Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: YouTuber Trevor Jacob has pled guilty to felony federal obstruction of an investigation for removing and destroying wreckage of his airplane that he intentionally crashed in November 2021 for online YouTube views. Maximum sentence is 20 years.

On November 24, 2021 Jacob was flying solo from Lompoc City Airport to Mammoth Lakes, California. He reported to the FAA that he had engine trouble and had to abandon the plane using a parachute. After the FAA launched an active investigation, Jacob lied about not knowing the location of wreckage for the next several weeks despite his video footage that he found the wreckage shortly after landing on the ground. On December 10, 2021 Jacob and a friend lifted the wreckage away from the national forest crash site using a helicopter. Jacob transported the wreckage back to Lompoc City Airport with a truck. He then cut up and disposed of the wreckage over then next several days using the airport's trash bins.

On December 23,2021 Jacob posted a YouTube video titled, "I Crashed My Airplane" which showed his account of engine trouble and the crash. Keen viewers were immediately skeptical of Jacob's account of a flight "emergency" noting he had multiple cameras recording the event including a selfie stick and that Jacob was wearing a parachute before the engine trouble occurred. Pilots commented how Jacob failed to follow basic procedures like attempting to restart the plane or contacting air traffic control with a mayday before ditching the plane. Largely based on the his YouTube video, the FAA revoked his pilot's license in April 2022.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The Biden administration on Thursday unveiled a sweeping plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. power industry, one of the biggest steps so far in its effort to decarbonize the economy to fight climate change. The proposal would limit how much carbon dioxide power plants, which are the source of more than a quarter of U.S. emissions, can chuff into the atmosphere, putting the industry on a years-long course to install billions of dollars of new equipment or shut down. Environmental groups and scientists have long argued that such steps are crucial to curb global warming, but fossil fuel-producing states argue that they represent government overreach and threaten to destabilize the electric grid.

The proposal sets standards that would push power companies to install carbon capture equipment (CCS) that can siphon the CO2 from a plant's smokestack before it reaches the atmosphere, or use super-low-emissions hydrogen as a fuel. The Environmental Protection Agency projects the plan would cut carbon emissions from coal plants and new gas plants by 617 million tons between 2028 and 2042, the equivalent of reducing the annual emissions of 137 million passenger vehicles. "Today we're proposing new technology standards that will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel power plants, protecting health and protecting our planet," EPA Administrator Michael Regan told students at the University of Maryland on their last day of school on Thursday.

Regan said that the agency has wielded the power of the federal Clean Air Act to craft the new power plant rules, along with a suite of other measures aimed at tackling vehicle emissions, as well as potent greenhouse gases methane and HFCs, that would reduce the equivalent of 15 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions between 2022 and 2055. The proposal, more than 18 months in the making, reflects constraints imposed on the EPA by the Supreme Court, which ruled last year that the agency cannot impose a system-wide shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy, but can regulate plants by setting technology-based standards applied on-site.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a collaborative investigation between Motherboard, lavialibera, and IrpiMedia: Mafioso Bartolo Bruzzaniti needed everyone to do their job just right. First, the Colombian suppliers would hide a massive amount of cocaine inside bananas at the port city of Turbo, Colombia. That shipping container would then be transported across the ocean to Catania, in Sicily, Italy. A corrupt port worker on the mafia's payroll would wave the shipment through and had advised the group how to package the drugs. This was so the cocaine could remain undetected even if the worker was forced to scan the shipment. Another group of on-the-ground mafiosos would then unload the cocaine outside of the port.

In March 2021, Bruzzaniti, an alleged member of the infamous 'Ndrangheta mafia group and who says Milan belongs to him "by right," asked his brother Antonio to go fetch something else crucial to the traffickers' success. "Go right now," Bruzzaniti wrote in a text message later produced in court records. "It's needed urgently." Investigators know what Bruzzaniti said because European authorities had penetrated an encrypted phone network called Sky and harvested around a billion of the users' messages. These phones are the technological backbone of organized crime around the world.

The thing Antonio needed to urgently fetch was a phone from a different encrypted phone network, one that the authorities appear to have not compromised and which the mafia have been using as part of their operations. To that phone, a contact sent one half of the shipping container's serial number. A reporting collaboration between Motherboard, lavialibera, and IrpiMedia has identified that encrypted phone as being run by a company called No. 1 Business Communication (No. 1 BC). The investigation has found members of the mafia and other organized crime groups turning to No. 1 BC as authorities cracked down on other platforms. The collaboration has identified multiple key players in No. 1 BC's development, sales, and legal structure. "Take the bc1 right away," Bruzzaniti wrote in another text, referring to the No. 1 BC phone.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An ex-Ubiquiti engineer, Nickolas Sharp, was sentenced to six years in prison yesterday after pleading guilty in a New York court to stealing tens of gigabytes of confidential data, demanding a $1.9 million ransom from his former employer, and then publishing the data publicly when his demands were refused. Sharp had asked for no prison time, telling United States District Judge Katherine Polk Failla that the cyberattack was actually an "unsanctioned security drill" that left Ubiquiti "a safer place for itself and for its clients," Bloomberg reported. In a court document (PDF), Sharp claimed that Ubiquiti CEO Robert Pera had prevented Sharp from "resolving outstanding security issues," and Sharp told the judge that this led to an "idiotic hyperfixation" on fixing those security flaws.

However, even if that was Sharp's true motivation, Failla did not accept his justification of his crimes, which include wire fraud, intentionally damaging protected computers, and lying to the FBI. "It was not up to Mr. Sharp to play God in this circumstance," Failla said. US attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, argued (PDF) that Sharp was not a "cybersecurity vigilante" but an "inveterate liar and data thief" who was "presenting a contrived deception to the Court that this entire offense was somehow just a misguided security drill." Williams said that Sharp made "dozens, if not hundreds, of criminal decisions" and even implicated innocent co-workers to "divert suspicion." Sharp also had already admitted in pre-sentencing that the cyber attack was planned for "financial gain." Williams said Sharp did it seemingly out of "pure greed" and ego because Sharp "felt mistreated" -- overworked and underpaid -- by the IT company, Williams said.

Court documents show that Ubiquiti spent "well over $1.5 million dollars and hundreds of hours of employee and consultant time" trying to remediate what Williams described as Sharp's "breathtaking" theft. But the company lost much more than that when Sharp attempted to conceal his crimes -- posing as a whistleblower, planting false media reports, and contacting US and foreign regulators to investigate Ubiquiti's alleged downplaying of the data breach. Within a single day after Sharp planted false reports, stocks plummeted, causing Ubiquiti to lose over $4 billion in market capitalization value, court documents show. Williams had pushed the court to impose a sentence between eight to 10 years, arguing that anything less would be perceived by the public as a "slap on the wrist." Sharp's six-year term is slightly less than that, but in a press release, Williams described the sentence as imposing "serious penalties" for Sharp's "callous crimes." "He was disgruntled at his employer, planning to leave the company, and wanted to extort millions of dollars and cause damage on his way out," Williams said in his sentencing memo.

Former Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi was sentenced to two years in prison for insider trading. Decrypt reports: Ishan Wahi, 32, and his associates -- including his brother, Nikhil -- made over $1.5 million from investing in new digital assets just before they were listed by America's biggest crypto exchange. Wahi was able to use his knowledge of incoming assets to buy them and then quickly sell them, to make huge profits. When the San Francisco-based exchange lists new coins and tokens, they quickly shoot up in value, a phenomenon known as "the Coinbase effect."

The Indian national tried to flee the country after being quizzed by Coinbase, the Department of Justice said. But he was stopped from boarding a flight to India by American cops. Wahi pleaded guilty in February to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud brought against him by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. Wahi, his brother and his friend, Sameer Ramani, were also hit with civil charges by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "[Wahi] violated the trust placed in him by his employer" by sharing the secret listings," said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. "Today's sentence should send a strong signal to all participants in the cryptocurrency markets that the laws decidedly do apply to them."

Clearview AI, the US startup that's attracted notoriety in recent years for a massive privacy violation after it scraped selfies off the Internet and used people's data to build a facial recognition tool it pitched to law enforcement and others, has been hit with another fine in France over non-cooperation with the data protection regulator. From a report: The overdue penalty payment of $5.7M has been issued by the French regulator, the CNIL -- on top of a $22M sanction it slapped the company with last year for breaching regional privacy rules. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets out conditions for processing personal data lawfully. Clearview has been found to have breached a number of requirements set out in law -- by France's CNIL and several other regional data protection authorities, including authorities in the UK, Italy and Greece, garnering several tens of millions in total fines to date. Whether Clearview will ever pay any of these fines remains an open question, since the US-based company has not been cooperating with EU regulators.

A Delaware judge has dismissed a shareholder lawsuit against financial technology company Block over its 2021 acquisition of majority ownership in Tidal, the music streaming service partly owned by rapper Jay-Z. From a report: A pension fund shareholder alleged that Block founder and CEO Jack Dorsey and the company's board of directors breached their fiduciary duties in agreeing to pay roughly $300 million to take control of Tidal as it was failing financially and the target of an ongoing criminal investigation. Chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick ruled Tuesday that the pension fund had failed to demand that Block's board pursue legal action itself before filing a derivative lawsuit on behalf of the company. Under Delaware law, shareholders must make such a demand or demonstrate that doing so would be futile because a majority of directors were self-interested, lacked independence or faced a substantial likelihood of liability.

McCormick noted that the demand requirement is a manifestation of Delaware's business judgment rule, under which courts defer to the decision-making of corporate directors unless there is an indication they acted in bad faith. That deference remains even if a corporate decision turns out to be unwise. "It seemed, by all accounts, a terrible business decision," the judge said of Block's acquisition of Tidal. "Under Delaware law, however, a board comprised of a majority of disinterested and independent directors is free to make a terrible business decision without any meaningful threat of liability, so long as the directors approve the action in good faith."

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is seeking the dismissal of 10 of the 13 charges against him over the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange. Axios reports: Lawyers for Bankman-Fried, who's pleaded not guilty to fraud, conspiracy, campaign finance law violations and money laundering, in a filing argued that several of the charges failed to properly state an offense. The motion that was filed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York is seeking the dismissal of 10 of the 13 charges against him. "Simply making a false statement, by itself, does not constitute wire fraud unless it is made for the purpose of obtaining money or property from the victim of the fraud," Bankman-Fried's lawyers wrote.

According to Ars Technica, SBF's lawyers are essentially arguing that there's no evidence of harm caused because fraud requires a "scheme to cause economic loss to the victim," which prosecutors allegedly haven't proved. Instead, SBF alleges that federal prosecutors have concocted "a hodgepodge of different intangible losses" suffered by banks and lenders -- including "the right to honest services," "the loss of control of assets," and "the deprivation of valuable information." [...] "In the end, the Government is trying to transform allegations of dishonesty and unfair dealing into violations of the federal fraud statutes," SBF's lawyers wrote. "While such conduct may well be improper, it is not wire fraud."

The 31-year-old Bankman-Fried, who is currently under house arrest on a $250 million bond at his parents' home in Palo Alto, California, faces more than 155 years in prison if convicted on all counts. A trial has been scheduled for October.

International online sports broadcasting company DAZN has joined a global task force that aims to shut down pirated and unauthorized sports streaming operations worldwide. The new group is operated by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), which counts giants like Amazon, Apple, NBC Universal, Netflix, Disney, Sony, and Warner Bros. among its members. From a report: Unauthorized streaming sources can often be the only available option for people to watch certain teams and matches subject to complicated broadcasting deals, locked into high-priced bundles, and blackouts. With more tech and entertainment companies using sports as a sweetener for their services (NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube, MLS / MLB for Apple TV Plus, and Thursday Night Football on Amazon Prime are a few examples), they have more reasons to collectively take issue with anyone popping up a free stream.

ACE as a whole had previously taken down IPTV-based service NitroTV, which allegedly charged users $20 per month in the US for a collection of unlicensed streaming content. ACE was first formed in 2017 as the anti-piracy arm of the Motion Picture Association (formerly known as the MPAA until it dropped the second A in 2019). Now with DAZN, it consists of 53 big media companies.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: An EU plan under which all WhatsApp, iMessage and Snapchat accounts could be screened for child abuse content has hit a significant obstacle after internal legal advice said it would probably be annulled by the courts for breaching users' rights. Under the proposed "chat controls" regulation, any encrypted service provider could be forced to survey billions of messages, videos and photos for "identifiers" of certain types of content where it was suspected a service was being used to disseminate harmful material. The providers issued with a so-called "detection order" by national bodies would have to alert police if they found evidence of suspected harmful content being shared or the grooming of children.

Privacy campaigners and the service providers have already warned that the proposed EU regulation and a similar online safety bill in the UK risk end-to-end encryption services such as WhatsApp disappearing from Europe. Now leaked internal EU legal advice, which was presented to diplomats from the bloc's member states on 27 April and has been seen by the Guardian, raises significant doubts about the lawfulness of the regulation unveiled by the European Commission in May last year. The legal service of the council of the EU, the decision-making body led by national ministers, has advised the proposed regulation poses a "particularly serious limitation to the rights to privacy and personal data" and that there is a "serious risk" of it falling foul of a judicial review on multiple grounds.

The EU lawyers write that the draft regulation "would require the general and indiscriminate screening of the data processed by a specific service provider, and apply without distinction to all the persons using that specific service, without those persons being, even indirectly, in a situation liable to give rise to criminal prosecution." The legal service goes on to warn that the European court of justice has previously judged the screening of communications metadata is "proportionate only for the purpose of safeguarding national security" and therefore "it is rather unlikely that similar screening of content of communications for the purpose of combating crime of child sexual abuse would be found proportionate, let alone with regard to the conduct not constituting criminal offenses." The lawyers conclude the proposed regulation is at "serious risk of exceeding the limits of what is appropriate and necessary in order to meet the legitimate objectives pursued, and therefore of failing to comply with the principle of proportionality". The legal service is also concerned about the introduction of age verification technology and processes to popular encrypted services. "The lawyers write that this would necessarily involve the mass profiling of users, or the biometric analysis of the user's face or voice, or alternatively the use of a digital certification system they note 'would necessarily add another layer of interference with the rights and freedoms of the users,'" reports the Guardian.

"Despite the advice, it is understood that 10 EU member states -- Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Spain -- back continuing with the regulation without amendment."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Justice Department has seized the domains of 13 DDoS-for hire services as part of an ongoing initiative for combatting the Internet menace. The providers of these illicit services platforms describe them as "booter" or "stressor" services that allow site admins to test the robustness and stability of their infrastructure. Almost, if not all, are patronized by people out to exact revenge on sites they don't like or to further extortion, bribes, or other forms of graft. The international law enforcement initiative is known as Operation PowerOFF. In December, federal authorities seized another 48 domains. Ten of them returned with new domains, many that closely resembled their previous names.

"Ten of the 13 domains seized today are reincarnations of services that were seized during a prior sweep in December, which targeted 48 top booter services," the Justice Department said. "For example, one of the domains seized this week -- cyberstress.org -- appears to be the same service operated under the domain cyberstress.us, which was seized in December. While many of the previously disrupted booter services have not returned, today's action reflects law enforcement's commitment to targeting those operators who have chosen to continue their criminal activities." According to a seizure warrant (PDF) filed in federal court, the FBI used live accounts available through the services to take down sites with high-capacity bandwidth that were under FBI control. "The FBI tested each of services associated with the SUBJECT DOMAINS, meaning that agents or other personnel visited each of the websites and either used previous login information or registered a new account on the service to conduct attacks," FBI Special Agent Elliott Peterson wrote in the affidavit. "I believe that each of the SUBJECT DOMAINS is being used to facilitate the commission of attacks against unwitting victims to prevent the victims from accessing the Internet, to disconnect the victim from or degrade communication with established Internet connections, or to cause other similar damage."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: NextGen Healthcare, a U.S.-based provider of electronic health record software, admitted that hackers breached its systems and stole the personal data of more than 1 million patients. In a data breach notification filed with the Maine attorney general's office, NextGen Healthcare confirmed that hackers accessed the personal data of 1.05 million patients, including approximately 4,000 Maine residents. In a letter sent to those affected, NextGen Healthcare said that hackers stole patients' names, dates of birth, addresses and Social Security numbers. "Importantly, our investigation has revealed no evidence of any access or impact to any of your health or medical records or any health or medical data," the company added. TechCrunch asked NextGen Healthcare whether it has the means, such as logs, to determine what data was exfiltrated, but company spokesperson Tami Andrade declined to answer.

In its filing with Maine's AG, NextGen Healthcare said it was alerted to suspicious activity on March 30, and later determined that hackers had access to its systems between March 29 and April 14, 2023. The notification says that the attackers gained access to its NextGen Office system -- a cloud-based EHR and practice management solution -- using client credentials that "appear to have been stolen from other sources or incidents unrelated to NextGen." "When we learned of the incident, we took steps to investigate and remediate, including working together with leading outside cybersecurity experts and notifying law enforcement," Andrade told TechCrunch in a statement. "The individuals known to be impacted by this incident were notified on April 28, 2023, and we have offered them 24 months of free fraud detection and identity theft protection." NextGen was also the victim of a ransomware attack in January this year, adds TechCrunch. The stolen data, including employee names, addresses, phone numbers and passport scans, appears to be available on the dark web.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has given its largest ever award of almost $279 million to a whistleblower whose information was crucial in an enforcement action by the regulator. The SEC did not reveal the case involved, but the award shows there is a significant incentive for whistleblowers to come forward with accurate information about potential securities law violations. Reuters reports: The award is more than double the $114 million that it had issued in October 2020. "As this award shows, there is a significant incentive for whistleblowers to come forward with accurate information about potential securities law violations," said Gurbir Grewal, director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, in a statement. "The whistleblower's sustained assistance including multiple interviews and written submissions was critical to the success of these actions," said Creola Kelly, chief of the SEC's Office of the Whistleblower.

Payments to whistleblowers are made out of an investor protection fund that was established by Congress and financed entirely through monetary sanctions paid to the SEC by securities law violators. Awards to whistleblowers can range from 10% to 30% of the money collected when the monetary sanctions exceed $1 million.

Apple failed to revive a long-running copyright lawsuit against cybersecurity firm Corellium over its software that simulates the iPhone's iOS operating systems, letting security researchers to identify flaws in the software. From a report: The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Monday ruled that Corellium's CORSEC simulator is protected by copyright law's fair use doctrine, which allows the duplication of copyrighted work under certain circumstances. Apple argued that Corellium's software was "wholesale copying and reproduction" of iOS and served as a market substitute for its own security research products. Corellium countered that its copying of Apple's computer code and app icons was only for the purposes of security research and was sufficiently "transformative" under the fair use standard. The three-judge panel largely agreed with Corellium, finding that CORSEC "furthers scientific progress by allowing security research into important operating systems" and that iOS "is functional operating software that falls outside copyright's core."

Elizabeth Holmes hasn't spoken to the media since 2016. Now convicted on criminal fraud charges — and counting down the days until she reports for prison — Holmes finally breaks the silence in a profile published today in the New York Times.

"I made so many mistakes," Holmes says, "and there was so much I didn't know and understand, and I feel like when you do it wrong, it's like you really internalize it in a deep way," Billy Evans, Ms. Holmes's partner and the father of their two young children, pushes a stroller with the couple's 20-month-old son, William... At one point, I tell her that I heard Jennifer Lawrence had pulled out of portraying her in a movie. She replied, almost reflectively, "They're not playing me. They're playing a character I created." So, why did she create that public persona? "I believed it would be how I would be good at business and taken seriously and not taken as a little girl or a girl who didn't have good technical ideas," said Ms. Holmes, who founded Theranos at 19. "Maybe people picked up on that not being authentic, since it wasn't..."

Her top lieutenant at Theranos, and much older boyfriend at the time, Ramesh Balwani, was found guilty of 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud at Theranos. He began a 13-year prison sentence last month. On Thursday, his legal team filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit... She said Mr. Balwani did not control her every interaction or statement at Theranos, but she "deferred to him in the areas he oversaw because I believed he knew better than I did," and those areas included the problematic clinical lab... Ms. Holmes's story of how she got here — to the bright, cozy house and the supportive partner and the two babies — feels a lot like the story of someone who had finally broken out of a cult and been deprogrammed. After her relationship with Mr. Balwani ended and Theranos dissolved, Ms. Holmes said, "I began my life again."

But then I remember that Ms. Holmes was running the cult...

What does she think would have happened if she hadn't garnered so much early attention as the second coming of Silicon Valley? Ms. Holmes does not blink: "We would've seen through our vision." In other words, she thinks if she'd spent more time quietly working on her inventions and less time on a stage promoting the company, she would have revolutionized health care by now. This kind of misguided talk is the one consistent thread in my reporting on who Ms. Holmes really is. She repeatedly says that Theranos wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme for her; she never sold her shares and didn't come out of it wealthy. Ms. Holmes's parents said they borrowed $500,000 against their Washington, D.C.-area home to post Ms. Holmes's bond...

She maintains the idealistic delusion of a 19-year-old, never mind that she's 39 with a fraud conviction, telling me she is still working on health care-related inventions and would continue to do so behind bars. "I still dream about being able to contribute in that space," Ms. Holmes said. "I still feel the same calling to it as I always did and I still think the need is there." If your head is exploding at how divorced from reality this sounds, that's kind of the point. When Ms. Holmes uses the messianic vernacular of tech, I get the sense that she truly believes that she could have — and, in fact, she still could — change the world, and she doesn't much care if we believe her or not...

It's this steadfast (or unhinged?) belief that has kept Ms. Holmes fighting, even though a guilty plea would have likely helped her chances of remaining free.

CoinDesk reports that Binance "temporarily paused bitcoin withdrawals Sunday morning U.S. time as the Bitcoin blockchain became overwhelmed with pending transactions and sky-high fees." The company resumed withdrawals within two hours of its initial Twitter posting about the withdrawals.

On-chain data shows that there are nearly 400,000 unconfirmed Bitcoin transactions, which is higher than anything seen during the bull runs of 2018 and 2021. The average transaction fee has also doubled since March, pushing it to a two-year high. The current transaction fee is just over $8, a 309% change from a year ago.
In an earlier CoinDesk article, an executive at Luxor Technologies, a full-stack Bitcoin mining pool, blamed the rising fees on the adoption of the new BRC-20 token standard, a new way to "inscribe" additional data during transactions. But meanwhile, an anonymous reader shared another report from Mashable about Binance: Bloomberg reported that the crypto exchange (currently the world's largest) is facing a U.S. Department of Justice probe over possibly allowing Russians to move money in a way that would violate U.S. sanctions... It's worth noting that no formal accusation has been made against Binance, as this is just a probe. It may be some time before accusations manifest — if they manifest at all. In 2021, Binance was under a similar investigation related to possible money laundering.
But another Reuters article adds that Bloomberg's sources "also said that Binance is discussing the possibility of settling with the Department of Justice regarding previous allegations that the exchange was also used to move money to circumvent U.S. sanctions against Iran."

And elsewhere, Reuters reports: Israel has seized around 190 crypto accounts at crypto exchange Binance since 2021 , including two it said were linked to Islamic State and dozens of others it said were owned by Palestinian firms connected to the Islamist Hamas group, documents released by the country's counter-terror authorities show...

In a blog post after its publication, Binance said that Reuters was "deliberately leaving out critical facts." The exchange has been "working closely with international counter-terrorism authorities" on the seizures, Binance said. "With regard to the specific organizations mentioned in the article, it's important to clarify that bad actors don't register accounts under the names of their criminal enterprises," it said...

Under Israeli law, the country's defense minister can order the seizure and confiscation of assets that the ministry deems related to terrorism... The seizures by Israel's National Bureau for Counter Terror Financing highlight how governments are targeting crypto companies in their efforts to prevent illegal activity. Binance, founded in 2017 by CEO Changpeng Zhao, says on its website it reviews information requests from governments and law enforcement agencies on a case-by-case basis, disclosing information as legally required.

Binance has also said it checks users for connections to terrorism and has "continued to invest tremendous resources to enhance its compliance program," it told U.S. senators in March in response to their requests for information on Binance's regulatory compliance and finances.

America's consumer-protecting federal agency has a division overseeing advertising practices. Its web site includes a "business guidance" section with "advice on complying with FTC law," and this week one of the agency's attorney's warned that the FTC "is focusing intensely on how companies may choose to use AI technology, including new generative AI tools, in ways that can have actual and substantial impact on consumers."

The warning came in a blog post titled "The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust." In the 2014 movie Ex Machina, a robot manipulates someone into freeing it from its confines, resulting in the person being confined instead. The robot was designed to manipulate that person's emotions, and, oops, that's what it did. While the scenario is pure speculative fiction, companies are always looking for new ways — such as the use of generative AI tools — to better persuade people and change their behavior. When that conduct is commercial in nature, we're in FTC territory, a canny valley where businesses should know to avoid practices that harm consumers...

As for the new wave of generative AI tools, firms are starting to use them in ways that can influence people's beliefs, emotions, and behavior. Such uses are expanding rapidly and include chatbots designed to provide information, advice, support, and companionship. Many of these chatbots are effectively built to persuade and are designed to answer queries in confident language even when those answers are fictional. A tendency to trust the output of these tools also comes in part from "automation bias," whereby people may be unduly trusting of answers from machines which may seem neutral or impartial. It also comes from the effect of anthropomorphism, which may lead people to trust chatbots more when designed, say, to use personal pronouns and emojis. People could easily be led to think that they're conversing with something that understands them and is on their side.

Many commercial actors are interested in these generative AI tools and their built-in advantage of tapping into unearned human trust. Concern about their malicious use goes well beyond FTC jurisdiction. But a key FTC concern is firms using them in ways that, deliberately or not, steer people unfairly or deceptively into harmful decisions in areas such as finances, health, education, housing, and employment. Companies thinking about novel uses of generative AI, such as customizing ads to specific people or groups, should know that design elements that trick people into making harmful choices are a common element in FTC cases, such as recent actions relating to financial offers , in-game purchases , and attempts to cancel services . Manipulation can be a deceptive or unfair practice when it causes people to take actions contrary to their intended goals. Under the FTC Act, practices can be unlawful even if not all customers are harmed and even if those harmed don't comprise a class of people protected by anti-discrimination laws.
The FTC attorney also warns against paid placement within the output of a generative AI chatbot. ("Any generative AI output should distinguish clearly between what is organic and what is paid.") And in addition, "People should know if an AI product's response is steering them to a particular website, service provider, or product because of a commercial relationship. And, certainly, people should know if they're communicating with a real person or a machine..."

"Given these many concerns about the use of new AI tools, it's perhaps not the best time for firms building or deploying them to remove or fire personnel devoted to ethics and responsibility for AI and engineering. If the FTC comes calling and you want to convince us that you adequately assessed risks and mitigated harms, these reductions might not be a good look. "

Thanks to Slashdot reader gluskabe for sharing the post.

The Washington Post reports: TurboTax will begin sending checks next week to nearly 4.4 million low-income Americans whom the company deceived into paying for tax services that should have been free, New York Attorney General Letitia James said.

The checks, part of a $141 million settlement reached in May 2022 between TurboTax owner Intuit and all 50 states and the District of Columbia, are for people who were eligible to file taxes for free through an IRS partner program but were "tricked" into paying TurboTax between 2016 and 2018, James (D) said in a statement Thursday.

The company was also accused of knowingly misleading customers and blocking its landing page for its IRS Free File Program, a public-private partnership with the IRS, from showing up on search engines such as Google. Because Intuit and other companies agreed to participate in that program, the IRS agreed not to offer its own free electronic tax services.

Intuit admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement.

Customers who qualify will receive between $29 and $85, depending on the number of years they paid for the services... Consumers who are eligible for the payments do not need to file a claim and will be notified by email, James's office said Thursday. Checks will be sent automatically and will be mailed throughout May.
"TurboTax's predatory and deceptive marketing cheated millions of low-income Americans who were trying to fulfill their legal duties to file their taxes," said Attorney General James. "Today we are righting that wrong and putting money back into the pockets of hardworking taxpayers who should have never paid to file their taxes." James described it as an effort "to stand up for ordinary Americans and hold companies who cheat consumers accountable," specifically calling out Intuit "for deceiving millions of low-income Americans into paying for tax services that should have been free."

Longtime Slashdot reader SonicSpike shares a report from Engadget: The Biden administration wants to impose a 30 percent tax on the electricity used by cryptocurrency mining operations, and it has included the proposal in its budget for the fiscal year of 2024. In a blog post on the White House website, the administration has formally introduced the Digital Asset Mining Energy or DAME excise tax. It explained that it wants to tax cryptomining firms, because they aren't paying for the "full cost they impose on others," which include environmental pollution and high energy prices.

Crypto mining has "negative spillovers on the environment," the White House continued, and the pollution it generates "falls disproportionately on low-income neighborhoods and communities of color." It added that the operations' "often volatile power consumption " can raise electricity prices for the people around them and cause service interruptions. Further, local power companies are taking a risk if they decide to upgrade their equipment to make their service more stable, since miners can easily move away to another location, even abroad. As Yahoo News noted, there are other industries, such as steel manufacturing, that also use large amounts of electricity but aren't taxed for their energy consumption. In its post, the administration said that cryptomining "does not generate the local and national economic benefits typically associated with businesses using similar amounts of electricity."

Critics believe that the government made this proposal to go after and harm an industry it doesn't support. A Forbes report also suggested that DAME may not be the best solution for the issue, and that taxing the industry's greenhouse gas emissions might be a better alternative. That could encourage mining firms not just to minimize energy use, but also to find cleaner sources of power. It might be difficult to convince the administration to go down that route, though: In its blog post, it said that the "environmental impacts of cryptomining exist even when miners use existing clean power." Apparently, mining operations in communities with hydropower have been observed to reduce the amount of clean power available for use by others. That leads to higher prices and to even higher consumption of electricity from non-clean sources. "If the proposal ever becomes a law, the government would impose the excise tax in phases," adds Engadget. "It would start by adding a 10 percent tax on miners' electricity use in the first year, 20 percent in the second and then 30 percent from the third year onwards."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times, written by journalist Cristina Criddle: One evening in late December last year, I received a cryptic phone call from a PR director at TikTok, the popular social media app. I'd written extensively about the company for the Financial Times, so we'd spoken before. But it was puzzling to hear from her just before the holidays, especially since I wasn't working on anything related to the company at the time. The call lasted less than a minute. She wanted me to know, "as a courtesy," that The New York Times had just published a story I ought to read. Confused by this unusual bespoke news alert, I asked why. But all she said was that it concerned an inquiry at ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, and that I should call her back once I'd read it.

The story claimed ByteDance employees accessed two reporters' data through their TikTok accounts. Personal information, including their physical locations, had been used as part of an attempt to find the writers' sources, after a series of damaging stories about ByteDance. According to the report, two employees in China and two in the US left the company following an internal investigation. In a staff memo, ByteDance's chief executive lamented the incident as the "misconduct of a few individuals." When I phoned the PR director back, she confirmed I was one of the journalists who had been surveilled. I put down my phone and wondered what it meant that a company I reported on had gone to such lengths to restrict my ability to do so. Over the following months, the episode became just one in a long series of scandals and crises that call into question what TikTok really is and whether the company has the world-dominating future that once seemed inevitable.