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Submission + - Tesla trying to stop people from selling their own Tesla truck (engadget.com) 3

Submitted by Morpeth
Morpeth writes: "A new “Cybertruck Only” clause in Tesla’s purchase agreement stipulates that buyers cannot sell their new vehicle within the first year unless they have explicit permission from the automaker, or they may be sued...Tesla states that it “may seek injunctive relief to prevent the transfer of title of the Vehicle” if buyers breach its resale provision, or it may “demand liquidated damages from you in the amount of $50,000 or the value received as consideration for the sale or transfer, whichever is greater.” The terms also warn that offending resellers could be barred from buying vehicles from Tesla in the future."

Submission + - Man Crushed to Death by Robot in South Korea (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A man has been crushed to death by a robot in South Korea after it failed to differentiate him from the boxes of food it was handling, reports say.

The incident occurred when the man, a robotics company employee in his 40s, was inspecting the robot. The robotic arm, confusing the man for a box of vegetables, grabbed him and pushed his body against the conveyer belt, crushing his face and chest, South Korean news agency Yonhap said.

He was sent to hospital but later died. According to Yonhap, the robot was responsible for lifting boxes of peppers and transferring them onto pallets.

The man had been checking the robot's sensor operations ahead of its test run at the pepper sorting plant in South Gyeongsang province, scheduled for 8 November, the agency adds, quoting police.

Submission + - What was Dr. Bunsen Honeydew's PhD in? (youtube.com)

Submitted by sandbagger
sandbagger writes: Dr. Bunsen Honeydew was the founder of Muppet Labs. He was ably aided by his lab assistant Beaker. Dr Honeydew was loosely based upon one Muppet performer's time at Hewlett Packard. However, it is unclear what area of science Honeydew was an expert in, having invented edible paper clips, dish tenderizer, exploding hats, a gorilla detector, hair-growing tonic, banana sharpener, a robot politician,,an electric nose warmer and a process to turn gold into cottage cheese.

Submission + - Bankman-Fried convicted on all charges

Submitted by Another Random Kiwi
Another Random Kiwi writes: As reported at the Washington Post, Sam Bankman-Fried, the former crypto mogul, was convicted on all charges this afternoon. After only 5 hours of deliberation the jury found him guilty of two counts of wire fraud, four counts of conspiracy to commit fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. Sentencing will be March 23rd, 2024.

Submission + - Mazda's DMCA takedown kills a hobbyist's smart car API tool (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by couchslug
couchslug writes: A new attack on the right to do with one's property as the owner sees fit. First step, threaten without providing evidence:

"Frequent Home Assistant contributor J. Nick Kolston, or bdraco on GitHub, was the first of many commenters confused by Mazda's code claims. "I couldn't find any of the copyrighted code in the pypi package that they reference in the notice so I'm not sure which code they are referencing (unless they mean the API itself?)," they wrote. Others noted that Rothweiler's extension, written in Python and JavaScript, was unlikely to have copied Mazda's mobile app code.

Reverse engineering for interoperability, such as exposing the Mazda app's particulars to Home Assistant, could be considered a fair use exception to the DMCA, as explained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And while the Supreme Court declined to rule on whether APIs are subject to copyright, it ruled in Oracle v. Google in 2021 that, depending on certain factors, re-implementation of an API, particularly for the purpose of connecting and extending products, is protected under fair use."

Submission + - Musicians upset venues taking t-shirt money (marketwatch.com)

Submitted by quonset
quonset writes: Whenever the subject of muscians making money comes up, inevitably it is said musicians make their money by doing shows and selling merchandise, not through record deals or streaming services. That may no longer be enough to keep some going.

In her first five years in the industry, however, Tomberlin said she doesn’t believe she was able to turn an annual profit. As she prepared to go on tour as an opening act for Ray LaMontagne this year, she took steps to cut costs, such as choosing to bring along only one support person instead of a full band.

So when the Filene Center near Washington, D.C., informed her that it was cutting deeply into her main way of making a profit, she took a stand. After being told she would have to hand over more than 40% of the money she collected from selling T-shirts and other items, Tomberlin refused to sell her merchandise at the venue and publicly spoke about a practice she calls robbery — venues taking cuts from bands’ merchandise sales.

“You make a budget and then you see the possibility of having your funds drained and you don’t know what you’re going to sell each night, so it’s just a real crapshoot,” Tomberlin said. “We can bank on what my guarantee is that night, but the merch is what really is covering your costs and hopefully helping you make, like, an actual profit.”

Other musicians are also speaking out about the practice, and their complaints seem to be having an effect. Industry giant Live Nation Entertainment Inc. announced recently that it would stop collecting merch fees at nearly 80 of the smaller clubs it owns and operates and provide all bands that play at those venues with an additional $1,500 in gas cards and cash.

Musicians who spoke with MarketWatch remain unsatisfied, however. Because of the way the announcement is phrased, many think merch fees at Live Nation clubs are only being paused until the end of the year. The musicians said they also wonder about the roughly 250 other Live Nation concert facilities, as well as the hundreds of venues owned by other companies.

A Live Nation spokesperson told MarketWatch the change is “open-ended.”

Submission + - YouTube under no obligation to host anti-vaccine advocate's videos, court says (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by ArchieBunker
ArchieBunker writes: A prominent anti-vaccine activist, Joseph Mercola, yesterday lost a lawsuit attempting to force YouTube to provide access to videos that were removed from the platform after YouTube banned his channels.

Mercola had tried to argue that YouTube owed him more than $75,000 in damages for breaching its own user contract and denying him access to his videos. However, in an order dismissing Mercola's complaint, US magistrate judge Laurel Beeler wrote that according to the contract Mercola signed, YouTube was "under no obligation to host" Mercola's content after terminating his channel in 2021 "for violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines by posting medical misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines."

“ The court found no breach because 'there is no provision in the Terms of Service that requires YouTube to maintain particular content' or be a 'storage site for users’ content,'" Beeler wrote.

Submission + - SPAM: "Grammarly Considered Harmful" 1

Submitted by Tesseractic
Tesseractic writes: I recently checked with DuckDuckGo and found _No Instances_ of the phrase "grammarly considered harmful" on the (searchable) web. I've made that search before and found nothing then, either.

You've probably seen their ads — the thing is supposed to improve your writing — spelling, grammar and style. What they don't tell you is that it doesn't necessarily work well, and that it may be harmful to you or your business' privacy and security.

Some years ago I read a posting from an editor of a website devoted to English grammar where he reported signing up for Grammarly's service and testing it against a number of common grammatical errors. Grammarly failed miserably and the decision was made to reject Grammarly's advertising on that grammar website. Grammarly's efficacy may have improved since then, but to me it seemed like they were using a "fake it until you make it" business model. Whether that's still the case I don't know. They may be using AI and getting better at it.

Quite apart from the issue of efficacy are the privacy and security issues. I recall that in at least one instance someone found what appeared to be a complete transcript of a Grammarly user's data from signup to learning, to substantial use on real business data. Imagine the harm that a rival could do to you if they got hold of _your_ data, or that of your employees. All it takes is one disgruntled Grammarly employee who wants to make some money on the side, and a shady data broker, and your confidential text data is up for sale.

That's assuming that there's no attack from any Black Hats.

There are some alternatives to Grammarly — discuss them in the comments. You might start with [spam URL stripped]...

Submission + - RIP Kevin Mitnick (dignitymemorial.com)

Submitted by Striek
Striek writes: Kevin David Mitnick (August 6, 1963 – July 16, 2023), has passed, of pancreatic cancer. He popularized the term "social engineering", and taught that there are no technological problems — only human problems. He inspired millions.

Submission + - Twitter has managed to break Twitter (independent.co.uk) 1

Submitted by jimll
jimll writes: As Twitter users worldwide have experienced over the weekend and has been widely reported, including in the Independent newspaper in the UK, Elon's rate limiting and API changes have broken lots of bits of Twitter, ranging from app users being told they've seen too many tweets, to Tweetdeck power users having spinning wheels in Notifications, searches and other columns on their UI.

It remains to be seen if this has been done on purpose by Mr Musk to see how much pain users and advertisers will bear, or if the changes to APIs and hosting details have resulted in such a mess nobody left at Twitter knows how to fix it.

Submission + - Musk limits number of tweets users can read (bbc.com)

Submitted by sdinfoserv
sdinfoserv writes: Twitter unverified accounts are now limited to reading 600 posts a day, new unverified accounts are limited to 300. Meanwhile, and "verified" accounts are currently limited to 6,000 posts a day..
Musk said the temporary limits were to address "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation". Of course he not explain what was meant by system manipulation in this context.

Submission + - National Geographic lays off all remaining staff writers (washingtonpost.com)

Submitted by DesScorp
DesScorp writes: The Washington Post reports that all remaining editorial staffers have been laid off at National Geographic, as the iconic magazine continues to spiral downward:

"Like one of the endangered species whose impending extinction it has chronicled, National Geographic magazine has been on a relentlessly downward path, struggling for vibrancy in an increasingly unforgiving ecosystem. On Wednesday, the Washington-based magazine that has surveyed science and the natural world for 135 years reached another difficult passage when it laid off all of its last remaining staff writers. The cutback — the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co. — involves some 19 editorial staffers in all, who were notified in April that these terminations were coming. Article assignments will henceforth be contracted out to freelancers or pieced together by editors. The cuts also eliminated the magazine’s small audio department. The layoffs were the second over the past nine months, and the fourth since a series of ownership changes began in 2015. In September, Disney removed six top editors in an extraordinary reorganization of the magazine’s editorial operations.

The famous yellow-bordered print issues of our youth is also an endangered species, as NatGeo also announced that print issues will no longer be sold on newsstands.

Submission + - Twitter hit with lawsuit for not paying promised bonuses (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by B0mb1tll
B0mb1tll writes: Twitter is facing a class-action lawsuit alleging that it failed to pay bonuses promised to current and former employees who stayed at the company after Elon Musk's October 2022 acquisition of the firm.

Twitter executives "repeatedly promised Plaintiff and the company's other employees that 2022 bonuses would be paid out at fifty percent of target. This promise was repeated following Musk's acquisition," alleged the complaint filed yesterday in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

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