An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After years of building political pressure for antitrust scrutiny of major tech companies, this month Congress and the US government delivered. The House Antitrust Subcommittee released a report accusing Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook of monopolistic behavior. The Department of Justice filed a complaint against Google alleging the company prevents consumers from sampling other search engines. The new fervor for tech antitrust has so far overlooked an equally obvious target: US broadband providers. "If you want to talk about a history of using gatekeeper power to harm competitors, there are few better examples," says Gigi Sohn, a fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy. Sohn and other critics of the four companies that dominate US broadband -- Verizon, Comcast, Charter Communications, and AT&T -- argue that antitrust intervention has been needed for years to lower prices and widen Internet access. Analysis by Microsoft last year concluded that as many as 162.8 million Americans do not use the Internet at broadband speeds (as many as 42.8 million lack meaningful broadband), and New America's Open Technology Institute recently found that US consumers pay, on average, more than those in Europe, Asia, or elsewhere in North America.

The Department of Justice complaint against Google argues that the company's payments to Apple to set its search engine as the default on the iPhone make it too onerous for consumers to choose a competing search provider. For tens of millions of Americans, changing broadband providers is even more difficult -- it requires moving. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which promotes community broadband projects, recently estimated from Federal Communications Commission data that some 80 million Americans can only get high-speed broadband service from one provider. "That is quite intentional on the part of cable operators," says Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School. "These companies are extracting rent from Americans based on their monopoly positions." The United States has suffered, and broken up, telecom monopolies in the past. AT&T had a government-sanctioned monopoly for much of the 20th century, until it was broken up in 1984. The 1996 Telecom Act included rules for phone providers aimed at encouraging competition, but it excluded "information services," leaving broadband companies freer rein. The White House and Congress will both need to act in order to make US broadband more competitive. "Options worth considering include reversing some of the acquisitions that turned Comcast and others into nation-spanning giants and mandating that companies allow competitors to use their networks, as is common in Europe, [says Joshua Stager, a senior policy counsel at New America's Open Technology Institute.]

Amazon and Apple face German antitrust scrutiny over a policy that excludes independent sellers of brand products on the online market place. From a report: Germany's Federal Cartel Office, the country's antitrust regulator, is probing both companies over a policy at Amazon called "brandgating," the authority said in an emailed statement. The policy allows makers of branded products such as iPhones to have independent sellers removed from the platform as long as Amazon can sell the items, according to the statement. "Brandgating agreements can help to protect against product piracy," the Cartel Office said. "But such measures must be proportionate to be in line with antitrust rules and may not result in eliminating competition." Amazon and Apple are among the tech giants under intense scrutiny by regulators across the world, including in the European Union, which is poised to propose sweeping new laws to rein in Silicon Valley. Authorities are wrestling with how to act against companies that critics say run a rigged game when they set the rules for platforms that also host their rivals.

The U.S. National Security Agency is rebuffing efforts by a leading Congressional critic to determine whether it is continuing to place so-called back doors into commercial technology products, in a controversial practice that critics say damages both U.S. industry and national security. Reuters reports: The NSA has long sought agreements with technology companies under which they would build special access for the spy agency into their products, according to disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and reporting by Reuters and others. These so-called back doors enable the NSA and other agencies to scan large amounts of traffic without a warrant. Agency advocates say the practice has eased collection of vital intelligence in other countries, including interception of terrorist communications. The agency developed new rules for such practices after the Snowden leaks in order to reduce the chances of exposure and compromise, three former intelligence officials told Reuters. But aides to Senator Ron Wyden, a leading Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, say the NSA has stonewalled on providing even the gist of the new guidelines.

The agency declined to say how it had updated its policies on obtaining special access to commercial products. NSA officials said the agency has been rebuilding trust with the private sector through such measures as offering warnings about software flaws. "At NSA, it's common practice to constantly assess processes to identify and determine best practices," said Anne Neuberger, who heads NSA's year-old Cybersecurity Directorate. "We don't share specific processes and procedures." Three former senior intelligence agency figures told Reuters that the NSA now requires that before a back door is sought, the agency must weigh the potential fallout and arrange for some kind of warning if the back door gets discovered and manipulated by adversaries.

Japan will be carbon neutral by 2050, its prime minister said this week, making an ambitious pledge to sharply accelerate the country's global warming targets, even as it plans to build more than a dozen new coal-burning power plants in the coming years. From a report: The prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, laid out the goal during his first major policy speech since taking office in September, when Japan's longest-serving leader, Shinzo Abe, abruptly resigned. The announcement came just weeks after China, Japan's regional rival, said it would reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2060. Addressing Japan's Parliament, Mr. Suga called for the country to "be carbon neutral in 2050," a declaration that drew loud applause from lawmakers. Achieving that goal will be good not only for the world, he said, but also for Japan's economy and global standing. "Taking an aggressive approach to global warming will bring about a transformation in our industrial structure and economic system that will lead to big growth" in the economy, he said, answering critics who have warned of the economic consequences. Japan's new climate pledge is a major upgrade of its previous commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, and necessary if the world hopes to keep a global temperature rise well below 2 degrees, as called for in the 2015 Paris climate accord.

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 quotes a report from The Intercept: After years of backlash over controversial government work, Google technology will be used to aid the Trump administration's efforts to fortify the U.S.-Mexico border, according to documents related to a federal contract. In August, Customs and Border Protection accepted a proposal to use Google Cloud technology to facilitate the use of artificial intelligence deployed by the CBP Innovation Team, known as INVNT. Among other projects, INVNT is working on technologies for a new "virtual" wall along the southern border that combines surveillance towers and drones, blanketing an area with sensors to detect unauthorized entry into the country.

Contracting documents indicate that CBP's new work with Google is being done through a third-party federal contracting firm, Virginia-based Thundercat Technology. Thundercat is a reseller that bills itself as a premier information technology provider for federal contracts. The contract was obtained through a FOIA request filed by Tech Inquiry, a new research group that explores technology and corporate power founded by Jack Poulson, a former research scientist at Google who left the company over ethical concerns. Not only is Google becoming involved in implementing the Trump administration's border policy, the contract brings the company into the orbit of one of President Donald Trump's biggest boosters among tech executives.

Documents show that Google's technology for CBP will be used in conjunction with work done by Anduril Industries, a controversial defense technology startup founded by Palmer Luckey. The brash 28-year-old executive -- also the founder of Oculus VR, acquired by Facebook for over $2 billion in 2014 -- is an open supporter of and fundraiser for hard-line conservative politics; he has been one of the most vocal critics of Google's decision to drop its military contract. Anduril operates sentry towers along the U.S.-Mexico border that are used by CBP for surveillance and apprehension of people entering the country, streamlining the process of putting migrants in DHS custody. CBP's Autonomous Surveillance Towers program calls for automated surveillance operations "24 hours per day, 365 days per year" to help the agency "identify items of interest, such as people or vehicles." The program has been touted as a "true force multiplier for CBP, enabling Border Patrol agents to remain focused on their interdiction mission rather than operating surveillance systems." It's unclear how exactly CBP plans to use Google Cloud in conjunction with Anduril or for any of the "mission needs" alluded to in the contract document. Google faced internal turmoil in 2018 over a contract with the Pentagon to deploy AI-enhanced drone image recognition solutions. "In response to the controversy, Google ended its involvement with the initiative, known as Project Maven, and established a new set of AI principles to govern future government contracts," notes The Intercept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission's top lawyer today explained the FCC's theory of why it can grant President Donald Trump's request for a new interpretation of a law that provides legal protection to social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Critics of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's plan from both the left and right say the FCC has no authority to reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives legal immunity to online platforms that block or modify content posted by users. FCC General Counsel Thomas Johnson said those critics are wrong in a blog post published on the FCC website today.

Johnson noted that the Communications Decency Act was passed by Congress as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was an update to the Communications Act of 1934 that established the FCC and provided it with regulatory authority. Johnson also pointed to Section 201(b) of the Communications Act, which gave the FCC power to "prescribe such rules and regulations as may be necessary in the public interest to carry out the provisions of this Act."

Johnson then explained why he believes this means the FCC can reinterpret Section 230: "The Supreme Court has twice considered whether the FCC's general rulemaking authority under Section 201(b), adopted in 1938, extends to the 1996 amendments to the Act. Both times, the Court held that it does. Writing for the Court in Iowa Utilities Board, and employing his trademark textualist method, Justice Scalia wrote that this provision 'means what it says: The FCC has rulemaking authority to carry out the 'provisions of [the 1934] Act.'' The Court explained that 'the clear fact that the 1996 Act was adopted, not as a freestanding enactment, but as an amendment to, and hence part of, [the 1934] Act' shows that Congress intended the Commission to have rulemaking authority over all its provisions. Likewise, in the later City of Arlington case, the Court confirmed that the Commission's rulemaking authority '[o]f course... extends to the subsequently added portions of the Act.' From these authorities, a simple conclusion follows: Because Section 230 is among the 'subsequently added portions of the Act,' it is subject to the FCC's Section 201(b) rulemaking authority." Matt Wood, VP of policy and general counsel at media-advocacy group Free Press, told Ars today: "The FCC lawyers' latest sleight-of-hand is a clever distraction, but still not good enough to save the Commission's pending foray into speech codes and Internet regulation. The agency claims that it's not going to make rules, it's merely going to interpret the supposed ambiguities in the language of Section 230 and let courts apply that interpretation. But there's no ambiguity to resolve, nor any reason for courts to follow the FCC's interpretation. And there's no hiding the fact that the FCC's pretense of interpretation without the effect of substantive rules is a ruse and nothing better."

Google's $2.1 billion deal for Fitbit might go down as the only merger to qualify as both pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. From a report: European Union antitrust regulators have again extended their decision deadline, this time to Jan. 8, 2021. And it could be further complicated by U.S. authorities, who are drawing up a broader antitrust case against Google and/or its parent company Alphabet. The deal was originally announced on Nov. 1, 2019. The delay is about data: Google has always said the acquisition is centered on devices, but that alone hasn't allayed regulator fears over what happens to the information those devices collect. Reuters reports that Google recently offered concessions to the European Commission: It would "restrict the use of Fitbit data for Google ads, facilitate rival makers of wearables seeking to connect to the Android platform and allow third parties' continued access to Fitbit users' data with their consent." These revisions appear to have satisfied the EC, but that could change once analyzed by outside critics. Plus, again, there are those pesky Americans.

"Singapore will become the world's first country to use facial verification in its national ID scheme, but privacy advocates are alarmed by what they say is an intrusive system vulnerable to abuse," reports AFP: Face scanning technology remains controversial despite its growing use and critics have raised ethical concerns about it in some countries — for instance, law enforcement agencies scanning crowds at large events to look for troublemakers. Singapore authorities are frequently accused of targeting government critics and taking a hard line on dissent, and activists are concerned about how the face scanning tech will be used. "There are no clear and explicit restraints on government power when it comes to things like surveillance and data gathering," said Kirsten Han, a freelance journalist from the city. "Will we one day discover that this data is in the hands of the police or in the hands of some other agency that we didn't specifically give consent for?"

Those behind the Singapore scheme stress facial verification is different to recognition as it requires user consent, but privacy advocates remain sceptical. "The technology is still far from benign," Privacy International research officer Tom Fisher told AFP. He said systems like the one planned for Singapore left "opportunities for exploitation", such as use of data to track and profile people.

"Facing the prospect that President Trump could lose his re-election bid, his cabinet is scrambling to enact regulatory changes affecting millions of Americans in a blitz so rushed it may leave some changes vulnerable to court challenges," reports the New York Times: The effort is evident in a broad range of federal agencies and encompasses proposals like easing limits on how many hours some truckers can spend behind the wheel, giving the government more freedom to collect biometric data and setting federal standards for when workers can be classified as independent contractors rather than employees. In the bid to lock in new rules before Jan. 20, Mr. Trump's team is limiting or sidestepping requirements for public comment on some of the changes and swatting aside critics who say the administration has failed to carry out sufficiently rigorous analysis. Some cases, like a new rule to allow railroads to move highly flammable liquefied natural gas on freight trains, have led to warnings of public safety threats...

If Democrats take control of Congress, they will have the power to reconsider some of these last-minute regulations, through a law last used at the start of Mr. Trump's tenure by Republicans to repeal certain rules enacted at the end of the Obama administration. But the Trump administration is also working to fill key vacancies on scientific advisory boards with members who will hold their seats far into the next presidential term, committees that play an important role in shaping federal rule making...

The Homeland Security Department is also moving, again with an unusually short 30-day comment period, to adopt a rule that will allow it to collect much more extensive biometric data from individuals applying for citizenship, including voice, iris and facial recognition scans, instead of just the traditional fingerprint scan. The measure, which the agency said was needed to curb fraud, would also allow it for the first time to collect DNA or DNA test results to verify a relationship between an application for citizenship and someone already in the United States.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nikola CEO Mark Russell downplayed the company's Badger pickup truck in comments to the Financial Times on Thursday. "The Badger was an interesting and exciting project to some shareholders, but our institutional shareholders are mostly focused on the business plan," Russell said. "Our core business plan since before we became publicly listed always focused on heavy trucks and hydrogen infrastructure." Russell's comments were published after markets closed on Thursday. Nikola's stock price plunged on Friday morning and is currently down about 14 percent for the day.

Negotiations with General Motors to design and build the truck have dragged on weeks longer than expected. Nikola and GM announced a wide-ranging partnership on September 8. It envisioned GM not only building the Badger but also supplying the batteries and fuel cells that power the trucks. Under the deal, GM would also supply hydrogen fuel-cell technology for Nikola's semi trucks outside the European market. Nikola was supposed to give GM $2 billion worth of stock to license GM's technology, reimburse GM to build out a Badger factory, and then pay GM on a cost-plus basis to assemble the Badger. The value of Nikola's stock soared immediately after the September 8 announcement, but it then tanked after a short-selling firm revealed that Nikola CEO Trevor Milton had lied when he said Nikola's first truck, the Nikola One, was fully functional. Nikola has admitted that a promotional video showed the truck rolling down a hill, not traveling under its own power. The price decline has made GM's expected $2 billion stake in Nikola worth much less.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Back in January, Google Health, the branch of Google focused on health-related research, clinical tools, and partnerships for health care services, released an AI model trained on over 90,000 mammogram X-rays that the company said achieved better results than human radiologists. Google claimed that the algorithm could recognize more false negatives -- the kind of images that look normal but contain breast cancer -- than previous work, but some clinicians, data scientists, and engineers take issue with that statement. In a rebuttal published today in the journal Nature, over 19 coauthors affiliated with McGill University, the City University of New York (CUNY), Harvard University, and Stanford University said that the lack of detailed methods and code in Google's research "undermines its scientific value."

Science in general has a reproducibility problem -- a 2016 poll of 1,500 scientists reported that 70% of them had tried but failed to reproduce at least one other scientist's experiment -- but it's particularly acute in the AI field. At ICML 2019, 30% of authors failed to submit their code with their papers by the start of the conference. Studies often provide benchmark results in lieu of source code, which becomes problematic when the thoroughness of the benchmarks comes into question. One recent report found that 60% to 70% of answers given by natural language processing models were embedded somewhere in the benchmark training sets, indicating that the models were often simply memorizing answers. Another study -- a meta-analysis of over 3,000 AI papers -- found that metrics used to benchmark AI and machine learning models tended to be inconsistent, irregularly tracked, and not particularly informative.

China is starting a first-of-its-kind digital yuan trial by distributing 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) of the digital currency among 50,000 participants selected by lottery. "That equates to each participant being granted 200 yuan, or $30, to spend at any of 3,389 designated restaurants and stores," notes Nikkei Asian Review. From the report: The trial ends next Monday. Other tests of digital currencies have mainly been done by the public sector, but this is the first to involve a large number of ordinary citizens. There was no cost to take part in the test. More than 1.91 million people applied to take part with and acceptance rate at less than 3%. Ostensibly, the digital yuan project is meant to make China's currency more international and user friendly. But critics say it would also allow authorities to more easily track funds.

Apprehensions over China's digital currency assume such transactions will not stop at the nation's border. If the digital yuan is taken up across the world through trade and other avenues, it could undermine the dollar's status as a global key currency. Sanctions that ban dollar transactions would risk losing effectiveness. And if the digital yuan becomes the international standard in terms of technology, it could create a hindrance to other nations' issuing their own digital currencies.

sandbagger writes: A government-backed advert that encouraged people working in the arts to reskill by turning to a career in cybersecurity has been scrapped after the culture secretary described it as "crass." On Monday morning Oliver Dowden distanced himself from the Cyber First campaign, which resurfaced on the same day his department was celebrating awarding $338 million in funding to struggling venues and organisations. Dowden tweeted that the ad campaign, which is backed by the government and promotes retraining in tech, did not come from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), while reiterating that he wanted to "save jobs in the arts." The advert depicts a ballet dancer tying her shoes, with the caption "Fatima's next job could be in tech," which critics said was in bad taste considering thousands of jobs are being lost in the culture sector. The campaign promises to equip people "with the essential cyber skills needed to set you on a rewarding career path."

Facebook is using its vast legal muscle to silence one of its most prominent critics. The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group established last month in response to the tech giant's failure to get its actual Oversight Board up and running before the presidential election, was forced offline on Wednesday night after Facebook wrote to the internet service provider demanding the group's website -- realfacebookoversight.org -- be taken offline. From a report: The group is made up of dozens of prominent academics, activists, lawyers, and journalists whose goal is to hold Facebook accountable in the run-up to the election next month. Facebook's own Oversight Board, which was announced 13 months ago, will not meet for the first time until later this month, and won't consider any issues related to the election. In a letter sent to one of the founders of the RFOB, journalist Carole Cadwalladr, the ISP SupportNation said the website was being taken offline after Facebook complained that the site was involved in "phishing."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Mercury News: The administration of President Donald Trump on Tuesday moved to impose major new limits on use of the controversial H-1B visa, intended for jobs requiring specialized skills and widely used by Silicon Valley technology firms. The new rules are expected to reduce the pool of skilled labor and raise costs for tech companies and other employers. Critics say that could force companies to move some operations outside the U.S.

The announced changes involve new rules from both Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Labor. Homeland Security said its rule, effective 60 days after it's published in the federal register, would "combat the use of H-1B workers to serve as a low-cost replacement for otherwise qualified American workers." The Homeland Security rule would fulfill a long-running Trump administration promise to revise the definition of which "specialty occupations" are eligible for the visa, according to a draft copy released late Tuesday. Also revised would be definitions of "worksite," "third-party worksite" and "U.S. employer," as well as clarifying how the government will determine whether an "employer-employee" relationship exists. Placements of H-1B workers at third-party sites -- as staffing companies do -- would last a maximum of a year.

The Labor Department's draft rule suggests visa approvals will require specific degrees for job types. If that change is made, it could lead to qualified applications being rejected, [said Sean Randolph, senior director of the Bay Area Council's Economic Institute.] While there are problems around wages paid to less-skilled H-1B holders, including those hired out to big tech firms by staffing companies, "it would be a mistake to tar and feather the entire system with that because what I've seen about how our tech companies here use the H-1Bs, they're very selective, and they're for important niche positions that otherwise a company would have a hard time filling," Randolph said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nikola has issued copyright-takedown notices targeting critics on YouTube who used clips of the promotional video in which a Nikola prototype truck was seen rolling down a hill. Nikola last month admitted that the promotional video of a supposedly functional Nikola One electric truck moving along a highway actually consisted of the company's vehicle rolling downhill. This week, Nikola "forced the removal of several critical videos from YouTube, saying they infringed its copyright by using footage from the company," including the truck-rolling-downhill video, the Financial Times reported yesterday.

Sam Alexander is one of at least two financial commentators who had videos removed by Google subsidiary YouTube at Nikola's request. He says that four of his videos were taken down. "The claim is from when I showed 30 seconds of their Nikola One in Motion footage, which is what they put on Twitter and it's of their Nikola One rolling down the hill," Alexander said in a YouTube video he posted Wednesday. Alexander said he believes his videos should be protected as fair use under YouTube's policies. He used the 30-second clip of the Nikola One in videos that lasted 10 minutes or more, he said. Alexander said he put the words "Source: Nikola" in the corner when he played the truck clip and played his own audio over the clip. Nikola appears to claim that YouTube is the party that initiated the video-removal process. "YouTube regularly identifies copyright violations of Nikola content and shares the lists of videos with us," a Nikola spokesperson told Ars. "Based on YouTube's information, our initial action was to submit takedown requests to remove the content that was used without our permission. We will continue to evaluate flagged videos on a case-by-case basis."

YouTube contradicted that claim, saying the company took advantage of the Copyright Match Tool that's available to people in the YouTube Partner Program. "Nikola has access to our copyright match tool, which does not automatically remove any videos," YouTube told the FT. "Users must fill out a copyright removal request form, and when doing so we remind them to consider exceptions to copyright law. Anyone who believes their reuse of a video or segment is protected by fair use can file a counter-notice."

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google plans to pay $1 billion to publishers globally for their news over the next three years, its CEO said on Thursday. The move could help it win over a powerful group amid heightened regulatory scrutiny worldwide. CEO Sundar Pichai said the new product called Google News Showcase will launch first in Germany, where it has signed up German newspapers including Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, and in Brazil with Folha de S.Paulo, Band and Infobae. It will be rolled out in Belgium, India, the Netherlands and other countries. About 200 publishers in Argentina, Australia, Britain, Brazil, Canada and Germany have signed up to the product.

"This financial commitment -- our biggest to date -- will pay publishers to create and curate high-quality content for a different kind of online news experience," Pichai said in a blog post. The product, which allows publishers to pick and present their stories, will launch on Google News on Android devices and eventually on Apple devices. "This approach is distinct from our other news products because it leans on the editorial choices individual publishers make about which stories to show readers and how to present them," Pichai said. The product builds on a licensing deal with media groups in Australia, Brazil and Germany in June, which also drew a lukewarm response from the European Publishers Council. Google is negotiating with French publishers, among its most vocal critics, while Australia wants to force it and Facebook to share advertising revenue with local media groups.

After five years and an investment of around $2.5 billion, Uber's effort to build a self-driving car has produced this: a car that can't drive more than half a mile without encountering a problem [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: "The car doesn't drive well" and "struggles with simple routes and simple maneuvers," said a manager in the unit, in a 1,500-word email sent three weeks ago to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, warning of the issues. The self-drivingâ"car unit "has simply failed to evolve and produce meaningful progress in so long that something has to be said before a disaster befalls us," said the manager in the email, which The Information has seen. The manager -- whose identity The Information confirmed -- reflects a common belief across Uber that the unit, known as the Advanced Technologies Group, is destined to lose the high-stakes race to its rivals, which have demonstrated a lot more headway, comparatively speaking.

The manager is one of a growing number of voices, both insiders and former employees, raising concerns about the unit's effectiveness and questioning Khosrowshahi's ability to hold anyone accountable for its failures. Thuan Pham, Uber's longtime chief technology officer, who quit earlier this year, is one of those critics. "Over the past two years I have periodically raised concerns with Dara on whether meaningful self-driving progress is being made at ATG and specifically urged him to ask specific questions in this area in order to assess this for himself," said Pham in an interview. "I just don't understand why, from all observable measures, the thing isn't making progress. How come there hasn't been accountability or transparency?"

A group of high-profile Facebook critics on Friday announced the launch of what they are calling the "Real Facebook Oversight Board," an effort that aims to counter an independent board established by Facebook last year to oversee its decisions on content moderation. From a report: The opposing effort represents how political the fight between Facebook and its critics has become in the lead-up to the presidential election. The group includes leaders from the Stop Hate for Profit boycott, like Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, and Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, as well as prominent Facebook critics like Roger McNamee and some journalists and pundits. The new oversight board rival cites an "urgent threat to democracy" leading up to its launch. It criticizes the independent oversight board, funded by Facebook, for its delayed launch. The board is billing its formation as an "emergency response" to urgent issues like voter suppression, election security and misinformation. The first of its meetings -- which appear to be more like media events than deliberations on content decisions -- will be held next week, broadcast on Facebook Live, with New York Times columnist Kara Swisher hosting. The response comes just after the actual Facebook-funded appeals board announced that it would be launching earlier than expected. [...] A document obtained by Axios that appears to be a pitch deck for the project alleges that the Facebook-funded oversight board is "little more than a corporate whitewashing exercise."