A CBS News investigation found that some companies that are hired to make negative web pages disappear appear to be forging judges’ signatures to trick Google into changing its search results. From the report: One of the only ways to get Google to permanently remove a link from its search results is with a court order from a judge. CBS News sorted through thousands of these court orders and spotted small businesses from all across America trying to clean up their reputations. But we also spotted a problem: Dozens of the court documents were fakes. “It never even crossed my mind that people would have the guts to actually go out there and just forge a court document,” said Eugene Volokh, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who specializes in internet law. Volokh points out that forging a court document is criminal. “Part of it is just how brazen it is. They take a judge’s signature and they copy it from one order to another order and they pretend something is a court order. It’s cheaper and it’s faster — if they don’t get caught,” Volokh said.

CBS News worked with Volokh and identified more than 60 fraudulent court orders sent to Google. Some are obviously fake, like one with a case number of “1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9.” Others are more sophisticated, and appear to be drawn from nine different federal courts across the country. The most recent fake court document we identified was submitted in April. It’s not just about making a bad review of a local restaurant disappear. CBS News uncovered bogus court documents submitted on behalf of two convicted criminals who wanted Google to forget about their crimes. Both were child sex offenders. Of the more than 60 phony documents, we found that 11 had signatures forged from judges in Hamilton County, Ohio.

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Source: Slashdot – CBS News Investigation Finds Fraudulent Court Orders Used To Change Google Search Results

The New York Times reports that Amazon is quietly exploring a new grocery store chain with a reimagined format for selling food (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). From the report: In early 2017, a memo circulated inside Amazon that imagined an ambitious new grocery chain. The document was written like a news release, a common practice for ideas being weighed inside the company, with the title “Grocery Shopping for Everyone.” The new stores, the document envisioned, would have robust sections for produce, fresh food and prepared meals. Nonperishable products, like paper towels or canned beans, would be stored on a separate floor, away from customers. Shoppers could order those items with an app, and while they shopped for fresh food, the other products would be brought down in time for check out. There would also be an area to pick up groceries ordered online and to manage packages for delivery drivers. The faux news release, which has not previously been reported, cited a fictional grocery expert named Hal Apenyo, as in the chili pepper, declaring success in just six months. “The conversion from offline grocery shopping to mixed format shopping has been massive,” the character was quoted as saying. A few months later, in June 2017, Amazon barged into the grocery business in a different way, by announcing a blockbuster deal to buy Whole Foods for $13.4 billion. The purchase catapulted Amazon near the top of the $700 billion grocery industry, and sank stocks of traditional grocers on fears that they would be outmaneuvered into oblivion. The memo and other big grocery proposals stopped circulating inside Amazon, as Whole Foods demanded everyone’s attention.

But two years later, instead of Whole Foods being the answer to Amazon’s grocery ambitions, it seems to have only whetted executives’ appetites. The marriage has made clear the difficulties of selling fresh food inexpensively, either in a physical store or through delivery. Bananas are not the same as books. But the combination has also shown glimmers of success, particularly in delivery. And that has provided some fuel to Amazon executives pushing to add another food-selling option — one built from the ground up that would change how people buy groceries. The company is now quietly exploring an ambitious new chain, probably separate from Whole Foods, that is not far removed from the one outlined in the old memo. It would be built for in-store shopping as well as pickup and delivery. As the discussions heated up this year, employees passed around a slightly updated version of the memo.

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Source: Slashdot – Amazon Is Quietly Exploring Unusual Grocery Store Format, NYT Report Says

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Department of Justice has approved T-Mobile’s controversial $26 billion merger with Sprint. And while the agency proposed a number of remedies it says will mitigate the competition and job-eroding impact of the deal, experts say the fixes will do nothing of the sort. From the beginning, the biggest issue with T-Mobile’s planned $26 billion merger with Sprint was the fact that it would reduce the number of major U.S. carriers from four to three. Historically, (say in Canada or Ireland) such consolidation results in two things: much higher prices, and a significant culling of jobs as redundant positions are eliminated. The DOJ says it will impose requirements offsetting the competitive harm of the deal. More specifically, the DOJ says that T-Mobile and Sprint will need to offload Sprint’s Boost Mobile and some spectrum to Dish Network, who’ll then attempt to build a new, viable fourth competitor from these scraps to offset the elimination of Sprint from the market. But experts consulted by Motherboard say the proposal isn’t likely to work, and the end result of the merger will still very likely be higher prices and worse service for all. Gigi Sohn, a former FCC lawyer and telecom expert, says the deal “certainly won’t lead to a viable fourth competitor any time soon, if ever.” She notes that Boost Mobile only has just 8.8 million subscribers, a far cry from the 158 million and 156 million subscribers of AT&T and Verizon, respectively. Building a viable fourth competitor requires far more than just a small prepaid company and some spectrum.

Consumer groups like Public Knowledge blasted the proposal, noting that a far more simpler solution would be to block the deal and force Sprint to find a suitor outside of the merger process. “Sprint is a significantly stronger competitor today than a new fourth competitor could be for the foreseeable future,” the groups said. The struggles that Dish and other would-be new entrants have consistently faced underscore that even with the best of intentions and a full commitment to deploy and compete, nothing is certain. Consumers will face considerable harm if the marketplace does not develop as the DOJ envisions.”

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Source: Slashdot – Experts Say the DOJ Justification For T-Mobile/Sprint Merger Approval Is a Joke

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a civil lawsuit seeking to recover more than $100 million from a notorious cryptocurrency exchange that has helped cyber-criminals launder stolen funds, such as those obtained from ransomware payments, dark web drug marketplaces, and funds from hacked cryptocurrency exchanges. ZDNet reports: In a lawsuit filed on Friday, July 26, the U.S. wants to recover $88,596,314 from the accounts of the now-defunct BTC-e cryptocurrency exchange, and an additional $12 million from Alexander “Mr. Bitcoin” Vinnick, BTC-e’s founder and CEO. The sum represents a fine that was imposed by the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in 2017 when the FBI shut down the BTC-e portal, and Greek authorities arrested Vinnick. For the past two years, the DOJ has been trying to extradite Vinnick to the U.S. to face charges, but with no success. The DOJ’s civil lawsuit is an alternative legal method to make sure the U.S. Treasury FinCEN recovers its due fine in the case U.S. authorities opened in 2017.

Those fines were imposed because BTC-e violated the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). First by not registering with U.S. authorities as a Money Services Business (MSB), even if it catered to U.S. consumers. Second, for failing to implement an anti-money laundering (AML) program in accordance with U.S. and many other international standards. And third, for failing to file any suspicious activity report (SAR) for the numerous shady transactions that have happened on its platform. When authorities charged Vinnick and shut down BTC-e on July 26, 2017, the DOJ said that the platform, which claimed on its website to have handled over $7 billion worth of Bitcoin in its lifetime, had laundered criminal proceeds of more than $4 billion, representing more than half of the funds that have ever gone through its accounts. After the BTC-e shutdown, it was revealed at the Black Hat USA 2017 security conference that 95% of all ransomware ransom payments that had been made up until that point had been cashed out and converted into fiat currency through Vinnik’s BTC-e portal.

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Source: Slashdot – US Files Lawsuit Against Bitcoin Exchange That Helped Launder Ransomware Profits

In a YouTube video and blog post, Google revealed that its upcoming Pixel 4 smartphone will feature face unlock technology and a feature called “Motion Sense,” which confirms that it will have a Project Soli chip that uses radar to detect hand gestures near the phone. The Verge reports: Adding face unlock puts the Pixel 4 on par with modern iPhones for unlocking, and it’s (at least in theory) more convenient than an in-screen fingerprint sensor. Google also confirmed that the Pixel 4 will use the face unlock feature for payments: “face unlock works in almost any orientation — even if you’re holding it upside down — and you can use it for secure payments and app authentication too.” As with the iPhone, Google says that biometric data will be stored locally in a secure chip and never share with other Google services. The Pixel 4’s face unlock feature will use a variety of sensors to identify your face, including depth, infrared, and RGB. That should mean that it will work in a variety of lighting situations and also work with a diverse set of faces. Google has told me that it has done “field research” to ensure both of those things.

As for the “Motion Sense” feature, there’s not a ton that we can glean from Google’s article. Earlier rumors have pointed to it being related to Project Soli, which uses radar to detect tiny hand or finger movements above the device. For example, Google has demoed rubbing your thumb and index finger together to simulate turning a dial on a smartwatch. Some code found in the next version of Android has suggested it could be used for media controls at the very least. Google’s post cites a possible use case where the Soli chip could detect your hand reaching for the phone, which would automatically turn on “the face unlock sensors.” If it all works, the phone would automatically unlock itself and be ready by the time you’re looking at it.

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Source: Slashdot – The Google Pixel 4 Will Have Built-In Radar and Unlock With a Face Scan

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: About 200 million Internet-connected devices — some that may be controlling elevators, medical equipment, and other mission-critical systems — are vulnerable to attacks that give attackers complete control, researchers warned on Monday. In all, researchers with security firm Armis identified 11 vulnerabilities in various versions of VxWorks, a slimmed-down operating system that runs on more than 2 billion devices worldwide. Billed collectively as Urgent 11, the vulnerabilities consist of six remote code flaws and five less-severe issues that allow things like information leaks and denial-of-service attacks. None of the vulnerabilities affects the most recent version of VxWorks or any of the certified versions of the OS, including VxWorks 653 or VxWorks Cert Edition.

For the 200 million devices Armis estimated are running a version that’s susceptible to a serious attack, however, the stakes may be high. Because many of the vulnerabilities reside in the networking stack known as IPnet, they can often be exploited by little more than boobytrapped packets sent from outside the Internet. Depending on the vulnerability, exploits may also be able to penetrate firewalls and other types of network defenses. The most dire scenarios are attacks that chain together multiple exploits that trigger the remote takeover of multiple devices. “Such vulnerabilities do not require any adaptations for the various devices using the network stack, making them exceptionally easy to spread,” Armis researchers wrote in a technical overview. “In most operating systems, such fundamental vulnerabilities in the crucial networking stacks have become extinct, after years of scrutiny unravelled and mitigated such flaws.” VxWorks-maker Wind River says the latest release of VxWorks “is not affected by the vulnerability, nor are any of Wind Rivers’ safety-critical products that are designed for safety certification, such as VxWorks 653 and VxWorks Cert Edition used in critical infrastructure.”

Wind River issued patches last month and is in the process of notifying affected customers of the threat.

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Source: Slashdot – 200 Million Devices — Some Mission-Critical — Vulnerable To Remote Takeover