Blue Origin has failed in its lawsuit against NASA over SpaceX's lunar lander contract. CNBCreports the Federal Court of Claims has ruled against Blue Origin, dismissing the company's claims. While the opinion is currently sealed, Blue Origin's case had revolved around accusations NASA ignored "key flight safety requirements" when handing the Human Landing System to SpaceX.

The opinion will be publicly available sometime after November 18th, when both sides of the lawsuit are expected to supply redactions. NASA put SpaceX's work on hold following the lawsuit, but efforts should resume November 8th.

Blue Origin previously challenged the contract through the Government Accountability Office only to be rejected in July, leading Jeff Bezos' outfit to respond with a lawsuit. The firm even tried drastically undercutting SpaceX with a $2 billion bid, arguing at the time that NASA has historically awarded contracts to multiple partners to make sure a mission launches on time.

Developing...

Patreon doesn't let creators offer crypto coins for the sake of profit, but that might change before long. TechCrunchreports Patreon executives Jack Conte and Julian Gutman said the company was "evaluating" the use of crypto, including a previously hinted-at possibility of allowing "creator coins" that fans can buy to show support. You could invest in creators and reap rewards if they hit the big time, or access special content reserved for coin owners.

Conte wouldn't say if Patreon had staff devoted to crypto projects, but did say the company was "thinking about it." The company had discussed the possibility of allowing creator coins during an online September discussion, but it was sidelined as the company grappled with the implications of Mastercard's tougher adult content standards.

Gutman added that Patreon was "interested" in studying the potential benefits of NFTs and related technologies for creators looking to sustain a business. NFTs have boosted the value of digital art, sometimes leading to sales worth millions, but there are also widespread concerns about the highly speculative nature of the market and the blockchain-based technology's environmental impact.

It wouldn't be surprising if Patreon embraced coins, NFTs or both. Patreon has fared well despite early pandemic jitters and raised $90 million just a year ago, but there's little doubt the service is trying to court as many creators as possible. A new stance on crypto might entice content producers who currently have to go elsewhere if they want to dabble in the technology.

Following months of pressure from employees and workers, Activision Blizzard says it will no longer employ forced arbitration in sexual harassment and discrimination claims. CEO Bobby Kotick announced the policy change in a letter to employees the company shared on Thursday. Kotick said the publisher will also implement a new company-wide zero-tolerance harassment policy. In the future, any employee who is found to have violated the rule will be fired immediately. Additionally, they’ll forfeit any future compensation, including equity awards.

“Our goal is to have the strictest harassment and non-retaliation policies of any employer, and we will continue to examine and tighten our standards to achieve this goal everywhere we do business,” Kotick said.

The executive outlined three other steps Activision Blizzard will take to create a safer and more diverse workplace. Over the next 10 years, it will invest $250 million in programs that create opportunities in tech and gaming for under-represented communities. Additionally, the company to plans to hire more women and non-binary people. According to Kotick, approximately 23 percent of all employees at Activision Blizzard identify as part of those groups. Its goal is to increase that number by 50 percent to more than one-third across the entire company within the next five years. Kotick also promised the company will share annual reports on progress it makes toward pay equity.

Separately, the executive said he has asked Activision Blizzard’s board of directors to reduce his total compensation to $62,500 per year until it feels like he has met the diversity and safety goals outlined above.

Today’s announcement sees Kotick and Activision Blizzard meeting many of the demands employees put before the company when they began protesting its actions in the wake of California’s sexual harassment lawsuit. When employees first staged a walkout in July, they demanded the end of forced arbitration, greater pay transparency and new hiring policies designed to increase representation across the company. “This is a great start, and there’s still work to do,” said Jessica Gonzalez, one of the employees involved with the A Better ABK advocacy group. “We can lead the charge as an industry standard. Victories and still pushing.”

It may not be a household name, but one of the more important players in the semiconductor industry is Imec. It’s a nonprofit research organization that has been around since 1984 and frequently works with companies like ASML, currently the only manufacturer in the world that makes the EUV lithography machines necessary for making 7nm, 5nm and 3nm chips. 

On Thursday, the organization announced the creation of the Sustainable Semiconductor Technologies and Systems program. As part of the initiative, Imec says it will work with the semiconductor industry to reduce its carbon footprint by helping partners analyze and anticipate the environmental impacts of their manufacturing decisions. With today’s announcement, the program also has its first partner: Apple.

If the program is to have a positive effect on the environment, Imec will need to attract more partners, but attracting Apple is a good first step. The company may not produce its own silicon, but there’s no denying it’s on the bleeding edge of chip design. More importantly, it’s among the most powerful buyers of manufacturing capacity in the industry. It frequently monopolizes the top-end processes of TSMC, the most important chip foundry in the world. Working together, Imec and Apple are well-positioned to inform other companies how to make their manufacturing more sustainable.

LinkedIn is introducing dedicated remote, hybrid and on-site search filters to help users on their next job hunt. You’ll see the labels when using the social network’s job search and Open to Work features. In the latter case, taking advantage of the filters will privately inform recruiters of the type of work you’re looking for, which the company says should help the right job find you. At the same time, LinkedIn is adding similar filters for company pages, allowing them to indicate things like their vaccine policies and return-to-office plans.

In testing the filters, LinkedIn says it saw more than 70 percent of searches involve people looking for remote-only roles. It’s a testament to how uncertain the pandemic has made every return-to-office plan. Even companies Amazon, Google and Facebook have struggled to find ones that stick. And so it’s no surprise most LinkedIn users are looking for opportunities where they can continue working from home.

American tech heavyweights are facing yet more scrutiny of their payment practices. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has ordered Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, PayPal and Square to hand over info concerning their payment system plans. The bureau wants to learn how these companies harvest data and control access to spot any anti-consumer behavior and provide "adequate" protections to the public.

The CFPB will also study Chinese tech firms' payment systems, including Alipay and WeChat Pay.

Director Rohit Chopra justified the order by warning that payments can pose a threat to the fair market thanks to their "tremendous scale and market power." He pointed to China as an example, noting that systems like Alipay and WeChat Pay are so thoroughly integrated with Chinese society that residents are effectively forced to use them as-is.

The bureau said it was following up on Federal Trade Commission oversight of Big Tech. The regulator has studied some of the companies' behavior in detail and, in the faces of Facebook and Google, put them under close watch. In 2020, for instance, the FTC investigated Facebook and Google acquisitions that hadn't been reported.

There's no certainty the CFPB orders will lead to regulatory action. However, they come right as politicians are trying to rein in Apple, Google and others for allegedly abusing app store payments. The Biden administration as a whole is also determined to crack down on tech companies. There's a chance CFPB will take corrective measures, even as those companies lower fees and otherwise try to make peace offerings.

The modern world has grown around steel bones — everything from tools and home appliances to skyscrapers and airplanes use the versatile material in their construction. But the process of making steel is a significant contributor to global warming and climate change. In 2018, reportedly every ton of steel produced generated 1.85 tons of carbon dioxide, accounting for about 7 percent of global CO2 emissions that year. This poses not just environmental challenges for our ever increasing world, it could also impact steel producers’ bottom line, which is why the industry is developing a “fossil-free” means of making the alloy, one that relies on renewable-sourced hydrogen rather than carbon coke.

Steel is an alloy composed of iron, which in its pure form is relatively soft, with a small amount of introduced carbon, usually about 2 percent of its total weight. This improves the material’s strength and reduces its propensity for fracturing. The process starts by combining iron ore, before coking coal and limestone (which remove impurities) in a blast furnace to create pig iron.

That molten pig iron is then poured into a furnace and high pressure air is introduced via a water-cooled lance. The oxygen chemically reacts with the molten iron to purge impurities — as well as produce significant amounts of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The oxygen also forces impurities like silicates and phosphates present in the pig iron to react with limestone flux, trapping them as waste slag. Today, per the World Steel Association, some 1,864 million metric tons of crude steel are produced annually with China producing a vast majority of it.

While the WSA points out that “in the last 50 years, the steel industry has reduced its energy consumption per tonne of steel produced by 60 percent” and notes that steel is infinitely reusable, and that “new” steel typically contain 30percent recycled steel on average the traditional methods of iron and steel production are becoming untenable — at least if we want to mitigate its impacts on climate change. What’s more, the International Energy Agency estimates that global steel production will grow by a third by 2050, which will only compound the industry’s environmental impacts. That’s where fossil-free steel comes in.

Take HYBRIT (Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology), for example. This process has been developed as a joint venture between three Swedish companies: SSAB, which makes steel, energy company Vattenfall, and LKAB, which mines iron ore. Rather than using coking coal and a blast furnace to convert raw iron ore into metallic iron, the HYBRIT method uses hydrogen generated from renewable energy sources and a technique known as direct reduction, which lowers the amount of oxygen contained within the ore without heating it above the metal’s melting point, to create sponge iron.

HYBRIT

Like pig iron, sponge iron is an intermediary material in the steelmaking process (it’ll get shipped off to SSAB to be turned into steel slabs), but in HYBRIT’s case, its production results in the creation of water vapor rather than carbon dioxide.

“The first fossil-free steel in the world is not only a breakthrough for SSAB, it represents proof that it’s possible to make the transition and significantly reduce the global carbon footprint of the steel industry,” Martin Lindqvist, CEO of SSAB, told reporters in August. “We hope that this will inspire others to also want to speed up the green transition.”

The HYBRIT coalition opened a pilot direct reduction plant in Luleå, Sweden last year and has announced plans to increase production to an industrial scale by 2026. The team claims that eliminating fossil fuels from the steelmaking industry in Sweden could drop the country’s total CO2 emissions by at least 10 percent. However, they are not the only group looking into fossil-free steel production. The H2 Green Steel company has announced its intent to open a large-scale plant in northern Sweden by 2024 and expects to produce 5 million tonnes of the material annually by 2030.

In June, Volvo announced that it would be partnering with SSAB to develop fossil-free steel for use in its products — both passenger cars and industrial machines. Last week, Volvo unveiled the first vehicle to be made with fossil-free steel, an 8-plus ton load carrier designed to operate within mines. Not only is the load carrier powered by a fully electric drivetrain, it can autonomously navigate across a worksite as well. Granted only about 3 of the vehicle’s 8 tons were made from fossil-free steel (the drivetrain’s steel components, for example, were made through traditional smelting means), this marks an important first step towards a carbon-neutral transportation future.

“When we have been talking about ‘fossil free’ in the transport sector, we have been focusing a lot on emissions from the vehicles in use. But it's clear to us and to everyone else that we also need to address the carbon footprint from the production of our vehicles,” Volvo Group’s Chief Technology Officer Lars Stenqvist told Forbes. “That's why it's so important now to team up with everyone in the value chain and collaborate in order to drive out all the fossil fuel also used in the production of components, parts and also running our production facilities.”

Volvo expects the autonomous load carriers to enter real-world operation by next year, though the company concedes that its ability to ramp up production of fossil-free vehicles will depend largely on SSAB’s ability to deliver sufficient quantities of the material.

Activision Blizzard has confirmed that more than 20 employees have "exited" the company as part of its efforts to change its internal culture following allegations of fostering a "frat boy" workplace. The video game company has published the letter Executive VP for Corporate Affairs Fran Townsend sent to employees revealing the move, in which she also said that more than 20 other individuals faced different types of disciplinary action. Back in July, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against the developer for allowing a work environment wherein female employees were allegedly subjected to constant sexual harassment.

The agency, which sued the company after a two-year investigation, detailed several of its findings in the lawsuit. It said female employees constantly have to fend off unwanted sexual comments, and that they have to endure being groped by male colleagues. They're also not paid as much as their male counterparts, are typically promoted more slowly and fired more quickly. At the time, Townsend told employees that the lawsuit "presented a distorted" picture of the company and that it included "factually incorrect, old and out of context stories." Hundreds of employees walked out in protest over the company's response. 

Now, in her letter, Townsend said that there's a team dedicated to investigating harassment claims, "working tirelessly to ensure that, moving forward, [the company] is a place where people are not only heard, but empowered." The team received an increasing number of reports in recent months, including concerns from years ago, and it was the members' investigation that led to the exit of more than 20 employees. Townsend declined to name those individuals, but she told Financial Times that they include several game developers and a few supervisors. None of them came from senior management or from the board. 

A Kotaku report from August named three senior designers who abruptly exited the company. Two of them — Diablo 4 lead designer Jesse McCree and World of Warcraft designer Jonathan LeCraft — were previously pictured inside the Cosby Suite. In its lawsuit, DEFH said the Cosby Suite is a room with a photo of Bill Cosby where male employees allegedly harassed women during company events.

To be able to handle more complaints, Activision Blizzard hired three full-time employees to join the investigation team. It's also adding 19 more full-time roles to its overall Ethics & Compliance Team, two of which will be dedicated to overseeing investigations for the EMEA and APAC regions. Townsend admitted that the team can't always share the details of an investigation, but she also promised more transparency "We know there’s a desire to know about the outcome when misconduct is reported. Sometimes, there are privacy reasons we can’t share. But where we can, we will be sharing more information with you. We will also be providing you regular aggregate data about investigative outcomes," she wrote in her letter.

Members of Congress have accused Amazon executives of misleading or lying to an antitrust committee about its business practices, following recent reports that the company uses third-party seller data to copy products and promotes those versions in search results. The representatives, all members of the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, are considering whether to ask the Department of Justice to undertake a criminal investigation.

In the letter to chief executive Andy Jassy, Reps. David Cicilline, Ken Buck, Pramila Jayapal, Jerrold Nadler and Matt Gaetz asked Amazon to provide "exculpatory evidence” to back up testimony from executives )(including former CEO Jeff Bezos) to the subcommittee in 2019 and 2020, according to The Wall Street Journal. Bezos told the committee last year that the company doesn't allow employees to use data from individual sellers to bolster its own product lines, though "couldn't guarantee" that the company hasn't misused such data. The company's associate general counsel, Nate Sutton, said in a 2019 testimony that Amazon doesn't “use individual seller data directly to compete” with third-party sellers.

An investigation published by Reuters last week suggested Amazon India "ran a systematic campaign" of copying other companies' products and manipulating search results to promote them. The Markup also reported that Amazon places its own products above competitors' goods in search results, including ones with higher customer ratings. The representatives said the reporting directly contradicts sworn testimony from Bezos, from whom Jassy took over in July, and other executives.

“We strongly encourage you to make use of this opportunity to correct the record and provide the Committee with sworn, truthful, and accurate responses to this request as we consider whether a referral of this matter to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation is appropriate,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter. "At best, this reporting confirms that Amazon's representatives misled the Committee. At worst, it demonstrates that they may have lied to Congress in possible violation of federal criminal law."

The House Judiciary Committee has been looking into this issue since 2019 as part of a broader investigation of competition in digital markets. The representatives gave Jassy until November 1st to respond to the letter. "We’re giving Amazon one last chance to come clean about how they abuse other seller’s data and unfairly advantage their own products," subcommittee chair Cicilline wrote on Twitter. "We cannot continue to allow Big Tech to destroy small businesses." 

"Like other retailers, we look at sales and store data to provide our customers with the best possible experience," Amazon told The Wall Street Journal. "However, we strictly prohibit our employees from using non-public, seller-specific data to determine which private label products to launch. While we don’t believe these claims are accurate, we take these allegations very seriously and have launched an internal investigation."

An Amazon spokesperson provided the following statement to Engadget:

Amazon and its executives did not mislead the committee, and we have denied and sought to correct the record on the inaccurate media articles in question. As we have previously stated, we have an internal policy, which goes beyond that of any other retailer’s policy that we’re aware of, that prohibits the use of individual seller data to develop Amazon private label products. We investigate any allegations that this policy may have been violated and take appropriate action. In addition, we design our search experience to feature the items customers will want to purchase, regardless of whether they are offered by Amazon or one of our selling partners.

Jack Dorsey says that Square is “considering” building its own Bitcoin mining system using custom silicon and open source software. “Square is considering building a Bitcoin mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals and businesses worldwide,” Dorsey wrote in a Twitter thread Friday.

He added that such a project would follow a similar approach as the bitcoin hardware wallet Square began working on earlier this summer. But building a mining system would be considerably more complicated for the payments company than simply building a wallet. Creating custom chips is, as Dorsey points out, “very expensive,” and would be new territory for the payments company, which has been a major supporter of Bitcoin.

“Mining needs to be more efficient,” Dorsey wrote. “Driving towards clean and efficient energy use is great for Bitcoin’s economics, impact, and scalability. Energy is a system-level problem that requires innovation in silicon, software, and integration.”

As with his earlier tweets about plans for the hardware wallet, Dorsey didn’t share many details about how the mining system would actually work. But he said the goal would be to make mining more efficient and accessible to more people, which could address two of the most important issues related to cryptocurrency mining.

Bitcoin-related power usage has reached record highs in recent years, raising major concerns about the cryptocurrency’s impact on climate change. Mining has also driven up the prices and scarcity of GPUs, which has made it increasingly difficult for the average crypto enthusiast to mine on their own.

"Bitcoin mining should be as easy as plugging a rig into a power source,” Dorsey said. Whether or not Square will be able to accomplish that, is less clear. He said that the company “will start the deep technical investigation required to take on this project,” and is hoping to hear feedback on the idea in the meantime.