Grocery Outlet Pins Profit, Sales Bump On ‘treasure-hunt’ Feel

Enlarge (credit: Apu Gomes / Stringer | Getty Images News) After the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary released a report accusing the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) of colluding with companies to censor conservative voices online, Elon Musk chimed in. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Musk wrote that X "has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators" behind an advertiser boycott on his platform. "Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution," Musk wrote, leading several X users to suggest that Musk wants it to be illegal for brands to refuse to advertise on X. Among other allegations, Congress' report claimed that GARM—which is part of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), whose members "represent roughly 90 percent of global advertising spend, or almost one trillion dollars annually"—directed advertisers to boycott Twitter shortly after Musk took over the platform.

Enlarge / Professional writers' names were attached to AI content they had nothing to do with. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Christina Warren) In one of the most egregiously unethical uses of AI we've seen, a web advertising company has re-created some defunct, classic tech blogs like The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and iLounge by mimicking the bylines of the websites' former writers and publishing AI-generated content under their names. The Verge reported on the fiasco in detail, including speaking to Christina Warren, a former writer for TUAW who now works at GitHub.

Tesla Inc. is postponing its planned robotaxi unveiling to October to allow teams working on the project more time to build additional prototypes, according to people familiar with the decision. The roughly two-month delay has been communicated internally, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information hadn’t been publicly announced.

Enlarge More than 1.5 million email servers are vulnerable to attacks that can deliver executable attachments to user accounts, security researchers said. The servers run versions of the Exim mail transfer agent that are vulnerable to a critical vulnerability that came to light 10 days ago. Tracked as CVE-2024-39929 and carrying a severity rating of 9.1 out of 10, the vulnerability makes it trivial for threat actors to bypass protections that normally prevent the sending of attachments that install apps or execute code.

Enlarge (credit: C. Marsicano) Gaiasia jennyae, a newly discovered freshwater apex predator with a body length reaching 4.5 meters, lurked in the swamps and lakes around 280 million years ago. Its wide, flattened head had powerful jaws full of huge fangs, ready to capture any prey unlucky enough to swim past. The problem is, to the best of our knowledge, it shouldn’t have been that large, should have been extinct tens of millions of years before the time it apparently lived, and shouldn’t have been found in northern Namibia.

Enlarge / A Redbox movie rental kiosk stands outside a CVS store. (credit: Getty) Since 2004, red DVD rental kiosks posted near entrances of grocery stores and the like tempted shoppers with movie (and until 2019, video game) disc rentals. But the last 24,000 of Redbox's kiosks are going away, as Redbox's parent company moved to chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy this week.