium carbonate. Positive electrical charges in the sintering aid layer neutralized the negative electrical charges the silver nanoparticles could accumulate from other compounds in their ink. This meant it took less energy for the silver nanoparticles printed on top of the sintering aid layer to come together, says study senior author Huanyu Cheng, a mechanical engineer at Pennsylvania State University.

The sintering aid layer also created a smooth base for circuits printed on top of it. This in turn improved the performance of these circuits in the face of bending, folding, twisting and wrinkling. In experiments, the scientists placed the silver nanoparticle circuit designs and the sintering aid layer onto a wooden stamp, which they pressed onto the back of a human hand. They next used a hair dryer set to cool to evaporate the solvent in the ink. A hot shower could easily remove these circuits without damaging the underlying skin. After the circuits sintered, they could help the researchers measure body temperature, skin moisture, blood oxygen, heart rate, respiration rate, blood pressure and bodily electrical signals such as electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) readings. The data from these sensors were comparable to or better than those measured using conventional commercial sensors that were simply stuck onto the skin, Cheng says. The findings have been published in the journal Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Rei writes: "Oh, it's going dude!" "But there's no lanes -- there's cars on the side of the road!" "DUDE, it's navigating through it ALL, bro!" ... "It paused to look DUDE!" "There's NO LANES! Elon, you madman!"

Such was one of the many reaction videos to come out overnight as Tesla released a major upgrade of Autopilot to a limited public beta. Complete with a new LIDAR-like visualization system, the car now provides a detailed display of how it perceives the world as it dodges parked cars, takes unprotected left turns with cross traffic and pedestrians, etc. No issues have been reported thus far, although one driver aborted after a roundabout due to a panicked passenger who didn't like how it exited into a lane with parked cars ahead (though the screen showed that it planned to change lanes to go around them).

The new version is the result of a long-running "4D" rewrite at Tesla, to overcome local maxima in earlier versions. Instead of processing each camera individually as a static series of frames, the neural net now processes a unified stitch of inputs over time, allowing context to persist between cameras and between frames. This in particular enhances parallax processing of depth input, both in terms of parallax between camera viewpoints and parallax between vehicle positions. If the public beta goes well, Elon is hopeful that Tesla will be able to roll out the new version broadly by the end of the year.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As stated earlier, new Ubuntu versions come April and October, and wouldn't you know it, we are at the end of the latter. With Halloween a bit more than a week away, Canonical today releases Ubuntu 20.10. Ubuntu's version numbering scheme is based on year (YY), a period, and the month (MM). For instance, the previous stable version was released this past April and it is numbered as 20.04. In addition, Canonical (the operating system's owner) assigns names -- sequentially and alphabetically. The alphanumeric code name is always based on two words starting with the same sequential letter -- an adjective followed by an animal name. The aforementioned 20.04 is named "Focal Fossa." This time, the operating system will be called Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla." This new version of the desktop operating system is loaded with fixes, new features, and a renewed focus on the now-iconic Raspberry Pi. Yes, folks, with a compatible Pi (models with 4GB or 8GB of RAM), you can now have the full Ubuntu desktop experience. More about the new features here.

The European Union has imposed sanctions today against Russia for its involvement in the 2015 German Parliament (Bundestag) hack. From a report: Sanctions were levied against the GRU (Russian Main Intelligence Directorate), a military intelligence agency part of the Russian Army, and two of its officers. The two GRU officers were identified as Dmitry Badin and Igor Kostyukov. EU officials said Badin was part of a team of Russian military intelligence officers who hacked the Bundestag IT network between April and May 2015. "This cyber-attack targeted the parliament's information system and affected its operation for several days," the EU said today. "A significant amount of data was stolen and the email accounts of several MPs as well as of Chancellor Angela Merkel were affected." Kostyukov was sanctioned for his role as First Deputy Head of the GRU. EU officials said Kostyukov commands the 85th Main Centre for Special Services (GTsSS), also known as Military Unit 26165, but more commonly known in the cyber-security industry under the hacker codenames of APT28, Fancy Bear, Sofacy, or Strontium.

Reader jkoebler writes: This is an in-depth, narrative investigation into Phantom Secure, a privacy-focused phone company that started selling locally to models and other VIPs, before eventually becoming a preferred network for serious, organized crime. One of Phantom's clients was the Sinaloa Cartel, according to a text message Phantom's owner Vincent Ramos sent to an associate included in court records.

The story follows how Phantom got set up, how it took over the world, and eventually how it got taken down by the FBI. It is the result of more than two years of reporting involving sources from the law enforcement, organized crime, and cybersecurity worlds. It features daring escapes from Las Vegas hotels, undercover agents, and a silver-plated AK-47 emblazoned with the Louis Vuitton logo.

According to a report from Wisconsin's Division of Executive Budget and Finance, Foxconn has not built the enormous Gen 10.5 LCD factory in Wisconsin that it specified in its contract with the state. "It also says that the building the company claims is a smaller Gen 6 LCD factory shows no signs of manufacturing LCDs in the foreseeable future and 'may be better suited for demonstration purposes,'" reports The Verge. From the report: The report notes that Foxconn received a permit to use its so-called "Fab" for storage, which The Verge first reported this week. Furthermore, according to an industry expert consulted by the state, Foxconn has not ordered the equipment that would be needed to make LCDs. If the building were to be used as an LCD manufacturing facility, the expert notes it would be the smallest Gen 6 in the world and "would appear to be more of a showcase than a business viable for the long term." If any LCD-related manufacturing were to take place in the building, the analysis says, it would likely only be the final assembly of components produced elsewhere and imported to Wisconsin. Such a project would have a vastly smaller impact on local supply chains and employ nowhere near the 13,000 workers anticipated in Foxconn's contract with the state.

Wisconsin Secretary of the Department of Administration Joel Brennan said in an interview with The Verge today that "clearly the Gen 6 that's been discussed and built in Mount Pleasant is not similar to other Gen 6 fabs around the world." Brennan said the memo was an effort to consult industry experts to better understand the scope of Foxconn's current project and its potential impact on the state. "There was justified criticism of the [former Governor Scott] Walker administration for entering into this contract, and not really getting any outside experts for an industry that was new to Wisconsin," Brennan said. "This is about making sure that we can use the best expertise that we have inside and outside state government so that we can make the best decisions possible." The report provides the fullest articulation of the state's reason for rejecting Foxconn's subsidy payments so far. Last week, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC), which oversees the deal, denied the company its first installment of the nearly $3 billion refundable tax credits because it hasn't built the "Gen 10.5 Fab" specified in its contract.

The project Foxconn has pursued instead, the new analysis says, would not have warranted the record-breaking subsidy package passed by then-Gov. Scott Walker, nor required the infrastructure state and local governments have built to support it. "Taxpayers fully performed their side of the agreement to date, while the Recipients have not," the report says. In fact, "state taxpayers have spent as much if not more than" Foxconn has on improvements to the company's supposed manufacturing campus. The Verge previously reported that state and local governments spent at least $400 million on the project, mostly on land and infrastructure the company will likely never need. Foxconn listed approximately $300 million in capital expenses at the end of 2019.