The US Justice Department today announced it filed an antitrust lawsuit against "six of the nation's largest landlords for participating in algorithmic pricing schemes that harmed renters."

One of the landlords, Cortland Management, agreed to a settlement "that requires it to cooperate with the government, stop using its competitors' sensitive data to set rents and stop using the same algorithm as its competitors without a corporate monitor," the DOJ said. The pending settlement requires Cortland to "cooperate fully and truthfully... in any civil investigation or civil litigation the United States brings or has brought" on this subject matter.

The US previously sued RealPage, a software maker accused of helping landlords collectively set prices by giving them access to competitors' nonpublic pricing and occupancy information. The original version of the lawsuit described actions by landlords but did not name any as defendants.

The Justice Department filed an amended complaint today in order to add the landlords as defendants. The landlord defendants are Greystar, LivCor, Camden, Cushman, Willow Bridge, and Cortland, which collectively "operate more than 1.3 million units in 43 states and the District of Columbia," the DOJ said.

"The amended complaint alleges that the six landlords actively participated in a scheme to set their rents using each other's competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms," the DOJ said.

The phrase "price fixing" came up in discussions between landlords, the amended complaint said:

For example, in Minnesota, property managers from Cushman & Wakefield, Greystar, and other landlords regularly discussed competitively sensitive topics, including their future pricing. When a property manager from Greystar remarked that another property manager had declined to fully participate due to "price fixing laws," the Cushman & Wakefield property manager replied to Greystar, "Hmm... Price fixing laws huh? That's a new one! Well, I'm happy to keep sharing so ask away. Hoping we can kick these concessions soon or at least only have you guys be the only ones with big concessions! It's so frustrating to have to offer so much."

FBI raided Cortland office

Cortland manages over 80,000 rental units in 13 states. The FBI raided its Atlanta office in May 2024 as part of a criminal investigation.

"Cortland is pleased to announce the US Department of Justice filed a proposed settlement that would resolve the Antitrust Division's civil investigation into Cortland related to antitrust violations in the multifamily housing industry," Cortland said in a statement provided to Ars today.

Cortland's statement said that last month, "the Antitrust Division informed Cortland that it had closed its criminal investigation into pricing practices in the multifamily industry. As a result, Cortland and its employees are no longer subject to the criminal investigation that motivated the Department of Justice's May 2024 search at Cortland's headquarters in Atlanta."

The settlement, if approved in federal court, would prohibit Cortland from accessing or using external nonpublic data from RealPage or other sources. Cortland said in its statement that it has developed its own software for managing revenue.

"We believe we were only able to achieve this result because Cortland has invested years and significant internal resources into developing a proprietary revenue management software tool that does not rely on data from external, non-public sources," Cortland said.

RealPage fights lawsuit

Rental companies have previously denied using software to collectively set prices in response to class action lawsuits. In December 2022, the National Multifamily Housing Council trade group said that "the highly fragmented nature of the rental apartment industry fosters competitive pricing, not anticompetitive behavior. No single owner or operator can 'set' rents for an entire market because other owners can always price over or under based on numerous circumstances. We believe rents in every market are dictated by the dynamics of that local market—the supply of housing, the demand for housing, economic conditions and more."

RealPage filed a motion to dismiss the US lawsuit in early December. The company has said its software "benefits both housing providers and residents," and "makes price recommendations in all directions—up, down, or no change—to align with property-specific objectives of the housing providers using the software." Landlords don't have to follow the recommendations, the company says.

The Justice Department says that landlords did more than use RealPage in the alleged pricing scheme. "Along with using RealPage's anticompetitive pricing algorithms, these landlords coordinated through a variety of means," such as "directly communicating with competitors' senior managers about rents, occupancy, and other competitively sensitive topics," the DOJ said.

There were "call arounds" in which "property managers called or emailed competitors to share, and sometimes discuss, competitively sensitive information about rents, occupancy, pricing strategies and discounts," the DOJ said.

Landlords discussed their use of RealPage software with each other, the DOJ said. "For instance, landlords discussed via user groups how to modify the software's pricing methodology, as well as their own pricing strategies," the DOJ said. "In one example, LivCor and Willow Bridge executives participated in a user group discussion of plans for renewal increases, concessions and acceptance rates of RealPage rent recommendations."

DOJ: Firms discussed “auto-accept” settings

The DOJ lawsuit says RealPage pushes clients to use "auto-accept settings" that automatically approve pricing recommendations. The DOJ said today that property rental firms discussed how they use those settings.

"As an example, at the request of Willow Bridge's director of revenue management, Greystar's director of revenue management supplied its standard auto-accept parameters for RealPage's software, including the daily and weekly limits and the days of the week for which Greystar used 'auto-accept,'" the DOJ said.

Greystar issued a statement saying it is "disappointed that the DOJ added us and other operators to their lawsuit against RealPage," and that it will "vigorously" defend itself in court. "Greystar has and will conduct its business with the utmost integrity. At no time did Greystar engage in any anti-competitive practices," the company said.

The Justice Department is joined in the case by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington. The case is in US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.

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Almost exactly a year ago, we were publicly yearning for the day when more portable gaming PC makers could ditch Windows in favor of SteamOS (without having to resort to touchy unofficial workarounds). Now, that day has finally come, with Lenovo announcing the upcoming Legion Go S as the first non-Valve handheld to come with an officially licensed copy of SteamOS preinstalled. And Valve promises that it will soon ship a beta version of SteamOS for users to "download and test themselves."

As Lenovo's slightly downsized followup to 2023's massive Legion Go, the Legion Go S won't feature the detachable controllers of its predecessor. But the new PC gaming handheld will come in two distinct versions, one with the now-standard Windows 11 installation and another edition that's the first to sport the (recently leaked) "Powered by SteamOS" branding.

The lack of a Windows license seems to contribute to a lower starting cost for the "Powered by SteamOS" edition of the Legion Go S, which will start at $500 when it's made available in May. Lenovo says the Windows edition of the device—available starting this month—will start at $730, with "additional configurations" available in May starting as low as $600.

The Windows version of the Legion Go S will come with a different color and a higher price. Credit: Lenovo

Both the Windows and SteamOS versions of the Legion Go S will weigh in at 1.61 lbs with an 8-inch 1200p 120 Hz LCD screen, up to 32GB of RAM, and either AMD's new Ryzen Z2 Go chipset or an older Z1 core.

Watch out, Windows?

Valve said in a blog post on Tuesday that the Legion Go S will sport the same version of SteamOS currently found on the Steam Deck. The company's work getting SteamOS onto the Legion Go S will also "improve compatibility with other handhelds," Valve said, and the company "is working on SteamOS support for more devices in the future."

A promised beta version of SteamOS will be released publicly before May, Valve said, "which should improve the experience on other devices, and users can download and test this themselves. And of course we'll continue adding support and improving the experience with future releases."

We found this logo hidden deep in an abandoned steel forge. Credit: Aurich Lawson | Steam

The official launch of the "Powered by SteamOS" program has been a long time coming; Valve's Lawrence Yang said as far back as 2022 that the company is "excited to see people make their own SteamOS machines." More recently, Valve confirmed that it was working on official SteamOS support for the Asus ROG Ally.

On the Steam Deck itself, the SteamOS experience has been consistently improving over the years thanks to new features and new updates to the Proton compatibility layer that allows Windows-based games to run on SteamOS' Linux core. But SteamOS as a whole has been held back somewhat by the aging Steam Deck hardware, which is not up to the most graphically demanding modern games.

Now that SteamOS will be available more widely, players will be able to enjoy the platform's best-in-class interface and gaming features on a wide variety of hardware form factors and power levels. That has to be at least a little bit worrisome to the people at Microsoft's games division, who have gotten used to Windows being the de facto PC gaming solution for decades now.

Who knows, maybe Valve CEO Gabe Newell's 2013 prediction that Linux was the future of gaming was simply a little bit too early.

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When suspicion began to mount that the young prosecutor, Yujin Choi, might have faked her sexual misconduct allegations against a Denver District Attorney's Office colleague, investigators asked to examine Choi's laptop and cell phone. But just before Choi was to have turned them in, her devices suffered a series of unlikely accidents.

First, she said, she managed to drop her phone into a filled bathtub. When she pulled the phone out of the water and found it was not working, Choi went to her laptop in order to make a video call. When the call ended, Choi then knocked over a bottle of water—whoops!—directly onto the computer, which was also taken out of commission. So, when the day came to hand in her devices, neither was working.

"I’m devastated that I may have tanked the investigation on my own, but that I also lost all of my personal data that were very important to me," Choi wrote to investigators. She had even, she added, gone to the local Apple Store in an attempt to retrieve the data on the devices. No luck.

The rather improbable story came to light this week after articles were published in the Denver Post and New York Times. The news stories were based on a December 31, 2024, ruling against Choi from Colorado's Office of the Presiding Disciplinary Judge, which handles complaints against lawyers in the state.

"In our view, [Choi's] narrative is not plausible," said the ruling. "If Respondent [that is, Choi] produced her devices in working condition, we have every confidence that the investigation would have uncovered evidence of Respondent’s dishonest conduct, including her fabrication of text messages and her manipulation of her downloaded Verizon message log."  It appeared more likely to the judge that Choi had purposely destroyed her devices.

These days, of course, if you get to the point where you are contemplating device destruction as a way out of a scandal, you're probably screwed already, given how much data about our activities is backed up to cloud services, stored on remote servers, or otherwise held by third parties. That was the case with Choi's situation, too, which deteriorated sharply after she went from being the accuser to being accused.

How we got here

Choi was a young attorney a few years out of law school, working at the Denver District Attorney's Office in various roles between 2019 and 2022. Beginning in 2021, she accused her colleague, Dan Hines, of sexual misconduct. Hines, she said at first, made an inappropriate remark to her. Hines denied it and nothing could be proven, but he was still transferred to another unit.

In 2022, Choi complained again. This time, she offered phone records showing inappropriate text messages she allegedly received from Hines. But Hines, who denied everything, offered investigators his own phone records, which showed no texts to Choi.

Investigators then went directly to Verizon for records, which showed that "Ms. Choi had texted the inappropriate messages to herself," according to the Times. "In addition, she changed the name in her phone to make it appear as though Mr. Hines was the one who had sent them."

At this point, the investigators started looking more closely at Choi and asked for her devices, leading to the incident described above.

In the end, Choi was fired from the DA's office and eventually given a disbarment order by the Office of the Presiding Disciplinary Judge, which she can still appeal. For his part, Hines is upset about how he was treated during the whole situation and has filed a lawsuit of his own against the DA's office, believing that he was initially seen as a guilty party even in the absence of evidence.

The case is a reminder that, despite well-founded concerns over tracking, data collection, and privacy, sometimes the modern world's massive data collection can work to one's benefit. Hines was able to escape the second allegation against him precisely because of the specific (and specifically refutable) digital evidence that was presented against him—as opposed to the murkier world of "he said/she said."

Choi might have done as she liked with her devices, but her "evidence" wasn't the only data out there. Investigators were able to draw on Hines' own phone data, along with Verizon network data, to see that he had not been texting Choi at the times in question.

Update: Ars Technica has obtained the ruling, which you can read here (PDF). The document recounts in great detail what a modern, quasi-judicial workplace investigation looks like: forensic device examinations, search warrants to Verizon, asking people to log into their cell phone accounts and download data while investigators look over their shoulders, etc.

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This is really a note to myself on how to do an emergency power reset. This is a desperation troubleshooting step if you find that the laptop won’t charge. One of my colleagues ran into this problem, and some Web searching suggested that there was a BIOS update for it, but unfortunately, the BIOS updater refuses to run unless the machine is on AC power, so they found themselves in a Catch-22.

For Lenovo laptops, look on the bottom for a small pinhole near the power connector. This is the power supply reset button. Unplug the laptop from all power sources, then insert a paper clip (or similar tool) into the hole and press the recessed button for 15 seconds.

For HP laptops and Dell laptops, there is a similar emergency reset procedure: With the laptop disconnected from all power sources, press and hold the power button for 15 to 20 seconds.

Acer figured, “¿Por qué no los dos?” They have both an emergency reset pinhole and a power button 15-second reset.

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Amazon is having an amazing sale on 4K Blu-rays. Right now, you can pick up three select titles for just $33. There’s no limit to how many times this promotion can be used — just add your selections to your cart and Amazon will tie them up into neat little bundles of three for $33 each, regardless of their currently discounted price.

This is a perfect opportunity to fill out your movie collection with some personal favorites like Jurassic Park, The Thing, and Pan’s Labyrinth, as well as contemporary classics like Oppenheimer, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, and Dune. There are dozens of eligible movies to choose from but we’ve plucked out a handful of our favorites that we think you should check out.

I’m not entirely opposed to the use of AI art. Like an airbrush or Photoshop or a Sharpie on drywall, it’s just another tool that can be used to create art. A powerful tool, sure, but just that: a tool. It’s a great way to get a start on something, or to, say, extend the background of a photo source being used in a larger project, or help to flesh out ideas, quickly. If you’re using it to create finished results on its own, without an actual human artist in control, you’re doing it wrong. Which seems to be precisely what Amazon Prime is doing right now, at least if the on-screen art for the documentary Racing Through Time is any indicator. The AI-generated art used for the poster image is so egregiously bad it caught the attention of Reddit’s r/formula1 forum, and it’s also a good reminder of the limitations of AI art, which all stem from the fact that, really, AI is an idiot.

The uproar from this has been pretty significant, which I think is quite healthy, like a horse sneezing at bad hay. I think I stole that analogy from Orwell’s 1984, by the way, which makes sense, because what the hell do I know about how horses react to hay? But the idea still holds: people can sense something wrong with these purely AI-generated images, and they’re right to call them out. Because they’re garbage.

The reaction has been covered online a good amount too, which is interesting, because, fundamentally, you wouldn’t think it’s all that newsworthy. This is some background art for an old documentary being shown on Amazon Prime Video. It’s hardly Earth-shattering news.

But, there’s more here, because it’s AI-generated, and we’re seeing both the limitations of AI and testing the limits of what we, the public, will accept. Here’s the big image in question:

At first glance, it seems fine. It’s a lineup of F1 cars on the track. But as soon as you start looking more closely, things rapidly start to fall apart. Like, this car, for instance:

Again, at a glance, it looks like a modern F1 car. then you notice the irregular and confusing structure behind the driver, the peculiar asymmetry, the wing that appears to be missing the entire left section, the wheel camber that doesn’t make sense – it’s a lot of little bits of weirdness that add up to a mess.

Or how about this one:

Hey, look, a three-wheeled car! That’s a bold choice! I guess if those Tyrell P34s could have six wheels, three must be half as good, right? There’s also plenty of asymmetry and confusing mounting systems and more nonsense here, too.

Maybe to make up for the tricycle-inspired three-wheeler F1 cars, this one seems to have six wheels? Sort of? They’re all almost wheels, but maybe not quite? The rear ones could be part of the wing? It’s very hard to tell. That helmet is shocking egg-shaped, too, and that front wing makes the bold choice not to extend all the way across the car.

As we go further rearward in the pack, the cars become less and less F1-like. What are those cars in the upper row there? That bluish-silver one looks sort of like a forgotten 1990s Chrysler concept car and the red one to the right feels like a Lincoln MKS coupé that never happened.

The point is, this is garbage. And, it’s the specific kind of garbage that genuinely unsettles people, because it’s uncanny valley sort of garbage. I know “uncanny valley” is used to describe human images that aren’t quite right, but I think the concept applies to cars as well. That’s because those of us who care about cars care very much about the specifics of cars. We care about the way they’re put together and the details that make one type of car different than another, no matter how minuscule or mundane seeming that may be to more healthily-adjusted people. In fact, the more obscure and specific, the better.

AI doesn’t understand any of this, because AI fundamentally doesn’t understand anything. We call it “artificial intelligence” but it’s not, not really, because it works so differently from how our brains work. It’s refining images from noise based on a massive dataset and comparing iterations at incredible speeds to end up with something that looks like what the prompt’s referenced target images are. But it has no idea what it’s making.

It doesn’t know that these F1 cars look ridiculous because it doesn’t know what an F1 car is. It doesn’t know what a tuna sandwich is, either, or a drill press or a vulva or a horse or anything. It has no idea what accurate is or how anything works or what is true or not. And that’s why we can never use AI alone for anything we do.

Cars are too specific; I can’t have AI generate an image of a 1971 Jensen Interceptor and end up with something I can actually use. Here, let’s try just that and see what happens! First, here’s a picture of a ’71 Interceptor, from the Beverly Hills Car Club for reference:

Okay, so let’s tell the AI to make me a 1971 Jensen Interceptor without me specifically showing it that reference image, and see what we get:

These are all very cool cars, and all feel appropriate for the era, but none of them are Jensen Interceptors.

I love this one, it feels like something Iso may have built in the late ’60s, but, again, it’s not an Interceptor. So this is useless, unless I somehow need a fictional car, which we do sometimes, but mostly we’re writing about cars that actually exist, because those are the cars you can drive and experience and, you know, were real.

Giving the AI the specific reference image sort of helped? But not really:

The front ends are a bit more constrained to something sort of Interceptor-like, but they’re still useless if I’m actually writing about an Interceptor.

This is a cool-looking car, one I might even say reminded me of a Jensen Interceptor, but it’s not one. And, as such, it’s unusable, save for fiction or perhaps background filler.

And even for less specific things, things that don’t necessarily require a reality-accurate car, AI just doesn’t understand humans enough to be useful. Take our topshot images, for example. Yesterday, I wrote a rant about how much modern electronic door handles piss me off, and I made this for the top image:

There’s text there, there’s a car and a callout to what I’m talking about. It’s not the best topshot I’ve ever made, but it works. Here’s what I got when I asked AI to make an image for an article complaining about modern complex car door handles:

What the hell is that? I guess some sort of door handles? It’s absolutely useless as a top image, and it hurts my brain to even look at it.

My whole point is that, at least at our current level of development, AI can not replace a human. It can help, certainly, it can be an incredible tool, no question, but there always needs to be a pair of knowledgable human eyes on the result, otherwise we get situations like this F1 mess.

And it’s not just like normal bad art. It’s actively more insulting, because it telegraphs that the entity that put the AI garbage out just doesn’t care. Quick and cheap is all that matters to places that do this kind of shit, and it’s good people see it and call it out. AI is only going to take all our jobs if we accept that everything will be shit, and we don’t have to do that.

So, everyone, feel free to mock and shame Amazon for this craptacular F1 image! For the good of humanity!

 

We Are In An AI-Caused Global Crisis Of Car Posters

You Have To Look At This Viral AI-Generated Disc Brake Diagram Because It’s Nuts

This Seemingly AI-Generated Car Article On Yahoo Is A Good Reminder That AI Is An Idiot

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