Policy

elon-musk-denies-knowing-who’s-suing-him-to-dodge-defamation-suit

Elon Musk denies knowing who’s suing him to dodge defamation suit

Policy / /
Elon Musk denies knowing who’s suing him to dodge defamation suit

After Elon Musk was accused of defaming Ben Brody—a 22-year-old Jewish man falsely linked to a neo-Nazi brawl in tweets that Musk responded to last year—the owner of X (formerly Twitter) sat for a heated Zoom deposition where he repeatedly denied ever knowing who Brody was.

When Brody’s attorney, Mark Bankston, asked Musk if he thought he ever did anything “wrong” to Brody, Musk replied, “I don’t know Ben Brody.”

“You’re aware that Ben Brody is somebody who’s sued you, right?” Bankston asked.

“I think you’re the one suing,” Musk said, adding that he views “many cases and probably this one too that the real plaintiff is the lawyer seeking money like you.” Continually, Musk emphasized, “what I think” the defamation case is “really about is about you getting a lot of money.”

Musk filed a motion to dismiss Brody’s case in January, accusing Brody of targeting “Musk’s exercise of his freedom of speech for the improper purpose of obtaining a payment ‘exceed[ing] $1,000,000,’ to which Brody is not entitled from Musk.” In the deposition, Musk accused Bankston of attacking his free speech rights, and in the motion to dismiss, Musk argued that “the public’s discussion of the identity of perpetrators of crime would be unduly trampled by the fear of liability for merely negligent speech,” if Brody won his defamation suit.

In that petition, Musk accused Brody of targeting him because he’s a billionaire, repeatedly pointing out that Brody had not sued other X users who had specifically named Brody as an alleged brawler in blogs and on X.

Musk’s tweet, the motion to dismiss argued, only claimed that a picture of one brawler “looks like” a “college student (who wants to join the govt).” Because the photo was not actually of Brody, Musk argued, and because he never names Brody, then Brody cannot claim he was defamed.

“It is not defamatory to say someone looks like someone else—that is not an accusation of a crime,” Musk’s motion to dismiss said.

But Bankston asked Musk in the deposition if “the reason that you’re saying that it looks like one is a college student” was because of other posts that Musk had seen where right-wing influencers had named Brody as involved in the brawl, describing him as a liberal college student studying political science.

“That’s probably why I’m saying this,” Musk confirmed, while arguing that he was obviously “speculating” in the tweet, which is why he tagged Community Notes to “fact-check” his own tweet.

“I can see a picture of my brother and say that looks like my brother, but it might not be my brother,” Musk argued.

Bankston told Musk that his X post garnered more than a million views, asking Musk, “Do you think you owed it to Ben Brody to be accurate as you could?”

Musk told Bankston that he aspires “to be accurate no matter who the person is,” suggesting that while it’s possible to be harmed by people posting false information, he did not think Brody was harmed by his tweet.

“I don’t think he has been meaningfully harmed by this,” Musk said, insisting to Bankston that he could not have defamed Brody because “I have no ill will to Ben Brody. I don’t know Ben Brody.”

Brody’s complaint alleged that Musk boosting a post linking him to the neo-Nazi brawl has caused permanent reputational damage and severe emotional harm. Bankston declined Ars’ request to comment on whether Brody continues to be a target for harassment and death threats.

“People are attacked all the time in the media, online media, social media, but it is rare that that actually has a meaningful negative impact on their life,” Musk said.

Brody has asked Musk to delete his post, but Musk claims he cannot recall ever being asked. In one of the few times when Alex Spiro, Musk’s attorney, advised Musk not to respond, Musk gave no answer when Bankston asked, “If you knew right now—knowing right now Ben is really upset that this tweet is still up and that he wanted there to be a retraction, how do you feel about that?”

Bankston also confirmed that Musk’s post never got fact-checked by Community Notes and thus appears to still be boosting the misinformation.

Elon Musk denies knowing who’s suing him to dodge defamation suit Read More »

epa-seeks-to-cut-“cancer-alley”-pollutants

EPA seeks to cut “Cancer Alley” pollutants

carcinogens, clean air act, EPA, Policy, pollution, Science, Sustainability, Toxicology / /

Out of the air —

Chemical plants will have to monitor how much is escaping and stop leaks.

–

Image of a large industrial facility on the side of a river.

Enlarge / An oil refinery in Louisiana. Facilities such as this have led to a proliferation of petrochemical plants in the area.

On Tuesday, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced new rules that are intended to cut emissions of two chemicals that have been linked to elevated incidence of cancer: ethylene oxide and chloroprene. While production and use of these chemicals takes place in a variety of locations, they’re particularly associated with an area of petrochemical production in Louisiana that has become known as “Cancer Alley.”

The new regulations would require chemical manufacturers to monitor the emissions at their facilities and take steps to repair any problems that result in elevated emissions. Despite extensive evidence linking these chemicals to elevated risk of cancer, industry groups are signaling their opposition to these regulations, and the EPA has seen two previous attempts at regulation set aside by courts.

Dangerous stuff

The two chemicals at issue are primarily used as intermediates in the manufacture of common products. Chloroprene, for example, is used for the production of neoprene, a synthetic rubber-like substance that’s probably familiar from products like insulated sleeves and wetsuits. It’s a four-carbon chain with two double-bonds that allow for polymerization and an attached chlorine that alters its chemical properties.

According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), chloroprene “is a mutagen and carcinogen in animals and is reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” Given that cancers are driven by DNA damage, any mutagen would be “reasonably anticipated” to drive the development of cancer. Beyond that, it appears to be pretty nasty stuff, with the NCI noting that “exposure to this substance causes damage to the skin, lungs, CNS, kidneys, liver and depression of the immune system.”

The NCI’s take on Ethylene Oxide is even more definitive, with the Institute placing it on its list of cancer-causing substances. The chemical is very simple, with two carbons that are linked to each other directly, and also linked via an oxygen atom, which makes the molecule look a bit like a triangle. This configuration allows the molecule to participate in a broad range of reactions that break one of the oxygen bonds, making it useful in the production of a huge range of chemicals. Its reactivity also makes it useful for sterilizing items such as medical equipment.

Its sterilization function works through causing damage to DNA, which again makes it prone to causing cancers.

In addition to these two chemicals, the EPA’s new regulations will target a number of additional airborne pollutants, including benzene, 1,3-butadiene, ethylene dichloride, and vinyl chloride, all of which have similar entries at the NCI.

Despite the extensive record linking these chemicals to cancer, The New York Times quotes the US Chamber of Commerce, a pro-industry group, as saying that “EPA should not move forward with this rule-making based on the current record because there remains significant scientific uncertainty.”

A history of exposure

The petrochemical industry is the main source of these chemicals, so their release is associated with areas where the oil and gas industry has a major presence; the EPA notes that the regulations will target sources in Delaware, New Jersey, and the Ohio River Valley. But the primary focus will be on chemical plants in Texas and Louisiana. These include the area that has picked up the moniker Cancer Alley due to a high incidence of the disease in a stretch along the Mississippi River with a large concentration of chemical plants.

As is the case with many examples of chemical pollution, the residents of Cancer Alley are largely poor and belong to minority groups. As a result, the EPA had initially attempted to regulate the emissions under a civil rights provision of the Clean Air Act, but that has been bogged down due to lawsuits.

The new regulations simply set limits on permissible levels of release at what’s termed the “fencelines” of the facilities where these chemicals are made, used, or handled. If levels exceed an annual limit, the owners and operators “must find the source of the pollution and make repairs.” This gets rid of previous exemptions for equipment startup, shutdown, and malfunctions; those exemptions had been held to violate the Clean Air Act in a separate lawsuit.

The EPA estimates that the sites subject to regulation will see their collective emissions of these chemicals drop by nearly 80 percent, which works out to be 54 tons of ethylene oxide, 14 tons of chloroprene, and over 6,000 tons of the other pollutants. That in turn will reduce the cancer risk from these toxins by 96 percent among those subjected to elevated exposures. Collectively, the chemicals subject to these regulations also contribute to smog, so these reductions will have an additional health impact by reducing its levels as well.

While the EPA says that “these emission reductions will yield significant reductions in lifetime cancer risk attributable to these air pollutants,” it was unable to come up with an estimate of the financial benefits that will result from that reduction. By contrast, it estimates that the cost of compliance will end up being approximately $150 million annually. “Most of the facilities covered by the final rule are owned by large corporations,” the EPA notes. “The cost of implementing the final rule is less than one percent of their annual national sales.”

This sort of cost-benefit analysis is a required step during the formulation of Clean Air Act regulations, so it’s worth taking a step back and considering what’s at stake here: the EPA is basically saying that companies that work with significant amounts of carcinogens need to take stronger steps to make sure that they don’t use the air people breathe as a dumping ground for them.

Unsurprisingly, The New York Times quotes a neoprene manufacturer that the EPA is currently suing over its chloroprene emissions as claiming the new regulations are “draconian.”

EPA seeks to cut “Cancer Alley” pollutants Read More »

report-details-how-russia-obtains-starlink-terminals-for-war-in-ukraine

Report details how Russia obtains Starlink terminals for war in Ukraine

Policy, russia starlink, spacex starlink, starlink ukraine / /

Starlink black market —

Russians buy from middlemen and “deliver SpaceX hardware to the front line.”

–

A Starlink terminal in front of a sign that says,

Enlarge / A Starlink terminal at the Everything Electric London conference on March 28, 2024 in England.

Getty Images | John Keeble

A report published today describes how Russia obtained Starlink terminals for its war in Ukraine despite US sanctions and SpaceX’s insistence that Russia hasn’t bought the terminals either directly or indirectly.

The Wall Street Journal report describes black market sales to Russians and a Sudanese paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). US Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently determined that the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias committed war crimes and are responsible for ethnic cleansing in Darfur.

The WSJ said it “tracked Starlink sales on numerous Russian online retail platforms,” “interviewed Russian and Sudanese middlemen and resellers, and followed Russian volunteer groups that deliver SpaceX hardware to the front line.”

The WSJ described Oleg, a salesman at Moscow-based online retailer shopozz.ru, who “supplemented his usual business of peddling vacuum cleaners and dashboard phone mounts by selling dozens of Starlink internet terminals that wound up with Russians on the front lines in Ukraine.”

Starlink terminals reportedly provide a technical upgrade to Russian troops whose radio communications were being jammed or intercepted by Ukraine troops.

“In Russia, middlemen buy the hardware, sometimes on eBay, in the US and elsewhere, including on the black market in Central Asia, Dubai or Southeast Asia, then smuggle it into Russia,” the report said. “Russian volunteers boast openly on social media about supplying the terminals to troops. They are part of an informal effort to boost Russia’s use of Starlink in Ukraine, where Russian forces are advancing.”

These “middlemen have proliferated in recent months to buy the user terminals and ship them to Russian forces,” the report said.

Lawmakers doubt SpaceX compliance with sanctions

Today’s report came about a month after two Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to SpaceX alleging that Russia’s use of Starlink in Ukraine raises questions about SpaceX’s “compliance with US sanctions and export controls.”

“We are concerned that you may not have appropriate guardrails and policies in place to ensure your technology is neither acquired directly or indirectly, nor used illegally by Russia,” said the letter from US Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and Robert Garcia (D-Calif.).

In February, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk denied what he called “false news reports [that] claim that SpaceX is selling Starlink terminals to Russia,” saying that, “to the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia.”

We contacted SpaceX today and will update this article if we get a response.

Russia has said it doesn’t allow Starlink use. A spokesperson for Russian President Vladimir Putin said in February that Starlink “is not certified [in Russia], therefore it cannot and is not officially supplied here. It cannot be used in any way.”

The Journal report said that US adversaries have been able to connect to satellites after dealers who sell Starlink terminals “register the hardware in countries where Starlink is allowed.” SpaceX uses geofencing to limit Starlink access, and Musk has said that “Starlink satellites will not close the link in Russia.” But blocking Russian use of Starlink in Ukraine without affecting Ukraine troops’ use of the service would likely be more complicated.

Ukraine, Sudan ask SpaceX for help

Ukraine’s top military-intelligence officer, Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, said in an interview that “Russian invasion forces in his country are using thousands of Starlink satellite Internet terminals, and that the network has been active in occupied parts of Ukraine for ‘quite a long time,'” according to a WSJ report in February.

The Journal’s new report states that “Ukrainian officials said they contacted SpaceX about Russian forces using Starlink terminals in Ukraine and that they are working together on a solution.” The report also quotes US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb as saying that the US is “working with Ukraine and we’re working with Starlink” on how to end Russian use of Starlink in Ukraine.

The RSF reportedly uses Starlink in fighting against government forces. “Sudanese military officials and unauthorized Starlink dealers said in interviews that Abdelrahim Hamdan Dagalo, the RSF’s deputy commander, has overseen the purchase of hundreds of Starlink terminals from dealers in the United Arab Emirates,” the WSJ report said.

The report also said that “Sudanese authorities have contacted SpaceX and requested help in regulating the use of Starlink, including by allowing the military to turn off service areas where it was helping the RSF. Starlink never responded to the request, Sudanese officials said.”

Report details how Russia obtains Starlink terminals for war in Ukraine Read More »

2,000-senior-women-win-“biggest-victory-possible”-in-landmark-climate-case

2,000 senior women win “biggest victory possible” in landmark climate case

climate change, climate inaction, European Court of Human Rights, Human rights, Policy, Switzerland / /
Members of Swiss association Senior Women for Climate Protection react after the announcement of decisions after a hearing of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to decide in three separate cases if states are doing enough in the face of global warming in rulings that could force them to do more, in Strasbourg, eastern France, on April 9, 2024.

Enlarge / Members of Swiss association Senior Women for Climate Protection react after the announcement of decisions after a hearing of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to decide in three separate cases if states are doing enough in the face of global warming in rulings that could force them to do more, in Strasbourg, eastern France, on April 9, 2024.

More than 2,000 older Swiss women have won a landmark European case proving that government climate inaction violates human rights.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled Tuesday that Switzerland had not acted urgently to achieve climate targets, leading victims, who are mostly in their 70s, to suffer physically and emotionally while potentially placed at risk of dying.

The women, part of a group called KlimaSeniorinnen (Senior Women for Climate Protection), filed the lawsuit nine years ago. They presented medical documents and scientific evidence that older women are more vulnerable to climate impacts, arguing that “their health and daily routines were affected” by Swiss heatwaves connected to climate change.

One woman who had to regularly measure her blood pressure and refrain from activities when temperatures were too high told the court that “the thermometer determined the way she led her life.” Another woman described how isolated she felt when “excessive heat” with “highly probable” links to climate change “exacerbated her asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.”

“Evidence showed that the life and health of older women were more severely impacted by periods of heatwaves than the rest of the population,” ECHR’s ruling said, noting that during recent warmest summers on record “nearly 90 percent of heat-related deaths had occurred in older women, almost all of whom were older than 75.”

The ECHR ruled that the Swiss government had violated these women’s rights to respect for private and family life under the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to comply with climate duties or to address “critical gaps” in climate policies. Throughout the proceedings, Swiss authorities acknowledged missing climate targets, including by not properly supervising greenhouse gas emissions in sectors like building and transport, and not regulating emissions in other sectors such as agricultural and financial.

“There was a long history of failed climate action,” ECHR’s ruling said.

“This included a failure to quantify, through a carbon budget or otherwise, national greenhouse gas emissions limitations,” ECHR President Siofra O’Leary said, noting in a Reuters report that Switzerland “had previously failed to meet its past greenhouse gas emission reduction targets by failing to act in good time and in an appropriate and consistent manner.”

As a result of the ECHR ruling, Switzerland may be forced to escalate efforts to reduce fossil fuel consumption, CNN reported.

Swiss President Viola Amherd told a news conference attended by Reuters that she would be reviewing the judgment, seemingly defending the country’s current climate actions by saying that “sustainability is very important to Switzerland, biodiversity is very important to Switzerland, the net zero target is very important to Switzerland.”

The court’s judgment is binding, cannot be appealed, and could “influence the law in 46 countries in Europe including the UK,” the BBC reported. Experts told CNN that the case could also influence other international courts, potentially opening the floodgates to more climate litigation globally.

2,000 senior women win “biggest victory possible” in landmark climate case Read More »

fcc-chair-rejects-call-to-impose-universal-service-fees-on-broadband

FCC chair rejects call to impose Universal Service fees on broadband

federal communications commission, Policy, Universal Service Fund / /
Ethernet cables connected to the ports in a wireless router

Getty Images | BernardaSv

The Federal Communications Commission chair decided not to impose Universal Service fees on Internet service, rejecting arguments for new assessments to shore up an FCC fund that subsidizes broadband network expansions and provides discounts to low-income consumers.

The $8 billion-a-year Universal Service Fund (USF) pays for FCC programs such as Lifeline discounts and Rural Digital Opportunity Fund deployment grants for ISPs. Phone companies must pay a percentage of their revenue into the fund, and telcos generally pass those fees on to consumers with a “Universal Service” line item on telephone bills.

Imposing similar assessments on broadband could increase the Universal Service Fund’s size and/or reduce the charges on phone service, spreading the burden more evenly across different types of telecommunications services. Some consumer advocates want the FCC to increase the fund in order to replace the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), a different government program that gives $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes but is about to run out of money because of inaction by Congress.

The Universal Service funding question is coming up now because, on April 25, the FCC is scheduled to vote on reclassifying broadband as a telecommunications service in order to re-impose the net neutrality rules scrapped during the Trump era.

Chair fears “major upheaval”

Imposing Universal Service charges on broadband would likely result in ISPs adding those costs to monthly bills and would make the net neutrality proceeding even more of a political minefield than it already is. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel’s net neutrality proposal takes the same stance against requiring Universal Service contributions that the FCC took in 2015 when it first imposed the net neutrality rules.

“We conclude that forbearing from imposing new universal service contribution requirements on BIAS [Broadband Internet Access Service] is in the public interest,” Rosenworcel’s proposal says. “For one thing, we agree with commenters who warn that suddenly and unnecessarily imposing new fees on broadband service could pose ‘major upheaval in what is actually a stable and equitable contribution system.’ Rather than risk this upheaval, we believe it in the public interest to proceed cautiously and incrementally.”

The deferral of action on Universal Service funding is welcome news to cable lobby group NCTA-The Internet & Television Association, even though it opposes the net neutrality plan overall. The NCTA has urged the FCC “to resist calls for immediate action and instead defer to Congress on the complex and controversial issues surrounding contribution reform.” Assessments on broadband “would almost certainly result in new passed-through fees not previously assessed on these services” and “may harm broadband adoption,” the NCTA says.

Broadband industry lobby group USTelecom has called for Big Tech firms to pay into the Universal Service Fund, an argument that has also been made repeatedly by Republican FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr.

Rosenworcel may be inclined to let Congress tackle broadband contributions to Universal Service. Her draft plan also raises the possibility of the FCC addressing the issue on its own in a separate proceeding:

Contrary to the assumption of some commenters, Commission efforts remain ongoing in this area. Congress has also been actively deliberating on legislative proposals to reform the USF contribution and funding mechanisms. USF contribution reform is an immensely complex and delicate undertaking with far-reaching consequences, and we believe that any decisions on whether and how to make BIAS providers contribute to USF funding are best addressed holistically in those ongoing discussions of USF contribution reform, on a full record and with robust input from all interested parties, rather than in this proceeding.

FCC chair rejects call to impose Universal Service fees on broadband Read More »

after-pushing-cloud-storage,-tv-provider-to-auto-delete-61-day-old-dvr-recordings

After pushing cloud storage, TV provider to auto-delete 61-day-old DVR recordings

Bell Canada, cable, Canada, Cloud, Policy, streaming, Tech / /

“Wish I knew this before” —

Customers originally had 365 days to enjoy the recordings.

–

hand holding tv remote in front of TV with static

Canadian telecom Bell Canada has been pushing its cloud-based DVR service to its Fibe TV subscribers for years. While it has given customers advantages, like the ability to view their recordings from more devices, such as phones, compared to using local DVR storage, users don’t have as much control over the recordings as they thought they had.

On May 1, Fibe TV will automatically delete recordings stored on its Cloud PVR (personal video recorder) offering once the recordings hit 61 days of age, as confirmed by Canadian online newspaper Daily Hive. Currently, customers maintain access to recordings stored via Cloud PVR for 365 days.

Fibe TV apparently started alerting customers of the upcoming change this month.

A Bell Canada spokesperson, Jacqueline Michelis, minimized the idea of disruption to customers, telling Daily Hive: “The viewing of nearly all recordings takes place within 60 days, so there is minimal impact to customers.” Michelis didn’t provide more details on how Bell Canada arrived at this conclusion.

An X user (formerly Twitter) user going by SimonDingleyTV shared what he said was a notice he received from Fibe TV about the policy change. He claimed that a company representative told him that the reason for the change was to “save space.”

Bell updated its website to acknowledge the time limit and noted that Cloud PVR also has a limit of up to 320 hours of recordings. If users surpass that limit, the oldest recordings will start getting deleted.

“Absolutely ridiculous”

Customers have turned to Bell Canada’s online support forum to share their discontent with the changes, with some saying that they don’t align with the services they expected to receive when signing up for Fibe TV. Thankfully, Bell Canada won’t be able to delete recordings stored on DVR hardware inside customers’ homes.

Other complaints are coming from users whose recordings are being deleted even when they haven’t come close to maxing out their cloud storage or if their recordings aren’t available on demand.

A user going by camisotro on Bell Canada’s online support forum called the announcement “absolutely ridiculous” and condemned what they perceived to be years of telecoms pushing back against users’ ability to record content:

… Bell eliminated the option for any device that actually records TV locally, forcing customers onto an inferior TV box with ‘Cloud PVR.’ Now they are nerfing it to a nearly useless 60 days of recording. This is not the service I signed up for on contract, and yet I am still continuing to pay increasing prices.

Like rivals, Bell pushed customers toward cloud-based DVR, with its website stating, “Fibe TV has evolved to a cloud-based storage system for all your recordings.”

However, some users may not have realized the trade-offs.

“Wish I knew this before I traded PVRs to change to cloud storage! No one told us that !!!,” a forum user known as Crazy aunt said.

Another user, Thornquills, called the news a “deal-breaker” because they’re “paying $10.00/month for cloud storage,” and “2 months is too restrictive, in my opinion.”

Meanwhile, Bell Canada rival Rogers Ignite confirmed to The Canadian Press that it will continue allowing its customers to keep DVR recordings stored in the cloud for one year, as its cloud PVR offering exists to “help manage storage capacity.”

Fibe TV’s policy change comes about two months after Bell Canada announced that it was laying off 4,800 workers and selling 45 of its 103 radio stations.

After pushing cloud storage, TV provider to auto-delete 61-day-old DVR recordings Read More »

claims-of-tiktok-whistleblower-may-not-add-up

Claims of TikTok whistleblower may not add up

censorship, Policy, syndication, tiktok / /
TikTok logo next to inverted US flag.

The United States government is currently poised to outlaw TikTok. Little of the evidence that convinced Congress the app may be a national security threat has been shared publicly, in some cases because it remains classified. But one former TikTok employee turned whistleblower, who claims to have driven key news reporting and congressional concerns about the app, has now come forward.

Zen Goziker worked at TikTok as a risk manager, a role that involved protecting the company from external security and reputational threats. In a wrongful termination lawsuit filed against TikTok’s parent company ByteDance in January, he alleges he was fired in February 2022 for refusing “to sign off” on Project Texas, a $1.5 billion program that TikTok designed to assuage US government security concerns by storing American data on servers managed by Oracle.

Goziker worked at TikTok for only six months. He didn’t hold a senior position inside the company. His lawsuit, and a second one he filed in March against several US government agencies, makes a number of improbable claims. He asserts that he was put under 24-hour surveillance by TikTok and the FBI while working remotely in Mexico. He claims that US attorney general Merrick Garland, director of national intelligence Avril Haines, and other top officials “wickedly instigated” his firing. And he states that the FBI helped the CIA share his private information with foreign governments. The suits do not appear to include evidence for any of these claims.

“This lawsuit is full of outrageous claims that lack merit and comes from an individual who significantly exaggerates his role with a company he worked at for merely six months,” TikTok spokesperson Michael Hughes said in a statement.

Yet court records and emails viewed by WIRED suggest that when Goziker raised the alarm about his ex-employer’s links to China, he found a ready audience. After he was fired, Goziker says he began meeting with elected officials, law enforcement agencies, and journalists to allege that, court documents say, he had discovered proof that TikTok’s software could send US data to Toutiao, a ByteDance app in China. That claim directly conflicted with TikTok executives’ assertions that the two companies operated separately.

Goziker says in court filings that what he saw made it necessary to reassess Project Texas. He also alleges that his account of the internal connection to China formed the basis of an influential Washington Post story published in March last year, which said the concerns came from “a former risk manager at TikTok.”

TikTok officials were quoted in that article as saying the allegations were “unfounded,” and that the employee had discovered “nothing more than a naming convention and technical relic.” The Washington Post said it does not comment on sourcing.

“I am free, I am honest, and I am doing this only because I am an American and because USA desperately need help and I cannot keep this truth away from PUBLIC,” Goziker said in an email to WIRED.

His March lawsuit alleging US officials conspired with TikTok to have him fired was filed against Garland, Haines, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, and the agencies they work for.

“Goziker’s main point is that the executives in the American company TikTok Inc. and certain executives from the American federal government have colluded to organize a fraud scheme,” Sean Jiang, Goziker’s lawyer in the case against the US government, told WIRED in an email. The lawsuits do not appear to contain evidence of such a scheme. The Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to requests for comment. The Department of Justice declined to comment.

Jiang calls the House’s recent passage of a bill that could force ByteDance to sell off TikTok “problematic,” because it “blames ByteDance instead of TikTok Inc for the wrongdoings of the American executives.” He says Goziker would prefer to see TikTok subjected to audits and a new corporate structure.

Claims of TikTok whistleblower may not add up Read More »

meta-relaxes-“incoherent”-policy-requiring-removal-of-ai-videos

Meta relaxes “incoherent” policy requiring removal of AI videos

ai labels, ai watermarks, ai-generated content, facebook, Instagram, made with ai, Meta, Policy, threads / /
Meta relaxes “incoherent” policy requiring removal of AI videos

On Friday, Meta announced policy updates to stop censoring harmless AI-generated content and instead begin “labeling a wider range of video, audio, and image content as ‘Made with AI.'”

Meta’s policy updates came after deciding not to remove a controversial post edited to show President Joe Biden seemingly inappropriately touching his granddaughter’s chest, with a caption calling Biden a “pedophile.” The Oversight Board had agreed with Meta’s decision to leave the post online while noting that Meta’s current manipulated media policy was too “narrow,” “incoherent,” and “confusing to users.”

Previously, Meta would only remove “videos that are created or altered by AI to make a person appear to say something they didn’t say.” The Oversight Board warned that this policy failed to address other manipulated media, including “cheap fakes,” manipulated audio, or content showing people doing things they’d never done.

“We agree with the Oversight Board’s argument that our existing approach is too narrow since it only covers videos that are created or altered by AI to make a person appear to say something they didn’t say,” Monika Bickert, Meta’s vice president of content policy, wrote in a blog. “As the Board noted, it’s equally important to address manipulation that shows a person doing something they didn’t do.”

Starting in May 2024, Meta will add “Made with AI” labels to any content detected as AI-generated, as well as to any content that users self-disclose as AI-generated.

Meta’s Oversight Board had also warned that Meta removing AI-generated videos that did not directly violate platforms’ community standards was threatening to “unnecessarily risk restricting freedom of expression.” Moving forward, Meta will stop censoring content that doesn’t violate community standards, agreeing that a “less restrictive” approach to manipulated media by adding labels is better.

“If we determine that digitally created or altered images, video, or audio create a particularly high risk of materially deceiving the public on a matter of importance, we may add a more prominent label so people have more information and context,” Bickert wrote. “This overall approach gives people more information about the content so they can better assess it and so they will have context if they see the same content elsewhere.”

Meta confirmed that, in July, it will stop censoring AI-generated content that doesn’t violate rules restricting things like voter interference, bullying and harassment, violence, and incitement.

“This timeline gives people time to understand the self-disclosure process before we stop removing the smaller subset of manipulated media,” Bickert explained in the blog.

Finally, Meta adopted the Oversight Board’s recommendation to “clearly define in a single unified Manipulated Media policy the harms it aims to prevent—beyond users being misled—such as preventing interference with the right to vote and to participate in the conduct of public affairs.”

The Oversight Board issued a statement provided to Ars, saying that members “are pleased that Meta will begin labeling a wider range of video, audio, and image content as ‘made with AI’ when they detect AI image indicators or when people indicate they have uploaded AI content.”

“This will provide people with greater context and transparency for more types of manipulated media, while also removing posts which violate Meta’s rules in other ways,” the Oversight Board said.

Meta relaxes “incoherent” policy requiring removal of AI videos Read More »

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Publisher: OpenAI’s GPT Store bots are illegally scraping our textbooks

AI, copyright, GPT Store, openai, Policy, syndication / /
OpenAI logo

For the past few months, Morten Blichfeldt Andersen has spent many hours scouring OpenAI’s GPT Store. Since it launched in January, the marketplace for bespoke bots has filled up with a deep bench of useful and sometimes quirky AI tools. Cartoon generators spin up New Yorker–style illustrations and vivid anime stills. Programming and writing assistants offer shortcuts for crafting code and prose. There’s also a color analysis bot, a spider identifier, and a dating coach called RizzGPT. Yet Blichfeldt Andersen is hunting only for one very specific type of bot: Those built on his employer’s copyright-protected textbooks without permission.

Blichfeldt Andersen is publishing director at Praxis, a Danish textbook purveyor. The company has been embracing AI and created its own custom chatbots. But it is currently engaged in a game of whack-a-mole in the GPT Store, and Blichfeldt Andersen is the man holding the mallet.

“I’ve been personally searching for infringements and reporting them,” Blichfeldt Andersen says. “They just keep coming up.” He suspects the culprits are primarily young people uploading material from textbooks to create custom bots to share with classmates—and that he has uncovered only a tiny fraction of the infringing bots in the GPT Store. “Tip of the iceberg,” Blichfeldt Andersen says.

It is easy to find bots in the GPT Store whose descriptions suggest they might be tapping copyrighted content in some way, as Techcrunch noted in a recent article claiming OpenAI’s store was overrun with “spam.” Using copyrighted material without permission is permissible in some contexts but in others rightsholders can take legal action. WIRED found a GPT called Westeros Writer that claims to “write like George R.R. Martin,” the creator of Game of Thrones. Another, Voice of Atwood, claims to imitate the writer Margaret Atwood. Yet another, Write Like Stephen, is intended to emulate Stephen King.

When WIRED tried to trick the King bot into revealing the “system prompt” that tunes its responses, the output suggested it had access to King’s memoir On Writing. Write Like Stephen was able to reproduce passages from the book verbatim on demand, even noting which page the material came from. (WIRED could not make contact with the bot’s developer, because it did not provide an email address, phone number, or external social profile.)

OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood says it responds to takedown requests against GPTs made with copyrighted content but declined to answer WIRED’s questions about how frequently it fulfills such requests. She also says the company proactively looks for problem GPTs. “We use a combination of automated systems, human review, and user reports to find and assess GPTs that potentially violate our policies, including the use of content from third parties without necessary permission,” Wood says.

New disputes

The GPT store’s copyright problem could add to OpenAI’s existing legal headaches. The company is facing a number of high-profile lawsuits alleging copyright infringement, including one brought by The New York Times and several brought by different groups of fiction and nonfiction authors, including big names like George R.R. Martin.

Chatbots offered in OpenAI’s GPT Store are based on the same technology as its own ChatGPT but are created by outside developers for specific functions. To tailor their bot, a developer can upload extra information that it can tap to augment the knowledge baked into OpenAI’s technology. The process of consulting this additional information to respond to a person’s queries is called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. Blichfeldt Andersen is convinced that the RAG files behind the bots in the GPT Store are a hotbed of copyrighted materials uploaded without permission.

Publisher: OpenAI’s GPT Store bots are illegally scraping our textbooks Read More »

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FCC won’t block California net neutrality law, says states can “experiment”

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Illustration of ones and zeroes overlaid on a US map.

Getty Images | Matt Anderson Photography

California can keep enforcing its state net neutrality law after the Federal Communications Commission implements its own rules. The FCC could preempt future state laws if they go far beyond the national standard but said that states can “experiment” with different regulations for interconnection payments and zero-rating.

The FCC scheduled an April 25 vote on Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel’s proposal to restore net neutrality rules similar to the ones introduced during the Obama era and repealed under former President Trump. The FCC yesterday released the text of the pending order, which could still be changed but isn’t likely to get any major overhaul.

State-level enforcement of net neutrality rules can benefit consumers, the FCC said. The order said that “state enforcement generally supports our regulatory efforts by dedicating additional resources to monitoring and enforcement, especially at the local level, and thereby ensuring greater compliance with our requirements.”

California stepped in to regulate broadband providers after then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai led a vote to repeal the federal rules. California beat ISPs in court, ensuring that it could enforce the state law even though Pai’s FCC attempted to preempt all state net neutrality rules.

The California law mostly mirrored the FCC’s repealed rules by prohibiting paid prioritization and blocking or throttling of lawful traffic, on both fixed and mobile networks. California went further than the FCC in regulating zero-rating by imposing a ban on paid data cap exemptions.

That means ISPs operating in California can’t exempt Internet traffic from customers’ data usage allowances in exchange for payment from a third party. In response to the state law, AT&T stopped exempting HBO Max from its mobile data caps and stopped its “sponsored data” program in which it charged other companies for similar exemptions from AT&T’s data caps.

FCC: No reason to preempt California

In the order scheduled for an April 25 vote, the FCC said the California law “appears largely to mirror or parallel our federal rules. Thus we see no reason at this time to preempt it.”

That doesn’t mean the rules are exactly the same. Instead of banning certain types of zero-rating entirely, the FCC will judge on a case-by-case basis whether any specific zero-rating program harms consumers and conflicts with the goal of preserving an open Internet. The FCC said it will evaluate sponsored-data “programs based on a totality of the circumstances, including potential benefits.”

The FCC order cautions that the agency will take a dimmer view of zero-rating in exchange for payment from a third party or zero-rating that favors an affiliated entity. But those categories will still be judged by the FCC on a case-by-case basis, whereas California bans paid data cap exemptions entirely.

Despite that difference, the FCC said it is “not persuaded on the record currently before us that the California law is incompatible with the federal rules.” The FCC also found that California’s approach to interconnection payments is compatible with the pending federal rule. Interconnection was the subject of a major controversy involving Netflix and big ISPs a decade ago.

Interconnection and zero-rating

The FCC’s new order addressed interconnection and zero-rating as follows:

As to the former, California prohibits BIAS [Broadband Internet Access Service] providers from requiring interconnection agreements “that have the purpose or effect of evading the other prohibitions” by blocking, throttling, or charging for traffic at the interconnection point. We have likewise stated in this Order that BIAS providers may not engage in interconnection practices that circumvent the prohibitions contained in the open Internet rules.

As to the latter, California restricts zero-rating when applied discriminatorily to only a subset of “Internet content, applications, services, or devices in a category” or when performed “in exchange for consideration, monetary or otherwise, from a third party.” We have likewise explained in this Order that sponsored-data programs—where a BIAS provider zero rates an edge product in exchange for consideration (monetary or otherwise) from a third party or where a BIAS provider favors an affiliate’s edge products—raise concerns under the general conduct standard.

The FCC said it found no evidence that the California law has “unduly burdened or interfered with interstate communications service.” When it comes to zero-rating and interconnection, the FCC said there is “room for states to experiment and explore their own approaches within the bounds of our overarching federal framework.”

The FCC said it will reconsider preemption of California rules if “California state enforcement authorities or state courts seek to interpret or enforce these requirements in a manner inconsistent with how we intend our rules to apply.”

FCC won’t block California net neutrality law, says states can “experiment” Read More »

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Elon Musk shares “extremely false” allegation of voting fraud by “illegals”

elon musk, Policy, texas, voter fraud, woke / /
Elon Musk's account on X (formerly Twitter) displayed on a smartphone next to a large X logo.

Getty Images | Nathan Stirk

Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson yesterday issued a statement debunking claims of widespread voter fraud that were amplified by X owner Elon Musk on the social network formerly named Twitter. Election officials in two other states also disputed the “extremely false” information shared by Musk.

Musk is generally a big fan of Texas, but on Tuesday he shared a post by the account “End Wokeness” that claimed, “The number of voters registering without a photo ID is SKYROCKETING in 3 key swing states: Arizona, Texas, and Pennsylvania.” The account claimed there were 1.25 million such registrations in Texas since the beginning of 2024, over 580,000 in Pennsylvania, and over 220,000 in Arizona.

“Extremely concerning,” Musk wrote in a retweet re-X. The End Wokeness post shared by Musk suggested that “illegals” are registering to vote in large numbers by using Social Security numbers that can be obtained for work authorizations. The End Wokeness post has been viewed 63 million times so far, and Musk’s re-post has been viewed 58.2 million times.

Nelson’s statement on the Texas government’s website called the claim “totally inaccurate.” For one thing, the real number of voter registrations is a small fraction of the number claimed in the post shared by Musk, the secretary of state wrote:

It is totally inaccurate that 1.2 million voters have registered to vote in Texas without a photo ID this year. The truth is our voter rolls have increased by 57,711 voters since the beginning of 2024. This is less than the number of people registered in the same timeframe in 2022 (about 65,000) and in 2020 (about 104,000).

“Extremely false”

The Texas Secretary of State office reports having 17,948,242 registered voters for the March 2024 elections, a gain of just under 189,000 voters since November 2023. The total gain over the past 24 months is a little over 764,000.

Pennsylvania’s data shows the state has 8.7 million registered voters and 87,440 voter registrations so far in 2024. Most of those were applications for party changes, while the other 39,877 were new-voter registrations.

Arizona’s total number of registered voters has been declining. While Arizona had 4.28 million registered voters in 2020 and 4.14 million in 2022, the state’s tally in March 2024 was 4,096,260.

Musk’s “Extremely concerning” post got a reply from Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, who called it “extremely false.”

“We haven’t even had that many new registrants TOTAL in 2024 in Arizona,” stated Richer, an elected official and Republican who has been active in calling out election misinformation on X. “And we have fewer than 35,000 registrants (out of 4.1 million registered voters in Arizona) who haven’t provided documented proof of citizenship.”

Musk’s platform has faced plenty of criticism over its moderation of misinformation on elections and other topics. After reports of deep cuts to X’s election integrity team in September 2023, Musk claimed the ex-X employees were “undermining election integrity.”

Elon Musk shares “extremely false” allegation of voting fraud by “illegals” Read More »

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Google sues two crypto app makers over allegedly vast “pig butchering” scheme

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Foul Play —

Crypto and other investment app scams promoted on YouTube targeted 100K users.

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Google sues two crypto app makers over allegedly vast “pig butchering” scheme

Google has sued two app developers based in China over an alleged scheme targeting 100,000 users globally over four years with at least 87 fraudulent cryptocurrency and other investor apps distributed through the Play Store.

The tech giant alleged that scammers lured victims with “promises of high returns” from “seemingly legitimate” apps offering investment opportunities in cryptocurrencies and other products. Commonly known as “pig-butchering schemes,” these scams displayed fake returns on investments, but when users went to withdraw the funds, they discovered they could not.

In some cases, Google alleged, developers would “double down on the scheme by requesting various fees and other payments from victims that were supposedly necessary for the victims to recover their principal investments and purported gains.”

Google accused the app developers—Yunfeng Sun (also known as “Alphonse Sun”) and Hongnam Cheung (also known as “Zhang Hongnim” and “Stanford Fischer”)—of conspiring to commit “hundreds of acts of wire fraud” to further “an unlawful pattern of racketeering activity” that siphoned up to $75,000 from each user successfully scammed.

Google was able to piece together the elaborate alleged scheme because the developers used a wide array of Google products and services to target victims, Google said, including Google Play, Voice, Workspace, and YouTube, breaching each one’s terms of service. Perhaps most notably, the Google Play Store’s developer program policies “forbid developers to upload to Google Play ‘apps that expose users to deceptive or harmful financial products and services,’ including harmful products and services ‘related to the management or investment of money and cryptocurrencies.'”

In addition to harming Google consumers, Google claimed that each product and service’s reputation would continue to be harmed unless the US district court in New York ordered a permanent injunction stopping developers from using any Google products or services.

“By using Google Play to conduct their fraud scheme,” scammers “have threatened the integrity of Google Play and the user experience,” Google alleged. “By using other Google products to support their scheme,” the scammers “also threaten the safety and integrity of those other products, including YouTube, Workspace, and Google Voice.”

Google’s lawsuit is the company’s most recent attempt to block fraudsters from targeting Google products by suing individuals directly, Bloomberg noted. Last year, Google sued five people accused of distributing a fake Bard AI chatbot that instead downloaded malware to Google users’ devices, Bloomberg reported.

How did the alleged Google Play scams work?

Google said that the accused developers “varied their approach from app to app” when allegedly trying to scam users out of thousands of dollars but primarily relied on three methods to lure victims.

The first method relied on sending text messages using Google Voice—such as “I am Sophia, do you remember me?” or “I miss you all the time, how are your parents Mike?”—”to convince the targeted victims that they were sent to the wrong number.” From there, the scammers would apparently establish “friendships” or “romantic relationships” with victims before moving the conversation to apps like WhatsApp, where they would “offer to guide the victim through the investment process, often reassuring the victim of any doubts they had about the apps.” These supposed friends, Google claimed, would “then disappear once the victim tried to withdraw funds.”

Another strategy allegedly employed by scammers relied on videos posted to platforms like YouTube, where fake investment opportunities would be promoted, promising “rates of return” as high as “two percent daily.”

The third tactic, Google said, pushed bogus affiliate marketing campaigns, promising users commissions for “signing up additional users.” These apps, Google claimed, were advertised on social media as “a guaranteed and easy way to earn money.”

Once a victim was drawn into using one of the fraudulent apps, “user interfaces sought to convince victims that they were maintaining balances on the app and that they were earning ‘returns’ on their investments,” Google said.

Occasionally, users would be allowed to withdraw small amounts, convincing them that it was safe to invest more money, but “later attempts to withdraw purported returns simply did not work.” And sometimes the scammers would “bilk” victims out of “even more money,” Google said, by requesting additional funds be submitted to make a withdrawal.

“Some demands” for additional funds, Google found, asked for anywhere “from 10 to 30 percent to cover purported commissions and/or taxes.” Victims, of course, “still did not receive their withdrawal requests even after these additional fees were paid,” Google said.

Which apps were removed from the Play Store?

Google tried to remove apps as soon as they were discovered to be fraudulent, but Google claimed that scammers concocted new aliases and infrastructure to “obfuscate their connection to suspended fraudulent apps.” Because scammers relied on so many different Google services, Google was able to connect the scheme to the accused developers through various business records.

Fraudulent apps named in the complaint include fake cryptocurrency exchanges called TionRT and SkypeWallet. To make the exchanges appear legitimate, scammers put out press releases on newswire services and created YouTube videos likely relying on actors to portray company leadership.

In one YouTube video promoting SkypeWallet, the supposed co-founder of Skype Coin uses the name “Romser Bennett,” which is the same name used for the supposed founder of another fraudulent app called OTCAI2.0, Google said. In each video, a completely different presumed hired actor plays the part of “Romser Bennett.” In other videos, Google found the exact same actor plays an engineer named “Rodriguez” for one app and a technical leader named “William Bryant” for another app.

Another fraudulent app that was flagged by Google was called the Starlight app. Promoted on TikTok and Instagram, Google said, that app promised “that users could earn commissions by simply watching videos.”

The Starlight app was downloaded approximately 23,000 times and seemingly primarily targeted users in Ghana, allegedly scamming at least 6,000 Ghanian users out of initial investment capital that they were told was required before they could start earning money on the app.

Across all 87 fraudulent apps that Google has removed, Google estimated that approximately 100,000 users were victimized, including approximately 8,700 in the United States.

Currently, Google is not aware of any live apps in the Play Store connected to the alleged scheme, the complaint said, but scammers intent on furthering the scheme “will continue to harm Google and Google Play users” without a permanent injunction, Google warned.

Google sues two crypto app makers over allegedly vast “pig butchering” scheme Read More »