Intel kicked off 2021 with a fresh lineup of mobile processors with a unique twist. The 11th Gen Tiger Lake H35-series processors aren’t just for any ol’ laptop. They target what Intel calls “ultraportable gaming laptops.” And at 3 p.m. ET today on The Tom’s Hardware Show, we’re sitting down with the chipmaker to learn more about what that means.
The Tom’s Hardware Show livestream is every Thursday at 3 p.m. ET. Today, Intel’s general manager of premium and gaming notebook segments, Fredrik Hamberger, will join Tom’s Hardware editors to give us an inside look at Intel’s H35 chips.
You can watch today’s Tom’s Hardware show below at 3 p.m. ET:
You can also catch the show on Facebook and the Tom’s Hardware Twitch channel. Every episode is also available to download as a podcast.
And like with any episode of The Tom’s Hardware Show, we’ll be taking questions from the audience. Join the livestream at 3 p.m. ET to submit your questions via chat YouTube or Facebook, and we may discuss them on air.
Announced during CES 2021 in January, Intel’s H35 CPUs go up to four CPU cores, eight threads and a 35W TDP. The flagship Core i7-11375H Special Edition can hit a 5.0 single-core turbo frequency and has a standard base clock speed of 3.3 GHz at 35W (it drops to 3.0 GHz at 28W).
Intel is positioning the H35 series as an option for the growing number of machines looking to compete with the best gaming laptops by including a discrete graphics cards while remaining portable. Our Asus TUF Dash F15 review showed what the quad-core Core i7-1130H can do alongside a mobile RTX 3070 graphics card in a 0.78-inch thick clamshell.
Join Tom’s Hardware this afternoon to learn more and ask Intel your H35 queries.
Facebook-owned Instagram has permanently banned Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a prominent anti-vaccine activist who had over 800,000 followers on the platform, The Wall Street Journal reports. A spokesperson for the service said his account was removed “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines.” His account on Facebook, however, is still live, with Facebook telling Variety that it has no plan to remove the page “at this time.”
Kennedy has been cited as one of the top spreaders of COVID-19 misinformation by the nonprofit organization Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), the WSJ notes. He also founded Children’s Health Defense, which CCDH calls a leading anti-vaccine charity.
Kennedy’s removal from the platform comes just a few days after Facebook announced it’s stepping up efforts to combat vaccine misinformation on its platforms. Although it banned anti-vaccination ads last October, and started removing vaccine misinformation in December, this week it said it was expanding the list of false COVID-19 and vaccine-related claims it would remove. In particular, it will remove posts that claim COVID-19 is man-made, or that vaccines are dangerous or ineffective.
Children’s Health Defense has previously challenged Facebook’s vaccine fact-checking initiatives. In a lawsuit filed last year, the group claimed that initiatives like fact-checking labels placed on its page created a “falsely disparaging” image of the organization.
Although Kennedy’s Instagram account has been removed, his pages are still live on Facebook and Twitter, with hundreds of thousands of followers between them. On Facebook itself he has over 300,000 followers, with 215,000 followers on Twitter. As of this writing, his most recent posts on both platforms contain links to Children’s Health Defense.
Facebook, a company known for ripping its ideas from competitors, has reportedly set its sights on social audio. The New York Times reports today that the company is working on a copycat of Clubhouse, the buzzy invite-only social audio startup. The Times reports the product is in the “early stages of development,” so it’s unclear if and when it might launch.
The news comes only five days after CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined Clubhouse and participated in a room to talk about the future of augmented and virtual reality. His presence on the app was shocking, given it’s a new social network, so the fact that Facebook might now be cloning Clubhouse is no surprise. The company has already done so with multiple other apps, including, most infamously, Stories, which it took from Snapchat, and Reels, its TikTok competitor that launched last year.
Twitter is also working on a Clubhouse competitor called Spaces, which is in beta at the moment. Its team acquired social podcasting company Breaker, seemingly for its expertise in social audio, to help beef up its efforts. Meanwhile, Mark Cuban is also at work on a live audio app called Fireside, which The Verge reported on earlier this week. Clearly, lots of people in tech think audio will be an important format for communicating in the future, and they’re rapidly trying to get in on it before the trend dies out.
Facebook plans to test how people respond to seeing fewer posts about politics in the News Feed. Starting this week, Facebook will “temporarily reduce” political posts for a “small percentage” of people in Canada, Brazil, and Indonesia, with a test in the US following some weeks later. The tests will continue for the next few months.
The experiment comes in response to feedback Facebook has (somehow just now) heard that “people don’t want political content to take over their News Feed,” Aastha Gupta, product management director at Facebook, wrote in a blog post this morning. The goal is to improve the News Feed by “finding a new balance of the content people want to see.”
Gupta says that political content only makes up about 6 percent of the typical News Feed right now in the US. Nonetheless, that small percentage has clearly had an oversized impact, prompting years of discussions around the polarizing effects of people being served up too-often misleading political stories. Facebook has widely been blamed for stoking polarization and boosting far-right voices.
In October, Facebook said it would temporarily stop recommending civic and political groups to users in the US, and last month it said that change would become permanent. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a call with investors that the goal was to “turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversations and communities.”
The tests around reducing political content overall are part of the same initiative. Zuckerberg said Facebook wants to allow political discussions and grassroots organizing to keep happening, but that users “don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services.”
Facebook says health agencies and information on COVID-19 from authoritative groups like the WHO will be exempt from the reduced political distribution.
The tests come after years of frustrations, from pretty much all directions, around how Facebook handles political content. Facebook shut down an internal effort in 2018 to make its site less divisive, The Wall Street Journal reported last year. At the same time, Facebook was making choices of its own that seemed to up the divisiveness. In 2017, the company pulled back on reductions to political content distribution would have had an outsized impact on right-wing sides, and instead put forward changes that more significantly limited the reach of left-wing sites, the Journal also reported.
Cloud computing company Salesforce is joining other Silicon Valley tech giants in announcing a substantial shift in how it allows its employees to work. In a blog post published Tuesday, the company says the “9-to-5 workday is dead” and that it will allow employees to choose one of three categories that dictate how often, if ever, they return to the office once it’s safe to do so.
Salesforce will also give employees more freedom to choose what their daily schedules look like. The company joins other tech firms like Facebook and Microsoft that have announced permanent work-from-home policies in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“As we enter a new year, we must continue to go forward with agility, creativity and a beginner’s mind — and that includes how we cultivate our culture. An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our Towers; the 9-to-5 workday is dead; and the employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks,” writes Brent Hyder, Salesforce’s chief people officer.
“In our always-on, always-connected world, it no longer makes sense to expect employees to work an eight-hour shift and do their jobs successfully,” Hyder adds. “Whether you have a global team to manage across time zones, a project-based role that is busier or slower depending on the season, or simply have to balance personal and professional obligations throughout the day, workers need flexibility to be successful.”
Hyder cites picking up young kids from school or caring for sick family members as reasons why an employee should not be expected to report to work on a strict eight-hour shift every day. He also points to how the removal of strict in-office requirements will allow Salesforce to expand its recruitment of new employees beyond expensive urban centers like San Francisco and New York.
In his blog post, Hyder defines the three different categories of work as flex, fully remote, and office-based. Flex would mean coming into the office one to three days per week and typically only for “team collaboration, customer meetings, and presentations.” Fully remote is what it sounds like — never coming into the office except perhaps in very rare situations or for work-related events. Office-based employees will be “the smallest population of our workforce,” Hyder says, and constitute employees whose roles require them be in the office four to five days per week.
“Our employees are the architects of this strategy, and flexibility will be key going forward,” Hyder writes. “It’s our responsibility as employers to empower our people to get the job done during the schedule that works best for them and their teams, and provide flexible options to help make them even more productive.”
Reddit will double the number of employees it has over the course of this year to around 1,400 after raising $250 million in a new funding round, the company has announced. Reddit currently has around 700 employees globally. Over 600 are based in the US, according to CNBC, where it has offices in San Francisco, New York, LA, and Chicago.
The announcement of the new funding round comes as the site’s r/WallStreetBets subreddit gained widespread attention for its role in increasing the share prices of GameStop, AMC, and other companies. Redditors organized to purchase shares in certain companies en-masse, turbocharging their stock prices at the expense of short-selling hedge funds. As of last week the Securities and Exchange commission is reportedly investigating whether misinformation posted on social media could have violated securities laws.
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman tells The Wall Street Journalthat the company isn’t planning on “materially changing” its strategy as a result of the funding round. The company says it plans to use the money to invest in video, advertising, consumer products, and international expansion. On Sunday, Reddit said that it spent its entire marketing budget on a single 5-second Super Bowl ad celebrating its role in the GameStop stocks saga. Last year Reddit acquired Dubsmash, a “short-form video social platform” whose video creation tools it plans to integrate into its own platform.
Reddit’s valuation doubled to $6 billion as a result of the new funding, according to the WSJ. Last quarter, the company’s direct advertising revenue was up 90 percent compared to the same period a year earlier, Reddit says.
As of December, Reddit boasted 52 million daily active users, For comparison, Facebook has around 1.85 billion daily users, Snapchat’s parent company Snap has 265 million daily active users, and Twitter recent said it averages 187 million.
Facebook is expanding what false claims it will remove from its platforms related to COVID-19, COVID-19 vaccines, and vaccines in general starting today. The company began removing debunked COVID-19 claims in December of last year and notifying customers when they had interacted with a post that has false information that same month. But now the list of potential claims that could get a post removed has grown.
Highlights from the new expanded list of false COVID-19 and vaccine-related claims that will be removed include:
COVID-19 is man-made
Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they were created to protect against
It’s safer to get a disease than to get its vaccine
Vaccines are dangerous, toxic, or cause autism
Facebook says it will start enforcing this policy immediately, focusing on groups, pages, and accounts that share content from its new list of debunked claims. The company also says it would consider removing the sources of the posts entirely if they became repeat offenders.
Notably, the company says that it will only be enforcing this change during the “COVID health emergency,” so while tamping down on such claims could be a major blow to the anti-vaccine movement on Facebook, it might not last long. Even if it remains brief, it’s an important change, Facebook was a major source of vaccine misinformation even before the pandemic and addressing it more directly could have a meaningful impact on people who might have otherwise become anti-vaxxers.
Expanding what counts as COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation is a smart move for Facebook, but some people worry what posts might get caught in the company’s new, larger misinformation net. Studies into the effectiveness of certain masks, vaccines, and tests are still ongoing. As written, Facebook’s new guidelines might prevent conversations around new research results, as UNC Professor Zeynep Tufekci notes.
Looking at the list, Facebook may have to take down some current real news and public health statements, too. We have ongoing clinical trials with no placebo, for example. (UK heterologous prime boost trial) Also today’s reports on ChAdOx1? May need to go under these guidelines. pic.twitter.com/iCCNi6eeBT
— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) February 8, 2021
What’s more, Tufekci points out, recommendations from public health agencies have changed over the course of the pandemic, which may mean that older posts from organizations like the World Health Organization may also be removed. The Verge has contacted Facebook with these concerns and will update if we learn more.
Outside of those policy changes, Facebook is also making adjustments to how factual COVID-19 information gets delivered on Facebook and Instagram. The company will feature links to vaccine information and for signing up to receive a vaccination in its COVID-19 Information Center, and it plans to bring the feature to Instagram as well.
Facebook also says that its continuing to improve search on both platforms to surface more “relevant, authoritative results” when a user searches something related COVID-19, including displaying users who discourage vaccinations lower in search results on Instagram. Finally, Facebook is extending $120 million in ad credits to “help health ministries, NGOs, and UN agencies” spread COVID-19 vaccine information to Facebook’s billions of users.
Teams inside Twitter are researching ways for the company to offer paid subscriptions, which could include charging money for access to TweetDeck, Bloomberg reports. TweetDeck is a popular alternative to the main Twitter website and mobile app that allows users to more efficiently manage multiple accounts and organize Twitter into a series of easier-to-read vertical feeds.
Alongside charging for TweetDeck, the teams are said to be exploring other ideas, including charging for new features like an “undo send” button or more profile customization options. Another idea involves introducing “tipping” to Twitter, where users could pay accounts for exclusive content.
Twitter is thought to be exploring these plans as a way to reduce its reliance on advertising, which currently provides the majority of its revenue. Bloomberg notes that competing ad businesses from Facebook and Snapchat continue to grow faster than Twitter’s, and the company is under pressure to diversify, thanks to the pandemic as well as high-profile activist investors. Introducing a series of premium pay models to Twitter would be a bold move given most social media companies prioritize offering their services for free to maximize growth.
In a statement given to Bloomberg, Twitter’s head of revenue products, Bruce Falck, confirmed the company’s plans to improve its revenue mix “may include” subscriptions, but he stressed that its plans are in the “very early exploration” stage. “We do not expect any meaningful revenue attributable to these opportunities in 2021,” he added.
Twitter has been exploring some of these ideas for years. Back in 2017, the company considered charging for premium TweetDeck features before later abandoning the plans, and last year a customer survey revealed an interest in charging for an “undo send” feature. Bloomberg notes that subscriptions have been mentioned on the company’s last two earnings calls, and just this past December, Twitter CFO Ned Segal said the company was exploring charging for features like “higher-quality video” and “analytics.”
Twitter is due to report its latest earnings tomorrow, so there’s a chance we might know more about its plans sooner rather than later.
Not long after it blocked Facebook, Myanmar has now ordered mobile networks and internet service providers to block Twitter and Facebook-owned Instagram in the country as well. The southeast Asian country’s military seized power in a coup earlier this week, detaining its civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi along with other government officials.
Facebook users had reportedly been using the social media platform to protest the coup, sharing photos of themselves giving the three-finger salute that’s become associated with resistance in the area.
“All mobile operators, international gateways and internet service providers in Myanmar received a directive on 5 February 2021 from the Myanmar Ministry of Transport and Communications (MoTC) to, until further notice, block the social media platforms Twitter and Instagram,” Norwegian telecom company Telenor said in a statement late Friday. The company provides mobile services in Myanmar.
Myanmar’s Ministry of Information issued an ominous statement on Tuesday, a day after the military seized power, instructing people not to spread rumors on social media, CNN reported. “Some media and public are spreading rumors on social media conducting gatherings to incite rowdiness and issuing statements which can cause unrest. We would like to urge the public not to carry out these acts and would like to notify the public to cooperate with the government in accordance with the existing laws,” the statement read.
Rafael Frankel, Facebook’s director of public policy, APAC emerging countries, said in a statement to The Verge that the company was “extremely concerned” by the shutdown orders, and urged authorities to unblock access immediately. “At this critical time, the people of Myanmar need access to important information and to be able to communicate with their loved ones,” Frankel said.
A Twitter spokesperson echoed that concern, saying in an email to The Verge that the order “undermines the public conversation and the rights of people to make their voices heard. The Open Internet is increasingly under threat around the world. We will continue to advocate to end destructive government-led shutdowns.”
Update February 6th, 11:13AM ET: Adds statements from Facebook and Twitter
Senate Democrats unveiled a new bill Friday that could force tech giants like Facebook and Google to be held more accountable for harmful content that leads to real-world violence.
The SAFE TECH Act, introduced by Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Mazie Hirono (D-HI), would overhaul Section 230 to the Communications Decency Act, a law that protects large tech platforms from liability over the content posted by their users. The Democrats’ bill would open new pathways for users to sue companies if content posted on their platforms threatens them personally with harassment, discrimination, or other forms of abuse.
The bill also prohibits Section 230 from applying to ads or other paid content on platforms, targeting a large source of revenue for companies like Facebook and Google.
“When Section 230 was enacted in 1996, the Internet looked very different than it does today. A law meant to encourage service providers to develop tools and policies to support effective moderation has instead conferred sweeping immunity on online providers even when they do nothing to address foreseeable, obvious and repeated misuse of their products and services to cause harm,” Warner said in a statement Friday.
The SAFE TECH Act is the Democrats’ first big content moderation bill following last month’s deadly attack on the Capitol. Shortly after the riot, tech platforms from Twitter to Parler were targeted for their alleged roles in the violence that transpired in Washington. Parler, the right’s formerly favored free speech platform, was forced offline for weeks after web hosts like AWS pulled their services to the site, alleging that posts on the platform encouraged violence.
Following the Capitol riots, lawmakers looked to Section 230 as a means of addressing misinformation and harmful content that may have led rioters to storm the Capitol. Days after, House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) called on the FBI to open an investigation into Parler for its perceived role in the attack. Other House Democrats, like Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), signed onto letters to the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube calling on them to audit their algorithms and make changes that could limit virality on harmful content.
With Democrats now in control of Congress and the presidency, previous negotiations on Section 230 have been flipped on their heads. Changing the law was first championed by Republicans who sought to punish tech companies over the lawmakers’ baseless claims that the platforms were biased against conservatives. Now, Democrats are moving to reform 230 in a way that punishes platforms for disinformation and harmful content.
“We need to be asking more from big tech companies, not less. How they operate has a real-life effect on the safety and civil rights of Americans and people around the world, as well as our democracy. Holding these platforms accountable for ads and content that can lead to real-world harm is critical, and this legislation will do just that,” Klobuchar said in a statement Friday.
Google is considering developing an Android alternative to Apple’s upcoming App Tracking Transparency, a new planned opt-in requirement the iPhone maker will impose on developers that demands they ask for permission to track iOS users across apps and websites. The news, first reported on Thursday by Bloomberg, underscores the increasing pressure on large tech companies, many spurred on by Apple, to take more proactive measures to better protect user privacy.
Google won’t say whether it is indeed working on an anti-tracking privacy measure for Android. But in a statement, a Google spokesperson tells The Verge, “We’re always looking for ways to work with developers to raise the bar on privacy while enabling a healthy, ad-supported app ecosystem.”
First announced at Apple’s developer conference last summer, App Tracking Transparency effectively slides a system-level opt in between an app’s tracking capabilities and a user’s preferences. If the user says they would rather not be tracked, there’s nothing the developer can do to get around that because Apple will disable a developer’s ability to gather the so-called Identifier for Advertisers code, or IDFA. That code both lets advertisers track users from one app or website to another for ad targeting while also helping advertisers measure the effectiveness of ads, such as whether a user ends up purchasing a product they saw on one app by using the mobile website of the merchant.
Apple intends to police developers using audits and other methods to enforce its policies, which include potentially suspending or banning apps from the App Store if a developer does not comply. Both Facebook and Google have publicly expressed concern for how Apple’s opt-in requirement could negatively affect their mobile advertising networks. But Facebook has gone a step further and begun waging a public relations war against Apple over the change by complaining it will harm small businesses and accusing Apple of being self-serving.
Google’s take on App Tracking Transparency would likely not be as severe, Bloomberg reports. Instead of forcing opt-in requirements on app developers, the Android alternative may resemble some of the upcoming privacy controls planned for Google’s Chrome browser, in which the company seeks to end some of the more insidious tracking technologies on the web today by developing less invasive alternatives and giving users more opt-out mechanisms.
Google’s work to develop new privacy practices and standards for the web is known as the Privacy Sandbox. As part of that ongoing project, Google has taken steps to phase out third-party cookies on Chrome and is working on tools that allow advertisers to target groups of users instead of directly targeting individuals. All of this could inform how Google develops an anti-tracking measure for Android, Bloomberg reports.
Instagram has disabled hundreds of accounts that were stolen as part of online hacking operations designed to gain access to and sell rare and coveted usernames, the company tells The Verge. Both TikTok and Twitter also took action on some of the accounts belonging to the same hackers, reports journalist and cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs.
The Facebook-owned platform set its sights mainly on the community surrounding OGUsers, a website well-known for trafficking in stolen usernames and helping facilitate the hacking of these accounts through methods like SIM swapping, which is when a user gains control of someone’s phone number and uses it to reset passwords and take control of social media handles. News of Instagram’s enforcement was first reported on Thursday by Reuters.
“Today, we’re removing hundreds of accounts connected to members of the OGUsers forum. They harass, extort and cause harm to the Instagram community, and we will continue to do all we can to make it difficult for them to profit from Instagram usernames,” a Facebook spokesperson tells The Verge. The disclosure is notable because it’s the first time the platform has publicly shared information regarding moderation against username hackers. Earlier this week, Instagram released a new feature that lets people recover deleted posts, in the event a hacker takes control of their account and wipes it clean.
Krebs reported on Thursday that the crackdown was something of a joint effort, with Twitter and TikTok also taking action against popular OGUsers community members at the same time on those companies’ respective platforms (although it’s unclear how much coordination there was between the three companies or how far-reaching TikTok and Twitter’s enforcement was).
“As part of our ongoing work to find and stop inauthentic behavior, we recently reclaimed a number of TikTok usernames that were being used for account squatting,” TikTok told Krebs in a statement. “We will continue to focus on staying ahead of the ever-evolving tactics of bad actors, including cooperating with third parties and others in the industry.”
In addition to disabling the accounts that were stolen, rendering them worthless, the social platforms have also disabled some accounts of well-known OGUsers middlemen who act as intermediaries during username transactions by holding funds in escrow in exchange for a cut of the fee, reports Reuters.
OGUsers made headlines last summer when a small cohort of hackers affiliated with the site allegedly participated in an unprecedented Twitter hack that involved resetting the passwords on the accounts of dozens of high-profile individuals and companies, including Elon Musk and Barack Obama, and using their access to run a bitcoin scam. Like the individual at the center of the Twitter hack, then-17-year-old Graham Ivan Clark, many of the hackers Instagram is cracking down on today and those who frequent OGUsers are minors, often drawn into the community by the allure of stealing and retaining a rare username of their own.
These usernames tend to be single words — in rare cases, individual letters or numbers — and they can fetch tens of thousands of dollars on underground markets for stolen digital goods. And because platforms like Instagram and Twitter have rules barring the buying and selling of accounts, the hackers interested in procuring one of these coveted handles often resort to illegal means to obtain them. SIM hacking is a popular method, but standard phishing as well as sustained online harassment, extortion, and even swatting are other known techniques, notes Reuters.
Myanmar’s government has blocked access to Facebook in the country, after users turned to the company’s services to protest this week’s military coup. In a statement given to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook confirmedthat the country’s telecoms providers had been ordered to block its services, adding, “We urge authorities to restore connectivity so that people in Myanmar can communicate with family and friends and access important information.” Myanmar’s government has ordered the services to be blocked until Sunday.
The block comes after users reportedly turned to the social network to protest after the military ousted elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and detained her along with other members of her party. The WSJ notes that users on Facebook were sharing photos of themselves banging pots and pans as a sign of protest, as well as images of a three-fingered salute — a gesture that’s become a sign of resistance in the region.
Telecoms provider Telenor confirmed to Nikkeithat it has followed the government’s orders, saying it has “decided to comply with the directive, while expressing grave concerns regarding breach of human rights.” The WSJ reports that an internet monitoring organization, NetBlocks, confirmed that Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all unavailable via the state-owned Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications’ network.
Facebook is an integral part of Myanmar’s internet ecosystem. “For the majority of Myanmar’s 20 million internet-connected citizens, Facebook is the internet” was how a report from 2018 put it, and Nikkei notes that Messenger is the primary communications channel for most of its citizens. It’s believed around half of the country’s population holds a Facebook account, meaning any attempt to block the service is a significant move.
This close relationship between Myanmar’s internet and Facebook has created problems. In 2018, Facebook admitted that it hadn’t done enough “to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence,” after critics said its platform had played a role in genocidal violence in the country. Facebook said it was investing in “people, technology and partnerships to examine and address the abuse of Facebook in Myanmar.”
Amazon plans to install high-tech video cameras in its delivery vehicles in order to better monitor the behavior of drivers as they deliver packages, according to a new report from The Information.
The hardware and software will be supplied by Netradyne, a California company behind a platform called Driveri that uses cameras and artificial intelligence to analyze a driver as they operate the vehicle. The camera then gives real-time feedback — including automated suggestions like “distracted driving” and “please slow down” — while collecting analysis that is used to later evaluate drivers during their shifts, the report states.
An unlisted, week-old video hosted on the website Vimeo details the partnership. It’s narrated by Karolina Haraldsdottir, Amazon’s senior manager for last-mile safety, and outlines the company’s goals as reducing collisions and holding drivers more accountable for mistakes on the road. The initiative mirrors one Amazon has taken with its long-haul trucking fleet, in which SmartDrive cameras monitor freight drivers for signs of fatigue and distracted driving, according to a separate report from The Information.
The marketing video showcases how the cameras record “100% of the time” (though without audio and not viewable live) and upload footage to a dedicated safety team for review if any one of 16 signals is triggered through an incident happening on the road or an action the driver takes. The driver is able to manually disable the camera, but only when the ignition is off. Drivers are also allowed to manually upload footage when they choose to.
Screenshot by Nick Statt / The Verge
“We’re always searching out innovative ways to keep drivers safe. That’s why we have partnered with Netradyne to help make improvements to the driver experience,” Haraldsdottir says on camera. She describes Netradyne as the first company to merge AI with video “to create industry-leading safety systems, reducing collisions by a third through in-cab warnings and another third through improving driver behaviors.”
Haraldsdottir says Amazon wants to “set up drivers for success and provide them support for being safer on road and handling incidents if and when they happen.” But The Information talked with some drivers who are concerned that the use of Netradyne’s technology might constitute unfair and invasive surveillance and place even further burdens on them as they try to meet tight deadlines.
Screenshot by Nick Statt / The Verge
Amazon has historically relied on last-mile operators like the US Postal Service and UPS to get packages to customers’ doorsteps, but the company has increasingly begun using its own growing logistics network of airplanes, trucks, and delivery vehicles to cut costs. For last-mile deliveries, that has included both third-party delivery companies Amazon contracts directly and a growing platform of Uber-like workers using their own vehicles under the Amazon Flex platform.
As part of this network, Amazon operates a fleet of tens of thousands of delivery drivers all over the country that, as part of these third-party firms, are not technically company employees. Nonetheless, these drivers operate Amazon Prime-branded vehicles and are subject to any restrictions or monitoring the company puts in place in many ways similar to the intense control Amazon exerts over its warehouse workers. That includes minute-by-minute surveillance via mobile app of where a driver is on their programmed route and whether they’re falling behind schedule.
Screenshot by Nick Statt / The Verge
Those monitoring tools appear to also include new Netradyne cameras, although The Information says it’s not clear when Amazon intends to install the cameras and how widespread throughout its delivery fleet they’ll be. “We are investing in safety across our operations and recently started rolling out industry leading camera-based safety technology across our delivery fleet,” an Amazon spokesperson told The Information in a statement. “This technology will provide drivers real-time alerts to help them stay safe when they are on the road.”
In using its own network of both professional and civilian delivery drivers, Amazon has faced scrutiny in recent years for prioritizing speed and consumer convenience over the safety of delivery personnel, while at the same time placing increasingly onerous burdens on its drivers dictating the route they take and the order in which they drop off packages to avoid delays.
Last fall, Amazon was caught surveilling contract Flex drivers in private Facebook groups to see whether some were planning labor actions like work stoppages or strikes. In March of last year, Amazon came under fire for declining to pay Flex drivers forced to stay home due to the coronavirus, despite Uber and Lyft opting to compensate their drivers.
Amazon delivery drivers have also caused dozens of accidents over the last half-decade, including some that resulted in deaths, but the company often avoids liability for the accidents due to the way it employs third-party firms and independent contractors, reported The New York Times in 2019. Just earlier this week, Amazon was ordered to pay more than $61 million to Flex drivers as part of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over wage theft allegations.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Andy Jassy speaking at the 2019 CERAWeek ConferencePhoto: Getty Images
The exec helped Amazon soar in the cloud, and now he’ll determine the company’s future
Amazon is getting a new CEO for the first time in its 27-year-history: cloud computing chief Andy Jassy, who will be replacing co-founder Jeff Bezos later this year. Jassy, currently the CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a core believer in Bezos’ business philosophies and a longtime veteran of the company, having run the cloud division since its inception nearly two decades ago.
Jassy, who turned 53 last year, is now getting the opportunity to make his mark not just on Amazon, but also the world and the major ways the company shaped it, from Whole Foods to a million-person-plus warehouse workforce to massive logistics and AI divisions with far-reaching real-world effects.
Far from a household name, Jassy is still one of the most consequential executives in Amazon’s history. His promotion underscores the importance of cloud computing to the biggest tech titans that now play vital roles in powering the entire internet. In the case of AWS, that includes everything from Netflix and Spotify to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Democratic National Committee.When AWS goes down, huge chunks of the internet go with it.
The transition of power is reminiscent of Satya Nadella’s promotion to the CEO role at Microsoft in 2014, after Nadella spent three years running the company’s Azure cloud business. Nadella modernized many elements of Microsoft’s business and company culture with a focus on the cloud and mobile computing, as well as an excellent eye for major acquisitions. Jassy’s ascent to the top job at Amazon may similarly usher in an era of transformation for the e-commerce giant.
The big question Amazon insiders and those on the outside looking in will try to answer in the next six months, before he takes the job in the third quarter of the year, will be whether Jassy deviates from Bezos’ approach or sticks to business as usual. Yet if Jassy continues to see himself as an acolyte of Bezos and his famous “Day 1” mentality — which argues that companies start to decline and die the moment they rest on their laurels — it will mean plenty of change is on the horizon. For Amazon, change is both the most important survival instinct and its most successful business tool.
Photo by Michele Doying / The Verge
When Jassy joined Amazon in the late ‘90s, the company was years away from thinking about the cloud and still focused solely on e-commerce. Jassy graduated from Harvard Business School in 1997 and joined Amazon soon thereafter as part of a wave of fresh MBAs flocking to the tech industry before the dot-com boom. Jassy moved out West with the intention of one day returning to New York, according to an interview last year on The Disruptive Voice podcast, but he’s never held a job at another company.
Jassy went on to become Bezos’ first “shadow” adviser, something like a corporate chief of staff who followed the CEO every day and sat in on all of his meetings, according to a profile of Jassy published late last month by Insider. Jassy also made a peculiar first impression on his boss by accidentally hitting him in the head with a kayak paddle during a characteristically competitive game of company broomball, as recounted in Brad Stone’s 2013 book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.
Bezos and Jassy’s relationship deepened in the years after, with Bezos tasking his younger lieutenant with exploring the then-nascent technology of cloud computing around 2003. The goal was to see whether it made sense for Amazon to offer hosting services to other websites and businesses, back when many of the largest tech companies mainly relied on third-party data centers or had already begun looking into or actively building their own. The idea came from Amazon’s own struggles to build an external development platform for retailers three years earlier, so third-party companies could build their own e-commerce operations.
It was Jassy who helped identify the problem: Amazon’s development tools, frankly, sucked. The company set out to improve them by creating easier-to-use APIs and other technology that would let any one team at Amazon pull from a common pool of resources. “So very quietly around 2000, we became a services company with really no fanfare,” Jassy told a crowd at the re:Invent conference in 2018, according to TechCrunch.
It took Amazon another six years of exploring and experimenting — with the effort to formally develop AWS really taking off after a fateful 2003 executive retreat at Bezos’ house, Jassy recounted — before the company launched its first cloud product in 2006. “In retrospect it [AWS] seems fairly obvious, but at the time I don’t think we had ever really internalized that,” Jassy said at re:Invent. The company’s early investments paid off, as it took competitors years to realize the business opportunity and launch comparable cloud products.
“If you believe companies will build applications from scratch on top of the infrastructure services if the right selection [of services] existed, and we believed they would if the right selection existed, then the operating system becomes the internet, which is really different from what had been the case for the [previous] 30 years,” Jassy explained.
That belief about the future of the internet proved prescient. Today, AWS powers a huge bulk of apps, services, and websites consumers and employees use every day, largely because Amazon has unparalleled resources and developer tools that make building and tapping into its massive resources as easy as using a standard API. It’s why so many companies forgo building their own data center operations and instead choose AWS or one of its competitors. Unless you’re Facebook or Google, both of which built out their own global data center operations, it’s simply easier to use Amazon than to do it yourself.
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Jassy deserves credit for architecting the company’s cloud vision, having run AWS since it was created and becoming its CEO after Bezos promoted him to the position from a senior vice president role back in 2016. His tenure at AWS has also turned cloud computing into the most profitable of Amazon’s divisions, accounting for roughly 63 percent of the company’s profits in 2020 and putting it on track to make more than $50 billion in revenue this year. Amazon now controls about a third of the entire cloud infrastructure market, more than its next closest competitors (Microsoft and Google) combined, according to Synergy Research.
Without AWS’s momentous growth, Amazon may not have had the resources to invest as much money back into its retail, logistics, streaming video, hardware, smart home, AI, and other divisions over the years. That makes AWS effectively the engine of Amazon’s continuous reinvention, and Jassy is the spark that helps drive it.
In recent years, Jassy has clearly fashioned himself as an heir apparent to Bezos, spinning tales of Amazon’s early days and the remarkable beginnings of AWS and how those learnings can be applied to other businesses. He’s a keynote speaker at Amazon’s high-profile re:Invent conference, an industry gathering dedicated to cloud computing, and he’s become a more public face of Amazon in recent years. Last summer, when longtime logistics executive Jeff Wilke, another potential Bezos successor, announced his retirement, the writing was on the wall. Someone would eventually take over from Bezos, and it was looking more likely than ever to be Jassy.
Jassy’s management quirks and persona have also become somewhat legendary within the company, similar to Bezos’ infamous email style and meeting decorum. Jassy is known internally for his exhaustive attention to detail and hands-on approach, his penchant for back-to-back meetings, and his welcoming embrace of social justice issues, according to Insider.
In September, he tweeted publicly about accountability for the killing of Breonna Taylor, and he’s been outspoken in his support for the Black Lives Matter movement and LGBTQ issues. Jassy, however, is also known for having defended controversial decisions, like Amazon’s sale of its flawed facial recognition technology to police departments and the government. (Amazon announced a one-year ban on its sale of the tech to law enforcement starting in June of last year.)
Jassy’s approach is also characterized as one of making tough and unprecedented calls, best exemplified in AWS’ decision to ban social media platform Parler last month following the US Capitol riot. It was a move the company did not take lightly considering its “religious” commitment to maintaining service for customers, Insider reported at the time. But it felt compelled to do so after outcry from employees and because Parler posed “a very real risk to public safety,” Amazon said in a statement at the time.
Jassy will no doubt be in charge of making even tougher calls in the future. But that’s part of both the job and the Amazon culture he’s helped cultivate. “It’s really hard to build a business that sustains for a long period of time,” Jassy told a virtual crowd at the all-digital Amazon re:Invent last December. “To do it, you’re going to reinvent yourself, and often you’re going to have to reinvent yourself many times over.”
That’s precisely what Amazon has done over the years, transforming from an online bookseller into an e-commerce giant and onward into a hardware maker, a major Hollywood and entertainment industry player, and now the second largest employer in the country. All the while, Jassy has worked behind the scenes to ensure AWS was growing into the profit machine it is today.
Now, Jassy appears ready for a reinvention of his own, at a time when Amazon is still at the forefront of so many industries and continuing to explore new territory, all while it faces increasing antitrust pressure in the US and overseas and mounting competition in the AI, cloud, and e-commerce industries.
“Typically, what you see is the desperate kind of reinvention — companies on the verge of falling apart or going bankrupt, deciding they have to reinvent themselves. When you wait until that point, it’s a crapshoot whether you’re going to be successful or not,” Jassy explained. “You want to be reinventing when you’re healthy. You want to be reinventing all the time.”
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