He turned in his gun and his badge, but kept his log-in credentials for Flock, reports the Washington Post. For five years. In the five years after leaving the force, [county sheriff's investigator Andrae] Wright searched the system more than 60 times without being stopped by anyone at the Georgia sheriff's office, according to a statement by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and Flock audit logs reviewed by The Post. He repeatedly searched the location of a vanity license plate bearing the middle name of his wife, according to the audit logs. The couple divorced this year, court records show, and at the time of some of his Flock searches, Wright was fighting for permanent custody of their teenage daughter. In July, after a tipster alerted local authorities, police arrested Wright and charged him with stalking his wife, claiming he misused Flock data "for the purpose of harassing and intimidating her," according to his warrant.
The article adds that since his arrest authorities "have investigated two more former police officers — another in Georgia and one in Michigan — for allegedly running Flock searches after their employment ended." Brian Bailey, a sheriff's office spokesman, said that the agency had not conducted regular audits of who had access to its Flock system during that time but that it plans to begin doing so. The case marked one of at least 11 times in which government officials have discovered unauthorized users have gained access to Flock databases and searched them without permission, sometimes to track the locations of romantic partners, a Washington Post investigation has found... In four of the cases, officers were able to keep using their log-ins to Flock after leaving the force or while serving a suspension, because their accounts were not shut off. In six of the cases, police shared log-ins or passwords with active law enforcement officers from other agencies, in what officials later deemed violations of state laws, department policies or Flock contracts.

In Indianapolis, a police recruit who was not authorized to access Flock was able to use the tool for more than two years after a more senior officer opened it on the more junior officer's laptop and didn't log out. The junior officer, Matthew Binford, used his colleague's credentials to search his estranged wife's license plate more than 1,000 times over a 12-month period, according to a court affidavit. Prosecutors criminally charged Binford and four other Indianapolis officers last month, after an August inquiry from The Post prompted an agencywide audit by the city's police department.
And "Passwords for at least 35 Flock customer accounts have been stolen," two U.S. congressman announced last November.

The Washington Post adds that last month in Georgia, the Cobb County Sheriff's Office discovered around 200 of its 900 staff members had Flock access, including people who worked at the county jail. While they've since reduced that number to just 50 authorized users, "around the country, police have informally shared their passwords with nonemployees and sometimes even set up formal accounts to allow officers from other agencies access to their Flock dashboard, according to interviews and officials' statements."

The article adds that Flock's leaders "have resisted calls from their own staff to implement stricter guardrails, according to three former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional repercussions. Flock managers told staff repeatedly that they didn't want to create barriers to securing camera contracts with law enforcement agencies that were resistant to more restrictive security controls, two of the employees said."

Greece has passed a law banning children under 15 from social media platforms beginning January 1, 2027. The legislation requires platforms to implement reliable age verification and parents to use government-backed apps to restrict access, with penalties for noncompliance under the EU's Digital Services Act. Engadget reports: "It would have been very easy to do absolutely nothing today and wait for the perfect European law. But the challenge is here. Children are sinking into the internet every day, and I believe a responsible government must do what it is obliged to do," said Greece's digital governance and AI minister, Dimitris Papastergiou.

The legislation was opposed by Greece's minority parties, so Mitsotakis used his majority government to pass the bill. The nation previously barred mobile phones in schools in 2024, and opinion polls show that the new social media ban for children is widely supported by Greece's adult population. Mitsotakis previously said that his government's "goal is to push the European Union in this direction as well."

For the first time, the UN has declared that exceeding the Paris Agreement's 1.5C warming limit is "imminent and unavoidable." "We are now saying this window has closed, but we can open it again by making the overshoot as brief as possible," UN Environment Program Executive Director Inger Andersen said on a call with reporters. "This is about how to find a way back as shortly and as quickly as possible with as limited an overshoot as possible." CNN reports: Past reports have examined the distance between countries' emissions reduction commitments and what it would take to limit global warming to 1.5 C above preindustrial levels. However, this year's report redefines the gap. Instead, it examines new emissions overshoot scenarios, and what it would take to limit peak warming to just 1.7 to 1.8 degrees C before bringing temperatures back down to 1.5 C through emissions cuts and the use of carbon removal technologies.

The report makes clear that every additional fraction of a degree of warming above 1.5 C "raises the risk of irreversible changes including in ice sheets, permafrost carbon, ocean circulation, and coral systems, along with devastating human impacts." Each added fraction of a degree of warming can have an "immense" impact "as measured in terms of damage, cost and loss of lives," said climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania. Mann was not involved in producing the UNEP report.

According to the UNEP, which is based in Nairobi, the lowest overshoot scenario would keep peak warming to between 1.7 and 1.8 degrees C and return global average temperatures to at or below 1.5 C by 2100. However, to follow such a pathway, global greenhouse gas emissions would need to be slashed by far more than anything currently on the table at the upcoming COP31 talks. This would require an 18% cut by 2030, 45% by 2035, and 69% by 2040, relative to 2025 levels.

Meeting this lowest-possible overshoot scenario would require a tripling of renewable electricity capacity by 2035, and dramatic cuts to fossil fuels, including the phaseout of coal by 2040, the report states. In addition, there would need to be a major scaling up of carbon removal technologies, which so far have not been proven to work at such a large scale. In stark contrast to these figures, the fulfillment of existing emissions reduction pledges would only yield a 5-to-8% emissions cut by 2030 and an 11-to-15% reduction by 2035, the report found. This would be associated with a peak warming of about 2.6 degrees C.

If countries simply follow their current policies, then warming could reach a peak of about 2.8 C. That estimate has increased since last year, in part because of the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement and retraction of its emissions reduction commitments, the report states. Even the scenario that assumes countries meet their existing reduction commitments, and nations with net-zero pledges succeed in fulfilling them, still brings warming to a peak of 2.1 C.

Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative appears to have accidentally disclosed several unpatched Linux kernel vulnerabilities on the public LKML instead of the private security list, including two CVSS 9.0 flaws that could enable remote code execution through SMB Direct and KSMBD. "This seemingly was a mistake with Linux's second-in-command Greg Kroah-Hartman responding to each report asking about their submission to the public mailing list," adds Phoronix. The newly-disclosed vulnerabilities include: ZDI-CAN-33549 as a CVSS 9.0 scored vulnerability for SMB Direct remote code execution vulnerability due to integer underflow. For this one there is a patch in a Git branch of code intended for Linux v7.5 but now presumably will be expedited for getting to mainline.

ZDI-CAN-33774 as a KSMBD race condition that can lead to remote code execution. Another CVSS 9.0 rated vulnerability.

ZDI-CAN-33367 is a vulneravbility for skbuff skb_zerocopy in the network code that can lead to local privilege escalation. For this one Linux kernel developers received a security report from another source last week over the same issue and a patch is expected to be posted soon.

ZDI-CAN-34068 as a VMWGFX VMware graphics driver bug with an out-of-bounds write leading to local privilege escalation.

ZDI-CAN-34076 an uninitialized resource in the NVMET code leading to information disclosure.

ZDI-CAN-32005 was also posted to the mailing list a day prior for a search-domain TCP query stack buffer overflow leading to local privilege escalation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Google is facing a backlash from some staff members over the company's deployment of its AI technology for military use. The BBC has spoken to several tech workers who have either recently resigned from Google's AI company, Google DeepMind, or are in the process of leaving, over concerns with the tech firm's military contracts. Sofia Liguori, a London-based research engineer, is one of them. She resigned from Google DeepMind this week and spoke about her concerns exclusively with the BBC, despite her contract restricting her from doing so.

"Realizing my company is pushing more and more for AI systems in military operations makes me feel ashamed to work at Google," Liguori said, speaking in a personal capacity. [...] After working for the company for three years, Liguori said she decided to resign over Google's increasing work with the US and Israeli militaries. "I don't agree with this direction and this has led me to lose faith in my company being true to its stated ethical values," she said. Those values, according to Google's AI Principles, include implementing AI with "human oversight" and aligning the technology with "international law and human rights." But former and current staff at the company, and experts the BBC spoke to, said they were concerned about the level of human oversight at critical moments.

The tech workers said they are particularly worried about the AI military deals signed this year, because they greatly increase the scope of what the Pentagon can use the technology for. Andreas Kirsch, an AI researcher, also resigned from Google DeepMind earlier this month over his concerns. Kirsch told the BBC that he believes "Google's governance and oversight are not sufficient or meaningful enough to deploy AI safely and responsibly in military and classified settings" or "to develop artificial superintelligence safely in the future." "Google seems to have no right to control or veto how the Pentagon uses its AI and also seems to have limited visibility into how it's being deployed," he added.

[...] Employees at Google have told the BBC that staff are scared to speak out about AI safety and its uses in warfare because their employment contracts prohibit them from publicly criticizing the company. "In principle I'm not allowed to criticize Google for the duration of my life," Sofia Liguori told the BBC. But she decided to do so "because I believe it's important for these things to be known and I also think that talking about facts is not criticizing." Liguori added that at Google "people are scared of retaliation and putting their career at risk. You feel you are being watched, you can't speak."

A current employee at Google DeepMind, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation, told the BBC that "a lot of motivated employees who signed up for [the company's] original mission could leave -- but there's also a pipeline of people at the start of the careers who could fill those positions. It could be a changing of the guard." Another Google DeepMind staff member, who also wished to remain anonymous, told the BBC: "A lot of people have left the company that feel strongly about this [how Google DeepMind has changed its ethics position]." "Some people are putting up a fight, others are thinking: 'it's a big company. What do you expect to change?'", the employee said. In response, a Google spokesperson told the BBC: "We work with public sector organisations worldwide and follow a consistent process for reviewing and entering these contracts, including compliance with our acceptable use policies and AI principles."

"We also have dedicated channels for employees to safely raise any concerns -- ranging from business ethics to misconduct -- and have strict workplace policies in place to prevent retaliation of any kind."

A CBC investigation found that more than 1.5 million Canadian Crime Stoppers tips spanning 25 years were exposed in a breach of the P3 Global Intel tip-management platform. About 850,000 records contained personally identifiable information, including addresses, phone numbers, emails, license plates and some banking details. Longtime Slashdot reader doconnor shares the report: The data was stolen last March by hacktivist collective Internet Yiff Machine. In a manifesto, the group said it wanted to disprove the claim by P3 Global Intel -- the company hired by Crime Stoppers to manage its tips -- that the platform was "anonymous" and "secure." A copy of the hacked data was made available to researchers and journalists, including CBC, by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a U.S. non-profit that archives and publishes hacked and leaked documents it deems to be in the public interest. The report found that more than 4,300 Crime Stoppers tipsters identified themselves by their full name, with hundreds of records containing staff warnings that individuals had "self-identified" or been "exposed," yet their information remained unredacted.

The leaked data included sensitive allegations involving murder, terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime, with nearly 49,000 tips linked to cases cleared through arrests or criminal charges. Cybersecurity experts criticized the retention of decades-old records... "If a tip is closed, does that need to stay online?" asked cybersecurity expert Ben Coon. "The answer to that, to me, is no."

The RCMP was initially told Canadian data was unaffected, then assured that exposed Canadian records contained no personally identifiable information. This appears to contradict the CBC's findings. Furthermore, affected individuals have not been systematically notified because contacting them could further jeopardize their anonymity.

"For a system that has been designed to promise anonymity to the users, that has failed categorically," said Prof. Ali Dehghantanha, the Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence at the University of Guelph.

A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found Facebook liable for deceiving users about privacy during the Cambridge Analytica scandal. State Attorney General Raul Torrez called it "one of the largest, if not the single largest state verdict against a company in American history." While Meta plans to appeal the ruling, the funds that are to be collected will go toward state education spending. The Associated Press reports: Jurors in September found Meta liable for over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws when a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, harvested Facebook user data to generate targeted political ads for the 2016 election. Forty-eight other states settled with Facebook in a nationwide case, but New Mexico chose to take the social media company to court on its own. [...] During the trial, jurors assessed whether Facebook misled users about privacy and content moderation 34 separate times. State prosecutors, though, argued Facebook's statements deceived the entire population of New Mexico and extended beyond social media users.

In the end, jurors agreed with this premise and found Facebook liable for 2.1 million violations on certain counts, bringing the total number of violations to over 43 million. Facebook's attorneys have argued in subsequent court filings that the state's consumer protection laws don't apply to people in New Mexico who weren't using the platform at the time. [...] In one of the few wins for the defense, jurors found the state didn't prove that Facebook made false claims about removing harmful content, including misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.

The state said the company favored certain accounts and allowed for violent or inaccurate content to proliferate. Attorney Randi McGinn said in her closing argument for the state that Facebook profited off harmful content, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied during his video deposition. Zuckerberg said the company has to carefully balance freedom of speech with content moderation. Attorneys for Facebook said the company has adapted its policies since the state's lawsuit was filed in 2021 and that it removes 99% of content that violates standards.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books. These logs would presumably reveal how Meta's torrent clients were set up, including any changes to their upload settings. [...] The server logs could reveal what happened on Meta's machines. However, publisher Entrepreneur Media also wants to know who approved the torrenting activity.

Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of the related lawsuits where it accuses Meta of contributing to piracy by uploading (seeding) works to third parties, similar to the authors' contributory infringement claim. To find out more, the publisher asked Meta to identify everyone who "made, authorized, or approved" the decisions to obtain the shadow library datasets, and to do so via BitTorrent.

Meta's answers named several people who are believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. However, Meta said it couldn't identify anyone who "formally" made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus, Meta argued. When it came to the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads, describing their choices as technical decisions.

Meta added that the acquisition of data from Anna's Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024, which involved its in-house lawyers. In other words, the company didn't name anyone higher up who approved the use of BitTorrent. "On that construction no one at Meta decided to torrent anything, yet Meta torrented shadow libraries repeatedly from 2022-2024," Entrepreneur Media countered. An internal Meta logbook warned that using torrents would involve sharing copyrighted material with others. "Using torrents would entail seeding the file such as sharing content outside. This would be legally not okay," the logbook stated.

Although Meta admits downloading data from LibGen and Anna's Archive via BitTorrent, it claims no one "made, authorized, or approved" a decision to distribute the material and that measures were taken to limit seeding. Meta's own expert previously estimated that uploads from its AWS servers amounted to no more than roughly 30% of the data downloaded during a period in 2024.

Judge Thomas Hixson is not convinced and ordered (PDF) the company to identify everyone involved in approving the downloads, including those who decided "whether or how to seed, or to mitigate seeding."

New court records reportedly show that DHS targeted Stop Cop City activist Samuel Tunick at an Atlanta airport because he was under investigation for suspected "terrorist activities." However, the CBP officers told him instead that they wanted to search his phone for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Tunick, who is not accused of terrorism or any other crime beyond allegedly wiping his GrapheneOS phone during the encounter, faces up to five years in prison. 404 Media reports: Instead of saying he was being targeted for suspected terrorism -- although this search happened just at the start of the second Trump administration, it has dramatically broadened what organizations or people may be considered such -- they said they needed his phone to look for "kiddie p*rn." "Good afternoon," an email sent from a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) official, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to CBP and other officials reads. "The following subject is scheduled to arrive in ATL [Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport] today via DL 1778 @ 1930 Hours. TUNICK is under investigation by HSI/JTTF for suspected terrorist activities." The email includes a photo of Tunick, and asks the officials to direct him to secondary inspection, retain all of his electronics, and collect their passcodes.

As 404 Media first revealed in December, Tunick was charged because he allegedly "did knowingly destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, and otherwise take any action to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel cellular phone, for the purpose of preventing and impairing the Government's lawful authority to take said property into its custody and control." Matthew Dodge, one of Tunick's lawyers, previously told 404 Media he only found one other case using the same obscure law, a drug trafficking case. "This is extraordinarily rare," Dodge said.

Tunick was part of the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, which broadly protested the building of a large police training center, and which authorities investigated for arson, vandalism, and doxing. Tunick is not suspected of any crime beyond the alleged wiping of the phone, and has previously put his current prosecution in the context of the wide spanning cases against other Stop Cop City protesters. The newly filed court record, in which Tunick's lawyers argue that evidence should be thrown out, include new photos and descriptions of the airport encounter. The CBP officials asked Tunick if they were going to find "kiddie p*rn" on his phone, which Tunick immediately denied. "As the evidentiary hearing made clear, these unfounded accusations were nothing more than pretext for a fishing expedition into the depths of Mr. Tunick's devices," the lawyers wrote. They added, "Officer Findley acknowledged that officers had no reason whatsoever to believe Mr. Tunick possessed child p*rnography," referring to one of the officials.

Security researchers say Meta's Muse AI assistant exposed thousands of users' shared conversations because conversation titles were placed in subdomains that could be discovered through public DNS records. Meta has since suspended the sharing feature while it considers making changes. Ars Technica reports: Like many online services, Muse has allowed users to share searches, conversations, images, and similar content with other people. Such share features usually involve clicking an option to create a unique URL that anyone can use to load a page hosting the content. To keep potentially sensitive information from being accessible to unintended people, the URLs typically contain a long sequence of text that can't be easily guessed.

Muse, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month was "built from the ground up for privacy and security," seems to take the same precautions. But a central design decision for constructing URLs has made the links easy to discover. As a result, researchers from security firm Claroc said they were able to enumerate 6,800 links Muse users created for sharing conversations with others. After opening a few hundred of them, the researchers found information that was clearly not intended to be publicly available... [...]. "If you had asked us beforehand, we would have guessed that gathering these would take real effort," the researchers wrote. "It took one query."

[...] The easiest way to discover the URLs is to perform a passive DNS search through one of many available commercial services. Passive DNS records store the historical resolution of domain names to IP addresses, as well as nameserver, and mail-server records over time. Passive DNS systems typically collect DNS responses from sensors positioned at recursive DNS resolvers or other infrastructure. A passive DNS record is generally created when a monitoring system observes a DNS response. In the case here, once the intended party clicks on the share link, the DNS information is recorded in a searchable database.

Claroc researchers were able to discover the Muse share links because all of them use the domain name cf.metaaiusercontent.com. Discovery is further made easy by the decision to add the conversation name to the URL, along with a long string of text. Simplified examples of such links are home-sale-budget-9f21c8a3.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, and loan-application-draft-a4c9e2.cf.metaaiusercontent.com. It's this last design decision, putting the conversation title in the subdomain rather than in the URL path, that makes public discovery possible.

The Trump administration has banned DeepSeek AI from most US civilian federal agencies, ordering the removal of the Chinese company's models and technology developed using them. The Department of Homeland Security did not specify the security threats behind the decision. The BBC reports: The order (PDF) is broad, as it requires agencies to ditch "all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations." Complying will be tricky as it is not clear which third-party products and services have been developed using DeepSeek's wares. Nor is it clear whether "developed using" means providing ongoing access to DeepSeek models via API or simply refers to any app vibe-coded with the help of DeepSeek.

It also leaves open the question of AI gateways. Services such as OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway make DeepSeek's models available through APIs. And those using gateway services may find themselves using DeepSeek models without meaning to do so. OpenRouter, for example, "routes requests to the best available providers for your model." It selects what the service deems to be the best fit provider of AI services. Vercel AI Gateway does the same by default. So federal civilian agencies could be using DeepSeek models inadvertently, if they haven't taken steps to constrain their AI providers.

TP-Link plans to begin assembling routers in Mississippi as early as 2027 after the FCC banned imports of new foreign-made consumer routers over security concerns. Engadget reports: The company has signed a letter of intent with manufacturer Key Tronic and, pending approval from regulators, TP-Link says stateside assembly of its routers could start at a Mississippi production line as soon as early 2027.

Once things are up and running, Wi-Fi 8 routers are expected to be among the first TP-Link products that Key Tronic assembles. TP-Link claims that the agreement is part of its "long-term effort to accelerate US investment in high-tech manufacturing and job creation, designing and assembling next-generation products for American consumers here on American soil."

The company said it will still have to source components from outside the US. "Many [components] are just not available from a domestic source, and this is not a TP-Link issue," TP-Link's corporate affairs officer Steve Kovsky told PC Mag. "This is an issue for all manufacturers that are trying to onshore manufacturing."

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from ProPublica: A few months into President Donald Trump's second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wanted Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it. The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request.

The proposition was shocking to CISA's career staffers, according to one of the former officials. CISA typically worked to thwart hackers. Moreover, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference. "My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don't like," one of the former officials said. "This goes against everything CISA represents." [Or, perhaps do something worse?]

The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA. Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions: protecting the nation's voting systems.

Florida's DMV says a September 4 breach exposed driver's license and motor vehicle records after attackers obtained credentials that a local law-enforcement employee had "improperly stored on an electronic device." The ShinyHunters group has been linked to the intrusion. Ars Technica reports: In a notice posted Friday, [Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV)] confirmed that it took "immediate steps" after discovering that "a malicious actor accessed certain department records on September 4, 2026, using compromised credentials." There's "no evidence" that data has yet been misused, the department said, but law enforcement "determined the information potentially affected includes driver license and motor vehicle data, to include document images, and other personal information."

[...] On a webpage describing the security incident, FLHSMV confirmed that an "international cybercriminal organization" was behind the breach but did not specify which group or how long they had access. Instead, officials claimed to have "promptly mitigated the breach, launched an investigation, and issued required notification to state authorities." Mitigations included "blocking unauthorized access, resetting relevant user credentials, engaging cybersecurity professionals, and implementing additional safeguards to protect sensitive information," FLHSMV said. Florida's investigation is "ongoing," officials said, but a cybercriminal group called ShinyHunters -- which recently claimed credit for hacking the FBI -- may have stolen the data. Florida residents affected by the breach will receive a letter offering one year of free credit monitoring through Sontiq, Inc. Those whose contact information is outdated can email the FLHSMV at customerinquiry@flhsmv.gov to determine whether their data was compromised.

"When you pay for a game, you should own it," says U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY), introducing a new bill to fight the practice of "a rental disguised as a sale".

Kotaku reports: The fifth best-selling game of 2024 in the U.S. was NBA 2K25. Every year, fans dump hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars into the grindy NBA basketball sim. But just a little over two years after its release, 2K Games confirmed it's already pulling the plug on it. The game will be delisted from digital storefronts on October 30. By January 1, 2027, online servers will go offline as well, making it impossible to play the most popular modes. A game millions paid $70 for will become mostly useless. Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres wants to change that.

"I think there should be a simple rule: if you pay for it, you own it," Torres told Kotaku in a phone interview this week. To make that the law of the land, the U.S. representative for New York's 15th congressional district since 2021 plans to introduce legislation in Congress called the Power To The Players Act. The bill would direct the Federal Trade Commission to create regulations protecting ownership rights for video games. Companies selling digital games would need to grant players more than just a license that can expire at any time, and games with online features would need to provide offline modes that still work even when servers eventually shut down...

The Power To The Players Act noticeably leaves out other types of digital media like movies and music, though Terminator 2 and a bunch of other movie purchases were ripped from people's digital libraries earlier this year.
Representative Torres "did not confirm if the bill will have any cosponsors," the article acknowledges, "or whether any of his Republican colleagues will sign on to support it."

But players will see the bill's importance next month, the article points out, "when Grand Theft Auto 6 releases as just a download code in a box, giving fans no control over a purchase that starts at $80.