Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this investigation by Time magazine's senior economics correspondent which argues that America's residential solar industry "is floundering." In late 2023 alone, more than 100 residential solar dealers and installers in the U.S. declared bankruptcy, according to Roth Capital Partners — six times the number in the previous three years combined. Roth expects at least 100 more to fail. The two largest companies in the industry, SunRun and Sunnova, both posted big losses in their most recent quarterly reports, and their shares are down 86% and 81% respectively from their peaks in January 2021... At the root of these struggles is the complicated financial engineering that helped companies raise money but that some investors and analysts say was built on a framework of lies — or at least exaggerations. Since at least 2016, big solar companies have used Wall Street money to fund their growth. This financialization raised the consumer cost of the panels and led companies to aggressively pursue sales to make the cost of borrowing Wall Street money worth it. National solar companies essentially became finance companies that happened to sell solar, engaging in calculations that may have been overly optimistic about how much money the solar leases and loans actually bring in.

"I've often heard solar finance and sales compared to the Wild West due to the creativity involved," says Jamie Johnson, the founder of Energy Sense Finance, who has been studying the residential solar industry for a decade. "It's the Silicon Valley mantra of 'break things and let the regulators figure it out.'"
Leasing the panels lets the companies claim green-energy tax credits (which they then sell to companies like Google). And meanwhile, bundles of solar-panel leases become asset-backed securities. By 2017, there were over $1 billion such securities... However, these financial innovations also increased the pressure on companies to grow quickly. Solar companies needed lots of new customers in order to package the loans into asset-backed securities and sell them to investors. Public companies especially faced intense scrutiny from investors who expected double-digit quarterly growth. And with upfront costs no longer a barrier for new customers, solar companies began to see almost every homeowner as a target, and they deployed expensive sales teams to go out and sell as aggressively as they could... Even today, about one-third of the upfront cost of a residential solar system goes to intermediaries like sales and financing people, says Pol Lezcano, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance. In Germany, where installation is done locally and there are fewer intermediaries, the typical residential system costs about 50% less than it costs in the U.S. "The upfront cost of these systems is stupidly high," says Lezcano, making residential solar not "scalable."

After growing 31% in 2021 and 40% in 2022, residential solar will only grow by 13% in 2023 and then contract 12% in 2024, according to predictions from the research firm Wood Mackenzie... Meanwhile, the pressure for fast sales may have led some companies to look the other way when salespeople obscured the terms of the solar panel leases and loans they were selling in order to close a deal.
One customer complains the solar panel company actually took out a lien on his house without his knowledge, according to the article. He's "one of a growing number of consumers now saying in courts and in arbitration that salesmen from solar-panel and solar-panel-finance companies — including some of the biggest in the U.S., like GoodLeap, Mosaic, Sunnova, and SunRun — tricked them into taking out onerous loans they didn't want — or that someone signed them up for a loan without their knowledge." Even some people who voluntarily signed up for financing products say they were misled about the actual cost of the solar panels. That's because loans from companies like GoodLeap and Mosaic often include an unexplained and significant "dealer fee." For example, a customer buying a $30,000 solar panel system with a low interest rate may not know that price includes a $10,000 loan-dealer fee. In other words, the cost of the panels, had they paid cash, would have been just $20,000; the extra 30% is the price they paid for the low-interest loan, though many consumers allege this was not explained to them...

In some ways, the current situation in the residential solar market is analogous to the subprime lending crisis that set off the Great Recession, though on a smaller scale. Like in the subprime lending crisis, some companies issued loans to people who could not — or would not — pay them. Like in the subprime lending crisis, thousands of these loans — and in solar's case, also leases — were packaged and sold to investors as asset-backed securities with promised rates of return. The Great Recession was driven largely by the fact that people stopped paying their loans, and the asset-backed securities didn't deliver the promised rate of return to investors. Similar cracks may be forming in the solar asset-backed securities market. For instance, the rate of delinquencies of loans in one of Sunnova's asset-backed securities was approaching 5% in the fall of last year, according to an October 2023 report issued by KBRA, a bond ratings agency. Historically, delinquencies in solar asset-backed securities had been around 1%.

The firms that grade these asset-backed securities have long said delinquencies would be low because rooftop-solar customers had high credit scores. The problem is that they appear not to have considered that even customers with good credit scores may not want to pay for solar panels that they were told would be free — or that salesmen could be signing people up without their knowledge.
Besides consumer cases in court, there's the possibility that regulators may act against solar companies that used inflated projections to juice their tax credits. "As early as 2016, a researcher at MIT's Energy Initiative estimated that such companies were overstating this value by as much as 50%." The broad problems facing residential solar and financing companies are already causing some pain in the forms of layoffs — California alone lost 17,000 solar jobs in 2023, according to the California Solar and Storage Association. There are ripple effects in the industry; Enphase Energy, which makes microinverters for solar panels, said in December it was laying off 10% of its workforce amidst softening demand.

It could get a lot worse before it gets better, with not just lost jobs, but near-total collapse of the current system. Some analysts, like Lezcano of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, think that the big, national players are going to have to fall apart for residential solar to become affordable in the U.S., and that in the future, the solar industry in the U.S. will look more like it does in Germany, where installations are done locally and there's fewer door-to-door sales.
"Over the past few years, a handful of people got rich off of Americans who were told they could simultaneously save money and save the planet. For example, Hayes Barnard, GoodLeap's founder and chairman, was named by Forbes as one of the 400 richest people in the world in 2023..."

Slashdot reader Bruce66423 shared this report from the BBC: A Spanish court has cleared a British man of public disorder, after he joked to friends about blowing up a flight from London Gatwick to Menorca.

Aditya Verma admitted he told friends in July 2022: "On my way to blow up the plane. I'm a member of the Taliban." But he said he had made the joke in a private Snapchat group and never intended to "cause public distress"... The message he sent to friends, before boarding the plane, went on to be picked up by UK security services. They then flagged it to Spanish authorities while the easyJet plane was still in the air.

Two Spanish F-18 fighter jets were sent to flank the aircraft. One followed the plane until it landed at Menorca, where the plane was searched. Mr Verma, who was 18 at the time, was arrested and held in a Spanish police cell for two days. He was later released on bail... If he had been found guilty, the university student faced a fine of up to €22,500 (£19,300 or $20,967) and a further €95,000 (£81,204 or $103,200) in expenses to cover the cost of the jets being scrambled.
But how did his message first get from the encrypted app to the UK security services? One theory, raised in the trial, was that it could have been intercepted via Gatwick's Wi-Fi network. But a spokesperson for the airport told BBC News that its network "does not have that capability"... A spokesperson for Snapchat said the social media platform would not "comment on what's happened in this individual case".
richi (Slashdot reader #74,551) thinks it's obvious what happened: SnapChat's own web site says they scan messages for threats and passes them on to the authorities. ("We also work to proactively escalate to law enforcement any content appearing to involve imminent threats to life, such as...bomb threats...."

"In the case of emergency disclosure requests from law enforcement, our 24/7 team usually responds within 30 minutes."

The National Security Agency buys certain logs related to Americans' domestic internet activities from commercial data brokers, according to an unclassified letter by the agency. The New York Times: The letter [PDF], addressed to a Democratic senator and obtained by The New York Times, offered few details about the nature of the data other than to stress that it did not include the content of internet communications. Still, the revelation is the latest disclosure to bring to the fore a legal gray zone: Intelligence and law enforcement agencies sometimes purchase potentially sensitive and revealing domestic data from brokers that would require a court order to acquire directly.

It comes as the Federal Trade Commission has started cracking down on companies that trade in personal location data that was gathered from smartphone apps and sold without people's knowledge and consent about where it would end up and for what purpose it would be used. In a letter to the director of national intelligence dated Thursday, the senator, Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, argued that "internet metadata" -- logs showing when two computers have communicated, but not the content of any message -- "can be equally sensitive" as the location data the F.T.C. is targeting. He urged intelligence agencies to stop buying internet data about Americans if it was not collected under the standard the F.T.C. has laid out for location records. "The U.S. government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans' privacy are not just unethical, but illegal," Mr. Wyden wrote.

George Carlin's estate is suing over the release of a comedy special that uses generative AI to mimic the deceased comedian's voice and style of humor. From a report: The lawsuit, filed in California federal court on Thursday, accuses the creators of the special of utilizing without consent or compensation George Carlin's entire body of work consisting of five decades of comedy routines to train an AI chatbot, which wrote the episode's script. It also takes issue with using his voice and likeness for promotional purposes. The complaint seeks a court order for immediate removal of the special, as well as unspecified damages. It's among the first legal actions taken by the estate of a deceased celebrity for unlicensed use of their work and likeness to manufacture a new, AI-generated creation and was filed as Hollywood is sounding the alarm over utilization of AI to impersonate people without consent or compensation.

The Federal Trade Commission ruled in a final order and opinion Monday that TurboTax, the popular tax filing software, engaged in deceptive advertising and banned the company from advertising its services for free unless it is free for all customers. CNN adds: By running ads for "free" tax services that many customers were not qualified for, the tax filing software violated the FTC Act and deceived consumers, the agency said. The FTC had first sued Intuit, TurboTax's owner, for its deceptive advertising in 2022. The FTC staff alleged most tax filers couldn't use the company's "free" services -- "such as those who get a 1099 form for work in the gig economy, or those who earn farm income." TurboTax advertising their products as free misled those customers, according to the FTC.

The FTC Administrative Law Judge D. Michael Chappell announced the initial decision in September, which the commission upheld Monday. Intuit had appealed to the FTC as part of the process. In a statement Monday, Intuit said it has appealed "this deeply flawed decision" to federal circuit court outside of the FTC. "Absolutely no one should be surprised that FTC Commissioners -- employees of the FTC -- ruled in favor of the FTC as they have done in every appeal for the last two decades. This decision is the result of a biased and broken system where the Commission serves as accuser, judge, jury, and then appellate judge all in the same case," an an Intuit spokesperson said.

Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: A security researcher in Germany has been fined $3,300 for finding and reporting an e-commerce database vulnerability that was exposing almost 700,000 customer records. Back in June 2021, according to our pals at Heise, an contractor identified elsewhere as Hendrik H. was troubleshooting software for a customer of IT services firm Modern Solution GmbH. He discovered that the Modern Solution code made an MySQL connection to a MariaDB database server operated by the vendor. It turned out the password to access that remote server was stored in plain text in the program file MSConnect.exe, and opening it in a simple text editor would reveal the unencrypted hardcoded credential.

With that easy-to-find password in hand, anyone could log into the remote server and access data belonging to not just that one customer of Modern Solution, but data belonging to all of the vendor's clients stored on that database server. That info is said to have included personal details of those customers' own customers. And we're told that Modern Solution's program files were available for free from the web, so truly anyone could inspect the executables in a text editor for plain-text hardcoded database passwords. The contractor's findings were discussed in a June 23, 2021 report by Mark Steier, who writes about e-commerce. That same day Modern Solution issued a statement [PDF] -- translated from German -- summarizing the incident [...]. The statement indicates that sensitive data about Modern Solution customers was exposed: last names, first names, email addresses, telephone numbers, bank details, passwords, and conversation and call histories. But it claims that only a limited amount of data -- names and addresses -- about shoppers who made purchases from these retail clients was exposed. Steier contends that's incorrect and alleged that Modern Solution downplayed the seriousness of the exposed data, which he said included extensive customer data from the online stores operated by Modern Solution's clients.

In September 2021 police in Germany seized the IT consultant's computers following a complaint from Modern Solution that claimed he could only have obtained the password through insider knowledge â" he worked previously for a related firm -- and the biz claimed he was a competitor. Hendrik H. was charged with unlawful data access under Section 202a of Germany's Criminal Code, based on the rule that examining data protected by a password can be classified as a crime under the Euro nation's cybersecurity law. In June, 2023, a Julich District Court in western Germany sided with the IT consultant because the Modern Solution software was insufficiently protected. But the Aachen regional court directed the district court to hear the complaint. Now, the district court has reversed its initial decision. On January 17, a Julich District Court fined Hendrik H. and directed him to pay court costs.

Exxon Mobil has filed a complaint in a Texas court seeking to block a climate proposal by activist investors from a shareholder vote in May. This marks Exxon's first legal action against such a proposal. Exxon argues the proposal, which urges adoption of emissions targets for Exxon's products, does not serve shareholder interests. The activist investors counter that Exxon is the only major oil company lacking these targets. TechCrunch: The problem Exxon faces is that the "basic rules of society," specifically "those embedded in ethical custom," are changing, and the company now finds itself on the wrong side of them. Two-thirds of Americans say we should prioritize alternative energy over fossil fuels, and 69% say the U.S. should move toward net-zero emissions by 2050, according to the Pew Research Center. Internationally, most people want their governments to do something about climate change.

Exxon would normally take its grievances to the SEC, filing a request with the regulator to omit the proposal from this year's proxy statement. But under the Biden administration, the SEC has been siding more frequently with shareholders. After all, who's the boss?

Terraform Labs, the company behind the stablecoin TerraUSD, which collapsed and roiled cryptocurrency markets in 2022, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States, according to court papers filed on Sunday. From a report: Singapore-based Terraform Labs, in a filing with the bankruptcy court in Delaware, listed assets and liabilities in the range of $100-$500 million. Terraform Labs said it would meet all financial obligations to employees and vendors during the Chapter 11 case without requiring additional financing. It also plans to continue Web3 offerings expansion. "The filing will allow TFL to execute on its business plan while navigating ongoing legal proceedings, including representative litigation pending in Singapore and U.S. litigation involving the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)," Terraform Labs said in a statement.

One man living in Virginia oversaw "the laundering of some $7 million in fraudulently obtained gift cards" from Walmart in an international operation which over five years scammed hundreds of victims into sending the numbers over the phone, reports a new ProPublica investigation. (Citing court evidence that emerged after his arrested in 2021). Earlier that year, he complained to an associate that more and more people were competing to resell cards in China, eating into his profits. So many scammers were flocking to Walmart that he and his team regularly encountered them at self-checkout counters.... "We ran into quite a few at the store, and we even started chatting."
It was apparently so common that federal prosecutors started calling it "The Walmart scheme." And while the store is supposed to watch for customers who appear to be acting on a scammer's instructions, "Too often, Walmart has failed." America's largest retailer has long been a facilitator of fraud on a mass scale, a ProPublica investigation has found. For roughly a decade, Walmart has resisted tougher enforcement while breaking promises to regulators and skimping on employee training, according to more than 50 interviews, internal documents supplied by former industry executives, court filings and other public records...More than $1 billion in fraud losses were routed through the company's financial systems between 2013 and 2022, according to filings by the Federal Trade Commission and court cases analyzed by ProPublica. That has helped fuel a boom in financial chicanery. Americans, many of them elderly, were swindled out of $27 billion between 2013 and 2022, according to the FTC...

Walmart has a financial incentive to avoid cracking down. It makes money each time a Walmart gift card is used and earns a fee when another brand of card is bought. And it receives one commission when a person sends a money transfer and a second when the recipient picks it up. The company's financial services business generates hundreds of millions in annual profits. (Its filings do not provide specific figures for gift cards and money transfers.) "They were concerned about the bucks. That's all," Nick Alicea, a former fraud team leader for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service who investigated Walmart for years, told ProPublica. Walmart's deficiencies have repeatedly attracted government scrutiny. In 2017, the attorneys general of New York and Pennsylvania investigated Walmart over concerns that it was "reaping the benefits" of gift card fraud. The investigation concluded a year later with Walmart promising to restrict or eliminate the use of its gift cards to purchase other gift cards...

Instead, the company let the practice continue until 2022 — even after it knew that millions of dollars were being laundered through its stores. The FTC sued Walmart in 2022, alleging it "turned a blind eye" as criminals took advantage of its money transfer service. Walmart, the FTC claimed, pocketed millions in fees while "letting fraudsters fleece its customers." Summarizing the FTC's evidence, a federal judge in the case wrote that "Walmart knew that its services were used by fraudsters" and that the company was repeatedly warned about certain stores where "twenty-five, fifty, or even seventy-five percent of money transfer activity was fraudulent." Separately, a federal grand jury in Pennsylvania is hearing evidence of possible criminal conduct in Walmart's money transfer business, according to corporate filings that did not detail the allegations.
While the FTC says Americans were swindled out of $27 billion between 2013 and 2022, Walmart responded to ProPublica's investigation by pointing out it's refunded $4 million to gift-card fraud victims, and also blocked more than $700 million in suspicious money transfers. "We have a robust anti-fraud program and other controls to help stop scammers and other criminals who may use the financial services we offer to harm our customers." The company's legal filings in the FTC case struck a different tone. Walmart is seeking to dismiss the suit, partly on the grounds that it has "no responsibility to protect against the criminal conduct of third parties." Though fraud is "deeply unfortunate," Walmart argues, such schemes are "reasonably avoidable by consumers."
Other interesting quotes from the article:

• "Walmart outlets at one point accounted for the top 20 locations for fraud nationally among chains that partnered with MoneyGram, according to internal documents."

• "In a single week in March 2017, consumers claiming they'd been duped into a money transfer filed 610 complaints about Walmart, according to documents obtained by ProPublica. CVS ranked second, with 47."

• "Site inspections routinely found that Walmart staff lacked anti-fraud training and that employees failed to ask screening questions..."

• Walmart resisted MoneyGram's attempts to fight fraud [according to the former fraud team leader for the postal inspector's office in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who investigated MoneyGram and Walmart].

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inc. Magazine: Google's DeepMind division has long led the way on all sorts of AI breakthroughs, grabbing headlines in 2016, when one of its systems beat a world champion at the strategy game Go, then seen as an unlikely feat. So when one of DeepMind's co-founders makes a pronouncement about the future of AI, it's worth listening, especially if you're a startup entrepreneur. AI might be coming for your job! Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and now CEO of Inflection AI -- a small, California-based machine intelligence company -- recently suggested this possibility could be reality in a half-decade or so.

At the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos this week, Suleyman said he thinks AI tech will soon reach the point where it could dream up a company, project-manage it, and successfully sell products. This still-imaginary AI-ntrepreneur will certainly be able to do so by 2030. He's also sure that these AI powers will be "widely available" for "very cheap" prices, potentially even as open-source systems, meaning some aspects of these super smart AIs would be free. Whether an AI entrepreneur could actually beat a human at the startup game is something we'll have to wait to find out, but the mere fact that Suleyman is saying an AI could carry out the role is stunning. It's also controversial, and likely tangled in a forest of thorny legal matters. For example, there's the tricky issue of whether an AI can own or patent intellectual property. A recent ruling in the U.K. argues that an AI definitively cannot be a patent holder.

Underlining how much of all of this is theoretical, Suleyman's musings about AI entrepreneurs came from an answer to a question about whether AIs can pass the famous Turing test. This is sometimes considered a gold standard for AI: If a real artificial general intelligence (AGI) can fool a human into thinking that it too is a human. Cunningly, Suleyman twisted the question around, and said the traditional Turing test wasn't good enough. Instead, he argued a better test would be to see if an AGI could perform sophisticated tasks like acting as an entrepreneur. No matter how theoretical Suleyman's thinking is, it will unsettle critics who worry about the destructive potential of AI, and it may worry some in the venture capital world, too. How exactly would one invest in a startup with a founder that's just a pile of silicon chips? Even Suleyman said he thinks that this sort of innovation would cause a giant economic upset.

An anonymous reader shares a report: These cafes had all adopted similar aesthetics and offered similar menus, but they hadn't been forced to do so by a corporate parent, the way a chain like Starbucks replicated itself. Instead, despite their vast geographical separation and total independence from each other, the cafes had all drifted toward the same end point. The sheer expanse of sameness was too shocking and new to be boring. Of course, there have been examples of such cultural globalisation going back as far as recorded civilisation. But the 21st-century generic cafes were remarkable in the specificity of their matching details, as well as the sense that each had emerged organically from its location. They were proud local efforts that were often described as "authentic," an adjective that I was also guilty of overusing. When travelling, I always wanted to find somewhere "authentic" to have a drink or eat a meal.

If these places were all so similar, though, what were they authentic to, exactly? What I concluded was that they were all authentically connected to the new network of digital geography, wired together in real time by social networks. They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds. In 2016, I wrote an essay titled Welcome to AirSpace, describing my first impressions of this phenomenon of sameness. "AirSpace" was my coinage for the strangely frictionless geography created by digital platforms, in which you could move between places without straying beyond the boundaries of an app, or leaving the bubble of the generic aesthetic. The word was partly a riff on Airbnb, but it was also inspired by the sense of vaporousness and unreality that these places gave me. They seemed so disconnected from geography that they could float away and land anywhere else. When you were in one, you could be anywhere.

My theory was that all the physical places interconnected by apps had a way of resembling one another. In the case of the cafes, the growth of Instagram gave international cafe owners and baristas a way to follow one another in real time and gradually, via algorithmic recommendations, begin consuming the same kinds of content. One cafe owner's personal taste would drift toward what the rest of them liked, too, eventually coalescing. On the customer side, Yelp, Foursquare and Google Maps drove people like me -- who could also follow the popular coffee aesthetics on Instagram -- toward cafes that conformed with what they wanted to see by putting them at the top of searches or highlighting them on a map. To court the large demographic of customers moulded by the internet, more cafes adopted the aesthetics that already dominated on the platforms. Adapting to the norm wasn't just following trends but making a business decision, one that the consumers rewarded. When a cafe was visually pleasing enough, customers felt encouraged to post it on their own Instagram in turn as a lifestyle brag, which provided free social media advertising and attracted new customers. Thus the cycle of aesthetic optimisation and homogenisation continued.

Coinbase said buying cryptocurrency on an exchange was more like collecting Beanie Babies than investing in a stock or bond. From a report: The biggest US crypto exchange made the comparison Wednesday in a New York federal court hearing. Coinbase was arguing for the dismissal of a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing it of selling unregistered securities. William Savitt, a lawyer for Coinbase, told US District Judge Katherine Polk Failla that tokens trading on the exchange aren't securities subject to SEC jurisdiction because buyers don't gain any rights as a part of their purchases, as they do with stocks or bonds. "It's the difference between buying Beanie Babies Inc and buying Beanie Babies," Savitt said. The question of whether digital tokens are securities has divided courts.

Apple has updated its long-standing App Store guidelines, giving developers the option to let users make in-app purchases for iOS apps outside of its App Store. But the changes still haven't won over one of the company's longtime critics. From a report: Under the new rules, app developers can provide customers with links to third-party purchase options for their apps, but they must still pay Apple fees of either 12% or 27%. Spotify, one of Apple's biggest critics, isn't a fan of the changes. In a statement, the music streaming service slammed the new rules. "Once again, Apple has demonstrated that they will stop at nothing to protect the profits they exact on the backs of developers and consumers under their app store monopoly," the company said in a statement. "Their latest move in the US -- imposing a 27% fee for transactions made outside of an app on a developer's website -- is outrageous and flies in the face of the court's efforts to enable greater competition and user choice." Tech columnist John Gruber, writing at DaringFireball: Maybe the cynics are right! Let's just concede that they are, and that Apple will only make decisions here that benefit its bottom line. My argument remains that Apple should not be pursuing this plan for complying with the anti-steering injunction by collecting commissions from web sales that initiate in-app. Whatever revenue Apple would lose to non-commissioned web sales (for non-games) is not worth the hit they are taking to the company's brand and reputationâ--âthis move reeks of greed and avariceâ--ânor the increased ire and scrutiny of regulators and legislators on the "anti-Big-Tech" hunt.

Apple should have been looking for ways to lessen regulatory and legislative pressure over the past few years, and in today's climate that's more true than ever. But instead, their stance has seemingly been "Bring it on." Confrontational, not conciliatory, conceding not an inch. Rather than take a sure win with most of what they could want, Apple is seemingly hell-bent on trying to keep everything. To win in chess all you need is to capture your opponent's king. Apple seemingly wants to capture every last piece on the boardâ--âeven while playing in a tournament where the referees (regulators) are known to look askance at blatant poor sportsmanship (greed).

Apple's calculus should be to balance its natural desire to book large amounts of revenue from the App Store with policies that to some degree placate, rather than antagonize, regulators and legislators. No matter what the sport, no matter what the letter of the rulebook says, it's never a good idea to piss off the refs.

A U.S. Court of Appeals said Apple will again be barred from selling the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 beginning Thursday. These models both contain a blood oxygen sensor that infringes on the intellectual property of medical device company Masimo.

"The court order Wednesday did not rule on Apple's effort to overturn a U.S. International Trade Commission ban on the company selling the affected watches in the United States," notes CNBC. "But it lifted an injunction that had blocked the ban from taking effect while that appeal is pending." From the report: In December, Apple chose to briefly remove the affected watches from its online and retail stores, though retailers with those devices in stock may still sell them. Earlier this week, court filings suggested that Apple had received approval from U.S. Customs for a modified version of its Apple Watches that lack the blood oxygen feature and therefore no longer infringe on Masimo's intellectual property. It could open a path for a modified Apple Watch to return to U.S. store shelves.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: OpenAI may finally have to answer for ChatGPT's "hallucinations" in court after a Georgia judge recently ruled against the tech company's motion to dismiss a radio host's defamation suit (PDF). OpenAI had argued that ChatGPT's output cannot be considered libel, partly because the chatbot output cannot be considered a "publication," which is a key element of a defamation claim. In its motion to dismiss, OpenAI also argued that Georgia radio host Mark Walters could not prove that the company acted with actual malice or that anyone believed the allegedly libelous statements were true or that he was harmed by the alleged publication.

It's too early to say whether Judge Tracie Cason found OpenAI's arguments persuasive. In her order denying OpenAI's motion to dismiss, which MediaPost shared here, Cason did not specify how she arrived at her decision, saying only that she had "carefully" considered arguments and applicable laws. There may be some clues as to how Cason reached her decision in a court filing (PDF) from John Monroe, attorney for Walters, when opposing the motion to dismiss last year. Monroe had argued that OpenAI improperly moved to dismiss the lawsuit by arguing facts that have yet to be proven in court. If OpenAI intended the court to rule on those arguments, Monroe suggested that a motion for summary judgment would have been the proper step at this stage in the proceedings, not a motion to dismiss.

Had OpenAI gone that route, though, Walters would have had an opportunity to present additional evidence. To survive a motion to dismiss, all Walters had to do was show that his complaint was reasonably supported by facts, Monroe argued. Failing to convince the court that Walters had no case, OpenAI's legal theories regarding its liability for ChatGPT's "hallucinations" will now likely face their first test in court. "We are pleased the court denied the motion to dismiss so that the parties will have an opportunity to explore, and obtain a decision on, the merits of the case," Monroe told Ars. "Walters sued OpenAI after a journalist, Fred Riehl, warned him that in response to a query, ChatGPT had fabricated an entire lawsuit," notes Ars. "Generating an entire complaint with an erroneous case number, ChatGPT falsely claimed that Walters had been accused of defrauding and embezzling funds from the Second Amendment Foundation."

"With the lawsuit moving forward, curious chatbot users everywhere may finally get the answer to a question that has been unclear since ChatGPT quickly became the fastest-growing consumer application of all time after its launch in November 2022: Will ChatGPT's hallucinations be allowed to ruin lives?"

An anonymous reader shares a report: Fortnite maker Epic Games is not happy about how Apple intends to comply with a district court's injunction that permitted app developers to direct users to their own websites and payment platforms -- a court order that came into effect following the Supreme Court's decision to not hear the Apple antitrust case, leaving the current ruling to stand. Though Apple had largely won the case, as the court decided it was not a monopolist, a judge ruled that app makers should be able to steer their customers to the web from links or buttons inside their apps, something that forced Apple to change its App Store rules.

But Apple's compliance doesn't give app makers the victory they had hoped, as the tech giant aims to still charge commissions on purchases made outside of apps -- a decision Epic aims to challenge in court. According to statements made by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, shared on X, Apple's "bad-faith" compliance undermines the judge's order that would have allowed buttons or external links "in addition to [in-app purchases.]" The Ninth Circuit District Court had ruled on one count of out ten in favor of Epic in its decision, finding that Apple violated California's Unfair Competition law. The decision meant Apple had to remove the "anti-steering" clause from its agreement with App Store developers. This clause for years had prevented app developers from directing their customers to other ways to pay for in-app purchases or subscriptions from inside their apps, leading to confusing screens or broken features, where customers would have to figure out on their own how to make the necessary purchases from the developer's website.

Apple has announced changes to its U.S. App Store, allowing developers to link to alternative payment methods, "provided that the app also offer purchases through Apple's own In-App Purchase system," reports 9to5Mac. The change comes in light of the Supreme Court declining to hear Apple's appeal in its legal battle with Epic Games. From the report: The guideline says that developers can apply for an entitlement that allows them to include buttons or links directing users to out-of-app purchasing mechanisms: "Developers may apply for an entitlement to provide a link in their app to a website the developer owns or maintains responsibility for in order to purchase such items. Learn more about the entitlement. In accordance with the entitlement agreement, the link may inform users about where and how to purchase those in-app purchase items, and the fact that such items may be available for a comparatively lower price. The entitlement is limited to use only in the iOS or iPadOS App Store on the United States storefront. In all other storefronts, apps and their metadata may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than in-app purchase."

According to Apple, the link to an alternative payment platform can only be displayed on "one app page the end user navigates to (not an interstitial, modal, or pop-up), in a single, dedicated location on such page, and may not persist beyond that page." Apple has provided templates that developers can use for communicating with customers about alternative in-app payment systems [...]. Apple has also confirmed that it will charge a commission on purchases made through alternative payment platforms. This commission will be 12% for developers who are a member of the App Store Small Business Program and 27% for other apps. The commission will apply to "purchases made within seven days after a user taps on an External Purchase Link and continues from the system disclosure sheet to an external website." Apple says developers will be required to provide accounting of qualifying out-of-app purchases and remit the appropriate commissions. [...] However, Apple also says that collecting this commission will be "exceedingly difficult and, in many cases, impossible." [...]

The other anti-steering change that Apple is required to make is to allow developers to communicate with customers outside of their apps about alternative purchasing options, such as via email. Apple made this change in 2021 as part of its settlement of a class-action lawsuit brought on by small developers.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a challenge by Apple to a lower court's decision requiring changes to certain rules in its lucrative App Store, as the justices shunned the lengthy legal battle between the iPhone maker and Epic Games, maker of the popular video game "Fortnite." Reuters: The justices also turned away Epic's appeal of the lower court's ruling that Apple's App Store policies limiting how software is distributed and paid for do not violate federal antitrust laws. The justices gave no reasons for their decision to deny the appeals. In a series of posts on X, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney wrote: The Supreme Court denied both sides' appeals of the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. The court battle to open iOS to competing stores and payments is lost in the United States. A sad outcome for all developers. Now the District Court's injunction against Apple's anti-steering rule is in effect, and developers can include in their apps "buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms, in addition to IAP."

As of today, developers can begin exercising their court-established right to tell US customers about better prices on the web. These awful Apple-mandated confusion screens are over and done forever. The fight goes on. Regulators are taking action and policymakers around the world are passing new laws to end Apple's illegal and anticompetitive app store practices. The European Union's Digital Markets Act goes into effect March 7.

Last year Marc Andreessen's firm "argued that AI companies would go broke if they had to pay copyright royalties or licensing fees," notes a Los Angeles Times technology columnist.

But are these powerful companies doing even more to ensure they're not billed for their training data? Just this week, British media outlets reported that OpenAI has made the same case, seeking an exemption from copyright rules in England, claiming that the company simply couldn't operate without ingesting copyrighted materials.... The AI companies also argue what they're doing falls under the legal doctrine of fair use — probably the strongest argument they've got — because it's transformative. This argument helped Google win in court against the big book publishers when it was copying books into its massive Google Books database, and defeat claims that YouTube was profiting by allowing users to host and promulgate unlicensed material. Next, the AI companies argue that copyright-violating outputs like those uncovered by AI expert Gary Marcus, film industry veteran Reid Southern and the New York Times are rare or are bugs that are going to be patched.
But finally, William Fitzgerald, a partner at the Worker Agency and former member of the public policy team at Google, predicts Google will try to line up supportive groups to tell lawmakers artists support AI: Fitzgerald also sees Google's fingerprints on Creative Commons' embrace of the argument that AI art is fair use, as Google is a major funder of the organization. "It's worrisome to see Google deploy the same lobbying tactics they've developed over the years to ensure workers don't get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald said. And OpenAI is close behind. It is not only taking a similar approach to heading off copyright complaints as Google, but it's also hiring the same people: It hired Fred Von Lohmann, Google's former director of copyright policy, as its top copyright lawyer....

[Marcus says] "There's an obvious alternative here — OpenAI's saying that we need all this or we can't build AI — but they could pay for it!" We want a world with artists and with writers, after all, he adds, one that rewards artistic work — not one where all the money goes to the top because a handful of tech companies won a digital land grab. "It's up to workers everywhere to see this for what it is, get organized, educate lawmakers and fight to get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald says.

"Because if they don't, Google and OpenAI will continue to profit from other people's labor and content for a long time to come."

Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis writes: Hundreds of British postal workers wrongly convicted of theft due to faulty accounting software could have their convictions reversed, according to a story from the BBC. Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office prosecuted 700 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses — an average of one a week — based on information from a computer system called Horizon, after faulty software wrongly made it look like money was missing. Some 283 more cases were brought by other bodies including the Crown Prosecution Service.
2024 began with a four-part dramatization of the scandal airing on British television, and the BBC reporting today that its reporters originally investigating the story confronted "lobbying, misinformation and outright lies."

Yet the Guardian notes that to this day in English and Welsh law, computers are still assumed to be "reliable" unless and until proven otherwise. But critics of this approach say this reverses the burden of proof normally applied in criminal cases. Stephen Mason, a barrister and expert on electronic evidence, said: "It says, for the person who's saying 'there's something wrong with this computer', that they have to prove it. Even if it's the person accusing them who has the information...."

He and colleagues had been expressing alarm about the presumption as far back as 2009. "My view is that the Post Office would never have got anywhere near as far as it did if this presumption wasn't in place," Mason said... [W]hen post office operators were accused of having stolen money, the hallucinatory evidence of the Horizon system was deemed sufficient proof. Without any evidence to the contrary, the defendants could not force the system to be tested in court and their loss was all but guaranteed.

The influence of English common law internationally means that the presumption of reliability is widespread. Mason cites cases from New Zealand, Singapore and the U.S. that upheld the standard and just one notable case where the opposite happened... The rise of AI systems made it even more pressing to reassess the law, said Noah Waisberg, the co-founder and CEO of the legal AI platform Zuva.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.