Israel's technology sector is pushing back against the new government's planned judicial overhaul, saying the proposed changes are spooking investors worried about economic stability, the independence of the courts and a right-wing legislative agenda. From a report: This week, a large Israeli software company said it would move its money out of Israel and the general partner of two venture-capital firms said future money raised could be kept abroad. Those moves followed a letter from hundreds of Israeli economists warning that the judicial changes would concentrate political power and remove democratic checks and balances in a way that "could cripple the country's economy." Two former Bank of Israel governors warned in an opinion column about the negative economic impacts of changes to the top court.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his recently sworn-in government are advancing plans that would give the ruling coalition control over which judges are appointed, and allow a simple majority of lawmakers to override decisions by the Supreme Court. The plan would also limit which cases the court can hear. Top members of the justice system and the political opposition have criticized the overhaul as an attempt to concentrate all power in the hands of the ruling coalition. Israel is highly reliant on its technology sector, which accounts for 15% of the country's gross domestic product and around half of its exports. The country has prospered in recent decades, attracting foreign investment that has fueled an explosion of startups and technology companies. Many Israeli tech companies are based in or have workers who live in the Tel Aviv area, a base for secular and liberal Israelis, many of whom oppose Mr. Netanyahu's government.

schwit1 shares a report from NPR: A British man who planned to have a "robot lawyer" help a defendant fight a traffic ticket has dropped the effort after receiving threats of possible prosecution and jail time. [...] The first-ever AI-powered legal defense was set to take place in California on Feb. 22, but not anymore. As word got out, an uneasy buzz began to swirl among various state bar officials, according to Browder. He says angry letters began to pour in. "Multiple state bar associations have threatened us," Browder said. "One even said a referral to the district attorney's office and prosecution and prison time would be possible." In particular, Browder said one state bar official noted that the unauthorized practice of law is a misdemeanor in some states punishable up to six months in county jail.

"Even if it wouldn't happen, the threat of criminal charges was enough to give it up," [said Joshua Browden, the CEO of the New York-based startup DoNotPay]. "The letters have become so frequent that we thought it was just a distraction and that we should move on." State bar associations license and regulate attorneys, as a way to ensure people hire lawyers who understand the law. Browder refused to cite which state bar associations in particular sent letters, and what official made the threat of possible prosecution, saying his startup, DoNotPay, is under investigation by multiple state bar associations, including California's. "The truth is, most people can't afford lawyers," he said. "This could've shifted the balance and allowed people to use tools like ChatGPT in the courtroom that maybe could've helped them win cases."

"I think calling the tool a 'robot lawyer' really riled a lot of lawyers up," Browder said. "But I think they're missing the forest for the trees. Technology is advancing and courtroom rules are very outdated."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ArsTechnica: The operator of Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall is being probed by New York's attorney general over the company's use of facial recognition technology to identify and exclude lawyers from events. AG Letitia James' office said the policy may violate civil rights laws. Because of the policy, lawyers who work for firms involved in litigation against MSG Entertainment Corp. can be denied entry to shows or sporting events, even when they have no direct involvement in any lawsuits against MSG. A lawyer who is subject to MSG's policy may buy a ticket to an event but be unable to get in because the MSG venues use facial recognition to identify them.

In December, attorney Kelly Conlon was denied entry into Radio City Music Hall in New York when she accompanied her daughter's Girl Scout troop to a Rockettes show. Conlon wasn't personally involved in any lawsuits against MSG but is a lawyer for a firm that "has been involved in personal injury litigation against a restaurant venue now under the umbrella of MSG Entertainment," NBC New York reported. James' office sent a letter (PDF) Tuesday to MSG Entertainment, noting reports that it "used facial recognition software to forbid all lawyers in all law firms representing clients engaged in any litigation against the Company from entering the Company's venues in New York, including the use of any season tickets."

"We write to raise concerns that the Policy may violate the New York Civil Rights Law and other city, state, and federal laws prohibiting discrimination and retaliation for engaging in protected activity," Assistant AG Kyle Rapinan of the Civil Rights Bureau wrote in the letter. "Such practices certainly run counter to the spirit and purpose of such laws, and laws promoting equal access to the courts: forbidding entry to lawyers representing clients who have engaged in litigation against the Company may dissuade such lawyers from taking on legitimate cases, including sexual harassment or employment discrimination claims." The AG's office also said it is concerned that "facial recognition software may be plagued with biases and false positives against people of color and women." The letter asked MSG Entertainment to respond by February 13 "to state the justifications for the Company's Policy and identify all efforts you are undertaking to ensure compliance with all applicable laws and that the Company's use of facial recognition technology will not lead to discrimination." "To be clear, our policy does not unlawfully prohibit anyone from entering our venues and it is not our intent to dissuade attorneys from representing plaintiffs in litigation against us," said an MSG spokesperson in a statement. "We are merely excluding a small percentage of lawyers only during active litigation. Most importantly, to even suggest anyone is being excluded based on the protected classes identified in state and federal civil rights laws is ludicrous. Our policy has never applied to attorneys representing plaintiffs who allege sexual harassment or employment discrimination."

Google plans to discontinue a pilot program that allows political campaigns to evade its email spam filters, the latest round in the technology giant's tussle with the GOP over online fundraising. The Washington Post reports: The company will let the program sunset at the end of January instead of prolonging it, Google's lawyers said in a filing on Monday. The filing, in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, asked the court to dismiss a complaint lodged by the Republican National Committee accusing Google of "throttling its email messages because of the RNC's political affiliation and views." "The RNC is wrong," Google argued in its motion. "Gmail's spam filtering policies apply equally to emails from all senders, whether they are politically affiliated or not." [...]

While rejecting the GOP's attacks, Google nonetheless bowed to them. The company asked the Federal Election Commission to greenlight the pilot program, available to all campaigns and political committees registered with the federal regulator. The company anticipated at the time that a trial run would last through January 2023. Thousands of public comments implored the FEC to advise against the program, which consumer advocates and other individuals said would overwhelm Gmail users with spam. Anne P. Mitchell, a lawyer and founder of an email certification service called Get to the Inbox, wrote that Google was "opening up the floodgates to their users' inboxes ... to assuage partisan disgruntlement."

The FEC gave its approval in August, with one Democrat joining the commission's three Republicans to clear the way for the initiative. Ultimately, more than 100 committees of both parties signed up for the program, said Google spokesman Jose Castaneda. The RNC was not one of them, as Google emphasized in its motion to dismiss in the federal case in California. "Ironically, the RNC could have participated in a pilot program leading up to the 2022 midterm elections that would have allowed its emails to avoid otherwise-applicable forms of spam detection," the filing stated. "Many other politically-affiliated entities chose to participate in that program, which was approved by the FEC. The RNC chose not to do so. Instead, it now seeks to blame Google based on a theory of political bias that is both illogical and contrary to the facts alleged in its own Complaint." [...] "Indeed, effective spam filtering is a key feature of Gmail, and one of the main reasons why Gmail is so popular," the filing stated.

The US Justice Department and eight states sued Alphabet's Google, calling for the break up of the search giant's ad-technology business over alleged illegal monopolization of the digital advertising market. From a report: "Google abuses its monopoly power to disadvantage website publishers and advertisers who dare to use competing ad tech products in a search for higher quality, or lower cost, matches," the Justice Department said in the complaint, which was filed in federal court in Virginia. New York, California and Virginia were among the states that signed on to the complaint.

The lawsuit represents the Biden administration's first major case challenging the power of one of the nation's largest tech companies, following through on a probe that began under former President Donald Trump. It also marks one of the few times the Justice Department has called for the breakup of a major company since it dismantled the Bell telecom system in 1982. Google is the dominant player in the $278.6 billion US digital-ad market, controlling most of the technology used to buy, sell and serve online advertising. A resolution in the case could be years away. The lawsuit marks the DOJ's second antitrust suit against Google and the fifth major case in the US challenging the company's business practices.

Germany's cartel office regulator said on Monday it had initiated proceedings against payment company PayPal Europe over the possibility that it hindered competition. Reuters reports: The subject of the proceedings was PayPal's rules for extra charges and the presentation of PayPal in the terms of use for Germany, the watchdog said. The regulator is investigating in particular rules that say merchants may not offer their goods and services at a lower price to customers who choose a cheaper payment method than PayPal.

PayPal demands that sellers do not express a preference for other payment methods or make their use more convenient for customers, according to the antitrust watchdog. "These clauses could restrict competition and constitute a violation of the prohibition of abuse," said cartel office chief Andreas Mundt in a statement. "We will now examine what market power PayPal has and to what extent online merchants are dependent on offering PayPal as a payment method."

CNN remembers how in 2016 Ruja Ignatova "touted her company, OneCoin, as a lucrative rival to Bitcoin in the growing cryptocurrency market." As OneCoin's co-founder, Ignatova told one audience in 2016 that "In two years, nobody will speak about Bitcoin anymore.

"Sixteen months later, Ignatova boarded a plane in Sofia, Bulgaria, and vanished. She hasn't been seen since." Authorities say OneCoin was a pyramid scheme that defrauded people out of more than $4 billion as Ignatova convinced investors in the US and around the globe to throw fistfuls of cash at her company. Federal prosecutors describe OneCoin as one of the largest international fraud schemes ever perpetrated. She is now one of the FBI's 10 most-wanted fugitives, alongside accused gang leaders and murderers, and is the only woman currently on that list....

Ignatova and her partners "conned unsuspecting victims out of billions of dollars, claiming that OneCoin would be the 'Bitcoin killer,'" US Attorney Damian Williams, New York's top prosecutor, said in a statement last month. "In fact, OneCoins were entirely worthless ... (Their) lies were designed with one goal, to get everyday people all over the world to part with their hard-earned money."
One subheading of CNN's story reads "She knew it was a scam from the start, court documents say." While [co-founder] Greenwood and Ignatova were working on the concept for OneCoin, they referred to it in emails as a "trashy coin," federal officials said in court documents. The documents show Greenwood described their investors as "idiots" and "crazy" in an email to Ignatova's brother, Konstantin Ignatov, who also took part in the scam and assumed OneCoin leadership after his sister vanished, according to prosecutors.... She also proposed an exit strategy should the company fail, saying in a 2014 email to Greenwood that they should "take the money and run and blame somebody else for this...."

Ignatova and her partners promised buyers a fivefold or even tenfold return on their investment, according to court documents. A buying frenzy ensued. Between the fourth quarter of 2014 and the fourth quarter of 2016 alone, investors gave OneCoin more than $4 billion, federal prosecutors said, citing records obtained in the course of their investigation. Some $50 million came from investors in the US, according to court documents. "She timed her scheme perfectly, capitalizing on the frenzied speculation of the early days of cryptocurrency," said Williams, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan.
The FBI is now offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to her arrest, according to the article, which notes this line appearing at the bottom of her FBI wanted poster.

"Ignatova is believed to travel with armed guards and/or associates. Ignatova may have had plastic surgery or otherwise altered her appearance."

IBM, along with 13 of its current and former executives, has been sued by investors who claim the IT giant used mainframe sales to fraudulently prop up newer, more trendy parts of its business. The Register reports: In effect, IBM deceived the market about its progress in developing Watson, cloud technologies, and other new sources of revenue, by deliberately misclassifying the money it was making from mainframe deals, assigning that money instead to other products, it is alleged. The accusations emerged in a lawsuit [PDF] filed late last week against IBM in New York on behalf of the June E Adams Irrevocable Trust. It alleged Big Blue shifted sales by its "near-monopoly" mainframe business to its newer and less popular cloud, analytics, mobile, social, and security products (CAMSS), which bosses promoted as growth opportunities and designated "Strategic Imperatives."

IBM is said to have created the appearance of demand for these Strategic Imperative products by bundling them into three- to five-year mainframe Enterprise License Agreements (ELA) with large banking, healthcare, and insurance company customers. In other words, it is claimed, mainframe sales agreements had Strategic Imperative products tacked on to help boost the sales performance of those newer offerings and give investors the impression customers were clamoring for those technologies from IBM. "Defendants used steep discounting on the mainframe part of the ELA in return for the customer purchasing catalog software (i.e. Strategic Imperative Revenue), unneeded and unused by the customer," the lawsuit stated.

IBM is also alleged to have shifted revenue from its non-strategic Global Business Services (GBS) segment to Watson, a Strategic Imperative in the CAMSS product set, to convince investors that the company was successfully expanding beyond its legacy business. Last April the plaintiff Trust filed a similar case, which was joined by at least five other law firms representing other IBM shareholders. A month prior, the IBM board had been presented with a demand letter from shareholders to investigate the above allegations. Asked whether any action has been taken as a result of that letter, IBM has yet to respond.

HPE and Oracle have settled their long-running legal case over alleged copyright infringement regarding Solaris software updates for HPE customers, but it looks like the nature of the settlement is going to remain under wraps. The Register reports: The pair this week informed [PDF] the judge overseeing the case that they'd reached a mutual settlement and asked for the case to be dismissed "with prejudice" -- ie, permanently. The settlement agreement is confidential, and its terms won't be made public. The case goes back to at least 2016, when Oracle filed a lawsuit against HPE over the rights to support the Solaris operating system. HPE and a third company, software support outfit Terix, were accused of offering Solaris support for customers while the latter was not an authorized Oracle partner.

Big Red's complaint claimed HPE had falsely represented to customers that it and Terix could lawfully provide Solaris Updates and other support services at a lower cost than Oracle, and that the two had worked together to provide customers with access to such updates. The suit against HPE was thrown out of court in 2019, but revived in 2021 when a judge denied HPE's motion for a summary judgement in the case. Terix settled its case in 2015 for roughly $58 million. Last year, the case went to court and in June a jury found HPE guilty of providing customers with Solaris software updates without Oracle's permission, awarding the latter $30 million for copyright infringement.

But that wasn't the end of the matter, because HPE was back a couple of months later to appeal the verdict, claiming the complaint by Oracle that it had directly infringed copyrights with regard to Solaris were not backed by sufficient evidence. This hinged on HPE claiming that Oracle had failed to prove that any of the patches and updates in question were actually protected by copyright, but also that Oracle could not prove HPE had any control over Terix in its purported infringement activities. Oracle for its part filed a motion asking the court for a permanent injunction against HPE to prevent it copying or distributing the Solaris software, firmware or support materials, except as allowed by Oracle. Now it appears that the two companies have come to some mutually acceptable out-of-court arrangement, as often happens in acrimonious and long-running legal disputes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over the past few days, dozens of tech companies have filed briefs in support of Google in a Supreme Court case that tests online platforms' liability for recommending content. Obvious stakeholders like Meta and Twitter, alongside popular platforms like Craigslist, Etsy, Wikipedia, Roblox, and Tripadvisor, urged the court to uphold Section 230 immunity in the case or risk muddying the paths users rely on to connect with each other and discover information online. Out of all these briefs, however, Reddit's was perhaps the most persuasive (PDF). The platform argued on behalf of everyday Internet users, whom it claims could be buried in "frivolous" lawsuits for frequenting Reddit, if Section 230 is weakened by the court. Unlike other companies that hire content moderators, the content that Reddit displays is "primarily driven by humans -- not by centralized algorithms." Because of this, Reddit's brief paints a picture of trolls suing not major social media companies, but individuals who get no compensation for their work recommending content in communities. That legal threat extends to both volunteer content moderators, Reddit argued, as well as more casual users who collect Reddit "karma" by upvoting and downvoting posts to help surface the most engaging content in their communities.

"Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act famously protects Internet platforms from liability, yet what's missing from the discussion is that it crucially protects Internet users -- everyday people -- when they participate in moderation like removing unwanted content from their communities, or users upvoting and downvoting posts," a Reddit spokesperson told Ars. Reddit argues in the brief that such frivolous lawsuits have been lobbed against Reddit users and the company in the past, and Section 230 protections historically have consistently allowed Reddit users to "quickly and inexpensively" avoid litigation. [...]

The Supreme Court will have to weigh whether Reddit's arguments are valid. To help make its case defending Section 230 immunity protections for recommending content, Reddit received special permission from the Supreme Court to include anonymous comments from Reddit mods in its brief. This, Reddit's spokesperson notes, is "a significant departure from normal Supreme Court procedure." The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit defending online privacy, championed the court's decision to allow moderators to contribute comments anonymously. "We're happy the Supreme Court recognized the First Amendment rights of Reddit moderators to speak to the court about their concerns," EFF's senior staff attorney, Sophia Cope, told Ars. "It is quite understandable why those individuals may be hesitant to identify themselves should they be subject to liability in the future for moderating others' speech on Reddit."

"Reddit users that interact with third-party content -- including 'hosting' content on a sub-Reddit that they manage, or moderating that content -- could definitely be open to legal exposure if the Court carves out "recommending' from Section 230's protections, or otherwise narrows Section 230's reach," Cope told Ars.

Karl Bode, reporting for TechDirt: Recently, New York State passed a new law demanding that regional broadband providers (Verizon, Charter Spectrum, and Altice) provide low-income consumers $15, 25 Mbps broadband tiers to help them survive COVID. The goal: to try and help struggling Americans afford the high cost of broadband during an historic health crisis. Under the proposal ISPs are also allowed to offer $20, 200 Mbps tiers, with any price increases capped at two percent per year. U.S. Regulators engaging in anything even close to price regulation of regional monopolies is, again, said monopolies' worst nightmare.

As a result, the broadband industry quickly sued New York, insisting that the state is forbidden from passing such a law thanks in part to the Trump administration's net neutrality repeal (which basically attempted to lobotomize state consumer protection authority in addition to killing popular net neutrality rules). As the case heads to court, it could have broader implications for other state efforts to mandate lower costs for consumers (in times of crisis or not): "The industry fear is that other states might impose requirements far more onerous than what New York requires, such as by further lowering the price, raising the speed requirements, or expanding the eligibility pool to make broadband affordable for middle-class customers," added Levin.

A wide range of businesses, internet users, academics and even human rights experts defended Big Tech's liability shield in a pivotal Supreme Court case about YouTube algorithms, with some arguing that excluding AI-driven recommendation engines from federal legal protections would cause sweeping changes to the open internet. From a report: The diverse group weighing in at the Court ranged from major tech companies such as Meta, Twitter and Microsoft to some of Big Tech's most vocal critics, including Yelp and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Even Reddit and a collection of volunteer Reddit moderators got involved. In friend-of-the-court filings, the companies, organizations and individuals said the federal law whose scope the Court could potentially narrow in the case -- Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- is vital to the basic function of the web. Section 230 has been used to shield all websites, not just social media platforms, from lawsuits over third-party content.

The question at the heart of the case, Gonzalez v. Google, is whether Google can be sued for recommending pro-ISIS content to users through its YouTube algorithm; the company has argued that Section 230 precludes such litigation. But the plaintiffs in the case, the family members of a person killed in a 2015 ISIS attack in Paris, have argued that YouTube's recommendation algorithm can be held liable under a US antiterrorism law. In their filing, Reddit and the Reddit moderators argued that a ruling enabling litigation against tech-industry algorithms could lead to future lawsuits against even non-algorithmic forms of recommendation, and potentially targeted lawsuits against individual internet users.

Google has been dealt a significant blow in one of its key overseas markets. India's Supreme Court on Thursday declined to block an antitrust order that requires the Android-maker to make a series of changes that could topple its financial viability. From a report: India's apex court rejected to block the ruling against Google by the nation's antitrust watchdog Competition Commission of India. The court extended the deadline for enforcement of CCI's order by one week, however. The matter will now go back to the country's appellate tribunal, the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT), where Google previously failed to secure any relief.

The Supreme Court has directed NCLAT to make its decision by March 31. The challenge for Google is that unless NCLAT reaches a decision in Google's favor by this month, the tech giant will have to make a series of changes to Android. [...] The CCI has ordered Google to not require licensing of its Play Store to be linked with mandating installation of several Google apps such as Chrome and YouTube. The watchdog has also ordered Google to allow removal of all its apps from phones and give smartphone users the ability to change their search engine provider. The CCI also fined Google $162 million in its first order.

The cases could significantly affect the power and responsibilities of social media platforms. From a report: For years, giant social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have operated under two crucial tenets. The first is that the platforms have the power to decide what content to keep online and what to take down, free from government oversight. The second is that the websites cannot be held legally responsible for most of what their users post online, shielding the companies from lawsuits over libelous speech, extremist content and real-world harm linked to their platforms. Now the Supreme Court is poised to reconsider those rules, potentially leading to the most significant reset of the doctrines governing online speech since U.S. officials and courts decided to apply few regulations to the web in the 1990s.

On Friday, the Supreme Court is expected to discuss whether to hear two cases that challenge laws in Texas and Florida barring online platforms from taking down certain political content. Next month, the court is scheduled to hear a case that questions Section 230, a 1996 statute that protects the platforms from liability for the content posted by their users. The cases could eventually alter the hands-off legal position that the United States has largely taken toward online speech, potentially upending the businesses of TikTok, Twitter, Snap and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. "It's a moment when everything might change," said Daphne Keller, a former lawyer for Google who directs a program at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot faced tough questions from some exhausted and fed-up staff about recent missteps and future plans in a company-wide Q&A session on Wednesday. The meeting comes just a week after the Assassin's Creed publisher announced new cancellations, delays, and cost-cutting measures, and told employees "the ball is in your court" to help get the $3 billion company back on track. From a report: "The ball is now in our court -- for years it has been in your court so why did you mishandle the ball so badly so we, the workers, have to fix it for you?" read one upvoted question on a list submitted in advance through corporate communication channels and viewed by Kotaku. It was a reference to a now infamous email Guillemot sent to staff last week that appeared to shift blame for the publisher's recent mistakes and hold lower-level employees accountable for fixing the situation.

Guillemot opened the meeting by apologizing. "I heard your feedback and I'm sorry this was perceived that way," Guillemot said, according to sources present who were not authorized to speak to press. "When saying 'the ball is in your court' to deliver our lineup on time and at the expected level of quality, I wanted to convey the idea that more than ever I need your talent and energy to make it happen. This is a collective journey that starts of course with myself and with the leadership team to create the conditions for all of us to succeed together." While that clarification resonated with some developers, others who spoke with Kotaku still feel management is out of touch and found little in the meeting to reassure them.

Hundreds of federal, state and local U.S. law-enforcement agencies have access without court oversight to a database of more than 150 million money transfers between people in the U.S. and in more than 20 countries, according to internal program documents and an investigation by Sen. Ron Wyden. WSJ: The database, housed at a little-known nonprofit called the Transaction Record Analysis Center, or TRAC, was set up by the Arizona state attorney general's office in 2014 as part of a settlement reached with Western Union to combat cross-border trafficking of drugs and people from Mexico. It has since expanded to allow officials of more than 600 law-enforcement entities -- from federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to small-town police departments in nearly every state -- to monitor the flow of funds through money services between the U.S. and countries around the world.

TRAC's data includes the full names of the sender and recipient as well as the transaction amount. Rich Lebel, TRAC's director, said the program has directly resulted in hundreds of leads and busts involving drug cartels and other criminals seeking to launder money, and has revealed patterns of money flow that help law-enforcement agencies get a broader grasp on smuggling networks. "It's a law-enforcement investigative tool," Mr. Lebel said. "We don't broadcast it to the world, but we don't run from or hide from it either." Mr. Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said TRAC allows the government to "serve itself an all-you-can-eat buffet of Americans' personal financial data while bypassing the normal protections for Americans' privacy."

Internal records, including TRAC meeting minutes and copies of 140 subpoenas from the Arizona attorney general, were obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. They show that any authorized law-enforcement agency can query the data without a warrant to examine the transactions of people inside the U.S. for evidence of money laundering and other crimes. One slideshow prepared by a TRAC investigator showed how the program's data could be used to scan for categories such as "Middle Eastern/Arabic names" in bulk transaction records.

Department of Justice: A complaint was unsealed this morning in federal court in Brooklyn charging Anatoly Legkodymov, a Russian national and senior executive of Bitzlato Ltd. (Bitzlato), a Hong Kong-registered cryptocurrency exchange, with conducting a money transmitting business that transported and transmitted illicit funds and that failed to meet U.S. regulatory safeguards, including anti-money laundering requirements. Legkodymov was arrested last night in Miami and is scheduled to be arraigned this afternoon in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. French authorities and the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) are taking concurrent enforcement actions.

According to court documents, Legkodymov is a senior executive and the majority shareholder of Bitzlato Ltd. (Bitzlato), a Hong Kong-registered cryptocurrency exchange that operates globally. Bitzlato has marketed itself as requiring minimal identification from its users, specifying that "neither selfies nor passports [are] required." On occasions when Bitzlato did direct users to submit identifying information, it repeatedly allowed them to provide information belonging to "straw man" registrants. As a result of these deficient know-your-customer (KYC) procedures, Bitzlato allegedly became a haven for criminal proceeds and funds intended for use in criminal activity. Bitzlato's largest counterparty in cryptocurrency transactions was Hydra Market, an anonymous, illicit online marketplace for narcotics, stolen financial information, fraudulent identification documents, and money laundering services that was the largest and longest running darknet market in the world. Hydra Market users exchanged more than $700 million in cryptocurrency with Bitzlato, either directly or through intermediaries, until Hydra Market was shuttered by U.S. and German law enforcement in April 2022. Bitzlato also received more than $15 million in ransomware proceeds.

Getty Images is suing Stability AI, creators of popular AI art tool Stable Diffusion, over alleged copyright violation. From a report: In a press statement shared with The Verge, the stock photo company said it believes that Stability AI "unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright" to train its software and that Getty Images has "commenced legal proceedings in the High Court of Justice in London" against the firm. Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge in an interview that the company has issued Stability AI with a "letter before action" -- a formal notification of impending litigation in the UK.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: GitHub has taken down a popular Pirate Bay proxy information portal from Github.io. The developer platform took action in response to a takedown request sent by City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU). The takedown notice concludes that the site, which did not link to any infringing content directly, is illegal. [...] "This site is in breach of UK law, namely Copyright, Design & Patents Act 1988, Offences under the Fraud Act 2006 and Conspiracy to Defraud," PIPCU writes. "Suspension of the domain(s) is intended to prevent further crime. Where possible we request that domain suspension(s) are made within 48 hours of receipt of this Alert," the notice adds. This takedown request was honored by GitHub, meaning that people who try to access the domain now get a 404 error instead.

While GitHub's swift response is understandable, it's worth pointing out how these blocking efforts are evolving and expanding, far beyond blocking the original Pirate Bay site. The Proxy Bay doesn't link to infringing content directly. The site links to other proxy sites which serve up the Pirate Bay homepage. From there, users may search for or browse torrent links that, once loaded, can download infringing content. Does this mean that simply linking to The Pirate Bay can be considered a crime in itself? If that's the case, other sites such as Wikipedia and Bing are in trouble too.

A more reasonable middle ground would be to consider the intent of a site. The Proxy Bay was launched to facilitate access to The Pirate Bay, which makes court orders less effective. In 2015 UK ISPs began blocking proxy and proxy indexing sites, so that explains why thepirateproxybay.com and others are regularly blocked. Whether this constitutes criminal activity is ultimately for the court to decide, not the police. In this regard, it's worth noting that City of London Police previously arrested the alleged operator of a range of torrent site proxies. The then 20-year-old defendant, who also developed censorship circumvention tool Immunicity, was threatened with a hefty prison sentence but the court disagreed and dismissed the case.

Bloomberg reports: After five people were killed in a 2020 arson in Colorado, law enforcement officials failed to turn up any leads through their initial investigative techniques. So they served a warrant to Google for anyone who had searched for the address of the fire, according to a court motion.

Google eventually complied with the data request, helping law enforcement find suspects. Three teenagers who had searched the address were charged with murder. But the technique also drew a challenge from defense lawyers, who are calling reverse keyword search warrants "a digital dragnet of immense proportions." It's the first case to challenge the constitutionality of the method, the attorneys say.

Defense lawyers filed a motion Wednesday to challenge the judge's decision to use evidence from the warrant to charge their client, Gavin Seymour. They're asking the Colorado Supreme Court to review the matter, after the judge earlier denied their motion to suppress the evidence. The keyword search warrant "is profoundly different from traditional search warrants seeking data belonging to a suspect," the defense argued in the court filing. "Instead, the process operates in reverse — search everyone first, and identify suspects later."
One defendant's lawyer points out Google must review the activities of billions of innocent searchers to respond to keyword search warrants, arguing this has "tremendous implications...for everyone in the country who uses Google to run searches."