Spain has fined Amazon and Apple a total of 194.1 million euros (over $218 million) for antitrust violations. According toReuters, the penalties relate to a deal the companies made in 2018 that made Amazon an authorized Apple dealer but also included alleged anti-competitive clauses. “The two companies restricted without justification the number of sellers of Apple products on the Amazon website in Spain,” Spain’s antitrust regulator, Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia (CNMC), said today.

The CNMC fined Apple 143.6 million euros and Amazon 50.5 million euros for their role in the alleged price-fixing conspiracy, based on contracts signed on October 31st, 2018. The agency said over 90 percent of existing vendors selling Apple products on Amazon were blocked from the storefront after the deal. In addition, Amazon allegedly restricted non-Spanish retailers in the European Union from reaching Spanish customers. The online retailer also supposedly diminished the allowed advertising from Apple’s competitors in consumer search results for Apple devices.

According to the CNMC, the result was higher online prices for Apple devices listed and sold in Spain.

Amazon and Apple denied that the deal hurt consumers in separate statements to Reuters. “We reject the suggestion made by CNMC that Amazon benefits from excluding sellers from its market place, as our business model hinges precisely on the success of the companies selling through Amazon,” an Amazon representative told the news outlet today. Similarly, Apple said the deal was about limiting counterfeit sales, adding that it had previously spent lots of money on hundreds of thousands of take-down notices for fake products.

The companies have two months to appeal the antitrust watchdog’s decision. Spokespeople for both firms told Reuters they plan to do just that.

At the Microsoft Inspire partner event today, the Windows maker announced pricing for its AI-infused Copilot for Microsoft 365. The suite of contextual artificial intelligence tools, the fruit of the company’s OpenAI partnership, will cost $30 per user for business accounts. In addition, the company is launching Bing Chat Enterprise, a privacy-focused version of the AI chatbot with greater security and peace of mind for handling sensitive business data.

Revealed in March, Microsoft 365 Copilot is the company’s vision of the future of work. The GPT-4-powered suite of tools lets you generate Office content using natural-language text prompts. For example, you can ask PowerPoint to create a presentation based on a Word document, generate a proposal from spreadsheet data or summarize emails and draft responses in Outlook — all by typing simple commands. “By grounding answers in business data like your documents, emails, calendar, chats, meetings and contacts, and combining them with your working context — the meeting you’re in now, the emails you’ve exchanged on a topic, the chats you had last week — Copilot delivers richer, more relevant and more actionable responses to your questions,” Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s Chief Communications Officer, wrote in an announcement today.

Microsoft began testing Copilot with a small group of select enterprise partners earlier this year but hasn’t yet announced when all business customers will gain access. However, announcing its pricing could mean that date is fast approaching. The $30 / mo. pricing will apply to Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers. The company still hasn’t announced Copilot consumer pricing or availability.

Meanwhile, Bing Chat Enterprise is Microsoft’s more security-minded variant of the popular AI chatbot that launched for consumers in February. “Since launching the new Bing in February, we’ve heard from many corporate customers who are excited to empower their organizations with powerful new AI tools but are concerned that their companies’ data will not be protected,” Shaw wrote. “That’s why today we’re announcing Bing Chat Enterprise, which gives organizations AI-powered chat for work with commercial data protection. What goes in — and comes out — remains protected, giving commercial customers managed access to better answers, greater efficiency and new ways to be creative.”

Bing Chat Enterprise begins rolling out today in a preview — at no additional cost — for Microsoft 365 E5, E3, Business Premium and Business Standard customers. In addition, the company says it will make the enterprise-focused chatbot available as a standalone $5 subscription “in the future.”

A typo has reportedly routed millions of US military emails — some containing highly sensitive information — to Mali. The problem stems from entering .ML instead of .MIL for the receiving email address domain. As reported by the Financial Times, the one-letter mistake has exposed data like “diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers” — and much more. Although the misdirected emails have (so far) landed with a contractor tasked with managing Mali’s country domain, control of .ML will soon revert to Mali’s government, which has ties to Russia.

The “typo leak” was exposed by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch contractor managing Mali’s country domain. Zuurbier says he made numerous attempts to warn the United States about the issue — beginning in 2014 — urging it to take it seriously; he says he hasn’t had any luck. He claims he started collecting the email this year as his contract’s expiration date (and handover of the domain, including the misfired emails, to the Malian government) approaches, as a last-ditch attempt to persuade the US to act with urgency. In a letter to the US in early July, Zuurbier wrote, “This risk is real and could be exploited by adversaries of the US.” He says he has collected around 117,00 emails, and nearly 1,000 more arrived last Wednesday alone.

Although Zuurbier says none of the messages were marked as classified, they still contain sensitive data about US military personnel, contractors and families. Reported contents include the travel plans for a May trip by US Army Chief of Staff, General James McConville, for a May trip to Indonesia. Other exposed information includes maps of installations, photos of bases, identity documents (including passport numbers), crew lists of ships, tax and financial records, medical data, ships’ crew lists, naval inspection reports, contracts, criminal complaints against personnel, internal bullying investigations and bookings. One email from an FBI agent included a Turkish diplomatic letter to the US, warning about possible operations by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

“If you have this kind of sustained access, you can generate intelligence even just from unclassified information,” former NSA head and retired four-star US Navy Admiral Mike Rogers told FT. Rogers says this isn’t uncommon, noting that people making mistakes isn’t out of the norm. However, he adds, “The question is the scale, the duration and the sensitivity of the information.”

Lt. Cmdr Tim Gorman, speaking for the Pentagon, told FT that the Department of Defense “is aware of this issue and takes all unauthorised disclosures of controlled national security information or controlled unclassified information seriously.” He said emails sent from .MIL to .ML address “are blocked before they leave the .mil domain and the sender is notified that they must validate the email addresses of the intended recipients,” which suggests the misdirected emails may have come from US military workers’ personal accounts.

Larry Hryb, better known as “Major Nelson” in Xbox circles, tweeted today that he’s leaving Microsoft. Hryb spent many years as one of the most prominent public faces of the brand as Director of Programming for Xbox Live. He didn’t state his reasons for leaving the company but said he plans to step back and work on his career’s next chapter. The move comes as Microsoft tries to close its $68 billion purchase of Activision. “As I take a moment and think about all we have done together, I want to thank the millions of gamers around the world who have included me as part of their lives,” Hryb said.

Hryb spent over two decades with Microsoft, joining the company as editor-in-chief of MSN Music in 2001. But in 2003, when he joined the Xbox division, he found his identity with the company. His public role was a combination of official employee and super fan. His blog posts, podcasts, interviews, unboxings and other various updates straddled the line between a marketing executive and a trusted “gamer’s gamer,” helping fans feel like they had one of their own on the inside at the gaming behemoth.

Xbox had used him less as a face of the company in recent years, but from at least the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, “Major Nelson” was practically synonymous with the platform. He says he got his gamer handle and public nickname from Larry Hagman’s character in the 1960s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie — after his TiVo recommended it.

Hryb hasn’t yet detailed what his next career chapter is. However, he did note that The Official Xbox Podcast, which he hosted, will take a hiatus this summer and return later “in a new format.”

Hayao Miyazaki’s first film in ten years (and supposedly his last) premiered in Japan today — without any lead-up marketing from Studio Ghibli. Soon after, Gkids announced that it had acquired the animated movie’s North American rights. Called Kimitachi wa Do Ikiruka (translated as “How Do You Live”) in Japan, the international release will use the title The Boy and the Heron. Gkids says it will arrive in North America “later this year.”

Little is known about the new movie, but Gkids describes the hand-drawn animated feature as “an original story written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki.” Studio Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki produces it with a musical score from Joe Hisaishi. It was previously announced that Miyazaki’s next film would have an IMAX release (as well as Dolby Atmos, Dolby Cinema and DTS:X) in Japan. However, it isn’t clear if it will screen in IMAX in the US.

When the film arrives stateside, don’t expect to see any more promotion than it got in Japan. Gkids says it will follow Studio Ghibli’s “unprecedented decision” to premiere the film in Japan without any marketing images, trailers, synopses ads — or any information — ahead of its surprise premiere today. Suzuki attributes the decision to honoring another era while hoping to spark imagination. “A poster and a title — that’s all we got when we were children. I enjoyed trying to imagine what a movie was about, and I wanted to bring that feeling back,” Suzuki reportedly told Japanese broadcaster NHK via The Japan Times and Deadline.

Gkids has distributed the North American versions of previous Miyazaki films, including The Tale of The Princess Kaguya, When Marnie Was There and From Up on Poppy Hill (among others). The 15-year-old producer and distributor has 12 Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations in its short history. “Hayao Miyazaki is a living legend in filmmaking, as evidenced by his Academy Award win for Spirited Away and his two Oscar nominations for Howl’s Moving Castle and The Wind Rises,’” David Jesteadt, president of Gkids, wrote in a press release today. “It’s been ten years since the world has seen a new film from Miyazaki-san, and Gkids is so proud and honored to unveil his latest, highly anticipated masterpiece in North America.”

LiveWire, the company spun out of Harley-Davidson’s electric division, has announced the specs of its S2 Del Mar e-motorcycle. The upcoming bike, which we already knew would cost $15,499, can go from zero to 60 mph in 3.0 seconds, has a top speed of 103 mph and 84 horsepower (63 kW).

The company announced preliminary S2 Del Mar specs earlier this year, but the official details slightly surpass some expectations. For example, LiveWire had said the bike would have a 110-mile city range, but it’s now rated for 113 miles of urban riding on a single charge. Its 3.0-second acceleration from zero to 60 mph is slightly faster than the originally advertised 3.1 seconds. In addition, its previously stated 184-pound-foot torque rating is now 194 ft-lb.

On the other hand, the S2 Del Mar is a bit heavier than expected: It’s now listed as 436 lbs in running order, as opposed to the 431 lbs LiveWire announced in April. Level 2 charging (for juicing its battery from 20 percent to 80 percent) is now listed at 78 minutes vs. the initial 75 minutes. The bike still doesn’t support fast charging and is limited to Level 1 and Level 2 capabilities. Of course, the S2 Del Mar is built as more of a commuter motorcycle than something you’d rely on for long distances: It’s only rated for 43 miles of sustained highway driving at 70 mph and a combined (highway / city) 70-mph range of 62 miles. If you drop it down to 55mph, it’s rated for 70 miles on the highway and 86 miles combined.

LiveWire

The bike supports OTA updates. “Now your motorcycle can receive updates and improvements as we develop them — keeping things easy, and keeping you riding,” the company’s website states. The bike has a four-inch round screen, connects to phones through USB-C and supports app-based navigation.

The S2 Del Mar still has the previously advertised $15,499 MSRP. Although we don’t yet know its release date, LiveWire earlier targeted a July US launch; with specs in hand, perhaps its official arrival isn’t far behind.

Twitter’s ad-revenue sharing program for creators has officially launched — and it’s reportedly already begun paying eligible Blue subscribers. Elon Musk announced the initiative in February, but with scant details about how it would work, nobody knew quite what to expect. However, some high-profile users report today they’ve received notifications about incoming deposits — including one user claiming he’s set to receive over $24,000. The rewards are based on ads in replies to eligible users’ content.

The program incentivizes creators who contribute popular content that drives ads — rewarding accounts that help Twitter make money (while driving new Blue subscriptions). “This means that creators can get a share in ad revenue starting in the replies to their posts,” a Twitter help article published today reads. “This is part of our effort to help people earn a living directly on Twitter.” Musk tweeted today that payouts “will be cumulative from when I first promised to do so in February.”

However, the bar is high to receive a transfer from the Musk-owned social media company. The support post says the revenue-sharing system applies to Twitter Blue or Verified Organizations subscribers with at least five million post impressions in each of the past three months. They’ll also need to pass a human review and adhere to the company’s Creator Subscriptions policies; Twitter will then pay eligible users using a Stripe account. The company says it will soon launch an application process, found under Monetization in account settings.

The move aims to make Twitter a more attractive platform for content creators. It may not be a coincidence that the program arrived about a week after Meta launched its Twitter rival Threads, which didn’t take long to gain traction — gaining over 100 million users in its first five days. That’s higher than previous record-holders ChatGPT and TikTok.

Around 80 Google Help subcontractors who recently voted to unionize with the Alphabet Workers Union-Communications Workers of America (AWU-CWA) found out last week that they will be laid off. The group began a hearing this week with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) regarding the complex issue of joint employment for contractors. “It really stinks of retaliation,” Casey Padron, a general writer on the team scheduled to lose her job in August, told Engadget today.

The group announced the unionization effort on Thursday, June 8th; around two-thirds of the workers were notified weeks later about the layoffs. The team includes writers and graphic designers who create internal and external content for the search giant, including Google Help support pages. They list Google and Accenture as joint employers “due to the direct role both companies play in shaping working conditions.” Because they were joint contractors employed by tech consultancy Accenture, they don’t appear to enjoy protections with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, legislation passed in 1988 that provides certain rights for laid-off workers. (California is currently considering expanding protections for contract workers.)

“Last week we received news that 80 of our nearly 120 recently unionized Google Help coworkers would be laid off,” said Julia Nagatsu Granstrom, Senior Writer and member of the Alphabet Workers Union- CWA. “We had exercised our right to organize as members of the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA in order to bring both Google and Accenture, a Google subcontractor, to the bargaining table to negotiate on several key demands, including layoff protections.” Nagatsu Granstrom describes the layoffs as “absolutely unacceptable,” given the timing of an active union campaign “with overwhelming support from workers.”

The Google Help cuts follow a group of company contractors rating search results who were fired last month after announcing intentions to unionize with the same organization, the AWU-CWA. However, they were reinstated and promised backpay after filing Unfair Labor Practice charges with the NLRB.


Henry Nicholls / reuters

Padron says the Google Help layoffs caught her off guard. “I was extremely surprised to hear about our team’s layoffs,” she told Engadget. “We are constantly told by Google and Accenture management how impressed they are with the quality of our work, so the timing of these layoffs looks suspiciously like retaliation for our union formation.” She says the employer’s proclaimed motive of budget tightening doesn’t add up. “They claimed that the cuts were a result of changes in budget allocation, but Accenture has also posted job listings that have our exact job description and project code.”

“These giant, wealthy corporations need to start living up to their own ‘core values’ and treating their workers with the dignity, respect, and humanity we deserve,” Padron added. “If these multi-billion dollar corporations can’t afford to provide humane working conditions to their employees, the business model needs radical change. Some of our operations managers and the Googlers we collaborate with have already expressed that Google’s help centers will suffer without our team. They will feel this loss, and they deserve to.”

Nagatsu Granstrom says the unionized workers will take “every recourse possible to support our impacted members and continue to organize workers at Google Help and beyond.” Padron echoes the upbeat, fighting tone. “If it’s Accenture and Google’s goal to demoralize us, they have failed,” she told Engadget. “We are more united than ever and will continue to fight for this job that so many of us love and rely on.”

A group of college professors sued Texas today for banning TikTok on state devices and networks, as reported byThe Washington Post. The plaintiffs say the prohibition compromises their research and teaching while “preventing or seriously impeding faculty from pursuing research that relates to TikTok,” including studying the very disinformation and data-collection practices the restriction claims to address. The plaintiffs say the ban makes it “almost impossible for faculty to use TikTok in their classrooms — whether to teach about TikTok or to use content from TikTok to teach about other subjects.”

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed the lawsuit in the name of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, an academic research advocacy group the Texas professors are members of. The lawsuit names Governor Greg Abbott and 14 other state and public education officials as defendants. “The government’s authority to control their research and teaching… cannot survive First Amendment scrutiny,” the complaint says.

One example cited by the plaintiffs is Jacqueline Vickery, Associate Professor in the Department of Media Arts at the University of North Texas, who studies and teaches how young people use social media for expression and political organizing. “The ban has forced her to suspend research projects and change her research agenda, alter her teaching methodology, and eliminate course materials,” the complaint reads. “It has also undermined her ability to respond to student questions and to review the work of other researchers, including as part of the peer-review process.”

The lawsuit says that, although faculty at public universities are public employees, the First Amendment shields them from government control over their research and teaching. “Imposing a broad restraint on the research and teaching of public university faculty is not a constitutionally permissible means of protecting Texans’ ‘way of life’ or countering the threat of disinformation,” the suit says, citing Abbott’s comments that he feared the Chinese government “wields TikTok to attack our way of life.” The suit also condemns the double standard of claiming to care about Texans’ privacy while still allowing Meta, Google and Twitter (all American companies) to harvest much of the same data as TikTok.

“The ban is suppressing research about the very concerns that Governor Abbott has raised, about disinformation, about data collection,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told The Washington Post. “There are other ways to address those concerns that don’t impose the same severe burden on faculty and researchers’ First Amendment rights,” he added, as well as their “ability to continue studying what has, like it or not, become a hugely popular and influential communications platform.”

This is the third lawsuit this year challenging state TikTok bans. Two Montana lawsuits funded by the Chinese social media company claim the prohibition violates free speech rights. According toThe New York Times, TikTok is not involved with the Texas suit.

A Congressional investigation concluded that several tax prep providers shared sensitive filing data with Meta and Google. It follows a 2022 report from The Markup highlighting the practice in which TaxSlayer, H&R Block and TaxAct used Meta’s Pixel tracking tool to harvest info like filing status, approximate adjusted gross income, refund amount, names of dependents and which text-entry fields users clicked on. Meta is already facing a lawsuit connected with the initial reporting.

The panel sent the conclusions to the IRS, FTC, DOJ and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGA), urging the agencies to investigate and prosecute if applicable. “Big Tax Prep has recklessly shared tens of millions of taxpayers’ sensitive personal and financial data with Meta for years, without appropriately disclosing this data usage or protecting the data, and without appropriate taxpayer consent,” the report reads. “The findings of this report reveal a shocking breach of taxpayer privacy by tax prep companies and by Big Tech firms that appeared to violate taxpayers’ rights and may have violated taxpayer privacy law.”

The review found the Meta Pixel tracker also gathered data about “whether taxpayers had visited pages for many revealing tax situations, such as having dependents, certain types of income (such as rental income or capital gains), and certain tax credits or deductions.” In addition, it transmitted the full names, email, country, state, city, zip codes, phone numbers and gender as hashed values. The information was also collected from taxpayers using TaxAct’s Free File service — which is through a partnership with the IRS.

Congressional investigators listed in the report include Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA).

“The tax prep firms were shockingly careless with their treatment of taxpayer data,” the investigation concluded. “They indicated that they installed the Meta and Google tools on their websites without fully understanding the extent to which they would send taxpayer data to these tech firms, without consulting with independent compliance or privacy experts, and without full knowledge of Meta’s use of and disposition of the data.” The panel also chided Meta and Google for acting “with stunning disregard for taxpayer privacy.”

The report cites laws that say, “a tax return preparer may not disclose or use a taxpayer’s tax return information prior to obtaining a written consent from the taxpayer,” while mentioning that the tax prep companies failed to do that. Although tax-filing companies can legally hand data to “auxiliary service providers in connection with the preparation of a tax return,” the panel said Meta and Google don’t meet that definition since the tracking was used for advertising. Violations can lead to fines of up to $1,000 per instance (likely pocket change for these companies) and up to a year in prison.