The Washington Post shares a story that hasn't been previously disclosed. "Russian agents came to the home of Google's top executive in Moscow to deliver a frightening ultimatum last September: take down an app that had drawn the ire of Russian President Vladimir Putin within 24 hours or be taken to prison." Google quickly moved the woman to a hotel where she checked in under an assumed name and might be protected by the presence of other guests and hotel security, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The same agents — believed by company officials to be from Russia's FSB, a successor to the KGB intelligence service — then showed up at her room to tell her the clock was still ticking.

Within hours, an app designed to help Russians register protest votes against Putin could no longer be downloaded from Google or Apple, whose main representative in Moscow faced a similarly harrowing sequence....

The unnerving encounters, which have not previously been disclosed, were part of a broader campaign that Putin intensified last year to erode sources of internal opposition — moves now helping him maintain his hold on power amid a global backlash over the invasion of Ukraine. In a single year, Putin had his political nemesis Alexei Navalny imprisoned after a poisoning attempt failed to kill him; pushed independent news outlets to the brink of extinction; orchestrated a Kremlin-controlled takeover of Russia's Facebook equivalent; and issued "liquidation" orders against human rights organizations.

Amid this internal offensive, Putin also moved to bring foreign technology companies to heel. Moscow deployed new devices that let it degrade or even block Russians' access to Facebook and Twitter, imposed fines totaling $120 million on firms accused of defying Kremlin censors, and ordered 13 of the world's largest technology companies to keep employees in Russia and thus exposed to potential arrest or other punishment for their employers' actions — a measure that U.S. executives refer to as the "hostage law."

On their own, these moves were seen as disparate signs of Russia' descent into authoritarianism. But they also laid the groundwork for the Soviet-style suppression of free expression now underway in Russia, much as the months-long military buildup set the stage for the invasion of Ukraine.
The article also notes "preliminary evidence that the suppression strategy is working. "Polls, whose reliability is always uncertain in Russia, show that a majority of Russians support the war. In interviews with Western journalists that have gone viral online, Russians who rely on state-controlled media have consistently echoed Kremlin falsehoods about eradicating alleged Nazism in Ukraine while seeming to be genuinely oblivious to the war's carnage."

The article also notes how Apple is responding to Ukraine's crisis — but also includes this anecdote: Apple has similarly kept employees in Russia and taken other steps to placate the Kremlin. The company last year began configuring iPhones sold in Russia to promote Kremlin-backed social media companies, enabling users to activate them with a single click. It is an accommodation Apple has rarely made elsewhere and advances Putin's goal of migrating Russian people to platforms controlled by the government, according to Russia analysts.

Friday the Verge reported: The Main Directorate for Combating Organized Crime and Corruption of Belarus (GUBOPiK) has detained prominent Wikipedia editor Mark Bernstein, according to the Belarusian publication Zerkalo.

The arrest comes after Bernstein's personal information was shared on GOBUPiK's public Telegram channel. Bernstein is one of the top 50 editors of Russian Wikipedia. The Verge was able to confirm that Bernstein's information — including his social media, Wikipedia handle, and place of work — had been shared in GUBOPik's channel on the messaging app. A video of Bernstein's arrest was also posted alongside his photo and personal details. In the photo itself, Bernstein is accused of "distributing fake anti-Russian information." The channel has since been made private....

In an activity log of Bernstein's purported Wikimedia username, you can see that he's made over 200,000 edits to Russian Wikipedia articles. Currently, his account is described as "blocked indefinitely."
"Earlier in March, Slate reported on the same Wikipedia editor and his efforts to ensure the correct information hits pages about the invasion," adds The Byte.

On Saturday the human rights site Charter 97 reported that Bernstein was given 15 days of arrest, "according to the Viasna human rights center."

"People around the world are using a new website to circumvent the Kremlin's propaganda machine by sending individual messages about the war in Ukraine to random people in Russia," reports the Wall Street Journal.

"The website was developed by a group of Polish programmers who obtained some 20 million cellphone numbers and close to 140 million email addresses owned by Russian individuals and companies."

A Tuesday report from the Daily Dot: Created by the hacking group known as Squad303, the tool, hosted at the domain 1920.in, loads a pre-written statement into a user's native SMS app that attempts to inform Russians about the ongoing conflict.

"Dear Russians, your media is being censored. The Kremlin is lying," the statement reads. "Find out the truth about Ukraine on the free internet and in the Telegram app. Time to overthrow dictator Putin!"

In a statement to the Daily Dot, a member of Squad303 described the effort as a "non-violent communication project" aimed at bypassing Russia's crackdown on independent news sources.

The domain name for the tool refers to Poland's surprise victory against Russian forces in 1920.

"We know that people wanted to get engaged to help Ukrainians. We wanted to deliver them a tool to start a dialog with Russians," the group said.... Squad303 claims that its tool has already been used to send out more than 6.3 million text messages, although the Daily Dot was unable to confirm the number.

"Companies critical to U.S. national interests will now have to report when they're hacked or they pay ransomware, according to new rules approved by Congress," reports the Associated Press: The rules are part of a broader effort by the Biden administration and Congress to shore up the nation's cyberdefenses after a series of high-profile digital espionage campaigns and disruptive ransomware attacks. The reporting will give the federal government much greater visibility into hacking efforts that target private companies, which often have skipped going to the FBI or other agencies for help. "It's clear we must take bold action to improve our online defenses," Sen. Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat who leads the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee and wrote the legislation, said in a statement on Friday.

The reporting requirement legislation was approved by the House and the Senate on Thursday and is expected to be signed into law by President Joe Biden soon. It requires any entity that's considered part of the nation's critical infrastructure, which includes the finance, transportation and energy sectors, to report any "substantial cyber incident" to the government within three days and any ransomware payment made within 24 hours....

The legislation designates the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as the lead agency to receive notices of hacks and ransomware payments.... The new rules also empower CISA to subpoena companies that fail to report hacks or ransomware payments, and those that fail to comply with a subpoena could be referred to the Justice Department for investigation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wall Street Journal: It's time to Spring Forward again, as most of the U.S. shifts Sunday into daylight-saving time. If it were up to some lawmakers, the lost hour of sleep every March would be but a fixture of the past. The tradition of setting clocks forward in the spring and backward in the fall has been a source of debate and consternation for decades. Efforts to make daylight-saving time -- or, in some cases, standard time -- permanent have bubbled up in state houses over the years. But the bipartisan cause to stop the time changes has gained renewed momentum recently (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), with lawmakers citing studies identifying the negative effects of clock changes on people's health and the economy.

Eighteen states have passed legislation or resolutions in the past four years making daylight-saving time permanent, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In 2022, 28 states are weighing bills regarding the time changes, according to the group, which tracks state laws. The majority of the 68 measures seek to make daylight-saving time the permanent standard -- making the changes less likely to be swiftly enacted. Under current federal law, any state can choose to observe standard time year-round. But states can't move to follow daylight-saving time permanently without changes to federal law.

A bipartisan group of senators, including Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Ed Markey (D., Mass.), reintroduced legislation in March 2021 to make daylight-saving time the year-round standard. The legislation would allow similar laws passed in states including Florida, Georgia, Delaware, Oregon and Louisiana to take effect. But the bill hasn't made much progress in the past year. "Switching in and out of daylight-saving time is outdated," Mr. Rubio said in a video message Thursday, renewing calls for action. "Let's just lock the clock once and for all and put all this stupidity behind us." [...] Lawmakers hoping to make daylight-saving time permanent say it would reduce car accidents, risks for heart attacks and reduce energy use. Some researchers, however, have questioned the role that time change plays in energy conservation and its correlation to negative health impacts.

Landmark legislation that will drastically curtail tech companies' ability to stop employees from talking about mistreatment is headed to the governor's desk in Washington state. GeekWire reports: Last week, Washington legislators approved House Bill 1795 -- also called the Silenced No More Act -- in major victory for activists who have fought to limit non-disclosures and non-disparagement agreements. The legislation, introduced by Rep. Liz Berry (D-Seattle), makes it illegal for companies to ban employees from discussing "illegal acts of discrimination, harassment, retaliation, wage and hour violations, and sexual assault."

"This bill is about empowering workers," said Berry in a statement last week. "It is about giving workers a voice. Despite the progress we've made in recent years, too many workers are still forced to sign NDAs and settlement agreements that silence them. This bill will allow all survivors of inappropriate or illegal workplace misconduct to share their experiences if they choose to do so." NDAs have long been common practice at many large tech companies, and often state that employees will have to repay severance money or face other financial ramifications if they violate the agreement.

Washington state will be the second state to ban these types of gag orders; California passed its own Silenced No More Act last year. There, the legislation passed despite vocal opposition from trade groups, which argued that employees could end up getting hurt if companies decide to limit severance payments, or to forgo them altogether.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that alleged REvil ransomware affiliate, Yaroslav Vasinskyi, was extradited to the United States last week to stand trial for the Kaseya cyberattack. BleepingComputer reports: Vasinkyi, a 22-year-old Ukrainian national, was arrested in November 2021 while entering Poland for his cybercrime activities as a REvil member. Vasinkyi is believed to be a REvil ransomware affiliate tasked to breach corporate networks worldwide, steal unencrypted data, and then encrypt all of the devices on the network. Shortly after Vasinkyi was arrested, the DOJ announced that he was responsible for the ransomware attack against Kaseya, a managed services provider, impacting thousands of companies worldwide.

"In the alleged attack against Kaseya, Vasinskyi caused the deployment of malicious Sodinokibi/REvil code throughout a Kaseya product that caused the Kaseya production functionality to deploy REvil ransomware to "endpoints" on Kaseya customer networks," explained the U.S. DoJ announcement. "After the remote access to Kaseya endpoints was established, the ransomware was executed on those computers, which resulted in the encryption of data on computers of organizations around the world that used Kaseya software." Vasinskyi is facing the following charges: conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in connection with computers; intentional damage to protected computers; and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

"If convicted for all counts, Vasinskyi will be sentenced to a total of 115 years in prison," adds BleepingComputer. "Additionally, he will also forfeit all property and financial assets."

The White House has been closely watching TikTok's rise as a dominant news source, leading to its decision to approach a select group of the platform's most influential names. From a report: This week, the administration began working with Gen Z For Change, a nonprofit advocacy group, to help identify top content creators on the platform to orchestrate a briefing aimed at answering questions about the conflict and the United States' role in it.

The briefing was led by Matt Miller, a special adviser for communications at the White House National Security Council, and Psaki. The Washington Post obtained a recording of the call, and in it, Biden officials stressed the power these creators had in communicating with their followers. "We recognize this is a critically important avenue in the way the American public is finding out about the latest," said the White House director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, "so we wanted to make sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source."

Russia has effectively legalized patent theft from anyone affiliated with countries "unfriendly" to it, declaring that unauthorized use will not be compensated. The Washington Post reports: The decree, issued this week, illustrates the economic war waged around Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as the West levies sanctions and pulls away from Russia's huge oil and gas industry. Russian officials have also raised the possibility of lifting restrictions on some trademarks, according to state media, which could allow continued use of brands such as McDonald's that are withdrawing from Russia in droves. The effect of losing patent protections will vary by company, experts say, depending on whether they have a valuable patent in Russia. The U.S. government has long warned of intellectual property rights violations in the country; last year Russia was among nine nations on a "priority watch list" for alleged failures to protect intellectual property. Now Russian entities could not be sued for damages if they use certain patents without permission.

The patent decree and any further lifting of intellectual property protections could affect Western investment in Russia well beyond any de-escalation of the war in Ukraine, said Josh Gerben, an intellectual property lawyer in Washington. Firms that already saw risks in Russian business would have more reason to worry. "It's just another example of how [Putin] has forever changed the relationship that Russia will have with the world," Gerben said. Russia's decree removes protections for patent holders who are registered in hostile countries, do business in them or hold their nationality.

The Kremlin has not issued any decree lifting protections on trademarks. But Russia's Ministry of Economic Development said last week that authorities are considering "removing restrictions on the use of intellectual property contained in certain goods whose supply to Russia is restricted," according to Russian state news outlet Tass, and that potential measures could affect inventions, computer programs and trademarks. The ministry said the measures would "mitigate the impact on the market of supply chain breaks, as well as shortages of goods and services that have arisen due to the new sanctions of western countries," Tass stated. Gerben said a similar decree on trademarks would pave the way for Russian companies to exploit American brand names that have halted their business in Russia. He gave a hypothetical involving McDonald's, one of the latest global giants to suspend operations in Russia under public pressure.

Google has been making unauthorized pages for restaurants and using them to take a cut of fees from delivery orders through sites like Postmates, DoorDash and Grubhub, according to a lawsuit Tuesday in San Francisco federal court. Reuters reports: The proposed class action (PDF) filed by Left Field Holdings, a Florida franchisee of Lime Fresh Mexican restaurants, said Google has been creating illegitimate digital "storefronts" for restaurants and deceiving users into thinking that the restaurants approved them. The lawsuit says Google takes a cut from the delivery sites for orders made through the storefronts, and in some cases delivery sites pay Google to divert users to them.

Left Field said restaurants are charged up to 30% of each order in fees by delivery sites, and therefore see "little (if any)" profits from them. Google never received permission to sell the restaurants' food, designed the storefronts to look like they were restaurant-appproved, and placed a large "Order Online" button under restaurant search results to lure users to its storefronts, according to Left Field. [...] The lawsuit accuses Google of deceiving customers and violating federal trademark law starting in 2019. It asks for an undisclosed amount of money damages on behalf of Left Field and similarly affected restaurant owners and a ban on Google's alleged misuse of their trade names. In response to the lawsuit, a Google spokesperson said that the "Order Online" feature is meant to "connect customers with restaurants they want to order food from," and that it lets restaurants "indicate whether they support online orders or prefer a specific provider, including their own ordering website."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets has released what it says is 800GB of data from a section of Roskomnadzor, the Russian government body responsible for censorship in the country. On Distributed Denial of Secrets' website, the organization describes the data as coming from a hack and says that Anonymous claimed responsibility. Roskomnadzor is the agency that has in recent days announced a block of Facebook and other websites in the country as the war in Ukraine intensifies.

Specifically, Distributed Denial of Secrets says the data comes from the Roskomnadzor of the Republic of Bashkortostan. The Republic of Bashkortostan is in the west of the country. Motherboard found references to the Republic of Bashkortostan in some of the released files. The data is split into two main categories: a series of over 360,000 files totalling in at 526.9GB and which date up to as recently as March 5, and then two databases that are 290.6GB in size, according to Distributed Denial of Secrets' website. "The source, a part of Anonymous, urgently felt the Russian people should have access to information about their government. They also expressed their opposition to the Russian people being cut off from independent media and the outside world," wrote DDoSecrets on its website, as highlighted by Forbes.

"We will soon be releasing the raw data while we look for solutions to extracting the data. One appears to be a legal research database that was, according to the file timestamp, last modified in 2020. The other appears to be a database for HR procedures." Given the size of the leak and timing, they note "it's always possible that something could be modified or planted."

HBO was hit with a class action lawsuit on Tuesday alleging that it shares subscribers' viewing history with Facebook, in violation of a federal privacy law. Variety reports: A class action law firm, Bursor & Fisher, filed the suit in federal court in New York on behalf of two HBO Max subscribers, Angel McDaniel and Constance Simon. The suit alleges that HBO provides Facebook with customer lists, which allows Facebook to match customers' viewing habits with their Facebook profiles. The suit alleges that HBO never receives consent from subscribers to do this, thereby violating the Video Privacy Protection Act. The act was passed in 1988, after a reporter obtained Robert Bork's rental history from a video store.

The lawsuit argues that HBO knows that Facebook can combine such data because HBO is a major advertiser on Facebook, and it in fact uses that information to retarget Facebook ads to its own subscribers. HBO Max has a privacy policy on its website, in which it discloses that it and its partners use cookies to deliver personalized ads, among other purposes. But the VPPA requires that subscribers give separate consent to share their video viewing history. "In other words," the lawsuit states, "a standard privacy policy will not suffice."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: DuckDuckGo is now down-ranking sites associated with Russian disinformation in response to the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine, but some critics say the change amounts to censorship. DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg announced the down-ranking on Twitter. "Like so many others I am sickened by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create," he wrote in the tweet, which included the hashtag StandWithUkraine. "At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation," he added. Weinberg didn't elaborate on the decision, or how the down-ranking will work. [...] Weinberg was quick to defend the decision, saying it was necessary to provide relevant search results over disinformation. Not everyone is a fan of the decision. "So you are censoring your users? DDG now decides what is or isn't misinformation? This decision should be left to the user," wrote one user on Twitter.

"You've got that magic 'disinformation finder' eh?" wrote another user. "You're just sure you're going to only downrank things that are wrong?"

Others referenced DuckDuckGo's commitment to "unbiased search."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Another European privacy watchdog has sanctioned the controversial facial recognition firm, Clearview AI, which scrapes selfies off the Internet to amass a databased of some 10 billion of faces to power an identity-matching service it sells to law enforcement. Italy's data protection agency today announced a [roughly $22 million] penalty for breaches of EU law -- as well as ordering the controversial company to delete any data on Italians it holds and banning it from any further processing of citizens' facial biometrics. Its investigation was instigated following "complaints and reports," it said, noting that as well as breaches of privacy law it found the company had been tracking Italian citizens and people located in Italy.

"The findings revealed that the personal data held by the company, including biometric and geolocation data, are processed illegally, without an adequate legal basis, which certainly cannot be the legitimate interest of the American company," the Garante said in a press release. Other General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) breaches it identified included transparency obligations (on account of Clearview not having adequately informed users of what it was doing with their selfies); violations of purpose limitation and having used user data for purposes other than those for which they were published online; and also breaches of data retention rules with no limit on storage. "Clearview AI's activity therefore violates the freedoms of the data subjects, including the protection of confidentiality and the right not to be discriminated against," the authority also said. CEO Hoan Ton-That said in a statement: "Clearview AI does not have a place of business in Italy or the EU, it does not have any customers in Italy or the EU, and does not undertake any activities that would otherwise mean it is subject to the GDPR."

Ton-That added: "We only collect public data from the open internet and comply with all standards of privacy and law. I am heartbroken by the misinterpretation by some in Italy, where we do no business, of Clearview AI's technology to society. My intentions and those of my company have always been to help communities and their people to live better, safer lives."

The Georgia state Senate voted 33-21 on Tuesday to pass a bill that seeks to prohibit social media platforms from removing or censoring content amid an outcry from conservatives that their political views are being discriminated against, even though a similar Texas law has been put on hold by a federal court. The Associated Press reports: Senate Bill 393 moves to the House for more debate. It declares that social media companies that have more than 20 million users in the United States are common carriers and that they can't block people from receiving certain messages based on viewpoints, location, race, ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, gender, sexual orientation or disability. "What we are stating here is you cannot be discriminated against for your viewpoint, your gender, your age or other things in this 21st century public square," said Sen. Greg Dolezal, a Cumming Republican who is sponsoring the bill. Dolezal said companies could still pull down lewd, obscene or offensive materials.

But the technology industry says the measure is illegal, in part because it would unconstitutionally make private companies host speech they don't agree with. They also argue that private owners should be able to do as they please with their own property. Dolezal has acknowledged that the state would be sued if it passed the law, but argues that a challenge could be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, breaking new and desirable ground. Researchers have not found widespread evidence that social media companies are biased against conservative news, posts or materials.

The bill says social media companies must publish how it moderates content, targets content to specific users, and how it boosts the reach or hides specific content. It also says social media companies have to publish a report every six months on how often they were alerted to potentially illegal content and how many times they removed or downplayed content and suspended or removed users. Anyone who doesn't think a company is following the law could file a civil lawsuit, including a class action, in Georgia courts.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GIzmodo: Ormeus is a cryptocurrency that was launched in 2017, the brainchild of John and Tina Barksdale -- two siblings and self-identified crypto marketers -- who are now facing federal securities charges in connection with their business. In a complaint unsealed Tuesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged the siblings with defrauding their investors out of $124 million. In an accompanying federal indictment unsealed the same day, the Justice Department announced multiple charges against John Barksdale -- wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Both agencies allege that the duo used misleading and outright fraudulent marketing techniques to lure in investors to a coin that wasn't nearly as valuable as they claimed.

"As alleged, Barksdale operated like a traveling salesman and peddled lies, overstatements, and misrepresentations regarding a cryptocurrency called Ormeus Coin, which resulted in duping thousands of investors throughout the world," said Ricky J. Patel, Homeland Security Investigations New York Special Agent in Charge, in a statement. According to officials, the Barksdales claimed that their business was supported by "one of the largest crypto mining operations in the world" and that the company was raking in monthly mining revenue between $5.4 and $8 million. The Barksdales also heralded their token as a "new digital money system backed by a fully-audited industrial crypto-mining operation." But, according to federal officials, most of those claims were BS.

Officials say the Ormeus mining operations shut down in 2019 after drawing too little money, that it never reached even a million dollars per month. According to the DOJ, John Barksdale claimed to have $250 million worth of Bitcoin stored at the mining operation that would secure the token's value. In reality, the coins belonged to someone else, the indictment states. The indictment against him claims that misrepresentations and fabrications about the coin's value were promoted via Ormeus Global, a multi-level marketing company that used false and manipulative advertising to encourage hapless investors to go all-in on the coin.

Apple said on Tuesday it has filed a lawsuit against Israeli cyber firm NSO Group and its parent company OSY Technologies for alleged surveillance and targeting of U.S. Apple users with its Pegasus spyware. From a report: The iPhone maker said it is also seeking to ban NSO Group from using any Apple software, services or devices to prevent further abuse. Apple is the latest in a string of companies and governments to come after NSO, the maker of the Pegasus hacking tool that watchdog groups say targeted human rights workers and journalists.

For the last two years, Unified Patents, an international organization of over 200 businesses, has been winning the battle against patent trolls "to keep them from stealing from the companies and organizations that actually use patents' intellectual property (IP)," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan Nichols. "This is their story to date." From the report: Unified Patents brings the fight to the trolls. It deters patent trolls from attacking its members by making it too expensive for the troll to win. The group does this by examining troll patents and their activities in various technology sectors (Zones). The United Patents Open Source Software Zone (OSS Zone) is the newest of these Zones. [...] Even before OSS Zone was formally launched, Unified Patents along with the Open Invention Network (OIN), the world's largest patent non-aggression group, launched legal cases against poor quality PAE-owned (Patent Assertion Entities) patents. The Linux Foundation and Microsoft have also joined the OSS Zone to battle these bad patents. [...]

Together, United Patents uses open-source software evidence as proof to establish that the trolls often don't have a case. This is done using Inter Partes Review (IPR), a 2012 legal tool for showing that a bad patent never should have been granted in the first place. [Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin] notes, "The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)'s discretionary rulings on IPRs have changed the landscape around NPEs. These cases take a long time to be resolved. Typically, it takes from 12 to 24 months. That also makes them expensive for both the OSS Zone and the trolls. Keith Bergelt, the OIN's CEO, said "In other technology areas when patents go through the IPR process or are reexamined, there is a settlement around 20% of the time. In the OSS Zone, there are few settlements. This makes it more costly and difficult to administer, but also is difficult on the PAEs. When the success rate against their patents is over 95%, certain PAEs that would otherwise hope to settle have essentially given up on defending their patents." Still, with such a high success rate, it's worth the expense.

To date, Unified has overseen and managed 43 challenges. Of these, 12 patents were found invalid, another 23 cases have been instituted, and six are still in process. This has led to multiple settlements for Unified Patents members. These, in turn directly pass through to OIN's 3,600+ community members. For example, an Accelerated Memory Tech patent 6,513,062, was used by the troll IP Investments Group to claim that the open-source Redis, which manages cache resources on the cloud, violated the patent. Redis, not having any money, IP Investments Group instead went after Hulu, Citrix Systems, Barracuda Networks, Kemp Technologies, and F5 Networks for their use of Redis software. IP Investments Group gave up rather than fighting it out. Everyone who uses Redis wins. It's one small victory, but that's how the patent troll wars are won. And, with the United Patents' high-success rate in knocking out bad patents, slowly but surely the patent trolls are being driven back from not only open-source software but all software.

With sanctions against Russia starting to bite, the Kremlin is mulling ways to keep businesses and the government running. The latest is a creative twist on state asset seizures, only instead of the government taking over an oil refinery, for example, Russia is considering legalizing software piracy. Ars Technica reports: Russian law already allows for the government to authorize -- "without consent of the patent holder" -- the use of any intellectual property "in case of emergency related to ensuring the defense and security of the state." The government hasn't taken that step yet, but it may soon, according to a report from Russian business newspaper Kommersant, spotted and translated by Kyle Mitchell, an attorney who specializes in technology law. It's yet another sign of a Cyber Curtain that's increasingly separating Russia from the West.

The plan would create "a compulsory licensing mechanism for software, databases, and technology for integrated microcircuits," the Kommersant said. It would only apply to companies from countries that have imposed sanctions. While the article doesn't name names, many large Western firms -- some of which would be likely targets -- have drastically scaled back business in Russia. So far, Microsoft has suspended sales of new products and services in Russia, Apple has stopped selling devices, and Samsung has stopped selling both devices and chips. Presumably, any move by the Kremlin to "seize" IP would exempt Chinese companies, which are reportedly considering how to press their advantage. Smartphone-makers Xiaomi and Honor stand to gain, as do Chinese automakers. Still, any gains aren't guaranteed since doing business in Russia has become riddled with problems, spanning everything from logistics to finance.

Zelle, the payments platform used by millions of customers, is a popular target of scammers. But banks have been reluctant to make fraud victims whole -- despite owning the system. From a report: Consumers love payment apps like Zelle because they're free, fast and convenient. Created in 2017 by America's largest banks to enable instant digital money transfers, Zelle comes embedded in banking apps and is now by far the country's most widely used money transfer service. Last year, people sent $490 billion through Zelle, compared with $230 billion through Venmo, its closest rival. Zelle's immediacy has also made it a favorite of fraudsters. Other types of bank transfers or transactions involving payment cards typically take at least a day to clear. But once crooks scare or trick victims into handing over money via Zelle, they can siphon away thousands of dollars in seconds. There's no way for customers -- and in many cases, the banks themselves -- to retrieve the money.

Nearly 18 million Americans were defrauded through scams involving digital wallets and person-to-person payment apps in 2020, according to Javelin Strategy & Research, an industry consultant. "Organized crime is rampant," said John Buzzard, Javelin's lead fraud analyst. "A couple years ago, we were just starting to talk about it" on apps like Zelle and Venmo, Mr. Buzzard said. "Now, it's common and everywhere." The banks are aware of the widespread fraud on Zelle. When Mr. Faunce called Wells Fargo to report the crime, the customer service representative told him, "A lot of people are getting scammed on Zelle this way." Getting ripped off for $500 was "actually really good," Mr. Faunce said the rep told him, because "many people were getting hit for thousands of dollars."