eBay pays $46M to journalists it targeted in bizarre harassment campaign

eBay pays $46M to journalists it targeted in bizarre harassment campaign

fivenewscrypto    juillet 29, 2026   

eBay and three former executives agreed to pay nearly $56 million in a settlement over a macabre campaign of cyberstalking and harassment that targeted two journalists in 2019.

As we've previously written, the case involved deliveries of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, a book about surviving the loss of a spouse, and a bloody pig mask to the home of a couple who run a news website. There were also harassing messages sent via email and Twitter, and an attempt to install a GPS tracking device on the victims' car. Criminal charges resulted in guilty pleas and prison terms for former eBay employees.

The victims were Ina and David Steiner of Natick, Massachusetts, who run the news website EcommerceBytes. "David and I officially settled the lawsuit we filed in 2021 against eBay and its former executives over the stalking and harassment campaign we endured in 2019 designed to stop our reporting," Ina Steiner wrote on EcommerceBytes yesterday. "The landmark civil rights settlement includes $55.7 million in compensation and charitable commitments."

Read full article

Comments

Study: Dinosaurs were charbroiled after Chicxulub impact

Study: Dinosaurs were charbroiled after Chicxulub impact

fivenewscrypto    juillet 29, 2026   

Some 66 million years ago, an asteroid impact wiped out three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, most notably taking down the dinosaurs. But exactly how that impact caused those extinctions has been the subject of fierce debate. According to a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, the impact would have produced an immense cloud of dust that superheated the upper atmosphere, charbroiling living organisms unable to take shelter and igniting widespread wildfires.

As previously reported, the most widely accepted explanation for what triggered that catastrophic mass extinction is known as the “Alvarez hypothesis,” after the late physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son, Walter. In 1980, they proposed that the extinction event may have been caused by a massive asteroid or comet hitting the Earth. They based this conclusion on their analysis of sedimentary layers at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary(the K-Pg boundary, formerly known as the K-T boundary) found all over the world, which included unusually high concentrations of iridium—a metal more commonly found in asteroids than on Earth. (That same year, Dutch geophysicist Jan Smit independently arrived at a similar conclusion.)

Since then, scientists have identified a likely impact site: a large crater in Chicxulub, Mexico, in the Yucatan Peninsula, first discovered by geophysicists in the late 1970s. The impactor that created it was sufficiently large (between 11 and 81 kilometers, or 7 to 50 miles) to melt, shock, and eject granite from deep inside the Earth, probably causing a megatsunami and ejecting vaporized rock and sulfates into the atmosphere. It has been estimated that the impact would have released energy over a billion times higher than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Read full article

Comments

Judge blocks first state law that would have banned prediction markets

Judge blocks first state law that would have banned prediction markets

fivenewscrypto    juillet 29, 2026   

Minnesota, the first US state to prohibit prediction markets, was prevented from enforcing the law by a federal court ruling just days before the ban was scheduled to take effect. But while Minnesota was stopped from enforcing a total ban, the state may ultimately be allowed to prohibit some types of prediction-market wagers.

The Trump administration and the two largest prediction markets—Kalshi and Polymarket—sued Minnesota after the state enacted the law in May. The cases were consolidated, and a ruling issued yesterday imposed a preliminary injunction blocking the law that was scheduled to take effect on August 1.

Minnesota lawmakers saw prediction markets as indistinguishable from gambling, but the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) argues it has exclusive authority to regulate the platforms under federal law. One of the primary legal questions is whether event contracts are "swaps," which are regulated by the CFTC.

Read full article

Comments

Trump admin exempts SpaceX's Starlink from FCC ban on foreign-made routers

Trump admin exempts SpaceX's Starlink from FCC ban on foreign-made routers

fivenewscrypto    juillet 29, 2026   

The Trump administration today exempted SpaceX's Starlink routers from the Federal Communications Commission ban on foreign-made routers.

A public notice issued by the FCC said Starlink routers received approval from the Department of War (also known as the Department of Defense). SpaceX's exemption is good until February 1, 2028.

The FCC kicked off an industry-wide scramble when it updated the Covered List to include all consumer-grade routers made at least partly outside the US, except those that are granted exemptions. The Covered List includes devices deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to national security. Given that routers are generally built outside the US or at least contain foreign-made components, all major vendors need exemptions.

Read full article

Comments

A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

fivenewscrypto    juillet 29, 2026   

One missing underscore in a Skyrim-themed username put an innocent Nova Scotia man in prison for 18 months.

A 2018 child-luring investigation, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually extended to Halifax, Canada, was based on a false premise.

Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name "fus__ro_dah" (two underscores after "fus"), but they accidentally requested records for the username "fus_ro_dah" (one underscore after "fus"). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme.

Read full article

Comments

“Google and Reddit do not own the Internet," web scraper says after court win

“Google and Reddit do not own the Internet," web scraper says after court win

fivenewscrypto    juillet 29, 2026   

After a big court loss last week, Google has confirmed that it won’t give up its fight to block AI bots from scraping its search results. And Reddit is weirdly along for the ride.

Curiously invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Google sued SerpApi last December. The search giant accused the web scraper of circumventing its anti-scraping technology and then selling content scraped from Google search results through an unauthorized “Google Search API” software service.

According to Google, the anti-scraping tech was in place to protect copyrighted content in search results. Allegedly, SerpApi’s circumvention threatened to disrupt Google’s relationships with rights holders, including some who license content to Google to appear in so-called “knowledge panels” that are displayed in some search results for well-known people or entities.

Read full article

Comments

5th Circuit blocks Texas law requiring websites to filter "harmful" speech

5th Circuit blocks Texas law requiring websites to filter "harmful" speech

fivenewscrypto    juillet 28, 2026   

Texas cannot enforce a law's requirement that websites block minors from seeing harmful speech, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled on Friday.

Big Tech lobby groups challenged the Texas "law’s requirement that certain social media-based 'digital service providers' (DSPs) monitor and filter content accessible to known minors to prevent exposure to several categories of potentially harmful speech," judges wrote. In a 2-1 ruling in favor of the tech groups' challenge, judges said the monitoring and filtering requirement is preempted by Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act of 1996.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and NetChoice challenged portions of the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act (SCOPE Act), which applies to websites and online applications that collect or process personally identifying information. The tech groups won a preliminary injunction from a district court. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed to the 5th Circuit but wasn't able to convince judges to reverse the injunction that prevents enforcement of the monitoring and filtering rules.

Read full article

Comments