Tag: allegedly
Citybuilder removed from Steam allegedly due to DMCA from disgruntled player
Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic is a citybuilder about wrangling supply chains and logistics. Sin is a big fan. Unfortunately the supply of the game itself from Steam has been halted, and its developers allege that it’s due to DMCA takedown notices filed by a “once a respected member of our community.”
NBA legend Paul Pierce settles with SEC over allegedly false crypto statements
NBA Hall of Famer Paul “The Truth” Pierce agreed to pay $1.4 million to settle charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission over a cryptocurrency he promoted on Twitter. The SEC charged Pierce with making false and misleading promotional statements about EthereumMax (EMAX) and failing to disclose the $244,000 payment in tokens he received for plugging it on social media.
The SEC said Pierce also posted a misleading screenshot of an account showing much more in EMAX holdings and profits than his account had. Pierce also tweeted a link to the currency’s website, including instructions on purchasing EMAX tokens. The government agency found that Pierce violated anti-touting and antifraud provisions of federal securities laws.
The retired NBA legend and former ESPN studio analyst didn’t admit or deny the SEC’s findings as part of the settlement. However, he did agree not to promote crypto for three years. Pierce’s case echoes Kim Kardashian’s $1.26 million settlement in October for plugging the same currency. Pierce and Kardashian were also sued last year for their involvement in the scheme.
“This case is yet another reminder to celebrities: The law requires you to disclose to the public from whom and how much you are getting paid to promote investment in securities, and you can’t lie to investors when you tout a security,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler in a statement today. “When celebrities endorse investment opportunities, including crypto asset securities, investors should be careful to research if the investments are right for them, and they should know why celebrities are making those endorsements.”
Google Allegedly Pays Apple Portion of Chrome Search Revenue as Part of Secretive Non-Compete Deal
According to a source said to be familiar with the matter who spoke to The Register, Google has been paying Apple a portion of search revenue generated by Chrome users on iOS in return for being the default search provider in Safari and other commercial benefits. The relationship between Apple and Google is an ongoing area of scrutiny for the U.S. Justice Department and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which are apparently looking into the secretive search revenue sharing deal.
Google pays Apple around $15 billion annually to ensure that its search engine is the default option on Apple devices, but the latest news that Google is purportedly paying Apple for searches in Chrome for iOS as part of a search revenue sharing deal is a new development. The revenue sharing agreement is said to be known about in detail by only a small number of people. The amount Google is paying Apple and the wider terms of the deal have been redacted from CMA reports.
Apple does not provide any obvious value to users seeking to use Google Search within Google Chrome for iOS. As a result, the CMA is concerned that the payments are designed to discourage Apple from competing with Google with its own search engine, which would have major ramifications for Google’s business model.
The arrangement was first alluded to publicly in an antitrust lawsuit filed on December 27, 2021 in San Francisco. In an amended PDF from March 2022 related to the lawsuit, the complaint alleges that Apple has been paid for the profits it would have made if it had competed with Google, minus the challenges and costs of actually doing so:
20. Because more than half of Google’s search business was conducted through Apple devices, Apple was a major potential threat to Google, and that threat was designated by Google as “Code Red.”
21. Google paid billions of dollars to Apple and agreed to share its profits with Apple to eliminate the threat and fear of Apple as a competitor.
22. Google viewed the aspect of Apple as a potential competitor to be “Code Red.”
23. If Apple became a competitor in the search business, Google would have lost half of its business.
Apple and Google are seeking a dismissal for the case on account of lack of evidence of a horizontal agreement between the two companies, but the CMA’s investigation now seems to suggest that such an agreement does exist.
This may explain why Apple has been reluctant to launch a rival search engine or develop Safari to the point of becoming a credible challenger to Chrome on macOS, according to The Register. Likewise, Google would be disincentivized from pushing Apple to allow a non-WebKit version of Chrome for iOS.
The result is a situation where Apple and Google see substantial benefits in maintaining each others’ dominance. This division of the market is said to be “per se illegal” under U.S. antitrust laws and is likely to come under fire as more information emerges.
This article, “Google Allegedly Pays Apple Portion of Chrome Search Revenue as Part of Secretive Non-Compete Deal” first appeared on MacRumors.com
Discuss this article in our forums
German Woman Allegedly Kills Doppelganger in Order to Fake Her Own Death – Coast to Coast
— Delivered by Feed43 service
A Bug in Grand Theft Auto Online Is Allegedly Being Exploited to Corrupt PC Players’ Accounts
Reports indicate that a bug in Grand Theft Auto V Online is putting PC gamers’ gameplay—and even, potentially, hardware—at risk.
Algorithms Allegedly Penalized Black Renters. The US Government Is Watching
Meta sues surveillance company for allegedly scraping more than 600,000 accounts
Meta has filed a lawsuit against Voyager Labs, which it has accused of creating tens of thousands of fake accounts to scrape data from more than 600,000 Facebook users’ profiles. It says the surveillance company pulled information such as posts, likes, friend lists, photos, and comments, along with other details from groups and pages. Meta claims that Voyager masked its activity using its Surveillance Software, and that the company has also scraped data from Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Telegram to sell and license for profit.
In the complaint, which was obtained by Gizmodo, Meta has asked a judge to permanently ban Voyager from Facebook and Instagram. “As a direct result of Defendant’s unlawful actions, Meta has suffered and continues to suffer irreparable harm for which there is no adequate remedy at law, and which will continue unless Defendant’s actions are enjoined,” the filing reads. Meta said Voyager’s actions have caused it “to incur damages, including investigative costs, in an amount to be proven at trial.”
Meta claims that Voyager scraped data from accounts belonging to “employees of non-profit organizations, universities, news media organizations, healthcare facilities, the armed forces of the United States, and local, state, and federal government agencies, as well as full-time parents, retirees, and union members.” The company noted in a blog post it disabled accounts linked to Voyager and that filed the suit to enforce its terms and policies.
“Companies like Voyager are part of an industry that provides scraping services to anyone regardless of the users they target and for what purpose, including as a way to profile people for criminal behavior,” Jessica Romero, Meta’s director of platform enforcement and litigation, wrote. “This industry covertly collects information that people share with their community, family and friends, without oversight or accountability, and in a way that may implicate people’s civil rights.”
In 2021, The Guardian reported that the Los Angeles Police Department had tested Voyager’s social media surveillance tools in 2019. The company is said to have told the department that police could use the software to track the accounts of a suspect’s friends on social media, and that the system could predict crimes before they took place by making assumptions about a person’s activity.
According to The Guardian, Voyager has suggested factors like Instagram usernames denoting Arab pride or tweeting about Islam could indicate someone is leaning toward extremism. Other companies, such as Palantir, have worked on predictive policing tech. Critics such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation claim that tech can’t predict crime and that algorithms merely perpetuate existing biases.
Data scraping is an issue that Meta has to take seriously. In 2021, it sued an individual for allegedly scraping data on more than 178 million users. Last November, the Irish Data Protection Commission fined the company €265 million ($277 million) for failing to stop bad actors from obtaining millions of people’s phone numbers and other data, which were published elsewhere online. The regulator said Meta failed to comply with GDPR data protection rules.