Daily Archives: February 28, 2024

Coinbase pulls rug. Crypto holder trading is disabled and all assets shown $0 to users. Bitcoin is shooting up currently at $61k highly volatile and history repeats itself. PTSD from GME buy button disable is real. Not your wallet, not your money.

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Coinbase is pulling the rug right now.

Check their sub and witness the fire.

Update:
They are now excusing it all with this error.

Update 2:
I argue it is fully artificial override since when loading the webpage it does momentarily flicker your true asset value and it gets then updated to zero when page finishes loading, even after one purges the browser data. So their data comes through, it is just forced to go zero to disable trading. I wait to be debunked. I do have some funds over there purely for science.

Update 3:
I now see my assets again after 70 minutes since the initial downtime began, missing a lot of “valuable” volatility.
Trading is still disabled though.
And in particular BTC-USD advanced trading doesn’t seem to load whatsoever.

Update 4:
Mainstream seems to be making articles now to ensure people their assets are all “wasted” yet safe.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/coinbase-tells-users-your-assets-are-safe-as-some-see-0-balance-1.2040524

…issues with Coinbase may have more significance these days, considering the outsized role the company plays in helping to manage the new spot-Bitcoin ETFs. Coinbase provides a variety of services to the fund issuers, including serving as custodian for eight of the 10 spot Bitcoin ETFs.

Source: Coinbase pulling the rug right now. Crypto holder trading is disabled and all assets shown $0 to users. Bitcoin is shooting up currently at $61k highly volatile and history repeats itself. PTSD from GME buy button disable is real. Not your wallet, not your money. : Superstonk

Basically trading from Coinbase has been suspended now that BTC is flying up. A bit like how Robin Hood and a few other traders stopped people from selling Gamestop when it flew up.

Scammers Are Now Scanning Faces To Defeat Age verification Biometric Security Measures

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For quite some time now we’ve been pointing out the many harms of age verification technologies, and how they’re a disaster for privacy. In particular, we’ve noted that if you have someone collecting biometric information on people, that data itself becomes a massive risk since it will be targeted.

And, remember, a year and a half ago, the Age Verification Providers Association posted a comment right here on Techdirt saying not to worry about the privacy risks, as all they wanted to do was scan everyone’s face to visit a website (perhaps making you turn to the left or right to prove “liveness”).

Anyway, now a report has come out that some Chinese hackers have been tricking people into having their faces scanned, so that the hackers can then use the resulting scan to access accounts.

Attesting to this, cybersecurity company Group-IB has discovered the first banking trojan that steals people’s faces. Unsuspecting users are tricked into giving up personal IDs and phone numbers and are prompted to perform face scans. These images are then swapped out with AI-generated deepfakes that can easily bypass security checkpoints

The method — developed by a Chinese-based hacking family — is believed to have been used in Vietnam earlier this month, when attackers lured a victim into a malicious app, tricked them into face scanning, then withdrew the equivalent of $40,000 from their bank account. 

Cool cool, nothing could possibly go wrong in now requiring more and more people to normalize the idea of scanning your face to access a website. Nothing at all.

And no, this isn’t about age verification, but still, the normalization of facial scanning is a problem, as it’s such an obvious target for scammers and hackers.

Source: As Predicted: Scammers Are Now Scanning Faces To Defeat Biometric Security Measures | Techdirt

EU to hit Apple with first ever fine in €500mn music streaming penalty

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apple and google as monopoly characters holding big bags of cash in front of a store

Brussels is to impose its first ever fine on tech giant Apple for allegedly breaking EU law over access to its music streaming services, according to five people with direct knowledge of the long-running investigation.

The fine, which is in the region of €500mn and is expected to be announced early next month, is the culmination of a European Commission antitrust probe into whether Apple has used its own platform to favour its services over those of competitors.

The probe is investigating whether Apple blocked apps from informing iPhone users of cheaper alternatives to access music subscriptions outside the App Store. It was launched after music-streaming app Spotify made a formal complaint to regulators in 2019.

The Commission will say Apple’s actions are illegal and go against the bloc’s rules that enforce competition in the single market, the people familiar with the case told the Financial Times. It will ban Apple’s practice of blocking music services from letting users outside its App Store switch to cheaper alternatives.

Brussels will accuse Apple of abusing its powerful position and imposing anti-competitive trading practices on rivals, the people said, adding that the EU would say the tech giant’s terms were “unfair trading conditions”.

It is one of the most significant financial penalties levied by the EU on big tech companies. A series of fines against Google levied over several years and amounting to about €8bn are being contested in court.

Apple has never previously been fined for antitrust infringements by Brussels, but the company was hit in 2020 with a €1.1bn fine in France for alleged anti-competitive behaviour. The penalty was revised down to €372mn after an appeal.

The EU’s action against Apple will reignite the war between Brussels and Big Tech at a time when companies are being forced to show how they are complying with landmark new rules aimed at opening competition and allowing small tech rivals to thrive.

Companies that are defined as gatekeepers, including Apple, Amazon and Google, need to fully comply with these rules under the Digital Markets Act by early next month.

The act requires these tech giants to comply with more stringent rules and will force them to allow rivals to share information about their services.

[…]

Source: EU to hit Apple with first ever fine in €500mn music streaming penalty

You can now mark up your Google Docs with handwritten notes on Android devices

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Google Docs is getting an annotation feature that will let you mark up your documents just like you might with a pen and paper. With today’s update, announced at MWC 2024, Google Docs users on Android devices can use a finger or stylus to write notes, highlight text and circle words to their heart’s desire. Google says the feature will work on Android tablets and smartphones, so it’s got some real potential to give devices like foldables even more of a productivity boost. It should also make for a smoother way to sign digital documents.

Android users will have access to multiple pen colors and highlighters with the new annotation tool for Google Docs, which is good news for anyone who loves color-coding their notes. If the popularity of digital notebooks like reMarkable’s tablets or Amazon’s Kindle Scribe has taught us anything, it’s that, as speedy as typing may be, plenty of people still prefer writing by hand when it’s an option. The only thing this update seems to be missing is the ability to convert handwriting to text, which would allow for more extensive writing tasks.

[…]

Source: You can now mark up your Google Docs with handwritten notes on Android devices

Reggaeton Be Gone – use a Raspberry Pi to jam bluetooth speakers when reggaeton music comes on

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[…]

Consider this scenario: Your wall-to-wall neighbor loves to blast Reggaeton music at full volume through a Bluetooth speaker every morning at 9 am. You have two options:

  • A. Knock on their door and politely ask them to lower the volume.
  • B. Build an AI device that can handle the situation more creatively.

Reggaeton Be Gone (the name is a homage to Tv-B-Gone device) will monitor room audio, it will identify Reggaeton genre with Machine Learning and trigger comm requests and packets to the Bluetooth speaker with the high goal of disabling it or at least disturbing the sound so much that the neighbor won’t have other option that turn it off.

[…]

Plans to make your own in the Source: Reggaeton Be Gone – Hackster.io

Nintendo files lawsuit against creators of Yuzu emulator

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yuzu nintendo switch emulator on android[…]

The 41-page lawsuit was filed against Tropic Haze, the company that makes Yuzu. (Nintendo also specifically references a person aliased as Bunnei, who leads development on Yuzu.) Yuzu is a free emulator that was released in 2018 months after the Nintendo Switch originally launched. The same folks who made Citra, a Nintendo 3DS emulator, made this one. Basically, it’s a piece of software that lets people play Nintendo Switch games on Windows PC, Linux, and Android devices. (It also runs on Steam Deck, which Valve showed — then wiped — in a Steam Deck video clip.) Emulators aren’t necessarily illegal, but pirating games to play on them is. But Nintendo said in its lawsuit that there’s no way to legal way to use Yuzu.

Nintendo argued that Yuzu executes codes that “defeat” Nintendo’s security measures, including decryption using “an illegally-obtained copy of prod.keys.”

“In other words, without Yuzu’s decryption of Nintendo’s encryption, unauthorized copies of games could not be played on PCs or Android devices,” Nintendo wrote in the lawsuit. As to the alleged damages created by Yuzu, Nintendo pointed to the release of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Tears of the Kingdom leaked almost two weeks earlier than the game’s May 12 release date. The pirated version of the game spread quickly; Nintendo said it was downloaded more than 1 million times before Tears of the Kingdom’s release date. People used Yuzu to play the game; Nintendo said more than 20% of download links pointed people to Yuzu.

Though Yuzu doesn’t give out pirated copies of games, Nintendo repeatedly said that most ROM sites point people toward Yuzu to play whatever games they’ve downloaded.

[…]

Nintendo is asking the court to shut down the emulator, and for damages. Polygon has reached out to Nintendo and Tropic Haze for comment.

The Tears of the Kingdom publisher is notoriously strict with its intellectual property. Nintendo’s won several lawsuits targeting pirated game sites like RomUniverse, where it was awarded more than $2 million in damages. Nintendo also notoriously went after an alleged Nintendo Switch hacker named Gary Bowser, who was arrested and charged for selling Switch hacks. Though he’s been released from prison, Bowser still owes Nintendo $10 million; he paid Nintendo $175 while in prison from money he earned working in the prison library and kitchen.

Source: Nintendo files lawsuit against creators of Yuzu emulator – Polygon

So if all the links point to the pirated copy of the game, why don’t Nintendo sue Google and Baidu and Yandex and all the other search engines that provide the links? Because they are huge and have massive lawyer engines. And Yuzu doesn’t. And also because providing links is not illegal, as has been seen again and again. Also, creating emulators is not illegal either, but the lawsuits will probably suffocate the company. The law is seriously broken.