Nintendo is facing a potential class-action lawsuit filed by a young gamer and backed by his father, alleging that the microtransactions in the mobile game Mario Kart Tour are "immoral." Axios reports: The suit calls for refunds for all minors in the U.S. who paid to use Mario Kart Tour's "Spotlight Pipes," which delivered players in-game rewards using undisclosed odds. Until last year, Mario Kart Tour players could spend real money to repeatedly activate the pipes, in the hope they'd randomly produce useful upgrades. The suit alleges that Nintendo intentionally made the game difficult to proceed in without paying, using "dark patterns," an industry term for tricking consumers, to steer players toward spending more.

The suit was filed in March but emerged on the federal docket last week after it was moved out of state court. Its plaintiff, identified as N.A., spent more than $170 on Mario Kart Tour microtransactions, via his father's credit card, which was linked to their Nintendo user account. "Defendant's lootbox mechanism capitalized on and encouraged addictive behaviors akin to gambling," according to N.A.'s suit. It states that minors are particularly susceptible to systems that involve surprise rewards. Axios notes that Nintendo "discontinued use of spotlight pipes in Mario Kart Tour last September, switching to a system that lets players directly purchase items offered in its in-game shop."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An app that had more than 50,000 downloads from Google Play surreptitiously recorded nearby audio every 15 minutes and sent it to the app developer, a researcher from security firm ESET said. The app, titled iRecorder Screen Recorder, started life on Google Play in September 2021 as a benign app that allowed users to record the screens of their Android devices, ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko said in a post published on Tuesday. Eleven months later, the legitimate app was updated to add entirely new functionality. It included the ability to remotely turn on the device mic and record sound, connect to an attacker-controlled server, and upload the audio and other sensitive files that were stored on the device.

The secret espionage functions were implemented using code from AhMyth, an open source RAT (remote access Trojan) that has been incorporated into several other Android apps in recent years. Once the RAT was added to iRecorder, all users of the previously benign app received updates that allowed their phones to record nearby audio and send it to a developer-designated server through an encrypted channel. As time went on, code taken from AhMyth was heavily modified, an indication that the developer became more adept with the open source RAT. ESET named the newly modified RAT in iRecorder AhRat.

Stefanko installed the app repeatedly on devices in his lab, and each time, the result was the same: The app received an instruction to record one minute of audio and send it to the attacker's command-and-control server, also known colloquially in security circles as a C&C or C2. Going forward, the app would receive the same instruction every 15 minutes indefinitely. [...] Stefanko said it's possible that iRecord is part of an active espionage campaign, but so far, he has been unable to determine if that's the case. "Unfortunately, we don't have any evidence that the app was pushed to a particular group of people, and from the app description and further research (possible app distribution vector), it isn't clear if a specific group of people was targeted or not," he wrote. "It seems very unusual, but we don't have evidence to say otherwise."

The European Commission has published its biannual list of foreign countries with problematic copyright policies. One of the highlighted issues is a lack of pirate site blocking, which is seen as an effective enforcement measure, writes TorrentFreak, a news website that tracks piracy news. Interestingly, the EU doesn't mention the United States, which is arguably the most significant country yet to implement an effective site-blocking regime.

An anonymous reader shares a press release from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU): The U.S. Supreme Court [Monday] declined to hear Moore v. United States, leaving in place a patchwork of lower court decisions on an important and recurring question about privacy rights in the face of advancing surveillance technology. In this case, police secretly attached a small camera to a utility pole, using it to surveil a Massachusetts home 24/7 for eight months -- all without a warrant. Law enforcement could watch the camera's feed in real time, and remotely pan, tilt, and zoom close enough to read license plates and see faces. They could also review a searchable, digitized record of this footage at their convenience. The camera captured every coming and going of the home's residents and their guests over eight months. As a result, the government targeted the home of a community pillar -- a lawyer, respected judicial clerk, devoted church member, and a grandmother raising her grandkids -- to cherry-pick images from months of unceasing surveillance in an effort to support unwarranted criminal charges against an innocent person.

Federal courts of appeals and state supreme courts have divided on the question of whether such sweeping surveillance is a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant. The highest courts of Massachusetts, Colorado, and South Dakota have held that long-term pole camera surveillance of someone's home requires a warrant. In Moore v. United States, the members of the full en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit split evenly on the question, with three judges explaining that a warrant is required, and three judges expressing the belief that the Fourth Amendment imposes no limit on this invasive surveillance. This issue will continue to arise in the lower courts; the ACLU filed an amicus brief on the question in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit earlier this month. "The Supreme Court's decision not to hear this case means that people across the country remain vulnerable to law enforcement's claim of unfettered authority to surveil any of us at our homes, for as long as they wish, with no judicial oversight," said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. "As the cost of surveillance technology falls and its use by law enforcement expands, the need to resolve whether the Fourth Amendment poses any constraint has become all the more urgent. We will continue fighting for essential privacy protections."

Employees of the Chinese-owned video app TikTok have regularly posted user information on a messaging and collaboration tool called Lark, according to internal documents. The New York Times: In August 2021, TikTok received a complaint from a British user, who flagged that a man had been "exposing himself and playing with himself" on a livestream she hosted on the video app. She also described past abuse she had experienced. To address the complaint, TikTok employees shared the incident on an internal messaging and collaboration tool called Lark, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. The British woman's personal data -- including her photo, country of residence, internet protocol address, device and user IDs -- were also posted on the platform, which is similar to Slack and Microsoft Teams. Her information was just one piece of TikTok user data shared on Lark, which is used every day by thousands of employees of the app's Chinese owner, ByteDance, including by those in China.

According to the documents obtained by The Times, the driver's licenses of American users were also accessible on the platform, as were some users' potentially illegal content, such as child sexual abuse materials. In many cases, the information was available in Lark "groups" -- essentially chat rooms of employees -- with thousands of members. The profusion of user data on Lark alarmed some TikTok employees, especially since ByteDance workers in China and elsewhere could easily see the material, according to internal reports and four current and former employees. Since at least July 2021, several security employees have warned ByteDance and TikTok executives about risks tied to the platform, according to the documents and the current and former workers. "Should Beijing-based employees be owners of groups that contain secret" data of users, one TikTok employee asked in an internal report last July. The user materials on Lark raise questions about TikTok's data and privacy practices and show how intertwined it is with ByteDance, just as the video app faces mounting scrutiny over its potential security risks and ties to China.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from STAT News: Amid what he called the worst youth mental health crisis in recent memory, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory Tuesday warning about social media's impact on developing young brains. "Through the last two and a half years I've been in office, I've been hearing concerns from kids and parents," Murthy told STAT. "Parents are asking 'Is social media safe for my kids?' Based on our review of the data, there isn't enough evidence that it is safe for our kids."

The advisory calls on policymakers and technology companies to take steps to minimize the risks of social media. "This is not going to be an issue that we solve with one sector alone," Murthy said. Policymakers, according to the report, need to develop age restrictions and safety standards for social media -- much like the regulations that the U.S. has in place for everything from cars to medicine. Specifically, Murthy would like to see policymakers require a higher standard of data privacy for children to protect them from potential harms like exploitation and abuse. Technology companies, meanwhile, need to be more transparent about the data they share, according to Murthy. He calls on companies to assess the potential risks of online interactions and take active steps to prevent potential misuse. He also suggests the establishment of scientific advisory committees to inform approaches and policies aimed at creating safe online environments for children.

The advisory also suggests families attempt to protect young people's mental health by developing a family media plan aimed at establishing healthy technology boundaries at home, such as creating "tech-free zones" that restrict phone use during certain hours or family mealtime. But Murthy noted that parents are already at the end of their rope in trying to manage how their children are exposed to and using this rapidly evolving technology. That responsibility has fallen entirely on them up to this point. "We've got to move quickly," he said. "None of us should be satisfied until we have clear evidence that these platforms are safe." The surgeon general's report comes two weeks after the American Psychological Association issued a health advisory on teens and social media use. The group noted the increased risk of anxiety and depression among adolescents who are exposed to discrimination and bullying online. "Other research has shown that adolescents ages 12-15 who spent more than three hours per day on social media face a heightened risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes compared to those who spent less time online," adds STAT News.

According to email addresses associated with Z-Library, more than 600,000 students and teachers are using the pirate eBook repository. TorrentFreak notes that this is "likely an underestimation," especially since the United States is excluded from the analysis. From the report: The team analyzed its user database to check how many user email-addresses are linked to universities, colleges and schools. This gives an impression of how many students and employees use the site but it's likely a low estimate, as students may very well use their personal email addresses to sign up. Still, the overall outcome and the global distribution of users is worth highlighting. China is the top country in absolute numbers, followed by India and Indonesia. This is no surprise, perhaps, as these countries also have the largest populations. Looking at the full database, Z-Library linked 600,000 email addresses to a total of 30,000 educational institutions around the world.

The only country missing from the top list, population-wise, is the United States. Z-Library notes that it intentionally excluded the country due to the criminal prosecution of two of the site's alleged operators. "It should be noted that when compiling statistics, we excluded all data related to the United States due to illegal arrest of two Russian citizens on suspicion of involvement in Z-Library," the shadow library writes on Telegram. There are also some relatively smaller countries in the top list, such as Australia. With a population of just over 25 million, Z-Library is relatively popular there, beating Brazil and Vietnam, which both have much larger populations.

The Australian Monash University also gets a special mention. Apparently, it is the educational institution where users have created the most public booklists. These lists are personal book collections that can be focused on any theme, including educational topics. Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland, is the runner-up based on the number of created booklists. It's worth a separate mention, however, as it also appears in the top 5 universities that donated to Z-Library. The list of most avid Z-Library supported is led by the top Chinese universities, which are grouped for the purpose of this analysis.

The iPhone maker, VC veteran are fighting for heart-health tracking market. From a report: There's an unwritten rule for technology startups: Never challenge Apple in court if you want to survive. The world's most valuable company has a track record of success in a long string of David versus Goliath battles over cutting-edge, life-changing technologies. But billionaire Vinod Khosla is no lightweight. He's one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated venture capitalists, and he's used to playing long odds on the startups he backs. Khosla Ventures LLC put itself on a collision course with Apple when it moved into the personal health and fitness space a decade ago and invested in AliveCor, a maker of cardiac monitoring devices and software. What might have been a big partnership opportunity for AliveCor in the years following the release of the Apple Watch in 2015, to offer watch bands that monitor heart health, has turned into a messy court fight.

Now, instead of riding Apple's coattails as a prominent player in the wearable medical device market, forecast to grow to $132.5 billion by 2031, AliveCor's Food and Drug Administration-approved technology is inaccessible to the tens of millions of people who buy Apple Watches every year. The startup is in its third year of trying to prove to judges that the iPhone maker brazenly copied its heart-monitoring technology and sabotaged AliveCor's ability to offer its own product on the Apple Watch. Apple has parried with claims that its smaller rival's patent-infringement and antitrust claims are meritless -- and with counterattacks alleging that AliveCor is the imitator.

The White House said on Tuesday it would ask workers how their employers use artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor them, as it allocates federal investments in the technology, which is expected to change the nature of work. From a report: The White House will hold a listening session with workers to understand their experience with employers' use of automated technologies for surveillance, monitoring and evaluation. The call will include gig work experts, researchers, and policymakers. Millions of users have tried AI apps and tools, which supporters say can make medical diagnoses, write screenplays, create legal briefs and debug software, leading to growing concern about how the technology could lead to privacy violations, skew employment decisions, and power scams and misinformation campaigns. As part of its evaluation of the technology, the administration will also announce new steps, including an updated roadmap for federal investments in AI research, a request for public input on AI risks and with a new report from the Department of Education on how AI affects teaching, learning and research.

The FBI misused surveillance powers granted by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) over 278,000 times between 2020 and early 2021 to conduct warrantless searches on George Floyd protesters, January 6 Capitol rioters, and donors to a congressional campaign, according to a newly unclassified court opinion. The Register reports: On Friday, the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court made public a heavily redacted April 2022 opinion [PDF] that details hundreds of thousands of violations of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- the legislative instrument that allows warrantless snooping. The Feds were found to have abused the spy law in a "persistent and widespread" manner, according to the court, repeatedly failing to adequately justify the need to go through US citizens' communications using a law aimed at foreigners.

The court opinion details FBI queries run on thousands of individuals between 2020 and early 2021. This includes 133 people arrested during the George Floyd protests and more than 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign. In the latter, "the analyst who ran the query advised that the campaign was a target of foreign influence, but NSD determined that only eight identifiers used in the query had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with the querying standard," the opinion says, referring to the Justice Department's National Security Division (NSD). In other words, there wasn't a strong enough foreign link to fully justify the communications search.

For the Black Lives Matter protests, the division determined that the FBI queries "were not reasonably likely to retrieve foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime." Again, an overreach of foreign surveillance powers. Additional "significant violations of the querying standard" occurred in searched related to the January 6, 2021 breach of the US Capitol, domestic drug and gang investigations, and domestic terrorism probes, according to the court. It's said that more than 23,000 queries were run on people suspected of storming the Capitol.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Agence France-Presse: The French government unveiled a plan on Monday to accelerate cuts to its greenhouse gas emissions, targeting a reduction of 50 percent by 2030 compared with 1990 levels. Unveiled by Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, the roadmap includes detailed figures for reductions for individual sectors of the economy, ranging from the transport industry to households. The objectives -- from speeding up the transition to electric cars or switching freight from road to rivers -- are aimed at bringing France's ambitions for slashing carbon pollution into line with the EU's target for 2030.

France has so far cut its emissions by 25 percent compared with 1990 levels, requiring major fresh efforts if it is to hit the new 50-percent target. "We're asking for a bit from the smallest (polluters) and a lot from the biggest," an aide to Borne told reporters, meaning around half of efforts would be for companies, a quarter for households and a quarter for local administrations. "Among other developed countries, the United Kingdom has the most ambitious short-term goals of any major economy, with an objective of 2030 emissions being 68 percent below 1990 levels," notes AFP. "The United States has committed to cut greenhouse gases 50-52 percent by 2030 below 2005 levels, while Germany has set a 65 percent reduction target compared to 1990."

According to the Wall Street Journal, TikTok filed a lawsuit against Montana claiming the state's law banning the app violates the First Amendment. Engadget reports: "Montana's ban abridges freedom of speech in violation of the First Amendment, violates the U.S. Constitution in multiple other respects, and is preempted by federal law," the lawsuit reads. The law prohibits the ByteDance-owned platform from operating in the state, as well as preventing Apple's and Google's app stores from listing the TikTok app for download. Although it isn't clear how Montana plans to enforce the ban, it states that violations will tally fines of $10,000 per day. However, individual TikTok users won't be charged. The lawsuit comes just days after a group of content creators sued the state for similar reasons. "Montana has no authority to enact laws advancing what it believes should be the United States' foreign policy or its national security interests, nor may Montana ban an entire forum for communication based on its perceptions that some speech shared through that forum, though protected by the First Amendment, is dangerous," the suit states. "Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Spain has advocated banning encryption for hundreds of millions of people within the European Union, according to a leaked document obtained by WIRED that reveals strong support among EU member states for proposals to scan private messages for illegal content. The document, a European Council survey of member countries' views on encryption regulation, offered officials' behind-the-scenes opinions on how to craft a highly controversial law to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in Europe. The proposed law would require tech companies to scan their platforms, including users' private messages, to find illegal material. However, the proposal from Ylva Johansson, the EU commissioner in charge of home affairs, has drawn ire from cryptographers, technologists, and privacy advocates for its potential impact on end-to-end encryption.

For years, EU states have debated whether end-to-end encrypted communication platforms, such as WhatsApp and Signal, should be protected as a way for Europeans to exercise a fundamental right to privacy -- or weakened to keep criminals from being able to communicate outside the reach of law enforcement. Experts who reviewed the document at WIRED's request say it provides important insight into which EU countries plan to support a proposal that threatens to reshape encryption and the future of online privacy. Of the 20 EU countries represented in the document leaked to WIRED, the majority said they are in favor of some form of scanning of encrypted messages, with Spain's position emerging as the most extreme. "Ideally, in our view, it would be desirable to legislatively prevent EU-based service providers from implementing end-to-end encryption," Spanish representatives said in the document. The source of the document declined to comment and requested anonymity because they were not authorized to share it.

In its response, Spain said it is "imperative that we have access to the data" and suggests that it should be possible for encrypted communications to be decrypted. Spain's interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, has been outspoken about what he considers the threat posted by encryption. When reached for comment about the leaked document, Daniel Campos de Diego, a spokesperson for Spain's Ministry of Interior, says the country's position on this matter is widely known and has been publicly disseminated on several occasions. Edging close to Spain, Poland advocated in the leaked document for mechanisms through which encryption could be lifted by court order and for parents to have the power to decrypt children's communications. Several other countries say they would give law enforcement access to people's encrypted messages and communications. "Cyprus, Hungary, and Spain very clearly see this law as their opportunity to get inside encryption to undermine encrypted communications, and that to me is huge," says Ella Jakubowska, a senior policy advisor at European Digital Rights (EDRI) who reviewed the document. "They are seeing this law is going far beyond what DG home is claiming that it's there for."

schwit1 shares a report from The Daily Beast: U.C. Berkeley has failed to disclose to the U.S. government massive Chinese state funding for a highly sensitive $240 million joint tech venture in China that has been running for the last eight years. The Californian university has not registered with the U.S. government that it received huge financial support from the city of Shenzhen for a tech project inside China, which also included partnerships with Chinese companies that have since been sanctioned by the U.S. or accused of complicity in human rights abuses.

The university has failed to declare a $220 million investment from the municipal government of Shenzhen to build a research campus in China. A Berkeley spokesperson told The Daily Beast that the university had yet to declare the investment -- announced in 2018 -- because the campus is still under construction. However, a former Department of Education official who used to help manage the department's foreign gifts and contracts disclosure program said that investment agreements must be disclosed within six months of signing, not when they are fully executed. Berkeley admitted that it had also failed to disclose to the U.S. government a $19 million contract in 2016 with Tsinghua University, which is controlled by the Chinese government's Ministry of Education.

The project's Chinese backers promised lavish funding, state-of-the-art equipment, and smart Ph.D. students for Berkeley academics researching national security-sensitive technologies, according to contract documents exclusively obtained by The Daily Beast. After the project got underway, Berkeley researchers granted Chinese officials private tours of their cutting-edge U.S. semiconductor facilities and gave "priority commercialization rights" for intellectual properties (IP) they produced to Chinese government-backed funds. A Berkeley spokesman said that Berkeley only pursued fundamental research through TBSI, meaning that all research projects were eventually publicly published and accessible to all; it did not conduct any proprietary research that exclusively benefited a Chinese entity. Still, Berkeley's ties to the Chinese government and sanctioned Chinese companies are sure to raise eyebrows in Washington, where U.S. policymakers are increasingly concerned about the outflow of U.S. technology to China, especially those with military applications.

Wikipedia describes Freenet as "a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication," released in the year 2000. "Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke," Wikipedia adds. (And in 2000 Clarke answered questions from Slashdot's readers...)

And now Ian Clarke (aka Sanity — Slashdot reader #1,431) returns to share this announcement: Freenet, a familiar name to Slashdot readers for over 23 years, has undergone a radical transformation: Freenet 2023, or "Locutus". While the original Freenet was like a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a full decentralized computer, allowing the creation of entirely decentralized services like messaging, group chat, search, social networking, among others. The new Freenet is implemented in Rust and designed for efficiency, flexibility, and transparency to the end user.
"Designed for simplicity and flexibility, Freenet 2023 can be used seamlessly through your web browser, providing an experience that feels just like using the traditional web," explains the announcement...

And in the comments below, Ian points out that "When the new Freenet is up and running, I think it will be the first system of any kind that could host something like Wikipedia, not just the data but the wiki CMS system it's built on. An editable wikipedia, entirely decentralized and very scalable...

"We've already had interest from everyone from video game developers who want to build a decentralized MMORPG, to political advocacy groups across the political spectrum. Plenty of people value freedom."

Long-time Slashdot reader SpzToid shared this story from the Telegraph: Millions of people get phone calls from scammers and wonder who is at the other end. Now we know: rather than someone in a call centre far away, a "bright young man" living in a lush flat in London has been unmasked as the mastermind behind so many of these calls.

Tejay Fletcher's trial exposed how criminals with a simple website bypassed police, phone operators and banks to facilitate "fraud on an industrial scale", scamming victims out of £100m ($124 million) of their hard earned cash. Fletcher, 35, who ran the website iSpoof.cc, was jailed for 13 years and four months earlier this week following his arrest in 2019 in what is the biggest anti-fraud operation mounted in the UK.

The website allowed criminals to disguise their phone numbers in a process known as "spoofing" and trick unsuspecting people to believe they were being called by their bank or other institutions... The number of people using iSpoof swelled to 69,000 at its peak, with as many as 20 people per minute targeted by callers using the site. More than 10 million fraudulent calls were made using iSpoof in the year to August 2022 — 3.5 million of them in the UK, the prosecution said. More than 200,000 victims in the UK — many of them elderly — lost £43m, while global losses exceeded £100m... The website allowed [its users] to intercept one-time passwords, which were "ironically" introduced by banks to increase their security measures, noted John Ojakovoh, prosecuting...

Fletcher was not particularly tech-savvy, but he used a website called freelancer.com to hire programmers to make the "building blocks" of the site.
iSpooft's users "could only pay via Bitcoin," the Telegraph writes. They describe Bitcoin as "a currency favoured by many criminals because it is more difficult to trace payments."

Here's what happened next: Posing as iSpoof customers, police paid for a trial subscription in Bitcoin and tested the website. They traced the money they paid to iSpoof and eventually discovered that the "lion's share" of the profits were going to Fletcher. They obtained a copy of the website's server, which revealed call logs that further incriminated Fletcher and the scammers using his website.

It turned out that Fletcher had deceived the scammers, too, when he claimed he was not storing any of their information, prosecutors said... Although Fletcher will remain behind bars, others are also being investigated. Some 120 suspected phone scammers have been arrested, 103 of them in London.

Two years ago Slashdot covered "the ad-free, privacy-first search engine from ex-Googlers" — with a $4.95 monthly subscription fee.

Today long-time Slashdot reader imcdona brings the news that "Neeva" is now shutting down. From Neeva's announcement: We started Neeva with the mission to take search back to its users. Having worked on search and search ads for over a decade, we sincerely believed that there was space for a model of search that put user and not advertiser interests first — a private, ads-free experience.

Building search engines is hard. It is even harder to do with a tiny team of 50 people who are up against entrenched organizations with endless resources. We overcame these obstacles and built a search stack from the ground up, running a crawl that fetched petabytes of information from the web and used that to power an independent search stack.

In early 2022, the upcoming impact of generative AI and LLMs became clear to us. We embarked on an ambitious effort to seamlessly blend LLMs into our search stack. We rallied the Neeva team around the vision to create an answer engine. We are proud of being the first search engine to provide cited, real-time AI answers to a majority of queries early this year.

But throughout this journey, we've discovered that it is one thing to build a search engine, and an entirely different thing to convince regular users of the need to switch to a better choice. From the unnecessary friction required to change default search settings, to the challenges in helping people understand the difference between a search engine and a browser, acquiring users has been really hard. Contrary to popular belief, convincing users to pay for a better experience was actually a less difficult problem compared to getting them to try a new search engine in the first place.

These headwinds, combined with the different economic environment, have made it clear that there is no longer a path towards creating a sustainable business in consumer search.

As a result, over the next few weeks, we will be shutting down neeva.com and our consumer search product, and shifting to a new area of focus.
"As part of the shutdown, we are deleting all user data..." the announcement emphasizes. "We are truly grateful to our community, and we are truly sorry that we aren't able to continue to provide the search engine that you want and deserve."

So what happens next? Many of the techniques we have pioneered with small models, size reduction, latency reduction, and inexpensive deployment are the elements that enterprises really want, and need, today. We are actively exploring how we can apply our search and LLM expertise in these settings, and we will provide updates on the future of our work and our team in the next few weeks.

"Driving an electric vehicle in Texas is soon to become more expensive," reports Gizmodo: Governor Greg Abbott signed a law (SB 505) on May 13 instituting new fees for registering and owning EVs in the state. Under the bill, electric car owners will have to pay $400 upon registering their vehicle. Then, every subsequent year, EV drivers will have to shell out an additional $200. Both of those fees are on top of the cost of the standard annual registration renewal fees, which are $50.75 each year for most passenger cars and trucks.

At least 32 states currently have special electric vehicle registration fees, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures. These range from $50 in places like Colorado, Hawaii, and South Dakota to $274 (starting in 2028) in a recently passed piece of Tennessee legislation...

Like many other states that have instituted EV fees, the reasoning behind the Lone Star State's new law is that electric car drivers don't buy gas. Taxes at the fuel pump are the primary way that most states, Texas included, amass funds for road construction, maintenance, and other driving-related infrastructure.
The bill's author told a local news station that "with the growing use of EVs, the revenue from the fuel tax is decreasing, which diminishes our ability to fund road improvements for all drivers."

But Gizmodo notes that Texas's gas tax "is among the lowest in the country, at just $0.20 per gallon." (And the average car uses less than 500 gallons a year, according to the American Petroleum Institute.)

SFGate reports: A proposed class-action lawsuit levels broad allegations that DoorDash, the San Francisco-headquartered food delivery giant, is engaging in fraudulent behavior — in part by charging iPhone users more than Android havers.

The complaint, a hefty 134-page airing of grievances about the fees and upsells faced while ordering on the app, filed by Maryland resident Ross Hecox and his children, contends that DoorDash conducts "price discrimination" by allegedly charging iPhone users an "expanded range fee" more often than their Android counterparts.

According to the suit, posted by Gizmodo, the fee — a markup to any deliveries outside of the user's immediate radius set by DoorDash — is arbitrarily applied without actually taking into account users' locations. At least seven tests with separate iPhone and Android devices were conducted by the plaintiffs to prove this point in the suit.

In one set of tests, an Android phone and an iPhone were used to place the same order — a breakfast sandwich with avocado and egg whites and a chocolate chip bagel from a nearby Panera Bread — to the same address simultaneously. In the first order, according to the suit, the iPhone was at the delivery location and the Android was 15 miles away; the iPhone user received the expanded range fee. In the second, the phones' locations were reversed, with the iPhone being used 15 miles away from the delivery site; the iPhone user, the suit alleges, was still charged the fee. In a third test involving Panera, the phones were both at the delivery location — the iPhone not only allegedly received the expanded range fee but was charged an additional dollar in delivery fees. Other tests allege that delivery fees on iPhone orders are "greatly" inflated.
DoorDash called the complaints "baseless and simply without merit," in a statement to Gizmodo.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Google will pay Washington state $39.9 million to resolve a lawsuit accusing the Alphabet unit of misleading consumers about its location tracking practices, state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said on Thursday. The settlement resolves claims that Google deceived people into believing they controlled how the search and advertising company collected and used their personal data. In reality, the state said Google was able to collect and profit from that data even if consumers disabled its tracking technology on their smartphones and computers, invading consumers' privacy.

A consent decree filed on Wednesday in King County Superior Court requires Google to be more transparent about its tracking practices, and provide a more detailed "Location Technologies" webpage describing them. "Today's resolution holds one of the most powerful corporations accountable for its unethical and unlawful tactics," Ferguson said in a statement. Google, based in Mountain View, California, denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle. "In November, Google agreed to pay $391.5 million to resolve similar allegations by 40 U.S. states," notes Reuters. "Some states including Washington chose to sue Google on their own about its tracking practices."