Privacy advocates warn internet activity could someday be used to prosecute women who sought abortions. But it's already happened, reports the Washington Post.

In a handful of cases over the years, "American prosecutors have used text messages and online research as evidence against women facing criminal charges related to the end of their pregnancies." Despite mounting concerns that the intricate web of data collected by fertility apps, tech companies and data brokers might be used to prove a violation of abortion restrictions, in practice, police and prosecutors have turned to more easily accessible data — gleaned from text messages and search history on phones and computers. These digital records of ordinary lives are sometimes turned over voluntarily or obtained with a warrant, and have provided a gold mine for law enforcement. "The reality is, we do absolutely everything on our phones these days," said Emma Roth, a staff attorney at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. "There are many, many ways in which law enforcement can find out about somebody's journey to seek an abortion through digital surveillance...."

Women have been punished for terminating pregnancy for years. Between 2000 and 2021, more than 60 cases in the United States involved someone being investigated, arrested or charged for allegedly ending their own pregnancy or assisting someone else, according to an analysis by If/When/How, a reproductive justice nonprofit. If/When/How estimates the number of cases may be much higher, because it is difficult to access court records in many counties throughout the country.

A number of those cases have hinged on text messages, search history and other forms of digital evidence.
In 2015 an Indiana woman received a sentence of 20 years in prison based partly on text messages she'd sent, according to the article (though that conviction was overturned).

It's provoked concern in countries around the world, and an activist group helping women travel to countries with less restrictive laws tells the Post that they now use encrypted messaging apps like Signal and VPNs to minimize records of their web searches.

The British army is "investigating an apparent hack," reports Engadget, after its official Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised Sunday: News of the breach was first reported by Web3 is Going Great . According to the blog, both accounts were simultaneously compromised to promote two different cryptocurrency scams.

Although it has since been scrubbed, the army's verified Twitter account was briefly changed to look like a page for The Possessed, a project involving a collection of 10,000 animated NFTs with a price floor of 0.58 Ethereum (approximately $1,063). During that time, the account tweeted out multiple links to a fake minting website....

Over on YouTube, the army's channel [had] been made to look like a page for Ark Invest...livestreaming videos that repurpose old footage of Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and Ark CEO Katie Wood discussing cryptocurrency. The clips feature an overlay promoting "double your money" Bitcoin and Ethereum scams. According to Web3 is Going Great, a similar scheme netted scammers $1.3 million this past May. It's unclear who is behind the attacks.

On Tuesday Brendan Carr, a commissioner on America's Federal Communications Commission,warned on Twitter that TikTok, owned by China-based company ByteDance, "doesn't just see its users dance videos: It collects search and browsing histories, keystroke patterns, biometric identifiers, draft messages and metadata, plus it has collected the text, images, and videos that are stored on a device's clipboard. Tiktok's pattern of misrepresentations coupled with its ownership by an entity beholden to the Chinese Community Party has resulted in U.S. military branches and national security agencies banning it from government devices.... The CCP has a track record longer than a CVS receipt of conducting business & industrial espionage as well as other actions contrary to U.S. national security, which is what makes it so troubling that personnel in Beijing are accessing this sensitive and personnel data.
Today CNN interviewed Carr, while also bringing viewers an update. TikTok's China-based employees accessed data on U.S. TikTok users, BuzzFeed had reported — after which TikTok announced it intends to move backup data to servers in the U.S., allowing them to eventually delete U.S. data from their servers. But days later Republican Senator Blackburn was still arguing to Bloomberg that "Americans need to know if they are on TikTok, communist China has their information."

And FCC commissioner Carr told CNN he remains suspicious too: Carr: For years TikTok has been asked directly by U.S. lawmakers, 'Is any information, any data, being accessed by personnel back in Beijing?' And rather than being forthright and saying 'Yes, and here's the extent of it and here's why we don't think it's a problem,' they've repeatedly said 'All U.S. user data is stored in the U.S.," leaving people with the impression that there's no access.... This recent bombshell reporting from BuzzFeed shows at least some of the extent to which massive amounts of data has allegedy been going back to Beijing.

And that's a problem, and not just a national security problem. But to me it looks like a violation of the terms of the app store, and that's why I wrote a letter to Google and Apple saying that they should remove TikTok and boot them out of the app store... I've left them until July 8th to give me a response, so we'll see what they say. I look forward to hearing from them. But there's precedence for this. Before when applications have taken data surreptitiously and put it in servers in China or otherwise been used for reasons other than servicing the application itself, they have booted them from the app store. And so I would hope that they would just apply the plain terms of their policy here.
When CNN points out the FCC doesn't have jurisdiction over social media, Carr notes "speaking for myself as one member" they've developed "expertise in terms of understanding how the CCP can effectively take data and infiltrate U.S. communications' networks. And he points out that the issue is also being raised by Congressional hearings and by Republican and Democrat Senators signing joint letters together, so "I'm just one piece of a broader federal effort that's looking at the very serious risks that come from TikTok." Carr: At the end of the day, it functions as sophisticated surveillance tool that is harvesting vast amounts of data on U.S. users. And I think TikTok should answer point-blank, has any CCP member obtained non-public user data or viewed it. Not to answer with a dodge, and say they've never been asked for it or never received a request. Can they say no, no CCP member has ever seen non-public U.S. user data.
Carr's appearance was followed by an appearance by TikTok's VP and head of public policy for the Americas. But this afternoon Carr said on Twitter that TikTok's response contradicted its own past statements: Today, a TikTok exec said it was "simply false" for me to say that they collect faceprints, browsing history, & keystroke patterns.

Except, I was quoting directly from TikTok's own disclosures.

TikTok's concerning pattern of misrepresentations about U.S. user data continues.

What exactly happened after El Salvador president Nayib Bukele made Bitcoin a legal tender for the country? "As Bitcoin has dropped more than 50 percent of its value this year, there have been suggestions that El Salvador's investment has pushed the country to the brink of bankruptcy," writes a Salvadoran political/human rights journalist in the New York Times.

"However, implying that the country's risk of default derives from the crypto-enthusiasm is wrong: The economic turmoil preceded and is bigger than that." The article notes that prior to their move into Bitcoin, "the Salvadoran economy was already stretched. Total debt amounted to about 90 percent of G.D.P., a large chunk of which had been accumulated by prior administrations or spurred by pandemic-related expenses."

But what are we missing with this focus on Bitcoin? Mr. Bukele has weaponized Bitcoin to whitewash his government's growing authoritarianism on the world stage. By spreading his propaganda, Bitcoin believers are promoting a product — and lining their pockets — at the expense of our rights and livelihoods.... Over the past three months, the government has used a state of emergency to imprison almost 40,000 people, often without defense. Mr. Bukele has begun to crack down on press freedom, through a gag law that prohibits reproducing messages from gangs and his government hasn't investigated the illegal use of Pegasus spyware to monitor dozens of journalists who cover El Salvador, including me, from independent news outlets between 2020 and 2021. Reporters have already fled the country, fearing reprisal for doing their jobs....

It's pretty obvious to anyone who visits any place in El Salvador other than its beaches that Mr. Bukele is not building a techno-utopia; he's building a run-of-the-mill authoritarian state in a tech disguise. Bitcoiners would do well to remember that when they cheer for Mr. Bukele, they're not ushering in the technology of the future; they're enabling a regime that's violating the human rights of its citizens. After all, the economic freedom Bitcoin promises is worth nothing to Salvadorans if it's the only freedom we can hope to have.
But even ignoring human rights issues — the Bitcoin experiment remains unpopular in El Salvador: Remittances account for more than 20 percent of El Salvador's G.D.P., because of a large diaspora mainly based in the United States. But, according to the Central Bank of El Salvador, only 1.5 percent of remittances went through digital wallets in April, which shows Salvadorans haven't gotten onboard with Bitcoin despite the promise of needed savings. And Mr. Bukele's plan for selling his Bitcoin bonds has stalled.

Just one year into Mr. Bukele's Bitcoin experiment, average Salvadorans can tell that Bitcoin isn't working for them. In May, a national poll showed that 71 percent of Salvadorans said they didn't see any benefit from the law for their family economy. Another found that about two of every 10 Salvadorans support the decision to adopt Bitcoin. Those Salvadorans haven't adopted the currency. A paper published in April by the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that "despite the legal tender status of Bitcoin and the large incentives implemented by the government, the cryptocurrency is largely not an accepted medium of exchange in El Salvador...." A December national poll showed that only about 11 percent of respondents believed the main beneficiaries of the Bitcoin law are the people, while about 80 percent believed it's either the rich, foreign investors, banks, businesspeople or the government.

"Boeing's troubled 737 MAX planes — which have twice crashed, killing 346 people — have experienced at least six mid-air emergencies and dozens of groundings in the year after an extensive probe cleared them to fly," reports Australia's public broadcaster ABC News: The incidents, pulled from U.S. government air safety databases, are among more than 60 mid-flight problems reported by pilots in the 12 months after the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recertified the plane's airworthiness in late 2020. Former employees of both Boeing and the FAA characterised the reports — which included engine shutdowns and pilots losing partial control of the plane — as serious and with the potential to end in tragedy.

In one incident in December 2021, a United Airlines pilot declared a mayday after the system controlling the pitch and altitude of the plane started malfunctioning...

The MAX's flight control system also failed on 22 separate flights, a problem which became the primary focus of the FAA's 20-month recertification effort after the two fatal crashes. More than 42 incidents involved equipment malfunctions, and on more than 40 occasions, flight crews chose to ground the affected aircraft while problems were fixed.... Some planes also had a multitude of problems. One Alaskan Airlines MAX-9 was grounded seven times over five months due to malfunctions with its navigation or communication equipment.

A Boeing spokeswoman told the ABC, "none of the reports indicate a trend".

"In fact, the in-service reliability of the 737 MAX is consistent with other commercial airplane models," the spokeswoman said. "Since November 2020, the 737 MAX has flown more than 1.5 million flight hours in more than 580,000 revenue flights. The overwhelming majority of these flights have been conducted without any incident."
Former senior Boeing manager Ed Pierson — who worked at the 737 MAX factory in Seattle between 2015 and 2018 — told ABC "There are a lot of similarities between what we're seeing in some of the reports with what happened during these two crashes."

The article also reports that America's Federal Aviation Administration "has now confirmed it did not investigate Boeing's alleged production problems after the crashes."

Later the article adds that the U.S. government "will announce a new audit examining Boeing's production oversight of the 737 MAX planes."

Slashdot reader thegarbz writes: In 2019 Maastricht University in the Netherlands was hit with a ransomware attack which locked 25,000 staff and students out of their research data. The university agreed to pay a ransom of €200,000 to unlock the encrypted data, reports German broadcaster DW. It seems that a small part of the ransom has been recovered, but with a twist.

A university official said the money will go into "a fund to help financially strapped students."

"A metallic NATO is starting to take shape," writes the senior metals columnist at Reuters, "though no-one is calling it that just yet." The Minerals Security Partnership is in theory open to all countries that are committed to "responsible critical mineral supply chains to support economic prosperity and climate objectives". But the coalition assembled by the United States is one of like-minded countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany with an Asian axis in the form of Japan and South Korea. [Also the European Commission, as well as Finland and Sweden.]

It is defined as much as anything by who is not on the invite list — China and Russia.

China's dominance of key enabling minerals such as lithium and rare earths is the single biggest reason why Western countries are looking to build their own supply chains. Russia, a major producer of nickel, aluminium and platinum group metals, is now also a highly problematic trading partner as its war in Ukraine that the Kremlin calls a "special military operation" grinds on. A previously highly globalised minerals supply network looks set to split into politically polarised spheres of influence, a tectonic realignment with far-reaching implications. The United States and Europe have realised that they can't build out purely domestic supply chains quickly enough to meet demand from the electric vehicle transition....

The process was already well underway before the U.S. State Department announced the formation of the Minerals Security Partnership on June 14. U.S. and Canadian officials have been working closely as Canada fleshes out a promised C$3.8 billion ($3.02 billion) package to boost production of lithium, copper and other strategic minerals. European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic has just been in Norway to seal "a strategic partnership" on battery technologies and critical raw materials.
The article points out America's Department of Defense is already investing $120 million in a new plant for heavy rare earths separation — and has chosen an Australian company as its partner.

Shortly thereafter the Defense Department noted an online disinformation campaign against its new partner (according to U.S.-based cybersecurity firm Mandiant), disinformation which Reuters describes as "a pro-China propaganda campaign" using fake social media accounts to try to stir up opposition.

Reuters shares the results of its investigation into what it calls "mercenary hackers": Reuters identified 35 legal cases since 2013 in which Indian hackers attempted to obtain documents from one side or another of a courtroom battle by sending them password-stealing emails. The messages were often camouflaged as innocuous communications from clients, colleagues, friends or family. They were aimed at giving the hackers access to targets' inboxes and, ultimately, private or attorney-client privileged information.

At least 75 U.S. and European companies, three dozen advocacy and media groups and numerous Western business executives were the subjects of these hacking attempts, Reuters found.

The Reuters report is based on interviews with victims, researchers, investigators, former U.S. government officials, lawyers and hackers, plus a review of court records from seven countries. It also draws on a unique database of more than 80,000 emails sent by Indian hackers to 13,000 targets over a seven-year period. The database is effectively the hackers' hit list, and it reveals a down-to-the-second look at who the cyber mercenaries sent phishing emails to between 2013 and 2020.... The targets' lawyers were often hit, too. The Indian hackers tried to break into the inboxes of some 1,000 attorneys at 108 different law firms, Reuters found....

"It is an open secret that there are some private investigators who use Indian hacker groups to target opposition in litigation battles," said Anthony Upward, managing director of Cognition Intelligence, a UK-based countersurveillance firm.

The legal cases identified by Reuters varied in profile and importance. Some involved obscure personal disputes. Others featured multinational companies with fortunes at stake. From London to Lagos, at least 11 separate groups of victims had their emails leaked publicly or suddenly entered into evidence in the middle of their trials. In several cases, stolen documents shaped the verdict, court records show.
Reuters spoke to email experts including Linkedin, Microsoft and Google to help confirm the authenticity of the data they'd received, and reports that one high-profile victim was WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann. (After Reuters told him he'd been targetted starting in 2017, Neumann hired a law firm.) "Reuters reached out to every person in the database — sending requests for comment to each email address — and spoke to more than 250 individuals. Most of the respondents said the attempted hacks revealed in the email database occurred either ahead of anticipated lawsuits or as litigation was under way."

America's FBI has been investigating the breachers since at least early 2018, Reuters reports, adding that pressure is now increasing on private eyes who acted as go-betweens for interested clients.

Meanwhile, Reuters found former employees of the mercenary firms, who told them that the firms employed dozens of workers — though "a month's salary could be as low as 25,000 rupees (then worth about $370), according to two former workers and company salary records...

"Asked about the hacker-for-hire industry, an official with India's Ministry of Justice referred Reuters to a cybercrime hotline, which did not respond to a request for comment."

U.S. right-to-repair advocates hoped a district judge would finally rule Friday on Massachusetts' voter-approved right-to-repair referendum. But they were disappointed again, reports the Boston Globe, since instead the judge said he'd first have to consider a recent ruling by America's Supreme Court limiting the regulatory powers of the U.S. government's Environmental Protection Agency: The Massachusetts law was approved by 75 percent of voters in a 2020 referendum. But its implementation has been held up by court challenges ever since. It would require all automakers selling new cars in Massachusetts to provide buyers with access to "telematic" data â diagnostic information â via a wireless connection. That way, car owners could get their cars repaired at any independent repair shop, instead of being forced to have the work done at manufacturer-approved dealerships.

But the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an association of the world's top carmakers, sued to overturn the law, arguing that only the federal government, not states, may enact such a rule. In addition, carmakers said that they could not redesign the digital systems of their cars in time to comply with the law's 2022 model-year deadline.

The lawsuit went to trial last summer, but the court's judgment has been repeatedly delayed. In the meantime, at least two auto manufacturers, Subaru and Kia, began selling cars in Massachusetts with their telematic features switched off, to avoid violating the law.
The state's attorney general has now granted a two-week "grace period" during which the law won't be enforced, according to the article, while the district judge "said that he expected to rule before the end of a two-week grace period."

An anonymous reader shares this report from NBC News: A controversial bitcoin mining operation on the largest of central New York's Finger Lakes does not meet the requirements of state climate laws, New York's Department of Environmental Conservation ruled Thursday, denying an air permit request the entity's owner, Greenidge Generation LLC., made in March 2021.

Renewing the air permit for the Greenidge facility on Seneca Lake "would be inconsistent with or would interfere with the attainment of statewide greenhouse gas emission limits," the Department of Environmental Conservation, or DEC, said in its ruling. It added that the company, which burns natural gas at its plant, has "failed to demonstrate that the continued operation of the facility is justified notwithstanding this inconsistency, as it has not provided any electric system reliability or other ongoing need for the facility." Greenhouse gas emissions from the plant have increased "dramatically" since a previous permit was issued to Greenidge in 2016 and after the 2019 enactment of New York's Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, DEC said.

Local residents and environmental groups lauded the decision. Greenidge said it would continue to operate the plant under its current permit while it challenged the DEC ruling....

Greenidge took over a mothballed power plant on the shores of Seneca Lake in 2014 and requested permits to operate it as a so-called peaker plant, providing electricity to the grid in times of heavy use. While the operation initially supplied most of its power to the grid, DEC found its main purpose has become bitcoin mining.
The article adds that the global usage of electricity for bitcoin mining "roughly equals the consumption of Pakistan, according to the University of Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index."

Google has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a legal fight with app developers over the money they earned creating apps for Android smartphones and for enticing users to make in-app purchases. Reuters reports: The app developers, in a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco, had accused Google of using agreements with smartphone makers, technical barriers and revenue sharing agreements to effectively close the app ecosystem and shunt most payments through its Google Play billing system with a default service fee of 30%.

As part of the proposed settlement, Google said in a blog post it would put $90 million in a fund to support app developers who made $2 million or less in annual revenue from 2016-2021. "A vast majority of U.S. developers who earned revenue through Google Play will be eligible to receive money from this fund, if they choose," Google said in the blog post. Google said it would also charge developers a 15% commission on their first million in revenue from the Google Play Store each year. It started doing this in 2021. "There were likely 48,000 app developers eligible to apply for the $90 million fund, and the minimum payout is $250," notes Reuters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: The day after Russia's February invasion of Ukraine, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner sent a letter (PDF) to Google warning it to be on alert for "exploitation of your platform by Russia and Russian-linked entities," and calling on the company to audit its advertising business's compliance with economic sanctions. But as recently as June 23, Google was sharing potentially sensitive user data with a sanctioned Russian ad tech company owned by Russia's largest state bank, according to a new report provided to ProPublica.

Google allowed RuTarget, a Russian company that helps brands and agencies buy digital ads, to access and store data about people browsing websites and apps in Ukraine and other parts of the world, according to research from digital ad analysis firm Adalytics. Adalytics identified close to 700 examples of RuTarget receiving user data from Google after the company was added to a U.S. Treasury list of sanctioned entities on Feb. 24. The data sharing between Google and RuTarget stopped four months later on June 23, the day ProPublica contacted Google about the activity.

RuTarget, which also operates under the name Segmento, is owned by Sberbank, a Russian state bank that the Treasury described as "uniquely important" to the country's economy when it hit the lender with initial sanctions. RuTarget was later listed in an April 6 Treasury announcement that imposed full blocking sanctions on Sberbank and other Russian entities and people. The sanctions mean U.S. individuals and entities are not supposed to conduct business with RuTarget or Sberbank. Of particular concern, the analysis showed that Google shared data with RuTarget about users browsing websites based in Ukraine. This means Google may have turned over such critical information as unique mobile phone IDs, IP addresses, location information and details about users' interests and online activity, data that U.S. senators and experts say could be used by Russian military and intelligence services to track people or zero in on locations of interest. Google spokesperson Michael Aciman told ProPublica that the company blocked RuTarget from using its ad products in March, and that RuTarget has not purchased ads directly via Google since then. "He acknowledged the Russian company was still receiving user and ad buying data from Google before being alerted by ProPublica and Adalytics," adds the report.

"Aciman said this action includes not only preventing RuTarget from further accessing user data, but from purchasing ads through third parties in Russia that may not be sanctioned. He declined to say whether RuTarget had purchased ads via Google systems using such third parties, and he did not comment on whether data about Ukrainians had been shared with RuTarget."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: A teen charged with setting a fire that killed five members of a Senegalese immigrant family in Denver, Colorado, has become the first person to challenge police use of Google search histories to find someone who might have committed a crime, according to his lawyers. In documents filed Thursday in Denver District Court, lawyers for the 17-year-old argue that the police violated the Constitution when they got a judge to order Google to check its vast database of internet searches for users who typed in the address of a home before it was set ablaze on Aug. 5, 2020. Three adults and two children died in the fire.

That search of Google's records helped point investigators to the teen and two friends, who were eventually charged in the deadly fire, according to police records. All were juveniles at the time of their arrests. Two of them, including the 17-year-old, are being tried as adults; they both pleaded not guilty. The defendant in juvenile court has not yet entered a plea. The 17-year-old's lawyers say the search, and all evidence that came from it, should be thrown out because it amounted to a blind expedition through billions of Google users' queries based on a hunch that the killer typed the address into a search bar. That, the lawyers argued, violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches. "People have a privacy interest in their internet search history, which is really an archive of your personal expression," said Michael Price, who is lead litigator of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' Fourth Amendment Center and one of the 17-year-old's attorneys. "Search engines like Google are a gateway to a vast trove of information online and the way most people find what they're looking for. Every one of those queries reveals something deeply private about a person, things they might not share with friends, family or clergy."

Price said that allowing the government to sift through Google's vast trove of searches is akin to allowing the government access to users' "thoughts, concerns, questions, fears." He added: "Every one of those queries reveals something deeply private about a person, things they might not share with friends, family or clergy," Price said. "'Psychiatrists in Denver.' 'Abortion providers near me.' 'Does God exist.' Every day, people pose those questions to Google seeking information."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PsychNewsDaily: Scientists from the University of Chicago have developed a new algorithm that can predict future crime a week in advance with about 90% accuracy, and within a range of about 1000 feet. It does so by learning patterns from public data on violent and property crimes. The tool was tested and validated using historical data from the City of Chicago around two broad categories of reported events: violent crimes (homicides, assaults, and batteries) and property crimes (burglaries, thefts, and motor vehicle thefts). These data were used because they were most likely to be reported to police in urban areas where there is historical distrust and lack of cooperation with law enforcement. Such crimes are also less prone to enforcement bias, unlike drug crimes, traffic stops, and other misdemeanor infractions.

The new model isolates crime by looking at the time and spatial coordinates of discrete events, and detecting patterns to predict future events. It divides the city into "spatial tiles" roughly 1,000 feet across, and predicts crime within these areas. Previous models relied more on traditional neighborhood or political boundaries, which are subject to bias. The model performed just as well with data from seven other U.S. cities: Atlanta, Austin, Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, and San Francisco.

Lead author Ishanu Chattopadhyay is careful to note that the tool's accuracy does not mean it should be used to direct law enforcement policy; police departments, for example, should not use it to swarm neighborhoods proactively to prevent crime, Chattopadhyay said. Instead, it should be added to a toolbox of urban policies and policing strategies to address crime. "We created a digital twin of urban environments. If you feed it data from what happened in the past, it will tell you what's going to happen in the future," he said. "It's not magical; there are limitations, but we validated it and it works really well," Chattopadhyay added. "Now you can use this as a simulation tool to see what happens if crime goes up in one area of the city, or there is increased enforcement in another area. If you apply all these different variables, you can see how the systems evolve in response." The findings have been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, is selling Immigrations and Customs Enforcement a suite of features used to track and identify cryptocurrency users, according to contract documents shared with The Intercept. From a report: In August 2021, Coinbase sold a single analytics software license to ICE for $29,000, followed by a software purchase potentially worth $1.36 million the next month, but details of exactly what capabilities would be offered to the agency's controversial Homeland Security Investigations division of were unclear. A new contract document obtained by Jack Poulson, director of the watchdog group Tech Inquiry, and shared with The Intercept, shows ICE now has access to a variety of forensic features provided through Coinbase Tracer, the company's intelligence-gathering tool (formerly known as Coinbase Analytics).

Coinbase Tracer allows clients, in both government and the private sector, to trace transactions through the blockchain, a distributed ledger of transactions integral to cryptocurrency use. While blockchain ledgers are typically public, the enormous volume of data stored therein can make following the money from spender to recipient beyond difficult, if not impossible, without the aid of software tools. Coinbase markets Tracer for use in both corporate compliance and law enforcement investigations, touting its ability to "investigate illicit activities including money laundering and terrorist financing" and "connect [cryptocurrency] addresses to real world entities."

Nkwe writes: Russians are searching for pirated Microsoft software online after the US tech giant halted sales in the country over its invasion of Ukraine, the Kommersant newspaper reported earlier this week. Russia-based web searches for pirated Microsoft software have surged by as much as 250% after the company suspended new sales on March 4, according to Kommersant. In June so far, there's been a 650% surge in searches for Excel downloads, the media outlet added. Microsoft said earlier this month it's significantly scaling down business in Russia, joining a long list of companies winding down businesses in the country amid sweeping sanctions over the war in Ukraine. The move hits Russia hard because the country relies on foreign software to power many of its manufacturing and engineering tech systems, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. Russian government agencies, too, are switching from Microsoft's Windows to the Linux operating system, the Moscow Times reported last Friday. Developers of Russian systems based on the Linux open source operating system are also seeing more demand, Kommersant reported. Not all sectors are able to swap out their systems easily.

A leader of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission said he has asked Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores over China-related data security concerns. CNBC reports: The wildly popular short video app is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, which faced U.S. scrutiny under President Donald Trump. Brendan Carr, one of the FCC's commissioners, shared via Twitter a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. The letter pointed to reports and other developments that made TikTok non-compliant with the two companies' app store policies.

"TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface. It is not just an app for sharing funny videos or meme. That's the sheep's clothing," he said in the letter. "At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data." Carr's letter, dated June 24 on FCC letterhead, said if the Apple and Alphabet do not remove TikTok from their app stores, they should provide statements to him by July 8. The statements should explain "the basis for your company's conclusion that the surreptitious access of private and sensitive U.S. user data by persons located in Beijing, coupled with TikTok's pattern of misleading representations and conduct, does not run afoul of any of your app store policies," he said. A TikTok spokesperson told BuzzFeed News in a statement: "We know we're among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of US user data. That's why we hire experts in their fields, continually work to validate our security standards, and bring in reputable, independent third parties to test our defenses."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom does not seem like a happy man right now. After accusing two of his former colleagues [Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk] of facilitating Chinese spying, Dotcom says that a report is being produced to show that mass infringement is taking place on Mega, a company he co-founded. Surprisingly, he says it will include live pirate links to content posted by Mega users. [...] Turning his attention to former colleagues Ortmann and van der Kolk, last week Dotcom publicly blamed them for his exit from Mega, claiming they had "stolen" the company from him. How this dovetails with previous allegations related to his major falling out with former Mega CEO Tony Lentino, who also founded domain name registrar Instra, is unknown.

Local media reports suggest that Dotcom hasn't spoken to former friends Ortmann and van der Kolk for years but their recent deal to avoid extradition in the Megaupload case by pleading guilty to organized crime charges puts Dotcom in a tough spot. "My co-defendants who claimed to be innocent for 10+ years were offered a sweet exit deal for a false confession," he said last week. And he wasn't finished there. After a research team found that Mega was vulnerable to attacks that allow for a "full compromise of the confidentiality of user files", Ortmann himself responded via a security notification stating that the issues had been fixed. In response, Dotcom accused Ortmann and van der Kolk of creating "backdoors" in Mega so that the Chinese government could decrypt users' files. "Same shady guys who just made a deal with the US and NZ Govt to get out of the US extradition case by falsely accusing me," he added.

Whether this reference to the no-extradition-deal betrayed what was really on Dotcom's mind is up for debate but whatever the motivation, he's not letting it go. In a tweet posted yesterday, he again informed his 850K+ followers that the company he founded "is not safe" and people who think that their files are unreadable by Mega are wrong. Shortly after, Dotcom delivered another message, one even darker in tone. It targeted Mega, the company he co-founded and where his colleagues still work. It's possible to interpret the tweet in several ways but none seem beneficial to his former colleagues, Mega, or its users. "In addition to security vulnerabilities a comprehensive report about mass copyright infringement on Mega with millions of active links and channels is in the works," he said. "[P]erhaps the most worrying thing about this new complication in an escalating dispute is its potential to affect the minority of users that actually store infringing files on Mega," adds TorrentFreak. "Any detailed report of 'mass copyright infringement' will draw negative attention directly to them, especially if the report includes active hyperlinks as Dotcom suggests."

"Couple that with Dotcom's allegations that the content of user files can be read, any conclusion that this upcoming infringement report hasn't been thought through from a user perspective can be easily forgiven..."

The UK's Intellectual Property Office has decided artificial-intelligence systems cannot patent inventions for the time being. The BBC reports: A recent IPO consultation found many experts doubted AI was currently able to invent without human assistance. Current law allowed humans to patent inventions made with AI assistance, the government said, despite "misperceptions" this was not the case. Last year, the Court of Appeal ruled against Stephen Thaler, who had said his Dabus AI system should be recognized as the inventor in two patent applications, for: a food container [and] a flashing light. The judges sided, by a two-to-one majority, with the IPO, which had told him to list a real person as the inventor. "Only a person can have rights - a machine cannot," wrote Lady Justice Laing in her judgement. "A patent is a statutory right and it can only be granted to a person." But the IPO also said it would "need to understand how our IP system should protect AI-devised inventions in the future" and committed to advancing international discussions, with a view to keeping the UK competitive.

Many AI systems are trained on large amounts of data copied from the internet. And, on Tuesday, the IPO also announced plans to change copyright law to allow anyone with lawful access - rather than only those conducting non-commercial research, as now -- to do this, to "promote the use of AI technology, and wider 'data mining' techniques, for the public good." Rights holders will still be able to control and charge for access to their works but no longer charge extra for the ability to mine them.

In the consultation, the IPO noted the UK was one of only a handful of countries to protect computer-generated works with no human creator. The "author" of a "computer-generated work" is defined as "the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken," it says. And protection lasts for 50 years from when the work is made. Performing-arts workers' union Equity had called for copyright law to be changed to protect actors' livelihoods from AI content such as "deepfakes," generated from images of their face or voice. The IPO took this issue seriously, it said, but "at this stage, the impacts of AI technologies on performers remain unclear." "We will keep these issues under review," it added.

The company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club has sued conceptual artist Ryder Ripps for selling duplicates of its Bored Ape non-fungible tokens or NFTs. From a report: The lawsuit, filed in a California court this weekend, accuses Ripps of a "calculated, intentional, and willful" scheme to damage BAYC while promoting his own copycat work. Ripps and Yuga Labs have been at odds for months, in part because of Ripps' RR/BAYC NFT series. The series used BAYC images but connected them with a different crypto token and sold them for the equivalent of around $200 apiece, a bargain compared to the real thing, which currently sell for around $100,000 on the low end.

"This is no mere monkey business. It is a deliberate effort to harm Yuga Labs at the expense of consumers by sowing confusion about whether these RR/BAYC NFTs are in some way sponsored, affiliated, or connected to Yuga Labs' official Bored Ape Yacht Club," says the lawsuit. The suit accuses Ripps of false advertising and trademark infringement among other offenses. It asks for financial damages and a court order demanding he cease infringing on BAYC's work, including a ban on using "confusingly similar" domain names like apemarket.com.