Tag: settlement

Mercedes-Benz Fined $1.5 Billion For Emissions Cheating

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Automaker Daimler AG and subsidiary Mercedes-Benz USA have agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve allegations they cheated on emissions tests, officials said Monday. The U.S. Department of Justice, Environmental Protection Agency and the California attorney general’s office said Daimler violated environmental laws by using so-called “defeat device software” to circumvent emissions…

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Confirms a Pattern of Age Discrimination at IBM

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has issued a sweeping decision concluding that IBM engaged in systematic age discrimination between 2013 and 2018, when it shed thousands of older workers in the United States. ProPublica reports: The EEOC finding, contained in an Aug. 31 letter to a group of ex-employees, comes more than two years after ProPublica reported that the company…

Elon Musk Says Settlers Will Likely Die on Mars

“But is that such a bad thing?” asks Popular Mechanics: Earlier this week, Elon Musk said there’s a “good chance” settlers in the first Mars missions will die. And while that’s easy to imagine, he and others are working hard to plan and minimize the risk of death by hardship or accident. In fact, the goal is to have people comfortably…

Weather Channel App To Change Practices After LA Lawsuit

The operator of The Weather Channel mobile app has agreed to change how it informs users about its location-tracking practices and sale of personal data as part of a settlement with the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, officials said Wednesday. From a report: City Attorney Mike Feuer alleged in a 2019 lawsuit that app users were misled when they agreed to…

China Sets Trial Run For Digital Yuan in Top City Hubs

Chinese authorities will expand test use of the country’s prototype digital currency across the nation’s three leading urban clusters centered on Beijing, Shanghai and the southern cities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong. From a report: The move, announced by the Ministry of Commerce, expands the coverage area for testing the cyber currency to a potential user base of around 400…

Settlement for Google+ Breach Offers Class Members Up to $12 Each

“Anyone in the United States who held a Google Plus account between January 1, 2015 and April 2, 2019, and believes they were impacted by a security flaw that Google disclosed in 2018 can now register for a payout from a class action settlement…” reports the Verge. “Each class action member is eligible for a payout of up to $12 after…

Anthony Levandowski Sentenced To 18 Months In Prison, As New $4 Billion Lawsuit Against Uber Is Filed

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer and serial entrepreneur who was at the center of a lawsuit between Uber and Waymo, has been sentenced to 18 months on one count of stealing trade secrets. Judge Alsup said that home confinement would “[give] a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade…

UAE Successfully Launches Hope Probe, Arab World’s First Mission To Mars

The first Arab space mission to Mars has blasted off aboard a rocket from Japan, with its unmanned probe — called Al-Amal, or Hope — successfully separating about an hour after liftoff. The Guardian reports: The Emirati project is one of three racing to Mars, including Tianwen-1 from China and Mars 2020 from the United States, taking advantage of a period…

Gizmodo Reports Airbnb ‘Agrees to Rat Out Its Hosts Like NYC Wants It To’

In New York City, Airbnb “has agreed to hand over personal data about its hosts — like their phone numbers and email addresses, along with a full list of every home they’re putting on the platform — in order to help city authorities track down those that flout the city’s regulations,” reports Gizmodo. The city is Airbnb’s largest market in the…