How the Nature Conservancy, the World’s Biggest Environmental Group, Became a Dealer of Meaningless Carbon Offsets

An anonymous reader shares a report: At first glance, big corporations appear to be protecting great swaths of U.S. forests in the fight against climate change. JPMorgan Chase & Co. has paid almost $1 million to preserve forestland in eastern Pennsylvania. Forty miles away, Walt Disney has spent hundreds of thousands to keep the city of Bethlehem, Pa., from aggressively harvesting…

Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestle Named Top Plastic Polluters For Third Year In a Row

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé have been accused of “zero progress” on reducing plastic waste, after being named the world’s top plastic polluters for the third year in a row. Coca-Cola was ranked the world’s No 1 plastic polluter by Break Free From Plastic in its annual audit, after its beverage bottles were…

Introducing Four New Online Master’s Degrees from HSE University

By Betty Vandenbosch, Chief Content Officer, Coursera Degrees in business, technology, and data science will enable students around the world to prepare for in-demand jobs The “future of work” is already here. According to the World Economic Forum, the global workforce is automating faster than expected, displacing 85 million jobs in the next five years. […]
The post Introducing Four New Online…

Pirate Bay Founder Warns US Govt Against Mafia-Esque Copyright Lobby

One of the original founders of The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde, is warning against the power American corporations have on the internet. After several copyright industry groups reported Sunde’s domain registration service Njalla to the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), branding it a “notorious market,” Sunde wrote a letter to the USTR, not to defend Njalla but to warn against the threat…

Will SpaceX’s Starlink satellites ruin stargazing?

SpaceX’s satellites will populate the night sky, affecting how we observe the stars. And this is just the beginning of private satellite mega-constellations. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/will-spacex-starlink-satellites-ruin-stargazing…

Amazon Now Has More Than 1 Million Employees

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Amazon.com said it now has about 1 million employees after hiring 250,000 workers in the third quarter, part of a growth spurt driven by booming ecommerce sales during the coronavirus pandemic and a milestone for a company founded in 1995 by Jeff Bezos as an online bookseller. Despite its rapid ascent, Amazon…

Facebook Finally Launches Its New Oversight Board for Content Moderation

NBC News reports that “Social media users who believe their posts have been unfairly removed from Facebook or Instagram can now file an appeal to Facebook’s Independent Oversight Board, the company announced Thursday.”
Positioned as a “Supreme Court” for Facebook’s content moderation decisions, the external panel of 20 journalists, academics, lawyers and human rights experts will weigh in — and potentially override…

US To Accuse Google of Protecting Illegal Monopoly

The Justice Department plans to accuse Google of maintaining an illegal monopoly over search and search advertising in a lawsuit to be filed on Tuesday, the government’s most significant legal challenge to a tech company’s market power in a generation, according to officials at the agency. From a report: In its suit, to be filed in a federal court in Washington,…

EU Shoots For $11.7B ‘Industrial Cloud’ To Rival US

The European Union aims to spend up to 10 billion euro ($11.7 million) over the next seven years to help build up a homegrown cloud computing sector that could rival foreign corporations such as Amazon, Google and Alibaba. From a report: Twenty-five EU countries signed a joint declaration last week pledging public money to power up the cloud sector and establishing…

What If the Government Ran a Social Network?

A publicly-funded social network run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation “has been proposed as one possible response if Facebook and Google limit services in Australia when the mandatory news code becomes law this year,” reports the Guardian: Facebook has warned it will block Australians from sharing news if the landmark plan to make digital platforms pay for news content becomes law….