digest-golf – Page 28

Lucasfilm heads to court to unmask Star Wars: The Force Awakens image leaker

Lucasfilm is demanding that popular photo-sharing site ImageShack cough up the identity of one of its users the studio says uploaded an infringing photograph connected to its upcoming Star Wars movie. ImageShack has already deleted the picture from user “Darth-Simi” whose account was used to post a picture that was described as a villain from the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie. The image included a glimpse of a red crossguard lightsaber like the one showed in a teaser trailer officially released in November. Lucasfilm’s parent company, Disney, is seeking a San Francisco federal court to order California-based ImageShack to turn over Darth-Simi’s personal information. The studio is making the demand [PDF] to remove the picture “Star Wars Episode VII Costume Design and Photograph” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Lucasfilm heads to court to unmask Star Wars: The Force Awakens image leaker

What Windows as a Service and a “free upgrade” mean at home and at work

Windows licensing is more or less straightforward in the consumer sphere. Oh, sure, there are complications surrounding self-built systems, but compared to the world of enterprise licensing, the range of options is limited and the pricing simple. Corporate licensing, however, is a whole other matter. We’ve been saying for some time that the process of updating and upgrading Windows is going to change in Windows 10, and perhaps unsurprisingly, this is going to have implications for Windows licensing. The underlying theme is this: Microsoft does not want the Windows market to be split between a bunch of different versions. For a brief period, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 were all both extant and actively supported Windows versions. This is bad for more or less the entire Windows world. It’s bad for developers of Windows software because they’re forced to choose between the best functionality (found in Windows 8.1) or the widest compatibility (target Windows XP). It’s bad for Microsoft, because it has to support all these versions. It’s bad, in many ways, for end-users, too; using old versions means that they don’t get the latest features, and in the case of Windows XP, they don’t even receive security updates. Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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What Windows as a Service and a “free upgrade” mean at home and at work

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

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

TracFone must pay $40M for throttling and capping “unlimited” data

TracFone has agreed to pay $40 million “to settle charges that it deceived millions of consumers with hollow promises of ‘unlimited’ data service,” the Federal Trade Commission announced today . Despite advertising unlimited data, the company’s various prepaid wireless brands “drastically slowed or cut off consumers’ mobile data after they used more than certain fixed limits in a 30-day period,” the FTC said. “Beginning today, consumers who had a Straight Talk, Net10, Simple Mobile, or Telcel America unlimited plan before January 2015 can visit http://ftc.gov/prepaidphones to file a claim for a refund,” the commission said. “Refunds will be paid to consumers whose data service was slowed or cut off. Consumers who had an unlimited plan but are unsure if their data service was slowed or cut off should still file a claim to find out if they are eligible for a refund.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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TracFone must pay $40M for throttling and capping “unlimited” data

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

Verizon nears “the end” of FiOS builds

It’s been nearly five years since Verizon decided to stop expanding its FiOS fiber network into new cities and towns, so this week’s news won’t come as a huge surprise: Verizon is nearing “the end” of its fiber construction and is reducing wireline capital expenditures while spending more on wireless. “I have been pretty consistent with this in the fact that we will spend more CapEx in the Wireless side and we will continue to curtail CapEx on the Wireline side. Some of that is because we are getting to the end of our committed build around FiOS, penetration is getting higher,” Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said yesterday in the Q4 2014 call with investors . Wireline capital spending totaled $1.6 billion in the most recent quarter and $5.8 billion for 2014, down 7.7 percent from 2013, Verizon said. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon nears “the end” of FiOS builds

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

Ken May

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