In the largest study of its kind, a team of academics from four US and Canadian universities said they were able to determine the size of China's Great Firewall internet censorship capabilities. From a report: In a research project that lasted nine months, from April to December 2020, academics developed a system called GFWatch that accessed domains from inside and outside China's internet space and then measured how the Great Firewall (GFW) would tamper with the connection at the DNS level in order to prevent Chinese users from accessing a domain, or an external entity accessing Chinese internal sites.

Using GFWatch, researchers said they tested 534 million distinct domains, accessing around 411 million domains on a daily basis in order to record and then verify that the blocks were persistent. After nine months of compiling data, they found that China's Great Firewall currently blocks around 311,000 domains, with 270,000 blocks working as intended, while 41,000 domains appear to have been blocked by accident. The research team said these latter domains appear to have been blocked accidentally when Chinese authorities tried to block a shorter domain and used a broad DNS filtering regular expression (regex) that did not account for situations where that shorter domain was also part of a longer domain name, indirectly banning other sites. For example, researchers said that when Chinese authorities blocked access to reddit.com, they also accidentally blocked access to booksreddit.com, geareddit.com, and 1,087 other sites.

The Guardian's UK/US site editor in the Asia Pacific timezone argues that China wants to undermine bitcoin because, behind the scenes, its reserve bank wants to set up its own digital currency — and then reboot the international financial system: The People's Bank of China aims to become the first major central bank to issue a central bank digital currency. While the PBOC's counterparts in the west have taken a more cautious approach, it has held trials in several major cities including Shenzhen, Chengdu, Shanghai and Hangzhou. The benefits of an e-currency are immense. As more and more transactions are made using a digital currency controlled centrally, the government gains more and more ability to monitor the economy and its people.

The rollout is also seen as part of Beijing's push to weaken the power of the U.S. dollar, and in turn that of the government in Washington... Alarm in western governments is such that the threat posed by the digital yuan, which could put China out of reach from international financial sanctions, for example, was discussed at last month's G7 meeting.
There's additional reasons for China's desire to replace bitcoin with its own currency, various experts tell the site. No central bank relishes the thought of a "parallel currency" — and there's also concerns about consumers being hurt by a lack of regulations, as well as the strain crypto-mining puts on the nation's electricity system. But the Guardian also adds that "The threat of an unregulated alternative monetary system emerging from blockchain technology is a clear and present danger to the Communist party, according to observers."

"Jim Cramer, a former hedge fund manager and CNN business expert, said the government in Beijing "believe it's a direct threat to the regime because... it is outside their control".

The New York Times reports on "an intense policy struggle" in America's national and state governments:

-On one side, large electric utilities and President Biden want to build thousands of miles of power lines to move electricity created by distant wind turbines and solar farms to cities and suburbs.

- On the other, some environmental organizations and community groups are pushing for greater investment in rooftop solar panels, batteries and local wind turbines.

And the result "could lock in an energy system that lasts for decades." At issue is how quickly the country can move to cleaner energy and how much electricity rates will increase... The option supported by Mr. Biden and some large energy companies would replace coal and natural gas power plants with large wind and solar farms hundreds of miles from cities, requiring lots of new power lines. Such integration would strengthen the control that the utility industry and Wall Street have over the grid. "You've got to have a big national plan to make sure the power gets from where it is generated to where the need is," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in an interview.

But many of Mr. Biden's liberal allies argue that solar panels, batteries and other local energy sources should be emphasized because they would be more resilient and could be built more quickly... In all probability, there will be a mix of solutions that include more transmission lines and rooftop solar panels. What combination emerges will depend on deals made in Congress but also skirmishes playing out across the country...

As millions of California homes went dark during a heat wave last summer, help came from an unusual source: batteries installed at homes, businesses and municipal buildings. Those batteries kicked in up to 6 percent of the state grid's power supply during the crisis, helping to make up for idled natural gas and nuclear power plants. Rooftop solar panels generated an additional 4 percent of the state's electricity... California showed that homes and businesses don't have to be passive consumers. They can become mini power plants, potentially earning as much from supplying energy as they pay for electricity they draw from the grid. Home and business batteries, which can be as small as a large television and as big as a computer server room, are charged from the grid or rooftop solar panels...

Regulators generally allow utilities to charge customers the cost of investments plus a profit margin, typically about 10.5 percent, giving companies an incentive to build power plants and lines... A 2019 report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a research arm of the Energy Department, found that greater use of rooftop solar can reduce the need for new transmission lines, displace expensive power plants and save the energy that is lost when electricity is moved long distances. The study also found that rooftop systems can put pressure on utilities to improve or expand neighborhood wires and equipment.
The director of a Chicago-based environmental nonprofit tells the Times that "Solar energy plus storage is as transformative to the electric sector as wireless services were to the telecommunications sector."

In a weird twist, fossil fuel companies are now joining forces with local groups (including environmental groups) to fight the construction of new power lines.

The BBC put some tough questions to Google CEO Sundar Pichai: in 2017, Google moved more than $20 billion to Bermuda through a Dutch shell company, as part of a strategy called "Double Irish, Dutch Sandwich". I put this to Pichai, who said that Google no longer uses this scheme, is one of the world's biggest taxpayers, and complies with tax laws in every country in which it operates. I responded that his answer revealed exactly the problem: this isn't just a legal issue, it's a moral one. Poor people generally don't employ accountants in order to minimise their tax bills; large-scale tax avoidance is something that the richest people in the world do, and — I suggested to him — may weaken the collective sacrifice.

When I invited Pichai to commit there and then to Google pulling out of all tax havens immediately, he didn't take up the offer...

It is true that the company generates most of its research and revenues in the U.S., which is where it pays most of its tax. Moreover, it has paid effective tax of 20% over the past decade, which is more than many companies.
In the longer podcast interview, Pichai says he also believes that in the future technologies may start reaching even further into our lives. And he calls artificial intelligence "the most profound technology that humanity will ever develop and work on...

"If you think about fire or electricity or the internet, it's like that. But I think even more profound...."

CoinDesk reports that "A project is in the works to make the Tor Client more adaptable and easier for third parties to use, with some help from Zcash Open Major Grants (ZOMG)." ZOMG announced on Tuesday that it is awarding the privacy-focused Tor Project a $670,000 grant to continue to develop Arti, a Rust coding language implementation of the Tor Client... Arti should make it simpler for third parties to embed and customize the Tor Client than the current implementation in the C coding language... "Arti is a project to make an improved version of Tor that will be more reliable, more secure, and easier for other software to use," said Nick Mathewson, chief network architect and co-founder of the Tor Project. "We hope that within the next several years, Arti will become the preferred implementation of the Tor protocols...."

"Onion routing has just had its 25th anniversary in May, and although Tor is a great set of privacy tools, the C program 'tor' itself (note the lowercase t) is beginning to show its age," Mathewson said. "We've found over the recent years that the complexity of the existing C code, and the fragility of the C language, make it unnecessarily difficult to improve the code while maintaining our security and privacy guarantees....

"Roughly half of Tor's security issues since 2016 would have been impossible in Rust, and many of the other issues would have been much less likely, based on our informal audit," he said...

The funding will go toward developer salaries as they develop Arti. Mathewson said the goal with this round of funding is to advance Arti to the point where it is ready for general use, testing and embedding.

CNN reports: As the bitcoin craze took off in 2017, a Long Island iced tea company sent its share price spiking as much as 380% merely by announcing a "pivot" to blockchain technology. Long Island Iced Tea Corp. even changed its name to Long Blockchain Corp. At the time, the episode underscored the excessive hype around the crypto space.

Now, regulators say the name change was at the heart of an illegal insider trading scheme.The Securities and Exchange Commission charged three people Friday with insider trading in advance of the announcement that sent Long Island Iced Tea Corp.'s stock price to the moon... December 21, 2017, Long Island Iced Tea Corp., until that point exclusively a soft drink maker, announced its makeover, describing the pivot to blockchain as a "once-in-a-generation opportunity."

Even though the company had no actual business tied to blockchain at the time, and no experience in the cryptocurrency space, its Nasdaq-listed share price skyrocketed and trading volume spiked by 1,000%.
But the company's leading shareholder had told a broker/stockholder who'd then tipped off a stock-trading friend (who within two hours of the announcement ended up with "$160,000 in illicit profits," the SEC said). CNN adds that all three have now been charged with insider trading.

"The SEC said Long Blockchain was delisted by the Nasdaq in February for allegedly making a 'series of public statements designed to mislead investors and to take advantage of the general investor interest in bitcoin and blockchain technology.'"

Bloomberg identifies a variety of cryptocurrency scams, including a "rug pull," where the creators of a new cryptocurrency suddenly cut and run.

"Old-fashioned Ponzi schemes, newly cryptodenominated, have swindled people out of billions too," Bloomberg adds. And a 35-year-old crypto trader living with his parents ("trading meme coins as a full-time job") also tells them about "honey pots," where a coin's creators see a spike in value — and then temporarily disable selling for other holders: It might sound like a joke, given the crypto meltdowns of late, but serious money is at stake here. Billions — real billions — are getting pilfered annually through a variety of cryptocurrency scams. The way things are going, this will only get worse. Back in the Wall Street Dark Ages — six, 12, 18 months ago — these sorts of shenanigans were mostly associated with shlocky brokerages like the one depicted in the 2013 movie The Wolf of Wall Street. In those halcyon days before GameStop, Dogecoin and the rest, schlubs on Long Island might pitch ridiculous over-the-counter stocks to the gullible...

Tokensniffer, aptly named for Shit Coins, claims to have tracked 42,071 tokens and 2,250 scams or hacks. That was as of June 16. More than 200 supposed stings were logged by users during the first two weeks of June alone... His website scrapes data about new meme tokens from popular social media channels and scans the source code... A "smell test" program searches for vulnerabilities. Clones of existing meme tokens are often a red flag. Most recent scams — the site flagged 450 in in one recent 30-day period — were honeypots. Those tend to be easier to spot because of their code, Tokensniffer's creator says. Rug pulls are more complicated.

Such supposed safeguards aside, people are getting scammed in growing numbers. So far this year, over $2.6 billion has been grabbed, according to Chainalysis, a New York-based blockchain researcher. That figure doesn't include a giant Ponzi scheme that just came to light in South Africa. Local authorities put the haul at $3.6 billion worth of Bitcoin. Gob-smacking as all of this might sound, these numbers in fact represent a marked decline from 2019, when fraudsters walked away with an estimated $9 billion. But here's a key difference: the sheer number of people getting hoodwinked. With a few outsize exceptions, most crypto scams seem to be getting smaller. That's the good news. The bad news is that there are more of them, and more people are getting stung. From 2019 to 2020, the number of victims has jumped 48% to an estimated 7.3 million, a figure approaching the official population of Hong Kong. Between the last three months of 2020 and the first three months of 2021, the number of unique scams rose nearly 18%, to 1,335, according to Chainalysis...

Michael Burry, of "The Big Short"-fame, has been warning all of this could all go horribly wrong. An estimated 10,000 new coins have been minted this year. Who can say how many will turn out to be shams? So many Shit Coins are flying around out there, and prices can be so volatile, that many people can't even tell if they've been scammed... This much is sure: no one complains when they're making money. It's when people start losing money — and lately, many have been — that they scream they've been taken.
"A decade after Bitcoin was created, regulators are still grappling with how to police cryptocurrencies," Bloomberg adds, "when the whole point is that they operate without governments or central banks."

Earlier this year in April Apple started mandating "App Tracking Transparency," which gives users a choice about whether they can be tracked across app.

Now tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30,335) writes: The numbers are in and a number of ad companies are reporting lowered iOS spending, but 10% or more increases in Android ad spending. The complaint is, of course, that without the granular data they used to get from tracking it's no longer worth spending on iOS ads.

Interestingly, only about 66% of users have actually denied tracking.
That's based on early data from the ad-measurement firm Branch Metrics (as reported by The Wall Street Journal ). MacRumors write: As a result, the amount of advertiser spending on Apple's mobile platform has fallen by about one-third between June 1 and July 1, while spending on Android rose over 10% for the same month, according to ad-measurement firm Tenjin Inc...

Without proper user tracking, advertisers have significantly less data about a user's interests, preferences, and more. Advertisers and companies, such as Facebook, use that data to compile a profile of a user. The type of data collected from tracking helps advertisers to ensure that their ads are being targeted to potential customers. [According to ad-measurement firm Tenjin Inc], "The shortage of user data to fuel Facebook Inc.'s suite of powerful ad-targeting tools reduces their effectiveness and appeal among some advertisers, ad agencies say."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In the latest bid to curb video-game addiction in China, tech giant Tencent has launched a facial recognition system to stop minors gaming into the night. The initiative will prevent people under 18 from playing between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. The system, dubbed Midnight Patrol, is in place in more than 60 of Tencent's games and includes popular titles like "Honor of Kings" and "Peacekeeper Elite," the company said in a press release Tuesday.

The facial-recognition system will allow Tencent to thwart the tactics kids have developed to get around current age restrictions such as using their parents' identities or devices. The system works by scanning the faces of players to check their age. "Anyone who refuses or fails face verification will be treated as a minor, included in the anti-addiction supervision of Tencent's game health system and kicked offline," the company said. The new rules fall in line with regulations the Chinese government laid out in 2019 to curb video-game addiction.

For some reason, Samsung apps designed to control internet-connected washer and dryers require "bogus," "absurd," "unacceptable," "pesky," and "awful" permissions. Motherboard reports: On Wednesday, a Reddit user complained that their washing machine app, the Samsung Smart Washer, wouldn't work "unless I give it access to my contacts, location and camera." This is a common complaint. "When I launch the app, the damned thing wants all sort of permissions: location, phone calls, media, and ... contacts??? The app won't work without these permissions," another Reddit user grumbled last year, referring to another Samsung app -- called Smart Home -- that requires the same seemingly exaggerated permissions. "Why would the Samsung Smart Home app need access to my contacts?" The reviews for these two apps, both of which have more than a million installs according to their stats on the Google Play store, aren't very positive either. The Smart Washer App has an average of 2.1 stars, thanks to a slew of reviews that mention the unnecessary permissions.

These situations speak to two issues: Apps that demand permissions that they don't need, and "smart" and internet of things devices that make formerly simple tasks very complicated, and open up potential privacy and security concerns. [...] It's unclear why apps that are designed to let you set the type of washing cycle you want, or see how long it's gonna take for the dryer to be done, would need access to your phone's contacts. In an FAQ for another Samsung app, the company says it needs access to contacts "to check if you already have a Samsung account set up in your device. Knowing this information helps mySamsung to make the sign-in process seamless." The report recommends using a newer app called SmartThings App, "which has less invasive permission requirements compared to the older apps." The SmartThings app doesn't list any required permissions, indicating that "you can use the app without optional permissions, but some functions may be limited."

A Swedish man wanted by the United States for defrauding over 3,500 victims of more than $16 million has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for securities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering, the Department of Justice said Thursday. CNBC reports: The DOJ says 47-year-old Roger Nils-Jonas Karlsson ran an investment fraud scheme from 2011 until his arrest in Thailand in June 2019. He pleaded guilty in March. According to court documents, Karlsson encouraged victims to buy shares in a scheme called "Eastern Metal Securities" using cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, promising "astronomical returns" tied to the price of gold. The funds paid by these victims were instead directed to Karlsson's personal bank accounts, where the money was put toward expensive homes, a racehorse, and a resort in Thailand. Karlsson has been ordered to forfeit this Thai resort and various other properties and accounts as part of the sentence.

Karlsson maintained the ruse, in part, by offering updates and account statements to victims. He also explained delayed payouts by falsely claiming to be working with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Karlsson's fraud targeted financially insecure investors, and the U.S. is seeking restitution on behalf of those victims. In addition to having to pay back $16,263,820, a restitution order is expected to be entered by the court within 90 days.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A new biometrics privacy ordinance has taken effect across New York City, putting new limits on what businesses can do with the biometric data they collect on their customers. From Friday, businesses that collect biometric information -- most commonly in the form of facial recognition and fingerprints -- are required to conspicuously post notices and signs to customers at their doors explaining how their data will be collected. The ordinance applies to a wide range of businesses -- retailers, stores, restaurants and theaters, to name a few -- which are also barred from selling, sharing or otherwise profiting from the biometric information that they collect.

The move will give New Yorkers -- and its millions of visitors each year -- greater protections over how their biometric data is collected and used, while also serving to dissuade businesses from using technology that critics say is discriminatory and often doesn't work. Businesses can face stiff penalties for violating the law, but can escape fines if they fix the violation quickly. The law is by no means perfect, as none of these laws ever are. For one, it doesn't apply to government agencies, including the police. Of the businesses that the ordinance does cover, it exempts employees of those businesses, such as those required to clock in and out of work with a fingerprint. And the definition of what counts as a biometric will likely face challenges that could expand or narrow what is covered.

One of the new features announced at WWDC 2021 is iCloud Private Relay, a new security feature that lets users hide their real IP address from third-party servers so that they cannot track them across the web. It's called fingerprinting and it is quickly becoming a popular method for advertisers because it allows them to pull together information about your device to pinpoint your identity. As 9to5Mac reports, Apple's new fingerprint-blocking feature has the ad tech industry worried. From the report: As pointed out by a Digiday report, Private Relay comes to join forces with App Tracking Transparency, a feature introduced with iOS 14.5 to prevent apps from tracking users without asking permission. With ATT, Apple relies on developers to update their apps and ask users whether or not they want to be tracked. Private Relay is expected to considerably reduce user tracking at a deeper system level: "And herein lies the rub for ad execs. Apple has told them fingerprinting is off-limits but doesn't seem to be aggressively enforcing this policy. Few execs, however, believe this perceived inaction will last. Eventually, goes the thinking, Apple won't need to enforce a policy like ATT to rid its mobile operating system of fingerprinting -- it will have the technology to block it from ever happening in the first place. The reason: Private Relay."

However, this will probably result in even more companies upset with Apple. Nii Ahene, head of strategy at Tinuiti, warns that Apple needs to be careful to avoid Private Relay being considered "anti-competitive or too dictatorial," as the company has been facing accusations of monopolistic practices. Digiday reports: "'Apple needs to be careful when it uses its market position in a way that could be interpreted as either anti-competitive or too dictatorial,' said Nii Ahene, chief strategy officer at digital agency Tinuiti. 'This is why there's a gradual rollout of Apple's privacy plan. The company communicates what it will do early, starts to have conversations behind the scenes, and then over some time the enforcement of the ATT policy starts to kick in.'" When Apple introduced ATT, companies like Facebook publicly criticized the feature since it directly affects the advertising business, which is responsible for the main income of these companies. Now, it's only a matter of time before more companies speak out against iCloud Private Relay.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Suppose you are in the business of generating passwords, it would probably be a good idea to use an additional source of entropy other than the current time, but for a long time, that's all Kaspersky Password Manager (KPM) used. In a blog post to cap off an almost two year saga, Ledger Donjon head of security research Jean-Baptiste Bedrune showed KPM was doing just that. "Kaspersky Password Manager used a complex method to generate its passwords. This method aimed to create passwords hard to break for standard password crackers. However, such method lowers the strength of the generated passwords against dedicated tools," Bedrune wrote.

One of the techniques used by KPM was to make letters that are not often used appear more frequently, which Bedrune said was probably an attempt to trick password cracking tools. "Their password cracking method relies on the fact that there are probably 'e' and 'a' in a password created by a human than 'x' or 'j', or that the bigrams 'th' and 'he' will appear much more often than 'qx' or 'zr'," he said. "Passwords generated by KPM will be, on average, far in the list of candidate passwords tested by these tools. If an attacker tries to crack a list of passwords generated by KPM, he will probably wait quite a long time until the first one is found. This is quite clever." The flip side was that if an attacker could deduce that KPM was used, then the bias in the password generator started to work against it.

"If an attacker knows a person uses KPM, he will be able to break his password much more easily than a fully random password. Our recommendation is, however, to generate random passwords long enough to be too strong to be broken by a tool." The big mistake made by KPM though was using the current system time in seconds as the seed into a Mersenne Twister pseudorandom number generator. "It means every instance of Kaspersky Password Manager in the world will generate the exact same password at a given second," Bedrune said. Because the program has an animation that takes longer than a second when a password is created, Bedrune said it could be why this issue was not discovered. "The consequences are obviously bad: every password could be bruteforced," he said. Bedrune added due to sites often showing account creation time, that would leave KPM users vulnerable to a bruteforce attack of around 100 possible passwords. "Kaspersky was informed of the vulnerability in June 2019, and released the fix version in October that same year," adds ZDNet. "In October 2020, users were notified that some passwords would need to be generated, with Kaspersky publishing its security advisory on 27 April 2021."

"All public versions of Kaspersky Password Manager liable to this issue now have a new logic of password generation and a passwords update alert for cases when a generated password is probably not strong enough," the security company said.

Motherboard bought an FBI "Anom" phone that the agency secretly sells to criminals to monitor their communications. Joseph Cox reports: The sleek, black phone seems perfectly normal. Unlocking the Google Pixel 4a with a PIN code reveals some common apps: Tinder, Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, and even Candy Crush. But none of those apps work, and tapping their icons doesn't do anything. Resetting the phone and typing in another PIN opens up an entirely different section of the device, with a new background and new apps. Now in place of the old apps sit a clock, a calculator, and the device's settings. Clicking the calculator doesn't open a calculator -- it opens a login screen.

"Enter Anom ID" and a password, the screen reads. Hidden in the calculator is a concealed messaging app called Anom, which last month we learned was an FBI honeypot. On Anom, criminals believed they could communicate securely, with the app encrypting their messages. They were wrong: an international group of law enforcement agencies including the FBI were monitoring their messages and announced hundreds of arrests last month. International authorities have held press conferences to tout the operation's success, but have provided few details on how the phones actually functioned.

Motherboard has obtained and analyzed an Anom phone from a source who unknowingly bought one on a classified ads site. On that site, the phone was advertised as just a cheap Android device. But when the person received it, they realized it wasn't an ordinary phone, and after being contacted by Motherboard, found that it contained the secret Anom app. When booting up the phone, it displays a logo for an operating system called "ArcaneOS." Very little information is publicly available on ArcaneOS. It's this detail that has helped lead several people who have ended up with Anom phones to realize something was unusual about their device. Most posts online discussing the operating system appear to be written by people who have recently inadvertently bought an Anom device, and found it doesn't work like an ordinary phone. After the FBI announced the Anom operation, some Anom users have scrambled to get rid of their device, including selling it to unsuspecting people online. The person Motherboard obtained the phone from was in Australia, where authorities initially spread the Anom devices as a pilot before expanding into other countries.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2013, eight tech companies were accused of funneling their users' data to the U.S. National Security Agency under the so-called PRISM program, according to highly classified government documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Six months later, the tech companies formed a coalition under the name Reform Government Surveillance, which as the name would suggest was to lobby lawmakers for reforms to government surveillance laws. The idea was simple enough: to call on lawmakers to limit surveillance to targeted threats rather than conduct a dragnet collection of Americans' private data, provide greater oversight and allow companies to be more transparent about the kinds of secret orders for user data that they receive.

Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo and AOL were the founding members of Reform Government Surveillance, or RGS, and over the years added Amazon, Dropbox, Evernote, Snap and Zoom as members. But then sometime in June 2019, Evernote quietly disappeared from the RGS website without warning. What's even more strange is that nobody noticed for two years, not even Evernote. "We hadn't realized our logo had been removed from the Reform Government Surveillance website," said an Evernote spokesperson, when reached for comment by TechCrunch. "We are still members."

Google used anticompetitive practices in an attempt to "preemptively quash" Samsung's Galaxy Store, and prevent it from becoming a viable competitor to its own Play Store. From a report: That's according to an antitrust lawsuit filed by a coalition of three dozen state attorney general, which accuses Google of illegally attempting to control app distribution on Android. The suit also alleges Google paid off app developers to stop them circumventing its store. The allegations challenge one of Google's core defenses of its policies, which is that unlike Apple's iOS rules, Android allows both competing app stores and side-loading apps directly. The lawsuit is effectively claiming that this openness is a facade, because while customers technically have the choice of where to get their apps from, Google's business practices have prevented a viable app store competitor from emerging.

"Google felt deeply threatened when Samsung began to revamp its own app store, the Samsung Galaxy Store," the suit says, and describes Google's approach to the competing store as "a threat it needed to preemptively quash." The suit outlines a range of tactics Google allegedly used to prevent Samsung's store from becoming a viable competitor. It claims Google used revenue share agreements with Android phone manufacturers that "outright prohibited" pre-installing some other app stores, and that it made "a direct attempt to pay Samsung to abandon relationships with top developers and scale back competition through the Samsung Galaxy Store."

A group of privacy-focused tech companies including DuckDuckGo, Vivaldi, and the company that makes Protonmail are calling for a broad ban on targeted, "surveillance-based" advertising. Motherboard reports: "Although we recognize that advertising is an important source of revenue for content creators and publishers online, this does not justify the massive commercial surveillance systems set up in attempts to 'show the right ad to the right people,'" the letter reads. The letter urges lawmakers in the United States and European Union to enact data protection laws that could protect consumers from the "privacy-hostile" practices that many companies turn to for their advertising. It explains that exploiting users' privacy for the sake of personalized ads is not necessary for companies to be profitable.

Many of the signatories, including Proton Technologies and DuckDuckGo, already prioritize data protection in their services. Mojeek, an independent search engine, posted in 2006 about its efforts to avoid using "big brother tactics" and collecting personal user data in order to make money. Many of these companies make money by advertising, but the advertising is "contextual" rather than targeted. For a search engine, this means that an advertiser can buy ads that show up when a user searches a specific term. This is different from targeted advertising, which in this example could potentially take into account a user's search history, their demographic and biographic info, their web browsing history, their geographic location, etc.

The attorneys general of 36 states and Washington, D.C., sued Google "alleging that the company illegally abused its power over developers that distribute apps through the Google Play store on mobile devices," according to Bloomberg. From the report: State attorneys general are targeting the fees Google takes from developers for purchases and subscriptions inside apps. The complaint was filed by 36 states and the District of Columbia in San Francisco federal court Wednesday. The complaint marks a new attack by government officials in the U.S. against the search engine's business practices. The Justice Department and a group of states filed separate complaints over Google's search business last year, while another state coalition sued over Google's digital advertising business. The states are taking on Google even after a federal judge in Washington last week threw out their antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. That case accused Facebook of illegally crushing competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp because it saw them as threats to its business. The judge said the states waited too long to challenge the acquisitions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: With only 30 minutes of audio, companies can now create a digital clone of your voice and make it say words you never said. Using machine learning, voice AI companies like VocaliD can create synthetic voices from a person's recorded speech -- adopting unique qualities like speaking rhythm, pronunciation of consonants and vowels, and intonation. For tech companies, the ability to generate any sentence with a realistic-sounding human voice is an exciting, cost-saving frontier. But for the voice actors whose recordings form the foundation of text-to-speech (TTS) voices, this technology threatens to disrupt their livelihoods, raising questions about fair compensation and human agency in the age of AI.

At the center of this reckoning is voice actress Bev Standing, who is suing TikTok after alleging the company used her voice for its text-to-speech feature without compensation or consent. This is not the first case like this; voice actress Susan Bennett discovered that audio she recorded for another company was repurposed to be the voice of Siri after Apple launched the feature in 2011. She was paid for the initial recording session but not for being Siri. Rallying behind Standing, voice actors donated to a GoFundMe that has raised nearly $7,000 towards her legal expenses and posted TikTok videos under the #StandingWithBev hashtag warning users about the feature. Standing's supporters say the TikTok lawsuit is not just about Standing's voice -- it's about the future of an entire industry attempting to adapt to new advancements in the field of machine learning.

Standing's case materializes some performers' worst fears about the control this technology gives companies over their voices. Her lawsuit claims TikTok did not pay or notify her to use her likeness for its text-to-speech feature, and that some videos using it voiced "foul and offensive language" causing "irreparable harm" to her reputation. Brands advertising on TikTok also had the text-to-speech voice at their disposal, meaning her voice could be used for explicitly commercial purposes. [...] Laws protecting individuals from unauthorized clones of their voices are also in their infancy. Standing's lawsuit invokes her right of publicity, which grants individuals the right to control commercial uses of their likeness, including their voice. In November 2020, New York became the first state to apply this right to digital replicas after years of advocacy from SAG-AFTRA, a performers' union. "We look to make sure that state rights of publicity are as strong as they can be, that any limitations on people being able to protect their image and voice are very narrowly drawn on first amendment lines," Jeffrey Bennett, a general counsel for SAG-AFTRA, told Motherboard. "We look at this as a potentially great right of publicity case for this voice professional whose voice is being used in a commercial manner without her consent."