Author: kenmay

NY sues Charter/Time Warner Cable, alleges false promise of fast Internet

(credit: Aurich Lawson) New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman today filed a lawsuit against Charter and its Time Warner Cable (TWC) subsidiary, claiming that the Internet provider “allegedly conduct[ed] a deliberate scheme to defraud and mislead New Yorkers by promising Internet service that they knew they could not deliver.” State officials said they conducted a 16-month investigation that reviewed internal corporate communications “and hundreds of thousands of subscriber speed tests,” concluding that Spectrum-TWC customers were “dramatically short-changed on both speed and reliability,” the attorney general’s announcement said . The 87-page summons and complaint filed in the New York State Supreme Court is available here . “The suit alleges that subscribers’ wired Internet speeds for the premium plan (100, 200, and 300 Mbps) were up to 70 percent slower than promised; Wi-Fi speeds were even slower, with some subscribers getting speeds that were more than 80 percent slower than what they had paid for,” the announcement said. “As alleged in the complaint, Spectrum-TWC charged New Yorkers as much as $109.99 per month for premium plans [that] could not achieve speeds promised in their slower plans.” Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NY sues Charter/Time Warner Cable, alleges false promise of fast Internet

The Future of iOS is 64-Bit Only — Apple To Stop Support For 32-Bit Apps

Your ability to run 32-bit apps on an iOS device is coming to an end. As several other Apple news sites have reported, Apple has updated the pop-up warning in the iOS 10.3 beta to say that the 32-bit app you’re running “will not work with future versions of iOS.” The warning goes on to say that the “developer of this app needs to update it to improve its compatibility.” From a ComputerWorld article (edited for clarity): In October 2014, Apple told developers that all new apps created after February 1, 2015 must have 64-bit support. Shortly after, Apple announced that all updates to apps must also be 64-bit compatible. Any 32-bit apps submitted to Apple after June 2015 would be rejected. Last September, Apple announced that it was going to remove apps from the App Store that did not “function as intended, don’t follow current review guidelines, or are outdated.” Presumably, this would include apps that did not meet the 64-bit requirement. Apple does not state which version of iOS will be 64-bit only, but since this is a major development, you can probably assume that this will happen in iOS 11. An announcement will likely be made during Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this summer. The switch to 64-bit only support means that older iOS devices built on 32-bit architecture will not be able to upgrade to the new iOS. This includes the iPhone 5, 5c, and older, the standard version of the iPad (so not the Air or the Pro), and the first iPad mini. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Future of iOS is 64-Bit Only — Apple To Stop Support For 32-Bit Apps

Touch Bar MacBook Pros Are Being Banned From Bar Exams Over Predictive Text

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When it launched late last year, the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar was largely reliant on first-party applications to show off what it could do. Since then, a number of other companies have jumped on board, helping the secondary screen grow into something more than novelty. Of course, as with any new technology, there’s going to be some unanticipated downside. Test taking software company Examsoft, for one, believes the input device could help facilitate cheating among students taking the bar exam. What’s perhaps most interesting here, is that the company’s calling out one of Touch Bar’s more mundane features: predictive text. “By default, ” the company writes, “the Touch Bar will show predictive text depending on what the student is typing, compromising exam integrity.” It’s hard to say precisely how the company expects a standard feature on mobile devices to help students pass one of the more notoriously exam out there, but The Next Web notes that some states have already taken action. North Carolina, for one, has required test takers with the new model MacBooks to disable the Touch Bar, while New York is banning the machines altogether. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Touch Bar MacBook Pros Are Being Banned From Bar Exams Over Predictive Text

GitLab.com Melts Down After Wrong Directory Deleted, Backups Fail

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Source-code hub Gitlab.com is in meltdown after experiencing data loss as a result of what it has suddenly discovered are ineffectual backups. On Tuesday evening, Pacific Time, the startup issued the sobering series of tweets, starting with “We are performing emergency database maintenance, GitLab.com will be taken offline” and ending with “We accidentally deleted production data and might have to restore from backup. Google Doc with live notes [link].” Behind the scenes, a tired sysadmin, working late at night in the Netherlands, had accidentally deleted a directory on the wrong server during a frustrating database replication process: he wiped a folder containing 300GB of live production data that was due to be replicated. Just 4.5GB remained by the time he canceled the rm -rf command. The last potentially viable backup was taken six hours beforehand. That Google Doc mentioned in the last tweet notes: “This incident affected the database (including issues and merge requests) but not the git repos (repositories and wikis).” So some solace there for users because not all is lost. But the document concludes with the following: “So in other words, out of 5 backup/replication techniques deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place.” At the time of writing, GitLab says it has no estimated restore time but is working to restore from a staging server that may be “without webhooks” but is “the only available snapshot.” That source is six hours old, so there will be some data loss. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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GitLab.com Melts Down After Wrong Directory Deleted, Backups Fail

‘Donkey Kong 64’ player finds rare collectible 17 years later

The 3D platformer Donkey Kong 64 was lauded for its expansive worlds and multitude of well-hidden collectibles when it launched on the Nintendo 64 in 1999. Like many games of the era, it has enjoyed a peculiar afterlife as speedrunners blitz through it in record time under various conditions, like picking up each of the 976 banana coins found within. Unfortunately, all those completionist runs now seem to be invalid: 17 years after the game came out, streamer Isotarge has found a 977th coin. Turns out the collectible was hidden underground in the game’s fifth level, Fungi Forest, but the telltale patch of dirt indicating buried treasure in the game was hidden by a patch of tall grass. Isotarge was examining save data for that stage and discovered that the information for a particular pickup, rainbow coins, was incomplete. Using analysis tools, they pinpointed its location and unearthed it. While Isotarge is no stranger to using glitches to find out-of-bounds items likely leftover by developers, this particular coin is in fair territory and can be plucked from the ground using an ordinary character move. @Znernicus yes, times have been removed in All Collectables, 949 banana coins (now 974), Fungi coins, DK coins, All Rainbow Coins — Bismuth

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‘Donkey Kong 64’ player finds rare collectible 17 years later

Amazon plans to build a $1.5 billion air cargo hub in Kentucky

We may be decades away from the flying warehouses Amazon wants to build, but the e-commerce giant is growing its shipping and distribution network in different ways. The company has just announced that it plans to build its first air cargo hub at Northern Kentucky Airport to house its current and future fleet of planes. It’s expected to cost Amazon over $1.5 billion in investment and might eventually have buildings and material-handling equipment. According to The Wall Street Journal , this move signifies that Amazon is “ramping up its expansion into transporting, sorting and delivering its own packages.” When the 2-million-square-foot hub opens, it will certainly reduce the e-retailer’s dependence on UPS and FedEx in the area. It will initially employ 2, 000 people, but it could end up having more personnel. WSJ says Amazon’s end goal is to deliver packages for itself and other retailers — to ultimately become a legit courier and direct competitor to bigger companies like UPS. It helps that the cargo hub’s location is apparently within a couple of days’ drive from a densely populated area. While Amazon doesn’t have a timeline for the air cargo hub yet, it has already begun working on its shipping freight endeavor. A WSJ report from a few days ago revealed that the company has been coordinating shipments of containers from China since October as a freight forwarder. Source: The Wall Street Journal

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Amazon plans to build a $1.5 billion air cargo hub in Kentucky

New brain-computer interface breaks through locked-in syndrome

Researchers have been using brain-computer interfaces to interact with patients suffering from locked-in syndrome for a few years now. But a new system from the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering in Switzerland may finally allow even the most immobile patients communicate with the outside world. There are degrees to locked-in syndrome. The lesser variety only allows those suffering from it to raise or lower their eyes and blink, they’re fully paralyzed otherwise. Fully locked-in syndrome prohibits even that degree of movement. So rather than rely on optical keyboards as previous studies have, the Wyss team developed a means of reading patient’s minds directly by measuring the flow of oxygenated blood flowing through their brains. The study was published Tuesday on the journal PLOS . The team relied on the help of four patients who suffer from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease), a motor neuron disorder that progressively destroys the nervous system’s ability to control the body’s muscles. The Wyss researchers first used near-infrared spectroscopy and electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the brain’s blood oxygenation and electrical activity levels. The patients were then asked basic yes or no questions while the machines recorded changes in those metrics. “The machine records the blood flow… and calculates how (it) changes during “yes” and during “no”, and the computer develops an idea, a pattern, ” Wyss neuroscientist, Niels Birbaumer, told Reuters . “And after a while, we know what the patient is thinking, when he thinks “yes”, or when he thinks “no”, and from that we calculate the answer.” After enough training, the system managed a 70 percent accuracy rate for standard Y/N questions like, “Is this your husband?” More interestingly, when asked “Are you happy?” all four respondents, 100 percent of the time, answered “yes”. The team hopes to leverage this data into future research in hopes that people paralyzed by disease or injury can lead fuller lives. Via: Reuters Source: PLOS

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New brain-computer interface breaks through locked-in syndrome

Civilization ported to 8-bit Commodore 64

Civilization was one of the classic games of the 16-bit age, when computers with speedy processors and hundreds of kilobytes of RAM made it possible to model and memorize complex, culture-bound simulations of human history. Twenty years on, though, it’s been ported back to a humble 8-bit system that predated it by years. The genius behind the conversion is Fabian Hertel, and it’s not just a mockup: a fully playable demo is available to enjoy . 8-bit Civ runs on Commodore 64 and, while reduced in scope, features cities, units, AI opponents, scientific advances and wonders of the world. 8 Bit Civilizations (working title) has understandably been reduced in scope from the original PC and Amiga versions. For example you can play against a maximum of 3 AI opponents (or 2 if barbarians are enabled), and the world map is not as large. However even in its current state, the game is every bit as fun as the original, and even includes some innovative new features. Such as you may chose the gender of your nation’s leader, so if you choose to play the English nation, you be Henry VIII as well as Elizabeth I. The game board is played from an isometric perspective, a feature which wasn’t added in the original line of games until Civilization II (1996). It clearly doesn’t shy much from the game’s complexity. Check out the traditionally numbing endgame going on in the screenshot below!

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Civilization ported to 8-bit Commodore 64

Dial-a-Grue: play Zork with nothing but an old phone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=cJzgiDgBpcw The first iteration of Dial-a-Grue , in 2011, was to kit out an old rotary dial phone with an embedded computer and text-to-speech engine so that you could play Zork with nothing but the handset. The new, 2.0 version of the project, is “to port Zork I (via a z-code interpreter) to an embedded platform, and enclose that and an old modem inside a telephone, so that the game can be played from a teletype, TDD, or old computer with an acoustically coupled modem.” ( via JWZ )

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Dial-a-Grue: play Zork with nothing but an old phone

Pandora’s radio data now included in Billboard Hot 100

Despite recent layoffs and the fact that it only launched a streaming service last month , Pandora is a giant player in the internet radio market. Billboard unveiled a partnership with the service for its Hot 100 chart, and says it immediately impacted 35 songs. It pushed nine of those up by five or more spots in the rankings, including Sex With Me from Rihanna and Rob $tone’s Chill Bill , which leaped 10 places. Lady Gaga’s Million Reasons , meanwhile, is now on the Hot 100 thanks to Pandora, Billboard says. Though Pandora recently launched a $10 Premium streaming service based on its Rdio acquisition , it won’t be available to the public until later this year. Still, it has a very consequential 78 million users and 4.3 million subscribers to its $5 Pandora Plus (not-on-demand) radio service. “Pandora is now the number one radio station in 87 US markets and represents roughly 10 percent of all radio listening, ” says Pandora CEO Tim Westergren. That’s why Pandora had such an immediate impact, even services with many more subscribers like Spotify and Apple Music already affect the chart. Pandora data will also be included in Billboard’s streaming and formula-based charts, including country, rock, R&B/Hip-Hop, Rap and Dance/Electronica. Despite the boost, Pandora announced earlier this month that it had laid off 7 percent of its workforce, due to a big increase in competition from Apple Music, Spotify and other services. On top of the $75 million spent on Rdio, it also completely revamped its site late last year and is no doubt spending big to launch Pandora Premium streaming. The company is reportedly looking for a buyer, with Sirius XM rumored to be the leading candidate so far. It may be able to take some hope from Tidal, which just sold a big chunk of itself to Sprint for a reported $200 million. Source: Billboard

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Pandora’s radio data now included in Billboard Hot 100