feed on feeds - 2019/10/26 - items 0 to 15

Ars Technica quotes the CEO of a fraudulent-review tracking company who says that fake reviews online have now reached 'epidemic proportions". But two U.S. regulators say that's just the beginning: Commissioners Rohit Chopra and Rebecca Slaughter of the Federal Trade Commission say it's about to get a lot worse, and they know who to blame: their own agency. The FTC this week brought its first case against a company for enlisting its employees in a coordinated fake-review campaign to boost sales. Chopra and Slaughter say the decision reached by their fellow commissioners could usher in even more review fraud. The settlement did not require the company to admit fault, notify customers of the fraud, or turn over any ill-gotten gains. "Dishonest firms may come to conclude that posting fake reviews is a viable strategy, given the proposed outcome here," Chopra said in a statement dissenting from the FTC's decision, joined by Slaughter. "Honest firms, who are the biggest victims of this fraud, may be wondering if they are losing out by following the law. Consumers may come to lack confidence that reviews are truthful...." [T]he FTC voted 3â"2 to allow Sunday Riley to settle the charges by agreeing not to post future fake reviews, without admitting fault. Chopra and Slaughter say the settlement will ultimately do more harm than good and that it tells companies there's little risk in engaging in online review fraud; even if regulators find the fake reviews, the company won't face a meaningful punishment, the dissenters say. FTC staffers told Ars Technica that it's extraordinarily rare for the FTC to get a fake-review case "as straightforward, prosecutable, and evidence-rich" as this one. The FTC's investigation began when an inside whistle-blower shared a company email on Reddit in which employees "were given step-by-step directions on how to post fake reviews" -- and on how to avoid detection.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today the Ocean Cleanup unveiled its new "Interceptor" solar-powered robot to collect waste plastic from rivers before it can enter the ocean, Fast Company reports: The system was designed by the nonprofit The Ocean Cleanup, which spent the past four years secretly developing and testing the technology while it continued to work on its main project -- a device that can capture plastic trash once it's already in the ocean. The nonprofit unveiled the Interceptor at an event in Rotterdam today. The ocean's plastic trash problem often starts in rivers: Every year, as much as 2.4 million metric tons of plastic flows from rivers to the sea, the nonprofit estimates. Most of that trash comes from rivers in Asia, in cities where recycling infrastructure is often inadequate. Around 1% of the world's rivers, or 1,000 rivers in total, are responsible for the majority of the trash entering the ocean... The new technology is designed to anchor to a riverbed, out of the path of passing boats. Like the system that the nonprofit designed for the ocean, which uses a large barrier that blocks part of the river to collect plastic as it floats by, the Interceptor has a floating barrier that directs trash into the system. The device is positioned where the greatest amount of plastic flows, and another device can be placed farther down the river to catch trash that might escape the first Interceptor. A conveyor belt pulls the trash out of the water, and an autonomous system distributes it into dumpsters on a separate barge, sending an alert to local operators when the system is full and ready to be taken to a recycler. The system runs on solar power. In a typical day, it might extract as much as 50,000 kilograms of trash; depending on the currents, tides, and how much plastic is in a given river, The Ocean Cleanup estimates it could theoretically collect as much as 100,000 kilograms [220,462 pounds]... Since it runs autonomously, it needs little human interaction and also doesn't require humans to sort through potentially dangerous debris collected from the water. It's designed to be mass-produced. The nonprofit aims to deploy it into all of the most polluting rivers in the next five years... "We project that we can remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040, and to truly rid the world's oceans of plastic we must do two things: cleanup legacy plastic and stop it from entering the ocean," they wrote in a press release. "Both are necessary to achieve this mission..."