In a Threads post today, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the Twitter rival is rolling out a beta of its fediverse integration in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. With the feature enabled, Threads users will be able to cross-post and view likes from other federated platforms, like Mastodon. The Verge reports: Threads previewed its fediverse integration earlier this week during the FediForum. As outlined on its support page, Meta says that you must have a public account to turn on fediverse sharing, which will allow users on other servers to "search for and follow your profile, view your posts, interact with your content, and share your content to anyone on or off their server."

There are still a few limitations, though. The beta currently doesn't let users view replies and follows from the fediverse, for example. Meta also can't promise that when you delete a federated post on Threads, it will also get deleted on the other platforms it was shared on.

An anonymous reader writes: Reddit priced its stock on Wednesday at $34 a share, the top of the anticipated range, a signal that investors are excited about the company's IPO on Thursday. The social media giant raised nearly $500 million in the offering. Excluding employee stock options, the 19-year old company's valuation will start at $5.4 billion, a far cry from its last private market value of $10 billion, set in August 2021, the top of the last tech markets boom. The stock, which is the most anticipated offering of the year so far, will debut on New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with the ticker symbol "RDDT."

Neuralink, the brain-chip startup founded by Elon Musk, showed its first patient using his mind to play online chess. Reuters reports: Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, played chess on his laptop and moved the cursor using the Neuralink device. The implant seeks to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts. Arbaugh had received an implant from the company in January and could control a computer mouse using his thoughts, Musk said last month.

"The surgery was super easy," Arbaugh said in the video streamed on Musk's social media platform X, referring to the implant procedure. "I literally was released from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairments. I had basically given up playing that game," Arbaugh said, referring to the game Civilization VI, "you all (Neuralink) gave me the ability to do that again and played for 8 hours straight."

Elaborating on his experience with the new technology, Arbaugh said that it is "not perfect" and they "have run into some issues." "I don't want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there's still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In India, a government-run agency will now monitor and undertake fact-checking for government related matters on social media even as tech giants expressed grave concerns about it last year. The Ministry of Electronics and IT on Wednesday wrote in a gazette notification that it is amending the IT Rules 2021 to cement into law the proposal to make the fact checking unit of Press Information Bureau the dedicated arbiter of truth for New Delhi matters. Tech companies as well as other firms that serve more than 5 million users in India will be required to "make reasonable efforts" to not display, store, transmit or otherwise share information that deceives or misleads users about matters pertaining to the government, the IT ministry said. India's move comes just weeks ahead of the general elections in the country. Relying on a government agency such as the Press Information Bureau as the sole source to fact-check government business without giving it a clear definition or providing clear checks and balances "may lead to misuse during implementation of the law, which will profoundly infringe on press freedom," Asia Internet Coalition, an industry group that represents Meta, Amazon, Google and Apple, cautioned last year.

Meanwhile, comedian Kunal Kamra, with support from the Editors Guild of India, cautioned that the move could create an environment that forces social media firms to welcome "a regime of self-interested censorship."

Christopher Harper reports via Tom's Hardware: Earlier this month, Danluu.com released an exhaustive 23-page analysis/op-ed/manifesto on the current status of unoptimized web pages and web app performance, finding that just loading a web page can even bog down an entry-level device that can run the popular game PUBG at 40 fps. In fact, the Wix webpage requires loading 21MB of data for one page, while the more famous websites Patreon and Threads load 13MB of data for one page. This can result in slow load times that reach up to 33 seconds or, in some cases, result in the page failing to load at all.

As the testing above shows, some of the most brutally intensive websites include the likes of... Quora, and basically every major social media platform. Newer content production platforms like Squarespace and newer Forum platforms like Discourse also have significantly worse performance than their older counterparts, often to the point of unusability on some devices. The Tecno S8C, one of the prominent entry-level phones common in emerging markets, is one particularly compelling test device that stuck. The device is actually quite impressive in some ways, including its ability to run PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Mobile at 40 FPS -- but the same device can't even run Quora and experiences nigh-unusable lag when scrolling on social media sites.

That example is most likely the best summation of the overall point, which is that modern web and app design is increasingly trending toward an unrealistic assumption of ever-increasing bandwidth and processing. Quora is a website where people answer questions -- there is absolutely no reason any of these websites should be harder to run than a Battle Royale game.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: AT&T says a massive trove of data impacting 71 million people did not originate from its systems after a hacker leaked it on a cybercrime forum and claimed it was stolen in a 2021 breach of the company. While BleepingComputer has not been able to confirm the legitimacy of all the data in the database, we have confirmed some of the entries are accurate, including those whose data is not publicly accessible for scraping. The data is from an alleged 2021 AT&T data breach that a threat actor known as ShinyHunters attempted to sell on the RaidForums data theft forum for a starting price of $200,000 and incremental offers of $30,000. The hacker stated they would sell it immediately for $1 million.

AT&T told BleepingComputer then that the data did not originate from them and that its systems were not breached. "Based on our investigation today, the information that appeared in an internet chat room does not appear to have come from our systems," AT&T told BleepingComputer in 2021. When we told ShinyHunters that AT&T said the data did not originate from them, they replied, "I don't care if they don't admit. I'm just selling." AT&T continues to tell BleepingComputer today that they still see no evidence of a breach in their systems and still believe that this data did not originate from them.

Today, another threat actor known as MajorNelson leaked data from this alleged 2021 data breach for free on a hacking forum, claiming it was the data ShinyHunters attempted to sell in 2021. This data includes names, addresses, mobile phone numbers, encrypted date of birth, encrypted social security numbers, and other internal information. However, the threat actors have decrypted the birth dates and social security numbers and added them to another file in the leak, making those also accessible. BleepingComputer has reviewed the data, and while we cannot confirm that all 73 million lines are accurate, we verified some of the data contains correct information, including social security numbers, addresses, dates of birth, and phone numbers. Furthermore, other cybersecurity researchers, such as Dark Web Informer, who first told BleepingComputer about the leaked data, and VX-Underground have also confirmed some of the data to be accurate. Despite AT&T's statement, BleepingComputer says if you were an AT&T customer before and through 2021, it's "[safe] to assume that your data was exposed and can be used in targeted attacks."

Have I Been Pwned's Troy Hunt writes: "I have proven, with sufficient confidence, that the data is real and the impact is significant."

A man has been sentenced for cyber flashing in England for the first time. From a report: Nicholas Hawkes, 39, from Basildon in Essex, was jailed for 66 weeks at Southend Crown Court today after he sent unsolicited photos of his erect penis to a 15-year-old girl and a woman on 9 February. The older victim took screenshots of the offending image on WhatsApp and reported Hawkes to the police the same day.

Cyber flashing became a criminal offence in England with the passage of the Online Safety Act on 31 January. It has been a crime in Scotland since 2010. The offence covers the sending of an unsolicited sexual image to people via social media, dating apps, text message or data-sharing services such as Bluetooth and AirDrop. Victims of cyber flashing get lifelong anonymity from the time they report the offence, as it also falls under the Sexual Offences Act.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Reddit, the social media platform gearing up for an initial public offering this week, said Nokia has accused it of infringing some of their patents. Nokia Technologies, the company's licensing business, sent Reddit a letter on Monday with the claims, and Reddit is evaluating them, according to a filing made Tuesday. Nokia's claims come as Reddit prepares for an initial public offering in an effort to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. The company has been working toward a listing for years, and its public market debut this week is set to become a high-profile addition to the year's roster of newly and soon-to-be public companies. Reddit said in the filing: "On March 18, 2024, Nokia sent us a letter indicating they believed that Reddit infringes certain of their patents. We will evaluate their claims. As we face increasing competition and become increasingly high profile, the possibility of receiving more intellectual property claims against us grows.

In addition, various 'non-practicing entities,' and other intellectual property rights holders have asserted in the past, and may attempt to assert in the future, intellectual property claims against us and have sought, and may attempt to seek in the future, to monetize the intellectual property rights they own to extract value through licensing arrangements or other settlements."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Back in 2004, in the pre-Web 2.0 era, research indicated that BitTorrent was responsible for an impressive 35% of all Internet traffic. At the time, file-sharing via peer-to-peer networks was the main traffic driver as no other services consumed large amounts of bandwidth. Fast-forward two decades and these statistics are ancient history. With the growth of video streaming, including services such as YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok, file-sharing traffic is nothing more than a drop in today's data pool. [...]

This week, Canadian broadband management company Sandvine released its latest Global Internet Phenomena Report which makes it clear that BitTorrent no longer leads any charts. The latest data show that video and social media are the leading drivers of downstream traffic, accounting for more than half of all fixed access and mobile data worldwide. Needless to say, BitTorrent is nowhere to be found in the list of 'top apps'. Looking at upstream traffic, BitTorrent still has some relevance on fixed access networks where it accounts for 4% of the bandwidth. However, it's been surpassed by cloud storage apps, FaceTime, Google, and YouTube. On mobile connections, BitTorrent no longer makes it into the top ten. The average of 46 MB upstream traffic per subscriber shouldn't impress any file-sharer. However, since only a small percentage of all subscribers use BitTorrent, the upstream traffic per user is of course much higher.

U.S. Supreme Court justices on Monday appeared skeptical of a challenge on free speech grounds to how President Joe Biden's administration encouraged social media platforms to remove posts that federal officials deemed misinformation, including about elections and COVID-19. From a report: The justices heard oral arguments in the administration's appeal of a lower court's preliminary injunction constraining how White House and certain other federal officials communicate with social media platforms. The Republican-led states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with five individual social media users, sued the administration.

They argued that the government's actions violated the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment free speech rights of users whose posts were removed from platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, now called X. The case tests whether the administration crossed the line from mere communication and persuasion to strong arming or coercing platforms - sometimes called "jawboning" - to unlawfully censor disfavored speech, as lower courts found.

Two investment advisors have reached settlements with the US Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly exaggerating their use of AI, which in both cases were purported to be cornerstones of their offerings. From a report: Canada-based Delphia and San Francisco-headquartered Global Predictions will cough up $225,000 and $175,000 respectively for telling clients that their products used AI to improve forecasts. The financial watchdog said both were engaging in "AI washing," a term used to describe the embellishment of machine-learning capabilities.

"We've seen time and again that when new technologies come along, they can create buzz from investors as well as false claims by those purporting to use those new technologies," said SEC chairman Gary Gensler. "Delphia and Global Predictions marketed to their clients and prospective clients that they were using AI in certain ways when, in fact, they were not." Delphia claimed its system utilized AI and machine learning to incorporate client data, a statement the SEC said it found to be false.

"Delphia represented that it used artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze its retail clients' spending and social media data to inform its investment advice when, in fact, no such data was being used in its investment process," the SEC said in a settlement order. Despite being warned about suspected misleading practices in 2021 and agreeing to amend them, Delphia only partially complied, according to the SEC. The company continued to market itself as using client data as AI inputs but never did anything of the sort, the regulator said.

A new EFF web page is urging U.S. readers to "Tell Congress: Stop the TikTok Ban," arguing the bill will "do little for its alleged goal of protecting our private information and the collection of our data by foreign governments." Tell Congress: Instead of giving the President the power to ban entire social media platforms based on their country of origin, our representatives should focus on what matters — protecting our data no matter who is collecting it... It's a massive problem that current U.S. law allows for all the big social media platforms to harvest and monetize our personal data, including TikTok. Without comprehensive data privacy legislation, this will continue, and this ban won't solve any real or perceived problems. User data will still be collected by numerous platforms and sold to data brokers who sell it to the highest bidder — including governments of countries such as China — just as it is now.

TikTok raises special concerns, given the surveillance and censorship practices of the country that its parent company is based in, China. But it's also used by hundreds of millions of people to express themselves online, and is an instrumental tool for community building and holding those in power accountable. The U.S. government has not justified silencing the speech of Americans who use TikTok, nor has it justified the indirect speech punishment of a forced sale (which may prove difficult if not impossible to accomplish in the required timeframe). It can't meet the high constitutional bar for a restriction on the platform, which would undermine the free speech and association rights of millions of people. This bill must be stopped.

"The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development," argues Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and business school ethics professor, saying that since the early 2010s, "something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents."

The Atlantic recently published an excerpt from his book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.: By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data... I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online — particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity — all were affected...

There's an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world. My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now...

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting "safe spaces" and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to "microaggressions" and sometimes claimed that words were "violence." These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.
The article argues educational scores also began dropping around 2012, while citing estimates that America's average teenager spends seven to nine hours a day on screen-based activities. "Everything else in an adolescent's day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed... The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else." (For example, there's "the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face.")

The article warns of fragmented attention, disrupted learning, social withdrawal, and "the decay of wisdom and the loss of meaning." ("This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life.") Its proposed solution?

• No smartphones before high school
• No social media before 16
• Phoneâfree schools
• More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

"We didn't know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It's time to end the phone-based childhood."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 and sinij for sharing the article.

"Pornhub has disabled its site in Texas," reports the Hill, "to object to a state law that requires the company to verify the age of users to prevent minors from accessing the site." Texas residents who visit the site are met with a message from the company that criticizes the state's elected officials who are requiring them to track the age of users. The company said the newly passed law impinges on "the rights of adults to access protected speech" and fails to pass strict scrutiny by "employing the least effective and yet also most restrictive means of accomplishing Texas's stated purpose of allegedly protecting minors." Pornhub said safety and compliance are "at the forefront" of the company's mission, but having users provide identification every time they want to access the site is "not an effective solution for protecting users online... Attempting to mandate age verification without any means to enforce at scale gives platforms the choice to comply or not, leaving thousands of platforms open and accessible," the message said, adding that "very few sites are able to compare the robust Trust and Safety measures we currently have in place."
The article adds that the state's attorney general is suing the owners of Pornhub for $1.6 million failing to enact age verification, plus an additional $10,000 a day.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker for sharing the news.

Newsweek points out that a Chinese government post arguing the bill is "on the wrong side of fair competition" was flagged by users on X. "TikTok is banned in the People's Republic of China," the X community note read. (The BBC reports that "Instead, Chinese users use a similar app, Douyin, which is only available in China and subject to monitoring and censorship by the government.")

Newsweek adds that China "has also blocked access to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Google services. X itself is also banned — though Chinese diplomats use the microblogging app to deliver Beijing's messaging to the wider world."

From the Wall Street Journal: Among the top concerns for [U.S.] intelligence leaders is that they wouldn't even necessarily be able to detect a Chinese influence operation if one were taking place [on TikTok] due to the opacity of the platform and how its algorithm surfaces content to users. Such operations, FBI director Christopher Wray said this week in congressional testimony, "are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national-security concerns represented by TikTok so significant...."

Critics of the bill include libertarian-leaning lawmakers, such as Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who have decried it as a form of government censorship. "The Constitution says that you have a First Amendment right to express yourself," Paul told reporters Thursday. TikTok's users "express themselves through dancing or whatever else they do on TikTok. You can't just tell them they can't do that." In the House, a bloc of 50 Democrats voted against the bill, citing concerns about curtailing free speech and the impact on people who earn income on the app. Some Senate Democrats have raised similar worries, as well as an interest in looking at a range of social-media issues at rival companies such as Meta Platforms.

"The basic idea should be to put curbs on all social media, not just one," Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) said Thursday. "If there's a problem with privacy, with how our children are treated, then we need to curb that behavior wherever it occurs."
Some context from the Columbia Journalism Review: Roughly one-third of Americans aged 18-29 regularly get their news from TikTok, the Pew Research Center found in a late 2023 survey. Nearly half of all TikTok users say they regularly get news from the app, a higher percentage than for any other social media platform aside from Twitter.

Almost 40 percent of young adults were using TikTok and Instagram for their primary Web search instead of the traditional search engines, a Google senior vice president said in mid-2022 — a number that's almost certainly grown since then. Overall, TikTok claims 150 million American users, almost half the US population; two-thirds of Americans aged 18-29 use the app.
Some U.S. politicians believe TikTok "radicalized" some of their supporters "with disinformation or biased reporting," according to the article.

Meanwhile in the Guardian, a Duke University law professor argues "this saga demands a broader conversation about safeguarding democracy in the digital age." The European Union's newly enacted AI act provides a blueprint for a more holistic approach, using an evidence- and risk-based system that could be used to classify platforms like TikTok as high-risk AI systems subject to more stringent regulatory oversight, with measures that demand transparency, accountability and defensive measures against misuse.
Open source advocate Evan Prodromou argues that the TikTok controversy raises a larger issue: If algorithmic curation is so powerful, "who's making the decisions on how they're used?" And he also proposes a solution.

"If there is concern about algorithms being manipulated by foreign governments, using Fediverse-enabled domestic software prevents the problem."

When it comes to TikTok, "The Chinese government is signaling that it won't allow a forced sale..." reported the Wall Street Journal Friday, "limiting options for the app's owners as buyers begin lining up to bid for its U.S. operations..."

"They have also sent signals to TikTok's owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, that company executives have interpreted as meaning the government would rather the app be banned in the U.S. than be sold, according to people familiar with the matter."

But that's not always how it plays out. McClatchy notes that in 2019 the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. ordered Grindr's Chinese owners to relinquish control of Grindr. "A year later, the Chinese owners voluntarily complied and sold the company to San Vicente Acquisition, incorporated in Delaware, for around $608 million, according to Forbes."

And CNN reminds us that the world's most-populous country already banned TikTok more than three years ago: In June 2020, after a violent clash on the India-China border that left at least 20 Indian soldiers dead, the government in New Delhi suddenly banned TikTok and several other well-known Chinese apps. "It's important to remember that when India banned TikTok and multiple Chinese apps, the US was the first to praise the decision," said Nikhil Pahwa, the Delhi-based founder of tech website MediaNama. "[Former] US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had welcomed the ban, saying it 'will boost India's sovereignty.'"

While India's abrupt decision shocked the country's 200 million TikTok users, in the four years since, many have found other suitable alternatives. "The ban on Tiktok led to the creation of a multibillion dollar opportunity ... A 200 million user base needed somewhere to go," said Pahwa, adding that it was ultimately American tech companies that seized the moment with their new offerings... Within a week of the ban, Meta-owned Instagram cashed in by launching its TikTok copycat, Instagram Reels, in India. Google introduced its own short video offering, YouTube Shorts. Homegrown alternatives such as MX Taka Tak and Moj also began seeing a rise in popularity and an infux in funding. Those local startups soon fizzled out, however, unable to match the reach and financial firepower of the American firms, which are flourishing.
In fact, at the time India "announced a ban on more than 50 Chinese apps," remembers the Washington Post, adding that Nepal also announced a ban on TikTok late last year.

Their article points out that TikTok has also been banned by top EU policymaking bodies, while "Government staff in some of the bloc's 27 member states, including Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands, have also been told not to use TikTok on their work phones." Canada banned TikTok from all government-issued phones in February 2023, after similar steps in the United States and the European Union.... Britain announced a TikTok ban on government ministers' and civil servants' devices last year, with officials citing the security of state information. Australia banned TikTok from all federal government-owned devices last year after seeking advice from intelligence and security agencies.
A new EFF web page warns that America's new proposed ban on TikTok could also apply to apps like WeChat...

Days before Reddit's upcoming initial public offering (IPO), the company announced that the FTC has launched an inquiry into the company's licensing of user data to AI companies. Reddit says that it's "not surprised" by the FTC's inquiry, given the novel nature of these agreements. Axios reports: Reddit says it received a letter on Thursday, March 14, in which the FTC said it's "conducting a non-public inquiry focused on our sale, licensing, or sharing of user-generated content with third parties to train AI models." The FTC also is expected to request a meeting with Reddit, plus various documents and information. Reddit isn't the only company receiving these so-called "hold letters," according to a former FTC official who spoke with Axios on background.

The Supreme Court clarified when public officials can block critical constituents from their personal profiles without violating their constitutional protections in a unanimous decision Friday. From a report: After hearing appeals of two conflicting rulings -- one filed against school board members in Southern California and another filed against the city manager of Port Huron, Mich. -- the justices provided no definitive resolution to the disputes and instead sent both cases back to lower courts to apply the new legal test. In a unanimous decision authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court said state officials cannot block constituents on their personal pages when they have "actual authority to speak on behalf of the State on a particular matter" and "purported to exercise that authority in the relevant posts."

"For social-media activity to constitute state action, an official must not only have state authority -- he must also purport to use it," Barrett wrote. The case marked the latest battle over public officials' social media presence when they mesh their official and personal roles. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard the Michigan case, sided with the city manager, James Freed, who deleted comments on his Facebook page left by a resident and blocked several of the resident's profiles. The resident, Kevin Lindke, had criticized Freed over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, court filings indicate.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Two years into office, President Donald Trump authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to launch a clandestine campaign on Chinese social media aimed at turning public opinion in China against its government, according to former U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the highly classified operation. Three former officials told Reuters that the CIA created a small team of operatives who used bogus internet identities to spread negative narratives about Xi Jinping's government while leaking disparaging intelligence to overseas news outlets. The effort, which began in 2019, has not been previously reported.

The CIA team promoted allegations that members of the ruling Communist Party were hiding ill-gotten money overseas and slammed as corrupt and wasteful China's Belt and Road Initiative, which provides financing for infrastructure projects in the developing world, the sources told Reuters. Although the U.S. officials declined to provide specific details of these operations, they said the disparaging narratives were based in fact despite being secretly released by intelligence operatives under false cover. The efforts within China were intended to foment paranoia among top leaders there, forcing its government to expend resources chasing intrusions into Beijing's tightly controlled internet, two former officials said. "We wanted them chasing ghosts," one of these former officials said. [...]

The CIA operation came in response to years of aggressive covert efforts by China aimed at increasing its global influence, the sources said. During his presidency, Trump pushed a tougher response to China than had his predecessors. The CIA's campaign signaled a return to methods that marked Washington's struggle with the former Soviet Union. "The Cold War is back," said Tim Weiner, author of a book on the history of political warfare. Reuters was unable to determine the impact of the secret operations or whether the administration of President Joe Biden has maintained the CIA program.

Refund fraud groups are exploiting lenient refund policies, resulting in significant losses for retailers like Amazon and prompting civil lawsuits and arrests. The scheme has become so pervasive that groups now market their services on Reddit, TikTok and Telegram. CNBC reports: Fraud groups are taking advantage of retailers' lenient return policies, experts told CNBC, which often include unlimited free returns and sometimes even a preference that customers keep the items. It's ballooned into a massive problem for retailers, costing them more than $101 billion last year, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail. The figure includes multiple forms of fraud, such as sending back clothing after it's been worn, known as "wardrobing," and returning shoplifted merchandise, the survey said.

In December, Amazon filed a lawsuit against Page and 47 other people across the globe with alleged ties to Rekk, accusing them of conspiring to steal millions of dollars worth of products in a refund fraud operation. Amazon described these services as "illegitimate 'businesses'" that look to "exploit the refund process for their own financial gain to the detriment of honest consumers and retailers who must bear the brunt of increased costs, decreased inventory, and service disruption that impacts genuine customers." An Amazon spokesperson said the company is addressing the issue "head on" through specialized teams and machine learning tools that detect and prevent refund fraud.

Here's how it works: A shopper buys a product online and sends the order information to a group such as Rekk, which then poses as the customer in requesting a refund. Amazon refunds the money to the customer, who then pays the fraud group usually between 15% and 30% of the refund amount, often via PayPal or with bitcoin. That means the customer ends up buying the product for what amounts to a huge discount. The fraud group then pays the conspiring employee at the retailer, typically a certain amount for a batch of packages the employee scans as returned.