An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a bid by child pornography victims to overcome a legal shield for internet companies in a case involving a lawsuit accusing Reddit Inc of violating federal law by failing to rid the discussion website of this illegal content. The justices turned away the appeal of a lower court's decision to dismiss the proposed class action lawsuit on the grounds that Reddit was shielded by a U.S. statute called Section 230, which safeguards internet companies from lawsuits for content posted by users but has an exception for claims involving child sex trafficking. The Supreme Court on May 19 sidestepped an opportunity to narrow the scope of Section 230 immunity in a separate case.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects "interactive computer services" by ensuring they cannot be treated as the "publisher or speaker" of information provided by users. The Reddit case explored the scope of a 2018 amendment to Section 230 called the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which allows lawsuits against internet companies if the underlying claim involves child sex trafficking. Reddit allows users to post content that is moderated by other users in forums called subreddits. The case centers on sexually explicit images and videos of children posted to such forums by users. The plaintiffs -- the parents of minors and a former minor who were the subjects of the images -- sued Reddit in 2021 in federal court in California, seeking monetary damages. The plaintiffs accused Reddit of doing too little to remove or prevent child pornography and of financially benefiting from the illegal posts through advertising in violation of a federal child sex trafficking law.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022 concluded that in order for the exception under FOSTA to apply, plaintiffs must show that an internet company "knowingly benefited" from the sex trafficking through its own conduct. Instead, the 9th Circuit concluded, the allegations "suggest only that Reddit 'turned a blind eye' to the unlawful content posted on its platform, not that it actively participated in sex trafficking." Reddit said in court papers that it works hard to find and prevent the sharing of child sexual exploitation materials on its platform, giving all users the ability to flag posts and using dedicated teams to remove illegal content.

In a groundbreaking ruling, a district court judge in New York, United States v. Smith (S.D.N.Y. May 11, 2023), declared that a warrant is necessary for cell phone searches at the border, unless there are urgent circumstances. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reports: The Ninth Circuit in United States v. Cano (2019) held that a warrant is required for a device search at the border that seeks data other than "digital contraband" such as child pornography. Similarly, the Fourth Circuit in United States v. Aigbekaen (2019) held that a warrant is required for a forensic device search at the border in support of a domestic criminal investigation. These courts and the Smith court were informed by Riley v. California (2014). In that watershed case, the Supreme Court held that the police must get a warrant to search an arrestee's cell phone. [...]

The Smith court's application of Riley's balancing test is nearly identical to the arguments we've made time and time again. The Smith court also cited Cano, in which the Ninth Circuit engaged extensively with EFF's amicus brief even though it didn't go as far as requiring a warrant in all cases. The Smith court acknowledged that no federal appellate court "has gone quite this far (although the Ninth Circuit has come close)."

We're pleased that our arguments are moving through the federal judiciary and finally being embraced. We hope that the Second Circuit affirms this decision and that other courts -- including the Supreme Court -- are courageous enough to follow suit and protect personal privacy.

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said on Sunday that the student loan payment pause is "gone" in the debt ceiling deal announced by the California Republican and President Biden late Saturday night. "The pause is gone within 60 days of this being signed. So that is another victory because that brings in $5 billion each month to the American public," McCarthy told Fox News on Sunday. McCarthy's remarks came after he and Biden came to an agreement in principle late Saturday to cap spending and raise the debt ceiling.

"What the president did, he went unconstitutionally and said he was going to waive certain people part of their debt for student loan, but then he paused everybody's student loan. So everybody who borrowed a student loan within 60 days of the signing is going to have to pay that back," McCarthy added. "The Supreme Court is taking up that case. But if the Supreme Court came back and said that was unconstitutional, the president could still say he's pausing, not waiving it. But now that this is in law, the Supreme Court decision will have to be upheld, that they would have to pay."

Earlier this month, the NY Times warned students and their families to "Expect Interest Rates on Federal Student Loans to Rise" to as high as 8.05% for new PLUS loans this fall. That news came as Apple, just days after a recent $90 billion share buyback, filed a prospectus with the SEC for a new $5 billion bond program with longer-term bonds expected to have a coupon rate of approximately 5%. The imbalance between loan rates for students and Apple shareholders was actually far more pronounced before the Fed fund rate hikes started last year in response to inflation. During the pandemic, Apple -- which reported around $166.3 billion in cash and investments on its balance sheet as of March 31 -- held a bond sale worth $14 billion for stock buybacks and dividends to benefit from borrowing rates as low as 0.70%. Direct PLUS student loan rates at that time were down to 5.30% for new loans but as high as 8.5% for existing loans (the U.S. Dept. of Education does not offer refinancing of its up-to-30-year fixed rate loans in times of much lower interest rates). Unlike the tax-deductible interest Apple pays, annual deductions on student loan interest are capped by the IRS at $2,500 (or lower, depending on the borrower's income).

Despite presumably benefiting from stock buybacks and dividends facilitated by Apple's low-interest bonds -- some of which carry rates as much as 90%+ lower than certain federal student loans -- some of the Senators identified as Apple shareholders by NBCLX are vehemently opposed to the idea of student loan relief for high interest-paying borrowers. Senator Shelley Capito (R-WV) opposes the program as "not fair", Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) called it "grossly unfair", and other Apple-shareholder Senators joined (PDF) colleagues in a Supreme Court filing calling student loan relief "unnecessary".

Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has begun her 11-year prison sentence after being convicted of four counts of fraud. The BBC reports: She will serve her term in a minimum-security prison in Texas. Holmes reported to the federal facility in Bryan, Texas, which holds between 500 and 700 inmates at any given time, on Tuesday. It is about 100 miles (160km) north of Houston, her hometown. Her arrival at the facility was confirmed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which declined to give any more details about her confinement, citing privacy concerns.

There, the woman once billed as the world's youngest self-made billionaire might work alongside other inmates for between 12 cents (10p) and $1.15 (93p) an hour - much of which will go towards her court-mandated restitution payments. [...] The Texas prison camp where Holmes will serve time is a sprawling 37-acre facility. Most inmates there have been convicted of non-violent crimes, low-level drug dealing or white-collar offenses. According to the facility's handbook, life largely revolves around work and extracurricular activities that include foreign language, computer literacy or business courses.

Holmes had fought to stay out of prison while her legal appeal works its way through the courts. She argued a delay would allow her to raise "substantial questions" about the case that could warrant a new trial. Her defense team also argued that she should remain free to care for her children, one who is nearly two and the other three months old. The Wall Street Journal reported the prison has facilities where inmates can host gatherings and where children can play. Holmes and other mothers are allowed to hold their children in their lap and breastfeed their infants, according to official Bureau of Prison guidelines.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A lawyer is in trouble after admitting he used ChatGPT to help write court filings that cited six nonexistent cases invented by the artificial intelligence tool. Lawyer Steven Schwartz of the firm Levidow, Levidow, & Oberman "greatly regrets having utilized generative artificial intelligence to supplement the legal research performed herein and will never do so in the future without absolute verification of its authenticity," Schwartz wrote in an affidavit (PDF) on May 24 regarding the bogus citations previously submitted in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Schwartz wrote that "the use of generative artificial intelligence has evolved within law rms" and that he "consulted the artificial intelligence website ChatGPT in order to supplement the legal research performed." The "citations and opinions in question were provided by ChatGPT which also provided its legal source and assured the reliability of its content," he wrote. Schwartz admitted that he "relied on the legal opinions provided to him by a source that has revealed itself to be unreliable," and stated that it is his fault for not confirming the sources provided by ChatGPT. Schwartz didn't previously consider the possibility that an artificial intelligence tool like ChatGPT could provide false information, even though AI chatbot mistakes have been extensively reported by non-artificial intelligence such as the human journalists employed by reputable news organizations. The lawyer's affidavit said he had "never utilized ChatGPT as a source for conducting legal research prior to this occurrence and therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false."

Federal Judge Kevin Castel is considering punishments for Schwartz and his associates. In an order on Friday, Castel scheduled a June 8 hearing at which Schwartz, fellow attorney Peter LoDuca, and the law firm must show cause for why they should not be sanctioned. "The Court is presented with an unprecedented circumstance," Castel wrote in a previous order on May 4. "A submission filed by plaintiff's counsel in opposition to a motion to dismiss is replete with citations to non-existent cases... Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations." [...] In the order issued on Friday last week, Castel said that Schwartz may be sanctioned for "the citation of non-existent cases to the Court," "the submission to the Court of copies of non-existent judicial opinions," and "the use of a false and fraudulent notarization." Schwartz may also be referred to an attorney grievance committee for additional punishment. Castel wrote that LoDuca may be sanctioned "for the use of a false and fraudulent notarization in his affidavit filed on April 25, 2023." The law firm could be sanctioned for "the citation of non-existent cases to the Court," "the submission to the Court of copies of non-existent judicial opinions annexed to the Affidavit filed on April 25, 2023," and "the use of a false and fraudulent notarization in the affidavit filed on April 25, 2023."

TorrentFreak: Five men behind pirate IPTV service 'Flawless' were sentenced to more than 30 years in prison today, after a private prosecution by the Premier League. A FACT test purchase in 2017 led to the involvement of four territorial police forces, three regional Trading Standards units, and the arrest of service kingpin, Mark Gould, in 2018. In less than two years, Flawless served over 50,000 UK households while generating millions in revenue.

A database containing the details of almost half-a-million RaidForums users has leaked online, a year after the U.S. Department of Justice seized the notorious cybercrime forum. From a report: The leaked database was posted on Exposed, described by security researchers as an up-and-coming forum "wanting to fill the void" left by the recent BreachForums shutdown. An Exposed admin, known as "Impotent," posted the alleged RaidForums user data, which includes the details of 478,000 users, including their usernames, email addresses, hashed passwords and registration dates. "All of the users that were on raidforums may have been infected," the admin's post says. RaidForums had around 550,000 users at the time of its shutdown last year. The admin added that some users' details have been removed from the leak, though it's unclear how many or the reasoning behind this.

Xiaoxing Xi, a Temple University professor who was falsely accused of spying for China, will be able to bring a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation. From a report: A judge at a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Xi on Wednesday, allowing the physicist to move forward with his case against the U.S. government for wrongful prosecution and violating his family's constitutional rights by engaging in unlawful search, seizure and surveillance. The decision comes after FBI agents swarmed Xi's Philadelphia home in 2015, rounded up his family at gunpoint, and arrested him on fraud charges related to economic espionage, before abruptly dropping the charges months afterward.

"I'm very, very glad that we can finally put the government under oath to explain why they decided to do what they did, violating our constitutional rights," Xi said in an exclusive interview with NBC News. "We finally have an opportunity to hold them accountable." The case will now be kicked back to the district court, continuing a long legal battle. Xi, who's represented in part by the American Civil Liberties Union, attempted to bring a suit against the government in 2017, alleging that FBI agents "made knowingly or recklessly false statements" to support their investigation and prosecution. Xi also claimed that his arrest was discriminatory, and that he was targeted due to his ethnicity, much like other scholars of Chinese descent. A district court dismissed his case in 2021, but Xi appealed the decision last year.

"Beginning next Thursday, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell plans to start enforcing the state's automotive right-to-repair law," reports the Boston Globe. "But this week, the world's top automakers asked a federal judge to stop her." The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a car industry trade group, sued to block enforcement of the law almost from the moment it was passed by voter referendum in 2020. Ever since, the law has been tied up in the courtroom of US District Judge Douglas Woodlock. Now the alliance has asked Woodlock to grant a temporary injunction that would stop Campbell from enforcing the law until he issues a final ruling in the case.

Campbell's predecessor, now-Governor Maura Healey, repeatedly refrained from enforcing the law, pending Woodlock's decision. But Healey always reserved the right to reverse this policy if a ruling took too long. In March, Campbell said she would start enforcing the law effective June 1. "The people of Massachusetts deserve the benefit of the law they approved more than two years ago," she said in a document filed with the court.

But the carmakers say that only the federal government has the authority to enact such a law. They claim the law is so poorly drafted that they can't comply with it, and even if they could, compliance would weaken vehicle security, making it easier for cyber criminals to steal digital data about vehicles and their owners. Two carmakers, Kia and Subaru, have tried to comply with the law by switching off the telematic services in their cars. But the carmakers argue that this deprives consumers of the right to use these features, which include emergency roadside assistance that could potentially save lives.

The PyPi registry of open source Python packages "began evaluating ways to reduce the amount of identifying information that it stores," reports the Register, "even before the U.S. Justice Department came asking for data on suspect users."

But now, "the Python community package registry wants developers to understand that it's working to minimize the user data that it stores." The goal is not to be unable to respond to lawful requests for information; rather it's to store only the minimum amount of data necessary so as not to expose users to unnecessary privacy intrusion. Coincidentally, data minimization may prevent organizations from becoming a preferred source of on-demand surveillance: having excessive amounts of information about users invites legal demands, which staff then have to handle...

Mike Fiedler, a member of the PyPI admin team, said in a statement on Friday that the organization's effort to improve user privacy and security dates back to 2020. Since the receipt of the subpoenas in March and April, that effort has been reinvigorated.

Much of the concern focuses on IP address data, which gets stored in conjunction with web log access; user events such as logins; project events including uploads; events associated with recently introduced organizations; and administrative PyPI journal entries. According to Fiedler, PyPI was able to stop storing IP data for journal entries — an append-only transaction log — because these were only exposed to administrators... To obscure IP addresses, PyPI is salting them — adding an arbitrary value — and then hashing them — running the data through a one-way scrambling function that creates a value called a hash. This provides a way to store a reference to potentially identifying data without actually storing raw data... PyPI has been using its CDN provider Fastly to pass along a salted hash of the IP address for requests via a custom header, along with broad GeoIP data (the country and city where the user is located), and is using that instead of the raw IP address. In April, the registry adopted code changes for hashing and salting IP addresses for requests that PyPI handles directly in Warehouse, the web application that implements the official Python package index.

And over the past few days, it has been replacing IP addresses in the PyPI user interface with geolocation data. PyPI still relies on IP address information to identify abuse — the creation of malicious packages, harassments, and so on — but Fiedler says even that is being looked at. "We're thinking about how to manage that without storing IP data, but we're not there yet," he said. Fiedler says the PyPI team will be weighing whether it can remove IP data from event history records after a period of time and whether the service can handle all its requests via CDN.

The judge's opinion noted the plaintiff's counsel had submitted a motion to dismiss "replete with citations to non-existent cases... Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations... The bogus 'Varghese' decision contains internal citations and quotes, which, in turn, are non-existent."

Eugene Volokh's legal blog describes what happened next: Thursday, plaintiff's counsel filed an affidavit in response, explaining that he was relying on the work of another lawyer at his firm, and the other lawyer (who had 30 years of practice experience) also filed an affidavit, explaining that he was relying on ChatGPT... ("The citations and opinions in question were provided by Chat GPT which also provided its legal source and assured the reliability of its content...")
Their affidavit said ChatGPT had "revealed itself to be unreliable," while adding that they had "never utilized ChatGPT as a source for conducting legal research prior to this occurrence and therefore were unaware of the possibility that its content could be false." The affidavit adds that the lawyer "greatly regrets having utilized generative artificial intelligence to supplement the legal research performed herein and will never do so in the future without absolute verification of its authenticity."

To support their position, their affidavit ends with this appendix — a ChatGPT transcript: [Q:] ls varghese a real case

[A:] Yes, Varghese v., China Southern Airlines Co Ltd, 925 F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019) is a real case.

[Q:] What is your source

[A:] I apologize for the confusion earlier. Upon double-checking, I found that the case Varghese v. China Southern Airlines Co. Ltd., 925 F.3d 1339 (11th Cir. 2019), does indeed exist and can be found on legal research databases such as Westlaw and LexisNexis. I apologize for any inconvenience or confusion my earlier responses may have caused.

[Q:] Are the other cases you provided fake

[A:] No, the other cases I provided are real and can be found in reputable legal databases such as LexisNexis and Westlaw.
"Judge Castel appeared to be unimpressed, and yesterday issued an order ordering the law firm and the second lawyer to show cause why they shouldn't be sanctioned."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader davide marney for submitting the story.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times: Snippets of computer code. More than six million pages of emails, Slack messages and other digital records. And a small black notebook, filled with handwritten observations. For months, federal prosecutors building the criminal case against the fallen cryptocurrency executive Sam Bankman-Fried have assembled a vast and unusually varied array of evidence. The documents include crypto transaction logs and encrypted group chats from Mr. Bankman-Fried's collapsed exchange, FTX, as well as strikingly personal reflections recorded by a key witness in the case. The mountain of evidence ranks among the largest ever collected in a white-collar securities fraud case prosecuted by the federal authorities in Manhattan, according to data provided by a person with knowledge of the matter...

The diversity and growing volume of materials in the FTX case underscore the legal challenges facing Mr. Bankman-Fried, 31, who is charged with 13 criminal counts, including accusations that he misappropriated billions of dollars in customer money, defrauded investors and violated campaign finance laws. He has pleaded not guilty. With the trial set for October, prosecutors have gathered evidence ranging from phones and laptops to the contents of Mr. Bankman-Fried's Google accounts, which amounted to 2.5 million pages alone. At a hearing in March, Nicolas Roos, a federal prosecutor investigating FTX, said the government had obtained a laptop crammed with so much information that the F.B.I.'s technicians were struggling to decipher all of it. "It is a massive amount to sift through, and sometimes you can find incredibly useful information," said Moira Penza, a former federal prosecutor who's now in private practice. "It is a real challenge...."

Many of FTX's corporate records, including emails, Slack messages and transaction logs, were held by Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm that took control of the exchange after it declared bankruptcy... In a January court filing, Sullivan & Cromwell displayed an excerpt from FTX's underlying code base, showing a feature that allowed Alameda to borrow virtually unlimited amounts of money from the exchange.

Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike shared this report from CBS News: Amid growing concerns of security risks to members of Congress, over 50 senators have been issued satellite phones for emergency communication, people familiar with the measures told CBS News... [Senate Sergeant at Arms] Gibson said satellite communication is being deployed "to ensure a redundant and secure means of communication during a disruptive event." Gibson said the phones are a security backstop in the case of an emergency that "takes out communications" in part of America.

Google has been ordered to pay Sonos $32.5 million after a jury verdict found that Google's smart speakers and media players infringed on one of Sonos' patents. The Verge reports: The legal battle started in 2020 when Sonos accused Google of copying its patented multiroom audio technology after the companies partnered in 2013. Sonos went on to win its case at the US International Trade Commission, resulting in a limited import ban on some of the Google devices in question. Google has also had to pull some features from its lineup of smart speakers and smart displays.

Last August, Google sued Sonos over allegations that the audio company infringed on Google's smart speakers and voice control technology. This most recent trial started earlier this month, with Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda telling Reuters at the time that the case pertains to "some very specific features that are not commonly used" and that Sonos "mischaracterized our partnership and technology." Neither Google nor Sonos immediately responded to The Verge's request for comment.

Sonos didn't come out of the case completely victorious, however, as the jury decided that Google's Home app didn't infringe on a separate patent filed by Sonos. The judge also told jurors to "disregard a $90 million damages estimate from a Sonos expert witness, saying he had decided that some of the evidence provided was inadmissible," Law360 reports.

A U.S. judge has approved Apple's $50 million class-action settlement resolving consumer claims over certain defective MacBook keyboards, in a ruling that spurned challenges to the deal. From a report: U.S. District Judge Edward Davila in San Jose, California, federal court in his ruling called the settlement "fair, adequate and reasonable." Eleven consumers from New York, Florida, California, Michigan and several other states were the lead plaintiffs in the national class action alleging consumer protection and warranty claims. The lawsuit accused Apple of failing to provide sufficient repairs or troubleshooting help for certain MacBook "butterfly" keyboards made between 2015 and 2019.

Britain's competition watchdog on Friday said social media giant Meta had offered to limit its use of other businesses' advertising data for its Facebook Marketplace service to address the regulator's competition concerns. From a report: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was minded to accept the commitments, which include advertisers being able to opt out of allowing their data to be used to improve the Facebook Marketplace classified ads platform. CMA executive director of enforcement Michael Grenfell said: "Reducing the risk of Meta unfairly exploiting the data of businesses who advertise on its platform for its own competitive advantage could help many UK businesses who advertise there. We are now consulting on these commitments which we believe, at this stage, will address our concerns."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Bcrypt turns 25 this year, and Niels Provos, one of its coinventors, says that looking back, the algorithm has always had good energy, thanks to its open source availability and the technical characteristics that have fueled its longevity. Provos spoke to WIRED about a retrospective on the algorithm that he published this week in Usenix ;login:. Like so many digital workhorses, though, there are now more robust and secure alternatives to bcrypt, including the hashing algorithms known as scrypt and Argon2. Provos himself says that the quarter-century milestone is plenty for bcrypt and that he hopes it will lose popularity before celebrating another major birthday.

A version of bcrypt first shipped with the open source operating system OpenBSD 2.1 in June 1997. At the time, the United States still imposed stringent export limits on cryptography. But Provos, who grew up in Germany, worked on its development while he was still living and studying there. "One thing I found so surprising was how popular it became," he says. "I think in part it's probably because it was actually solving a problem that was real, but also because it was open source and not encumbered by any export restrictions. And then everybody ended up doing their own implementations in all these other languages. So these days, if you are faced with wanting to do password hashing, bcrypt is going to be available in every language that you could possibly operate in. But the other thing that I find interesting is that it's even still relevant 25 years later. That is just crazy."

Provos developed bcrypt with David Mazieres, a systems security professor at Stanford University who was studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and Provos collaborated on bcrypt. The two met through the open source community and were working on OpenBSD. [...] Password security is always lagging, though, and both Provos and Mazieres expressed disbelief and disappointment that the state of passwords broadly has not evolved in decades. Even new schemes like passkeys are only just beginning to emerge. "Bcrypt should have been superseded already," Provos says. "It's surprising how much reliance we still have on passwords. If you had asked me 25 years ago, I would not have guessed that."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The U.S. Supreme Court Court on Thursday significantly curtailed the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the nation's wetlands and waterways. It was the court's second decision in a year limiting the ability of the agency to enact anti-pollution regulations and combat climate change. The challenge to the regulations was brought by Michael and Chantell Sackett, who bought property to build their dream house about 500 feet away from Idaho's Scenic Priest Lake, a 19-mile stretch of clear water that is fed by mountain streams and bordered by state and national parkland. Three days after the Sacketts started excavating their property, the EPA stopped work on the project because the couple had failed to get a permit for disturbing the wetlands on their land. Now a conservative Supreme Court majority has used the Sackett's case to roll back longstanding rules adopted to carry out the 51-year-old Clean Water Act. While the nine justices agreed that the Sacketts should prevail, they divided 5-to-4 as to how far to go in limiting the EPA's authority.

Writing for the court majority (PDF), Justice Samuel Alito said that the navigable waters of the United States regulated by the EPA under the statute do not include many previously regulated wetlands. Rather, he said, the CWA extends to only streams, oceans, rivers and lakes, and those wetlands with a "continuous surface connection to those bodies." Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by the court's three liberal members, disputed Alito's reading of the statute, noting that since 1977 when the CWA was amended to include adjacent wetlands, eight consecutive presidential administrations, Republican and Democratic, have interpreted the law to cover wetlands that the court has now excluded. Kavanaugh said that by narrowing the act to cover only adjoining wetlands, the court's new test will have quote "significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States." In addition to joining Kavanaugh's opinion, the court's liberals, signed on to a separate opinion by Justice Elena Kagan. Pointing to the air and water pollution cases, she accused the majority of appointing itself instead of Congress as the national policymaker on the environment. President Biden, in a statement, called the decision "disappointing." It "upends the legal framework that has protected America's waters for decades," he said. "It also defies the science that confirms the critical role of wetlands in safeguarding our nation's streams, rivers, and lakes from chemicals and pollutants that harm the health and wellbeing of children, families, and communities."

"I don't think its an overstatement to say its catastrophic for the Clean Water act," said Jim Murphy of the National Wildlife Federation. Wetlands play an "enormous role in protecting the nation's water," he said. "They're really the kidneys of water systems and they're also the sponges. They absorb a lot of water on the landscape. So they're very important water features and they're very important to the quality of the water that we drink, swim, fish, boat and recreate in."

Invasive spyware capable of reading a smartphone's messages and listening to calls was found on the phones of at least 12 Armenian journalists, politicians and civil society members, according to a report published Thursday by a group of nonprofit organizations. From a report: The spyware, called Pegasus and made by the Israeli company NSO, had previously been found on the phones of thousands of people around the world, leading to U.S. sanctions in 2021 and a lawsuit from Apple. But researchers said their most recent findings are unique -- they believe it is the first time that the technology has been weaponized in an armed conflict between countries.

Armenia has intermittently battled its neighbor Azerbaijan for decades. In 2020, a cease-fire was broken in the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, leaving thousands dead. Since then, the two countries have been mired in a sporadic shooting war which has killed dozens more. The report, a collaboration among the international internet rights group Access Now, Amnesty International and the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, calls for "an immediate moratorium" on the sale and transfer of spyware technology. NSO is the most notorious mercenary spyware developer in the world. It creates powerful programs like Pegasus, which can hack smartphones to reveal information such as contacts, calls and location.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has signed a groundbreaking right-to-repair law, which will come into effect on July 1, 2024. The Verge reports: The rules, part of an omnibus appropriations bill, require electronics manufacturers to let independent repair shops and consumers buy the parts and tools necessary to repair their own equipment. But the rules don't apply to some notable categories, including farm equipment, game consoles, medical devices, and motor vehicles.

The new Minnesota rules take effect July 1st, 2024, and they cover products sold on or after July 1st, 2021. If manufacturers sell a product in the state, they must offer residents the equipment to repair it on "fair and reasonable" terms within 60 days, and they must offer documentation for performing repairs and service free of charge. Failure to do so will violate Minnesota's Deceptive Trade Practices statute, opening manufacturers up to penalties from the attorney general. "This is the biggest right to repair win to date," said Nathan Proctor, who leads the right to repair initiative at public interest group PIRG, in a statement. PIRG notes that Minnesota is the first state to offer right-to-repair protections for home appliances and commercial and educational computing systems, which were carved out of New York's law. In a blog post, repair site iFixit focused on the free documentation element. "With online documentation, people everywhere in the world -- not just in Minnesota -- will benefit from this," said iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens.