Tag: digest-golf

FCC expected to fine Sprint $105 million for overcharging customers

The Federal Communications Commission is reportedly on the verge of fining Sprint $105 million for cramming charges that brought complaints from tens of thousands of customers. The $105 million fine would match one levied on AT&T , which was accused of the same illegal practice. The US government has also sued T-Mobile  over cramming charges. The FCC has not confirmed the action against Sprint, but it was reported Monday in the National Journal  and yesterday in The   Wall Street Journal . “According to the enforcement action, which hasn’t been finalized, Sprint billed customers for third-party services it knew they hadn’t asked for and didn’t want,”  National Journal wrote. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FCC expected to fine Sprint $105 million for overcharging customers

Oakland cops disciplined 24 times for failing to turn on body-worn cameras

OAKLAND, Calif.—Over the last two years, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) has disciplined police officers on 24 occasions  for disabling or failing to activate body-worn cameras, newly released public records show. The City of Oakland did not provide any records prior to 2013, and the OPD did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. The records show that on November 8, 2013 one officer was terminated after failing to activate his camera. Less than two weeks later, another resigned for improperly removing the camera from his or her uniform. However, most officers received minor discipline in comparison. The OPD has used Portable Digital Recording Devices (PDRDs) since late 2010 . According to the department’s  own policy , patrol officers are required to wear the cameras during a number of outlined situations, including detentions, arrests, and serving a warrant. At present, the city has about 700 officers . Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Oakland cops disciplined 24 times for failing to turn on body-worn cameras

4 seconds of body cam video can reveal a biometric fingerprint, study says

Researchers say they can have computers examine body camera video footage and accurately identify a person wearing a body-mounted device in about four seconds, according to a recently released paper . The authors of the study had their software look at biometric characteristics like height, stride length, and walking speed to find the identity of the person shooting the footage. As they point out, this could have both positive and negative implications for civilians, law enforcement, and military personnel if they’re using body-mounted cameras. (It’s important to note that this research paper,  Egocentric Video Biometrics , was posted  to the arXiv repository . As such, it’s not considered a final, peer-reviewed work.) Using static, mounted cameras to match a person’s height and gait is a relatively common and well-researched vector for narrowing down the identity of people caught in videos. The authors said that, to get an accurate read of the biometric data of the person wearing the body cam, the footage has to be from a camera secured to one point on a person’s body (handheld cameras don’t work), and it has to have at least four seconds of video of the camera-wearer walking. Despite these restrictions, the two researchers from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem noted that once the necessary information had been gathered, “the identity of the user can be determined quite reliably from a few seconds of video.” “This is like a fingerprint,” Shmuel Peleg, one of the paper’s authors, told The Verge. “In order to find the person you have to have their fingerprint beforehand. But we can compare two people and say whether two videos were shot by the same person or not.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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4 seconds of body cam video can reveal a biometric fingerprint, study says

Steam’s first “Holiday Auction” halted after dupe bug ruins market [Updated]

Update:  Valve has updated its auction site to note that the Gem auctions will return “shortly” and that “an issue with Gems… means we need to reset and start again.” Specifically: All gems created by you will be returned to your Inventory. All Gem purchases from the Community Market will be reimbursed. All Auction bids have been canceled and the Auction will be reset. Trades involving Gems are being investigated on a case-by-case basis. Original Story The virtual “Holiday Auction” Steam first announced yesterday evening seemed like a cute idea at the time. For a limited time, users would be able to trade in unused or unwanted Steam Inventory items for “gems,” which could in turn, starting Monday, be used to bid against others on codes for 2,000 Steam games, 200,000 copies in all. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Steam’s first “Holiday Auction” halted after dupe bug ruins market [Updated]

Synaptics builds a fingerprint reader right into its trackpads

Consider the trackpad. The ones in Windows laptops are rarely (if ever) their best feature, but they nevertheless remain ubiquitous. Synaptics is one of the biggest names in trackpads, and today it announced a new one called the ” SecurePad ” that integrates a fingerprint reader into the trackpad itself rather than as a separate component. The SecurePad will have a small, 4mm by 10mm sensor on the trackpad’s surface that can scan a “fingertip placed at any angle on the sensor.” Said sensor will be available in a variety of different Synaptics trackpads, including the TouchPad , ClickPad , and ForcePad , and those trackpads will all be available in a variety of sizes. LED lights will provide feedback and allow the sensor to be used in dark environments. Fingerprint data traveling between the sensor and the “host processor” is encrypted to prevent the information from being accessed by other apps (Apple uses a similar sort of encryption with TouchID , and it prevents user apps from accessing fingerprint data in transit). We’ve contacted Synaptics to see if storing and reading fingerprints securely requires a separate chip to be installed in laptops that use the SecurePad and to get more detail on how this encryption works—we’ll update this article if we receive a response. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Synaptics builds a fingerprint reader right into its trackpads

Comcast sued by customers for turning routers into public hotspots

A pair of Comcast customers has sued the company for turning Xfinity Internet routers into public Wi-Fi hotspots, saying Comcast’s actions pose risks to subscribers and are taken without seeking their authorization. Plaintiff Toyer Grear and daughter Joycelyn Harris of Alameda County, California, filed the suit on December 4 ( PDF ) in US District Court in Northern California, seeking class action status on behalf of all Comcast customers who lease wireless routers that broadcast Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspots. “Without authorization to do so, Comcast uses the wireless routers it supplies to its customers to generate additional, public Wi-Fi networks for its own benefit,” the complaint states. The plaintiffs seek financial damages and an order preventing Comcast “from using residential customers’ wireless routers to create Xfinity Wi-Fi Hotspots without first obtaining authorization.” Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast sued by customers for turning routers into public hotspots

Samsung 850 EVO SSD takes its storage into the third dimension

Things have advanced quite a bit since our last thoroughly in-depth look at how solid state disks work, and Samsung has been one of the biggest companies leading the charge toward faster, denser solid state drives. Its 840 EVO was the first consumer SSD to use TLC NAND—that’s triple-level cell NAND, which can store three bits per memory cell instead of one or two. Now, Samsung’s newest consumer SSD takes NAND density a step further, stacking the memory cells on top of each other in a complex sandwich. The 850 EVO, formally announced this morning , uses 32-layer TLC “V-NAND,” where the “V” stands for “vertical.” As we discussed previously at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, Samsung is the only SSD manufacturer that makes ” the whole widget “—it’s the only vertically integrated OEM that builds every part of the SSDs it sells, including the NAND that actually holds the data. This gives the company a distinct advantage over other SSD manufacturers—most of whom source their NAND from Samsung. The 850 EVO is set to be released in four capacities: 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, and 1TB. These are all decimal measurements, not binary—so that “1TB” is properly one trillion bytes, not 1024GB (there are official IEC units for binary measurements, but I’ll eat glass before I start saying ” tebibyte “). The quoted numbers on Samsung’s site look pretty good for a consumer-level drive: max sequential read speeds of 540MB/s, max sequential write speeds of 520MB/s, and relatively high IOPS across a variety of read and write regimes. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung 850 EVO SSD takes its storage into the third dimension

Apple manager gets year in jail, $4.5m fine for selling industry secrets

Onetime Apple supply manager Paul Shin Devine will spend a year in prison and repay $4.5 million for selling Apple’s secrets to suppliers, the AP reports . Devine, who worked at Apple from 2005 until his arrest in August of 2010 , pleaded guilty to wire fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering—and could have been sentenced to as much as 20 years in prison. Working with Singapore resident Andrew Ang, Devine was accused of selling confidential information to companies that hoped to become Apple suppliers, and to suppliers trying to negotiate better deals with the company. Winning an Apple contract can be a make-or-break moment for a supplier, as we saw in the recent dust-up between Apple and would-be sapphire manufacturer GT Advanced Technologies ; companies hoping to get in on the action sent “millions in kickbacks” to Devine. Ang and Chua Kim Guan, who were respectively the sales director and general manager of Jin Li Mould Manufacturing, were charged in 2013 for bribing Devine. They were accused of paying Devine $387,600 between 2006 and 2009. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Apple manager gets year in jail, $4.5m fine for selling industry secrets

Rovio lays off 110 people as Angry Birds hype fades

Rovio has confirmed that 110 people will lose their jobs as the Angry Birds maker also shuts down its game-development studio in Tampere, Finland. The layoffs, first announced in October, amount to about 14 percent of the company’s workforce. It had been expected that Rovio would make 130 people redundant but after a round of consultations this number has now been reduced. Rovio said that as a result of the redundancies “several positions” have been opened for internal applications. The actual number of employees out of work will depend on how many new internal positions are filled. The closing of its Tampere development studio means that Rovio will move all of its Finnish operation to its Espoo headquarters. The company shot to fame in 2009 when it released Angry Birds , its 52nd game . The title went on to become the most downloaded mobile game of all time. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Rovio lays off 110 people as Angry Birds hype fades

AT&T still throttles “unlimited data”—even when network not congested

A while back, we reported that AT&T had stopped throttling unlimited data users except in cases when the network is congested. We were wrong. AT&T did change its policy to stop the automatic throttling of many unlimited data plans, but the company’s older, more draconian throttling policy still applies to customers with unlimited LTE data. AT&T told Ars the policy will be changed for all customers sometime in 2015, but it did not say whether that will happen closer to the beginning of the year or the end of the year. Here’s how it works: Customers who have 3G or non-LTE 4G phones and “ legacy unlimited data plans ” are throttled for the remainder of the billing period after they exceed 3GB of data in a month, but only “at times and in areas that are experiencing network congestion.” 4G and LTE are practically synonymous these days, but AT&T also applies the 4G label to its HSPA network technology. Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T still throttles “unlimited data”—even when network not congested