The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has taken legal action against software giant Adobe and two of its top executives for allegedly deceiving consumers about the actual costs of its popular subscription services and deliberately obstructing cancellations. In a federal court complaint filed by the Department of Justice at the FTC's request, the commission accuses Adobe of obscuring hefty early termination fees and making it excessively difficult for customers to cancel their subscriptions. The complaint alleges that when signing up for subscriptions on Adobe's website, the company steers consumers toward the "annual paid monthly" option, pre-selecting it as the default while burying details about the 50% early termination fee for canceling within the first year. Customers have lodged numerous complaints, saying they were unaware the plan committed them for a full year.

According to the FTC, even when customers did attempt to cancel, Adobe forced them to navigate a bureaucratic maze of web pages, unhelpful customer service reps, dropped calls, and transfers. Some customers who thought they had successfully canceled continued to be charged. Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, noted, "Adobe trapped customers into year-long subscriptions through hidden early termination fees and numerous cancellation hurdles." The complaint charges that these deceptive "dark patterns" violate the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act. It names Adobe's President of Digital Media, David Wadhwani, and Vice President Maninder Sawhney as co-defendants for their oversight roles in these shady business practices.

Our favorite thing about Zau might surprise you. Or, it might be the first thing you noticed. In a recent Discord Q+A (viewable below), ZAU Creative Director Abubakar Salim throws the deceptively simple question to Lead Artist Ackeem Durrant and Lead Designer Zi Peters: what's your favorite thing about our main character? Since our reveal in December, we've been completely floored by how many of you took the leap to pre-order ZAU. We worked hard to give the game a fair price—and a 10% discount to everyone who buys before launch day - plus carefully crafted in-game content that feels special while not detracting from our central vision for the game. We're incredibly grateful for your support. Thank you.

Wield the dance of the shaman. Reclaim your father's spirit
A grieving boy begins to read a Bantu tale written by his late father. Adventure into the beautiful and treacherous lands of Kenzera as Zau, a young shaman who bargains with the God of death to bring his Baba back from darkness. With your cosmic powers and untried courage, you advance into unknown mythological lands. Once bursting with life, Kenzera is now rife with lost ancestral spirits. As Zau advances toward his goal, 3 mighty beings lie in wait, fearsome in their strength yet somehow strangely familiar. Will you embrace the dance of the shaman?

Microsoft has been hit by the first successful lawsuit over its forced Windows 10 upgrade. The first of possibly many, Teri Goldstein from California, successfully sued Microsoft for $10,000 in damages and legal fees over its deceptively designed Windows 10 upgrade software, which automatically downloaded and upgraded her computer's Windows 7 installation almost without the consent of the user. She convinced the court that the upgrade made her computer slower, and that she lost business due to the upgrade process and the slowing down of her computer. Microsoft dropped its appeal and paid up.

Microsoft is heavily criticized for the way it distributes its free Windows 10 upgrade for PCs with Windows 7 and Windows 8. What started out as an optional upgrade, quickly evolved into an almost unavoidable upgrade that forces itself upon the users, through clever design of the upgrade software's user interface. Microsoft recently changed Windows 10 upgrade into a "recommended update" for Windows 7/8, making users with auto-install for recommended updates discover that their machines have been upgraded almost without their consent. Could this be the first of many successful lawsuits over this issue at least in a precedent-driven American civil justice system?

MSI today issued its first official statement on our investigation which found that the company had a pattern of sending reviewers samples with higher clock-speeds out-of-the-box, than what retail cards offer out-of-the-box, by means of enabling a higher software overclock profile by default, which consumers otherwise had to enable using the MSI Gaming app. We had argued that this practice was deceptive and the review samples weren't 100% representative of retail cards.

The company today released corrective BIOS updates for at least two Gaming series graphics cards, the MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X, and the GTX 1070 Gaming X, which enable the "OC mode" clock-speed profile by default. These BIOS updates enable you to have "OC mode" clock speeds without you having to install the MSI Gaming app to enable them. The company, however, did not mention whether the cards that are currently under production will ship with "OC mode" out of the box, going forward. Without that assurance, this is a farcical workaround which will appease only those bold and skilled enough to update graphics card BIOSes, and not corrective action.

Cashing in on anger against the likes of MSI and ASUS for sending out graphics card review samples with higher out-of-the-box clock speeds than retail cards, EVGA put out a press release, stating that it never indulges in such deceptive practices as putting up "fake" reviews, or sending out cards with "tweaked clock-speeds" to reviewers, adding that with EVGA, "what you see is what you get."

Last week, we unearthed a disturbing pattern of MSI and ASUS sending out graphics card review samples with higher clock speeds out-of-the-box than what consumers get in their retail cards, out-of-the-box. Till date, we have not received any follow-up statements on the matter from either company.

We haven't heard the last of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 970 memory allocation controversy, not by a long shot. Owners of the card, after having compiled technical information and details over weeks, filed a class-action lawsuit in a US Court (District Court for the Northern District of California). The lawsuit, titled "Andrew Ostrowsky (and others in similar situation) vs. NVIDIA Corporation and GIGABYTE Global Business Corporation," accuses the defendants of unfair, unlawful, and deceptive business practices, in three separate charges, and misleading advertising, demanding for Jury Trial.

The lawsuit goes on to read that the amount in controversy exceeds US $5 million, and encompasses over 100 Class members, meeting the minimal diversity clause, with the plantiff and numerous Class members being citizens of different states than the defendants. The lawsuit accuses the defendants of misleading buyers of the GeForce GTX 970 graphics cards with memory amount (being 3.5 GB with a 0.5 GB "spillover," and not the advertised 4 GB), ROP count being 56 and not 64 (as communicated to the media at launch, and to buyers through them); and L2 cache amount being 1.75 MB and not 2 MB. If you are eligible to be a Class member, find details of the law firms involved in the lawsuit document.

Three days ago, we brought you news of how researchers have made proof-of-concept attacks on HP printers by reprogramming their firmware. Among other things, these attacks could deliberately cause the fuser in a printer to overheat and singe the paper, until shut down by a built-in unoverridable thermal switch, preventing a fire. Now, in light of this, a lawsuit has been filed by David Goldblatt of New York, seeking damages for fraudulent and deceptive business practices and is looking for class action status: "As a result of HP's failure to require the use of digital signatures to authenticate software upgrades, hackers are able to reprogram the HP Printers' software with malicious software without detection," the suit says. "Once the HP printers' software is maliciously reprogrammed, the HP printers can be remotely controlled by computer hackers over the Internet, who can then steal personal information, attack otherwise secure networks, and even cause physical damage to the HP printers, themselves." Note that HP has used digital signatures since 2009 to authenticate the firmware updates, helping to mitigate this potential problem in recent models.

Despite this though, HP still intends to patch the firmware to eliminate threats from this hack, which exploits bugs in the firmware. As these attacks have only actually been demonstrated in the lab and no actual losses have been incurred by Goldblatt, it makes one wonder if he is just using the prevailing American "victim culture" to try and make a quick buck off HP. HP are the top printer brand, mainly because their products are excellent, performing well and lasting a long time, plus other companies' printers and embedded devices have the same problems, so it seems unlikely that he would really not have bought HP printers.