Sonos Makes Tom Conrad Its Permanent CEO as He Pursues Turnaround
Conrad, who took the temporary job in January, will assume the official role immediately, Sonos said on Wednesday. He previously served as an executive at Snap Inc. and the Pandora music streaming service.
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Yahoo
7 minutes ago
- Yahoo
What is the American Worker Rebate Act of 2025? Status update on Trump stimulus check
The American Worker Rebate Act of 2025 was introduced after President Donald Trump floated the idea of a tariff rebate check for taxpayers, much like the stimulus checks that were given during the COVID-19 pandemic. On July 25, responding to a reporter that asked about all of the "tariff revenue coming in" and the "possibility of a rebate to the American public,' Trump said: "We're thinking about that actually." "We have so much money coming in, we're thinking about a little rebate. But the big thing we want to do is pay down debt. But we're thinking about a rebate." A few days after the presidents' tariff rebate comments, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley announced the American Worker Rebate Act of 2025 aimed at sending checks to Americans. Here's what to know about a possible stimulus or rebate check, how much and who would qualify. What is the American Worker Rebate Act of 2025? Hawley's bill, called the American Worker Rebate Act of 2025, would provide a minimum of $600 per adult and dependent child, or $2,400 for a family of four, according to news officials. The benefit would be reduced by 5% for joint filers with an adusted gross income above $150,000 or single filers earning more than $75,000 individually. According to an analysis from The Budget Lab at Yale released July 28, Trump's tariffs could cost U.S. households an average of $2,400 in 2025 through higher prices passed on from companies paying higher tariff taxes. The Treasury Department said on July 25, that the U.S. government posted a $27 billion surplus in June, following a $316 billion deficit in May. Customs duties totaled approximately $27 billion for the month, up from $23 billion in May and 301% higher than June 2024. On an annual basis, tariff collections have totaled $113 billion, or 86% more than a year ago. The bill would allow for a larger rebate if the tariff revenue exceeds projections. Are we getting a stimulus check or Trump tariff rebate in 2025? Trump floated the idea of using part of the governement revenue being generated by the new tariffs and returning it to taxpayers of a certain income level in the form of a rebate check. The rebate idea would be similar to the stimulus checks sent during the pandemic. A rebate is a partial refund of the purchase price that a consumer paid, often upon meeting certain conditions — more like a discount that is refunded after the purchase versus a discount that is applied at the point of sale. A stimulus check on the other hand, is a direct payment to encourage spending and stimulate the economy by putting money directly into the consumers' hands. In February, Trump said he would consider the plan to pay out $5,000 stimulus checks to taxpayers in the form of a 'DOGE dividend' during a summit in Miami. He explained it as using part of the 20% of the savings identified by Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and giving it back to taxpayers. However, he has not shared any further specifics or details about the possible 'DOGE dividend' or its certainty since then. Are we getting an economic relief package in 2025? While speculation about a of $2,000 has surfaced on social media and unverified websites, there has been no official confirmation of any additional economic relief package in 2025 from Congress or the IRS to support this claim. Any such news should be taken with caution as it could be misinformation or attempted fraud. Maria Francis is a Pennsylvania-based journalist with the Mid-Atlantic Connect Team. This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Are we getting a stimulus check? Economic relief package 2025 rebate Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
21 minutes ago
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'Tracking Everyone, All the Time': What Americans Need To Know About Israel's Secret Eavesdropping Program
Nowadays, it seems that the limit to government surveillance is neither the law nor technological capabilities; it's storage space. In the 1990s, the U.S. National Security Agency was "annually converting more than 22 million pounds of secret documents into cheap, soluble slurry" in order to make room for more, according to Body of Secrets by James Bamford. In 2014, the NSA spent $1.5 billion on a massive data center in Utah riddled with electrical problems. But Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the NSA, seems to have figured out a simple workaround for the problem: Contract it out to private industry. A joint investigative report by The Guardian and the Israeli publications +972 Magazine and Local Call revealed on Wednesday that Unit 8200 has been storing massive amounts of intercepted phone audio on Microsoft's Azure cloud service. Microsoft, which pleaded ignorance of what the Israeli government was using its servers for, is not the only American institution involved in setting up the program. Its architect, who trained under U.S. military instructors, may have created a blueprint for future mass surveillance in other countries. The cloud-powered surveillance program was the brainchild of Brig. Gen. Yossi Sariel, the former commander of Unit 8200. Sariel spent 2019 at the National Defense University, a U.S. Department of Defense academy for American and foreign national security professionals, The Washington Post reported last year. In 2020, he "returned to Israel brimming with plans," according to the Post, and took command of Unit 8200 from 2021 until last year. One of those plans, this week's reporting revealed, was to work with private cloud providers. Under Sariel's tenure, Unit 8200's ability to retain and process audio data massively increased. The unit has gone from wiretapping tens of thousands of subjects to recording millions of people's calls, according to the report. Unit 8200 officers told The Guardian and +972 that the unofficial mantra of the project was "a million calls per hour." (The combined population of Israel and the Palestinian territories is 14 million.) Leaked files suggest that Unit 8200 had a goal of storing 70 percent of its data on Azure and that the Israeli military already had 11,500 terabytes of data in total stored on an Azure server in the Netherlands by July 2025. That would be the equivalent of 200 million hours of audio, although it's not clear how much of those 11,500 terabytes comes from Unit 8200's phone intercepts. Microsoft confirmed that Unit 8200 was a customer of its data security services but said that it had "no information" about the data stored on its servers. After the report was published, the Israeli military put out a statement claiming that "Microsoft is not and has not been working with the [Israel Defense Forces] on the storage or processing of data." Even before the surveillance revelations, the relationship between Microsoft and the Israeli government was a subject of controversy. Several Microsoft employees have been fired for publicly protesting over the issue. Most recently, engineer Joe Lopez was fired in May 2025 after shouting "Microsoft is killing Palestinians" during CEO Satya Nadella's keynote speech. Beyond the specifics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, the new reporting carries some lessons about the future of surveillance. Monitoring begets more monitoring; governments set up dragnets in response to security threats, then realize how useful the data is for other goals. The cycle used to be limited by data storage capacity. Nowadays, private industry is increasingly willing and able to fulfill governments' appetite for surveillance capacity, though it's also afraid of bad press and legal liability. Sariel became interested in mass surveillance data collection after a 2015 wave of lone-wolf Palestinian attacks that were impossible to predict by conventional investigative techniques. Someone "decides to perpetrate an attack using a kitchen knife to stab a victim, or the family vehicle to run people over," Sariel wrote in 2021 under a pseudonym, which The Guardian exposed as his last year. "Sometimes the person doesn't even know a day before that he or she is going to commit such an attack. In these cases, traditional intelligence agencies are helpless. How can such an attack be predicted or prevented?" Intelligence officers told +972 Magazine that Sariel became obsessed with "tracking everyone, all the time," and "suddenly, the public became our enemy." While some officers insisted that the surveillance dragnet has saved lives, another portrayed it as a machine that constantly creates pretexts for more aggressive action. "These people get entered into the system, and the data on them just keeps growing," an intelligence officer who recently served in the West Bank told +972. "When they need to arrest someone and there isn't a good enough reason to do so, [the surveillance repository] is where they find the excuse. We're now in a situation where almost no one in the [Palestinian] territories is 'clean,' in terms of what intelligence has on them." For all its technical sophistication, Israeli intelligence failed to anticipate the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. (In fact, Israeli leaders' overconfidence in their high-tech defense may have led them to miss signs of an impending war.) Yet those attacks became another reason to expand the data collection, because the army was preparing to take "long-term control" of Gaza, an intelligence officer told +972. Israeli officials were also uncomfortable with putting such sensitive data in the hands of a foreign third party. Documents from the Israeli justice ministry, obtained by +972, warned that cloud services based in other countries could be exposed to legal liability or even be forced to hand over intelligence data. After the war in Gaza began, Microsoft officials warned Israeli counterparts not to use its services for lethal military targeting, a source at Microsoft told The Guardian. If recent history is any indication, U.S. officials will be watching these challenges closely. The Bush administration looked to Israeli precedents for justifying war-on-terror measures legally, and American police have often incorporated trips to Israel into their counterterrorism training. The "start-up nation" may soon become a model for public-private surveillance partnerships as well. The post 'Tracking Everyone, All the Time': What Americans Need To Know About Israel's Secret Eavesdropping Program appeared first on Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
As electric bills rise, evidence mounts that data centers share blame. States feel pressure to act
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech's energy-hungry data centers. It's not clear that any state has a solution and the actual effect of data centers on electricity bills is difficult to pin down. Some critics question whether states have the spine to take a hard line against tech behemoths like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta. But more than a dozen states have begun taking steps as data centers drive a rapid build-out of power plants and transmission lines. That has meant pressuring the nation's biggest power grid operator to clamp down on price increases, studying the effect of data centers on electricity bills or pushing data center owners to pay a larger share of local transmission costs. Rising power bills are 'something legislators have been hearing a lot about. It's something we've been hearing a lot about. More people are speaking out at the public utility commission in the past year than I've ever seen before,' said Charlotte Shuff of the Oregon Citizens' Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. 'There's a massive outcry.' Not the typical electric customer Some data centers could require more electricity than cities the size of Pittsburgh, Cleveland or New Orleans, and make huge factories look tiny by comparison. That's pushing policymakers to rethink a system that, historically, has spread transmission costs among classes of consumers that are proportional to electricity use. 'A lot of this infrastructure, billions of dollars of it, is being built just for a few customers and a few facilities and these happen to be the wealthiest companies in the world,' said Ari Peskoe, who directs the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard University. 'I think some of the fundamental assumptions behind all this just kind of breaks down.' A fix, Peskoe said, is a 'can of worms" that pits ratepayer classes against one another. Some officials downplay the role of data centers in pushing up electric bills. Tricia Pridemore, who sits on Georgia's Public Service Commission and is president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, pointed to an already tightened electricity supply and increasing costs for power lines, utility poles, transformers and generators as utilities replace aging equipment or harden it against extreme weather. The data centers needed to accommodate the artificial intelligence boom are still in the regulatory planning stages, Pridemore said, and the Data Center Coalition, which represents Big Tech firms and data center developers, has said its members are committed to paying their fair share. But growing evidence suggests that the electricity bills of some Americans are rising to subsidize the massive energy needs of Big Tech as the U.S. competes in a race against China for artificial intelligence superiority. Data and analytics firm Wood Mackenzie published a report in recent weeks that suggested 20 proposed or effective specialized rates for data centers in 16 states it studied aren't nearly enough to cover the cost of a new natural gas power plant. In other words, unless utilities negotiate higher specialized rates, other ratepayer classes — residential, commercial and industrial — are likely paying for data center power needs. Meanwhile, Monitoring Analytics, the independent market watchdog for the mid-Atlantic grid, produced research in June showing that 70% — or $9.3 billion — of last year's increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand. States are responding Last year, five governors led by Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro began pushing back against power prices set by the mid-Atlantic grid operator, PJM Interconnection, after that amount spiked nearly sevenfold. They warned of customers 'paying billions more than is necessary.' PJM has yet to propose ways to guarantee that data centers pay their freight, but Monitoring Analytics is floating the idea that data centers should be required to procure their own power. In a filing last month, it said that would avoid a "massive wealth transfer' from average people to tech companies. At least a dozen states are eyeing ways to make data centers pay higher local transmission costs. In Oregon, a data center hot spot, lawmakers passed legislation in June ordering state utility regulators to develop new — presumably higher — power rates for data centers. The Oregon Citizens' Utility Board says there is clear evidence that costs to serve data centers are being spread across all customers — at a time when some electric bills there are up 50% over the past four years and utilities are disconnecting more people than ever. New Jersey's governor signed legislation last month commissioning state utility regulators to study whether ratepayers are being hit with 'unreasonable rate increases' to connect data centers and to develop a specialized rate to charge data centers. In some other states, like Texas and Utah, governors and lawmakers are trying to avoid a supply-and-demand crisis that leaves ratepayers on the hook — or in the dark. Doubts about states protecting ratepayers In Indiana, state utility regulators approved a settlement between Indiana Michigan Power Co., Amazon, Google, Microsoft and consumer advocates that set parameters for data center payments for service. Kerwin Olsen, of the Citizens Action Council of Indiana, a consumer advocacy group, signed the settlement and called it a 'pretty good deal' that contained more consumer protections than what state lawmakers passed. But, he said, state law doesn't force large power users like data centers to publicly reveal their electric usage, so pinning down whether they're paying their fair share of transmission costs "will be a challenge.' In a March report, the Environmental and Energy Law Program at Harvard University questioned the motivation of utilities and regulators to shield ratepayers from footing the cost of electricity for data centers. Both utilities and states have incentives to attract big customers like data centers, it said. To do it, utilities — which must get their rates approved by regulators — can offer 'special deals to favored customers' like a data center and effectively shift the costs of those discounts to regular ratepayers, the authors wrote. Many state laws can shield disclosure of those rates, they said. In Pennsylvania, an emerging data center hot spot, the state utility commission is drafting a model rate structure for utilities to consider adopting. An overarching goal is to get data center developers to put their money where their mouth is. 'We're talking about real transmission upgrades, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars,' commission chairman Stephen DeFrank said. 'And that's what you don't want the ratepayer to get stuck paying for." ___ Follow Marc Levy on X at Solve the daily Crossword
