Remember back when 1984 wasn’t supposed to be like 1984? Back in July Amazon clandestinely deleted copies of George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and other titles from customers’ Kindles because it turns out the editions were not authorized by the works’ copyright holders. Customers immediately cried foul, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos promptly apologized for the decision, characterizing it as “stupid” and “thoughtless,” and issued refunds to buyers. Now, Amazon has agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a class action lawsuit over the deletions, and Amazon has—mostly—promised not to delete books from users’ Kindle readers.
The class-action lawsuit sought unspecified damages for each buyer impacted by the deletions and an order barring Amazon from deleting material from Kindles altogether. In the settlement agreement, Amazon agrees it will only delete materials from customers’ Kindles if ordered to do so by a regulatory or judicial order, or if deleting content is necessary to protect customers from viruses or other malware embedded in content. Amazon will also be able to delete ebooks of a customer wants a refund, or if the customer never pays for the ebook.
The settlement still needs to be approved by the judge handling the case, but assuming it goes through, it moves purchased ebooks closer to the realm of physical books, rather than merely content licensed through copyright holders and distributors, who can in theory modify the terms of the license at any time.
The Chicago law firm handling the case says it plans to donate its portion of the $150,000 settlement to a charity.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.