According to NBC News, the FBI created a national online database in May to facilitate information sharing between hundreds of police departments and law enforcement agencies across the country pertaining to swatting incidents. From the report: No central agency has tracked swatting incidents or suspects in the U.S., so official statistics are not available. By 2019, there were an estimated 1,000 swatting incidents domestically each year, according to a report from the Anti-Defamation League, and each incident is estimated to cost at least $10,000 to affected communities, even before expenditures on follow-up work like investigations, property repairs and counseling. Swatting is increasingly enabled by technology that can be used to mask a caller's real voice, their phone number or IP address (also called "spoofing") or to make their false report sound more credible.

[Chief Scott Schubert with the bureau's Criminal Justice Information Services headquarters in Clarksburg, West Virginia] told NBC News that the FBI's new centralized database should help the agency "get that common picture of what's going on across our nation so we can learn from that." [...] While the earliest recorded case of swatting occurred in 2002, to this day, there is no specific law criminalizing swatting in the U.S., says John Jay's Shapiro. "Without a statute in place, there's no designated resources or training for investigating swatting incidents," she said. "And the 911 dispatchers do not have the resources and training they need to differentiate between actual emergencies and false reports."

Legally, the False Information and Hoaxes statute, also known as section 1038, is most frequently used to prosecute swatting. Other statutes can sometimes apply -- one pertaining to interstate threats involving explosives and another pertaining to interstate communications, which refers to extortion or threats to injure or kidnap somebody. "Too often, perpetrators are getting a slap on the wrist compared to the consequences suffered by their victims," Shapiro said.

New data (PDF) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that one-third of Americans worked from home in 2022, up from a quarter, or 25%, in 2019. The survey also found that Americans working full time from home worked 2.5 hours less a day than Americans at the office. Barron's reports: Overall, the total civilian population worked for an average of 3.23 hours a day in 2022 down from 3.26 hours a day in 2019. The U.S. is 1% lazier. That number, given by the BLS, is the total population. Don't forget, babies don't work. [...] As far as what Americans were doing with the time not spent working, TV watching stayed flat, socializing dropped, and gaming increased. "Economics is complicated, but labor productivity is essentially the basis for economic gains," writes Barron's Al Root. "The economy is measured in dollars, but the dollar is just a unit of account. More output per worker is how living standards improve."

"In a strange way, coming back to work is like an economic stimulus package. If people go back to the office, at a 2019 rate, and work 8.2 hours a day instead of the at-home 5.7 hours a day, the economy has just added roughly 800 million weeks of work, an 8% bump."

"The findings will give management teams some momentum to bring workers back to the office," adds Root.

Two U.S. authors have filed a proposed class action lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the company infringed their copyrights by using their works without permission to train its generative AI system, ChatGPT. The plaintiffs, Massachusetts-based writers Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, claim the data used to train ChatGPT included thousands of books, including those from illegal "shadow libraries." Reuters reports: The complaint estimated that OpenAI's training data incorporated over 300,000 books, including from illegal "shadow libraries" that offer copyrighted books without permission. Awad is known for novels including "13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl" and "Bunny." Tremblay's novels include "The Cabin at the End of the World," which was adapted in the M. Night Shyamalan film "Knock at the Cabin" released in February.

Tremblay and Awad said ChatGPT could generate "very accurate" summaries of their books, indicating that they appeared in its database. The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of money damages on behalf of a nationwide class of copyright owners whose works OpenAI allegedly misused.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Two U.S. schools have confirmed that TIAA, a nonprofit organization that provides financial services for individuals in academic fields, has been caught up in the mass-hacks targeting MOVEit file transfer tools. Middlebury College in Vermont and Trinity College in Connecticut both released security notices confirming they experienced data breaches as a result of a security incident at the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, or TIAA. According to its website, TIAA serves mire than five million active and retired employees participating at more than 15,000 institutions and manages $1.3 trillion in assets in more than 50 countries.

Both of the security notices confirm that TIAA was affected by hackers' widespread exploitation of a flaw in MOVEit Transfer, an enterprise file transfer tool developed by Progress Software. The mass-hack has so far claimed more than 160 victims, according to Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow, including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Siemens Energy. Only 12 of these victims have confirmed the number of people affected, which already adds up to more than 16 million individuals.

While TIAA notified affected schools of its security incident, the organization has yet to publicly acknowledge the incident. In response to a Twitter user questioning the organization's silence, TIAA responded saying that its offices were closed. It's not yet known how many organizations have been impacted as a result of the cyberattack on TIAA. TIAA has not yet been listed on the dark web leak site of the Russia-linked Clop ransomware gang, which has claimed responsibility for the ongoing MOVEit cyberattacks.

Data privacy laws in Colorado and Connecticut will go into effect Saturday. From a report: If companies haven't finished their compliance work to abide by the rules, they could face civil penalties of up to $20,000 per violation in some states. Colorado and Connecticut add to an increasingly complex patchwork of state data privacy laws. California paved the way in 2018 after passing the country's first state-level privacy bill, while Virginia followed this year.

The Colorado and Connecticut laws apply to entities that do business in those states, as well as businesses that process a certain amount of data about in-state customers. Under the new laws, residents of each state will have the right to request businesses delete their personal information, ask for a copy of the information businesses have collected about them, opt out of the sale of their personal data, and more. Both laws also require businesses to request opt-in permission from consumers before letting businesses process their sensitive information -- differing from the opt-out mechanism consumers have in California

The FTC has proposed a new rule banning numerous forms of fake reviews online, from outright fabricated ones to those that are sketchily repurposed or secretly manipulated. It may not totally rehabilitate the notoriously unreliable online review ecosystem, but it could help make things a bit more bearable. From a report: This rule has been a long time in the making, which is par for the course at any federal regulator. The FTC's first case of this type was in 2019, against a merchant that was making misleading claims and paying for fake reviews. Before that, it had taken on "influencer marketing" where a person didn't disclose that they were being paid to promote a product. Now the agency is ready to take comprehensive action with rules they first previewed last October and have now put in near-final form. The proposed rule is the result of much research and of consultation with businesses, consumers, and even advertising trade organizations that predictably advised the FTC not to bother cracking down on this lucrative business.

A top adviser to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health admitted that he used a personal email account in an apparent effort to evade the strictures of the Freedom of Information Act, according to records obtained by congressional investigators probing the origin of Covid-19. The official also expressed his intention to delete emails in order to avoid media scrutiny. The Intercept: "As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA'd constantly," wrote David M. Morens, a high-ranking NIH official, in a September 2021 email, one of a series of email exchanges that included many leading scientists involved in the bitter Covid origins debate. "Stuff sent to my gmail gets to my phone," he added, "but not my NIH computer." After noting that his Gmail account had been hacked, however, he wrote to the group to say that he might have to use his NIH email account to communicate with them instead. "Don't worry," he wrote, "just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don't want to see in the New York Times."

RSS Advisory Board: This month marks the 20th anniversary of the effort that became the Atom feed format. It all began on June 16, 2003, with a blog post from Apache Software Foundation contributor Sam Ruby asking for feedback about what constitutes a well-formed blog entry. The development of RSS 2.0 had been an unplanned hopscotch from a small group at Netscape to a smaller one at UserLand Software, but Atom was a barn raising. Hundreds of software developers, web publishers and technologists gathered for a discussion in the abstract that led to a concrete effort to build a well-specified syndication format and associated publishing API that could become Internet standards. Work was done on a project wiki that grew to over 1,500 pages. Everything was up for a vote, including a plebiscite on choosing a name that ballooned into a four-month-long bikeshed discussion in which Pie, Echo, Wingnut, Feedcast, Phaistos and several dozen alternatives finally, mercifully, miraculously lost out to Atom.

The road map of the Atom wiki lists the people, companies and projects that jumped at the chance to create a new format for feeds. XML specification co-author Tim Bray wrote: "The time to write it all down and standardize it is not when you're first struggling to invent the technology. We now have aggregators and publishing systems and search engines and you-name-it, and I think the community collectively understands pretty well what you need, what you don't need, and what a good syntax looks like. So, now's the time."

China is shoring up its position as the world leader in renewable power and potentially outpacing its own ambitious energy targets, a report has found. The Guardian: China is set to double its capacity and produce 1,200 gigawatts of energy through wind and solar power by 2025, reaching its 2030 goal five years ahead of time, according to the report by Global Energy Monitor, a San Francisco-based NGO that tracks operating utility-scale wind and solar farms as well as future projects in the country.

It says that as of the first quarter of the year, China's utility-scale solar capacity has reached 228GW, more than that of the rest of the world combined. The installations are concentrated in the country's north and north-west provinces, such as Shanxi, Xinjiang and Hebei. In addition, the group identified solar farms under construction that could add another 379GW in prospective capacity, triple that of the US and nearly double that of Europe. China has also made huge strides in wind capacity: its combined onshore and offshore capacity now surpasses 310GW, double its 2017 level and roughly equivalent to the next top seven countries combined. With new projects in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Gansu and along coastal areas, China is on course to add another 371GW before 2025, increasing the global wind fleet by nearly half.

The UK made last-minute amendments toughening up its sweeping, long-awaited Online Safety Bill following scrutiny in Parliament's upper chamber, the House of Lords. From a report: Internet companies carrying pornographic content will be explicitly required to use age verification or estimation measures, and ensure these methods are effective, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said in an emailed statement Friday. Executives will be held personally responsible for child safety on their platforms, the statement said.

DSIT didn't respond to follow-up questions about the detail of this policy. Regulator Ofcom will be empowered to retrieve data on the online activity of deceased children to understand if and how their online activity may have played any role in their death, if requested by a coroner, the government said. It also announced Ofcom will research the role that app stores play in children's access to harmful content. The watchdog will also publish guidance on how platforms can reduce risks to women and have to improve public literacy of disinformation.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Social media firms will be ordered to protect children from encountering dangerous stunts and challenges on their platforms under changes to the online safety bill. The legislation will explicitly refer to content that "encourages, promotes or provides instructions for a challenge or stunt highly likely to result in serious injury" as the type of material that under-18s should be protected from. The bill will also require social media companies to proactively prevent children from seeing the highest risk forms of content, such as material encouraging suicide and self-harm. Tech firms could be required to use age-checking measures to prevent under-18s from seeing such material.

In another change to the legislation, which is expected to become law this year, social media platforms will have to introduce tougher age-checking measures to prevent children from accessing pornography -- bringing them in line with the bill's measures for mainstream sites such as Pornhub. Services that publish or allow pornography on their sites will be required to introduce "highly effective" age-checking measures such as age estimation tools that estimate someone's age from a selfie. Other amendments include requiring the communications watchdog Ofcom to produce guidance for tech firms on protecting women and girls online. Ofcom, which will oversee implementation of the act once it comes into force, will be required to consult with the domestic abuse commissioner and victims commissioner when producing the guidance, in order to ensure it reflects the voices of victims.

The updated bill will also criminalize the sharing of deepfake intimate images in England and Wales. In a further change it will require platforms to ask adult users if they wish to avoid content that promotes self-harm or eating disorders or racist content. Once the law comes into force breaches will carry a punishment of a fine of £18m or up to 10% of global turnover. In the most extreme cases, Ofcom will be able to block platforms.