Block is the latest notable tech company to lay off hundreds of workers, according to reports. CEO Jack Dorsey is said to have informed employees that the company is firing a "large number" of them, with Cash App, Square and the foundational (i.e. operations) teams bearing the brunt of the impact. According to a Business Insider source, Block is letting go nearly 1,000 people.

Dorsey reportedly wrote in his memo that the company is becoming leaner. It laid off around 40 people from the Tidal team in December. Last year, Block said it planned to limit its headcount to around 12,000 workers, a reduction from the around 13,000 it had in late 2023. Engadget has contacted Block for confirmation of the layoffs.

While it was initially expected that the layoffs would take place over a period of months, executives reportedly opted against that in favor carrying them out at the same time. "Why is so much happening in one single day? All of these teams were confident in the direction they're taking, and were ready to take action within the same 2-3 weeks," Dorsey is said to have written in his memo. "We decided it would be better to do [it] at once rather than arbitrarily space them out, which didn't seem fair to the individuals or to the company. When we know we need to take an action, we want to take it immediately, rather than let things linger on forever."

The tech industry has shed tens of thousands of workers over the last year or so, including thousands this month alone across companies including Unity, Twitch, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, eBay and Google. It also emerged on Tuesday that PayPal is firing around 2,500 people. 

It looks like Ring is reversing course on its police-friendly stance regarding data sharing, according to reporting from Bloomberg. Amazon told the publication that Ring’s home doorbell unit would stop acquiescing to warrantless police requests for footage from users’ video doorbells and surveillance cameras. This practice has long been derided by privacy advocacy groups, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Senator Ed Markey even launched a probe into the policy back in 2022.

Additionally, Ring will disable its Request For Assistance tool next week, which is a program that allows law enforcement to ask users for footage on a voluntary basis, according to an official blog post. From now on, police and fire departments will have to seek a warrant to request footage from users, though Amazon could provide footage without a warrant if the agency can prove its essential for an ongoing emergency. 

As a matter of fact, the entire Neighbors app, which is where the Request For Assistance feature lives, is undergoing an overhaul to shift its focus from crime and safety to more of a community hub, according to Ring spokesperson Yassi Yarger. To that end, the Neighbors app is getting a new highlight reel feature for users to peruse the most popular video captures of the week. Ring hasn't given a reason given for this sudden shift in priorities. Crime is down nationwide, sure, but it's not like we live in a Star Trek utopia. The company has been diversifying its portfolio lately, adding new products to the lineup, which could be one reason. 

Ring has been cozying up with law enforcement since inception, as the company always stated its primary reason to exist was to improve public safety. “Our mission to reduce crime in neighborhoods has been at the core of everything we do at Ring,” founding chief Jamie Siminoff said when Amazon bought the company for $839 million back in 2018.

Of course, we don’t exactly know if Amazon and Ring will stick by this decision, or if they’ll start quietly allowing law enforcement to nab videos six or eight months down the line. However, this is becoming something of a trend in the tech industry. Google just changed its location history feature on Maps to stop police from nabbing data on everyone in the vicinity of a crime. Law enforcement had been relying on the feature for years.

The US attorney's office in Massachusetts says eBay will pay a $3 million penalty to resolve criminal charges following a harassment campaign conducted by several former executives. Several ex-employees targeted a couple who wrote a newsletter that was critical of the company.

The Justice Department charged eBay with two counts of stalking through interstate travel, two counts of stalking through electronic communications services, one count of witness tampering and one count of obstruction of justice. The $3 million fine was the statutory maximum for the felonies. As part of a deferred prosecution agreement with authorities, eBay also needs to improve its compliance program and retain an independent corporate compliance monitor for three years.

The US attorney's office says eBay "admitted to a detailed recitation of all the relevant facts about its conduct." In August 2019, the company's former senior director of safety and security Jim Baugh and six others carried out a harassment campaign against Ina and David Steiner of Massachusetts. The couple wrote about litigation involving eBay and higher-ups at the company were said to have been frustrated about the negative coverage.

Baugh and his co-conspirators harassed the couple by, among other things, sending them a fetal pig, a funeral wreath and live spiders and cockroaches. According to prosecutors, three of the former eBay employees traveled to the Steiners' home in the aim of planting a GPS tracking device on their car. The campaign also involved sending harassing messages via Twitter (now X).

Baugh and several others were convicted and sent to prison. One other has admitted to their part in the campaign but has yet to be sentenced.

In a victim impact statement published on their website, the Steiners wrote that "eBay's actions against us had a damaging and permanent impact on us — emotionally, psychologically, physically, reputationally, and financially — and we strongly pushed federal prosecutors for further indictments to deter corporate executives and board members from creating a culture where stalking and harassment is tolerated or encouraged."

The pair and Steiner Associates, the publisher of their EcommerceBytes newsletter, have filed a civil lawsuit against eBay and the former employees. A trial has been scheduled for March next year.

When Mark Zuckerberg announced last year that Meta was laying off 10,000 workers, he described 2023 as a "year of efficiency" defined by removing layers of middle management to create a "leaner org." Turns out the company still isn't done restructuring its organization. According to Business Insider, Meta recently told at least 60 of its employees at Instagram that it's eliminating their position altogether. The affected employees are technical program managers, the people who go in between Meta's tech workers, including its engineers, and the higher level product managers.

Based on posts on Blind, an app for tech employees, and on LinkedIn seen by the publication, the workers losing their jobs are given the chance to be interviewed to be considered for a position as product manager. By March, those who chose to leave or weren't given a new role will no longer have a job with Meta. The company slashed 11,000 jobs in the fall of 2022 in addition to the 10,000 workers it laid off last year in an effort to cut costs. It also issued a hiring freeze and closed thousands of open roles it was originally hiring for. 

"A leaner org will execute its highest priorities faster. People will be more productive, and their work will be more fun and fulfilling," Zuckerberg said last year. It's unclear if Meta has already lifted its hiring freeze, but it's expected to do so only after it's done with restructuring. 

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has filed a complaint against SpaceX, accusing it of unlawfully firing eight employees involved in writing a letter that called Elon Musk's behavior on social media "a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment." According to the filing, the company committed an unfair labor practice when it fired the workers for "engaging in protected concerted activity at work." It also accused SpaceX of interrogating at least one employee about the letter, as well as about the identities of their colleagues and the nature of their "concerted protected activity."

In addition, the complaint said SpaceX created an "impression of surveillance" by showing an employee screenshots of a Signal group chat several employees were a part of. The open letter at the center of this case was calling out Musk's "harmful Twitter behavior" before he acquired the website now known as X. In particular, the employees raised concerns about the crude jokes he made on X about the sexual misconduct accusations against him, which SpaceX settled for $250,000. The letter asked the company to hold leadership accountable for their actions and to condemn harmful behavior.

The employees involved in writing the letter circulated it within the company in mid-2022. According to The New York Times, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell reprimanded them within a few hours of sending it out and told them to "stop flooding employee communication channels immediately." Five employees were reportedly fired the next day, and four others were fired over July and August. Only one of them didn't take part in filing the unfair labor practice complaint. "At SpaceX the rockets may be reusable, but the people who build them are treated as expendable," Paige Holland-Thielen, one of the fired employees, told The Times. "I am hopeful these charges will hold SpaceX and its leadership accountable for their long history of mistreating workers and stifling discourse."

The case is slated to go before an administrative judge on March 5, though the company could settle before it takes place. If the NLRB decides that the company has violated labor laws, it can order SpaceX to reinstate workers and to give them appropriate backpay. SpaceX could appeal the decision to the board and then to a federal court, though, so it could be a long journey for the employees involved. 

Musk has been at odds with the NLRB for years through his other companies. The board previously accused X of illegally firing an employee who pushed back against his return-to-office policy. Meanwhile, Tesla has dealt with several NLRB complaints, including one accusing the automaker of illegally terminating employees in retaliation for union activity.

Donald Trump’s former “fixer,” Michael Cohen, used Google Bard to cite made-up legal cases that ended up in a federal court. The New York Times reported Friday that Cohen admitted in unsealed court papers that he passed on documents referencing bogus cases to his lawyer, who then relayed them to a federal judge. Cohen reportedly wrote in the sworn declaration he hadn’t stayed on top of “emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology.”

Cohen’s legal team filed the paperwork in a motion asking for an early end to court supervision from his 2018 campaign finance case, for which he served three years in prison. After Cohen’s attorney, David M. Schwartz, presented the legal documents to the federal court, Judge Jesse M. Furman of the Federal District Court said he was having trouble finding the three decisions cited by Schwartz (via Cohen).

Judge Furman told Schwartz that if he couldn’t provide documentation of the cases, the attorney needed to provide “a thorough explanation of how the motion came to cite cases that do not exist and what role, if any, Mr. Cohen played in drafting or reviewing the motion before it was filed.” Schwartz must also explain why he shouldn’t be sanctioned “for citing nonexistent cases to the court.” Cohen is a former lawyer who was disbarred after pleading guilty to multiple felonies.

Enter Bard. Cohen said he didn’t realize the AI bot “was a generative text service that, like ChatGPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not.” Cohen also blamed his lawyer, saying he didn’t realize Schwartz “would drop the cases into his submission wholesale without even confirming that they existed.”

Although lawyers using AI chatbots to cite hallucinated cases makes for easy comedy, this flub could have profound implications for a critical case with potential political ramifications. Cohen is expected to be the star witness in the Manhattan criminal case against Trump for allegedly falsifying business records. The Bard flub gives Trump’s lawyers new ammunition to discredit the onetime fixer.

Cohen joins the company of ChatGPT Lawyer Steven Schwartz, who cited made-up cases (sourced through OpenAI’s chatbot) in a civil case earlier this year. He was allegedly joined by the attorney for Fugees rapper Pras Michel. In October, the artist accused his lawyer of using an AI program he may have had a financial stake in to produce his closing arguments.

A London judge has sentenced the teenage hacker who infiltrated Rockstar Games, leaking Grand Theft Auto VI footage, to an indefinite hospitalization, as reported by The BBC. The 18-year-old, Arion Kurtaj, breached Rockstar’s servers from a Travelodge hotel while under police custody, using only an Amazon Fire TV Stick, smartphone, keyboard and mouse. (He was promptly re-arrested.) Kurtaj was a central member of the Lasus$ international hacking group.

Doctors declared Kurtaj unfit to stand trial because he has acute autism. Following the judgment, the jury was instructed to determine if he committed the alleged crimes, not whether he had criminal intent. Following a mental health assessment suggesting he “continued to express the intent to return to cybercrime,” the judge decided he remained too high a risk to the public. The court also heard accounts of Kurtaj’s allegedly violent behavior while in custody, including reports of injury and property damage.

Despite Rockstar's claim that the hack cost it $5 million and thousands of hours of staff time, Kurtaj’s attorneys argued the success of the GTA 6 trailer, which racked up 128 million views in its first four days, meant his hack didn’t cause serious harm.

A second Lapsus$ member was found guilty in the same trial, but the 17-year-old’s name wasn’t made public because they’re a minor. The unnamed hacker was accused of working with Kurtaj and other Lapsus$ members to infiltrate Nvidia and phone company BT/EE, stealing data and demanding a $4 million ransom. The minor was sentenced to an 18-month youth rehabilitation order under “intense supervision,” including a ban on VPN use.

The two accomplices are the first Lapsus$ members to be convicted. Authorities believe other “digital bandits” in the group (suspected to be primarily teenagers in the UK and Brazil) are still at large. It isn’t clear what kind of payoff the hackers got from the ransom requests, if any, as none of the affected companies have admitted to ponying up.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has found that eBay has violated the rights of unionized workers at TCGPlayer, a trading card marketplace owned by the company. This comes in response to charges filed by the Communications Workers of America back in March of this year. eBay has allegedly refused to recognize TCGPlayer’s worker union and it delayed participating in any bargaining practices and it has also refused to divulge any information with the group that the union is legally entitled to.

As part of its examination of the issue, the NLRB said that because eBay and TCGPlayer broke the law, the company must face legal consequences for its union-busting practices. The union, which officially formed in March following numerous anti-union actions from eBay and TCGPlayer, was denied representation during disciplinary investigations. The NLRB also found that eBay was changing working conditions and benefits without engaging in bargaining with the group. On top of that, eBay is said to have even enforced rules that would punish any workers’ elections to unionize.

While the NLRB lays out evidence of eBay’s union-busting practices, it did not officially issue a decision on the matter. The agency is still waiting on the company’s response to the issue. “Now that the board has come to a decision on eBay’s illegal practices, we hope the company will see the light, obey labor law and engage in good faith bargaining practices so that workers can secure a strong union contract,” Dennis Trainor, Communications Workers of America District 1 Vice-President, said in a statement. eBay could not be reached for comment.

The US Department of Justice says it has disrupted the Blackcat ransomware group. Also called ALPHV or Noberus, the hackers have targeted over 1,000 computer networks and extorted millions of dollars from victims. Bloomberg reports its members were known for speaking Russian. “In disrupting the BlackCat ransomware group, the Justice Department has once again hacked the hackers,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco wrote in a DOJ news release.

The FBI says it developed a decryption tool, which it has used to help over 500 Blackcat victims recover their data — saving more than $68 million in ransom payments. The agency adds that it has “gained visibility into the Blackcat ransomware group’s computer network” and seized several of its websites.

“With a decryption tool provided by the FBI to hundreds of ransomware victims worldwide, businesses and schools were able to reopen, and health care and emergency services were able to come back online,” Monaco wrote. “We will continue to prioritize disruptions and place victims at the center of our strategy to dismantle the ecosystem fueling cybercrime.”

REUTERS / Reuters

Blackcat’s developers create and update the ransomware software, which “affiliates” deploy in attacks on high-value targets; the developers and attackers then split the profits. Once an affiliate has infiltrated a network, they typically steal sensitive data before encrypting the victim’s system, incapacitating it. They then ask for a ransom. If the victims pay, the hackers say they’ll decrypt the system and abstain from exposing their confidential information. If the targets refuse to pony up, the hackers leave the victims locked out and publish their spicy documents on the dark web.

Blackcat took credit for infiltrating businesses and other US and European organizations. These included hacks on MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment, Reddit, US critical infrastructure (government facilities, emergency services, defense industrial base companies, critical manufacturing and healthcare facilities), a large UK hospital group and various attacks across the energy sector.

Its members aren’t afraid to think outside the box, either. Last month, Blackcat affiliates reportedly ratcheted the pressure on a hacked company by snitching to the SEC for not reporting their infiltration.

Although this could only be a fleeting upper hand in a long-running game of cat and mouse, the DOJ warns it’s just getting started. “Criminal actors should be aware that the announcement today is just one part of this ongoing effort,” wrote the DOJ’s Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri. “Going forward, we will continue our investigation and pursue those behind Blackcat until they are brought to justice.”

Trevor Milton, the disgraced founder of Nikola, was just sentenced to four years in prison on three counts of fraud. 

In October 2022, a jury found Milton guilty of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud. Milton faced up to 60 years in prison. Prosecutors asked the judge for an 11-year prison sentence and a $5 million fine, according to The New York Times, while the defense argued for probation. 

After announcing the sentence at a federal court hearing in New York City, U.S. District Judge Edgar Ramos spoke directly to Milton. "As difficult as it may be for you or your family to hear, I believe the jury got it right," Ramos said, as transcribed Reuters.

Milton addressed the court before sentencing was handed down, saying "I did not intend to harm anyone and I did not commit those crimes levied against me." He also spoke at length about his rural upbringing and recited biblical verse. 

Prosecutors claimed that Milton pumped up the value of the company's stock by lying to investors about "nearly all aspects" of Nikola's business. Among other things, Milton claimed his company had a fully functional electric truck. The company released a video that made it appear as though a Nikola One prototype was able to move by itself. However, an indictment alleged that the truck was actually rolling down a hill and that Milton was involved in the video's creation.

In addition, Milton was accused of lying about Nikola having billions of dollars worth of pre-order reservations and that it was producing hydrogen fuel at four times less than market rates. Prosecutors also said Milton falsely claimed Nikola had developed "game-changing" battery tech.

Nikola is still in business and it plans to resume deliveries of its battery electric truck in early 2024 following a recall over battery issues that cost around $61.8 million to resolve. In the nine months to September 30, Nikola produced 96 trucks and shipped 79.

The company's stock price has dropped by 99 percent since 2020 and investors are said to have lost more than $660 million. Milton sold around $100 million of his Nikola stock in 2020 and spent most of that on luxury goods such as a plane and real estate, according to the Times. It's likely that Milton will appeal this conviction, as he's already asked Ramos for a new trial following the jury's guilty verdict.