courts
The Justice Department Took Down the 911 S5 Botnet
The US Justice Department has dismantled an enormous botnet: According to an indictment unsealed on May 24, from 2014 through July 2022, Wang and others are alleged to have created and disseminated ...
AI and Microdirectives
Imagine a future in which AIs automatically interpret—and enforce—laws. All day and every day, you constantly receive highly personalized instructions for how to comply with the law, sent directly by your government ...
Class-Action Lawsuit for Scraping Data without Permission
I have mixed feelings about this class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that it “scraped 300 billion words from the internet” without either registering as a data broker or obtaining consent ...
Fines as a Security System
Tile has an interesting security solution to make its tracking tags harder to use for stalking: The Anti-Theft Mode feature will make the devices invisible to Scan and Secure, the company’s in-app ...
Kevin Mitnick Hacked California Law in 1983
Early in his career, Kevin Mitnick successfully hacked California law. He told me the story when he heard about my new book, which he partially recounts his 2012 book, Ghost in the ...
Decarbonizing Cryptocurrencies through Taxation
Maintaining bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies causes about 0.3 percent of global CO2 emissions. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s more than the emissions of Switzerland, Croatia, and Norway combined ...
Hacking Trespass Law
This article talks about public land in the US that is completely surrounded by private land, which in some cases makes it inaccessible to the public. But there’s a hack: Some hunters ...

Regulating DAOs
In August, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned the cryptocurrency platform Tornado Cash, a virtual currency “mixer” designed to make it harder to trace cryptocurrency transactions—and a worldwide ...
Facebook Has No Idea What Data It Has
This is from a court deposition: Facebook’s stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people ...
The Justice Department Will No Longer Charge Security Researchers with Criminal Hacking
Following a recent Supreme Court ruling, the Justice Department will no longer prosecute “good faith” security researchers with cybercrimes: The policy for the first time directs that good-faith security research should not ...