An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: T-Mobile caused a bit of a stir earlier this month when a leak revealed it planned to move people from older, cheaper plans to pricier ones starting with their November bill cycle. On Wednesday, the carrier officially walked back the changes with CEO Mike Sievert confirming that they would not happen. "We tend to do tests and pilots of things quite a bit to try to figure out what's the right answer," Sievert said on a company earnings call, in response to a question about industry pricing and how it could raise its average revenues per user, a key industry metric. "In this case, we had a test sell to try to understand customer interest in, and acceptance of, migrating off old legacy rate plans to something that's higher value, for them and for us."

Sievert noted that the company was doing training around this test and said it wasn't planned to be a "broad, national thing." In its statement confirming the leak, the company told CNET earlier this month that the notices it was sending out was going to "a small number" of its users, but the carrier never clarified what a "small number" actually meant and didn't respond to that question when asked. At the time, the carrier said that the switch would generally see customers pay "an increase of approximately $10 per line" per month.

With the "plenty of feedback" the company received following the leak, Sievert said that T-Mobile has learned that this "particular test sell isn't something that our customers are going to love." He mentioned that no migrations of plans have actually rolled out. As for what will happen going forward, the carrier will continue to do tests and pilots for different changes, Mike Katz, T-Mobile's president of marketing, strategy and products, said on the call.

Jameson Dow reports via Electrek: As the latest step in the saga of recalled Chevy Bolts, GM is offering owners of '20-'22 Bolts early payment of $1,400 of an anticipated class action settlement in exchange for installing a piece of diagnostics software that the company says will detect whether batteries require a full replacement. [...] In June, GM announced that it would stop replacing 2020-2022 Chevy Bolt Batteries and would instead verify the integrity of the battery with software over a period of 6,200 miles in which Bolt owners were only allowed to charge their batteries to 80% or ~207 of the original EPA's 259-mile range. GM replaced most batteries on '17-'19 Bolts but then ended up offering software diagnostics instead of battery replacements to many '20-'22 model year Bolts. GM says that the software will detect which batteries actually require a fix, but the software requires 6,214 miles/10,000 km worth of driving to detect these problems, during which time charging must be limited to 80%.

This left many customers aggrieved at being promised a new battery and not receiving it, and further, at needing to wait some number of months with restricted charging before receiving a solution. Or, in the case of low-mileage customers, that 6,214 miles might even take years -- which brings up a conflict with GM's insistence that the diagnostic period be finished by March 31, 2025, in order to qualify owners for an extended warranty for a replaced battery pack. Now, GM is trying to sweeten the pot to get customers to install the "software final remedy" by offering early/upfront payment of an anticipated $1,400 class action settlement. The payment comes in the form of a Visa eRewards card that can be used for online purchases.

But you can only get this early payment if you install the "software final remedy" before December 31, 2023, and sign a legal release associated with taking the payment. If you don't, you'll have to wait for the class action to be sorted out. The compensation program only applies to owners involved in recall N212345944. If the class action settlement ends up being more than $1,400, GM says that the difference will still be paid out to owners who take advantage of this early compensation offer. As noted in The Verge's report, "[o]lder Chevy Bolt models that were made from 2017 to 2019 were initially provided 'fixes' in 2021 to keep the vehicles from catching fire, but it did not work." A different issue with the batteries appeared in 2020, "during which time at least 19 Bolts caught fire with full batteries."

Pebble, the first of the would-be Twitter replacements to emerge after Elon Musk bought Twitter, is shutting down. The social media platform -- previously known as T2 to indicate a desire to build a Twitter clone -- was founded by former Twitter employees Sarah Oh and Gabor Cselle. Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: Pebble was an early-stage, Twitter-like social network. Its goal was to become the "place to have the authentic conversations we've always wanted to have." Its founders, who were largely Twitter alumni, designed Pebble to look and feel like pre-Musk Twitter, with a 280-character limit and direct messaging. I rather liked it, but it appears I was in the minority. Pebble was always a bit rough around the edges, and it never made it past about 20,000 users.

In what was still a surprising announcement, Pebble revealed its plans to shut down operations on November 1, 2023. In a letter to users, Pebble said: "The painful truth, however, is that we were not growing quickly enough for investors to believe that we will break out. Combine that with a crowded space of alternatives -- and the uphill climb is even steeper. In order to continue to build out a complete Pebble, we would have needed more investment, and more time." That was not to be -- and Pebble's backers ran out of money and time.

A spokesperson for the platform stated: "While we are immensely proud of what we achieved with our dedicated team and an incredible community, the reality is that our growth rate was not meeting the expectations set by our investors." With the digital landscape burgeoning with alternative platforms, Pebble was competing in an increasingly crowded marketplace. As the platform prepares for its final curtain call, the team behind Pebble is shifting its focus to showing gratitude to its supportive community. They are exploring potential avenues to ensure that the connections formed on Pebble can continue in another guise. Further details are expected to be shared soon.

Since disclosing a security breach of its support systems Friday, Okta has shed more than $2 billion from its market valuation "Okta shares slumped more than 11% Friday after the company said an unidentified hacking group was able to access client files through a support system," reports CNBC. "The company did not provide more details beyond a set of technical identifiers. The company's stock continued to fall in Monday trading, ultimately closing down 8.1%." From the report: Okta is a lesser-known name but forms a critical part of cybersecurity systems at major corporations. The identity management company boasts more than 18,000 customers who use its products to provide a single login point for many different platforms that a given company uses. Zoom, for example, uses Okta to give "seamless" access through a single login to the company's Google Workspace, ServiceNow, VMware and Workday platforms. Okta said it had communicated with all affected clients in Friday's announcement. At least one of those clients said it had alerted Okta about a potential breach weeks earlier. [...]

Okta has also been at the center of other higher-profile incidents. Earlier this year, for example, casino giants Caesars and MGM were both affected by hacks. Caesars was forced to pay millions in ransom to the hacking group, sources told CNBC. MGM had to shut down critical systems that the company acknowledged would have a material effect on its bottom line in an SEC filing. The direct and indirect losses from those incidents totaled over $100 million. Both those attacks targeted MGM and Caesars' Okta installations, using a sophisticated social engineering attack that went through IT help desks. Three other companies were also targeted by the hacking group, an Okta executive told Reuters.

Okta has also been a target before. A hacking group purportedly accessed numerous Okta systems in a March attempt. That group, Lapsus$, has been tied to hacking attacks at Uber and Grand Theft Auto maker Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, according to a report from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Economists spent 2021 expecting inflation to prove "transitory." They spent much of 2022 underestimating its staying power. And they spent early 2023 predicting that the Federal Reserve's rate increases, meant to cure the inflation, would plunge the economy into a recession. None of those forecasts have panned out. The New York Times: Two big issues have made it difficult to forecast since 2020. The first was the coronavirus pandemic. The world had not experienced such a sweeping disease since the Spanish flu in 1918, and it was hard to anticipate how it would roil commerce and consumer behavior. The second complication came from fiscal policy. The Trump and Biden administrations poured $4.6 trillion of recovery money and stimulus into the economy in response to the pandemic. President Biden then pushed Congress to approve several laws that provided funding to encourage infrastructure investment and clean energy development. Between coronavirus lockdowns and the government's enormous response, standard economic relationships stopped serving as good guides to the future.

Take inflation. Economic models suggested that it would not take off in a lasting way as long as unemployment was high. It made sense: If a bunch of consumers were out of work or earning tepid pay gains, they would pull back if companies charged more. But those models did not count on the savings that Americans had amassed from pandemic aid and months at home. Price increases began to take off in March 2021 as ravenous demand for products like used cars and at-home exercise equipment collided with global supply shortages. Unemployment was above 6 percent, but that did not stop shoppers. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 exacerbated the situation, pushing up oil prices. And before long, the labor market had healed and wages were growing rapidly.

Bitcoin has surged past $33,000 per coin on Monday, rising nearly 11% in 24 hours. According to CoinGecko, the coin is up more than 17% in the past seven days. Decrypt reports: Bulls have flooded the space as talk about a spot Bitcoin ETF has investors hopeful that the long-awaited crypto product will soon get approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A Monday CoinShares report showed that institutional investors are pouring money into the space; JPMorgan analysts said last week that a spot Bitcoin ETF could be approved by Christmas.

High-profile investment firms that have applied to the SEC for a spot ETF are fine tuning their applications in the hope that the regulator will give them the green light. Investors have been hungry for a spot Bitcoin ETF for the best part of a decade but Wall Street's biggest regulator experts say has denied applications for such a product, mostly citing the potential for market manipulation as one of the main reasons.

But analysts are now more optimistic than ever before: BlackRock, world's biggest fund manager, applied for a Bitcoin ETF of its own. Not long after, manager Grayscale scored a victory against the SEC when a federal judge sided with the firm over its application to convert its flagship Bitcoin fund into an ETF.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Hamas' attacks against Israel on October 7 have shifted the geopolitical landscape and triggered a looming Israeli ground assault in the Gaza Strip. Now the ripple effects are reaching the cryptocurrency industry, where they've become the United States Department of the Treasury's rallying cry for a crackdown on cryptocurrency anonymity services. The US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) [on October 19th] released a set of proposed rules that would designate foreign cryptocurrency "mixers" -- services that blend users' digital funds to offer more anonymity and make them harder to trace -- as money laundering tools that pose a threat to national security and would thus face new sanctions and regulations. The new rules, if adopted following a 90-day period of public comment and debate, would potentially represent the broadest restrictions imposed yet on the mixing services and could make it far harder for cryptocurrency holders to put their money through the services before cashing it out at a US cryptocurrency exchange, or even at a foreign exchange that accepts US customers.

While the proposed rules were almost certainly in the works long before October 7, the Treasury's announcement tied the push for a change in policy directly to the use of cryptocurrency by Hamas and militant groups in Gaza. "The Treasury Department is aggressively combatting illicit use of all aspects of the CVC ecosystem by terrorist groups," Wally Adeyemo, deputy secretary of the Treasury, wrote in a statement, using the term "CVC" to mean convertible virtual currency. Adeyemo says that this includes Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a militant group that often aligns with Hamas, which Israel blamed for an explosion at a hospital in Gaza earlier this week.

Cryptocurrency mixers have existed almost as long as Bitcoin itself. They offer to take in a user's cryptocurrency, blend it with that of other users, and return the funds so that they are harder to follow from their origin to destination on blockchains, which generally record every transaction in full public view. The Treasury's rule change would designate those cryptocurrency-mixing services -- or at least the majority of them that are based outside the US -- as a "primary money laundering concern." They would thus be considered a threat to US national security as defined by section 311 of the Patriot Act, a section of the law designed to restrict how domestic financial institutions interact with potential sources of terrorist financing. The rule change would mean that US financial services, as well foreign ones with US customers -- including cryptocurrency exchanges -- would have to go through extra record-keeping and reporting requirements for funds that have touched a foreign cryptocurrency mixer, and it might even allow the Treasury to block US exchanges from handling those funds. "We've never seen anything like this before," says Ari Redbord, the head of global policy for TRM Labs, a blockchain analysis firm. Redbord notes that the rule change isn't proposing a blanket ban on foreign mixing services, only new rules for interacting with them. "The reality, however, is that 311 actions oftentimes have a sort of name-and-shame effect, where people are just not wanting to engage with these platforms out of fear of being caught up in money laundering or other type of illicit activity."

"I think the challenge for regulators is, how do we thread the needle between stopping illicit actors from using these platforms but at the same time allow regular users to enable some degree of privacy?" Redbord added. "I think the concern is that this could very much be throwing the baby out with the bathwater."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Cleveland has spent years being dubbed the "worst connected city in the U.S." thanks to expensive, patchy, and slow broadband. Why Cleveland broadband sucks so badly isn't really a mystery: consolidated monopoly/duopoly power has resulted in a broken market where local giants like AT&T and Charter don't have to compete on price, speeds, availability, customer service, or much of anything else. Data also shows that despite billions in tax breaks, regulatory favors, and subsidies, companies like AT&T have long refused to upgrade low-income and minority Cleveland neighborhoods to fiber. These companies not only engage in this deployment "redlining," but data also makes it clear they often charge these low income and minority neighborhoods more money for the same or slower broadband.

Last week I spent some time talking to Cleveland city leaders and local activists about their plan to do something about it. On one hand, they've doled out $20 million in COVID relief broadband funding to local non-profit DigitalC to deliver fixed wireless broadband at speeds of 100 Mbps for as little as $18. On the other hand, they've convinced a company named SiFi Networks to build a $500 million open access fiber network at no cost to taxpayers. SiFi Networks will benefit from a tight relationship with the city, while making its money from leasing access to the network to ISPs. [...]

Local activists like DigitalC CEO Joshua Edmonds tell me they hope the project teaches U.S. towns and cities that there are alternatives to being feckless supplicants to regional telecom mono/duopolies: "This is a major victory, and I hope that people don't look at it as just a major victory for Cleveland. Every city where there's a prevalent digital divide, where there's political will and ability to execute, people should be paying close attention to what happens in Cleveland, paying close attention to how DigitalC was able to fight and navigate with our coalition of stakeholders."

The hangover from the bursting of the startup bubble is weighing on big U.S. university endowments, with write-downs in their growth and venture-capital investments driving a second straight year of weak returns. From a report: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported a loss of 2.9% and Duke University, a loss of 1% for the fiscal year ending June 30, while endowments at Yale and Stanford gained 1.8% and 4.4%, respectively. The median return for endowments and foundations of more than $1 billion was 5.6%, according to a preliminary estimate from Cambridge Associates.

That was well behind the overall stock market. The MSCI All Country World Index and the S&P 500 gained 17.1% and 19.6% for the period, including dividends, respectively. They were boosted by the rally in tech giants including Microsoft and Nvidia that have benefited from developments in artificial intelligence. Small endowments of less than $500 million, which typically have less exposure to private investments and more to public equities, had a median return of 8.8%, according to Cambridge. "You were at the mercy of portfolio construction," said Matt Bank of Charlotte, N.C.-based Global Endowment Management, an outsourced investment firm. "Those decisions drove your short-term results, and the specific decisions you made within categories mattered less." Exposure to China also had a negative impact on returns, several endowment chiefs said.

One 80-year-old retired teacher in Los Angeles lost $69,000 in bitcoin to scammers. And 46,000 people lost over $1 billion to crypto scams since 2021 (according to America's Federal Trade Commission).

Now the Los Angeles Times reports California's new moves against scammers using bitcoin ATMs, with a bill one representative says "is about ensuring that people who have been frauded in our communities don't continue to watch our state step aside when we know that these are real problems that are happening." Starting in January, California will limit cryptocurrency ATM transactions to $1,000 per day per person under Senate Bill 401, which Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law. Some bitcoin ATM machines advertise limits as high as $50,000... Victims of bitcoin ATM scams say limiting the transactions will give people more time to figure out they're being tricked and prevent them from using large amounts of cash to buy cryptocurrency.

But crypto ATM operators say the new laws will harm their industry and the small businesses they pay to rent space for the machines. There are more than 3,200 bitcoin ATMs in California, according to Coin ATM Radar, a site that tracks the machines' locations. "This bill fails to adequately address how to crack down on fraud, and instead takes a punitive path focused on a specific technology that will shudder the industry and hurt consumers, while doing nothing to stop bad actors," said Charles Belle, executive director of the Blockchain Advocacy Coalition...

Law enforcement has cracked down on unlicensed crypto ATMs, but it can be tough for consumers to tell how serious the industry is about addressing the concerns. In 2020, a Yorba Linda man pleaded guilty to charges of operating unlicensed bitcoin ATMs and failing to maintain an anti-money-laundering program even though he knew criminals were using the funds. The illegal business, known as Herocoin, allowed people to buy and sell bitcoin in transactions of up to $25,000 and charged a fee of up to 25%.
So there's also provisions in the law against exorbitant fees: The new law also bars bitcoin ATM operators from collecting fees higher than $5 or 15% of the transaction, whichever is greater, starting in 2025. Legislative staff members visited a crypto kiosk in Sacramento and found markups as high as 33% on some digital assets when they compared the prices at which cryptocurrency is bought and sold. Typically, a crypto ATM charges fees between 12% and 25% over the value of the digital asset, according to a legislative analysis...

Another law would by July 2025 require digital financial asset businesses to obtain a license from the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: For years, tech companies like Open AI have freely used news stories to build data sets that teach their machines how to recognize and respond fluently to human queries about the world. But as the quest to develop cutting-edge AI models has grown increasingly frenzied, newspaper publishers and other data owners are demanding a share of the potentially massive market for generative AI, which is projected to reach to $1.3 trillion by 2032, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.

Since August, at least 535 news organizations — including the New York Times, Reuters and The Washington Post — have installed a blocker that prevents their content from being collected and used to train ChatGPT. Now, discussions are focused on paying publishers so the chatbot can surface links to individual news stories in its responses, a development that would benefit the newspapers in two ways: by providing direct payment and by potentially increasing traffic to their websites. In July, Open AI cut a deal to license content from the Associated Press as training data for its AI models. The current talks also have addressed that idea, according to two people familiar with the talks who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, but have concentrated more on showing stories in ChatGPT responses.

Other sources of useful data are also looking for leverage. Reddit, the popular social message board, has met with top generative AI companies about being paid for its data, according to a person familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations. If a deal can't be reached, Reddit is considering blocking search crawlers from Google and Bing, which would prevent the forum from being discovered in searches and reduce the number of visitors to the site. But the company believes the trade-off would be worth it, the person said, adding: "Reddit can survive without search."
"The moves mark a growing sense of urgency and uncertainty about who profits from online information," the article argues. "With generative AI poised to transform how users interact with the internet, many publishers and other companies see fair payment for their data as an existential issue."

They also cite James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, who suggests Open AI's decision to negotiate "may reflect a desire to strike deals before courts have a chance weigh in on whether tech companies have a clear legal obligation to license — and pay for — content."

"No roof, no solar power. That has been the dispiriting equation shutting out roughly half of all Americans from plugging into the sun," writes the Washington Post's "Climate Coach" column.

"But signing up for solar soon might be as easy as subscribing to Netflix." Scores of new small solar farms that sell clean, local electricity directly to customers are popping up. The setup, dubbed "community solar," is designed to bring solar power to people who don't own their own homes or can't install panels — often at prices below retail electricity rates...

At least 22 states have passed legislation encouraging independent community solar projects, but developers are just beginning to expand. Most existing projects are booked. At the moment, community solar projects in the United States generate enough electricity to power about 918,000 homes — less than 1 percent of total households, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a nonprofit trade group. But as more states join, and the Environmental Protection Agency's "Solar for All" program pours billions into federal solar power grants, more Americans will get the chance...

While projects exist in most states, they are highly concentrated: More than half are in Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York. These might be on a condo roof, or on open land like the 10-MW Fresno community solar farm, on a city-owned plot surrounded by agricultural land. Most are small: 2 megawatts of capacity on average, about enough to power 200 to 400 homes... The renewable energy marketplace EnergySage and the nonprofit Solar United Neighbors connect customers to community solar projects in their region. People generally receive monthly credits for electricity produced by their share of solar panels. These are subtracted from their total electricity bill or credited on future bills... Subscribers on average save about 10 percent on their utility bill (the range is 5 percent to 15 percent).

These economics are propelling the industry to record heights. Between 2016 and 2019, community solar capacity more than quadrupled to 1.4 gigawatts. By the end of this year, energy research firm Wood Mackenzie estimates, there will be 6 GW of community solar. And the Energy Department wants to see community solar reach 5 million households by 2025. "The economics are strongly on the side of doing this," says Dan Kammen, an energy professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "It's now cheaper to build new solar than to operate old fossil [fuel plants]. ... We're at the takeoff point."
The article notes "solar for renters" saves about $100 per year for the average ratepayer (while rooftop solar arrays may save homeowners over $1,000 annually). But according to the article, the arrangement still "reflects a new reality...

"Solar energy prices are falling as private and public money, and new laws, are fueling a massive expansion of small-scale community solar projects."

404 Media (working with Court Watch) reports on a $30 Million cash-for-Bitcoin laundering ring operating in the heart of New York For years, a gang operating in New York allegedly offered a cash-for-Bitcoin service that generated at least $30 million, with men standing on street corners with plastic shopping bags full of money, drive-by pickups, and hundreds of thousands of dollars laid out on tables, according to court records.

The records provide rare insight into an often unseen part of the criminal underworld: how hackers and drug traffickers convert their Bitcoin into cash outside of the online Bitcoin exchanges that ordinary people use. Rather than turning to sites like Coinbase, which often collaborate with and provide records to law enforcement if required, some criminals use underground, in-real-life Bitcoin exchanges like this gang which are allegedly criminal entities in their own right.

In a long spanning investigation by the FBI involving a confidential source and undercover agents, one member of the crew said "that at least some of his clients made money by selling drugs, that his wealthiest clients were hackers, and that he had made approximately $30 million over the prior three years through the exchange of cash for virtual currency," the court records read.
Thanks to user Slash_Account_Dot for sharing the news.

Breached web sites distribute malware to visitors by claiming they need to update their browser. But one group of attackers "have developed an ingenious way of keeping their malware from being taken down by security experts or law enforcement," reports security researcher Brian Krebs.

"By hosting the malicious files on a decentralized, anonymous cryptocurrency blockchain." [W]hen Cloudflare blocked those accounts the attackers began storing their malicious files as cryptocurrency transactions in the Binance Smart Chain (BSC), a technology designed to run decentralized apps and "smart contracts," or coded agreements that execute actions automatically when certain conditions are met. Nati Tal, head of security at Guardio Labs, the research unit at Tel Aviv-based security firm Guardio, said the malicious scripts stitched into hacked WordPress sites will create a new smart contract on the BSC Blockchain, starting with a unique, attacker-controlled blockchain address and a set of instructions that defines the contract's functions and structure. When that contract is queried by a compromised website, it will return an obfuscated and malicious payload.

"These contracts offer innovative ways to build applications and processes," Tal wrote along with his Guardio colleague Oleg Zaytsev. "Due to the publicly accessible and unchangeable nature of the blockchain, code can be hosted 'on-chain' without the ability for a takedown." Tal said hosting malicious files on the Binance Smart Chain is ideal for attackers because retrieving the malicious contract is a cost-free operation that was originally designed for the purpose of debugging contract execution issues without any real-world impact. "So you get a free, untracked, and robust way to get your data (the malicious payload) without leaving traces," Tal said.

In response to questions from KrebsOnSecurity, the BNB Smart Chain (BSC) said its team is aware of the malware abusing its blockchain, and is actively addressing the issue. The company said all addresses associated with the spread of the malware have been blacklisted, and that its technicians had developed a model to detect future smart contracts that use similar methods to host malicious scripts. "This model is designed to proactively identify and mitigate potential threats before they can cause harm," BNB Smart Chain wrote. "The team is committed to ongoing monitoring of addresses that are involved in spreading malware scripts on the BSC. To enhance their efforts, the tech team is working on linking identified addresses that spread malicious scripts to centralized KYC [Know Your Customer] information, when possible."

Karen K. Ho reports via ARTnews: British Museum has announced plans to digitize its entire collection in order to increase security and public access, as well as ward off calls for the repatriation of items. The project will require 2.4 million records to upload or upgrade and is estimated to take five years to complete. The museum's announcement on October 18 came after the news 2,000 items had been stolen from the institution by a former staff member, identified in news reports as former curator Peter Higgs. About 350 have been recovered so far, and last month the museum launched a public appeal for assistance. [...]

On the same day the British Museum announced its digitization initiative, Jones and board chairman George Osborne gave oral evidence to the UK Parliament's Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Their comments included an explanation of how the thefts occurred, policy changes made as a result, and how the museum will handle whistleblower complaints going forward. They also gave more details about the British Museum's strategy for digitizing its collection, estimated at a cost of $12.1 million. "We are not asking the taxpayer or the Government for the money; we hope to raise it privately," Osborne said.

The increased digital access to the collection would also be part of the museum's response to requests for items to be returned or repatriated. "Part of our response can be: "They are available to you. Even if you cannot visit the museum, you are able to access them digitally." That is already available -- we have a pretty good website -- but we can use this as a moment to make that a lot better and a lot more accessible," Osborne said.

echo123 shares a report from the Associated Press: Thousands of information technology workers contracting with U.S. companies have for years secretly sent millions of dollars of their wages to North Korea for use in its ballistic missile program, FBI and Department of Justice officials said. The Justice Department said Wednesday that IT workers dispatched and contracted by North Korea to work remotely with companies in St. Louis and elsewhere in the U.S. have been using false identities to get the jobs. The money they earned was funneled to the North Korean weapons program, FBI leaders said at a news conference in St. Louis.

Court documents allege that North Korea's government dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers to live primarily in China and Russia with the goal of deceiving businesses from the U.S. and elsewhere into hiring them as freelance remote employees. The workers used various techniques to make it look like they were working in the U.S., including paying Americans to use their home Wi-Fi connections, said Jay Greenberg, special agent in charge of the St. Louis FBI office. Greenberg said any company that hired freelance IT workers "more than likely" hired someone participating in the scheme. An FBI spokeswoman said Thursday that the North Koreans contracted with companies across the U.S. and in some other countries. "We can tell you that there are thousands of North Korea IT workers that are part of this," spokeswoman Rebecca Wu said. Federal authorities announced the seizure of $1.5 million and 17 domain names as part of the investigation, which is ongoing. FBI officials said the scheme is so prevalent that companies must be extra vigilant in verifying whom they are hiring, including requiring interviewees to at least be seen via video.

The IT workers generated millions of dollars a year in their wages to benefit North Korea's weapons programs. In some instances, the North Korean workers also infiltrated computer networks and stole information from the companies that hired them, the Justice Department said. They also maintained access for future hacking and extortion schemes, the agency said. Officials didn't name the companies that unknowingly hired North Korean workers, say when the practice began, or elaborate on how investigators became aware of it. But federal authorities have been aware of the scheme for some time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday released a landmark proposal restricting how financial institutions handle consumer data. [...] The proposed rule -- which faces months of feedback and lobbying from industry and consumer groups before it's approved -- would bar financial firms from "hoarding" a consumer's data, the agency said. It would require companies to share information, at a customer's request, with other businesses offering competing products and prevent them from charging for it.

Banks would be required to make personal financial data available to consumers free of charge, and companies that access a person's data would not be able to use it for targeted advertising. Access to a person's data would have to be reauthorized annually, and consumers would have the right to revoke access at any time. The proposal, which implements Section 1033 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, also "seeks to move the market away from risky data collection practices" such as screen scraping, the CFPB said. "It is often really daunting for a consumer to switch banks, in part because it's difficult to take their financial transaction history data to a new bank," White House National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard said on a call with reporters. "Today's rule will help ensure financial companies compete based on service quality and pricing."

The bar for taking a sick day is getting lower, and some bosses say that's a problem. From a report: U.S. workers have long viewed an unwillingness to take sick days as a badge of honor. That's a laurel workers care much less about these days. The number of sick days Americans take annually has soared since the pandemic, employee payroll data show. Covid-19 and a rise in illnesses such as RSV, which can require days away from work, are one reason. Managers and human-resources executives also attribute the jump to a bigger shift in the way many Americans relate to their jobs.

For one, more workers are using up sick time often for reasons such as mental health. And unlike older workers, who might have been loath to call in sick for fear of seeming weak or unreliable, younger workers feel more entitled to take full advantage of the benefits they've been given, executives and recruiters say. That confidence has only grown as record low unemployment persists. So far this year, 30% of white-collar workers with access to paid leave have taken sick time, up from 21% in 2019, according to data from payroll and benefits software company Gusto. Employees between ages 25 and 34 are taking sick days most often, with their use rates jumping 45% from before the pandemic.

[...] Younger workers used to follow the example of their older peers and come in even when under the weather, says Crystal Williams, chief human resources officer at global business payments company Fleetcor, which has around 5,000 U.S. employees. She suspects early-career employees aren't taking cues from older co-workers in the same way now that five days a week at the office is no longer the norm. Prepandemic, Fleetcor workers in their 20s and 30s took one or two sick days a year, she says. Now, it's more like three to five.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The IRS will test a free tax filing service in 2024 for a subset of lucky taxpayers in as many as 13 states, the agency announced today. Direct File, as the service is called, is a shot across the bows of Turbotax, H&R Block, and other paid tax prep services, whose owners have resisted free and simple tax filing for decades. "This is a critical step forward for this innovative effort that will test the feasibility of providing taxpayers a new option to file their returns for free directly with the IRS," said IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel in a press release announcing the news.

Over the last year and a half, the IRS has been building out the pilot program, which it characterizes as being "one more potential option" on the continuum from self-managed Free File, to commercial products like Turbotax, to a tax prep professional. The IRS describes Direct File as "a mobile-friendly, interview-based service" available in English and Spanish, intended for people with simpler tax situations like W-2s and common income credits and deductions. Whether the interviews are with actual people or some kind of automated or semi-automated process is unclear. But this, like many of its specifics, will likely change as the agency receives feedback from this limited scale pilot.

Arizona, California, Massachusetts, and New York are the four states that are integrating with Direct File for 2024 (i.e. the 2023 tax year); Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming "may also be eligible," due to not having state income tax, but it is not final. Every state was given the opportunity to participate in the Direct File program, but not all were "in a position to join." Among the residents of these states, a limited number of individuals with "relatively simple returns" will have the opportunity to try Direct File. This will in turn "allow the IRS to evaluate the costs, benefits and operational challenges associated with providing a voluntary Direct File option to taxpayers." In software terms, we'd probably call this an alpha.

A new book by Nobel prize-winning economist Angus Deaton"feels like an existential crisis," writes Fast Company, "as he questions his own legacy — and wonders whether policies prescribed by economists over the years have unintentionally contributed to inequality" in America. Angus Deaton: People who have a four-year college degree are doing pretty well. But if you go to the people who don't have a college degree, horrible things are happening to them... The opportunities are getting bigger and bigger, but the safety net's falling further and further away. . . I think of it as much broader than income inequality: People without a BA are like an underclass. They're dispensable...

Fast Company: Why has Europe been able to avoid so many of these rises in inequality and "deaths of despair" and the U.S. hasn't?

Deaton: Anne [Case, my wife] and I wrestled with that in our book Deaths of Despair. One reason is that we don't have any safety net here... The other story is we've got this hideous healthcare system... we're spending [almost] 20% of GDP. There's no other country that spends anything like that. That money comes out of other things we could have, like a safety net and a better education system. And it's not delivering much, except the healthcare providers are doing really quite well: the hospitals, the doctors, the pharma companies, the device manufacturers. Not only does it cost a lot, but we fund it in this really bizarre way, which is that for most people who are not old enough to qualify for Medicare, they get their health insurance through their employer...

Fast Company : The theme of your new book seems to be something of an existential crisis for you as an economist. How much are economists to blame for some of these issues?

Deaton: [...] I think there are some broad things that we didn't do very well. We bent the knee a little too much to the Chicago libertarian view, that markets could do everything. I'm not trying to say that I was right and everybody else was wrong. I was with the mob. I think we thought that financial markets were much safer than they'd been in the past, and we didn't have to worry about them as much. That was dead wrong. I think we were way overenthusiastic about hyperglobalization. We had this belief that people would lose their jobs but they'd find other, better jobs, and that really didn't happen. So there are a lot of things that I think are going to be seriously reconsidered over the next years.
But he admits economists are short on solutions for economic inequality. "When they say, 'Well, what would work'" there's this uncomfortable silence where you feel foolish. Everybody's quoting [former Italian philosopher and politician Antonio] Gramsci [saying that] the old system is broken but the new system is struggling to be born. No one really knows what it's going to look like."

The book is titled Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality. But in the interview Deaton still remains hopeful about America, calling it "a very inventive place," and noting that in the field of economics "there's always hope and there's always change; economics is a very open profession, and it changes very quickly."