New York's attorney general on Thursday filed a civil lawsuit accusing Celsius Network founder Alex Mashinsky of scheming to defraud hundreds of thousands of investors by inducing them to deposit billions of dollars in digital assets with his cryptocurrency company. From a report: The lawsuit filed in a New York state court in Manhattan accuses Mashinsky of violating the state's Martin Act, which gives Attorney General Letitia James broad power to pursue civil and criminal cases over securities fraud, and other laws. Mashinsky was accused of promoting Celsius as a safe alternative to banks, while concealing that Celsius was actually engaged in risky investment strategies that contributed to its collapse and bankruptcy. "Alex Mashinsky promised to lead investors to financial freedom but led them down a path of financial ruin," James said in a statement. "Making false and unsubstantiated promises and misleading investors is illegal."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered an entirely new kind of quantum entanglement, a phenomenon that causes particles to become weirdly linked, even across vast cosmic distances, reports a new study. The discovery allowed them to capture an unprecedented glimpse of the bizarre world inside atoms, the tiny building blocks of matter. The mind-bending research resolves a longstanding mystery about the nuclei of atoms, which contain particles called protons and neutrons, and could help shed light on topics ranging from quantum computing to astrophysics. The exciting discoveries took place at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a specialized facility at Brookhaven in New York that can accelerate charged atoms, known as ions, to almost light speed. When these ions collide -- or even just pass near each other -- their interactions expose the inner workings of atoms, which are governed by the trippy laws of quantum mechanics. [...]

Now, for the first time ever, scientists at Brookhaven have captured interference patterns that are created by the entanglement of two particles with different charges, a breakthrough that has opened up a completely new window into the mysterious innards of atoms that make up visible matter in the universe, according to a study published on Wednesday in Science Advances. "There's never been any measurement in the past of interference between distinguishable particles," said Daniel Brandenburg, a physics professor at the Ohio State University who co-authored the new study, in a call with Motherboard. "That's the discovery; the application is that we get to use it to do some nuclear physics." Brandenburg and his colleagues achieved this milestone with the help of a sensitive detector called the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC, or STAR, that captured interactions between gold ions that were boosted to the brink of light speed. Clouds of photons, which are particles that carry light, surround the ions and interact with another type of particle, called gluons, that hold atomic nuclei together. These encounters between the photons and the gluons set off a chain of events that ultimately created two new particles, called pions, which have opposite charges -- one positive and one negative. When these pions careened into the STAR detector, the precision instrument measured some of their key properties, such as velocity and angle of impact, which were then used to probe the size, shape, and arrangement of gluons inside the atomic nuclei with a precision that has never been achieved before.

Scientists have imaged atomic nuclei at lower energies before, but attempts to probe these structures at high energies has always produced a puzzling result. Nuclei in these experiments look way bigger than they should, according to models, an outcome that has puzzled scientists for decades. Now, the STAR collaboration has now solved this mystery by pinpointing a blurring effect that is linked to the photons in the experiment. Essentially, past studies captured one-dimensional glimpses of nuclei that did not account for important patterns in photons, such as their polarization direction. The new study included this polarization information, allowing Brandenburg and his colleagues to probe the nuclei from two angles, parallel and perpendicular to the photon's motion, producing a two-dimensional view that matches theoretical predictions. What's more, the team is even able to make out the rough positions of key particles in the nucleus, such as protons and neutrons, as well as the distribution of gluons. It also offers a new way to unravel persistent mysteries about the behavior of atoms at high energies. [...] Brandenburg hopes to repeat this technique, and versions of it, at RHIC and other facilities like the Large Hadron Collider, in order to tease out the long-hidden details inside atomic nuclei.

U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will on Wednesday announce plans to force school pupils in England to study math up to the age of 18, according to a Downing Street briefing. The initiative attempts to tackle innumeracy and better equip young people for the workplace. CNBC reports: In his first speech of 2023, Sunak is expected to outline plans for math to be offered through alternative qualification routes. Comparatively, traditional A-Levels subject-based qualifications allow high school students in England to elect academic subjects to study between the ages of 16 and 18. [...] Sunak's education proposals would only affect pupils in England. Education is a devolved issue, with Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish authorities managing their own systems.

School-based education in England is only compulsory up to the age of 16, after which children can choose to pursue further academic qualifications such as A-Levels or alternative qualifications, or vocational training. The prime minister is expected to say in his Wednesday speech that the issue of mandatory math is "personal" for him. "Every opportunity I've had in life began with the education I was so fortunate to receive. And it's the single most important reason why I came into politics: to give every child the highest possible standard of education," he will say.

Sunak attended prestigious fee-paying institutions -- the Stroud School and Winchester College -- before studying at Oxford University. He is expected to acknowledge that the planned overhaul will be challenging and time consuming, with work beginning during the current parliamentary term and finishing in the next.

At least three major torrent sites are currently exposing intimate details of their operations to anyone with a web browser. TorrentFreak understands that the sites use a piece of software that grabs brand-new content from other sites before automatically uploading it to their own. A security researcher tried to raise the alarm but nobody will listen. From the report: To get their hands on the latest releases as quickly as possible, [private torrent sites, or private trackers as they're commonly known] often rely on outside sources that have access to so-called 0-Day content, i.e, content released today. The three affected sites seem to have little difficulty obtaining some of their content within minutes. At least in part, that's achieved via automation. When outside suppliers of content are other torrent sites, a piece of software called Torrent Auto Uploader steps in. It can automatically download torrents, descriptions, and associated NFO files from one site and upload them to another, complete with a new .torrent file containing the tracker's announce URL. The management page [here] has been heavily redacted because the content has the potential to identify at least one of the sites. It's a web interface, one that has no password protection and is readily accessible by anyone with a web browser. The same problem affects at least three different servers operated by the three sites in question.

Torrent Auto Uploader relies on torrent clients to transfer content. The three sites in question all use rTorrent clients with a ruTorrent Web UI. We know this because the researcher sent over a whole bunch of screenshots and supporting information which confirms access to the torrent clients as well as the Torrent Auto Uploader software. The image [here] shows redactions on the tracker tab for good reason. In a regular setup, torrent users can see the names of the trackers coordinating their downloads. This setup is no different except that these URLs reference three different trackers supplying the content to one of the three compromised sites.

Rather than publish a sequence of completely redacted screenshots, we'll try to explain what they contain. One begins with a GET request to another tracker, which responds with a torrent file. It's then uploaded to the requesting site which updates its SQL database accordingly. From there the script starts checking for any new entries on a specific RSS feed which is hidden away on another site that has nothing to do with torrents. The feed is protected with a passkey but that's only useful when nobody knows what it is. The same security hole also grants direct access to one of the sites tracker 'bots' through the panel that controls it. Then there's access to 'Staff Tools' on the same page which connect to other pages allowing username changes, uploader application reviews, and a list of misbehaving users that need to be monitored. That's on top of user profiles, the number of torrents they have active, and everything else one could imagine. Another screenshot featuring a torrent related to a 2022 movie reveals the URL of yet another third-party supplier tracker. Some basic queries on that URL lead to even more torrent sites. And from there, more, and more, and more -- revealing torrent passkeys for every single one on the way.

Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty in New York federal court Tuesday to eight charges related to the collapse of his former crypto exchange FTX and hedge fund Alameda Research. CNBC reports: The onetime crypto billionaire was indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and securities fraud, individual charges of securities fraud and wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to avoid campaign finance regulations. The trial will begin on Oct. 2. [...] Earlier in the day, attorneys for Bankman-Fried filed a motion to seal the names of two individuals who had guaranteed Bankman-Fried release on bail with a bond. They claimed that the visibility of the case and the defendant had already posed a risk to Bankman-Fried's parents, and that the guarantors should not be subject to the same scrutiny. [Judge Lewis Kaplan] approved the motion in court. Federal prosecutor Danielle Sassoon told the court that Bankman-Fried had worked with foreign regulators to transfer assets that FTX's U.S. management had been attempting to recover through the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process.

Regulators in the Bahamas and FTX's U.S. lawyers have been fighting for weeks in Delaware bankruptcy court over hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. FTX's attorneys insist that Bahamian regulators have illicitly transferred hundreds of millions of dollars, and that Bankman-Fried assisted them. Bahamian regulators say that local laws give them jurisdiction over those assets, and dispute the validity of the U.S. Chapter 11 proceedings. Federal prosecutors appear to agree with FTX's U.S. attorneys. Sassoon asked Kaplan to impose a new restriction barring Bankman-Fried from transferring or accessing FTX customer assets. The judge approved that motion as well.

The U.S. attorney's office for the SDNY had argued that Bankman-Fried used $8 billion worth of customer assets for extravagant real estate purchases and vanity projects, including stadium naming rights and millions in political donations. Federal prosecutors built the indictment against Bankman-Fried with unusual speed, packaging together the criminal charges against the 30-year-old in a matter of weeks. The federal charges came alongside complaints from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The porn industry has been around for a while and in today's digital age business is booming. When Laurie Schlegel isn't seeing her patients who struggle with sex addiction, she's at the Louisiana State Capitol. The Republican state representative from Metairie passed HB 142 earlier this year requiring age verification for any website that contains 33.3% or more pornographic material. "Pornography is destroying our children and they're getting unlimited access to it on the internet and so if the pornography companies aren't going to be responsible, I thought we need to go ahead and hold them accountable," said Schlegel. According to Schlegel, websites would verify someone's age in collaboration with LA Wallet. So, if you plan on using these sites in the future, you may want to download the app. "I would say so," said Sara Kelley, project manager with Envoc. "I mean, I think it's a must-have for anyone who has a Louisiana state ID or driver's license."

Kelley added there are other ways websites could ask you to verify your age if you cannot access LA Wallet. She added that although some personal information will be required, companies must not retain personal data after complete verification. "It doesn't identify your date of birth, it doesn't identify who you are, where you live, what part of the state you're in, or any information from your device or from your actual ID. It just returns that age to say that yes, this person is old enough to be allowed to go in," explained Kelley. It will be the website's responsibility to ensure age verification is required when accessing their site in Louisiana. Schlegel said there will be consequences for those who fail to follow the law.

Apple is raising the price of getting a new battery installed in most iPhones, iPads, and Macs, starting on March 1st. The company made the announcement on the devices' repair pages, in small text under its price estimators. From a report: How much the price hike is depends on what device you have. For iPhones, it's simple -- Apple's site says "the out-of-warranty battery service fee will be increased by $20 for all iPhone models prior to iPhone 14." For phones with a home button, that means the price will be going from $49 to $69, and for Face ID phones that means it'll be going from $69 to $89. Those prices, by the way, were put in place in 2019, after Apple ran a year-long promotion where you could get a new battery for $29, to make up for its battery throttling controversy. For "all MacBook Air models" the price increase will be $30, bringing the price from $129 to $159.

The Australian city of Melbourne recently posted QR codes its citizens could use to report grafitti, reports Australia's public broadcaster ABC.

Unfortunately, someone overlaid "a number" of those QR codes with "alternative" QR codes leading to a pro-graffiti documentary: The City of Melbourne is investigating how many of the QR codes have been affected and is assessing whether an alternative will be needed in future.... The lord mayor said the City of Melbourne had initiated discussions with Victoria Police and would draw on CCTV footage to see "how we can catch those culprits". [...]

The Lord Mayor did not believe the compromised QR codes had resulted in more graffiti in the city. "I think this is more of a PR effort by the vandals," she said.

The Ohio Supreme Court has unanimously overruled a judgment of the Ohio Second District Court of Appeals and moved that there must be "direct" physical loss or physical damage in the company's computer software for insurance policy coverage. From a report: In the three-year court proceedings between the greater Dayton medical billing software maker EMOI and its insurance service provider Lansing, Michigan-based Owners Insurance Company, the latter asserted that the insurance contract unambiguously stated only "direct physical loss" or "direct physical damage" to media would be covered under the insurance policy.

The court in its final ruling gave the rationale that a computer might have physical electronic components that are "tangible" in nature but the information stored there has no "physical presence"; thus a ransomware attack on the company software has no coverage under the company's insurance policy. The judgment against EMOI concludes that a software developer can't use its property insurance to cover losses. A district judge had dismissed EMOI's case against Owners, which the developer brought forth just months after the attack. But the appellate court in November 2021 had ruled in favor of EMOI stating that the claimant could sue the insurance company for allegedly treating its claim in bad faith by failing to properly examine "the various types of damage that can occur to media such as software."

Tim Wu, a central architect of President Biden's push to clip the wings of the nation's largest companies, is leaving the White House. From a report: Mr. Wu's last day at the National Economic Council will be Wednesday, ending his 22-month tenure as special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy, the White House said. Mr. Wu told The New York Times that he would return to his previous job, as a professor at Columbia Law School. Mr. Wu is one-third of a troika -- along with Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter at the Justice Department -- leading Washington's attempts to more aggressively check corporate giants, including the largest tech companies. He was an author of a July 2021 executive order demanding that federal agencies take steps to increase competition across the economy. Ms. Khan and Mr. Kanter have tried to block corporate consolidation using uncommon arguments in court.

Mr. Wu, 50, said personal reasons were driving his departure. He has been commuting to Washington from New York, he said, requiring him to spend stretches away from his young children. "There's a time where the burden on family is too much," Mr. Wu said. "I've been feeling the balance has shifted." Mr. Wu said he had entered the job believing it to be a "once-in-a-generation chance" to reverse decades of more conservative thinking in antitrust law. The administration has notched some wins on that front -- such as enacting parts of the 2021 executive order, which led to efforts by the government to open up charging networks for electric vehicles and make hearing aids available for purchase over the counter.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KOMO: Ermenildo Castro, 28, of Tacoma, allegedly told detectives that he was inspired by the 90's movie "Office Space" when he devised a plan to divert customer fees from his employer, Zulily.com, into his own bank accounts. According to court documents, Castro wrote software code that manipulated the online retailer's checkout page to send the shipping fees into his own account. The charges allege Castro netted $260,000 in stolen shipping fees. Seattle police detectives said Castro also used his position as a software engineer to manipulate prices on Zulily to purchase approximately $41,000 in merchandise for 'pennies on the dollar'.

According to police, the company's cybersecurity staff found a document on Castro's laptop titled 'OfficeSpace project', which outlined Castro's scheme to 'cleanup evidence' by manipulating audit logs and disabling alarm logging. The theft began in February and by March the company had identified discrepancies in the shipping fees being charged to customers, an SPD report states. Castro was part of the team assigned to investigate the discrepancies in shipping fees, according to the report. Zulily investigators eventually caught on to Castro's scheme and went to his house in Tacoma where they found boxes of merchandise piled up outside the front door and driveway, the report states. In total, Zulily's team said Castro had sent over 1,000 items sent to his house. Seattle police detectives wrote a narrative explaining how Castro's alleged scheme related to the movie "Office Space," including the plot outline on IMDB.com.

"In the Initech office, the insecure Peter Gibbons hates his job. His best friends are two software engineers Michael Bolton and Samir Nagheenanajar, that also hate Initech. When he discovers that Michael and Samir will be downsized, they decide to plant a virus in the banking system to embezzle fraction of cents on each financial operation into Peter's account. However[,] Michael commits a mistake in the software on the decimal place and they siphon off over $300,000. The desperate trio tries to fix the problem, return the money and avoid going to prison."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: A new short-term rental registration law put forth by the administration of New York City Mayor Eric Adams could remove thousands of Airbnb listings from the market next month. The new measure, which will go into effect in January, will require Airbnb hosts to register their short-term rentals with the city's database -- including proof that the hosts themselves reside there, and that their home abides by local zoning and safety requirements. If Airbnb hosts fail to comply, they could face $1,000 to $5,000 in penalty fees.https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYCadmin/0-0-0-133488

Christian Klossner, executive director for the city's Office of Special Enforcement, told the New York Daily News that he expects to see 10,000 listings disappear after the new regulations go into effect. "Every illegal short-term rental in our city represents a unit of housing that is not available for real New Yorkers to live in," New York State Senator Liz Krueger said in July, following news of the lawsuit. "In the middle of an ongoing affordable housing crisis, every single unit matters." There are nearly 40,000 Airbnb listings in New York City alone, according to InsideAirbnb, which tracks these numbers. More than half of those listings, according to the database, are for an entire home, or apartment. A spokesperson for Airbnb said the new regulations will hurt average New Yorkers who are struggling to keep up with rising costs.

"Airbnb agrees regular New Yorkers should be able to share their home and not be targeted by the City, and we urge the administration to work with our Host community to support a regulatory framework that helps responsible Hosts and targets illegal hotel operators," Nathan Rotman, public policy regional lead for Airbnb, said in a statement to NPR on Wednesday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An appeals court has revived a lawsuit against that accuses Google, YouTube, DreamWorks, and a handful of toymakers of tracking the activity of children under 13 on YouTube. In an opinion (PDF) released Wednesday, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act does not bar lawsuits based on individual state privacy laws.

Passed in 1998 and amended in 2012, COPPA requires websites to obtain parental consent for the collection and dissemination of personally identifiable information of children under the age of 13. COPPA gives the FTC and state attorneys general the ability to investigate and levy fines for violations of the law. Several states across the US have laws similar to COPPA on the books. The revived lawsuit cites laws in California, Colorado, Indiana, and Massachusetts to argue that Hasbro, DreamWorks, Mattel, and the Cartoon Network illegally lured children to their YouTube channels in order to target them with ads.

A federal judge in San Francisco dismissed the original lawsuit, ruling that COPPA bars individuals from suing companies for privacy violations. In a unanimous decision, the Ninth Circuit judges hearing the appeal disagreed with the district court's reasoning. COPPA is not, in fact, the only route to enforcement, according to the ruling. "Since the bar on 'inconsistent' state laws implicitly preserves 'consistent' state substantive laws, it would be nonsensical to assume Congress intended to simultaneously preclude all state remedies for violations of those laws," wrote Judge Margaret McKeown. The case, which seeks damages for a seven-year time period between 2013 and 2020, now heads back to district court.

Intel and SoftBank-backed VLSI Technology have agreed to end a $4 billion patent dispute, according to documents filed in Delaware District Court this week. From a report: The decision marks a victory for Intel, which has already lost $3 billion in failed patent disputes to VLSI over the past few years. The case in question dates back to 2018 and alleged that Intel had infringed on five VLSI-owned patents governing things like secure communications, power optimization and delivery, and flip-chip interconnects.

If VLSI sounds familiar, that's because the company has been lurking around the semiconductor industry in one shape or form since the late '70s. The company originally made ASICs before it was acquired by Philips Electronics and later spun off under NXP. But despite any early successes in chipmaking, VLSI is now owned by SoftBank's Fortress Investment Group, and appears to exist solely to sue chipmakers it believes have violated its intellectual property -- in other words, it's a patent troll. The decision to call it quits comes after nearly five years of litigation. Tuesday, Intel and VLSI released a joint filing in which Intel and VLSI mutually agreed to dismiss the case and resolve all disputes over Intel's use of the aforementioned patents. Critically, VLSI has done so with prejudice. As we understand it, this means the company can't refile the case.

Of the billions of dollars in customer deposits that disappeared from FTX in a flash, $200 million was used to fund investments in two companies, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which charged founder Sam Bankman-Fried with "orchestrating a scheme to defraud equity investors." From a report: Through its FTX Ventures unit, the crypto firm in March invested $100 million in Dave, a fintech company that had gone public two months earlier through a special purpose acquisition company. At the time, the companies said they would "work together to expand the digital assets ecosystem."

The other deal the SEC appears to have referenced was a $100 million investment round in September for Mysten Labs, a Web3 company. In total, it was a $300 million funding round that valued Mysten at $2 billion and included participation from Coinbase Ventures, Binance Labs and Andreessen Horowitz's crypto fund.

Last week, LastPass announced that attackers stole customer vault data after breaching its cloud storage earlier this year using information stolen during an August 2022 incident. "While the company insists that your login information is still secure, some cybersecurity experts are heavily criticizing its post, saying that it could make people feel more secure than they actually are and pointing out that this is just the latest in a series of incidents that make it hard to trust the password manager," reports The Verge. Here's an excerpt from the report: LastPass' December 22nd statement was "full of omissions, half-truths and outright lies," reads a blog post from Wladimir Palant, a security researcher known for helping originally develop AdBlock Pro, among other things. Some of his criticisms deal with how the company has framed the incident and how transparent it's being; he accuses the company of trying to portray the August incident where LastPass says "some source code and technical information were stolen" as a separate breach when he says that in reality the company "failed to contain" the breach. He also highlights LastPass' admission that the leaked data included "the IP addresses from which customers were accessing the LastPass service," saying that could let the threat actor "create a complete movement profile" of customers if LastPass was logging every IP address you used with its service.

Another security researcher, Jeremi Gosney, wrote a long post on Mastodon explaining his recommendation to move to another password manager. "LastPass's claim of 'zero knowledge' is a bald-faced lie," he says, alleging that the company has "about as much knowledge as a password manager can possibly get away with." LastPass claims its "zero knowledge" architecture keeps users safe because the company never has access to your master password, which is the thing that hackers would need to unlock the stolen vaults. While Gosney doesn't dispute that particular point, he does say that the phrase is misleading. "I think most people envision their vault as a sort of encrypted database where the entire file is protected, but no -- with LastPass, your vault is a plaintext file and only a few select fields are encrypted."

Palant also notes that the encryption only does you any good if the hackers can't crack your master password, which is LastPass' main defense in its post: if you use its defaults for password length and strengthening and haven't reused it on another site, "it would take millions of years to guess your master password using generally-available password-cracking technology" wrote Karim Toubba, the company's CEO. "This prepares the ground for blaming the customers," writes Palant, saying that "LastPass should be aware that passwords will be decrypted for at least some of their customers. And they have a convenient explanation already: these customers clearly didn't follow their best practices." However, he also points out that LastPass hasn't necessarily enforced those standards. Despite the fact that it made 12-character passwords the default in 2018, Palant says, "I can log in with my eight-character password without any warnings or prompts to change it."

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will require anyone arriving by air from China to provide a negative Covid test, following a surge of Covid-19 cases across China as Beijing has eased its strict zero-Covid rules. Politico reports: Under the new rules, which will take effect on Jan. 5, anyone two years and older will need to show a negative result from a test taken within two days of their departure from airports in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, administration officials told reporters in a briefing. The move reflects the Biden administration's alarm about the potential spillover of new Covid variants linked to soaring Covid infections in China. The Chinese government ended its draconian Covid-zero policy -- hinged to mass testing, tracing and lockdowns -- on Dec. 7 following mass protests in November fueled by anger about the strategy. According to health authorities in Milan, almost half of the passengers on flights from China were found to have COVID-19. They, too, will begin testing all arrivals from China and will be sequencing the tests to see if there are new variants.

U.S. prosecutors have filed criminal charges of commodities fraud and manipulation against a man accused of trying to steal about $110 million in October by rigging the Mango Markets cryptocurrency exchange. From a report: According to a complaint made public on Tuesday in Manhattan federal court, Avraham Eisenberg's trades in futures related to Mango's crypto token MNGO enabled him to withdraw $110 million in cryptocurrencies from other investors' deposits, with no apparent intention to repay the funds. Eisenberg was arrested on Monday night in Puerto Rico, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in Manhattan said in a court filing. It was unclear whether Eisenberg has a lawyer. Mango is a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange run by Mango DAO that lets investors lend, borrow, swap, and use leverage to trade cryptocurrency assets. The Dec. 23 complaint signed by FBI Special Agent Brandon Racz said Eisenberg on Oct. 11 used two accounts to concurrently buy and sell futures based on the relative values of MNGO and the stablecoin USD Coin (USDC).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: FTX customers filed a class action lawsuit against the failed crypto exchange and its former top executives including Sam Bankman-Fried on Tuesday, seeking a declaration that the company's holdings of digital assets belong to customers. FTX pledged to segregate customer accounts and instead allowed them to be misappropriated and therefore customers should be repaid first, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. "Customer class members should not have to stand in line along with secured or general unsecured creditors in these bankruptcy proceedings just to share in the diminished estate assets of the FTX Group and Alameda," said the complaint.

The proposed class, which wants to represent more than 1 million FTX customers in the United States and abroad, seeks a declaration that traceable customer assets are not FTX property. The customer class also wants the court to find specifically that property held at Alameda that is traceable to customers is not Alameda property, according to the complaint. If the court determines it is FTX property, then the customers seek a ruling that they have a priority right to repayment over other creditors.

TikTok will no longer be allowed on any device managed by the US House of Representatives. Ars Technica reports: On Tuesday, the House's Chief Administrative Office announced the ban of the popular video-sharing app, a move that comes just a week after legislation that would bar TikTok from all federal devices was introduced. Congresspersons and their staffers will not be able to download the app on managed devices, the CAO's Office of Cybersecurity said in an email seen by Reuters. The mobile app is a "high risk to users due to a number of security risks," the email said. "If you have the TikTok app on your House mobile device, you will be contacted to remove it," the email continued.

Potential federal bans aside, TikTok is already at least partially banned from government-owned devices in 19 states. And the federal omnibus spending bill passed last week will put the kibosh on TikTok when it comes to all federally managed smartphones and devices.