The Defense Department made its list of Chinese companies that operate in the US and have been linked to the Chinese military public this week.

The list was published by Axios and other media outlets on Wednesday. It was required as part of the 1999 National Defense Authorization Act but was not previously assembled, according to Axios.

The act called on the department to determine and publish "Communist Chinese military companies operating in the United States," or any other commercial entity that is "owned or controlled by the People's Liberation Army."

The act states that the president has the authority to impose sanctions against any of the companies listed, which include telecommunications giant Huawei, China Railway Construction Corporation, China Telecommunications Corporation, and Hikvision, which was blacklisted by the US in October 2019 for building surveillance tools that aided in the oppression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. 

Huawei has long sparred with the US over allegations that its technology poses a security risk and could act as a backdoor for the Chinese government to spy. US prosecutors have also accused the company of violating sanctions against Iran and stealing trade secrets from US carriers.

The US has lobbied its allies to reject Huawei equipment, resulting in several countries turning down the Chinese firm when planning an expansion of their 5G networks. Huawei has denied allegations of spying and stealing trade secrets. 

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo railed against China and "tools of the [Chinese Communist Party] surveillance state," specifically calling out Huawei. 

"The tide is turning against Huawei as citizens around the world are waking up to the danger of the Chinese Communist Party's surveillance state," Pompeo said in a statement on Wednesday.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican who has been consistently tough on China, said in a statement to Financial Times that the list of Chinese entities was "woefully inadequate." 

"The list only touches the surface of the Chinese government's exploitation of US capital markets at the expense of retail investors and pensioners by omitting the networks of affiliated and subsidiary companies," Rubio told FT.

In response to the list, Hikvision denied that it was linked to the Chinese military and said it "strongly opposes the decision by the US government to misapply a never-used provision of a 21-year-old law."

Adding that it will continue to try to resolve these matters with the US government.

 

Palantir, the secretive data-analytics company founded by tech billionaire and outspoken Trump-supporter Peter Thiel, is used to courting controversy on hot-button topics like surveillance and politics. 

But the tech company's newest addition to its board of directors has caused a stir in an unexpected realm: the media.

On Tuesday, Wall Street Journal reporter Alexandra Wolfe announced that she was joining Palantir's board of directors, becoming the first woman to join the company's board. 

The news, which was first reported in a Bloomberg scoop, quickly spread across media circles and confounded observers, not least because journalists are typically not allowed to join corporate boards. 

And tech companies — particularly those preparing for a multi-billion dollar IPO — typically want a level of operational experience and expertise not possessed by the average news scribe. 

Wolfe, who was based in the Wall Street Journal's New York bureau, is the daughter of famous journalist and author Tom Wolfe, whose novels include the 1987 bestseller "Bonfire of the Vanities." She is friends with Thiel, the cofounder of Palantir, which was valued at $20 billion in its last public funding round five years ago.

The Wall Street Journal did not make any internal, newsroom-wide announcement about Wolfe's unusual departure, but word quickly spread across the newsroom. The code of conduct for Dow Jones, which publishes the Wall Street Journal, explicitly bars employees from serving as directors of for-profit institutions, except under specific circumstances.

It's unclear how much WSJ management knew about Wolfe's move to Palantir leading up to the announcement, or whether Wolfe was allowed to stay at the newspaper while her Palantir role was still private, one source told Business Insider.  

Wolfe joined Palantir as one of three new independent directors brought on as the company looks forward to a possible fall IPO. 

Wolfe declined to comment. Colleen Schwartz, a spokesperson for Dow Jones, confirmed that Wolfe resigned to accept the job at Palantir. Lisa Gordon, a spokesperson for Palantir, declined to comment. 

Soon after her board seat was made public, Wolfe announced on Twitter that she was leaving the Journal. Joe Lonsdale, an 8VC partner and Palantir cofounder, responded with his congratulations.

Her Tweet quickly generated backlash from people critical of Palantir's record of contracting with government agencies such as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And journalists piled on, decrying the conflict of interest in the situation.

Wolfe has since deleted her Twitter account. 

It's unclear why Wolfe got involved with Palantir, but she has publicly acknowledged that she is friends with Thiel. Her 2017 book "Valley of the Gods" follows recipients of Thiel's fellowship, which pays students to drop out of college.

Wolfe's long reporting career has spanned business publications including BusinessWeek and Portfolio, though her most recent bylines are for the weekly column Weekend Confidential, which is mostly light profiles and interviews with people like the professional home organizer Marie Kondo and poet Maggie Smith. 

Palantir was also under pressure to diversify its board. California, where the company is headquartered, requires public companies to have at least one female director. Palantir stuck to the minimum. 

With the exception of CEO Alex Karp, who is half Black, the remaining members of the board are all white men. 

The other two new board seats went to Zillow founder Spencer Racott and 8VC partner Alexander Moore, an early employee at Palantir.

Facebook chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally addressed a group of top executives from agency holding companies and advertisers on Tuesday as the platform faces mounting pressure and an intensifying advertiser boycott over its content moderation in the aftermath of George Floyd's death.

Companies in the  meeting included Anheuser-Busch InBev, Dentsu Aegis Network, Nestle, Omnicom Media Group, and Unilever, all members of  Facebook's client council group. Zuckerberg was joined by Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and VP of global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson, three sources confirmed to Business Insider.

On the call, Zuckerberg acknowledged the advertisers' concerns over its policies on political content moderation, explained the company's position, tried to reassure them that the company was reviewing its policies and decision-making processes, and took questions from them, sources said.

Zuckerberg is known to address the group once a year, with this address coinciding with advertisers' rising concern over Facebook's content moderation policies.

A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed the meeting took place and said that it was scheduled on June 11, before the boycott gained steam. Anheuser-Busch InBev, Dentsu Aegis Network, Nestle, and Unilever did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment by the time of publication. 

Zuckerberg told attendees that Facebook doesn't set its policies to maximize business interests, but that its "north star" was commitment to the principles of freedom of expression and neutrality, according to a source familiar with the meeting. Another source said his explanation of Facebook's position "struck a tone."

The move comes as brands including The North Face, REI, Patagonia and Ben & Jerry's are pulling advertising from the platform in July to protest its approach to content moderation. Facebook has been under fire from activists and its own employees last month after it let stand inflammatory posts by President Trump on protests over police brutality. 

The brands and agencies at the meeting are part of Facebook's client council, a small-knit group that works with Facebook as it caters to the advertising industry. It's addressed issues in the past including brand safety, the US presidential election, and third-party data.

While Zuckerberg has addressed the group before, Tuesday's meeting focused on the boycott and underscored how much the backlash against Facebook is intensifying, according to a source. While Facebook has faced criticism about its handling of user data and the spread of misinformation on before, such criticism has rarely translated to wider collective action against Facebook. Some ad agencies are saying things are different this time around. 

"Zuckerberg rarely takes part in these calls," the source said. 

Zuckerberg echoed a memo Everson sent to ad agencies last week and pointed to recent efforts Facebook had made, including a voter registration effort, a move to let people see fewer political ads on Facebook and Instagram, and improved detection capabilities for hate speech. Facebook has also removed ads featuring a red triangular Nazi symbol used during World War II from President Trump's re-election campaign and acknowledged that its enforcement of content rules "isn't perfect."

One day after former presidential candidate Andrew Yang floated a plan for consumers to sell their data to big social media companies, research that includes a survey of 2,000 Americans flatly finds that "consumers aren't buying it." 

On Tuesday, Yang wrote in an opinion piece in The Los Angeles Times that the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the state's recent privacy legislation, "makes it possible to create a union of consumers that can collectively set a price for the use of their data, negotiate with tech companies and ensure that compensation is passed on to consumers in a data dividend."

But a survey released Wednesday by the $24 billion identity-security company Okta shows 31% of Americans want $100 or more for a company to access their browsing history or social media data. "These price tags don't bode well for companies trying to make a policy like this work. Facebook, for example, has 2.5 billion users. Paying each of those users $100 comes out to a whopping $250 billion," the survey said. 

And that's not to mention that 37% said that they wouldn't sell their personal information at any price, with another 27% unsure about the prospect. And users are willing to draw lines in the sand: 76% of respondents said that there's at least one type of personal information they wouldn't sell. 41% of respondents wouldn't sell their social media data in particular at all. 

Yang floated the idea previously, and the survey zeroed in on the issue championed by the Democrat and former tech executive, noting "Yang proposed this type of system during his campaign, suggesting that consumers should 'receive a share of the economic value generated from [their] data.' Consumers aren't buying it." 

Yang did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

"At first glance, Andrew Yang's privacy policy seems like a great idea – companies get the data they need to innovate and consumers get paid for it," said Okta CEO Todd McKinnon in an interview. "But even when lured by compensation, many Americans are uncomfortable with sharing their data, and those who are comfortable with it aren't going to be convinced by a couple of bucks. I fully support passing a federal privacy law that gives consumers more control over their data while also empowering businesses to innovate, but Yang's model isn't the solution."

The survey also focused on other pressing social issues at what Okta says is a difficult time. "When you have stress and when you have a lot of uncertainty in the world, that affects people's views on privacy, and these are important issues," McKinnon said. "Contact-tracing of COVID-19 could be a life and death issue. Trust in the handling of voter information is fundamental to democracy. The issues don't get much bigger. But oftentimes people don't even know how their data is being collected, or what their rights are."

The survey – which polled 2,000 people each in the US, UK, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, and France –reflects Americans' distrust of government data-handling. Seventy-one percent of Americans don't trust the government with their data, the highest level of distrust among the US, UK, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, and France, the report found. Meanwhile 23% of Americans believe the government tracks their offline conversations, by far the highest level of mistrust among the six nations. And 84% of Americans are worried that data collection for COVID-19 containment will sacrifice too much of their privacy.

At the same time, the American public is largely unaware of what data is being collected about their lives. Nearly four out of five Americans polled (78%) don't think a consumer hardware provider such as Fitbit (in the process of being acquired by Google) is tracking their biometric data. Fitbit collects data to provide users with content and for other purposes that users can configure as described here. 75% of Americans don't believe streaming services are collecting information about their online media consumption. (Read the details of Netflix's viewing history controls here.)  

The combination of crucial privacy issues and contentious issues such as contact-tracing – using technology to track who has been in contact with the COVID-19 virus – and online voting makes dialogue and policy-making about privacy controls more difficult, McKinnon says. "In that environment it's even harder to get a balanced education and constructive dialogue about what to do with data," he said. "We can't even agree on wearing masks."

New York privacy attorney Jim Koenig of the firm Fenwick & West says Americans have a lot to consider related to handling of their data right now. "Recent events aren't so much introducing privacy as a major concern, but rather underscoring its criticality and accelerating the development and implementation of controls to protect it," he says. Americans are being asked to contribute to the fight against COVID-19 by releasing data on their health and location. "On the other side, there has been a call to limit the capturing and of sharing of individual information given the privacy and security protections that individuals want as we head into the upcoming election and consider changes in law enforcement techniques."

The Okta research report also touches on the handling of voter information. "The complications related to proving one's identity take their toll on democracy," the report says, finding that 14% of Americans say they don't vote because of complications with the registration process. 

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is facing a new federal indictment in the US that claims he conspired with hackers associated with groups including "Anonymous" and "LulzSec." 

A federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, returned the second superseding indictment against Assange on Wednesday. It doesn't add new charges but the Department of Justice in a press release explained their case does "broaden the scope of the conspiracy" Assange was previously charged with orchestrating.

"Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited and agreed with hackers to commit computer intrusions to benefit WikiLeaks," the press release said.

In the release, the DOJ said that in 2012 "Assange communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec (who by then was cooperating with the FBI), and provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack." It also said WikiLeaks obtained and published information retrieved as part of a hack into an "American intelligence consulting company by an 'Anonymous' and LulzSec-affiliated hacker."

Federal prosecutors previously indicted Assange for obtaining and disseminating sensitive national security information in 2010. In April and then with a superseding indictment in May 2019 the US government charged Assange with 18 total criminal counts, including violating the Espionage Act.

The 2019 indictment also alleged that Assange helped former US army analyst Chelsea Manning hack a password on a classified Pentagon computer.

In its release Wednesday, the DOJ called the leaks "one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States."

Assange currently remains in custody in the United Kingdom as the US seeks his extradition to Virginia, where he would eventually be put on trial.

California is planning to file court documents that could force Uber and Lyft to reclassify drivers as employees within weeks, according to a press release Wednesday from Attorney General Xavier Becerra.

Beccera's office plans to seek a preliminary injunction against Uber and Lyft, which, if a court agrees, would require them to grant drivers employment status while they await the outcome of a pending lawsuit over the issue, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

"It's time for Uber and Lyft to own up to their responsibilities and the people who make them successful: their workers," Becerra said in the release.

"Misclassifying your workers as 'consultants' or 'independent contractors' simply means you want your workers or taxpayers to foot the bill for obligations you have as an employer — whether it's paying a legal wage or overtime, providing sick leave, or providing unemployment insurance," he added.

In May, Becerra and city attorneys general from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego sued Uber and Lyft, accusing the ride-hailing companies of miscategorizing their drivers as independent contractors under the state's gig work law, AB-5.

Earlier this month, the state regulator that oversees Uber and Lyft ruled that drivers are considered employees under the law. 

Both rideshare giants have aggressively defended their position and argued that requiring them to reclassify drivers would significantly impact their business models and force them to raise prices, while putting many drivers out of work.

"The vast majority of drivers want to work independently, and we've already made significant changes to our app to ensure that remains the case under California law. When over 3 million Californians are without a job, our elected leaders should be focused on creating work, not trying to shut down an entire industry," Uber spokesperson Matthew Wing told Business Insider in a statement.

"We believe the courts should let the voters decide. Trying to force drivers to give up their independence 100 days before the election threatens to put a million more people out of work at the worst possible time. It would be incredibly harmful to millions of people and the California economy to grant this motion 100 days before the voters decide, and we will oppose this motion," Lyft spokesperson Julie Wood told Business Insider in a statement.

In their statements, both Uber and Lyft referenced a ballot measure they have proposed that would exempt them from AB-5. Uber and Lyft have committed at least $60 million toward fighting for the exemption, including a combined $267,000 to a group called Protect App-Based Drivers, which has been working to generate public support for the measure.

Driver advocacy group Rideshare Drivers United told Business Insider in a statemtent that it "fully supports" the state's request for an injunction.

"Drivers and other app-based delivery workers have been deprived basic labor rights, with most of us making less than minimum wage after expenses," the group said, adding: "This is what we've been pushing for – enforcement of AB5 to hold Lyft and Uber accountable to the most basic labor laws. This is a huge step forward for all app-based workers who deserve the same essential labor rights as any other workers."

For its 122,000 customers, Slack aims to replace internal email communication with channel-based messaging. Now it's taking its mission to quash email a step further with a new tool that could help it replace it between different organizations, too. 

The feature, called Slack Connect, allows a company to create a shared channel with up to 20 other organizations, expanding on an earlier feature that allowed two organizations to create shared channel. 

The ultimate goal is to replace email communication by making it as easy to talk to anyone outside your own organization via Slack as it is to talk to a colleague internally, said Tamar Yehoshua, Slack's chief product officer. 

"We think it's going to be a huge advantage for how people work across organizations," Yehoshua told Business Insider. "It's really about getting more people off of email for this type of work and getting them onto Slack." 

For example, a company might create a shared Slack channel for a handful of partners, so that it can streamline announcements or connect those working with the same customer. Or a VC firm could create a shared channel where employees at its portfolio companies could connect. Beyond just channel-based chat, users are able to direct message anyone outside the company who is in a shared channel. Eventually, Slack wants to make it possible for people to message anyone in an organization that their company has marked as a partner. 

The launch of Slack Connect adds another layer to the company's ongoing competition with rival Microsoft. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield previously told Business Insider that Microsoft is "unhealthily preoccupied" with "killing" Slack because the company threatens email. If Slack reduces email use in an office, then Microsoft Office 365 — which includes email service Outlook — may become less attractive to corporate buyers. While both Slack and Microsoft's chat app teams have seen increased usage during the remote work era for internal communication, Slack Connect directly tackles email use for external communication at companies.  

Beyond being faster and efficient, Yehoshua said that communicating via Slack is a more secure way of working with people outside your organization than email is. While corporate email inboxes are susceptible to spam and phishing attempts, corporate Slack channels are more protected: IT administrators at a company will have to give permission for an employee from a given company to connect, she explains. 

"We want Slack connect to be incredibly easy and simple to use for our users, and have the control needed for the administrators in the organization, so the organization feels like this is a really secure way to collaborate and the user feels like this is dead simple," Yehoshua said. 

Slack has been testing the product with a select group of customers and have seen them using it to chat with groups of suppliers, customers, or outside legal counsel. These multi-org channels can also connect to and use any other third-party application that people are need for work, and can use Slack's workflow builder tool to create processes and tasks with users outside their organization.  

Slack's also adding features that make those integrations more useful. One of the first steps is beefing up integrations with calendars apps. Slack is working on developing the ability to scan the calendars of everyone in a shared channel and suggest meeting times that work for everyone. That feature will eventually work across both Google Calendar and Outlook 

At the moment Slack Connect is only available to paid customers, but Yehoshua said the company is looking at ways to expand the features to all users as the feature continues to evolve, so that a paid customer could create a shared chat that included someone who uses Slack for free. As remote work becomes a more permanent part of how people do their jobs, she believes that organizations with channel-based messaging for external communication will have an easier time adapting. 

"That's where all the communication is happening," Yehoshua said, "So Slack Connect just enables you to do that even more when you're not having events, when you're not having in-person meetings."

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You can think of your HBO Max subscription as a family plan. It allows you to create up to five profiles, with separate settings for adults and kids. 

Whenever you open the HBO Max app, you can choose which profile to use, and change profiles while you're using the app.

You can add and customize profiles using the HBO Max mobile app on an iPhone, iPad, or Android device.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

iPhone 11 (From $699.99 at Apple)

iPad (From $329.99 at Apple)

Samsung Galaxy S10 (From $699.99 at Walmart)

How to add a profile on HBO Max

1. Start the HBO Max app and tap the "Profile" icon at the bottom-right of the screen, and then tap "Switch Profiles."

2. To add a new adult profile, tap "Add Adult." 

3. Enter the person's name and choose a color ring for their profile — this won't affect anything other than what the profile looks like.

4. Tap "Save."

How to add an kid profile on HBO Max

1. Open the HBO Max app and tap "Profile" in the bottom-right corner, and then tap "Switch Profiles."

2. To add a new kid profile, tap "Add Kid." 

3. If this is the first time you're creating a child's profile, you'll need to enter a PIN. This pin is used to lock away mature content. You'll need to enter that PIN to change the profile to a standard adult one, so make it something your kid can't guess (but which you'll remember). Also, there's only one PIN shared across all kid profiles.

4. Enter the child's name, enter a month and year for their birthday, and choose a color ring. Tap "Next." 

5. On the next screen, set the parental controls. You can choose the rating for shows and movies that you want your child to have access to. Then tap "Save."

How to change the PIN for kid profiles on HBO Max

If you want to change the PIN that HBO Max uses for its kid profiles, you need to do that from the mobile app. 

1. Tap the Profile icon in the bottom-right corner of the screen.

2. Tap the Settings icon at the top-left — it's shaped like a gear.

3. Tap "Parental Controls."

4. Enter the current PIN, followed by the new PIN you want to use, and then tap "Change PIN." 

If you forget your PIN, you can tap "Forgot PIN?" and HBO Max will send you a PIN reset email with instructions to reset it.

 

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform has opened an investigation into a data firm that sells people's smartphone location data to government agencies.

The company, Venntel, is facing scrutiny for the Democratic-led committee for its business of buying location data from various smartphone apps and selling that data to agencies including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. DHS used location data from Venntel to track down people who crossed the border into the US illegally, the Wall Street Journal reported in February.

More recently, the FBI updated its contract with Venntel in May, The Intercept reported Wednesday, although the terms of that contract have not been made public.

Now, Reps. Caroline Maloney and Mark DeSaulnier have sent a letter to Venntel demanding more information about the company's full list of clients and its data sources. The letter was also signed by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden.

"We seek information about your company's provision of consumer location data to federal government agencies for law enforcement purposes without a warrant and for any other purposes, including in connection with the response to the coronavirus crisis," wrote the letter's authors. "The vast majority of Americans carry cell phones with apps capable of collecting precise location information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This location-tracking raises serious privacy and security concerns."

When people's smartphone location data is tracked, that data is tied to an anonymous identifier rather than to personally identifying information. But multiple studies have shown that it's easy to "de-anonymize" this data by connecting it with other data points — for example, seeing where a device stays overnight and connecting that with a person's home address — raising the possibility that location data could be used to keep tabs on individuals' movements.

Venntel is a subsidiary of Gravy Analytics Inc., a data firm that has touted its ability to track more than 150 million devices in the US monthly.

Lawmakers requested that Venntel provide answers to their questions by early July.

Venntel did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Big banks have leaned on a visa that has now been suspended as part of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump this week. 

On Monday, Trump suspended a variety of visa programs for the remainder of the year, an extension of what was a 60-day freeze on work visas established back in April. The move elicited strong reactions from executives in the tech industry, where the "highly-skilled" H1-B visas are relied on to recruit talent. 

Tech companies, however, aren't the only ones likely to be impacted by the suspension of the program. Big banks, which have continued to put more resources toward their tech teams, have also granted thousands of H-1B visas. 

Read more: Trump's shutdown of H-1B visas is a huge hit to the Silicon Valley tech giants that employ tens of thousands of affected workers

According to data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup accounted for over 5,000 new or renewed H-1B visas in 2019. In total, there are only 85,000 H-1B visa spots open in the US each year. 

To be sure, these numbers don't indicate the total number of employees on H-1B visas at the banks, only the ones that either received or renewed visas in 2019. 

JPMorgan, the second-largest of the six banks by headcount, had the highest total number H-1Bs approved in 2019, totalling 1,697 between new (433) and renewed (1,264) visas. A spokesperson for the bank declined to comment. 

Despite being the smallest bank of the six in terms of number of employees, there was a total of 1,036 H-1B visas approved in 2019 at some Goldman Sachs entities.

"We consider all qualified candidates for positions at Goldman Sachs regardless of whether they may need a visa for their work authorization," a Goldman Sachs spokesperson told Business Insider via email.  "The firm and our advisors are providing assistance and advice to any employees impacted by the latest Executive Order."

See also: Amazon criticizes Trump's temporary ban of immigrant working visas: 'We oppose the Administration's short-sighted action'

Citigroup and Bank of America had 748 and 733 approved H-1B visas in 2019, respectively. Spokespeople at both banks declined to comment.

Morgan Stanley had 619 approved H-1B visas in total in 2019. A spokesperson for the bank declined to comment. 

Wells Fargo, the largest of the five banks, had the lowest number of H-1B visas approved in 2019, totalling 217.

"Wells Fargo sponsors a limited number of employees with specialized skill sets on H-1B and L-1 visas," a spokesperson for the bank said via email. "Where applicable, we are working with those employees to help them understand and limit the impact of travel restrictions resulting from the executive order."

To be sure, Wall Street's use of the H-1B visa still pales in comparison to Silicon Valley. Google and Amazon were granted 9,078 and 8,937 H-1B visa applications in 2019, respectively. Microsoft, meanwhile, had 5,925 applications, while Facebook had 2,657. 

Read more:

Amazon, Google, Apple, and other tech companies are speaking out against Trump's freeze on immigrant work visas

Elon Musk says he 'very much' disagrees with Trump's suspension of H-1Bs and other temporary work visas

Unpacking the nCino and GoHealth IPO filings

All 23 seasons of the Comedy Central animated adult comedy "South Park" debuted on WarnerMedia's new streaming service HBO Max — with five episodes missing.

The absent five episodes all featured depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. Season five's "Super Best Friends," and season 14's "200" and "201," had already been removed from the show's previous streaming home Hulu and from the official South Park website, where a notice appears when one tries playing the episodes that says, "We apologize that South Park Studios cannot stream" them.

"South Park" creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker received online threats in 2010 for mocking the Prophet Muhammad in the episode "200," which prompted Comedy Central to censor all voice and visual references to him in "201." Later, Comedy Central pulled "200," "201," and "Super Best Friends" from streaming.

For its new deal with HBO Max, Comedy Central also pulled season 10's "Cartoon Wars Part 1" and "Cartoon Wars Part 2." (The "Cartoon Wars" episodes are still available to watch at the South Park website.)

The "Cartoon Wars" episodes focus on Cartman's efforts to get another popular animated series, "Family Guy," canceled by exploiting an upcoming episode that will feature a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad.

HBO Max bought the rights to "South Park" in October for between $500 million and $550 million, according to Variety.

In September, Comedy Central renewed the series for three more seasons. New episodes will be available on HBO Max 24 hours after they air on Comedy Central. 

Adam Jackson knows a thing or two about online marketplaces — and what's wrong with many of them.

He's been working on marketplaces off an on for the last 16 years. During that time, he's founded four of them — in areas ranging from telemedicine to automobile parts and repair — and sold two to bigger companies. He's seen what works well and what doesn't.

"Having been a marketplace builder my whole life, I kind of had a front-row seat to two of the big problems that happen when you build big marketplaces," Jackson, a serial entrepreneur, told Business Insider in an interview this week.

Traditional marketplaces are operated by for-profit companies that are owned by their founders and investors. That structure tends to create a disconnect between the interests of those owners and the interest of those who actually use the marketplaces to buy and sell goods and services, Jackson said.

The first big problem that arises from that structure is that the marketplace operators tend to charge high and sometimes outrageous fees to their users, he said. Essentially that allows them to skim off much of the value generated by the market. Jackson pointed to Amazon, which charges fees to sellers in its marketplaces that can add up to 50% or more of listing prices, as an "egregious example."

"The fees end up creating misaligned incentives," Jackson said.

The second big problem with the traditional ownership structure is that it tends to concentrate wealth, he said. For Uber drivers, most of the value of the app comes from all of the riders that use it. Likewise, consumers use Uber because they know they can generally find a driver quickly and easily through it.

But when Uber went public, much of the value it realized from that event went to a handful of founders and investors in the company, Jackson said. Meanwhile, many Uber drivers are earning poverty wages and some have to sleep in their cars, because they're homeless, he said.

Investor-owned marketplaces engender "this crazy wealth concentration," Jackson said. "This is not a socialistic argument. I just think this stuff is bad for business."

Jackson has an answer to those problems. Instead of an investor owned marketplace, he's now created one that will be owned by its users via a cryptocurrency token and operated by a non-profit foundation. The new marketplace, a kind of job board for freelance tech workers dubbed Braintrust, officially launched out of stealth mode on Wednesday. He's hoping it will be just the first of many more to come.

Read more about Braintrust and why Jackson thinks it will demonstrate a way of fixing the shortcomings of traditional marketplaces here.

Got a tip about tech? Contact Troy Wolverton via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Amazon engineers are collaborating on an internal Wiki page that shows how to replace unconsciously racist and gender-biased terms with more inclusive language.

The Wiki page, seen by Business Insider, is titled "Alternative Phrasings to Unconscious Bias in Communication," and has been viewed roughly 30,000 times since its creation earlier this month.

Although it's not an official mandate by the leadership team, managers are encouraging employees to review the page, which is available companywide, according to people familiar with the effort. Amazon's internal Wiki forum is a crowd-sourced platform where employees share company-related information and work together on certain projects.

"Words and phrases that seem completely innocuous to one person trigger strong reactions in others. We encourage you to be mindful about historical impact and context behind these words and phrases," the page said.

The Wiki page lists dozens of words and phrases that may have negative connotations implied by the use of color, or that have a specific history that relates to racial discrimination. 

For example, it says "brown bags" should be replaced by "learning session" or "lunch and learn" because the term "Brown Paper Bag Test" was allegedly used in the past as a way to compare one's skin color to a brown paper bag to determine access to certain privileges. It also says "blacklist" has a racial stigma attached to it and should be replaced by "Blocklist" or "approved." 

The term "cake walk," which is used to describe something easy, should be banned because it comes from a dance developed on plantations by African American slaves, the page said. And the words "master/slave," commonly used among developers to describe a networking model, should instead be called "primary/secondary" or "active/passive," it said. Other words, such as "Oriental" and "grandfathered," are also discouraged for their racial undertones, it said.

In an email to Business Insider, Amazon's spokesperson confirmed the existence of the Wiki page, saying the company's leadership team is supportive of this movement and have encouraged teams to openly discuss how to tackle this industry-wide problem. 

The movement is the latest example of employee-driven change at Amazon aimed at fostering a more inclusive work environment.

In the weeks following last month's death of George Floyd, hundreds of employees have called for Amazon to add "inclusion" to its famous leadership principles, while sharing stories of racial and gender discrimination they've experienced at work. Meanwhile, Amazon's climate activist group has been encouraging employees to join racial protests as part of its effort to reduce Amazon's environmental impact in communities of color.

Amazon's leadership team hasn't responded to these individual requests yet, but has been a vocal supporter of the broader Black Lives Matter movement. 

CEO Jeff Bezos told Amazon employees to cancel their meetings last Friday to commemorate Juneteenth, a holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the US. He also shared a couple of racially insensitive customer emails to show his support for minorities. Other leaders across the company have also addressed the issue through internal emails.

The initiative to reduce the use of certain unconsciously biased words has been gaining steam across the tech community as well. Google, for example, is starting to ditch words like "blacklist" and "whitelist," according to the news site 9to5Google. GitHub is planning to replace the word "master" on its service with a more neutral word like "main." 

In Amazon's case, the Wiki page's creator wrote that the goal isn't to entirely eliminate the use of colors in their language. Instead, it's simply intended to encourage a more inclusive form of communication among employees.

"Our goal is to encourage our colleagues to consider the language we use every day, and how we might make our workplace more inclusive by using less biased language," it said. "When considering language that may reflect unconscious bias, think about whether the term will be perceived by others as having negative associations."

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Thousands abandoned their offices and crafted makeshift work areas in their homes in March as the COVID-19 pandemic ushered office workers indoors to help stunt the spread of the virus.

But not everyone had a souped-up workstation in their home.

Sidegiggle's Hid-Den concept, created by designer Irene Yu, could address that problem. The mobile tiny room is designed to fit in the corner of your living room and serve as an enclosed mini-office pod, providing freedom from distraction of kids, pets, and other aspects of the home.

Here's how it would work.

Results of the 2020 J.D. Power Initial Quality Study are in and it's not great news for Tesla.

In total, J.D. Power ranked 32 car brands for its study, which included Buick, Volkswagen, Lexus, Cadillac, BMW, Toyota, Acura, Subaru, and Jaguar. Of them all, Tesla scored the lowest among the bunch in terms of new vehicle quality and problems experienced by owners. 

The study is based on responses from 87,282 buyers and lessees of new, 2020 model-year cars during their first 90 days of ownership. Initial Quality is decided based on the number of problems experienced per 100 vehicles (abbreviated as PP100). The lower the score, the higher the quality. 

Tesla scored a 250 PP100, which is behind Land Rover's 228 PP100, Audi's 225 PP100, and Volvo's 210 PP100. Dodge and Kia ranked the highest, both tying for first place with scores of 136 PP100.

There is a bit of a caveat, however: J.D. Power notes that this is the first time the agency has profiled Tesla and that Tesla isn't officially ranked among the other brands because it "doesn't meet ranking criteria." 

"Unlike other manufacturers, Tesla doesn't grant us permission to survey its owners in 15 states where it is required," said Doug Betts, president of the automotive division at J.D. Power. "However, we were able to collect a large enough sample of surveys from owners in the other 35 states, and, from that base, we calculated Tesla's score."

A J.D. Power spokesperson clarified to Business Insider in an emailed statement that in order for a brand to be included in the study and appear in the official study ranking, the agency has to be able to gather insight from the brand's owners in all 50 states. Tesla isn't included in the official study results because J.D. Power can't survey Tesla owners in all 50 states.

But, "it should be noted that about two-thirds of Tesla's sales occur in the 15 states in which we cannot collect owner insights," the spokesperson said. 

In any case, however, the surveyed Tesla owners apparently had the most problems with their vehicles' more traditional quality issues, like build quality.

Betts told USA Today that problems stemmed from paint defects, poorly fitting body panels, hoods and trunks that were hard to open and close, excessive wind noise entering the cabin, and squeaks and rattles. Bets said the issues were "primarily a result of factory quality."

Separately, Dave Sargent, vice president of automotive quality at J.D. Power clarified, "It's important to note that the primary reason for Tesla's score is not the EV-related aspects of the vehicle — they perform well here." 

Tesla did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

You can see the J.D. Power 2020 Initial Quality Study here.