A prison term of up to one year and other tougher penalties for online insults came into effect Thursday as part of Japan's efforts to tackle cyberbullying. From a report: The revised Penal Code also raised the fine for insults to up to 300,000 yen ($2,200), upping the ante from the current penalty of detention for less than 30 days or a fine of less than 10,000 yen. The statute of limitations for insults has also been extended from one year to three years.

Moves to amend the law gained traction after Hana Kimura, a 22-year-old professional wrestler and cast member on the popular Netflix reality show "Terrace House," was believed to have committed suicide in May 2020 after receiving a barrage of hateful messages on social media. Two men in Osaka and Fukui prefectures were fined 9,000 yen each for insults posted about TV personality Kimura before her death, but some expressed concern the penalties were too light, which led to the push for the legal changes.

In a study conducted in Columbus, researchers found that neighborhoods with more dogs had lower rates of homicide, robbery and, to a lesser extent, aggravated assaults compared to areas with fewer dogs, at least when residents also had high levels of trust in each other. Phys.Org reports: The results suggest that people walking their dogs puts more "eyes on the street," which can discourage crime, said Nicolo Pinchak, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in sociology at The Ohio State University. "People walking their dogs are essentially patrolling their neighborhoods," Pinchak said. "They see when things are not right, and when there are suspect outsiders in the area. It can be a crime deterrent."

For the study, researchers looked at crime statistics from 2014 to 2016 for 595 census block groups -- the equivalent of neighborhoods -- in the Columbus area. They obtained survey data from a marketing firm that asked Columbus residents in 2013 if they had a dog in their household. Finally, they used data from the Adolescent Health and Development in Context study (which Browning runs) to measure trust in individual neighborhoods. As part of that study, residents were asked to rate how much they agreed that "people on the streets can be trusted" in their neighborhoods. Research has shown that trust among neighbors is an important part of deterring crime, because it suggests residents will help each other when facing a threat and have a sense of "collective efficacy" that they can have a positive impact on their area, Pinchak said.

Results of this study showed, as expected, that neighborhoods with high levels of trust had lower levels of homicide, robbery and aggravated assaults when compared to neighborhoods with low levels of trust. But among high-trust neighborhoods, those with high concentrations of dogs showed an additional drop in crime compared to those with low concentrations of dogs. Among the high-trust neighborhoods, neighborhoods high in dog concentration had about two-thirds the robbery rates of those low in dog concentration and about half the homicide rates, the study found. It really has to do with the dog walking, Pinchak said. [...] Results showed that the trust and dog-walking combination helped reduce street crimes: those crimes like homicides and robberies that tend to occur in public locations, including streets and sidewalks. The study found that more dogs in a neighborhood was also related to fewer property crimes, like burglaries, irrespective of how much residents trust each other, Pinchak said. [...] The protective effect of dogs and trust was found even when a wide range of other factors related to crime was taken into account, including the proportion of young males in the neighborhood, residential instability and socioeconomic status. The study was published in the journal Social Forces.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: After causing outrage among online services including Cloudflare, the most aggressive pirate site injunction ever handed down in the US has undergone significant weight loss surgery. Now before the court is a heavily modified injunction that is most notable for everything that's been removed. It appears that Cloudflare drew a very clear line in the sand and refused to step over it. [...] The injunctions granted extreme powers, from residential ISP blocking to almost any other action the plaintiffs deemed fit to keep the sites offline. Almost immediately that led to friction with third-party service providers and the situation only worsened when a concerned Cloudflare found itself threatened with contempt of court for non-compliance. The CDN company fought back with support from Google and EFF and that led the parties back to the negotiating table. Filings in the case last week suggested an acceptance by the plaintiffs that the injunction cannot be enforced in its present form. The parties promised to work on a new injunction to address both sides' concerns and as a result, a new proposal now awaits the court's approval. [...]

With the contempt of court issue behind them, Cloudflare and the plaintiffs appear to have settled their differences. An entire section in the injunction dedicated to Cloudflare suggests that the CDN company is indeed prepared to help the video companies but they'll have to conform to certain standards. Before even contacting Cloudflare they'll first need to make "reasonable, good faith efforts to identify and obtain relief for the identified domains from hosting providers and domain name registries and registrars."

If the plaintiffs still need Cloudflare's assistance, Cloudflare will comply with requests against domain names listed in this injunction and future injunctions by preventing access to the following: "Pass-through security services, content delivery network (CDN) services, video streaming services, and authoritative DNS services, DNS, CDN, streaming services, and any related services." An additional note states that the plaintiffs acknowledge that Cloudflare's compliance "will not necessarily prevent the Defendants from providing users with access to Defendants' infringing services." Given the agreement on the terms, the amended injunction will likely be signed off by the court in the coming days. Service providers everywhere will breathe a sigh of relief while rightsholders will have a template for similar cases moving forward. The proposed amended injunction documents can be found here (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 pdf).

The former top corporate lawyer at Apple pleaded guilty to insider trading charges, for what prosecutors called a five-year scheme to trade ahead of the iPhone maker's quarterly earnings announcements. Gene Levoff, 48, of San Carlos, California, pleaded guilty to six securities fraud charges at a hearing before U.S. District Judge William Martini in Newark, New Jersey. From a report: Levoff allegedly exploited his roles as corporate secretary, head of corporate law and co-chair of a committee that reviewed drafts of Apple's results to generate $604,000 of illegal gains on more than $14 million of trades from 2011 to 2016. Prosecutors said Levoff ignored the quarterly "blackout periods" that barred trading before Apple's results were released, as well as the company's broader insider trading policy -- which he was responsible for enforcing. "Gene Levoff betrayed the trust of one of the world's largest tech companies for his own financial gain," First Assistant U.S. Attorney Vikas Khanna in New Jersey said in a statement.

The government is failing to enact the policies needed to reach the UK's net zero targets, its statutory advisers have said, in a damning progress report to parliament. From a report: The Climate Change Committee (CCC) voiced fears that ministers may renege on the legally binding commitment to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, noting "major policy failures" and "scant evidence of delivery." Lord Deben, the chair of the committee and a former Conservative environment secretary, said the government had set strong targets on cutting emissions but policy to achieve them was lacking. "The government has willed the ends, but not the means," he said. "This report showed that present plans will not fulfil the commitments [to net zero]."

He said net zero policies were also the best way to reduce the soaring cost of living. Average household bills would be about $151.3 lower today if previous plans on green energy and energy efficiency had been followed through. "If you want to deal with the cost of living crisis, this is exactly what you need to do," he said. The greatest failure was the insulation policy. Britain's homes are the draughtiest in western Europe, heating costs are crippling household budgets, and heating is one of the biggest single sources of carbon emissions, but the government has no plans to help most people insulate their homes.

schwit1 writes: Mickey will be for the public domain in 2024, following U.S. copyright laws that state intellectual property on artistic work expires at the 95-year mark. When Mickey Mouse first appeared, Disney's copyright was protected for 56 years. The company supported the Copyright Act of 1976 which extended protections for 75 years. In 1998, Disney lobbied for a further extension. It is unclear whether the entertainment giant plans to make another move before 2023 to prevent Mickey from being moved into the public domain. Once copyright expires, anyone wishing to use characters from everyone's favorite rodent will not have to request permission or pay copyright charge.

A hacker has claimed to have procured a trove of personal information from the Shanghai police on one billion Chinese citizens, which tech experts say, if true, would be one of the biggest data breaches in history. From a report: The anonymous internet user, identified as "ChinaDan," posted on hacker forum Breach Forums last week offering to sell the more than 23 terabytes (TB) of data for 10 bitcoin BTC=, equivalent to about $200,000. "In 2022, the Shanghai National Police (SHGA) database was leaked. This database contains many TB of data and information on Billions of Chinese citizen," the post said. "Databases contain information on 1 Billion Chinese national residents and several billion case records, including: name, address, birthplace, national ID number, mobile number, all crime/case details." Reuters was unable to verify the authenticity of the post. The Shanghai government and police department did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.

Privacy advocates warn internet activity could someday be used to prosecute women who sought abortions. But it's already happened, reports the Washington Post.

In a handful of cases over the years, "American prosecutors have used text messages and online research as evidence against women facing criminal charges related to the end of their pregnancies." Despite mounting concerns that the intricate web of data collected by fertility apps, tech companies and data brokers might be used to prove a violation of abortion restrictions, in practice, police and prosecutors have turned to more easily accessible data — gleaned from text messages and search history on phones and computers. These digital records of ordinary lives are sometimes turned over voluntarily or obtained with a warrant, and have provided a gold mine for law enforcement. "The reality is, we do absolutely everything on our phones these days," said Emma Roth, a staff attorney at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. "There are many, many ways in which law enforcement can find out about somebody's journey to seek an abortion through digital surveillance...."

Women have been punished for terminating pregnancy for years. Between 2000 and 2021, more than 60 cases in the United States involved someone being investigated, arrested or charged for allegedly ending their own pregnancy or assisting someone else, according to an analysis by If/When/How, a reproductive justice nonprofit. If/When/How estimates the number of cases may be much higher, because it is difficult to access court records in many counties throughout the country.

A number of those cases have hinged on text messages, search history and other forms of digital evidence.
In 2015 an Indiana woman received a sentence of 20 years in prison based partly on text messages she'd sent, according to the article (though that conviction was overturned).

It's provoked concern in countries around the world, and an activist group helping women travel to countries with less restrictive laws tells the Post that they now use encrypted messaging apps like Signal and VPNs to minimize records of their web searches.

The British army is "investigating an apparent hack," reports Engadget, after its official Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised Sunday: News of the breach was first reported by Web3 is Going Great . According to the blog, both accounts were simultaneously compromised to promote two different cryptocurrency scams.

Although it has since been scrubbed, the army's verified Twitter account was briefly changed to look like a page for The Possessed, a project involving a collection of 10,000 animated NFTs with a price floor of 0.58 Ethereum (approximately $1,063). During that time, the account tweeted out multiple links to a fake minting website....

Over on YouTube, the army's channel [had] been made to look like a page for Ark Invest...livestreaming videos that repurpose old footage of Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and Ark CEO Katie Wood discussing cryptocurrency. The clips feature an overlay promoting "double your money" Bitcoin and Ethereum scams. According to Web3 is Going Great, a similar scheme netted scammers $1.3 million this past May. It's unclear who is behind the attacks.

On Tuesday Brendan Carr, a commissioner on America's Federal Communications Commission,warned on Twitter that TikTok, owned by China-based company ByteDance, "doesn't just see its users dance videos: It collects search and browsing histories, keystroke patterns, biometric identifiers, draft messages and metadata, plus it has collected the text, images, and videos that are stored on a device's clipboard. Tiktok's pattern of misrepresentations coupled with its ownership by an entity beholden to the Chinese Community Party has resulted in U.S. military branches and national security agencies banning it from government devices.... The CCP has a track record longer than a CVS receipt of conducting business & industrial espionage as well as other actions contrary to U.S. national security, which is what makes it so troubling that personnel in Beijing are accessing this sensitive and personnel data.
Today CNN interviewed Carr, while also bringing viewers an update. TikTok's China-based employees accessed data on U.S. TikTok users, BuzzFeed had reported — after which TikTok announced it intends to move backup data to servers in the U.S., allowing them to eventually delete U.S. data from their servers. But days later Republican Senator Blackburn was still arguing to Bloomberg that "Americans need to know if they are on TikTok, communist China has their information."

And FCC commissioner Carr told CNN he remains suspicious too: Carr: For years TikTok has been asked directly by U.S. lawmakers, 'Is any information, any data, being accessed by personnel back in Beijing?' And rather than being forthright and saying 'Yes, and here's the extent of it and here's why we don't think it's a problem,' they've repeatedly said 'All U.S. user data is stored in the U.S.," leaving people with the impression that there's no access.... This recent bombshell reporting from BuzzFeed shows at least some of the extent to which massive amounts of data has allegedy been going back to Beijing.

And that's a problem, and not just a national security problem. But to me it looks like a violation of the terms of the app store, and that's why I wrote a letter to Google and Apple saying that they should remove TikTok and boot them out of the app store... I've left them until July 8th to give me a response, so we'll see what they say. I look forward to hearing from them. But there's precedence for this. Before when applications have taken data surreptitiously and put it in servers in China or otherwise been used for reasons other than servicing the application itself, they have booted them from the app store. And so I would hope that they would just apply the plain terms of their policy here.
When CNN points out the FCC doesn't have jurisdiction over social media, Carr notes "speaking for myself as one member" they've developed "expertise in terms of understanding how the CCP can effectively take data and infiltrate U.S. communications' networks. And he points out that the issue is also being raised by Congressional hearings and by Republican and Democrat Senators signing joint letters together, so "I'm just one piece of a broader federal effort that's looking at the very serious risks that come from TikTok." Carr: At the end of the day, it functions as sophisticated surveillance tool that is harvesting vast amounts of data on U.S. users. And I think TikTok should answer point-blank, has any CCP member obtained non-public user data or viewed it. Not to answer with a dodge, and say they've never been asked for it or never received a request. Can they say no, no CCP member has ever seen non-public U.S. user data.
Carr's appearance was followed by an appearance by TikTok's VP and head of public policy for the Americas. But this afternoon Carr said on Twitter that TikTok's response contradicted its own past statements: Today, a TikTok exec said it was "simply false" for me to say that they collect faceprints, browsing history, & keystroke patterns.

Except, I was quoting directly from TikTok's own disclosures.

TikTok's concerning pattern of misrepresentations about U.S. user data continues.

What exactly happened after El Salvador president Nayib Bukele made Bitcoin a legal tender for the country? "As Bitcoin has dropped more than 50 percent of its value this year, there have been suggestions that El Salvador's investment has pushed the country to the brink of bankruptcy," writes a Salvadoran political/human rights journalist in the New York Times.

"However, implying that the country's risk of default derives from the crypto-enthusiasm is wrong: The economic turmoil preceded and is bigger than that." The article notes that prior to their move into Bitcoin, "the Salvadoran economy was already stretched. Total debt amounted to about 90 percent of G.D.P., a large chunk of which had been accumulated by prior administrations or spurred by pandemic-related expenses."

But what are we missing with this focus on Bitcoin? Mr. Bukele has weaponized Bitcoin to whitewash his government's growing authoritarianism on the world stage. By spreading his propaganda, Bitcoin believers are promoting a product — and lining their pockets — at the expense of our rights and livelihoods.... Over the past three months, the government has used a state of emergency to imprison almost 40,000 people, often without defense. Mr. Bukele has begun to crack down on press freedom, through a gag law that prohibits reproducing messages from gangs and his government hasn't investigated the illegal use of Pegasus spyware to monitor dozens of journalists who cover El Salvador, including me, from independent news outlets between 2020 and 2021. Reporters have already fled the country, fearing reprisal for doing their jobs....

It's pretty obvious to anyone who visits any place in El Salvador other than its beaches that Mr. Bukele is not building a techno-utopia; he's building a run-of-the-mill authoritarian state in a tech disguise. Bitcoiners would do well to remember that when they cheer for Mr. Bukele, they're not ushering in the technology of the future; they're enabling a regime that's violating the human rights of its citizens. After all, the economic freedom Bitcoin promises is worth nothing to Salvadorans if it's the only freedom we can hope to have.
But even ignoring human rights issues — the Bitcoin experiment remains unpopular in El Salvador: Remittances account for more than 20 percent of El Salvador's G.D.P., because of a large diaspora mainly based in the United States. But, according to the Central Bank of El Salvador, only 1.5 percent of remittances went through digital wallets in April, which shows Salvadorans haven't gotten onboard with Bitcoin despite the promise of needed savings. And Mr. Bukele's plan for selling his Bitcoin bonds has stalled.

Just one year into Mr. Bukele's Bitcoin experiment, average Salvadorans can tell that Bitcoin isn't working for them. In May, a national poll showed that 71 percent of Salvadorans said they didn't see any benefit from the law for their family economy. Another found that about two of every 10 Salvadorans support the decision to adopt Bitcoin. Those Salvadorans haven't adopted the currency. A paper published in April by the National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that "despite the legal tender status of Bitcoin and the large incentives implemented by the government, the cryptocurrency is largely not an accepted medium of exchange in El Salvador...." A December national poll showed that only about 11 percent of respondents believed the main beneficiaries of the Bitcoin law are the people, while about 80 percent believed it's either the rich, foreign investors, banks, businesspeople or the government.

"Boeing's troubled 737 MAX planes — which have twice crashed, killing 346 people — have experienced at least six mid-air emergencies and dozens of groundings in the year after an extensive probe cleared them to fly," reports Australia's public broadcaster ABC News: The incidents, pulled from U.S. government air safety databases, are among more than 60 mid-flight problems reported by pilots in the 12 months after the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recertified the plane's airworthiness in late 2020. Former employees of both Boeing and the FAA characterised the reports — which included engine shutdowns and pilots losing partial control of the plane — as serious and with the potential to end in tragedy.

In one incident in December 2021, a United Airlines pilot declared a mayday after the system controlling the pitch and altitude of the plane started malfunctioning...

The MAX's flight control system also failed on 22 separate flights, a problem which became the primary focus of the FAA's 20-month recertification effort after the two fatal crashes. More than 42 incidents involved equipment malfunctions, and on more than 40 occasions, flight crews chose to ground the affected aircraft while problems were fixed.... Some planes also had a multitude of problems. One Alaskan Airlines MAX-9 was grounded seven times over five months due to malfunctions with its navigation or communication equipment.

A Boeing spokeswoman told the ABC, "none of the reports indicate a trend".

"In fact, the in-service reliability of the 737 MAX is consistent with other commercial airplane models," the spokeswoman said. "Since November 2020, the 737 MAX has flown more than 1.5 million flight hours in more than 580,000 revenue flights. The overwhelming majority of these flights have been conducted without any incident."
Former senior Boeing manager Ed Pierson — who worked at the 737 MAX factory in Seattle between 2015 and 2018 — told ABC "There are a lot of similarities between what we're seeing in some of the reports with what happened during these two crashes."

The article also reports that America's Federal Aviation Administration "has now confirmed it did not investigate Boeing's alleged production problems after the crashes."

Later the article adds that the U.S. government "will announce a new audit examining Boeing's production oversight of the 737 MAX planes."

Slashdot reader thegarbz writes: In 2019 Maastricht University in the Netherlands was hit with a ransomware attack which locked 25,000 staff and students out of their research data. The university agreed to pay a ransom of €200,000 to unlock the encrypted data, reports German broadcaster DW. It seems that a small part of the ransom has been recovered, but with a twist.

A university official said the money will go into "a fund to help financially strapped students."

"A metallic NATO is starting to take shape," writes the senior metals columnist at Reuters, "though no-one is calling it that just yet." The Minerals Security Partnership is in theory open to all countries that are committed to "responsible critical mineral supply chains to support economic prosperity and climate objectives". But the coalition assembled by the United States is one of like-minded countries such as Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany with an Asian axis in the form of Japan and South Korea. [Also the European Commission, as well as Finland and Sweden.]

It is defined as much as anything by who is not on the invite list — China and Russia.

China's dominance of key enabling minerals such as lithium and rare earths is the single biggest reason why Western countries are looking to build their own supply chains. Russia, a major producer of nickel, aluminium and platinum group metals, is now also a highly problematic trading partner as its war in Ukraine that the Kremlin calls a "special military operation" grinds on. A previously highly globalised minerals supply network looks set to split into politically polarised spheres of influence, a tectonic realignment with far-reaching implications. The United States and Europe have realised that they can't build out purely domestic supply chains quickly enough to meet demand from the electric vehicle transition....

The process was already well underway before the U.S. State Department announced the formation of the Minerals Security Partnership on June 14. U.S. and Canadian officials have been working closely as Canada fleshes out a promised C$3.8 billion ($3.02 billion) package to boost production of lithium, copper and other strategic minerals. European Commission Vice-President Maros Sefcovic has just been in Norway to seal "a strategic partnership" on battery technologies and critical raw materials.
The article points out America's Department of Defense is already investing $120 million in a new plant for heavy rare earths separation — and has chosen an Australian company as its partner.

Shortly thereafter the Defense Department noted an online disinformation campaign against its new partner (according to U.S.-based cybersecurity firm Mandiant), disinformation which Reuters describes as "a pro-China propaganda campaign" using fake social media accounts to try to stir up opposition.

Reuters shares the results of its investigation into what it calls "mercenary hackers": Reuters identified 35 legal cases since 2013 in which Indian hackers attempted to obtain documents from one side or another of a courtroom battle by sending them password-stealing emails. The messages were often camouflaged as innocuous communications from clients, colleagues, friends or family. They were aimed at giving the hackers access to targets' inboxes and, ultimately, private or attorney-client privileged information.

At least 75 U.S. and European companies, three dozen advocacy and media groups and numerous Western business executives were the subjects of these hacking attempts, Reuters found.

The Reuters report is based on interviews with victims, researchers, investigators, former U.S. government officials, lawyers and hackers, plus a review of court records from seven countries. It also draws on a unique database of more than 80,000 emails sent by Indian hackers to 13,000 targets over a seven-year period. The database is effectively the hackers' hit list, and it reveals a down-to-the-second look at who the cyber mercenaries sent phishing emails to between 2013 and 2020.... The targets' lawyers were often hit, too. The Indian hackers tried to break into the inboxes of some 1,000 attorneys at 108 different law firms, Reuters found....

"It is an open secret that there are some private investigators who use Indian hacker groups to target opposition in litigation battles," said Anthony Upward, managing director of Cognition Intelligence, a UK-based countersurveillance firm.

The legal cases identified by Reuters varied in profile and importance. Some involved obscure personal disputes. Others featured multinational companies with fortunes at stake. From London to Lagos, at least 11 separate groups of victims had their emails leaked publicly or suddenly entered into evidence in the middle of their trials. In several cases, stolen documents shaped the verdict, court records show.
Reuters spoke to email experts including Linkedin, Microsoft and Google to help confirm the authenticity of the data they'd received, and reports that one high-profile victim was WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann. (After Reuters told him he'd been targetted starting in 2017, Neumann hired a law firm.) "Reuters reached out to every person in the database — sending requests for comment to each email address — and spoke to more than 250 individuals. Most of the respondents said the attempted hacks revealed in the email database occurred either ahead of anticipated lawsuits or as litigation was under way."

America's FBI has been investigating the breachers since at least early 2018, Reuters reports, adding that pressure is now increasing on private eyes who acted as go-betweens for interested clients.

Meanwhile, Reuters found former employees of the mercenary firms, who told them that the firms employed dozens of workers — though "a month's salary could be as low as 25,000 rupees (then worth about $370), according to two former workers and company salary records...

"Asked about the hacker-for-hire industry, an official with India's Ministry of Justice referred Reuters to a cybercrime hotline, which did not respond to a request for comment."

U.S. right-to-repair advocates hoped a district judge would finally rule Friday on Massachusetts' voter-approved right-to-repair referendum. But they were disappointed again, reports the Boston Globe, since instead the judge said he'd first have to consider a recent ruling by America's Supreme Court limiting the regulatory powers of the U.S. government's Environmental Protection Agency: The Massachusetts law was approved by 75 percent of voters in a 2020 referendum. But its implementation has been held up by court challenges ever since. It would require all automakers selling new cars in Massachusetts to provide buyers with access to "telematic" data â diagnostic information â via a wireless connection. That way, car owners could get their cars repaired at any independent repair shop, instead of being forced to have the work done at manufacturer-approved dealerships.

But the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an association of the world's top carmakers, sued to overturn the law, arguing that only the federal government, not states, may enact such a rule. In addition, carmakers said that they could not redesign the digital systems of their cars in time to comply with the law's 2022 model-year deadline.

The lawsuit went to trial last summer, but the court's judgment has been repeatedly delayed. In the meantime, at least two auto manufacturers, Subaru and Kia, began selling cars in Massachusetts with their telematic features switched off, to avoid violating the law.
The state's attorney general has now granted a two-week "grace period" during which the law won't be enforced, according to the article, while the district judge "said that he expected to rule before the end of a two-week grace period."

An anonymous reader shares this report from NBC News: A controversial bitcoin mining operation on the largest of central New York's Finger Lakes does not meet the requirements of state climate laws, New York's Department of Environmental Conservation ruled Thursday, denying an air permit request the entity's owner, Greenidge Generation LLC., made in March 2021.

Renewing the air permit for the Greenidge facility on Seneca Lake "would be inconsistent with or would interfere with the attainment of statewide greenhouse gas emission limits," the Department of Environmental Conservation, or DEC, said in its ruling. It added that the company, which burns natural gas at its plant, has "failed to demonstrate that the continued operation of the facility is justified notwithstanding this inconsistency, as it has not provided any electric system reliability or other ongoing need for the facility." Greenhouse gas emissions from the plant have increased "dramatically" since a previous permit was issued to Greenidge in 2016 and after the 2019 enactment of New York's Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, DEC said.

Local residents and environmental groups lauded the decision. Greenidge said it would continue to operate the plant under its current permit while it challenged the DEC ruling....

Greenidge took over a mothballed power plant on the shores of Seneca Lake in 2014 and requested permits to operate it as a so-called peaker plant, providing electricity to the grid in times of heavy use. While the operation initially supplied most of its power to the grid, DEC found its main purpose has become bitcoin mining.
The article adds that the global usage of electricity for bitcoin mining "roughly equals the consumption of Pakistan, according to the University of Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index."

Google has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a legal fight with app developers over the money they earned creating apps for Android smartphones and for enticing users to make in-app purchases. Reuters reports: The app developers, in a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco, had accused Google of using agreements with smartphone makers, technical barriers and revenue sharing agreements to effectively close the app ecosystem and shunt most payments through its Google Play billing system with a default service fee of 30%.

As part of the proposed settlement, Google said in a blog post it would put $90 million in a fund to support app developers who made $2 million or less in annual revenue from 2016-2021. "A vast majority of U.S. developers who earned revenue through Google Play will be eligible to receive money from this fund, if they choose," Google said in the blog post. Google said it would also charge developers a 15% commission on their first million in revenue from the Google Play Store each year. It started doing this in 2021. "There were likely 48,000 app developers eligible to apply for the $90 million fund, and the minimum payout is $250," notes Reuters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: The day after Russia's February invasion of Ukraine, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner sent a letter (PDF) to Google warning it to be on alert for "exploitation of your platform by Russia and Russian-linked entities," and calling on the company to audit its advertising business's compliance with economic sanctions. But as recently as June 23, Google was sharing potentially sensitive user data with a sanctioned Russian ad tech company owned by Russia's largest state bank, according to a new report provided to ProPublica.

Google allowed RuTarget, a Russian company that helps brands and agencies buy digital ads, to access and store data about people browsing websites and apps in Ukraine and other parts of the world, according to research from digital ad analysis firm Adalytics. Adalytics identified close to 700 examples of RuTarget receiving user data from Google after the company was added to a U.S. Treasury list of sanctioned entities on Feb. 24. The data sharing between Google and RuTarget stopped four months later on June 23, the day ProPublica contacted Google about the activity.

RuTarget, which also operates under the name Segmento, is owned by Sberbank, a Russian state bank that the Treasury described as "uniquely important" to the country's economy when it hit the lender with initial sanctions. RuTarget was later listed in an April 6 Treasury announcement that imposed full blocking sanctions on Sberbank and other Russian entities and people. The sanctions mean U.S. individuals and entities are not supposed to conduct business with RuTarget or Sberbank. Of particular concern, the analysis showed that Google shared data with RuTarget about users browsing websites based in Ukraine. This means Google may have turned over such critical information as unique mobile phone IDs, IP addresses, location information and details about users' interests and online activity, data that U.S. senators and experts say could be used by Russian military and intelligence services to track people or zero in on locations of interest. Google spokesperson Michael Aciman told ProPublica that the company blocked RuTarget from using its ad products in March, and that RuTarget has not purchased ads directly via Google since then. "He acknowledged the Russian company was still receiving user and ad buying data from Google before being alerted by ProPublica and Adalytics," adds the report.

"Aciman said this action includes not only preventing RuTarget from further accessing user data, but from purchasing ads through third parties in Russia that may not be sanctioned. He declined to say whether RuTarget had purchased ads via Google systems using such third parties, and he did not comment on whether data about Ukrainians had been shared with RuTarget."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: A teen charged with setting a fire that killed five members of a Senegalese immigrant family in Denver, Colorado, has become the first person to challenge police use of Google search histories to find someone who might have committed a crime, according to his lawyers. In documents filed Thursday in Denver District Court, lawyers for the 17-year-old argue that the police violated the Constitution when they got a judge to order Google to check its vast database of internet searches for users who typed in the address of a home before it was set ablaze on Aug. 5, 2020. Three adults and two children died in the fire.

That search of Google's records helped point investigators to the teen and two friends, who were eventually charged in the deadly fire, according to police records. All were juveniles at the time of their arrests. Two of them, including the 17-year-old, are being tried as adults; they both pleaded not guilty. The defendant in juvenile court has not yet entered a plea. The 17-year-old's lawyers say the search, and all evidence that came from it, should be thrown out because it amounted to a blind expedition through billions of Google users' queries based on a hunch that the killer typed the address into a search bar. That, the lawyers argued, violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches. "People have a privacy interest in their internet search history, which is really an archive of your personal expression," said Michael Price, who is lead litigator of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' Fourth Amendment Center and one of the 17-year-old's attorneys. "Search engines like Google are a gateway to a vast trove of information online and the way most people find what they're looking for. Every one of those queries reveals something deeply private about a person, things they might not share with friends, family or clergy."

Price said that allowing the government to sift through Google's vast trove of searches is akin to allowing the government access to users' "thoughts, concerns, questions, fears." He added: "Every one of those queries reveals something deeply private about a person, things they might not share with friends, family or clergy," Price said. "'Psychiatrists in Denver.' 'Abortion providers near me.' 'Does God exist.' Every day, people pose those questions to Google seeking information."