Author: kenmay

T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

Enlarge T-Mobile USA failed to adequately disclose speed and data restrictions on its “unlimited data” plans and has agreed to pay a fine and provide some benefits to customers, the Federal Communications Commission said today. Like other carriers, T-Mobile slows the speeds of its unlimited data customers after they’ve used a certain amount of data each month; when these customers connect to congested cell towers, they receive lower speeds than customers without unlimited data plans. The throttling is applied after customers use 26GB in a month. “Under its ‘Top 3 Percent Policy,’ T-Mobile ‘de-prioritizes’ its ‘heavy’ data users during times of network contention or congestion,” the FCC said in an announcement today. “This potentially deprived these users of the advertised speeds of their data plan. According to consumers, this policy rendered data services ‘unusable’ for many hours each day and substantially limited their access to data.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

Vudu Movies On Us Offers Thousands of Free Movies, If You Don’t Mind Some Ads

It’s annoying to pay for a movie service and wonder where all the good movies are . Vudu’s hoping that you won’t mind that feeling quite as much if you get your movies for free (with a few ads, of course). Read more…

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Vudu Movies On Us Offers Thousands of Free Movies, If You Don’t Mind Some Ads

Spanish Police Arrest Their First Ever eBook Pirate

An anonymous reader writes: Spain’s Ministry of the Interior has announced the first ever arrest of an eBook pirate. The suspect is said to have uploaded more than 11, 000 literary works online, many on the same day as their official release. More than 400 subsequent sites are said to have utilized his releases. The investigation began in 2015 following a complaint from the Spanish Reproduction Rights Centre (CEDRO), a non-profit association of authors and publishers of books, magazines, newspapers and sheet music. According to the Ministry, CEDRO had been tracking the suspect but were only able to identify him by an online pseudonym. However, following investigations carried out by the police, his real identity was discovered. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Spanish Police Arrest Their First Ever eBook Pirate

Netgear’s new Nighthawk router doubles as a Plex server

Video streaming is becoming one of the main things we do on the internet, and few things in life are more annoying than having to wait for a clip to finish buffering. To keep up with our growing appetites for speed, Netgear has unveiled the Nighthawk X10 router, which it says is the fastest in the world. It’s got a 1.7GHz quad-core processor onboard that the company says is the speediest in a home router, as well as Quad Stream Wave 2 WiFi architecture that helps the device get up to 7.2 Gbps. Plus, it supports the latest 802.11ad standard . But what’s really interesting about the Nighthawk X10 is its Plex Media support that lets you turn any USB 3.0 flash drive or hard disk into a server, without requiring a computer. Previous devices in the popular Nighthawk line have also had USB ports onboard, but the X10 is the first to offer Plex firmware in its app to let you set up one or both of the two connected drives as a server. There’s no real limit to the storage size of the drives you can attach. Other non-speed-related goodies that come with the X10 include new mobile support for OpenVPN, so you can tap into your home network even when you’re overseas. The Nighthawk X10 is now available for $500, which is more expensive than prior models. That’s because, as Netgear explained, the new iteration is more like a mini PC than a mere router. If you’re a Plex fan, or prize having a really fast, high-end router that can keep your videos and backed up files available wherever you are, that price may be worth it. Otherwise, you might be better off finding a cheaper option.

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Netgear’s new Nighthawk router doubles as a Plex server

‘Cultlike’ Devotion: Apple Once Refused To Join Open Compute Project, So Their Entire Networking Team Quit

mattydread23 writes: Great story about the Open Compute Project from Business Insider’s Julie Bort here, including this fun tidbit: “‘OCP has a cultlike following, ‘ one person with knowledge of the situation told Business Insider. ‘The whole industry, internet companies, vendors, and enterprises are monitoring OCP.’ OCP aims to do for computer hardware what the Linux operating system did for software: make it ‘open source’ so anyone can take the designs for free and modify them, with contract manufacturers standing by to build them. In its six years, OCP has grown into a global entity, with board members from Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Intel, and Microsoft. In fact, there’s a well-known story among OCP insiders that demonstrates this cultlike phenom. It involves Apple’s networking team. This team was responsible for building a network at Apple that was so reliable, it never goes down. Not rarely — never. Building a 100% reliable network to meet Apple’s exacting standards was no easy task. So, instead of going it alone under Apple’s secrecy, the Apple networking team wanted to participate in the revolution, contributing and receiving help. But when the Apple team asked to join OCP, Apple said ‘no.’ ‘The whole team quit the same week, ‘ this person told us.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Cultlike’ Devotion: Apple Once Refused To Join Open Compute Project, So Their Entire Networking Team Quit

Samsung 960 Pro review: The fastest consumer SSD you can buy

(credit: Edward Chester) The all new Samsung 960 Pro, released today, is the follow up to last year’s 950 Pro . It offers the same core set of features, with an M.2 form factor , four-lane PCIe 3.0 interface, NVMe communication standard, and 3D V-NAND. But the 960 Pro isn’t just a minor spec bump. Samsung has seriously cranked up the speed (and capacities) of its flagship drives to the point where such ludicrous performance may be lost on all but the most demanding of users. These are some seriously hardcore SSDs. Where the 950 Pro was available in just 256GB and 512GB versions, the 960 Pro starts at 512GB, with 1TB and 2TB versions also available. For the first time, you can reasonably consider replacing an entire array of spinner hard drives or even 2.5-inch SATA SSDs with these things—so long as you’ve got the cash, of course. With a 256GB starting capacity, Samsung was able to offer the speed, longevity, and warranty of the 950 Pro to those only able to budget £170 ($199) for an SSD. But with the 960 Pro starting at $329 for the 512GB model  (probably ~£330), rising to $629 for 1TB, and an eye-watering $1,299 for 2TB, you’ll need to save some extra pennies to buy one, or wait it out for the Evo drives Samsung is launching later this year. Although a marked step down from the Pro range in some regards, the Evos are in theory faster than the 950 Pro drives for less money (thanks to using cheaper and more tightly packed TLC V-NAND). The 250GB will cost just $129 (~£130), 500GB will be $249 and 1TB will cost $470. There won’t be a 2TB version of the 960 Evo. Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung 960 Pro review: The fastest consumer SSD you can buy

XG.fast DSL does 10Gbps over telephone lines

(credit: Bob Dormon / Ars Technica UK) Nokia has achieved a connection speed of 5Gbps—about 625MB/sec—over 70 metres of conventional twisted-pair copper telephone wire, and 8Gbps over 30 metres. The trial used a relatively new digital subscriber line (DSL) protocol called XG.fast (aka G.fast2). XG.fast is the probable successor of G.fast , which was successfully trialled in a few countries over the past couple of years and will soon begin to commercially roll out. (In an unusual turn of events,  the UK will probably be the first country with G.fast .) Fundamentally, both G.fast and XG.fast are best described as “VDSL on steroids.” Basically, while a VDSL2 signal frequency maxes out around 17MHz, G.fast starts at 106MHz (it can be doubled to 212MHz) and XG.fast uses between 350MHz and 500MHz. This means that there’s a lot more bandwidth (the original meaning of the word), which in turn can be used for transferring data at higher speeds. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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XG.fast DSL does 10Gbps over telephone lines

Millimeter-wave 5G modem coming mid-2018 with 5Gbps peak download

(credit: Qualcomm) Qualcomm is promising to launch its first 5G modem in 2018, even though basic standards for 5G have yet to be established , nor even which part of the radio spectrum it will use. Dubbed the Snapdragon X50, the San Diego chipmaker says its new modem will be able to deliver blindingly fast peak download speeds of around 5Gbps. The X50 5G will at first operate with a bandwidth of about 800MHz on the 28GHz millimetre wave (mmWave in Qualcomm jargon) spectrum, a frequency that’s also being investigated by Samsung, Nokia, and Verizon. However, the powers that be have far from settled on this area of the spectrum, with 73GHz also being mooted. In the UK, Ofcom is investigating several bands in a range between 6GHz and 100GHz. As the industry as a whole is a long way from consensus, this could be Qualcomm’s bid to get the final frequency locked down well before 2020—the year that 5G is expected to reach any kind of consumer penetration. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Millimeter-wave 5G modem coming mid-2018 with 5Gbps peak download

Amazon Japan’s manga-ready Kindle has 8 times the storage

Amazon Japan has an unusual challenge with the Kindle: it not only has to cater to your typical bookworm, but to a local fondness for image-heavy (and thus storage-intensive) manga books . What it’s going to do? Release a special model just for those readers, apparently. The company has introduced a manga version of the Kindle Paperwhite with 32GB of storage, or eight times as much space as the run-of-the-mill 4GB model. You could cram every single volume of Asari-chan , Kochikame and Naruto into this e-reader, Amazon says. On top of that, a 33 percent faster page turning speed promises to keep you engrossed in your comics. The manga Kindle is available for pre-order now, with pricing commanding a slight premium over the usual Paperwhite. You’re spending ¥16, 280 (about $157), or ¥12, 280 ($118) if you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber. The first units ship October 21st, and the update to improve page turning performance should arrive by the end of the month. As you might gather, it’s not very likely that you’ll see this model elsewhere in the world — when the 4GB in regular Kindles is enough to hold thousands of regular books, Amazon doesn’t have much incentive to boost their capacity any time soon. Source: Amazon Japan (translated 1) , (2)

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Amazon Japan’s manga-ready Kindle has 8 times the storage

Samsung’s new 10nm process promises big power efficiency improvements

Enlarge (credit: Samsung) The news hasn’t been great for Samsung’s smartphone division lately, but there is good news for the chipmaking arm of the company: Samsung announced today that it has started to mass-produce chips on its new 10nm LPE manufacturing process, a major improvement over its current 14nm process. According to Samsung, 10nm chips can fit 30 percent more transistors within the same physical area as a 14nm chip. Chip designers will be able to create chips that are up to 27 percent faster or chips that use up to 40 percent less power, though most chips will probably do a little of both instead of maximizing one or the other. A second-generation, 10nm LPP process will begin mass production in the second half of 2017, roughly one year from today. Other than the timing, we only know that this revision is intended to boost performance. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung’s new 10nm process promises big power efficiency improvements