A blockbuster prisoner exchange between the United States, Russia and Germany on Thursday included at least two prominent cybercriminals held by the U.S. on charges of financially motivated cybercrime and hacking to facilitate insider trading. Cyberscoop reports: The prisoners were part of a deal that freed 16 people from Russia, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan. A White House spokesperson confirmed that as part of the deal, the U.S. released convicted Russian cybercriminals Roman Seleznev and Vladislav Klyushin. Seleznev is a notorious Russian hacker known for running extensive cybercrime operations. He was involved in numerous cyberattacks, including credit card fraud, theft, and selling stolen credit card information on "Carder[dot]su," a cybercriminal forum ring. Seleznev conducted his criminal activities under the alias "Track2" and "nCux." He is the son of Valery Seleznev, a prominent member of the Russian Duma, the country's parliament. Seleznev was sentenced in 2017 to 27 years in prison for his involvement in a massive credit-card computer fraud scheme. Klyushin was extradited to the U.S. for his involvement in an elaborate hack-to-trade scheme that netted approximately $93 million through securities trades based on confidential corporate information stolen from U.S. computer networks. With insider knowledge of companies' financial performance, Klyushin and his co-conspirators predicted stock price movements and traded on stolen information. They used accounts in multiple countries, including Cyprus, Denmark, Portugal, Russia, and the U.S., misleading brokerage firms about their activities.

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A U.S. judge has thrown out a Republican National Committee lawsuit accusing Alphabet's Google of intentionally misdirecting the political party's email messages to users' spam folders. From a report: U.S. District Judge Daniel Calabretta in Sacramento, California, on Wednesday dismissed the RNC's lawsuit for a second time, and said the organization would not be allowed to refile it. While expressing some sympathy for the RNC's allegations, he said it had not made an adequate case that Google violated California's unfair competition law. The lawsuit alleged Google had intentionally or negligently sent RNC fundraising emails to Gmail users' spam folders and cost the group hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential donations. Google denied any wrongdoing.

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Open-source compliance and security platform FOSSA has acquired developer community platform StackShare, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. From a report: StackShare is one of the more popular platforms for developers to discuss, track, and share the tools they use to build applications. This encompasses everything from which front-end JavaScript framework to use to which cloud provider to use for specific tasks.

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Google wants to help ease the pain of comparison shopping across multiple tabs in Chrome with a new AI-powered tool that can summarize your tabs into one page. From a report: The tool, which Google is calling "tab compare," will use generative AI to pull product data from tabs you have open and collect it all into one table. Assuming it works and pulls accurate information, the tool seems like it could be a handy way to look at a number of different products in one unified view. But while it's potentially useful, the tool could also take away traffic from sites that collect and compare product information -- which might be especially worrying for independent publishers that are already struggling to be seen on Google. I'm also skeptical that Google will correctly pull all of the finer details about various products into the tables it creates with tab compare. I don't always trust Google's accuracy right now! There are some limits on what tab compare can do. The tables it creates are limited to 10 items because "we've just found the column layout doesn't scale very well beyond that," Google spokesperson Joshua Cruz tells The Verge.

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AI music startup Suno is pushing back against the world's biggest record labels, saying in a court filing that a lawsuit they filed against the company aims to stifle competition. From a report: In a filing Thursday in federal court in Massachusetts, Suno said that while the record labels argue the company infringed on their recorded music copyrights, the lawsuit actually reflects the industry's opposition to competition -- which Suno's AI software represents by making it easy for anyone to make music. "Where Suno sees musicians, teachers, and everyday people using a new tool to create original music, the labels see a threat to their market share," the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company wrote in the filing, which also asked the court to enter judgment in Suno's favor.

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Mozilla is following in Google Chrome's footsteps in officially distrusting Entrust as a root certificate authority (CA) following what it says was a protracted period of compliance failures. From a report: A little over a month ago, Google was the first to make the bold step of dropping Entrust as a CA, saying it noted a "pattern of concerning behaviors" from the company. Entrust has apologized to Google, Mozilla, and the wider web community, outlining its plans to regain the trust of browsers, but these appear to be unsatisfactory to both Google and Mozilla. In an email shared by Mozilla's Ben Wilson on Wednesday, the root store manager said the decision wasn't taken lightly, but equally Entrust's response to Mozilla's concerns didn't inspire confidence that the situation would materially change for the better. "Mozilla previously requested that Entrust provide a detailed report on these recent incidents and their root causes, an evaluation of Entrust's recent actions in light of their previous commitments given in the aftermath of similarly serious incidents in 2020, and a proposal for how Entrust will re-establish Mozilla's and the community's trust," said Wilson.

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After striking deals with Google and OpenAI, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is calling on Microsoft and others to pay if they want to continue scraping the site's data. From a report: "Without these agreements, we don't have any say or knowledge of how our data is displayed and what it's used for, which has put us in a position now of blocking folks who haven't been willing to come to terms with how we'd like our data to be used or not used," Huffman said in an interview this week. He specifically named Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity for refusing to negotiate, saying it has been "a real pain in the ass to block these companies." Reddit has been escalating its fight against crawlers in recent months. At the beginning of July, its robots.txt file was updated to block web crawlers it doesn't have agreements with. Then people began noticing that Reddit results were only visible in Google results -- where Reddit is paid for its data to be shown -- and not other search engines like Bing. Huffman said that Microsoft has been using Reddit's data to train its AI and summarizing its content in Bing results "without telling us" and that Reddit's data has also been sold through the Bing API to other search engines.

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