They have a long track record of treating everyone, employees, customers, etc. as "fodder" for their algorithmic profiting.

I'd rather walk miles than call Uber.

So you understand the situation to be the target company is using VMWare products it has under an existing perpetual license agreement, but that refused to change the terms of that agreement or to sign any new agreements? I could see that as a legal foundation for the audits to "ensure only the existing licensed products are being used." (But I'd sure ask, "Where was corporate legal when that contract was first signed?" Agreeing to an unconstrained right for some outside company to enter your company and "audit" it strikes me as Not A Good Thing. Now if there are some constraints on the audit on the pre-existing contracts, that would be interesting to know. And it wouldn't surprise me for the two companies to engage in substantial legal negotiations and possibly litigation to constrain an "audit.")

Does VMWare have a contract clause that permits them to 'audit' a former customer? Under what country's laws would this be conducted? NL or US?
IANAL, but it's not clear at all to me that a company with whom you no longer have a contract has any legal right to conduct a clearly forensic audit. And of course, as others here have pointed out, this is an action that inflicts financial damage on the former customer to support such an audit. I'm sure the target company's legal counsel is working overtime preparing a response to this.

But of course, it's easy to pound on Apple and Google. Shutting down the wider surveillance economy would gore a lot more oxen... THOSE do much more damage to actual end users than the Apple/Google duopoly. Apple & Google arguably hurt the big players like Epic, but as far as I'm personally concerned, that's A Feature.

A good place to start when there's a problem with your bank: https://www.helpwithmybank.gov...

Credit Unions are supervised by a different agency: https://ncua.gov/consumers

It actually was a bit of a search to find "SMNP", so my original post was both a commentary on how our eyes tend to see what we expect, and to provide the acronym expansion for the lazy among us...

I had to read more closely to see that didn't say what I thought it said. From the Scripps article: A second strategy employed saponin/MPLA nanoparticles (SMNP).

Another post where I wish I had moderator points today....

Sigh, no mod points for me today... This is on target.

See also the comments on AI in restaurants: https://slashdot.org/story/25/...

Well, in the case from late last year that I was a member of the class, I thought the claim was totally bogus. And that case did not go to trial, instead the company settled out of court. That's the best result for the scumbag lawyers, they get paid without having their bogus claims subjected to actual trial. I think this claim against Apple is similarly bogus, and has the same goal. Settle out of court, lawyers pocket their huge payout....

The one class where there was a legitimate concern, a meaningful settlement, and I actually suffered significant damages, was a case over failed plumbing (plastic pipes.) But by the time our pipes failed, the settlement was out of money.

Otherwise, I'm very much not interested in having some data-sucking AI tell me what to eat.

"Class Action ambulance chasers plan to sue Apple" When they get 1/3 of the settlement PLUS expenses, this is a very lucrative deal for class action specialists. As far as I'm concerned, that is legalized extortion. The purported justification that class members would not get "justice" without that kind of award does not hold water. Having been a member of multiple class actions, I got peanuts, and usually didn't think there was much of a case.

We had thermite for our nuclear materials safes. So yeah, I'm familiar with a lot of this technology and a lot of the operational imperatives.

And arguing AD because it was "easy to administer" doesn't match my understanding or my observation. I know that was not the LDAP solution we were developing. But of course, our tactical computers didn't run Windows, either.

The use of Active Directory in TOCs always bothered me. That's a single source product of failure. And a lot of it made no sense. I asked, "What's next, the CAC-enabled rifle? You put your CAC card into the butt of the gun, and if it can't talk to the Bn AD server, it won't shoot?"