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☀️ Tesla discontinues its Solar Roof
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- Tesla has quietly killed its Solar Roof, the roughly decade-old product that turned shingles and tiles into solar panels, removing all mentions from its website and redirecting the old pages to a generic solar landing page.
- The Solar Roof never took off: Tesla wanted 1,000 installations a week but reached only 20 to 40 by 2022, while high prices, with some quotes hitting $200,000, and custom manufacturing kept costs stubbornly high.
- Reports pointed to the roof's non-solar parts warping and underproducing electricity, likely because the tight gap between tiles and roof trapped heat, cutting the cells' output as voltage falls with rising temperature.
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🚗 Uber fined $1B over driver suspensions
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- The Dutch Data Protection Authority fined Uber €825 million ($966 million) for using automated systems to suspend driver accounts without warning drivers or giving them a human to review the decision.
- The August 17 penalty is the second-largest ever issued under Europe's GDPR, behind only a €1.2 billion fine against Meta in 2023, and Uber said it will appeal the decision.
- Uber temporarily suspended drivers suspected of fraud, like inflating fares with detours or accepting rides they never completed, and says only 126 European drivers were deactivated for low customer ratings in 2021.
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📉 Amazon hikes Echo prices up to 60%
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- Amazon has raised prices on several Echo, Kindle, Fire TV, and Eero products, blaming rising memory and storage costs, with some jumps as steep as 60% on its cheaper smart home devices.
- The Echo Dot climbed from $50 to $80, while the Fire TV Stick 4K Max went from $60 to $85 and the 16GB Kindle rose from $110 to $150.
- Amazon confirmed the changes, pointing to "significant increases in memory and storage component costs" across the electronics industry, and said it held off on passing those costs to shoppers for as long as it could.
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🎵 TikTok settles child privacy suit
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- TikTok and its parent company ByteDance agreed to pay $400 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit accusing the app of breaking children's online privacy laws, without admitting any wrongdoing.
- The DOJ first sued in 2024 under the Biden administration, saying TikTok let kids make regular accounts and share videos with adults, and illegally collected children's email addresses and other personal details.
- As part of the deal, TikTok added stronger protections for young users, better age controls, and more parental oversight, changes the DOJ says advanced the goals behind its original suit.
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🤖 Nvidia's coding agent aces ARC-AGI-3 test
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- Nvidia's AVO coding agent completed all 183 levels across the 25 public games in the ARC-AGI-3 test with a perfect score, working through the puzzles without any prior instructions or set goals.
- AVO is a wrapper built around Anthropic's Claude Opus 5, and while the model alone scored just 30 percent on the same public set, the added software layer pushed the result all the way up to 100 percent.
- Nvidia originally made AVO to tune GPU code, then swapped its tools for the ARC-AGI-3 interface, where it cleared the levels in 6,624 actions, about 12 percent fewer than the rival VISTA wrapper needed.
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🚗 US lab probes Chinese lidar security
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- The Idaho National Laboratory, a Department of Energy facility, is examining whether Chinese lidar sensors could create security dangers if they spread across vehicles in the United States, according to two people who spoke to TechCrunch.
- The lab is looking mainly at cybersecurity risks, and possibly clearing Chinese lidar of concerns, with funding from unnamed electric and autonomous vehicle companies; Rivian, GM, Ford, and others said they weren't aware of it.
- The probe comes as lawmakers push bills to ban Chinese lidar over spying fears, while suppliers Hesai and RoboSense have cut sensor prices from as much as $75,000 a decade ago to a few hundred dollars.
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