An anonymous reader shares a report: By now, the Forbes 30 Under 30 list has become more than a little notorious for the amount of entrants who go on to be charged with fraud.[...] Gokce Guven, a 26-year-old Turkish national and the founder and CEO of fintech startup Kalder, was charged last week with alleged securities fraud, wire fraud, visa fraud, and aggravated identity theft. The New York-based fintech startup -- which uses the "Turn Your Rewards into [a] Revenue Engine" tagline -- says it can help companies create and monetize individual rewards programs. The company was founded in 2022, and offers participating firms the opportunity to earn ongoing revenue streams via partner affiliate sales, Axios previously reported.

Guven was featured in last year's Forbes 30 Under 30 list. The magazine notes in the writeup that Guven's clients included major chocolatier Godiva and the International Air Transport Association, the trade organization that represents a majority of the world's airlines. Kalder also claims to have enjoyed the backing of a number of prominent VC firms. The U.S. Department of Justice alleges that, during Kalder's seed round in April of 2024, Guven managed to raise $7 million from more than a dozen investors after presenting a pitch deck that was rife with false information.

According to the government, Kalder's pitch deck claimed that there were 26 brands "using Kalder" and another 53 brands in "live freemium." However, officials say that, in reality, Kalder had, in many cases, only been offering heavily discounted pilot programs to many of those companies. Other brands "had no agreement with Kalder whatsoever -- not even for free services," officials said in a press release announcing the indictment. The pitch deck also "falsely reported that Kalder's recurring revenue had steadily grown month over month since February 2023 and that by March 2024, Kalder had reached $1.2 million in annual recurring revenue." The government also accuses Guven of having kept two separate sets of financial books.

Apple TV+ has landed the screen rights to Cosmere, the sprawling literary universe created by Brandon Sanderson. "The first titles being eyed for adaptation are the Mistborn series, for features, and The Stormlight Archive series, for television," reports the Hollywood Reporter. From the report: The deal is rare one, coming after a competitive situation which saw Sanderson meet with most of the studio heads in town. It gives the author rarefied control over the screen translations, according to sources. Sanderson will be the architect of the universe; will write, produce and consult; and will have approvals. That's a level of involvement that not even J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin enjoys.

Sanderson's literary success and fan following helped pave the way for such a deal. One of the most prolific and beloved fantasy authors working today, he has sold over 50 million copies of his books worldwide, collectively across his series. [...] While the Cosmere books are set in various worlds and eras, the underlying premise concerns a being named Adolnasium who is killed by a group of conspirators. The being's power is broken into 16 shards, which are then spread out throughout many worlds by the conspirators, spreading many kinds of magic across the universe.

Court documents unsealed last week in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic reveal that the AI company ran an operation called "Project Panama" to buy millions of physical books, slice off their spines, scan the pages to train its Claude chatbot, and then send the remains to recycling companies.

The company spent tens of millions of dollars on the effort and hired Tom Turvey, a Google executive who had worked on the legally contested Google Books project two decades earlier. Anthropic bought books in batches of tens of thousands from retailers including Better World Books and World of Books. A vendor document noted the company was seeking to scan between 500,000 and two million books.

Before Project Panama, Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann downloaded books from LibGen, a shadow library of pirated material, over 11 days in June 2021. He later shared a link to the Pirate Library Mirror site with colleagues, writing "this is awesome!!!" Meta employees similarly downloaded books from torrent platforms after approval from Mark Zuckerberg, court filings allege, though one engineer wrote that "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right." Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion in August without admitting wrongdoing.

The video game industry is experiencing something that most consumer-facing businesses would consider remarkable: organized online campaigns from players are actually forcing studios to cancel projects or publicly walk back any association with AI-generated content.

Running With Scissors, the publisher behind the Postal shooter franchise, recently scrapped a title after players accused its trailer of containing AI-generated graphics. Goonswarm Games, the developer behind the canceled project, subsequently shut down entirely and cited six years of lost work alongside what it described as a flood of threats and accusations.

Sandfall Interactive's "Obscur: Expedition 33" had its Indie Game Awards Game of the Year honor rescinded after the developer said it had considered AI-generated images, even though the final release contained none. Larian Studios, the developer behind Baldur's Gate 3, faced immediate backlash after CEO Swen Vincke mentioned in an interview that the company was using generative AI to "explore ideas" for an upcoming release. Vincke later clarified on X that artists use AI only for reference images the way they would use "art books or Google," and Larian executives eventually stated on Reddit that AI would play no role in final artwork.

An expanded class-action lawsuit filed last Friday alleges that a member of Nvidia's data strategy team directly contacted Anna's Archive -- the sprawling shadow library hosting millions of pirated books -- to explore "including Anna's Archive in pre-training data for our LLMs."

Internal documents cited in the amended complaint show Nvidia sought information about "high-speed access" to the collection, which Anna's Archive charged tens of thousands of dollars for. According to the lawsuit, Anna's Archive warned Nvidia that its library was illegally acquired and maintained, then asked if the company had internal permission to proceed. The pirate library noted it had previously wasted time on other AI companies that couldn't secure approval. Nvidia management allegedly gave "the green light" within a week.

Anna's Archive promised access to roughly 500 terabytes of data, including millions of books normally only accessible through Internet Archive's controlled digital lending system. The lawsuit also alleges Nvidia downloaded books from LibGen, Sci-Hub, and Z-Library.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: NVIDIA executives allegedly authorized the use of millions of pirated books from Anna's Archive to fuel its AI training. In an expanded class-action lawsuit that cites internal NVIDIA documents, several book authors claim (PDF) that the trillion-dollar company directly reached out to Anna's Archive, seeking high-speed access to the shadow library data. [...] Last Friday, the authors filed an amended complaint that significantly expands the scope of the lawsuit. In addition to adding more books, authors, and AI models, it also includes broader "shadow library" claims and allegations. The authors, including Abdi Nazemian, now cite various internal Nvidia emails and documents, suggesting that the company willingly downloaded millions of copyrighted books. The new complaint alleges that "competitive pressures drove NVIDIA to piracy," which allegedly included collaborating with the controversial Anna's Archive library.

According to the amended complaint, a member of Nvidia's data strategy team reached out to Anna's Archive to find out what the pirate library could offer the trillion-dollar company "Desperate for books, NVIDIA contacted Anna's Archive -- the largest and most brazen of the remaining shadow libraries -- about acquiring its millions of pirated materials and 'including Anna's Archive in pre-training data for our LLMs,'" the complaint notes. "Because Anna's Archive charged tens of thousands of dollars for 'high-speed access' to its pirated collections [] NVIDIA sought to find out what "high-speed access" to the data would look like."

According to the complaint, Anna's Archive then warned Nvidia that its library was illegally acquired and maintained. Because the site previously wasted time on other AI companies, the pirate library asked NVIDIA executives if they had internal permission to move forward. This permission was allegedly granted within a week, after which Anna's Archive provided the chip giant with access to its pirated books. "Within a week of contacting Anna's Archive, and days after being warned by Anna's Archive of the illegal nature of their collections, NVIDIA management gave 'the green light' to proceed with the piracy. Anna's Archive offered NVIDIA millions of pirated copyrighted books." The complaint states that Anna's Archive promised to provide NVIDIA with access to roughly 500 terabytes of data. This included millions of books that are usually only accessible through Internet Archive's digital lending system, which itself has been targeted in court. The complaint does not explicitly mention whether NVIDIA ended up paying Anna's Archive for access to the data.

Additionally, it's worth mentioning that NVIDIA also stands accused of using other pirated sources. In addition to the previously included Books3 database, the new complaint also alleges that the company downloaded books from LibGen, Sci-Hub, and Z-Library. In addition to downloading and using pirated books for its own AI training, the authors allege NVIDIA distributed scripts and tools that allowed its corporate customers to automatically download "The Pile", which contains the Books3 pirated dataset.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC: Led by Texas and New Hampshire, U.S. states across the national map, both red and blue in political stripes, are developing bitcoin strategic reserves and bringing cryptocurrencies onto their books through additional state finance and budgeting measures. Texas recently became the first state to purchase bitcoin after a legislative effort that began in 2024, but numerous states have joined the "Reserve Race" to pass legislation that will allow them to ultimately buy cryptocurrencies. New Hampshire passed its crypto strategic reserve law last May, even before Texas, giving the state treasurer the authority to invest up to 5% of the state funds in crypto ETFs, though precious metals such as gold are also authorized for purchase. Arizona passed similar legislation, while Massachusetts, Ohio, and South Dakota have legislation at various stages of committee review...

Similarities in the actions taken across states to date include include authorizing the state treasurer or other investment official to allow the investment of a limited amount of public funds in crypto and building out the governance structure needed to invest in crypto... [New Hampshire] became the first state to approve the issuance of a bitcoin-backed municipal bond last November, a $100 million issuance that would mark the first time cryptocurrency is used as collateral in the U.S. municipal bond market. The deal has not taken place yet, though plans are for the issuance to occur this year... "What's different here is it's bitcoin rather than taxpayer dollars as the collateral," [said University of Chicago public policy professor Justin Marlowe]. In numerous states, including, Colorada, Utah, and Louisiana,crypto is now accepted as payment for taxes and other state business...

"For many in the state/local investing industry, crypto-backed assets are still far too speculative and volatile for public money," Marlowe said. "But others, and I think there's a sort of generational shift in the works, see it as a reasonable store of value that is actually stronger on many other public sector values like transparency and asset integrity," he added.
Public policy professor Marlowe "sees the state-level trend as largely one of signaling at present," according to the article. (Marlowe says "If you're a governor and you want to broadcast that you are amenable to innovative business development in the digital economy, these are relatively low-cost, low-risk ways to send that signal.") But the bigger steps may reflect how crypto advocates have increasing political power in the states. The article notes that the cryptocurrency industry was the largest corporate donor in a U.S. election cycle in 2024, "with support given to candidates on both sides."

"It is already amassing a war chest for the 2026 midterms."

Anna's Archive has been hit with a U.S. federal court default judgment and permanent injunction over its scraping and distribution of OCLC's WorldCat data, which occurred more than two years ago. According to the ruling, the shadow library must delete all copies of its WorldCat data and stop scraping, using, storing, or distributing the data. "It is expected that OCLC will use the injunction to motivate third-party intermediaries to take action against Anna's Archive," reports TorrentFreak. From the report: Yesterday, a federal court in Ohio issued a default judgment and permanent injunction against the site's unidentified operator(s). This order was requested by OCLC, which owns the proprietary WorldCat database that was scraped and published by Anna's Archive more than two years ago. OCLC initially demanded millions of dollars in damages but eventually dropped this request, focusing on taking the site down through an injunction that would also apply to intermediaries. "Anna's Archive's flagrantly illegal actions have damaged and continue to irreparably damage OCLC. As such, issuance of a permanent injunction is necessary to stop any further harm to OCLC," the request read.

This pivot makes sense since Anna's Archive did not respond to the lawsuit and would likely ignore all payment demands too. However, with the right type of court order, third-party services such as hosting companies and domain registrars might come along. The permanent injunction, issued by U.S. District Court Judge Michael Watson yesterday, does not mention any third-party services by name. However, it is directed at all parties that are "in active concert and participation with" Anna's Archive. Specifically, the site's operator and these third parties are prohibited from scraping WorldCat data, storing or distributing the data on Anna's Archive websites, and encouraging others to store, use or share this data. Additionally, the site has to delete all WorldCat data, which also includes all torrents.

Judge Watson denied the default judgment for 'unjust enrichment' and 'tortious interference.' However, he granted the order based on the 'trespass to chattels' and 'breach of contract' claims. The latter is particularly noteworthy, as the judge ruled that because Anna's Archive is a 'sophisticated party' that scraped the site daily, it had constructive notice of the terms and entered into a 'browsewrap' agreement simply by using the service. While these nuances are important for legal experts, the result for Anna's Archive is that it lost. And while there are no monetary damages, the permanent injunction can certainly have an impact. Further reading: Spotify Says 'Anti-Copyright Extremists' Scraped Its Library

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft's digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are disappearing in a shift described inside Microsoft as an "AI-powered learning experience."

Microsoft started cutting back on its employee subscriptions to news and reports services in November, with some publishers receiving an automated email cancellation of a contract. [...] Strategic News Service (SNS), which has provided global reports to Microsoft's roughly 220,000 employees and executives for more than 20 years, is no longer part of Microsoft's subscription list.

Scifi author/tech activist Cory Doctorow has decried the "enshittification" of our technologies to extract more profit. But Saturday he also described what could be "the beginning of the end for enshittification" in a new article for the Guardian — "our chance to make tech good again". There is only one reason the world isn't bursting with wildly profitable products and projects that disenshittify the US's defective products: its (former) trading partners were bullied into passing an "anti-circumvention" law that bans the kind of reverse-engineering that is the necessary prelude to modifying an existing product to make it work better for its users (at the expense of its manufacturer)...

Post-Brexit, the UK is uniquely able to seize this moment. Unlike our European cousins, we needn't wait for the copyright directive to be repealed before we can strike article 6 off our own law books and thereby salvage something good out of Brexit... Until we repeal the anti-circumvention law, we can't reverse-engineer the US's cloud software, whether it's a database, a word processor or a tractor, in order to swap out proprietary, American code for robust, open, auditable alternatives that will safeguard our digital sovereignty. The same goes for any technology tethered to servers operated by any government that might have interests adverse to ours — say, the solar inverters and batteries we buy from China.

This is the state of play at the dawn of 2026. The digital rights movement has two powerful potential coalition partners in the fight to reclaim the right of people to change how their devices work, to claw back privacy and a fair deal from tech: investors and national security hawks. Admittedly, the door is only open a crack, but it's been locked tight since the turn of the century. When it comes to a better technology future, "open a crack" is the most exciting proposition I've heard in decades.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

Google and Character.AI have agreed to settle multiple lawsuits from families alleging the chatbot encouraged self-harm and suicide among teens. "The settlements would mark the first resolutions in the wave of lawsuits against tech companies whose AI chatbots encouraged teens to hurt or kill themselves," notes Axios. From the report: Families allege that Character.AI's chatbot encouraged their children to cut their arms, suggested murdering their parents, wrote sexually explicit messages and did not discourage suicide, per lawsuits and congressional testimony. "Parties have agreed to a mediated settlement in principle to resolve all claims between them in the above-referenced matter," one document filed in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida reads.

The documents do not contain any specific monetary amounts for the settlements. Pricy settlements could deter companies from continuing to offer chatbot products to kids. But without new laws on the books, don't expect major changes across the industry. Last October, Character.AI said it would bar people under 18 from using its chatbots, in a sweeping move to address concerns over child safety.

Book publisher HarperCollins said it will start translating romance novels under its famous Harlequin label in France using AI, reducing or eliminating the pay for the team of human contract translators who previously did this work. 404Media: Publisher's Weekly broke the news in English after French outlets reported on the story in December. According to a joint statement from French Association of Literary Translators (ATFL) and En Chair et en Os (In Flesh and Bone) -- an anti-AI activist group of French translators -- HarperCollins France has been contacting its translators to tell them they're being replaced with machines in 2026.

The ATFL/ En Chair et en Os statement explained that HarperCollins France would use a third party company called Fluent Planet to run Harlequin romance novels through a machine translation system. The books would then be checked for errors and finalized by a team of freelancers. The ATFL and En Chair et en Os called on writers, book workers, and readers to refuse this machine translated future. They begged people to "reaffirm our unconditional commitment to human texts, created by human beings, in dignified working conditions."

A survey of 2,000 teachers, students and parents conducted by the New York Times found that many high schools have stopped assigning full novels to students, opting instead for excerpts that are often read on school-issued laptops rather than in print. The shift stems from multiple factors: a belief that students have shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare students for standardized tests, and the influence of Common Core standards adopted by many U.S. states more than a decade ago.

Schools increasingly rely on curriculum products like StudySync, which takes an anthology approach to literature rather than requiring complete books. Teachers acknowledge that teens now read far fewer full novels than previous generations, though some educators push back against the trend. "Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still assign whole books," said Heather McGuire, a New Mexico English teacher who responded to the survey.

2025'S final months finally saw the publication of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Bovadium Fragments, writes the Los Angeles Review of Books: Anyone who has read Tolkien's letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and The Bovadium Fragments is a work brimming with Tolkien's fury — specifically, ire over mankind's obsession with motor vehicles. Tolkien's anger is expressed through a playful satire told from the perspective of a group of future archaeologists who are studying the titular fragments, which tell of a civilization that asphyxiated itself on its own exhaust fumes. Tolkien's fictional fragments use the language of ancient myth, reframing modern issues like traffic congestion and parking with a grandeur that highlights their total absurdity. It is Tolkien at his angriest and funniest, making The Bovadium Fragments a minor treasure in his ever-growing catalog...

As Tolkien put it in one of his private letters, "the spirit of 'Isengard,' if not of Mordor, is of course always cropping up. The present design of destroying Oxford in order to accommodate motor-cars is a case." Readers of The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) will recognize the allusion. In the author's magnum opus, Isengard is a kind of industrial hell, endlessly feeding its furnaces with felled trees... The Bovadium Fragments brings Tolkien's visceral hatred of such machines to the fore for the first time — on the same level as Isengard or the scoured Shire. In Tolkien's story, the words "Motores" and "monsters" are interchangeable. And with his grand, mythic register, Tolkien defamiliarizes the car enough for modern readers to see it as he does — as truly monstrous. "[T]he Motores continued to bring forth an ever larger progeny," Tolkien writes. "[M]any of the citizens harboured the monsters, feeding them with the costly oils and essences which they required, and building houses for them in their gardens...."

One suspects that Tolkien would have preferred to see Oxford return to the era of the donkey cart. That kind of nostalgia is familiar in Tolkien's work — the idea that we developed just a little too far, skipping past an Eden we failed to recognize a generation or two ago. (For Tolkien, the paragon of paradise seems to have been a rural village around the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.) But he also knows that mankind's impulse to develop is something we cannot help. And the inevitable blowback we get from our hubris is something we cannot avoid. That defeatist attitude is suggested in the frame narrative to The Bovadium Fragments, in which the archaeologists smugly declare their superiority to the extinct citizens of old Oxford. "We at any rate are not likely to fall into such folly," one of them says.

In their more enlightened future, we are told, they only pursue the more benign science of longevity. Their wish is that one day they shall "at last conquer mortality, and not 'die like animals.'" But humans are animals, Tolkien argues. And in stretching beyond that, we may find progress and modern conveniences like motorcars. But perhaps we also pave a road to Isengard. And we may not recognize that destination until it is too late — until we are trapped within its walls, suffocating on our own exhaust fumes.

The International Publishers Association spent the past year promoting the slogan "Democracy depends on reading," but Atlantic senior editor Adam Kirsch argues that this utilitarian pitch fundamentally misunderstands why people become readers in the first place.

The most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that less than half of Americans read a single book in 2022, and only 38% read a novel or short story. A University of Florida and University College London study found daily reading for pleasure fell 3% annually from 2003 to 2023. Among 13-year-olds, just 14% read for fun almost every day in 2023, down from 27% a decade earlier.

Kirsch says to stop treating reading as civic medicine. "It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice," he writes. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn't stop people from buying dangerous books. Now that books are deemed virtuous, nobody picks them up. He points to Don Quixote and Madame Bovary -- novels whose protagonists are ruined by their reading habits. Great writers, he notes, never idealized literature the way educators do. The pitch to young readers should emphasize staying up late reading under the covers by flashlight, hoping nobody finds out.