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Submission + - Google to destroy browsing data to settle consumer privacy lawsuit (nbcnews.com)

Submitted by SonicSpike
SonicSpike writes: Google agreed to destroy billions of data records to settle a lawsuit claiming it secretly tracked the internet use of people who thought they were browsing privately.

Terms of the settlement were filed on Monday in the Oakland, California federal court, and require approval by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs valued the accord at more than $5 billion, and as high as $7.8 billion. Though users will not receive damages, they may still sue individually for damages.

The class action began in 2020, covering millions of Google users who used private browsing since June 1, 2016.

Users alleged that Google’s analytics, cookies and apps let the Alphabet unit improperly track people who set Google’s Chrome browser to “Incognito” mode and other browsers to “private” browsing mode.

Under the settlement, Google will update disclosures about what it collects in “private” browsing, a process it has already begun. It will also let Incognito users block third-party cookies for five years.

Submission + - Fire crews receive special training to handle EV fires (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by RockDoctor
RockDoctor writes: A BBC investigation reports on special training that UK Fire and Rescue Service staff are receiving to handle Electric Vehicle fires.

While [a hazardous materials specialist] stressed that EV fires are rare, they pose a challenge quite unlike a conventionally fuelled vehicle fire. [...] The batteries — the source of the fire — are often hard to reach, he says, and EV fires can create directional jet flames and vapour cloud explosions.

"Our preferred approach is to let them burn themselves out," says [the specialist].

Electric cars are also known to reignite "up to two or three weeks after the initial fire", says Mr Maher, meaning they have to be "quarantined" away from other vehicles even after the fire appears to have been put out.

The results of [Fire Service] searches show there were 59 electric vehicle fire references in 2022-23 across England — up from 30 the previous year.

[The UK Government's Home Office] recommended car parks increased the spacing between electric vehicles to reduce the risk of fires spreading between vehicles. Which will only increase the pressure to reduce all vehicle usage in town and city centres, as parking space is effectively reduced.

Comment Re:Power? (Score 4, Interesting) 41

by thule (#64354962) Attached to: Microsoft, OpenAI Plan $100 Billlion 'Stargate' AI Supercomputer
For now, the answer is to spread the datacenters across the country. Which causes other issues. https://twitter.com/corbtt/status/1772392525174620355:

Spoke to a Microsoft engineer on the GPT-6 training cluster project. He kvetched about the pain they're having provisioning infiniband-class links between GPUs in different regions.
Me: "why not just colocate the cluster in one region?"
Him: "Oh yeah we tried that first. We can't put more than 100K H100s in a single state without bringing down the power grid."

Submission + - WSJ: America Made a Huge Bet on Sports Gambling. The Backlash Is Here (archive.is)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: American sports spent more than a century keeping gambling as far away as possible, in the name of preserving competitive purity and repelling scandal and corruption.

Now, less than six years after the Supreme Court opened the door for states to embrace legal sports betting, major U.S. leagues are already confronting the darker sides of sports betting with alarming frequency. And at the heart of the problems is the population whose ability to bet on sports is the most severely curbed: the athletes themselves.

The past two weeks alone have seen players across the major professional and college leagues drawn into a building avalanche of gambling scandals that showed just how perilous the new landscape has become.

Earlier this month, the National Basketball Association fielded complaints from players and a head coach about betting’s growing influence and its potential dangers. Days later, Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter became the subject of a league investigation of alleged suspicious betting activity.

The National Football League, meanwhile, suspended 10 players for betting just last year.

The controversies have extended into the collegiate ranks as well. In the buildup to March Madness—the biggest sports-betting event in America—the Temple University men’s basketball team was flagged by prominent gambling watchdog firm U.S. Integrity for suspicious wagering activity on its games.

The situation has become worrisome enough that NCAA president Charlie Baker on Wednesday amped up his organization’s call for a nationwide ban on bets on the performance of individual college athletes. He added that “these last several days show there is more work to be done.”

Last week, a nightmare scenario in Major League Baseball also served as a reminder that, even as legal gambling proliferates, illegal gambling in the U.S. remains a potent force. Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani, the highest paid athlete in American sports history, found himself embroiled in a betting scandal stemming from his longtime interpreter’s association with an alleged illegal bookmaker who is under federal investigation.

Submission + - Red Hat issues urgent alert for Fedora Linux users due to malicious code (betanews.com)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: In a recent security announcement, Red Hat’s Information Risk and Security and Product Security teams have identified a critical vulnerability in the latest versions of the “xz” compression tools and libraries. The affected versions, 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, contain malicious code that could potentially allow unauthorized access to systems. Fedora Linux 40 users and those using Fedora Rawhide, the development distribution for future Fedora builds, are at risk.

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