Game-making platform and fledgling metaverse Roblox made the news yesterday as the focus of a New York Times report about a ‘90s era tax cut that’s spun out of control. Originally created to foster investment in small businesses, the Qualified Small Business Stock, or Q.S.B.S., exemption has transformed into a way for ultra-wealthy businesses to Read more about Roblox and many other huge tech businesses Save Millions Taking Advantage Of A Massive Tax Dodge[…]

Norton antivirus’s inbuilt cryptominer has re-entered the public consciousness after a random Twitter bod expressed annoyance at how difficult it is to uninstall. The addition of Ncrypt.exe, Norton 360’s signed cryptocurrency-mining binary, to installations of Norton antivirus isn’t new – but it seems to have taken the non-techie world a few months to realise what’s Read more about Yes, Norton 360 has a built in cryptominer. Deletion is not easy.[…]

Google and Facebook have come a little unstuck in the cookie department as French watchdog Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) slapped the pair with a €150m and €60m fine respectively. The CNIL kicked off its investigations after receiving complaints regarding the way cookies can be refused on facebook.com, youtube.com and google.fr. The Read more about France fines Meta, Google: Cookies must be as easy to reject as to accept[…]

Electric- and hydrogen-powered truck startup Nikola has agreed to a $125 million settlement over charges that it defrauded investors after misleading them about its products, technical advances and financial prospects. Nikola violated the antifraud and disclosure control provisions of the federal securities laws, the Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday. In July the founder and Read more about EV startup Nikola (who showed video of car rolling down hill as being powered) settles with U.S. for $125 million[…]

[…] According to court documents, Ishii switched the transfer address for a Sony Life transaction to use a Silvergate Bank account under his control.. Ishii later converted the stolen funds into more than 3879 bitcoins via A Coinbase set up to automatically transfer all added funds to an offline cryptocurrency cold wallet with a Bitcoin Read more about US returns $154 Million in bitcoins stolen by Sony employee[…]

First, come up with a catchy name for a cryptocurrency project. Next, convince the credulous to buy associated digital tokens. Finally, abandon the project and keep investors’ funds. This “rug pulling” scam lacks sophistication but evidently it works. According to Chainalysis, a blockchain data biz, separating cryptocoin buyers from their money in this manner has Read more about Cryptocurrency ‘rug pulls’ cheated investors out of ‘$8bn’[…]

[…] new research detailed in The Wall Street Journal suggests its inequality problems are worse than the United States’ disgraceful performance under the dollar. An incredible feat considering income inequality in 2020 America was the highest of all G7 nations according to data from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development viewed by Pew Research. That Read more about Bitcoin’s Inequality Problem Is Putting the Dollar to Shame 0.01% owns 27% of all BTC[…]

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 Read more about FAA says lack of federal whistleblower protections is ‘enormous factor’ hindering Blue Origin safety review[…]

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 Read more about Italian regulator fines Amazon $1.28 billion for abusing its market dominance[…]

[…] 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 Read more about 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 Read more about 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 Read more about ‘Wall of secrecy’ in Pfizer contracts as company accused of profiteering[…]

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 — Read more about UK competition regulator orders Meta to sell Giphy[…]

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 Read more about Hitting the Books: How Amazon laundered the ‘myth of the founder’ into a business empire[…]

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 Read more about Big tech fined 2% revenue if they force their own in-app payment system in S Korea[…]

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 Read more about 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 Read more about How Facebook and Google Actually Fund the Creation of Misinformation[…]

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 Read more about Beijing issues fines for 43 Big Tech M&A deals[…]

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 Read more about Vizio’s profit on ads, subscriptions, and data is double the money it makes selling TVs[…]

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 Read more about King of Ad Fraud Zhukov to reign in a US prison for years[…]

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 Read more about EU Plans to Ban Trading Practice That Helps Fuel GameStop Value Surge – or retail traders actually trade[…]