Food-delivery companies DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats have sued New York City over a legislation to license food-delivery apps and to permanently cap commissions they can charge restaurants. From a report: The three food-delivery companies filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York late on Thursday. The companies are seeking an injunction that would prevent New York from enforcing the fee-cap ordinance adopted last month, as well as unspecified monetary damages and a jury trial. The New York City Council approved in August a legislation which limits the amount that food-delivery companies can charge restaurants to use their platforms and requires them to obtain operating licenses that are valid for two years. read more "Those permanent price controls will harm not only Plaintiffs, but also the revitalization of the very local restaurants that the City claims to serve," the companies said in the lawsuit filed on Thursday. The suit argues that the legislation is unconstitutional because "it interferes with freely negotiated contracts between platforms and restaurants by changing and dictating the economic terms on which a dynamic industry operates."

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has joined the advisory board of hosted email service provider ProtonMail. From a report: In a statement, ProtonMail CEO and founder Andy Yen said the addition of Berners-Lee to the company's advisory board was aligned with its goal to "create an internet where people are in control of their information at all times. Our vision is to build an internet where privacy is the default by creating an ecosystem of services accessible to everyone, everywhere, every day," Yen said. Yen said the company already had a past relationship with Berners-Lee, explaining that the idea of ProtonMail was initially conceived at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, where the World Wide Web was created.

The addition of Berners-Lee comes almost immediately after ProtonMail received flak for giving a climate activist's IP address to French authorities to comply with a Swiss court order. Addressing the logging of the IP address in a blog post earlier this week, Yen said all companies have to comply with laws, such as court orders, if they operate within 15 miles of land. "No matter what service you use, unless it is based 15 miles offshore in international waters, the company will have to comply with the law," Yen said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A Long Island man was charged on Wednesday with using his position as an I.T. supervisor for Suffolk County to mine cryptocurrency from government offices, costing the county thousands of dollars in electricity. Prosecutors said that Christopher Naples, 42, of Mattituck, L.I., had hidden 46 specialized devices used to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in six rooms in the Suffolk County Center in Riverhead, including underneath floorboards and inside an unused electrical panel. Mr. Naples was charged with public corruption, grand larceny, computer trespass and official misconduct. If convicted of the top charge, he could face up to 15 years in prison.

Mr. Naples had admitted that the devices belonged to him and that he had been operating them for at least several months before the district attorney's office was alerted to the scheme. Prosecutors said that at least 10 of Mr. Naples's machines had been running since February, costing Suffolk County more than $6,000. [...] [G]iven that 36 more machines had been discovered, it was likely that Mr. Naples had cost the county thousands more. [...] [O]ne room in which Mr. Naples had placed the devices had critically important computer servers and other equipment for the entire county, and that the temperature in that room in which the devices were placed had dropped 20 degrees shortly after they were disabled.

"Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) purchased access to NSO Group's Pegasus spyware in 2019 after internal efforts to create similar iOS and Android surveillance tools failed," reports AppleInsider. The news comes less than a month after the Digital Agenda committee chairman of Germany's federal parliament, Manual Hoferlin, declared Apple to be on a "dangerous path" with plans to enact on-device child sexual assault material monitoring. He said the system undermines "secure and confidential communication" and represents the "biggest breach of the dam for the confidentiality of communication that we have seen since the invention of the Internet." From the report: The federal government revealed the agreement with NSO in a closed-door session with the German parliament's Interior Committee on Tuesday, reports Die Zeit. When the BKA began to use Pegasus is unclear. While Die Zeit says the tool was purchased in 2019 and is currently used in concert with a less effective state-developed Trojan, a separate report from Suddeutsche Zeitung, via DW.com, cites BKA Vice President Martina Link as confirming an acquisition in late 2020 followed by deployment against terrorism and organized crime suspects in March.

Officials made the decision to adopt Pegasus in spite of concerns regarding the legality of deploying software that can grant near-unfettered access to iPhone and Android handsets. As noted in the report, NSO's spyware exploits zero-day vulnerabilities to gain access to smartphones, including the latest iPhones, to record conversations, gather location data, access chat transcripts and more. Germany's laws state that authorities can only infiltrate suspects' cellphone and computers under special circumstances, while surveillance operations are governed by similarly strict rules.

BKA officials stipulated that only certain functions of Pegasus be activated in an attempt to bring the powerful tool in line with the country's privacy laws, sources told Die Zeit. It is unclear how the restrictions are implemented and whether they have been effective. Also unknown is how often and against whom Pegasus was deployed. According to Die Zeit, Germany first approached NSO about a potential licensing arrangement in 2017, but the plan was nixed due to concerns about the software's capabilities. Talks were renewed after the BKA's attempts to create its own spyware fell short.

The Biden administration on Wednesday released a blueprint for producing almost half of the nation's electricity from the sun by 2050 -- something that would require the country to double the amount of solar energy installed every year over the next four years and then double it again by 2030. From a report: The expansion of solar energy is part of President Biden's effort to fight climate change, but there would be little historical precedent for increasing solar energy, which contributed less than 4 percent of the country's electricity last year, that quickly. Such a large increase, laid out in an Energy Department report, is in line with what most climate scientists say is needed to stave off the worst effects of global warming. It would require a vast transformation in technology, the energy industry and the way people live.

The Energy Department said its calculations showed that solar panels had fallen so much in cost that they could produce 40 percent of the country's electricity by 2035 -- enough to power all American homes -- and 45 percent by 2050. Getting there will mean trillions of dollars in investments by homeowners, businesses and the government. The electric grid -- built for hulking coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants -- would have to be almost completely remade with the addition of batteries, transmission lines and other technologies that can soak up electricity when the sun is shining and to send it from one corner of the country to another.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Australia's High Court, roughly the equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court, has ruled that Facebook users are responsible for the content of complete strangers who post defamatory comments on their posts. The ruling upholds a June 2019 ruling by the Supreme Court of New South Wales, home to Australia's largest city of Sydney. And it runs counter to how virtually everyone thinks about liability on the internet.

The High Court's ruling on Wednesday is just a small part of a larger case brought against Australian news outlets, including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian, among others, by a man who said he was defamed in the Facebook comments of the newspapers' stories in 2016. The question before the High Court was the definition of "publisher," something that isn't easily defined in Australian law. From Australia's ABC News: "The court found that, by creating a public Facebook page and posting content, the outlets had facilitated, encouraged and thereby assisted the publication of comments from third-party Facebook users, and they were, therefore, publishers of those comments."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In the latest quasi-throwback toward "do not track," the UK's data protection chief has come out in favor of a browser- and/or device-level setting to allow Internet users to set "lasting" cookie preferences -- suggesting this as a fix for the barrage of consent pop-ups that continues to infest websites in the region. European web users digesting this development in an otherwise monotonously unchanging regulatory saga, should be forgiven -- not only for any sense of deja vu they may experience -- but also for wondering if they haven't been mocked/gaslit quite enough already where cookie consent is concerned.

Last month, UK digital minister Oliver Dowden took aim at what he dubbed an "endless" parade of cookie pop-ups -- suggesting the government is eyeing watering down consent requirements around web tracking as ministers consider how to diverge from European Union data protection standards, post-Brexit. (He's slated to present the full sweep of the government's data 'reform' plans later this month so watch this space.) Today the UK's outgoing information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, stepped into the fray to urge her counterparts in G7 countries to knock heads together and coalesce around the idea of letting web users express generic privacy preferences at the browser/app/device level, rather than having to do it through pop-ups every time they visit a website.

In a statement announcing "an idea" she will present this week during a virtual meeting of fellow G7 data protection and privacy authorities -- less pithily described in the press release as being "on how to improve the current cookie consent mechanism, making web browsing smoother and more business friendly while better protecting personal data" -- Denham said: "I often hear people say they are tired of having to engage with so many cookie pop-ups. That fatigue is leading to people giving more personal data than they would like. The cookie mechanism is also far from ideal for businesses and other organizations running websites, as it is costly and it can lead to poor user experience. While I expect businesses to comply with current laws, my office is encouraging international collaboration to bring practical solutions in this area. There are nearly two billion websites out there taking account of the world's privacy preferences. No single country can tackle this issue alone. That is why I am calling on my G7 colleagues to use our convening power. Together we can engage with technology firms and standards organizations to develop a coordinated approach to this challenge," she added.

Gizmodo highlights the findings of a new ProPublica report on WhatsApp's content moderation system. What they found was that there are at least 1,000 WhatsApp content moderators employed by Facebook's moderator contract firm Accenture to review user-reported content that's been flagged by its machine learning system. "They monitor for, among other things, spam, disinformation, hate speech, potential terrorist threats, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), blackmail, and "sexually oriented businesses,'" reports Gizmodo. "Based on the content, moderators can ban the account, put the user 'on watch,' or leave it alone." From the report: Most can agree that violent imagery and CSAM should be monitored and reported; Facebook and Pornhub regularly generate media scandals for not moderating enough. But WhatsApp moderators told ProPublica that the app's artificial intelligence program sends moderators an inordinate number of harmless posts, like children in bathtubs. Once the flagged content reaches them, ProPublica reports that moderators can see the last five messages in a thread.

WhatsApp discloses, in its terms of service, that when an account is reported, it "receives the most recent messages" from the reported group or user as well as "information on your recent interactions with the reported user." This does not specify that such information, viewable by moderators, could include phone numbers, profile photos, linked Facebook and Instagram accounts, their IP address, and mobile phone ID. And, the report notes, WhatsApp does not disclose the fact that it amasses all users' metadata no matter their privacy settings.

WhatsApp didn't offer much clarity on what mechanism it uses to receive decrypted messages, only that the person tapping the "report" button is automatically generating a new message between themselves and WhatsApp. That seems to indicate that WhatsApp is deploying a sort of copy-paste function, but the details are still unclear. Facebook told Gizmodo that WhatsApp can read messages because they're considered a version of direct messaging between the company and the reporter. They added that users who report content make the conscious choice to share information with Facebook; by their logic, Facebook's collection of that material doesn't conflict with end-to-end encryption. So, yes, WhatsApp can see your messages without your consent.

slack_justyb writes: Unity has filed a patent with the USPTO for "Methods and apparatuses to improve the performance of a video game engine using an Entity Component System (ECS)."

ECS methods are something that some other open source game engines already use. One example is Bevy for Rust. Some are already commenting on the ramifications of this patent application and indicating that this could be a massive overstep by Unity to attempt to patent something already used by other lesser-known game engines.

Facebook says it's finally ready to launch its most ambitious new product in years: a digital wallet called Novi. But the man leading the charge says Washington could stand in its way. From a report: Facebook needs to convince regulators skeptical of its power that it's a good idea. "If there's one thing we need, it's the benefit of the doubt," Facebook's David Marcus said in an interview with Axios. "[W]e're starting with a trust deficit that we need to compensate." Much of Facebook's broader ambitions, like building a "meta-verse" and advancing its shopping platform, are tied to innovations in payments.

Marcus -- head of F2, which stands for Facebook Financial -- visited Washington last week to meet with key regulatory stakeholders about Novi, a wallet app built on blockchain technology. Crypto-based payment systems, he says, will help to "really lower the bar for accessibility to a modern financial system." He was also there to discuss the Diem Association, a group made up of 26 corporate and non-profit members that is building a blockchain-based payments system that Novi will use.

The group is meant to act as an unbiased third party that allows various digital wallets around the world to trade using the same type of digital coin, called a Diem. Marcus says Facebook is hoping to launch Novi in conjunction with Diem by years' end. While Novi is ready to launch now, it's unclear whether Diem will be ready this year, in part because it requires more regulatory buy-in. Regardless, "we plan to actually get it out (Novi) in the market this half, no matter what," he said.

ProtonMail, a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. From a report: The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn't log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation -- in that case Swiss law. While ProtonMail didn't cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users. For the past year, a group of people have taken over a handful of commercial premises and apartments near Place Sainte Marthe in Paris. They want to fight against gentrification, real estate speculation, Airbnb and high-end restaurants. While it started as a local conflict, it quickly became a symbolic campaign. They attracted newspaper headlines when they started occupying premises rented by Le Petit Cambodge -- a restaurant that was targeted by the November 13th, 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

On September 1st, the group published an article on Paris-luttes.info, an anticapitalist news website, summing up different police investigations and legal cases against some members of the group. According to their story, French police sent an Europol request to ProtonMail in order to uncover the identity of the person who created a ProtonMail account -- the group was using this email address to communicate. The address has also been shared on various anarchist websites. The next day, @MuArF on Twitter shared an abstract of a police report detailing ProtonMail's reply. According to @MuArF, the police report is related to the ongoing investigation against the group who occupied various premises around Place Sainte-Marthe. It says that French police received a message on Europol.

"The advent of gaming, especially computer gaming, marks a fundamental break in human affairs," argues American economist Tyler Cowen (in a Bloomberg opinion column).

"Gaming is profoundly transforming two central aspects of the modern world: culture and regulation. There will be no turning back... Plenty of trading already takes place in games — involving currencies, markets, prices and contracts. Game creators and players set and enforce the rules, and it is harder for government regulators to play a central role. The lesson is clear: If you wish to create a new economic institution, put it inside a game. Or how about an app that gamifies share trading? Do you wish to experiment with a new kind of stock exchange or security outside the purview of traditional government regulation? Try the world of gaming, perhaps combined with crypto, and eventually your "game" just might influence events in the real world...

[R]egulators are already falling behind. Just as gaming has outraced the world of culture, so will gaming outrace U.S. regulatory capabilities, for a variety of reasons: encryption, the use of cryptocurrency, the difficulties of policing virtual realities, varying rules in foreign jurisdictions and, not incidentally, a lack of expertise among U.S. regulators. (At least the Chinese government's attempt to restrict youth gaming to three hours a week, while foolhardy, reflects a perceptive cultural conservatism.)

Both the culture-weakening and the regulation-weakening features of games follow from their one basic characteristic: They are self-contained worlds. Until now, human institutions and structures have depended on relatively open and overlapping networks of ideas. Gaming is carving up and privatizing those spaces. This shift is the big trend that hardly anyone — outside of gaming and crypto — is noticing.

If the much-heralded "metaverse" ever arrives, gaming will swallow many more institutions, or create countervailing versions of them. Whether or not you belong to the world of gaming, it is coming for your worlds. I hope you are ready.

"Tech companies have long encouraged putting listening devices in homes and pockets..." reports the Washington Post. "But some are growing concerned that these devices are recording even when they're not supposed to — and they're taking their fears to the courts." (Alternate URLs here and here.) On Thursday, a judge ruled that Apple will have to continue fighting a lawsuit brought by users in federal court in California, alleging that the company's voice assistant Siri has improperly recorded private conversations... [H]e ruled that the plaintiffs, who are trying to make the suit a class action case, could continue pursuing claims that Siri turned on unprompted and recorded conversations that it shouldn't have and passed the data along to third parties, therefore violating user privacy. The case is one of several that have been brought against Apple, Google and Amazon that involve allegations of violation of privacy by voice assistants...

The voice assistants are supposed to turn on when prompted — saying "Hey, Siri," for example — but the lawsuit alleges that plaintiffs saw their devices activate even when they didn't call out the wake word. That conversation was recorded without their consent and the information was then used to target advertisements toward them and sent on to third-party contractors to review, they allege... The lawsuits ask the companies to contend with what they do once they hear something they weren't intended to. Nicole Ozer, the technology and civil liberties director of the ACLU of California, said the suits are a sign that people are realizing how much information the voice technology is collecting.

"I think this lawsuit is part of people finally starting to realize that Siri doesn't work for us, it works for Apple," she said.
An Amazon spokesperson told the Post only a "small fraction" of audio is manually reviewed, and users can opt-out of those reviews or manage their recordings. Apple told the Post that isn't selling its Siri recordings, and that its recordings are not associated with an "identifiable individual." And Google pointed out that they don't retain audio recordings by default "and make it easy to manage your privacy preferences."

But there's still concerns. "A Washington Post investigation in 2019 found that Amazon kept a copy of everything Alexa records after it thinks it hears its name — even if users didn't realize," the Post adds. In a 2019 video, Post reporter Geoffrey A. Fowler even spliced together all of Amazon's recordings of his voice, into a spoken-word anthem titled "Your voice now belongs to Amazon. "Eavesdropping is an invasion," Fowler argues in the video, adding that Amazon "is putting its profits over our privacy. It's also a sign of a bold data grab that's going on in our increasingly connected homes."

This week the Guardian reported that a "tumultuous few weeks" awaits El Salvador as it prepares to become the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender on Tuesday. In August a research note by Bank of America enthused about the new law's ability to reduce the cost of cross-border transactions (remittances account for 20% of El Salvador's GDP), increase digital penetration in a country where 70% of people still do not use banks, and attract foreign investment as a first mover in cryptocurrency adoption. Since then, however, the verdict from international financial organisations — and El Salvadorans themselves — has turned decidedly pessimistic. "The law was adopted extremely quickly, without a technical study or a public debate," says Ricardo Castañeda, a local economist. "I don't think the president has fully understood the implications of the law, its potential to cause serious macroeconomic problems and convert the country into a haven for money laundering."

The regulatory framework for adoption has yet to be published and there are rumours of delays to the Chivo app. Bankers in the capital say they have received calls from anxious clients threatening to withdraw their deposits rather than risk exposure to the volatile cryptocurrency markets. The ratings agency Moody's downgraded El Salvadoran debt over fears of "weakened governance" evidenced by the new law, and the IMF — with which the government is negotiating a $1bn loan — published a blogpost highlighting the risks of adopting crypto as national currency. "The shift from euphoria to scepticism has been very fast," says Castañeda.

The potential benefits identified by the Bank of America are probably overstated. A paper by Johns Hopkins University says the cost of remittances via Bitcoin will be higher than traditional methods, and a July survey found that nearly two-thirds of El Salvadorans would not be open to accepting payment in Bitcoin. Eric Grill, CEO of Chainbytes, which produces Bitcoin ATMs, told the Guardian that his plan to relocate manufacturing to El Salvador had faced serious challenges in sourcing parts. Local geothermal energy experts say Bukele's plan to power energy-intensive Bitcoin mining activities from the country's volcanoes are wildly optimistic.
Reuters offered an update on Thursday. "In the main handicraft market of El Salvador's capital, traders complain that with a week to go before bitcoin becomes legal tender, no officials have come to explain how it will work or what benefits it may bring."

"Two-and-a-half years after the deadly Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX crash, with the final investigation report into the accident still pending, the airline's management has reached a settlement with Boeing and said it expects to resume flying the jet again by January," reports the Seattle Times: The financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed. The Seattle Times reported exclusively in January that Boeing had then offered an amount on the order of $500 million to $600 million, a large portion of which was not cash but concessions, including discounts on future airplane sales and waivers on maintenance costs... A person with knowledge of the final settlement said Saturday that it included a payment of $280 million in cash, discounts on future planes, free maintenance and parts for three years, and replacement of the aircraft that crashed — with an estimated value for the total package less than $600 million.

The settlement comes as Ethiopia is torn by a bloody civil war in the northern region of Tigray that has frayed relations with the U.S. and undermined its economy. Meanwhile, the state-owned airline has struggled for 18 months with the extreme downturn in air travel due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Parallel to the settlement over the MAX, Ethiopian Airlines this week made public a related agreement: Boeing will partner with Ethiopian to make the airline's base in Addis Ababa "Africa's aviation hub" and to set up a manufacturing facility there to make airplane parts.
The Times also looks at what's changed for Boeing since their two fatal crashes: This summer, the FAA slowed certification of Boeing's next new plane, the 777X; directed Boeing to rework its flight manuals for both the 777X and MAX 10 to include detailed emergency pilot procedures; and ordered Boeing to improve the independence of engineers working on airplane certification, after a third of those surveyed by the FAA said they feel they cannot raise safety concerns without interference... With deliveries of the 787 suspended, restoring the MAX to market acceptance is now central to Boeing's cash generation.

The jet has been back in service since late December, and more than 300 MAXs are now carrying passengers globally. Even as the pandemic continues to suppress air travel, Boeing is building new MAXs at a rate of 16 jets per month with a plan to increase production to 31 per month early in 2022. By year end, Boeing hopes to deliver more than 200 of the MAXs that were parked during the prolonged grounding...

In January, Boeing escaped serious consequences from a criminal investigation into the MAX crashes when the Department of Justice imposed a fine of $244 million, a relatively small amount for Boeing. Boeing's ongoing estimate of the total cost of the MAX crisis in financial filings has stabilized at about $21 billion, of which almost $9 billion is compensation to airline customers. Wall Street doesn't expect that to grow...

The upgraded flight controls on the MAXs flying today include fixes to the MCAS design flaws. And all MAX pilots undergo simulator training specific to the system before they fly the aircraft.

America's National Security Agency "isn't really sure when or even if quantum computers will be able to crack public key cryptography," writes TechRadar.

They report that the NSA "has expressed its reservations about the potential of quantum computing" in a new FAQ titled Quantum Computing and Post-Quantum Cryptography. "NSA does not know when or even if a quantum computer of sufficient size and power to exploit public key cryptography (a CRQC) will exist," said the security agency in response to whether it is worried about the potential of adversarial use of quantum computing. In the FAQ, the NSA describes a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer (CRQC) as a quantum computer that's capable of actually attacking real world cryptographic systems, something that's currently infeasible.

While it agrees that such a computer would be "devastating" to the digital security infrastructure, it seems to suggest that it doesn't believe such a CRQC would ever materialize.

However, the growing research in quantum computing has moved the agency to also support the development of post-quantum cryptographic standards, along with plans for eventual transition to such standards.

America's consumer-protection agency has apparently launched a "preliminary investigation" into how often McDonalds franchise owners are allowed to repair their own McFlurry-making equipment, reports CBS Moneywatch (citing an article Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal).

The machine's manufacturer insists that the product's warranty is void if purchasers attempt to fix machines on their own, according to the Wall Street Journal. But CBS MoneyWatch adds: It's illegal for companies to make warranties conditional on the use of certain parts or services, a practice antitrust law calls "tying"...

The Federal Trade Commission in July issued a new policy broadly in favor of the "right to repair," an issue that President Joe Biden singled out in a broad executive order on anticompetitive practices. The agency is now writing new rules targeting repair restrictions. "If this [case] is connected to that, it's going to be the first example of the FTC looking at repair restrictions as something worth investigating," said Nathan Proctor, senior director of the Right to Repair campaign for the U.S. Public Interest Group.

"One project going dark — due to a DMCA takedown or otherwise — can impact thousands of developers," GitHub warns in a blog post this week: We saw that firsthand with both leftpad and mimemagic. That's why GitHub's designed its DMCA process to follow the law in requiring takedown requests to identify specific content. We want developers on our platform and elsewhere to have a clear opportunity to remove infringing code yet keep non-infringing code up for others to use, modify, and learn from.

Ensuring that software copyright allegations are specific and actionable benefits the entire developer ecosystem. That's why GitHub submitted a "friend of the court" brief in the SAS Institute, Inc. v. World Programming Ltd. case before a Federal Court of Appeals.

This case is the most recent in a ten-year litigation spanning both the UK and the US. SAS Institute has brought copyright and non-copyright claims against World Programming's software that runs code written in the SAS language, and the copyright claims drew comparison to the recent Google v. Oracle Supreme Court case. But this case is different from Google v. Oracle because here the alleged copyright infringement is based on a claim of "nonliteral" infringement. That means there is no allegation that specific lines of code were literally copied, but only that other aspects, like the code's overall structure and organization, were used. In nonliteral infringement claims, the questions arise: what aspects of the "nonliteral" features were taken and are they actually protected by copyright...?

GitHub believes that for claims involving nonliteral copying of software, it is critical that a copyright owner provide — as early as possible — examples that would allow a developer, a court, or a software collaboration platform like GitHub to identify what was claimed to be copied. Our brief helps educate the court why specificity is especially important for developers.... We urged the court to think about efficiency in dispute resolution to avoid FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). The sooner infringement allegations can be made specific and clear, the sooner infringing code can be changed and non-infringing code can stay up. That should be the result for both federal lawsuits, as well as DMCA infringement notices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Take-Two Interactive has sued several programmers and enthusiasts said to be behind the popular re3 and reVC Grand Theft Auto fan projects. The lawsuit says that after the company filed a DMCA takedown notice to remove the projects from Github, the defendants filed a bad faith counter notice to have the content reinstated, thus triggering this copyright infringement lawsuit. "Defendants' source code projects, known as re3 and reVC, purport to have created a set of software files (which Defendants claim they 'reverse engineered' from the original Game software) that allow members of the public to play the Games on various hardware devices, but with so-called 'enhancements' and 'modifications' added by Defendants," the complaint reads (PDF). "Perhaps most notably, Defendants claim that their derivative GTA source code enables players to install and run the Games on multiple game platforms, including those on which the Games never have been released, such as the PlayStation Vita and Nintendo Switch." According to Take-Two, the defendants' conduct is willful and deliberate since they are well aware that they do not have the necessary rights to copy, adapt or distribute derivative GTA source code or the audiovisual elements of the games. The gaming giant adds that [defendant Angelo Papenhoff] publicly expressed concern that Take-Two would find out about the 're3' and 'reVC' projects.
[...]
Take-Two says that by willfully and maliciously copying, adapting and distributing its source code and other content, all of the defendants have infringed its exclusive rights under copyright law. As a result, the company is entitled to damages in amounts to be determined at trial or, alternatively, a maximum statutory damages award of $150,000 for each infringed work. Additionally, the gaming company says that by submitting bad faith DMCA counternotices to have the projects restored to Github, three of the defendants made misrepresentations under U.S.C. 512(f). Finally, Take-Two is seeking temporary, preliminary, and permanent injunctive relief to restrain the defendants from continuing their allegedly infringing activities. The company wants all infringing source code and games removed from the Internet and wants the defendants to hand over all materials that infringe its rights. Take-Two also wants a full accounting of "any and all sales or downloads of products or services" that infringe its rights.

The US Commerce Department said Friday that it will eliminate an internal security division after an investigation found it had overstepped its authority when it launched criminal investigations into Commerce employees and US citizens. From a report: The Investigations and Threat Management Service division had no "adequate legal authority" to conduct criminal investigations, according to an internal investigation by the Commerce Department's Office of General Counsel.

The investigators recommended that the ITMS unit be eliminated within 90 days, and that its security duties be folded into other Commerce divisions. The Commerce Department said in a statement it would accept the report's recommendations. "Our most important priority is creating an environment at the Department of Commerce where employees feel safe and respected," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in the statement. "We are committed to maintaining our security, but also equally committed to protecting the privacy and civil liberties of our employees and the public."

[...] ITMS was the subject of a Congressional investigation earlier this year. In May, Sen. Roger Wicker, (R-Mississippi), the ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, released a fact sheet detailing a Congressional investigation into the ITMS that began in February. Wicker's memo claimed that ITMS "surveilled social media activity on Twitter to monitor accounts that posted commentary critical of processes used to conduct the US Census." The Washington Post was first to report on ITMS' activities.