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If you’ve bought bottled water from Trader Joe’s, youll want to be aware of a recent recall published by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Thats because the recall involves water in glass bottles that present a laceration risk. In total, about 61,500 bottles are included in the recall. Heres what you need to know. What is being recalled? The recall involves select lots of Gerolsteiner brand sparkling water sold at Trader Joe’s. The water was manufactured by Gerolsteiner Brunnen GmbH & Co. KG in Germany. Here are the details of the recalled product: Product name: Gerolsteiner 750ml Sparkling Water Bottles Lot numbers: 11/28/2024 L or 11/27/2024 L According to the CPSC notice, the recalled units were sold individually for about $3 per bottle and also sold in cases of 15 bottles. Around 61,500 bottles are thought to be impacted. The large glass bottles can be identified by the white, blue, and red label with the name Gerolsteiner on the front of it. The lot number of the bottle can be viewed on the lower part of the label. According to a separate notice on the Gerolsteiner website, the best-before dates on the products are December 2027. Why is the bottled water being recalled? The reason for the bottled water recall doesnt have to do with the water itself. Instead the recall has been issued because there is a defect with the glass water bottle the sparkling water comes in. That bottle can crack, leading to a laceration hazard. While there is a risk to individuals handling the recalled bottles, the CPSC says that so far, no incidents or injuries have been reported. Where and when were the recalled bottled waters sold? The recalled bottled waters were sold at Trader Joes stores in 12 states between December 2024 and January 2025. Individual bottles retailed for about $3. The 12 states where the bottled water was sold are: Alabama Arkansas Colorado Florida Georgia Kansas Louisiana New Mexico Oklahoma South Carolina Tennessee Texas What do I do if I have the recalled bottled water? If you have the recalled bottled water, you should immediately stop using the bottles, says the CPSC. Instead, you should return the bottles to their place of purchase. The CPSC notice notes that you will not need to have your proof of purchase but that the bottle of the product is required in order to receive a refund, which may be in the form of credit or cash.
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State officials are warning Americans not to respond to a surge of scam road toll collection texts.The texts impersonating state road toll collection agencies attempt to get phone users to reveal financial information, such as credit or debit cards or bank accounts.They’re so-called smishing scamsa form of phishing that relies on SMS texts to trick people into sending money or share sensitive information.Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said she received one purporting to be from the statewide GeauxPass toll system.“It is a SCAM,” Murrill posted on Facebook this week. “If you ever receive a text that looks suspicious, be sure to never click on it. You don’t want your private information stolen by scammers.”Even states that don’t charge drivers tolls have noticed an uptick.“We do not have tolls roads in Vermont but travelers may mistake these scams for actual toll operators in other states,” Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark said in a video public service announcement posted on Instagram.Cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks said last week that a threat actor has registered over 10,000 domains for the scams. The scams are impersonating toll services and package delivery services in at least 10 U.S. states and the Canadian province of Ontario.While Apple bans links in iPhone messages received from unknown senders, the scam attempts to bypass that protection by inviting users to reply with “Y” and reopen the text.A warning last April from the FBI said the texts used nearly identical language falsely claiming that recipients have an unpaid or outstanding toll. Some threaten fines or suspended driving privileges if recipients don’t pay up.The FBI at the time asked those who received the scams to file a complaint with its IC3 internet crime complaint center and to also delete the texts. The FBI didn’t immediately respond to a request for updated guidance Thursday.The story has been corrected to reflect that the FBI did not issue a fresh warning this week on road toll text scams. The FBI warning was issued in April 2024.
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Before I go any further, a programming note: On Thursday, March 27 at 1 p.m. ET, my colleague Max Ufberg and I will host The AI Tools We Love Right Nowand Whats Next, an online event exclusively for Fast Company Premium subscribers. Well discuss the AI-assisted productivity products that are actually helping us get our jobs done, and where wed like to see the whole category go. Fast Company Premium subscribers can RSVP here. And if you arent yet a subscriber, heres where you can become one. Hope to see you there! When I first got excited by Siri, it wasnt part of Apple, let alone the iPhone. At the timeFebruary 2010it was just promising a stand-alone iPhone app from a startup that had been spun out of Silicon Valley R&D icon SRI, drawing on its research collaboration with the U.S. Department of Defenses DARPA lab. Almost three months elapsed before Apple acquired Siri, and another year and a half until the company built it into iOS, starting with a beta version on the iPhone 4s. I was excited about that, too, calling it breathtaking for a beta and adding, If voice-activated assistants are all around us in five or ten years, well look back and say it all started here. They were, and we did. Screenshots I took of Siri in February 2010, well before it was a standard iPhone feature. (It still cant help book flights.) But long before Siri celebrated its fifth birthday, its reputation foundered. Even early on, much analysis of the voice assistant deemed it a disappointment, often expressing the hope that Apple would eventually give it a transformative upgrade. Over time, oceans of wordage were dedicated to the topic. More than 15 years after I first gave Siri a try, its still waiting for its big, game-changing update. In this case, the update in question is the more natural, relevant, personal version that Apple previewed last June as part of Apple Intelligence during its WWDC keynote. It still hasnt shipped. And on Friday, the company announced that work on the update was taking longer than we thought and the release wouldn’t happen until sometime in the coming year. The most logical guess: It will be rolled into iOS 19 and MacOS 16, which should ship this fall. Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber has a long and acidic account of the delay and its implications. In brief: Apple seems to have repeatedly shown off stuff so far from completion that it wasnt even ready for live demos. Eventually, the company concluded that it was in over its headfor reasons it hasnt explained, and wontand pushed the release off to some unspecified date. Theres a name for products like that: vaporware. The tech industry is rife with examples. Apple, in its modern history, has been atypically disciplined about avoiding themwhich makes this incident only more striking. Now, its easy to understand how Apple bit off a more ambitious upgrade than it could chew its way through as quickly as expected. The new Siri is designed to respond to free-form requests such as Send Erica the photos from Saturdays barbecue, a big leap from the assistants history of only understanding a limited set of instructions expressed in a precise way. Along with requiring greater language skills, the new Siri will sift through your email, calendar, contacts, notes, photos, and other information stored on your device in ways that havent been done before. All this is the most interesting use of AI that Apple has announced, and also the most ambitious. Its literally something only Apple could do. No other company has enough access to iOS to dream of building itthough as my colleague Jared Newman explained last June, it also held the potential to make third-party apps way more Siri-friendly than in the past. But for all of the new Siris potential, it also feels like something that Apple was scrambling to release as proof it isnt behind in AI. The generative AI boom unleashed more than two years ago by ChatGPT has left the company in an unusually reactive mode, as it plays catch-up in areas such as image generation. A much better Siri might have taken Apple far beyond me-too territory. It still could. With the delay, however, the company only looks more like it doesnt yet have a handle on AI and how to make the most of it in Apple products. I cant help but think, though, that Apples failure to get the new Siri out the door isnt just about the challenge of doing AI in a way thats useful, reliable, and safe. Its part of the much larger, longer story of Siri being full of promise and only sporadically living up to it. I see two other specific factors at play. Part of Apples 2024 preview of the new era for Siri. [Screenshot: Apple] Factor one: Apple may be overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of software updates it tries to pump out each year. In the pre-iPhone era, the company had only one operating system to wrangleMacOS, then known as OS Xand didnt attempt to update it on a set timetable. Now its put itself on a yearly schedule and must juggle upgrades for MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, tvOS, and VisionOS. Of course thats tough. Its no shocker that certain elements might suffer from insufficient resource allocation: More often than not, for instance, my beloved iPad feels neglected from a software standpoint. And Apple TVtheoretically a core Apple product in the streaming ageremains a little-changing hobby. Artificial intelligence must be the furthest thing from an area Apple feels it can safely deprioritize. But its also among the most demanding. The company may simply have had too many things going on at once to adequately focus on Siri, even after bragging about the new version during its WWDC and iPhone 16 keynotes. Factor two: On some level I dont quite understand, Apple may never quite have emotionally bonded with Siri. How else to explain the companys failure to do all that much with it over all these years? Acquiring Siri in 2010 was prescient. So was building it into the iPhone. If Apple had pushed ahead with the feature as ambitiously as possible, iOS might look quite different today. Apple might even have a reputation for being ahead in AI. But maybe Siri simply took it out of its comfort zone of polished visuals, touch input, consistent experiences, and the other elements that made the iPhone such a landmark. Declaring that Siri was headed for a new era, showing it off in splashy canned presentations, and then kicking the can down the road is one of the more embarrassing predicaments Apple has created for itself in recent years. Despite that, I think the delay was sensible. Its more important that Siri be great than that it arrive on time. And having waited for it to be great since 2011, we can surely wait a little longer. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if youre reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. Im also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. More top tech stories from Fast Company Box CEO Aaron Levie finds a middle ground on tech policy during Trumps second termThe Box CEO says U.S. leadership in AI and innovation still depends on smart policyand hes cautiously encouraged by what hes seen so far. Read More TikToks comment sections are being flooded with copy-pasted Christian messagesIs it a revival, a bot campaign, or just TikTok being TikTok? Read More Moonvalley launches an AI video generator built for moviemakingThe startups Marey model creates high-definition video from licensed footageand its already being tested by major studios and brands. Read More 4 AI robots your aging parents want in their homesFrom digital assistants to handy robots, AI could dramatically change the way people age in place. Read More NASAs new AI satellites could revolutionize disaster responseIn partnership with startup Ubotica, NASAs JPL is testing AI-powered satellites that analyze and act in real timewithout waiting for human input. Read More Try these hybrid tools for thinking on paperFrom reMarkable to Rocketbook, heres how you can combine analog and digital tools to capture ideas, stay organized, and avoid distraction. Read More
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