Comcast to issue discounts for days-long outage caused by bad update

Even this DSL-loving turtle thought Comcast’s service was too slow this week. Comcast Comcast attempted to update its X1 cable platform this week, but it ended up causing a lengthy outage for many customers. The company apologized yesterday and promised to issue credits to compensate customers for the time they weren’t able to use their TV service. Customer reports suggest that Internet service went down as well. “We know some of our customers may have missed their favorite shows off and on over the past few days and were unable to easily reach our customer care representatives for assistance… and we’re really sorry,” Comcast Senior VP Charlie Herrin wrote . Herrin’s new job is fixing Comcast’s disappointing customer service. His announcement yesterday, titled, “Our mistake: making it right for customers,” continues: In the process of upgrading the X1 platform with new services and features, a technical issue arose that caused problems for our customers. We’re working now to identify the customers who were impacted to personally apologize and proactively give them credits which we plan to have out to them within the next two weeks. This issue was our fault and we want to make it right. So what happened? While we were deploying an upgrade to the X1 platform, we discovered an issue in the way the software that updates X1 was configured. We immediately stopped the deployment, and our engineers began working to identify the root cause and fix the issue. While service has returned to normal for most X1 customers, our engineers are now going back over this issue and taking extra steps to prevent it from happening again. The fix we’ve put in place should be automatic—customers don’t need to do anything (such as rebooting or unplugging the box). Thanks to our customers who have been patient with us, and to our employees who have been working around the clock on this. Outages were reported  in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and other cities. According to customer reports at DownDetector.com, more customers experienced Internet outages than TV outages, with 10 percent reporting a “total blackout.” We’ve asked Comcast whether the faulty update also caused Internet outages but haven’t received an answer yet. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast to issue discounts for days-long outage caused by bad update

Ubisoft pulls upcoming holiday titles off Steam [Updated]

Update:  It seems all three games discussed below are now back up  on the US Steam store, though they are still unavailable in the UK. We’ll continue to monitor the situation and reach out for comment from Ubisoft and Valve. Original Story PC gamers who want to download upcoming Ubisoft titles like Far Cry 4 , The Crew , and Assassin’s Creed: Unity won’t be able to go through Valve’s Steam service, it seems. The Steam store pages for all three of those holiday titles have been taken down, being pulled in the UK early yesterday and disappearing in the US and other countries over last night and into this morning. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ubisoft pulls upcoming holiday titles off Steam [Updated]

Fast-Acting Nuclear Reactor Will Power Through Piles of Plutonium

Even the latest generation of nuclear power reactors can only harvest about five percent of the energy stored in their radioactive fuel supplies, and the toxic leftovers must then be buried deep underground to slowly decay over hundreds of thousands of years. But thanks to a new breed of sodium-cooled pool reactor, we may soon be able to draw nearly 100 times more energy from nuclear fuels, while slashing their half-lives by two orders of magnitude. Read more…

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Fast-Acting Nuclear Reactor Will Power Through Piles of Plutonium

Silk Road 3 Is Already Up, But It’s Not the Future of Darknet Drugs

There are three things you can count on in life: Death, taxes, and people buying drugs on the internet. Yesterday, the FBI seized black market website Silk Road 2.0 and charged the alleged admin Blake Benthall in federal court, trumpeting its bust with a sassy takedown notice . Read more…

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Silk Road 3 Is Already Up, But It’s Not the Future of Darknet Drugs

Taylor Swift wants no part of the music streaming ‘experiment’

Just days ago, Taylor Swift shook off Spotify . The star opted not to leave her new album off of the service and pulled the rest of her catalog. Lucky for us, Yahoo caught up with the globe-trotting star during a promotional tour in Japan for more insight on the matter. As you might expect, she echoed the sentiment shared by some of her fellow musician s: streaming services don’t adequately compensate artists and the rest of the folks who have a hand in making albums. What’s more, Swift goes on to call Spotify and similar offerings “experiments, ” and she isn’t “willing to contribute my life’s work” to those outfits that don’t properly pay up. Spotify, for example, has been around since 2008, so we’re a bit beyond the honeymoon phase. Subscription-based and ad-supported music streaming has taken root in our lives, and it’s not leaving anytime soon unless there’s some kind of drastic change. She’s also well aware of the example she’s setting. And being the popular role model that she is, Swift doesn’t want folks thinking it’s okay to give their hard work away for free. In the end though, it apparently just didn’t feel right. “But I think it’s really still up for debate whether this is actual progress, or whether this is taking the word “music” out of the music industry, ” Swift explainss. Of course, Swift’s previous releases are available elsewhere, and Rdio reaffirmed its commitment to artist choice today, while boasting that the star’s back catalog can still be streamed there. If you’re after the full quote from the interview, it’s just below. Oh yeah, Swift’s new album 1989 sold well over a million albums in its first week. If I had streamed the new album, it’s impossible to try to speculate what would have happened. But all I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment. And I’m not willing to contribute my life’s work to an experiment that I don’t feel fairly compensates the writers, producers, artists, and creators of this music. And I just don’t agree with perpetuating the perception that music has no value and should be free. I wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this summer that basically portrayed my views on this. I try to stay really open-minded about things, because I do think it’s important to be a part of progress. But I think it’s really still up for debate whether this is actual progress, or whether this is taking the word “music” out of the music industry. Also, a lot of people were suggesting to me that I try putting new music on Spotify with “Shake It Off, ” and so I was open-minded about it. I thought, “I will try this; I’ll see how it feels.” It didn’t feel right to me. I felt like I was saying to my fans, “If you create music someday, if you create a painting someday, someone can just walk into a museum, take it off the wall, rip off a corner off it, and it’s theirs now and they don’t have to pay for it.” I didn’t like the perception that it was putting forth. And so I decided to change the way I was doing things. [Photo credit: Fred Lee/ABC via Getty Images] Filed under: Internet , Software Comments Via: TechCrunch Source: Yahoo

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Taylor Swift wants no part of the music streaming ‘experiment’

Facebook makes it easier to hide your annoying friends’ posts

If you’ve just about had enough of those annoying online quizzes you keep seeing on Facebook , well the social network has just introduced a new way for you to stop seeing them. Now when you select to hide a story (which you can do by hitting the arrow on the top right), you can also request to see less from that person or Page. Or, if you so choose, you can unfollow them entirely. Additionally, there’s also a new News Feed setting that’ll show you the top people, Pages and Groups that have popped up in your feed in the past week. You can then unfollow them if you want, or re-follow the folks that you’ve unfollowed in the past. Both features are available on desktop today. As for mobile, the latter News Feed setting is ready today, while the former “see less” feature will be available in coming weeks. Thankfully, even after you’ve unfollowed your buddy’s posts, your Facebook friendship will still remain intact. Filed under: Internet Comments

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Facebook makes it easier to hide your annoying friends’ posts

PC Cooling Specialist Zalman Goes Bankrupt Due To Fraud

An anonymous reader writes Zalman’s parent company Moneual’s CEO Harold Park, and vice presidents Scott Park and Won Duck-yeok, have apparently spent the last five years producing fraudulent documentation relating to the sales performance of Zalman. These documents inflated sales figures and export data for Zalman’s products. The reason? Bank loans. By increasing sales and exports Park and his associates were able to secure bank loans totaling $2.98 billion. Someone has finally realized what has been going on, though, triggering Zalman’s shares to be suspended on the stock market and the company filing for bankruptcy protection. The questions now turn to how this practice was allowed to continue unnoticed for so long and how the banks will go about getting their near $3 billion back. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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PC Cooling Specialist Zalman Goes Bankrupt Due To Fraud

Lenovo is the new king of the PC and tablet hill

Did you know that Lenovo had planned to become the world’s biggest PC and tablet maker by the end of 2016? It turns out that the company’s achievement was even greater than its ambition, since the milestone has been reached six financial quarters early. In Lenovo’s latest earnings release, the company trumps its new status as king of the PC (and tablet) world, having made a healthy $262 million net profit for the three months between July and September. Some of the highlights include a big upswing in tablet and smartphone sales, as well as a big boost from the enterprise businesses its keeps buying from IBM . At the same time, Lenovo has decided to add Yahoo co-founder (and current Alibaba board member) Jerry Yang to its board, because that’s the sort of thing a company does when it’s making serious bank. Filed under: Lenovo Comments Via: Reuters Source: Lenovo , (2)

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Lenovo is the new king of the PC and tablet hill

British Spies Are Free To Target Lawyers and Journalists

Advocatus Diaboli writes British spies have been granted the authority to secretly eavesdrop on legally privileged attorney-client communications, according to newly released documents. On Thursday, a series of previously classified policies confirmed for the first time that the U.K.’s top surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters has advised its employees: “You may in principle target the communications of lawyers.” The country’s other major security and intelligence agencies—MI5 and MI6—have adopted similar policies, the documents show. The guidelines also appear to permit surveillance of journalists and others deemed to work in “sensitive professions.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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British Spies Are Free To Target Lawyers and Journalists

Major Performance Improvement Discovered For Intel’s GPU Linux Driver

An anonymous reader writes: LunarG, on contract with Valve Software, discovered a critical shortcoming with the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver that was handicapping the performance. A special bit wasn’t being set by the Linux driver but was by the Windows driver, which when enabled is increasing the Linux performance in many games by now ~20%+, which should allow for a much more competitive showing between Intel OpenGL performance on Windows vs. Linux. However, the patch setting this bit isn’t public yet as apparently it’s breaking video acceleration in certain cases. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Major Performance Improvement Discovered For Intel’s GPU Linux Driver