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The Register's Simon Sharwood reports: Japan's National Consumer Affairs Center on Wednesday suggested citizens start "digital end of life planning" and offered tips on how to do it. The Center's somewhat maudlin advice is motivated by recent incidents in which citizens struggled to cancel subscriptions their loved ones signed up for before their demise, because they didn't know their usernames or passwords. The resulting...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A federal court yesterday ruled against parents who sued a Massachusetts school district for punishing their son who used an artificial intelligence tool to complete an assignment. Dale and Jennifer Harris sued Hingham High School officials and the School Committee and sought a preliminary injunction requiring the school to change their son's grade and expunge...

According to Business Insider (paywalled), Microsoft's Copilot tool inadvertently let customers access sensitive information, such as CEO emails and HR documents. Now, Microsoft is working to fix the situation, deploying new tools and a guide to address the privacy concerns. The story was highlighted by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. From the report: These updates are designed "to identify and mitigate oversharing and ongoing governance...

An anonymous reader shares a report: People are using Spotify playlist and podcast descriptions to distribute spam, malware, pirated software and cheat codes for video games. Cybersecurity researcher Karol Paciorek posted an example of this: A Spotify playlist titled "*Sony Vegas Pro*13 C-r-a-c-k Free Download 2024 m-y-s-o-f-t-w-a-r-e-f-r-e-e.com" acts as a free advertisement for piracy website m-y-s-o-f-t-w-a-r-e-f-r-e-e[dot]com, which hosts malicious software. "Cybercriminals exploit Spotify for...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, which are suing OpenAI for allegedly scraping their works to train its AI models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted data potentially relevant to the case. Earlier this fall, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so that counsel for The Times and Daily News could perform searches...

In a 23-page document (PDF) filed late Wednesday, U.S. regulators asked a federal judge to break up Google after a court found the tech giant of maintaining an abusive monopoly through its dominant search engine. As punishment, the DOJ calls for a sale of Google's Chrome browser and restrictions to prevent Android from favoring its own search engine. The Associated Press reports: Although regulators...

A new study reveals that many users, particularly students and Redditors, view Z-Library as a vital resource for overcoming economic barriers to education, reflecting a "Robin Hood" mentality that prioritizes access to knowledge over copyright concerns. TorrentFreak reports: The research looks at the motivations of two groups; Reddit users and Chinese postgraduate students. Despite the vast differences between these groups, their views on Z-Library...

The Verge's Richard Lawler reports: Strava recently informed its users and partners that new terms for its API restrict the data that third-party apps can show, refrain from replicating Strava's look, and place a ban on using data "for any model training related to artificial intelligence, machine learning or similar applications." The policy is effective as of November 11th, even though Strava's own post...

Half of young Norwegians find online piracy acceptable when streaming services are too expensive, according to a new government survey released this week. The Ipsos poll of 1,411 respondents found that 32% of all Norwegians justify using pirate sites to save money, with acceptance rising to 50% among those under 30. The rates increase further when specifically asked about pirating due to high streaming...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The US Patent and Trademark Office banned the use of generative artificial intelligence for any purpose last year, citing security concerns with the technology as well as the propensity of some tools to exhibit "bias, unpredictability, and malicious behavior," according to an April 2023 internal guidance memo obtained by WIRED through a public records request. Jamie Holcombe, the...

One of India's largest news agencies, Asian News International, has sued OpenAI in a case that could set a precedent for how AI companies use copyrighted news content in the world's most populous nation. From a report: Asian News International filed a 287-page lawsuit in the Delhi High Court on Monday, alleging the AI company illegally used its content to train its AI models...

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. Justice Department wants Google to sell off its Chrome browser as part of its ongoing search monopoly case. The recommendations will be made official on Wednesday. 9to5Google reports: At the top of the list is having Google sell Chrome "because it represents a key access point through which many people use its search engine." There are many questions about...

India's competition watchdog has ordered WhatsApp to stop sharing user data with other Meta units for advertising purposes for five years and also levied a fine of $25.4 million for antitrust violations related to WhatsApp's controversial 2021 privacy policy. From a report: The Competition Commission of India, which began the investigation in 2021, found that WhatsApp's "take-it-or-leave-it" privacy update constituted an abuse of Meta's...

The Belgian region of Flanders is rolling out personal data "pods" to 7 million citizens in a trial of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee's vision for user-controlled data privacy. Five Belgian hospitals have begun storing patient visit information in the data pods, developed by Berners-Lee's startup Inrupt over the past five years. The system aims to help compliance with European privacy regulations by...

On a small network of islands north of Seattle, Washington, San Juan County just completed its first full year of 32-hour workweeks, reports CNN. And Tuesday the county released a report touting "a host of positive outcomes — from recruiting to retention to employee happiness — and a cost savings of more than $975,000 compared to what the county would have paid if it...

"The Pentagon's latest report on UFOs has revealed hundreds of new reports of unidentified and unexplained aerial phenomena," reports the Associated Press, "but no indications suggesting an extraterrestrial origin. "The review includes hundreds of cases of misidentified balloons, birds and satellites as well as some that defy easy explanation, such as a near-miss between a commercial airliner and a mysterious object off the coast...

jojowombl shares a report from The Guardian: Legal documents released in ongoing US litigation between NSO Group and WhatsApp have revealed for the first time that the Israeli cyberweapons maker -- and not its government customers -- is the party that "installs and extracts" information from mobile phones targeted by the company's hacking software. The new details were contained in sworn depositions from NSO...

Chinese hackers, reportedly linked to a Chinese intelligence agency, breached T-Mobile as part of a broader cyber-espionage campaign targeting telecom companies to spy on high-value intelligence targets. "T-Mobile is closely monitoring this industry-wide attack, and at this time, T-Mobile systems and data have not been impacted in any significant way, and we have no evidence of impacts to customer information," a company spokesperson told...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: The Australian government plans to enact laws requiring big tech firms to protect its citizens online, the latest move by the center-left Labor administration to crack down on social media including through age limits and curbs on misinformation. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland announced the government's plan for a legislated Digital Duty of Care in Australia on...

ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports: [...] At KubeCon North America 2024 this week, CNCF executive director Priyanka Sharma said in her keynote, "Patent trolls are not contributors or even adopters in our ecosystem. Instead, they prey on cloud-native adopters by abusing the legal system. We are here to tell the world that these patent trolls don't stand a chance because CNCF is uniting the ecosystem...

quonset shares a report from CNN: Between August 2022 and January 2024, hundreds of swatting calls were made across the country targeting religious institutions, government offices, schools, and random people. Authorities were finally able to track down the criminal, Alan Fillon, who entered the plea to four counts of making interstate threats to injure the person of another, the US Attorney's Office for the...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Data Center Dynamics: The Japanese government is planning to invest approximately $65 billion to support the country's semiconductor and AI industries. The initiative, which will run until the end of the decade, is expected to generate ~$104 billion in public and private investment during the period. According to a report from Reuters, this new round of funding...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: U.K. consumer rights group 'Which?' is filing a legal claim against Apple under competition law on behalf of some 40 million users of iCloud, its cloud storage service. The collective proceeding lawsuit, which is seeking 3 billion pounds in compensation damages (around $3.8 billion at current exchange rates), alleges that Apple has broken competition rules by...

During a public joint hearing today titled "Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Exposing the Truth," four experts testified that the U.S. is running secret UAP programs, including crash retrieval and reverse-engineering programs for advanced nonhuman technology. Although the Pentagon maintains there's no evidence of alien spacecraft, witnesses like Luis Elizondo and Michael Gold argue that UAPs represent an intelligence enigma and call for open, stigma-free study...