Anuj Goel

Epic Games has agreed to pay $520 million to resolve Federal Trade Commission allegations that the "Fortnite" videogame developer violated online privacy protections for children and tricked players into making unintended purchases. From a report: The FTC said the agreement consisted of two record-breaking settlements that resolve a pair of civil complaints it was filing against Epic. One, filed in federal court, alleged the company violated the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting personal information from "Fortnite" players under the age of 13 without notifying their parents or obtaining verifiable parental consent. That lawsuit also accused the company of illegally enabling real-time voice and text chat communications for children and teens in the game by default. Further, the FTC said Epic put those users at risk by connecting them with strangers, and as a result, some were "bullied, threatened, harassed and exposed to dangerous and psychologically traumatizing issues such as suicide." Epic will pay a $275 million civil penalty for the alleged COPPA violations, the FTC said, the largest assessed in the commission's enforcement of the privacy law. Epic didn't admit or deny the FTC's allegations as part of the settlements. The commission also said the company agreed to pay $245 million in consumer refunds to resolve the second complaint, which was filed in administrative court. It is the FTC's largest settlement that bars the use of so-called dark patterns, tactics that trap customers into paying for goods and services and create obstacles to canceling. The agency alleged that Epic deployed a variety of tactics to drive unintended purchases of virtual perks such as outfits and dance moves in "Fortnite," including the use of counterintuitive, inconsistent and confusing button configurations. "These tactics led to hundreds of millions of dollars in unauthorized charges for consumers," it said.

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UK regulator Ofcom proposed changes to net neutrality rules carried over from the European Union to give telecommunications and internet providers more flexibility. From a report: Internet service providers should be allowed to offer a broader range of premium packages on a wider variety of parameters such as latency, and could include discounted tariffs during off-peak hours, according to proposals from the watchdog published Friday. "The net neutrality rules constrain the activities of broadband providers, and could be restricting their ability to develop new services and manage their networks," Ofcom said in the report. Net neutrality is shorthand for rules that intend to ensure traffic carried over telecom networks is treated equally, without favoring certain services or content. Debates over such regulations often prove controversial due to tensions over what constitutes an open and free internet and fears consumers could suffer if it becomes harder to compare prices. The report proposed that telecom providers be allowed to not charge a customer's overall allowance for certain services, like public health advice.

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Sweden-based price comparison service PriceRunner has announced that it's suing Google for €2.1 billion ($2.4 billion) after a European court ruled that Google breached EU antitrust laws. Last November, the European Union's General Court upheld a decision to fine Google a record €2.42 billion (US$2.8 billion) for favoring its own comparison shopping services over rivals. 

"We are ... seeking compensation for the damage Google has caused us during many years, but are also seeing this lawsuit as a fight for consumers who have suffered tremendously from Google’s infringement of the competition law for the past fourteen years and still today," said PriceRunner CEO Mikael Lindahl. 

PriceRunner claimed that Google has a "monopoly-like position" in Europe adding that it believes it has still not complied with the EU Commission's decision and is "abusing it's dominant position." As such, it claimed that traffic and profits are diverted from itself and other shopping services, and that its offers are higher than other services, harming consumers. "Since the violation is still ongoing the amount of damages increases every day, we expect the final damages amount of the lawsuit to be significantly higher," it wrote.

Google lost its first appeal against the EU fine, but it launched another one last month, saying "we feel there are areas that require legal clarification from the European Court of Justice." Engadget has reached out to Google for comment on the PriceRunner lawsuit. 

The Yutu-2 rover is on a roll. It's been exploring the far side of the moon since early 2019 as part of China's Chang'e-4 lunar lander mission. It now has its eyes set on a strange-looking cube-shaped object it spotted in the distance. From a report: Andrew Jones, a journalist who covers the Chinese space program for SpaceNews and Space.com, highlighted a new rover update in a series of tweets Friday. The nickname for the cube-shaped object translates to "mystery house." The rover team is planning to drive over and get a closer look at the object. As with Yutu-2's intriguing discovery of a "gel-like" substance inside a crater in 2019, don't get too excited for aliens. That substance turned out to be glassy-looking rock. And as far as I know, Stanley Kubrick never planted a monolith on the real moon, and those metal sculptures that were once all the rage on Earth haven't made the trek across space. Yutu-2's view of the cube is fuzzy and far-off, so the object's true nature should become clearer as the rover gets closer. The most likely explanation is a boulder. This part of the moon is pockmarked with impact craters, which can feature quite a bit of chunky debris.

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Amazon employee Dustin Mitchell is also a metal guitarist in Texas who decided to name his band "Doomscroll," reports Kotaku — and in February Mitchell tried trademarking Doomscroll with America's Patent and Trademark Office. But then on October 13th, the last day of the trademark's 30-day public comment period, "he got an email from a lawyer who represented Id Software." The lawyer asked Mitchell to extend the 30-day USPTO trademark deadline in order to avoid any legal action. Mitchell felt weird after getting the email, telling Wired that he was a big fan of the old Doom games as a kid and now he was facing off against the devs over his band name. "They're trying to take something away from me that is completely unrelated to them," said Mitchell. A trademark lawyer told Wired that while it might seem odd, Mitchell most likely had every right to trademark the word doomscroll because within the context of music it "is not generic or descriptive of music, musical performances, or musical services." But Id's lawyers are most likely "scooting" in to try to protect the brand name and franchise from any confusion. According to the Wired report, Id has similarly stepped in to stop other folks from trademarking or registering brand names that use the word doom, including a rock metal event named the "Maryland Doom Fest" and a podcast titled "Garden of Doom." For now, the future of Doomscroll (The band) is up to lawyers at Id Software. In October, Mitchell received a lengthy trial schedule that goes all the way until 2023. So this most likely won't be settled anytime soon, unless the guitarist gives up the fight.

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LG will reportedly start selling iPhones and iPads in its South Korean stores this August -- mere months after the company quit making Android devices. Android Authority reports: According to MacRumors, the Herald Economic Daily claims LG has struck a deal with Apple to sell the iPhone and iPad in 400 stores across South Korea starting in August. LG may have to overcome some hurdles to make this happen. The company reportedly signed a "win-win" agreement with the country's National Mobile Communication Distribution Association that bars it from selling a direct competitor's phones in its stores. That deal was made in 2018, however, or well before LG signaled that it would quit making phones and tablets. LG is supposedly planning to renegotiate the agreement once it officially sells the iPhone and iPad in its shops. The deal unsurprisingly wouldn't include Macs, as systems like the MacBook Air compete directly with the Gram series and other LG computers where the iPhone and iPad are relatively safe.

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Hyundai has acquired Boston Dynamics from Softbank in a deal that values the robotics company at $1.1 billion.

Lyft will sell its self-driving car unit to Woven Planet, a subsidiary of Toyota, for $550 million in cash, the companies announced Monday. CNBC reports: As part of the deal, Lyft and Woven Planet will work together on enhancing automated driving technology safety, according to a release. "Not only will this transaction allow Lyft to focus on advancing our leading Autonomous platform and transportation network, this partnership will help pull in our profitability timeline," Lyft Co-Founder and President John Zimmer said in a statement. The company expects the deal will remove $100 million of annualized non-GAAP operating expenses on a net basis, according to the release. Because of that, Zimmer added that if the deal closes when expected in the third quarter and recovery from the pandemic continues, Lyft expects to become profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis in Q3.

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William Robinson shares a report: The growing list of "firsts" for Perseverance, NASA's newest six-wheeled robot on the Martian surface, includes converting some of the Red Planet's thin, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere into oxygen. A toaster-size, experimental instrument aboard Perseverance called the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) accomplished the task. The test took place April 20, the 60th Martian day, or sol, since the mission landed Feb. 18. While the technology demonstration is just getting started, it could pave the way for science fiction to become science fact -- isolating and storing oxygen on Mars to help power rockets that could lift astronauts off the planet's surface. Such devices also might one day provide breathable air for astronauts themselves. MOXIE is an exploration technology investigation -- as is the Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) weather station -- and is sponsored by NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. "This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars," said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for STMD. "MOXIE has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise as we move toward our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars. Oxygen isn't just the stuff we breathe. Rocket propellant depends on oxygen, and future explorers will depend on producing propellant on Mars to make the trip home." For rockets or astronauts, oxygen is key, said MOXIE's principal investigator, Michael Hecht of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory.

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Quibi is considering shutting itself down, WSJ reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter, a move that points to a possible crash landing for a once-highflying entertainment startup that raised $1.75 billion in capital. From the report: The streaming service has been plagued with problems since it launched in April, facing lower-than-expected viewership, disappointing download numbers and a lawsuit from a well-capitalized foe. The service is aimed at mobile viewers, but the coronavirus pandemic forced would-be subscribers away from the kinds of on-the-go situations Quibi executives envisioned for its users. Quibi attracted blue-chip advertisers including Pepsi, Walmart and Anheuser-Busch, securing about $150 million in ad revenue in the run-up to its launch. Those deals came under strain earlier this year amid lower-than-expected viewership for Quibi's shows, prompting advertisers to defer their payments. In recent weeks, Quibi hired a restructuring firm to evaluate its options, the people said. The firm recommended the options to the board of directors this week, laying out a list of options that included shutting the company down. Update: 10/21 19:44 GMT: The Information is reporting that Quibi has decided to shut down. From the report: The closure is a stunning end to Katzenberg's hopes of creating a new category of video entertainment, short programs of a few minutes in length that could be watched on the go. Katzenberg, a former Disney executive who later helped start DreamWorks, raised nearly $2 billion to finance Quibi. Among the backers were most of the major Hollywood studios, Google, Alibaba and the Madrone Capital Partners. Quibi scheduled calls with investors and employees on Wednesday afternoon to deliver the news.

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Scientists have shown shocking the tongue -- combined with a carefully designed sound program -- can reduce symptoms of tinnitus, not just while patients are being treated, but up to 1 year later. Science Magazine reports: In the team's experiment, 326 people with tinnitus sat for up to 1 hour at a time with a small plastic paddle on their tongue. Tiny electrodes in the paddle delivered an electrical current designed to broadly excite the brain, getting activity going through a number of interconnected regions. The electrical stimulation feels a little like pop rocks candy fizzing in your mouth, [says Hubert Lim, a biomedical engineer at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities]. Subjects also wore headphones that delivered a more targeted hit to the brain's auditory system. Each person heard a rapidly changing series of pure tones at different frequencies, against a background noise that sounds "kind of like electronic music," Lim says. The goal of the two together was to distract the brain by heightening its sensitivity, forcing it to suppress the activity that causes tinnitus. "The brain can only pay attention to so many things," Lim says. Over the 12 weeks of treatment, the patients' tinnitus symptoms improved dramatically. More than 80% of those who complied with the prescribed regimen saw an improvement. And they saw an average drop of about 14 points on a tinnitus severity score of one to 100, the researchers report today in Science Translational Medicine. When the team followed up after 12 months, 80% of the participants still had lower tinnitus scores, with average drops of 12.7 and 14.5 points.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Underwater quantum links are possible across 30 meters (100 feet) of turbulent water, scientists have shown. Such findings could help to one day secure quantum communications for submarines. [...] In the new study, researchers experimented with quantum communications in a "flume tank," a water tank in which scientists can generate waves to mimic the ocean. They also tried two different strategies for quantum communications -- one involving just the polarization of the light, and the other incorporating the polarization and the orbital angular momentum of the signals -- to analyze how quantum communication protocols might differ in maximum distances and data transfer rates. The researchers achieved quantum communication at up to 72 kilobits per second across up to 30 meters of turbulent water, the longest distance yet reported for such links. Although turbulence did result in significant wandering and distortion of light signals, those error rates didn't prevent quantum links from successfully being established with either communication protocol. Unexpectedly, the researchers found they could keep quantum communication going even while the transmitter moved down the flume tank. "We had expected that this would not be possible without beam-tracking technology," says Felix Hufnagel, a lead author and quantum physicist at the University of Ottawa in Canada. After the scientists analyzed their data, they suggested the maximum distance for secure quantum communications might actually be 80 meters in turbulent water, although this would depend on factors such as the efficiency of the detectors used. Improving such factors might significantly boost the maximum communications distance, they say. The findings have been detailed in a preprint article on April 9.

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California revealed for the first time an 18-month investigation into Facebook's privacy practices and accused the social media giant in a court filing on Wednesday of hampering the investigation. From a report: Revelation of the probe is the latest bad news for Facebook, which is already under investigation by 47 U.S. states. Some states, particularly New York and Nebraska, have raised concerns that Facebook and other big tech companies engage in anti-competitive practices, expose consumer data to potential data theft and push up advertising prices. Facebook had no immediate comment. The Facebook investigations are part of a larger landscape of probes of big tech firms by the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. California's investigation began in 2018 as a probe into the Cambridge Analytica scandal but "expanded over time to an investigation into whether Facebook has violated California law, by among other things, deceiving users and ignoring its own policies in allowing third parties broad access to user data," the agency said in a court filing.

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SpaceX isn't wasting much time now that Starhopper has completed its hover test. The company has filed an FCC communication permissions request that, as Elon Musk confirmed, prepares for test-flying the "orbit-class" Starship. The vehicle will fly mu...

As we approach Nintendo's 130th anniversary next month, we're taking some time to look back on the company's devices that preceded the Switch, and we're starting with its immediate predecessor, the 3DS. In Engadget's review of the original version ba...

Sleep tracking and personal fitness gadgets are nothing new, and even the cheapest knock-off wearables will do a decent enough job of monitoring the main criteria, so companies are constantly looking at ways to make their devices even more useful. Po...

A group of more than 30 Microsoft employees is lobbying coworkers to stop donating to the company's political action committee in an effort to starve the PAC of funds, multiple Microsoft workers with knowledge of the efforts told OneZero. From a report: While Microsoft pitches itself as an inclusive and progressive company -- especially during Pride Month, with tweets and donations to LGBTQ+ causes -- employees who have donated to the PAC say they have no control over which candidates are being supported, meaning that they have no say when the PAC financially supports candidates whose views the employees don't want to support. Microsoft employees who spoke to OneZero -- on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals -- say that the PAC doesn't ask employees for input or supply avenues to suggest or control which candidates should be supported. "Candidates that we dislike are those that advance policies contrary to the company's stated policies of diversity, inclusion, and growth mindset," one employee, who said they had persuaded about 10 others to stop donating to the PAC, told OneZero. The PAC is a voluntary, opt-in fund that's entirely supported by donations from more than 4,000 of Microsoft's 140,000 employees, according to a 2015 blog post. The goal of Microsoft's "MSPAC" is to "support and encourage the election to federal offices of persons who support the needs of business in a free and healthy economy," according to its website. In other words, the PAC exists to extend Microsoft's political influence and serve its business interests. It also brings prominent speakers to campus for employees who donate to MSPAC, and occasionally opens those events up to nondonors.

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While Netflix was famously reticent about releasing viewing statistics, over the last year or so the company has become more open about it. Its latest revelation confirms the theory that someone out there likes Adam Sandler movies, since his latest s...

Google and Huawei have preliminarily agreed to settle a class action lawsuit from Nexus 6P users who say their devices experienced a bootlooping issue that caused the phones to shut down randomly, regardless of the battery level. Pending court approval, the companies would be liable to a $9.75 million settlement for the class action that began in April 2017, which may result in payments of up to $400 for participating plaintiffs. The Verge reports: The lawsuit alleged that Google, which contracted the design and manufacturing of its early Android smartphones to third-party companies, and Huawei, one of the chosen companies, breached the device warranty since the companies were aware of the issue, but did not respond to the bug. The plaintiffs also said the companies continued selling the faulty devices while failing to acknowledge the issue. If the court approves the settlement at the next hearing on May 9th, Nexus 6P users in the U.S. who purchased the device on or after September 25th, 2015 would be eligible to claim reimbursement. The proposal currently states that those who are eligible for the settlement could be paid up to $400 for their faulty device, while those who received a Pixel XL in a prior warranty exchange program would only be eligible for up to $10. Those who submit proper documentation for the bug will receive the most settlement money, while those without may be eligible for up to $75. For full details on submitting a claim, check out the as-filed longform notice document, which explains the process that will go into effect following court approval.

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Xiaomi has officially launched the Mi 9 at an event in China after months of teasers. The triple-camera flagship is powered by Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 855 chip, and is supported by 6 to 8GB of RAM -- depending on which model you get. During the eve...

An anonymous reader quotes CNET: Opera, an underdog in a browser market dominated by Google's Chrome, raised $115 million in an initial public offering Friday. The company sold 9.6 million American depositary shares at $12 each, the high end of the $10-to-$12 range it expected for the IPO. When the stock started trading more broadly at about 7:30 a.m. PT, it rose as high as 28 percent above that before settling in at a 10 percent rise, to $13.24, during midday trading.... In fact, Opera raised a big notch more, because at the same time as the IPO, it also secured a $60 million private funding round from Tospring Technology, also known as Bitmain, which makes Bitcoin mining computers, IDG Capital Fund and IDG Capital Investors. And the financial firms underwriting the IPO had an option to release another 15 percent of shares -- 1.44 million. "It gets us roughly up to $190 million," Chief Financial Officer Frode Jacobsen said.... In the first three months of 2018, Opera reported net income of $6.6 million on revenue of $39.4 million. The company makes money through partnerships with search engines, including Google and Yandex, that pay for search traffic it sends their way and through advertising deals like promoting websites on the browser's bookmarking, or speed dial, page. Opera has 264 million monthly active users on smartphones and 57 million on personal computers, Opera said in regulatory filings. Starting in 2017, it built an AI-powered news service into its browser and now offers it as a standalone app called Opera News. That has 90 million monthly users. The news app and service has been responsible for the turnaround in Opera's recent financial fortunes, Jacobsen said.

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AmiMoJo quotes the Register: The Internet Engineering Task Force has taken another small step in protecting everybody's privacy... As the draft proposal explains, the RFCs that define NTP have what amounts to a convenience feature: packets going from client to server have the same set of fields as packets sent from servers to clients... "Populating these fields with accurate information is harmful to privacy of clients because it allows a passive observer to fingerprint clients and track them as they move across networks". The header fields in question are Stratum, Root Delay, Root Dispersion, Reference ID, Reference Timestamp, Origin Timestamp, and Receive Timestamp. The Origin Timestamp and Receive Timestamp offer a handy example or a "particularly severe information leak". Under NTP's spec (RFC 5905), clients copy the server's most recent timestamp into their next request to a server – and that's a boon to a snoop-level watcher. The proposal "proposes backward-compatible updates to the Network Time Protocol to strip unnecessary identifying information from client requests and to improve resilience against blind spoofing of unauthenticated server responses." Specifically, client developers should set those fields to zero.

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occamboy writes: Perhaps the ultimate conundrum! I've taken over a software project in an extremely specialized area that needs remediation in months, so it'll be tough to build an internal team quickly enough. The good news is that there are outside software engineering groups that have exactly the right experience and good reputations. The bad news is that my management is worried about letting source code out of the building. Seems to me that unless I convince the suits otherwise, my options are to: 1) have all contractors work on our premises — a pain for everyone, and they might not want to do it at all 2) have them remote in to virtual desktops running on our premises — much of our software is sub-millisecond-response real-time systems on headless hardware, so they'll need to at least run executables locally, and giving access to executables but not sources seems like it will have challenges. And if the desktop environment goes down, more than a dozen people are frozen waiting for a fix. Also, I'd imagine that if a remote person really wanted the sources, they could video the sources as they scrolls by. I'll bet there are n better ways to do this, and I'm hoping that there are some smart Slashdotters who'll let me know what they are; please help!

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An anonymous reader writes: Partnering with Adafruit, Microsoft has announced the Windows IoT Core Starter Kit. The $75 kit comes comes with an SD card preloaded with Windows 10 IoT. According to the Raspberry Pi blog: "The pack is available with a Pi 2 for people who are are new to Raspberry Pi or who'd like a dedicated device for their projects, or without one for those who'll be using a Pi they already own. The box contains an SD card with Windows 10 Core and a case, power supply, wifi module and Ethernet cable for your Pi; a breadboard, jumper wires and components including LEDs, potentiometers and switches; and sensors for light, colour, temperature and pressure. There's everything you need to start building."

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An anonymous reader writes: Ready to take on Apple Pay and Android Pay, Samsung Pay is now live in the United States. The service has already launched in South Korea, where it saw over $30 million in transactions its first month. The Verge reports: "Samsung Pay may be more capable than other competing services, but its availability has some limits. First, it's only built into Samsung's newest devices: the Galaxy S6, the S6 Edge and Edge+, and the Note 5. You also need a credit or debit card from Visa, MasterCard, or American Express card, and it has to be issued by one of just a few banks: Bank of America, Citi, American Express, and US Bank are available at launch. (Samsung Pay also works with customer loyalty cards.)"

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