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California Cracks Down on 'Predatory' Early Cancellation Fees

2 weeks 6 days ago
California has enacted new legislation that aims to limit companies from charging consumers "exorbitant" fees to cancel fixed-term contracts. From a report: Assembly Bill 483 was signed into law by California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday, placing transparency requirements and fee limits on early terminations for installment contracts -- plans that allow consumers to make recurring payments for goods and services over a specified duration. This includes services that lure consumers into signing annual contracts by allowing them to pay in installments that appear similar to rolling monthly subscriptions, but with hefty cancellation fees for not locking in for the full year. The bill bans companies from hiding early termination fee disclosures within fine print or obscured hyperlinks, and limits the total fee amount to a maximum of 30 percent of the total contract cost. The goal is to make it easier for Californians to take these fees into account when comparing between services, and lessen the financial burden if they need to end their contract early.

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Oracle First In Line For AMD “Altair” MI450 GPUs, “Helios” Racks

2 weeks 6 days ago

It is Oracle OpenWorld CloudWorld AI World this week, so we expect a lot of AI infrastructure announcements from Big Red, with AI being the biggest new workload to hit the enterprise in decades. …

Oracle First In Line For AMD “Altair” MI450 GPUs, “Helios” Racks was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

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Satellites Are Leaking the World's Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data

2 weeks 6 days ago
Researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Maryland have found that roughly half of geostationary satellite signals transmit sensitive data without encryption. The team spent three years using an $800 satellite receiver on a university rooftop in San Diego to intercept communications from satellites visible from their location. They collected phone calls and text messages from more than 2,700 T-Mobile users in just nine hours of recording. The researchers also obtained data from airline passengers using in-flight Wi-Fi, communications from electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms, and US and Mexican military communications that revealed personnel locations and equipment details. The exposed data resulted from telecommunications companies using satellites to relay signals from remote cell towers to their core networks. The researchers examined only about 15% of global satellite transponder communications and presented their findings at an Association for Computing Machinery conference in Taiwan this week. Most companies warned by the researchers have encrypted their satellite transmissions, but some US critical infrastructure owners have not yet added encryption.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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