The German Koblenz Regional Court has banned the internet service provider 1&1 from marketing its fiber-to-the-curb service as fiber-optic DSL. The court found that the company misled customers because its network uses copper cables for the final stage of connections, sometimes extending up to a mile from the distribution box to subscribers' homes.

Customers who visited the ISP's website and checked connection availability received a notification stating that a "1&1 fiber optic DSL connection" was available, even though fiber optic cables terminate at street-level distribution boxes or building service rooms. The company pairs the copper lines with vectoring technology to boost DSL speeds to 100 megabits per second. The Federation of German Consumer Organizations filed the lawsuit. Ramona Pop, the organization's chairperson, said that anyone who promises fiber optics but delivers only DSL is deceiving customers.

Apple lashed out at the European Union's attempts to tame the power of Silicon Valley in the most far-reaching legal challenge of the bloc's Big Tech antitrust rules. From a report: The iPhone maker's lawyer Daniel Beard told the General Court in Luxembourg on Tuesday that the Digital Markets Act "imposes hugely onerous and intrusive burdens" at odds with Apple's rights in the EU marketplace.

The DMA came onto the EU's books in 2023 and is designed to clip the wings of the world's largest technology platforms with a slew of dos and don'ts. But over recent months, the law has also drawn the ire of US President Donald Trump and plagued EU-US trade talks. Apple -- seen as the biggest renegade against the EU's crackdown -- challenged the law on three fronts: EU obligations to make rival hardware work with its iPhone, the regulator's decision to drag the hugely profitable App Store under the rules, and a decision to probe whether iMessage should have faced the rules, which it later escaped.

A Court of Accounts report written before Sunday's theft of crown jewels from the Louvre revealed the museum's security systems were outdated and inadequate [non-paywalled source]. The report noted a lack of basic CCTV equipment across multiple wings. Cameras had mainly been installed only when rooms were refurbished due to repeated postponements of scheduled modernization. In the Denon wing where the Apollo Gallery was targeted, a third of rooms had no CCTV cameras. Three-quarters of rooms in the Richelieu wing and nearly two-thirds in the Sully wing lacked cameras.

The thieves were caught on camera at one point but were masked and impossible to identify, according to Paris public prosecutor Laure Beccuau. The alarm system activated when thieves cut open display cases, but they threatened staff who left the area. Culture minister Rachida Dati confirmed new CCTV cameras would be installed. President Macron had earmarked $186.30 million to upgrade the Louvre's security systems under a renaissance plan launched in June.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Texas is being sued by a Big Tech lobby group over the state's new law that will require app stores to verify users' ages and impose restrictions on users under 18. "The Texas App Store Accountability Act imposes a broad censorship regime on the entire universe of mobile apps," the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) said yesterday in a lawsuit (PDF). "In a misguided attempt to protect minors, Texas has decided to require proof of age before anyone with a smartphone or tablet can download an app. Anyone under 18 must obtain parental consent for every app and in-app purchase they try to download -- from ebooks to email to entertainment."

The CCIA said in a press release that the law violates the First Amendment by imposing "a sweeping age-verification, parental consent, and compelled speech regime on both app stores and app developers." When app stores determine that a user is under 18, "the law prohibits them from downloading virtually all apps and software programs and from making any in-app purchases unless their parent consents and is given control over the minor's account," the CCIA said. "Minors who are unable to link their accounts with a parent's or guardian's, or who do not receive permission, would be prohibited from accessing app store content."

The law requires app developers "to 'age-rate' their content into several subcategories and explain their decision in detail," and "notify app stores in writing every time they improve or modify the functions, features, or user experience of their apps," the group said. The lawsuit says the age-rating system relies on a "vague and unworkable set of age categories." "Our Constitution forbids this," the lawsuit said. "None of our laws require businesses to 'card' people before they can enter bookstores and shopping malls. The First Amendment prohibits such oppressive laws as much in cyberspace as it does in the physical world." The lawsuit was filed in US District Court for the Western District of Texas. CCIA members include Apple and Google, which have both said the law would reduce privacy for app users. The companies recently described their plans to comply, saying they would take steps to minimize the privacy risks.

Jason Allen has responded to critics who say he is not an artist by filing a new brief and announcing plans to sell oil-print reproductions of his AI-generated image. Allen won the Colorado State Fair Fine Arts Competition in 2022 after submitting Theatre D'opera Spatial, which Midjourney created. He said in a press release that being called an artist does not concern him but his work and expression do.

Allen says he asked himself what could make the piece undeniably art and decided to create physical reproductions using technology. The reproductions employ a three-dimensional printing technique from a company called Arius that uses oil paints to simulate brushstrokes. Allen said the physical artifact is singular and real. His legal filing argues that he produced the artwork by providing hundreds of iterative text prompts to Midjourney and experimenting with over six hundred prompts before cropping and upscaling the final image. The U.S. Copyright Office has rejected his copyright applications for three years. The office maintains that Midjourney does not treat text prompts as direct instructions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Record labels Sony, Warner, and Universal yesterday asked the Supreme Court to help it boot pirates off the Internet. Sony and the other labels filed their brief (PDF) in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, a case involving the cable Internet service provider that rebuffed labels' demands for mass terminations of broadband subscribers accused of repeat copyright infringement. The Supreme Court's eventual decision in the case may determine whether Internet service providers must terminate the accounts of alleged pirates in order to avoid massive financial liability.

Cox has argued (PDF) that copyright-infringement notices -- which are generated by bots and flag users based on their IP addresses -- sent by record labels are unreliable. Cox said ISPs can't verify whether the notices are accurate and that terminating an account would punish every user in a household where only one person may have illegally downloaded copyrighted files. Record labels urged the Supreme Court to reject this argument.

"While Cox waxes poetic about the centrality of Internet access to modern life, it neglects to mention that it had no qualms about terminating 619,711 subscribers for nonpayment over the same period that it terminated just 32 for serial copyright abuse," the labels' brief said. "And while Cox stokes fears of innocent grandmothers and hospitals being tossed off the Internet for someone else's infringement, Cox put on zero evidence that any subscriber here fit that bill. By its own admission, the subscribers here were 'habitual offenders' Cox chose to retain because, unlike the vast multitude cut off for late payment, they contributed to Cox's bottom line." Record labels were referring to a portion of Cox's brief that said, "Grandma will be thrown off the Internet because Junior illegally downloaded a few songs on a visit."

The U.S. Department of Justice seized about $15 billion in bitcoin from wallets tied to Chen Zhi, founder of Cambodia's Prince Holding Group, who is accused of running one of the world's biggest "pig butchering" scams. Prosecutors say Zhi's network trafficked people into forced-labor scam compounds that defrauded victims worldwide through fake crypto investment schemes. CNBC reports: The seizure is the largest forfeiture action by the DOJ in history. An indictment charging the alleged pig butcher, Chen Zhi, was unsealed Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn, New York. Zhi, who is also known as "Vincent," remains at large, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York. He was identified in court filings as the founder and chairman of Prince Holding Group, a multinational business conglomerate based in Cambodia, which prosecutors said grew "in secret .... into one of Asia's largest transnational criminal organizations. [...]

The scams duped people contacted via social media and messaging applications online into transferring cryptocurrency into accounts controlled by the scheme with false promises that the crypto would be invested and produce profits, according to the office. "In reality, the funds were stolen from the victims and laundered for the benefit of the perpetrators," the release said. "The scam perpetrators often built relationships with their victims over time, earning their trust before stealing their funds."

Prosecutors said that hundreds of people were trafficked and forced to work in the scam compounds, "often under the threat of violence." Zhi and a network of top executives in the Prince Group are accused of using political influence in multiple countries to protect their criminal enterprise and paid bribes to public officials to avoid actions by law enforcement authorities targeting the scheme, according to prosecutors.

An anonymous reader shares a report: An attorney in a New York Supreme Court commercial case got caught using AI in his filings, and then got caught using AI again in the brief where he had to explain why he used AI, according to court documents filed earlier this month.

New York Supreme Court Judge Joel Cohen wrote in a decision granting the plaintiff's attorneys' request for sanctions that the defendant's counsel, Michael Fourte's law offices, not only submitted AI-hallucinated citations and quotations in the summary judgment brief that led to the filing of the plaintiff's motion for sanctions, but also included "multiple new AI-hallucinated citations and quotations" in the process of opposing the motion.

"In other words," the judge wrote, "counsel relied upon unvetted AI -- in his telling, via inadequately supervised colleagues -- to defend his use of unvetted AI."

The case itself centers on a dispute between family members and a defaulted loan. The details of the case involve a fairly run-of-the-mill domestic money beef, but Fourte's office allegedly using AI that generated fake citations, and then inserting nonexistent citations into the opposition brief, has become the bigger story.

"Dutch authorities have temporarily nationalized Nexperia, owned by Chinese company Wingtech, over fears of critical product unavailability," writes longtime Slashdot reader evil_aaronm. Reuters reports: The Hague invoked never-before-used powers under a Dutch law known as the "Availability of Goods Act." The decision led to a 10% fall in Wingtech's shares in Shanghai on Monday. The Dutch government will not take ownership of Nexperia, but it will now have the power to reverse or block management decisions it considers harmful. The company's regular production is continuing. [...] Wingtech called the Dutch government's intervention in Nexperia, once part of Dutch electronics group Philips, "excessive interference driven by geopolitical bias." Wingtech also alleged that non-Chinese Nexperia executives had tried to forcibly alter the company's equity structure through legal proceedings in a "cloaked power grab" on the company.

A copy of an Amsterdam commercial court ruling dated October 7 and seen by Reuters showed that the court decided on October 1 to suspend Wingtech CEO Zhang Xuezheng from his position as executive director at Nexperia after finding "well founded reasons to doubt" the company was pursuing correct management policy or actions under Dutch civil law. It appointed Dutch businessman Guido Dierick to take Zhang's position with a "deciding vote", and transferred control of almost all of Nexperia's shares to a Dutch lawyer for management. The Dutch state and the company's labour council had supported the moves, the document showed. [...]

In its statement, the Dutch government said that administrative problems at Nexperia posed a threat to the company's "crucial technological knowledge" without elaborating. "The loss of these capabilities could pose a risk to Dutch and European economic security," it said. Nexperia is one of the world's largest makers of simple computer chips such as diodes and transistors, though it also develops more advanced technologies such as "wide gap" semiconductors used in electrical settings and useful for electric cars, chargers and AI data centres. Wingtech said in a filing to the Shanghai stock exchange on Monday that its control over Nexperia would be temporarily restricted due to the Dutch order and court rulings, affecting decision making and operational efficiency.

Car manufacturers decided they would rather cheat to prioritise "customer convenience" and sell cars than comply with the law on deadly pollutants, the first day of the largest group action trial in English legal history has been told. From a report: More than a decade after the original "dieselgate" scandal broke, lawyers representing 1.6 million diesel car owners in the UK argue that manufacturers deliberately installed software to rig emissions tests. They allege the "prohibited defeat devices" could detect when the cars were under test conditions and ensure that harmful NOx emissions were kept within legal limits, duping regulators and drivers.

Should the claim be upheld, estimated damages could exceed $8 billion. The three-month hearing that opened at London's high court on Monday will focus on vehicles sold by five manufacturers -- Mercedes, Ford, Renault, Nissan and Peugeot/Citroen -- from 2009. In "real world" conditions, when driven on the road, lawyers argue, the cars produced much higher levels of emissions. The judgment on the five lead defendants will also bind other manufacturers including Jaguar Land Rover, Vauxhall/Opel, Volkswagen/Porsche, BMW, FCA/Suzuki, Volvo, Hyundai-Kia, Toyota and Mazda, whose cases are not being heard to reduce the case time and costs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The City of New York is reaching across the country to sue tech giants headquartered in California over allegations that their platforms have created a youth mental health crisis. The city, along with its school districts and health department, alleges that "gross negligence" on the part of Meta, Alphabet, Snap, and ByteDance has gotten kids hooked on social media, which has created a "public nuisance" that is placing a strain on the city's resources.

In a 327-page complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the city alleges that tech companies have designed their platforms in a way that seeks to "maximize the number of children" using them, and have built "algorithms that wield user data as a weapon against children and fuel the addiction machine." The city also alleges that these companies "know children and adolescents are in a developmental stage that leaves them particularly vulnerable to the addictive effects of these features," but "target them anyway, in pursuit of additional profit."

[...] It cites data from the New York City Police Department, for instance, that show at least 16 teens have died while "subway surfing" -- riding outside of a moving train -- a dangerous behavior which the lawsuit claims has been encouraged by social media trends. Two girls, ages 12 and 13, died earlier this month while subway surfing. It also cited survey data collected from New York high school students, which shows that 77.3% of the city's teens spend three or more hours per day on screens, which it claims has contributed to lost sleep and, in turn, absences from school -- corroborated by the city's school districts, which provided data to show that 36.2% of all public school students are considered chronically absent, missing at least 10% of the school year.

The Internet Archive must block access to books in its Open Library project for Belgian users after negotiations with publishers failed. A Brussels Business Court issued a site-blocking order in July targeting several shadow libraries and the Internet Archive. A Belgian government department paused the order for the U.S. nonprofit and urged both parties to negotiate. The talks over recent weeks were unsuccessful.

The Department for Combating Infringements of Copyright concluded last week that the Internet Archive hosts the contested books and has the ability to render them inaccessible. Publishers must supply a list of books to be blocked. The nonprofit then has 20 calendar days to implement the measures and prevent future digital lending of those works in Belgium. The order includes a one-time penalty of $578,000 for non-compliance and remains in place until July 16 next year. The Internet Archive operates Open Library by purchasing physical copies and digitizing them to lend out one at a time. Publishers previously won a U.S. federal court case against the project.

After failed negotiations with publishers, Belgium's copyright enforcement agency has ordered the Internet Archive to block access to specific books in its Open Library within Belgium or face a 500,000-euro fine. TorrentFreak reports: Back in July, the Brussels Business Court issued a sweeping ex parte site-blocking order targeting several "shadow libraries" including Anna's Archive, Libgen, and Z-Library. Unusually, the order also included the Internet Archive's Open Library, a project operated by the well-known U.S. non-profit organization Internet Archive. The order was granted based on a request from publishers and authors who claimed, among other things, that the operators of the targeted sites were difficult to identify. This also applied to the Internet Archive, which was not heard by the court before the order was issued.

[...] Over the past several weeks, Internet Archive attempted to reach an agreement with the publishers, but the effort was unsuccessful. It is clear, however, that the Internet Archive believes that its use of copyrighted books for the Open Library qualifies as fair use. The organization is known to purchase physical copies, which it then digitizes to lend out to patrons, one copy at a time. This self-digitizing project was previously contested in a U.S. federal court, where the publishers ultimately came out as the winner. They argued that the Internet Archive project competed with their own licensing business for book lending. The detailed arguments at the center of the Belgian case are not public, but after hearing both sides, the Department for Combating Infringements of Copyright concluded that Internet Archive must take action.

In a follow-up decision (PDF) published last week, the government department explicitly states that it can't rule on U.S. fair use or the Belgian equivalent, but concludes that self-blocking measures are warranted. The Internet Archive hosts the contested books and has the ability to render them inaccessible. If it refuses to do so, it may be considered a copyright infringer under local law. The final decision requires the rightsholders to supply the Internet Archive with a list of all books that should be blocked in Belgium. The non-profit then has 20 calendar days to implement the necessary measures. In addition to making the books unavailable, Internet Archive must also prevent these works from being made available for digital lending in the future.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Changes are coming to the Play Store in spite of a concerted effort from Google to maintain the status quo. The company asked the US Supreme Court to freeze parts of the Play Store antitrust ruling while it pursued an appeal, but the high court has rejected that petition. That means the first elements of the antitrust remedies won by Epic Games will have to be implemented in mere weeks.

The app store case is one of three ongoing antitrust actions against Google, but it's the furthest along of them. Google lost the case in 2023, and in 2024, US District Judge James Donato ordered a raft of sweeping changes aimed at breaking Google's illegal monopoly on Android app distribution. In July, Google lost its initial appeal, leaving it with little time before the mandated changes must begin.

[...] The more dramatic changes are not due until July 2026, but this month will still bring major changes to Android apps. Google will have to allow developers to link to alternative methods of payment and download outside the Play Store, and it cannot force developers to use Google Play Billing within the Play Store. Google is also prohibited from setting prices for developers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: The operator of a popular pirate sports streaming site in Argentina has gone from spending time in jail with murderers to landing a new high-profile job a month later. Alejo "Shishi" Warles, the 25-year-old operator of Al Angulo TV, was arrested on August 20 in a LaLiga-backed crackdown. After his release on bail, he was hired by professional esports team 9z Globant, a partnership involving Argentine tech unicorn Globant. [...] The team is the result of a partnership between 9z Team and Argentinian tech unicorn Globant. Somewhat ironically, Globant previously worked with LaLiga to monitor the live-streaming user experience. Warles welcomed himself to 9z Globant via the team's social media account, referring to himself as an idol, genius, and GOAT.

Lucia Quinteros, the main social media manager at the esports team, informed Entre Rios that after considering their new hire's history, they believe that he can add value to the team. "We hired Alejo, not the person who set up that project (Al Angulo TV). Of course, we evaluated what happened, but we believe that, from now on, Alejo can pursue a different career path," Quinteros said. According to Warles himself, he was hired because he's the best. Like many of his comments, this bravado should not be taken too seriously, but nevertheless sits in stark contrast to the typical pirate site operator facing criminal charges.

A high court in India has ruled that legible medical prescriptions are a fundamental right after a judge found a government doctor's report completely incomprehensible. Justice Jasgurpreet Singh Puri of the Punjab and Haryana High Court issued the order while reviewing a bail petition in an unrelated criminal case. The medico-legal report examining an alleged assault victim was written in handwriting that the judge said left not even a single word or letter legible.

The court directed India's government to add handwriting instruction to medical school curriculum and mandated a two-year timeline for rolling out digital prescriptions nationwide. Until electronic systems are implemented, all doctors must write prescriptions in capital letters. The Indian Medical Association, representing over 330,000 physicians, told BBC it would help address the issue. Association president Dr Dilip Bhanushali said doctors in Indian cities have largely adopted digital prescriptions but practitioners in rural areas and small towns continue using handwritten notes.

In India, Bollywood stars are asking judges to protect their voice and persona in the era of AI. From a report: One famous couple's biggest target is Google's YouTube. Abhishek Bachchan and his wife Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, known for her iconic Cannes Film Festival red carpet appearances, have asked a judge to remove and prohibit creation of AI videos infringing their intellectual property rights. But in a more far-reaching request, they also want Google ordered to have safeguards to ensure such YouTube videos uploaded anyway do not train other AI platforms, legal papers reviewed by Reuters show.

A handful of Bollywood celebrities have begun asserting their "personality rights" in Indian courts over the last few years, as the country has no explicit protection for those like in many U.S. states. But the Bachchans' lawsuits are the most high-profile to date about the interplay of personality rights and the risk that misleading or deepfake YouTube videos could train other AI models. The actors argue that YouTube's content and third-party training policy is concerning as it lets users consent to sharing of a video they created to train rival AI models, risking further proliferation of misleading content online, according to near-identical filings from Abhishek and Aishwarya dated September 6, which are not public.

Charlie Javice, founder of college financial-aid startup Frank, was sentenced to over seven years in prison for defrauding JPMorgan by inflating user numbers before the bank's $175 million acquisition. CNN reports: Javice, 33, was convicted in March of duping the banking giant when it bought her company, called Frank, in the summer of 2021. She made false records that made it seem like Frank had over 4 million customers when it had fewer than 300,000. Addressing the court before she was sentenced, Javice, who was in her mid-20s when she founded the company, said she was "haunted that my failure has transformed something meaningful into something infamous." Sometimes speaking through tears, she said she "made a choice that I will spend my entire life regretting."

Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein largely dismissed arguments by Javice's lawyer, Ronald Sullivan, that he should be lenient because the negotiations that led to Frank's sale pitted "a 28-year-old versus 300 investment bankers from the largest bank in the world." Still, the judge criticized the bank, saying "they have a lot to blame themselves" for after failing to do adequate due diligence. He quickly added, though, that he was "punishing her conduct and not JPMorgan's stupidity." Javice was among a number of young tech executives who vaulted to fame with supposedly disruptive or transformative companies, only to see them collapse amid questions about whether they had engaged in puffery and fraud while dealing with investors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A Chinese national has been convicted following an international fraud investigation which resulted in what's believed to be the single largest cryptocurrency seizure in the world. The Metropolitan Police says it recovered 61,000 bitcoin worth more than $6.7 billion in current prices. Zhimin Qian, also known as Yadi Zhang, pleaded guilty on Monday at Southwark Crown Court of illegally acquiring and possessing the cryptocurrency. A second person appeared in court on Tuesday to admit to their role in the scheme.

Malaysian national Seng Hok Ling, of Matlock, Derbyshire, pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court of entering into a money laundering arrangement on or before April 23, 2024. According to the charge, he had been dealing in cryptocurrency on Qian's behalf, "knowing or suspecting his actions would facilitate the acquisition or control of criminal property by another." Between 2014 and 2017 Qian led a large-scale scam in China which involved cheating more than 128,000 victims and storing the stolen funds in bitcoin assets, the Met said in a statement.

It said the 47-year-old's guilty plea followed a seven-year probe into a global money laundering web which began when it got a tipoff about the transfer of criminal assets. Qian had been "evading justice" for five years up to her arrest, which required a complex investigation involving multiple jurisdictions, said Detective Sergeant Isabella Grotto, who led the Met's investigation. She fled China using false documents and entered the UK, where she attempted to launder the stolen money by buying property, said the Met. "By pleading guilty today, Ms Zhang hopes to bring some comfort to investors who have waited since 2017 for compensation, and to reassure them that the significant rise in cryptocurrency values means there are more than sufficient funds available to repay their losses," said Qian's solicitor Roger Sahota, of Berkeley Square Solicitors.

"Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are increasingly being used by organised criminals to disguise and transfer assets, so that fraudsters may enjoy the benefits of their criminal conduct," added deputy chief Crown prosecutor, Robin Weyell. "This case, involving the largest cryptocurrency seizure in the UK, illustrates the scale of criminal proceeds available to those fraudsters."

alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: Critics of YouTuber Ethan Klein are pushing back on subpoenas that would reveal their identities as part of an ongoing legal fight between Klein and his detractors. Klein is a popular content creator whose YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers. He's also involved in a labyrinthine personal and legal beef with three other content creators and the moderators of a subreddit that criticizes his work. Klein filed a legal motion to compel Discord and Reddit to reveal the identities of those moderators, a move their lawyers say would put them in harm's way and stifle free speech on the internet forever.

[...] On July 31, a judge allowed Klein's lawyers to file a subpoena with Reddit and Discord that would reveal the identities of the people running r/h3snark and an associated Discord server. On September 22, lawyers for the defendants filed a motion to quash the subpoenas. "On its face, the Action is about copyright infringement," the latest filing said. "At its heart, however, the Action is about stifling criticism and seeking retribution by unmasking individuals for perceived reputational harms TEI [Klein's production company] attributes to [John Doe moderators] unrelated to TEI's intellectual property rights." [...]

The anonymity of places like Reddit and Discord grant a layer of protection to people seeking to critique power. This case could set a dangerous precedent, the lawyers believe. "If the court allows TEI's Subpoenas, it would enable TEI to impose a considerable price on Does' use of the vehicle of anonymous speech -- including public exposure, real risks of retaliation and actual harm, and the financial and other burdens of defending the Action," the filing said. The filing added: "Very few would-be commentators are prepared to bear costs of this magnitude. So, when word gets out that the price tag of criticizing Ethan is this high -- that speech will disappear. But that is precisely what Ethan Klein wants."