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Submission + - FTC Probing Allegations of Amazon's Deceptive Discounting (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As part of its review of Amazon's agreement to buy Whole Foods, the Federal Trade Commission is looking into allegations that Amazon misleads customers about its pricing discounts, according to a source close to the probe. The FTC is probing a complaint brought by the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog, which looked at some 1,000 products on Amazon's website in June and found that Amazon put reference prices, or list prices, on about 46 percent of them. An analysis found that in 61 percent of products with reference prices, Amazon's reference prices were higher than it had sold the same product in the previous 90 days, Consumer Watchdog said in a letter to the FTC dated July 6. Amazon said in a statement that Consumer Watchdog's study was "deeply flawed." "The conclusions the Consumer Watchdog group reached are flat out wrong," Amazon said. "We validate the reference prices provided by manufacturers, vendors and sellers against actual prices recently found across Amazon and other retailers."

Comment Re:ISPs should meter their customers (Score 1) 107

Your numbers and/or units are wrong.

> 33,480,000 bytes

That is only 33.48 megabytes.

But your error is before that.

3600 * 24 * 31 = 2678400 sec/month (that one you got right)
2678400 sec/month * 100,000,000 bits/sec = 267,840,000,000,000 bits/month (you had an error here)
267,840,000,000,000 bits/month / 8 bits/byte = 33,480,000,000,000 bytes/month
33,480,000,000,000 bytes/month / 1,000,000,000 bytes/gigabyte = 33,480 gigabytes/month
33,480 gigabytes/month * 15 $/gigabyte = $502,200

Comment Re:Also, who does not separate drive control? (Score 2) 192

by CoderJoe (#50377459) Attached to: Why Car Info Tech Is So Thoroughly At Risk

Normally there are two _separate_ CAN busses, one which handles all the critical crap, and one which handles the infotainment and comfort stuff. There's a module which connects the two, providing read-only queries from the second to the first. None of the hacks breached this system.

Oh really? Then how did that Jeep Cherokee hack via the infotainment system work?

from http://www.wired.com/2015/07/h... (emphasis mine)

As the two hackers remotely toyed with the air-conditioning, radio, and windshield wipers, I mentally congratulated myself on my courage under pressure. That's when they cut the transmission.

Immediately my accelerator stopped working. As I frantically pressed the pedal and watched the RPMs climb, the Jeep lost half its speed, then slowed to a crawl. This occurred just as I reached a long overpass, with no shoulder to offer an escape. The experiment had ceased to be fun.

Comment Re:More proof... (Score 1) 60

by CoderJoe (#50289297) Attached to: Manipulating Microsoft WSUS To Attack Enterprises

Is it any different then say apt-get using unsecured http or ftp connections?

In addition to the package .deb files being signed, the official package repositories have signed package indexes. I suppose one could just serve up a modified index without a signature, but apt might warn or error on that. (I haven't checked this part)

Comment Re:Mod parent up. (Score 2) 391

by CoderJoe (#50227479) Attached to: $340 Audiophile Ethernet Cable Tested

From the cable tear-down, it does not appear that either end had any of the shielding connected to the plug shield.

With XLR cable connections, you have your shield, which IS connected at both ends, and your signal ground, which is isolated from the shield.

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