Charlotte Henry

The U.S. Department of Commerce added a further 11 Chinese firms to its list of those involved in human rights violations, CNET reported. Violations include attacks on Muslim minority groups. One of those, Nanchang O-Film Tech, is known to have associations with Apple.

The Commerce Department said the group of 11 companies that supported “mass arbitrary detention, forced labor, involuntary collection of biometric data and genetic analysis” targeted at Uighurs and other minority groups will face restrictions on US products, including technology. “Beijing actively promotes the reprehensible practice of forced labor and abusive DNA collection and analysis schemes to repress its citizens,” Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said in a statement Monday. “This action will ensure that our goods and technologies are not used in the Chinese Communist Party’s despicable offensive against defenseless Muslim minority populations.”

Yale economist Professor Fiona Scott Morton has written papers about bringing antitrust cases against Google and Facebook. She’s also been hired by Apple and Amazon to help them navigate such probes (although that was not revealed in the recent papers). There’s an interesting profile of her on Bloomberg News.

Scott Morton, hailed in a 2019 article in the New Republic as an “antitrust crusader,” said she began consulting for Amazon in the last year, while her work for Apple dates back several years. She said she usually discloses her clients when speaking at conferences. The lack of disclosure on the Google and Facebook papers, she said, shouldn’t be an issue because Apple and Amazon didn’t pay her to write them. What’s more, she added, those papers didn’t focus on either Apple or Amazon.

Musician Sarah Bareilles wrote all the songs in Apple TV+ newcomer, Little Voice. She explained to the South China Morning Post how fellow executive producer J.J. Abrams got her to sign-up to the project.

Bareilles was a huge fan of Felicity, the Keri Russell university-set TV series that Abrams co-created. And Abrams was a big admirer of Waitress, based on the 2007 movie that also happened to star Russell. “Apparently I have a Keri Russell thing,” Bareilles jokes. Abrams didn’t have a plan, but he wanted more of what Bareilles and co-writer Jessie Nelson did with their 2016 Broadway show about a waitress in an abusive marriage. “I started thinking about, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to see that same sort of tone [as Felicity], but what if Felicity was a songwriter?’ – the idea of a young woman, a young person, finding their voice as an artist and as a person,” Bareilles says.

On Wednesday, a number of high-profile Twitter accounts were taken over in a major hack. Motherboard revealed how an internal tool at the social media firm helped the attackers.

The accounts were taken over using an internal tool at Twitter, according to the sources, as well as screenshots of the tool obtained by Motherboard. One of the screenshots shows the panel and the account of Binance; Binance is one of the accounts that hackers took over today. According to screenshots seen by Motherboard, at least some of the accounts appear to have been compromised by changing the email address associated with them using the tool. In all, four sources close to or inside the underground hacking community provided Motherboard with screenshots of the user tool. Two sources said the Twitter panel was also used to change ownership of some so-called OG accounts—accounts that have a handle consisting of only one or two characters—as well as facilitating the tweeting of the cryptocurrency scams from the high profile accounts.

The global launch of Instagram Reels, Facebook’s challenger to TikTok, is imminent. NBC News reported that it will arrive in the U.S. in and over 50 other countries in the coming weeks.

Like TikTok, Instagram Reels lets users make and share 15-second video clips set to a vast catalogue of music. Like TikTok, users can also borrow and remix audio from other people’s videos. And, like TikTok, users could see their clips go viral in a “Featured Reels” section of the most popular videos. Facebook first launched Reels in Brazil last November and expanded it to France and Germany last month. It launched in India last week — just days after India banned TikTok and more than 50 other Chinese apps citing privacy and security concerns. Facebook will launch Reels in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Mexico and roughly 50 other countries. Users will be able to access Reels through a new icon at the bottom of their screen in Instagram and post Reels to Instagram Stories.