Dr. Sola Talabi, an adjunct assistant professor of nuclear engineering, believes nuclear power "has the ability to solve" the world's two biggest problems: global energy poverty and global warming.

He tells the Daily Beast, "Nuclear can uniquely address those issues." While novel in the civilian energy sector, SMRs have powered naval warships and submarines for almost 70 years. U.S. naval nuclear reactors have logged more than 5,400 reactor years, and steamed more than 130 million miles without a single radiological incident or radiation-related fatality. This sterling safety record allows the U.S. Navy to operate its reactors largely without controversy even in Japan, a country that has a strong anti-nuclear movement birthed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and amplified by Fukushima...

[T]he plant can remove heat generated by its fuel even if electrical power is lost. Next-generation SMRs are also designed such that they don't require a pressurizing system like the one that failed at Three Mile Island. Even in the extraordinarily improbable event of a core meltdown, Talabi said that SMRs are still remarkably safe. Unlike their large-scale predecessors, the diminutive size of SMRs eliminates the need for active safety systems backed by human operators. If radionuclide particles — an unstable element that's harmful to humans — are released from the core, gravity and other natural phenomena such as thermal and steam concentration will force them to settle safely within the confines of the plant's containment vessel.

In the yet more unlikely case that radionuclide particles breach the containment vessel, Talabi's research indicates they will settle over a much smaller area than if they were released from a large-scale reactor, posing far less of a health and environmental hazard and simplifying cleanup... [E]conomists don't realize that many of the systems required by large-scale reactors, such as the ones that maintain pressure and coolant flow in the plant's core, won't be miniaturized in the smaller plants. They'll be eliminated. SMRs should also be less expensive because they can be factory-fabricated, and their smaller parts will be easier for more manufacturers to produce....

Despite his optimism for SMRs' potential, Talabi acknowledges that they have some drawbacks. Widespread use may slash carbon emissions, but will necessitate increased uranium mining. They also create a security risk, as nuclear fuel will need to be transported between thousands of locations, and reactor sites may be targeted by warring states and terrorists. Government statutes also fail to account for differences between SMRs and large-scale reactors, inhibiting their construction....

That said, Talabi believes that SMRs' potential in solving climate change and global energy poverty far outweighs their risks, and makes overcoming their obstacles well worth it.... "It's not a technology challenge," Talabi said. With public and government support, SMRs could soon be powering the globe with carbon-free electricity. To Talabi, it's just a matter of awareness and understanding.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader WindBourne for sharing the article

The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is denying defendants their constitutional right to a jury trial by putting them in front of its own internal judges. From a report: In a 2-1 ruling, the court ruled for George Jarkesy and Patriot28 LLC, who sued the SEC in 2011 after the agency imposed a $300,000 fine and other punishments in a securities fraud case. Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote in the majority opinion that the SEC violated the Seventh Amendment's right to a jury trial by bringing defendants before in-house judges and allowing the agency to "act as both prosecutor and judge." Congress also unconstitutionally delegated power to the SEC to act as a legislative body, Elrod wrote.

"'We the People' are the fountainhead of all government power. Through the Constitution, the people delegated some of that power to the federal government so that it would protect rights and promote the common good," Elrod said. "But that accountability evaporates if a person or entity other than Congress exercises legislative power." In a dissenting opinion, Judge Eugene Davis disagreed, saying the right to a jury trial did not pertain to administrative proceedings and that the SEC was enforcing laws and statutes in the public interest.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Notorious facial recognition company Clearview AI has agreed to permanently halt sales of its massive biometric database to all private companies and individuals in the United States as part of a legal settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union, per court records. Monday's announcement marks the close of a two-year legal dispute brought by the ACLU and privacy advocate groups in May of 2020 against the company over allegations that it had violated BIPA, the 2008 Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. This act requires companies to obtain permission before harvesting a person's biometric information -- fingerprints, gait metrics, iris scans and faceprints for example -- and empowers users to sue the companies who do not.

In addition to the nationwide private party sales ban, Clearview will not offer any of its services to Illinois local and state law enforcement agencies (as well as all private parties) for the next five years. "This means that within Illinois, Clearview cannot take advantage of BIPA's exception for government contractors during that time," the ACLU points out, though Federal agencies, state and local law enforcement departments outside of Illinois will be unaffected. That's not all. Clearview must also end its free trial program for police officers, erect and maintain an opt-out page for Illinois residents, and spend $50,000 advertising it online. The settlement must still be approved by a federal judge before it takes effect. "Fourteen years ago, the ACLU of Illinois led the effort to enact BIPA -- a groundbreaking statute to deal with the growing use of sensitive biometric information without any notice and without meaningful consent," Rebecca Glenberg, staff attorney for the ACLU of Illinois, said in a statement. "BIPA was intended to curb exactly the kind of broad-based surveillance that Clearview's app enables. Today's agreement begins to ensure that Clearview complies with the law. This should be a strong signal to other state legislatures to adopt similar statutes."

"A California judge ruled this week that the confidentiality agreements Google requires its employees to sign are too broad and break the state's labor laws," reports the Washington Post, calling it "a decision that could make it easier for workers at famously secret Big Tech firms to speak openly about their companies." A Google employee identified as John Doe argued that the broad nondisclosure agreement the company asked him to sign barred him from speaking about his job to other potential employers, amounting to a non-compete clause, which are illegal in California. In a Thursday ruling in California Superior Court, a judge agreed with the employee, while declining to make a judgment on other allegations that Google's agreements blocked whistleblowing and sharing information about wages with other workers.

The ruling marks the latest victory for labor advocates who have sought to force Big Tech companies to relax the stringent confidentiality policies that compel employees to stay quiet about every aspect of their jobs, even after they quit....

The decision isn't final and could still be appealed by Google.... If Google doesn't appeal, or loses the appeal, it could have a real impact on how much power companies hold over employees, said Ramsey Hanafi, a partner with QH Law in San Francisco. "It would mean most of these Big Tech companies would have to rewrite their agreements," Hanafi said. "They all have this broad language that employees can't say anything about anything about their old companies...."

In its opinion, the California Courts of Appeal affirmed the importance of the state's labor laws that go further than federal laws in protecting employees' rights to free speech. Those laws give workers in California the right to "speak as they choose about their work lives," the court wrote. "In sum, these statutes establish as a minimum employment standard an employee anti-gag rule...."
The lawsuit was originally filed in 2016, the article points out, and has been responsible for exposing several internal Google documents (including one detailing a program where employees can report suspected leakers of Google information).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Charlie Osborne: The parents of two teenagers allegedly responsible for stealing $1 million in Bitcoin are being sued. According to court documents obtained by Brian Krebs, Andrew Schober lost 16.4552 in Bitcoin (BTC) in 2018 after his computer was infected with malware, allegedly the creation of two teenagers in the United Kingdom. The complaint (.PDF), filed in Colorado, accuses Benedict Thompson and Oliver Read, who were minors at the time, of creating clipboard malware. The malicious software, designed to monitor cryptocurrency wallet addresses, was downloaded and unwittingly executed by Schober after he clicked on a link, posted to Reddit, to install the Electrum Atom cryptocurrency application.

During a transfer of Bitcoin from one account to another, the malware triggered a Man-in-The-Middle (MiTM) attack, apparently replacing the address with one controlled by the teenagers and thereby diverting the coins into their wallets. According to court documents, this amount represented 95% of the victim's net wealth at the time of the theft. At today's price, the stolen Bitcoin is worth approximately $777,000. "Mr. Schober was planning to use the proceeds from his eventual sale of the cryptocurrency to help finance a home and support his family," the complaint reads. The pair, tracked down during an investigation paid for by Schober, are now adults and are studying computer science at UK universities. The mothers and fathers of Thompson and Read are named in the complaint. Emails were sent to the parents prior to the complaint requesting that the teenagers return the stolen cryptocurrency to prevent legal action from being taken. However, the requests, sent in 2018 and 2019, were met with silence.

Schober's complaint claims that the parents "knew or reasonably should have known" what their children were up to, and that they also failed to take "reasonable steps" in preventing further harm. In response (.PDF), the defendants do not argue the charge, but rather have requested a motion to dismiss based on two- and three-year statutes of limitation. "Despite his knowledge of his injury and the general cause thereof, Plaintiff waited to file his lawsuit beyond the two and three years required of him by the applicable statutes of limitations," court documents say. "For this reason, Plaintiff's claims against Defendants should be dismissed." However, Schober's legal team has argued (.PDF) that the teenagers were not immediately traced, and roughly a year passed between separately identifying Read and Thompson. Schober's lawyers have requested that the motion to dismiss is denied.

In March of 2020, Florida's governor was assuring the state that there was no evidence of Covid-19 in Florida, remembers the Washington Post. But there was — as far back as January.

The Miami Herald reports that when questioned Florida's Department of Health told its data manager to hide that data from public view, "emails from within the agency reviewed by the Miami Herald and others show." Eventually that data manager was fired, and within months her home had been raided by gun-toting police officers.

But that's not the end of the story. The latest development? That data manager is now instead "officially a whistleblower under Florida law, the Office of the Inspector General told her attorneys Friday," the Miami Herald reports. The Inspector General now says the data manager has indeed shown "reasonable cause to suspect that an employee or agent of an agency or independent contractor has violated [a] federal, state or local law, rule or regulation." Slashdot reader whoever57 notes the move "will grant her certain protections."

The Miami Herald reports: Rebekah Jones, who was responsible for building the COVID-19 data dashboard for the Florida Department of Health, was fired last year after raising concerns about "misleading data" being presented to the public, according to the complaint, which was reviewed by the Miami Herald. In the complaint, filed July 17, 2020, Jones alleged she was fired for "opposition and resistance to instructions to falsify data in a government website." She described being asked to bend data analysis to fit pre-determined policy and delete data from public view after questions from the press — actions she claimed "represent an immediate injury to the public health, safety, and welfare, including the possibility of death to members of the public."

On Friday, the Office of the Inspector General informed Jones that "the information disclosed does meet the criteria for whistleblower status as described by ... Florida statutes," according to the email obtained by the Herald... "It's pretty huge," Jones told the Herald in response to the news. "This isn't vindication but this is a start. It's a big push forward...."

A department spokesperson said at the time that Jones was fired for "insubordination."
There's now an ongoing investigation into Jones' allegations. And in December Florida's Sun-Sentinel newspaper cited other issues with the state government's transparency:

• The Florida Department of Health's county-level spokespeople were ordered in September to stop issuing public statements about COVID-19 until after the Nov. 3 election.

• State officials withheld information about infections in schools, prisons, hospitals and nursing homes, relenting only under pressure or legal action from family members, advocacy groups and journalists.

• The governor highlighted statistics that would paint the rosiest picture possible and attempted to cast doubt on the validity of Florida's rising death toll.

"Unfortunately, the possibility of the Department of Health manipulating information is not a stretch," writes the editorial board of the Miami Herald.

For that reason, they write that Jones' whistleblower victory "stands to be a win over state secrecy for the rest of us."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: The popular legal research and data brokerage firm LexisNexis signed a $16.8 million contract to sell information to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to documents shared with The Intercept. The deal is already drawing fire from critics and comes less than two years after the company downplayed its ties to ICE, claiming it was "not working with them to build data infrastructure to assist their efforts." Though LexisNexis is perhaps best known for its role as a powerful scholarly and legal research tool, the company also caters to the immensely lucrative "risk" industry, providing, it says, 10,000 different data points on hundreds of millions of people to companies like financial institutions and insurance companies who want to, say, flag individuals with a history of fraud. LexisNexis Risk Solutions is also marketed to law enforcement agencies, offering "advanced analytics to generate quality investigative leads, produce actionable intelligence and drive informed decisions" -- in other words, to find and arrest people.

The LexisNexis ICE deal appears to be providing a replacement for CLEAR, a risk industry service operated by Thomson Reuters that has been crucial to ICE's deportation efforts. In February, the Washington Post noted that the CLEAR contract was expiring and that it was "unclear whether the Biden administration will renew the deal or award a new contract." LexisNexis's February 25 ICE contract was shared with The Intercept by Mijente, a Latinx advocacy organization that has criticized links between ICE and tech companies it says are profiting from human rights abuses, including LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters. The contract shows LexisNexis will provide Homeland Security investigators access to billions of different records containing personal data aggregated from a wide array of public and private sources, including credit history, bankruptcy records, license plate images, and cellular subscriber information. The company will also provide analytical tools that can help police connect these vast stores of data to the right person. In a statement to The Intercept, a LexisNexis Risk Solutions spokesperson said: "Our tool contains data primarily from public government records. The principal non-public data is authorized by Congress for such uses in the Drivers Privacy Protection Act and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act statutes." They declined to say exactly what categories of data the company would provide ICE under the new contract, or what policies, if any, will govern how agency agency uses it.

schwit1 shares an article from Entrepreneur: If anyone has the ability to surprise the world with his ambitious projects, it is Elon Musk . The billionaire announced that he is building a new city in Texas to be called Starbase, around the rocket launch site of his company SpaceX...

Later, he alluded to his project to colonize the red planet, hinting that Starbase would be just the beginning to go further. "From there to Mars. And hence the Stars," detailed the CEO of Tesla.

The tycoon, who is currently the second richest person in the world , said that his city will occupy an area "much larger" than Boca Chica , a place that houses a launch site for SpaceX and where the company is building its Starship rocket... Eddie Treviño, judge for Cameron County, Texas, confirmed that SpaceX informed the authorities of Elon Musk's intention: to incorporate Boca Chica into the city of Starbase . The official noted that the mogul and his company must comply with all state statutes of incorporation and clarified that the county will process any petition in accordance with the law.
Musk also tweeted that the leader of his new city "shall be The Doge," linking to a Wikipedia definition for the Venetian word doge (meaning either "military commander" or "spiritual leader".)

Musk made his remark in response to a Twitter user named Wootiez, who had asked him whether his new city would be dog friendly.

Miami's mayor Francis Suarez is trying to attract tech talent to his city. (The New York Times recently noted he's joined by "a few venture capital influencers trying to tweet the city's startup world into existence.") So he's still pushing a proposal to use bitcoin in a few city operations as "part of a larger play if you will to position Miami as one of the most tech-forward cities in the country," according to Reuters.

Bloomberg reports: The mayor wants to allow the City of Miami's workers to choose to receive all or a portion of their pay in Bitcoin, according to a resolution passed by the city's governing commission. In addition, the mayor proposed allowing people to pay all or part of property taxes or city fees in crypto.

Although the commission approved the resolution 4-1, it significantly dialed back its original wording. It only agreed to study the practicality of such steps, rather than taking action, as the original proposal had suggested...

Suarez also wants the city to analyze the feasibility to invest some government funds in Bitcoin, the resolution said. It's not clear how much of that is actually possible: Florida statutes have strict limitations on how local governments can invest surplus funds, generally restricting investments to low-volatility instruments such as those issued by the U.S. government. In the past year alone, Bitcoin has shown it can double in price — or lose half its value — in a month's time....

Ken Russell, vice-chairman of the city commission, said he's "certainly not opposed" to the idea of integrating Bitcoin into the city's business, but it's important to ensure "we all know what we're getting into."

"What needs to be done is diligence, and not just from the legal perspective," he said in an interview Wednesday. "It's not just a currency, it's a concept."
Bloomberg also points out that the mayor of the City of Miami "doesn't control the budget or municipal workforce or get a vote on the commission.

"He asked voters to give him more managerial power, but the initiative failed."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Google has raised a handful of concerns with Australia's pending Telecommunications Legislation Amendment (International Production Orders) Bill 2020 (IPO Bill), including the Commonwealth's choice of phrasing, the avenues proposed for record-sharing, and the Bill being at odds with the purpose of the United States' Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data Act (CLOUD Act). [...] In a submission [PDF] to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) and its review of the IPO Bill, Google said while it encourages and supports efforts by the Australian government to negotiate an executive agreement, it said there are certain elements of the Bill that give it cause for concern.

"Especially when considering how the interception powers under this Bill could be used in tandem with technical capability notices under the controversial Telecommunications and Other Legislation (Assistance and Access) Act," it wrote. Making a recommendation to the PJCIS, Google said the Bill should not apply to service providers in their capacity as infrastructure providers to corporations or government entities, saying corporations or government entities are best placed to produce the requested records themselves. Under the Bill, designated communications providers are instructed to provide any requested communications and data to the requesting agency or the Australian Designated Authority. Google would prefer the authority to be a two-way channel.

Google also poked holes in the Bill's enforcement threshold. Civil penalties for non-compliance with an IPO establishes a framework for compliance. If a designated communications provider receives a valid IPO and the designated communications provider meets the "enforcement threshold" when the IPO is issued, the designated communications provider must comply with the IPO. Google labelled the two-step test that is the threshold, a "relatively low bar to meet." "Failure to comply with an IPO may lead to a civil penalty of up to AU$10 million for body corporates. The imposition of a mandatory obligation to comply with an IPO is contrary to the purpose of the CLOUD Act which is to lift blocking statutes, but explicitly does not create a compulsory obligation on service providers," it said. Specifically, the search giant said it was concerned by the attempt to impose a mandatory obligation on overseas-based designated communications providers that exists "only in the construct of an otherwise non-compulsory international agreement." Google is seeking further information about the role that eligible judges will play in approving IPOs that involve the interception of communications. It also wants the appeal options contained within the Bill to be strengthened.

McGruber quotes IEEE Spectrum: Greg Mills, co-owner of Southwest Engineering Concepts, is suing the state of Arizona's technical registration board to protest being fined for working without an engineering license, which Mills maintains he doesn't need because it doesn't pertain to the type of work he performs.

It's the latest case pitting engineers against state licensing agencies that by some accounts have become more aggressive in attempting to regulate who can call themselves an engineer, even as the use of that term becomes more widespread. Meanwhile, licensing proponents maintain it's necessary for the public interest and point out that Arizona statutes have clear definitions of what an engineer is...

The central issue is Mills' right to call himself an engineer despite not being a state-licensed professional engineer. Mills, an IEEE Member, has worked as an engineer for three decades, at first for aerospace and tech companies. For the last 10 years, he and his wife have co-owned a three-person engineering consulting firm that makes electronics prototypes and other equipment for startups and small and mid-sized companies that can't afford to hire in-house engineering staff...
Mills is represented by the same public interest law firm that helped an Oregon engineer win a similar suit against that stateâ(TM)s engineering licensing agency.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Silicon Valley is terrified. In a little over three months, California will see the widest-sweeping state-wide changes to its privacy law in years. California's Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) kicks in on January 1 and rolls out sweeping new privacy benefits to the state's 40 million residents -- and every tech company in Silicon Valley. California's law is similar to Europe's GDPR. It grants state consumers a right to know what information companies have on them, a right to have that information deleted and the right to opt-out of the sale of that information.

Since the law passed, tech giants have pulled out their last card: pushing for an overarching federal bill. In doing so, the companies would be able to control their messaging through their extensive lobbying efforts, allowing them to push for a weaker statute that would nullify some of the provisions in California's new privacy law. In doing so, companies wouldn't have to spend a ton on more resources to ensure their compliance with a variety of statutes in multiple states. Just this month, a group of 51 chief executives -- including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, IBM's Ginni Rometty and SAP's Bill McDermott -- signed an open letter to senior lawmakers asking for a federal privacy bill, arguing that consumers aren't clever enough to "understand rules that may change depending upon the state in which they reside." Then, the Internet Association, which counts Dropbox, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Uber (and just today ZipRecruiter) as members, also pushed for a federal privacy law. "The time to act is now," said the industry group. If the group gets its wish before the end of the year, the California privacy law could be sunk before it kicks in. TechNet, a "national, bipartisan network of technology CEOs and senior executives," also demanded a federal privacy law, claiming -- and without providing evidence -- that any privacy law should ensure "businesses can comply with the law while continuing to innovate." Its members include major venture capital firms, including Kleiner Perkins and JC2 Ventures, as well as other big tech giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Verizon

"It's no accident that the tech industry launched this campaign right after the California legislature rejected their attempts to undermine the California Consumer Privacy Act," Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, told TechCrunch. "Instead of pushing for federal legislation that wipes away state privacy law, technology companies should ensure that Californians can fully exercise their privacy rights under the CCPA on January 1, 2020, as the law requires."

On July 1st, California became the first state in the nation to try to reduce the power of bots by requiring that they reveal their "artificial identity" when they are used to sell a product or influence a voter. Violators could face fines under state statutes related to unfair competition. From a report: Just as pharmaceutical companies must disclose that the happy people who say a new drug has miraculously improved their lives are paid actors, bots in California -- or rather, the people who deploy them -- will have to level with their audience. "It's literally taking these high-end technological concepts and bringing them home to basic common-law principles," Robert Hertzberg, a California state senator who is the author of the bot-disclosure law, told me. "You can't defraud people. You can't lie. You can't cheat them economically. You can't cheat 'em in elections."

California's bot-disclosure law is more than a run-of-the-mill anti-fraud rule. By attempting to regulate a technology that thrives on social networks, the state will be testing society's resolve to get our (virtual) house in order after more than two decades of a runaway Internet. We are in new terrain, where the microtargeting of audiences on social networks, the perception of false news stories as genuine, and the bot-led amplification of some voices and drowning-out of others have combined to create angry, ill-informed online communities that are suspicious of one another and of the government. Regulating bots should be low-hanging fruit when it comes to improving the Internet. The California law doesn't even ban them outright but, rather, insists that they identify themselves in a manner that is "clear, conspicuous, and reasonably designed."

Carl Malamud believes in open access to government records, and he has spent more than a decade putting them online. You might think states would welcome the help. From a report: But when Mr. Malamud's group posted the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, the state sued for copyright infringement. Providing public access to the state's laws and related legal materials, Georgia's lawyers said, was part of a "strategy of terrorism." A federal appeals court ruled against the state, which has asked the Supreme Court to step in. On Friday, in an unusual move, Mr. Malamud's group, Public.Resource.Org, also urged the court to hear the dispute, saying that the question of who owns the law is an urgent one, as about 20 other states have claimed that parts of similar annotated codes are copyrighted.

The issue, the group said, is whether citizens can have access to "the raw materials of our democracy." The case, Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, No. 18-1150, concerns the 54 volumes of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, which contain state statutes and related materials. The state, through a legal publisher, makes the statutes themselves available online, and it has said it does not object to Mr. Malamud doing the same thing. But people who want to see other materials in the books, the state says, must pay the publisher.

A federal district court has ruled that the state of Oregon illegally infringed on a man's First Amendment rights for fining him $500 because he wrote "I am an engineer" in a 2014 email to the state's Engineering Board. The court ruled that the provision in the law he broke is unconstitutional, which opens the door for people in the state to legally call themselves "engineers." Motherboard reports: This dystopian saga dates back to 2013, when Mats Jarlstrom's wife, while driving, was caught by a red light camera near their home in Beaverton, Oregon. Rather than pay the red light camera fine, Jarlstrom, an electrical engineer, spent months researching the specifics of yellow light timing and red light cameras, and learned that his wife had likely been ticketed for running a yellow light. Jarlstrom began sharing his findings on his personal website, at conferences, and even got featured on 60 Minutes. He also wrote several emails to the Oregon Board of Engineers explaining what he had found. In the email, he noted that he was an "engineer."

Rather than looking into whether traffic light timing should be changed, however, the board sent Jarlstrom a warning -- and then a $500 fine for the crime of "practicing engineering without being registered." Jarlstrom had violated one of Oregon's "Title Laws," which states that "no persons may ... hold themselves out as an 'engineer'" unless they are an "individual who is registered in this state and holds a valid certificate to practice engineering in this state." Jarlstrom has a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and spent his career working in electronics, but wasn't board certified. He sued the state's engineering board and, last week, a U.S. District Court judge for the District of Oregon ruled that the state's law is unconstitutional. The judge wrote: "The statutes prohibit truthfully describing oneself as an 'engineer,' in any context. This restriction clearly controls and suppresses protected speech, and enforcement of the statute against protected speech is not a hypothetical threat. The term 'engineer,' standing alone, is neither actually nor inherently misleading. Courts have long recognized that the term 'engineer' has a generic meaning separate from 'professional engineer' and that the term has enjoyed 'widespread usage in job titles in our society to describe positions which require no professional training.'"

"The judge ordered that the word 'engineer' be struck from Oregon's law, which is 'substantially overbroad in violation of the First Amendment' and specifically noted that Jarlstrom may describe himself publicly and privately using the word 'engineer' and that he may continue to talk about traffic light timing publicly," reports Motherboard.

According to The New York Times, President Trump has ordered Energy Secretary Rick Perry to "prepare immediate steps" to stop the closure of unprofitable coal and nuclear plants around the country. From the report: Under one proposal outlined in the memo, which was reported by Bloomberg, the Department of Energy would order grid operators to buy electricity from struggling coal and nuclear plants for two years, using emergency authority that is normally reserved for exceptional crises like natural disasters. That idea triggered immediate blowback from a broad alliance of energy companies, consumer groups and environmentalists. On Friday, oil and gas companies joined with wind and solar organizations in a joint statement condemning the plan, saying that it was "legally indefensible" and would force consumers to pay more for electricity.

The administration has also discussed invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950, which allows the federal government to intervene in private industry in the name of national security. (Harry S. Truman used the law to impose price controls on the steel industry during the Korean War.) If the Trump administration were to invoke these two statutes, the move would almost certainly be challenged in federal court by natural gas and renewable energy companies, which could stand to lose market share. Such an intervention could cost consumers between $311 million to $11.8 billion pear year, according to a preliminary estimate (PDF) by Robbie Orvis, director of energy policy design at Energy Innovation.

A proposed class-action lawsuit alleging Facebook's ad placement tools facilitate discrimination against older job-seekers has been expanded to identify additional companies. "When Facebook's own algorithm disproportionately directs ads to younger workers at the exclusion of older workers, Facebook and the advertisers who are using Facebook as an agent to send their advertisements are engaging in disparate treatment," a communications union alleged in the amended complaint, citing a legal test for employment discrimination, filed Tuesday in San Francisco federal court. The union added claims under California's fair employment and unfair competition statutes to the lawsuit, which was initially filed in December. Chicago Tribune reports: The Communications Workers of America is suing on behalf of union members and other job seekers who allegedly missed out on employment opportunities because companies used Facebook's ad tools to target people of other ages. The original filing named defendants are Amazon.com Inc., Cox Media Group, Cox Communications Inc. and T-Mobile, as well as what the union estimates to be hundreds of employers and employment agencies who used Facebook's tools to filter out older job hunters when seeking to fill positions. The amended filing adds Ikea, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and the University of Maryland Medical System to its list of companies who allegedly used Facebook's tools to filter by age. Those three entities, as well as Facebook, aren't named defendants in the lawsuit.

The union alleged in its amended lawsuit that Facebook also uses age-filtering in ads intended to find its own new employees. In January, the union filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint about the alleged practice, according to a copy obtained by Bloomberg News. The CWA says it has filed similar claims against dozens of companies, and that the agency has asked those employers, and Facebook, to respond to the allegations. An EEOC spokeswoman declined to confirm or deny the existence of any complaints.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that companies can use arbitration clauses in employment contracts to prohibit workers from banding together to take legal action over workplace issues. From a report: The vote was 5 to 4, with the court's more conservative justices in the majority. The court's decision could affect some 25 million employment contracts. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said the court's conclusion was dictated by a federal law favoring arbitration and the court's precedents. If workers were allowed to band together to press their claims, he wrote, "the virtues Congress originally saw in arbitration, its speed and simplicity and inexpensiveness, would be shorn away and arbitration would wind up looking like the litigation it was meant to displace." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, a sign of profound disagreement. In her written dissent, she called the majority opinion "egregiously wrong." In her oral statement, she said the upshot of the decision "will be huge under-enforcement of federal and state statutes designed to advance the well being of vulnerable workers."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Good news out of the Ninth Circuit: the federal court of appeals heeded EFF's advice and rejected an attempt by Oracle to hold a company criminally liable for accessing Oracle's website in a manner it didn't like. The court ruled back in 2012 that merely violating a website's terms of use is not a crime under the federal computer crime statute, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But some companies, like Oracle, turned to state computer crime statutes -- in this case, California and Nevada -- to enforce their computer use preferences. This decision shores up the good precedent from 2012 and makes clear -- if it wasn't clear already -- that violating a corporate computer use policy is not a crime.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Federal prosecutors have filed a hate crime charge against 51-year-old Kansas resident Adam Purinton, according to the Department of Justice. Purinton, who is accused of shooting three people in an Olathe bar, reportedly told a local Garmin engineer to "get out of my country" before opening fire. Purinton is currently being held on first-degree murder charges filed by local prosecutors. Today's indictment accuses Purinton of committing murder "because of Kuchibhotla's actual and perceived race, color, religion and national origin," with additional charges for the attempted murder of Madasani and violations of federal firearm statutes. The Justice Department declined to say whether it will pursue the death penalty, although it is authorized by the hate crime statute.