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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, AMC notified subscribers of a proposed $8.3 million settlement that provides awards to an estimated 6 million subscribers of its six streaming services: AMC+, Shudder, Acorn TV, ALLBLK, SundanceNow, and HIDIVE. The settlement comes in response to allegations that AMC illegally shared subscribers' viewing history with tech companies like Google, Facebook, and X (aka Twitter) in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA). Passed in 1988, the VPPA prohibits AMC and other video service providers from sharing "information which identifies a person as having requested or obtained specific video materials or services from a video tape service provider." It was originally passed to protect individuals' right to private viewing habits, after a journalist published the mostly unrevealing video rental history of a judge, Robert Bork, who had been nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. The so-called "Bork Tapes" revealed little -- other than that the judge frequently rented spy thrillers and British costume dramas -- but lawmakers recognized that speech could be chilled by monitoring anyone's viewing habits. While the law was born in the era of Blockbuster Video, subscribers suing AMC wrote in their amended complaint (PDF) that "the importance of legislation like the VPPA in the modern era of datamining is more pronounced than ever before." According to subscribers suing, AMC allegedly installed tracking technologies -- including the Meta Pixel, the X Tracking Pixel, and Google Tracking Technology -- on its website, allowing their personally identifying information to be connected with their viewing history. [...] If it's approved, AMC has agreed to "suspend, remove, or modify operation of the Meta Pixel and other Third-Party Tracking Technologies so that use of such technologies on AMC Services will not result in AMC's disclosure to the third-party technology companies of the specific video content requested or obtained by a specific individual." All registered users of AMC services who "requested or obtained video content on at least one of the six AMC services" between January 18, 2021, and January 10, 2024, are currently eligible to submit claims under the proposed settlement. The deadline to submit is April 9. In addition to distributing the $8.3 million settlement fund among class members, subscribers will also receive a free one-week digital subscription.

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Google said it will allow businesses to install ChromeOS Flex on their Windows devices, "potentially preventing millions of PCs from hitting landfills after Microsoft ends support for Windows 10 next year," reports Reuters. The Chrome operating system will ultimately allow users to keep using their Windows 10 systems, while also providing regular security updates and features like data encryption. From the report: ChromeOS is significantly less popular than other operating systems. In January 2024, it held a 1.8% share of the worldwide desktop OS market, far behind Windows' share of about 73%, according to data from research firm Statcounter. ChromeOS has struggled with wider adaptability due to its incompatibility with legacy Windows applications and productivity suites used by businesses. Google said that ChromeOS would allow users to stream legacy Windows and productivity applications, which will help deliver them to devices by running the apps on a data center.

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Tom Warren reports via The Verge: Microsoft is teasing the potential for unique Xbox hardware in the future and a powerful next-gen console. Four previously exclusive Xbox games are officially coming to the PS5 and Nintendo Switch soon, and Microsoft wants to reassure Xbox fans that it's still very much invested in the future of its platform and hardware. In an official Xbox podcast today, Xbox president Sarah Bond teased that Microsoft will deliver 'the largest technical leap' with the next-generation Xbox: "We've got more to come. There's some exciting stuff coming out in hardware that we're going to share this holiday. We're also invested in the next-generation roadmap. What we're really focused on there is delivering the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation, which makes it better for players and better for creators and the visions that they're building." Speaking to The Verge, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer went a step further, teasing that the Xbox hardware teams are thinking about building different kinds of hardware. "I'm very proud of the work that the hardware team is doing, not only for this year, but also into the future," says Spencer. "[We're] really thinking about creating hardware that sells to gamers because of the unique aspects of the hardware. It's kind of an unleashing of the creative capability of our hardware team that I'm really excited about." Perhaps that unique hardware is an Xbox handheld. "We see a lot of opportunity in different types of devices, and will share specifics on our future hardware plans as soon as we are ready," says Microsoft in an Xbox blog post today.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: We already know thatOpenAI's chatbots can pass the bar exam without going to law school. Now, just in time for the Oscars, a new OpenAI app called Sora hopes to master cinema without going to film school. For now a research product, Sora is going out to a few select creators and a number of security experts who will red-team it for safety vulnerabilities. OpenAI plans to make it available to all wannabe auteurs at some unspecified date, but it decided to preview it in advance. Other companies, from giants like Google to startups likeRunway, have already revealed text-to-video AI projects. But OpenAI says that Sora is distinguished by its striking photorealism -- something I haven't seen in its competitors -- and its ability to produce longer clips than the brief snippets other models typically do, up to one minute. The researchers I spoke to won't say how long it takes to render all that video, but when pressed, they described it as more in the "going out for a burrito" ballpark than "taking a few days off." If the hand-picked examples I saw are to be believed, the effort is worth it. OpenAI didn't let me enter my own prompts, but it shared four instances of Sora's power. (None approached the purported one-minute limit; the longest was 17 seconds.) The first came from a detailed prompt that sounded like an obsessive screenwriter's setup: "Beautiful, snowy Tokyo city is bustling. The camera moves through the bustling city street, following several people enjoying the beautiful snowy weather and shopping at nearby stalls. Gorgeous sakura petals are flying through the wind along with snowflakes." The result is a convincing view of what is unmistakably Tokyo, in that magic moment when snowflakes and cherry blossoms coexist. The virtual camera, as if affixed to a drone, follows a couple as they slowly stroll through a streetscape. One of the passersby is wearing a mask. Cars rumble by on a riverside roadway to their left, and to the right shoppers flit in and out of a row of tiny shops. It's not perfect. Only when you watch the clip a few times do you realize that the main characters -- a couple strolling down the snow-covered sidewalk -- would have faced a dilemma had the virtual camera kept running. The sidewalk they occupy seems to dead-end; they would have had to step over a small guardrail to a weird parallel walkway on their right. Despite this mild glitch, the Tokyo example is a mind-blowing exercise in world-building. Down the road, production designers will debate whether it's a powerful collaborator or a job killer. Also, the people in this video -- who are entirely generated by a digital neural network -- aren't shown in close-up, and they don't do any emoting. But the Sora team says that in other instances they've had fake actors showing real emotions. "It will be a very long time, if ever, before text-to-video threatens actual filmmaking," concludes Wired. "No, you can't make coherent movies by stitching together 120 of the minute-long Sora clips, since the model won't respond to prompts in the exact same way -- continuity isn't possible. But the time limit is no barrier for Sora and programs like it to transform TikTok, Reels, and other social platforms." "In order to make a professional movie, you need so much expensive equipment," says Bill Peebles, another researcher on the project. "This model is going to empower the average person making videos on social media to make very high-quality content." Further reading: OpenAI Develops Web Search Product in Challenge To Google

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Texas-based Intuitive Machines' inaugural moon mission began early Thursday morning, heading toward what could be the first U.S. lunar landing in more than 50 years. From a report: Intuitive Machines' Nova-C lander launched from Florida on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, beginning the IM-1 mission. "It is a profoundly humbling moment for all of us at Intuitive Machines. The opportunity to return the United States to the moon for the first time since 1972 is a feat of engineering that demands a hunger to explore," Intuitive Machines vice president of space systems Trent Martin said during a press conference. The IM-1 lander, named "Odysseus" after the mythological Greek hero, is carrying 12 government and commercial payloads -- six of which are for NASA under an $118 million contract. NASA leadership emphasized before the launch that "IM-1 is an Intuitive Machines' mission, it's not a NASA mission." But it marks the second mission under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to deliver science projects and cargo to the moon with increasing regularity in support of the agency's Artemis crew program. The agency views CLPS missions as "a learning experience," NASA's deputy associate administrator for exploration in the science mission directorate, Joel Kearns, told press before the launch.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: For some Apple Vision Pro buyers, the honeymoon is already over. It's no coincidence that there's been an uptick on social media of Vision Pro owners saying they're returning their $3,500 headsets in the past few days. Apple allows you to return any product within 14 days of purchase -- and for the first wave of Vision Pro buyers, we're right about at that point. Comfort is among the most cited reasons for returns. People have said the headset gives them headaches and triggers motion sickness. The weight of the device, and the fact that most of it is front-loaded, has been another complaint. Parker Ortolani, The Verge's product manager, told me that he thought using the device led to a burst blood vessel in his eye. At least one other person noted they had a similar experience with redness. (To be fair, VR headset users have anecdotally reported dry eyes and redness for years.)

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Applying to some of the most common customer and food service jobs in the country now requires a long and bizarre personality quiz featuring blue humanoid aliens, which tells employers how potential hires rank in terms of "agreeableness" and "emotional stability." If you've applied to a job at FedEx, McDonald's, or Darden Restaurants (the company that operates multiple chains including Olive Garden) you might have already encountered this quiz, as all these companies and others are clients of Paradox.ai, the company which runs the test and helps them with other recruiting tasks. Judging by the reaction on Reddit, where Paradox.ai's personality quiz has gone viral a couple of times in recent weeks and bewildered many users, most people are not familiar with the process. Personality quizzes as part of an application for hourly work isn't new, but the Paradox.ai test has gone repeatedly viral in recent weeks presumably because of the bizarre scenarios it presents applicants with and the blue humanoid alien thing. Other clients included on Paradox's website include CVS, GM, Nestle, 3M, and Unilever.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Alphabet's Google is rolling out a new version of its powerful artificial intelligence model that it says can handle larger amounts of text and video than products made by competitors. The updated AI model, called Gemini 1.5 Pro, will be available on Thursday to cloud customers and developers so they can test its new features and eventually create new commercial applications. Google and its rivals have spent billions to ramp up their capabilities in generative AI and are keen to attract corporate clients to show their investments are paying off. [...] Gemini 1.5 can be trained faster and more efficiently, and has the ability to process a huge amount of information each time it's prompted, according to Vinyals. For example, developers can use Gemini 1.5 Pro to query up to an hour's worth of video, 11 hours of audio or more than 700,000 words in a document, an amount of data that Google says is the "longest context window" of any large-scale AI model yet. Gemini 1.5 can process far more data compared with what the latest AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic can handle, according to Google. In a pre-recorded video demonstration for reporters, Google showed off how engineers asked Gemini 1.5 Pro to ingest a 402-page PDF transcript of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and then prompted it to find quotes that showed "three funny moments."

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OpenAI has been developing a web search product that would bring the Microsoft-backed startup into more direct competition with Google, The Information reports, citing a person with knowledge of OpenAI's plans. From the report: The search service would be partly powered by Bing, this person said. The move to launch a search app comes a year after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said his company would "make Google dance" by incorporating artificial intelligence from OpenAI into Microsoft's Bing search engine. That partnership has failed to dent Google's search dominance. It isn't clear whether the search product would be separate from ChatGPT, the chatbot OpenAI runs and which also uses Bing's index of the web to answer some questions. OpenAI could be looking to speed up the service, which can be slow because it also does tasks like proofreading and summarizing documents.

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Dumping chemicals in the ocean? Spraying saltwater into clouds? Injecting reflective particles into the sky? Scientists are resorting to once unthinkable techniques to cool the planet because global efforts to check greenhouse gas emissions are failing. From a report: These geoengineering approaches were once considered taboo by scientists and regulators who feared that tinkering with the environment could have unintended consequences, but now researchers are receiving taxpayer funds and private investments to get out of the lab and test these methods outdoors. The shift reflects growing concern that efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions aren't moving fast enough to prevent the destructive effects of heat waves, storms and floods made worse by climate change. Geoengineering isn't a substitute for reducing emissions, according to scientists and business leaders involved in the projects. Rather, it is a way to slow climate warming in the next few years while buying time to switch to a carbon-free economy in the longer term. Three field experiments are under way in the U.S. and overseas. This month, researchers aboard a ship off the northeastern coast of Australia near the Whitsunday Islands are spraying a briny mixture through high-pressure nozzles into the air in an attempt to brighten low-altitude clouds that form over the ocean. Scientists hope bigger, brighter clouds will reflect sunlight away from the Earth, shade the ocean surface and cool the waters around the Great Barrier Reef, where warming ocean temperatures have contributed to massive coral die-offs. The research project, known as marine cloud brightening, is led by Southern Cross University as part of the $64.55 million, or 100 million Australian dollars, Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program. The program is funded by the partnership between the Australian government's Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and includes conservation organizations and several academic institutions.

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The UK has entered a recession after GDP contracted 0.3% in the fourth quarter of 2023, the Office for National Statistics said Thursday. This follows a 0.1% GDP decline in Q3. The data shows meager 0.1% growth for the full year, the worst performance since 2009 barring 2020. All main sectors declined in Q4, with manufacturing, construction and wholesale facing the biggest drops, only partially offset by upticks in rentals and hotels. The recession deals a blow to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's economic pledges ahead of local elections Thursday and the national vote expected this year, potentially widening the lead held by the opposition Labour Party in polls.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGate: Cisco, the San Jose-based networking and telecommunications giant, is laying off 5% of its workforce. The company announced the cuts in a Wednesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, alongside its quarterly earnings report. Based on the company's reported head count, the layoffs will hit at least 4,000 workers. Cisco wrote in the filing that the cuts are aimed to "realign the organization and enable further investment in key priority areas." Most of the cuts will go through this quarter, per the filing. Cisco estimated that severance payments and other termination benefits will cost the company $800 million. In a statement to SFGATE on Wednesday, Cisco spokesperson Robyn Blum cited "the cautious macro environment, our customers continuing to absorb high levels of product inventory, and ongoing weakness in the Service Provider market," as reasons for the layoff. "The care of our people is a top priority, and we will provide impacted employees with career support and market-competitive severance packages," the statement continued.

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Nvidia is now the third most valuable company in the U.S., surpassing Google parent Alphabet and Amazon. It's only behind Apple and Microsoft in terms of market cap. CNBC reports: Nvidia rose over 2% to close at $739.00 per share, giving it a market value of $1.83 trillion to Google's $1.82 trillion market cap. The move comes one day after Nvidia surpassed Amazon in terms of market value. The symbolic milestone is more confirmation that Nvidia has become a Wall Street darling on the back of elevated AI chip sales, valued even more highly than some of the large software companies and cloud providers that develop and integrate AI technology into their products. Nvidia shares are up over 221% over the past 12 months on robust demand for its AI server chips that can cost more than $20,000 each. Companies like Google and Amazon need thousands of them for their cloud services. Before the recent AI boom, Nvidia was best known for consumer graphics processors it sold to PC makers to build gaming computers, a less lucrative market.

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Andrew Cunningham reports via Ars Technica: For around three years now, the team of independent developers behind the Asahi Linux project has worked to support Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, despite Apple's total lack of involvement. Over the years, the project has gone from a "highly unstable experiment" to a "surprisingly functional and usable desktop operating system." Even Linus Torvalds has used it to run Linux on Apple's hardware. The team has been steadily improving its open source, standards-conformant GPU driver for the M1 and M2 since releasing them in December 2022, and today, the team crossed an important symbolic milestone: The Asahi driver's support for the OpenGL and OpenGL ES graphics have officially passed what Apple offers in macOS. The team's latest graphics driver fully conforms with OpenGL version 4.6 and OpenGL ES version 3.2, the most recent version of either API. Apple's support in macOS tops out at OpenGL 4.1, announced in July 2010. Developer Alyssa Rosenzweig wrote a detailed blog post that announced the new driver, which had to pass "over 100,000 tests" to be deemed officially conformant. The team achieved this milestone despite the fact that Apple's GPUs don't support some features that would have made implementing these APIs more straightforward. "Regrettably, the M1 doesn't map well to any graphics standard newer than OpenGL ES 3.1," writes Rosenzweig. "While Vulkan makes some of these features optional, the missing features are required to layer DirectX and OpenGL on top. No existing solution on M1 gets past the OpenGL 4.1 feature set... Without hardware support, new features need new tricks. Geometry shaders, tessellation, and transform feedback become compute shaders. Cull distance becomes a transformed interpolated value. Clip control becomes a vertex shader epilogue. The list goes on." Now that the Asahi GPU driver supports the latest OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards -- released in 2017 and 2015, respectively -- the work turns to supporting the low-overhead Vulkan API on Apple's hardware. Vulkan support in macOS is limited to translation layers like MoltenVK, which translates Vulkan API calls to Metal ones that the hardware and OS can understand. [...] Rosenzweig's blog post didn't give any specific updates on Vulkan except to say that the team was "well on the road" to supporting it. In addition to supporting native Linux apps, supporting more graphics APIs in Asahi will allow the operating system to take better advantage of software like Valve's Proton, which already has a few games written for x86-based Windows PCs running on Arm-based Apple hardware.

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"A lot of that AI chatbots that you spend days talking to push hard on getting more and more private information from you," writes longtime Slashdot reader michelcultivo, sharing a report from Gizmodo. "To be perfectly blunt, AI girlfriends and boyfriends are not your friends," says Misha Rykov, a Mozilla Researcher from the company's *Privacy Not Included project. "Although they are marketed as something that will enhance your mental health and well-being, they specialize in delivering dependency, loneliness, and toxicity, all while prying as much data as possible from you." Gizmodo reports: Mozilla dug into 11 different AI romance chatbots, including popular apps such as Replika, Chai, Romantic AI, EVA AI Chat Bot & Soulmate, and CrushOn.AI. Every single one earned the Privacy Not Included label, putting these chatbots among the worst categories of products Mozilla has ever reviewed. You've heard stories about data problems before, but according to Mozilla, AI girlfriends violate your privacy in "disturbing new ways." For example, CrushOn.AI collects details including information about sexual health, use of medication, and gender-affirming care. 90% of the apps may sell or share user data for targeted ads and other purposes, and more than half won't let you delete the data they collect. Security was also a problem. Only one app, Genesia AI Friend & Partner, met Mozilla's minimum security standards. One of the more striking findings came when Mozilla counted the trackers in these apps, little bits of code that collect data and share them with other companies for advertising and other purposes. Mozilla found the AI girlfriend apps used an average of 2,663 trackers per minute, though that number was driven up by Romantic AI, which called a whopping 24,354 trackers in just one minute of using the app. The privacy mess is even more troubling because the apps actively encourage you to share details that are far more personal than the kind of thing you might enter into a typical app. EVA AI Chat Bot & Soulmate pushes users to "share all your secrets and desires," and specifically asks for photos and voice recordings. It's worth noting that EVA was the only chatbot that didn't get dinged for how it uses that data, though the app did have security issues. [...]

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Devin Coldeway reports via TechCrunch: Researchers at Amazon have trained the largest ever text-to-speech model yet, which they claim exhibits "emergent" qualities improving its ability to speak even complex sentences naturally. The breakthrough could be what the technology needs to escape the uncanny valley. These models were always going to grow and improve, but the researchers specifically hoped to see the kind of leap in ability that we observed once language models got past a certain size. For reasons unknown to us, once LLMs grow past a certain point, they start being way more robust and versatile, able to perform tasks they weren't trained to. That is not to say they are gaining sentience or anything, just that past a certain point their performance on certain conversational AI tasks hockey sticks. The team at Amazon AGI -- no secret what they're aiming at -- thought the same might happen as text-to-speech models grew as well, and their research suggests this is in fact the case. The new model is called Big Adaptive Streamable TTS with Emergent abilities, which they have contorted into the abbreviation BASE TTS. The largest version of the model uses 100,000 hours of public domain speech, 90% of which is in English, the remainder in German, Dutch and Spanish. At 980 million parameters, BASE-large appears to be the biggest model in this category. They also trained 400M- and 150M-parameter models based on 10,000 and 1,000 hours of audio respectively, for comparison -- the idea being, if one of these models shows emergent behaviors but another doesn't, you have a range for where those behaviors begin to emerge. As it turns out, the medium-sized model showed the jump in capability the team was looking for, not necessarily in ordinary speech quality (it is reviewed better but only by a couple points) but in the set of emergent abilities they observed and measured. Here are examples of tricky text mentioned in the paper: - Compound nouns: The Beckhams decided to rent a charming stone-built quaint countryside holiday cottage. - Emotions: "Oh my gosh! Are we really going to the Maldives? That's unbelievable!" Jennie squealed, bouncing on her toes with uncontained glee. - Foreign words: "Mr. Henry, renowned for his mise en place, orchestrated a seven-course meal, each dish a piece de resistance. - Paralinguistics (i.e. readable non-words): "Shh, Lucy, shhh, we mustn't wake your baby brother," Tom whispered, as they tiptoed past the nursery. - Punctuations: She received an odd text from her brother: 'Emergency @ home; call ASAP! Mom & Dad are worried... #familymatters.' - Questions: But the Brexit question remains: After all the trials and tribulations, will the ministers find the answers in time? -Syntactic complexities: The movie that De Moya who was recently awarded the lifetime achievement award starred in 2022 was a box-office hit, despite the mixed reviews. You can read more examples of these difficult texts being spoken naturally here.

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New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a lawsuit against four of the nation's largest social media companies, accusing them of fueling a "national youth mental health crisis." From a report: The lawsuit was filed to hold TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube Accountable for their damaging influence on the mental health of children, Adams said. The lawsuit, filed in California Superior Court, alleged the companies intentionally designed their platforms to purposefully manipulate and addict children and teens to social media applications. The lawsuit pointed to the use of algorithms to generate feeds that keep users on the platforms longer and encourage compulsive use. "Over the past decade, we have seen just how addictive and overwhelming the online world can be, exposing our children to a non-stop stream of harmful content and fueling our national youth mental health crisis," Adams said. "Our city is built on innovation and technology, but many social media platforms end up endangering our children's mental health, promoting addiction, and encouraging unsafe behavior." The lawsuit accused the social media companies of manipulating users by making them feel compelled to respond to one positive action with another positive action. "These platforms take advantage of reciprocity by, for example, automatically telling the sender when their message was seen or sending notifications when a message was delivered, encouraging teens to return to the platform again and again and perpetuating online engagement and immediate responses," the lawsuit said. The city is joining hundreds of school districts across the nation in filing litigation to force the tech companies to change their behavior and recover the costs of addressing the public health threat.

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After missing its sales target in the last quarter, Sony says it plans to emphasize the PlayStation 5's profitability over unit sales as the console approaches its fourth birthday. "Looking ahead, PS5 will enter the latter stage of its life cycle," said Sony senior vice president Naomi Matsuoka. "As such, we will put more emphasis on the balance between profitability and sales. For this reason, we expect the annual sales pace of PS5 hardware will start falling from the next fiscal year." Sony also said it has no plans to release "any new major existing franchise titles" in its next fiscal year. The Verge reports: Sony now expects to sell 4 million fewer PS5 consoles in its 2023 fiscal year ending March 31st compared to previous projections, Bloomberg reports. The revision came as part of today's third-quarter earnings release which saw Sony lower the PS5 sales forecast from the 25 million consoles it expected to sell down to 21 million. While PS5 sales were up in Sony's third quarter, increasing to 8.2 million units from 6.3 million in the same quarter the previous year, Bloomberg notes that this was roughly a million units lower than it had previously projected. That's despite the release of the big first-party title Spider-Man 2, strong sales of third-party titles, and the launch of a new slimmer PS5 in November. In its third quarter, Sony's gaming revenue was up 16 percent versus the same period the previous year, sitting at 1.4 trillion yen (around $9.3 billion), but operating income was down 26 percent to 86.1 billion yen (around $572 million) due to promotions in the third quarter ending on December 31st.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Department of Defense is notifying tens of thousands of individuals that their personal information was exposed in an email data spill last year. According to the breach notification letter sent out to affected individuals on February 1, the Defense Intelligence Agency -- the DOD's military intelligence agency -- said, "numerous email messages were inadvertently exposed to the Internet by a service provider," between February 3 and February 20, 2023. TechCrunch has learned that the breach disclosure letters relate to an unsecured U.S. government cloud email server that was spilling sensitive emails to the open internet. The cloud email server, hosted on Microsoft's cloud for government customers, was accessible from the internet without a password, likely due to a misconfiguration. The DOD is sending breach notification letters to around 20,600 individuals whose information was affected. "As a matter of practice and operations security, we do not comment on the status of our networks and systems. The affected server was identified and removed from public access on February 20, 2023, and the vendor has resolved the issues that resulted in the exposure. DOD continues to engage with the service provider on improving cyber event prevention and detection. Notification to affected individuals is ongoing," said DOD spokesperson Cdr. Tim Gorman in an email to TechCrunch.

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Amazon faces a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of false advertising and deceptive practices because Prime Video now serves commercials by default. Variety reports: "For years, people purchased and renewed their Amazon Prime subscriptions believing that they would include ad-free streaming," the lawsuit says. "But last month, Amazon changed the deal. To stream movies and TV shows without ads, Amazon customers must now pay an additional $2.99 per month ... This is not fair, because these subscribers already paid for the ad-free version; these subscribers should not have to pay an additional $2.99/month for something that they already paid for." The case was filed on behalf of Wilbert Napoleon, a resident of Eastvale, Calif., who says he's a Prime member. "Plaintiff brings this case for himself and for other Amazon Prime customers," the suit said. The complain alleged that Amazon violates Washington State and California state consumer protection laws that prohibit unfair competition and deceptive business acts and practices. Amazon's conduct, as alleged, "was immoral, unethical, oppressive, unscrupulous and substantially injurious to consumers,â according to the lawsuit. The suit seeks unspecific monetary damages, including punitive damages, as well as an injunction to block Amazon's alleged deceptive conduct. The suit was filed Feb. 9, after Amazon starting on Jan. 29 began running ads in Prime Video content in major markets including the United States unless users opt to pay extra ($2.99/month in the U.S.) to have an ad-free experience. Some analysts have forecast Prime Video ads generating more than $3 billion in revenue in 2024.

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