A German man was allegedly passing state secrets to Russian intelligence services.

Source connection

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When Safari users in Hong Kong recently tried to load the popular code-sharing website GitLab, they received a strange warning instead: Apple’s browser was blocking the site for their own safety. The access was temporarily cut off thanks to Apple’s use of a Chinese corporate website blacklist, which resulted in the innocuous site being flagged as a purveyor of misinformation. Neither Tencent, the massive Chinese firm behind the web filter, nor Apple will say how or why the site was censored.

The outage was publicized just ahead of the new year. On December 30, 2022, Hong Kong-based software engineer and former Apple employee Chu Ka-cheong tweeted that his web browser had blocked access to GitLab, a popular repository for open-source code. Safari’s “safe browsing” feature greeted him with a full-page “deceptive website warning,” advising that because GitLab contained dangerous “unverified information,” it was inaccessible. Access to GitLab was restored several days later, after the situation was brought to the company’s attention.

The warning screen itself came courtesy of Tencent, the mammoth Chinese internet conglomerate behind WeChat and League of Legends. The company operates the safe browsing filter for Safari users in China on Apple’s behalf — and now, as the Chinese government increasingly asserts control of the territory, in Hong Kong as well.

Apple spokesperson Nadine Haija would not answer questions about the GitLab incident, suggesting they be directed at Tencent, which also declined to offer responses.

The episode raises thorny questions about privatized censorship done in the name of “safety” — questions that neither company seems interested in answering: How does Tencent decide what’s blocked? Does Apple have any role? Does Apple condone Tencent’s blacklist practices?

“They should be responsible to their customers in Hong Kong and need to describe how they will respond to demands from the Chinese authorities to limit access to information,” wrote Charlie Smith, the pseudonymous founder of GreatFire, a Chinese web censorship advocacy and watchdog group. “Presumably people purchase Apple devices because they believe the company when they say that ‘privacy is a fundamental human right’. What they fail to add is *except if you are Chinese.”

Ka-cheong tweeted that other Hong Kong residents had reported GitLab similarly blocked on their devices thanks to Tencent. “We will look into it,” Apple engineer Maciej Stachowiak tweeted in response. “Thanks for the heads-up.” But Ka-cheong, who also serves as vice president of Internet Society Hong Kong Chapter, an online rights group, said he received no further information from Apple.

“Presumably people purchase Apple devices because they believe the company when they say that ‘privacy is a fundamental human right’. What they fail to add is *except if you are Chinese.”

The block came as a particular surprise to Ka-cheong and other Hong Kong residents because Apple originally said the Tencent blocklist would be used only for Safari users inside mainland China. According to a review of the Internet Archive, however, sometime after November 24, 2022, Apple quietly edited its Safari privacy policy to note that the Tencent blacklist would be used for devices in Hong Kong as well. (Haija, the Apple spokesperson, did not respond when asked when or why Apple expanded the use of Tencent’s filter to Hong Kong.)

Though mainland China has heavily censored internet access for decades, Hong Kong typically enjoyed unfettered access to the web, a freedom only recently threatened by the passage of a sweeping, repressive national security law in 2020.

Silently expanding the scope of the Tencent list not only allows Apple to remain in the good graces of China — whose industrial capacity remains existentially vital to the California-based company — but also provides plausible deniability about how or why such site blocks happen.

“While unfortunately many tech companies proactively apply political and religious censorship to their mainland Chinese users, Apple may be unique among North American tech companies in proactively applying such speech restrictions to users in Hong Kong,” said Jeffrey Knockel, a researcher with Citizen Lab, a digital security watchdog group at the University of Toronto.

Knockel pointed out that while a company like Tencent should expected to comply with Chinese law as a matter of course, Apple has gone out of its way to do so.

“The aspect which we should be surprised by and concerned about is Apple’s decision to work with Tencent in the first place to filter URLs for Apple’s Hong Kong users,” he said, “when other North American tech companies have resisted Hong Kong’s demands to subject Hong Kong users to China-based filtering.”

The block on GitLab would not be the first time Tencent deemed a foreign website “dangerous” for apparently ideological reasons. In 2020, attempts to visit the official website of Notepad++, a text editor app whose French developer had previously issued a statement of solidarity with Hong Kong dissidents, were blocked for users of Tencent web browsers, again citing safety.

The GitLab block also wouldn’t be the first time Apple, which purports to hold deep commitments to human rights, has bent the company’s products to align with Chinese national pressure. In 2019, Apple was caught delisting an app Hong Kong political dissidents were using to organize; in November, users noticed the company had pushed a software update to Chinese iPhone users that significantly weakened the AirDrop feature, which protesters throughout the country had been using to spread messages on the ground.

“All companies have a responsibility to respect human rights, including freedom of expression, no matter where in the world they operate,” Michael Kleinman, head of Amnesty International’s Silicon Valley Initiative, wrote to The Intercept. “Any steps by Apple to limit freedom of expression for internet users in Hong Kong would contravene Apple’s responsibility to respect human rights under the UN Guiding Principles.”

In 2019, Apple publicly acknowledged that it had begun using a “safe browsing” database maintained by Tencent to filter the web activity of its users in China, instead of an equivalent list operated by Google. Safe browsing filters ostensibly protect users from malicious pages containing malware or spear-phishing attacks by checking the website they’re trying to load against a master list of blacklisted domains.

In order to make such a list work, however, at least some personal information needs to be transmitted to the company operating the filter, be it Google or Tencent. When news of Apple’s use of the Tencent safe browsing list first broke, Matthew Green, a professor of cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, described it as “another example of Apple making significant modifications to its privacy infrastructure, largely without publicity or announcement.”

“I suppose the nature of having a ‘misinformation’ category is that China is going to have its own views on what that means.”

While important questions remain about exactly what information from Safari users in Hong Kong and China is ultimately transmitted to Tencent and beyond, the GitLab incident shows another troubling aspect of safe browsing: It gives a single company the ability to unilaterally censor the web under the aegis of public safety.

“Our concern was that outsourcing this stuff to Chinese firms seemed problematic for Apple,” Green explained in an interview with The Intercept, “and I suppose the nature of having a ‘misinformation’ category is that China is going to have its own views on what that means.”

Indeed, it’s impossible to know in what sense GitLab could have possibly been considered a source of dangerous “unverified information.” The site is essentially an empty vessel where software developers, including corporate clients like T-Mobile and Goldman Sachs, can safely store and edit code. The Chinese government has recently cracked down on some open-source code sites similar to GitLab, where engineers from around the world are able to freely interact, collaborate, and share information. (GitLab did not respond to a request for comment.)

Notably, the censorship-evasion and anonymity web browser Tor has turned to GitLab to catalog instances of Chinese state internet censorship, though there’s no indication it was this activity that led to GitLab’s addition to the Tencent list.

While Tencent provides some public explanation of its criteria for blocking a website, its decision-making process is completely opaque, and the published censorship standards are extremely vague, including offenses like “endangering national security” and “undermining national unity.”

Tencent has long been scrutinized for its ties to the Chinese government, which frequently leverages state power to more closely influence or outright control nominally private firms.

Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that the Chinese government was acquiring so-called golden shares of Tencent, a privileged form of equity that’s become “a common tool used by the state to exert influence over private news and content companies.” A 2021 New York Times report on Tencent noted the company’s eagerness to cooperate with Chinese government mandates, quoting the company’s president during an earnings call that year: “Now I think it’s important for us to understand even more about what the government is concerned about, what the society is concerned about, and be even more compliant.”

While Tencent’s compliance with the Chinese national security agenda ought not to come as a surprise, Knockel of Citizen Lab says Apple’s should.

“Ultimately I don’t think it really matters exactly how GitLab came to be blocked by Tencent’s Safe Browsing,” he said. “Tencent’s blocking of GitLab for Safari users underscores that Apple’s subjection of Hong Kong users to screening via a China-based company is problematic not only in principle but also in practice.”

The post Apple Brings Mainland Chinese Web Censorship to Hong Kong appeared first on The Intercept.

(NewsNation) — After his grandfather died, Caitlin Sawyer’s son Levi started acting out and struggled to transition from pre-K to kindergarten at his rural elementary school in Crete, Nebraska.

“He was having a really hard time following directions from his teacher — just lining up, coming inside, sitting, putting things away,” Sawyer said. “At home, we were noticing more aggression, specifically toward me — defiance, hard times with routines and transitions.”

To address her son’s behavior, Sawyer, who is also a special education teacher, teamed up with the school’s psychologist to create a plan using a program called Teachers and Parents and Partners, or TAPP.

TAPP works by getting parents and educators talking to each other. It then follows up by making communication a habit, and offering specific tactics based on the information shared about what’s happening at both home and at school. It trains school psychologists and other specialists in how to implement the method and work with teachers and parents.

TAPP is being tested in big cities and small towns. But the program’s founders are particularly interested in what it could do in rural schools. The project is in the midst of a five-year research project to create an online version designed specifially to help rural districts; the program Sawyer took part in was part of that research.

The need is there. Rural schools are less likely to do assessments for mental health disorders than their urban counterparts. This is despite the fact that mental health problems including depression and anxiety are more common among rural children than urban children. Rural youth are also more at risk for suicide than urban children.

“Rural schools … tend not to have special programs for behavioral, social-emotional and mental health challenges, nor do the rural communities surrounding them,” said Susan Sheridan, TAPP’s lead consultant and the director of the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

TAPP’s premise sounds like a no-brainer: Building good relationships between parents and teachers is almost universally recognized as important. Despite that, however, teachers and parents often don’t communicate regularly. One survey conducted during the 2015-2016 school year found that just 42 percent of students had parents who said they were contacted by telephone about their children. Meanwhile, surveys of teachers have shown that many struggle with reaching and engaging parents.

“Even as an educator, there were times I would kind of lose sight of things that I knew, just because it was happening with my own child and it wasn’t happening with a student at school,” Sawyer said. “So being in those meetings, it was really helpful to have other members of the team that you know are looking out for your child.”

Sawyer met with Levi’s teacher and the school psychiatrist, Cassandra Ginapp, to learn what concerns they had about her son’s behavior, and developed a plan that would carry over from home to school.

From the TAPP process, Sawyer put into place a new bedtime routine: She would use a timer to inform her son how long he had before he needed to be in bed. She paired this with a sticker chart where he could earn rewards for good behavior.

Meanwhile, his teacher and Ginapp began to work on his behavior at school. He was placed close to his teacher so she could give him silent signals if he needed help redirecting and focusing. When he did a good job, he would earn additional duties.

“So for him, being the teacher helper, being the line leader, those were key things that he really responded well to. So that’s what she would have him work toward,” Ginapp said.

By the end of the process, which took about nine weeks, Sawyer noticed considerable changes in her son.

“What I noticed most with him was he was able to process through his emotions with me more. The aggression stopped. He was able to talk to me more. We both got into a rhythm and figured each other out,” she said.

Sheridan, the TAPP founder, said that the program is particularly relevant in rural schools.

“In these situations, it is especially important that services support not just the student but also build capacities of parents and teachers, since they are the adults who can continue to provide positive and effective supports to youth,” she said.

Sheridan and her colleagues have performed several studies of TAPP as it has been implemented in a range of districts across the country. Those studies found that implementing TAPP reduces behavior issues such as temper tantrums and yelling.

The TAPP coursework. Photo by Alan Jackson/Jackson Studios, copyright 2022, Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.

Although she had no estimate of how often TAPP is currently being used, she noted that hundreds of people have been trained in the TAPP process. It is currently being implemented in districts in rural Colorado, rural Nebraska and the Madison Metropolitan School District in Wisconsin.

It’s not a perfect system. Ginapp noted that TAPP only works when everyone involved makes an effort.

“If you have a parent that may be a little more resistant — or a teacher, for example — if they’re a little more resistant and not buying into the process, then I can see where it may not be as successful,” Ginapp said.

For Sawyer, the process was invaluable.

“I think that there isn’t enough emphasis on the relationship between parents and teachers, especially with students that are struggling with behavior, whether that be emotional regulation, other things happening at home. I feel like there’s a lot of power in communication and teamwork between their teacher and parents,” Sawyer said.

Construction workers are losing out on thousands by being misclassified.

Bryan Hainer/Getty Images

• Many workers are classified by employers as independent contractors, rather than employees.
• That might be costing them thousands, since employees receive overtime pay and benefits.
• The Biden administration has proposed a rule making it easier for gig workers to be counted as employees.

Misclassifying employees as gig workers can cost them thousands of dollars in lost pay and benefits, according to a new analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

EPI looked at 11 professions where workers are often misclassified as independent contractors — in essence, gig workers who work for themselves, rather than employees entitled to salaries with regular withholding and benefits. Misclassification, and title inflation, are some mechanisms that employers can use to maintain power over wages, benefits, and overtime.

Misclassification is a “persistent problem” across growing industries like trucking and delivery, according to a National Employment Law Project analysis. NELP finds that 10% to 30% of employers — and potentially more — misclassify workers as independent contractors, “which indicates that several million workers nationally may be misclassified.”

Now, with the Department of Labor eyeing a proposal to make it easier for gig workers to be classified as employees, EPI is highlighting the current cost of being an independent contractor. For instance, according to EPI’s calculations, construction workers being classified as independent contractors instead of employees costs between $10,177 and $16,729 per year. 

The following table highlights just how much workers of the different occupations in EPI’s analysis lose out on because they’re misclassified as independent contractors:

“A typical home health aide loses out on $6,189 per year in income and job benefits as an independent contractor compared with what they would have earned as an employee,” a post on Twitter from EPI about the analysis said. Additionally, the authors estimate that a home health aide worker classified as an independent contractor can lose as much as $9,529 per year, according to the high estimate for this job.

This translates to a range of 19.8% to 30.5%. For construction workers, the range is 19.4% to 31.9%.

Truck drivers misclassified as independent contractors may lose between $11,076 and $18,053, according to EPI’s estimates. That roughly $18,000 figure translates to a loss of 34.1% and the highest figure in the above table.

Employees are entitled to the federal minimum wage, and, according to the Department of Labor, often overtime at the time and a half rate. Not being classified as an employee, then, can lead to lower incomes.

But workers don’t just lose out on pay. They also take a hit to their prospective benefits. As EPI notes, employees and employers both pay into Social Security and Medicare; however, independent contractors shoulder that burden on their own. Additionally, independent contractors have less access to other forms of social support, like unemployment insurance; one of the most notable pandemic-era unemployment expansions made gig workers newly eligible for UI between March 2020 and September 2021. 

That all adds up, per EPI, and weighs on how much money social insurance programs get in turn. NELP finds that state and federal governments lose out on billions in revenue every year due to misclassification.

The Biden administration is taking aim at misclassification, hoping to crack down on it and offer an easier pathway for independent contractors to be considered employees. 

“Misclassification deprives workers of their federal labor protections, including their right to be paid their full, legally earned wages,” Secretary Marty Walsh said in a press release on the DOL’s proposed rule on classification. “The Department of Labor remains committed to addressing the issue of misclassification.”

The NYSE halted trading of several stocks when a systems glitch meant the exchange failed to set some companies’ opening prices.

Michael Nagle/Getty Images

• An NYSE glitch was caused by a staffer in the exchange’s Chicago data center, per Bloomberg.
• The employee failed to properly shut down the disaster-recovery system, sources said.
• The glitch affected more than 250 companies and caused double-digit swings for some share prices.

A glitch on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that led to dramatic price swings for more than 250 firms has been traced back to a staffer who left a backup system running, a report says.

The NYSE halted trading for several stocks Tuesday for 15 minutes after a technical error meant the exchange didn’t conduct “opening auctions” for the affected stocks, resulting in shares for some companies beginning at unusually high or low prices.

Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo stock fell 13% and 15% respectively at the exchange’s 9:30 a.m. open, while Walmart shares jumped 12% as a result of the glitch, which the NYSE attributed to a “system issue.”

The cause, according to a Bloomberg report, was a staffer at the NYSE’s backup centre on the Cermak Road in Chicago who failed to properly shut down the center’s disaster-recovery system. 

A person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg the error misled the exchange’s system to skip the opening auction, treating the opening bell as a continuation of trading and failing to set opening prices.

Sources with direct knowledge said that NYSE executives spent hours trying to trace the source of the error until they were confident it wouldn’t be repeated. They also tried determining whether the trades could be “clearly erroneous” under market rules and subsequently canceled.

The NYSE is currently assessing how much the glitch will cost and is already fielding claims from some affected companies under exchange rules, per Bloomberg.

“Unfortunately, the NYSE has not owned up to their full responsibility and retail investors will have to go through a lengthy process to correct orders, with no guarantee of a reasonable outcome,” Charles Schwab spokesperson Mayura Hooper told Bloomberg as the bank openly criticized the exchange.

“It further heightens our concerns that routing even greater levels of retail orders to the exchanges will dramatically reduce the quality of the investing experience for America’s retail investors.”

Insider reached out to the NYSE for a comment but a response was available at the time of publication. 

Tesla shares rallied Thursday after the electric carmaker beat Wall Street’s fourth-quarter targets.

Yasin Ozturk/Getty Images

• Tesla shares climbed 7% in premarket trading Thursday.
• The electric carmaker posted its fourth-quarter earnings after Wednesday’s closing bell, beating Wall Street’s expectations.
• CEO Elon Musk is testifying in a trial over allegations of securities fraud.

Tesla rallied Thursday as investors looked past CEO Elon Musk’s ongoing trial to pile into the stock after it beat Wall Street’s revenue and profit expectations for the fourth quarter.

Shares climbed 6.9% to $154.39 in premarket trading after the electric carmaker posted earnings per share of $1.19 for the three months up until December 31, 2022. That comfortably beat analysts’ forecast of $1.05, according to data from Refinitiv.

Tesla’s revenue also grew 37% year on year to $24.3 billion for the fourth quarter, which narrowly beat analysts’ $24.1 billion target and could show shareholders that recent aggressive price cuts have helped to revive faltering demand. Musk said on an earnings call after Wednesday’s closing bell that Tesla’s “price changes really [made] a difference” in the fourth quarter of 2022.

“Tesla’s troubles in recent times have really put the brakes on what had been a rapidly accelerating share price but its latest earnings report has helped charge things up again,” AJ Bell’s investment director Russ Mould said Thursday.

“Posting its best ever quarterly revenue and profit and beating expectations was always likely to be rewarded by shareholders, and so it proved with the shares making material gains in after-hours trading,” he added.

Tesla’s gains come after Musk testified in a high-profile San Francisco trial sparked by a class-action shareholder lawsuit alleging he committed securities fraud in 2018.

Investors suing the world’s second-richest man say he illegally manipulated Tesla’s stock price by tweeting that he had “funding secured” to take the company private at $420 a share. The deal never happened. 

So far in his testimony Musk has accused the governor of Saudi Arabia’s $620 billion wealth fund of “ass-covering” — and said that he’d have cashed in on SpaceX stock to take Tesla private.

Read more: Elon Musk on Saudi ‘ass-covering’ and 10 other things the Tesla boss said to defend himself in the ‘funding secured’ trial

Rep. George Santos on Capitol Hill on January 25, 2023.

Andrew Harnik/AP Photo

• Fundraising committees associated with George Santos listed a new treasurer on Wednesday.
• But the man listed said he doesn’t work for Santos, and his name was signed without his consent.
• A legal expert told ABC News that this could be against the law.

When fundraising committees associated with Rep. George Santos’ campaign filed amendments to their statements of organizations on Wednesday, they notified the Federal Election Commission of a new treasurer.

But that treasurer, Thomas Datwyler, now says he doesn’t work for Santos, informed the campaign that he didn’t want to work for them, and was listed as serving in the position without his consent.

“On Monday, we informed the Santos campaign that Mr. Datwyler would not be serving as treasurer,” Datwyler’s attorney Derek Ross told ABC News.

“It appears that there’s been a disconnect between that conversation and the filings today, which we did not authorize,” he continued, per the news outlet.

Ross and Datwyler did not respond to Insider’s requests for comment, but a source familiar with the matter told ABC News that Datwyler and his legal team are now seeking guidance from the FEC on how best to proceed.

The amended filing appears to have an electronic signature for Datwyler, who has served as a treasurer and accountant for several senate and congressional campaigns.

This would be against the law.

“This is a very, very strange situation because those amendments that were filed today are electronically signed, or at least they say they’re electronically signed by the new treasurer,” Adav Noti, who worked for the FEC and is now senior vice president and legal director at the Campaign Legal Center watchdog, told ABC News.

“It’s completely illegal to sign somebody else’s name on a federal filing without their consent,” Noti continued.

The news comes a day after Santos’ political operation made significant revisions to his 2022 campaign filings, revealing that a large personal loan he gave to his campaign didn’t in fact come from his own funds.

The campaign had previously listed the $500,000 loan as coming from the “personal funds of the candidate.”

The amended filing doesn’t mention the source of the funds, further adding to the mystery of the campaign’s financial disclosures.

Santos’ finances and lies about his personal history are now under investigation by prosecutors at the federal level, in New York state, and in Brazil.

Santos did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.