MORE CHARGES IN JPMORGAN HACK: Federal prosecutors announced expanded criminal charges against three men tied to the 2014 hack of JPMorgan Chase. The hack “resulted in the loss of more than 80 million customers’ names and e-mail addresses — what prosecutors say is the largest theft of consumer data from a bank in history. The ring allegedly also hacked other financial companies, including E-Trade and Scottrade, as well as financial news organization Dow Jones, and ran illegal Internet casinos and illicit payment processors,” The Washington Post reports. “The JPMorgan customer data was used, prosecutors charge, to further a ‘pump and dump’ scheme by which the three men allegedly artificially inflated the prices of penny stocks and then sold them to reap huge profits.”
1K MORE JOBS: Apple will hire 1,000 more workers in Ireland weeks before a decision that could force the company to pay substantial back taxes. “The European Union last year accused Ireland of swerving international tax rules by letting Apple shelter profits worth tens of billions of dollars from revenue collectors in return for maintaining jobs. A decision on whether the tax deal with Apple constituted unfair state aid is due after Christmas, Finance Minister Michael Noonan told journalists on Wednesday,” Reuters reports. “Noonan said the decision showed that the controversy around Apple’s tax deal ‘hasn’t affected their enthusiasm for Ireland’ … Apple paid an average tax rate of just 2.5 percent on around $109 billion of non-U.S. profits in the five years to 2014, a fraction of Ireland’s 12.5 percent tax rate.”
CONTROVERSY OVER T-MOBILE VIDEO PLAN: T-Mobile’s plan to allow customers to watch video services like Netflix on their devices without counting the usage against their plans is drawing criticism from consumer advocates. Supporters of net neutrality warned the program could “tilt the Internet in favor of the biggest companies, violating the principle of net neutrality. ‘As it stands, it looks like a net-neutrality violation right now,’ said Barbara van Schewick, a professor at Stanford Law School and a leading net-neutrality supporter. ‘The essence of net neutrality is that we don’t want Internet service providers to pick winners and losers,'” National Journal reports.
