Silicon Valley Tech News Roundup – June 11th
SEC asks for a freezing order for Binance because $2.2 billion of U. S. clients’ assets are at risk – 6/8
On Monday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao that claims they engaged in an unregistered offer and sale of securities and integrated investor funds with their own.
On Tuesday, SEC issued another filing asking for a freezing order as they claim there is a “significant risk” of $2.2 billion of the U. S. Binance customers’ assets being stolen by Changpeng Zhao and Binance entities.
Based on the filing, Binance.US could not specify who controlled the customers’ assets. It also describes Zhao as a “foreign national who has made overt his views that he is not subject to the jurisdiction of this Court.” Likewise, SEC claims Zhao controls BAM Management and BAM Trading, two U. S. subsidiaries of Binance. According to SEC, they amassed “illicit gains” of over $420.4 million in profits and venture fundraising.
The filing states: “Given the history of Zhao’s and Binance’s open desire to avoid U.S. regulation and oversight, and their surreptitious control over BAM Trading and commingling of and movements of BAM Trading assets through a web of Zhao-controlled entities outside of the United States, there can be no assurance that BAM Trading employees are not influenced by Zhao or Binance today.” SEC also claims Zhao’s legal team states he is not subject to U.S. law.
Binance did not respond to a request for comment.
U. S. court filing claims ByteDance allowed CCP to spy on Hong Kong protestors – 6/8
Yintao Yu, a former TikTok executive, filed a lawsuit with the San Francisco Superior Court this week. It claims ByteDance allowed members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to spy on Hong Kong’s protestors and civil rights activists. Yu was the head of engineering at ByteDance in the US for a year (until July 2018).
According to Yu, ByteDance gave the CCP members “super user” credentials (also known as “god user”) that allowed them to access data collected by ByteDance. TikTok users who uploaded “protest-related content” were identified and monitored. The lawsuit claims in 2018. CCP committee members used their “super user” credentials “to identify and locate the Hong Kong protesters, civil rights activists, and supporters of the protests.” While the committee members were physically present at the ByteDance offices, they were not employees. Yu also claims the monitoring was common knowledge among the senior executives at ByteDance.
ByteDance denies the claims: “We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint.” According to the company, Yu worked for the discontinued app Flipagram and filed the lawsuit for media attention.
On Monday Reddit communities go dark in protest – 6/10
Moderators of some of the most popular Reddit communities will make their subreddits private on Monday in protest against how the management runs the company.
Reddit introduced new changes that involve developers of the third-party apps used to browse the platform. Developers created apps like Reddit is Fun, Sync, ReddPlanet, and Apollo to allow users access the platform on their phones. The new changes apply to charges to access the platform’s Application Programming Interface (API). According to the app developers, they will have to shut down as they can no longer afford the charges.
Besides several paid moderators, thousands of unpaid mods run Reddit and keep it functional. Steve Huffman (the CEO of Reddit) addressed the controversy: “We respect when you and your communities take action to highlight the things you need, including, at times, going private.” But he also stated Reddit “needs to be a self-sustaining business.”
The blackout includes 3489 subreddits and five of the most popular ones (each with a membership of over 30 million users). One of the moderators stated to the BBC: “Our entire community is supporting us against this change… It feels good to be able to have the power to say: ‘We will not continue to moderate our communities if you push these changes through.”
New return-to-office mandates lead to tension in Silicon Valley – 6/10
Big tech companies want their workforce to return to the office after the pandemic. But their efforts are meeting resistance from their employees.
Google recently announced it wants its staff back in the office for at least three days a week. This week the company announced it will strictly enforce the new mandate by tracking office badge attendance, which could factor in performance reviews.
Chris Schmidt (a member of the Alphabet Workers Union and a software engineer) stated: “Overnight, workers’ professionalism has been disregarded in favor of ambiguous attendance tracking practices tied to our performance evaluations… The practical application of this new policy will be needless confusion amongst workers and a disregard for our various life circumstances.”
Ryan Lamont (spokesperson for Google) claims that the new policy is “going well, and we want to see Googlers connecting and collaborating in-person, so we’re limiting remote work to exception only.” He said team leaders could study the reports on how their teams are adapting to the new models. The reports also include “aggregated data” on badge swipes.
Meanwhile, at Amazon, office workers staged a walk-out to voice their displeasure over the new policies. Meta also wants its workers assigned to an office to return for at least three days a week this September. However, Meta’s spokesperson said the new policy is not set in stone.
