Albert Saniger, the founder and former CEO of Nate, an AI shopping app that promised a "universal" checkout experience, was charged with defrauding investors on Wednesday, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. From a report: Founded in 2018, Nate raised over $50 million from investors like Coatue and Forerunner Ventures, most recently raising a $38 million Series A in 2021 led by Renegade Partners. Nate said its app's users could buy from any e-commerce site with a single click, thanks to AI. In reality, however, Nate relied heavily on hundreds of human contractors in a call center in the Philippines to manually complete those purchases, the DOJ's Southern District of New York alleges.

Saniger raised millions in venture funding by claiming that Nate was able to transact online "without human intervention," except for edge cases where the AI failed to complete a transaction. But despite Nate acquiring some AI technology and hiring data scientists, its app's actual automation rate was effectively 0%, the DOJ claims.

Scientists "demonstrated a promising step toward using a person's own immune cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers" at America's National Institutes of Health (or NIH), reports the Washington Post.

But the results were published in Nature Medicine on Tuesday — "the same day the agency was hit with devastating layoffs..." The treatment approach is still early in its development; the personalized immunotherapy regimen shrank tumors in only about a quarter of the patients with colon, rectal and other GI cancers enrolled in a clinical trial. But a researcher who was not involved in the study called the results "remarkable" because they highlight a path to a frustratingly elusive goal in medicine — harnessing a person's own immune defenses to target common solid tumor cancers. Until now, cell-based immunotherapy has worked mainly on blood cancers, such as leukemia, but not the solid cancers that seed tumors in the breast, brain, lungs, pancreas and GI tract...

But the progress arrives at a sad time for science — and for patients, said the leader of the work, NIH immunotherapy pioneer Steven Rosenberg. Two patients' treatments using the experimental therapy had to be delayed because NIH's capacity to make personalized cell therapies has been slowed by the firing of highly skilled staff and by purchasing slowdowns. Those occurred even before major layoffs took place Tuesday... The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) responded to an email asking about clinical trial delays with a statement: "NIH and HHS are complying with President Trump's executive order."
It's "a very exciting study," said Patrick Hwu, president of the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. Finding ways to tailor this cell-based immunotherapy approach to common solid tumors that cause the vast majority of cancer deaths has remained a major scientific challenge... Rosenberg and colleagues first tried to create tumor infiltrating lymphocytes [or "TILs"] using the method that worked in melanoma for 18 patients with GI cancers that had spread. It failed completely. In a second iteration, his team sequenced the mutations present in each patient's tumor and used that information to sift out and expand the TILs that could home in on that patient's specific tumor cells. The results were far from a triumph, but provided a clue — this time, three of 39 patients' tumors shrank. In the last stage of the trial, the scientists added a drug called pembrolizumab that takes the brakes off immune cells. This time, eight of the 34 patients responded.

"Right now, only a few labs in the country can do what they just did," Hwu said.
While Rosenberg is already working "to refine and improve upon the results," he told the Post that two scientists involved in the specialized process of preparing the cells to treat patients were fired in the probationary purge. "We've had to slow down our work and delay the treatment of some patients...."

And there's also dramatically fewer people now who can purchase research materials, which the Post says it "making it slower and more difficult to obtain supplies."

"U.S. stock market futures plunged on Sunday evening," reports Yahoo Finance, "after the new U.S. tariff policy began collecting duties over the weekend..."

The EU will vote on $28 billion in retaliatory tariffs Wednesday, Reuters reports. (And those tariffs will be approved unless "a qualified majority of 15 EU members representing 65% of the EU's population oppose it. They would enter force in two stages, a smaller part on April 15 and the rest a month later.")

But France's Economy and Finance Minister has an idea: more strictly regulating how data is used by America's Big Tech companies. Politico EU reports/A>: "We may strengthen certain administrative requirements or regulate the use of data," Lombard said in an interview with Le Journal Du Dimanche. He added that another option could be to "tax certain activities," without being more specific.

A French government spokesperson already said last week that the EU's retaliation against U.S. tariffs could include "digital services that are currently not taxed." That suggestion was fiercely rejected by Ireland, which hosts the European headquarters of several U.S. Big Tech firms...

Technology is seen as a possible area for Europe to retaliate. The European Union has a €157 billion trade surplus in goods, which means it exports more than it imports, but it runs a deficit of €109 billion in services, including digital services. Big Tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta dominate many parts of the market in Europe.
Amid the market turmoil, what about cryptocurrencies, often seen as a "proxy" for the level of risk felt by investors? In the 10 weeks after October 6, the price of Bitcoin skyrocketed 67% to $106,490 by December 10th. But by January 30th it had started dropping again, and now sits at $77,831 — still up 22% for the last six months, but down nearly 27% over the last 10 weeks. Yet even after all that volatility, Bitcoin suddenly fell again more than 6% on Sunday, reports Reuters, "as markets plunged amid tariff tensions. Ether, the second largest cryptocurrency, fell more than 10% on Sunday."

It was already the best-selling videogame of all time, notes the Hollywood Reporter. And A Minecraft Movie just had the biggest opening ever for a video game movie adaptation. WIth a production budget of $150 million, it earned in $157 million in just its first weekend in the U.S., with a worldwide total of $301 million.

A Warner Bros. executive called the movie "lightning in a bottle," while the head of co-producer Legendary Pictures acknowledged the game is a global phenomon, according to the article. (About the movie's performance, the executive "said the opening is a both a reflection of the mandate to celebrate the world of Minecraft in a joyful way, and the singular experience that only theatrical can offer."

But an unfinished version leaked online before the movie was even released, reports Variety Screenshots and footage from the fantasy adventure were being shared widely on social media platforms this week, and were also available on file sharing sites. The images and scenes have uncompleted visual effects. Most of the footage was quickly taken down by the rights holders. Although pirated footage is a common problem for major film releases, it's rare to have a working print leak online in this way, raising questions about how such an early version of the movie was accessed, stolen and then shared.

U.K. postmasters were mistakenly sent to prison due to a bug in their "Horizon" accounting software — as first reported by Computer Weekly back in 2009. Nearly 16 years later, the same site reports that now the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission "is attempting to contact any former subpostmasters that could have been prosecuted for unexplained losses on the Post Office's pre-Horizon Capture software.

"There are former subpostmasters that, like Horizon users, could have been convicted of crimes based on data from these systems..." Since the Post Office Horizon scandal hit the mainstream in January 2024 — revealing to a wide audience the suffering experienced by subpostmasters who were blamed for errors in the Horizon accounting system — users of Post Office software that predated Horizon have come forward... to tell their stories, which echoed those of victims of the Horizon scandal. The Criminal Cases Review Commission for England and Wales is now reviewing 21 cases of potential wrongful conviction... where the Capture IT system could be a factor...

The SCCRC is now calling on people that might have been convicted based on Capture accounts to come forward. "The commission encourages anyone who believes that their criminal conviction, or that of a relative, might have been affected by the Capture system to make contact with it," it said. The statutory body is also investigating a third Post Office system, known as Ecco+, which was also error-prone...

A total of 64 former subpostmasters in Scotland have now had their convictions overturned through the legislation brought through Scottish Parliament. So far, 97 convicted subpostmasters have come forward, and 86 have been assessed, out of which the 64 have been overturned. However, 22 have been rejected and another 11 are still to be assessed. An independent group, fronted by a former Scottish subpostmaster, is also calling on users of any of the Post Office systems to come forward to tell their stories, and for support in seeking justice and redress.

Berkeley, California is "the latest city to try to block landlords from using algorithms when deciding rents," reports the Associated Press (noting that officials in many cities claim the practice is driving up the price of housing).

But then real estate software company RealPage filed a federal lawsuit against Berkeley on Wednesday: Texas-based RealPage said Berkeley's ordinance, which goes into effect this month, violates the company's free speech rights and is the result of an "intentional campaign of misinformation and often-repeated false claims" about its products.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued Realpage in August under former President Joe Biden, saying its algorithm combines confidential information from each real estate management company in ways that enable landlords to align prices and avoid competition that would otherwise push down rents. That amounts to cartel-like illegal price collusion, prosecutors said. RealPage's clients include huge landlords who collectively oversee millions of units across the U.S. In the lawsuit, the Department of Justice pointed to RealPage executives' own words about how their product maximizes prices for landlords. One executive said, "There is greater good in everybody succeeding versus essentially trying to compete against one another in a way that actually keeps the entire industry down."

San Francisco, Philadelphia and Minneapolis have since passed ordinances restricting landlords from using rental algorithms. The Department of Justice case remains ongoing, as do lawsuits against RealPage brought by tenants and the attorneys general of Arizona and Washington, D.C...

[On a conference call, RealPage attorney Stephen Weissman told reporters] RealPage officials were never given an opportunity to present their arguments to the Berkeley City Council before the ordinance was passed and said the company is considering legal action against other cities that have passed similar policies, including San Francisco.
RealPage blames high rents not on the software they make, but on a lack of housing supply...

Is OpenAI's ChatGPT violating copyrights? The New York Times sued OpenAI in December 2023. But Ars Technica summarizes OpenAI's response. The New York Times (or NYT) "should have known that ChatGPT was being trained on its articles... partly because of the newspaper's own reporting..."

OpenAI pointed to a single November 2020 article, where the NYT reported that OpenAI was analyzing a trillion words on the Internet.

But on Friday, U.S. district judge Sidney Stein disagreed, denying OpenAI's motion to dismiss the NYT's copyright claims partly based on one NYT journalist's reporting. In his opinion, Stein confirmed that it's OpenAI's burden to prove that the NYT knew that ChatGPT would potentially violate its copyrights two years prior to its release in November 2022... And OpenAI's other argument — that it was "common knowledge" that ChatGPT was trained on NYT articles in 2020 based on other reporting — also failed for similar reasons...

OpenAI may still be able to prove through discovery that the NYT knew that ChatGPT would have infringing outputs in 2020, Stein said. But at this early stage, dismissal is not appropriate, the judge concluded. The same logic follows in a related case from The Daily News, Stein ruled. Davida Brook, co-lead counsel for the NYT, suggested in a statement to Ars that the NYT counts Friday's ruling as a win. "We appreciate Judge Stein's careful consideration of these issues," Brook said. "As the opinion indicates, all of our copyright claims will continue against Microsoft and OpenAI for their widespread theft of millions of The Times's works, and we look forward to continuing to pursue them."

The New York Times is also arguing that OpenAI contributes to ChatGPT users' infringement of its articles, and OpenAI lost its bid to dismiss that claim, too. The NYT argued that by training AI models on NYT works and training ChatGPT to deliver certain outputs, without the NYT's consent, OpenAI should be liable for users who manipulate ChatGPT to regurgitate content in order to skirt the NYT's paywalls... At this stage, Stein said that the NYT has "plausibly" alleged contributory infringement, showing through more than 100 pages of examples of ChatGPT outputs and media reports showing that ChatGPT could regurgitate portions of paywalled news articles that OpenAI "possessed constructive, if not actual, knowledge of end-user infringement." Perhaps more troubling to OpenAI, the judge noted that "The Times even informed defendants 'that their tools infringed its copyrighted works,' supporting the inference that defendants possessed actual knowledge of infringement by end users."

For the second time, President Trump has extended the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok's U.S. operations by 75 days. The TikTok deal "requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed," said Trump in a post on his Truth Social platform. The extension will "keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days."

"We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs (Necessary for Fair and Balanced Trade between China and the U.S.A.!)," Trump added. CNBC reports: ByteDance has been in discussion with the U.S. government, the company told CNBC, adding that any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law. "An agreement has not been executed," a spokesperson for ByteDance said in a statement. "There are key matters to be resolved." Before Trump's decision, ByteDance faced an April 5 deadline to carry out a "qualified divestiture" of TikTok's U.S. business as required by a national security law signed by former President Joe Biden in April 2024.

ByteDance's original deadline to sell TikTok was on Jan. 19, but Trump signed an executive order when he took office the next day that gave the company 75 more days to make a deal. Although the law would penalize internet service providers and app store owners like Apple and Google for hosting and providing services to TikTok in the U.S., Trump's executive order instructed the attorney general to not enforce it. "This proves that Tariffs are the most powerful Economic tool, and very important to our National Security!," Trump said in the Truth Social post. "We do not want TikTok to 'go dark.' We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: It took only seconds for the judges on a New York appeals court to realize that the man addressing them from a video screen -- a person about to present an argument in a lawsuit -- not only had no law degree, but didn't exist at all. The latest bizarre chapter in the awkward arrival of artificial intelligence in the legal world unfolded March 26 under the stained-glass dome of New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division's First Judicial Department, where a panel of judges was set to hear from Jerome Dewald, a plaintiff in an employment dispute. "The appellant has submitted a video for his argument," said Justice Sallie Manzanet-Daniels. "Ok. We will hear that video now."

On the video screen appeared a smiling, youthful-looking man with a sculpted hairdo, button-down shirt and sweater. "May it please the court," the man began. "I come here today a humble pro se before a panel of five distinguished justices." "Ok, hold on," Manzanet-Daniels said. "Is that counsel for the case?" "I generated that. That's not a real person," Dewald answered. It was, in fact, an avatar generated by artificial intelligence. The judge was not pleased. "It would have been nice to know that when you made your application. You did not tell me that sir," Manzanet-Daniels said before yelling across the room for the video to be shut off. "I don't appreciate being misled," she said before letting Dewald continue with his argument.

Dewald later penned an apology to the court, saying he hadn't intended any harm. He didn't have a lawyer representing him in the lawsuit, so he had to present his legal arguments himself. And he felt the avatar would be able to deliver the presentation without his own usual mumbling, stumbling and tripping over words. In an interview with The Associated Press, Dewald said he applied to the court for permission to play a prerecorded video, then used a product created by a San Francisco tech company to create the avatar. Originally, he tried to generate a digital replica that looked like him, but he was unable to accomplish that before the hearing. "The court was really upset about it," Dewald conceded. "They chewed me up pretty good." [...] As for Dewald's case, it was still pending before the appeals court as of Thursday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Walled Culture has been following closely Italy's poorly designed Piracy Shield system. Back in December we reported how copyright companies used their access to the Piracy Shield system to order Italian Internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to all of Google Drive for the entire country, and how malicious actors could similarly use that unchecked power to shut down critical national infrastructure. Since then, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), an international, not-for-profit association representing computer, communications, and Internet industry firms, has added its voice to the chorus of disapproval. In a letter (PDF) to the European Commission, it warned about the dangers of the Piracy Shield system to the EU economy [...]. It also raised an important new issue: the fact that Italy brought in this extreme legislation without notifying the European Commission under the so-called "TRIS" procedure, which allows others to comment on possible problems [...].

As well as Italy's failure to notify the Commission about its new legislation in advance, the CCIA believes that: this anti-piracy mechanism is in breach of several other EU laws. That includes the Open Internet Regulation which prohibits ISPs to block or slow internet traffic unless required by a legal order. The block subsequent to the Piracy Shield also contradicts the Digital Services Act (DSA) in several aspects, notably Article 9 requiring certain elements to be included in the orders to act against illegal content. More broadly, the Piracy Shield is not aligned with the Charter of Fundamental Rights nor the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU -- as it hinders freedom of expression, freedom to provide internet services, the principle of proportionality, and the right to an effective remedy and a fair trial.

Far from taking these criticisms to heart, or acknowledging that Piracy Shield has failed to convert people to paying subscribers, the Italian government has decided to double down, and to make Piracy Shield even worse. Massimiliano Capitanio, Commissioner at AGCOM, the Italian Authority for Communications Guarantees, explained on LinkedIn how Piracy Shield was being extended in far-reaching ways (translation by Google Translate, original in Italian). [...] That is, Piracy Shield will apply to live content far beyond sports events, its original justification, and to streaming services. Even DNS and VPN providers will be required to block sites, a serious technical interference in the way the Internet operates, and a threat to people's privacy. Search engines, too, will be forced to de-index material. The only minor concession to ISPs is to unblock domain names and IP addresses that are no longer allegedly being used to disseminate unauthorized material. There are, of course, no concessions to ordinary Internet users affected by Piracy Shield blunders. In the future, Italy's Piracy Shield will add:
- 30-minute blackout orders not only for pirate sports events, but also for other live content;
- the extension of blackout orders to VPNs and public DNS providers;
- the obligation for search engines to de-index pirate sites;
- the procedures for unblocking domain names and IP addresses obscured by Piracy Shield that are no longer used to spread pirate content;
- the new procedure to combat piracy on the #linear and "on demand" television, for example to protect the #film and #serietv.

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: A coalition of Washington state business leaders -- which includes Microsoft President Brad Smith and Amazon Chief Legal Officer David Zapolsky -- released a letter Wednesday urging state lawmakers to reconsider recently proposed tax and budget measures. "I actually think it's an almost unprecedented outpouring of support from across the business community," said Microsoft's Smith in an interview. In their letter, which reads in part like it could have been penned by a GenAI Marie Antoinette, the WA business leaders question whether any more spending is warranted given how poorly Washington's 4th and 8th graders compare to children in the rest of the nation on test scores. The letter also laments the increase in WA's homeless population as it celebrates WA Governor Bob Ferguson's announcement that he would not sign a proposed wealth tax.

From the letter: "We have long partnered with you in many areas, including education funding. Despite more than doubling K-12 spending and increasing teacher salaries to some of the highest rates in the nation, 4th and 8th grade assessment scores in reading and math are among the worst in the country. Similarly, we have collaborated with you to address housing and homelessness. Despite historic investments in affordable housing and homelessness prevention since 2013, Washington's homeless population has grown by 71 percent, making it the third largest in the nation after California and New York, according to HUD. These outcomes beg the question of whether more investment is needed or whether we need different policies instead."

Back in 2010, Smith teamed with then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to fund an effort to defeat an initiative for a WA state income that was pushed for by Bill Gates Sr. In 2023, Bezos moved out of WA state before being subjected to a 7% tax on gains of more than $250,000 from the sale of stocks and bonds, a move that reportedly saved him $1.2 billion in WA taxes on his 2024 Amazon stock sales.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Europol has shut down one of the largest dark web pedophile networks in the world, prompting dozens of arrests worldwide and threatening that more are to follow. Launched in 2021, KidFlix allowed users to join for free to preview low-quality videos depicting child sex abuse materials (CSAM). To see higher-resolution videos, users had to earn credits by sending cryptocurrency payments, uploading CSAM, or "verifying video titles and descriptions and assigning categories to videos."

Europol seized the servers and found a total of 91,000 unique videos depicting child abuse, "many of which were previously unknown to law enforcement," the agency said in a press release. KidFlix going dark was the result of the biggest child sexual exploitation operation in Europol's history, the agency said. Operation Stream, as it was dubbed, was supported by law enforcement in more than 35 countries, including the United States. Nearly 1,400 suspected consumers of CSAM have been identified among 1.8 million global KidFlix users, and 79 have been arrested so far. According to Europol, 39 child victims were protected as a result of the sting, and more than 3,000 devices were seized.

Police identified suspects through payment data after seizing the server. Despite cryptocurrencies offering a veneer of anonymity, cops were apparently able to use sophisticated methods to trace transactions to bank details. And in some cases cops defeated user attempts to hide their identities -- such as a man who made payments using his mother's name in Spain, a local news outlet, Todo Alicante, reported. It likely helped that most suspects were already known offenders, Europol noted. Arrests spanned the globe, including 16 in Spain, where one computer scientist was found with an "abundant" amount of CSAM and payment receipts, Todo Alicante reported. Police also arrested a "serial" child abuser in the US, CBS News reported.

Online scam operations across Southeast Asia are rapidly adapting to recent crackdowns, adopting AI and expanding globally despite the release of 7,000 trafficking victims from compounds along the Myanmar-Thailand border, experts say. These releases represent just a fraction of an estimated 100,000 people trapped in facilities run by criminal syndicates that rake in billions through investment schemes and romance scams targeting victims worldwide, CNN reports.

"Billions of dollars are being invested in these kinds of businesses," said Kannavee Suebsang, a Thai lawmaker leading efforts to free those held in scam centers. "They will not stop." Crime groups are exploiting AI to write scamming scripts and using deepfakes to create personas, while networks have expanded to Africa, South Asia, and the Pacific region, according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. "This is a situation the region has never faced before," said John Wojcik, a UN organized crime analyst. "The evolving situation is trending towards something far more dangerous than scams alone."

Newcomer: Keith O'Brien, the man who allegedly spied for Deel while working at Rippling, is apparently clearing his conscience, according to a sworn Irish affidavit. O'Brien says in the affidavit that Deel paid him to spy on Rippling and that he coordinated directly with Deel's CEO, Alex Bouaziz.

For some background, Alex Bouaziz is Deel's CEO and Philippe Bouaziz is his father, Deel's CFO. Rippling, which competes directly with Deel, has sued Deel over the alleged spying. O'Brien says in the affidavit: I decided to cooperate after I got a text from a friend on March 25, 2025 saying, "the truth will set you free." I was also driving with a family member to meet my solicitors and she told me that if I had done something wrong that I should "just tell the truth." I was having bad thoughts at the time; it was a horrible time for me. I was getting sick concealing this lie. I realised that I was harming myself and my family to protect Deel. I was concerned, and I am still concerned, about how wealthy and powerful Alex and Philippe are, but I know that what I was doing was wrong. After I spoke with my solicitors at Fenecas Law, I started to feel a sense of relief. I want to do what I can to start making amends and righting these wrongs. Deel CEO allegedly agreed to pay O'Brien 5000 euros a month.

Substack has announced it will legally support foreign writers lawfully residing in the U.S. who face government targeting over their published work, partnering with the nonprofit FIRE to expand its existing Defender program. The Verge reports: In their announcement, Substack and FIRE mention the international Tufts University student who was arrested by federal agents last week. Her legal team links her arrest to an opinion piece she co-wrote for the school's newspaper last year, which criticized Tufts for failing to comply with requests to divest from companies with connections to Israel. "If true, this represents a chilling escalation in the government's effort to target critics of American foreign policy," Substack and FIRE write.

The initiative builds on Substack's Defender program, which already offers legal assistance for independent journalists and creators on the platform. The company says it has supported "dozens" of Substack writers facing claims of defamation and trademark infringement since it launched the program in the US in 2020. It has since brought Substack Defender to writers in Canada and the UK.