This is called a bank error in your favour. You are liable to return the money, and you should not spend it or use it. But the bank is not allowed to just grab the money from your account. And here is part of the problem: crypto exchanges are not under the same legal restrictions as banks, which allows them to just access your accounts with relative impunity.

Earlier today, reports surfaced regarding a jaw-dropping clerical error at South Korean crypto exchange Bithumb regarding a promotional reward being sent to some customers. According to some early accounts, the reward was supposed to be 2,000 Korean won, but the users were sent 2,000 bitcoin instead. At current prices, this amounts to a roughly $140 million giveaway. That would be bad. But it was apparently much worse.

Bithumb itself has confirmed the error and indicated 620,000 bitcoin (worth around $43 billion) was accidentally sent to 695 users. The amount was large enough to cause a temporary 10% downtick in the price of bitcoin on the exchange, as some of the customers who received the misallocated funds immediately sold them. According to Bithumb, further damage was avoided by limiting withdrawals and transactions for the affected customers, and 99.7% of the errantly sent bitcoin has been recovered.

“We would like to clarify that this matter has nothing to do with external hacking or security breaches, and there are no problems with system security or customer asset management,” reads a translated version of Bithumb’s post on the matter.

The massive amount of bitcoin handed out to Bithumb customers also brings the concept of “paper bitcoin” to the forefront, as the reality is these exchanges do not necessarily have all of the bitcoin to back the amounts shown to their respective customers. This issue was at the heart of the infamous collapse of early bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox in 2014, which was by far the largest crypto exchange at the time. According to blockchain data provider Arkham Intelligence, Bithumb has roughly $5.3 billion in assets, which is nowhere near the $43 billion it says it errantly awarded to some of its customers.

[…]

Source: South Korean Crypto Exchange Accidentally Gave Away $43 Billion Worth of Paper Bitcoin

To be fair, some features such as traffic, speedcam and map updates require continuous processing and work to do. I understand that these features require a subscription. But to use hardware that is already built in to you car, such as a seat heating unit, or a temperature sensor that detects if it is colder than a certain temperature outside and then heating your car seat and steering wheel at startup? Shameless.

Remember BMW’s subscription seat heater scandal? You’d be forgiven for letting it slip your mind; after all, there’s been more than enough rage bait (automotive and otherwise) to go around in recent years. The short version is this: Both manufacturers and dealers are all about making money on their cars long after the initial sale. Traditionally, that revenue has largely come from maintenance, but since EVs don’t require as much upkeep as internal-combustion cars, the future of that model is in jeopardy. Need proof? Look no further than Tesla, which just paywalled previously standard features behind a new FSD subscription.

But while BMW ultimately backed down over heated seats, the company still believes in the features-as-a-service model, and will continue to offer post-purchase upgrades through its ConnectedDrive platform.

“BMW remains fully committed to the ConnectedDrive environment as an essential part of the global BMW Aftersales strategy,” a BMW spokesperson told The Drive in an emailed statement.

[…]

BMW and Tesla certainly aren’t alone in this. Most semi-autonomous driving software comes with some sort of subscription—often after a trial period—and there’s precedent for subscription add-ons going back much farther than the EV era. GM has been charging membership fees for OnStar services since the mid-1990s, when cellular service coverage was finally sufficient to support the company’s roadside assistance program. We’ve also seen countless app- and infotainment-based “concierge” services come and go over the years.

However you look at it, subscriptions are here to stay—and not just at BMW.

Source: BMW Commits to Subscriptions Even After Heated Seat Debacle

Back in May, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt offered what might be the single most audacious statement of the Trump era—and that’s saying something:

I think everybody – the American public believe it’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.

Anyway, in unrelated news, Donald Trump just filed a lawsuit against his own IRS, demanding that taxpayers pay him $10 billion.

Ten. Billion. Dollars.

The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in Miami, claims that Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization were grievously harmed when IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn leaked Trump’s tax returns to the New York Times and ProPublica back in 2019 and 2020. Littlejohn was caught, prosecuted, and is currently serving a five-year prison sentence—the system worked, justice was served, case closed. But apparently that’s not enough for a man whose appetite for grift has no discernible ceiling.

Before we dive into why this lawsuit is weapons-grade insane, let’s establish some context that the complaint conveniently glosses over.

When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he broke with decades of tradition by refusing to release his tax returns. Every major party nominee since Nixon had done so voluntarily. Trump’s excuse? He was being audited and would release them after the audit was complete. Somehow, nearly a decade later, those returns were never officially released. There’s no clear evidence the audit ever existed. The whole thing had the distinct aroma of a man who had something to hide.

In 2020, the New York Times obtained 17 years of Trump’s tax records from Littlejohn. The reporting revealed that Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017, and paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years—largely by reporting chronic business losses. The House Ways & Means Committee later obtained and released some of his returns through proper legal channels.

And the result of all this exposure? Trump won the 2024 election and his net worth has skyrocketed in such an obvious way that, contra Karoline Leavitt’s statement, it would be difficult to find anyone who legitimately believes that Trump isn’t profiting off his Presidency.

According to Forbes, Trump’s wealth jumped from $3.9 billion in 2024 to $7.3 billion by September 2025, driven largely by his crypto ventures and the value of Trump Media and Technology Group. So grievous was the harm from this leak that Trump is now richer than he’s ever been.

Which brings us to the lawsuit. Trump is demanding $10 billion—more than his entire current net worth—from the federal government. The federal government he controls and which he’s stocked with cronies.

[…]

The Department of Justice—which would normally defend the government in such lawsuits—is currently headed by an Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General who previously worked as Trump’s personal lawyers and who have repeatedly made it clear that they view their current jobs as still being the President’s personal lawyers.

[…]

As I wrote last year when Trump demanded a mere $230 million in a similar scheme, this creates a situation where Trump’s own lawyers get to decide whether Trump’s claims should be successful—and potentially how much taxpayer money flows directly into his pocket. The fact that it’s now more than 40 times that amount just demonstrates that his corruption has no upper bound.

The damages claimed are laughable. The complaint lists the horrifying “harm” Trump suffered. Hold onto your hats:

ProPublica published at least 50 articles as a result of Defendants’ unlawful disclosures, many of which contained false and inflammatory claims about Defendants’ confidential tax documents.

And:

Because of Defendants’ wrongful conduct, Plaintiffs were subject to, among many others, at least eight (“8”) separate stories in the New York Times which wrongly and specifically alleged various improprieties related to Plaintiffs’ financial records and taxpayer history

Eight. Stories. In the New York Times. That’s apparently worth $10 billion in damages. From the US taxpayer. Trump has probably generated more negative headlines in a single weekend of Truth Social posts.

And if the stories were really defamatory (note: they weren’t) sue those publications for defamation and… see how that goes. Because Trump’s defamation lawsuits have a remarkable track record of getting laughed out of court.

But here—clever, clever, clever—this case need never go to court. The IRS and the DOJ (both run by Trump loyalists) can just “settle” and hand over however much taxpayer money Trump wants.

[…]

Source: Trump Demands $10 Billion From Taxpayers For Leaked Tax Returns; His Own Lawyers Get To Decide What He Gets | Techdirt

According to Appfigures, the top five free iPhone apps right now in the U.S. are:

1. ChatGPT
2. JumpJumpVPN
3. V2Box
4. UpScrolled
5. Threads

Yesterday, Apple blogger John Gruber of Daring Fireball posted the overall most popular iPhone apps for all of 2025, and the top five were:

1. ChatGPT
2. Threads
3. Google
4. TikTok
5. WhatsApp

I’m not the first person to point this out, but it’s not exactly a stretch to infer that the three apps that have suddenly squeezed in between ChatGPT and Threads are on the list due to dissatisfaction with TikTok. Two are VPN apps, which can theoretically be used to access TikTok from a virtual network in a country where the U.S. version of TikTok is unnecessary, and one, UpScrolled, is an Australian video and text sharing app that recently went viral.

To refresh your memory on what’s going on with TikTok, after years of trying to force Chinese-owned ByteDance to relinquish ownership and let a U.S.-friendly buyer take over, a legal entity was created earlier this month that can take ownership of TikTok, with Adam Presser as its new CEO. This allows TikTok to comply with a new U.S. law essentially requiring TikTok to be run by a U.S. company or be banned.

But this entity, a complex joint corporate venture in charge of U.S. operations for TikTok, appears from the outside to be struggling to keep everything in order, amid the handoff from TikTok’s Singapore base of operations (U.S. TikTok data was already largely housed in the U.S., so it’s not clear if this transition actually involves any large, burdensome data transfers).

According to an X post from TikTok, the problem is that there’s been “a major infrastructure issue triggered by a power outage at one of our U.S. data center partner sites,” and there may be various glitches, service slowdowns, failures, and issues with user metrics. Oracle has further clarified that the TikTok issue stems from a weather-related blackout at one of its data centers. Oracle owns 15 percent of the new TikTok U.S. venture.

The issues TikTok is referring to dovetail nicely with the descriptions of problems described by users likw videos that sit in review indefinitely, and posts that get low or zero view counts, often despite high numbers for other engagement metrics like comments or shares. Other general issues that fit with a data center interruption include a possible lack of analytics in TikTok Studio, livestreamers apparently getting random messages saying they need to stop streaming immediately, and irrelevant search results.

[…]

Source: Looks Like American TikTok’s Problems Are Sending Users Flocking to Alternatives

It’s quite bizarre that TikTok has to use an outmoded platform which is not in the  top social networks (X Twitter) to post that it is experiencing problems.

A recent report released by Lunio, a platform specializing in invalid traffic (IVT) detection and prevention, reveals that a staggering $63 billion (€53.6 billion) is wasted annually on digital advertising due to bot traffic and ad fraud. This finding underscores a significant issue plaguing the advertising industry.

The 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report released by Lunio analyzes over 2.7 billion paid ad clicks across major platforms such as Google, Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Bing, covering the period from August 2024 to August 2025. The results paint a rather grim picture of the challenges faced by advertisers in ensuring genuine user engagement.

The Hidden Costs of Invalid Traffic

Invalid traffic, or IVT, encompasses clicks, impressions, or conversions that originate from users lacking genuine intent. This can range from coordinated bot activities and automated scraping to malicious competitor behavior or accidental clicks. While some invalid traffic may not be intentionally harmful, it invariably drains advertising budgets and distorts analytics, which, in turn, misguides automated targeting algorithms.

According to Lunio’s analysis, 8.51% of all paid traffic is classified as invalid, resulting in a silent yet substantial burden on return on ad spend (ROAS). For advertisers aiming for a 3-4x ROAS, even a small IVT rate could mean millions in potential lost revenue, as marketing budgets are wasted on traffic that fails to convert.

TikTok and Social Platforms Suffer the Most

The report highlights distinctive differences in IVT rates across ad platforms, with TikTok exhibiting the highest average IVT rate at 24.2%. This alarming statistic indicates that nearly one in four paid ad clicks on the site is associated with non-human or invalid activity. The rapid growth of TikTok, combined with high levels of automated engagement, has made the platform particularly susceptible to fraud.

Other social platforms are also grappling with high IVT exposure, with LinkedIn and X/Twitter recording rates of 19.88% and 12.79%, respectively. Conversely, Meta has managed to achieve an average IVT of 8.2%, thanks in part to extensive investments in bot detection and fraud prevention, bolstering advertiser confidence in their platform.

Google’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Among major search platforms, Google continues to outperform Bing and Microsoft in terms of managing invalid traffic. Lunio’s data shows that Google Ads boasts an average IVT rate of 7.57%, compared to Bing’s 10.32%. However, the report also identifies weaknesses within Google’s extensive advertising ecosystem. While search campaigns remain the cleanest format, with an average IVT rate of 5.21%, this rate escalates significantly when moving to automated inventory. Display and video campaigns, for instance, recorded IVT rates of 12.02% and 20.62%, respectively.

As Google shifts towards more automated solutions, visibility over traffic quality becomes increasingly essential to prevent wasted budgets from extending alongside performance gains. The findings indicate that while Google’s search platform may be a robust option, the rising automation across its ecosystem presents a duality of risk.

Industry Impact and Future Challenges

Industries such as financial services, education, and telecommunications are disproportionately affected by invalid traffic, with lead generation campaigns encountering 32% higher rates compared to eCommerce models. Gaming and iGaming take the lead, averaging an astonishing IVT rate of 18.49% largely due to aggressive competition and the prevalence of sophisticated fraud.

Moreover, the emergence of “agentic AI,” autonomous systems interacting with ads on behalf of users, presents an evolving challenge for marketers. While not inherently malicious, this new category complicates the distinction between genuine engagement and synthetic interaction. According to Simran Cashyap, CPTO of Lunio, this technological advancement may disrupt conventional understandings of “real” traffic, urging advertisers to seek stronger tools and protections to ensure that their optimization processes remain grounded in reality.

As automation reshapes the digital advertising landscape, gaining visibility into traffic quality is not merely a defensive strategy but a competitive advantage. The industry faces the complex task of evolving alongside faster technological advancements in order to maintain integrity in performance metrics. The full report can be accessed at Advanced Television.

Source: Digital Advertising Faces $63 Billion Loss To Invalid Traffic By 2025, New Report Reveals – Biz Brief

How much does a carton of eggs cost? Depends on who you are. A new study produced in collaboration with policy group Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports, and More Perfect Union found that people who purchased the exact same product from the exact same store at the exact same time were charged different prices—sometimes up to nearly 25% more—when placing the order on Instacart.

The study tapped 437 volunteer shoppers in four cities who were put in groups that were synced up virtually to add items from a specific grocery store into their Instacart shopping carts at the same time. They then reported the prices that appeared for those researchers to determine if people were being charged different prices for the same goods.

The result was a pretty resounding “Yes.” According to the study, nearly three-quarters of all grocery items tested in the experiment produced multiple prices across shoppers, including some products that showed five different prices for the same product.

[…]

Researchers reported that the final total of the Instacart shopping carts varied by an average of 7% despite every item and condition being identical.

[…]

According to Consumer Reports, the company confirmed the study accurately reflected its pricing strategies, which it claims to only do at 10 partnering grocery retailers that it chose not to name.

[…]

While Instacart didn’t name the retailers they have partnered with for this program, the study did name where they performed their tests. One retailer was Target, and they found varying prices on items sold through Instacart from the retailer. Target told Groundwork Collaborative that it has no business relationship with Instacart and “does not directly share any pricing information with Instacart or dictate what Instacart prices appear on their platform.” Instacart acknowledged to the publication that it scrapes Target’s prices and adds an upcharge to offset “operating and technology costs.” So Target was seemingly not one of the 10 retail partners, but shoppers there were still exposed to price variance. Instacart claims it has ended pricing experiments at Target.

It certainly seems like the pricing discrepancies are an example of surveillance pricing, where consumers are served different prices based on information the platform knows about them. The study didn’t find any clear correlation that would link certain shopper demographic data and the prices they were presented, and Instacart told Consumer Reports that it doesn’t use any personal or demographic data from users in its pricing experiments and instead explained that customers are randomly assigned to price groups.

[…]

“These tests are not dynamic pricing – prices never change in real-time, including in response to supply and demand. The tests are never based on personal or behavioral characteristics — they are completely randomized,” an Instacart spokesperson told Gizmodo.

So Instacart’s varied pricing is allegedly part of an experiment that randomly assigns shoppers to different pricing groups, but brands whose goods are available on Instacart can use the company’s data-driven pricing platform to serve different prices based on different demographic data. For the end user, that likely feels like a distinction without a difference, as they are ultimately seeing different prices based on conditions that are outside of their control.

Source: Instacart Charging Customers Different Prices for Same Products, Study Finds

[…]Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.

A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.

On average, one December 2024 document notes, the company shows its platforms’ users an estimated 15 billion “higher risk” scam advertisements – those that show clear signs of being fraudulent – every day. Meta earns about $7 billion in annualized revenue from this category of scam ads each year, another late 2024 document states.

Much of the fraud came from marketers acting suspiciously enough to be flagged by Meta’s internal warning systems. But the company only bans advertisers if its automated systems predict the marketers are at least 95% certain to be committing fraud, the documents show. If the company is less certain – but still believes the advertiser is a likely scammer – Meta charges higher ad rates as a penalty, according to the documents. The idea is to dissuade suspect advertisers from placing ads.

[…]

The details of Meta’s confidential self-appraisal are drawn from documents created between 2021 and this year across Meta’s finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions. Together, they reflect Meta’s efforts to quantify the scale of abuse on its platforms – and the company’s hesitancy to crack down in ways that could harm its business interests.

Meta’s acceptance of revenue from sources it suspects are committing fraud highlights the lack of regulatory oversight of the advertising industry, said Sandeep Abraham, a fraud examiner and former Meta safety investigator who now runs a consultancy called Risky Business Solutions.

“If regulators wouldn’t tolerate banks profiting from fraud, they shouldn’t tolerate it in tech,” he told Reuters.

In a statement, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the documents seen by Reuters “present a selective view that distorts Meta’s approach to fraud and scams.” The company’s internal estimate that it would earn 10.1% of its 2024 revenue from scams and other prohibited ads was “rough and overly-inclusive,” Stone said. The company had later determined that the true number was lower, because the estimate included “many” legitimate ads as well, he said. He declined to provide an updated figure.

[…]

Source: Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show | Reuters

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) is set to deliver a landmark ruling on Tuesday that could determine the future of the EU’s Minimum Wage Directive – and, with it, define the limits of the bloc’s authority over national social policies.

Denmark – backed by Sweden – has taken the Commission to the EU’s top court, arguing that the directive breaches EU treaties by legislating directly on pay, an area beyond the EU’s legal remit.

Adopted in 2022, the Minimum Wage Directive aims to ensure “adequate minimum wages” and stronger collective bargaining – negotiations between workers and employers over pay and conditions – across the EU.

While countries don’t have to introduce a mandatory minimum wage, the rules require those with less than 80% collective-bargaining coverage to come up with a plan to strengthen wage-setting systems.

Belgium, Portugal, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, and Luxembourg all sided with the European Commission wanting to keep the law in place.

“This a real clash here between the Nordic model – collective bargaining – and the EU’s tradition of individual rights,” said Laust Høgedahl, associate professor of employment relations at Aalborg University in Denmark.

In January, the court’s advocate general – an independent expert helping judges decide in complex cases – recommended that judges rule in favour of Denmark in a non-binding opinion.

An ‘earthquake’ under EU’s social pillar

If the court follows the advocate general’s reasoning, it would be “a political earthquake” for the EU’s social policy, said Christina Hiessl, who is a professor of labour law at Belgium’s KU Leuven.

“Up to now, the Court has always sided with the Commission,” Hiessl said.

“The EU also wants to build social rights alongside the single market,” Høgedahl said. “Those social rights will become much harder to advance if this directive falls.”

Hiessl believes Danish fears are exaggerated. “It’s a common misconception that the directive imposes statutory minimum wages,” she said. “It very clearly does not.”

Current figures put Denmark’s collective bargaining rate at 82%, slightly above the 80% threshold – the level of worker coverage below which EU countries are expected to take steps to promote collective bargaining.

According to Høgedahl, Danish resistance is a principled stance rather than one of substance.

“Wage is sacred in Denmark,” he says. “It belongs to the social partners, not to politicians – not in Copenhagen, and certainly not in Brussels.”

Source: EU’s minimum wage faces judgment day | Euractiv

Of course, the Danish, who also want to implement Chat Control (blanket espionage of all EU citizens through their smartphones) would hate to see fair wages for EU citizens as well.

[…]The programming non-profit’s deputy executive director Loren Crary said in a blog post today that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had offered $1.5 million to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and the Python Package Index (PyPI), but the Foundation quickly became dispirited with the terms of the grant it would have to follow.

“These terms included affirming the statement that we ‘do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws,'” Crary noted. “This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole.”

To make matters worse, the terms included a provision that if the PSF was found to have violated that anti-DEI diktat, the NSF reserved the right to claw back any previously disbursed funds, Crary explained.

“This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk,” the PSF director added.

The PSF’s mission statement enshrines a commitment to supporting and growing “a diverse and international community of Python programmers,” and the Foundation ultimately decided it wasn’t willing to compromise on that position, even for what would have been a solid financial boost for the organization.

“The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14,” Crary added, noting that the $1.5 million would have been the largest grant the Foundation had ever received – but it wasn’t worth it if the conditions were undermining the PSF’s mission.

The PSF board voted unanimously to withdraw its grant application.

The non-profit would’ve used the funding to help prevent supply chain attacks; create a new automated, proactive review process for new PyPI packages; and make the project’s work easily transferable to other open-source package managers. […]

Source: Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings • The Register

Blockchains are still synonymous with the wild world of cryptocurrencies, but on Monday, 30 banks and SWIFT – the world’s most important cross-border payment service – made them an utterly mainstream part of the global financial system.

SWIFT – aka the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication – provides a messaging service that financial institutions use to move money around the world. The service is widely used but is slow because, as explained by ANZ Bank, SWIFT “doesn’t actually move the money.”

“This means the instruction to pay and the movement of funds happen separately, often requiring a complex network of accounts and correspondent banks to enable a payment to be processed. This disconnect can slow payments down and lead to a lack of visibility for both sender and recipient.”

It can also mean cross-border payments take a couple of days to complete.

SWIFT’s problems are well known and financial services types see the service as sound – but also sand in the gears of global trade.

Blockchain enthusiasts who saw cryptocurrency transactions rapidly rippling across distributed ledgers, therefore wondered if their preferred technology could improve the speed of cross-border cash transfers. Many startups, some with support from sensible central banks, have explored this idea, usually by proposing “stablecoins” – digital currencies pegged to the value of a fiat currency – which would be exchanged on a blockchain to provide faster settlements than SWIFT can achieve.

China has similar ideas: One application for its Digital Yuan is enabling rapid cross-border transactions in the Middle Kingdom’s currency, and not the US Dollar that is often used to move money around the world. If China could use its digital currency to control a slice of global trade, it could weaken Western institutions like SWIFT.

Almost everyone contemplating using a blockchain to move money around the world imagines either supplanting SWIFT, or stealing a lot of its business.

It’s therefore unsurprising that on Monday SWIFT announced its intention to “add a blockchain-based shared ledger to its technology infrastructure, a pivotal step for global finance that promises to make instant, always-on cross-border transactions possible at unprecedented scale.”

SWIFT will also build tools to integrate its existing payment systems, and its new blockchain.

“It is envisaged that the ledger – a secure, real-time log of transactions between financial institutions – will record, sequence and validate transactions and enforce rules through smart contracts,” SWIFT’s announcement explains. “It will be built for interoperability, both with existing and emerging networks, while maintaining the trust, resilience and compliance synonymous with Swift and critical to the secure functioning of global finance.”

34 financial institutions from 16 countries have signed up to design the ledger, with help from Ethereum outfit Consensys.

SWIFT didn’t predict when this ledger will go live, which is probably sensible as projects of this magnitude can easily go pear-shaped and previous attempts at using blockchains for high-volume mission critical systems have gone badly.

But for now, an entity that has for decades played an important role in the global economy has decided it needs to rebuild itself on blockchain.

In some ways that’s unremarkable because very few people need to care about the technology plumbing their banks employ. SWIFT adopting Blockchain, however, will likely bring tokenized assets much closer to the mainstream.

Source: Blockchain just became a mainstream part of global finance • The Register

YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to end the case brought by US president Donald Trump, who alleged the vid-streamer had infringed his freedom of speech.

The case stems from the events of January 6th, 2020, when supporters of the president stormed the US Capitol building and attempted to disrupt certification of the presidential election that Trump lost. YouTube, Meta, and Twitter all suspended Trump’s accounts after January 6th, because they felt the president might use their platforms to incite violence.

Once out of office, Trump sued all three. His case [PDF] against YouTube claimed the video outfit deprived him of the constitutional right to freedom of speech. Lawyers at the time pointed out Trump didn’t have a legal leg to stand on, because corporations are not required to guarantee or preserve free speech.

Meta and Twitter nonetheless settled their cases, and on Monday YouTube did likewise.

A court filing [PDF] states that the settlement is not “an admission of liability or fault on the part of the Defendants or their agents, servants, or employees, and is entered into by all Parties for the sole purpose of compromising disputed claims and avoiding the expenses and risks of further litigation.”

President Trump is a paper billionaire. Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, reported annual revenue of $350 billion for its last full financial year, and net income of $100 billion. YouTube alone generates revenue close to $10 billion each quarter.

The vid-streamer can therefore afford to litigate.

The risks of litigation are another matter, as the second Trump administration has seemingly looked favorably on companies engaged in activities that might require the federal government’s approval, and which resolve matters close to the president’s heart.

Google could certainly benefit from good relations with the administration, as it faces possible appeals against a recent antitrust judgment that left its monopolies intact, and seeks approval to build new datacenters to run AI workloads.

This settlement might help because Trump has directed one $22 million payment YouTube will make to the body overseeing his pet project – construction of a ballroom at the White House. Another $2.5 million payment will go to plaintiffs who joined the case and also felt YouTube infringed their rights.

YouTube has not commented on the matter at the time of writing. ®

Source: YouTube coughs up $24.5 million to make Trump case go away • The Register

Reddit says that it has caught AI companies scraping its data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so it’s going to start blocking the Internet Archive from indexing the vast majority of Reddit. The Wayback Machine will no longer be able to crawl post detail pages, comments, or profiles; instead, it will only be able to index the Reddit.com homepage, which effectively means Internet Archive will only be able to archive insights into which news headlines and posts were most popular on a given day.

”Internet Archive provides a service to the open web, but we’ve been made aware of instances where AI companies violate platform policies, including ours, and scrape data from the Wayback Machine,” spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt tells The Verge.

The Internet Archive’s mission is to keep a digital archive of websites on the internet and “other cultural artifacts,” and the Wayback Machine is a tool you can use to look at pages as they appeared on certain dates, but Reddit believes not all of its content should be archived that way. “Until they’re able to defend their site and comply with platform policies (e.g., respecting user privacy, re: deleting removed content) we’re limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors,” Rathschmidt says.

[…]

Source: Reddit will block the Internet Archive | The Verge

The privacy argument does not hold – the Reddit content is freely viewable to anyone with a web browser. And Reddit is making content deals with AI companies. So it looks like Reddit is a kettle calling the pot black there.