"Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit is taking legal action to ensure the safety and integrity of our AI services," according to a Friday blog post by the unit's assistant general counsel. Microsoft blames "a foreign-based threat-actor group" for "tools specifically designed to bypass the safety guardrails of generative AI services, including Microsoft's, to create offensive and harmful content.

Microsoft "is accusing three individuals of running a 'hacking-as-a-service' scheme," reports Ars Technica, "that was designed to allow the creation of harmful and illicit content using the company's platform for AI-generated content" after bypassing Microsoft's AI guardrails: They then compromised the legitimate accounts of paying customers. They combined those two things to create a fee-based platform people could use. Microsoft is also suing seven individuals it says were customers of the service. All 10 defendants were named John Doe because Microsoft doesn't know their identity.... The three people who ran the service allegedly compromised the accounts of legitimate Microsoft customers and sold access to the accounts through a now-shuttered site... The service, which ran from last July to September when Microsoft took action to shut it down, included "detailed instructions on how to use these custom tools to generate harmful and illicit content."

The service contained a proxy server that relayed traffic between its customers and the servers providing Microsoft's AI services, the suit alleged. Among other things, the proxy service used undocumented Microsoft network application programming interfaces (APIs) to communicate with the company's Azure computers. The resulting requests were designed to mimic legitimate Azure OpenAPI Service API requests and used compromised API keys to authenticate them. Microsoft didn't say how the legitimate customer accounts were compromised but said hackers have been known to create tools to search code repositories for API keys developers inadvertently included in the apps they create. Microsoft and others have long counseled developers to remove credentials and other sensitive data from code they publish, but the practice is regularly ignored. The company also raised the possibility that the credentials were stolen by people who gained unauthorized access to the networks where they were stored...

The lawsuit alleges the defendants' service violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Lanham Act, and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and constitutes wire fraud, access device fraud, common law trespass, and tortious interference.

"What if they ban TikTok and people keep using it anyway?" asks the New York Times, saying a pending ban in America "is vague on how it would be enforced" Some experts say that even if TikTok is actually banned this month or soon, there may be so many legal and technical loopholes that millions of Americans could find ways to keep TikTok'ing. The law is "Swiss cheese with lots of holes in it," said Glenn Gerstell, a former top lawyer at the National Security Agency and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy research organization. "There are obviously ways around it...." When other countries ban apps, the government typically orders internet providers and mobile carriers to block web traffic to and from the blocked website or app. That's probably not how a ban on TikTok in the United States would work. Two lawyers who reviewed the law said the text as written doesn't appear to order internet and mobile carriers to stop people from using TikTok.

There may not be unanimity on this point. Some lawyers who spoke to Bloomberg News said internet providers would be in legal hot water if they let their customers continue to use a banned TikTok. Alan Rozenshtein, a University of Minnesota associate law professor, said he suspected internet providers aren't obligated to stop TikTok use "because Congress wanted to allow the most dedicated TikTok users to be able to access the app, so as to limit the First Amendment infringement." The law also doesn't order Americans to stop using TikTok if it's banned or to delete the app from our phones....

Odds are that if the Supreme Court declares the TikTok law constitutional and if a ban goes into effect, blacklisting the app from the Apple and Google app stores will be enough to stop most people from using TikTok... If a ban goes into effect and Apple and Google block TikTok from pushing updates to the app on your phone, it may become buggy or broken over time. But no one is quite sure how long it would take for the TikTok app to become unusable or compromised in this situation.
Users could just sideload the app after downloading it outside a phone's official app store, the article points out. (More than 10 million people sideloaded Fortnite within six weeks of its removal from Apple and Google's app stores.) And there's also the option of just using a VPN — or watching TikTok's web site.

(I've never understood why all apps haven't already been replaced with phone-optimized web sites...)

Automattic is cutting its weekly contributions to WordPress.org from 3,988 hours to 45 hours, escalating tensions with rival WP Engine amid their ongoing legal dispute. The dramatic reduction comes after a federal court granted WP Engine an injunction over Automattic's handling of a disputed plugin.

The company, which runs WordPress.com, blamed the cutback on legal costs from its battle with WP Engine, which CEO Matt Mullenweg previously called a "cancer" to the community. Automattic said remaining contributions will focus on "security and critical updates" through the Five for the Future program.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Crypto Briefing: The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has been authorized to sell approximately 69,370 Bitcoin seized in connection with the Silk Road darknet marketplace, a haul currently valued at around $6.5 billion, DB News reported Wednesday. The decision is set to end a years-long legal dispute over the BTC stash's ownership. On December 30, a federal judge ruled in favor of the DOJ's request to liquidate the crypto assets, the report said. Battle Born Investments, which had asserted a claim to the Bitcoin stash through a bankruptcy estate, ultimately failed in its bid to delay the sale.

As noted, the group had pursued a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking the identity of "Individual X," who initially surrendered Bitcoin, but the effort also proved unsuccessful. Battle Born's legal counsel criticized the DOJ's handling of the case, alleging the department employed "procedural trickery" in its use of civil asset forfeiture to avoid scrutiny. The DOJ, in its arguments before the court, cited Bitcoin's price volatility as motivation for seeking a quick sale of the seized assets. A DOJ spokesperson, when contacted, stated, "The Government will proceed further consistent with the judgment in this case."

The update comes after the US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal challenging the seizure of the Bitcoin stash, which was brought by Battle Born last October. The decision likely paved the way for the US government to sell Bitcoin, which was valued at $4.4 billion at the time. The US Marshals Service is expected to manage the liquidation process, which, if confirmed, will be one of the largest sales of seized crypto in history. Further reading: Judge Rejects Man From Retrieving $750 Million of Bitcoin From Landfill

An IT engineer from Wales lost a decade-long legal battle to recover a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins from a Newport landfill. The hard drive, accidentally thrown away in 2013, is now valued between $700-750 million. crypto.news reports: However, Judge Keyser KC ruled there were no "reasonable grounds" for the claim, citing environmental concerns and the council's ownership of the landfill contents. The landfill reportedly holds 1.4 million tonnes of waste, but Howells claims to have pinpointed the hard drive's location to a 100,000-ton section. Reacting to the ruling, Howells expressed frustration, calling it a "kick in the teeth," according to the BBC.

Plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta allege that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg authorized the team behind the company's Llama AI models to use a dataset of pirated ebooks and articles for training. They further accuse the company of concealing its actions by stripping copyright information and torrenting the data. TechCrunch reports: In newly unredacted documents filed (PDF) with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California late Wednesday, plaintiffs in Kadrey v. Meta, who include bestselling authors Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, recount Meta's testimony from late last year, during which it was revealed that Zuckerberg approved Meta's use of a data set called LibGen for Llama-related training. LibGen, which describes itself as a "links aggregator," provides access to copyrighted works from publishers including Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. LibGen has been sued a number of times, ordered to shut down, and fined tens of millions of dollars for copyright infringement.

According to Meta's testimony, as relayed by plaintiffs' counsel, Zuckerberg cleared the use of LibGen to train at least one of Meta's Llama models despite concerns within Meta's AI exec team and others at the company. The filing quotes Meta employees as referring to LibGen as a "data set we know to be pirated," and flagging that its use "may undermine [Meta's] negotiating position with regulators." The filing also cites a memo to Meta AI decision-makers noting that after "escalation to MZ," Meta's AI team "[was] approved to use LibGen." (MZ, here, is rather obvious shorthand for "Mark Zuckerberg.")

The details seemingly line up with reporting from The New York Times last April, which suggested that Meta cut corners to gather data for its AI. At one point, Meta was hiring contractors in Africa to aggregate summaries of books and considering buying the publisher Simon & Schuster, according to the Times. But the company's execs determined that it would take too long to negotiate licenses and reasoned that fair use was a solid defense. The filing Wednesday contains new accusations, like that Meta might've tried to conceal its alleged infringement by stripping the LibGen data of attribution.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A federal judge this week rejected Google's motion to throw out a class-action lawsuit alleging that it invaded the privacy of users who opted out of functionality that records a users' web and app activities. A jury trial is scheduled for August 2025 in US District Court in San Francisco. The lawsuit concerns Google's Web & App Activity (WAA) settings, with the lead plaintiff representing two subclasses of people with Android and non-Android phones who opted out of tracking. "The WAA button is a Google account setting that purports to give users privacy control of Google's data logging of the user's web app and activity, such as a user's searches and activity from other Google services, information associated with the user's activity, and information about the user's location and device," wrote (PDF) US District Judge Richard Seeborg, the chief judge in the Northern District Of California.

Google says that Web & App Activity "saves your activity on Google sites and apps, including associated info like location, to give you faster searches, better recommendations, and more personalized experiences in Maps, Search, and other Google services." Google also has a supplemental Web App and Activity setting that the judge's ruling refers to as "(s)WAA." "The (s)WAA button, which can only be switched on if WAA is also switched on, governs information regarding a user's '[Google] Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services.' Disabling WAA also disables the (s)WAA button," Seeborg wrote. But data is still sent to third-party app developers through the Google Analytics for Firebase (GA4F), "a free analytical tool that takes user data from the Firebase kit and provides app developers with insight on app usage and user engagement," the ruling said. GA4F "is integrated in 60 percent of the top apps" and "works by automatically sending to Google a user's ad interactions and certain identifiers regardless of a user's (s)WAA settings, and Google will, in turn, provide analysis of that data back to the app developer."

Plaintiffs have brought claims of privacy invasion under California law. Plaintiffs "present evidence that their data has economic value," and "a reasonable juror could find that Plaintiffs suffered damage or loss because Google profited from the misappropriation of their data," Seeborg wrote. The lawsuit was filed in July 2020. The judge notes that summary judgment can be granted when "there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law." Google hasn't met that standard, he ruled. In a statement provided to Ars, Google said that "privacy controls have long been built into our service and the allegations here are a deliberate attempt to mischaracterize the way our products work. We will continue to make our case in court against these patently false claims."

TikTok has been pushing the platform's sister app, Lemon8, encouraging users to migrate via sponsored posts amid a looming ban. Axios reports: In the last few weeks, Lemon8 has been promoting its app to TikTok users through sponsored TikTok videos. In one sponsored post, TikTok user @miller.dailylife shares a video with a creator saying, "TikTok actually has another backup app. It's called Lemon8 ... and it automatically signs you in with your TikTok so you can still keep the same TikTok name and things like that. And it's supposed to transfer your followers over. ... Once you add Lemon8, it automatically pops up on your TikTok bio, so that people can just click on it. So, just so you guys know, now that they're trying to do this ban, if you want to have somewhere else to go where the government is not 100% controlling what we see, what we consume ... Just go ahead and go on to Lemon8."

In November, TikTok began informing users of its sister app, Lemon8, that beginning late that month Lemon8 would be powered by TikTok, and their TikTok usernames would also be used on Lemon8. "Some of your data on TikTok will be used to power services on lemon8," the notice says. "Your Lemon8 profile link will be shown to your TikTok profile publicly by default," it continues. "You can choose not to show it by editing your TikTok profile." Last March, Lemon8 jumped into the U.S. App Store's Top 10 list shortly after it launched in the U.S. It currently ranks as one of the top-ranking free apps on Apple's app store.

The report notes that the TikTok ban law also applies to other apps owned by TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance, like Lemon8. "ByteDance could be betting that regulators and app store companies are so focused on TikTok that they won't pay attention to its other apps," says Axios.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Justice Department today announced it filed an antitrust lawsuit against "six of the nation's largest landlords for participating in algorithmic pricing schemes that harmed renters." One of the landlords, Cortland Management, agreed to a settlement "that requires it to cooperate with the government, stop using its competitors' sensitive data to set rents and stop using the same algorithm as its competitors without a corporate monitor," the DOJ said. The pending settlement requires Cortland to "cooperate fully and truthfully... in any civil investigation or civil litigation the United States brings or has brought" on this subject matter.

The US previously sued RealPage, a software maker accused of helping landlords collectively set prices by giving them access to competitors' nonpublic pricing and occupancy information. The original version of the lawsuit described actions by landlords but did not name any as defendants. The Justice Department filed an amended complaint (PDF) today in order to add the landlords as defendants. The landlord defendants are Greystar, LivCor, Camden, Cushman, Willow Bridge, and Cortland, which collectively "operate more than 1.3 million units in 43 states and the District of Columbia," the DOJ said. "The amended complaint alleges that the six landlords actively participated in a scheme to set their rents using each other's competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms," the DOJ said. The phrase "price fixing" came up in discussions between landlords, the amended complaint said: "For example, in Minnesota, property managers from Cushman & Wakefield, Greystar, and other landlords regularly discussed competitively sensitive topics, including their future pricing. When a property manager from Greystar remarked that another property manager had declined to fully participate due to 'price fixing laws,' the Cushman & Wakefield property manager replied to Greystar, 'Hmm... Price fixing laws huh? That's a new one! Well, I'm happy to keep sharing so ask away. Hoping we can kick these concessions soon or at least only have you guys be the only ones with big concessions! It's so frustrating to have to offer so much.'"

The Justice Department is joined in the case by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington. The case is in US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.

Further reading: Are We Entering an AI Price-Fixing Dystopia?

Microsoft plans to invest $3 billion to expand its artificial intelligence and cloud Azure services in India, turning to the world's most populous nation to fuel its revenue growth engine. From a report: The firm, which has been operating in India for more than two decades, will also train an additional 10 million people in the country with AI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event in Bengaluru Tuesday.

"The investments in infrastructure and skilling we are announcing today reaffirm our commitment to making India AI-first, and will help ensure people and organizations across the country benefit broadly," said Nadella. "The diffusion rate of AI in India is exciting." India is a key overseas market for American tech giants that have poured tens of billions of dollars in building and scaling their operations in the South Asian market over the past two decades as they work to court businesses serving hundreds of millions of users.

A forthcoming peer-reviewed study (PDF) from Rutgers University's Network Contagion Research Institute argues that TikTok surfaces fewer anti-CCP posts compared to Instagram and YouTube, despite higher user engagement with such content. It also found that heavy TikTok usage correlates with more favorable views of China's human rights record. The findings come a Supreme Court hearing later this week on whether the federal government can ban TikTok. Gizmodo reports: The new peer-reviewed paper, which was first reported by The Free Press, begins by examining whether content on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube related to the keywords "Tiananmen," "Tibet," "Uyghur," and "Xinjiang" tends to display pro- or anti-CCP sentiment. The researchers found that TikTok's algorithm didn't necessarily surface more pro-CCP content in response to searches for those terms, but it delivered fewer anti-CCP posts than did Instagram or YouTube and significantly more posts that were irrelevant to the subject.

In the second stage of their study, the NCRI team tested whether the lower performance of anti-CCP content was a result of less user engagement (likes and comments) with those posts. They found that TikTok users "liked or commented on anti-CCP content nearly four times as much as they liked or commented on pro-CCP content, yet the search algorithm produced nearly three times as much pro-CCP content" while there was no similar discrepancy on Instagram or YouTube.

Finally, the researchers surveyed 1,214 Americans about their social media usage and their views on China's human rights record. The more time users spent on any social media platform, the more likely they were to have favorable views of China's human rights record, the survey showed. Users were particularly more likely to have favorable views if they spent more than three hours a day using TikTok. The researchers wrote that they could not definitively conclude that spending more time on TikTok resulted in more positive views of China, but "taken together, the findings from these three studies raise the distinct possibility that TikTok is a vehicle for CCP propaganda."

A U.S. Appeals Court ruled this week that net neutrality couldn't be reinstated by America's Federal Communications Commission. But "Despite the dismantling of the FCC's efforts to regulate broadband internet service, state laws in California, New York and elsewhere remain intact," notes the Los Angeles Times: This week's decision by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, striking down the FCC's open internet rules, has little bearing on state laws enacted during the years-long tug-of-war over the government's power to regulate internet service providers, telecommunications experts said. In fact, some suggested that the Cincinnati-based 6th Circuit's decision — along with other rulings and the U.S. Supreme Court's posture on a separate New York case — has effectively fortified state regulators' efforts to fill the gap. "Absent an act of Congress, the FCC has virtually no role in broadband any more," Ernesto Falcon, a program manager for the California Public Utilities Commission, said in an interview. "The result of this decision is that states like California, New York and others will have to govern and regulate broadband carriers on our own."

California has one of the nation's strongest laws on net neutrality, the principle that internet traffic must be treated equally to ensure a free and open network. Former Gov. Jerry Brown signed the measure into law in 2018, months after federal regulators in President elect-Donald Trump's first administration repealed the net neutrality rules put in place under President Obama. Colorado, Oregon and other states also adopted their own standards.

The Golden State's law has already survived legal challenges. It also prompted changes in the way internet service providers offered plans and services. "California's net neutrality law, which is seen as the gold standard by consumer advocates, carries national impact," Falcon said.... "The state's authority and role in broadband access has grown dramatically now," Falcon said.
California's net neutrality rules prohibit "throttling" data speeds, according to the article.

In a potential U.S.-China conflict, cyberattackers are military weapons. That's the thrust of a new article from the Wall Street Journal: The message from President Biden's national security adviser was startling. Chinese hackers had gained the ability to shut down dozens of U.S. ports, power grids and other infrastructure targets at will, Jake Sullivan told telecommunications and technology executives at a secret meeting at the White House in the fall of 2023, according to people familiar with it. The attack could threaten lives, and the government needed the companies' help to root out the intruders.

What no one at the briefing knew, including Sullivan: China's hackers were already working their way deep inside U.S. telecom networks, too. The two massive hacking operations have upended the West's understanding of what Beijing wants, while revealing the astonishing skill level and stealth of its keyboard warriors — once seen as the cyber equivalent of noisy, drunken burglars. China's hackers were once thought to be interested chiefly in business secrets and huge sets of private consumer data. But the latest hacks make clear they are now soldiers on the front lines of potential geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and China, in which cyberwarfare tools are expected to be powerful weapons. U.S. computer networks are a "key battlefield in any future conflict" with China, said Brandon Wales, a former top U.S. cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security, who closely tracked China's hacking operations against American infrastructure. He said prepositioning and intelligence collection by the hackers "are designed to ensure they prevail by keeping the U.S. from projecting power, and inducing chaos at home."

As China increasingly threatens Taiwan, working toward what Western intelligence officials see as a target of being ready to invade by 2027, the U.S. could be pulled into the fray as the island's most important backer... Top U.S. officials in both parties have warned that China is the greatest danger to American security.

In the infrastructure attacks, which began at least as early as 2019 and are still taking place, hackers connected to China's military embedded themselves in arenas that spies usually ignored, including a water utility in Hawaii, a port in Houston and an oil-and-gas processing facility. Investigators, both at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and in the private sector, found the hackers lurked, sometimes for years, periodically testing access. At a regional airport, investigators found the hackers had secured access, and then returned every six months to make sure they could still get in. Hackers spent at least nine months in the network of a water-treatment system, moving into an adjacent server to study the operations of the plant. At a utility in Los Angeles, the hackers searched for material about how the utility would respond in the event of an emergency or crisis. The precise location and other details of the infrastructure victims are closely guarded secrets, and couldn't be fully determined.

American security officials said they believe the infrastructure intrusions — carried out by a group dubbed Volt Typhoon — are at least in part aimed at disrupting Pacific military supply lines and otherwise impeding America's ability to respond to a future conflict with China, including over a potential invasion of Taiwan... The focus on Guam and West Coast targets suggested to many senior national-security officials across several Biden administration agencies that the hackers were focused on Taiwan, and doing everything they could to slow a U.S. response in a potential Chinese invasion, buying Beijing precious days to complete a takeover even before U.S. support could arrive.
The telecom breachers "were also able to swipe from Verizon and AT&T a list of individuals the U.S. government was surveilling in recent months under court order, which included suspected Chinese agents. The intruders used known software flaws that had been publicly warned about but hadn't been patched."

And ultimately nine U.S. telecoms were breached, according to America's deputy national security adviser for cybersecurity — including what appears to have been a preventable breach at AT&T (according to "one personal familiar with the matter"): [T]hey took control of a high-level network management account that wasn't protected by multifactor authentication, a basic safeguard. That granted them access to more than 100,000 routers from which they could further their attack — a serious lapse that may have allowed the hackers to copy traffic back to China and delete their own digital tracks.
The details of the various breaches are stunning: Chinese hackers gained a foothold in the digital underpinnings of one of America's largest ports in just 31 seconds. At the Port of Houston, an intruder acting like an engineer from one of the port's software vendors entered a server designed to let employees reset their passwords from home. The hackers managed to download an encrypted set of passwords from all the port's staff before the port recognized the threat and cut off the password server from its network...

Remember that massive botnet run by Chinese government hackers? Flax Typhoon "compromised computer networks in North America, Europe, Africa, and across Asia, with a particular focus on Taiwan," according to the U.S. Treasury Department. (The group's botnet breaching this autumn affected "at least 260,000 internet-connected devices," reports the Washington Post, "roughly half of which were located in the United States.")

Friday America's Treasury Department sanctioned "a Beijing-based cybersecurity company for its role in multiple computer intrusion incidents against U.S. victims..." according to an announcement from the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control. "Between summer 2022 and fall 2023, Flax Typhoon actors used infrastructure tied to Integrity Tech during their computer network exploitation activities against multiple victims. During that time, Flax Typhoon routinely sent and received information from Integrity Tech infrastructure."

From the Washington Post: The group behind the attacks was active since at least 2021, but U.S. authorities only managed to wrest control of the devices from the hackers in September, after the FBI won a court order that allowed the agency to send commands to the infected devices...

Treasury's designation follows sanctions announced last month on Sichuan Silence Information Technology Company, in which U.S. officials accused the company of exploiting technology flaws to install malware in more than 80,000 firewalls, including those protecting U.S. critical infrastructure. The new sanctions on Beijing Integrity Technology are notable due to the company's public profile and outsize role in servicing China's police and intelligence services via state-run hacking competitions. The company, which is listed in Shanghai and has a market capitalization of more than $327 million, plays a central role in providing state agencies "cyber ranges" — technology that allows them to simulate cyberattacks and defenses...

In September, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said the Flax Typhoon attack successfully infiltrated universities, media organizations, corporations and government agencies, and in some cases caused significant financial losses as groups raced to replace the infected hardware. He said at the time that the operation to shut down the network was "one round in a much longer fight...." A 2024 assessment by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said China is the most "active and persistent" cyberthreat and that actors under Beijing's direction have made efforts to breach U.S. critical infrastructure with the intention of lying in wait to be able to launch attacks in the event of major conflict.
"The Treasury sanctions bar Beijing Integrity Technology from access to U.S. financial systems and freeze any assets the company might hold in the United States," according to the article, "but the moves are unlikely to have a significant effect on the company," (according to Dakota Cary, a fellow at the Atlantic Council who has studied the company's role in state-sponsored hacking).

The Register's Jude Karabus reports: IBM and semiconductor maker GlobalFoundries have settled all of their litigation against each other, including breach of contract, patent, and trade secret suits, the pair say. The details of the settlement are confidential. All that both companies were prepared to say in yesterday's statements was that the deal they'd agreed would resolve "all litigation matters, inclusive of breach of contract, trade secrets, and intellectual property claims between the two companies." They added that the settlement would allow the companies to "explore new opportunities for collaboration in areas of mutual interest." In 2021, IBM sued GlobalFoundries for $2.5 billion, accusing it of failing to deliver on 10nm and 7nm chip production commitments, which disrupted IBM's hardware roadmap. GlobalFoundries poaching engineers countersued in 2023, alleging IBM misused trade secrets and poached engineers to support partnerships with Intel and Rapidus, potentially compromising proprietary technologies.

A federal judge in Connecticut refused to dismiss a long-running lawsuit accusing the former Nestle Waters North America of defrauding consumers by labeling its Poland Spring bottled water as "spring water." From a report: While rejecting some claims in the proposed class action, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Alker Meyer in New Haven called it an open question whether Poland Spring qualified as spring water under the laws of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Poland Spring is now owned by Tampa, Florida-based Primo Brands, following multiple corporate transactions. Consumers sued Nestle Waters, then owned by Nestle, in 2017, saying it deceived them into overpaying for Poland Spring with labels declaring it to be "Natural Spring Water" or "100% Natural Spring Water."

The plaintiffs said "not one drop" of the 1 billion gallons sold annually in the United States came from a natural spring, and that the actual Poland Spring in Maine "ran dry" two decades before Nestle bought the brand in 1992. In seeking a dismissal, Nestle Waters said geologists and officials in the eight states agreed that Poland Spring complied with a U.S. Food and Drug Administration rule defining spring water, and each state authorized its sale as "spring water."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Hollywood Reporter: A trio of major music publishers suing Anthropic over the use of lyrics to train its AI system have reached a deal with the Amazon-backed company to resolve some parts of a pending preliminary injunction. U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee on Thursday signed off on an agreement between the two sides mandating Anthropic to maintain existing guardrails that prevent its Claude AI chatbot from providing lyrics to songs owned by the publishers or create new song lyrics based on the copyrighted material.

In a statement, Anthropic said Claude "isn't designed to be used for copyright infringement, and we have numerous processes in place designed to prevent such infringement." It added, "Our decision to enter into this stipulation is consistent with those priorities. We continue to look forward to showing that, consistent with existing copyright law, using potentially copyrighted material in the training of generative AI models is a quintessential fair use." [...] Under the agreement, Anthropic will apply already-implemented guardrails in the training of new AI systems. The deal also provides an avenue for music publishers to intervene if the guardrails aren't working as intended.

"Publishers may notify Anthropic in writing that its Guardrails are not effectively preventing output that reproduces, distributes, or displays, in whole or in part, the lyrics to compositions owned or controlled by Publishers, or creates derivative works based on those compositions," the filing states. "Anthropic will respond to Publishers expeditiously and undertake an investigation into those allegations, with which Publishers will cooperate in good faith." Anthropic has maintained in court filings that existing guardrails make it unlikely that any future user could prompt Claude to produce any material portion of the works-in-suit. They consist of a "range of technical and other measures -- at all levels in the development lifecycle -- that aim to prevent users from simply prompting Claude to regurgitate training data," said a company spokesperson. The court is expected to issue a ruling in the coming months on whether to issue preliminary injunction that would bar Anthropic from training future models on lyrics owned by the publishers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Apple has agreed (PDF) to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then sold to third parties for targeted ads. In the proposed class-action settlement (PDF) -- which comes after five years of litigation -- Apple admitted to no wrongdoing. Instead, the settlement refers to "unintentional" Siri activations that occurred after the "Hey, Siri" feature was introduced in 2014, where recordings were apparently prompted without users ever saying the trigger words, "Hey, Siri." Sometimes Siri would be inadvertently activated, a whistleblower told The Guardian, when an Apple Watch was raised and speech was detected. The only clue that users seemingly had of Siri's alleged spying was eerily accurate targeted ads that appeared after they had just been talking about specific items like Air Jordans or brands like Olive Garden, Reuters noted. It's currently unknown how many customers were affected, but if the settlement is approved, the tech giant has offered up to $20 per Siri-enabled device for any customers who made purchases between September 17, 2014, and December 31, 2024. That includes iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, MacBooks, HomePods, iPod touches, and Apple TVs, the settlement agreement noted. Each customer can submit claims for up to five devices.

A hearing when the settlement could be approved is currently scheduled for February 14. If the settlement is certified, Apple will send notices to all affected customers. Through the settlement, customers can not only get monetary relief but also ensure that their private phone calls are permanently deleted. While the settlement appears to be a victory for Apple users after months of mediation, it potentially lets Apple off the hook pretty cheaply. If the court had certified the class action and Apple users had won, Apple could've been fined more than $1.5 billion under the Wiretap Act alone, court filings showed. But lawyers representing Apple users decided to settle, partly because data privacy law is still a "developing area of law imposing inherent risks that a new decision could shift the legal landscape as to the certifiability of a class, liability, and damages," the motion to approve the settlement agreement said. It was also possible that the class size could be significantly narrowed through ongoing litigation, if the court determined that Apple users had to prove their calls had been recorded through an incidental Siri activation -- potentially reducing recoverable damages for everyone.

A U.S. appeals court ruled on Thursday the Federal Communications Commission did not have legal authority to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules. From a report: The decision is a blow to the outgoing Biden administration that had made restoring the open internet rules a priority. President Joe Biden signed a 2021 executive order encouraging the FCC to reinstate the rules.

A three-judge panel of the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the FCC lacked authority to reinstate the rules initially implemented in 2015 by the agency under Democratic former President Barack Obama, but then repealed by the commission in 2017 under Republican former President Donald Trump.

The rules also forbid special arrangements in which ISPs give improved network speeds or access to favored users. The court cited the Supreme Court's June decision in a case known as Loper Bright to overturn a 1984 precedent that had given deference to government agencies in interpreting laws they administer, in the latest decision to curb the authority of federal agencies. "Applying Loper Bright means we can end the FCC's vacillations," the court ruled.

A filing in an antitrust lawsuit against some of the nation's top universities alleges the schools overcharged students by $685 million in a "price-fixing" scheme, raising serious questions about their past admission and financial aid policies. From a report: Documents and testimony from officials at Georgetown University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and other elite schools suggest they appeared to favor wealthy applicants despite their stated policy of accepting students without regard for their financial circumstances. That "need-blind" policy allowed the schools to collaborate on financial aid under federal law, but plaintiffs in the case say the colleges violated the statute by considering students' family income.

Every year, according to a motion filed in federal court Monday night, Georgetown's then-president would draw up a list of about 80 applicants based on a tracking list that often included information about their parents' wealth and past donations, but not the applicants' transcripts, teacher recommendations or personal essays. "Please Admit," was often written at the top of the list, the lawsuit contends -- and almost all of the applicants were. Former students accuse 17 elite schools, including most of the Ivy League, of colluding to limit the financial aid packages of working- and middle-class students. The claimed damages of $685 million, which were detailed in the court filing Monday night, would automatically triple to more than $2 billion under U.S. antitrust laws.