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A Nintendo Switch modder has entered a legal battle against Nintendo without legal representation, Torrent Freak reports. Ryan Daly, alleged owner of Modded Hardware, denied all allegations in a lawsuit filed by Nintendo in July. Nintendo claims Modded Hardware offers hardware and firmware for creating and playing pirated games, as well as providing customers with pirated Nintendo titles. The company filed suit after Daly...

An anonymous reader shares a report: The companies behind the streaming industry, including smart TV and streaming stick manufacturers and streaming service providers, have developed a "surveillance system" that has "long undermined privacy and consumer protection," according to a report from the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) published today and sent to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Unprecedented tracking techniques aimed at pleasing advertisers...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's case accusing Amazon of stifling competition in online retail will move forward, though some of the states that sued alongside the agency had their claims dismissed, court documents showed. U.S. District Judge John Chun in Seattle unsealed his ruling from Sept. 30, which dismissed some of the claims brought by attorneys...

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared the EFF's "Deeplink" blog post: EFF, along with the ACLU and the ACLU of Mississippi, filed an amicus brief on Thursday asking a federal appellate court to continue to block Mississippi's HB 1126 — a bill that imposes age verification mandates on social media services across the internet. Our friend-of-the-court brief, filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for...

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared this report from Australia's public broadcaster ABC: Ecovacs robot vacuums, which have been found to suffer from critical cybersecurity flaws, are collecting photos, videos and voice recordings — taken inside customers' houses — to train the company's AI models. The Chinese home robotics company, which sells a range of popular Deebot models in Australia, said its users are "willingly...

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: Hundreds of Americans have been arrested after being connected to a crime by facial recognition software, a Washington Post investigation has found, but many never know it because police seldom disclose their use of the controversial technology... In fact, the records show that officers often obscured their reliance on the software in public-facing reports,...

The British Post Office scandal "was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software," remembers Computer Weekly, "which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history." But now the Post Office "is investigating allegations that a senior executive instructed staff to destroy or conceal documents that...

"Pig Butchering Alert: Fraudulent Trading App targeted iOS and Android users." That's the title of a new report released this week by cybersecurity company Group-IB revealing the official Apple App Store and Google Play store offered apps that were actually one part of a larger fraud campaign. "To complete the scam, the victim is asked to fund their account... After a few seemingly successful...

Wired reports on "AI-powered cameras mounted on cars and trucks, initially designed to capture license plates, but which are now photographing political lawn signs outside private homes, individuals wearing T-shirts with text, and vehicles displaying pro-abortion bumper stickers — all while recordi00ng the precise locations of these observations..." The detailed photographs all surfaced in search results produced by the systems of DRN Data, a...

This week the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York unsealed charges over a "scheme to commit fraud" in carbon markets, which they say fraudulently netted one company "tens of millions of dollars" worth of credits — which led to "securing an investment of over $100 million." MarketWatch reports: Ken Newcombe had spent years building a program to distribute more environmentally...

T-Mobile experienced three major data breaches in 2021, 2022, and 2023, according to CSO Online, "which impacted millions of its customers." After a series of investigations by America's Federal Communications Commission, T-Mobile agreed in court to a number of settlement conditions, including moving toward a "modern zero-trust architecture," designating a Chief Information Security Office, implementing phishing-resistant multifactor authentication, and adopting data minimization, data inventory,...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Comcast says data on 237,703 of its customers was in fact stolen in a cyberattack on a debt collector it was using, contrary to previous assurances it was given that it was unaffected by that intrusion. That collections agency, Financial Business and Consumer Solutions aka FBCS, was compromised in February, and according to a filing...

On September 28, California amended the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 to recognize the importance of mental privacy. "The law marks the second such legal protection for data produced from invasive neurotechnology, following Colorado, which incorporated neural data into its state data privacy statute, the Colorado Privacy Act (CPA) in April," notes Law.com. GovTech reports: The new bill amends the California Consumer Privacy...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The European Union's top court has sided with a privacy challenge to Meta's data retention policies. It ruled on Friday that social networks, such as Facebook, cannot keep using people's information for ad targeting indefinitely. The judgement could have major implications on the way Meta and other ad-funded social networks operate in the region. Limits on...

Cloudflare has emerged victorious in a patent infringement lawsuit against Sable Networks, securing a $225,000 settlement and forcing the patent holder to dedicate its entire portfolio to the public domain. The case, which began in March 2021 with Sable asserting nearly 100 claims across four patents, concluded after a Texas jury found Cloudflare not guilty of infringement in February 2024. Sable, described by Cloudflare...

The one-and-done nature of 23andMe is "indicative of a core business problem with the once high-flying biotech company that is now teetering on the brink of collapse," reports NPR. As 23andMe struggles for survival, many of its 15 million customers are left wondering what the company plans to do with all the data it has collected since it was founded in 2006. An anonymous...

"The Fight to Repair Newsletter is reporting that U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling out agricultural equipment giant John Deere for possible violations of the federal Clean Air Act and a years-long pattern of thwarting owners' ability to repair their farm equipment," writes longtime Slashdot reader chicksdaddy. From the report: Deere "appears to be evading its responsibilities under the Clean Air Act to grant...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A federal judge blocked one of California's new AI laws on Wednesday, less than two weeks after it was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom. Shortly after signing AB 2839, Newsom suggested it could be used to force Elon Musk to take down an AI deepfake of Vice President Kamala Harris he had reposted (sparking a petty...

Meta has confirmed that it may use images analyzed by its Ray-Ban Meta AI smart glasses for AI training. The policy applies to users in the United States and Canada who share images with Meta AI, according to the company. While photos captured on the device are not used for training unless submitted to AI, any image shared for analysis falls under different policies,...

WhatsApp and its parent Meta asked a judge to award them a total win against spyware maker NSO Group as punishment for discovery violations in a years-long case accusing the Israeli company of violating anti-hacking laws. From a report: NSO Group violated the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, repeatedly ignoring the court's orders and its discovery obligations, according to a motion for sanctions filed...

WP Engine, a major web hosting provider, has filed a federal lawsuit against WordPress [PDF] co-founder Matt Mullenweg and Automattic, alleging libel and attempted extortion. The suit stems from a public dispute over WordPress trademark usage and open-source licensing. WP Engine, which hosts over 200,000 websites, accuses Mullenweg and Automattic of "abuse of power, extortion, and greed." The conflict escalated after Mullenweg called WP...

Law enforcement from 12 countries arrested four individuals linked to the LockBit ransomware gang, including a developer and a bulletproof hosting administrator. The operation also resulted in the seizure of LockBit infrastructure and involved sanctions targeting affiliates of both LockBit and Evil Corp. BleepingComputer reports: According to Europol, a suspected LockBit ransomware developer was arrested in August 2024 at the request of French authorities...

Novelist Christopher Farnsworth has filed a class-action lawsuit (PDF) against Meta, accusing the company of using his and other authors' pirated books to train its Llama AI model. Farnsworth seeks damages and an order to stop the alleged copyright infringement, joining a growing group of creators suing tech companies over unauthorized AI training. Reuters reports: Farnsworth said in the lawsuit on Tuesday that Meta...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: A New Jersey appeals court says a couple cannot sue Uber over a life-altering car accident because of the app's terms and conditions, even though they say it was their daughter who agreed to those terms while placing an Uber Eats order. John and Georgia McGinty -- a Mercer County couple both in their 50s --...