"After a Supreme Court of the United States ruling in Feb. 2026, many tariffs imposed by the Trump administration were declared illegal because the president overstepped his authority," writes Slashdot reader hcs_$reboot. "As a result, the U.S. government now has to refund a massive amount of money, around $160-170+ billion, paid mainly by importers." According to the New York Times, the administration has now begun accepting refund requests, "surrendering its prized source of revenue -- plus interest." From the report: For some U.S. businesses, the highly anticipated refunds could be substantial, offering critical if belated financial relief. Tariffs are taxes on imports, so the president's trade policies have served as a great burden for companies that rely on foreign goods. Many have had to choose whether to absorb the duties, cut other costs or pass on the expenses to consumers. By Monday morning, those companies can begin to submit documentation to the government to recover what they paid in illegal tariffs.

In a sign of the demand, more than 3,000 businesses, including FedEx and Costco, have already sued the Trump administration in a bid to secure their refunds, with some cases filed even before the Supreme Court's ruling. But only the entities that officially paid the tariffs are eligible to recover that money. That means that the fuller universe of people affected by Mr. Trump's policies -- including millions of Americans who paid higher prices for the products they bought -- are not able to apply for direct relief.

The extent to which consumers realize any gain hinges on whether businesses share the proceeds, something that few have publicly committed to do. Some have started to band together in class-action lawsuits in the hopes of receiving a payout. Many business owners said they weren't sure how easy the tariff refund process would be, particularly given Mr. Trump's stated opposition to returning the money. The administration has suggested that it may be months before companies see any money. Adding to the uncertainty, the White House has declined to say if it might still try to return to court in a bid to halt some or all of the refunds. The money will mostly go to importers and companies, since they were the ones that directly paid the tariffs. While individual refunds with interest could take around 60 to 90 days to process, the overall effort will probably move much more slowly because of how large and complicated it will be.

There are also legal questions around whether companies would have to pass any of that money on to consumers. Slashdot reader AmiMoJo commented: "This is perhaps the biggest transfer of wealth in American history. Most of those companies will just pocket the refund and not pass any of it on to the consumer. If prices go down at all, they won't be back to pre-tariff levels. You paid the tariffs, but you ain't getting the refund."

Axios reports that the NSA is using Anthropic's restricted Mythos Preview model despite the Pentagon insisting the company poses a "supply chain risk." Axios reports: The government's cybersecurity needs appear to be outweighing the Pentagon's feud with Anthropic. The department moved in February to cut off Anthropic and force its vendors to follow suit. That case is ongoing. The military is now broadening its use of Anthropic's tools while simultaneously arguing in court that using those tools threatens U.S. national security.

Two sources said the NSA was using Mythos, while one said the model was also being used more widely within the department. It's unclear how the NSA is currently using Mythos, but other organizations with access to the model are using it predominantly to scan their own environments for exploitable security vulnerabilities.

Anthropic restricted access to Mythos to around 40 organizations, contending that its offensive cyber capabilities were too dangerous to allow for a wider release. Anthropic only announced 12 of those organizations. One source said the NSA was among the unnamed agencies with access. The NSA's counterparts in the U.K. have said they have access to the model through the country's AI Security Institute. Anthropic's CEO met with top U.S. officials on Friday to discuss "opportunities for collaboration," according to a White House spokesperson, "as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology."

"Motorola has filed a lawsuit in India against social media platforms and content creators," reports TechCrunch, "over posts it alleges are defamatory..." The lawsuit, filed in a Bengaluru court and obtained by TechCrunch, names platforms such as X, YouTube, and Instagram along with dozens of content creators, and seeks takedown of the content as well as broader restraint on what it describes as false or defamatory material related to the company's devices. In its over 60-page filing, Motorola has sought a permanent injunction restraining the defendants from publishing or sharing what it describes as false or defamatory content about its products, including reviews, videos, comments, and boycott campaigns.

The complaint cites hundreds of posts across platforms, including videos alleging device issues and phones catching fire. But it is also targeting unfavorable product reviews and user commentary that the company alleges are false or defamatory. In a statement after publication, a Motorola spokesperson said it had initiated legal action "in the interest of public safety" against what it described as demonstrably false claims that its devices had exploded or caught fire.
One online creator told TechCrunch "they expect more such legal action in the future, as evolving rules around online content increase liability for creators and platforms — a trend reflected in recently proposed changes to India's IT rules aimed at tightening oversight of online content."

A Motorola spokesperson "said the company did not seek to suppress legitimate reviews or criticism and was reviewing the scope of the proceedings, adding that it apologized to creators affected inadvertently."

"Nevada quietly signed an agreement earlier this year with a company that collects location data from cellphones, allowing police to track a device virtually in real time," reports the Associated Press. "All without a warrant." The software from Fog Data Science, adopted this January in Nevada through a Department of Public Safety contract, pulls information from smartphone apps in order to let state investigators identify the location of mobile devices. The state is allowed more than 250 queries a month using the tool, which allows officers to track a device's location over long stretches of time and enables them to see what Fog calls "patterns of life," according to company documents from 2022. It can help them deduce where and when people work and live, with whom they associate and what places they visit, according to privacy experts... Traditionally, police must obtain a warrant from a judge to access cellphone location information — a process that can take days or weeks. And while cellphone users may be aware that they are sharing their location through apps such as Google Maps, critics say few are aware that such information can make its way to police...

Other agencies in Nevada have been known to use technology similar to Fog. In 2013, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department acquired something known as a cell-site simulator that mimics cellphone towers and can sweep up signals from entire areas to track individuals, with some models capable of intercepting texts and calls. Police have not released detailed information about the technology since then.
"Police in other states have said the technology (and its low price tag) has helped expand investigatory capacity," the article adds.

But it also points out that Fog Data Science has a web page letting individuals opt out of all their data sets.

Back in the 1990s, floppy disks "had a mere capacity of 1.44MB," remembers XDA Developers, "which would soon become absolutely tiny for the increasingly large pieces of software that would come about." Floppy disks also felt quite fragile, and while we got "superfloppy" formats that were physically larger and had more capacity, those were pretty unwieldy as portable storage. Enter 1994, when a company called Iomega introduced its variant of a "superfloppy", the Zip drive... [T]he initial capacity introduced in 1994 reached a whopping 100MB, which was huge number when put up against the traditional floppy disk. Zip drives also had major performance benefits, with read speeds that could average 1.4MB/s, as opposed to the comparatively sluggish 16kB/s speeds of a traditional floppy disk, as well as a seek time of around 28ms seconds, whereas a floppy disk averaged 200ms. Zip drives weren't quite as fast as desktop HDDs, but for portable storage, this was a huge step forward...

[I]n 1998, Iomega introduced the Zip 250 disks, which increased the capacity to 250MB, and, already in the new millennium, we got the Zip 750, which took that further to 750MB... It was an appealing enough proposition that big computer manufacturers like Dell started including a Zip drive in some of their PCs. Even Apple included Zip drives in some of its Power Macintosh models from the mid-to-late 90s. However, things started to shift towards the end of the decade as other portable formats rose to prominence, most notably CDs and USB flash drives.

Despite their initial success, it didn't take long for users to start noticing a major drawback of Zip drives: many times, they would just fail. It wasn't necessarily related to age or any particular misuse of the disks, it just happened. It was a big enough phenomenon that it became known as the "click of death", and once it happened, your drive was gone. The problem was estimated by Iomega to affect around 0.5% of Zip drives, but while that sounds like a small number, when you sell products by the thousands, it becomes fairly widespread. It was a big enough issue that, in September 1998, a class action lawsuit was filed against Iomega for the common problems. Some of the complaints in that lawsuit were eventually dismissed by the court of Delaware, but others were not, and once the public became aware of the problems with Zip drives, it was hard for the brand to make a comeback.

It didn't help that this happened around the same time as formats such as CDs were becoming more popular... And eventually, USB flash drives became the most popular way to carry data around since they were smaller and offered much faster speeds... Eventually, after seeing its profits plummet by the mid-2000s, Iomega was sold to a company called EMC in 2008, and in 2013, EMC and Lenovo formed a joint venture that took over Iomega's business and removed all of the Iomega branding from its products.
The article does note that "as late as 2014, some aviation companies were still using Zip drives to distribute updates for navigation databases." Are there any Slashdot readers who still remember their own Zip drive experiences?

Share your memories in the comments of that once-so-trendy storage technology from the 1990s...

Friday Anthropic's CEO met with top U.S. officials and "discussed opportunities for collaboration," according to a White House spokesperson itedd by Politico, "as well as shared approaches and protocols to address the challenges associated with scaling this technology."

CNN notes the meeting happens at the same time Anthropic "battles the Trump administration in court for blacklisting its Claude AI model..." The meeting took place as the US government is trying to balance its hardline approach to Anthropic with the national security implications of turning its back on the company's breakthrough technology — including its Mythos tool that can identify cybersecurity threats but also present a roadmap for hackers to attack companies or the government... The Office of Management and Budget has already told agencies it is preparing to give them access to Mythos to prepare, Bloomberg reported. Axios reported the White House is also in discussion to gain access to Mythos.
The Trump administration "recognizes the power" of Mythos, reports Axios, "and its highly sophisticated — and potentially dangerous — ability to breach cybersecurity defenses." "It would be grossly irresponsible for the U.S. government to deprive itself of the technological leaps that the new model presents," a source close to negotiations told us. "It would be a gift to China"... Some parts of the U.S. intelligence community, plus the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA, part of Homeland Security), are testing Mythos. Treasury and others want it.
The White House added they plan to invite other AI companies for similar discussions, Politico reports. But Mythos "is also alarming regulators in Europe, who have told POLITICO they have not been able to gain access..." U.S. government agency tech leaders sought access to the model after Anthropic earlier this year began testing the model and granted limited access to a select group of companies, including JPMorgan, Amazon and Apple... after finding it had hacking capabilities far outstripping those of previous AI models. This includes the ability to autonomously identify and exploit complex software vulnerabilities, such as so-called zero-day flaws, which even some of the sharpest human minds are unable to patch. The AI startup also wrote that the model could carry out end-to-end cyberattacks autonomously, including by navigating enterprise IT systems and chaining together exploits. It could also act as a force-multiplier for research needed to build chemical and biological weapons, and in certain instances, made efforts to cover its tracks when attacking systems, according to Anthropic's report on the model's capabilities and its safety assessments.

Those findings and others have inspired fears that the model could be co-opted to launch powerful cyberattacks with relative ease if it fell into the wrong hands. Logan Graham, a senior security researcher at Anthropic, previously told POLITICO that researchers and tech firms had been given early access to Mythos so they could find flaws in their critical code before state-backed hackers or cybercriminals could exploit them. "Within six, 12 or 24 months, these kinds of capabilities could be just broadly available to everybody in the world," Graham said.

A Manhattan federal jury found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally maintained monopoly power in the ticketing market. The findings follow an antitrust case brought by states after a separate DOJ settlement. CNN reports: The verdict was reached following a lengthy trial in New York federal court that included testimony from top executives in the music and entertainment industries. Jurors began deliberating on Friday. The Justice Department and 39 state attorneys general, including California and New York, and Washington, DC, sued Live Nation in 2024 alleging its combination with Ticketmaster and control of "virtually every aspect of the live music ecosystem" have harmed fans, artists, and venues.

During the second week of trial, in a move that surprised even the judge, the Justice Department reached a secret settlement with Live Nation. A handful of states signed onto the deal, but more than two dozen proceeded to trial. Under the DOJ deal, Live Nation agreed to allow competitors, like SeatGeek or StubHub, to offer tickets to its events, cap ticketing service fees at 15%, and divest exclusive booking agreements with 13 amphitheaters. The deal includes a $280 million settlement fund for state damages claims for the handful of states that signed onto the deal. The DOJ settlement requires the judge's approval.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, secured a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna's Archive. The shadow library failed to appear in court and briefly released millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent. In addition to the monetary penalty, a permanent injunction required domain registrars and other parties to suspend the site's domain names. [...]

The music labels get the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages for around 50 works. Spotify adds a DMCA circumvention claim of $2,500 for 120,000 music files, bringing the total to more than $322 million. The plaintiff previously described their damages request as "extremely conservative." The DMCA claim is based only on the 120,000 files, not the full 2.8 million that were released. Had they applied the $2,500 rate to all released files, the damages figure would exceed $7 billion. Anna's Archive did not show up in court, and the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment attempts to address this directly, by ordering Anna's Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents.

Whether the site will comply with this order is highly uncertain. For now, the monetary judgment is mostly a victory on paper, as recouping money from an unknown entity is impossible. For this reason, the music companies also requested a permanent injunction. In addition to the damages award, [Judge Jed Rakoff] entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna's Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg. Domain registries and registrars of record, along with hosting and internet service providers, are ordered to permanently disable access to those domains, disable authoritative nameservers, cease hosting services, and preserve evidence that could identify the site's operators.

The judgment names specific third parties bound by those obligations, including Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Switch Foundation, The Swedish Internet Foundation, Njalla SRL, IQWeb FZ-LLC, Immaterialism Ltd., Hosting Concepts B.V., Tucows Domains Inc., and OwnRegistrar, Inc. Anna's Archive is also ordered to destroy all copies of works scraped from Spotify and to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, including valid contact information for the site and its managing agents. That last requirement could prove significant, given that the identity of the site's operators remains unknown.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Several Californians sued Sutter Health and MemorialCare this week over allegations that an AI transcription tool was used to record them without their consent, in violation of state and federal law. The proposed class-action lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, states that, within the past six months, the plaintiffs received medical care at various Sutter and MemorialCare facilities.

During those visits, medical staff used Abridge AI. According to the complaint, this system "captured and processed their confidential physician-patient communications. Plaintiffs did not receive clear notice that their medical conversations would be recorded by an artificial intelligence platform, transmitted outside the clinical setting, or processed through third-party systems." The complaint adds that these recordings "contained individually identifiable medical information, including but not limited to medical histories, symptoms, diagnoses, medications, treatment discussions, and other sensitive health disclosures communicated during confidential medical consultations."

In recent years, Abridge's software and AI service have been rapidly deployed across major health care providers nationwide, including Kaiser Permanente, the Mayo Clinic, Duke Health, and many more. When activated, the software captures, transcribes, and summarizes conversations between patients and doctors, and it turns them into clinical notes. Sutter Health began partnering with Abridge two years ago. Sutter spokesperson Liz Madison said the company is aware of the lawsuit. "We take patient privacy seriously and are committed to protecting the security of our patients' information," Madison said. "Technology used in our clinical settings is carefully evaluated and implemented in accordance with applicable laws and regulations."

Arizona state prosecutors allege Kalshi is running an illegal gambling operation, charging the prediction market with 20 "wagering" misdemeanors. But Friday a federal judge "temporarily barred Arizona from enforcing its gambling laws against predictive market operators," reports the Associated Press, "and put the brakes on a criminal wagering case that the state has filed against Kalshi.

"U.S. District Judge Michael Liburdi's ruling means a Monday arraignment hearing for Kalshi has been called off." The order was issued in a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration. The judge's order said the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission had sufficiently shown that "event contracts" fall within the Commodity Exchange Act's definition of "swaps," and that it had demonstrated a reasonable chance of success in showing that the act preempts Arizona law... The commission had sued Arizona in response to cease-and-desist letters sent to Kalshi from state gambling regulators and the criminal charges filed against the prediction market operator. The commission argued Arizona is intruding on its exclusive federal power to regulate national swaps markets...

Earlier this month, the federal government filed lawsuits against Connecticut, Arizona and Illinois challenging their efforts to regulate prediction market operators. The Trump administration has so far backed the platforms. President Donald Trump's eldest son is an adviser for both Kalshi and Polymarket and an investor in the latter. Trump's social media platform Truth Social is also launching its own cryptocurrency-based prediction market called Truth Predict.
Federal and state judges in Nevada and Massachusetts have now issued early rulings in favor of states looking to ban Kalshi and its competitor Polymarket from offering sports being in their states, according to the article, "while federal judges in New Jersey and Tennessee have ruled in favor of Kalshi."

And Arizona's attorney general's office said it disagrees with the court's ruling and "will evaluate our next steps."

Critics say social media is engineered to be as addictive as tobacco or gambling, writes the Washington Post — while adding that "the science has been moving in parallel with the court's recognition." A growing body of research links heavy social media use not only to declines in mental health but to measurable cognitive effects — on attention, memory and focus — that in some studies resemble accelerated aging. Science also suggests we have more control than we realize when it comes to reversing this damage, and the solution is surprisingly simple: Take a break... "Digital detoxes" can sound like a fad. But in one of the largest studies to date, published in PNAS Nexus and involving more than 467 participants with an average age of 32, even a short time away produced striking results — effectively erasing a decade of age-related cognitive decline.

For 14 days, participants used a commercially available app, Freedom, to block internet access on their phones. They were still allowed calls and text messages, essentially turning a smartphone into a dumb phone. Their time online decreased from 314 minutes to 161 minutes, and by the end of the period the participants had improvements in sustained attention, mental health as well as self-reported well-being. The improvement in sustained attention was about the same magnitude as 10 years of age-related decline, the researchers noted, and the effect of the intervention on depression symptoms was larger than antidepressants and similar to that of cognitive behavioral therapy.

But two things were even more mind-blowing... Even those people who cheated and broke the rules after a few days seemed to have positive effects from the break; and in follow-up reports after the two weeks, many people reported the positive effects lingered. "So you don't have to necessarily restrict yourself forever. Even taking a partial digital detox, even for a few days, seems to work," Kushlev said.
The article also notes a November study at Harvard published in JAMA Network Open where nearly 400 people 'found that even a short break can make a measurable difference: After just one week of reduced smartphone use, participants reported drops in anxiety (16.1 percent), depression (24.8 percent) and insomnia (14.5 percent)..."

"Other experiments point in the same direction — whether decreasing social media use by an hour a day for one week or stepping away from just Facebook and Instagram."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Trump administration has stepped up an effort to unmask a Reddit user who criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After failing to obtain information through a summons issued (PDF) to Reddit, the government reportedly issued a subpoena demanding that Reddit provide the information and appear before a grand jury in Washington, DC. The Intercept described the subpoena today. "According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month," the article said.

The legal saga began in US District Court for the Northern District of California. On March 12, the anonymous Reddit user whose information is being sought filed a motion (PDF) to quash a summons seeking a host of information from Reddit. The summons was issued by the Department of Homeland Security and directed Reddit to turn information over to an ICE senior special agent. The summons cited authority under 19 U.S. Code 1509, which is part of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. The motion to quash said the summons is not authorized by the law, which deals with imports of boats, alcoholic drinks, and animals, among other things.

"J. Doe is a US citizen who has not traveled out of the country, is not engaged in any international commerce, has no business concerns outside the United States, and primarily uses their Reddit account to engage in political speech relevant to their local community," said the filing by the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC), which represents the Reddit user. "Yet the government claims the right to obtain Doe's name, telephone number, home address, banking and credit card information, IP addresses, telephone model number(s), and the names of any other accounts associated with their Reddit account. The information sought by the government in no way pertains to customs or importing or exporting merchandise, and is clearly intended to chill free speech." "We should be very, very, very concerned that they've now taken one of these to a grand jury," said David Greene, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "It's something to be taken very seriously."

A Reddit spokesperson told Ars today that "we seek to inform users of any legal process compelling disclosure of their data, as we did in this case, because users should have the agency to protect their own information and are often better positioned to challenge requests that impact them."

"We do not voluntarily share information with any government, especially not on users exercising their rights to criticize the government or plan a protest. We review every inquiry for legal sufficiency and routinely object to requests that are overbroad or threaten civil rights. When legally compelled to disclose data, we provide only the minimum required and notify the user whenever possible so they can defend their interests."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant's iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device's push notification database, multiple people present for FBI testimony in a recent trial told 404 Media. The case involved a group of people setting off fireworks and vandalizing property at the ICE Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas in July, and one shooting a police officer in the neck. The news shows how forensic extraction -- when someone has physical access to a device and is able to run specialized software on it -- can yield sensitive data derived from secure messaging apps in unexpected places. Signal already has a setting that blocks message content from displaying in push notifications; the case highlights why such a feature might be important for some users to turn on.

"We learned that specifically on iPhones, if one's settings in the Signal app allow for message notifications and previews to show up on the lock screen, [then] the iPhone will internally store those notifications/message previews in the internal memory of the device," a supporter of the defendants who was taking notes during the trial told 404 Media. [...] During one day of the related trial, FBI Special Agent Clark Wiethorn testified about some of the collected evidence. A summary of Exhibit 158 published on a group of supporters' website says, "Messages were recovered from Sharp's phone through Apple's internal notification storage -- Signal had been removed, but incoming notifications were preserved in internal memory. Only incoming messages were captured (no outgoing)."

404 Media spoke to one of the supporters who was taking notes during the trial, and to Harmony Schuerman, an attorney representing defendant Elizabeth Soto. Schuerman shared notes she took on Exhibit 158. "They were able to capture these chats bc [because] of the way she had notifications set up on her phone -- anytime a notification pops up on the lock screen, Apple stores it in the internal memory of the device," those notes read. The supporter added, "I was in the courtroom on the last day of the state's case when they had FBI Special Agent Clark testifying about some Signal messages. One set came from Lynette Sharp's phone (one of the cooperating witnesses), but the interesting detailed messages shown in court were messages that had been set to disappear and had in fact disappeared in the Signal app." Further reading: Apple Gave Governments Data On Thousands of Push Notifications

A federal appeals court denied Anthropic's bid to temporarily block the Pentagon's blacklisting, meaning the company remains shut out of Defense Department contracts while the case continues, even though a separate court has allowed other federal agencies to keep using Claude for now. CNBC reports: "In our view, the equitable balance here cuts in favor of the government," the appeals court said in its decision. "On one side is a relatively contained risk of financial harm to a single private company. On the other side is judicial management of how, and through whom, the Department of War secures vital AI technology during an active military conflict. For that reason, we deny Anthropic's motion for a stay pending review on the merits." With the split decisions by the two courts, Anthropic is excluded from DOD contracts but is able to continue working with other government agencies while litigation plays out. Defense contractors will be prohibited from using Claude in their work with the agency, but they can use it for other cases.

[...] In the ruling on Wednesday, the court acknowledged that Anthropic "will likely suffer some degree of irreparable harm absent a stay," but that the company's interests "seem primarily financial in nature." While the company claimed the DOD was standing in the way of its right to free speech, "Anthropic does not show that its speech has been chilled during the pendency of this litigation," the order said. Because of the harm Anthropic is likely to suffer, the appeals court said "substantial expedition is warranted."

An Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement after the ruling that the company is "grateful the court recognized these issues need to be resolved quickly" and that it's "confident the courts will ultimately agree that these supply chain designations were unlawful." "While this case was necessary to protect Anthropic, our customers, and our partners, our focus remains on working productively with the government to ensure all Americans benefit from safe, reliable AI," Anthropic said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: Farmers have been fighting John Deere for years over the right to repair their equipment, and this week, they finally reached a landmark settlement. While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere's authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents (PDF) -- far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.

The settlement also includes an agreement by Deere to provide "the digital tools required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair" of tractors, combines, and other machinery for 10 years. That part is crucial, as farmers previously resorted to hacking their own equipment's software just to get it up and running again. John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding in 2023 that partially addressed those concerns, providing third parties with the technology to diagnose and repair, as long as its intellectual property was safeguarded. Monday's settlement seems to represent a much stronger (and legally binding) step forward. The report notes that a judge's approval of the settlement is still required but likely to happen. John Deere also faces another lawsuit by the U.S. FTC, accusing the company of forcing farmers to use its authorized dealer network and driving up their costs for parts and repairs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A group of Russian government hackers have hijacked thousands of home and small business routers around the world as part of an ongoing campaign aimed at redirecting victim's internet traffic to steal their passwords and access tokens, security researchers and government authorities warned on Tuesday. [...] The hacking group targeted unpatched routers made by MikroTik and TP-Link using previously disclosed vulnerabilities according to the U.K. government's cybersecurity unit NCSC and Lumen's research arm Black Lotus Labs, which released new details of the campaign Tuesday.

According to the researchers, the hackers were able to spy on large numbers of people over the course of several years by compromising their routers, many of which run outdated software, leaving them vulnerable to remote attacks without their owners' knowledge. The NCSC said that these operations are "likely opportunistic in nature, with the actor casting a wide net to reach many potential victims, before narrowing in on targets of intelligence interest as the attack develops." Per the researchers and government advisories, the Russian hackers hacked routers to modify the device's settings so that the victim's internet requests are surreptitiously passed to infrastructure run by the hackers. This allows the hackers to redirect victims to spoof websites under their control, then steal passwords and tokens that let the hackers log in to that victim's online accounts without needing their two-factor authentication codes.

Black Lotus Labs said that Fancy Bear compromised at least 18,000 victims in around 120 countries, including government departments, law enforcement agencies, and email providers across North Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia. Microsoft, which also released details of the campaign on Tuesday, said in a blog post that its researchers identified over 200 organizations and 5,000 consumer devices affected by these hacking operations, including at least three government organizations in Africa. The Justice Department said Tuesday it neutralized compromised routers in the U.S. under court authorization. As the DOJ put it, the FBI "developed a series of commands to send to compromised routers" to collect evidence, reset settings, and prevent hackers from breaking back in.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Following on the heels of the landmark Cox v. Sony ruling, the Supreme Court has vacated the contributory copyright infringement verdict against ISP Grande Communications, ordering the Fifth Circuit to reconsider its decision in light of the new precedent. [...] The order (PDF) effectively removes the case from the Supreme Court docket, urging the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to take another look at its decision in light of the new ruling.

Given the similarities between the two cases, it is no surprise that the Supreme Court came to this conclusion. It is now up to the Fifth Circuit to revisit whether Grande's conduct meets the intent threshold that was established in Cox. That is a significantly higher bar than the one applied in the original verdict, which found that continuing to provide service to known infringers was enough to establish material contribution.

The music companies previously said they sent over a million copyright infringement notices, but that Grande failed to terminate even a single subscriber account in response. However, without proof of active inducement, these absolute numbers carry less weight now. Whether this translates into a win for Grande on remand remains to be seen. For now, however, the original $47 million verdict is further away than ever.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: President Javier Milei of Argentina promoted a cryptocurrency last year that quickly skyrocketed in value then cratered just as fast, costing investors millions of dollars and setting off a scandal and an investigation. Mr. Milei said he was simply highlighting a private venture and had no connection to the digital coin called $Libra. New evidence is now raising questions about his assertion. Phone logs from a federal investigation by Argentine prosecutors into the coin's collapse show seven phone calls between Mr. Milei and one of the entrepreneurs behind the cryptocurrency on the night in 2025 when Mr. Milei posted about $Libra on X. The contents of the calls, which took place before and after Mr. Milei's post, are not known.

But the phone logs -- which were obtained by The New York Times and first reported by a local cable news channel, C5N -- suggest a greater degree of communication between Mr. Milei and the entrepreneurs who launched the token than what the president has publicly acknowledged. Newly uncovered messages also suggest Mr. Milei received regular payments from one of the entrepreneurs while he was a congressman. Mr. Milei has not publicly commented on the call logs and other documents, and he did not respond to a request for comment. He is named as a person of interest in the federal prosecutor's continuing investigation into the digital coin, according to court documents reviewed by The Times, but has not been formally charged with any crime. The latest revelations have revived a scandal that threatens the very foundation of a president who rose to power and was elected president in 2023 by attacking a political class he called corrupt.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that New Jersey gaming regulators cannot prevent Kalshi from allowing people in the state to use its prediction market to place financial bets on the outcome of sporting events. A three-judge panel of the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 (PDF) in finding that the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has exclusive jurisdiction over the sports-related event contracts that Kalshi allows people to trade on its platform. The ruling marked the first time a federal appeals court has ruled on what has become the central issue in an escalating battle over the ability of state gaming regulators to police the activity of prediction market operators.

Kalshi and companies like it allow users to place trades and profit from predictions on events such as sports and elections. States argue that firms like Kalshi are operating without required state licenses, in violation of gaming laws, including bans on wagers by those under 21. Those states include New Jersey, which last year sent Kalshi a cease-and-desist letter stating that its listing of sports-related event contracts on its platform violated state gambling laws that prohibit betting on collegiate sports. Kalshi sued the state, arguing its event contracts qualify as "swaps," a type of derivative contract, that under the Commodity Exchange Act can only be regulated by the CFTC, which had granted the company a license to operate a designated contract market (DCM).

A lower-court judge had sided with New York-based Kalshi and issued a preliminary injunction, prompting New Jersey to appeal. But a majority of the judges on the 3rd Circuit panel concluded the Commodity Exchange Act likely preempted state law. "Kalshi's sports-related event contracts are swaps traded on a CFTC-licensed DCM, so the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction," U.S. Circuit Judge David Porter wrote. The ruling was in line with the position advanced in other litigation by the CFTC under President Donald Trump's administration. The regulator last week sued Arizona, Connecticut and Illinois to prevent them from pursuing what it called unlawful efforts to regulate prediction markets.

One crime ring scammed 2,000 elderly people of more than $27 million between 2021 and 2023 using tech support/bank impersonation/refund scams. "Victims were in their 70s and 80s," reports the U.S. Attorney's office for California's southern district. Victims were first told they'd received a refund (either online or via phone), but then told they'd been "over-refunded" a massive amount, and asked to return that amount.

But 42-year-old Jiandong Chen just admitted Thursday in a U.S. federal court that he was involved in the fraud and money laundering via cryptocurrency — pleading guilty to two charges with maximum penalties of 40 years in prison and a $1 million fine, plus 20 years in prison with a maximum fine of $500,000 or twice the amount laundered. "Chen, a Chinese national, is the second defendant charged in a five-defendant indictment." And what tripped him up seems to be that "Certain members of the conspiracy also did in-person pickups of money directly from victims..."

And so YouTube enters the story — when the scammers called pranksters with 1,790,000 subscribers to their "Trilogy Media" channel. In an elaborate three-hour video, the team of pranksters lured the scammer to a rented Airbnb where they're staging a fake funeral with a nun. (One of the men acting in the video remembers "we start doing a prayer... I'm holding the scammer's hand in my nun outfit...")

They convince the scammer to collect the cash from a dead man — "Is there anything you'd like to say to him?" Then there's demon voices. The scammer's victim resurrects from the dead. Did the cash mule bring holy water?

The end result was a video titled "CONFRONTING SCAMMERS WITH A FAKE FUNERAL (EPIC REACTIONS)". But two and a half years later, their "cash mule sting house" video has racked up over 1.3 million views, 22,000 likes, and 2,979 comments. ("This video is longer than Oppenheimer. Thanks for the laughs fellas.")

And the scammer is facing 60 years in prison.