Count GE in on the “screw your customers” bandwagon. Twitter user @ShaneMorris tweeted: “My fridge has an RFID chip in the water filter, which means the generic water filter I ordered for $19 doesn’t work. My fridge will literally not dispense ice, or water. I have to pay General Electric $55 for a water filter from them.” Fortunately, there appears to be a way to hack them to work: How to Hack RWPFE Water Filters for Your GE Fridge. Hacks aside, count me out from ever buying another GE product if it includes anti-customer “features” like these. “The difference between RWPF and RPWFE is that the RPWFE has a freaking RFID chip on it,” writes Jack Busch from groovyPost. “The fridge reads the RFID chip off your filter, and if your filter is either older than 6 months or not a genuine GE RPWFE filter, it’s all ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t dispense any water for you right now.’ Now, to be fair, GE does give you a bypass cartridge that lets you get unfiltered water for free (you didn’t throw that thing away, did you?). But come on…”

Jack proceeds to explain how you can pop off the filter bypass and “try taping the thing directly into your fridge where it would normally meet up when the filter is install.” If you’re able to get it in just the right spot, “you’re set for life,” says Jack. Alternatively, “you can tape it onto the front of an expired RPWFE GE water filter, install it backward, and then keep using it (again, not recommended for too much longer than six months). Or, you can tape it to the corresponding spot on a generic filter and reinstall it.”

Source: GE Fridges Won’t Dispense Ice Or Water Unless Your Water Filter ‘Authenticates’ Via RFID Chip – Slashdot

It’s no secret that Opera isn’t doing so well in the era of Chrome dominance. According to a report published by Hindenburg Research, the company’s losses in browser revenue have apparently led it to create multiple loan apps with short payment windows and interest rates of ~365-876%, which are in violation of new Play Store rules Google enacted last year.

You may recall that Opera became a public company in mid-2017, shortly after it was purchased by a China-based investor group. Since then, Opera’s market share has continued to fall, due to the increasing dominance of Chrome. As a result, Opera decided to pivot to predatory short-term lending in Africa and Asia across four apps: OKash and OPesa in Kenya, CashBean in India, and OPay in Nigeria.

The apps have apparently remained available in the Play Store (except OPesa, which seems to be gone) by advertising different loan rates in the app description than users actually receive. For example, the listing for OKash stated its loans range from 91-365 days (the page now says 61-365 days), but an email response from the company stated it only offered loans from 15-29 days — significantly lower than the 60-day minimum enforced by Google. All of Opera’s other apps were also found to be in violation to varying extents.

If you think that’s bad, then buckle in! According to Play Store reviews, the OKash and OPesa apps sent text messages or calls to people in the user’s contacts when payments were late, threatening to take legal action or place the borrower on a credit blacklist. A former employee told Hindenburg Research that this practice ended last year “because it was said it was illegal.” That’s probably a good reason to stop doing something, right?

Play Store reviews on OKash

Unfortunately for Opera, scamming low-income people isn’t helping the company’s financial situation. With all apps in violation of Play Store policies (and one already removed from the store), Opera’s primary means of income could very well disappear, and Hindenburg Research found evidence of investor money possibly being redirected to other companies and people:

1. $9.5 million of cash went toward an entity that appears to have been owned 100% by Opera’s Chairman/CEO, despite company disclosures suggesting otherwise. Ostensibly, the reason for the payment was to ‘purchase’ a business that was already funded and operated by Opera. To us, this transaction simply looks like a cash withdrawal.

2. $30 million of cash went into a karaoke app business owned by Opera’s Chairman/CEO, days before the arrest of a key business partner.

3. $31+ million of cash was doled out for “marketing expenses and prepayments” to an antivirus software company controlled by an Opera director and influenced by Opera’s Chairman/CEO. The antivirus company has no other known marketing clients, but is paid to help Opera with Google and Facebook ads and other marketing services. (Note: Most firms use a marketing agency for help with marketing needs.)

Since the report was released on January 16th, Opera’s stock price has dropped from ~$9 to $7.15 after hours (as of the time of writing).

You can read the full report at the link below. In the meantime, it might be a good idea to uninstall any Opera-owned apps — they might start sending texts to your friends about your browsing habits.

• Source:
• Hindenburg Research

Source: Opera reportedly has multiple predatory loan apps in the Play Store with interest rates of up to 876%

Amazon has a “bullying” problem.

So insisted PopSockets CEO and inventor David Barnett today while describing his company’s relationship with the e-commerce and logistics giant. Barnett was addressing members of the House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law and, over the course of the hearing, laid out how the Jeff Bezos-helmed corporate behemoth had pressured his smartphone accessory company in a manner best described as incredibly shady.

Barnett was joined by executives from Sonos, Basecamp, and Tile, who all took turns airing a list of grievances against major tech players such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. They all recounted, in manners specific to their respective companies, how the major tech players have used their market dominance to squeeze smaller competitors in allegedly anticompetitive ways.

The CEO of PopSockets, however, appeared to have a personal beef with Jeff Bezos (which he pronounced “Bey-zoo”).

“Multiple times we discovered that Amazon itself had sourced counterfeit product and was selling it alongside our own product,” he noted.

Barnett, under oath, told the gathered members of the House that Amazon initially played nice only to drop the hammer when it believed no one was watching. After agreeing to a written contract stipulating a price at which PopSockets would be sold on Amazon, the e-commerce giant would then allegedly unilaterally lower the price and demand that PopSockets make up the difference.

Colorado Congressman Ed Perlmutter asked Barnett how Amazon could “ignore the contract that [PopSockets] entered into and just say, ‘Sorry, that was our contract, but you got to lower your price.'”

Barnett didn’t mince words.

“With coercive tactics, basically,” he replied. “And these are tactics that are mainly executed by phone. It’s one of the strangest relationships I’ve ever had with a retailer.”

Barnett emphasized that, on paper, the contract “appears to be negotiated in good faith.”

However, he claimed, this is followed by “… frequent phone calls. And on the phone calls we get what I might call bullying with a smile. Very friendly people that we deal with who say, ‘By the way, we dropped the price of X product last week. We need you to pay for it.'”

Barnett said he would push back and that’s when “the threats come.”

He asserted that Amazon representatives would tell him over the phone: “If we don’t get it, then we’re going to source product from the gray market.”

In other words, as with so many things Amazon, it’s either play ball or get bent according to Barnett.

An Amazon spokesperson reached for comment, unsurprisingly, framed the issue differently.

“We sought to continue working with PopSockets as a vendor to ensure that we could provide competitive prices, availability, broad selection and fast delivery for those products to our customers,” read the statement in part. “Like any brand, however, PopSockets is free to choose which retailers it supplies and chose to stop selling directly through Amazon.”

Essentially, in Amazon’s view, PopSockets chose to get bent. We should all be so lucky to be offered such a choice.

Source: PopSockets CEO calls out Amazon’s ‘bullying with a smile’ tactics

In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-generating products as the reason for why it needed to take this action. The overall number may still be higher, though, as Mozilla is still looking into how this decision will affect workers in the U.K. and France. In 2018, Mozilla Corporation (as opposed to the much smaller Mozilla Foundation) said it had about 1,000 employees worldwide.

“You may recall that we expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside of search. This did not happen,” Baker writes in her memo. “Our 2019 plan underestimated how long it would take to build and ship new, revenue-generating products. Given that, and all we learned in 2019 about the pace of innovation, we decided to take a more conservative approach to projecting our revenue for 2020. We also agreed to a principle of living within our means, of not spending more than we earn for the foreseeable future.”

Source: Mozilla lays off 70 as it waits for new products to generate revenue | TechCrunch

Time to donate!

France’s competition watchdog has slapped Google with a €150 million (~$166 million) fine after finding the tech giant abused its dominant position in the online search advertising market.

In a decision announced today — following a lengthy investigation into the online ad sector — the competition authority sanctioned Google for adopting what it describes as “opaque and difficult to understand” operating rules for its ad platform, Google Ads, and for applying them in “an unfair and random manner.”

The watchdog has ordered Google to clarify how it draws up rules for the operation of Google Ads and its procedures for suspending accounts. The tech giant will also have to put in place measures to prevent, detect and deal with violations of Google Ads rules.

A Google spokesman told TechCrunch the company will appeal the decision.

The decision — which comes hard on the heels of a market study report by the U.K.’s competition watchdog asking for views on whether Google should be broken up — relates to search ads which appear when a user of Google’s search engine searches for something and ads are served alongside organic search results.

More specifically, it relates to the rules Google applies to its Ads platform which set conditions under which advertisers can broadcast ads — rules the watchdog found to be confusing and inconsistently applied.

It also found Google had changed its position on the interpretation of the rules over time, which it said generated instability for some advertisers who were kept in a situation of legal and economic insecurity.

In France, Google holds a dominant position in the online search market, with its search engine responsible for more than 90% of searches carried out, and holds more than 80% of the online ad market linked to searches, per the watchdog, which notes that that dominance puts requirements on it to define operating rules of its ad platform in an objective, transparent and non-discriminatory manner.

However, it found Google’s wording of ad rules failed to live up to that standard — saying it is “not based on any precise and stable definition, which gives Google full latitude to interpret them according to situations.”

Explaining its decision in a press release, the Autorité de la Concurrence writes [translated by Google Translate]:

[T]he French Competition Authority considers that the Google Ads operating rules imposed by Google on advertisers are established and applied under non-objective, non-transparent and discriminatory conditions. The opacity and lack of objectivity of these rules make it very difficult for advertisers to apply them, while Google has all the discretion to modify its interpretation of the rules in a way that is difficult to predict, and decide accordingly whether the sites comply with them or not. This allows Google to apply them in a discriminatory or inconsistent manner. This leads to damage both for advertisers and for search engine users.

The watchdog’s multi-year investigation of the online ad sector was instigated after a complaint by a company called Gibmedia — which raised an objection more than four years ago after Google closed its Google Ads account without notice.

Source: France slaps Google with $166M antitrust fine for opaque and inconsistent ad rules | TechCrunch

Airbnb will be breathing a sigh of relief today: Europe’s top court has judged it to be an online platform, which merely connects people looking for short-term accommodation, rather than a full-blown estate agent.

The ruling may make it harder for the “home sharing” platform to be forced to comply with local property regulations — at least under current regional rules governing e-commerce platforms.

The judgement by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) today follows a complaint made by a French tourism association, AHTOP, which had argued Airbnb should hold a professional estate agent licence. And, that by not having one, the platform giant was in breach of a piece of French legislation known as the “Hoguet Law.”

However, the court disagreed — siding with Airbnb’s argument that its business must be classified as an “information society service” under EU Directive 2000/31 on electronic commerce.

Commenting on the ruling in a statement, Luca Tosoni, a research fellow at the Norwegian Research Center for Computers and Law at the University of Oslo, told us: “The Court’s finding that online platforms that facilitate the provision of short-term accommodation services, such as Airbnb, qualify as providers of ‘information society services’ entails strict limitations on the ability to introduce or enforce restrictive measures on similar services by a Member State other than that in whose territory the relevant service provider is established.”

Source: Airbnb is a platform not an estate agent, says Europe’s top court | TechCrunch

Amsterdam was hoping to make Airbnb collect tourist taxes too, which the county of Amsterdam will now have to do themselves. Also, Amsterdam – a 100% tourist city – is now whining that it doesn’t want tourists any more and is blaming Airbnb for having them.

It’s been about a year since users of Canadian cryptocurrency exchange QuadrigaCX were informed that the company’s CEO unexpectedly died, taking the password that accessed most the money from their accounts with him to the grave. And now, those clients want to know what’s inside that grave.

The majority of QuadrigaCX’s holdings were kept offline in “cold storage,” with a password known only by 30-year-old CEO Gerald Cotten. On January 14, the company posted a Facebook note announcing Cotten had died about month earlier “due to complications with Crohn’s disease” while on a trip to India “where he was opening an orphanage to provide a home and safe refuge for children in need.”

The news meant that 76,000 people lost cryptocurrency and cash that amounted to about $163 million USD, collectively, according to Bloomberg. The story became more suspicious in June when a bankruptcy monitor revealed that Cotten funneled most of the money into fraudulent accounts and spent much of it on his wife and himself. Growing skepticism around the mysterious death has driven lawyers representing Quadriga CX users to request that Cotten’s grave be exhumed.

On Friday, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court-appointed lawyers sent a letter asking Canadian police to conduct an autopsy on the body in Cotten’s grave “to confirm both its identity and the cause of death” citing the “questionable circumstances surrounding Mr. Cotten’s death” and “the need for certainty around the question of whether Mr. Cotten is in fact deceased.”

Richard Niedermayer, a lawyer representing Cotten’s wife Jennifer Robertson told the New York Times in an email that Robertson was “heartbroken to learn” about the exhumation request, adding that Cotten’s death “should not be in doubt.”

The QuadrigaCX users’ counsel is asking that the exhumation and autopsy happen by the Spring of 2020 due to “decomposition concerns.”

Source: QuadrigaCX Want to Exhume Body of CEO Gerald Cotten

Microsoft has once again flipped the switch on small banner ads in the Windows 10 Mail and Calendar UWP app for Windows 10.

We last saw these ads in November last year, when Microsoft said they were an experiment.

Then the ads only showed for those who were not Office 365 subscribers, but on this occasion, they are present for everyone and appear non-removable.

The ads are not fixed – when you read your Gmail if offers to let you read your Gmail on mobile, and for Outlook.com accounts it offers the Outlook app for mobile.

Most annoyingly, the ads are still present, even if you use the Outlook app on mobile, and take up considerable vertical space in the menu.

When asked Microsoft said;

“The ads within the app itself will be displayed regardless of which email address you use it with. It is not removable, but you can submit it as a suggestion within the Feedback Hub on Windows 10 here: https://msft.it/6012TVPXG . “

Ads in Mail and Calendar app are of course not in and of themselves evil, but most people feel they have paid for the built-in software in Windows, such as the mail app, when they purchased the computer, and it appears the ads will show even if you use a non-Microsoft email provider.

Source: Ads in Mail and Calendar app for Windows 10 are back – MSPoweruser

Amazon.com is blocking its third-party sellers from using FedEx’s ground delivery network for Prime shipments, citing a decline in performance heading into the final stretch of the holiday shopping season. The ban on using FedEx’s Ground and Home services starts this week and will last “until the delivery performance of these ship methods improves,” according to an email Amazon sent Sunday to merchants that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Amazon has stopped using FedEx for its own deliveries in the U.S., but third-party merchants had still been able to use FedEx. Such sellers now account for more than half of the merchandise sold on Amazon’s website, including many items listed as eligible for Prime.

FedEx said the decision impacts a small number of shippers but “limits the options for those small businesses on some of the highest shipping days in history.” The carrier said it still expects to handle a record number of packages this holiday season. “The overall impact to our business is minuscule,” a FedEx spokeswoman said. In its email to merchants, Amazon said sellers can use FedEx’s speedier and more expensive Express service for Prime orders or FedEx Ground for non-Prime shipments.

Source: Amazon Blocks Sellers From Using FedEx Ground For Prime Shipments – Slashdot

How can a marketplace justify controlling marketpeoples’ logistics?

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is adding another responsibility to his job: Pichai will also be the CEO of parent holding company Alphabet going forward, taking the helm from co-founder and longtime CEO Larry Page.

Additionally, co-founder Sergey Brin will be resigning from his post as the president of Alphabet. Brin and Page jointly announced the leadership change in a blog post Tuesday afternoon, writing:

“Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President. Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. He will be the executive responsible and accountable for leading Google, and managing Alphabet’s investment in our portfolio of Other Bets.”

“We are deeply committed to Google and Alphabet for the long term, and will remain actively involved as Board members, shareholders and co-founders. In addition, we plan to continue talking with Sundar regularly, especially on topics we’re passionate about,” the duo wrote.

Pichai has been with Google since 2004, and oversaw several of the company’s key products before becoming CEO of Google in 2015 when the search giant reorganized its corporate structure.

Source: Sundar Pichai Becomes Alphabet CEO, Larry Page to Step Back – Variety

Whether we decide to take out that insurance policy, buy Bitcoin, or switch jobs, many economic decisions boil down to a fundamental gamble about how to maximize our wealth over time. How we understand these decisions is the subject of a new perspective piece in Nature Physics that aims to correct a foundational mistake in economic theory.

According to author Ole Peters (London Mathematical Laboratory, Santa Fe Institute), people’s real-world behavior often “deviates starkly” from what standard economic theory would recommend.

Take the example of a simple coin toss: Most people would not gamble on a repeated coin toss where a heads would increase their net worth by 50%, but a tails would decrease it by 40%.

“Would you accept the gamble and risk losing at the toss of a coin 40% of your house, car and life savings?” Peters asks, echoing a similar objection raised by Nicholas Bernoulli in 1713.

But early economists would have taken that gamble, at least in theory. In classical economics, the way to approach a decision is to consider all possible outcomes, then average across them. So the coin toss game seems worth playing because equal probability of a 50% gain and a 40% loss are no different from a 5% gain.

Why people don’t choose to play the game, seemingly ignoring the opportunity to gain a steady 5%, has been explained psychologically— people, in the parlance of the field, are “risk averse”. But according to Peters, these explanations don’t really get to the root of the problem, which is that the classical “solution” lacks a fundamental understanding of the individual’s unique trajectory over time.

Instead of averaging wealth across parallel possibilities, Peters advocates an approach that models how an individual’s wealth evolves along a single path through time. In a disarmingly simple example, he randomly multiplies the player’s total wealth by either 150% or 60% depending on the coin toss. That player lives with the gain or loss of each round, carrying it with them to the next turn. As the play time increases, Peters’ model reveals an array of individual trajectories. They all follow unique paths. And in contrast to the classical conception, all paths eventually plummet downward. In other words, the approach reveals a fray of exponential losses where the classical conception would show a single exponential gain.

Encouragingly, people seem to intuitively grasp the difference between these two dynamics in empirical tests. The perspective piece describes an experiment conducted by a group of neuroscientists led by Oliver Hulme, at the Danish Research Center for Magnetic Resonance. Participants played a gambling game with real money. On one day, the game was set up to maximize their wealth under classical, additive dynamics. On a separate day, the game was set up under multiplicative dynamics.

“The crucial measure was whether participants would change their willingness to take risks between the two days,” explains the study’s lead author David Meder. “Such a change would be incompatible with classical theories, while Peters’ approach predicts exactly that.”

The results were striking: When the game’s dynamics changed, all of the subjects changed their willingness to take risks, and in doing so were able to approximate the optimal strategy for growing their individual wealth over time.

“The big news here is that we are much more adaptable than we thought we were,” Peters says. “Theseaspects of our behavior we thought were neurologically imprinted are actually quite flexible.”

“This theory is exciting because it offers an explanation for why particular risk-taking behaviors emerge, and how these behaviors should adapt to different circumstances. Based on this, we can derive novel predictions for what types of reward signals the brain should compute to optimize wealth over time” says Hulme.

Peters’ distinction between averaging possibilities and tracing individual trajectories can also inform a long list of economic puzzles— from the equity premium puzzle to measuring inequality to detecting Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

“It may sound obvious to say that what matters to one’s wealth is how it evolves over time, not how it averages over many parallel states of the same individual,” writes Andrea Taroni in a companion Editorial in Nature Physics. “Yet that is the conceptual mistake we continue to make in our economic models.”

Source: This ‘fix’ for economic theory changes everything from gambles to Ponzi schemes

Eighteen states rang in 2019 with minimum wage increases — some that will ultimately rise as high as $15 an hour — and so far, opponents’ dire predictions of job losses have not come true.

What it means: The data paint a clear picture: Higher minimum wage requirements haven’t reduced hiring in low-wage industries or overall.

State of play: Opponents have long argued that raising the minimum wage will cause workers to lose their jobs and prompt fast food chains (and other stores) to raise prices.

But job losses and price hikes haven’t been pronounced in the aftermath of a recent wave of city and state wage-boost laws.

• And more economists are arguing that the link between minimum wage hikes and job losses was more hype than science.

What we’re hearing: “The minimum wage increase is not showing the detrimental effects people once would’ve predicted,” Diane Swonk, chief economist at international accounting firm Grant Thornton, tells Axios.

• “A lot of what we’re seeing in politics is old economic ideology, not what economics is telling us today.”

[…]

Axios used Bureau of Labor Statistics data to compare job growth rates in four states with low minimum wages vs. eight states with high minimum wages:

• Since 2016, when California became the first state to pass the $15 minimum wage law, all 12 states have seen growth in restaurant, bar and hotel jobs.
• Three of the four states with job growth higher than the U.S. median have passed laws that will raise the state minimum wage to at least $13.50.
• Three of the five states with the slowest job growth rates did not have a state minimum wage above the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour.
• An outlier was Massachusetts, which had the slowest job growth in the sector and currently has the highest state minimum wage: $12 an hour.

The big picture: A number of peer-reviewed academic studies have found little to no impact on hiring as states and municipalities have raised the minimum wage.

• Rather, such increases are likely to have increased hiring in the strong U.S. economy, Bill Spriggs, chief economist at labor union AFL-CIO, tells Axios.

Source: Job loss predictions over rising minimum wages haven’t come true – Axios

Hackers didn’t waste any time and have started hijacking Disney+ user accounts hours after the service launched.

Many of these accounts are now being offered for free on hacking forums, or available for sale for prices varying from $3 to $11, a ZDNet investigation has discovered.

A stream of user complaints

The Disney+ video streaming service launched this week, on November 12. The service, although being available only in the US, Canada, and the Netherlands, has already amassed more than 10 million customers in its first 24 hours.

The Disney+ launch was marred by technical issues. Many users reported being unable to stream their favorite movies and shows.

But hidden in the flood of complaints about technical issues was a smaller stream of users reporting losing access to their accounts.

Many users reported that hackers were accessing their accounts, logging them out of all devices, and then changing the account’s email and password, effectively taking over the account and locking the previous owner out.

Source: Thousands of hacked Disney+ accounts are already for sale on hacking forums | ZDNet

Aside from traditional cable, which remains a must for any sports fan at the absolute least, there now exist more than a half-dozen prominent streaming services (and lots more small ones), all filled with a couple of buzzy shows, some old favorites, and endless filler crap that makes the library of content seem more valuable than it is. And if keeping up with the Emmy-nominated offerings of services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime didn’t already feel like a financial strain, the launch of Apple TV+ and the fawned-over premiere of Disney+ might have done it.

By my count, if you want to watch shows on HBO, Apple TV+, Disney+, CBS All-Access, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Netflix, it’d run you $60.93 a month or $731.16 a year, and that’s before factoring in a standard cable package for live events and other shows, or the other streaming services sure to launch in the near future. (NBC’s got one coming down the pike.)

[…]

Instead of letting viewers just pay for the stuff they watch, they’re forced, instead, to choose between equally flawed packages where the fun and/or high-quality shows get bundled with pointless crap that jacks up the price. Unlike Spotify and its clones, which include essentially all the music a person could want, one relatively cheap subscription to any Movie/TV streaming service doesn’t give you access to more-or-less the entire history of moving pictures. And unlike Spotify and its clones, which have caused a massive downturn in music piracy, the shows on all these platforms are ripe for stealing.

[…]

A simple glance at torrent websites shows that plenty of people are stealing from the brand new steaming services—episodes of The Mandalorian and Dickinson all have hundreds or thousands of seeders and are among the most popular shows on torrent sites. I reached out specifically to Disney, Apple, and Netflix to ask what their policy was on going after pirated content, and haven’t heard back, but it’s obvious that these companies assume that at least some of their viewers aren’t paying the full price for their services. Given that you can watch as many as six simultaneous streams with Apple TV+, and four with Disney+ and the top Netflix package, the more common form of piracy—password sharing—is built into the system.

Source: Disney + and ‘The Mandalorian’ Are Driving People Back to Torrenting

Google will soon offer checking accounts to consumers, becoming the latest Silicon Valley heavyweight to push into finance. The Wall Street Journal: The project, code-named Cache, is expected to launch next year with accounts run by Citigroup and a credit union at Stanford University, a tiny lender in Google’s backyard. Big tech companies see financial services as a way to get closer to users and glean valuable data. Apple introduced a credit card this summer. Amazon.com has talked to banks about offering checking accounts. Facebook is working on a digital currency it hopes will upend global payments. Their ambitions could challenge incumbent financial-services firms, which fear losing their primacy and customers. They are also likely to stoke a reaction in Washington, where regulators are already investigating whether large technology companies have too much clout.

The tie-ups between banking and technology have sometimes been fraught. Apple irked its credit-card partner, Goldman Sachs Group, by running ads that said the card was “designed by Apple, not a bank.” Major financial companies dropped out of Facebook’s crypto project after a regulatory backlash. Google’s approach seems designed to make allies, rather than enemies, in both camps. The financial institutions’ brands, not Google’s, will be front-and-center on the accounts, an executive told The Wall Street Journal. And Google will leave the financial plumbing and compliance to the banks — activities it couldn’t do without a license anyway.

Source: Next in Google’s Quest for Consumer Dominance — Banking – Slashdot

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players will no longer be able to trade container keys between accounts because the trade was part of a massive worldwide fraud network. Players earned cases in Counter-Strike containing weapons and cosmetic upgrades, but had to purchase the keys to open the boxes. Developer Valve runs an internal marketplace on Steam where it allowed players to trade the boxes and the keys. Valve patched the game on October 28 and explained the problem in its patch notes.

“In the past, most key trades we observed were between legitimate customers,” the statement said. “However, worldwide fraud networks have recently shifted to using CS:GO keys to liquidate their gains. At this point, nearly all key purchases that end up being traded or sold on the marketplace are believed to be fraud-sourced.”

This isn’t the first time Counter-Strike’s microtransactions were at the center of fraud. In September, 2017, the Federal Trade Commission settled with two YouTubers who ran popular websites that allowed fans to gamble their Counter-Strike skins. The influencers advertised the gambling site to fans on YouTube with video titles like HOW TO WIN $13,000 IN 5 MINUTES CS GO Betting without disclosing that they owned it.

Source: ‘Nearly All’ Counter-Strike Microtransactions Are Being Used for Money Laundering – VICE

Forty-seven state attorneys general have now joined a sweeping investigation into Facebook’s business practices aimed at determining whether the company has engaged in anti-competitive behavior, ignored privacy laws, or violated any other laws, according to the New York Attorney General’s office.

In a statement on Tuesday, Letitia James, the Democratic attorney general of New York, said in a statement that investigators would use every tool at their disposal “to determine whether Facebook’s actions stifled competition and put users at risk.” The officials also aim to determine whether Facebook has “reduced the quality of consumers’ choices” and “increased the price of advertising.”

“When competition is blocked, innovation can be stifled and consumers are harmed. Facebook, like every other company, must comply with our antitrust laws, and this investigation is looking into whether it has,” said Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, adding: “No one is above the law.”

The probe is the latest sign of a growing bipartisan unease with the immense sway a small number of tech companies hold over the digital economy. Google’s market power is likewise being scrutinized by attorneys general in four dozen states. And the U.S. Justice Department, reflecting concerns that “Big Tech” is abusing its control to stifle competition in markets, announced a broad antitrust review of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple this summer.

Source: Facebook Under Investigation by 47 Attorneys General

<iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/RFA92mXjXLI” frameborder=”0″ allow=”accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture” allowfullscreen></iframe>