Tag: black

Verizon creates monthly “maintenance” fee for customers with old routers

The Verizon FiOS Quantum Gateway (no maintenance fee required). (credit: Verizon) Verizon FiOS customers using one of the company’s older routers are being told they must pay a new monthly “maintenance charge” of $2.80 to cover the cost of supporting the apparently outdated equipment. Customers also have the option of buying one of the company’s newer routers, though some report being able to convince Verizon to give them a new one for free. “Our records indicate that you have an older model router that is being discontinued,” says an e-mail to customers published today by DSLReports . “If you do plan to keep using your current router, we will begin billing, on 9.29.16, a monthly Router Maintenance Charge of $2.80 (plus taxes), to ensure we deliver the best support.” Verizon confirmed the change to DSLReports, saying that the notice was sent to customers using the BHR1 and BHR2 routers. “Many of these routers have been in use for nearly ten years and have required more frequent repairs, so we’re trying to reduce that maintenance load and expense,” Verizon said. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon creates monthly “maintenance” fee for customers with old routers

CERN Physicists Have Discovered a Batch of New Exotic Particles

Scientists working at CERN have found four new “tetraquark” particles comprised of the same four subatomic building blocks. These exotic particles don’t last very long, and they probably don’t play an important cosmological role, but the discovery reveals the surprising diversity of the tetraquark family. Read more…

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CERN Physicists Have Discovered a Batch of New Exotic Particles

Ethical Hackers Donate 1,000,000 Air Miles To Charity

An anonymous reader writes:Certified ethical hackers at Offensi.com identified a bug allowing remote code execution on one of United Airlines’ sites, and submitted their findings to the airline’s “bug bounty” program. After a fix was placed into production, their team was awarded 1, 000, 000 Mileage Plus air miles, which they say was accompanied by an email informing them that the IRS would consider their award as $20, 000 of taxable income. “If after evaluating the taxable amount you choose not to accept your award, you are also able to donate your award to charity, ” the e-mail explained. The hackers ultimately chose to distribute their air miles among three charities — the Ronald McDonald house, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and the Casa de Esperanza de los Ninos Organization. Another security researcher complained in November that United failed to close a serious vulnerability he’d identified for almost six months. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ethical Hackers Donate 1,000,000 Air Miles To Charity

Windows 10 Upgrades Will Cost $120 Starting July 30th, So Go Do It Now

Free upgrades to Microsoft’s latest operating system are running out soon. On June 30th, one year after the release of Windows 10, anyone who hasn’t already upgraded will have to shell out $119 to move up to the latest and greatest. Read more…

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Windows 10 Upgrades Will Cost $120 Starting July 30th, So Go Do It Now

‘World of Warcraft’ keeps growing with ‘Legion’ in August

Blizzard will launch World of Warcraft ‘s sixth expansion, Legion , on August 30th, unleashing hordes of hellish beasts and fresh quests into the game world. Legion adds the Demon Hunter hero class, customizable artifact weapons and a new continent called the Broken Isles, among other updates. Pre-orders are live now in two flavors: the $50 Standard Edition or the $70 Digital Deluxe Edition, which includes an adorable demon dog as a pet, the Illidari Felstalker mount, and in-game goodies for Heroes of the Storm , StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3 (all of which are Blizzard properties as well). Pre-ordering the Standard or Digital Deluxe versions of Legion grants players the ability to boost one character up to level 100 and early access to the Demon Hunter class. Plus, there’s one more way to give Blizzard your money: The $90 Collector’s Edition includes everything from the Digital Deluxe version plus a hardcover art book, a two-disc behind-the-scenes Blu-ray / DVD set, a CD soundtrack and a Legion mousepad. This bundle will be available at retail only. World of Warcraft is an MMO that debuted in 2004 and quickly evolved into one of the most popular video games in the world. It hit a player-count high in 2010 with 12 million subscribers, but that number fell to 10 million in 2014 and finally 5.5 million in September 2015. That’s still millions of players, but the decline has fueled whispers of WoW ‘s demise — something that Blizzard will surely try to silence with Legion . Starting in 2016, Blizzard will no longer report subscriber numbers for World of Warcraft , so we’ll have to rely on gut feelings going forward. Source: BusinessWire

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‘World of Warcraft’ keeps growing with ‘Legion’ in August

Canadian Police Have Had BlackBerry’s Global Decryption Key Since 2010

Justin Ling and Jordan Pearson, reporting for Vice News: A high-level surveillance probe of Montreal’s criminal underworld shows that Canada’s federal policing agency has had a global encryption key for BlackBerry devices since 2010. The revelations are contained in a stack of court documents that were made public after members of a Montreal crime syndicate pleaded guilty to their role in a 2011 gangland murder. The documents shed light on the extent to which the smartphone manufacturer, as well as telecommunications giant Rogers, cooperated with investigators. According to technical reports by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that were filed in court, law enforcement intercepted and decrypted roughly one million PIN-to-PIN BlackBerry messages in connection with the probe. The report doesn’t disclose exactly where the key — effectively a piece of code that could break the encryption on virtually any BlackBerry message sent from one device to another — came from. But, as one police officer put it, it was a key that could unlock millions of doors. Government lawyers spent almost two years fighting in a Montreal courtroom to keep this information out of the public record. Motherboard has published another article in which it details how Canadian police intercept and read encrypted BlackBerry messages. “BlackBerry to Canadian court: Please don’t reveal the fact that we backdoored our encryption, ” privacy and security activist Christopher Soghoian wittily summarizes the report. “Canadian gov: If you use Blackberry consumer encryption, you’re a “dead chicken”. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Canadian Police Have Had BlackBerry’s Global Decryption Key Since 2010

Run 500 hard-to-find Apple II programs in your web browser

Sure, it’s easy to find ways to run classic Apple II programs like The Oregon Trail or Prince of Persia . But what about that obscure educational title you remember using as a kid? Is it doomed to be forgotten? You might not have to worry. The Internet Archive has announced that its web-based emulation catalog now includes over 500 relatively tough-to-find Apple II programs that might otherwise have disappeared forever. If you remember using the likes of The Quarter Mile or The Observatory , you can fire it up without having to dig your old computer out of storage. In many cases, it’s almost surprising that the programs are available at all. They come from an era when copy protection frequently involved hardware-specific tricks, and attempts to crack them often broke code or included unsightly credits to the cracking teams involved. Here, that isn’t an issue — the goal is to preserve the software as faithfully as possible. The Internet Archive likely can’t save everything even it keeps expanding its library, but it could prevent large swaths of Apple II history from being reduced to memories. Source: Internet Archive

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Run 500 hard-to-find Apple II programs in your web browser

Vivo Xplay5 boasts 6GB RAM and a familiar curved screen

If you need an excuse to acquire a new exotic Chinese smartphone, then how about 6GB of RAM? Not only is Vivo’s new Xplay5 the first mobile device to announce this spec, but it’s also the second non-Samsung device — following the BlackBerry Priv — to pack a screen that’s curved on both sides. Judging by its familiar metallic design, you’d easily think that the Xplay5 is the bastard child of the Galaxy S6 Edge (front) and the iPhone (back) after a one night stand in Dongguan (the S7 Edge’s chamfer isn’t as shiny). Despite the unfortunate similarities, this is still a surprisingly decent product in terms of hardware and specs — much like how its predecessor, the Xplay3S , managed to wow us a little over two years ago. The dual-SIM Xplay5 comes in two flavors. The “Flagship Edition” features Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 chipset, 6GB of speedy LPDDR4 RAM, 128GB of internal storage and a “HiFi 3.0” package consisting of two ES9028 SABRE Mobile DAC chips plus three OPA1612 amplifiers for improved audio quality overall. As for the regular model, you get the mid-range Snapdragon 652 , a “mere” 4GB of RAM, also 128GB of storage and a different combination of audio chips (CS4398 plus AD45257). Both versions sport a 5.43-inch Super AMOLED display with QHD resolution (2, 560 x 1, 440) along with a fingerprint reader on the back. For photography, a 16-megapixel f/2.0 Sony IMX298-powered main camera with phase detection auto-focus plus dual-tone LED flash, and a generous 8-megapixel f/2.4 front-facing camera for you selfie addicts. The built-in 3, 600mAh battery should be plentiful, and the rapid charging support comes in handy (we’ve yet to confirm whether it’s the Quick Charge 2.0 or 3.0 standard). What’s a bit disappointing is the lack of NFC and USB Type-C here, as well as the fact that the Xplay5 only comes with Android 5.1 (under Vivo’s skin, of course). While no date has been mentioned for the “Flagship Edition” just yet, the regular model is already up for pre-order. It’s no Xiaomi; you’ll need to pay up 3, 698 yuan or about $560, or you can wait for a while to save up 4, 288 yuan or about $650 for that beast of a phone. Both are available in gold and pink. Source: Vivo

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Vivo Xplay5 boasts 6GB RAM and a familiar curved screen

Netflix is going all in on HDR and more original content

After revealing an ambitious plan for global expansion earlier this year , Netflix is now looking to focus on what’s arguably the most important part of its business: content. In a recent meeting at Mobile World Congress 2016 , the video giant shared more details about what subscribers should expect next. And that mostly revolves around making a bigger push for original shows, improving the Netflix mobile apps on iOS and Android, as well as bringing support for high dynamic range (HDR) programming. The company hasn’t been shy to divulge its appreciation for HDR, but it’s going all out on the technology in 2016. “We started exploring HDR content about one year ago, ” says Chris Jaffe, vice president of user interface innovation at Netflix, “it is the [obvious] next-level resolution in the playback experience.” Over the coming months, there will be many HDR shows available on the platform, including Marco Polo season one and the highly anticipated second season of Daredevil . But Jaffe knows it won’t be easy, particularly due to the amount of internet bandwidth required by this type of content. As such, he says, Netflix has already worked out various compression algorithms , which adjust the quality of the video based on its complexity and still serve it up at a high resolution. So long as you have 16-20 Mbps connection, the experience should suffer from a minimum buffering woes. Of course, Ultra HD content plays a major role in Netflix’s strategy too, and there are more than 600 hours of 4K programming expected to hit the streaming service in 2016. Additionally, Jaffe says Netflix is launching 30 shows this year, including new seasons for existing series like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black , plus 10 original movies and a number of documentaries and exclusive content for kids . “[We have] 75 million members around the world; essentially that means 75 million different experiences, ” he says about the challenge Netflix faces to have something for everyone, from movies and TV shows to the algorithm used to recommend what you should watch. On the mobile side, Netflix is expected to rollout a revamped iOS app tomorrow, featuring support for Arabic and auto-play episodes. Later this year, both the iOS and Android applications will let also you manage your data usage, in case you have a cap on your smartphone or tablet plan and want to limit streams to a certain quality. Meanwhile, if you have a Chromecast, you can expect a second-screen experience for to arrive “shortly, ” which is going to give you access to IMDB-like metadata from your iOS or Android device. It’ll come in handy during those times when you don’t know who an actor is, or want to know what other movies they are in — the benefit here is you’re able to do it directly from the app. You have to give it to Netflix for its appetite to keep growing across the board, but you also have to ask yourself if it’s trying to do too much all at once. As always, however, only time will tell. For now, if you’re a Netflix buff , there’s no reason you shouldn’t be excited about the company’s plans for the near future. [Image credits: Netflix, Getty Images]

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Netflix is going all in on HDR and more original content