Victoria Fox's Blog, page 110

The fiber market heats up with the purchase of the Digi network by Onivia

The sale by Digi of an extensive fiber optic network to Onivia – one of the large independent wholesale operators in the Spanish market – is significant for several reasons. One is the economic importance in itself, since the transaction amounts to 750 million euros .

But it is also going to have very important consequences in the future configuration of the competitive framework of the telecommunications sector in Spain. To begin with, it represents the creation of a very important group, with 10 million homes – between the 6 million that it buys from Digi and the more than 4 million that Onivia already owned -, and with a very complementary presence from the big cities – which is where it has deployed Digi – to the medium and small s – which are Onivia ‘s previous focus of specialization -.

This will undoubtedly be an incentive and facilitator of competition, since a group of that scale will undoubtedly lower the barriers to entry into the sector. The new Onivia will make it easier for operators of all types, including regional ones, to consider extending their commercial activity to other areas very easily.

The big difference, furthermore, is that Onivia may be more aggressive in its prices than the other two large existing fiber networks in Spain: those in the hands of Telefónica and Masorange . The reason is that, unlike its two rivals, Onivia does not have a retail customer base to protect.

The objective of every wholesale operator is to ensure that the greatest number of telcos use their network to reach customers. The other great effect is that, due to its new scale, it will be considered a potential consolidator of the wholesale telecom sector, a sector that is too atomized and in which many groups lack the necessary scale.

Therefore, it could accelerate the inevitable consolidation process that must occur in this sector in which there are other operators susceptible to purchase or merger, such as Adamo, Elanta, Olin, PTV, Rede Aberta or Asteo.

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Criteria rises to 5% in Telefónica in the midst of the escalation of Sepi and the Saudi STC

The holding company of La Caixa doubles its participation and, adding 2.5% of CaixaBank, is positioned as the largest shareholder, waiting for Sepi and STC to reach 10% each.

CriteriaCaixa , the holding company that manages the business assets of the La Caixa Foundation , informed the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) yesterday that it has reached a 5.007% stake in the share capital of Telefónica , which represents c

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Short message service X: Brazil's judiciary launches investigation against Elon Musk

In Brazil, the highest court has opened an investigation against tech billionaire Elon Musk for obstruction of justice by company X. Judge Alexandre de Moraes accused Musk of “criminal instrumentalization” of the short message service X. “The social network X must refrain from disregarding court orders, including reactivating an account that the Supreme Court has ordered to be blocked,” the judge said.

Moraes threatened Musk with a fine of about $20,000 for each account that is reactivated in violation of the court’s decision. “Social networks are not a lawless space,” the judge wrote in capital letters in his order.

Moraes is one of eleven judges of the Supreme Court. He also heads the country’s Supreme Electoral Court (TSE). In the fight against disinformation, he has ordered the blocking of accounts of influential personalities on online networks in recent years. Most of them were supporters of the far-right former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was banned from all political office for eight years by the TSE in June.

Attorney General calls for regulation of social networks

Musk recently launched a series of attacks against Moraes on X. “This judge has shamelessly and repeatedly betrayed the Constitution and the Brazilian people,” Musk wrote. He called for his removal or resignation. Musk also threatened to publish details of the order blocking the X accounts, something the Supreme Court had previously prohibited.

Shortly after the first attacks against Moraes, Brazilian Attorney General Jorge Messias called for “regulation of social networks”. “We cannot live in a society where billionaires living abroad control social networks and are willing to violate the rule of law by disregarding court orders and threatening our authorities,” he wrote on X.

In Brazil, the highest court has opened an investigation against tech billionaire Elon Musk for obstruction of justice by company X. Judge Alexandre de Moraes accused Musk of “criminal instrumentalization” of the short message service X. “The social network X must refrain from disregarding court orders, including reactivating an account that the Supreme Court has ordered to be blocked,” the judge said.

Moraes threatened Musk with a fine of about $20,000 for each account that is reactivated in violation of the court’s decision. “Social networks are not a lawless space,” the judge wrote in capital letters in his order.

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Android’s Bluetooth trackers are finally shipping in late May

Chipolo’s trackers. The keychain tracker takes a CR2023 battery; the card is not rechargeable. Chipolo
Pebblebee’s trackers are all rechargeable. Pebblebee
Google’s “Find My Device” app. Google

After an announcement that ended up being a year early, Android’s version of Tile/AirTags is ready to launch. Google has been gearing up on the software side of things to enable a Bluetooth tracking network on Android, and the company’s two tracking tag hardware partners, Pebblebee and Chipolo, now have ship dates. The two companies each have a press release today, with Pebblebee saying its trackers will ship in “late May,” while Chipolo says it will ship “after May 27th.” Google has a blog post out, too, promising “additional Bluetooth tags from Eufy, Jio, Motorola and more” later this year.

Both sets of devices have been up for preorder for a year now, and it doesn’t seem like anything has changed since. Both companies are offering little Bluetooth trackers in a keychain tag or credit card format, and Pebblebee has a third stick-on tag format. They’ll all be anonymously tracked by Android’s 3 billion-device Bluetooth tracker network, and the device owner will be able to see them in Google’s “Find my device” app.

Chipolo’s “One Point” key chain tag is the only thing that takes a CR2032 coin cell battery, while the company’s credit card tracker is not rechargeable. Pebblebee’s key chain, credit card, and stick-on tracker all have rechargeable batteries, including the wallet card, which is very rare! Nothing has UWB for precise location tracking—everything uses a speaker. Both companies sell multiple SKUs of what look like the exact same product but are locked to Google’s or Apple’s network—no switching allowed.

These were all supposed to come out in 2023 originally. Google’s patch notes say that the tracking network shipped in Android in December 2022, even though nothing is using it. The company has actually been waiting on Apple. In May 2023, Google and Apple announced a joint standard for “unknown tracker” alerts. While the two networks will not be compatible, they will team up to alert users if a tracker is being used to stalk them. All this hardware was announced a week later, but in July 2023, Google shipped its half of the joint tracking standard (enabling Android phones to alert users to an unknown AirTag), and the company said it wouldn’t enable its tracking network until Apple released its half of the standard in iOS. It looks like Apple will do that in iOS 17.5, taking a year to do what Google did in a month. iOS 17.5 is expected to be out—you guessed it—at the end of May, so these tags can finally ship.

Listing image by Chipolo

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Apple now allows retro game emulators on its App Store—but with big caveats

Enlarge / The classic Sega Genesis game Sonic the Hedgehog running on an iPhone—in this case, as a standalone app.Samuel Axon

When Apple posted its latest update to the App Store’s app review and submission policies for developers, it included language that appears to explicitly allow a new kind of app for emulating retro console games.

Apple has long forbidden apps that run code from an external source, but today’s announced changes now allow “software that is not embedded in the binary” in certain cases, with “retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games” specifically listed as one of those cases.

Here’s the exact wording:

4.7 Mini apps, mini games, streaming games, chatbots, plug-ins, and game emulators

Apps may offer certain software that is not embedded in the binary, specifically HTML5 mini apps and mini games, streaming games, chatbots, and plug-ins. Additionally, retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games. You are responsible for all such software offered in your app, including ensuring that such software complies with these Guidelines and all applicable laws. Software that does not comply with one or more guidelines will lead to the rejection of your app. You must also ensure that the software adheres to the additional rules that follow in 4.7.1 and 4.7.5. These additional rules are important to preserve the experience that App Store customers expect, and to help ensure user safety.

It’s a little fuzzy how this will play out, but it may not allow the kind of emulators you see on Android and desktop, which let you play retro games from any outside source.

Retro game emulators run what are colloquially called ROM files, which are more or less images of the game cartridges or discs that played on console hardware. By now, it’s well-established that the emulators themselves are completely legal, but the legality of the ROM files downloaded from ROM sites on the Internet depends on the specific files and circumstances.

There are ROMs that are entirely public domain or in some license where the creator allows distribution; there are ROMs that are technically copyrighted intellectual property but where the original owner no longer exists, and the current ownership is unknown or unenforced; and there are some ROMs (like many games made by Nintendo) where the owner still has an interest in controlling distribution and often takes action to try to curb illegal sharing and use of the files.

Additionally, many game publishers use emulators to run ROMs of their own retro games, which they sell to consumers either as standalone games or in collections for modern platforms.

It’s not completely clear from Apple’s wording, but our interpretation of Apple’s new rules is that it’s likely only the last of those examples will be possible; companies that own the intellectual property could launch emulator apps for downloading ROMs of their (and only their) games. So, for example, Sega could offer a Sega app that would allow users to download an ever-expanding library of Sega games, either as part of a subscription, for free, or as in-app purchases. Sega has offered its retro games on the iPhone before in emulation but with a standalone app for each game.

“You are responsible for all such software offered in your app, including ensuring that such software complies with these Guidelines and all applicable laws,” Apple writes. And it specifically says “retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games” in the list of exceptions to the rules against “software that is not embedded inside the binary”—but it doesn’t list any other method for retro game console emulator apps.

Whatever the case, this update is not limited to the European Union. Apple has been subjected to regulatory scrutiny in both the EU and the United States regarding its App Store rules. It’s likely the company is making this change to preempt criticism in this area, though it did not name its reasons when announcing the change other than to say it has been made to “support updated policies, upcoming features, and to provide clarification.”

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Why are there so many species of beetles?

EnlargeLaurie Rubin via Getty

Caroline Chaboo’s eyes light up when she talks about tortoise beetles. Like gems, they exist in myriad bright colors: shiny blue, red, orange, leaf green and transparent flecked with gold. They’re members of a group of 40,000 species of leaf beetles, the Chrysomelidae, one of the most species-rich branches of the vast beetle order, Coleoptera. “You have your weevils, longhorns, and leaf beetles,” she says. “That’s really the trio that dominates beetle diversity.”

An entomologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Chaboo has long wondered why the kingdom of life is so skewed toward beetles: The tough-bodied creatures make up about a quarter of all animal species. Many biologists have wondered the same thing, for a long time. “Darwin was a beetle collector,” Chaboo notes.

Enlarge / Despite their kaleidoscopic variety, most beetles share the same three-part body plan. The insects’ ability to fold their flight wings, origami-like, under protective forewings called elytra allows beetles to squeeze into rocky crevices and burrow inside trees. Beetles’ knack for thriving in a large range of microhabitats could also help explain their abundance of species, scientists say.Bugboy52.40 (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Of the roughly 1 million named insect species on Earth, about 400,000 are beetles. And that’s just the beetles described so far. Scientists typically describe thousands of new species each year. So—why so many beetle species? “We don’t know the precise answer,” says Chaboo. But clues are emerging.

One hypothesis is that there are lots of them because they’ve been around so long. “Beetles are 350 million years old,” says evolutionary biologist and entomologist Duane McKenna of the University of Memphis in Tennessee. That’s a great deal of time in which existing species can speciate, or split into new, distinct genetic lineages. By way of comparison, modern humans have existed for only about 300,000 years.

Yet just because a group of animals is old doesn’t necessarily mean it will have more species. Some very old groups have very few species. Coelacanth fish, for example, have been swimming in the ocean for approximately 360 million years, reaching a maximum of around 90 species and then declining to the two species known to be living today. Similarly, the lizard-like reptile the tuatara is the only living member of a once globally diverse ancient order of reptiles that originated about 250 million years ago.

Another possible explanation for why beetles are so rich in species is that, in addition to being old, they have unusual staying power. “They have survived at least two mass extinctions,” says Cristian Beza-Beza, a University of Minnesota postdoctoral fellow. Indeed, a 2015 study using fossil beetles to explore extinctions as far back as the Permian 284 million years ago concluded that lack of extinction may be at least as important as diversification for explaining beetle species abundance. In past eras, at least, beetles have demonstrated a striking ability to shift their ranges in response to climate change, and this may explain their extinction resilience, the authors hypothesize.

Complicating the mystery of beetle diversity is the fact that some branches of the beetle family tree have many more species than others. For example, dung beetles, which spend their lives rolling deftly crafted balls of excrement, are only modestly diverse. “This family is around 8,000 species, so it’s not a huge group,” says community ecologist Jorge Ari Noriega at Universidad El Bosque in Bogotá, Colombia.

By contrast, Chrysomeloidea—a superfamily containing longhorn and leaf beetles—includes 63,000 species, while Brupestoidea, a group of metallic wood- and leaf-boring beetles also known as jewel beetles for their glitzy iridescent colors, includes about 15,000 species.

This large variation in species richness among beetle lineages means that “no one explanation holds very well for any one group,” says McKenna. Still, among plant-eating beetles—which make up roughly a quarter of all beetle species—a clear pattern is emerging. Based on genetic analyses of different beetle lineages, McKenna and his colleagues have found evidence that a major factor spurring beetle diversity was the diversification of flowering plants during the Cretaceous period.

A Spotted Tortoise Beetle (Aspidimorpha miliaris) from a diverse subfamily sitting of beetles on the edge of a plant stem. Mariano Sayno via Getty
A green tortoise beetle (Cassida viridis) Jasius via Getty Images
And an adult Yellow Tortoise Beetle. ViniSouza128 via Getty

During the Cretaceous period, which started around 145 million years ago, an explosion of new flowering plant species spread across the Earth’s surface, colonizing many different habitats. Today, plants make up about 80 percent of the mass of Earth’s life. Making the most of plants as food is an ecological strategy that has helped fuel the radiation of not only beetles but also herbivorous species including ants, bees, birds, and mammals.

In the case of herbivorous beetles, their most species-rich lineages carry a fascinating assortment of genes that permit the digestion of plants, McKenna has found. Many of these genes code for enzymes that help to break down plant cell walls, allowing access to sugars stored in hard-to-digest compounds like cellulose, hemicellulose and pectin. “The lineages that have these genes were the ones that are so incredibly successful,” McKenna says.

These genes were ingenious adaptations that turned indigestible plant parts into food. They allowed herbivorous beetles to eat more and different kinds of plants, which in turn enabled the insects to move into new habitats and occupy new ecological niches. As plant-eating beetles spread out geographically and adopted different diets and lifestyles, the genetic differences between them grew, resulting in new species.

For reasons unclear, some species of plant-eating beetles lost their digestion-aiding genes as they evolved, including a gene coding for pectinase, an enzyme that enables the breakdown of pectin. Evolutionary ecologist Hassan Salem at the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen, Germany, explains that to compensate, some beetles evolved a different strategy for eating plants: They forged relationships with bacterial partners—called symbionts—that also aid plant digestion.

For some beetles, these special symbiotic microbes became an alternate tool for keeping plants on the menu, expanding the number of habitats where new species could evolve and thrive. For example, in the vast majority of tortoise leaf beetle species, the group Salem studies, it’s not a genetically encoded enzyme that breaks down pectin, but a bacterial symbiont. The beetles get the bacteria from their mothers: Every time a female deposits an egg, she also leaves behind a capsule containing the microbes. The tortoise beetle embryo develops inside the egg, then burrows into the capsule to digest the symbiont about a day before it emerges.

“It’s the first thing it encounters in life … so it’s a very intimate association,” says Salem. When Salem and his team have experimentally removed the microbe caplets from developing larvae, the adult, germ-free beetles that emerge have a high mortality rate because they can’t access pectin in the plant cell.

Enlarge / The metamorphic life cycle of beetles is likely another driver of overall beetle success. That’s because beetles can exploit different ecological niches during various stages, divvying up microhabitats and resources as they change from egg to larva to pupa to adult.blueringmedia via Getty

In addition to making plants easier to digest, some plant-associated microbes may have paved the way for beetle diversification because they provide beetles with predator protection. In the tortoise leaf beetle Chelymorpha alternans, for example, a fungus called Fusarium—often found in crops like bananas and sweet potatoes—grows on the surface of beetle pupae during metamorphosis. “We’ve demonstrated that if you remove the fungus, then ants readily find them and feed on them,” says Aileen Berasategui, an evolutionary biologist at the Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment in the Netherlands. Fusarium, in other words, may be shielding the beetles from harmful predators, further expanding beetle territory and enabling diversification.

Berasategui adds that plenty of bark beetles, like ambrosia beetles, also benefit from Fusarium fungi, but in a different way. The beetles carry the fungi from tree to tree in specialized pockets called mycangia. Once the tree’s fungal infection is underway, the beetles indulge in a fungi feast.

Adapting to conduct this kind of agriculture—sowing spores that will grow into food—has also helped beetle species to exploit new habitats. “From their own nest, they take a little piece, and then … fly to a new tree where they start their own nest, they sow the new fungus, they generate this new garden,” says Berasategui. Called fungiculture, the approach has independently evolved in ambrosia beetles seven times. The evolution of new beetle species is thought to have been shaped by mutually beneficial relationships with these fungi—part of a 50-million-year history in which insects such as ants, termites and ambrosia beetles have independently evolved to farm fungi, according to a 2005 article published in the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics.

Plant-eating beetles have evolved other innovations that may have allowed them to speciate more than other beetle groups. In the leaf beetles that Chaboo studies, for example, the emergence in the fossil record of defensive fecal shields—structures built from a beetle’s own excretions and sloughed-off skin—“coincide with massive species radiations,” she says. Most beetle shield-users are solitary species, but some live in groups, arranging themselves in formations that protect them from predators. Fecal shield protection may have helped the beetles move into more open habitats, Chaboo says.

Whether they eat plants or dine on other fare such as carrion, beetles from all groups have evolved an impressive array of tools to solve many different problems. In that sense, beetles are a microcosm of the tree of life, McKenna says.

Resilient as beetles are, however, we can’t take their survival for granted. Insect populations are in decline in many places—“and, yes, beetles are part of that,” says Beza-Beza. How they’ll survive the impacts of humans is “one of the core questions right now,” he adds, though he’s betting there will be beetles on Earth “longer than there will be humans.”

Beetling away on scientific puzzles in the Central American cloud forest sky islands where he works, Beza-Beza has a special affinity for Ogyges politus, a beetle species that lives and feeds on rotting logs. “It only occurs in the mountains next to my hometown,” he says. “So it reminds me where I’m from … and that there are these jewels everywhere.”

This story originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

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$158,000 ALS drug pulled from market after failing in large clinical trial

EnlargeAmlyx

Amylyx, the maker of a new drug to treat ALS, is pulling that drug from the market and laying off 70 percent of its workers after a large clinical trial found that the drug did not help patients, according to an announcement from the company Thursday.

The drug, Relyvrio, won approval from the Food and Drug Administration in September 2022 to slow the progression of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease). However, the data behind the controversial decision was shaky at best; it was based on a study of just 137 patients that had several weaknesses and questionable statistical significance, and FDA advisors initially voted against approval. Still, given the severity of the neurogenerative disease and lack of effective treatments, the FDA ultimately granted approval under the condition that the company was working on a Phase III clinical trial to solidify its claimed benefits.

Relyvrio—a combination of two existing, generic drugs—went on the market with a list price of $158,000.

Last month, the company announced the top-line results from that 48-week, randomized, placebo-controlled trial involving 664 patients: Relyvrio failed to meet any of the trial’s goals. The drug did not improve patients’ physical functions, which were scored on a standardized ALS-specific test, nor did it improve quality of life, respiratory function, or overall survival. At that time, the co-CEOs of the company said they were “surprised and deeply disappointed” by the result, and the company acknowledged that it was considering voluntarily withdrawing the drug from the market.

In the announcement on Thursday, the company called Relyvrio’s market withdrawal a “difficult moment for the ALS community.” Patients already taking the medication who wish to continue taking it will be able to do so through a free drug program, the company said. It is no longer available to new patients, effective Thursday.

Amylyx is now “restructuring” to focus on two other drug candidates that treat different neurodegenerative disease. The change will include laying off 70 percent of its workforce, which, according to The Washington Post, includes more than 350 employees.

Relyvrio is part of a series of similarly controversial drugs for devastating neurodegenerative diseases that have gained FDA approval despite questionable data. In January, drug maker Biogen announced it was abandoning Aduhelm, a highly contentious Alzheimer’s drug that failed two large trials prior to its heavily criticized approval.

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Artificial Intelligence: Meta wants to allow more AI content with warnings on platforms

Instead of deleting photos and videos created or manipulated using artificial intelligence, the Meta Group wants to add warning labels to more of this type of content in the future. In return, they will be allowed to remain on Meta platforms such as Facebook. Meta is thus following a recommendation from its independent supervisory board, which had feared a restriction of freedom of speech.

Content will be marked with the label “Made with AI” based on metadata in its files. However, the relaxation does not apply to content that contains hate speech, bullying or false reports about elections, the company announced on Friday.

With the help of artificial intelligence and advancing technology, it is becoming increasingly easier to produce false reports and thus manipulate public opinion. Meta therefore wants to place appropriate warnings particularly clearly in cases where this danger is particularly great.

New changes to come into force in May

In addition, internal technology will be used to automatically recognize AI content. The new rules will be applied to Facebook , Instagram and Threads, Meta’s short message service.

The Facebook group plans to introduce the new tags as early as May. Meta announced that it intends to abandon its previously more restrictive approach to AI-generated posts by July.

Instead of deleting photos and videos created or manipulated using artificial intelligence, the Meta Group wants to add warning labels to more of this type of content in the future. In return, they will be allowed to remain on Meta platforms such as Facebook. Meta is thus following a recommendation from its independent supervisory board, which had feared a restriction of freedom of speech.

Content will be marked with the label “Made with AI” based on metadata in its files. However, the relaxation does not apply to content that contains hate speech, bullying or false reports about elections, the company announced on Friday.

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Success of the app Vinted : Almost too good to be true

This story begins and ends with a clothes closet. In between, it’s about a few hundred million used trousers, shirts and hoodies, handbags and dresses that change hands every year with the help of Vinted. Vinted is now the largest online platform for second-hand fashion in Europe with users in 20 countries.

The wardrobe that started it all was the size of a garage. Because it really was a garage, and it was located near the Lithuanian capital Vilnius in 2008. Milda Mitkute, then 22, had amassed so much fashion in a post-Soviet shopping spree that there wasn’t much room in her parents’ garage when she stored her belongings for a while. Her parents were annoyed, says Mitkute, and she realized she had to get rid of something. She could also use a bit of money and told the programmer Justas Janauskas about it at a party. That evening, the two decided to set up a website on which Mitkute, and soon everyone else, could sell their excess clothes. Vinted was born, then still under the name Manu Drabužiai, in English “My Clothes” .

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Claims of TikTok whistleblower may not add up

EnlargeSOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images

The United States government is currently poised to outlaw TikTok. Little of the evidence that convinced Congress the app may be a national security threat has been shared publicly, in some cases because it remains classified. But one former TikTok employee turned whistleblower, who claims to have driven key news reporting and congressional concerns about the app, has now come forward.

Zen Goziker worked at TikTok as a risk manager, a role that involved protecting the company from external security and reputational threats. In a wrongful termination lawsuit filed against TikTok’s parent company ByteDance in January, he alleges he was fired in February 2022 for refusing “to sign off” on Project Texas, a $1.5 billion program that TikTok designed to assuage US government security concerns by storing American data on servers managed by Oracle.

Goziker worked at TikTok for only six months. He didn’t hold a senior position inside the company. His lawsuit, and a second one he filed in March against several US government agencies, makes a number of improbable claims. He asserts that he was put under 24-hour surveillance by TikTok and the FBI while working remotely in Mexico. He claims that US attorney general Merrick Garland, director of national intelligence Avril Haines, and other top officials “wickedly instigated” his firing. And he states that the FBI helped the CIA share his private information with foreign governments. The suits do not appear to include evidence for any of these claims.

“This lawsuit is full of outrageous claims that lack merit and comes from an individual who significantly exaggerates his role with a company he worked at for merely six months,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement.

Yet court records and emails viewed by WIRED suggest that when Goziker raised the alarm about his ex-employer’s links to China, he found a ready audience. After he was fired, Goziker says he began meeting with elected officials, law enforcement agencies, and journalists to allege that, court documents say, he had discovered proof that TikTok’s software could send US data to Toutiao, a ByteDance app in China. That claim directly conflicted with TikTok executives’ assertions that the two companies operated separately.

Goziker says in court filings that what he saw made it necessary to reassess Project Texas. He also alleges that his account of the internal connection to China formed the basis of an influential Washington Post story published in March last year, which said the concerns came from “a former risk manager at TikTok.”

TikTok officials were quoted in that article as saying the allegations were “unfounded,” and that the employee had discovered “nothing more than a naming convention and technical relic.” The Washington Post said it does not comment on sourcing.

“I am free, I am honest, and I am doing this only because I am an American and because USA desperately need help and I cannot keep this truth away from PUBLIC,” Goziker said in an email to WIRED.

His March lawsuit alleging US officials conspired with TikTok to have him fired was filed against Garland, Haines, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, and the agencies they work for.

“Goziker’s main point is that the executives in the American company TikTok Inc. and certain executives from the American federal government have colluded to organize a fraud scheme,” Sean Jiang, Goziker’s lawyer in the case against the US government, told WIRED in an email. The lawsuits do not appear to contain evidence of such a scheme. The Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to requests for comment. The Department of Justice declined to comment.

Jiang calls the House’s recent passage of a bill that could force ByteDance to sell off TikTok “problematic,” because it “blames ByteDance instead of TikTok Inc for the wrongdoings of the American executives.” He says Goziker would prefer to see TikTok subjected to audits and a new corporate structure.

Goziker shared records with WIRED showing that as he sought to share his concerns about TikTok, he scheduled meetings with officials from the DHS, FBI, and the Tennessee Attorney General’s office. He also purported to have met with staff in the offices of several US senators, including Missouri Republican Josh Hawley, Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, and Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Hawley and Warner each introduced separate legislation last year that would have allowed the US government to ban TikTok, and all three senators have voiced support for the more recent TikTok bill that already passed the House. (Hawley has expressed skepticism that it would get through the Senate.) Representatives for the senators did not respond to requests for comment about whether their staff had met with Goziker. The FBI declined to comment, and a representative for the Tennessee Attorney General did not respond to a request for comment.

Jeremy Daum, a scholar at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School, says he wasn’t surprised that US authorities may have been willing to engage with Goziker. Lawmakers have grown increasingly worried about threats from China despite a lack of clear evidence that TikTok poses a unique security threat compared to other Internet platforms. “It’s just incredibly easy to get people to focus on China these days,” he says. “I’ve never seen a smoking gun about TikTok.”

Goziker, who has sometimes used the first name Gene instead of Zen, started working as a risk manager at TikTok in August of 2021, reporting to the senior director of operations. Goziker says in court filings that he joined TikTok from the National Bank of Pakistan, where he worked as a senior vice president in charge of enterprise risk management for its Americas’ operations. In court filings, he says that he was born in Ukraine in 1978 and started his career at Citibank after receiving a graduate degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2006.

Despite not holding a senior position, Goziker claims that his main job at TikTok was “overseeing” Project Texas to ensure the social media app’s plan to secure US user data would be effective. The goal was to implement a set of safeguards that would satisfy the ​​Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency body charged with evaluating national security risks associated with foreign firms acquiring or taking major stakes in US companies. CFIUS has the power to force companies to unwind deals it considers risky, and since 2019 has been investigating ByteDance’s 2017 purchase of a lip-syncing app called Musical.ly, which was later merged into TikTok.

Goziker claims that he interviewed more than three dozen people at TikTok and ByteDance about Project Texas, according to court filings. He says that he identified flaws in the initiative that led him to refuse to “sign off” on it, despite alleged pressure from his manager and other executives at the company. Goziker tried to flag his concerns to TikTok’s top leadership, including the CEO and board of directors, according to court records.

Goziker alleges in court filings that he found evidence TikTok’s software could send data to China in January of 2022—weeks before he was fired. He claims in the filings that through “collaborative and willful joint effort with ByteDance engineers from mainland China,” he obtained “a verified artifact” in TikTok’s software that connected the platform to Toutiao, a popular Chinese news aggregation app also owned by ByteDance. Goziker said that his findings demonstrated US data from TikTok could still flow to the People’s Republic, despite TikTok’s assertions to the contrary. The filings do not contain detailed documentary evidence of his allegations.

In March last year, two weeks after Goziker’s claims appeared in The Washington Post, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appeared before Congress and got a grilling about his app’s links to China. Afterward, US representatives Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican, each sent questions to TikTok about the claims aired in the Post story.

TikTok responded by saying that many of the allegations in the article were unfounded. It stated that the reference to Toutiao in TikTok’s code “does not in any way indicate a correlation between, integration of, or network connectivity between Toutiao and TikTok,” adding that the “Toutiao news application cannot interfere with TikTok data flows once Project Texas is complete.”

In the lawsuits and an email record reviewed by WIRED, Goziker revealed that he had also been in touch with a Forbes journalist who has written a number of influential stories about TikTok’s data security practices and links to ByteDance. In June of 2022, when the journalist worked at BuzzFeed News, they published an article based on 80 internal meetings at TikTok in which nine different employees reportedly made statements “indicating that engineers in China had access to US data between September 2021 and January 2022.”

Goziker asserted to WIRED that he was the source of the recordings. Forbes told WIRED it does not comment on sourcing.

Senator Warner and Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican and the vice chair of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, later cited that BuzzFeed story in a letter urging the Federal Trade Commission to start an investigation into TikTok. Politico reported this month that the agency heeded that call and opened a probe into whether the app “deceived its users by denying that individuals in China had access to their data.”

As Goziker was filing his lawsuits, US lawmakers were getting closer to banning the app than ever before. The House of Representatives approved a bill last month that would force ByteDance to sell off TikTok within six months before the app would become illegal to download from US app stores. The legislation is now being considered by the Senate, and President Joe Biden has already said he would sign it into law.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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