Ferrari is recalling almost every car it has sold since 2005, Google suffered an outage, and Meta’s new chatbot is already spewing false statements.
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That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now, welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Wednesday, August 10, and I’m your host, Tom Li.
Ferrari is currently recalling almost every car it has sold since 2005. The reason for the recall is the cap of the brake fluid reservoir. Venting can fail to happen, causing a vacuum to build up, resulting in potential brake fluid leaks. Ars Technica reports that the fix is quite simple and just involves a new brake fluid reservoir cap, and a software patch that lets a driver know if their brake fluid reservoir is running low. Ferrari said that only about 1 per cent of cars are actually affected by this issue, but to be cautious, it is replacing them all. This recall includes about 23,555 cars within the U.S. Owners should be notified by the end of September by Ferrari about when to bring their cars in to be fixed.
Source: Ars Technica
Google experienced some issues early Tuesday morning and was briefly down with users in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Singapore and elsewhere reporting problems with the search engine. DownDetector.com confirmed that the website was “having problems.” The company issued an apology shortly after, stating that the issue affected services like Gmail and Maps. Over 40,000 users in the U.S. reported that Google wasn’t working.
Source: CNBC
Meta’s new BlenderBot 3 AI chatbot was released in the U.S. last Friday. However, after being out for less than a week, it’s already learned enough from online interactions to make a few false statements. An article from Mashable has reported that some of these interactions include claims that Donald Trump won the 2020 U.S. presidential election and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. This is vaguely reminiscent of Microsoft Tay released six years ago. In 2016, the Microsoft chatbot was taken offline just two days after release because it started praising Adolf Hitler.
Source: Mashable
Burger King accidentally emailed thousands of customers a blank order email receipt. The blank emails began popping up after midnight on Tuesday. Customers turned to Twitter to discuss what these emails may mean, with some even receiving two Burger King emails. The order emails were completely blank and were sent from Burger King’s main promotional marketing email address. It is still unknown what caused the blank emails. Reports from The Verge reveal that there’s no clear indication that Burger King has been breached. According to the article, many people who received an email don’t even remember creating a Burger King account.
Source: The Verge
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