I so, so, so don't want to drive any new car that can do this:

A federal appeals court refused to bring back a class action lawsuit alleging four auto manufacturers had violated Washington state’s privacy laws by using vehicles’ on-board infotainment systems to record and intercept customers’ private text messages and mobile phone call logs.

The court ruled that the practice does not meet the threshold for an illegal privacy violation under state law, handing a big win to automakers Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen and General Motors, which are defendants in five related class action suits focused on the issue.

The plaintiffs had appealed a prior judge’s dismissal. But the appeals court ruled Tuesday that the interception and recording of mobile phone activity did not meet the Washington Privacy Act’s standard that a plaintiff must prove that “his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation” has been threatened.

A suit filed against Honda in 2021, argu[ed] that beginning in at least 2014 infotainment systems in the company’s vehicles began downloading and storing a copy of all text messages on smartphones when they were connected to the system.

An Annapolis, Maryland-based company, Berla Corporation, provides the technology to some car manufacturers but does not offer it to the general public, the lawsuit said. Once messages are downloaded, Berla’s software makes it impossible for vehicle owners to access their communications and call logs but does provide law enforcement with access, the lawsuit said.

Many car manufacturers are selling car owners’ data to advertisers as a revenue boosting tactic, according to earlier reporting by Recorded Future News. Automakers are exponentially increasing the number of sensors they place in their cars every year with little regulation of the practice.

https://therecord.media/class-action-lawsuit-cars-text-messages-privacy

Reddit users figured out that some bot crawlers scrape popular threads and auto-generate AI articles based on user comments, so they decided to create some fake hype to confuse them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/154umm2/im_so_excited_they_finally_introduced_glorbo/

It worked.

https://archive.li/2023.07.20-203104/https://www.zleague.gg/theportal/world-of-warcraft-wow-players-excited-for-glorbos-introduction/

This is why real journalism matters.

“Be the statue”

I am really concerned that this #Meta verification scheme will be particularly attractive to seniors who use Facebook and are plagued with impersonators who attempt to scam their friends via messenger. They’re going to see $15 and say well, that’s less than lunch for two people at McDonald’s and they are going to give their money and their ID to address a problem that isn’t theirs to solve.

I feel like we aren't calling the 2038 problem the "epocholypse" often enough

We should all try harder to make this a thing

I am annoyed at how much coverage of these recurring "Big Gorilla lays off around 10.000 people" is basically just a rehash of the company press release, with not a single journalist asking how it's possible that all of these big tech companies made the same exact mistake of hiring too many people, while simultaneously showing record profits.

Like, if a 'rigorous review' finds 12.000 redundancies, why does nobody question leadership about how this was allowed to happen?

Not one critical note.

As a distributed systems researcher, I’d like to thank the House of Representatives for demonstrating that leader election protocols can’t be guaranteed to terminate.