Month: November 2019

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

Tesla's next "Gigafactory" will be in the Berlin area, Elon Musk announced at an event in Germany on Tuesday evening. Techcrunch's Kirsten Korosec reports that Musk made the comments during an on-stage conversation with Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess at the Golden Steering Wheel awards show.

The original Gigafactory was Tesla's massive battery factory in Nevada. Musk dubbed it a "Gigafactory" because it was designed to produce batteries with gigawatt-hours of storage capacity. Batteries are made in Nevada and then shipped to Tesla's car factory in Fremont, California, for final assembly.

When Tesla built a car manufacturing facility in Shanghai, China, the company dubbed that "Gigafactory 3." (Tesla's beleaguered solar panel factory in Buffalo, NY, is Gigafactory 2.) Tesla took a more integrated approach in China, building batteries and cars in the same facility.

Enlarge / The Amazon logo at the entrance of a logistics center in France, July 2019. (credit: Denis Charlet | AFP | Getty )

Amazon has come quite a way from when it was just an online bookstore, but it still operates a booming retail business among all its other ventures. A majority of the retail products sold on Amazon aren't actually sold by Amazon at all but rather by its sprawling network of third-party "marketplace" vendors. The company's relationships with those vendors, foreign and domestic, are at the center of a web of investigations and criticism.

Third-party retailers accounted for about 58% of Amazon's retail activity in 2018, company CEO Jeff Bezos said earlier this year, and they sold a cumulative $160 billion worth of goods. But those goods are sold in a "flea market" environment with minimal quality control, leading to ubiquitous counterfeits or recalled goods available for sale from fly-by-night merchants. If something goes wrong with your sale, getting recourse from these sellers is impossible.

Risky imports

All those kinda shady Amazon listings from companies in China you never heard of? They're not a bug, The Wall Street Journal reports today. They're a feature, present by design.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Leon Neal)

Update: The Google/Ascension project is now being investigated by the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services, the Wall Street Journal reported in an update last night. The office said it "will seek to learn more information about this mass collection of individuals' medical records to ensure that HIPAA protections were fully implemented." Google said it is "happy to cooperate with any questions about the project," and that "We believe Google’s work with Ascension adheres to industry-wide regulations (including HIPAA) regarding patient data, and comes with strict guidance on data privacy, security, and usage."

Original story from November 12, 2019 follows:

Google now has access to detailed medical records on tens of millions of Americans, but the company promises it won't mix that medical data with any of the other data Google collects on consumers who use its services.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back once again with a new round of deals and price drops. Today's list is headlined by a quick PSA for those who subscribe to a Verizon unlimited data plan or plan to subscribe to a Fios home Internet plan: if you're at all interested the new Disney+ streaming service, you can get a 12-month subscription at no extra cost. As a refresher, Disney's Netflix competitor launched on Tuesday and normally costs $7 a month or $70 a year.

Now, as is often the case with mobile carrier promos, there's some fine print to sort through. To get the free year of service, you need to subscribe to one of the carrier's Verizon Unlimited, Go Unlimited, Beyond Unlimited, Above Unlimited, Get More Unlimited, Do More Unlimited, Pay More Unlimited, or Start Unlimited plans. (If you're marveling at the fact that Verizon has had this many unlimited plans, many of which aren't actually unlimited, you're not alone.) Both new and existing subscribers are eligible; Verizon has options on its promo page for existing subscribers who wish to switch to an unlimited plan and those who wish to move over from another carrier.

The offer is also available to Verizon Fios home Internet users and the handful of people who can access its 5G Home plan, but only if you're a new subscriber, not if you have currently pay for one of those services. For Fios users, you'll need a standalone Internet plan of at least 50/50 Mbps service, a two-year "Triple Play" bundle, or a 2-year Internet + TV "Double Play" bundle. Either way, all of this has you signing up for Disney+ through Verizon, not Disney.

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Disney's new streaming service is straining under the load as users rush to log in to the highly anticipated service on its US launch day. Frustrated users took to social media to complain about seeing "unable to connect" error screens instead of the Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar movies they were hoping for.

"The consumer demand for Disney+ has exceeded our high expectations," Disney tweeted on Tuesday morning. "We are working to quickly resolve the current user issue."

Disney is aiming to reshape the paid video streaming landscape with its Disney+ offering. Until now, a lot of online streaming has been done on independent services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.