The Central African Republic (CAR) has approved Bitcoin as legal tender -- just the second country to do so. The BBC reports: CAR is one of the world's poorest countries, but is rich in diamonds, gold and uranium. It has been wracked by conflict for decades and is a close Russian ally, with mercenaries from the Wagner Group helping fight rebel forces. Lawmakers voted unanimously to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, said a statement from the CAR presidency. The move puts CAR "on the map of the world's boldest and most visionary countries", it said.

El Salvador became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as an official currency in September 2021 - a move criticized by many economists, including the International Monetary Fund, which said it increased the risk of financial instability. Others have raised fears that cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin could make it easier for criminals to launder money, and that they are environmentally damaging because they use so much electricity to generate.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Yahoo Finance: A single mom who signed up for a $30,000 income-share agreement at a for-profit coding bootcamp has filed a lawsuit in California, alleging she entered the agreement under "false pretenses." Redmond, Washington-based Emily Bruner is suing Bloom Institute of Technology, formerly known as Lambda School, and its head Austen Allred, alleging they misrepresented job placement rates, operated without a license during her course of study, and hid the "true nature" of the school's financial interest in students' success. "I feel like Lambda misled me at every turn -- about their job placement rates and about how they would prepare us for jobs in the field. I was even more shocked when I found out they were operating illegally," Bruner said in a press release. "I took time away from my young son and other career opportunities to participate in a program based on lies," added Bruner, who's seeking a refund from the school as well as monetary damages. "While I'm thankful I opted out of arbitration so I can have my day in court, I wish my classmates who were also misled could be here with me."

Income-share agreements, known as ISAs, are an alternative type of student loan financing where a borrower receives a loan, then pays a percentage of their income after graduation. The terms of an ISA depends on various factors, such as their major topic of study and projected future earnings. [...] Bruner, the plaintiff, signed her ISA on June 29, 2019 when she was living in New Mexico because she could not pay the full tuition amount to attend Lambda full-time, according to the lawsuit. She says she moved back home to North Carolina to live with her parents, who would help her take care of her baby. She took out $30,000 for its six- and 12-month computer science programs offered by San Francisco-based Lambda, according to the complaint. Bruner started school in September 2019 and finished the following August. Students at Lambda agree to pay 17% of their post-Lambda salary for 24 months once they make more than $50,000 a year, according to the lawsuit.

After graduating, she couldn't find a job as a web developer or a software engineer, and was, according to the lawsuit, told by employers that "she did not have the technical skills for the job, and that her education had not prepared her to be a web developer." Bruner ended up going back to program management, a field she was working in prior to attending Lambda. In the lawsuit, she alleged that Lambda misrepresented the fact that it did not have necessary approval from the state regulator, the California Bureau for Postsecondary Education. She also alleged that the school falsified and misrepresented the school's job placement rates. Finally she also alleged that the school hid the true nature of its financial interest in students' success -- specifically by "falsely representing" that Lambda only was compensated when students found jobs and earned income.

The International Monetary Fund "has indicated it will not give El Salvador a much-needed loan unless it drops bitcoin" as one of the country's legal tenders, reports the Los Angeles Times. And meanwhile the "bitcoin bond" proposed by El Salvador has been "delayed indefinitely."

But the government has taken other actions:
After a dramatic spike in killings here over a single weekend last month, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's reaction was swift — and extreme. He sent soldiers into poor neighborhoods to round up thousands of people who he claimed were gang members, then paraded them in front of news cameras in their underwear and handcuffs.

He tweeted pictures of detainees who had been bruised and bloodied by security forces, suggesting they "maybe fell" or "were eating fries with ketchup." And he started feeding the nation's prisoners two meals a day instead of three, warning that if violence continued, "I swear to God that they won't eat a single grain of rice."

It is a distinct look for Bukele, who has been focused in recent months on presenting himself to the world as a modern tech innovator on a quest to turn El Salvador into a cryptocurrency paradise. Not only is Bukele now embracing the mano duro techniques of past Latin American leaders, he is going much further, using the homicide spree — which left 87 people dead in three days — as a pretext for suspending civil liberties and attacking the press.

In recent days, Bukele and his loyalists in the Legislative Assembly ordered a state of emergency that restricts freedom of association, suspends the norm that detainees be informed of their rights at the moment of arrest and denies prisoners access to lawyers....

That Bukele would use the spate of homicides as a pretext to further consolidate power is no surprise to many of his critics, who believe he may be preparing to stay in office past 2024, when he is supposed to step down, even though El Salvador's constitution bans consecutive presidential terms.

But they also say that there may be another motive for his new tough-on-crime stance: diverting attention from the deepening failure of his cryptocurrency experiment.

"Facebook is threatening it will simply pull out of Europe altogether if it is no longer able to share data about European users with its U.S. operations, applications, and data centres," reports ITWire.

It's customary for regulatory filings to preemptively declare a wide variety of possible future hazards, and in that spirit a recently-filed Meta financial statement cites a ruling by the EU's Court of Justice (in July of 2020) voiding a U.S. law called the Privacy Shield (which Meta calls one legal basis for its current dara-transferring practices). Though courts are now determining the ruling's ramifications, ITWire notes that "with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) well in force, the U.S. Privacy Shield principles were found non-compliant and consequently invalid." So while that ruling affects every American company, including cloud companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, it's Facebook/Meta that "says stopping transatlantic data transfers will have a devastating impact on its targeted online advertisements capabilities."

Read it yourself, in Meta's own words:

"If a new transatlantic data transfer framework is not adopted and we are unable to continue to rely on Standard Contractual Clauses [now also subject to new judical scrutiny] or rely upon other alternative means of data transfers from Europe to the United States, we will likely be unable to offer a number of our most significant products and services, including Facebook and Instagram, in Europe, which would materially and adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations."

Of course, the filing also cites other hazards like the possibility of new legislation restricting Facebook's ability to collect data about minors, complaining that such legislation "may also result in limitations on our advertising services or our ability to offer products and services to minors in certain jurisdictions."

And in addition, "We are, and expect to continue to be, the subject of investigations, inquiries, data requests, requests for information, actions, and audits by government authorities and regulators in the United States, Europe, and around the world, particularly in the areas of privacy, data protection, law enforcement, consumer protection, civil rights, content moderation, and competition..."

"Orders issued by, or inquiries or enforcement actions initiated by, government or regulatory authorities could cause us to incur substantial costs, expose us to unanticipated civil and criminal liability or penalties (including substantial monetary remedies), interrupt or require us to change our business practices in a manner materially adverse to our business, result in negative publicity and reputational harm, divert resources and the time and attention of management from our business, or subject us to other structural or behavioral remedies that adversely affect our business."

(Thanks to Slashdot reader juul_advocate for sharing the story!)

One day, we will all don AR glasses, capable of serving up information geospatially tied to every house and place in our neighborhoods. But who will own and control these spatial AR layers? From a report: It's the stuff of nightmares: The other day, I found my property occupied by a stranger, who was renting it out, Airbnb style. The good news: I'm OK. I wasn't actually evicted from my own home -- at least not in this world. Someone had acquired my property in Upland, a blockchain-powered game that allows people to buy, develop, rent out and sell virtual land parcels based on real-world property borders. It's a bit like Monopoly, played on top of Google Maps, with virtual land speculation happening on a gamified version of the real world. With bright and colorful imagery, and a goofy-looking llama as a mascot, Upland emphasizes that it's all fun and games. That's true for its economy as well, as most of its in-game transactions have little to no monetary value in the real world. The person who bought my property currently makes the equivalent of 4 cents a month in Upland's in-game currency by renting it out to other players.

However, Upland has big ambitions, which include eventually expanding into AR, and providing its data via APIs to third-party developers who may one day be able to build their own game and nongame applications with it. And the company is not alone: A small but growing number of startups and crypto initiatives have begun selling and renting out AR spaces tied to real-world addresses. One day, these efforts could be key to telling your smart glasses which information to display as you look at a famous landmark, or even your neighbor's home. This brings up a ton of questions: Who should have the rights to an AR layer tied to a physical address? What does it mean that these AR properties are being divided up among early adopters before most people even know they exist? Will we see the same issues that have plagued real world real estate, including gentrification and displacement, replicated in AR?

The government of El Salvador on Monday rejected a recommendation by the International Monetary Fund to drop Bitcoin as legal tender in the Central American country. ABC News reports: Treasury Minister Alejandro Zelaya angrily said that "no international organization is going to make us do anything, anything at all." Zelaya told a local television station that Bitcoin is an issue of "sovereignty." "Countries are sovereign nations and they take sovereign decisions about public policy," he said.

The IMF recommended last week that El Salvador dissolve the $150 million trust fund it created when it made the cryptocurrency legal tender and return any of those unused funds to its treasury. The agency cited concerns about the volatility of Bitcoin prices, and the possibility of criminals using the cryptocurrency. After nearly doubling in value late last year, Bitcoin has plunged in value. Zelaya said El Salvador has complied with all financial transaction and money laundering rules.

The International Monetary Fund is pushing El Salvador to ditch bitcoin as legal tender, according to a statement released on Tuesday. CNBC reports: IMF directors "stressed that there are large risks associated with the use of bitcoin on financial stability, financial integrity, and consumer protection, as well as the associated fiscal contingent liabilities." The report, which was published after bilateral talks with El Salvador, went on to "urge" authorities to narrow the scope of its bitcoin law by removing bitcoin's status as legal money. In Sept. 2021, the Central American nation became the world's first country to adopt the cryptocurrency as legal tender, alongside the U.S. dollar.

The IMF report went on to say that some directors had expressed concern over the risks associated with issuing bitcoin-backed bonds, referring to the president's plan to raise $1 billion via a "Bitcoin Bond" in partnership with Blockstream, a digital assets infrastructure company. Part of El Salvador's nationwide move into bitcoin also involved launching a national virtual wallet called Chivo that which offers no-fee transactions and allows for quick cross-border payments. For a country where 70% of citizens do not have access to traditional financial services, Chivo is meant to offer a convenient onramp for those who have never been a part of the banking system.

IMF directors agreed that the Chivo e-wallet could facilitate digital means of payment, thereby helping to "boost financial inclusion," though they emphasized the need for "strict regulation and oversight." Many Salvadorans have reported cases of identity theft, in which hackers use their national ID number to open a Chivo Wallet, in order to claim the free $30 worth of bitcoin offered by the government as an incentive to open a digital wallet. For months, the IMF has bemoaned Bukele's bitcoin experiment. [...] El Salvador has also been trying since early 2021 to secure a $1.3 billion loan from the IMF -- an effort which appears to have soured over this bitcoin row. The country will need to figure out some other backstop to shore up its finances. The IMF predicts that under current policies, public debt will rise to 96% of GDP by 20216, putting the country on "an unsustainable path."

The cryptocurrency market had around $130 billion wiped off its value over the last 24 hours as major digital coins continued their multi-day sell-off. From a report: Bitcoin was last down around 4% at $33,755.57, according to Coin Metrics, while Ether plunged 7% to $2,239.08. Earlier in the morning both fell to their lowest points since July and are each about 50% off their all-time highs. Cryptocurrencies are moving in tandem with stocks, which have continued to fall since the beginning of the year and just came off of their worst week since March 2020. Investors have been selling risk assets like technology stocks as they prepare for tighter monetary policy from the U.S. Federal Reserve and higher interest rates. "Looking forward, our most immediate concern is how equities markets respond to this week's Fed meeting," said Leah Wald, CEO at digital asset investment manager Valkyrie Funds. "A consolidation in traditional assets would catalyze a potential recovery in bitcoin, ether and other altcoins. Realistically, though, digital asset traders tend to be willing to take on more risk than traders in other asset classes, so we do expect some volatility in the coming days and weeks."

Russia must ban cryptocurrencies, the country's central bank said in a report released Thursday. From a report: The report, "Cryptocurrencies: trends, risks, measures," was presented during an online press conference with Elizaveta Danilova, the director of the Bank of Russia's Financial Stability Department. The report says cryptocurrencies are volatile and widely used in illegal activities such as fraud. By offering an outlet for people to take their money out of the national economy, they risk undermining it and making the regulator's job of maintaining optimal monetary policies harder, the report says.

The bank, therefore, suggest Russia needs new laws and regulations that effectively ban any crypto-related activities in the country. In particular, cryptocurrency issuance and organization of its circulation in Russia must be banned. The ban should apply to exchanges, over-the-counter trading desks and peer-to-peer platforms. An existing ban on using crypto for payments should be reinforced, and punishment should be introduced for buying or selling goods, services and labor by Russian individuals and businesses, the report suggests.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Over the past few years we have seen copyright holders take several ISPs to court, accusing them of failing to disconnect repeat copyright infringers. These lawsuits have expanded recently, with VPN providers and hosting companies as the main targets. The VPN lawsuits are filed by a group of independent movies companies that previously went after piracy sites and apps. They include the makers of films such as The Hitman's Bodyguard, Dallas Buyers Club, and London Has Fallen. In one of these cases, the filmmakers accused VPN Unlimited's company KeepSolid Inc. of being involved in widespread copyright infringement. The company allegedly 'encouraged' subscribers to use pirate sites and did nothing to stop infringing traffic.

Most VPNs can't track the online activities of subscribers and the filmmakers believe that VPN Unlimited and other providers actively promoted their services to online pirates. For example, by referencing known pirate sites. "Defendant KeepSolid encourages its users to access torrent sites including the Pirate Bay," the complaint read, showing a screenshot from the VPN's help section, which remains online today. Instead of fighting the case on its merits, both parties have agreed to settle the case behind closed doors. Last week, they informed the Virginia federal court that an agreement had been reached. As part of this settlement, all claims against VPN Unlimited were dismissed. The full details of the settlement agreement are confidential. Both parties agreed to cover their own costs but it's unknown whether any monetary damages are involved. What is clear is that, going forward, VPN Unlimited will restrict torrent traffic on its U.S. servers.

"Pursuant to the confidential settlement agreement, Plaintiffs have requested and Defendant KeepSolid has agreed to use commercially reasonable efforts to block BitTorrent traffic," the joint dismissal stipulation reads. As it reads, this measure applies to BitTorrent traffic as a broad category. That includes both pirated content and lawful torrent transfers. In addition, VPN Unlimited will also take more targeted measures to stop traffic to torrent sites. VPN Unlimited has agreed to block access to several pirate sites. These include YTS, The Pirate Bay, RARBG, 1337x, and several proxies. These measures are again limited to U.S.-based VPN servers. Popcorn-time.tw is also on the blocklist, but this Popcorn Time fork has already shut down.

A beta "payments" feature now lets users of the popular encrypted messaging app send MobileCoin around the globe. From a report: In the spring of 2021, the encrypted communications app Signal announced that it would add a payments feature in beta for its users in the UK, testing out an integration with a relatively new, privacy-focused cryptocurrency called MobileCoin. But a much broader phase of that experiment has quietly been underway since mid-November. That's when Signal made the same feature accessible to all of its users without fanfare, offering the ability to send digital payments far more private than a credit card transaction -- or a Bitcoin transfer -- to many millions of phones. MobileCoin founder Josh Goldbard confirmed the timing of the rollout, and says that it spurred massive adoption of the cryptocurrency, which now sees thousands of daily transactions versus just dozens before the global beta release. "There are over a hundred million devices on planet Earth right now that have the ability to turn on MobileCoin and send an end-to-end encrypted payment in five seconds or less," Goldbard says, referencing reports of Signal's total download numbers.

In fact, getting started using Signal's payments feature still isn't quite that simple. Anyone outside of sanctioned companies like North Korea and Syria can access their MobileCoin wallet within a message by tapping the "+" icon and then "payment." But the challenge for many will be loading that wallet in the first place; the cryptocurrency is listed for sale on only a few smaller cryptocurrency exchanges -- such as BitFinex and FTX -- none of which yet offer it to US consumers. Signal itself didn't respond to WIRED's requests for comment on the global rollout of the payments feature. But last April, Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike explained to WIRED that he wanted to add payments to the encrypted video-calling and texting app to match features from rivals like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger -- while also bringing Signal's lauded privacy protections to monetary transactions. "I would like to get to a world where not only can you feel [a sense of privacy] when you talk to your therapist over Signal, but also when you pay your therapist for the session over Signal," Marlinspike said at the time.

The U.S. workplace safety watchdog is investigating the circumstances around the collapse during Friday night's storm of an Amazon.com building in Illinois in which six workers died, an official at the U.S. Department of Labor said on Monday. From a report: The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has six months to complete its investigation, issue citations, and propose monetary penalties if violations of workplace safety and/or health regulations are found, Scott Allen, a U.S. Department of Labor regional director for public affairs, said via email. He added that compliance officers have been on site since Saturday. Six workers were killed when the Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, buckled under the force of a devastating storm, police said. A barrage of tornadoes ripped through six U.S. states, leaving a trail of death and destruction at homes and businesses stretching more than 200 miles (322 km).

"Bitcoin mining is a process of competitively wasting electricity to guess a winning number every 10 minutes or so," writes author David Gerard in Foreign Policy magazine.

And he's got an equally negative take on Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's experiment in making Bitcoin an official national currency alongside the U.S. dollar. "When a con artist's grift starts to fall apart, he knows to move onto the next one fast..." More than 91 percent of Salvadorans want dollars, not bitcoins. The official Chivo payment system was unreliable at launch in September — the kiss of death for a new system. Users joined for the $30 signup bonus, spent it or cashed it out, then didn't use Chivo again. The system completely failed to check new users' photos, relying solely on their national identity card number and date of birth; massive identity fraud to steal signup bonuses ensued. Bitcoin's ridiculously volatile price was appreciated only by aspiring day traders. Large street protests against compulsory Bitcoin implementation continued through October. The government stopped promoting Chivo on radio, TV, and social media. Chivo buses and vans were seen with plastic taped over the company's logo.

Bukele's financial problems remain. El Salvador can't print its own dollars, so Bukele urgently needs to fund his heavy deficit spending. The International Monetary Fund has not lent the country the $1 billion Bukele asked for, and has indicated its strong concerns about the Bitcoin scheme... At the Latin American Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference on Nov. 20, Bukele came onstage to an animation of beaming down from a flying saucer and outlined his plans for Bitcoin City: a new charter city to be built from scratch, centered on bitcoin mining — and powered by a volcano. Bitcoin City would be paid for with the issuance of $1 billion in "volcano bonds," starting in mid-2022.

The 10-year volcano bonds would pay 6.5 percent annual interest. $500 million of the bond revenue would be used to buy bitcoins... Holding $100,000 in volcano bonds for five years would qualify investors for Salvadoran citizenship... Holders of El Salvador's existing sovereign debt were unimpressed. The volcano bonds would be a strictly worse investment than buying the country's existing bonds and hedging them with bitcoins. The existing bonds dropped from 75 cents on the dollar to a record low of 63.4 cents after the volcano bond announcement...

[T]he volcano bonds are Bukele's way to get Bitcoin holders' money into the Salvadoran economy and count it as dollars. Bukele will brazen all of this out as long as he can, periodically throwing new plans on the table as a distraction. If he can maintain power, then the Bitcoin users will discover that he's taken their money. If he can't maintain power, then his successor will have no love for his failed Bitcoin schemes. Either scenario ends with a lot of disappointed Bitcoin users — because a national economy really can't run on a volatile and manipulated speculative commodity that's unusable as a currency.

Both the Bitcoin users and Bukele seem to think the other is a sucker who they'll take for everything they've got. It's possible that both will lose.
The article also points out that with El Salvador's high electricity rates, one of their power plant recently spent $4,672 in electricity to mine $269 in bitcoin.

Two leading U.S. Senators "are urging federal regulators to investigate Facebook over allegations the company misled advertisers, investors and the public about public safety and ad reach on its platform," reports CNBC: On Thursday, Senator Warren urged the heads of the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission to open criminal and civil investigations into Facebook or its executives to determine if they violated U.S. wire fraud and securities laws. A day earlier, Senator Cantwell, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, encouraged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether Facebook, now called Meta, violated the agency's law against unfair or deceptive business practices. Cantwell's letter was made public on Thursday...

In her letter to the FTC, Cantwell focused on Facebook's claims about the safety of its products, in addition to the allegedly inflated ad projections... She suggested the agency investigate Facebook and, depending what the evidence shows, pursue monetary relief for advertisers and disgorgement of allegedly ill-gotten gains.
Senator Warren points to a whistleblower's recent allegations that Facebook misled both investors and advertising customers about their ad reach, according to the article. But Warren's letter also argued the possibility Facebook violated securities law with "breathtakingly illegal conduct by one of the world's largest social media companies," according to the article. And in addition, Warren "wrote that evidence increasingly suggests executives were aware the metric 'was meaningfully and consistently inflated.'"

Bloomberg adds this quote from Senator Cantwell's letter: "A thorough investigation by the Commission and other enforcement agencies is paramount, not only because Facebook and its executives may have violated federal law, but because members of the public and businesses are entitled to know the facts regarding Facebook's conduct as they make their decisions about using the platform."

While China's sweeping new data privacy laws have left tech companies confused about how to comply, they also put the U.S. even further behind in the global race to set digital standards. From a report: China enacted its Personal Information Privacy Law earlier this month, following Europe as the second major international player to have its own sweeping data privacy regulations. The law, regarded as China's version of Europe's General Data Protection Regulation, is a set of rules for how businesses can collect, use, process, share and transfer personal information. Another Chinese data regulation, the Data Security Law, went into effect Sept. 1. The laws aim to protect Chinese citizens from the private sector, while the Chinese government still has easy access to personal data.

In May, influential U.S. business groups sent comments, viewed by Axios, to the National People's Congress protesting that the draft law's vague language, monetary penalties and criminal liabilities were harsh. They also said it would hurt innovation by being overly prescriptive and burdensome. The U.S. still does not have a federal data privacy law, and China's move could allow it to set future global norms on its terms. Meanwhile, tech companies doing business in China will have to navigate the vague new rules, and that could be expensive.

The suit, filed by the now defunct photo start-up Phhhoto, accused the social network of stalling on a deal and then putting it out of business. From a report: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, downloaded a popular new app, Phhhoto, on Aug. 8, 2014, and took a selfie. Other Facebook executives and product managers soon followed suit. The social network then made overtures to integrate Phhhoto. But the interest of Facebook's top executives in Phhhoto was just a show, according to a lawsuit filed on Thursday in the Eastern District of New York by the start-up, which is now defunct. Instead, Facebook simply wanted to squash the competition, according to the suit, which accused the company of antitrust violations. In the suit, Phhhoto's founders -- Champ Bennett, Omar Elsayed and Russell Armand -- claim that after Mr. Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives downloaded their app and approached them about a partnership, no deal materialized. Facebook instead launched a competing product that mirrored Phhhoto's features. Facebook also suppressed Phhhoto's content within its photo-sharing app, Instagram, the suit says.

Phhhoto is represented by Gary L. Reback, a well-known lawyer. In the 1990s, Mr. Reback persuaded the Justice Department to sue Microsoft for violating antitrust laws, a case that Microsoft ultimately settled in 2001. Phhhoto's suit seeks unspecified monetary damages from Facebook. The lawsuit stands out because of Mr. Zuckerberg's personal involvement, Mr. Reback said in an interview. He called Mr. Zuckerberg "the monopolist's C.E.O" and said the Facebook founder had engaged in "anticompetitive conduct to an extent not seen since Bill Gates," one of the founders of Microsoft.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson called NFT and "play-to-earn" games the "the future of our industry," but added that "it's still early to figure out how that's going to work," when asked about the topic during the company's earnings call this week. From a report: "I think that in the context of the games we create and the live services that we offer, collectible digital content is going to play a meaningful part in our future," Wilson said. "So, it's still early to tell, but I think we're in a really good position, and we should expect us to kind of think more innovatively and creatively about that on a go-forward basis." EA has yet to officially step into the NFT and "play-to-earn," or blockchain space that's been growing in the past few years. "Play-to-earn" games often require players pay an up-front cost through cryptocurrency to play the game and collect unique, in-game items. Those items can then increase in value and be sold to other players. It's common for players to also have input on the game's development as their monetary stake in it increases the game's overall value. Recent EA job listings include "NFT" and "blockchain" in the descriptions, suggesting that the company is at least aware of the genre's surge in popularity. A post for a senior director of the company's competitive gaming brand reads, "We set the pace for EA's investment in gaming subscriptions, our PC storefront and platform, competitive gaming (including FIFA, Apex Legends, and Madden NFL), as well as new business opportunities, including fantasy sports, blockchain and NFTs, and more."

Somewhere on Yahoo, one writer asks "Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?" There was a time when comic books were sold at newsstands alongside mainstream publications, according to Forbes, but that changed in the early 1980s when periodical comics all but disappeared from newsstands. From then on, the vast majority of comic books were sold through independently owned retail comic shops.
But GamesRadar+ notes a boom started in the 1990s — when comic books became an investment: Long story short, folks outside of regular comic book readers discovered that, in some cases, key comic book issues (such as those that debuted popular characters or titles) could be worth significant amounts of money on the secondary market, leading to some fans buying dozens of copies of a single issue in the hopes of someday capitalizing on their monetary value...

Someone should've explained supply and demand — the bubble burst because when everyone is buying and meticulously preserving a million copies of a comic book, there is no rarity to drive up the value to the level of less well-preserved comic books from earlier eras.
Their article also points out that this era saw the dawn of lucrative "variant covers". But the '90s also saw a rebellion of top Marvel artists who left to found Image comics, "the first major third-party publisher to challenge Marvel and DC's reign over the industry in years," which led to "a rise in independent and creator-owned comic books, both large and small, and helped the rising tide of indie publishers gain a solid foothold as an overall industry presence." (Presumably this "rising tide" would also include publishers of manga and anime-derived titles.)

So where are we now? The article on Yahoo notes the vast popularity of comic book movies, and also argues that "The billion-dollar comic business continues to boom." According to Publisher's Weekly, sales of comic books and graphic novels topped $1.28 billion in 2020, an all-time high. It's no fluke. With a few exceptions — sales fell a little in 2017, for example — comic book sales have been rising consistently for decades.
But who's actually reading comic books? Is it teenagers? Nostalgic adults? Investing collectors? People who saw the movies first? (If you're 12 years old, are you going to read some comic book, or watch The Avengers?)

Comic books now also have to compete with incredibly immersive videogames, virtual reality, and a gazillion cellphone apps — not to mention social media, and even online fan fiction. So I'd be interested to hear the experiences of Slashdot's readers. It seems like we'd be a reasonably good cross section of geek culture — but can we solve the riddle of the state of the comic book industry today?

Share your own thoughts in the comments. Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg Law: Companies including Amazon and Facebook could face fines over fake reviews or other misleading endorsements online, according to a warning from the Federal Trade Commission. The warning comes as social media has blurred the line between authentic content and advertising, according to the FTC's Wednesday announcement. Practices such as influencer marketing leave some consumers confused about when posters are paid to endorse a product, if their connection to the brand isn't clearly disclosed.

The agency sent more than 700 companies a notice that they could incur penalties of up to $43,792 per violation if they use endorsements in ways that run counter to past FTC enforcement cases. The notices demonstrate FTC chair Lina Khan's efforts to ramp up enforcement under the commission's existing authorities, following a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that limited the agency's ability to seek monetary awards in court. The commission's move on endorsements relies on an agency authority that allows for civil penalties against a company that engages in conduct that it knows has been found unlawful in a previous FTC administrative order, other than a consent order.

"New Zealand's central bank is exploring the possibility of issuing a digital currency, saying the benefits it would bring include its potential use as a monetary policy tool," reports Bloomberg. The central bank cites "the declining use, acceptance and availability of cash in New Zealand, and emerging innovations in private money, namely stablecoins." While developing a central bank digital currency would require long lead times given the complexities and involve a multi-stage approach, the Royal Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) said it broadly favors the idea. A digital currency should support the New Zealand dollar "as our single unit of account" and be exchanged 1-for-1 with cash, it said, adding "cash is here to stay for as long as some of us need it."

The RBNZ said a digital currency would support the value anchor role of central bank money by:

- Providing individuals and businesses with the option of converting privately issued money into a digital form of central bank money, ensuring the long-term convertibility of private money into central bank money

- Improving the technological form of central bank money to ensure it remains relevant in a digital future

- Providing an additional monetary policy tool by it being either issued to provide monetary stimulus, or interest bearing....

Other central banks around the world, including the European Central Bank, are also exploring the possibility of issuing a digital currency.