Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes Ars Technica: Texas Governor Greg Abbott's office knew of looming natural gas shortages on February 10, days before a deep freeze plunged much of the state into blackouts, according to documents obtained by E&E News and reviewed by Ars.

Abbott's office first learned of the likely shortfall in a phone call from then-chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas DeAnne Walker. In the days leading up to the power outages that began on February 15, Walker and the governor's office spoke 31 more times.

Walker also spoke with regulators, politicians, and utilities dozens of times about the gas curtailments that threatened the state's electrical grid. The PUC chair's diary for the days before the outage shows her schedule dominated by concerns over gas curtailments and the impact they would have on electricity generation. Before and during the disaster, she was on more than 100 phone calls with various agencies and utilities regarding gas shortages.

After the blackouts began, Abbott appeared on Fox News to falsely assert that wind turbines were the driving force behind the outages.

The Biden administration has blocked a Trump-era rule that would have made it easier for companies like Uber, Lyft and Instacart to continue classifying rideshare drivers and delivery workers as independent contractors under federal law. From a report: The rule pertained to the classification of gig workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires employers to pay non-exempt employees at least the federal minimum wage. The Trump administration published the rule in January 2021, and it was originally set to go into effect on March 8. In February, Biden's labor department delayed implementation until May 7. Now, the Department of Labor has officially withdrawn the rule. The decision to rescind the rule does not mean gig workers will be considered employees. But it does mean certain gig workers won't face an additional obstacle in their efforts to be classified as employees. The rule would have implemented a new interpretation of what type of worker is an independent contractor. The DOL, however, determined that it would have "narrowed the scope of facts and considerations" in determining whether someone is an independent contractor or employee.

Donald Trump's Facebook account should not be reinstated, the social media giant's oversight board said on Wednesday, barring an imminent return to the platform. From a report: However, the board has punted the final decision over Trump's account back to Facebook itself, suggesting the platform make a decision in six months regarding what to do with Trump's account and whether it will be permanently deleted. Facebook suspended Trump's account after the Capitol attack of 6 January, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed Congress in an attempt to overturn the former president's defeat by Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Trump was initially suspended from Facebook and Instagram for 24 hours, as a result of two posts shared to the platform in which he appeared to praise the actions of the rioters. The company then extended the president's ban "at least until the end of his time in office." His account was suspended indefinitely pending the decision of the oversight board, a group of appointed academics and former politicians meant to operate independently of Facebook's corporate leadership.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Following a controversial ban on political discussions earlier this week, Basecamp employees are heading for the exits. The company employs around 60 people, and roughly a third of the company appears to have accepted buyouts to leave, many citing new company policies. On Monday, Basecamp CEO Jason Fried announced in a blog post that employees would no longer be allowed to openly share their "societal and political discussions" at work. "Every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant," Fried wrote. "You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target."

Basecamp's departures are significant. According to Twitter posts, Basecamp's head of design, head of marketing and head of customer support will all depart. The company's iOS team also appears to have quit en masse and many departing employees have been with the company for years. [...] According to Platformer, Fried's missive didn't tell the whole story. Basecamp employees instead said the tension arose from internal conversations about the company itself and its commitment to DEI work, not free-floating arguments about political candidates. Fried's blog post does mention one particular source of tension in a roundabout way, referencing an employee-led DEI initiative that would be disbanded. "We make project management, team communication, and email software," Fried wrote. "We are not a social impact company."

"An internal task force found that Facebook failed to take appropriate action against the Stop the Steal movement ahead of the January 6 Capitol insurrection, and hoped the company could 'do better next time,'" writes Buzzfeed: Last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of a House of Representatives committee that his company had done its part "to secure the integrity of the election." While the social network did not catch everything, the billionaire chief executive said, Facebook had "made our services inhospitable to those who might do harm" in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Less than a week after his appearance, however, an internal company report reached a far different conclusion... Shared on Facebook's employee communication platform last month, the report is a blunt assessment of how people connected to "Stop the Steal," a far-right movement based on the conspiracy theory that former president Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election, used the social network to foment an attempted coup. The document explicitly states that Facebook activity from people connected to Stop the Steal and other Trump loyalist groups including the Patriot Party played a role in the events of Jan. 6, and that the company's emphasis on rooting out fake accounts and "inauthentic behavior" held it back from taking preemptive action when real people were involved...

The document contradicts Zuckerberg's statement to Congress about Facebook being "inhospitable" to harmful content about the election, and refutes chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg's January comment that the insurrection was "largely organized on platforms that don't have our abilities to stop hate, don't have our standards and don't have our transparency...." Facebook disputed the idea that the report went against Zuckerberg's and Sandberg's public statements and noted that both had said there was violative content on the platform that the company did not catch...

Facebook's researchers also outline the bureaucratic, policy, and enforcement struggles of the social giant when trying to respond to a coordinated, fast-paced movement that exploits its platform to spread hate and incite violence. Despite the company removing the most populous Stop the Steal groups from its platform, the enforcement was "piecemeal" and allowed other groups to flourish. The company admitted that it only realized it was a cohesive movement "after the Capitol Insurrection and a wave of Storm the Capitol events across the country...." Ultimately, the report says, the issue is that the company is not prepared to deal with what it calls "coordinated authentic harm."

"We learned a lot from these cases," the report says. "We're building tools and protocols and having policy discussions to help us do better next time."
But Buzzfeed's 3,400-article concludes on a skeptical note. "The report echoes previous high-profile examples where Facebook failed to act and later issued a report promising to do better..."

UPDATE (4/26): After the report's existence was revealed, access to it was suddenly restricted for many Facebook employees, Buzzfeed writes — on a new web page republishing the whole report in its entirety.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A series of senior European MPs have been approached in recent days by individuals who appear to be using deepfake filters to imitate Russian opposition figures during video calls. Those tricked include Rihards Kols, who chairs the foreign affairs committee of Latvia's parliament, as well as MPs from Estonia and Lithuania. Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the UK foreign affairs select committee, has also said he was targeted.

"Putin's Kremlin is so weak and frightened of the strength of @navalny they're conducting fake meetings to discredit the Navalny team," Tugendhat posted in a tweet, referring to the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. "They got through to me today. They won't broadcast the bits where I call Putin a murderer and thief, so I'll put it here." Kols uploaded a photograph of Leonid Volkov, an ally of Navalny, and a screenshot of his doppelganger taken from the video call. Volkov said the two looked virtually identical. "Looks like my real face -- but how did they manage to put it on the Zoom call? Welcome to the deepfake era " he wrote.

Kols said he had been approached by email by a person claiming to be Volkov and had held a short video-conference call with him, where they discussed support for Russian political prisoners and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Only later did he realise he may have been the victim of a hi-tech prank, he said. "Quite a painful lesson, but perhaps we can also say thanks to this fake Volkov for this lesson for us and Lithuanian and Estonian colleagues," he wrote. "It is clear that the so-called truth decay or post-truth and post-fact era has the potential to seriously threaten the safety and stability of local and international countries, governments and societies." Volkov accused a Russian duo named Vovan and Lexus, who regularly target western officials, of being behind the call.

The White House unveiled on Tuesday a 100-day plan intended to protect the U.S. power grid from cyber-attacks, mainly by creating a stronger relationship between U.S. national security agencies and the mostly private utilities that run the electrical system. From a report: The plan is among the first big steps toward fulfilling the Biden administration's promise to urgently improve the country's cyber defenses. The nation's power system is both highly vulnerable to hacking and a target for nation-state adversaries looking to counter the U.S. advantage in conventional military and economic power. "The United States faces a well-documented and increasing cyber threat from malicious actors seeking to disrupt the electricity Americans rely on to power our homes and businesses," Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said. Although the plan is billed as a 100-day sprint -- which includes a series of consultations between utilities and the government -- it will likely take years to fully implement, experts say. It will ask utilities to pay for and install technology to better detect hacks of the specialized computers that run the country's power systems, known as industrial control systems. The Edison Electric Institute, the trade group that represents all U.S. investor-owned electric companies, praised the White House plan and the Biden administration's focus on cybersecurity. "Given the sophisticated and constantly changing threats posed by adversaries, America's electric companies remain focused on securing the industrial control systems that operate the North American energy grid," said EEI president Tom Kuhn.

"Facebook has repeatedly allowed world leaders and politicians to use its platform to deceive the public or harass opponents despite being alerted to evidence of the wrongdoing," reports the Guardian: The Guardian has seen extensive internal documentation showing how Facebook handled more than 30 cases across 25 countries of politically manipulative behavior that was proactively detected by company staff.

The investigation shows how Facebook has allowed major abuses of its platform in poor, small and non-western countries in order to prioritize addressing abuses that attract media attention or affect the US and other wealthy countries. The company acted quickly to address political manipulation affecting countries such as the US, Taiwan, South Korea and Poland, while moving slowly or not at all on cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mongolia, Mexico and much of Latin America.

"There is a lot of harm being done on Facebook that is not being responded to because it is not considered enough of a PR risk to Facebook," said Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook who worked within the company's "integrity" organization to combat inauthentic behavior. "The cost isn't borne by Facebook. It's borne by the broader world as a whole."

Chamber of Progress, a new tech industry group funded by giants like Amazon, Facebook and Google, is announcing its support for a corporate tax increase like the one President Joe Biden proposed to fund his $2 trillion infrastructure plan. From a report: The move sets Chamber of Progress, a new center-left group, apart from other business organizations that have opposed Biden's tax hike, like the Business Roundtable and U.S. Chamber of Commerce. While the group's endorsement does not reflect the individual views of each company that funds it, it does send a signal that the tech industry is open to higher tax rates and supports greater infrastructure investment. Chamber of Progress launched late last month and is an industry coalition focused on a range of economic, social and consumer issues, including creating a social safety net and tackling income inequality. Biden proposed raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% to help fund his American Jobs Plan, which includes infrastructure proposals that span the entire economy. The plan includes money to expand broadband availability, which is key to the success of internet businesses, and other priorities the tech industry has emphasized, like clean energy.

The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Gary Gensler to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, putting in place a battle-tested Wall Street watchdog at a moment when Democrats are looking to rein in financial market risk. From a report: The Senate confirmed Gensler in a 53-45 vote. The MIT professor and former Goldman Sachs partner is returning to government after serving as a top regulator in the Obama administration, when he cracked down on big bank trading activities that fueled the 2008 global financial crisis. Gensler will lead work on sweeping new federal regulations that would require companies to disclose their contributions and exposure to climate change, which is poised to trigger a huge lobbying fight and is already stirring deep partisan tensions. The effort will be in focus next week when President Joe Biden holds an international climate summit. And following four years of light-touch regulation under Trump, Democrats are urging the SEC to step up oversight of major financial firms after a series of high-profile market snafus this year. In recent days, for example, international banks with operations in the U.S. suffered billions of dollars in losses after a little-known investment fund collapsed and sent shockwaves through the markets.

Professional political trolling is still a thriving underground industry around the world, despite crackdowns from the biggest tech firms. From a report: Coordinated online disinformation efforts offer governments and political actors a fast, cheap way to get under rivals' skin. They also offer a paycheck to people who are eager for work, typically in developing countries. "It's a more sophisticated means of disinformation to weaken your advisories," said Todd Carroll, CISO and VP of Cyber Operations at CybelAngel. Facebook last week said it had uncovered a massive troll farm in Albania, linked to an Iranian militant group. The operation had the the hallmarks of a typical troll farm, which Facebook defines as "a physical location where a collective of operators share computers and phones to jointly manage a pool of fake accounts as part of an influence operation." "The main thing we saw was strange signals centralized coordination between different fake accounts," said Ben Nimmo, Facebook's global influence operations threat intelligence lead. Like numerous troll farms uncovered over the past few years, there was one easy giveaway: content from the network targeted Iran, but was posted on social media during normal working hours on Central European Time.

Confronting progressive U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Amazon officials tweeted "the kind of bad-ittude you rarely see from a major corporation," writes Kara Swisher.

"Here's what was more extraordinary — and revealing — to me: One of the most powerful companies in the world could not take criticism from politicians without acting like one of the biggest babies in the world..." But why? [I]t all felt oddly emotional and risky, which is why it was clear that the decision to launch such attacks could have been made only by someone who never suffers when mistakes are made: Mr. Bezos.

Why would he take such an approach?

I don't think his intention was to influence the union vote in Alabama. Instead, the goal was to goad progressives into proposing legislation around things like data privacy and a $15 federal minimum wage that Mr. Bezos knows cannot pass without being watered down and, thus, made less dangerous to giants like Amazon. After gaining immense power in the pandemic and becoming one of the best-liked brands around, the company is now saying to Washington legislators, who have dragged their feet and held endless and largely useless hearings about how to deal with tech: I dare you to regulate us.

For Amazon, weak regulation would certainly be much better than having to talk about the very real human toll that free shipping might have on its workers. It's an attitude that we will see adopted by a lot more tech leaders who are going to try to use the momentum for regulation in their favor, rather than let it run over them. In a recent congressional hearing, for example, Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, sheepishly proposed changes to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which gives platforms broad immunity for content posted on their sites. Many observers felt, though, that Mr. Zuckerberg's proposals were a smoke screen that would ultimately benefit Big Tech companies like Facebook.

It's high-risk, but possibly high reward, which has been Mr. Bezos' brand for his entire career, even before he was armed with all this power and money.

In an interview, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly addressed Silicon Valley heavyweights like Elon Musk and others who have bemoaned California's COVID-19 restrictions and taxes and said they're taking their ball and moving to places like Miami or Brownsville, Texas, or the 140-square-foot Hawaiian island they own. Daly said: I've been working at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco since 1996 and when I arrived in 1996 there was a series of books written that said Silicon Valley was dead, it was over. People were going to move to Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, and Boston and that was going to be the end of Silicon Valley. It had reached its peak and it was on the demise. Of course, it didn't happen. What happens is that absolutely tech firms move to other parts of the country, they relocate, and some of it is the business climate that they cite, some of it is that it's easier to get a workforce if you spread it around the United States than if you're all in one area. That concentration does raise housing values, and housing prices because people want to live here. All of these things are true and yet year after year, decade after decade, you see Silicon Valley robustly continuing to grow and continuing to thrive.

The H-1B visa ban introduced by President Donald Trump last year expired on Wednesday, with President Joe Biden allowing the rules to come to an end. From a report: In an update on Thursday, the US Department of State said visa applicants who were previously refused due to Trump's freeze may reapply by submitting a new application. Visa applicants who have not yet been interviewed will have their applications prioritized and processed under the State Department's phased resumption plan. The Trump administration in June 2020 stopped the government issuing H-1B visas through an an executive order linked to the coronavirus pandemic. In October, Trump then placed new restrictions on H-1B visas for highly skilled foreign workers -- rules that were struck down by a federal judge in December who said the administration failed to show "good cause" for issuing the rules on an emergency basis. Bloomberg adds: Biden's decision will please business groups from Silicon Valley giants to India's IT services leaders, which had pressured the administration to lift the ban ever since the new president took office. Executives have grown frustrated that the directive was not immediately revoked, arguing it hurt U.S. companies. American tech firms, from Facebook to Google, rely on foreign talent to shore up domestic workforces. Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services traditionally dispatch Indian software engineers to work in tandem with their American clients, which include some of the largest Wall Street banks and technology corporations. It remains unclear whether Biden will ease visa restrictions in general, reversing curbs imposed by the former Trump administration.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, an Alabama native with a lifelong interest in civil rights, joins condemnations of Georgia's new voting law. From a report: "The right to vote is fundamental in a democracy. American history is the story of expanding the right to vote to all citizens, and Black people, in particular, have had to march, struggle and even give their lives for more than a century to defend that right."

"Apple believes that, thanks in part to the power of technology, it ought to be easier than ever for every eligible citizen to exercise their right to vote," Cook continues. "We support efforts to ensure that our democracy's future is more hopeful and inclusive than its past." The floodgates are open, as Axios' Courtenay Brown wrote on Wednesday. Almost a week after a bill that curbs voting access in Georgia became law -- and nearly one month after it passed the state's House -- a slew of corporations have come out against voter suppression.

The Hill reports that Amazon engaged in "a heated Twitter exchange" with U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren "after the lawmaker claimed that it and other large corporations 'exploit loopholes and tax havens to pay close to nothing in taxes.'" The exchange began after Warren (Democrat - Massachusetts) tweeted a clip from Thursday's Senate Finance Committee hearing, in which she accused Amazon and other companies of "manipulating the tax code to avoid paying their fair share."

Hours later, the Amazon News Twitter account responded with, "You make the tax laws @SenWarren; we just follow them."

"If you don't like the laws you've created, by all means, change them," Amazon tweeted, adding that the tech giant "has paid billions of dollars in corporate taxes over the past few years alone...." The company added that since 2010, it has invested $350 billion in the U.S. economy and in 2020, added 400,000 new jobs across the country...

Warren later Thursday evening hit back at Amazon, tweeting, "I didn't write the loopholes you exploit... your armies of lawyers and lobbyists did."

"But you bet I'll fight to make you pay your fair share," she continued. "And fight your union-busting. And fight to break up Big Tech so you're not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets."
UPDATE: Bernie Sanders was recently called out on Twitter by the retail chief of Amazon. "I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that's not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace."

A recent article in Recode suggests the tweets may have been encouraged by Jeff Bezos: Amazon has long been at odds with Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren over their criticisms of the company's labor and business practices. But the discord reached a new height last week when Amazon aggressively went after both on Twitter in an unusual attack for a large corporation. With each new snarky tweet from an Amazon executive or the company's official Twitter account, insiders and observers alike asked a version of the same question: "What the hell is going on?"

Turns out that Amazon leaders were following a broad mandate from the very top of the company: Fight back.

Recode has learned that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos expressed dissatisfaction in recent weeks that company officials weren't more aggressive in how they pushed back against criticisms of the company that he and other leaders deem inaccurate or misleading. What followed was a series of snarky and aggressive tweets that ended up fueling their own media cycles.

The timing was likely not coincidental. Bezos and other Amazon leaders are on edge as the company is facing the largest union election in its history at its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse.

The powerful Democrat overseeing antitrust legislation wants to hit Big Tech with the legislative equivalent of a swarm of drones rather than a single, hulking battleship that would be simpler to defeat. From a report: In an interview with Axios on Sunday, Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) said he didn't want to give the major technology companies and their armies of lobbyists the easy target of a massive antitrust bill. Instead, in his role running the House Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel, he plans to craft a series of smaller bills -- perhaps 10 or more -- that will be ready in May.

The way Cicilline sees it, this small-target strategy achieves two goals: He has a better chance of finding common ground between Democrats and Republicans on more narrowly targeted issues. And he makes it harder for Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google to mobilize quickly against reforms they don't like. "If you look at the way these technology companies have staffed up with their lobbying and the money they're investing in Washington, it's designed ... to prevent any changes to the current ecosystem that benefits them enormously," Cicilline told Axios. "They have literally billions and billions and billions of reasons to try to protect the current system because it produces ... profits not seen on planet Earth." Recognizing this reality, Cicilline said his intention is to use this range of bills to advance all the recommendations in his panel's 450-page investigation into competition in the digital marketplace.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US President Joe Biden is reportedly planning to nominate antitrust scholar Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, a move that would indicate his administration is open to aggressive antitrust regulation not only generally but specifically against Amazon and other Big Tech firms. At present, Khan is an associate law professor at Columbia Law School. Khan vaulted directly to antitrust superstardom in 2017 while she was still a law student, when she published her blockbuster paper "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" in the Yale Law Journal.

In "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," Khan argued that using consumer pricing as the key benchmark for determining whether a company or a merger is anticompetitive is not sufficient and that Amazon's size and scale make it anticompetitive. "Specifically," she wrote in the abstract, "current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive." Her work made an enormous splash. FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, a Democrat, sought her as an advisor in 2018, when the commission was kicking off an antitrust enforcement review. "It's rare to come across a legal prodigy like Lina Khan," Chopra told The New York Times in 2018. "Nothing about her career is typical. You don't see many law students publish groundbreaking legal research, or research that had such a deep impact so quickly." Critics, on the other hand, dubbed her theories "hipster antitrust."

During 2019 and 2020, Khan served as one of the House subcommittee staffers who compiled a massive, blockbuster report digging into the antitrust implications of Big Tech. After 16 months of hearings, research, and analysis, the committee determined last fall that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google were all in some way breaking competition law and needed to be reined in. The news comes only a few days after the Biden administration announced it was bringing on Tim Wu as special advisor on technology and competition policy. Wu is one of the most outspoken critics of Big Tech, arguing in his most recent book, 2018's The Curse of Bigness, that unchecked market concentration was leading to a new Gilded Age and all the problems that come with it.

India's government has threatened to jail employees of Facebook, its WhatsApp unit and Twitter as it seeks to quash political protests and gain far-reaching powers over discourse on foreign-owned tech platforms, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the warnings. From the report: The warnings are in direct response to the tech companies' reluctance to comply with data and takedown requests from the government related to protests by Indian farmers that have made international headlines, the people say. At least some of the written warnings cite specific, India-based employees at risk of arrest if the companies don't comply, according to two of the people. The threats mark an escalation of India's efforts to pressure U.S. tech companies at a moment when those companies are looking to the world's second-most-populous nation for growth in the coming years. Some of the government's requests for data involve WhatsApp, which is hugely popular in India and promises users encrypted communication, unable to be read by outside parties.

Facebook will lift its ban on political ads on Thursday, ending a self-imposed prohibition that began immediately after the November 2020 general election and remained active for months. Politico reports: Facebook informed top political advertisers of its decision by phone and email on Wednesday, according to sources with knowledge of the announcement. The social media giant banned political and social issue-related ads in early November in an effort to curb misinformation around the general election. But the pause on political ads extended deep into the first months of the Biden administration, only partially lifted ahead of the Georgia Senate runoffs in early January.

Facebook will now return political ads to its platform, one of the largest and most cost-effective ways for campaigns to reach voters and potential supporters. Digital strategists in both parties were sharply critical of Facebook's decision to cut off access to voters for the last several months, upending off-year campaign strategies. In an email sent to clients on Wednesday, Facebook representatives said, "while we are lifting the ad pause, our work is not over."

"For the past several years, we invested heavily to fight misinformation, voter suppression and election interference, and remain committed to removing and reducing this type of content while connecting people with reliable information across our apps," the email continued, signed by two Facebook partners. "As a result, we plan to use the coming months to take a closer look at how these ads work on our service to see where further changes may be merited."