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The New York Times reported Thursday that an open letter will be published in the Times on Friday that asks Amazon to reconsider its decision to walk away from its plan to build a 25,000-employee campus in Long Island City, Queens. The company pulled the plug on the project, dubbed HQ2, following vocal and persistent opposition to the plan after it was announced three months ago. CNET reports: The letter was signed by the CEOs of Mastercard, Warby Parker, Goldman Sachs, Tishman Speyer and Jetblue, among others. The presidents of the Building & Construction Trades Council of Greater New York and state AFL-CIO, which were expecting thousands of construction jobs to come from the project, also signed, as did U.S. Reps. Hakeem Jeffries and Carolyn Maloney. "We know the public debate that followed the announcement of the Long Island City project was rough and not very welcoming," the letter stated. "Opinions are strong in New York -- sometimes strident. We consider it part of the New York charm! But when we commit to a project as important as this, we figure out how to get it done in a way that works for everyone."

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has also had several conversations with Amazon, including CEO Jeff Bezos, about bringing back the project, the Times said. The letter and Cuomo's behind-the-scenes efforts are part of the latest fallout since Amazon abandoned HQ2 in New York. The opposition has celebrated the exit as a victory for grassroots campaigns and a stand against lavish government incentives for new development plans. Amazon was slated to get about $3 billion in tax breaks for building the project. Supporters, who weren't as vocal during the run-up to Amazon leaving, expressed shock and consternation about Amazon's decision and worried that New York would appear unfriendly to new businesses. While the business community was broadly seen as in favor of the project, the letter shows how both the camps supporting and opposing HQ2 included unions and Democratic U.S. congress members.

According to The New York Times, "Hundreds of Google employees, upset at the company's decision to secretly build a censored version of its search engine for China, have signed a letter demanding more transparency to understand the ethical consequences of their work (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source)." In the letter, the employees wrote that the project and Google's apparent willingness to abide by China's censorship requirements "raise urgent moral and ethical issues." They added, "Currently we do not have the information required to make ethically-informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment." From the report: The letter is circulating on Google's internal communication systems and is signed by about 1,000 employees, according to two people familiar with the document, who were not authorized to speak publicly. The letter also called on Google to allow employees to participate in ethical reviews of the company's products, to appoint external representatives to ensure transparency and to publish an ethical assessment of controversial projects. The document referred to the situation as a "code yellow," a process used in engineering to address critical problems that impact several teams.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source: The Trump administration announced Monday that it would take formal steps to repeal President Barack Obama's signature policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, setting up a bitter fight over the future of America's efforts to tackle global warming. At an event in eastern Kentucky, Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that his predecessors had departed from regulatory norms in crafting the Clean Power Plan, which was finalized in 2015 and would have pushed states to move away from coal in favor of sources of electricity that produce fewer carbon emissions. The repeal proposal, which will be filed in the Federal Register on Tuesday, fulfills a promise President Trump made to eradicate his predecessor's environmental legacy. Eliminating the Clean Power Plan makes it less likely the United States can fulfill its promise as part of the Paris climate agreement to ratchet down emissions that are warming the planet and contributing to heat waves and sea-level rise. Mr. Trump has vowed to abandon that international accord.

In announcing the repeal, Mr. Pruitt made many of the same arguments that he had made for years to Congress and in lawsuits: that the Obama administration exceeded its legal authority in an effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. (Last year, the Supreme Court blocked the rule from taking effect while courts assessed those lawsuits.) A leaked draft of the repeal proposal asserts that the country would save $33 billion by not complying with the regulation and rejects the health benefits the Obama administration had calculated from the original rule.

Symon Gold writes "A desk set purportedly containing a piece of moon rock is up for auction at Lelands.com. Listing here. The New York Times (free registration required) has a story about the piece--a retirement gift given to Joe Healy, an engineer at NASA's Lunar Receiving Laboratory who worked on the Apollo missions and who died a decade ago. The auction runs until 9 p.m. on December 4th with an opening bid of $50,000."

Stone Rhino writes: "No longer do you need to remember passwords. Now, thanks to graduate students at Berkeley you merely need to pick out the right pieces of abstract art. There is a story on it at the New York Times. However, there is a problem with it that I see: 5 images from a set of 25 means 53,130 potential combinations. This would be much easier to crack by brute force than a standard alphanumeric password with its billions of possibilities and millions of likely choices." Maybe you have to get the sequence of images correct? If so there are some six million combinations, still weaker than a optimum password but probably stronger than the passwords most people choose (usually their significant other's name). There's another article on passwords in that same NYT edition.

camusflage writes: "The New York Times has a story that some physicists think it might be possible to make black holes at the under construction Large Hadron Collider at CERN, slated to come online in 2006. Trying to allay concerns about a man-made black hole blipping us out of existence, they say "The same calculations ... predict that around 100 such black holes a year are `organically' and apparently safely produced in the earth's atmosphere in cosmic ray collisions." As long as we can keep critters from building nests in the singularity, we should be okay."

g8orade writes: "This NYT article presents the increasingly difficult path researchers in public arenas (universities) have distributing the results of their efforts, because of patents held on the genetic structures of food crops. Stallman makes a big case for distinguishing between copyright and patents, but anyone want to start the Free Food Foundation?"

Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this article in The New York Times (free registration required), a trick enables someone to essentially bug an e-mail message so that the spy would be privy to any comments that a recipient might add as the message is forwarded to others or sent back and forth. The vulnerability could facilitate the harvesting of e-mail addresses. Widely used e-mail programs that are vulnerable to the exploit (because they enable JavaScript) include Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express and Netscape 6." A snippet from the article: "The potential for such e-mail spying was first discovered by Carl Voth, an engineer in British Columbia. 'What bothers me is that in this case, my vulnerability is a function of what you do,' Mr. Voth said. 'I can be careful, I can take every precaution, I can turn off JavaScript, and it doesn't matter. If my neighbor isn't diligent and I send him an e-mail, I'm still vulnerable.'" "The Privacy Foundation, an educational and research organization based in Denver, plans to publicize and demonstrate the technique today."

An unnamed correspondent writes: "The New York Times has a story about how an anti-trade group conned a trade conference into inviting a talk from a member using a page at www.gatt.org that looks like a legitimate WTO/GATT page with a bogus e-mail link to the WTO's director-general. It seems like domain hijacking to me, but the real WTO 'respects the nature of the Internet' and is playing it cool. Funny for those amused by pranks and hoaxes." (Yes, it's the New York Times, so no-login URLs will doubtless soon appear.) I must admit, this made me think about from which misleading domain names it would be coolest to receive such misdirected mail.

Roger writes: "The New York Times is reporting that MP3.com and Warner Music have reached a settlement, after a few weeks of rumors that a settlement with the RIAA was near. My.mp3.com should come back soon. NYT; free registration required."

According to an UpsideToday article, everyone's favorite "free registration required" news source is to be acquired by the online satirical paper The Onion. It's a clever little piece about all the mergers floating around these days.

adamy writes "Seems that a Japanese firm is selling a robot that gives backrubs for the low low price of $47 G." Products like this make the Aibo seem like a bargain.