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This week the Free Software Foundation "backed a lone developer's brave effort to overturn a pivotal court ruling that threatens to undermine the AGPLv3 — the foundation's GNU Affero General Public License, version 3," reports the Register. "At stake is the future of not just the AGPLv3, but the FSF's widely used GNU Public License it is largely based on, and the software covered...

Sam Bankman-Fried — one of the largest donors to the Democratic Party — "was convicted of fraud, sentenced to 25 years in prison and mostly went silent," reports the Wall Street Journal. "Until recently..." Now, from behind bars at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, Bankman-Fried is orchestrating an extraordinary public-relations blitz that looks very much like a campaign to make the most audacious...

Equuleus42 (Slashdot reader #723) brings word that the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is sharing a new tool for fighting back against cellphone surveillance by Stingray cell-site simulators. Android Authority reports: "Rayhunter" uses an open-source software package designed to look for evidence of IMSI catchers in action, running on an old Orbic Speed RC400L mobile hotspot. The great thing about that choice is that you...

Signal President Meredith Whittaker warned at SXSW that agentic AI poses significant privacy and security risks, as these AI agents require extensive access to users' personal data, likely processing it unencrypted in the cloud. TechCrunch reports: "So we can just put our brain in a jar because the thing is doing that and we don't have to touch it, right?," Whittaker mused. Then she...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A 37-year-old Tennessee man was arrested Thursday, accused of stealing Blu-rays and DVDs from a manufacturing and distribution company used by major movie studios and sharing them online before the movies' scheduled release dates. According to a US Department of Justice press release, Steven Hale worked at the DVD company and allegedly stole "numerous 'pre-release'...

President Trump has signed an executive order to establish a strategic reserve of cryptocurrencies by using tokens already owned by the government. Reuters reports: A "Strategic Bitcoin Reserve" will be capitalized with bitcoin owned by the federal government that was seized as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings, the White House crypto czar, billionaire David Sacks, said in a post on social...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, music labels sought to add nearly 500 more sound recordings to a lawsuit accusing the Internet Archive (IA) of mass copyright infringement through its Great 78 Project, which seeks to digitize all 3 million three-minute recordings published on 78 revolutions-per-minute (RPM) records from about 1898 to the 1950s. If the labels' proposed second...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: DuckDuckGo has big plans for embedding AI into its search engine. The privacy-focused company just announced that its AI-generated answers, which appear for certain queries on its search engine, have exited beta and now source information from across the web -- not just Wikipedia. It will soon integrate web search within its AI chatbot, which...

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is proposing to expand mandatory social media screening, currently required only for new arrivals, to include all non-citizens already residing in the U.S. who apply for immigration benefits. The Register reports: Back in 2019, the Department of Homeland Security, which runs USCIS, decided anyone looking to enter the US on a work visa or similar had to...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Alphabet on Thursday seeking its communications with former President Joe Biden's administration about content moderation policies. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, a Republican, also asked the YouTube parent company for similar communications with companies and groups outside government, according to a copy of the subpoena seen by Reuters. The...

1Password has introduced a 'nearby items' feature, allowing users to tag credentials with physical locations so the relevant information automatically surfaces when users are near those locations. Engadget reports: Location information can be added to any new or existing item in a 1Password vault. The app has also been updated with a map view for setting and viewing the locations of your items. In...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Trump administration is eliminating a preference for fiber Internet in a $42.45 billion broadband deployment program, a change that is expected to reduce spending on the most advanced wired networks while directing more money to Starlink and other non-fiber Internet service providers. One report suggests Starlink could obtain $10 billion to $20 billion under...

India's income tax department will gain powers to access citizens' social media accounts, emails and other digital spaces beginning April 2026 under the new income tax bill, in a significant expansion of its search and seizure authority. The legislation, which has raised privacy concerns among legal experts, allows tax officers to "gain access by overriding the access code" to computer systems and "virtual digital...

Nintendo has trumpeted its latest legal success in the company's ongoing fight against pirated games as "significant" not only for itself, "but for the entire games industry." From a report: The Mario maker today confirmed it had won a final victory over French file-sharing company Dstorage, which operates the website 1fichier.com, following years of legal wrangling and repeated appeals. Nintendo's victory means European file-sharing...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: After a group of attorneys were caught using AI to cite cases that didn't actually exist in court documents last month, another lawyer was told to pay $15,000 for his own AI hallucinations that showed up in several briefs. Attorney Rafael Ramirez, who represented a company called HoosierVac in an ongoing case where the Mid...

CISA has warned U.S. federal agencies about active exploitation of vulnerabilities in Cisco VPN routers and Windows systems. "While the cybersecurity agency has tagged these flaws as actively exploited in the wild, it has yet to provide specific details regarding this malicious activity and who is behind it," adds Bleeping Computer. From the report: The first flaw (tracked as CVE-2023-20118) enables attackers to execute...

Despite a January announcement that America would explore the idea of a national digital asset stockpile, the exact cryptocurrecies weren't specified. Today on social media the president posted that it would include bitcoin, ether, XRP, Solana's SOL token and Cardano's ADA, reports CNBC — prompting a Sunday rally in cryptocurrencies trading. XRP surged 33% after the announcement while the token tied to Solana jumped...

A malicious PyPi package effectively turned its users' systems "into an illicit network for facilitating bulk music downloads," writes The Hacker News. Though the package has been removed from PyPI, researchers at security platform Socket.dev say it enabled "coordinated, unauthorized music downloads from Deezer — a popular streaming service founded in France in 2007." Although automslc, which has been downloaded over 100,000 times, purports...

NBC News reports that Utah could make history as America's first state to ban fluoride in public water systems — even though major medical associations supporting water fluoridation: If signed into law [by the governor], HB0081 would prevent any individual or political subdivision from adding fluoride "to water in or intended for public water systems..." A report published recently in JAMA Pediatrics found a...

"We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible," Mozilla explained Wednesday in a clarification a recent Terms of Use update. "Without it, we couldn't use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the...

Apple is facing a class action lawsuit alleging it misled consumers by falsely claiming certain Apple Watches were carbon neutral, as the carbon offset projects it relied on did not effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Verge reports: Apple said in 2023 that "select case and band combinations" of its Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Ultra 2, and Apple Watch SE would be...

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is set to review a California district court's ruling in Neo4j v. PureThink, which upheld Neo4j's right to modify the GNU AGPLv3 with additional binding terms. If the appellate court affirms this decision, it could set a precedent allowing licensors to impose unremovable restrictions on open-source software, potentially undermining the enforceability of GPL-based licenses and threatening the integrity...

UPDATE (3/1/2025): "We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible," Mozilla explained Wednesday in a clarification a recent Terms of Use update. "Without it, we couldn't use information typed into Firefox, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described...

Researchers at George Mason University discovered a vulnerability in Apple's Find My network that allows hackers to silently track any Bluetooth device as if it were an AirTag, without the owner's knowledge. 9to5Mac reports: Although AirTag was designed to change its Bluetooth address based on a cryptographic key, the attackers developed a system that could quickly find keys for Bluetooth addresses. This was made...