This week as America celebrated Labor Day, the Washington Post told the story of how 4,000 cafeteria workers at Google quietly unionized during the pandemic: Google is famous for its cafeterias, which serve its legions of programmers and product managers everything from vegan poke to gourmet tacos — free. But the cooks and servers behind those meals are generally contractors who work for other companies, and do not get the generous perks and benefits reserved for Google employees. So over the past few years, thousands of them have unionized, securing higher wages, retirement benefits and free platinum health care coverage.

Unite Here, a 300,000-member union of hotel and food service workers, has been steadily working to unionize Silicon Valley cafeteria workers since 2018, experiencing the most success at Google. Employed by the contract companies Compass and Guckenheimer, those unionized now make up about 90 percent of total food services workers at Google, according to the union. Workers have unionized at 23 Google offices nationwide, including in Seattle and San Jose.

Now, the union is tackling new territory: the South.... Google workers in Atlanta employed by a different cafeteria company — Sodexo — presented their manager with a list of demands and said they plan to unionize.... [Last week] Sodexo and the union reached an agreement: Should a majority of workers choose to unionize, Sodexo would not try to block it.
The article notes that more than 230 Starbucks locations have also voted to unionize since last year. But Google offers a case study in the difference it can make, according to the Post's summary of observations from D. Taylor, the president of Unite Here.

"The average unionized worker at a Google cafeteria makes $24 an hour, pays little to nothing for health insurance and has access to a pension plan. At Sodexo-run Google cafeterias, workers make $15 an hour and pay premiums in the hundreds of dollars, Taylor said."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid for sharing the story.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A group of independent movie companies has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AT&T. The Internet provider, which has over 80 million subscribers in the US, faces far-reaching demands. In addition to millions in damages, the filmmakers want the ISP to terminate the accounts of repeat infringers and block access to sites such as The Pirate Bay and YTS. [...] In a complaint (PDF) filed at a federal court in Texas, Voltage Pictures and its affiliates, known for films such as "After We Collided," "Dallas Buyers Club," "Room 203," and "The Bird Catcher", accuse the ISP of contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.

"For years, AT&T has knowingly allowed AT&T users to engage in online piracy, the illegal distribution and downloading of copyrighted materials, including films. AT&T provides the IP addresses used for piracy, makes the connections needed to share and download pirated films, and transmits the pirated films," they write. The ISP allegedly turned a blind eye to pirating subscribers, facilitating mass online piracy. The filmmakers say they sent tens of thousands of notices to the company, reporting alleged copyright infringements. In some cases, hundreds of notices were sent for a single IP address without any visible response from the Internet provider.

In the United States, the law requires Internet providers to adopt a policy that provides for the termination of accounts of repeat infringers, under appropriate circumstances. AT&T references this in its terms but according to the filmmakers' complaint, this policy is not sufficient. The lawsuit specifically claims that AT&T willingly keeps repeat infringers on board because that adds tens of millions of dollars to AT&T's bottom line. [...] To compensate for all piracy-related losses, the plaintiffs request actual or statutory damages, which can run into millions of dollars. In addition, they also want AT&T to terminate repeat infringers under appropriate circumstances. Finally, and of particular interest, the movie companies also want the Internet provider to block foreign pirate sites. They include YTS, The Pirate Bay, RARBG, 1337x, and others that have been called out in the US Trade Representative's annual overview of notorious markets.

Intel has dripped out details about its upcoming Arc graphics cards over the last few months, but until recently, we didn't have full specifications for the GPUs. That changed when Intel dropped a video and a post breaking down the full Arc A-series. From a report: The company shared the spec sheets of the Arc A380, Arc A580, Arc 750, and Arc A770. It also explained the naming structure of the new GPUs along with other details. Just about the only major piece of information we're still missing is the release date for the cards. At the top end of the range, Intel's Arc A770 will have 32 Xe cores, 32 ray-tracing units, and a graphics clock of 2100MHz. That GPU will be available with either 8GB or 16GB of memory. Sitting just below the Arc A770, the Arc A750 will have 28 Xe cores, 28 ray-tracing units, and 8GB of memory. The Intel Arc A580 will sit in the middle between the company's high-end GPUs and the Intel Arc A380.

United Airlines is moving deeper into the flying taxi business. Not only has the airline plowed $15 million into Eve Air Mobility, it ordered 200 flying taxis and has an option for another 200. United expects to start receiving Eve's four-seater electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle (eVTOL) as soon as 2026. From a report: The company says its investment was spurred by both its confidence in the urban air mobility market and Eve's working relationship with Embraer. According to United, Embrarer is "a trusted aircraft manufacturer with a proven track record of building and certifying aircraft over the company's 53-year history." Embrarer previously worked with Uber on a flying taxi project that the latter eventually ditched. Eve's flying taxi has conventional fixed wings, rotors and pushers with a design that United says favors safety, efficiency, reliability and certifiability. It's said to have a range of 60 miles and United added that the vehicle can "reduce noise levels by 90 percent compared to current conventional aircraft."

A new forensic analysis of controversial Donkey Kong world records claims those records were scored on an emulator and not on original hardware, essentially accusing the record holder of cheating. From a report: The controversy revolves around Billy Mitchell, a well-known player who holds several records on classic arcade games such as Donkey Kong and Pac-Man, and the main character in the documentary King of Kong. For years, some people in the retro arcade game community have accused Mitchell of lying about his Donkey Kong records, prompting Twin Galaxies, an arcade game community that keeps track of high scores (among other things) and the Guinness World Records to strip Mitchell of its recognition, though the organization later reversed its decision.

The new technical analysis focuses on Mitchell's Donkey Kong records of 1,047,200 and 1,050,200 points. The author of the analysis is Tanner Fokkens, a hardware engineer and a competitive Donkey Kong player. His report was backed by five other experts. The crux of the controversy and accusations against Mitchell is that he claimed to have scored those records on original Donkey Kong arcade hardware, while his critics accused him of using MAME, an emulator that is recognized as a legitimate way to play the game, but records scored on these two different platforms are recognized as two different categories of records. "MAME scores which are passed off as coming from original arcade are disqualified," Fokkens wrote in his report.

Android 13 has recently hit the streets, and with it, Google is raising the minimum requirements for Android phones. From a report: Google's latest blog post announced that the minimum amount of RAM for Android Go, the low-end version of Android, is now 2GB for Android 13, whereas previously, it was 1GB. Esper's Mishaal Rahman and Google Product Expert Jason Bayton also claim the minimum storage requirements have been bumped up to 16GB, though Google doesn't seem to have publicly documented this anywhere. The increase in system requirements means any phone that doesn't meet the minimum specs won't be able to update to Android 13. New phones launching with Android 13 will need to meet the minimum requirements to be eligible for Play Store licensing, though launching with an older version of Android (with lower requirements) will still be an option for a while. Technically, anyone can grab the Android source code and build anything with it, but if you want to license the Google apps and have access to the Google-trademarked brand "Android," you'll need to comply with Google's rules.

India plans to mandate which loan apps are allowed on app stores in the country, the latest in a series of recent steps from the world's second largest internet market to crack down on sketchy and unethical lenders. From a report: The Reserve Bank of India, the country's central bank, will prepare a "whitelist" of all legal apps and the nation's IT ministry will ensure that only approved apps are hosted on app stores, the Finance Ministry said in a statement. The central bank will also monitor "mule" or "rented" accounts for money laundering practices and review and cancel licenses of non banking financial institutions if they are found guilty, the Finance Ministry said Friday. Indian authorities in recent quarters have been clamping down on lending apps that levy exorbitant fees and use unethical means to collect the payments back. India's central bank said earlier this month that it was moving ahead with new guidelines for digital lending that will mandate firms to provide more disclosure and transparency to benefit consumers as well as restrict several business practices.

The first beta for the Android 13 quarterly release includes a new "clear calling" feature that "reduces background noises during calls." From a report: It was first spotted by Mishaal Rahman on Twitter who also tweeted directions to enable it for yourself without root, if you're feeling bold. The images shared by Rahman note that Clear Calling works "on most mobile networks," is "not available for Wi-Fi calling," and "content from your call is not sent to Google."

Logitech makes some of the most popular webcams in the world, but using them on some of the most popular computers, like the M2 MacBook Air or M1 Pro MacBook Pro, is a less than stellar experience. From a report: Plugging one into any M1 or M2 Mac for a video call isn't an issue, but if you want to tweak in-depth settings or use some of these webcams' highlight features, doing that right now ranges from clumsy to impossible. That's because its most capable webcam software, Logitech Capture, isn't available on computers with Apple silicon. Logitech switched up its software plan for people who use newer Mac laptops and desktops without making much effort to tell anyone. Instead of offering Logitech Capture, its de facto software focused squarely on webcam settings and content creation features, it has two distinct and lesser Mac applications to choose from: Logi Tune and Logitech G Hub.

Tune is a confusing app that lets you toggle settings for Logitech gadgets, with calendar integration added in, for some reason. G Hub was built for gamers who want to tweak RGB lighting and sensitivity settings for gaming-focused products and, now, webcams. Each app's interface looks different and lets you switch different settings, so you've got a choice with which app you use -- too much choice, if you ask me, given how limited the functionality is within each one. But neither offers as many options as Logitech Capture. You can access basic settings, like the ability to zoom in for a tighter crop or make a host of adjustments to the picture settings (or set them to auto settings), but you can't adjust the frame rate or the resolution. What that means is people who own an M1 or M2 Mac cannot utilize its face-tracking feature or switch between horizontal or vertical orientations on a nice, relatively high-end webcam like the $160 Logi StreamCam.

Alphabet's Google pays billions of dollars each year to Apple, Samsung Electronics and other telecom giants to illegally maintain its spot as the No. 1 search engine, the US Justice Department told a federal judge Thursday. From a report: DOJ attorney Kenneth Dintzer didn't disclose how much Google spends to be the default search engine on most browsers and all US mobile phones, but described the payments as "enormous numbers."

"Google invests billions in defaults, knowing people won't change them," Dintzer told Judge Amit Mehta during a hearing in Washington that marked the first major face-off in the case and drew top DOJ antitrust officials and Nebraska's attorney general among the spectators. "They are buying default exclusivity because defaults matter a lot." Google's contracts form the basis of the DOJ's landmark antitrust lawsuit, which alleges the company has sought to maintain its online search monopoly in violation of antitrust laws. State attorneys general are pursuing a parallel antitrust suit against the search giant, also pending before Mehta.

The ship that would have become the world's largest cruise liner has been scrapped before it ever had the chance to take its maiden voyage. Gizmodo reports: Global Dream II was slated to carry 9,000 passengers and was built by German-Hong Kong shipbuilding firm MV Werften to the tune of nearly $US1.4 ($2) billion, according to the Daily Mail. It was nearly finished when the company went bankrupt at the start of this year. Since that happened, no buyer has stepped up to buy the 20-deck, 341.99 m-long monstrosity. That means it's now destined for the scrap heap. The Mail says that Global Dream II also features an outdoor waterpark and a movie theatre.

The capacity of this ship blows the second largest ship, the Oasis-class Wonder of the Sea which is owned and operated by Royal Caribbean, out of the water (I love a good pun). The Wonder of the Seas has a passenger capacity of only 6,988. Pathetic. Despite the $US1.4 ($2) billion put out to build this behemoth, the ship still needs about $US230,000,000 ($319,286,000) worth of work. Apparently, it is structurally complete, but equipment and passenger facilities still need to be finished. Eagle-eyed readers will have noted the "II" in the ship's name. Yes, there is a twin Global Dream, but it hasn't been given the ax... yet. The Mail reports that right now the two ships are being stored in a German shipyard in Wismar. However, that yard will soon be used to build military vessels. That means the Global Dreams have to be out of there by the end of next year.

Rolls-Royce has ended its involvement in a project by Boom Supersonic to develop a faster-than-sound passenger airliner, leaving unclear the powerplant options available to Boom. FlightGlobal reports: "We are appreciative of Rolls-Royce's work over the last few years, but it became clear that Rolls' proposed engine design and legacy business model is not the best option for Overture's future airline operators or passengers," Boom said on 7 September. "Later this year, we will announce our selected engine partner and our transformational approach for reliable, cost-effective and sustainable supersonic flight."

Earlier in the day, news broke that R-R had backed out of the Boom project. "We've completed our contract with Boom and delivered various engineering studies for their Overture supersonic program," the UK engine manufacturer says. "After careful consideration, Rolls-Royce has determined that the commercial aviation supersonic market is not currently a priority for us and, therefore, will not pursue further work on the program at this time. It has been a pleasure to work with the Boom team and we wish them every success in the future."

Boom, with offices in Denver, has been developing a supersonic aircraft called Overture that it says will carry up to 80 passengers and cruise at Mach 1.7. It initially intended for Overture to have two engines, but recently changed to a four-engined design. The company has been targeting first flight of Overture in 2026 and first delivery in 2029. "Overture remains on track to carry passengers in 2029, and we are looking forward to making our engine announcement later this year," Boom says.

Meta Platforms has disbanded its Responsible Innovation team, which was once a prominent piece of its effort to address concerns about the potential downsides of its products. From a report: The team had included roughly two dozen engineers, ethicists and others who collaborated with internal product teams and outside privacy specialists, academics and users to identify and address potential concerns about new products and alterations to Facebook and Instagram. Meta spokesman Eric Porterfield said the company remains committed to the team's goals, and that most of its former members would continue similar work elsewhere at Meta, though they aren't guaranteed new jobs. He said the company believed its safe and ethical product design resources were better spent on more issue-specific teams.

The team's demise comes at a tumultuous time for Meta, as it contends with a precipitous slowdown in its core digital-advertising business that has prompted it to slow hiring in recent months. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has been trying to overhaul a broad swath of the social-media giant's businesses, emphasizing initiatives that can help drive near-term growth or that fit with his longer-term emphasis on the metaverse, a loosely defined, more immersive version of the internet that he says is central to the company's future. As envisioned, according to past statements by the company and the team's leaders, the Responsible Innovation team was to have had a formative role in future company products, beginning with encouraging newly hired engineers in how to think about potential downsides to what they build and then consulting on the design of specific products.

Until about a month ago, shoppers on Dell's website looking for a new laptop could log in using their Facebook credentials to avoid creating a new username and password. That option is now gone. Dell isn't alone. CNBC: Other big brands, including Best Buy, Ford Motor, Pottery Barn, Nike, Patagonia, Match and Amazon's video-streaming service Twitch have removed the ability to sign on with Facebook. It's a marked departure from just a few years ago, when the Facebook login was plastered all over the internet, often alongside buttons that let you sign in with Google, Twitter or LinkedIn. Jen Felch, Dell's chief digital and chief information officer, said people stopped using social logins, for reasons that include concerns over security, privacy and data-sharing.

"We really just looked at how many people were choosing to use their social media identity to sign in, and that just has shifted over time," Felch said. "One thing that we see across the industry is more and more security risks or account takeovers, whether that's Instagram or Facebook or whatever it might be, and I just think we're observing people making a decision to isolate that social media account versus having other connections to it." The disappearing login is the latest sign of Facebook's diminishing influence on the internet following more than a decade of spectacular growth. In the past year, the company's business has been beset by Apple's iOS privacy change, which made it harder to target ads, a deteriorating economy, competition from short-video service TikTok, and reputational damage after a whistleblower leaked documents showing Facebook knew of the harm caused by many of its products.

American social media companies are increasingly feeling the squeeze from TikTok, the fastest growing video platform on the planet, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. At this year's Code Conference, some of the world's top tech and media CEOs, and prominent political voices, raised concerns at the event about the power, rapid growth and surveillance capabilities of the Chinese-owned platform, in some cases calling for it to be banned altogether. From a report: "The reason why this has been so challenging for companies to respond to in the United States, but also around the world, is the scale of TikTok's investment," said Spiegel of Snap, which recently laid off some 20% of its own workforce.

"What nobody had anticipated in the United States was the level of investment that ByteDance made into the U.S. market, and of course in Europe, because it was just something that was unimaginable -- no startup could afford to invest billions and billions and billions of dollars in user acquisition like that around the world," Spiegel said Wednesday night. "It was a totally different strategy than any technology company had expected before because it wasn't an innovation-led strategy; it was really about subsidizing large-scale user acquisition."

Apple CEO Tim Cook dismissed the idea of adopting RCS messaging to put an end to the green bubbles that surround messages when iPhone users text someone on an Android device. From a report: "I don't hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point," Cook said when asked how Apple founder Steve Jobs would feel about using the RCS standard in iMessage during Vox Media's Code 2022 event on Wednesday night. Instead, Cook said, "I would love to convert you to an iPhone."

But the person who asked the question, Vox Media's LiQuan Hunt, came back with a valid complaint, saying that his mother can't see the videos he sends her. It all comes down to a lack of interoperability between iMessage and RCS, both messaging systems that could allow higher-quality images and videos -- if they worked together. If you've tried to send a video from Android to iOS (or vice versa) using your regular text messaging app, then you know that your videos come out completely fuzzy on the other end. Cook's suggestion to fix this annoying issue? "Buy your mom an iPhone."

Bob Iger, former Disney CEO, explained on Wednesday why Disney didn't acquire Twitter in 2016. He said: "We enter the process immediately, looking at Twitter as the solution: a global distribution platform. It was viewed as sort of a social network. We were viewing it as something completely different. We could put news, sports, entertainment, [and] reach the world. And frankly, it would have been a phenomenal solution, distribution-wise. Then, after we sold the whole concept to the Disney board and the Twitter board, and we're really ready to execute -- the negotiation was just about done -- I went home, contemplated it for a weekend, and thought, 'I'm not looking at this as carefully as I need to look at it.' Yes, it's a great solution from a distribution perspective. But it would come with so many other challenges and complexities that as a manager of a great global brand, I was not prepared to take on a major distraction and having to manage circumstances that weren't even close to anything that we had faced before. Interestingly enough, because I read the news these days, we did look very carefully at all of the Twitter users -- I guess they're called users? -- and we at that point estimated with some of Twitter's help that a substantial portion -- not a majority -- were not real. I don't remember the number but we discounted the value heavily. But that was built into our economics. Actually, the deal that we had was pretty cheap."

A timely mobile alert may have prevented hundreds of thousands of Californians from being plunged into darkness in the middle of a heat wave Tuesday night. Bloomberg reports: Just before 5:30 p.m. local time, California's grid operator ordered its highest level of emergency, warning that blackouts were imminent. Then, at 5:48 p.m., the state's Office of Emergency Services sent out a text alert to people in targeted counties, asking them to conserve power if they could. Within five minutes the grid emergency was all but over. Power demand plunged by 1.2 gigawatts between 5:50 and 5:55 p.m., and would continue to drop in the hours after that, according to data from the California Independent System Operator. A gigawatt is enough to power about 750,000 Californian homes.

But while the state's grid operator said California had avoided rolling blackouts Tuesday, some cities apparently didn't get the message. Officials in three San Francisco Bay area cities -- Alameda, Healdsburg and Palo Alto -- reported on social media that power shutdowns were underway that evening, which also could have contributed to the sharp decline in demand. By 8 p.m., the grid operator canceled the highest level of emergency without calling for power cuts. More than 500,000 homes and businesses had been warned earlier in the day that they might lose service.

Apple today announced that all iPhone 14 models sold in the U.S. do not have a built-in SIM card tray and instead rely entirely on eSIM technology. MacRumors reports: Tech specs on Apple's website confirm the iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 14 Pro, and iPhone 14 Pro Max are not compatible with physical SIM cards and instead have dual eSIM support, allowing for multiple cellular plans to be activated on a single device. An eSIM is a digital SIM that allows users to activate a cellular plan without having to use a physical nano-SIM card. eSIM availability is rapidly expanding, but the technology is still not available in all countries, which explains why iPhone 14 models will remain available with a SIM card tray outside of the U.S. for now. Apple's website has a list of carriers that support eSIM technology around the world. In the U.S., this includes AT&T, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Verizon, Xfinity Mobile, Boost Mobile, H2O Wireless, Straight Talk, C Spire, and some others.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: In March, two veteran Facebook engineers found themselves grilled about the company's sprawling data collection operations in a hearing for the ongoing lawsuit over the mishandling of private user information stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The hearing, a transcript of which was recently unsealed (PDF), was aimed at resolving one crucial issue: What information, precisely, does Facebook store about us, and where is it? The engineers' response will come as little relief to those concerned with the company's stewardship of billions of digitized lives: They don't know.

The admissions occurred during a hearing with special master Daniel Garrie, a court-appointed subject-matter expert tasked with resolving a disclosure impasse. Garrie was attempting to get the company to provide an exhaustive, definitive accounting of where personal data might be stored in some 55 Facebook subsystems. Both veteran Facebook engineers, with according to LinkedIn two decades of experience between them, struggled to even venture what may be stored in Facebook's subsystems. "I'm just trying to understand at the most basic level from this list what we're looking at," Garrie asked. "I don't believe there's a single person that exists who could answer that question," replied Eugene Zarashaw, a Facebook engineering director. "It would take a significant team effort to even be able to answer that question." When asked about how Facebook might track down every bit of data associated with a given user account, Zarashaw was stumped again: "It would take multiple teams on the ad side to track down exactly the -- where the data flows. I would be surprised if there's even a single person that can answer that narrow question conclusively." [...]

Facebook's stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level. In the March 2022 hearing, Zarashaw and Steven Elia, a software engineering manager, described Facebook as a data-processing apparatus so complex that it defies understanding from within. The hearing amounted to two high-ranking engineers at one of the most powerful and resource-flush engineering outfits in history describing their product as an unknowable machine. The special master at times seemed in disbelief, as when he questioned the engineers over whether any documentation existed for a particular Facebook subsystem. "Someone must have a diagram that says this is where this data is stored," he said, according to the transcript. Zarashaw responded: "We have a somewhat strange engineering culture compared to most where we don't generate a lot of artifacts during the engineering process. Effectively the code is its own design document often." He quickly added, "For what it's worth, this is terrifying to me when I first joined as well."