It says a lot about the state of the auto industry and where it's going that software problems have cost the CEO of a carmaker his job. From a report: Volkswagen ousted Herbert Diess as chief executive officer after severe software-development delays set back the scheduled launch of new Porsches, Audis and Bentleys. This was untenable considering buggy software postponed the debut of VW's initial rollout of ID models, and customers are still having to drop off their cars at the dealer for updates the company has struggled to make over the air.

Sure, Diess also didn't do enough to make allies and became increasingly isolated due to his hard-nosed leadership style. In his push to transform the company into an electric-vehicle leader, he repeatedly clashed with labor leaders by warning VW was losing out to Tesla and needed to cut thousands of jobs. But failures at the carmaker's software unit Cariad ultimately eroded Diess's support from the powerful Porsche and Piech family that calls the shots. Back in December, VW overhauled its management board, stripping Diess of some responsibilities while tasking him to turn around Cariad. While there's been a lot of re-arranging since then, Diess didn't manage to make the issues go away.

A joint investigation by Nikkei and a Tokyo analytics company found that Apple has jumped into automobile-related technologies, as shown by the company's recent patent applications. From a report: Apple has filed patents in self-driving and other vehicle software as well as in hardware related to riding comfort, such as seats and suspension. The U.S. tech and services company is also targeting vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology, which allows cars to communicate with each other and connect to the "Internet of Things," moves seen as a major push by Apple to build its own platform and join a growing industry shift from just cars to overall mobility.

Nikkei and Intellectual Property Landscape found that as of June 1, Apple applied for and published 248 automobile-related patents after 2000. It typically takes about 18 months after filing a patent for it to be published. While most of Apple's applications in 2021 have yet to be published, eight were. This number is bound to increase throughout the year. Of Apple's 27 applications made in 2020, five were published at the same time in 2021. The number of patents published in 2021 is almost certain to exceed this, according to Intellectual Property Landscape.

ZDNet reports: Microsoft is rolling out a new security default for Windows 11 that will go a long way to preventing ransomware attacks that begin with password-guessing attacks and compromised credentials. The new account security default on account credentials should help thwart ransomware attacks that are initiated after using compromised credentials or brute-force password attacks to access remote desktop protocol (RDP) endpoints, which are often exposed on the internet.

RDP remains the top method for initial access in ransomware deployments, with groups specializing in compromising RDP endpoints and selling them to others for access.

The new feature is rolling out to Windows 11 in a recent Insider test build, but the feature is also being backported to Windows 10 desktop and server, according to Dave Weston, vice president of OS Security and Enterprise at Microsoft. "Win11 builds now have a DEFAULT account lockout policy to mitigate RDP and other brute force password vectors. This technique is very commonly used in Human Operated Ransomware and other attacks — this control will make brute forcing much harder which is awesome!," Weston tweeted.

Weston emphasized "default" because the policy is already an option in Windows 10 but isn't enabled by default. That's big news and is a parallel to Microsoft's default block on internet macros in Office on Windows devices, which is also a major avenue for malware attacks on Windows systems through email attachments and links.... The defaults will be visible in the Windows Local Computer Policy directory "Account Lockout Policy".

The default "account lockout duration" is 10 minutes; the "account lockout threshold" is set to a maximum of 10 invalid logon attempts; a setting to "allow administrator account lockout" is enabled; and the "reset account lockout counter after" setting is set to 10 minutes.

It's difficult for large projects to convert existing C++ codebases into Rust, argue Google engineers — so they've created a new "experimental" open source programming language called Carbon.

Google Principal Software Engineer Chandler Carruth introduced Carbon this week at the "CPP North" C++ conference in Toronto. TechRadar reports: The newly announced Carbon should be interoperable with the popular C++ code, however for users looking to make the full switch, the migration should be fairly easy. For those unsure about a full changeover, Carruth delved into more detail about some of the reasons why Carbon should be considered a powerful successor to the C++ language, including simpler grammar and smoother API imports.
Google's engineers are already building tools to translate C++ into this new language. "While Carbon began as a Google internal project, the development team ultimately wants to reduce contributions from Google, or any other single company, to less than 50% by the end of the year," reports The New Stack, adding that Google ultimately wants to hand off the project to an independent software foundation where development will be led by volunteers: Long the language of choice for building performance-critical applications, C++ is plagued with a number of issues that hamper modern developers, Carruth explained on a GitHub page. It has accumulated decades of technical debt, bringing with it many of the outdated practices that were part of the language's predecessor, C. The keepers of C++ prioritize backward compatibility, in order to continue to support widely-used projects such as Linux and its package management ecosystem, Carruth charged.

The language's evolution is also stymied by a bureaucratic committee process, oriented around standardization rather than design. Which can make it difficult to add new features. C++ has largely a sequestered development process, in which a select committee makes the important decisions, in a waterfall process that can take years. "The committee structure is designed to ensure representation of nations and companies, rather than building an inclusive and welcoming team and community of experts and people actively contributing to the language," Carruth wrote. "Access to the committee and standard is restricted and expensive, attendance is necessary to have a voice, and decisions are made by live votes of those present."

Carruth wants to build Carbon by a more open community-led environment. The project will be maintained on GitHub, and discussed on Discord.... The design team wants to release a core working version ("0.1") by the end of the year.
Carbon will boast modern features like generics and memory safety (including dynamic bounds checks), the article points out. And "The development team will also set out to create a built-in package manager, something that C++ sorely lacks."

Long-time Slashdot reader Bodhammer shared this story of a remarkable solar-powered tower that produces carbon-neutral, sustainable versions of diesel and jet fuel — using only water and carbon dioxide (plus sunlight) as its inputs. One hundred and sixty-nine sun-tracking reflector panels, each presenting three square meters (~32 sq ft) of surface area, redirect sunlight into a 16-cm (6.3-in) hole in the solar reactor at the top of the 15-m-tall (49-ft) central tower. This reactor receives an average of about 2,500 suns' worth of energy — about 50 kW of solar thermal power.

This heat is used to drive a two-step thermochemical redox cycle. Water and pure carbon dioxide are fed in to a ceria-based redox reaction, which converts them simultaneously into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, or syngas. Because this is all being done in a single chamber, it's possible to tweak the rates of water and CO2 to live-manage the exact composition of the syngas. This syngas is fed to a Gas-to-Liquid (GtL) unit at the bottom of the tower, which produced a liquid phase containing 16% kerosene and 40% diesel, as well as a wax phase with 7% kerosene and 40% diesel — proving that the ceria-based ceramic solar reactor definitely produced syngas pure enough for conversion into synthetic fuels....

The team says the system's overall efficiency (measured by the energy content of the syngas as a percentage of the total solar energy input) was only around 4% in this implementation, but it sees pathways to getting that up over 20% by recovering and recycling more heat, and altering the structure of the ceria structure. "We are the first to demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain from water and CO2 to kerosene in a fully-integrated solar tower system," said ETH Professor Aldo Steinfeld, the corresponding author of the research paper. "This solar tower fuel plant was operated with a setup relevant to industrial implementation, setting a technological milestone towards the production of sustainable aviation fuels."

"The solar tower fuel plant described here represents a viable pathway to global-scale implementation of solar fuel production," reads the study.

There's been "a dramatic escalation of Chinese espionage on US soil over the past decade," sources in the U.S. counterintelligence community have told CNN this weekend.

But some dramatic new examples have been revealed. For example, in 2017 China's government offered to build a $100 million pavilion in Washington D.C. with an ornate 70-foot pagoda. U.S. counterintelligence officials realized its location — two miles from the U.S. Capitol — appeared "strategically placed on one of the highest points in Washington DC...a perfect spot for signals intelligence collection." Also alarming was that Chinese officials wanted to build the pagoda with materials shipped to the US in diplomatic pouches, which US Customs officials are barred from examining, the sources said. Federal officials quietly killed the project before construction was underway...

Since at least 2017, federal officials have investigated Chinese land purchases near critical infrastructure, shut down a high-profile regional consulate believed by the US government to be a hotbed of Chinese spies and stonewalled what they saw as clear efforts to plant listening devices near sensitive military and government facilities.

Among the most alarming things the FBI uncovered pertains to Chinese-made Huawei equipment atop cell towers near US military bases in the rural Midwest. According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, the FBI determined the equipment was capable of capturing and disrupting highly restricted Defense Department communications, including those used by US Strategic Command, which oversees the country's nuclear weapons.... It's unclear if the intelligence community determined whether any data was actually intercepted and sent back to Beijing from these towers. Sources familiar with the issue say that from a technical standpoint, it's incredibly difficult to prove a given package of data was stolen and sent overseas.

The Chinese government strongly denies any efforts to spy on the US.... But multiple sources familiar with the investigation tell CNN that there's no question the Huawei equipment has the ability to intercept not only commercial cell traffic but also the highly restricted airwaves used by the military and disrupt critical US Strategic Command communications, giving the Chinese government a potential window into America's nuclear arsenal.... As Huawei equipment began to proliferate near US military bases, federal investigators started taking notice, sources familiar with the matter told CNN. Of particular concern was that Huawei was routinely selling cheap equipment to rural providers in cases that appeared to be unprofitable for Huawei — but which placed its equipment near military assets.

This week America's Department of Defense "created an office to track unidentified objects in space and air, [and] under water," reports Space.com, "or even those that appear to travel between these domains." UFOs, or as they are now known, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) have been receiving newfound levels of government scrutiny not seen in decades. Multiple hearings and classified briefings have taken place in the halls of the U.S. Congress in recent months, and many lawmakers have expressed concern that America's airspace may not be as safe as we think due to the many sightings of unidentified objects military aviators and other armed forces personnel have reported.

With that in mind, the Department of Defense announced the creation of this new office in a statement published Wednesday (July 20). The office is known as the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, and was established within the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security... The office has six primary lines of effort: surveillance, collection and reporting; system capabilities and design; intelligence operations and analysis; mitigation and defeat; governance; and science and technology.
A statement from the U.S. Department of Defense spells out its mission:

• To synchronize efforts across the Department of Defense, and with other U.S. federal departments and agencies
• To detect, identify and attribute objects of interest in, on or near military installations, operating areas, training areas, special use airspace and other areas of interest
• As necessary, to mitigate any associated threats to safety of operations and national security.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 notes the office already has its own Twitter feed, providing "updates and information relative to our examinations of unidentified anomalous phenomena across space, air, and maritime domains."

Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who publicly claimed that the company's LaMDA conversational artificial intelligence is sentient, has been fired, according to the Big Technology newsletter, which spoke to Lemoine. The Verge reports: In June, Google placed Lemoine on paid administrative leave for breaching its confidentiality agreement after he contacted members of the government about his concerns and hired a lawyer to represent LaMDA. [...] Google maintains that it "extensively" reviewed Lemoine's claims and found that they were "wholly unfounded." This aligns with numerous AI experts and ethicists, who have said that his claims were, more or less, impossible given today's technology. Lemoine claims his conversations with LaMDA's chatbot lead him to believe that it has become more than just a program and has its own thoughts and feelings, as opposed to merely producing conversation realistic enough to make it seem that way, as it is designed to do. He argues that Google's researchers should seek consent from LaMDA before running experiments on it (Lemoine himself was assigned to test whether the AI produced hate speech) and published chunks of those conversations on his Medium account as his evidence. Google issued the following statement to The Verge: "As we share in our AI Principles, we take the development of AI very seriously and remain committed to responsible innovation. LaMDA has been through 11 distinct reviews, and we published a research paper earlier this year detailing the work that goes into its responsible development. If an employee shares concerns about our work, as Blake did, we review them extensively. We found Blake's claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with him for many months. These discussions were part of the open culture that helps us innovate responsibly. So, it's regrettable that despite lengthy engagement on this topic, Blake still chose to persistently violate clear employment and data security policies that include the need to safeguard product information. We will continue our careful development of language models, and we wish Blake well."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US Senators Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) want to ban Internet data caps. The senators today introduced the "Uncap America Act," which would "prohibit predatory data caps that force families to pay high costs and unnecessary fees to access high-speed broadband," they said in a press release. "A broadband Internet access service provider shall not impose a data cap except when tailored primarily for the purposes of reasonable network management or managing network congestion," the bill says. The proposed law would order the Federal Communications Commission to issue "regulations to define the conditions under which a data cap is to be considered tailored to the purpose of reasonable network management or managing network congestion."

Data caps that don't comply with the exceptions would violate the Communications Act. "While certain broadband Internet access service networks may require practices to effectively manage congestion, those practices should be tailored to improve equitable access among consumers," the bill says. "Unnecessary data caps limit participation in the digital economy and are contrary to the public interest." The bill can be expected to attract fierce opposition from the broadband industry and would face long odds of passing through the Senate and House. If it does become law, it would likely prohibit the home Internet data caps imposed by Comcast and others, which clearly exist for financial purposes and not for any network management need.

While the Lujan/Booker bill leaves key details up to the FCC, it provides a comprehensive definition of what counts as a data cap under the proposed law. The bill says a data cap is "a limit on the amount of bits or other units of information a customer of a broadband Internet access service provider may download or upload during a period of time specified by the broadband Internet service access provider before the customer is charged a fee for additional usage; is subject to an increasing cost per bit or other unit of information; is charged for an incremental block of usage; or experiences a reduction of access speed; or that the customer is otherwise discouraged or prevented from exceeding." The proposed law would apply to home Internet services and mobile data plans, as it uses a definition of broadband service in US law that includes "mass-market retail service by wire or radio." But the FCC would be able to define different rules for different types of connections, Lujan's office told Ars.

In an upcoming update, Chromebooks equipped with mobile data will be able to serve as a Wi-Fi hotspot for other devices, just like Android and iOS devices can today. 9to5Google reports: The work-in-progress feature has made its first appearance in ChromeOS code in the form of a new flag coming to chrome://flags. The details are quite slim at the moment, with little more than the flag description available today. That said, it's easy to imagine how a mobile hotspot would work on ChromeOS, based on how the same feature works on Android phones today.

Presumably, you would be able to choose the name and password for your Chromebook's hotspot through the Settings app in ChromeOS, where you can also toggle the hotspot on and off. If it truly follows the example of Android, there would also be an easy way to turn on your hotspot through a Quick Settings toggle.

With Apple's new CarPlay software announced in June, the company is "is diving deeper into its automotive ambitions, opening up the possibility to enter into a multibillion segment of the auto industry that's growing quickly: The ability to sell additional services and features to car owners," reports CNBC. From the report: The auto industry faces an unappealing choice: Offer CarPlay and give up potential revenue and the chance to ride a major industry shift, or spend heavily to develop their own infotainment software and cater to an potentially shrinking audience of car buyers who will purchase a new vehicle without CarPlay. [...] Industry observers believe carmakers need to embrace software services -- and look at Apple's offering with skepticism -- or risk getting left behind. "It's a really difficult time in the industry, where the car companies think they're still building cars. They're not. They're building software on wheels, and they don't know it, and they're trading it away," said Conrad Layson, senior analyst at AutoForecast Solutions.

The new version of CarPlay could be a huge emerging revenue engine for Apple. First, if a user loves the iPhone's CarPlay interface, then they're less likely to switch to an Android phone. That's a strategic priority for Apple, which generates the majority of its revenue through hardware sales. Second, while the company doesn't yet charge a fee to automakers or suppliers, it could sell services for vehicles the same way it distributes iPhone software. In June, Apple revealed that it has explored features that integrate commerce into the car's cockpit. One new feature announced this summer would allow CarPlay users to navigate to a gas pump and pay for the fuel from the dashboard of the car, according to Reuters. Apple already generates tens of billions from the App Store, and stands to boost that if it ever decides to charge for services in cars...

SpaceX made it through its second attempt to launch 46 satellites on Friday (July 22), breaking a record along the way. The launch allowed SpaceX to surpass its 31 record launches of 2021 with a 32nd record launch in 2022, and still counting. Space.com reports: The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket, which induced a scrub at T-46 seconds on Thursday (July 21), lifted off successfully from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California Friday. Liftoff took place at 1:40 p.m. EDT (1740 GMT or 10:40 a.m. local time at the launch site) amid severely foggy conditions on the west coast. Falcon 9's first stage also completed its mission, landing atop the "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship in the Pacific Ocean as planned, about 8.5 minutes after launch. The report notes that SpaceX has launched more than 2,800 individual Starlink satellites to orbit as the company seeks to build out its satellite-internet service.

If you have been on Steam, the world's largest PC gaming platform, you might have noticed an anomaly on the chart of the top 20 most popular apps: Wallpaper Engine. The software is pretty cool -- it lets you download animated and interactive wallpapers for your machine's monitor -- but it's hard to explain why an obscure wallpaper app consistently ranks alongside global blockbuster franchises like Counter-Strike or Dota. From a report: The epiphany will come when you begin to read Wallpaper Engine's many reviews. More than 200,000 of them are written in Chinese, stretching from 2016 to 2022. And these reviews almost all talk about one thing: porn. Or more specifically, about using the software as a cloud drive and a video player for exchanging adult-only content.

Online porn is banned in China, so people there have to get creative to access it. Steam is one of the only popular global platforms still available in the country, and its community features, international high-speed servers, and increasingly hands-off approach when it comes to sexual content have made it an inevitable choice. Chinese users now make up at least 40% of Wallpaper Engine's global user base, MIT Technology Review estimates. Last year, users in China suddenly needed to use VPN services to access certain Steam services. As the reviews show, now they are afraid they may soon lose this rare community, either because of platform content moderation or the possibility that China might block Steam altogether.

Tech companies should move ahead with controversial technology that scans for child abuse imagery on users' phones, the technical heads of GCHQ and the UK's National Cybersecurity Centre have said. From a report: So-called "client-side scanning" would involve service providers such as Facebook or Apple building software that monitors communications for suspicious activity without needing to share the contents of messages with a centralised server. Ian Levy, the NCSC's technical director, and Crispin Robinson, the technical director of cryptanalysis -- codebreaking -- at GCHQ, said the technology could protect children and privacy at the same time.

"We've found no reason why client-side scanning techniques cannot be implemented safely in many of the situations one will encounter," they wrote in a discussion paper published on Thursday, which the pair said was "not government policy." They argued that opposition to proposals for client-side scanning -- most famously a plan from Apple, now paused indefinitely, to scan photos before they are uploaded to the company's image-sharing service -- rested on specific flaws, which were fixable in practice. They suggested, for instance, requiring the involvement of multiple child protection NGOs, to guard against any individual government using the scanning apparatus to spy on civilians; and using encryption to ensure that the platform never sees any images that are passed to humans for moderation, instead involving only those same NGOs.

We appear to be entering a period of Windows' development where we can expect new features and tweaks to come to the operating system several times a year. To that end, Microsoft continues to add, remove, and generally experiment with Windows 11's features and user interface via its Insider Preview channels. From a report: The most interesting addition we've seen in a while is rolling out to users on the experimental Dev Channel now: a modified version of the taskbar with much-improved handling of app icon overflow when users have too many apps open at once. Click an ellipsis button on your taskbar, and a new icon overflow menu opens up, allowing you to interact with any of those extra icons the same way you would if they were sitting on the taskbar. This would be a big improvement over the current overflow behavior, which devotes one icon's worth of space to show the icon for the app you last interacted with, leaving the rest inaccessible. That icon will continue to appear on the taskbar alongside the new ellipsis icon. Microsoft says that app icons in the overflow area will be able to show jump lists and other customizable shortcuts the same as any other app icon in the taskbar.

Google's search engine is to be banned in the occupied Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk after pro-Russian authorities there accused the US tech giant of promoting "terrorism and violence against all Russians." From a report: In a statement posted to the social messaging service Telegram, Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), said: "The inhuman propaganda of Ukraine and the west has long crossed all boundaries. There is a real persecution of Russians, the imposition of lies and disinformation." He accused Google's search engine of being at the forefront of this effort, saying it "openly, on the orders of its curators from the US government, promotes terrorism and violence against all Russians, and especially the population of Donbas."

AMD looks to be on the cusp of releasing a competitor to RTX Voice, a feature for Nvidia graphics cards that cancels out background noise when you're on a call or otherwise using your mic. From a report: That's according to a trailer that AMD posted to its YouTube channel (apparently in error), Tom's Hardware reports. Thankfully, a copy of the trailer was downloaded before it was deleted by Reddit user u/zenobian and uploaded to the AMD subreddit. The leaked trailer suggests that AMD's Noise Suppression feature will work very similarly to Nvidia's RTX Voice (which has subsequently been rolled into Nvidia's Broadcast app). It uses "a real-time deep learning algorithm" to offer "two-way noise-reduction" that filters background noise out of both outgoing and incoming microphone audio, and is apparently built into AMD's existing Adrenalin software.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp has likely advanced its production technology by two generations, defying US sanctions intended to halt the rise of China's largest chipmaker. From a report: The Shanghai-based manufacturer is shipping Bitcoin-mining semiconductors built using 7-nanometer technology, industry watcher TechInsights wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. That's well ahead of SMIC's established 14nm technology, a measure of fabrication complexity in which narrower transistor widths help produce faster and more efficient chips. Since late 2020, the US has barred the unlicensed sale to the Chinese firm of equipment that can be used to fabricate semiconductors of 10nm and beyond, infuriating Beijing.

A person familiar with the developments confirmed the report, asking not to be named as they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. SMIC's surprising progress raises questions about how effective export controls have been and whether Washington can indeed thwart China's ambition to foster a world-class chip industry at home and reduce reliance on foreign technologies. It also comes at a time American lawmakers have urged Washington to close loopholes in its Chinese-oriented curbs and ensure Beijing isn't supplying crucial technology to Russia. The restrictions effectively derailed Huawei Technologies's smartphone business by cutting it off from the tools to compete at the cutting edge -- but that company is now quietly staffing up a renewed effort to develop its in-house chipmaking acumen.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A video started circulating on Twitter Thursday of a Boston Dynamics-style robot dog firing a submachine gun into targets amid a snowy backdrop. This type of robot dog (it doesn't seem like the robot in the video is a Boston Dynamics Spot, just looks a lot like it) is famous for dancing, but now appears to have fulfilled every warning given by journalists and analysts. It's got a gun and it's ready to kill. A lot of questions remain. First, the robot dog doesn't seem to be able to handle the recoil of the gun well. As it fires its rounds, the barrel trails up and the dog has to take a minute to get its balance back. We also don't know if the dog is firing on its own or if, and this is more likely, someone is off-camera pulling the trigger remotely.

The robot's feet, various ports, and its front are completely different from Boston Dynamics' Spot. There's dozens of knockoffs of the Boston Dynamics dog selling on the international market. The one in the video appears to be a UnitreeYusu "technology dog" selling on AliExpress for about $3,000. The feet, port placement, and joint coverings are all the same. The robot also has strips of Velcro on either of its flanks. The left flank bears a Russian flag and the other appears with a wolf's head. In another video on the channel, a man wears a similar patch on his arm. It appears to be a wolf's head insignia commonly associated with Russian Special Operations Forces or Spetsnaz. That doesn't mean that Spetsnaz is using armed robot dogs, as pretty much anyone can buy a similar patch online in various places.

The gun is also Russian. It appears to be a PP-19 Vityaz, a submachine gun based on the AK-74 design. As the dog wanders around and fires, it sometimes moves in front of an armored personnel carrier with a unique triangular door. That's a BDRM-2, a Russian armored car that's been spotted recently in Ukraine. Finally, there's the account the video originally appeared on. Before making its way to Twitter, the video of the dog was posted to the YouTube account of Alexander Atamov on March 22, 2022. Atamov is listed on his LinkedIn profile as the founder of "HOVERSURF" and his Facebook page lists him as living in Moscow. He posted a picture of the robot dog on March 21. According to Facebook's translation of his post, he called the dog "Skynet."

It appears that a crypto Twitter user named Cobie influenced the FBI into bringing an insider trading case. From a report: The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York is bringing an indictment against a former Coinbase employee, who allegedly tipped his brother and his buddy about which assets were about to list on Coinbase -- leading to $1.5 million in "realized and unrealized gains," according to the indictment. This is the first insider trading case involving cryptocurrency markets, says U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, in a statement.

Ishan Wahi, the Coinbase employee who was charged, was involved in listing new crypto assets on Coinbase's exchange. When Coinbase announces that a new token will be listed, that token often pops in value -- which means that the company told employees to keep silent about Coinbase's listing plans. Wahi started working for Coinbase in October 2020. In August 2021, he was allowed access to a channel where Coinbase employees discussed listing new projects with details like "exact announcement / launch dates + timelines."