The Houston Chronicle reports: The Texas Supreme Court ruled Friday in a Houston case that Facebook is not a "lawless no-man's-land" and can be held liable for the conduct of pimps who use its technology to recruit and prey on children.

The ruling came in a trio of Houston civil actions involving teenage trafficking victims who met their abusive pimps through Facebook's messaging functions. They sued the California-based social media juggernaut for negligence and product liability, saying that Facebook failed to warn about or attempt to prevent sex trafficking from taking place on its internet platforms. The suits also alleged that Facebook benefited from the sexual exploitation of trafficking victims. The justices said trafficking victims can move forward with lawsuits on the grounds that Facebook violated a provision of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code passed in 2009.

Facebook lawyers argued the company was shielded from liability under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which states that what users say or write online is not akin to a publisher conveying the same message. Essentially, they said, Facebook is immune to these types of lawsuits. The majority wrote, "We do not understand Section 230 to 'create a lawless no-man's-land on the Internet' in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally participate in the evil of online human trafficking... Holding internet platforms accountable for the words or actions of their users is one thing, and the federal precedent uniformly dictates that Section 230 does not allow it," the opinion said. "Holding internet platforms accountable for their own misdeeds is quite another thing. This is particularly the case for human trafficking."

The justices explained that Congress recently amended Section 230 to add the possibility of civil liability for websites that violate state and federal human-trafficking laws. They said under the amended law states may protect residents from internet companies that knowingly or intentionally participate in human trafficking through their action or inaction..... Annie McAdams, a lead attorney for the plaintiffs, said it was a groundbreaking decision. This is the first case to beat Facebook on its argument that it had immunity under Section 230, she said.

The Wall Street Journal reports: Authorities in the U.K. and Japan took aim at affiliates of Binance Holdings Ltd., the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange network, in the latest regulatory crackdown on the wildly popular trade in bitcoin and other digital assets. The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, the country's lead financial regulator, told consumers Saturday that Binance's local unit wasn't permitted to conduct operations related to regulated financial activities...

Binance Markets Ltd., the company's U.K. arm, applied to be registered with the Financial Conduct Authority and withdrew its application on May 17. "A significantly high number of cryptoasset businesses are not meeting the required standards" under money-laundering regulations, said a spokesperson for the FCA in an email. "Of the firms we've assessed to date, over 90% have withdrawn applications following our intervention."

Japan's financial watchdog issued a statement on June 25, saying that Binance isn't registered to do business in the country...

As of April, Binance operated the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world by trading volume, allowing tens of billions of dollars of trades to pass through its networks, according to data provider CryptoCompare. It was founded in 2017 and initially based in China, later moving offices to Japan and Malta. It recently said it is a decentralized organization with no headquarters... The FCA move doesn't ban customers from using Binance completely; U.K. customers can continue to use Binance's non-U.K. operations for activities the FCA doesn't directly regulate, such as buying and selling direct holdings in bitcoin.
The Financial Times called the move "one of the most significant moves any global regulator has made against Binance" and "a sign of how regulators are cracking down on the cryptocurrency industry over concerns relating to its potential role in illicit activities such as money laundering and fraud, and over often weak consumer protection." But more countries are also taking action, Reuters reports: Last month, Bloomberg reported that officials from the U.S. Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service who probe money laundering and tax offences had sought information from individuals with insight into Binance's business. In April, Germany's financial regulator BaFin warned the exchange risked being fined for offering digital tokens without an investor prospectus.
And CoinDesk adds: Binance is no longer open for business in Canada's most populous province, apparently choosing to close shop rather than meet the fate of other cryptocurrency exchanges that have had actions filed against them for allegedly failing to comply with Ontario securities laws.

I sometimes talk about "the family of geeks" — how our shared experiences can bring us together.

But if that's true, there's been a death in the family.... Manatee County Administrator Scott Hopes, who is also an epidemiologist, said six unvaccinated employees, including five in the IT department, tested positive for the virus within a two-week period.

The two IT employees who died last week were identified in local media and obituaries as Mary Knight, 58, and Alphonso Cox, 53.

Hopes said that the one IT employee, 23, exposed to the virus who was vaccinated did not get infected. "This particular outbreak demonstrates the effectiveness, I believe, with the vaccine," he said to reporters Monday. "All of the cases were non-vaccinated. They were unvaccinated." He added in a news release, "Individual employees in the IT Department who were known to be fully vaccinated and who were in close proximity of those who were infected did not contract COVID-19."

But even with the outbreak, masks will remain optional for staffers returning this week, with unvaccinated workers being "encouraged but not required, to follow covid-19 prevention measures...." Manatee County, located in southwest Florida, has fully vaccinated 43 percent of its eligible population. The Manatee Board of County Commissioners repealed coronavirus safety requirements last month and strongly recommended that people visiting the County Administration Building "use their best judgment" to protect themselves from a potential spread of the virus...

When the second employee died Thursday, the decision was made to shut down the building the next day so it could be disinfected. "When you have that many cases, and you have a 40 percent fatality rate, you have to worry," Hopes said to Florida Politics. "I would prefer not to have any more employee funerals." Yet the county announced over the weekend that "face masks will be optional for the public and employees inside the facility...."

Funerals and celebration-of-life events for Knight and Cox are scheduled to take place later this week.
Thanks to Slashdot reader luis_a_espinal (a Florida-based software engineer) for sharing the story. Country administrator Hopes is concerned, reports the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, because "Of the first five cases, all were sick enough to be hospitalized or died. That's not the normal COVID variant that we saw last year." And yet... As officials work to control the outbreak, questions have been raised about how far the county can go to keep employees safe — including whether it can inquire about employees' vaccination status, since the recent victims so far have not been fully vaccinated... "We are allowed to ask," Hopes said. "But they don't have to tell us, and whatever their response is, we are not to ask any further." Manatee County School District General Counsel Mitch Teitelbaum said the school district had the same understanding of privacy laws...

[The county-owned seaport] Port Manatee had reported three new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, spurring fears that the virus was continuing to spread among the county's workforce. On Tuesday, port spokeswoman Virginia Zimmerman said the three cases had been an "aberration" and that there are not any additional cases to report. Zimmerman said the port does not inquire about employees' vaccination status, and that the port "encourages, but does not require, staff to be vaccinated."

While the county scrambles to mitigate the spread of the virus, Hopes said many county employees are grieving the loss of their coworkers.

"These weren't just colleagues," Hopes said. "These people have basically lived at work together for 20 years, and this happened quickly."

The Washington Post reports that this week the U.S. government "banned the import of solar panels and other goods made with materials produced by a Chinese company that it accused of using forced laborers from China's Xinjiang region, a move likely to complicate the U.S. push toward clean energy." U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued a withhold release order Thursday barring silicon-based products from the company, Hoshine Silicon, which operates from plants in Xinjiang that have been connected to coercive state labor programs targeting Uyghurs and other minorities, as The Post reported on Thursday.

The order could have widespread impact on the solar industry, which is dominated by Chinese suppliers that source materials from Hoshine, the world's largest producer of metallurgical-grade silicon, a key raw material in solar panels. "Almost the complete solar industry is affected by Hoshine," said Johannes Bernreuter, a research analyst in Germany who studies the solar supply chain... By banning only Hoshine imports, CBP stopped short of targeting Xinjiang producers of another key solar ingredient, polysilicon. Those producers have also been connected to coercive labor programs targeting Uyghurs. In a note to investors, Height Securities described the ban "as a substantive but measured first shot across the bow" by the Biden administration, "which needs solar industry support" as it tries to balance rooting out forced labor in U.S. supply chains and an environmental agenda...

[I]ndustry experts said enforcement could be a challenge given the complexity of the solar supply chain and Hoshine's dominance in the industry. Hoshine has produced metallurgical-grade silicon for at least eight of the world's largest polysilicon makers, according to the company's public statements and annual reports. Analysts say that together these firms account for nearly all of the world's supply of solar-grade polysilicon. The move could also undermine U.S. hopes of cooperating with China on climate change, one of few areas of potential collaboration between the two countries increasingly at loggerheads over human rights and investigating the origin of the covid-19 pandemic... Industry experts say it would be safer for U.S. agents to assume all silicon products entering the United States from China contain at least some material sourced from Hoshine, whose metallurgical-grade silicon is used in a wide range of consumer products, including electronics, cars, chemicals and sealants...

The import ban was the most prominent of several measures the Biden administration took Thursday against China's solar-product suppliers. The Commerce Department also added several Chinese polysilicon producers to an export black list, which bars U.S. entities from exporting technology or other goods to the firms without first obtaining a government license.

The New York Times tells the story of Fayçal Ziraoui, a 38-year-old French-Moroccan business consultant who "caused an online uproar" after saying he'd cracked the last two unsolved ciphers of the four attributed to the Zodiac killer in California "and identified him, potentially ending a 50-year-old quest." Maybe because he said he cracked them in just two weeks. Many Zodiac enthusiasts consider the remaining ciphers — Z32 and Z13 — unsolvable because they are too short to determine the encryption key. An untold number of solutions could work, they say, rendering verification nearly impossible.

But Mr. Ziraoui said he had a sudden thought. The code-crackers who had solved the [earlier] 340-character cipher in December had been able to do so by identifying the encryption key, which they had put into the public domain when announcing their breakthrough. What if the killer used that same encryption key for the two remaining ciphers? So he said he applied it to the 32-character cipher, which the killer had included in a letter as the key to the location of a bomb set to go off at a school in the fall of 1970. (It never did, even though police failed to crack the code.) That produced a sequence of random letters from the alphabet. Mr. Ziraoui said he then worked through a half-dozen steps including letter-to-number substitutions, identifying coordinates in numbers and using a code-breaking program he created to crunch jumbles of letters into coherent words...

After two weeks of intense code-cracking, he deciphered the sentence, "LABOR DAY FIND 45.069 NORT 58.719 WEST." The message referred to coordinates based on the earth's magnetic field, not the more familiar geographic coordinates. The sequence zeroed in on a location near a school in South Lake Tahoe, a city in California referred to in another postcard believed to have been sent by the Zodiac killer in 1971.

An excited Mr. Ziraoui said he immediately turned to Z13, which supposedly revealed the killer's name, using the same encryption key and various cipher-cracking techniques. [The mostly un-coded letter includes a sentence which says "My name is _____," followed by a 13-character cipher.] After about an hour, Mr. Ziraoui said he came up with "KAYR," which he realized resembled the last name of Lawrence Kaye, a salesman and career criminal living in South Lake Tahoe who had been a suspect in the case. Mr. Kaye, who also used the pseudonym Kane, died in 2010.

The typo was similar to ones found in previous ciphers, he noticed, likely errors made by the killer when encoding the message. The result that was so close to Mr. Kaye's name and the South Lake Tahoe location were too much to be a coincidence, he thought. Mr. Kaye had been the subject of a report by Harvey Hines, a now-deceased police detective, who was convinced he was the Zodiac killer but was unable to convince his superiors. Around 2 a.m. on Jan. 3, an exhausted but elated Mr. Ziraoui posted a message entitled "Z13 — My Name is KAYE" on a 50,000-member Reddit forum dedicated to the Zodiac Killer.

The message was deleted within 30 minutes.

"Sorry, I've removed this one as part of a sort of general policy against Z13 solution posts," the forum's moderator wrote, arguing that the cipher was too short to be solvable.

Space.com reports: The U.S. government needs some more time to get to the bottom of the UFO mystery. That's the main take-home message from the highly anticipated UFO report released Friday.

"The limited amount of high-quality reporting on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) hampers our ability to draw firm conclusions about the nature or intent of UAP," the report's executive summary states, using the military's now-preferred term for "UFO" (presumably because that older acronym has a lot of baggage attached to it).
Or, as CNET puts it, "all those sightings of bizarre things in the sky over the years fall into several categories, require more study and remain largely unexplained and unidentified." (Though they point out the Department of Defense's "UAP" Task Force reported eleven "documented instances in which pilots reported near misses...")

The report drew a response from Chris Carter, who created The X-Files, a TV drama about a government conspiracy hiding evidence of UFO's. Filming the show brought Carter in contact with real-world people who claimed they'd seen aliens, and he still thinks that when it comes to UFO, most of us are not quite there yet — but want to believe: The universe is just too vast for us to be alone in it. Carl Jung wanted to believe, as did Carl Sagan. Both wrote books on the subject... Can the new report, or any government report, give us clear answers?

I'm as skeptical now as I've ever been... [F]or me, the report on U.F.O.s was dead on arrival. Ordered up by a bipartisan group of legislators during the Trump administration, the interim report revealed nothing conclusive about U.F.O.s or their extraterrestrial origins. And the portions that remain classified will only fuel more conspiracy theories.

This is "X-Files" territory if there ever was any...

Writing on CNN, an American historian looks at the Supreme Court's recent 8-1 ruling in favor of the free-speech rights of Brandi Levy, who as a 14-year-old cheerleader had posted a photo to Snapchat cursing out her school and its cheerleading program. But the historian also suggests where this ruling came up short: In recent decades the Court has sought to widen public schools' parental and paternalist reach, shrinking the sphere of students' free speech rights... In Levy's case, she was using social media off-campus, outside of school hours, to express a criticism of an extracurricular activity. If her school could control that speech, then there would be very little space left for Levy to express herself.

Yet the Court took too modest an approach to students' rights. The Mahanoy decision was much narrower than the lower court's. The Third Circuit had ruled that the school had no right to interfere with off-campus speech, a decision that would have significantly expanded students' rights. In Mahanoy, the Court ruled that schools may still regulate student speech off-campus, depending on the circumstances (though did not lay out a framework for those circumstances, leaving that to future court decisions)...

[P]ublic schools are more properly (if less creatively) understood as, well, the schools of democracy, where students are taught and guided and given an opportunity to test out the rights of citizenship. Social media have become an integral part of students' public identity — indeed, of many adults' public identity. Students should be taught about the inevitable permanence of ephemeral speech. A Snapchat snap, an Instagram story, a Twitter fleet, all designed to disappear, can easily be made permanent. Levy thought she was making a relatively private, fleeting statement, only to find it memorialized in Supreme Court jurisprudence.

But students should also have more speech protections, be allowed to criticize the institutions in which they spend so much of their time — and be largely free of their school's oversight when they are beyond the schoolhouse gates.

Remember when ProPublica said they'd obtained the tax returns of some of America's richest people?

Now they're reporting that Peter Thiel turned a small retirement account — the kind meant to help middle class investors — "into a $5 billion tax-free piggy bank." Billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned "confiscatory taxes." He's been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And he's bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes. But Thiel doesn't need a man-made island to avoid paying taxes. He has something just as effective: a Roth individual retirement account.

Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall. To put that into perspective, here's how much the average Roth was worth at the end of 2018: $39,108... What's more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions....

While most Americans are dutifully paying taxes — chipping in their part to fund the military, highways and safety-net programs — the country's richest citizens are finding ways to sidestep the tax system. One of the most surprising of these techniques involves the Roth IRA, which limits most people to contributing just $6,000 each year... Yet, from the start, a small number of entrepreneurs, like Thiel, made an end run around the rules: Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock — no matter how giant — are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments.
ProPublica argues Thiel's move alone "deprived the U.S. government of untold millions in tax revenue. Perhaps billions." But he's not the only multi-millionaire they found stashing vast sums into untaxed accounts:

• Ted Weschler, a deputy of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway had $264.4 million at the end of 2018.
• Hedge fund manager Randall Smith, whose Alden Global Capital has gutted newspapers around the country, had $252.6 million in his.
• Warren Buffett, one of the richest men in the world and a vocal supporter of higher taxes on the rich: $20.2 million
• Former Renaissance Technologies hedge fund manager Robert Mercer: $31.5 million

According to The New York Times, citing a highly anticipated UFO report released on Friday, "The government still has no explanation for nearly all of the scores of unidentified aerial phenomena reported over almost two decades and investigated by a Pentagon task force, [...] a result that is likely to fuel theories of otherworldly visitations." From the report: A total of 143 reports gathered since 2004 remain unexplained, the document released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. Of those, 21 reports of unknown phenomena, involving 18 episodes, possibly demonstrate technological capabilities that are unknown to the United States: objects moving without observable propulsion or with rapid acceleration that is believed to be beyond the capabilities of Russia, China or other terrestrial nations. But, the report said, more rigorous analysis of those episodes is needed. There is no evidence that any of the episodes involve secret American weapons programs, unknown technology from Russia or China or extraterrestrial visitations. But the government report did not rule out those explanations.

The nine-page document essentially declines to draw conclusions, announcing that the available reporting is "largely inconclusive" and noting that limited and inconsistent data created a challenge in evaluating the phenomena. The report said the number of sightings was too limited for a detailed pattern analysis. While they clustered around military training or testing grounds, the report found that that could be the result of collection bias or the presence of cutting-edge sensors in those areas. Government officials outlined a plan to develop, if additional funding is available, a better program to observe and collect data on future unexplained phenomena. [...] The government intends to update Congress within 90 days on efforts to develop an improved collection strategy and what officials are calling a technical road map to develop technology to better observe the phenomena, senior government officials told reporters on Friday. Officials said they would provide lawmakers with periodical updates beyond that.

An anonymous reader shares a report: By this point in the internet's history, most of us have come to terms with the fact that accessing the web involves giving up information about ourselves every time we visit a website. Mozilla thinks we can do better, and so it's launching Rally, a data-sharing platform and plugin the company claims is the first-of-its-kind in the browser space. With Rally, Mozilla says it hopes to make a case for an equitable market for data, "one where every party is treated fairly" and "where people understand the value of their data." In practice, Rally will allow you to share your browsing data with computer scientists and sociologists studying the web. Out of the gate, they'll be a single study from Princeton University that seeks to understand how people find, consume and share news about politics and COVID-19. At some point later, Beyond the Paywall from Stanford University will examine the economics needed for a more sustainable news landscape.

AmiMoJo shares a report from TorrentFreak: Police in Japan have arrested three individuals who uploaded so-called "fast movies" to YouTube. These edits of mainstream movie titles, that use copyrighted content to reveal entire plotlines in around 10 minutes, are said to discourage people from watching the originals, costing the industry hundreds of millions in lost revenue. According to Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), there are channels with hundreds of uploads being viewed tens of millions of times, often with a for-profit motive. This means that they may fall outside traditional "fair use" style exceptions.

Miyagi Prefectural Police Life Safety Division and the Shiogama Police Station arrested three suspects under suspicion of uploading "fast movies" to YouTube without the rightsholders' consent. The arrests were reportedly carried out under the Copyright Act, which was boosted with new amendments on January 1, 2021. "From June to July 2020, the suspects edited 'I Am a Hero' and two other motion pictures owned by Toho Co., Ltd. as well as 'Cold Fish' and one other motion picture owned by Nikkatsu Corporation down to about 10 minutes without the permission of the right holders. Further, the suspects added narration and uploaded the videos to YouTube to earn advertising revenue," CODA explains. All of the channels shared by CODA appear to be operated from Japan but there is no shortage of YouTube channels operated from the US too.

The House Judiciary Committee advanced a bill to prevent companies like Amazon.com, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet's Google from favoring their own products, a measure that critics warned could complicate the use of Apple's own apps on its iPhone or shopping on Amazon. From a report: The legislation was the fifth bill out of six being taken up by the committee in a session that ran for nearly 20 hours into early Thursday morning, before breaking until later in the day. The measure, sponsored by antitrust subcommittee Chair David Cicilline, advanced on a narrowly bipartisan 24-20 vote. The marathon session featured recurring clashes over whether software giant Microsoft would be subject to the committee's four bills focused on the biggest tech companies. The criteria for a "covered platform" in those proposals are based on market capitalization, monthly users and whether other businesses depend on the company's services. The extensive back and forth featured debate about antitrust principles, content moderation, freedom of speech and even how legislation should define a foreign adversary. These discussions didn't fall along party lines, and in some cases showed disagreement among Democrats and found Republicans pitted against each other.

Google is announcing today that it is delaying its plans to phase out third-party cookies in the Chrome browser until 2023, a year or so later than originally planned. From a report: Other browsers like Safari and Firefox have already implemented some blocking against third-party tracking cookies, but Chrome is the most-used desktop browser, and so its shift will be more consequential for the ad industry. That's why the term "cookiepocalypse" has taken hold. In the blog post announcing the delay, Google says that decision to phase out cookies over a "three month period" in mid-2023 is "subject to our engagement with the United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)." In other words, it is pinning part of the delay on its need to work more closely with regulators to come up with new technologies to replace third-party cookies for use in advertising. Few will shed tears for Google, but it has found itself in a very difficult place as the sole company that dominates multiple industries: search, ads, and browsers.

schwit1 shares a report from CNN: The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a former high school cheerleader who argued that she could not be punished by her public school for posting a profanity-laced caption on Snapchat when she was off school grounds. The case involving a Pennsylvania teenager was closely watched to see how the court would handle the free speech rights of some 50 million public school children and the concerns of schools over off-campus and online speech that could amount to a disruption of the school's mission or rise to the level of bullying or threats.

The 8-1 majority opinion was penned by Justice Stephen Breyer. "It might be tempting to dismiss (the student's) words as unworthy of the robust First Amendment protections discussed herein. But sometimes it is necessary to protect the superfluous in order to preserve the necessary," Breyer wrote. Breyer said that the court has made clear that students "do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression even 'at the school house gate.'" "But," he said, "we have also made clear that courts must apply the First Amendment in light of the special characteristics of the school environment." "The school itself has an interest in protecting a student's unpopular expression, especially when the expression takes place off campus. America's public schools are the nurseries of democracy," the opinion read.

Breyer disagreed with the reasoning of a lower court opinion that held that a school could never regulate speech that takes place off campus, but at the same time he declined to set forth what he called "a broad, highly general First Amendment rules stating just what counts as 'off-campus speech." Instead, he allowed that while the cheerleader's post were "crude" they "did not amount to fighting words." He said that while she used "vulgarity" her speech was not "obscene." In addition, her post appeared "outside of school hours from a location outside of school" and they did not target any member of the school community with "abusive" language. He added that she used her own personal cellphone and her audience consisted of a private circle of Snapchat friends. Breyer said "these features of her speech" diminish the school's interest in punishing her. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented. He wrote that students like the former cheerleader "who are active in extracurricular programs have a greater potential, by virtue of their participation, to harm those programs." He added: "For example, a profanity-laced screed delivered on social media or at the mall has a much different effect on a football program when done by a regular student than when done by the captain of the football team. So, too, here."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon won a Texas trial in which it was accused of incorporating an Israeli company's patented "smart kitchen" inventions for voice commands to shop for groceries online into the Alexa digital assistant. Amazon didn't infringe three patents owned by closely held Ikan Holdings LLC's Freshub unit, the federal jury in Waco, Texas, said Tuesday. Freshub said its inventions allow consumers to create shopping lists, establish a shopping cart and order from their local grocer by using voice commands or scanning bar codes of products with an internet-connected device. Amazon knew of Freshub and its patents when it incorporated the technology into its Alexa assistant and Echo smart speakers, and promoted it for use with its Whole Foods grocery chain, Freshub claimed.

Amazon accused the company of manipulating patent applications to ensure they covered Alexa and Echo after the popular products had already entered the market. Amazon also warned jurors that a victory for Freshub would mean more lawsuits by the company against other tech firms like Apple and Google. Freshub argued consumers using the technology spent more money, so it was entitled to $3.50 per unit sold with the functionality, for a total of $246 million. Amazon argued that the patents were worth at most $1 million.

Sony Music has obtained an injunction that requires the freely available DNS-resolver Quad9 to block a popular pirate site. The order, issued by the District Court in Hamburg, Germany, is the first of its kind. The Quad9 foundation has already announced that it will protest the judgment, which could have far-reaching consequences. TorrentFreak reports: The Hamburg court found that the DNS service is not eligible for the liability protections that other third-party intermediaries such as ISPs and domain registrars typically enjoy. And if Quad9 fails to comply with the injunction, it will have to pay a fine of 250,000 euros per 'infringing' DNS query plus potentially two years in prison. One of the arguments that Sony brought up in court was that Quad9 already blocks various problematic sites voluntarily. In fact, the DNS-resolver promotes threat blocking as a feature. "Quad9 blocks against known malicious domains, preventing your computers and IoT devices from connecting to malware or phishing sites," the company's website reads.

Bill Woodcock, chairman of the Quad9 foundation, doesn't believe that the company's malware and phishing filters, which help to protect users, are on par with blocking a pirate site. He informed the German news site Heise that Quad9 will appeal to the injunction. Speaking with TorrentFreak, Quad9's General Manager, John Todd, says that the company is still reviewing the order, which it received last Friday. The non-profit foundation doesn't believe its resources should be used to benefit for-profit companies such as Sony.

Senior executives at a French spyware firm have been indicted for the company's sale of surveillance software to authoritarian regimes in Libya and Egypt that resulted in the torture and disappearance of dissidents. MIT Technology Review reports: While high-tech surveillance is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide, it is rare for companies or individuals to face legal consequences for selling such technologies -- even to notorious dictatorships or other dangerous regimes. But charges in the Paris Judicial Court against leaders at Amesys, a surveillance company that later changed its name to Nexa Technology, claim that the sales to Libya and Egypt over the last decade led to the crushing of opposition, torture of dissidents, and other human rights abuses. The former head of Amesys, Philippe Vannier, and three current and former executives at Nexa technologies were indicted for "complicity in acts of torture" for selling spy technology to the Libyan regime. French media report that Nexa president Olivier Bohbot, managing director Renaud Roques, and former president Stephane Salies face the same charges for surveillance sales to Egypt.

The charges were brought by brought by the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes unit of the court, but the case began 10 years ago when Amesys sold its system for listening in on internet traffic to the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Six victims of the spying testified in France about being arrested and tortured by the regime, an experience that they say is a direct result of these spying tools. In 2014, the company sold surveillance software to Egyptian president Abdel al-Sisi shortly after he took control of the country in a military coup. The complaints, filed by the International Federation for Human Rights, or FIDH, and the French League for Human Rights, allege that the company did not have government permission to sell its technologies to Libya or Egypt because oversight was weak and at times nonexistent. The claims led to an independent judicial investigation against Amesys/Nexa, which is still ongoing. Next, the judges will decide whether to send the case to criminal court or dismiss it if there is not sufficient evidence -- but the indictment is a major step forward and points toward the prospect that the judges will view the evidence as potentially strong enough to support a criminal trial.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In a short CCTV video, a clerk at a small convenience store can be seen taking a bottle of coffee from a cooler and drinking it. When he returns to the cash register, an unseen person's voice emits from a speaker on the ceiling and interrogates him about whether he scanned and paid for the item. In another video, a cashier is standing behind the counter talking to someone just out of frame. There's a 'ding' sound, and the voice from above questions the cashier about who the other man is -- he's there to give the cashier a ride at the end of his shift -- then orders the man to stand on the other side of the counter.

The videos are just a few examples that Washington-based Live Eye Surveillance uses to demonstrate its flagship product: a surveillance camera system that keeps constant watch over shops and lets a remote human operator intervene whenever they see something they deem suspicious. For enough money -- $399 per month according to one sales email Motherboard viewed -- a person in Karnal, India will watch the video feed from your business 24/7. The monitors "act as a virtual supervisor for the sites, in terms of assuring the safety of the employees located overseas and requesting them to complete assigned tasks," according to a job posting on the company's website. [...] On its website, the company claims several major corporations as customers, including 7-Eleven, Shell, Dairy Queen, and Holiday Inn. Many of those businesses are franchised, and it isn't clear from Live Eye's materials whether the corporations have purchased the surveillance systems or if they've been bought by individual franchise owners.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: While bitcoin leaves a visible trail of transactions on its underlying blockchain, the niche "privacy coin" monero was designed to obscure the sender and receiver, as well as the amount exchanged. As a result, it has become an increasingly sought-after tool for criminals such as ransomware gangs, posing new problems for law enforcement. "We've seen ransomware groups specifically shifting to monero," said Bryce Webster-Jacobsen, director of intelligence at GroupSense, a cyber security group that has helped a growing number of victims pay out ransoms in monero. "[Cyber criminals] have recognized the ability for mistakes to be made using bitcoin that allow blockchain transactions to reveal their identity."

Russia-linked REvil, the notorious ransomware group believed to be behind the attack this month on meatpacker JBS, has removed the option of paying in bitcoin this year, demanding monero only, according to Brett Callow, threat analyst at Emsisoft. Meanwhile, both DarkSide, the group blamed for the Colonial Pipeline hack, and Babuk, which was behind the attack on Washington DC police this year, allow payments in either cryptocurrency but charge a 10 to 20 percent premium to victims paying in riskier bitcoin, experts say. Justin Ehrenhofer, a cryptocurrency compliance expert and member of the monero developer community, said that at the beginning of 2020, its use by ransomware gangs was "a rounding error." Today he estimates that about 10 to 20 percent of ransoms are paid in monero and that the figure will probably rise to 50 percent by the end of the year.

Brave, the maker of a popular ad blocking browser, opened on Tuesday a public beta of its privacy-focused search engine, a first step in creating a product that could compete with market titan Google. From a report: Unlike other new search engines, which generally repackage results from Google and Microsoft's Bing, Brave is building an independent index of the web. (Brave Search will rely on Bing in some areas, like images, where its own results aren't yet good enough.) Initially, Brave Search won't show ads -- the chief way that Google monetizes its search results. Later, it'll offer free, ad-supported search and a paid option with no ads.