The Internet

Roku Doesn't Support IPv6 and It Might Be a Big Deal (daringfireball.net) 121

As highlighted by Daring Fireball's John Gruber, Roku doesn't support IPv6 -- a next-gen Internet Protocol standard intended to eventually replace IPv4, the protocol many Internet services (including Roku) still use today. "DingleBog3899" writes on the Roku community forum: I work for a Native American tribe in the PNW. We scrambled to get the reservation reliable internet in the later part of 2019. We managed to cover most of the reservation with wi-max and wifi with a fiber back haul configuration. We are now slowly getting more stable and reliable fiber to the home(FttH) service installed to as many homes as we can, but it is slow process covering the mostly rural landscape doing all the work in house. Our tribal network started out IPv6, but soon learned we had to somehow support IPv4 only traffic. It took almost 11 months in order to get a small amount of IPv4 addresses allocated for this use. In fact there were only enough addresses to cover maybe 1% of population. So we were forced to create a very expensive proxy/translation server in order to support this traffic.

We learned a very expensive lesson. 71% of the IPv4 traffic we were supporting was from Roku devices. 9% coming from DishNetwork & DirectTV satellite tuners, 11% from HomeSecurity cameras and systems, and remaining 9% we replaced extremely outdated Point of Sale (POS) equipment. So we cut Roku some slack three years ago by spending a little over $300k just to support their devices. First off I despise both Apple and that other evil empire (house of mouse) I want nothing to do with either of them. Now with that said I am one of four individuals that suggested and lobbied 15 other tribal nations to offer a new AppleTV device in exchange for active Roku devices. Other nations are facing the same dilemma. Spend an exorbitant amount of money to support a small amount of antiquated devices or replace the problem devices at fraction of the cost.
"Now if Roku cannot be proactive at keeping up with connectivity standards they are going to be wiped out by their own complacency," adds DingleBob3899. "Judging by the growing number of offers to replace their devices for free their competitors are already proactively exploiting that complacency. When we approached Apple to see about a discount to purchase a large number of their devices, for the exchange, they eagerly offered to supply their devices for free."
Graphics

Nvidia Confirms Latest GeForce Driver Is Causing CPU Spikes (pcworld.com) 21

An Nvidia GPU driver update has caused some users to see inflated CPU usage after closing 3D games, which persists until a reboot. Nvidia confirmed the problem with driver update 531.18, and will post a hotfix on March 7. PCWorld reports: The company confirmed the problem with the latest driver update, 531.18, which was published on February 28th. An updated list of open issues (including some that didn't make it into the full release notes) was posted to Nvidia's support forum, and spotted by VideoCardz.com. Issue number 4007208 reads, "Higher CPU usage from NVIDIA Container may be observed after exiting a game." Some users are showing CPU usage of up to 10-15 percent in these conditions -- not enough to seriously hamper most gaming desktops, but more than enough to be an annoyance, especially if you use your PC for other intensive tasks. Like opening three Chrome tabs at once.

At the moment there's no easy fix, so the immediate solution if you're affected is to roll back your driver to version 528.49 from February 8th, available for manual download here.

Microsoft

Microsoft Will Now Preview the Future of Windows With New Canary Channel (theverge.com) 23

Microsoft is getting ready to publicly test major new Windows features even earlier. While the software giant has been previewing changes to Windows for nearly a decade, a new Canary channel for Windows Insiders will allow anyone to try out "hot off the presses" builds of Windows that include major changes to the kernel, APIs, and other big parts of Windows. From a report: It feels like this new Canary channel is preparation work for Windows 12, which Intel and Microsoft have both been hinting at recently. "The new Canary Channel is going to be the place to preview platform changes that require longer-lead time before getting released to customers," says Amanda Langowski, Microsoft's head of the Windows Insider program, in a blog post today. "Some examples of this include major changes to the Windows kernel, new APIs, etc." We've seen Microsoft test underlying platform changes to Windows before that eventually shipped in a future version of Windows. Microsoft tested some display changes to Windows 10 preview builds before Windows 11 was announced, and the changes only ended up shipping in what became Windows 11. Likewise, x64 emulation for Windows 10 on Arm was tested early on and only ever shipped in Windows 11.
Security

Unkillable UEFI Malware Bypassing Secure Boot Enabled By Unpatchable Windows Flaw (arstechnica.com) 115

Researchers have announced a major cybersecurity find -- the world's first-known instance of real-world malware that can hijack a computer's boot process even when Secure Boot and other advanced protections are enabled and running on fully updated versions of Windows. From a report: Dubbed BlackLotus, the malware is what's known as a UEFI bootkit. These sophisticated pieces of malware hijack the UEFI -- short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface -- the low-level and complex chain of firmware responsible for booting up virtually every modern computer. As the mechanism that bridges a PC's device firmware with its operating system, the UEFI is an OS in its own right. It's located in an SPI-connected flash storage chip soldered onto the computer motherboard, making it difficult to inspect or patch. Because the UEFI is the first thing to run when a computer is turned on, it influences the OS, security apps, and all other software that follows. These traits make the UEFI the perfect place to run malware. When successful, UEFI bootkits disable OS security mechanisms and ensure that a computer remains infected with stealthy malware that runs at the kernel mode or user mode, even after the operating system is reinstalled or a hard drive is replaced.

As appealing as it is to threat actors to install nearly invisible and unremovable malware that has kernel-level access, there are a few formidable hurdles standing in their way. One is the requirement that they first hack the device and gain administrator system rights, either by exploiting one or more vulnerabilities in the OS or apps or by tricking a user into installing trojanized software. Only after this high bar is cleared can the threat actor attempt an installation of the bootkit. The second thing standing in the way of UEFI attacks is UEFI Secure Boot, an industry-wide standard that uses cryptographic signatures to ensure that each piece of software used during startup is trusted by a computer's manufacturer. Secure Boot is designed to create a chain of trust that will prevent attackers from replacing the intended bootup firmware with malicious firmware. If a single firmware link in that chain isn't recognized, Secure Boot will prevent the device from starting.

United Kingdom

UK Government Urged To Consider Changing Law To Allow Gene Editing of Embryos (theguardian.com) 48

Ministers must consider changing the law to allow scientists to carry out genome editing of human embryos for serious genetic conditions -- as a matter of urgency. That is the key message of a newly published report by a UK citizens' jury made up of individuals affected by genetic conditions. From a report: The report is the first in-depth study of the views of individuals who live with genetic conditions about the editing of human embryos to treat hereditary disorders and will be presented at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing, which opens at the Crick Institute in London this week. Scientists say that in a few years, they will be ready to use genome editing techniques to alter genes and induce changes in physical traits, such as disease risk, in future generations. In the UK, around 2.4 million people live with a genetic condition. These include cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, muscular dystrophy, various cancers, and some forms of hereditary blindness.

"Genome editing offers the prospect of preventing such conditions affecting future generations but there needs to be a full national debate on the issues," said Prof Anna Middleton of Cambridge University, the project's leader. "These discussions need to start now because genome editing is advancing so quickly. Many affected individuals want to debate the ethical issues and explore what implementation might look like." Genome editing acts like a pair of molecular scissors that can cut a strand of DNA at a specific site, allowing scientists to alter the structure of a gene, a form of manipulation that does not involve the introduction of DNA from other organisms. In the UK, as in most countries worldwide, it is illegal to perform genome editing on embryos that lead to pregnancy.

Microsoft

Microsoft's Latest AI Assistant Is Meant for Marketers, Customer Reps and Work Apps (bloomberg.com) 23

Microsoft, having brought artificial intelligence to its battle with Google over search, is now turning to the latest AI technology to catch up with rivals in the corporate applications market such as Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. From a report: The software giant is introducing an AI assistant -- called Dynamics 365 Copilot -- for applications that handle tasks such as sales, marketing and customer service. Based on technology from OpenAI, the software can draft contextual chat and email answers to customer-service queries. It can help marketers come up with customer categories to target, and write product listings for e-commerce. The new capabilities are being released in preview form on Monday and are being tested by hundreds of early customers. For example, Italian aperitif maker Campari is trying out the marketing tools to concoct targeted campaigns for events around the Negroni cocktail.

Microsoft also said its next set of AI announcements, planned for March 16, will relate to "workplace productivity," a term the software maker usually uses to mean Office software. Business applications are the latest Microsoft programs to get an AI makeover so far this year as the company adds language-generation tools and chatbots to everything from its Bing internet-search engine to the Teams corporate-conferencing software. The strategy follows a successful debut for an AI programming tool called GitHub Copilot last year and Microsoft's expansion of its investment in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, in January. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has said the company plans to overhaul its whole product lineup using AI and tools from OpenAI. In the business applications category, where Microsoft has operated for more than two decades but lagged behind rivals, Nadella ultimately wants to use AI to break down silos between formerly separate programs, each with their own workflows and acronyms, like ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) software. Instead, he said, they should be blended and have one AI copilot that can retrieve information and help workers with tasks. Still, like the Bing bot, Nadella noted Microsoft's Dynamics tool will also make mistakes.

United States

US Fed Reserve Zoom Conference Canceled After 'Porn-Bombing' (pcmag.com) 75

A Federal Reserve Zoom event with more than 220 people was canceled after a user hijacked proceedings and displayed pornographic content, Reuters reports. From a report: The hijack left Fed Governor Christopher Waller unable to deliver his opening remarks because graphic images from a call participant named "Dan" began to pop up on the screen. In a statement to Reuters, Brent Tjarks, executive director of the Mid-Size Bank Coalition of America (MBCA), which hosted the Zoom event, said: "We were a victim of a teleconference or Zoom hijacking and we are trying to understand what we need to do going forward to prevent this from ever happening again. It is an incident we deeply regret. We have had various programs and this is something that we have never had happen to us." Tjarks adds that he suspects a security switch for the Zoom event that would have muted users and prevented them from sharing their screens was incorrectly set, though he could not confirm. The MBCA, whose roughly 100 members include banks with between $10 billion and $100 billion in assets, made the decision to cancel the event minutes after it was scheduled to commence, citing "technical difficulties."
EU

WhatsApp Agrees To Be More Transparent on Policy Changes, EU Says (reuters.com) 5

Meta Platforms' WhatsApp has agreed to be more transparent about changes to its privacy policy introduced in 2021, the European Commission said on Monday, following complaints from consumer bodies across Europe. From a report: The European Consumer Organisation (BEUC) and the European Network of consumer authorities told WhatsApp last year that it had not clarified the changes in plain and intelligible language, violating the bloc's laws. EU members' national regulators can sanction companies for breaches. WhatsApp has now agreed to explain changes to EU users' contracts and how these could affect their rights, and has agreed to display prominently the possibility for users to accept or reject the changes and ensure that users can easily close pop-up notifications on updates. The company also confirmed that users' personal data is not shared with third parties or other Meta companies, including Facebook, for advertising purposes.
Transportation

New $10B High-Speed Rail Line to Las Vegas Planned in California (sfgate.com) 190

"For years, California has championed high-speed rail as its future, even as its marquee project faces headwinds," writes SFGate.

"While the high-speed rail connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco slowly comes to fruition, a separate rail plan in Southern California has finalized an important labor deal, and construction is set to begin this year... to connect Las Vegas to Los Angeles with a new 218-mile rail system. On Feb. 23, Brightline announced it had reached an agreement to work with a coalition of major labor unions. The High-Speed Rail Labor Coalition includes 13 rail unions representing more than 160,000 freight, regional, commuter and passenger railroad workers.... The $10 billion investment is set to create 35,000 jobs during construction, with more than $10 billion in economic impact....

Brightline West trains can reach speeds of up to 200 mph. The company said its trains will cut down the more than 40 million one-way trips to Las Vegas each year by car or bus. It said it aims to attract 12 million of those trips annually and reduce CO2 emissions by removing 3 million vehicles and 400,000 tons of CO2 from the road. Moreover, the train is expected to relieve traffic on Interstate 15....

Brightline Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs Ben Porritt told SFGATE that Brightline West plans to break ground later in 2023. "Our construction timeline is approximately 3.5-4 years, which would have us opening by the end of 2027," he said.

"Riders can expect a travel time of just over two hours as the train reaches its 180 mph top speed," reports Jalopnik. "The line is expected to be an elevated line as well running above the desert floor."

Brightline trains in Florida are already reaching speeds of 130 miles per hour.
AMD

Will AMD's 'openSIL' Library Enable Open-Source Silicon Initialization With Coreboot? (phoronix.com) 29

Formerly known as LinuxBIOS, coreboot is defined by Wikipedia as "a software project aimed at replacing proprietary firmware (BIOS or UEFI) found in most computers with a lightweight firmware."

Phoronix is wondering if there's about to be a big announcement from AMD: AMD dropped a juicy tid-bit of information to be announced next month with "openSIL" [an open-source AMD x86 silicon initialization library], complete with AMD Coreboot support....

While about a decade ago AMD was big into Coreboot and at the time committed to it for future hardware platforms (2011: AMD To Support Coreboot On All Future CPUs) [and] open-source AGESA at the time did a lot of enabling around it, that work had died off. In more recent years, AMD's Coreboot contributions have largely been limited to select consumer APU/SoC platforms for Google Chromebook use. But issues around closing up the AGESA as well as concerns with the AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP) have diminished open-source firmware hopes in recent years....

For the Open Compute Project Regional Summit in Prague, there is a new entry added with a title of OSF on AMD — Enabled by openSIL (yes, folks, OSF as in "Open-Source Firmware").... [H]opefully this will prove to be a monumental shift for open-source firmware in the HPC server space.

From the talk's description: openSIL (AMD open-source x86 Silicon Initialization Library) offers the versatility, scalability, and light weight interface to allow for ease of integration with open-source and/or proprietary host boot solutions such as coreboot, UEFI and others and adds major flexibility to the overall platform design.

In other words, this library-based solution simply allows a platform integrator to scale from feature rich solutions such as UEFI to slim, lightweight, and secure solutions such as coreboot.

The description promises the talk will include demonstrations "highlighting system bring-up using openSIL integrated with coreboot and UEFI Host Firmware stacks on AMD's Genoa based platforms."
GUI

Why is Meta Slashing Prices on its VR Headsets? (cnn.com) 127

"Meta is cutting prices for two of its virtual reality headsets as it continues trying to boost adoption for the nascent technology on which it has bet its future," reports CNN: The company announced Friday that it is slashing the price of its higher-end Meta Quest Pro headset by some $500, bringing its cost to $999, roughly six months after it was released. Meta is also lowering the price of its Quest 2 headset from $499.99 to $429.99. The price cut for the Quest 2 will go into effect in more than a dozen countries including the United States on Sunday. The Quest Pro price drop will take effect the same day in the United States and Canada and on March 15 in all other countries where it is sold.

"Our goal has always been to create hardware that's affordable for as many people as possible to take advantage of all that VR has to offer," the company said in a blog post.

Yahoo Finance believes Meta is lowering prices "because consumers are, well, just not buying as many as the company expected." The Verge agrees that the Meta Quest Pro was "an absolute boondoggle of a device" — but suggests that's not the whole story.

"if you look at the Quest 2, which most people use for playing games, as a game console, it's done reasonably well." Mark Rabkin, Meta's vice president for VR, told staff that Meta has sold over 20 million Quest headsets thus far. That includes both the Quest and Quest 2.... That seems like a small number, but the Nintendo GameCube only sold 21 million consoles in its entire lifespan, and the Xbox Series X and S are estimated to have sold approximately 20 million consoles thus far. So if you look at the Quest 2, which most people use for playing games, as a game console, it's done reasonably well.
Their conclusion? "Meta might have big ambitions for VR headsets and their place in the metaverse, but the reality is that the top software on the Quest 2 are all games.... And while Meta is thrusting metaverse experiences onto users, it's kind of ignoring that core gamer audience."
GUI

A 'Cruelty-Free' Circus Replaced Animals with Holograms (msn.com) 51

The Washington Post reports: A new spectacle is taking over the tented world of acrobats, clowns and juggling entertainers. And while it may have a trunk and tusks, it weighs absolutely nothing. Circuses, once known for showcasing elephants in all their heft are now presenting a much lighter creature — a 3D hologram.

The Circus-Theater Roncalli in Germany was the first to do it, and photographer Davide Bertuccio wanted to see for himself how the group pulled it off. When he attended a show at the end of 2022, he was immediately struck by the quiet atmosphere inside the tent. "Finding a circus without the din of animals, but the simple noise of people was a surprise" he said.

The holographic figures are custom-built for the circus using 3D animations, photography and virtual rendering. The system of 11 digital laser projectors positioned around the stage flash animations onto a circular net hoisted up for each performance. The entire light show is operated by one person, and it takes about 10 people to take down the metallic netting to make room for the other performers, including acrobats, clowns and dancers, Bertuccio said.

The circus introduced the holograms in 2019, the Post reports, and "other acts have followed suit, including the French circus L'Écocirque, which features holograms of a lion, an elephant and beluga whales, accompanied by a live orchestra blaring rock music."
Windows

Apple's 'iMessage' Texts are Coming To Windows (with Limitations) (macrumors.com) 24

Microsoft "is adding iPhone support to its Phone Link app on Windows 11," reports MacRumors. "The app allows iPhone users to make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and view an iPhone's notifications directly on a PC." Notably, the app brings limited iMessage functionality to Windows. After pairing an iPhone with a PC via Bluetooth and granting some permissions on the iPhone, users can send and receive iMessages and SMS text messages in Phone Link, but there is no support for group chats or sending photos and videos.
The Verge notes you won't see the full message history in conversations, "as only messages that have been sent or received using Phone Link will be displayed." Microsoft isn't using blue or green bubbles in Phone Link either, as the company isn't able to differentiate between a standard text message and one sent via iMessage. The Phone Link integration for iOS is basic compared to what's available for Android, but Microsoft has never supported messaging or calls for iPhone users before, so this is a step in the right direction....

This new Phone Link support arrives alongside a big new Windows 11 update that includes AI-powered Bing on the taskbar, a screen recording feature, better touch optimizations, and more. If you're interested in testing this new Phone Link support for iOS, it will be available for Windows Insiders in the Dev, Beta, and Release Preview channels, but Microsoft is kicking off testing with a "small percentage" of testers this week.

Thanks to ttyler (Slashdot reader #20,687) for sharing the news.
Chrome

First Look At Google Chrome's Blink Engine Running On an iPhone (9to5google.com) 39

Google has begun the process of bringing Chrome's full Blink browser engine to iOS against current App Store rules, and now we have our first look at the test browser in action. 9to5Google reports: In the weeks since the project was announced, Google (and Igalia, a major open source consultancy and frequent Chromium contributor) have been hard at work getting a simplified "content_shell" browser up and running in iOS and fixing issues along the way. As part of that bug fixing process, some developers have even shared screenshots of the minimal Blink-based browser running on an iPhone 12. In the images, we can see a few examples of Google Search working as expected, with no glaringly obvious issues in the site's appearance. Above the page contents, you can see a simple blue bar containing the address bar and typical browser controls like back, forward, and refresh.

With a significant bit of effort, we were able to build the prototype browser for ourselves and show other sites including 9to5Google running in Blink for iOS, through the Xcode Simulator. As an extra touch of detail, we now know what the three-dots button next to the address bar is for. It opens a menu with a "Begin tracing" button, to aid performance testing. From these work-in-progress screenshots, it seems clear that the Blink for iOS project is already making significant progress, but it's clearly a prototype not meant to be used like a full web browser. The next biggest step that Google has laid out is to ensure this version of Blink/Chromium for iOS passes all of the many tests that ensure all aspects of a browser are working correctly.

Transportation

Universal Hydrogen's 40-Passenger Hydrogen Electric Plane Completes Maiden Flight (electrek.co) 50

Mere weeks after achieving experimental airworthiness certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Universal Hydrogen has successfully taken its 40-passenger regional hydrogen electric plane to the skies. Electrek reports: Universal Hydrogen is celebrating today following the first successful flight of the hydrogen electric plane this morning, which took off in Grant County, Washington, at 8:41 a.m. PST and flew for 15 minutes. For this initial flight, one of the airplane's engines was replaced with Universal Hydrogen's fuel cell-electric powertrain. The other standard engine remained to ensure the safety of the plane and its pilot, former US Air Force test pilot Alex Kroll.

Kroll spoke to the confidence achieved during flight: "During the second circuit over the airport, we were comfortable with the performance of the hydrogen powertrain, so we were able to throttle back the fossil fuel turbine engine to demonstrate cruise principally on hydrogen power. The airplane handled beautifully, and the noise and vibrations from the fuel cell powertrain are significantly lower than from the conventional turbine engine."

Connect has secured the first US order to convert 75 ATR 72-600 planes to Universal Hydrogen powertrains with the purchase rights for 25 more. With the first successful flight complete, Universal Hydrogen kicks off a two-year testing program that is expected to enable full certification for hydrogen electric passenger flights using the aforementioned ATR 72 planes by 2025. The flight also marks the Dash-300 flying test bed as the largest hydrogen electric plane to take flight, paving the way for more hydrogen electric conversions of existing aircraft.
You can watch a video of the flight on YouTube or embedded in Electrek's article.
Transportation

Mississippi Passes Bill To Stop EV Dealers (electrek.co) 154

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: The Mississippi Senate has passed a bill that will stop electric car companies from opening their own dealerships in the state [...]. The bill started as House Bill 401, which you can see on the Mississippi Legislature's website. It amends Mississippi law related to car dealerships, clarifying that EV manufacturers can't get around the state's dealership laws, an exception that has been used by some manufacturers who have never opened a licensed dealer before. This will stop EV manufacturers from opening any physical locations in Mississippi. There is an exception in the law carved out for Tesla, which currently operates a single location in Brandon, Mississippi. "Mississippi has no statewide electric vehicle purchase incentive but does impose an annual $150 tax on electric vehicles, far above the amount of taxation that a hypothetical similarly efficient gas vehicle would have to pay," notes Electrek. "This charge is approximately equivalent to the amount of gas taxes a similarly efficient gas vehicle would pay if it drove 100,000 miles in a year."
Microsoft

Microsoft Unveils AI Model That Understands Image Content, Solves Visual Puzzles (arstechnica.com) 46

Researchers from Microsoft have introduced Kosmos-1, a multimodal model that can reportedly analyze images for content, solve visual puzzles, perform visual text recognition, pass visual IQ tests, and understand natural language instructions. From a report: The researchers believe multimodal AI -- which integrates different modes of input such as text, audio, images, and video -- is a key step to building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can perform general tasks at the level of a human. "Being a basic part of intelligence, multimodal perception is a necessity to achieve artificial general intelligence, in terms of knowledge acquisition and grounding to the real world," the researchers write in their academic paper, Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models.

Visual examples from the Kosmos-1 paper show the model analyzing images and answering questions about them, reading text from an image, writing captions for images, and taking a visual IQ test with 22â"26 percent accuracy. [...] In this case, Kosmos-1 appears to be purely a Microsoft project, without OpenAI's involvement. The researchers call their creation a "multimodal large language model" (MLLM) because its roots lie in natural language processing, like a text-only LLM, such as ChatGPT. And it shows: For Kosmos-1 to accept image input, the researchers must first translate the image into a special series of tokens (basically text) that the LLM can understand.

Privacy

San Diego Police Want To Add Surveillance Tech: 500 Streetlight Cameras Plus License Plate Readers (sandiegouniontribune.com) 24

San Diego Union-Tribune: Almost three years ago, the city of San Diego cut off access to its broad network of Smart Streetlights -- more than 3,000 devices perched atop light poles that could collect images and other data, some of which the Police Department used to solve criminal cases. The city removed that access, at least without a warrant, because of concerns from the public about surveillance and privacy issues. On Wednesday, the San Diego Police Department said it wants access to 500 of those devices to be restored -- and they want to add another crime-solving tool to the network: automated license plate readers.

The controversy surrounding the Smart Streetlights began in 2019 when it was revealed that the cameras had been installed without public input. Police started accessing the camera footage in 2018 for investigations. Direct access was cut off in 2020 as a result of public outcry. Because the Smart Streetlight cameras had not been well maintained over the years, the city would need to install new cameras. Adding the license plate reader technology would mark the first time the city of San Diego would have the readers in fixed locations. This is the first big push for surveillance technology in San Diego since the city approved ordinances last year specifically setting rules to govern this kind of technology in light of privacy concerns.

Social Networks

Reddit Tells Court: Film Studios Spewed 'Nonsense' in Demand for Users' Names (arstechnica.com) 36

Reddit is fighting a film-industry attempt to identify users who discussed piracy, telling a federal court that the studios' request for users' real names should be rejected and that one of the studios' arguments is "nonsense." From a report: "Courts have long recognized that the First Amendment protects online anonymity and have established a stringent standard to use in precisely this scenario, where a litigant seeks to unmask users for the purpose of providing evidence in litigation that does not involve those users... Plaintiffs are far from meeting that strict standard here," Reddit said Tuesday in a filing in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Reddit has no involvement in the lawsuit that triggered the request for users' identities -- the studios behind films such as Hellboy, Rambo V: Last Blood, Tesla, and The Hitman's Bodyguard sued cable broadband provider RCN in a different court, alleging that RCN failed to terminate Internet subscribers who illegally downloaded copyrighted movies. (RCN is now known as Astound Broadband after being combined with several other cable ISPs in the same ownership group.) In an attempt to prove that RCN turned a blind eye to users downloading copyrighted movies, the film studios subpoenaed Reddit seeking identifying information for specific users who commented in piracy-related threads. After Reddit provided information on only one user, calling the other requests a "fishing expedition," the studios filed a motion to compel Reddit to respond to the subpoena.

Businesses

Work Phones Make Comeback as More Employers Ban WhatsApp, TikTok (bloomberg.com) 65

There may be a new ringtone in your life -- the urgent chime of a company-issued cell phone. From a report: In a throwback to the Blackberry era, telecom-service providers are seeing strong growth from companies handing out phones to employees. The phenomenon, which started during the pandemic, picked up recently thanks to new compliance policies around the use of WhatsApp and TikTok. It's provided a "tailwind" for subscriber gains at AT&T, Chief Financial Officer Pascal Desroches said at a conference this week. At the same event, T-Mobile US Inc. Chief Financial Officer Peter Osvaldik said his company's corporate customer count "grew every quarter in 2022."

The phones are more than just a corporate perk, said Gartner analyst Lisa Pierce. "It's also about control" -- a means of restricting or blocking applications and keeping corporate data secure, she said. Businesses, especially those in finance, have grown concerned about the security of their data, and the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have stepped up their scrutiny over unauthorized private communication on applications such as WhatsApp and through personal email. Late last year, Congress, along with several states, banned China-owned TikTok from government employees' devices over national security concerns. This puts organizations in the position of either requiring their workers to remove apps from personal phones, or offering a secure second device. That second device helps explain how wireless carriers keep racking up millions of new subscribers long after the time when the mobile market passed saturation, with nearly every adult in the US owning at least one phone.

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