Pilot’s selfies “likely” caused fatal crash, flight investigators say

A pilot’s selfies “likely” caused a single-engine plane crash outside Denver that killed the pilot and sole passenger last year, the National Transportation Safety Board has concluded. The NTSB probe said investigators discovered a GoPro camera near the wreckage that captured footage aboard the two-seater Cessna 150 taken on May 30 and on the day of the May 31 crash. “Based on the evidence of cell phone use during low-altitude maneuvering, including the flight immediately before the accident flight, it is likely that cell phone use during the accident flight distracted the pilot and contributed to the development of spatial disorientation and subsequent loss of control,” the NTSB said . Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Pilot’s selfies “likely” caused fatal crash, flight investigators say

Verizon reportedly selling off old wires to focus more on wireless

Verizon is reportedly close to selling off parts of its wireline network and some cell towers in a series of deals totaling more than $10 billion, helping the company fund spectrum license purchases that will boost its wireless business. The Wall Street Journal reported the deals today , saying they “will involve different buyers and could be announced as soon as later this week.” The report said Verizon will sell “a package of assets including cellphone towers and parts of its wireline business” but did not get any more specific. Presumably, Verizon would be selling off parts of its old copper telephone and DSL networks rather than its FiOS fiber-to-the-home assets. Given Verizon’s focus on its wireless business, the cell towers are probably surplus to requirements. Verizon’s wireless subsidiary just committed to purchasing $10.4 billion worth of wireless spectrum licenses. Verizon lost $2.23 billion in its most recent quarter. Besides funding that spectrum purchase, Verizon is trying to pay off debt, according to the  Journal report. The company “took on a massive debt load” last year when it spent $130 billion to buy out Vodafone’s 45 percent stake in Verizon Wireless, the report said. Verizon now owns 100 percent of Verizon Wireless. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon reportedly selling off old wires to focus more on wireless

CBS reporter’s “hack” caused by stuck backspace key, says US govt

According to a US Department of Justice Inspector General report released today, an investigation “was not able to substantiate the allegations that [Sharyl] Attkisson’s computers were subject to remote intrusion by the FBI, other government personnel, or otherwise.” The report was introduced into the Senate record at the confirmation hearing for Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch. Attkisson, who has written a book about her experiences trying to cover the Obama White House which includes the allegation of hacking , has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice, outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, and the Postmaster General for the alleged hacking of her home and work computers. Today, Attkisson testified at Lynch’s confirmation hearing. The report from the DoJ’s Office of the Inspector General casts a different light on Attkisson’s allegations: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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CBS reporter’s “hack” caused by stuck backspace key, says US govt

iTunes Connect bug logs developers in to other developers’ accounts at random

This morning, a number of developers signed in to Apple’s iTunes Connect service only to be greeted by a list of apps that didn’t belong to them. TechCrunch has a good roundup of tweets from affected developers —it seems that whenever developers signed in with their credentials, they were being granted access to other developers’ accounts at random. As of about noon Eastern today, Apple took the service down to resolve the problem. It also looks like developers won’t be able to submit new apps or invite new testers to TestFlight while iTunes Connect is down. Affected developers can check Apple’s System Status page for developers for updates while they wait for the problems to be resolved (no other developer services appear to be affected by the outage). We don’t yet know whether the outage was caused by some error on Apple’s end or by a security breach like the one that brought all developer systems down  in the summer of 2013 . We’ve asked Apple when the service will be back and what caused the login problem in the first place, and we’ll update this article as we have new details. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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iTunes Connect bug logs developers in to other developers’ accounts at random

Apple Remote Desktop admin tool is updated for the first time in forever

There was one other Apple software update that came out yesterday, though it got lost in the shuffle between OS X and iOS system updates and record-breaking financial results . The venerable Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) application has been bumped from version 3.7.2 to version 3.8. Version  3.7.2 was a relatively minor update issued in March of 2014, and version 3.7 goes all the way back to October of 2013. ARD is pretty far off the beaten path, but the short version is that it’s an administrative tool used primarily by IT people to manage large numbers of Macs. It can do standard remote desktop stuff—viewing and taking control of remote Macs’ screens to perform maintenance or help out end users—but it also has a bunch of other handy capabilities. Among other things, administrators can use ARD to push out updates or other software packages to a bunch of Macs at once, run scheduled maintenance, show user and application usage histories, and view hardware and software information for each computer. The biggest addition to version 3.8 is official support for OS X Yosemite, and the update redesigns the app’s icon and UI to mesh better with Yosemite’s new aesthetic. Older versions of ARD supported Yosemite, but performance was quite a bit slower and image quality was visibly poorer than it was for officially supported versions. Improvements to file copying, Full Screen mode, and viewing multiple client desktops at once round out the update. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple Remote Desktop admin tool is updated for the first time in forever

FCC: Blocking Wi-Fi in hotels is prohibited

On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission issued an “Enforcement Advisory” stating that blocking W-Fi in hotels is unequivocally “prohibited.” “Persons or businesses causing intentional interference to Wi-Fi hotspots are subject to enforcement action,” the FCC bluntly stated, referencing a dispute between Marriott and its customers who said the hotel chain had blocked their personal hotspots to force them to pay for Marriott’s Wi-Fi services. “The Enforcement Bureau has seen a disturbing trend in which hotels and other commercial establishments block wireless consumers from using their own personal Wi-Fi hot spots on the commercial establishment’s premises,” the FCC wrote. “As a result, the Bureau is protecting consumers by aggressively investigating and acting against such unlawful intentional interference.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FCC: Blocking Wi-Fi in hotels is prohibited

iOS 8.1.3 released, reduces the space you need to install updates

Apple has just released iOS 8.1.3, the third patch for iOS 8.1 and the sixth update to iOS 8 since its release. The most significant problem addressed by the new update is that it reduces the amount of free space that you need to install software updates, a problem which has proven especially irritating for owners of 8GB and 16GB iDevices. Currently, users who are using most of their storage either need to delete stuff or connect their phones to iTunes to perform updates, a throwback to pre-iOS 5 releases of the operating system. The update squashes a few other bugs too: it fixes problems keeping some users from entering their passwords for Messages and FaceTime; fixes a problem where Spotlight would stop showing locally installed apps among its search results (this is one we’ve run into); and fixes multitasking gestures for iPad users. Finally, 8.1.3 adds a few configuration options to limit iDevices’ functionality during standardized tests. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iOS 8.1.3 released, reduces the space you need to install updates

Don’t cry for the Google Play edition program; it was already dead

Earlier this week, the last of the Google Play edition Android phones in Google’s online storefront were listed as ” no longer available for sale .” When contacted for comment, Google had nothing to say, but it’s not hard to read between the lines here. The last new Google Play phone was introduced in the spring of 2014. Plans for a Galaxy S5 GPe phone made it far enough that official press photos leaked out into the wild , but the phone never materialized. The program hit its peak early last year, when a full half-dozen devices were listed all at once: the Galaxy S4 , the HTC Ones M7 and M8 , the first-generation Moto G , the Sony Z Ultra , and the LG G Pad 8.3 . Like doomed kids making their way through Willy Wonka’s factory, they silently dropped out one by one. Now they’re all gone, and it looks a whole lot like the program has wrapped up. If so, it’s a quiet, inconspicuous end to a quiet, inconspicuous program. Normally we’d say that fewer choices for Android shoppers would be a bad thing, but the changes Google has made to Android since the GPe program was introduced had already rendered it mostly irrelevant. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Don’t cry for the Google Play edition program; it was already dead

PlayStation Now review: Sony finally proves streaming gaming is viable

When Sony launched its PlayStation Now service as a beta last year, the ridiculous per-game rental pricing structure stopped us from giving it any serious consideration almost immediately. Last week, though, the service graduated from beta with a more feasible all-you-can-play subscription plan . Suddenly this was an opportunity. Has the idea of running games on remote servers advanced at all since OnLive’s ahead-of-its-time launch back in 2010 ? We’ve been kicking the tires on the service for about a week now, and what we’ve found is a surprisingly compelling addition to the pay-per-game ownership model of retail discs and downloads. If you have the bandwidth and a yearning to sample some PS3 classics among the service’s somewhat limited initial selection on your PlayStation 4, PlayStation Now is well worth checking out. Performance When initially reviewing OnLive back in 2010 , running a game through the offering’s remote servers was a noticeably worse experience than running that same game locally. Even with a 20Mbps FiOS connection, our reviewer “could tell that the game was not running natively” thanks to “framerate bumps, sudden resolution drops, and gameplay blips.” Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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PlayStation Now review: Sony finally proves streaming gaming is viable

Making ultra-thin materials with holes the size of water molecules

While visiting GE’s China Technology Center, we got to take a look at reverse osmosis membranes. Reverse osmosis is the most energy-efficient means of removing dissolved substances from water. It’s what’s used commercially for desalination, the process of producing drinking water from seawater. The term “membrane” is typically used to mean a thin sheet of some material (in fact, the word “sheet” appears in the definition of the term). But for some of the things GE is using it for, the membranes were thin yet robust tubes, each one capable of supporting the weight of a bowling ball. Despite that toughness, features on the tubes are so fine that they can allow water molecules to pass through but reject many things that are roughly the same size, such as the salt ions found in seawater. This all raises an obvious question: how do you actually produce anything like that? We decided to look into the process of making reverse osmosis membranes. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Making ultra-thin materials with holes the size of water molecules