An anonymous reader shares a report: Only the government could spend 20 years creating a national ID that no one wanted and that apparently doesn't even work as a national ID. But that's what the federal government has accomplished with the REAL ID, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now considers unreliable, even though getting one requires providing proof of citizenship or lawful status in the country.

In a December 11 court filing [PDF], Philip Lavoie, the acting assistant special agent in charge of DHS' Mobile, Alabama, office, stated that, "REAL ID can be unreliable to confirm U.S. citizenship." Lavoie's declaration was in response to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in October by the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm, on behalf of Leo Garcia Venegas, an Alabama construction worker. Venegas was detained twice in May and June during immigration raids on private construction sites, despite being a U.S. citizen. In both instances, Venegas' lawsuit says, masked federal immigration officers entered the private sites without a warrant and began detaining workers based solely on their apparent ethnicity.

And in both instances officers allegedly retrieved Venegas' Alabama-issued REAL ID from his pocket but claimed it could be fake. Venegas was kept handcuffed and detained for an hour the first time and "between 20 and 30 minutes" the second time before officers ran his information and released him.

JPMorgan Chase is now fighting to avoid paying $10.2 million in disputed legal charges racked up by Charlie Javice, the convicted founder of student-finance startup Frank, after court filings revealed her defense team billed more than $5 million simply for attending her fraud trial -- including on days when court wasn't even in session.

A previously sealed Delaware court filing [PDF] released Monday showed that Javice's total legal tab has reached $74 million, far exceeding the $30 million Elizabeth Holmes spent defending herself in the Theranos case. JPMorgan claims the five law firms representing Javice operated under the mindset that "someone else is paying her bills." The bank's filing focused on Quinn Emanuel and Mintz Levin, the two largest firms on Javice's defense. JPMorgan said Javice had between 16 and 29 lawyers and legal staff present every day of her six-week trial, billing an average of $360,000 daily. No more than four lawyers had speaking roles.

Among the 2,377 pages of receipts submitted for March: a Cookie Monster toddler's toy, lavender and jasmine sachets, 57 hotel room upgrades at $300 per night, and a $900 meal at Koloman, a highly rated New York restaurant. A New York jury found Javice guilty in March of misleading JPMorgan into acquiring Frank for $175 million by fabricating millions of fake users. She was sentenced in September to seven years in prison but remains free on bail pending her appeal.

The fight over net neutrality saw another turbulent year in 2025, as federal protections that seemed poised for a comeback in 2024 were first struck down by a court and then preemptively removed by the Trump administration's FCC without a chance for public comment.

The removal, The Verge summarizes in a report, was part of Chairman Brendan Carr's "Delete, Delete, Delete" initiative targeting what the agency deems unnecessary regulations. Federal net neutrality rules have now been on and off for 15 years, passing under Obama in 2010, returning in 2015, getting overturned in 2017, and briefly revived in 2024 before courts struck them down again.

Matt Wood, vice president of policy and general counsel at nonprofit Free Press, told The Verge that ISPs often feel little financial impact from these rules. "A lot of their complaints about the supposed 'burdens' from these rules are really just ideological in nature," Wood said. States have filled the void.

California's 2018 law remains the nation's gold standard, and Maine passed a bipartisan bill in June. John Bergmayer, legal director at Public Knowledge, said state-level laws and the threat of new ones "has kept some of the worst outcomes in check."

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is now pressuring states to exempt ISPs from net neutrality laws to remain eligible for broadband infrastructure funding. Chao Jun Liu of the Electronic Frontier Foundation summed up the year's pattern: "ISPs just want to do whatever they want to do with no limits and nobody telling them how to do it."

Finnish authorities on Wednesday seized a vessel suspected of severing an undersea telecommunications cable that connects Helsinki to Tallinn by dragging its anchor across the Gulf of Finland, the latest in a string of infrastructure incidents that have put Baltic Sea nations on edge since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Police are investigating the case as aggravated criminal damage and have not disclosed the ship's name, nationality or details about its crew. The cable belongs to Finnish telecoms group Elisa. Estonia's justice ministry reported that a second telecoms cable connecting the two countries -- owned by Sweden's Arelion -- also went down on Wednesday. This follows Finland's December 2024 boarding of the Russian-linked oil tanker Eagle S, which investigators said damaged a power cable and multiple telecoms links using the same anchor-dragging method. A Finnish court in October dismissed criminal charges against the Eagle S crew after prosecutors failed to prove intent.

Two cybersecurity professionals who spent their careers defending organizations against ransomware attacks have pleaded guilty in a Florida federal court to using ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware to extort American businesses throughout 2023.

Ryan Goldberg, a 40-year-old incident response manager from Georgia, and Kevin Martin, a 36-year-old ransomware negotiator from Texas, admitted to conspiring to obstruct commerce through extortion. Between April and December 2023, Goldberg, Martin, and a third unnamed co-conspirator deployed the ransomware against multiple U.S. victims and agreed to pay ALPHV BlackCat's operators a 20% cut of any ransoms received. They successfully extracted approximately $1.2 million in Bitcoin from one victim, splitting their 80% share three ways before laundering the proceeds. Both men face up to 20 years in prison and are scheduled for sentencing on March 12, 2026.

The Justice Department noted that all three conspirators possessed specialized skills in securing computer systems against the very attacks they carried out. ALPHV BlackCat has targeted more than 1,000 victims globally and was the subject of an FBI disruption operation in December 2023 that saved victims an estimated $99 million through a custom decryption tool.

Yes, greenhouse gas emissions kept rising in 2025, writes Bloomberg (alternate URL here). And the pledges of various governments to lower greenhouse gases "are nowhere near where they need to be to avoid catastrophic climate change..."

But in 2025, "there were silver linings too." The world is decarbonizing faster than was expected 10 years ago and investment into the clean energy transition, including everything from wind and solar to batteries and grids, is expected to have reached a new record of $2.2 trillion globally in 2025, according to research by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit, a London nonprofit. "Is this enough to keep us safe? No it clearly isn't," said Gareth Redmond-King, international lead at the ECIU. "Is it remarkable progress compared to where we were headed? Clearly it is...." Global investment in clean tech far outpaced what went into polluting industries. For every $1 funding fossil fuel projects, $2 went into clean power, according to the ECIU. For China, the EU, the U.S. and India, the four largest polluters, it was $2.60.

Funds flowing into renewable power set another record in the first half of this year and were up 10% compared to the same period in 2024, to $386 billion, according to the latest available research by BloombergNEF. Solar and wind grew fast enough to meet all new electricity demand globally in the first three quarters of 2025, according to UK-based energy think tank Ember. That means renewable capacity is set to hit a new record globally this year, with Ember forecasting an 11% increase from 2024. Over the last three years, renewable capacity grew by nearly 30% on average. That puts the world within reach of the goal set at COP 28 in Dubai in 2023 to triple clean power by 2030. China is leading the charge, with the world's largest polluter expected to have delivered 66% of new solar capacity, and 69% of new wind globally this year, according to Ember. Renewables also advanced in parts of Asia, Europe and South America.

The explosive power demand from artificial intelligence is also turning the tide on green technology investment, which had soured in recent years. For the first three quarters of this year, global clean tech investment, which was dominated by funding in next-generation nuclear reactors, renewables and other solutions that help power data centers, has already surpassed all of 2024. That marks the sector's first annual increase since the 2022 peak. And despite President Trump's rollback of climate policies, the S&P's main gauge tracking clean energy is up about 50% this year, outperforming most other stock indexes and even gold. That same enthusiasm has also helped channel more capital into developing and upgrading the power grid, a backbone of the global energy transition.
The article also notes that prices per kilowatt-hour of battery capacity "fell by 8% to a record $108 this year and they're expected to decline a further 3% next year, according to BloombergNEF."

And this year the International Court of Justice "determined that countries risk being in violation of international law if they don't work toward keeping global warming to the 1.5C threshold agreed on at the Paris climate conference in 2015."

The Register reports on challenges facing Europe's pursuit of "digital sovereignty": The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)... Furthermore, these warrants often come with a gag order, legally prohibiting the provider from informing their customer that their data has been accessed. This renders any contractual clauses requiring transparency or notification effectively meaningless. While technical measures like encryption are often proposed as a solution, their effectiveness depends entirely on who controls the encryption keys. If the US provider manages the keys, as is common in many standard cloud services, they can be forced to decrypt the data for authorities, making such safeguards moot....

American hyperscalers have recognized the market demand for sovereignty and now aggressively market 'sovereign cloud' solutions, typically by placing datacenters on European soil or partnering with local operators. Critics call this 'sovereignty washing'... [Cristina Caffarra, a competition economistand driving force behind the Eurostack initiative] warns that this does not resolve the fundamental problem. "A company subject to the extraterritorial laws of the United States cannot be considered sovereign for Europe," she says. "That simply doesn't work." Because, as long as the parent company is American, it remains subject to the CLOUD Act...

Even when organizations make deliberate choices in favour of European providers, those decisions can be undone by market forces. A recent acquisition in the Netherlands illustrates this risk. In November 2025, the American IT services giant Kyndryl announced its intention to acquire Solvinity, a Dutch managed cloud provider. This came as an "unpleasant surprise" to several of its government clients, including the municipality of Amsterdam and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. These bodies had specifically chosen Solvinity to reduce their dependence on American firms and mitigate CLOUD Act risks.
Still, The Register provides several examples of government systems that are "taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT."

• Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism now has 1,200 employees on the European open-source collaboration platform Nextcloud, leading several other Austrian ministries to also implement Nextcloud. (The Ministry's CISO tells the Register "We can see our input in Nextcloud releases. That is a feeling we never had with Microsoft.")

• France's Ministry of Economics and Finance recently completed NUBO (which the Register describes as "an OpenStack-based private cloud initiative designed to handle sensitive data and services.")

• In November the International Criminal Court in The Hague announced it was replacing its Microsoft office software with a European alternative.

• The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is replacing Microsoft products with open-source alternatives for 30,000 civil servants

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

The Trump administration has announced it would replace the lottery programme used to grant H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers with a system that prioritises higher-paid individuals. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security said it would begin to implement a "weighted" selection process to give an advantage to higher-skilled and higher-paid applicants from February, according to a statement posted on its website. Matthew Tragesser, Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson, said: "The existing random selection process of H-1B registrations was exploited and abused by US employers who were primarily seeking to import foreign workers at lower wages than they would pay American workers."

The move is the latest in a broad crackdown on US immigration by President Donald Trump, who has dramatically stepped up deportations of immigrants and sent enforcement agents into cities across the country to carry out arrests. The change also follows moves earlier this year to curb the number of applicants for the H-1B visa, which is popular among technology and professional services companies, including charging an additional $100,000 fee.

Beryl Howell, a federal judge on the US District Court for the District of Columbia, late on Tuesday ruled the White House could move forward with the application charge after the US Chamber of Commerce had sued in October to block the six-figure fee.

A group of authors led by John Carreyrou has filed a new lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the AI firms of training models on pirated copies of their books. TechCrunch reports: If this sounds familiar, it's because another set of authors already filed a class action suit against Anthropic for these same acts of copyright infringement. In that case, the judge ruled that it was legal for Anthropic and similar AI companies to train on pirated copies of books, but that it was not legal to pirate the books in the first place.

While eligible writers can receive about $3,000 from the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, some authors were dissatisfied with that resolution -- it doesn't hold AI companies accountable for the actual act of using stolen books to train their models, which generate billions of dollars in revenue. The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit say the proposed Anthropic settlement "seems to serve [the AI companies], not creators."

"LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates, eliding what should be the true cost of their massive willful infringement."

A federal judge blocked Texas' app store age-verification law, ruling it likely violates the First Amendment by forcing platforms to gate speech and collect data in an overly broad way. The law was set to go into effect on January 1, 2026. The Verge reports: In an order granting a preliminary injunction on the Texas App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420), Judge Robert Pitman wrote that the statute "is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book." Pitman has not yet ruled on the merits of the case, but his decision to grant the preliminary injunction means he believes its defenders are unlikely to prevail in court.

Pitman found that the highest level of scrutiny must be applied to evaluate the law under the First Amendment, which means the state must prove the law is "the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state interest." The judge found this is not the case and that it wouldn't even survive intermediate scrutiny, because Texas has so far failed to prove that its goals are connected to its methods. Since Texas already has a law requiring age verification for porn sites, Pitman said that "only in the vast minority of applications would SB 2420 have a constitutional application to unprotected speech not addressed by other laws." Though Pitman acknowledged the importance of safeguarding kids online, he added, "the means to achieve that end must be consistent with the First Amendment. However compelling the policy concerns, and however widespread the agreement that the issue must be addressed, the Court remains bound by the rule of law." "The Texas App Store Accountability Act is the first among a series of similar state laws to face a legal challenge, making the ruling especially significant, as Congress considers a version of the statute," notes The Verge. "The laws, versions of which also passed in Utah and Louisiana, aim to impose age verification standards at the app store level, making companies like Apple and Google responsible for transmitting signals about users' ages to app developers to block users from age-inappropriate experiences."

"The state can still appeal the ruling with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has a history of reversing blocks on internet regulations."

European public institutions are quietly migrating away from American cloud providers and office software, driven less by policy ambitions in Brussels than by the mundane legal reality that GDPR-mandated risk assessments keep flagging the US CLOUD Act as an unacceptable threat to citizen data.

Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism moved 1,200 employees to the open-source platform Nextcloud in four months. Germany's Schleswig-Holstein has already transitioned 24,000 of its 30,000 civil servants to LibreOffice, Nextcloud and Thunderbird. The International Criminal Court in The Hague announced in November 2025 that it would replace Microsoft office software after chief prosecutor Karim Khan was temporarily locked out of his Outlook account.

Competition economist Cristina Caffarra estimates that 90% of Europe's digital infrastructure is now controlled by non-European companies. Forrester predicts no European enterprise will fully abandon US hyperscalers in 2026, but these targeted migrations for sensitive government applications are already underway.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, the US Department of the Interior announced that it was pausing the leases on all five offshore wind sites currently under construction in the US. The move comes despite the fact that these projects already have installed significant hardware in the water and on land; one of them is nearly complete. In what appears to be an attempt to avoid legal scrutiny, the Interior is blaming the decisions on a classified report from the Department of Defense.

The second Trump administration announced its animosity toward offshore wind power literally on day one, issuing an executive order on inauguration day that called for a temporary halt to issuing permits for new projects pending a re-evaluation. Earlier this month, however, a judge vacated that executive order, noting that the government has shown no indication that it was even attempting to start the re-evaluation it said was needed. But a number of projects have gone through the entire permitting process, and construction has started. Before today, the administration had attempted to stop these in an erratic, halting manner. Empire Wind, an 800 MW farm being built off New York, was stopped by the Department of the Interior, which alleged that it had been rushed through permitting. That hold was lifted following lobbying and negotiations by New York and the project developer Orsted, and the Department of the Interior never revealed why it changed its mind. When the Interior Department blocked a second Orsted project, Revolution Wind offshore of southern New England, the company took the government to court and won a ruling that let it continue construction.

Today's announcement targets those and three other projects. Interior says it is pausing the permits for all five, which are the only projects currently under construction. It claims that offshore wind creates "national security risks" that were revealed in a recent analysis performed by the Department of Defense, which apparently neglected to identify these issues during the evaluations it did while the projects were first permitted. What are these risks? The Interior Department is being extremely coy. It notes that offshore wind turbines can interfere with radar sensing, but that's been known for a while. In announcing the decision, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum also noted "the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies." But the announcement says that the Defense Department analysis is classified, meaning nobody is likely to know what the actual reason is -- presuming one exists. The classification will also make it far more challenging to contest this decision in court.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Search Engine Land: Google said today that it is suing SerpApi, accusing the company of bypassing security protections to scrape, harvest, and resell copyrighted content from Google Search results. The allegations: Google said SerpApi:

-Circumvented Google's security measures and industry-standard crawling controls.
-Ignored website directives that specify whether content can be accessed.
-Used cloaking, rotating bot identities, and large bot networks to scrape content at scale.
-Took licensed content from Search features, including images and real-time data, and resold it for profit.

What Google is saying. "Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override [crawling] directives and give sites no choice at all," Google wrote, calling the alleged scraping "brazen" and "unlawful." Google said SerpApi's activity "increased dramatically over the past year." [...] If Google wins, reliable SERP data could become harder to get, more expensive, or both -- especially for teams that rely on tools powered by services like SerpApi. As AI already reduces clicks and transparency, Google now appears intent on making it even harder for brands to understand how Search works, how they appear in results, and how to measure success.

Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to move mission-critical systems like ERP, manufacturing, and aircraft design data onto a digitally sovereign European cloud, citing national security concerns and fears around U.S. extraterritorial laws like the CLOUD Act. "I need a sovereign cloud because part of the information is extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective," Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital, told The Register. "We want to ensure this information remains under European control." The Register reports: The driver is access to new software. Vendors like SAP are developing innovations exclusively in the cloud, pushing customers toward platforms like S/4HANA. The request for proposals launches in early January, with a decision expected before summer. The contract -- understood to be worth more than 50 million euros -- will be long term (up to ten years), with price predictability over the period. [...] Jestin is waiting for European regulators to clarify whether Airbus would truly be "immune to extraterritorial laws" -- and whether services could be interrupted.

The concern isn't theoretical. Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan reportedly lost access to his Microsoft email after Trump sanctioned him for criticizing Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, though Microsoft denies suspending ICC services. Beyond US complications, Jestin questions whether European cloud providers have sufficient scale. "If you asked me today if we'll find a solution, I'd say 80/20."

A California judge signaled support for forcing Vizio to provide the full source code for its SmartCast TV software after finding a contractual obligation under the GPL. If upheld, the case could strengthen users' rights to modify GPL-licensed software embedded in consumer electronics. The Register reports: The legal complaint from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) seeks access to the SmartCast source code so that Vizio customers can make changes and improvements to the platform, something that ought to be possible for code distributed under the GPL. On Thursday, California Superior Court Judge Sandy Leal issued a tentative ruling in advance of a hearing, indicating support for part of SFC's legal challenge. The tentative ruling is not a final decision, but it signals the judge's inclination to grant the SFC's motion for summary adjudication, at least in part.

"The tentative ruling [PDF] grants SFC's motion on the issue that a direct contract was made between SFC and Vizio when SFC's systems administrator, Paul Visscher, requested the source code to a TV that SFC has purchased," the SFC said in a blog post. "This contract obligated Vizio to provide SFC the complete and corresponding source code." [...]

Karen Sandler, executive director of the SFC, told The Register in an email that the hearing went well, though Vizio's legal counsel "stridently disagreed" with the legal analysis in the tentative ruling. "Judge Leal said she would take the matter 'under submission' which means she will think about it further," Sandler said. "After the Court went off the record, Leal's clerk specifically verified the Court reporter could provide an expedited transcript, so Leal will likely review the hearing transcript soon." Sandler expects Leal will examine the filings again before issuing her opinion, which is likely to be issued in the next few weeks.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in his Wednesday Senate testimony that the agency he governs "is not an independent agency, formally speaking." Axios: During his testimony, the word "independent" was removed from the FCC's mission statement on its website. The extraordinary statement speaks to a broader trend of regulatory agencies losing power to the executive branch during the Trump era. Last week, the Supreme Court appeared poised to allow President Trump to fire members of the Federal Trade Commission during oral arguments over the issue.

Sen. Ben Ray LujÃn (D-N.M.) began the line of questioning, citing the FCC's website, which said the agency was independent as of Wednesday morning. By Wednesday afternoon, the FCC's mission statement no longer said it was independent. Chairman Carr would not respond directly to questions about whether he believed the president was his boss. He would not answer whether it's appropriate if the president were to pressure him to go after media companies. He suggested the president has the power to fire him and other FCC commissioners.

Google is suing a Chinese-speaking cybercriminal group it says is responsible for a massive wave of scam text messages sent to Americans this year, according to a legal complaint filed Tuesday. From a report: The group, known as Darcula, sells software that allows users to send phishing text messages en masse, impersonating organizations like the IRS or the U.S. Postal Service in scams. The lawsuit is designed to give Google legal standing so U.S. courts will allow it to seize websites the group uses, hampering their operations, a spokesperson said.

Darcula is possibly the most prominent name in an emerging, loosely affiliated cybercrime world that creates and sells hacking programs for aspiring scammers to use. Darcula's signature program, called Magic Cat, provides an easy-to-use, intuitive way for cybercriminals without advanced hacking skills to quickly spam millions of phone numbers with links to fake websites impersonating businesses like YouTube's premium service, then steal the credit card numbers victims put in.

mprindle writes: The Texas Attorney General sued five major television manufacturers, accusing them of illegally collecting their users' data by secretly recording what they watch using Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology.

The lawsuits target Sony, Samsung, LG, and China-based companies Hisense and TCL Technology Group Corporation. Attorney General Ken Paxton's office also highlighted "serious concerns" about the two Chinese companies being required to follow China's National Security Law, which could give the Chinese government access to U.S. consumers' data.

According to complaints filed this Monday in Texas state courts, the TV makers can allegedly use ACR technology to capture screenshots of television displays every 500 milliseconds, monitor the users' viewing activity in real time, and send this information back to the companies' servers without the users' knowledge or consent.

A Kansas man who sued Verizon in small claims court after the carrier refused to unlock his iPhone has won his case, scoring a small but meaningful victory against a company that retroactively applied a policy change to deny his unlock request.

Patrick Roach bought a discounted iPhone 16e from Verizon's Straight Talk brand in February 2025, intending to pay for one month of service before switching the device to US Mobile. Under FCC rules dating back to a 2019 waiver, Verizon must unlock phones 60 days after activation on its network. Verizon refused to unlock the phone, citing a new policy implemented on April 1, 2025 requiring "60 days of paid active service."

Roach had purchased his device over a month before that policy took effect. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Henry ruled in October 2025 that applying the changed terms to Roach's earlier purchase violated the Kansas Consumer Protection Act. The court ordered Verizon to refund Roach's $410.40 purchase price plus court costs. Roach had previously rejected a $600 settlement offer because it would have required him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. He estimated spending about 20 hours on the lawsuit but said "it wasn't about" the money.

Roomba manufacturer iRobot filed for bankruptcy today, reports Bloomberg.

After 35 years, iRobot reached a "restructuring support agrement that will hand control of the consumer robot maker to Shenzhen PICEA Robotics Co, its main supplier and lender, and Santrum Hong Kong Compny." Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganised company... The plan will allow the debtor to remain as a going concern and continue to meet its commitments to employees and make timely payments in full to vendors and other creditors for amounts owed throughout the court-supervised process, according to an iRobot statement... he company warned of potential bankruptcy in December after years of declining earnings.
Roomba says it's sold over 50 million robots, the article points out, but earnings "began to decline since 2021 due to supply chain headwinds and increased competition.

"A hoped-for by acquisition by Amazon.com in 2023 collapsed over regulatory concerns."