In late 2021, VanMoof claimed to be "the most funded e-bike company in the world" after raising a total of $182 million in the two years prior -- a figure that would later surpass $200 million. Now, according to multiple sources spoken to by TechCrunch, the Dutch e-bike company's strategy and momentum "appear to have steered dangerously off course." From the report: Our sources tell us that VanMoof is working on securing a bridge round that will help it stay afloat. Sources also claim that senior staff, including the CEO and a co-founder, as well as the president (who is also an investor) have left executive roles in the business. The company has refused to provide any on-the-record comment on its status until later this week. But the facts are plain: The company has, as of June 29 and by its own admission, stopped taking orders. VanMoof also filed paperwork, revealed in January, of its need to raise money to stave off bankruptcy.

Customers, annoyed with the pauses and other delays in servicing existing bikes on the road, have turned to social media like Reddit and Twitter to air their complaints and debate whether the company is going bust or not. The first recent, visible cracks in the company appeared in late June when potential customers discovered its online ordering system was no longer working. [...] The story changed again a few days later. In response to TechCrunch's questions about the ordering system, a spokesperson said that the pause was actually intentional (a feature not a bug!). Despite the summer period being the peak season for the cycling market, a VanMoof spokesperson claimed it would be pausing orders to catch up on production and delivery. The company didn't answer any of TechCrunch's multiple questions about why VanMoof was behind on orders (supply chain issues? lacking funds?), what the company's current capacity was, how many orders were outstanding, or when VanMoof hoped to begin sales again. As of the time of publication, the sales pause was going on 12 days.

Despite the pause and the other details, VanMoof had been sending out communications that imply it's business-as-usual at the e-bike company. On June 27 it announced that KwikFit NL, the car maintenance chain, would be a new service partner. The day before that it issued a firmware update and a video was posted of a panel that co-founder Taco Carlier participated in. But there have been a number of warning signs in plain sight for months that tell a different story. [...]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Commission today decided it is safe for personal data to be transferred from the European Union to US-based companies, handing a victory to firms like Facebook and Google despite protests from privacy advocates who worry about US government surveillance. The commission announced that it "adopted its adequacy decision for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework," concluding "that the United States ensures an adequate level of protection -- comparable to that of the European Union -- for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies under the new framework. On the basis of the new adequacy decision, personal data can flow safely from the EU to US companies participating in the Framework, without having to put in place additional data protection safeguards."

In May, Facebook-owner Meta was fined 1.2 billion euros for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with transfers of personal data to the United States and was ordered to stop storing European Union user data in the US within six months. But Meta said at the time that if the pending data-transfer pact "comes into effect before the implementation deadlines expire, our services can continue as they do today without any disruption or impact on users." The data-transfer deal "is expected to face a legal challenge from European privacy advocates, who have long said that the US needs to make substantial changes to surveillance laws," a Wall Street Journal report said today. "Transfers of data from Europe to the US have been in question since an EU court ruled in 2020 that a previous deal allowing trans-Atlantic data flows was illegal because the US didn't give EU individuals an effective way to challenge surveillance of their data by the US government."

The EC's announcement said the new framework has "binding safeguards to address all the concerns raised by the European Court of Justice, including limiting access to EU data by US intelligence services to what is necessary and proportionate, and establishing a Data Protection Review Court (DPRC), to which EU individuals will have access." The new court "will be able to order the deletion" of data that is found to have been collected in violation of the new rules. The framework will be administered and monitored by the US Department of Commerce and the "US Federal Trade Commission will enforce US companies' compliance," the EC announcement said. EU residents who challenge data collection will have free access to "independent dispute resolution mechanisms and an arbitration panel." US companies can join the EU-US framework "by committing to comply with a detailed set of privacy obligations, for instance the requirement to delete personal data when it is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was collected, and to ensure continuity of protection when personal data is shared with third parties," the European Commission said. The latest deal is expected to get challenged, according to the WSJ. European Parliament member Birgit Sippel, who is in Germany's Social Democratic Party, said the "framework does not provide any meaningful safeguards against indiscriminate surveillance conducted by US intelligence agencies," according to The New York Times.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, which represents major tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, said: "Today's decision means that EU and US businesses will soon have full legal certainty again to transfer personal data across the Atlantic... Data flows are vital to transatlantic trade and the EU-US economic relationship, which is worth 5.5 trillion euros per year. Nevertheless, the two economies had been left without guidelines for data transfers after an EU Court ruling invalidated the previous framework back in 2020."

The booster just touched down on the droneship. "The Falcon 9 first-stage has now successfully launched and landed for a record-breaking 16th time," announced SpaceX's feed on YouTube. It was also SpaceX's 206th landing of an orbital-class rocket.

Long-time Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone quotes Spaceflight Now on how SpaceX tested "the limits of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday evening." The booster, tail number 1058, made its historic debut on May 20, 2020, carrying the first astronauts to ride atop a Falcon 9 aboard the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour. The first stage is distinctive in the SpaceX fleet as it is the only one to display a red NASA "worm" logo on its fuselage. It went on to fly 14 more times, including the launches of South Korea's Anasis 2 military communications satellite, a space station cargo delivery run, two Transporter ride-share missions and ten batches of Starlink satellites. With 15 flights already accomplished, it is the joint fleet leader with booster 1060.

Originally, the company hoped to reuse each Falcon 9 first stage 10 times.

"We got to 10 [flights] and the vehicles were still looking really good, so we started the effort to qualify for 15," Jon Edwards, SpaceX vice president of Falcon launch vehicles and Falcon engineering, told the trade publication Aviation Week & Space Technology in an interview last year.

SpaceX is now further pushing the envelope by going beyond the previously certified limit of 15 flights. It has been over 200 days since booster 1058 last flew. During that time it is likely SpaceX conducted extensive inspections and refurbishment work to clear the rocket for additional launches.

For its 16th ride to space, booster 1058 will carry 22 second-generation Starlink 'V2 mini' satellites into orbit, on a mission designated Starlink 6-5.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Recalling a past Computer History Museum look at the evolution of programming languages, Doug Meil ponders the age-old question of Why Are There So Many Programming Languages? in a new Communications of the ACM blog post.

"It's worth noting and admiring the audacity of PL/I (1964)," Meil writes, "which was aiming to be that 'one good programming language.' The name says it all: Programming Language 1. There should be no need for 2, 3, or 4. [Meil expands on this thought in Lessons from PL/I: A Most Ambitious Programming Language.] Though PL/I's plans of becoming the Highlander of computer programming didn't play out like the designers intended, they were still pulling on a key thread in software: why so many languages? That question was already being asked as far back as the early 1960's."

One of PL/I's biggest fans was Digital Research Inc. (DRI) founder Gary Kildall, who crafted the PL/I-inspired PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers) in 1973 for Intel. But IBM priced PL/I higher than the languages it sought to replace, contributing to PL/I's failure to gain traction. (Along the lines of how IBM's deal with Microsoft gave rise to a price disparity that was the undoing of Kildall's CP/M OS, bundled with every PC in a 'non-royalty' deal. Windows was priced at $40 while CP/M was offered 'a la carte' at $240.) As a comp.lang.pl1 poster explained in 2006, "The truth of the matter is that Gresham's Law: 'Bad money drives out good' or Ruskin's principle: 'The hoi polloi always prefer an inferior, cheap product over a superior, more expensive one' are what govern here."

The July 1 deadline for the US airline industry came and went, and not much happened. "We're not aware of any disruptions specifically related to 5G over the weekend," wrote Ian Petchenik, director of communications for Flightradar24, on Monday. Mike Dano writes via Light Reading: Petchenik noted the flight-tracking company does not specifically collect data on the types of issues that delay flights. Regardless, the situation is remarkable considering warnings of "major disruptions," "chaos" and the possibility that "the nation's commerce will grind to a halt" if 5G gets too close to airplanes in the US. Broadly, the high-stakes standoff between the US wireless industry and the airline industry -- which kicked into high gear just over a year ago -- appears to be something that both sides now mostly want to forget.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Globe and Mail: A Saskatchewan judge says an emoji can amount to a contractual agreement and ordered a farmer to pay more than $82,000 for not delivering product to a grain buyer after responding to a text message with a thumbs-up image. The Court of King's Bench decision said a grain buyer with South West Terminal sent a text to farmers in March 2021 saying that the company was looking to buy 86 tons of flax for $17 per bushel to be delivered in the fall. The buyer, Kent Mickleborough, later spoke with Swift Current farmer Chris Achter on the phone and texted a picture of a contract to deliver the flax in November, adding "please confirm flax contract." Achter texted back a thumbs-up emoji. But when November came around, the flax was not delivered and prices for the crop had increased.

Mickleborough said the emoji amounted to an agreement because he had texted numerous contracts to Achter, who previously confirmed through text message and always fulfilled the order. But the farmer argued that the emoji indicated only that he'd received the contract in the text message. "I deny that he accepted the thumbs-up emoji as a digital signature of the incomplete contract," Achter said in an affidavit to court. "I did not have time to review the Flax Contract and merely wanted to indicate that I did receive his text message."

Justice Timothy Keene said in his June decision that the thumbs-up emoji did meet signature requirements and therefore the farmer breached his contract. The judge pointed to a Dictionary.com definition of the thumbs-up emoji, which said it is used to express assent, approval or encouragement in digital communications. "This court readily acknowledges that a (thumbs-up) emoji is a non-traditional means to `sign' a document but nevertheless under these circumstances this was a valid way to convey the two purposes of a `signature,"' Keene wrote in his decision. Keene's decision noted the case is novel, but the judge said emojis are now commonly used.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Nearly 70 IT security and privacy academics have added to the clamor of alarm over the damage the U.K.'s Online Safety Bill could wreak to, er, online safety unless it's amended to ensure it does not undermine strong encryption. Writing in an open letter (PDF), 68 U.K.-affiliated security and privacy researchers have warned the draft legislation poses a stark risk to essential security technologies that are routinely used to keep digital communications safe.

"As independent information security and cryptography researchers, we build technologies that keep people safe online. It is in this capacity that we see the need to stress that the safety provided by these essential technologies is now under threat in the Online Safety Bill," the academics warn, echoing concerns already expressed by end-to-end encrypted comms services such as WhatsApp, Signal and Element -- which have said they would opt to withdraw services from the market or be blocked by U.K. authorities rather than compromise the level of security provided to their users. [...] "We understand that this is a critical time for the Online Safety Bill, as it is being discussed in the House of Lords before being returned to the Commons this summer," they write. "In brief, our concern is that surveillance technologies are deployed in the spirit of providing online safety. This act undermines privacy guarantees and, indeed, safety online."

The academics, who hold professorships and other positions at universities around the country -- including a number of Russell Group research-intensive institutions such as King's College and Imperial College in London, Oxford and Cambridge, Edinburgh, Sheffield and Manchester to name a few -- say their aim with the letter is to highlight "alarming misunderstandings and misconceptions around the Online Safety Bill and its interaction with the privacy and security technologies that our daily online interactions and communication rely on." "There is no technological solution to the contradiction inherent in both keeping information confidential from third parties and sharing that same information with third parties," the experts warn, adding: "The history of 'no one but us' cryptographic backdoors is a history of failures, from the Clipper chip to DualEC. All technological solutions being put forward share that they give a third party access to private speech, messages and images under some criteria defined by that third party."

Last week, Apple publicly voiced its opposition to the bill. The company said in a statement: "End-to-end encryption is a critical capability that protects the privacy of journalists, human rights activists, and diplomats. It also helps everyday citizens defend themselves from surveillance, identity theft, fraud, and data breaches. The Online Safety Bill poses a serious threat to this protection, and could put UK citizens at greater risk. Apple urges the government to amend the bill to protect strong end-to-end encryption for the benefit of all."

A federal judge yesterday ordered the Biden administration to halt a wide range of communications with social media companies, siding with Missouri and Louisiana in a lawsuit (PDF) that alleges Biden and his administration violated the First Amendment by colluding with social networks "to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content." Ars Technica reports: The Biden administration argued that it communicated with tech companies to counter misinformation related to elections, COVID-19, and vaccines, and that it didn't exert illegal pressure on the companies. The communications to social media companies were not significant enough "to convert private conduct into government conduct," Department of Justice lawyers argued in the case. But Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump nominee at US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, granted the plaintiffs' request (PDF) for a preliminary injunction imposing limits on the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Justice, the US Census Bureau, the State Department, the Homeland Security Department, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and many specific officials at those agencies. The injunction also affects White House officials.

The agencies and officials are prohibited from communicating "with social-media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms," Doughty ruled. The injunction prohibits "specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech." Government agencies and officials are further barred from urging, encouraging, or pressuring social media companies "to change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content containing protected free speech." The ruling also said the government may not coordinate with third-party groups, including the Election Integrity Partnership, the Virality Project, and the Stanford Internet Observatory, to pressure social media companies.

Doughty provided several exceptions that allow the government to communicate with social media companies about criminal activity and other speech that the First Amendment doesn't protect. The Biden administration may continue to inform social networks about posts involving criminal activity or criminal conspiracies, national security threats, extortion, criminal efforts to suppress voting, illegal campaign contributions, cyberattacks against election infrastructure, foreign attempts to influence elections, threats to public safety and security, and posts intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures. The US can also exercise "permissible public government speech promoting government policies or views on matters of public concern," communicate with social networks "in an effort to detect, prevent, or mitigate malicious cyber activity," and "communicat[e] with social-media companies about deleting, removing, suppressing, or reducing posts on social-media platforms that are not protected free speech by the Free Speech Clause in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Ariane 5 rocket has had a long run, with nearly three decades of service launching satellites and spacecraft. Over that time, the iconic rocket, with a liquid hydrogen-fueled core stage and solid rocket boosters, has come to symbolize Europe's guaranteed access to space. But now, the road is coming to an end for the Ariane 5. As soon as Tuesday evening, the final Ariane 5 rocket will lift off from Kourou, French Guiana, carrying a French military communications satellite and a German communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit. A 90-minute launch window opens at 5:30 pm ET (21:30 UTC). The launch will be webcast on ESA TV. And after this? Europe's space agency faces some difficult questions.

According to NBC News, the FBI created a national online database in May to facilitate information sharing between hundreds of police departments and law enforcement agencies across the country pertaining to swatting incidents. From the report: No central agency has tracked swatting incidents or suspects in the U.S., so official statistics are not available. By 2019, there were an estimated 1,000 swatting incidents domestically each year, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League, and each incident is estimated to cost at least $10,000 to affected communities, even before expenditures on follow-up work like investigations, property repairs and counseling. Swatting is increasingly enabled by technology that can be used to mask a caller's real voice, their phone number or IP address (also called "spoofing") or to make their false report sound more credible.

[Chief Scott Schubert with the bureau's Criminal Justice Information Services headquarters in Clarksburg, West Virginia] told NBC News that the FBI's new centralized database should help the agency "get that common picture of what's going on across our nation so we can learn from that." [...] While the earliest recorded case of swatting occurred in 2002, to this day, there is no specific law criminalizing swatting in the U.S., says John Jay's Shapiro. "Without a statute in place, there's no designated resources or training for investigating swatting incidents," she said. "And the 911 dispatchers do not have the resources and training they need to differentiate between actual emergencies and false reports."

Legally, the False Information and Hoaxes statute, also known as section 1038, is most frequently used to prosecute swatting. Other statutes can sometimes apply -- one pertaining to interstate threats involving explosives and another pertaining to interstate communications, which refers to extortion or threats to injure or kidnap somebody. "Too often, perpetrators are getting a slap on the wrist compared to the consequences suffered by their victims," Shapiro said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Social media firms will be ordered to protect children from encountering dangerous stunts and challenges on their platforms under changes to the online safety bill. The legislation will explicitly refer to content that "encourages, promotes or provides instructions for a challenge or stunt highly likely to result in serious injury" as the type of material that under-18s should be protected from. The bill will also require social media companies to proactively prevent children from seeing the highest risk forms of content, such as material encouraging suicide and self-harm. Tech firms could be required to use age-checking measures to prevent under-18s from seeing such material.

In another change to the legislation, which is expected to become law this year, social media platforms will have to introduce tougher age-checking measures to prevent children from accessing pornography -- bringing them in line with the bill's measures for mainstream sites such as Pornhub. Services that publish or allow pornography on their sites will be required to introduce "highly effective" age-checking measures such as age estimation tools that estimate someone's age from a selfie. Other amendments include requiring the communications watchdog Ofcom to produce guidance for tech firms on protecting women and girls online. Ofcom, which will oversee implementation of the act once it comes into force, will be required to consult with the domestic abuse commissioner and victims commissioner when producing the guidance, in order to ensure it reflects the voices of victims.

The updated bill will also criminalize the sharing of deepfake intimate images in England and Wales. In a further change it will require platforms to ask adult users if they wish to avoid content that promotes self-harm or eating disorders or racist content. Once the law comes into force breaches will carry a punishment of a fine of £18m or up to 10% of global turnover. In the most extreme cases, Ofcom will be able to block platforms.

In a landmark ruling (PDF) on Thursday, the New Jersey Supreme Court sided with Facebook in a major court decision that requires prosecutors to get a wiretap order if they want to eavesdrop on social media accounts without adequate evidence of a crime. New Jersey Monitor reports: In a reversal of lower court decisions, the high court ruled against authorities who argued a warrant is sufficient to obtain nearly real-time release of such communications. That argument is unsupported by federal or state statute, the court said, adding that allowing such releases would effectively neuter New Jersey's wiretap law.

In separate cases focused on two men under investigation for drug offenses, authorities obtained a communications data warrant to force Facebook to disclose social media postings -- within 15 minutes of their creation -- made by the pair over a 30-day span. The state contended such releases, which Facebook said were as close to real-time as technology allows, could be made without meeting the higher bar for a wiretap order because by the time Facebook provided them, they would already have been transmitted and electronically stored.

But Thursday's decision says allowing such releases would make the state's wiretap statute obsolete because "law enforcement today would never need to apply for a wiretap order to obtain future electronic communications from Facebook users' accounts on an ongoing basis." Authorities must show probable cause to obtain a warrant. To obtain a wiretap order, they must also demonstrate that other investigatory methods would fail -- because they are too dangerous, for example -- according to criminal defense lawyer Brian Neary. Neary argued on behalf of the New Jersey State Bar Association, which joined the case as a friend of the court. "It's great to see the New Jersey Supreme Court make clear that whenever the government seeks ongoing access to our private conversations, it must meet the heightened protections required under state law and the federal and state constitutions," said Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union.

"Alaska Weather," a daily 30-minute TV show that has broadcast across Alaska for the past 47 years, is going off the air due to a lack of funds. Gizmodo reports: In lieu of the news, residents seeking information on their state's weather will be forced to lean on spotty, sub-par internet. Friday evening will be the final television installment of "Alaska Weather," as first reported by Alaska Public Media. The show, which is the only weather program produced directly by the National Weather Service, has filled an information and communications void for decades. Without it, "if you don't have good internet connectivity, you're in a world of hurt in western and northern Alaska as far as getting weather information," said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center, to the Associated Press. And many in Alaska don't have reliable or fast internet access.

General, aviation, and maritime forecast segments will remain available online only, via YouTube. Emergency alerts, like storm warnings, will be relegated to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration radio broadcasts, which don't cover the whole state, per Alaska Public Media. Officials from the state-owned, non-profit media organization say that money problems are to blame. Putting together and distributing "Alaska Weather" has cost Alaska Public Media $200,000 annually, and the network can't afford to do it anymore, according to Linda Wei, APM's chief content officer.

"It's no longer sustainable for us to continue in this manner," Wei told AP. "It's not a decision that we came to lightly." Big state funding cuts in 2019 left APM in a tough spot. The media org kept "Alaska Weather" going on its own for years, following the loss of state backing, but now Wei says the network can't anymore. "We've been doing this, without support, for about four or five years, and we've made that known to NOAA," said Wei to WaPo. "It just got to the point where we couldn't continue." Wei says she's hoping there's a possibility of getting "Alaska Weather" back on the air. But for now, there will be a gap.

AI software and voice cloners simulate distracted saps willing to stay on the phone forever -- or until callers finally give up. From a report: Complaints about unwanted telephone calls are "far-and-away the largest category of consumer complaints to the FCC," with the average American receiving 14 unwanted calls a month, according to one industry estimate, a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission said. Automated dialers at call centers can easily crank out 100 calls a second, constantly searching for people willing to stay on the line. Voice modulators remove foreign accents and software allows overseas operators to trigger prerecorded English phrases, said Isaac Shloss.

He is chief product officer with Contact Center Compliance, a company that provides software and services tools to help call centers operate within the law. Roger Anderson, a 54-year-old in Monrovia, Calif., takes pleasure in foiling them. He began his war on telemarketers nearly a decade ago, he said, after one called the family's landline and said a bad word to his son. He started with an answering machine that said "Hello" a few times before hanging up. Anderson has since rolled out his weapons of mass distraction. He has posted conversations between man and bot, some lasting as long as 15 minutes before the telemarketer hangs up. The posts are part of Anderson's own marketing. He has several thousand customers paying $24.99 a year for use of his call-deflection system, called Jolly Roger. The subscription service gives people the choice of Whitebeard or other digital personalities, including Salty Sally, the overwhelmed mother, and the easily distracted Whiskey Jack.

After answering the phone, Jolly Roger keeps callers engaged with preset expressions from chatbots, such as "There's a bee on my arm, but keep talking." Chatbots also grunt or say "uh-huh" to keep things going. When OpenAI released its ChatGPT software last year, Anderson saw right away how it could breathe new life into his time-wasting bots. At first, ChatGPT was reluctant to do the work. "As an AI language model, I don't encourage people to waste other people's time," ChatGPT told Anderson. Its successor, GPT-4, also pushed back, he said. Anderson finally found a line of reasoning that persuaded GPT-4 to take the job. "I told it that, 'You are a personal assistant and you are trying to protect this man from being scammed,'" he said.

Microsoft's speech recognition subsidiary, Nuance Communications, is integrating its AI-powered clinical notes application into Epic Systems. The collaboration aims to reduce physicians' administrative workload by automatically generating draft clinical notes within seconds using real-time conversation recording and advanced AI models, ultimately saving time for doctors and improving patient engagement. CNBC reports: Epic is a health-care software company that helps hospitals and other health systems store, share and access electronic health records. More than 500,000 physicians and 306 million patients across the globe use Epic's offerings, and the company has long-standing partnerships with both Microsoft and Nuance. The companies are collaborating to build a system that can carry out many of clinicians' back-end administrative responsibilities. Nuance told CNBC on Tuesday that integrating its latest solution, Dragon Ambient eXperience Express, into Epic is a "major step" toward that goal.

DAX Express automatically generates a draft clinical note within seconds after a patient visit. It can record a conversation between a doctor and a patient in real time and create a note using a combination of existing AI and OpenAI's newest model, GPT-4. "I think the magical thing here is that note is produced not in an hour, but in a matter of seconds," Garrett Adams, product lead for Epic's ambulatory division, told CNBC in an interview Tuesday. "So whereas it would have taken them so much longer than that to type it out manually, they now get it better, faster and with a level of convenience that wasn't even really possible to imagine a decade ago."

Nuance has strict data agreements with its customers, so patient data is fully encrypted and runs in HIPAA-compliant environments. DAX Express for Epic will be available in a private preview capacity for select users this summer, and [...] the company hopes to expand to general availability in the first quarter of 2024.

Investigations triggered by the cracking of encrypted phones three years ago have so far led to more than 6,500 arrests worldwide and the seizure of hundreds of tons of drugs, French, Dutch and European Union prosecutors said Tuesday. From a report: The announcement underscored the staggering scale of criminality -- mainly drugs and arms smuggling and money laundering -- that was uncovered as a result of police and prosecutors effectively listening in to criminals using encrypted EncroChat phones. "It helped to prevent violent attacks, attempted murders, corruption and large-scale drug transports, as well as obtain large-scale information on organised crime," European Union police and judicial cooperation agencies Europol and Eurojust said in a statement.

The French and Dutch investigation gained access to more than 115 million encrypted communications between some 60,000 criminals via servers in the northern French town of Roubaix, prosecutors said at a news conference in the nearby city of Lille. As a result, 6,558 suspects have been arrested worldwide, including 197 "high-value targets." Seized drugs included 30.5 million pills, 103.5 metric tons (114 tons) of cocaine, 163.4 metric tons (180 tons) of cannabis and 3.3 metric tons (3.6 tons) of heroin. The investigations also led to nearly 740 million euros ($809 million) in cash being recovered and assets or bank accounts worth another 154 million euros ($168 million) frozen.

JP Morgan has been fined $4 million by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for deleting millions of email records dating from 2018 relating to its Chase Bank subsidiary. From a report: The Financial services outfit apparently deleted somewhere in the region of 47 million electronic communications records from about 8,700 electronic mailboxes covering the period January 1 through to April 23, 2018. Many of these, it turns out, were business records that were required to be retained under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the SEC said in a filing detailing its ruling.

Worse still, the stuffup meant that it couldn't produce evidence that that the SEC and others subpoenaed in their investigations. "In at least 12 civil securities-related regulatory investigations, eight of which were conducted by the Commission staff, JPMorgan received subpoenas and document requests for communications which could not be retrieved or produced because they had been deleted permanently," the SEC says. The trouble for JP Morgan can be traced to a project where the company aimed to delete from its systems any older communications and documents that were no longer required to be retained. According to the SEC's summary, the project experienced "glitches," with those documents identified for deletion failing to be deleted under the processes implemented by JPMorgan.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The United Parcel Service (UPS) says fraudsters have been harvesting phone numbers and other information from its online shipment tracking tool in Canada to send highly targeted SMS phishing (a.k.a. "smishing") messages that spoofed UPS and other top brands. The missives addressed recipients by name, included details about recent orders, and warned that those orders wouldn't be shipped unless the customer paid an added delivery fee. In a snail mail letter sent this month to Canadian customers, UPS Canada Ltd. said it is aware that some package recipients have received fraudulent text messages demanding payment before a package can be delivered, and that it has been working with partners in its delivery chain to try to understand how the fraud was occurring.

"During that review, UPS discovered a method by which a person who searched for a particular package or misused a package look-up tool could obtain more information about the delivery, potentially including a recipient's phone number," the letter reads. "Because this information could be misused by third parties, including potentially in a smishing scheme, UPS has taken steps to limit access to that information." The written notice goes on to say UPS believes the data exposure "affected packages for a small group of shippers and some of their customers from February 1, 2022 to April 24, 2023." [...]

In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, Sandy Springs, Ga. based UPS [NYSE:UPS] said the company has been working with partners in the delivery chain to understand how that fraud was being perpetrated, as well as with law enforcement and third-party experts to identify the cause of this scheme and to put a stop to it. "Law enforcement has indicated that there has been an increase in smishing impacting a number of shippers and many different industries," reads an email from Brian Hughes, director of financial and strategy communications at UPS. "Out of an abundance of caution, UPS is sending privacy incident notification letters to individuals in Canada whose information may have been impacted," Hughes said. "We encourage our customers and general consumers to learn about the ways they can stay protected against attempts like this by visiting the UPS Fight Fraud website."

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed new rules to crack down on hidden fees charged by cable and satellite video providers. "My administration's top priority is lowering the cost of living for the middle class, and that includes cracking down on companies' use of junk fees to hide true costs from families, who end up paying more as a result," Biden said in a statement on Tuesday. Ars Technica reports: As Biden noted, the FCC "proposed a new rule that would require cable and satellite TV providers to give consumers the all-in price for the service they're offering up front." The proposed rule would force companies like Comcast, Charter Spectrum, and DirecTV to publish more accurate prices. Biden continued: "Too often, these companies hide additional junk fees on customer bills disguised as "broadcast TV" or "regional sports" fees that in reality pay for no additional services. These fees really add up: according to one report, they increase customer bills by nearly 25 percent of the price of base service."

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel first floated pricing transparency rules for the TV services offered by cable and satellite companies in March. That effort took a step forward on Tuesday when the commission approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that seeks public comment on rules that would force video providers to offer accurate prices in advertising. "Consumers who choose a video service based on an advertised monthly price may be surprised by unexpected fees related to the cost of video programming that raise the amount of the bill significantly," the NPRM said. The cable and satellite TV companies' practice of listing "Broadcast TV" and "Regional Sports Network" fees separately from the advertised price "can be potentially misleading and interpreted as a government-imposed tax or fee, instead of a company-imposed service fee increase," and make it hard for customers to compare prices across providers, the FCC said.

The docket is available here, and comments will be accepted for 60 days after the NPRM is published in the Federal Register. The FCC said its proposal "would require cable operators and DBS [direct broadcast satellite] providers to clearly and prominently display the total cost of video programming service." The FCC is also seeking comment on whether it has the authority to impose similar requirements on other types of video providers. But Rosenworcel reportedly said in a congressional hearing that the FCC's authority under US law doesn't extend to streaming services.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: With tens of millions of regular monthly visitors, South Korean piracy site Noonoo TV made powerful enemies. The stand-off reached the boiling point in March when broadcasters formed a new anti-piracy coalition and warned of punishing legal action. Noonoo TV responded by throwing in the towel but after clone site 'Noonoo TV Season 2' appeared online, the government says it will develop an AI anti-piracy system that will stop any 'Season 3' variants in their tracks.

Alongside a promise to work closely with the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the Korea Communications Commission, and the National Security Agency to protect 'K' content from unlawful distribution, the Ministry of Science says the time is right to enhance manual work carried out by humans with automated systems better suited to the job. "Since the detection and response to illegal sites is currently centered on manual work based on human resources, to overcome this limitation, we plan to develop technology that can automatically detect and verify new versions and substitute sites," the Ministry said. "Online video service (OTT) content is a precious asset created with the blood and sweat of many people. It's a growth engine that will be responsible for the future of our country, so it is very important for mature citizens to refrain from using these illegal sites."