As a department of America's federal Health agency, the Food and Drug Administration is responsible for public health rules, including prescription medicines. And the FDA "has not changed its position that currently available clinical trial data do not demonstrate that ivermectin is effective against COVID-19," they confirmed to CNN this week. "The agency has not authorized or approved ivermectin for use in preventing or treating COVID-19."

But there was also a lawsuit. In "one of its more popular pandemic-era social media campaigns," the agency tweeted out "You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it." The post attracted nearly 106,000 likes — and over 46,000 reposts, and was followed by another post on Instagram. "Stop it with the #ivermectin. It's not authorized for treating #COVID."

Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik writes that the posts triggered a "groundless" lawsuit: It was those latter two lines that exercised three physicians who had been prescribing ivermectin for patients. They sued the FDA in 2022, asserting that its advisory illegally interfered with the practice of medicine — specifically with their ability to continue prescribing the drug. A federal judge in Texas threw out their case, but the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals — the source of a series of chuckleheaded antigovernment rulings in recent years — reinstated it last year, returning it to the original judge for reconsideration.

Now the FDA has settled the case by agreeing to delete the horse post and two similar posts from its accounts on the social media platforms X, LinkedIn and Facebook. The agency also agreed to retire a consumer advisory titled "Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19." In defending its decision, the FDA said it "has chosen to resolve this lawsuit rather than continuing to litigate over statements that are between two and nearly four years old."

That sounds reasonable enough, but it's a major blunder. It leaves on the books the 5th Circuit's adverse ruling, in which a panel of three judges found that the FDA's advisory crossed the line from informing consumers, which they said is all right, to recommending that consumers take some action, which they said is not all right... That's a misinterpretation of the law and the FDA's actions, according to Dorit Rubinstein Reiss of UC College of the Law in San Francisco. "The FDA will seek to make recommendations against the misuse of products in the future, and having that decision on the books will be used to litigate against it," she observed after the settlement.
"A survey by Boston University and the University of Michigan estimated that Medicare and private insurers had wasted $130 million on ivermectin prescriptions for COVID in 2021 alone."

New documents from a class action against Meta "reveal some of the specific ways it tackled rivals in recent years," reports the Observer.

"One of them was using software made by a mobile data analytics company called Onavo in 2016 to access user activities on Snapchat, and eventually Amazon and YouTube, too." Facebook acquired Onavo in 2013 and shut it down in 2019 after a TechCrunch report revealed that the company was paying teenagers to use the software to collect user data.

In 2020, two Facebook users filed a class action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Meta, then called Facebook, alleging the company engaged in anticompetitive practices and exploited user data. In 2023, the plaintiffs' attorney Brian J. Dunne submitted documents listing how Facebook used Onavo's software to spy on competitors, including Snapchat. According to the documents, made public this week, the Onavo team pitched and launched a project codenamed "Ghostbusters" — in reference to the Snapchat logo — where they developed "kits that can be installed on iOS or Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains," allowing them "to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage."

The documents also included a presentation from the Onavo team to Mark Zuckerberg showing that they had the ability to track "detailed in-app activity" by "parsing Snapchat analytics collected from incentivized participants in Onavo's program...." The technology was used to do the same to YouTube from 2017 to 2018 and Amazon in 2018, according to the documents. "The intended and actual result of this program was to harm competition, including Facebook's then-nascent Social Advertising competitor Snapchat," the document alleged.

In 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the outlawing of sports betting in America.

But the Wall Street Journal reports that since then all the major professional sports bodies "now realize just how much they have to lose as the new era unfolds." "All it takes is for a reasonable fan to go, 'Am I just watching theater, or is this actually sport?' for the credibility of a sport to start crumbling,'" said Declan Hill, an expert on match fixing at the University of New Haven.

Since the prohibition on sports gambling was lifted, leagues that had once viewed betting as an existential threat to their integrity scrambled to partner with gambling companies and brought them into the tent.... The NBA itself also announced a new feature designed to mesh the betting experience with live action: Fans watching games on League Pass, the flagship streaming platform, would be able to opt in to view betting odds on the app's interface and click through to place wagers... Cleveland Cavaliers head coach J.B. Bickerstaff said that gambling had "gone too far... I personally have had my own instances with some of the sports gamblers," he added, "where they got my telephone number, were sending me crazy messages about where I live, and my kids and all that stuff."

NBA spokesman Mike Bass said that instances of reported harassment related to sports betting are investigated. Then, just days after Haliburton and Bickerstaff's complaints, the NBA found itself grappling with a new case... The league is investigating suspicious activity around [Toronto Raptors forward Jontay] Porter, after app users placed sizable wagers that his totals for points, rebounds and assists in a pair of games would all come in under the lines set by oddsmakers. When Porter's numbers fell below those marks and the bets paid out, it raised a red flag signaling possible irregularities....

The NCAA has turned to state legislatures to impose regulations that would take single players out of gamblers' crosshairs. The group is lobbying to ban player-specific proposition bets that aren't directly related to the final score of the game — the exact kind of wagers at the center of the Porter situation in the NBA
After noticing "the gambling-related negativity taking over his social-media feeds," pro basketball player Tyrese Haliburton gave the Journal his own assessment of how it's affecting the fan base.

"To half the world, I'm just helping them make money on DraftKings."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

404 Media claims to have identified "the fundamental flaw with the age verification bills and laws" that have already passed in eight state legislatures (with two more taking effect in July): "the delusional, unfounded belief that putting hurdles between people and pornography is going to actually prevent them from viewing porn."

They argue that age verification laws "drag us back to the dark ages of the internet." Slashdot reader samleecole shared this excerpt: What will happen, and is already happening, is that people — including minors — will go to unmoderated, actively harmful alternatives that don't require handing over a government-issued ID to see people have sex. Meanwhile, performers and companies that are trying to do the right thing will suffer....

The legislators passing these bills are doing so under the guise of protecting children, but what's actually happening is a widespread rewiring of the scaffolding of the internet. They ignore long-established legal precedent that has said for years that age verification is unconstitutional, eventually and inevitably reducing everything we see online without impossible privacy hurdles and compromises to that which is not "harmful to minors." The people who live in these states, including the minors the law is allegedly trying to protect, are worse off because of it. So is the rest of the internet.
Yet new legislation is advancing in Kentucky and Nebraska, while the state of Kansas just passed a law which even requires age-verification for viewing "acts of homosexuality," according to a report: Websites can be fined up to $10,000 for each instance a minor accesses their content, and parents are allowed to sue for damages of at least $50,000. This means that the state can "require age verification to access LGBTQ content," according to attorney Alejandra Caraballo, who said on Threads that "Kansas residents may soon need their state IDs" to access material that simply "depicts LGBTQ people."
One newspaper opinion piece argues there's an easier solution: don't buy your children a smartphone: Or we could purchase any of the various software packages that block social media and obscene content from their devices. Or we could allow them to use social media, but limit their screen time. Or we could educate them about the issues that social media causes and simply trust them to make good choices. All of these options would have been denied to us if we lived in a state that passed a strict age verification law. Not only do age verification laws reduce parental freedom, but they also create myriad privacy risks. Requiring platforms to collect government IDs and face scans opens the door to potential exploitation by hackers and enemy governments. The very information intended to protect children could end up in the wrong hands, compromising the privacy and security of millions of users...

Ultimately, age verification laws are a misguided attempt to address the complex issue of underage social media use. Instead of placing undue burdens on users and limiting parental liberty, lawmakers should look for alternative strategies that respect privacy rights while promoting online safety.
This week a trade association for the adult entertainment industry announced plans to petition America's Supreme Court to intervene.

Algorithms might help hotels illegally collude on prices, even if no humans from those businesses actually talk to each other about them, according to US antitrust enforcers. From a report: The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission jointly submitted a statement of interest in Cornish-Adebiyi v. Caesars Entertainment, a case brought before the US District Court of New Jersey. The class action case was brought by New Jersey residents who rented rooms in Atlantic City hotels and alleged that several of those hotels engaged in an illegal price-fixing conspiracy through the use of a common pricing algorithm.

The plaintiffs are trying to show that the hotels violated Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits "conspiracy in restraint of trade" and is used to prosecute illegal price-fixing. They say that the hotels allegedly used a pricing algorithm platform called Rainmaker, knowing that their competitors were also using the platform and choosing it for that reason. The agencies really care about how this issue is handled. "Judicial treatment of the use of algorithms in price fixing has tremendous practical importance," the DOJ and FTC write in their statement.

Apple has sued its former employee Andrew Aude for leaking information about more than a half-dozen Apple products and policies, including its then-unannounced Journal app and Vision Pro headset, product development policies, strategies for regulatory compliance, employee headcounts, and more. MacRumors reports: Aude joined Apple as an iOS software engineer in 2016, shortly after graduating college. He worked on optimizing battery performance, making him "privy to information regarding dozens of Apple's most sensitive projects," according to the complaint. In April 2023, for example, Apple alleges that Aude leaked a list of finalized features for the iPhone's Journal app to a journalist at The Wall Street Journal on a phone call. That same month, The Wall Street Journal's Aaron Tilley published a report titled "Apple Plans iPhone Journaling App in Expansion of Health Initiatives."

Using the encrypted messaging app Signal, Aude is said to have sent "over 1,400" messages to the same journalist, who Aude referred to as "Homeboy." He is also accused of sending "over 10,000 text messages" to another journalist at the website The Information, and he allegedly traveled "across the continent" to meet with her. Other leaks relate to the Vision Pro and other hardware: "As another example, an October 2020 screenshot on Mr. Aude's Apple-issued work iPhone shows that he disclosed Apple's development of products within the spatial computing space to a non-Apple employee. Mr. Aude made this disclosure even though Apple's development efforts were confidential and not known to the public. Over the following months, Mr. Aude disclosed additional Apple confidential information -- including information concerning unannounced products, and hardware information."

Apple believes that Aude's actions were "extensive and purposeful," with Aude allegedly admitting that he leaked information so he could "kill" products and features with which he took issue. The company alleges that his wrongful disclosures resulted in at least five news articles discussing the company's confidential and proprietary information. Apple says these public revelations impeded its ability to "surprise and delight" with its latest products. Apple said it learned of Aude's wrongful disclosures in late 2023, and the company fired him for his alleged misconduct in December of that year. [...] Apple is seeking both compensatory and punitive damages in an amount to be determined at trial, and it is also seeking other legal remedies. The full complaint can be read here (PDF).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Do you remember Facebook Watch? Me neither. Mark Zuckerberg's short-lived streaming service never really got off the ground, but court filings unsealed in Meta's antitrust lawsuit claim "Watch" was kneecapped starting in 2018 to protect Zuckerberg's advertising relationship with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. "For nearly a decade, Netflix and Facebook enjoyed a special relationship," said plaintiffs in filings (PDF) made public on Saturday. "It is no great mystery how this close partnership developed, and who was its steward: from 2011-2019, Netflix's then-CEO Hastings sat on Facebook's board and personally directed the companies' relationship"

The filings detail Hastings' uncomfortably close relationship with Meta's upper management, including Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. During these years, Netflix was allegedly granted special access to Facebook users' private message inboxes, among other privileged analytics tools, in exchange for hundred-million-dollar advertising deals. This gave Facebook greater dominance in its all-important ad division, plaintiffs allege, so the company was fine to retreat from Netflix's streaming territory by shuttering Watch. In 2017, Facebook Watch began signing deals to populate its streaming service with original TV Shows from movie stars such as Bill Murray. A year later, the service attempted to license the popular '90s TV show Dawson's Creek. Facebook Watch had meaningful reach on the home screen of the social media platform, and an impressive budget as well. Facebook and Netflix appeared ready to butt heads in the streaming world, and the Netflix cofounder found himself in the middle as a Facebook board member. [...]

Netflix was a large advertiser to Facebook, and plaintiffs allege Zuckerberg shuttered its promising Watch platform for the sake of the greater advertising business. Zuckerberg personally emailed the head of Facebook Watch in May of 2018, Fidji Simo, to tell her their budget was being slashed by $750 million, just two years after Watch's launch, according to court filings. The sudden pivot meant Facebook was now dismantling the streaming business it had spent the last two years growing. During this time period, Netflix increased its ad spend on Facebook to roughly $150 million a year and allegedly entered into agreements for increased data analytics. By early 2019, the ad spend increased to roughly $200 million a year. Hastings left Facebook's board later in 2019.
UPDATE: Meta (Again) Denies Netflix Read Facebook Users' Private Messenger Messages.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Nigeria doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation when it comes to respecting the speech rights of its own citizens, nor the rights of platforms that its citizens use. But I will admit that even with that reputation in place, I'm a bit at a loss as to why the country decided to arrest and charge a woman for violating those same laws because she wrote an unkind review of a can of tomato puree on Facebook: "A Nigerian woman who wrote an online review of a can of tomato puree is facing imprisonment after its manufacturer accused her of making a 'malicious allegation' that damaged its business. Chioma Okoli, a 39-year-old entrepreneur from Lagos, is being prosecuted and sued in civil court for allegedly breaching the country's cybercrime laws, in a case that has gripped the West African nation and sparked protests by locals who believe she is being persecuted for exercising her right to free speech."

By now you're wondering what actually happened here. Well, Okoli got on Facebook after having tried a can of Nagiko Tomato Mix, made by local Nigerian company Erisco Foods. Her initial post essentially complained about it being too sugary. So pretty standard fair for a review-type post on Facebook. When she started getting some mixed replies, some of them told her to stop trying to ruin the company and just buy something else, with one such message supposedly coming from a relative of the company's ownership. To that, she replied: "Okoli responded: 'Help me advise your brother to stop ki***ing people with his product, yesterday was my first time of using and it's pure sugar.'"

By the way, you can see all of this laid out by Erisco Foods itself on its own Facebook page. The company also claims that she exchanged messages with others talking about how she wanted to trash the product online so that nobody would buy it and that sort of thing. Whatever the truth about that situation is, this all stems from a poor review of a product posted online, which is the kind of speech countries with free speech laws typically protect. In Okoli's case, she was arrested shortly after those posts. [...] Okoli is pregnant and was placed in a cell during her arrest that had water leaking into it, by her account. She was also forced to apologize to Erisco Foods as part of her bond release, which she then publicly stated was done under duress and refused to apologize once out of holding. Okoli is also countersuing both Erisco Foods and the police, arguing for a violation of her speech rights.

TikTok is being investigated by the FTC over its data and security practices, "a probe that could lead to a settlement or a lawsuit against the company," reports the Associated Press. From the report: In its investigation, the FTC has been looking into whether TikTok violated a portion of federal law that prohibits "unfair and deceptive" business practices by denying that individuals in China had access to U.S. user data, said the person, who is not authorized to discuss the investigation. The agency also is scrutinizing the company over potential violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires kid-oriented apps and websites to get parents' consent before collecting personal information of children under 13.

The agency is nearing the conclusion of its investigation and could settle with TikTok in the coming weeks. But there's not a deadline for an agreement, the person said. If the FTC moves forward with a lawsuit instead, it would have to refer the case to the Justice Department, which would have 45 days to decide whether it wants to file a case on the FTC's behalf, make changes or send it back to the agency to pursue on its own.

A British court has ruled that Julian Assange can't be extradited to the United States on espionage charges unless U.S. authorities guarantee he won't get the death penalty, giving the WikiLeaks founder a partial victory in his long legal battle over the site's publication of classified American documents. From a report: Two High Court judges said they would grant Assange a new appeal unless U.S. authorities give further assurances within three weeks about what will happen to him. The ruling means the legal saga, which has dragged on for more than a decade, will continue -- and Assange will remain inside London's high-security Belmarsh Prison, where he has spent the last five years. Judges Victoria Sharp and Jeremy Johnson said the U.S. must guarantee that Assange, who is Australian, "is afforded the same First Amendment protections as a United States citizen, and that the death penalty is not imposed."

Two of the world's largest credit card networks, Visa and Mastercard, as well as the banks that issue cards with them, have agreed to settle a decadeslong antitrust case brought upon by merchants. From a report: The settlement is set to lower swipe fees merchants pay when customers make purchases using their Visa or Mastercard by $30 billion over five years, according to a press release announcing the settlement Tuesday morning. The settlement, which only applies to US merchants, is the result of a lawsuit filed in 2005. However, nothing is considered finalized until it receives approval from the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York. Even then, the case can also be appealed in what could be a lengthy battle.

Typically, swipe fees cost merchants 2% of the total transaction a customer makes -- but can be as much as 4% for some premium rewards cards, according to the National Retail Federation. The settlement would lower those fees by at least 0.04 percentage point for a minimum of three years. Additionally, the settlement would require Visa and Mastercard to maintain the swipe fee rates that existed as of December 31, 2023 for five years.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: An environmental community group on Tuesday sued Stronghold Digital Mining claiming the company's bitcoin mine in northeastern Pennsylvania that burns waste coal and old tires for energy is polluting nearby communities with dangerous chemicals. The lawsuit by Save Carbon County filed in state court in Philadelphia, also names Pennsylvania as a defendant. The group, a nonprofit whose members live near the bitcoin mine, is seeking compensatory and punitive damages from the company, and an order directing the state to stop allowing the pollution to continue. The group said Stronghold has created a public and private nuisance by releasing mercury into waterways and spewing harmful chemicals like sulfur dioxide into the air from an aging power plant it bought to power its energy-thirsty operations. The state has issued permits allowing the pollution and subsidized the crypto-mine through tax incentives despite having an affirmative duty in the state constitution to protect the environment for its citizens, according to the lawsuit. A Stronghold spokesperson said in a statement that its operations actually clean up land and water in the area by using waste coal left behind by historic coal production in the region. "Stronghold's facilities have cleaned up millions of tons of waste coal and reclaimed over 1,050 acres of once-blighted land, now sports fields, parks, and fishing spots for local communities," the spokesperson said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, Florida became the first state to ban kids under 14 from social media without parental permission. It appears likely that the law -- considered one of the most restrictive in the US -- will face significant legal challenges, however, before taking effect on January 1. Under HB 3, apps like Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok would need to verify the ages of users, then delete any accounts for users under 14 when parental consent is not granted. Companies that "knowingly or recklessly" fail to block underage users risk fines of up to $10,000 in damages to anyone suing on behalf of child users. They could also be liable for up to $50,000 per violation in civil penalties. [...]

DeSantis' statement noted that "in addition to protecting children from the dangers of social media, HB 3 requires pornographic or sexually explicit websites to use age verification to prevent minors from accessing sites that are inappropriate for children." This suggests that Florida could face a legal challenge from adult sites like Pornhub, which have been suing to block states from requiring an ID to access adult content. Most recently, Pornhub blocked access to its platform in Texas, arguing that such laws "impinge on the rights of adults to access protected speech" and fail "strict scrutiny by employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas's stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors."

According to the Guardian, [Florida House Speaker Paul Renner, who spearheaded the law] expected that social media companies would "sue the second after" HB 3 was signed. So far, no legal challenges have been raised, but Renner seemingly expects that the law's focus on "addictive features such as notification alerts and autoplay videos, rather than on their content" would ensure that the law defeats any constitutional concerns potentially raised by social media companies. "We're going to beat them, and we're never, ever going to stop," Renner vowed.

Court filings unsealed last week allege Meta created an internal effort to spy on Snapchat in a secret initiative called "Project Ghostbusters." Gizmodo: Meta did so through Onavo, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service the company offered between 2016 and 2019 that, ultimately, wasn't private at all. "Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted we have no analytics about them," said Mark Zuckerberg in an email to three Facebook executives in 2016, unsealed in Meta's antitrust case on Saturday. "It seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them... You should figure out how to do this."

Thus, Project Ghostbusters was born. It's Meta's in-house wiretapping tool to spy on data analytics from Snapchat starting in 2016, later used on YouTube and Amazon. This involved creating "kits" that can be installed on iOS and Android devices, to intercept traffic for certain apps, according to the filings. This was described as a "man-in-the-middle" approach to get data on Facebook's rivals, but users of Onavo were the "men in the middle."

Meta's Onavo unit has a history of using invasive techniques to collect data on Facebook's users. Meta acquired Onavo from an Israeli firm over 10 years ago, promising users private networking, as most VPNs do. However, the service was reportedly used to spy on rival social media apps through tens of millions of people who downloaded Onavo. It gave Facebook valuable intel about competitors, and this week's court filings seem to confirm that. A team of senior executives and roughly 41 lawyers worked on Project Ghostbusters, according to court filings. The group was heavily concerned with whether to continue the program in the face of press scrutiny. Facebook ultimately shut down Onavo in 2019 after Apple booted the VPN from its app store.

The FTX bankruptcy estate has raised $884 million by selling the majority of its Anthropic shares to two dozen institutional investors. "The sale of the Anthropic shares is a big win for the FTX estate, which pledged in January to pay back the defunct exchange's customers 100% of the value of their holdings at the time of the exchange's collapse," reports CoinDesk. "FTX's FTT token climbed 10% on the news." From the report: According to Friday court filings, the top buyer is ATIC Third International Investment Company, a tech investment company wholly owned by the government of Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala. ATIC has agreed to purchase 16,664,167 shares of Anthropic from FTX for $500 million. Other buyers include Jane Street Global Trading -- an affiliate of the erstwhile employer of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried -- "certain funds" tied to Fidelity Investments and The Ford Foundation.

Apple has been hit with a flurry of new consumer lawsuits accusing the iPhone maker of monopolizing the smartphone market, piggybacking on a sweeping antitrust case lodged by the U.S. Justice Department and 15 states last week. From a report: At least three proposed class actions have been filed since Friday in California and New Jersey federal courts by iPhone owners who claim Apple inflated the cost of its products through anticompetitive conduct. The lawsuits, seeking to represent millions of consumers, mirror the Justice Department's claims that Apple violated U.S. antitrust law by suppressing technology for messaging apps, digital wallets and other items that would have increased competition in the market for smartphones.

FrankOVD shares a report: Here's a paragraph from the DOJ's antitrust lawsuit against Apple in full: "In addition to degrading the quality of third-party messaging apps, Apple affirmatively undermines the quality of rival smartphones. For example, if an iPhone user messages a non-iPhone user in Apple Messages -- the default messaging app on an iPhone -- then the text appears to the iPhone user as a green bubble and incorporates limited functionality: the conversation is not encrypted, videos are pixelated and grainy, and users cannot edit messages or see typing indicators.

"This signals to users that rival smartphones are lower quality because the experience of messaging friends and family who do not own iPhones is worse -- even though Apple, not the rival smartphone, is the cause of that degraded user experience. Many non-iPhone users also experience social stigma, exclusion, and blame for 'breaking' chats where other participants own iPhones. This effect is particularly powerful for certain demographics, like teenagers -- where the iPhone's share is 85 percent, according to one survey. This social pressure reinforces switching costs and drives users to continue buying iPhones -- solidifying Apple's smartphone dominance not because Apple has made its smartphone better, but because it has made communicating with other smartphones worse."

"If you've ever jokingly wondered if your search or viewing history is going to 'put you on some kind of list,' your concern may be more than warranted," writes Mashable : In now unsealed court documents reviewed by Forbes, Google was ordered to hand over the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and user activity of Youtube accounts and IP addresses that watched select YouTube videos, part of a larger criminal investigation by federal investigators.

The videos were sent by undercover police to a suspected cryptocurrency launderer... In conversations with the bitcoin trader, investigators sent links to public YouTube tutorials on mapping via drones and augmented reality software, Forbes details. The videos were watched more than 30,000 times, presumably by thousands of users unrelated to the case. YouTube's parent company Google was ordered by federal investigators to quietly hand over all such viewer data for the period of Jan. 1 to Jan. 8, 2023...
"According to documents viewed by Forbes, a court granted the government's request for the information," writes PC Magazine, adding that Google was asked "to not publicize the request." The requests are raising alarms for privacy experts who say the requests are unconstitutional and are "transforming search warrants into digital dragnets" by potentially targeting individuals who are not associated with a crime based simply on what they may have watched online.
That quote came from Albert Fox-Cahn, executive director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, who elaborates in Forbes' article. "No one should fear a knock at the door from police simply because of what the YouTube algorithm serves up. I'm horrified that the courts are allowing this."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

America's Justice Department "is considering whether to allow Julian Assange to plead guilty to a reduced charge of mishandling classified information," reports the Wall Street Journal, citing "people familiar with the matter."

Though Assange faces trial for publishing thousands of confidential U.S. documents in 2010, this development opens up "the possibility of a deal that could eventually result in his release from a British jail," reports the Journal.

Where things stand currently: A U.K. court is currently considering whether to allow a last-ditch appeal by the 52-year-old. After U.S. prosecutors charged him in 2019, U.K. law-enforcement officials apprehended him, and he has been in a London prison ever since... Britain's High Court is expected to decide within weeks whether to grant Assange a further right to appeal his extradition to the U.S. If the court rules against him, the U.S. government will likely have 28 days to come and collect Assange and bring him to face trial.
But... Justice Department officials and Assange's lawyers have had preliminary discussions in recent months about what a plea deal could look like to end the lengthy legal drama, according to people familiar with the matter, a potential softening in a standoff filled with political and legal complexities. The talks come as Assange has spent some five years behind bars. U.S. prosecutors face diminishing odds that he would serve much more time even if he were convicted stateside.

The discussions remain in flux, and talks could fizzle. Any deal would require approval at the highest levels of the Justice Department. Barry Pollack, a lawyer for Assange, said he has been given no indication that the department will take a deal. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.

If prosecutors allow Assange to plead to a U.S. charge of mishandling classified documents — something his lawyers have floated as a possibility — it would be a misdemeanor offense. Under such a deal, Assange potentially could enter that plea remotely, without setting foot in the U.S. The time he has spent behind bars in London would count toward any U.S. sentence, and he would likely be free to leave prison shortly after any deal was concluded.
U.S. authorities "gave a package of assurances, including a pledge he could be transferred to his native Australia to serve any sentence," according to the article. The Australian government, which has largely been supportive of Assange, could shorten any sentence once he landed on Australian soil, said Nick Vamos, a partner at London law firm Peters & Peters and a former head of extradition for England and Wales's Crown Prosecution Service. "I honestly think as soon as he arrived in Australia he would be released," he said.

The Dutch pirate site blocklist has expanded with two new targets, shadow libraries Anna's Archive and Library Genesis. The court order was obtained by local anti-piracy group BREIN, acting on behalf of major publishers. Interestingly, Z-Library isn't listed in the blocking order, despite explicit warnings previously issued by BREIN. TorrentFreak reports: All blocking requests were submitted by local anti-piracy group BREIN, which acts on behalf of rightsholders. These include the major Hollywood studios but BREIN's purview is much broader. Last week, it obtained the latest blocking order, this time on behalf of the publishing industry. Issued by the Rotterdam District Court, the order requires a local Internet provider to block two well-known shadow libraries; "Anna's Archive" and "Library Genesis" (LibGen). News of this new court order was shared by BREIN which notes that both sites were found to make copyright infringing works available on a large scale. At the time of writing, a published copy is not available but, based on the covenant, all large Internet providers are expected to implement the blockades. "These types of illegal shadow libraries are very harmful. The only ones who benefit are the anonymous owners of these illegal services. Authors and publishers see no return on their efforts and investments," BREIN comments. "Copyright holders deserve an honest living. There are numerous legal ways to obtain ebooks. If desired, this can also be done very cheaply; through the library for example."

The Rotterdam court issued a so-called 'dynamic' blocking order, meaning that rightsholders can update the targeted domains and IP addresses if the sites switch to new ones in the future. This also applies to mirrors and increases the blockades' effectiveness, as there is no need to return to court. Previously, Internet provider KPN challenged these 'dynamic' orders, suggesting that they are too broad. The court rejected this argument, however, noting that the process hasn't led to any major problems thus far. BREIN further reports that Google is voluntarily offering a helping hand. As reported in detail previously, the search engine removes blocked domains from its local search results after being notified about an ISP blocking order. "The effectiveness of the blocking measure is increased because Google cooperates in combating these infringements and, at the request of BREIN, completely removes all references to websites that are blocked by order of the Dutch court from the search results," BREIN writes.