In This Creepy New Novel, the Toys Are Watching Us

Samanta Schweblin’s writing straddles the unsettling border between the real and the surreal. Her novel “Fever Dream” takes place in a hospital where a dying woman narrates episodes from her past to a strange young boy who is missing part of his soul. Her short story collection “Mouthful of Birds” features a woman who falls in love with a merman, an expectant mother who shrinks her fetus to the size of an almond and spits it out, and a teenage girl who devours live birds.Her latest novel, “Little Eyes,” may be her most unsettling work yet — and her most realistic. Its dystopian premise is eerily plausible: People around the world have become obsessed with robotic stuffed animals called kentukis, which are operated remotely by strangers who can move and see the toy’s surroundings but can’t communicate except through grunts and squeaks.The narrative unfolds in more than a dozen towns and cities around the world, with characters that include “dwellers” who inhabit the toys and the “keepers” who own them. A lonely Guatemalan boy operates a stuffed dragon in Norway and dreams of seeing snow. A Peruvian woman who inhabits a bunny in Germany becomes engrossed with the romantic life of her keeper. A Venezuelan girl who has been kidnapped by sex traffickers is rescued by a panda kentuki controlled by someone in Croatia. The relationships between the owners and their toys range from nurturing to manipulative to violent, raising questions about voyeurism, the limits of virtual connection and how technology is both infantilizing and empowering us.“There’s a lot of ambiguity in her writing, and she trusts the reader a lot,” Megan McDowell, who translated “Little Eyes” and Schweblin’s earlier works into English, said in a Skype interview. “She leads you where she wants you to go, and then she leaves you there.”Schweblin, 42, grew up in a middle-class family on the outskirts of Buenos Aires and has lived in Berlin since 2012. She has long been celebrated as one of the most innovative Spanish-language writers of her generation, ever since she published her award-winning debut collection nearly 20 years ago. Her books have been translated in 35 languages. But her work has only recently caught on with U.S. readers, beginning with the English translation in 2017 of “Fever Dream.” Since then, her global rise has been swift: “Fever Dream” was a finalist for the Booker International Prize and won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novella, and is being adapted into a film for Netflix; both “Mouthful of Birds” and “Little Eyes” were longlisted for the Booker International Prize.In an email interview, Schweblin discussed the avoidance of technology in literature, the surreal nature of her work and how she thinks quarantine is affecting us. A condensed and edited excerpt from the exchange, which McDowell translated, is below.Can you tell me about where you are right now and how the pandemic has affected your daily life?I’m in Lago Puelo, in the far south of Argentine Patagonia, a small and isolated town. I came here almost two months ago now to visit my mom for a few days, but the pandemic and obligatory quarantine trapped me, and I haven’t been able to get back to Berlin.The first days were tough. Life was telling me: You’re staying here, with your little carry-on suitcase and your two books for the plane, you’re staying here and you have no return date. But now the days pass quickly, and I feel ever more comfortable, strangely comfortable. I rented a ramshackle cabin from a neighbor where I go every day to write. On the way I pass cows, bulls, horses, packs of dogs that keep me company almost the whole way. I concentrate on work, I exercise, I practically don’t talk to anyone all day long. I’m almost ashamed to say it: I’m happy amid the storm.How did you come up with the concept of kentukis?From the intersection of some circumstances of my life two or three years ago: a lot of connection with other people through social networks and mobile devices, traveling a lot, practically jumping city to city, language to language and culture to culture. Also a disquiet, or curiosity, that I couldn’t manage to formulate to myself and that had to do, precisely, with the way literature was writing these worlds.I was reading contemporary literature, and I could feel how writers often avoided naming terms that by then absolutely belonged to our reality: “WhatsApp,” “Instagram,” even something as simple as the idea of a “cellphone.”I myself, in my own writing, found myself noticing this problem. Why does the incursion of these technological realities into more literary texts bother us so much? Or, for example, absolutely realistic and literary poetry that dares to include this new reality, but are then labeled as “tech-poetry” or “sci-fi” or “futurist”? I wondered, and I still wonder, what happens to us with technology that we incorporate it so easily into our everyday, but then we reject it in the space of fiction?As a writer, another question arose from all this, the question that I think finally freed the idea of the kentukis: How can we talk about technology without getting tangled up in technical terms? How can we talk about the problems that we, as users, have with technology, without letting technology play a starring role?Your work often features animals, and “Little Eyes” centers on machines that are part human, part stuffed animals. What effect were you aiming for with that combination?Animals, toys, robots, all have in common a strange moral force that they exercise over us. There’s something in those eyes, in the way we see ourselves reflected, that destabilizes us. The digital world is full of strangers, real people without faces or bodies. If we could see their facial expressions and gestures, would we behave the same way with them?Pets watch how we live, they know we’re real, and we like to be looked at and adored. But it also soothes us to know that an animal looks but doesn’t talk, adores but doesn’t offer an opinion.Something that makes the relationships between kentukis and their owners so uncomfortable is that the kentukis can’t speak. That reminded me of something I read about your childhood — that you stopped speaking for a year when you were 12 because you didn’t want to be misunderstood. I wondered how that experience shaped your approach to language and writing.How odd, I had never made that connection, but you’re absolutely right. The thing is, language has always made me uncomfortable. I feel language as something heavy, rigid, but above all, inexact. It’s so easy to open our mouths and say something we’d rather not have said, it’s so terrifying to finally name out loud this thing that wasn’t said and to see it transformed into something real.Clarice Lispector said, “The word is my dominion over the world.” That’s what I feel with the written word: While orality exposes me to all the noises and dangers of language, the written word stops the world and gives me all the time I need to say exactly what I want to say.At the moment, we’re all isolated but the world also feels more interconnected, because every person in every country is experiencing, to a degree, the same catastrophe. As an artist, how are you processing what’s happening right now? Do you think the world you created in “Little Eyes” will resonate with people who are now even more dependent on technology for connection?It’s strange, because it wasn’t intentional. In “Little Eyes,” the users connect without bodies, they’re there and at the same time they’re not. They can move freely around another person’s living, nip at their heels, and still not really be there.In this sense, the quarantine isn’t imposing something new. We’ll come out of it with new rules, which will normalize part of this world in which we are beings who are ever more surveilled, and where the physical presence of bodies almost seems threatening.What are you working on right now?I’ve been thinking about a new novel for a few months now, but I’m still in the stage of notes and preparation, and I still don’t fully see its form or tone. In part because of this coronavirus quarantine but also because of personal reasons, my life has taken a radical turn in these past three months. I feel dizzy, as I guess most people in the world are right now, and I foresee that something essential is changing in the way I look at everything. I guess it’s a process that we’re all going through. I feel myself floating when I’m surprised to see I don’t know where I stand, and my ideas about what fiction is and how it affects reality change day by day. Read the full article

Vallejo Official's Removal Is Sought After He Throws Cat During Zoom Meeting

The city Planning Commission meeting in Vallejo, Calif., last week followed the same humdrum pattern of so many municipal meetings: There was the Pledge of Allegiance and a roll call, followed by various reports.That posed the usual challenges: Commissioners with microphones muted when they were trying to be heard, some of them appearing half offscreen at times or talking over one another.But things took an unexpected turn about 2 hours and 24 minutes into the session after one of the commissioners, Chris Platzer, was asked if he had any comments after reviewing a project application.“Yes, this is the section where you can, Commissioner Platzer,” the commission’s chairman said.The cat meowed loudly again. “OK, first, I’d like to introduce my cat,” Mr. Platzer said, lifting it close to the camera and then, with two hands, tossing it off screen.The cat squeaked as it was being thrown, and a thud could be heard.One commissioner on the videoconference put his hands to his forehead and covered his eyes in response.The meeting concluded 26 minutes later, but that was hardly the end of it.Bob Sampayan, the mayor of Vallejo, which is about 30 miles north of San Francisco, and Robert McConnell, a City Council member and the liaison to the commission, have asked for the council to consider Mr. Platzer’s immediate removal at a meeting on Tuesday, a city spokeswoman, Christina Lee, said on Monday.“The city does not condone the behavior that Vallejo Planning Commissioner Chris Platzer exhibited during the April 20th Planning Commission meeting,” she said. “This type of behavior does not model the core values of the City of Vallejo.”After the planning meeting adjourned, Mr. Platzer was heard using expletives, she said, adding that the mayor and Mr. McConnell discussed his behavior immediately after the episode and called for his removal within 48 hours.Stephanie Bell, senior director of cruelty casework for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the group was prepared to place the cat “in an understanding, loving home” if Mr. Platzer’s “lack of patience or understanding” made cat guardianship inappropriate.“The cats in our care rely on us for everything, including food, respect and affection, and no one should ever punish them for seeking our attention,” she said. “While cats are known for agility, this cat was thrown and could have slammed into furniture, the wall or the ground.”As of Monday morning, the city had not received a formal resignation from Mr. Platzer, Ms. Lee said; however, The Times-Herald of Vallejo reported on Saturday that it had received an email from him suggesting that he was stepping down.Mr. Platzer, who could not be reached on Monday, was appointed to the volunteer position in August 2016 and his term was set to expire in June.“I did not conduct myself in the Zoom meeting in a manner befitting of a planning commissioner and apologize for any harm I may have inflicted,” he wrote in the email, The Times-Herald reported. “I serve at the pleasure of the council and no longer have that trust and backing.”He added, “We are all living in uncertain times and I certainly, like many of you, am adjusting to a new normalcy.”The Zoom episode was one of the latest to surface as officials adjust to remote working. In Florida, a judge this month admonished lawyers for getting too lax in their dress during their videoconference court appearances. Read the full article

True Tales of Quarantined Socializing

Digital dance raves. Streaming soundbaths. Book readings by phone. Now we’ve gotta get creative. Read the full article

The Week in Tech: Gigs at Home, but Not What Start-Ups Intended

Each week, we review the week’s news, offering analysis about the most important developments in the tech industry.Hello from our new market-melting, social-distancing, work-from-home reality. This is Erin Griffith, a start-ups and venture capital reporter in San Francisco. I hope you are staying sane while staying inside.I’m calling this past week The Tom Hanks Awakening. Seemingly from the moment news broke Wednesday evening that Mr. Hanks, our American treasure, had tested positive for the coronavirus, conversations about the virus shifted from half-measures and are-we-overreacting Twitter debates to blanket cancellations and true fear. A number of prominent tech companies, like Twitter, shifted from recommending that employees work from home to issuing mandatory policies.(Not to diminish the power of Mr. Hanks, but the rapid spread of the virus across the country and the World Health Organization’s declaration of a pandemic may have also nudged things along.)For the tech industry, that means more fallout and some opportunity. Every business, from small start-ups to the largest tech companies in the world, is preparing for a challenging year.For many large, unprofitable start-ups, this will be the first true test of whether their businesses can withstand a downturn. Many of the industry’s most prominent start-up “unicorns,” including Uber, Airbnb and WeWork, have long boasted that they were born in the recession of 2008-09. They capitalized on the moment by giving people who were laid off in the downturn flexible “gig economy” work and office space. Therefore, the thinking goes, they can survive the next one.But their businesses are now global, with tens of thousands of employees and delicate networks of millions of customers, drivers, home-rental operators — and, in WeWork’s case, potentially germ-laden office spaces. This is a whole new kind of test for their business models.For example, many Airbnb hosts have seen their bookings fall off a cliff as the company grapples with travel cancellations. This past week, the company made its refund policy more flexible to encourage people to book travel. It even set up a small fund to keep Chinese hosts afloat during the outbreak. Tracey Northcott, a full-time Airbnb host in Japan whom I interviewed for an article, said she had lost $40,000 worth of bookings for April. She is trying to stay upbeat, joking that she may need to start selling off her supplies of toilet paper to make ends meet.The newly announced ban on European travel to the United States only adds to the blow.Drivers for Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Postmates petitioned those gig-economy companies for better protections for those affected by the virus. The companies responded by proposing a fund that would pay drivers who have been quarantined or infected. It’s a small gesture of support for the workers, many of whom have no other safety net. But it further strains these money-losing businesses when they’re already under pressure to show investors they can turn a profit.Some companies are set up to thrive in this moment. Digital-learning services are in demand as schools close. The stock prices of remote-working tools like Zoom surged. Telemedicine is growing. Fitness fanatics are flocking to at-home workout systems like Peloton. Teenagers are turning to Instagram memes to get their virus news. Streaming and video-game companies like Netflix and Activision Blizzard and delivery services like Amazon and GrubHub have been added to stock-picker lists. Criminals and scammers are also thriving: Hackers are using misinformation about the virus to set digital traps and steal personal data from people, Sheera Frenkel, Davey Alba and Raymond Zhong reported.Some creative Airbnb hosts are even advertising “corona-free” getaways stocked with doomsday prepper supplies. Capitalism.

Some stories you shouldn’t miss

Oh, right, the election. The fight over what constitutes free speech online has continued to escalate, most recently with a manipulated video of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Twitter, Cecilia Kang reported.The much-buzzed-about Samsung Galaxy flip phone is a dud, Brian Chen determined. Brian tested out the phone’s purported attention-grabbing abilities by conspicuously flipping it open at several bars. “Not a single person noticed or commented on my nonconformist Z Flip,” he wrote, noting that he got more attention for dyeing his hair blue in high school.Outdoor Voices, a prominent e-commerce start-up selling workout clothes to millennial women, recently imploded, pushing out its founder and slashing its valuation by more than half, Sapna Maheshwari and I reported. The blowup revealed the business challenges facing many “direct to consumer” brands backed by venture capital, and the generational challenges between young disrupters and the experienced executives needed to help them mature.How are we doing?We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected] this email?Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here. Read the full article

High-Flying Trading App Robinhood Goes Down at the Wrong Time

“This is a huge black eye for them and they really need to do something to earn back the trust of their clients,” said Ben Carlson, the director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management in New York and the author of the blog, A Wealth of Common Sense. “I can’t recall another time when an entire platform was down all day like this.”During the market turbulence, other trading firms that cater to small investors have also experienced difficulties. The website for mutual fund giant Vanguard experienced “sporadic unavailability” on Friday because of heavy trading volumes, a spokesman said. TD Ameritrade also said trade confirmations were slow to process on Friday. But none were down as long as Robinhood, which has made it particularly easy to buy and sell not only traditional stocks, but also riskier investment products like cryptocurrencies and options, a contract that makes it possible to bet on stocks going up or down.Many Robinhood customers nursing losses on Monday, when markets rose, had purchased options contracts to bet that the markets would fall. When markets instead surged, they were unable to get out of the contracts because the app was down.Taylor Dalton, 29, said he had recently decided to invest roughly $8,000 in stocks and option contracts through Robinhood, including “put” contracts on airline stocks, which would give him the opportunity to profit if their shares declined.“Yesterday, I had plans to close out all of my options and take a profit,” said Mr. Dalton, who co-owns a cupcake and coffee bar franchise. “Now I am in the red,” he added, referring to his gains that have been erased, “and I am not sure what to do.”As for Robinhood, he said, “I am definitely never using them again.”Nathaniel Popper reported from San Francisco and Tara Siegel Bernard from New York. Read the full article

Judge Halts Work on Microsoft’s JEDI Contract, a Victory for Amazon

A federal judge in Washington ordered Microsoft on Thursday to halt all work on a $10 billion cloud-computing contract for the Pentagon, in a victory for Amazon, which had challenged the awarding of the contract.In a sealed opinion, the judge, Patricia E. Campbell-Smith of the Court of Federal Claims, ordered work to stop on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, known as JEDI, until Amazon’s legal challenge was resolved. The 10-year contract was one of the largest tech contracts from the Pentagon, and Microsoft was set to begin work on it this month.The decision adds to the acrimony surrounding the lucrative deal, which was a major prize in the technology industry, and ratchets up the legal battle around the transformation of the military’s cloud-computing systems. Amazon had been seen as a front-runner to win the JEDI contract, but the Department of Defense awarded it to Microsoft in October.Amazon protested and said the process had been unfair. The internet giant claimed that President Trump had interfered in the bidding for the contract because of his feud with Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive and owner of The Washington Post. The Post has aggressively covered the Trump administration, and the president has referred to the newspaper as the “Amazon Washington Post” and accused it of spreading “fake news.”“This is all setting the stage for a major court fight between Amazon and Microsoft, with the D.O.D. caught in between,” said Daniel Ives, an analyst for Wedbush Securities who has been tracking the JEDI contract. “It’s a political football that’s being kicked around.”Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s vice president of communications, said in a statement on Thursday that the company was “disappointed with the additional delay” but that it believed “we will ultimately be able to move forward with the work to make sure those who serve our country can access the new technology they urgently require.”“We believe the facts will show they ran a detailed, thorough and fair process in determining the needs of the warfighter were best met by Microsoft,” he added.Lt. Col. Robert Carver, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was disappointed by the decision, which has “unnecessarily delayed implementing D.O.D.’s modernization strategy and deprived our warfighters of a set of capabilities they urgently need.” He added that the Defense Department was “confident in our award.”Amazon did not return a request for comment.When Microsoft was awarded the contract, the Defense Department was explicit that the bidding process had been correctly executed. “The acquisition process was conducted in accordance with applicable laws and regulations,” it said at the time. “All offerors were treated fairly and evaluated consistently with the solicitation’s stated evaluation criteria.”In public, Mr. Trump has said there were other “great companies” that should have a chance at the contract. But a speechwriter for former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in a recent book that Mr. Trump had wanted to foil Amazon and give the contract to another company.In December, Amazon filed its legal challenge against the awarding of JEDI, saying that Mr. Trump used “improper pressure” on the Pentagon at its expense. The company also argued that its cloud-computing services were superior to Microsoft’s and that it was better situated to fulfill the contract’s technical requirements.Since then, Amazon has escalated the battle. The company asked the court this week to let it depose Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Amazon argued that hearing from them was crucial to determine if they had intervened against it in the contract. Mr. Esper had recused himself from the contract award decision in October, citing his son’s employment at IBM, one of the early bidders on the JEDI contract.“The question is whether the president of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of the D.O.D. to pursue his own personal and political ends,” an Amazon spokesman said at the time.The Pentagon said it was strongly opposed to Amazon’s deposition request. Microsoft said Amazon “only provided the speculation of bias, with nothing approaching the ‘hard facts’ necessary” to demand them.In another court filing this month, Amazon argued that an injunction was necessary to prevent it from losing the profit it could earn from the contract.JEDI “will transform D.O.D.’s cloud architecture and define enterprise cloud for years to come,” wrote Kevin Mullen, an attorney representing Amazon in the case.The JEDI contract has also been in the spotlight because it is viewed as crucial to the Pentagon’s efforts to modernize its technology. Much of the military operates on computer systems from the 1980s and ’90s, and the Defense Department has spent billions of dollars trying to make them talk to one another.Mr. Ives, the analyst, has said that landing the JEDI contract put Microsoft in a position to earn the roughly $40 billion that the federal government is expected to spend on cloud computing over the next several years.On Thursday, Judge Campbell-Smith also required that Amazon pay a $42 million deposit that the court will hold in case it later determines that the injunction was wrongfully issued and that Microsoft is owed damages. Amazon must submit a plan for offering the money to the court by next Thursday, and it must agree to redactions to the judge’s order no later than Feb. 27 so that it can be made public.The preliminary injunction was a “prudent decision” given the complexities of the deal and the monetary stakes, Mr. Ives said, and the $42 million demanded from Amazon would not be a burden for the company.“It’s less than a rounding error relative to their treasure chest,” he said. He added that he expected Microsoft to prevail in the deal.Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed reporting. Read the full article

SoftBank Takes Another Multibillion-Dollar Hit From Bad Bets

SoftBank Group has taken another multibillion-dollar hit from its ambitious but costly bets on once high-flying companies like Uber and WeWork, putting growing pressure on the Japanese conglomerate to get its financial house in order.The company, which has used its $100 billion Vision Fund to dominate the world of technology investment, has become a target for hedge fund giant Elliott Management, which has been urging changes at the Japanese firm, including governance overhauls and stock buybacks.On Wednesday, SoftBank may have given Elliott another reason to complain. It said the Vision Fund and other investments cost its bottom line 225.1 billion yen, or about $2 billion, in the final three months of last year.Overall, SoftBank reported a profit of about $501 million for the quarter, well short of what investors had expected. Its profit was less than one-tenth of what it had posted one year earlier. Its operating profit fell 99 percent.In November, SoftBank said it had lost $4.6 billion on its investment in WeWork, the office space tech company whose initial public offering imploded spectacularly last fall after the revelation of serious governance issues, including allegations of self-dealing by the company’s chief executive.The results came one day after a judge in the United States approved a merger between Sprint, which SoftBank controls, and T-Mobile, another American wireless carrier. Read the full article

Clearview’s Facial Recognition App Is Identifying Child Victims of Abuse

“We thought it was too controversial of a feature because it was too easy to use that functionality for abuse,” said Mr. Burns. “And also it’s just a legal nightmare.”Still, Mr. Burns said, he understood why investigators would want to use facial recognition software. “They are faced with a very grim task, and if there’s a tool that gives them an opportunity to safeguard victims, I don’t blame them for trying to grab it with both hands,” he said.Since Clearview’s practices have come to light, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Venmo and YouTube have sent the company cease-and-desist letters, asking it to stop scraping photos from their sites and delete existing images in its database. The attorney general of New Jersey banned the use of Clearview by officers in the state and called for an investigation into how it and similar technologies were being used by law enforcement. A class-action lawsuit seeking certification was filed in Illinois, where a strong biometric privacy law prohibits the use of residents’ faceprints without their consent, and another was filed on Feb. 3 in Virginia.Bills banning the use of facial recognition by police have recently been introduced in New York and Washington. And Clearview received a letter from Senator Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, asking for a list of law enforcement agencies that have used the app and whether biometric information has been collected for children under 13 years old.“While this type of technology has existed for quite some time, we believe we have created something that enables law enforcement to solve previously unsolvable crimes and, most importantly, protect vulnerable children,” Mr. Ton-That said in his email. “At the same time, we are responding to requests for information from government and other interested parties as appropriate, and look forward to engaging in constructive discussions with them as we work to make our communities safer.”In October, law enforcement groups sent a letter to members of Congress, urging them to not ban the use of facial recognition for their investigations. “We understand the public’s concern about protection of their privacy and civil rights,” they wrote. “With clear, publicly available policies we believe those concerns can be addressed.”Many agencies had been using Clearview for months at the time the letter was sent, but the letter made no mention of it.Michael H. Keller and Aaron Krolik contributed reporting. Read the full article

Uber Posts Faster Growth, but Loses $1.1 Billion

SAN FRANCISCO — Uber capped a difficult 2019 by posting faster growth in its ride-hailing business, even as it lost more money.On Thursday, Uber said its revenue in the fourth quarter of 2019 increased 37 percent to $4 billion from a year ago, faster than the 30 percent growth it recorded in the previous quarter. The company lost $1.1 billion, more than the $887 million it lost a year earlier.“We recognize that the era of growth at all costs is over,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber’s chief executive. “I’m gratified by our progress, steadily delivering against the commitments we’ve made to our shareholders on our path to profitability.”The results were driven by growth in Uber’s main ride-hailing business, with the number of trips rising 28 percent to more than 1.9 billion and revenue increasing 27 percent to more than $3 billion. In contrast, Uber’s food delivery business, called Uber Eats, lost $461 million on revenue of $734 million.Uber went into retreat for much of 2019 after staging a disappointing initial public offering in May. The company, which spends a lot of money to attract passengers and drivers, immediately faced doubts over whether it could ever make a profit. Since then, Uber’s stock has plunged.In response to its critics, Mr. Khosrowshahi has cut costs at the company and pulled back parts of its business. Last year, he laid off more than 1,000 employees and withdrew Uber’s food delivery service from South Korea. Last month, Mr. Khosrowshahi also sold Uber’s food delivery business in India to a local competitor, Zomato.Mr. Khosrowshahi has said Uber is aiming to make an operating profit by 2021.“Clearly, Uber has put out a somewhat aggressive timeline for profitability,” said Tom White, a senior equity analyst at D.A. Davidson. “These exits are partly a function of them making sure they meet that target.”Uber is dealing with other challenges. On Jan. 1, California legislation went into effect that may force the company to reclassify its drivers, who are freelancers, as employees. That would drive up Uber’s costs because it would have to provide them with benefits and other perks. Uber last year filed a suit to block the law and has asked for a preliminary injunction that would give it a reprieve from the new rules until the case was resolved.The company also faces hurdles in London, one of its biggest markets. In November, London authorities decided not to extend Uber’s taxi operating license because of persistent safety problems. Uber continues to operate there while it appeals the decision.“Regulation of ride sharing is finally catching up,” Mr. White said. “These businesses are looking less and less like these completely transformative, transportation-as-a-service models, and more and more like tech-enabled taxi companies. You have a lot more regulation, a lot more fees and a lot more oversight, which generally raises costs.”It has not been all bad news for the company. A court in Brazil ruled on Wednesday that Uber’s drivers could not be considered employees. Read the full article

An Algorithm That Grants Freedom, or Takes It Away

“We walked into a hornet’s nest I didn’t even know existed,” Mr. Stephens said.In response to the protests, the state commission recommended a much simpler setup based on software already used by the state courts. But even this algorithm is difficult for a layperson to understand. Asked to explain it, Mr. Stephens suggested speaking with another commissioner.Nyssa Taylor, criminal justice policy counsel with the Philadelphia A.C.L.U., was among the protesters. She worries that algorithms will exacerbate rather than reduce racial bias. Even if governments share how the systems arrive at their decisions — which happens in Philadelphia in some cases — the math is sometimes too complex for most people to wrap their heads around.Various algorithms embraced by the Philadelphia criminal justice system were designed by Richard Berk, a professor of criminology and statistics at Penn. These algorithms do not use ZIP codes or other location data that could be a proxy for race, he said. And though he acknowledged that a layperson couldn’t easily understand the algorithm’s decisions, he said human judgment has the same problem.“All machine-learning algorithms are black boxes, but the human brain is also a black box,” Dr. Berk said. “If a judge decides they are going to put you away for 20 years, that is a black box.”Mark Houldin, a former public defender who was also among the protesters, said he was concerned that the algorithms were unfairly attaching labels to individuals as they moved through the criminal justice system.In an affidavit included with a lawsuit recently filed by the defender’s office, a former Philadelphia probation officer said the probation department’s predictive algorithm also affected arraignment hearings. For years, she said, if someone was arrested and charged with a new crime while on probation — and had been deemed “high risk” by the algorithm — the probation office automatically instructed the jail not to release the person.A spokesman for Philadelphia County denied that the system operated this way. “Every detainer issued is reviewed by supervisory staff of” the probation department, he said, “and notice is sent to the appropriate judicial authority.” Read the full article

The Only Safe Election Is a Low-Tech Election

But Democrats should also blame their party’s leadership for entrusting such an important process to new technology in the first place — not just in Iowa, but in places like Nevada, where Democrats are reportedly planning to use a similar mobile app to tally votes in the state’s primary election later this month.It’s enough to make you wonder: Have these party officials ever been to a polling site or a caucus venue? They are not pristine WeWorks with blazing fast internet connections and an army of Geek Squad workers on call. They are mostly high school gyms, nursing homes and church basements with cinder-block walls and horrible cellphone service. The people who work at them are volunteers, and many are — how can I put this delicately? — members of the generation that still refers to the TV remote as “the clicker.”Using a proprietary app to report vote totals is the kind of thing that sounds simple on a start-up’s whiteboard, but utterly falls apart in a chaotic real-world environment, where connections drop, phones malfunction and poorly tested apps strain under a surge of traffic. Add an army of frenzied poll workers, impatient voters and twitchy news media, and you might as well have asked the caucus workers to whip up their own JavaScript.I’m not opposed to technology in political campaigning. Want to use Facebook ads to drum up donors? Go for it. Want to put your voter database on the blockchain? Be my guest.But when it comes to the actual business of registering and counting people’s votes, many of the smartest tech experts I know fiercely oppose high-tech solutions, like “paperless” digital voting machines and mobile voting apps. After all, every piece of technology involved in the voting process is a possible point of failure. And the larger and more interconnected the technical system, the more vulnerable it is to an attack.“Many of the leading opponents of paperless voting machines were, and still are, computer scientists, because we understand the vulnerability of voting equipment in a way most election officials don’t,” said Barbara Simons, a computer scientist and board chair of Verified Voting, an election security nonprofit, in an interview with The Atlantic in 2017.In Iowa, there is a silver lining: The caucus system doesn’t use voting machines at all, and its public, open-air nature means that it is less susceptible to tampering than a secret ballot. In addition, state officials this year required caucusgoers to fill out paper “presidential preference cards,” which could be used in case of a recount. So despite the delays, there is at least some certainty that the results will be accurate when they are finally announced. Read the full article

China, Desperate to Stop Coronavirus, Turns Neighbor Against Neighbor

GUANGZHOU, China — One person was turned away by hotel after hotel after he showed his ID card. Another was expelled by fearful local villagers. A third found his most sensitive personal information leaked online after registering with the authorities.These outcasts are from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, where a rapidly spreading viral outbreak has killed more than 360 people in China and sent fear rippling around the world. They are pariahs in China, among the millions unable to go home and feared as potential carriers of the mysterious coronavirus.All across the country, despite China’s vast surveillance network with its facial recognition systems and high-end cameras that is increasingly used to track its 1.4 billion people, the government has turned to familiar authoritarian techniques — like setting up dragnets and asking neighbors to inform on one another — as it tries to contain the outbreak.It took the authorities about five days to contact Harmo Tang, a college student studying in Wuhan, after he returned to his hometown, Linhai, in eastern Zhejiang Province. Mr. Tang said he had already been under self-imposed isolation when local officials asked for his personal information, including name, address, phone number, identity card number and the date he returned from Wuhan. Within days, the information began to spread online, along with a list of others who returned to Linhai from Wuhan.Local officials offered no explanation but returned a few days later to fasten police tape to his door and hang a sign that warned neighbors that a Wuhan returnee lived there. The sign included an informant hotline to call if anyone saw him or his family leave the apartment. Mr. Tang said he received about four calls a day from different local government departments.“In reality there’s not much empathy,” he said. “It’s not a caring tone they’re using. It’s a warning tone. I don’t feel very comfortable about it.”Of course, China has a major incentive to track down potential carriers of the disease. The coronavirus outbreak has put parts of the country under lockdown, brought the world’s second-largest economy to a virtual standstill and erected walls between China and the rest of the world.Still, even some government officials called for understanding as concerns about prejudice spread. Experts warned such marginalization of an already vulnerable group could prove counterproductive, further damaging public trust and sending those who should be screened and monitored deeper underground.“We are paying attention to this issue,” Ma Guoqiang, the Chinese Communist Party secretary of Wuhan, said at a news conference there last Tuesday.“I believe that some people may label Hubei people or report them, but I also think most people will treat Hubei people with a good heart.”While networks of volunteers and Christian groups have been vocal about offering help, many local leaders have focused efforts on finding and isolating people from Hubei. On big screens and billboards, propaganda videos and posters warn people to stay inside, wear masks and wash hands.In the northern province of Hebei, one county offered bounties of 1,000 yuan, or about $140, for each Wuhan person reported by residents. Images online showed towns digging up roads or deputizing men to block outsiders. Some apartment-building residents barricaded the doors of their towers with China’s ubiquitous ride-share bikes.In the eastern province of Jiangsu, quarantine turned to imprisonment after authorities used metal poles to barricade shut the door of a family recently returned from Wuhan. To get food, the family relied on neighbors who lowered provisions with a rope down to their back balcony, according to a local news report.Scared for the safety of his children as conditions at home worsened, Andy Li, a tech worker from Wuhan traveling with his family in Beijing, rented a car and began driving south to Guangdong, an effort to find refuge with relatives there. In Nanjing, he was turned away from one hotel before getting a room at a luxury hotel.There he set up a self-imposed family quarantine for four days, until local authorities ordered all people from Wuhan to move to a hotel next to the city’s central rail station. Mr. Li said the quarantine hotel did not seem to be doing a good job isolating people. Food delivery workers came and went, while gaps in the doors and walls allowed drafts in.“They’re only working to separate Wuhan people from Nanjing people,” Mr. Li said. “They don’t care at all if Wuhan people infect each other.”To help, he stuffed towels and tissues under the door to block the drafts.“I’m not complaining about the government," Mr. Li said. “There will always be loopholes in policy. But in a selfish way I’m just really worried about my children.”Across the country, the response from local authorities often resembles the mass mobilizations of the Mao era rather than the technocratic, data-driven wizardry depicted in propaganda about China’s emerging surveillance state. They have also turned to techniques Beijing used to fight the outbreak of SARS, another deadly disease, in 2002 and 2003, when China was much less technologically sophisticated.Checkpoints to screen people for fevers have popped up at tollbooths, at the front gates of apartment complexes and in hotels, grocery stores and train stations. Often those wielding the thermometer guns don’t hold them close enough to a person’s forehead, generating unusually low temperature readings. Such checks were worthless, for instance, against one man in the western province of Qinghai, whom police are investigating on suspicion that he covered up his symptoms to travel.Authorities have used computerized systems that track ID cards — which must be used to take most long-distance transport and stay in hotels — to round up people from Wuhan. Yet one article about the ID system in The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party, included a plea to all passengers on affected flights and trains to report themselves.The campaigns have turned life upside down in unexpected ways. Jia Yuting, a 21-year-old student in Wuhan, had already been back in her hometown in central China for 18 days — longer than the 14-day quarantine period — when she got news her grandfather was sick in a nearby village. During a visit to see him, she followed local instructions broadcast on speakers in the village and registered her personal details with the local Communist Party Committee.When a middle-school teacher randomly reached out to her on the messaging app WeChat to inquire about her health, she realized her data had been leaked online and was spreading on a list. Later, she received a threatening phone call from a man who lived in her home city.“Why did you come back Wuhan? You should have stayed there. You Wuhan dog!” she recalled him saying.Authorities offered her no explanation for how it happened, and insisted such leaks did not disrupt her regular life. Three days after her visit to the village, her grandfather died. Local officials there immediately told her family that she would not be allowed to return to the village to pay her final respects at a funeral that was taking place more than three weeks after she had returned from Wuhan.“I feel that the villagers are ignorant and the government isn’t helping; instead it’s leaking the information everywhere without telling them that I don’t have any symptoms,” she said, adding that she felt guilty she could not be there to comfort her grandmother.“I was very close to my grandfather. I think it’s not humane, it’s cruel.”Lin Qiqing contributed research. Read the full article

How Much Are We Paying for Our Subscription Services? A Lot

Online subscriptions sure sound cheap, but what do a few bucks a month to watch TV shows, store photos online and stream music add up to? Quite a lot, it turns out. In 2019, we each spent $640 on digital subscriptions like streaming video and music services, cloud storage, dating apps and online productivity tools, according to an analysis for The New York Times by Mint, the online budgeting tool owned by Intuit, using data from millions of its users. That was up about 7 percent from $598 in 2017. We increased our spending the most last year on streaming TV services, paying $170 to subscribe to the likes of Netflix, Hulu and new entrants like Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus. While that was far cheaper than most traditional cable TV packages, which cost roughly $1,200 a year, it was up 30 percent from the $130 we spent on streaming TV services in 2017. Our spending on digital subscriptions is likely to only rise as more of our possessions become connected to the internet, like our television sets, home security systems and cars. At the same time, it will become harder and harder to keep track of all of the services we pay for. Just ask Josué Rojas, an artist who runs a nonprofit in San Francisco. He said he paid for Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify and Apple’s iCloud storage service — all told, his annual cost is roughly $410, which is below what the average consumer pays. But Mr. Rojas occasionally loses track of his spending. Last year, he said, he and his wife subscribed to the CBS All Access streaming app to watch the Grammys. After the ceremony concluded, the couple forgot to cancel the $6 subscription for several months. “Coming home from work and essentially needing a spreadsheet to keep track of all these different subscriptions can be pretty overbearing very quickly,” Mr. Rojas said. Kevin Westcott, a vice chairman for the research and consulting firm Deloitte, who led a study on digital media trends, said the No. 1 reason that people subscribed to a streaming service was to watch exclusive content — like original TV shows, including HBO’s “Watchmen” or “The Mandalorian” on Disney Plus. “The question that arises is, once you’ve watched that series, do you continue to use it?” Mr. Westcott said. “Is there enough of a library that keeps you engaged? Otherwise, it becomes a subscription you have that you haven’t used.” Plenty of us have fallen into this trap. It’s wise to regularly audit our subscriptions and prune the ones we no longer need. Here are some tips.

Cancel ahead of time

Many of us wait until the last minute to cancel a subscription, but there is generally no penalty to ending payments ahead of time. Let’s say Netflix bills you on the 28th of each month. If you decided on Feb. 5 that it was time to cancel, you would still be able to use Netflix until Feb. 28. There is no benefit to waiting until Feb. 27 to end the subscription. With some forethought, you can get savvy about managing your active subscriptions. For example, if there is a six-episode TV show on Disney Plus once a week, you can set a calendar reminder to cancel your subscription a few weeks before the show ends its run. If the calendar alert appears and you realize there is still something you want to watch on Disney Plus, you can continue paying and reschedule the calendar reminder to appear again a month later.

Audit your subscriptions

Using budget-tracking tools like Mint and regularly checking your credit card statement are obvious steps to watch your spending, but subscription charges can easily be overlooked when they carry generic labels like “Amazon” or “Google.” It can also be challenging to find out what services you are still subscribed to, let alone how to discontinue memberships. So here’s a cheat sheet for finding the controls to cancel the most popular types of subscriptions: On Apple mobile devices, open the Settings app and tap on your first and last name at the top, then tap Subscriptions. You can see a list of the apps you have subscribed to, like Apple TV Plus, Apple Music, HBO Now and Hulu Plus, and cancel the ones you no longer use. On Android devices, open the Google Play Store app. Tap the Menu icon (three horizontal lines) and then tap Subscriptions. Amazon subscriptions are the most confusing to manage because the company offers so many different types of subscriptions and the controls are scattered throughout different parts of the website. Here are the most important settings: For canceling memberships like Amazon Prime and ComiXology, hover over “Accounts & Lists” and click on “Memberships & Subscriptions.” For Amazon app subscriptions, hover over “Accounts & Lists” and click on “Your Android Apps & Devices,” and then select “Your Subscriptions.” For managing Amazon photo storage, hover over “Accounts & Lists,” click on “Your Amazon Photos,” then click “Manage Storage” and, finally, click “Cancel my plan.” For managing Kindle books subscriptions, hover over “Accounts & Lists,” click “Your Kindle Unlimited” and, under “Manage Membership,” select “Cancel Kindle Unlimited Membership.” For managing Amazon Music, hover over “Accounts & Lists,” click “Your Music Library,” then click “Your Amazon Music Settings” and select “Amazon Music Unlimited.” Finally, click “Cancel” in the Subscription Renewal section. For managing Audible audiobooks subscriptions, visit Audible.com, click “Account Details” and click “Cancel my membership.” If keeping track of subscriptions sounds daunting, that’s because it is — and this is partly why many companies have shifted toward subscriptions. But a subscriptions audit is worth undertaking at least once every three months. After thoroughly vetting my credit card bills and subscriptions dashboards, I noticed my wife was paying for Audible, the audiobook service, even though she no longer downloaded audiobooks. I confess I gave her something of a hard time — only to realize later that I had neglected to cancel my subscription to Amazon’s ComiXology Unlimited after starting a free trial to read one comic book. I ended up canceling the ComiXology subscription, but only after paying an extra $18 over three months. Read the full article

Bitcoin Has Lost Steam. But Criminals Still Love It.

SAN FRANCISCO — The last few months have not been good for Bitcoin. The value of the digital tokens has steadily dropped. Bitcoin trading on cryptocurrency exchanges has slowed. And using Bitcoin to buy legal items? That has also dropped.But one corner of the Bitcoin economy is still going strong: the sale of illegal drugs and other types of lawbreaking.The amount of cryptocurrency spent on so-called dark net markets, where stolen credit card information and a wide array of illegal drugs can be purchased with Bitcoin, rose 60 percent to reach a new high of $601 million in the last three months of 2019, according to data released Tuesday by Chainalysis, a firm that tracks every Bitcoin transaction and serves as an adviser to an array of government authorities.The continuing growth of illegal transactions underscores the difficulties that Bitcoin has had in moving past its reputation as a refuge for scoundrels, even as Wall Street institutions have begun buying and selling the digital tokens.The enduring success of Bitcoin-fueled illegal activity also points to the struggles that the authorities have faced in containing the new kinds of bad behavior that cryptocurrencies have helped enable.Bitcoin played a crucial role in the recent growth of so-called ransomware attacks, in which hackers steal or encrypt computer files and refuse to give them back unless a Bitcoin payment is made.Bitcoin is still popular among currency speculators, and illicit activity accounts for only 1 percent of all Bitcoin transactions. But that nearly doubled from the previous year. Illegal activity appeared to be one of the few parts of the Bitcoin economy impervious to changes in price, according to Chainalysis’s new Crypto Crime Report.Chainalysis’s data is likely to understate the number of Bitcoin transactions going to illegal purposes because the company cannot identify some of the activity dedicated to ransomware, tax evasion and money laundering. It is widely assumed that some of the people buying Bitcoin on legitimate trading exchanges are doing so to skirt national laws.That illicit activity is “pervasive” on the dark net, said Calvin Shivers, the assistant director of the F.B.I.’s criminal investigative division, but he added that the F.B.I. remained “undeterred” and was “surging resources” to tackle the problem.In addition to the online black markets, the authorities have been aggressively targeting cryptocurrency schemes. But the amount of Bitcoin going into fraudulent activity still hit a new high. Fraudsters more than tripled their take from the year before, grabbing $3.5 billion from millions of victims in 2019, the Chainalysis data shows.Illegal transactions have been a central part of the Bitcoin story since the first online black market, the Silk Road, helped give people a reason to begin using Bitcoin in 2011. Bitcoin was useful for the Silk Road because the structure of Bitcoin, without any central authority, makes it possible for a user to create a Bitcoin wallet and use the tokens without registering an identity with anyone.There was hope among some in the Bitcoin community that the cryptocurrency would find a broader use as electronic cash, as the inventor of Bitcoin originally posited.As the value of Bitcoin increased, big companies like Expedia and Stripe announced that they would begin taking Bitcoin. But when users realized that Bitcoin had many drawbacks as a way of making purchases — like being slower and more expensive than traditional cash — there was little uptake.Bitcoin aficionados now believe the cryptocurrency is more useful as a new kind of alternative asset, like gold. Many people on Wall Street have bought into that idea, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the owner of the New York Stock Exchange both allow traders to buy and sell derivatives based on Bitcoin. Trading, however, has been tepid.Some believed that the digital token might prove to be popular in countries like Venezuela or Argentina, where local currencies are even less stable than Bitcoin. But in those places, interest has recently fallen off, data gathered by the Block, a research firm, suggests.Bitcoin prices and trading did spike in the middle of last year, soon after Facebook announced its intention to create the Libra cryptocurrency. The price of Bitcoin rose from around $4,000 to more than $12,000. But it has become clear that Libra might face just as many legal difficulties as Bitcoin. The price of a Bitcoin has recently hovered around $9,000.Even with the recent declines, Bitcoin trading and prices are still far ahead of where they were at the beginning of 2017, before a price run that took Bitcoin to nearly $20,000.Bitcoin advocates have generally been unconcerned about the amount of illegal activity done using Bitcoin, because they see much larger amounts of illegal activity with traditional currencies, and because Bitcoin has significant drawbacks for criminals.“Bitcoin is still a pretty lousy currency to use for cybercrime,” said Ryan Selkis, the founder of the cryptocurrency consulting firm Messari. “Maybe it is good for petty crime, but if you are running a cartel, it is a different story.”The ledger of all Bitcoin transactions, known as the blockchain, publicly records every transaction. Names are not assigned to Bitcoin addresses, but firms like Chainalysis have tracked criminals by tracing transactions through the blockchain to places that know the identity of their users, like Bitcoin exchanges.Some new dark net markets have pushed customers to use alternative cryptocurrencies that leave less of a trail. But criminals seem to be undeterred by Bitcoin’s drawbacks. The spread of fentanyl, which is blamed for the opioid crisis in the United States, was made possible, law enforcement has said, by Chinese labs selling the drug online for Bitcoin.One of the new black markets that have become popular over the last year, Empire Market, has several pages of listings for fentanyl in various forms, from 12 grams for $1,600 in Bitcoin to a patch for $41. Almost all of the new sites have lengthy sections on why, even with the drawbacks of Bitcoin, they will remain the place to buy drugs online.“We welcome all honest vendors to set up shop here, there really is no reason for you not to vend on Monopoly,” the marketplace called Monopoly says on its support page, after explaining the steps it has taken to avoid the fate of previous markets. Read the full article

As Virus Spreads, Anger Floods Chinese Social Media

SHANGHAI — Recently, someone following the coronavirus crisis through China’s official news media would see lots of footage, often set to stirring music, praising the heroism and sacrifice of health workers marching off to stricken places.But someone following the crisis through social media would see something else entirely: vitriolic comments and mocking memes about government officials, harrowing descriptions of untreated family members and images of hospital corridors loaded with patients, some of whom appear to be dead.The contrast is almost never so stark in China. The government usually keeps a tight grip on what is said, seen and heard about it. But the sheer amount of criticism — and the often clever ways in which critics dodge censors, such as by referring to Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, as “Trump” or by comparing the outbreak to the Chernobyl catastrophe — have made it difficult for Beijing to control the message.In recent days, critics have pounced when officials in the city of Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, wore their protective masks incorrectly. They have heaped scorn upon stumbling pronouncements. When Wuhan’s mayor spoke to official media on Monday, one commenter responded, “If the virus is fair, then please don’t spare this useless person.”The condemnations stand as a rare direct challenge to the Communist Party, which brooks no dissent in the way it runs China. In some cases, Chinese leaders appear to be acknowledging people’s fear, anger and other all-too-human reactions to the crisis, showing how the party can move dramatically, if sometimes belatedly, to mollify the public.Such criticism can go only so far, however. Some of China’s more commercially minded media outlets have covered the disease and the response thoroughly if not critically. But articles and comments about the virus continue to be deleted, and the government and internet platforms have issued fresh warnings against spreading what they call “rumors.”“Chinese social media are full of anger, not because there was no censorship on this topic, but despite strong censorship,” said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of China Digital Times, a website that monitors Chinese internet controls. “It is still possible that the censorship will suddenly increase again, as part of an effort to control the narrative.”When China’s leaders battled the SARS virus in the early 2000s, social media was only just beginning to blossom in the country. The government covered up the disease’s spread, and it was left to journalists and other critics to shame the authorities into acknowledging the scale of the problem.Today, smartphones and social media make it harder for mass public health crises to stay buried. But internet platforms in China are just as easily polluted with false and fast-moving information as they are everywhere else. During outbreaks of disease, Beijing’s leaders have legitimate reason to be on alert for quack remedies and scaremongering fabrications, which can cause panic and do damage.In recent days, though, Beijing seems to be reasserting its primacy over information in ways that go beyond mere rumor control. At a meeting this past weekend between Mr. Xi and other senior leaders, one of the measures they resolved to take against the virus was to “strengthen the guidance of public opinion.”Wang Huning, the head of the Communist Party’s publicity department and an influential party ideologue, was also recently named deputy head of the team in charge of containing the epidemic, behind only China’s premier, Li Keqiang.Chinese officials seem to recognize that social media can be a useful tool for feeling out public opinion in times of crisis. WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging platform, over the weekend said that it would crack down hard on rumors about the virus. But it also created a tool for users to report tips and information about the disease and the response.Internet backlash may already have caused one local government in China to change course on its virus-fighting policies. The southern city of Shantou announced on Sunday that it was stopping cars, ships and people from entering the city, in a policy that echoed ones in Wuhan. But then word went around that the decision had led people to panic-buy food, and by the afternoon, the order had been rescinded.Nowhere has the local government been the target of more internet vitriol than in Hubei Province, where Wuhan is the capital.After the Hubei governor, Wang Xiaodong, and other officials there gave a news briefing on Sunday, web users mocked Mr. Wang for misstating, twice, the number of face masks that the province could produce. They circulated a photo from the briefing of him and two other officials, pointing out that one of them did not cover his nose with his mask, another wore his mask upside down and Mr. Wang did not wear a mask at all.On Monday, social media users were similarly unrelenting toward Wuhan’s mayor, Zhou Xianwang.During an interview Mr. Zhou gave to state television, commenters in live streams unloaded on him, with one writing: “Stop talking. We just want to know when you will resign.”Top authorities may be deliberately directing public anger toward officials in Hubei and Wuhan as a prelude to their resigning and being replaced. Many other targets within the Chinese leadership seem to remain off limits.This month, as news of the coronavirus emerged but Mr. Xi did not make public appearances to address it, people on the social platform Weibo began venting their frustration in veiled ways, asking “Where’s that person?”But even those comments were deleted. So some users started replacing Mr. Xi’s name with “Trump.” As in, “I don’t want to go through another minute of this year, my heart is filled with pain, I hope Trump dies.”Other people hungering to express frustration have taken to the Chinese social platform Douban, which has been flooded recently by user reviews for “Chernobyl,” the hit television series about the Soviet nuclear disaster.“In any era, any country, it’s the same. Cover everything up,” one reviewer wrote on Monday.“That’s socialism,” wrote another.Some Chinese news outlets have been able to report incisively on the coronavirus. The influential newsmagazine Caixin has put out rigorous reporting and analysis. The Paper, a digital news outlet that is overseen by Shanghai’s Communist Party Committee, published a chilling video about a Wuhan resident who couldn’t find a hospital that would treat him and ended up wandering the streets.Mr. Xiao, the Chinese internet expert, said the central authorities long gave such outlets special leeway to cover certain topics in ways that official media cannot. But the outlets should not be viewed as independent of the government, he said, calling their coverage “planned and controlled publicity” from the authorities.Even outside the digital realm, it is not hard to find people in China who remain unsure of whether to trust what their government is telling them about the epidemic.Chen Pulin, a 78-year-old retiree, was waiting outside a Shanghai hospital recently while his daughter was inside being tested for the virus. When word of the disease first began trickling out, he immediately had doubts about whether officials were being forthcoming about it.“Even now, the government seems to be thinking about the economy and social stability,” Mr. Chen said. “Those things are important, but when it comes to these infectious diseases, stopping the disease should come first.”Li Yuan contributed reporting from Hong Kong. Claire Fu, Lin Qiqing and Wang Yiwei contributed research. Read the full article

Jeff Bezos’ Hack Inquiry Falls Short of Implicating National Enquirer

American Media has said that it obtained information about the affair from Ms. Sanchez’s brother, Michael Sanchez, a Hollywood talent agent whom people at The Enquirer have described as a longtime source of information and tips.Mr. Sanchez and American Media executed a nondisclosure agreement on Oct. 18, 2018, “concerning certain information, photographs and text messages documenting an affair between Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez,” according to a contract between the two parties reviewed by The New York Times.Eight days later, Mr. Sanchez granted American Media the right to publish and license the text messages and photographs he had provided in exchange for $200,000, according to the contract and four people with knowledge of the arrangement.“The single source of our reporting has been well documented,” American Media said in a statement. “In September of 2018, Michael Sanchez began providing all materials and information to our reporters. Any suggestion that a third party was involved in or in any way influenced our reporting is false.”After federal agents and prosecutors examined allegations of wrongdoing by American Media in connection with the Bezos story last year, the company provided evidence showing them that Ms. Sanchez had provided text messages and compromising photos of Mr. Bezos to her brother, who passed them along to the tabloid, according to four people with knowledge of the situation.That does not preclude the possibility that Saudi Arabia could have sent other useful information to The Enquirer. Nor were Mr. Bezos and his investigators off-base in suspecting a possible link between the tabloid and the kingdom. American Media and Saudi Arabia had both tried to build relationships with Mr. Trump, and one way to the president’s heart could have been an attack on Mr. Bezos, whom Mr. Trump once referred to as “Jeff Bozo” in a Twitter post.At the same time, the American Media chairman David J. Pecker sought business opportunities and financing in Saudi Arabia. He met with Prince Mohammed in Saudi Arabia in 2017 after attending a White House dinner with a well-connected contact of the crown prince. In March 2018, American Media published a 97-page glossy magazine, “The New Kingdom,” essentially a promotional brochure for the crown prince and the nation. Read the full article