A U.S. appeals court has ruled that Customs and Border Protection agents can conduct in-depth searches of phones and laptops, overturning an earlier legal victory for civil liberties groups. The Verge reports: First Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch declared that both basic and "advanced" searches, which include reviewing and copying data without a warrant, fall within "permissible constitutional grounds" at the American border. Lynch ruled against a group of US citizens and residents objecting to invasive searches of their electronic devices. The group includes Sidd Bikkannavar, a NASA scientist who was detained and pressured to unlock a secure government-issued phone. Most of the incidents date to 2017, when then-President Donald Trump pushed for tighter border security alongside travel bans and other restrictions. But some took place earlier, reflecting long-standing concerns among groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, which backed this lawsuit.

A district court declared that CBP searches violated the Fourth Amendment by not requiring "reasonable suspicion" that the devices contained contraband. Lynch disagreed. "Electronic device searches do not fit neatly into other categories of property searches, but the bottom line is that basic border searches of electronic devices do not involve an intrusive search of a person," she wrote. That lowers the bar for conducting them at the border, where the government's interest in security is "at its zenith." "Warrantless and suspicionless electronic device searches can give border officers unfettered access to vast amounts of private information about our lives," said Esha Bhandari, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. "We are disappointed with the ruling and evaluating all options to ensure we don't lose our privacy rights when we travel."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last Friday, a man entered the Beverly Hills police department, only to be treated to a mini DJ set that could potentially get his Instagram account banned. Sennett Devermont was at the department to file a form to obtain body camera footage from an incident in which he received a ticket he felt was unfair. Devermont also happens to be a well-known LA area activist, who regularly live-streams protests and interactions with the police to his more than 300,000 followers on Instagram. So, he streamed this visit as well -- and that's when things got weird.

In a video posted on his Instagram account, we see a mostly cordial conversation between Devermont and BHPD Sgt. Billy Fair turn a corner when Fair becomes upset that Devermont is live-streaming the interaction, including showing work contact information for another officer. Fair asks how many people are watching, to which Devermont replies, "Enough." Fair then stops answering questions, pulls out his phone, and starts silently swiping around -- and that's when the ska music starts playing. Fair boosts the volume, and continues staring at his phone. For nearly a full minute, Fair is silent, and only starts speaking after we're a good way through Sublime's "Santeria."

Assuming that Fair wasn't just trying to share his love of '90s stoner music with the citizens of Beverly Hills, this seems to be an intentional (if misguided) tactic to use social media companies' copyright protection policies to prevent himself from being filmed. Instagram in particular has been increasingly strict on posting copyrighted material. Any video that contains music, even if it's playing in the background, is potentially subject to removal by Instagram. Most people complain about these rules. Beverly Hills law enforcement, however, seems to be a fan. "Under most circumstances, civilians are legally permitted to openly film on-duty police officers under the First Amendment," the report notes. "And while the interaction between Devermont and Fair is pretty benign, BHPD's recent behavior suggests that at least some cops believe they can prevent themselves from being filmed or livestreamed by playing copyrighted music, which would have serious implications for more serious incidents of police misconduct."

In a statement emailed to VICE News, Beverly Hills PD said that "the playing of music while accepting a complaint or answering questions is not a procedure that has been recommended by Beverly Hills Police command staff," and that the videos of Fair were "currently under review."

A man who left a negative review of a legal firm on the TrustPilot website has been ordered to pay $34,000 in libel damages. The BBC reports: Philip James Waymouth engaged London law firm Summerfield Browne online to provide advice but was unsatisfied with the service he received. He then left a review accusing the firm of being "another scam solicitor," according to court documents. The firm took legal action, stating that this was untrue and defamatory. The number of business enquiries it received had dropped since the publication of the review, Summerfield Browne said.

Mr Waymouth had not engaged with Summerfield Browne's complaints procedure before leaving the review, the High Court in London heard. He did not attend the online hearing or send a legal representative. He previously said he had offered to remove the review in exchange for a refund of the 200-pound fee (plus VAT) he had paid but claimed the firm had not responded. In the review, Mr Waymouth alleged: "I paid upfront for a legal assessment of my case. "But what I got was just the information I sent them, reworded and sent back to me." Finding for the firm, judge Master David Cook said it was "beyond any dispute" the words in the review "had a clear tendency to put people off dealing with the claimant firm." And Mr Waymouth had "never fully articulated" why he was unhappy with Summerfield Browne's work.

Intel sued a former Oregon employee last week, alleging he took trade secrets with him when he bolted for Microsoft and used the information to gain an advantage in subsequent business negotiations with Intel. From a report: The engineer, Varun Gupta, worked for Intel for a decade before leaving for Microsoft in January 2020, according to the suit. He allegedly loaded Intel trade secrets onto two USB drives before quitting and later accessed them on his Microsoft-issued laptop. Gupta could not immediately be reached for comment.

Intel and Microsoft are longtime partners and, increasingly, rivals as Microsoft develops its own chip engineering capabilities. Microsoft is preparing to open a big new engineering hub in Hillsboro, near Intel's Oregon research factories, and has hired a former Intel vice president to help lead it. In this case, though, the litigation indicates Intel and Microsoft worked together to investigate the incident. Intel's complaint claims that Gupta had denied knowing where the one of the USB drives was, but later turned it over to Microsoft for analysis. He claimed to have discarded a second USB drive that allegedly contained Intel secrets, according to the litigation. The suit asserts that Microsoft determined Gupta had plugged the USB drives into his Microsoft-issued laptop. "In his new role at Microsoft, Gupta used the confidential information and trade secrets he misappropriated from Intel, deploying that information in head-to-head negotiations with Intel concerning customized product design and pricing for significant volumes of Xeon processors," Intel alleged in Friday's filing.

Facebook is being sued for "losing control" of the data of about a million users in England and Wales. From a report: The alleged failings were revealed in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where harvested data was used for advertising during elections. Journalist Peter Jukes, leading the action, claims his data was compromised. Facebook told BBC News there was "no evidence" UK or EU users' data had been transferred to Cambridge Analytica. But the case against the technology giant, expected to last for at least three years, will argue a "loss of control" over users' personal data warrants individual compensation. The harvesting of Facebook users' personal information by third-party apps was at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, exposed in 2018. Cambridge Analytica's app on Facebook had harvested the data of people who interacted with it -- and that of friends who had not given consent.

According to a researcher, favicons can be a security vulnerability that could let websites track your movement and bypass VPNs, incognito browsing status, and other traditional methods of cloaking your movement online. From a report: The tracking method is called a Supercookie, and it's the work of German software designer Jonas Strehle. "Supercookie uses favicons to assign a unique identifier to website visitors. Unlike traditional tracking methods, this ID can be stored almost persistently and cannot be easily cleared by the user," Strehle said on his Github. "The tracking method works even in the browser's incognito mode and is not cleared by flushing the cache, closing the browser or restarting the system, using a VPN or installing AdBlockers."

Strehle's Github explained that he became interested in the idea of using favicons to track users after reading a research paper [PDF] on the topic from the University of Illinois at Chicago. "The complexity and feature-rich nature of modern browsers often lead to the deployment of seemingly innocuous functionality that can be readily abused by adversaries," the paper explained. "In this paper we introduce a novel tracking mechanism that misuses a simple yet ubiquitous browser feature: favicons." To be clear, this is a proof-of-concept and not something that Strehle has found out in the wild.

The U.S. Navy has patents on weird and little understood technology. According to patents filed by the Navy, it is working on a compact fusion reactor that could power cities, an engine that works using "inertial mass reduction," and a "hybrid aerospace-underwater craft." From a report: Dubbed the "UFO patents," The War Zone has reported that the Navy had to build prototypes of some of the outlandish tech to prove it worked. Dr. Salvatore Cezar Pais is the man behind the patents and The War Zone has proven the man exists, at least on paper. Pais has worked for a number of different departments in the Navy, including the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAVAIR/NAWCAD) and the Strategic Systems Programs. (SSP) The SSP mission, according to its website, is to "provide credible and affordable strategic solutions to the warfighter." It's responsible for developing the technology behind the Trident class nuclear missiles launched from Submarines. The patents all build on each other, but at their core is something Pais called the "Pais Effect." This is the idea that, "controlled motion of electrically charged matter via accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin subjected to smooth yet rapid acceleration transients, in order to generate extremely high energy/high intensity electromagnetic fields."

Robinhood was sued Monday for wrongful death by the family of Alex Kearns, a 20-year-old customer who took his life last summer after believing he had racked up big losses on the millennial-favored stock trading app. CNBC reports: "This case centers on Robinhood's aggressive tactics and strategy to lure inexperienced and unsophisticated investors, including Alex, to take big risks with the lure of tantalizing profits," said the complaint filed by his parents Dan and Dorothy Kearns, and his sister Sydney Kearns in a California state court in Santa Clara. The family is based in Naperville, Illinois. Robinhood's "reckless conduct directly and proximately caused the death of one of its victims," the complaint said. The lawsuit is also accusing the brokerage of negligent infliction of emotional distress and unfair business practices.

Alex Kearns, a then-sophomore at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, committed suicide in June after thinking he had a negative $730,165 cash balance on Robinhood. The complaint alleges that Kearns misunderstood the Robinhood financial statement and was protecting his family from the financial obligation. The suit says that Kearns made three attempts to contact Robinhood customer service regarding the massive underwater balance. However, his messages were met with automated replies, according to the complaint.

In a note to his family that CNBC has seen, Kearns accused Robinhood of allowing him to pile on too much risk. He claimed the puts he bought and the shares sold "should have cancelled out," according to the note. "How was a 20 year old with no income able to get assigned almost a million dollars worth of leverage?" read the note Kearns wrote to his family. "There was no intention to be assigned this much and take this much risk, and I only thought that I was risking the money that I actually owned." A Robinhood spokesperson told CNBC, "We were devastated by Alex Kearns' death. Since June, we've made improvements to our options offering."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Biden administration has abandoned a Trump-era lawsuit that sought to block California's net neutrality law. In a court filing today, the US Department of Justice said it "hereby gives notice of its voluntary dismissal of this case." Shortly after, the court announced that the case is "dismissed in its entirety" and "all pending motions in this action are denied as moot."

The case began when Trump's DOJ sued California in September 2018 in US District Court for the Eastern District of California, trying to block a state net neutrality law similar to the US net neutrality law repealed by the Ajit Pai-led FCC. Though Pai's FCC lost an attempt to impose a blanket, nationwide preemption of any state net neutrality law, the US government's lawsuit against the California law was moving forward in the final months of the Trump administration.

The Biden DOJ's voluntary dismissal of the case puts an end to that. "I am pleased that the Department of Justice has withdrawn this lawsuit," FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said today. "When the FCC, over my objection, rolled back its net neutrality policies, states like California sought to fill the void with their own laws. By taking this step, Washington is listening to the American people, who overwhelmingly support an open Internet, and is charting a course to once again make net neutrality the law of the land." The report notes that California still has to defend its net neutrality rules against a separate lawsuit filed by the major broadband-industry lobby groups. "The industry groups representing all the biggest ISPs and many smaller ones filed an amended complaint against California in August 2020, claiming the net neutrality law is 'unconstitutional state regulation,'" reports Ars.

Europe's antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager, has warned Apple to give equal treatment to all apps on its platform amid the iPhone maker's privacy changes that have drawn charges of anti-competitive practices from rival Facebook. From a report: Apple will in the spring ask iPhone users for consent to track their data for personalized ads in what it says is a move to protect users' privacy but which will limit apps' ability to gather data from people's phones that can be used for targeted advertising. Facebook has been among the most vocal of the critics which stand to lose a substantial part of their revenue from Apple's move. Facebook in a December blog post called it anti-competitive behaviour, saying that Apple's own personalized ad platform would be exempt from the new requirement giving users a choice of whether to opt in to tracking by third parties. Vestager said while the issue is privacy-related, it can morph into an antitrust issue if Apple tilts the level playing field. "It can be competition if it is shown that Apple is not treating its own apps in the same way," she told Reuters in an interview on Monday.

A new book promises "the untold story of the cyberweapons market — the most secretive, invisible, government-backed market on earth — and a terrifying first look at a new kind of global warfare."

Its author — a New York Times cybersecurity reporter — shares the book's story about David Evenden, a former National Security Agency analyst who later worked in Abu Dhabi: He, like two dozen other N.S.A. analysts and contractors, had been lured to the United Arab Emirates by a boutique Beltway contractor with offers to double, even quadruple, their salaries and promises of a tax-free lifestyle in the Gulf's luxury playground. The work would be the same as it had been at the agency, they were told, just on behalf of a close ally. It was all a natural extension of America's War on Terror. Mr. Evenden started tracking terror cells in the Gulf. This was 2014, ISIS had just laid siege to Mosul and Tikrit and Mr. Evenden tracked its members as they switched out burner phones and messaging apps...

Soon, though, he was assigned to a new project: proving the Emiratis' neighbor, Qatar, was funding the Muslim Brotherhood. The only way to do that, Mr. Evenden told his bosses, would be to hack Qatar. "Go for it," they told him. No matter that Qatar was also an American ally or that, once inside its networks, his bosses showed no interest in ever getting out. Before long his team at the contractor, CyberPoint, was hacking Emirati enemies, real and perceived, all over the world: Soccer officials at FIFA, the monarchy's Twitter critics, and especially Qatari royals. They wanted to know where they were flying, who they were meeting, what they were saying. This too was part of the mission, Mr. Evenden was told; it had all been cleared up high. In the War on Terror and the cyber arms market, you could rationalize just about anything.

All the rationalizations were stripped away the day emails from the first lady of the United States popped up on his screen. In late 2015, Michelle Obama's team was putting the finishing touches on a trip to the Middle East. Qatar's Sheikha Moza bint Nasser had invited Mrs. Obama to speak... And every last email between the first lady, her royal highness, and their staff — every personal reflection, reservation, itinerary change and security detail — was beaming back to former N.S.A. analysts' computers in Abu Dhabi. "That was the moment I said, 'We shouldn't be doing this,' he told me. "We should not be targeting these people."

Mr. Evenden and his family were soon on a flight home. He and the few colleagues who joined him tipped off the F.B.I. (The agency does not comment on investigations, but interviews suggest its review of CyberPoint is ongoing.) To pre-empt any fallout, some employees came clean to Reuters. The hack of Sheika Moza's emails with Mrs. Obama has never been reported.

It wasn't long after Mr. Evenden settled back in the states that he started fielding calls and LinkedIn messages from his old buddies at the N.S.A., still in the service, who had gotten a "really cool job offer" from Abu Dhabi and wanted his advice. By 2020, the calls had become a drumbeat.

"Don't go," he pleaded. "This is not the work you think you will be doing." You might think you're a patriot now, he wanted to warn them, but one day soon you too could wake up and find you're just another mercenary in a cyber arms race gone horribly wrong...
The author criticizes America's security establishment. "When we discovered openings in the systems that govern the digital universe, we didn't automatically turn them over to manufacturers for patching. We kept them vulnerable in the event the F.B.I. needed to access a terrorist's iPhone or Cyber Command had reason to drop a cyberweapon on Iran's grid one day..."

But the author also warns that "the potential for a calamitous attack — a deadly explosion at a chemical plant set in motion by vulnerable software, for example — is a distraction from the predicament we are already in. Everything worth taking has already been intercepted: Our personal data, intellectual property, voter rolls, medical records, even our own cyberweaponry..."

The book's title? This is How They Tell Me the World Ends.

Long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R) shared this investigation from the Washington Post's technology writer: When I spot-checked what a couple dozen apps claim about privacy in the App Store, I found more than a dozen that were either misleading or flat-out inaccurate...

Apple's big privacy product is built on a shaky foundation: the honor system. In tiny print on the detail page of each app label, Apple says, "This information has not been verified by Apple." The first time I read that, I did a double take. Apple, which says caring for our privacy is a "core responsibility," surely knows devil-may-care data harvesters can't be counted on to act honorably...

About 1 in 3 of the apps I checked that claimed they took no data appeared to be inaccurate... If a journalist and a talented geek could find so many problems just by kicking over a few stones, why isn't Apple? Even after I sent it a list of dubious apps, Apple wouldn't answer my specific questions, including: How many bad apps has it caught? If being inaccurate means you get the boot, why are some of the ones I flagged still available?

Putting aside the deception, there's another question: Are Apple's labels even helpful...? Nowhere on any of Apple's privacy labels, in fact, do we learn with whom apps are sharing our data. Imagine if nutrition facts labels left off the whole section about ingredients.

Irony alert, there's a tech giant that is more transparent: Facebook. With a setting called "off-Facebook activity" that it launched in 2020, you can actually see all the different apps and websites that are feeding your data to Facebook and ask the social network to stop using the data to target you with ads.
Finally, the article notes that apps from some major companies — including Google — "have yet to even post labels."

"A New Jersey appeals court has ruled that a man accused of murder is entitled to review proprietary genetic testing software to challenge evidence presented against him," reports The Register.

Long-time Slashdot reader couchslug shared their report: The maker of the software, Cybergenetics, has insisted in lower court proceedings that the program's source code is a trade secret. The co-founder of the company, Mark Perlin, is said to have argued against source code analysis by claiming that the program, consisting of 170,000 lines of MATLAB code, is so dense it would take eight and a half years to review at a rate of ten lines an hour. The company offered the defense access under tightly controlled conditions outlined in a non-disclosure agreement, which included accepting a $1m liability fine in the event code details leaked. But the defense team objected to the conditions, which they argued would hinder their evaluation and would deter any expert witness from participating...

Those arguing on behalf of the defense cited past problems with other genetic testing software such as STRmix and FST (Forensic Statistical Tool). Defense expert witnesses Mats Heimdahl and Jeanna Matthews, for example, said that STRmix had 13 coding errors that affected 60 criminal cases, errors not revealed until a source code review. They also pointed out, as the appeals court ruling describes, how an FST source code review "uncovered that a 'secret function...was present in the software, tending to overestimate the likelihood of guilt.'"
EFF activists have already filed briefs in multiple courts "warning of the danger of secret software being used to convict criminal defendants," reports an EFF blog post.

"No one should be imprisoned or executed based on secret evidence that cannot be fairly evaluated for its reliability, and the ruling in this case will help prevent that injustice."

Friday the U.S. military released 400 other names it considered for Space Force's soliders (before settling on the word "guardians.")

Politico writes that the names were "crowdsourced" from the U.S. military's space workforce, and "Troops clearly had fun with their submissions, which included Space Cadet, Spacies, Anti-Gravity Gang, Homo Spaciens and Spacefolk." But the Space Force had more science fiction-inspired names it could have picked. Fleet Officer, Stormtrooper and Trekkies were both among the suggested names...

Many in the public still confuse NASA's civil space mission with the Space Force's national security focus, and a name like Ground-Based Astronauts or Apollonauts, harkening back to the space agency's moon landing program, would not help... One suggestion was Skywalker, though members of the Space Force at least in the short-term will be Earth-bound to operate the nation's GPS constellation and provide early missile warning.

Though the Space Force's workforce is expected to be highly-skilled in technical fields, its members may not have taken kindly to one suggestion: Geek...

Others perhaps took the suggestion process too literally, with one suggestion just saying "nothing because you wouldn't hear it in space anyway."
The UPI reminds readers that the U.S. Space Force "is now a full military branch that was allocated $15.4 billion in the 2021 budget and enlisted 16,000 active duty and civilian personnel who were all reassigned from the defunct Air Force Space Command."

White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed Wednesday that the Biden administration will keep Space Force... "They absolutely have the full support of the Biden administration. And we are not revisiting the decision to establish the Space Force," Psaki said Wednesday at a White House news briefing...

Many experts were not surprised that President Joe Biden will keep Space Force as its own branch of the military because it would take an act of Congress to abolish it when it now has bipartisan support as a valuable tool in future military efforts....
The UPI also got this comment from a research associate with the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The name is funny; it sounds like something that Trump just dreamed up," said Young. "But it's been talked about in national security circles for over a decade now. It's something that's just going to be important to have going forward."

And a co-director of the Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution tells them bluntly that "The Space Force is a serious attempt to deal with a serious problem, and that problem is the deployment of anti-satellite weapons by countries like Russia and China."

In 2019 two New York Times opinion writers obtained cellphone app data "containing the precise locations of more than 12 million individual smartphones for several months in 2016 and 2017." (It's data that they say is "supposed to be anonymous, but it isn't. We found celebrities, Pentagon officials and average Americans.")

Now they've obtained a remarkable new trove of data, "this time following the smartphones of thousands of Trump supporters, rioters and passers-by in Washington, D.C., on January 6, as Donald Trump's political rally turned into a violent insurrection."

And here the stakes for a privacy violation were even higher: [The data set] shows how Trump supporters traveled from South Carolina, Florida, Ohio and Kentucky to the nation's capital, with pings tracing neatly along major highways, in the days before the attack. Stops at gas stations, restaurants and motels dot the route like bread crumbs, each offering corroborating details. In many cases, these trails lead from the Capitol right back to their homes... Unlike the data we reviewed in 2019, this new data included a remarkable piece of information: a unique ID for each user that is tied to a smartphone. This made it even easier to find people, since the supposedly anonymous ID could be matched with other databases containing the same ID, allowing us to add real names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and other information about smartphone owners in seconds.

The IDs, called mobile advertising identifiers, allow companies to track people across the internet and on apps. They are supposed to be anonymous, and smartphone owners can reset them or disable them entirely. Our findings show the promise of anonymity is a farce. Several companies offer tools to allow anyone with data to match the IDs with other databases. We were quickly able to match more than 2,000 supposedly anonymous devices in the data set with email addresses, birthdays, ethnicities, ages and more...

Smartphone users will never know if they are included in the data or whether their precise movements were sold. There are no laws forcing companies to disclose what the data is used for or for how long. There are no legal requirements to ever delete the data. Even if anyone could figure out where records of their locations were sold, in most states, you can't request that the data be deleted. Their movements could be bought and sold to innumerable parties for years. And the threat that those movements could be tied back to their identity will never go away.

If the January 6 rioters didn't know before, they surely know now the cost of leaving a digital footprint...
The article argues that de-anonymizing the data "gets easier by the day," warning this latest data set demonstrates "the looming threat to our liberties posed by a surveillance economy that monetizes the movements of the righteous and the wicked alike."

But it also warns that "The location-tracking industry exists because those in power allow it to exist... The dark truth is that, despite genuine concern from those paying attention, there's little appetite to meaningfully dismantle this advertising infrastructure that undergirds unchecked corporate data collection.

"This collection will only grow more sophisticated."

The U.S. agency overseeing elections has "quietly weakened a key element of proposed security standards..." reports the Associated Press, "raising concern among voting-integrity experts that many such systems will remain vulnerable to hacking." The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is poised to approve its first new security standards in 15 years after an arduous process involving multiple technical and elections community bodies and open hearings. But ahead of a scheduled February 10 ratification vote by commissioners, the EAC leadership tweaked the draft standards to remove language that stakeholders interpreted as banning wireless modems and chips from voting machines as a condition for federal certification. The mere presence of such wireless hardware poses unnecessary risks for tampering that could alter data or programs on election systems, say computer security specialists and activists, some of whom have long complained than the EAC bends too easily to industry pressure.

Agency leaders argue that overall, the revised guidelines represent a major security improvement. They stress that the rules require manufacturers to disable wireless functions present in any machines, although the wireless hardware can remain.

In a February 3 letter to the agency, computer scientists and voting integrity activists say the change "profoundly weakens voting system security and will introduce very real opportunities to remotely attack election systems." They demand the wireless hardware ban be restored...

The ban on wireless hardware in voting machines would force vendors who currently build systems with off-the-shelf components to rely on more expensive custom-built hardware, said EAC Chair Benjamin Hovland, which could hurt competition in an industry already dominated by a trio of companies. He also argued that the guidelines are voluntary, although many state laws are predicated on them... Hovland stressed that the amended guidelines say all wireless capability must be disabled in voting equipment. But computer experts say that if the hardware is present, the software that activates it can be introduced. And the threat is not just from malign actors but also from the vendors and their clients, who could enable the wireless capability for maintenance purposes then forget to turn it off, leaving machines vulnerable...

Experts are pushing for universal use of hand-marked paper ballots and better audits to bolster confidence in election results.

Slashdot reader GatorSnake shares "Another take of the implications of Section 230... One person poisoned the online personas of multiple people who had 'wronged' her, with it being nearly impossible to have the false accusations removed from the sites or from Google's search results."

The New York Times reports: Mr. Babcock, a software engineer, got off the phone and Googled himself. The results were full of posts on strange sites accusing him of being a thief, a fraudster and a pedophile. The posts listed Mr. Babcock's contact details and employer. The images were the worst: photos taken from his LinkedIn and Facebook pages that had "pedophile" written across them in red type. Someone had posted the doctored images on Pinterest, and Google's algorithms apparently liked things from Pinterest, and so the pictures were positioned at the very top of the Google results for "Guy Babcock."

Mr. Babcock, 59, was not a thief, a fraudster or a pedophile. "I remember being in complete shock," he said. "Why would someone do this? Who could it possibly be? Who would be so angry?" Then he Googled his brother's name. The results were just as bad. He tried his wife. His sister. His brother-in-law. His teenage nephew. His cousin. His aunt. They had all been hit. The men were branded as child molesters and pedophiles, the women as thieves and scammers...

Ripoff Report offered "arbitration services," which cost up to $2,000, to get rid of "substantially false" information. That sounded like extortion; Mr. Babcock wasn't about to pay to have lies removed... Ripoff Report is one of hundreds of "complaint sites" — others include She's a Homewrecker, Cheaterbot and Deadbeats Exposed — that let people anonymously expose an unreliable handyman, a cheating ex, a sexual predator. But there is no fact-checking. The sites often charge money to take down posts, even defamatory ones. And there is limited accountability. Ripoff Report, like the others, notes on its site that, thanks to Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, it isn't responsible for what its users post.

"If someone posts false information about you on the Ripoff Report, the CDA prohibits you from holding us liable for the statements which others have written. You can always sue the author if you want, but you can't sue Ripoff Report just because we provide a forum for speech...."
The Times found over 100 so-called "complaint" sites with more defamatory posts — Babcock's brother-in-law calculates there've been 12,000 made by the same person. The Times ultimately attributes the posts to a disgruntled employee fired by Mr. Babcock's father — in the year 1993 — who was now using a computer in a public library at the University of Toronto.

"Under U.S. law, a foreign court generally can't force an American website to remove content..." the Times notes, leaving few options for the victims they'd interviewed. "Victims spent years begging Google, Pinterest and WordPress to take down the slanderous posts or at least make them harder to find. The companies rarely did so, until I contacted them to request comment for this article. Pinterest then removed photos... Automattic, which owns WordPress, deleted her blogs."

But not Google Images.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Denmark's government has agreed to take a majority stake in a 25 billion euro artificial "energy island," which is to be built 50 miles (80km) offshore, in the middle of the North Sea. The island to the west of the Jutland peninsula will initially have an area of 120,000 sq meters -- the size of 18 football pitches -- and in its first phase will be able to provide 3m households with green energy. It will be protected from North Sea storms on three sides by a high sea wall, with a dock for service vessels taking up the fourth side.

In a broad deal struck on Wednesday night, the Social Democrat government agreed with its support parties and the rightwing opposition that the state should hold a 51% stake in the island, with the remainder held by the private sector. The project builds on an inter-party deal struck in June on energy policy, in which the parties agreed to construct two wind energy hubs, one artificial and another centered on the Baltic island of Bornholm. The two hubs will initially support 5GW of wind generation and triple Denmark's current installed offshore wind. The capacity will later be expanded to as much as 12GW.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Thursday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the incoming Democrat head of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, introduced an omnibus bill signaling a pitched battle over the future of antitrust law. The law takes aim not just at big tech companies, but potentially all large companies. According to experts Motherboard spoke with, some parts of the bill offer ambitious changes to antitrust law, but others adhere to a framework that has undermined enforcing antitrust law for too long already.

At its core, the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act essentially combines legislation Klobuchar has proposed over the past few years as well as some that Senate Democrats have been considering. It takes a harder stance on anticompetitive mergers and acquisitions, and also promises to empower the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department's antitrust division to aggressively enforce antitrust law. Some of the bill's key proposals concern amendments and provisions to the Clayton Act of 1914, an antitrust law that made certain anticompetitive practices such as price discrimination outright illegal. In her omnibus bill, one key proposal seeks to strengthen anticompetitive merger enforcement by amending the Clayton Act to outright ban mergers that "create an appreciable risk of materially lessening competition," as well as mergers that create monopsonies (buyers or employers who can suppress prices or wages via anti-competitive practices targeting other buyers or employers).

Klobuchar's merger prohibitions also shift the burden of proof to the merging companies, which would have to prove a deal would not be anticompetitive, or create a monopoly or monopsony. In part, this means deals where a merger (or acquisition) yielded over 50 percent market share, where a transaction is valued over $5 billion, or where an acquisition worth over $50 million by a company valued over $100 billion would be presumed illegal. This move won her some praise from experts who praised its clear presumptive bar on large mergers. Other key proposals, however, that have raised concerns among antitrust advocates who are seeking larger structural changes.

Google is exploring an alternative to Apple's new anti-tracking feature, the latest sign that the internet industry is slowly embracing user privacy, Bloomberg is reporting, citing people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: Internally, the search giant is discussing how it can limit data collection and cross-app tracking on the Android operating system in a way that is less stringent than Apple's solution, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private plans. Google is trying to balance the rising demands of privacy-conscious consumers with the financial needs of developers and advertisers. The Alphabet unit is seeking input from these stakeholders, similar to how it's slowly developing a new privacy standard for web browsing called the Privacy Sandbox. With more than $100 billion in annual digital ad sales, Google has a vested interest in helping partners to continue generating revenue by targeting ads to Android device users and measuring the performance of those marketing spots. "We're always looking for ways to work with developers to raise the bar on privacy while enabling a healthy, ad-supported app ecosystem," a Google spokesman said in a statement.

[...] A Google solution is likely to be less strict and won't require a prompt to opt in to data tracking like Apple's, the people said. The exploration into an Android alternative to Apple's feature is still in the early stages, and Google hasn't decided when, or if, it will go ahead with the changes. On the iPhone, Google offers developers a framework so they can monetize their apps using Google ads. In a recent blog post, Google said Apple's ad-tracking update means developers "may see a significant impact" on their ad revenue. To keep advertisers happy while improving privacy, the discussions around Google's Android solution indicate that it could be similar to its planned Chrome web browser changes, the people said. Further reading: Google's iOS Apps Haven't Been Updated in Weeks. Could Apple's Privacy Labels Be the Reason?
Facebook Warns Advertisers on Apple Privacy Changes
Apple's Tim Cook Criticizes Social Media Practices, Intensifying Facebook Conflict
Facebook Looks To Take its Fight With Apple To Court.