Glaxo says the heartburn drug doesn't cause tumors. But the company was warned by its own scientists and independent researchers about the potential danger. From a report: The small British company was sometimes called Glaxo University, because it conducted important pharmaceutical research that rarely resulted in profitable drugs. Then the scientists at Glaxo Laboratories created a molecule they called ranitidine, and in 1978 the company was granted a US patent. The molecule was new, but not novel. The scientists had, as scientists sometimes do, looked for a way to mimic the success of an established drug -- in this case, one that healed ulcers and could be used to treat heartburn. They developed ranitidine quickly, and the US Food and Drug Administration reviewed it quickly. Glaxo gave it the brand name Zantac. Glaxo marketed it as better and safer than the drug that inspired it, Tagamet, and before long, Zantac overtook Tagamet to become the world's bestselling prescription medication. For years, Glaxo counted on Zantac for nearly half of its sales and almost as much of its profit. The company won an award from Queen Elizabeth; the chief executive officer was knighted. Zantac created reputations and fortunes. It financed the modern version of Glaxo, which, after mergers and takeovers and spinoffs, ended up as GSK, a company now worth some $73 billion. Among its most popular drugs are the antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin and the shingles vaccine Shingrix.

But not Zantac. In 2019 the drug was found to be tainted with high levels of a probable carcinogen. Not by chance or mistake in a few batches. The poison is created by ranitidine itself. Zantac's makers and health regulators around the world recalled the drug, and in the spring of 2020 the FDA forced it off the market altogether. No company could manufacture it; nobody should ingest it. The carcinogen, called NDMA, was once added to rocket fuel and is now used only to induce cancer in lab rats. The FDA says consuming minuscule amounts isn't harmful. But tests were revealing excessive amounts of NDMA in ranitidine -- and a capacity to create even more over time. No version seemed safe. From ranitidine's beginning to its end, Glaxo had been warned by its own scientists and independent researchers about the potential danger. An account of those four decades emerges in hundreds of documents, thousands of pages, many of which have never been made public. Bloomberg Businessweek reviewed court filings, many still under seal, as well as studies, FDA transcripts and new drug applications obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests. They show that the FDA considered the cancer risks when approving ranitidine. But Glaxo didn't share a critical study. Over the years, the company also backed flawed research designed to minimize concerns and chose not to routinely transport and store the medication in ways that could have eased the problem. Glaxo sold a drug that might harm people, tried to discount evidence of that and never gave anyone the slightest warning. More than 70,000 people who took Zantac or generic versions of it are suing the company in US state courts for selling a potentially contaminated and dangerous drug.

US prosecutors said their discovery that Sam Bankman-Fried used a virtual private network to access the internet on two recent occasions raises concerns that the FTX co-founder could be hiding his online activities. From a report: The Manhattan judge handling Bankman-Fried's criminal fraud case last week expressed his own concerns that even if the defendant is barred from using encrypted messaging apps like Signal, he could still use old-fashioned secret code to contact witnesses in the case, similar to letters penned by Mary, Queen of Scots, more than 400 years ago. US District Judge Lewis Kaplan refused on Feb. 9 to approve an agreement negotiated between prosecutors and Bankman-Fried that would have required him to stop using Signal and certain other apps and to only contact a specific set of former and current FTX employees, while preserving his right to use WhatsApp with monitoring technology, iMessage and also make Zoom and FaceTime calls. In a letter to the judge late Monday, a prosecutor in the office of the Manhattan US attorney said the government is discussing with lawyers for Bankman-Fried how to fashion internet ground rules acceptable to both sides and the court.

GitHub and digital rights group EFF have filed briefs supporting stream-ripping site Yout.com in its legal battle with the RIAA. GitHub warns that the lower court's decision threatens to criminalize the work of many other developers. The EFF, meanwhile, stresses that an incorrect interpretation of the DMCA harms people who use stream-rippers lawfully. TorrentFreak reports: In 2020, YouTube ripper Yout.com sued the RIAA, asking a Connecticut district court to declare that the site does not violate the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. The music group had previously used DMCA takedown notices to remove many of Yout's appearances in Google's search results. This had a significant impact on revenues, the site argued, adding that it always believed it wasn't breaking any laws and hoped the court would agree. Last October, the Connecticut district court concluded that Yout had failed to show that it doesn't circumvent YouTube's technological protection measures. As such, it could be breaking the law. Yout operator Johnathan Nader opted to appeal the decision. Nader's attorneys filed their opening brief (PDF) last week at the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, asking it to reverse the lower court's decision. The YouTube ripper is not the only party calling for a reversal. Yesterday, Microsoft-owned developer platform GitHub submitted an amicus brief that argues for the same. And in a separate filing, the EFF also agrees that the lower court's decision should be overturned.

GitHub's brief starts by pointing out that the company takes no position on the ultimate resolution of this appeal, nor does it side with all of Yout's arguments. However, it does believe that the lower court's interpretation of the DMCA is dangerous. The district court held that stream rippers can violate the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. The court noted that these tools allow people to download video and audio from YouTube, despite the streaming platform's lack of a download button. According to GitHub, this conclusion is premature, dangerous, and places other software types at risk. In the present lawsuit, GitHub reiterates that stream-ripping tools should not be outlawed. The fact that YouTube doesn't have a download button doesn't mean that tools that enable people to download videos circumvent technological access restrictions. "YouTube's decision not to provide its own 'download' button, however, is not a restriction on access to works. It merely affects how users experience them," GitHub writes. If the court order is allowed to stand, GitHub warns that a broad group of developers could be exposed to criminal liability, effectively chilling technological innovation. YouTube download tools are not the only types of software at risk, according to GitHub. There are many others that affect 'how users experience' online websites. These could also be seen as problematic, based on the district court's expansive interpretation of the DMCA. These widely accepted tools could put their creators at risk if the DMCA is interpreted too strictly, GitHub warns.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) also submitted an amicus curiae brief (PDF) yesterday. The digital rights group takes interest in copyright cases, particularly when they get in the way of people's ability to freely use technology. In this instance, EFF points out that stream-rippers such as Yout.com provide a neutral technology with plenty of legal uses. They can be used for infringing purposes, but that's also true for existing technologies -- the printing press, for example. "Like every reproduction technology -- from the printing press to the smartphone -- these programs, colloquially called 'streamrippers,' have important lawful uses as well as infringing ones. "Video creators, educators, journalists, and human rights organizations all depend on the ability to make copies of user-uploaded videos," EFF adds. In common with GitHub, EFF notes that the absence of a download button on YouTube doesn't imply that download tools automatically violate the DMCA, especially when there are no effective download restrictions on the platform. [...] According to EFF, Yout and similar tools provide the same functions as video cassette recorders once did. They allow people to make copies of videos that are posted publicly by their creators. In addition, these tools are vital for some reporters and useful to creatives who use them for future work.

According to CoinDesk, Kraken has agreed to shut its cryptocurrency-staking operations to settle charges with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). From the report: The SEC will discuss and vote on the settlement during a closed-door commissioner meeting on Thursday afternoon, and an announcement may come later in the day, the industry person told CoinDesk. Kraken offers a number of services under its staking umbrella, including a crypto-lending product offering up to 24% yield. This is also expected to shut down under the settlement, the industry person said. Kraken's staking service offered a 20% APY, promising to send customers staking rewards twice per week, according to its website. Bloomberg reported that Kraken was close to a settlement with the SEC over offering unregistered securities on Wednesday.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler has previously said he believes staking through intermediaries -- like Kraken -- may meet the requirements of the Howey Test, a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court case commonly used as one measure of whether something can be defined as a security under U.S. laws. Staking looks similar to lending, Gensler said at the time. The SEC has brought and settled charges with lending companies before, such as now-bankrupt lender BlockFi. A Kraken settlement would help Gensler's mission, giving his agency a big win as it continues its efforts to police the broader crypto ecosystem. The majority of people staking on Ethereum, for example, use services, according to Dune Analytics. CNBC reports that the crypto exchange has also agreed to "pay a $30 million fine to settle an enforcement action alleging it sold unregistered securities."

"The SEC claims Kraken failed to register the offer and sale of its crypto staking-as-a-service program. U.S. investors had crypto assets worth over $2.7 billion on Kraken's platform, the SEC alleged, earning Kraken around $147 million in revenue, according to the SEC complaint (PDF)." The SEC announced the charges in a press release.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Authorities in the United States and United Kingdom today levied financial sanctions against seven men accused of operating "Trickbot," a cybercrime-as-a-service platform based in Russia that has enabled countless ransomware attacks and bank account takeovers since its debut in 2016. The U.S. Department of the Treasury says the Trickbot group is associated with Russian intelligence services, and that this alliance led to the targeting of many U.S. companies and government entities. Initially a stealthy trojan horse program delivered via email and used to steal passwords, Trickbot evolved into "a highly modular malware suite that provides the Trickbot Group with the ability to conduct a variety of illegal cyber activities, including ransomware attacks," the Treasury Department said.

"During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Trickbot targeted hospitals and healthcare centers, launching a wave of ransomware attacks against hospitals across the United States," the sanctions notice continued. "In one of these attacks, the Trickbot Group deployed ransomware against three Minnesota medical facilities, disrupting their computer networks and telephones, and causing a diversion of ambulances. Members of the Trickbot Group publicly gloated over the ease of targeting the medical facilities and the speed with which the ransoms were paid to the group."

Only one of the men sanctioned today is known to have been criminally charged in connection with hacking activity. According to the Treasury Department, the alleged senior leader of the Trickbot group is 34-year-old Russian national Vitaly "Bentley" Kovalev. A New Jersey grand jury indicted Kovalev in 2012 after an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service determined that he ran a massive "money mule" scheme, which used phony job offers to trick people into laundering money stolen from hacked small to mid-sized businesses in the United States. The 2012 indictment against Kovalev relates to cybercrimes he allegedly perpetrated prior to the creation of Trickbot. A copy of the now-unsealed 2012 indictment of Kovalev is here (PDF).

UnknowingFool writes: UK Judge James Mellor has thrown out Craig Wright's cases against Bitcoin derivatives like Bitcoin Cash as Wright cannot claim copyright on the Bitcoin file format. Wright had sued forks of Bitcoin claiming they breached his copyrights to prevent them from operating. The judge disagreed noting that Wright had failed to meet a requirement of copyright called "fixation" detailing where/when/how the original expression was first recorded somewhere in any media.

"Whilst I accept that the law of copyright will continue to face challenges with new digital technologies, I do not see any prospect of the law as currently stated and understood in the caselaw allowing copyright protection of subject-matter which is not expressed or fixed anywhere," wrote Judge Mellor. In other words Wright has failed to show any evidence that he wrote down the file format somewhere to claim that he created the file format.

This is not the first time Wright has failed to produce credible evidence in a court case: in an Oslo, Norway case last year Wright claimed he destroyed a hard drive in 2016 containing the Nakomoto original keys despite telling a U.S. court in 2020 that he was waiting on the same keys to be delivered by a special courier. Those keys were later ruled to be fictitious. Decrypt notes that Wright is "currently in the process of suing 15 Bitcoin developers to retreive around 111,000 bitcoin after he lost the encrypted keys to access them when his home computer network was allegedly hacked."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Pictures of 100 Birkin bags covered in shaggy, multi-colored fur have become the focus of a court dispute that will decide how digital artists can depict commercial activities in their art and cast new light on whether brands are protected in the metaverse. In the case, being heard this week in a New York federal courtroom, the luxury handbag maker Hermes is challenging an artist who sells the futuristic digital works known as NFTs or non-fungible tokens. Artist and entrepreneur Mason Rothschild created images of the astonishingly expensive Hermes handbag, the Birkin, digitally covered the bags in fur and turned the pictures into an "art project," which he called MetaBirkin. Then he sold editions of the images online for total earnings of more than $1m, according to court records.

Hermes promptly sued, claiming the artist was simply "a digital speculator who is seeking to get rich quick by appropriating" the Hermes brand. The "Metabirkins brand simply rips off Hermes's famous Birkin trademark by adding the generic prefix "meta," read the original complaint filed by Hermes in January last year, noting that the "meta" in the name refers to the digital metaverse now being pumped by technology innovators as the next big thing in tech profit-making. Rothschild, whose real name is Sonny Estival, countered that he has a first amendment right to depict the hard-to-buy, French handbags in his artwork, just as Andy Warhol portrayed a giant Campbell's soup cans in his famous pop culture silk screens. "I'm not creating or selling fake Birkin bags. I'm creating art works that depict imaginary, fur-covered Birkin bags," said Rothschild in a letter to the community after the case was filed. "The fact that I sell the art using NFTs doesn't change the fact that it's art." "One hurdle that Hermes will have to overcome in the case is the fact that US trademark law requires brands to register their trademarks for each specific type of use, so digital sales might require a separate registration," notes the report.

"In the end, [Michelle Cooke, a partner at the law firm Arentfox Schiff LLP, who advises brands on these types of trademark issues] says the decision might come down to whether the jury believes Rothschild did the MetaBirkin project as an artistic project 'or was it a money-making venture that he cast as an artistic project when he got into trouble.'"

A former Coinbase product manager pleaded guilty on Tuesday in what U.S. prosecutors have called the first insider trading case involving cryptocurrency, his defense lawyer said in a court hearing. From a report: Ishan Wahi, 32, pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, after initially pleading not guilty last year. Prosecutors said Wahi shared confidential information with his brother Nikhil and their friend Sameer Ramani about forthcoming announcements of new digital assets that Coinbase would let users trade. "I knew that Sameer Ramani and Nikhil Wahi would use that information to make trading decisions," Ishan Wahi said during Tuesday's hearing in federal court in Manhattan. "It was wrong to misappropriate and disseminate Coinbase's property." Nikhil Wahi and Ramani were charged with using ethereum blockchain wallets to acquire digital assets and trading at least 14 times before Coinbase announcements between June 2021 and April 2022.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: Julius "Zeekill" Kivimaki, a 25-year-old Finnish man charged with extorting a local online psychotherapy practice and leaking therapy notes for more than 22,000 patients online, was arrested this week in France. A notorious hacker convicted of perpetrating tens of thousands of cybercrimes, Kivimaki had been in hiding since October 2022, when he failed to show up in court and Finland issued an international warrant for his arrest. [...] According to the French news site actu.fr, Kivimaki was arrested around 7 a.m. on Feb. 3, after authorities in Courbevoie responded to a domestic violence report. Kivimaki had been out earlier with a woman at a local nightclub, and later the two returned to her home but reportedly got into a heated argument. Police responding to the scene were admitted by another woman -- possibly a roommate -- and found the man inside still sleeping off a long night. When they roused him and asked for identification, the 6 3 blonde, green-eyed man presented an ID that stated he was of Romanian nationality. The French police were doubtful. After consulting records on most-wanted criminals, they quickly identified the man as Kivimaki and took him into custody.

Kivimaki initially gained notoriety as a self-professed member of the Lizard Squad, a mainly low-skilled hacker group that specialized in DDoS attacks. But American and Finnish investigators say Kivimaki's involvement in cybercrime dates back to at least 2008, when he was introduced to a founding member of what would soon become HTP. Finnish police said Kivimaki also used the nicknames "Ryan", "RyanC" and "Ryan Cleary" (Ryan Cleary was actually a member of a rival hacker group -- LulzSec -- who was sentenced to prison for hacking). Kivimaki and other HTP members were involved in mass-compromising web servers using known vulnerabilities, and by 2012 Kivimaki's alias Ryan Cleary was selling access to those servers in the form of a DDoS-for-hire service. Kivimaki was 15 years old at the time. In 2013, investigators going through devices seized from Kivimaki found computer code that had been used to crack more than 60,000 web servers using a previously unknown vulnerability in Adobe's ColdFusion software.

Multiple law enforcement sources told KrebsOnSecurity that Kivimaki was responsible for making an August 2014 bomb threat against former Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley that grounded an American Airlines plane. That incident was widely reported to have started with a tweet from the Lizard Squad, but Smedley and others said it started with a call from Kivimaki. Kivimaki also was involved in calling in multiple fake bomb threats and "swatting" incidents -- reporting fake hostage situations at an address to prompt a heavily armed police response to that location.

An anonymous reader shares a report from Ars Technica: Over the years, King of Kong star Billy Mitchell has seen his world-record Donkey Kong scores stripped, partially reinstated, and endlessly litigated, both in actual court and the court of public opinion. Through it all, Mitchell has insisted that every one of his records was set on unmodified Donkey Kong arcade hardware, despite some convincing technical evidence to the contrary.

Now, new photos from a 2007 performance by Mitchell seem to show obvious modifications to the machine used to earn at least one of those scores, a fascinating new piece of evidence in the long, contentious battle over Mitchell's place in Donkey Kong score-chasing history.

The photos in question were taken at the Florida Association of Mortgage Brokers (FAMB) Convention, which hosted Mitchell as part of its "80s Arcade Night" promotion in July 2007. Mitchell claims to have achieved a score of 1,050,200 points at that event, a performance that was recognized by adjudicator Twin Galaxies as a world record at the time (but which by now would barely crack the top 30). In his defamation case against Twin Galaxies, Mitchell includes testimony from several purported witnesses to his FAMB performance. That includes former Twin Galaxies referee Todd Rogers (who was later also banned from Twin Galaxies), who testified that the machine used at the event was "an original Nintendo Donkey Kong Arcade machine as I have known since 1981."

But the pictures from the FAMB convention, made public by fellow high-score-chaser David Race last month, raise additional questions about that claim, thanks to what Race calls a "glaringly non-original joystick" seen in the machine shown in those photos.

The Washington Post looks at the effectiveness — and the implications — of "citywide surveillance" networks, including Memphis's SkyCop , "built on 2,100 cameras that broadcast images back to a police command center every minute of every day." Known for their blinking blue lights, the SkyCop cameras now blanket many of the city's neighborhoods, gas stations, sidewalks and parks. The company that runs SkyCop, whose vice president of sales previously worked for the Memphis police, promotes it as a powerful crime deterrent that can help "neighborhoods take back their streets." But after a decade in which Memphis taxpayers have paid $10 million to expand the surveillance system, crime in the city has gone up....

No agency tracks nationwide camera installation statistics, but major cities have invested heavily in such networks. Police in Washington, D.C., said they had deployed cameras at nearly 300 intersections by 2021, up from 48 in 2007. In Chicago, more than 30,000 cameras are viewable by police; in parts of New York City, the cameras watch every block. Yet researchers have found no substantive evidence that the cameras actually reduce crime....

In federal court, judges have debated whether round-the-clock police video recording could constitute an unreasonable search as prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. Though the cameras are installed in public areas, they also capture many corners of residential life, including people's doors and windows. "Are we just going to put these cameras in front of everybody's house and monitor them and see if anybody's up to anything?" U.S. Circuit Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson said during oral arguments for one such case in 2021....

Dave Maass, a director at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation who researches police surveillance technology, said these systems have expanded rapidly in the United States without real evidence that they have led to a drop in crime. "This often isn't the community coming in and asking for it, it's police going to conferences where ... vendors are promising the world and that they'll miraculously solve crimes," Maass said. "But it's just a commercial thing. It's just business."
Nonetheless, the Post notes that in Memphis many SkyCop cameras are even outfitted "with license-plate recognition software that records the time and location of every passing car."

The New York Post reports: Facebook can secretly drain its users' cellphone batteries, a former employee contends in a lawsuit.

The practice, known as "negative testing," allows tech companies to "surreptitiously" run down someone's mobile juice in the name of testing features or issues such as how fast their app runs or how an image might load, according to data scientist George Hayward. "I said to the manager, 'This can harm somebody,' and she said by harming a few we can help the greater masses," said Hayward, 33, who claims in a Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit that he was fired in November for refusing to participate in negative testing....

Killing someone's cellphone battery puts people at risk, especially "in circumstances where they need to communicate with others, including but not limited to police or other rescue workers," according to the litigation filed against Facebook's parent company, Meta Platforms. "I refused to do this test," he said, adding, "It turns out if you tell your boss, 'No, that's illegal,' it doesn't go over very well." Hayward was hired in October 2019 for a six-figure gig.

He said he doesn't know how many people have been impacted by Facebook's negative testing but believes the company has engaged in the practice because he was given an internal training document titled, "How to run thoughtful negative tests," which included examples of such experiments being carried out. "I have never seen a more horrible document in my career," he said....

The lawsuit, which sought unspecified damages, has since been withdrawn because Hayward is required to go to arbitration, said the lawyer, who said Hayward stands by the allegations.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader WankerWeasel for sharing the article.

Meta's stock surged on Thursday after the company reported better-than-expected earnings, said it would buy back billions of dollars in its stock, and overcame a court challenge to its ambitions in the so-called metaverse. The New York Times reports: Shares of the tech giant, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, climbed more than 23 percent, its biggest daily gain in nearly 10 years. And it was a huge move for a company its size, adding nearly $100 billion in market value in a single day, or about as much as Citigroup's entire market capitalization.

After ending last year with a loss of more than 60 percent, Meta's stock is up more than 50 percent this year, as the mood among tech investors has brightened. The Nasdaq Composite, an index that includes many tech companies, including Meta, has risen nearly 20 percent this year. The report notes that plenty of challenges remain for the company. "Meta faces setbacks in digital advertising as clients rein in spending because of higher interest rates and inflation," reports The New York Times. "The company is also fighting to retain users drawn to newer apps like TikTok, the short-form video app that Mr. Zuckerberg considers one of his most formidable rivals. The billions that Meta is spending pursuing its founder's vision of the metaverse may not pay off."

In November, Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees in what was the most significant job cuts since its founding in 2004.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A judge in Colombia used ChatGPT to make a court ruling, in what is apparently the first time a legal decision has been made with the help of an AI text generator -- or at least, the first time we know about it. Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia, who presides over the First Circuit Court in the city of Cartagena, said he used the AI tool to pose legal questions about the case and included its responses in his decision, according to a court document (PDF) dated January 30, 2023.

"The arguments for this decision will be determined in line with the use of artificial intelligence (AI)," Garcia wrote in the decision, which was translated from Spanish. "Accordingly, we entered parts of the legal questions posed in these proceedings." "The purpose of including these AI-produced texts is in no way to replace the judge's decision," he added. "What we are really looking for is to optimize the time spent drafting judgments after corroborating the information provided by AI."

The case involved a dispute with a health insurance company over whether an autistic child should receive coverage for medical treatment. According to the court document, the legal questions entered into the AI tool included "Is an autistic minor exonerated from paying fees for their therapies?" and "Has the jurisprudence of the constitutional court made favorable decisions in similar cases?" Garcia included the chatbot's full responses in the decision, apparently marking the first time a judge has admitted to doing so. The judge also included his own insights into applicable legal precedents, and said the AI was used to "extend the arguments of the adopted decision." After detailing the exchanges with the AI, the judge then adopts its responses and his own legal arguments as grounds for its decision.

Pakistan has "degraded" Wikipedia in the country for 48 hours for not removing "sacrilegious contents" and warned of fully blocking the site if the online encyclopedia fails to comply with the directions. From a report: The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, the nation's telecom regulator, said Wednesday afternoon that it had approached Wikipedia to block or remove certain "blasphemous" contents by issuing court orders, but said the online encyclopedia neither complied nor appeared before the authority. If the "intentional failure" on Wikipedia's part persists, the regulator will move to block the online encyclopedia within the country, it warned.

Celsius Network misled its investors -- and on occasion used new customer funds to pay for other customers' withdrawals, the usual definition of a Ponzi scheme, an independent examiner (PDF) for the U.S. bankruptcy court in New York said in a Tuesday filing. CoinDesk reports: In September, Shoba Pillay was asked by the court to offer an outside view of goings-on at the crypto lender, has now published an account of the firm's operations in the runup to bankruptcy being declared in July. "In every key respect -- from how Celsius described its contract with its customers to the risks it took with their crypto assets -- how Celsius ran its business differed significantly from what Celsius told its customers," Pillay wrote, after interviewing staffers, including former Chief Executive Officer Alex Mashinsky, as well as customers of and vendors to the company. [...]

Despite repeatedly saying he was not selling CEL, and despite employees internally saying the token's true value was zero, Mashinsky sold 25 million tokens to the value of at least $68.7 million between 2018 and bankruptcy, Pillay said. Co-founders Nuke Goldstein and S. Daniel Leon are cited as making CEL sales valued at $2.8 million and $9.74 million respectively. Pillay said Mashinsky's claims to the media and on social media to "always have 200% collateral" were "far off the mark," with 14% of Celsius' institutional loans wholly unsecured in December 2020. That figure rose to nearly 36% by mid-2021 -- and even then some of the collateral was in unstable assets such as FTX's FTT token, Pillay said.

"What Celsius and Mr. Mashinsky never did was correct the record after the fact for the thousands of live audience members who heard these misstatements or for those who watched the recorded videos on YouTube before they were edited," Pillay said. Pillay also uncovered "significant tax compliance deficiencies" in the company, saying that its mining arm may owe over $23.1 million in use taxes, and has reserved $3.7 million in liability in U.K. value-added tax.

The Washington Post reports that "there are only seven working offshore wind turbines in the entire United States at the moment. In Europe, there are more than 5,000. China also has thousands."

And yet 17 wind-power projects in the eastern U.S. are facing "considerable" resistance, while shareholders "are pressuring companies not to invest in more projects beyond the wave that has already begun, said Paul Zimbardo, an analyst at Bank of America." Surging costs from inflation and labor shortages have developers saying their projects may not be profitable. A raft of lawsuits and pending federal restrictions to protect sensitive wildlife could further add to costs. The uncertainty has clouded bright expectations for massive growth in U.S. offshore wind, which the Biden administration and several state governments have bet big on in their climate plans. "We're trying to stand up an entire industry in the United States, and we're having natural growing pains," said Cindy Muller, a lawyer who runs the Houston office and co-chairs the offshore wind initiative at the law firm Jones Walker.

State leaders and the Biden administration have homed in on the industry because the power of offshore winds can produce a rare round-the-clock source of greenhouse-gas-free electricity — and one difficult for future administrations to undo once turbines are in the ground. The administration set a goal for 30 gigawatts of new power from offshore wind by 2030. That is about 3 percent of what the country needs to get to 80 percent clean electricity by that time, according to estimates from a team led by University of California at Berkeley researchers.... Delays make it unlikely that the Biden administration will meet its 2030 goal, lawyers and analysts said.
The article notes that last fall three wind developers"moved to renegotiate their contracts, saying they can no longer afford to deliver power for the prices promised because of soaring costs." And meanwhile a massive wind project south of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts "is years behind schedule amid regulatory delays and litigation from opponents."

Though the project has finally started laying cable, now an oil company-funded advocacy group "is providing the financial backing and legal expertise for litigation...taking up the cause of the whales in court." (This despite the fact that America's ocean-montoring agency, the NOAA, says whales aren't affected by wind power.) The Post notes that the project's construction finally began "a little more than a year ago...in the same area where a die-off of humpback whales began seven years ago." NOAA says about 40% of the whales showed evidence they'd been struck by a ship or entangled in nets, and both whales and fishermen "may be following their prey (small fish) which are reportedly close to shore this winter."

Ironically, the Sierra Club tells the Washington Post that "The biggest threat to the ocean ecosystem is climate change."

GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI "told a San Francisco federal court that a proposed class-action lawsuit for improperly monetizing open-source code to train their AI systems cannot be sustained," reports Reuters: The companies said in Thursday court filings that the complaint, filed by a group of anonymous copyright owners, did not outline their allegations specifically enough and that GitHub's Copilot system, which suggests lines of code for programmers, made fair use of the source code. A spokesperson for GitHub, an online platform for housing code, said Friday that the company has "been committed to innovating responsibly with Copilot from the start" and that its motion is "a testament to our belief in the work we've done to achieve that...."

Microsoft and OpenAI said Thursday that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the case because they failed to argue they suffered specific injuries from the companies' actions. The companies also said the lawsuit did not identify particular copyrighted works they misused or contracts that they breached.

Microsoft also said in its filing that the copyright allegations would "run headlong into the doctrine of fair use," which allows the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in some situations. The companies both cited a 2021 U.S. Supreme Court decision that Google's use of Oracle source code to build its Android operating system was transformative fair use.
Slashdot reader guest reader shares this excerpt from the plaintiffs' complaint: GitHub and OpenAI have offered shifting accounts of the source and amount of the code or other data used to train and operate Copilot. They have also offered shifting justifications for why a commercial AI product like Copilot should be exempt from these license requirements, often citing "fair use."

It is not fair, permitted, or justified. On the contrary, Copilot's goal is to replace a huge swath of open source by taking it and keeping it inside a GitHub-controlled paywall. It violates the licenses that open-source programmers chose and monetizes their code despite GitHub's pledge never to do so.

The Associated Press reports that America's Federal Reserve Board "has denied a Wyoming cryptocurrency bank's application for Federal Reserve System membership, officials announced Friday, dealing a setback to the crypto industry's attempts to build acceptance in mainstream U.S. banking." Many in crypto have been looking to Cheyenne-based Custodia Bank's more than 2-year-old application as a bellwether for crypto banking. Approval would have meant access to Federal Reserve services including its electronic payments system.

The rejection adds to doubts about crypto banking's viability, particularly in Wyoming, a state that has sought to become a hub of crypto banking, exchanges and mining....

Custodia sued the Federal Reserve Board and Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in Wyoming federal court last year, accusing them of taking an unreasonably long time on its application. In a statement Friday, the company said it was "surprised and disappointed" by the rejection and pledged to continue to litigate the issue.
In a statement, America's Federal Reserve Board argued argued that Custodia's "novel business model" and focus on crypto-assets "presented significant safety and soundness risks." "The Board has previously made clear that such crypto activities are highly likely to be inconsistent with safe and sound banking practices.

"The Board also found that Custodia's risk management framework was insufficient to address concerns regarding the heightened risks associated with its proposed crypto activities, including its ability to mitigate money laundering and terrorism financing risks."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Aerospace giant Boeing entered a plea of not guilty to a criminal charge at an arraignment in federal court in Texas Thursday. The company is charged with felony fraud related to the crashes of two of its 737 Max airplanes that killed a total of 346 people. About a dozen relatives of some of those who were killed in the crashes gave emotional testimony during the three-hour arraignment hearing about how they've been affected by what they call "the deadliest corporate crime in U.S. history." They testified after Boeing's chief aerospace safety officer Mike Delaney entered a plea of not guilty on behalf of the airplane manufacturer to the charge of conspiracy to commit fraud. The company is accused of deceiving and misleading federal regulators about the safety of a critical automated flight control system that investigators found played a major role in causing the crashes in Indonesia in 2018 and in Ethiopia in 2019.

Boeing and the Justice Department had entered into a deferred prosecution agreement to settle the charge two years ago but many of the families of the crash victims objected to the agreement, saying that they were not consulted about what they called a "secret, sweetheart deal." Under the terms of the agreement, Boeing admitted to defrauding the FAA by concealing safety problems with the 737 Max, but pinned much of the blame on two technical pilots who they say misled regulators while working on the certification of the aircraft. Only one of those pilots was prosecuted and a jury acquitted him at trial last year. Boeing also agreed to pay $2.5 billion, including $1.7 billion in compensation to airlines that had purchased 737 Max planes but could not use them while the plane was grounded for 20 months after the second plane crashed. The company also agreed to pay $500 million in compensation to the families of those killed in the two Max plane crashes, and to pay a $243 million fine. The agreement also required Boeing to make significant changes to its safety policies and procedures, as well as to the corporate culture, which many insiders have said had shifted in recent years from a safety first focus to one that critics say put profits first.

After three years, if the aerospace giant and defense contractor lived up to the terms of the deferred prosecution agreement, the criminal charge against Boeing would be dismissed and the company would be immune from further prosecution. But last fall, U.S. District Court Judge Reed O'Connor agreed that under the Crime Victims' Rights Act, the relatives' rights had been violated and they should have been consulted before the DOJ and Boeing reached the agreement. Last week, he ordered Boeing to appear Thursday to be arraigned. On Thursday, the families asked Judge O'Connor to impose certain conditions on Boeing as a condition of release, including appointing an independent monitor to oversee Boeing's compliance with the terms of the previous deferred prosecution agreement, and that the company's compliance efforts "be made public to the fullest extent possible." O'Connor did not rule on whether to impose those conditions yet, as Boeing and the Justice Department opposed the request. But he did impose a standard condition that Boeing commit no new crimes.