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Saturday, June 13, 2020
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It was on the morning of 18 March, when Glastonbury was confirmed cancelled, that Sarah Gresty, BA course leader in fashion at Central Saint Martins (CSM), realised that the class of 2020 would be a graduating year unlike any other.

"That was when we thought: OK, this is only heading one way. After that, everything happened really fast. That evening many of the international students started getting sent home, and were literally grabbing their things from the studios and heading to the airport." Within days, all students were told that there would be no final show. "It was traumatic," says Gresty. "For many of them, that show is a moment they had been dreaming about since they were children." I have spent the last week talking to class of 2020 graduates from all over the country, and a word I have heard time and again is "heartbreaking". They made it all the way to the final year of fashion college, only to find themselves in the right place at the wrong time, with college paused before the show that was meant to launch them into the world. A final-year fashion show, after all, is a night like no other – think prom meets Absolutely Fabulous meets Frieze. But there are other words I have heard a lot, too. Change. Opportunity. Sustainability. Reset. "I am proud to be part of the first generation of post-pandemic graduates," CSM student Viktorija Kozorezova tells me from her bedroom, where she is producing the wearable sculptures she had been planning to produce in the college metal workshop, but out of DIY filling foam instead. Maisie Crome, from Kingston School of Art, has spotted craft and homemade projects "all over Instagram, the TV news, everywhere. I specialise in knitwear and I chime on about handmade, about UK-made, so I'm really excited to be part of that movement." "I know for a fact," says Hannah Eleri Russell of the University for the Creative Arts Epsom, "that this time has made me look at clothes in my wardrobe in a different way. Given the level of overproduction, I hope this is a chance to consider caring for our clothes better and to learn new ways to mend and make pieces." Facebook Twitter Pinterest Have we kicked our fashion habit?: customers wait ahead of the Balmain x H&M launch on Regent Street, London, November 2015. Photograph: Ray Tang/Rex/Shutterstock Fashion has been taken apart at the seams by the coronavirus crisis – and the class of 2020 could be the ones to redesign and remake it. Graduate-level jobs in the industry often mean a move to an atelier in Paris, Milan or New York. But the globalised supply chains on which mass fashion depends in order to serve customers with the speed and low prices they now expect have been severed, and a question mark hangs over whether they can ever be safely resurrected. Thousands of independent designer labels whose survival depends on the sale of clothes that have been sitting behind shuttered shop doors since March look set to go bust. The British Fashion Council has warned that without substantial support, half the country's industry could be wiped out. At a meta level, there is a sense of a spell having been broken. The carousel of seasonal fashion trends broke down just as the spring/summer ride was getting started, throwing everyone off, to stumble indoors to their homes and comfy clothes. There is no guarantee that consumers will automatically dance to the beat of trends again. Sale-of-the-century discounts are likely this summer as retailers rush to shift stock – but will anyone want an expensive keepsake of a season they spent indoors and anxious? How do we try on clothes safely? What happens to fashion week, now that squishing hundreds of people from all over the world on to packed benches so they can take pictures on their phones seems, well, loopy? And – biggest of all, this – how will this unexpected quarantine of shopping impact on consumer demand? Have we kicked our fashion habit? And what will that mean for a generation hoping to make a living creating clothes? We need to build a new fashion system that is ethical and equal, and empowers young people "Fashion will survive. Creativity will always find its way, I'm not worried about that," says Jefferson Hack, co-founder and CEO of Dazed Media. Fashion, after all, was one of the first industries to repurpose itself, with designers pivoting to the production of masks and gowns for frontline workers. "What I am concerned about is the bad deal that young people get in this country. Long before coronavirus, the younger generation were being hung out to dry economically and politically. The generation Dazed is for have inherited a messed-up environment and an insecure economy. We need to build a new fashion system that is ethical and equal, and empowers young people." Many students tell me of jobs that had been advertised disappearing from recruitment websites. Some who planned to begin postgraduate courses in the autumn have deferred, waiting to see how the chips fall, while others who hoped to find employment are opting for further study. Many are wrestling with emotional fallout alongside the logistical issues. "I always felt left out by traditional educational methods," says Thomas Robert, a fashion promotion student at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU). "High school was tough and so was college. University has been the making of me as a person, and I feel deflated that I will not get to celebrate this amazing milestone in my life." Another MMU student, Deanna Barber, says: "I know this won't last for ever, but it feels like my goals have got much further away. A lot of uncertainty – about income, happiness, sense of achievement – has entered my life." That uncertainty is felt right up to the top of the fashion food chain. "I feel very strongly that when we come out at the other end, people's values are really going to have shifted," Anna Wintour said recently. "It is an opportunity for all of us to look at our industry… and really think about the waste and the amount of money and consumption and excess that we've all – and I obviously include myself in this – that we've all indulged in. We really need to rethink what this industry stands for." Fashion, after all, should be about change. "Positives can and will come out of this," says Emma Hope Allwood, head of fashion at Dazed Digital. "We have been given what we never had before: time and distance to work out what we want our industry to look like. This crisis has made the waste and the excess more visible." The ingenuity required to complete studies during lockdown has prompted students to think outside fashion's ribbon-tied box. One student, no longer able to source the buttons she wanted, went beachcombing for shells and used those instead. Another, who had planned to shoot her collection on a model friend in the city where she studied, found herself isolating in the country with her parents and had to switch to using her mother. Seeing the clothes on her mum unexpectedly made them look even stronger, she says. When fashion students and established designers are canvassed about the future of fashion, a remarkable consensus emerges: almost everyone wants to ditch overproduction and waste. But almost everyone wants to save the fashion show. I'll wait four years for Frank Ocean to make an album. I can wait more than three months for a brand to do a show Fashion has become bloated. Collections are too big and too frequent. "We have too much product," as Joseph Altuzarra put it bluntly to Vogue recently, and it is produced to a trend cycle that has become unintelligible. Coats now have to go on sale in July to shift them before the sundresses hit the shop floor in November. The internal workings of a schedule yoked to outmoded department-store logic has come unmoored from common sense. Giorgio Armani has announced that his next haute couture collection will be seasonless, with pieces for all climates, and denounced the churn of high-speed fashion as "criminal" and "absurd". Designers Dries Van Noten and Marine Serre, and retailers Selfridges in the UK and Lane Crawford in Hong Kong and mainland China, are among the signatories of an open letter proposing a "reset" to the seasons. They want collections to be on sale for longer, with less emphasis on the "extra" seasons of resort and high summer. The late Azzedine Alaïa, who refused to conform to Paris fashion week schedules and showed his collections as and when he felt they were ready and appropriate, is being hailed as ahead of his time. "I'll wait four years for Frank Ocean to make an album," notes Dazed Digital's Hope Allwood. "I can wait more than three months for a brand to do a show." But the fashion show – for all its bad press as a gaudy totem of excess – still has a magic, one many designers want to rediscover in a new, more modern form. For the rest of 2020 at least, social distancing seems set to put paid to fashion weeks as we have known them. "It's pretty clear that if the September shows do happen – and that's a very big if at this point – they will be completely different," says Imran Amed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion. "I look back to the shows in February, where we were all squeezed in like sardines, and that seems like another world. I don't think fashion week will look the same this year – and then the question is, does that change become permanent?" The fashion show at its best can be an electric collective experience, immersive theatre at its best. But in the last decade, Hollywood-scale set-building and guests flown in from all over the world have contributed to a spectacle of excess, pickled in champagne and reeking of carbon. There is a strong desire to bring back the magic, without the circus. For many labels, cost-cutting will be an economic necessity – and even for the luxury houses best placed to ride this out, there is the matter of tone. "The narrative of fashion as a symbol of excess isn't always warranted," says Hope Allwood, "but in a post-pandemic world brands will not want to be seen to embody it." This vintage of graduates are firmly generation Z, the first to have grown up fully digital native. They are perfectly poised to do what fashion designers have been attempting to do, but not quite pulling off, for the past two decades, and reinvent the fashion show as a digital-first event. "Until now, digital has always been peripheral to fashion week," says Amed. "Digital has meant a show produced for a live audience and then broadcast. Or an Instagrammable moment – but that depends on a live audience who are there Instagramming it. This could be the moment when fashion week becomes, by necessity, created primarily for digital consumption." Why stop at Instagram and YouTube: Fashion Week x Netflix, anyone? Big brands need to work with young trailblazers, who know how to be engaging and fun The crisis has, Amed points out, broken down outmoded fashion snobberies toward digital. With conferences and shows cancelled, many of the grandest names have found their way on to less polished forms of communication. Marc Jacobs loves a Zoom chat; Olivier Rousteing, creative director of Balmain, is on TikTok. "There is an opportunity for young people here, because there are still so many brands who really have no idea when it comes to digital content. Now is the time for them to be working with the young trailblazers who understand how to create work that is fun and engaging. This is going to be a more marketable skill than ever before," says Amed. Many of this year's graduates are ahead of this curve. Earlier this year, long before the logistical impact of the pandemic was being felt, Heriot-Watt University in Scotland had already decided to replace the traditional fashion show with a new, more sustainable format showing final work digitally through video, film and photography. At CSM, five of this year's 109 graduates had opted for entirely virtual final collections before the crisis began to unfold. Scarlett Yang, a student who has been collaborating with brands on 3D animations and virtual reality showcases, tells me she now "has more offers of work than I had before". Jessica Gray, 23, a matchesfashion.com scholar at CSM, says her final collection "represents the overwhelming effect of the screen interfering in our lives. If that wasn't a premonition, I don't know what is!" The crisis has accelerated a shift towards a more waste-conscious mindset. One student who had had his heart set on a beautiful silk that ended up shuttered in a locked-down Italian factory has made his final collection using a bedsheet donated by his parents instead. Another, with bracing can-do spirit, is embroidering on to loo roll. And while some internships in Paris and Milan have been cancelled, others are happening online. The savings on travel and accommodation not only make for a smaller carbon footprint, but opportunities that are more accessible to students with less financial support, as Gresty points out. The coming generation have the opportunity to make sustainability a core value. "Young people will emerge from this period wanting to buy for the future, to buy secondhand – just to make better choices, even if that's buying something on Depop knowing you can flip it again later," says Hope Allwood. "If your business doesn't care about leaving the world in a better shape through your practice, you will make yourself irrelevant." Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nigerian influencer Angel Obasi wearing a face mask in Lagos, Nigeria May 2020. Photograph: Temilade Adelaja/Reuters Today's 20-year-olds, who have grown up with the climate emergency at the centre of their world view, see environmental impact as an essential part of thinking about fashion, rather than a notion at loggerheads with it. "I think the entire seasonal cycle should adapt itself to the climate crisis," says Saskia Purr, a student at Nottingham Trent University. "Climate change is making our winters warmer and our summers longer." It is becoming fashionable, in industry circles, to propose that the way forward for fashion is to turn the clock back. "You know what fashion should have done? We should have stuck to our guns," says Bebe Moratti, founder of the Italian ethical luxury brand Redemption. The fashion system, he says, should step away from the mass-consumption gravy train. "People say you can't go back to the old ways, but that's exactly what the brands that have survived the longest have done. Look at Hermès. That is what the dynamic of fashion should be – an investment in something that's beautifully made, something that you love, a transaction that supports the person that made it. So, is my business model crazy, to go back to a place where we cherish what we buy, where we cherish the workers, where we cherish the environment? No. It's not crazy at all. It works." "This crisis has made the nation less materialistic," says Bournemouth student Ffion McCormick-Edwards. "We have stayed connected by talking about what we are looking forward to: things like a family barbecue, or a party with friends, or seeing our grandparents." Despite the blow of missing out on graduation, "I wouldn't say this term has been all loss," says fashion knitwear student Rhiannon Davies. "My collection has become a lot more authentic to me, because doing it at home has cut off the many voices that I would find distracting at university. Facing myself – and my own company – is something I don't usually do a lot of. I almost feel I've found myself in the process." Still, the class of 2020 has been dealt a harsh blow. "I think the biggest loss is not the show itself, but the camaraderie around it," says Gresty. "The last seven weeks before a show is sheer hard work, tears, panic, but also this amazing energy, supporting each other through the fatigue – and then coming together in celebration. Not having that is tough." Despite the hardships of this term, she sees a bright future. "Students keep saying to me, 'We're so unlucky to be in this year – why us?' and I say, 'Are you joking? You are lucky. This is such a special year. This is the year that everyone will remember for ever.'" Topics Fashion Class of 2020: a Weekend magazine graduate special Graduation Anna Wintour Dries Van Noten Instagram YouTube Zoom features Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on WhatsApp Share on Messenger Reuse this content

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It was on the morning of 18 March, when Glastonbury was confirmed cancelled, that Sarah Gresty, BA course leader in fashion at Central Sa...

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So IBM has seen the light on facial recognition technology.

On Monday, in a dramatic and surprisingly passionate statement (at least for the CEO of a major tech company), Arvind Krishna called on the US Congress to enact reforms to advance racial justice and combat systemic racism, while announcing that his company was getting out of the facial recognition business.In his letter, Mr Krishna said that "IBM no longer offers general-purpose IBM facial recognition or analysis software" and "firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and principles of trust and transparency. We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies."Amen to that. No sooner had the letter been released than cynics and sceptics were poring over it for the get-out clause. IBM was never a big player in the facial recognition game, said some, and so it's no sacrifice to exit it: to them, Krishna's letter was just "virtue- signalling". Yet two days later Amazon heard the signal and announced a one-year suspension of police force use of its Rekognition facial recognition software – they say they'd like Congress to pass stronger regulation around it.The IBM announcement and now Amazon's are a big deal. Just ponder their significance for a moment: two major tech companies have declared that a technology that its industry (and governments of all stripes, everywhere) regards as the biggest thing since, well, internet search, is toxic. This is still news to the evangelists of machine learning, and maybe also to many police authorities and government ministers, but it will come as no surprise to regular readers of this column. I wrote about it just over a year ago, for example, citing a startling essay by Luke Stark, a Microsoft researcher, who called facial recognition "the plutonium of AI". The technology, he said, was "dangerous, racialising, and has few legitimate uses; facial recognition needs regulation and control on par with nuclear waste".To date, that warning (often echoed by other concerned experts) has fallen on deaf ears. Or, more accurately, on ears that do not want to hear it. For them, there's too much revenue in this to entertain doubts about societal damage. The commercial and governmental worlds have been salivating at the potential of facial recognition technology. Shops want to be able to identify customers in real time as they come through the door. Firms want it to make sure that only authorised personnel enter offices. Universities and schools want it to track student attendance at classes. Police forces want it to increase the effectiveness of stop-and-search operations. And on top of everything else, there's the geopolitical angle: China is using the technology everywhere and the preservation of US hegemony depends on us getting on top of it before Chinese tech sweeps the world market. It's Huawei on steroids, in other words.From the outset, it was obvious that digital technology enabled surveillance of astonishing comprehensiveness. If anyone doubted that, then Edward Snowden removed all grounds for doubt in 2013. But real-time facial recognition is the most toxic manifestation to date of the technology's dystopian potential, because it finally closes the loop. For if surveillance is to be really effective, it must enable tangible (re)action.It's not just enough for people to fear that they are perpetually being watched, in other words; it's when the watchers have the capability for automated instant reaction that the penny drops for the watched. This capability is already being deployed in China. Cameras scan pedestrian crossings and roadways looking for jaywalkers. When transgressors are spotted, they are instantly identified by name and their images are displayed on large screens in the street. From there it's a small step to also make a deduction from their "social credit" scores or issue a fine.As I write this, I can hear the standard response of tech evangelists to criticism: technology is neither good not bad – it all depends on how it's used. And that's at least an arguable proposition. What makes facial recognition interesting, though, is that it may be an exception to that rule, a technology that is so toxic that it should be generally illegal and only deployed in tightly controlled circumstances. In that sense, it should be treated like we treat plutonium. And just as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence decides which medicines and techniques should be available in the NHS, our societies now need an equivalent body to decide whether technologies such as facial recognition should be deployed and under what circumstances. And sometimes, such a body will just have to say "no".What I've been readingThe Gospel of PeterTara Isabella Burton has written an interesting profile of Silicon Valley's leading contrarian, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.Radical thoughts on parentingThere's a fascinating conversation on The Correspondent site with Alison Gopnik, the psychologist whose work on how children learn is profound.Eternal Zoom doomBenedict Evans has written a truly insightful essay on his blog about why technology can't mimic face-to-face events.

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So IBM has seen the light on facial recognition technology. On Monday, in a dramatic and surprisingly passionate statement (at least for t...

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Thursday, June 11, 2020
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Twitter is trying to stop people from sharing articles they have not read, in an experiment the company hopes will "promote informed discussion" on social media.

In the test, pushed to some users on Android devices, the company is introducing a prompt asking people if they really want to retweet a link that they have not tapped on."Sharing an article can spark conversation, so you may want to read it before you tweet it," Twitter said in a statement. "To help promote informed discussion, we're testing a new prompt on Android – when you retweet an article that you haven't opened on Twitter, we may ask if you'd like to open it first."The problem of users sharing links without reading them is not new. A 2016 study from computer scientists at Columbia University and Microsoft found that 59% of links posted on Twitter are never clicked. Less academically sound, but more telling, was another article posted that same year with the headline "Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting" – the fake news website the Science Post has racked up a healthy 127,000 shares for the article which is almost entirely lorem ipsum filler text.Twitter's solution is not to ban such retweets, but to inject "friction" into the process, in order to try to nudge some users into rethinking their actions on the social network. It is an approach the company has been taking more frequently recently, in an attempt to improve "platform health" without facing accusations of censorship.In May, the company began experimenting with asking users to "revise" their replies if they were about to send tweets with "harmful language" to other people. "When things get heated, you may say things you don't mean," the company explained. "To let you rethink a reply, we're running a limited experiment on iOS with a prompt that gives you the option to revise your reply before it's published if it uses language that could be harmful."That move has proved less effective, with the company's filter picking up as much harmless – if foul-mouthed – conversation between friends as it does genuinely hateful speech targeting others."We're trying to encourage people to rethink their behaviour and rethink their language before posting because they often are in the heat of the moment and they might say something they regret," Twitter's global head of site policy for trust and safety said at the time.

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Twitter is trying to stop people from sharing articles they have not read, in an experiment the company hopes will "promote informed d...

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Don't believe everything you hear about working from home.

The pandemic has closed offices around the world. The video-conferencing service Zoom has seen its corporate subscriber numbers grow more than 350%. Cloud companies are falling over themselves to tell people "see, we told you so! The cloud works!" Well, up to a point.OK, the cloud does work. The technology is fast and (mostly) secure. For too many years small business owners – a great number of them my own clients – ignored these powerful technologies that would have allowed their employees more flexibility. Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, we've learned that, assuming a relatively new computer and a relatively decent broadband connection, most office workers can get much of their jobs done from their home offices. And, depending on the person, potentially be more productive.So does this mean the end of the office? A "new normal"? Everyone just goes home and phones it in? Of course not. Sure, big companies like Square and Twitter are now giving their employees the ability to work from home "permanently". And, no surprise here, surveys like this one are now saying that people prefer to work from home where they can hang out with their dogs and wear their fuzzy slippers instead of getting dressed to sit in a corporate center cubicle for eight hours. Some analyses insist that working from home increases productivity. Other reports are saying that – because of this phenomenon – offices will become empty, rents will plummet, company cultures will forever change and the face-to-face workplace will fade into history. Don't believe it. The demand for real estate may dip, but it'll return. Don't burn your cubicles or destroy your beautiful new open office plan. This trend, like a pendulum, will ultimately swing back in another direction. Why do I say this?It's because what value does a small business have when its employees are allowed to roam free, loosely connected via Office or G Suite, and because of the unavoidable lack of supervisory controls are allowed to do, say and think things that may not be consistent with a company's mission or messaging? Not very valuable at all. Case in point: my company.Because my company has been virtual for more than 10 years. Every one of my 10 people works from home. Sure, the overhead is low. But you know what? I miss an office. My company suffers from not having one. We have no culture. We rarely see each other as a group. We are not really a team, and lack bonding or social connections. We miss out on extemporaneously sharing ideas. Our innovation suffers. As a result, the value of my business suffers. I know I'm not alone in this.Over the past decade big companies reversed their work-from-home policies to get people back into the office and talking face to faceSatya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, recently told the New York Times not to "over-celebrate" any perceived productivity gains from remote work. "What I miss is when you walk into a physical meeting, you are talking to the person that is next to you, you're able to connect with them for the two minutes before and after," he says. "One of the things I feel is, hey, maybe we are burning some of the social capital we built up in this phase where we are all working remote. What's the measure for that?"The remote work craze isn't new. The internet has been around for a while. And over the past decade big companies like Yahoo, IBM, Aetna, Best Buy and many others reversed their work-from-home policies to get people back into the office and talking face to face. They realized the cost of keeping these workers away from each other far exceeded the savings they were reaping on rent and utilities. They realized that people need human contact to get things done. Real, live, face-to-face human contact.The work from home craze is not hyped. It's just overhyped. Every business needs to have a work-from-home policy and if you didn't learn that from the pandemic then you are definitely missing the boat. Giving employees some flexibility to do their jobs remotely not only improves their job satisfaction but creates a great recruiting tool for those younger employees who have been demanding this benefit for years. Clearly the technology works and, depending on the person, your productivity should not suffer.But work-from-home policies need balance. I've seen from many successful clients that a good policy requires a certain number of days every week in the office. There has to be physical presence. You need to see that worker and that worker needs to see you and his or her colleagues. You can't create a team when everyone's completely virtual. Something is missing. Human contact is missing. Technology just can't replace that. Don't worry, your dog will be fine.

2:27 PM

Don't believe everything you hear about working from home. The pandemic has closed offices around the world. The video-conferencing se...

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Three prominent human rights activists have accused Zoom of disrupting or shutting down their accounts because they were linked to events to mark the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre or were to discuss China's measures to exert control over Hong Kong.

Lee Cheuk Yan, a veteran activist with the Hong Kong Alliance, which organises the city's annual Tiananmen Square vigil, said his account was shut down in May before he was to host a Zoom event on an extradition bill that caused mass anti-government protests in Hong Kong last year. Lee said he purchased a subscription to the platform in an effort to get access, but his account remained blocked."I demanded an answer from Zoom but so far they haven't given me an answer," Lee told the Guardian. "It's very unusual that a consumer can't reopen their account. So the only explanation is that it's politically motivated."Unlike several other western platforms, Zoom is not blocked in China, which is partly why China-focused activists have hosted events on it."I was warned about using Zoom before, because it can be accessed in China, but that's why they chose it. We want people to be able to see it in China," said Lee. He said he had been able to told two other events on the conferencing app earlier in May.Zhou Fengsuo, a former protest leader at Tiananmen demonstrations, said his account was shut down in early June after he hosted an online memorial on 31 May for the anniversary of the 4 June 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protests in the square in central Beijing."A significant proportion of attendees were from China. Our conference provided many the opportunity to connect with activists abroad for the first time," said Zhou's group Humanitarian China, adding that 250 people joined the event through Zoom while 4,000 watched it live through social media.The organisation said that after it was locked out of the account on 7 June, repeated attempts to log in failed and queries to Zoom went unanswered. Zhou's account has now been reinstated."It seems possible Zoom acted on pressure from the CCP to shut down our account. If so, Zoom is complicit in erasing the memories of the Tiananmen massacre in collaboration with an authoritarian government," the group said.Wang Dan, a former student protest leader at Tiananmen, said a Zoom event he held on 3 June to commemorate the anniversary was shut down twice.Zoom said in a statement that it "must comply with laws in the countries where we operate". It said: "We regret that a few recent meetings with participants both inside and outside of China were negatively impacted and important conversations were disrupted." Zoom added that it was not in the company's power "to change the laws of governments opposed to free speech". It said it was "committed to modifying its processes to further protect its users from those who wish to stifle their communications".Wang and Lee's events were hosted outside of mainland China, and Zhou is based in the US.Zoom, which has surged in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic, has come under scrutiny owing to security concerns. Chen Yunfei, an activist based in Sichuan who participated in the 1989 protests as a student, spoke at the online Tiananmen memorial hosted by Zhou's group. Chen was detained later that day and released on 5 June.PEN America denounced Zoom for bowing to the Chinese government. The group's CEO, Suzanne Nossel, said in a statement: "Zoom portends to be the platform of choice for companies, school systems and a wide range of organisations that need a virtual way to communicate, especially amid global lockdown. But it can't serve that role and act as the long arm of the Chinese government. You don't get to have it both ways."Frances Eve, a deputy director of research at Chinese Human Rights Defenders, said: "Zoom must stop enabling government suppression of free expression rights." She said the company must "clarify its internal processes that allowed the Chinese government to quickly have it censor activists".

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Three prominent human rights activists have accused Zoom of disrupting or shutting down their accounts because they were linked to events t...

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Amazon is implementing a one-year moratorium on police use of its artificial intelligence software Rekognition amid a growing backlash over the tech company's ties to law enforcement.

The company has recently stated its support for the Black Lives Matter movement, which advocates for police reform – using Twitter to call for an end to "the inequitable and brutal treatment of black people" in the US and has putting a "Black lives matter" banner at the top of its home page. But the company has been criticized as hypocritical because it sells its facial recognition software to police forces.Amazon has not said how many police forces use the technology, or how it is used, but marketing materials have promoted Rekognition being used in conjunction with police body cameras in real time.When it was first released, Amazon's Rekognition software was criticized by human rights groups as "a powerful surveillance system" that is available to "violate rights and target communities of color". Advocacy groups also said the technology could have a disproportionately negative effect on non-white people. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez echoed this complaint in a tweet on Wednesday, saying the technology "shouldn't be anywhere near law enforcement"."Facial recognition is a horrifying, inaccurate tool that fuels racial profiling and mass surveillance," she said. "It regularly falsely [identifies] Black and Brown people as criminal".An experiment run by the ACLU in 2018 showed Rekognition incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress to photos of people arrested for a crime. It overwhelmingly misidentified Congress members who are not white. Facial recognition software, like many forms of artificial intelligence, has a long history of racial bias. The field of artificial intelligence, which is overwhelmingly white and male, is frequently criticized for its lack of diversity.In a statement on its blog Wednesday, Amazon said it will pull the use of its technology from police forces until there is stronger regulation around it. The move follows IBM putting a permanent end to its development of facial recognition technology."We've advocated that governments should put in place stronger regulations to govern the ethical use of facial recognition technology, and in recent days, Congress appears ready to take on this challenge," Amazon said. "We hope this one-year moratorium might give Congress enough time to implement appropriate rules, and we stand ready to help if requested."While some privacy advocates say the move represents a step in the right direction, Evan Greer, of digital rights group Fight for the Future, said this is "nothing more than a public relations stunt from Amazon".She said Amazon could spend the year moratorium improving the technology and lobbying Congress to make industry-friendly regulation so the technology can be implemented in the future. Amazon spent $16.8m on lobbying in 2019."The reality is that facial recognition technology is too dangerous to be used at all," Greer said. "Like nuclear or biological weapons, it poses such a profound threat to the future of humanity that it should be banned outright."Nicole Ozer, the technology and civil liberties director with the American Civil Liberties Union of northern California, also called on Amazon to make more meaningful commitments. "This surveillance technology's threat to our civil rights and civil liberties will not disappear in a year," Ozer said. "Amazon must fully commit to a blanket moratorium on law enforcement use of face recognition until the dangers can be fully addressed, and it must press Congress and legislatures across the country to do the same. They should also commit to stop selling surveillance systems like Ring that fuel the over-policing of communities of color. The Washington county sheriff's office in Oregon, the first law enforcement agency in the country to contract with Amazon to use the technology, confirmed on Wednesday it would suspend its use of the product in light of the announcement.Suspension of this particular program does not mean all partnerships with law enforcement will be halted. Amazon noted in its announcement that the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, as well as technology companies Thorn and Marinus Analytics, will still have access to Rekognition for human trafficking cases.Amazon also has not made changes to Ring, its camera-connected smart doorbell company, which has also been criticized for increasing the policing of non-white Americans. A report from Motherboard in 2019 revealed black and brown people are more likely to be surveilled by the Neighbors app, where Ring users can post videos and photos of "suspicious" people caught on camera.The doorbell app now partners with more than 1,300 police forces across the US – a 300% increase from just 400 police forces in August 2019. The ACLU has called on Amazon to "stop selling surveillance systems like Ring that fuel the over-policing of communities of color". It also called on other companies that power facial recognition, including Microsoft, to halt the technology."Face recognition technology gives governments the unprecedented power to spy on us wherever we go," said Ozer. "It fuels police abuse. This surveillance technology must be stopped."

2:27 PM

Amazon is implementing a one-year moratorium on police use of its artificial intelligence software Rekognition amid a growing backlash over...

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European food delivery service Just Eat Takeaway has agreed to buy the US-based app Grubhub for $7.

3bn (£5.8bn) in a deal that would create the world's largest food delivery service outside China. Confirmation of the all-stock takeover deals a blow to Uber, which has its own food delivery business and was reportedly in discussions with Grubhub. The tie-up will give the Netherlands-based Just Eat Takeaway access to the lucrative food delivery market in the US, with the combined business able to serve customers in 25 countries. Along with the US, these include some of the world's most profitable food delivery markets – the UK, Netherlands and Belgium. Under the terms of the deal, which will need approval from both sets of shareholders, Grubhub's shareholders would own 30% of the combined group. There has been a surge in demand in the food delivery market during the pandemic, as government shutdowns prevented restaurants from serving diners at their premises. The deal comes less than six months after Takeaway.com won a fierce £6.3bn bidding battle to buy Just Eat, fighting off its rival Prosus, the Amsterdam-listed offshoot of the South African technology group Naspers. Jitse Groen, the chief executive and founder of Just Eat Takeway described himself and the Grubhub boss, Matt Maloney, as "the two remaining food delivery veterans in the sector", adding that they started their businesses on different continents at the turn of the century. "Both of us have a firm belief that only businesses with high-quality and profitable growth will sustain in our sector," Groen said. Sign up to the daily Business Today email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk When Grubhub was founded, the online takeaway industry did not exist in the US, Maloney said. "Combining the companies that started it all will mean that two trailblazing start-ups have become a clear global leader. We share a focus on a hybrid model that places extra value on volume at independent restaurants, driving profitable growth," he added. Just Eat Takeaway and Grubhub together processed 593m orders in 2019 and have more than 70 million active customers globally. The takeaway delivery market expanded by almost 20% in 2019 in the UK, excluding Northern Ireland, according to the analysis firm Kantar. Topics Mergers and acquisitions Couriers/delivery industry Food & drink industry Apps Mergers, acquisitions and funding news Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share via Email Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on WhatsApp Share on Messenger Reuse this content

2:27 PM

European food delivery service Just Eat Takeaway has agreed to buy the US-based app Grubhub for $7. 3bn (£5.8bn) in a deal that would cre...

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