Tag: amazon

Amazon Data Center Linked to Cluster of Rare Cancers

For the hundreds of communities who’ve been saddled with data centers in recent years, the bulky fixtures are sources of unbearable noise, soaring energy prices, and plenty of electrical fires.

Add another grim possibility to that list: debilitating rare cancers.

Reporting on the “data center boom” in the state of Oregon, Rolling Stone tells the story of Jim Doherty, a cattle rancher and former county commissioner of Morrow, in eastern Oregon.

Doherty’s story began when he noticed a rise in bizarre medical conditions among the county’s 45,000 residents, linked to toxins in the local water. Working with the county health office, the rancher-turned-official began a survey of 70 wells throughout his jurisdiction — 68 of which, his testing found, violated the federal limit for nitrates in drinking water.

Of the first 30 homes he visited, Doherty told RS that 25 residents had recently had miscarriages, while six had lost a kidney. “One man about 60 years old had his voice box taken out because of a cancer that only smokers get, but that guy hadn’t smoked a day of his life,” he told the publication.

But the spike in cancer-causing pollution wasn’t just the fault of local farms, as Doherty expected. It had its roots in a 10,000 square foot data center by the commerce giant Amazon, which first went online in Morrow County in 2011.

Basically, the allegations go like this: industrial megafarms operating in the area are responsible for churning out millions of gallons of wastewater, laden with nitrates from fertilizers. All that waste has to go somewhere, which is one way of saying it mostly ends up in the ground.

Amazon’s hulking data center, thirsty for water to cool its blazing hot computer chips, supercharged this process, adding millions of gallons of wastewater a year to the heavy volume of farm runoff, which Morrow County was already struggling to keep up with. Soon even the deepest reaches of the local aquifer were tainted, according to RS, as huge volumes of data center and agricultural wastewater saturated the water table.

This meant that the data center itself began taking on the toxic sludge as it drew on groundwater to cool its electronics. When it did, evaporation only further concentrated the wastewater, which occasionally contained nitrate levels eight times higher than Oregon’s safe limit. The super concentrated data center water then made its way back into the waste system, where it ostensibly piled up all over again.

In response to the allegations, Amazon spokesperson Lisa Levandowski said that “our data centers draw water from the same supply as other community members; nitrates are not an additive we use in any of our processes, and the volume of water our facilities use and return represents only a very small fraction of the overall water system — not enough to have any meaningful impact on water quality.”

Morrow County residents, however, beg to differ.

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WaPo Defends Data Centers—With Few Disclosures That Amazon Depends on Them

US electricity prices, you may have noticed, keep going up. And in some parts of the country, like here in the DC region, they’re soaring. In Virginia, for example, electricity rates are up 13% this year, an issue Democrats highlighted as they swept back into power in Richmond earlier this month.

Burgeoning electric bills also factored into Democrats’ November wins in New Jersey and Georgia. But let’s stick with Virginia for a moment, where energy-sucking data centers are so plentiful that if northern Virginia’s DC suburbs were to secede, the new country would have more data center capacity than China.

As a result of these data centers, this new country would likely suffer from crippling electric bills. “Wholesale electricity [now] costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers. That’s being passed on to customers,” read a recent Bloomberg subhead.

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Report: U.S. Is the World’s Largest Debtor to China — Thanks to Amazon, Disney, and Tesla

A report published on Tuesday by the AidData research lab at William & Mary university in Williamsburg, Virginia, found that the United States is the largest recipient of loans from China.

The report, entitled Chasing China: Learning to Play by Beijing’s Global Lending Rules, found that 1,193 Chinese banks, investment companies, and government institutions loaned $2.2 trillion to recipients in 179 countries between 2000 and 2023.

AidData researchers drew two surprising conclusions from their research: “China’s overseas lending portfolio is vastly larger than previously understood,” and its loans to the developed world are an order of magnitude larger than widely believed.

The common image of Chinese loans is banks pumping huge loans to Third World countries through China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The ostensible purpose of BRI was to help developing countries build vital infrastructure, but the projects are often criticized as unprofitable “debt traps” approved by spendthrift local governments that saddle the borrowing nations with debts to Beijing they can never repay.

Whatever the flaws of BRI might be, AidData determined that only about 20 percent of China’s titanic lending portfolio involves infrastructure projects in developing nations. Meanwhile, the amount China loans to developed nations “skyrocketed from 12% to 76%” between 2000 and 2023. Ten of the top 20 destinations for Chinese loans are “high-income” countries.

“Another major discovery is that Chinese state-owned creditors have bankrolled approximately 10,000 projects and activities in 72 high-income countries to the tune of nearly $1 trillion,” the report said.

“Much of the lending to wealthy countries is focused on critical infrastructure, critical minerals, and the acquisition of high-tech assets like semiconductor companies,” noted AidData’s lead author, Brad Parks.

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Secret details of Israel’s mammoth deal with Google and Amazon revealed – media

Israel has forced US tech giants Google and Amazon to violate their own legal obligations under a 2021 cloud services contract with West Jerusalem, according to a joint investigation by several news media outlets, including The Guardian.

The Jewish state’s contracts with US tech platforms have been under close scrutiny following widespread accusations, including from the UN, that its military response to the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack that killed over 1,200 people constitutes a genocide.

Known as Project Nimbus, the $1.2 billion deal reportedly bars the firms from restricting the Israeli government’s access to cloud services they provide, even if it violates their terms of use, the reports, carried by The Guardian along with +972 Magazine and Local Call, suggest.

The deal also reportedly requires the two companies to secretly notify West Jerusalem using a so-called “winking mechanism” should any foreign state or court seek access to Israeli data stored in the cloud.

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AWS outage post-mortem fingers DNS as the culprit that took out a chunk of the internet and services for days — automation systems race and crash

The recent Amazon Web Services outage that took out a significant portion of the internet, games, and even smart home devices for days, was extensively covered in the news. Cloud services’ distributed architecture should protect customers from failures like this one, so what went wrong? Amazon published a detailed technical post-mortem of the failure, and as the famous haiku poem goes: “It’s not DNS. / There’s no way it’s DNS. / It was DNS.”

As a rough analogy, consider what happens when there’s a car crash. There’s a traffic jam that stretches for miles, in an accordion-like effect that lasts well after the accident scene has been cleared. The very first problem was fixed relatively quickly, with a three-hour outage from October 19 at 11:48 PM until October 20 at 2:40 AM. However, as with the traffic jam example, dependencies started breaking, and didn’t fully come online until much later.

The root cause was reportedly that the DNS configuration for DynamoDB (database service) was broken and published to Route53 (DNS service). In turn, parts of EC2 (virtual machine service) also went down, as its automated management services rely on DynamoDB. Amazon’s Network Load Balancer also naturally depends on DNS, so it too encountered issues.

It’s worth noting that DynamoDB failing across the entire US-East-1 region is, by itself, enough to bring down what are probably millions of websites and services. However, not being able to bring up EC2 instances was extra bad, and load balancing being affected was diamond-badge bad.

The specific technical issue behind the DNS failure was a programmer’s “favorite” bug: a race condition, in which two repeating events keep re-doing or undoing each other’s effects — the famous GIF of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck with the poster is illustrative.

The DynamoDB DNS resolution uses two components: a DNS Planner that, as the name implies, periodically issues a new Plan that considers system load and availability. The DNS Enactors, whenever they see a new Plan, apply it to Route53 as a transaction, meaning a plan either fully applies or it doesn’t. So far, so good.

What happened was that the first DNS Enactor was taking its sweet time to apply what we’ll call the Old Plan. As New Plans came in, another Enactor took one and applied it. There’s now good and updated data in Route53, and a clean-up of outdated plans (Old Plan included) is issued, just as First Enactor finished applying Old Plan.

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Maine Woman Receives 250 State Election Ballots in Amazon Package Delivery

As voters in Maine prepare to cast their ballots in a state referendum election on November 4th, a Newburgh woman received a surprise delivery.  She was expecting a package with household goods and a toy lightsaber, but instead received bundles of ballots for the November 4th election, totaling over 250 ballots.

According to the Maine Wire:

The discovery raised alarms about election security, leading the Maine Republican Party Chairman to call for a federal criminal investigation as the state is mere weeks from deciding on whether it will join 36 other states in requiring some form of Vote ID.

The package arrived Tuesday looking beat up and re-taped, as if tampered with. Inside, along with household items, were bundles of ballots packaged in tamper-evident packs of 50 — the same format used for official shipments to local clerks. Election officials who reviewed photographs confirmed the documents appear to be authentic 2025 ballots.

The resident, stunned by the find, immediately turned the ballots over to the town office.

“I am greatly concerned for our state and its voting requirements,” she said.

“When I opened it, there were 250 official State of Maine referendum ballots inside my box. Thank goodness I am an honest citizen and immediately reached out to my town clerk and took the ballots to the town for safekeeping.”

Photographs obtained by the Maine Wire show that the ballots were included in the box with the household items the woman had ordered.

Previously Maine Wire posted to X a clip of Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows admitting that non-citizens may be on the voter rolls in Maine, prompting calls for voter identification.

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Outrage erupts after Amazon sells book about Charlie Kirk’s assassination HOURS after the shooting

Outrage and online conspiracy theories spread after a book about Charlie Kirk’s assassination was listed for sale on Amazon.

On Wednesday, social media users shared images of a book available on Amazon titled ‘The Shooting of Charlie Kirk: A Comprehensive Account of the Utah Valley University Attack, the Aftermath, and America’s Response.’

However, many irate users on X pointed out that the publication date listed on the retail giant’s website showed ‘September 9, 2025,’ the day before Kirk was fatally shot during his college campus speaking tour. 

The existence of the book and the bizarre date immediately set off wild speculation that the assassination was an orchestrated plot against the conservative influencer.

Speaking with the Daily Mail, an Amazon spokesperson confirmed that the book was listed on September 10, noting that the publishing date was wrong due to a system error. 

‘The title in question is no longer available for sale. Due to a technical issue, the date of publication that had been displayed for this title, while it was briefly listed, was incorrect, and we apologize for any confusion this may have caused,’ the spokesperson said.

They added that the 81-page book was actually published ‘late in the afternoon’ on September 10, the day Kirk was killed in Orem, Utah. 

While the book was briefly available on Amazon, it was advertised as being written by Anastasia J Casey. However, the Daily Mail could not find any record of a published author by that name.

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Amazon Acquires Bee, the AI Wearable That Hears Everything You Say

Amazon is moving to acquire Bee, a startup focused on voice-driven wearable technology, signaling a broader push into AI-powered personal devices.

Bee manufactures a lightweight bracelet and an Apple Watch app designed to capture and process audio from the surrounding environment. The device listens continuously unless the user manually mutes it. Its primary function is to help users manage tasks by turning spoken cues into reminders and lists.

The company promotes its vision by stating, “We believe everyone should have access to a personal, ambient intelligence that feels less like a tool and more like a trusted companion. One that helps you reflect, remember, and move through the world more freely.”

According to Amazon, Bee employees have been offered positions within the company, suggesting that the acquisition includes not just technology but the team behind it. This move is part of Amazon’s intent to extend its AI ambitions beyond home assistants like the Echo. Other major tech companies are following similar paths. OpenAI is developing its own hardware, Meta has begun embedding AI into smart glasses, and Apple is rumored to be working on its own version of AI-integrated eyewear.

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Amazon Ring Cashes In On Techno-Authoritarianism And Mass Surveillance

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff is back at the helm of the surveillance doorbell company, and with him is the surveillance-first-privacy-last approach that made Ring one of the most maligned tech devices. Not only is the company reintroducing new versions of old features which would allow police to request footage directly from Ring users, it is also introducing a new feature that would allow police to request live-stream access to people’s home security devices.

This is a bad, bad step for Ring and the broader public.

Ring is rolling back many of the reforms it’s made in the last few years by easing police access to footage from millions of homes in the United States. This is a grave threat to civil liberties in the United States. After all, police have used Ring footage to spy on protestors, and obtained footage without a warrant or consent of the user. It is easy to imagine that law enforcement officials will use their renewed access to Ring information to find people who have had abortions or track down people for immigration enforcement.

Siminoff has announced in a memo seen by Business Insider that the company will now be reimagined from the ground up to be “AI first”—whatever that means for a home security camera that lets you see who is ringing your doorbell. We fear that this may signal the introduction of video analytics or face recognition to an already problematic surveillance device.

It was also reported that employees at Ring will have to show proof that they use AI in order to get promoted.

Not to be undone with new bad features, they are also planning on rolling back some of the necessary reforms Ring has made: namely partnering with Axon to build a new tool that would allow police to request Ring footage directly from users, and also allow users to consent to letting police livestream directly from their device.

After years of serving as the eyes and ears of police, the company was compelled by public pressure to make a number of necessary changes. They introduced end-to-end encryption, they ended their formal partnerships with police which were an ethical minefield, and they ended their tool that facilitated police requests for footage directly to customers. Now they are pivoting back to being a tool of mass surveillance.

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The ‘Economy of Genocide’ Report: A Reckoning Beyond Rhetoric

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in occupied Palestine, stands as a testament to the notion of speaking truth to power. This “power” is not solely embodied by Israel or even the United States, but by an international community whose collective relevance has tragically failed to stem the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Her latest report, ‘From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,’ submitted to the UN Human Rights Council on July 3, marks a seismic intervention. It unflinchingly names and implicates companies that have not only allowed Israel to sustain its war and genocide against Palestinians, but also confronts those who have remained silent in the face of this unfolding horror.

Albanese’s ‘Economy of Genocide’ is far more than an academic exercise or a mere moral statement in a world whose collective conscience is being brutally tested in Gaza. The report is significant for multiple, interlocking reasons. Crucially, it offers practical pathways to accountability that transcend mere diplomatic and legal rhetoric. It also presents a novel approach to international law, positioning it not as a delicate political balancing act, but as a potent tool to confront complicity in war crimes and expose the profound failures of existing international mechanisms in Gaza.

Two vital contexts are important to understanding the significance of this report, considered a searing indictment of direct corporate involvement, not only in the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, but Israel’s overall settler-colonial project.

First, in February 2020, following years of delay, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) released a database that listed 112 companies involved in business activities within illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine. The database exposes several corporate giants – including Airbnb, Booking.com, Motorola Solutions, JCB, and Expedia – for helping Israel maintain its military occupation and apartheid.

This event was particularly earth-shattering, considering the United Nations’ consistent failure at reining in Israel, or holding accountable those who sustain its war crimes in Palestine. The database was an important step that allowed civil societies to mobilize around a specific set of priorities, thus pressuring corporations and individual governments to take morally guided positions. The effectiveness of that strategy was clearly detected through the exaggerated and angry reactions of the US and Israel. The US said it was an attempt by “the discredited” Council “to fuel economic retaliation,” while Israel called it a “shameful capitulation” to pressure.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza, starting on October 7, 2023, however, served as a stark reminder of the utter failure of all existing UN mechanisms to achieve even the most modest expectations of feeding a starving population during a time of genocide. Tellingly, this was the same conclusion offered by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who, in September 2024, stated that the world had “failed the people of Gaza.”

This failure continued for many more months and was highlighted in the UN’s inability to even manage the aid distribution in the Strip, entrusting the job to the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a mercenary-run violent apparatus that has killed and wounded thousands of Palestinians. Albanese herself, of course, had already reached a similar conclusion when, in November 2023, she confronted the international community for “epically failing” to stop the war and to end the “senseless slaughtering of innocent civilians.”

Albanese’s new report goes a step further, this time appealing to the whole of humanity to take a moral stance and to confront those who made the genocide possible. “Commercial endeavors enabling and profiting from the obliteration of innocent people’s lives must cease,” the report declares, pointedly demanding that “corporate entities must refuse to be complicit in human rights violations and international crimes or be held to account.”

According to the report, categories of complicity in the genocide are divided into arms manufacturers, tech firms, building and construction companies, extractive and service industries, banks, pension funds, insurers, universities, and charities.

These include Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, IBM, and even Danish shipping giant Maersk, among nearly 1,000 other firms. It was their collective technological know-how, machinery, and data collection that allowed Israel to kill, to date, over 57,000 and wound over 134,000 in Gaza, let alone maintain the apartheid regime in the West Bank.

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