An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's Google is facing billions of dollars in potential damage claims as part of mass arbitration tied to the company's online search and advertising technology businesses, which courts have ruled were illegal monopolies. Advertisers are banding together to seek payouts through mass arbitration proceedings. While many companies that displayed ads purchased through Google -- including USA Today Co. and Advance Publications -- have sued for damages since the rulings in 2024, advertiser contracts with the search giant require mandatory arbitration over legal disputes.

In arbitration, legal disputes are handled by a mediator, a process that tends to favor companies in individual claims. Mass arbitration -- where 25 or more claims against the same company are pooled together -- have become more common and provide a greater likelihood of settlement awards for claimants. Ashley Keller, a Chicago lawyer whose firm has handled mass arbitrations against DoorDash, Postmates and TurboTax-maker Intuit, said he's already signed up a "significant number" of advertisers to participate in claims against Google. The first of those are expected to be filed this week.

"Two federal judges have already adjudicated Google to be a monopolist," Keller said in an interview with Bloomberg. "It seems sensible to seek redress." Keller, who is also representing Texas and other states in a lawsuit against Google for monopolization of advertising technology, estimates potential claims for online search and display ads could reach $218 billion or more, based on calculations from an economist his firm has hired. Similar mass arbitrations have lasted 12 to 24 months between the filing of claims and resolution, he said. "Given the nature of these matters, we cannot estimate a possible loss," Google said in a recent corporate filing. "We believe we have strong arguments against these open claims and will defend ourselves vigorously."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Agrochemical maker Bayer and attorneys for cancer patients announced a proposed $7.25 billion settlement Tuesday to resolve thousands of U.S. lawsuits alleging the company failed to warn people that its popular weedkiller Roundup could cause cancer. The proposed settlement comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to hear arguments in April on Bayer's assertion that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's approval of Roundup without a cancer warning should invalidate claims filed in state courts. That case would not be affected by the proposed settlement.

But the settlement would eliminate some of the risk from an eventual Supreme Court ruling. Patients would be assured of receiving settlement money even if the Supreme Court rules in Bayer's favor. And Bayer would be protected from potentially larger costs if the high court rules against it. Germany-based Bayer, which acquired Roundup maker Monsanto in 2018, disputes the assertion that Roundup's key ingredient, glyphosate, can cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But the company has warned that mounting legal costs are threatening its ability to continue selling the product in U.S. agricultural markets. "Litigation uncertainly has plagued the company for years, and this settlement gives the company a road to closure," Bayer CEO Bill Anderson said Tuesday. The proposed settlement could total up to $7.25 billion over 21 years and resolve most of the remaining U.S. lawsuits surrounding the cancer-related harms of Roundup. The report notes that more than 125,000 claims have been filed since 2015, and while many have already been settled, this deal aims to cover most outstanding and future claims tied to past exposure.

Individual payouts would vary widely based on exposure type, age at diagnosis, and cancer severity. Bayer can also cancel the deal if too many plaintiffs opt out.

"Earlier available only to the paying subscribers, the Comet browser now offers its core features to all users at no cost," writes the Times of India. "This includes AI-powered search, contextual recommendations, and integrated tools designed to streamline research and content discovery." They say the move reflects the Chromium-based browser's goal to "compete with incumbents like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge" — but also reflects Perplexity's "broader mission to democratize AI tools."
More details from The Verge: The internet is better on Comet," the company says, promising to remain free forever as it styles the browser as a serious challenger to Google's Chrome...

It's supposed to make surfing the web simpler and help you with tasks like shopping, booking trips, and general life admin. To borrow the company's words again: you "get more done." The AI-powered browser launched in July, though was only available for users who subscribed to the $200 per month Perplexity Max plan... No subscription at all will be needed to use Comet going forward, the company says.
Perplexity has even struck deals with major sites including the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times to offer free access to their sites for one month through the Comet browser. And last week Perplexity also launched an agressive paid referral program, where active Perplexity Pro/Max subscribers get a payout of up to $15 for each friend who downloads and uses Comet through their affiliate link. (The payout size is based on the friend's country, with $15 being the payout amount for a U.S. user, with $10 payouts for users in 19 other countries include Canada, Australia, the U.K., several EU countries, Japan, and South Korea.

In addition, Srinivas has been sharing positive tweets about Comet. (Like "This is unbelievable. Comet automatically hunts down Sora 2 invite codes across the web and signs you up!") But Perplexity is making even bigger claims for its browser: Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas said that the Comet AI browser can improve productivity so that companies won't need to hire more people. "Instead of hiring one more person on your team, you could just use Comet to supplement all the work that you're doing," Srinivas told CNBC's "Squawk Box"... The CEO said the artificial intelligence-powered web browser is a "true personal assistant" that allows users to complete more tasks in the same amount of time and said that the productivity gained could be worth $10,000 per year for a single person...

Other tech companies have also been rolling out their own AI browser assistants. In January, OpenAI introduced its web agent, Operator, and Google released Gemini AI to its Chrome browser in September.
Meanwhile, The Verge adds, The Browser Company (makers of the Arc browser) "is going all in on Dia, and Opera just launched its own AI browser, Neon."

Of course, popularity brings problems, writes the Times of India: iPhone users are being warned by Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas against downloading a fake 'Comet' app on the App Store. He clarified that the official iOS version is not yet released and the current listing is unauthorized spam..
And earlier this month the browser security platform LayerX described a "CometJacking" attack where malicious prompts could be hidden in URLs (as a parameter). Comet is instructed "to look for data in memory and connected services (e.g., Gmail, Calendar), encode the results (e.g., base64), and POST them to an attacker-controlled endpoint... all while appearing to the user as a harmless 'ask the assistant' flow." (And with some trivial encoding it also seems to evade exfiltration checks.)

The Hacker News reported that Perplexity has classified the findings as "no security impact."

Thousands of Norwegians briefly believed they had won massive Eurojackpot prizes after a manual coding error by Norsk Tipping mistakenly multiplied winnings by 100 instead of dividing. The Register reports: Eurojackpot, a pan-European lottery launched in 2012, holds two draws per week, and its jackpots start at about $12 million with a rollover cap of $141 million. Norsk Tipping, Norway's Eurojackpot administrator, admitted on Friday that a "manual error" it its conversion process from Eurocents to Norwegian kroner multiplied amounts by 100 instead of dividing them. As a result, "thousands" of players were briefly shown jackpots far higher than their actual winnings before the mistake was caught, but no incorrect payouts were made.

Norsk Tipping didn't disclose how large the false jackpots were, but math suggests the improper amounts were 10,000x times higher. Regardless, it seems like a lot of people thought they were big winners, based on what the company's now-former CEO, Tonje Sagstuen, said on Saturday. "I have received many messages from people who had managed to make plans for holidays, buying an apartment or renovating before they realized that the amount was wrong," Sagstuen said in a statement. "To them I can only say: Sorry!" The incorrect prize amounts were visible on the Norsk Tipping website only briefly on Friday, but the CEO still resigned over the weekend following the incident.

While one of the Norsk Tipping press releases regarding the incident described it as "not a technical error," it still appears someone fat-fingered a bit of data entry. The company said it will nonetheless be investigating how such a mistake could have happened "to prevent something similar from happening again."

Bruce Perens, original co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has responded to questions from Slashdot readers about a new alternative he's developing that hopefully helps "Post Open" developers get paid.

But first, "One of the things that's clear from the Slashdot patter is that people are not aware of what I've been doing, in general," Perens says. "So, let's start by filling that in..."

Read on for the rest of his wide-ranging answers....

Lawyers for the defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX said customers would receive all the money they lost when the firm collapsed in 2022 and receive interest on top of it. "But the recoveries come with a caveat," reports the New York Times. "The amount owed to customers was calculated based on the value of their holdings at the time of FTX's bankruptcy in November 2022. That means customers won't reap the benefits of a recent surge in the crypto market that sent the price of Bitcoin to a record high." From the report: The announcement was a landmark in the attempt to recover the $8 billion in customer assets that disappeared when FTX imploded virtually overnight, setting off a crisis in the crypto industry. Under a plan filed in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware, virtually all FTX's creditors, including hundreds of thousands of ordinary investors who used the exchange to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, would receive cash payments equivalent to 118 percent of the assets they had stored on FTX, the lawyers said. Those payments would flow from a pool of assets that FTX's lawyers have pulled together in the 17 months since the exchange collapsed, the lawyers said. [...] It will take months for the payouts to begin. The plan must be approved by the federal judge overseeing FTX's bankruptcy, John T. Dorsey.

Sarah Perez reports via TechCrunch: EyeEm, the Berlin-based photo-sharing community that exited last year to Spanish company Freepik after going bankrupt, is now licensing its users' photos to train AI models. Earlier this month, the company informed users via email that it was adding a new clause to its Terms & Conditions that would grant it the rights to upload users' content to "train, develop, and improve software, algorithms, and machine-learning models." Users were given 30 days to opt out by removing all their content from EyeEm's platform. Otherwise, they were consenting to this use case for their work.

At the time of its 2023 acquisition, EyeEm's photo library included 160 million images and nearly 150,000 users. The company said it would merge its community with Freepik's over time. Despite its decline, almost 30,000 people are still downloading it each month, according to data from Appfigures. Once thought of as a possible challenger to Instagram -- or at least "Europe's Instagram" -- EyeEm had dwindled to a staff of three before selling to Freepik, TechCrunch's Ingrid Lunden previously reported. Joaquin Cuenca Abela, CEO of Freepik, hinted at the company's possible plans for EyeEm, saying it would explore how to bring more AI into the equation for creators on the platform. As it turns out, that meant selling their work to train AI models. [...]

Of note, the notice says that these deletions from EyeEm market and partner platforms could take up to 180 days. Yes, that's right: Requested deletions take up to 180 days but users only have 30 days to opt out. That means the only option is manually deleting photos one by one. Worse still, the company adds that: "You hereby acknowledge and agree that your authorization for EyeEm to market and license your Content according to sections 8 and 10 will remain valid until the Content is deleted from EyeEm and all partner platforms within the time frame indicated above. All license agreements entered into before complete deletion and the rights of use granted thereby remain unaffected by the request for deletion or the deletion." Section 8 is where licensing rights to train AI are detailed. In Section 10, EyeEm informs users they will forgo their right to any payouts for their work if they delete their account -- something users may think to do to avoid having their data fed to AI models. Gotcha!

Fintech giant Stripe announced on Thursday that it would let customers accept cryptocurrency payments, starting with USDC stablecoins, initially only on Solana, Ethereum and Polygon. TechCrunch reports: This will be the first time that Stripe has taken crypto payments since 2018, when it dropped support for Bitcoin due to it being too unstable. Stripe in 2022 tried its first reentry into the crypto market when it announced payouts (but not payments) in USDC, with Twitter as its marquee customer for the service. Thursday's news has no customer names attached to it.

On Wednesday the company unveiled a long list of other launches, the most significant update being that Stripe, for the very first time, would let customers integrate competing payment providers with Stripe's other financial services tooling. Thursday's nod to expanding crypto support is also part of that bigger strategy to open up its walled garden. A brief timeline of Stripe's dance with crypto underscores the tricky line that Stripe has walked over the years when it comes to cryptocurrency. True to its disruptive roots as a fintech, the company has wanted to be in the middle of the conversation around how blockchain-based technologies will affect financial services. But it runs the risk of subverting its bigger business and positioning as a stable and sensible financial powerhouse if it dabbles too deeply or for too long in periods of instability. The company processed $1 trillion in transactions last year, and it's still growing; it is currently worth $65 billion on paper.

Roblox is offering developers another way to earn money by allowing them to offer subscriptions within their experiences, according to a blog post published Tuesday. The Verge reports: Roblox already offers developers a lot of ways to monetize their experiences, including the ability to sell virtual items in an experience or on the Roblox marketplace, offering in-experience passes to certain content and gating experiences behind paid access. However, those examples are all one-time fees, and Roblox argues that subscriptions would offer a way for developers to "establish a recurring economic relationship with their users and potentially increase the predictability of their earnings." (Other monetization options include subscriptions to private servers, engagement-based payouts, and slotting in Roblox's "Immersive Ads.")

Subscriptions would also give Roblox another thing it can point to as a reason to develop for its metaverse platform instead of others. Epic Games' new system for Fortnite, for example, rewards creators based on factors like how long people play their experiences but doesn't allow creators to directly sell virtual goods or subscriptions inside those experiences. Developers looking for more flexibility in how they monetize might choose Roblox instead.

As Pwn2Own Vancouver comes to a close, a whopping $1,115,000 has been awarded by Trend Micro and Zero Day Initiative. The 15th anniversary edition saw 17 "contestants" attacking 21 targets, reports Hot Hardware — though "the biggest payouts were for serious exploits against Microsoft's Teams utility." While Teams isn't technically a part of Windows, it does come bundled with all new installs of Windows 11, which means that these exploits are practically Windows exploits. Hector "p3rr0" Peralta, Masato Kinugawa, and STAR Labs each earned $150,000 for major exploits of the utility.

Windows 11 itself wasn't spared, though. Marcin Wiazowski and STAR Labs each earned $40,000 for privilege escalation exploits on Microsoft's operating system on day one, and on day two, TO found a similar bug for a $40,000 payout of his own. Day three saw no less than three more fresh exploits against Windows 11, all in the serious privilege escalation category; all three winners pocketed another $40,000....

Other targets attacked at Pwn2Own 2022 included Mozilla Firefox (hacked), Apple Safari (hacked), and Ubuntu Desktop (hacked)... Of course, details of the hacks aren't made public, because they're zero-days, after all. That means that they haven't been patched yet, so releasing details of the exploits could allow malicious actors to make use of the bugs. Details will be revealed 3 months from now, during which time Microsoft, Tesla, Apple, and others should have their software all sewn up.
With all the points totalled, the winner was Singapore-based cybersecurity company Star Labs, which was officially crowned "Master of Pwn" on Saturday. "They won $270,000 and 27 points during the contest," explains the official Twitter feed for Zero Day Initiative (the judges for the event).

A blog post from Zero Day Initiative describes all 21 attacks, including six successful attacks against Windows, three successful attacks against Teams — and four against Ubuntu Desktop.

Amid the ongoing disruption from Russia, some ethical hackers in Ukraine are feeling lost as bug bounty platform HackerOne has allegedly withheld their payouts. From a report: The loss due to the sudden halt is said to have mounted to hundreds and thousands of dollars. A few of the affected ethical hackers -- also known as cybersecurity researchers -- have taken the issue to social media. Some of them have also written to the platform to get clarity on why exactly it has disabled their payments in the middle of the humanitarian catastrophe in the country. Ethical hackers normally earn payouts ranging from tens and hundreds to over millions of dollars in the form of rewards through bug bounty platforms for reporting flaws in various Internet-based solutions. However, HackerOne is said to have suddenly stopped payouts for some Ukrainian hackers.

Earlier this month, HackerOne CEO Marten Mickos had announced, "[A]s we work to comply with the new sanctions, we'll withdraw all programmes for customers based in Russia, Belarus, and the occupied areas of Ukraine." On Monday, he clarified that the restrictions were for sanctioned regions - Russia and Belarus, not mentioning any clear details about the status of Ukraine. "That's a really weird situation," said independent security researcher Bob Diachenko, who has been associated with the San Francisco, California-based platform for the last two-three years now. The security researcher tweeted on Sunday that HackerOne stopped paying bounties worth around $3,000 for the flaws he reported. Alongside stopping payouts, HackerOne has removed its 'Clear' status from all Ukraine accounts. The status essentially allows ethical hackers to participate in private programmes run by various companies to earn a minimum of $2,000 for a high-severity vulnerability or $5,000 for a critical one. It requires background-check for researchers to participate in the listed programmes.

A "massive leak" by a whistleblower revealed the secret details of bank accounts linked to more than 30,000 Credit Suisse clients around the world, reports the Guardian.

They note that Credit Suisse is one of the world's largest private banks, as well as Switzerland's second-biggest lender, with 50,000 employees — and yet the leaked information "points to widespread failures of due diligence by Credit Suisse, despite repeated pledges over decades to weed out dubious clients and illicit funds," including "clients involved in torture, drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and other serious crimes."

The accounts are worth more than $108 billion USD (that's 100 billion Swiss Francs or £80 billion)... The Guardian is part of a consortium of media outlets given exclusive access to the data. We can reveal how Credit Suisse repeatedly either opened or maintained bank accounts for a panoramic array of high-risk clients across the world. They include a human trafficker in the Philippines, a Hong Kong stock exchange boss jailed for bribery, a billionaire who ordered the murder of his Lebanese pop star girlfriend and executives who looted Venezuela's state oil company, as well as corrupt politicians from Egypt to Ukraine.

One Vatican-owned account in the data was used to spend €350m (£290m) in an allegedly fraudulent investment in London property that is at the centre of an ongoing criminal trial of several defendants, including a cardinal....

This month, Credit Suisse became the first major Swiss bank in the country's history to face criminal charges — which it denies — relating to allegation it helped launder money from the cocaine trade on behalf of the Bulgarian mafia. However, the repercussions of the leak could be much broader than one bank, threatening a crisis for Switzerland, which retains one of the world's most secretive banking laws... Over the past three decades, Credit Suisse has faced at least a dozen penalties and sanctions for offences involving tax evasion, money laundering, the deliberate violation of US sanctions and frauds carried out against its own customers that span multiple decades and jurisdictions. In total, it has racked up more than $4.2bn in fines or settlements. That includes the $2.6bn the Swiss bank agreed to pay US authorities after pleading guilty to conspiring to aid tax evasion in 2014; the $536m it was fined by the US five years before for deliberately circumventing US sanctions against countries including Iran and Sudan in 2009, and other payouts to Germany and Italy over tax evasion allegations.

Jeff Neiman, a Florida-based attorney who represents a number of Credit Suisse whistleblowers, believes the sheer number of scandals involving the bank indicates a deeper problem. "The bank likes to say it's just rogue bankers. But how many rogue bankers do you need to have before you start having a rogue bank?" he said. Neiman alleges there has been a culture at the bank "which encourages its bankers probably from the top down to hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, bury their heads in the sand on a good day, and on many days, actively assist folks to skirt whatever the law may be in order to best protect assets under management...."

The debate over whether Switzerland's banking industry has undergone sufficient reforms is likely to be renewed in light of the leak.
"Nearly 50 media organisations have spent months poring over the data," reports the BBC: But the Swiss bank rejected the allegations in a statement on Sunday, saying it strongly rejected the allegations and insinuations about the bank's alleged business practices or lack of due diligence carried out. "The matters presented are predominantly historical, in some cases dating back as far as the 1940s, and the accounts of these matters are based on partial, inaccurate, or selective information taken out of context", it said.... "Approximately 90% of the reviewed accounts are today closed or were in the process of closure prior to receipt of the press inquiries, of which over 60% were closed before 2015," it said, although it would not comment on specific clients mentioned....

In a statement published by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the anonymous source explained their motivation for leaking the records more than a year ago. "I believe that Swiss banking secrecy laws are immoral. The pretext of protecting financial privacy is merely a fig leaf covering the shameful role of Swiss banks as collaborators of tax evaders," they wrote....

It follows other scandals for the Swiss bank, including the departure of two of its top executives after allegedly breaking Covid regulations and spying on former staff.

MIT's Technology Review shares data from a Facebook-run tool called CrowdTangle. It shows that by 2018 in the nation of Myanmar (population: 53 million), " All the engagement had instead gone to fake news and clickbait websites.

"In a country where Facebook is synonymous with the internet, the low-grade content overwhelmed other information sources." [T]he sheer volume of fake news and clickbait acted like fuel on the flames of already dangerously high ethnic and religious tensions. It shifted public opinion and escalated the conflict, which ultimately led to the death of 10,000 Rohingya, by conservative estimates, and the displacement of 700,000 more. In 2018, a United Nations investigation determined that the violence against the Rohingya constituted a genocide and that Facebook had played a "determining role" in the atrocities. Months later, Facebook admitted it hadn't done enough "to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence." Over the last few weeks, the revelations from the Facebook Papers, a collection of internal documents provided to Congress and a consortium of news organizations by whistleblower Frances Haugen, have reaffirmed what civil society groups have been saying for years: Facebook's algorithmic amplification of inflammatory content, combined with its failure to prioritize content moderation outside the US and Europe, has fueled the spread of hate speech and misinformation, dangerously destabilizing countries around the world.

But there's a crucial piece missing from the story. Facebook isn't just amplifying misinformation.

The company is also funding it.

An MIT Technology Review investigation, based on expert interviews, data analyses, and documents that were not included in the Facebook Papers, has found that Facebook and Google are paying millions of ad dollars to bankroll clickbait actors, fueling the deterioration of information ecosystems around the world.
Facebook pays them for permission to open their content within Facebook's app (where Facebook controls the advertising) rather than having users clickthrough to the publisher's own web site, reports Technology Review: Early on, Facebook performed little quality control on the types of publishers joining the program. The platform's design also didn't sufficiently penalize users for posting identical content across Facebook pages — in fact, it rewarded the behavior. Posting the same article on multiple pages could as much as double the number of users who clicked on it and generated ad revenue. Clickbait farms around the world seized on this flaw as a strategy — one they still use today... Clickbait actors cropped up in Myanmar overnight. With the right recipe for producing engaging and evocative content, they could generate thousands of U.S. dollars a month in ad revenue, or 10 times the average monthly salary — paid to them directly by Facebook. An internal company document, first reported by MIT Technology Review in October, shows that Facebook was aware of the problem as early as 2019... At one point, as many as 60% of the domains enrolled in Instant Articles were using the spammy writing tactics employed by clickbait farms, the report said...

75% of users who were exposed to clickbait content from farms run in Macedonia and Kosovo had never followed any of the pages. Facebook's content-recommendation system had instead pushed it into their news feeds.
Technology Review notes that Facebook now pays billions of dollars to the publishers in their program. It's a long and detailed article, which ultimately concludes that the problem "is now happening on a global scale." Thousands of clickbait operations have sprung up, primarily in countries where Facebook's payouts provide a larger and steadier source of income than other forms of available work. Some are teams of people while others are individuals, abetted by cheap automated tools that help them create and distribute articles at mass scale...

Google is also culpable. Its AdSense program fueled the Macedonia- and Kosovo-based farms that targeted American audiences in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. And it's AdSense that is incentivizing new clickbait actors on YouTube to post outrageous content and viral misinformation.
Reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson told Technology Review that they'd misunderstood the issue. And the spokesperson also said "we've invested in building new expert-driven and scalable solutions to these complex issues for many years, and will continue doing so."

Google's spokesperson confirmed examples in the article violated their own policies and removed the content, adding "We work hard to protect viewers from clickbait or misleading content across our platforms and have invested heavily in systems that are designed to elevate authoritative information."

Facebook is adding a new perk to its bug bounty program that will pay bonus rewards to researchers based on the time it takes the social network to fix a vulnerability after it's found and reported by bug hunters. ZDNet reports: Essentially, Facebook is acknowledging that it's sometimes slow to reach a bounty decision and is using this bonus payment to encourage patience among the researchers in its bug bounty community. The Payout Time Bonus will reward reports that are paid more than 30 days from the time Facebook receives all the necessary information for a successful reproduction of the report and its impact, Facebook said. The bonuses will be paid on a sliding scale, with payouts made between 30-59 days receiving a 5% bonus; payouts made between 60-89 days receiving a 7.5% bonus; and payouts made after 90 days or more receiving a 10% bonus. Reports that require clarification from the researcher will have the payments adjusted accordingly.

James Randi, a Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims, has passed away Tuesday "due to age-related causes." He was 92. Slashdot reader trinarybit first shared the news. The Washington Post reports: An inveterate skeptic and bristly contrarian in his profession, Mr. Randi insisted that magic is based solely on earthly sleight of hand and visual trickery. He scorned fellow magicians who allowed or encouraged audiences to believe their work was rooted in extrasensory or paranormal powers. In contrast, the bearded, gnomish Mr. Randi cheerfully described himself as a "liar" and "cheat" in mock recognition of his magician's skills at duping people into thinking they had seen something inexplicable -- such as a person appearing to be cut in half with a saw -- when it was, in fact, the result of simple physical deception. He was equally dismissive of psychics, seers and soothsayers. Still, he was always careful to describe himself as an investigator, not a debunker, and insisted he was always open to the possibility of supernatural phenomena but simply found no evidence of it after decades of research.

To put his money where his mouth was, Mr. Randi and the research organization he helped found in 1976, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, offered payouts ranging up to $1 million to anyone who could demonstrate a supernatural or paranormal phenomenon under mutually agreed, scientifically controlled conditions. While he had many takers, he said, none of them earned a cent. Randi was featured in a handful of Slashdot stories over the years, including a two-part interview where he answered your questions.

Countless Uber drivers are now being pushed to the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, transporting humans, food, supplies, and maybe soon Covid-19 testing kits as shelter-in-place rules cause demand for delivery services to spike. Yet despite their exposure to infection, gig workers lack paid sick leave, health benefits, or unemployment insurance because of their status as independent contractors. From a report: Earlier this month, Uber, Lyft, and Amazon drivers protested the exclusion of gig workers from Silicon Valley's monumental heave to protect itself from the coronavirus. As technology employees go remote, contractors are burdened with extra demands and no additional support. Uber, Lyft, and Amazon eventually agreed to compensate gig workers through ad hoc funds, but OneZero spoke to Uber drivers who say this is hardly a safety net. "I think I'm going to fall through the cracks," said Kimberly James, a 46-year-old driver for Uber Eats in Atlanta, Georgia. After a series of devastating hardships, including losing her house in a fire, James has come to rely on food delivery platforms like Uber Eats and DoorDash to survive.

In 2012, James was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, and her weekly income of $400 means she cannot afford to get sick. Health officials have warned that the coronavirus is especially dangerous for immunocompromised people, so today James has no choice but to isolate indoors. One-time payouts are based on a person's average daily earnings for the past six months. Someone making $28.57 per day is eligible for a payment of $400, the equivalent of 14 days of average pay, while someone earning $121.42 per day can receive $1,700, Uber says on its website. To qualify, drivers must have completed one trip in the 30 days before March 6, 2020, when the global program was first announced.

"There's still time to file a claim for a share of the $425 million that Equifax agreed to cough up after hosing almost half of the country in its massive data breach a few years ago," writes a Pennyslvania newspaper columnist, pointing victims to equifaxbreachsettlement.com.

"But unless you can prove you were an identity theft victim who lost money, or had to waste time cleaning up the mess, don't expect much of a payout. Victims are being hosed again." The breach affected an estimated 147 million Americans. Hackers exploited a known but unpatched website vulnerability and gained access to names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, driver's license numbers and credit card numbers. Facing lawsuits from federal and state consumer protection agencies, Equifax agreed to a settlement. It offered several ways for people to file claims, with a deadline of Jan. 22.

The option that applies to most people is 10 years of free credit monitoring, or a cash payout of up to $125 for those who already have monitoring. But you aren't going to get anywhere near $125. The settlement called for a pot of only $31 million for those payouts. And based on the number of people who have applied, that's not enough to cover the maximum payment. You may not even get enough to buy a decent sandwich, according to Ted Frank, director of litigation for Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which includes the Center for Class Action Fairness. "That's down to $6 or $7 now," Frank told CNBC in December. "Maybe even less than that."

Frank spoke after the federal judge overseeing the settlement awarded $77.5 million of the $425 million settlement fund to the attorneys who represented consumers against Equifax. His organization had opposed that award as being too much.
Meanwhile, the Motley Fool notes that in 2019 Equifax's stock rose 50.5% -- after dropping 21% in 2018 and remaining "relatively flat" in 2017.

"The credit-reporting company's stock rose thanks to a series of earnings beats and with the shadow of the big 2017 data breach receding further into the rear view...."

Most of the attention around automation focuses on how factory robots and self-driving cars may fundamentally change our workforce, potentially eliminating millions of jobs. But AI that can handle knowledge-based, white-collar work is also becoming increasingly competent. From a report on Quartz: One Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is reportedly replacing 34 human insurance claim workers with "IBM Watson Explorer," starting by this month. The AI will scan hospital records and other documents to determine insurance payouts, according to a company press release, factoring injuries, patient medical histories, and procedures administered. Automation of these research and data gathering tasks will help the remaining human workers process the final payout faster, the release says.

A federal just has approved the largest auto-scandal settlement in U.S. history, a $14.7 billion settlement concerning Volkswagen Group's diesel car emissions scandal. USA Today reports: U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer in San Francisco approved the sweeping agreement between consumers, the government, California regulators and the German automaker in a written ruling a week after signaling he was likely to sign off. He said the agreement is "fair, reasonable and adequate." The settlement comes about a year after Volkswagen admitted that it rigged 11 million vehicles worldwide with software designed to dodge emissions standards. The company is still facing criminal investigations by the U.S. Justice Department and German prosecutors. The U.S. probe could lead to additional financial penalties and criminal indictments. About 475,000 Volkswagen owners in the U.S. can choose between a buyback or a free fix and compensation, if a repair becomes available. VW will begin administering the settlement immediately, having already devoted several hundred employees to handling the process. Buybacks range in value from $12,475 to $44,176, including restitution payments, and varying based on milage. People who opt for a fix approved by the Environmental Protection Agency will receive payouts ranging from $5,100 to $9,852, depending on the book value of their car. Volkswagen will also pay $2.7 billion for environmental mitigation and another $2 billion for clean-emissions infrastructure.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Peter Whoriskey and Dan Keating report at the Washington Post that Medicare annually pays $69.6 billion for physician services according to an arcane and little-known price list, known as the Relative Value Update over which doctors themselves exercise considerable and less-than-totally-transparent influence. A 31-member committee of the American Medical Association (AMA) recommends what Medicare should pay for some 10,000 procedures — with the fees based in part on how long it takes to complete each one. But this time-and-motion study often fails to take full account of changing technology and other factors affecting physician productivity, so anomalies result. For example, if the AMA time estimates are correct, then 41 percent of gastroenterologists were typically performing 12 hours or more of procedures in a day, which is longer than the typical outpatient surgery center is open and and one gastroenterologist in the Post story would have to work 26 hours, according to the committee time estimates, to accomplish what he gets done in a typical workday. Here's how it works: Medicare pays for a 15-minute colonoscopy as if it took 75 minutes resulting in a median salary for a gastroenterologist of $481,000. It is possible that in 1992, critics allow, when the price list was first developed, a colonoscopy actually took something close to 75 minute when doctors had to hunch over an eyepiece similar to that of a microscope for a look. But technology has advanced and now the images are processed and displayed on a large screen in high-definition video. Responding to criticism that the nation's method of valuing medical procedures misprices payments, a bipartisan group of legislators has drafted a bill that would reshape the way the nation pays doctors. The bill would require Medicare officials to collect data such as how much time doctors spend doing procedures and reducing the doctor payment for overvalued services. 'What started as an advisory group has taken on a life of its own,' says Tom Scully, who was Medicare chief during the George W. Bush Administration. 'The idea that $100 billion in federal spending is based on fixed prices that go through an industry trade association in a process that is not open to the public is pretty wild.'"