Make moments count. Make priorities. Make the time. Make your gifts known. Make a nobody feel like a somebody. Make your voice heard. Make the small things big. Make someone smile. Make the change. Make love. Make up. Make peace. Make sure to tell your people they are loved. Make sure to have no regrets. Make sure you are ready.”
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, once said: "I took a taxi one day to the BBC offices for an interview.
When I arrived, I asked the driver to wait for me for Forty Minutes until I 'll get back, but the driver apologized and said, "I can't, because I have to go home to listen to Winston Churchill's speech".
I was amazed and delighted with the man's desire to listen to my speech! So I took out 20 pounds and gave it to the taxi driver instead of 5 Pounds without telling him who I was. When the driver collected the money, he said: "I'll wait for hours until you come back sir! And let Churchill go to hell".
You can see how Principles have been modified in favour of money; Nations were sold for money; Honour sold for money; Families split for money; Friends separated for money; People killed for money; and people being made slaves for money.
Do u know the miracles of zamzam Water from HOLY MAKKAH?
ZamZam water level is around 10.6 feet below the surface. It is the miracle of Allah that when Zam Zam was pumped continuously for more than 24 hours with a pumping rate of 8,000 liters per second, water level dropped to almost 44 feet below the surface,
BUT WHEN THE PUMPING WAS STOPPED, the level immediately elevated again to 13 feet after 11 minutes. 8,000 liters per second means that 8,000 x 60 = 480,000 liters per minute 480,000 liters per minutes means that 480,000 x 60 = 28.8 Million liters per hour And 28.8 Million liters per hour means that 28,800,000 x 24 = 691.2 Million liters per day So they pumped 690 Millions liters of ZamZam in 24 hours, but it was re-supplied in 11 minutes only. And not to forget this well is providing water from the time of Hazrat Ismaeel as till now.
There are 2 miracles here, the first that ZamZam was re-filled immediately & the second is that Allah Holds the extra-ordinarily powerful Aquifer for not throwing extra ZamZam out of the well.
It is the translation of the word ZamZam, which means Stop Stop! said by Hajirah RZ. Zimam is an Arabic word, it is the rope / REIN attached to bridle or noseband & it is used / pulled to stop the running animal.
Zamzam water has no color or smell, but it has a distinct taste. Water usually fills your thrust. But surprisingly, Zamzam fills your hunger as well as your thrust. One can stay alive just by drinking zam zam water for as long as he can. _______ The results of the water samples tested by the European laboratories shows that Zamzam water contains
1. CALCIUM & MAGNESUIM: The difference between Zamzam water and other water was in the quantity of calcium and magnesium salts. The content of these was slightly higher in Zamzam water. This may be why this water refreshes tired hajis.
2. FLUORIDE: But more significantly, the water contains fluorides that have an effective germicidal action. _______ Masaru Emoto is a Japanese energy scholar, author and entrepreneur, best known for his claims that human consciousness has an effect on the molecular structure of water.
Following is his research on zamzam water:
1. The quality / purity of Zamzam water has, will not be find any where else in the water on this earth.
2. He used the technology named NANO, and researched a lot on Zamzam water. And found out that if one drop of Zamzam water mix in 1000 drops of regular water, regular water will get the same quality like Zamzam water.
3. He also found that a mineral in one drop of Zamzam water has its own importance that will not be find any other water on this earth.
4. He also found in some tests that the quality or ingredients of Zamzam water can not be changed, why, science does not know the reason. Even he re-cycled the Zamzam water, but no change it was still pure.
5. This scientist also found out that, the Muslims say BISMILLAH before eating / drinking. He says that after saying BISMILLAH on regular water, there are some strange changes happened in the quality of regular water. That makes it best water.
6. He also found out that if some one recites the Quran on regular water, it gets the ability for the treatment of different diseases. ______ "If you are in doubt about it, then bring a book like it." [A challenge from the Lord of the Worlds]
The
largest salary increase I’ve helped get was for a female FAANG
executive: I helped her get $5.4M more on her offer. Through the
process, it struck me that even though she was a senior leader everyone
admired (you’d 100% know of her if I told you her name), she had very
little knowledge of how to negotiate. Don’t get me wrong — she knew how
to ask and be assertive, but she was much less comfortable “playing the
game.”
And she’s not alone.
Regardless of how
senior or junior you are, most tech folks struggle with negotiation.
Partially this is because compensation is set up to be intentionally
misleading. Partially it’s because sticking up for yourself is
nerve-racking AF.
Here are the 10 commandments to negotiation I wish everyone knew:
1. Negotiation starts earlier than you think
Every
recruiter worth their salt will ask about your salary expectations when
you first start interviewing. Do not — I repeat, do not — give them a
number.
What to do instead: Ask for the range they’re budgeted for the role.
How to say it: “Can
you tell me the salary band for this level? Happy to let you know if
it’s within my range, and we can discuss specific numbers later when
I’ve met the team.”
Bonus points: If you’re
junior/mid, time all your interviews so you get offers around the same
time. If you’re senior, get some press before you start meeting folks.
2. Mine for intel during interviews
Go
into the interview ready not just to answer questions but to ask some
of your own. You will use this as ammunition to negotiate later. Here
are a few examples of what you should ask:
What’s the biggest priority for the team right now?
Why is this role open?
What’s the biggest challenge for someone stepping into this role?
How does the org structure on the team work?
3. Don’t give in to the pressure
Once
you’ve been offered the role, the recruiter’s job shifts from
evaluating you to closing you. Most experienced recruiters will ask you
again to put up a number for your salary. Clever recruiters may even
tell you that they “will go to bat for you.” Yeah, no thanks.
What recruiters say: “If you give me your number, I will make it happen for you.”
What they mean: “I’ll get you something lower, but kinda close to what you asked for.”
4. At FAANG, your recruiter may have no say at all
At
FAANG-size companies (i.e. over 5K employees), compensation is heavily
formulaic. In fact, there is often a separate team — the “compensation
committee” — who sets your salary. They take into account your
background, interview performance, and level. They give the recruiter a
number to go with. The recruiter then gives you the number, and every
time you negotiate they have to go back to that committee to ask for a
re-evaluation.
What do clever recruiters do? They get your number up-front to save some legwork.
Unfortunately,
this may hurt your chances of getting more on your offer later. It also
deprives you of some valuable data — where you fall in the level/salary
band. If you get caught in this loop, quickly turn the tables: most
companies will consider “new information,” like another offer, to reopen
a negotiation. Don’t forget, an offer to stay from your existing
company also counts!
5. Read between the lines
Your initial offer speaks volumes, if you know how to interpret the data. Here are a few scenarios you should consider:
Let’s say you’re applying for an L6 role at a big company.
Initial offer comes in low:
The team may have felt that you have a lot of “room for growth.” In
this case, my advice is to dig deeper and ask the interviewer to share
feedback from folks who met you to fix any misconceptions before you ever negotiate.
Telling someone you want more money because you’re “the greatest PM
ever” while the team felt you were “meh” is not going to fly.
Middle of the road:
You got “the number” (the medium opening number that’s basically a
template recruiters use). It’s the most common opening offer — companies
do this to reduce risk of lawsuits. Over 80% of people get it. It
likely means you don’t have a strong advocate on the interview loop. Do
not negotiate until you match with a team and you have a manager batting
for you.
Initial offer comes in top-of-band:
There was likely a discussion about giving you a higher level. Many
times in this case, you can push for an “out-of-band” offer —
essentially getting paid for an L7 while you’re an L6.
6. At a startup, the playbook is different
You
may be dealing with the founder directly. It’s very likely there is no
range for the role, as smaller companies have much less access to salary
data. The goal at the initial offer conversation is to understand three
things:
That
last one can be tricky because you need data the recruiter may be
reluctant to give — the option strike price, preferred price, number of
outstanding shares — and you need to understand how options work. At last, get ready to ask:
“What is the valuation based on?”
And get ready to not get a straight answer until you’ve asked five times (yes, this is normal).
TL;DR:
Ask the questions an investor would ask because, *news flash*, you are
now an investor — but instead of cash, you’re staking your time and
earning trajectory on the company’s success. You can meet with the
investors too; it’s 100% OK to ask for that when the company is
early-stage.
Lastly, 2021 has been a weird year for startup
compensation, so much of the data from previous years is unreliable.
Remote work, abundant access to capital, and greater trust in
international talent have skewed things quite a bit. Still, I find the Holloway Guide ranges to be a good starting point.
7. Your job is to win hearts and minds
It
can be tempting to think you need to negotiate now that you have data.
Nope, not yet. The next step, instead, is to upsell your worth before
you come back with any kind of counteroffer. This is especially
important if you’re going for a senior role.
What to do next:
Ask for follow-up meetings with decision makers. If you’re a Director
or higher, you can usually ask to meet with any VP and possibly C-level
execs. VPs can often meet with the CEO and even board members. Take your
time; this is important if you want your salary to reflect your value.
If everyone wants you, you’ll be calling the shots later.
How to run these effectively: Come prepared with three things, tailored to who you’re meeting:
Questions about how you can create meaningful impact
Ideas based on your interviews so far
Bonus points: discussing obstacles to your taking the role and making them sell you on it
8. OK, now get some good data
Did you know that women make only 47 cents in equity
for every dollar a man makes? A HUGE reason for that is that many women
don’t fully evaluate their offer before negotiating. Let’s change that.
Particularly if you are a woman, ask yourself these questions:
Is the offer competitive? (Browse 5.3M offers here.)
Not
all offers are made equal — in fact, they are intentionally confusing.
At Google, you may get a front-loaded vesting schedule on your stock; at
Amazon, sizable cash bonuses the first two years. It seems obvious that
you should look at the comp, but that’s not everything:
Which company has a better trajectory?
How do promotions work?
Is your manager influential enough to pull for you when needed?
Is your product or team visible enough to get good resourcing?
What’s the company brand worth to your earnings trajectory?
TL;DR: Getting paid more up-front doesn’t always mean you’ll make the most overall. Plan carefully.
10. Time to make an ask
It
can be awkward to ask for more money, but trust me, everyone expects
you to do it. On top of that, it doesn’t help that so much of the advice
out there is conflicting. Let’s set the record straight:
“I need a competing offer.”
MYTH:
You absolutely do not need multiple offers. Just being able to say
you’re speaking to other companies is sufficient — you can quote the
expected salaries for other roles if needed.
“I need to provide copies of my other offers.”
MYTH:
Nope, nope, nope (even though Google in particular loves to ask for
them). You signed an NDA before every interview, so you can always use
that as a reason.
“I should send the recruiter an email with my ask and justification.”
MYTH:
Negotiating via email = MAJOR CRINGE and definitely a worse outcome. I
know there are folks selling fill-in-the-blank templates out there. My
advice if you want a meaningful/large increase is to have the
conversation over the phone.
“If I find a number online, I can quote it as a reason to get more.”
MYTH:
Nothing boils a recruiter’s blood more than “It says X on Glassdoor.”
Compensation is an exact science — have arguments prepared that are
specific to your situation.
“The best way to get more is to reiterate how qualified I am.”
MYTH:
You already got interviewed and everyone’s read your resume. That’s how
you got your initial offer; now you need to build additional arguments.
Use the information you collected during the interview about what
challenges the team is facing — maybe that increases the scope of the
role? Discuss why leaving your current role will be hard — are you
critical to your current team? In other words: instead of asking for money, make them give you more money by bringing in obstacles the recruiter needs to overcome to close you.
“I need to be aggressive and threaten to walk if they don’t match.”
MYTH:
LOL, let me know how that goes for you. My guess is you’ll get a
mediocre increase worded as a “final offer.” If you want big moves, I’m
talking $100K+ more, you need to collaborate with your recruiter, not
make them an enemy.
As a final word of wisdom:
Start with negotiating your overall compensation, not individual
components. For example, ask for “500K” and then the next round ask “Can
I have X more equity?” Then, when you’ve exhausted all other avenues,
ask for a signing bonus. If you still need more help, you can always read our guide.
Now that you’ve got all these RSUs in your compensation…
If
your new RSUs are more than 10% of your liquid net worth, you should
make a plan to diversify ASAP. Holding a concentrated position can
translate into greater portfolio volatility, which has been shown to
reduce compounded growth rates and future wealth. At Candor we help you
automate RSU diversification by converting your stock weekly, even
during blackout periods. You can find us here.
Facebook conditioned its $5 billion payment to the Federal Trade Commission to resolve the Cambridge Analytica dataleak probe on the agency droppingplans to sue Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergindividually, shareholders allege in a lawsuit.
In suits made public Tuesday, two
groups of shareholders claimed that members of Facebook’s board allowed
the company to overpay on its fine in order to protect Zuckerberg, the
company’s founder and largest shareholder. The complaints, which cite
internal discussions among Facebook’s board members, were filed in
Delaware Court of Chancery last month.
“Zuckerberg, Sandberg, and other
Facebook directors agreed to authorize a multi-billion settlement with
the FTC as an express quid pro quo to protect Zuckerberg from being
named in the FTC’s complaint, made subject to personal liability, or
even required to sit for a deposition,” one of the suits alleged.
The FTC has never disclosed that it
originally planned to name Zuckerberg personally in the lawsuit, and the
agency's two Democrats at the time voted against the settlement in part
because of the lack of personal liability for the CEO.
The multi-front battle: The
lawsuits show that Facebook has still yet to move beyond the Cambridge
Analytica scandal, even as antitrust, alleged privacy failures and other
problems plague the company. The Senate Commerce Committee said last
week that it was opening a probe into how the company downplayed its own
research on how Facebook's photo-sharing app Instagram worsens mental
health and body image issues for teens.
Newly public: The groups
originally filed their suits last year. They amended the complaints last
month after receiving internal files about the board’s discussions on
privacy, which a federal judge had ordered Facebook to provide.
How it went down: In February
2019, the FTC sent Facebook’s lawyers a draft complaint that named both
the company and Zuckerberg personally as a defendant, the shareholders
said. The FTC also said in court that Facebook’s fine would have been
closer to $106 million, but the company agreed to the $5 billion penalty
to avoid having Zuckerberg or Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg
deposed and any liability for the CEO, the suit alleged.
“The Board has never provided a
serious check on Zuckerberg’s unfettered authority,” one set of
shareholders said. “Instead, it has enabled him, defended him, and paid
billions of dollars from Facebook’s corporate coffers to make his
problems go away.”
They also alleged that Zuckerberg and
Sandberg both declined to be interviewed by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the
firm hired to audit Facebook’s privacy compliance as part of a 2012
settlement with the FTC, allowed other managers to provide untrue
statements about the company’s practices and never provided the board
with copies of PwC’s audits.
The accounting firm concluded that Facebook didn’t have enough controls in place to protect user data, the second suit alleged,
and “that Facebook’s privacy controls were not operating with
sufficient effectiveness to provide reasonable assurance to protect the
privacy of covered information.”
Facebook staying out of it: Facebook declined to comment on the suits.
Exploring strange new worlds. Understanding the origins
of the universe. Searching for life in the galaxy. These are not the
plot of a new science fiction movie, but the mission objectives of the James Webb Space Telescope, the long-awaited successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA is building and launching the Webb in partnership with the European Space Agency and Canada.
The launch, which will propel the Webb to nearly a million miles away, is now scheduled for December 18, 2021.
When it fully deploys in space, the Webb will usher in a new age of
astronomy, scientists say, and show humanity things it has never seen
before.
“The Webb represents the culmination of decades, if not centuries, of astronomy,” saysSara Seager, a planetary scientist and astrophysicist at MIT. “We’ve been waiting for this a very long time.”
Scientists started thinking about a follow-up even before the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990. After more than three decades in space, it’s unclear how much longer this boundary-breaking satellite will be able to scan and photograph the universe.
The Webb was originally supposed to launch in 2010 and cost around $1 billion.
Its price tag has since ballooned to $10 billion, and it’s way overdue.
But the wait will be worth it, at least according to the scientists who
expect new and revealing glimpses of our universe.
“We’re going right up to the edge of the observable universe with Webb,” says Caitlin Casey, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. “And yeah, we’re excited to see what’s there.”
The Webb will surpass the Hubble in several ways. It will
allow astronomers to look not only farther out in space but also
further back in time: It will search for the first stars and galaxies of the universe.
It will allow scientists to make careful studies of numerous exoplanets
— planets that orbit stars other than our sun — and even embark on a
search for signs of life there.
The Webb is a machine for answering unanswered questions
about the universe, for exploring what has been unexplorable until now.
Here’s a guide to what the Webb is capable of.
The Webb’s golden mirror is a giant leap for telescopes of its kind
The launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, named after famed astronomer Edwin Hubble,
was itself a huge leap forward for astronomy. Here on Earth,
astronomers seek out remote mountaintops and deserts to build major
telescopes for the best chance of viewing a dark sky away from pollution
and bright lights. But their view is still marred by the slight haze
and luminescence of the Earth’s atmosphere. Space is “the ultimate mountaintop,” as NASA explains. There’s no better view of space than the one from, well, space.
Hubble has meant so much during its 30-year run. For one
thing, it’s sent us unforgettable, jaw-droppingly beautiful images like
those of the Lagoon Nebula and the Pillars of Creation.
It’s also taught us about the age of the universe, about what happens when stars explode, about black holes. It helped establish many of the boundaries that the Webb hopes to push. Most powerfully, its observations have led scientists
to believe the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, propelled
by something so mysterious that scientists simply call it “dark
energy.”
The Webb, named for the man who led NASA
in the decade leading up to the moon landing, is set to take all this a
step further. “What we’re going to get is a telescope that’s about 100
times more powerful than Hubble,” says Amber Straughn, an astrophysicist at NASA who works on the Webb.
How?
The Webb improves on Hubble in two key ways. The first is
just its size: Hubble was about the size of a school bus, whereas Webb
is more like the size of a tennis court. “This thing is enormous,”
Straughn says. “Webb is by far the biggest telescope NASA’s ever
attempted to send into space.”
But it’s not just the total size of the contraption that
matters. When it comes to reflecting telescopes, the key component is
the size of its curved mirror. “You could sort of think of a telescope
mirror like a light bucket,” Straughn says. The more light you can
collect in this bucket, the fainter and farther-away things you can see
in the universe.
Hubble’s mirror was an impressive 7.8 feet in diameter.
Webb’s beautiful, gold-hued mirrors combine for a diameter of 21.3 feet.
Overall, that amounts to more than six times the light-collecting area.
What does that mean in practice? Well, consider one of Hubble’s most famous images, the Deep Field. In 1995, scientists
set the Hubble to stare off into a teeny-tiny patch of sky (about the
size of the head of a pinhead, held at arm's length from the viewer) and
capture as much light as it could from that one spot.
This photograph also revealed Hubble’s larger power — as a
time machine. In astronomy, the farther away things are, the older they
are (because light from faraway places takes a very long time to travel to Earth). That means this Hubble Deep Field is not only a snapshot of space: It also contains the history of our universe. Galaxies in this image appear to us as they were billions of years ago.
“What Webb will do is take that field and go even
further,” UT Austin’s Casey explains. “So the tiny specks of light in
the background of the Hubble Deep Field will brighten and become more
detailed, we’ll be able to see spiral arms, we’ll be able to see
structure, and then we’ll get more specks of light even further in the
past. We’re seeing farther back in time with Webb.”
With Webb, astronomers like Casey will be able to see so
far back that they’ll potentially spot the very first stars and
galaxies. Hubble has seen light dating to about 400 million years after
the Big Bang, which took about 13.3 billion years to reach us.
“That’s far! But Webb has the capability to take us to
250 million years after the Big Bang,” explains Casey, who has been
approved to work with the Webb Space Telescope. “It might not sound like
a big difference. What’s a few hundred million years between friends?
Actually, it’s the difference between seeing the first stars that ever
turned on [and] arriving a bit too late after the funeral.”
Beyond that are barriers through which even the Webb cannot see. Prior to the first starlight, the universe was shrouded by a “dense, obscuring fog of primordial gas,” as the National Science Foundation explains. There’s no light that reaches our telescopes from this time, which is called the cosmic dark ages.
(There is some background radiation from the Big Bang
called the cosmic microwave background, a faint glow that shines to us
from before the dark ages. But for the most part, the dark ages is a
blank spot in our timeline of the universe.)
Casey and other astronomers hope the Webb will help them
understand the end of the dark ages and figure out what caused this fog
to lift. Scientists suspect the starlight from the earliest galaxies did it.
“If you have a cloud of gas and it encounters energetic
light, that energetic light will ionize that gas and disassociate that
cloud,” Casey says. “And so if that light just has turned on, it then
hits that gas and really transforms the entire universe from a dark
place to a light place.”
The Webb telescope sees infrared light — which can be very, very old
The Webb’s other advantage is the type of light it collects.
Light comes in a lot of different varieties. The human
eye can see only a narrow band known as visible light, but the universe
contains lots and lots of light outside this range, including the
higher-frequency, higher-energy forms: ultraviolet, gamma rays. Then
there’s the lower-energy light with longer wavelengths: infrared,
microwaves, radio.
The Hubble Space Telescope collects visible light, ultraviolet, and a little bit of infrared. The Webb is primarily an infrared telescope,
so it sees light that’s in a longer wavelength than what our eyes can
see. This seems nerdy and technical, but it’s actually what allows Webb
to look further back in time than the Hubble.
Infrared light is often very old light, due to a
phenomenon call redshifting. When a light source is moving away from a
viewer, it gets stretched out, morphing into a longer and longer
wavelength, growing redder. (The opposite is true as well: As a light
source grows closer, the wavelengths shorten, growing bluer.) It’s
similar to what happens when a siren goes by: The pitch increases as the
siren approaches, then decreases as it trails away.
Because space is constantly expanding, the farthest
things away from us in the universe are moving away from us. “And as
light travels through space from those distant galaxies, the light is
literally stretched by the expansion of space,” Straughn says.
Imagine a star that’s really far away. The light from
that star may start off in the visible spectrum, but it gets stretched
on its journey to us. It grows redder and redder. “So when we see
distant galaxies with Hubble, they’re sort of these little, tiny red
nuggets,” Straughn says. Eventually, these very distant, old galaxies
grow so red that they drop into the infrared spectrum. Webb can see this
ancient light that has become invisible to the human eye.
Conveniently, infrared light has other uses as well. It’s
a really good type of light to use to look at exoplanets. For instance,
if you were on a planet that orbits another star and wanted to see
Earth, visible light wouldn’t be your best bet.
“The Earth peaks in the infrared,” says Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory astronomer Kevin Stevenson,
who plans to use the Webb in his research. So if we want to be able to
study an Earth-like planet in another solar system, “What we really want
to do is observe at infrared wavelengths, because that’s where the
light from the Earth is being emitted.”
Exoplanet scientists like Stevenson are going to use the
Webb to analyze the atmospheres of these worlds: The Webb is capable of
determining some of the chemicals in their atmospheres. “We can detect
water, CO, CO2, methane,” Stevenson says. While those aren’t definitive
signs of life on their own, they could begin to ask fascinating
questions: What created that methane and carbon dioxide? Could it have
been life?
“We all want to find another Earth, don’t we?” Stevenson
says. “The prospect of answering the question ‘are we alone?’ has been
something that we’ve been asking ourselves for centuries. And I think
with James Webb, this will provide us the first opportunity to really
answer that question.”
This $10 billion gadget better not break
Scientists are clearly raring to go, but the Webb
revolution has taken a while. One reason for all the launch delays to
the launch has to do with contractor snafus. But a big source of all of them, NASA’s Straughn says, is the complexity of the Webb itself.
“Because it’s so big, there aren’t any rockets that are big enough to launch it fully deployed,” Straughn says. The telescope has to be folded up
to fit inside a rocket, and has to deploy itself in space. “So that
whole process of building a deployable telescope in space is the source
of a lot of the engineering challenges.”
Upping the stakes is the fact that while Hubble was
launched to around 340 miles above the Earth, Webb will be almost a
million miles away — four times the distance from the Earth to the moon.
That means once the Webb is launched, it will be
unserviceable by human hands if it breaks. That’s scary, considering the
history of the Hubble. Shortly after the Hubble launched in 1990,
engineers realized there was a problem with its mirror;
the telescope’s initial images came back fuzzy, and astronauts had to
launch a space shuttle to fix it. That won’t be possible with the Webb.
It just has to work.
It will be far away for good reason. Because Webb is an
infrared telescope, it needs to be kept cold. The Earth itself is warm
and glows in infrared. “Anything warm glows in infrared light,” Straughn
says. “If the telescope was warm, it would just glow and see itself.”
Remarkably, any scientist around the world can apply to
use the Webb Space Telescope, provided they write up a project proposal
that passes peer review. It’s pretty competitive. Last year the Space Telescope Science Institute,
which operates space telescopes from John Hopkins University in
Maryland, put out a call for proposals for Webb’s first observing run.
About a quarter of the proposals were accepted.
“It feels like part of me is still stunned,” says Lisa Dang,
a physics PhD student at McGill University who was one of the lucky few
to get approved to use the Webb. “And the other part is having this
imposter syndrome — like, these data better be really amazing.”
Dang is set to study one of the most extreme planets ever discovered: K2-141 b,
a planet 202 light-years from Earth and so close to its host star that
its surface is believed to be covered by an ocean of lava. If it has
clouds, they are likely made out of vaporized rock, which could then
precipitate out “rock rain.” Not much is confirmed about this lava
planet, but Dang will use the Webb to study its atmosphere and see
what’s possible on this extreme world.
Winning the project proposal “made me feel like an
astronomer for the first time,” Dang says. “But it also makes K2-141 b
very real suddenly.”
This is the power of an unprecedented telescope such as
the Webb. It will help astronomers like Dang fill in the blank spaces of
the cosmos.
“It’s wild, when you think about it, that we’re able to
piece together the history of what happened before the Earth or the sun
even existed,” Casey says.
If all goes according to plan, these kinds of
breakthroughs could come in a matter of months. Astronomers around the
world are waiting for the countdown to begin.
A Michigan State Police contract,
obtained by The Intercept, sheds new light on the growing use of
little-known surveillance software that helps law enforcement agencies
and corporations watch people’s social media and other website activity.
The software, put out by a Wyoming company called ShadowDragon,
allows police to suck in data from social media and other internet
sources, including Amazon, dating apps, and the dark web, so they can
identify persons of interest and map out their networks during
investigations. By providing powerful searches of more than 120
different online platforms and a decade’s worth of archives, the company
claims to speed up profiling work from months to minutes. ShadowDragon
even claims its software can automatically adjust its monitoring and
help predict violence and unrest. Michigan police acquired the software
through a contract with another obscure online policing company named
Kaseware for an “MSP Enterprise Criminal Intelligence System.”
The inner workings of the product are generally not known to the
public. The contract, and materials published by the companies online,
allow a deeper explanation of how this surveillance works, provided
below.
ShadowDragon has kept a low profile but has
law enforcement customers well beyond Michigan. It was purchased twice
by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in the last two
years, documents show, and was reportedly acquired by the Massachusetts State Police and other police departments within the state.
Michigan officials appear to be keeping their contract and the
identities of ShadowDragon and Microsoft from the public. The
Michigan.gov website does not make the contract available; it instead offers an
email address at which to request the document “due to the sensitive
nature of this contract.” And the contract it eventually provides has
been heavily redacted: The copy given to David Goldberg, a professor at
Wayne State University in Detroit had all mentions of ShadowDragon
software and Microsoft Azure blacked out. What’s more, Goldberg had to
file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the contract. When
the state website did offer the contract, it was unredacted, and I downloaded it before it was withdrawn.
Last year, The Intercept published several articles detailing how
a social media analytics firm called Dataminr relayed tweets about the
George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests to police. The same year, I
detailed at The Intercept how Kaseware’s partner Microsoft helps police surveil and patrol communities through its own offerings and a network of partnerships.
This new revelation about the Michigan contract raises questions
about what digital surveillance capabilities other police departments
and law enforcement agencies in the U.S. might be quietly acquiring. And
it comes at a time when previously known government social media
surveillance is under fire
from civil rights and liberties advocates like MediaJustice and the
American Civil Liberties Union. It also raises the specter of further
abuses in Michigan, where the FBI has been profiling Muslim communities and so-called Black Identity Extremists.
In 2015, it was revealed that for years, the state police
agency was using cell site simulators to spy on mobile phones without
disclosing it to the public.
“Social media surveillance technologies, such as the software
acquired by Michigan State Police, are often introduced under the false
premise that they are public safety and accountability tools. In
reality, they endanger Black and marginalized communities,” Arisha
Hatch, vice president and chief of campaigns at civil rights nonprofit
Color of Change, wrote in an email.
Michigan State Police spokesperson Shanon Banner said in an email
that “the investigative tools available to us as part of this contract
are only used in conjunction with criminal investigations, following all
state and federal laws.” The founder of ShadowDragon, Daniel Clemens,
wrote that the company provides only information that is publicly
available and does not “build products with predictive capabilities.”
A Shadowy Industry
Kaseware and ShadowDragon are part of a shadowy industry of software
firms that exploit what they call “open source intelligence,” or OSINT: the
trails of information that people leave on the internet. Clients
include intelligence agencies, government, police, corporations, and
even schools.
Kaseware, which is partnered to ShadowDragon and Microsoft, provides a
platform for activities that support OSINT and other elements of
digital policing, like data storage, management, and analysis. Its
capabilities range from storing evidence to predictive policing. By
contrast, the two ShadowDragon products acquired by the Michigan State
Police are more narrowly tailored for the surveillance of people using
social media, apps, and websites on the internet. They run on the
Kaseware platform.
To understand how Kaseware and ShadowDragon work together, let us consider each in turn, starting with ShadowDragon.
ShadowDragon: Social Media Surveillance
The Michigan State Police purchased two of ShadowDragon’s OSINT
intelligence tools to run on the Kaseware platform: SocialNet and
OIMonitor.
SocialNet was invented by cybersecurity consulting firm Packet Ninjas
in 2009. Clemens, Packet Ninja’s founder and CEO, went on to start
ShadowDragon as a sister company in 2016, licensing the cyber
intelligence and investigative tools developed by Packet Ninjas over the
prior decade.
At the time of SocialNet’s creation, investigators were left to
search social media networks for clues manually. If a person made a
public post on Twitter or Facebook, for example, an investigator was
free to look online, but they had to personally log onto and search one
social network at a time, post by post, for people who might be suspects
and for their friends and other associates.
Alerted to this problem
by a friend from Pretoria, South Africa-based Paterva, makers of the
Maltego OSINT platform, Clemens decided to build SocialNet. As he put it
in an interview,
“the idea [behind SocialNet] was, let’s throw a net out into all of the
social media platforms, the social media universe, and see what we get
back.” Clemens has claimed in
a company video that “when the FBI started using [SocialNet], they did
an evaluation” and concluded “what used to take us two months in a
background check or an investigation is now taking between five to 15
minutes.”
Today, SocialNet says it pulls data from more than 120 social media networks, websites, and platforms, as well as from the dark web,
data dumps, and RSS feeds. A full list of sources isn’t available, but a
company promotional video and listing at the Maltego website gives an
indication of which websites fall into their surveillance net:
SocialNet searches for information that is publicly available across
these websites and pulls it in when there is a match. But it is
difficult to know with precision which data it pulls. In the promotional
video, some categories of information appear, such as BlackPlanet
users; Busted! mugshots; Bing search results; Amazon comments, products,
users, and wishlists; and so on. Clemens said the company has “crawlers
that scrape information from the public websites. Nothing proprietary
or private is provided to us by the platform companies.”
On its website, ShadowDragon also claims
to conduct “chat protocol monitoring (WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.)” as
well as “dialog protocol monitoring (IRC, etc.).” For these services,
it’s also unclear exactly what kinds of information can be pulled or how
it’s done. Clemens said they don’t intercept any private chats, and
they can confirm whether a specific phone number has a WhatsApp account
if the user’s privacy settings allow it.
In a March 2019 blog post,
Clemens referenced an “integration into monitoring Telegram,” which,
along with WhatsApp, had become “a go-to when there are disruptions.” He
also claimed to have added “some interesting OSINT capabilities in our
SocialNet platform for more hardened and encrypted/secure communication
protocols. (Please ping us on this).” Although Telegram has said its
instant messages are “heavily encrypted,” it also offers widely
available groups and channels.
Clemens said the company is able to monitor chat platforms like
Telegram through public sources of information, which reveal, for
example, “if you respond to a public thread of Twitter or public
Telegram group.” He added, “We don’t evade any encryption
implementations because we’re not interested in weakening the technical
security for other platforms.” Clemens declined to elaborate on what
“capabilities” SocialNet has “for more hardened and encrypted/secure
communication protocols.”
In fact, ShadowDragon seems to strive toward total information awareness. In an interview about investigations, Clemens has stated,
“I want to know everything about the suspect: Where do they get their
coffee, where do they get their gas, where’s their electric bill, who’s
their mom, who’s their dad?”
The precise inner workings of SocialNet are off limits to the public,
as it is expensive software that is sold at the discretion of the
company. Nevertheless, some online resources give an indication of how
it works.
With its surveillance net cast across the internet, SocialNet
can be used to perform investigations on persons and networks of
interest, according to publicly available marketing materials.
Investigators can run search queries for names, email addresses, phone
numbers, aliases, or other information to begin to identify persons of
interest, determine their physical location, ascertain their
“lifestyles,” and analyze their broader networks (such as friends and
friends of friends).
The materials also show how SocialNet organizes information for the
analyst, visually mapping social network graphs and suggesting links
between persons of interest and their networks. Timelines can be created
to help sort out evidence and piece together clues into a broader
picture of what the investigator is trying to uncover. Physical
locations can be uncovered or inferred.
An online tutorial
from 2011 depicts an investigator using SocialNet to hunt down possible
targets by cross-referencing their company domain names with their
email addresses, then finding a friend who two targets might have in
common. The demonstration suggests that the investigator might want to
“social engineer” — or trick — the mutual friend into speaking to the
targets.
The other ShadowDragon tool purchased by the
Michigan State Police, OIMonitor, sends alerts in response to the sort
of data captured by SocialNet, a company engineer says in an online video.
Other company materials say OIMonitor can go further, helping to
detect potential crime before it happens and performing other advanced
feats. One video
explains OIMonitor can “automate and customize monitoring parameters.”
In another video, a ShadowDragon representative provides an example
of a corporation looking to protect its physical venue or executives.
The corporation would “build out an entire dossier of attack patterns,
of things people say that’s bad or something threatening,” and OIMonitor
“just alerts them when it sees the criteria that they’ve set and that
they have experience recognizing as a problem.”
Clemens told me that “customers come to us for the ability to
identify and analyze previous patterns of behavior and relationships
using only public information. We disagree with predictive policing and
so we don’t build products with predictive capabilities or even
suggestions.” Yet their own website says, in the description for the “Predicting Violence”
video, “Clever security teams use OIMonitor to find indicators of
unrest and violence before they start. Because riots don’t start in a
vacuum; there are always indicators.” It’s also unclear if information
pulled from ShadowDragon may be pooled with other data and used by
clients for predictive policing on other systems (Clemens declined to
comment on that).
Hatch raised an alarm about the civil rights implications of
ShadowDragon’s software, stating, “It could be used to incorrectly
identify Black people as criminal suspects and out social justice
activists who wish to remain anonymous for fear of being harassed by
police and white nationalists.”
ShadowDragon also appears to be hoarding information that users and platforms wanted to delete. OIMonitor provides clients with access
to ShadowDragon’s private “historical archive from 2011 to today,” and
it saves monitoring results in case the data disappears from the web,
according to one company video.
In a case example given by the company, running the phone number of a
suspect through the ShadowDragon software “popped up with an old
Foursquare account” he had logged into at his mother’s house 10 years
ago. After looking for the suspect for a month, the investigators were
able to find him the following day.
In addition to police, ShadowDragon services corporate clients, and it can be potentially used for worker surveillance. In a blog post,
the company advertised the ability to use OIMonitor for employee
background checks by employers. Clemens declined to respond to questions
about using ShadowDragon for worker surveillance.
Kaseware: An End-to-End Investigative Platform
Compared with ShadowDragon, Kaseware, the other software company
contracting with Michigan State Police, is more sweeping in scope,
handling more aspects of police work and venturing into the
controversial realm of algorithmic crime fighting.
In 2009, Kaseware’s founders were working at the FBI, where, the company says, they transformed
its 1980s mainframe system into an award winning, modern, web-enabled
platform called Sentinel. Soon thereafter, some of the designers of
Sentinel left the FBI to build Kaseware, based out of Denver and
launched in 2016 as a cloud “software as a service” product for government and corporations.
Kaseware is a centralized online platform where law enforcement
authorities, intelligence agencies, and corporations can dump their
surveillance data. Once on the platform, the surveillance can be
monitored, mapped, and otherwise analyzed using tools
built specifically for Kaseware. The company touts the system’s speed
and ability to integrate diverse sources of information for
command-and-control centers, saying it handles investigations and
security monitoring in an “end-to-end” way: from the ingestion of raw
surveillance at one end to the conclusion of an investigation at the
other. Its diverse set of capabilities are similar to Microsoft’s Domain Awareness System.
Kaseware claims
to streamline a wide range of law enforcement drudgery: generating
reports, managing workloads, facilitating video conferences, and
querying information from the controversial federal records
clearinghouse National Crime Information Center. A redacted portion of
the MSP contract says it can “integrate with FBI eGuardian system
via file exchange.” The eGuardian system allows the FBI to collect and
share Suspicious Activity Reports, or SAR, from different agencies
across the United States. As the ACLU notes,
the system gives law enforcement officials broad discretion to collect
information about commonplace activities and to store it in criminal
intelligence files without evidence of wrongdoing.
A cornerstone Kaseware feature is its ability to ingest and analyze
massive amounts of data. Files, records, logs, disc images, and evidence
are pulled into the platform, which can also handle evidence from “recordings, body cameras, closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras and other sources.” The company claims it can help hunt down a perpetrator’s physical location.
Kaseware marketing materials say its platform ingests zip codes,
addresses, GPS coordinates, geotags, satellite imagery, and data from
internet-connected devices, correlating it with “socioeconomic trends
and environmental events to create layered maps” to reveal “illegal
activity” and — crucially, for civil rights advocates — conduct
“predictive policing.”
Predictive policing, or the use of statistics that quantifies past
crimes to predict future ones, has been heavily criticized by legal scholars and activists on grounds that the systems generate discrimination and harm. Two scholars tested the PredPol predictive policing software for Oakland, California, and found
its software would target Black people at twice the rate as white
people. This is because Black people are overrepresented in Oakland’s
drug crime databases, leading to disproportionate policing of low-income
communities and communities of color.
The Michigan State Police told me, “We do not use the predictive
policing function of the Kaseware platform.” However, it is worth noting
the capability is there, and the software has been sold to other
clients who may be making use of it.
Kaseware also touts its access to open source intelligence across its
marketing literature. Its platform utilizes OSINT tools like
ShadowDragon “to instantly search hundreds of open web, dark web, deep
web and social media sources to access crucial data on cybercriminals’
names, keywords, emails, aliases, phones numbers and more.” Clients “can
also import social media information for forensic analysis alongside
other case details, including photos, followers, likes, friends and post
connections.”
It’s unclear if Kaseware has special access to information or
services with the companies listed in the way that Dataminr, for
example, is provided access
to Twitter’s “firehose,” a database of every public tweet from the
moment it was posted. Twitter’s senior director of global public policy
strategy, Nick Pickles, told me in an email that “we’re not able to
disclose details of our commercial agreements,” but it is “safe to say
that” Kaseware is “on our radar.” Another Twitter spokesperson, Katie
Rosborough, did not answer questions about Kaseware or ShadowDragon,
saying only that Twitter’s public programming interface is not available
for law enforcement purposes. Partners like Dataminr historically have
not used that interface.
Contracts and Deployments
The Michigan State Police contract redacts every mention of
ShadowDragon, SocialNet, OIMonitor, and Microsoft Azure in the contract
shared with the public. David Goldberg’s FOIA request was “partially
denied” citing exemptions to the act to protect “trade secrets, or
financial or proprietary information”; to “protect the security or
safety of persons or property, or the confidentiality, integrity, or
availability of information systems”; and to protect “the identity of a
person who may become a victim of a cybersecurity incident as a result
of the disclosure of identifying that person” or that person’s
“cybersecurity-related practices.”
As I reported
at The Intercept, through its Public Safety and Justice division,
Microsoft provides an extensive array of services to police forces
across the world via its own products and that of partners (like
Kaseware), who typically operate on the Azure Cloud. Microsoft services
the U.S. and Israeli militaries with its HoloLens augmented reality goggles. Its carceral solutions
include its own Digital Prison Management Solution based on its Domain
Awareness System surveillance platform built with the New York Police
Department years ago. Together with its partners, Microsoft’s products
and services extend across the carceral pipeline, from juvenile
detention and pretrial through prison and parole.
Kaseware’s Chief Business Officer Mark Dodge,
a former Naval intelligence and CIA officer, told me in interviews
prior to this year that before working at Kaseware, he had worked at
Accenture, where he helped develop Microsoft’s Domain Awareness System
for the NYPD. He said he also did work for Singapore, which runs the
Microsoft DAS, and “a couple others,” including in London. Dodge then
had a brief stint with Microsoft partner Axon, the industry leader in
Taser stun guns and body cameras — illustrating how circles in the
intelligence, police, and corporate surveillance industry intersect.
The length of the MSP contract is five years, from January 31, 2020,
to January 31, 2025. The Kaseware license costs $340,000 annually, while
SocialNet and OIMonitor cost $39,000 each, bringing the package to
$418,000 per year, or $2,090,000 over five years. The state of Michigan
redacted the contract values of ShadowDragon features. The MSP opted for
a two-day training session at $3,000, which ShadowDragon says
constitutes a “big deep dive on threat assessment and sentiment
analysis.”
The total cost of the MSP contract is $3,293,000.
The sum paid to Microsoft for its Azure Government Cloud services is
bundled into the “Licensing & Support Services” portion of the
contract, and there is no indication how much of that money Microsoft
receives.
Because most of their contracts are not made public or difficult to
access, it’s hard to discern how pervasive Kaseware and ShadowDragon are
in the world.
The first ShadowDragon contract
with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was awarded to
IT firm C & C International Computers & Consultants, Inc. on
July 16, 2020, at a cost of $289,500. The second was for a contract awarded to cybersecurity firm Panamerica Computers on August 31, 2021 at a cost of $602,056. Both were for the use of SocialNet.
ShadowDragon’s SocialNet, OIMonitor, and malware investigation product MalNet is also being deployed
by IT firm ALTEN Calsoft Labs and Cloudly in Asia — “especially
India” — as “solutions for industries such as Government, Banking,
Financial Services, Healthcare and many other verticals.” ALTEN is
headquartered in Bangalore, India, and has offices in the U.S., Europe,
and Singapore. Cloudly is a cybersecurity, intelligence, and
surveillance firm based in Silicon Valley.
With offices in the U.S. and Denmark, ShadowDragon claims a market
presence in “North America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin
America.”
When asked about potential human rights abuses by clients, Clemens
said the company vets “all in-bound requests for our products to ensure
they’re not used to conduct human rights violations.”
Dodge, in the interviews predating this story, told me Kaseware had
about 30 customers as of June 2020 but does not disclose most of them.
The Winslow, Arizona, Police Department rolled out
a Kaseware Computer Aided Dispatch and Records Management System in
2018, and the Wickenburg, Arizona, Police Department was at least considering it.
Kaseware states its
platform “is now used by police departments around the world, Fortune
100 Companies, and many international non-profit organizations.”
Kaseware did not respond to a request for comments for this article.
Human Rights: A World of All-Seeing Public Surveillance
With Kaseware and ShadowDragon, we live in a world where the public’s
online behavior can be monitored across the internet and accessed at
the click of a button to determine who we are, who we know, what our
“lifestyle” is like, where we are located, and more.
These capabilities fundamentally change police powers, said Eric
Williams, managing attorney at the Detroit Justice Center’s Economic
Equity Practice: “It is qualitatively different when you go from the
police being able to check information” a little at a time “to
artificial intelligence being able to analyze everything that you’ve
done online.”
The potential for discriminatory applications is enormous. Williams
noted that searches made by big data tools are “inevitably biased
against people of color, poor people” and the like. He said that
activists from Black Lives Matter, unions, and the #MeToo movement may
be targeted by these technologies, “depending on who is in charge of
them.”
Phil Mayor, a senior staff attorney at the
ACLU of Michigan, said of ShadowDragon, “mapping of the relationships
between people risks suspicion by association” and “is likely to
entrench systemic racism and is a threat to everyone’s privacy. … This
presents the scary possibility of law enforcement of our daily lives
that would be unimaginable until recently.”
There is virtually no transparency behind what Kaseware and
ShadowDragon do, or how the Michigan State Police and other clients
might be using their products, where they are deployed, for what
purpose, and who gets access. Likewise for how these tools impact
activists, the poor, and marginalized communities, who are
disproportionately the targets of police surveillance.
“It’s deeply concerning that this kind of technology is being
purchased and used by law enforcement without public discussion,” Mayor
told me. “Before engaging in new forms of surveillance of citizens, law
enforcement should be coming to the polity and asking what we expect in
terms of our privacy rather than making those decisions for us.”
Williams echoed this, stating, “It is problematic that public money
is being spent on surveillance, of a particularly intrusive type, and
the public is unaware of it.” Even if the police want to keep their
surveillance methods hidden, “the public has a right to know, and should
know, given the lack of laws we have governing a lot of electronic
surveillance.”
In the U.S., as many as 70 percent of police forces use social media to gather intelligence and monitor the public. Yet the law does little to constrain these kinds of tools and practices.
“There’s not a lot of regulations on this,” Williams said, “and we
can’t begin to have a discussion on how it should be regulated if we’re
not aware that it’s happening.” He added that he favors a ban on the
technology, given its opaque deployment and intrusive nature.
Dragnet social media surveillance needs to be urgently addressed by
lawmakers, who should step in and ban this attack on civil rights and
liberties immediately.
For Dean Landers, fixing people’s refrigerators, dishwashers, and washing machines is more of a hassle than it should be.
Even after 40 years running an award-winning repair service in Baltimore, Landers says he still gets the runaround from appliance makers. He can’t always obtain the diagnostic data or electronic codes he needs to finish a job, and if he needs to consult with the manufacturer when all the usual repair steps fail, some won’t even let him pay for the privilege.
That all translates to longer waits and costlier repairs for customers, who in turn may end up replacing their appliances instead of fixing them.
“Every day, we run into something where we need to figure something out by doing an end-around, by talking to somebody else, by doing deeper-dive research than I should have to do because of the structure that these manufacturers have set up,” Landers says.
Home appliances are an overlooked facet of the right-to-repair movement, which aims to make parts, tools, and diagnostic information more easily available to users and independent repair shops. While the difficulties of repairing consumer electronics and heavy equipment have received widespread attention, large appliances have flown under the radar, even as evidence shows that they’re more prone to breaking down than they once were.
That leads not just to greater expenses for consumers, but to more electronic waste. Data from the Environmental Protection Agency shows that 2.1 million tons of waste from major appliances went to landfills in 2018, up from 1.2 tons in 2005, even as recycling increased during that same time frame. A 2015 United Nations University study found that large appliances, such as dishwashers and washing machines, made up nearly two-thirds of all e-waste worldwide. Unlike with phones and other consumer electronics, home appliances have no thriving refurbished market, likely due to the high costs of hauling the products around.
Lawmakers have started to take notice. Large appliances like refrigerators, dishwashers, and washing machines are becoming the next frontier in the growing right-to-repair movement, with a new bill in Congress and fresh interest from the Federal Trade Commission.
Why appliances are hard to fix
If you’ve ever suspected that appliance manufacturers don’t make them like they used to, the evidence is on your side. A 2015 study by the Öko-Institut, a German environmental group, found that 13% of all large appliances that people replaced in 2012 were less than five years old, up from 7% in 2004. Most of those replacements were prompted by breakdowns in the original products.
Based on surveys of its members, Consumer Reports also estimated in 2019 that 40% of all refrigerators will experience issues within their first five years, with problem rates as high as 60% for certain Electrolux and Frigidaire models. For dishwashers and washing machines, the chance of having an issue within five years was 30%, and it was 20% for ranges.
Matthew Zieminski, the general manager of operations for the appliance-repair booking service Nana, says home appliances are a lot more complicated than they used to be. A modern clothes dryer might have a dozen different functions, from steaming and wrinkle-releasing to low-heat drying. That means more potential points of failure, and more ways for users to break things by choosing the wrong settings.
“We do tend to see a shorter lifespan now than we did in the past. And part of that is just, there’s a lot more features, and it’s a lot more complex of an environment than it was 20 or 30 years ago,” Zieminski says.
Still, some reliability issues can’t just be explained by the presence of more technology. Last year, LG settled a class action lawsuit over compressor problems in nearly 1.6 million refrigerators. As part of the settlement, LG denied any wrongdoing and said its fridges weren’t defective. However, according to two technicians I spoke with, those fridges are now a frequent source of repair requests.
After publication, LG spokeswoman Taryn Brucia said the company now backs its refrigerators with a five year warranty on its cooling system, including labor, and a 10-year warranty for linear compressor parts with five years of coverage for labor.
LG is also facing a class action lawsuit over compressors in its Kenmore-branded refrigerators, and Samsung is facing a class action suit over its refrigerators’ ice makers.
Kei Son Summers, an appliance repair tech and the owner of Mr. Kei Services in Oklahoma City, says he believes quality control has fallen by the wayside as companies race to get their products out the door.
“It’s a problem all around when manufacturers don’t take the time to quality-check their [product] before it goes out,” he says.
Authorized repair pressure
Because their appliances are breaking down faster, manufacturers have strong incentives to drive down the cost of repairs while they’re still under warranty, which is often for one year but can run longer depending on the manufacturer. One way companies accomplish this is by pressuring technicians to perform warranty repairs at below their typical costs, says Nathan Proctor, who heads the right-to-repair campaign for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, or U.S. PIRG.
Proctor says that in many cases, technicians can only access troubleshooting guides or diagnostic information by becoming authorized service providers, but that authorization can come with strings attached. For instance, the manufacturer can dictate the price of warranty repairs and require a certain number of them, effectively forcing technicians to recoup their costs in volume or through additional out-of-warranty work.
Three repair technicians confirmed to me that this is common practice among manufacturers.
“If you don’t take the warranty jobs, you can’t get access to the parts, you can’t get the service instructions, and you can’t service the out-of-warranty stuff, so you’re kind of over a barrel,” Proctor says.
While joining an authorized repair program isn’t always detrimental—it can lead to new business, for instance, or provide steady work for new technicians — working with every manufacturer doesn’t always make sense. Repair companies may not want to become authorized if they don’t stand behind a company’s products, or if the brand isn’t popular enough to justify fixing appliances at cut rates.
In those cases, technicians have to rely on workarounds to get the information they need. For example, Dean Landers says that a lot of electronic parts have a programming code that allows them to pair with the existing system, but some manufacturers won’t provide those codes to unauthorized technicians. Landers says he’s hired a former field technician whose only job now is to track down the help that appliance makers won’t provide.
“If you don’t have a relationship with them, because you’re not authorized . . . you can’t get it,” he says. “And so now you’ve got to try to do an end-around. You’ve got to try and find someone that does have that access that will help you, through chat rooms, Facebook pages, myriad ways.”
Technicians and consumers do have options at their disposal for finding their own fixes. Sites like RepairClinic and Sears Parts Direct provide both parts and guides for common issues, similar to how iFixit works for consumer electronics.
But technicians say those resources don’t always have the information they need or the best prices. In those cases, they have to rely on quid-pro-quo arrangements with other repair providers, in which they trade access to various brands.
“You have to have a lot of friends is what you have to do,” Landers says.
Meanwhile, appliance makers put pressure on consumers to stick with authorized technicians as well. A 2018 survey of 50 appliance makers by U.S. PIRG found that 45 of them had threatened to void the warranties of any product repaired by a non-authorized service provider. Proctor says 43 of those companies were still threatening to void warranties as of last October.
The practice echoes that of the consumer electronics industry, which has used an array of tactics to discourage unauthorized repairs. Apple, for instance, has warned users against installing cheaper third-party screen replacements and withheld battery-health reporting features. Many other device makers have stuck scary—and potentially illegal—warning stickers on their products, telling customers that unauthorized repairs could void their warranties.
“It’s the same as Apple or anybody else. It’s to control the behavior of their existing customers to their own benefit,” Proctor says.
Safety first
The appliance industry has argued that its motivations aren’t so nefarious. In a 2019 statement to the FTC, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, or AHAM, said it was concerned with the agency’s investigation into repair restrictions. The trade group cited the proprietary nature of manufacturers’ products and the safety of users, given that technicians are entering customers’ homes and dealing with delicate electronics.
Those arguments echo what other industries claim in their fight against right-to-repair laws, but AHAM also points to the large number of locally-owned repair shops that exist as evidence that the repair industry is healthy. The group says there are more than 20,000 service providers across the U.S., 87% of which are authorized with at least one brand, and 94% of which employ 10 or fewer people. (The group otherwise did not answer specific questions for this story.)
According to U.S. PIRG’s Proctor and some technicians, the industry’s argument that authorizing repair technicians is necessary to ensure quality doesn’t withstand scrutiny.
“I’ve seen some of these guys that are certified, they ain’t worth crap sometimes,” says Myles Ong, the owner of J&M Appliances in Las Vegas.
Landers had a similar assessment, especially outside of major cities where technicians are in shorter supply. “They’re not vetting those guys,” he says. “They need bodies.”
Besides, Ong says, he’s heard of numerous instances in which LG has sent compressors directly to consumers so they can find their own repair technicians, something that Landers says he’s seen happening as well. (LG spokesman Ken Hong would only say that the company doesn’t sell compressors through its customer service website.)
That may be a response to both a shortage of technicians during the pandemic and the refrigerators involved in LG’s class action lawsuit, but it undercuts the argument that only authorized technicians are trustworthy. It’s also prompting more people to just give up and replace their appliances.
“Now, [technicians are] scheduling people out weeks and months, and people don’t have that time,” Ong says. “They’re buying new stuff instead of waiting.”
Carrots and sticks
Landers says the solutions are straightforward. Working with the United Appliance Servicers Association, a trade group for technicians, he recently helped establish a vetting process for refrigerator company Sub-Zero that doesn’t have the usual warranty strings attached. The trade group vets the repair company, Sub-Zero gives its approval, and the technicians get access to the information they need.
“I think that’s a phenomenal middle ground,” he says.
While Landers doesn’t expect the industry to have a right-to-repair awakening on its own, new laws or regulations could help them see the light. In the EU, new rules that went into effect this year require appliance makers to offer replacement parts for up to 7 years for dishwashers and 10 years for other appliances. The FTC has already said that it will crack down on potential violations of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which generally bars companies from tying warranty coverage to a specific service provider. U.S. PIRG’s Proctor says stricter enforcement of those rules could give technicians more leverage when dealing with appliance makers.
Meanwhile, a bill proposed by Congressman Joe Morelle, called the Fair Repair Act, would require companies to make tools, parts, and diagnostics available for any product that depends even partly on the use of electronics. In other words, the very digitization that makes appliances more failure-prone could also end up ensuring they’re easier to repair.
The appliance industry will almost certainly fight those rules, but technicians believe the companies will ultimately benefit when anyone can make repairs more easily. It’ll improve the brands’ reputations, they say, and will benefit the environment at a time when customers are becoming more sensitive about e-waste.
“As long as we get the information to know how to do it, we don’t have to send stuff to a landfill,” Ong says.
