It alleges that Apple made "false, misleading, or deceptive representations" about consumers' rights under Australian law.

ACCC chairman Rod Sims said: "Consumer guarantee rights under the Australian Consumer Law exist independently of any manufacturer's warranty and are not extinguished simply because a consumer has goods repaired by a third party."

Internet monitoring allows GM to order parts when it detects they’re wearing out instead of having to store them at the factory. That reduces inventory and saves money, Franks said.

Hooking robots to the internet for preventive maintenance is just the start of a spurt of new robotics technology, Franks said. GM is using robots that can work safely alongside humans in the factory that produces the Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid, he said.

On April 1, a customer who purchased Garadget on Amazon using the name R. Martin reported problems with the iPhone application that controls Garadget.

Shortly afterward, not having gotten a response, Martin left a 1-star review of Garadget on Amazon.

Grisak then responded by bricking Martin's product remotely.

These delightfully demonic figurines are the creation of Parastone, a company in the Netherlands that specializes in 3-D recreations of classic paintings.

Every person and beast in a Bosch canvas is so well-rendered that their diminutive contortions hold up to intense scrutiny. Most of these characters are taken from Bosch's triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, but there are a few from elsewhere.

US Patent No. 8,473,532 (the '532 patent), "Method and apparatus for automatic organization for computer files," began its life with publicly-funded Louisiana Tech University. But in September last year, it was sold to a patent troll. A flurry of lawsuits quickly followed.

Within two months of the sale, Micoba had filed nearly a dozen cases in the Eastern District of Texas, suing companies like SpiderOak and Dropbox, alleging they infringed at least claim 13 of the '532 patent.

According to RPX, Micoba is associated with IP Edge, which itself is associated with eDekka (the biggest patent troll of 2014) and Bartonfalls (the winner of our October 2016 Stupid Patent of the Month for its patent on changing the channel).

For this technique to work, two conditions must be met. First, the flatbed scanner lid must be left open in an upright position so an attacker can aim light beams at its sensors.

Second, an attacker must find a way to install malware on an air-gapped system.

Similarly, scientists hacked a smart lightbulb that was installed in the same room as the air-gapped PC, and made it pulsate in a controlled manner that relayed commands to the scanner, and to the attached air-gapped PC.

The producers of this week's new Ghost in the Shell film must really believe nobody has seen its source material. That's the only way to enjoy this live-action reboot: oblivious to 1995's original anime film or its manga comic-book precursor.

Every bit of social commentary and science-fiction mystique that made the Japanese film and books so stunning has been wrung dry. Respect for the viewer goes into the garbage, replaced by an obnoxious, paint-by-numbers plot of good versus evil.

But this live-action reboot doesn't just miss the subtle interactions, buried beneath the basic-plot surface, that made the original such a remarkable film. It also nukes the entire plot structure.

Annoying sites that open hard-to-eradicate “Do you want to leave this site? Are you sure?” dialogues are in Chrome's cross-hairs: the Chrome team has decided JavaScript dialogues offer too much scope for abuse, and is laying out a roadmap to get rid of them.

While workers have traditionally looked to unions to address their grievances, a new generation is trusting in the power of petitions to force changes.

Employee petitions are now so popular there’s a website, coworker.org, devoted to hosting them.

Interns at one (unnamed) company described in a blog about being fired en masse after signing a petition asking for a more relaxed dress code.

Companies have become more sophisticated about shutting down unions, and only 6.4% of US private-sector workers are organized. Petitions only work if employers are willing to entertain them, but for many employees, they’re the only way to be heard.

The major goal is to create a new rendering engine that's able to exploit the full power of today's hardware, which is a kind of marketing speak for "we're going to isolate every process and offload more rendering tasks to the GPU".

But since it seems there's just no way to stop the web-slowing world of crappy blogging tools, perhaps the browser can figure out a way around this by rethinking the rendering process.