FTX ex-engineering head Nishad Singh pleaded guilty to criminal charges in New York on Tuesday, becoming the latest member of Sam Bankman-Fried's former leadership team to agree to a deal. CNBC reports: The six charges against Singh include conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws. FTX spiraled into bankruptcy in November after the crypto exchange, founded by Bankman-Fried, couldn't meet customers' withdrawal demands.

"Today's guilty plea underscores once again that the crimes at FTX were vast in scope and consequence," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a statement. "They rocked our financial markets with a multibillion dollar fraud. And they corrupted our politics with tens of millions of dollars in illegal straw campaign contributions. These crimes demand swift and certain justice and that is exactly what we are seeking in the Southern District of New York."

The Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission both filed related civil complaints against Singh on Tuesday. The SEC said in a release that Singh is cooperating with the agency's ongoing investigation, and he has separately agreed to settle with the CFTC. Two of the criminal charges against Singh are related to wire fraud and another is conspiracy to commit commodities fraud.

The Wikimedia Foundation was fined 2 million roubles ($27,000) by a Russian court on Tuesday after the authorities accused it of failing to delete "misinformation" about the Russian military from Wikipedia, the courts service said. From a report: Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Russia introduced sweeping new laws restricting what people can report about the conflict, fining or blocking websites that spread information at odds with the Kremlin's official narrative. Wikimedia, which owns Wikipedia, was already fined last year after it failed to delete two articles related to the war, including one on "evaluations of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine." The latest fine was imposed after the authorities accused Wikipedia of "spreading misinformation" in articles about Russian military units, Wikimedia Russia said.

Apple has taken billions from game developers but failed to reinvest it, leaving the App Store a confusing mess for mobile gamers, writes Neil Long, former App Store editor. The Guardian: Late last year, the developer of indie hit Vampire Survivors said it had to rush-release a mobile edition to stem the flow of App Store clones and copycats. Recently a fake ChatGPT app made it through app review and quickly climbed the charts before someone noticed and pulled it from sale. It's not good enough. Apple could have reinvested a greater fraction of the billions it has earned from mobile games to make the App Store a good place to find fun, interesting games to fit your tastes. But it hasn't, and today the App Store is a confusing mess, recently made even worse with the addition of ad slots in search, on the front page and even on the product pages themselves.

Search is still terrible, too. Game developers search in vain for their own games on launch day, eventually finding them -- having searched for the exact title -- under a slew of other guff. Mobile games get a bumpy ride from some folks -- this esteemed publication included -- for lots of reasons. [...] However, finding the good stuff is hard. Apple -- and indeed Google's Play store -- opened the floodgates to developers without really making sure that what's out there is up to standard. It's a wild west. Happily things may be about to change -- including that 30% commission on all in-app purchases. After a bruising US court battle between Apple and Epic Games over alleged monopolistic practices, government bodies in the UK, EU, US, Japan and elsewhere are examining Apple and Google's "effective duopoly" over what we see, do and play on our phones.

Three long-time Slashdot readers all submitted this story — schwit1, sinij, and DevNull127.

DevNull127 writes: Four U.S. agencies have concluded that the Covid-19 virus originated at the Wuhan market, the Wall Street Journal reports. The U.S. National Intelligence Council reached the same conclusion. Then there's two more agencies (including America's CIA) that are "undecided."

But there is one agency that decided — with "low confidence" — that the virus had somehow leaked from a lab. (And the FBI also decided with "moderate confidence" on that same theory.) "The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic's origin," writes the Wall Street Journal — adding that unfortunately U.S. officials "declined" to give any details on what led to the Energy Department's position.
The Wall Street Journal also notes: Despite the agencies' differing analyses, the update reaffirmed an existing consensus between them that Covid-19 wasn't the result of a Chinese biological-weapons program, the people who have read the classified report said....

Some scientists argue that the virus probably emerged naturally and leapt from an animal to a human, the same pathway for outbreaks of previously unknown pathogens. Intelligence analysts who have supported that view give weight to "the precedent of past novel infectious disease outbreaks having zoonotic origins," the flourishing trade in a diverse set of animals that are susceptible to such infections, and their conclusion that Chinese officials didn't have foreknowledge of the virus, the 2021 report said.
Also responding to the Department of Energy's outlying position was a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at Canada's University of Saskatchewan, who posted a series of observations on Twitter: The available evidence shows overwhelmingly that the pandemic started at Huanan market via zoonosis. I have no idea what this evidence that Department of Energy has is. All I know that it is "weak" and resulted in a conclusion of "low confidence".

It reportedly comes from the DOE's own network of national labs rather than through spying. But I do know that to be consistent with the available scientific evidence, the DOE has to explain how the virus emerged twice over 2 wks in humans at the same market the size of a tennis court, over 8 km & across a river from the only lab in Wuhan working on SARSr-CoVs....

Claims of a progenitor at WIV are pure speculation & unsupported by evidence.... Despite 3 years of a global search for this evidence, it has not materialized, while evidence supporting zoonosis associated with Huanan has continued to stack up. At some point, an absence of evidence might just be evidence of absence.

FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was hit Thursday with four new criminal charges, including ones related to commodities fraud and making unlawful political contributions, in a superseding indictment filed in New York federal court. A source familiar with the new counts said that SBF, as he is popularly known, could face an additional 40 years in prison if convicted in the case, where he is accused of "multiple schemes to defraud." CNBC reports: The charging document lays out how Bankman-Fried allegedly operated an illegal straw donor scheme as he moved to use customers funds to run a multimillion-dollar political influence campaign. Bankman-Fried and fellow FTX executives combined to contribute more than $70 million toward the 2022 midterm elections, according to campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets. The indictment claims that Bankman-Fried and his co-conspirators "made over 300 political contributions, totaling tens of millions of dollars, that were unlawful because they were made in the name of a straw donor or paid for with corporate funds." "To avoid certain contributions being publicly reported in his name, Bankman-Fried conspired to and did have certain political contributions made in the names of two other FTX executives," the new filing claims.

The document refers to one such example, in 2022, when Bankman-Fried and "others agreed that he and his co-conspirators should contribute at least a million dollars to a super PAC that was supporting a candidate running for a United States Congressional seat and appeared to be affiliated with pro-LGBTQ issues." The group of conspirators, according to the document, selected an individual only identified in the document as "CC-1" or co-conspirator 1, to be the donor. However, in 2022, then-FTX Director of Engineering Nishad Singh contributed $1.1 million to the LGBTQ Victory Fund Federal PAC, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

SBF's alleged campaign finance scheme included efforts to keep his contributions to Republicans "dark," according to the new indictment. And, the alleged straw donor scheme was coordinated, at least in part, "through an encrypted, auto-deleting Signal chat called 'Donation Processing,'" according to the indictment. The document says another unnamed co-conspirator "who publicly aligned himself with conservatives, made contributions to Republican candidates that were directed by Bankman-Fried and funded by Alameda," the crypto tycoon's hedge fund. Again, the document does do not name the alleged second FTX co-conspirator who contributed to Republican candidates.

The indictment alleges that Bankman-Fried and his allies allegedly tried to "further conceal the scheme" by recording "the outgoing wire transfers from Alameda to individuals' bank accounts for purposes of making contributions as Alameda 'loans' or 'expenses.'" The document says that "while employees at Alameda generally tracked loans to executives, the transfers to Bankman-Fried, CC-1, and CC-2 in the months before the 2022 midterm elections were not recorded on internal Alameda tracking spreadsheets." The internal Alameda spreadsheets, however, "noted over $100 million in political contributions, even though FEC records reflect no political contributions by Alameda for the 2022 midterm elections to candidates or PACs."

Images in a graphic novel that were created using the artificial-intelligence system Midjourney should not have been granted copyright protection, the U.S. Copyright Office said in a letter seen by Reuters. From the report: "Zarya of the Dawn" author Kristina Kashtanova is entitled to a copyright for the parts of the book she wrote and arranged, but not for images she made using Midjourney, the office said in its letter, dated Tuesday. The decision is one of the first by a U.S. court or agency on the scope of copyright protection for works created with AI, and comes amid the meteoric rise of generative AI software like Midjourney, Dall-E and ChatGPT.

The Copyright Office said in its letter that it would reissue its registration for "Zarya of the Dawn" to omit images that "are not the product of human authorship." [...] Midjourney is an AI-based system that generates images based on text prompts entered by users. Kashtanova wrote the text of "Zarya of the Dawn," and Midjourney created the book's images based on her prompts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: The Supreme Court on Tuesday turned away an Ohio man's claim that his constitutional rights were violated when he was arrested and prosecuted for making satirical posts about his local police department on Facebook. The justices' rejection of Anthony Novak's appeal means his civil rights lawsuit against the Parma Police Department cannot move forward. With its decision, the court again declined to consider revisiting "qualified immunity," the contentious legal defense that lets police officers and other government officials off the hook in civil rights cases if constitutional violations have not been "clearly established" when they occur. At issue was whether a lower court correctly granted the police officers qualified immunity under the rationale that previous court precedent had not clearly established that Novak's actions constituted protected speech under the Constitution's First Amendment.

In March 2016, Novak set up a Facebook page that purported to be that of the Parma Police Department. He published six satirical posts in 12 hours, one of which claimed there was a job opening to which minorities were encouraged not to apply and another that warned people not to give food, money or shelter to homeless people. The police department, claiming the posts had disrupted its operations, launched an investigation and ultimately searched Novak's apartment, arrested him and jailed him for four days. Novak was charged under a state law that criminalizes disruption of police operations but acquitted at trial.

The police officers, Kevin Riley and Thomas Connor, say they had probable cause to arrest Novak because they genuinely believed his conduct was disrupting their operations. Novak sued the officers and the police department, saying they had violated his free speech rights, as well as his right to be free of unlawful searches and seizures under the Constitution's Fourth Amendment. After lengthy litigation, a federal judge dismissed Novak's claims. The Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in a ruling in April that "the officers reasonably believed they were acting within the law" even if his Facebook page was obviously a parody. That's because there was no court precedent saying it's a violation of the Constitution to be arrested in retaliation for satirical remarks when the officers have probable cause, the court said. Novak's appeal was backed by satirical news sites The Babylon Bee and The Onion, which filed a lighthearted brief saying its writers "have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists."

The U.S. Supreme Court, hearing a case that could reshape the internet, considered on Tuesday whether Google bears liability for user-generated content when its algorithms recommend videos to users. From a news writeup: In the case, Gonzalez vs, Google, the family of a terrorist attack victim contends that YouTube violated the federal Anti-Terrorism Act because its algorithm recommended ISIS videos to users, helping to spread their message. Nohemi Gonzalez was an American student killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris, and his family's lawsuit challenges the broad legal immunity that tech platforms enjoy for third party content posted on their sites. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, protects platforms from legal action over user-generated content, and it also protects them if they choose to remove content. Section 230 has withstood court challenges for the past three decades even as the internet exploded.

The attorney for Gonzalez's family claimed that YouTube's recommendations fall outside the scope of Section 230, as it is the algorithms, not the third party, that actively pick and choose where and how to present content. In this case, the attorney said, it enhanced the ISIS message. "Third parties that post on YouTube don't direct their videos to specific users," said the Gonzalez's attorney Eric Schnapper. Instead, he said, those are choices made by the platform. Justice Neil Gorsuch said he was '"not sure any algorithm is neutral. Most these days are designed to maximize profit." [...] Internet firms swear that removing or limiting 230 protections would destroy the medium. Would it? Chief Justice John Roberts asked Google's attorney Lisa Blatt. "Would Google collapse and the internet be destroyed if Google was prevented from posting what it knows is defamatory?" She said, "Not Google," but other, smaller websites, yes. She said if the plaintiffs were victorious, the internet would become a zone of extremes -- either The Truman Show, where things are moderated into nothing, or like "a horror show," where nothing is.

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear a bid by the operator of the popular Wikipedia internet encyclopedia to resurrect its lawsuit against the National Security Agency challenging mass online surveillance. From a report: Turning away the Wikimedia Foundation's appeal, the justices left in place a lower court's dismissal of the lawsuit based on the government's assertion of what is called the state secrets privilege, a legal doctrine that can shut down litigation if disclosure of certain information would damage U.S. national security. Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, Wikimedia Foundation sued in 2015 challenging the legality of the NSA's "Upstream" surveillance of foreign targets through the "suspicionless" collection and searching of internet traffic on data transmission lines flowing into and out of the United States.

Medical device maker AliveCor announced today that President Biden has upheld an International Trade Commission ruling that could result in a potential import ban on the Apple Watch over its EKG feature. The Verge reports: Back in December, the ITC issued a final determination (PDF) that Apple had infringed on AliveCor's wearable EKG tech. In the ruling, the ITC recommended a limited exclusion order and a cease-and-desist order for Apple Watch models with EKG features. If enforced, that would mean that Apple would no longer be able to import Apple Watch with EKG capabilities into the US for sale. According to Apple spokesperson Hannah Smith, the company will appeal the ITC's decision to the Federal Circuit.

A veto from Biden would have rendered the issue moot. According to The Hill, while presidents generally don't interfere with ITC rulings, in 2013, former President Obama vetoed a similar import ban after the ITC ruled that iPhones and iPads infringed on Samsung tech. It's possible that Apple was hoping for history to repeat itself, as it reportedly amped up lobbying last week ahead of Biden's decision.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/11/23550036/the-apple-watchs-blood-oxygen-feature-is-at-the-center-of-a-potential-import-ban Biden's decision doesn't mean every Apple Watch from the Series 4 to the Apple Watch Ultra (excluding both generations of the SE) is about to disappear off shelves. Apple's Smith told The Verge the ITC's ruling doesn't have any real impact at the moment. That's because the Patent Trial and Appeal Board recently ruled that AliveCor's EKG tech isn't actually patentable, and AliveCor would have to win its appeal (PDF) to that ruling for any potential ban to take effect. However, AliveCor isn't the only medical tech company that's seeking an import ban on the Apple Watch via the ITC. Masimo also sued Apple for allegedly infringing on five of its pulse oximetry patents. Last month, an ITC judge also ruled in Masimo's favor and will decide whether a potential import ban is warranted in May. If so, that import ban would impact any Apple Watch with an SpO2 sensor (i.e., the Series 6 or later, excluding the SE.)

Starry, an ISP that launched in 2016 with a focus on delivering home internet with wireless antennas instead of cables, has declared bankruptcy. The Verge reports: In a press release (PDF), the company says that it intends to quickly restructure and that it'll continue providing internet service in its "five core operating markets." Those are Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, Denver, and Washington, DC. The ISP has clearly been struggling over the past few months. In October 2022, it announced that it was laying off around 500 people, which amounted to about half of its staff. A few months later, Starry announced it was leaving Columbus, Ohio, in a bid to focus more on its five "core" markets. All the while, it was burning millions of dollars in cash, and its stock was dropping after a special purpose acquisition company-backed IPO in March -- it started at around $10 a share but is now worth $0.012, down from last week when it was approximately $0.02 per share.

The company also defaulted on its Rural Digital Opportunity Fund bids after it won awards from the FCC to work on providing internet to underserved areas in the US. Had it completed the work, it stood to receive almost $269 million, according to Light Reading. Starry has asked the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware to approve a plan that would give it $43 million in funding from lenders, which it says would provide "the necessary liquidity to continue its normal business operations and meet its post-filing obligations to its employees, customers and vendors." "With the support of our lenders, we feel confident in our ability to successfully exit this process as a stronger company, well-positioned to continue" providing internet to customers, said Starry CEO Chet Kanojia in the company's press release.

The growing conflict between China and the U.S. extends from computer-chip factories to a suspected spy balloon over American skies. Running through it all is a struggle for technological superiority. From a report: China has striven for years to develop cutting-edge technologies, in part through heavy spending on research. Now, according to Western officials and executives, it also has mobilized its legal system to pry technology from other nations. Officials in the U.S. and European Union accuse China of using its courts and patent panels to undermine foreign intellectual-property rights and help Chinese businesses. They say China is focusing such efforts on industries it deems important, including technology, pharmaceuticals and rare-earth minerals.

A U.S. manufacturer of X-ray equipment had a decade-old patent invalidated by a Chinese legal panel. A Spanish mobile-antenna designer lost a similar fight in a Shanghai court. Another Chinese court ruled that a Japanese conglomerate broke antitrust law by refusing to license its technology to a Chinese rival. At China's Communist Party congress in October, when Xi Jinping secured a third term as party leader, he praised the country for becoming a global innovator and pledged to help it prosper further. "We will increase investment in science and technology through diverse channels and strengthen legal protection of intellectual property rights, in order to establish a foundational system for all-around innovation," he told Chinese lawmakers.

America's Federal Trade Commission "has long been dwarfed by Silicon Valley titans like Google and Apple, each staffed with thousands of engineers and technologists," notes the Washington Post.

"But FTC leaders are hoping combining and expanding their forces into a dedicated tech unit will help them keep up with the rapid advancements across the industry — and to keep it in check." The creation of the office will increase the number of technologists on staff by roughly a dozen, up from the current 10 — more than doubling the agency's capacity, officials said. In an exclusive interview announcing the move, FTC Chief Technology Officer Stephanie Nguyen said the unit will work with teams across the agency's competition and consumer protection bureaus to investigate potential misconduct and bring cases against violators. "Actually being able to have staff internally to approach these matters and help with subject matter expertise is critical," said Nguyen, who will lead the office.

The announcement arrives at a critical juncture. Federal regulators are dialing up investigations into tech behemoths like Amazon and waging blockbuster legal battles against Microsoft and Facebook parent company Meta. While Nguyen declined to discuss specific probes or cases, she said the new technology office will work directly on both the agency's investigative and enforcement efforts to "strengthen and support our attorneys" as they look to tackle alleged abuses across the economy. "The areas ... we will focus on is to work on cases," she said.... Nguyen said, the new team of technologists could help the agency refine the subpoenas it issues companies to get at the heart of their business models, or to strike a settlement that gets closer to "the root cause of the harm" taking place.
Republican Commissioner Christine Wilson, who Tuesday announced plans to resign "soon," voted in favor of creating the office, joining with the other commissioners in a unanimous vote.

The office's core mission will have three key areas, reports FedScoop: "strengthening and supporting law enforcement investigations, advising commission staff on policy and research initiatives, and highlighting market trends."

"For more than a century, the FTC has worked to keep pace with new markets and ever-changing technologies by building internal expertise," FTC Chair Lina Khan said. "Our office of technology is a natural next step in ensuring we have the in-house skills needed to fully grasp evolving technologies and market trends as we continue to tackle unlawful business practices and protect Americans."

Read on for more details about the new office.

Christine Wilson, a Republican-appointed commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, writing for The Wall Street Journal: Much ink has been spilled about Lina Khan's attempts to remake federal antitrust law as chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. Less has been said about her disregard for the rule of law and due process and the way senior FTC officials enable her. I have failed repeatedly to persuade Ms. Khan and her enablers to do the right thing, and I refuse to give their endeavor any further hint of legitimacy by remaining. Accordingly, I will soon resign as an FTC commissioner. Since Ms. Khan's confirmation in 2021, my staff and I have spent countless hours seeking to uncover her abuses of government power. That task has become increasingly difficult as she has consolidated power within the Office of the Chairman, breaking decades of bipartisan precedent and undermining the commission structure that Congress wrote into law. I have sought to provide transparency and facilitate accountability through speeches and statements, but I face constraints on the information I can disclose -- many legitimate, but some manufactured by Ms. Khan and the Democratic majority to avoid embarrassment.

Consider the FTC's challenge to Meta's acquisition of Within, a virtual-reality gaming company. Before joining the FTC, Ms. Khan argued that Meta should be blocked from making any future acquisitions and wrote a report on the same issues as a congressional staffer. She would now sit as a purportedly impartial judge and decide whether Meta can acquire Within. Spurning due-process considerations and federal ethics obligations, my Democratic colleagues on the commission affirmed Ms. Khan's decision not to recuse herself. I dissented on due-process grounds, which require those sitting in a judicial capacity to avoid even the appearance of unfairness. The law is clear. In one case, a federal appeals court ruled that an FTC chairman who investigated the same company, conduct, lines of business and facts as a committee staffer on Capitol Hill couldn't then sit as a judge at the FTC and rule on those issues. In two other decisions, appellate courts held that an FTC chairman couldn't adjudicate a case after making statements suggesting he prejudged its outcome. The statements at issue were far milder than Ms. Khan's definitive pronouncement that all Meta acquisitions should be blocked. These cases, with their uncannily similar facts, confirm that Ms. Khan's participation would deny the merging parties their due-process rights. I also disagreed with my colleagues on federal ethics grounds.

A federal judge has levied crippling sanctions against the city of Seattle for deleting thousands of text messages between high-ranking officials, including the former mayor and police chief, during the three-week Capitol Hill Organized Protest -- a ruling that will undermine the city's defense against a lawsuit filed by business owners and residents affected by the high-profile protests. From a report: In a pair of lengthy orders Jan. 13, U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly sent the so-called Hunters Capital lawsuit to trial on two of five claims, dismissing three others. He also ordered the city to pay the attorneys fees for those who showed city leaders destroyed significant evidence about their decision-making during CHOP, including their move to abandon the Police Department's East Precinct. The judge found significant evidence that the destruction of CHOP evidence was intentional and that officials tried for months to hide the text deletions from opposing attorneys. "The Court finds substantial circumstantial evidence that the city acted with the requisite intent necessary to impose a severe sanction and that the city's conduct exceeds gross negligence," he wrote. For that reason, Zilly said that when the case goes to trial he'll instruct the jury that it may presume the text messages were detrimental to the city's legal position and that there's significant circumstantial evidence they were deleted intentionally.

Sarah Blesener writes via The New York Times: Since his arrest two months ago, Samuel Bankman-Fried, the disgraced cryptocurrency executive, has been physically confined to the Palo Alto home of his parents, under the force of a $250 million bail package. But he has roamed largely unfettered in the wilderness of the internet: conducting interviews, posting narratives, making calls on encrypted apps and using a virtual private network, a web tool that allows users to conceal data and visit websites without detection. Those unrestrained days may soon be over. On Thursday, a federal judge overseeing Mr. Bankman-Fried's multibillion-dollar fraud case signaled a willingness to jail him for his persistent testing of his confinement's boundaries, going beyond what prosecutors had asked. "Why am I being asked to turn him loose in this garden of electronic devices?" the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, asked prosecutors, describing the well-wired home of Mr. Bankman-Fried's parents, both professors at Stanford Law School.

No new conditions were set during Thursday's hearing, the latest of several hearings, held in federal court in Manhattan, to consider more restrictive bail terms. Judge Kaplan asked both sides to prepare concrete proposals that would limit and monitor Mr. Bankman-Fried's access to the internet without inhibiting his ability to participate in his defense. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged Mr. Bankman-Fried with orchestrating widespread fraud at FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he founded, accusing him of misappropriating billions of dollars of customers' money. Prosecutors said he used the funds to finance lavish real estate purchases, political contributions and investments in other companies. After he was charged in December, Mr. Bankman-Fried was released on bail with the requirement that he wear an ankle monitor and stay confined to his parents' house. [...]

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Terraform Labs and its CEO, Do Kwon, with fraud, alleging that they orchestrated a multibillion dollar "crypto asset securities fraud," the SEC said Thursday. CNBC reports: Kwon and Terraform allegedly schemed from Apr. 2018 until the collapse of TerraUSD, also known as UST, and its sister coin luna in May 2022 to raise billions of dollars from investors through the offer and sale of an "inter-connected suite" of crypto asset securities, including securities-based swaps that mirrored U.S. equities, and most famously, the so-called "algorithmic stablecoin" Terra USD. The company advertised UST as a "yield-bearing" coin, offering to pay interest of up to 20 percent, according to the complaint.

Like many stablecoins, UST was pegged at a 1-to-1 ratio with the dollar. Minting one new UST required "burning," or destroying, one luna. This structure allowed for arbitrage opportunities that were key to maintaining the peg: Users could always swap one luna for UST and vice versa at a guaranteed price of $1, regardless of the market price of either token at the time. But the price of luna grew unstable and forced UST to break its $1 peg, an effort which sent both terra and luna spiraling.

The complaint against Kwon and Terraform was filed in federal court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, and charges both with violating the registration and anti-fraud provisions of both the Securities and Exchange Acts. The SEC alleges that Kwon marketed those assets, including those mAsset swaps and Terra, as profit-bearing securities, "repeatedly claiming" the tokens would increase in value. [...] Kwon's current whereabouts are unknown, but the Terra co-founder was recently believed to be in Serbia, according to South Korean intelligence. Kwon is wanted in South Korea for his involvement in the collapse of TerraUSD.

The Supreme Court is about to reconsider Section 230, a law that's been foundational to the internet for decades. But whatever the court decides might end up changing the rules for a technology that's just getting started: artificial intelligence-powered search engines like Google Bard and Microsoft's new Bing. From a report: Next week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Gonzalez v. Google, one of two complementary legal complaints. Gonzalez is nominally about whether YouTube can be sued for hosting accounts from foreign terrorists. But its much bigger underlying question is whether algorithmic recommendations should receive the full legal protections of Section 230 since YouTube recommended those accounts to others. While everyone from tech giants to Wikipedia editors has warned of potential fallout if the court cuts back these protections, it poses particularly interesting questions for AI search, a field with almost no direct legal precedent to draw from.

Companies are pitching large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT as the future of search, arguing they can replace increasingly cluttered conventional search engines. (I'm ambivalent about calling them "artificial intelligence" -- they're basically very sophisticated autopredict tools -- but the term has stuck.) They typically replace a list of links with a footnote-laden summary of text from across the web, producing conversational answers to questions. These summaries often equivocate or point out that they're relying on other people's viewpoints. But they can still introduce inaccuracies.

Police use of automated data analysis to prevent crime in some German states was unconstitutional, a top German court said on Thursday, ruling in favour of critics of software provided by the CIA-backed Palantir. From a report: Provisions regulating the use of the technology in Hesse and Hamburg violate the right to informational self-determination, a statement from the constitutional court said. Hesse has been given a Sept. 30 deadline to rewrite its provisions, while legislation in Hamburg -- where the technology was not yet in use -- was nullified. "Given the particularly broad wording of the powers, in terms of both the data and the methods concerned, the grounds for interference fall far short of the constitutionally required threshold of an identifiable danger," the court said. However, court president Stephan Harbarth said states had the option "of shaping the legal basis for further processing of stored data files in a constitutional manner."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The founder of WallStreetBets, which has been credited with helping ignite investors' frenzy into "meme" stocks, sued Reddit on Wednesday, accusing it of wrongly banning him from moderating the community and undermining his trademark rights. Jaime Rogozinski said his ouster, ostensibly for violating Reddit policy by "attempting to monetize a community," was a pretext to keep him from trying to control "a famous brand that helped Reddit rise to a $10 billion valuation" by late 2021.

According to the complaint filed in federal court in Oakland, California, Rogozinski applied to trademark "WallStreetBets" in March 2020, one month before his ouster, when the community reached 1 million subscribers. Founded in 2012, the community now has 13.6 million subscribers. "If you build it, they will come," the complaint said, quoting from the 1989 movie "Field of Dreams. "Reddit's dreams, however, turned out to be Mr. Rogozinski's nightmare as the company insists, 'if you build it, we will take it from you.'" Rogozinski said he is a dual U.S.-Mexican citizen, and lives in Mexico City. He is seeking at least $1 million in damages for breach of contract and violations of his publicity rights, and a ban on Reddit's use of WallStreetBets unless it reinstates him as senior moderator of the r/WallStreetBets subreddit. Reddit rejected Rogozinski's claims. "This is a completely frivolous lawsuit with no basis in reality," a spokeswoman said. "Jamie was removed as a moderator of r/WallStreetBets by Reddit and banned by the community moderators for attempting to enrich himself. This lawsuit is another transparent attempt to enrich himself."