### Issue 1910 - Tuesday 15th August, 2023

## In Today's Issue

- Sam Bankman-Fried goes to jail for tampering with witnesses, breaching bail
- Dell to pay $10m fine for misleading prices of monitors bundled with computers
- Amazon to give AI summaries of product reviews, New York Times bans AI scraping of its content, Microsoft has ad segments aimed at gamblers
- Change the mind of global warming deniers by messing with their cookies
- Cheap WD HDD, Reolink PoE doorbell, Eufy smart scales, Catch Connect SIM, USB-C portable monitor, Sennheiser headphones, Meross HomeKit garage door controller, Apple gift cards, ThinkPad E14, Google Pixel Watch

## The News

### Sam Bankman-Fried goes to jail for tampering with witnesses, breaching bail

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried breached his very generous bail conditions and is now in jail. Old mate "tried to tamper with witnesses at least twice" - first he reached out to a former FTX lawyer, saying he "would really love to reconnect and see if there's a way for us to have a constructive relationship, use each other as resources when possible, or at least vet things with each other". More recently, he showed the New York Times "private writings of Caroline Ellison, his former girlfriend and the ex-CEO of Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency trading hedge fund that was one of his businesses". Both of these people are due to give evidence against the cryptocrook and he really shouldn't be talking to them or trying to influence them in any way. Sam is now enjoying the hospitality of New York's Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

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### Dell to pay $10m fine for misleading prices of monitors bundled with computers

Dell got slapped with a $10m fine by the federal court after the ACCC sued them for making, "false or misleading representations on its website about the prices of monitors and the potential savings when a monitor was purchased with a computer". Dell admitted that the "original" price the monitor was listed as being sold at when purchased with a computer was never sold at that high of a price and the add-on price was actually more expensive than if you purchased the monitor on its own. Dell has refunded or compensated around 4,250 customers that got sucked in and that they got $2m of revenue with this dodgy sales tactic. Hopefully the $10m fine is a strong signal to the market that it's not worth the effort to do something similar.

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### Amazon to give AI summaries of product reviews, New York Times bans AI scraping of its content, Microsoft has ad segments aimed at gamblers

- Amazon is gonna use AI to create short summaries of product reviews to "help shoppers determine at a glance what other customers said about a product before they spend time reading through individual reviews". Bots writing content for bots, cool.
- The New York Times on the other hand doesn't want AI anywhere near its precious content, updating its terms of service to ban website crawlers and specifically call out the use of any of its content in the development of machine learning/AI systems.
- Researchers discovered that Microsoft's advertising platform has an audience segment for "heavy TAB gamblers" and people who have gambled "in the last seven days". Kinda worrying that you can target potentially problem gamblers with more ads for gambling products.

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## Something I Saw On The Internet

### Change the mind of global warming deniers by messing with their cookies

Sizzle subscriber Jackie just showed me News Jacker, a cookie manipulator designed to get people that think climate change isn't real or not a big deal into reading more accurate and realistic climate change related news. You send someone a link which appears to be an innocent edible cookie recipe, but in the background modifies the inedible digital cookies on their device to make it seem like the user of that device is interested in learning more about climate change. It's the same way ads are shown to you based on previous websites you've visited, but for any service that recommends news to you (i.e: Google News, Microsoft Edge's homepage, etc). The creators don't go into much more detail than that, but I like the concept.

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## Bargains

- WD Ultrastar DC HC550 18TB SATA HDD - $419 from Silicon Centre AU
- Reolink Video Doorbell PoE with Chime - $127.49 from Amazon
- Eufy T9148111 smart digital bathroom scales - $75 from Amazon
- Catch Connect 365-day SIM with 200GB data & unlimited calls/SMS - $150 from Catch (eligible for 8% cashback via Cashrewards)
- MNN 15.6" 1080p IPS portable USB-C monitor - $152.54 from Amazon
- Sennheiser HD 450SE noise cancelling wireless headphones - $130 from Amazon
- Meross Smart Garage Door Opener Remote (Compatible with Apple Homekit) - $54.60 from Amazon
- Earn 20x Everyday Rewards points on Apple gift cards at Woolworths
- Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 5 (AMD 7530U CPU, 14" 1080p, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) - $845.55 (can possibly get extra cashback via Cashrewards/Shopback)
- Google Pixel Watch - $329 at JB Hi-Fi

## Image Of The Day

Artemis II crew members, shown inside the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, check out their Orion crew module on Aug. 8, 2023. From left are: Victor Glover, pilot; Reid Wiseman, commander; Christina Hammock Koch, mission specialist; and Jeremy Hansen, mission specialist. The crew module is undergoing acoustic testing ahead of integration with the European Service Module. Artemis II is the first crewed mission on NASA’s path to establishing a long-term lunar presence for science and exploration under Artemis. (NASA Johnson / Flickr)

## The End

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