The odds are that you are going to win tonight’s Powerball multi-state lottery drawing are very small. You’re more likely to be struck by lightning, or eaten by a shark. Still, that doesn’t stop people from paying $2 for a slip of hope. As long as you’re planning what you’re going to do with that money, you should keep in mind that where you buy a ticket matters for tax reasons.
If you’re curious and are planning to buy tickets across state lines, the lottery site USAMega has a handy chart with the current tax rate for each state on lottery prizes. You’ll have tax withheld according to the tax rate of where you bought the ticket, regardless of where you actually live. You should also keep in mind that you have to redeem the ticket in the state where it was purchased.
CNBC uses the example of someone who works in New York City and lives in New Jersey. While the federal government’s tax bite is always the same, the combined state and city taxes withheld for a ticket bought in NYC will be 12.7%.
Buying the same ticket at home in New Jersey means that only 8% would be withheld. That might not seem like a big difference, but the excess tax would be $20.8 million — for a sole winner who took the $443.3 million lump sum payment.
A New Jersey taxpayer would get that money back as a refund eventually, but only after filing his or her tax return the following winter or spring.
From paying $425 for a cleanse to claiming “healing stickers” are made from material designed for NASA space suits, Gwyneth Paltrow’s “modern lifestyle brand” Goop is no stranger to controversy. Now, a consumer watchdog group is asking regulators in California to investigate the product line for deceptive advertising.
The folks at Truth In Advertising have sent a complaint letter [PDF], urging attorneys for the California Food Drug and Medical Device Task Force to investigate what it claims are Goop’s unsubstantiated and deceptive health and disease treatment claims.
TINA, as the watchdog group is known, claims that its investigation of Goop found more than 50 instances of the company claiming that its products, or third-party products sold via Goop, could treat, cure, prevent, alleviate, or reduce the risk of ailments, ranging from depression, anxiety, to infertility and arthritis.
Related: Goop Suggests Its Critics Are Seeking Attention, Might Just Be Jealous
“The problem is that the company does not possess the competent and reliable scientific evidence required by law to make such claims,” TINA alleges in a statement.
Among the advertising claims questioned by TINA:
• That carnelian crystal “treats infertility,” in addition to “easing period cramps, tempering PMS, regulating menstrual cycles,… and addressing shame around female body parts and sexual trauma.”
• “Jade eggs can… prevent uterine prolapse.”
• Goop’s essential oils can “help tremendously with chronic issues from anxiety and depression to migraines.”
• Goop’s Black Rose Bar is “brilliant for treating acne, eczema, and psoriasis.”
A full list of the claims challenged by TINA can be found on the organization’s website.
Additionally, TINA notes that its representatives attended Goop’s first-ever wellness summit, “In Goop Health,” in June.
At the conference, TINA staffers, who were undercover, paid $500 to $1,500 for the chance to sit in on panel discussions and test products that were purported to have cognitive benefits.
At the conference, TINA reps spoke with a barista serving cups of Bulletproof Coffee — a Goop partner brand. The barista claimed that the grass-fed butter in the coffee increased brain function, among other things.
When the barista was asked to explain how brain function was affected by the coffee, the individual provided a “garbled” answer that included an explanation that “you feel a little bit different.”
Armed with these examples, TINA sent a warning letter [PDF] to Goop and Paltrow about its concerns on Aug. 11, signaling its intent to alert regulators if Goop failed to take action on the claims by Aug. 18.
According to TINA, the organization was in contact with Goop’s legal counsel and provided the company with a list of Goop and Goop-promoted webpages containing illegal health claims.
Goop to date has only made limited changes to its marketing, TINA claims.
As a result, TINA filed its letter with the district attorneys for the California Food, Drug and Medical Device Task Force.
“Marketing products as having the ability to treat diseases and disorders not only violates established law but is a terribly deceptive marketing ploy that is being used by Goop to exploit women for its own financial gain,” Bonnie Patten, executive director for TINA, said in a statement. “Goop needs to stop its misleading profits-over-people marketing immediately.”
Consumerist has reached out to Goop for comment on TINA’s letters.
Sonos, the current popular brand of smart speaker that people don’t [yet] talk to, really wants its customers to agree to the company’s new privacy policy; so much so, that failing to acknowledge the new rules can turn your Sonos speakers into very expensive shelf decorations when they eventually “cease to function.”
Yes, that’s the problem with “smart” devices. They depend on cloud-based software, which means that when the company that operates its software goes out of business or decides to make the device obsolete, certain features or the whole device will no longer work.
In the case of the Sonos privacy update, the devices will keep working, but gradually lose functionality over time as new software updates come along.
ZDNet pointed out this catch for customers who decide not to accept the company’s new privacy policy. The real problem is that the devices will have a different privacy policy going forward than they did when they were purchased.
Experts on privacy are not huge fans of this development.
“We’re going to see this more and more where core services for things that people paid for are going to be conditioned on accepting ever-evolving privacy policies and terms of use,” Joe Jerome, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told ZDNet. “That’s not going to be fair unless companies start providing users with meaningful choices and ensure that basic functionality continues if users say no to new terms.”
Sonos hasn’t specified what functionality might no longer work in the future if customers don’t accept the new privacy policy.
The new privacy policy is important to the operation of speakers since it lets customers integrate their speakers and devices like an Amazon Echo or Google Home that are an interface to a virtual assistant.
In a blog post addressed to its customers, Sonos tried to explain that the privacy changes are to support future features, some of which may not even exist.
“The most important thing for you to know is that Sonos does not keep recordings of your voice data,” the policy states. “It goes to the voice assistant service (for example Amazon) that you’ve activated on your Sonos system.”
It does, however, also share information about your WiFi network, the devices that you use with the Sonos system, the names of rooms on your system, and your logins for integrated services.
“When information is shared, it will be with a product or service you have requested or authorized,” Sonos explains. “We’ve included this information in past versions, but in the current version we’re much more specific and clear about what information we are collecting and sharing with these partners.”
It’s possible to opt out of some, but not all, of these options for sharing your information.
While Amazon, Google, and Apple have all given their voice-controlled intelligent assistants smart speakers to live in, Samsung’s Bixby hasn’t had a speaker to call home. Instead, it’s been limited to the Galaxy S8 smartphone. That may change soon, as Samsung says it’s about to follow its rivals into the smart speaker market.
The president of Samsung’s mobile division confirmed today that a smart spacer will be launched sometime in the near future.
“Maybe soon we will announce it. I am already working on it,” DJ Koh told CNBC.
He adds that in the interest of providing a “fruitful user experience at home” with the company’s devices, he’ll be “moving quite heavily on it.”
Koh didn’t offer details on whether or not the device will be powered by Bixby, but the S8 and new Note 8 both have a feature called “Bixby Home” that lets people connect their devices to their phone.
It’s also unclear how much such a speaker might cost, but it’ll have competition at any price: Alibaba recently announced a $73 voice-activated speaker; the Google Home runs around $129.99, Amazon’s Echo sells for about $180; and Apple’s toilet paper roll HomePod is at the top of the price pile at $349.
Facebook hat im Vorfeld der Bundestagswahl Zehntausende Konten gelöscht, die im Verdacht stehen, Falschinformationen oder irreführende Inhalte zu verbreiten. Das teilte das Unternehmen mit.
Fake IDs aren’t just a problem for people whose identities have been stolen and used to make a new driver’s license, but they can also lead to unlicensed drivers hitting the roads and potentially endangering others. Officials in New York say they’ve made a serious dent in these kinds of crimes with its driver’s license facial recognition technology.
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office says that the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles’ Facial Recognition Technology Program has identified more than 21,000 possible cases of identity theft or fraud since its launch in 2010, with more than 7,000 of those cases happening in the last 18 months.
So far, investigations have resulted in more than 4,000 arrests involving more than 16,000 people who are now facing some kind of administrative action against them.
Cuomo’s office attributes this success to a technology upgrade in Jan. 2016 that doubled the number of measurement points mapped to each driver’s photograph, “vastly improving the system’s ability to match a picture to one that already exists in the database, and identify people who had two or more identities.”
Cuomo’s office lists a few cases of accused fraudsters who have been arrested for allegedly obtaining fake licenses, including a furniture mover who allegedly stole a customer’s identity and tried to obtain a New York driver license under that person’s name but was denied.
He didn’t give up, and instead is accused of flying to Florida and allegedly obtaining a license issued in the customer’s name there. Authorities say he then leased a car with that license, and allegedly stole $50,000 in cash from the victim’s bank account. According to investigators, he was in the middle of receiving a shipment of furniture he’d allegedly fraudulently charged when authorities arrested him.
The governor’s announcement also cites a study of the program by the Institute for Traffic Safety Management and Research, which found that drivers with multiple licenses pose a serious traffic safety risk.
And of the more than 12,300 cases that involve drivers with multiple licenses who may be fraud problems, 24% of them didn’t have a valid license under their own name.
“The use of this facial recognition technology has allowed law enforcement to crack down on fraud, identity theft, and other offenses — taking criminals and dangerous drivers off our streets and increasing the safety of New York’s roadways,” Governor Cuomo said in a statement.
Who else might use facial recognition? While NY does not send driver’s license photos to an FBI program criticized by privacy advocates after a 2016 Government Accountability Office report [PDF] found that the FBI had collected hundreds of millions of face recognition photos in its Next Generation Identification database, New York does submit “criminal photos” to that program.
And according to the GAO report “the FBI has entered into agreements to search and access external databases— including millions of U.S. citizens’ drivers’ license and passport photos…”
“Face recognition is notoriously inaccurate across the board and may also misidentify African Americans and ethnic minorities, young people, and women at higher rates than whites, older people, and men, respectively,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation said last June.
A student loan servicing company that handles accounts for millions of borrowers nationwide now stands accused of preying on people in a federal program that forgives the loans of borrowers who work in public service and education jobs.
A lawsuit [PDF] filed today by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey accuses the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA) — doing business as FedLoan Servicing — of harming borrowers by improperly servicing their accounts as part of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program and the Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) Grant program.
The complaint claims that PHEAA’s actions put these borrowers at risk of losing their eligibility for having the loans forgiven. These borrowers also saw their repayment costs increase, says Healey, because PHEAA prevented them from making monthly payments that would have counted toward their obligations under the federal forgiveness programs.
Since 2012, PHEAA has had the exclusive contract for servicing both the public service forgiveness and TEACH Grant programs.
For those unfamiliar with the public service forgiveness option, it was launched in 2007. That’s when the government began offering a public service loan forgiveness program that will forgive certain federal student loans for borrowers who work for government organizations and non-profit groups for 10 years and make 120 on-time monthly payments on their loans.
New Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is currently calling for the elimination of this forgiveness program, though it’s believed that those currently enrolled will not be affected if it is cancelled.
Under the TEACH Grant program, students who wish to pursue teaching careers in low-income schools for at least four years in fields such as math, science, or foreign language are given financial grants. Students receive up to $4,000/year to help pay for the education required for their teaching career.
According to the AG’s lawsuit, since that time PHEAA has failed to properly and timely process borrowers’ applications for the programs. This has caused many borrowers to miss deadlines required to either participate in the program or remain eligible for loan forgiveness.
Under its contract, PHEAA must guide borrowers through the process of both enrolling in and managing their monthly payments, ensuring they remain eligible for the programs. Healey claims that PHEAA has been unreasonably slow to perform these duties.
For instance, the lawsuit points to processing issues with the Dec. 2015 debut of the REPAYE plan, an income driven repayment plan for federal student loan borrowers who participate in the forgiveness plans.
“Its failure to process applications timely and properly resulted in a lengthy application processing backlog that delayed borrowers from staying on track with monthly payments that would count towards loan forgiveness,” Healey notes.
As a result, Healey notes that these borrowers — which include public service employees and low-income borrowers — lost months that would otherwise have counted toward achieving loan forgiveness.
In some cases, PHEAA, in an effort to make up for processing delays, would place borrowers’ accounts in forbearance.
While this would relieve borrowers from having to pay their debts for a certain timeframe, it is not an approved payment plan under the loan forgiveness programs.
Months during which loans are in forbearance do not qualify toward loan forgiveness. As a result, the lawsuit claims that borrowers will have to make payments on loans for longer than required, eventually delaying the forgiveness of their loans.
In addition to preventing borrowers from staying on track in their repayment plans under the program, the lawsuit contends that PHEAA also miscalculated borrowers’ monthly payments and sent erroneous or unnecessary bills to borrowers.
In some cases, the suit claims that PHEAA overcharged borrowers and collected tens of thousands of dollars in payments that were not due. These overcharges, according to the complaint, were the result of a defect in PHEAA’s servicing system and affected 1% of all borrowers nationally.
Healey claims that PHEAA knew of this issue, but failed to correct it for nearly a year. Since then, the company has allegedly failed to refund the overcharges or notify borrowers they were overcharged.
“This company’s actions have jeopardized the financial futures of teachers and public servants across the country,” AG Healey said in a statement.
The lawsuit seeks restitution, injunctive relief, civil penalties, and reimbursement of the costs and expenses related to PHEAA’s practices.
This isn’t the first time the servicing of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program has come under fire.
Back in Dec. 2016, four borrowers who were previously qualified for the program sued the Dept. of Education to find out why they received letters from FedLoan that they were no longer eligible to have their loans forgiven. What’s more, the decision was retroactive, meaning none of the time they’d spent working toward the forgiveness goal would be counted.
The lawsuit [PDF] alleges that the Department acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” when it changed its interpretation eligibility requirements without explanation.
The Department responded to the lawsuit in March, noting in a filing that the FedLoan approval letter was never a reflection of a “final agency action on the borrower’s qualifications” for the program.
In the filing, the Dept. denies that its acts were arbitrary or that the plaintiffs are required to any relief as a result of being deemed ineligible for the forgiveness program.
More recently, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a report highlighting borrower complaints about student loan servicers mishandling the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.
According to the report — which analyzed complaints from March 1, 2016 through Feb. 28, 2017 — many borrowers aren’t receiving proper notification of this eligibility.
For instance, the CFPB found that borrowers experienced delays or denials of access to promised loan forgiveness, forcing some to forfeit months or years of qualifying service. This, the CFPB contends, can add hundreds or thousands of dollars to the total cost of borrowers’ student debt.
When you hear about a “spill” in a waterway, you might picture waste products or some kind of noxious liquid. In Washington state, though, the state is asking for the public’s help in cleaning up a massive and very problematic spill of live salmon from an aquaculture farm north of Seattle.
The company behind the farm, Cooke Aquaculture, told the Seattle Times that unusual tide activity related to Monday’s solar eclipse caused a breach in the pen where the fish are kept.
The farm and the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife don’t know how many fish escaped from the pen, which held 305,000 fish, or 3 million pounds, of Atlantic salmon that aren’t native to the area, and aren’t equipped to survive.
The farm and wildlife authorities won’t know how many fish escaped until the upcoming harvest, when the fish will be inventoried. Their best guess is that 3,000 to 4,000 fish escaped.
Cooke is in the process of applying for a permit to run another farm where fish are kept in net pens, and the spill does not give opponents of that plan any reason any more confidence in the company.
“If they can’t be trusted in an accident like this how can they be trusted to tell the truth in the permitting process?” one environmental activist asked the Times. The same activist called the company’s explanation for the broken net “B.S.,” since pens should be built to withstand high tides.
Although they don’t have exact numbers on how many fish escaped, officials do know that the water is full of salmon that don’t belong there, and they’re hoping that fishers will pitch in and help catch the invaders as quickly as they can. As long as they catch Atlantic salmon, people who already hold fishing licenses for this year are welcome to catch as many fish as they want at any weight. The state has published a handy guide to identifying Atlantic salmon.
READ MORE: 7 Things We Learned From New ‘Frontline’ About State Of The Seafood Industry
A spokeswoman for fish farming firm Cooke stood by the company’s story, and emphasized that the Atlantic salmon will not be an invasive species. They cannot interbreed with the King salmon that the Northwest is known for, and aren’t equipped to survive in the wild.
“It’s primarily a business loss,” she said. “The salmon will be food for the seals and the fishermen can enjoy them.”
A researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agreed with this assessment, telling the Times that the fish are, as salmon go, couch potatoes.
“They are domesticated,” he said. “Imagine a dairy cow getting lost out in the Serengeti. It doesn’t last very long.”
A year after Samsung recalled and eventually discontinued the Galaxy Note 7 after several of the devices’ batteries overheated and exploded or caught fire, the tech company is prepping the release of its next version of the smartphone, the Galaxy Note 8.
In an attempt to avoid a similarly fiery smartphone debacle, Samsung says it has increased scrutiny of the new device’s batteries ahead of its expected September launch.
Samsung reiterated it commitment to safety today in the announcement of the new Galaxy Note 8, revealing that it has taken extra steps to ensure the device and its battery are safe.
Samsung says that it has “re-assessed every step of the smartphone manufacturing process” and put the new phone through its “8-point battery safety check.”
These checks, the company notes on its website, include “putting our batteries through extreme testing, inside and out, followed by careful inspection by X-ray and the human eye to ensure highest quality.”
According to Samsung, the eight-point safety check entails a durability test, charge/discharge tests, visual inspections, tests of batter leakage, x-ray tests, an accelerated usage test, a disassembling test, and a voltage test.
Additionally, the company says it has invited a team of experts from academia and research centers to provide it with “objective analysis to ensure the safety of the battery.”
Samsung has, for the first time, enlisted the assistance of product safety consultant Underwriters Laboratories to conduct additional tests of the phone’s batteries.
The tech company and UL say they have been working closely to make meaningful advancements with smartphone tests.
“As a result, the Note8 has successfully completed a rigorous series of device and battery safety compatibility test protocols,” Sajeev Jesudas, President, UL International, said in a statement. “We look forward to maintaining our strategic relationship with Samsung to help ensure device safety for all consumers.”
In the end, Samsung tells The New York Times it believes the new tests and other upgrades to the phone have made it unlikely to explode.
“Samsung pursues innovation, and we stumbled,” Justin Denison, head of product strategy for Samsung, tells the Times. “We accepted it, we learned from it, we’ve applied processes and we’ve had quite a bit of success in recovering from that.”
Despite the previous issues with the Note 7, Samsung believes customers will welcome the new Note 8 with open arms.
In fact, Denison tell the Times that Samsung’s own surveys of Galaxy Note 7 owners found that eight of 10 described their previous phone with the word “love.”
This finding was echoed by some third-party firms that found that 64% of 1,000 individuals still consider Samsung products to be reliable, with 27% saying they would purchase the Note 8.
The U.S. Department of Justice recently tried to compel a website hosting company to turn over all the information the company has on the approximately 1.3 million internet users who visited a site created to organize a protest during President Trump’s inauguration. Now the DOJ is rethinking that plan, withdrawing its demand for this mountain of data.
The DOJ contends that the website DisruptJ20.org was “used to organize a riot” on the morning of Trump’s Jan. 20, 2017, inauguration ceremony in Washington, D.C.
As part of its case against the site, the DOJ served a sweeping warrant [PDF] on web-hosting company DreamHost, seeking virtually every piece of information DreamHost might have about DisruptJ20 and its visitors.
Not surprisingly, this rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, including the folks at DreamHost, who have been fighting the warrant in court.
Now, the DOJ says its original intent for the warrant is being misunderstood, and that the government did not know when it drafted the warrant that DreamHost had retained such extensive user data.
“The Warrant — like the criminal investigation — is singularly focused on criminal activity,” explained the DOJ in a brief [PDF] filed yesterday with a D.C. Superior Court judge. “It will not be used for any other purpose.”
According to the brief, the warrant “was not intended to be used, and will not be used, to ‘identify the political dissidents of the current administration,’ Nor will it be used to ‘chill free association and the right of free speech afforded by the Constitution.'”
More bluntly, the brief states that “The government has no interest in records relating to the 1.3 million IP addresses” previously referenced by DreamHost on its blog and its court filing.
The DOJ says that any evidence seized from DreamHost that is not within the scope of the warrant will be sealed and will not be revisited without getting a second court order.
The government’s brief seeks to exclude unpublished content on the site, and also data related to general access of the DisruptJ20 site, meaning most user info will no longer be included in the DOJ warrant.
DreamHost calls the DOJ’s change of course a “victory” for internet privacy but cautions that “Much of the DOJ’s original demand for information is still in place, and there are still a few issues that we consider to be problematic for a number of reasons.”
The company is continuing to challenge the warrant on First and Fourth Amendment grounds and will be in court tomorrow (Thursday, Aug. 24) for another hearing related to this dispute.
