Twitter has informed US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) that it's transitioning away from using Mitto AG's services to deliver two-factor authentication codes to its users, according to Bloomberg. Swiss tech firm Mitto is an established provider of automated text messages that some big companies have been using to send out not just 2FA codes, but also sales promotions and appointment reminders. Bloombergreported in December, however, that one of its co-founders operated a secret surveillance operation that helped governments locate users through their phones.

Company COO Ilja Gorelik allegedly sold surveillance technology firms access to Mitto's networks, allowing them to track people using their mobile devices. Those companies, in turn, contracted with government agencies. Mitto told Bloomberg back then that it had no knowledge or involvement in Gorelik's surveillance operation and that it's launching an internal probe to determine if its technology and business had been compromised. The Wyden aide Bloomberg talked to said Twitter cited media reports as a major factor for its decision.

Aside from Twitter, Mitto's clients include Google, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, Tencent and Alibaba. Mitto has reportedly been telling customers that Gorelik is no longer with the firm. Still, the publication says several other clients have cut ties with Mitto since the report came out, though it's unclear if Google and the other well-known tech companies and services that it counts as customers are also parting ways with it. 

Earlier today, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, who allegedly attempted to launder more than 25,000 Bitcoins that were stolen as part of the 2016 hack of Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex. What was unclear to us at the time was that an even greater crime had played out across Morgan's social media pages: her rap career. 

Spotted by NBC reporter Kevin Collier, Morgan — who performed under the alias Razzlekhan — seemingly spent all of the time she was not allegedly shifting around $3.6 billion in cryptocurrency shooting rap videos, leaving precious little bandwidth to actually learn how to write or perform music in a pleasing way. On her YouTube page, can find Morgan’s rap videos sprinkled in between unboxing clips and a review of 13 different kinds of aluminum-free deodorant. Morgan, the self-proclaimed “Crocodile of Wall Street,” states that she experiences synesthesia, which results in "art" that "often resembles something between an acid trip and a delightful nightmare." 

We implore you to form your own opinion:

"Cutthroat Country," embedded above, provides an overview of Morgan's many talents as a rapper. Her delivery is tuneless, the bars are cringe and the accompanying music video isn't much better. But the best part is that Morgan seemingly implicates herself in the exact money laundering scheme she stands accused of carrying out. "Spearfish your password / all your funds transferred," she says in the 2:36 mark of the song.

But her magnum opus is perhaps "Versace Bedouin," a "rap anthem of misfits and weirdos":

"Always be a GOAT, not a god damn sheep," she raps at the start of song. "Spirit of a revolutionary, power of a dictator / love to be contrary, but I'm fly like a gator," she says later. What's striking about both videos are the low-budget production values on display. Morgan and her husband allegedly laundered billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, and yet it looks like they shot the clips on a shoestring budget. 

We could say more about the videos, but we think YouTube user Gudi said it best. “The Man couldn’t allow this much talent to roam the streets. RIP.” Morgan and Lichtenstein face money laundering and conspiracy charges. If convicted, they face up to a maximum of 25 years in prison.

Apple will expand benefits for all of its retail employees in the US, beginning April 4th. Bloomberg reports the new benefits include increased vacation and sick days, paid parental leave and more. It will impact both full-time and part-time employees across all 270 Apple Stores nationwide.

The tech giant’s offer of more generous benefits didn’t come out of the blue. Apple, like many corporations, is having a tough time recruiting and retaining hourly workers in a tight labor market. A number of media outlets, including The Verge, Gizmodo, 9to5Mac and others have reported on the grim realities of Apple’s retail operations, which include low pay, stressful workloads and low employee morale. Staffing shortages due to Covid-19 led to many stores operating on reduced hours or closing altogether. Dozens of Apple employees staged a Christmas Eve walkout in order to protest their working conditions. The testimony of these workers presents a stark contrast to Apple's financial standing during the pandemic, which has produced several consecutive record-breaking quarters.

Apple will double the number of paid sick days for both full-time and part-time employees. Full-time retail employees will receive 12 sick days instead of six. The company will also be more lenient in granting sick leave, allowing workers to use sick leave for mental health days or in order to take family members to the doctor. Part-time workers will also receive paid vacation days and paid parental leave for up to six weeks.

The company’s benefits expansion follows similar moves by Amazon, Walmart and Fedex to retain hourly and front-line employees. Thousands of frontline workers have since quit or retired due to stressful and dangerous working conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic. But labor rights advocates point out that many of these improvements, such as bonuses or hazard pay, are either temporary or have since been rolled back.

The next PlayStation 4 and PS5 system update will add a handful of new accessibility and quality of life features to Sony’s consoles. Among the additions is support for voice commands on PlayStation 5. Sony’s previous-generation console has had that feature since launching in 2013, but it’s now making its way to the company’s latest console too.

Starting with a beta Sony will make available to English-speaking users in the US and UK first, the company is adding a system option that will make the console respond to “Hey PlayStation.” It’s a feature you can turn off, but leaving it on will allow you to use your voice to launch games and other apps, as well as open the system menu and control media playback. The update will bring other new accessibility features, including one that makes headphones output mono sound. Sony notes that’s something that should be particularly helpful to players with unilateral hearing loss.

As part of the same update, Sony is also tweaking how group chats work. Moving forward, they’ll be known as parties, and you’ll have the option to decide whether they’re private or open to the public. Should you leave your party open, not only can your friends join without an invite, but so can their friends as well.

Another new PS5 feature will allow you to filter your games by genre, as well as keep up to five of them to your console’s home screen for quick access. Sony has also updated the design of trophy cards and added support for more screen reader languages, among other changes.

You can help Sony beta test the update by signing up to do so on the company’s website. Look for an email in your inbox on Wednesday to find out if you’ve been selected to take part. Sony will release both PlayStation 4 and PS5 system updates later this year.

Coco, a company that offers food deliveries by remote-controlled robot, has expanded beyond its home base of Los Angeles for the first time. The service is now available in Austin as it commences a nationwide rollout. Coco plans to bring its robots to Dallas, Houston and Miami in the next few months.

The company says its service, which debuted in 2020, now has hundreds of delivery robots on the streets of LA, covering all of the city's major neighborhoods. Coco claims to reduce costs and deliver food to customers 30 percent faster than traditional methods with an on-time delivery rate of 97 percent. It partnered with 10 Austin restaurants and chains at the outset, and will offer deliveries in the South Lamar, South Congress, South Austin, Downtown, Northside, North Loop and Domain neighborhoods from the jump.

Other robot delivery services — such as Yandex, Serve Robotics (a former division of Postmates) and Nuro — have adopted the self-driving approach. Coco's robots, on the other hand, are controlled by employees who work from home.

It can be a pain to time music with a video you're editing — you may spend ages trimming and slicing tracks to create an arrangement that matches your footage. Adobe thinks your computer can do the heavy lifting, though. It just updated Premiere Pro with a Remix feature that uses AI to re-time music to fit your video's duration. This probably won't be completely satisfying if you're exacting about your soundtracks, but it could save valuable hours if you were just looking for well-timed background audio.

The Premiere Pro update is also far more useful for transcriptions. Speech-to-text conversion is now available offline through downloadable language packs, leading to transcriptions up to three times faster on M1- and Core i9-based systems. English is included by default.

Adobe is providing some of its customary hardware optimizations. Windows users can now export 10-bit HDR videos up to 10 times faster with Intel- or NVIDIA-based graphics. Block Dissolve and Linear Wipe effects now use GPU acceleration, too. And if you own one of the latest 14- or 16-inch MacBook Pros, Premiere Pro now properly adapts to the display notch. These won't necessarily affect your workflows in the way Remix might, but they'll be appreciated if they help you finish projects that much sooner.

Just as many of the ugliest online fights begin these days, Brian "Box" Brown, an Eisner-winning illustrator and comic artist, sent a seemingly innocuous tweet. It read, in part, "my former regular freelance employer has let me know they'll be...Embracing NFTs 🙃 so...we had to part ways." The then unnamed business, Gumroad, shot back the next day with a now-pinned response denying it had plans to enter the controversial crypto-collecting space, and has since attacked detractors from its corporate account, provided conflicting information and alienated a growing portion of the artist community it serves. How did it get so bad?

Gumroad, for the unfamiliar, is a digital goods sales platform, which hosts anything from art to ebooks to self-help courses. It was built in 2011 by then-19-year-old CEO Sahil Lavinglia, who is perhaps the only consistent figure within the company. Following a period of growth Lavinglia had to lay off staff in 2016 after failing to raise more money. The company survived, but as it is presently structured, Gumroad is something of an anomaly. The number of full-time employees, according to one the CEO's blog posts is "none. Not even me," preferring to maintain a contractor workforce. It also espouses a version of radical transparency, choosing to make its product roadmap and board meetings public. 

The image of an all-remote workplace free from deadlines or meetings belies a somewhat haphazard business. Some former workers seemingly signed no contracts beyond basic tax forms. Some contract work was compensated through Venmo. At least one of the contracts signed by Brown related to royalties and IP rights for book illustrations listed one Kun Wu Yu as the primary party, and the address as what appears to be a cancer research center in Taiwan. (When asked about this he first glibly replied that "cancer research is an important cause" and later stated he didn't recall the contract.) To say Lavinglia is not an especially careful founder might be an understatement. According to a former contractor, who we granted anonymity for fear of retaliation, "it's not the ideal work culture it appears to be."

Brown by all indications was among the permalancers filling out the ranks of Gumroad, and a busy one at that. "There was never a time in the last two years where it even slowed down" he told Engadget from the "20 plus hours per week" he billed, which he estimates became a "large portion of my daily work" and contributed around $2000 to his monthly income. Then in January, he alleges, Lavingia ceased communication. In 15 years of freelancing, he said "I never experienced a situation where a regular gig for that long suddenly just disappeared without even an email being like, 'we're gonna let you go,' you know what I mean?" He believes he was no longer assigned work because of his refusal to get involved with the company's seeming NFT ambitions. 

Once the differences in opinion between Lavinglia and Brown became open hostilities, that penchant for transparency turned into a cudgel. Both parties began posting screenshots from the company Slack (something which Brown claims to have since been removed from) which reflect uncharitably — though Gumroad has since deleted many of these tweets. 

In one, after Gumroad had ghosted him, Brown asks if there's any available illustration work, to which Lavinglia states "the one idea I have is an NFT project, unfortunately 😔" — a possible commission to help make 7,777 generative art characters. "It sounds like you need someone who is into [NFTs] from here on out," Brown says. "Yep, probably," Lavinglia responds. 

Lacking here is the context that the subject of NFTs had, according to Brown, come up repeatedly for the past six months. Each time Brown refused, though some more tactfully than others. (In another tweeted screenshot dating to September, Lavinglia pitches NFTs as an options, and Brown demurs by claimed involvement in such a scheme would cause his readership to "cancel" him.) 

The aforementioned anonymous former contractor told Engadget that "my understanding is that Gumroad was going to get into NFTs at some point in 2022/2023." Gumroad has been in the midst of a site redesign, for which it appears to have retained the services of high-powered brand manager and former Google design director Karin Soukup; in an email introducing Soukup to Brown, Lavinglia sent an email last October with the subject "Illustrations for Gumroad rebrand (+ NFTs...?)." (When asked via Twitter DM, Lavinglia wrote "Yeah, don’t recall. But the parens and ? seem pretty clear 😂." 

In his personal capacity, Lavinglia has been a minor booster for NFTs and crypto generally. He minted an NFT of his Twitter avatar and sold it on OpenSea, seemingly to Unacademy founder Guarav Munjal for the equivalent of around $3,000 USD — and pledging to split the proceeds 50/50 between himself and the artist (his own wife.) "NFT ownership is much more accessible than equity ownership," he tweeted last September, a statement only made stranger by the knowledge that Gumroad is itself financed in part by equity crowdfunding.  

It's unclear how any of these screenshots lend credence to Lavinglia's position that the company is not pursuing NFTs; conversely it seems evident that had Brown agreed to the project Gumroad most likely would be entering the crypto space. On his personal account he attempted to make a distinction between "doing an NFT collection" and "pivoting to NFTs" — later stating "we may do an NFT collection in the future, but no plans."

While an abundance of evidence suggests Gumroad is not being entirely transparent about the degree to which it's investing in some sort of NFT play, it's also not entirely clear digital tulip mania is to blame for Brown's loss of a steady gig. According to the same anonymous former contractor, there have been several similar cases in recent months. "Most of the marketing team got let go recently and it came as a surprise to all of us," they wrote. Others confirmed they were no longer working for Gumroad but declined to go into detail as to the nature of their departures. It's unclear why the company many be thinning its ranks yet again, and Lavinglia declined to comment on the matter. Gumroad's jobs page states that the company is in a hiring freeze until April. 

Employees aren't the only ones leaving Gumroad — or at least trying to. Some of those who abhor NFTs, as well as bystanders who felt the company's public spat with Brown was inappropriate, have pledged to leave the platform. However, a number of them — including Brown — found themselves unable to delete their accounts. "We found the bug around deletion, and are working to fix it now. The issue is that these users all have made money with Gumroad but haven’t been paid out yet (due to not connecting a bank account for example)," Lavinglia told Engadget, "working to allow them to delete if they wish to anyway." The bug seems to be impacting at least one creator with no outstanding monetary balance on the platform. 

Lavinglia has been about as tactful with irate users of his site as he has with his former illustrator — at one point, and in apparent contravention of California privacy laws, he cross-referenced an account's email address against the site's user information. "Never used Gumroad, never going to," Jacob van Loon tweeted. Gumroad replied "According to your bio's email address, you already have." The response was hastily deleted. Van Loon maintains that no such account was ever created.

Backlash against crypto has been a recent source of strife for a number of companies. Creators of various stripes were incensed to learn Kickstarter was a drifting into blockchain technologies; comic artist Spike Trotman to recently launched her own crowdfunding initiative in order to avoid involvement in the crypto space. Chat app Discord walked back plans to NFT and crypto integration plans last November following user backlash while Electronic Arts softened its own bullish outlook on the technology for similar reasons. A growing number of artists have voiced concerns about NFTs, in general, as a vector for theft, while the entire market for these digital goods seems, at best, wildly inflated and riddled with bad actors. These incidents have also been an opportunity for some firms to win over to skeptical creators, such as unabashed indie game marketplace Itch.io: 

But it's not just customers who companies stand to lose by stepping into this space. While Brown maintains that working for Gumroad, until recently, was an excellent gig that paid well and afforded him plenty of freedom, when asked if he'd consider working for the company again in a non-NFT context he responded with an emphatic "hell no." He considers the whole affair a breach of trust. "I'm married, I have two children, I have a mortgage, I have all kinds of bills [...] and so I need to plan for that. I can't just suddenly lose my regular gig and they don't tell me. They lost all my trust there," he said "And then when they lied online from their account on Twitter, you know, I would never work for them again, at this point. I just have no trust at all, with them. It's irrelevant whether they actually make NFTs or not, because they already made an action on NFTs by making me leave the company because I didn't want to work on that." 

Have you worked in some capacity for Gumroad? I'd like to hear from you. Download Signal messenger for iOS or Android and text me confidentially at 646 983 9846.

Meta has “absolutely no desire to withdraw from Europe.” The company issued the statement in a blog post it published on Tuesday after some media outlets published reports claiming it had “threatened” to pull Facebook and Instagram from the continent amid uncertainty over whether the US and European Union would agree to replace a scrapped transatlantic privacy agreement.

The “threat” Meta made came in the form of a disclosure the company made in its latest earnings report. Published last week, the document said the company would “likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe” if the US and European Union failed to ratify a new data transfer agreement and the company couldn’t depend on other existing mechanisms. Meta has issued similar warnings in the past, but it did so without naming Facebook and Instagram specifically.

At the center of Meta’s fears over its future on the European continent are the Safe Harbour Agreement and Privacy Shield, both of which were struck down by the European Court of Justice in recent years over fears of what happens to the data of EU citizens once it’s on servers in the US. As the company points out, it’s not the only business facing uncertainty over whether officials can agree to a substitute. It notes at least 70 other companies have voiced similar concerns.

"We want to see the fundamental rights of EU users protected, and we want the internet to continue to operate as it was intended: without friction, in compliance with applicable laws — but not confined by national borders,” the company said.

For the most part, European lawmakers seemed to welcome the prospect of Meta leaving the EU market. “I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook,” said French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire when asked to comment on the possibility of Meta pulling Facebook and Instagram. “Digital giants must understand that the European continent will resist and affirm its sovereignty.”

Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects mastermind behind Blade Runner, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey and numerous others, died on Monday at age 79. His daughter Amy Trumbull announced the news on Facebook, writing that her father’s death followed a “two-year battle” with cancer, a brain tumor and stroke.

Trumbull was born on April 8, 1942 in Los Angeles, the son of a mechanical engineer and artist. His father worked on the special effects for films including The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars: A New Hope. The younger Trumbull worked as an illustrator and airbrush artist in Hollywood for many years. His career really took off after he cold-called Stanley Kubrick, a conversation which led to a job working on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One of his most significant contributions to 2001 was creating the film’s Star Gate, a ground-breaking scene where astronaut Dave Bowman hurtles through an illuminated tunnel transcending space and time. In order to meet Kubrick’s high aesthetic standards for the shot, Trumbull essentially designed a way to turn the film camera inside-out. Trumbull’s ad hoc technique “was completely breaking the concept of what a camera is supposed to do,” he said during a lecture at TIFF.

Trumbull earned visual effects Oscar nominations for his work on Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner. He also received the President's Award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1996.

Later in his career, Trumbull voiced distaste over the impact of computers on visual effects, decrying the cheapening and flattening impact of the new era of CGI. “Today, the motion picture visual effects industry has almost entirely given way to computer graphics. We’re able to do things that were absolutely inconceivable in the old days like water effects, fire, explosions, smoke. But, almost everything in the visual effects industry today is created on computers. There’s a certain commoditization that has resulted that I’m not comfortable with myself. I like miniatures and physical effects and what I call organic effects,” said Trumbull in a 2018 interview for The Hollywood Reporter.

He spent the last years of his life working on a new super-immersive film format he dubbed MAGI, which he believed would improve the experience of watching a film in theaters. But Trumbull struggled to draw the interest of today’s film industry. “What interests me is being able to create profound personal experiences for audiences,” Trumbull toldMIT Technology Review in 2016. “Whatever it is, I want you to feel like what’s happening on the screen is actually happening in real-time, to you, in this theater.”

Instagram is making it a whole lot easier to remove posts, comments and other activity from the platform. The photo sharing app is rolling out new account controls that allow users to bulk delete comments and posts, and review past interactions and search activity.

The features will be available in a new section of users’ profiles called ”your activity.” The goal, according to Instagram, is to make it easier to revisit and delete past interactions. While it was technically possible to delete past likes, comments and posts from Instagram in the past, the only way to do so without deleting your account altogether was to manually wade through your past posts one by one.

Now, the “your activity” section will offer shortcuts to view past timeline and Story posts, as well as likes and comments on other users’ feeds. There are also shortcuts to review time spent in the app, search history, link clicks and account-level activity like username changes.

Instagram first previewed the changes in December, noting at the time that it could be “particularly important for teens to more fully understand what information they've shared on Instagram.” The app has come under renewed pressure to create more safety features for younger people in recent months, and making it easier to remove past activity could be seen as one way to “depressurize” the app.