Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm shares a blog post from Stockfish announcing a lawsuit against ChessBase: The Stockfish project strongly believes in free and open-source software and data. Collaboration is what made this engine the strongest chess engine in the world. We license our software using the GNU General Public License, Version 3 (GPL) with the intent to guarantee all chess enthusiasts the freedom to use, share and change all versions of the program. Unfortunately, not everybody shares this vision of openness. We have come to realize that ChessBase concealed from their customers Stockfish as the true origin of key parts of their products (see also earlier blog posts by us and the joint Lichess, Leela Chess Zero, and Stockfish teams). Indeed, few customers know they obtained a modified version of Stockfish when they paid for Fat Fritz 2 or Houdini 6 -- both Stockfish derivatives -- and they thus have good reason to be upset. [ChessBase released Fat Fritz 2, described on their website as the "new number 1" chess engine "with a massive new neural network, trained by Albert Silver with the original Fat Fritz." They advertise Fat Fritz 2 as using novel strong ideas compared to existing chess engines, but in reality Fat Fritz 2 is just Stockfish with a different neural network and minimal changes that are neither innovative nor appear to make the engine stronger.] ChessBase repeatedly violated central obligations of the GPL, which ensures that the user of the software is informed of their rights. These rights are explicit in the license and include access to the corresponding sources, and the right to reproduce, modify and distribute GPLed programs royalty-free.

In the past four months, we, supported by a certified copyright and media law attorney in Germany, went through a long process to enforce our license. Even though we had our first successes, leading to a recall of the Fat Fritz 2 DVD and the termination of the sales of Houdini 6, we were unable to finalize our dispute out of court. Due to Chessbase's repeated license violations, leading developers of Stockfish have terminated their GPL license with ChessBase permanently. However, ChessBase is ignoring the fact that they no longer have the right to distribute Stockfish, modified or unmodified, as part of their products. Thus, to enforce the consequences of the license termination, we have filed a lawsuit. This lawsuit is broadly supported by the team of maintainers and developers of Stockfish. We believe we have the evidence, the financial means and the determination to bring this lawsuit to a successful end. We will provide an update to this statement once significant progress has been made.

Malaysian authorities seized 1,069 bitcoin mining rigs, laid them out in a parking lot at police headquarters, and used a steamroller to crush them, as part of a joint operation between law enforcement in the city of Miri and electric utility Sarawak Energy. CNBC reports: Assistant Commissioner of Police Hakemal Hawari told CNBC the crackdown came after miners allegedly stole $2 million worth of electricity siphoned from Sarawak Energy power lines. A video of the event posted last week by local Sarawak news outlet Dayak Daily has since gone viral on social media.

Acting on a tip, authorities on the island of Borneo confiscated the rigs in six separate raids between February and April. In total, police destroyed about $1.26 million of mining equipment. Police opted to crush the mining gear rather than sell it, in accordance with a court order. Other countries, like China, have taken a different route, reportedly auctioning off seized rigs. Hawari said that electricity theft by bitcoin miners led to three houses burning down in the city. The Miri police chief told CNBC that there are no other active mining operations underway currently. The report notes that crypto mining is not illegal in Malaysia, although "there are stringent laws around power use."

"The Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance estimates that Malaysia accounts for 3.44% of all the world's bitcoin miners, placing it in the top ten mining destinations on the planet."

Delta Air Lines was sued for more than $1 billion by one of its own pilots, who claims he developed a text-messaging app for flight crews that the airline stole and used as the basis for its own app. Bloomberg reports: Captain Craig Alexander sued Atlanta-based Delta for trade-secrets theft in Georgia state court on Monday. He claims he spent $100,000 of his own money to develop his QrewLive app, which he pitched to the airline as a way to address crew communication snafus after disrupted flights. Delta turned him down but went on to launch its own identical tool, he claims. Delta "stole like a thief in the night" and defrauded its own loyal employee, Keenan Nix, a lawyer for Alexander, said Wednesday in an interview. He said Alexander, an 11-year veteran at the airline, was flying a Delta 757 "as we speak."

A five-hour power outage that resulted in hundreds of flight cancellations in August 2016 cost Delta more than $150 million. The pilot said in the suit he emailed Chief Executive Officer Ed Bastian at the time saying "he had a 'solution.'" Bastian allegedly responded promptly and referred Alexander to the company's new chief information officer. Bastian and the CIO, Rahul Samant, are both named in the suit, along with four other Delta executives. Alexander claims he had several positive meetings with the airline in 2015 and 2016 in which executives made clear they were interested in acquiring his app. But Delta eventually cut off discussions and then launched its own crew app in April 2018, called Flight Family Communications. "'FFC' is a carbon copy, knock-off of the role-based text messaging component of Craig's proprietary QrewLive communications platform," Alexander said in his suit.

The pilot noted in his suit that Bastian and Samant have both bragged to investors that the app has smoothed operations. In describing the damages he's seeking, Alexander said the value of the technology, "based solely upon operational cost savings to Delta, conservatively exceeds $1 billion." Alexander is also seeking punitive damages against Delta. "To add insult to theft and injury, Captain Craig Alexander must use his stolen QrewLive text messaging platform every day while he works for Delta," the suit claims. "Each time he looks at the FFC app, he is painfully reminded that Delta stole his proprietary trade secrets, used them to Delta's enormous financial benefit." "While we take the allegations specified in Mr. Alexander's complaint seriously, they are not an accurate or fair description of Delta's development of its internal crew messaging platform," said Morgan Durrant, a Delta spokesperson.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) yesterday filed a complaint against Amazon over the sale of hundreds of thousands of hazardous products, including carbon monoxide detectors that fail to detect carbon monoxide, hair dryers without required protection from shock and electrocution, and flammable sleepwear meant for children. The CPSC said it sued Amazon to "force [the] recall" of the dangerous products. While Amazon has halted sales of most of them already and issued refunds, the CPSC said it isn't satisfied with how Amazon notified customers and said the industry giant must do more to ensure that the faulty products are destroyed. The dangerous products were offered by third parties using the "Fulfilled by Amazon" (FBA) program, in which Amazon stores products in its warehouses, ships them to customers, and takes a sizable cut from the proceeds. The CPSC's administrative complaint alleges that Amazon hasn't taken enough responsibility for dangerous third-party products that it ships via FBA.

The complaint didn't mention any specific incidents of injury but said the evidence supporting the charges includes "lawsuits concerning incidents or injuries involving various consumer products identified in the Complaint." It also said that CPSC staff tested the products and found that they don't meet safety requirements. Products that don't meet these requirements pose a substantial risk of injury or death to consumers, the agency said. The CPSC said its complaint "seeks to force Amazon, as a distributor of the products, to stop selling these products, work with CPSC staff on a recall of the products, and to directly notify consumers who purchased them about the recall and offer them a full refund." In a statement provided to Ars, Amazon said it has already removed the "vast majority" of the products from its online store, notified customers, and provided refunds. Amazon alleged that the CPSC hasn't provided enough information about the remaining products. Amazon's full statement reads: "Customer safety is a top priority and we take prompt action to protect customers when we are aware of a safety concern. As the CPSC's own complaint acknowledges, for the vast majority of the products in question, Amazon already immediately removed the products from our store, notified customers about potential safety concerns, advised customers to destroy the products, and provided customers with full refunds. For the remaining few products in question, the CPSC did not provide Amazon with enough information for us to take action and despite our requests, CPSC has remained unresponsive. Amazon has an industry-leading recalls program and we have further offered to expand our capabilities to handle recalls for all products sold in our store, regardless of whether those products were sold or fulfilled by Amazon or third-party sellers. We are unclear as to why the CPSC has rejected that offer or why they have filed a complaint seeking to force us to take actions almost entirely duplicative of those we've already taken."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Polygon: Sega's Key Master arcade game is causing problems for the company once again. A new lawsuit alleges that Key Master is intentionally rigged against players. It's marketed as a game of skill, but players claim machines bar against awarding successful runs, making Key Master more of a chance-based game. Marcelo Muto filed the lawsuit on Monday in a California court. It's a proposed class action lawsuit looking for $5 million in damages to be distributed amongst wronged consumers. With Sega, Play It! Amusements (which is owned by Sega and now called Sega Amusements) and Komuse America (which co-manufactures Key Master) are named in the suit.

Key Master has been the target of multiple court cases in the past, dating back to at least 2013. This 2021 lawsuit, as well as the others, claims these machines are rigged only to allow players to win prizes at certain times -- specifically, at intervals determined by player losses. You've probably seen Key Master machines in malls or arcades, touting prizes like iPads, earbuds, and other pricey electronics. To play, you must navigate a key towards a specific keyhole by stopping the automatic movement by hitting a button. If the key goes in, you win the prize. The problem, according to the lawsuit, is that these machines are programmed to only allow players the ability to win after a certain number of player failures. If the machine is not ready to award a prize, it's allegedly programmed to overshoot the keyhole -- even if the player hit the button at the correct time -- and force the player to lose.

The problem here is that Key Master isn't marketed as a game of chance. It's portrayed as "a simple game of pure skill with a straight-forward directive," lawyers said. However, lawyers said that the deception behind the machine -- that it won't award players until certain settings are met -- is laid out in the game's manual, which was provided alongside the lawsuit as evidence. In the manual, according to screenshots, the Key Master machine "will not reward a prize until the number of player attempts reaches the threshold of attempts set by [the] operator." Lawyers for Muto said the default setting is 700, but that each machine can be programmed by individual operators. "Key Master is no longer listed on the Sega Amusements website; instead, it's been re-named Prize Locker," adds Polygon. "It's the same design, but it's 100% skill-based, Sega said on the website."

"In the lawsuit, Muto's lawyers said Prize Locker and the conversion kit (which 'allows an operator of a Key Master game to convert the game' to a skill-based one) are offered because Sega itself has realized that 'many areas of the world aren't able to benefit from this outstanding category [of arcade game] due to local or state regulations prohibiting their operation.' Lawyers alleged that this is Sega 'tacitly conced[ing] that Key Master is rigged.'"

Facebook filed a petition Wednesday to have Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan recused from the ongoing antitrust lawsuit the agency brought against the company. From a report: Facebook argued in its petition that Khan "has consistently made public statements" accusing the company of bad conduct that constitutes a violation of antitrust law. The company said her past work has made clear Khan has already made up her mind on Facebook's liability in the pending antitrust case, which should be grounds for recusal. The FTC must decide in the coming weeks whether to file an amended complaint in its antitrust case against Facebook in federal court after a judge dismissed its initial claims. Alternatively, the FTC could decide to try the case internally before its administrative law judge. Facebook's petition follows a similar move by Amazon, which sought Khan's recusal from antitrust probes into its business based on her past criticism of its power. Khan rose to scholarly fame after publishing "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" in the Yale Law Journal while a student in 2017.

Republicans are questioning Amazon's relationship with the Pentagon after newly released emails show that defense officials praised tech executives vying for a $10 billion contract during the Trump administration. The Verge reports: On Tuesday, The New York Times reported on previously unreleased emails that show Pentagon officials applauding Amazon executives while the company sought out a lucrative defense contract between 2017 and 2018. The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure project, or JEDI, set out to find a tech company that would move the Defense Department's computer networks over to the cloud. In one instance, the Times reports that former Trump Defense Secretary Jim Mattis traveled to Silicon Valley to meet with executives from companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google in 2017. During this trip, Mattis was made "uncomfortable" while Amazon representatives aggressively pitched their cloud-computing products to him. A former Mattis adviser, Sally Donnelly, also referred to Bezos as "the genius of our age." Donnelly, who later sent Mattis a list of reasons he should meet with Bezos, had previously worked at a consulting firm where her clients included Amazon.

"This is exactly what we were concerned about, and it contradicts Amazon's insistence that there is nothing to see here," Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said in a joint statement Tuesday. "It's become more and more clear that Amazon used its market power and paid-for connections to circumvent ethical boundaries and avoid competition in an attempt to win this contract." Microsoft won the multibillion-dollar contract in 2019 after a closely watched bidding fight between Amazon. But earlier this month, the Defense Department announced that it would cancel its contract amid an ongoing legal battle alleging that Trump wrongfully interfered in the bidding process. In canceling the prior contract, Amazon is given a second chance to win the $10 billion deal. But Republicans in Washington are calling for the company to testify regarding its Pentagon relationships in light of the newly released emails.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: u/SaveVideo was a Reddit video downloader bot that helped users download and save videos from Reddit. The service was used by millions of people but according to its operator has now shut down following an ultimatum from Reddit. "The gods of Reddit have decided and I am obliged to obey or risk a lawsuit," SaveVideo announced yesterday. 'SaveVideo' (which operates from the RedditSave.com domain) is a decently sized operation by any standards. SimilarWeb stats indicate that since the start of the year, RedditSave.com has attracted a steady 10 million visitors per month. But now, however, the show is over. "It has been a great pleasure to serve you all in the past few months. However, as they say, All good things must come to an end," its operator writes. "The gods of reddit have reached out to us. They do not want us to continue this service any longer."

The operator of the bot service says they have complied and as a result, the SaveVideo and RedditSave bots have been shut down. What is more surprising is that this doesn't appear to have been a simple request from Reddit but one that was supported by the threat of legal action. "The gods of reddit have decided and I am obliged to obey or risk a lawsuit," the bots' operator explains. Most Reddit users commenting on the shutdown are taking the stance that it is Reddit's admins who have threatened legal action but the announcement certainly leaves room for other scenarios too, including repeated complaints from copyright holders. [...] Reddit has no official comment at this stage but has informed TorrentFreak that it was "not responsible for whatever notice or litigation threat" received by SaveVideo. Update: SaveVideo's operator says the downloader bot is back. "Reddit has confirmed to me that the notice did not originate from them," they added. "With that being said, I have restored all the bot/website's services back to normal." We'll see how long this lasts...

A notorious group of cybercriminals whose operations were almost totally dismantled last year seems to be back in business -- in yet another example of the seemingly intractable nature of cybercrime. Gizmodo reports: The Russian-speaking group known as "Trickbot" (which is also the name of the malware that they're responsible for creating and distributing), has built up its infrastructure and seems to be preparing for some nefarious new campaign, The Daily Beast first reported. The group, which has been connected to ransomware attacks and widespread theft of financial information, is an outgrowth of an older, Russia-based cybercrime group called "Dyre." After Dyre was initially broken up by Russian authorities back in 2015, the remaining members regrouped, creating new malware tools and working to employ them in even more expansive criminal enterprises. Trickbot, which today operates out of numerous places in Eastern Europe -- including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and others -- is perhaps best known for running one of the world's largest botnets. Botnets are large networks of "zombie" devices -- computers that have been infected with special kinds of malware that allow them to be collectively controlled by a hacker, typically for malicious purposes. In Trickbot's case, the group has used its million-plus botnet for an assortment of sordid activities, including helping to launch ransomware attacks throughout the world.

Last fall, the Pentagon's Cyber Command attempted to debilitate Trickbot, fearing that hackers connected to the group might attempt to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. CYBERCOM launched a series of "coordinated attacks" against Trickbot's servers, ultimately succeeding in disrupting its operations. However, it was clear that federal officials did not expect their efforts to be a long-term deterrent, with anonymous sources telling the Washington Post that the action was "not expected to permanently dismantle the network." Around the same time, Microsoft launched its own campaign that was also targeted at dismantling the group. The company tracked and analyzed the servers that were involved in operating the botnet, subsequently garnering a court order that allowed them to disable the IP addresses connected to those servers. Microsoft's operation even involved working together with ISPs to reportedly go "door to door" in Latin America, where they helped to replace routers that had been compromised by the criminal group. However, as is often the case with cybercrime, few of the culprits behind the malware's distribution were ever tracked down or faced charges.

Indeed, a recent report from security firm Fortinet seems to show that the group has allegedly helped create a new strain of ransomware, dubbed "Diavol." On top of this, another report from BitDefender shows that the group has built back up its infrastructure and that it has recently been seen gearing up for new attacks and malicious activity, with the firm ultimately noting that "Trickbot shows no sign of slowing down."

Alphabet unit Google will seek to overturn a record 4.34-billion-euro ($5.15 billion) EU antitrust fine at a five-day hearing in September at Europe's second-highest court, Reuters reported Monday, citing people familiar with the matter said. From the report: The European Commission in its 2018 decision said Google had used its popular Android mobile operating system to thwart rivals, an anti-competitive practice dating from 2011. Android, used by device makers for free, is found on about 80% of the world's smartphones. The case is the most important of the EU's three cases against Google because of Android's market power. Google has racked up more than 8 billion euros in EU antitrust fines in the last decade.

A Swedish man wanted by the United States for defrauding over 3,500 victims of more than $16 million has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for securities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering, the Department of Justice said Thursday. CNBC reports: The DOJ says 47-year-old Roger Nils-Jonas Karlsson ran an investment fraud scheme from 2011 until his arrest in Thailand in June 2019. He pleaded guilty in March. According to court documents, Karlsson encouraged victims to buy shares in a scheme called "Eastern Metal Securities" using cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, promising "astronomical returns" tied to the price of gold. The funds paid by these victims were instead directed to Karlsson's personal bank accounts, where the money was put toward expensive homes, a racehorse, and a resort in Thailand. Karlsson has been ordered to forfeit this Thai resort and various other properties and accounts as part of the sentence.

Karlsson maintained the ruse, in part, by offering updates and account statements to victims. He also explained delayed payouts by falsely claiming to be working with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Karlsson's fraud targeted financially insecure investors, and the U.S. is seeking restitution on behalf of those victims. In addition to having to pay back $16,263,820, a restitution order is expected to be entered by the court within 90 days.

Ministers back down after hundreds of government offices insist banishing fax would be impossible. From a report: Most bureaucrats might be expected to welcome the chance to be freed from the tyranny of the fax machine. But in Japan, government plans to send the must-have item of 1980s office equipment the way of telex have in effect been scrapped after they encountered resistance from "faxophile" officials. A cabinet body that promotes administrative reform said in June it had decided to abolish the use of fax machines "as a rule" by the end of the month and switch to emails at ministries and agencies in the Tokyo district of Kasumigaseki, Japan's bureaucratic nerve centre. The move would enable more people to work from home, it said, citing concerns that too many people were still going to the office during the coronavirus pandemic to send and receive faxes. Exceptions would be made for disaster response and interactions with the public and businesses that had traditionally depended on faxes. Instead of embracing the digital age, however, hundreds of government offices mounted a defence of the much-maligned machine, insisting that banishing them would be "impossible," according to the Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper.

The backlash has forced the government to abandon its mission to turn officialdom into a digital-only operation, the newspaper said on Wednesday. Members of the resistance said there were concerns over the security of sensitive information and "anxiety over the communication environment" if, as the government had requested, they switched exclusively to email. Japanese ministries and agencies use faxes when handling highly confidential information, including court procedures and police work, and the Hokkaido Shimbun said there were fears that exclusively online communication would result in security lapses. "Although many ministries and agencies may have stopped using fax machines, I can't say with pride that we managed to get rid of most of them," an official at the cabinet body told the newspaper.

Epic's legal spat with Apple over App Store practices will spill over to Australia. From a report: After a series of hearings and trials that stretched nearly nine months, Apple and Epic made their final pitches to a US District Court in California on May 24. Both companies now await Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers' decision, but that doesn't mean the litigation is over. After a successful appeal Thursday by Epic, the case will soon be brought to an Australian court. At the center of the legal action is Apple's App Store. Epic's ultrapopular Fortnite was kicked off the iOS App Store in August after Epic built a direct payment system into the game that would allow it to bypass Apple's 30% fee for App Store purchases. Epic sued Apple immediately, accusing the company of anticompetitive practice. Epic argues that the App Store is monopolistic, that developers hoping to get their apps to customers have no choice but to go through the App Store -- and pay the fees associated with that. Apple calls Epic's lawsuit a marketing stunt and argues that the App Store gives developers access to a huge audience of iPhone and iPad users.

In November, Epic brought the issue to Australia, initiating proceedings against Apple by arguing that the iPhone-maker's practices contravene Australia's Competition and Consumer Act. Apple was able to appeal against the suit in April, arguing that the case should be settled in the US District Court. Epic quickly counter-appealed, arguing that public policy concerns justify a separate trial. Australia's Federal Court ruled in favor of Epic on Thursday. "This is a positive step forward for Australian consumers and developers who are entitled to fair access and competitive pricing across mobile app stores," an Epic spokesperson said. "We look forward to continuing our fight for increased competition in app distribution and payment processing in Australia and around the world."

Google used anticompetitive practices in an attempt to "preemptively quash" Samsung's Galaxy Store, and prevent it from becoming a viable competitor to its own Play Store. From a report: That's according to an antitrust lawsuit filed by a coalition of three dozen state attorney general, which accuses Google of illegally attempting to control app distribution on Android. The suit also alleges Google paid off app developers to stop them circumventing its store. The allegations challenge one of Google's core defenses of its policies, which is that unlike Apple's iOS rules, Android allows both competing app stores and side-loading apps directly. The lawsuit is effectively claiming that this openness is a facade, because while customers technically have the choice of where to get their apps from, Google's business practices have prevented a viable app store competitor from emerging.

"Google felt deeply threatened when Samsung began to revamp its own app store, the Samsung Galaxy Store," the suit says, and describes Google's approach to the competing store as "a threat it needed to preemptively quash." The suit outlines a range of tactics Google allegedly used to prevent Samsung's store from becoming a viable competitor. It claims Google used revenue share agreements with Android phone manufacturers that "outright prohibited" pre-installing some other app stores, and that it made "a direct attempt to pay Samsung to abandon relationships with top developers and scale back competition through the Samsung Galaxy Store."

The attorneys general of 36 states and Washington, D.C., sued Google "alleging that the company illegally abused its power over developers that distribute apps through the Google Play store on mobile devices," according to Bloomberg. From the report: State attorneys general are targeting the fees Google takes from developers for purchases and subscriptions inside apps. The complaint was filed by 36 states and the District of Columbia in San Francisco federal court Wednesday. The complaint marks a new attack by government officials in the U.S. against the search engine's business practices. The Justice Department and a group of states filed separate complaints over Google's search business last year, while another state coalition sued over Google's digital advertising business. The states are taking on Google even after a federal judge in Washington last week threw out their antitrust lawsuit against Facebook. That case accused Facebook of illegally crushing competition by buying Instagram and WhatsApp because it saw them as threats to its business. The judge said the states waited too long to challenge the acquisitions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: With only 30 minutes of audio, companies can now create a digital clone of your voice and make it say words you never said. Using machine learning, voice AI companies like VocaliD can create synthetic voices from a person's recorded speech -- adopting unique qualities like speaking rhythm, pronunciation of consonants and vowels, and intonation. For tech companies, the ability to generate any sentence with a realistic-sounding human voice is an exciting, cost-saving frontier. But for the voice actors whose recordings form the foundation of text-to-speech (TTS) voices, this technology threatens to disrupt their livelihoods, raising questions about fair compensation and human agency in the age of AI.

At the center of this reckoning is voice actress Bev Standing, who is suing TikTok after alleging the company used her voice for its text-to-speech feature without compensation or consent. This is not the first case like this; voice actress Susan Bennett discovered that audio she recorded for another company was repurposed to be the voice of Siri after Apple launched the feature in 2011. She was paid for the initial recording session but not for being Siri. Rallying behind Standing, voice actors donated to a GoFundMe that has raised nearly $7,000 towards her legal expenses and posted TikTok videos under the #StandingWithBev hashtag warning users about the feature. Standing's supporters say the TikTok lawsuit is not just about Standing's voice -- it's about the future of an entire industry attempting to adapt to new advancements in the field of machine learning.

Standing's case materializes some performers' worst fears about the control this technology gives companies over their voices. Her lawsuit claims TikTok did not pay or notify her to use her likeness for its text-to-speech feature, and that some videos using it voiced "foul and offensive language" causing "irreparable harm" to her reputation. Brands advertising on TikTok also had the text-to-speech voice at their disposal, meaning her voice could be used for explicitly commercial purposes. [...] Laws protecting individuals from unauthorized clones of their voices are also in their infancy. Standing's lawsuit invokes her right of publicity, which grants individuals the right to control commercial uses of their likeness, including their voice. In November 2020, New York became the first state to apply this right to digital replicas after years of advocacy from SAG-AFTRA, a performers' union. "We look to make sure that state rights of publicity are as strong as they can be, that any limitations on people being able to protect their image and voice are very narrowly drawn on first amendment lines," Jeffrey Bennett, a general counsel for SAG-AFTRA, told Motherboard. "We look at this as a potentially great right of publicity case for this voice professional whose voice is being used in a commercial manner without her consent."

Former President Donald Trump, who has complained about censorship by social media giants, plans to announce class action lawsuits today against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Axios reported Wednesday. From the report: It's the latest escalation in Trump's yearslong battle with Twitter and Facebook over free speech and censorship. Trump is completely banned from Twitter and is banned from Facebook for another two years. Trump is scheduled to make an announcement at a press conference today at 11 am. Trump's legal effort is supported by the America First Policy Institute, a non-profit focused on perpetuating Trump's policies. The group's president and CEO and board chair, former Trump officials Linda McMahon and Brooke Rollins, will accompany him during the announcement. Class action lawsuits would enable him to sue the two tech CEOs on behalf of a broader group of people that he argues have been censored by biased policies. To date, Trump and other conservative critics have not presented any substantial evidence that either platform is biased against conservatives in its policies or implementation of them.

Twitter no longer enjoys the liability protection against user-generated content in India, the government said in a court filing this week as tension escalates between the two over the South Asian nation's new IT rules. From a report: In a court filing on Monday, New Delhi said Twitter has lost its immunity in India after the American social network failed to comply with the new local IT rules, which were unveiled in February and went into effect in late May. Experts have said in recent weeks that the Indian court -- and not the Indian government -- holds the power to decide whether Twitter gets to keep its safe harbor protections in the world's second largest internet market.

Internet services enjoy what is broadly referred to as "safe harbor" protection that say that tech platforms won't be held liable for the things their users post or share online. If you insult someone on Twitter, for example, the company may be asked to take down your post (if the person you have insulted has approached the court and a takedown order has been issued) but it likely won't be held legally responsible for what you said or did. Without the protection, Twitter -- which according to mobile insight firm App Annie, has over 100 million users in India -- is on paper responsible for everything those users say on its platform.

Anyone deciding to download the free and open-source audio editor Audacity is being warned that the software may now be classified as spyware due to recent updates to its privacy policy. From a report: Audacity has been around for over 21 years and classes as the world's most popular audio editing software. On April 30, the Muse Group acquired Audacity with the promise that the software would "remain forever free and open source." However, as FOSS Post reports, last week the Audacity privacy policy page was updated and introduced a number of personal data collection clauses. The data collected includes OS version and name, user country based on IP address, the CPU being used, data related to Audacity error codes and crash reports, and finally "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities' requests (if any)." The personal data collected can be shared with Muse Group employees, auditors, advisors, legal representatives and "similar agents," potential company buyers, and "any competent law enforcement body, regulatory, government agency, court or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary (i) as a matter of applicable law or regulation, or (ii) to exercise, establish or defend our legal rights."
UPDATE: Ars Technica's Jim Salter disagrees, pointing out that "neither the privacy policy nor the in-app telemetry in question are actually in effect yet," and that the company now plans to self-host its telemetry sessions rather than using third-party libraries and hosting.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you receive emails flagged as spam or see a warning that a message might be a phishing attempt, it's a sign that your email provider is scanning your emails. The company may do that just to protect you from danger, but in some situations it can delve into your communications for other purposes, as well. Google announced that it would stop scanning Gmail users' email messages for ad targeting in 2017 -- but that doesn't mean it stopped scanning them altogether. Verizon didn't respond to requests for comments about Yahoo and AOL's current practices, but in 2018 the Wall Street Journal reported that both email providers were scanning emails for advertising. And Microsoft scans its Outlook users' emails for malicious content. Here's what major email providers say about why they currently scan users' messages.

Email providers can scan for spam and malicious links and attachments, often looking for patterns. [...] You may see lots of ads in your email inbox, but that doesn't necessarily mean your email provider is using the content of your messages to target you with marketing messages. For instance, like Google, Microsoft says that it refrains from using your email content for ad targeting. But it does target ads to consumers in Outlook, along with MSN, and other websites and apps. The data to do that come from partnering with third-party providers, plus your browsing activity and search history on Bing and Microsoft Edge, as well as information you've given the company, such as your gender, country, and date of birth.

[...] If you're using an email account provided by your employer, an administrator with qualifying credentials can typically access all your incoming and outgoing emails on that account, as well as any documents you create using your work account or that you receive in your work account. This allows companies to review emails as part of internal investigations and access their materials after an employee leaves the company. [...] Law enforcement can request access to emails, though warrants, court orders, or subpoenas may be required. Email providers may reject requests that don't satisfy applicable laws, and may narrow requests that ask for too much information. They may also object to producing information altogether.