Business, Financial & Legal - Page 78

An American man has made a strange filing in an Iowa court, asking his new ex-wife and attorney to meet him on the field of battle.

The Kansas man is 40-year-old David Ostrom, who says that his now ex-wife, Bridgette Ostrom, has "destroyed (him) legally". So in response to being "destroyed legally", Ostrom has asked the court to grant him 'trial by combat' and to give him twelve weeks to prepare his weapons for battle. Ostrom wants to forge his own kata and wakizashi swords for the trial. According to the Des Moines Register, the court states, "To this day, trial by combat has never been explicitly banned or restricted as a right in these United States".

Ostrom's main target in this trial by combat is not his ex-wife but instead her attorney, Matthew Hudson. Ostrom says, "I think I've met Mr. Hudson's absurdity with my own absurdity." Ostrom even suggested to his ex-wife to choose Hudson as her "champion". In response to the trial by combat request, Hudson has filed a motion to suspend Ostrom's visitation rights to his children and has asked to court to enforce a psychological evaluation on Ostrom.

A man from the United Kingdom has been caught stealing a ridiculous amount of Harry Potter merchandise, which he was then selling on eBay.

The man, 35-year old Adam Hill, who is now a former Warner Bros. employee, has been caught stealing Harry Potter merchandise from his work. Throughout 2017 and 2018, Hill managed to steal $48,000 USD worth of Harry Potter merchandise that included items such as wands, badges, keyrings and more. Hill was taking these items from his workplace and selling them from his personal eBay account.

Hill got caught when his colleagues noticed a bunch of Harry Potter merch arriving and disappearing from under his desk at work. Crown Prosecution Service's Jan Muller, said: "In a significant breach of trust, Adam Hill had the audacity to steal thousands of pounds of merchandise from Warner Bros in plain sight of his work colleagues; but they reported him after growing suspicious of the items constantly piling up under his desk". Hill has been sentenced to 14 months in prison suspended for 18 months and 250 hours of unpaid labor.

Tesla goes from strength to strength hitting the New Year, with the electric vehicle maker now worth more than any American vehicle manufacturer at any point ever -- a milestone that topples even Ford Motor Company's all-time high in 1999.

Back at Tesla's IPO in 2010, you would've purchased a single share of $TSLA for $17 but now you're looking at an insane $470 per share. Tesla has continued to impress through the years, with 2019 being one of their best yet on strong Model 3, Model S, and Model X sales as well as the introduction of their exciting new Cybertruck.

Tesla has also got its new Gigafactory operational in Shanghai, China -- with Elon Musk flying into the country and even dancing for the crowd on stage. Tesla will be building its new Model Y electric vehicle in Shanghai at its new Gigafactory 3, with the company also teasing an all-new "built for China" model that will be announced in the future.

Tesla delivered 367,500 vehicles in 2019 which marks a huge increase for the electric vehicle maker, as that is more than double the cars it shipped in the previous two years, combined.

Even just in Q4 2019, Tesla broke its own records for making close to 105,000 vehicles and delivering 112,000 vehicles. Most of this is from the super-popular Model 3 sedan, with 92,500 Model 3s delivered -- a 46% increase of Q4 2018, while delivering 19,450 Model S and Model X electric vehicles.

Tesla is bringing more Gigafactory locations online, with its recent Shanghai-based Gigafactory 3 churning out its Model 3 vehicles now. Tesla says that its new Gigafactory 3 facility has already made 1000 cars ready for consumers, and has a production run-rate of making more than 3000 cars per week (this excludes local battery pack production).

Two Amazon employee's who spoke out against the companies current environmental policies say Amazon heavily warned them that they could be fired if they continued speaking out.

The two employee's Maren Costa and Jamie Kowalski spoke to The Washington Post about how they believe that Amazon is currently attributing to climate change by still supporting the use of oil and gas with its cloud computing business. Costa and Kowalski said that they were called into official Amazon human resources meetings where they were accused of violating the company's explicit external communications policy.

Costa, in particular, said that an Amazon lawyer sent her an email that said if future violations were detected it could "result in formal corrective action, up to and including termination of your employment with Amazon." Engadget reached out to Amazon for a statement and received the following: "Our policy regarding external communications is not new and we believe is similar to other large companies."

AMD has gone from stride to stride in the last few years, and all of that success has been towards this very moment -- AMD stock price just reached a new peak of $49.10.

The last time that AMD stock was this high was back on June 21, 2000 during the time of the 1GHz race with Intel. Things went down from there, but back up into the $35-$40 range in 2005-2006, when AMD was kicking some ass with its Opteron processors. But then things went really far south until Lisa Su took over as CEO in 2014 and turned things around, big time.

AMD now has some kick ass products all over the place, between the new Zen 2-based CPUs on 7nm with Ryzen 3000, Ryzen Threadripper 3000, and EPYC processors -- not to forget the new 7nm-based Navi-powered Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5500 series graphics cards. AMD is also powering the next-gen Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 consoles with a semi-custom SoC on the 7nm node, meaning the company is literally firing on all cylinders right now in all the right ways.

TikTok continues to find itself in trouble with the US Navy first banning the use of the Chinese social media app on government-issued devices, and now the US Army is following in the same footsteps.

US Army spokesperson Lt. Col. Robin Ochoa spoke with Military.com saying that TikTok was "considered a cyber threat". The US Defense Department warned employees back in mid-December 2019 to delete TikTok to "circumvent any exposure of personal information".

The major issue here is that US Army employees can't use TikTok on their government-issued smartphones, but nothing is stopping them (yet) from using TikTok on their personal devices. The US Army is continuing to warn soldiers against strange texts and other potentially damaging messages so that personal (and possibly critical) data isn't exposed.

Many Apple users that love their iPhone also love their Apple Watch to go alongside it. One of the main features of the Apple Watch is its heartbeat monitoring, and that the Watch can measure a wearer's irregular heartbeat, an amazing feature for fitness users.

Unfortunately, Apple seemed to have stepped in a bit of trouble when it comes to the Apple Watch's heartbeat monitor, as a New York doctor has claimed the company has ripped off his patented invention. Dr. Joseph Wiesel is suing Apple over allegations that the Watch is using his patented invention that covered "pioneering steps" in atrial fibrillation.

According to Wiesel, his invention allowed for the monitoring of "irregular pulse rhythms from a succession of time intervals." Wiesel also said that he contacted Apple back in 2017 in regard to the patent, giving them sufficient information. He is now going forward with the lawsuit and is asking the court to make Apple pay him royalties and to block the company from adding his invention to their product without his permission.

While the reviews for The Witcher TV show are accurately mixed, it can't be debated that the new TV show has caused a spike in overall Witcher IP attention.

The TV show has had some dividing opinions since its release, with critics giving it some tough love, but the majority of the people that watched it rating it well. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 93% and IMDB has settled on 8.7/10, and both scores reflect that most people who watched the show at least enjoyed it more than average.

Since the release of the TV show, a portion of people wanted more of The Witcher universe and have since sought out new content to consume. We can see this primarily in Amazon's Author Rank chart as The Witcher creator, Andrzej Sapkowski, is placed at #1. All of CD Projekt Reds games are also getting massive attention, the spikes in players have basically revived the series once again. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in particular.

Spotify, the largest music streaming platform in the world, has said that it will stop running political ads in 2020.

Spotify spoke to Ad Age about its new approach to political ads on its platform, and the company said that for the time being, they would be putting a "pause" on political advertising. This "pause" will affect the free ad-supported version of Spotify and any original podcasts it makes.

This change will also only apply for the US as this is the only country that is currently running political ads. Third-party users will still be able to implement political ads into their content, just as long as they fall into line with Spotify's content policy.

Tesla Motors shareholders will be cheering during the Christmas period, with Tesla stock breaching $420 per share on Monday -- and in perfect faction, Tesla and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk made a weed joke.

Musk is no stranger to blazing up controversy after he smoked weed live on the Joe Rogan show and landed in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But now that Tesla stock was smoking hot at $420, Musk tweeted out: "Whoa ... the stock is so high lol".

Back in August 2018, Musk found himself stuck in residue over a tweet that saw the Tesla CEO joking that he was "considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured". An obvious weed joke, but something the SEC didn't take lightly -- accusing him of misleading Tesla investors.

Lyft has found itself in quite the bad position just before the holidays, with the ride-sharing giant seeing its algorithm flagging names and banning them, or going as far as asking them to change their name.

The algorithm itself is flagging names like "Dick", "Finger", "Cummings" and others as inappropriate and not meeting Lyft's "community guidelines". One Lyft customer, Michael Finger, was emailed by Lyft with the email stating the company "noticed the name on your Lyft account doesn't align with our Community Guidelines". Crazy.

Another was Kevin Cocks, who received a push notification with the same warning and asked him to "update" his name by 12/21 in order to continue using Lyft. Lyft's mysterious algorithm is also picking up non-English names with a user named Bubunyo, where he received the same email about the Community Guidelines -- he said "if you are expecting me to use an English name, it won't happen cos I'm not English. You might as well ban me".

It seems that long time the British online technology publication, TheInquirer.net, is shutting down. The announcement has come as a shock to many, including the staff who were informed only last week of the decision.

TheInquirer.net was founded by Mike Magee after his departure from The Register in 2001. In 2006, the website was acquired by VNU from Mike Magee. Currently TheInquirer.net is owned by Incisive Media, which has made the decision to shut down the website. Incisive Media made the decision due to a recent decline in digital advertising, along with a change of focus for their business.

During the lifetime of the TheInquirer.net, many major stories broke on the site, including the Sony laptop battery scandal, including coverage of CPUs, and GPUs many fiscal quarters before their release to market. Several journalists and analysts also got their start at, or worked for TheInquirer at one point or another including Charlie Demerjian (SemiAccurate), Fuad Abazovic (Fudzilla, ACA), and Rob Squires (TweakTown).

We all know there will be millions of families across the world spilling into arguments over the holiday and Christmas period, when it comes to money, politics, TV and movies, gaming, technology, and virtually everything in between.

But don't worry, Amazon is here to the rescue with its virtual assistant receiving a new upgrade that will settle family disputes. Amazon Alexa's new feature is called a "distraction technique" and will be voice activated by saying "Alexa, change the subject!" The perfect distraction, right?

Amazon researched into the subject, finding that at 6:30PM on Christmas Day is the peak time for when family arguments begin. Once it has been activated with "Alexa, change the subject", the Amazon Alexa will distraction feature by asking other triggering questions like "Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?" An easier question posed by the newly-powered Alexa is "What would your superpower be and why?"

A man is facing 12 years imprisonment for possessing and manufacturing more than $1.4 million counterfeit goods.

Ever thought about ripping off Nintendo? Maybe this story will halt your nefarious curiosity. According to the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, the owner of an El Monte toy import business has been charged with manufacturing and possessing more than $1.4 million dollars worth of counterfeit goods. Some of the counterfeit goods that were made and sold were rip off Nintendo products mainly aimed at the Super Mario and Pokemon franchises.

The man who is facing the charges is named Wan Piao and is currently facing seven felony counts of counterfeit offenses and an allegation of "taking more than $500,000 through fraud and embezzlement". Piao has also been accused of manufacturing and possessing more than 500,000 counterfeit items, and he could face up to 12 years custody. Other counterfeit brands that were found in his possession are: Hello Kitty, Angry Birds, Lego Ninjago, JanSport, and Shopkins.

Twitch is being slammed by a $3 billion lawsuit by the Rambler Group, Russia's third-largest ISP, over illegal streams of Premiere League soccer matches.

Rambler Group claims that Twitch breached their exclusive broadcasting rights of the game, and is now suing the Amazon-owned streaming giant for $3 billion. Twitch reportedly breached Rambler Group's exclusive streaming rights over 36,000 times in the final months of 2019, with the Russian ISP wanting to ban Twitch across the country.

Julianna Tabastaeva, a lawyer for Twitch, explained: "(Twitch) only provides users with access to the platform and is unable to change the content posted by users, or track possible violations". She added that Twitch took "all necessary measures to eliminate the violations, despite not receiving any official notification from Rambler".

Corsair has just added another company to its portfolio, with the gaming giant acquiring game controller company Scuf Gaming. The acquisition of Scuf Gaming will take place over the next month.

Andy Paul, founder and CEO of Corsair said: "We are thrilled to greatly expand our portfolio of industry-leading peripherals and enter the gaming controller space to help gamers play at their best. Scuf leads the market for performance controllers and are a key ingredient to the success of countless esports professionals".

Scuf will remain a separate brand to Corsair post-acquisition, continuing to run things from their Atlanta-based HQ. Elgato was acquired by Corsair in 2018 and did the same thing, letting Elgato go about their business in their own way.

The Pirate Bay is back in the headlines with its new streaming service 'BayStream' picked up by TorrentFreak, where pretty much everything is available with a YouTube-style UI.

BayStream has some of the largest and most popular TV shows and movies available, including Disney+ exclusives like The Mandalorian and even DC's latest and $1 billion club member Joker. If the content is readily available, then the stream will be fine -- but if you're trying to stream obscure TV shows and movies then you might run into some troubles.

The new streaming service supports files up to 20GB, with TorrentFreak reporting there is "no mention of premium accounts or affiliate programs". But who is operating BayStream? The Pirate Bay? It doesn't seem so, as there is a "Kopimi" logo in the bottom which seems to show us that someone out there is supporting the pirate movement.

When thinking about how much a domain name would be worth, probably the big boys like www.Google.com or www.Facebook.com come to mind. But what about the worth to a single person? Immeasurable.

An example of this is Rosi Lorathio Adams, who was just sentenced to 14 years in prison for attempting to steal the domain doitforstate.com from its owner. Adams runs a small social media empire called State Snaps that the US Department of Justice describes as "images and videos of young adults engaged in crude behavior, drunkenness, and nudity". State Snap followers eventually coined the term "Do it for State", which led to State Snaps' owner wanting the domain.

The owners' name was not disclosed, but it's known that Adams contacted the owner of the domain back in 2015 and asked if he could purchase it. The owner did not want to sell him the domain and declined Adams for another two years. Then in June of 2017, Adam's got his cousin Sherman Hopkins Jr to break into the owners' house and force him into giving him ownership of the domain name.

Samsung is in hot water with 8 employees found guilty of destroying evidence in a fraud case, something that is being linked to $3.9 billion in accounting fraud -- sending multiple people to jail.

The Seoul Central District Court ordered 3 executives from Samsung Electronics up to 2 years of jail according to state news agency Yonhap, picked up by the Financial Times. There were other employees scooped up in the mix from 2 other Samsung affiliates: Samsung BioLogics, a drug maker, and its subsidiary Samsung Bioepis.

A raid took place at a Samsung BioLogics factory, where prosecutors found a bunch of laptops and servers that were hidden underneath a meeting room floor. In October, prosecutors pressed the case saying these Samsung employees participated in the "biggest crime of evidence destruction in the history of South Korea".