Policy – Page 7

Apple pulls end-to-end encryption in UK, spurning backdoors for gov’t spying

Apple, data privacy, data protection, Encryption, end to end encryption, Online Privacy, Policy, united kingdom / Kelly Newman / February 23, 2025

“We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy,” Apple said. “Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before.”

For UK Apple users, some data can still be encrypted. iCloud Keychain and Health, iMessage, and FaceTime will remain end-to-end encrypted by default. But other iCloud services will not be encrypted, effective immediately, including iCloud Backup, iCloud Drive, Photos, Notes, Reminders, Safari Bookmarks, Siri Shortcuts, Voice memos, Wallet passes, and Freeform.

In the future, Apple hopes to restore data protections in the UK, but the company refuses to ever build a backdoor for government officials.

“Apple remains committed to offering our users the highest level of security for their personal data and are hopeful that we will be able to do so in the future in the United Kingdom,” Apple said. “As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services, and we never will.”

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SEC’s “scorched-earth” lawsuit against Coinbase to be dropped, company says

coinbase, Cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency exchange, Donald Trump, Policy, SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission / Shannon Garcia / February 23, 2025

On Friday, a Coinbase executive declared the “war against crypto” over—”at least as it applies to Coinbase.”

According to Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) plans to drop its lawsuit against the largest US cryptocurrency exchange as the agency shifts to embrace Donald Trump’s new approach to regulating cryptocurrency in the US.

The SEC sued Coinbase in 2023, accusing Coinbase of “operating its crypto asset trading platform as an unregistered national securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency” and “failing to register the offer and sale of its crypto asset staking-as-a-service program.”

“Since at least 2019, Coinbase has made billions of dollars unlawfully facilitating the buying and selling of crypto asset securities,” the SEC alleged.

At that time, the SEC claimed that Coinbase’s supposedly dodgy operations were depriving investors of “significant protections, including inspection by the SEC, recordkeeping requirements, and safeguards against conflicts of interest, among others.” The litigation was intended to protect Coinbase customers, the SEC said, by holding Coinbase to the same standards as any service acting as an exchange, broker, or clearing agency.

Former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, long considered an adversary in the crypto industry, had warned that Coinbase “deliberately” flouted rules to cheat investors out of protections for financial gain. That left customers exposed to risks, Gensler claimed, and allowed for insider trading that resulted in a settlement.

“You simply can’t ignore the rules because you don’t like them or because you’d prefer different ones: the consequences for the investing public are far too great,” Gensler said.

SEC’s “scorched-earth” lawsuit against Coinbase to be dropped, company says Read More »

Under new bill, Bigfoot could become California’s “official cryptid”

bigfoot, cryptids, Policy / Kelly Newman / February 22, 2025

You might suspect that a one-line bill about Bigfoot that bears the number “666” is a joke, but AB-666 is apparently a serious offering from California Assemblymember Chris Rogers. Rogers represents a California district known for its Bigfoot sightings (or “sightings,” depending on your persuasion—many of these have been faked), and he wants to make Bigfoot the “official cryptid” of the state.

His bill notes that California already has many official symbols, including the golden poppy (official flower), the California redwood (official tree), the word “Eureka” (official motto), the red-legged frog (official amphibian), the grizzly bear (official animal), swing dancing (official dance), and the saber-toothed cat (official fossil). The state has so many of these that there are separate categories for freshwater fish (golden trout) and marine fish (garibaldi). So why not, Rogers wants to know, “designate Bigfoot as the official state cryptid”?

That’s… pretty much the bill, which was introduced this week and already has Bigfoot advocates excited. SFGate talked to Matt Moneymaker, who it describes as “a longtime Bigfoot researcher and former star of the Animal Planet series Finding Bigfoot,” about the bill. Moneymaker loves it, noting that he has personally “had a face-to-face encounter one time, after which I was absolutely sure they existed because I had one about 20 feet in front of me, growling at me.”

Rogers represents California Assembly District 2, a sprawling expanse of Northern California that includes the town of Willow Grove, epicenter of the early Bigfoot sightings back in the 1950s. Today, the small community boasts the Bigfoot Museum, the Bigfoot Motel, and the Bigfoot Steakhouse—to say nothing of Bigfoot’s Barbershop, Bigfoot Equipment & Repair, and, of course, the Bigfoot Cannabis Company. The bill seems like an easy way to goose interest in Bigfoot and to reap the tourist dollars that come from that interest.

This is not to deny the underlying reality of a Bigfoot-like creature (though you can indeed count me among the extremely, extremely skeptical—surely most of these sightings are of bears). Moneymaker runs the Bigfoot Field Researchers’ Organization, which tracks sightings across the US. The most recent one I could find on the site was report 77,879 (!), which came from rural Buchanan County, Virginia, on November 10, 2024.

Under new bill, Bigfoot could become California’s “official cryptid” Read More »

Elon Musk to “fix” Community Notes after they contradict Trump

community notes, disinformation, Donald Trump, elon musk, fact checking, misinformation, Policy, Twitter, X / Mike M. / February 22, 2025

Elon Musk apparently no longer believes that crowdsourcing fact-checking through Community Notes can never be manipulated and is, thus, the best way to correct bad posts on his social media platform X.

Community Notes are supposed to be added to posts to limit misinformation spread after a broad consensus is reached among X users with diverse viewpoints on what corrections are needed. But Musk now claims a “fix” is needed to prevent supposedly outside influencers from allegedly gaming the system.

“Unfortunately, @CommunityNotes is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media,” Musk wrote on X. “Working to fix this.”

Musk’s announcement came after Community Notes were added to X posts discussing a poll generating favorable ratings for Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That poll was conducted by a private Ukrainian company in partnership with a state university whose supervisory board was appointed by the Ukrainian government, creating what Musk seems to view as a conflict of interest.

Although other independent polling recently documented a similar increase in Zelenskyy’s approval rating, NBC News reported, the specific poll cited in X notes contradicted Donald Trump’s claim that Zelenskyy is unpopular, and Musk seemed to expect X notes should instead be providing context to defend Trump’s viewpoint. Musk even suggested that by pointing to the supposedly government-linked poll in Community Notes, X users were spreading misinformation.

“It should be utterly obvious that a Zelensky[y]-controlled poll about his OWN approval is not credible!!” Musk wrote on X.

Musk’s attack on Community Notes is somewhat surprising. Although he has always maintained that Community Notes aren’t “perfect,” he has defended Community Notes through multiple European Union probes challenging their effectiveness and declared that the goal of the crowdsourcing effort was to make X “by far the best source of truth on Earth.” At CES 2025, X CEO Linda Yaccarino bragged that Community Notes are “good for the world.”

Yaccarino invited audience members to “think about it as this global collective consciousness keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time,” but just one month later, Musk is suddenly casting doubts on that characterization while the European Union continues to probe X.

Perhaps most significantly, Musk previously insisted as recently as last year that Community Notes could not be manipulated, even by Musk. He strongly disputed a 2024 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that claimed that toxic X users were downranking accurate notes that they personally disagreed with, claiming any attempt at gaming Community Notes would stick out like a “neon sore thumb.”

Elon Musk to “fix” Community Notes after they contradict Trump Read More »

FTC investigates “tech censorship,” says it’s un-American and may be illegal

ftc, Policy / Mike M. / February 21, 2025

The Federal Trade Commission today announced a public inquiry into alleged censorship online, saying it wants “to better understand how technology platforms deny or degrade users’ access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations, and how this conduct may have violated the law.”

“Tech firms should not be bullying their users,” said FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who was chosen by President Trump to lead the commission. “This inquiry will help the FTC better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds.”

The FTC announcement said that “censorship by technology platforms is not just un-American, it is potentially illegal.” Tech platforms’ actions “may harm consumers, affect competition, may have resulted from a lack of competition, or may have been the product of anti-competitive conduct,” the FTC said.

The Chamber of Progress, a lobby group representing tech firms, issued a press release titled, “FTC Chair Rides MAGA ‘Tech Censorship’ Hobby Horse.”

“Republicans have spent nearly a decade campaigning against perceived social media ‘censorship’ by attempting to dismantle platforms’ ability to moderate content, despite well-established Supreme Court precedent,” the group said. “Accusations of ‘tech censorship’ also ignore the fact that conservative publishers and commentators receive broader engagement than liberal voices.”

Last year, the Supreme Court found that a Texas state law prohibiting large social media companies from moderating posts based on a user’s “viewpoint” is unlikely to withstand First Amendment scrutiny. The Supreme Court majority opinion said the court “has many times held, in many contexts, that it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression—to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences. That principle works for social-media platforms as it does for others.”

FTC investigates “tech censorship,” says it’s un-American and may be illegal Read More »

ISP sued by record labels agrees to identify 100 users accused of piracy

altice, copyright infringement, Policy / Kelly Newman / February 21, 2025

Cable company Altice agreed to give Warner and other record labels the names and contact information of 100 broadband subscribers who were accused of pirating songs.

The subscribers “were the subject of RIAA or third party copyright notices,” said a court order that approved the agreement between Altice and the plaintiff record companies. Altice is notifying each subscriber “of Altice’s intent to disclose their name and contact information to Plaintiffs pursuant to this Order,” and telling the notified subscribers that they have 30 days to seek relief from the court.

If subscribers do not object within a month, Altice must disclose the subscribers’ names, phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses. The judge’s order was issued on February 12 and reported yesterday by TorrentFreak.

The names and contact information will be classified as “highly confidential—attorneys’ eyes only.” A separate order issued in April 2024 said that documents produced in discovery “shall be used by the Parties only in the litigation of this Action and shall not be used for any other purpose.”

Altice, which operates the Optimum brand, was sued in December 2023 in US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The music publishers’ complaint alleges that Altice “knowingly contributed to, and reaped substantial profits from, massive copyright infringement committed by thousands of its subscribers.”

The lawsuit said plaintiffs sent over 70,000 infringement notices to Altice from February 2020 through November 2023. At least a few subscribers were allegedly hit with hundreds of notices. The lawsuit gave three examples of IP addresses that were cited in 502, 781, and 926 infringement notices, respectively.

Altice failed to terminate repeat infringers whose IP addresses were flagged in these copyright notices, the lawsuit said. “Those notices advised Altice of its subscribers’ blatant and systematic use of Altice’s Internet service to illegally download, copy, and distribute Plaintiffs’ copyrighted music through BitTorrent and other online file-sharing services. Rather than working with Plaintiffs to curb this massive infringement, Altice did nothing, choosing to prioritize its own profits over its legal obligations,” the plaintiffs alleged.

ISPs face numerous lawsuits

This is one of numerous copyright lawsuits filed against broadband providers, and it’s not the first time an ISP handed names of subscribers to the plaintiffs. We have previously written articles about film studios trying to force Reddit to identify users who admitted torrenting in discussion forums. Reddit was able to avoid providing information in one case in part because the film studios already obtained identifying details for 118 subscribers directly from Grande, the ISP they had sued.

ISP sued by record labels agrees to identify 100 users accused of piracy Read More »

SpaceX engineers brought on at FAA after probationary employees were fired

Policy, Space / Mike M. / February 21, 2025

Kiernan is currently a lead software engineer at SpaceX, according to his LinkedIn page. Before joining SpaceX in May 2020, he worked at Wayfair and is a 2017 Dartmouth graduate.

Smeal is a software engineer who has worked at SpaceX since September 2021, according to his LinkedIn. He graduated from Saint Vincent College in 2018.

Glantz is a software engineer who has worked at SpaceX since May 2024 and worked as an engineering analyst at Goldman Sachs from 2019 to 2021, according to his LinkedIn, and graduated from the University of Michigan in 2019.

Malaska, Kiernan, Smeal, and Glantz did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The FAA also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In his post on X, Duffy wrote, “Because I know the media (and Hillary Clinton) will claim Elon’s team is getting special access, let me make clear that the @FAANews regularly gives tours of the command center to both media and companies.”

But on Wednesday, FAA acting administrator Chris Rocheleau wrote in an email to FAA staff, viewed by WIRED, that DOGE and the teams of special government employees deployed in federal agencies were “top-of-mind,” before noting that the agency had “recently welcomed” a team of special government employees who had already toured some FAA facilities. “We are asking for their help to engineer solutions while we keep the airspace open and safe,” he wrote, adding that the new employees had already visited the FAA Command Center and Potomac TRACON, a facility that controls the airspace around and provides air traffic control services to airports in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia areas.

In a Department of Transportation all-hands meeting late last week, Duffy responded to a question about DOGE’s role in national airspace matters, and without explicitly mentioning the new employees, suggested help was needed on reforming Notice to Air Mission (NOTAM) alerts, a critical system that distributes real-time data and warnings to pilots but which has had significant outages, one as recently as this month. “If I can get ideas from really smart engineers on how we can fix it, I’m going to take those ideas,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by WIRED. “Great engineers” might also work on airspace issues, he said.

SpaceX engineers brought on at FAA after probationary employees were fired Read More »

Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn’t illegal without proof of seeding

AI copyright, AI training, copyright, leeching, Meta, online piracy, Policy, seeding, torrenting / DJ Henderson / February 21, 2025

Just because Meta admitted to torrenting a dataset of pirated books for AI training purposes, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Meta seeded the file after downloading it, the social media company claimed in a court filing this week.

Evidence instead shows that Meta “took precautions not to ‘seed’ any downloaded files,” Meta’s filing said. Seeding refers to sharing a torrented file after the download completes, and because there’s allegedly no proof of such “seeding,” Meta insisted that authors cannot prove Meta shared the pirated books with anyone during the torrenting process.

Whether or not Meta actually seeded the pirated books could make a difference in a copyright lawsuit from book authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Authors had previously alleged that Meta unlawfully copied and distributed their works through AI outputs—an increasingly common complaint that so far has barely been litigated. But Meta’s admission to torrenting appears to add a more straightforward claim of unlawful distribution of copyrighted works through illegal torrenting, which has long been considered established case-law.

Authors have alleged that “Meta deliberately engaged in one of the largest data piracy campaigns in history to acquire text data for its LLM training datasets, torrenting and sharing dozens of terabytes of pirated data that altogether contain many millions of copyrighted works.” Separate from their copyright infringement claims opposing Meta’s AI training on pirated copies of their books, authors alleged that Meta torrenting the dataset was “independently illegal” under California’s Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA), which allegedly “prevents the unauthorized taking of data, including copyrighted works.”

Meta, however, is hoping to convince the court that torrenting is not in and of itself illegal, but is, rather, a “widely-used protocol to download large files.” According to Meta, the decision to download the pirated books dataset from pirate libraries like LibGen and Z-Library was simply a move to access “data from a ‘well-known online repository’ that was publicly available via torrents.”

Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn’t illegal without proof of seeding Read More »

Trump order declares independent US agencies aren’t independent anymore

independent agencies, Policy, Trump / Mike M. / February 20, 2025

The White House fact sheet said the goal of this provision is to ensure that the president and attorney general “interpret the law for the executive branch, instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations.”

John Bergmayer, legal director of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, said Trump’s order is based on a “unitary executive” theory that “has made its way from the fringes of academia to the halls of power.”

“In this latest Executive Order, the Trump regime purports to seize for itself the power Congress delegated to independent regulatory agencies, and as written, declares the White House’s interpretation of the law as ‘authoritative,’ with no mention of the courts,” Bergmayer said. “Of course, the president is not, and never has been, the final arbiter of what is lawful. Lawyers working for the government owe their allegiance to the American people, not to President Donald J. Trump.”

Trump’s OMB director, Russell Vought, told Tucker Carlson in a recent interview that “there are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such—SEC or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soup—but that is not something that the Constitution understands. So there may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them, but as an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out.”

Extending Trump’s grip

Although the president nominates commissioners and appoints chairs at agencies like the FCC, independent agencies are supposed to make their own decisions. A 2023 report by the Congressional Research Service said an independent agency is “a freestanding executive branch organization that is not part of any department or other agency,” and which has “greater autonomy from the President’s leadership and insulation from partisan politics than is typical of executive branch agencies.”

Other independent agencies include the National Labor Relations Board and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the report said. Laws approved by Congress specify the authority of independent agencies along with the agencies’ “goals, principles, missions, and mandates,” the report said.

Trump order declares independent US agencies aren’t independent anymore Read More »

AI making up cases can get lawyers fired, scandalized law firm warns

AI, Artificial Intelligence, chatbot, chatgpt, fake AI cases, generative ai, Policy / 9u50fv / February 20, 2025

Morgan & Morgan—which bills itself as “America’s largest injury law firm” that fights “for the people”—learned the hard way this month that even one lawyer blindly citing AI-hallucinated case law can risk sullying the reputation of an entire nationwide firm.

In a letter shared in a court filing, Morgan & Morgan’s chief transformation officer, Yath Ithayakumar, warned the firms’ more than 1,000 attorneys that citing fake AI-generated cases in court filings could be cause for disciplinary action, including “termination.”

“This is a serious issue,” Ithayakumar wrote. “The integrity of your legal work and reputation depend on it.”

Morgan & Morgan’s AI troubles were sparked in a lawsuit claiming that Walmart was involved in designing a supposedly defective hoverboard toy that allegedly caused a family’s house fire. Despite being an experienced litigator, Rudwin Ayala, the firm’s lead attorney on the case, cited eight cases in a court filing that Walmart’s lawyers could not find anywhere except on ChatGPT.

These “cited cases seemingly do not exist anywhere other than in the world of Artificial Intelligence,” Walmart’s lawyers said, urging the court to consider sanctions.

So far, the court has not ruled on possible sanctions. But Ayala was immediately dropped from the case and was replaced by his direct supervisor, T. Michael Morgan, Esq. Expressing “great embarrassment” over Ayala’s fake citations that wasted the court’s time, Morgan struck a deal with Walmart’s attorneys to pay all fees and expenses associated with replying to the errant court filing, which Morgan told the court should serve as a “cautionary tale” for both his firm and “all firms.”

Reuters found that lawyers improperly citing AI-hallucinated cases have scrambled litigation in at least seven cases in the past two years. Some lawyers have been sanctioned, including an early case last June fining lawyers $5,000 for citing chatbot “gibberish” in filings. And in at least one case in Texas, Reuters reported, a lawyer was fined $2,000 and required to attend a course on responsible use of generative AI in legal applications. But in another high-profile incident, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, avoided sanctions after Cohen accidentally gave his own attorney three fake case citations to help his defense in his criminal tax and campaign finance litigation.

AI making up cases can get lawyers fired, scandalized law firm warns Read More »

Acer CEO says its PC prices to increase by 10 percent in response to Trump tariffs

Acer, china tariffs, Donald Trump, PCs, Policy, Tech, Windows / Beth Washington / February 19, 2025

PC-manufacturer Acer has said that it plans to raise the prices of its PCs in the US by 10 percent, a direct response to the new 10 percent import tariff on Chinese goods that the Trump administration announced earlier this month.

“We will have to adjust the end user price to reflect the tariff,” said Acer CEO Jason Chen in an interview with The Telegraph. “We think 10 percent probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It’s very straightforward.”

These price increases won’t roll out right away, according to Chen—products shipped from China before the tariffs went into effect earlier this month won’t be subject to the increased import taxes—but we can expect them to show up in PC price tags over the next few weeks.

Chen also said that Acer was considering moving more of its manufacturing outside of China as a result of the tariffs, something that Acer had done for some of its desktop PCs after Trump imposed similar tariffs on Chinese imports during his first term. Manufacturing systems in the US is also “one of the options,” according to Chen.

Acer CEO says its PC prices to increase by 10 percent in response to Trump tariffs Read More »

OpenAI board considers special voting powers to prevent Elon Musk takeover

elon musk, openai, Policy / DJ Henderson / February 19, 2025

Poison pill another option

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 and created an additional “capped profit” entity in 2019. Any profit beyond the cap is returned to the nonprofit, OpenAI says.

That would change with OpenAI’s planned shift to a for-profit public benefit corporation this year. The nonprofit arm would retain shares in the for-profit arm and “pursue charitable initiatives in sectors such as health care, education, and science.”

Before making his offer, Musk asked a federal court to block OpenAI’s conversion from nonprofit to for-profit. The Financial Times article suggests that new voting rights for the nonprofit arm could address the concerns raised by Musk about the for-profit shift.

“Special voting rights could keep power in the hands of its nonprofit arm in future and so address the Tesla chief’s criticisms that Altman and OpenAI have moved away from their original mission of creating powerful AI for the benefit of humanity,” the FT wrote.

OpenAI could also consider a poison pill or a shareholder rights plan that would let shareholders “buy up additional shares at a discount in order to fend off hostile takeovers,” the FT article said. But it’s not clear whether this is a likely option, as the article said it’s just one that “could be considered by OpenAI’s board.”

In April 2022, Twitter’s board approved a poison pill to prevent a hostile takeover after Musk offered to buy Twitter for $43 billion. But Twitter’s board changed course 10 days later when it agreed to a $44 billion deal with Musk.

OpenAI board considers special voting powers to prevent Elon Musk takeover Read More »