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Citing frustration with mobile carriers enforcing different phone-unlocking policies that are bad for consumers, the Federal Communications Commission is proposing a 60-day unlocking requirement that would apply to all wireless providers.

The industry's "confusing and disparate cell phone unlocking policies" mean that "some consumers can unlock their phones with relative ease, while others face significant barriers," Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said at yesterday's FCC meeting. "It also means certain carriers are subject to mandatory unlocking requirements while others are free to dictate their own. This asymmetry is bad for both consumers and competition."

The FCC is "proposing a uniform 60-day unlocking policy" so that "consumers can choose the carrier that offers them the best value," Starks said. Unlocking a phone allows it to be used on a different carrier's network as long as the phone is compatible.

Enlarge / A telephone in a prison. (credit: Getty Images | Image Source)

The Federal Communications Commission today voted to lower price caps on prison phone calls and closed a loophole that allowed prison telecoms to charge high rates for intrastate calls. Today's vote will cut the price of interstate calls in half and set price caps on intrastate calls for the first time.

The FCC said it "voted to end exorbitant phone and video call rates that have burdened incarcerated people and their families for decades. Under the new rules, the cost of a 15-minute phone call will drop to $0.90 from as much as $11.35 in large jails and, in small jails, to $1.35 from $12.10."

The new rules are expected to take effect in January 2025 for all prisons and for jails with at least 1,000 incarcerated people. The rate caps would take effect in smaller jails in April 2025.

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US senators want AT&T to explain why it stores massive amounts of call and text message records on a third-party analytics platform that bills itself as an "AI Data Cloud."

AT&T revealed last week that "customer data was illegally downloaded from our workspace on a third-party cloud platform," and that the breach "includes files containing AT&T records of calls and texts of nearly all of AT&T's cellular customers." The third-party platform is Snowflake, and AT&T is one of many Snowflake corporate customers that had data stolen. Ticketmaster is another notable company affected by the breach.

AT&T and Snowflake each got letters yesterday from US Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the chair and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. The senators asked AT&T CEO John Stankey to answer a series of questions, including this one:

Enlarge / Dr. Craig Wright arrives at the Rolls Building, part of the Royal Courts of Justice, on February 6, 2024, in London, England. (credit: Dan Kitwood / Staff | Getty Images News)

A British judge is referring self-proclaimed bitcoin inventor Craig Wright to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to consider criminal charges of perjury and forgery. The judge said that CPS can decide whether Wright should be arrested and granted two injunctions that prohibit Wright from re-litigating his claim to be bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto.

"I have no doubt that I should refer the relevant papers in this case to the CPS for consideration of whether a prosecution should be commenced against Dr. Wright for his wholescale perjury and forgery of documents and/or whether a warrant for his arrest should be issued and/or whether his extradition should be sought from wherever he now is. All those matters are to be decided by the CPS," Justice James Mellor of England's High Court of Justice wrote in a ruling issued today.

If Wright actually believes he is Nakamoto, "he is deluding himself," Mellor wrote.

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Major record labels sued Verizon on Friday, alleging that the Internet service provider violated copyright law by continuing to serve customers accused of pirating music. Verizon "knowingly provides its high-speed service to a massive community of online pirates," said the complaint filed in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Universal, Sony, and Warner say they have sent over 340,000 copyright infringement notices to Verizon since early 2020. "Those notices identify specific subscribers on Verizon's network stealing Plaintiffs' sound recordings through peer-to-peer ('P2P') file-sharing networks that are notorious hotbeds for copyright infringement," the lawsuit said.

Record labels allege that "Verizon ignored Plaintiffs' notices and buried its head in the sand" by "continu[ing] to provide its high-speed service to thousands of known repeat infringers so it could continue to collect millions of dollars from them." They say that "Verizon has knowingly contributed to, and reaped substantial profits from, massive copyright infringement committed by tens of thousands of its subscribers."

Enlarge / FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr arrive to testify during a House committee hearing on March 31, 2022, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch )

A federal court on Friday temporarily stayed enforcement of net neutrality regulations but has not decided on the merits of a telecom-industry request to block the rules on a longer-term basis.

The Federal Communications Commission's revived net neutrality rules were scheduled to take effect on July 22. But the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit needs more time to consider the industry motion to block the rules and wants the parties to file supplemental briefs. As a result, the FCC can't enforce the rules until at least August 5.

"To provide sufficient opportunity to consider the merits of the motion to stay the FCC's order, we conclude that an administrative stay is warranted. The FCC's order is hereby temporarily stayed until August 5, 2024," the court said on Friday.

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AT&T today said a breach on a third-party cloud platform exposed the call and text records of nearly all its cellular customers. The leaked data is said to include phone numbers that AT&T subscribers communicated with, but not names.

An AT&T spokesperson confirmed to Ars that the data was exposed in the recently reported attack on "AI data cloud" provider Snowflake, which also affected Ticketmaster and many other companies. As previously reported, Snowflake was compromised by a group that obtained login credentials through information-stealing malware.

"In April, AT&T learned that customer data was illegally downloaded from our workspace on a third-party cloud platform," AT&T announced today. AT&T said it is working with law enforcement and "understands that at least one person has been apprehended."

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Elon Musk's overhaul of the Twitter verification system deceives users and violates the Digital Services Act, the European Commission said today in an announcement of preliminary findings that could lead to a big financial penalty.

The social media platform now called X "designs and operates its interface for the 'verified accounts' with the 'Blue checkmark' in a way that does not correspond to industry practice and deceives users," the EU regulator said. "Since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a 'verified' status, it negatively affects users' ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with. There is evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the 'verified account' to deceive users."

Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said. The EC said it "informed X of its preliminary view that it is in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers."

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Republican lawmakers are fighting a Biden administration attempt to bring cheap broadband service to low-income people, claiming it is an illegal form of rate regulation. GOP leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced an investigation into the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is administering the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program that was approved by Congress in November 2021.

"States have reported that the NTIA is directing them to set rates and conditioning approval of initial proposals on doing so. This undoubtedly constitutes rate regulation by the NTIA," states a letter to the NTIA from Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), Subcommittee on Communications and Technology Chair Bob Latta (R-Ohio), and Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chair Morgan Griffith (R-Va.).

As evidence, the letter points to a statement by Virginia that described feedback received from the NTIA. The federal agency told Virginia that "the low-cost option must be established in the Initial proposal as an exact price or formula."

Enlarge / An X sign at company headquarters in San Francisco. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

A federal judge yesterday granted Elon Musk's motion to dismiss a class-action complaint alleging that laid-off Twitter employees were wrongfully denied the severance they were entitled to under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).

The employees may be able to latch onto another lawsuit against Twitter that alleges different severance-related violations, but their claim under ERISA was denied by US District Judge Trina Thompson in the Northern District of California.

"Plaintiffs are not without recourse," Thompson wrote, noting that they may benefit from similar cases ongoing against the Musk-owned firm. "Indeed, there are other cases brought against Twitter for the failure to pay wages or provide employee severance benefits during the same or overlapping period that Plaintiffs allege Defendants denied them and the putative class sufficient severance benefits under the severance plan at issue here."

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The Federal Communications Commission said it is preparing to block a phone company that carried illegal robocalls pushing fake programs that promised to wipe out consumers' tax debt. Veriwave Telco "has not complied with FCC call blocking rules for providers suspected of carrying illegal traffic" and now has two weeks to contest an order that would require all downstream voice providers to block all of the telco's call traffic, the FCC announced yesterday.

Robocalls sent in the months before tax filing season "purported to provide information about a 'National Tax Relief Program' and, in some instances, also discussed a 'Tax Dismissal Program,'" the FCC order said. "The [Enforcement] Bureau has found no evidence of the existence of either program. Many of the messages further appealed to recipients with the offer to 'rapidly clear' their tax debt."

Call recipients who listened to the prerecorded message and chose to speak to an operator were then asked to provide private information. Nearly 16 million calls were sent, though it's unclear how many went through Veriwave.

Enlarge / An American Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft approaches San Diego International Airport for a landing on June 28, 2024. (credit: Getty Images | Kevin Carter )

Boeing has agreed to plead guilty to a criminal charge and pay $243.6 million for violating a 2021 agreement that was spurred by two fatal crashes. The US government notified a judge of Boeing's plea agreement in a July 7 filing in US District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

"The parties have agreed that Boeing will plead guilty to the most serious readily provable offense," the Department of Justice said. If accepted by the court, the deal would allow Boeing to avoid a trial.

Families of victims said in a filing yesterday that they will urge the court to reject the deal at a plea hearing. "The families intend to argue that the plea deal with Boeing unfairly makes concessions to Boeing that other criminal defendants would never receive and fails to hold Boeing accountable for the deaths of 346 persons," their lawyers wrote.

Enlarge / FTC Chair Lina Khan testifies before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on May 15, 2024, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch)

A US judge ruled against the Federal Trade Commission in a challenge to its rule banning noncompete agreements, saying the FTC lacks "substantive" rulemaking authority.

The preliminary ruling only blocks enforcement of the noncompete ban against the plaintiff and other groups that intervened in the case, but it signals that the judge believes the FTC cannot enforce the rule. The case is in US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, so appeals would be heard in the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit—which is generally regarded as one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country.

In April, the FTC issued a rule that would render the vast majority of current noncompete clauses unenforceable and ban future ones. The agency said that noncompete clauses are "an unfair method of competition and therefore a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act," calling them "a widespread and often exploitative practice imposing contractual conditions that prevent workers from taking a new job or starting a new business."

Enlarge / ATM at a Patelco Credit Union branch in Dublin, California, on July 23, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Smith Collection/Gado )

A California-based credit union with over 450,000 members said it suffered a ransomware attack that is disrupting account services and could take weeks to recover from.

"The next few days—and coming weeks—may present challenges for our members, as we continue to navigate around the limited functionality we are experiencing due to this incident," Patelco Credit Union CEO Erin Mendez told members in a July 1 message that said the security problem was caused by a ransomware attack. Online banking and several other services are unavailable, while several other services and types of transactions have limited functionality.

Patelco Credit Union was hit by the attack on June 29 and has been posting updates on this page, which says the credit union "proactively shut down some of our day-to-day banking systems to contain and remediate the issue... As a result of our proactive measures, transactions, transfers, payments, and deposits are unavailable at this time. Debit and credit cards are working with limited functionality."

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The US Supreme Court today agreed to hear a challenge to the Texas law that requires age verification on porn sites. A list of orders released this morning shows that the court granted a petition for certiorari filed by the Free Speech Coalition, an adult-industry lobby group.

In March, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Texas could continue enforcing the law while litigation continues. In a 2-1 decision, 5th Circuit judges wrote that "the age-verification requirement is rationally related to the government's legitimate interest in preventing minors' access to pornography. Therefore, the age-verification requirement does not violate the First Amendment."

The dissenting judge faulted the 5th Circuit majority for reviewing the law under the "rational-basis" standard instead of the more stringent strict scrutiny. The Supreme Court "has unswervingly applied strict scrutiny to content-based regulations that limit adults' access to protected speech," Judge Patrick Higginbotham wrote at the time.

Enlarge / The Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, DC, in May 2023. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

The US Supreme Court has avoided making a final decision on challenges to the Texas and Florida social media laws, but the majority opinion written by Justice Elena Kagan criticized the Texas law and made it clear that content moderation is protected by the First Amendment.

The Texas law "is unlikely to withstand First Amendment scrutiny," the Supreme Court majority wrote. "Texas has thus far justified the law as necessary to balance the mix of speech on Facebook's News Feed and similar platforms; and the record reflects that Texas officials passed it because they thought those feeds skewed against politically conservative voices. But this Court has many times held, in many contexts, that it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression—to 'un-bias' what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences. That principle works for social-media platforms as it does for others."

A Big Tech lobby group that challenged the state laws said it was pleased by the ruling. "In a complex series of opinions that were unanimous in the outcome, but divided 6-3 in their reasoning, the Court sent the cases back to lower courts, making clear that a State may not interfere with private actors' speech," the Computer & Communications Industry Association said.