Struggling retailer GameStop’s stock curiously hit an all time high today. But it’s not because Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo suddenly decided to stop selling their games digitally. And it’s not because a new set of Funko Pops has taken the internet’s imagination by storm.

No, the stock price jumped to an all-time high because some institutional investors bet on the company to fail, and a bunch of amateurs on social media decided to call their bluff and try getting rich in the process.

GameStop has struggled to reinvent itself as video games have increasingly gone digital. Now, established investors and Reddit day-traders are going to war over its future, and making the company’s stock price do ridiculous things in the process.

At the beginning of the year, GameStop’s stock was trading at just under $20 a share. In the weeks since, it’s more than tripled in value reaching just over $73 at its highest point today. “GameStop is up 174% in January to date, with its average daily rolling 10-day volatility peaking at the highest level in the nearly two decades the stock has been trading,” Bloomberg reported.

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As Ars Technica reported earlier this week, some investors spent last fall shorting GameStop’s stock, effectively speculating that it was overvalued and would implode, possibly making them a bunch of money in the process.

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Meanwhile, people hanging out on subreddits like Wallstreetbets (self-described as “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal”) and the finance influencer realm of TikTok (nicknamed FinTok) started putting their money behind GameStop’s longevity.

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“[E]ssentially, people on WallStreetBets, along with several YouTube and TikTok investors guessed as long as a year ago that if they bought shares of GameStop at a low price, the short sellers would eventually be forced to cover their short en masse, which would drive the price up,” wrote Vice in another great explainer published this week.

Shorting seemed like a sensible bet considering months of bad news and poor financial reports coming out of GameStop. But then, as Vice pointed out, Reddit finance personalities began musing about how they thought GameStop was actually a great investment opportunity. The logic was based on how many other investors were already short selling it. Just today, CNBC reported that GameStop is “the single most shorted name in the U.S. stock market.”

If someone shorts a stock, i.e. sells it and gives the original owner an IOU, and then that original owner needs the stock back, they need to “cover” the short by buying additional stock. This helps pump up the price of the stock even further, making it more valuable and potentially creating a feedback loop where it just goes up and up and up as everyone scrambles to buy back from the same limited pool of shares.

One of the GameStop short sellers is Andrew Left, called “Wall Street’s Bounty Hunter” by The New York Times because of his reputation for shorting companies he considers weak and following up by publishing research about why the company is going to fail, or, in some cases, alleging outright fraud. Yesterday, Left put out a six and a half minute video on YouTube making his case for why GameStop is doomed. WallStreetBets in turn organized what finance pundit Jim Cramer called “an ambush,” pumping up up GameStop’s stock in a coordinated campaign to “squeeze” Left, forcing him to buy tons of stock of his own to “cover” his position and in turn making their shares worth even more. Jim Cramer is an absolute goon, but if anything fits the bill of “Mad Money” it’s this.

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As with everything on the internet, what may have started as some people trying to (and succeeding at) making a bunch of quick cash has become much more, including a sort of crusade against Left as well as an unlikely source of GameStop fandom.

Earlier this month, GameStop announced Ryan Cohen would be taking a seat on its board. Cohen is formerly the CEO of the pet food website Chewy.com, but he’s already become a golden boy meme in the world of GameStop stocks. Search his name on Twitter and you’ll find people tweeting things like “Papa Cohen will take us all to mars suit up homies it will be a bumpy ride to the [rocket emoji] so u don’t fall off.”

[…]

Source: GameStop Stock Breaks Records As Reddit Traders War With Short Sellers

Elastic CEO and co-founder Shay Banon has attacked AWS for what he claims is unacceptable use of the open-source Elasticsearch product and trademark.

Banon’s post is part of the company’s defence of its decision to drop the open-source Apache 2.0 licence for its ElasticSearch and Kibana products and instead use the copyleft SSPL or restrictive Elastic licence – though the plan is to add provisions to mitigate this by having code revert to the Apache 2.0 licence after a period of up to five years.

The new rant makes explicit that the purpose of the licence change is to make it harder for AWS to use Elastic’s code. According to Banon, AWS has been “doing things that we think are just NOT OK since 2015.” Banon said that “we’ve tried every avenue available including going through the courts,” presumably a reference to this lawsuit [PDF], the outcome of which is not yet determined.

Banon wants to prevent “companies from taking our Elasticsearch and Kibana products and providing them directly as a service without collaborating with us.” The issue is not clear-cut, though, since permissive open-source licences like Apache 2.0 specifically include the right to modify and distribute the product.

Well yes, but the modified bits are supposed to go back into the product, which AWS isn’t doing. They are selling the product and their own addons and not bringing the addons back to the Open Source project and community. Basically they steal the idea and code and then throw more money at it than any FOSS developer can and close that up.

The company has also protected its investment by releasing some features only under the Elastic licence. Elasticsearch is based on Apache Lucene so Elastic itself is vulnerable to accusations of benefiting from open source while now trying to lock down its products for commercial advantage.

And very strange it is that AWS can commercialise but Elasticsearch can’t.

The Elasticsearch trademark is another matter, and Banon also claims that AWS has not been honest with customers about its fork called Open Distro for Elasticsearch, which underlies the Amazon Elasticsearch Service. AWS CTO Werner Vogels announced this on Twitter with a now-deleted tweet calling it “a great partnership between @elastic and AWS.” According to Banon, there was no collaboration.

“Over the years, we have heard repeatedly that this confusion persists,” Banon said. He also claimed that proprietary features in Elasticsearch are “serving as ‘inspiration’ for Amazon.”

In March 2019, Adrian Cockcroft, Amazon’s VP of cloud architecture strategy, said that the motivation for the Open Distro for Elasticsearch was that “since June 2018, we have witnessed significant intermingling of proprietary code into the code base” and complained about “an extreme lack of clarity as to what customers who care about open source are getting and what they can depend on.” According to Cockcroft, AWS offered “significant resources” to support a community version of Elasticsearch but this was refused. “The whole idea of open source is that multiple users and companies can put it to work and everyone can contribute to its improvement,” he said.

So it would nice if AWS actually gave back.

In February 2020, AWS added security features to its Elasticsearch service, in partnership with Floragunn GmbH, whose Search Guard product is a third-party security add-on for Elasticsearch. Floragunn’s product is also subject of litigation [PDF] from Elastic, which claims in the court filing that it is a “knowing and willful infringement of Elastic’s copyright in the source code for Elastic’s X-Pack software.”

Andi Gutmans, VP of analytics and ElastiCache at AWS, said in the same month last year: “We want to make the community aware that AWS performed our own due diligence prior to partnering with Floragunn and found no evidence that Search Guard misappropriated any copyrighted material.” He added that “this kind of behavior is misaligned with the spirit of open source.”

And here come the FOSS fundamentalists

Yestrday, Charlie Hull, co-founder of UK open-source search consultancy Flax, said: “Although Elasticsearch creator Shay Banon is always at pains to point out his personal commitment to ‘open,’ what that means in practice has shifted several times as his company has grown, taken investment and gone public. Elastic’s actions over the years, such as deliberately mixing Apache 2 and Elastic licensed code, have shown it was shifting away from a true open source model.”

According to Hull, Elastic’s new terms are unlikely to affect third-party services that do not directly expose Elasticsearch, such as a library book search. But he did add that “the boundaries of what constitutes a ‘Prohibited SaaS Offering’ are not entirely clear,” and that “those considering Elasticsearch for new projects will have to consider how important they regard the freedoms of a true open source license and perhaps examine alternatives.”

This guy doesn’t code, doesn’t contribute but points people at FOSS products as a ‘consultant’. But he does have an opinion on how people should program for free so he can point them at their products.

Linux developer Drew DeVault said of the licence change: “Elasticsearch belongs to its 1,573 contributors, who retain their copyright, and granted Elastic a license to distribute their work without restriction… Elastic has spit in the face of every single one of 1,573 contributors, and everyone who gave Elastic their trust, loyalty, and patronage. This is an Oracle-level move.”

And another developer who has their salary paid and so doesn’t have to worry about their product being used by everyone on the planet whilst you as programmer of the product are making barely enough to get by whilst working crazy hours and having shit piled on you by self rightous people. It’s a comfortable position to be an idealist from.

Source: AWS has been doing things that are ‘just NOT OK since 2015,’ says Elastic as firm yanks Apache 2.0 licence • The Register

I spoke about the problems of FOSS in 2017 and with the importance of the products increasing with the complexity whilst the pay and conditions are miserable makes this still very very relevant

A lengthy antitrust investigation into PC games geo-blocking in the European Union by distribution platform Valve and five games publishers has led to fines totalling €7.8 million (~$9.4 million) after the Commission confirmed today that the bloc’s rules had been breached.The geo-blocking practices investigated since before 2017 concerned around 100 PC video games of different genres, including sports, simulation and action games.In addition to Valve — which has been fined just over €1.6 million — the five sanctioned games publishers are: Bandai Namco (fined €340,000), Capcom (€396,000), Focus Home (€2.8 million), Koch Media (€977,000) and ZeniMax (€1.6 million).The Commission said the fines were reduced by between 10% and 15% owing to cooperation from the companies, with the exception of Valve, which it said chose not to cooperate (a “prohibition Decision” rather than a fine reduction was applied in its case).

Source: Valve and five PC games publishers fined $9.4M for illegal geo-blocking | TechCrunch

In 2017, Facebook said it was testing a new way of selling online advertising that would threaten Google’s control of the digital ad market. But less than two years later, Facebook did an about-face and said it was joining an alliance of companies backing a similar effort by Google.Facebook never said why it pulled back from its project, but evidence presented in an antitrust lawsuit filed by 10 state attorneys general last month indicates that Google had extended to Facebook, its closest rival for digital advertising dollars, a sweetheart deal to be a partner.Details of the agreement, based on documents the Texas attorney general’s office said it had uncovered as part of the multistate suit, were redacted in the complaint filed in federal court in Texas last month. But they were not hidden in a draft version of the complaint reviewed by The New York Times.Executives at six of the more than 20 partners in the alliance told The Times that their agreements with Google did not include many of the same generous terms that Facebook received and that the search giant had handed Facebook a significant advantage over the rest of them.The executives, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their business relationships with Google, also said they had not known that Google had afforded such advantages to Facebook. The clear disparity in how their companies were treated by Google when compared to Facebook has not been previously reported.

Source: Behind a Secret Deal Between Google and Facebook – The New York Times

Tesla is an oddity in the business landscape. The company’s stock is so stratospheric that Elon Musk has surpassed Jeff Bezos as the world’s richest person. Now, we have another mind-blowing metric. At Tesla’s current price-to-earnings ratio, it would take the company almost 1,600 years to make what the stock market says it’s worth.The New Statesman put up a startling comparison. In 2020, Tesla delivered 499,550 vehicles. Yet, its market capitalization shot up to $750 billion dollars. Comparatively, General Motors delivered 2.5 million vehicles in the same year, yet its market value is only $62 billion. Tesla’s price-to-earnings ratio — a comparison of current share price to earnings per share — is roughly 128X (the industry average is 15X), according to Zacks Investment Research. Based on that ratio, it would take Tesla 1,600 years to make the kind of money the stock market says it’s worth.

Source: Tesla Would Take Nearly 1,600 Years To Make The Amount Of Money The Stock Market Values It At

Epic Games intends to file a competition lawsuit against Google in the UK as part of the ongoing Fortnite-kicked-off-platforms saga, according to documents lodged with the Competition Appeal Tribunal.The lawsuit will allege that Google, holder of “a dominant position in the Android app distribution market”, has unfairly restricted “competition from alternative app stores and other channels for the distribution of apps” [PDF].The legal action the games dev is taking in the UK is similar to a US lawsuit it filed against Apple, which ejected Epic from its App Store in a commercial spat about cult game Fortnite.The dispute is over exclusivity and how much of a cut Google takes from in-game microtransactions in Fortnite. As we reported back in 2018, Epic launched the Android version of Fortnite through its own website rather than the Google Play Store, the official app repository for Android. This initially deprived Google of its 30 per cent cut of Android app sale prices, though the app was later released through the Play Store.At the time, Epic chief exec Tim Sweeney had a good old spleen-venting session about the “economics of the store ecosystem as it exists right now”.In August 2020, Epic introduced what its Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) claim described as “a direct payment option into the Fortnite app on the Google Play Store. This enabled consumers to pay Epic directly for in-app content instead of using Google’s payment processor.” Google responded by ejecting Fortnite from the Play Store altogether.Epic is set to allege that Google is “using its market position to charge unfair prices for the distribution of apps via the Google Play Store and/or in relation to the purchase of digital in-app content within those apps,” breaking section 18 of the Competition Act 1998 and Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

Source: Epic Games files competition lawsuit against Google in the UK over Fortnite’s ejection from Play Store • The Register

[…]

the estimated $100 million Uber apparently straight-up squandered on incredibly obvious, third-party digital advertising scams… something that is garnering mainstream coverage in the first days of 2021, despite coming to light back in February of last damn year.

You Google Played yourself — Former Sleeping Giants alum and co-founder of Check My Ads, Nandini Jammi, caught most of us up on the whole situation yesterday in a lengthy Twitter thread detailing just how Uber, the poster child of startup capitalism’s unethical robber baron mentality, managed to recently waste a mind-boggling $100 million in pointless digital advertising campaigns through a host of blatantly shady ad networks.

One such instance involved launching “‘battery saver’ style apps in Google Play, giving them root access to your phone.” Upon typing “Uber” into Google Play, the service “auto-fires a click to make it look like you clicked on an Uber ad and attribute the install to themselves.”

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Source: Uber wasted $100 million on useless digital ad campaigns

A lot more moralising in the article on how Uber is evil and how this writer would spend someone else’s money but we’re seeing more and more about how the huge digital “targetted” ad spends are actually not delivering on their promises

China’s crackdown on Jack Ma’s empire is far from over: The country’s regulators have ordered the Ma-founded Alibaba affiliate Ant Group to scale down its business. In particular, they’ve ordered the company to “return to its origins” as a payment provider. Ant Group started out as Alipay, which became China’s largest digital payment platform, though it eventually expanded to offer investment and savings accounts, as well as lending, insurance and wealth management services. Pan Gongsheng, the deputy governor of China’s central bank, called those services “illegal” and said the company must “strictly rectify” those activities. As The Guardian noted, those services are the group’s most profitable and fastest-growing divisions.

Gongsheng listed all the steps Ant Group are required to take as ordered by Chinese regulators in a release posted on the bank’s official website. Those requirements include prohibiting unfair competition, improving corporate governance and ensuring everything it does is “in accordance with the law.” As for the company, it told The Guardian in a statement that it would form a “rectification working group” to implement those requirements. A spokesperson explained:

“We will enlarge the scope and magnitude of opening up for win-win collaboration, review and rectify our work in consumer rights protection, and comprehensively improve our business compliance and sense of social responsibility. Ant will make its rectification plan and working timetable in a timely manner and seek regulators’ guidance in the process.”

Back in November, Chinese regulators blocked Ant’s planned IPO in Hong Kong and Shanghai, which was expected to raise $34 billion. Authorities also introduced new draft laws to oversee tech companies’ data collecting activities, along with other rules they say are meant to protect consumers. And just a few days ago, regulators opened an investigation into Alibaba’s “suspected monopolistic conduct.”

Ma’s businesses seem to have become a target after he called Chinese banks state-owned “pawnshops” for handing out unnecessary loans at a finance summit in Shanghai in October. According to Bloomberg, his companies have been in crisis mode since then and his executives even formed a task force to deal with government watchdogs on a daily basis.

Source: China pushes Alibaba founder Jack Ma to downsize his finance business | Engadget

China kicked off an investigation into alleged monopolistic practices at Alibaba Group Holding and summoned affiliate Ant Group Co. to a high-level meeting over financial regulations, escalating scrutiny over the twin pillars of billionaire Jack Ma’s internet empire.

The probe announced Thursday marks the formal start of the Communist Party’s crackdown on the crown jewel of Ma’s sprawling dominion, spanning everything from e-commerce to logistics and social media. The pressure on Ma is central to a broader effort to rein in an increasingly influential internet sphere: Draft anti-monopoly rules released November gave the government unusually wide latitude to rein in entrepreneurs like Ma who until recently enjoyed unusual freedom to expand their realms.

Once hailed as drivers of economic prosperity and symbols of the country’s technological prowess, Alibaba and rivals like Tencent Holdings face increasing pressure from regulators after amassing hundreds of millions of users and gaining influence over almost every aspect of daily life in China.

“It’s clearly an escalation of coordinated efforts to rein in Jack Ma’s empire, which symbolized China’s new ‘too-big-to-fail’ entities,” said Dong Ximiao, a researcher at Zhongguancun Internet Finance Institute. “Chinese authorities want to see a smaller, less dominant and more compliant firm.”

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Ma isn’t on the verge of a personal downfall, those familiar with the situation have said. His very public rebuke is instead a warning Beijing has lost patience with the outsize power of its technology moguls, increasingly perceived as a threat to the political and financial stability President Xi Jinping prizes most.

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The country’s internet ecosystem — long protected from competition by the likes of Google and Facebook — is dominated by two companies, Alibaba and Tencent, through a labyrinthine network of investment that encompasses the vast majority of the country’s startups in arenas from AI to digital finance. Their patronage has also groomed a new generation of titans including food and travel giant Meituan and Didi Chuxing — China’s Uber. Those that prosper outside their aura, the largest being TikTok-owner ByteDance Ltd., are rare.

The anti-monopoly rules now threaten to upset that status quo with a range of potential outcomes, from a benign scenario of fines to a break-up of industry leaders. Beijing’s diverse agencies appear to be coordinating their efforts — a bad sign for the internet sector.

“There is nothing that Chinese Communist Party doesn’t control and anything that does appear to be gyrating out of its orbit in any way is going to get pulled back very quickly,” said Alex Capri, a Singapore-based research fellow at the Hinrich Foundation.

The campaign against Alibaba and its peers got into high gear in November, after Ma famously attacked Chinese regulators in a public address for lagging the times. Market overseers subsequently suspended Ant’s IPO — the world’s largest at $35 billion — while the anti-monopoly watchdog threw markets into a tailspin shortly after with its draft legislation.

[…]

 

Source: China Targets Jack Ma’s Alibaba With Monopoly Investigation | Time

YouTube says it has found a “smoking gun” to prove that a class-action lawsuit filed by Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider and Pirate Monitor Ltd was filed in bad faith. According to the Google-owned platform, the same IP address used to upload ‘pirate’ movies to the platform also sent DMCA notices targeting the same batch of content.

[…]

Schneider told the court that a number of her songs had been posted to YouTube without her permission. Pirate Monitor Ltd argued similarly, stating that pirated copies of its works had been uploaded to the site. Both further said they had been denied access to Content ID.

In its response, YouTube focused on Pirate Monitor, alleging that the company or its agents uploaded the ‘pirate’ movies and then claimed mass infringement, something which disqualified them from accessing Content ID.

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“Through agents using pseudonyms to hide their identities, Pirate Monitor uploaded some two thousand videos to YouTube, each time representing that the content did not infringe anyone’s copyright. Shortly thereafter, Pirate Monitor invoked the notice-and-takedown provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to demand that YouTube remove the same videos its agents had just uploaded.”

[…]

In all, YouTube processed nearly 2,000 DMCA notices it received by Pirate Monitor in the fall of 2019. All of the targeted videos had a uniform length, around 30 seconds each, generated from “obscure Hungarian movies”. They had been uploaded in bulk from users with IP addresses allocated to Pakistan.

“That alone was suspicious, there is no obvious reason why short clips from relatively unknown Hungarian-language movies should be uploaded to YouTube from accounts and devices in Pakistan,” YouTube writes.

Furthermore, YouTube notes that the videos were uploaded by users with similar names, such as RansomNova11 and RansomNova12, who gave the clips nondescript titles. Perhaps even more telling, the takedown notices were sent soon after the videos were uploaded, sometimes before the videos had been seen by anyone.

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After considerable digging, YouTube found a smoking gun. In November 2019, amidst a raft of takedown notices from Pirate Monitor, one of the ‘RansomNova’ users that had been uploading clips via IP addresses in Pakistan logged into their YouTube account from a computer connected to the Internet via an IP address in Hungary,” YouTube explains.

“Pirate Monitor had been sending YouTube its takedown notices from a computer assigned that very same unique numeric address in Hungary. Simply put, whoever RansomNova is, he or she was sharing Pirate Monitor’s computer and/or Internet connection, and doing so at the same time Pirate Monitor was using the same computer and/or connection to send YouTube takedown notices.”

Source: YouTube Class Action: Same IP Address Used to Upload ‘Pirate’ Movies & File DMCA Notices * TorrentFreak

Cydia, the original app store for jailbroken iPhones, has joined a wave of companies and regulators in targeting Apple over antitrust concerns. In a lawsuit it filed on Thursday, it accused Apple of “anti-competitive acquisition and maintenance of an illegal monopoly over iOS app distribution.”

Were that not the case, Cydia argues, users would “be able to choose how and where to locate and obtain iOS apps, and developers would be able to use the iOS app distributor of their choice.” Apple rejected accusations it has a monopoly and told Motherboard it would review the lawsuit.

Apple launched the App Store in 2008, the year after Cydia arrived. The unofficial store allows users who jailbreak their iPhone and iPad to download apps and add features that Apple hasn’t necessarily approved.

Over time, Apple has made jailbreaking its devices more difficult and Cydia isn’t as prominent or popular as it once was. In 2010, Cydia developer Jay “Saurik” Freeman said 4.5 million users were searching the store for apps.

Like the App Store, Cydia took a cut of app sales and revenue peaked at around $10 million in 2011 and 2012, according to the Washington Post. Freeman ended purchases from Cydia’s store in 2018.

The suit follows a number of high-profile moves against Apple for similar reasons. Back in August, Epic Games sued Apple over its App Store rules after trying to bypass them. A coalition of companies, including Epic and Spotify, has formed to pressure Apple and Google into changing their app store practices. Apple is also under antitrust scrutiny from regulators in Europe and the US.

Source: Jailbreak app store Cydia files its own antitrust lawsuit against Apple | Engadget

Wall Street has begun trading water as a commodity, like gold or oil. The country’s first water market launched on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange this week with $1.1 billion in contracts tied to water prices in California, Bloomberg News reported.

The market allows farmers, hedge funds, and municipalities to hedge bets on the future price of water and water availability in the American West. The new trading scheme was announced in September, prompted by the region’s worsening heat, drought, and wildfires fueled by climate change. There were two trades when the market went live Monday.

“Climate change, droughts, population growth, and pollution are likely to make water scarcity issues and pricing a hot topic for years to come,” RBC Capital Markets managing director and analyst Deane Dray told Bloomberg. “We are definitely going to watch how this new water futures contract develops.”

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Source: Wall Street Begins Trading Water Futures as a Commodity – Yale E360

In 2017, Zunum Aero was flying high. The Kirkland, Washington-based aviation startup came out of stealth mode with bold plans to build a fleet of 12-seat hybrid electric jets for short, regional hops between cities. The company, which had received millions of dollars from the venture arms of Boeing and JetBlue, said it would be ready to fly by 2022.

Not long after, those dreams came crashing down to earth. In 2018, Zunum ran out of cash, forcing it to lay off nearly all of its employees and vacate its headquarters. It struggled to raise additional funds that it needed to get its plans back in motion. And now, Zunum is striking back at one of its former investors. The company filed a lawsuit in Washington Superior Court this week accusing aerospace giant Boeing of fraud, technology theft, breach of contract, and misappropriation of trade secrets.

Zunum said that Boeing “colluded with other key aerospace manufacturers and funders” to sabotage its efforts to raise additional cash and tried to poach Zunum’s engineers during the process. The startup claims that Boeing saw its superior technology and potential to disrupt air travel as a threat to its own dominance in the aviation world and sought to undermine it. Using its due diligence as an investor as subtext, Zunum said Boeing gained access to its business plan and proprietary technology, and “exploited” Zunum for its own benefit.

“Boeing saw an innovative venture, with a dramatically improved path to the future, and presented itself as interested in investing and partnering with Zunum,” the company claims in court filings. “But instead, Boeing stole Zunum’s technology and intentionally hobbled the upstart entrant in order to maintain its dominant position in commercial aviation by stifling competition.”

It’s rare that a startup would sue one of its investors after failing to deliver on its promises. But Zunum said its setbacks weren’t because of bad technology or a faulty business plan. Rather, the company claims it was sabotaged by Boeing, which misused its position as an investor to pillage its talent and patents before eventually scuttling the company’s ability to continue to raise money.

Zunum also names HorizonX, Boeing’s venture capital arm, and French engine supplier Safran as co-defendants. The company is seeking compensatory and punitive damages. A spokesperson for Boeing said the lawsuit was without merit and that the company would “vigorously” contest it in court.

[…]

Zunum puts the blame on Boeing. The Chicago-based company repeatedly reneged on promises for additional funds and dissuaded other investors from putting money in, the lawsuit alleges.

“Boeing also kept Zunum beholden to it for much-needed capital and market validation, stringing Zunum along with the prospects of an anchor investment and providing leadership on further fundraising,” the lawsuit says. “Although Zunum also sought investments elsewhere, Boeing actively interfered with and undermined those business relationships while inducing Zunum to continue its reliance on Boeing by holding out the prospect of a strategic partnership or merger.”

[…]

“Zunum discovered that Boeing was secretly developing a replica prototype of Zunum’s flagship aircraft design, staffed by the very same engineers and other professionals whom Boeing had assigned to conduct extensive due diligence on Zunum, under non-disclosure and non-use obligations,” the lawsuit reads.

Source: Struggling electric jet startup Zunum sues Boeing for fraud and misuse of trade secrets – The Verge

Don’t be surprised if you start seeing ads on videos made by smaller YouTube creators. The video-sharing website has updated its Terms of Service, and it includes a new section that gives it the right to monetize videos from channels not big enough to be part of its Partner Program. That doesn’t mean new creators can start earning from their videos right away, though — YouTube said in a forum post explaining the changes to its ToS that non-YPP members won’t be getting a cut from those ads.

To become eligible for the YouTube Partner Program, a creator has to be living in a country where it’s active, has to have 4,000 public watch hours in the last 12 months and has to have over 1,000 subscribers. YouTube only used to run ads on videos from channels that don’t meet those criteria under special circumstances, such as if the channel was previously a YPP member. Going forward, though, the website can monetize any video, so long as it meets its ad-friendly guidelines.

Source: YouTube will run ads on smaller creators’ videos without paying them | Engadget

iOS 14.3 will prompt some users to install selected third-party applications during setup, in what is likely an attempt to stifle any allegations of anticompetitive behaviour from regulators.

The feature, which is buried deep within the beta version of the upcoming iOS release and was first spotted by 9to5Mac, is believed to be activated depending on the location of the user, and states: “In compliance with regional legal requirements, continue to view available apps to download.”

Although iOS is not the most widely installed mobile operating system (that particular crown belongs to Android), it is unique insofar as the control exerted by Apple on the ecosystem, famously dubbed the Walled Garden. This limits where users can download third-party software – exclusively the App Store – and forces developers to use Apple’s payment processing methods, which take a 30 per cent cut of all transactions. Moreover, until recently, users were unable to select third-party products for their default browser and email apps.

This has prompted antitrust investigations in several jurisdictions, including the US, Japan, and the EU, often prompted by the complaints of competitors, such as Spotify and Rakuten. This is in addition to the legal action taken by Epic Games, which has claimed Apple deliberately tries to disadvantage third-party developers through its app store policies.

[…]

Source: Apple braces for antitrust woes by letting users select and install third-party apps during setup of iOS 14.3 • The Register

This is something I have been talking about since early 2019 and it’s good to see action happening on it

The European Union is serving formal antitrust charges to Amazon, saying that the retailer has misused its position to compete against third-party businesses using its platform. Officials, led by competition chief Margrethe Vestager, believe there is enough evidence to charge the company for this misuse. This data, so the claim goes, was used by Amazon to build copycat products to undercut these independent businesses, especially in large markets like France and Germany.

At the same time, regulators have opened a second investigation into favorable treatment around the “Buy Box” and the “Prime Label.” Officials suspect that independent sellers that use Amazon’s own logistics network are able to use features that those with their own logistics networks do not. Vestager said that they want those independents to be able to “compete on the merits” rather than on any sort of lock-in.

Amazon, very broadly, is a retailer itself, but it’s also a retail platform that lets third parties sell their wares side by side with Amazon’s own. These independent, unaffiliated companies can even piggyback on Amazon’s vast logistics and warehousing network. But there’s a catch: If a small seller makes a surprisingly popular product, Amazon can see that sales data on its own system. There could be the temptation for Amazon to make a similar product and direct sales toward itself.

We reached the preliminary conclusion that @amazon illegally has abused its dominant position as a marketplace service provider in DE & FR. @amazon may have used sensitive data big scale to compete against smaller retailers. Now for @amazon to respond. @EU_Competition

— Margrethe Vestager (@vestager) November 10, 2020

This isn’t a hypothetical, and The Wall Street Journal published a report in April claiming the company was doing this very thing. Former employees have claimed that Amazon can not only identify hot trends but also use that data to price their own products competitively. In one example, the makers of a popular car trunk organizer found that, a while after, Amazon launched a very similar product as part of its private label offering.

Now, Amazon has said that using third-party seller data in this manner is against its own policies and affirmed that position in Congress. Amazon has also said that the practice of producing “private label” goods is used by every major retailer, and isn’t a threat to the independent brands they sell. But regulators in both the US and Europe aren’t satisfied with that answer and are pushing for more information. In July 2019, the EU opened a formal investigation to see if what Amazon was doing violated local competition rules, with today’s charges the result of that procedure.

[…]

 

Source: European Commission charges Amazon over misuse of seller data | Engadget

I have been talking about this since early 2019, it’s good to see action on this!

The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed a legal request to formally take control of more than $1bn in Bitcoin (BTC) generated from the sales of illicit goods at Silk Road.

It is believed the crypto-coins were stolen from the dark-web market at some point, and now the Feds want to take ownership of the haul.

Between 2011 and 2013, Silk Road sold a variety of illegal drugs and services online, until it was shut down by US law enforcement. In 2015, the site’s operator, Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Now the Feds say they have an agreement to get a billion-dollar payday with Bitcoins used on the site.

In that brief period, the site racked up total revenue of more than 9.5m BTC resulting in about 600K BTC of sales commissions, according to the DoJ’s forfeiture filing.

When Ulbricht was arrested in October, 2013, the FBI said it had seized 144,336 BTC from Ulbricht’s hardware, plus 29,655 BTC from a prior seizure, totaling 173,991 BTC, which was worth about $33.6m at the time or about $2.6bn at the current exchange rate.

Prior to that, in May, 2012, according to Tom Robinson, chief scientist and co-founder of cryptocurrency analytics biz Elliptic, about 70,000 BTC left Silk Road’s digital wallet before being moved to a Bitcoin wallet with the address 1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx in 2013.

Since then, there have been a few transactions between BTC addresses related to the Silk Road funds that have remained beyond the reach of US authorities. According to a Dept of Justice court filing [PDF] today, law enforcement officers earlier this year worked with a third-party Bitcoin attribution company to analyze unattributed transactions and noticed an unusual pattern among some of them.

“These 54 transactions were not noted in the Silk Road database as a vendor withdrawal or a Silk Road employee withdrawal and therefore appear to represent Bitcoin that was stolen from Silk Road,” the court filing explained, noting that they amounted to 70,411.46 BTC. Worth about $354,000 at the time of the transfers, the value of that digital currency has skyrocketed to over $1bn today.

Investigators managed to link an unidentified individual with these transactions and the Bitcoin wallet identified above that begins 1HQ3.

“According to the investigation, Individual X was able to hack into Silk Road and gain unauthorized and illegal access to Silk Road and thereby steal the illicit cryptocurrency from Silk Road and move it into wallets that Individual X controlled,” the filing claimed. “…Ulbricht became aware of Individual X’s online identity and threatened Individual X for return of the cryptocurrency to Ulbricht.”

The government contends that Individual X failed to return the funds and kept the cryptocurrency without spending it. The complaint goes on to state that on Tuesday, Individual X signed an agreement with the US Attorney’s Office in Northern California to surrender the hacked funds.

Also on Tuesday, the 1HQ3 wallet shows a transfer of 69,369 BTC, worth about $1bn – presumably this represents Individual X providing the government with access to the funds it hopes to formally seize.

The Register has asked the Department of Justice to confirm that it controls the receiving digital wallet but we’ve not heard back.

The DoJ legal filing signals to the court that the government will present evidence that the cited property can be lawfully forfeited. If the court approves the forfeiture, the Feds will officially gain control of the funds

Source: Uncle Sam’s legal eagles hope to get their claws on $1bn in Bitcoin ‘stolen by hacker’ from dark-web souk Silk Road • The Register

We all knew it was coming. Today, the US government’s Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. The company, which is a part of Alphabet, is accused of having an unfair monopoly over search and search-related advertising. In addition, the department disagrees with the terms around Android, the most widely-used mobile operating system, that forces phone manufacturers to pre-load Google applications and set Google as the default search engine. That decision stops rival search providers from gaining traction and, as a consequence, ensures that Google continues to make enormous amounts of cash via search-related advertising.

“Google pays billions of dollars each year to distributors—including popular-device manufacturers such as Apple, LG, Motorola, and Samsung; major U.S. wireless carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon; and browser developers such as Mozilla, Opera, and UCWeb— to secure default status for its general search engine and, in many cases, to specifically prohibit Google’s counterparties from dealing with Google’s competitors,” the lawsuit filing reads.

[…]

Walker also argued that Google competes with platforms such as Twitter, Expedia and OpenTable, which let you search for news, flights and restaurant reservations respectively.” Every day, Americans choose to use all these services and thousands more,” he said.

Some of Google’s rivals feel differently. “We’re pleased the DOJ has taken this key step in holding Google accountable for the ways it has blocked competition, locked people into using its products, and achieved a market position so dominant they refuse to even talk about it out loud,” Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of search engine provider DuckDuckGo said in a Twitter thread. “While Google’s anti-competitive practices hurt companies like us, the negative impact on society and democracy wrought by their surveillance business model is far worse. People should be able to opt out in one click.”

As the Wall Street Journal explains, the Justice Department has been preparing to launch this case for over a year. “Over the course of the last 16 months, the Antitrust Division collected convincing evidence that Google no longer competes only on the merits but instead uses its monopoly power – and billions in monopoly profits – to lock up key pathways to search on mobile phones, browsers, and next generation devices, depriving rivals of distribution and scale,” the Department said in a statement today.

[…]

Today’s lawsuit is arguably the biggest antitrust move since the government’s case against Microsoft in 1998. Back then, the technology company was accused of using its Windows monopoly to push Microsoft-made software such as Internet Explorer. A judge eventually ordered Microsoft to break up into two separate companies. The technology giant appealed, however, and by the end of 2001 it had reached a settlement with the department. “Back then, Google claimed Microsoft’s practices were anticompetitive, and yet, now, Google deploys the same playbook to sustain its own monopolies,” the Justice Department argues in today’s lawsuit filing.

Source: The Department of Justice sues Google over antitrust concerns | Engadget

The timing of this is not coincidental. The DoJ was apparently pushed into this before it was ready in order to look good for the elections.

I have been talking about this since early 2019 and it’s great to see how this has been gaining traction since then