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Earlier this year, the Internal Revenue Service announced that its website was used as an avenue for hackers to get their hands on nearly 500,000 stolen Social Security Numbers . While those ne’er-do-wells apparently didn’t have a difficult time traversing the site, consumers who actually head to the portal for help during tax time aren’t so lucky. For that reason, the agency is asking for help in revamping its online presence — and a chance to win $10,000.  The IRS launched a three-week contest — with cash prizes — this week, asking individuals to suggest ways in which the agency can improve the design, organization and presentation of its website. The “tax design challenges” aims to make the IRS’s site easier for a person to manage their tax responsibilities, and use their own tax data to make informed and effective decisions about their personal finances. The IRS says submissions will be considered for three categories: overall design, best taxpayer usefulness, and best fina...

In a move that brings it closer to Amazon Prime territory, Postmates is launching a new subscription service that promises same-day delivery for a monthly fee of $9.99. Dubbed “Postmates Plus Unlimited,” the program works much like Amazon’s Prime Now: subscribers get free same-day delivery on orders of at least $30 from Postmate’s collection of partners, the company announced on Thursday . The company currently has deals with about 3,000 stores and services in the U.S. Subscribers will also skip the 9% service fee usually charged for Postmates delivery on every order. The hope is that customers will become loyal to the Postmates program and order things more often, which will then attract more retail partners. “The great thing about Amazon Prime is it centers everyone’s default e-commerce to Amazon, and on Amazon, you default to products on Prime,” Sean Plaice, co-founder and chief technical officer at Postmates told Bloomberg . “That’s the same thing we’re looking to have here. Wh...

When a drug patent nears its end, drug companies sometimes do really stupid , potentially illegal things to delay or prevent their bottom line being dinged by a lower-cost generic version. One drug company is accused of not just paying off a generic drug maker to delay the release of its version of two medications, but further hurting consumers by agreeing to not compete with the generic. Pennsylvania-based Endo Pharmaceuticals — maker of brand-name opioid Opana ER and lidocaine patch Lidoderm — is accused of making these sorts of illegal deals with generic companies, according to a lawsuit [ PDF ] filed this week by the Federal Trade Commission. According to the complaint, back in 2009 these two brand-name drugs accounted for 64% of Endo’s annual revenue, but generic competition was in the offing for both products. So in 2010, the FTC says that Endo made a deal with California’s Impax Laboratories — a company that was trying to introduce a generic of Opana ER — to keep that generi...

While it might matter to some consumers that slave labor was involved in making that chocolate bar on the grocery store shelf, food companies like Nestlé and Hershey don’t have to disclose what kind of workers are involved in the production process on product labels, a judge ruled this week. U.S. District Judge Joseph Spero ruled that the two chocolate companies don’t have a duty to disclose that their cocoa suppliers use child slave labor, Courthouse News reports, basically because there’s not enough room for such things. “There are countless issues that may be legitimately important to many customers, and the courts are not suited to determine which should occupy the limited surface area of a chocolate wrapper,” Spero wrote in a pair of identical rulings related to two class actions against Nestlé and Hershey. Two customers sued the companies back in September 2015, claiming that both Nestlé and Hershey were violating California’s Consumer Legal Remedies Act and the state’s unfai...

What’s worse than sitting down with your laptop only to have the hot computer burn your legs? When that laptop catches on fire. And that’s why Toshiba is recalling the laptop battery packs used in 39 of its computer models. According to a notice filed with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the lithium-ion battery packs in approximately 91,000 Toshiba laptops can overheat, posing burn and fire hazards to consumers. The battery packs were used in several Toshiba computers, including the Portege, Satellite, and Tecra laptops, sold between June 2011 and January 2016. In addition to the laptops directly affected by the recall, Toshiba cautions that other computers may be affected if their owners purchased extra battery packs or had their batteries replaced during servicing. A complete list of battery pack part numbers included in this recall can be found on Toshiba’s website . Toshiba says it has received four reports of the battery packs overheating and melting. Howev...

On our master list of known Sears and Kmart stores that will be closing in coming months , one item kind of stands out: one store in Albuquerque plans to cut the size of its store in half and close the Auto Center, renting out the rest of the store. Sears appears to be using the same plan in other markets, including three stores in California. At least, that’s the speculation of Sacramento Business Journal, which noticed rental brochures for retail spaces that looked like half of local Sears atores. The addresses matched up, and the stores happen to be in malls where the Sears store had been sold to Seritage Growth Properties, a real estate investment trust that shares many investors with Sears, including manifesto-writing CEO Eddie Lampert. When Sears decides to close or downside a store, Seritage is able to rent the unoccupied space out to anyone it likes. None of this should be news to Consumerist readers, who have known for a few years now that Sears Heritage has been trying ...

While we don’t know all the details of Amazon’s long-anticipated Prime Air delivery drones just yet, we can guess at some of the specifics along the way. And if a recent patent application the company filed means anything, the drones may have a few things to say. Amazon filed a patent for automated aerial vehicle technology that has two parts: first is the use of multiple propellers rotating in different directions to cut down on noise, notes The Register . One propeller goes one direction to provide lift. “While the second propeller may cause lift of the AAV,” the patent suggests, it “may also be operable to produce sound that cancels noise generated by the first propeller.” The other part of the patent is also split into two parts, and involves using propellers to communicate with folks on the ground. First, the propellers can be used to make sounds, the patent says, to do things like warn people to get out of the drone’s way. “Suppose, for instance, that the AAV were deliveri...

While the women on the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team have outshone the men’s team — winning three World Cup championships since 1991 and gold medals in all but one of the Summer Olympics since 1994 — they remain significantly underpaid than their underperforming male counterparts. Today, five members of that championship team filed an action with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that the U.S. Soccer Federation is unfairly discriminating against female players. In the complaint — disclosed this morning by the law firm representing players Carli Llloyd, Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, Becky Sauerbrunn, and Hope Solo — the reigning World Cup champs contend that the USSF pays male players upwards of four times what the women get, even though the female team is a significant generator of revenue for the organization. “Recently, it has become clear that the Federation has no intention of providing us equal pay for equal work,” said Rapinoe in a statement released today...

Sprint has a deal that might be attractive to some out there, but there’s a bit of math involved: customers can get access to Amazon Prime as a monthly add-on to their regular contracts. Okay, cool — but then there’s the price. It’s $10.99 per month for free two-day-shipping, access to Amazon’s music and video services, and all the other stuff that comes with a Prime membership. That monthly price adds up to $131.88 a year (h/t The Verge ), which is $32.88 more than the $99 regular Prime customers pay for a year’s access. So why would you ever want to pay more money than everyone else for something? Perhaps people may want to try Prime for more than a month but not an entire year. Because once you’ve used your Prime membership — either to buy something with two-day shipping or access Prime videos and music, etc. — you’re locked into paying that $99 for the entire year. That would seem to be the only scenario that would make sense here. If you do decide to use the Sprint program, p...

A group of Target warehouse employees in New York filed a class-action seeking lawsuit against the retailer, accusing the company of misclassifying workers with low-level management responsibilities so they wouldn’t receive overtime pay.  The lawsuit, first filed in New York Supreme Court in December, claims that Target violated state labor laws by misclassifying “operations group leaders” as exempt from overtime, Reuters reports. According to the original complaint, the Target employee claims he was required to work approximately 48 to 54 hours per week as well as being required to attend a 90-minute meeting once a month and another 90-minute meeting each quarter. In addition to these duties, the plaintiff claims he would routinely take his work home after hours, emailing updates to supervisors. “However, [he] never received any overtime pay of time and one-half his regular rate of pay for any hours worked over 40 hours in a week,” the suit states. The man says that beca...

Last year, we told you of a long-running dispute over a Florida state law that says skim milk must be categorized as “imitation milk product” unless the dairy adds vitamins to the final product. This week, a federal court finally chimed in on the matter, upholding the state regulation. This case goes back to 2012, when a company called Ocheesee Creamery found out from the Florida Department of Agriculture that — because Ocheesee didn’t add any vitamins to its skim milk — it would have to be labeled as a “Non-Grade ‘A’ Milk Product, Natural Milk Vitamins Removed.” The state contends that some vitamins and nutrients are removed when the cream is skimmed off of whole milk, and so skim milk must re-introduce those items to be nutritionally equal to milk. The Ocheesee folks counter that they should not be forced to introduce additives to their skim milk. There are also federal standards with regard to replacing nutrients that have been removed from a product, but they only apply to milk...

Remember last year when an airplane door panel fell from the sky, landing on a North Carolina golf course ? While that was certainly an unusual and scary situation, an Arizona woman can now top it: an airplane emergency slide dropped from the heavens and landed outside her house.  A Mesa woman tells AZFamily that she’s used to hearing the sounds of planes flying above, but she got more than she ever imagined on Wednesday. “It was a loud bang and then the house actually shook,” the woman recalls, noting that at first she thought the commotion may have been a downed tree. “It just smelled like sulfur burning.” When she went to investigate, she found it was anything but a tree. Someone else had called 911 to report that they had witnessed an object falling from an airplane, AZFamily reports. “They kind of put two and two together that this must be the emergency slide,” the homeowner says. A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed that the object was ...

The “Share a Coke” campaign was a huge success for Coca-Cola, boosting sales as people scooped up bottles with their own or family members’ names. Other than bringing names back for a third year in the United States, how could the beverage giant replicate the success? Instead of names, now they’re switching to song lyrics, which are less personalized but can sometimes be even more personal. A few examples that a Coke executive shared with Buzzfeed News include famous lines from super-famous longs like “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers, or “We Are the Champions” by Queen. Those may be poor examples, actually, since the lyric shared for both of those is also the title of the song, You’ll be able to hunt through coolers for your favorite lyrics starting in April, and the bottles will be available through summer. Coke plans to target different songs and genres of music to different regions, based on research about what’s popular in different parts of the country. “Share A Coke” Trades In N...

We’re no strangers to the idea of one unruly passenger prompting a commercial flight to change course, but who would have ever thought someone could disrupt a flight by doing something so peaceful as yoga and meditation? Folks, it can happen, and it did. According to the FBI, a recent United Airlines flight heading from Honolulu International Airport to Narita International Airport in Japan turned around because a passenger refused to stop doing yoga in the back of the plane and return to his seat, the Associated Press reports. The FBI says in its complaint that the man told them he didn’t feel like sitting in his seat during the meal service, so he retreatd to the back of the plane to do yoga and meditate. When his wife and flight attendants told him he had to return to his seat, he got angry. The man “pushed his wife because she was trying to make him stop,” the complaint said. “He felt that she was siding with the flight crew.” He also attempted to head-butt and bite some Marin...

For almost exactly a year now, users of Amazon’s ordering gadget, the Dash button , have been able to quickly restock their supply of nearly 30 household products like Tide, Cottonelle, Bounty, and Ziplock. Today, the e-commerce giant announced it would add close to 100 additional products — many not of the household variety — to the line-up, including Energizer batteries, Stayfree feminine pads, Peet’s Coffee, Red Bull, Doritos, and Trojan condoms. As was previously the case, the gadget can be purchased for $4.99, but for a limited time Amazon will provide customers a $4.99 credit for each Dash button they buy. [ Amazon ] by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

While the debate about encryption (brought to the foreground by the recent fight between Apple and the FBI ) continues to rage on, at least one U.S. senator has clearly had enough, and is ready to draw a line in the sand. Speaking at the RightsCon conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Sen. Ron Wyden (OR) called on those in attendance — mostly members of the tech community, and advocates for consumer, civil, and human rights — to support his efforts in Washington to protect encryption, security, and privacy for all Americans. In his remarks, Wyden explained that he was motivated, in part, by the string of data breaches involving retailers and government agencies that now seem to occur on a regular basis. “We had a series of high-profile hacks at the same time — Target, Anthem, OPM,” said the senator, “and understandably, consumers said, ‘We want better security for our devices,’ and companies began to respond.” Encryption, Wyden argued, is a vital part of that protection. It...

One of Apple’s biggest concerns about being compelled to assist the FBI in bypassing the security measures on the iPhone was that it would be just the first of many requests to get around the device’s encryption, thus increasing the odds of this work-around getting into the hands of hackers. Now comes news that the FBI — which was able to crack the iPhone lockdown without Apple’s assistance — is offering to unlock Apple devices for other law enforcement agencies. The AP reports that the FBI has agreed to assist prosecutors in Arkansas by unlocking Apple devices belonging to a pair of teenagers charged with murder. One of the teens was slated to go to trial next week, but after news broke earlier this week that the FBI had been able to bypass the iPhone encryption, the judge in the case agreed to delay proceedings until June so that prosecutors could seek assistance from the FBI in unlocking an iPhone and an iPad they believe contain evidence of the suspects’ plans for the July 201...

Would you eat a burger from Chipotle? No, not at Chipotle, but a fast-casual burger restsaurant that uses the same food-sourcing and cooking methods, and has a similar vibe and a GMO-free menu? The company, which also runs pizza and pan-Asian noodle restaurants modeled on its main brand, trademarked the phrase “Better Burger,” which sounds like a nice name for a burger place. The Chipotle brand name might be a bit tainted right now, which might make the idea of expanding their business under a familiar model but a new brand name an appealing idea. The company’s other brands, ShopHouse Southeast Asian Kitchen and Pizzeria Locale, are relatively small now, with fewer than ten outlets of each open now. In an e-mail to Bloomberg , which noticed the original trademark application, a Chipotle spokesperson said that the company is “exploring” the burger idea, describing it as a “growth seed” alongside the other two chains. Their business model could extend to more than pizzas and ramen, he...

Just about any pay-TV or Internet service provider (often one in the same) lets new customers sign up online. You can do the whole process — check your address for availability ( even if the company’s database is dreadfully wrong ), pick a service tier, schedule an installation appointment, and even have your credit history checked — all without talking to a single human being. But if you need to cancel that same service, you likely have to spend quite a long time talking to someone on the phone, explaining that you simply don’t want to give their company any more money. A recently introduced piece of legislation in California, AB 2867 , is hoping to compel cable companies and ISPs to offer the option of one-click cancelation on their websites. The bill’s sponsor, Assemblyman Mike Gatto from Los Angeles, argues that “if you are able to sign up for a service online, you should also be able to cancel it the same way.” And that’s exactly what the bill’s language currently states: “If ...

Each year during tax time millions of consumers put their financial future in the hands of strangers, trusting that these tax preparers — who are largely unregulated — know the rules, will get them the best possible result (hopefully a refund), and won’t sell them on a product that costs more than it’s worth. But in the world of complicated tax codes and credits, consumers continue to face a long list of risks, including untrained preparers, undisclosed fees, and dangerous refund anticipation products.  These are just a few of the issues — and financial dangers — that the National Consumer Law Center and Consumer Federation of America are warning consumers about in their annual Tax Time Report [ PDF ]. “There’s a minefield of dangers for the tens of millions of consumers who use paid tax preparers to fill out their most important financial document of the year,” Chi Chi Wu, staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, and author of the report, said in a stat...

One feature of the Google-owned navigation app Waze that I hear is very useful is its sometimes-controversial crowdsourced police alerts , which warn users when there’s a speed trap ahead. Now the app is adding a feature which your GPS from the last decade may have had: it will warn you when you’re over the speed limit. Speed limits are complex, since they can include school zones, construction zones, and varying limits along the same highway. You might wonder what the limit is when you’ve just turned onto an unfamiliar road, and Waze will tell you if you’re speeding –– or if you’re a preset speed over the official limit, like 5 or 10 miles per hour over. The feature has rolled out in 20 countries, which do not include the United States or Waze’s home country of Israel. They promise that support in the rest of the world is coming “soon.” In some large cities, the app has compiled data about intersections that it considers especially dangerous, and will warn users to be especially c...

Contrary to what you may have believed your entire life, it turns out that the Hamburglar is not a character limited solely to pilfering beef patties from McDonald’s. How else might one explain how 33 cases of Burger King Whoppers went missing from the back of a truck recently? Warren, MI police are investigating the crime, which happened while the driver of a semi-truck that was carrying the burgers ended up taking a nap on the job, the Detroit Free Press reports. “It’s a whopper of a theft,” the city’s mayor, Jim Fouts, told the newspaper. Here’s how the mystery of the disappearing Whoppers went down: on Thursday night, the driver tasked with transporting the Burger King products attempted to deliver several cases of burgers to the distribution center, but for some reason, he ended up having to wait several hours to complete the delivery. He fell asleep in the truck and woke up at 2 a.m. to find that his truck’s shipping seal was busted and a few boxes of Whoppers were missing....

Late last year, Pepsi prepared to introduce a new beverage, the old-timey and upscale 1893, or as its trademark application called it, “1893 From the Makers of Pepsi-Cola.” It’s just one of many products taking advantage of a strange trend in soft drinks right now: making products with real sugar is a selling point, something that the industry might not have expected just a few years ago. Wait…isn’t sugar bad for us? Why are health-conscious consumers turning to more calorific beverages? Even the CEO of PepsiCo, Indira Nooyi, seems to find current consumer preferences a little confusing. “They are willing to go to organic non-GMO products even if it has high salt, high sugar, high fat,” she told investors on a conference call last year. Nooyi would have expected diet soft drink sales to go up as Americans became interested in “clean” eating,” not full-sugar drinks. The appeal, though, is that sugar is something that we think of as natural, coming from a plant. There’s a reason why ...

If you’ve been jonesing for a new kind of Gatorade, you’ll have a while longer to wait: after announcing last year that it was working on an organic version of Gatorade that it would unleash upon the masses in 2016 , PepsiCo now says it’s pushing back the release date for that planned beverage to sometime in 2017. “It’s in our road map to do Gatorade with less artificial [flavors], and we are developing a G organic that we are planning to launch next year, and then we plan to evaluate the rest of the portfolio to have better choices for athletes,” Xavi Cortadellas, Head of Innovation at Gatorade told TheStreet . As for why it’s making a move to the organic side, Al Carey, the CEO of PepsiCo Americas Beverages, said last year that it’s what customers want. “It’s a consumer interest,” Carey said then. “I think they’re very interested in non-GMO [genetically modified organisms] and organic, and to the degree you can make it meaningful to the consumer — do it.” Of course, Pepsi isn’t a...

The food fight between Pepperidge Farm and Trader Joe’s over Belgian chocolate sandwich cookies has been put to bed, after the two sides agreed to settle their issues out of court. For those who don’t remember, Pepperidge Farm sued Trader Joe’s in federal court late last year, claiming that the latter’s Crispy Cookies filled with chocolate were way too close to the company’s Milano brand. The lawsuit sought undisclosed damages and to block Trader Joe’s from selling its sandwich cookie in the future. So does this mean shoppers will have access to both kinds of cookies? It’s unclear, but seems likely: a lawyer representing Pepperidge Farm told the Associated Press on Wednesday that the two food companies had reached a “mutually satisfactory resolution” and agreed to make no further comments about their fight. A judge then dismissed the case once Pepperidge Farm filed notice that it was withdrawing its lawsuit. “We don’t comment on litigation,” a Trader Joe’s spokeswoman told Cons...

Federal law bars debt relief services from receiving upfront fees before they’ve even renegotiated a single debt for a customer. But one student loan debt relief operation allegedly took in nearly $3.6 million in illegal fees, only to enroll borrowers in programs that are already available for free. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced today that it has taken action against Student Aid Institute and CEO Steven Lamont for illegally demanding hundreds of dollars in upfront fees to help borrowers enroll in federal income-driven plans and misrepresenting that the company had an affiliation with the Department of Education. According to the complaint [ PDF ], beginning in 2012 the company began to market, sell, and administer student-loan debt relief services to consumers through telemarketing calls and direct mail. To entice borrowers to enroll in the program, telemarketers and mailings implied that the organization was endorsed, sponsored by, or affiliated with the Dep...

Uber customers and drivers will no longer be able to reach the company by way of a support email address — a system many customers were frustrated with in the first place — as the company is switching to an in-app tool for troubleshooting and reporting issues. Uber is phasing out the support@uber.com email address that drivers and passengers have used to report lost items, unruly customers and troublesome drivers, and other issues. Want to know your passenger rating? The app will provide that information instantly with the new feature. By moving customer support over to its app, Uber says response times will go down and customer satisfaction will go up. In fact, both are already true, Uber claims, adding that customer service has increased 10% since it began rolling out the feature. “Ultimately, our goal is to create a product that’s so great you never need to contact customer service,” Uber says in the announcement. “In the meantime, we’re doubling down on our technology so that ...

Last May, an investigation involving federal regulators and prosecutors from all 50 states l ed to four national cancer charities being charged with swindling consumers out of $187 million in charitable donations. Today, two of those bogus charities — responsible for $75 million in bilked donations — have agreed to close up shop and provide refunds to donors. The Federal Trade Commission, along with all 50 states and the District of Columbia, announced today that Cancer Fund of America (CFA), Cancer Support Services Inc. (CSS), and James Reynolds, Sr. — the man behind both groups — will settle  will settle charges that the organizations claimed to help cancer patients, but instead, spent the overwhelming majority of donations on their operators, families and friends, and fundraisers. According to the original complaint [ PDF ], the two charities, along with the Children’s Cancer Fund of America Inc. (CCFOA) and The Breast Cancer Society Inc. (BCS), used telemarketing calls, we...

America’s female shoppers just aren’t as interested as they used to be in most of the stuff available in malls: spending on almost everything is down. There’s one area of retail that’s growing that you might not have expected, though: sales of high-end cosmetics are climbing, which include makeup and skin care. Why is that? Blame YouTube. Specifically, YouTube beauty tutorials, which show amateurs who might not trust the advice of a commission-based salesperson how to apply certain products and create new looks. Sure, online beauty personalities receive freebies or might be on makeup company payrolls too, but you can watch hours of videos without feeling directly pressured to buy anything. A bigger focus on environmental chemicals and additives as a society is also turning some customers away from cheap makeup. “People are becoming more aware that what they put on their skin seeps into their skin,” one industry analyst told the Washington Post . “There’s definitely been a rise in de...

Facebook is continuing its efforts to transform Messenger from simply a chatting platform into a customer service portal with a foray into travel: the social media company announced a new partnership with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines that will let the carrier’s customers access their boarding pass and other flight information through the Messenger app. Flyers on KLM will be able to pull up things like their boarding passes, itineraries and frequent flyer number, get check-in reminders and flight status updates, rebook flights, and contact customer support through a Messenger chat thread. The feature will work everywhere Messenger and KLM are both accessible. “This is one that I’ve been personally eager to solve for a while,” Facebook’s head of Messenger, David Marcus, said in a Facebook post on Wednesday . “Removing stress, and complication from air travel. I’m excited to announce that our first airline partner on Messenger will start rolling out their presence today.” It’s likely tha...

We don’t know why anyone would want to be like Comcast, but AT&T sure seems to be doing its best to dress itself up just like the chaps from Kabletown. They both hate community broadband and will lobby to shut it down when it competes with their services , and they both only offer competitive pricing when Google Fiber is in the mix . Now AT&T is following Comcast’s lead on data caps, by generously offering to let customers pay more to avoid running into those monthly limits. Yesterday, AT&T announced some news for its U-Verse subscribers. Starting May 23, most U-verse Internet users will see higher monthly limits, with the slowest tier now having access to 300GB of data a month and the fastest levels of service getting up to a terabyte of data: If you’re using U-Verse for Internet but getting AT&T-owned DirecTV satellite TV service, there will be no monthly data cap. Of course, it’s no coincidence that AT&T is exempting DirecTV customers just as the company prepa...

If you’ve been wishing for longer videos of cute cats, dogs, and kids saying the darndest things on Instagram, the social media gods have heard your prayers. Instagram users will now be able to post videos that are up to one minute long, adding 45 seconds to the previous video length limits. Before this update, users could only post videos up to 15 seconds in length, which is awfully short when there’s an adorable cockatoo screeching funny things, or a dog and a raccoon engaging in some solid interspecies snuggling. “In the last six months, the time people spent watching video increased by more than 40 percent,” the company said in its announcement , adding that “longer videos mean more diverse stories” from popular accounts. The company says the update started rolling out on Tuesday, and will be available “for everyone in the coming months.” Instagram is also bringing back the ability to make videos out of multiple clips from your camera roll — if you’re an iOS user. This move to...

With the massive Takata airbag recall seemingly growing by millions of vehicles and inflators every few weeks, the Japanese auto parts maker is looking to the future of its wallet, determining that if a comprehensive recall of the company’s inflators eventually occurs it will spend roughly $24 billion.  Bloomberg , citing a person close to the matter, reports that a worst-case scenario involving the recall of all Takata airbags containing the volatile chemical explosive ammonium nitrate — one of the root causes for the violent ruptures that have killed nine people in the U.S. and 10 in the world — would total more than 287.5 million inflators. A spokesperson for Takata declined to comment on the possibility of an all-encompassing recall of airbags, saying the company doesn’t disclose production figures for specific products. The $24 billion cost estimate, which is more than the company’s total assets in 2015, far exceeds a previous projection by Jefferies Group analysts of $7...

The high-profile legal standoff between Apple and the FBI recently came to an end when the government unlocked a terrorist’s iPhone without Apple’s assistance , but new data confirms that this single showdown is just one of dozens of cases where the federal government has successfully used a more than 225-year-old law to compel Apple or Google to aid authorities in bypassing smartphone security measures. At the center of the recently concluded Apple vs. FBI dispute is the All Writs Act , which allows a judge to compel a person or group to assist in the enforcement of a court order — but only if that assistance is both necessary and “agreeable to the usages and principles of law.” In February, the federal government successfully sought a court order under the All Writs Act, compelling Apple to aid the FBI in unlocking an iPhone that had belonged to Syed Farook, one of the shooters who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, CA, on Dec. 2, 2015. Apple fought back against the court order, ...