Policy

dirty-deeds-in-denver:-ex-prosecutor-faked-texts,-destroyed-devices-to-frame-colleague

Dirty deeds in Denver: Ex-prosecutor faked texts, destroyed devices to frame colleague

How we got here

Choi was a young attorney a few years out of law school, working at the Denver District Attorney’s Office in various roles between 2019 and 2022. Beginning in 2021, she accused her colleague, Dan Hines, of sexual misconduct. Hines, she said at first, made an inappropriate remark to her. Hines denied it and nothing could be proven, but he was still transferred to another unit.

In 2022, Choi complained again. This time, she offered phone records showing inappropriate text messages she allegedly received from Hines. But Hines, who denied everything, offered investigators his own phone records, which showed no texts to Choi.

Investigators then went directly to Verizon for records, which showed that “Ms. Choi had texted the inappropriate messages to herself,” according to the Times. “In addition, she changed the name in her phone to make it appear as though Mr. Hines was the one who had sent them.”

At this point, the investigators started looking more closely at Choi and asked for her devices, leading to the incident described above.

In the end, Choi was fired from the DA’s office and eventually given a disbarment order by the Office of the Presiding Disciplinary Judge, which she can still appeal. For his part, Hines is upset about how he was treated during the whole situation and has filed a lawsuit of his own against the DA’s office, believing that he was initially seen as a guilty party even in the absence of evidence.

The case is a reminder that, despite well-founded concerns over tracking, data collection, and privacy, sometimes the modern world’s massive data collection can work to one’s benefit. Hines was able to escape the second allegation against him precisely because of the specific (and specifically refutable) digital evidence that was presented against him—as opposed to the murkier world of “he said/she said.”

Choi might have done as she liked with her devices, but her “evidence” wasn’t the only data out there. Investigators were able to draw on Hines’ own phone data, along with Verizon network data, to see that he had not been texting Choi at the times in question.

Update: Ars Technica has obtained the ruling, which you can read here (PDF). The document recounts in great detail what a modern, quasi-judicial workplace investigation looks like: forensic device examinations, search warrants to Verizon, asking people to log into their cell phone accounts and download data while investigators look over their shoulders, etc.

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meta-axes-third-party-fact-checkers-in-time-for-second-trump-term

Meta axes third-party fact-checkers in time for second Trump term


Zuckerberg says Meta will “work with President Trump” to fight censorship.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California on September 25, 2024.  Credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg

Meta announced today that it’s ending the third-party fact-checking program it introduced in 2016, and will rely instead on a Community Notes approach similar to what’s used on Elon Musk’s X platform.

The end of third-party fact-checking and related changes to Meta policies could help the company make friends in the Trump administration and in governments of conservative-leaning states that have tried to impose legal limits on content moderation. The operator of Facebook and Instagram announced the changes in a blog post and a video message recorded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political,” Zuckerberg said. He said the recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.”

“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes, similar to X, starting in the US,” Zuckerberg said. “After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”

Meta says the soon-to-be-discontinued fact-checking program includes over 90 third-party organizations that evaluate posts in over 60 languages. The US-based fact-checkers are AFP USA, Check Your Fact, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, PolitiFact, Science Feedback, Reuters Fact Check, TelevisaUnivision, The Dispatch, and USA Today.

The independent fact-checkers rate the accuracy of posts and apply ratings such as False, Altered, Partly False, Missing Context, Satire, and True. Meta adds notices to posts rated as false or misleading and notifies users before they try to share the content or if they shared it in the past.

Meta: Experts “have their own biases”

In the blog post that accompanied Zuckerberg’s video message, Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said the 2016 decision to use independent fact-checkers seemed like “the best and most reasonable choice at the time… The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.”

But experts “have their own biases and perspectives,” and the program imposed “intrusive labels and reduced distribution” of content “that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate,” Kaplan wrote.

The X-style Community Notes system lets the community “decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see… Just like they do on X, Community Notes [on Meta sites] will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings,” Kaplan wrote.

The end of third-party fact-checking will be implemented in the US before other countries. Meta will also move its internal trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, Zuckerberg said. “Our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” he said. Meta will continue to take “legitimately bad stuff” like drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation “very seriously,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg pledges to work with Trump

Meta will “phase in a more comprehensive community notes system” over the next couple of months, Zuckerberg said. Meta, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, will also “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said that “Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship,” that “Latin American countries have secret courts that can quietly order companies to take things down,” and that “China has censored apps from even working in the country.” Meta needs “the support of the US government” to push back against other countries’ content-restriction orders, he said.

“That’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the Biden administration. “By going after US and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.”

Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, praised Meta’s policy changes. Carr has promised to shift the FCC’s focus from regulating telecom companies to cracking down on Big Tech and media companies that he alleges are part of a “censorship cartel.”

“President Trump’s resolute and strong support for the free speech rights of everyday Americans is already paying dividends,” Carr wrote on X today. “Facebook’s announcements is [sic] a good step in the right direction. I look forward to monitoring these developments and their implementation. The work continues until the censorship cartel is completely dismantled and destroyed.”

Group: Meta is “saying the truth doesn’t matter”

Meta’s changes were criticized by Public Citizen, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader. “Asking users to fact-check themselves is tantamount to Meta saying the truth doesn’t matter,” Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert said. “Misinformation will flow more freely with this policy change, as we cannot assume that corrections will be made when false information proliferates. The American people deserve accurate information about our elections, health risks, the environment, and much more.”

Media advocacy group Free Press said that “Zuckerberg is one of many billionaires who are cozying up to dangerous demagogues like Trump and pushing initiatives that favor their bottom lines at the expense of everything and everyone else.” Meta appears to be abandoning its “responsibility to protect its many users, and align[ing] the company more closely with an incoming president who’s a known enemy of accountability,” Free Press Senior Counsel Nora Benavidez said.

X’s Community Notes system was criticized in a recent report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which said it “found that 74 percent of accurate community notes on US election misinformation never get shown to users.” (X previously sued the CCDH, but the lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge.)

Previewing other changes, Zuckerberg said that Meta will eliminate content restrictions “that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse” and change how it enforces policies “to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms.”

“We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now, we’re going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, and for lower severity violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action,” he said. “The problem is the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t. So by dialing them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.”

Meta to relax filters, recommend more political content

Zuckerberg said Meta will re-tune content filters “to require much higher confidence before taking down content.” He said this means Meta will “catch less bad stuff” but will “also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Meta has “built a lot of complex systems to moderate content,” he noted. Even if these systems “accidentally censor just 1 percent of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he said.

Kaplan wrote that Meta has censored too much harmless content and that “too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail.'”

“In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content,” Kaplan wrote. “This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.”

Another upcoming change is that Meta will recommend more political posts. “For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts,” Zuckerberg said. “But it feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’re going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.”

Photo of Jon Brodkin

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

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“i’m-getting-dizzy”:-man-films-waymo-self-driving-car-driving-around-in-circles

“I’m getting dizzy”: Man films Waymo self-driving car driving around in circles

Waymo says the problem only caused a delay of just over five minutes and that Johns was not charged for the trip. A spokesperson for Waymo, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet, told Ars today that the “looping event” occurred on December 9 and was later addressed during a regularly scheduled software update.

Waymo did not answer our question about whether the software update only addressed routing at the specific location the problem occurred at, or a more general routing problem that could have affected rides in other locations.

The problem affecting Johns’ ride occurred near the user’s pickup location, Waymo told us. The Waymo car took the rider to his destination after the roughly five-minute delay, the spokesperson said. “Our rider support agent did help initiate maneuvers that helped resolve the issue,” Waymo said.

Rider would like an explanation

CBS News states that Johns is “still not certain he was communicating with a real person or AI” when he spoke to the support rep in the car. However, the Waymo spokesperson told Ars that “all of our rider support staff are trained human operators.”

Waymo told Ars that the company tried to contact Johns after the incident and left him a voicemail. Johns still says that he never received an explanation of what caused the circling problem.

We emailed Johns today and received a reply from a public relations firm working on his behalf. “To date, Mike has not received an explanation as to the reason for the circling issue,” his spokesperson said. His spokesperson confirmed that Johns did not miss his flight.

It wasn’t clear from the video whether Johns tried to use the “pull over” functionality available in Waymo cars. “If at any time you want to end your ride early, tap the Pull over button in your app or on the passenger screen, and the car will find a safe spot to stop,” a Waymo support site says.

Johns’ spokesperson told us that “Mike was not immediately aware of the ‘pull over’ button,” so “he did not have an opportunity to use it before engaging with the customer service representative over the car speaker.”

While Waymo says all its agents are human, Johns’ spokesperson told Ars that “Mike is still unsure if he was speaking with a human or an AI agent.”

“I’m getting dizzy”: Man films Waymo self-driving car driving around in circles Read More »

do-kwon,-the-crypto-bro-behind-$40b-luna/terra-collapse,-finally-extradited-to-us

Do Kwon, the crypto bro behind $40B Luna/Terra collapse, finally extradited to US

The US government finally got its metaphorical hands on Do Hyeong Kwon, the 33-year-old Korean national who built a financial empire on the cryptocurrency Luna and the “stablecoin” TerraUSD, only to see it all come crashing down in a wipeout that cost investors $40 billion.

As private investors filed lawsuits, and as the governments of South Korea and the United States launched fraud investigations, Do Kwon was nowhere to be found. In 2022, the Korean government filed a “red notice” with Interpol, seeking Kwon’s arrest and his return to Korea. A few months later, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Kwon with fraud in the US.

On September 17, 2022, Kwon famously tweeted, “I am not ‘on the run’ or anything similar”—but he also wouldn’t say where he was. He didn’t help his case when he was arrested in March 2023 by the authorities in Montenegro. At an airport. With fake travel documents. On his way to a country with no US extradition agreement.

After serving some time in a Montenegro prison, Kwon battled extradition to both Korea and the US. This delayed the process by some months, but on December 31, 2024, he was shipped off to US authorities. Today, he appeared in front of a federal judge in New York City, where he pled “not guilty” to fraud.

The US Justice Department crowed about the extradition, with US Attorney General Merrick Garland pointing out that the US can sometimes get to people in surprising ways.

“We secured this extradition despite Kwon’s alleged attempt to cover his tracks by laundering proceeds of his schemes and trying to use a fraudulent passport to travel to a country that did not have an extradition treaty with the United States,” Garland said in a statement. “This extradition from Montenegro is an example of the Justice Department’s international partnerships, which enable the pursuit of criminals wherever they attempt to hide.”

Five alleged misrepresentations

As for the charges, the US also unsealed a massive indictment against Kwon today, which you can read here (PDF) if you want all the gory details.

The basic claim is that Kwon “defrauded investors by falsely advertising the company’s blockchain products as decentralized, reliable, and effective, and by engaging in market manipulation, ultimately resulting in more than $40 billion in investor losses,” according to the US government. This, the government alleges, happened in five key ways:

Do Kwon, the crypto bro behind $40B Luna/Terra collapse, finally extradited to US Read More »

anthropic-gives-court-authority-to-intervene-if-chatbot-spits-out-song-lyrics

Anthropic gives court authority to intervene if chatbot spits out song lyrics

Anthropic did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment on how guardrails currently work to prevent the alleged jailbreaks, but publishers appear satisfied by current guardrails in accepting the deal.

Whether AI training on lyrics is infringing remains unsettled

Now, the matter of whether Anthropic has strong enough guardrails to block allegedly harmful outputs is settled, Lee wrote, allowing the court to focus on arguments regarding “publishers’ request in their Motion for Preliminary Injunction that Anthropic refrain from using unauthorized copies of Publishers’ lyrics to train future AI models.”

Anthropic said in its motion opposing the preliminary injunction that relief should be denied.

“Whether generative AI companies can permissibly use copyrighted content to train LLMs without licenses,” Anthropic’s court filing said, “is currently being litigated in roughly two dozen copyright infringement cases around the country, none of which has sought to resolve the issue in the truncated posture of a preliminary injunction motion. It speaks volumes that no other plaintiff—including the parent company record label of one of the Plaintiffs in this case—has sought preliminary injunctive relief from this conduct.”

In a statement, Anthropic’s spokesperson told Ars that “Claude isn’t designed to be used for copyright infringement, and we have numerous processes in place designed to prevent such infringement.”

“Our decision to enter into this stipulation is consistent with those priorities,” Anthropic said. “We continue to look forward to showing that, consistent with existing copyright law, using potentially copyrighted material in the training of generative AI models is a quintessential fair use.”

This suit will likely take months to fully resolve, as the question of whether AI training is a fair use of copyrighted works is complex and remains hotly disputed in court. For Anthropic, the stakes could be high, with a loss potentially triggering more than $75 million in fines, as well as an order possibly forcing Anthropic to reveal and destroy all the copyrighted works in its training data.

Anthropic gives court authority to intervene if chatbot spits out song lyrics Read More »

appeals-court-blocks-fcc’s-efforts-to-bring-back-net-neutrality-rules

Appeals court blocks FCC’s efforts to bring back net neutrality rules

“The key here is not whether Broadband Internet Service Providers utilize telecommunications; it is instead whether they do so while offering to consumers the capability to do more,” Griffin wrote, concluding that “they do.”

“The FCC exceeded its statutory authority,” Griffin wrote, at one point accusing the FCC of arguing for a reading of the statute “that is too sweeping.”

The three-judge panel ordered a stay of the FCC’s order imposing net neutrality rules—known as the Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet Order.

In a statement, FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel suggested that Congress would likely be the only path to safeguard net neutrality moving forward. In the federal register, experts noted that net neutrality is critical to boosting new applications, services, or content, warning that without clear rules, the next Amazon or YouTube could be throttled before it can get off the ground.

“Consumers across the country have told us again and again that they want an Internet that is fast, open, and fair,” Rosenworcel said. “With this decision it is clear that Congress now needs to heed their call, take up the charge for net neutrality, and put open Internet principles in federal law.”

Rosenworcel will soon leave the FCC and will be replaced by Trump’s incoming FCC chair pick, Brendan Carr, who helped overturn net neutrality in 2017 and is expected to loosen broadband regulations once he’s confirmed.

Appeals court blocks FCC’s efforts to bring back net neutrality rules Read More »

siri-“unintentionally”-recorded-private-convos;-apple-agrees-to-pay-$95m

Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M

Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then shared with third parties and used for targeted ads.

In the proposed class-action settlement—which comes after five years of litigation—Apple admitted to no wrongdoing. Instead, the settlement refers to “unintentional” Siri activations that occurred after the “Hey, Siri” feature was introduced in 2014, where recordings were apparently prompted without users ever saying the trigger words, “Hey, Siri.”

Sometimes Siri would be inadvertently activated, a whistleblower told The Guardian, when an Apple Watch was raised and speech was detected. The only clue that users seemingly had of Siri’s alleged spying was eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items like Air Jordans or brands like Olive Garden, Reuters noted (claims which remain disputed).

It’s currently unknown how many customers were affected, but if the settlement is approved, the tech giant has offered up to $20 per Siri-enabled device for any customers who made purchases between September 17, 2014, and December 31, 2024. That includes iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, MacBooks, HomePods, iPod touches, and Apple TVs, the settlement agreement noted. Each customer can submit claims for up to five devices.

A hearing when the settlement could be approved is currently scheduled for February 14. If the settlement is certified, Apple will send notices to all affected customers. Through the settlement, customers can not only get monetary relief but also ensure that their private phone calls are permanently deleted.

While the settlement appears to be a victory for Apple users after months of mediation, it potentially lets Apple off the hook pretty cheaply. If the court had certified the class action and Apple users had won, Apple could’ve been fined more than $1.5 billion under the Wiretap Act alone, court filings showed.

But lawyers representing Apple users decided to settle, partly because data privacy law is still a “developing area of law imposing inherent risks that a new decision could shift the legal landscape as to the certifiability of a class, liability, and damages,” the motion to approve the settlement agreement said. It was also possible that the class size could be significantly narrowed through ongoing litigation, if the court determined that Apple users had to prove their calls had been recorded through an incidental Siri activation—potentially reducing recoverable damages for everyone.

Siri “unintentionally” recorded private convos; Apple agrees to pay $95M Read More »

it’s-january,-which-means-another-batch-of-copyrighted-work-is-now-public-domain

It’s January, which means another batch of copyrighted work is now public domain

It’s January, and for people in the US, that means the same thing it’s meant every January since 2019: a new batch of previously copyrighted works have entered the public domain. People can publish, modify, and adapt these works and their characters without needing to clear rights or pay royalties.

This year’s introductions cover books, plays, movies, art, and musical compositions from 1929, plus sound recordings from 1924. Most works released from 1923 onward are protected for 95 years after their release under the terms of 1998’s Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. This law prevented new works from entering the public domain for two decades.

As it does every year, the Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a rundown of the most significant works entering the public domain this year.

Significant novels include Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, the first English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.

Many of the films on the list showcase the then-new addition of sound to movies, including the first all-color feature-length film with sound throughout (Warner Bros.’ On With the Show!) and the first films with sound from directors like Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock. Buster Keaton’s final silent film, Spite Marriage, is also on the list. Musical compositions include notables like Singin’ in the Rain and Tiptoe Through the Tulips.

On the Disney front, we get the Silly Symphony short The Skeleton Dance, as well as a dozen more Mickey Mouse shorts. These include the first films to depict Mickey wearing white gloves and the first to show him talking—as we covered last year, it’s only the 1920s-era versions of these characters who have entered the public domain, so each new version is significant for people looking to use these characters without drawing the ire of Disney and other copyright holders.

It’s January, which means another batch of copyrighted work is now public domain Read More »

power-company-hid-illegal-crypto-mine-that-may-have-caused-outages

Power company hid illegal crypto mine that may have caused outages

But Russia presumably gets no taxes on illegal crypto mining, and power outages can be costly for everyone in a region. So next year, Russia will ban crypto mining in 10 regions for six years and place seasonal restrictions that would disrupt some crypto mining operations during the coldest winter months in regions like Irkutsk, CoinTelegraph reported.

Illegal mining is still reportedly thriving in Irkutsk, though, despite the government’s attempts to shut down secret farms. To deter any illegal crypto mining disrupting power grids last year, authorities seized hundreds of crypto mining rigs in Irkutsk, Crypto News reported.

In July, Russian president Vladimir Putin linked blackouts to illegal crypto mines, warning that crypto mining currently consumes “almost 1.5 percent of Russia’s total electricity consumption,” but “the figure continues to go up,” the Moscow Times reported. And in September, Reuters reported that illegal mines were literally going underground to avoid detection as Russia’s crackdown continues.

Even though illegal mines are seemingly common in parts of Siberia and increasingly operating out of the public eye, finding an illegal mine hidden on state land controlled by an electrical utility was probably surprising to officials.

The power provider was not named in the announcement, and there are several in the region, so it’s not currently clear which one made the controversial decision to lease state land to an illegal mining operation.

Power company hid illegal crypto mine that may have caused outages Read More »

trump-told-scotus-he-plans-to-make-a-deal-to-save-tiktok

Trump told SCOTUS he plans to make a deal to save TikTok

Several members of Congress— Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Representative Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)—filed a brief agreeing that “the TikTok ban does not survive First Amendment scrutiny.” They agreed with TikTok that the law is “illegitimate.”

Lawmakers’ “principle justification” for the ban—”preventing covert content manipulation by the Chinese government”—masked a “desire” to control TikTok content, they said. Further, it could be achieved by a less-restrictive alternative, they said, a stance which TikTok has long argued for.

Attorney General Merrick Garland defended the Act, though, urging SCOTUS to remain laser-focused on the question of whether a forced sale of TikTok that would seemingly allow the app to continue operating without impacting American free speech violates the First Amendment. If the court agrees that the law survives strict scrutiny, TikTok could still be facing an abrupt shutdown in January.

The Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments to begin on January 10. TikTok and content creators who separately sued to block the law have asked for their arguments to be divided, so that the court can separately weigh “different perspectives” when deciding how to approach the First Amendment question.

In its own brief, TikTok has asked SCOTUS to strike the portions of the law singling out TikTok or “at the very least” explain to Congress that “it needed to do far better work either tailoring the Act’s restrictions or justifying why the only viable remedy was to prohibit Petitioners from operating TikTok.”

But that may not be necessary if Trump prevails. Trump told the court that TikTok was an important platform for his presidential campaign and that he should be the one to make the call on whether TikTok should remain in the US—not the Supreme Court.

“As the incoming Chief Executive, President Trump has a particularly powerful interest in and responsibility for those national-security and foreign-policy questions, and he is the right constitutional actor to resolve the dispute through political means,” Trump’s brief said.

Trump told SCOTUS he plans to make a deal to save TikTok Read More »

tech-worker-movements-grow-as-threats-of-rto,-ai-loom

Tech worker movements grow as threats of RTO, AI loom


Advocates say tech workers movements got too big to ignore in 2024.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

It feels like tech workers have caught very few breaks over the past several years, between ongoing mass layoffs, stagnating wages amid inflation, AI supposedly coming for jobs, and unpopular orders to return to office that, for many, threaten to disrupt work-life balance.

But in 2024, a potentially critical mass of tech workers seemed to reach a breaking point. As labor rights groups advocating for tech workers told Ars, these workers are banding together in sustained strong numbers and are either winning or appear tantalizingly close to winning better worker conditions at major tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

In February, the industry-wide Tech Workers Coalition (TWC) noted that “the tech workers movement is far more expansive and impactful” than even labor rights advocates realized, noting that unionized tech workers have gone beyond early stories about Googlers marching in the streets and now “make the headlines on a daily basis.”

Ike McCreery, a TWC volunteer and ex-Googler who helped found the Alphabet Workers Union, told Ars that although “it’s hard to gauge numerically” how much movements have grown, “our sense is definitely that the momentum continues to build.”

“It’s been an exciting year,” McCreery told Ars, while expressing particular enthusiasm that even “highly compensated tech workers are really seeing themselves more as workers” in these fights—which TWC “has been pushing for a long time.”

In 2024, TWC broadened efforts to help workers organize industry-wide, helping everyone from gig workers to project managers build both union and non-union efforts to push for change in the workplace.

Such widespread organizing “would have been unthinkable only five years ago,” TWC noted in February, and it’s clear from some of 2024’s biggest wins that some movements are making gains that could further propel that momentum in 2025.

Workers could also gain the upper hand if unpopular policies increase what one November study called “brain drain.” That’s a trend where tech companies adopting potentially alienating workplace tactics risk losing top talent at a time when key industries like AI and cybersecurity are facing severe talent shortages.

Advocates told Ars that unpopular policies have always fueled workers movements, and RTO and AI are just the latest adding fuel to the fire. As many workers prepare to head back to offices in 2025 where worker surveillance is only expected to intensify, they told Ars why they expect to see workers’ momentum continue at some of the world’s biggest tech firms.

Tech worker movements growing

In August, Apple ratified a labor contract at America’s first unionized Apple Store—agreeing to a modest increase in wages, about 10 percent over three years. While small, that win came just a few weeks before the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) determined that Amazon was a joint employer of unionized contract-based delivery drivers. And Google lost a similar fight last January when the NLRB ruled it must bargain with a union representing YouTube Music contract workers, Reuters reported.

For many workers, joining these movements helped raise wages. In September, facing mounting pressure, Amazon raised warehouse worker wages—investing $2.2 billion, its “biggest investment yet,” to broadly raise base salaries for workers. And more recently, Amazon was hit with a strike during the busy holiday season, as warehouse workers hoped to further hobble the company during a clutch financial quarter to force more bargaining. (Last year, Amazon posted record-breaking $170 billion holiday quarter revenues and has said the current strike won’t hurt revenues.)

Even typically union-friendly Microsoft drew worker backlash and criticism in 2024 following layoffs of 650 video game workers in September.

These mass layoffs are driving some workers to join movements. A senior director for organizing with Communications Workers of America (CWA), Tom Smith, told Ars that shortly after the 600-member Tech Guild—”the largest single certified group of tech workers” to organize at the New York Times—reached a tentative deal to increase wages “up to 8.25 percent over the length of the contract,” about “460 software engineers at a video game company owned by Microsoft successfully unionized.”

Smith told Ars that while workers for years have pushed for better conditions, “these large units of tech workers achieving formal recognition, building lasting organization, and winning contracts” at “a more mass scale” are maturing, following in the footsteps of unionizing Googlers and today influencing a broader swath of tech industry workers nationwide. From CWA’s viewpoint, workers in the video game industry seem best positioned to seek major wins next, Smith suggested, likely starting with Microsoft-owned companies and eventually affecting indie game companies.

CWA, TWC, and Tech Workers Union 1010 (a group run by tech workers that’s part of the Office and Professional Employees International Union) all now serve as dedicated groups supporting workers movements long-term, and that stability has helped these movements mature, McCreery told Ars. Each group plans to continue meeting workers where they are to support and help expand organizing in 2025.

Cost of RTOs may be significant, researchers warn

While layoffs likely remain the most extreme threat to tech workers broadly, a return-to-office (RTO) mandate can be just as jarring for remote tech workers who are either unable to comply or else unwilling to give up the better work-life balance that comes with no commute. Advocates told Ars that RTO policies have pushed workers to join movements, while limited research suggests that companies risk losing top talents by implementing RTO policies.

In perhaps the biggest example from 2024, when Amazon announced that it was requiring workers in-office five days a week next year, a poll on the anonymous platform where workers discuss employers, Blind, found an overwhelming majority of more than 2,000 Amazon employees were “dissatisfied.”

“My morale for this job is gone…” one worker said on Blind.

Workers criticized the “non-data-driven logic” of the RTO mandate, prompting an Amazon executive to remind them that they could take their talents elsewhere if they didn’t like it. Many confirmed that’s exactly what they planned to do. (Amazon later announced it would be delaying RTO for many office workers after belatedly realizing there was a lack of office space.)

Other companies mandating RTO faced similar backlash from workers, who continued to question the logic driving the decision. One February study showed that RTO mandates don’t make companies any more valuable but do make workers more miserable. And last month, Brian Elliott, an executive advisor who wrote a book about the benefits of flexible teams, noted that only one in three executives thinks RTO had “even a slight positive impact on productivity.”

But not every company drew a hard line the way that Amazon did. For example, Dell gave workers a choice to remain remote and accept they can never be eligible for promotions, or mark themselves as hybrid. Workers who refused the RTO said they valued their free time and admitted to looking for other job opportunities.

Very few studies have been done analyzing the true costs and benefits of RTO, a November academic study titled “Return to Office and Brain Drain” said, and so far companies aren’t necessarily backing the limited findings. The researchers behind that study noted that “the only existing study” measuring how RTO impacts employee turnover showed this year that senior employees left for other companies after Microsoft’s RTO mandate, but Microsoft disputed that finding.

Seeking to build on this research, the November study tracked “over 3 million tech and finance workers’ employment histories reported on LinkedIn” and analyzed “the effect of S&P 500 firms’ return-to-office (RTO) mandates on employee turnover and hiring.”

Choosing to only analyze the firms requiring five days in office, the final sample covered 54 RTO firms, including big tech companies like Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. From that sample, researchers concluded that average employee turnover increased by 14 percent after RTO mandates at bigger firms. And since big firms typically have lower turnover, the increase in turnover is likely larger at smaller firms, the study’s authors concluded.

The study also supported the conclusion that “employees with the highest skill level are more likely to leave” and found that “RTO firms take significantly longer time to fill their job vacancies after RTO mandates.”

“Together, our evidence suggests that RTO mandates are costly to firms and have serious negative effects on the workforce,” the study concluded, echoing some remote workers’ complaints about the seemingly non-data-driven logic of RTO, while urging that further research is needed.

“These turnovers could potentially have short-term and long-term effects on operation, innovation, employee morale, and organizational culture,” the study concluded.

A co-author of the “brain drain” study, Mark Ma, told Ars that by contrast, Glassdoor going fully remote at least anecdotally seemed to “significantly” increase the number and quality of applications—possibly also improving retention by offering the remote flexibility that many top talents today require.

Ma said that next his team hopes to track where people who leave firms over RTO policies go next.

“Do they become self-employed, or do they go to a competitor, or do they fund their own firm?” Ma speculated, hoping to trace these patterns more definitively over the next several years.

Additionally, Ma plans to investigate individual firms’ RTO impacts, as well as impacts on niche classes of workers with highly sought-after skills—such as in areas like AI, machine learning, or cybersecurity—to see if it’s easier for them to find other jobs. In the long-term, Ma also wants to monitor for potentially less-foreseeable outcomes, such as RTO mandates possibly increasing firms’ number of challengers in their industry.

Will RTO mandates continue in 2025?

Many tech workers may be wondering if there will be a spike in return-to-office mandates in 2025, especially since one of the most politically influential figures in tech, Elon Musk, recently reiterated that he thinks remote work is “poison.”

Musk, of course, banned remote work at Tesla, as well as when he took over Twitter. And as co-lead of the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk reportedly plans to ban remote work for government employees, as well. If other tech firms are influenced by Musk’s moves and join executives who seem to be mandating RTO based on intuition, it’s possible that more tech workers could be forced to return to office or else seek other employment.

But Ma told Ars that he doesn’t expect to see “a big spike in the number of firms announcing return to office mandates” in 2025.

His team only found eight major firms in tech and finance that issued five-day return-to-office mandates in 2024, which was the same number of firms flagged in 2023, suggesting no major increase in RTOs from year to year. Ma told Ars that while big firms like Amazon ordering employees to return to the office made headlines, many firms seem to be continuing to embrace hybrid models, sometimes allowing employees to choose when or if they come into the office.

That seeming preference for hybrid work models seems to align with “future of work” surveys outlining workplace trends and employee preferences that the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) conducted for years but has seemingly since discontinued. In 2021, CTA reported that “89 percent of tech executives say flexible work arrangements are the most important employee benefit and 65 percent say they’ll hire more employees to work remotely.” The next year, which apparently was the last time CTA published the survey, the CTA suggested hybrid models could help attract talents in a competitive market hit with “an unprecedented demand for workers with high-tech skills.”

The CTA did not respond to Ars’ requests to comment on whether it expects hybrid work arrangements to remain preferred over five-day return-to-office policies next year.

CWA’s Smith told Ars that workers movements are growing partly because “folks are engaged in this big fight around surveillance and workplace control,” as well as anything “having to do with to what extent will people return to offices and what does that look like if and when people do return to offices?”

Without data backing RTO mandates, Ma’s study suggests that firms will struggle to retain highly skilled workers at a time when tech innovation remains a top priority for the US. As workers appear increasingly put off by policies—like RTO or AI-driven workplace monitoring or efficiency efforts threatening to replace workers with AI—Smith’s experience seems to show that disgruntled workers could find themselves drawn to unions that could help them claw back control over work-life balance. And the cost of the ensuing shuffle to some of the largest tech firms in the world could be “significant,” Ma’s study warned.

TWC’s McCreery told Ars that on top of unpopular RTO policies driving workers to join movements, workers have also become more active in protesting unpopular politics, frustrated to see their talents apparently used to further controversial conflicts and military efforts globally. Some workers think workplace organizing could be more powerful than voting to oppose political actions their companies take.

“The workplace really remains an important site of power for a lot of people where maybe they don’t feel like they can enact their values just by voting or in other ways,” McCreery said.

While unpopular policies “have always been a reason workers have joined unions and joined movements,” McCreery said that “the development of more of these unpopular policies” like RTO and AI-enhanced surveillance “really targeted” at workers has increased “the political consciousness and the sense” that tech workers are “just like any other workers.”

Layoffs at companies like Microsoft and Amazon during periods when revenue is increasing in the double-digits also unify workers, advocates told Ars. Forbes noted Microsoft laid off 1,000 workers “just five days before reporting a 17.6 percent increase in revenue to $62 billion,” while Amazon’s 1,000-worker layoffs followed a 14 percent rise in revenue to $170 billion. And demand for AI led to the highest profit margins Amazon’s seen for its cloud business in a decade, CNBC reported in October.

CWA’s Smith told Ars as companies continue to rake in profits and workers feel their work-life balance slipping away while their efforts in the office are potentially “used to increase control and cause broader suffering,” some of the biggest fights workers raised in 2024 may intensify next year.

“It’s like a shock to employees, these industries pushing people to lower your expectations because we’re going to lay off hundreds of thousands of you just because we can while we make more profits than we ever have,” Smith said. “I think workers are going to step into really broad campaigns to assert a different worldview on employment security.”

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Tech worker movements grow as threats of RTO, AI loom Read More »

youtuber-won-dmca-fight-with-fake-nintendo-lawyer-by-detecting-spoofed-email

YouTuber won DMCA fight with fake Nintendo lawyer by detecting spoofed email

Defending his livelihood, Neumayer started asking questions. At first, that led to his videos being reinstated. But that victory was short-lived, as the supposed Nintendo lawyer only escalated his demands, spooking the YouTuber into voluntarily removing some videos, The Verge reported, while continuing to investigate the potential troll.

Reaching out directly to Nintendo helped, but questions remain

The Verge has all the receipts, sharing emails from the fake lawyer and detailing Neumayer’s fight blow-for-blow. Neumayer ultimately found that there was a patent lawyer with a similar name working for Nintendo in Japan, although he could not tell if that was the person sending the demands and Nintendo would not confirm to The Verge if Tatsumi Masaaki exists.

Only after contacting Nintendo directly did Neumayer finally get some information he could work with to challenge the takedowns. Reportedly, Nintendo replied, telling Neumayer that the fake lawyer’s proton email address “is not a legitimate Nintendo email address and the details contained within the communication do not align with Nintendo of America Inc.’s enforcement practices.”

Nintendo promised to investigate further, as Neumayer continued to receive demands from the fake lawyer. It took about a week after Nintendo’s response for “Tatsumi” to start to stand down, writing in a stunted email to Neumayer, “I hereby retract all of my preceding claims.” But even then, the troll went down fighting, The Verge reported.

The final messages from “Tatsumi” claimed that he’d only been suspended from filing claims and threatened that other Nintendo lawyers would be re-filing them. He then sent what The Verge described as “in some ways the most legit-looking email yet,” using a publicly available web tool to spoof an official Nintendo email address while continuing to menace Neumayer.

It was that spoofed email that finally ended the façade, though, The Verge reported. Neumayer detected the spoof by checking the headers and IDing the tool used.

Although this case of copyright trolling is seemingly over, Neumayer—along with a couple other gamers trolled by “Tatsumi”—remain frustrated with YouTube, The Verge reported. After his fight with the fake Nintendo lawyer, Neumayer wants the streaming platform to update its policies and make it easier for YouTubers to defend against copyright abuse.

Back in May, when Ars reported on a YouTuber dismayed by a DMCA takedown over a washing machine chime heard on his video, a YouTube researcher and director of policy and advocacy for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Katharine Trendacosta told Ars that YouTube’s current process discourages YouTubers from disputing copyright strikes.

“Every idiot can strike every YouTuber and there is nearly no problem to do so. It’s insane,” Neumayer said. “It has to change NOW.”

YouTuber won DMCA fight with fake Nintendo lawyer by detecting spoofed email Read More »