Grubhub ordered to pay $3.5 million to settle Washington DC deceptive practices lawsuit

Grubhub has been ordered to pay $3.5 million to settle the lawsuit filed against the company by the District of Columbia over “deceptive trade practices.” Washington DC Attorney General Karl Racine has announced that his office has reached an agreement with the food delivery service “for charging customers hidden fees and using deceptive marketing techniques.” If you’ll recall, his office sued the company earlier this year, accusing it of charging hidden fees and misrepresenting Grubhub+ subscription’s offer of “unlimited free delivery,” since customers still have to pay a service fee.

The DC Attorney General’s office also accused the company of listing 1,000 restaurants in the area without their permission by using numbers that route to Grubhub workers or creating websites without the eateries’ consent. A previous TechCrunch report said the company had already ended those practices. Racine also said at the time that Grubhub ran a promotion called “Supper for Support” at the beginning of the pandemic and then “stuck restaurants with the bill” that cut into their profit margins.

Grubhub called the lawsuit frivolous at the time of its filing and said that the company was “disappointed [the AG’s office has] moved forward with [it] because [the service’s] practices have always complied with DC law, and in any event, many of the practices at issue have been discontinued.”

Under the terms of the settlement, Grubhub will pay affected customers in the DC area a total of $2.7 million. Their cut will be credited to their accounts, and it will be sent to them as a check if it remains unused within 90 days. In addition, the company has to pay $800,000 in civil penalties to the District of Columbia and has to clearly mark additional fees people have to pay with their order going forward.

NLRB says Tesla violated the law by telling employees not to talk about pay

The National Labor Relations Board has accused Tesla of violating labor law by prohibiting employees in Orlando, Florida from talking about workplace matters. According to Bloomberg, NLRB’s Tampa regional director filed a complaint against the automaker in September for breaking the law when it told employees not to discuss their pay with other people and not to talk about the termination of another employee. In addition, based on the filing the news organization obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Tesla management reportedly told employees “not to complain to higher level managers” about their working conditions. 

Tesla has had to face several complaints by the NLRB over the past years. In 2021, the agency found that the automaker had violated US labor laws by firing a union activist and threatening workers’ benefits. The NLRB ordered the company to rehire union activist Richard Ortiz and to remove all mentions of disciplinary action from his files. It also ordered Tesla chief Elon Musk to delete a tweet that the court had deemed a threat that employees would be giving up company-paid stock options if they join a union. The tweet in question is still live, and Tesla is appealing the NLRB’s ruling in court. 

An agency spokesperson told Bloomberg that a judge will hear the complaint filed by the Tampa regional director in February. As the publication notes, companies can still appeal the agency judges’ decision to NLRB members in Washington and then to federal court, so any corrective action may take years to happen.

Google Voice now flags suspected spam calls

Google Voice has made it easier to filter out spammers trying to call your number. The tech giant has announced that the service will now flag suspected spam calls and will clearly label them as such, complete with a big red exclamation mark. Spam calls and texts have been a huge issue for a years, and they aren’t going away anytime soon — according to the FCC, consumers in the US receive approximately 4 billion robocalls per month and that Americans had lost nearly $30 billion to scam calls in 2021. Google says the feature was designed to help protect you “from unwanted calls and potentially harmful scams.”

The new label that says “suspected spam caller” will show up not just on the incoming call screen, but also in call history for future reference. If you confirm that the call is spam, any future call from that number will head straight to voicemail, and all its call history entries will be sent to the spam folder. But if you confirm that the number is legitimate and isn’t a spam caller, the warning will never be displayed for it again. Here’s what the label would look like on the call screen:

Google
Google

Google uses the same artificial intelligence that’s in charge of identifying spam calls across its ecosystem to pinpoint spam callers for this feature. Apparently, that AI has been filtering out billions of spam calls a month for the tech giant. To note, the new label will only appear if your spam filter setting under Security is turned off. If it’s on, all calls Google suspects to be spam are sent to voicemail from the start.

Apple’s 512GB MacBook Air M2 is $220 off right now

You can get the latest MacBook Air on sale right now — even better, the discounted variant is the one with the bigger storage capacity. The silver 2022 MacBook Air with 512GB of internal storage and Apple’s M2 processor is currently listed for $1,279 o…

Twitter went down for thousands of users

Many suggested it would happen, and now it has: Twitter went down. Thousands of Twitter users reported having issues accessing the website on the evening of December 28th according to comments on DownDetector. Based on people’s reports, the outage started just before 7PM Eastern time, reaching its peak at around 7:44PM before returning fully after around two hours. It appears people had more problems accessing the website itself — only a fraction had difficulties loading the social network through its apps. 

According to The Guardian, users who couldn’t access the website were met with a message that read “something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault.” Elon Musk responded that he wasn’t having any trouble loading the social network, but did note that “significant backend server” changes were made around the same time that should make the service “feel faster.”

On Christmas Eve, Musk revealed that he had disconnected one of Twitter’s more sensitive server racks, but that the social network remained operational. He purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October, months after initiating the acquisition and trying to back out of the deal. The company had laid off around half of the workforce and thousands of contractors since then, and one former employee told The Washington Post in November that they knew of six critical systems that “no longer have any engineers.”

Isik Mater, the director of research at internet monitoring service NetBlocks, told The New York Times that “the problems with Twitter exhibit in multiple countries and are widespread.” Mater also said that the “platform API is affected, which serves the mobile app as well as many aspects of the desktop site.”

US House of Representatives bans TikTok on its devices

TikTok is now banned on any device owned and managed by the US House of Representatives, according to Reuters. The House’s Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) reportedly told all lawmakers and their staff in an email that they must delete the app from t…

Twitter reinstates accounts of some suspended journalists and Mastodon

Twitter has announced through its Safety account that it has “identified several policies where permanent suspension was a disproportionate action for breaking Twitter rules.” The website has already started reinstating accounts that were suspended for violating those rules, the tweet continued, and it will lift more suspensions every week over the next month. Twitter didn’t specify the policies it’s talking about and which accounts will be reinstated. But upon checking, the accounts of Mastodon and the journalists recently banned due to the website’s new doxxing rules are up and running again. 

To understand what happened, we have to go back a few days. The website banned several accounts over the past week, starting with @ElonJet, the account that tracked flights of Elon Musk’s private jet using publicly available data. Other accounts that also tracked the planes of government agencies and high-profile individuals were banned, as well. 

On his account, Musk announced that any account “doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended.” In a follow-up tweet, he said that a car carrying his child was “followed by crazy stalker” and that he was taking legal action against Jack Sweeney, the college student who ran @ElonJet, and “organizations who supported harm to [his] family.” As of this writing, the @ElonJet account is still suspended. 

Shortly after that, Twitter also suspended the account of its rival social network Mastodon when it tweeted a link to the account tracking Musk’s jet on its own service. It’s worth noting that Twitter seems to have started flagging posts containing the word “Mastodon” as “sensitive content” days before this happened. Users also found themselves unable to post links to Mastodon servers.

In addition to Mastodon, Twitter suspended the accounts of several journalists who report on Elon Musk and the social network itself. Most of them talked about Sweeney or linked to @ElonJet in some way, and based on Musk’s responses to questions about the event, the journalists were suspended due to Twitter’s new doxxing rules. One of the banned journalists, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, posted a screenshot of the tweet that the website had flagged for doxxing: It was a report about Mastodon’s suspension for tweeting a link to it service’s own @ElonJet account.

Following the journalists’ suspensions, Musk posted a poll asking people whether he should reinstate the accounts of users who doxxed his exact location in real time “now” or “in 7 days.” The “now” option won, and Musk promised that those accounts will be restored. So far, Twitter has reinstated Harwell’s account, along with the accounts of The New York Times’Ryan Mac, Mashable’sMatt Binder, The Intercept’sMicah Lee and CNN’sDonie O’Sullivan. Keith Olbermann’s account is still suspended, and it’s unclear if Twitter will lift @ElonJet’s suspension in the coming days. 

Amazon is picking up the TV and film rights to Warhammer 40,000

Warhammer shows and films may be coming to Prime Video in the next few years. Amazon has secured the global rights to Warhammer 40,000, according to Deadline, and Henry Cavill is set to star in and executive produce the franchise. The company’s confirmation comes after the announcement by Games Workshop, the manufacturer behind the miniature wargame, that it has “reached an agreement in principle” with Amazon. It’s unclear if the two companies have already worked out the details of their partnership, but Games Workshop said it’s giving Amazon the rights to develop films and TV series based on the IP, along with any associated merchandising rights. Deadline lists games and animation as other potential projects.

The tabletop wargame has been around since 1987 and is set in the distant future with a rich lore that encompasses humans, alien races and gods. Based on Deadline’s report, production company Vertigo Entertainment teamed up with Cavill, who once posted a photo of himself painting a Warhammer miniature in the middle of pandemic lockdowns, to secure the Warhammer 40,000 IP before bringing the project to Amazon. Cavill recently left The Witcher, where he played Geralt of Rivia, and was supposed to play Superman in future DC films. However, he was ultimately dropped as the superhero after DC Studios’ new co-chairman James Gunn decided to write a movie for a younger Man of Steel. 

In a statement, Cavill said: “I have loved Warhammer since I was a boy, making this moment truly special for me. The opportunity to shepherd this cinematic universe from its inception is quite the honour and the responsibility. I couldn’t be more grateful for all the hard work put in by Vertigo, Amazon Studios and Games Workshop to make this happen. One step closer to making a nigh on lifelong dream come true.”

Update12/16/22 9:35AM ET: Added the official announcement from Warhammer.

Microsoft brings full Teams integration to HoloLens 2

Microsoft’s latest update for the HoloLens 2 makes it easier for users to collaborate with colleagues. One of the biggest additions is perhaps the full integration of Microsoft Teams, because users will no longer have to hop on a computer or a phone to attend meetings with the rest of their organization. While the headset has had the capability to make and receive Teams video calls for years, its collaborative features were still pretty limited. 

With this new update, Microsoft is giving HoloLens 2 users the capability to display an array of holographic windows with Teams calls, chats and calendars. Since the update also adds OneDrive integration, users will be able to access their cloud-based folders and see Word documents, PDFs and videos shared during calls. 

Microsoft has also combined its two Dynamics 365 Mixed Reality apps, namely the Dynamics 365 Guides app that provides step-by-step holographic instructions to users and the Dynamics 365 Remote Assist app that lets frontline workers show colleagues what they’re seeing in the field. The company said the combined application was a priority request from Toyota, which has been providing feedback for the headset since 2016. 

David Kleiner, who leads Toyota North America’s Applied Technology & Research Lab, explained that giving frontline workers laptops won’t work, because they don’t have desk jobs and that using a device they can wear with all the tools they need is much more practical. “Someone can grab a HoloLens, start a Guides session, and literally have a trainer in their head,” Kleiner said. “If they do need help, they can call an expert right from the app.”

In addition to discussing the headset’s new capabilities, Microsoft also said that it would release a successor to the current iteration. Reports earlier this year claimed that the tech giant scrapped its plans for the HoloLens 3 and that it was going to be the end for the device. Microsoft, however, denied that it was killing the HoloLens and called it “critical part of [the company’s] plans for emerging categories like mixed reality and the metaverse.” Now, Microsoft mixed reality VP Scott Evans said that the company is “just looking for the right design point to make it a meaningful update” because “[customers] want a successor device that’s going to enable an even higher return on investment.”