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The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has slapped coding boot camp BloomTech -- formerly known as Lambda School -- with several punishments for alleged deceptive business practices. From a report: The business, which claims on its site it will help students land their "dream job" in tech at companies like Amazon, Cisco, and Google, accepted the consent order without admitting or denying any wrongdoing. In an announcement yesterday, the CFPB said it had taken action against BloomTech and its CEO Austen Allred for allegedly not disclosing the true cost of its loans to students and allegedly claiming overoptimistic hiring rates for BloomTech graduates. BloomTech, formerly Lambda School, has operated since 2017 and offers six- to nine-month vocational programs in science and engineering, with a focus on computer technology. "BloomTech and its CEO sought to drive students toward income share loans that were marketed as risk-free, but in fact carried significant finance charges and many of the same risks as other credit products," said Rohit Chopra, director of the CFPB. With income share loans or income share agreements, BloomTech allowed students to pay tuition later but in exchange had to pay a percentage of their future income, CFPB claimed. The agency alleged that BloomTech explicitly told students that its income share loans (which cost an average of $4k "finance charge" to use) weren't actually loans at all. The CFPB claimed in the settlement order a "significant majority" of students used these loans to finance their education, and alleged each student could end up paying up to $30k of their income to BloomTech to settle the loans. From the CFPB's press release: BloomTech advertised on its website that 71 to 86 percent of students were placed in jobs within six months of graduation, when its non-public reporting to investors consistently showed placement rates closer to 50 percent. Allred tweeted that the school achieved a 100 percent job-placement rate in one of its cohorts, and later acknowledged in a private message that the sample size was just one student.

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Big Blue bosses retaliate against those seeking overtime, lawsuit claims

IBM has been accused of cheating its executive assistants by denying them overtime pay and meal breaks and retaliating against them for accurately reporting their working hours.…

A jury found Avraham "Avi" Eisenberg guilty on all three counts of fraud and manipulation in a $110 million crypto trade scheme using the Mango Markets platform. Axios: The case was the first known test for a jury to decide whether existing U.S. laws governing fraud and market manipulation apply to the world of decentralized finance (DeFi). The 28-year-old Eisenberg will be held to account for his actions on Oct. 11, 2022, when a series of trades he made intentionally boosted the price of Mango Markets' native token, MNGO, as well as the price of futures contracts. He used the inflated futures holdings as collateral to borrow other cryptocurrencies on the platform, then quickly withdrew those assets and walked away from his collateral. Eisenberg never disputed the facts of the strategy but contended that what he did was legal and permitted by the DeFi protocol, a principle in the industry known as "code is law." U.S. laws apply to DeFi: "Avraham Eisenberg ran a con," prosecutors said Wednesday, during closing arguments, continuing its momentum from last week. The word "con" was used at least six more times in those remarks.

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U.S. aircraft manufacturer Boeing plans to enter the flying car business in Asia by 2030, looking to tap demand for the fast travel the vehicles could provide in the region's traffic-choked cities. Nikkei: Boeing Chief Technology Officer Todd Citron revealed the plans in an interview with Nikkei. The company is developing electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) craft at subsidiary Wisk Aero. The aircraft will adopt autonomous technology, rare among eVTOL craft. The plan is to first obtain certification in the U.S. before expanding into Asia. Details of the Asia business will be finalized in the future, including whether Boeing will sell the aircraft to companies aiming to provide eVTOL transportation services or operate the services itself. Boeing is currently considering which country in Asia to enter first, including Japan. In Japan, domestic startup SkyDrive and Germany's Volocopter are scheduled to operate air taxi services at the 2025 Osaka World Expo. Boeing opened a research and development base in Nagoya on Thursday. It first established R&D operations in Japan in 2022 but had been renting space from other companies until now.

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Alphabet Workers Union says bosses refuse to listen to concerns

Google has fired more than two dozen employees after they staged sit-ins at the web giant's offices in protest of its cloud contract with the Israeli government. …

Nigeria will criminalize the destruction of broadband fiber cables following repeated complaints by MTN Nigeria and other telecommunications companies that they are losing billions of naira, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Nigeria's works ministry, which supervises federal road constructors, is finalizing the regulation that will be signed as an executive order by President Bola Tinubu, said the people, asking not to be identified as they weren't authorized to comment. While there are presently laws against vandalism, the authorities are aiming to regulate construction firms more closely. The order will enforce stiff penalties on offenders, said the people, declining to provide more details or say when it will be signed. "Telecom assets are critical backbone that supports the economy across sectors," said Temitope Ajayi, a senior presidential aide, who noted that the Association of Telecommunications Companies has been demanding the classification for years. New rules will provide "further assurance that the Nigerian government will protect their investments against vandals and criminal elements."

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Do not pass go, do not collect $200, says government agency

The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has slapped coding boot camp BloomTech with several punishments for alleged deceptive business practices.…

And it's far from the only hyperscaler getting in on the act

Microsoft is looking to significantly expand datacenter space to service expected AI demand, tripling the rate at which it adds capacity early in its next financial year. Other hyperscalers appear to be following suit.…

The U.S. Copyright Office has granted a copyright registration to Elisa Shupe, a retired U.S. Army veteran, for her novel "AI Machinations: Tangled Webs and Typed Words," which extensively used OpenAI's ChatGPT in its creation. The registration is among the first for creative works incorporating AI-generated text, but with a significant caveat - Shupe is considered the author of the "selection, coordination, and arrangement" of the AI-generated content, not the text itself. Shupe, who writes under the pen name Ellen Rae, initially filed for copyright in October 2022, seeking an Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) exemption due to her cognitive impairments. The Copyright Office rejected her application but later granted the limited copyright after Shupe appealed. The decision, as Wired points out, highlights the agency's struggle to define authorship in the age of AI and the nuances of copyright protection for AI-assisted works.

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Vote met strong opposition from Biden's office

A draft law to restrict the US government's ability to procure data on citizens through data brokers will progress to the Senate after being passed in the House of Representatives.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: A financially motivated criminal hacking group says it has stolen a confidential database containing millions of records that companies use for screening potential customers for links to sanctions and financial crime. The hackers, which call themselves GhostR, said they stole 5.3 million records from the World-Check screening database in March and are threatening to publish the data online. World-Check is a screening database used for "know your customer" checks (or KYC), allowing companies to determine if prospective customers are high risk or potential criminals, such as people with links to money laundering or who are under government sanctions.The hackers told TechCrunch that they stole the data from a Singapore-based firm with access to the World-Check database, but did not name the firm. A portion of the stolen data, which the hackers shared with TechCrunch, includes individuals who were sanctioned as recently as this year.

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Not just Windows 10. Don't forget about Exchange Server, Skype for Business, and all those Office installations

Windows 10 isn't the only Microsoft product due for the chop next year – end of support also beckons for Office 2016, 2019, and a swathe of productivity servers.…

Meta debuted a new version of its powerful Llama AI model, its latest effort to keep pace with similar technology from companies like OpenAI, X and Google. The company describes Llama 3 8B and Llama 3 70B, containing 8 billion and 70 billion parameters respectively, as a "major leap" in performance compared to their predecessors. Meta claims that the Llama 3 models, trained on custom-built 24,000 GPU clusters, are among the best-performing generative AI models available for their respective parameter counts. The company supports this claim by citing the models' scores on popular AI benchmarks such as MMLU, ARC, and DROP, which attempt to measure knowledge, skill acquisition, and reasoning abilities. Despite the ongoing debate about the usefulness and validity of these benchmarks, they remain one of the few standardized methods for evaluating AI models. Llama 3 8B outperforms other open-source models like Mistral's Mistral 7B and Google's Gemma 7B on at least nine benchmarks, showcasing its potential in various domains such as biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and commonsense reasoning. TechCrunch adds: Now, Mistral 7B and Gemma 7B aren't exactly on the bleeding edge (Mistral 7B was released last September), and in a few of benchmarks Meta cites, Llama 3 8B scores only a few percentage points higher than either. But Meta also makes the claim that the larger-parameter-count Llama 3 model, Llama 3 70B, is competitive with flagship generative AI models including Gemini 1.5 Pro, the latest in Google's Gemini series.

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Criminals make lucrative use of stolen credit cards

Speaking at Black Hat Asia on Thursday, a Korean researcher revealed how the discovery of one phishing website led to uncovering an operation whose activities leveraged second-hand shops and included using Apple’s "someone-else pickup" method to cash in.…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced substantial internal reorganizations on Thursday, including the creation of a new team called "Platforms and Devices" that will oversee all of Google's Pixel products, all of Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Photos, and more. From a report: The team will be run by Rick Osterloh, who was previously the SVP of devices and services, overseeing all of Google's hardware efforts. Hiroshi Lockheimer, the longtime head of Android, Chrome, and ChromeOS, will be taking on other projects inside of Google and Alphabet. This is a huge change for Google, and it likely won't be the last one. There's only one reason for all of it, Osterloh says: AI. "This is not a secret, right?" he says. Consolidating teams "helps us to be able to do full-stack innovation when that's necessary," Osterloh says. He uses the example of the Pixel camera: "You had to have deep knowledge of the hardware systems, from the sensors to the ISPs, to all layers of the software stack. And, at the time, all the early HDR and ML models that were doing camera processing... and I think that hardware / software / AI integration really showed how AI could totally transform a user experience. That was important. And it's even more true today."

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Some say various cell services were out, others still say landlines were affected. What just happened?

Updated Widespread 911 outages in the United States appear to have mostly been resolved, though that doesn't mean the cause is clear.…

Researchers in Canada got most of what they were hoping for in the country's 2024 federal budget, with a big boost in postgraduate pay and more funding for research and scientific infrastructure. From a report: "We are investing over $5 billion in Canadian brainpower," said finance minister Chrystia Freeland in her budget speech on 16 April. "More funding for research and scholarships will help Canada attract the next generation of game-changing thinkers." Postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers have been advocating for higher pay for the past two years through a campaign called Support Our Science. They requested an increase in the value, and number, of federal government scholarships, and got more than they asked for. Stipends for master's students will rise from Can$17,500 (US$12,700) to $27,000 per year, PhDs stipends that ranged from $20,000 to $35,000 will be set to a uniform annual $40,000 and most postdoctoral-fellowship salaries will increase from $45,000 to $70,000 per annum. The number of scholarships and fellowships provided will also rise over time, building to around 1,720 more per year after five years. "We're very thrilled with this significant new investment, the largest investment in graduate students and postdocs in over 21 years," says Kaitlin Kharas, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, Canada, and executive director of Support Our Science. "It will directly support the next generation of researchers." Although only a small proportion of students and postdoctoral fellows receive these federal scholarships, other funders tend to use them as a guide for their own stipends. Many postgraduates said that low pay was forcing them to consider leaving Canada to pursue their scientific career, says Kharas, so this funding should help to retain talent in the country.

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It'll be pricier, but there are geopolitical benefits, says CEO

TSMC boss C C Wei says customers who want to fabricate in the chip giant's non-Taiwan facilities will need share the cost by paying more.…

U.S. lawmakers have moved closer to enacting a countrywide ban on TikTok. From a report: Last month, the House of Representatives passed a bill by a wide margin that would ban distribution of TikTok in U.S. unless TikTok's Chinese parent, ByteDance, sells its ownership in the app within 165 days of the law's enactment. On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson issued a new proposal that would extend the sale requirement deadline to nine months, with a potential for a 90-day extension -- addressing a key concern of Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate's Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, that the divestiture timeline was too short. The revised TikTok ban proposal is tied to a broader bill providing emergency aid for Ukraine and Israel; the House is expected to vote on the measure Saturday, and if it passes would move to the Senate. President Biden has said he will sign the TikTok divest-or-ban legislation into law. On Wednesday evening, Cantwell said she supported the revised TikTok ban bill. "I'm very happy that Speaker Johnson and House leaders incorporated my recommendation to extend the ByteDance divestment period from six months to a year," she said in a statement. "As I've said, extending the divestment period is necessary to ensure there is enough time for a new buyer to get a deal done. I support this updated legislation."

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Thermal shield damage is screwing with daytime observations of X-ray bursts

NASA is sending astronauts out to fix an X-ray telescope on the International Space Station (ISS) after the instrument developed a "light leak."…