An anonymous reader quotes a report from the U.S. Department of Justice: Two criminal complaints filed by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York were unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging 44 defendants with various crimes related to efforts by the national police of the People's Republic of China (PRC) -- the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) -- to harass Chinese nationals residing in the New York metropolitan area and elsewhere in the United States. The defendants, including 40 MPS officers and two officials in the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), allegedly perpetrated transnational repression schemes targeting U.S. residents whose political views and actions are disfavored by the PRC government, such as advocating for democracy in the PRC. In the two schemes, the defendants created and used fake social media accounts to harass and intimidate PRC dissidents residing abroad and sought to suppress the dissidents' free speech on the platform of a U.S. telecommunications company (Company-1). The defendants charged in these schemes are believed to reside in the PRC or elsewhere in Asia and remain at large.

The two-count complaint charges 34 MPS officers with conspiracy to transmit interstate threats and conspiracy to commit interstate harassment. All the defendants are believed to reside in the PRC, and they remain at large. As alleged, the officers worked with Beijing's MPS bureau and are or were assigned to an elite task force called the "912 Special Project Working Group" (the Group). The purpose of the Group is to target Chinese dissidents located throughout the world, including in the United States. [...] The complaint alleges how members of the Group created thousands of fake online personas on social media sites, including Twitter, to target Chinese dissidents through online harassment and threats. These online personas also disseminated official PRC government propaganda and narratives to counter the pro-democracy speech of the Chinese dissidents. As alleged, for example, Group members created and maintained the fake social media accounts through temporary email addresses, posted official PRC government content, and interacted with other online users to avoid the appearance that the Group accounts were "flooding" a given social media platform. The Group tracks the performances of members in fulfilling their online responsibilities and rewards Group members who successfully operate multiple online personas without detection by the social media companies who host the platforms or by other users of the platforms.

The investigation also uncovered official MPS taskings to Group members to compose articles and videos based on certain themes targeting, for example, the activities of Chinese dissidents located abroad or the policies of the U.S. government. As alleged, the defendants also attempted to recruit U.S. persons to act as unwitting agents of the PRC government by disseminating propaganda or narratives of the PRC government. On several occasions, the defendants used online personas to contact individuals assessed to be sympathetic and supportive of the PRC government's narratives and asked these individuals to disseminate Group content. In addition, Group members took repeated affirmative actions to have Chinese dissidents and their meetings removed from the platform of Company-1. For example, Group members disrupted a dissident's efforts to commemorate the Tiananmen Square Massacre through a videoconference by posting threats against the participants through the platform's chat function. In another Company-1 videoconference on the topic of countering communism organized by a PRC dissident, Group members flooded the videoconference and drowned out the meeting with loud music and vulgar screams and threats directed at the pro-democracy participants. "These cases demonstrate the lengths the PRC government will go to silence and harass U.S. persons who exercise their fundamental rights to speak out against PRC oppression, including by unlawfully exploiting a U.S.-based technology company," said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department's National Security Division. "These actions violate our laws and are an affront to our democratic values and basic human rights."

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday charged cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex and its former CEO William Shihara with operating an unregistered national securities exchange, broker and clearing agency. From a report: The SEC alleged in its complaint, which was filed in a U.S. district court in Washington, that Shihara coordinated with crypto asset issuers seeking to make their tokens available for trading on Bittrex's platform to delete public statements that Shihara believed would lead regulators to investigate those token offerings as securities. The SEC also charged Bittrex's foreign affiliate, Bittrex Global GmbH, for failing to register as a national securities exchange in connection with its operation of a single shared order book along with Bittrex. Seattle-based Bittrex had previously announced it would shutter its U.S. operations effective April 30 due to "continued regulatory uncertainty." The company's non-U.S. operations are based in Liechtenstein.

Alphabet's Google received a mixed ruling on Thursday from a San Francisco federal judge in a patent lawsuit brought by Sonos over wireless audio technology, failing to invalidate all of the patents before a trial but narrowing Sonos' claims. Reuters reports: The case, set for trial May 8, is part of a contentious intellectual property dispute between the former business partners over their smart speakers that includes lawsuits in the United States, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Sonos won a limited import ban on some Google devices from the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) last year, while Google has sued Sonos for patent infringement at the ITC and in California. [...]

Sonos accused Google in the San Francisco case of infringing four patents related to multi-room wireless speaker technology. U.S. District Judge William Alsup previously invalidated one of the patents and determined Google infringed another. Alsup found Thursday that a second Sonos patent was also invalid, but rejected Google's request to cancel the remaining two patents before trial. The judge also said Google did not infringe one of the surviving patents willfully, reducing Sonos' potential damages. Alsup also said he would hold a separate bench trial after the jury trial to determine whether Google's redesigned speakers infringe Sonos' patents.

Federal authorities are making arrests and seizing funds with the help of new tools to identify criminals through cryptocurrency transactions. From a report: James Zhong appeared to have pulled off the perfect crime. In December 2012, he stumbled upon a software bug while withdrawing money from his account on Silk Road, an online marketplace used to hide criminal dealings behind the seemingly bulletproof anonymity of blockchain transactions and the dark web. Mr. Zhong, a 22-year-old University of Georgia computer-science student at the time, used the site to buy cocaine. "I accidentally double-clicked the withdraw button and was shocked to discover that it resulted in allowing me to withdraw double the amount of bitcoin I had deposited," he later said in federal court. After the first fraudulent withdrawal, Mr. Zhong created new accounts and with a few hours of work stole 50,000 bitcoins worth around $600,000, court papers from federal prosecutors show.

Federal officials closed Silk Road a year later on criminal grounds and seized computers that held its transaction records. The records didn't reveal Mr. Zhong's caper at first. Authorities hadn't yet mastered how to track people and groups hidden behind blockchain wallet addresses, the series of letters and numbers used to anonymously send and receive cryptocurrency. One elemental feature of the system was the privacy it gave users. Mr. Zhong moved the stolen bitcoins from one account to another for eight years to cover his tracks. By late 2021, the red-hot crypto market had raised the value of his trove to $3.4 billion. In November 2021, federal agents surprised Mr. Zhong with a search warrant and found the digital keys to his crypto fortune hidden in a basement floor safe and a popcorn tin in the bathroom. Mr. Zhong, who pleaded guilty to wire fraud, is scheduled to be sentenced Friday in New York federal court, where prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence of less than two years.

Mr. Zhong's case is one of the highest-profile examples of how federal authorities have pierced the veil of blockchain transactions. Private and government investigators can now identify wallet addresses associated with terrorists, drug traffickers, money launderers and cybercriminals, all of which were supposed to be anonymous. Law-enforcement agencies, working with cryptocurrency exchanges and blockchain-analytics companies, have compiled data gleaned from earlier investigations, including the Silk Road case, to map the flow of cryptocurrency transactions across criminal networks worldwide. In the past two years, the U.S. has seized more than $10 billion worth of digital currency through successful prosecutions, according to the Internal Revenue Service -- in essence, by following the money. Instead of subpoenas to banks or other financial institutions, investigators can look to the blockchain for an instant snapshot of the money trail.

Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has recovered over $7.3 billion in cash and liquid crypto assets, an increase of more than $800 million since January, the company's attorney said on Wednesday at a U.S. bankruptcy court hearing in Delaware. Reuters reports: FTX attorney Andy Dietderich said the company is starting to think about its future after months of effort devoted to collecting resources and figuring out what went wrong under the leadership of indicted ex-founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty. "The situation has stabilized, and the dumpster fire is out," Dietderich said.

FTX has benefited from a recent rise in crypto prices, Dietderich said. Its total recovery would be valued at $6.2 billion based on crypto prices from November 2022, when it filed for bankruptcy after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform in three days and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal. As it looks to the future, FTX is negotiating with stakeholders about options for restarting its crypto exchange, and it may make a decision on that in the current quarter, Dietderich said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An Amsterdam court today ordered one of the largest adult entertainment websites, xHamster, to remove all amateur footage showing recognizable people in the Netherlands who did not consent to be featured on the site. The ruling followed complaints raised by the Expertise Bureau for Online Child Abuse, known as EOKM, which identified 10 videos where xHamster could not verify it had secured permission from amateur performers to post. The court found that this violated European privacy laws and conflicted with a prior judgment from the Amsterdam court requiring porn sites to receive permission from all performers recognizably featured before posting amateur videos.

According to EOKM director Arda Gerkens, this ruling will require xHamster to clean up its site and is part of EOKM's larger plan to stop all porn sites from distributing amateur footage without consent. The Amsterdam court has given xHamster three weeks to comply with the order and remove all footage posted without consent, or face maximum fines per video up to $32,000 daily. Lawyers assisting EOKM on the case said the verdict had "major consequences for the entire porn industry," including bigger sites like Pornhub, which already was required to remove 10 million videos, as Vice reported in 2020. "Now it's xHamster's turn," Otto Volgenant of Boekx Advocaten said in EOKM's press release, noting that 30 million people visit xHamster daily.

On xHamster, only professional producers and verified members can upload content. The website requires everyone who creates an account to upload an ID and share a selfie to become verified. Before any verified member's upload is made public, xHamster moderators -- a team of 28 who use software approved by EOKM to identify illegal content -- conduct a review to block any illegal content. The website's terms of service require that each uploader provides a consent form from each person recognizably featured in all amateur content. Hammy Media told the court that it had already removed all violating content that EOKM had flagged in the case and provided assurances that moderators check to ensure the uploader is the same person as the performer. However, in his order, judge RA Dudok van Heel wrote that "it is sufficiently plausible for the time being that a large amount of footage is being made public on xhamster.com, of which it cannot be demonstrated that permission has been obtained from the persons who appear recognizable in the picture."

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has approved a final consent order in its first-ever enforcement action over a case involving "review hijacking," or when a marketer steals consumer reviews of another product to boost the sales of its own. TechCrunch reports: In this case, the FTC has ordered supplements retailer The Bountiful Company, the maker of Nature's Bounty vitamins and other brands, to pay $600,000 for deceiving customers on Amazon where it used a feature to merge the reviews of different products to make some appear to have better ratings and reviews than they otherwise would have had if marketed under their own listings. The case exposes how sellers have been exploiting an Amazon feature that allows sellers to request the creation of "variation" relationships between different products and SKUs. The feature is meant to help marketers and consumers alike as it creates a single detail page on Amazon.com that shows similar products that are different only in narrow, specific ways, the FTC explains -- like items that come in a different color, size, quantity or flavor. For instance, a t-shirt may have a dozen SKUs associated with one another because the shirt comes in a wide variety of colors.

For shoppers, it's helpful to see all the options on one page so you can pick the item that best matches your needs and budget. In the case of supplements, the feature could be used to combine the same products by merging various SKUs featuring different quantities of the item in question, like bottles with 50, 100 or 200 pills, for example. However, The Bountiful Company exploited Amazon's feature to merge its newer products with older, well-established products which had different formulations, the FTC said. The FTC cited and screenshotted more than a dozen examples from 2020 and 2021 in its original complaint (PDF) against the vitamin and supplement maker, which in 2021 sold its core brands -- including Nature's Bounty and Sundown -- to Nestle. As a result of these product merges, consumers who happened across any of the newer products would believe them to be better received than they were in reality, as they were benefiting from the merged ratings and reviews of other, differentiated items.

"Boosting your products by hijacking another product's ratings or reviews is a relatively new tactic, but is still plain old false advertising," Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said this February when the consent order was first announced ahead of its public comment period and finalized version. With today's decision, Bountiful will have to pay the Commission $600,000 as monetary relief for consumers. It's also prohibited from making similar types of misrepresentations and barred from using "deceptive review tactics that distort what consumers think about its products or services," the FTC said in a unanimous 4-0 decision.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've ever researched anything online, you've probably used the Internet Archive (IA). The IA, founded in 1996 by librarian and engineer Brewster Kahle, describes itself as "a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more." Their annals include 37 million books, many of which are old tomes that aren't commercially available. It has classic films, plenty of podcasts and -- via its Wayback Machine -- just about every deleted webpage ever. Four corporate publishers have a big problem with this, so they've sued the Internet Archive. In Hachette v. Internet Archive, the Hachette Publishing Group, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins and Wiley have alleged that the IA is committing copyright infringement. Now a federal judge has ruled in the publishers' favor. The IA is appealing the decision.

[...] Not only is this concern-trolling disingenuous, but the ruling itself, grounded in copyright, is a smack against fair use. It brings us one step closer to perpetual copyright -- the idea that individuals should own their work forever. The IA argued that their project was covered by fair use, as the Emergency Library provides texts for educational and scholarly purposes. Even writers objected to the court's ruling. More than 300 writers signed a petition against the lawsuit, including Neil Gaiman, Naomi Klein and -- get this -- Chuck Wendig. Writers lost nothing from the Emergency Library and gained everything from it. For my part, I've acquired research materials from the IA that I wouldn't have found anywhere else. The archive has scads of primary sources which otherwise might require researchers to fly across the country for access. The Internet Archive is good for literacy. It's good for the public. It's good for readers, writers and anyone who's invested in literary education. It does not harm authors, whose income is no more dented by it than any library programs. Even the Emergency Library's initial opponents have conceded this. The federal court's decision is a victory for corporations and a disaster for everyone else. If this decision isn't reversed, human beings will lose more knowledge than the Library of Alexandra ever contained. If IA's appeal fails, it will be a tragedy of historical proportions.

An anonymous readers shared this report from the Washington Post: Brian Hood is a whistleblower who was praised for "showing tremendous courage" when he helped expose a worldwide bribery scandal linked to Australia's National Reserve Bank. But if you ask ChatGPT about his role in the scandal, you get the opposite version of events. Rather than heralding Hood's whistleblowing role, ChatGPT falsely states that Hood himself was convicted of paying bribes to foreign officials, had pleaded guilty to bribery and corruption, and been sentenced to prison.

When Hood found out, he was shocked. Hood, who is now mayor of Hepburn Shire near Melbourne in Australia, said he plans to sue the company behind ChatGPT for telling lies about him, in what could be the first defamation suit of its kind against the artificial intelligence chatbot.... "There's never, ever been a suggestion anywhere that I was ever complicit in anything, so this machine has completely created this thing from scratch," Hood said — confirming his intention to file a defamation suit against ChatGPT. "There needs to be proper control and regulation over so-called artificial intelligence, because people are relying on them...."

If it proceeds, Hood's lawsuit will be the first time someone filed a defamation suit against ChatGPT's content, according to Reuters. If it reaches the courts, the case would test uncharted legal waters, forcing judges to consider whether the operators of an artificial intelligence bot can be held accountable for its allegedly defamatory statements.
The article notes that ChatGPT prominently warns users that it "may occasionally generate incorrect information." And another Post article notes that all the major chatbots now include disclaimers, "such as Bard's fine-print message below each query: 'Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn't represent Google's views.'"

But the Post also notes that ChatGPT still "invented a fake sexual harassment story involving a real law professor, Jonathan Turley — citing a Washington Post article that did not exist as its evidence." Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 tipped us off to that story. But here's what happened when the Washington Post searched for accountability for the error: In a statement, OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix said, "When users sign up for ChatGPT, we strive to be as transparent as possible that it may not always generate accurate answers. Improving factual accuracy is a significant focus for us, and we are making progress...." Katy Asher, senior communications director at Microsoft, said the company is taking steps to ensure search results are safe and accurate. "We have developed a safety system including content filtering, operational monitoring, and abuse detection to provide a safe search experience for our users," Asher said in a statement, adding that "users are also provided with explicit notice that they are interacting with an AI system."

But it remains unclear who is responsible when artificial intelligence generates or spreads inaccurate information. From a legal perspective, "we just don't know" how judges might rule when someone tries to sue the makers of an AI chatbot over something it says, said Jeff Kosseff, a professor at the Naval Academy and expert on online speech. "We've not had anything like this before."

Several domain names tied to Genesis Market, a bustling cybercrime store that sold access to passwords and other data stolen from millions of computers infected with malicious software, were seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today. KrebsOnSecurity reports: Sources tell KrebsOnsecurity the domain seizures coincided with "dozens" of arrests in the United States and abroad targeting those who allegedly operated the service, as well as suppliers who continuously fed Genesis Market with freshly-stolen data. Active since 2018, Genesis Market's slogan has long been, "Our store sells bots with logs, cookies, and their real fingerprints." Customers could search for infected systems with a variety of options, including by Internet address or by specific domain names associated with stolen credentials.

But earlier today, multiple domains associated with Genesis had their homepages replaced with a seizure notice from the FBI, which said the domains were seized pursuant to a warrant issued by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. But sources close to the investigation tell KrebsOnSecurity that law enforcement agencies in the United States, Canada and across Europe are currently serving arrest warrants on dozens of individuals thought to support Genesis, either by maintaining the site or selling the service bot logs from infected systems. The seizure notice includes the seals of law enforcement entities from several countries, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. [...]

One feature of Genesis that sets it apart from other bot shops is that customers can retain access to infected systems in real-time, so that if the rightful owner of an infected system creates a new account online, those new credentials will get stolen and displayed in the web-based panel of the Genesis customer who purchased that bot. "While some infostealers are designed to remove themselves after execution, others create persistent access," reads a March 2023 report from cybersecurity firm SpyCloud. "That means bad actors have access to the current data for as long as the device remains infected, even if the user changes passwords. SpyCloud says Genesis even advertises its commitment to keep the stolen data and the compromised systems' fingerprints up to date. "According to our research, Genesis Market had more than 430,000 stolen identities for sale as of early last year -- and there are many other marketplaces like this one," the SpyCloud report concludes.

A German court has ordered hosting provider Uberspace to take the website of the open-source youtube-dl software offline. The ruling is the result of a copyright infringement lawsuit, filed by Sony, Warner and Universal last year. Uberspace will appeal the verdict and, meanwhile, youtube-dl's code remains available on GitHub. TorrentFreak reports: After hearing both sides, the district court of Hamburg ruled on the matter last week, handing a clear win to the music companies. The verdict wasn't immediately made available to the public but the music companies were quick to claim the win in a press release, stating that Uberspace must take youtube-dl's website offline. According to Frances Moore, CEO of the global music industry group IFPI, the court's decision once again confirms that stream-ripping software is illegal.

"YouTube-DL's services have enabled users to stream rip and download copyrighted music without paying. The Hamburg Regional Court's decision builds on a precedent already set in Germany and underscores once again that hosting stream-ripping software of this type is illegal. "We continue to work globally to address the problem of stream ripping, which is draining revenue from those who invest in and create music," Moore adds. Interestingly, the open source youtube-dl code remains available on the Microsoft-owned developer platform GitHub. Whether the music companies have any plans to target the problem at this source is unknown.

Uberspace's legal representative German Society for Civil Rights (GFF) informs TorrentFreak that the decision doesn't come as a total surprise since the court already declared YouTube's "rolling cipher" to be an effective technical protection measure in an earlier case. That said, the defense believes that the order, which effectively amounts to a blanket ban on youtube-dl, failed to take the software's potentially legitimate uses into account. In addition, GFF believes that the court's decision severely restricts the hosting provider's freedom to operate. "If web hosts have to delete an entire website on demand of the rightsholders even in complex situations with no legal precedent, this poses a threat to the business model of web hosts and ultimately to the free flow of information on the Internet." Uberspace says it will appeal the judgement and GFF is confident the hosting provider will ultimately prevail.

Virgin Orbit, founded by Richard Branson, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Tuesday after the satellite launching business struggled to secure long-term funding following a failed launch in January. From a report: The filing comes less than two years after Virgin Orbit first went public at a valuation of roughly $3 billion. But the January mishap left the company scrambling for new funding and forced it to halt operations. "We believe that the Chapter 11 process represents the best path forward to identify and finalize an efficient and value-maximizing sale," Virgin Orbit Chief Executive Dan Hart said in a statement. The company, which was spun off from space tourism firm Virgin Galactic in 2017, sends satellites into orbit using rockets launched from a modified Boeing 747 plane. The Long Beach, California-based company lodged the filing seeking a sale of its assets in a Delaware court days after announcing the layoff of roughly 85% of its 750 employees. Virgin Orbit listed assets of about $243 million and total debt at $153.5 million as of Sept. 30. The company went public in December 2021 through a blank-check merger, raising $255 million less than expected.

Frank founder Charlie Javice was charged with fraud in the $175 million sale of her college financial planning site to JPMorgan Chase. The charges include conspiracy, wire fraud, bank fraud and securities fraud. From a report: JPMorgan, which acquired Frank in 2021, sued Javice and another executive, Olivier Amar, in federal court in Delaware in December, alleging they used fake customer accounts to lead the bank into completing the deal by vastly inflating the number of people using her site.

An influential consultant for Amazon sellers has admitted to bribing employees of the e-commerce giant for information to help his clients boost sales and to get their suspended accounts reinstated. From a report: Ephraim "Ed" Rosenberg wrote in a LinkedIn post that he will plead guilty in federal court to a criminal charge, stemming from a 2020 indictment that charged six people with conspiring to give sellers an unfair competitive advantage on Amazon's third-party marketplace. Four of the defendants have already pleaded guilty, including one former Amazon employee who was sentenced last year to 10 months in prison.

Rosenberg, who's based in Brooklyn, is a well-known figure in the world of Amazon third-party sellers. He runs a consultancy business that advises entrepreneurs on how to sell products on the online marketplace, and navigate unforeseen issues with their Amazon account. Rosenberg's Facebook group for sellers, ASGTG, has over 68,000 members, and he hosts a popular conference for sellers each year. "For a time, some years ago, I began to obtain and use Amazon's internal annotations -- Amazon's private property -- to learn the reasons for sellers' suspensions, in order to assist them in getting reinstated, if possible," wrote Rosenberg, who is due to appear in U.S. District Court in Seattle on March 30, for a change of plea hearing, according to court records. "On some occasions, I paid bribes, directly and indirectly, to Amazon employees to obtain annotations and reinstate suspended accounts. These actions were against the law."

Alphabet's Google LLC intentionally destroyed employee "chat" evidence in antitrust litigation in California and must pay sanctions and face a possible penalty at trial, a U.S. judge ruled on Tuesday. Reuters reports: U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco said in his order (PDF) that Google "fell strikingly short" in its duties to preserve records. The ruling is part of a multidistrict litigation that includes a consumer class action with as many as 21 million residents; 38 states and the District of Columbia; and companies including Epic Games Inc and Match Group LLC. The consumers and other plaintiffs are challenging Google's alleged monopoly for distributing Android mobile applications, allegations that Google has denied. Plaintiffs have claimed aggregate damages of $4.7 billion.

The judge asked the plaintiffs' lawyers by April 21 to provide an amount in legal fees they are seeking as a sanction. Separately, the plaintiffs will have a chance to urge Donato to tell jurors that Google destroyed information that was unfavorable to it. He said he wants to see "the state of play" at a later stage in the case. "Google has tried to downplay the problem and displayed a dismissive attitude ill tuned to the gravity of its conduct," the judge said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the midst of perpetrating what federal prosecutors say was a massive corporate hacking campaign, Israeli private detective Aviram Azari in 2017 received welcome news. A group of hackers in India wrote him to say they had successfully infiltrated the email and social-media accounts of a group of environmental activists campaigning against Exxon. "On a happy note I would like to report some success below: Project Name Rainbow," the hackers wrote in electronic messages that were viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The messages included evidence of the successful intrusions, including screenshots of compromised email inboxes.

The messages along with court records reveal new details about the hacking campaign, including that thousands of individuals and companies were targeted and at least some of the attacks resulted in the hackers successfully gaining access to the private accounts of the victims and obtaining their passwords. Among the targets was the Rockefeller Family Fund, a charity created by some of the heirs of John D. Rockefeller, who founded Exxon's forebear Standard Oil. The fund has for years been involved in campaigns arguing that Exxon hid from the public the full extent of what it knew internally about climate change and the role fossil fuels played in causing it.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was charged with directing $40 million in bribes to one or more Chinese officials to unfreeze assets relating to his cryptocurrency business in a rewritten indictment unsealed Tuesday. CBS News reports: The charge of conspiracy to violate the anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act means Bankman-Fried faces now faces a total of 13 charges after being arrested in the Bahamas last December and brought to the United States soon thereafter. [...] The indictment said Chinese law enforcement authorities in early 2021 froze certain Alameda crypto-trading accounts on two of China's largest cryptocurrency exchanges. The accounts, it said, contained about $1 billion worth of crypto.

Bankman-Fried understood that the accounts had been frozen by Chinese authoritIes as part of an ongoing probe of a particular Alameda trading counterparty, the indictment said. After Bankman-Fried failed several attempts to unfreeze the accounts through the use of lawyers and lobbying, the 31-year-old ultimately agreed to direct a multimillion dollar bribe to try to unfreeze the accounts, the indictment said.

"Bankman-Fried and others sought to regain access to the assets to fund additional Alameda trading activity, in order to assist Bankman-Fried and Alameda in obtaining and retaining business," court documents state. The bribe payment of cryptocurrency -- then worth about $40 million -- was moved from Alameda's main trading account to a private cryptocurrency wallet in November 2021 and the frozen accounts were unfrozen at about the same time, the indictment said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Facial recognition firm Clearview has run nearly a million searches for US police, its founder has told the BBC CEO Hoan Ton-That also revealed Clearview now has 30 billion images scraped from platforms such as Facebook, taken without users' permissions. [...] The company is banned from selling its services to most US companies, after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took Clearview AI to court in Illinois for breaking privacy law. But there is an exemption for police, and Mr Ton-That says his software is used by hundreds of police forces across the US.

Police in the US do not routinely reveal whether they use the software, and it is banned in several US cities including Portland, San Francisco and Seattle. The use of facial recognition by the police is often sold to the public as only being used for serious or violent crimes. In a rare interview with law enforcement about the effectiveness of Clearview, Miami Police said they used the software for every type of crime, from murders to shoplifting. Assistant Chief of Police Armando Aguilar said his team used the system about 450 times a year, and that it had helped solve several murders. However, critics say there are almost no laws around the use of facial recognition by police.

Binance Holdings, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, and Chief Executive Officer Changpeng Zhao, were sued by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission for allegedly breaking trading and derivatives rules. From a report: The CFTC filed the lawsuit Monday in federal court in Chicago. The derivatives regulator said Binance shirked its obligations by not properly registering with it. Since at least 2021, the CFTC has been probing Binance over whether it failed to keep US residents from buying and selling crypto derivatives. CFTC rules generally require platforms to register with the agency if they let Americans trade those products.

"TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee Thursday about safety and national security concerns surrounding his social media behemoth," writes MSNBC, adding "He was not well received." Given what we know about how Big Tech abuses data, about how China's authoritarian government systematically embraces surveillance as a tool of social control, and about the increasingly adversarial geopolitical relationship between the U.S. and China, it's not sinophobic to ask questions about how to guard against TikTok's misuse. It's common sense. While a ban is probably too drastic and may fail to solve all the issues at hand, regulating the company is sensible. Fortunately, one of the key ways to address some of the concerns posed by TikTok — restricting all companies' capacity to collect data on Americans — could help us solve problems with online life that extends well beyond this social media platform....

[Evan Greer, the director at Fight for the Future, a digital rights organization], believes members of Congress laser focused on TikTok are "on a sidequest" in the scheme of a bigger crisis of surveillance of online life; Greer points to the American Data Privacy and Protection Act as a potential solution. That law would put in place strong data minimization policies, strictly limiting how and how much data companies can collect on people online. It also would deal a huge blow to the power of the algorithms of TikTok and other social media apps because their content recommendation relies on collecting huge amounts of data about its users. The passage of that act would force any company operating in the U.S., not just TikTok, to collect far less data — and reduce all social media companies' capacities to shape the flow of information through algorithmic amplification.

In addition to privacy legislation, the Federal Trade Commission could play a more aggressive role in creating and enforcing rules around commercial surveillance, Greer pointed out. TikTok raises legitimately tricky questions about national security. But it's not the only social media company that does, and national security concerns aren't the only reason to rethink the freedom we've given to social media companies in our society. Any time a powerful actor has vast control over the flow of information, it should be scrutinized as a possible source of exploitation, censorship and manipulation — and, when appropriate, regulated. TikTok should serve as the springboard for that conversation, not the beginning and ending of it.
CNN points out that TikTok isn't the only Chinese-owned platform finding viral success in America. "Of the top 10 most popular free apps on Apple's U.S. app store, four were developed with Chinese technology." Besides TikTok, there's also shopping app Temu, fast fashion retailer Shein and video editing app CapCut, which is also owned by ByteDance.
Duncan Clark, chairman and founder of investment advisory BDA China, tells CNN that these apps could be next.

But writing in the New York Times, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia argues that "it's difficult to see how a ban could survive First Amendment review." The Supreme Court and lower courts have held repeatedly that the mere invocation of national security is insufficient to justify the suppression of First Amendment rights. In court, the government will have to introduce evidence that the threats it is addressing are real, not merely conjectural, and that the proposed ban would address those threats. The evidence assembled so far is not likely to be sufficient. All of this will no doubt be frustrating to some policymakers, including to some who are commendably focused on the very real risks that social media companies' practices pose to Americans' privacy and security. But the legitimacy of our democracy depends on the free trade of information and ideas, including across international borders.