Enlarge (credit: FABRICE COFFRINI / Contributor | AFP)

Google just lost a massive antitrust trial over its sprawling search business, as US district judge Amit Mehta released his ruling, showing that he sided with the US Department of Justice in the case that could disrupt how billions of people search the web.

"Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his opinion. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

The verdict will likely come as a shock to Google, which had long argued that punishing Google for being the best in search would be "unprecedented" and frequently pointed to the DOJ's lack of direct evidence. However, Mehta found the limited direct evidence compelling, especially "Google’s admission that it does not 'consider whether users will go to other specific search providers (general or otherwise) if it introduces a change to its Search product.'"

Enlarge / Elon Musk and Sam Altman share the stage in 2015, the same year that Musk alleged that Altman's "deception" began. (credit: Michael Kovac / Contributor | Getty Images North America)

After withdrawing his lawsuit in June for unknown reasons, Elon Musk has revived a complaint accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of fraudulently inducing Musk to contribute $44 million in seed funding by promising that OpenAI would always open-source its technology and prioritize serving the public good over profits as a permanent nonprofit.

Instead, Musk alleged that Altman and his co-conspirators—"preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by artificial intelligence"—always intended to "betray" these promises in pursuit of personal gains.

As OpenAI's technology advanced toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) and strove to surpass human capabilities, "Altman set the bait and hooked Musk with sham altruism then flipped the script as the non-profit’s technology approached AGI and profits neared, mobilizing Defendants to turn OpenAI, Inc. into their personal piggy bank and OpenAI into a moneymaking bonanza, worth billions," Musk's complaint said.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

The US Department of Justice sued TikTok today, accusing the short-video platform of illegally collecting data on millions of kids and demanding a permanent injunction "to put an end to TikTok’s unlawful massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy."

The DOJ said that TikTok had violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule), claiming that TikTok allowed kids "to create and access accounts without their parents’ knowledge or consent," collected "data from those children," and failed to "comply with parents’ requests to delete their children’s accounts and information."

The COPPA Rule requires TikTok to prove that it does not target kids as its primary audience, the DOJ said, and TikTok claims to satisfy that "by requiring users creating accounts to report their birthdates."

Enlarge / Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, during an interview at Bloomberg House on the opening day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2024. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

OpenAI is facing increasing pressure to prove it's not hiding AI risks after whistleblowers alleged to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that the AI company's non-disclosure agreements had illegally silenced employees from disclosing major safety concerns to lawmakers.

In a letter to OpenAI yesterday, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) demanded evidence that OpenAI is no longer requiring agreements that could be "stifling" its "employees from making protected disclosures to government regulators."

Specifically, Grassley asked OpenAI to produce current employment, severance, non-disparagement, and non-disclosure agreements to reassure Congress that contracts don't discourage disclosures. That's critical, Grassley said, so that it will be possible to rely on whistleblowers exposing emerging threats to help shape effective AI policies safeguarding against existential AI risks as technologies advance.

Enlarge (credit: Tim Macpherson | Image Source)

As a result of book publishers successfully suing the Internet Archive (IA) last year, the free online library that strives to keep growing online access to books recently shrank by about 500,000 titles.

IA reported in a blog post this month that publishers abruptly forcing these takedowns triggered a "devastating loss" for readers who depend on IA to access books that are otherwise impossible or difficult to access.

To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court's decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA's controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law. An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library's lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA's lending than by preventing it.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Pornhub will soon be blocked in five more states as the adult site continues to fight what it considers privacy-infringing age-verification laws that require Internet users to provide an ID to access pornography.

On July 1, according to a blog post on the adult site announcing the impending block, Pornhub visitors in Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, and Nebraska will be "greeted by a video featuring" adult entertainer Cherie Deville, "who explains why we had to make the difficult decision to block them from accessing Pornhub."

Pornhub explained that—similar to blocks in Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, and Mississippi—the site refuses to comply with soon-to-be-enforceable age-verification laws in this new batch of states that allegedly put users at "substantial risk" of identity theft, phishing, and other harms.

Enlarge (credit: RicardoImagen | E+)

Photos of Brazilian kids—sometimes spanning their entire childhood—have been used without their consent to power AI tools, including popular image generators like Stable Diffusion, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned on Monday.

This act poses urgent privacy risks to kids and seems to increase risks of non-consensual AI-generated images bearing their likenesses, HRW's report said.

An HRW researcher, Hye Jung Han, helped expose the problem. She analyzed "less than 0.0001 percent" of LAION-5B, a dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. The dataset does not contain the actual photos but includes image-text pairs derived from 5.85 billion images and captions posted online since 2008.

Enlarge (credit: Future Publishing / Contributor | Future Publishing)

TikTok is now disputing a Reuters report that claims the short-video app is cloning its algorithm to potentially offer a different version of the app, which might degrade over time, just for US users.

Sources "with direct knowledge" of the project—granted anonymity because they're not authorized to discuss it publicly—told Reuters that the TikTok effort began late last year. They said that the project will likely take a year to complete, requiring hundreds of engineers to separate millions of lines of code.

As these sources reported, TikTok's tremendous undertaking could potentially help prepare its China-based owner ByteDance to appease US lawmakers who passed a law in April forcing TikTok to sell its US-based operations by January 19 or face a ban. But TikTok has maintained that the "qualified divestiture" required by the law would be impossible, and on Thursday, TikTok denied the accuracy of Reuters' report while reiterating its stance that a sale is not in the cards.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

The New York Times is fighting to take down a game called Worldle, according to a legal filing viewed by the BBC, in which The Times apparently argued that the geography-based game is "creating confusion" by using a name that's way too similar to Wordle.

Worldle is "nearly identical in appearance, sound, meaning, and imparts the same commercial impression" to Wordle, The Times claimed.

The Times bought Wordle in 2022, paying software developer Josh Wardle seven figures for the daily word-guessing puzzle game after its breakout success during the pandemic. Around the same time, Worldle was created—along with more than 100 other Wordle spinoffs offering niche alternatives to Wordle, including versions in different languages and completely different games simply using the name construction ending in "-le." The Times filed for a Wordle trademark the day after buying the game and by March 2022, it started sending takedown requests.

Enlarge (credit: Apu Gomes / Stringer | Getty Images News)

After months of loudly protesting a subpoena, Elon Musk has once again agreed to testify in the US Securities and Exchange Commission's investigation into his acquisition of Twitter (now called X).

Musk tried to avoid testifying by arguing that the SEC had deposed him twice before, telling a US district court in California that the most recent subpoena was "the latest in a long string of SEC abuses of its investigative authority.”

But the court did not agree that Musk testifying three times in the SEC probe was either "abuse" or "overly burdensome." Especially since the SEC has said it's seeking a follow-up deposition after receiving "thousands of new documents" from Musk and third parties over the past year since his last depositions. And according to an order requiring Musk and the SEC to agree on a deposition date from US district judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, "Musk’s lament does not come close to meeting his burden of proving 'the subpoena was issued in bad faith or for an improper purpose.'"

Enlarge (credit: Tim Robberts | DigitalVision)

After launching Slack AI in February, Slack appears to be digging its heels in, defending its vague policy that by default sucks up customers' data—including messages, content, and files—to train Slack's global AI models.

According to Slack engineer Aaron Maurer, Slack has explained in a blog that the Salesforce-owned chat service does not train its large language models (LLMs) on customer data. But Slack's policy may need updating "to explain more carefully how these privacy principles play with Slack AI," Maurer wrote on Threads, partly because the policy "was originally written about the search/recommendation work we've been doing for years prior to Slack AI."

Maurer was responding to a Threads post from engineer and writer Gergely Orosz, who called for companies to opt out of data sharing until the policy is clarified, not by a blog, but in the actual policy language.

Enlarge (credit: Apu Gomes / Stringer | Getty Images News)

A US district judge William Alsup has dismissed Elon Musk's X Corp's lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X (formerly Twitter) systems and violating both X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data.

X sued Bright Data to stop the company from scraping and selling X data to academic institutes and businesses, including Fortune 500 companies.

According to Alsup, X failed to state a claim while arguing that companies like Bright Data should have to pay X to access public data posted by X users.

Enlarge / WETA "Gollum" figure at Arclight at the opening of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King." (credit: Barry King / Contributor | WireImage)

A day after announcing that the tentatively titled Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum was scheduled for a 2026 release, Warner Bros. immediately moved to block a beloved 2009 unauthorized fan film with the exact same name on YouTube.

Less than 12 hours later, though, the studio appeared to back down from this copyright fight, reinstating the fan film on YouTube amid fan backlash protesting the copyright strike on Reddit as a "dick move."

In 2009, director Chris Bouchard—who most recently directed Netflix's The Little Mermaid—released The Hunt for Gollum through Independent Online Cinema after he claimed to have "reached an understanding" with the rightsholder of The Lord of the Rings books, then called Tolkien Enterprises (now called Middle-earth Enterprises).

Enlarge / John Schmidtlein, partner at Williams & Connolly LLP and lead litigator for Alphabet Inc.'s Google, arrives to federal court in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, Oct. 2, 2023. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

Halfway through the first day of closing arguments in the Department of Justice's big antitrust trial against Google, US District Judge Amit Mehta posed the question that likely many Google users have pondered over years of DOJ claims that Google's market dominance has harmed users.

"What should Google have done to remain outside the crosshairs of the DOJ?" Mehta asked plaintiffs halfway through the first of two full days of closing arguments.

According to the DOJ and state attorneys general suing, Google has diminished search quality everywhere online, primarily by locking rivals out of default positions on devices and in browsers. By paying billions for default placements that the government has argued allowed Google to hoard traffic and profits, Google allegedly made it nearly impossible for rivals to secure enough traffic to compete, ultimately decreasing competition and innovation in search by limiting the number of viable search engines in the market.

Enlarge / A cropped image showing Raw TV's poster for the Netflix documentary What Jennifer Did, which features a long front tooth that leads critics to believe it was AI-generated. (credit: Raw TV)

An executive producer of the Netflix hit What Jennifer Did has responded to accusations that the true crime documentary used AI images when depicting Jennifer Pan, a woman currently imprisoned in Canada for orchestrating a murder-for-hire scheme targeting her parents.

What Jennifer Did shot to the top spot in Netflix's global top 10 when it debuted in early April, attracting swarms of true crime fans who wanted to know more about why Pan paid hitmen $10,000 to murder her parents. But quickly the documentary became a source of controversy, as fans started noticing glaring flaws in images used in the movie, from weirdly mismatched earrings to her nose appearing to lack nostrils, the Daily Mail reported, in a post showing a plethora of examples of images from the film.

Futurism was among the first to point out that these flawed images (around the 28-minute mark of the documentary) "have all the hallmarks of an AI-generated photo, down to mangled hands and fingers, misshapen facial features, morphed objects in the background, and a far-too-long front tooth." The image with the long front tooth was even used in Netflix's poster for the movie.

Enlarge (credit: apomares | E+)

A jury has unanimously convicted Avi Eisenberg in the US Department of Justice's first case involving cryptocurrency open-market manipulation, the DOJ announced Thursday.

The jury found Eisenberg guilty of commodities fraud, commodities market manipulation, and wire fraud in connection with the manipulation on a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange called Mango Markets.

Eisenberg is scheduled to be sentenced on July 29 and is facing "a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison on the commodities fraud count and the commodities manipulation count, and a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on the wire fraud count," the DOJ said.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

Amid safety scandals involving "many loose bolts" and widespread problems with Boeing's 737 Max 9s, Boeing is apparently considering buying back Spirit AeroSystems, the key supplier behind some of Boeing's current manufacturing problems, sources told The Wall Street Journal.

Spirit was initially spun out from Boeing Commercial Airplanes in 2005, and Boeing had planned to keep it that way. Last year, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun sought to dispel rumors that Boeing might reacquire Spirit as federal regulators launched investigations into both companies. But now Calhoun appears to be "softening that stance," the WSJ reported.

According to the WSJ's sources, no deal has formed yet, but Spirit has initiated talks with Boeing and "hired bankers to explore strategic options." Sources also confirmed that Spirit is weighing whether to sell its operations in Ireland, which manufactures parts for Boeing rival Airbus.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

WhatsApp will soon be granted access to explore the "full functionality" of the NSO Group's Pegasus spyware—sophisticated malware the Israeli Ministry of Defense has long guarded as a "highly sought" state secret, The Guardian reported.

Since 2019, WhatsApp has pushed for access to the NSO's spyware code after alleging that Pegasus was used to spy on 1,400 WhatsApp users over a two-week period, gaining unauthorized access to their sensitive data, including encrypted messages. WhatsApp suing the NSO, Ars noted at the time, was "an unprecedented legal action" that took "aim at the unregulated industry that sells sophisticated malware services to governments around the world."

Initially, the NSO sought to block all discovery in the lawsuit "due to various US and Israeli restrictions," but that blanket request was denied. Then, last week, the NSO lost another fight to keep WhatsApp away from its secret code.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

It looks like Elon Musk may lose X's lawsuit against hate speech researchers who encouraged a major brand boycott after flagging ads appearing next to extremist content on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

X is trying to argue that the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) violated the site's terms of service and illegally accessed non-public data to conduct its reporting, allegedly posing a security risk for X. The boycott, X alleged, cost the company tens of millions of dollars by spooking advertisers, while X contends that the CCDH's reporting is misleading and ads are rarely served on extremist content.

But at a hearing Thursday, US district judge Charles Breyer told the CCDH that he would consider dismissing X's lawsuit, repeatedly appearing to mock X's decision to file it in the first place.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Thousands of the most dedicated Reddit users will have a chance to snag shares when the company goes public in 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

Citing people familiar with the matter, The Journal reported that 75,000 of the "most prolific" Redditors will have an opportunity to buy "an as-yet-undetermined number of shares" before trading starts.

This privilege, WSJ noted, is "normally" reserved for "big investors" who can stand to hugely profit if the share prices dramatically rise after Reddit begins listing shares on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), which is expected to happen this March.