Daily Archives: January 31, 2022

Intel’s $1.2bn EU antitrust fine cancelled by court 12 years after Intel didn’t pay up

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Intel Corporation no longer has to pay a €1.06bn ($1.2bn, £890m) fine imposed by the European Commission (EC) in 2009 for abusing its dominance of the chip market.

On Wednesday, the General Court of the European Union annulled the EC antitrust penalty [PDF] after previously upholding it in 2014 [PDF].

After rival AMD complained in 2000 and again in 2003 that Intel was engaging in anti-competitive conduct by offering its hardware partners rebates for using Intel’s x86 chips, an EC antitrust investigation that got underway in 2004 and concluded in 2009 with a €1.06 billion penalty against Chipzilla.

The EC at the time found Intel’s conduct between October 2002 and December 2007 to be anti-competitive.

“The evidence gathered by the Commission led to the conclusion that Intel’s conditional rebates and payments induced the loyalty of key OEMs and of a major retailer, the effects of which were complementary in that they significantly diminished competitors’ ability to compete on the merits of their x86 CPUs,” the EC said in its 2009 decision. “Intel’s anti-competitive conduct thereby resulted in a reduction of consumer choice and in lower incentives to innovate.”

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The ruling suggests that EU trustbusters won’t be able to constrain corporate behavior if alleged misconduct fails to fit within the limited definition of competitive abuse under EU law (Article 102 TFEU). According to the Associated Press, EC VP Margrethe Vestager said at a press briefing in Brussels that the EC needs more time to consider what comes next.

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Source: Intel’s $1.2bn EU antitrust fine cancelled by court • The Register

Which begs the question – why is China leading the way in anti-competitive lawmaking?

LG Announces New Ad Targeting Features for TVs – wait, wtf, I bought my TV, not a service!

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there are plenty of cases where you throw down hundreds of dollars for a piece of hardware and then you end up being the product anyway. Case in point: TVs.

On Wednesday, the television giant LG announced a new offering to advertisers that promises to be able to reach the company’s millions of connected devices in households across the country, pummeling TV viewers with—you guessed it—targeted ads. While ads playing on your connected TV might not be anything new, some of the metrics the company plans to hand over to advertisers include targeting viewers by specific demographics, for example, or being able to tie a TV ad view to someone’s in-store purchase down the line.

If you swap out a TV screen for a computer screen, the kind of microtargeting that LG’s offering doesn’t sound any different than what a company like Facebook or Google would offer. That’s kind of the point.

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Aside from being an eyesore that literally no TV user wants, these ads come bundled with their own privacy issues, too. While the kinds of invasive tracking and targeting that regularly happens with the ads on your Facebook feed or Google search results are built off of more than a decade’s worth of infrastructure, those in the connected television (or so-called “CTV”) space are clearly catching up, and catching up fast. Aside from what LG’s offering, there are other players in adtech right now that offer ways to connect your in-app activity to what you watch on TV, or the billboards you walk by with what you watch on TV. For whatever reason, this sort of tech largely sidesteps the kinds of privacy snafus that regulators are trying to wrap their heads around right now—regulations like CPRA and GDPR are largely designed to handle your data is handled on the web, not on TV.

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The good news is that you have some sort of refuge from this ad-ridden hell, though it does take a few extra steps. If you own a smart TV, you can simply not connect it to the internet and use another device—an ad-free set-top box like an Apple TV, for instance—to access apps. Sure, a smart TV is dead simple to use, but the privacy trade-offs might wind up being too great.

Source: LG Announces New Ad Targeting Features for TVs

More Than 80% of NFTs Created for Free on OpenSea Are Fraud or Spam, Company Says

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OpenSea has revealed just how much of the NFT activity on its platform is defined by fakery and theft, and it’s a lot. In fact, according to the company, nearly all of the NFTs created for free on its platform are either spam or plagiarized.

The revelation began with some drama. On Thursday, popular NFT marketplace OpenSea announced that it would limit how many times a user could create (or “mint”) an NFT for free on the platform using its tools to 50. So-called “lazy minting” on the site lets users skip paying a blockchain gas fee when they create an NFT on OpenSea (with the buyer eventually paying the fee at the time of sale), so it’s a popular option especially for people who don’t have deep pockets to jumpstart their digital art empire.

This decision set off a firestorm, with some projects complaining that this was an out-of-the-blue roadblock for them as they still needed to mint NFTs but suddenly couldn’t. Shortly after, OpenSea reversed course and announced that it would remove the limit, as well as provided some reasoning for the limit in the first place: The free minting tool is being used almost exclusively for the purposes of fraud or spam.

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Source: More Than 80% of NFTs Created for Free on OpenSea Are Fraud or Spam, Company Says

Finnish diplomats were targeted by NSO Pegasus spyware

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Finland’s government says the mobile devices of its diplomats have been hacked using Pegasus spyware.

The Finnish foreign ministry stated on Friday that some of its officials abroad had been targeted by the sophisticated software.

“The highly sophisticated malware has infected users’ Apple or Android telephones without their noticing and without any action from the user’s part,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“Through the spyware, the perpetrators may have been able to harvest data from the device and exploit its features.”

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NSO says it only sells Pegasus to governments for the purpose of fighting crime and terrorism.

But an investigation last year revealed that the spyware had been used to target journalists, activists and politicians in a number of countries — including France, Spain, and Hungary.

A recent Citizen Lab report also found that critics of Poland’s right-wing government were hacked using Pegasus.

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Source: Finnish diplomats were targeted by Pegasus spyware, says foreign ministry | Euronews

A Chinese Satellite Just Grappled Another And Pulled It Out Of Orbit

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Chinese satellite was observed grabbing another satellite and pulling it out of its normal geosynchronous orbit and into a “super-graveyard drift orbit.” The maneuver raises questions about the potential applications of these types of satellites designed to maneuver close to other satellites for inspection or manipulation and adds to growing concerns about China’s space program overall.

On January 22, China’s Shijian-21 satellite, or SJ-21, disappeared from its regular position in orbit during daylight hours when observations were difficult to make with optical telescopes. SJ-21 was then observed executing a “large maneuver” to bring it closely alongside another satellite, a dead BeiDou Navigation System satellite. SJ-21 then pulled the dead satellite out of its normal geosynchronous orbit and placed it a few hundred miles away in what is known as a graveyard orbit. These distant orbits are designated for defunct satellites at the end of their lives and are intended to reduce the risk of collision with operational assets.

The unusual maneuver was observed by telescopes belonging to commercial space awareness firm Exoanalytic Solutions. During a webinar hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) this week, Exoanalytic Solutions’ Brien Flewelling said the SJ-21 satellite “appears to be functioning as a space tug.” Space Command did not respond to a request for comment, Breaking Defense reports.

Space Force has been increasingly turning to commercial space companies to provide a variety of data and services to boost its situational awareness, and to that end, Joint Task Force-Space Defense awarded Exoanalytic Solutions a contract in 2021 to provide space domain data. “Comms, data relay, remote sensing, and even ISR and some other things — [these] capabilities are increasingly available in the commercial market,” Space Force deputy Lt. Gen. David Thompson said last year.

SJ-21, or Shijian-21, was launched in October 2021 atop a Long March-3B rocket. The satellite is officially designated as an On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing, or OSAM satellite, a broad class of satellites designed with capabilities to get close to and interact with other satellites. Such systems could enable a wide range of applications including extending the life of existing satellites, assembling satellites in orbit, or performing other maintenance and repairs. According to Chinese state news outlets, SJ-21 was designed to “test and verify space debris mitigation technologies.”

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Source: A Chinese Satellite Just Grappled Another And Pulled It Out Of Orbit

How normal am I? – Let an AI judge you

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This is an art project by Tijmen Schep that shows how face detection algoritms are increasingly used to judge you. It was made as part of the European Union’s Sherpa research program.

No personal data is sent to our server in any way. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. All the face detection algorithms will run on your own computer, in the browser.

In this ‘test’ your face is compared with that of all the other people who came before you. At the end of the show you can, if you want to, share some anonimized data. That will then be used to re-calculate the new average. That anonymous data is not shared any further.

Source: How normal am I?