Month: October 2016

Enlarge (credit: Urich Baumgartgen via Getty Images)

Two California lawyers are being accused of filing "sham lawsuits" in a wide-ranging conspiracy to get Google and other search engines to de-index negative reviews about their clients. As the case (PDF) brought by a group called Consumer Opinion states:

The other conspirators engaged attorneys Mark W. Lapham ("Lapham") and Owen T. Mascott (“Mascott”) to file sham lawsuits either by the subjects of the negative reviews or by corporations that had no interest in the allegedly defamatory statements, against a defendant who most certainly was not the party that published the allegedly defamatory statements, and the parties immediately stipulated to a judgment of injunctive relief, so the conspirators could provide the order to Google and other search engines, thus achieving the goal of deindexing all pages containing negative reviews.

Consumer Opinion runs pissedconsumer.com, and the group says these lawyers essentially manipulated California's legal system by conducting a "rather brilliant but incredibly unethical" scheme to make negative reviews on the site essentially disappear from search results. The suit asks a federal judge to "discipline them for those misdeeds."

The suit notes a complex web of reputation companies and fake or "stooge" defendants working together. According to the lawsuit, it works like this: the attorneys sue the "stooge" authors of negative reviews—allegedly defamatory reviews that are published on the pissedconsumer.com site. But these lawsuit defendants didn't actually write the review, and the suits immediately settle. The judgements are then used to get Yahoo, Google, and Bing to erase negative reviews from search results. The suit alleges that a Florida attorney, the subject of some 59 negative reviews on pissedconsumer.com, was among the beneficiaries of the alleged scheme.

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Our planet does some weird stuff that escapes our notice simply because of scale. The Earth spins faster during an El Niño year—or after some earthquakes—but we’re never going to miss a millisecond here or there. It’s also easy to forget that the plates that make up the Earth’s crust are in constant motion, changing various locations incrementally. In fact, Australia will be updating GPS coordinates again this year to correct the continent’s drift away from its last-mapped whereabouts.

But that’s not all. It turns out that Australia—yes, the entire continent—tilts and slides around in a little dance each year because of seasonal weather patterns around the world.

University of Newcastle researcher Shin-Chan Han uncovered this finding while fiddling around with satellite data. Earth-observing satellites can detect many of the small, weird things the Earth does and may even need to account for them to preserve their precision. The exact center of Earth’s mass, for example, is known to wander a bit.

(credit: The.Comedian)

On Tuesday morning, US District Judge Charles Breyer gave final approval on a $14.7 billion settlement in the Volkswagen Group diesel emissions scandal that broke last September. The German automaker outfitted many of its diesel VWs and Audis with illegal software that reduced the cars’ emissions in the lab but spewed up to 40 times the legal limit of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) on the road.

The automaker said that with the judge’s approval, it would begin buying back affected diesels by mid-November.

According to the terms of the settlement, VW Group has set aside $10.033 billion to buy back 475,474 2.0L diesel TDI vehicles at the value the car was worth in September 2015 before the EPA made public VW Group’s misdeeds. (That number is a bit smaller in practice because about 3,500 customers have opted out of the program thus far according to Reuters, possibly with the hope of suing Volkswagen outside of this consumer class action.) Consumers and lessees will also get an additional payout of between $5,100 and $10,000 depending on the model and year of their car.

Enlarge (credit: Otto)

The march towards a future of self-driving vehicles continues apace. In Singapore, a successful pilot trial with driverless buses is expanding, and in Colorado, Uber-owned startup Otto and Anheuser-Busch InBev just used an autonomous freight hauler to ship some beer.

Both trials represent baby steps towards a driverless future. The Colorado beer delivery, which TechCrunch describes as "mostly a stunt," required a police escort and several weeks of careful planning to map the route and find a time when traffic was light. Almost 52,000 cans of Budweiser left Fort Collins and drove through Denver to Colorado Springs via I-25, roughly 120 miles (193km).

In a blog post, Otto (which was bought by Uber in August) wrote that it still envisions truck drivers having careers despite their vehicles doing most of the heavy lifting: