Being allergic to a large class of food (hey gluten-free eaters!), I know firsthand how important accurate allergy markers on menus are. Still, a new criminal complaint alleges that a former Disney World employee intentionally altered menu allergy information to say that foods did not contain peanuts when they actually did, 404 Media and Court Watch reported in collaboration.
The complaint alleges that Michael Scheuer was fired by Disney and then used a still viable password to access a proprietary menu creation and inventory system maintained by a third party. During his wrongdoings, he allegedly altered allergy information, as well as added profane language, altered prices, and changed the font to Wingdings. Those Wingdings were what initially alerted employees. All menus in the database were deemed unusable and the application went offline for one to two weeks to fix the problems.
Disney changed the passwords, but then Scheuer allegedly broke into several FTPs of a third-party company, changing allergy markers and QR codes from menus to the Boycott Israel website. He tried to break into Disney employees’ accounts about 8,000 times. Disney claims the altered menus were identified before they were sent to restaurants.
This case is not related to a doctor who died of an allergic reaction after eating at a restaurant in Disney Springs last year. Notably, Disney tried to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the doctor’s husband in August, alleging that he had agreed to settle the lawsuits out of court through arbitration. The reason? He had signed the terms of service for a one-month Disney+ trial in 2019 and then again when creating an account to buy park tickets.
The Biden administration has unveiled its “AI Proliferation Rule,” which aims to restrict the export of the GPUs most coveted for AI applications. Although it doesn’t name the country, it is largely seen as a means to prevent China from overtaking the US in AI development.
The rule proposes three licensing tiers. The first tier is unrestricted and includes the domestic market as well as 18 strategic allies. Most countries fall into the second tier, which will have limits on how much computing power they can import from the US via top GPUs. The third tier includes China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, and effectively prevents US companies from selling their most powerful GPUs there.
US-based companies would also be prevented from sharing many details of their AI software models with countries outside the first tier, and would have to get permission from the federal government before building large data centers in any second-tier country.