A London court on Tuesday authorized a lawsuit that seeks to have Google pay £920 million ($1.1 billion) for overcharging customers for app store purchases.

Filed as a class action on behalf of 19.5 million UK citizens, the suit alleges Google charged commission fees up to 30 percent on app sales. Consumer rights advocate Liz Coll, who previously served as digital policy manager at consumer rights organization Citizens Advice, brought the lawsuit, alleging Google has violated both EU and UK competition laws.

Representatives for the claimant group told Reuters that a detailed judgment has yet to be published, but the initial filing made in July 2021 specifies that Google violated multiple sections of the Competition Act 1998.

For incidents happening before the UK left the EU, the suit also alleged violations of Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU, which covers abuse of dominant market positions.

Source: UK court okays $1.1b Play Store gouging suit against Google

Google has counter-sued Match seeking monetary damages and a judgement that would let it kick Tinder and the group’s other dating apps out of the Play Store, Bloomberg has reported. Earlier this year, Match sued Google alleging antitrust violations over a decision requiring all Android developers to process “digital goods and services” payments through the Play Store billing system.

Following the initial lawsuit in May, Google and Match reached a temporary agreement allowing Match to remain on the Play Store and use its own payments system. Google also agreed to make a “good faith” effort to address Match’s billing concerns. Match, in turn, was to make an effort to offer Google’s billing system as an alternative.

However, Google parent Alphabet claims that Match Group now wants to avoid paying “nothing at all” to Google, including its 15 to 30 percent Play Store fees, according to a court filing. “Match Group never intended to comply with the contractual terms to which it agreed… it would also place Match Group in an advantaged position relative to other app developers,” the document states.

Match group said that Google’s Play Store policies violate federal and state laws. “Google doesn’t want anyone else to sue them so their counterclaims are designed as a warning shot,” Match told Bloomberg in a statement. “We are confident that our suit, alongside other developers, the US Department of Justice and 37 state attorneys general making similar claims, will be resolved in our favor early next year.”

Match is referring to an antitrust action launched last year by States and the federal government probing Google’s Play Store fees. Shortly before that, Google dropped its fee on app developer revenue to 15 percent on the first $1 million, and 30 percent after that. At the same time, it announced it would enforce a policy requiring all developers to process payments through the Play Store’s billing system. Earlier this year, a Senate bill moved forward targeting in-app payments in both Google and Apple’s stores.

Source: Google files a lawsuit that could kick Tinder out of the Play Store | Engadget

Greedy bastards at Google – nope, you can’t force a marketplace on people and you can’t force these fees on them either.

[…]

On its ConnectedDrive Store in South Korea, BMW owners can pay a monthly fee to have a creature comfort such as heated seats. It costs ₩24,000 or approximately $18 at current exchange rates. Alternatively, you can get a one-year plan for $176 or a three-year subscription for $283.

The BMW ConnectedDrive Store is a portal used by existing owners to download a variety of apps. It’s all done over the air, without having to visit a dealer to have the new software installed. With heated seats, the German luxury brand is kind enough to provide a one-month test period free of charge. Should you want the feature permanently, that’ll set you back $406.

A similar subscription plan is offered for a heated steering wheel and it costs $10 per month, $92 annually, and $161 for three years. You can also buy it outright for $222. Do you want wireless Apple CarPlay? That’ll be $305. The store also allows BMW customers to upgrade the headlights to include a high-beam assistant, additional safety systems, and the camera-based Driver Recorder.

One of the most unusual items found in the BMW ConnectedDrive Store is called IconicSounds Sport. It essentially plays fake engine noises through the car’s speakers should you be willing to pay $138 to have the feature permanently. There are no monthly or yearly subscription plans available for this “feature.”

[…]

We can already imagine a smartphone-like jailbreak to unlock these goodies without having to pay the automaker. Doing so will likely result in voiding the warranty after taking down the automaker’s paywall. Even if someone is willing to wait until the warranty expires, chances are that person will hack the car the very next day to “download” all the available features.

Of course, this isn’t something new as upgrades through the OBD port have been around for many years, especially for VAG products.

Source: BMW Heated Seats Subscription Is Real And It Costs $18 Per Month

Wait, so you actually already paid for these features when you bought the car but to use them you have to keep paying?

As for the hacks, you can change the actual sound output here: Engine Sound Setting Coding Tutorial w/ Bimmercode

We have done many, many posts explaining how, unfortunately, it seems the idea of a person owning the things they’ve bought has become rather passe. While in the age of antiquity, which existed entire tens of years ago, you used to be able to own things, these days you merely license them under Ts and Cs that are either largely ignored and clicked through or that are indecipherable, written in the otherwise lost language known as “Lawyer-ese”. The end result is a public that buys things, thinks they retain ownership over them, only to find out that the provider of the things alters them, limits their use, or simply erases them from being.

Take anyone who bought a movie distributed by StudioCanal in Germany and Austria through Sony’s Playstation store, for instance. Sony previously had a deal to make those movie titles available in its store, but declined to continue offering movies and shows in 2021, stating that streaming services had made the deal un-competitive.

Sony’s PlayStation group stopped offering movie and TV show purchases and rentals, as of Aug. 31, 2021, citing the rise of streaming-video services. At the time, Sony assured customers that they “can still access movie and TV content they have purchased through PlayStation Store for on-demand playback on their PS4, PS5 and mobile devices.

And when Sony said that, it apparently forgot to add two very important words to its statement: “for now.” Instead, Sony decided to drop the bomb with yet another statement regarding StudioCanal content in Germany and Austria. It essentially amounts to: hey fuckers, that shit you bought is about to disappear, mmkay bye.

“As of August 31, 2022, due to our evolving licensing agreements with content providers, you will no longer be able to view your previously purchased Studio Canal content and it will be removed from your video library,” the notices read. “We greatly appreciate your continued support.”

Poof, it’s gone! That remark about appreciating the public’s “continued support” seems more like begging than acknowledging reality. Especially once you start asking the questions that immediately leap to mind.

For example: will customers get a refund for the movies that they bought and now can’t access? As per the source article “it’s unclear”, which likely means “hahahahaha nope.” How many movies were delisted? Literally hundreds. Are these just small-time movies? Nope, they include AAA titles like The Hunger Games and John Wick.

And so a whole bunch of people are going to find out that they didn’t buy anything, they rented some movies for a previously indefinite period of time that just became definite, long after the purchase was made. It’s hard to imagine something more anti-consumer than that.

Source: You Don’t Own What You’ve Bought: Sony Removes 100s Of Movies Bought Through PS Store | Techdirt

This graphic compares the cost of living and purchasing power of 578 cities worldwide, using New York City as a benchmark for comparison.

Source: Comparing the Cost of Living Around the World

What they do is compare cost of living to purchasing power. There are some surprising results. The graphic in the link allows you to hover over it.

[…]

the European Union has passed a pair of landmark bills designed to rein in Big Tech’s power. The Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act are intended to promote fairer competition, improve privacy protection, as well as banning both the use of some of the more egregious forms of targeted advertising and misleading practices.

The Digital Services Act, for instance, focuses on online platforms like Facebook, Amazon and Google. They will be tasked with being more proactive both with content moderation and also to prevent the sale of illegal or unsafe goods being sold on their platforms. Users will also be able to learn how and why an algorithm recommended them a certain piece of content, and to challenge any moderation decision that was made algorithmically. Finally, companies will no longer be able to use sensitive personal data for ad-targeting, sell ads to children, or use dark patterns — deceptive page design that can manipulate you into saying yes to something even when you’d much rather say no, such as joining a service or preventing you from leaving one you no longer wish to use.

These obligations operate on a sliding scale, and so the largest platforms will have the greatest obligations placed upon them. Platforms with 45 million or more monthly users will be subject to independent auditing to ensure they are preventing fake news and illegal content. Those platforms will also have to open up their algorithms and data to (approved) researchers to enable them to study the effects, and potential harm, the systems can cause.

The Digital Markets Act, meanwhile, is more focused on preventing dominant platform holders, like Google, Microsoft and Apple, from abusing their scale. This includes offering better interoperability with smaller, rival services, ensuring files can be sent between systems. There is also a large carve-out for app storefronts, with developers now entitled to contact their customers about deals without going via the platform holder in question. And platform holders will no longer be able to give their systems favorable treatment, such as when Google promoted its own shopping service over that of rivals.

The EU has given both bills plenty of teeth, and can dole out a maximum penalty of 10 percent of its total worldwide turnover from the previous year, should regulators find non-compliance. This figure will, however, jump to 20 percent of worldwide turnover if officials find “repeated non-compliance.” That’s a hefty figure big enough that not even Apple would be able to stomach losing on a regular basis. Although, as with GDPR regulation, the EU still has questions to answer about how much effort, time and money it’s prepared to put behind a body to monitor big tech.

Now that they have been passed, the Digital Services Act will come into force by 1st January 2024 (unless some procedural stuff delays it) while the Digital Markets Act will come into force at some point soon after, and major platforms — dubbed “Gatekeepers” will have a further six months to get their houses in order before the new rules apply to them.

Source: European Union passes landmark laws to rein in big tech | Engadget

The European Commission has set up a taskforce, with about 80 officials expected to join up, which critics say is inadequate. Last month it put out a 12 million euro ($12.3 million) tender for experts to help in investigations and compliance enforcement over a four-year period.

EU industry chief Thierry Breton sought to address enforcement concerns, saying various teams would focus on different issues such as risk assessments, interoperability of messenger services and data access during implementation of the rules.

Regulators will also set up a European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency to attract data science and algorithm scientists to help with enforcement.

“We have started to gear the internal organisation to this new role, including by shifting existing resources, and we also expect to ramp up recruitment next year and in 2024 to staff the dedicated DG CONNECT team with over 100 full time staff,” Breton said in a blogpost.

[…]

“We raised the alarm last week with other civil society groups that if the Commission does not hire the experts it needs to monitor Big Tech’s practices in the market, the legislation could be hamstrung by ineffective enforcement,” BEUC Deputy Director General Ursula Pachl said in a statement.

The DMA is set to force changes in companies’ businesses, requiring them to make their messaging services interoperable and provide business users access to their data.

Business users would be able to promote competing products and services on a platform and reach deals with customers off the platforms.

Companies will not be allow to favour their own services over rivals’ or prevent users from removing pre-installed software or apps, two rules that will hit Google and Apple hard.

The DSA bans targeted advertising aimed at children or based on sensitive data such as religion, gender, race and political opinions. Dark patterns, which are tactics that mislead people into giving personal data to companies online, will also be prohibited

Source: EU lawmakers pass landmark tech rules, but enforcement a worry

On 23 December 2021, the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) appears to have imposed an administrative fine of 2 million euros on the DeGiro of the German company flatexDEGIRO Bank AG (FlatexDeGiro) because the online broker reported unusual transactions too late and incorrectly to Financial Intelligence. Unit – Netherlands (FIU).

DeGiro did this late in 27 cases and an incorrect transaction date was reported in ten cases. Unusual transactions may indicate money laundering by investors.

Investment firms, such as DeGiro, are required to report unusual transactions to the FIU. DeGiro made a total of 36 reports from mid-2019 to mid-2020. The majority of those reports came in too late, sometimes a few months after the legal deadline.

The transaction date was also incorrect for almost one in three. In doing so, DeGiro violated the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Prevention Act (Wwft). Because DeGiro was absorbed into FlatexDeGiro through a legal merger in May 2021, the fine is imposed on that company.

Source: Fikse boete voor onlinebroker DeGiro – Emerce (original in Dutch)

FBI officials and federal prosecutors announced Ignatova’s new designation in a press conference Thursday. Ignatova was charged in 2019 with wire fraud, securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering for her part in the OneCoin crypto company that prosecutors alleged was just a ponzi scheme.

Michael Driscoll, the FBI’s assistant director-in-charge for New York declined to answer Reuters’ questions whether they had any leads, but said Ignatova “left with a tremendous amount of cash,” adding, “money can buy a lot of friends.”

Ignatova was part of a Bulgaria-based crypto company called OneCoin. The company claimed they were performing a regular crypto mining operation—generating new tokens added to a blockchain—and pumped out $3.78 billion in revenue from the end of 2014 to the middle of 2016. But despite the upward momentum, investigators from the U.S. Department of Justice reported that OneCoin’s value was rigged internally, that the coins were essentially worthless, and users could not even trace ownership of the coins. The DOJ alleged those at the head of the company made nearly $2.5 billion in profit that they squirreled away in company bank accounts.

Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, told reporters Ignatova capitalized “on the frenzied speculation of the early days of cryptocurrency.”

In an FBI-provided video of Ignatova speaking at a London company event dated June, 2016, Ignatova boasted about her two million active users, adding “no other cryptocurrency has as many users as we do,”

Bloomberg reported that after Ignatova grew suspicious that the feds were onto her, she fled to Greece and then investigators lost track of her.

In 2019, the U.S. unsealed an indictment against Ignatova, charging her with the previously mentioned litany of financial crimes. That same year, Konstantin Ignatova, one of OneCoin’s founders and Ruja’s brother, was charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Konstantin managed to get a plea deal, and though his sentencing was set for May 13, his attorneys adjourned the date for 90 days so he could further cooperate with authorities.

The Cryptoqueen has evaded police custody and remains at large to this day. So, the FBI says it’ll pay up to a $100,000 reward for any info that leads to an arrest.

[…]

Source: ‘Cryptoqueen’ Lands a Spot On the FBI’s Most Wanted List

The European Union (EU) finally agreed on landmark anti-money laundering rules for crypto transactions Wednesday, despite industry concerns over the law harming privacy and innovation.

The final proposals will mean customer identity needs to be verified for even the smallest crypto transfers, if it’s between two regulated digital wallet providers – but payments to unhosted private wallets will largely be left out of laundering checks.

[…]

EU lawmaker Ondřej Kovařík confirmed the provisional deal in a tweet, saying that it “strikes the right balance in mitigating risks for fighting money laundering in the crypto sector without preventing innovation and overburdening businesses.”

[…]

Kovařík said those unhosted wallet rules would only apply when transfers were made to a person’s own private wallet, and only when the value was over 1,000 euros ($1,052). A further source briefed on talks has confirmed those details.

Ernest Urtasun, a member of the European Greens party, who jointly led parliament’s negotiations on the law, tweeted that the rules were “putting an end to the wild west of unregulated crypto, closing major loopholes in the European anti-money laundering rules.”

Urtasun confirmed that the final deal would mean that, for transactions between regulated wallets, customer identity details have to be recorded for even the smallest transaction. That makes crypto rules unlike those for the conventional banking sector, which only catch those worth over 1,000 euros.

Lawmakers and governments overturned European Commission plans to exempt small transactions, arguing that price volatility and the ability to break up payments into smaller chunks would make it unworkable for crypto.

[…]

Source: No AML Checks For Most Transfers To Unhosted Crypto Wallets, EU Policymakers Decide

One of Apple’s most senior legal executives, whom the iGiant trusted to prevent insider trading, has admitted to insider trading.

Gene Levoff pleaded guilty to six counts of security fraud stemming from a February 2019 complaint, according to a Thursday announcement from the US Department of Justice on Thursday.

Levoff used non-public information about Apple’s financial results to inform his trades on Apple stock, earning himself $227,000 and avoiding $377,000 of losses. He was able to access the information as he served as co-chairman of Apple’s Disclosure Committee, which reviewed the company’s quarterly draft, annual report and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings.

Levoff’s biggest trade was the sale of $10 million of his own Apple stock in July 2015 – a deal that almost depleted his entire holding and came just before Apple announced worse results than the market anticipated. According to the SEC, this saved him $345,000 in losses.

[…]

he did try (and fail) to have the case overthrown last year, by arguing there was no specific criminal law barring insider training.

Levoff’s sentencing is scheduled for November. He faces up to 20 years in prison per count and a $5 million fine.

Source: Apple’s insider trading prevention guy pleads guilty to that • The Register

The collapse of the tokens linked to the Terra ecosystem, stablecoin terraUSD (UST) and Luna (LUNA), has led to some major investors coming clean and detailing their losses. Two more backers of Terra are disclosing exactly how their balance sheets have been affected.

Delphi Digital, a research firm and boutique investor, said in a blog post that it always had concerns about the structure of UST and LUNA, but believed that the sizable reserves in the Luna Foundation Guard, a nonprofit that supports the Terra network, would prevent the unthinkable from happening.

[…]

The firm wrote that in the first quarter of 2021, Delphi Ventures Master Fund purchased a small amount of LUNA, worth 0.5% of its net asset value (NAV) at the time. That position grew as LUNA’s value increased and the fund increased its holdings, including a $10 million investment in the LFG’s funding round in February. That investment is now worthless.

While Delphi said that it didn’t sell any LUNA, it’s now sitting on “a large unrealized loss.”

[…]

One of Terra’s other prominent backers is Hashed, an early-stage venture fund based in Seoul, South Korea. The company invested in TerraForm Labs’ $25 million venture round in 2021, according to Crunchbase data.

[…]

Hashed didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but on-chain data shows that the firm had staked over 27 million in LUNA on the Columbus 3 mainnet, 9.7 million in LUNA for the Columbus 4 mainnet and 13.2 million in LUNA on the current Columbus 5 mainnet.

All in all, Hashed’s losses amount to over $3.5 billion using pricing data from early April.

Local media in South Korea report that more than 200,000 investors in the country hold Terra-related tokens.

[…]

Source: Hashed Wallet Takes $3.5B Hit, Delphi Digital Discloses Loss After Terra’s LUNA Collapse

Apple has announced an update to its subscription policy that’s supposed to make auto-renews seamless but could also lead to surprise charges. Under the old policy, the tech giant will ask users to opt in before they’re charged for a subscription that has recently raised its price. Going forward, however, it will allow developers to automatically charge higher prices, so long as they meet a set of conditions. Apple will notify users of the price increase in advance via email and push notification, but it’s up to them to unsubscribe before they’re charged.

In its announcement, the company said that developers can use the feature if they don’t increase their price more than once a year. Further, the increase must not exceed $5 and 50 percent of the current subscription pricing, or $50 and 50 percent of the current annual subscription price. Presumably, that means users will automatically get charged $15 for a subscription that was formerly $10. However, they’ll have to opt in for a $30 sub that used to cost just $20, because while that’s 50 percent higher than the old price, the increase is also way higher than $5.

[…]

Source: Apple will allow some apps to automatically charge you higher subscription prices | Engadget

Amazon.com Inc.’s main European retail business reported 1.16 billion euros ($1.26 billion) of losses in 2021, which allowed the company to pay no income tax and receive 1 billion euros in tax credits, corporate filings seen by Bloomberg show.

The Luxembourg-based business recorded sales of 51.3 billion euros last year, up 17% from 43.8 billion euros in 2020. The unit, called Amazon EU Sarl, includes revenue generated by its e-commerce activities in the U.K, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Amazon has been a target of European regulators over its tax arrangements. The Seattle-based company won an appeal on a 250 million-euro ($280 million) tax bill imposed after regulators said agreements with Luxembourg dating back to 2003 amounted to illegal state aid. Last year, the European Commission appealed in the European Court of Justice.

An Amazon spokesperson said the company is subject to taxes in all its European branches, and that revenues, profits and taxes are recorded and reported directly to local tax authorities in those countries.

The filings provide a rare regional breakdown into Amazon’s finances. Over 2021 the group posted in global income of $33.36 billion, up from $21.3 billion the year previous. However the company does not break out income and sales from e-commerce in every country in its financial reports.

[…]

Source: Amazon (AMZN) Europe Unit Pays No Taxes on $55 Billion Sales in 2021 – Bloomberg

Pokémon-style NFT battler Axie Infinity was one of the biggest “success” stories in the world of crypto gaming. Now it’s responsible for one of the biggest thefts in the history of the technology. The gaming-focused blockchain Ronin Network announced earlier today that an Axie Infinity exploit allowed a hacker to “drain” roughly $600 million worth of crypto currency from the network.

“There has been a security breach on the Ronin Network,” the company announced on its Substack. “Earlier today, we discovered that on March 23rd, Sky Mavis’s Ronin validator nodes and Axie DAO validator nodes were compromised resulting in 173,600 Ethereum and 25.5M USDC drained from the Ronin bridge in two transactions.”

The person responsible allegedly used hacked private keys to order the fraudulent withdrawals. How, you ask? According to Ronin, “the attacker found a backdoor through our gas-free RPC node, which they abused to get the signature for the Axie DAO validator.”

Basically, the Ronin “side-chain” for games like Axie Infinity uses “9 validator nodes” to prevent fraudulent transactions. However, in November, due to overwhelming demand by new Axie players, Ronin gave special privileges to Sky Mavis, the company behind the game, so it could sign transactions on its behalf.

[…]

“The Axie DAO allowlisted Sky Mavis to sign various transactions on its behalf,” Ronin writes. “This was discontinued in December 2021, but the allowlist access was not revoked. Once the attacker got access to Sky Mavis systems they were able to get the signature from the Axie DAO validator by using the gas-free RPC.“

Ronin has apparently locked down accounts while it continues its investigation into the hack, meaning no one can get their funds out even as the price of RON, the network’s native token, has reportedly plummeted more than 25%.

[…]

Source: Pokémon-Like NFT Game Axie Infinity Scammed Out Of $600 Million

GameStop  (GME) – Get GameStop Corp. Class A Report shares extended declines Tuesday, after being halted by officials on the New York Stock Exchange, in a move that could snap the meme stock’s longest winning streak in more than a decade.

Both GameStop and AMC Entertainment  (AMC) – Get AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. Class A Report names that defined last year’s meme-stock phenomenon, were halted in early Tuesday trading amid heighted volatility and larger-than-usual pre-market volumes.

GameStop was last seen trading 6.1% lower on the session at $178.00 each, a move that would still leave the stock up 41% over the past month, while AMC fell as much as 12% before trading 2.1% into the red at $28.80 each.

Last week, Securities and Exchange Commission filings late Tuesday showed that Cohen’s RC Ventures LLC, which has also built stakes in Bed Bath & Beyond BBBY, now owns around 9.1 million GameStop shares representing an 11.9% overall stake in the Grapevine, Texas-based group.

Short interest in the shares remains elevated, however, with data from S3 Partners showing just under $1.2 billion in bets against the group, a figure that represents around 12.66 million shares, or 20.1% of the stock’s outstanding float.

GameStop reported a wider-than-expected loss of $1.86 per share for its fiscal fourth quarter last week, and managed to record negative free cash flow of $131.6 million even as revenues rose 6.2% to $2.25 billion.

Source: GameStop Stock Halted On NYSE, Extends Slide As Trading Resumes – TheStreet

Oddly enough this article talks it down but a quick look at the chart shows astronomic growth on both stocks. Superstonk is going nuts on Reddit.

A now-former HP finance planning manager pleaded guilty on Wednesday to charges of wire fraud, money laundering, and filing false tax returns that follow from the misappropriation of company funds.

According to the US Justice Department, Shelbee Szeto, 30, of Fremont, California, worked at HP Inc from August 2017 through June 2021, first as an executive assistant and then as a finance planning manager.

During that time, she was responsible for paying HP vendors

[…]

Szeto was issued multiple PCards and, according to prosecutors, she devised a scheme to make purported vendor payments to financial accounts that she controlled and then used HP’s funds to purchase goods for herself.

“Between approximately April 24, 2018 and April 23, 2021, Szeto knowingly charged approximately $4.8 million dollars in payments from her HP PCards to PayPal, Square, and Stripe merchant accounts under her control and for her personal benefit,” the indictment stated.

To make this spending appear legitimate, Szeto submitted false invoices to HP.

[…]

Szeto managed to make several transactions in the $30,000 to $40,000 range; Square declined to process a payment for $330,000. Asked for supporting paperwork by the payment processor, she is said to have provided false documentation and to have falsely told Square investigators the funds were for marketing work related to a real-estate transaction.

Her bank, First Republic, also questioned the source of her funds, according to the indictment, and the IRS noticed that her 2019 and 2020 tax forms were inaccurate. All told, Szeto is said to have cost HP $5.2m.

The Justice Department said Szeto spent the funds on: a 2020 Tesla sedan; a 2021 Porsche SUV; various bags and purses from Chanel, Dior, Gucci, and Hermes; and an assortment jewelry including necklaces, rings, pendants, and wristwatches from Audemars Piguet, Bulgari, Cartier, and Rolex.

[…]

Source: HP staffer blew $5m on personal expenses with company card • The Register