Enlarge / Sam Bankman-Fried leaves court in New York on Thursday, Feb. 16, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of defrauding customers by a federal jury today. He was convicted on all seven counts, Reuters and other news outlets reported. The 12-member jury returned the verdict after several hours of deliberation.

The seven charges are wire fraud on customers of FTX, conspiracy to commit wire fraud on customers of FTX, wire fraud on lenders to Alameda Research, conspiracy to commit wire fraud on lenders to Alameda Research, conspiracy to commit securities fraud on investors in FTX, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud on customers of FTX in connection with purchases and sales of cryptocurrency and swaps, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

The five charges related to wire fraud and money laundering carry maximum sentences of 20 years each, while the two securities and commodities fraud charges have maximum sentences of five years each. US District Judge Lewis Kaplan will determine the actual sentence.

Enlarge / A nurse is on night shift at the emergency clinic of the International Peace Maternity & Child Health Hospital of China welfare institute in Shanghai, April 1, 2022. (credit: Getty | Yuan Quan)

In the first seven months of 2023, the rate of fetuses identified with the condition quadrupled compared with historic rates, according to a brief report appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine Thursday.

For the report, doctors from two big obstetric centers in the cities of Shanghai and Changsha combined their centers’ clinical records from January 2014 through July 2023. The doctors found that from 2014 to 2022, the yearly total of situs inversus cases was typically about five to six per 10,000 pregnant people undergoing ultrasounds. But, in 2023, the rate jumped to nearly 24 cases per 10,000 ultrasound screenings.

Enlarge / A building at Apple Park, the company’s Cupertino, California, HQ. (credit: Apple)

Apple reported its earnings for the fourth quarter of its 2023 fiscal year on Thursday, and while the revenue dollar count was enormous as usual, the company nonetheless reported lower year-over-year revenue for the third consecutive quarter.

The iPhone was the only hardware product that saw any growth compared to the same time last year; revenue was down across the rest of the board for Mac, iPad, and wearables (which primarily includes Watch and AirPods).

On the other hand, the company’s services business again beat expectations and helped make up for lagging hardware sales. Services is a large bucket that includes many things, from subscriptions like Apple TV+, iCloud, and Apple Music to the company’s search deal with Google, which is now at the heart of the Google antitrust trial in the United States.

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“The types of personal information contained in the impacted eligibility census file included your Name, Social Security Number, and health or medical insurance plan number,” a letter sent to affected Okta employees stated. “We have no evidence to suggest that your personal information has been misused against you.”

Enlarge / House of the Dragon is one of the shows Max offers in 4K HDR. (credit: Warner Bros. Discovery)

The Verge reported today that Max has started emailing customers, informing them that they will no longer be able to access 4K or HDR streams and will be limited to streaming to two simultaneous devices at a time. The changes will happen “on or after” December 5, the publication said.

Enlarge / Westfield High School in Westfield, NJ, in 2020. (credit: Icon Sportswire / Contributor | Icon Sportswire)

This October, boys at Westfield High School in New Jersey started acting “weird,” the Wall Street Journal reported. It took four days before the school found out that the boys had been using AI image generators to create and share fake nude photos of female classmates. Now, police are investigating the incident, but they’re apparently working in the dark, because they currently have no access to the images to help them trace the source.

According to an email that the WSJ reviewed from Westfield High School principal Mary Asfendis, the school “believed” that the images had been deleted and were no longer in circulation among students.

It remains unclear how many students were harmed. A Westfield Public Schools spokesperson cited student confidentiality when declining to tell the WSJ the total number of students involved or how many students, if any, had been disciplined. The school had not confirmed whether faculty had reviewed the images, seemingly only notifying the female students allegedly targeted when they were identified by boys claiming to have seen the images.

Enlarge / It just reads different in that typeface. (credit: Department of Justice)

Those slides, newly made public as an exhibit in the Department of Justice’s ongoing antitrust trial against Google, on “The State of Privacy,” cast a dim light on Apple’s competitors, particularly Google. They quote former CEO Eric Schmidt’s notorious remarks on Google’s policy to “get right up to the creepy line but not cross it.” They unfavorably compare Apple and Google’s approaches to account data combination, voice search privacy, maps, and search. And most notably, they give over an entire slide to a summary: “Android is a massive tracking device.”

The exhibit is, as noted, redacted for public filing and abridged, so slides not pertaining to Google’s search dominance and other issues at trial are missing. Still, Apple’s presentation offers a rare glimpse into the company’s perception of Google, particularly Android, and how its own devices and services might stand apart.

Enlarge / Dr. Michelle Fiscus poses for a portrait in her home. Fiscus was the Medical Director for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health until she was fired. (credit: Getty | William DeShazer)

The state of Tennessee will pay $150,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Dr. Michelle Fiscus, the state’s former top vaccination official who was fired in July 2021 after promoting COVID-19 vaccinations in the early stages of the deadly delta wave.

The state claimed Fiscus was fired over complaints about her leadership approach and her handling of an informational letter to health providers regarding the state’s law on the vaccination rights of minors. Fiscus countered with a point-by-point rebuttal of the state’s claims, releasing years of performance reviews that rated her work as “outstanding.”

Fiscus claims she was actually fired after her efforts to promote COVID-19 vaccinations outraged GOP state lawmakers who “bought into the anti-vaccine misinformation,” she alleged in a lengthy statement published by The Tennessean.

Enlarge / This is the engine bay of a 2018 RAV4 Hybrid, but the problem is not the hybrid traction battery. (credit: Alun Taylor)

There’s plenty of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about electric cars and the potential risk of battery fires, but the regular old 12 V battery is responsible for Toyota issuing a recall for more than 1.8 million cars this week.

Toyota says the problem is due to differences in the sizes of replacement batteries—some have smaller tops than others, and if a smaller-top battery isn’t held in properly by its clamp, the battery could move under hard cornering, letting the positive terminal contact the clamp, causing a short-circuit and possible fire risk.

The problem affects 2013–2018 RAV4s—about 1,854,000 of them, according to Toyota. The official National Highway Traffic Safety Administration safety recall notice has not yet been posted, but NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation has had an open case looking into the problem since February 2021, after 11 complaints about “non-crash thermal events” starting in the engine bays of RAV4s.

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That’s been harder than it sounds to get right—the older players among us will remember the AI in earlier installments of GT, which mostly stuck to a preprogrammed line with little concern for where you, the human player, wanted to put your car. Microsoft’s long-running Forza franchise actually has its origin in a neural net experiment, and more recently, its developers used each human player to train an AI agent that would populate their friends’ games, albeit with imperfect results.

Enlarge / The Motocompacto was the product of one engineer’s spare time. (credit: Kevin Williams)

Well, it’s because the Motocompacto is a modern reinterpretation of an iconic Honda scooter—the Motocompo. Back in the early 1980s, Honda sold a square-shaped (gas-powered) scooter, meant to fold up and fit in the trunk of its City subcompact hatchback. Even though neither the Motocompo nor the Honda City ever made their way outside of Japan, the outrageously cute form factor serves as inspiration for the similarly named Motocompacto. Heck, Honda has even shown it off in the cargo area of the Prologue EV crossover, surely a nod to this charmingly Ska-filled ad.

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Travis Brown, a software developer based in Berlin, alleges his account was first suspended on July 1 this year, several months after his data formed the basis of New York Times and CNN reports claiming that far-right influencers featured prominently among Twitter Blue subscribers, and how thousands of previously banned X accounts, including members of the far-right, were being reinstated on the site.

On Tuesday, Brown announced his decision to challenge his account’s suspension in court in Berlin. “This is a matter of principle,” he says. “I think it is important that platforms like Twitter are not allowed to shut down criticism arbitrarily.” X did not reply to repeated requests for comment.

Enlarge / The Milky Way Galaxy rises over Namibia. (credit: Curt Belser)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light; a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

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Artists suing Stability AI, Deviant Art, and Midjourney hit a roadblock this week in their quest to prove allegations that AI image generators illegally use copyrighted works to mimic unique artistic styles without compensation or consent.

On Monday, US district judge William H. Orrick dismissed many of the artists’ claims after finding that the proposed class-action complaint “is defective in numerous respects.” Perhaps most notably, two of the three named plaintiffs—independent artist Kelly McKernan and concept artist/professional illustrator Karla Ortiz—had apparently never registered any of their disputed works with the Copyright Office. Orrick dismissed their claims with prejudice, dropping them from the suit.

But while McKernan and Ortiz can no longer advance their claims, the lawsuit is far from over. Lead plaintiff, cartoonist, and illustrator Sarah Andersen will have the next 30 days to amend her complaint and keep the copyright dispute alive.

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Tesla’s controversial driver assistance feature Autopilot has received another pass. On Tuesday a jury in California found that Autopilot was not to blame for a 2019 crash in Riverside County that killed the driver and left his wife and son severely injured. That marks the second time this year a jury has found that Autopilot was not responsible for a serious crash.

The case was filed by the two survivors of the Riverside crash and alleged that an Autopilot malfunction caused Micah Lee’s Tesla Model 3 to veer off a highway at 65 mph (105 km/h) before it struck a tree and burst into flames. Lee died in the crash, and his wife and then-8-year-old son were seriously injured; as a result the plaintiffs asked for $400 million plus punitive damages.

But Tesla denied Autopilot was defective and claimed that Lee had been drinking alcohol before the crash. Nine members of the jury agreed with Tesla after four days of deliberation.

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On Tuesday, The Guardian accused Microsoft of damaging its journalistic reputation by publishing an AI-generated poll beside one of its articles on the Microsoft Start website. The poll, created by an AI model on Microsoft’s news platform, speculated on the cause of a woman’s death, reportedly triggering reader anger and leading to reputational concerns for the news organization.

“This has to be the most pathetic, disgusting poll I’ve ever seen,” wrote one commenter on the story. The comment section has since been disabled.

The poll appeared beside a republished Guardian story about Lilie James, a 21-year-old water polo coach who was found dead with head injuries in Sydney. The AI-generated poll presented readers with three choices to speculate on the cause of James’ death: murder, accident, or suicide. Following negative reactions, the poll was removed, but critical comments remained visible for a time before their removal.

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The US Securities and Exchange Commission sued SolarWinds Corp. and Chief Information Security Officer Timothy Brown yesterday, alleging that they concealed security failures that led to a nearly two-yearlong cyberattack known as “Sunburst.” The attack, reportedly carried out by Russian hackers, inserted malicious code into SolarWinds network-management software used by thousands of customers, including US government agencies and private companies.

From the time of its initial public offering in October 2018 until January 2021, SolarWinds and Brown “defrauded SolarWinds’ investors and customers through misstatements, omissions, and schemes that concealed both the Company’s poor cybersecurity practices and its heightened—and increasing—cybersecurity risks,” the SEC lawsuit said. “SolarWinds’ public statements about its cybersecurity practices and risks painted a starkly different picture from internal discussions and assessments about the Company’s cybersecurity policy violations, vulnerabilities, and cyberattack.”

The SEC sued the company and Brown in US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The SEC is seeking disgorgement of “ill-gotten gains,” civil monetary penalties, and a permanent ban on Brown from acting as an officer or director for any company that issues securities.