Tag: faces
Nintendo still faces calls to fix Joy-Con drift
![Nintendo still faces calls to fix Joy-Con drift](https://static.techspot.com/images2/news/ts3_thumbs/2019/09/2019-09-17-ts3_thumbs-8b2.jpg)
British consumer group Which? has called for Nintendo to do more to resolve stick drift which continues to plague the Switch’s Joy-Con controllers. The group’s independent lab results suggest a design flaw affects the joysticks in a significant portion of Switch controllers. This isn’t the first time an investigation uncovered…
Ticketmaster faces antitrust scrutiny in Mexico following Bad Bunny ticket sales fiasco
The head of Profeco, Mexico’s consumer protection watchdog, has promised to sue Ticketmaster following a ticketing snafu in the country’s capital, reports The New York Times. On the weekend of December 9th, Puerto Rican reggaeton star Bad Bunny was scheduled to play two soldout shows in Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca, the largest stadium in Latin America. The Friday night date saw thousands of fans denied entry to the venue after they were told by Estadio Azteca staff the tickets they bought directly from Ticketmaster were fake.
Profeco accused the company of overselling tickets. According to the agency, more than 1,600 ticket holders were denied entry on the first night, and another 110 on the following evening. “Ticketmaster claimed they were counterfeit, but they were all issued by them,” Profeco head Ricardo Sheffield told local news outlets. Ticketmaster has agreed to refund all affected fans the full price of their ticket, plus a 20 percent compensation fee. Profeco is preparing to file a class-action lawsuit against the company. Ticketmaster Mexico could also be fined up to 10 percent of its total sales in 2021. “As we are a fiscal authority, if they don’t want to pay of their own will, we will seize their accounts then, and they will pay because they have to,” Sheffield said.
📍Si compraste boletos para el concierto de #BadBunny el pasado 9 y 10 de diciembre en el #EstadioAzteca, y te negaron el acceso.
Ingresa a 🔗https://t.co/VIrQmLsrL9 y comienza tu proceso de reclamación de reembolso total + bonificación no menor al 20% del precio pagado. pic.twitter.com/hs3TUa3J64
— Profeco (@Profeco) December 15, 2022
In a statement Ticketmaster posted to Twitter this week, the company denied the claim it oversold tickets. It blamed the event on demand for Bad Bunny tickets – saying more than 4.5 million people tried to purchase just 120,000 stubs – and scalpers who sold fake tickets. “On Friday, an unprecedented number of false tickets, not bought through our official channels, were presented at the gates,” the company said, according to an Associated Press translation. “The situation, in addition to confusion among access control personnel, caused temporary interruptions in the ticket reading system, which unfortunately momentarily impeded recognition of legitimate tickets.”
Información importante con respecto al concierto de @sanbenito (#BadBunny) en el @EstadioAzteca 👇 pic.twitter.com/LCmp5L1fvo
— Ticketmaster México (@Ticketmaster_Me) December 12, 2022
In November, Democratic lawmakers, including House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, began calling for the break up of Ticketmaster after the company botched sales of Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets. “Daily reminder that Ticketmaster is a monopoly, its merger with LiveNation should never have been approved, and they need to be reigned in,” Ocasio-Cortez said last month. The US Department of Justice reportedly opened an antitrust investigation into Ticketmaster parent company LiveNation before the Swift fiasco. The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumers recently announced it would hold a hearing on the company’s recent failures.
Iranian student faces death penalty for giving ‘chocolates and hugs’ in protests
Britain faces another day of travel chaos with drivers warned of ‘lethal’ icy roads
Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard faces roadblock as FTC sues to stop it
Atlantic Records faces second lawsuit over its 1980s corporate culture following New York’s Adult Survivors Act
CBI: UK faces decade of lost growth without action
Meta faces lawsuit for harvesting financial data from tax prep websites
A group of anonymous plaintiffs who filed their taxes online in 2020 using H&R Block has sued Meta, accusing the company of violating users’ trust and privacy. If you’ll recall, a recent Markup investigation revealed that H&R Block, along with other popular tax-filing websites like TaxAct and TaxSlayer, have been sending users’ sensitive financial information to Meta through its Pixel tracking tool.
Pixel is a piece of code companies can embed on their websites so they can track visitors’ activities and identify Facebook and Instagram users to target with ads. Apparently, the aforementioned tax prep websites had been transmitting personal information, such as income data, filing statuses, refund amounts and dependents’ tuition grants, to Meta through that code. The tax-filing services had already changed their Pixel settings to stop sending information or had been reevaluating how they used Pixel by the time Markup’s report came out.
In a statement sent to Engadget when the news first came out, Meta said that advertisers are prohibited from sharing personal information and that it uses an automated system that can filter out sensitive content sent through Pixel. The plaintiffs acknowledged in their complaint (PDF, courtesy of The Markup) that Meta does require businesses that use Pixel to “have lawful rights to collect, use and share” user data before providing the company with any information. However, the plaintiffs argue that Meta makes no effort to enforce that rule and instead relies on a “broken honor-system” that has resulted in “repeated, documented violations.”
According to The Markup, the lawsuit is seeking class action status for people who used the tax prep services mentioned in the publication’s report. The services themselves, however, were not named as defendants in the case.
Crypto scammer faces 18 months in prison over $22 million SIM attack
A young man is facing time behind bars for his role in a high-profile crypto scam. Bloombergreports a federal judge has sentenced 25-year-old Nicholas Truglia to 18 months in prison for allegedly taking part in a scheme that stole $22 million in cryptocurrency from blockchain adviser Michael Terpin in 2018. The perpetrators are said to have asked Truglia to convert Triggers tokens stolen from Terpin into Bitcoin after breaching the consultant’s phone.
Truglia has been described as a member of a larger criminal group that relied heavily on SIM swapping, or transferring victim phone numbers to SIM cards under attackers’ control, to rob crypto industry personalities. Terpin accused a New York State teen of leading the group following a private investigation and successfully recouped some of his losses. The teen pointed to Truglia and two other people as accomplices.
Truglia is the only person in the group subject to criminal charges, and is already facing civil penalties near $80 million for his alleged involvement. The relatively light sentence appears to have been influenced by Truglia’s autism, which defense attorney Jeffrey Udell claimed made it harder to understand the real-world consequences of the theft.
This is far from the largest crypto heist in recent memory. State-backed hackers and online gangs have been linked to thefts worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the blockchain. The length of the sentence is unlikely to deter others, for that matter. However, the sentencing theoretically sends a message that aiding crypto thieves is still a serious crime.