Two companies based in Texas have been linked to a spate of robocalls that used artificial intelligence to mimic President Joe Biden. The audio deepfake was used to urge New Hampshire voters not to participate in the state's presidential primary. New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella said as many as 25,000 of the calls were made to residents of the state in January.

Formella says an investigation has linked the source of the robocalls to Texan companies Life Corporation and Lingo Telecom. No charges have yet been filed against either company or Life Corporation's owner, a person named Walter Monk. The probe is ongoing and other entities are believed to be involved. Federal law enforcement officials are said to be looking into the case too.

“We have issued a cease-and-desist letter to Life Corporation that orders the company to immediately desist violating New Hampshire election laws," Formella said at a press conference, according to CNN. "We have also opened a criminal investigation, and we are taking next steps in that investigation, sending document preservation notices and subpoenas to Life Corporation, Lingo Telecom and any other individual or entity."

The Federal Communications Commission also sent a cease-and-desist letter to Lingo Telecom. The agency said (PDF) it has warned both companies about robocalls in the past.

The deepfake was created using tools from AI voice cloning company ElevenLabs, which banned the user responsible. The company says it is "dedicated to preventing the misuse of audio AI tools and [that it takes] any incidents of misuse extremely seriously."

Meanwhile, the FCC is seeking to ban robocalls that use AI-generated voices. Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the agency is responsible for making rules regarding robocalls. Commissioners are to vote on the issue in the coming weeks.

Samsung chairman Jay Y. Lee's legal troubles may be in the rearview mirror as a Korean court acquitted him of stock manipulation and accounting fraud charges over a 2015 merger, The Financial Times has reported. The ruling allows Lee to continue leading Samsung, which saw a sharp decline in revenue last year. 

Seeking a five year jail term, prosecutors accused Lee of manipulating the share price of two Samsung subsidiaries to smooth the way for a merger that allowed him to consolidate his power. However, the Seoul Central District Court ruled that the prosecutors failed to prove that. "It is hard to say that Lee Jae-yong [aka Jay Y. Lee] . . . spearheaded the merger, and that the merger was done just for the sake of Lee’s succession," the judge stated in the ruling.

The verdict will allow Lee and Samsung to focus on its declining smartphone and memory chip businesses. Samsung recently lost its smartphone sales crown to Apple, and is now behind SK Hynix in the new and hot market of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used by NVIDIA and others to create artificial intelligence (AI) models. 

The decision was heralded by business groups including the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry, but not everyone in the country agreed. "The ruling will free Lee of legal risks, but I am at a loss for words in terms of the country’s economic justice," Park Ju-geun, head of corporate thinktank Leaders Index, told the FT. "This goes totally against all previous court rulings on the merger."

Lee was originally sentenced to five years in prison in 2017 after being found guilty of bribing public officials over the same merger. He walked free after a year in detention, but the South Korean Supreme Court overturned that decision and ordered the case to be retried.

While Lee was sentenced with two-and-a-half years of prison time in early 2021 in that retrial, he was paroled half a year later in a development that civic groups had described as another example of the justice system being lenient towards the country's elite. (Korea's former president Park Geun-hye also went to jail for her role in the same affair.) 

In 2022, Lee was given a pardon by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, ostensibly so he could help the country overcome its economic crisis. Ironically, Yoon is the country's former chief prosecutor and oversaw the original convictions of Lee and Park. 

Tesla and the 25 California counties that sued the automaker for mishandling hazardous waste at its facilities around the state have already reached an agreement just a few days after the lawsuit was filed. The court has ordered the automaker to pay $1.5 million as part of the settlement, which also includes hiring a third party to conduct annual waste audits of its trash containers for five years. These auditors will be taking a close look at the company's trash containers to check for hazardous materials. 

The counties that sued Tesla, which include Los Angeles and San Francisco, accused the company of dumping improperly labeled materials at transfer centers and landfills that were "not permitted to accept hazardous waste." Based on the complaint filed in San Joaquin County, Tesla was illegally disposing the waste it generated manufacturing and servicing its vehicles. 

Undercover investigators from the environmental division at the San Francisco District Attorney's Office were the first to find evidence of Tesla's illegal activities back in 2018. They found trash containers at the company's service centers containing materials, such as aerosols, antifreeze, lubricating oils, brake cleaners, lead acid batteries, aerosols, antifreeze, waste solvents, electronic waste and waste paint when they weren't supposed to. Investigators from other California counties' District Attorney's offices conducted their own investigations and found similar unlawful disposals. The Alameda country authorities who looked into its Fremont factory activities, for instance, discovered illegal disposal of waste containing copper and primer-contaminated debris. 

Tesla reached a settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency over its handling of hazardous materials back in 2019 and had to agree to properly manage waste at its Fremont plant in addition to paying a $31,000 fine. The automaker had also taken steps to screen its trash containers for hazardous waste before taking them to the landfill after being notified of the issue. But as District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said, "today's settlement against [the company] serves to provide a cleaner environment for citizens throughout the state by preventing the contamination of [their] precious natural resources when hazardous waste is mismanaged and unlawfully disposed." By having a third party regularly check whether Tesla continues to comply with the agreement, authorities can ensure that the company isn't illegally dumping harmful materials across the state over the next few years. 

Comcast is discontinuing its its “Xfinity 10G Network” branding to describe its internet service after a National Advertising Review Board (NARB) panel found that the term could mislead consumers into thinking that Comcast’s cellular and broadband services would offer much faster speeds than current-generation networks. Comcast rivals T-Mobile and Verizon had challenged the branding with the National Advertising Division (NAD), an ad industry watchdog, which had recommended that Comcast get rid of it in October 2023. Comcast’s confusing branding is at the heart of this challenge: “5G” refers to mobile internet, while “10G” refers to 10-gigabit broadband speeds typically delivered to homes through physical infrastructure.

On Wednesday, the NARB said that it agreed with the NAD’s decision and recommended that Comcast “discontinue use of the term 10G in the product service name ‘Xfinity 10G Network’ and when 10G is used descriptively to describe the Xfinity network.” The NARB found that the branding could mislead consumers into thinking that “10G” offered significantly faster speeds than current-generation 5G networks

The NARB also decided that using “10G” to refer to home broadband, as Comcast did, was misleading because consumers would assume that they would get 10-gigabit internet speeds on every Xfinity connection. In reality, as Ars Technica pointed out, getting those speeds requires getting Xfinity’s fiber-to-the-home connection, which typically costs hundreds of dollars more in monthly fees, installation, and activation over Xifnity’s regular cable broadband plans.

In a statement that Comcast provided to the NARB, the company agreed to stop using the misleading branding in its marketing. "Although Comcast strongly disagrees with NARB's analysis and approach, Comcast will discontinue use of the brand name 'Xfinity 10G Network' and will not use the term '10G' in a manner that misleadingly describes the Xfinity network itself," Comcast said. 

The company said, however, that it still “reserves the right” to use both “10G” and “Xifnity 10G” in ways that do “not misleadingly describe the Xfinity network itself”, so expect both terms to still show up in Xfinity marketing, just, hopefully, in less misleading ways.

Tesla is facing a lawsuit from 25 California counties accusing it of mishandling hazardous waste at facilities around the state, according to a complaint filed in San Joaquin County Superior Court. The lawsuit, which seeks civil penalties and an injunction forcing Tesla to correctly handle waste, was filed after months of negotiations reportedly broke down. Civil penalties could amount to as much as $70,000 per violation per day, Reuters reported.

Los Angeles, San Francisco and other counties accused Tesla of improperly labeling and disposing of materials at transfer stations or landfills "not permitted to accept hazardous waste." Waste materials include "lubricating oils, brake fluids, lead acid batteries, aerosols, antifreeze, cleaning fluids, propane, paint, acetone, liquified petroleum gas, adhesives and diesel fuel," the complaint states. It adds that Tesla "continues to do so at and/or from its facilities."

Tesla revealed that it was being probed by California district attorneys over its waste management handling in a 2022 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing. It stated at the time that it "had implemented various remedial measures, including conducting training and audits and enhancements to its site waste management programs," according to TechCrunch. It said in October 2023 that it was in settlement talks with District Attorneys across California, but those apparently failed to bear fruit.

Tesla has previously faced legal repercussions over its handling of waste. In 2019, it reached a settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency over federal hazardous materials violations. As part of that, Tesla agreed to properly manage waste at its Fremont plant and pay a $31,000 fine. 

The CEOs of five social media companies are headed to Washington to testify in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about child safety. The hearing will feature Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, TikTok CEO Shou Chew, Discord CEO Jason Citron and X CEO Linda Yaccarino.

The group will face off with lawmakers over their record on child exploitation and their efforts to protect teens using their services. The hearings will be live streamed beginning at 10 AM ET on Wednesday, January 31.

Though there have been previous hearings dedicated to teen safety, Wednesday’s event will be the first time Congress has heard directly from Spiegel, Yaccarino and Citron. It’s also only the second appearance for TikTok’s Chew, who was grilled by lawmakers about the app’s safety record and ties to China last year.

Zuckerberg, of course, is well-practiced at these hearings by now. But he will likely face particular pressure from lawmakers following a number of allegations about Meta’s safety practices that have come out in recent months as the result of a lawsuit from 41 state attorneys general. Court documents from the suit allege that Meta turned a blind eye to children under 13 using its service, did little to stop adults from sexually harassing teens on Facebook and that Zuckerberg personally intervened to stop an effort to ban plastic surgery filters on Instagram.

As with previous hearings with tech CEOs, it’s unclear what meaningful policy changes might come from their testimony. Lawmakers have proposed a number of bills dealing with online safety and child exploitation, though none have been passed into law. However, there is growing bipartisan support for measures that would shield teens from algorithms and data gathering and implement parental consent requirements.

In October 2023, 23andMe admitted that it suffered a data breach that compromised its users' information. The company has been hit with several lawsuits since then, and according to The New York Times, one of them is accusing 23andMe of failing to notify customers that they were specifically targeted for having Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. They also weren't told that their test results with genetic information had been compiled in curated lists that were then shared on the dark web, the plaintiffs said. 23andMe recently released a copy of the letters it sent to affected customers, and they didn't contain any reference to the users' heritage. 

The lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Francisco after the company revealed that the hack had gone unnoticed for months. Apparently, the hackers started accessing customers' accounts using login details already leaked on the web in late April 2023 and continued with their activities until September. It wasn't until October that the company finally found out about the hacks. On October 1, hackers leaked the names, home addresses and birth dates of 1 million users with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry on black hat hacking forum BreachForums. 

After someone responded to the post asking access to "Chinese accounts," the lawsuit said the poster linked to a file containing information on 100,000 Chinese users. The poster also said they had access to 350,000 Chinese profiles and could release more information if there was enough interest. In addition, the same poster allegedly returned to the forum in mid-October to sell data on "wealthy families serving Zionism" after the explosion at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza. 

"The current geopolitical and social climate amplifies the risks" to users whose data was exposed, according to the lawsuit, since the leaked information included their names and addresses. The plaintiffs want their case to be heard by a jury and are seeking compensatory, punitive and other damages.

The Pokémon Company knows about Palworld and is very much aware that the game is drawing a lot of comparisons with its intellectual property, based on a statement it has published. While the company didn't explicitly name Palworld, it said it's going to investigate a game "released in January 2024" and will "take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to Pokémon." It also clearly stated that it has "not granted any permission for the use of Pokémon intellectual property or assets in that game."

Palworld, released on January 18, is an open-world game featuring monsters that look like Pokémon, except they can use guns. It also has a darker theme, allowing players to sell their "pals" to slavery, kill them and eat them aside from being able to battle them to the death. It has gotten a lot of attention since it was released, and according to its developer Pocket Pair, it sold 7 million copies on Steam alone in just five days. 

As IGN notes, Pocket Pair previously said that its game is more like Ark Survival Evolved and Vanaheim than Pokémon. In an interview with Automaton, the company's CEO Takuro Mizobe said Palworld "cleared legal reviews" and that there had been "no action taken against it by other companies." The Pokémon Company's statement insinuates that that could change if it determines that the developer has infringed on its copyright, though we'll have to wait for the results of its investigation to know for sure.

The full statement reads:

"We have received many inquiries regarding another company’s game released in January 2024. We have not granted any permission for the use of Pokémon intellectual property or assets in that game. We intend to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to the Pokémon. We will continue to cherish and nurture each and every Pokémon and its world, and work to bring the world together through Pokémon in the future."

Major apparel supplier VF Corp followed up on its December cyberattack disclosure, with its latest Securities and Exchange Commission form admitting to a data breach impacting up to 35.5 million customers. That means if you've purchased from its major brands like Vans, North Face, Timberland, Dickies and more, you may have been impacted. But VF Corp still insists that the incident won't hurt its financial performance.

Initially, VF Corp warned customers that the cyberattack it experienced in December could have an impact on its holiday order fulfillment. The company said "unauthorized occurrences" on its IT systems caused operational disruptions, and the attackers likely stole personal information. Now, it's come out just how widespread the damage from the attack could be. 

VF Corp did not respond to a request for comment clarifying what type of data the hackers stole. In the SEC filing, however, the company said it did not collect consumer social security numbers, bank account information or payment card information, and that there is no evidence the hackers stole passwords. It also said that the unauthorized users were "ejected" from its systems by December 15, after being discovered two days earlier. 

"Since the filing of the Original Report, VF has substantially restored the IT systems and data that were impacted by the cyber incident, but continues to work through minor operational impacts," the latest filing states. VF still has not confirmed who was behind the attack.

The US Supreme Court has declined to hear the appeals filed by both Apple and Epic Games following a judge’s ruling that Apple must allow developers to offer alternative methods to pay for apps and services other than through the App Store. It did not provide an explanation as to why it refused to review either appeal, but it means the permanent injunction giving developers a way to avoid the 30 percent cut Apple takes will remain in place.

Apple made the appeal to the high court back in September of last year, requesting it review the circuit court’s decision it deemed “unconstitutional.” The case brought forward by Epic Games is the first to challenge the business model of the App store, which helps Apple rake in billions. In May 2023, Apple said that developers generated about $1 trillion in total billings through the App Store in 2022. Gaming apps sold on the App Store generate an estimated $100 billion in revenue each year.

While the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of Epic’s appeal that Apple has indeed broken California's Unfair Competition law, it rejected Epic’s claim that the App store is a monopoly. In addition to declining to hear Apple’s appeal, SCOTUS also will not review Epic’s appeal that the district court had made “legal errors.”

Epic claimed that Apple violates federal antitrust laws through its business model, however, this is not an issue the high court will consider. The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, called the appeal denial “a sad outcome” on X.

Epic Games has been front and center in the fight against Apple’s developer transaction fee policy since 2020. Other companies, including Spotify and the New York Times, are also trying to challenge app store policies on Apple and Google platforms. The Coalition for App Fairness, which consists of more than 60 companies now, believes no developers should be required to use the app store exclusively. The Epic lawsuit was just the start — problems have been piling up for Apple. Even the Department of Justice (DOJ) is reportedly considering filing an antitrust case against it. The DOJ has been conducting an investigation into whether Apple’s App Store practices have killed competition in the space.