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Over the past few months, geopolitical tensions have escalated as Russia amassed tens of thousands of troops along Ukraine’s border and made subtle but far-reaching threats if Ukraine and NATO don’t agree to Kremlin demands.

Now, a similar dispute is playing out in cyber arenas, as unknown hackers late last week defaced scores of Ukrainian government websites and left a cryptic warning to Ukrainian citizens who attempted to receive services.

Be afraid and expect the worst

“All data on the computer is being destroyed, it is impossible to recover it,” said a message, written in Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish, that appeared late last week on at least some of the infected systems. “All information about you has become public, be afraid and expect the worst."

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Amazon has halted a plan to ban customers using UK-issued Visa credit cards from this week, as the companies work on a “potential solution” to a rancorous dispute that threatened to severely disrupt shoppers.

The world’s largest online retailer announced the proposed ban in November, citing the “high fees Visa charges for processing credit card transactions,” and advised customers to find new payment methods.

However, on Monday Amazon said that “the expected change regarding the use of Visa credit cards on Amazon.co.uk will no longer take place on January 19.” The group added that it was “working closely with Visa on a potential solution that will enable customers to continue using their Visa credit cards on Amazon.co.uk.”

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The past year saw a breathtaking rise in the value of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, with Bitcoin gaining 60 percent in value in 2021 and Ethereum spiking 80 percent. So perhaps it's no surprise that the relentless North Korean hackers who feed off that booming crypto economy had a very good year as well.

North Korean hackers stole a total of $395 million worth of crypto coins last year across seven intrusions into cryptocurrency exchanges and investment firms, according to blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. The nine-figure sum represents a nearly $100 million increase over the previous year's thefts by North Korean hacker groups, and it brings their total haul over the past five years to $1.5 billion in cryptocurrency alone—not including the uncounted hundreds of millions more the country has stolen from the traditional financial system. That hoard of stolen cryptocurrency now contributes significantly to the coffers of Kim Jong-un's totalitarian regime as it seeks to fund itself—and its weapons programs—despite the country's heavily sanctioned, isolated, and ailing economy.

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Intel is reportedly planning to build a large chip facility in New Albany, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, the state capital. An official announcement is expected on January 21.

The company reportedly plans to invest $20 billion in the site, and the city of New Albany is working to annex up to 3,600 acres of land to accommodate the facility, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which first reported the deal.

Given the size of the parcel and the facility’s rumored price tag, it is likely the site of Intel’s “mega-fab,” which CEO Pat Gelsinger said would be like “a little city.” The mega-fab would contain six to eight modules, he said, and would focus on lithography processes and packaging techniques. Suppliers would have space on the site, too.

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PayPal is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging that the digital payments company violated racketeering laws by freezing customer funds without offering an explanation.

When users contacted PayPal about the frozen funds, they were told they had violated the company’s “acceptable use policy” but weren’t told how that violation had occurred, the lawsuit says. What’s more, it alleges that in at least one instance, PayPal said that a user would “have to get a subpoena” to find out why.

“PayPal violates its own Agreement by failing to provide adequate notice to users whose accounts have had holds placed on them,” the lawsuit says. When PayPal does let users know it placed a hold on their funds, “it does not inform such users why such funds are being held, how they can obtain a release of the hold, and/or how they can avoid future holds being placed on their accounts.”

Enlarge / An Ukrainian Military Forces serviceman watches through spyglass in a trench on the frontline with Russia-backed separatists near to Avdiivka, southeastern Ukraine, on January 9, 2022. (credit: Anatolii Stepanov | Getty Images)

Ukraine said it was the target of a “massive cyber attack” after about 70 government websites ceased functioning.

On Friday morning targets included websites of the ministerial cabinet, the foreign, education, agriculture, emergency, energy, veterans affairs and environment ministries. Also out of service were the websites of the state treasury and the Diia electronic public services platform, where vaccination certificates and electronic passports are stored.

“Ukrainians! All your personal data has been uploaded to the public network,” read a message temporarily posted on the foreign ministry’s website. “All data on your computer is being erased and won’t be recoverable. All information about you has become public, fear and expect the worst.”

Enlarge / Gigi Sohn answering questions on December 1, 2021, at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on her nomination to the Federal Communications Commission. (credit: Senate Commerce Committee)

Comcast's hiring of a new lobbyist is part of an attempt to "torpedo" President Joe Biden's nomination of Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission, advocacy group Free Press alleged yesterday.

"Comcast just hired a lobbying firm to try to torpedo Gigi Sohn's nomination to the FCC. The company clearly knows that Sohn will work for people, not corporations," Free Press wrote in an email to members. The email asked people to call Commerce Committee Chair Sen. Maria Cantwell (D–Wash.) to urge a vote on Sohn's nomination by the end of January.

Comcast's newly hired lobbyist is Kirk Adams of Consilium Consulting in Phoenix, Arizona. Adams' lobbying disclosure, which was filed with Congress on January 6, lists one specific lobbying issue that he expects to work on: "FCC nominations." An amended version of the lobbying registration filed about 11 hours later deleted "FCC Nominations" and replaced it with "telecommunications policy."

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The Biden administration has made vaccine mandates central to its attempts to limit the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Or at least it has tried to; various states and other organizations have used the courts to challenge the federal government's authority to impose these mandates. Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments regarding two of the most significant mandates: one for all hospital workers issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and a second for all employees of large companies issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

By the time the cases were argued before the Supreme Court, the HHS rule was already blocked by a stay issued by a lower court. By contrast, the OSHA rules had seen a lower court lift earlier stays, leaving it on the verge of enforcement.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court issued expedited rules that reflected the tone of the questioning the week before. The OSHA rule is now subject to a stay that blocks its implementation, a decision that saw the court's three liberal justices issue a dissent. The stay against the HHS rules, by contrast, was lifted, but only by a close 5-4 ruling.

Enlarge / Theranos founder and former CEO Elizabeth Holmes leaves the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building in San Jose, California, on December 17, 2021. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Elizabeth Holmes’ trial was delayed for months, and now her sentencing will be similarly held up. The judge in her trial scheduled the hearing for late September.

US District Judge Edward Davila’s order, issued yesterday, set sentencing for September 26. He also set aside June 16 to address motions that Holmes’ attorneys are likely to file in which they may ask for the conviction to be reversed or for a new trial.

Holmes was convicted earlier this month of three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The jury was hung on three counts, which prosecutors moved to dismiss in a filing made jointly with Holmes’ attorneys. The former CEO of Theranos was acquitted of the remaining charges of wire fraud against patients.

Enlarge / SpaceX CEO Elon Musk discusses Starlink at Mobile World Congress Barcelona on June 29, 2021 . (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

SpaceX has abandoned a Starlink plan that Amazon objected to during a high-profile battle at the Federal Communications Commission last year and wants to launch its second-generation broadband satellites starting in March. But the dispute isn't over, as Amazon says that SpaceX's latest filing "raises a number of issues that call for analysis and a potential response" and asked the FCC for a month-long delay before comments are due.

In August 2021, Amazon satellite-broadband subsidiary Kuiper Systems objected to Starlink proposing "two different configurations for the nearly 30,000 satellites of its Gen2 System, each of which arranges these satellites along very different orbital parameters." Amazon said that proposing "two mutually exclusive configurations" violates an FCC rule and would force competitors to do double the work to evaluate the potential for interference.

SpaceX said it pitched two possible configurations in case its preferred setup doesn't work out. The FCC rule doesn't specifically prohibit SpaceX's approach but says that an application will be rejected if it "is defective with respect to completeness of answers to questions, informational showings, internal inconsistencies, execution, or other matters of a formal character."

Enlarge / Image from the City of Austin's warning to ignore QR code stickers on parking meters. (credit: City of Austin)

Scammers in a few big Texas cities have been putting fake QR codes on parking meters to trick people into paying the fraudsters. Parking enforcement officers recently found stickers with fraudulent QR codes on pay stations in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio.

San Antonio police warned the public of the scam on December 20, saying that "people attempting to pay for parking using those QR codes may have been directed to a fraudulent website and submitted payment to a fraudulent vendor." Similar scams were then found in Austin and Houston.

The Austin Transportation Department started examining their own meters after being "notified of a QR code scam by the City of San Antonio in late December—when more than 100 pay stations were stickered with fraudulent codes," Fox 7 Austin reported last week. Austin officials checked the city's 900 or so parking pay stations and found fraudulent QR codes on 29 of them, according to a KXAN article.

Enlarge / A worker picks up trash in front of the new logo in front of Meta's headquarters on October 28, 2021, in Menlo Park, Calif. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust suit against Facebook may proceed, a federal judge has ruled. The company had filed a motion to dismiss the case, which the judge denied.

US District Judge James Boasberg had invited the FTC to refile the case after throwing out its initial attempt when he found it lacking. “Second time lucky?” Boasberg wrote in yesterday’s opinion. Apparently.

“The core theory of the lawsuit remains essentially unchanged,” he said of the FTC's refiling. “The facts alleged this time around to fortify those theories, however, are far more robust and detailed than before, particularly in regard to the contours of Defendant’s alleged monopoly.”

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T-Mobile has responded to complaints that it is blocking iCloud Private Relay on iPhones, saying that the block only affects subscribers who enabled parental controls or other types of content filtering. T-Mobile also says it has identified a bug in iOS that may be messing with users' iCloud Private Relay settings, but Apple hasn't confirmed this.

"Customers who chose plans and features with content filtering (e.g. parent controls) do not have access to the iCloud Private Relay to allow these services to work as designed. All other customers have no restrictions," T-Mobile told Ars last night. This also applies to customers who subscribed to Sprint before the companies merged.

Customers affected by iCloud Private Relay blocking get an error message in the iPhone settings app when they try to enable the Apple privacy feature. The message says, "Your cellular plan doesn't support iCloud Private Relay. With Private Relay turned off, this network can monitor your Internet activity, and your IP address is not hidden from known trackers or websites."

Enlarge / A Google employee holds a sign during a walkout to protest how the tech giant handled sexual misconduct at Jackson Square Park in New York on Thursday, Nov. 1, 2018. (credit: Peter Foley/Bloomberg)

For years, Google has attempted to kill employee-led unionization efforts under an initiative codenamed “Project Vivian.” In the words of one senior manager, Project Vivian existed “to engage employees more positively and convince them that unions suck.”

Project Vivian appears to be Google’s response to a surge in worker activism that began in 2018, when thousands of employees walked out in protest of the company’s response to sexual harassment complaints. Months later, employees began pushing for improved working conditions for Google contractors and an end to contracts with US government agencies involved in deportations and family separations. Two employees who helped organize the 2018 walkout later left the company, saying they were facing retaliation.

Ultimately, five employees were fired, and two were disciplined. They filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board alleging that Google interfered with their law-protected rights to organize at the workplace. The NLRB agreed and filed a complaint against Google in December 2020. Google refused to settle, and the matter went to the NLRB’s administrative court.

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Google is making a last-ditch effort to change the EU’s incoming laws on Big Tech with a flurry of advertising, emails and targeted social media posts aimed at politicians and officials in Brussels.

As EU policymakers put the finishing touches to the Digital Markets Act (DMA), executives at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley are stepping up their efforts to water down parts of the legislation that they fear may have a severe impact on their business.

“Top executives in California have known about the DMA all along but they are only waking up now,” said one Google insider.

Enlarge / Visitors view a 10-meter-tall Pikachu glass and steel sculpture in Shanghai, China On November 28, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Future Publishing)

A California appeals court has upheld the firings of two Los Angeles Police Department officers who failed to respond to a robbery in progress and instead went searching for a Snorlax in the Pokémon Go augmented reality game.

Officers Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell were being recorded by a digital in-car video system (DICVS) when they decided to catch a Pokémon after not responding to a robbery on Saturday, April 15, 2017, according to the California Court of Appeal ruling issued Friday. A board of rights found the officers "guilty on multiple counts of misconduct" based on part on the "recording that captured petitioners willfully abdicating their duty to assist a commanding officer's response to a robbery in progress and playing a Pokémon mobile phone game while on duty," the ruling said.

The former officers appealed, claiming the city "proceeded in a manner contrary to the law by using the DICVS recording in their disciplinary proceeding and by denying them the protections of the Public Safety Officers Procedural Bill of Rights Act," Friday's ruling said. A trial court denied the petition challenging the firings, and a three-judge panel at the appeals court unanimously upheld that decision on Friday.

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Less than a year after Verizon and other ISPs forced users to switch plans in order to get government-funded discounts, a new federal program will prevent such upselling by requiring ISPs to let customers obtain subsidies on any Internet plan.

With last year's $50-per-month Emergency Broadband Benefit that was created by Congress, the Federal Communications Commission let ISPs participate in the program as long as they offered the discount on at least one service plan. The FCC said it did so to encourage participation by providers, but some major ISPs drastically limited the subsidy-eligible plans—forcing users to switch to plans that could be more expensive in order to get a temporary discount.

Congress subsequently created a replacement program that will offer $30 monthly subsidies to people with low incomes. The program also specified that ISPs "shall allow an eligible household to apply the affordable connectivity benefit to any Internet service offering of the participating provider at the same terms available to households that are not eligible households." The FCC still has to make rules for implementing the new Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), but that requirement prevented the FCC from using the same one-plan rule that helped ISPs use the program as an upselling opportunity.

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For years, printers have been encumbered with digital rights management systems that prevent users from buying third-party ink and toner cartridges. Printer companies have claimed that their chip-enabled cartridges can “enhance the quality and performance” of their equipment, provide the “best consumer experience,” and “protect [the printers] from counterfeit and third-party ink cartridges.”

Left unsaid is the fact that requiring first-party cartridges also ensures a recurring revenue stream. It’s an old business model—Gillette sold its razor handles cheaply to sell more razors, for example—and it's one that printer companies have enthusiastically embraced. Lexmark, HP, Canon, Brother, and others all effectively require users to purchase first-party ink and toner.

To enforce the use of first-party cartridges, manufacturers typically embed chips inside the consumables for the printers to “authenticate.” But when chips are in short supply, like today, manufacturers can find themselves in a bind. So Canon is now telling German customers how to defeat its printers’ warnings about third-party cartridges.

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When Susan Schaap, 61, travels from her Dutch hometown of Zeewolde to the nearest city of Leylystad, the 30-minute drive takes her through vast tulip fields, interrupted only by wind turbines and sometimes sheep. But if Facebook parent company Meta’s plans are approved, her view would be replaced by the Netherlands’ largest ever data center.

Meta’s data center is “too big for a small town like Zeewolde,” says Schaap, who has become one of the project’s most vocal opponents. “There are 200 data centers in the Netherlands already,” she argues, and the move would give huge swathes of farmland to just one company, “which is not fair.”

Enlarge / The US Supreme Court building in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Mike Kline)

On Friday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases that could severely limit the federal government's ability to set public health policy during the pandemic. At issue is whether existing health and safety authority given to federal agencies by Congress is broad enough to cover the pandemic or whether Congress needs to step in and explicitly authorize the agencies' actions.

The arguments occur as the US sees an unprecedented surge in COVID-19 cases. Indeed, two of the state lawyers arguing against these new public health measures were caught up in that surge and had to participate in the hearings remotely.

For and against

Two separate cases are being heard today, both regarding executive actions taken by the Biden administration. The first case involves a rule, issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), covering all health care workers at facilities that accept Medicare and Medicaid. The rule requires these workers to be vaccinated unless they are exempted on medical or religious grounds. The second case involves a vaccine-or-test mandate issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA); the mandate would apply to any businesses with 100 or more employees.