Ars Technica - Law & Disorder

Facebook needs to enforce misinfo rules against Trump, Biden campaign says

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 21:38:00 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Fabian Sommer | picture alliance | Getty Images)

After being used as a platform for massive voter-interference campaigns in 2016, Facebook promised this time would be better. The company changed its policies and swore up and down that it would work hard to mitigate the spread of misinformation and support Americans' rights to get out and vote this fall. But with five weeks to go before Election Day—and early voting already underway in some states—critics allege Facebook is not keeping up with the challenge.

The latest person to accuse Facebook of failing to manage misinformation is the Democratic candidate for president, former Vice President Joe Biden. The Biden campaign said in a letter to Facebook (PDF) last night that the company is not only failing to take long-promised additional actions, but is in fact regressing in how well it handles falsehoods.

"Facebook's continued promise of future action is serving as nothing more than an excuse for inaction," Biden campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon wrote. "Millions of people are voting. Meanwhile, your platform is the nation's foremost propagator of disinformation about the voting process."

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How Internet-connected voter check-in devices can create election chaos

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 21:24:41 GMT

Enlarge / A polling-place worker holds an "I'm a Georgia Voter" sticker during the primary election on June 9, 2020 in Atlanta. (credit: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)

A federal judge in Georgia has ordered election officials to print paper backups of voter data so that voting can proceed even if the digital system for checking in voters fails. This is a win for plaintiffs who have argued that flaws in Georgia's electronic-poll-book (EPB) system hampered voting in the June primary and could do so again in November.

Over the last 20 years, a lot of discussion has revolved around the risk that electronic voting machines pose to the security and integrity of elections. But there has been less attention paid to electronic poll books—another digital system that can undermine election integrity if they malfunction.

Pollworkers use EPBs to verify a voter's eligibility and then check the voter in. Malfunctions in these systems can slow down the voting process so much that some people give up voting altogether. By targeting precincts where most people vote for a particular candidate or party, a hacker could potentially swing a close election just by triggering malfunctions in electronic poll books. And while voting machines are supposed to be kept off the Internet, electronic poll books are often online throughout election day.

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Man refused to disband party that violated COVID order, gets year in jail

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 16:32:24 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Caspar Benson)

A Maryland judge sentenced a man to one year in jail after finding him guilty of throwing two large parties in violation of a state pandemic order that banned large gatherings. Police were called to the man's home twice in one week, and he refused to disband the party on the second occasion, authorities said.

Shawn Marshall Myers, 42, was sentenced on Friday at the District Court of Maryland, said an announcement by the state's attorney for Charles County. Myers' legal troubles began on March 22 when "multiple officers responded to Myers' residence... for the report of a large party" violating Governor Larry Hogan's order in which "large gatherings were strictly prohibited," the state's attorney office said.

Myers allegedly hosted about 50 people at the party. "Upon arrival, officers told Myers that his party violated the current mandate. Myers was argumentative with officers but eventually agreed to disband his party," the state's attorney office said.

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Verizon, AT&T to pay $127M for allegedly overcharging government agencies

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 19:35:42 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Viktoryia Vinnikava | EyeEm)

Verizon and AT&T have agreed to pay a combined $127 million to settle lawsuits alleging that they overcharged California and Nevada government entities for wireless service. The lawsuit was filed in 2012 and resulted in a settlement approved on Thursday last week by Sacramento County Superior Court, the plaintiffs' law firm, Constantine Cannon, announced.

"Verizon will pay $76 million and AT&T $51 million to settle claims that, for more than a decade, they knowingly ignored cost-saving requirements included in multibillion-dollar contracts offering wireless services to state and local government users in California, Nevada, and other states," the announcement said. "Sprint and T-Mobile previously reached settlements totaling $11.7 million. Combined, the four major telecom providers will pay $138.7 million to settle allegations in the lawsuits." Those numbers do not include what the carriers agreed to pay in attorneys' fees, which is $23.45 million from Verizon and $13 million from AT&T.

The contracts required that carriers bill government entities "at the 'lowest cost available' and that the carrier[s] identify 'optimized' rate plans that best suited actual usage patterns that drive cost," the law firm also said. The lawsuits alleged that the carriers' contract violations "cheated California and Nevada government entities out of hundreds of millions in savings," the law firm said.

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Trump likely overstepped authority with TikTok ban, judge rules

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 19:15:42 GMT

Enlarge / TikTok's US fate is up in the air, but at least you can still download and patch it. (credit: SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images)

President Donald Trump's attempt to ban TikTok from operating inside the United States probably exceeds the authority the president has to do such things, a federal judge has ruled.

TikTok narrowly avoided being removed from app stores last night when Judge Carl Nichols of the US District Court for DC issued an injunction late yesterday requiring the government to pause on its ban. TikTok got its reprieve, but the terms of the order (PDF) were sealed until midday today.

To meet the standard for an injunction, Nichols explained, TikTok basically needed to prove four things to his satisfaction. The first factor, however, is the most important: TikTok needed to prove its case is "likely to succeed on the merits." In plain English, that means: is it going to win its lawsuit against the administration? And the answer, Nichols determined, is probably yes, because the actions the administration took "likely exceed the lawful bounds" of the law under which those actions were taken.

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IRS may put cryptocurrency question at the top of 1040 to catch cheaters

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 16:36:48 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel / Getty Images News)

The Internal Revenue Service is considering adding a question to Form 1040—America's primary income tax form—asking tax filers if they dealt in virtual currency in 2020. It would be the agency's latest attempt to crack down on underreporting of cryptocurrency profits.

If an American buys bitcoin, ether, or another cryptocurrency and then sells it later at a profit, she or he will typically owe capital gains tax on the difference. But blockchains do not have the tax reporting infrastructure that has become standard for conventional financial institutions. So the IRS doesn't have an easy way to figure out who has received a cryptocurrency windfall. In the early years of the bitcoin boom, many taxpayers failed to report large bitcoin-related profits.

In recent years, the IRS has increased pressure on cryptocurrency traders to comply with tax laws. A 2014 bulletin laid out the basic rules for paying taxes on virtual currency price gains. In 2016, the IRS sought transaction data about thousands of users of Coinbase, a popular US-based cryptocurrency exchange. Coinbase complied with the request in 2018 after some legal wrangling.

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Nikola founder bought truck designs from third party

Sun, 27 Sep 2020 16:55:52 GMT

Enlarge / A 2018 Nikola video showed the Nikola One prototype rolling down a shallow hill in Utah. Nikola now says it never claimed the truck was driving under its own power. (credit: Nikola)

The original design for Nikola’s flagship truck was purchased by founder Trevor Milton from a designer in Croatia, according to two people with knowledge of the matter, despite company claims in a 2018 lawsuit that the vehicle was initially designed by Mr. Milton “in his basement..”

The truck, the Nikola One, is at the centre of a $2 billion lawsuit with Tesla, in which Nikola alleges its rival infringed on its patents. Nikola claims in that lawsuit that Mr. Milton began designing the model in 2013, with other company staff later working on it.

In a rebuttal to the lawsuit filed last week, Tesla alleged that Nikola could not protect the designs because they did not originate from the company itself, but from Adriano Mudri, a designer based in Croatia.

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TikTok’s fate to go down to the wire; judge will rule before midnight

Sun, 27 Sep 2020 15:46:55 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

TikTok will be gone from app stores tomorrow morning unless a federal judge acts to block the Trump administration's ban on the app before midnight tonight.

Judge Carl Nichols of the US District Court for DC said today that he will determine whether to grant or reject TikTok's request for an injunction on the ban before the deadline hits at the stroke of 12.

In a hearing on Thursday, Nichols gave the administration until Friday afternoon either to delay or defend the ban. The administration chose to file a response defending the ban but did so under seal, so the filings are not available to the public.

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FBI offers $10,000 reward for GirlsDoPorn mastermind Michael Pratt

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 20:50:47 GMT

Enlarge (credit: FBI)

The FBI is intensifying its worldwide search for Michael James Pratt, the New Zealand-born pornographer who created the controversial GirlsDoPorn website while living in the San Diego area. This week the FBI announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.

Nearly two dozen women sued Pratt and his associates for using fraud and coercion to get them to appear in pornographic videos. The women won a $13 million judgment in January, but by the time the ruling was announced, Pratt had apparently fled the country.

Meanwhile, the federal government charged Pratt with conspiracy to commit sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion. Prosecutors later added child pornography charges because at least one of his victims was under 18.

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Alphabet, shareholders settle in lawsuits over sexual harassment at Google

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 20:08:53 GMT

Enlarge / Google's corporate headquarters. (credit: Alex Tai | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images)

Alphabet, Google's parent company, said today it has settled a set of shareholder lawsuits related to the company's handling of sexual harassment claims. Alphabet will commit $310 million to corporate diversity programs over the next decade, and the company agreed to allow its board to take on a greater oversight role in misconduct cases.

As part of the new agreement, Alphabet will expand on its current policy of "prohibiting severance for anyone terminated for any form of misconduct," to include anyone who is currently under investigation for "sexual misconduct or retaliation," Google VP of People Operations Eileen Naughton said in a company blog post.

The settlement is the outcome of a consolidated set of lawsuits investor groups filed against Alphabet in California in 2018, alleging that the company breached its fiduciary duty to shareholders when it retained, and handsomely paid off, male executives credibly accused of sexual harassment. (Other shareholder suits, in federal court and in Delaware, are still in progress, according to the New York Times.)

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Apple backs down on taking 30% cut of paid online events on Facebook

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 20:02:27 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Facebook)

Facebook has temporarily shamed Apple out of taking a 30 percent cut of paid online events organized by small businesses and hosted on Facebook—things like cooking classes, workout sessions, and happy hours. Demand for these kinds of online events has soared during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Apple says that it has a longstanding policy that digital products must be purchased using Apple's in-app payments system—and hence pay Apple's 30 percent tax. In contrast, companies selling physical goods and services are not only allowed but required to use other payment methods (options here include Apple Pay, which doesn't take such a big cut).

For example, an in-person cooking class is not a digital product, so a business selling cooking class tickets via an iPhone app wouldn't have to give Apple a 30 percent cut. But if the same business offers a virtual cooking class, Apple considers that to be a digital product and demands a 30 percent cut—at least if the customer pays for the class using an iOS device.

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Microsoft boots apps out of Azure used by China-sponsored hackers

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 10:45:52 GMT

Enlarge / Computer chip with Chinese flag, 3d conceptual illustration. (credit: Steve McDowell / Agefotostock)

Fortune 500 companies aren’t the only ones flocking to cloud services like Microsoft Azure. Increasingly, hackers working on behalf of the Chinese government are also hosting their tools in the cloud, and that’s keeping people in Redmond busy.

Earlier this year, members of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center suspended 18 Azure Active Directory applications after determining they were part of a sprawling command-and-control network. Besides the cloud-hosted applications, the members of the hacking group Microsoft calls Gadolinium also stored ill-gotten data in a Microsoft OneDrive account and used the account to execute various parts of the campaign.

Microsoft, Amazon, and other cloud providers have long touted the speed, flexibility, and scale that comes from renting computing resources as needed rather than using dedicated servers in-house. Hackers seem to be realizing the same benefits. The shift to the cloud can be especially easy thanks to free trial services and one-time payment accounts, which allow hackers to quickly get up and running without having to have an established relationship or even a valid payment card on file.

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Judge gives Trump admin. Friday deadline to delay or defend TikTok ban

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 20:19:04 GMT

Enlarge / A stand of TikTok (Douyin) at The First International Artificial Products Expo Hangzhou on October 18, 2019, in Hangzhou, China. (credit: Long Wei | VCG | Getty Images)

A federal judge today gave the Trump administration until Friday to either defend its planned ban of short-form-video app TikTok in court or hold off on it, adding one more wrinkle to the seemingly endless on-again, off-again saga.

If the government doesn't voluntarily postpone the planned TikTok ban by 2:30pm (EDT) on Friday, then it will have to show up for a hearing on Sunday morning, where he will rule on TikTok's request for an injunction on the ban, Judge Carl Nichols of the US District Court for DC said today.

Nichols said that the ban, if it takes effect, could prevent potentially hundreds of thousands of new users per day from signing up for TikTok. "I don't think [a ban] merely preserves the status quo," he said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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Former Facebook manager: "We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook”

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 19:22:27 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Chesnot | Getty Images)

Speaking to Congress today, the former Facebook manager first tasked with making the company make money did not mince words about his role. He told lawmakers that the company "took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset" and arguing that his former employer has been hugely detrimental to society.

Tim Kendall, who served as director of monetization for Facebook from 2006 through 2010, spoke to Congress today as part of a House Commerce subcommittee hearing examining how social media platforms contribute to the mainstreaming of extremist and radicalizing content.

"The social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity," Kendall said in his opening testimony (PDF). "At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding—at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war."

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Ex-eBay employees to plead guilty in "bloody pig mask” cyberstalking case

Thu, 24 Sep 2020 15:45:18 GMT

Enlarge / A bloody pig mask allegedly mailed to cyberstalking victims by then-eBay employees. (credit: FBI)

Four former eBay employees are expected to plead guilty to charges that they led a cyberstalking campaign against an online newsletter's editor and publisher. In June, federal officials announced charges and said the harassment campaign "included sending the couple anonymous, threatening messages, disturbing deliveries—including a box of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, and a bloody pig [Halloween] mask—and conducting covert surveillance of the victims."

The four people who are scheduled to plead guilty are Stephanie Popp, eBay's former senior manager of global intelligence; Stephanie Stockwell, former manager of eBay's Global Intelligence Center (GIC); Veronica Zea, a former eBay contractor who worked as an intelligence analyst in the GIC; and Brian Gilbert, a former senior manager of special operations for eBay's Global Security Team.

A hearing for a "waiver of indictment and plea to information" is scheduled for October 8, according to an entry in the court docket yesterday. The upcoming guilty pleas were also announced on Twitter by the US Attorney's office in Massachusetts. The case is in US District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

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California bans new internal combustion engines, starting in 2035

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 21:26:44 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

On Wednesday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order requiring that all new passenger cars and trucks sold in the state from 2035 be zero-emissions vehicles. Additionally, all drayage trucks—the ones that move containers around at places like the Port of Los Angeles—must also go emissions free by this date, as well as off-road vehicles and equipment. Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles get an extra decade to comply, but by 2045 these too must ditch internal combustion engines.

Although this is the first such ICE ban in the United States, Governor Newsom is following in the footsteps of policymakers in Europe, China, and elsewhere. In 2016, Paris, Madrid, Athens, and Mexico City announced bans on new diesel vehicles from 2025. The same year, Germany's Bundesrat voted to outlaw new ICE vehicles from 2030, although this was not a binding resolution.

The following year, France announced that new ICE vehicles would be banned from 2040. The UK also picked 2040 as the end of new gasoline and diesel vehicles within its borders, a timeline that in February was brought forward by five years to 2035, then this past Monday it was brought forward another five years, to 2030. And China is also phasing out internal combustion vehicles, albeit over a longer timeline.

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Justice Dep’t. sends its Section 230 rewrite to Congress

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 20:30:16 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

The Department of Justice today dropped a proposed "recalibration" of one of the most important laws governing the US Internet into Congress's lap and urged legislators to act to remove a liability protection on which nearly every website and app currently relies.

Attorney General Bill Barr sent the proposed legislation—an extension of his June wish list—to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence (in his role as President of the Senate) this morning.

"For too long Section 230 has provided a shield for online platforms to operate with impunity," Barr said in a written statement. "Ensuring that the internet is a safe, but also vibrant, open, and competitive environment is vitally important to America," he added. "We therefore urge Congress to make these necessary reforms to Section 230 and begin to hold online platforms accountable both when they unlawfully censor speech and when they knowingly facilitate criminal activity online."

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T-Mobile hits back at AT&T and Verizon after spectrum-hoarding accusations

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 18:40:32 GMT

Enlarge / T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert speaks during a keynote at CES 2020 in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

T-Mobile US CEO Mike Sievert yesterday fired back at AT&T and Verizon, saying the carriers' complaints about T-Mobile obtaining more spectrum licenses show that they are afraid of competition.

"The duopolists are scrambling to block this new competition any way they can... Suddenly in the unfamiliar position of not having a dominant stranglehold on the wireless market, and preferring not to meet the competitive challenge in the marketplace, AT&T and Verizon are urging the FCC to slow T-Mobile down and choke off our ability to compete fairly for added radio spectrum," Sievert wrote in a blog post.

As we wrote Monday, Verizon and AT&T have urged the Federal Communications Commission to impose limits on T-Mobile's ability to obtain more spectrum licenses. AT&T complained that T-Mobile's acquisition of Sprint allowed it to amass "an unprecedented concentration of spectrum."

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The fight over the fight for California’s privacy future

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 09:25:25 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

When state Senator Bob Hertzberg learned that an ambitious privacy initiative had gotten enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in California, he knew he had to act quickly.

“My objective,” he says, “was to get the damn thing off the ballot.”

It was the spring of 2018. Facebook’s emerging Cambridge Analytica scandal had cast a harsh light on the tech giants’ data-gathering practices, spurring calls for more consumer privacy protections. The initiative was the brainchild of Alastair Mactaggart, a wealthy San Francisco real estate developer, who had the idea in the shower in 2015 and funded the effort out of pocket. Mactaggart enlisted his neighbor Rick Arney and Mary Stone Ross, a former CIA analyst and lawyer, to help craft the ballot measure. None had any background in data privacy or, for that matter, anything related to the tech industry.

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"LokiBot,” the malware that steals your most sensitive data, is on the rise

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 21:11:39 GMT

Enlarge (credit: Christiaan Colen / Flickr)

Federal and state officials are seeing a big uptick in infections coming from LokiBot, an open source DIY malware package for Windows that’s openly sold or traded for free in underground forums. It steals passwords and cryptocurrency wallets, and it can also download and install new malware.

In an alert published on Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency and the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center said LokiBot activity has scaled up dramatically in the past two months. The increase was measured by “EINSTEIN,” an automated intrusion-detection system for collecting, correlating, analyzing, and sharing computer security information across the federal civilian departments and agencies.

“CISA has observed a notable increase in the use of LokiBot malware by malicious cyber actors since July 2020,” Tuesday’s alert stated. “Throughout this period, CISA’s EINSTEIN Intrusion Detection System, which protects federal, civilian executive branch networks, has detected persistent malicious LokiBot activity.”

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