Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

CDC director tells Fox News federal government 'looking into' potential COVID-19 vaccine mandate

07/30/21 3:56 PM

New story in Technology from Time: ‘Cube Crawls’ and ‘Frat Bro’ Culture: California’s Huge Activision Blizzard Lawsuit Alleges Yet Another Toxic Workplace in the Video Game Industry

On July 20, California filed an explosive workplace discrimination and harassment lawsuit against Activision Blizzard, publisher of immensely popular video games including World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and the Call of Duty franchise. It has resulted in a shockwave of response from employees, other games studios and players.

The lawsuit alleges a “frat bro” culture was allowed to flourish in the office, creating an environment in which women were sexually harassed and discriminated against in advancement and compensation decisions.

Activision Blizzard is one of the largest video game publishers in the world, owning studios who have created and released some of the most popular titles over the past decade. Its 2016 acquisition of Candy Crush publisher King, expanded its audience by millions more. As of this year, the holding company has 435 million monthly active users worldwide and reported a net revenue of over $2 billion in the first quarter of 2021.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The lawsuit, filed by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), and initially reported by Bloomberg Law, marks the latest round of accusations in the gaming industry of abusive behavior being ignored, tolerated or outright participated in by upper management within prominent game studios. But this lawsuit is also potentially precedent setting, as the DFEH might be keen to make an example of one of the largest video game companies in the industry, according to The Washington Post.

Here’s what to know about the Activision Blizzard lawsuit, and what it reveals about accusations of rampant workplace abuse in the video game industry.

 

What does California’s lawsuit allege?

Court documents claim to reveal a culture of gender discrimination at Activision Blizzard that invaded nearly every aspect of the work experience for women at the company, who make up only about 20% of the 9,500 employees, including “compensation, assignment, promotion, termination, constructive discharge and retaliation.”

A two-year investigation by DFEH concluded that the company allowed a “frat bro” culture to take hold, according to the lawsuit, and create an environment that allowed sexual harassment to subsist with impunity. Widespread complaints from women included their appearance regularly commented on and being groped by male employees, as well as being pursued romantically by male supervisors.

In the most extreme case of alleged employee abuse, one woman killed herself on a company trip after being subjected to sexual harassment, according to the lawsuit.

The DFEH investigation also uncovered that women were less likely to be promoted, were more likely to be terminated, and were consistently paid less for performing the same work (or more work) than male employees. Complaints of unequal pay for women resulted in the holding company’s hiring of legal counsel for analysis of compensation multiple times, but no corrective action was taken, according to the court documents.

The lawsuit also alleges that women of color were particularly vulnerable to discrimination at Activision Blizzard. One Black woman reported it took her longer than men hired after her to be made a permanent employee. This employee and another Black woman both reported being micro-managed about their time, with one woman claiming her manager made her write a one-page summary of how she would use time off. Both women left the company as a result of the discriminatory treatment.

The lawsuit claims women who reported concerns were not only unsupported by HR, but their complaints were also not kept confidential, resulting in retaliation which included being unwillingly transferred to another unit, being cut out of work projects, and being laid off.

According to the documents, this frat house work environment included “cube crawls,” in which male employees would drink “copious amounts” of alcohol, crawl through cubicles and behave inappropriately toward women in the office.

Only two individuals were named directly in the lawsuit: Blizzard President J. Allen Brack and Alex Afrasiabi, a former creative director for World of Warcraft. Documents claim Afrasiabi’s widespread harassment was not only witnessed by supervisors, but widely known enough that his hotel room during a company event was nicknamed the “Crosby Suite” [sic] after Bill Cosby. Since the controversy of the lawsuit drew attention last week, the company told Kotaku in a statement that Afrasiabi had already been fired for mistreatment of other employees in the summer of 2020.

 

How did Activision Blizzard respond?

An official response from Activision Blizzard stated that the DFEH included “distorted, and in many cases false, descriptions of Blizzard’s past,” and accused the agency of rushing its report.

Brack sent out a mass email to employees on July 22 condemning the discriminatory behavior, and stated that he disdains “bro culture” and has “spent [his] career fighting against it.”

Activision Blizzard executive Fran Townsend pushed back against the DFEH’s allegations in an email to employees on July 23, stating that the suit presented “a distorted and untrue picture of our company.” She called the lawsuit “meritless and irresponsible.”

 

How has the lawsuit impacted Activision Blizzard employees and the games industry?

Activision Blizzard employees circulated an open letter on July 26, calling Townsend’s statements “abhorrent and insulting.” Afterwards, hundreds of employees held a walkout at Blizzard’s Irvine campus, demanding greater pay transparency, employee participation in determining hiring and promotion practices, the option to select a third party HR auditor, the ending of forced arbitration, and other changes. The open letter was signed by over 2,000 current and former employees, according to CNN.

A few hundred employees have gathered at the #ActiBlizzWalkout, exceeding the 100 or so organizers expected. Employees are being asked to surround the Blizzard campus. The organizers have also set up a rest area for refreshments, poster making and dog watching. pic.twitter.com/Si7Fof3sys

— Sam Blake (@hisamblake) July 28, 2021

 

On July 27, Bobby Kotick, Activision Blizzard’s CEO backtracked on the company’s initial response, which he called “tone deaf,” and promised quick action to address discrimination and harassment claims with the assistance of law firm WilmerHale.

“It is imperative that we acknowledge all perspectives and experiences and respect the feelings of those who have been mistreated in any way,” Kotick stated. “I am sorry that we did not provide the right empathy and understanding.”

While Kotick said WilmerHale was hired to address systemic issues, it has also been reported that WilmerHale has a reputation for being a union-busting firm. A public response from employees noted that Kotick did not address the other demands of the walkout.

Game developers around the world have shown their support for the workers of Activision Blizzard. Most notably, over 500 employees at Ubisoft, which owns the Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry franchises, among others, signed an open letter standing in solidarity. Employees at Ubisoft, who have recently been witness to their own whirlwind of harassment accusations, expressed a desire for industry-wide change.

Some games media outlets and players have thrown support behind outraged Activision Blizzard employees as well. News sites including The Gamer and Prima Games have opted to discontinue covering Activision Blizzard games. Some Twitch streamers and players also chose to participate in a boycott of Activision Blizzard games in order to support the walkout.

 

How widespread are workplace harassment claims in video games?

The details of the Activision Blizzard lawsuit sound disturbingly familiar to many past and recent allegations of workplace abuse within prominent video game studios.

Employees of Riot Games, best known for its League of Legends franchise, walked out in 2019 in response to the company’s persistent sexual harassment allegations, as well as its policy of forced arbitration. An extensive Kotaku report unveiled the company’s fraternity-like culture, which included eerily similar allegations to the Activision Blizzard lawsuit. While Riot has since made efforts to alleviate its workplace issues, the company was also subjected to a $10 million settlement paid out to female employees after being sued by the state of California.

Ubisoft, another massive developer and publisher, came under fire last year after public sexual harassment allegations were made, criticizing a toxic work environment the company allowed to fester. Although some executives at the company were fired for inappropriate conduct, the aforementioned letter sent by employees from 32 Ubisoft studios demands further accountability. It states the company “only fired the most public offenders” and that the culture at Ubisoft has not sufficiently evolved.

Claims of sexual harassment and toxic workplaces have sprung up around many other games studios. In 2019, Warner Bros. Interactive’s NetherRealm, the studio behind the Mortal Kombat franchise, was accused of cultivating a toxic work environment rife with fraternity-like culture and abusive worker practices.

Reports of senior employees behaving inappropriately have also been a problem at other studios, such as Gearbox, where CEO Randy Pitchford has received multiple accusations of varying types of misconduct, some of which have been dismissed by courts. David Cage, the studio head of Quantic Dream, maker of Detroit: Become Human, was accused in 2018 of making sexist and racist comments, as well as fostering an environment that tolerated sexual harassment, according to Polygon.

While Activision Blizzard’s lawsuit details arguably some of the most disturbing consequences of unchecked sexual harassment, and seems poised to set a precedent as a landmark gender discrimination case, it also mirrors allegations within the games industry as a whole. If one of the largest video game makers in the world can draw such a large public lawsuit, it could embolden other agencies and employees to expose work abuses that have remained hidden for years.

 

If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider.

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Carl Levin, Michigan’s longest-serving senator, dead at 87

07/29/21 7:48 PM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Biden reveals new measures White House is implementing for the country in battle against COVID-19 delta variant

07/29/21 1:26 PM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Dusty Hill, longtime ZZ Top bassist, dead at 72

07/28/21 12:39 PM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Simone Biles to miss next round of Olympic competition

07/28/21 12:37 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

CDC announces new guidance as COVID-19 delta variant sparks growing health concerns

07/27/21 12:11 PM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

CDC to recommend masks for some vaccinated people in certain situations

07/27/21 7:45 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Jan. 6 committee, after partisan battle over appointees, holds first hearing on Capitol attack

07/27/21 6:39 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Simone Biles out of Tokyo Olympics gymnastics team final after apparent injury

07/27/21 4:45 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Mike Enzi, former Wyoming senator, dead at 77

07/26/21 11:22 PM

New story in Technology from Time: Activision Blizzard Staff Sign Petition Supporting Labor Lawsuit

Nearly 1,000 current and former Activision Blizzard Inc. employees have signed a letter calling the company’s responses to a recent discrimination lawsuit “abhorrent and insulting.”

The new letter, which was reviewed by Bloomberg, was circulated Monday following a turbulent week for the publisher behind games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft.

Last week, the California Department of Fair Housing and Employment filed an explosive lawsuit against Activision Blizzard that alleged sexual discrimination, harassment and retaliation. In response, an Activision Blizzard spokesman called the allegations false and distorted. A subsequent email from Activision executive Frances Townsend described the suit’s claims as “factually incorrect, old and out of context.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

But dozens of current and former employees, particularly at the Irvine, California-based subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment, have come out on social media in support of the lawsuit’s claims and shared their own allegations of discrimination. Internally, Blizzard employees have been fuming and pushing back against what they see as legitimate grievances against the company’s culture, according to employees who asked not to be identified.

“Our company executives have claimed that actions will be taken to protect us, but in the face of legal action — and the troubling official responses that followed — we no longer trust that our leaders will place employee safety above their own interests,” the letter says. “To claim this is a ‘truly meritless and irresponsible lawsuit,’ while seeing so many current and former employees speak out about their own experiences regarding harassment and abuse, is simply unacceptable.”

The full letter:

To the Leaders of Activision Blizzard,

We, the undersigned, agree that the statements from Activision Blizzard, Inc. and their legal counsel regarding the DFEH lawsuit, as well as the subsequent internal statement from Frances Townsend, are abhorrent and insulting to all that we believe our company should stand for. To put it clearly and unequivocally, our values as employees are not accurately reflected in the words and actions of our leadership.

We believe these statements have damaged our ongoing quest for equality inside and outside of our industry. Categorizing the claims that have been made as “distorted, and in many cases false” creates a company atmosphere that disbelieves victims. It also casts doubt on our organizations’ ability to hold abusers accountable for their actions and foster a safe environment for victims to come forward in the future. These statements make it clear that our leadership is not putting our values first. Immediate corrections are needed from the highest level of our organization.
Our company executives have claimed that actions will be taken to protect us, but in the face of legal action — and the troubling official responses that followed — we no longer trust that our leaders will place employee safety above their own interests. To claim this is a “truly meritless and irresponsible lawsuit,” while seeing so many current and former employees speak out about their own experiences regarding harassment and abuse, is simply unacceptable.

We call for official statements that recognize the seriousness of these allegations and demonstrate compassion for victims of harassment and assault. We call on Frances Townsend to stand by her word to step down as Executive Sponsor of the ABK Employee Women’s Network as a result of the damaging nature of her statement. We call on the executive leadership team to work with us on new and meaningful efforts that ensure employees — as well as our community — have a safe place to speak out and come forward.

We stand with all our friends, teammates, and colleagues, as well as the members of our dedicated community, who have experienced mistreatment or harassment of any kind. We will not be silenced, we will not stand aside, and we will not give up until the company we love is a workplace we can all feel proud to be a part of again. We will be the change.

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Veterans Affairs to mandate COVID vaccine for health care personnel, the first such mandate for a federal agency

07/26/21 11:18 AM

New story in Technology from Time: This Vermont Utility Is Revolutionizing Its Power Grid to Fight Climate Change. Will the Rest of the Country Follow Suit?

Visitors entering a code-locked central control room at Green Mountain Power (GMP)’s Colchester, Vt., headquarters instinctively lower their voices, whispering in deference to operators relaying orders from behind semicircular clusters of screens. It’s an intimidating space; one side of the black-walled room is taken up by a display showing a sprawling, yellow-lit maze of connections and symbols: a map of electricity flowing across the local grid. Technicians here have the daunting job of managing that vast, interconnected network; controlling hundreds of breaker switches; monitoring solar and hydroelectric electrical output; and anticipating energy demand spikes to keep Vermont’s lights on. When there’s an outage, these operators help coordinate the painstaking work of bringing the system back online.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“It’s basically like a puzzle,” says Jeff Lawrence, a seven-year control-room veteran. “When a storm comes through, the puzzle falls apart. You’ve got to put it back together, one piece at a time.”

In Vermont and around the country, those puzzle pieces have been falling apart more often as climate change makes extreme weather events more frequent and severe. Last month, extreme high temperatures pushed power grids in the Pacific Northwest to their limits, while around 700 people were killed during Texas’ massive power outages this past winter. “It’s heartbreaking to see weather events come through, and to see the impacts of climate change happening all over the country,” says Green Mountain Power CEO Mari McClure, sitting in a conference room at company headquarters.

Hilary Swift for TIME GMP engineers spent two years modeling electrical scenarios and testing components to make sure the system would work safely. “I can come up with 10,000 reasons why you wouldn’t pursue this,” says Josh Castonguay, VP of engineering and innovation, photographed at the solar farm on June 23. “This won’t work. That won’t work. They’re all things that you’ve just gotta engineer through.”

McClure speaks in measured tones, drawing shapes with her hands as she explains that, in part to mitigate the threat of climate change, GMP is in the process of transforming its grid. It’s moving away, she says, from large generator plants and long transmission lines, and toward a more decentralized approach premised on technologies like networks of utility-connected devices and new, cheaper battery storage, in a system meant to protect against massive power outages and hasten a transition away from fossil fuels. McClure, onetime MVP of the University of Buffalo’s women’s basketball team, is fond of sports metaphors. “You play hard, and winning takes care of itself,” she says. “That’s the analogy to our transformation work.” But just as in a basketball game, when it comes to the gargantuan task of remaking the nation’s power grid to avoid climate catastrophe, the clock is running out.

Decarbonizing the U.S. electrical system is not as simple as replacing every fossil-fuel-burning power station with a wind farm or a solar field. Unlike coal and natural gas, renewable resources are intermittent—meaning they don’t work when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. A major shift to renewables will require electric grids to be reconstructed to account for those limitations, a massive and costly undertaking. National leaders have made plenty of pledges to address both emissions and resilience, but have been slow to implement real-world solutions. Lately, GMP and other forward-thinking power companies have begun bridging that gap, piloting the complex systemwide reconstruction and engineering workarounds necessary to create a reliable, carbon-free power grid before it’s too late.

Hilary Swift for TIME GMP’s headquarters in Colchester, Vt. When activated this month, the Panton system will become the first U.S. utility-built community microgrid able to run on renewable energy without a fossil-fuel backup.

Rural Panton, Vt., is home to GMP’s newest effort to remake the electric system: a “microgrid” attached to a solar power plant, which can distribute its electricity to parts of the nearby community in case they get cut off from the main energy network due to falling trees or heavy snows, common occurrences in this isolated New England town. GMP engineers spent two years modeling electrical scenarios and testing components to make sure the system would work safely. “I can come up with 10,000 reasons why you wouldn’t pursue this,” says Josh Castonguay, VP of engineering and innovation at GMP, standing near a 4.9-megawatt storage battery that helps power the grid when the sun isn’t shining, and which doubles as a local energy supply for the town in an emergency. “This won’t work. That won’t work. They’re all things that you’ve just gotta engineer through.” When activated this month, the Panton system will become the first U.S. utility-built community microgrid able to run on renewable energy without a fossil-fuel backup.

Getting a system like this up and running isn’t easy. For one thing, power-line circuit breakers—which cut off electricity if, say, a tree knocks down a utility pole—weren’t designed to operate with only a single battery pumping power through their lines. GMP’s solution is a novel use of a type of transformer known as a grounding bank to increase the voltage of Panton’s microgrid high enough to make sure its breakers trip if electrical wires are damaged.

Another of GMP’s grid-modernization projects is to lease Tesla Powerwall battery backup systems to homeowners at below-market rates—and then use them, with homeowners’ permission, to help cover a community’s electricity needs during peak times (it promised to leave plenty of charge prior to snowstorms or other weather events that could bring down transmission lines). When the program began back in 2017, it was the first such utility-sponsored initiative in the U.S.; nearly 1,000 Vermonters had signed up within a year. State regulators approved it as a permanent program in late 2020. It offers huge climate benefits: utilities often tap their dirtiest electricity generation resources during the most intense periods of high demand a few times a year, either by purchasing power from fossil-fuel plants in far-off states or spinning up dormant natural gas-fired “peaker plants.” With its Powerwall program, GMP can offset some of that peak demand, dumping stored electricity onto the grid from garages and basements around the state, a type of setup known as a “virtual power plant” (VPP). (The term also refers to networks of other devices, like water heaters, that utilities can control remotely to manage the grid.)

Hilary Swift for TIME “Utilities across the country are getting better at seeing that we’ve run out of time with fossil fuels,” says Green Mountain Power CEO Mari McClure. “On the other hand, we have to move faster as an industry.”

Other U.S. utilities have since started similar battery grid programs, many with advice from GMP. New Hampshire’s Liberty Utilities started a battery VPP program in 2018; Rocky Mountain Power of Utah, Wyoming and Idaho did so in 2019; and Portland General Electric and Southern California Edison launched programs last year. Battery-making firms and installers like Sonnen and Sunrun have partnered with utilities, participated in utility programs that allowed multiple installers to contribute batteries, or, in Sonnen’s case, networked their own U.S. home battery communities. (The U.S. is playing catchup here to some extent; such initiatives have existed outside the country since 2015.) Meanwhile, GMP has expanded its own VPP initiative, investing about $30 million to sign up more than 2,000 homes in one of the largest utility-coordinated home battery programs in the country.

Graphic by Lon Tweeten for TIME

Energy experts say VPP systems are essential in the near term, in part because they can help prevent overloads like the one that crippled Texas earlier this year. In the longer term, transitioning to renewable energy will require accounting for intermittency, which means building a huge amount of energy storage so power is available on cloudy or windless days. Exactly how much energy storage the U.S. will need depends on factors like how much the country chooses to invest in new transmission lines—which can reduce the need for batteries by moving energy from wind farms and solar fields that are producing power to areas where renewables are idle—but projections range from around 150 to 450 gigawatts of capacity, or total potential power output, to make a fully renewable, national system work. (The Hoover Dam, for context, has a 2-gigawatt capacity.) Utility-scale batteries like the one in Panton could account for much of that new storage, along with hydropower pumped into reserve reservoirs. But rolling out VPP battery systems as well could make the job easier and cheaper than building utility-scale batteries alone, as VPPs will be more cost-effective in many cases, reduce the need for new transmission wires to connect large batteries to the grid and provide the additional benefit of home backup power in case the electricity goes out.

When it comes to systemic change in the power system, local opposition has a reputation for derailing even the best-laid green-energy plans. Some of GMP’s wind-turbine projects, for instance, have gotten pushback from residents concerned about noise and marred hilltop views. In Panton, the company started selling the community on a solar field and microgrid back in 2015, scheduling calls with town board members and bringing delegations to council meetings. “I think they were just trying to feel us out,” says Howard Hall, chairman of the town’s select board, in the 18th century former church that serves as town hall for the Lake Champlain community of less than 700 residents. GMP ended up upgrading that 150-year-old building with new LED lights and electric heat pumps, and installing the community’s first and only streetlight at a nearby intersection. The charm offensive worked—aside from a few grumbles, Hall says locals have been happy to work with GMP to test the company’s new microgrid project. “My residents can get reliable power no matter what the conditions are, and it doesn’t cost us anything,” says Hall. “Why wouldn’t we do it?”

The desire for backup power in snowstorm-prone Vermont motivated some participation in GMP’s VPP program as well, but many residents also joined out of concern for a warming climate—a weighty issue in the broadly liberal-leaning state (69% of Vermonters think climate change is affecting the weather, 5 percentage points above the national average). Many locals have noticed winter snows disappearing, summers growing hotter and springs seeming to come sooner every year. “I’ve just been so alarmed by what we’re dumping into the atmosphere, and the global effect it’s having on ecosystems,” says VPP participant Gerry Hawkes, 71. He and his wife Karen Hawkes, 73, showed me a GMP-connected battery in the basement of their log house, which Gerry built decades ago on a hilltop in Woodstock, Vt., 50 miles southeast of Panton.

Gerry spent his career working as a forester and inventor, developing innovations like a modular bicycle-path system and a wheelbarrow-like tool for clearing earthquake rubble. Now he runs a business mitigating local invasive plants without herbicides, using a jerry-rigged flamethrower and a self-designed tractor-mulcher he calls the “Forest Saver.” He’s affable, smiling as he speaks, but his tone turns somber when the topic turns to environmental issues—particularly the threat that climate change and other environmental stressors pose to New England’s famed forests. “We don’t know how fast things are unfolding, but we’re not going in the right direction,” Gerry says. He points out a stand of trees with yellowed and thinning leaves. “See, there’s plenty of room for them,” he says. “They shouldn’t be dying like that.”

Hilary Swift for TIME A Tesla Powerwall battery backup system in a home in Guilford, Vt. When the grid-modernization program began in 2017, it was the first such utility-sponsored initiative in the U.S. Nearly 1,000 Vermonters had signed up within a year. In late 2020, state regulators approved it as a permanent program.

Mari McClure’s tenure as chief of GMP has coincided with a renewed national focus on climate change and grid resilience that goes up to the highest levels of government. “As we’ve seen more hurricanes, and more challenging environmental issues from severe weather, we want to have a resilient system,” says Patricia Hoffman, acting assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity. Still, energy experts say the country’s grids aren’t being modernized fast enough. Some large utilities, like North Carolina–based Duke Energy, have proposed “pathways” to zero out their emissions that still rely on building new natural gas plants, even as consensus grows that such projects are impossible to justify from a climate perspective. Other utilities are making slow headway on new grid initiatives. Orange and Rockland Utilities, a subsidiary of New York–based Consolidated Edison that services parts of northern New Jersey and southeastern New York, launched a solar battery VPP project last June, but a year later had not yet brought any home batteries online. (The utility says COVID-19 slowed their plans, because they weren’t able to do direct door-to-door marketing.) Meanwhile, some new transmission lines, another essential component of a green transition, have been mired by local legal challenges, a bad sign as the Biden Administration prepares to expand such infrastructure. Battery storage, meanwhile, may be too expensive to build at the multihundred-gigawatt scale needed for decarbonization.

Other countries have moved faster than the U.S. on innovative grid enhancements. Australia is developing what it says will be the world’s largest VPP system, connecting 50,000 home batteries. In the U.K., Kaluza, a spin-off of British energy supplier Ovo, is paying customers to access their electric-car batteries while they’re charging in order to help manage electrical peaks (company representatives say the firm will expand to the U.S. in coming months). A similar, decentralized initiative from Ford, which uses batteries on its upcoming electric F-150, may be years away.

In the U.S., new transmission lines are waiting on federal money, while utility-scale storage, though growing, would also be spurred by additional public investment. In the world of VPPs, some U.S. utilities blame slow progress on state regulators that control utilities’ spending and fees, and which can create disincentives for utilities to put money toward new, advanced grid programs if there are no mechanisms to recoup their investments. Battery installers like Sunrun say utilities themselves are purposefully slowing down such initiatives. “There are definitely utilities that are not as forward-looking at Green Mountain Power,” says Chris Rauscher, who directs Sunrun’s policy and storage market strategy. “Historically, those utilities’ playbook has been to delay, delay, delay, just throw sand in everyone’s eyes, because they want time to try and figure out where the future is headed and how they can benefit.” Yet some observers say the battery-makers aren’t blameless either. Interoperability—or the ability for batteries from different manufacturers to work as part of a single system—is a significant obstacle to widespread use of VPPs, since utilities have to be able to charge or discharge large networks of batteries in tandem in order to manage demand spikes. But battery-makers aren’t exactly falling over themselves to work together and overcome those problems. “They all think they can monopolize the market,” says Arshad Mansoor, CEO of Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit energy-research organization.

Hilary Swift for TIME While the desire for backup power in the snowstorm-prone state motivated some participation in GMP’s VPP program, many residents joined out of concern for a warming climate. “I’ve just been so alarmed by what we’re dumping into the atmosphere, and the global effect it’s having on ecosystems,” says Gerry Hawkes, who has a GMP-connected battery in the basement of his log house.

And regardless of blame, there remains the sheer enormity of the task ahead, and the scant time left to accomplish it. Electrical systems are premised on large, centralized “base-load” power plants that push a constant current of electricity to the far extremes of the grid, with additional power plants that kick in extra electricity when it’s needed. Indeed, removing carbon emissions from base-load plants might be the final frontier in green grid conversion. Nuclear energy can provide base-load power, but new atomic development has been sluggish for years, thanks in part to enduring public-perception issues following high-profile accidents, while carbon-capture fossil-fuel systems—which could theoretically generate zero-emission base-load power—are still years from large-scale implementation. And though renewable-energy resources like wind and solar produce plenty of power, intermittency means it will be extremely difficult for them to take over for base-load plants without enormous amounts of new transmission lines and storage, from networks of small batteries to multimegawatt behemoths.

Facing the task of remaking that system, McClure is cautiously hopeful. “Utilities across the country are getting better at seeing that we’ve run out of time with fossil fuels,” she says. “On the other hand, we have to move faster as an industry.” Karen Hawkes is hopeful too—she says she’s witnessed an environmental turnaround before. Through the 1970s and 1980s, many of Vermont’s trees began to sicken and die en masse, a phenomenon linked to acid rain from cars and smokestacks, before 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act helped reverse the decline. She recalls that, during the worst period, her husband Gerry shook with emotion after examining scant, sickly foliage on a maple tree near their house. “I can remember Gerry saying, ‘I think in five years we won’t see the maple trees.’ And I was devastated by that remark,” Karen says, standing near the same tree Gerry had studied decades ago, its leaves shifting under evening sunlight. “But that didn’t happen—the Clean Air Act helped a lot. So I am much more optimistic.”

New story in Technology from Time: How the Alleged Outing of Catholic Priest Shows the Sorry State of Data Privacy in America

On Tuesday, the Catholic Substack newsletter The Pillar published an investigation into Monsignor Jeffrey Burrill, who had, up until that day, been the top administrator in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops based in Wisconsin. Burrill resigned, The Pillar said, in anticipation of their report, which alleged he had regularly used the LGBTQ dating app Grindr and visited gay bars from 2018 to 2020.

Their source? “Commercially available app signal data.”

Catholic and LGBTQ advocates alike condemned The Pillar’s report as homophobic in its insinuations that Burrill’s alleged use of a LGBTQ dating app somehow proved he “engaged in serial sexual misconduct.” Others argued Burrill’s alleged behavior was hypocritical, as Catholic doctrine considers same-sex relationships a sin. Burrill himself was not immediately available for comment and has not made a statement publicly.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Regardless, many online commentators raised the same question: Wait, just how exactly did The Pillar get this information?

The article cites “commercially available app signal data” from “a mobile device correlated to Burrill” that was “obtained and analyzed by The Pillar.” It says the data “conveys mobile app data signals during two 26-week periods, the first in 2018 and the second in 2019 and 2020,” and says the information was “obtained from a data vendor and authenticated by an independent data consulting firm contracted by The Pillar.”

Read More: Your iPhone’s Next Software Update Aims to Foil App Trackers and Digital Advertisers. Here’s How

Privacy experts tell TIME the controversial report highlights the sorry state of the current data privacy landscape.

“It’s an excellent example of the lack of data protection in America,” says Jennifer King, a privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. “It shows just how low the threshold is if you want to actually target an individual.”

How third party vendors get your data

It’s still unclear how exactly The Pillar obtained Burrill’s phone data and Grindr denies that it came from the app.

“We do not believe Grindr is the source of the data behind the blog’s unethical, homophobic witch hunt. We have looked closely at this story, and the pieces simply do not add up,” a Grindr spokesperson said in a statement to TIME. “Grindr has policies and systems in place to protect personal data, and our users should continue to feel confident and proud in using Grindr regardless of their religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”

Grindr did not respond to follow-up questions asking for details on how it had investigated the issue internally, or whether the app sells user data to third party vendors. But Andrés Arrieta, director of consumer privacy engineering at the data privacy non-profit the Electronic Frontier Foundation, tells TIME the practice is incredibly common among mobile apps.

“There’s an industry whose full existence is to gather as much data about everyone, and then to sell it to anyone that will buy it,” Arrieta says.

Many apps, especially free ones, sell aggregated data—which can include demographics or location information—about their users to third party vendors as an extra source of revenue; these vendors then turn around and sell that data to advertisers looking for information on particular types of users, explains King. The data is transferred under the expectation that user identities will be made anonymous.

Someone could feasibly approach one of these third party vendors, King says, and pay for a package of location data, which might include when a user logged in and out, their approximate locations, and their phone’s static ID number (a unique string of numbers assigned to each mobile device). These packages can feature users of specific apps, like dating apps, explains Ben Zhao, a professor of computer science at the University of Chicago.

Read More: TikTok Has Started Collecting Your ‘Faceprints’ and ‘Voiceprints.’ Here’s What It Could Do With Them

The issue, King explains, is that if you wanted to find the static ID number of a particular individual’s phone, and knew identifying factors like where they lived, worked, and traveled, you could parse through all of the location data to figure out which static ID number belongs to that person.

It appears The Pillar did just this. In its report, The Pillar said it “correlated a unique mobile device to Burrill when it was used consistently from 2018 until at least 2020 from the USCCB staff residence and headquarters, from meetings at which Burrill was in attendance, and was also used on numerous occasions at Burrill’s family lake house, near the residences of Burrill’s family members, and at a Wisconsin apartment in Burrill’s hometown, at which Burrill himself has been listed as a resident.”

The Pillar did not respond to TIME’s question as to whether someone tipped them off about Burrill having an account on Grindr.

This tactic isn’t unprecedented, King says. There’ve been examples of debt collectors using similar methods to track people’s movements in the repossession industry.

“In essence, the privacy protection that you get from anonymizing things before you aggregate them and package them to be sold, is really a facade,” says Zhao. “Oftentimes companies think that they’re doing the right thing by anonymizing data, but what they’re doing actually falls short of what is really necessary to completely protect users from privacy attacks.”

“People in academia and in some industry circles have understood this for a long time,” he continues. “But I think there’s a general lack of understanding of this for the public, and that perhaps is why this particular story is so shocking to many people.”

The Conference of Catholic Bishops directed TIME to a Tuesday statement announcing Burrill had stepped down after it became aware of coming reports alleging “possible improper” behavior. “In order to avoid becoming a distraction to the operations and ongoing work of the Conference, Monsignor Burrill has resigned, effective immediately,” the statement said.

A lack of protection for users

Data privacy advocates have pointed to The Pillar’s report as the latest example of why the United States should impose stricter regulations on the buying and selling of personal user data.

“Experts have warned for years that data collected by advertising companies from Americans’ phones could be used to track them and reveal the most personal details of their lives. Unfortunately, they were right,” said Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden in a statement on The Pillar report shared with TIME. “Data brokers and advertising companies have lied to the public, assuring them that the information they collected was anonymous. As this awful episode demonstrates, those claims were bogus – individuals can be tracked and identified.”

In 2020, Wyden and Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy sent a letter signed by 10 other Senators asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate the online ad economy and the ways personal data, including locational information, is sold by brokers. A FTC spokesperson confirmed to TIME that they received Wyden’s letter but did not have any further comment. (FTC investigations are nonpublic.)

Read More: Pegasus Spyware Reportedly Hacked Thousands of iPhones Worldwide. Here’s What to Know

Congress has also failed to pass any comprehensive data privacy legislation, and only a handful of states have enacted laws tackling the issue on their own. California became the first to do so in 2018 with its Consumer Privacy Act, which intends to give users the right to ask companies to delete their data and not sell it, but doesn’t actually stop the practice by third party services, King explains.

Arrieta argues regulation should make it so users opt into their data being collected and sold, rather than opting out. Regulation will also need an enforcement mechanism, he argues, and users need to be given the ability to see what data is being collected on them, who it’s being shared with and the option to delete it.

The European Union’s model for privacy protections is the strongest in the world, and its General Data Protection Regulation law, implemented in 2018, has taken steps to crack down on the collection of data in the ad tech industry. Yet still, Arrieta explains, The Pillar’s investigation could have happened in any country.

Legislation won’t be a complete fix for the U.S. though, Zhao argues. It will also take a higher level of awareness among consumers, he says, and leadership from tech companies to strengthen their privacy policies.

Arrieta says he has hope that greater privacy protections are on the way—but cautions it’ll be an uphill battle. “There’s billions of dollars in this industry,” he says. “It’s gonna be a big fight.”

New story in Technology from Time: Apple TV’s New Calibration Feature Can Make Your 4K TV Look Its Best. Here’s How to Use It

Hiding indoors from the heat waves of summer is a perfect excuse to watch your favorite (or least favorite) binge-friendly show yet again. But you might not be getting the most out of your new 4K TV, at least where colors are concerned.

To get your money’s worth out of your glowing content box you’ll need to calibrate your TV correctly. And if you have an Apple TV running the latest tvOS 14.5 update, it’s easier than ever.

Why calibrate your TV?

Are you noticing spots darker or a little more muddled than they should be, or colors that seem a hair out of whack? It could be a problem with your TV’s color balance. It’s the reason those hues might seem a little flat, why you can’t see anything happening during Game of Thrones’ night scenes, or why the sick outfits in Loki aren’t popping.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Color calibration ensures your TV is properly representing the colors attempting to be shown, essentially attempting to match and adjust your screen for any actual color inaccuracies. Color standards, like the DCI-P3, exist to ensure all shows and films are displayed as intended on screens large or small. Improper color calibration, like the type seen in TV retailer showrooms, often lead to images being washed out, or even oversaturated to the point of distortion.

Sure, you can attempt to color balance your screen with your TV’s built-in preset picture modes or messing with the settings, but finding the correct balance for you, your space and your favorite show can be extremely tricky. While your Apple TV will attempt to mimic a standardized DCI-P3 color set, chances are it might not hit the nail on the head, which may lead to continual fiddling with your TV.

You can buy Blu-Ray discs designed to help you color balance your TV, but these offerings are often in the $40 range. The latest update to the Apple TV includes a robust new calibration feature to save you time and money.

How to calibrate your TV with an Apple TV

Apple TV’s new calibration process is fairly straightforward, but first make sure you have everything you need and that your preferred watching area is all set.

You’ll need an iPhone with FaceID support, in addition to needing an Apple TV from 2015 or later. A color TV would also be helpful. An LG OLED would work just fine.

Next, do your best to eliminate any ambient light from the room. It might throw off the testing process and calibrate your TV incorrectly.

In the Settings app on the Apple TV, first select the Video and Audio option, then Color Balance. Then grab your iPhone and follow the prompt on-screen, which will instruct you to flip your phone around and point the display at your TV, holding it near the screen and inside the white box displayed on your TV.

Inside the TV’s displayed box, flashes of color will appear. The iPhone’s sensors will read the colors and communicate with the Apple TV what it detects until the calibration process is complete. Then, you’ll be able to select from the “Balanced” or “Unbalanced” options. Don’t like the change? Just select “Unbalanced” and avoid messing with your screen.

And that’s it! After that, your TV should be properly calibrated to your screen and environment.

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Cleveland Indians have chosen new name after more than 100 years

07/23/21 7:20 AM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Shooting on busy DC street causes multiple injuries as crowd runs from scene

07/22/21 6:19 PM

Fox News Breaking News Alert

Fox News Breaking News Alert

THEIR HANDS ARE TIED

07/22/21 3:34 PM

New story in Technology from Time: When Parents Said No to Their Kids Being Vaccinated, This Teenager Created VaxTeen. Now It’s More Crucial Than Ever

Like many 18-year-olds, Kelly Danielpour is preparing to start college in the fall, planning out her classes, buying dorm necessities and wondering what her roommate will be like. Unlike many 18-year-olds, she’s also spending her spare time helping teens across the country navigate vaccine-hesitant parents and get their COVID-19 vaccines.

As the highly contagious Delta variant spreads, posing a greater risk for people who are unvaccinated and stoking fears of a fourth wave of COVID-19 cases, health experts are urging more Americans to get vaccinated. “This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a press briefing on July 16. And the looming start of a new school year has fueled debates over vaccine and mask requirements for returning students.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“There are so many teenagers who are unvaccinated. There are so many adults,” Danielpour tells TIME. Danielpour founded VaxTeen last year to help young people access vaccines and learn about their options if their parents don’t want them to get vaccinated. “A vaccine is a collective health measure. We all have to take part for it to be truly effective.”

Vaccination rates are lagging, particularly among young people. Just 42.6% of 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 — a smaller percentage than any older age group, according to a Mayo Clinic tracker. Among minors, 38% of 16- to 17-year-olds and 25% of 12- to 15-year-olds were fully vaccinated as of July 14, according to an American Academy of Pediatrics analysis of CDC data.

Read more: See How COVID-19 Has Spread in the U.S. and Around the World

That analysis also found the pace of child vaccinations is slowing, dropping to 315,000 new vaccinations during the week of July 14 — down from a peak of 1.6 million child vaccinations at the end of May, when children ages 12 and older became eligible to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

<strong>“They said that a teenager couldn’t have possibly created the site.”</strong>That’s what worries Danielpour, who just graduated from high school and lives in Los Angeles, where county leaders recently reinstituted a requirement to wear masks indoors due to rising COVID-19 cases. She started the research for VaxTeen before the pandemic, after coming across a Reddit post from a teenager who wanted to get their routine adolescent immunizations but whose parents opposed vaccines. Danielpour fell down a social media “rabbit hole” and encountered lots of other teens in similar situations. Most wanted to know if they could consent to vaccines on their own, without parental permission, and how they could go about getting them. “I was just in awe, and I also realized how many barriers were in place,” she says. “Whenever we talk about sort of the anti-vaccine movement, we always just talk about parents. We don’t really think about kids having their own opinions on this, or being part of this conversation or having the potential to be the decision makers. She wanted VaxTeen to be a resource for those teens, and her work became newly urgent amid the COVID-19 vaccine rollout and the pervasiveness of vaccine hesitancy.

Jessica Pons—The New York Times/ReduxKelly Danielpour, founder of the website VaxTeen.org, in Los Angeles, on June 16, 2021.

Nearly a quarter of parents say they will definitely not get their child vaccinated against COVID-19, and 18% said they will only get their child vaccinated if schools require it, according to a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“The best thing you can do for yourself and for everyone else is to get vaccinated if you can,” says Joshua Petrie, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health who studies epidemiology and the transmission of respiratory viruses. “The vaccines have been incredibly effective, and they’re our best shot at keeping things at lower levels, particularly with the Delta variant picking up speed here in the U.S.”

Ahead of the new school year, the issue of youth vaccinations and school vaccine requirements has grown more divisive. The American College Health Association recommends that colleges require the COVID-19 vaccine for all on-campus students this fall, but some states have prohibited K-12 schools and colleges from imposing such requirements. This week, a federal judge upheld Indiana University’s requirement that all students and faculty be vaccinated against COVID-19. The student plaintiffs, who object to the vaccine mandate, plan to appeal.

Read more: A Fourth Wave of COVID-19 Is Brewing in the U.S. Is There Enough Time to Stop It?

Facing pressure from conservative lawmakers as vaccine misinformation spreads, the Tennessee Department of Health plans to end adolescent vaccine outreach and stop holding COVID-19 vaccine events at schools, according to a report by the Tennessean on July 13. And lawmakers in other states have introduced legislation on either side of this issue.

To the extent that teens aren’t getting vaccinated because of apathy or lack of awareness, the Biden Administration has ramped up outreach to young people, launching a COVID-19 Student Corps to get teens to advocate for the vaccine among peers and the COVID-19 College Vaccine Challenge to encourage colleges to boost vaccination efforts.

VaxTeen has focused on teens who want to be vaccinated but who can’t get the shot because of their parents. Young people consistently email Danielpour and reach out over Twitter and Instagram, asking for help and advice. She also scrolls through Reddit and Twitter for posts from teens sharing their vaccination questions and dilemmas. “I just want to be able to go to school in person,” wrote one student on Reddit, who identified herself as a 16-year-old who “can’t change my parents’ minds” about vaccines. “I feel like my health and my concerns are just being completely disregarded,” wrote another 16-year-old girl on Reddit, referring to her mother. “Any advice on how to convince her?”

Danielpour responded to both of them, sharing guides on which states allow teens to be vaccinated without parental consent. She has focused her efforts both on access—helping teens find a vaccine clinic along their bus route that’s open on weekends, for example—and awareness, sharing fact-based vaccination information for them to take back to skeptical parents. “In many cases, convincing a parent is a teen’s only option,” she says.

Danielpour has received pushback and some hateful comments on social media and in emails from people who disagree with the work she’s doing. Some argue that vaccination decisions should be a discussion only between parents and their children. Others have pushed baseless conspiracy theories that VaxTeen is run by a pharmaceutical company.

“They said that a teenager couldn’t have possibly created the site,” Danielpour says—an accusation she tried to take as a compliment. “They don’t think a teen could have possibly done it, and I did.”

Read more: Applying to College Was Never Easy. The Pandemic Made it Nearly Impossible

She usually reads the opposing comments anyway to better understand vaccine polarization. “It is coming from a place of fear, and the better I understand that, the better VaxTeen’s work will be,” she says.

The website directs teens to resources on debunking vaccination myths and talking to parents about vaccines, including questions parents might ask and how best to answer them with factual medical information. If that doesn’t work, the site also includes a guide to each state’s laws on parental consent.

Forty states currently require parental consent for children under 18 to be vaccinated, and Nebraska requires it until age 19. Some states allow a minor to “self-consent” at a certain age—14 in Alabama and 16 in South Carolina, for example. And other states, without specifying an age, give healthcare providers the ability to decide if a minor is mature enough to consent to vaccination on their own.

In some parts of the country, legal challenges have been issued that would reduce teen access to vaccines. A bill under consideration in South Carolina would prohibit minors from getting the COVID-19 vaccine without parental consent. Meanwhile, two federal lawsuits filed this month are challenging a law passed in Washington, D.C., last year that allows children 11 and older to get vaccines without their parents’ consent.

Danielpour would like to see all states let teenagers be vaccinated without parental permission. “I don’t deny that a parent’s job is to keep their child safe. And if you’re encountering a lot of misinformation, then that can scare you,” she says. “But I also think that there’s a line in some sense, and that the more present fear—and the fear based in fact—is of the virus and seeing what it’s doing to everyone.”

More than 600,000 people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19. And while children have been less likely to get seriously ill from the virus, they also lost out on formative experiences and rites of passage during the pandemic. Danielpour, who got a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as she could, acknowledges that the return of a traditional high school experience or typical life on a college campus hinges on widespread vaccinations.

“There’s so much that depends on that — going back to school or back to normal life, having friends, being in a classroom,” she says. “There are invaluable experiences that are part of growing up that depend on our vaccine success.”