A computer using artificial intelligence can't be listed as an inventor on patents because only a human can be an inventor under U.S. law, a federal judge ruled in the first American decision that's part of a global debate over how to handle computer-created innovation. From a report: Federal law requires that an "individual" take an oath that he or she is the inventor on a patent application, and both the dictionary and legal definition of an individual is a natural person, ruled U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia. The Artificial Inventor Project, run by University of Surrey Law Professor Ryan Abbott, has launched a global effort to get a computer listed as an inventor. Abbott's team enlisted Imagination Engines founder Stephen Thaler to build a machine whose main purpose was to invent. Rulings in South Africa and Australia have favored his argument, though the Australian patent office is appealing the decision in that country. "We respectfully disagree with the judgment and plan to appeal it," Abbott said in an email. "We believe listing an AI as an inventor is consistent with both the language and purpose of the Patent Act. Brinkema cited cases in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the nation's top patent court, rejected the idea of a corporation being an inventor.

Apple has delayed plans to roll out its child sexual abuse (CSAM) detection technology that it chaotically announced last month, citing feedback from customers and policy groups. From a report: That feedback, if you recall, has been largely negative. The Electronic Frontier Foundation said this week it had amassed more than 25,000 signatures from consumers. On top of that, close to 100 policy and rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, also called on Apple to abandon plans to roll out the technology. In a statement on Friday morning, Apple told TechCrunch: "Last month we announced plans for features intended to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them, and limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material. Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features."

Mina Hsiang will lead the U.S. Digital Service, the Office of Management and Budget told Axios Thursday, as the Biden administration beefs up its cadre of technological special forces tasked with solving problems across the federal government. From the report: Washington is preparing to spend trillions in infrastructure money allocated by the president's top-priority legislation, and building and tuning the digital systems for those programs will demand know-how. Hsiang will be the first woman and first Asian-American to be the administrator of USDS, which was launched in 2014 in the aftermath of the troubled rollout of the HealthCare.gov website.

Hsiang is a USDS veteran from the Obama administration and worked on the HealthCare.gov rescue team. More recently, she helped the Biden administration with the launch of the Vaccines.gov website to help Americans find COVID-19 vaccines. She will fill the vacancy left by the April departure of Matt Cutts, the Google veteran who led the service from 2017.

USDS teams are deployed for crisis work that needs a quick response -- such as assisting at the southern border or helping with the Afghanistan evacuation. They also help implement new programs like those created by the American Rescue Plan. "Government services -- and helping people access those services via many channels, including digitally -- are more critical now than ever," Hsiang told Axios. "The pandemic has been a catalyst to our country's collective awareness of this truth and has mobilized people to step up and act." Earlier this week, the Biden administration announced a new program, the U.S. Digital Corps, aimed at bringing software engineers, data scientists and others into federal agencies for two-year fellowships.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: It looks like a Lightning cable, it works like a Lightning cable, and I can use it to connect my keyboard to my Mac. But it is actually a malicious cable that can record everything I type, including passwords, and wirelessly send that data to a hacker who could be more than a mile away. This is the new version of a series of penetration testing tools made by the security researcher known as MG. MG previously demoed an earlier version of the cables for Motherboard at the DEF CON hacking conference in 2019. Shortly after that, MG said he had successfully moved the cables into mass production, and cybersecurity vendor Hak5 started selling the cables. But the more recent cables come in new physical variations, including Lightning to USB-C, and include more capabilities for hackers to play with.

"There were people who said that Type C cables were safe from this type of implant because there isn't enough space. So, clearly, I had to prove that wrong. :)," MG told Motherboard in an online chat. The OMG Cables, as they're called, work by creating a Wi-Fi hotspot itself that a hacker can connect to from their own device. From here, an interface in an ordinary web browser lets the hacker start recording keystrokes. The malicious implant itself takes up around half the length of the plastic shell, MG said. MG said that the new cables now have geofencing features, where a user can trigger or block the device's payloads based on the physical location of the cable. "It pairs well with the self-destruct feature if an OMG Cable leaves the scope of your engagement and you do not want your payloads leaking or being accidentally run against random computers," he said. "We tested this out in downtown Oakland and were able to trigger payloads at over 1 mile," he added. He said that the Type C cables allow the same sort of attacks to be carried out against smartphones and tablets. Various other improvements include being able to change keyboard mappings, the ability to forge the identity of specific USB devices, such as pretending to be a device that leverages a particular vulnerability on a system.

UK ISP Sky Broadband is monitoring the IP addresses of servers suspected of streaming pirated content to subscribers and supplying that data to an anti-piracy company working with the Premier League. That inside knowledge is then processed and used to create blocklists used by the country's leading ISPs, to prevent subscribers from watching pirated events. An anonymous reader shares the report from Torrent Freak: In recent weeks, an anonymous source shared a small trove of information relating to the systems used to find, positively identity, and then ultimately block pirate streams at ISPs. According to the documents, the module related to the Premier League work is codenamed 'RedBeard.' The activity appears to start during the week football matches or PPV events take place. A set of scripts at anti-piracy company Friend MTS are tasked with producing lists of IP addresses that are suspected of being connected to copyright infringement. These addresses are subsequently dumped to Amazon S3 buckets and the data is used by ISPs to block access to infringing video streams, the documents indicate. During actual event scanning, content is either manually or fingerprint matched, with IP addresses extracted from DNS information related to hostnames in media URLs, load balancers, and servers hosting Electronic Program Guides (EPG), all of which are used by unlicensed IPTV services.

The big question then is how the Premier League's anti-piracy partner discovers the initial server IP addresses that it subsequently puts forward for ISP blocking. According to documents reviewed by TF, information comes from three sources -- the anti-piracy company's regular monitoring (which identifies IP addresses and their /24 range), manually entered IP addresses (IP addresses and ports), and a third, potentially more intriguing source -- ISPs themselves. The document revealing this information is not dated but other documents in the batch reference dates in 2021. At the time of publishing date, the document indicates that ISP cooperation is currently limited to Sky Broadband only. TorrentFreak asked Friend MTS if that remains the case or whether additional ISPs are now involved. It appears that instead of monitoring customer IP addresses, Sky is compiling data on which IP addresses subscribers are pulling most data from during (and potentially before) match or event times. Sky then uploads the highest-trafficked IP addresses along with the port the traffic is streamed on to the S3 bucket mentioned above, every five minutes. It is then accessed by the anti-piracy company which, every five minutes, extracts the IP, bandwidth rate, and the port number that bandwidth is on. At the time of the document's publication, the Sky 'Top Talker' threshold for the Premier League's 'RedBeard' module was 100mbps. The IP address information provided by the ISP that exceeds this limit then appears to be cross-referenced by IP address and port number with data obtained during game week scanning at Friend MTS. It is then processed accordingly. Torrent Freak goes on to note that the Premier League is "seeking cooperation from additional ISPs too."

"In summary, it appears that Sky subscribers aren't being directly monitored per se, but the servers they draw most bandwidth from are being noted by Sky and that data is being forwarded for anti-piracy enforcement," the report adds. "This means that Sky subscribers' piracy habits are directly providing information to support Premier League, Matchroom Boxing, and Queensbury Promotions blocking efforts."

Apple will start asking for permission to enable Personalized Ads in iOS 15, the company's method of serving relevant ads in the App Store and Apple News by analyzing what you read, purchase, and search for on your device. From a report: The company used to collect that information by default, but now it plans to ask for permission. Apple required other developers to seek users' permission with the debut of App Tracking Transparency, so it seems like it's showing that it will hold itself to a similar standard. The Personalized Ads pop-up should show up when you open the App Store if you're running the most recent iOS 15 beta. In the pop-up, Apple writes that the ads will help you discover relevant apps, products, and services while protecting your privacy by using "device-generated identifiers and not linking advertising information to your Apple ID."

A team of researchers with AMD have filed a patent application that looks toward a more efficient and reliable quantum computing architecture, thanks to a conventional multi-SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) approach. Tom's Hardware reports: According to the application, AMD is researching a system that aims to use quantum teleportation to increase a quantum system's reliability, while simultaneously reducing the number of qubits necessary for a given calculation. The aim is to both alleviate scaling problems and calculation errors stemming from system instability. The AMD patent, titled "Look Ahead Teleportation for Reliable Computation in Multi-SIMD Quantum Processor," aims to improve quantum stability, scalability, and performance in novel, more efficient ways. It describes a quantum architecture based on quantum processing regions: areas of the chip that hold or can hold qubits, lying in wait for their turn on the processing pipeline. AMD's approach aims to improve on existing quantum architectures by actually reducing the number of qubits needed to perform complex calculations -- via the science fiction-esque concept of quantum teleportation.

AMD's design aims to teleport qubits across regions, enabling workloads that would theoretically require in-order execution to become capable of being processed in an out-of-order philosophy. As a quick refresher, in-order execution features dependencies between one instruction and the next, meaning that a workload has to be processed sequentially, with later steps dependent on the previous step being fully processed and its result being known before the chip can move ahead with the computation. As you may imagine, there are chip resources (in this case, qubits) that sit idle until it's their time to perform the next calculation step. On the other hand, Out-of-order execution analyzes a given workload, figures out which parts of it are dependent on previous results and which are not, and executes every step of the instruction that doesn't require a previous result, thus improving performance via increased parallelism.

AMD's patent also includes a look-ahead processor embedded into the architecture, tasked to analyze the input workload, predict what steps can be tackled in parallel (and those that can't), and appropriately distribute the workload across qubits, using a quantum teleporting technique to deliver them to the required quantum processing, SIMD-based region. How this quantum teleportation occurs isn't described in the patent -- it looks like AMD is playing its cards close to its chest on this one.

schwit1 shares a report from Slate: Enrolling more students at one of America's best public universities might be bad for the environment. That's the conclusion of California Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman, who on Aug. 23 ordered the University of California-Berkeley to temporarily freeze the number of students it admits every year under the California Environmental Quality Act, putting crowded classrooms in the same category as heavy infrastructure like highways and airports. "Further increases in student enrollment above the current enrollment level at UC-Berkeley could result in an adverse change or alteration of the physical environment," the judge wrote (PDF).

How'd we get here? Under California law, universities are periodically required to prepare a long-term development plan that includes enrollment forecasts and an environmental impact study. In 2005, UCâ"Berkeley produced one projecting that its headcount would stabilize at about 33,500 students. Instead, the school ended up enrolling more than 42,000 by 2020, with plans to admit more still in the years to come. The university didn't think that welcoming more students to campus required it to perform a whole new environmental review. But a state appeals court in San Francisco disagreed in 2020, ruling (PDF) that increasing enrollment counted as a "project" that needed to be evaluated under the CEQA, just like building a stadium or dorm would be. In doing so, the judges sided with a local community group, Save Berkeley's Neighborhoods, which sued UC-Berkeley in 2019 and set the stage for last week's lower court decision officially hitting pause on the school's enrollment ambitions. California's flagship public university must now assess the ecological cost of its student body at once.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon's attempt to block proposals for the next-generation Starlink system is a "delay tactic" and a continuation of Amazon's strategy of "hinder[ing] competitors to compensate for Amazon's failure to make progress of its own," SpaceX told the Federal Communications Commission yesterday. "Amazon's track record amply demonstrates that as it falls behind competitors, it is more than willing to use regulatory and legal processes to create obstacles designed to delay those competitors from leaving Amazon even further behind," SpaceX told the FCC in its filing. Approving Amazon's request would hurt consumers by denying them "access to faster-moving competition," SpaceX said.

Amazon last week urged the FCC to reject an update to SpaceX's Starlink plan because it "proposes two different configurations for the nearly 30,000 satellites of its Gen2 System, each of which arranges these satellites along very different orbital parameters." Amazon contends that the SpaceX request violates a rule requiring applications to be complete and have no internal inconsistencies. Amazon's request would prevent the commission from seeking public comment on SpaceX's application, SpaceX said. "The commission should recognize this gambit for the obstructionist tactic that it is, reject Amazon's request, and quickly put the amendment out for public comment," SpaceX said. The public-comment process will allow "any issues [to] be fully vetted," SpaceX said.

A government bill to create new police powers to spy on criminal suspects online, disrupt their data and take over their accounts has been passed with the support of Labor. From a repoort: The identify and disrupt bill passed the Senate on Wednesday, despite concerns about the low bar of who can authorise a warrant, and that the government failed to implement all the safeguards recommended by the bipartisan joint committee on intelligence and security. The bill creates three new types of warrants to enable the AFP and Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission to modify and delete data, take over accounts and spy on Australians in networks suspected of committing crimes. Earlier in August, the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security -- (PJCIS) chaired by the Liberal senator James Paterson -- made a series of recommendations to improve oversight and safeguards.

On Tuesday, the home affairs minister, Karen Andrews, introduced amendments to implement some of the proposed safeguards, including a sunset clause so the new powers would expire after five years and stronger criteria to issue warrants. Andrews said the amendments would mean data disruption warrants would need to be "reasonably necessary and proportionate" and data disruption and account takeover warrants would need to specify the types of activities proposed to be carried out. The media would also gain some extra protection, with the addition of a "public interest test for data disruption warrants, network activity warrants and account takeover warrants where an investigation of an unauthorised disclosure offence is in relation to a person working in a professional capacity as a journalist," she said.

Apple's plan to digitize your wallet is slowly taking shape. What started with boarding passes and venue tickets later became credit cards, subway tickets, and student IDs. Next on Apple's list to digitize are driver's licenses and state IDs, which it plans to support in its iOS 15 update expected out later this year. From a report: But to get there it needs help from state governments, since it's the states that issue driver's licenses and other forms of state identification, and every state issues IDs differently. Apple said today it has so far secured two states, Arizona and Georgia, to bring digital driver's license and state IDs. Connecticut, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Utah are expected to follow, but a timeline for rolling out wasn't given.

Apple said in June that it would begin supporting digital licenses and IDs, and that the TSA would be the first agency to begin accepting a digital license from an iPhone at several airports, since only a state ID is required for traveling by air domestically within the United States. The TSA will allow you to present your digital wallet by tapping it on an identity reader. Apple says the feature is secure and doesn't require handing over or unlocking your phone. The digital license and ID data is stored on your iPhone but a driver's license must be verified by the participating state. That has to happen at scale and speed to support millions of drivers and travelers while preventing fake IDs from making it through. The goal of digitizing licenses and IDs is convenience, rather than fixing a problem. But the move hasn't exactly drawn confidence from privacy experts, who bemoan Apple's lack of transparency about how it built this technology and what it ultimately gets out of it.

A federal judge was recently found to have owned Apple stock while presiding over a case brought against the tech giant by Nokia, though the discovery is unlikely to lead to further legal action. AppleInsider reports: Apple and Nokia were embroiled in a bitter patent dispute from 2009 to 2011, with both companies filing a series of legal complaints and regulatory challenges as competition in the smartphone market came to a head. The issue was ultimately settled in June 2011, and while terms of the agreement were kept confidential, Apple was expected to make amends with a one-time payment and ongoing royalties. According to a new court filing on Monday, a federal judge presiding over one of many scattershot legal volleys filed by Nokia owned stock in Apple when the suit was lodged in 2010. Judge William M. Conley of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin disclosed the potential conflict of interest in a letter to both parties dated Aug. 27.

"Judge Conley informed me that it has been brought to his attention that while he presided over the case he owned stock in Apple," writes Joel Turner, the court's chief deputy clerk. "His ownership of stock neither affected nor impacted his decisions in this case." It is unclear how many shares Judge Conley possessed during the case, but ownership of company stock in any capacity would have required his recusal under the Code of Conduct for United States Judges. An advisory from the Judicial Conference Codes of Conduct Committee explains that disqualifying factors should be reported "as soon as those facts are learned," even if the realization occurs after a judge issues a decision.

"The parties may then determine what relief they may seek and a court (without the disqualified judge) will decide the legal consequence, if any, arising from the participation of the disqualified judge in the entered decision," Advisory Opinion 71 reads, as relayed by Turner. Apple and Nokia are invited to respond to Conley's disclosure by Oct. 27 should they wish to seek redress, though the companies are unlikely to take action considering the case was not a lynchpin in Nokia's overarching strategy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Tim De Chant: Nearly a decade ago, Theranos touted a revolutionary diagnostic device that could run myriad medical tests without having to draw blood through a needle. Today, the startup's founder, Elizabeth Holmes, goes to court, where she's facing 12 criminal counts for statements she made to investors and consumers about her company's technology. Holmes founded Theranos in 2003 after dropping out of Stanford University at the age of 19. Driven by her phobia of needles, Holmes wanted to create diagnostic tests that use blood from finger pricks rather than from needles. The idea caught on, attracting well-connected board members like Henry Kissinger and James Mattis, drawing over $400 million in investments from wealthy investors including Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch, and securing lucrative partnerships with Walgreens and Safeway. At its peak, Theranos was worth over $9 billion. But Theranos' myth started unwinding in 2015 when a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that the company had been performing most of its tests on traditional blood diagnostic machines rather than its own "Einstein" device. The company's own employees doubted the machine's accuracy.

Holmes and [Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, Theranos' president and chief operating officer] were indicted in June 2018, and soon Theranos was facing mounting civil and criminal investigations. The company settled a Securities and Exchange Commission probe and shut down shortly thereafter. The end of Theranos didn't halt the scrutiny of Holmes' and Balwani's behavior, though. Three rounds of indictments have brought the total to 10 counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The latest indictment, which supersedes the previous two, was filed in June 2020. Both Holmes and Balwani have pleaded not guilty, and Balwani's trial will begin next year. The indictments aren't limited to claims about the company's proprietary diagnostic machine but also include what Holmes and Balwani allegedly said to investors about revenue and business deals. The prosecution says the pair told investors that Theranos would bring in over $100 million in revenue in 2014, helping the company break even, and hit $1 billion in 2015, amounts that exceeded the executives' actual expectations. Prosecutors also say that the pair falsely told investors that the company landed contracts with the Pentagon.

The road to trial has been filled with delays, first due to the COVID-19 pandemic and then again when Holmes became pregnant. Her child was born in July, around the time the trial was supposed to begin. If convicted, Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison. Today's proceedings kick off jury selection, in which prosecutors and defense attorneys will begin questioning over 100 potential jurors. [...] Opening statements are scheduled to begin on September 8, and the trial may run through mid-December. Holmes is expected to claim that Balwani, who was her boyfriend for much of Theranos' existence, was an abusive and controlling partner. A court filing released on Saturday revealed that Holmes is expected to take the stand during the trial and allege that he monitored her calls, texts, and emails and was physically violent, claims that Balwani denies. Her attorneys say these actions affected her "state of mind" when the alleged fraud took place.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company, written by Mark Sullivan: On Monday the Biden administration announced a new program, called the U.S. Digital Corps, designed to attract young tech talent to roles in the government. The Corps offers early-career technologies a chance to get engaged in government via a two-year fellowship focused on major Biden administration priorities, including coronavirus response, economic recovery, cybersecurity, and streamlining government services. The program will begin by recruiting 30 people with skill sets in software engineering, data science, design, cybersecurity, and other critical technology fields this fall. It'll place them in one of five agencies -- the General Services Administration (GSA), Veterans Affairs, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- where they'll start work in 2022.

Only 3% of the government's workforce is under 30 years old, says the GSA, which will handle the recruiting. And only a quarter of the current workforce are women. The GSA says it'll hire a diversity of people for the Corps to help even out those ratios. The program will recruit from "leading undergraduate programs," as well as from "alternative training pathways" such as apprenticeships, bootcamps, and certificate programs. [...] The U.S. Digital Corps is a collaboration between GSA, the White House Office of Management and Budget, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. It's the "first and only government-wide, technology-specific recruitment program for early-career Americans," says the GSA in a press release.

Earlier this month Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin sued NASA over a moon lander contract awarded to SpaceX.

Now Mashable reports that "America's next trip to the moon may suddenly be delayed a bit thanks to...PDFs?" A U.S. federal judge has granted the Department of Justice a week-long extension in its lawsuit with Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin. The reason? Large PDF files...

According to the DOJ, there is more than 7 GB of data related to the case. However, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims' online system allows for only files of up to 50 MB in size to be uploaded. This all amounts to "several hundred" PDFs, including other file formats that would be converted to PDFs. The DOJ says it also sought to convert multiple separate documents into individual PDF batches but explained that those larger files could cause the upload system to crash. "We have tried several different ways to create 50-megabyte files for more efficient filing, all without success thus far," the DOJ said.

Instead of using the online file system, the U.S. government will transfer the documents for the case to DVDs.
Futurism reports the situation was exacerbated "because the agency staff that could have fixed the issue were at the 36th Annual Space Symposium last week."

On Twitter, space reporter Joey Roullete notes the judge's ruling means an additional one-week stay before the awarding of SpaceX's contract..

Or, as Mashable puts it, "Space exploration is currently on hold thanks to a lawsuit and a slew of pesky PDF files."

The Washington Post reports that the U.S. government "plans to expand its use of facial recognition to pursue criminals and scan for threats, an internal survey has found, even as concerns grow about the technology's potential for contributing to improper surveillance and false arrests." Ten federal agencies — the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Interior, Justice, State, Treasury and Veterans Affairs — told the Government Accountability Office they intend to grow their facial recognition capabilities by 2023, the GAO said in a report posted to its website Tuesday. Most of the agencies use face-scanning technology so employees can unlock their phones and laptops or access buildings, though a growing number said they are using the software to track people and investigate crime. The Department of Agriculture, for instance, said it wants to use it to monitor live surveillance feeds at its facilities and send an alert if it spots any faces also found on a watch list...

The GAO said in June that 20 federal agencies have used either internally developed or privately run facial recognition software, even though 13 of those agencies said they did not "have awareness" of which private systems they used and had therefore "not fully assessed the potential risks ... to privacy and accuracy." In the current report, the GAO said several agencies, including the Justice Department, the Air Force and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, reported that they had used facial recognition software from Clearview AI, a firm that has faced lawsuits from privacy groups and legal demands from Google and Facebook after it copied billions of facial images from social media without their approval... Many federal agencies said they used the software by requesting that officials in state and local governments run searches on their own software and report the results. Many searches were routed through a nationwide network of "fusion centers," which local police and federal investigators use to share information on potential threats or terrorist attacks...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, who have called the technology "the way of the future," said earlier this month that they had run facial recognition scans on more than 88 million travelers at airports, cruise ports and border crossings. The systems, the officials said, have detected 850 impostors since 2018 — or about 1 in every 103,000 faces scanned.

Megan Borovicka forget all about her Facebook account after 2013, reports the Washington Post. "But Facebook never forgot about her." The 42-year-old Oakland, California, lawyer never picked any "friends," posted any status updates, liked any photos or even opened the Facebook app on her phone. Yet over the last decade, Facebook has used an invisible data vacuum to suction up very specific details about her life — from her brand of underwear to where she received her paycheck... It isn't just the Facebook app that's gobbling up your information. Facebook is so big, it has convinced millions of other businesses, apps and websites to also snoop on its behalf. Even when you're not actively using Facebook. Even when you're not online. Even, perhaps, if you've never had a Facebook account.

Here's how it works: Facebook provides its business partners tracking software they embed in apps, websites and loyalty programs. Any business or group that needs to do digital advertising has little choice but to feed your activities into Facebook's vacuum: your grocer, politicians and, yes, even the paywall page for this newspaper's website. Behind the scenes, Facebook takes in this data and tries to match it up to your account. It sits under your name in a part of your profile your friends can't see, but Facebook uses to shape your experience online. Among the 100 most popular smartphone apps, you can find Facebook software in 61 of them, app research firm Sensor Tower told me. Facebook also has trackers in about 25 percent of websites, according to privacy software maker Ghostery...

Facebook got a notice when I opened Hulu to watch TV. Facebook knew when I went shopping for paint, a rocking chair and fancy beans. Facebook learned I read the websites What To Expect, Lullaby Trust and Happiest Baby. Over two weeks, Facebook tracked me on at least 95 different apps, websites and businesses, and those are just the ones I know about. It was as if Facebook had hired a private eye to prepare a dossier about my life. Why does Facebook think that's okay? The company emailed me answers about how its tracking technology works, but declined my requests to interview its chief privacy officer or other executives about its alleged monopoly....

Who in their right mind thought they were signing up for this much surveillance back when they first joined Facebook?
The article points out that in 2014 Facebook began allowing its advertisers to target users based on websites they'd visited...and now also gathers more data about users from other companies. And "While many companies were using browser cookies, which could be easily cleared or blocked, Facebook tied what it learned to real identities — the names on our Facebook profiles." And beyond that, companies "can report other identifying information to Facebook like your email to help it figure out who you are... If you've never had a Facebook account at all? It may still be watching."

It's a lucrative business, the Post points out. "In 2013, the average American's data was worth about $19 per year in advertising sales to Facebook, according to its financial statements. In 2020, your data was worth $164 per year."

What does Facebook know about your off-Facebook activity? You can find out at this URL.

If you just want to stop them from giving this information to advertisers, the right side of that page has an option to "Clear History — Disconnect off-Facebook activity history from your account." But you then have to also click "More Options" and then "Manage Future Activity" to also stop them from later matching up more of your off-Facebook activity to your profile for advertisers.

If you try to select it, Facebook warns what you'll be missing — that "Keeping your future off-Facebook activity saved with your account allows us to personalize your experience." And proceeding anyways then generates a popup reminding you that "We'll still receive activity from the businesses and organizations you visit. It may be used for measurement purposes and to make improvements to our ads systems, but it will be disconnected from your account."

And apparently your activity on Oculus isn't covered, and will still remain connected to your Facebook account.

The Associated Press reports: Cuba's government said Thursday it will recognize — and regulate — cryptocurrencies for payments on the island. A resolution published in the Official Gazette said the Central Bank will set rules for such currencies and determine how to license providers of related services within Cuba.

The popularity of such currencies has grown among a technologically savvy group in Cuba as it has become harder to use dollars, in part because of toughened embargo rules imposed under former President Donald Trump... Because [cryptocurrencies] can be used for long-distance transactions that are supposedly anonymous, they are often popular with people attempting to evade government regulations — presumably including U.S. restrictions on sending money to places such as Cuba.

Slashdot reader Charlotte Web quotes CNN: Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder and former CEO of Theranos whose criminal trial is set to begin in a matter of days, is likely to defend herself by claiming she was the victim of a decade-long abusive relationship with her ex-boyfriend, also a former Theranos executive, court documents reveal.

According to the newly unsealed documents, Holmes plans to have an expert testify about the psychological, emotional and sexual abuse she experienced from Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, who served as the company's COO, including the abusive tactics he allegedly used to "exert control" as well as the psychological impact. Balwani, according to a court filing, "adamantly denies" the claims. Holmes is also "likely to testify herself to the reasons why she believed, relied on, and deferred to Mr. Balwani," according to a filing from Holmes' attorney. In a separate filing from Balwani's attorneys, they acknowledge Holmes' plans to introduce evidence that Balwani verbally disparaged her, controlled what she ate, how she dressed, and who she interacted with, "essentially dominating her and erasing her capacity to make decisions." The filing calls the allegations "deeply offensive to Mr. Balwani" and "devastating personally to him...."

Balwani, a former software executive, joined Theranos in 2009, becoming Holmes' second-in-command. Nearly 20 years Holmes' senior, the pair had met in 2002 on a trip to Beijing through Stanford University's Mandarin program.

Balwani's case is slated to begin in 2022 after the completion of Holmes' trial.

Possibly anticipating some new regulations, America's Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating "gamification and behavioral prompts used by online brokerages that encourage trading," reports CNBC.

And SEC chairman Gary Gensler has specifically requested public input on two questions: First, the SEC chair wants to know how the financial regulator should protect investors against a potential conflict of interest. Online brokerages generate profits when their customers trade more often. Robinhood Markets, for example, makes money in part by sending its customers' orders to high-frequency traders in exchange for cash. That process is itself controversial and known on Wall Street as payment for order flow. But if game-like prompts or congratulatory messages from online brokerages cause customers to make more trades — and especially if more trades result in poorer portfolio performance at slightly worse prices — should the SEC intervene?

Gensler's second key question is a bit more cerebral. In essence, the SEC wants to answer: If brokerages' game-like or predictive prompts assume optimal outcomes and impact how often customers trade, should the regulator consider those in-app prompts as formal investment recommendations or investment advice?
Or, as Barrons puts it, "Critics say that some stock-trading apps look more like online games or gambling services, and their graphic interfaces are coercing users into making bad decisions."

Meanwhile, MarketWatch (via Dow Jones Newswires) reports on another issue: "According to a new survey from consumer finance website MagnifyMoney, 32% of U.S. investors say they have made trades while drunk." Gen Z members fell into the trap the most of any generation, with 59% confessing to drunk trading, while 9% of baby boomers admitted to trading under the influence. This can be combined with the rise in "emotionally charged" investing that traders say they would later regret. Per the survey, 66% of Americans admit to making impulsive investing decisions... Entering trade orders on mobile devices has assuredly made stock trading easier to complete while engaged in other tasks, including imbibing, but why does it seemingly impact younger investors more? According to the Addiction Center, an informational group for people struggling with substance-use disorders and co-occurring behavioral and mental-health disorders, the gamification interface of trading apps like Robinhood could be a factor.
A Robinhood spokesperson told MarketWatch their platform was designed "to remove historical barriers to investing and open financial markets to millions upon millions of people previously left behind.

"We are proud to expand access to the financial system and enable everyday people to learn and invest responsibly."