Netflix assembled an impressive roster of writers and editors for its fan site project, Tudum, which launched in early December of 2021. Today, a significant portion of those new hires have been sent packing for reasons unknown. 

A swath of the site's formerstaffannounced their departures today on Twitter, with former Vice culture writer Josh Terry claiming "laid off my team," suggesting the cuts may be drastic. Netflix claims there are no plans to mothball the site. It declined to comment on the number of workers who were impacted but confirmed that some amount of staff and contractors had been let go; The Hollywood Report placed its estimate at least 10 people. 

All a Netflix spokesperson would tell Engadget on the record was that "our fan website Tudum is an important priority for the company." 

Tudum was billed by Netflix on launch as "a backstage pass that lets you dig deeper into the Netflix films, series, and stars you love" — essentially an attempt to prop up a media business on the strength of the streaming platform's original content. It's not clear at this time what kind of change in staffing or strategy prompted this round of layoffs, who remains at the site or if the newly-separated writers and editors were given any advance notice. 

The job cuts come not long after Netflix announced during its quarterly earnings that it had lost subscribers (approximately 200,000 of them) for the first time in a decade. What followed was a swift and brutal backlash from the market that saw the streaming service's share price drop by 25 percent. So far it's plans to turn the ship around have been limited to trying to stop customers from sharing login information, and mulling the idea of a cheaper ad-supported subscription tier. 

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Earlier this month, Verizon retail workers at locations in Lynnwood and Everett, Washington successfully voted to join the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Now the company has fired Jesse Mason, a worker at the nearby Seattle Northgate and Aurora Village locations. He contends his sudden separation from the company was an illegal attempt to prevent more stores from organizing, and has, with the help of the CWA, filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) charge against the company with the National Labor Relations Board.

Mason, who previously worked with AT&T (which is unionized under CWA), started at Verizon in August and had received no prior disciplinary actions — in fact, he told Engadget, he was one of the top Specialists at his branch. It wasn't until his annual review that he started to wonder if maybe unionization could be a path toward making Verizon more equitable. 

"They were like, 'Well, you're newer to Verizon, therefore because you're new your raise for the whole year is going to be 1 percent. It is not negotiable," he told Engadget. Performance notwithstanding, 1 percent did little to offset the cost of living in the greater Seattle area, or the country's soaring 8 percent inflation rate. "When you're giving people a 1 percent raise, that's the same thing as giving them a pay cut," he said. 

What solidified his decision to reach out to CWA was seeing the nationwide push by Starbucks workers to organize. In specific, attending a rally in his area sometime in February.

"A week after the Everett and Lynnwood vote went public, that they pulled me aside and told me that they were launching an investigation," Mason said, though he was unable to go into details on the nature of the investigation pending his ULP, "But it was about something very minor and easily correctable." What made this stranger, was the speed and lack of adherence to internal processes in his case. "There's some progressive discipline, like verbal warning, and a written warning and a final, final warning," he said "With me, the next shift that I worked after I was at the watch party to celebrate those stores unionizing, they said that the result of the investigation was my immediate separation from Verizon." 

Mason claimed to have never been given any of the documentation related to the investigation. Verizon did not respond to a request for comment.

In between the union drive going public a few miles away at his sister stores and Mason's firing, he also claimed Verizon flew in several company higher-ups — something a worker at the Lynnwood and Everett locations also alleged happened after going public. One manager, according to Mason, pushed misinformation regarding the cost of union dues to CWA, despite such contracts being publicly available. 

CWA Secretary-Treasurer Sara Steffens has called Mason's firing "a clear tactic meant to intimidate other workers,” and it's difficult to argue that Verizon's actions may have a chilling effect on organizing efforts in the area. Still, Mason said he's fully confident the NLRB will find in his favor and reinstate his job with backpay. But the among of rigamarole in the meantime shows the limits of the agency's power.

"I think that this case really shows some of the weaknesses of the NLRB currently, not just being understaffed, but that even if I do get my job back, it's not like one of those lawsuits where someone slips and falls and they get millions of dollars in settlements," Mason said. "There's no real consequence for this kind of retaliatory union busting." He added wryly, "I think it's a bad idea, because it's only going to have me work on union stuff full time until I'm back there."

A group of 21 quality assurance testers at Raven Software have received the blessing of the National Labor Relations Board to conduct a union vote, per a 27-page ruling from the agency released Friday. Raven's parent company — Activision Blizzard —did not respond in time to a request for voluntary recognition for the new union, the Game Workers Alliance, back in January. 

Tensions within the company came to a head last December, when approximately a third of the group's QA testers were suddenly laid off — after several months of promises to improve compensation. Raven workers began organizing shortly thereafter, and engaged in a weeks-long strike. 

Once they returned to work, however, they were informed their unit would be broken up. "Our QA colleagues will embed directly within various teams across the studio," was how Raven Studio head Brian Raffel put it at the time, a move the seemed intended to stymie unionization efforts. 

Since then, Activision tried to convince the NLRB that the dispersed nature of the QA team should be grounds to dismiss the vote. But as per today's ruling, the agency didn't sign on to that view. According to Jennifer Hadsall, a regional director of the agency, there is “no evidence that Q.A. testers are being eliminated or that their role would fundamentally change with the embed process.” Activision also tried (and failed) to convince the NLRB that the entirety of Raven Studio's estimated 230 employees would need to be included in the vote.

"We are pleased that after reviewing the evidence, the National Labor Relations Board rejected Raven Software management’s attempts to undermine our efforts to form a union," a group of Game Workers Alliance organizers told Engadget over email. "It’s now time for Raven management to stop trying to prevent us from exercising our rights. We are looking forward to voting for - and winning - our union."

According to a statement from Activision, the company is “disappointed that a decision that could significantly impact the future of our entire studio will be made by fewer than 10 percent of our employees.” The company is also seeking avenues to appeal the NLRB's ruling. 

Raven software was founded over 30 years ago and had a hand in producing some beloved games like Heretic and Hexen during the golden age of first-person shooters. Since its acquisition by Activision in 1997, it's role has largely been reduced to maintaining the Call of Duty franchise. 

Tensions between Raven and its owners have mirrored those within Activision Blizzard at large, where sexual misconduct claims, allegedly covered up by the company's top brass have roiled rank-and-file workers. Employees staged a walkout last November in disgust, to voice dissent against the corporate culture in general and CEO Bobby Kotick in specific. Earlier this week it was reported that on two separate occasions, Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg used her influence to allegedly quash negative stories about Kotick, her then-boyfriend, that were in the works at British tabloid The Daily Mail. 

The NLRB will begin mailing out ballots to eligible part-time and full-time QA workers, who will have until May 20 to cast; a vote count is presently schedule to take place on May 23. 

Are you an Activision Blizzard worker with a tip to share? You can reach me confidentially on Signal messengered at 646 983 9846.

When Elli Daniels started working at the Apple Store in Cumberland Mall location in Atlanta, her hourly wage was $16.50 — rosy by comparison to the federal minimum Georgia adopts, but below average for sales in her metro region. Three years later and in spite of several raises, her pay has nowhere near kept up pace with national inflation, or Apple's soaring profits for that matter. 

She's one of the 100 eligible workers at the Apple Store location that petitioned the National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday, with the backing of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), to hold a union election. It will be the first such election for an Apple retail location in the US.

"One of the biggest things that we're fighting for is going to be for fair pay and a livable wage, because with Atlanta being such a huge city, it's just getting more and more expensive to live here," Daniels told Engadget. "Everybody deserves the opportunity to be able to not worry about whether they can afford food or pay their bills. Everybody deserves to be able to afford to live in the city that they work in." 

Daniels, a product zone specialist, was clear however, that her and her coworkers' desire for better pay isn't borne out of grievance. By all indications a sincere devotee of Apple's products, she specified that "we want to do this because we love this company, not because we want to turn our back on them."

Similarly to the Google Fiber retail workers who recently unionized in Kansas City, Missouri, Apple has been completely silent on the issues, according to Daniels. "We haven't heard anything from Apple corporate at all." Consequently, the workers and CWA opted to file for both voluntary recognition and a union election simultaneously. Apple's silence seems to indicate the company intends to let things go to a vote, though we've reached out to them for confirmation. 

Over the pandemic years, Apple has raked in tremendous profits, even as the economy at large suffers. It has posted record-breaking quarters over and over, but the winnings aren't being distributed equally, according to Daniels. Raising wages is an obvious way to relieve material hardship for Apple Store workers, some of whom have "had to leave the company because they just needed more money to be able to pay their bills, because they were growing a family." But it's also a philosophical means to "try to close the gap" between corporate and retail employees. "It's really important that both sides of the coin get fair treatment in the company that we all work for," she said.

Cumberland workers aren't alone, either. Apple Store workers in New York City's Grand Central terminal, backed by the Fruit Stand Workers United, recently called for a minimum wage of $30 per hour. They're also riding a wave of newfound union sentiment displayed by the first successful unionization vote at a US Amazon warehouse, as well as a rash of successful union drives across Starbucks locations nationwide. As yet, Apple has not seemingly deployed the same captive audience meetings and union-busting techniques those companies have become increasingly associated with. 

"We love Apple no matter what," Daniels stressed, "I think it's all just making sure that we all can put our heads together and really make Cumberland the best place that it can be for all of us — both for us that are here now, as well as people that are that are here in the future."

Earlier this evening, the Capitol Police in Washington, D.C. called for an evacuation of Congress due to an "aircraft that poses probable threat" which was flying circles around Capitol Building airspace, according to the Associated Press's Zeke Miller. Given the violent riot and attempted insurrection that recently took place there, one could forgive USCP for operating with an abundance of caution. 

What became clear in short order was that the aircraft in question, according to Flight Radar, had taken off from nearby Joint Base Andrews, and was of a make and model in use by Army parachute teams as well as commercial skydivers. Incidentally, that's because the payload of this suspicious Viking DHC-6-400 was, in fact, parachutists. Parachutists from the Army's Golden Knights, specifically, who were dropping into Nationals Park during tonight's game against the Arizona Diamondbacks. (At the time of this writing, the Diamondbacks are winning, handily.)

As later reported by severaljournalists, the airspace incursion was part of a preplanned Military Appreciation Day — which appears on the Nat's game schedule and entitles two free tickets to (as it's written on their website) "ACTIVE DUTY, DEPENDENTS, VETERANS, AND RESERVISTS WITH MILITARY ID OR PROOF OF SERVICE, WHILE SUPPLIES LAST." Whatever your feelings on reverence for the armed forces during sporting events, undeniably these sorts of these happen regularly, and the subset of those displays that involve parachuting service members are not uncommon. 

It's not precisely clear where the breakdown in communication occurred. Did the Army forget to tell the Capitol Police? Did USCP get the memo but simply lose track of things, as one does in our busy, hyperconnected lives? According to NBC, Capitol Police "were not notified in advance of the planned Golden Knights jump" according to "a law enforcement source." 

We've reached out both USCP and Joint Base Andrews to illuminate the situation. But rather than mock an honest of nationally panic-inducing mistake from the comfort of our keyboards, we thought it best to led our expertise in order to prevent such a situation from occurring again. 

Google Calendar [Free]

It hardly bears mentioning, but Google Calendar is a standby for keeping track of important dates, like birthdays, meetings or when someone might be flying into restricted airspace. There are options to set up push notifications or emails to nudge you when those events are getting close. The last thing you want to do is come up against a deadline and panic!

Slack Notifications [Free with enterprise options]

Do the police or military even use Slack? I have no way to know. But given tonights events maybe they should! Setting up reminders in the workplace messaging application is pretty straightforward. 

Calendar [Free]

Been using Mac's Calendar software a lot lately and pretty rarely blank on the stuff I'm supposed to be doing (or not doing!) Microsoft has a parallel product in Outlook Calendar, for the Windows users among you. No one trusts me with important stuff like national security, but my hit-rate on never issuing an unnecessary evacuation is 100 percent. I think that speaks for itself. 

Calendly [Free with enterprise options]

Increasingly I seem to be getting invites through this service. I don't like it very much, but it still beats making a nation of 330 million people believe they're about to bear witness to a potential tragedy. 

Any.do [Free with premium options]

Haven't used this task reminder app and don't plan to. Keep seeing it on lists of 'best reminder software' though. Just trying to be helpful. 

A simple text message will do in a pinch [negligible cost per message]

Sometimes things slip! It's ok. Nearly everyone on the planet has a cell phone on their person at all times these days. Send the relevant party a quick message. While having something potentially annoying drop in your lap last minute is never ideal, it is always preferable to no communication at all. 

We'll update if we hear back about what exactly happened tonight. The Nationals' 'Patriotic Series' continues on May 29 (Memorial Day), July 4 and September 1, although those dates don't seem to feature any more parachuting. 

On a rush hour train in Brooklyn's Sunset Park Tuesday morning, an individual described as wearing a gas mask and construction vest opened fire inside a subway car, hitting 10 passengers and critically injuring five. Some commuters in the area however, discovered that in the wake of the shooting, fare prices quoted by rideshare companies had skyrocketed due to understandably increased demand. 

Some apparently contemporaneous tweets show users being quoted $70 or more to leave the neighborhood. 

“Our hearts go out to the victims of this morning’s terrible shooting in Sunset Park," Josh Gold, a spokesperson for Uber told Engadget. "Following the incident, Uber disabled surge pricing in the vicinity and capped pricing citywide." Similarly, Lyft has responded to one user on Twitter to state that it has "suspended prime-time pricing for riders in the area," thought the company has not yet responded to a request for comment. 

Neither company would say for how long they intend to keep surge pricing disabled. However, both have stated they'll refund customers in some capacity. "If anyone on our platform experienced unintended charges during this emergency, we will work to get them refunded," Gold told Engadget, clarifying that customers would still be charged the normal, non-surged price, rather than receive a complete refund for the trip. Lyft likewise in the same tweet stated it is "working to adjust fares for certain riders who paid prime-time prices when the situation first unfolded" though it did which overcharged passengers would be eligible. 

The appearance of price gauging during a tragic event is obviously not the kind of attention either company would prefer to get — and is an inherent danger to automated systems that are unable to account for the context of a localized increase in demand. Still, this is far rideshare companies have managed to bungle similar circumstances. Surge pricing spiked after a bomb in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan injured dozens in 2016; in Sydney, Australia during a 16-hour hostage crisis in 2014; in London after a vehicle was deliberately driven into a crowd of pedestrians in 2017; and in 2020 after eight people were shot in downtown Seattle, leaving one dead. 

The perpetrator of this morning's shooting remains at large some 12 hours later, though authorities have since released information on a person of interest.

In a tally with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) this afternoon, Google Fiber customer service workers — jointly employed by Google parent Alphabet and staffing agency BDS Connected Solutions — voted 9 to 1 to form a union. They'll be represented by the Alphabet Workers Union, an arm of the Communications Workers of America.

Workers at the store, which operates out of Kansas City, Missouri, told Engadget back in January that they were feeling left out of important workplace conversations, especially around safety and staffing. 

This story is developing...

It feels like the price of most things has increased lately — that's the rub with inflation. While many Americans who have experienced the rollercoaster of capitalism before have some familiarity with cost instability around staples like food and gas, inflation, SpaceX claims, is also behind some upcoming changes to its satellite internet provider, Starlink. 

"Due to excessive levels of inflation, the price of the Starlink kit is increasing from $499 to $549 for deposit holders, and $599 for all new orders, effective today," an email forwarded to Engadget states. "In addition, the Starlink monthly service price will increase from $99 to $110. The new price will apply to your subscription on 4/22/2022." 

The email reminds customers that, within their first year they can cancel and receive "a partial refund of $200," or a full refund if their equipment was received within the last 30 days. Several other customers have posted identical emails on Twitter, though the company has yet to respond to our request for confirmation, and for further details. We'll update if we hear back.

Last Thursday to celebrate the closing of a new $400 million round, the venture capital firm M13 held an invite-only schmoozing opportunity in the former offices of Musical.ly, opening with a introductory chat on "the future of crypto, the decentralized web, and creators." Curiously, one of the guests was Cameo's Steven Galanis who, according to audio provided to Engadget by an attendee, took the opportunity to share a metaphor he apparently has deployed before: that the rampant speculation around Web3 is akin to the colonization of the Americas by Europeans. To be clear, he seems to think of both as good things.

Cameo, the service that hit unicorn status last May and allows anyone to book a short, custom video message from celebrities and pseudo-celebrities like Fran Drescher, Gilbert Gottfried or the guy who played Hagrid, is not a Web3 business in any sense — not that "Web3" itself is a particularly meaningful or well-defined piece of terminology. 

But Galanis seems to have become something of a booster for these loosely conjoined elements of emergent tech. His Twitter profile picture is of toga- and 3D glasses-wearing Bored Ape NFT, for which he seems to have paid 100 ETH — the equivalent of around $300,000 at the time. He steered Cameo toward minting its own set of NFTs (called "Cameo Pass") last month with the promise that proceeds would be reinvested into, among other things,"exploration of further Web3 projects focused on fan/talent interactions." 

Presumably this enthusiasm — a contrast to the oftenchilly reception towards NFTs at other tech companies — helped land Galanis on stage for M13's shindig, along with Lightning Labs's Liz Stark. But in the course of his enthusiastic boosterism he shared "the analogy that I like to give people" about Web3, which we've edited for clarity (emphasis ours):

"I actually think right now it's like 1493. Columbus has just gotten back from the New World. And he's going to the King of Spain and the Queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, and he's like 'there's a whole world over there that like, there's literally just gold coming out of rivers.' And then the King of France hears about it, the Kingdom of England hears about it. And what does everybody decide? We need to start building boats. So right now we're in this age where everybody's building boats. Everybody's trying to go to this New World. [...] So everybody's going over, there's gonna mutinies on some boats. Somebody's gonna hit an iceberg. [...] But somebody is gonna end up on Manhattan, like in the digital world, and they're gonna pull a bunch of beads out of their pocket, and they're going to make the best real estate transaction of all time."

It boggles the mind that anyone could be aware of the colonization and systematic genocide of native peoples, and conclude that the moral is to not miss out on the opportunity to kill, steal and swindle again for personal gain. Or that if someone were to sincerely believe something quite so awful, they would at least have the good sense not to share that opinion, apparently, on multiple occasions.

Beyond the blunt insensitivity of the remarks, Galanis seems to have little to no grasp of the events he references. "Everybody is building boats!!!? This is a sort of 20th [century] arms race point of view," William Fowler, a professor emeritus of history at Northeaster, told Engadget via email. "England sent Cabot (1497) West, but that did not result in much. Not until Jamestown, 1607, did England, through a private company, establish a permanent colony in America. 

As for their naval power, England barely made it through the Armada, 1588, and did not have a first class navy until [the] mid 17th [century] ... France sent Cartier (1534), but it would be almost one hundred years before they got serious in Canada." All of this is to say nothing of the fact that Columbus was far from the first European to stumble onto the Americas (that distinction likely goes to the Vikings) or that he "went to his grave (1506) believing he had found a route to the Indies," according to Fowler.

The tale of Manhattan's land rights being bought out from under native people by the Dutch for baubles is, at best, highly exaggerated. Unlike Staten Island or other areas of land, the contract between the Dutch and native peoples for Manhattan is either lost or never existed, and according to the Gotham Center's Richard Howe "the extant evidence for the Dutch purchase of Manhattan is scant, indirect and circumstantial." 

While a letter claiming a transfer occurred, dated November 7 1626, does survive, it's both inconclusive and in no way mentions "beads" — rather that the land had been purchased "for the value of 60 guilders" (which is something like $1,000 in today's dollars.) Whether native tribes shared the same understanding of property, or could be said to have freely entered into these types of contracts is unresolved. Nor is it known if the people who allegedly signed over the deed were even the tribe primarily occupying Manhattan at the time.

Whatever the case, this "investment" was short-lived, and New Amsterdam was "taken easily by the British," according to Fowler, in 1664, less than 20 years after the rights were supposedly sold for a song. Let's not even get into how the metaphor fails on a structural level in that Web3 isn't a valuable resource simply awaiting discovery and exploitation. Its illusion of riches shares more in common with El Dorado than the "New World."

It might appear unfair to expect Galanis to have studied history, rather than basing offensive flights of fancy on colonialist myths. Then again, history was the man's area of study at Duke. Engadget made several attempts to contact Cameo to allow Galanis to explain precisely what he might have meant by this analogy, and have yet to hear back. "Trying to apply 21st [century] criteria to ages past should be done with great care," professor Fowler wrote, "[Galanis] may have something to say, but it is hard to dig through the rhetoric to get to his point, if he has any."

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During his first State of the Union address, President Biden announced that the same website where Americans could order free at-home covid tests will open up for a second round of distribution next week. 

The effort to mail out free tests began in mid-January, from an initial stockpile of 500,000,000. While the initiative was a welcome change — especially as an agreement between the White House and several retail chains to keep costs of these tests down had just expired — it was also criticized as being inadequate. Its major shortcoming was limiting each recipient address to four tests, an insufficient number for some households. 

Presumably this limitation was to prevent the nation's cache of tests from becoming depleted. But according to reports late last week, around half of that initial half-billion are yet to be claimed.

Unfortunately, this next round of distributions will be much like the first. While Biden was not specific in his speech to the nation, the covidtests.gov site states that "Starting next week, every home in the U.S. will be able to order an additional set of 4 tests." 

Covid testing in clinics around the country remain free, even to those without insurance coverage. The number of new cases continues to fall after the winter Omicron spike, and the CDC recently updated its guidance to suggest that the majority of Americans no longer need to wear masks in most circumstances.