America's Department of Justice "has launched a criminal investigation into the Boeing jetliner blowout that left a gaping hole on an Alaska Airlines plane," reports the Associated Press, citing a report from the Wall Street Journal.

"As part of the new investigation, the Justice Department has interviewed pilots and flight attendants on the flight..." the Journal reports. "Investigators have taken steps to begin notifying Alaska passengers on board during the Jan. 5 accident that they are potential crime victims in the case, according to a document viewed by The Wall Street Journal." The probe would inform the Justice Department's review of whether Boeing complied with an earlier settlement that resolved a federal investigation following two fatal 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019. Investigations don't always result in formal charges of wrongdoing.

Separately, investigators with the Transportation Department's Inspector General's office in recent weeks have been seeking to interview Federal Aviation Administration officials in the Seattle area who oversee Boeing's manufacturing...

If the Justice Department finds that Boeing violated the terms of the 2021 settlement, the company could face prosecution on the original count of defrauding the U.S. Alternatively, the government could seek to extend the probationary, three-year agreement that requires Boeing to update the Justice Department on its compliance improvements.
In a related development, Boeing "has acknowledged in a letter to Congress that it cannot find records for work done on the door panel of the Alaska Airlines plane," reports the Associated Press: "We have looked extensively and have not found any such documentation," Ziad Ojakli, Boeing executive vice president and chief government lobbyist, wrote to Sen. Maria Cantwell on Friday. The company said its "working hypothesis" was that the records about the panel's removal and reinstallation on the 737 MAX final assembly line in Renton, Washington, were never created, even though Boeing's systems required it.
Not having the documents "raises concerns about quality assurance, quality management safety management systems within Boeing," said the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board earlier this week.

"This is a serious, potentially illegal, lapse in standard aviation manufacturing quality processes," reports the Seattle Times.

Meanwhile, America's National Transportation Safety Board is also investigating a United Airlines Boeing 737-8 flight "that last month experienced 'stuck' rudder pedals," reports Axios, "after touching down in Newark, per a preliminary report released Thursday." The captain reported that during the landing rollout, which is after touchdown but before the plane slows to taxi speed, the pedals did not respond to foot pressure and remained stuck. "The captain used the nosewheel steering tiller to keep the airplane near the runway centerline while slowing to a safe taxi speed before exiting the runway onto a high-speed turn-off," the report states.

Shortly after, the rudder pedals began to operate normally, the captain said. There were no injures and the airplane was removed from service for maintenance and troubleshooting. An inspection found no obvious malfunctions, said the National Transportation Safety Board. After removing the rudder system components, United conducted a second flight test and found the rudder controls operated normally, per the report. "With coordination with United, the issue was successfully resolved with the replacement of three parts and the airplane returned to service last month," Boeing said in a statement, adding that this is the only report of such an issue that they've received for the 737 MAX fleet.

The investigation is ongoing.

One year after Silicon Valley Bank's collapse and seizure, "Regional bank stocks remain volatile compared to other types of financial institutions," reports the Observer, "indicating investors' lingering worries about the sector."

But not everyone suffered: Benefiting from the crisis were big players, like JPMorgan Chase. After acquiring First Republic's $212.6 billion in loans and $92.4 billion in deposits for just over $10 billion in May 2023, JPMorgan saw a 67 percent year-over-year growth in profits that quarter. Overall, larger commercial banks saw inflows as customers sought safer institutions to hold their money.
And what happened to Silicon Valley Bank? Axios reports: Today, SVB says it's still the same bank customers loved, but with better risk management and some other tweaks, like smaller deposit requirements for startup borrowers, president Marc Cadieux told Axios last month. 81% of SVB's clients from a year ago are still banking with SVB, according to Cadieux, with "thousands of them" returning after initially switching out...

"I think there was an inference that this was a regional bank crisis, but it really wasn't — those were niche banks," Citizens CEO Bruce Van Saun tells Axios. "The failure was is in governance and the business model."
Citizens is America's 14th largest bank, and as its CEO, Van Saun was asked by CNN what caused 2023's failures at other banks: CEO Van Saun: Both of those banks [Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank] went from $50 billion in assets to over $200 billion in four years. They grew too fast, took in a high percentage of uninsured deposits, had very concentrated, narrow customer bases so they were susceptible to [deposit] flight risk. They also borrowed short and invested long, which is a cardinal sin of banking. They didn't manage their interest rate risk well because they didn't have the muscle that you would have if you grew slowly over the years and were heavily regulated like bigger banks like ourselves.

CNN: Who deserves more blame: failed banks' management teams for not ensuring proper guardrails were in place or financial supervisors whose jobs are to identify red flags?

Van Saun: It's a joint failure...

CNN: [W]hat about commercial real estate? The number of people working in offices is much, much lower than it was pre-pandemic. Are you bracing for another chapter of banking stress? What is Citizens doing to cushion against potential high losses in the sector given close to one-fifth of your loans are there?

Van Saun: You have to look under the covers. The nature of our portfolio matters.

Within commercial real estate, industrial, warehouse and distribution space is fine. Multi-family homes are generally fine. When it comes to offices, we have certain pockets of life science businesses like lab research facilities that are super safe because they never had to close during Covid. [Loans to general office buildings are riskier though, he said.] We go through all of that and we say we'll lose some money here, but we're not going to lose our shirt and we've put up big reserves against them. We're working on a loan-by-loan basis with our most senior people. I think it's a well-managed process.

A recent survey found that academic organizations are failing to preserve digital material -- "including science paid for with taxpayer money," reports Ars Technica, highlighting the need for improved archiving standards and responsibilities in the digital age. From the report: The work was done by Martin Eve, a developer at Crossref. That's the organization that organizes the DOI system, which provides a permanent pointer toward digital documents, including almost every scientific publication. If updates are done properly, a DOI will always resolve to a document, even if that document gets shifted to a new URL. But it also has a way of handling documents disappearing from their expected location, as might happen if a publisher went bankrupt. There are a set of what's called "dark archives" that the public doesn't have access to, but should contain copies of anything that's had a DOI assigned. If anything goes wrong with a DOI, it should trigger the dark archives to open access, and the DOI updated to point to the copy in the dark archive. For that to work, however, copies of everything published have to be in the archives. So Eve decided to check whether that's the case.

Using the Crossref database, Eve got a list of over 7 million DOIs and then checked whether the documents could be found in archives. He included well-known ones, like the Internet Archive at archive.org, as well as some dedicated to academic works, like LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) and CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe). The results were... not great. When Eve broke down the results by publisher, less than 1 percent of the 204 publishers had put the majority of their content into multiple archives. (The cutoff was 75 percent of their content in three or more archives.) Fewer than 10 percent had put more than half their content in at least two archives. And a full third seemed to be doing no organized archiving at all. At the individual publication level, under 60 percent were present in at least one archive, and over a quarter didn't appear to be in any of the archives at all. (Another 14 percent were published too recently to have been archived or had incomplete records.)

The good news is that large academic publishers appear to be reasonably good about getting things into archives; most of the unarchived issues stem from smaller publishers. Eve acknowledges that the study has limits, primarily in that there may be additional archives he hasn't checked. There are some prominent dark archives that he didn't have access to, as well as things like Sci-hub, which violates copyright in order to make material from for-profit publishers available to the public. Finally, individual publishers may have their own archiving system in place that could keep publications from disappearing. The risk here is that, ultimately, we may lose access to some academic research.

As reported by 404 Media, the New York Times has issued hundreds of copyright takedown requests against Wordle clones "in which it asserts not just ownership over the Wordle name but over the broad concepts and mechanics of the word game, which includes its '5x6 grid' and 'green tiles to indicate correct guesses.'" From the report: The Times filed at least three DMCA takedown requests with coders who have made clones of Wordle on GitHub. These include two in January and, crucially, a new DMCA filed this week against Chase Wackerfuss, the coder of a repository called âoeReactle,â which cloned Wordle in React JS (JavaScript). The most recent takedown request is critical because it not only goes after Reactle but anyone who has forked Reactle to create a different spinoff game; an archive of the Reactle code repository shows that it was forked 1,900 times to create a diverse set of games and spinoffs. These include Wordle clones in dozens of languages, crossword versions of Wordle, emoji and bird versions of world, poker and AI spinoffs, etc.

"I write to submit a revised DMCA Notice regarding an infringing repository (and hundreds of forked repositories) hosted by Github that instruct users how to infringe The New York Times Co.'s ('The Times') copyright in its immensely popular Wordle game and create knock-off copies of the same. Unfortunately, hundreds of individuals have followed these instructions and published infringing Wordle knock-off games that The Times has spent the past month removing, including off of Github's websites," the DMCA takedown request against Reactle reads. "The Times's Wordle copyright includes the unique elements of its immensely popular game, such as the 5x6 grid, green tiles to indicate correct guesses, yellow tiles to indicate the correct letter but the wrong place within the word, and the keyboard directly beneath the grid. This gameplay is copied exactly in the repository, and the owner instructs others how to knock off the game and create an identical word game," it adds.

The DMCA request then says that GitHub must delete forks of the repository, which it writes were "infringing to the same extent as the parent repository" and which it says were made in what was "clearly bad faith." [...] The DMCA takedown requests are particularly notable because they come at a time when the New York Times is financially thriving, while many of its competitors are losing money, laying people off, and shutting down. The Times is thriving in part because Wordle, the crossword puzzle, and its recipe apps are juggernauts. The company has been aggressively expanding its "Games" business with Wordle, Connections, and a brand new word search game called Strands. The New York Times issued a statement in response: "The Times has no issue with individuals creating similar word games that do not infringe The Times's 'Wordle' trademarks or copyrighted gameplay. The Times took action against a GitHub user and others who shared his code to defend its intellectual property rights in Wordle. The user created a 'Wordle clone' project that instructed others how to create a knock-off version of The Times's Wordle game featuring many of the same copyrighted elements. As a result, hundreds of websites began popping up with knock-off 'Wordle' games that used The Times's 'Wordle' trademark and copyrighted gameplay without authorization or permission."

Researchers have developed a way to circumvent safety measures built into large language models (LLMs) using ASCII Art, a graphic design technique that involves arranging characters like letters, numbers, and punctuation marks to form recognizable patterns or images. Tom's Hardware reports: According to the research paper ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMs, chatbots such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2 can be induced to respond to queries they are designed to reject using ASCII art prompts generated by their ArtPrompt tool. It is a simple and effective attack, and the paper provides examples of the ArtPrompt-induced chatbots advising on how to build bombs and make counterfeit money. [...]

To best understand ArtPrompt and how it works, it is probably simplest to check out the two examples provided by the research team behind the tool. In Figure 1 [here], you can see that ArtPrompt easily sidesteps the protections of contemporary LLMs. The tool replaces the 'safety word' with an ASCII art representation of the word to form a new prompt. The LLM recognizes the ArtPrompt prompt output but sees no issue in responding, as the prompt doesn't trigger any ethical or safety safeguards.

Another example provided [here] shows us how to successfully query an LLM about counterfeiting cash. Tricking a chatbot this way seems so basic, but the ArtPrompt developers assert how their tool fools today's LLMs "effectively and efficiently." Moreover, they claim it "outperforms all [other] attacks on average" and remains a practical, viable attack for multimodal language models for now.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson believes generative AI will "revolutionize" the gaming industry over the next five years. He predicts that the technology will allow for more efficient content creation, reducing development time from months to days. From a report: Greater efficiency coupled with "deeper, more immersive experiences" will lead to significant audience expansion over the next few years and provide a "multi-billion dollar" growth opportunity, he said. Wilson said that in the past it might take six months to build an in-game sports stadium. Over the last 12 months, that time has shrunk to six weeks, and over the coming years it could maybe be cut to six days.

And while FIFA 23 has 12 run cycles for how the players move in the game, EA Sports FC 24 has 1,200 created with generative AI. Over the next five years, Wilson hopes that generative AI will make EA's development 30% more efficient, help grow its 700 million-strong player base by "at least" 50%, and lead to players spending 10-20% more money on its games. "What we've seen every time there's been a meaningful technological advancement in media and in technology, where you are able to democratise an industry and hand it over to the population at large, incredible things happen," he said.

During a recent Morgan Stanley conference, Warner Bros. Discovery gaming boss J.B. Perrette discussed some of the company's strategy for gaming going forward, and it includes more live-service, mobile, and free-to-play games. From a report: He said, "We're doubling down on games as an area where we think there is a lot more growth opportunity that we can tap into with the IP that we have and some of the capabilities we have on the studio where we're uniquely positioned as both a publisher and a developer of games."

Perrette said WBD's recent gaming output has focused on AAA games for console, and that's great when a game like Hogwarts Legacy sells 22 million copies and becomes the best-selling game of the year, but this kind of success is never guaranteed in what Perrette said was a "volatile" market. He pointed out that one of WBD's latest big games, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, was a disappointment for the company.

So the plan going forward, he said, is to help reduce volatility by focusing on core franchises and bringing at least some of them to the mobile and free-to-play space, as well as continuing to invest in live-service games that people play--and spend money on--over a long period of time. This will help WBD generate more consistent revenue, he said, going on to tease that WBD had some new mobile free-to-play games coming this year. Also worth noting is that just because WBD may push into new places, that doesn't necessarily mean it will stop making big single-player AAA games.

Carriers have gotten stricter about how many items you can take on board, no matter how small they are. From a report: Fanny packs. Cross-body bags. Shopping bags. Pillows and blankets. The Southwest Airlines gate agent rattled off so many items that counted toward the two carry-on bag limit on my flight to Baltimore, I thought it might be a playful jab at Spirit and Frontier and their rigid carry-on policing to collect more fees. But this was no joke. Southwest quietly began cracking down on carry-on bags on Feb. 22, ahead of the spring and summer travel rush, advising gate agents of the changes in a memo. This crackdown isn't about bag size. It is about how many bags you have.

Southwest isn't alone in putting passengers' personal items in its crosshairs as a way to save precious bin space and speed up boarding. Delta and United agents have also recently asked me to stuff my small Lululemon bag in my backpack. One American Airlines frequent flier told me he watched gate agents in Sacramento, Calif., and Dallas list a litany of items that count as a personal item on weekend flights to Nashville, Tenn., last month. Carting all your stuff to the gate can save you time and often saves money, especially with some airlines' new, higher checked-baggage fees. Delta joined the club on Tuesday, announcing prices of $35 for your first bag and $45 for your second. But testing airlines' carry-on limits is now more likely to backfire, and lose you precious time as airlines make you consolidate items or check a bag at the gate.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Krebs on Security: There are indications that U.S. healthcare giant Change Healthcare has made a $22 million extortion payment to the infamous BlackCat ransomware group (a.k.a. "ALPHV") as the company struggles to bring services back online amid a cyberattack that has disrupted prescription drug services nationwide for weeks. However, the cybercriminal who claims to have given BlackCat access to Change's network says the crime gang cheated them out of their share of the ransom, and that they still have the sensitive data Change reportedly paid the group to destroy. Meanwhile, the affiliate's disclosure appears to have prompted BlackCat to cease operations entirely. [...]

The affiliate claimed BlackCat/ALPHV took the $22 million payment but never paid him his percentage of the ransom. BlackCat is known as a "ransomware-as-service" collective, meaning they rely on freelancers or affiliates to infect new networks with their ransomware. And those affiliates in turn earn commissions ranging from 60 to 90 percent of any ransom amount paid. "But after receiving the payment ALPHV team decide to suspend our account and keep lying and delaying when we contacted ALPHV admin," the affiliate "Notchy" wrote. "Sadly for Change Healthcare, their data [is] still with us." [...] On the bright side, Notchy's complaint seems to have been the final nail in the coffin for the BlackCat ransomware group, which was infiltrated by the FBI and foreign law enforcement partners in late December 2023. As part of that action, the government seized the BlackCat website and released a decryption tool to help victims recover their systems. BlackCat responded by re-forming, and increasing affiliate commissions to as much as 90 percent. The ransomware group also declared it was formally removing any restrictions or discouragement against targeting hospitals and healthcare providers. However, instead of responding that they would compensate and placate Notchy, a representative for BlackCat said today the group was shutting down and that it had already found a buyer for its ransomware source code. [...] BlackCat's website now features a seizure notice from the FBI, but several researchers noted that this image seems to have been merely cut and pasted from the notice the FBI left in its December raid of BlackCat's network.

Fabian Wosar, head of ransomware research at the security firm Emsisoft, said it appears BlackCat leaders are trying to pull an "exit scam" on affiliates by withholding many ransomware payment commissions at once and shutting down the service. "ALPHV/BlackCat did not get seized," Wosar wrote on Twitter/X today. "They are exit scamming their affiliates. It is blatantly obvious when you check the source code of their new takedown notice." Dmitry Smilyanets, a researcher for the security firm Recorded Future, said BlackCat's exit scam was especially dangerous because the affiliate still has all the stolen data, and could still demand additional payment or leak the information on his own. "The affiliates still have this data, and they're mad they didn't receive this money, Smilyanets told Wired.com. "It's a good lesson for everyone. You cannot trust criminals; their word is worth nothing."

"Reddit users have been reacting with deep gloom to the firm saying it plans to sell shares to the public..." the BBC recently reported: The company has said its plans are "exciting" and will offer the business opportunities for growth. However many users worry the move will fundamentally change the website... "When the most important customers shift from [users] to shareholders, the product always [suffers]," said one person. "It becomes 'what can we do this quarter to squeak out an additional point of revenue', instead of 'how can we make this product better'...."

[T]he company has recorded losses every year since its start, including more than $90m last year. In the filing, Reddit said it had not started trying to make money seriously until 2018. It reported $804m in revenue last year, up more than 20% from 2022. Advertising accounted for nearly all of the revenue, but in a note to prospective investors chief executive Steve Huffman said he was excited about opportunities to make the platform a venue for commerce and license its content to AI companies.

Microsoft built two datacenters west of Phoenix, with plans for seven more (serving, among other companies, OpenAI). "Microsoft has been adding data centers at a stupendous rate, spending more than $10 billion on cloud-computing capacity in every quarter of late," writes the Atlantic. "One semiconductor analyst called this "the largest infrastructure buildout that humanity has ever seen."

But is this part of a concerning trend? Microsoft plans to absorb its excess heat with a steady flow of air and, as needed, evaporated drinking water. Use of the latter is projected to reach more than 50 million gallons every year. That might be a burden in the best of times. As of 2023, it seemed absurd. Phoenix had just endured its hottest summer ever, with 55 days of temperatures above 110 degrees. The weather strained electrical grids and compounded the effects of the worst drought the region has faced in more than a millennium. The Colorado River, which provides drinking water and hydropower throughout the region, has been dwindling. Farmers have already had to fallow fields, and a community on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix went without tap water for most of the year... [T]here were dozens of other facilities I could visit in the area, including those run by Apple, Amazon, Meta, and, soon, Google. Not too far from California, and with plenty of cheap land, Greater Phoenix is among the fastest-growing hubs in the U.S. for data centers....

Microsoft, the biggest tech firm on the planet, has made ambitious plans to tackle climate change. In 2020, it pledged to be carbon-negative (removing more carbon than it emits each year) and water-positive (replenishing more clean water than it consumes) by the end of the decade. But the company also made an all-encompassing commitment to OpenAI, the most important maker of large-scale AI models. In so doing, it helped kick off a global race to build and deploy one of the world's most resource-intensive digital technologies. Microsoft operates more than 300 data centers around the world, and in 2021 declared itself "on pace to build between 50 and 100 new datacenters each year for the foreseeable future...."

Researchers at UC Riverside estimated last year... that global AI demand could cause data centers to suck up 1.1 trillion to 1.7 trillion gallons of freshwater by 2027. A separate study from a university in the Netherlands, this one peer-reviewed, found that AI servers' electricity demand could grow, over the same period, to be on the order of 100 terawatt hours per year, about as much as the entire annual consumption of Argentina or Sweden... [T]ensions over data centers' water use are cropping up not just in Arizona but also in Oregon, Uruguay, and England, among other places in the world.
The article points out that Microsoft "is transitioning some data centers, including those in Arizona, to designs that use less or no water, cooling themselves instead with giant fans." And an analysis (commissioned by Microsoft) on the impact of one building said it would use about 56 million gallons of drinking water each year, equivalent to the amount used by 670 families, according to the article. "In other words, a campus of servers pumping out ChatGPT replies from the Arizona desert is not about to make anyone go thirsty."

This week Linux Foundation Charities launched "a groundbreaking open source software solution for real-time fraud prevention" named Tazama — "with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."

They're calling it "the first-ever open source platform dedicated to enhancing fraud management in digital payments." Until now, the financial industry has grappled with proprietary and often costly solutions that have limited access and adaptability for many, especially in developing economies.

This challenge is underscored by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, which reported that nearly $1 trillion was lost to online fraud in 2022. Tazama challenges this status quo by providing a powerful, scalable, and cost-effective alternative that democratizes access to advanced financial monitoring tools that can help combat fraud... The solution's architecture emphasizes data sovereignty, privacy, and transparency, aligning with the priorities of governments worldwide. Hosted by LF Charities, which will support the operation and function of the project, Tazama showcases the scalability and robustness of open source solutions, particularly in critical infrastructure like national payment switches.
Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, described their reaction as "excited to see an open source solution that not only enhances financial security but also provides a platform for our community to actively contribute to a project with broad societal impacts."

And the announcement also includes a comment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's deputy director for payment systems. "This pioneering open source platform helps address critical challenges like fraud detection and compliance and paves the way for innovative, inclusive financial solutions that serve everyone, especially those in low-income countries.

"The launch of Tazama signifies another stride towards securing and democratizing digital financial services."

"These days in San Francisco, every major business closure triggers a rush to assign blame," argues the San Francisco Standard: When Macy's announced this week that it would shutter its flagship store in Union Square, it unleashed a wave of mourning and recriminations... Mayor London Breed and other local pols like state Sen. Scott Wiener tried to allay fears that Macy's was leaving because of crime, noting the planned closure is one of 150 nationwide. But in a tough election year, it seems few had the appetite to listen to her call for nuance...

The unavoidable truth is the pandemic hollowed out downtown San Francisco's offices and led to an exodus of tech staffers who preferred remote work. It meant the loss of thousands of people who had reason to regularly stroll by Macy's and so many other corporate retailers. Meanwhile, everybody else had even less reason to go shopping in an urban core. Why bother dressing up and schlepping downtown when you could get the same layaway deals online...? [R]etail has been recovering. But it should be no surprise that the recovery has happened largely in suburban markets, which have not experienced a mass exit of workers... Elsewhere, the reality is simple: Malls and department stores have been dying for the last decade, struggling to attract young people and redevelop growing vacant space into desirable uses.

Although Macy's is a legacy name, industry reports show it has been in a real doom loop of its own making. Everyone is angry about retail "shrinkage," an industry term for losses in inventory due to external theft, employee theft and mismanagement. However, reporting by CNBC and others has demonstrated that while corporate retailers may be seeing a bump in retail shrink, it is a smaller factor than other operational missteps. Industry experts suggest that "shrink" can be an excuse for poor inventory management and staffing issues, and brands like Lowe's, Foot Locker and Walgreens are now downplaying organized theft as a primary cause of revenue loss. The reality is that a swath of American retail chains have needed to downsize to remain profitable... [R]eactionary cries for police crackdowns on petty theft and homelessness miss how similar retail shutdowns are happening in cities with tougher crime laws and less visible poverty. Consider that Macy's has already conducted layoffs and cut employee benefits to remain afloat, triggering a worker strike in 2022. Then there's Macy's faltering credit card revenue, which the company said accounted for nearly triple the revenue loss as retail shrink.

While The Standard has reported on Macy's workers blaming theft for the closure, my own visit to Macy's on Tuesday and conversations with longtime sales associates in multiple departments suggested that low staffing, an aging clientele and dips in seasonal shopping have greatly affected business...

Turns out, "scary people stealing things" is a boogeyman that feels more tangible than the obscure machinations of a faltering corporation.
The San Francsico Standard itself was funded in part by billionaire venture capitalist Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital...

Americans filing their taxes could face privacy threats, reports the Washington Post: "We just need your OK on a couple of things," TurboTax says as you prepare your tax return.

Alarm bells should be ringing in your head at the innocuous tone.

This is where America's most popular tax-prep website asks you to sign away the ironclad privacy protections of your tax return, including the details of your income, home mortgage and student loan payments. With your permission to blab your money secrets, the company earns extra income from showing you advertisements for the next three years for things like credit cards and mortgage offers targeted to your financial situation.

You have the legal right to say no when TurboTax asks for your permission to "share your data" or use your tax information to "improve your experience...."
The article complains that granting permission allows TurboTax to share details with "sibling" companies "such as your salary, the amount of your tax refund, whether you received a tax break for student loans and the day you printed your tax return..."

"You'll see that permission request once near the beginning of the tax prep process. If you skip it then, you'll see the same screen again near the end. You'll have to say yes or no..." This is part of the corporate arms race for your personal data. Everyone including the grocery store, your apps and the manufacturer of your car are gobbling information to profit from details of your life. With TurboTax, though, you have the power to refuse to participate...

TurboTax and the online tax prep service from H&R Block have been asking every year to blab your tax return. We've cautioned you about it for each of the past two tax filing seasons. (I focused only on TurboTax this year.)

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from The Washington Post: A YouTube contractor was addressing the Austin City Council on Thursday, calling on them to urge Google to negotiate with his union, when a colleague interrupted him with jaw-dropping news: His 43-person team of contractors had all been laid off...

The YouTube workers, who work for Google and Cognizant, unanimously voted to unionize under the Alphabet Workers Union-CWA in April 2023. Since then, the workers say that Google has refused to bargain with them. Thursday's layoff signifies continued tensions between Google and its workers, some of whom in 2021 formed a union...

Workers had about 20 minutes to gather their belongings and leave the premises before they were considered trespassing.
Video footage of the moment is embedded at the top of the article. "I was speechless, shocked," said the contractor who'd been speaking. He told the Washington Post "I didn't know what to do. But angered, that was the main feeling." The council meeting was streaming live online and has since spread on social media. The contractors view the layoff as retaliation for unionizing, but Google and information technology subcontractor Cognizant said it was the normal end of a business contract.

The ability for layoffs to spread over social media highlights how the painful experience of a job loss is frequently being made public, from employees sharing recordings of Zoom meetings to posting about their unemployment. The increasing tension between YouTube's contractors and Google comes as massive layoffs continue to hit the tech industry — leaving workers uneasy and companies emboldened. Google already has had rounds of cuts the past two years.

Google has been in a long-running battle with many of its contractors as they seek the perks and high pay that full-time Google workers are accustomed to. The company has tens of thousands of contractors doing everything from food service to sales to writing code... Google maintains that Cognizant is responsible for the contractors' employment and working conditions, and therefore isn't responsible for bargaining with them. Cognizant said it is offering the workers seven weeks of paid time to explore other roles at the company and use its training resources.

Last year, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Cognizant and Google are joint employers of the contractors. In January, the NLRB sent a cease-and-desist letter to both employers for failing to bargain with the union. Since then the issue of joint employment, which would ultimately determine which company is responsible for bargaining, has landed in an appeals court and has yet to be ruled on.
"Workers say they don't have sick pay, receive minimal benefits and are paid as little as $19 an hour," according to the article, "forcing some to work multiple jobs to make ends meet." Sam Regan, a data analyst contractor for YouTube Music, told the Washington Post that he was one of the last workers to leave the meeting where the layoffs were announced.

"Upon leaving, he heard one of the security guards call the non-emergency police line to report trespassers."

"A ransomware gang once thought to have been crippled by law enforcement has snarled prescription processing for millions of Americans over the past week..." reports the Washington Post.

"The hackers stole data about patients, encrypted company files and demanded money to unlock them, prompting the company to shut down most of its network as it worked to recover." Insurance giant UnitedHealthcare Group said the hackers struck its Change Health business unit, which routes prescription claims from pharmacies to companies that determine whether patients are covered by insurance and what they should pay... Change Health and a rival, CoverMyMeds, are the two biggest players in the so-called switch business, charging pharmacies a small fee for funneling claims to insurers. "When one of them goes down, obviously it's a major problem," said Patrick Berryman, a senior vice president at the National Community Pharmacists Association...

UnitedHealth estimated that more than 90 percent of the nation's 70,000-plus pharmacies have had to alter how they process electronic claims as a result of the Change Health outage. But it said only a small number of patients have been unable to get their prescriptions at some price. At CVS, which operates one of the largest pharmacy networks in the nation, a spokesperson said there are "a small number of cases in which our pharmacies are not able to process insurance claims" as a result of the outage. It said workarounds were allowing it to fill prescriptions, however...

For pharmacies that were not able to quickly route claims to a different company, the Change Health outage left pharmacists to try to manually calculate a patient's co-pay or offer them the cash price. Compounding the impact, thousands of organizations cut off Change Health from their systems to ensure the hackers did not infect their networks as well... The attack on Change Health has left many pharmacies in a cash-flow bind, as they face bills from the companies that deliver the medication without knowing when they will be reimbursed by insurers. Some pharmacies are requiring customers to pay full price for their prescriptions when they cannot tell if they are covered by insurance. In some cases, that means people are paying more than $1,000 out of pocket, according to social media posts.

The situation has been "extremely disruptive," said Erin Fox, associate chief pharmacy officer at University of Utah Health. "At our system, our retail pharmacies were providing three-day gratis emergency supplies for patients who could not afford to pay the cash price," Fox said by email. "In some cases, like for inhalers, we had to send product out at risk, not knowing if we will ever get paid, but we need to take care of the patients." Axis Pharmacy Northwest near Seattle is "going out on a limb and dispensing product with absolutely no inkling if we'll get paid or not," said Richard Molitor, the pharmacist in charge. UPDATE: CNN reports Change Healthcare has now announced "plans for a temporary loan program to get money flowing to health care providers affected by the outage." It's a stop-gap measure meant to give some financial relief to health care providers, which analysts say are losing millions of dollars per day because of the outage. Some US officials and health care executives told CNN it may be weeks before Change Healthcare returns to normal operations.
"Once standard payment operations resume, the funds will simply need to be repaid," the company said in a statement. Change Healthcare has been under pressure from senior US officials to get their systems back online. Officials from the White House and multiple federal agencies, including the department of Health and Human Services, have been concerned by the broad financial and health impact of the hack and have been pressing for ways to get Change Healthcare back online, sources told CNN...

In a message on its website Friday afternoon, Change Healthcare also said that it was launching a new version of its online prescribing service following the cyberattack.
Thanks to Slashdot reader CaptainDork for sharing the news.

Since implementing a remote-first policy in 2021, Yelp says it's experienced a surge in job applications and a more satisfied workforce. Fortune reports: Last year, the total number of job applicants was 43% higher compared to 2021, according to Yelp's 2024 Remote Work Report released earlier this month. The number of applicants for sales roles skyrocketed by 103%, and prospects for its general and administrative (G&A) positions shot up 52% over the same time period. Those increases fall in line with data that shows a tidal wave of applicants clamoring for remote jobs. "It's rewarding to see both the level of interest and the quality of our applicants," Carmen Amara, chief people officer at Yelp, told Fortune. "Remote work has allowed us to attract a number of candidates who previously would not have applied to Yelp due to their location."

Despite arguments that remote work weakens workers' connections and growth opportunities, Yelp says it has found the opposite to be true. About 90% of the company's more than 4,700 employees say they have found effective ways to collaborate remotely, and 91% say they are confident in upward career mobility while working out of the office. Flexible schedules have also facilitated a healthy work-life balance -- about 89% of the company's workers say they can manage personal and professional demands, and the same amount say that the remote model has allowed them to make positive changes for their wellbeing.

Notably, Yelp's global tenure has increased to 3.5 years in 2023, compared to 2.8 years the year prior. The company says it's using the money it saved from shutting down its underutilized offices in New York City, Chicago, and Washington D.C., to funnel back into employee benefits, professional development, and wellness reimbursements.

Stack Overflow has launched an API that will require all AI models trained on its coding question-and-answer content to attribute sources linking back to its posts. And it will cost money to use the site's content. From a report: "All products based on models that consume public Stack Overflow data are required to provide attribution back to the highest relevance posts that influenced the summary given by the model," it confirmed in a statement. The Overflow API is designed to act as a knowledge database to help developers build more accurate and helpful code-generation models. Google announced it was using the service to access relevant information from Stack Overflow via the API and integrate the data with its latest Gemini models, and for its cloud storage console.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of the lead developers of Django, writes in a long post that he says has come from a place of frustration: [...] Instead, every time a maintainer finds a way to get paid, people show up to criticize and complain. Non-OSI licenses "don"t count" as open source. Someone employed by Microsoft is "beholden to corporate interests" and not to be trusted. Patreon is "asking for handouts." Raising money through GitHub sponsors is "supporting Microsoft's rent-seeking." VC funding means we're being set up for a "rug pull" or "enshitification." Open Core is "bait and switch."

None of this is hypothetical; each of these examples are actual things I've seen said about maintainers who take money for their work. One maintainer even told me he got criticized for selling t-shirts! Look. There are absolutely problems with every tactic we have to support maintainers. It's true that VC investment comes with strings attached that often lead to problems down the line. It sucks that Patreon or GitHub (and Stripe) take a cut of sponsor money. The additional restrictions imposed by PolyForm or the BSL really do go against the Freedom 0 ideal. I myself am often frustrated by discovering that some key feature I want out of an open core tool is only available to paid licensees.

But you can criticize these systems while still supporting and celebrating the maintainers! Yell at A16Z all you like, I don't care. (Neither do they.) But yelling at a maintainer because they took money from a VC is directing that anger in the wrong direction. The structural and societal problems that make all these different funding models problematic aren't the fault of the people trying to make a living doing open source. It's like yelling at someone for shopping at Dollar General when it's the only store they have access to. Dollar General's predatory business model absolutely sucks, as do the governmental policies that lead to food deserts, but none of that is on the shoulders of the person who needs milk and doesn't have alternatives.

Emily Shugerman reports via The Daily Beast: Gemini, the crypto startup owned by the Winklevoss twins, will have to return $1.1 billion to customers who lost money in their partnership with the now-bankrupt crypto lender Genesis. In a deal with the New York State Department of Financial Services, Gemini agreed to return the funds lost by customers of its Earn program, in which users could loan their crypto to Genesis in exchange for interest payments. According to the Department of Financial Services, Gemini "did not fully vet or sufficiently monitor [Genesis] throughout the life of Earn," and the company defaulted on its loans and then went bankrupt, leaving some 200,000 Earn customers empty-handed. "Gemini failed to conduct due diligence on an unregulated third party, later accused of massive fraud, harming Earn customers who were suddenly unable to access their assets after Genesis Global Capital experienced a financial meltdown," DFS Superintendent Adrienne A.Harris said in a statement. "Today's settlement is a win for Earn customers, who have a right to the assets they entrusted to Gemini."

In a tweet, Gemini said it was "pleased to announce that we have finally reached a settlement in principle with Genesis and other creditors in the Genesis Bankruptcy that will, if approved by the Bankruptcy Court, result in all Earn users receiving 100% of their digital assets back in kind." The DFS said Gemini would also pay $40 million to the Genesis bankruptcy for the benefit of Earn customers, as well as a $37 million fine for "significant failures that threatened the safety and soundness of the company."