US Navy Forced To Pay Software Company For Piracy

The U.S. Navy was found guilty of piracy and is ordered to pay a software company $154,400 for a lawsuit filed back in 2016. Gizmodo reports: The company, Bitmanagement Software GmbH, filed a complaint against the Navy, accusing the military branch of copyright infringement. GmbH claimed they had issued 38 copies of their 3D virtual reality software, BS Contact Geo, but while they were still in negotiations for additional licenses, the Navy installed the software onto at least 558,466 machines between 2013 and 2015. In the court filing (PDF), GmbH claimed, “Without Bitmanagement’s advance knowledge or consent, the Navy installed BS Contact Go onto hundreds of thousands of computers. Bitmanagement did not license or otherwise authorize these uses of its software, and the Navy has never compensated Bitmanagement for these uses of Bitmanagement’s software.”

The company sued the Navy for nearly $600 million for “willful copyright infringement” of the software which, according to the vendor’s website, is a 3D viewer that “enables you to visualize and interact with state of the art 2D/3D content,” and is based on digital data captured from “various sources (land surveys, CAD, satellite imagery, airborne laser scanning, etc).” The court filings stated that after GmbH filed the lawsuit in July 2016, the Navy uninstalled the BS Contact Geo software from all of its computers and “subsequently reinstalled the software on 34 seats, for inventory purposes.” GmbH wrote in the court filing, “The government knew or should have known that it was required to obtain a license for copying Bitmanagement software onto each of the devices that had Bitmanagement software installed. The government nonetheless failed to obtain such licenses.”

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Amazon To Spend $1 Billion a Year On Theatrical Film Releases

Zoom Shares Plunge 90% From Peak As Pandemic Boom Fades

Shares of Zoom have tumbled about 90% from their pandemic peak in October 2020 as the former investor darling struggles to adjust to a post-COVID world. Reuters reports: The stock was down nearly 10% on Tuesday after the company cut its annual sales forecast and posted its slowest quarterly growth, prompting at least six brokerages to cut their price targets. The company, which became a household name during lockdowns due to the popularity of its video-conferencing tools, is trying to reinvent itself by focusing on businesses, with products such as cloud-calling service Zoom Phone and conference-hosting offering Zoom Rooms. Analysts, however, say any turnaround in the business is still a few quarters away as growth in its mainstay online unit slows and competition from Microsoft’s Teams and Cisco’s Webex and Salesforce’s Slack gets intense.

“Zoom has a fundamental flaw — it has needed to spend heavily to keep hold of market share. Spending to cling onto, rather than grow, market share is never a good place to be and was a sign of trouble ahead,” Hargreaves Lansdown equity analyst Sophie Lund-Yates said. The company’s operating expenses surged 56% in the third quarter as it spent more on product development and marketing. Its adjusted operating margin shrank to 34.6% from 39.1% a year earlier.

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iFixit Put Up a Right To Repair Billboard Along New York Governor’s Drive To Work

Right to Repair website iFixit put up a billboard in Albany, New York, calling for Gov. Kathy Hochul to sign the landmark Right to Repair law, which was passed overwhelmingly nearly six months ago by the state legislature. PIRG reports: Supported by Repair.org, U.S. PIRG and NYPIRG, Consumer Reports, Environment New York, the Story of Stuff Project, Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, NRDC, Environmental Action and EFF, calls for the governor to sign the bill have increased The legislation must advance to the governor by the end of December and be signed by January 10, 2023.

The Albany Times Union editorialized twice for the governor to sign the bill, recently noting that the bill has come under intense opposition from manufacturers: “Meanwhile, lobbyists, big corporations and a few trade organizations are pressing for a veto … Ms. Hochul must sign the bill, and then lawmakers should get to work passing an expanded version that includes all the products that were needlessly stripped from the original. Big corporations and the lobbyists they hire won’t be happy, but that shouldn’t matter a bit.”

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Amazon Launches Second Cloud Region In India, Pledges $4.4 Billion Investment

Amazon has set up its second AWS region in India and says the cloud unit will invest more than $4.4 billion in the South Asian market by 2030, part of the company’s attempts to widen its growing cloud tentacles across the globe. TechCrunch reports: The retailer said Tuesday that it has launched an AWS infrastructure region in the city of Hyderabad, its second cloud region in the country. An additional AWS datacenter cluster will allow the firm to offer “greater choice” in the country and support over 48,000 full-time jobs annually, Amazon said. AWS, which leads the cloud market in India, has amassed a number of major clients in the country including Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, Niti Aayog, PhysicsWallah and Acko. “As a part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s $1 Trillion Digital Economy vision, the ‘India cloud’ is set for big expansion and innovation. Data centers are an important element of the digital ecosystem. The investments by AWS in expanding their data centers in India is a welcome development and would certainly help catalyze India’s digital economy,” said Rajeev Chandrashekhar, Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology and for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, in a statement.

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Apple Device Analytics Contain Identifying iCloud User Data, Claim Security Researchers

A new analysis has claimed that Apple’s device analytics contain information that can directly link information about how a device is used, its performance, features, and more, directly to a specific user, despite Apple’s claims otherwise. MacRumors reports: On Twitter, security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry have found that Apple’s device analytics data includes an ID called “dsId,” which stands for Directory Services Identifier. The analysis found that the dsId identifier is unique to every iCloud account and can be linked directly to a specific user, including their name, date of birth, email, and associated information stored on iCloud.

On Apple’s device analytics and privacy legal page, the company says no information collected from a device for analytics purposes is traceable back to a specific user. “iPhone Analytics may include details about hardware and operating system specifications, performance statistics, and data about how you use your devices and applications. None of the collected information identifies you personally,” the company claims. In one possible differentiator, Apple says that if a user agrees to send analytics information from multiple devices logged onto the same iCloud account, it may “correlate some usage data about Apple apps across those devices by syncing using end-to-end encryption.” Even in doing so, however, Apple says the user remains unidentifiable to Apple. We’ve reached out to Apple for comment.

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More Than 50% of Bitcoin Addresses Are Now In Loss

Most addresses holding bitcoin (BTC), the largest cryptocurrency, are now in the red, the first time that’s happened since the start of the coronavirus-induced crash of March 2020. CoinDesk reports: Just over 51%, or 24.6 million addresses of the total 47.9 million, are below purchase price on their investments, according to data provided by blockchain analytics firm IntoTheBlock. About 45% are in the money, which means they are boasting unrealized gains, while the rest are roughly at break-even. IntoTheBlock defines out-of-the-money addresses as those that acquired coins at an average price higher than bitcoin’s going market rate of $16,067.

The bearish momentum looks overdone, according to Lucas Outumuro, head of research at IntoTheBlock. Previous bear markets ended with the majority of addresses being out of-the money. The percentage of out-of-the-money addresses stood at 55% in January 2019. Bitcoin bottomed near $3,200 around the same time and began a bull run three months later. Further reading: Silence From Digital Currency Group’s Genesis Spooks Crypto

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Did Sam Bankman-Fried’s Millions Buy the Media’s Loyalty?

As the FTX fallout continues to unfold, Reason reports:

The mainstream coverage of SBF and FTX is more than a little blase… SBF was heavily involved in Democratic Party politics: In the 2022 election cycle, he was the second most prolific funder of Democratic candidates. But he wasn’t just a funder of electoral efforts. He funded both progressive and mainstream media organizations…
But SBF’s own attitude toward his funding of these causes seems to be that it’s all for show. When asked if ethics is “mostly a front”, SBF replied “yeah, that’s not all of it but it’s a lot.”
If SBF considered his generous donations to be a “front” for something else, one wonders what about the else. Is it perhaps the case that SBF thought he was actually buying goodwill and favorable coverage? He was, as it happens, the beneficiary of countless gushing magazine profiles and was frequently hailed as the “white knight” of crypto.
Indeed, SBF is still benefitting from some kinder-than-expected coverage from the mainstream media, even in the wake of the revelations about his fraudulent activities” and even from outlets that did not receive his largesse.
Read Reason’s full article here.

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FTX Owes Nearly $3.1 Billion to Top 50 of Its 1M Creditors. Celebrity Endorsers Sued

ABC News reports:

The cryptocurrency exchange FTX owes creditors $3.1 billion, according to court documents filed late Saturday night….

Creditors’ names were not listed on the court filing, but the largest is owed $226,280,579, .

As part of its bankruptcy proceedings, FTX was required to list to the court its 50 largest creditors — either individuals or corporations — who are owed money. The second largest entity is owed $203,292,504, the court filing shows.

A video at the top of the article from ABC News adds that several celebrities “are being sued by a man who invested in the now-bankrupt crypto exchange… The lawyer behind the class claims that FTX was a massive ponzi scheme, only successful because it had a boost from celebrities.”

Meanwhile CNN adds that FTX “owes about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors, it said in a court filing on Saturday, without naming them.”

The crypto exchange said on Saturday it has launched a strategic review of its global assets and is preparing for the sale or reorganization of some businesses. A hearing on FTX’s so-called first-day motions is set for Tuesday morning before a US bankruptcy judge, according to a separate court filing….

There could be more than 1 million creditors in the US cases that are already filed, FTX Group said, adding that it has been in touch with “dozens” of US and international regulatory agencies including the US Attorney’s Office, the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Meanwhile, authorities in the Bahamas — where FTX is based — are investigating whether any criminal misconduct occurred related to the company’s implosion, the Royal Bahamas Police Force said in a statement last Sunday. The Bahamian authorities have also taken control of cryptocurrency assets held by FTX Digital Markets, The Bahamas-based FTX unit that filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection Tuesday.

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Debate at COP27: Nuclear Energy, Climate Friend or Foe?

Long-time Slashdot reader gordm shares an interesting video from the United Nations Climate Change Conference. “At COP27, Tobias Holle (activist with Youth Strike for Climate) debated Mark Nelson (founder of Radiant Energy Fund) as to whether nuclear power can help us tackle climate change.”

The event took place at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s “Atoms for Climate” pavillion, where the IAEA’s climate advisor presented the debate’s topic as “Nuclear Energy: Climate Friend or Foe?” (and introduced the two debaters as “enthusiastic young climate champions”). The Youth Strike for Climate activist objected to commiting humanity to 1 million years of maintaining nuclear waste. But he also argued that extreme weather was creating additional security risks, that the per-kilowatt hour cost was economically prohibitive, that nuclear plants were politically unpopular — and that anyways, they take too long to build giving our current climate crisis. “We need fast solutions.”

The Radiant Energy founder disagreed, arguing over specific statistics and insisting that nuclear energy should be considered a low-carbon energy solution, and also safe. (He pointed out that Chernobyl’s nuclear plant actually continued operating for 14 years after its 1986 nuclear accident.) Interestingly he also argued that in the Netherlands there’s a museum of nuclear waste — a science museum attached to their nuclear facility — “where they don’t just have the high-level waste, they have the highest part of high-level waste, the most dangerous isotopes, separated from the nuclear fuel. The most radioactive stuff — very hot for 500 years — and they have a tour where you can walk over it, and you can feel the warmth from the floor from the radioactive isotopes….

“You can absolutely manage the safe, secure, and even educational storage of the most radioactive isotopes… We know very well how to manage it.”

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