Ransomware has been around since the late 1980s, but it got a massive shot in the arm when leaked NSA cyberweapons were merged with existing strains of ransomware, with new payment mechanisms that used cryptocurrencies, leading to multiple ransomware epidemics that locked up businesses, hospitals, schools, and more (and then there are the state-level cyberattacks that pretend to be ransomware). Read the rest

I buy my eyeglasses online, paying about $30 a pair (I use Optical4Less, though there are many other online prescription eyeglass stores with equally low prices). I've always suspected brick and mortar eyeglass shops to be a ripoff, and this excellent LA Times article by David Lazurus confirmed my suspicions.

[E. Dean Butler, the founder of LensCrafters] said he recently visited factories in China where many glasses for the U.S. market are manufactured. Improved technology has made prices even lower than what Dahan recalled.

“You can get amazingly good frames, with a Warby Parker level of quality, for $4 to $8,” Butler said. “For $15, you can get designer-quality frames, like what you’d get from Prada.”

And lenses? “You can buy absolutely first-quality lenses for $1.25 apiece,” Butler said.

Yet those same frames and lenses might sell in the United States for $800.

Butler laughed. “I know,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. It’s a complete rip-off.”

Image: Iryna Inshyna/Shutterstock Read the rest

The Truth-In-Billing, Remedies, and User Empowerment over Fees Act [TRUE Fees] has been introduced by Rep Anna Eshoo [D-CA] and Sen Ed Markey [D-MA]; if passed, it will force ISPs and cable operators to advertise the true costs of their packages, including all surcharges. Read the rest

Airhelp is a service that helps airline passengers in 30 countries file claims (for delays, lost bags, overbookings, and cancellations) structured to increase the likelihood of paying out; the bots have made $930m in successful claims to date, and the company behind it only collects a commission when a claim succeeds. Read the rest

When Trump FCC Chairman (and former telcoms executive) Ajit Pai murdered Net Neutrality, he told us the slaughter was necessary, otherwise the ISPs wouldn't invest in their networks. Read the rest

My local cable monopoly is Spectrum, part of Charter, and I refuse to get anything except internet service through them (alas, my city, Burbank, will not sell me access to our amazing, 100GB/s fiber network, which runs directly under my house, because they have a deal with Charter not to connect any non-commercial-zoned properties to our muni fiber). Read the rest

Louis Rossman is one of the highest-profile independent Apple repair technicians, famous in part for fixing devices that Apple has declared to have reached their end-of-life, diverting these devices from landfill and keeping them in the hands of the people who paid good money for them. Read the rest

Canada's CBC News went into Apple Stores with hidden cameras and discovered that the Geniuses there were especially smart when it came to ripping off customers who brought their equipment in for repair. In some cases the Geniuses told customers that they should buy a new computer, phone, or iPad rather than fix their broken one, even though the repair was a lot cheaper. In this video, we see an Apple Genius tell a reporter that a repair would $1100 and $100 in labor. The reporter took the computer to an independent repair technician, who removed the case and fixed the computer by straightening a bent pin. Read the rest

Inside the Fake Science Factory (German/English subtitles) documents Svea Eckert and team's years of investigation into predatory journals and the criminals behind them. Read the rest

For seven years, Florida state inmates could buy a $100 MP3 player from Access Corrections, the prisons' exclusive provider, and stock it with MP3s that cost $1.70 -- nearly double the going rate in the free world. Read the rest

When the DoJ greenlit the merger of AT&T and Time-Warner, they blessed a union that would see one of technology's most notorious monopolists get even bigger, with the presumption that scaling up to unimaginable size would curb a terrible company's worst abuses. Read the rest

America's health care is totally screwed up, Part Ten Gazillion: in many cases, the medicines your doctor prescribes are cheaper than the co-pay your health insurance charges, which means that if you just buy the meds instead of charging them to insurance, you save money. Read the rest

Olesja Schemjakowa of France enjoyed coffee and cake at a cafe in Switzerland. Her bill was $23.76. When it was time to settle the bill, she accidentally entered her PIN code (7686) as the tip on the cafe's terminal device. She didn't realize her mistake until she was back home and got her bank statement in the mail and saw that she'd been charged $7,732 for the snack.

She called her credit card company and asked them to reverse the charges but they told her they wouldn't help her because the charge was not fraudulent. She asked the police department in the town where the cafe was located but they told her it wasn't a "criminally relevant" matter. She then called the cafe owner, who agreed to refund the money, but soon stopped communicating with her. Schemjakowa then learned that the cafe owner had filed for bankruptcy and shut down the cafe.

From Oddity Central:

At this point, there doesn’t seem to be anything else she can do to get her money back.

“I just can’t understand how the cafe owner can just keep the money, and I can not do anything about it,” Schemjakowa told [Swiss newspaper] Blick. “That’s just not fair!”

The unemployed woman added that she could live comfortably for a few months in France with that money, so getting it back is a big deal. Unfortunately chances of that happening are very slim.

“I’ve been told there may still be a one percent chance that I’ll see my money back,” the woman said.

Illustrator Lili Chin noticed that Old Navy was selling clothes with her art on it. When she asked them to compensate her, they told her to go pound sand.

From her blog:

My art gets stolen all the time.

I have been through many copyright infringement cases - some have been resolved amicably, and there are ones that have taken more work. This case against Old Navy (Gap) is not getting resolved right now because Old Navy is denying copyright infringement.

They are being totally unapologetic, and have said that it would be a “bad business decision” for me to expect to be reasonably compensated for the use of my art. Instead of compensating me, they have chosen to pay a large law firm to fight me, and have even asked the judge to order me to pay THEIR legal fees.

When a company as large and mainstream as Old Navy steals my art and profits from it, and is unapologetic about it, I cannot afford NOT to fight this. My lawyers and I will be fighting this for as long as it takes.

From Paragraph 7 of Chin's legal filing:" The six dog illustrations on the Infringing Product are clearly shoddy copies of Dogs of the World Illustrations, as shown below."

Old Navy's response: "7. Deny the allegations of paragraph 7 of the Complaint."

Come on, Old Navy. Are you really expecting a judge to believe these aren't copies of Chin's work? Read the rest

T-Mobile didn't want its rural users to know how shitty its service was, so when the company couldn't connect a call, it would play fake "ring tones" to the caller that made it sounds like the person on the other end wasn't picking up. It did this "hundreds of millions of times" per year. Read the rest

Last July, Wisconsin's far-right state government declared victory for its "free market" agenda when it announced that it would transfer $3,000,000,000 in taxpayer-funded corporate welfare to Foxconn, in order to tempt the company to open a factory in the state -- despite the company's long history of broken promises and outright lies about the jobs and spending in other places that had welcomed it in. Read the rest

Since the passage of the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, "Warranty Void if Removed" stickers and other policies that put restrictions on third party repairs have been unenforceable in America, but that doesn't stop companies from putting deceptive tamper-evident stickers on their equipment in an effort to trick or intimidate their customers into going to a manufacturer-authorized service depot. Read the rest