Alex Hern reports via the Guardian: The email newsletter service Substack is facing a user revolt after its chief executive defended hosting and handling payments for "Nazis" on its platform, citing anti-censorship reasons. In a note on the site published in December, the chief executive, Hamish McKenzie, said the firm "doesn't like Nazis," and wished "no one held these views." But he said the company did not think that censorship -- by demonetising sites that publish extreme views -- was a solution to the problem, and instead made it worse. Some of the largest newsletters on the service have threatened to take their business elsewhere if Substack does not reverse its stance.

On Tuesday Casey Newton, who writes Platformer -- a popular tech newsletter on the platform with thousands of subscribers paying at least $10 a month -- became the most prominent yet. [...] Substack takes a 10% cut of subscriptions from paid newsletters, meaning the loss of Platformer alone could represent six figures of revenue. Other newsletters have already made the jump. Talia Lavin, a journalist with thousands of paid subscribers on her newsletter The Sword and the Sandwich, moved to a competing service, Buttondown, on Tuesday. Substack's leadership team said in a statement: "As we face growing pressure to censor content published on Substack that to some seems dubious or objectionable, our answer remains the same: we make decisions based on principles not PR, we will defend free expression, and we will stick to our hands-off approach to content moderation."

Alexander Martin reports via The Record: The owner of an apartment in Veliky Novgorod in Russia has been arrested for discrediting the country's armed forces after a neighbor alerted the police to the message 'Slava Ukraini' scrolling across their LED curtains. When police went to the scene, they saw the garland which the owner had hung in celebration of the New Year and a "slogan glorifying the Armed Forces of Ukraine," as a spokesperson for the Ministry of Internal Affairs told state-owned news agency TASS. The apartment owner said the garland was supposed to display a "Happy New Year" greeting, TASS reported.

Several other people in Russia described a similar experience on the AlexGyver web forum, linked to a DIY blog popular in the country. They said at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, their LED curtains also began to show the "Glory to Ukraine" message in Ukrainian. It is not clear whether any of these other posters were also arrested. The man in Veliky Novgorod will have to defend his case in court, according to TASS. Police have seized the curtain itself.

An independent investigation into the cause of the message by the AlexGyver forum users found that affected curtains all used the same open-source firmware code. The original code appears to have originated in Ukraine before someone created a fork translated into Russian. According to the Telegram channel for AlexGyver, the code had been added to the original project on October 18, and then in December the people or person running the fork copied and pasted that update into their own version. "Everyone who downloaded and updated the firmware in December received a gift," the Telegram channel wrote. The message was "really encrypted, hidden from the 'reader' of the code, and is displayed on the first day of the year exclusively for residents of Russia by [geographic region]."

A federal criminal complaint has revealed that state and local agencies in New Jersey bought millions of dollars worth of banned Chinese surveillance cameras. The cameras were purchased from a local company that rebranded the banned equipment made by Dahua Technology, a company that has been implicated in the surveillance of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. According to 404 Media, "At least $15 million of the equipment was bought using federal COVID relief funds." From the report: The feds charged Tamer Zakhary, the CEO of the New Jersey-based surveillance company Packetalk, with three counts of wire fraud and a separate count of false statements for repeatedly lying to state and local agencies about the provenance of his company's surveillance cameras. Some of the cameras Packetalk sold to local agencies were Dahua cameras that had the Dahua logo removed and the colors of the camera changed, according to the criminal complaint.

Dahua Technology is the second largest surveillance camera company in the world. In 2019, the U.S. government banned the purchase of Dahua cameras using federal funds because their cameras have "been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China's campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in Xingjiang." The FCC later said that Dahua cameras "pose an unacceptable risk to U.S. national security." Dahua is not named in the federal complaint, but [404 Media's Jason Koebler] was able to cross-reference details in the complaint with Dahua and was able to identify specific cameras sold by Packetalk to Dahua's product.

According to the FBI, Zakhary sold millions of dollars of surveillance equipment, including rebranded Dahua cameras, to agencies all over New Jersey despite knowing that the cameras were illegal to sell to public agencies. Zakhary also specifically helped two specific agencies in New Jersey (called "Victim Agency-1" and "Victim Agency-2" in the complaint) justify their purchases using federal COVID relief money from the CARES Act, according to the criminal complaint. The feds allege, essentially, that Zakhary tricked local agencies into buying banned cameras using COVID funds: "Zakhary fraudulently misrepresented to the Public Safety Customers that [Packetalk's] products were compliant with Section 889 of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for 2019 [which banned Dahua cameras], when, in fact, they were not," the complaint reads. "As a result of Zakhary's fraudulent misrepresentations, the Public Safety Customers purchased at least $35 million in surveillance cameras and equipment from [Packetalk], over $15 million of which was federal funds and grants."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facing more than 30 lawsuits from victims of its massive data breach, 23andMe is now deflecting the blame to the victims themselves in an attempt to absolve itself from any responsibility, according to a letter sent to a group of victims seen by TechCrunch. "Rather than acknowledge its role in this data security disaster, 23andMe has apparently decided to leave its customers out to dry while downplaying the seriousness of these events," Hassan Zavareei, one of the lawyers representing the victims who received the letter from 23andMe, told TechCrunch in an email.

In December, 23andMe admitted that hackers had stolen the genetic and ancestry data of 6.9 million users, nearly half of all its customers. The data breach started with hackers accessing only around 14,000 user accounts. The hackers broke into this first set of victims by brute-forcing accounts with passwords that were known to be associated with the targeted customers, a technique known as credential stuffing. From these 14,000 initial victims, however, the hackers were able to then access the personal data of the other 6.9 million million victims because they had opted-in to 23andMe's DNA Relatives feature. This optional feature allows customers to automatically share some of their data with people who are considered their relatives on the platform. In other words, by hacking into only 14,000 customers' accounts, the hackers subsequently scraped personal data of another 6.9 million customers whose accounts were not directly hacked.

But in a letter sent to a group of hundreds of 23andMe users who are now suing the company, 23andMe said that "users negligently recycled and failed to update their passwords following these past security incidents, which are unrelated to 23andMe." "Therefore, the incident was not a result of 23andMe's alleged failure to maintain reasonable security measures," the letter reads. [...] 23andMe's lawyers argued that the stolen data cannot be used to inflict monetary damage against the victims. "The information that was potentially accessed cannot be used for any harm. As explained in the October 6, 2023 blog post, the profile information that may have been accessed related to the DNA Relatives feature, which a customer creates and chooses to share with other users on 23andMe's platform. Such information would only be available if plaintiffs affirmatively elected to share this information with other users via the DNA Relatives feature. Additionally, the information that the unauthorized actor potentially obtained about plaintiffs could not have been used to cause pecuniary harm (it did not include their social security number, driver's license number, or any payment or financial information)," the letter read. "This finger pointing is nonsensical," said Zavareei. "23andMe knew or should have known that many consumers use recycled passwords and thus that 23andMe should have implemented some of the many safeguards available to protect against credential stuffing -- especially considering that 23andMe stores personal identifying information, health information, and genetic information on its platform."

"The breach impacted millions of consumers whose data was exposed through the DNA Relatives feature on 23andMe's platform, not because they used recycled passwords," added Zavareei. "Of those millions, only a few thousand accounts were compromised due to credential stuffing. 23andMe's attempt to shirk responsibility by blaming its customers does nothing for these millions of consumers whose data was compromised through no fault of their own whatsoever."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Facebook recently rolled out a new "Link History" setting that creates a special repository of all the links you click on in the Facebook mobile app. Users can opt-out, but Link History is turned on by default, and the data is used for targeted ads. The company pitches Link History as a useful tool for consumers "with your browsing activity saved in one place," rather than another way to keep tabs on your behavior. With the new setting you'll "never lose a link again," Facebook says in a pop-up encouraging users to consent to the new tracking method. The company goes on to mention that "When you allow link history, we may use your information to improve your ads across Meta technologies."

Facebook promises to delete the Link History it's created for you within 90 days if you turn the setting off. According to a Facebook help page, Link History isn't available everywhere. The company says it's rolling out globally "over time." This is a privacy improvement in some ways, but the setting raises more questions than it answers. Meta has always kept track of the links you click on, and this is the first time users have had any visibility or control over this corner of the company's internet spying apparatus. In other words, Meta is just asking users for permission for a category of tracking that it's been using for over a decade. Beyond that, there are a number of ways this setting might give users an illusion of privacy that Meta isn't offering. "The Link History doesn't mention anything about the invasive ways Facebook monitors what you're doing once you visit a webpage," notes Gizmodo's Thomas Germain. "It seems the setting only affects Meta's record of the fact that you clicked a link in the first place. Furthermore, Meta links everything you do on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and its other products. Unlike several of Facebook's other privacy settings, Link History doesn't say that it affects any of Meta's other apps, leaving you with the data harvesting status quo on other parts of Mark Zuckerberg's empire."

"Link History also creates a confusing new regime that establishes privacy settings that don't apply if you access Facebook outside of the Facebook app. If you log in to Facebook on a computer or a mobile browser instead, Link History doesn't protect you. In fact, you can't see the Link History page at all if you're looking at Facebook on your laptop."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A court in Washington, D.C., has been stuck with a tough, maybe impossible question: What does full moon face emoji mean? Let me explain: In the summer of 2022, Ryan Cohen, a major investor in Bed Bath & Beyond, responded to a tweet about the beleaguered retailer with this side-eyed-moon emoji. Later that month, Cohen -- hailed as a "meme king" for his starring role in the GameStop craze -- disclosed that his stake in the company had grown to nearly 12 percent; the stock price subsequently shot up. That week, he sold all of his shares and walked away with a reported $60 million windfall.

Now shareholders are suing him for securities fraud, claiming that Cohen misled investors by using the emoji the way meme-stock types sometimes do -- to suggest that the stock was going "to the moon." A class-action lawsuit with big money on the line has come to legal arguments such as this: "There is no way to establish objectively the truth or falsity of a tiny lunar cartoon," as Cohen's lawyers wrote in an attempt to get the emoji claim dismissed. That argument was denied, and the court held that "emojis may be actionable."

The humble emoji -- and its older cousin, the emoticon -- has infiltrated the corporate world, especially in tech. Last month, when OpenAI briefly ousted Sam Altman and replaced him with an interim CEO, the company's employees reportedly responded with a vulgar emoji on Slack. That FTX, the failed cryptocurrency exchange once run by Sam Bankman-Fried, apparently used these little icons to approve million-dollar expense reports was held up during bankruptcy proceedings as a damning example of its poor corporate controls. And in February, a judge allowed a lawsuit to move forward alleging that an NFT company called Dapper Labs was illegally promoting unregistered securities on Twitter, because "the 'rocket ship' emoji, 'stock chart' emoji, and 'money bags' emoji objectively mean one thing: a financial return on investment."

"This year has been a major turning point in American health care," reports USA Today, "and patients can anticipate several major developments in the new year," including the beginning of a CRISPR "revolution" and "a new reckoning with drug prices that could change the landscape of the U.S. health care system for decades to come." Health care officials expect 2024 to bring a wave of innovation and change in medicine, treatment and public health... Many think 2024 could be the year more people have the tools to follow through on New Year's resolutions about weight loss. If they can afford them and manage to stick with them, people can turn to a new generation of remarkably effective weight-loss drugs, also called GLP-1s, which offer the potential for substantial weight loss...

In 2023, mental health issues became among the nation's most deadly, costly and pervasive health crises... The dearth of remedies has also paved the way for an unsuspecting class of drugs: psychedelics. MDMA, a party drug commonly known as "ecstasy," could win approval for legal distribution in 2024, as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Another psychedelic, a ketamine derivative eskatemine, sold as Spravato, was approved in 2019 to treat depression, but it is being treated like a conventional therapy that must be dosed regularly, not like a psychedelic that provides a long-lasting learning experience, said Matthew Johnson, an expert in psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University. MDMA (midomafetamine capsules) would be different, as the first true psychedelic to win FDA approval.

In a late-stage trial of patients with moderate or severe post-traumatic stress disorder, close to 90% showed clinically significant improvements four months after three treatments with MDMA and more than 70% no longer met the criteria for having the disorder, which represented "really impressive results," according to Matthew Johnson, an expert in psychedelics at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Psilocybin, known colloquially as "magic mushrooms," is also working its way through the federal approval process, but it likely won't come up before officials for another year, Johnson said. Psychedelics are something to keep an eye on in the future, as they're being used to treat an array of mental health issues: eskatimine for depression, MDMA for PTSD and psilocybin for addiction. Johnson said his research suggests that psychedelics will probably have a generalizable benefit across many mental health challenges in the years to come.
2024 will also be the first year America's drug-makers face new limits on how much they can increase prices for drugs covered by the federal health insurance program Medicare.

It was a half a century ago that America passed legislation to protect vanishing species and their habitats — and since then, more than five dozen species have recovered. Just one example: In 1963 only 417 nesting pairs of bald eagles were found in the lower 48 states. But today there's more than 300,000 bald eagles, writes USA Today. "[T]hough its future remains uncertain, many experts say it remains one of the nation's crowning achievements."

But 1,252 species are still listed as endangered in the U.S. — 486 animals, and 766 plants — with 417 more species categorized as "threatened." The perils of the changing climate add urgency to calls for increased funding and more protection. In North Carolina, for example, the rising sea steadily creeps over a refuge that's home to the sole remaining wild red wolf population. Off New England, warming waters forced changes in the foraging habits of the endangered North Atlantic right whale, putting the massive marine mammals in harm's way more often... One in 5 plant and animal species in the nation remain at risk of extinction, says Susan Holmes, executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition. "Loss of habitat and climate change are absolutely some of the most important threats that we have."

"We are at what I would say is a pivotal moment with the threats of climate change," she said. "We have to act faster than ever in order to ensure that these species are going to thrive."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by Naomi Kresge: In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, hundreds of scientists from all over the world banded together in an open-source effort to develop an antiviral that would be available for all. They could never have anticipated the many roadblocks they would face along the way, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which made refugees out of a group of Kyiv chemists who were doing important work for the project. The group, which called itself Covid Moonshot, hasn't given up on its effort to introduce a more affordable, patent-free treatment for the virus. Their open-source Covid antiviral, now funded by Wellcome, is on track to be ready for human testing within the next year and a half, according to Annette von Delft, a University of Oxford scientist and one of the Moonshot group's leaders. More early discovery work on a range of potential inhibitors for other viruses is also still going on and being funded by a US government grant.

"It's a bit like a proof of concept," von Delft says, for bringing a patent-free experimental drug into the clinic, a model that could be repurposed as a tool to fight neglected tropical diseases or antimicrobial resistance, or prepare for future pandemics. "Can we come up with a strategic model that can help those kinds of compounds with less of a business case along?" Of course, there was definitely a business case for a Covid antiviral, and some of the biggest drugmakers rushed to develop them. In 2022, Pfizer Inc.'s Paxlovid was one of the world's best-selling medicines with $18.9 billion in revenue. Demand has since cratered for the pill, which needs to be given shortly after infection and can't be taken alongside a number of other commonly prescribed medicines. Analysts expect the Paxlovid revenue to plunge just shy of $1 billion this year.

However, there is still a need for a better Covid antiviral, particularly in countries where access to the Pfizer pill is limited, according to von Delft. Covid cases have surged again this holiday season, with the rise of a new variant called JN.1 reminding us that the virus is still changing to evade the immunity we've built up so far. Just before Christmas, UK authorities said about one in every 24 people in England and Scotland had the disease. An accessible antiviral could help people return to work more quickly, and it could also be tested as a potential treatment for long Covid. "We know from experience in viral disease that there will be resistance variants evolving over time," von Delft said. "We'll need more than one."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Albania's Parliament said on Tuesday that it had suffered a cyberattack with hackers trying to get into its data system, resulting in a temporary halt in its services. A statement said Monday's cyberattack had not "touched the data of the system," adding that experts were working to discover what consequences the attack could have. It said the system's services would resume at a later time. Local media reported that a cellphone provider and an air flight company were also targeted by Monday's cyberattacks, allegedly from Iranian-based hackers called Homeland Justice, which could not be verified independently.

Albania suffered a cyberattack in July 2022 that the government and multinational technology companies blamed on the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Believed to be in retaliation for Albania sheltering members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq, or MEK, the attack led the government to cut diplomatic relations with Iran two months later. The Iranian Foreign Ministry denied Tehran was behind an attack on Albanian government websites and noted that Iran has suffered cyberattacks from the MEK. In June, Albanian authorities raided a camp for exiled MEK members to seize computer devices allegedly linked to prohibited political activities. [...] In a statement sent later Tuesday to The Associated Press, MEK's media spokesperson Ali Safavi claimed the reported cyberattacks in Albania "are not related to the presence or activities" of MEK members in the country.

Andy Maxwell reports via TorrentFreak: As the crew of Artemis 2 prepare to become the first humans to fly to the moon since 1972, the possibilities of space travel are once again igniting imaginations globally. More than 92% of internet users who want to learn more about this historic mission and the program in general are statistically likely to use Google search. Behind the scenes, however, the ability to find relevant content is under attack. Blundering DMCA takedown notices sent by a company calling itself DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. claim to protect the rights of an OnlyFans/Instagram model working under the name 'Artemis'. Instead, keyword-based systems that fail to discriminate between copyright-infringing content and that referencing the word Artemis in any other context, are flooding towards Google. They contain demands to completely deindex non-infringing, unrelated content, produced by innocent third parties all over the world.

A recent deindexing demand dated December 13, 2022, lists DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. of Canada as the sender. The name of the content owner is redacted but the notice itself states that the company represents a content creator performing under the name Artemis. The notice demands the removal of 3,617 URLs from Google search. If successful, those URLs would be completely unfindable by more than 92% of the world's population who use that search engine. [...] At least 9 of the first 20 URLs in the notice demand the removal of non-infringing articles and news reports referencing the Artemis space program. None have anything to do with the content the sender claims to protect. [...]

Theories as to who might own and/or operate DMCA Piracy Prevention Inc. aren't hard to find but the company does exist and is registered as a corporate entity in Canada. Registered at the same address is a company with remarkably similar details. BranditScan is a corporate entity operating in exactly the same market offering similar if not identical services. BranditScan has sent DMCA takedown notices to Google under three different notifier accounts.

Following policy adjustments by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in January, more foreign-born workers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields are able to live and work permanently in the United States. "The jump comes after USCIS in January 2022 tweaked its guidance criteria relating to two visa categories available to STEM workers," reports Science Magazine. "One is the O-1A, a temporary visa for 'aliens of extraordinary ability' that often paves the way to a green card. The second, which bestows a green card on those with advanced STEM degrees, governs a subset of an EB-2 (employment-based) visa." From the report: The USCIS data, reported exclusively by ScienceInsider, show that the number of O-1A visas awarded in the first year of the revised guidance jumped by almost 30%, to 4570, and held steady in fiscal year 2023, which ended on 30 September. Similarly, the number of STEM EB-2 visas approved in 2022 after a "national interest" waiver shot up by 55% over 2021, to 70,240, and stayed at that level this year. "I'm seeing more aspiring and early-stage startup founders believe there's a way forward for them," says Silicon Valley immigration attorney Sophie Alcorn. She predicts the policy changes will result in "new technology startups that would not have otherwise been created."

President Joe Biden has long sought to make it easier for foreign-born STEM workers to remain in the country and use their talent to spur the U.S. economy. But under the terms of a 1990 law, only 140,000 employment-based green cards may be issued annually, and no more than 7% of those can go to citizens of any one country. The ceiling is well below the demand. And the country quotas have created decades-long queues for scientists and high-tech entrepreneurs born in India and China. The 2022 guidance doesn't alter those limits on employment-based green cards but clarifies the visa process for foreign-born scientists pending any significant changes to the 1990 law. The O-1A work visa, which can be renewed indefinitely, was designed to accelerate the path to a green card for foreign-born high-tech entrepreneurs.

Although there is no cap on the number of O-1A visas awarded, foreign-born scientists have largely ignored this option because it wasn't clear what metrics USCIS would use to assess their application. The 2022 guidance on O-1As removed that uncertainty by listing eight criteria -- including awards, peer-reviewed publications, and reviewing the work of other scientistsâ"and stipulating that applicants need to satisfy at least three of them. The second visa policy change affects those with advanced STEM degrees seeking the national interest waiver for an EB-2. Under the normal process of obtaining such a visa, the Department of Labor requires employers to first satisfy rules meant to protect U.S. workers from foreign competition, for example, by showing that the company has failed to find a qualified domestic worker and that the job will pay the prevailing wage. That time-consuming exercise can be waived if visa applicants can prove they are doing "exceptional" work of "substantial merit and national importance." But once again, the standard for determining whether the labor-force requirements can be waived was vague, so relatively few STEM workers chose that route. The 2022 USCIS guidance not only specifies criteria, which closely track those for the nonimmigrant, O-1A visa, but also allows scientists to sponsor themselves.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A group of clowns is suing their former employer Clowns.com for multiple labor law violations, according to recently filed court records. Four people -- Brayan Angulo, Cameron Pille, Janina Salorio, and Xander Black -- filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday alleging Adolph Rodriguez and Erica Barbuto, owners of Clowns.com and their former bosses, misclassified them as independent workers for years, and failed to pay them for their time. The Long Island-based company, which provides entertainers for events, violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and the New York Labor Law, the lawsuit claims.

The owners of Clowns.com didn't give employees detailed pay statements as required by New York law, the lawsuit alleges. "As a result, Plaintiffs did not know how precisely their weekly pay was being calculated, and were thus deprived of information that could be used to challenge and prevent the theft of their wages," it says. The clowns weren't paid for time "spent at the warehouse gathering and loading equipment and supplies into vehicles," or for travel time between parties, or when parties went on for longer than expected, they claim. Pille said she's "proud to join with my clown colleagues" to stand up to wage theft and misclassification. "For years, Clowns.com has treated clowns, who are largely young actors with no prior training in clowning who sign up for this job to make ends meet, as independent contractors."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple's AirTags are meant to help you effortlessly find your keys or track your luggage. But the same features that make them easy to deploy and inconspicuous in your daily life have also allowed them to be abused as a sinister tracking tool that domestic abusers and criminals can use to stalk their targets. Over the past year, Apple has taken protective steps to notify iPhone and Android users if an AirTag is in their vicinity for a significant amount of time without the presence of its owner's iPhone, which could indicate that an AirTag has been planted to secretly track their location. Apple hasn't said exactly how long this time interval is, but to create the much-needed alert system, Apple made some crucial changes to the location privacy design the company originally developed a few years ago for its "Find My" device tracking feature. Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, San Diego, say, though, that they've developed (PDF) a cryptographic scheme to bridge the gap -- prioritizing detection of potentially malicious AirTags while also preserving maximum privacy for AirTag users. [...]

The solution [Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matt Green] and his fellow researchers came up with leans on two established areas of cryptography that the group worked to implement in a streamlined and efficient way so the system could reasonably run in the background on mobile devices without being disruptive. The first element is "secret sharing," which allows the creation of systems that can't reveal anything about a "secret" unless enough separate puzzle pieces present themselves and come together. Then, if the conditions are right, the system can reconstruct the secret. In the case of AirTags, the "secret" is the true, static identity of the device underlying the public identifier that is frequently changing for privacy purposes. Secret sharing was conceptually useful for the researchers to employ because they could develop a mechanism where a device like a smartphone would only be able to determine that it was being followed around by an AirTag with a constantly rotating public identifier if the system received enough of a certain type of ping over time. Then, suddenly, the suspicious AirTag's anonymity would fall away and the system would be able to determine that it had been in close proximity for a concerning amount of time.

Green notes, though, that a limitation of secret sharing algorithms is that they aren't very good at sorting and parsing inputs if they're being deluged by a lot of different puzzle pieces from all different puzzles -- the exact scenario that would occur in the real world where AirTags and Find My devices are constantly encountering each other. With this in mind, the researchers employed a second concept known as "error correction coding," which is specifically designed to sort signal from noise and preserve the durability of signals even if they acquire some errors or corruptions. "Secret sharing and error correction coding have a lot of overlap," Green says. "The trick was to find a way to implement it all that would be fast, and where a phone would be able to reassemble all the puzzle pieces when needed while all of this is running quietly in the background." The researchers published (PDF) their first paper in September and submitted it to Apple. More recently, they notified the industry consortium about the proposal.

Google has indicated that it is ready to settle a class-action lawsuit filed in 2020 over its Chrome browser's Incognito mode. From a report: Arising in the Northern District of California, the lawsuit accused Google of continuing to "track, collect, and identify [users'] browsing data in real time" even when they had opened a new Incognito window. The lawsuit, filed by Florida resident William Byatt and California residents Chasom Brown and Maria Nguyen, accused Google of violating wiretap laws.

It also alleged that sites using Google Analytics or Ad Manager collected information from browsers in Incognito mode, including web page content, device data, and IP address. The plaintiffs also accused Google of taking Chrome users' private browsing activity and then associating it with their already-existing user profiles. Google initially attempted to have the lawsuit dismissed by pointing to the message displayed when users turned on Chrome's incognito mode. That warning tells users that their activity "might still be visible to websites you visit."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Times is targeting various companies under the OpenAI umbrella, as well as Microsoft, an OpenAI partner that both uses it to power its Copilot service and helped provide the infrastructure for training the GPT Large Language Model. But the suit goes well beyond the use of copyrighted material in training, alleging that OpenAI-powered software will happily circumvent the Times' paywall and ascribe hallucinated misinformation to the Times.

The suit notes that The Times maintains a large staff that allows it to do things like dedicate reporters to a huge range of beats and engage in important investigative journalism, among other things. Because of those investments, the newspaper is often considered an authoritative source on many matters. All of that costs money, and The Times earns that by limiting access to its reporting through a robust paywall. In addition, each print edition has a copyright notification, the Times' terms of service limit the copying and use of any published material, and it can be selective about how it licenses its stories.

In addition to driving revenue, these restrictions also help it to maintain its reputation as an authoritative voice by controlling how its works appear. The suit alleges that OpenAI-developed tools undermine all of that. [...] The suit seeks nothing less than the erasure of both any GPT instances that the parties have trained using material from the Times, as well as the destruction of the datasets that were used for the training. It also asks for a permanent injunction to prevent similar conduct in the future. The Times also wants money, lots and lots of money: "statutory damages, compensatory damages, restitution, disgorgement, and any other relief that may be permitted by law or equity."

In October, Apple issued notifications warning over a half dozen India lawmakers of their iPhones being targets of state-sponsored attacks. According to a new report from the Washington Post, the Modi government responded by criticizing Apple's security and demanding explanations to mitigate political impact (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). From the report: Officials from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) publicly questioned whether the Silicon Valley company's internal threat algorithms were faulty and announced an investigation into the security of Apple devices. In private, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, senior Modi administration officials called Apple's India representatives to demand that the company help soften the political impact of the warnings. They also summoned an Apple security expert from outside the country to a meeting in New Delhi, where government representatives pressed the Apple official to come up with alternative explanations for the warnings to users, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. "They were really angry," one of those people said.

The visiting Apple official stood by the company's warnings. But the intensity of the Indian government effort to discredit and strong-arm Apple disturbed executives at the company's headquarters, in Cupertino, Calif., and illustrated how even Silicon Valley's most powerful tech companies can face pressure from the increasingly assertive leadership of the world's most populous country -- and one of the most critical technology markets of the coming decade. The recent episode also exemplified the dangers facing government critics in India and the lengths to which the Modi administration will go to deflect suspicions that it has engaged in hacking against its perceived enemies, according to digital rights groups, industry workers and Indian journalists. Many of the more than 20 people who received Apple's warnings at the end of October have been publicly critical of Modi or his longtime ally, Gautam Adani, an Indian energy and infrastructure tycoon. They included a firebrand politician from West Bengal state, a Communist leader from southern India and a New Delhi-based spokesman for the nation's largest opposition party. [...] Gopal Krishna Agarwal, a national spokesman for the BJP, said any evidence of hacking should be presented to the Indian government for investigation.

The Modi government has never confirmed or denied using spyware, and it has refused to cooperate with a committee appointed by India's Supreme Court to investigate whether it had. But two years ago, the Forbidden Stories journalism consortium, which included The Post, found that phones belonging to Indian journalists and political figures were infected with Pegasus, which grants attackers access to a device's encrypted messages, camera and microphone. In recent weeks, The Post, in collaboration with Amnesty, found fresh cases of infections among Indian journalists. Additional work by The Post and New York security firm iVerify found that opposition politicians had been targeted, adding to the evidence suggesting the Indian government's use of powerful surveillance tools. In addition, Amnesty showed The Post evidence it found in June that suggested a Pegasus customer was preparing to hack people in India. Amnesty asked that the evidence not be detailed to avoid teaching Pegasus users how to cover their tracks. "These findings show that spyware abuse continues unabated in India," said Donncha O Cearbhaill, head of Amnesty International's Security Lab. "Journalists, activists and opposition politicians in India can neither protect themselves against being targeted by highly invasive spyware nor expect meaningful accountability."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The United States and the state of California have reached an agreement in principle with the truck engine manufacturer Cummins on a $1.6 billion penalty to settle claims that the company violated the Clean Air Act by installing devices to defeat emissions controls on hundreds of thousands of engines, the Justice Department announced on Friday. The penalty would be the largest ever under the Clean Air Act and the second largest ever environmental penalty in the United States. Defeat devices are parts or software that bypass, defeat or render inoperative emissions controls like pollution sensors and onboard computers. They allow vehicles to pass emissions inspections while still emitting high levels of smog-causing pollutants such as nitrogen oxide, which is linked to asthma and other respiratory illnesses.

The Justice Department has accused the company of installing defeat devices on 630,000 model year 2013 to 2019 RAM 2500 and 3500 pickup truck engines. The company is also alleged to have secretly installed auxiliary emission control devices on 330,000 model year 2019 to 2023 RAM 2500 and 3500 pickup truck engines. "Violations of our environmental laws have a tangible impact. They inflict real harm on people in communities across the country," Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. "This historic agreement should make clear that the Justice Department will be aggressive in its efforts to hold accountable those who seek to profit at the expense of people's health and safety."

In a statement, Cummins said that it had "seen no evidence that anyone acted in bad faith and does not admit wrongdoing." The company said it has "cooperated fully with the relevant regulators, already addressed many of the issues involved, and looks forward to obtaining certainty as it concludes this lengthy matter. Cummins conducted an extensive internal review and worked collaboratively with the regulators for more than four years." Stellantis, the company that makes the trucks, has already recalled the model year 2019 trucks and has initiated a recall of the model year 2013 to 2018 trucks. The software in those trucks will be recalibrated to ensure that they are fully compliant with federal emissions law, said Jon Mills, a spokesman for Cummins. Mr. Mills said that "next steps are unclear" on the model year 2020 through 2023, but that the company "continues to work collaboratively with regulators" to resolve the issue. The Justice Department partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency in its investigation of the case.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. From a report: The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit [PDF], filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.

The suit does not include an exact monetary demand. But it says the defendants should be held responsible for "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages" related to the "unlawful copying and use of The Times's uniquely valuable works." It also calls for the companies to destroy any chatbot models and training data that use copyrighted material from The Times. The lawsuit could test the emerging legal contours of generative A.I. technologies -- so called for the text, images and other content they can create after learning from large data sets -- and could carry major implications for the news industry. The Times is among a small number of outlets that have built successful business models from online journalism, but dozens of newspapers and magazines have been hobbled by readers' migration to the internet.

theodp writes: Back in May 2021, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org touted the signing of a licensing agreement with WhiteHat Jr., allowing the edtech company with a controversial past (Whitehat Jr. was bought for $300M in 2020 by Byju's, an edtech firm that received a $50M investment from Mark Zuckerberg's venture firm) to integrate Code.org's free-to-educators-and-organizations content and tools into their online tutoring service. Code.org did not reveal what it was charging Byju's to use its "free curriculum and open source technology" for commercial purposes, but Code.org's 2021 IRS 990 filing reported $1M in royalties from an unspecified source after earlier years reported $0. Coincidentally, Whitehat Jr. is represented by Aaron Kornblum, who once worked at Microsoft for now-President Brad Smith, who left Code.org's Board just before the lawsuit was filed.

Fast forward to 2023 and the bloom is off the rose, as Court records show that Code.org earlier this month sued Whitehat Education Technology, LLC (Exhibits A and B) in what is called "a civil action for breach of contract arising from Whitehat's failure to pay Code.org the agreed-upon charges for its use of Code.org's platform and licensed content and its ongoing, unauthorized use of that platform and content." According to the filing, "Whitehat agreed [in April 2022] to pay to Code.org licensing fees totaling $4,000,000 pursuant to a four-year schedule" and "made its first four scheduled payments, totaling $1,000,000," but "about a year after the Agreement was signed, Whitehat informed Code.org that it would be unable to make the remaining scheduled license payments." While the original agreement was amended to backload Whitehat's license fee payment obligations, "Whitehat has not paid anything at all beyond the $1,000,000 that it paid pursuant to the 2022 invoices before the Agreement was amended" and "has continued to access Code.org's platform and content."

That Byju's Whitehat Jr. stiffed Code.org is hardly shocking. In June 2023, Reuters reported that Byju's auditor Deloitte cut ties with the troubled Indian Edtech startup that was once an investor darling and valued at $22 billion, adding that a Byju's Board member representing the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative had resigned with two other Board members. The BBC reported in July that Byju's was guilty of overexpanding during the pandemic (not unlike Zuck's Facebook). Ironically, the lawsuit Exhibits include screenshots showing Mark Zuckerberg teaching Code.org lessons. Zuckerberg and Facebook were once among the biggest backers of Code.org, although it's unclear whether that relationship soured after court documents were released that revealed Code.org's co-founders talking smack about Zuck and Facebook's business practices to lawyers for Six4Three, which was suing Facebook.

Code.org's curriculum is also used by the Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) initiative, but it is unclear what royalties -- if any -- Amazon pays to Code.org for the use of Code.org curriculum. While the AFE site boldly says, "we provide free computer science curriculum," the AFE fine print further explains that "our partners at Code.org and ProjectSTEM offer a wide array of introductory and advance curriculum options and teacher training." It's unclear what kind of organization Amazon's AFE ("Computer Science Learning Childhood to Career") exactly is -- an IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search failed to find any hits for "Amazon Future Engineer" -- making it hard to guess whether Code.org might consider AFE's use of Code.org software 'commercial use.' Would providing a California school district with free K-12 CS curriculum that Amazon boasts of cultivating into its "vocal champion" count as "commercial use"? How about providing free K-12 CS curriculum to children who live where Amazon is seeking incentives? Or if Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos testifies Amazon "funds computer science coursework" for schools as he attempts to counter a Congressional antitrust inquiry? These seem to be some of the kinds of distinctions Richard Stallman anticipated more than a decade ago as he argued against a restriction against commercial use of otherwise free software.