Month: July 2019

Enlarge / Elon Musk. (credit: DAVID MCNEW/AFP/Getty Images)

Tesla has always been a turbulent place to work, and that has been especially true of Tesla's Autopilot team. Between 2016 and 2018, Tesla lost three Autopilot chiefs in a period of 18 months, with a number of lower-level Autopilot managers and engineers leaving as well.

The Information's Amir Efrati reports that Tesla has suffered a fresh wave of Autopilot departures.

"At least 11 members of the software team, or close to 10% of the total group, including some longtime members, departed in the past few months," Efrati writes. "These departures follow Mr. Musk's removal of the Autopilot group's leader Stuart Bowers around the start of May."

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is highlighted by a new low on the 256GB variant of Samsung's EVO Select microSDXC card. It's currently down to $37, which is $6-8 off where it's usually sat over the last couple months.

We've recommended the EVO Select before—the gist of it today is that, while it's not the highest-performing card for running apps or handling the OS for a Raspberry Pi, it's still plenty fast for copying photos to a device, recording 4K video, downloading movies, and generally storing media. It's a U3, Class 10 card with a 10-year warranty, and at this price, it's still good value.

If you're all set on the mobile storage front, though, we also have deals on various video games, the 128GB 9.7-inch iPad, Instant Pots, and, yes, the entire original run of Cowboy Bebop. Have a look for yourself below.

Enlarge / A T-Mobile store in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | helen89)

T-Mobile US is trying to force customers into arbitration in order to avoid a class-action lawsuit that accuses the phone carrier of violating federal law by selling its customers' real-time location data to third parties.

T-Mobile yesterday filed a motion to compel arbitration in US District Court in Maryland, saying that customers agreed to terms and conditions that require disputes to be handled in arbitration instead of courts. The two plaintiffs named in the lawsuit did not opt out of the arbitration agreement, T-Mobile wrote.

"As T-Mobile customers, each Plaintiff accepted T-Mobile's Terms and Conditions ('T&Cs')," T-Mobile wrote in a memorandum of law. "In so doing, they agreed to arbitrate on an individual basis any dispute related to T-Mobile's services and to waive their right to participate in a class action unless they timely opted out of the arbitration procedure outlined in the T&Cs. Neither Plaintiff elected to opt out. Accordingly, Plaintiffs have brought their grievances to the wrong forum and their claims should be dismissed in favor of arbitration."

Enlarge / Mary Rich, the mother of slain DNC staffer Seth Rich, gives a press conference in Bloomingdale on August 1, 2016. SVR agents jumped on Seth Rich's death as an opportunity to launch a disinformation campaign, according to a new report. (credit: Getty Images)

Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR, or Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki Rossiyskoy Federatsii), the successor to the Soviet KGB's First Chief Directorate, is the keeper of the KGB's legacy of "active measures." The group engages in political warfare using subversive operations to weaken the United States and links between NATO allies. And according to a new report from Yahoo News' Michael Isikoff, the SVR played a particularly underhanded role in activities leading up to the 2016 US presidential election in order to create a counter-narrative to the exposure of other Russian intelligence agencies' hacking operations at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). The SVR wanted to spin a conspiracy theory about the death of DNC staffer Seth Rich—a conspiracy theory that promoted Rich as the source of DNC and Clinton campaign emails published by Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks.

This fabricated narrative had Rich being killed not in a botched robbery, as Washington DC police had found, but by a hit squad hired by Hillary Clinton as retribution for leaking campaign emails to WikiLeaks. This conspiracy theory was planted through various websites and later promoted by InfoWars' Alex Jones and other "alt-right" media outlets. Ultimately, it was even promoted within the Trump administration as investigations by the Justice Department into the DNC and Clinton email hacks went forward.

Julian Assange suggested that Rich was a source—and was killed as a result—in an interview with Dutch television. He made those suggestions even though he knew that WikiLeaks had received the emails after Rich was killed. Assange's suggestion spurred additional speculation, which was also fueled by posts from a Twitter account: @TEN_GOP, a fake Tennessee Republican account. @TEN_GOP was one of several accounts run by the Internet Research Agency, the organization in St. Petersburg that ran the Russian social media disinformation campaign leading up to, and in the wake of, the 2016 presidential elections.