The mass shooting of 19 children and two teachers, and the wounding of 17 more people, at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday was a genuinely horrific event. The students killed were 9, 10 and 11 years old, in the second, third and fourth grades. The adults killed, both women, were fourth-grade teachers. The perpetrator of the crime barricaded himself inside a classroom and opened fire with a lightweight semi-automatic rifle that he had obtained a day after his 18th birthday, one week earlier.

Several years ago, I had to deal with a situation that may be familiar to a lot of people: I was slammed with a series of high medical bills that had been denied by the insurance company. The doctor was in network, but according to the insurance company, his bills were coded wrong. Or wait, his facilities weren’t in network or… well, you get the idea. It took over a year and many phone calls to iron out the issue — and I wouldn’t have gotten through it had I not been able to record each phone call I made with the insurance company and the various medical facilities involved.

Mike Parson, Governor of Missouri, does not understand how websites work. He held a press conference earlier this week in St. Louis to once more reiterate his desire to prosecute a St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist for looking at the source code of a state-run website.

The Ontario government has passed new laws it says will help employees disconnect from the office and create a better work-life balance.

The recently passed $1 trillion infrastructure package is jam-packed with initiatives but sprinkled in there alongside $17 billion in funding for road safety programs is a mandate requiring carmakers to implement monitoring systems to identify and stop drunk drivers.

The fight over the pipeline will be, at least for now, where Biden’s climate commitment will be judged.

The Epic v. Apple trial was bookended by Tims. Epic Games called its CEO Tim Sweeney as the first witness nearly three weeks ago. Yesterday, Apple called Tim Cook as the last to take the stand, before both sides make their final case to a judge on Monday. Cook was supposed to bring home Apple’s defense of its ecosystem. He did it by laying out Apple’s most high-minded principles — but also its hard financial calculations.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday issued a stunning ruling: It said a decades-old legal shield preventing platforms from lawsuits should not apply to Snapchat in a case involving a fatal car crash.

The European Commission will issue antitrust charges against Apple over concerns about the company’s App Store practices, according to a report from the Financial Times. The commission has been investigating whether Apple has broken EU competition rules with its App Store policies, following an initial complaint from Spotify back in 2019 over Apple’s 30 percent cut on subscriptions.

Google will soon be more selective about which apps on the Play Store can see all of the other apps you have installed (via XDA-Developers). As Ars Technica points out, your list of installed apps, innocent as it seems, can communicate to developers personal traits like dating preferences and political affiliations. So starting on May 5th, 2021, developers will have to provide a very good reason for why Google should let you access info like that.

A new bill to bring back net neutrality is on its way, supported by one of the open internet’s most fervent advocates. At an advocacy event last month, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) announced that he would be introducing a measure in the next few “weeks” that would engrave the no throttling, block, or paid fast lanes rules into law.

The vaccine rollout in the United States has been a national embarrassment. A doctor in Houston was fired for using ten doses of vaccine that would have otherwise expired and gone to waste. Local and state sign-up portals are impossible to navigate, even for tech-literate adult children trying to enroll their elderly parents. There is seemingly unending confusion about overall supply, which states are desperately low on shots, and when the country can expect vaccine production to scale up to meet the urgency of the demand.

In October, Wisconsin denied Foxconn subsidies because it had failed to build the LCD factory specified in its contract with the state. As The Verge reported, it had created a building one-twentieth the size of the promised factory, taken out a permit to use it for storage, and failed to employ anywhere near the number of employees the contract called for. Nevertheless, Foxconn publicly objected “on numerous grounds” to Wisconsin’s denial of subsidies.

The draft language of the emergency coronavirus relief package includes a tax break for corporate meal expenses pushed by the White House and strongly denounced by some congressional Democrats, according to a summary of the deal circulating among congressional officials and officials who are familiar with the provision.

In 1992, David Sedaris first read “Santaland Diaries,” the tale of the horrible time he had working as a Macy’s elf. The story includes him recounting an awful customer threatening to have him fired, which he imagines responding to by saying, “I’m going to have you killed.” That was the ‘90s, though, and Sedaris is no longer a lowly department store elf. He’s now a rich guy who would like to be able to fire people who, like his younger self, did not do their jobs to the satisfaction of angry customers.

Not everyone looks forward to working from home in some idyllic location, far away from the city crowds.

Laurence Berland and Kathryn Spiers were fired in the wake of employee organizing efforts. Now, the NLRB says the terminations violated labor law.

The Trump administration has officially withdrawn from the Open Skies treaty, six months after starting the process to leave.

Employees who choose to work remotely should pay a tax to help those workers on low incomes who cannot, said a research note from Deutsche Bank. According to the research report titled "What We Must Do to Rebuild," employees who work from home receive immediate financial benefits, including reduced costs for travel, food and clothing.

The next four years won't be easy for tech. But they'll be easier than they could've been.