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upstart writes:

Assange wins High Court bid to appeal against extradition to US over spying charges:

Julian Assange wins High Court bid to appeal against extradition to US over spying charges

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has won a last-ditch bid to appeal his extradition to the United States to face espionage charges.

High Court judges on Monday granted him permission to appeal his removal to the US where he is being prosecuted over an alleged conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information over the publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

The decision has granted the 52-year-old a reprieve in order for lawyers to challenge his extradition at a full appeal hearing at a later date.

It was feared he could have been put on a plane within days if his bid was denied. However, his legal team had vowed to apply to the European Court of Human Rights for an emergency injunction to halt his removal if they were unsuccessful.

looorg writes:

Flying cars within six years.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Transportation/Boeing-aims-to-bring-flying-cars-to-Asia-by-2030
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20240517_28/

Made by Boeing, that might not inspire one with confidence due the current aircraft issues they have.

U.S. aircraft manufacturer Boeing plans to enter the flying car business in Asia by 2030, looking to tap demand for the fast, short-distance travel the vehicles could provide in the region's traffic-choked cities.

[...] 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 selecting its first Asian market, 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.

[...] The single-occupant aircraft was developed by a US company. It measures 4.5 meters wide and 2.6 meters high. [...] Officials said the craft can fly at a maximum speed of about 100 kph. It can stay aloft for approximately 15 minutes.

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-accidentally-nukes-customer-account-causes-two-weeks-of-downtime/

Buried under the news from Google I/O this week is one of Google Cloud's biggest blunders ever: Google's Amazon Web Services competitor accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason. UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service. UniSuper thankfully had some backups with a different provider and was able to recover its data, but according to UniSuper's incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn't happen until May 15.

UniSuper's website is now full of must-read admin nightmare fuel about how this all happened. First is a wild page posted on May 8 titled "A joint statement from UniSuper CEO Peter Chun, and Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian." This statement reads, "Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper's Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper's Private Cloud subscription. This is an isolated, 'one-of-a-kind occurrence' that has never before occurred with any of Google Cloud's clients globally. This should not have happened. Google Cloud has identified the events that led to this disruption and taken measures to ensure this does not happen again."

[...] A June 2023 press release touted UniSuper's big cloud migration to Google, with Sam Cooper, UniSuper's Head of Architecture, saying, "With Google Cloud VMware Engine, migrating to the cloud is streamlined and extremely easy. It's all about efficiencies that help us deliver highly competitive fees for our members."

[...] The second must-read document in this whole saga is the outage update page, which contains 12 statements as the cloud devs worked through this catastrophe. The first update is May 2 with the ominous statement, "You may be aware of a service disruption affecting UniSuper's systems." UniSuper immediately seemed to have the problem nailed down, saying, "The issue originated from one of our third-party service providers, and we're actively partnering with them to resolve this." On May 3, Google Cloud publicly entered the picture with a joint statement from UniSuper and Google Cloud saying that the outage was not the result of a cyberattack.

[...] The joint statement and the outage updates are still not a technical post-mortem of what happened, and it's unclear if we'll get one. Google PR confirmed in multiple places it signed off on the statement, but a great breakdown from software developer Daniel Compton points out that the statement is not just vague, it's also full of terminology that doesn't align with Google Cloud products. The imprecise language makes it seem like the statement was written entirely by UniSuper. It would be nice to see a real breakdown of what happened from Google Cloud's perspective, especially when other current or potential customers are going to keep a watchful eye on how Google handles the fallout from this.

Anyway, don't put all your eggs in one cloud basket.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The Register is reporting on the issues raised by an anecdote about how library e-book reading habits get reflected in mobile ads, with the observation that tracking is occurring and with the underlying question being about how the tracking is occurring. The context is that many libraries use DRM'd mobile phone apps to allow limited, temporary access to e-books to the subset of patrons willing to install the app to the subset of patrons willing to agree to the app's terms of service to the subset of patrons with smart phones.

In December, 2023, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign information sciences professor Masooda Bashir led a study titled "Patron Privacy Protections in Public Libraries" that was published in The Library Quarterly. The study found that while libraries generally have basic privacy protections, there are often gaps in staff training and in privacy disclosures made available to patrons.

It also found that some libraries rely exclusively on social media for their online presence. "That is very troubling," said Bashir in a statement. "Facebook collects a lot of data – everything that someone might be reading and looking at. That is not a good practice for public libraries."

Salo said that the amount of visitor-tracking scripts on many library websites is just beyond the pale.

"I have been watching actually the situation with healthcare organizations getting absolutely nailed to the wall for Google pixels and Facebook pixels and what have you, as potential HIPAA violations," she said.

"And you know, it's the same kind of thing [with libraries]. If we think this stuff is confidential, we should act like it and we're very frequently not. So yes, I am absolutely on a one-librarian war against Google and Facebook pixels. That just has got to stop."

— The Register, An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads. That's not supposed to happen.

The assertion is that this level of tracking is not supposed to happen with library services, as per professional decisions by earlier generations of librarians. The terms of service and licensing which both the libraries and their patrons gave the nod to may even explicitly allow the surveillance and warn of it buried in scores of pages of legalese. Be that as it may, the apps creators (and the purchasers, the libraries) may even be unknowingly affected by trackers built into the Software Development Kits used to build the app. Thus the bigger question is why so many librarians and their patrons have become so unversed in mobile ICT as to buy and deploy such DRMed software-as-a-service, which contain two kinds of violations of basic rights: digital restrictions and tracking. Academic librarian, Dorothea Salo, is off to a good start in mitigating the problems but there is a lot to catch up on.

For what its worth, there are DRM-free, public domain options including LibriVox for audio books and Project Gutenberg for e-books in several formats. Some regions will have their own analog for public domain literature, such as Project Runeberg for Nordic literature in the public domain.

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/intel-pci-history

Personal computing has changed a lot in the past four decades, and one of the biggest changes, perhaps the most unheralded, comes down to compatibility. These days, you generally can't fry a computer by plugging in a joystick that the computer doesn't support. Simply put, standardization slowly fixed this. One of the best examples of a bedrock standard is the peripheral component interconnect, or PCI, which came about in the early 1990s and appeared in some of the decade's earliest consumer machines three decades ago this year. To this day, PCI slots are used to connect network cards, sound cards, disc controllers, and other peripherals to computer motherboards via a bus that carries data and control signals. PCI's lessons gradually shaped other standards, like USB, and ultimately made computers less frustrating. So how did we get it? Through a moment of canny deception.

[...] So how did we end up with the standards that we have today, and the PCI expansion card standard specifically? PCI wasn't the only game in town—you could argue, for example, that if things played out differently, we'd all be using NuBus or Micro Channel architecture. But it was a standard seemingly for the long haul, far beyond other competing standards of its era.

Who's responsible for spearheading this standard? Intel. While PCI was a cross-platform technology, it proved to be an important strategy for the chipmaker to consolidate its power over the PC market at a time when IBM had taken its foot off the gas, choosing to focus on its own PowerPC architecture and narrower plays like the ThinkPad instead, and was no longer shaping the architecture of the PC.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

North Korea laundered $147.5 mln in stolen crypto in March:

North Korea laundered $147.5 million through virtual currency platform Tornado Cash in March after stealing it last year from a cryptocurrency exchange, according to confidential work by United Nations sanctions monitors seen by Reuters on Tuesday.

The monitors told a U.N. Security Council sanctions committee in a document submitted on Friday that they had been investigating 97 suspected North Korean cyberattacks on cryptocurrency companies between 2017 and 2024, valued at some $3.6 billion.

That included an attack late last year where $147.5 million was stolen from HTX cryptocurrency exchange before being laundered in March this year, the monitors told the committee, citing information from crypto analytics firm PeckShield and blockchain research firm Elliptic.

In 2024 alone, the monitors said they had been looking at "11 cryptocurrency thefts ... valued at $54.7 million," adding that many of those "may have been conducted by DPRK IT workers inadvertently hired by small crypto-related companies."

The monitors said that according to U.N. member states and private companies, North Korean IT workers operating abroad generate "substantial income for the country."

The U.N. sanctions monitors were disbanded at the end of April after Russia vetoed the annual renewal of their mandate. Some of the monitors submitted unfinished work, which was shared with the council's North Korea sanctions committee on Friday.

Traditionally, reports by the sanctions monitors are first agreed by all eight members. The unfinished work submitted to the committee did not go through that process.

The monitors said they had been investigating a Feb. 6 New York Times report that Russia released $9 million out of $30 million in frozen North Korean assets and allowed Pyongyang to open an account at a Russian bank in South Ossetia so it could better obtain access to international banking networks.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Mayflies live for only a day. Galapagos tortoises can reach up to age 170. The Greenland shark holds the world record at over 400 years of life.

Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel laureate and author of the newly released book "Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality," opened his packed Harvard Science Book Talk last week by noting the vast variabilities of lifespans across the natural world.

Death is certain, so far as we know. But there's no physical or chemical law that says it must happen at a fixed time, which raises other, more philosophical issues.

The "why" behind these enormous swings, and the quest to harness longevity for humans, have driven fevered attempts (and billions of dollars in research spending) to slow or stop aging. Ramakrishnan's book is a dispassionate journey through current scientific understanding of aging and death, which basically comes down to an accumulation of chemical damage to molecules and cells.

"The question is whether we can tackle aging processes, while still keeping us who we are as humans," said Ramakrishnan during his conversation with Antonio Regalado, a writer for the MIT Technology Review. "And whether we can do that in a safe and effective way."

Even if immortality—or just living for a very, very long time—were theoretically possible through science, should we pursue it? Ramakrishnan likened the question to other moral ponderings.

"There's no physical or chemical law that says we can't colonize other galaxies, or outer space, or even Mars," he said. "I would put it in that same category. And it would require huge breakthroughs, which we haven't made yet."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The US Department of Justice yesterday said it has determined that Boeing violated a 2021 agreement spurred by two fatal crashes and is now facing a potential criminal prosecution.

Boeing violated the agreement "by failing to design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program to prevent and detect violations of the US fraud laws throughout its operations," the DOJ said in a filing in US District Court for the Northern District of Texas. Because of this, "Boeing is subject to prosecution by the United States for any federal criminal violation of which the United States has knowledge," the DOJ said.

The US government is still determining whether to initiate a prosecution and said it will make a decision by July 7. Under terms of the 2021 agreement, Boeing has 30 days to respond to the government's notice.

[...] "We believe that we have honored the terms of that agreement and look forward to the opportunity to respond to the Department on this issue," Boeing said. "As we do so, we will engage with the Department with the utmost transparency, as we have throughout the entire term of the agreement, including in response to their questions following the Alaska Airlines 1282 accident."

Yesterday's DOJ court filing said that Boeing could be prosecuted for the charge listed in the one-count criminal information that was filed at the same time as the deferred prosecution agreement in 2021. That document alleged that Boeing defrauded the Federal Aviation Administration in connection with the agency's evaluation of the Boeing 737 Max. The DOJ filing yesterday said Boeing could also be prosecuted for other offenses.

In January 2021, the DOJ announced that Boeing signed the deferred prosecution agreement "to resolve a criminal charge related to a conspiracy to defraud the Federal Aviation Administration's Aircraft Evaluation Group (FAA AEG) in connection with the FAA AEG's evaluation of Boeing's 737 Max airplane."

This occurred after 346 passengers died in two Boeing 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019 in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Boeing agreed to pay $2.5 billion, including $1.77 billion in compensation for airline customers and $500 million for the heirs, relatives, and legal beneficiaries of the crash victims.

[...] The nonprofit Foundation for Aviation Safety, which is led by former Boeing employee Ed Pierson, recently accused Boeing of violating the deferred prosecution agreement. Pierson alleged in a December 2023 court filing that "Boeing has deliberately provided false, incomplete, and misleading information to the FAA, the flying public, airline customers, regulators, and investors."

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The regulator is warning OEMs to respect data privacy or it will get mad:

The Federal Trade Commission's Office of Technology has issued a warning to automakers that sell connected cars. Companies that offer such products "do not have the free license to monetize people's information beyond purposes needed to provide their requested product or service," it wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. Just because executives and investors want recurring revenue streams, that does not "outweigh the need for meaningful privacy safeguards," the FTC wrote.

Based on your feedback, connected cars might be one of the least-popular modern inventions among the Ars readership. And who can blame them? Last January, a security researcher revealed that a vehicle identification number was sufficient to access remote services for multiple different makes, and yet more had APIs that were easily hackable.

Later, in 2023, the Mozilla Foundation published an extensive report examining the various automakers' policies regarding the use of data from connected cars; the report concluded that "cars are the worst product category we have ever reviewed for privacy."

Those were rather abstract cases, but earlier this year, we saw a very concrete misuse of connected car data. Writing for The New York Times, Kash Hill learned that owners of connected vehicles made by General Motors had been unwittingly enrolled in OnStar's Smart Driver program and that their driving data had been shared with their insurance company, resulting in soaring insurance premiums.

[...] The FTC says that automakers and other businesses must protect users' data against illegal collection, use, and disclosure. It points to recent enforcement actions against companies in other sectors that have illegally collected or used geolocation data, surreptitiously disclosed sensitive user data, and illegally used sensitive data for automated decisions.

The FTC says the easiest way to comply is to not collect the data in the first place.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

This week the European Space Agency posted a slightly ominous note regarding its BepiColombo spacecraft, which consists of two orbiters bound for Mercury.

The online news release cited a "glitch" with the spacecraft that is impairing its ability to generate thrust. The problem was first noted on April 26, when the spacecraft's primary propulsion system was scheduled to undertake an orbital maneuver. Not enough electrical power was delivered to the solar-electric propulsion system at the time.

According to the space agency, a team involving its own engineers and those of its industrial partners began working on the issue. By May 7 they had made some progress, restoring the spacecraft's thrust to about 90 percent of its original level. But this is not full thrust, and the root cause of the problem is still poorly understood.

[...] The spacecraft consists of three components. The "transfer module" is where the current problems are occurring. It was built by the European Space Agency and is intended to power the other two components of the spacecraft until October 2025. It is essential for positioning the spacecraft for entry into orbit around Mercury. The other two elements of the mission are a European orbiter, MPO, and a Japanese orbiter, Mio. After their planned arrival in orbit around Mercury in December 2025, the two orbiters will separate and make at least one year's worth of observations, including the characterization of the small planet's magnetic field.

The news release is ambiguous about the fate of BepiColombo if full power cannot be restored to its propulsion system.

[...] What is clear, she said, is that the current thrust level can support the next critical milestone, BepiColombo's fourth Mercury swing-by, which is due to occur on September 5 of this year. This is the first of three swing-bys scheduled to happen in rapid succession from September to January that will slow the spacecraft down relative to Mercury.

"This swing-by sequence provides a braking delta-V of 2.4 km/s and provides a change of velocity vector direction with respect to the Sun as required for the trajectory end game in 2025," Montagnon said.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Column: Exxon Mobil is suing its shareholders to silence them about global warming:

You wouldn't think that Exxon Mobil has to worry much about being harried by a couple of shareholder groups owning a few thousand dollars worth of shares between them — not with its $529-billion market value and its stature as the world's biggest oil company.

But then you might not have factored in the company's stature as the world's biggest corporate bully.

In February, Exxon Mobil sued the U.S. investment firm Arjuna Capital and Netherlands-based green shareholder firm Follow This to keep a shareholder resolution they sponsored from appearing on the agenda of its May 29 annual meeting. The resolution urged Exxon Mobil to work harder to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of its products.

The company's legal threat worked: Days after the lawsuit was filed, the shareholder groups, weighing their relative strength against an oil behemoth, withdrew the proposal and pledged not to refile it in the future.

Yet even though the proposal no longer exists, the company is still pursuing the lawsuit, running up its own and its adversaries' legal bills. Its goal isn't hard to fathom.

"What purpose does this have other than sending a chill down the spines of other investors to keep them from speaking up and filing resolutions?" asks Illinois State Treasurer Michael W. Frerichs, who oversees public investment portfolios, including the state's retirement and college savings funds, worth more than $35 billion.

In response to the lawsuit, Frerichs has urged Exxon Mobil shareholders to vote against the reelection to the board of Chairman and Chief Executive Darren W. Woods and lead independent director Joseph L. Hooley at the annual meeting.

He's not alone. The $496-billion California Public Employees' Retirement System, or CalPERS, the nation's largest public pension fund, is considering a vote against Woods, according to the fund's chief operating investment officer, Michael Cohen.

"Exxon has gone well beyond any other company that we're aware of in terms of suing shareholders for trying to bring forward a proposal," Cohen told the Financial Times. "There doesn't seem to be anything other than an agenda of sending a message of shutting down shareholders' ability to speak their mind."

California Treasurer Fiona Ma, a CalPERS board member, backs a vote against Woods. "As the largest public pension fund in the country, we have a responsibility to lead on issues that threaten to undermine shareowners," she says.

The proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis & Co., which helps institutional investors decide how to vote on shareholder proposals and board elections, has counseled a vote against Hooley, citing Exxon Mobil's "unusual and aggressive tactics" in fighting activist investors.

Exxon Mobil's action against Arjuna and Follow This opens a new chapter in the long battle between corporate managements and shareholder gadflies.

upstart writes:

Possible evidence of glueballs found during Beijing Spectrometer III experiments:

A large international team of physicists working on the BES III collaboration has announced possible physical evidence of glueballs. In their study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group analyzed decaying particles in a particle collider and uncovered what they believe to be evidence of glueballs.

Glueballs are theoretical interactions that can occur between gluons, which are carriers of the strong nuclear force. Up until this latest research, it was not known if such theories were correct.

Gluons are subatomic particles that are believed to hold quarks together. Quarks are also subatomic particles; they form the nuclei of protons. Mesons are also made from quarks, or more specifically, one quark and one antiquark. Because gluons carry the strong nuclear force, they are able to interact with quarks and other gluons. Due to this latter characteristic, researchers have suggested that gluons could form a kind of particle without involving quarks. The result would be a glueball.

For this new study, the research team was looking for evidence of glueballs. To do so, they forced mesons to collide at high speeds at the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider, located at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing, China. They then studied the resulting debris field.

More specifically, they looked for and measured rare combinations of proton/antiprotons in the debris field—prior work using the same collider had found evidence of these.

The researchers were able to analyze 10 billion samples generated over the past decade, and they found evidence of particles with an average mass of 2,395 MeV/c2, which matches what theory has suggested for glueballs.

For now, they have named the particle X(2370) based on the mass of the original particles observed.

The research team acknowledges that their findings are not absolute proof of the existence of glueballs—other interactions, they note, could have led to similar findings. Thus, more work is required before a consensus can be reached.

More information: M. Ablikim et al, Determination of Spin-Parity Quantum Numbers of X(2370) as 0−+ from J/ψ→γKS0KS0η′, Physical Review Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.181901

Original Submission

upstart writes:

'California Stop' Is Costing Californians Millions In Tickets:

The "California Stop," also known as the "California Roll," is the act of not coming to a full and complete stop at a stop sign. Whatever it's called where you live, it's illegal and can get you a $200+ ticket and can land you in hot water with your driving record when it's issued by an agency with authority. One California agency however, with no type of traffic authority has been issuing thousands of rolling stop tickets by secretly recording drivers.

KTLA reports that California's Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority issues around 17,000 rolling stop tickets each year, bringing in over $1.1 million in revenue annually. What exactly is the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority? According to the agencies site, it's described as "a local public agency dedicated to the acquisition, preservation and protection of open space, wildlife habitat, and urban, mountain and river parkland that is easily accessible to the public."

[...] The problem with these tickets — aside from being issued by a state park agency with no real authority to issue them — is that they're technically not citations. It seems their sole purpose is to bring in revenue for the MRCA as one Prius driver who was ticketed discovered. "They're engaged in a deceptive practice of pretending to enforce the motor vehicle code when they don't have the authority to do that, and they're tricking people into paying these tickets," they told KTLA.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Evidence is mounting that tech companies' policies demanding staff return to the office are only serving to drive out the talent that became accustomed to remote work.

According to a Gartner-led survey of 3,500 employees in the tech industry undertaken in November 2023, 19 percent of non-executives said they'd quit over a return-to-office mandate, and an even larger proportion in management positions expressed similar sentiments.

"While 58 percent of executives with a mandate to return to the office said their organization provided a convincing reason for the decision, many senior leaders are unwilling to come back into the office," said Caroline Ogawa, director of Gartner's HR practice.

In another Gartner poll run in September of 170 HR heads, some 63 percent voiced higher expectations of staff coming back to the traditional workplace; 34 percent said a mandated return was already in place, and 13 percent warned that “consequences” of not complying had “intensified”.

Ogawa added: “An April 2024 Gartner survey of 64 HR leaders revealed 64 percent say senior leaders are concerned onsite requirements will increase attrition,” she added.

Canalys predicted more than 18 months ago that tech businesses need to re-consider the metrics they use to evaluate how productive an employee is: because being tethered to a desk is not giving an accurate picture. Proximity bias, the analysis said, would have implications for staff retention.

"dalek" writes:

A recent article on SN discussed Comcast bundling streaming services with its cable offering, and the reason for this is the precedent set during the dispute between Charter and Disney last year.

Minutes before the Florida-Utah college football game on August 31, Disney pulled their channels from Charter Spectrum's lineup over a carriage fee dispute. Disney's timing was intentional in blacking out their channels right before the start of football season, expecting fans would be angry that networks like ESPN were unavailable, and would pressure Charter into agreeing to higher fees. Although carriage fee disputes are quite common, this one seemed different, especially when Charter CEO Christopher Winfrey promptly scheduled a conference call with investors and permanently discontinue carrying Disney-owned networks.

Winfrey said that the current business model of pay TV is "broken", insisting that any resolution to the blackout address what Charter saw as more fundamental issues. ESPN receives the highest subscriber fees of any channel by a wide margin, and hoping to address the rising costs of cable, Charter indicated it would begin offering a cheaper option for TV without sports channels. Charter also objected that streaming platforms are not yet profitable, saying that higher subscriber fees were subsidizing the cost of developing streaming services, but those streaming services contained premium programming that wasn't available with a cable subscription. In other words, Charter said it was unfair for cable subscribers to pay the costs for Hulu and Disney+ without getting access to the programming on those services.

Subscriber fees for networks like ESPN are particularly high because of multi-billion dollar contracts they've entered into with sports leagues with the expectation that revenue from subscriber fees would continue to increase. Although it doesn't directly involve Disney, the bankruptcy of Diamond Sports Group and its impact on sports like baseball show the failures of this business model. In 2015, the St. Louis Cardinals signed a 22-year contract worth over a billion dollars for Fox Sports Midwest to broadcast most of their games. When many Fox properties were purchased by Disney, their regional sports networks were auctioned off to Sinclair to satisfy antitrust regulators. Contracts like the $1 billion agreement with the Cardinals were negotiated on the basis that these networks would bring in enough subscriber fee and advertising revenue to remain profitable.