Google cannot be held liable for defamation simply for providing hyperlinks to other webpages, Australia’s highest court ruled today. Ars Technica reports: By itself, providing a URL is not “participation in the communication of defamatory matter which happens to be at that address… In reality, a hyperlink is merely a tool which enables a person to navigate to another webpage,” the High Court of Australia ruling said. The case relates to a Google search result that linked to a 2004 article published by The Age with the title, “Underworld loses valued friend at court.” The article described Melbourne-based lawyer George Defteros, who was charged with conspiracy to murder and incitement to murder the day before it was published. The charge was withdrawn in 2005. Defteros sued Google after becoming aware that a Google search of his name produced a link to the article and a snippet. Google refused to remove the article from search results despite a request from Defteros in 2016.

A lower-court judge “found that the Underworld article conveyed a defamatory imputation, namely that the respondent had crossed the line from being a professional solicitor to being a confidant and friend of criminal elements,” today’s ruling noted. Lower courts decided that Google “published the defamatory matter because the provision of the Search Result was instrumental to the communication of the content of the Underworld article to the user, in that it lent assistance to its publication,” according to a summary of today’s ruling (PDF) provided by the High Court of Australia. Google had been ordered to pay Defteros $40,000 (about $27,710 in USD). But in reversing lower-court rulings, a 5-2 majority of the High Court found that Google did not publish the defamatory matter.
Google “did not lend assistance to The Age in communicating the defamatory matter contained in the Underworld article” because the “provision of a hyperlink in the Search Result merely facilitated access to the Underworld article and was not an act of participation in the bilateral process of communicating the contents of that article to a third party,” the summary of the ruling said. “There was no other basis for finding publication because the appellant had not participated in the writing or disseminating of the defamatory matter.” […] Today’s ruling could have been different if Google had been paid to promote The Age article. The appeal “does not present the occasion to consider whether the conclusion would be different in respect of those hyperlinks that, by agreement with a third party, are promoted by the appellant following a search request,” the ruling said. “Nor was any issue raised on this appeal about any service provided in the aggregation of news results. It suffices to say that it is arguable that the appellant and a third party might share a common intention to publish the content of a third-party webpage that, as a consequence of an agreement between the appellant and the third party, is promoted as a search result.”

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Source: Slashdot – Linking To News Doesn’t Make Google Liable For Defamation, Australia Court Rules

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Blockdata, a crypto research firm, released an updated blog post Tuesday showing who’s been the most active investors in the crypto scene from September 2021 through June 2022. Researchers noted big tech firms including the likes of Tencent, Microsoft, PayPal, Samsung, and Alphabet (Google) are putting big money into crypto companies and startups. Some of these companies, like PayPal, have been a longtime and verbal supporter of blockchain tech (thanks in part to its co-founder Peter Thiel). Still others, like Google, have been much more subdued. […] What Google chooses to invest in may help answer where the company wants to see blockchain tech go, or what it may want to incorporate into its own tech infrastructure. In the report, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, sat at the top of the pile showing it had put over $1.5 billion into crypto companies over four rounds of investment. Some of the company’s overall funds went to the likes of Dapper Labs, the company that was behind the NBA’s Top Shot and UFC Strike licensed video NFTs. The company was also behind CryptoKitties, a NFT-based game that’s seen the price of its products tank.

What makes this more complicated is there are actually two of Google’s investing arms involved in this fundraising. GV (Google’s investing arm once called Google Ventures) helped fund Dapper Labs and another crypto infrastructure company Voltage, which got $6 million in total investments at the start of 2022. CapitalG, the company’s independent private equity firm, had a hand in the $550 million raised by Fireblock, a crypto custody firm, as well as investments with digital currency venture capital company Digital Currency Group Of course, this was all before the most recent crypto crash, which has seen a multitude of once-strong crypto companies layoff thousands of workers. Though it’s not like this is the first time we’ve heard about Google’s parent company Alphabet with their big financial interest in blockchain companies. They’ve been investing in this tech since 2016, according to the Blockdata report. Previous reports showed they had put money into crypto companies like Ripple (which just like many small altcoins since the recent crypto crash, isn’t doing too hot). Google had previously made much wider investments across a wider variety of blockchain-based companies. That was then, and this is now. Blockdata analysts said this limited slate of investments is an attempt to make concentrated bets on a small set of companies, but even with executive’s stated hopes for blockchain tech, it’s hard to see all investments truly panning out.

Though it was fourth in the size of its contributions, Samsung was leading the pack in the number — and eye-twitching variety — of crypto ventures it was making it rain on over an incredible 13 rounds of investing. A total of $979.26 million went to the likes of Dank Bank, a NFT platform for trying to monetize “memes and other iconic moments in internet history.” They put more of their funds behind Yuga Labs, the creators of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTS. They put down their investment in March, but in April, users on the group’s official Instagram and Discord were scammed of nearly $13.7 million worth of NFTs. Still, founders said many of BAYC’s rather strange initiatives like a Bored Ape “Metaverse” are still moving full steam ahead. They also put money into Sky Mavis, the makers of the crypto-based “play-to-earn” game Axie Infinity. That investment probably didn’t do them any wonders considering its token bridge suffered one of the biggest hacks in crypto history earlier this year. The game has struggled to recover after that blow, though players had already been leaving the platform before hackers snatched away bridge funds. “Blockdata’s research shows that 81 of the top 100 public companies have made some kind of past or present crypto investment,” adds Gizmodo. “2021 showed the absolute highest amount of overall investment in blockchain companies. Funding totals have increased by a factor of 14 from 2019 to last year.”

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Source: Slashdot – Google’s Investing Arms Are Pumping .56 Billion Into Blockchain Companies

A security researcher says that Apple’s iOS devices don’t fully route all network traffic through VPNs as a user might expect, a potential security issue the device maker has known about for years. From a report: Michael Horowitz, a longtime computer security blogger and researcher, puts it plainly — if contentiously — in a continually updated blog post. “VPNs on iOS are broken,” he says. Any third-party VPN seems to work at first, giving the device a new IP address, DNS servers, and a tunnel for new traffic, Horowitz writes. But sessions and connections established before a VPN is activated do not terminate and, in Horowitz’s findings with advanced router logging, can still send data outside the VPN tunnel while it’s active.

In other words, you might expect a VPN client to kill existing connections before establishing a secure connection so they can be re-established inside the tunnel. But iOS VPNs can’t seem to do this, Horowitz says, a finding that is backed up by a similar report from May 2020. “Data leaves the iOS device outside of the VPN tunnel,” Horowitz writes. “This is not a classic/legacy DNS leak, it is a data leak. I confirmed this using multiple types of VPN and software from multiple VPN providers. The latest version of iOS that I tested with is 15.6.”

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Source: Slashdot – iOS VPNs Have Leaked Traffic For More Than 2 Years, Researcher Claims