As the FCC winds down its lip-service commenting period on Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to roll back net neutrality rules that stop internet service providers from interfering with the things you do and see online, we wanted to remind you of that time we challenged more than a dozen cable companies — all of whom publicly claimed to love the core ideas of neutrality — if they would put those rules into a legally binding contract; not one of them said yes.
PepsiCo, the snack corporation that has brought us simple culinary delights such as Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and Doritos Locos Tacos flavored Doritos, has a new product line geared to current consumers’ tastes. The Simply line is organic versions of 11 of the company’s main chip brands, including Lay’s, Cheetos, Doritos, and Tostitos.
Bloomberg News reports that the products are now in stores, including the grocery section of Amazon.com. That leads to an interesting question: Now that Amazon owns Whole Foods, a company with famously strict rules about what products it will carry, would Frito-Lay products from the organic line ever appear on the shelves of Whole Foods?
The new products meet all of the requirements that Whole Foods has for its food suppliers, and are made from certified organic ingredients. Unless the chain has some kind of philosophical opposition to PepsiCo itself, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t be for sale there.
“Amazon’s acquisition makes it much more likely that Whole Foods will carry these better-for-you brands, even if they’re made by large incumbent [consumer packaged goods] players,” a research analyst who follows snack companies told Bloomberg News. “The smaller brands just can’t keep up with the spending and velocity required from Amazon anymore.”
Either smaller brands and the companies that make private label items for Whole Foods will have to keep up, or the big players will start to appear on the store and virtual shelves.
Are there customers out there who want both the Doritos brand and a guarantee that their food was grown without synthetic pesticides and genetic modification? Sure, the chief marketing officer at Frito-Lay says.
“The notion of clean and simple is very important to a segment of consumers,” she told Bloomberg in an interview. There are customers who want “simple” ingredients but who also like a salty, flavored corn chip made from non-GMO corn.
If you’ve ever looked at the list of ingredients on a can of air freshener and wondered what, exactly, is involved in that “sea breeze” scent, you’ll have some more answers soon: Procter & Gamble is joining other companies in the push for transparency with a promise that eventually all of its smelliest home and personal care offerings will detail exactly what substances make up “fragrance.”
For example, if you check out the current ingredient page for Febreze products, things like “Alcohol” and “Citric Acid” are included along with “fragrance*.”
Follow that asterisk and P&G says that Febreze perfumes are “formulated taking into account our stringent internal safety standards for every ingredient, as well as the safety standards set by the International Fragrance Association (IFRA).”
If you dig a little further on P&G’s site, you can find a list of ingredients in its “fragrance palette,” as well as those it does not use at all. However, there are no explanations as to what any of these things are, so if you want to know what “β-Farnesene” is, you’re on your own — at least for now.
P&G announced today that its new plan is to share all fragrance ingredients — for any substance present in concentrations of greater than 0.01% — online for its entire product portfolio in the U.S. and Canada by 2019. The company will start by focusing on fabric, home, and beauty care categories, listing what’s in certain Tide, Febreze, Herbal Essences, and Olay products.
Pointing out that it already lists all fragrance ingredients online, P&G says this move is an “additional level of detail” that will “offer consumers more reliable information to help choose what’s best for them and their families.”
Beyond simply saying what’s in these products, P&G says it will also add information like where else the ingredients can be found, “such as everyday fruits, foods, and other products.”
Of course, just because your face wash is made with the same thing that’s in grapefruit rinds doesn’t mean you should go rubbing it all over your face. If an ingredient and its possible side effects are unfamiliar to you, you’ll still have to do a bit of research on your own.
“While we applaud P&G’s actions today, we will also urge them to go further in protecting public health,” says U.S. PIRG Toxics Advocate Dev Gowda. “P&G should also provide full fragrance disclosure to consumers on product packages, regardless of the product category and whether the product contains fragrance ingredients over 100 parts per million.”
P&G seems to be taking a page out of the playbook other companies are using to woo shoppers who want to know exactly what they’re putting on their skin or spraying in their kitchen.
In February, P&G competitor Unilever promised it would list its fragrance ingredients for its home and personal care goods online, which you can see in the wild over on the Seventh Generation website.
Brands like skincare company Beauty Counter as well as household names like SJC-owned Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day also feature online ingredient glossaries, explaining things like what’s in each product — whether it’s synthetic or from a plant-based source — and what they do.
Retailers are jumping on the transparency bandwagon as well: After encouraging suppliers to remove eight controversial chemicals from products last year, Walmart is the latest company to join The Chemical Footprint Project, which rates companies on their use of chemicals.
Also this year, Target unveiled new guidelines for manufacturers that will require them them to remove certain chemicals from products and list all ingredients on products over the next five years.
It was a big day in news for connected-home devices, with Google announcing plans to put its Home technology on a slew of new appliances, while two competing digital assistants — Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana — began to make nice with each other.
Maybe your notion of a voice-activated appliance is you screaming at your dishwasher to just please work properly for once. It’s becoming increasingly likely that your next washer will be able to listen and talk back to you.
The Google Assistant launched with the Google Home smart speaker in 2016 and works on both the company’s Android operating system and Apple’s iOS.
This morning, Google announced a major expansion in platforms where Assistant can live. In addition to third-party connected speakers from Anker, Panasonic, and Mobvoi, the company is planning to integrate Assistant into a wide variety of appliances.
Forgot to turn the dishwasher on before you went to bed? Tell your Assistant-enabled phone or speaker, “OK Google, run the dishwasher,” and it should work. At least, if your dishwasher is one of the appliances coming from “manufacturers like LG” that has Assistant integration.
Google promises to keep updating its list of participating manufacturers as the week goes on.
Meanwhile, some of the other voice assistants out there appear to be teaming up. As Reuters reports, Alexa and Cortana appear to be making friends.
Amazon and Microsoft have announced a bit of a partnership for their respective AI assistants, Reuters explains. The two will be able to talk to each other for a more seamless consumer experience.
Basically, you’ll be able to run one through the other. If you’re not near your Amazon device, but you’re using a laptop with Cortana enabled, you’ll be able to say, “Cortana, open Alexa,” and you’ll have access to your Amazon service, or vice versa.
Analysts told Reuters they were surprised the companies were working so closely together, since usually these services — and the massive troves of data and code used to drive them — are kept closely proprietary.
But, analysts also note, what Amazon has just gained is one more edge on Google. By beating Google to the smart-speaker market, Amazon managed to become the “accidental winner” of the home AI race, and Google — which only released Home in late 2016 — has been scrambling to catch up.
Google, meanwhile, recently teamed up with Walmart to try and gain on the Amazon behemoth.
Most of us can walk into any big box or warehouse store and buy a case of bottled water for less than $10. But one Best Buy store in hurricane-devastated Texas was caught charging between $30 to $43 just for cases of water, leading to claims of price-gouging. Amid the blowback for its egregiously overpriced water, Best Buy is apologizing and claims it was all a mistake.
A reader submitted a photo of the Best Buy display to a reporter at news site Grit Post, who shared it on Twitter and on the site. The image went viral, because even the least price-conscious shopper knows that $43 for a case of Dasani is several times what one should expect to pay.
Best Buy apologized for selling this item, telling Grit Post in an emailed statement: “This was a big mistake on the part of a few employees at one store on Friday. As a company we are focused on helping, not hurting affected people. We’re sorry and it won’t happen again.”
The company’s spokesman explained the pricing, noting that it was “not as an excuse, but as an explanation.”
It’s actually an understandable error: The chain doesn’t normally sell water by the case, but it does sell some bottled water in coolers near its checkouts. That meant that the retailer had no price set up in the system for when it’s selling cases of water, and employees simply multiplied the normal single-bottle price by 24.
Intentional price-gouging, however, is a problem during any natural disaster, and has been reported around the region affected by Hurricane Harvey. Some Wingstop customers in Corpus Christi (warning: auto-play video at that link) were charged a mysterious “catering tray” fee for their meals, which one cashier called a “convenience fee.” Customers who complained to the chain received refunds.
KXAN kicked off an investigation when the Best Western where their crew stayed charged $289 before taxes for a room that normally cost $120. The Attorney General investigated, and was able to get refunds for dozens of families who stayed at the hotel during the storm.
That location has already lost its Best Western franchise as a result of the hurricane-related price hikes.
“We are deeply offended and saddened by the actions taken by this hotel,” the chain’s public relations manager told KXAN in a statement. “As a result, we are immediately severing any affiliation with the hotel. This hotel’s actions are contrary to the values of Best Western. We do not tolerate this type of egregious and unethical behavior.”
Price-gouging happens because customers really do have no other choice — so if you find yourself in this situation, document the price, whether it’s a doubled hotel room rate, $20 for a gallon of gas, or $5 for a liter of water. Then take that documentation to your state’s attorney general as well as to the retailer’s corporate office if it’s a chain.
“If you see [price-gouging] happening, take a photograph,” Texas Deputy Attorney General Jim Davis told KXAN-TV out of Austin in an interview. “Use your cell phone. That’s one of the things of this storm that’s different, is the social media effect and the information we get.”
While the AG’s office is searching social media for complaints of price-gouging, don’t assume that posting to Facebook is sufficient. Make sure to submit your complaint to the Attorney General’s office.
Ken Paxton, Texas AG and hero to people who found RadioShack gift cards in their sock drawer long after the retailer’s bankruptcy, has reminded people in Texas that the state fines merchants $20,000 for price-gouging, and the fine multiplies to $250,000 when the person overcharged is over 65.
Repeat after me: Map apps can be useful, but you should not follow their advice blindly. For example, if you’re on your bike and it tells you to cycle through a tunnel meant only for cars. Don’t do that.
Port Authority police intercepted a delivery worker on the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel after he biked through it on his way to drop off food for a customer, NJ.com reports.
While it’s perfectly okay to cycle across many of the area’s bridges, bikes — and other “velocipedes” — are barred from entering the Lincoln Tunnel, according to Port Authority regulations [PDF].
The cyclist says he was simply following the directions on a mapping app. He showed the police his phone, “which supported his claim,” a Port Authority spokesman told NJ.com.
In the end, traffic wasn’t majorly disrupted, and police issued a traffic summons for trespass.
He’s not the only one who has blamed technology for leading them astray:
• A lost truck driver once landed a big rig on a public park’s footbridge and blamed his GPS.
• Then there was the driver who followed her map app and ended up crossing an airport taxiway.
• Back in 2013, a woman in Europe drove 900 miles instead of 90 due to a GPS error.
• And a year before that, a GPS failure led to an arrest after a woman drove onto a golf course.
• Of course, we can never forget when Australian police warned people against using Apple maps, lest they end up lost in the wilderness.
If you need more evidence that we are living in an increasingly internet-connected world, look no further than a recent software update aimed at making sure 465,000 people with pacemakers don’t have hearts that are vulnerable to hackers.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced this week that medical device company Abbott has issued a corrective action for implantable cardiac pacemakers made under the St. Jude’s Medical brand. According to the company there is a “risk of patient harm due to potential exploitation of cybersecurity vulnerabilities.”
To address this heart-hacking vulnerability, Abbott is issuing a firmware update to the pacemakers.
While this update is being treated as a recall, the devices will continue to function as intended “and replacement of implanted pacemaker devices is not recommended.”
To that end, there are no known reports of patient harm related to the cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the 465,000 radio-frequency-enabled implanted Abbott devices impacted in the U.S.; the company says this firmware update is part of a plan announced in January, and will “provide an additional layer of security against unauthorized access to these devices.”
Included in the update:
• Accent
• Anthem
• Accent MRI
• Accent ST
• Assurity
• Allure
Not included: Any implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs) or cardiac resynchronization ICDs (CRT-Ds)
Going forward, any pacemaker manufactured as of Aug. 28, 2017 will have the update pre-loaded in the device.
If you have an impacted pacemaker, you should talk with your physician about when you should receive the update — which requires an in-person patient visit — as well as address any questions or concerns you might have.
The process will take about three minutes to complete, during which time the device will operate in backup mode “and essential, life-sustaining features will remain available.”
If you have any questions or want additional information, check out http://ift.tt/2wT7Bti, or contact Abbott’s hotline at 1-800-722-3774.
“As medical devices become increasingly interconnected via the Internet, hospital networks, other medical devices, and smartphones, there is an increased risk of exploitation of cybersecurity vulnerabilities, some of which could affect how a medical device operates,” the FDA notes.
Key cards may be a convenient way for hotels to issue room keys, but a bug in one popular model made it convenient to electronically pick the locks. An override code to open doors was programmed into the locks, making them easy to open after a quick shopping trip to RadioShack. One man took advantage of this bug and used it to gain access to rooms across the country, stealing stuff from hotels and guests alike.
In an excellent feature story in Wired, you can learn the slightly horrifying story of how tens of millions of electronic locks in hotels have an easily exploitable flaw, but the manufacturer has no way to push an update out to all of them. Years after the flaw was discovered, many of them still haven’t been fixed.
A man in Arizona had learned about the exploit from a TV news item just as he was about to be sent back to prison on charges that he thought had been dismissed. His crimes until then were minor forgeries and driving under the influence, and he decided that if he was going to prison for six years, he should do something that (to him) really merited that kind of sentence.
The first time he gained access to a room using his door-opening gadget, he just stole a pile of towels and pillows, not ready to risk stealing televisions yet. Eventually, he moved on to stealing multiple room TVs as well as guests’ stuff. Police and hotels were mystified.
He began entering empty hotel rooms during the day, at first un-bolting and removing hotel-owned TVs, but eventually making off with customers’ electronics, jewelry, and entire suitcases. Who looks twice at a person wheeling a suitcase down a hotel hallway?
“Everything’s gone. No prints. No forced entry,” a detective in Tempe, AZ, one of the cities that the hotel hacker first hit, told Wired. “It was like a ghost had slipped in and slipped out.”
He grew bolder, eventually stealing a guest’s luggage while the man napped in his bed during the day. Meanwhile, the maker of the popular door lock model, Onity, began to take the threat seriously and realized that it needed to pay for some kind of fix, and began sending plugs for the data ports on each door. The hotel hacker figured out how to remove the lock’s cover and get rid of the plastic piece blocking his access.
The hotel hacker was eventually caught, pleading guilty to three of what he claims are at least a hundred hotel burglaries. He was sentenced to nine years in state prison in Arizona.
Five years after his spree began, though, there are still exploitable Onity locks around. If you see an open port that looks like it could take a DC power plug on your hotel room door, maybe take anything irreplaceable in your room with you, or lock it in a safe.
Normally, when a security researcher shares this kind of exploit with the world, as the man who discovered this issue did at a hacker conference and even a mainstream media article, the company responsible rushes to fix the problem before anyone can begin a nationwide crime spree.
Onity, the lock-maker, put that expense on the hotels that use its lock instead. Replacing the relevant part in each of its locks cost around $25 per lock, with tens of millions of locks installed.
As a result, there are still plenty of exploitable locks around. Watch your back. Or, we should say, your bags.
Dedicated and effective government employees can come from many prior walks of life, it’s true; the path through any career can be winding and complex. But choosing someone with major ties to a for-profit college that engaged in questionable behaviors to head up a division tasked with investigating for-profit colleges that engage in questionable behaviors seems like a bad sign.
There’s a new hire coming to the Department of Education, Politico reports: Julian Schmoke, currently a high-ranking director at a community college in Georgia, will be taking over as head of the Department’s Student Aid Enforcement Office.
The Student Aid Enforcement Office was formed in early 2016, “as part of the Obama Administration’s aggressive action to protect students and taxpayers.”
The Enforcement Office basically works with other divisions within the Department of Education to investigate instutitions’ shady actions around student lending. Basically, it’s the gorup that handles alleged fraud on the part of for-profit colleges and universities.
The first head of the Enforcement division came from the FTC, where he had previously worked on consumer protection issues; that follows. But the same cannot be said of the new nominee: Prior to his current role as a college administrator, Schmoke spent several years working for DeVry University.
Yes, the same for-profit DeVry University you’ve probably seen commercials for — and the same DeVry University that just finished paying out $49 million in refunds to more than 17,3000 students after it reached a $100 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over those ads in late 2016.
In short, the Department of Education has now hired a guy who spent much of a career at a for-profit school busted for fraud… to head the department that helps determine which for-profit schools need to be busted for fraud.
The new hire is just one of many recent signals from the Trump Administration that the Department of Education is making a 180 on issues related to for-profit education.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos herself has financial ties to a student loan refinancer.
In June, DeVos named the head of a private, for-profit student lending company to run the Department’s Office of Financial Aid. That same month she also promised to “reset” rules that regulated for-profit colleges and held them more accountable.
And in July, it came out that the Education Department had not approved a single loan forgiveness claim since the start of the new Administration on Jan. 20.
So while it is theoretically possible that Schmoke’s ties to DeVry don’t mean he will be anything other than a stalward defender of students’ rights… probably best not to hold your breath.
Don’t select your plastic surgeon based solely on their Instagram posts. That feels like something we shouldn’t have to tell people, but the “bad idea”-ness of it all is being highlighted by a new report which found that fewer than 20% of cosmetic surgery posts on Instagram are from board-certified plastic surgeons.
The report, published today in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal by researchers from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, looked at the most popular posts related to an array of common plastic surgery-related hashtags and found a variety of people — some doctors, some not — pushing cosmetic surgery services without certification from medical boards in either the U.S. or Canada.
Becoming a board-certified plastic surgeon requires years of post-medical school training specifically in this field, in addition to several more years of surgical training and experience.
In some cases, these surgeries are indeed being marketed by physicians, but ones who aren’t specifically trained in this field, like gynecologists, dermatologists, emergency medicine physicians, and doctors specializing in family medicine — though all reportedly marketed themselves as “cosmetic surgeons,” a designation that many physicians can use but which is not an indication of any specific training or experience in the field.
“A cosmetic surgeon is not necessarily the same thing as a board certified plastic surgeon, and patients need to be made aware of this,” explains Robert Dorfman, lead author of the study.
Perhaps more alarming were the plastic surgery-related ads placed by non-physicians: dentists, hair salons, and spas with no affiliated doctor.
“This is a very scary finding,” says Dorfman. “Providers — ranging from physicians who are not licensed in plastic surgery to dentists, hair salon employees and barbers — are doing procedures for which they do not have formal or extensive training. That’s extremely dangerous for the patient.”
The majority of the most popular cosmetic surgery marketing posts were from doctors based in other countries, with Turkey, Russia, Brazil, and Colombia leading the way.
Of all the top posts related to plastic surgery hashtags on Instagram, the report says that fewer than 18% were published by actual board-certified plastic surgeons.
What’s more, the study found that the posts published by the board-certified surgeons were significantly more likely to contain educational information for prospective patients, as opposed to purely promotional content.
“It is critical that board-certified plastic surgeons use social media like Instagram as a platform to educate patients about the risks of surgery and dangers of having plastic surgery performed by those with improper training,” concludes the study.
What’s that old saying, again? “When you love someone, say it with meat”? That’s how employees at one Los Angeles Whole Foods welcomed their new e-commerce overlords, sculpting Amazon and Prime logos out of ground beef in the display case.
A few observant shoppers browsing the meat department at an L.A.-area Whole Foods spotted beef sculptures devoted to Amazon branding this week, apparently in celebration of Amazon and Whole Foods officially becoming one on Monday:
But these were not displays commissioned by Jeff Bezos, as meat guys working at the store in question confirmed to Recode that they decided to get creative on their own: “One of the managers” apparently thought it would be fun to make the Amazon logo out of meat, so a worker used a paper cutout of the Amazon logo as a guide to shape the beef.
We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment on this culinary ode to the company, and will update this post if we hear back.
