Candice Ciresi, GitLab's director of risk and global compliance, has resigned after less than six months on the job, apparently saying that the $2.75 billion startup is "engaging in discriminatory and retaliatory behavior." Business Insider reports: Notably, Ciresi resigned in public: GitLab espouses a culture of transparency, whereby all major product and corporate policy decisions are announced and discussed where anybody can see. She posted her resignation in response to one such discussion -- an active debate over a proposed GitLab policy, in which it would ban the hiring of people who live in China or Russia for any role that would require access to customer data. At the time of writing, Ciresi's post announcing her resignation had been reviewed and then "redacted" by GitLab, citing concerns that it would "further inflame this situation." However, Ciresi's comment went out via email to GitLab users who had subscribed to this particular discussion. Per a screenshot posted to Reddit, Ciresi wrote: "As I believe GitLab is engaging in discriminatory and retaliatory behavior, I have tendered my resignation." "We did decide to moderate this post for review, as there have already been credible personal and physical threats against GitLab employees in this issue thread," GitLab says, in part, in place of Ciresi's comment. "While this particular post did not contain a personal threat to anyone, we were concerned it would further inflame this situation." GitLab confirmed Ciresi's departure but didn't comment any further.

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House Democrats have been releasing transcripts of closed-door testimonies as they prepare to begin public hearings.

Transcripts, scheduled public hearings and more depositions: What happened this week in the Trump impeachment inquiry?

Google's proposal to create a level playing field for price comparison shopping rivals to stave off fresh fines has not led to more traffic for its competitors, Europe's antitrust chief said this week. From a report: European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager two years ago slapped Google with a $2.65 billion fine for favoring its own price comparison shopping service and told it to stop its anti-competitive business practices. The world's most popular internet search engine subsequently offered to allow competitors to bid for advertising space at the top of a search page, giving them the chance to compete on equal terms. The proposal does not seem to be doing the trick, Vestager said. "We may see a show of rivals in the shopping box. We may see a pickup when it comes to clicks for merchants. But we still do not see much traffic for viable competitors when it comes to shopping comparison," she told a Web Summit conference. British price comparison service Foundem, whose original complaint triggered the EU case against Google

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Former President Mohammed Morsi died while standing trial for charges legal observers said were politically motivated.

In a letter sent to federal lawmakers, an online merchant has accused Amazon.com of forcing him and other sellers to use the company's expensive logistics services, which in turn forces them to raise prices for consumers. From a report: The 62-page document, reviewed by Bloomberg, lays out an antitrust case that emphasizes harm to consumers -- the traditional basis for such cases in the U.S. Until now, antitrust experts have suggested that Amazon was not vulnerable to such an argument and that regulators would need to find another way to restrain the company's growing market power. The complaint, based on an analysis of thousands of Amazon transactions over several years involving more than 100 products, turns all of that thinking on its head. It accuses Amazon of "tying" its marketplace and logistics services together, an antitrust violation in which a company uses dominance in one market to give itself an advantage in another market where it's less established. The letter refers to previous Supreme Court rulings on tying, including one against Kodak in 1992 that said the photocopier manufacturer violated antitrust laws by forcing customers who bought its machines to also use its parts and repair services. "When it comes to Amazon's dealings with third-party merchants, some of the conduct actually does lend itself to antitrust scrutiny," said Hal Singer, an antitrust expert and Georgetown University adjunct professor retained by the merchant to work on the analysis. "If you can connect the conduct to some measureable harm, in this case increased prices, that gets you into the antitrust ballpark."

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Turkish president also says offensive will continue until all Kurdish forces leave the region.

Longtime Slashdot reader mdecerbo writes: Back in 2015, defense giant BAE Systems fired cryptographer Don Davis on his first day of work, after learning he didn't want to work more than 40 hours a week while caring for his dying wife. Davis filed a federal lawsuit, and the Boston Globe suggested that the company should settle it rather than try to defend the "soullessness of the machine." It's unusual for the public to hear anything about settlements of lawsuits like this; they're usually kept confidential to avoid publicity. So it's remarkable that BAE and Davis have now issued a joint statement that the lawsuit is resolved, with one division of BAE announcing that they will retrain their HR staff about male employees with caregiving responsibilities. Maybe one part of the machine has gotten a little less soulless. Could this become a trend, where tech companies have to actually let employees have some sort of a life?

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Syria government and opposition representatives met to discuss a future constitution in Geneva but did not shake hands.

harrymcc writes: On November 9 2004, a new version of Mozilla's browser called Firefox shipped. It was taking on one of the most daunting monopolies in tech: Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which had more than 90 percent market share. But Firefox was really good, and it became an instant hit, ending Microsoft's dominance of the web. Over at Fast Company, Sean Captain took a look at the browser's original rise, the challenges it faced after Google's Chrome arrived on the scene, and the moves it's currently making to put user privacy first.

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ICJ rejects Moscow's bid to block case brought by Ukraine accusing Russia of supporting pro-Russian separatist rebels.

Order comes after Supreme Court ruling ending the mandatory imprisonment of convicts after they lose their first appeal.

Shutterstock, the well-known online purveyor of stock images and photographs, is the latest U.S. company to willingly support China's censorship regime, blocking searches that might offend the country's authoritarian government, The Intercept reported this week. From the report: The publicly traded company built a $639 million-per-year business on the strength of its vast -- sometimes comically vast -- catalog of images depicting virtually anything a blogger or advertiser could imagine. The company now does business in more than 150 countries. But in China, there is now a very small, very significant gap in Shutterstock's offerings. In early September, Shutterstock engineers were given a new goal: The creation of a search blacklist that would wipe from query results images associated with keywords forbidden by the Chinese government. Under the new system, which The Intercept is told went into effect last month, anyone with a mainland Chinese IP address searching Shutterstock for "President Xi," "Chairman Mao," "Taiwan flag," "dictator," "yellow umbrella," or "Chinese flag" will receive no results at all. Variations of these terms, including "umbrella movement" -- the precursor to the mass pro-democracy protests currently gripping Hong Kong -- are also banned. [...] Shutterstock's censorship feature appears to have been immediately controversial within the company, prompting more than 180 Shutterstock workers to sign a petition against the search blacklist and accuse the company of trading its values for access to the lucrative Chinese market. Chinese internet users already struggle to discuss even the tamest of taboo subjects; now, it seemed, the situation would get a little worse, with the aid of yet another willing American company.

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All major browsers -- including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Brave -- have plans to support DNS-over-HTTPS (or DoH), a protocol that encrypts DNS traffic and helps improve a user's privacy on the web. From a report: The DoH protocol has been one of the year's hot topics. It's a protocol that, when deployed inside a browser, it allows the browser to hide DNS requests and responses inside regular-looking HTTPS traffic. Doing this makes a user's DNS traffic invisible to third-party network observers, such as ISPs. But while users love DoH and have deemed it a privacy boon, ISPs, networking operators, and cyber-security vendors hate it. A UK ISP called Mozilla an "internet villain" for its plans to roll out DoH, and a Comcast-backed lobby group has been caught preparing a misleading document about DoH that they were planning to present to US lawmakers in the hopes of preventing DoH's broader rollout. However, this may be a little too late. ZDNet has spent the week reaching out to major web browser providers to gauge their future plans regarding DoH, and all vendors plan to ship it, in one form or another.

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Aiming for greater efficiency, the 99-member British insurance market plans to merge its two boards into one.