France has become the latest country to pull out of the controversial energy charter treaty (ECT), which protects fossil fuel investors from policy changes that might threaten their profits. The Guardian reports: Speaking after an EU summit in Brussels on Friday, French president, Emmanuel Macron, said: "France has decided to withdraw from the energy charter treaty." Quitting the ECT was "coherent" with the Paris climate deal, he added. Macron's statement follows a recent vote by the Polish parliament to leave the 52-nation treaty and announcements by Spain and the Netherlands that they too wanted out of the scheme.

The European Commission has proposed a "modernization" of the agreement, which would end the writ of the treaty's secret investor-state courts between EU members. That plan is expected to be discussed at a meeting in Mongolia next month. A French government official said Paris would not try to block the modernization blueprint within the EU or at the meeting in Mongolia. "But whatever happens, France is leaving," the official said. While France was "willing to coordinate a withdrawal with others, we don't see that there is a critical mass ready to engage with that in the EU bloc as a whole," the official added.

The French withdrawal will take about a year to be completed, and in that time, discussion in Paris will likely move on to ways of neutralizing or reducing the duration of a "sunset clause" in the ECT that allows retrospective lawsuits. Progress on that issue is thought possible by sources close to ongoing legal negotiations on the issue.

The International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) has announced the launch of its fully operational metaverse, initially designed for activities such as immersive training courses for forensic investigations. Decrypt reports: Unveiled at the 90th Interpol General Assembly in New Delhi, the INTERPOL Metaverse is described as the "first-ever Metaverse specifically designed for law enforcement worldwide." Among other things, the platform will also help law enforcement across the globe to interact with each other via avatars. "For many, the Metaverse seems to herald an abstract future, but the issues it raises are those that have always motivated INTERPOL -- supporting our member countries to fight crime and making the world, virtual or not, safer for those who inhabit it," Jurgen Stock, Interpol's secretary general said in a statement.

One of the challenges identified by organizations is that something that is considered a crime in the physical world may not necessarily be the same in the virtual world. "By identifying these risks from the outset, we can work with stakeholders to shape the necessary governance frameworks and cut off future criminal markets before they are fully formed," said Madan Oberoi, Interpol's executive director of Technology and Innovation. "Only by having these conversations now can we build an effective response."

In a live demonstration at the event, Interpol experts took to a Metaverse classroom to deliver a training course on travel document verification and passenger screening using the capabilities of the newly-launched platform. Students were then teleported to an airport where they were able to apply their newly-acquired skills at a virtual border point. Additionally, Interpol has created an expert group that will be tasked with ensuring new virtual worlds are "secure by design." The report notes that Interpol has also joined "Defining and Building the Metaverse," a World Economic Forum initiative around metaverse governance.

Bruce66423 shares a report from the BBC: A hacker who stole two unreleased songs from Ed Sheeran and sold them on the dark web has been jailed for 18 months. Adrian Kwiatkowski traded the music by Sheeran and 12 songs by rapper Lil Uzi Vert in exchange for cryptocurrency. The 23-year-old, from Ipswich, managed to get hold of them after hacking the performers' digital accounts, the Crown Prosecution Service said. Kwiatkowski admitted 19 charges, including copyright infringement and possessing criminal property. He had made 131,000 pounds ($148,000) from the music, City of London Police said.

According to police, seven devices, including a hard drive that contained 1,263 unreleased songs by 89 artists, were seized. A document saved on the hard drive summarised the method he had used to obtain them along with a stash of Bitcoin which was seized. In August, Kwiatkowski pleaded guilty at Ipswich Magistrates Court to three charges of unauthorised access to computer material, 14 charges of selling copyrighted material, one charge of converting criminal property and two charges of possession of criminal property. Chief crown prosecutor Joanne Jakymec said Kwiatkowski had "complete disregard" for the musicians' creativity, hard work and lost earnings. "He selfishly stole their music to make money for himself by selling it on the dark web," she said. "We will be pursuing ill-gotten gains from these proceeds of crime."

UK regulator Ofcom proposed changes to net neutrality rules carried over from the European Union to give telecommunications and internet providers more flexibility. From a report: Internet service providers should be allowed to offer a broader range of premium packages on a wider variety of parameters such as latency, and could include discounted tariffs during off-peak hours, according to proposals from the watchdog published Friday. "The net neutrality rules constrain the activities of broadband providers, and could be restricting their ability to develop new services and manage their networks," Ofcom said in the report.

Net neutrality is shorthand for rules that intend to ensure traffic carried over telecom networks is treated equally, without favoring certain services or content. Debates over such regulations often prove controversial due to tensions over what constitutes an open and free internet and fears consumers could suffer if it becomes harder to compare prices. The report proposed that telecom providers be allowed to not charge a customer's overall allowance for certain services, like public health advice.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Networked doorbell surveillance cameras like Amazon's Ring are everywhere, and have changed the nature of delivery work by letting customers take on the role of bosses to monitor, control, and discipline workers, according to a recent report (PDF) by the Data & Society tech research institute. "The growing popularity of Ring and other networked doorbell cameras has normalized home and neighborhood surveillance in the name of safety and security," Data & Society's Labor Futures program director Aiha Nguyen and research analyst Eve Zelickson write. "But for delivery drivers, this has meant their work is increasingly surveilled by the doorbell cameras and supervised by customers. The result is a collision between the American ideas of private property and the business imperatives of doing a job."

Thanks to interviews with surveillance camera users and delivery drivers, the researchers are able to dive into a few major developments interacting here to bring this to a head. Obviously, the first one is the widespread adoption of doorbell surveillance cameras like Ring. Just as important as the adoption of these cameras, however, is the rise of delivery work and its transformation into gig labor. [...] As the report lays out, Ring cameras allow customers to surveil delivery workers and discipline their labor by, for example, sharing shaming footage online. This dovetails with the "gigification" of Amazon's delivery workers in two ways: labor dynamics and customer behavior.

"Gig workers, including Flex drivers, are sold on the promise of flexibility, independence and freedom. Amazon tells Flex drivers that they have complete control over their schedule, and can work on their terms and in their space," Nguyen and Zelickson write. "Through interviews with Flex drivers, it became apparent that these marketed perks have hidden costs: drivers often have to compete for shifts, spend hours trying to get reimbursed for lost wages, pay for wear and tear on their vehicle, and have no control over where they work." That competition between workers manifests in other ways too, namely acquiescing to and complying with customer demands when delivering purchases to their homes. Even without cameras, customers have made onerous demands of Flex drivers even as the drivers are pressed to meet unrealistic and dangerous routes alongside unsafe and demanding productivity quotas. The introduction of surveillance cameras at the delivery destination, however, adds another level of surveillance to the gigification. [...] The report's conclusion is clear: Amazon has deputized its customers and made them partners in a scheme that encourages antagonistic social relations, undermines labor rights, and provides cover for a march towards increasingly ambitious monopolistic exploits. As Nguyen and Zelickson point out, it is ingenious how Amazon has "managed to transform what was once a labor cost (i.e., supervising work and asset protection) into a revenue stream through the sale of doorbell cameras and subscription services to residents who then perform the labor of securing their own doorstep."

The RIAA has submitted its most recent overview of notorious markets to the U.S. Trade Representative. As usual, the music industry group lists various torrent sites, cyberlockers and stream-ripping services as familiar suspects. In addition, several 'AI-based' music mixers and extractors are added as an emerging threat. TorrentFreak reports: "There are online services that, purportedly using artificial intelligence (AI), extract, or rather, copy, the vocals, instrumentals, or some portion of the instrumentals from a sound recording, and/or generate, master or remix a recording to be very similar to or almost as good as reference tracks by selected, well known sound recording artists," RIAA writes.

Songmastr is one of the platforms that's mentioned. The service promises to "master" any song based on the style of well-known music artists such as Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Coltrane, Bob Dylan, James Brown and many others. The site's underlying technology is powered by the open-source Matchering 2.0 code, which is freely available on GitHub. And indeed, its purported AI capabilities are prominently in the site's tagline. "This service uses artificial intelligence and is based on the open source library Matchering. The algorithm masters your track with the same RMS, FR, peak amplitude and stereo width as the reference song you choose," Songmastr explains.

Where Artificial Intelligence comes into play isn't quite clear to us. The same can be said for the Acapella-Extractor and Remove-Vocals websites, which the RIAA lists in the same category. The names of these services are pretty much self-explanatory; they can separate the vocals from the rest of a track. The RIAA logically doesn't want third parties to strip music or vocals from copyrighted tracks, particularly when these derivative works are further shared with others. While Songmastr's service is a bit more advanced, the RIAA sees it as clearly infringing. After all, the original copyrighted tracks are used by the site to create derivative works, without the necessary permission. [...] The RIAA is clearly worried about these services. Interestingly, however, the operator of Songmastr and Acapella-Extractor informs us that the music group hasn't reached out with any complaints. But perhaps they're still in the pipeline. The RIAA also lists various torrent sites, download sites, streamrippers, and bulletproof ISPs in its overview, all of which can be found in the full report (PDF) or listed at the bottom of TorrentFreak's article.

The Biden administration said it will launch a cybersecurity labeling program for consumer Internet of Things devices starting in 2023 in an effort to protect Americans from "significant national security risks." TechCrunch reports: Inspired by Energy Star, a labeling program operated by Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy to promote energy efficiency, the White House is planning to roll out a similar IoT labeling program to the "highest-risk" devices starting next year, a senior Biden administration official said on Wednesday following a National Security Council meeting with consumer product associations and device manufacturers. Attendees at the meeting included White House cyber official Anne Neuberger, FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, National Cyber Director Chris Inglis and Sen. Angus King, alongside leaders from Google, Amazon, Samsung, Sony and others.

The initiative, described by White House officials as "Energy Star for cyber," will help Americans to recognize whether devices meet a set of basic cybersecurity standards devised by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Though specifics of the program have not yet been confirmed, the administration said it will "keep things simple." The labels, which will be "globally recognized" and debut on devices such as routers and home cameras, will take the form of a "barcode" that users can scan using their smartphone rather than a static paper label, the administration official said. The scanned barcode will link to information based on standards, such as software updating policies, data encryption and vulnerability remediation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Chess grandmaster Hans Niemann filed a $100 million lawsuit against world champion Magnus Carlsen and others for alleged defamatory statements claiming that Niemann cheated in competition. The suit claims that the defendants, including Chess.com, inflicted "devastating damages" against Niemann by "egregiously defaming him" and "unlawfully colluding" to bar him from the professional chess world. "My lawsuit speaks for itself," Niemann said Thursday in a Twitter post.

Niemann, 19, has admitted to cheating on two occasions, once when he was 12 years old and a second time when he was 16. But he denied claims that he cheated in an over-the-board match against Magnus Carlsen this year. Carlsen withdrew from the Sinquefield Cup in September after losing to Niemann, and eventually came forward with concerns that Niemann had cheated in the match in which he defeated Carlsen. The suit claims that Carlsen's comments were a retaliatory attempt to keep Niemann from damaging his reputation. Chess.com subsequently banned Niemann after reporting that an internal investigation revealed evidence of more cheating than Niemann's public statements had expressed.

The report from Chess.com did not find evidence of cheating in Niemann's over-the-board matches, including the match against Carlsen, though the website notes that its cheating detection is primarily used for online matches. The report does, however, allege that Niemann likely cheated in over 100 online chess games, including several prize money events. It also shows that Niemann's Chess.com "Strength Score" sits in the range of over a dozen anonymous grandmasters who have admitted to cheating. The report also notes that Niemann is by far the fastest-rising player by yearly gain in classical over-the-board chess. The lawsuit is available in full here (PDF).

Parler was so excited to tell its users that the artist formerly known as Kanye West had decided to buy the social media network, it accidentally doxed all its members. Fortune reports: The platform has been embraced by conservatives who departed Twitter over allegations of political censorship, and West, a known lover of controversy, agreed to buy it earlier this week so those users could "freely express" themselves. But in an email announcing the rapper's involvement, the company publicly copied in 300-plus email addresses of its verified VIP members instead of blind copying, allowing their personal contact details to be visible to everyone else in the email chain.

The incident was revealed by newsletter writer Adam Ryan who shared screenshots of the original message from Parler about the "monumental new chapter," explaining that they expected the acquisition to be complete by the end of the year and describing their VIP members as "an invaluable part of the Parler family and experience." Ryan's screenshot also showed the blurred-out addresses of "gold-badged" members in the email chain who consist of "influencers, celebrities, journalists, media organizations, public officials, government entities, businesses, organizations, and nonprofits." Some of the well-known names in the email chain include Sen. Ted Cruz, former President Donald Trump, and Rep. Matt Gaetz.

Further reading: Ye's 'Buyout' Of Parler Looks Very Much Like A Failed Company Taking Advantage Of Troubled Rich Guy (Techdirt)

Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition firm that scrapes selfies and other personal data off the Internet without consent to feed an AI-powered identity-matching service it sells to law enforcement and others, has been hit with another fine in Europe. From a report: This one comes after it failed to respond to an order last year from the CNIL, France's privacy watchdog, to stop its unlawful processing of French citizens' information and delete their data. Clearview responded to that order by, well, ghosting the regulator -- thereby adding a third GDPR breach (non-cooperation with the regulator) to its earlier tally.

Here's the CNIL's summary of Clearview's breaches:
Unlawful processing of personal data (breach of Article 6 of the GDPR)
Individuals' rights not respected (Articles 12, 15 and 17 of the GDPR)
Lack of cooperation with the CNIL (Article 31 of the RGPD)

"Clearview AI had two months to comply with the injunctions formulated in the formal notice and to justify them to the CNIL. However, it did not provide any response to this formal notice," the CNIL wrote in a press release today announcing the sanction [emphasis its]. The size of the fine is $19.57 million.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: TikTok users would still risk having personal data exposed to hacking and espionage by China even if the Biden administration forges a security agreement designed to spare the video platform from a total US ban. That's the conclusion of former national security officials and other experts as the Justice Department reviews an accord that would keep the popular video-streaming app, which is owned by China's ByteDance, accessible to its millions of US users.

TikTok has been under US scrutiny since 2019 over concerns that Chinese actors might tap those users' information for espionage or other harmful purposes. "They built the whole system in China," said Stewart Baker, a national security lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson LLP. "Unless they're going to rebuild the system in the United States at great expense, sooner or later, when something goes wrong, there's going to turn out to be only one engineer who knows how to fix it. And he or she is likely to be in China." This analysis of the agreement is based on interviews with former national security officials, lawyers who have worked on similar deals and experts who have studied data security, social media platforms and telecommunications companies. There's no indication a decision has been made.

TikTok is routing all its US user traffic through servers maintained by Oracle and the database giant is auditing the app's algorithms. Still, additional restrictions on how US user data is stored and accessed will be necessary -- and might not resolve US security concerns no matter how strong a deal looks on paper, the experts said. The experts' skepticism is shared by Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said he's aware of the conversations around TikTok and couldn't give details. Nonetheless, he said the company has "a big mountain to climb with me to prove the case that it can really be safe." Warner said China has a bad track record on protecting users' privacy. "They've shown repeatedly the ability to create this surveillance state that ought to scare the dickens out of all of us." He added that it's much harder today to wall off TikTok's data technically or ban it outright than it was five or six years ago as the popularity of the app has surged. "The burden of proof that you can really segregate American data, particularly if the code is still being written in China -- that would be a tough case to make." Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesperson for TikTok, said that while the company would not comment on the specifics of its discussions with the US government, "We are confident that we are on a path to fully satisfy all reasonable U.S. national security concerns."

Oberwetter said that while some employees based in China would have access to public data posted by users, they would not have access to private user information, and their use of the public data -- including videos and comments -- would be very limited.

Intel is being taken to court in Massachusetts over its proposals to build a distribution and logistics warehouse on the site of its defunct R&D offices and chip factory that closed in 2013. The Register reports: At the heart of this showdown are claims by townsfolk that Intel has not revealed to the surrounding community what exactly it intends to build, and that the land is supposed to be used for industry and manufacturing yet it appears a huge commercial warehouse will be built instead. The x86 giant has spent years trying to figure out what to do the campus -- whether to salvage it for production or research, or to sell it to a developer. It came close to securing a buyer earlier this year.

The site in question is at 75 Reed Road in Hudson, Massachusetts, which holds a special place in computer history. It was the home of Digital Equipment Corporation's R&D and chip manufacturing before Intel took over the land and facility following a patent battle with DEC in 1997. Intel continued R&D at the site and kept it producing chips until it threw the towel in, leaving the location open to options. Ultimately, the site was up for sale with Intel planning to demolish the 40-year-old main buildings while offloading the land. However, the chipmaker, perhaps in response to a revitalization of American semiconductor manufacturing funded by CHIPS Act government subsidies, decided it wants to remake the property into a distribution and logistics and storage facility -- something that might sound innocuous but has the nearby community up in arms.

Further, Intel doesn't have to use the redeveloped site for its own purposes at all: it can, and probably will, market the facility to a future tenant. And it can breeze through planning law requirements without having to reveal the full scope of traffic, pollution, and other impacts due to its status as a "logistics" facility. And that is what really has the locals enraged. Crucially, the site is adjacent to two retirement villages with 286 units and a childcare center. As a former R&D and manufacturing facility, neighboring communities understood the scope of traffic and resource impacts of such a factory. [...] The even bigger problem is that this represents another example of a large tech company wheedling its way through local restrictions to build community-damning facilities, said Michael Pill, the lawyer representing both retirement condo facilities and the childcare center in their legal challenge [PDF] to Intel. "What Intel has done here is something deeply unpleasant that grows out of its desire to dump the property without any thought to the community where they were once an important pillar of manufacturing," Pill told The Register. "There is a pattern of development in which big companies come sailing into towns, saying they'll build million-plus square foot facilities with hundreds of loading docks and all the planning is done on spec."

In response to the lawsuit, Intel's lawyers said in a filing that the proposed changes are subject to approval by the town: "Because the proposed redevelopment is a permitted use in the zoning district, the project will require site plan review from the town of Hudson planning board."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Register: GitHub Copilot -- a programming auto-suggestion tool trained from public source code on the internet -- has been caught generating what appears to be copyrighted code, prompting an attorney to look into a possible copyright infringement claim. On Monday, Matthew Butterick, a lawyer, designer, and developer, announced he is working with Joseph Saveri Law Firm to investigate the possibility of filing a copyright claim against GitHub. There are two potential lines of attack here: is GitHub improperly training Copilot on open source code, and is the tool improperly emitting other people's copyrighted work -- pulled from the training data -- to suggest code snippets to users?

Butterick has been critical of Copilot since its launch. In June he published a blog post arguing that "any code generated by Copilot may contain lurking license or IP violations," and thus should be avoided. That same month, Denver Gingerich and Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) said their organization would stop using GitHub, largely as a result of Microsoft and GitHub releasing Copilot without addressing concerns about how the machine-learning model dealt with different open source licensing requirements.

Copilot's capacity to copy code verbatim, or nearly so, surfaced last week when Tim Davis, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, found that Copilot, when prompted, would reproduce his copyrighted sparse matrix transposition code. Asked to comment, Davis said he would prefer to wait until he has heard back from GitHub and its parent Microsoft about his concerns. In an email to The Register, Butterick indicated there's been a strong response to news of his investigation. "Clearly, many developers have been worried about what Copilot means for open source," he wrote. "We're hearing lots of stories. Our experience with Copilot has been similar to what others have found -- that it's not difficult to induce Copilot to emit verbatim code from identifiable open source repositories. As we expand our investigation, we expect to see more examples. "But keep in mind that verbatim copying is just one of many issues presented by Copilot. For instance, a software author's copyright in their code can be violated without verbatim copying. Also, most open-source code is covered by a license, which imposes additional legal requirements. Has Copilot met these requirements? We're looking at all these issues." GitHub's documentation for Copilot warns that the output may contain "undesirable patterns" and puts the onus of intellectual property infringement on the user of Copilot, notes the report.

Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy is less willing to set aside how Copilot deals with software licenses. "What Microsoft's GitHub has done in this process is absolutely unconscionable," he said. "Without discussion, consent, or engagement with the FOSS community, they have declared that they know better than the courts and our laws about what is or is not permissible under a FOSS license. They have completely ignored the attribution clauses of all FOSS licenses, and, more importantly, the more freedom-protecting requirements of copyleft licenses."

Brett Becker, assistant professor at University College Dublin in Ireland, told The Register in an email, "AI-assisted programming tools are not going to go away and will continue to evolve. Where these tools fit into the current landscape of programming practices, law, and community norms is only just beginning to be explored and will also continue to evolve." He added: "An interesting question is: what will emerge as the main drivers of this evolution? Will these tools fundamentally alter future practices, law, and community norms -- or will our practices, law and community norms prove resilient and drive the evolution of these tools?"

A Russian lawmaker on Wednesday urged state institutions to stop using WhatsApp messenger and the industry ministry sought to promote domestically produced software as Russia tries to wean itself off Western technology. From a report: WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms was found guilty of "extremist activity" in Russia in March and later added to financial monitoring agency Rosfinmonitoring's list of "terrorists and extremists." Meta's lawyer in court has said Meta was not carrying out extremist activity and was against Russophobia. Russia blocked Meta's Facebook and Instagram in March, objecting to restrictions on Russian media and some posts permitted by users in Ukraine. Widely used among Russians, WhatsApp has always remained available, but Anton Gorelkin, deputy head of the Russian parliament's committee on information policy, on Wednesday said he personally would be deleting the app and recommended a wider ban.

"Everyone visiting Qatar for the World Cup needs to install spyware on their phone," writes security researcher Bruce Schneier. His comments are in response to an article from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK), reporting: Everyone traveling to Qatar during the football World Cup will be asked to download two apps called Ehteraz and Hayya. Briefly, Ehteraz is an covid-19 tracking app, while Hayya is an official World Cup app used to keep track of match tickets and to access the free Metro in Qatar. In particular, the covid-19 app Ehteraz asks for access to several rights on your mobile., like access to read, delete or change all content on the phone, as well as access to connect to WiFi and Bluetooth, override other apps and prevent the phone from switching off to sleep mode.

The Ehteraz app, which everyone over 18 coming to Qatar must download, also gets a number of other accesses such as an overview of your exact location, the ability to make direct calls via your phone and the ability to disable your screen lock. The Hayya app does not ask for as much, but also has a number of critical aspects. Among other things, the app asks for access to share your personal information with almost no restrictions. In addition, the Hayya app provides access to determine the phone's exact location, prevent the device from going into sleep mode, and view the phone's network connections. It remains to be seen whether Qatar will strictly enforce the installation of these apps. "I know people who visited Saudi Arabia when that country had a similarly sketchy app requirement," says Schneier. "Some of them just didn't bother downloading the apps, and were never asked about it at the border."

The Clearing House, a banking association and payments company owned by the largest commercial banks in the U.S., has joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) -- the world's largest patent nonaggression consortium. ZDNet reports: The OIN has long protected Linux and Linux-related software from patent aggression by rival companies. With the increase in patent troll attacks, the OIN is also defending companies from these assaults. You may not think financial companies and banks are subject to such attacks. I mean, TCH's roots go all the way back to 1853. Think again.

As Keith Bergelt, CEO of OIN, said in June, "The most sophisticated and compelling global banking and fintech companies have essentially become technology companies that employ open-source software to deliver their services at scale." Further, patent trolls "appear to be targeting them for this reason, along with the fact that financial services companies have not historically been active patent filers." That's because, historically, they've purchased most of their tech from third-party vendors.

That was then. This is now. Today, financial institutions generate more tech in-house, so they're more concerned about being granted patents, building patent portfolios, and related patent issues. Indeed, these days fintech businesses have their own Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), the financial sector branch of the Linux Foundation. So, Bergelt said in a release Wednesday, "Advancements in financial services and fintech increasingly rely on open-source technologies. As the most experienced payment company in the US, and a keystone for the financial services industry, we are pleased that The Clearing House is committed to patent nonaggression in core Linux and adjacent open-source technologies."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A former Wall Street Journal reporter is accusing a major U.S. law firm of having used mercenary hackers to oust him from his job and ruin his reputation. In a lawsuit filed late Friday, Jay Solomon, the Journal's former chief foreign correspondent, said Philadelphia-based Dechert LLP worked with hackers from India to steal emails between him and one of his key sources, Iranian American aviation executive Farhad Azima. Solomon said the messages, which showed Azima floating the idea of the two of them going into business together, were put into a dossier and circulated in a successful effort to get him fired.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, said Dechert "wrongfully disclosed this dossier first to Mr. Solomon's employer, the Wall Street Journal, at its Washington DC bureau, and then to other media outlets in an attempt to malign and discredit him." It said the campaign "effectively caused Mr. Solomon to be blackballed by the journalistic and publishing community." Dechert said in an email that it disputed the claim and would fight it in court. The lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal actions related to hired hackers operating out of India, notes Reuters. "In June, Reuters reported on the activities of several hack-for-hire shops, including Delhi area-companies BellTroX and CyberRoot, that were involved in a decade-long series of espionage campaigns targeting thousands of people, including more than 1,000 lawyers at 108 different law firms."

Solomon said in a statement Saturday that the hack-and-leak he suffered was an example of "a trend that's becoming a great threat to journalism and media, as digital surveillance and hacking technologies become more sophisticated and pervasive. This is a major threat to the freedom of the press."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Bernard Arnault, the CEO of luxury brand LVMH -- known for expensive labels like Louis Vuitton -- is the world's second-richest man according to Bloomberg's Billionaires Index. He currently clocks in at a net worth of $133 billion, beating out Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' paltry $130 billion. He's also been harangued on Twitter for his consistent use of private jets. French accounts that use planes' transponder signals and publicly accessible information have tracked Arnault's and other rich folks' use of private jets to reveal just how much wasteful flying time is used by the world's wealthiest.

In September, the Twitter account laviodebernard (Bernard's Plane) wrote that Arnault's plane had been de-registered in France. The account wrote "The LVMH private jet has not been registered in France since September 1, 2022. Still no word from Bernard Arnault or LVMH on the subject of private jets. So Bernard, are we hiding?" Apparently, that's just what Arnault has been doing. On the LVMH-owned podcast released Monday, Arnault admitted that the LVMH group "had a plane, and we sold it." He added: "The result now is that no one can see where I go because I rent planes when I use private planes."

Antoine Arnault, the second scion of the world's second richest man, a LVMH board member and director of communications for Louis Vuitton, also said during the podcast that other people knowing where their company jet is could give competitors an edge. He also told French news channel 5's a Vous last week "This plane is a work tool." As translated by Bloomberg, the younger Arnault added that the company sold the plane over the summer.

The Mexican attorney general's office said on Sunday it is investigating the purchase of Pegasus computer spyware by the previous administration and whether it was carried out legally. From a report: In a statement, the office referred to existing probes of two people, including a prominent ex-official, into the use of Pegasus spyware, days after the current government denied it had spied on journalists or critics. Pegasus belongs to Israeli spyware firm NSO Group, which typically only sells the software to governments or law enforcement organizations.

"Over the past year, thousands of people have lost tens, if not hundreds, of millions in cryptocurrency when gangs of sophisticated scammers whisked their money out of their accounts," reports the Washington Post, noting the accounts "managed by an app from the publicly traded cryptocurrency giant Coinbase.

"Now those victims are fighting back. Nearly 100 people are trying to hold Coinbase accountable, saying the company didn't do enough to protect them." Scam victims says they notified the company, begging it to fix defects in its Coinbase Wallet software that had allowed the victims unknowingly to grant the scammers access to their accounts. The requests were to no avail, scam victims say.

"They're trying to be a financial institution without the infrastructure to back it up," said Eric Rosen, a lawyer at Roche Freedman representing some 96 victims in the arbitration demand, which is akin to a lawsuit, filed against Coinbase. "There were no procedures in place to stop these frauds," Rosen said. "Of course, scammers quickly picked up on this, and directed victims to download the Coinbase Wallet."

Many of the victims lost their life savings. The demand says that the rules requiring banks to reimburse debit-card users for unauthorized transfers also should apply to Coinbase's customers....

If the arbitration demand results in an order that Coinbase reimburse its customers, it provides the possibility of a way forward for the victims of a massive ongoing scam that The Washington Post reported in April had already caused thousands of victims more than $60 million of losses. The individuals participating in the Coinbase arbitration demand, some of whom were scammed as late as this August, say they lost more than $21 million total.

Many were forced by Coinbase Wallet's terms of service to turn to arbitration instead of challenging them through the U.S. courts. The decision of the arbitrator won't set a formal legal precedent, but will help answer one of the top questions of the b urgeoning crypto era: Do the existing rules of the financial system apply to cryptocurrency companies?
One more interesting detail from the Post's article. "Reports from ProPublica and Vice say that at least some of the front-line scammers are themselves victims of human trafficking in Southeast Asia, forced to work under threats of violence."