An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: What I felt was fear," says Claudia Duarte Agostinho as she remembers the extreme heatwave and fires that ripped through Portugal in 2017 and killed more than 100 people. "The wildfires made me really anxious about what sort of future I would have." Claudia, 24, her brother Martim, 20, and her sister Mariana, 11, are among six young Portuguese people who have filed a lawsuit against 32 governments, including all EU member states, the UK, Norway, Russia, Switzerland and Turkey. They accuse the countries of insufficient action over climate change and failing to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions enough to hit the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5C. The case is the first of its kind to be filed at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg. If it is successful, it could have legally-binding consequences for the governments involved. The first hearing in the case is being held on Wednesday.

Aged from 11 to 24, the six claimants argue that the forest fires that have occurred in Portugal each year since 2017 are a direct result of global warming. They claim that their fundamental human rights -- including the right to life, privacy, family life and to be free from discrimination -- are being violated due to governments' reluctance to fight climate change. They say they have already been experiencing significant impacts, especially because of extreme temperatures in Portugal forcing them to spend time indoors and restricting their ability to sleep, concentrate or exercise. Some also suffer from eco-anxiety, allergies and respiratory conditions including asthma. None of the young applicants is seeking financial compensation.

Lawyers representing the six young claimants are expected to argue in court that the 32 governments' current policies are putting the world on course for 3C of global warming by the end of the century. [...] In separate and joint responses to the case, the governments argue that the claimants have not sufficiently established that they have suffered as a direct consequence of climate change or the Portuguese wildfires. They claim there is no evidence to show climate change poses an immediate risk to human life or health, and also argue that climate policy is beyond the scope of the European Court of Human Rights jurisdiction. "These six young people from Portugal, who are ordinary individuals concerned about their future, will be facing 32 legal teams, hundreds of lawyers representing governments whose inaction is already harming them," says Gearoid O Cuinn, director of Global Legal Action Network (GLAN).

"So this is a real David vs Goliath case that is seeking a structural change to put us on a much better track in terms of our future."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether state laws that seek to regulate Facebook, TikTok, X and other social media platforms violate the Constitution. The justices will review laws enacted by Republican-dominated legislatures and signed by Republican governors in Florida and Texas. While the details vary, both laws aim to prevent the social media companies from censoring users based on their viewpoints. The court's announcement, three days before the start of its new term, comes as the justices continue to grapple with how laws written at the dawn of the digital age, or earlier, apply to the online world.

The justices had already agreed to decide whether public officials can block critics from commenting on their social media accounts [...]. Separately, the high court also could consider a lower-court order limiting executive branch officials' communications with social media companies about controversial online posts. The new social media cases follow conflicting rulings by two appeals courts, one of which upheld the Texas law, while the other struck down Florida's statute. By a 5-4 vote, the justices kept the Texas law on hold while litigation over it continues.

Slash_Account_Dot writes: I recently got my hands on an ordinary-looking iPhone-to-HDMI adapter that mimics Apple's branding and, when plugged in, runs a program that implores you to "Scan QR code for use." That QR code takes you to an ad-riddled website that asks you to download an app that asks for your location data, access to your photos and videos, runs a bizarre web browser, installs tracking cookies, takes "sensor data," and uses that data to target you with ads. The adapter's app also kindly informed me that it's sending all of my data to China.

The cord was discovered by friend of 404 Media John Bumstead, an electronics refurbisher and artist who buys devices in bulk from electronics recyclers. Bumstead tweeted about the cord and was kind enough to send me one so I could try it myself. Joseph has written about malicious lightning cables and USB cables made by hackers that can be used for keystroke logging and spying. While those malicious lightning cables are products marketed for spying, the HDMI adapter Bumstead has been found in the wild and is just another crappy knockoff cable sold on Amazon's increasingly difficult to navigate website. This HDMI adapter is designed to look exactly like Apple's same adapter.

Three Arrows Capital co-founder Su Zhu was apprehended in Singapore while trying to leave the country on Friday. From a report: Teneo, which is liquidating the defunct firm's estate, said it received a committal order against Zhu after he failed to comply with an earlier Singapore court order compelling him to cooperate with the liquidation investigation. The order sentenced Zhu to four months in prison, according to a statement by Teneo. Zhu was apprehended at Singapore's Changi Airport on Friday afternoon, Teneo said, adding that the Sept. 25 order also saw Zhu's co-founder Kyle Davies receive the same sentence. Zhu didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: New York state banned the use of facial recognition technology in schools Wednesday, following a report that concluded the risks to student privacy and civil rights outweigh potential security benefits. Education Commissioner Betty Rosa's order leaves decisions on digital fingerprinting and other biometric technology up to local districts. The state has had a moratorium on facial recognition since parents filed a court challenge to its adoption by an upstate district.

[A]n analysis by the Office of Information Technology Services issued last month "acknowledges that the risks of the use of (facial recognition technology) in an educational setting may outweigh the benefits." The report, sought by the Legislature, noted "the potentially higher rate of false positives for people of color, non-binary and transgender people, women, the elderly, and children." It also cited research from the nonprofit Violence Project that found that 70% of school shooters from 1980 to 2019 were current students. The technology, the report said, "may only offer the appearance of safer schools."

Biotechnology would not stop a student from entering a school "unless an administrator or staff member first noticed that the student was in crisis, had made some sort of threat, or indicated in some other way that they could be a threat to school security," the report said. The state report found that the use of digital fingerprinting was less risky and could be beneficial for school lunch payments and accessing electronic tablets and other devices. Schools may use that technology after seeking parental input, Rosa said. "Schools should be safe places to learn and grow, not spaces where they are constantly scanned and monitored, with their most sensitive information at risk," said Stefanie Coyle, deputy director of the NYCLU's Education Policy Center.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Japan Times: From Oct. 1, a new tax regulation decades in the making will go into effect -- and hundreds of thousands of workers in Japan are angry. The Qualified Invoicing System, which requires taxable businesses to issue invoices containing tax information for transactions, has generated a full-fledged movement against it. A petition on Change.org to halt the regulation has received nearly 450,000 signatures. The social movement [...] has held regular demonstrations and conferences advocating against the law, alongside significant protest from the world of pop culture: Animators, filmmakers, voice actors, manga artists and V-tubers of all stripes have joined together against it.

While the law is complex, the reason it's hated is not: It's effectively a tax increase. While the system was created to ensure that businesses will properly pay consumption tax, for many freelancers and small businesses the result will amount to a 10% increase in taxes -- a high enough jump to potentially devastate creatives who already make a living by the narrowest of margins. [...] Those who have already registered as taxable businesses or sole proprietors with sales of over 10 million yen are required to register for the system. Small freelancers and tax-exempt businesses, however, will need to consider carefully what to do. "Tax compliance will be the biggest issue for freelancers," [says Fumiko Mizoguchi, indirect tax service country leader at Deloitte]. "If freelancers agree to issue qualified invoices, they should offer the counter-suggestion that their prices will increase 10% as a result."

Meanwhile, the protest movement is steady on the ground in Tokyo. Voiction, which has been meeting with legislators to try to halt the law, plans on continuing to fight through the rest of the year and beyond. [Voice actress Yuhko Kaida] explains that the government could still decide to allow small businesses to not file 2023's consumption tax in March 2024, when taxes are due. "If we have the willpower, we can stop this law," Kaida says. "Then we can reduce the damage to people's lives."

samleecole writes: A food delivery robot company that delivers for Uber Eats in Los Angeles provided video filmed by one of its robots to the Los Angeles Police Department as part of a criminal investigation, 404 Media has learned. The incident highlights the fact that delivery robots that are being deployed to sidewalks all around the country are essentially always filming, and that their footage can and has been used as evidence in criminal trials. Emails obtained by 404 Media also show that the robot food delivery company wanted to work more closely with the LAPD, which jumped at the opportunity.

Apple said it has asked the US Supreme Court to review a judge's ruling from two years ago that could diminish the billions of dollars in revenue its App Store generates by letting app developers direct users to alternative payment methods. From a report: Apple's request to the high court on Thursday is its latest salvo in a drawn-out battle with Epic Games over how the iPhone maker runs its app marketplace. App Store revenue is lucrative for Apple, with developers charged a commission of as much as 30% for sales of digital goods and services -- a fee that the maker of the popular Fortnite game is trying to avoid paying. At the same time, years of complaints from app developers and scrutiny from governments globally have already forced Apple to rewrite some of the rules protecting its dominance in the $160 billion app distribution marketplace.

Apple's request comes a day after Epic petitioned the Supreme Court to review a separate part of the ruling, that App Store policies don't violate federal antitrust laws. Apple's filing couldn't immediately be confirmed in court records. The Supreme Court, per its regular schedule, could decide by the end of the year or early next year whether it will take up either or both of the petitions. In a mixed ruling in September 2021 following a trial, a federal judge in Oakland, California, largely rejected Epic's claims that Apple's online marketplace policies violated federal law by barring third-party app marketplaces on its operating system. But she also found that Apple flouted California state law by blocking developers from letting consumers know about alternative payment methods. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the trial judge's decision in April.

The U.S. government on Wednesday sued eBay, accusing the online platform of violating the Clean Air Act and other environmental laws by allowing the sale of several harmful products, including devices that defeat automobile pollution controls. From a report: EBay could face billions of dollars in penalties, including up to $5,580 for each Clean Air Act violation, according to the government's complaint filed in the federal court in Brooklyn, New York. The Department of Justice said eBay illegally allowed the sale of at least 343,011 aftermarket "defeat" devices that help vehicles generate more power and get better fuel economy by evading emissions controls.

EBay was also accused of allowing the sale of at least 23,000 unregistered, misbranded or restricted-use pesticides, violating a 2020 "stop sale" order from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The San Jose, California-based company also allegedly distributed 5,614 paint and coating removal products containing methylene chloride, a potentially lethal chemical linked to brain and liver cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. "EBay has the power, the authority, and the resources to stop the sale of these illegal, harmful products on its website," the complaint said. "It has chosen not to; instead, it has chosen to engage in these illegal transactions."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: GPUs from all six of the major suppliers are vulnerable to a newly discovered attack that allows malicious websites to read the usernames, passwords, and other sensitive visual data displayed by other websites, researchers have demonstrated in a paper (PDF) published Tuesday. The cross-origin attack allows a malicious website from one domain -- say, example.com -- to effectively read the pixels displayed by a website from example.org, or another different domain. Attackers can then reconstruct them in a way that allows them to view the words or images displayed by the latter site. This leakage violates a critical security principle that forms one of the most fundamental security boundaries safeguarding the Internet. Known as the same origin policy, it mandates that content hosted on one website domain be isolated from all other website domains. [...]

GPU.zip works only when the malicious attacker website is loaded into Chrome or Edge. The reason: For the attack to work, the browser must:

1. allow cross-origin iframes to be loaded with cookies
2. allow rendering SVG filters on iframes and
3. delegate rendering tasks to the GPU

For now, GPU.zip is more of a curiosity than a real threat, but that assumes that Web developers properly restrict sensitive pages from being embedded by cross-origin websites. End users who want to check if a page has such restrictions in place should look for the X-Frame-Options or Content-Security-Policy headers in the source. "This is impactful research on how hardware works," a Google representative said in a statement. "Widely adopted headers can prevent sites from being embedded, which prevents this attack, and sites using the default SameSite=Lax cookie behavior receive significant mitigation against personalized data being leaked. These protections, along with the difficulty and time required to exploit this behavior, significantly mitigate the threat to everyday users. We are in communication and are actively engaging with the reporting researchers. We are always looking to further improve protections for Chrome users."

An Intel representative, meanwhile, said that the chipmaker has "assessed the researcher findings that were provided and determined the root cause is not in our GPUs but in third-party software." A Qualcomm representative said "the issue isn't in our threat model as it more directly affects the browser and can be resolved by the browser application if warranted, so no changes are currently planned." Apple, Nvidia, AMD, and ARM didn't comment on the findings.

An informational write-up of the findings can be found here.

New submitter AsylumWraith shares a report: The US government aims to restore sweeping regulations for high-speed internet providers, such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, reviving "net neutrality" rules for the broadband industry -- and an ongoing debate about the internet's future. The proposed rules from the Federal Communications Commission will designate internet service -- both the wired kind found in homes and businesses as well as mobile data on cellphones -- as "essential telecommunications" akin to traditional telephone services, according to multiple people familiar with the plan. The rules would ban internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or slowing down access to websites and online content, the people told CNN.

Agency chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel plans to unveil the proposal in a speech at the National Press Club on Tuesday, the people added, saying the FCC plans to vote Oct. 19 on whether to advance the draft rules by soliciting public feedback on them -- a step that would precede the creation of any final rules. In addition to the prohibitions on blocking and throttling internet traffic, the draft rules also seek to prevent ISPs from selectively speeding up service to favored websites or to those that agree to pay extra fees, the people added, a move designed to prevent the emergence of "fast lanes" on the web that could give some websites a paid advantage over others.

Slash_Account_Dot writes: A federal counterintelligence agency tracking hackers has bought data harvested from the backbone of the internet by a private company because it was easier and took less time than getting similar data from the NSA, according to internal U.S. government documents. According to the documents, going through an agency like the NSA could take "days," whereas a private contractor could provide the same data instantly. The news is yet another example of a government agency turning to the private sector for novel datasets that the public is likely unaware are being collected and then sold.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has done tens of thousands of face recognition searches using software from outside providers in recent years. Yet only 5 percent of the 200 agents with access to the technology have taken the bureau's three-day training course on how to use it, a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) this month reveals. The bureau has no policy for face recognition use in place to protect privacy, civil rights, or civil liberties. Lawmakers and others concerned about face recognition have said that adequate training on the technology and how to interpret its output is needed to reduce improper use or errors, although some experts say training can lull law enforcement and the public into thinking face recognition is low risk.

Since the false arrest of Robert Williams near Detroit in 2020, multiple instances have surfaced in the US of arrests after a face recognition model wrongly identified a person. Alonzo Sawyer, whose ordeal became known this spring, spent nine days in prison for a crime he didn't commit. The lack of face recognition training at the FBI came to light in a GAO report examining the protections in place when federal law enforcement uses the technology. The report was compiled at the request of seven Democratic members of Congress. Report author and GAO Homeland Security and Justice director Gretta Goodwin says, via email, that she found no evidence of false arrests due to use of face recognition by a federal law enforcement agency.

The GAO report focuses on face recognition tools made by commercial and nonprofit entities. That means it does not cover the FBI's in-house face recognition platform, which the GAO previously criticized for poor privacy protections. The US Department of Justice was ordered by the White House last year to develop best practices for using face recognition and report any policy changes that result. The outside face recognition tools used by the FBI and other federal law enforcement covered by the report comes from companies including Clearview AI, which scraped billions of photos of faces from the internet to train its face recognition system, andThorn, a nonprofit that combats sex trafficking by applying face recognition to identify victims and sex traffickers from online commercial sex market imagery.The FBI ranks first among federal law enforcement agencies examined by the GAO for the scale of its use of face recognition. More than 60,000 searches were carried out by seven agencies between October 2019 and March 2022. Over half were made by FBI agents, about 15,000 using Clearview AI and 20,000 using Thorn. "No existing law requires federal law enforcement personnel to take training before using face recognition or to follow particular standards when using face recognition in a criminal investigation," notes Wired.

"The DOJ plans to issue a department-wide civil rights and civil liberties policy for face recognition but has yet to set a date for planned implementation, according to the report. It says that DOJ officials, at one point in 2022, considered updating its policy to allow a face recognition match alone to justify applying for a search warrant."

Emma Roth reporting via The Verge: Facebook can be sued over allegations that its advertising algorithm is discriminatory, a California state court of appeals ruled last week. The decision stems from a class action lawsuit filed against Facebook in 2020, which accused the company of not showing insurance ads to women and older people in violation of civil rights laws. The case centers around Samantha Liapes, a 48-year-old woman who turned to Facebook to find an insurance provider. The lawsuit alleges that Facebook's ad delivery system didn't show Liapes ads for insurance due to her age and gender.

In a September 21st ruling, the appeals court reversed a previous decision that said Section 230 (which protects online platforms from legal liability if users post illegal content) shields Facebook from accountability. The appeals court concluded that the case "adequately" alleges that Facebook "knew insurance advertisers intentionally targeted its ads based on users' age and gender" in violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act. It also found significant similarities between Facebook's ad platform and Roommates.com, a service that exceeded the protections of Section 230 by including dropdown menus with options that allowed for discrimination. "There is little difference with Facebook's ad tools" and their targeting capabilities, the court concluded. "Facebook does not merely proliferate and disseminate content as a publisher ... it creates, shapes, or develops content" with the tools.

Web3 is Going Great reports: After the Hong Kong-based JPEX exchange limited withdrawals amidst what appeared to be an impending collapse of the platform, things are now looking a lot more like fraud. Police have received more than 2,200 complaints pertaining to the exchange, involving $178 million in possible losses. Eleven people, including various crypto influencers who had promoted the exchange, were taken in for questioning. However, police have said those eleven people were not likely central to the fraud, and that the leaders of the JPEX project are on the run.

"New York City is now turning to robots to help patrol the Times Square subway station," quipped one local newscast.

The non-profit New York City blog Gothamist describes the robot as "almost as tall as the mayor — but at least three-times as wide around the waist," with a maximum speed of 3 miles per hour-- but a 360-degree field of vision, equipped with four cameras to send live video (without audio) to the police. A 420-pound, 5-foot-2-inch robocop with a giant camera for a face will begin patrolling the Times Square subway station overnight, the New York Police Department announced Friday morning. At a press conference held underground in the 42nd Street subway station, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said the city is launching a two-month pilot program to test the Knightscope K5 Autonomous Security Robot. During the press conference, the K5 robot — which is shaped like a small, white rocketship — stood silently along with uniformed officers and city officials in suits. Stripes of glowing blue lights indicated it was "on."

The K5 will act as a crime deterrent and provide real-time information on how to best deploy human officers to a safety incident, the mayor said. It features multiple cameras, a button that can connect the public with a real person, and a speaker for live audio communication... During the pilot program, the K5 will patrol the Times Squares subway station from midnight to 6 a.m. with a human NYPD handler that will help introduce it to the public. After two months, the mayor said the handler will no longer be necessary, and the robot will go on solo patrol...

Knightscope, which manufactures the robot, reports that it has been deployed to 30 clients in 10 states, including at malls and hospitals. The K5 has been in some sticky situations in other cities. One was toppled and slathered in barbecue sauce in San Francisco, while another was beaten by an intoxicated man in Mountain View, California, according to news reports. Another robot fell into a pool of water outside an office building in Washington, D.C.

When asked whether the robot was at risk of vandalism in New York City, the mayor strode over to it and gave it a few firm shoves. "Let's be clear, this is not a pushover. 420 pounds. This is New York tested," he said.
The city is leasing the robot for $9 an hour — And yes, local newscasts couldn't resist calling it a robocop. One shows the mayor announcing "We will continue to stay ahead of those who want to harm everyday New Yorkers."

Though the robot is equipped with facial recognition capability, it will not be activated.

Recent breaches of MGM's casino systems "were probably carried out by teens and young adults who have allied themselves with one of the world's most notorious ransomware gangs," writes the Washington Post's technology reporter.

Their alliance with the "Scattered Spider" group is described as "part of a trend that has alarmed security experts and defenders of corporate computer networks." The group is said to be "very active in the past two years, targeting large companies via stolen employee credentials and tricks such as convincing tech support employees that they have been accidentally locked out of their computers and need a new password." They moved from cryptocurrency thefts to targeting businesses that provide third-party business functions such as help desks and call center staffing, allowing them to infiltrate networks of many customers. And they extorted Western Digital and other technology firms after stealing internal data before heading for the jackpots in Las Vegas. But their willingness to deploy crippling ransomware while demanding money is a major escalation, as is their choice of a business partner: ALPHV, a hacking group whose affiliates include members of the former Russian powerhouses BlackMatter and DarkSide, the groups responsible for the Colonial Pipeline hack that awoke Washington to the national security risk of ransomware. ALPHV provided the BlackCat ransomware that the young hackers installed in the casinos' systems...

[According to new research presented Friday at the LABScon security conference] they came together through crimes enabled by SIM-swapping, which usually involves convincing phone company employees to hand over control of someone else's phone number. Because of poor security controls around those numbers, such gambits have allowed criminals to amass millions of dollars by beating SMS text-based two-factor authentication on cryptocurrency accounts. The extra money has made alliances possible with criminals who have different skills to bring to the table, including some who had hacked police servers and could send emails from purported officers demanding emergency disclosures of information on phone and internet customers. Worse, the researchers said, they have now attracted recruiters for the Russian gangs who want to combine their business savvy with the techniques and local knowledge of the native English speakers.

In 2020 Serbian scientists were gifted China's "Fire-Eye" labs, remembers the Washington Post. The sophisticated portable labs "excelled not only at cracking the genetic code for viruses, but also for humans, with machines that can decipher genetic instructions contained within the cells of every person on Earth, according to its Chinese inventors."

Although some of them were temporary, "scores" of the portable labs "were donated or sold to foreign countries during the pandemic," reports the Washington Post. But it adds that now those same labs "are attracting the attention of Western intelligence agencies amid growing unease about China's intentions." Some analysts perceive China's largesse as part of a global attempt to tap into new sources of highly valuable human DNA data in countries around the world. That collection effort, underway for more than a decade, has included the acquisition of U.S. genetics companies as well as sophisticated hacking operations, U.S. and Western intelligence officials say. But more recently, it received an unexpected boost from the coronavirus pandemic, which created opportunities for Chinese companies and institutes to distribute gene-sequencing machines and build partnerships for genetic research in places where Beijing previously had little or no access, the officials said. Amid the pandemic, Fire-Eye labs would proliferate quickly, spreading to four continents and more than 20 countries, from Canada and Latvia to Saudi Arabia, and from Ethiopia and South Africa to Australia. Several, like the one in Belgrade, now function as permanent genetic-testing centers...

BGI Group, the Shenzhen-based company that makes Fire-Eye labs, said it has no access to genetic information collected by the lab it helped create in Serbia. But U.S. officials note that BGI was picked by Beijing to build and operate the China National GeneBank, a vast and growing government-owned repository that now includes genetic data drawn from millions of people around the world. The Pentagon last year officially listed BGI as one of several "Chinese military companies" operating in the United States, and a 2021 U.S. intelligence assessment linked the company to the Beijing-directed global effort to obtain even more human DNA, including from the United States. The U.S. government also has blacklisted Chinese subsidiaries of BGI for allegedly helping analyze genetic material gathered inside China to assist government crackdowns on the country's ethnic and religious minorities...

Beijing's drive to sweep up DNA from across the planet has occasionally stirred controversy, particularly after a 2021 Reuters series about aspects of the project. Chinese academics and military scientists have also attracted attention by debating the feasibility of creating biological weapons that might someday target populations based on their genes. Genetic-based weapons are regarded by experts as a distant prospect, at best, and some of the discussion appears to have been prompted by official paranoia about whether the United States and other countries are exploring such weapons.

U.S. intelligence officials believe China's global effort is mostly about beating the West economically, not militarily. There is no public evidence that Chinese companies have used foreign DNA for reasons other than scientific research. China has announced plans to become the world's leader in biotechnology by 2035, and it regards genetic information — sometimes called "the new gold" — as a crucial ingredient in a scientific revolution that could produce thousands of new drugs and cures...

U.S. intelligence officials said in interviews that they have limited insight into how BGI handles DNA information acquired overseas, including whether genetic data from the Fire-Eye labs ultimately end up in the computers of China's military or intelligence services... Chinese law makes clear that any information collected using BGI's machines can be accessed by the Chinese government. A national intelligence law enacted in 2017 stipulates that Chinese firms and citizens are legally bound to share proprietary information acquired in foreign countries whenever requested.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article

The White House is considering requiring cloud computing firms to report some information about their customers to the U.S. government, Semafor reported Friday, citing people familiar with an upcoming executive order on AI. From the report: The provision would direct the Commerce Department to write rules forcing cloud companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon to disclose when a customer purchases computing resources beyond a certain threshold. The order hasn't been finalized and specifics of it could still change. Similar "know-your-customer" policies already exist in the banking sector to prevent money laundering and other illegal activities, such as the law mandating firms to report cash transactions exceeding $10,000.

In this case, the rules are intended to create a system that would allow the U.S. government to identify potential AI threats ahead of time, particularly those coming from entities in foreign countries. If a company in the Middle East began building a powerful large language model using Amazon Web Services, for example, the reporting requirement would theoretically give American authorities an early warning about it. The policy proposal represents a potential step toward treating computing power -- or the technical capacity AI systems need to perform tasks -- like a national resource. Mining Bitcoin, developing video games, and running AI models like ChatGPT all require large amounts of compute.

FrankOVD writes: Google is being sued by a widow who says her husband drowned in September 2022 after Google Maps directed him over a collapsed bridge in Hickory, North Carolina. Google failed to correct its map service despite warnings about the broken bridge two years before the accident, according to the lawsuit filed Tuesday by Alicia Paxson in Wake County Superior Court. Philip Paxson "died tragically while driving home from his daughter's ninth birthday party, when he drove off of an unmarked, unbarricaded collapsed bridge in Hickory, North Carolina while following GPS directions," the complaint said.

The Snow Creek Bridge reportedly collapsed in 2013 and wasn't repaired. Barricades were typically in place but "were removed after being vandalized and were missing at the time of Paxson's wreck," according to The Charlotte Observer. The lawsuit has five defendants, including Google and its owner Alphabet. The other defendants are James Tarlton and two local business entities called Tarde, LLC and Hinckley Gauvain, LLC. Tarlton and the two businesses "owned, controlled, and/or were otherwise responsible for the land" containing the bridge, the lawsuit said.