Policy – Page 9

Judge ends man’s 11-year quest to dig up landfill and recover $765M in bitcoin

The landfill owns the trash

Hard drive that could provide access to 8,000 bitcoins is buried at the dump.

Aerial view of a Newport Council landfill site on March 18, 2022 in Newport, Wales. Credit: Getty Images | Matthew Horwood

A British judge ruled against a man who wants to excavate a landfill where he says a hard drive with access to thousands of bitcoins was mistakenly dumped over 11 years ago.

Since 2013, James Howells has been hoping to recover a laptop hard drive that he says contains the private key for cryptocurrency which he says he mined in 2009. We wrote about it at the time, noting that the value of a bitcoin had just passed $1,000, making 7,500 bitcoins worth $7.5 million.

The alleged number of bitcoins has changed a bit, with Howells now saying he lost 8,000 bitcoins. The bitcoin price exceeded $100,000 last month and was worth over $95,636 as of this writing, or $765 million for 8,000 bitcoins.

High Court Judge Keyser KC issued his ruling yesterday, siding with the defendant in Howells v. Newport City Council. Howells has no realistic chance of success at trial, the judge ruled. Howells sought “an order that the defendant either deliver the hard drive or allow his team of experts to excavate the landfill in order to find it, and (in the alternative) compensation equivalent to the value of the Bitcoin that he can no longer access.”

Landfill authority owns the trash

The council said that excavating the landfill site would let harmful substances escape into the environment, endangering residents with “potentially serious risks which raises public health issues and environmental concerns,” the ruling said.

The judge found no “reasonable grounds for bringing this case,” saying it has “no realistic prospect of succeeding if it went to trial and that there is no other compelling reason why it should be disposed of at trial.” He granted summary judgment for the defendant, dismissing the claim.

The ruling quotes the Control of Pollution Act 1974, which states that “anything delivered to the authority by another person in the course of using the facilities shall belong to the authority and may be dealt with accordingly.” Howells “submitted that section 14(6)(c) merely says that anything so delivered shall belong to the authority but does not say that it shall cease to belong to its former owner,” the ruling said. The judge disagreed, writing that “the words ‘shall belong to the authority’ are unqualified and unrestricted.”

The judge found no reason to determine that the defendant retaining the hard drive is “unconscionable” under the law. “In my view there would be no realistic prospect of a finding that the defendant’s retention of the Hard Drive was unconscionable. The defendant was not retaining it for gain or because it wanted it. It was retaining it because it was buried in landfill,” the ruling said.

Statute of limitations

The claim is also barred by the six-year statute of limitations because Howells “knew the facts material to his claim by November 2013 but did not commence proceedings until May 2024,” the ruling said.

The judge didn’t need to rule on whether the hard drive really contains access to bitcoin, saying that “the only relevant issues in this case concern ownership of, and rights of access to, the Hard Drive.” Howells sought access to the landfill site in Newport, Wales, starting in November 2013 but local officials refused. He says the hard drive is 2½ inches in size and has a wallet.dat file containing a private key that can enable access to the bitcoin.

The city council said excavation would breach the terms of its license with NRW (Natural Resources Body for Wales), cause health and safety risks for staff, risk damage from ground movement during or after excavation work, and prevent the council from “discharg[ing] its statutory waste disposal functions whilst the site is excavated.”

After his November 2013 outreach, Howells “made repeated requests to the defendant for access to the Site in order to find and retrieve the Hard Drive, but these were largely ignored by the defendant,” the ruling said. “The claimant then set about securing investment and expertise to enable a team of experts to undertake a landfill excavation and recovery operation and in 2023 he began to advance his case formally to the defendant.”

“This ruling has taken everything from me”

The BBC yesterday quoted Howells as saying that “the case being struck out at the earliest hearing doesn’t even give me the opportunity to explain myself or an opportunity for justice in any shape or form. There was so much more that could have been explained in a full trial and that’s what I was expecting.”

“It’s not about greed, I’m happy to share the proceeds but nobody in a position of power will have a decent conversation with me… This ruling has taken everything from me and left me with nothing. It’s the great British injustice system striking again,” he said.

In January 2021, CNN wrote that Howells “has offered to pay the council a quarter of the current value of the hoard, which he says could be distributed to local residents.”

Why the hard drive was dumped

As for how the hard drive went to the landfill, Howells claims it “was taken from his home without his permission or consent on the morning of 5th August 2013,” the ruling said.

His ex-girlfriend, Halfina Eddy-Evans, said in a recent interview with the Daily Mail that she brought the hard drive and other unwanted belongings to the dump, at Howells’ request. “I thought he should be running his errands, not me, but I did it to help out… I’d love nothing more than him to find it. I’m sick and tired of hearing about it,” she said.

The ruling describes Howells’ version of the 2013 event as follows:

In his drawers he found two hard drives: one was the Hard Drive, and the other was a blank hard drive that contained no data. He meant to throw out the blank hard drive, but instead he mistakenly picked up the Hard Drive and put it into one of the black bin-liners. He then left the two bin bags downstairs in his house and asked his partner at the time to take them to the landfill at the Site the following day after completing the school run. However, she said that she did not want to take the black bin bags to the Site and refused to do so. The claimant was not overly concerned at her refusal, because he decided that on the following morning he would check to make sure that he had put the correct hard drive in the bin bags. However, when he awoke at 9 o’clock the following morning he found that his partner had had a change of heart and had already taken the bin bags to the Site and manually deposited them into the general waste bins at the Site.

The ruling cited testimony that “the landfill contains around 350,000 tonnes of waste with a further 50,000 tonnes added annually. Once the skip at the reception area is full, the waste is emptied into the landfill, where it is then covered with inert material to minimise the release of gases or liquids and then compacted.”

Howells thinks data can be recovered

Howells believes the hard drive may still be usable, according to a 2021 New Yorker article. “Although the covering of the drive was metal, the disk inside was glass,” reporter D.T. Max wrote. “‘It’s actually coated in a cobalt layer that is anti-corrosive,’ Howells told me. He conceded that the hard drive would have been subjected to some compacting when it was layered in with soil and other trash. But, however rough the process, it might not have fractured the disk and destroyed the drive’s contents.”

The 2021 CNN report quoted Howells as saying he wanted to “dig a specific area of the landfill based on a grid reference system and recover the hard drive whilst adhering to all safety and environmental standards. The drive would then be presented to data recovery specialists who can rebuild the drive from scratch with new parts and attempt to recover the tiny piece of data that I need in order to access the bitcoins.”

Yesterday’s ruling said that according to a report prepared for Howells, “in November 2013 the Hard Drive was ‘probably’ located ‘within an area of approximately 2,000 square metres of the site’ and ‘within an approximate volume of 10,000-15,000 tonnes of waste.'”

“It would be a criminal offence for the claimant or anyone acting for him to sort over or disturb any refuse deposited at the Site, unless he were authorised to do so by the defendant: see section 27 of CPA 1974 and section 60 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990,” the ruling said. “The defendant could only give such authorisation, or excavate the Site itself, if it were first to apply for and obtain a new environmental permit from NRW, as the Schedule of permitted activities in its existing permit does not allow excavation of the Site.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

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Coal likely to go away even without EPA’s power plant regulations

carbon emissions, electric grid, Energy, EPA, Policy, renewable energy, Science, Sustainability / Tim Belzer / January 9, 2025

Set to be killed by Trump, the rules mostly lock in existing trends.

In April last year, the Environmental Protection Agency released its latest attempt to regulate the carbon emissions of power plants under the Clean Air Act. It’s something the EPA has been required to do since a 2007 Supreme Court decision that settled a case that started during the Clinton administration. The latest effort seemed like the most aggressive yet, forcing coal plants to retire or install carbon capture equipment and making it difficult for some natural gas plants to operate without capturing carbon or burning green hydrogen.

Yet, according to a new analysis published in Thursday’s edition of Science, they wouldn’t likely have a dramatic effect on the US’s future emissions even if they were to survive a court challenge. Instead, the analysis suggests the rules serve more like a backstop to prevent other policy changes and increased demand from countering the progress that would otherwise be made. This is just as well, given that the rules are inevitably going to be eliminated by the incoming Trump administration.

A long time coming

The net result of a number of Supreme Court decisions is that greenhouse gasses are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and the EPA needed to determine whether they posed a threat to people. George W. Bush’s EPA dutifully performed that analysis but sat on the results until its second term ended, leaving it to the Obama administration to reach the same conclusion. The EPA went on to formulate rules for limiting carbon emissions on a state-by-state basis, but these were rapidly made irrelevant because renewable power and natural gas began displacing coal even without the EPA’s encouragement.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration replaced those rules with ones designed to accomplish even less, which were thrown out by a court just before Biden’s inauguration. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court stepped in to rule on the now-even-more-irrelevant Obama rules, determining that the EPA could only regulate carbon emissions at the level of individual power plants rather than at the level of the grid.

All of that set the stage for the latest EPA rules, which were formulated by the Biden administration’s EPA. Forced by the court to regulate individual power plants, the EPA allowed coal plants that were set to retire within the decade to continue to operate as they have. Anything that would remain operational longer would need to either switch fuels or install carbon capture equipment. Similarly, natural gas plants were regulated based on how frequently they were operational; those that ran less than 40 percent of the time could face significant new regulations. More than that, and they’d have to capture carbon or burn a fuel mixture that is primarily hydrogen produced without carbon emissions.

While the Biden EPA’s rules are currently making their way through the courts, they’re sure to be pulled in short order by the incoming Trump administration, making the court case moot. Nevertheless, people had started to analyze their potential impact before it was clear there would be an incoming Trump administration. And the analysis is valuable in the sense that it will highlight what will be lost when the rules are eliminated.

By some measures, the answer is not all that much. But the answer is also very dependent upon whether the Trump administration engages in an all-out assault on renewable energy.

Regulatory impact

The work relies on the fact that various researchers and organizations have developed models to explore how the US electric grid can economically meet demand under different conditions, including different regulatory environments. The researchers obtained nine of them and ran them with and without the EPA’s proposed rules to determine their impact.

On its own, eliminating the rules has a relatively minor impact. Without the rules, the US grid’s 2040 carbon dioxide emissions would end up between 60 and 85 percent lower than they were in 2005. With the rules, the range shifts to between 75 and 85 percent—in essence, the rules reduce the uncertainty about the outcomes that involve the least change.

That’s primarily because of how they’re structured. Mostly, they target coal plants, as these account for nearly half of the US grid’s emissions despite supplying only about 15 percent of its power. They’ve already been closing at a rapid clip, and would likely continue to do so even without the EPA’s encouragement.

Natural gas plants, the other major source of carbon emissions, would primarily respond to the new rules by operating less than 40 percent of the time, thus avoiding stringent regulation while still allowing them to handle periods where renewable power underproduces. And we now have a sufficiently large fleet of natural gas plants that demand can be met without a major increase in construction, even with most plants operating at just 40 percent of their rated capacity. The continued growth of renewables and storage also contributes to making this possible.

One irony of the response seen in the models is that it suggests that two key pieces of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are largely irrelevant. The IRA provides benefits for the deployment of carbon capture and the production of green hydrogen (meaning hydrogen produced without carbon emissions). But it’s likely that, even with these credits, the economics wouldn’t favor the use of these technologies when alternatives like renewables plus storage are available. The IRA also provides tax credits for deploying renewables and storage, pushing the economics even further in their favor.

Since not a lot changes, the rules don’t really affect the cost of electricity significantly. Their presence boosts costs by an estimated 0.5 to 3.7 percent in 2050 compared to a scenario where the rules aren’t implemented. As a result, the wholesale price of electricity changes by only two percent.

A backstop

That said, the team behind the analysis argues that, depending on other factors, the rules could play a significant role. Trump has suggested he will target all of Biden’s energy policies, and that would include the IRA itself. Its repeal could significantly slow the growth of renewable energy in the US, as could continued problems with expanding the grid to incorporate new renewable capacity.

In addition, the US is seeing demand for electricity rise at a faster pace in 2023 than in the decade leading up to it. While it’s still unclear whether that’s a result of new demand or simply weather conditions boosting the use of electricity in heating and cooling, there are several factors that could easily boost the use of electricity in coming years: the electrification of transport, rising data center use, and the electrification of appliances and home heating.

Should these raise demand sufficiently, then it could make continued coal use economical in the absence of the EPA rules. “The rules … can be viewed as backstops against higher emissions outcomes under futures with improved coal plant economics,” the paper suggests, “which could occur with higher demand, slower renewables deployment from interconnection and permitting delays, or higher natural gas prices.”

And it may be the only backstop we have. The report also notes that a number of states have already set aggressive emissions reduction targets, including some for net zero by 2050. But these don’t serve as a substitute for federal climate policy, given that the states that are taking these steps use very little coal in the first place.

Science, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/science.adt5665 (About DOIs).

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

Coal likely to go away even without EPA’s power plant regulations Read More »

US selling 69K seized bitcoins could mess with Trump plans for crypto reserve

Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, department of justice, Donald Trump, Federal Reserve, Policy, Silk Road, US bitcoin reserve / Rejus Almole / January 9, 2025

At the end of 2024, a US court authorized the Department of Justice to sell 69,370 bitcoins from “the largest cryptocurrency seizure in history.”

At bitcoin’s current price, just under $92,000, these bitcoins are worth nearly $6.4 billion, and crypto outlets are reporting that DOJ officials have said they’re planning to proceed with selling off the assets consistent with the court’s order. The DOJ had reportedly argued that bitcoin’s price volatility was a pressing reason to push for permission for the sale.

Ars has reached out to the DOJ for comment and will update the story with any new information regarding next steps.

A hacker initially stole these bitcoins from Silk Road—an illegal online marketplace where goods could only be bought and sold with bitcoins—in 2012, shortly before the US government shut down the marketplace. The US later discovered the stolen bitcoins in 2020 while conducting further investigations of Silk Road, eventually securing a consent agreement that year from the hacker, who signed the bitcoins over to the government.

Whether the government’s seizure of those bitcoins was proper has been disputed by Battle Born Investments, a company that purchased the assets of bankruptcy estate from an individual who they believed to be either the hacker whose bitcoins were seized or someone “associated with him.”

After a court battle failed to return the bitcoins, Battle Born attempted to unmask the hacker through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which sparked a new court fight. But ultimately, in late December, the court agreed with the US government that the hacker had a right to privacy as someone who was the subject of a criminal investigation and shouldn’t be unmasked. That ended Battle Born’s claim to the bitcoins and cleared the way for the government’s sale.

US selling 69K seized bitcoins could mess with Trump plans for crypto reserve Read More »

Google loses in court, faces trial for collecting data on users who opted out

Google, google privacy lawsuit, Policy / Paul Patrick / January 9, 2025

Plaintiffs have brought claims of privacy invasion under California law. Plaintiffs “present evidence that their data has economic value,” and “a reasonable juror could find that Plaintiffs suffered damage or loss because Google profited from the misappropriation of their data,” Seeborg wrote.

The lawsuit was filed in July 2020. The judge notes that summary judgment can be granted when “there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.” Google hasn’t met that standard, he ruled.

In a statement provided to Ars, Google said that “privacy controls have long been built into our service and the allegations here are a deliberate attempt to mischaracterize the way our products work. We will continue to make our case in court against these patently false claims.”

In a proposed settlement of a different lawsuit, Google last year agreed to delete records reflecting users’ private browsing activities in Chrome’s Incognito mode.

Google disclosures are ambiguous, judge says

Google claimed that the “undisputed facts” show its collection of “data was lawful and consistent with its representations to class members,” Seeborg wrote. But in the judge’s view, the “various interpretations of these disclosures render them ambiguous such that a reasonable user would expect the WAA and (s)WAA settings to control Google’s collection of a user’s web app and activity on products using Google’s services.”

Google contends that its system is harmless to users. “Google argues that its sole purpose for collecting (s)WAA-off data is to provide these analytic services to app developers. This data, per Google, consists only of non-personally identifiable information and is unrelated (or, at least, not directly related) to any profit-making objectives,” Seeborg wrote.

On the other side, plaintiffs say that Google’s tracking contradicts its “representations to users because it gathers exactly the data Google denies saving and collecting about (s)WAA-off users,” Seeborg wrote. “Moreover, Plaintiffs insist that Google’s practices allow it to personalize ads by linking user ad interactions to any later related behavior—information advertisers are likely to find valuable—leading to Google’s lucrative advertising enterprise built, in part, on (s)WAA-off data unlawfully retrieved.”

Google loses in court, faces trial for collecting data on users who opted out Read More »

X CEO signals ad boycott is over. External data paints a different picture.

CES 2025, Donald Trump, elon musk, linda yaccarino, online advertising, Policy, Twitter, twitter ad boycott, X / Tim Belzer / January 9, 2025

When X CEO Linda Yaccarino took the stage as a keynote speaker at CES 2025, she revealed that “90 percent of the advertisers” who boycotted X over brand safety concerns since Elon Musk’s 2022 Twitter acquisition “are back on X.”

Yaccarino did not go into any further detail to back up the data point, and X did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to comment.

But Yaccarino’s statistic seemed to bolster claims that X had made since Donald Trump’s re-election that advertisers were flocking back to the platform, with some outlets reporting that brands hoped to win Musk’s favor in light of his perceived influence over Trump by increasing spending on X.

However, it remains hard to gauge how impactful this seemingly significant number of advertisers returning will be in terms of spiking X’s value, which fell by as much as 72 percent after Musk’s Twitter takeover. And X’s internal data doesn’t seem to completely sync up with data from marketing intelligence firm Sensor Tower, suggesting that more context may be needed to understand if X’s financial woes may potentially be easing up in 2025.

Before the presidential election, Sensor Tower previously told Ars that “72 out of the top 100 spending US advertisers” on Twitter/X from October 2022 had “ceased spending on the platform as of September 2024.” This was up from 50 advertisers who had stopped spending on Twitter/X in October 2023, about a year after Musk’s acquisition, suggesting that the boycott had seemingly only gotten worse.

Shortly after the election, AdWeek reported that big brands, including Comcast, IBM, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Lionsgate Entertainment, had resumed advertising on X. But by the end of 2024, Sensor Tower told Ars that X still had seemingly not succeeded in wooing back many of pre-acquisition Twitter’s top spenders, making Yaccarino’s claim that “90 percent of advertisers are back on X” somewhat harder to understand.

X CEO signals ad boycott is over. External data paints a different picture. Read More »

After embarrassing blunder, AT&T promises bill credits for future outages

AT&T, Policy / Mike M. / January 8, 2025

“All voice and 5G data services for AT&T wireless customers were unavailable, affecting more than 125 million devices, blocking more than 92 million voice calls, and preventing more than 25,000 calls to 911 call centers,” the Federal Communications Commission said in a report after a months-long investigation into the incident.

The FCC report said the nationwide outage began three minutes after “AT&T Mobility implemented a network change with an equipment configuration error.” This error caused the AT&T network “to enter ‘protect mode’ to prevent impact to other services, disconnecting all devices from the network.”

The FCC found various problems in AT&T’s processes that increased the likelihood of an outage and made recovery more difficult than it should have been. The agency described “a lack of adherence to AT&T Mobility’s internal procedures, a lack of peer review, a failure to adequately test after installation, inadequate laboratory testing, insufficient safeguards and controls to ensure approval of changes affecting the core network, a lack of controls to mitigate the effects of the outage once it began, and a variety of system issues that prolonged the outage once the configuration error had been remedied.”

AT&T said it implemented changes to prevent the same problem from happening again. The company could face punishment, but it’s less likely to happen under Trump’s pick to chair the FCC, Brendan Carr, who is taking over soon. The Biden-era FCC compelled Verizon Wireless to pay a $1,050,000 fine and implement a compliance plan because of a December 2022 outage in six states that lasted one hour and 44 minutes.

An AT&T executive told Reuters that the company has been trying to regain customers’ trust over the past few years with better offers and product improvements. “Four years ago, we were losing share in the industry for a significant period of time… we knew we had lost our customers’ trust,” Reuters quoted AT&T Executive VP Jenifer Robertson as saying in an article today.

After embarrassing blunder, AT&T promises bill credits for future outages Read More »

Misconfigured license plate readers are leaking data and video in real time

law enforcement, license plate readers, Policy, Security, syndication / Mike M. / January 8, 2025

In just 20 minutes this morning, an automated license-plate-recognition (ALPR) system in Nashville, Tennessee, captured photographs and detailed information from nearly 1,000 vehicles as they passed by. Among them: eight black Jeep Wranglers, six Honda Accords, an ambulance, and a yellow Ford Fiesta with a vanity plate.

This trove of real-time vehicle data, collected by one of Motorola’s ALPR systems, is meant to be accessible by law enforcement. However, a flaw discovered by a security researcher has exposed live video feeds and detailed records of passing vehicles, revealing the staggering scale of surveillance enabled by this widespread technology.

More than 150 Motorola ALPR cameras have exposed their video feeds and leaking data in recent months, according to security researcher Matt Brown, who first publicized the issues in a series of YouTube videos after buying an ALPR camera on eBay and reverse engineering it.

As well as broadcasting live footage accessible to anyone on the Internet, the misconfigured cameras also exposed data they have collected, including photos of cars and logs of license plates. The real-time video and data feeds don’t require any usernames or passwords to access.

Alongside other technologists, WIRED has reviewed video feeds from several of the cameras, confirming vehicle data—including makes, models, and colors of cars—have been accidentally exposed. Motorola confirmed the exposures, telling WIRED it was working with its customers to close the access.

Over the last decade, thousands of ALPR cameras have appeared in towns and cities across the US. The cameras, which are manufactured by companies such as Motorola and Flock Safety, automatically take pictures when they detect a car passing by. The cameras and databases of collected data are frequently used by police to search for suspects. ALPR cameras can be placed along roads, on the dashboards of cop cars, and even in trucks. These cameras capture billions of photos of cars—including occasionally bumper stickers, lawn signs, and T-shirts.

“Every one of them that I found exposed was in a fixed location over some roadway,” Brown, who runs cybersecurity company Brown Fine Security, tells WIRED. The exposed video feeds each cover a single lane of traffic, with cars driving through the camera’s view. In some streams, snow is falling. Brown found two streams for each exposed camera system, one in color and another in infrared.

Misconfigured license plate readers are leaking data and video in real time Read More »

US sues six of the biggest landlords over “algorithmic pricing schemes”

department of justice, Policy, realpage / Tim Belzer / January 7, 2025

The Justice Department says that landlords did more than use RealPage in the alleged pricing scheme. “Along with using RealPage’s anticompetitive pricing algorithms, these landlords coordinated through a variety of means,” such as “directly communicating with competitors’ senior managers about rents, occupancy, and other competitively sensitive topics,” the DOJ said.

There were “call arounds” in which “property managers called or emailed competitors to share, and sometimes discuss, competitively sensitive information about rents, occupancy, pricing strategies and discounts,” the DOJ said.

Landlords discussed their use of RealPage software with each other, the DOJ said. “For instance, landlords discussed via user groups how to modify the software’s pricing methodology, as well as their own pricing strategies,” the DOJ said. “In one example, LivCor and Willow Bridge executives participated in a user group discussion of plans for renewal increases, concessions and acceptance rates of RealPage rent recommendations.”

DOJ: Firms discussed “auto-accept” settings

The DOJ lawsuit says RealPage pushes clients to use “auto-accept settings” that automatically approve pricing recommendations. The DOJ said today that property rental firms discussed how they use those settings.

“As an example, at the request of Willow Bridge’s director of revenue management, Greystar’s director of revenue management supplied its standard auto-accept parameters for RealPage’s software, including the daily and weekly limits and the days of the week for which Greystar used ‘auto-accept,'” the DOJ said.

Greystar issued a statement saying it is “disappointed that the DOJ added us and other operators to their lawsuit against RealPage,” and that it will “vigorously” defend itself in court. “Greystar has and will conduct its business with the utmost integrity. At no time did Greystar engage in any anti-competitive practices,” the company said.

The Justice Department is joined in the case by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington. The case is in US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.

US sues six of the biggest landlords over “algorithmic pricing schemes” Read More »

Dirty deeds in Denver: Ex-prosecutor faked texts, destroyed devices to frame colleague

Colorado, framed, legal, Policy / Kris Guyer / January 7, 2025

How we got here

Choi was a young attorney a few years out of law school, working at the Denver District Attorney’s Office in various roles between 2019 and 2022. Beginning in 2021, she accused her colleague, Dan Hines, of sexual misconduct. Hines, she said at first, made an inappropriate remark to her. Hines denied it and nothing could be proven, but he was still transferred to another unit.

In 2022, Choi complained again. This time, she offered phone records showing inappropriate text messages she allegedly received from Hines. But Hines, who denied everything, offered investigators his own phone records, which showed no texts to Choi.

Investigators then went directly to Verizon for records, which showed that “Ms. Choi had texted the inappropriate messages to herself,” according to the Times. “In addition, she changed the name in her phone to make it appear as though Mr. Hines was the one who had sent them.”

At this point, the investigators started looking more closely at Choi and asked for her devices, leading to the incident described above.

In the end, Choi was fired from the DA’s office and eventually given a disbarment order by the Office of the Presiding Disciplinary Judge, which she can still appeal. For his part, Hines is upset about how he was treated during the whole situation and has filed a lawsuit of his own against the DA’s office, believing that he was initially seen as a guilty party even in the absence of evidence.

The case is a reminder that, despite well-founded concerns over tracking, data collection, and privacy, sometimes the modern world’s massive data collection can work to one’s benefit. Hines was able to escape the second allegation against him precisely because of the specific (and specifically refutable) digital evidence that was presented against him—as opposed to the murkier world of “he said/she said.”

Choi might have done as she liked with her devices, but her “evidence” wasn’t the only data out there. Investigators were able to draw on Hines’ own phone data, along with Verizon network data, to see that he had not been texting Choi at the times in question.

Update: Ars Technica has obtained the ruling, which you can read here (PDF). The document recounts in great detail what a modern, quasi-judicial workplace investigation looks like: forensic device examinations, search warrants to Verizon, asking people to log into their cell phone accounts and download data while investigators look over their shoulders, etc.

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Meta axes third-party fact-checkers in time for second Trump term

facebook, Instagram, Meta, Policy, Trump / Tim Belzer / January 7, 2025

Zuckerberg says Meta will “work with President Trump” to fight censorship.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California on September 25, 2024. Credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg

Meta announced today that it’s ending the third-party fact-checking program it introduced in 2016, and will rely instead on a Community Notes approach similar to what’s used on Elon Musk’s X platform.

The end of third-party fact-checking and related changes to Meta policies could help the company make friends in the Trump administration and in governments of conservative-leaning states that have tried to impose legal limits on content moderation. The operator of Facebook and Instagram announced the changes in a blog post and a video message recorded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political,” Zuckerberg said. He said the recent elections “feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech.”

“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes, similar to X, starting in the US,” Zuckerberg said. “After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”

Meta says the soon-to-be-discontinued fact-checking program includes over 90 third-party organizations that evaluate posts in over 60 languages. The US-based fact-checkers are AFP USA, Check Your Fact, Factcheck.org, Lead Stories, PolitiFact, Science Feedback, Reuters Fact Check, TelevisaUnivision, The Dispatch, and USA Today.

The independent fact-checkers rate the accuracy of posts and apply ratings such as False, Altered, Partly False, Missing Context, Satire, and True. Meta adds notices to posts rated as false or misleading and notifies users before they try to share the content or if they shared it in the past.

Meta: Experts “have their own biases”

In the blog post that accompanied Zuckerberg’s video message, Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said the 2016 decision to use independent fact-checkers seemed like “the best and most reasonable choice at the time… The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.”

But experts “have their own biases and perspectives,” and the program imposed “intrusive labels and reduced distribution” of content “that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate,” Kaplan wrote.

The X-style Community Notes system lets the community “decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see… Just like they do on X, Community Notes [on Meta sites] will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings,” Kaplan wrote.

The end of third-party fact-checking will be implemented in the US before other countries. Meta will also move its internal trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, Zuckerberg said. “Our US-based content review is going to be based in Texas. As we work to promote free expression, I think it will help us build trust to do this work in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams,” he said. Meta will continue to take “legitimately bad stuff” like drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation “very seriously,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg pledges to work with Trump

Meta will “phase in a more comprehensive community notes system” over the next couple of months, Zuckerberg said. Meta, which donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, will also “work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world that are going after American companies and pushing to censor more,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said that “Europe has an ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship,” that “Latin American countries have secret courts that can quietly order companies to take things down,” and that “China has censored apps from even working in the country.” Meta needs “the support of the US government” to push back against other countries’ content-restriction orders, he said.

“That’s why it’s been so difficult over the past four years when even the US government has pushed for censorship,” Zuckerberg said, referring to the Biden administration. “By going after US and other American companies, it has emboldened other governments to go even further. But now we have the opportunity to restore free expression, and I am excited to take it.”

Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, praised Meta’s policy changes. Carr has promised to shift the FCC’s focus from regulating telecom companies to cracking down on Big Tech and media companies that he alleges are part of a “censorship cartel.”

“President Trump’s resolute and strong support for the free speech rights of everyday Americans is already paying dividends,” Carr wrote on X today. “Facebook’s announcements is [sic] a good step in the right direction. I look forward to monitoring these developments and their implementation. The work continues until the censorship cartel is completely dismantled and destroyed.”

Group: Meta is “saying the truth doesn’t matter”

Meta’s changes were criticized by Public Citizen, a nonprofit advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader. “Asking users to fact-check themselves is tantamount to Meta saying the truth doesn’t matter,” Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert said. “Misinformation will flow more freely with this policy change, as we cannot assume that corrections will be made when false information proliferates. The American people deserve accurate information about our elections, health risks, the environment, and much more.”

Media advocacy group Free Press said that “Zuckerberg is one of many billionaires who are cozying up to dangerous demagogues like Trump and pushing initiatives that favor their bottom lines at the expense of everything and everyone else.” Meta appears to be abandoning its “responsibility to protect its many users, and align[ing] the company more closely with an incoming president who’s a known enemy of accountability,” Free Press Senior Counsel Nora Benavidez said.

X’s Community Notes system was criticized in a recent report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which said it “found that 74 percent of accurate community notes on US election misinformation never get shown to users.” (X previously sued the CCDH, but the lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge.)

Previewing other changes, Zuckerberg said that Meta will eliminate content restrictions “that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse” and change how it enforces policies “to reduce the mistakes that account for the vast majority of censorship on our platforms.”

“We used to have filters that scanned for any policy violation. Now, we’re going to focus those filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations, and for lower severity violations, we’re going to rely on someone reporting an issue before we take action,” he said. “The problem is the filters make mistakes, and they take down a lot of content that they shouldn’t. So by dialing them back, we’re going to dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.”

Meta to relax filters, recommend more political content

Zuckerberg said Meta will re-tune content filters “to require much higher confidence before taking down content.” He said this means Meta will “catch less bad stuff” but will “also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Meta has “built a lot of complex systems to moderate content,” he noted. Even if these systems “accidentally censor just 1 percent of posts, that’s millions of people, and we’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” he said.

Kaplan wrote that Meta has censored too much harmless content and that “too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail.'”

“In recent years we’ve developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content,” Kaplan wrote. “This approach has gone too far. As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable.”

Another upcoming change is that Meta will recommend more political posts. “For a while, the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts,” Zuckerberg said. “But it feels like we’re in a new era now, and we’re starting to get feedback that people want to see this content again, so we’re going to start phasing this back into Facebook, Instagram, and Threads while working to keep the communities friendly and positive.”

Meta axes third-party fact-checkers in time for second Trump term Read More »

“I’m getting dizzy”: Man films Waymo self-driving car driving around in circles

Cars, Policy, self-driving, waymo / Kris Guyer / January 6, 2025

Waymo says the problem only caused a delay of just over five minutes and that Johns was not charged for the trip. A spokesperson for Waymo, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet, told Ars today that the “looping event” occurred on December 9 and was later addressed during a regularly scheduled software update.

Waymo did not answer our question about whether the software update only addressed routing at the specific location the problem occurred at, or a more general routing problem that could have affected rides in other locations.

The problem affecting Johns’ ride occurred near the user’s pickup location, Waymo told us. The Waymo car took the rider to his destination after the roughly five-minute delay, the spokesperson said. “Our rider support agent did help initiate maneuvers that helped resolve the issue,” Waymo said.

Rider would like an explanation

CBS News states that Johns is “still not certain he was communicating with a real person or AI” when he spoke to the support rep in the car. However, the Waymo spokesperson told Ars that “all of our rider support staff are trained human operators.”

Waymo told Ars that the company tried to contact Johns after the incident and left him a voicemail. Johns still says that he never received an explanation of what caused the circling problem.

We emailed Johns today and received a reply from a public relations firm working on his behalf. “To date, Mike has not received an explanation as to the reason for the circling issue,” his spokesperson said. His spokesperson confirmed that Johns did not miss his flight.

It wasn’t clear from the video whether Johns tried to use the “pull over” functionality available in Waymo cars. “If at any time you want to end your ride early, tap the Pull over button in your app or on the passenger screen, and the car will find a safe spot to stop,” a Waymo support site says.

Johns’ spokesperson told us that “Mike was not immediately aware of the ‘pull over’ button,” so “he did not have an opportunity to use it before engaging with the customer service representative over the car speaker.”

While Waymo says all its agents are human, Johns’ spokesperson told Ars that “Mike is still unsure if he was speaking with a human or an AI agent.”

“I’m getting dizzy”: Man films Waymo self-driving car driving around in circles Read More »

Do Kwon, the crypto bro behind $40B Luna/Terra collapse, finally extradited to US

Cryptocurrency, do kwon, Policy / Rejus Almole / January 3, 2025

The US government finally got its metaphorical hands on Do Hyeong Kwon, the 33-year-old Korean national who built a financial empire on the cryptocurrency Luna and the “stablecoin” TerraUSD, only to see it all come crashing down in a wipeout that cost investors $40 billion.

As private investors filed lawsuits, and as the governments of South Korea and the United States launched fraud investigations, Do Kwon was nowhere to be found. In 2022, the Korean government filed a “red notice” with Interpol, seeking Kwon’s arrest and his return to Korea. A few months later, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Kwon with fraud in the US.

On September 17, 2022, Kwon famously tweeted, “I am not ‘on the run’ or anything similar”—but he also wouldn’t say where he was. He didn’t help his case when he was arrested in March 2023 by the authorities in Montenegro. At an airport. With fake travel documents. On his way to a country with no US extradition agreement.

After serving some time in a Montenegro prison, Kwon battled extradition to both Korea and the US. This delayed the process by some months, but on December 31, 2024, he was shipped off to US authorities. Today, he appeared in front of a federal judge in New York City, where he pled “not guilty” to fraud.

The US Justice Department crowed about the extradition, with US Attorney General Merrick Garland pointing out that the US can sometimes get to people in surprising ways.

“We secured this extradition despite Kwon’s alleged attempt to cover his tracks by laundering proceeds of his schemes and trying to use a fraudulent passport to travel to a country that did not have an extradition treaty with the United States,” Garland said in a statement. “This extradition from Montenegro is an example of the Justice Department’s international partnerships, which enable the pursuit of criminals wherever they attempt to hide.”

Five alleged misrepresentations

As for the charges, the US also unsealed a massive indictment against Kwon today, which you can read here (PDF) if you want all the gory details.

The basic claim is that Kwon “defrauded investors by falsely advertising the company’s blockchain products as decentralized, reliable, and effective, and by engaging in market manipulation, ultimately resulting in more than $40 billion in investor losses,” according to the US government. This, the government alleges, happened in five key ways:

Do Kwon, the crypto bro behind $40B Luna/Terra collapse, finally extradited to US Read More »