Facebook parent company Meta says it may stop Canadians from sharing news content in response to the country’s proposed Bill C-18 legislation. Introduced by the ruling Liberal government earlier this year, The Online News Act seeks to force platforms like Facebook into revenue-sharing partnerships with local news organizations. The legislation is modeled after Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, which the country successfully passed in early 2021 after considerable resistance from Google and Meta.

In a blog post published late Friday, Meta said it wanted to be “transparent about the possibility that we may be forced to consider whether we continue to allow the sharing of news content in Canada.” The threat came after the House of Commons Heritage Committee did not invite Meta to a meeting about the legislation earlier in the week. The panel did hear testimony from Google, though only after the company asked to be included in the proceedings.

“We have always approached our engagement with Canadian public authorities on this legislation in the spirit of honest and fair debate, and so were surprised not to receive an invitation to participate, particularly given public comments by lawmakers that this law is targeted at Facebook,” Meta said following the snub. The Canadian government and social media giant have had an acrimonious relationship ever since CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg ignored subpoenas from the parliament’s ethics committee in 2019.

The bill’s sponsor, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, accused Meta of using the same playbook the company employed in Australia. “All we’re asking the tech giants like Facebook to do is negotiate fair deals with news outlets when they profit from their work,” he told The National Post. Among other objections, Meta claims news content is not a significant source of revenue for the company. When Australia enacted its News Media Bargaining Code, Meta briefly cut access to all news content within the country. However, the company eventually signed agreements with organizations like News Crop to carry their coverage.

The Republican National Committee is suing Google. According to Axios (via The Verge), the organization filed a lawsuit with California’s Eastern District Court on Friday. The complaint accuses Google of sending “millions” of RNC campaign emails to Gmail spam folders in an extension of the company’s “discriminatory” filtering practices.

“At approximately the same time at the end of each month, Google sends to spam nearly all of the RNC’s emails,” the complaint claims. “Critically, and suspiciously, this end of the month period is historically when the RNC’s fundraising is most successful.”

The lawsuit comes after Google launched a controversial program to appease GOP lawmakers concerned about its filtering practices. In June, after a study found that Gmail was more likely than competing email clients to filter emails from Republican campaigns, the company said it would work with the Federal Election Commission to pilot a system designed to prevent political messages from ending up in spam folders. The concession came after Republican lawmakers introduced a bill that sought to ban email platforms from using algorithms to route campaign messages automatically.

According to a recent report from The Verge, the Republican National Committee is not taking advantage of the program Google built to address the party’s concerns. The organization’s complaint doesn’t explicitly mention the pilot. Instead, it points to a training session the RNC attended on August 11th, the same day the FEC approved Google’s program.

“This discrimination has been ongoing for about ten months — despite the RNC’s best efforts to work with Google,” the organization claims. Google did not immediately respond to Engadget’s request for comment. “As we have repeatedly said, we simply don't filter emails based on political affiliation," the company told Axios, adding that Gmail’s spam filters reflect user actions.

Workers are still struggling to unionize Amazon warehouses in New York State. Staff at the company's Albany-area ALB1 warehouse have voted 406-206 against joining a union. The 31 challenged ballots aren't enough to alter the outcome. Don't expect a repeat of the Alabama vote, where there were enough disputed ballots to potentially alter the results.

As with past votes, Amazon conducted an anti-union campaign that included discouraging posters and displays in prominent locations around the ALB1 facility. While the extent of the campaign isn't yet known, the company has also been accused at other warehouses of blocking pro-union pamphlets, retaliating against labor organizers and generally interfering with elections. ALB1 employees have been trying to form a union since at least May, and succeeded with an August petition to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to hold an election.

We've asked Amazon for comment. In a statement, the ALU said this was a "sham election" and accused Amazon of violating labor law through tactics that included intimidation and retaliation. While the union didn't outline its formal response to the vote, it stressed that this "won't be the end" of the organization at ALB1.

Pro-union forces haven't had many victories at Amazon buildings. While those at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island voted to unionize, others at the nearby LDJ5 opted against it. That's on top of the failed Alabama vote and Amazon's reported attempts to quash labor movements in places like Maryland's DMD9 facility. While there's still a mounting labor movement that has prompted walkouts and impromptu strikes, they haven't had much practical impact.

Amazon has occasionally addressed the concerns of workers by raising wages. It has a history of opposing reforms to working conditions, though. For now, the company is only expected to improve conditions and reinstate fired workers in response to NLRB-linked orders and government legislation.

In September, SpaceX sent a letter to the Department of Defense, asking the Pentagon to take over paying for the expenses related to Ukraine's use of its Starlink satellite internet. According to CNN, SpaceX told the department that continuing to provide the Ukranian government with access to Starlink would cost the company over $120 million for the rest of 2022 and almost $400 million over the next 12 months. "We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time," the company wrote. Now, company chief Elon Musk seems to have backtracked on the decision to ask the Pentagon for assistance and wrote on Twitter that SpaceX will "keep funding [the] Ukraine [government] for free" even though Starlink is still losing money.

Musk confirmed what he said in his tweet to The Financial Times and added that SpaceX will continue funding Ukraine's access to Starlink's satellite internet "indefinitely."

When news about the letter came out, Musk defended his company's position and clarified that SpaceX is not asking the Pentagon to pay for previous expenses. He explained that SpaceX simply can't fund the existing system in Ukraine and regularly send thousands of new terminals to replace the ones routinely destroyed by the Russian forces at the same time. Musk added that the "burn" for keeping the Starlink system running in the country is $20 million a month, since it's had to "defend against cyberattacks and jamming," as well.

Earlier this month, The Times reported that Ukrainian troops grappled with Starlink outages that led to "catastrophic" loss of communication on the frontline. Musk responded that the piece "falsely claims that Starlink terminals [and] service were paid for, when only a small percentage have been." Based on SpaceX's letter that CNN had obtained, though, around 85 percent of the 20,000 terminals in Ukraine at the time were fully or partially funded by the US, the UK, Poland and other outside sources.

The Pentagon confirmed after knowledge of the letter became public that it's been discussing payments with SpaceX but that it's also been looking at potential alternatives. Sabrina Singh, the Pentagon's deputy press secretary, said in a statement: "There's not just SpaceX, there are other entities that we can certainly partner with when it comes to providing Ukraine with what they need on the battlefield."

SpaceX's donations of Starlink satellite service to Ukraine might not last much longer. CNN says it obtained documents indicating that SpaceX sent a letter to the Defense Department in September claiming the company is "not in a position" to fund Starlink internet in Ukraine as it has without tens of millions of dollars in monthly funding. The company estimated that data access for the Ukranian government and military might cost $124 million for the rest of 2022 and almost $380 million per year, and asked the Pentagon to take over that financing.

Elon Musk elaborated on the reasoning in a tweet on Friday. SpaceX couldn't afford to fund the current infrastructure "indefinitely" while simultaneously delivering more Starlink terminals and managing data use "100X greater" than typical homes, Musk claimed. The satellite technology has not only been used to coordinate Ukranian military campaigns, but can be used to provide data to cell towers and other civilian networks that serve many people. The executive added that the "burn" was close to $20 million per month and included the cost of defending against Russian "cyberattacks & jamming."

The documents apparently contradict one of Musk's earlier claims, however. Where he said last week that only a "small percentage" of Starlink terminals and service received external funding, the letter suggests about 85 percent of the 20,000 Ukraine systems at the time (now 25,000) were at least partly funded by the US, Poland and others. A leak in April indicated that the US had already spent millions to get Starlink hardware to Ukraine. Even so, resources may have been tight. Ukranian commander General Valerii Zaluzhniy directly asked Musk to provide close to 8,000 additional terminals in July, but SpaceX answered by pointing the military leader to the Defense Department.

Word of the letter comes at a bad moment for Musk. He recently drew flak from Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky and diplomat Andrij Melnyk for proposing a peace deal that included conceding the illegally annexed Crimea region to Russia. Musk even half-joked his firm was "just following [Melnyk's] recommendation" to "fuck off" following the proposal. We'd add that Musk's net worth of roughly $220 billion is more than Ukraine's 2021 GDP — there have been numerous calls for the entrepreneur to personally fund Starlink service. There are doubts SpaceX is fully committed to supporting Ukraine's fight against Russia, and the funding request doesn't help matters.

The Department of Labor has issued a proposal that could make it more likely for millions of people to be classified as employees rather than independent contractors. Should the proposal become a formal rule, gig workers (such as Uber and Lyft drivers) would likely gain benefits and protections afforded to employees if they're reclassified. Those may include a minimum wage, overtime, unemployment insurance contributions and their employer paying a share of Social Security taxes, as The New York Times notes.

Last year, the Department of Labor rescinded a Trump-era rule that made it easier for companies to classify gig workers as contractors. However, a federal court in Texas reinstated that rule in March, as Bloomberg notes.

Under the latest proposal, the Department of Labor plans to implement a test to determine if workers should be classed as employees or contractors. Factors such as how much control workers have over how they carry out tasks and how much bandwidth they have to increase their earnings by offering other services would be assessed. Other considerations include whether workers need to buy their own equipment and if their work is critical to a company's business. There would be a lower threshold for requiring employee status than the current test.

Even if the proposal does become a final rule, it wouldn't directly affect the guidelines that states and other federal agencies have for determining employment status. It would have more of a direct impact on laws that the Department of Labor enforces, including the federal minimum wage. However, as the Times points out, many employers, regulators and judges may defer to the agency's criteria on worker classification.

“While independent contractors have an important role in our economy, we have seen in many cases that employers misclassify their employees as independent contractors, particularly among our nation’s most vulnerable workers,” Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh said in a statement. “Misclassification deprives workers of their federal labor protections, including their right to be paid their full, legally earned wages. The Department of Labor remains committed to addressing the issue of misclassification.”

Some states have attempted to have gig workers classified as employees, but the likes of Uber and Lyft have fought against such requirements. In 2020, California voted to pass a ballot measure backed by ride-hailing and delivery companies. The passage of Proposition 22 stripped app-based drivers of employee protections by classifying them as independent contractors. A judge ruled last year that Prop. 22 was unconstitutional, but that decision has been appealed.

Hackers believed to be based in Russia temporarily forced around 14 public-facing websites for US airports offline on Monday. The LaGuardia, O’Hare and LAX websites were among those targeted, and most are back online. A senior US government official said that air traffic control, internal airport communications and other critical operations were not affected, but travelers looking for security wait times or other information may have been inconvenienced, according to ABC News. An LAX spokesperson affirmed that "no internal airport systems were compromised and there were no operational disruptions."

"On Monday October 10th, 2022 at approx. 0300 hours there was a denial of service incident lasting 15 minutes that resulted in intermittent delays accessing the LaGuardia airport website," a Port Authority spokesperson told ABC News. "The Port Authority's cybersecurity defense system did its job by detecting the incident quickly, addressing the problem in 15 minutes, and enabling us to alert others by notifying federal authorities immediately. There was no operational impact to any Port Authority facilities."

The incident, said to be the result of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, have been pinned on pro-Russia hacker group Killnet. The hackers are not believed to be government actors, however. There's no evidence that the Russian government was involved in this incident, a cybersecurity analyst said.

Both the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Transportation Security Administration are monitoring the situation, CNN reports. CISA noted it didn't have any worries about airport operational disruptions.

Ukrainian forces have reportedly been dealing with Starlink outages as they try to take back Russian-occupied areas. Some of the outages, which are said to have caused a severe loss of communication over the last several weeks, occurred as troops broke through the frontline into territory controlled by Russia as well as during battles, a Ukraine government official told The Financial Times.

The cause of the apparent outages are not yet known. Engadget has contacted Starlink owner SpaceX for comment.

Starlink outages were reported in the four regions that Russia annexed last month following referendums, the legitimacy of which have been disputed. As the Financial Times notes, there's a significant Ukrainian counteroffensive in those areas.

Some terminals are said to have not been working in areas near Khariv, which Ukraine has almost entirely liberated, amid a push into Luhansk, one of the regions that Russia has claimed. However, military officials claimed this week that Starlink terminals were working in freshly liberated areas east of Izyum and in southern Kherson, according to the report.

Ukrainian troops have been using the terminals to stay in contact, operate drones and receive intelligence while stationed in parts of the country that don't have other secure networking options. Soon after Russia's invasion, SpaceX, with the help of American taxpayers, sent thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine for both military and civilian use.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk warned Ukrainians to exercise caution while using Starlink. Researchers pointed out that Russia may be able to use signals from the terminals for targeting purposes. Meanwhile, Musk this week caused anger and concern in Ukraine and among the country's allies when he suggested that referendums should be held to determine the Russia-Ukraine border. He also claimed SpaceX has spent $80 million to support Ukraine through Starlink.

Months after reaching a deal, the White House has taken official steps to protect data transfers between the US and European Union. President Biden has signed an executive order directing the government's efforts to implement the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. The approach mainly requires that intelligence agencies "take into consideration" privacy and civil liberties before seeking data, and only conduct surveillance when there's a clearly defined need to address national security concerns.

Intelligence gatherers will also need to update their policies on elements like data handling, with reviews keeping them in line. There will also be a "multi-layer" review process for EU residents' privacy violation complaints. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) will investigate possible lawbreaking through its civil liberties officer, while the Attorney General will use a new Data Protection Review Court to review the results of those investigations and make binding rulings.

The Data Privacy Framework is a response to the EU Court of Justice striking down the Privacy Shield agreement in 2020. The court found that the pact gave the US too much leeway to surveil EU data, and wasn't consistent with privacy requirements effectively equal to European law. The US balked at this rejection, arguing that it cast doubt on companies' ability to legally transfer data.

The European Commission will still need to examine the framework to determine if it offers enough protection. Between this and law enforcement-oriented agreements with countries like Australia and the UK, though, the US is quickly firming up its approach to international data sharing — albeit with concerns that spies might still have too much power.

General Motors, through its GM Defense subsidiary, will build a battery pack prototype for the Department of Defense to test and analyze. The agency's Defense Innovation Unit is seeking a scalable design that can be used in electrified versions of tactical military vehicles.

The battery pack will be based on GM's Ultium platform, which it's using to power its own electric vehicles. Due to the type of battery cells it employs, Ultium is billed as a modular and scalable system that can be adapted to different needs, so it may just fit the bill for the military.

GM said the military wants a light- to heavy-duty EV for use in garrison and operational environments in order to reduce fossil fuel use. As a result, that should reduce the military's carbon emissions.

This isn't the first partnership that GM Defense has forged with the military. In July, the company secured a deal with the US Army to provide an electric Hummer for testing. Last year, GM Defense president Steve duMont said the company would build an electric military vehicle prototype based on the Hummer EV.