fortune--2020-01-16--Changes are abound. Here’s what you should know

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DIGITAL HEALTH
Takeda gets in on the CRISPR game. It's not exactly a secret that CRISPR, the gene-editing tech, is one of the hottest developments in biopharma. Yet another company is hopping on to the bandwagon—Takeda, a Japanese pharma giant, is jumping onto a $61 million round alongside OrbiMed in an effort to expand the way that CRISPR technology may work. (Endpoints News)
THE BIG PICTURE
A new blood pressure study underscores medicine's gender problem. There's a bias issue in clinical trials across gender and race. A new study published in JAMA underscores the severity of the issue when it comes to blood pressure. In data amassed over more than 40 years, researchers found that high blood pressure may start presenting itself in women far earlier than it does in men—and that has long term consequences when it comes to cardiovascular disease. (New York Times)
REQUIRED READING
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Warren: I'll Use the Force of the Government to Make Tech Work for People With Disabilities, by Elizabeth Warren
Apple Buys an AI Startup, But Not Necessarily for a Smarter Siri, by Don Reisinger
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fortune--2020-01-16--How to avoid the growing ‘fleeceware’ scam

‘ Unrealistically high : ’ Experts doubt China can fulfill its targets in ‘ Phase One ’ of the U.S. @ @

A new type of scam called fleeceware is draining the pocketbooks of people who download apps that come with free trials. Even after uninstalling the apps, the victims continue to be billed.
Nearly two dozen apps in the Google Play store with as many as 600 million users have allegedly engaged in the shady practice, according to research released on Tuesday by security firm Sophos.
The apps include fortune tellers, keyboard apps, and video editors, the company said.
“One reason Sophos wants to create awareness, and highlight this Fleeceware business model, is that this business model can cause significant harm to users, and there’s little recourse,” Sophos researcher Jagadeesh Chandraiah said in a blog post. “The Google Play Store policies are significantly less consumer-friendly than US credit card policies; Those who managed to get refunds have been able to obtain them only with great difficulty.”
Another app called Fortunemirror offers a free three-day trial and then a $69.99 weekly subscription. The app claims to facilitate a “live future reading” via a “hand scan” and delivers a daily horoscope. As of Wednesday afternoon, it was still available in the Google Play store.
“The creators are banking on the bet that you’re a dimwit; the charge is over 60 dollars a week if you fall for the free three day trial trap and forget to cancel your subscription,” writes one user, who gave the app a one-star review in the Google Play Store.
Fortune sent an email for comment to an address listed for the developer of Fortunemirror, but the message bounced back.
This is the second batch of fleeceware apps Sophos has identified. In September, the company shared a list two dozen other apps, including calculators and QR code readers, charging customers $100 to $240 after they had uninstalled those apps.
Sophos said Google removed those apps after they were reported. Google did not respond to a request for comment from Fortune.
Sophos’ study was limited to Google Play and did not include Apple’s App Store. Andrew Brandt, principal researcher at Sophos, said the decision was because, “Apple generally has stricter guidelines and requirements then Google Play when it comes to what apps they allow in their marketplace for download.”
While it’s difficult for consumers to know ahead of time whether an app will fleece them, Sophos listed some clues to look out for. For example, many of the allegedly scammy apps have suspiciously high numbers of installs listed, along with a mix of glowing five-star reviews mixed with bad reviews from customers complaining about being overcharged.
“Users should read the terms and conditions, especially when it comes to subscriptions and refunds. The user interface elements can be very difficult to read so make sure you understand the terms of the subscription agreement,” Brandt says. “Many of these app vendors also tell you that there’s a 3-day free trial, but Google’s own policies only give you 48 hours after purchase to claim a refund, after which it is at the app publisher’s discretion whether or not they’ll refund the money already collected.”
Users should also be suspicious about basic apps that cost hundreds of dollars annually.
Finally, if all else fails, set a reminder to cancel a subscription before the free trial period is over. But consumers should be sure to cancel via Google Play subscriptions, rather than simply uninstalling the app.
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fortune--2020-01-15--Why Boeing’s shares are holding up despite a brutal year

Exclusive : Consumer confidence nears a record high in the U.S. , but dips in China and Europe

In a year of bad news—followed by yet more bad news—Tuesday was an extraordinary day for Boeing and its battered shareholders. Consider this rundown of headlines:
First, news broke that rival Airbus overtook Boeing in 2019, delivering more than twice as many airplanes—863 to 380—to customers last year. Dig deeper into the numbers and some real red flags appear for Boeing. The struggling aviation and defense giant reported that in 2019, for the first time in decades, it had a negative net number of commercial airplane orders. In other words, cancellations outpaced deliveries by 87 as airline customers continued to move on from the grounded Boeing 737 MAX.
Also on Tuesday, American Airlines announced it would keep the 737 MAX out of commission for a further two months, until June. And, to put a further exclamation point on the day, evidence surfaced that Boeing talked Lion Air out of more 737 MAX training for its pilots, generating further questions about whether Boeing did everything it could to keep pilots safe in the run-up to the two fatal MAX crashes that killed 346.
All in all, it was one heck of a second day on the job for new CEO David Calhoun.
And yet, with all that bad new, shares closed up 0.65%, outpacing the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500.
Through all the turmoil of firing its CEO, congressional testimony, and its finances going south, the trading dynamics for Boeing’s stock have remained remarkably steady over the past 10 months.
Yes, there’s been a 25% drop in the Boeing share price since its record high of $440.62 on March 1, 2019. But zoom out, and you see the share price is holding up fine. It’s trading 10% above where it was in December, 2018, when the markets swooned, and it’s more than twice as high as it was just three years ago. If you bought Boeing shares on January, 2, 2017, you’d be pretty happy right now with the return.
A couple of factors have put a floor on the shares, at least for now. And, market watchers believe, the company is at a crossroads. It’s primed either to take off, or to drop further. Fortune looks closely at what would trigger both scenarios.
The bearish case
Equity investing is not supposed to work this way. Bad news drives down share prices, particularly when sales are spiraling down and no one is sure what the future will bring.
In Boeing’s case, the tragedies of the 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019 were the start of an historically bad stretch for the company. Business impacts began to quickly show as one national air safety regulator after another grounded the plane, and airlines began having second thoughts about the aircraft.
The graph below shows both net orders (new orders minus cancelled and rescheduled ones) and plane deliveries for both Boeing and the other half of the world’s major commercial aircraft duopoly—Airbus.
Boeing’s sales performance dropped off a cliff between 2018 and 2019. And, because of the fractured relationship between the company and regulators, particularly the Federal Air Administration, no one knows for certain when the MAX might fly again—in the U.S. or overseas.
Airliners aren’t the entirety of Boeing’s business, but they do represent an enormous piece. Commercial airplanes are only one of four major business divisions. The others include defense, space, and security; global services; and Boeing capital. But commercial airplanes have represented about 60% of total revenue. If the MAX doesn’t get off the ground, neither does Boeing’s business.
Total revenues were down 19.4% from $72.8 billion in the first nine months of 2018 to $58.6 billion in the same period of 2019. During that period, earnings per share sunk from about $12 to $0.66.
For investors, an important attraction is its commitment to share buybacks and dividend payments. But the investment community is right to feel antsy. Moody’s issued a credit downgrade review warning (S&P Global Ratings had already cut the credit rating the company in December) and now there’s fresh scrutiny on ex-CEO Dennis Muilenburg’s $80.7 million payout. Finally, there has been a series of equity analyst downgrades over the last few months, with Cowen and Berenberg announcing theirs days and weeks before yesterday’s bad news.
Still, the stock price more or less hangs on for a few reasons.
“Under normal circumstances, you say the market responds quickly to information, except for something like manufacturing,” said Giacomo Santangelo, a senior lecturer in economics at Fordham University. Even with the slide in new sales, existing contracts can’t be so easily put to the side. “All of the negative news on Boeing over the last year was not expected to affect the business now because they’re still producing. It’s the new contracts and future business” that will determine the true extent of the trouble the company faces.
The bullish case
It helps that Boeing operates in a duopolistic market. Airline customers have limited alternatives at the moment. They can’t write off fleet additions because many of their planes are aging. Newer craft have greater fuel efficiency to cut costs and boost margins at a time when air travel is booming. The only other supplier of this sort of commercial aircraft, Airbus, has its own problems with capacity. As an industry analyst at Citi told Fortune, if Boeing hadn’t had such a bad year in 2019, the big story in the sector would be the problems Airbus had meeting delivery targets.
It all points to the fact that there’s captured demand that can’t walk away or find another source.
As the Boeing share price demonstrates, investors are staying calm amid the firehose of bad news. One big reason: they believe the situation has hit bottom and can only go up from here.
“Boeing’s share price would have been hit a lot harder if people thought there was a reasonable probability that the 737 MAX would not fly again,” said Jerry Braakman, chief investment officer for First American Trust.
The larger issues of addressing the toxic workplace culture and repairing relationships with suppliers and regulators “will cost money,” said Braakman, who personally owns some Boeing shares. “And, for investors, that’s always a drag.”
The recent change at the top was also greeted with relief; investors poured back into the stock once Muilenburg was relieved of his duties.
“Bringing David Calhoun in is what gives us confidence to keep owning the stock,” said Kevin Simpson, chief investment officer at Capital Wealth Planning, which held a position in shares until they hit around $440, at which point it sold and then bought back at $375. “He’s the polar opposite of David Muilenberg. He’s not hiding things under the rug.”
However, no one is complacent about Boeing’s future. “It has resources to continue, but it needs to resolve this in a reasonable amount of time,” Braakman said.
What’s a reasonable timeline for Boeing to get back on track? Various analysts told Fortune that the company needs to be on its way to normalcy by late spring, early summer, or even the end of 2020 (although the longer the delay, the more impact share prices will feel) to fully regain the trust of the markets.
“If it happens later this year, Boeing can still do okay,” said Capital Wealth Planning lead portfolio manager Josh Smith. “If it stretches into 2021, then things get a little dicey.”
For now, all eyes and ears will be on the Boeing earnings report at the end of January. And nobody is discounting yet more bad news.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
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—Investors see a 2020 recession coming—but think they’ll make money
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—What $1,000 in 10 top stocks a decade ago would be worth today
—Laws meant to close down tax havens and shut loopholes could have opposite effect
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fortune--2020-01-17--Everything you need to know before the 2020 Census starts next week

Yandex , Russia ’ s biggest search engine , is an on-ramp for child sexual imagery , experts say

The 2020 Census kicks off Tuesday in remote Alaska. U.S. Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham will be there to conduct the first count in the Bering Sea community of Toksook Bay. Dillingham planned to spend time Friday at the Alaska Native Cultural Charter School in Anchorage, giving students a lesson on statistics. Additional outreach is planned throughout the weekend.
Why is the 2020 Census starting in Alaska?
With its sparse population and subzero temperature, rural Alaska can be hard to reach, and some of its villages are accessible only when the ground is frozen. So, the Census Bureau starts the head count in The Last Frontier state by going door-to-door in January — more than two months before the rest of the nation — so it can make sure it reaches villages before the spring thaw, when residents head out to fish and hunt. The state’s heritage is traditionally on display during these first counts. In 2000, then-U.S. Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt arrived for the first count in the village of Unalakleet as a passenger in a dog sled. This year, Alaska Native dancers from Toksook Bay will perform for Dillingham.
When does it start elsewhere?
Residents in the rest of the U.S., as well as the rest of Alaska, can start responding online and by telephone in mid-March. The Census Bureau plans to send out a first round of notices explaining how to participate during the second week of March. It will send up to four more rounds of mailings, including a paper questionnaire, in March and April to households that haven’t responded.
Will someone be knocking at my door?
Only if you fail to reply online, by mail or by telephone. This is the first census in which the Census Bureau is encouraging most people to answer the questions via the internet. Around three-quarters of households will initially get invitations to respond to the questionnaire online. However, the Census Bureau realizes some communities don’t have easy access to the internet, and about a quarter of households will initially receive paper questionnaires that can be mailed back. By May, the Census Bureau will be sending out workers to knock on the doors of households it hasn’t heard back from.
What are the questions?
The form asks how many people live in the household as of April 1, whether the home is owned or rented, and the form-filler’s age, race and sex. It also asks if the form-filler is Latino, and if so, their country of origin. In the race question, the form-filler also can specify country of origin. All other residents in the household must answer, or have the first form-filler answer for them, the same questions on age, sex and race. They must specify their relationship to the form-filler and if they live elsewhere, like away at college. For the first time, same-sex couples will be able to identify as such, either as spouses or unmarried partners.
Is there a citizenship question?
No. The Trump administration tried to add the question, but the U.S. Supreme Court blocked it.
Who gets counted?
Everyone residing in the United States and the five U.S. territories, including non-citizens and immigrants living in the country illegally. Also included are military personnel temporarily deployed overseas, who are counted at their home addresses in the U.S.
Will my information be shared?
No. Under federal law, all responses are kept completely confidential, and they can be used only to produce statistics.
Why should I care about the Census?
Because it is used to determine who your representative in Congress is, where new businesses can build, how crowded your local schools will get over the next decade, and whether highways in your community get money for repairs. The results of the 2020 Census help determine the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal spending, as well as how many congressional seats each state gets.
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fortune--2020-01-17--Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine, is an on-ramp for child sexual imagery, experts say

A Q & A with Sen. Kelly Loeffler on her unlikely path to Washington—and what she ’ s planning to @ @

Experts say the spread of images of child sexual exploitation online has reached unprecedented levels, calling the situation a major social crisis. While much of this material spreads through well-hidden channels, such as the so-called dark web, there is a major culprit hiding in plain sight: Yandex, Russia’s largest technology firm.
Yandex is the most-used search engine in Russia and the fifth most popular worldwide. It has a Nasdaq-traded stock and a market cap of over $14 billion. According to cybercrime experts, though, the site has not implemented controls employed by other large search engines that have cut the accessibility of images showing child sexual abuse. As a result, they say, Yandex has become a major vector for the spread of child sexual imagery online, including by providing a user-friendly on-ramp to darker corners of the Internet. The company’s role in spreading illicit images around the globe appears to be, in large part, an unintended consequence of Russian government policy.
A number of controls block child sexual imagery from the open Internet. One crucial method used by Google and Bing consists of blacklists of illicit websites and illegal images maintained by the London-based nonprofit Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). Developed using data collated from member companies and other sources, these blacklists have been shown to be effective, but Yandex is not a member of the coalition. Neither is Baidu, the third-ranked search portal worldwide, but it does not have an English-language portal. Yahoo, the fourth-ranked portal, is powered by Bing’s technology.
According to Fred Langford, the organization’s deputy CEO, Yandex wants to join the IWF, “but they’re finding it quite difficult.”
“‘It came from above,’ is what they said to me,” Langford says of his conversations with Yandex. “And I think what they were trying to say is that it came from Putin.”
Yandex neither confirms nor denies Langford’s characterization of why it is not a member of the IWF. “We have developed proprietary technologies that help to prevent access to illegal content in general and child abuse content in particular,” the company said in a written statement to Fortune. Experts, however, contend that Yandex’s independent efforts are much less effective than the approach taken by Western companies and nonprofits.
Yandex’s isolation from collaborative efforts appears to be the result of Russian authorities attempting to maintain political control by clamping down on the Internet and the country’s Internet firms. As the Kremlin has pushed to centralize control of political communication, it has limited interaction between Russian businesses and international nonprofits such as the IWF. As a result, Yandex lacks access to the tools necessary to effectively filter out this illicit content.
According to Chad M.S. Steel, a researcher who investigates crimes against children online, children worldwide are the inevitable victims of Yandex’s weakened filtering.
“Any platform like Yandex that makes it easier for individuals to get that first access to [child sexual] content in a low-risk way is a threat to children,” he said.
Blocking images of child sexual abuse
The global spread of the Internet has been accompanied by an explosion of its use to distribute child sexual imagery, including images of child sexual abuse. Over the past decade, reports of child sexual imagery online have grown from 1 million annually to 45 million per year, the New York Times reported in September 2019. Nonprofits, including some that have spent decades fighting child exploitation, say the spread of these images has exceeded the capabilities of law enforcement, governments, and nonprofits to combat it.
Search and social media companies are in a better position to block these images, especially thanks to machine-learning tools that can filter content at a large scale. One such effort began in November 2013, when both Google and Microsoft’s Bing undertook a series of measures to block child sexual imagery in search results. These measures have come to include de-indexing sites known to host child sexual imagery from searches; blocking keywords in dozens of languages used to locate the material; presenting warnings in response to many search terms; and blocking known abuse images.
Over time, the IWF has become more central to these efforts, with U.S. search companies now contributing to the nonprofit’s blacklists of websites and images. These lists and other IWF services are used by digital media providers from Amazon to Twitter to TikTok, as well as Internet service providers in some countries. According to Langford, the IWF’s blacklist of websites hosting child sexual imagery contains from 6,000 to 7,000 unique URLs at any given time, with between 500 and 1,000 either added or removed each day.
“You whack it down in one area, it pops up somewhere else,” says Langford. “It’s all about how quickly we can find it.”
The IWF also maintains a tool that allows its members to identify and filter known child sexual images. This tool uses technology called PhotoDNA, which was developed by Microsoft and researchers at Dartmouth University. PhotoDNA creates compact “hashes,” unique digital signatures that can be used to quickly identify known child sexual images even after they have been cropped, resized, or otherwise manipulated. (PhotoDNA is also used by criminal investigators to automatically process files in child sexual imagery cases, reducing the psychological stress involved in screening such files manually.)
According to a 2015 study by Steel, Bing and Google’s efforts—including the use of shared IWF data—were effective in significantly reducing searches for child sexual exploitation imagery on those platforms. Yandex did not implement the same controls, and Steel’s research found that search levels for child sexual imagery through the site stayed steady.
“We take the problem of illegal content, especially explicit materials involving children or their access to pornographic resources, very seriously,” Yandex wrote in its statement. “Yandex products and services feature technologies, such as blacklisting or pornographic image recognition, to help filter out illegal material.”
Steel is skeptical that Yandex is taking the problem seriously. He claims that the site’s reverse-image search function shows that it does have technology that could be used for more effective filtering. But, he says, “they’re not doing that, or if they are, it is so inextensive that it’s ineffective.” Langford says Yandex would find it difficult or even impossible to achieve the same level of effectiveness as the IWF blacklist, which receives data from more than 140 member organizations, members of the public, and police worldwide, as well as a staff of expert analysts.
And despite its claims, Yandex actively directs users toward child sexual imagery in ways that would be seemingly trivial to change. Tests by Fortune found that, far from blocking image or web searches for English terms like “jailbait,” Yandex autocompletes them for users, suggests other terms often used by users seeking child sexual imagery, and in some cases even points users toward specific websites associated with such terms.
A training ground for predators
Though precise data is scarce, Steel says that Yandex remains a significant conduit for child sexual images nearly five years after his comparative study—particularly for novice offenders.
“If I could categorize offenders as more or less sophisticated, [Yandex] fits in as something that the less sophisticated offenders use frequently because it’s very easy,” Steels says.
At the most basic level, Steel says, the Russian search engine can return child sexual imagery directly through its image search function, whose layout and functionality is similar to Google and Bing’s. It also often leads to Russian image-sharing and social media sites that are rife with child sexual imagery, thanks to what Steel calls “minimal enforcement” of controls on such imagery on Russian websites more broadly.
The site also opens doors to other, even darker corners of the Internet. Users of child sexual imagery often congregate on what’s known as the dark web, which is only accessible using specialized tools. There, they also often use obscure terminology to describe content being sold or shared.
Yandex can act as an on-ramp for offenders not already familiar with those intricacies, Steel says. Those tempted to seek out child sexual imagery for the first time “don’t know the terminology; they don’t know what they’re going to find.” But after a simple search, when users click on an image, they may be led to sites that host other “content of interest,” he says. That might include message boards that teach users relevant terms and where to get more content.
The Russian connection
According to Sarah Mendelson, an expert on anti–human trafficking policy at Carnegie Mellon University, Russian authorities had a fairly laissez-faire stance toward the Internet until 2011’s Arab Spring. Those mass protests toppled dictators in the Middle East and were organized in part over the Internet.
Later that year, Russia itself saw huge protests against Putin’s run for a third presidential term, also organized online. The protests were met with heavy police repression and followed by an election with many signs of fraud that continued Putin’s hegemony. The Russian President has since tightened his authoritarian grip on his country, squelching Internet blacklists and internationally connected machine-learning tools as a consequence.
“Over the last 20 years [the Kremlin] has made it nearly impossible for local and international NGOs to function in Russia,” Mendelson says. This has led to the expulsion or hamstringing of organizations including the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, Peace Corps, USAID, and now, apparently, the IWF.
Russia’s state media regulator, Roskomnadzor, and the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, an Internet policy advisory group that works closely with the Russian government, did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
In 2015, a new law passed requiring all data on Russian citizens be stored locally, potentially giving the Kremlin greater oversight over the activity of dissidents. In November 2019, a new set of laws went into effect requiring that all traffic be routed through state-controlled infrastructure. The first measure has been weakly enforced, and there is broad skepticism that the 2019 measure is even technically feasible.
But the Kremlin has also angled for direct control over big Internet firms such as Yandex and Mail.ru. In November 2019, Yandex agreed to a dramatic restructuring that gave the Kremlin seats on the board and, in effect, the power to remove the company’s leadership at will. This was regarded by investors as preferable to alternatives, which might have included outright nationalization of the companies.
Yandex’s absence from the IWF appears to be a consequence of the Kremlin’s opposition to foreign NGOs as a threat to its power and its growing ability to directly exert its will on the matter.
“The Russian government is interested in making sure that Yandex is held close,” says Mendelson. “They’re going to make sure that Yandex is not going to be overly influenced by the outside.”
Children: authoritarianism’s collateral damage
While Yandex is a Russian company, neither its use nor the consequences of its misuse stop at the Russian border. Experts believe the online proliferation of images showing child sexual abuse is having effects around the globe.
“In 2001, it was a lot harder to get your hands on child exploitation material than it is now,” says Eric Oldenburg, a law enforcement liaison officer at Griffeye who spent 15 years investigating child exploitation, including as part of an FBI task force.
Oldenburg believes increased access is key to a vicious cycle increasing the consumption of child sexual imagery. “Having a site that doesn’t filter content like [Yandex] is an avenue to not only get [offenders] what they want, but the justification that, ‘Hey, it’s out there, everyone’s doing it.’”
Steel agrees. “The real danger is, the more of this material is out there, the more it becomes normalized, and the more likely individuals are to acquire it and continue using it,” he says. That in turn encourages the production of more child sexual imagery, Steel adds, because new technology—including the dark web and cryptocurrency—has made it possible to profit from the production of those images.
But the subjects of this imagery are real children, and their abuse has devastating and lifelong physical and psychological consequences. Many victims of commercial child sexual imagery come from Africa, the Philippines, and other economically troubled regions with weak governments. Russia itself is also a major hub of human trafficking, thanks to its post-Soviet economic collapse and a lack of support services.
“The population that is vulnerable to trafficking is receiving no support” in Russia, Mendelson says, adding that child sexual imagery itself is inherently a form of human trafficking, because victims cannot give legal consent.
According to the U.S. State Department, Russia “is not making significant efforts” to combat human trafficking. That lax approach extends to the possession and distribution of child sexual imagery, according to the IWF’s Langford.
“Certain names do continue to appear on Whois data of various sites [containing child sexual imagery],” Langford says. “When it comes to sharing [child sexual imagery], I don’t see the evidence that the [Russian] police are arresting people… I think there are people who could or should possibly be prosecuted, who may have influence over others.”
As with Yandex’s inability to collaborate internationally on filtering, this may be, above all, a matter of Russian government priorities. After all, if you have only so many resources, you have to decide where to put them, says Steel.
“Russia in general,” he says, “is more concerned with internal security and regulating things like political speech, than with addressing online child sexual exploitation.”
Update 2/25: During reporting for this story, Yandex did not respond to multiple requests to comment on claims that the company had not joined the IWF due to Russian government policy. After publication, a spokesperson described those claims to Fortune as “complete and utter nonsense.” Yandex also expanded on their prior statement, saying: “We have agreed to join the international non-profit organization NCMEC (National Center for Missing & Exploited Children) and we are currently also evaluating the use of PhotoDNA technology in our services. As for IWF, we have never refused to work with them and on the contrary are looking at different forms of cooperation, including sharing with IWF some of our own technology and expertise.”
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—Food-delivery services feeling pressure to finally turn a profit
—Beware: Iranian cyberattacks may actually be false flags
—How to avoid the growing ‘fleeceware’ scam
—Nude child photos and other ‘toxic content’ are on Giphy, shared by private accounts exploiting loopholes, researchers say
—Jack Dorsey makes it clear: Twitter will never get an edit button
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fortune--2020-01-17--Electronic Arts executive wants to make video games more inclusive

Everything you need to know before the 2020 Census starts next week

In recent years, the video game industry has focused more on making games that reflect the diversity of all people who play them. But Laura Miele, who oversees the creation of all video games by game maker EA, said there’s still a lot of room for improvement.
“We exist to inspire the world to play, and when you’re in the business of inspiring the world, it means the world. You need to ensure that you have diverse and inclusive content for everyone to play and for everyone to connect with,” she said.
EA, which owns several notable franchises including FIFA, Madden NFL, and the latest Star Wars games, is trying to embrace diversity with a set of guidelines implemented in 2018 that are supposed to increase inclusion in games. That means looking for opportunities to include more female characters, characters of various ethnicities, or other marginalized identities—and making sure the people creating those games come from diverse backgrounds.
EA’s push is part of a broader effort in the gaming industry to get away from telling stories centered only around heterosexual white male characters. These programs also aim to make gaming workplaces more inclusive and, in some cases, reach out to the larger gaming community that make up its fans.
In addition to EA, major gaming companies such as Activision Blizzard, Ubisoft, and Microsoft’s Xbox also have similar initiatives underway, according to Nika Nour, executive director of the IGDA Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for diversity among game developers. She also pointed to diversity efforts by independent developers and advocacy organizations.
But Nour said that it will take some time before the industry makes significant progress.
“It takes generations to actually make long-lasting change. As someone who loves instant gratification, that’s something that I’ve just had to learn in this role: that we’re in this for the long haul,” Nour said. “There are no quick fixes.”
EA’s initiative has already had some results, said Miele. It started after workers noticed the female characters added to EA’s NBA Live games were broader than their real-life counterparts, and that the animations didn’t look true-to-life despite being based on digital images of the facial features and movements of real-life players. That’s when they realized the developers created the characters using existing male digital skeletons. Reviewing the game through the prism of inclusivity allowed them to make the change before launch, so that female characters looked more life realistic.
It’s an effort that Miele, whose tenure at EA stretches over 20 years and various departments, said she’s happy to work on. Previously, while playing video games online, she had been targeted by other players, either by treating her like a less-worthy player by not including her in teams or group efforts because she was a female player. It led Miele to play as a male avatar online, a tactic she’s since ended.
And though Miele said she hasn’t worked in a sexist environment, which is said to be common in the gaming industry, she’s said she’s seen “less inclusive behavior at other companies.” It’s a point she, like many others in the gaming industry, hesitate to talk about—not necessarily to avoid the subject, but because gaming is supposed to be about fun.
EA, like with many companies, has an imperfect record itself, ranging from its own employees making inappropriate remarks to its associations within the gaming community to ensuring that the streamers it works with are in line with its core values.
“I know people have had hard experiences in our industry, and I don’t want that to be the world that we live in,” Miele said.
Miele recounts organizing women ahead of meetings to rally support before a female peer’s presentation and advocating for the creation of workplace associations that provide support for underrepresented groups. EA now has eight such groups, one of which Miele started herself: the Women’s Ultimate Team, an employee group for women at EA. Beyond serving as an employee resource, these groups are supposed to help improve inclusion by getting more people from underrepresented backgrounds involved at the company. This behind-the-scenes groundwork is critical for meaningful change, according to Nour.
Miele is optimistic about making an impact and stresses, even if unintentionally, that these conversations about inclusion have only emerged in the past four or five years. It’s not enough to just focus on diversity among characters in games, for example. It also matters whether those roles are heroes or villains, and what’s in their dialogue.
“Though we have a big impact and reach, we still have a pretty big runway ahead of us,” Miele said.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—7 companies founded in the last 10 years that you now can’t live without
—Electronic health records are creating a ‘new era’ of health care fraud
—Apple, Amazon, and Google want to create a smart home standard
—What a $1,000 investment in 10 top stocks a decade ago would be worth today
—Amazon is on a collision course with employee activists outraged by the climate crisis
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-01-17--On a bumpy road to IPO, Airbnb doubles down on corporate governance

This article originally ran in Term Sheet, Fortune’s newsletter about deals and dealmakers. Sign up here.
This morning, Airbnb announced that it will serve “all stakeholders,” not just investors. Calling it “the right thing to do for society,” the home-sharing giant wrote in a statement that its stakeholder base will include guests, hosts, communities, shareholders, and employees.
In other words, Airbnb is sending the message that companies should no longer advance only the interests of shareholders.
“These principles inspire behaviors that lead to thinking not just about near-term actions but longer-term horizons,” Airbnb’s statement reads. “They encourage us to think about all our stakeholders and instill accountability. And they summon our creativity.”
Airbnb is a rare type of unicorn: The company has been generally well-liked by the public, run by a CEO who’s done things differently than the uber-aggressive founder types who started companies around the same time.
But its road to an initial public offering has also been full of hurdles. A company whose business is built on mutual trust between hosts and guests, Airbnb is now facing a trustworthiness crisis. My colleague Aric Jenkins recently reported on the challenges within the company as it tries to implement safety changes and stake its claim as the ultimate one-stop shop travel company.
With Airbnb under even more scrutiny in the public markets following the meltdown of WeWork and the underwhelming performances of Uber, Lyft, and Slack, it’s making changes. Today, it also announced changes to its compensation program by considering factors such as progress on guest safety when calculating employee bonuses.
After the outrage sparked by WeWork’s governance practices, it’s only natural that fellow startups on the road to IPO will place a bigger focus on corporate governance, employee rights, and inclusive cultures. I wouldn’t be surprised if Airbnb’s actions become the new norm.
HOUSEKEEPING: As a reminder, Term Sheet won’t be in your inbox this Monday for the MLK holiday. I’ll still be around, so feel free to tweet at me here. Have a great weekend, and see you next week!
Polina Marinova
Twitter: @polina_marinova
Email: polina.marinova@fortune.com
VENTURE DEALS
- Funnel, a Sweden-based developer of a platform that helps marketers automate their data collection, raised $47 million in Series B funding. Eight Roads Ventures and F-Prime Capital co-led the round, and was joined by investors including Balderton Capital, Oxx, Zobito, Industrifonden, and Kreos Capital.
- Homebound, a Santa Rosa, Calif.-based construction tech company modernizing custom homebuilding in communities affected by wildfires, raised $53 million in funding. Investors include Fifth Wall, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, Forerunner, Google Ventures, Sound Ventures and Atomic.
- Verbit, an Israel-based AI-powered transcription platform, raised $31 million in Series B funding. Stripes led the round, and was joined by investors including Viola Ventures, Vertex Ventures, HV Ventures, Oryzn Capital and ClalTech.
- WorkBoard, a Redwood City, Calif.-based provider of execution intelligence applications for enterprise managers, raised $30 million in Series C funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, and was joined by investors including GGV Capital, M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) and Workday Ventures.
- Cyral, a Redwood City, Calif.-based cloud security company, raised $11 million in Series A funding. Redpoint Ventures led the round, and was joined by investors including A.Capital Ventures, Costanoa VC, Firebolt, SV Angel and Trifecta Capital.
- Uplevel, a Seattle-based engineering effectiveness platform, raised $7.5 million in seed funding. Investors include Norwest Venture Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and Voyager Capital.
- LOLIWARE, a New York-based seaweed-based material technology company, raised $6 million in funding. Hatzimemos / Libby led the round.
- Rebound Technologies, a developer of an alternative to traditional vapor compression cooling systems, raised $5 million in Series A funding. Clean Energy Ventures and Skyview Ventures co-led the round, and was joined by investors including Autodesk Foundation.
- Upflex, a New York-based developer of office workspace software, raised $4.1 million in seed funding. Ecosystem Integrity Fund led the round.
- Compound, a New York City-based fintech marketplace for urban residential real estate investing, raised $2.1 million in seed funding. Kairos led the round, and was joined by investors including Blue Ivy Ventures and Zing Capital.
- TestFit Inc, a Dallas-based building configuration software, raised $2 million in funding from Parkway Venture Capital.
PRIVATE EQUITY DEALS
- Skyview Capital acquired Fidelis Cybersecurity, a Bethesda, Md.-based company focused on automated detection and response.
OTHER DEALS
- CarGurus acquired Autolist, a San Francisco-based car shopping platform. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
IPOs
- Phoenix Tree Holdings, a Beijing-based online marketplace for residential rentals, raised $130 million (58% insider bought) in an offering of 9.6 million ADSs priced at $13.50 apiece. The firm posted revenue of $374.3 million and loss of $191.6 million in 2018. Tiger Global (20% pre-offering), Joy Capital (15.7%), CMC Capital Partners (9.4%), and Ant Financial (7.8%) back the firm. It plans to list on the NYSE as “DNK.” “Read more.”
- I-Mab, a Chinese drug developer focused on autoimmune diseases, raised $104 million in an IPO of 7.4 million ADSs priced at $14. It listed revenue of $7.8 million in 2018 and loss of $58.7 million. C-Bridge Capital and Hony Capital back the firm. It plans to list on the Nasdaq as “IMAB.” Read more.
- Atotech, a U.K.-based maker of finishing solutions, filed for an $100 million IPO. The firm posted revenue of $1.2 billion and loss of $23.7 million in 2018. Carlyle backs the firm. It plans to list on the NYSE as “ATC.” “Read more.”
- Velocity Financial, a Westlake, Calif.-based mortgage lender, raised $94 million in an IPO of 7.25 million shares priced at $13 apiece. The firm posted net interest income of $124.7 million and net income of $10.6 million in 2018. Snow Phipps and PIMCO back the firm. It plans to list on the NYSE as “VEL.” Read more.
-F45 Training, a provider of group workout classes that started in Australia, filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO, Bloomberg reports citing sources. Read more.
PEOPLE
- Pantheon promoted Toni Vainio and Erik Wong to partner.
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fortune--2020-01-17--The certainty of Magic Leap’s augmented-reality future

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The former humanitarian aid worker Malka Older’s 2016 science fiction novel Infomocracy and its two sequels tell the story of a democratic future still rife with natural disasters and conflict. The books feature a next-generation search engine called The Information that has annotated the world with information thanks to ubiquitous augmented reality technology.
By happy coincidence, I had just finished Infomocracy before heading to CES, where I spent some time with Magic Leap. The well-funded startup is making augmented-reality gear, though they prefer to call AR “spatial computing.” In an intentionally dimly lit suite in the Cosmopolitan Hotel, I tried on Magic Leap’s latest projection glasses, which connected to a hockey puck-sized computer that clips to your waist.
It was all good fun when a game of shooting alien robots emerged from a “door” in the wall, but the second demo got me thinking back to Older’s books.
As I looked down at the floor of the room through the glasses, a 3-D projection of downtown Los Angeles appeared. Using a hand controller, I could point and click at bits of the city and get information about traffic and pollution measurements, among other metropolitan data points. I could also walk around the room to see the city from different angles as the projection shifted perspective seamlessly in real-time. It was all very smooth and very cool. I had already started imagining whether Google or some other entity would end up as the “search engine” of an Infomocracy-like future when it was time to go.
As I made my way downstairs at the Cosmo and back through the bright lights and loud noise of the casino, I realized that I had seen a technology that surely will arrive eventually. But pioneers don’t always end up as winners–who remembers the otherwise trailblazing Xerox Alto or GridPad tablet? Magic Leap has had its own struggles. Jessica Lessin’s tech newsletter The Information (hey, there’s that name again) this week put the startup on its 2020 list of troubled tech companies.
Whether Magic Leap develops into an amazing business is yet to be seen, but in the meantime, it has developed some amazing technology.
Aaron Pressman
Twitter: @ampressman
Email: aaron.pressman@fortune.com
NEWSWORTHY
Agony in 30 second servings. As if we needed another choice for streaming video, Comcast's NBC unit unveiled more details of its ad-supported offering called Peacock on Thursday. It will be free to watch network shows the day after broadcast with ads, a $5 per month tier will have more content, and for $10 all of the ads disappear. It all starts July 15. Meanwhile, Netflix could spend $17 billion on original content this year, more than any competitor, according to a new estimate from BMO Capital Markets.
Cheaper by the dozen. Another crowded market, podcasting, is feeling the pressure. Hyped premium podcast service Luminary cut its monthly price from $8 to $5. It's also adding an annual plan that equates to under $3 a month.
A club that would want me. In the stock market, Google's parent company Alphabet exceeded a $1 trillion valuation, joining Apple, at $1.4 trillion, and Microsoft, at $1.3 trillion, in that exclusive club. My bet still stands that a tech company will overtake newly-public oil giant Saudi Aramco within 12 months. Apple's only $400 billion behind.
Reverse pollution. Speaking of Microsoft and fossil fuels, the company made an unusual pledge on Thursday, saying it would go "carbon negative" in the next 10 years. Going a step beyond more common pledges of becoming "carbon neutral," Microsoft is saying it will be a net benefit to the environment by 2030.
Conspiracy theory. It may be the plot of an upcoming Malka Older thriller, but a cybersecurity expert says he found evidence that a server used by Georgia election officials in 2016 was hacked. The unknown hackers had the ability "to modify files, delete data, and install malware,” Logan Lamb said in an affidavit filed in federal court in Atlanta on Thursday.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
If you've recently ordered food delivered via Uber Eats, DoorDash, or one of the other players in that space, the price you paid was subsidized by venture capital. None of the companies has yet figured out how to turn a profit zipping McDonald's fries and Starbucks coffees to your door, as Fortune's own Danielle Abril explores in a piece about the future of the segment. It's not looking pretty, she reports after speaking with Jordan Nof, managing partner of Tusk Ventures.
"The future of food delivery could play out a number of ways. Companies could refocus on dense, urban areas where they’re more likely to turn a profit because they could deliver more meals per trip, said Nof. They could also switch to offering more deliveries of fast food than restaurant meals, which, according to Webb, would help the companies lower their cost per delivery. Additionally, delivery companies could sell themselves to larger corporations that are willing to take on losses like Amazon (even though Amazon shuttered its small food delivery service in June). Or, to earn more revenue, they could pivot into other services like renting space in shared kitchens.
"In a worst-case scenario like venture capital drying up or the economy taking a downturn, some food delivery services may have to shutter."
FOR YOUR WEEKEND READING PLEASURE
A few long reads that I came across this week:
Good Morning, Vietnam: How a War-Torn Country Became the Second Largest Producer of Coffee in the World (Coffee or Die)
Around me, on low blue plastic chairs, old men smoke cigarettes and trade stories, families huddle around squat tables and watch the hordes of bikes drone by, and servers ambulate from group to group depositing drinks or collecting glasses as they go. In spite of all the chaos of the Vietnamese capital’s streets, cafes are a surprisingly tranquil refuge from the unrelenting hustle. Time, like the coffee dripping into condensed milk, seems to crawl.
For Bumble, the Future Isn’t Female, It’s Female Marketing (Bloomberg Businessweek)
Whitney Wolfe Herd set out to build a safer dating app for women, but it’s not clear that she’s made a measurable difference.
After My Dad Died, I Started Sending Him Emails. Months Later, Someone Wrote Back (Glamour)
“I shot the signals of my mourning into space for months, fully expecting them to die unreceived. And when I least expected it, someone sent signals back.”
How New York’s Bagel Union Fought—and Beat—a Mafia Takeover (Grub Street)
The mob saw an opportunity. Local 338 had other ideas.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Amazon Prime’s numbers (and influence) continue to grow By Don Reisinger
Could Fitbit be a flu warning tool? By Sy Mukherjee
Pinterest exceeded all of its year’s goals for hiring minorities By Ellen Mcgirt
Meet the woman building the ‘backbone’ of the cannabis industry By Nicole Gull Mcelroy
Making green energy more trusted—with the same tech that keeps cryptocurrency safe By David Z. Morris
Beware: Iranian cyberattacks may actually be false flags By Robert Hackett
THE FUTURE OF FORTUNE IS HERE
In 1930, Fortune published its first-ever issue, featuring the goddess Fortuna and her wheel on the cover. This year, on our 90th anniversary, we’re celebrating with a new Fortune. Here’s what’s in store for you:
BEFORE YOU GO
My feature story last month about delivery giant UPS missed one of the company's key attractions, or so one of my teenagers reliably informs me. Check out the Instagram feed @upsdogs to see the many cute rovers that "Brown"'s delivery force encounters on a daily basis. Fortune is closed on Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. See you back here on Tuesday.
Aaron Pressman
On Twitter: @ampressman
Email: aaron.pressman@fortune.com


fortune--2020-01-17--Phoebe Waller-Bridge and ‘Fleabag’ cast reflect on love, religion, and saying goodbye

Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag could become the most feted two-season series of all time.
In the past year, Waller-Bridge’s pitch-black comedy swept the Emmys, TV Critics Awards, Golden Globes, and Critics’ Choice and is now primed to make a similar showing at the 2020 Screen Actors Guild Awards ceremony in Los Angeles on Jan. 19.
In a rare appearance with her cast, Waller-Bridge (as Fleabag) joined costars Sian Clifford (Claire), Andrew Scott (Priest), and Brett Gelman (Martin) for a wide-ranging conversation about Fleabag with Fortune during a SAG-AFTRA event on Jan. 7 in Los Angeles to discuss the series.
What follows is an edited, condensed version of that conversation.
Before we dig into Fleabag, I’d love to know what each of you was most obsessed with growing up in terms of entertainment. Whose posters did you have on your bedroom walls?
Brett Gelman: Basically I took a bunch of movie posters and put pictures of my face over all of them. (Laughter) What, that’s strange? No, on my wall I had the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin—mostly comedians. Actually, for my bar mitzvah, my mother wrote to all my favorite comedians and said, “You’re my son’s favorite…”
Phoebe Waller-Bridge: This is not true.
Gelman: I’m serious. She said, “Will you please sign this photo and put it in a self-addressed envelope for his bar mitzvah?” So I had all these signed photographs from comedians’ assistants. (Laughter) Richard Pryor, Bob Hope, George Burns, Mel Brooks, Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, Billy Crystal.
Sian Clifford: Okay it’s really embarrassing now, but I had Leonardo DiCaprio.
This was Leo circa Titanic?
Clifford: Oh yeah, ’90s Leo, prime Leo. Romeo + Juliet Leo. I brushed shoulders with him at the Globes, which was surreal and terrifying. Oh, and a lot of boy bands were on my wall too.
Andrew Scott: I had Kylie Minogue on mine, which is quite gay, isn’t it? (Laughter) My dad comes in, “Is that your heartthrob?” And I’m like, “Uh, yeah. My musical heartthrob.”
Waller-Bridge: I had [1990s Irish boy band] Boyzone on my wall. When I first got to school a girl asked me, “Are you into Take That or Boyzone?” I didn’t know what either of those things meant. So I just said, “Boyzone,” because it had “boy” in it and it sounded like there was a zone for that. (Laughs) Then it was the band I had to associate with all the way through school. I had Brad Pitt and also George Clooney on my wall, but just George’s face. It had a red background. It was an awkward headshot of him, not even from a movie.
Gelman: Your wall sounds like the casting board for Ocean’s 11. (Laughter)
Waller-Bridge: I was also completely obsessed with the movie Rescuers Down Under. The main character was a boy called Cody who got to ride on the back of an eagle, which was my dream. I wanted to be a boy riding on the back of an eagle. I think I’m getting there!
In a rare appearance with her cast, Waller-Bridge (Fleabag, at far right) was joined by costars (left to right) Andrew Scott (Priest), Sian Clifford (Claire), and Brett Gelman (Martin) for a wide-ranging conversation about “Fleabag” during a SAG-AFTRA Q&A and screening event on Jan. 7 in Los Angeles. Chris Pizzello—Invision/AP
Phoebe, you’ve been sharing stories about Fleabag now for years. Is there anything left to tell us about how you transformed your one-woman stage show into an Amazon Studios comedy?
Waller-Bridge: Probably not. (Laughter) No, I think with the first [season], I felt like it had to completely end because the play also had an ending. I had to honor that the original story had one arc. The surprising thing was actually being able to open the characters’ hearts up again and find more in there, especially when you thought you’d created a catharsis that should have been enough for the audience! That’s why it was really challenging going back for [season] two. We’d seen the most interesting parts of this woman’s life: her breakdown, flashbacks of her friend dying. But our director, Harry Bradbeer, said, “If she’s got something else to learn, there’s more story.” Originally I was “Ugh,” but he was right. So what we worked out was, What she had to learn was how to love. That was a big lesson for me, that there was something more for her to learn.
A lot of American showrunners talk about the pressure they feel to pack as much plot as possible into the first season of a show, even just into their pilots. Did you feel that too, especially considering that you’d only expected to do one season?
Waller-Bridge: Yeah, I believe that about jokes as well. Having all those jokes in the first episode can really screw you, but it also really pushes you. It’s great to not worry about what comes later, as long as what you’ve got in front of you is funny, and it moves fast.
Andrew, I want to thank you for being so cool about being so totally objectified as the hot guy in season two. How has it felt for you to see the Hot Priest movement taken hold of the Internet so fiercely?
Scott: It’s surreal, though I try not to go online too much. (Laughs) My sister sends me the exceptional stuff. But it is genuinely exciting to be involved with something that’s such a work of art, and no less a work of art because it’s funny. And then for so many people to see, honor, and love it is genuinely special and rare. So yeah, it’s been amazing.
“It is genuinely exciting to be involved with something that’s such a work of art, and no less a work of art because it’s funny,” says Andrew Scott, seen here as “Fleabag’s” Hot Priest, as he’s been dubbed by the Internet. Steve Schofield—Amazon
Sian, you’ve known Phoebe since drama school in England. What were your first impressions of each other when you met?
Clifford: Obviously good because we’re still here. (Laughs) There was a three-day initiation period to our drama school and on the third day there was this terrible party. We found ourselves on the same subway platform afterward and discovered we were from the same part of London. That was was the moment we connected. My impression of Phoebe was that she was intoxicating as a human.
Waller-Bridge: It’s funny, one of my earliest memories of school was that really long train ride. The first few days of school, no one’s talking to you. Then suddenly we talked for 40 minutes! I also remember you being coy and saying you couldn’t sing. I was like, “I can’t sing either.” And then the next day in singing lessons she was like [sings loudly]. Typical humility.
Scott: Did you guys did you do serious stuff together in drama school or comedies?
Waller-Bridge: We were never actually in a play together.
Clifford: There were like 34 people, and they split us into two groups. We were in the same group, and we had the same monstrous acting teacher who made us feel very small. (Laughs)
I love the scene at the end of season two when Claire announces to Martin that she’s leaving him. How did you balance humor with what is actually a very sad moment, even though we know they are terrible for each other?
Gelman: For me, Martin’s awful behavior was rooted in the sadness of his marriage falling apart, and then desperation and rage from his denial of that pain to the point where he became a walking explosion. So that scene was about diving into the pathos of that, but at a pace that was very important.
Clifford: Yes, what he said. (Laughs) And it was all on the page. I know we did one version that was super emotional, which didn’t feel right. And we didn’t have much time that day.
Waller-Bridge: The amazing thing with these guys is that you can try the whole scale of performance with them. Start with just comedy, then after three takes they’ll turn it around and suddenly you’ve got floods of tears, it’s Shakespearean, and you’re like, “Oh shit!” Like, “Okay, Sian, turn off the tears and make it more hurt than angry this time?” That scene in particular was extraordinary because I’d changed Brett’s monologue in the car on the way to set, with him in the car. It was the meanest thing I could have done. (Laughs) Then he did it three times word-perfect, like “Bang bang!” Sian didn’t know what was going to come out of his mouth. I have such huge gratitude to you both for taking that on.
Andrew, religion is a major theme this season. Not to stereotype Irish people, but I assume you were raised Catholic?
Scott: Yes, I was.
Have you gotten negative feedback about your character having sex and the show’s overall depiction of religion?
Scott: Actually no, not for the most part. So often religious figures are painted in very extreme ways, and we wanted to create a more human character, particularly coming from Catholic Ireland. I grew up feeling this huge amount of rage, so I’d loved the idea of creating somebody, as we kept saying, who’s good at his job and relatable. In our generation, many people feel let down by the church. So where does our spirituality go? We created a character who is actually a good person and has a genuine spiritual conflict. Something happens when these two characters see each other for the first time. They love each other immediately, but that love has a real competitor in religion. The huge love they feel for each other has to have a huge love battling against it. Phoebe and I talked a lot about how you can manifest love in surprising ways.
Waller-Bridge: I remember early on [in season two] Andrew said, “I don’t know why, but I think we need a moment where Fleabag asks me if I’m a real priest.” And I’m like, “I agree, and I don’t know why.” So I wrote it into the script, and it’s one of the most powerful moments between them. It’s kind of aggressive: “Are you a real priest?” And Andrew comes back, with his beautiful acting that I can watch over and over again, with a simple, “Yes.” It was such a moment.
The cast of “Fleabag” pose with their Golden Globe for Best Television Series, Musical or Comedy, on Jan. 5. Chris Pizzello—AP
How much has Fleabag totally ruined you when choosing projects now?
Clifford: Everything else is just… different. I’ve worked on a couple of things since we packed up Fleabag that were beautiful in a completely different way. But they’re not even close, and that’s really difficult. As an actor, you want to be as elastic as possible and stretch yourself in different ways.
Gelman: I think it’s dangerous to think that way. There’s nothing absolute to anything artistic. This show is unlike anything at all I’ve done before or since, and that’s not really characterizing it as better or worse. I just feel grateful to have worked with artists like Phoebe, Andrew, and Sian, the rest of the cast and the crew of the show. You work on something like this and you gain more of a respect for yourself as an actor, and I think that can also carry you into the future.
Scott: One of the biggest things I learned working with Phoebe is that there’s a great pressure set to complete everything that’s on the call sheet. And what she’s so brave about is saying, “No… can actually we just stop here today?” Acting’s very pressurizing, particularly on a budget and when the light is going. But what our audience wants is chemistry, magic, and aliveness, and sometimes priorities need to shift to accomplish that. Her generosity on set is incredibly unique.
Phoebe, you’ve said on numerous occasions that there will not be a third season of Fleabag. But when the show is inevitably rebooted in 20 years, as all iconic series now are, where we will find our hero then?
Waller-Bridge: (Laughs) I honestly have no idea. I think this show is just so instinctive. When I do this character, I have to go so deeply into what I’m feeling at that exact moment. Like, “Okay, now I’m going to write about religion.” And that instinct turned out to be right. So if she comes back later, I’ll have to learn it all then because when I think of a future for her now, I can’t see it! But I hope she’s having a delicious glass of wine somewhere warm.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—These Best Picture Oscar nominees are “problematic,” but will it matter?
—This year will be the first real litmus test for the streaming vs. theater debate
—An oral history of Laura Dern—by Laura Dern
—World War I takes the pop culture spotlight after years of being the “neglected war”
—Disney is ready to roll out new Star Wars sagas as one story ends
Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.


fortune--2020-01-17--A Q&A with Sen. Kelly Loeffler on her unlikely path to Washington—and what she’s planning to do ther

A Q&A with Sen. Kelly Loeffler on her unlikely path to Washington—and what she’s planning to do there

How’s this for the rarest of résumés for a new U.S. senator: an outsider who hasn’t run for office since the eighth grade, grew up farming corn and tending cattle, spent a career building a $50 billion trading empire, and got the nod over opposition from President Donald Trump?
The unorthodox Republican newcomer is Kelly Loeffler, 49, whom Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp chose in early November to replace Sen. Johnny Isakson, the three-term veteran who retired at year’s end because of ill health. At more than six feet in heels, with a cascading blonde mane, one of only 26 women in the U.S. Senate, and a clear outsider from the business world, she’s bound to stand out.
Loeffler was a controversial choice. Trump pressed Kemp on three occasions to name Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, a fierce Trump defender in the House impeachment hearings. Kemp arranged for Trump to meet the charismatic Loeffler (pronounced “Leffler”) at a secret meeting, but apparently she didn’t win over the POTUS, who kept championing Collins. Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, also lobbied for the congressman. Republican hard-liners groused that Loeffler had donated cash to the Romney campaign in 2012 but none to Trump in 2016, and they suspected she was a closet liberal who wouldn’t promote the President’s agenda with the zeal of a Collins.
Kemp bucked the establishment onslaught, reportedly reckoning that Loeffler could win over suburban women, a group that’s critical to winning statewide races and has been trending Democratic. The appointment was as historic as it was bold. It’s been 98 years since Georgia had a female senator: In 1922, Rebecca Felton of Georgia was appointed as the first woman to ever hold a Senate seat, but she served a token term of just one day. Loeffler needs to mount a series of winning campaigns to keep her seat, a tough road for someone who’s never before courted voters. In November she’ll run in a special election to fill the last two years of Isakson’s term, and if she wins, run again in 2022.
Though Loeffler lacks a legislative record to lure voters, she can highlight a hugely successful business career that shows a knack for tackling real-world problems. Until her appointment, she was mainly known as co-owner of the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream and for flirting with a Senate run in 2014. She’s already polishing her profile as an entrepreneur who spent her career creating jobs and profits, not chasing a job inside the Beltway. As this writer has witnessed in covering Loeffler, she displays a folksy, common touch that masks a backbone of steel. Her first job was weeding soybean fields, and punching a time card, on her family’s farm in rural Illinois. Each morning her mother wrote down the trading prices of corn and soybeans, instilling in her daughter a lifeline fascination with commodity markets.
After gaining an MBA from Chicago’s DePaul University, Loeffler worked as a trainee at Toyota and a securities analyst at a Wall Street firm, then joined a private equity shop in Texas. In 2002 her boss announced that he was leaving for a tiny power exchange in Atlanta that was a pioneer in trading natural-gas futures. As she watched Enron collapse, Loeffler viewed big opportunities by achieving what Enron had set out to do: creating an efficient, electronic marketplace for buying and selling natural gas and other energy products. “When I see a house burning down, I like to run in,” she told me in a 2018 interview. In 2002, Loeffler took a flier by hopping to the Atlanta startup as one of the first 100 employees.
The venture was Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the energy trading network that Jeff Sprecher had bought from an Atlanta utility for a token $1 and was rapidly building. Loeffler quickly became a top lieutenant to Sprecher, eventually rising to head of marketing, investor relations, and communications. In 2004, Loeffler and Sprecher wed. “Our honeymoon in St. Nevis was the only time in 10 years we took an entire week off,” Loeffler told me. With Loeffler riding shotgun, Sprecher built ICE from a startup to a colossus, purchasing the International Petroleum Exchange (now ICE Futures Europe), the New York Board of Trade (ICE Futures U.S.), and in 2013 purchased NYSE Euronext for $9.75 billion to capture the New York Stock Exchange. Following each deal, Sprecher transformed rowdy open-outcry markets into streamlined electronic exchanges. Today, ICE boasts a $53 billion market cap and ranks as the world’s second-largest owner of exchanges, after the CME Group. ICE’s success could make Loeffler the richest senator; she and her huband’s combined net worth stands at over $500 million in ICE stock alone.
In mid-2018, Loeffler took a new role as CEO of Bakkt, a venture majority-owned by ICE that aims at democratizing cryptocurrencies. Shortly before Loeffler departed for the Senate, Bakkt won a license to become the first federally regulated exchange for trading Bitcoin futures. It’s now striving for the goal Loeffler always envisioned: revolutionizing retail payments. In concert with a group of partners that includes Starbucks, Bakkt aims to enable customers to pay with Bitcoin at the checkout counter using their cell phones, streamlining today’s convoluted process and radically reducing fees. It’s not clear if the gambit will work, but the mission reflects Loeffler’s big ambitions.
While Sprecher is a voluble raconteur—his sister Karen, a filmmaker, described him to me as “a know-it-all who knows it all”—Loeffler is surprisingly soft-spoken. It’s quality-against-type that she cultivates. “I may not be the loudest voice in the room, but you don’t have to be shrill to be tough,” she said in her announcement speech upon being appointed. It took little time for Loeffler to showcase her down-home side. In a Twitter post on Jan. 11, she enthused over “how impressed I was” by a plant producing Kia autos that she toured in West Point, a hamlet in far western Georgia on the Chattahoochee River. The photo shows Loeffler trading grins with a Kia worker, the pair posing in front of her newly purchased Kia Telluride. The Kia will be the Loeffler campaign car, she announced. “Look forward to driving Georgia-made vehicle throughout the Peach State!” proclaimed the tweet.
Loeffler will be vulnerable to rookie mistakes that could hurt her chances in the elections soon to come. But from this writer’s experience, she’s a natural as much at ease chatting up farmers at a state fair as courting wealthy donors at a ballroom gala. Although her politics are mostly a blank slate, she is anything but an empty vessel. But filling her agenda with other legislators’ initiatives doesn’t sound like Kelly Loeffler. She’s more likely to find fresh causes to make her own.
This conversation, conducted on Jan. 15, edited and condensed for clarity, is one of the first occasions she’s detailed what she’ll do as Georgia’s unlikely new senator.
Have you ever run for office in your life?
I ran for student council president in eighth grade, and I ran against two of my best friends. Early polling where there would be 90 votes for the whole junior high indicated that I would be in first. And I helped the number three candidate with his campaign signs. So I did end up winning. The polling back then was accurate. I won, and that is when I thought I’d go out on top.
In terms of helping Georgia, talk about what you envision.
Our governor Brian Kemp has done a tremendous job setting the tone there and will continue to make sure that we have a low tax environment, that we’re providing innovative ways for providing for education and health care challenges. And then our state’s number one infrastructure project is the Savanah Harbor expansion project. It’s already a leading port in the United States. We’ll make it bigger to increase the commerce that comes into the United States through that port. I was in Savanah about three weeks ago and was able to tour it and see the immense scale of it. It’s a multi-modal network of the port connecting the trains, trucking. This is the lifeblood of commerce: shipping product as we increase manufacturing in the United States.
I also got to see the other end of that supply chain. I had the good fortune of being able to get to West Point, Georgia, before I came to Washington, to visit Kia Motors Manufacturing Group, KMMG. Kia is a South Korean manufacturer, but they’ve invested well over $1 billion in the state of Georgia and brought the first auto manufacturing plant to Georgia. That plant employs at any one time between 3,000 to 4,000 employees around the clock running three shifts, but it’s also spawned the growth of the automotive supply chain in Georgia, where we been able to employ another 10,000 Georgians. It just shows you how one investment is amplified throughout the state.
I came out of the automotive industry. My first job out of college was with Toyota, and I was a management trainee. I worked my way through the field organizations in different cities across the United States, so I know firsthand how competitive the automobile industry is and how vital it is to our manufacturing. We talked a lot about the agricultural communities in Georgia, and those agricultural communities are now being supported by expansion of manufacturing.
Are there advantages to being an entrepreneurial outsider?
Being an outsider and having that perspective of what it’s like to sign a paycheck, what it’s like to hire, and what it’s like to have to fire someone in a downturn gives you a sense of the real economy very quickly. And for me, having operated in a global business and working side by side with our management team when I was at ICE, I saw firsthand the risks that companies have to take: They have to raise capital, they have to have benefit plans, they have to hire and train employees, think about the investments that they make and the competitive landscape.
What lessons did you learn from growing up on a farm?
My parents required that I fill out a time card so that I could understand what it took to earn a dollar, and then I would go to the mall on the weekend, and I could see how quickly I would spend it. It was a great lesson. My mom recently sent me some of those time cards, and it instilled a sense of pride in hard work, results, the dignity in work, and the desire to learn and grow. Besides my work ethic, what I took away from the farm was an appreciation of markets and free market economies on a global scale, because farmers are really at the middle of a market economy. When I was young my mom and my grandmother would write corn and soybeans futures prices on the Formica countertop. I always say I learned commodities futures before I learned math.
Neither political party is addressing the debt and deficits situation. We’re now booking trillion-dollar deficits. Is there anything you’d like to do about this?
I do think it’s an important issue, particularly for future generations. We have to be responsible. Fiscal discipline is entirely necessary. It’s practiced in the private sector. It’s needed in the public sector, and as I learn, I’ll be applying that lens.
I grew up in the era of Ronald Reagan. He was President when I graduated from junior high and high school. During the Reagan era was when I really started paying attention to business. In fact, my mom bought me The Art of the Deal when I was going into the 11th or 12th grade. I was buying investment banking books because I knew that I wanted to work in markets. In my farm community, there weren’t very many business people, so it seemed very glamorous to me.
But this idea of fiscal discipline is important. I tend to be more of Reagan supply-sider-type discipline, but I’m looking to make sure we make smart decisions for the long term. That leads to what we saw with the China trade agreement. Sometimes you have to make some decisions near term that are difficult but are very important for the long-term result.
Do you consider yourself a free trader?
I’m a fair trader. Free trade is important from an economic perspective, but fair trade is vitally important, particularly when you think about where the value in economies is so influenced by intellectual property and tariffs on important goods like agriculture. It has to be fair. Anything that levels the playing field is the right direction.
Let’s move on to impeachment. Do you think the Republicans should agree to call new witnesses?
My first position is that this impeachment exercise is completely political. But as a Republican caucus in the Senate, we’ve agreed on how to proceed at the outset, which would be consistent with how the Clinton impeachment played out. But we’ve made no decisions beyond that because we need to hear the opening statements and the questions before anything else is decided.
Would you be open to witnesses?
I wouldn’t venture forward on that one. I would say this is our chance to actually have a fair trial, to have due process that was not afforded to the President in the House, and that’s really going to be the standard. So we’ll deal with the witness question when we get there.
Given your experience running Bakkt, are there ways the fintech revolution can be aided by changes in regulation?
In fintech, a lot of folks in that industry come from the technology world and don’t have financial services experience and don’t understand the financial regulation rules, be it Treasury, the SEC. Our view was that we’d work within the existing framework of federal regulation versus having it change to suit the needs of innovation.
We’ve seen over the last three to four decades as technology has really come into financial services that rules have evolved to accommodate electronic trading, for example. We did not seek any changes; we met the existing regulations. That said, there are times when innovation comes about, and there needs to be an accommodation. We didn’t require that for our product. But if you think about how much banking has changed, how much trading has changed, that markets have changed, there have been changes in federal rules to accommodate innovation and those rules have been made in Congress, but they’re not always necessary.
What’s your view of the “Squad” and the socialist movement?
Socialism does not work. Socialism is the biggest threat to our country that we have today. That’s a big part of why I’m here. Our free market capitalism in the United States has been the single best thing for the entire world, not just for our country. It’s why more people want to come to our country than want to leave. It’s why people come here to be educated. It’s why the American dream exists.
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fortune--2020-01-17--New Grammys chief Deborah Dugan put on ‘administrative leave’ after misconduct allegation

The Recording Academy has placed Deborah Dugan, its president and CEO of just six months, on administrative leave following an allegation of misconduct by a senior leader at the organization.
The move announced late Thursday comes 10 days before the 2020 Grammy Awards will be held in Los Angeles.
“In light of concerns raised to the Recording Academy Board of Trustees, including a formal allegation of misconduct by a senior female member of the Recording Academy team, the board has placed Recording Academy President and CEO Deborah Dugan on administrative leave, effective immediately,” the academy said in a statement to The Associated Press. “The board has also retained two independent third-party investigators to conduct independent investigations of the allegations.”
Dugan, the former CEO of Bono’s (RED) organization, became the first woman appointed to lead the academy.
Recording Academy Board Chair Harvey Mason Jr., the music producer who has worked with Chris Brown, Jennifer Hudson and more, will serve as interim president and CEO of the academy.
“The board determined this action to be necessary in order to restore the confidence of the Recording Academy’s membership, repair Recording Academy employee morale, and allow the Recording Academy to focus on its mission of serving all music creators,” the statement continued. “The Recording Academy Board of Trustees is committed to fostering a safe, diverse, and inclusive workplace, music industry, and society.”
Dugan succeeded Neil Portnow, who led the Grammys since 2002. Before joining (RED), the AIDS organization that launched in 2006, Dugan was president of Disney Publishing Worldwide and executive vice president at EMI/Capitol Records. She started her career as an attorney on Wall Street.
Dugan didn’t immediately reply to an email seeking comment from The Associated Press.
Before Dugan, music executive Christine Farnon held the top position at the academy for years, though she never had the title of president and CEO. She held multiple positions at the Grammys throughout her tenure, retiring in 1992 as executive vice president. Michael Greene became the first official president and CEO of the academy in 1988, leading the organization until 2002 when Portnow took over.
This year’s Grammys is set to feature performances by Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, Demi Lovato, Aerosmith, Bonnie Raitt, Tyler, the Creator, Run-DMC, Rosalía, H.E.R. and Lizzo, who is the top nominee with eight.
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fortune--2020-01-17--India scoffs at Amazon CEO Bezos’s offer to invest $1 billion in the country

India’s government has scoffed at Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos’ offer to invest $1 billion in the country, firing the latest salvo at an e-commerce giant that’s been accused of predatory business practices.
Trade minister Piyush Goyal delivered a stinging rebuke two days after Bezos arrived in New Delhi and touted his efforts to help digitize small and medium enterprises. The investment would bring Amazon’s bet on the Indian market to about $6.5 billion. Goyal told a gathering of foreign ministers from around the world he welcomed an investigation into the company’s alleged “predatory pricing and unfair trade practices.”
“They may have put in a billion dollars,” Goyal said at the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi on Thursday. “But then if they make a loss of a billion dollars every year, then they jolly well have to finance that billion dollars. So it’s not as if they are doing a great favor to India when they invest a billion dollars.”
Bezos has attracted significant opposition during a tour of India intended to underscore its importance as a growth driver for Amazon. The country’s antitrust regulator initiated a formal investigation hours before his arrival, and retailers affiliated with the Confederation of All India Traders organized sit-ins and public rallies in multiple cities to protest Amazon’s traditional cut-price approach and exclusive-selling practices.
Outside the venue of Amazon India’s annual event for small retailers Wednesday, demonstrators held banners proclaiming “Amazon, go back!” and with Bezos’ face crossed-out. The CEO has sought a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi but that hasn’t come through.
Amazon has sought to counter the negativity with a PR offensive. From Delhi, Bezos went on to Mumbai where he visited a neighborhood store. It’s these small stores that are up in arms against the retail behemoth. The chief executive then rubbed shoulders with Bollywood personalities — Amazon is plowing money into creating Bollywood-dominated content for its Prime Video service to lure movie-mad Indians. On Friday, the company declared it planned to create a million jobs within the country by 2025. The retail giant said it had already created 700,000 jobs in six years of operating its marketplace there.
Increasing Hostility
Still, Goyal’s comments were an indication that Modi’s government is trying to safeguard the interests of smaller Indian traders, the traditional voter base of his Bharatiya Janata Party, as elections approach in the state of Delhi, home to the country’s capital.
Soon after Goyal spoke, the chief of his party’s foreign cell, Vijay Chauthaiwale, tweeted barely-veiled criticism of the Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos. The U.S. newspaper has been criticized by the BJP and its allies for its coverage of the Modi government’s increasingly right-wing policies.
The flare-up suggests India is turning increasingly hostile to the monopolistic practices of foreign e-commerce players that dominate the burgeoning market. Responding to widespread complaints, India restricted foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail and this has forced Amazon and Walmart Inc.’s Flipkart, the two biggest e-commerce players in India, to overhaul business models to comply with new rules introduced in December 2018.
In 2016, New Delhi had said foreign-owned e-commerce platforms could operate as marketplaces — facilitating transactions between sellers and consumers — but not sell directly. Flipkart and Amazon had established wholesale networks to reach their customers. But the more recent regulations target this workaround, banning foreign e-commerce sites from selling goods from companies in which they own a stake or have commercial arrangements with.
Yet resentment toward Amazon and Walmart lingers. On Thursday, Goyal also questioned why an e-commerce marketplace should make losses.
“Anybody who tries to use the e-commerce marketplace model to get into the multi-brand retail space surreptitiously will have to be questioned, will have to be investigated,” Goyal said.
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fortune--2020-01-17--Europe is mulling tough new limits on the use of facial recognition and A.I.

The European Union is considering new legally binding requirements for developers of artificial intelligence in an effort to ensure modern technology is developed and used in an ethical way.
The EU’s executive arm is set to propose the new rules apply to “high-risk sectors,” such as healthcare and transport, and suggest the bloc updates safety and liability laws, according to a draft of a so-called “white paper” on artificial intelligence obtained by Bloomberg. The European Commission is due to unveil the paper in mid-February and the final version is likely to change.
The paper is part of the EU’s broader effort to catch up to the U.S. and China on advancements in AI, but in a way that promotes European values such as user privacy. While some critics have long argued that stringent data protection laws like the EU’s could hinder innovation around AI, EU officials say harmonizing rules across the region will boost development.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has pledged her team would present a new legislative approach on artificial intelligence within the first 100 days of her mandate, which started Dec. 1, handing the task to the EU’s digital chief, Margrethe Vestager, to coordinate.
A spokesman for the Brussels-based Commission declined to comment on leaks but added: “To maximize the benefits and address the challenges of Artificial Intelligence, Europe has to act as one and will define its own way, a human way. Trust and security of EU citizens will therefore be at the center of the EU’s strategy.”
Facial Recognition
The EU is also considering new obligations for public authorities around the deployment of facial recognition technology and more detailed rules on the use of such systems in public spaces. However, the provision on facial recognition isn’t among the three policy options officials recommend that the commission pursue.
The provision suggests prohibiting use of facial recognition by public and private actors in public spaces for several years to allow time to assess the risks of such technology.
“Such a ban would be a far-reaching measure that might hamper the development and uptake of this technology,” the commission says in the document, adding that it’s therefore preferable to focus on implementing relevant provisions in the EU’s existing data protection laws.
As part of the recommended policy measures, the EU also wants to urge its member states to appoint authorities to monitor the enforcement of any future rules governing the use of AI, according to the document.
In the draft, the EU defines high-risk applications as “applications of artificial intelligence which can produce legal effects for the individual or the legal entity or pose risk of injury, death or significant material damage for the individual or the legal entity.”
Artificial intelligence is already subject to a variety of European regulations, including rules on fundamental rights around privacy, non-discrimination, as well as product safety and liability laws, but the rules may not fully cover all specific risks posed by new technologies, the Commission says in the document. For instance, product safety laws currently wouldn’t apply to services based on AI.
Key Requirements
The EU’s AI strategy will build on previous work coordinated by the commission, including reports published in the last year by a committee of academics, experts and executives. EU rules often reverberate across the globe, as companies don’t want to build software or hardware which would be banned from the bloc’s vast developed market.
One of the reports outlined a set of seven key requirements that AI systems should implement in order to be deemed trustworthy, including incorporating human oversight, respect for privacy, traceability and avoiding unfair bias in decisions taken by the systems.
The other report outlined policy and investment recommendations for the EU and its member states. The experts said unnecessarily prescriptive regulation should be avoided but that governments should restrict the development of automated lethal weapons and consider new rules around unjustified tracking through facial recognition or other biometric technologies.
Alphabet Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai will also make a rare public appearance in Brussels next week to give a speech at a think-tank about the development of responsible AI ahead of the EU’s February announcement.
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