FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on December 14, 2017, in Washington DC, the day of the FCC’s vote to repeal net neutrality rules.
The Federal Communications Commission has issued $208.4 million in fines against robocallers since 2015, but the commission has collected only $6,790 of that amount. That’s because the FCC lacks authority to enforce the penalties, according to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal learned of the $6,790 figure by making a Freedom of Information Act request. “An FCC spokesman said his agency lacks the authority to enforce the forfeiture orders it issues and has passed all unpaid penalties to the Justice Department, which has the power to collect the fines,” the Journal report said. “Many of the spoofers and robocallers the agency tries to punish are individuals and small operations, [the spokesman] added, which means they are at times unable to pay the full penalties.”
The Justice Department declined to comment.
Since Ajit Pai became FCC chairman in January 2017, the FCC has issued $202 million in forfeiture orders against robocallers but has collected none of it, the Journal wrote. That includes a $120 million penalty issued in May 2018 against a robocaller that was accused of making 96 million robocalls during a three-month period in order to trick people into buying vacation packages.
Separately, the Federal Trade Commission has collected $121 million out of $1.5 billion worth of penalties issued against robocallers since 2004, the Journal report said. An FTC spokesperson told the Journal that it is proud of its 8 percent collection rate.
“The dearth of financial penalties collected by the US government for violations of telemarketing and auto-dialing rules shows the limits the sister regulators [FCC and FTC] face in putting a stop to illegal robocalls,” the Journal wrote. “It also shows why the threat of large fines can fail to deter bad actors.” Fines can be “a deterrent on legitimate companies that have real assets in the US,” but they aren’t as effective against scammers and overseas operators, an attorney quoted by the Journal said.
Paid FCC fines are deposited into the US Treasury. In some cases, the FCC settles with offenders, and such settlements can include refunds for consumers or compliance requirements.
The FCC’s enforcement process begins with the issuance of a proposed fine. This first formal step “informs the company of the alleged unlawful activity, establishes the maximum penalty that could be assessed for that violation, and provides the company with an opportunity to contest the allegations,” the FCC says.
The FCC’s best bet for collecting is often settling with the violator for some amount lower than the proposed fine. If there is no settlement, the FCC can issue the aforementioned forfeiture orders and hope that the violators pay up. The $208.4 million figure in the Journal story consists of “forfeiture orders in cases involving robocalling, Do Not Call Registry, and telephone solicitation violations,” the Journal wrote.
FTC shuts down robocallers
The FTC has more authority than the FCC to require refunds for consumers and shut down robocalling operations. On Tuesday this week, the FTC announced court settlements with “four separate operations responsible for bombarding consumers nationwide with billions of unwanted and illegal robocalls pitching auto warranties, debt-relief services, home security systems, fake charities, and Google search results services.”
Under these new settlements, “the defendants are banned from robocalling and most telemarketing activities, including those using an automatic dialer, and will pay significant financial judgments,” the FTC said.
But the FTC will just collect parts of those judgments. For example, one of the settlements imposed fines totaling $5.5 million against a defendant and his companies. But the fines will be suspended once the defendant pays $18,000.
Americans receive tens of billions of robocalls each year, according to estimates cited by the FCC. Pai has repeatedly talked tough on robocallers, for example by urging carriers to adopt stronger anti-robocall technologies.
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, one of two Democrats on the Republican-controlled commission, wants stronger action.
“I’ve called for carriers to make free tools to block robocalls available to every consumer,” she wrote on Twitter today. She also criticizing the FCC’s poor record in collecting fines: “It’s time for my colleagues [to] join me in this effort.”
The lack of follow-through on big fines isn’t new to Pai’s FCC. The FCC in 2015 proposed a fine of $100 million against AT&T for throttling the wireless Internet connections of customers with unlimited data plans without adequately notifying the customers about the reduced speeds. But AT&T fought the proposed penalty, and the FCC apparently never issued a forfeiture order in that case.
Do you miss the old days of YouTube? When the platform was dominated by random videos of people’s everyday lives; instead of movie trailers, commercials, clickbait, and lots of awfulness all vying for a place in your queue? A website called defaultfile.name manages to strip that all away by randomly playing videos that were uploaded to YouTube with the camera’s default filename—and I can’t click away.
There have been previous attempts to mine YouTube for undiscovered treasure like this (be it genuinely entertaining or cringe-worthy) but those have always sought out videos with zero views; randomly grabbing clips that no one has ever watched. With this new approach, you’ll occasionally find a video with a few thousand views, but for the most part, it guarantees a steady stream of clips from amateurs who are uploading their content using automated tools, or directly from their devices. It’s safe to assume they don’t know the first thing about SEO, optimizing their videos to maximize views, or, in some cases, that their clips have even been uploaded to YouTube in the first place.
The site provides a preview of the next video to be loaded, which is useful if you find yourself falling down the rabbit’s hole at work as there’s the genuine risk you’re going to stumble across something you don’t want your co-workers seeing. YouTube has a hard enough time policing NSFW videos with millions of views being reported by hundreds of users; so it’s unlikely anyone’s keeping a close eye on the content down at this level.
Social media thrives on humanity’s voyeuristic tendencies, but few share snippets of their daily lives now without at least a thin layer of shellac to make their photos, videos, and posts more likable. Defaultfile.name is like entering YouTube through its less-flashy back door, and somehow watching a high-schooler practice a speech in front of his grandparents while the camera struggles to keep focus feels far more compelling than the umpteenth teaser for the next Avengers movie.
Are you pregnant yet? Don’t you like kids? Well, it’s different when it’s your own child. Being a parent is the most important job in the world. You’re being a bit selfish. What if your parents had decided not to have you? Speaking of your parents, isn’t it cruel to deny them the joy of grandchildren? Besides, who will take care of you when you get old? You’re just saying that because you’re young. You’ll change your mind. Your biological clock is ticking! What if your kid cured cancer?
If you don’t have kids and don’t want them, apologies: You’ve heard this all before from well-meaning relatives, friends, coworkers, cashiers, taxi drivers, crossing guards. If you do have kids and you’ve said anything like the above, the childfree community would like to let you know that you’re not being as thoughtful and caring as you (maybe) mean to be.
See, all of those questions and statements are forbidden by the bylaws of popular subreddit r/childfree, where they’re known as “bingos”: “cliché phrases parents say in an effort to convince the childfree that their decision is wrong, and that they are shirking their societal duty by not reproducing.” The subreddit is a forum to vent about being antagonized by “mombies” and “daddicts.” More importantly, it’s a place for users to speak openly about choice, offer stories and support to others, and share advice about how to respond to bingos or convince doctors to sterilize them.
By now, some of you might be forming a hard nugget of disapproval for the snarky childfree redditors. You’re far from alone: Multiplesociologicalstudies have found that voluntary childlessness often sparks immediate disdain and “moral outrage,” even from total strangers. The stigma knows no race, religion, gender, or border. Researchers have found similar negative judgements of childfree adults everywhere from India to Italy to Israel. (If you’re having trouble imagining the hostility, try typing “childless”—or even better, “childless millennial”—into Google.)
Emma Grey Ellis covers memes, trolls, and other elements of internet culture for WIRED.
Still, fertility rates in the United States (and everywhere else) continue to drop. And contrary to certain hypotheses, voluntarily childfree people seem to rarelyregret their choice. r/childfree has nearly half a million subscribers, and similar communities exist on just about everysocialmediaplatform.
For the childfree, the reasons to consider childfreedom extend beyond baby hatred, questions of bodily autonomy, or suboptimal finances. Concerns go broader, ranging from the economy to politics to climate. “We basically have 12 years until the planet is an apocalyptic hellscape,” says Justine, a longtime r/childfree member in her early thirties. “We aren’t as lucky as our parents, and they seem to have no idea how much more difficult it is to ‘get by’ for us than it was for them.”
When responding to crusading parents who might try to convince them out of their stance, many childfree people use prepared “scripts,” formed by years of entertaining the same inquiries. They know they’re working against ingrained biases: The childfree are keenly aware that they are prefigured in the eyes of most as a band of entitled, disrespectful millennials, trading tradition for self-interest.
Being childfree—they first want you to know—is hardly a millennial idea. “There have always been people who have made the choice not to have children, but we’ve never noticed them in that way,” says Amy Blackstone, a (childfree) sociologist at the University of Maine and author of the forthcoming book Childfree by Choice. Priests and nuns and other celibate ascetics spring to mind, but plenty of lay people throughout history have made the same call. Referring to somebody as a spinster or “confirmed bachelor” was a coy implication of queerness, but it’s also a signpost for the childfree of yesteryear. “What’s different is that we’re talking about it openly now,” Blackstone says.
Activists have been challenging the taboo of childfreedom since the early 1970s, when second-wave feminism (which focused on family-centric issues such as reproductive rights, workplace equality, and marital rape) collided with the overpopulation and overconsumption worries of the environmental movement. In 1972, journalist Ellen Peck founded the National Organization for Non-Parents with a simple goal: making more people aware that parenthood was a choice, not an obligatory life chapter.
According to Blackstone, the economic boom-time of the 1980s, along with its focus on women “having it all,” re-hushed the childfree—though it didn’t extinguish them. “I wish there was something like [r/childfree] 30 years ago,” writes one redditor. “I am a 60 year old woman who has been happily married for 35 years. We are childless by choice and have never regretted it. I was always pretty sure I did not want children.” Other posters share their own experiences in the comments beneath. With over 300 upvotes: “I’m 55 myself and I can still remember being told by the gyno—at age 40!— that she wouldn’t sterilize me because ‘you still might change your mind.’ Yeah, that’s a negatory, ghost rider, damn satisfied with my decision, too.” (Manychildfree people, but especially women, struggle for decades to get permanent birth control. Doctors’ concerns are seldom medical, so r/childfree’s moderators maintain an international list of childfree-friendly doctors and a guide to getting sterilized.)
The millennial-aged redditors seem to have a broader focus—as a generation, they’ve been shaped by third-wave feminism, acceptance of wider notions of family, climate change, and the Great Recession. “Since the recession, everyone is freaking out about lower fertility rates caused by women delaying pregnancy,” says Alison Gemmill, a demographer at Stony Brook University. But the childfree aren’t just delaying, and that’s started to show in the data too. “We’ve also seen a decline in fertility intention. More women are intending to have no children,” Gemmill says. She doesn’t foresee an imminent demographic apocalypse, but that hasn’t stopped political pundits and other commentators from preaching about society’s impending doom.
“People worry we won’t have enough taxpayers to pay for our aging population,” Blackstone says. “It also becomes a nationalist concern: ‘We need more people to defend our borders.’” In the mouths of some conservative commentators, worrying about low birth rates in the US and Western Europe takes on a tone not just of nationalism but also of ethnic anxiety—You Will Not Replace Us (as long as these inconvenient millennial women start churning out babies). One strategy for softening the appearance of racism is recruiting far-right mommy bloggers, like Wife With a Purpose. These women spread motherly messages about their laundry and their role in preserving white “heritage.” Online spaces controlled by the so-called alt-right teem with them—advocating for “radical traditionalism” and sharing Norman Rockwell-esque photos with captions reminding you that men are meant to protect and women to nurture.
Living as they do in a stridently pro-reproduction climate, it’s difficult for childfree people to publicly express the sentiments behind the downward-trending data. “Participants from a range of places told us how they felt ‘like a freak’ until they went online,” says Tracy Morison, a lecturer at Massey University of New Zealand who has studied online childfree communities. “Then they discovered others who felt the same as they did and discovered a vocabulary to articulate what they had been thinking and feeling.” For many, even the term “childfree” (as opposed to “childless,” a word that implies loss and incompleteness) was an affirming revelation.
The feelings the childfree have learned to articulate within their own spaces are often grounded in deep reflection. Sure, people pop off about hating obnoxious kids—codenamed Bratleys in the US, “sprogs” or “anklebiters” in Morison’s part of the world—so much so that a splinter subreddit, r/truechildfree, broke away to become a more “respectful” alternative. (Another, more hardline subreddit, r/antinatalism, is for people who “assign negative value to birth.” It can get pretty nihilistic.) For most, more sober discussions take precedence: economic woes, environmental concerns, political unrest. US users fret about reproductive rights under attack. Lots of them probably still wouldn’t be interested in having kids even in a stable economy with no environmental threats, but a sense of grim calculation—why would I bring a child into a world I can’t guarantee will be able to nurture them?—also pervades the space.
The harsher realities of millennial life certainly weigh heavily on Justine. “I got my bachelor’s degree and licensure in a field where I ended up not being able to find work. I was unemployed for years. After completing a year or so of occupational training, I finally obtained a job in medical transcription, a field that is slowly dying due to automation, with a paycheck based on production,” she says. “Adding a kid to my life would be insane even if I wanted to.”
For Justine and many other childfree people, having their struggles sneered at as selfishness is especially isolating. Morison’s research has found mounting hostility between parents and the childfree—especially mothers and childfree women. For childfree people, the animus comes from a lifetime of judgement, invasive questions, and, at times, real disadvantage. Morison found that childfree individuals were often expected to work overtime because they had no children. In some states, like Iowa, the government will take a larger percentage of your estate if you leave your possession to someone other than a biological heir—something some childfree Iowans feel unduly penalized by.
The centrality of parenthood can hurt parents too. “Having kids—lots of them—is glorified, so people are pressured to have kids when they aren’t ready to, to have more kids than they want to or can afford, or to spend heaps of resources on becoming biological parents,” Morison says. “Then talking about the challenges or even regrets of parenthood is culturally taboo.” Discussions about postpartum depression have only recently made it to the mainstream, in no small part because of supportive online communities, but struggling new mothers still face stigmas of their own.
The childfree movement rejects one of life’s basic drives with reason and thoughtfulness, asking fundamental questions about the worlds childfree people live in. “The reality is that in the US, we have some of the worst supports for parents in the workplace in the world,” Blackstone says. If a plummeting fertility rate is truly a concern, some policy changes—say, paid family leave, or the environmental reforms teenagers around the world have been asking for—might help. Still, asking non-parents what would convince them to procreate is, the childfree people’s view, the wrong question. “I wish we could shift conversations away from ‘What’s wrong with you?’ and toward why some people are hesitant to become parents,” Blackstone says. “If there are cultural problems, let’s solve them. But then leave the rest of us alone.” Parenthood may no longer be the default. Most childfree people are deeply concerned about the state of future—and procreating isn’t the only way to contribute.
Roundup on sale in San Francisco on Feb. 25, 2019.Photo: Haven Daley (AP)
A federal jury in California has awarded $80 million to a man who said Monsanto herbicide Roundup was a “substantial factor” in him developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma, CNN reported on Wednesday. It’s a major blow to the chemical manufacturer and its parent company, German chemical giant Bayer AG, which are facing hundreds of lawsuits related to the glyphosate-based herbicide in San Francisco.
In the first phase of the trial, which concluded on March 20, the jury found that plaintiff Edwin Hardeman’s cancer was likely due to Roundup exposure. In the second phase that ended this week, the jury found Hardeman proved in court that Monsanto released Roundup with a defective design, then was negligent in its responsibility to provide adequate warning about potential health risks. According to the lawsuit, Hardeman said he had used Roundup on his property for over 20 years before he was diagnosed with cancer in 2015. $75 million of the $80 million jury award is punitive.
The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) deemed Roundup a probable carcinogen in 2015, though evidence was mixed as to just how much of a risk it poses to most humans. However, it later emerged that Monsanto had a hand in one supposedly “independent” review published in Critical Reviews in Toxicology challenging the IARC conclusions in 2016. (The Environmental Protection Agency says is glyphosate-based herbicides are safe when used according to label directions.)
In a statement on the Bayer website, the company said it was “disappointed” in the decision, said it still believed that Roundup was not carcinogenic, and claimed the outcome of the case would have “no impact on future cases and trials, as each one has its own factual and legal circumstances.” It also said it would appeal the verdict.
One of Hardeman’s lawyers, Aimee Wagstaff, told CNN, “We are excited that after three long years of litigation, Mr. Hardeman finally has a resolution, and that the jury has held Monsanto accountable for its bad conduct of manipulation and deception.” In an additional statement provided to the news network, his attorneys wrote, “It is clear from Monsanto’s actions that it does not care whether Roundup causes cancer, focusing instead on manipulating public opinion and undermining anyone who raises genuine and legitimate concerns about Roundup.”
As the Associated Press noted, the judge in the case, Vince Chhabria, is overseeing hundreds of other Roundup lawsuits and the ruling places plaintiffs in those cases in a strong position to reach generous settlements. Another lawsuit against Monsanto that ended in August 2018 concluded with a $289 million jury award, though it was later slashed to $78 million, the AP wrote.
According to the Wall Street Journal, shares in Bayer “extended sharp losses at the start of the week after sliding 13% on the day of the phase-one verdict,” reflecting increasing wariness by investors that the company is going to continue to lose in court:
Tom Claps, a legal analyst at Susquehanna Financial Group, said Wednesday’s verdict “doesn’t bode well for the remaining cases” in both state and federal court, since Monsanto thought the two-phased trial would be a more favorable setting. Investors unfamiliar with the U.S. legal system, he said, need to get comfortable with the fact that the litigation could take years to play out and cost what he estimates at between $2.5 billion to $4.5 billion to resolve.
Other investors and analysts have said they would wait for at least two or three further verdicts before estimating how much this might cost Bayer.
According to the Journal, another case involving a married couple in their 70s who also developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma is scheduled to go to trial on Thursday. Roundup lawsuits could take years to make their way through the court system, though CNN reported that the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund’s Kara Cook-Schultz, a proponent of banning Roundup, said she believed there would be a more immediate impact in the form of “even more awareness that Roundup is not as safe as advertised.”
Boeing has detailed its promised software update for 737 Max jets, and it largely matches up with the rumored safety improvements that could reduce the likelihood of a crash. The anti-stall Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) will now compare the data from both of the 737’s angle-of-attack sensors, rather than relying on one. If there’s a disagreement of 5.5 degrees or more, MCAS won’t kick in. The software will also reduce its input during an incident, and won’t apply so much input to the stabilizers that the crew can’t counteract it.
The aircraft maker has also produced a new PC-based training program to help pilots better understand MCAS and how to react when the technology is in use. It’s further promising to deliver a previously optional safety feature available for free.
The FAA still has to approve the fix, and it’ll take time after that to both install the update, test it and train crews on the changes. This also doesn’t include foreign airlines that will want to conduct their own retrofits and testing, which could take considerably longer. It may take several weeks before you see the 737 Max fly again in the US, and months worldwide.
Not that Boeing will have much choice but to take its time. The Justice Department is investigating multiple concerns about the 737 Max family in the wake of crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, such as the decisions to make safety features optional and to leave much of the safety certification process to Boeing. It will have to show that its proposed software and training fixes should be enough to minimize the potential for future tragedies, and might have to make further accommodations if officials aren’t satisfied.
The Air Force wants to see if AI-powered autonomous drones can help human pilots better perform their mission. In a press release, the Air Force said it was seeking input from the tech industry in a new AI initiative for autonomous drones it calls Skyborg. Still in its planning stages, the Air Force is looking for market research and concept of operations analysis for Skyborg to get a sense of what technologies are out there for such a fleet. It is seeking to launch protoypes of the autonomous drones as early as 2023.
What exactly would the autonomous drones under Skyborg do? According to a request for information filed on March 15, the Air Force wants the system to avoid other aircraft, terrain, obstacles, and hazardous weather. The system should allow drones to take-off and land independently. Skyborg should also be able to be operated by humans with little or no pilot or engineering experience.
The Air Force is also asking for a "separate payload and flight architecture to allow for modular adjustments and adaptability." In other words, the Skyborg system could ideally use different sensors depending on the mission, such as a camera for a surveillance role or particle detection sensor for detecting air contaminants.
"The primary goal of the Skyborg program is to deploy a modular, fighter-like aircraft that can be used to quickly update and field iteratively more complex autonomy to support the warfighter," said the request for information.
In short, Skyborg would be to a human pilot like R2D2 is to Skywalker. Will Roper, the Air Force assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, made the Star Wars reference at a conference earlier this month, reported C4ISRNet. Skyborg could respond to or anticipate a human pilot’s commands. Or a pilot could send Skyborg in their place to an airspace filled with enemy planes and avoid danger.
Skyborg may fuel images of the AI-powered fighter jet in the 2005 military sci-fi film Stealth. But Skyborg’s capability seems to be benign in comparison; the request doesn’t call for weapons. The project is still very much in its early stages. What exactly Skyborg will be able to do, and how, has yet to be decided.
Given the fallout from Project Maven, the Air Force’s latest foray into AI may also ruffle feathers in Silicon Valley. But Skyborg and Project Maven appear to be functionally different projects, at least on the surface. Skyborg uses AI to help military pilots in combat, while much of Project Maven’s criticism was over Google assisting the military in the surveillance of private citizens. If Google does decide to bid for another contract with the Air Force, the decision won’t have been made lightly. Google’s new ethical AI advisory council, which will vet any decisions that Google makes in the AI space, holds its first meeting in April.
Office Depot agreed this week to pay a $25 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly lying to customers in order to get them to pay for tech support. The retailer offered consumers a free virus scan, which would claim to the person’s computer was infected with malware even if it wasn’t. According to the FTC, Office Depot scammed customers out of millions of dollars for computer repair services between 2009 and November 2016.
To carry out the fake scans, Office Depot used a piece of diagnostics software called PC Health Check, which was created and licensed by Support.com. While the tool was supposedly running a virus scan on a customer’s computer, the results it produced were actually based on a series of questions that the customer is asked prior to the scan. Those questions include whether the computer is running slowly, receives virus warnings, crashes often or displays pop-up ads. If a person answered yes to one of the four questions, they would be told their machine has "malware symptoms." OfficeDepot would then offer to fix the problem, charging up to $300 for an often unnecessary repair.
In addition to Office Depot’s fine, Support.com has also agreed to a $10 million settlement with the FTC over the alleged scheme. Fake tech support services are nothing new and are some of the most common types of phishing and robocall scams. However, people probably don’t expect the same level of trickery from a reputable business as they would from an unwanted phone call.
