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United States: Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines And Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2022
by Gunnar Larson 24 Nov '22

24 Nov '22

https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/social-media/1252100/information-techno… With the aim of making the social media intermediaries accountable to ensure a secure, credible and dependable internet, and to make certain that the constitutional rights of the Indian citizens are not contravened by the big-tech platforms, the Central Government of India recently notified the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2022. The amended Rules make it mandatory for the intermediaries i.e., the social media platforms, such as Twitter, Meta, Instagram, YouTube, etc. to comply with the law of the land. The revised Rules specify that the intermediary is required to publish its rules and regulations, privacy policy and user agreement on its website/mobile-based application or both and ensure compliance with the same. Any change in rules and regulations, privacy policy or user agreement is also to be intimated to the users periodically and at least once a year. Further, reasonable efforts shall be made by the intermediary to not host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, store, update or share any information that: 1. belongs to another person over which the user does not have any right; 2. is obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, invasive of another's privacy, insulting or harassing on the basis of gender, racially or ethnically objectionable, relating or encouraging money laundering or gambling, or promoting enmity between different groups on the grounds of religion or caste with the intent to incite violence; 3. is harmful to children; 4. infringes any patent, trademark, copyright or other proprietary rights; 5. deceives or misleads the addressee about the origin of the message or intentionally communicates any misinformation or information which is patently false and untrue or misleading in nature; 6. impersonates another person; 7. threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign States, or public order, or causes incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence, or prevents investigation of any offence, or is insulting other nation; 8. contains a software virus or any other computer code, file or program designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of any computer resource; 9. violates any law for the time being in force. The amended Rules also provide for the constitution of the Grievance Appellate Committees, before which any person aggrieved by the decision of the Grievance Office of the social media companies may prefer an appeal. Each Grievance Appellate Committee shall consist of a chairperson and two whole-time members appointed by the Central Government, of which one shall be a member *ex-officio * and two shall be independent members. Any complaint before the Grievance Appellate Committee is to be acknowledged and resolved expeditiously and, in a time-bound manner. The Committee shall adopt an online dispute resolution mechanism wherein the entire appeal process, from the filing of the appeal to the decision thereof, shall be conducted through digital mode. While the Union ministers have hailed the present amendment to IT Rules as one which empowers the users, the move has been condemned by the public policy and advocacy groups who believe that the constitution of Grievance Appellate Committees would essentially hinder online free speech. The appointment of members of the Committees by the central government would also lead to a reasonable apprehension of bias. The advocacy group, Internet Freedom Foundation, in one of its tweets stated, “*This will incentivise platforms to remove/suppress any speech unpalatable to the government or those exerting political pressure and increase government control and power since the government will be effectively able to also decide what content must be displayed by platforms* ”. Some apprehensions have also been raised towards adequately staffing these committees. To conclude, regulating online content has been a bone of contention between the government and the social media giants. However, once the Grievance Appellate Committees are set up, it would become obligatory for the social media companies to follow the instructions of the government-appointed members, shifting the power to the state. Source: - https://www.meity.gov.in/writereaddata/files/Gazette%20notification_IT%20Ru… - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/govt-notifies-changes-…

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The Sound Of "Silent Attorneys": Judge Orders Google To Re-Review Emails Withheld For Privilege To Which Counsel Never Responded
by Gunnar Larson 24 Nov '22

24 Nov '22

https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/trials-appeals-compensation/1252210/the… Back in May, we wrote about <https://www.mondaq.com/redirection.asp?article_id=1252210&company_id=7032&r…> a pending motion before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, in which the U.S. Department of Justice and several state attorneys general ("DOJ Plaintiffs") sought to sanction Defendant Google and compel disclosure of all emails withheld for privilege that legal counsel received but never responded to (affectionately referred to as "silent attorney" emails). The DOJ Plaintiffs claimed the silent attorney emails constituted artificial requests for legal advice intended to conceal sensitive business communications from discovery. After the parties briefed the issues, the judge ordered that the parties identify cases in support of their positions on whether the judge had the power to issue sanctions for pre-litigation conduct, and further ordered Google to produce a random sample of 210 of the 21,000 "silent attorney" emails for the court's *in camera* review. The same day our blog post was published, the judge made a decision on these motions at a status conference, and the transcript has recently been made public. In short, the judge concluded that he did not have inherent authority to issue sanctions with respect to this particular pre-litigation conduct, but he did order Google to re-review any of the privileged "silent attorney" emails that had not already been re-reviewed for privilege. The DOJ Plaintiffs identified several cases in which courts have exercised their inherent authority to sanction pre-litigation conduct, while Google identified none that resembled the facts of this case. The court acknowledged that while the cases cited by DOJ Plaintiffs did demonstrate that the judge has inherent authority to sanction pre-litigation conduct, none of the cases would allow him to sanction the particular type of pre-litigation conduct here – that is, the alleged practice of copying lawyers on emails in order to conceal sensitive business information from discovery. The judge grouped the facts in DOJ Plaintiffs' cases into two categories of "bad" but distinguishable pre-litigation conduct: (1) conduct that affects the ability to bring, maintain, or defend the litigation itself (e.g., employee accessing records from employer's server and using those records to bring and prosecute the lawsuit), and (2) spoliation of evidence. The judge noted that the conduct in the present case aligned more closely with the spoliation cases, but emphasized the important distinction that unlike cases in which evidence is spoliated, the documents here are still available, and are in fact being produced to the DOJ Plaintiffs. The judge also provided an analysis of the random sample of 210 documents produced for *in camera* review, noting that Google ended up de-designating and producing 26 documents out of the 210 that it had previously withheld as privileged. Of the remaining 184 documents, the judge was satisfied that approximately 75% were clearly privileged, while approximately 25% required more context for a full determination of privilege, but did not appear to be designated as such in bad faith. The judge expressed concern, however, with the fact that 26 of the 210 documents – approximately 12% – were "de-privileged" upon re-review. When the court originally ordered Google to provide a 210 document sample, this number represented 10% of the approximately 21,000 "silent attorney" documents being withheld as privileged at the time. Since then, Google had already re-reviewed and produced an additional 5,000 or so documents, leaving approximately 16,000 still at issue at the time of the court conference. The judge asked Google whether it had re-reviewed all of the withheld "silent attorney" emails with the same level of scrutiny as the 210 provided to the court. Google's counsel did not provide a clear answer, explaining that some of the documents had already been re-reviewed, while others had not, and that different lawyers might reasonably come to different conclusions regarding privilege. The judge acknowledged that this might be true, but stressed that the court and the plaintiffs should still feel satisfied that all documents are equally scrutinized with respect to privilege. He reasoned that, assuming the remaining documents would be de-privileged at the same rate as the 210-document sample, 12% of 16,000 – 1,920 – documents was not an insubstantial number. Therefore, the judge ordered Google to conduct a re-review of any of the 16,000 documents that had not yet been re-reviewed, using a level of scrutiny that is consistent with the 210-document sample review, and to produce any documents they determine are not privileged. One takeaway from this case is the need for counsel to take real care when withholding emails on privilege grounds that were sent to an attorney but received no response. Reviewing each email and having consistent criteria for privilege determinations will go a long way to helping avoid drawn-out and expensive discovery

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When Actual Knowledge Is Not Notice: Harvard Loses Excess Coverage For Defense Costs In Case Litigated All The Way To Supreme Court
by Gunnar Larson 24 Nov '22

24 Nov '22

https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/insurance-laws-and-products/1251772/whe… Recently, amid the tempest of media coverage surrounding Supreme Court oral arguments in the case of Students for Fair Admission v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, another federal court quietly issued a dispositive order in related coverage litigation, holding that Harvard's excess carrier, Zurich, had no coverage obligation in the underlying case because Harvard did not provide timely notice under a "claims-made-and-reported" policy. The case is President and Fellows of Harvard College v. Zurich Am. Ins. Co., 1:21-cv-11530-ADB (D. Mass.). Harvard faced an uphill battle in the coverage suit: it did not report the claim to Zurich within the policy's reporting period, and multiple Massachusetts decisions have strictly construed similar notice requirements in favor of insurance carriers. Harvard attempted to distinguish this line of cases on the basis that, here, Zurich had actual notice of the underlying litigation due to the case's public notoriety and widespread media reporting. Actual notice would be dispositive, Harvard argued, because the purpose of a claims-made notice requirement is to permit the carrier to make informed underwriting decisions prospectively. But U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs disagreed, concluding that under extant authority, "[p]rejudice and actual or constructive knowledge are not exceptions to the general rule" that notice provisions in claims-made policies should be strictly enforced. Importantly, in other contexts, courts in many jurisdictions have rejected insurers' late notice defenses when the insurer could not demonstrate that it was prejudiced by the timing of notice and/or when notice was not a condition precedent to coverage under the relevant policy language. Harvard's failure to give earlier notice may have resulted from an overly optimistic initial prediction of Harvard's likely legal spend in the matter. According to the parties' filings, when the underlying suit was filed in November 2014, Harvard had a $2.5 million self-insured retention and a $25 million primary policy through AIG. Harvard timely tendered its defense to AIG but said nothing to Zurich at the time-perhaps because it did not think the claim would pierce the $27.5M layer. Although Harvard finally provided notice to Zurich in May 2017, by then it was too late: the claims-made policy required notice during the policy period or within 90 days of the expiration of the policy, a window that expired in January 2016, more than a year earlier. To state the obvious-this decision provides a cautionary tale to all policyholders, especially those holding claims-made-and-reported policies. Policyholders are often hesitant to report claims because they doubt that the subject insurance will come into play and they do not want to risk a premium increase by reporting a claim to a layer that is ultimately never reached. But this is a classic example of being penny-wise and pound-foolish. It may have been reasonable for Harvard to initially predict that its defense costs in the underlying case would remain within its primary limits, but by the time Harvard filed its complaint against Zurich in September 2021, Harvard reported that its $25 million primary policy had been exhausted-and this was before Supreme Court briefing and oral argument. Harvard's omission to provide notice to Zurich may well have cost it millions. When in any doubt, policyholders should give notice early and often. Pillsbury's insurance professionals are always on hand to assist with navigating any challenges.

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Professional Liability Brew: Loaded Dice? Dishonesty, Professional Negligence And Loss Of A Chance (Video)
by Gunnar Larson 24 Nov '22

24 Nov '22

https://www.mondaq.com/uk/professional-negligence/1252626/professional-liab… Economic downturns lead to increases in dishonesty and fraud disputes. In this brew, hear from Sara Ibrahim <https://www.mondaq.com/redirection.asp?article_id=1252626&company_id=30134&…> and Rob Hammond <https://www.mondaq.com/redirection.asp?article_id=1252626&company_id=30134&…> on how this impacts "loss of a chance" professional negligence claims and their pleading, post *– Perry v Raleys* [2019] UKSC 5 and *Brearley* [2021] EWHC 2635 (Ch).

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Our Leadership Team | SoFi
by Gunnar Larson 23 Nov '22

23 Nov '22

https://www.sofi.com/our-leadership/ Harvey Schwartz BOARD MEMBER Harvey M. Schwartz is a business leader, investor and philanthropist. For the past 30+ years, Harvey’s professional focus has centered on tackling complex financial and business challenges, innovating and strengthening financial markets and developing leaders. Harvey retired from Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. following 20+ distinguished years at the company where he oversaw sales and trading, finance, technology and operations. He completed his tenure as the firm’s President and Co-Chief Operating Officer. He joined Goldman Sachs in 1997 and subsequently held numerous senior leadership positions including, Chief Financial Officer, Global Co-Head of the Securities Division, Head of Securities Division Sales, Head of North American Sales and Co-Head of the Americas Financing Group. He additionally served as a member of the firm’s Management Committee and co-headed its Risk Committee, Steering Committee on Regulatory Reform and Finance Committee. Harvey established the firm’s Investment Policy Committee on which he also served as a member. Prior to Goldman Sachs, Harvey spent a decade working at several other financial firms including at Citicorp from 1990 through 1997. As both an investor and advisor, he is currently involved in a range of investment and philanthropic endeavors focused on physical and mental health management and developing future business leaders, including women and young people seeking a career in finance. Among his efforts, Harvey founded and supports a pioneering program for students at his alma mater Rutgers University that provides them with real-life financial services experience through internships, professional networking opportunities and mentorship. Harvey earned BA from Rutgers University where he is member of the university’s Hall of Distinguished Alumni and a past member of the Rutgers University Foundation’s Board of Overseers. He received his MBA from Columbia University.

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Evidence Grows that Crypto and Federally-Insured Banks Are a Combustible Mixture
by Gunnar Larson 23 Nov '22

23 Nov '22

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2022/11/evidence-grows-that-crypto-and-feder… The fallout from the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX and its missing billions of dollars of customer funds has, finally, galvanized some members of Congress to push back against the swarms of crypto lobbyists whose activities are clearly impacting the safety and soundness of U.S. banks. On Monday, Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, along with Senators Jack Reed (D-RI), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), and Tina Smith (D-MN), sent a letter to federal banking regulators warning that SoFi, a federally-insured bank, potentially posed a risk to safety and soundness as a result of its digital asset trading activities. The Senators wrote as follows: “In January 2022, SoFi received approval from the Federal Reserve for the acquisition of Golden Pacific Bancorp, Inc. and a conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for the creation of SoFi Bank, N.A. SoFi completed the acquisition in February 2022. As part of the approval, the Federal Reserve provided SoFi with two years to divest from SoFi Digital Assets — a nonbank subsidiary that allows retail investors to buy and sell digital assets — or conform the subsidiary’s impermissible digital asset activities to the law. During this conformance period, SoFi has committed not to ‘expand [its] impermissible activities,’ except as specifically authorized by law. SoFi initially agreed to these terms, but since the acquisition, SoFi Digital Assets has apparently expanded its retail digital assets operations. “Two months after receiving regulatory approval, SoFi announced a new service allowing customers of its national bank to invest part of every direct deposit into digital assets with no fees. The company publicly billed this service as ‘the latest expansion of SoFi’s offerings to make it simpler to get started with cryptocurrency investing.’ SoFi’s own investor protection materials, however, warn customers that at least one token listed on SoFi Digital Assets is ‘a crypto pump-and-dump’ hazard with ‘no special use case or features’ and that ‘[it] might be among the most high-risk endeavors an investor can take.’ Troublingly, this conduct raises questions about SoFi’s compliance with commitments made in the January 2022 approvals and to meeting its ongoing obligations as a banking organization. “SoFi’s digital asset activities pose significant risks to both individual investors and safety and soundness. As we saw with the crypto meltdown this summer, where crypto-assets lost over $1 trillion in value in a matter of weeks, contagion in the banking system was limited because of regulatory guardrails. In the event of crypto-related exposures at SoFi Digital Assets ultimately require its parent company, bank holding company, or affiliated national bank to seek emergency liquidity or other financial assistance from the Federal Reserve or FDIC, taxpayers may be on the hook. Your agencies have publicly acknowledged these types of crypto-related risks. In fact, the Fed issued guidance detailing the risks posed by crypto-asset related activities to cybersecurity, anti-money laundering and countering of financing of terrorism efforts, consumer protection, and financial stability. Similarly, the OCC called out the volatility of crypto activities and the risks of the crypto ‘hype-driven economy’ to investors of modest means, and the FDIC issued an advisory warning of the risks to consumers when crypto companies misrepresent the availability of deposit insurance for crypto assets.” The Senators asked the banking regulators to force SoFi to comply with “all consumer financial protection and banking regulations.” You can read the letter to the banking regulators here and the very strong letter to SoFi’s CEO, Anthony Noto, here. How did the U.S. banking system become the playground of crypto billionaires? The answer is that they had a lot of help from some Republican members of Congress who sit on the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committees. We have, to our repulsion, watched these Senators and Reps shill for the crypto industry during hearings for years as if they are actually the industry’s registered lobbyists. See our report: As Bitcoin Crashes 34 Percent in a Week, U.S. Congressman Ted Budd Pushes Bank Regulator to Approve More Crypto National Bank Charters. (God help us all, Ted Budd (R-NC) was elected as a U.S. Senator from North Caroline in the midterm election this month.) Another big shill for the crypto industry is Pat Toomey (R-PA), who, thankfully, has decided to retire from Congress. This is what Toomey had to say about crypto at a Senate Banking hearing last week: “I want to follow up on a comment the Chairman made. I think I heard the Chairman refer to crypto as ‘risky new financial products’ and the insinuation was that they might have the ability to crash our financial system. “I think there’s a really important distinction that I want to underscore here. If you look at what happened with FTX, at least what appears to have happened by a very extensive coverage, this is fundamentally not about the kind of assets that were held by FTX. It’s about what individuals did with those assets. “There are a lot of corollaries. There are a lot of analogies here. One comes to mind. In 2011 MF Global commodity brokerage firm, it was run by former New Jersey Senator Jon Corzine. It collapsed after customers funds were misappropriated to fill a shortfall caused by the firm’s exposure to some trading that went south. Now, nobody suggested that the problem was the instruments that were used. The problem was the use of customers funds. Similarly, the 2008 financial crisis involved disastrous consequences with what people were doing with mortgages. Did we decide we gotta ban mortgages? Of course not.” Toomey, like most other crypto shills, has the ability to sound like he’s making the most sensible arguments that any intelligent person could make. But on closer examination, every single point he makes in the three paragraphs above collapses as quickly as FTX. Let’s start with the statement that “this is fundamentally not about the kind of assets that were held by FTX.” In reality, this is totally about the kind of assets that were held by FTX – and used to perpetuate a fraud. The speed at which the fraud unraveled is also totally “about the kind of assets.” What Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder and CEO of FTX, did with the help of his closest colleagues, was to create their own magic money. It was a crypto token called FTT. It was backed by nothing more than the hyped reputation of FTX, its celebrity endorsers, and the fawning media’s coverage of faux billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. In that sense, FTT functioned much like the “stock” of FTX. The price of FTT soared through a buying binge between FTX and Bankman-Fried’s own hedge fund, Alameda Research. FTT’s price went from less than $4 in December 2020 to more than $84 in September 2021 – a 2,000 percent gain in less than a year. FTT is trading at $1.29 this morning. CNBC explains what was going on with the FTT token as follows: “The source explained that Alameda could post the FTT tokens it held as collateral and borrow customer funds. Even if FTX created more FTT tokens, it would not drive down the coin’s value because these coins never made it onto the open market. As a result, these tokens held their market value, allowing Alameda to borrow against them – essentially receiving free money to trade with. “FTX had been able to sustain this pattern as long as it maintained the price of FTT and there was not a flood of customer withdrawals on the exchange. In the week leading up to the bankruptcy filing, FTX did not have enough assets to match customer withdrawals, the source said.” Reuters reported that Bankman-Fried had moved as much as $10 billion of FTX customers’ money to his hedge fund, Alameda Research, through a “backdoor” in its software. Alameda lost much of the money on wild bets while $1 billion to $2 billion had just “disappeared,” according to Reuters. The Financial Times reported that FTX held just $900 million “in easily sellable assets” against $9 billion “of liabilities the day before it collapsed into bankruptcy.” To attempt to equate what FTX was doing with commodity markets or mortgages is a clever sleight of hand by Toomey. But it fails miserably. Commodities have traded on exchanges for centuries. Home mortgages have been used in the U.S. since the 1930s. Crypto is new and risky and unstable and based on nothing more than thin air in most cases and has been collapsing since almost the moment it was introduced.

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" . . . another cryptocurrency trading platform called Genesis will fall . . ."
by professor rat 23 Nov '22

23 Nov '22

TWIN Towers in NYC considered vulnerable to implosion https://www.npr.org/2022/11/22/1138639733/crypto-contagion-ftx-genesis-bloc… NPR, I know. My bat.

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Formal anarchist organizations considered harmful
by professor rat 23 Nov '22

23 Nov '22

I could never join any anarchist organization that would have me as a member https://anarchopac.com/2021/09/10/when-malatesta-got-shot/ Repost with a grain of saltpeter

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Cryptocurrency: Jamie Dimon's JPMorgan Bows To Kiss The Golden Ass Of Bitcoin
by grarpamp 23 Nov '22

23 Nov '22

Jamie Dimon who spent YEARS bashing crypto while his daughters fill their Gucci bags with Bitcoin, is now a full on SHILL for Crypto... https://cryptonews.net/16490097/ Attn Buffet Munger and Schiff... Bitcoin is coming for you too.

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Re: [ot][spam][crazy][fiction] morning spam 3: hybrid mcboss
by Karl Semich 23 Nov '22

23 Nov '22

On 11/22/22, Karl Semich <0xloem(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Experimentee: "Oh, that's the ... um ... you know it's kind of nice to > see that thing broken." > > Cyborg Torturer: "I keep wanting to jump in and torture. It's broken > in a funny where where I'm like, about to start, but don't have to do > anything, on and on." > > Experimentee: "Yeah, your urge is really strong, uhh, so, um, that > part breaking worked to stop the immediate result I guess." >

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