Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, became the subject of a federal review this fall after a group of 21 current and former employees co-signed an essay that raised serious questions about the safety of the company’s rockets — including the rocket making headlines for flying Bezos and other celebrities to space.

But that review was hamstrung by a lack of legal protections for whistleblowers in the commercial spaceflight industry, according to emails from Federal Aviation Administration investigators that were obtained by CNN Business.

The FAA also confirmed in a statement Friday that its Blue Origin review is now closed, saying the “FAA investigated the safety allegations made against Blue Origin’s human spaceflight program” and “found no specific safety issues.”

The emails obtained by CNN Business, however, reveal that investigators were not able to speak with any of the engineers who signed the letter anonymously. Investigators also were not able to go to Blue Origin and ask for documents or interviews with current employees or management, according to the FAA.

The situation highlights how commercial spaceflight companies like Blue Origin are operating in a regulatory bubble, insulated from much of the scrutiny other industries are put under. There are no federal whistleblower statues that would protect employees in the commercial space industry if they aid FAA investigators, according to the agency.

[…]

Source: FAA says lack of federal whistleblower protections is ‘enormous factor’ hindering Blue Origin safety review – CNN

Italy’s antitrust authority (AGCM) has fined Amazon €1.13 billion ($1.28 billion) for “abuse of dominant position,” the second penalty it has imposed on Amazon over the last month. Amazon holds a position of “absolute dominance” in the Italian brokerage services market, “which has allowed it to promote its own logistics service, called Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA),” the authority wrote in a (Google translated) press release.

According to the AGCM, companies must use Amazon’s FBA service if they want access to key benefits like the Prime label, which in turn allows them to participate in Black Friday sales and other key events. “Amazon has thus prevented third-party sellers from associating the Prime label with offers not managed with FBA,” it said.

The authority said access to those functions are “crucial” for seller success. It also noted that third-party sellers using FBA are not subject to the same stringent performance requirements as non-FBA sellers. As such, they’re less likely to be suspended from the platform if they fail to meet certain goals. Finally, it noted that sellers using Amazon’s logistics services are discouraged from offering their products on other online platforms, at least to the same extent they do on Amazon.

[…]

Source: Italian regulator fines Amazon $1.28 billion for abusing its market dominance | Engadget

[…]

Spotify took down the work of hundreds of comedians, including big names like John Mulaney, Jim Gaffigan, and Kevin Hart, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. Mulaney, Gaffigan, Hart, and other comedians are represented by Spoken Giants, a global rights company that’s leading the fight to get radio and digital platforms, such as Spotify, SiriusXM, Pandora, and YouTube, to pay comedians royalty payments on the copyright for their written work.

According to the outlet, the streaming giant been in negotiations with Spoken Giants but couldn’t reach an agreement. On Thanksgiving, Spotify informed Spoken Giants that would pull all work by comedians represented by the organization until they could come to an understanding.

[…]

“In music, songwriter royalties are a very basic revenue stream, so this is not an unfamiliar concept and our work is based on established precedents and clear copyright language,” King said. “With this take-down, individual comedians are now being penalized for collectively requesting the same compensation songwriters receive.”

[…]

Source: Spotify Pulls Content of Comedians Fighting to Get Royalties

The 2022 World Inequality Report, a huge undertaking coordinated by economic and inequality experts Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, was the product of four years of research and produced an unprecedented data set on just how wealth is distributed.

“The world is marked by a very high level of income inequality and an extreme level of wealth inequality,” the authors wrote.

The data serves as a complete rebuke of the trickle-down economic theory, which posits that cutting taxes on the rich will “trickle down” to those below, with the cuts eventually benefiting everyone. In America, trickle-down was exemplified by President Ronald Reagan’s tax slashes. It’s a theory that persists today, even though most research has shown that 50 years of tax cuts benefits the wealthy and worsens inequality.

[…]

Piketty, who was Zucman’s doctoral adviser, wrote the tome “Capital in the 21st Century” which used an unprecedented data set going back to the French Revolution to expose how centuries of growing wealth inequality was a feature of capitalism, not a bug. The World Inequality Report was his effort to do the same for recent history.

They argue in the new report that the last two decades of wealth data show that “inequality is a political choice, not an inevitability.”

For instance, when it comes to wealth, which accounts for the values of assets people hold, researchers found that the “poorest half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all.” That bottom half owns just 2% of total wealth. That means that the top half of the world holds 98% of the world’s wealth, and that gets even more concentrated the wealthier you get.

Indeed, the richest 10% of the world’s population hold 76%, or two-thirds of all wealth. That means the 517 million people who make up the top hold vastly more than the 2.5 billion who make up the bottom. The world’s policy choices have led to wealth trickling up rather than down.

[…]

Billionaires now hold a 3% share of global wealth, up from 1% in 1995

The report notes that “2020 marked the steepest increase in global billionaires’ share of wealth on record.” Broadly, the number of billionaires rose to a record-number in 2020, with Wealth-X finding that there are now over 3,000 members of the three-comma club.

[…]

Source: Huge 20-Year Study Shows Trickle-Down Is a Myth, Inequality Rampant

Ministers have agreed a secrecy clause in any dispute with the drugs manufacturer Pfizer over Britain’s Covid vaccine supply. Large portions of the government’s contracts with the company over the supply of 189m vaccine doses have been redacted and any arbitration proceedings will be kept secret.

The revelation comes as Pfizer is accused by a former senior US health official of “war profiteering’’ during the pandemic. In a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation to be broadcast this week, Tom Frieden, who was director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Barack Obama, said: “If you’re just focusing on maximising your profits and you’re a vaccine manufacturer … you are war profiteering.”

Zain Rizvi, research director at Public Citizen, a US consumer advocacy organisation which has examined Pfizer’s global vaccine contracts, said: “There is a wall of secrecy surrounding these contracts and it’s unacceptable, particularly in a public health crisis.”

Rizvi said the UK needed to explain why it had agreed to secret arbitration proceedings. He said: “It’s the only high-income country we have seen that has agreed to this provision. It allows pharmaceutical companies to bypass domestic legal processes.

“The UK government has allowed the drug firms to call the shots. How did we end up in a situation where a handful of drug firms were able to exert so much control over the most powerful governments in the world? It points to a broken system.”

Pfizer has won plaudits for its vaccine delivery programme, but the US multinational faces growing scrutiny over the scale of its profits and the proportion of doses it has delivered to low-income countries.

While AstraZeneca agreed to sell its vaccine at cost during the pandemic, Pfizer wanted to secure its profits. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which now has the brand name Comirnaty, will be one of the most lucrative drugs in pharmaceutical history.

The Channel 4 investigation reveals analysis by one biological engineering expert claiming the Pfizer vaccine costs just 76p to manufacture for each shot. It is reportedly being sold for £22 a dose to the UK government.

The estimated manufacturing costs do not include research, distribution and other costs, but Pfizer says its profit margin as a percentage before tax are in the “high-20s”. Pfizer expects to deliver 2.3bn vaccines this year with predicted revenues of $36bn (£26.3bn).

A report last month by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of organisations including aid charities, said Pfizer and other drug firms have sold the majority of doses to rich countries, leaving low-income countries “out in the cold” . Only 2% of people in low-income countries had been fully vaccinated against coronavirus. Drug firms should suspend intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines, tests, treatments and other medical tools.

Pfizer has faced increased scrutiny allegations of excessive global profits after its partner, the biotechnology company BioNTech, announced in September 2020 it was to receive up to €375m (£320m) from the German government to fund vaccine development.

Anna Marriott, Oxfam’s health policy manager said: “It is deplorable that billions of people around the world are being denied vaccines so that pharmaceutical companies can make obscene profits. Given that public investment was crucial to vaccine development, it’s incomprehensible that pharma monopolies are being prioritised over people’s lives.”

[…]

Source: ‘Wall of secrecy’ in Pfizer contracts as company accused of profiteering | UK news | The Guardian

As rumored, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has ordered Meta (Facebook) to sell Giphy, saying the deal “could harm social media users and UK advertisers.” It found that the deal would boost Meta’s already prodigious market power by limiting other platforms’ access to Giphy GIFs, “driving more traffic to Facebook owned sites — Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.”

The CMA said that Meta’s sites dominated social media user time to the tune of 73 percent and that it could further muscle out rivals like TikTok, Twitter and Snapchat by leveraging Giphy. It added that prior to the merger, Giphy launched “innovative advertising services” used by brands like Dunkin’ Donuts and Pepsi that it could have brought to the UK.

“Facebook terminated Giphy’s advertising services at the time of the merger, removing an important source of potential competition,” the regulator wrote. “The CMA considers this particularly concerning given that Facebook controls nearly half of the £7 billion display advertising market in the UK.”

[…]

Source: UK competition regulator orders Meta to sell Giphy | Engadget

We’ve heard the fable of “the self-made billionaire” a thousand times: some unrecognized genius toiling away in a suburban garage stumbles upon The Next Big Thing, thereby single-handedly revolutionizing their industry and becoming insanely rich in the process — all while comfortably ignoring the fact that they’d received $300,000 in seed funding from their already rich, politically-connected parents to do so.

In The Warehouse: Workers and Robots at Amazon, Alessandro Delfanti, associate professor at the University of Toronto and author of Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science, deftly examines the dichotomy between Amazon’s public personas and its union-busting, worker-surveilling behavior in fulfillment centers around the world — and how it leverages cutting edge technologies to keep its employees’ collective noses to the grindstone, pissing in water bottles. In the excerpt below, Delfanti examines the way in which our current batch of digital robber barons lean on the classic redemption myth to launder their images into that of wonderkids deserving of unabashed praise.

[…]

Source: Hitting the Books: How Amazon laundered the ‘myth of the founder’ into a business empire | Engadget

South Korean has again imposed new regulations on app stores, this time with a regime that will see operators fined up to two per cent of revenue if they force their proprietary in-app payment systems on developers.

“Considering that certain payment methods compulsory acts are serious illegal acts of app market operators, an enforcement ordinance has been prepared that imposes a fine of two per cent of sales and one per cent of sales for delayed screening or deletion,” the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), yesterday announced in a (Korean language) canned statement.

The new regulation follows the September 2021 introduction of the country’s Telecommunications Business Act, which prevents tech giants from restricting payment options on their platforms – either to pay for apps or for in-app purchases. The Act also prevents the likes of Google, Apple and others from taking a cut of in-app purchases facilitated by third-party services.

[….]

Source: Big tech fined if they force their own in-app payment system • The Register

Come on, EU, US, where are you guys?!

The north-German state of Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch to open source software, including LibreOffice, in its administration and schools.

In doing so, the state wants to reduce its dependence on proprietary software, and eventually end it altogether. By the end of 2026, Microsoft Office is to be replaced by LibreOffice on all 25,000 computers used by civil servants and employees (including teachers), and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by GNU/Linux.

The necessary steps for this are specified in the planning of the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament (German), as digital minister Jan Philipp Albrecht explains in an interview with c’t (also German – Google Translate version here).

Lothar Becker and Thorsten Behrens from The Documentation Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, were invited to a meeting with those responsible (photos below). The focus was on cloud solutions, integration with LibreOffice and other systems, and video conferencing tools.

[…]

Source: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice

MIT’s Technology Review shares data from a Facebook-run tool called CrowdTangle. It shows that by 2018 in the nation of Myanmar (population: 53 million), ” All the engagement had instead gone to fake news and clickbait websites.

“In a country where Facebook is synonymous with the internet, the low-grade content overwhelmed other information sources.” [T]he sheer volume of fake news and clickbait acted like fuel on the flames of already dangerously high ethnic and religious tensions. It shifted public opinion and escalated the conflict, which ultimately led to the death of 10,000 Rohingya, by conservative estimates, and the displacement of 700,000 more. In 2018, a United Nations investigation determined that the violence against the Rohingya constituted a genocide and that Facebook had played a “determining role” in the atrocities. Months later, Facebook admitted it hadn’t done enough “to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.” Over the last few weeks, the revelations from the Facebook Papers, a collection of internal documents provided to Congress and a consortium of news organizations by whistleblower Frances Haugen, have reaffirmed what civil society groups have been saying for years: Facebook’s algorithmic amplification of inflammatory content, combined with its failure to prioritize content moderation outside the US and Europe, has fueled the spread of hate speech and misinformation, dangerously destabilizing countries around the world.

But there’s a crucial piece missing from the story. Facebook isn’t just amplifying misinformation.

The company is also funding it.

An MIT Technology Review investigation, based on expert interviews, data analyses, and documents that were not included in the Facebook Papers, has found that Facebook and Google are paying millions of ad dollars to bankroll clickbait actors, fueling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.
Facebook pays them for permission to open their content within Facebook’s app (where Facebook controls the advertising) rather than having users clickthrough to the publisher’s own web site, reports Technology Review: Early on, Facebook performed little quality control on the types of publishers joining the program. The platform’s design also didn’t sufficiently penalize users for posting identical content across Facebook pages — in fact, it rewarded the behavior. Posting the same article on multiple pages could as much as double the number of users who clicked on it and generated ad revenue. Clickbait farms around the world seized on this flaw as a strategy — one they still use today… Clickbait actors cropped up in Myanmar overnight. With the right recipe for producing engaging and evocative content, they could generate thousands of U.S. dollars a month in ad revenue, or 10 times the average monthly salary — paid to them directly by Facebook. An internal company document, first reported by MIT Technology Review in October, shows that Facebook was aware of the problem as early as 2019… At one point, as many as 60% of the domains enrolled in Instant Articles were using the spammy writing tactics employed by clickbait farms, the report said…

75% of users who were exposed to clickbait content from farms run in Macedonia and Kosovo had never followed any of the pages. Facebook’s content-recommendation system had instead pushed it into their news feeds.
Technology Review notes that Facebook now pays billions of dollars to the publishers in their program. It’s a long and detailed article, which ultimately concludes that the problem “is now happening on a global scale.” Thousands of clickbait operations have sprung up, primarily in countries where Facebook’s payouts provide a larger and steadier source of income than other forms of available work. Some are teams of people while others are individuals, abetted by cheap automated tools that help them create and distribute articles at mass scale…

Google is also culpable. Its AdSense program fueled the Macedonia- and Kosovo-based farms that targeted American audiences in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. And it’s AdSense that is incentivizing new clickbait actors on YouTube to post outrageous content and viral misinformation.
Reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson told Technology Review that they’d misunderstood the issue. And the spokesperson also said “we’ve invested in building new expert-driven and scalable solutions to these complex issues for many years, and will continue doing so.”

Google’s spokesperson confirmed examples in the article violated their own policies and removed the content, adding “We work hard to protect viewers from clickbait or misleading content across our platforms and have invested heavily in systems that are designed to elevate authoritative information.”

Source: How Facebook and Google Actually Fund the Creation of Misinformation – Slashdot

China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) has fined tech giants 43 times – with Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent told to pay up for failing to declare deals deemed to violate anti-monopoly legislation.

According to SAMR, more rigorous anti-monopoly law enforcement has seen businesses file more paperwork, sometimes about past transactions. SAMR’s own probes have spotted acquisitions that weren’t reported at the time.

Those efforts turned up 43 transactions, conducted between 2012 and 2021, that violated China’s 2008 Anti-Monopoly Law. Each count received a fine of ¥500,000 ($78,300). The regulatory body said that all were “assessed as having no effect of excluding or restricting competition”.

The market regulator posted about the fines on its WeChat account and Weibo page on Saturday.

State-sponsored media Global Times reported that Alibaba and Tencent each racked up more than ten cases.

[…]

China’s national anti-monopoly bureau was inaugurated on Thursday and guidelines for antitrust compliance of enterprises abroad were issued the same day.

The government in Beijing, and SAMR in particular, has been busy. Earlier this month the organization drafted new rules for internet platforms considered “super large” that hold them to higher standards than smaller, less influential ones in an attempt to stamp out anticompetitive behavior.

In September, the org ordered Alibaba, Tencent and more to stop blocking links to rivals. And it has been known to step in and outright ban mergers it deems imprudent.

[…]

Source: Beijing issues fines for 43 Big Tech M&A deals • The Register

It’s odd that China is leading the way in anti-monopolistic behaviour whilst the EU and US are lagging behind severely.

It’s been less than a year since Vizio became a publicly traded company, and one consequence of that is we know more about its business than ever before. The TV maker released its latest earnings report on Tuesday and revealed that over the last three months, its Platform Plus segment that includes advertising and viewer data had a gross profit of $57.3 million. That’s more than twice the amount of profit it made selling devices like TVs, which was $25.6 million, despite those device sales pulling in considerably more revenue.

When Vizio filed to go public, it described the difference between the two divisions. While Devices is easy to understand — 4K TVs, soundbars, etc. — Platform Plus is a little more complicated. It counts money made from selling ad placements on its TV homescreens, deals for the buttons on remotes, ads that run on streaming channels, its cut from subscriptions, and viewer data that it tracks and sells as part of the InScape program.

The company says shipments of its TVs fell to 1.4 million in 2021 compared to 2.1 million in 2020, a drop of 36 percent. CEO William Wang told investors on the call that he sees “pretty healthy inventory” going into the holiday season, so anyone planning to pick up a value-priced TV or soundbar should have some decent options available.

That spike in Platform Plus revenue, which shot up 136 percent compared to last year, did a lot to help Vizio make up the difference as profits from TVs dipped compared to last year. Supply chain and logistics problems affecting many companies hit Vizio hard, too, but execs also said the company is working with its third-party partners to help find warehouse and trucking employees.

Where the numbers keep growing is in its number of active SmartCast accounts, which are now over 14 million, and how much money it makes from each user on average. That number has nearly doubled from last year, going from $10.44 to $19.89. On the call with investors and analysts, Vizio execs said 77 percent of that money comes directly from advertising, like the kind that runs on its WatchFree Plus package of streaming channels, a group that recently expanded with content targeting. The next biggest contributor is the money it makes selling Inscape data about what people are watching.

Vizio isn’t the only smart TV maker that’s really in the advertising business — as we noted a couple of years ago, while you probably know Roku for its TV OS and streaming boxes, CEO Anthony Wood is very up front about its true model. Roku’s most recent report revealed that on average it’s pulling in $40 per month on each user, or more than double what Vizio manages. One way Vizio plans to catch up is by building its own in-app payment system, which chief revenue officer Mike O’Donnell says will roll out to consumers next year.

[…]

Source: Vizio’s profit on ads, subscriptions, and data is double the money it makes selling TVs – The Verge

With this kind of profitability it’s not really surprising that everyone is out to turn you into a product.

Aleksandr Zhukov, a Russian national and the self-proclaimed “king of fraud,” this week received a 10-year prison sentence for carrying out a $7m digital ad fraud scheme.

Zhukov was convicted in May of multiple counts of fraud and money laundering. He was arrested in Bulgaria in 2018 and extradited to America the following year.

“Sitting at his computer keyboard in Bulgaria and Russia, Zhukov boldly devised and carried out an elaborate multi-million-dollar fraud against the digital advertising industry, and victimized thousands of companies across the United States,” said Breon Peace, US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in a statement.

Starting around 2014, according to court documents, Zhukov and co-conspirators launched a fraudulent ad business called Media Methane that took payment from ad networks to present ads online to internet users.

“Rather than place these advertisements on real publishers’ webpages as promised, however, Zhukov and others rented thousands of computer servers located at commercial data centers in the United States and elsewhere, and used those data center computer servers to simulate humans viewing ads on fabricated webpages,” the US government’s indictment [PDF] says.

Zhukov and his associates – seven individuals who are being prosecuted separately – are said to have rented more than 2,000 servers in data centers in Dallas, Texas, and in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Media Methane allegedly offered ad space on fabricated web pages to ad buyers who would bid for the space. But the company showed those ads to an audience of bots.

The bots – computer programs – are said to have been designed to interact with the fake web pages so as to simulate realistic mouse movements and webpage interactions like viewing videos on social media sites. They were trained to bypass CAPTCHA puzzles, to accept cookies, and to fake being signed-in to social media services. Their code, the indictment claims, managed to avoid the fraud detection software used by several US cybersecurity firms.

To make the fraud more believable, Zhukov is said to have leased more than 765,000 IP addresses from IP address leasing companies, which he then assigned to data-center servers and entered into a global registry of IP addresses. By falsely registering IP addresses in the names of companies like Comcast and Time Warner Cable, Zhukov made it appear that the addresses belonged to residential US internet subscribers of those services. Some 6,000 domains are said to have been spoofed in this manner.

The companies victimized by this scheme, said to have netted more than $7m, include The New York Times, The New York Post, Comcast, Nestle Purina, the Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children, and Time Warner Cable.

According to the government, Zhukov hired various developers to help him carry out his fraud scheme and he referred to himself as the “king of fraud.” The Feds claim he personally took in more than $4.8m through the ad fraud scheme, though Zhukov’s attorneys are currently trying to convince the judge that only about $1m should be subject to forfeiture.

Criminal ad fraud prosecutions have been relatively rare. Among the more notable cases are a 2011 click fraud case against six Estonian nationals and one Russian national, another from 2017, and a medical ad fraud case from 2019.

Source: King of Ad Fraud to reign in a US prison for years • The Register

The European Commission is planning to ban payment for order flow, paralleling potential U.S. moves to stem a practice that hit the headlines during the meme-stock mania.

A forthcoming review of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive will include a ban amid other measures to increase transparency, such as a consolidated tape of information about transactions, people familiar with the matter said.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is separately weighing a ban on payment for order flow, in which trading firms pay retail brokerages to execute their trades. Regulators are concerned that video-game like prompts have encouraged excessive trading on app-based brokerages that fueled a explosive surge in value for GameStop Corp. and other stocks this year.

While the day-trading frenzy is far more muted in Europe than the U.S., the practice of zero-commission trading is starting to cross the Atlantic. That prompted the bloc’s markets watchdog to warn firms and investors in July of the risks arising from payment for order flow.

EXPLAINER: How Payment for Order Flow Works 

A spokesperson for the European Commission declined to comment.

Mairead McGuinness, the EU’s financial services commissioner, said this month regulators were “closely monitoring” payment for order flow. It was difficult to assess how problematic the practice is “because there is no consolidated view of all liquidity and prices of financial instruments traded across execution venues in the European markets.”

McGuinness said the payment for order flow “may lead to retail orders not being executed on terms most favorable to the client but instead on the terms most profitable to brokers,” according to a written response to a question from a European Union lawmaker.

“This would not be in line with the second Markets in Financial Instruments Directive,” she said. It’s also why regulators are “considering proposing legislation to facilitate a consolidated tape that provides all brokers and their clients with such a holistic view” of all liquidity and prices of financial instruments traded across execution venues in the European markets.

Consolidated Tape

The EU is planning to set a separate tape for each asset class, according to the people familiar. Details on delivery, specifications and speed would be set out later. There may be a tender process to choose the provider of a consolidated tape for an asset class.

The current draft notes a 15-minute delay to consolidate the data will remain acceptable, echoing current rules where exchanges should provide their data for free after 15 minutes. Those contributing data to the tape would share its revenue if the tape consolidates data in less than 15 minutes.

Source: EU Plans to Ban Trading Practice That Helps Fuel GameStop Value Surge – Bloomberg

So trying to restrict people from trading is somehow good for “the market”?

A Register reader triggered a kerfuffle for Samsung after asking the electronics biz if he could disable large and intrusive adverts splattered across his new smart TV’s programme guide.

Ross McKillop bought the telly from UK retailer John Lewis but felt distinctly undersold when he turned it on to find the internet-connected device displaying advertising on its electronic programme guide menu.

Ross McKillop’s Samsung TV displaying smart ads taking up half the screen space

“If you press the menu button to change between like TV or Netflix or, or whatever, even different sources, there’s an advert panel,” lamented McKillop to The Reg. “It seems that people accept this.”

Irritated by the giant advert for Samsung’s own wares, McKillop took to Twitter to ask the obvious question. The answer was surprisingly blunt.

Hey, Ross. Congratulations on your new TV. You wouldn’t be able to disable the ads we’re afraid. ^HA

— Samsung UK (@SamsungUK) October 27, 2021

“The more annoying [advert],” McKillop told us, “is the one that appears on the application menu, on every menu [level].”

Such a problem is, sadly, not new, as we reported about a year ago when other Samsung TV customers began wondering where the giant adverts splattered all over their TVs’ user interfaces had come from.

“I expect Netflix to promote Netflix’s products or Netflix programming on a service I pay for because it’s a service,” stormed McKillop, adding that he didn’t expect to have his TV’s manufacturer insert unavoidable advertising into his new box.

Smart readers (like our man Ross) know that you can kill ads at home with innovations such as the Pi-Hole home network-level adblocker.

Our reader also pointed out that the adverts on his new internet-connected telly were not visible in Samsung’s marketing videos about the product.

We asked Samsung if it wished to comment. The manufacturer failed to respond. McKillop has since returned his TV to retailer John Lewis.

Samsung has been relatively open about what its smart TVs do. A quick look at the “Samsung privacy policy – smart TV supplement” on its UK website reveals that the company hoovers up information about “your TV viewing history” including “information about the networks, channels, websites visited, and programs viewed on your Samsung Smart TV and the amount of time spent viewing them”.

This kind of subtle-but-invasive monitoring was the subject of a warning by an American university professor in 2019 who described it as “a cesspit of surveillance”.

The devices can pose a security risk unless they’re treated like any other internet-connectable device, as the Korean giant itself reminded tellywatchers a couple of years ago (well, they deleted that Twitter missive but El Reg doesn’t forget).

All in all, if you’re buying a Samsung TV, just remember that you’re not only paying for a big panel so you can watch reruns of Friends; you’re also paying to be part of Samsung’s global TV advertising network.

Source: Reg reader ditches Samsung smart TV after seeing huge UI ads • The Register

The civil trial of Ira Kleiman vs. Craig Wright started on Monday in Miami. The estate of David Kleiman is suing Craig Wright, the self declared inventor of bitcoin, for 50% ownership of 1.1 million bitcoins. The estate claims Kleiman was in a partnership with Wright to mine the coins but after Kleiman died in April 2013, Wright denied any partnership. At over $60,000 each per bitcoin, this case is currently worth $65 billion.

Craig Wright has previously claimed he is the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, which has been met with skepticism based on his inability to show any proof. In this case, Wright has made numerous dubious claims. After the case was filed in 2018, Wright claimed he did not have the keys to the coins but that they would be arriving in January 2020 through a “bonded courier.” After January 2020, Wright provided keys to the estate for verification which the estate claims the bitcoins were fake. Expressing skepticism that the courier even existed, the estate asked for more information about the courier. Wright then claimed the identity of the courier and all communications were protected under attorney-client privilege as the courier was an attorney.

Source: Kleiman v. Wright: $65 Billion Bitcoin Case Has Started – Slashdot

 U.S. tech giant Google has paid Russia more than 32 million roubles ($455,079) in fines for failing to delete content Moscow deems illegal, the company and a Russian lawmaker said after talks on Monday.

[…]

In 2020, Google’s compliance with requests to delete content was 96.2%, Pancini said, and in the first half of this year, it removed over 489,000 videos, but Russia said too much banned content still remained available.

Piskarev said last week that this included child pornography. Russia has ordered other foreign tech firms to delete posts promoting drug abuse and dangerous pastimes, information about homemade weapons and explosives, as well as ones by groups it designates as extremist or terrorist.

Around 2,650 pieces of illegal content on Google’s internet resources remained undeleted as of the start of October, the RIA news agency cited Piskarev as saying.

“Work has been carried out, as we see, however it is still very far from ideal,” he said.

Piskarev said Pancini had cited technical difficulties for Google’s failure to remove all the banned content.

Source: Google pays fines to Russia over banned content

As soon as you hear about child pornography alarm bells should be ringing – someone is trying to do something else which is totally unacceptable

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has smacked Facebook with a £50m ($68.7m) fine for “deliberately” not giving it the full picture about its ongoing $400m acquisition of gif-slinger Giphy.

The move  – fingered by the CMA as a “major breach” – comes just weeks after the antisocial network dismissed the UK’s regulator’s initial findings as being based on “fundamental errors” and just hours after the US Dept of Justice and its Department of Labor announced separate agreements with the firm in which it will fork over $14.25m to settle allegations of discriminatory hiring practices.

Facebook first announced its intention to buy the image platform, which hosts a searchable database of short looping soundless animated GIFs – many of which are sourced from reality TV and films – in May last year. Giphy also hosts MP4 looped video clips (so users can “enjoy” audio), which it also unaccountably calls gifs. Pinterest, Reddit and Salesforce’s comms firm Slack have all integrated Giphy into their platforms so you can “react” to friends and colleagues. Facebook’s acquisition values the company at $400m.

[…]

Bamford said companies were not required to seek the CMA’s approval before they completed an acquisition but noted that “if they decide to go ahead with a merger, we can stop the companies from integrating further if we think consumers might be affected and an investigation is needed.”

He added: “We warned Facebook that its refusal to provide us with important information was a breach of the order but, even after losing its appeal in two separate courts, Facebook continued to disregard its legal obligations.

“This should serve as a warning to any company that thinks it is above the law.”

[…]

Source: Facebook fined by UK competition body • The Register

When asked in July, 2020, by US Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) whether Amazon ever mined data from its third-party vendors to launch competing products, founder and then CEO Jeff Bezos said he couldn’t answer “yes” or “no,” but insisted Amazon had rules disallowing the practice.

“What I can tell you is we have a policy against using seller-specific data to aid our private label business but I can’t guarantee that policy has never been violated,” Bezos said.

According to documents obtained by Reuters, Amazon’s employees in India flouted that policy by copying the products of Amazon marketplace sellers for its in-house brands and then manipulating search results on Amazon’s website to place its knockoffs at the top of search results lists.

“The documents reveal how Amazon’s private-brands team in India secretly exploited internal data from Amazon.in to copy products sold by other companies, and then offered them on its platform,” said Reuters reporters Aditya Kalra and Steve Stecklow in a report published on Wednesday.

“The employees also stoked sales of Amazon private-brand products by rigging Amazon’s search results so that the company’s products would appear, as one 2016 strategy report for India put it, ‘in the first 2 or three … search results’ when customers were shopping on Amazon.in.”

Last year, the Wall Street Journal published similar allegations that the company used third-party merchant data to develop competing products, which prompted Rep. Jayapal’s question to Bezos. Such claims are central to the ongoing antitrust investigations of Amazon being conducted in the US, Europe, and India.

[…]

Source: Amazon accused of copying merchant products in India • The Register

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, whose high-profile antitrust lawsuit against Apple is now under appeal, is today calling out the iPhone maker for giving itself access to an advertising slot its competitors don’t have: the iPhone’s Settings screen. Some iOS 15 users noticed Apple is now advertising its own services at the top of their Settings, just below their Apple ID. The services being suggested are personalized to the device owner, based on which ones they already subscribe to, it appears.

For example, those without an Apple Music subscription may see an ad offering a free six-month trial. However, current Apple Music subscribers may instead see a prompt to add on a service they don’t yet have, like AppleCare coverage for their devices.

Sweeney suggests this sort of first-party advertising is an anticompetitive risk for Apple, as some of the services it’s pushing here are those that directly compete with third-party apps published on its App Store. But those third-party apps can’t gain access to the iPhone’s Settings screen, of course — they can only bid for ad slots within the App Store itself.

Writes Sweeney: “New from the guys who banned Fortnite: settings-screen ads for their own music service, which come before the actual settings, and which aren’t available to other advertisers like Spotify or Sound Cloud.”

[…]

Source: Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney calls out Apple for promoting its services in the iPhone Settings screen | TechCrunch

And in the meantime, US judges are blind and deaf to obvious monopolies in plain sight.

Apple’s decision to only allow Apple Pay to access the NFC chip in iPhones could result in the Silicon Valley giant paying hefty anti-monopoly fines in Europe.

The EU is set to file anti-competitive charges against Cupertino regarding its tap-to-pay system, Reuters reported, citing sources. Euro antitrust watchdogs are apparently not happy that the NFC chips in iPhones and iPads are restricted to the iGiant’s Pay software, unfairly locking out alternative wireless payment apps.

The charges will be the result of a European Commission investigation that started last year into Apple’s terms and conditions with merchants, the limited access to the NFC hardware, and more.

“It is important that Apple’s measures do not deny consumers the benefits of new payment technologies, including better choice, quality, innovation and competitive prices,” said Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager in 2020. “I have therefore decided to take a close look at Apple’s practices regarding Apple Pay and their impact on competition.”

[…]

Source: Report: EU to file NFC antitrust charges against Apple Pay • The Register