An anonymous reader shares a report: Threads, Meta's new social app, is drawing users at an astounding pace, amassing 10 million signups in just seven hours, according to co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. But the highly-anticipated new service, which requires an Instagram account for onboarding, features an intriguing stipulation: Deleting a Threads account terminates the linked Instagram account. In a 'Supplemental Privacy Policy,' Meta explains: "You may deactivate your Threads profile at any time, but your Threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account."
Instagram's Head of Content posted on Threads:

"To clarify, you can deactivate your Threads account, which hides your Threads profile and content, you can set your profile to private, and you can delete individual threads posts - all without deleting your Instagram account. Threads is powered by Instagram, so right now it's just one account, but we're looking into a way to delete your Threads account separately."

Instagram's new Twitter competitor called Threads launched today on the web, providing an early look at what to expect from the app that will launch on iOS and Android tomorrow. You can view the web interface here. The Verge reports: Meta briefly made Threads available on the web before pulling profiles offline a few hours later. The Verge was able to access Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's first thread (is that what we call them?!) using the web app, and many other brands and creators including Netflix, Gary Vee, and Instagram.

The web interface is fairly basic right now for viewing threads, with options to like, comment, repost, and share -- all prompting you to download the mobile app for the time being. If you're in an unsupported country, like markets in the EU, then you'll only be able to view threads right now. Much like Twitter, you can view an account's main posts in one section and the full reply history in another.

Fediverse integration won't be available immediately at the launch of Threads, but it's clear Instagram is looking to add this soon. Profiles include an Instagram username and link, with a threads.net label that includes the following description: "Soon, you'll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, like @zuck@threads.net."

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked key Biden administration agencies and officials from meeting and communicating with social media companies about "protected speech," in an extraordinary preliminary injunction in an ongoing case that could have profound effects on the First Amendment. From a report: The injunction came in response to a lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, who allege that government officials went too far in their efforts to encourage social media companies to address posts that they worried could contribute to vaccine hesitancy during the pandemic or upend elections.

The Trump-appointed judge's move could undo years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies. For more than a decade, the federal government has attempted to work with social media companies to address a wide range of criminal activity, including child sexual abuse images and terrorism. Over the last five years, coordination and communication between government officials and the companies increased as the federal government responded to rising election interference and voter suppression efforts after revelations that Russian actors had sowed disinformation on U.S. social sites during the 2016 election. Public health officials also frequently communicated with the companies during the coronavirus pandemic, as falsehoods about the virus and vaccines spread on social networks including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

The European Union (EU) is seeking closer cooperation with Japan in areas such as artificial intelligence to reduce reliance on China. CNBC reports: EU Commissioner Thierry Breton is meeting with the Japanese government on Monday, and artificial intelligence will be "very high" on his agenda, he said in a video posted on Twitter on Sunday. "I will engage with [the] Japanese government ... on how we can organize our digital space, including AI based on our shared value," Breton said.

Breton also said there will be an EU-Japan Digital Partnership council, to discuss areas including quantum and high-performance computing. The EU held a similar council with South Korea last week, in which the two sides agreed to cooperate on technologies such as AI and cybersecurity. Partnerships with key Asian countries with strong technology sectors come as the EU looks to "de-risk" from China -- a different approach from that of the U.S., which has sought to decouple its economy from Beijing. Part of that EU strategy involves deepening the relationship with allied countries around technology.

Breton told Reuters on Monday that the bloc and Japan will cooperate in the area of semiconductors. Japan is a key country in the semiconductor supply chain, and Tokyo has been looking to strengthen its domestic industry. Last week, a fund backed by the Japanese government proposed to buy domestic chipmaking firm JSR for around 903.9 billion yen ($6.3 billion). The EU has also been looking to strengthen its own semiconductor industry across the bloc.

Gfycat, a place where users uploaded, created, and distributed GIFs of all sorts, is shutting down as of Sept. 1, according to a message on its homepage. From a report: Users of the Snap-owned service are asked to "Please save or delete your Gfycat content." "After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com." Gfycat rose as a service during a period where, like Imgur, it was easier to use than any native tools provided by content sites like Facebook or Reddit.

As CEO and co-founcer Richard Rabbat told TechCrunch in 2016, after raising $10 million from investors, GIFs were "hard to make, slow to upload, and when you shared them, the quality wasn't very good." Gfycat created looped, linked Webm videos that, while compressed, retained an HD quality to them. They were easier to share than actual GIF-format files, and offered an API for other sites to tap in. "I see Gfycat as the ultimate platform for all short-form content, the way that YouTube is the platform for longer videos and Twitter is the platform for text-based news and media discussions," VC funder Ernestine Fu told TechCrunch in 2016, long before TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Elon Musk's Twitter ownership came to pass.

Mark Zuckerberg in late 2021 had a question for those working on Meta Platforms' strategy for its virtual-reality headset: If Apple can sell iPhones in China, and Tesla can sell cars, why can't we sell our devices there? From a report: The question, posed on a video call, led to a push by Meta to restart its China business by selling its Quest headsets in the country, according to a person familiar with the matter, more than a decade after Facebook was blocked there. The company held discussions with several Chinese tech companies and has made progress with videogame powerhouse Tencent, people familiar with the matter said. But the effort faces challenges, in part because Chinese executives worry that Zuckerberg isn't seen as friendly to China, according to people familiar with the matter.

In recent years the Meta founder has accused China of stealing technology and taken aim at ByteDance, the Chinese owner of video-sharing platform TikTok. That has undermined a charm offensive Zuckerberg undertook in Beijing in 2016 and bolstered negative views of the entrepreneur in Beijing, the people said. Officials' perceptions of Zuckerberg could add uncertainty should Meta and its partner seek licenses and approvals for their products and services in China, some of the people said. Meta's refusal to comply with Beijing's censorship rules led to its being blocked in 2009, officials have said. Both Facebook and Twitter were cut off that year after unrest in China's Xinjiang region, with state media saying social media was used to stir riots.

Futurism reports: G/O Media, a major online media company that runs publications including Gizmodo, Kotaku, Quartz, Jezebel, [the Onion], and Deadspin, has announced that it will begin a "modest test" of AI content on its sites... In an email to staff, G/O Media editorial director Merrill Brown argued that the news shouldn't come as a surprise since "everyone in the media business" has been considering AI.

The trial will include "producing just a handful of stories for most of our sites that are basically built around lists and data," Brown wrote. "These features aren't replacing work currently being done by writers and editors, and we hope that over time if we get these forms of content right and produced at scale, AI will, via search and promotion, help us grow our audience..."

Unions representing G/O Media and The Onion staff issued a statement, writing that "we are appalled by this news. The hard work of journalists cannot be replaced by unreliable AI programs notorious for creating falsehoods and plagiarizing the work of real writers." Gizmodo and Kotaku staff, in particular, were outraged at the news. "AI content will not replace my work — but it will devalue it, place undue burden on editors, destroy the credibility of my outlet, and further frustrate our audience," Gizmodo journalist Lin Codega tweeted in response to the news. "AI in any form, only undermines our mission, demoralizes our reporters, and degrades our audience's trust."

"The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope launched at 11:12 a.m. ET Saturday," reports CNN, "aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

CNN is calling it "a mission designed to unravel some of the greatest mysteries of the universe." The 1.2-meter-diameter (4-foot-diameter) telescope has set off on a monthlong journey to its orbital destination of the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, which is nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) away from Earth and also home to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope... After arriving at orbit, Euclid will spend two months testing and calibrating its instruments — a visible light camera and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer — before surveying one-third of the sky for the next six years. Euclid's primary goal is to observe the "dark side" of the universe, including dark matter and dark energy. While dark matter has never actually been detected, it is believed to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe. Meanwhile, dark energy is a mysterious force thought to play a role in the accelerating expansion of the universe.

In the 1920s, astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe has been expanding since its birth 13.8 billion years ago. But research that began in the 1990s has shown that something sparked an acceleration of the universe's expansion about 6 billion years ago, and the cause remains a mystery. Unlocking the true nature of dark energy and dark matter could help astronomers understand what the universe is made of, how its expansion has changed over time, and if there is more to understanding gravity than meets the eye... Euclid is designed to create the largest and most accurate three-dimensional map of the universe, observing billions of galaxies that stretch 10 billion light-years away to reveal how matter may have been stretched and pulled apart by dark energy over time. These observations will effectively allow Euclid to see how the universe has evolved over the past 10 billion years...

The telescope's image quality will be four times sharper than those of ground-based sky surveys. Euclid's wide perspective can also record data from a part of the sky 100 times bigger than what Webb's camera can capture. During its observations, the telescope will create a catalog of 1.5 billion galaxies and the stars within them, creating a treasure trove of data for astronomers that includes each galaxy's shape, mass and number of stars created per year. Euclid's ability to see in near-infrared light could also reveal previously unseen objects in our own Milky Way galaxy, such as brown dwarfs and ultra-cool stars.

In May 2027, Euclid will be joined in orbit by the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope. The two missions will overlap in their study of cosmic acceleration as they both create three-dimensional maps of the universe...Roman will study one-twentieth of the sky in infrared light, allowing for much more depth and precision. The Roman telescope will peer back to when the universe was just 2 billion years old, picking out fainter galaxies than Euclid can see.
CNN points out that "While primarily an ESA mission, the telescope includes contributions from NASA and more than 2,000 scientists across 13 European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan."

And they also note this statement from Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "With these upcoming telescopes, we will measure dark energy in different ways and with far more precision than previously achievable, opening up a new era of exploration into this mystery."

From NASA's announcement: Scientists are unsure whether the universe's accelerated expansion is caused by an additional energy component, or whether it signals that our understanding of gravity needs to be changed in some way. Astronomers will use Roman and Euclid to test both theories at the same time, and scientists expect both missions to uncover important information about the underlying workings of the universe...

Less concentrated mass, like clumps of dark matter, can create more subtle effects. By studying these smaller distortions, Roman and Euclid will each create a 3D dark matter map... Tallying up the universe's dark matter across cosmic time will help scientists better understand the push-and-pull feeding into cosmic acceleration.
SpaceX tweeted footage of the telescope's takeoff, and the successful landing of their Falcon 9's first stage on a droneship called A Shortfall of Gravitas.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Two U.S. schools have confirmed that TIAA, a nonprofit organization that provides financial services for individuals in academic fields, has been caught up in the mass-hacks targeting MOVEit file transfer tools. Middlebury College in Vermont and Trinity College in Connecticut both released security notices confirming they experienced data breaches as a result of a security incident at the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, or TIAA. According to its website, TIAA serves mire than five million active and retired employees participating at more than 15,000 institutions and manages $1.3 trillion in assets in more than 50 countries.

Both of the security notices confirm that TIAA was affected by hackers' widespread exploitation of a flaw in MOVEit Transfer, an enterprise file transfer tool developed by Progress Software. The mass-hack has so far claimed more than 160 victims, according to Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Siemens Energy. Only 12 of these victims have confirmed the number of people affected, which already adds up to more than 16 million individuals.

While TIAA notified affected schools of its security incident, the organization has yet to publicly acknowledge the incident. In response to a Twitter user questioning the organization's silence, TIAA responded saying that its offices were closed. It's not yet known how many organizations have been impacted as a result of the cyberattack on TIAA. TIAA has not yet been listed on the dark web leak site of the Russia-linked Clop ransomware gang, which has claimed responsibility for the ongoing MOVEit cyberattacks.

The website Goodreads has become an essential avenue for building readership, but the same features that help generate excitement can also backfire. The New York Times: Cecilia Rabess figured her debut novel, "Everything's Fine," would spark criticism: The story centers on a young Black woman working at Goldman Sachs who falls in love with a conservative white co-worker with bigoted views. But she didn't expect a backlash to strike six months before the book was published. In January, after a Goodreads user who had received an advanced copy posted a plot summary that went viral on Twitter, the review site was flooded with negative comments and one-star reviews, with many calling the book anti-Black and racist. Some of the comments were left by users who said they had never read the book, but objected to its premise.

"It may look like a bunch of one-star reviews on Goodreads, but these are broader campaigns of harassment," Rabess said. "People were very keen not just to attack the work, but to attack me as well." In an era when reaching readers online has become a near-existential problem for publishers, Goodreads has become an essential avenue for building an audience. As a cross between a social media platform and a review site like Yelp, the site has been a boon for publishers hoping to generate excitement for books. But the same features that get users talking about books and authors can also backfire. Reviews can be weaponized, in some cases derailing a book's publication long before its release. "It can be incredibly hurtful, and it's frustrating that people are allowed to review books this way if they haven't read them," said Roxane Gay, an author and editor who also posts reviews on Goodreads. "Worse, they're allowed to review books that haven't even been written. I have books on there being reviewed that I'm not finished with yet."

Apple has uploaded the entire first episode of its sci-fi series "Silo" to Twitter, allowing anyone there to watch the opening installment for free. Engadget reports: Silo is based on the science fiction novel Wool by American author Hugh Howey. It takes place on a post-apocalyptic version of Earth, where what remains of humanity is confined to the Silo, a 144-story underground bunker that serves as a self-sufficient underground community. The citizens are told that the world outside the Silo is perilous, but questions arise about what truly lies beyond. It's a clever premise that allows showrunner Graham Yost to explore the book's themes about truth vs. fiction and information as power. Apple has reportedly renewed the series for a second season. You can watch the full episode on Twitter here.

Damus, a decentralized social networking app backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, will be removed from the App Store due to Apple's strict payment rules. From a report: Apple had threatened to remove Damus earlier this month over the app's tips feature, claiming that it could be used by content creators to sell digital content on the platform. The tech giant has a long history of prohibiting developers from selling additional in-app content unless the transactions go through Apple, which takes a 30% cut. To avoid a ban, the team behind Damus had to tweak the app's tipping feature, which is made possible by way of Bitcoin's Lightning Network. The company previously explained in a tweet that it had to remove the tips button from posts and was only allowed to permit tips on profiles.

Rapid changes, fueled by AI, are impacting the large pockets of the internet, argues a new column. An excerpt: In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed. Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There's the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an "AI editor" expects "output of 200 to 250 articles per week." ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with "AI-generated junk."

Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don't. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and "AI is tearing Wikipedia apart." The old web is dying, and the new web struggles to be born. The web is always dying, of course; it's been dying for years, killed by apps that divert traffic from websites or algorithms that reward supposedly shortening attention spans. But in 2023, it's dying again -- and, as the litany above suggests, there's a new catalyst at play: AI.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: One of the cybercriminals behind 2020's major Twitter hack was sentenced to five years in U.S. federal prison on Friday. Joseph O'Connor (AKA "PlugwalkJoe"), a 24-year-old British citizen, previously pleaded guilty to seven charges associated with the digital attack. He was arrested in Spain in 2021 and extradited to the U.S. in April of this year. In addition to the five years of jail time, O'Connor was also sentenced to three additional years under supervised release and ordered to pay back more than $790,000 in illicitly obtained funds, according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Southern District of New York. Previously, Graham Ivan Clark, another one of the hackers involved who was 17 at the time of the attack, pleaded guilty to related charges and was sentenced to three years in prison.

With all charges combined, O'Connor faced a maximum of 77 years in prison, per a Reuters report, while prosecutors called for a seven-year sentence. Ultimately, he will likely only serve about half of his five years, after having already spent nearly 2.5 years in pre-trial custody, Judge Jed S. Rakoff said during the Friday hearing, according to TechCrunch. Along with his fellow hackers, O'Connor "used his sophisticated technological abilities for malicious purposes -- conducting a complex SIM swap attack to steal large amounts of cryptocurrency, hacking Twitter, conducting computer intrusions to take over social media accounts, and even cyberstalking two victims, including a minor victim," according to a previous statement given by prosecuting U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. [...]

An investigation by the New York State Department of Financial Services determined that the breach was made possible because Twitter "lacked adequate cybersecurity protections," according to an October 2020 report. O'Connor and co were able to gain access to the social platform's internal systems through a simple scheme of calling Twitter employees posing as the company IT department. They were able to trick four Twitter workers into providing their login credentials. The FBI launched its own investigation, which found that O'Connor and his co-conspirators had managed to transfer account ownership to unauthorized users -- sometimes themselves, and sometimes to others willing to pay for the accounts. O'Connor himself paid $10,000 to take over one specific, unnamed account, according to a Department of Justice press statement from May. In addition to the Twitter hack, O'Connor also pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $800,000 from a crypto company by SIM swapping at least three executives' phone numbers. He further admitted to blackmailing an unnamed public figure via Snapchat and swatting a 16-year-old girl.

96,000 American students took this year's [Java-based] AP Computer Science A test. And more than a third — a full 34% — missed question #4.

It asks test-takers to write two methods for the class BoxOfCandy — one that moves a Candy object to the first row (of a column), and one that finds and returns a Candy object of a specfic flavor, removing it from the box.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shares some thoughts: - "If 34% of students are not getting any points, it's a test question problem, not a student one," argued one commenter on Twitter. [Question 4 is 5-pages long.]

- Here's a stab at an Excel VBA solution to Question 4 for comparison-to-Java purposes. It's a little bit clunkier due to how VBA functions return results compared to Java, but it's still pretty concise and allows code to be easily tested and results to be easily visualized using the 2D Excel worksheet grid.

- AI-powered Bing refuses to provide the answer to the question that completely eluded 32,000+ AP CS A exam takers ("I'm sorry but I cannot provide you with the answer to that question. It is not ethical to share the answers to an exam question". [But] it does tip one off to a suggested Java solution for Q4 that can be found in A+ Computer Science's 2023 AP CS A Exam Review.

Blizzard's Battle.net online service was the target of an apparent DDoS attack, "since at least the early hours of Sunday morning," reports Engadget, "making it difficult, if not impossible, to play Diablo IV, World of Warcraft and other Blizzard titles." It was just 20 minutes ago that they tweeted that the DDOS attacks "have ended."

Engadget notes Blizzard's customer support account had tweeted at 10:24AM EST, "We continue to actively monitor an ongoing DDoS attack which is affecting latency/connections to our games." When players launched Battle.net on PC, a notification warned "We are currently experiencing a DDoS attack, which may result in high latency and disconnections for some players..."

On Reddit, some players reported they hadn't been able to play Blizzard's latest game for at least 10 to 12 hours.

Engadget predicts, "At the very least, you can bet this incident will likely renew calls for Blizzard to add an offline mode to Diablo IV."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Police forces in the UK are seeing a "record number" of false calls to 999, the UK's emergency services number, and the culprit is apparently Android. As the BBC reports, Android 12 added an easy-access feature for emergency services: just press the power button five times, and your phone will dial emergency services for you. That's apparently pretty easy to do accidentally when a phone is sitting in your pocket, or if you have a wonky power button, resulting in a surge of totally silent accidental calls to emergency dispatch.

The National Police Chiefs Council tweeted earlier this month that "Nationally, all emergency services are currently experiencing record high 999 call volumes. There's a few reasons for this, but one we think is having a significant impact is an update to Android smartphones." The BBC report says one department "received 169 silent 999 calls between 00:00 and 19:00 BST on Sunday alone." In response to these most recent complaints, Google says it's working on a fix with Android OEMs.

The funny thing is, Android 12 -- and this easy emergency call feature -- came out a year and a half ago. Thanks to the unique (uniquely bad) way that Android is rolled out, the feature is only now hitting enough people to become a national problem. Google's Pixel devices get new Android updates immediately, but everyone else can take months or years to get new versions of Android because it's up to your device manufacturer to make new, bespoke Android builds for every device they have ever released. When this landed on Pixel devices in 2021, it was immediately flagged as a problem by some people, with one Reddit post calling it "dangerous." Since then, there has been a steady stream of posts warning people about it. Until a patch comes out, Google's current recommendation is to turn the feature off. While Google developed the feature, it's up to the manufacturers to decide how and when the emergency SOS feature works. Google said in a statement: "To help these manufacturers prevent unintentional emergency calls on their devices, Android is providing them with additional guidance and resources. We anticipate device manufacturers will roll out updates to their users that address this issue shortly. Users that continue to experience this issue should switch Emergency SOS off for the next couple of days."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Grimace, an ancient McDonalds character who -- recent marketing blitz aside -- may be so unknown among younger readers they will actually need to consult a website to find out who the hell he is, has for a very long time had an extensive page up over at the unofficial McDonalds Wiki. Until this week, at least, when McDonalds paid the site's owners to temporarily replace Grimace's biography with a paid advertisement.

Let's be clear up front: the original biography, written by critic, writer and digital marketer Nathan Steinmetz, aka Humanstein, isn't the most important piece of historical information on the internet. Doing exactly what it needed to do, it served as an introduction to the character himself, before also (this was the real highlight) delving into real-life matters like Malaysian Happy Meals, records of his public appearances and a list of the people who had voiced the character and worn the purple suit. Or it did, until it started looking like this instead. At time of writing the page had been completely hijacked, Nathan's research wiped and replaced with reminders that people can go buy a Grimace meal at McDonalds and play a video game based on the character. The wiki's changelog says the swap is temporary, running "for the length of this [advertising] campaign." [...]

According to a recently discovered patent application, Mastercard plans to develop software optimized for bitcoin and blockchain transactions. The second-largest payment-processing corporation also aims to facilitate crypto-based transactions by reducing connections between virtual asset service providers. Crypto News reports: The trademark application is a fascinating window into Mastercard's plans for the future of digital currency. Details have been revealed about creating a downloadable application programming interface (API) designed to verify transactions inside blockchain networks and ease the handling or trading of cryptocurrency. By standardizing this API software, communication between VASPs may be streamlined and crypto transactions easier. Mastercard wants to set up a platform for financial institutions to exchange customer information to verify compliance. This new step is significant for Mastercard's fast-growing presence in the cryptocurrency sector. The corporation announced its intention to offer a limited number of cryptocurrencies on its network in February 2021.

Trial lawyer Kyle Roche has led an interesting life, according to the New York Times. He once earned $100 million selling bitcoin. He helped win a case against Craig Wright (who claims to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto) through his law firm Roche Freedman. And Roche also founded a startup that lets people bet on the outcome of (civil) lawsuits, "to make access to justice more affordable."

But something very bad for his career happened in January of 2022 when two businessmen flew Roche from Miami to the U.K. to discuss an investment. When he woke up the next morning, Roche said, he felt groggy... The brain fog was odd because he didn't think he'd had all that much to drink. As he flew back to Miami a few days later, Roche couldn't shake the feeling that something was amiss.

Months passed. Then, one day last summer, Roche's world detonated. A website called Crypto Leaks posted two dozen videos of him that had been secretly recorded during his meetings with Villavicencio and Ager-Hanssen. The videos portrayed Roche and his law firm, Roche Freedman, as being in the pocket of one of their crypto clients [Ava Labs]... In other clips, Roche made it sound like his sole concern, even when representing other clients, was to promote Ava Labs' interests...

One after another, companies that Roche Freedman had sued filed motions to disqualify the firm from their cases. In October, the first of those motions succeeded: A federal judge in New York tossed Roche Freedman from a case it had filed against Tether, the operator of the world's most used "stablecoin." Within days, Roche was forced to resign from the law firm he had founded. With his career in tatters, he said, he enrolled in ethics classes and began to see a therapist.
Roche calls the recorded remarks baseless bluster to impress a prospective investor (and alleges in court there are signs of deep fake alterations). While Roche "was felled by his own loose lips and his overly cozy relationship with a client," the Times reports "he also was the victim of an elaborate international setup." On April 3, 2020, Roche Freedman filed lawsuits seeking class-action status against seven issuers of digital coins, alleging they had pumped what amounted to unregistered securities with false statements and then dumped them, leaving retail investors holding the bag... Those suits were just an opening salvo: Sixteen months later, Roche filed his biggest securities fraud case yet. It alleged that a British entrepreneur, Dominic Williams, and entities he controlled had swindled investors out of billions of dollars by aggressively promoting, and then dumping, a digital coin tied to a grandiose plan to revolutionize computing. Williams had boldly proclaimed that his Internet Computer blockchain — a decentralized network of computers powered by a digital token called ICP — would supplant the big cloud services offered by Amazon and Microsoft and become humanity's primary computing platform. But after an initial surge that briefly made it one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies, ICP had plummeted 92% — a collapse that Roche's lawsuit attributed to "massive" selling by Williams and other insiders. (Williams denied the allegations.)
The Times reports that Roche's prospective investor Ager-Hanssen, "in addition to running his venture capital firm, has long had a sideline digging up dirt on behalf of wealthy clients entangled in business disputes in Britain and Scandinavia. On multiple occasions, he has secretly recorded his targets. For example, in a 2014 interview, he recounted how he had snared the adversary of a Swedish financier with a hidden microphone and boasted that he employed former intelligence officers from the CIA, MI6 and Mossad..." Roche believes them because he thinks he knows who hired Ager-Hanssen: Williams, the British entrepreneur who was the target of Roche Freedman's biggest pump-and-dump lawsuit... On May 12, 2022, Williams wrote on Twitter that he was "coming for" his critics. That was the same day the cryptoleaks.info domain name was registered. That was the same day the cryptoleaks.info domain name was registered. Then, on June 9, 2022, the Crypto Leaks website went live. Billing itself as the defender of "the honest crypto community," it posted two reports that aligned with Williams' interests...

The first espoused a complicated theory about the ICP token crash that Williams had previously floated on Twitter. The second attacked the Times for an article it had published about the crash. Williams tweeted a link to that Crypto Leaks report, calling it "Gobsmacking." The Dfinity Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit that Williams created to oversee his blockchain, has since sued the Times for defamation in New York. The Times is seeking to dismiss the suit. The videos of Roche were the crux of Crypto Leaks' third exposé. After they were published, Williams and Dfinity filed a motion to disqualify Roche Freedman as plaintiffs' counsel in the pump-and-dump lawsuit, saying Roche's comments demonstrated "a disregard for the integrity of the judicial system...."

Last month, the judge overseeing the pump-and-dump case granted Williams' motion and disqualified Freedman Normand Friedland as plaintiffs' counsel.