It’s a sue and be sued world out there!

In August, Juul Labs filed trademark claims against 30 entities in China selling counterfeit Juul products on Ebay. Now, the company has announced that a federal court granted the company a temporary restraining order over the accounts, and froze the counterfeiters’ PayPals. Take that, counterfeiters!

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For Juul, this isn’t a simple matter of copyright infringement, though. The company is fighting to reduce teenage use of the product, especially in light of a FDA investigation into why teens love Juuls so much (and whether that’s Juul’s fault). And maintaining control over online sales that are age-verified is a crucial component of that campaign.

Legitimate Juul products are only available online through Juul’s website. However, as of this writing, there were over 2,000 listings for Juul or Juul-related products on Ebay. Any Juul device or pod you might see on Ebay or elsewhere that’s not Juul’s website directly comes from a counterfeiter, or an unauthorized seller. 

But selling Juul directly through the company’s own site isn’t just important to controlling the company’s cashflow, or even for verifying that the product is the real deal. Keeping Juul’s site as the sole online seller is crucial to ensuring that teens don’t purchase the e-cigs online. 

“Keeping JUUL out of the hands of young people is a priority for us,” Victoria Davis, a Juul Labs spokesperson told Mashable over email. “We have a strict and industry-leading age-verification process on our Web site so no one under the age of 21 can access JUUL. However, counterfeiters do not utilize the same type of age verification systems, which may enable minors to purchase products.” 

Juul’s site requires users to register with their social security numbers in order to verify that they’re over 21. So circumventing Juul’s commerce system means that the counterfeiters are actually undermining the company’s very intentional efforts to keep the cute lil’ vapes out of the hands of kids.

Juul is going after the counterfeiters through the legal system, as well as directly with sales platforms like Ebay and Amazon. But Davis described the hunt for counterfeiters as a “challenge” because the sellers can easily make new profiles. That isn’t deterring Juul, though, since more counterfeiters are popping up as the company grows.

“The prevalence of counterfeiters has increased dramatically over the last year consistent with JUUL’s rise in the marketplace,” Davis said. “The process of tracking and identifying the culprits of counterfeit products is time intensive. We have dedicated resources to this initiative to ensure these products stay off the market and out of hands of underage users.”

In other words, Juul’s attempts to go after counterfeiters is like USB-vape whack-a-mole. And the nicotine habits of kids are on the line. 

The indefensible job shaming of The Cosby Show mainstay Geoffrey Owens was undoubtedly going to bring the best out of the entertainment world.

After a bit of time deliberating on offers, Owens is taking up a role as Commander Adams on NCIS: New Orleans, according to Entertainment Weekly. 

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The character of Adams is an old and valued friend of the show’s lead, Special Agent Dwayne Cassius Pride, providing “both medical and spiritual advice.”

“For Commander Adams, we needed someone with compassion, competence, and heart. That’s Geoffrey in a nutshell,” executive producer Christopher Silber told the publication. 

“An accomplished actor who seemed like the perfect fit to add to our extended repertory company. We’re lucky to have him on the show.”

Owens will appear in the sixth episode of Season 5, which will air in late-October. Earlier this week, the actor also accepted an offer from director Tyler Perry to appear in 10 episodes of the OWN series The Haves and the Have Nots.

It’s worth noting that Owens has booked acting roles and taught in the years gone by, but as he admitted on Good Morning America last week, sometimes that’s not enough.

“I got to a point where I’d been teaching, acting, directing for 30+ years, but it got to a point where it just didn’t add up enough and you gotta do what you got to do,” he told the show.

Seven paint options for future Teslas will soon dwindle to five.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Monday night that Tesla would “simplify manufacturing” by removing Obsidian Black Metallic and Silver Metallic from the menu of colors as of Wednesday, possibly so it can catch up on missed production deadlines and fulfill  orders already placed by consumers who want to drive its new electric sedan, the Model 3. 

Any color beyond Solid Black already come at an additional cost, but starting Wednesday the metallic black and silver options will be moved to a “special order” status.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment as to why the metallic colors were problematic for production, or what Musk means by “higher price,” but we’ll update this post if we hear back.

In a reply to a customer who wanted to know about options to service his Silver Metallic Model X 100, Musk tweeted that service centers will continue to stock parts in each color for owners of cars painted with the soon-limited colors. 

In July, Musk stated an August goal of producing 6,000 Model 3 cars per week, however the current reality is closer to 3,500, according to estimates by Bloomberg.

After the announcement, Musk described the process of using red paint as looking “like an episode of Dexter,” the TV series about a serial killer/blood spatter expert. He included a photo showing the car plant in red, looking “so sus.” 

With Musk wanting to get this show on the road, he most likely realized there’s just no time for frivolous things like sparkly paint.

Logitech is flipping the design of the computer mouse on its side with its MX Vertical Advanced Ergonomic mouse.

The idea is to re-invent the mouse, at the same time making in forward-looking and more useful, I guess. It also happens to look like an enlarged garlic clove.

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The point of a vertical mouse is to provide an “ergonomic” design (i.e. one that won’t strain your hand). The packaging is says it positions your hand at a 57-degree angle, which is apparently a more “natural” one. However, there’s a steep learning curve — one I ultimately never conquered.

It looks and feels futuristic

The MX vertical is interesting-looking, but that only goes so far. By flipping the mouse controls on the side, it’s like you’re shaking a hand when using it. Your index and pointer finger will rest on the left and right clickers, with a scroll wheel in the middle.

So on what would typically be the backside of the mouse, you rest your thumb on a grippy surface, which also has the forward and backward buttons. It’s definitely an experience that takes getting used to. For starters, the bumps along the exterior don’t go all the way around, which makes it less intuitive to hold.

You can turn the MX Vertical on or shut it off with a small switch on the bottom. Luckily, Logitech didn’t put the charging port next to the switch like Apple’s Magic Mouse does; instead, the USB-C charging port sits on the front of the device. 

To make sure the mouse moves smoothly, Logitech put a thin rubber lining around the edge of the bottom, letting you use the MX Vertical without a mouse pad on a variety of surfaces.

The MX Vertical can confuse your muscle memory

In trying to use Logitech’s innovative mouse, I regularly found myself trying to click buttons that weren’t there. It was hard to retrain my hand to find the left and right clicker buttons, especially since Logitech put an inch of space below them with no grooves or humps.

Still, after a few days, I was getting in the groove. However, dragging and dropping documents remained a challenge — I would often accidentally let them go when I didn’t mean to.

In short, the MX Vertical takes a while to figure out. If you’re expecting to just plug this in and be a vertical-mouse whiz, chances are that’s not going to happen.

It’s not so much that it reinvents the controls, but rather your finger movements. Of course, you can still click to navigate a webpage, open a text, start a text field, and even make some light photo adjustments. Logitech’s MX Vertical also throws in a forward and backward button for the thumb to use. That’s handy, but be wary of how you move your thumb. In my testing, I would frequently engage one of these controls by accident, and my workflow would get jumbled. You also use your thumb to change the pointer speed on the fly via the small circular button on the top. 

Each clicker has a good tactile feel to it and makes a sound — like any good mouse does. Same goes for the scroll well, which worked well to make it through a long document easily or to scroll through results in a browser. I do imagine that, over time, dust could build up in the gap between the right and left clickers and the scroll wheel, though.

I tried one game of Fortnite with the MX Vertical and immediately regretted it. Flipping the location of the core clickers really screwed up my rhythm and didn’t offer the accuracy I needed for gaming. The scroll wheel performed differently than console controls, keyboard ones, and a traditional mouse. This is definitely not a gaming mouse.

Wrist comfort: not a feature

One of the main ideas behind Logitech’s vertical-mouse design is that it’s more ergonomic and be more comfortable on your wrist and arm. However, I found that the MX Vertical, far from reducing pain, merely relocates it. I am right handed, and after using the mouse for a few hours, I began to get sore on the top and side of my wrist. 

This is a bummer to say the least. To fix this I would likely need an elevated mouse pad, which would be an additional expense.

Light customizations

Along with the MX Vertical, Logitech includes its Options app for Windows and macOS. This is the command center for all of your available accessories, like keyboards and mouses. In here you can get a tour of the MX Vertical, see the default button setup, and make changes.

For example, you can have the circular button along the central ridge change the pointer speed, engage mission control, or play and pause content. You can customize the other buttons as well. Logitech lets you have this same level of possibilities for the forward and backward buttons on the left-hand side.

Three choices for connectivity

Like Logitech’s other wireless mice, you have the option of connecting through a receiver that plugs into a USB port directly to your computer via Bluetooth. Both of these standards are on-board the MX Vertical. Bluetooth pairing is done through a button on the bottom of the mouse, and it showed up within a few seconds on a MacBook Air. The connection was pretty strong even from a few feet away.

Bluetooth will allow you to pair the MX Vertical with multiple devices, like a tablet and a laptop. You can quickly switch between the two, and it’s a nice trick that allows you to have one, and only one, peripheral on your desk.

Setup is definitely easier if you use the USB receiver, which is basically plug and play. And if you have other Logitech gear, you can connect them all to a single receiver with some minor settings adjustments.

Either way, the MX Vertical should work like a charm, with virtually no lag, once connected. However, if you want to go old school, you can always plug the MX Vertical in with the USB-C to USB-A cable for a hard-wired experience.

Final thoughts

Logitech isn’t asking for an insane amount for the MX Vertical. At $99.99, it’s in line with other high-end computer peripherals, and the design is eye-catching.

However, a vertical mouse isn’t the clear step forward Logitech seems to think it is. After using it for a while, I found the experience lacking. While I could get used to the unintuitive button placement, my discomfort made me question the ergonomic benefits.

At the end of the day Logitech’s MX Vertical is a good mouse, but for $99 you should really be getting a great mouse.

There is a great narrative to be written, a first draft of the history of the Trump administration and the long national nightmare it is making us suffer through. Unfortunately, Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward isn’t it. 

Having slogged through Michael Wolff’s gossipy Fire and Fury and Omarosa Manigault-Newman’s self-serving but not very self-aware Unhinged, I had high hopes for Woodward’s book. The legendary Washington Post reporter has dished the goods on five presidents now, famously helping to bring down one. If anyone could bring us back to Earth and do the full Nixon number on Trump, many thought, it would be Woodward.

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Unfortunately, it seems that at this point in his life, Woodward has become more a creature of official Washington, DC than just about anyone in that city. For example, he has a certain starry-eyed reverence for the military; more than one general in Fear is described as “ramrod straight.” Vast chapters focus on internal debates over what to do about Afghanistan and Syria, while the Muslim travel ban gets nary a mention. 

And in the most unintentional self-parody, Woodward declares himself skeptical about the Steele dossier on Trump-Russia collusion, which uplifted the infamous pee tape rumor — based on nothing more than the fact that Woodward at the time was skeptical about its content. He goes on to quote his own television appearances at length. 

Later, he is shocked when Trump declares in a TV interview with NBC’s Lester Holt that he fired FBI director James Comey because of the whole “Russia thing.” This answer, Woodward declares, “seemed very much at odds with his letter to Comey.” Gee, Bob, you think? 

Woodward has good sources, but is incredibly credulous about them. You can practically hear the stampede as members of Trump’s inner circle rush towards Woodward to get themselves portrayed in the best light. He repeats conversations as Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Lindsay Graham related them. He leans heavily on accounts of conversations by former Trump staffer Rob Porter. Only in the last 20 pages does he casually mention that Porter resigned after evidence emerged that he beat his wife. 

Much of what emerges from these conversations is as gossipy as anything in Wolff’s book. Only Wolff, a seasoned gossip columnist, knew how to make this stuff interesting. Woodward has committed the cardinal sin of political reporting: He has written a boring narrative.

For example, Woodward tells us that Bannon eventually shed his boisterous appearance at the beginning of the administration, became a team player, and “was 10 times the unifier that Jared and Ivanka were” by the end of his time in power. There’s no justification for this statement; it’s just put out there like some ineffective slam from a B-movie version of Mean Girls. Wolff, come back, all is forgiven.

Similarly, we’re repeatedly told that former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster felt shut out by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who had formed a “team of two” against him. But so what? Who cares? Trump is actively tearing away the fabric of the American republic, and this is what you chose to focus on?

Just about all the shocking news from the book — such as the fact that advisers like Porter would hide trade withdrawal letters from Trump to prevent him from signing them — has already come out. What remains in Fear has the feeling of album filler from a band that knows you’re just buying their latest record for the hit singles. 

As for Trump himself, he really didn’t need to go nuclear on Woodward. He comes out of the book looking relatively good. Sure, he is petulant, foul-mouthed, perpetually insulting, unwilling to learn or to change his decades-old concepts on trade and international alliances. But we already knew that about him. Woodward portrays him as a man constantly trying to do the right thing by his base. 

There’s little mention of the president’s inherent racism, his overt obstruction of justice, or his decades of involvement with Russian organized crime (as detailed in another book out this month, Craig Unger’s superior House of Trump, House of Putin). Woodward does Trump a huge favor: He takes him at his word. He legitimizes him. In these pages, the tantrum-throwing leader is transformed into a president who’s not afraid to break a few eggs in his pursuit of a harsh but pro-America agenda. 

It’s a good thing Woodward has spent his promotional media blitz telling us that he’s trying to get his readers to wake up and pay attention to the dysfunction at the White House. Because that is not something you’d necessarily get from his book; it’s almost an apology for Trump. 

If this is what passes for the first draft of history, then the only thing we have to fear is Fear itself. 

YouTube shut down several accounts connected to the Syrian regime amid rumors spreading of a possible chemical attack in Syria over the weekend.

The channels include PresidencyCy, an account frequently used to promote Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and an account promoting the Ministry of Defense. Other acounts terminated from YouTube belonged to the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), and SANA’s TV channel.

In a statement provided to Mashable, a YouTube spokesperson says that “YouTube complies with all applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws — including with respect to content created and uploaded by restricted entities. If we find that an account violates our Terms of Service or Community Guidelines, we disable it.”

Banners on three of the accounts say the channels were removed “due to a violation of YouTube’s Terms of Service.” However, YouTube provides a different explanation for the PresidencyCy channel: “This account has been terminated due to a legal complaint.”

YouTube didn’t comment on the reason behind the dual messaging.

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The shutdowns come weeks after a video from TomoNews US, an outlet run by the Taiwanese animated news company Next Animation Studio, claimed that the Syrian government accounts might have generated advertising revenue, which would be in violation of U.S. sanctions on the Syrian regime.

The video from TomoNews US shows that some of the ads that played before videos on PresdencyCy’s account include ads for Wells Fargo, various organizations that support refugees, and even President Donald Trump.

President Barack Obama signed an executive order in 2011 blocking American companies from doing business with the Syrian government.

SEE ALSO: InfoWars terms of service bans ‘hateful’ users just like Facebook, YouTube, and Apple

On the issue of whether the videos were monetized, YouTube confirmed “that it didn’t have a financial relationship with any of the removed channel owners.”

YouTube also confirmed that ads ran on the Syrian state-run channels, however the company said “the content on these channels was being monetized by separate content owners, not by the channel owners directly,” meaning that the accounts connected to the Syrian regime used content belonging to third parties.

YouTube’s system scans videos for such content and allows the copyright owner of the uploaded content to monetize the video, not the user who uploaded a copy of the content.

YouTube did not respond to queries as to whether it would pay the copyright owners for ads shown on material uploaded by the banned Syrian state-run channels.