Quiz
Which “expert” recommends eating a stone a day, smoking during pregnancy and considers it safe to stare at the sun for 45 minutes?
Answer
These are, as you might have guessed, some crazy answers provided by AI Overviews, Google’s new search engine using generative artificial intelligence. Faced with the avalanche of absurd examples appearing on the web, Google claims to have “acted quickly” to correct its robot.
6 million Apple
PHOTO ADEK BERRY, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
The Superior Court of Quebec approved a $6 million settlement as part of a class action against Apple regarding its AppleCare program.
Have you purchased an AppleCare warranty in an Apple Store since December 2015 and believe you have not been sufficiently informed of the “legal warranty” applicable in Quebec? You could receive up to 50% of the amount paid for AppleCare, $25 minimum, according to an agreement of 6 million as part of a class action approved by the Superior Court on March 19, and for which the period of claim began on May 24. According to the agreement, 30% of the total amount, or 1.8 million, will be paid in fees to the lawyers of the firms LPC Avocats and Renno Vathilakis.
Submit a claim in the Badaoui v. case. Apple Canada
Gift Card Fraud
PHOTO PATRICK T. FALLON, BLOOMBERG
A large international scheme led by a Moroccan group, Storm-0539, also called Atlas Lion, specializes in fraud by issuing fake gift cards.
Back to back in May, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Microsoft sounded the alarm about fraud targeting an unexpected area: gift cards. It would be a vast international system led by a Moroccan group, Storm-0539, also called Atlas Lion, whose activity increased by 30% between last March and April according to Microsoft. Hackers trap employees of gift card companies and register with cloud services as nonprofits.
Check out the Microsoft report “Into the Lion’s Den”
ICQ disappears
SCREENSHOT
After 28 years of existence, the venerable online messaging service ICQ will be closed on June 26, its owner announced to ICQ.com.
Many Internet users were unaware of it, but one of the pioneers of online messaging, ICQ, very popular in the early 2000s, still exists. Not for long, according to a terse message published last Friday at ICQ.com which announces that the service will be abolished on June 26. Launched in 1996 by an Israeli firm, ICQ (“I’m looking for you”, in French) was bought for US 400 million in 1998 by AOL, then by the Russian owner of the social network VK in 2010. ICQ has been surviving since April 2023, date of the last update of its software, while its two mobile versions have disappeared.
Confidential bottle of wine
PHOTO ANDRES LARROVERE, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
It took three months for someone to come across the paragraph hidden in the privacy policy of British non-profit Tax Policy Associates offering a bottle of wine.
The British non-profit Tax Policy Associates wanted to demonstrate through the absurd that no one reads privacy policies. It’s done. Last February, Tax Policy Associates slipped a small paragraph into the conditions of use of its site offering a bottle of wine to anyone who found it. On May 9, three months later, the founder of the organization, Dan Neidle, announced on X that an Internet user had finally come forward. It was “kind of cheating,” he said, since he was only reading the privacy policy to use it as inspiration for his own site.
Read Dan Neidle’s tweet