An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, commingled customer funds with company revenue in 2020 and 2021, in breach of U.S. financial rules that require customer money to be kept separate, three sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. One of the sources, a person with direct knowledge of Binance's group finances, said the sums ran into billions of dollars and commingling happened almost daily in accounts the exchange held at U.S. lender Silvergate Bank. Reuters couldn't independently verify the figures or the frequency. But the news agency reviewed a bank record showing that on Feb. 10, 2021, Binance mixed $20 million from a corporate account with $15 million from an account that received customer money.

The money flows at Binance described by Reuters indicate a lack of internal controls to ensure customer funds were clearly identifiable and segregated from company revenues, three former U.S. regulators said. They said the commingling of these funds put client assets at risk by obscuring their whereabouts. Binance customers shouldn't "need a forensic accountant to find where their money is," said John Reed Stark, a former chief of the Securities and Exchange Commission's Office of Internet Enforcement. Reuters found no evidence that Binance client monies were lost or taken.

The commingling of customer and corporate funds can be a precursor to heavy losses for clients of financial firms. In December, the SEC and CFTC alleged that the founder of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange, Sam Bankman-Fried, for years had commingled client funds at his trading firm and used the monies to finance venture capital investments, political donations and real estate purchases. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to fraud charges and said he did not knowingly commingle any funds. In a statement to Reuters, Binance denied mixing customer deposits and company funds. "These accounts were not used to accept user deposits; they were used to facilitate user purchases" of crypto, said spokesperson Brad Jaffe.

"There was no commingling at any time because these are 100% corporate funds." When users sent money to the account, he said, they were not depositing funds but buying the exchange's bespoke dollar-linked crypto-token, BUSD. This process was "exactly the same thing as buying a product from Amazon," Jaffe said.

A dozen poor countries are facing economic instability and even collapse under the weight of hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign loans, much of them from the world's biggest and most unforgiving government lender, China. From a report: An Associated Press analysis of a dozen countries most indebted to China -- including Pakistan, Kenya, Zambia, Laos and Mongolia -- found paying back that debt is consuming an ever-greater amount of the tax revenue needed to keep schools open, provide electricity and pay for food and fuel. And it's draining foreign currency reserves these countries use to pay interest on those loans, leaving some with just months before that money is gone. Behind the scenes is China's reluctance to forgive debt and its extreme secrecy about how much money it has loaned and on what terms, which has kept other major lenders from stepping in to help. On top of that is the recent discovery that borrowers have been required to put cash in hidden escrow accounts that push China to the front of the line of creditors to be paid.

Countries in AP's analysis had as much as 50% of their foreign loans from China and most were devoting more than a third of government revenue to paying off foreign debt. Two of them, Zambia and Sri Lanka, have already gone into default, unable to make even interest payments on loans financing the construction of ports, mines and power plants. In Pakistan, millions of textile workers have been laid off because the country has too much foreign debt and can't afford to keep the electricity on and machines running. In Kenya, the government has held back paychecks to thousands of civil service workers to save cash to pay foreign loans. The president's chief economic adviser tweeted last month, "Salaries or default? Take your pick."

The Washington Post notes a trend at U.S. colleges like the University of Maryland: "booming enrollment in computer science and plummeting student demand for the humanities." The number of students nationwide seeking four-year degrees in computer and information sciences and related fields shot up 34 percent from 2017 to 2022, to about 573,000, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The English-major head count fell 23 percent in that time, to about 113,000. History fell 12 percent, to about 77,000... In 2010, arts and humanities majors of all kinds outnumbered the computer science total at the University of Maryland more than 4 to 1. Now the university counts about 2,400 students majoring in arts and humanities — a collection of disciplines that fill an entire college — and about 3,300 in computer science...

As with many schools, the University of Maryland is searching for a new academic equilibrium to simultaneously handle rising demand for tech credentials and preserve what appear to be vulnerable pillars of the humanist tradition. New majors, such as "immersive media design," are arising to bridge technology and humanities as departments in older fields push to stay competitive. The ferment has fed debate about the purpose of college, the value of degrees and how much career prospects — rather than passion for learning — shape the academic paths that students take. Some schools have taken radical steps. Marymount University, a Catholic institution in Northern Virginia, decided in February to phase out history and English majors, citing low enrollment and a responsibility to prepare students "for the fulfilling, in-demand careers of the future." St. Mary's University of Minnesota made a similar announcement last year. There is no sign that more prominent colleges and universities will follow suit...

Computer science, a base for exploring artificial intelligence and other topics, is not the only hot subject these days. Data science has taken off over the past decade. So has nursing. Business, management and marketing have enduring appeal. In a time of economic upheaval, avoiding debt and landing a good job are top goals for many students. Value matters. "Public confidence in college paying off is being questioned at a higher rate than ever before," Michael Itzkowitz, former director of the federal College Scorecard, wrote in an email. "Some of this has to do with rising tuition costs. Some of this was influenced by the pandemic, where many students were questioning the cost they were paying to learn from their home computer, rather than being on a physical college campus."

"China delivered the latest salvo in an escalating semiconductor war with the U.S.," reports Bloomberg, "announcing that Micron Technology Inc. products have failed to pass a cybersecurity review in the country." In a statement Sunday, Beijing warned operators of key infrastructure against buying the company's goods, saying it found "relatively serious" cybersecurity risks in Micron products sold in the country. The components caused "significant security risks to our critical information infrastructure supply chain," which would affect national security, according to the statement from the Cyberspace Administration of China, or CAC...

Chinese officials privately say that the probe of Micron is part of a broader trend toward the dominance of "pro-retaliation" voices in Beijing, where national security concerns increasingly trump economic arguments. "No one should understand this decision by CAC as anything but retaliation for the US's export controls on semiconductors," said Holden Triplett, founder of Trenchcoat Advisors and a former FBI counterintelligence official in Beijing. "No foreign business operating in China should be deceived by this subterfuge. These are political actions pure and simple, and any business could be the next one to be made an example of." The move brings fresh uncertainty to the other US chipmakers that sell to China, the world's biggest market for semiconductors.
The article notes pointedly that memory chips "aren't usually considered a cybersecurity risk because they don't require any specific software or run code. They're mostly basic grids of transistors used for storing data and, as such, haven't typically been a vector of attack for hackers." The Associated Press describes China's move as "stepping up a feud with Washington over technology and security," adding that Chinese officials "appear to be struggling to find ways to retaliate without hurting China's smartphone producers and other industries and efforts to develop its own processor chip suppliers," which import more than $300 billion in foreign chips every year. An official review of Micron under China's increasingly stringent information security laws was announced April 4, hours after Japan joined Washington in imposing restrictions on Chinese access to technology to make processor chips on security grounds. Foreign companies have been rattled by police raids on two consulting firms, Bain & Co. and Capvision, and a due diligence firm, Mintz Group. Chinese authorities have declined to explain the raids but said foreign companies are obliged to obey the law.

India's government gave nearly early household a bank account offering app-based digital money transfers, reports the Economist. But that's just the beginning: Take a walk on Mumbai's Juhu beach and little has changed in five years — except for the QR codes adorning every food stall. Go to São Paulo in Brazil, Beijing in China, or many other cities across the emerging world and you find something similar. "Most people only want to use UPI," says Govind, a seaside-snack vendor at Juhu, referring to India's fast-growing payments network. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a platform that allows free and fast account-to-account transfers using fintech apps such as PhonePe or Google Pay. Unlike Alipay in China, it is open, so users are not locked into a single company and can take their financial history to competitors, notes Praveena Rai, the chief operating officer of the National Payments Corporation of India (NpCI), which manages the platform. And it is facilitated by QR codes or easy-to-remember virtual IDs.

UPI is drawing attention from across the world. "Look at what India has accomplished with the UPI, Aadhaar and the payments stack," Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, has marvelled. Overall, it processed over $1trn in transactions in 2022, equivalent to a third of India's GDP. It was bolstered by the government's surprise "demonetisation" of 2016, when multiple high-denomination banknotes were discontinued. UPI also benefited when covid left consumers scared of cash. It has grown from around 17% of 31bn digital transactions in 2019 to 52% of 88.4bn transactions by 2022. "India leads the world in real-time digital payments by clocking almost 40% of all such transactions," Narendra Modi, the prime minister, has boasted.

The Indian model is inspiring others. Brazil's Pix, which facilitates bank-to-bank payments with a small fee, was launched in November 2020. It now accounts for some 30% of Brazil's electronic payments (credit and debit cards take up around 20% each). Such open instant-payment systems are an alternative both to the bank/card model in the rich world and to the closed fintech one in China... The hope is that UPI and similar systems might now let some poorer countries leapfrog the West... Mr Nilekani hopes UPI will eventually be used everywhere. "If I go to Lulu in Dubai or Harrods in London, I should be able to make a payment with UPI." That would surely create new competition for the bank/card behemoths in the West.

Last week the Telegraph reported that a recent firmware update to HP printers "prevents customers from using any cartridges other than those fitted with an HP chip, which are often more expensive. If the customer tries to use a non-HP ink cartridge, the printer will refuse to print."

Some HP "Officejet" printers can disable this "dynamic security" through a firmware update, PC World reported earlier this week. But HP still defends the feature, arguing it's "to protect HP's innovations and intellectual property, maintain the integrity of our printing systems, ensure the best customer printing experience, and protect customers from counterfeit and third-party ink cartridges that do not contain an original HP security chip and infringe HP's intellectual property."

Meanwhile, Engadget now reports that "a software update Hewlett-Packard released earlier this month for its OfficeJet printers is causing some of those devices to become unusable." After downloading the faulty software, the built-in touchscreen on an affected printer will display a blue screen with the error code 83C0000B. Unfortunately, there appears to be no way for someone to fix a printer broken in this way on their own, partly because factory resetting an HP OfficeJet requires interacting with the printer's touchscreen display. For the moment, HP customers report the only solution to the problem is to send a broken printer back to the company for service.
BleepingComputer says the firmware update "has been bricking HP Office Jet printers worldwide since it was released earlier this month..." "Our teams are working diligently to address the blue screen error affecting a limited number of HP OfficeJet Pro 9020e printers," HP told BleepingComputer... Since the issues surfaced, multiple threads have been started by people from the U.S., the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, Poland, New Zealand, and France who had their printers bricked, some with more than a dozen pages of reports.

"HP has no solution at this time. Hidden service menu is not showing, and the printer is not booting anymore. Only a blue screen," one customer said.

"I talked to HP Customer Service and they told me they don't have a solution to fix this firmware issue, at the moment," another added.

Long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid shared this story from the Telegraph: Millions of people get phone calls from scammers and wonder who is at the other end. Now we know: rather than someone in a call centre far away, a "bright young man" living in a lush flat in London has been unmasked as the mastermind behind so many of these calls.

Tejay Fletcher's trial exposed how criminals with a simple website bypassed police, phone operators and banks to facilitate "fraud on an industrial scale", scamming victims out of £100m ($124 million) of their hard earned cash. Fletcher, 35, who ran the website iSpoof.cc, was jailed for 13 years and four months earlier this week following his arrest in 2019 in what is the biggest anti-fraud operation mounted in the UK.

The website allowed criminals to disguise their phone numbers in a process known as "spoofing" and trick unsuspecting people to believe they were being called by their bank or other institutions... The number of people using iSpoof swelled to 69,000 at its peak, with as many as 20 people per minute targeted by callers using the site. More than 10 million fraudulent calls were made using iSpoof in the year to August 2022 — 3.5 million of them in the UK, the prosecution said. More than 200,000 victims in the UK — many of them elderly — lost £43m, while global losses exceeded £100m... The website allowed [its users] to intercept one-time passwords, which were "ironically" introduced by banks to increase their security measures, noted John Ojakovoh, prosecuting...

Fletcher was not particularly tech-savvy, but he used a website called freelancer.com to hire programmers to make the "building blocks" of the site.
iSpooft's users "could only pay via Bitcoin," the Telegraph writes. They describe Bitcoin as "a currency favoured by many criminals because it is more difficult to trace payments."

Here's what happened next: Posing as iSpoof customers, police paid for a trial subscription in Bitcoin and tested the website. They traced the money they paid to iSpoof and eventually discovered that the "lion's share" of the profits were going to Fletcher. They obtained a copy of the website's server, which revealed call logs that further incriminated Fletcher and the scammers using his website.

It turned out that Fletcher had deceived the scammers, too, when he claimed he was not storing any of their information, prosecutors said... Although Fletcher will remain behind bars, others are also being investigated. Some 120 suspected phone scammers have been arrested, 103 of them in London.

Wired reports on "hundreds of freelancers employed all over the world to animate fake profiles and chat with people who have signed up for dating and hookup sites." They describe one worker at Cyprus-based vDesk as "expected to lure people into paying, message by message, for conversations with fictional characters." WIRED spoke to dozens of people working in the industry, people who had worked for months at a time at two of the companies involved in the creation of virtual profiles... Often recruited into "customer support" or content moderation roles, they found themselves playing roles in sophisticated operations set up to tease subscription money from lonely hearts looking for connections online... Freelancers working in the industry say they make a fraction of the money users are paying. Workers earn around 7 cents per message, or 2 euro an hour.
WIRED shares stories from a "freelance customer support representative" in Ireland and a "freelance remote translator" in Mexico who both ended up doing the same kind of work. (And ironically, both reported they ended up talking to people they knew in real-life...) For the worker in Mexico, "his chat history had all of his personal details: his name, city, job, past marriages. His kids' names and ages. For nearly two years, he had been talking to a virtual. He says he's in love with her."

The portals "usually include lengthy terms and conditions," the article points out, with most saying something like "we may use system profiles at our discretion to communicate with users to enhance our users' entertainment experience..." Once she got over the realization — on her first day working for the company — that translating really meant "flirting through fake profiles," she couldn't help but be impressed by how detailed the virtuals are. "The fakes don't seem like obviously unattainable women, they are eerily convincing and hyper-specific," she says... The sites collect detailed information about users, building profiles that help the freelancers maintain the fiction. These contain their living arrangements, details about their family and marital status ("single after two failed marriages," one read), and other personal details. "It will add their kids' names and ages, when they tell us them," Alice says, "if they have been to therapy recently, what they have been feeling — anything which can be used by the virtual to keep a sense of real connection..."

If the user asks to move off to a free messaging app, the freelancers must write through the virtuals "I prefer to stay in here until I know you better" or "I feel safer on this app until we are better acquainted," and so on...

One morning, Alice opened her chat to a new message:

"Please stop talking to my husband, he is spending money we do not have to talk to you," read the chat line.
The workers don't even know the source of their profile pictures, Wired points out. "A reverse-image search on some of the images seen by WIRED show that at least some are grabbed from pornography sites."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: When the French government formed a new anti-piracy agency called Hadopi, the mission was to significantly disrupt BitTorrent and similar peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. Hadopi was a pioneer of the so-called "graduated response" scheme which consists of monitoring a file-sharer's internet activities and following up with a warning notice to deter their behavior. Any future incidents attract escalating responses including fines and internet disconnections. Between 2010 and 2020, Hadopi issued 12.7 million warning notices at a cost to French taxpayers of 82 million euros. The program's effect on overall piracy rates remains up for debate but according to French internet rights groups, Hadopi doesn't just take citizens' money. When it monitors citizens' internet activities, retains huge amounts of data, and then links identities to IP addresses to prevent behavior that isn't a "serious crime," Hadopi violates fundamental rights.

Despite its authorization under the new law, the official launch of the Hadopi agency in 2009 met with significant opposition. File-sharers had issues with the program for obvious reasons but for digital rights group La Quadrature du Net, massive internet surveillance to protect copying rights had arrived at the expense of citizens' fundamental right to privacy. La Quadrature's opposition to the Hadopi anti-piracy program focuses on the law crafted to support it. One of the implementing decrees authorizes the creation of files containing internet users' IP addresses plus personal identification data obtained from their internet service providers. According to the digital rights group's interpretation of EU law, that is unlawful.

With support from the Federation of Associative Internet Service Providers, French Data Network, and Franciliens.net, in 2019 La Quadrature filed an appeal before the Council of State (Conseil d'Etat), requesting a repeal of the decree that authorizes the processing of personal information. The Council of State referred the matter to the Constitutional Council and its subsequent decision gave La Quadrature the impression that Hadopi's position was untenable. For their part, Hadopi and the government reached the opposite conclusion. The Council of State heard La Quadrature's appeal and then referred questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for interpretation under EU law. In CJEU Advocate General Szpunar's non-binding opinion issued last October, friction between privacy rights and the ability to enforce copyrights were on full display. [...] Faced with an opinion that recognizes difficulties faced by rightsholders but runs up against case-law, AG Szpunar proposed "readjustment of the case-law of the Court." This would ensure that rightsholders retain the ability to enforce their rights, when an IP address is the only means by which an infringer can be identified (CJEU, pdf). The first court hearing occurred on Tuesday, and a further legal opinion is expected in late September 2023. The ruling from the CJEU is expected before the end of the year.

From Street Fighter 6 to Mortal Kombat 1, 2023 offers a robust slate of big, brawling attractions. From a report: The pandemic stole one of gaming's purest experiences: karate chopping your buddy in the stomach and laughing as their health meter falls to zero. The culture around fighting games -- side by side on a couch or in a whirring arcade -- doesn't translate so well to Zoom. It didn't help that a lot of the online play technology for these games has for years fallen short of expectations. Few mainstream fighting games were released over the last three years. But in 2023, fighting games are returning with a vengeance. The list includes Capcom's Street Fighter 6, Warner Bros Games' just-announced Mortal Kombat 1 and Cygames' Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising. Fans are also hoping to get Project L from Tencent's Riot Games and Tekken 8 from Bandai Namco Studios sometime in the not too distant future. "Rather than trash talking online, it's a lot better to do in person," Street Fighter 6 producer Shuhei Matsumoto told me in an interview this week. We were talking about what his highly-anticipated game, launching June 2, and the broader fighting genre has learned from the pandemic disruptions.

The new Street Fighter aims to bring what people love about in-person gaming into the online arena. 2016's Street Fighter 5 famously didn't have the best online experience. "For 5, the team acknowledged there were some issues with the existing net code," Matsumoto said. "As a team, we all agreed that something had to be done for Street Fighter 6." Capcom put together a specialized team to improve the online experience for Street Fighter 6. The team also aimed to upload facets of the culture of Street Fighter. In previous Street Fighter games, the main thing online contenders had to size up their opponent was their gamer tag. Street Fighter 6 has a Battle Hub, which game director Takayuki Nakayama said "is like an extension of arcade culture." Players can now dress up their avatars and show off their outfits while congregating with friends -- a process that Nakayama said can "humanize" online competitors. The culture of fighting games has changed a lot since 2020. Arcades in Japan, where Capcom traditionally debuted its latest titles, shuttered at a rapid fire rate -- a trend that began pre-Covid but accelerated during the lockdowns. Meanwhile, money has bled out of the esports industry, which funded local, national and international tournaments. 2023 promises to reinvigorate fighting games. Capcom's Pro Tour has a $2 million prize pool. "I would say it's fully bounced back and then some," said Alec Polsley, who owns my local LAN cafe. On weekends, the place is teeming with competitors leaning over sweaty controllers.

Companies in Apple's third-party repair program say delays in the process and high pricing for parts make it almost impossible to compete with the juggernaut. From a report: In 2021 Apple, under pressure from a Productivity Commission review on the "right to repair," launched its independent repair provider program in Australia. It was trumpeted as a way for small companies to compete with Apple to repair their products -- such as the iPhone -- using Apple tools and spare parts. At the time, repairers said they felt the move was a token gesture designed to head off any potential right-to-repair legislation that would have been recommended by the Productivity Commission review. Two years later, some say their fears have been realised. A number of repairers Guardian Australia has spoken to in Australia and the US suggest Apple's slow response times and the high cost for replacement parts makes it almost impossible for them to be viable competitors. The repairers requested anonymity to speak about the program, fearing that reprisals from the California-based tech giant might prevent them from remaining in the program.

Apple has indicated it takes an average of eight weeks for repairers to be admitted to the program, but repairers Guardian Australia has spoken to said the wait time can be up to six months -- and that it feels like the applications sit in a black hole, without any point of contact within Apple to provide an update on their status. Once repairers are admitted to the program, they receive training from Apple, as well as access to Apple parts, tools, repair manuals and diagnostic software for the company's iPhones and Macs. But they say the price of the parts, as well as the process to get a discounted rate for replacement parts, make it difficult for repairers to compete with Apple's own repair program. One repairer, who says his business repairs between 30 and 40 Apple products every week, said the average repair takes between an hour to an hour and a half. If it charge the rate Apple charges customers for repairs, then its maximum margin is about $60.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Five TikTok content creators have filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn Montana's first-in-the-nation ban on the video sharing app, arguing the law is an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights. The Montana residents also argued in the complaint, filed in federal court late Wednesday without public notice, that the state doesn't have any authority over matters of national security. Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the bill into law Wednesday and said it would protect Montana residents' private data and personal information from being harvested by the Chinese government. The ban is scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, 2024.

"The law takes the broadest possible approach to its objectives, restricting and banning the protected speech of all TikTok users in Montana to prevent the speculative and unsubstantiated possibility that the Chinese government might direct TikTok Inc., or its parent, to spy on some Montana users," the complaint states. "We expected a legal challenge and are fully prepared to defend the law," said Emily Flower, spokeswoman for the Montana Department of Justice. TikTok has argued the law infringes on people's First Amendment rights. However, spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter declined to comment on the lawsuit Thursday. She also declined to say whether the company helped coordinate the complaint.

The plaintiffs are Montana residents who use the video-sharing app for things like promoting a business, connecting with military veterans, sharing outdoor adventures or expressing their sense of humor. Two of them have more than 200,000 followers. One content creator, Carly Ann Goddard, shares videos about living on a ranch, parenting, recipes and home decor. Her account has 97,000 followers and has allowed her to roughly triple her family's household income, the complaint states. TikTok creators can make money in several ways, including by being paid to advertise products to their followers. The lawsuit -- filed just hours after Gianforte signed the measure into law -- states the ban would "immediately and permanently deprive Plaintiffs of their ability to express themselves and communicate with others." "Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes," the plaintiffs' attorneys wrote.

A former CFO of a Seattle startup is accused of diverting $35 million and losing it when the crypto market crashed last year (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), according to a report. The CFO allegedly used the funds for personal expenses and investments without authorization. The Seattle Times reports: Nevin Shetty, 39, was hired in March 2021 as CFO of a company called fabric, which makes software platforms for retail commerce. About a year later, after the company informed him it was letting him go over job performance concerns, he secretly took the money and transferred it to HighTower Treasury, a crypto platform he controlled as a side business, the indictment said. His idea was to pay the company 6% interest while retaining profits above that, but soon the $35 million investment was practically worthless, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle said in a news release.

The indictment in U.S. District Court charged Shetty with four counts of wire fraud. He is scheduled to be arraigned May 25. Shetty's attorney, Cooper Offenbecher, said in an emailed statement that he and his client had been in regular contact with prosecutors and disagreed with the decision to bring an indictment. "As the CFO of his former employer, tasked with making investment decisions for its benefit, Mr. Shetty was personally devastated by these losses, which occurred as a result of a catastrophic crash in the cryptocurrency market in May 2022," Offenbecher wrote. "We look forward to responding to these allegations in Court."

Prosecutors, however, said that as the company raised hundreds of millions of dollars in startup funding, it adopted a conservative approach to managing that money -- a policy that Shetty had helped draft. According to the Seattle tech news website GeekWire, fabric had raised more than $293 million by February 2022 and was valued at $1.5 billion. In an emailed statement, the company said it had been cooperating with law enforcement and appreciated the work of the FBI and federal prosecutors. "While the amount taken is substantial, fabric remains very well-funded with years of runway," the statement said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's new inactive account policy already has people up in arms. The company announced on Tuesday that accounts that have gone unused for two years will be deleted, and a lot of people are asking what exactly this means for YouTube content. There are probably millions of videos out there from dead and inactive YouTube creators -- would Google's new data policy mean deleting nearly two decades of online history?

A day later, Google now says there will be no digital burning of Alexandria. YouTube's creator liaison, Rene Ritchie, clarified on Twitter that Google has "no plans to delete accounts with YT videos." 9to5Google heard the same statement from a Google spokesperson.

That is great news, but that's also very vague and runs contrary to what all of Google's current documentation says, including the blog post. Can people keep a Google account alive forever with a single video? [...] It seems like the company is still figuring this out. "It doesn't make sense to delete old YouTube content," adds Ars' Ron Amadeo. "While inactive data for things like Gmail and Google Photos are nothing but a money pit, YouTube content is available to the public, and Google runs ads on those videos, so those videos make money. If there's no creator to share revenue with, that's even better! Culling old videos would not just damage YouTube as a platform, it would also hurt Google's bottom line."

An anonymous reader shares a report: This week, we looked at a new hardware startup called Telly that's giving away half a million of its new smart televisions for free. The catch is that the 55-inch smart television is fitted with a second display that sits underneath and displays ads while you watch your favorite shows. The trade-off for a free television is agreeing to let this brand-new startup collect vast amounts of data about you because the money ads make from you cover the costs of the television itself. According to its privacy policy, the startup collects data about what you view, where you're located, what you watch, as well as what could be inferred about you from that information.

But annotations left in its privacy policy that were published in error raise concerns about its data practices. We've pasted below the portion of Telly's privacy policy verbatim, typos included, as it was published at the time -- and have highlighted the questionable passage in bold for emphasis: "As noted in the Terms of Use, we do not knowingly collect or solicitPersonal Data about children under 13 years of age; ifyou are a child under the age of 13, please do not attempt to register for orotherwise use the Services or send us any Personal Data. Use of the Servicesmay capture the physical presence of a child under the age of 13, but noPersonal Data about the child is collected. If we learn we have collectedPersonal Data from a child under 13 years of age, we will delete thatinformation as quickly as possible. (I don't know that this is accurate. Do wehave to say we will delete the information or is there another way aroundthis)? If you believe that a child under 13 years of age may have providedPersonal Data to us, please contact us at..." A short time after contacting Telly for comment, the company removed the section from its privacy policy.

European Union states on Tuesday gave the final nod to the world's first comprehensive set of rules to regulate cryptoassets on Tuesday, piling pressure on countries such as Britain and the United States to play catch up. From a report: An EU finance minister meeting in Brussels approved rules that were thrashed out with the European Parliament, which gave its approval in April. The rules are expected to be rolled out from 2024. Regulating crypto has become more urgent for regulators after the collapse of crypto exchange FTX. "Recent events have confirmed the urgent need for imposing rules which will better protect Europeans who have invested in these assets, and prevent the misuse of crypto industry for the purposes of money laundering and financing of terrorism," said Elisabeth Svantesson, finance minister for Sweden, which holds the EU presidency.

The rules require firms that want to issue, trade and safeguard cryptoassets, tokenised assets and stablecoins in the 27 country bloc to obtain a licence. Ministers took steps to combat tax evasion and the use of cryptoasset transfers for money laundering by making transactions easier to trace. They agreed on a requirement that from January 2026 service providers obtain the name of senders and beneficiaries in cryptoassets, regardless of the amount being transferred.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: One of the UK's leading gambling brands allegedly paid blogs advising new mothers to recommend its online casino games and link to its website, in a tactic that has been condemned as "predatory" by leading mental health and addiction experts. Coral struck deals with parenting bloggers to embed links in posts offering tips, including on how to relieve the stress of caring for a new baby. One post, ostensibly about baby food recipes, said: "If as a mum you can't leave the house, then why not consider bingo online? "You can click here to play Bingo online at Coral -- this momentary break from childcare can prove beneficial."

The Advertising Standards Authority's (ASA) guidelines state that gambling adverts must not be "socially irresponsible," including presenting betting as a way to relieve loneliness or depression. Another parenting blog recommended "opulent games of online roulette that are easy to learn and can provide some handy winnings too." The ASA guidelines also state that gambling must not be presented as a "solution to financial concerns." A further three parenting blogs posted parenting articles that also contained segments recommending online casino or bingo and linking to the Coral website. A source familiar with the arrangements said Coral had paid the bloggers to include the links.

Entain, which owns Coral, said the articles including links to the Coral website had been posted between 2014 and 2016, before it bought Ladbrokes Coral in 2018. On Tuesday, the company said it would try to get them taken down as soon as possible, although they remained live on Sunday. The source, who used to work for a company that arranged such deals with bloggers, said Coral staff had read the articles and signed them off before publication. [...] Only one of the blog posts disclosed that links contained in the article were the result of a sponsorship or affiliate marketing arrangement. The Guardian has chosen not to name the blogs because the authors could not be reached for comment. The source said the practice was chiefly aimed at manipulating Google's search results by creating an association between women and online casino and bingo games.

The top US cryptocurrency enforcement tsar is promising a crackdown on illicit behaviour on digital platforms, saying the scale of crypto crime has grown "significantly" in the past four years. From a report: The Department of Justice is targeting crypto exchanges along with the "mixers and tumblers" that obscure the trail of transactions, Eun Young Choi, who was appointed director of the agency's national cryptocurrency enforcement team last year, told the Financial Times in an interview. The DoJ is targeting companies that commit crimes themselves or allow them to happen, such as enabling money laundering, she said. "But on top of that, they're allowing for all the other criminal actors to easily profit from their crimes and cash out in ways that are obviously problematic to us," she added. "And so we hope that by focusing on those types of platforms, we're going to have a multiplier effect."

Choi said the focus on platforms would "send a deterrent message" to businesses that are skirting anti-money laundering or client identification rules, and who were not investing in solid compliance and risk mitigation procedures. Choi heads a new unit focused on criminal misuse of digital assets as the US under the administration of President Joe Biden has emerged as one of the jurisdictions with the toughest stance on crypto worldwide. "We're seeing the scale and the scope of digital assets being used in a variety of illicit ways grow significantly over the last, say, four years," she said. "I think that is concurrent with the increase of its adoption by the public writ large."

Ilya Pozin made a bunch of money when Viacom bought Pluto TV, the free video-streaming company he co-founded, for $340 million four years ago. Since exiting Pluto about a year after that deal closed, Pozin has been working on another startup venture -- one he thinks will be a much bigger deal. From a report: On Monday, Pozin's brainchild, Telly, comes out of stealth after two years in development. Telly wants to ship out thousands (and eventually millions) of free 4K HDTVs, which would cost more than $1,000 at retail, according Pozin. The 55-inch main screen is a regular TV panel, with three HDMI inputs and an over-the-air tuner, plus an integrated soundbar. The Telly TVs don't actually run any streaming apps that let you access services like Netflix, Prime Video or Disney+; instead, they're bundled with a free Chromecast with Google TV adapter.

What's new and different: The unit has a 9-inch-high second screen, affixed to the bottom of the set, which is real estate Telly will use for displaying news, sports scores, weather or stocks, or even letting users play video games. And, critically, Telly's second screen features a dedicated space on the right-hand side that will display advertising -- ads you can't skip past and ads that stay on the screen the whole time you're watching TV... and even when you're not.

More than a decade ago engineers at AMD "began toying with a radical idea," remembers the New York Times. Instead of designing one big microprocessor, they "conceived of creating one from smaller chips that would be packaged tightly together to work like one electronic brain."

But with "diminishing returns" from Moore's Law, packaging smaller chips suddenly becomes more important. [Alternate URL here.] As much as 80% of microprocessors will be using these designs by 2027, according to an estimate from the market research firm Yole Group cited by the Times: The concept, sometimes called chiplets, caught on in a big way, with AMD, Apple, Amazon, Tesla, IBM and Intel introducing such products. Chiplets rapidly gained traction because smaller chips are cheaper to make, while bundles of them can top the performance of any single slice of silicon. The strategy, based on advanced packaging technology, has since become an essential tool to enabling progress in semiconductors. And it represents one of the biggest shifts in years for an industry that drives innovations in fields like artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and military hardware. "Packaging is where the action is going to be," said Subramanian Iyer, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped pioneer the chiplet concept. "It's happening because there is actually no other way."

The catch is that such packaging, like making chips themselves, is overwhelmingly dominated by companies in Asia. Although the United States accounts for around 12 percent of global semiconductor production, American companies provide just 3 percent of chip packaging, according to IPC, a trade association. That issue has now landed chiplets in the middle of U.S. industrial policymaking. The CHIPS Act, a $52 billion subsidy package that passed last summer, was seen as President Biden's move to reinvigorate domestic chip making by providing money to build more sophisticated factories called "fabs." But part of it was also aimed at stoking advanced packaging factories in the United States to capture more of that essential process... The Commerce Department is now accepting applications for manufacturing grants from the CHIPS Act, including for chip packaging factories. It is also allocating funding to a research program specifically on advanced packaging...

Some chip packaging companies are moving quickly for the funding. One is Integra Technologies in Wichita, Kan., which announced plans for a $1.8 billion expansion there but said that was contingent on receiving federal subsidies. Amkor Technology, an Arizona packaging service that has most of its operations in Asia, also said it was talking to customers and government officials about a U.S. production presence... Packaging services still need others to supply the substrates that chiplets require to connect to circuit boards and one another... But the United States has no major makers of those substrates, which are primarily produced in Asia and evolved from technologies used in manufacturing circuit boards. Many U.S. companies have also left that business, another worry that industry groups hope will spur federal funding to help board suppliers start making substrates.

In March, Mr. Biden issued a determination that advanced packaging and domestic circuit board production were essential for national security, and announced $50 million in Defense Production Act funding for American and Canadian companies in those fields. Even with such subsidies, assembling all the elements required to reduce U.S. dependence on Asian companies "is a huge challenge," said Andreas Olofsson, who ran a Defense Department research effort in the field before founding a packaging start-up called Zero ASIC. "You don't have suppliers. You don't have a work force. You don't have equipment. You have to sort of start from scratch."