Technology

A new complaint filed Friday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) accuses Facebook of helping landlords and home sellers violate the Fair Housing Act. According to the grievance filed by the department, Facebookad settings let sellers disregard laws by targeting specific demographics.

HUD says that the ability to tailor Facebook advertisements to bar individuals of a certain race, religion, sex, national origin and various other categories is a clear violation of the rule, which was enacted as part of the 1968 Civil Rights Act.

&The Fair Housing Act prohibits housing discrimination including those who might limit or deny housing options with a click of a mouse,& Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, Anna María Farías said in a statement issued by the department. &When Facebook uses the vast amount of personal data it collects to help advertisers to discriminate, itthe same as slamming the door in someoneface.&

Facebook was quick to respond to the complaint. While it acknowledges that the technology leaves open the potential for misuse, it insists that itbeen working to undercut abuse.

&There is no place for discrimination on Facebook; itstrictly prohibited in our policies,& Facebook said in a statement offered to The Washington Post. &Over the past year we&ve strengthened our systems to further protect against misuse. We&re aware of the statement of interest filed and will respond in court; we&ll continue working directly with HUD to address their concerns.&

The complaint has been a long time coming, with the National Fair Housing Alliance and other housing groups having already taken Facebook to court over the issue earlier this year.

While Hollywoodinterest in romantic comedies seems to be fading, Netflix has been picking up some of the slack. Just a few months ago, it released the tremendously funSet It Up. And now we&ve got To All The Boys I&ve Loved Before, a high school romance based on the young adult novel by Jenny Han.

To All The Boys tells the story of Lara Jean Covey (played by Lana Condor), a teenager whowritten love letters to all of her crushes, but never sent them — until the beginning of the movie, when they mysteriously end up in the hands of the titular boys.

Naturally, this leads to intense mortification and embarrassment, particularly when Lara Jean is so desperate to hide her feelings on her sisterex Josh (Israel Broussard) that she agrees to pretend to date her former () crush Peter (Noah Centineo).

On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we&re joined by our colleague Taylor Nakagawa to review the film. Taylor wasn&t entirely won over — after all, you can probably guess most of what happens next based on the bare bones plot description above. But your regular hosts Anthony and Jordan enjoyed it anyway, particularly the movietremendously charming leads.

We also discuss Crazy Rich Asians, one of the rare Hollywood rom coms to make it onto the big screen, and how the filmmakers turned down an offer from Netflix. And we cover the weekstreaming news, including Netflixexclusive deal with Black-ish creator Kenya Barris and the reports that Amazon is in talks to buy a theater chain.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcastsor find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

It was a simple concept: a cryptocurrency whose units were always and constantly worth exactly one dollar, because they were backed by dollars held in a bank. Voila: dollars with the powers of crypto, such as the ability to quickly and permissionlessly transfer an arbitrary amount … and, er, a certain lack of pesky regulations.

Now there are $2.7 billion worth of Tether in circulation, and they are anything but simple. (Euro Tether also exist but they&re a rounding error.) Who created Tether The same people behind the exchange BitFinex, with whom Tether shares a CEO, a CFO, and (until recently) a Chief Strategy Officer. That much we can be fairly confident about. But everything else about this money is shrouded in a deep fog of mystery tinged with misconduct.

Who buys Tether Ithard to say; you can trade USD for them at a couple of crypto exchanges, notably Kraken in addition to the BitFinex exchange, but I haven&t been able to find any recent public examples of anyone, institution or person, actually buying newly issued Tethers from Bitfinex. So who provides the US dollars which are said to back all newly issued Tether Itvery hard to say.

Who audits them, to ensure those dollars are there Well — actually — nobody, despite their web site‘s assurances that their reserve holdings are &subject to frequent professional audits& and &Our reserve account is regularly audited.& But they &dissolved& their relationship with their first auditors, Friedman LLP, without an audit ever being completed, and the &proof of funds& &transparency update& so prominent on their home page stresses it &should not be construed as the results of an audit.&

Do we have any reason to believe those dollars actually exist Well, yes. The fact their &transparency report& is not an audit makes it very limited, questionable evidence, in my book … but itsome evidence nonetheless. (Itreally quite something that we&re talking about some evidence, rather than an actual audit, for the existence of nearly three billion, with a &B,& dollars which are theoretically backing a very widely used asset.) Furthermore they appear to have banking relationships in Puerto Rico, and/or with ING, and the massive growth in total bank deposits in Puerto Rico over the last year or so roughly corresponds with the number of Tethers which have been issued in that time.

How do you redeem Tether for US dollars That… both hard and easy to answer. I&ve been following the Tether saga with some interest for a full year and I have yet to come across any public example of Tether actually doing this for anyone. Ever. Their most recent public announcement on the subject, from the end of last year, says &exchanges and other qualified corporate customers can contact Tether directly to arrange for creation and redemption. Sadly, however, we cannot create or redeem tether for any U.S.-based customers at this time.&

However! The most interesting thing about Tether is that you don&t need to redeem them for dollars. As long as a cryptocurrency exchange believes that one Tether is worth one dollar, you can just use your Tether to buy bitcoin, or ether, or whatevercoin, and then transfer / convert that to dollars. Itthose cryptocurrency:Tether exchange rates which actually matter. As long as those are maintained, itactually irrelevant to the average user whether Tether is actually backed by dollars … which obviously opens up a lot of space in which shenanigans might occur.

What are those whiffs of misconduct to which I previously referred I mean. How much time do you have One passionate critic, known as Bitfinexed, has been writing about this for quite some time now; ita pretty deep rabbit hole. University of Texas researchers have accused Bitfinex/Tether of manipulating the price of Bitcoin (upwards.) The two entities have allegedly been subpoenaed by US regulators. In possibly (but also possibly not — again, a fog of mystery) related news, the US Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into cryptocurrency price manipulation, which critics say is ongoing. Comparisons are also being drawn with Liberty Reserve, the digital currency service shut down for money laundering five years ago:

So what the hell is going on Good question. On the one hand, people and even companies are innocent until proven guilty, and the opacity of cryptocurrency companies is at least morally consistent with the industry as a whole. A wildly disproportionate number of crypto people are privacy maximalists and/or really hate and fear governments. (I wish the US government didn&t keep making their &all governments become jackbooted surveillance police states!& attitude seem less unhinged and more plausible.)

But on the other … yes, one reason for privacy maximalism is because you fear rubber-hose decryption of your keys, but another, especially when anti-government sentiment is involved, is because you fear the taxman, or the regulator. A third might be that you fear what the invisible hand would do to cryptocurrency prices, if it had full leeway. And it sure doesn&t look good when when at least one of your claims, e.g. that your unaudited reserves are &subject to frequent professional audits,& is awfully hard to interpret as anything other than a baldfaced lie.

How can we ever find out I see four plausible answers: 1) a serious, competent, trustworthy, professional organization actually performs a full audit; 2) a legal / regulatory / criminal investigation forces Tether to open up their books; 3) a whistleblower tells all; 4) we don&t, ever. In the interim, this misconduct-tinged fog will continue to cover their entire enterprise … and their users won&t care, as long as one Tether buys you exactly as much bitcoin as one dollar, on every cryptocurrency exchange which supports them.