Tom Perkins writes via The Guardian: Almost half of a federal government panel that helps develop US nutritional guidelines has significant ties to big agriculture, ultra-processed food companies, pharmaceutical companies and other corporate organizations with a significant stake in the process's outcome. The revelation is part of a new report from US Right to Know, a government transparency group that looked for ties to corporate interests among the 20-member panel of food and nutrition experts that makes recommendations for updating the US government's official dietary guidelines.

It found nine members had ties to Nestle, Pfizer, Coca-Cola, the National Egg Board and other prominent food lobby groups, among others. The findings raise questions about whether the panel is looking out for Americans' health or corporate profits, and "erodes confidence in dietary guidelines," said Gary Ruskin of US Right to Know. "Millions of Americans' lives are affected by this report and it's crucial that the report tell the truth to American people and it's not degraded into another sales pitch for big food and big pharma," he said. [...]

"The guidelines affect the entire US food system quite strongly," Ruskin said. US Right to Know scoured public records dating back five years for conflicts of interest among the 20 panel members. In addition to the nine it found with "high-risk conflicts of interest" and connections to the food and drug industry, it found four more members who have possible conflicts of interest. It applauded the agencies for appointing seven members who did not appear to have any conflicts. At least four panelists have connections to at least two companies each among Abbott, Novo Nordisk, the National Dairy Council, Eli Lilly and Weight Watchers International. One panel member has received about $240,000 in grant funding from Eli Lilly.

Jonathan Greig writes via The Record: Genetic testing giant 23andMe confirmed that a data scraping incident resulted in hackers gaining access to sensitive user information and selling it on the dark web. The information of nearly 7 million 23andMe users was offered for sale on a cybercriminal forum this week. The information included origin estimation, phenotype, health information, photos, identification data and more. 23andMe processes saliva samples submitted by customers to determine their ancestry.

When asked about the post, the company initially denied that the information was legitimate, calling it a "misleading claim" in a statement to Recorded Future News. The company later said it was aware that certain 23andMe customer profile information was compiled through unauthorized access to individual accounts that were signed up for the DNA Relative feature -- which allows users to opt in for the company to show them potential matches for relatives. [...] When pressed on how compromising a handful of user accounts would give someone access to millions of users, the spokesperson said the company does not believe the threat actor had access to all of the accounts but rather gained unauthorized entry to a much smaller number of 23andMe accounts and scraped data from their DNA Relative matches.

A researcher approached Recorded Future News after examining the leaked database and found that much of it looked real. [...] The researcher downloaded two files from the BreachForums post and found that one had information on 1 million 23andMe users of Ashkenazi heritage. The other file included data on more than 300,000 users of Chinese heritage. The data included profile and account ID numbers, names, gender, birth year, maternal and paternal genetic markers, ancestral heritage results, and data on whether or not each user has opted into 23andme's health data. The researcher added that he discovered another issue where someone could enter a 23andme profile ID, like the ones included in the leaked data set, into their URL and see someone's profile. The data available through this only includes profile photos, names, birth years and location but does not include test results.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A man who admitted attempting to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II with a crossbow after discussing his plan with an AI-powered chatbot has been sentenced to 9 years in prison for treason. It's the UK's first treason conviction in more than 40 years. Jaswant Singh Chail, who was 19 at the time of his arrest on Christmas Day, 2021, scaled the walls of Windsor Castle's grounds with a mask and a loaded high-power crossbow. He said his intent was, as a British Sikh, to assassinate the Queen in a Star Wars-inspired plan to avenge the 1919 Jallianwalla Bagh massacre, a colonial-era atrocity during British rule in India. Prosecutors said that Chail was encouraged to undertake this plot after discussing it at length with an AI-powered chatbot that egged him on and bolstered his resolve. [...] Chail is currently being held at Broadmoor high-security hospital and will remain there until he is psychologically well enough to serve his sentence.

Slash_Account_Dot shares a report from 404 Media, written by Joseph Cox: In a bombshell report, an oversight body for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Enforcement (CBP), and the Secret Service all broke the law while using location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on smartphones. In one instance, a CBP official also inappropriately used the technology to track the location of coworkers with no investigative purpose. For years U.S. government agencies have been buying access to location data through commercial vendors, a practice which critics say skirts the Fourth Amendment requirement of a warrant. During that time, the agencies have typically refused to publicly explain the legal basis on which they based their purchase and use of the data. Now, the report shows that three of the main customers of commercial location data broke the law while doing so, and didn't have any supervisory review to ensure proper use of the technology. The report also recommends that ICE stop all use of such data until it obtains the necessary approvals, a request that ICE has refused.

The report, titled "CBP, ICE, and Secret Service Did Not Adhere to Privacy Policies or Develop Sufficient Policies Before Procuring and Using Commercial Telemetry Data," is dated September 28, 2023, and comes from Joseph V. Cuffari, the Inspector General for DHS. The report was originally marked as "law enforcement sensitive," but the Inspector General has now released it publicly.

James Hunt reports via The Block: A group of FTX U.S.-based employees stumbled across a backdoor for its affiliated trading firm Alameda Research months before the crypto exchange collapsed in Nov. 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The backdoor allowed Alameda to have a negative balance of up to $65 billion using customer funds, according to previous court filings revealing code buried in FTX's systems. Negative balances were not possible for other FTX users, who would be automatically liquidated if they fell into the red.

The employees reportedly alerted their division boss to the discovery, who discussed it with former FTX CEO Sam Bankman Fried's lieutenant Nishad Singh, but the issue was never resolved. Instead, the leader of the team who raised the concern was sacked, the WSJ said. [...] The backdoor forms a key part of the prosecution's case in Bankman-Fried's trial. Bankman-Fried faces multiple fraud charges and could serve decades in prison. He pleaded not guilty to all charges.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Following preliminary objections over Google's data terms, set out back in January by Germany's antitrust watchdog, the tech giant has agreed to make changes that will give users a better choice over its use of their information, the country's Federal Cartel Office (FCO) said today. The commitments cover situations where Google would like to combine personal data from one Google service with personal data from other Google or non-Google sources or cross-use these data in Google services that are provided separately, per the authority.

Per the FCO decision document (PDF): "The Commitments cover in principle all services operated by Google and directed to end users in Germany with more than one million monthly active users (MAU) in Germany [and Android Automotive whether it meets that threshold or not]." But, as we report below, Google's core platform services designated under the EU's DMA are not covered -- nor is Fitbit, which the document notes is already subject to "far-reaching obligations regarding the cross-service processing of health and wellness data" as a result of EU merger control. [...]

Per the FCO decision document, the implementation date (in principle) for Google's commitments is September 30, 2024 — with an earlier date of March 6, 2024 for commitments covering Google Assistant and Contacts. But the FCO notes that it may provide Google with an extension upon "substantiated request". Once implemented, the commitments will have a five year duration from their start date. The document also notes that if, in the future, a Google service falls out of the DMA designation as a core platform service and meets the FCO usage threshold then these local commitments will be applied to it. The converse will also apply; meaning if the European Commission designates one of the Google services covered by this commitments to the DMA list of core platform services it would no longer fall under this arrangement. Gmail is an interesting example here as the EU recently accepted Google's arguments to exclude the web mail service from the DMA list of core platform services -- but the tech giant is facing future restrictions on how it can use Gmail users' data under the FCO commitments (even if these will only apply in Germany). Commenting in a statement, Andreas Mundt, president of the Bundeskartellamt, said: "Data are key for many business models used by large digital companies. The market power of large digital companies is based on the collection, processing and combination of data. Google's competitors do not have these data and are thus faced with serious competitive disadvantages. In the future users of Google services will have a much better choice as to what happens to their data, how Google can use them and whether their data may be used across services. This not only protects the users' right to determine the use of their data but also curbs Google's data-driven market power. Large digital companies offer a wide range of different digital services. Without the users' free and informed consent the data from Google's services and third-party services can no longer be cross-used in separate services offered by Google or even be combined. We have made sure that Google will provide a separate choice option in the future."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Within the past year, there have been approximately five times more school shooting hoaxes called in to police than actual school shootings reported in 2023. Where data from Everytown showed "at least 103 incidents of gunfire on school grounds" in 2023, The Washington Post recently uncovered what seems to be a coordinated campaign of active shooter hoaxes causing "swattings" -- where police respond with extreme force to fake crimes -- at more than 500 schools nationwide over the past year. In just one day in February, "more than 30 schools were targeted," The Post reported.

The Post "examined police reports, emergency call recordings, body-camera footage, or call logs in connection with incidents in 24 states," which seemed to reveal a "distinct pattern" potentially linking swatting hoaxes nationwide. A man who "speaks with a heavy accent" -- and possibly uses a device or app to alter his voice in real time -- relies on a virtual private network (VPN) to mask his IP address, then places the hoax calls on non-emergency lines using free Internet-calling services. He frequently pretends to be a teacher hiding from the fake shooter on campus and sometimes falsely reports student shootings. To some law enforcement officials, the voice sounds too similar from call to call to be chalked up to coincidence. The Post stitched together audio that shows why many authorities believe these hoax calls might be coming from the same caller, whose motivations are currently unknown. It's possible the hoax calls are being orchestrated by one person with a hostile compulsion or by one or several perpetrators advertising swatting services available for hire online. [...]

According to The Post, the FBI has been investigating this string of school shooting hoaxes, but it's unclear how far that investigation has gotten -- mostly because tracing the hoax calls has perplexed many law enforcement agencies nationwide. Tracing calls is difficult partly because many VPN providers outside the US don't always cooperate with law enforcement, and some of the most popular free Internet-calling services only require an email address to sign up. However, The Post reported that it has increasingly become clear to law enforcement that one particular Internet-calling service appears to be the most popular choice for hoax callers reporting school shootings: TextNow. One police captain in Lousiana, Shannon Mack -- who is described as specializing in "cases involving Internet-based phone services -- told The Post that "nine times out of 10," hoax calls she has investigated have come from a TextNow number.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Crime predictions generated for the police department in Plainfield, New Jersey, rarely lined up with reported crimes, an analysis by The Markup has found, adding new context to the debate over the efficacy of crime prediction software. Geolitica, known as PredPol until a 2021 rebrand, produces software that ingests data from crime incident reports and produces daily predictions on where and when crimes are most likely to occur. We examined 23,631 predictions generated by Geolitica between February 25 and December 18, 2018, for the Plainfield Police Department (PD). Each prediction we analyzed from the company's algorithm indicated that one type of crime was likely to occur in a location not patrolled by Plainfield PD. In the end, the success rate was less than half a percent. Fewer than 100 of the predictions lined up with a crime in the predicted category, that was also later reported to police. Diving deeper, we looked at predictions specifically for robberies or aggravated assaults that were likely to occur in Plainfield and found a similarly low success rate: 0.6 percent. The pattern was even worse when we looked at burglary predictions, which had a success rate of 0.1 percent.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from The Intercept: The Heat Initiative, a nonprofit child safety advocacy group, was formed earlier this year to campaign against some of the strong privacy protections Apple provides customers. The group says these protections help enable child exploitation, objecting to the fact that pedophiles can encrypt their personal data just like everyone else. When Apple launched its new iPhone this September, the Heat Initiative seized on the occasion, taking out a full-page New York Times ad, using digital billboard trucks, and even hiring a plane to fly over Apple headquarters with a banner message. The message on the banner appeared simple: 'Dear Apple, Detect Child Sexual Abuse in iCloud' -- Apple's cloud storage system, which today employs a range of powerful encryption technologies aimed at preventing hackers, spies, and Tim Cook from knowing anything about your private files.

Something the Heat Initiative has not placed on giant airborne banners is who's behind it: a controversial billionaire philanthropy network whose influence and tactics have drawn unfavorable comparisons to the right-wing Koch network. Though it does not publicize this fact, the Heat Initiative is a project of the Hopewell Fund, an organization that helps privately and often secretly direct the largesse -- and political will -- of billionaires. Hopewell is part of a giant, tightly connected web of largely anonymous, Democratic Party-aligned dark-money groups, in an ironic turn, campaigning to undermine the privacy of ordinary people.

For an organization demanding that Apple scour the private information of its customers, the Heat Initiative discloses extremely little about itself. According to a report in the New York Times, the Heat Initiative is armed with $2 million from donors including the Children's Investment Fund Foundation, an organization founded by British billionaire hedge fund manager and Google activist investor Chris Cohn, and the Oak Foundation, also founded by a British billionaire. The Oak Foundation previously provided $250,000 to a group attempting to weaken end-to-end encryption protections in EU legislation, according to a 2020 annual report. The Heat Initiative is helmed by Sarah Gardner, who joined from Thorn, an anti-child trafficking organization founded by actor Ashton Kutcher. [...] Critics say these technologies aren't just uncovering trafficked children, but ensnaring adults engaging in consensual sex work. "My goal is for child sexual abuse images to not be freely shared on the internet, and I'm here to advocate for the children who cannot make the case for themselves," Gardner said, declining to name the Heat Initiative's funders. "I think data privacy is vital. I think there's a conflation between user privacy and known illegal content."

Todd Shields and Loren Grush reporting via Bloomberg: Dish Network Corp. was fined $150,000 by US regulators for leaving a retired satellite parked in the wrong place in space, reflecting official concern over the growing amount of debris orbiting Earth and the potential for mishaps. The Federal Communications Commission called the action its first to enforce safeguards against orbital debris. "This is a breakthrough settlement, making very clear the FCC has strong enforcement authority and capability to enforce its vitally important space debris rules," Loyaan A. Egal, the agency's enforcement bureau chief, said in a statement.

Dish's EchoStar-7 satellite, which relayed pay-TV signals, ran short of fuel, and the company retired it at an altitude roughly 76 miles (122 kilometers) above its operational orbit. It was supposed to have been parked 186 miles above its operational orbit, the FCC said in an order (PDF). The company admitted it failed to park EchoStar-7 as authorized. It agreed to implement a compliance plan and pay a $150,000 civil penalty, the FCC said.

Ian Freeman, a New Hampshire man in his 40s, has been sentenced to eight years in prison for running an unlicensed bitcoin exchange business. He will also be fined at least $40,000, although the exact amount still has to be determined in a hearing. The Associated Press reports: Ian Freeman was taken away in handcuffs following his sentencing in U.S. District Court in Concord. Prosecutors said Freeman, a libertarian activist and radio show host, created a business that catered to fraudsters who targeted elderly women with romance scams, serving as "the final step in permanently separating the victims from their money." Freeman, who is in his 40s, said in court he did not believe he broke the law. He said he was trying to get people to adopt bitcoin. He said there were times he detected fraud and protected many potential scam victims. He apologized for not being able to help them all. "I don't want people to be taken advantage of," said Freeman, who said he cooperated with law enforcement to help some people get their money back.

Freeman said he devised a series of questions for customers, including whether a third party was putting them up to their transactions or if they were under duress. Some victims lied about their circumstances, he said. Freeman also said he didn't learn about scam victims until he saw their stories in the news. "It didn't matter how strict I was or how many questions I asked," he said. After a two-week trial, he was convicted of eight charges in December, although his conviction on a money laundering charge was later overturned by the judge. The prosecution is appealing it to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.

Freeman was sentenced on the remaining charges, which include operating an unlicensed money transmitting business and conspiracy to commit money laundering and wire fraud. Freeman's lawyers said they planned to appeal and asked that he remain free on bail for now, but U.S. District Court Judge Joseph LaPlante didn't allow it. The sentencing guidelines called for much longer term, ranging from about 17 years to nearly 22 years in prison.

dcblogs writes: The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge against the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which allows STEM graduates to work in the U.S. for up to three years on a student F-1 visa. John Miano, the attorney representing WashTech, the labor group that brought the appeal, called the decision "staggering." He said it "strips Congress of the ability to control nonimmigrant programs," such as OPT, the H-1B program, and other programs designed to provide temporary guest workers. In the most extreme example of what the decision may allow, Miano said it theoretically enables the White House to let people on tourist visas work. The decision "gives more authority to the federal government to do what it wants," he said.

The OPT program permits STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) graduates to work for up to three years under a student F-1 visa. Critics of the program said it brought unfair competition to the U.S. labor market. Ron Hira, an associate professor of Public Policy at Howard University, said the U.S. administration of the OPT program is so poor that "the program has effectively no controls, accountability, or worker protections."

A group of Senate Republicans, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, argued in briefs filed with the court that the federal government was using the OPT program to sidestep the annual H-1B visa cap. More than 30 Republican House members also filed a brief in support.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Britain's passport database could be used to catch shoplifters, burglars and other criminals under urgent plans to curb crime, the policing minister has said. Chris Philp said he planned to integrate data from the police national database (PND), the Passport Office and other national databases to help police find a match with the "click of one button." But civil liberty campaigners have warned the plans would be an "Orwellian nightmare" that amount to a "gross violation of British privacy principles".

Foreign nationals who are not on the passport database could also be found via the immigration and asylum biometrics system, which will be part of an amalgamated system to help catch thieves. The measures have been deemed controversial by campaigners as the technology could get a match even if images are blurred or partially obscured. Speaking at a fringe event of the Conservative party conference hosted by the Policy Exchange thinktank, Philp said: "I'm going to be asking police forces to search all of those databases -- the police national database, which has custody images, but also other databases like the passport database -- not just for shoplifting but for crime generally to get those matches, because the technology is now so good that you can get a blurred image and get a match for it.

"Operationally, I'm asking them to do it now. In the medium term, by which I mean the next two years, we're going to try and create a new data platform so you can press one button [and it] lets you search it all in one go. Until the new platform is created, he said police forces should search each database separately. [...] Philp said he has already ordered police forces that have access to the passport database to start searching it alongside the police national database, which stores custody images. Officers will be able to compare those facial images against CCTV, dashcam and doorbell technology to help find a match for criminals as prosecution rates are at record lows. He later added: "I would also just remind everyone that the wider public, including shop staff and security guards, do have the power of citizen's arrest and where it's safe to do so I would encourage that to be used. Because if you do just let people walk in and take stuff and walk out without proper challenge, including potentially a physical challenge, then it will just escalate."

Bill Omar Carrasquillo, better known by his YouTube name Omi In a Hellcat, has been arrested after the feds found Carrasquillo had amassed a $30 million fortune with a large-scale piracy scheme in which he was buying and reselling copyrighted material from cable TV. Jalopnik reports: He was sentenced to five years in prison for "piracy of cable TV, access device fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and hundreds of thousands of dollars of copyright infringement," along with having to forfeit his millions and pay $15 million in restitution. Those millions helped pay for the car collection now going up for auction.

[Road & Track reports Omi In A Hellcat's entire 57 vehicle collection is up for auction.] As of this writing, the auction features 32 cars and 25 bikes and off road vehicles. Despite his crimes, the man had decent taste in cars. There's good stuff to be had like.

This week America's Department of Energy announced $264 million for 29 projects as part of its Energy Earthshots Initiative "to advance clean energy technologies within the decade."

The funding will support 11 new research centers — along with 18 university research teams — studying things like industrial decarbonization, carbon storage, and offshore wind energy. The ultimate goal is a clean-energy revolution that will "accelerate innovations toward more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions."

One ambitious example: The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been selected to lead an Energy Earthshot Research Center focused on developing chemical processes that use sustainable methods instead of burning fossil fuels to radically reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions to stem climate change and limit the crisis of a rapidly warming planet... The ORNL-led Non-Equilibrium Energy Transfer for Efficient Reactions center, or NEETER, will coordinate a research team from across the nation focused on replacing bulk heating for chemical processes with electrified means, providing a new way to do chemistry, and decarbonizing large-scale processes in the chemical industry. DOE has committed $19 million over four years for the center...

The scientists, in addition to using their own laboratories, will use Department of Energy Office of Science user facilities, including ORNL's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, Spallation Neutron Source, High Flux Isotope Reactor, and Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences. They will also include the beam line at Stanford's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. NEETER's proposed research is a radical departure from traditional chemistry and holds promise for transformational breakthroughs in energy-related chemical reactions. The NEETER EERC addresses the Department of Energy's Industrial Heat Shot announced in 2022, which aims to develop cost-competitive industrial heat decarbonization technologies with at least 85% lower greenhouse gas emissions by 2035. This EERC will employ new kinds of chemical catalysis as one pathway toward electrifying the delivery of process heat.
The projects include:

• Investigating hydrogen arc plasmas for carbon-free steelmaking

• Using exascale computer simulations and observations to produce more resilient clean energy systems.

• The University of Florida has reportedly teamed with Switzerland-based Synhelion to "research the production of green hydrogen, aiming for a lower cost to produce."

• The Center for Understanding Subsurface Signals and Permeability will attempt research to "advance enhanced geothermal systems with the goal of making them a widely accessible and reliable source of renewable energy"

• Another research center (also lead by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) will research effort to "make floating offshore wind a long-term viable energy source."

"Our Energy Earthshots are game-changing endeavors to unleash the technologies of the clean energy transition and make them accessible, affordable, and abundant," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. "The Energy Earthshot Research Centers and the related work happening on college campuses around the country will be instrumental in developing the clean energy and decarbonization solutions we need to establish a 100% clean grid and beat climate change."

America's Department of Justice "has finally posted what judge Amit Mehta described at the Google search antitrust trial as an 'embarrassing' exhibit that Google tried to hide from the public," reports Ars Technica: The document in question contains meeting notes that Google's vice president for finance, Michael Roszak, "created for a course on communications," Bloomberg reported. In his notes, Roszak wrote that Google's search advertising "is one of the world's greatest business models ever created" with economics that only certain "illicit businesses" selling "cigarettes or drugs" "could rival."

At trial, Roszak told the court that he didn't recall if he ever gave the presentation. He said that the course required that he tell students "things I don't believe as part of the presentation." He also claimed that the notes were "full of hyperbole and exaggeration" and did not reflect his true beliefs, "because there was no business purpose associated with it." According to Bloomberg, Google repeatedly objected to the document being shared in court, claiming it was irrelevant to the DOJ's case. Then, after Mehta allowed the DOJ to present the document as evidence, Google tried to seal off Roszak's testimony on the document...

Beyond likening Google's search advertising business to illicit drug markets, Roszak's notes also said that because users got hooked on Google's search engine, Google was able to "mostly ignore the demand side" of "fundamental laws of economics" and "only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales." This was likely the bit that actually interested the DOJ. "We could essentially tear the economics textbook in half," Roszak's notes said. Part of the DOJ's case argues that because Google has a monopoly over search, it's less incentivized to innovate products that protect consumers from harm like invasive data collection.

A Google spokesman told Bloomberg that Roszak's statements "don't reflect the company's opinion" and "were drafted for a public speaking class in which the instructions were to say something hyperbolic and attention-grabbing." The spokesman also noted that Roszak "testified he didn't believe the statements to be true."

"San Francisco's downtown has lost roughly 150,000 daily workers since the pandemic," reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

But on the bright side, "Some of San Francisco's empty office buildings are one step closer to being converted into residential units," reports SFGate: The owners of eight San Francisco office buildings responded to a request from the city for landlords interested in converting their properties into condos or apartments, the San Francisco Chronicle reported... The properties would yield about 1,100 units if they were to all be converted, according to the Chronicle. All of the buildings are located in neighborhoods downtown, including the Civic Center area and the Financial District...

Converting offices to housing is a notably difficult process, especially in San Francisco, where the city's tedious permitting and approvals process has deterred many landlords from pursuing the process entirely. However, that could soon change: The request for interest put forth by the city was part of an initiative intended to jump-start office-to-housing conversions that was announced in June. In March, Mayor London Breed and the Board of Supervisors introduced legislation that would facilitate these conversions by exempting certain downtown buildings from housing requirements that are more difficult to apply to former offices, like rear yard space and a variety of unit types.
Or, as the Chronicle puts it, "The much-discussed push to revive downtown San Francisco by converting empty office buildings to housing is starting to gather real-world momentum, with property owners looking to take advantage of a political climate in which the mayor and Board of Supervisors are desperate to activate the city's struggling central neighborhoods." While converting eight commercial buildings totaling less than 1 million square feet would not put much of a dent in the historic 33.9% office vacancy — more than 30 million square feet of space — the interest is indicative that an increasing number of landlords are accepting the reality that the pandemic and remote work has rendered some buildings obsolete. "We were pleased with the responses — it was more than we had expected, and there was a good variety of buildings," said Anne Taupier, director of development for the city's Office of Economic and Workforce Development. "We think there is a chance to see some game-changing activation...."

Taupier said that all of the property owners said that recent legislation streamlining and lowering affordable housing requirements would be key to making conversions possible. Most of them would be candidates for Mills Act tax credits, which allow cities to reduce taxes for 10 years or more to owners of historic properties.
One of the biggest applications came from Mark Shkolnikov's Group I. "The support from the city has just been remarkable," Shkolnikov said. "They have been frequently checking in to see what they can do to help move this along.

Anyone who has used H&R Block's tax return preparation services since 2015 "may have unintentionally helped line Meta and Google's pocket," reports Gizmodo: That's according to a new class action lawsuit which alleges the three companies "jointly schemed" to install trackers on the H&R Block site to scan and transmit tax data back to the tech companies which then used elements of the data to engage in targeted advertising.

Attorneys bringing the case forward claim the three companies' conduct amounts to a "pattern of racketeering activity" covered under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a tool typically reserved for organized crime. "H&R Block, Google, and Meta ignored data privacy laws, and passed information about people's financial lives around like candy," Brent Wisner, one of the attorneys bringing forward the complaint said.

The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California this week, stems from a bombshell Congressional report released earlier this year detailing the way multiple tax preparation firms, including H&R Block, "recklessly" shared the sensitive tax data of tens of millions of Americans without proper safeguards. At issue are the tax preparation firms' use of tracking "pixels" placed on their websites. These trackers, which the lawsuit refers to as "spy cams" would allegedly scan tax documents and reveal a variety of personal tax information, including a filer's name, filing status, federal taxes owed, address, and number of dependents. That data was then anonymized and used for targeted advertising and to train Meta's AI algorithms, the congressional report notes.
The attorneys argue that H&R Block, Meta, and Google "explicitly and intentionally" entered into an agreement to violate taxpayers' privacy rights for financial gain, according to the article. The suit seeks refunds and punitive damages.

Kotaku reports: A newly unsealed FBI indictment accuses a former analyst at Goldman Sachs of insider trading, including allegedly using an Xbox to pass tips onto his close friends. The friend group earned over $400,000 in ill-gotten gains as a result, federal prosecutors claim. "There's no tracing [Xbox 360 chat]," the analyst allegedly told his friend who was worried they might be discovered.

He appears to have made a grave miscalculation.

The FBI arrested Anthony Viggiano and alleged co-conspirator Christopher Salamone, charging them with securities fraud on September 28. Viggiano is accused of using his previous position at Goldman Sachs to share trading tips with Salamone and others. Salamone has already pleaded guilty. Bloomberg reports that this is the fifth incident in recent years of a person associated with the investment bank allegedly using their position to do crimes...

Probably best to keep the crime talk on Xbox to a minimum either way, especially now that Microsoft is using AI to monitor communications for illicit and toxic activities.
In a statement an FBI official said "This indictment is yet another example of individuals believing they can get away with benefiting from trading on material non-public information.

The Associated Press reports: The National Security Agency is starting an artificial intelligence security center -- a crucial mission as AI capabilities are increasingly acquired, developed and integrated into U.S. defense and intelligence systems, the agency's outgoing director announced Thursday. Army Gen. Paul Nakasone said the center would be incorporated into the NSA's Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, where it works with private industry and international partners to harden the U.S. defense-industrial base against threats from adversaries led by China and Russia.

Nakasone was asked about using AI to automate the analysis of threat vectors and red-flag alerts -- and he reminded the audience that U.S. intelligence and defense agencies already use AI. "AI helps us, But our decisions are made by humans. And that's an important distinction," Nakasone said. "We do see assistance from artificial intelligence. But at the end of the day, decisions will be made by humans and humans in the loop."

Nakasone said it would become "NSA's focal point for leveraging foreign intelligence insights, contributing to the development of best practices guidelines, principles, evaluation, methodology and risk frameworks" for both AI security and the goal of promoting the secure development and adoption of AI within "our national security systems and our defense industrial base." He said it would work closely with U.S. industry, national labs, academia and the Department of Defense as well as international partners.