The SEC has granted the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., or DTCC, a no-action letter allowing it to custody and recognize tokenized stocks, ETFs, and Treasuries on approved blockchains for three years. "Although this program is a pilot subject to various operational limitations, it marks a significant incremental step in moving markets onchain," SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said in a statement. Bloomberg reports: With the permission, DTCC will also extend their record-keeping to the blockchain, Michael Winnike, global head of strategy and market solutions at DTCC Clearing & Securities Services, said in an interview. "It's the same legal entitlement, the same stock that you would hold in your account from the DTCC in traditional form," Winnike said. [...] The SEC's authorization of tokenization services only applies to a specific set of securities that trade often. The approval includes the Russell 1000 index which represents the 1,000 largest publicly traded US companies, as well as exchange-traded funds that track major indices and US Treasury bills, bonds and notes, Winnike said. "This allows us both to create value for the markets, while staying in a pre-defined pool of highly-liquid securities to start," said Winnike. The firm's ultimate aspiration is to add its entire depository, which represents $100 trillion in securities, to the blockchain, a move that would require further expansion of the no-action relief from the SEC, he said.

Winnike said the tokenization service will help bridge the traditional and digital worlds in part because the new technology will have the same legal entitlements and controls as traditional markets, including freezing or forced transfers if assets are stolen. "This enables participants to adopt and integrate, because they know there is a trusted party that can recover their securities as needed" and can address potential errors, he said. The new blockchain service will also allow investors to move assets all the time, not just Monday through Friday when traditional markets are open. "That creates a lot of new utility," Winnike said. "It brings the two ecosystems together."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Do Kwon, the South Korean cryptocurrency entrepreneur behind two digital currencies that lost an estimated $40 billion in 2022, was sentenced in New York federal court on Thursday to 15 years in prison for fraud and conspiracy. Kwon, 34, who co-founded Singapore-based Terraform Labs and developed the TerraUSD and Luna currencies, previously pleaded guilty and admitted to misleading investors about a coin that was supposed to maintain a steady price during periods of crypto market volatility.

Kwon was one of several cryptocurrency moguls to face federal charges after a slump in digital token prices in 2022 prompted the collapse of a number of companies. [...] Kwon was accused of misleading investors in 2021 about TerraUSD, a so-called stablecoin designed to maintain a value of $1. Prosecutors alleged that when TerraUSD slipped below its $1 peg in May 2021, Kwon told investors a computer algorithm known as "Terra Protocol" had restored the coin's value. Instead, Kwon arranged for a high-frequency trading firm to secretly buy millions of dollars of the token to artificially prop up its price, according to charging documents. "I made false and misleading statements about why it regained its peg by failing to disclose a trading firm's role in restoring that peg," Kwon said in court. "What I did was wrong."

He also faces charges in South Korea, and under his plea deal, prosecutors won't oppose his transfer abroad after he serves half of his U.S. sentence.

joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: More than 10,000 Docker Hub container images expose data that should be protected, including live credentials to production systems, CI/CD databases, or LLM model keys. After scanning container images uploaded to Docker Hub in November, security researchers at threat intelligence company Flare found that 10,456 of them exposed one or more keys. The most frequent secrets were access tokens for various AI models (OpenAI, HuggingFace, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq). In total, the researchers found 4,000 such keys. "These multi-secret exposures represent critical risks, as they often provide full access to cloud environments, Git repositories, CI/CD systems, payment integrations, and other core infrastructure components," Flare notes. [...]

Additionally, they found hardcoded API tokens for AI services being hardcoded in Python application files, config.json files, YAML configs, GitHub tokens, and credentials for multiple internal environments. Some of the sensitive data was present in the manifest of Docker images, a file that provides details about the image.Flare notes that roughly 25% of developers who accidentally exposed secrets on Docker Hub realized the mistake and removed the leaked secret from the container or manifest file within 48 hours. However, in 75% of these cases, the leaked key was not revoked, meaning that anyone who stole it during the exposure period could still use it later to mount attacks.

Flare suggests that developers avoid storing secrets in container images, stop using static, long-lived credentials, and centralize their secrets management using a dedicated vault or secrets manager. Organizations should implement active scanning across the entire software development life cycle and revoke exposed secrets and invalidate old sessions immediately.

President Trump signed an executive order establishing a single federal AI regulatory framework that preempts state-level rules, aiming to centralize oversight of the rapidly growing AI industry. "The Trump administration, with the aid of AI and crypto czar David Sacks, has been pursuing a path that would allow federal rules to preempt state regulations on AI, a move meant to keep big Democratic-led states like California and New York from exerting their control over the growing industry," notes CNBC.

Developing...

A UC Berkeley professor, suspecting years of targeted computer damage against one Ph.D. student, secretly installed a hidden camera that allegedly caught another doctoral candidate sabotaging the student's laptop. The student now faces felony vandalism charges and is due for his first court appearance on Dec. 15. The Mercury News reports: A UC Berkeley professor smelled a rat -- over the years there had been $46,855 in damage from computers that failed, and nearly all of it seemed to affect one particular Ph.D. candidate at the college's Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department.

The professor wondered if the student's luck was really that bad, or if something else was afoot. So he installed a hidden camera -- disguised in a department laptop, and pointed it at the student's computer. According to police, the sly move captured another Ph.D. candidate, 26-year-old Jiarui Zou, damaging his fellow student's computer with some implement that caused sparks to fly out of the laptop.

Now, Zou has been charged with three felony counts of vandalism, related to the destruction of three computers on Nov. 9-10. The charges allege the damage amounted to more than $400 each time, though the professor who reported the vandalism, and the affected student, told police they suspect Zou of the additional incidents that had been going on for years, court records show.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken's decision to adopt Calibri a "wasteful" diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters. The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.

A cable dated December 9 sent to all U.S. diplomatic posts said that typography shapes the professionalism of an official document and Calibri is informal compared to serif typefaces. "To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department's written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface," the cable said. "This formatting standard aligns with the President's One Voice for America's Foreign Relations directive, underscoring the Department's responsibility to present a unified, professional voice in all communications," it added.

Netflix's $72 billion bid to buy Warner Bros Discovery has triggered a consumer class action claiming the merger would crush competition, erase HBO Max as a rival, and hand Netflix control over major franchises. Reuters reports: The proposed class action (PDF) was filed on Monday by a subscriber to Warner Bros-owned HBO Max who said the proposed deal threatened to reduce competition in the U.S. subscription video-on-demand market. "Netflix has demonstrated repeated willingness to raise subscription prices even while facing competition from full-scale rivals such as WBD," the lawsuit said. [...] The lawsuit said the Warner Bros deal would eliminate one of Netflix's closest rivals, HBO Max, and give Netflix control over Warner Bros marquee franchises including Harry Potter, DC Comics and Game of Thrones. On Monday, Paramount Skydance launched a $108 billion hostile bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery with an all-cash, $30-per-share offer.

Longtime Slashdot reader Randseed writes: With the likes of Google Nest, Ring, and others cooperating with law enforcement, I started to look for affordable wireless IP security cameras that I can put around my house. Unfortunately, it looks like almost every thing now incorporates some kind of cloud-based slop. All I really want is to put up some cameras, hook them up to my LAN, and install something like ZoneMinder. What are the most economical, wireless IP security cameras that I can set up with my server?

Congress quietly removed provisions that would have let the U.S. military fix its own equipment without relying on contractors, despite bipartisan and Pentagon support. The Register reports: The House and Senate versions of the NDAA passed earlier both included provisions that would have extended common right-to-repair rules to US military branches, requiring defense contractors to provide access to technical data, information, and components that enabled military customers to quickly repair essential equipment. Both of those provisions were stripped from the final joint-chamber reconciled version of the bill, published Monday, right-to-repair advocates at the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) pointed out in a press release. [...]

According to PIRG's press release on the matter, elected officials have been targeted by an "intensive lobbying push" in recent weeks against the provisions. House Armed Services Committee chair Mike Rogers (R-AL) and ranking Democrat Adam Smith (D-WA), responsible for much of the final version of the bill, have received significant contributions from defense contractors in recent years, and while correlation doesn't equal causation, it sure looks fishy. [Isaac Bowers, PIRG's federal legislative director] did tell us that he was glad that the defense sector's preferred solution to the military right to repair fight -- a "data as a service" solution -- was also excluded, so the 2026 NDAA isn't a total loss for the repairability fight. "That provision would have mandated the Pentagon access repair data through separate vendor contracts rather than receiving it upfront at the time of procurement, maintaining the defense industry's near monopoly over essential repair information and keeping troops waiting for repairs they could do quicker and cheaper themselves," Bowers said in an email.

An aide to the Democratic side of the Committee told The Register the House and Senate committees did negotiate a degree of right-to-repair permissions in the NDAA. According to the aide and a review of the final version of the bill, measures were included that require the Defense Department to identify any instances where a lack of technical data hinders operation or maintenance of weapon systems, as well as aviation systems. The bill also includes a provision that would establish a "technical data system" that would "track, manage, and enable the assessment" of data related to system maintenance and repair. Unfortunately, the technical data system portion of the NDAA mentions "authorized repair contractors" as the parties carrying out repair work, and there's also no mention of parts availability or other repairability provisions in the sections the staffer flagged -- just access to technical data. That means the provisions are unlikely to move the armed forces toward a new repairability paradigm.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Since online genealogy services began operating, millions of people have sent them saliva samples in hopes of learning about their family roots and discovering far-flung relatives. These services also appeal to law enforcement authorities, who have used them to solve cold case murders and to investigate crimes like the 2022 killing of four University of Idaho students. Crime-scene DNA submitted to genealogy sites has helped investigators identify suspects and human remains by first identifying relatives.

The use of public records and family-tree building is crucial to this technique, and its main tool has been the genealogy site Ancestry, which has vast amounts of individual DNA profiles and public records. More than 1,400 cases have been solved with the help of so-called genetic genealogy investigations, most of them with help from Ancestry. But a recent step taken by the site is now deterring many police agencies from employing this crime-solving technique.

In August, Ancestry revised the terms and conditions on its site to make it clear that its services were off-limits "for law enforcement purposes" without a legal order or warrant, which can be hard to get, because of privacy concerns. This followed the addition last year to the terms and conditions that the services could not be used for "judicial proceedings." Investigators say the implications are dire and will result in crucial criminal cases slowing or stalling entirely, denying answers to grieving families. "Everyone who does this work has depended on the records database that Ancestry controls," said David Gurney, who runs Ramapo College's Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center in New Jersey. "Without it, casework is going to be a lot slower, and there will be some cases that can't be resolved at all."

Europol's GRIMM taskforce has arrested nearly 200 people accused of running or participating in "violence-as-a-service" schemes where cybercrime groups recruit youth online for real-world attacks. "These individuals are groomed or coerced into committing a range of violent crimes, from acts of intimidation and torture to murder," the European police said on Monday. The Register reports: GRIMM began in April, and includes investigators from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the UK, plus Europol experts and online service providers. During its first six months, police involved in this operation arrested 63 people directly involved in carrying out or planning violent crimes, 40 "enablers" accused of facilitating violence-for-hire services, 84 recruiters, and six "instigators," five of whom the cops labeled "high-value targets." [...]

Many of the criminals involved in recruiting and carrying out these violence-for-hire services are also members of The Com. This is a loosely knit gang, primarily English speakers, involved in several interconnected networks of hackers, SIM swappers, and extortionists. Their reach has spread across the Atlantic, and over the summer, the FBI warned that a subset of this cybercrime group, called In Real Life (IRL) Com, poses a growing threat to youth. The FBI's security bulletin specifically called out IRL Com subgroups that offer swat-for-hire services, in which hoaxers falsely report shootings at someone's residence or call in bomb threats to trigger massive armed police responses at the victims' homes.

The Trump administration will allow Nvidia to resume selling H200 chips to China, but only if the U.S. government takes a 25% cut. Axios reports: Trump said on Truth Social that he'll allow Nvidia to sell H200 chips -- the generation of chips before its current, more-advanced Blackwell lineup -- to China, with the U.S. government pocketing a quarter of the revenue. He said he would apply "the same approach to AMD, Intel, and other GREAT American Companies."

American defense hawks fear that China could use Nvidia chips to advance its military ambitions. Trump said Monday that the sales will be subject to "conditions that allow for continued strong National Security." The blockade remains in place for Nvidia's current generation of Blackwell chips, which will be replaced in the second half of 2026 by even more advanced Rubin chips. Huang said recently he was unsure if China would want the older chips. "We applaud President Trump's decision to allow America's chip industry to compete to support high paying jobs and manufacturing in America," Nvidia said in a statement. "Offering H200 to approved commercial customers, vetted by the Department of Commerce, strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America."

Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: Taiwan's government has ordered a one-year block of a popular, mainland Chinese-owned social media app Xiaohongshu, also known as The Little RedNote, citing its failure to cooperate with authorities over fraud-related concerns. Taiwan's Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited Xiaohongshu's, which does not have business presence on the island, refusal to cooperate with authorities as the basis for the ban, claiming that the platform has been linked to more than 1,700 fraud-related cases that resulted in financial losses of 247.7 million Taiwanese dollars ($7.9 million). "Due to the inability to obtain necessary data in accordance with the law, law enforcement authorities have encountered significant obstacles in investigations, creating a de facto legal vacuum," the ministry said in a statement.

Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Taiwan's opposition party, Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun decried the government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu for one year as censorship. "Many people online are already asking 'How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,'" Cheng posted on social media. Meta was facing fines earlier this year for failing to disclose information on individuals who funded advertisements on its social media platforms, marking the second such penalty in Taiwan for violating the anti-fraud act. "Meta failed to fully disclose information regarding who paid for the advertisement and who benefited from it," Depute Minister Lin of Ministry of Digital Affairs said at a news conference on June 18.

If MODA decides to impose the fine, it would mark the second such penalty against Meta in Taiwan, following a NT$1 million ($33,381) fine issued in May for violating the Fraud Crime Hazard Prevention Act by failing to disclose information on individuals who commissioned and funded two Facebook advertisements. Meta's Threads were also included in the regulatory framework following nearly 1,900 fraud-related reports associated with the platform, with 718 confirmed as scams. Xiaohongshu has surged in popularity among young Taiwanese in recent years, amassing 3 million users in the island of 23 million.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta's proposal to use less personal data for targeted advertising in its pay-or-consent model that will be rolled out next month won the approval of EU antitrust regulators on Monday, signaling the company will not face daily fines after all. [...] The U.S. tech giant has been locked in discussions with the European Commission after getting hit with a $233 million fine in April for breaching the Digital Markets Act aimed at reining in the power of Big Tech. The violation covered Facebook and Instagram in the period from November 2023 to November 2024, after which Meta tweaked its pay-or-consent model to use less personal data for targeted advertising.

The EU executive has been examining the changes to see if they comply with the DMA, with Meta risking daily fines of as much as 5% of its average daily worldwide turnover if found to be still in breach of the law. The tweaks are in wording, design and transparency to remind users of the two options. Meta did not plan on any substantial changes to its November proposal despite the risk of EU fines, people with direct knowledge of the matter had told Reuters. The Commission, which acts as the EU competition enforcer, acknowledged Meta's November proposal, saying that it will monitor the new ad model and seek feedback, with no more talk of periodic fines. "Meta will give users the effective choice between consenting to share all their data and seeing fully personalized advertising, and opting to share less personal data for an experience with more limited personalized advertising," the Commission said in a statement.

"First the penny. Next, paper checks?" asks CNN: When the U.S. Mint stopped making pennies last month for the first time in 238 years, it drew a lot of attention. But there have been quiet moves to stop using paper checks as well. The government stopped sending out most paper checks to recipients as of the end of September, part of an effort to fully modernize federal benefits payments. And on Thursday the Federal Reserve put out a notice that suggested it is considering — but only considering — the "winding down" of checking services it now provides for banks.

The central bank's statement said that as an alternative to winding down those services, it is mulling more investment in its check processing services, but noted that would come at a higher cost. But it is also considering not making any such investments, in order to keep costs roughly unchanged. That would lead to reduced reliability of those services going forward. "Over time, check use has steadily declined, digital payment methods have grown in availability and use, and check fraud has risen," said the notice from the Fed. "Also, the Reserve Banks will need to make substantial investments in their check infrastructure to continue providing the same level of check services going forward."

A report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta in June found that as of last year, more than 90% of surveyed consumers said they prefer to use something other than a check for paying bills, and just 6% paid by check. That's a sharp drop from the 18% of bills paid by checks as recently as 2017. Consumers also reported they view checks as second-worst for convenience and speed of payment, ahead of only money orders. And they're ranked as the least secure form of any payment other than cash.

But even if it's true that options such as direct deposit, automatic bill paying and electronic payment systems such as Venmo, PayPal and Zelle have all reduced the need for traditional checks, paper checks are still an important part of the payment system. They make up about 5% of transactions and represent 21% of the value of all those payments, according to a statement from Michelle Bowman, the Fed's vice chair for supervision, who dissented from the Fed's Thursday statement.

Bloomberg reports that Google "must renegotiate any contract to make its search engine or artificial intelligence app the default for smartphones and other devices every year, a federal judge ruled." Judge Amit Mehta in Washington sided with the US Justice Department on the one year limitation in his final ruling on what changes the search giant must make in the wake of a landmark ruling that the company illegally monopolized online search. The yearly renegotiation will give rivals — particularly those in the burgeoning generative AI field — a chance to compete for key placements.

The final judgment will still allow Google to offer its products to Apple Inc. for use in its popular iPhone and pay other electronics makers like Samsung Electronics Co. for default placement. But the judge said those contracts must be renegotiated annually. Mehta noted in his ruling that both Google and the US government said they could work with the one-year limitation on default contracts. As such, "the court holds that a hard-and-fast termination requirement after one year would best carry out the purpose of the injunctive relief."

"Woman Hailed as Hero for Smashing Man's Meta Smart Glasses on Subway," reads the headline at Futurism: As Daily Dot reports, a New York subway rider has accused a woman of breaking his Meta smart glasses. "She just broke my Meta glasses," said the TikTok user, who goes by eth8n, in a video that has since garnered millions of views.

"You're going to be famous on the internet!" he shouted at her through the window after getting off the train. The accused woman, however, peered back at him completely unfazed, as if to say that he had it coming.

"I was making a funny noise people were honestly crying laughing at," he claimed in the caption of a followup video. "She was the only person annoyed..." But instead of coming to his support, the internet wholeheartedly rallied behind the alleged perpetrator, celebrating the woman as a folk hero — and perfectly highlighting how the public feels about gadgets like Meta's smart glasses.

"Good, people are tired of being filmed by strangers," one user commented.

"The fact that no one else on the train is defending him is telling," another wrote...

Others accused the man of fabricating details of the incident. "'People were crying laughing' — I've never heard a less plausible NYC subway story," one user wrote.
In a comment on TikTok, the man acknowledges he'd filmed her on the subway — it looks like he even zoomed in. The man says then her other options were "asking nicely to not post it or blur my face".

He also warns that she could get arrested for breaking his glasses if he "felt like it". (And if he sees her again.) "I filed a claim with the police and it's a misdemeanor charge." A subsequent video's captions describe him unboxing new Meta smartglasses "and I'm about to do my thing again... no crazy lady can stop me now."

I'm imagining being mugged — and then telling the mugger "You're going to be internet famous!" But maybe that just shows how easy it is to weaponize smartglasses and their potential for vast public exposure.

While Netflix hopes to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $72 billion, CNBC reports a senior official in America's federal government said the administration was viewing the deal with "heavy skepticism. And that's not the only hurdle: On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Paramount, in a letter to lawyers for Warner Bros. Discovery [WBD], had warned that a sale to Netflix likely would "never close" because of regulatory challenges in the United States and overseas. "Acquiring Warner's streaming and studio assets 'will entrench and extend Netflix's global dominance in a matter not allowed by domestic or foreign competition laws,' Paramount's lawyers wrote," the Journal reported.
Paramount "is now weighing its options about whether to go straight to shareholders with one more improved bid," CNBC reported Friday, "perhaps even higher than the $30-per-share, all-cash offer it submitted to Warner Bros. Discovery this week."

And CNBC reported Friday that the review by America's Department of Justice "can take anywhere from months to more than a year." Netflix said Friday it expects the transaction to close in 12 to 18 months, after Warner Bros. Discovery spins out its portfolio of cable networks into Discovery Global... As part of the deal, Netflix has agreed to pay a $5.8 billion breakup fee to Warner Bros. Discovery if the deal were to get blocked by the government.
Netflix's planned move is already drawing high-powered criticism, reports CNN:

• "The world's largest streaming company swallowing one of its biggest competitors is what antitrust laws were designed to prevent. The outcome would eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers, raise prices for consumers, and reduce the volume and diversity of content for all viewers...." the Writers Guild of America union representing Hollywood writers.

• "Producers are rightfully concerned... Our legacy studios are more than content libraries — within their vaults are the character and culture of our nation." — The Producers Guild of America
• The deal raises "many serious questions" about the entertainment industry's future, "especially the human creative talent whose livelihoods and careers depend on it." — SAG-AFTRA, Hollywood's biggest actors union

• "This is not a win for consumers. Netflix has already aggressively raised prices, increased ad load, and stopped people from sharing passwords. Absorbing a competitor with strong content will only lead to its service becoming more expensive and give consumers less choice." — Ross Benes, a senior analyst at eMarketer, told CNN. [Benes also thinks this could mean fewer companies spending heavily on movies and TV shows. "This contracts the industry."

India is weighing a proposal to mandate always-on satellite tracking in smartphones for precise government surveillance -- an idea strongly opposed by Apple, Google, Samsung, and industry groups. Reuters reports: For years, the [Prime Minister Narendra Modi's] administration has been concerned its agencies do not get precise locations when legal requests are made to telecom firms during investigations. Under the current system, the firms are limited to using cellular tower data that can only provide an estimated area location, which can be off by several meters.

The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), which represents Reliance's Jio and Bharti Airtel, has proposed that precise user locations should only be provided if the government orders smartphone makers to activate A-GPS technology -- which uses satellite signals and cellular data -- according to a June internal federal IT ministry email. That would require location services to always be activated in smartphones with no option for users to disable them. Apple, Samsung, and Alphabet's Google have told New Delhi that should not be mandated, said three of the sources who have direct knowledge of the deliberations.

A measure to track device-level location has no precedent anywhere else in the world, lobbying group India Cellular & Electronics Association (ICEA), which represents both Apple and Google, wrote in a confidential July letter to the government, which was viewed by Reuters. "The A-GPS network service ... (is) not deployed or supported for location surveillance," said the letter, which added that the measure "would be a regulatory overreach." Earlier this week, Modi's government was forced to rescind an order requiring smartphone makers to preload a state-run cyber safety app on all devices after public backlash and privacy concerns.

The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement, accusing the AI startup of repackaging its paywalled reporting without permission. TechCrunch reports: The Times joins several media outlets suing Perplexity, including the Chicago Tribune, which also filed suit this week. The Times' suit claims that "Perplexity provides commercial products to its own users that substitute" for the outlet, "without permission or remuneration." [...] "While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity's unlicensed use of our content to develop and promote their products," Graham James, a spokesperson for The Times, said in a statement. "We will continue to work to hold companies accountable that refuse to recognize the value of our work."

Similar to the Tribune's suit, the Times takes issue with Perplexity's method for answering user queries by gathering information from websites and databases to generate responses via its retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) products, like its chatbots and Comet browser AI assistant. "Perplexity then repackages the original content in written responses to users," the suit reads. "Those responses, or outputs, often are verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions, summaries, or abridgments of the original content, including The Times's copyrighted works."

Or, as James put it in his statement, "RAG allows Perplexity to crawl the internet and steal content from behind our paywall and deliver it to its customers in real time. That content should only be accessible to our paying subscribers." The Times also claims Perplexity's search engine has hallucinated information and falsely attributed it to the outlet, which damages its brand. "Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI," Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity's head of communications, told TechCrunch. "Fortunately it's never worked, or we'd all be talking about this by telegraph."