A Bloomberg investigative reporter wrote a new book titled Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. This week Bloomberg published an excerpt that begins when the reporter received a flirtatious text message from a woman named Vicky Ho for a scam that's called "pig butchering".

"Vicky's random text had found its way to pretty much exactly the wrong target. I'd been investigating the crypto bubble for more than a year..." After a day, Vicky revealed her true love language: Bitcoin price data. She started sending me charts. She told me she'd figured out how to predict market fluctuations and make quick gains of 20% or more. The screenshots she shared showed that during that week alone she'd made $18,600 on one trade, $4,320 on another and $3,600 on a third... For days, she went on chatting without asking for me to send any money. I was supposed to be the mark, but I had to work her to con me.... Vicky sent me a link to download an app called ZBXS. It looked pretty much like other crypto-exchange apps. "New safe and stable trading market," a banner read at the top. Then Vicky gave me some instructions. They involved buying one cryptocurrency using another crypto-exchange app, then transferring the crypto to ZBXS's deposit address on the blockchain, a 42-character string of letters and numbers...

People around the world really were losing huge sums of money to the con. A project finance lawyer in Boston with terminal cancer handed over $2.5 million. A divorced mother of three in St. Louis was defrauded of $5 million. And the victims I spoke to all told me they'd been told to use Tether, the same coin Vicky suggested to me. Rich Sanders, the lead investigator at CipherBlade, a crypto-tracing firm, said that at least $10 billion had been lost to crypto romance scams.

The huge sums involved weren't the most shocking part. I learned that whoever was posing as Vicky was likely a victim as well — of human trafficking. Most "pig-butchering" operations were orchestrated by Chinese gangsters based in Cambodia or Myanmar. They'd lure young people from across Southeast Asia to move abroad with the promise of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling. Then, when the workers arrived, they'd be held captive and forced into a criminal racket. Thousands have been tricked this way. Entire office towers are filled with floor after floor of people sending spam messages around the clock, under threat of torture or death.

With the assistance of translators, I started video chatting with people who'd escaped...

I'd heard that [southwestern Cambodia's giant building complex] Chinatown alone held as many as 6,000 captive workers like "Vicky Ho."
Two of the workers interviewed "said they'd seen workers murdered." And another worker said Tether was used specifically because "It's more safe. We are afraid people will track us... It's untraceable."

The reporter's conclusion? "It was hard to see how this slave complex could exist without cryptocurrency."

America's teens hate Android phones, according to a new article from the Wall Street Journal: Melissa Jones, a former teacher in Lebanon, Ind., observes that, among students, it's considered most important to own a new, up-to-date phone. And judging by the copious TikTok content that pits users of the two operating systems against each other — with Android most frequently the butt of the joke — many teens associate Androids with older technology, and older people, no matter how new the phone actually is.

"You're telling me in 2023, you still have a 'Droid?" says 20-year-old online creator Abdoul Chamberlain during a video posted in April. "You gotta be at least 50 years old." The video goes on to say that only parents have Androids, and despite the persistent claims from Android users that features like the cameras or battery life are better on the Android than the iPhone, Chamberlain refuses to get one. Other videos more somberly describe the experience of showing up to high school with an Android phone and being called "broke" or "medieval" by the poster's peers. Still more describe the feeling of being the lone Android user in a group chat of iPhone owners, shamed by texts which, when rendered in Apple's proprietary iMessage platform, appear in a revelatory bright green rather than the cool blue of messages sent between Apple devices.

Apple holds 57% of the phones market versus Android's 42% in the U.S., according to web traffic analysis site Statcounter. The data skews worse for Android when narrowed down to teenagers. According to a survey of 7,100 American teens last year conducted by investment bank Piper Sandler, 87% of teens currently have an iPhone, and 87% plan on sticking with the brand for their next phone.

But the stigma regarding Android phones is mostly an American phenomenon, at least to the degree to which it affects purchase habits. Worldwide, per the same Statcounter report, Androids represent the significant majority of all smartphones, holding a 71% share of sales compared with Apple's 28%.
Two years ago someone asked Reddit's "Ask Teens" forum, do teenagers really hate Android phones? But the responses were a lot more balanced.

"No," replied one (presumably teenaged) Reddit user. "Apple fanboys are just obnoxious, probably because they're knowingly getting scammed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: This year, BMO, a Canadian bank, was looking for Canadian adults to apply for a credit card. So the bank's advertising agency ran a YouTube campaign using an ad-targeting system from Google that employs artificial intelligence to pinpoint ideal customers. But Google, which owns YouTube, also showed the ad to a viewer in the United States on a Barbie-themed children's video on the "Kids Diana Show," a YouTube channel for preschoolers whose videos have been watched more than 94 billion times. When that viewer clicked on the ad, it led to BMO's website, which tagged the user's browser with tracking software from Google, Meta, Microsoft and other companies, according to new research from Adalytics, which analyzes ad campaigns for brands. As a result, leading tech companies could have tracked children across the internet, raising concerns about whether they were undercutting a federal privacy law, the report said. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, requires children's online services to obtain parental consent before collecting personal data from users under age 13 for purposes like ad targeting.

Adalytics identified more than 300 brands' ads for adult products, like cars, on nearly 100 YouTube videos designated as "made for kids" that were shown to a user who was not signed in, and that linked to advertisers' websites. It also found several YouTube ads with violent content, including explosions, sniper rifles and car accidents, on children's channels. An analysis by The Times this month found that when a viewer who was not signed into YouTube clicked the ads on some of the children's channels on the site, they were taken to brand websites that placed trackers -- bits of code used for purposes like security, ad tracking or user profiling -- from Amazon, Meta's Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others -- on users' browsers. As with children's television, it is legal, and commonplace, to run ads, including for adult consumer products like cars or credit cards, on children's videos. There is no evidence that Google and YouTube violated their 2019 agreement with the F.T.C.

The report's findings raise new concerns about YouTube's advertising on children's content. In 2019, YouTube and Google agreed topay a record $170 million fineto settle accusations from the Federal Trade Commission and the State of New York that the company had illegally collected personal information from children watching kids' channels. Regulators said the company had profited from using children's data to target them with ads. YouTube then said it would limit the collection of viewers' data and stop serving personalized ads on children's videos. On Thursday, two United States senators sent a letter to the F.T.C., urging it to investigate whether Google and YouTube had violated COPPA, citing Adalytics and reporting by The New York Times. Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Senator Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, said they were concerned that the company may have tracked children and served them targeted ads without parental consent, facilitating "the vast collection and distribution" of children's data. "This behavior by YouTube and Google is estimated to have impacted hundreds of thousands, to potentially millions, of children across the United States," the senators wrote. Google spokesman Michael Aciman called the report's findings "deeply flawed and misleading."

Google has stated that running ads for adults on children's videos is useful because parents watching could become customers. However, they acknowledge that violent ads on children's videos violate their policies and have taken steps to prevent such ads from running in the future. Google claims they do not use personalized ads on children's videos, ensuring compliance with COPPA.

Google notes that it does not inform advertisers if a viewer has watched a children's video, only that they clicked on the ad. Google also says it cannot control data collection on a brand's website after a YouTube viewer clicks an ad -- a process that could occur on any website.

According to Adweek, the New York Times updated its Terms of Service on August 3rd to prohibit its content from being used in the development of "any software program, including, but not limited to, training a machine learning or artificial intelligence (AI) system." That includes text, photographs, images, audio/video clips, "look and feel," metadata, and compilations. The Verge reports: The updated terms now also specify that automated tools like website crawlers designed to use, access, or collect such content cannot be used without written permission from the publication. The NYT says that refusing to comply with these new restrictions could result in unspecified fines or penalties. Despite introducing the new rules to its policy, the publication doesn't appear to have made any changes to its robots.txt -- the file that informs search engine crawlers which URLs can be accessed. The move follows a recent update to Google's privacy policy that discloses the search giant reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools.

"It was difficult to maintain a poker face when the leader of a big US tech firm I was chatting to said there was a definite tipping point at which the firm would exit the UK," writes a BBC technology editor: Many of these companies are increasingly fed up. Their "tipping point" is UK regulation — and it's coming at them thick and fast. The Online Safety Bill is due to pass in the autumn. Aimed at protecting children, it lays down strict rules around policing social media content, with high financial penalties and prison time for individual tech execs if the firms fail to comply. One clause that has proved particularly controversial is a proposal that encrypted messages, which includes those sent on WhatsApp, can be read and handed over to law enforcement by the platforms they are sent on, if there is deemed to be a national security or child protection risk...

Currently messaging apps like WhatsApp, Proton and Signal, which offer this encryption, cannot see the content of these messages themselves. WhatsApp and Signal have both threatened to quit the UK market over this demand.

The Digital Markets Bill is also making its way through Parliament. It proposes that the UK's competition watchdog selects large companies like Amazon and Microsoft, gives them rules to comply with and sets punishments if they don't. Several firms have told me they feel this gives an unprecedented amount of power to a single body. Microsoft reacted furiously when the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) chose to block its acquisition of the video game giant Activision Blizzard. "There's a clear message here — the European Union is a more attractive place to start a business than the United Kingdom," raged chief executive Brad Smith. The CMA has since re-opened negotiations with Microsoft. This is especially damning because the EU is also introducing strict rules in the same vein — but it is collectively a much larger and therefore more valuable market.

In the UK, proposed amendments to the Investigatory Powers Act, which included tech firms getting Home Office approval for new security features before worldwide release, incensed Apple so much that it threatened to remove Facetime and iMessage from the UK if they go through. Clearly the UK cannot, and should not, be held to ransom by US tech giants. But the services they provide are widely used by millions of people. And rightly or wrongly, there is no UK-based alternative to those services.
The article concludes that "It's a difficult line to tread. Big Tech hasn't exactly covered itself in glory with past behaviours — and lots of people feel regulation and accountability is long overdue."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Rex Heuermann, the meticulous architectural consultant who the authorities say murdered three women and buried them on a Long Island beach more than a decade ago, may have been among the last of the dying breed of American serial killers. Even as serial killers came to inhabit a central place in the nation's imagination -- inspiring hit movies, television shows, books, podcasts and more -- their actual number was dwindling dramatically. There were once hundreds at large, and a spike in the 1970s and '80s terrified the country. Now only a handful at most are known to be active, researchers say. The techniques that led to the arrest of Mr. Heuermann, who has pleaded not guilty to the crimes, help explain the waning of serial killing, which the F.B.I. defines as the same person killing two or more victims in separate events at different times.

It is harder to hide. Rapid advances in investigative technology, video and other digital surveillance tools, as well as the ability to analyze mountains of information, quickly allow the authorities to find killers who before would have gone undetected. At the same time, Americans have adopted more cautious habits in their everyday lives -- hitchhiking, for example, is less common, and children are driven to and from school. That reduces easy targets. And, some theorize, those bent on killing now opt for spectacular mass murders. "The 'perfect crime' concept is more of a concept than it ever has been before," said Adam Scott Wandt, an assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. More than a decade ago, prosecutors said, Mr. Heuermann tried to cover his digital tracks by communicating with victims using so-called burner phones, prepaid units purchased anonymously for temporary use. But thanks to exponential progress in technology since 2010, investigators were able not only to chart Mr. Heuermann's decade-old movements; they could also monitor exactly what he was searching online in recent months. They saw that he was using an anonymous account for internet queries like "Why could law enforcement not trace the calls made by the long island serial killer," prosecutors said. He had also been visiting massage parlors and contacting women working as escorts, they said.

The ubiquity of technology has made it harder to get away with murder, Mr. Wandt said. The amount of data people create in their daily lives is more than many can conceptualize, he said. Just by walking outside, people are now tracked by ever-present cameras, from Amazon's Ring units outside homes to surveillance at banks and retail stores, he said. Every use of a phone or computer creates streams of data that are collected directly on devices or immortalized on servers, he said. A concerted effort by the federal government to ensure that even the smallest police departments can use technology to their benefit has also helped give investigators an upper hand, Mr. Wandt said. In 1987, there were 198 known active serial killers -- people connected to at least two murders -- and 404 known victims across the United States, according to a report published three years ago by researchers who run Radford University and Florida Gulf Coast University's Serial Killer Database. By 2018, there were only 12 known serial killers and 44 victims, according to the report. "The big question is: Are they going underground and finding other techniques?â said Terence Leary, an associate professor in the psychology department at Florida Gulf Coast University and the team leader for the database.

He said that some serial murderers have killed for discrete periods before taking prolonged breaks: "Maybe they decided to give it up. Who knows?"

Brave Software, maker of the Brave web browser, has tuned its search engine to run on a homegrown index of images and videos in an effort to end its dependency on "Big Tech" rivals. The Register reports: On Thursday, the company said that image and video results from Brave Search -- available on the web at search.brave.com and via its browser -- will be served from Brave's own index. Search indexes are made by visiting online resources -- typically web pages, images, videos, or other files -- with a crawler bot and recording the locations of these resources in a database. And when an internet user submits a query to a search engine, the search engine checks its index (and possible other sources) to find the addresses of resources that correspond to the query keywords. There's actually a lot more to it but that's the basic idea.

Brave now aims to ride the wave of discontent with "Big Tech" by highlighting its commitment to privacy and independence â" small tech. "Brave Search is 100 percent private and anonymous, which sets a high bar for image/video search to meet," the company said in a blog post provided to The Register. "Whether it's a matter of personal safety or personal preference, users should be able to discover content without their search engine reporting and profiling those results to a Big Tech company." [...] Brave argues that having its own index frees the company from content decisions made by others. "Brave is on a mission to build a user-first Web," the company said in its blog post. "That mission starts with the Brave browser and Brave Search. With the release of image and video search, we're continuing to innovate within the search industry, providing viable and preferable products for users who want choice and transparency in their search for information online."

According to a new study from online game development platform School XYZ, the exodus of major international video game publishers from Russia led to a sharp rise in the number of video gamers playing pirates games. TorrentFreak reports: Almost seven out of ten video gamers (69%) said they'd played at least one pirated copy in 2022, and more than half (51%) said that they're now pirating more than they did in 2021. As first reported by the Russian news outlet Vedomosti (paywall), the study was conducted across all regions of Russia and took into account all unlicensed game formats, in most cases downloaded from torrent sites. While over a quarter of respondents (27%) said they'd pirated three PC games in 2022, and 20% confessed to pirating more than 10, other figures from the study are more positive. Of the 31% of gamers who reported pirating nothing in 2022, all said that they were opposed to piracy. Just 7% of gamers admitted to buying no games at all in 2022, meaning that 93% bought at least one piece of legitimate content.

According to Alexander Kuzmenko, the former editor of Russian videogame magazine and gaming website Igromania (Game Mania), it's not just the departure of publishers including Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo causing problem for gamers. When platforms like Steam and GOG, known for their ease of access, stopped supporting Russian bank cards, barriers appeared in a previously frictionless system. Yegor Tomsky, CEO at Watt Studio, agrees that buying content has become much more difficult. "Players are used to buying games on Steam in one click, and now, to buy a game, you need to perform the same actions as when downloading a pirated version, so everyone chooses to save money," Tomsky says.

As the Russian economy faces huge difficulties directly linked to the invasion of Ukraine, some fear that game piracy rates are heading towards the 90%+ mark last seen around two decades ago. People everywhere are trying to save money and according to Konstantin Sakhnov, co-founder of Vengeance Games, overseas game publishers may see lost profits reach $200-$300 million. A report from Kommersant published today indicates that local companies are also feeling the pain. According to data published by job search platform HH.ru, during the first half of 2023 the number of vacancies for video game developers in Russia plummeted 38%.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A phone-recorded video posted to Reddit shows a wooden desk strewn with various office supplies. On a monitor on the desk, a video begins to play: an Amazon delivery driver, being recorded by a driver-facing camera in their van, leans out of their window to talk to a customer. Though the video is cute, the setup is not: The camera's AI tracks their movements, surrounding them with a bright green box. Below them on the monitor's screen, a yellow line marks the length of the clip sent to the driver's dispatcher. Above them sits a timecode and a speed marker of "0 MPH." The driver opens their door, and moments later, a small French bulldog leaps into the van, tail wagging. The driver is delighted. The person behind the camera laughs a little. [...] The desk set-up looks consistent with that of an Amazon delivery service partner (DSP), the small-business contractors responsible for Amazon's door-to-door deliveries. The DSPs usually operate out of Amazon delivery warehouses, where they are given a desk like the one in the video, in a small area of the warehouse, out of which they select routes, dispatch drivers, and monitor their actions on the road with the help of the cameras.

The video is one of a slew of in-van surveillance videos recently posted to Reddit, a phenomenon which hasn't frequently been seen on the site before. Over the past two weeks, many users in the Amazon delivery service partner drivers subreddit (r/AmazonDSPDrivers) have shared video footage from the cameras, either directly or by recording it on their phone from a monitor within the warehouse. It is clear that many of the videos are not being posted by the subject of the video themselves, and highlights the fact that Amazon drivers, who already have incredibly difficult jobs, are being monitored at all times.

When Motherboard first wrote about the "Biometric Consent" form drivers had to sign that allows them to be monitored while on the job, Amazon insisted that the program was about safety only, and that workers shouldn't be worried about their privacy: "Don't believe the self-interested critics who claim these cameras are intended for anything other than safety," a spokesperson told us at the time. But this video, and a rash of others that have recently become public, shows that access to the camera feeds is being abused. [...] It's not clear why there has been a sudden spate of videos being posted publicly. One current Amazon delivery driver said that the drivers themselves did not have access to the videos -- only Amazon, Netradyne, and the relevant DSPs did.

This week Bill Gates said "there are more reasons than not to be optimistic that we can manage the risks of AI while maximizing their benefits." One thing that's clear from everything that has been written so far about the risks of AI — and a lot has been written — is that no one has all the answers. Another thing that's clear to me is that the future of AI is not as grim as some people think or as rosy as others think. The risks are real, but I am optimistic that they can be managed. As I go through each concern, I'll return to a few themes:

- Many of the problems caused by AI have a historical precedent. For example, it will have a big impact on education, but so did handheld calculators a few decades ago and, more recently, allowing computers in the classroom. We can learn from what's worked in the past.

— Many of the problems caused by AI can also be managed with the help of AI.

- We'll need to adapt old laws and adopt new ones — just as existing laws against fraud had to be tailored to the online world.
Later Gates adds that "we need to move fast. Governments need to build up expertise in artificial intelligence so they can make informed laws and regulations that respond to this new technology."

But Gates acknowledged and then addressed several specific threats:

• He thinks AI can be taught to recognize its own hallucinations. "OpenAI, for example, is doing promising work on this front.

• Gates also believes AI tools can be used to plug AI-identified security holes and other vulnerabilities — and does not see an international AI arms race. "Although the world's nuclear nonproliferation regime has its faults, it has prevented the all-out nuclear war that my generation was so afraid of when we were growing up. Governments should consider creating a global body for AI similar to the International Atomic Energy Agency."

• He's "guardedly optimistic" about the dangers of deep fakes because "people are capable of learning not to take everything at face value" — and the possibility that AI "can help identify deepfakes as well as create them. Intel, for example, has developed a deepfake detector, and the government agency DARPA is working on technology to identify whether video or audio has been manipulated."

• "It is true that some workers will need support and retraining as we make this transition into an AI-powered workplace. That's a role for governments and businesses, and they'll need to manage it well so that workers aren't left behind — to avoid the kind of disruption in people's lives that has happened during the decline of manufacturing jobs in the United States."

Gates ends with this final thought:

"I encourage everyone to follow developments in AI as much as possible. It's the most transformative innovation any of us will see in our lifetimes, and a healthy public debate will depend on everyone being knowledgeable about the technology, its benefits, and its risks.

"The benefits will be massive, and the best reason to believe that we can manage the risks is that we have done it before."

The Washington Post begins a recent article with the story of an 18-year-old drug dealer with mental health issues named Zachary Burkard, who shot two unarmed 17-year-olds with a "ghost gun" he built from a kit bought online.

The father of one of those 17-year-olds thinks "They've just made it entirely too easy to get these guns... A child can buy one. There's no background checks. You don't even need a bank account. You can go to 7-Eleven and get a debit card, put money on it and buy a gun." The families of the two teens, with the help of the anti-gun-violence group Everytown for Gun Safety, are now suing the distributor of the parts Burkard used to make his ghost gun, 80P Builder of Florida, and the manufacturer, Polymer80 of Nevada, for gross negligence in providing a teenager with a weapon when he was not legally able to buy a handgun from a federally licensed dealer. The case, those who track the weapons say, demonstrates a frightening phenomenon... Teenagers have discovered the ease with which they can acquire the parts for a ghost gun, and they have been buying, building and shooting the homemade guns with alarming frequency. Everytown for Gun Safety compiled a list of more than 50 incidents involving teens and ghost guns since 2019. Among them:

- In Brooklyn Park, Minn., police arrested two teens with ghost guns in December after authorities said one of them attempted to shoot someone outside their car but instead killed their friend inside it.
- In New Rochelle, N.Y., a 16-year-old created a "ghost gun factory" in his bedroom last year, police said, before killing another 16-year-old...

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) estimated that Polymer80 was responsible for more than 88 percent of the ghost guns recovered by police between 2017 and 2021, though there are nearly 100 manufacturers selling parts, or full kits, which can be made into unserialized guns, a list compiled by Everytown shows. Teens are hardly the only users. Last year, police departments seized at least 25,785 ghost guns nationwide, the Justice Department said recently, and those are just the weapons submitted by police to ATF for tracing, even though they don't have serial numbers and largely cannot be traced. In 2021, the number of guns recovered was 19,344, meaning seizures rose 33 percent the following year.

ATF has linked ghost guns to 692 homicides and nonfatal shootings through 2021, including mass killings and school shootings...

[This May] in Baltimore, authorities arrested three 14-year-olds after armed robberies and an armed carjacking. Police said one of them had a ghost gun. And in Valdosta, Ga., authorities said, a 16-year-old bought a ghost gun kit online in 2021 and assembled her own Glock-style pistol. One day while some friends were at her house, the teen accidentally shot a 14-year-old in the head, leaving him partially paralyzed, with severe brain damage and permanent physical and cognitive issues, his family's lawyer Melvin Hewitt said.
While some states have passed regulations, last year America's national firearm-regulating agency also declared parts of ghost guns to be firearms, according to the article, in an attempt to close a commonly-cited loophole. The parts makers challenged the new rule in court, lost twice, then won in a conservative federal court in Texas. The U.S. Justice Department may now appeal that decision to the higher Fifth Circuit court, and if it loses there "could appeal to the Supreme Court." Dudley Brown, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, said he is against all regulation of privately made firearms, calling the practice of building weapons a "long and storied tradition in America."

Disney, Netflix, and other media and entertainment giants are pushing back against the FTC's "click to cancel" proposal (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source) that would make it easier for people to cancel streaming, gaming, and other services. Insider reports: Companies of all stripes have angered consumers by making services all too easy to sign up for but often confoundingly difficult to cancel, with gyms and news outlets considered among the worst offenders. The FTC has gone after individual companies; it recently sued Amazon, alleging the etailer "tricked" people into signing up for Amazon Prime. That followed the FTC's proposal in March for a regulation that's intended "to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up." The policy would cover providers of both digital and physical subscriptions, from streamers and gym memberships to phone companies and cable TV distributors. The new rule would require companies to offer a simple mechanism for users to cancel subscriptions the same way they signed up. For example, you wouldn't have to cancel a service in person or over the phone if you signed up for it online. "I can't tell you how much time I've spent trying to cancel subscriptions I never wanted, let alone the cost!" one person wrote in a comment to the FTC.

The Internet & Television Association, which counts Disney, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery as members, said in its public comment that the proposed reg is so vague, it would lead marketers to be excessive in their disclosures, leaving consumers "inundated" and "confused." The reg would even infringe on its members' freedom of speech, the association argued. "The proposal would also severely curtail or, in some cases, even prohibit companies from communicating with their customers, in violation of the First Amendment," the association wrote. Sirius XM wrote in its comments that one proposed requirement -- that companies maintain records of phone calls with customers -- would cost the company "several million" dollars a year to comply with. The Entertainment Software Association, the video gaming trade organization, noted that the FTC's proposed disclosure requirements "would interfere with game play and customer enjoyment." The ESA wrote that "most consumers understand autorenewal offers and are knowing and willing participants in the marketplace" and that letting customers cancel immediately would prevent member companies from offering them alternative plans or discounts. The ESA was joined in its comments by the Digital Media Association and Motion Picture Association, whose members include Netflix, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Universal Pictures. The FTC will examine the feedback it's received through public comment before considering a final rule.

In late 2021, VanMoof claimed to be "the most funded e-bike company in the world" after raising a total of $182 million in the two years prior -- a figure that would later surpass $200 million. Now, according to multiple sources spoken to by TechCrunch, the Dutch e-bike company's strategy and momentum "appear to have steered dangerously off course." From the report: Our sources tell us that VanMoof is working on securing a bridge round that will help it stay afloat. Sources also claim that senior staff, including the CEO and a co-founder, as well as the president (who is also an investor) have left executive roles in the business. The company has refused to provide any on-the-record comment on its status until later this week. But the facts are plain: The company has, as of June 29 and by its own admission, stopped taking orders. VanMoof also filed paperwork, revealed in January, of its need to raise money to stave off bankruptcy.

Customers, annoyed with the pauses and other delays in servicing existing bikes on the road, have turned to social media like Reddit and Twitter to air their complaints and debate whether the company is going bust or not. The first recent, visible cracks in the company appeared in late June when potential customers discovered its online ordering system was no longer working. [...] The story changed again a few days later. In response to TechCrunch's questions about the ordering system, a spokesperson said that the pause was actually intentional (a feature not a bug!). Despite the summer period being the peak season for the cycling market, a VanMoof spokesperson claimed it would be pausing orders to catch up on production and delivery. The company didn't answer any of TechCrunch's multiple questions about why VanMoof was behind on orders (supply chain issues? lacking funds?), what the company's current capacity was, how many orders were outstanding, or when VanMoof hoped to begin sales again. As of the time of publication, the sales pause was going on 12 days.

Despite the pause and the other details, VanMoof had been sending out communications that imply it's business-as-usual at the e-bike company. On June 27 it announced that KwikFit NL, the car maintenance chain, would be a new service partner. The day before that it issued a firmware update and a video was posted of a panel that co-founder Taco Carlier participated in. But there have been a number of warning signs in plain sight for months that tell a different story. [...]

Google violated its promised standards when placing video ads on other websites, according to new research that raises questions about the transparency of the tech giant's online-ad business. From a report: Google's YouTube runs ads on its own site and app. But the company also brokers the placement of video ads on other sites across the web through a program called Google Video Partners. Google charges a premium, promising that the ads it places will run on high-quality sites, before the page's main video content, with the audio on, and that brands will only pay for ads that aren't skipped.

Google violates those standards about 80% of the time, according to research from Adalytics, a company that helps brands analyze where their ads appear online. The firm accused the company of placing ads in small, muted, automatically-played videos off to the side of a page's main content, on sites that don't meet Google's standards for monetization, among other violations. Adalytics compiled its data by observing campaigns from more than 1,100 brands that got billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023. The company shared its findings with The Wall Street Journal. In a statement, Google said the report "makes many claims that are inaccurate and doesn't reflect how we keep advertisers safe."

The US Supreme Court refused to revive a lawsuit by music website Genius Media accusing Alphabet's Google of stealing millions of song lyrics. From a report: The justices left in place a ruling that tossed out the suit, which accused Google of violating a contract with Genius by using its song lyrics in search results without attribution. It's the latest victory at the Supreme Court for Google, which earlier this year won a battle over whether its video-streaming platform YouTube can be held liable for hosting terrorist videos.

There are deep disagreements over how copyright laws apply to online speech and aggregation. The lower court said Genius does not own any of the copyrights to its lyrics -- instead, those are held by the songwriters and publishers. Genius claimed that Google violated its contract by scraping lyrics and boosting them in Google Search results without any attribution. Genius, which claimed the saga caused millions of dollars in losses for the website, initially sued Google in 2019. In order to drum up attention and prove its case, Genius said it used a secret code spelling out the word "red-handed" to prove Google was stealing its lyrics. "We appreciate the court's decision, agreeing with the Solicitor General and multiple lower courts that Genius' claims have no merit," Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said Monday. "We license lyrics on Google Search from third parties, and we do not crawl or scrape websites to source lyrics."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: With tens of millions of regular monthly visitors, South Korean piracy site Noonoo TV made powerful enemies. The stand-off reached the boiling point in March when broadcasters formed a new anti-piracy coalition and warned of punishing legal action. Noonoo TV responded by throwing in the towel but after clone site 'Noonoo TV Season 2' appeared online, the government says it will develop an AI anti-piracy system that will stop any 'Season 3' variants in their tracks.

Alongside a promise to work closely with the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the Korea Communications Commission, and the National Security Agency to protect 'K' content from unlawful distribution, the Ministry of Science says the time is right to enhance manual work carried out by humans with automated systems better suited to the job. "Since the detection and response to illegal sites is currently centered on manual work based on human resources, to overcome this limitation, we plan to develop technology that can automatically detect and verify new versions and substitute sites," the Ministry said. "Online video service (OTT) content is a precious asset created with the blood and sweat of many people. It's a growth engine that will be responsible for the future of our country, so it is very important for mature citizens to refrain from using these illegal sites."

Google last month upgraded its Bard chatbot with a new machine-learning model that can better understand conversational language and compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT. As Google develops a sequel to that model, it may hold a trump card: YouTube. From a report: The video site, which Google owns, is the single biggest and richest source of imagery, audio and text transcripts on the internet. And Google's researchers have been using YouTube to develop its next large-language model, Gemini, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. The value of YouTube hasn't been lost on OpenAI, either: The startup has secretly used data from the site to train some of its artificial intelligence models, said one person with direct knowledge of the effort. AI practitioners who compete with Google say the company may gain an edge from owning YouTube, which gives it more complete access to the video data than rivals that scrape the videos. That's especially important as AI developers face new obstacles to finding high-quality data on which to train and improve their models. Major website publishers from Reddit to Stack Exchange to DeviantArt are increasingly blocking developers from downloading data for that purpose. Before those walls came up, AI startups used data from such sites to develop AI models, according to the publishers and disclosures from the startups.

The advantage that Google gains in AI from owning YouTube may reinforce concerns among antitrust regulators about Google's power. On Wednesday, the European Commission kicked off a complaint about Google's power in the ad tech world, contending that Google favors its "own online display advertising technology services to the detriment of competing providers." The U.S. Department of Justice in January sued Google over similar issues. Google could use audio transcriptions or descriptions of YouTube videos as another source of text for training Gemini, leading to more-sophisticated language understanding and the ability to generate more-realistic conversational responses. It could also integrate video and audio into the model itself, giving it the multimodal capabilities many researchers believe are the next frontier in AI, according to interviews with nearly a dozen people who work on these types of machine-learning models. Google CEO Sundar Pichai told investors earlier this month that Gemini, which is still in development, is exhibiting multimodal capabilities not seen in any other model, though he didn't elaborate.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: A strange letter showed up on Kay Dean's doorstep. It was 2017, and the San Jose resident had left a one-star review on the Yelp page of a psychiatry office in Los Altos. Then the letter arrived: It seemed the clinic had hired a local lawyer to demand that Dean remove her negative review or face a lawsuit. The envelope included a $50 check. Dean, who once worked as a criminal investigator in the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Inspector General, smelled something fishy. She decided to look into the clinic, part of a small California chain called SavantCare. By the time her work was done, she'd found a higher calling -- and SavantCare's ex-CEO was fighting felony charges.

Since then, Dean, 60, has mounted a yearslong crusade against Yelp and the broader online review ecosystem from a home office in San Jose. Yelp, founded in San Francisco in 2004, is deeply entrenched in American consumer habits, and has burrowed itself into the larger consciousness through partnerships with the likes of Apple Maps. The company's crowdsourced reviews undergird the internet's web of recommendations and can send businesses droves of customers -- or act as an insurmountable black mark. Dean follows fake reviews from their origins in social media groups to when they hit the review sites, methodically documenting hours of research in spreadsheets and little-watched YouTube videos. Targets accuse her of an unreasonable fixation. Yelp claims it aggressively and effectively weeds out fakes. But Dean disagrees, and she's out to convince America that Yelp, Google and other purveyors of reviews cannot be trusted.

"This is an issue that affects millions of consumers, and thousands of honest businesses," she said in her YouTube page's introductory post on April 30, 2020, facing the camera dead-on. "I'm creating these videos to expose this massive fraud against the American public and shine a light on Big Tech's culpability." "I don't do it lightly. If I put a video up, it's serious," she told SFGATE in May. "I'm putting myself out there." Dean is particularly motivated by the types of small businesses that she's found gaming Yelp's recommendation algorithm. She has spotted seemingly paid-for reviews on the pages of lawyers, home contractors, and doctors' offices -- high-ticket companies for which she says she'd "rather have no information than fake information."

Google is bringing generative AI technology to shopping, aiming to get a jump on e-commerce sites like Amazon. From a report: The Alphabet-owned company announced features Wednesday aimed at helping people understand how apparel will fit on them, no matter their body size, and added capabilities for finding products using its search and image-recognition technology. Additionally, Google introduced new ways to research travel destinations and map routes using generative AI -- technology that can craft text, images or even video from simple prompts.

"We want to make Google the place for consumers to come shop, as well as the place for merchants to connect with consumers," Maria Renz, Google's vice president of commerce, said in an interview ahead of the announcement. "We've always been committed to an open ecosystem and a healthy web, and this is one way where we're bringing this technology to bear across merchants." Google is the world's dominant search engine, but 46% of respondents in a survey of US shoppers conducted last year said they still started their product searches and research on Amazon, according to the research firm CivicScience. TikTok, too, is making inroads, CivicScience's research found -- 18% of Gen Z online shoppers turn to the platform first. Google is taking note, with some of its new, AI-powered shopping exploration features aimed at capturing younger audiences.

A new virtual "try-on" feature, launching on Wednesday, will let people see how clothes fit across a range of body types, from XXS to 4XL sizes. Apparel will be overlaid on top of images of diverse models that the company photographed while developing the capability. Google said it was able to launch such a service because of a new image-based AI model that it developed internally, and the company is releasing a new research paper detailing its work alongside the announcement.

The company that currently owns the Atari name and trademarks has decided to give owners of the old Atari Video Computer System (aka the Atari 2600) something new to do. From a report: Mr. Run and Jump is a new Atari-published platformer that is coming to vintage Atari consoles in cartridge form, complete with a box and instruction manual. Preorders for the cartridge begin on July 31 for $59.99. The version of Mr. Run and Jump coming to the 2600 is a primitive version of a much different-looking game with the same name that's coming to PCs and all major game consoles on July 25. We've got to hand it to Atari here -- as a PR gambit for a new game, porting a rough version of your game to a 46-year-old game console and then giving it a physical release complete with box and manual is pretty good.

Atari is billing this release as "the first 2600 cartridge launch for a new Atari title since 1990," though there have also been some limited-run cartridge releases for games like 2005's Yars' Return. There were also a few new 2600-inspired games and remakes, including Vctr Sctr, in Atari's 50th-anniversary collection, which also got a physical release on modern consoles. Although modern game development for the 2600, NES, Game Boy, and other retro consoles are mostly the provenance of homebrew developers working in emulators, physical cartridge releases aren't uncommon. Limited Run Games and other independent and crowdfunded outfits have released plenty of physical cartridges for old consoles, including a Smash Bros-style NES game that includes a Wi-Fi chip to support online play.