An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: New York residents eyeing a new 3D printer may soon have to submit a criminal background check if a newly proposed state bill becomes law. The recently introduced legislation, authored by state senator Jenifer Rajkumar, aims to snub out an increasingly popular loophole where convicted felons who would otherwise be prohibited from legally buying a firearm instead simply 3D print individual components to create an untraceable "ghost gun." If passed, New York would join a growing body of states placing restrictions on 3D printers in the name of public safety.

The New York bill, called AB A8132, would require a criminal history background check for anyone attempting to purchase a 3D printer capable of fabricating a firearm. It would similarly prohibit the sale of those printers to anyone with a criminal history that disqualifies them from owning a firearm. As it's currently written, the bill doesn't clarify what models or makes of printers would potentially fall under this broad category. The bill defines a three-dimensional printer as a "device capable of producing a three-dimensional object from a digital model." "Three-dimensionally printed firearms, a type of untraceable ghost gun, can be built by anyone using a $150 three-dimensional printer," Rajkumar wrote in a memorandum explaining the bill. "This bill will require a background check so that three-dimensional printed firearms do not get in the wrong hands."

The NYPD has reported a 60% increase in seized ghost guns over the past two years. Meanwhile, on a national level, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives reported a 1083% increase in ghost gun recoveries from 2017-2021, figures they say are likely underreported.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled today that evidence gleaned from a warrant for Google's search data could be used in the prosecution of a teen who was charged with murder for a fire that killed five people in the Denver area. From a report: As police scrambled to solve the source of the 2020 blaze, they asked Alphabet's Google to provide information about people who searched for the address of the house that went up in flames, using a controversial technique known as a keyword search warrant. After some initial objections, Google provided data that enabled detectives to zero in on five accounts, leading to the arrest of three suspects in the case.

Lawyers for one of the suspects, Gavin Seymour, who was found to have Googled the home's address 14 times in the days before the fire, argued that the keyword warrant constituted an illegal search and that any evidence from it should be suppressed. His motion is the first known challenge to the constitutionality of keyword search warrants. The case is ongoing. In its 74-page decision, the court found that law enforcement had acted in good faith when it obtained the warrant for the teen's search history. Still, it stressed that the findings were specific to the facts of the case, and it refrained from weighing in about the use of Google's search data more broadly.

A new book by Nobel prize-winning economist Angus Deaton"feels like an existential crisis," writes Fast Company, "as he questions his own legacy — and wonders whether policies prescribed by economists over the years have unintentionally contributed to inequality" in America. Angus Deaton: People who have a four-year college degree are doing pretty well. But if you go to the people who don't have a college degree, horrible things are happening to them... The opportunities are getting bigger and bigger, but the safety net's falling further and further away. . . I think of it as much broader than income inequality: People without a BA are like an underclass. They're dispensable...

Fast Company: Why has Europe been able to avoid so many of these rises in inequality and "deaths of despair" and the U.S. hasn't?

Deaton: Anne [Case, my wife] and I wrestled with that in our book Deaths of Despair. One reason is that we don't have any safety net here... The other story is we've got this hideous healthcare system... we're spending [almost] 20% of GDP. There's no other country that spends anything like that. That money comes out of other things we could have, like a safety net and a better education system. And it's not delivering much, except the healthcare providers are doing really quite well: the hospitals, the doctors, the pharma companies, the device manufacturers. Not only does it cost a lot, but we fund it in this really bizarre way, which is that for most people who are not old enough to qualify for Medicare, they get their health insurance through their employer...

Fast Company : The theme of your new book seems to be something of an existential crisis for you as an economist. How much are economists to blame for some of these issues?

Deaton: [...] I think there are some broad things that we didn't do very well. We bent the knee a little too much to the Chicago libertarian view, that markets could do everything. I'm not trying to say that I was right and everybody else was wrong. I was with the mob. I think we thought that financial markets were much safer than they'd been in the past, and we didn't have to worry about them as much. That was dead wrong. I think we were way overenthusiastic about hyperglobalization. We had this belief that people would lose their jobs but they'd find other, better jobs, and that really didn't happen. So there are a lot of things that I think are going to be seriously reconsidered over the next years.
But he admits economists are short on solutions for economic inequality. "When they say, 'Well, what would work'" there's this uncomfortable silence where you feel foolish. Everybody's quoting [former Italian philosopher and politician Antonio] Gramsci [saying that] the old system is broken but the new system is struggling to be born. No one really knows what it's going to look like."

The book is titled Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality. But in the interview Deaton still remains hopeful about America, calling it "a very inventive place," and noting that in the field of economics "there's always hope and there's always change; economics is a very open profession, and it changes very quickly."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: Caltech has had some ups (winning $1.1 billion) and some downs (losing the $1.1 billion award and being ordered to a trial on damages) since suing Apple and Broadcom in 2016 over Wi-Fi patents. Reuters reported this week that Caltech is dropping its yearslong lawsuit against Apple and Broadcom, about two months after the companies came to a "potential settlement."

Caltech wrote in a filing with a US District Court in California that it would drop its claims "with prejudice," meaning it can't refile its case, and asked that Broadcom do so as well, stating later that Broadcom "does not oppose this request." Caltech also writes that it will dismiss its claims against Apple — again, "with prejudice."

The filing then says that Caltech "respectfully requests that all counterclaims asserted by Apple also be dismissed."

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from Business Insider: Two men from the Fort Lauderdale, Florida area scammed Uber Eats out of more than $1 million over 19 months, local police say.

The suspects carried out the scheme — which began in January 2022 — by creating fake accounts on the Uber Eats app to act as both the customer and courier when placing grocery orders, the Broward County Sheriff's Office said in a statement. This worked because Uber Eats provides couriers with prepaid cards they can use to purchase up to $700 to complete customers' orders.

Police claim the suspects would show up as couriers for their fake grocery orders before canceling them and using the prepaid cards to purchase gift cards at the stores.
According to the sheriff's office, "On January 24, 2023, detectives conducted a surveillance operation and observed Morgan and Blackwood travel to 27 different Walgreens committing fraud that totaled a $5,013.28 loss for Uber that day. "

Yesterday America's Federal Trade Commission said it remained focused on its appeal opposing Microsoft's deal to buy Activision, reports Reuters.

Reuters notes that Microsoft and Activision closed their transaction Friday "after winning approval from Britain on condition that they sell the streaming rights to Activision's games to Ubisoft Entertainment." But the U.S. Federal Trade Commission "has also fought the deal, and has an argument scheduled before an appeals court on December 6. The agency said on Friday that it remained focused on that appeal." An FTC spokesperson had this comment for Reuters.

"The FTC continues to believe this deal is a threat to competition."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: U.S. President Joe Biden traveled to Philadelphia on Friday to announce the recipients of $7 billion in federal grants across 16 states for the development of seven regional hydrogen hubs, advancing a key part of a plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy. The announcement of the funding to boost manufacturing and blue-collar jobs was held in Pennsylvania -- a state that could decide the 2024 presidential election -- underscoring the power Biden wields as he spends the upcoming months doling out money flowing from his landmark pieces of legislation that remain largely unknown to large swaths of the American public.

The seven proposed hubs involving companies ranging from Exxon Mobil to Amazon were selected, with their projects spanning 16 states from Pennsylvania to California. The program is intended to jump-start the production of "clean hydrogen" along with the infrastructure needed to get it to industrial users like steelmakers and cement plants. "I'm here to announce one of the largest advanced manufacturing investments in the history of this nation," Biden said," He noted that the total investment will reach $50 billion when taking into account additional investments from private companies.

The hub selections will now kick off a long process that includes multiple phases, from design and development to permitting, financing and construction. "It's not guaranteed that someone selected is even going to make it through negotiations and get awarded the money," said Jason Munster, who was involved in analyzing the projects for the Department of Energy and is now a hydrogen consultant at CleanEpic. The hubs selected will serve the Middle Atlantic, Appalachian, Midwest, Minnesota and Plains states, the Gulf Coast, Pacific Northwest and California. The two largest projects include $1.2 billion each for Texas and California -- the former an oil giant and the other a green energy leader.

Emilia David reports via The Verge: A bipartisan bill seeks to create a federal law to protect actors, musicians, and other performers from unauthorized digital replicas of their faces or voices. The Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act of 2023 -- or the No Fakes Act -- standardizes rules around using a person's faces, names, and voices. Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) sponsored the bill.

It prevents the "production of a digital replica without consent of the applicable individual or rights holder" unless part of a news, public affairs, sports broadcast, documentary, or biographical work. The rights would apply throughout a person's lifetime and, for their estate, 70 years after their death. The bill includes an exception for using digital duplicates for parodies, satire, and criticism. It also excludes commercial activities like commercials as long as the advertisement is for news, a documentary, or a parody. Individuals, as well as entities like a deceased person's estate or a record label, can file for civil action based on the proposed rules. The bill also explicitly states that a disclaimer stating the digital replica was unauthorized won't be considered an effective defense.

Ashley Belanger reports via Ars Technica: This month, more than three dozen victims allegedly terrorized by stalkers using Apple AirTags have joined a class-action lawsuit filed in a California court last December against Apple. They alleged in an amended complaint (PDF) that, partly due to Apple's negligence, AirTags have become "one of the most dangerous and frightening technologies employed by stalkers" because they can be easily, cheaply, and covertly used to determine "real-time location information to track victims." Since the lawsuit was initially filed in 2022, plaintiffs have alleged that there has been an "explosion of reporting" showing that AirTags are frequently being used for stalking, including a spike in international AirTags stalking cases and more than 150 police reports in the US as of April 2022. More recently, there were 19 AirTags stalking cases in one US metropolitan area -- Tulsa, Oklahoma -- alone, the complaint said.

This seeming escalation is concerning, plaintiffs say, because Apple allegedly has not done enough to mitigate harms, and AirTags stalking can lead to financial ruin, as victims bear significant costs like hiring mechanics to strip their cars to locate AirTags or repeatedly relocating their homes. AirTags stalking can also end in violence, including murder, plaintiffs alleged, and the problem is likely bigger than anyone knows, because stalking is historically underreported. [...] Many plaintiffs said they had no clue what AirTags were when they first discovered hidden AirTags were being used to monitor their moves. At the very least, plaintiffs want Apple to be responsible for raising awareness of how AirTags are used by stalkers -- not just to inform people who are at risk of stalking but also to ensure law enforcement is aware. Plaintiffs have alleged that Apple did not provide information to police that prevented them from accessing protective orders and pressing criminal charges. The complaint also suggested other remedies Apple could provide, like improving the consistency of AirTag alerts, which plaintiffs claimed only sometimes appeared on iPhones, so that users are always aware when an AirTag is nearby. "Apple continues to find itself in the position of reacting to the harms its product has unleashed, as opposed to prophylactically preventing those harms," the complaint said.

A technology specialist for the National Network to End Domestic Violence, Corbin Streett, is also quoted in the complaint, pointing out that Apple's threat model seemed to only consider risks of strangers using AirTags for unwanted stalking, not abusive partners. That's a problem since advocacy groups like the federally funded Stalking Prevention, Awareness, & Resource Center report (PDF) that the "vast majority of stalking victims are stalked by someone they know" and "intimate partner stalkers are the most likely stalkers to approach, threaten, and harm their victims." "I hope Apple keeps their learning hat on and works to figure out that piece of the puzzle," Streett said.

Google said on Thursday that it will defend users of generative AI systems in its Google Cloud and Workspace platforms if they are accused of intellectual property violations, joining Microsoft, Adobe and other companies that have made similar pledges. From a report: Major technology companies like Google have been investing heavily in generative AI and racing to incorporate it into their products. Prominent writers, illustrators and other copyright owners have said in several lawsuits that both the use of their work to train the AI systems and the content the systems create violate their rights. "To our knowledge, Google is the first in the industry to offer a comprehensive, two-pronged approach to indemnity" that specifically covers both types of claims, a company spokesperson said. Google said its new policy applies to software, including its Vertex AI development platform and Duet AI system, which generates text and images in Google Workspace and Cloud programs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed SB 244, or the Right to Repair Act, into law, making it easier for owners to repair devices themselves or to take them to independent repair shops. Because California is one of the world's largest economies, this iFixit-cosponsored bill may make it easier for people all over the US to repair their devices. The law, which joins similar efforts in New York, Colorado, and Minnesota, is tougher than some of its predecessors.

Manufacturers must make available appropriate tools, parts, software, and documentation for seven years after production for devices priced above $100. (Less expensive devices only have to have these materials available for three years.) [...] The bill is effective on electronics made and sold after July 1st, 2021. Though the bill is fairly sweeping, there are carve-outs for game consoles and alarm systems. Further reading: Cory Doctorow: Apple Sabotages Right-to-Repair Using 'Parts-Pairing' and the DMCA

Utah became the latest state Tuesday to file a lawsuit against TikTok, alleging the company is "baiting" children into addictive and unhealthy social media habits. From a report: TikTok lures children into hours of social media use, misrepresents the app's safety and deceptively portrays itself as independent of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, Utah claims in the lawsuit. "We will not stand by while these companies fail to take adequate, meaningful action to protect our children. We will prevail in holding social media companies accountable by any means necessary," Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit, which was filed in state court in Salt Lake City. Arkansas and Indiana have filed similar lawsuits while the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to decide whether state attempts to regulate social media platforms such as Facebook, X and TikTok violate the Constitution.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A California judge has thrown out a $32.5 million verdict win for Sonos against Google after two of Sonos' patents were deemed unenforceable and invalid. As a result, Google has started to re-introduce software features it had removed due to Sonos' lawsuit. In a decision dated October 6, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said that Sonos had wrongfully linked its patent applications for multi-room audio technology to a 2006 application in order to make them appear older and claim that its inventions came before Google's products, as first reported by Reuters.

"Sonos filed the provisional application from which the patents in suit claim priority in 2006, but it did not file the applications for these patents and present the asserted claims for examination until 2019," the decision (PDF) reads. "By the time these patents issued in 2019 and 2020, the industry had already marched on and put the claimed invention into practice. In fact, in 2014, five years before Sonos filed the applications and presented the claims, accused infringer Google LLC shared with Sonos a plan for a product that would practice what would become the claimed invention."

The decision states that the two companies were exploring a potential collaboration, but that it never materialized. Alsup goes on to note that Google began introducing its own products that featured multi-room audio technology in 2015, and also that Sonos waited until 2019 to pursue claims on the invention. "This was not a case of an inventor leading the industry to something new," Alsup wrote. "This was a case of the industry leading with something new and, only then, an inventor coming out of the woodwork to say that he had come up with the idea first — wringing fresh claims to read on a competitor's products from an ancient application." "We recently made a change to speaker groups for Nest speakers, displays, and Chromecast where certain devices can only belong to one speaker group at a time in the Google Home app," the company wrote in a blog post. "A federal judge has found that two patents that Sonos accused our devices of infringing are invalid. In light of this legal decision we're happy to share that we will be rolling back this change."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facebook may have to overhaul its entire ad-targeting system after a California court ruled (PDF) last month that the platform's practice of routinely targeting ads by age, gender, and other protected categories violates a state anti-discrimination law. The decision came after a 48-year-old Facebook user, Samantha Liapes, fought for years to prove that Facebook had discriminated against her as an older woman using the platform's ad-targeting system to shop for life insurance policies.

Liapes filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook in 2020. In her complaint, Liapes alleged that "Facebook requires all advertisers to choose the age and gender of its users who will receive ads, and companies offering insurance products routinely tell it to not send their ads to women or older people." Further, she alleged that Facebook's ad-delivery algorithm magnifies the problem by using these required inputs to serve the ads to "lookalike audiences." Through its algorithm, Liapes alleged that she found that Facebook "discriminates against women and older people," by intentionally excluding them from seeing certain life insurance ads. This, Liapes alleged, caused harm by preventing her from signing up for deals that "often change and may expire" -- deals which she said were disproportionately being advertised on Facebook to younger and/or male audiences. As evidence, Liapes pointed to ads that Facebook did not serve to her -- allegedly because advertisers used the platform's Audience Selection and Lookalike Audience tools to exclude her -- as an older woman [...]. "As a result, she had a harder time learning about those products or services," Liapes' complaint alleged. [...]

Initially, a court agreed with Facebook's arguments that Liapes had not provided sufficient evidence establishing Facebook's intent or demonstrating harms caused, but rather than amend her complaint, Liapes appealed. Then, in what tech law expert Eric Goldman on his blog called a "shocking conclusion," a California court last month reversed that initial decision, finding instead that Facebook's ad-targeting tools are not neutral, discriminate against users by age and gender, and are not immune under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Goldman -- who joked that Liapes wanting more Facebook ads is "a desire shared by almost no one" -- said that the potential impact of this ruling goes beyond possibly shaking up Facebook's ad system. It also seemingly implicates every other ad network by finding that "any gender- or age-based ad targeting for any product or service (and targeting based on any other protected characteristics) could violate the Unruh Act." If the ruling is upheld, that could "have devastating effects on the entire Internet ecosystem," Goldman warned. "The court's single-minded determination to find a valid discrimination claim under these conditions casts a long and troubling shadow over the online advertising industry," Goldman wrote in his blog. "Who needs new privacy laws if the Unruh Act already bans most ad targeting?"

"The opinion never expressly says that the Unruh Act regulates ad targeting," Goldman told Ars. "It takes some reading between the lines to reach that conclusion."

Adi Robertson reports via The Verge: California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed AB 1394, a law that would punish web services for "knowingly facilitating, aiding, or abetting commercial sexual exploitation" of children. It's one of several online regulations that California has passed in recent years, some of which have been challenged as unconstitutional. Newsom's office indicated in a press release yesterday that he had signed AB 1394, which passed California's legislature in late September.

The law is set to take effect on January 1, 2025. It adds new rules and liabilities aimed at making social media services crack down on child sexual abuse material, adding punishments for sites that "knowingly" leave reported material online. More broadly, it defines "aiding or abetting" to include "deploy[ing] a system, design, feature, or affordance that is a substantial factor in causing minor users to be victims of commercial sexual exploitation." Services can limit their risks by conducting regular audits of their systems. As motivation, the bill text cites whistleblower complaints that Facebook responded inadequately to child abuse on the platform and a 2022 Forbes article alleging that TikTok Live had become a haven for adults to prey on teenage users.

An economist testified that Google made billions of dollars in extra ad revenue starting in 2017 — by making a secret change to its auction algorithm that bumped their revenues up 15%. Bloomberg reports: Michael Whinston, a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Friday that Google modified the way it sold text ads via "Project Momiji" — named for the wooden Japanese dolls that have a hidden space for friends to exchange secret messages. The shift sought "to raise the prices against the highest bidder," Whinston told Judge Amit Mehta in federal court in Washington.

Google's advertising auctions require the winner to pay only a penny more than the runner-up. In 2016, the company discovered that the runner-up had often bid only 80% of the winner's offer. To help eliminate that 20% between the runner-up and what the winner was willing to pay, Google gave the second-place bidder a built-in handicap to make their offer more competitive, Whinston said, citing internal emails and sealed testimony by Google finance executive Jerry Dischler earlier in the case...

About two-thirds, more than 60%, of Google's total revenue comes from search ads, Dischler said previously, amounting to more than $100 billion in 2020.
In 2021 Google was also accused of running "a secret program to track bids on its ad-buying platform," according to the New York Post (citing reporting by the Wall Street Journal). A Texas-led antitrust suit accused Google "of using the information to gain an unfair market advantage that raked in hundreds of millions of dollars annually, according to a report."

And the Post's article also mentioned "an alleged hush-hush deal in which Google allegedly guaranteed that Facebook would win a fixed percentage of advertising deals."

Nearly 12% of America's population is in California. And the Los Angeles Times is predicting changes to what they eat: California became the first state in the nation to prohibit four food additives found in popular cereal, soda, candy and drinks after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a ban on them Saturday. The California Food Safety Act will ban the manufacture, sale or distribution of brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben and red dye No. 3 — potentially affecting 12,000 products that use those substances, according to the Environmental Working Group.

The legislation was popularly known as the "Skittles ban" because an earlier version also targeted titanium dioxide, used as a coloring agent in candies including Skittles, Starburst and Sour Patch Kids, according to the Environmental Working Group. But the measure, Assembly Bill 418, was amended in September to remove mention of the substance...

Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel (D-Woodland Hills), who authored AB 418, hailed the move as a "huge step in our effort to protect children and families in California from dangerous and toxic chemicals in our food supply." Gabriel said the bill won't ban any foods or products but will require food companies to make "minor modifications" to their recipes and switch to safer alternative ingredients. The use of the chemicals has already been banned in the European Union's 27 nations as well as many other countries due to scientific research linking them to cancer, reproductive issues, and behavioral and developmental problems in children, Gabriel said. Many major brands and manufacturers — including Coke, Pepsi, Gatorade and Panera — have voluntarily stopped using the additives because of concerns about their affect on human health. Brominated vegetable oil was previously used in Mountain Dew, but Pepsi Co. has since stopped using it in the beverage. It is still used, however, in generic soda brands such as Walmart's Great Value-branded Mountain Lightning. Propylparaben and potassium bromate are commonly found in baked goods. Red dye no. 3 is used by Just Born Quality Confections to color pink and purple marshmallow Peeps candy, according to Consumer Reports. "What we're really trying to get them to do is to change their recipes," Gabriel told The Times in March. "All of these are nonessential ingredients...."

"This is a milestone in food safety, and California is once again leading the nation," said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, which co-sponsored the bill along with Consumer Reports. The law could affect food across the country, Cook said, because the size of California's economy might prompt manufacturers to produce just one version of their product rather than separate ones for the state and the rest of the nation.
A study by California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (cited in the bill) found that "consumption of synthetic food dyes can result in hyperactivity and other neurobehavioral problems in some children, and that children vary in their sensitivity to synthetic food dyes. The report also found that current federal levels for safe intake of synthetic food dyes may not sufficiently protect children's behavioral health." The reports adds that America's Food and Drug Administration had set levels for the additives" "decades ago," and that those levels "do not reflect newer research."

The Los Angeles Times notes that the law won't take effect until January of 2027 — and that it imposes fines of "up to $10,000 for violations."

The Times also points out that former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had endorsed the bill as "common sense".

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: A man accused of shooting down a law enforcement drone being used at a business near his Florida home could be sentenced to 10 years in federal prison...

Lake County sheriff's deputies responded to a burglary at a 10-acre industrial property in July 2021 in Mount Dora, northwest of Orlando, according to a plea agreement. As deputies used a $29,000 drone in the outdoor search, gunfire from a neighboring residential property caused it to crash into a metal roof and catch fire, prosecutors said. Deputies went to the property and found Goney, who said he shot down the drone with a .22-caliber rifle because it had been "harassing" him, investigators said.
The man had 29 previous felony convictions — and federal law prohibits most convicted felons from possessing firearms and ammunition...

Since 2004 October has been designated "Cybersecurity Awareness Month" in America, "a collaborative effort between government and industry to enhance cybersecurity awareness, encourage actions by the public to reduce online risk and generate discussion on cyber threats on a national and global scale."

That's according to America's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (or CISA), the operational lead for federal cybersecurity and national coordinator for critical infrastructure security and resilience (specifically designed for collaboration and partnership). It's why the NSA is publicizing the ten most common cybersecurity misconfigurations in large organizations.

But in addition, for consumers CISA is introducing a new program this year that "promotes behavioral change across the Nation, with a particular focus on how individuals, families and small to medium-sized businesses can Secure Our World by focusing on the four critical actions..." In a video the director of America's cyberdefense agency calls them steps "that everyone can take to stay safe online."

• Use Strong Passwords, "meaning long, random, and unique to each account. And use a password manager to generate and to save them."

• Turn on Multi-Factor Authentication on All Accounts That Offer It. "You need more than a password on your most important accounts, like email, social media, and financial accounts."

• Recognize and Report Phishing. "Be cautious of unsolicited emails, texts, or calls asking you for personal information, and don't click on links or open attachments from unknown sources.

• Update Your Software. "In fact, enable automatic updates on your software, so the latest security patches just keep your devices continuously up-to-date."

The video ends by noting CISA is asking tech companies and software developers to create products that are "secure by design."

"And let's secure our families by ensuring that our loved ones know what to look for and how to stay safe online."

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden's administration is facing pressure from some lawmakers to restrict American companies from working on a freely available chip technology widely used in China — a move that could upend how the global technology industry collaborates across borders...

RISC-V can be used as a key ingredient for anything from a smartphone chip to advanced processors for artificial intelligence... The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernize its military. Their comments represent the first major effort to put constraints on work by U.S. companies on RISC-V...

Executives from China's Huawei Technologies have embraced RISC-V as a pillar of that nation's progress in developing its own chips. But the United States and its allies also have jumped on the technology, with chip giant Qualcomm working with a group of European automotive firms on RISC-V chips and Alphabet's Google saying it will make Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, work on RISC-V chips...

Jack Kang, vice president of business development at SiFive, a Santa Clara, California-based startup using RISC-V, said potential U.S. government restrictions on American companies regarding RISC-V would be a "tremendous tragedy." "It would be like banning us from working on the internet," Kang said. "It would be a huge mistake in terms of technology, leadership, innovation and companies and jobs that are being created."
One U.S. Representative said the Chinese Communist Party was "abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips.

"U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws."