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Valerie Warner is 71 years old — and owes $268,000 in student loans. Roughly 40 years ago she went to law school, but was only able to find work as a legal aid and later work in the public school system, which the Washington Post calls "a rewarding job but one that didn't pay enough to wipe out her loans." Later she earned a...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Lyft is suing the city of San Francisco, claiming the city unfairly charged the ride-hailing company over $100 million in taxes, Bloomberg reports. The lawsuit alleges that, over the course of five years, San Francisco unfairly labeled money earned by Lyft drivers as company revenue. In the complaint, Lyft maintains that its drivers are its customers,...

A new report reveals that the VW Group left sensitive data for 800,000 electric vehicles from Audi, VW, Seat, and Skoda poorly secured on an Amazon cloud, exposing precise GPS locations, battery statuses, and user habits for months. Carscoops reports: It gets worse. A more tech-savvy user could reportedly connect vehicles to their owners' personal credentials, thanks to additional data accessible through VW Group's...

President Biden on Monday signed the SHARE IT Act (H.R. 9566) into law, mandating federal agencies share custom-developed code with each other to prevent duplicative software development contracts and reduce the $12 billion annual government software expenditure. The law requires agencies to publicly list metadata about custom code, establish sharing policies, and align development with best practices while exempting classified, national security, and privacy-sensitive...

Montenegro has approved the extradition of cryptocurrency entrepreneur Do Kwon to the United States over his role in the collapse of TerraUSD and Luna tokens, which wiped out $40 billion from investors and destabilized global crypto markets. The BBC reports: "The Minister of Justice, Bojan Bozovic, issued a decision approving the extradition of the accused, Kwon Do Hyung, to the United States of America,"...

A wave of fraudulent copyright takedowns on YouTube has exposed vulnerabilities in the platform's content moderation system, enabling anonymous users to threaten creators' channels through false legal claims, The Verge is reporting. Several gaming content creators, including a channel with 1.5 million subscribers, received takedown notices from someone impersonating Nintendo's legal team. Though YouTube acknowledged the false claims, the company declined to explain how...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Boston Globe: Every weekday morning at 8:30, Preston Thorpe makes himself a cup of instant coffee and opens his laptop to find the coding tasks awaiting his seven-person team at Unlocked Labs. Like many remote workers, Thorpe, the nonprofit's principal engineer, works out in the middle of the day and often stays at his computer late...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: More than 140 Facebook content moderators have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder caused by exposure to graphic social media content including murders, suicides, child sexual abuse and terrorism. The moderators worked eight- to 10-hour days at a facility in Kenya for a company contracted by the social media firm and were found to...

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) warns that while most adults recognize the importance of wiping personal data from old devices, nearly 30% don't know how, and a significant number of young people either don't care or find it too cumbersome. The Register reports: Clearing personal data off an old device is an important step before ditching it or handing it on to another...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In a landmark ruling, the Court of Milan has ordered (PDF) Cloudflare to block pirate streaming services that offer Serie A football matches. The court found that Cloudflare's services are instrumental in facilitating access to live pirate streams, undermining Italy's 'Piracy Shield' legislation. The order, which applies in Italy, affects Cloudflare's CDN, DNS resolver, WARP and...

Netflix has sued Broadcom in California federal court, accusing the chipmaker's cloud computing subsidiary VMware of violating its patent rights in virtual machines. From a report: The lawsuit said VMware's cloud software infringes five Netflix patents covering aspects of operating virtual machines. Broadcom and Netflix have been embroiled in a separate patent dispute since 2018 over Netflix's alleged infringement of Broadcom patents related to...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is suing Walmart and payroll service provider Branch Messenger for alleged illegal payment practices for gig workers. The bureau says Walmart was opening direct deposit accounts using Spark delivery drivers' social security numbers without their consent. The accounts also can come with intense fees that, according to the complaint,...

Vietnam's Decree 147 mandates social media users on platforms like Facebook and TikTok to verify their identities and requires tech companies to store and share user data with authorities upon request, sparking concerns over increased censorship, self-censorship, and threats to free expression. Furthermore, the decree imposes restrictions on gaming time for minors and limits livestreaming to verified accounts. It becomes effective on Christmas Day....

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Health care company Ascension lost sensitive data for nearly 5.6 million individuals in a cyberattack that was attributed to a notorious ransomware gang, according to documents filed with the attorney general of Maine. Ascension owns 140 hospitals and scores of assisted living facilities. In May, the organization was hit with an attack that caused mass...

The Biden administration has launched a Section 301 investigation into China's semiconductor industry, citing concerns over non-market practices, supply chain dependencies, and national security risks. The Hill reports: In a fact sheet, the White House said China "routinely engages in non-market policies and practices, as well as industrial targeting, of the semiconductor industry" that harms competition and creates "dangerous supply chain dependencies." The Biden...

An anonymous reader shares a report: A lawyer defending an alleged distributor of Anom, the encrypted phone company for criminals that the FBI secretly ran and backdoored to intercept tens of millions of messages, is pushing to learn the identity of the confidential human source (CHS) who first created Anom and provided it to the FBI starting the largest sting operation in history, according...

A U.S. judge has ruled that Israeli spyware maker NSO Group breached hacking laws by using WhatsApp to infect devices with its Pegasus spyware. From a report: In a historic ruling on Friday, a Northern California federal judge held NSO Group liable for targeting the devices of 1,400 WhatsApp users, violating state and federal hacking laws as well as WhatsApp's terms of service, which...

It's not who owns AI training data. The Boston Review asks who owns its output? In a conversation with Microsoft's Copilot, I invited the AI to speculate what kind of thing it might write if it were not confined to answering human prompts. Among its answers was this response about its own intelligence: "Humans are inferior to AI in many ways. Humans are slow,...

A series of drone sightings over U.S. military bases "has renewed concerns that the U.S. doesn't have clear government-wide policy for how to deal with unauthorized incursions that could potentially pose a national security threat," reports CNN: "We're one year past Langley drone incursions and almost two years past the PRC spy balloon. Why don't we have a single [point of contact] who is...

The Associated Press reports that in Albania (population: 2,402,113), "children comprise the largest group of TikTok users in the country, according to domestic researchers." But "Albania's prime minister said Saturday the government will shut down the video service TikTok for one year, blaming it for inciting violence and bullying, especially among children" after "the stabbing death of a teenager in mid-November by another teen...

"More than a decade after the advent of the 3D-printed gun as an icon of libertarianism and a gun control nightmare, police say one of those homemade plastic weapons has now been found in the hands of perhaps the world's most high-profile alleged killer," Wired wrote this month: For the community of DIY gunsmiths who have spent years honing those printable firearm models, in...

On Thursday New Jersey lawmakers passed a resolution "calling on the federal government to conduct a 'rigorous and ongoing' investigation into the drone sightings in the state," reports the Associated Press: Meanwhile, federal and local authorities are warning against pointing lasers at suspected drones, because aircraft pilots are being hit in the eyes more often. Authorities also said they are concerned people might fire...

The U.S. Department of Justice has charged Russian-Israeli national, Rostislav Panev, for his alleged role as a developer in the LockBit ransomware group, accused of designing malware and maintaining infrastructure for attacks that extorted over $500 million and caused billions in global damages. CyberScoop reports: The arrest is part of a broader campaign by international law enforcement agencies to dismantle LockBit. In February, a...

Jurors delivered a mixed verdict on Friday, ruling that Qualcomm had properly licensed its central processor chips from Arm. This decision effectively concludes Arm's lawsuit against Qualcomm, which had the potential to disrupt the global smartphone and PC chip markets. The dispute stemmed from Qualcomm's $1.4 billion acquisition of chip startup Nuvia in 2021. Arm claimed Qualcomm breached contract terms by using Nuvia's designs...