The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission has launched a joint effort to modernize antitrust enforcement, seeking comment on how the agencies can apply current law in cases against tech companies like Meta (parent company of Facebook) and Google. From a report: The announcement came at a joint press conference from FTC Chair Lina Khan and Justice Department Antitrust Chief Jonathan Kanter, who described the move as a wide-ranging enforcement modernization effort. While the announcement spans markets, it specifically questions how regulators should approach merger approval in digital markets, potentially setting new legal standards around data aggregation, interoperability, and market consolidation that can affect competition. "The digital revolution has not only impacted the markets of tech but markets across our economy, many of which have been rebuilt from the inside out," Kanter said during Tuesday's press conference. "Just think about what happens when you check your weather forecast or purchase your morning coffee. In seconds, whether you see them or not, you interact with dozens of distinct services; many of these services have the ability to exploit and exercise market power."

The UK government is set to launch a multi-pronged publicity attack on end-to-end encryption, Rolling Stone has learned. From the report: One key objective: mobilizing public opinion against Facebook's decision to encrypt its Messenger app. The Home Office has hired the M&C Saatchi advertising agency -- a spin-off of Saatchi and Saatchi, which made the "Labour Isn't Working" election posters, among the most famous in UK political history -- to plan the campaign, using public funds. According to documents reviewed by Rolling Stone, one the activities considered as part of the publicity offensive is a striking stunt -- placing an adult and child (both actors) in a glass box, with the adult looking "knowingly" at the child as the glass fades to black. Multiple sources confirmed the campaign was due to start this month, with privacy groups already planning a counter-campaign.

To say that Big Tech controls the internet might seem like an exaggeration. Increasingly, in at least one sense, it's literally true. From a report: The internet can seem intangible, a post-physical environment where things like viral posts, virtual goods and metaverse concerts just sort of happen. But creating that illusion requires a truly gargantuan -- and quickly-growing -- web of physical connections. Fiber-optic cable, which carries 95% of the world's international internet traffic, links up pretty much all of the world's data centers, those vast server warehouses where the computing happens that transforms all those 1s and 0s into our experience of the internet. Where those fiber-optic connections link up countries across the oceans, they consist almost entirely of cables running underwater -- some 1.3 million kilometers (or more than 800,000 miles) of bundled glass threads that make up the actual, physical international internet. And until recently, the overwhelming majority of the undersea fiber-optic cable being installed was controlled and used by telecommunications companies and governments. Today, that's no longer the case.

In less than a decade, four tech giants -- Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Meta (formerly Facebook ) and Amazon -- have become by far the dominant users of undersea-cable capacity. Before 2012, the share of the world's undersea fiber-optic capacity being used by those companies was less than 10%. Today, that figure is about 66%. And these four are just getting started, say analysts, submarine cable engineers and the companies themselves. In the next three years, they are on track to become primary financiers and owners of the web of undersea internet cables connecting the richest and most bandwidth-hungry countries on the shores of both the Atlantic and the Pacific, according to subsea cable analysis firm TeleGeography. By 2024, the four are projected to collectively have an ownership stake in more than 30 long-distance undersea cables, each up to thousands of miles long, connecting every continent on the globe save Antarctica. In 2010, these companies had an ownership stake in only one such cable -- the Unity cable partly owned by Google, connecting Japan and the U.S.

The Observer reports: For bitcoin enthusiasts in Kosovo with a breezy attitude to risk, it has been a good week to strike a deal on computer equipment that can create, or "mine", the cryptocurrency. From Facebook to Telegram, new posts in the region's online crypto groups became dominated by dismayed Kosovans attempting to sell off their mining equipment — often at knockdown prices. "There's a lot of panic and they're selling it or trying to move it to neighbouring countries," said cryptoKapo, a crypto investor and administrator of some of the region's largest online crypto communities.

The frenetic social media action follows an end-of-year announcement by Kosovo's government of an immediate, albeit temporary, ban on all crypto mining activity as part of emergency measures to ease a crippling energy crisis....

Kosovo has the cheapest energy prices in Europe due in part to more than 90% of the domestic energy production coming from burning the country's rich reserves of lignite, a low-grade coal, and fuel bills being subsidised by the government. The largest-scale crypto mining is thought to be taking place in the north of the country, where the Serb-majority population refuse to recognise Kosovo as an independent state and have consequently not paid for electricity for more than two decades.... Kosovans spent the final days of 2021 in darkness as domestic and international factors combined to cause energy shortages and rolling blackouts across the country....

Since the Kosovan authorities made the decision, police and customs officers have begun conducting regular raids, seizing hundreds of pieces of hardware. While a 60-day state of energy emergency remains in place, the prospect of upcoming regulation and energy bill price rises leaves the future anything but certain. "There are a lot of people who have invested in crypto mining equipment and it's not a small investment," cryptoKapo said. "People have even taken out loans to invest and the impact now is very bad on their lives."

Slashdot reader DevNull127 shares a transcript from a recent segment on CNN: CNN: Here's a moral question peculiar to these days: Is it wrong to mock people who publicly crusade against the Covid vaccine, and then die of the disease?

Or does it drive home the message about saving lives?

There are entire web sites that are devoted to such mockery. Sorry Antivaxxer.com gleefully tales stories and photos of anti-vaccine advocates who end up in the ICU, intubated, or dead from the disease.

One recent case of this kind of tasteless taunting spurred two dueling opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times. Orange County Republican Kelly Ernby, a former assistant D.A. and state assembly candidate who had lobbied publicly against the Covid vaccines, passed away earlier this month at age 46 from Covid complications. She was unvaccinated. Ernby's death unleashed a torrent of reaction on the internet. On her own Facebook page under a Christmas collage that she had posted, there are now more than 4,600 comments. Some are sympathy notes; many other are not.

In response to the piling on, Los Angeles Times columnist Nicholas Goldberg wrote, "I don't understand how crowing over the death of others furthers useful debate — or increases vaccination rates." But a few days later, Goldberg's colleague Michael Hiltzik published a column expressing the exact opposite. "Mocking anti-vaxxers' Covid deaths is ghoulish, yes — but may be necessary." Michael Hiltzik joins me now, he's the L.A. Times' business columnist. He's also a Pulitzer Prize winner. Michael let's make clear at the outset: you are not talking about the everyday people who don't get vaxxed, sadly contract Covid, and die. You're talking about people with a platform, right?

Michael Hiltzik: That's correct... In my column, I pointed out that the unvaccinated really fall into three categories. There are those who can't get vaccinated for legitimate reasons — small children, people with genuine medical contra-indications of vaccination. Then there's a fairly large group of people who I think have been duped into resisting the vaccine, duped by misinformation and disinformation about the vaccines, and sort of nonsense about preserving our freedoms in the face of this pandemic.

The real targets who are important here are those who spent the last few months or years of their lives crusading against sensible, safe policies such as vaccination and social distancing and what have you — and ended up paying the ultimate price for their own — basically, their own folly.

[CNN puts a pargraph on the screen, highlighting Hiltzik's comment that "Mockery is not necessarily the wrong reaction to those who publicly mocked anti-Covid measures and encouraged others to follow suit, before they perished of the disease the dangers of which they belittled."]

Michael Hiltzik: You know, we have sort of a cultural habit of not speaking ill of the dead, of treating the good deceased — looking at the good that they've done during their lives. I'm not sure that in this case that's entirely appropriate, because so many of them actually have promoted reckless, dangerous policies.

And as I wrote there, they took innocent people along with them.

So is mockery the only response? Well, I don't know — but as I wrote, every one of these deaths is a teachable moment. And unfortunately we haven't been learning from the lesson that we should be hearing from them.
In his column, Hiltzik had argued that "[P]leas for 'civility' are a fraud.

"Their goal is to blunt and enfeeble criticism and distract from its truthfulness. Typically, they're the work of hypocrites."

BuzzFeed News reports: Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally signed off on a secret advertising deal that allegedly gave Facebook special privileges on Google's ad platform, according to newly unredacted court documents filed on Friday.

The allegation is from a complaint first filed in December 2020 by Texas and several other states against Google for engaging in "false, deceptive, or misleading acts" while operating its buy-and-sell auction system for digital ads. In the complaint, state attorneys general claim Google illegally teamed up with Facebook, its fiercest competitor in the digital advertising market, for a 2018 deal Google dubbed "Jedi Blue" in a reference to Star Wars. Prior to the alleged deal, Facebook appeared to threaten Google's dominance in the market by backing an ad-buying technique called "header bidding." "Google understood the severity of the threat to its position if Facebook were to enter the market and support header bidding," the complaint reads. "To diffuse this threat, Google made overtures to Facebook."

In the end, Facebook backed off after Google agreed to give the social network "information, speed, and other advantages" in auctions run by Google, the complaint says.

The newly unredacted version of the complaint shows that the deal was allegedly struck at the highest levels of the companies, a noteworthy level of cooperation from two of the most powerful companies in the world.

The House select committee investigating the deadly Capitol riot has subpoenaed social media giants Twitter, Reddit and the parent companies of Facebook and Google, the panel's chairman said Thursday. CNBC reports: The select committee had asked a trove of records last summer from those and other social companies, but received "inadequate responses" from four of the largest platforms, according to a press release Thursday. The committee is once again demanding that Google parent company Alphabet, Twitter, Reddit and Meta -- formerly known as Facebook -- hand over a slew of records relating to domestic terrorism, the spread of misinformation and efforts to influence or overturn the 2020 election.

"Two key questions for the Select Committee are how the spread of misinformation and violent extremism contributed to the violent attack on our democracy, and what steps -- if any -- social media companies took to prevent their platforms from being breeding grounds for radicalizing people to violence," Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in the press release. "It's disappointing that after months of engagement, we still do not have the documents and information necessary to answer those basic questions," Thompson said. "The Select Committee is working to get answers for the American people and help ensure nothing like January 6th ever happens again. We cannot allow our important work to be delayed any further."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Researchers at Mozilla announced this week the launch of its "Facebook Pixel Hunt" study, which seeks to track the company's immense web-wide tracking network and investigate the intel it's collecting on users. As the name suggests, this study is focused on a piece of tracking tech known as the "Facebook pixel." Chances are, you've visited a site that uses it; these tiny pieces of tech are buried in literally millions of sites across the web, from online stores to news outlets to... well, you name it. In exchange for onboarding a free pixel on their site, these sites can then track their own visitors and microtarget ads with the same sort of precision you'd expect from a data-hungry company like Facebook.

In exchange for giving these sites the power to track every pageview, purchase, search query, and much, much more, Facebook (naturally) requires that this data be shared with it, too. In cases where the website visitor has an account on some Facebook platform, this offsite data just gets glombed onto whatever Facebook already knows about that person. If they don't have a Facebook account, then the company collects that data anyway, and uses it to create a "shadow profile" of that particular person. These are the sorts of shadowy practices that Mozilla's team wants to research with this study -- and you can help them do it if you're a Firefox user. Mozilla teamed up with reporters from the Markup to gather details about Facebook tracking using a free-to-download browser extension, Mozilla Rally, that will hoover up data sent out by Facebook's pixels as you browse across the web. Aside from that data, the extension also keeps track of the time spent on different web pages, the URLs that the browser visits, and more. Mozilla was quick to note in its announcement that the only data being exported from the extension will be de-identified, and not shared with any third parties besides the Markup's reporters.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can move forward with its latest antitrust lawsuit against Meta, a US district judge ruled on Tuesday. The decision is a significant win for the regulator, which had seen its first complaint thrown out by Judge James Boasberg last June. Engadget reports: Per The Washington Post, Boasberg now says the agency can move forward with its complaint thanks to the "more robust and detailed" evidence it presented with its amended suit, which the FTC filed in August. "Although the agency may well face a tall task down the road in proving its allegations, the Court believes that it has now cleared the pleading bar and may proceed to discovery," the judge said.

In October, Meta asked the court to dismiss the suit, arguing the FTC had failed yet again to present a "factual basis for alleging monopoly power." The agency's amended complaint is approximately two dozen pages longer than its original one, but it puts forward many of the same arguments. Specifically, the FTC alleges Facebook used the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 to secure its dominant position in the social media market.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A National Labor Relations Board ruling sheds light on a highly secret anti-union campaign at Google, that a top executive explicitly described as an initiative to "convince [employees] that unions suck." The campaign was called Project Vivian, and ran at Google between late 2018 and early 2020 to combat employee activism and union organizing efforts at the company, according to court documents. Google's director of employment law, Michael Pfyl, described Project Vivian as an initiative "to engage employees more positively and convince them that unions suck."

In his January 7 ruling, a NLRB judge wrote that Google must "immediately" produce 180 internal documents that he reviewed related to Google's Project Vivian campaign, including the document with Pfyl's description. Google has so far refused to hand over these documents to an attorney representing aggrieved former Google employees, citing attorney client privilege. The fired employees filed a subpoena for these documents as part of an ongoing NLRB lawsuit against the company. Google fired the workers in 2019 after they organized against the company's contracts with immigration detention agencies. In late 2020, the NLRB issued a federal complaint against Google for illegally firing and surveilling the four software engineers. Google claimed at the time and maintains that it fired them for breaching security protocols. In 2019, Google employees discovered that Google had hired a union avoidance firm called IRI Consultants. IRI Consultants is known for assisting employers in anti-union campaigns by collecting information on workers' personalities, finances, work ethic, motivations, and ethnicity in order to defeat union drives. At the time, Google was facing an unprecedented wave of employee protests and activism for issues related to sexual harassment, contracts with Department of Defense and Customers and Border Protection.

In his ruling on the documents related to Project Vivian, the NLRB judge describes evidence he reviewed of a situation where a Google attorney proposed to find a "respected voice to publish an OpEd outlining what a unionized tech workplace would look like, and counseling employees of FB (Facebook), MSFT(Microsoft), Amazon, and google (sic) not to do it." Kara Silverstein, Google's human resources director said that she "like[d] the idea" of the op-ed, but that it should be executed so that "there would be no fingerprints and not Google specific." IRI Consultants eventually provided a proposed draft of the op-ed to a Google attorney, according to the judge's report. The secret documents pertaining to Google's Project Vivian also reveal that "the decision to hire IRI was not made by lawyers but by a group composed primarily of non-attorneys" including Silverstein, Google's human resources director and Danielle Brown, Google's vice president of employee engagement. Project Vivian also included discussions of Google employees' "opposition to mandatory arbitration," the judge's report says. Ending forced arbitration at Google has previously been a crucial rallying point for employee activists at Google. The company agreed to end mandatory arbitration in February 2019, following employee protests. "The underlying case here has nothing to do with unionization, it's about employees breaching clear security protocols to access confidential information and systems inappropriately," a Google spokesperson said. "We disagree with the characterization of the legally privileged materials referred to by the complainants. As we've stated, our teams engage with dozens of outside consultants and law firms to provide us with advice on a wide range of topics, including employer obligations and employee engagement. This included IRI Consultants for a short period. However, we made a decision in 2019 not to use the materials or ideas explored during this engagement, and we still feel that was the right decision."

The Washington Post asks what may be the ultimate question of our times. "Whether the largest social media companies have become so critical to public debate that being banned or blacklisted by them — whether you're an elected official, a dissident, or even just a private citizen who runs afoul of their content policies — amounts to a form of modern-day censorship."

"And, if so, are there circumstances under which such censorship is justified?"

The first person cited is Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. Fighting over whether a given speech restriction is or isn't censorship, she adds, is often an excuse to avoid harder, more nuanced discussions as to exactly which types of speech ought to be restricted, and by whom, and on what authority. "There are a lot of people in the U.S. who will claim to be [free speech] absolutists but then basically be fine with censoring sexuality," she says. In contrast, expressions of sexuality are widely accepted in Germany, where York now lives, but there's broad consensus that censorship of Holocaust denial is warranted. In New Zealand, she adds, the democratically elected government has a Chief Censor who reviews the content of films and literature. "I'm very wary of censorship," York says. "But the reason is, who do you trust to do it? It's not that all speech is totally equal and valid." In other words, the problem York sees isn't social platforms banning a powerful figure such as Trump. It's their lack of legitimacy as arbiters of speech, especially when they're censoring people who lack the stature to speak out through other means.

David Kaye, a law professor at University of California-Irvine and the former U.N. Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, agrees that we should be wary of tech giants' power over discourse — especially in countries that lack a robust free press. But he balks at applying the term "censorship" to content moderation decisions taken by the likes of Facebook, Twitter or YouTube in the United States... We're better off, Kaye believes, reserving the term "censorship" for the many instances around the world in which speech restrictions are backed by the power of the state. That can include cases in which "the state puts demands on social media to take down content, or criminalizes individuals who tweet," as has happened in China, the United Arab Emirates, Myanmar and elsewhere...

"If we start to dilute the idea of censorship as a state-driven tool by equating it with what platforms are doing, we start to misunderstand what platforms are actually doing, and why they're doing it," Kaye said.
The Post ultimately cites three experts who agree on one point: that it's worth scrutinizing the decisions of social media platforms because of their growing influence — whether or not you end up calling it censorship. But they also cite a follow-up observation from Chinmayi Arun, a resident fellow of Yale Law School's Information Society Project.

Too often overlooked in the debates over what social networks take down is that they aren't just passive conduits of information: Their recommendation algorithms and design decisions actively shape what speech gets heard, and by how many, and how it is framed — often fueling the kind of divisive content that they later face pressure to remove.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may or may not have censored Trump a year ago. But there's no doubt that for years prior, they amplified and enabled him.

Gizmodo writes that "It's hard to blame someone for running away from a burning building. The same can be applied to Silicon Valley, where the head of public relations at Meta, Facebook's parent company, is stepping down." His departure comes as the tech giant struggles to put out several PR fires, most notable among them the fallout from the "Facebook Papers," a series of damning reports first published by the Journal last fall that included thousands of leaked internal documents.
"The central thesis of Haugen's leaks is that that Facebook and its executives know about the problems Facebook helps ignite and proliferate, from political lies to eating disorders, and don't do enough to stop them," writes Insider.com. They add that whistleblower Haugen "has also taken aim at the company's efforts to expand encryption to increase user privacy, suggesting such a move may make it easier for Facebook to ignore countries conducting espionage on its platforms."

And they note that Facebook also lost its VP of Product Communications, Roberta Thomson.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the departure of communications head John Pinette is "creating a void at the top of the department managing the controversies surrounding the tech giant." John Pinette had overseen the company's external communications since 2019. Prior to joining what was then Facebook, Pinette handled business and philanthropic dealings for deceased Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. He also ran communications for Alphabet Inc.'s Google in Asia and advised Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in past jobs.

The programming language of the year has been announced by the TIOBE Index: Python!

But noting that the TIOBE index is based on the number of search results for a programming language across popular search engines, a headline at The Next Web asks: "What does this title even mean?" [TIOBE] takes services such as Google, QQ, Sohu, Amazon, and Wikipedia to calculate the results. TIOBE uses "+" programming" query and a special formula to devise these ratings that change every month. You can read more about the whole process here. The programming language of the year title is decided by the jump in ratings year-on-year. Python overtook C# by a margin of 0.13% — almost a photo finish.

The index doesn't indicate the best or most efficient programming language, nor does it measure the amount of code written in a language across the internet. It simply gives us a high-level understanding of resources and pages available on the web related to them.

There's a huge amount of criticism towards the TIOBE index, especially as it uses one query and doesn't consider non-English languages. The organization said that it's trying to introduce more parameters to calculate the ratings.
TIOBE's annual award is being called "prestigious" — by the announcement at TIOBE.com: The award is given to the programming language that has gained the highest increase in ratings in one year. C# was on its way to get the title for the first time in history, but Python surpassed C# in the last month.

Python started at position #3 of the TIOBE index at the beginning of 2021 and left both Java and C behind to become the number one of the TIOBE index. But Python's popularity didn't stop there. It is currently more than 1 percent ahead of the rest [with a "rating" of 13.58%]. Java's all time record of 26.49% ratings in 2001 is still far away, but Python has it all to become the de facto standard programming language for many domains. There are no signs that Python's triumphal march will stop soon.
In fact, this makes the second year in a row Python has won TIOBE's annual award.

But it's as good a conversation-starter as any. ZDNet reminds us that Microsoft hired Python creator Guido van Rossum in 2020 to work on improving Python's efficiency, while the second most popular language on TIOBE's annual list, C#, "is a language designed by Microsoft technical fellow Anders Hejlsberg for the .NET Framework and Microsoft's developer editing tool Visual Studio."

And ZDNet also spottted a few other patterns in TIOBE's year-end look at programming language popularity: There were several movers and shakers this year. Rust, a systems programming language that deals with memory safety flaws, is now in 26th position, ahead of MIT's Julia, and Kotlin, a language endorsed by Google for Android app development. Rust was a stand out language in 2021, gaining backing from Facebook, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Apple's Swift for iOS and macOS app development jumped from 13th to 10th place, while Google's Go inched up from 14 to 13, according to Tiobe. Kotlin moved from 40th to 29th. Google's Dart dropped from 25th to 37th position, Julia fell from 23rd to 28th position, while Microsoft TypeScript dropped from from 42 to 49.

The top 10 languages in Tiobe's list for January 2022 were Python, C, Java, C++,C#, Visual Basic, JavaScript, Assembly Language, SQL, and Swift.

The surviving sister of Dave Patrick Underwood, a federal security guard who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2020, has filed a lawsuit against Meta, the parent organization of Facebook. The suit seeks to hold the company accountable for connecting the two men charged in the murder plot and giving them a space online to plan the attack. Engadget reports: Underwood was shot outside a federal building in Oakland, California in May of 2020. The two men charged inn the case were later linked to so-called "boogaloo" anti-government movement, which Facebook banned from its platform in June of 2020 citing the group's history of "actively promoting violence against civilians, law enforcement and government officials and institutions."

"The shooting was not a random act of violence," the lawsuit states. "It was the culmination of an extremist plot hatched and planned on Facebook by two men who Meta connected through Facebook's groups infrastructure and its use of algorithms designed and intended to increase user engagement and, correspondingly, Meta's profits." The lawsuit alleges the two men would never have met if not for Facebook's recommendations, which pushed them both to join groups that "openly advocated for violence." A spokesperson for Meta said in a statement to The New York Times that the "claims are without legal basis," and pointed to the company's work to ban "militarized social movements."

The Swiss army has told its ranks to stop using foreign instant-messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram for official communications. Instead, it's opting for a Swiss alternative -- in part over concerns about legislation in Washington that governs how U.S. authorities can access information held by tech companies. From a report: Army leaders, in a letter to top commanders last month, called for use of the Swiss instant messaging service Threema, and a promotion for the service was posted Dec. 29 on the Swiss army's page on Facebook, which, like WhatsApp, is owned by the U.S. company now known as Meta. Officials have cited an enhanced need for secure communications as Swiss soldiers have fanned out to support the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the Alpine country. A letter sent to army chiefs last month said Threema "must be used for all service communications," adding that "no other messaging service will be authorized."

A beta "payments" feature now lets users of the popular encrypted messaging app send MobileCoin around the globe. From a report: In the spring of 2021, the encrypted communications app Signal announced that it would add a payments feature in beta for its users in the UK, testing out an integration with a relatively new, privacy-focused cryptocurrency called MobileCoin. But a much broader phase of that experiment has quietly been underway since mid-November. That's when Signal made the same feature accessible to all of its users without fanfare, offering the ability to send digital payments far more private than a credit card transaction -- or a Bitcoin transfer -- to many millions of phones. MobileCoin founder Josh Goldbard confirmed the timing of the rollout, and says that it spurred massive adoption of the cryptocurrency, which now sees thousands of daily transactions versus just dozens before the global beta release. "There are over a hundred million devices on planet Earth right now that have the ability to turn on MobileCoin and send an end-to-end encrypted payment in five seconds or less," Goldbard says, referencing reports of Signal's total download numbers.

In fact, getting started using Signal's payments feature still isn't quite that simple. Anyone outside of sanctioned companies like North Korea and Syria can access their MobileCoin wallet within a message by tapping the "+" icon and then "payment." But the challenge for many will be loading that wallet in the first place; the cryptocurrency is listed for sale on only a few smaller cryptocurrency exchanges -- such as BitFinex and FTX -- none of which yet offer it to US consumers. Signal itself didn't respond to WIRED's requests for comment on the global rollout of the payments feature. But last April, Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike explained to WIRED that he wanted to add payments to the encrypted video-calling and texting app to match features from rivals like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger -- while also bringing Signal's lauded privacy protections to monetary transactions. "I would like to get to a world where not only can you feel [a sense of privacy] when you talk to your therapist over Signal, but also when you pay your therapist for the session over Signal," Marlinspike said at the time.

Alphabet's Google was slapped with a record French fine of 150 million euros ($170 million) by the nation's privacy watchdog, together with a 60 million-euro fine for Meta Platforms' Facebook, over the way the companies manage cookies. From a report: CNIL, France's data protection authority, on Thursday issued the companies with a three-month ultimatum "to provide internet users located in France with a means of refusing cookies as simple as the existing means of accepting them, in order to guarantee their freedom of consent." Failing to do so will come with the risk of an additional daily fine of 100,000 euros, CNIL said in the statement. The latest penalties follow probes by the watchdog looking at companies' compliance with new rules on cookies, which are tracking devices that are placed on people's computers. The watchdog in 2020 fined Google 100 million euros and online shopping giant Amazon.com Inc. 35 million euros for placing such cookies on people's computers without their consent.

An Italian mafia boss on the run for 20 years was tracked down to a Spanish town after being spotted on Google Street View. The Guardian reports: Gioacchino Gammino, a convicted murderer listed among Italy's most wanted gangsters, was arrested in Galapagar, a town near Madrid, where over the years he had married, changed his name to Manuel, worked as a chef and owned a fruit and vegetable shop. Sicilian police carried out several investigations in their search for Gammino, 61, and a European arrest warrant was issued in 2014. The fugitive was traced to Spain, but it was Google Street View that helped to pinpoint his precise location.

The navigation tool, accessible through Google Maps, had captured an image of two men chatting outside a fruit and vegetable shop called El Huerto de Manu, or Manu's Garden, in Galapagar. Police believed one of the men closely resembled Gammino, but his identity was only confirmed when they came across a listing for a nearby restaurant called La Cocina de Manu or Manu's Kitchen. The shop and the restaurant are now closed, but the police found a photo of Gammino, dressed in his chef's garb, on a still-existing Facebook page for La Cocina de Manu. He was recognisable by the scar on the left side of his chin. The restaurant's menu included a dish called Cena Siciliana or Sicilian dinner. Gammino was arrested on 17 December but the details surrounding his capture did not come to light until they were reported by La Repubblica on Wednesday. Upon his arrest, Gammino reportedly told police: "How did you find me? I haven't even called my family for 10 years!"

Facebook parent company Meta Platforms has stopped development of a new software operating system to power its virtual reality devices and upcoming augmented reality glasses, The Information reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the decision. From a report: Shelving the project, which had been underway for several years and involved hundreds of employees, marked a setback for the company's attempt to own the underlying software behind its Oculus VR headset and future augmented or mixed reality devices. The screens of its planned devices aim to overlay digital images on the real world or weave real-world objects into VR apps.

Meta uses an open-source version of Google's Android operating system to power Meta's existing Oculus Quest VR devices. But Meta wanted to create an OS from scratch to power them and future devices, a project that became known internally as XROS. XR is a catch-all term for VR, AR, and mixed reality. In MR, the wearer of a headset could view and use real-world objects, such as a keyboard, to do work or play games in a VR-like app. Instead, the company has told some staff it would continue to modify an open-source version of Android, which Google developed for smartphones but which other companies have used to power various devices, the people familiar with the matter said. Meta's modified version of Android, known internally as VROS, powers existing Oculus VR headsets.

The Washington Post reports: China is turning a major part of its internal Internet data surveillance network outward, mining Western social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets, according to a Washington Post review of hundreds of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company filings.

China maintains a countrywide network of government data surveillance services — called public opinion analysis software — that were developed over the past decade and are used domestically to warn officials of politically sensitive information online. The software primarily targets China's domestic Internet users and media, but a Washington Post review of bidding documents and contracts for over 300 Chinese government projects since the beginning of 2020 include orders for software designed to collect data on foreign targets from sources such as Twitter, Facebook and other Western social media.... These surveillance dragnets are part of a wider drive by Beijing to refine its foreign propaganda efforts through big data and artificial intelligence. They also form a network of warning systems designed to sound real-time alarms for trends that undermine Beijing's interests... Some of the Chinese government's budgeting includes buying and maintaining foreign social media accounts on behalf of police and propaganda departments....

The documents describe highly customizable programs that can collect real-time social media data from individual social media users. Some describe tracking broad trends on issues including U.S. elections... The exact scope of China's government public opinion monitoring industry is unclear, but there have been some indications about its size in Chinese state media. In 2014, the state-backed newspaper China Daily said more than 2 million people were working as public opinion analysts... In June 2020, Twitter suspended 23,000 accounts that it said were linked to the Chinese Communist Party and covertly spreading propaganda to undermine pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. This month, Twitter said it removed a further 2,048 accounts linked to Beijing and producing coordinated content undermining accusations of rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Experts say those accounts represent a small fraction of China's efforts to boost pro-Beijing messaging on foreign social media.
Reached for comment, a Twitter spokesperson told the Post," We prohibit use of our API for surveillance purposes, as per our developer policy and terms."

The Post adds that Facebook "did not respond to requests for comment about whether it is aware of the monitoring...."