A number of Amazon’s Chinese suppliers are linked to forced Uyghur labor camps from China’s Xinjiang region, according to a new report from the Tech Transparency Project. The organization found that five of Amazon’s suppliers have been directly accused by watchdog groups and journalists of relying on workers from China’s many “reeducation centers”, which it uses to detain Uyghur Muslims, Kazakhs and other ethnic minorities. The suppliers produce Amazon devices and Amazon-branded products, such as the Amazon Basics line of home goods and tech accessories.

“The findings raise questions about Amazon’s exposure to China’s repression of minority Uyghurs in Xinjiang—and the extent to which the e-commerce giant is adequately vetting its supplier relationships," wrote the authors of the report. "Amazon says that its suppliers 'must not use forced labor' and that it 'does not tolerate suppliers that traffic workers or in any other way exploit workers by means of threat, force, coercion, abduction, or fraud.' But its supplier list tells a different story.” 

Two of the suppliers named in the report—Luxshare Precision Industry and AcBel Polytech—were also used by Apple, according to an investigation last year from The Information. Both Amazon and Apple have denied working with forced labor suppliers, despite evidence that suggests otherwise.

“Amazon complies with the laws and regulations in all jurisdictions in which it operates, and expects suppliers to adhere to our Supply Chain Standards. We take allegations of human rights abuses seriously, including those related to the use or export of forced labor. Whenever we find or receive proof of forced labor, we take action,” Amazon spokesperson Erika Reynoso said in a statement to NBC.

The Australian Institute of Strategic Policies found that many major global brands deployed forced labor from China, including Adidas, Gap, H&M, Microsoft, Nike, Sony, Victoria’s Secret and Zara. Amnesty International estimates that China is currently holding roughly 1 million prisoners in internment camps, where they are reportedly forced to renounce their religion and subject to hard labor in factories. The camps are mostly in the Western China region of Xinjiang, and have been in place since 2017.

Both the US and the EU imposed sanctions on China in 2021, barring any imports from Xinjiang until businesses can prove that they no longer use forced labor. But the report found that many Amazon-branded products are still produced in the Xinjiang region. For example, the report found that a couple of towel brands still listed on Amazon advertise using “China-long staple cotton” from the Xinjiang region.

“Amazon’s continued use of companies with well-documented ties to forced labor in Xinjiang cast doubt on the tech giant’s stated intolerance of human rights abuses in its supply chain,” wrote the report’s authors.

SNL comic Pete Davidson, who once played an astronaut on a sketch with Elon Musk, may reportedly be a passenger on an upcoming Blue Origin flight, reportedPage Six. The Jeff Bezos-owned commercial space travel company has successfully launched three crewed spaceflights over the past year. A source close to Davidson said that while he had yet to sign an official contract, details are currently being finalized. It’s unlikely the 28-year old’s desire to be launched into space at the cost of $2.5 million per minute just appeared out of nowhere. In fact, Davidson and his girlfriend Kim Kardashian dined with Jeff Bezos and his partner Lauren Sanchez earlier this year. According to Page Six’s source, Davidson “got on really well” with Bezos.

How much is Davidson’s journey into the edge of space going to cost? Blue Origin has been notoriously tight-lipped about the price of seats on its future flights. The winning bid in a public auction for a seat on the very first Blue Origin flight was $28 million. The winner, Justin Sun, CEO of blockchain platform Tron, later had to give up his seat because of “scheduling conflicts” (luckily he was able to reschedule the once-in-a-lifetime experience for another date). But the actual price of a seat is most likely far less. The cost of upcoming suborbital flights through Richard Branson’s commercial flight company, Virgin Galactic, is a far more frugal $400,000. Bezos has said in earlier interviews that a seat on Blue Origin’s New Shepard would likely be in the same ballpark. Given that Davidson’s net worth is estimated to be around $8 million, it’s likely this will be more appropriate for his budget range. Not all Blue Origin passengers have had to pay, so it's possible Davidson may have secured a better deal. 

New Glenn’s next flight is scheduled for takeoff at some point in the fourth quarter of 2022. Thanks to the surge of celebrity interest in Bezo's commercial space venture, Davidson will actually be the third SNL alum to join a Blue Origin flight. Former Blue Origin passengers William Shatner and Bezos have both hosted SNL.

A group of Democratic lawmakers led by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) want regulators to take a closer look at Amazon’s points-based attendance policy, which they believe may be punishing workers for taking legally protected time off. First reported by Vice, the letter to the Department of Labor and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission focuses on Amazon’s “no-fault” approach to absences, which adds points every time an employee misses work without giving advance notice, regardless of the reason. If workers reach a certain number of points, they are automatically reviewed for termination.

Under the company’s attendance policy, an employee whose child has suddenly fallen ill or who suffers a medical emergency would still be penalized. Employees who don’t report absences at least 16 hours before the start of shift receive two points on their record. If they give notice less than two hours before a shift, they receive two points and an “absence submission infraction”. If workers receive three absence submission infractions and eight attendance points, Amazon will consider firing them.

Lawmakers believe that Amazon’s attendance policy could violate current laws that allow workers to take sick, family, medical and pregnancy leave without advance notice. For example, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) guarantees eligible workers unpaid leave for a variety of circumstances, including pregnancy or the need to take care of a sick family member.

“We field numerous calls from Amazon employees; while many workers know about Amazon’s punitive attendance policies, they describe never receiving information about the federal, state, and local laws that entitle them to legally protected time off—much less understanding how such laws apply in practice in their own lives,” noted labor rights group Better Balance in a letter to Congress.

Other companies with "no-fault" attendance policies have run into legal troubles in the past. Back in 2011, Verizon was ordered to pay $20 million after the EEOC found that the company's no-fault attendance policy made no exceptions for disabled workers. 

Many warehouse workers have complained that Amazon neglected to inform them of their rights under FMLA or disability laws. The company has had a poor track record with how it treats workers at its many warehouses and fulfillment centers. A number of warehouses, in response to poor working conditions at the e-commerce giant, are currently pushing to unionize.

Twitter will resume business travel and open up its offices all around the world on March 15th, according to a tweet by Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. While some Twitter staff began working out of the company’s San Francisco and New York City offices last fall, most offices have remained closed since the beginning of the pandemic. But unlike many companies who are returning to in-person operations, Twitter is not requiring employees to come back. Early into the pandemic, Twitter granted employees the option of working from home indefinitely.

Agrawal noted that a workforce where a large fraction will either be 100 percent remote or switching between the office and home will have its unique challenges. “In 2020 we adjusted quickly to working virtually with resilience and agility, but almost all of us were working from home. Distributed working will be much, much harder. Anyone who has joined a meeting remotely while others are in a conference room knows this pain. There will be lots of challenges in the coming months, and we’ll need to be proactive, intentional, learn and adapt,” wrote Agrawal. 

Both Twitter and Slack have adopted “work from home forever” policies during the pandemic, but other tech companies are being more strict. Facebook employees have the option to request to work from home permanently, but some roles are not eligible for this privilege. Google is mandating that all employees return to work by April 4th for at least three days a week, though employees can request extensions or apply to work from home permanently.

Spotify has shut down its Moscow operations indefinitely in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, reported Variety. The streaming platform had just opened a representative office in Moscow last month, after a new Russian law required foreign tech companies with an audience of over 500,000 users to establish an office in the nation by 2022. But the law is new enough that most of the companies impacted (a list that includes Meta, Twitter and Telegram) have yet to comply. So far, Spotify, TikTok and Apple have opened offices in Russia.

Users in Russia will still be able to access Spotify. “We think it’s critically important to try to keep our service operational in Russia to allow for the global flow of information,” according to the statement provided to Variety by a Spotify spokesperson.

Spotify will also yank RT and Sputnik News off its platform, both Kremlin-funded news outlets with a massive global audience. Critics say both outlets function as propaganda tools for the Russian government and their foreign policy interests. Canada and the EU have both banned Russian state programming from their airwaves in recent days, and both outlets are under investigation in the UK. 

But it's still pretty easy to view such Kremlin-backed outlets in the US. The National Association of Broadcasters has called for US broadcasters to stop airing RT, RT America and Sputnik News; so far only DirectTV and Roku has complied. Both Apple and Google have also removed apps from these outlets from their app stores. 

But most other platforms, including Meta, TikTok and YouTube, are merely demoting or downranking Russian state-backed channels in the United States, though they are banning them outright in the European Union. Meta has stopped recommending RT and Sputnik News channels in the feeds of Facebook Main and Instagram, but users can directly go to the pages themselves.

After nearly two years working from home, Google employees in the Bay Area and several other cities will be back at the office on April 4th. The announcement came in an email from John Casey, Google’s vice president of global benefits, reported CNBC. Casey cited the steady drop in COVID-19 cases in the Bay Area, advances in treatment and improved safety measures as reasons behind the return’s timing. Google, along with much of Silicon Valley, initially planned a January return-to-work date, but was forced to delay it due to the Omicron surge. Since then, the company has allowed workers to voluntarily return to its Mountain View and San Francisco offices if they agree to wear a mask and are fully vaccinated.

Google is taking a slow approach to transitioning its entire workforce back to the office. Last year CEO Sundar Pichai laid out a "hybrid work" plan, with most employees having the option to work remotely for at least part of the week. We'll see this plan in action in April, with most Google employees still working from home two days a week. Employees can work at the office more often if they choose, or file for an extension of their work-from-home arrangement if they’re not ready to return. 

Springtime seems to be when much of Big Tech is eyeing a return to campus. Microsoft employees returned to work at the Redmond, Washington headquarters this week, but with the expectation that most employees will spend about 50 percent of their time working remotely. Most Meta employees will be returning to the office on March 28th. Twitter employees can opt to work remotely forever, but has allowed employees access to their San Francisco and New York City offices if they show proof of vaccination.

President Joe Biden called for the “vast majority” of federal employees to return to the office in his State of the Union Speech on Tuesday. So it’s likely we’ll see even more companies announce their re-opening dates soon, especially if cases continue to decline and cities drop mask mandates.

SEC officials do not know the whereabouts of Satish Kumbhani, the founder of crypto trading platform BitConnect, who was charged last week with defrauding investors of $2.4 billion in a Ponzi scheme. This puts the SEC in quite a bind, since they have to serve the 36-year old entrepreneur with his court papers. In a court filing from Monday, the SEC stated that they did not have an address for Kumbhani, an Indian citizen, and suspected that he likely fled to another country. 

The DOJ is charging Kumbhani with a number of offenses, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodity price manipulation and conspiracy to commit international money laundering.

“Kumbhani’s location remains unknown, and the Commission remains unable to state when its efforts to locate him will be successful, if at all," wrote the SEC in its filing.

In order to buy some time, the SEC is asking the US District Court for the Southern District of New York for an extension of 90 days. Since BitConnect is an unincorporated entity and not a formal corporation, all court papers have to be served to Kumbhani himself.

First founded in 2016, BitConnect attracted a lot of attention on social media for its “Lending Program” which allowed users to lend their Bitcoin in exchange for a propriety Bitconnect cryptocoin. The program claimed it could guarantee returns by using investors’ money to trade on the volatility of the cryptocurrency markets." 

“Under this program, Kumbhani and his co-conspirators touted BitConnect’s purported proprietary technology, known as the 'BitConnect Trading Bot' and 'Volatility Software', as being able to generate substantial profits and guaranteed returns by using investors’ money to trade on the volatility of cryptocurrency exchange markets. As alleged in the indictment, however, BitConnect operated as a Ponzi scheme by paying earlier BitConnect investors with money from later investors,” wrote the DOJ’s Office of Public Affairs in a press release.

After years of crypto existing in a legally murky universe, U.S. government officials are cracking down on cryptocurrency fraud and scams at an increasing rate. Last year, the DOJ launched a national cryptocurrency enforcement team to handle complex cryptocurrency investigations, and recently appointed veteran cybersecurity prosecutor Eun Young Choi as its director.

BitConnect is just one of many cryptocurrency schemes that law enforcement has pinned down in recent months. The founders of BitMex, a crypto derivatives exchange, plead guilty to skirting anti-laundering laws in the US and were ordered to pay $20 million in fines. Earlier this month, the DOJ arrested Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, two entrepreneurs who allegedly attempted to launder more than 25,000 Bitcoins stolen from the 2016 Bitfinex hack.

When your Kia electric vehicle is out of power, you can now order a technician who will arrive with a battery and charge it for you. The automaker is partnering with Currently, an on-demand mobile EV charging app, to service Kia customers in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose. While there’s no shortage of public chargers in these cities (San Jose has the highest number of public chargers per capita in the country), Kia is only using these three cities as a launching pad. It plans to expand Currently service to other cities in the future.

In order to use the service, simply download the Currently app and book a time and place for the charge. A Currently technician will then arrive at your location with a portable charging system. Drivers don’t have to be present during the charging, but should make sure their charging port can be accessed by their technician.

Under the partnership, Kia EV drivers will receive two free months of service with Currently. Following the trial period, Currently subscriptions range from $25 a month (for two charge deliveries) to $80 a month (for six charge deliveries). But note that Currently will only deliver a charge that the company says is good for 50 miles, and that can vary depending on your specific vehicle.

Unfortunately, if you’re ever stranded on the highway, it’s best to call your roadside assistance service. Currently doesn’t dispatch its technicians to highways. While it’s unlikely all drivers will want mobile EV charging regularly (especially in large EV markets with plentiful public chargers), it could be convenient for those who are time-strapped or in an emergency.

Taxpayers can now delete any selfies they submitted to ID.me, the company tasked by the IRS to verify identities. Following uproar from privacy advocates, civil liberties groups and Congress, the federal agency last month axed a new requirement that taxpayers who want to access certain online services must comply with ID.me's facial recognition tool. Users were asked to verify their identity by uploading a selfie and government-issued ID onto ID.me’s portal, which uses automated facial recognition to vet the images. Beginning today, any ID.me account holders who wish to delete their presence on the site can do so by simply visiting account.id.me. Don’t worry if you don’t get around to it. ID.me will automatically delete all facial recognition data from taxpayers on March 11th.

Not all taxpayers were required to use ID.me (only users seeking to look up past tax returns or child tax credit refunds online, and this is only if you don't have a current online IRS account). Unfortunately, if you fall into those two groups, you’ll still need to jump through some extra hoops on ID.me's website. Users will need to schedule a video interview with an IRS agent, as well as submit a photo ID such as a driver’s license, passport or state ID. While a video call may be less of a privacy invasion than facial recognition, you may be in for a long wait. While some users connect to a video agent in a matter of minutes, some have reported wait times of a few hours or more. Automated facial recognition is still an option for those who can’t stand the wait time. The company announced that starting on March 11th, it will begin automatically deleting photos submitted by users within 24 hours. 

Luckily for those who already have an IRS online account, they can skip ID.me altogether. The IRS has promised to roll out a new authentication tool by next tax season that won’t require ID.me, but hasn’t detailed what it is. Tax-related identity theft surged during the pandemic, with many thieves filing fraudulent claims for unemployment benefits. The agency advises taxpayers to file early, and to be on the lookout for any letters from the IRS about potential identity fraud. Taxpayers can also file for an Identity Protection Pin (IP Pin), a special six-digit number issued by the IRS that provides another layer of security in case your social security number is compromised.

Uber hopes to accelerate a planned sale of its remaining holdings in Yandex.Taxi, the Russian-owned ride-hailing platform, reportedThe New York Times. Uber owns a 29% stake in the service, which was roughly equivalent to $800 million at the end of 2021. While speeding up the sale is directly in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Uber has been looking to exit the Russian market for a while. Last year Uber announced it would sell its stake of Yandex’s autonomous vehicle and food delivery divisions back to the Russian internet company for a total of $1 billion. In the wake of Monday’s decision, three Uber executives resigned from the board of Yandex.Taxi.

“In light of recent events, we are actively looking for opportunities to accelerate the sale of our remaining holdings and, in the meantime, will remove our executives from the board of the joint venture,” Uber said in a statement to the Times.

The decision aligns with similar moves made by private US companies like Google, Apple, Meta, Netflix and others to cut ties with Russia in light of its invasion of Ukraine. It will also mark the end of what has been a very rocky ride for Uber in Russia, since it first launched in the country in 2014. The ride-hailing and food delivery market in Russia was already dominated by Yandex.Taxi, which is partly owned by Russia’s largest tech company, Yandex. Both companies entered in a $3.7 billion dollar deal in 2017, with Uber owning 37 percent of Yandex.Taxi. Customers in Russia can use either the Yandex or Uber app to hail a ride.

Concerns that Yandex.Taxi is illegally harvesting user data prompted Lithuania’s transport and economy minister on Monday to ask Google and Apple to remove the app from their respective app stores, citing national security concerns. Back in 2018, the head of Lithuania’s cybersecurity center noted that the Yandex.Taxi app requests access to your camera, microphone and local data network, and urged locals not to use the platform. Yandex has denied the allegations and stated that the app complies with EU data regulations.