digest-golf – Page 46

Shocker: Cable TV prices went up four times the rate of inflation

The Federal Communications Commission today issued a report on average cable TV prices in the US , and to the surprise of no one, it turns out they went up a lot. “Basic cable service prices increased by 6.5 percent [to $22.63] for the 12 months ending January 1, 2013. Expanded basic cable prices increased by 5.1 percent [to $64.41] for those 12 months, and at a compound average annual rate of 6.1 percent over the 18-year period from 1995-2013,” the FCC said. The basic cable increase was four times the rate of inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the 12-month period, and substantially above inflation for the 1995-2013 measurement. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Shocker: Cable TV prices went up four times the rate of inflation

Samsung to launch first AMOLED-equipped tablets at June 12 event

Samsung We’ve previously talked about Samsung’s “flood the market” strategy for phones, but the company applies the same tactic to tablets, too. After releasing the Note 10.1 seven months ago and an entire line of NotePro and TabPro tablets in February, the company has announced yet another tablet event planned for June 12. According to the invite, this event is for the Samsung Galaxy Tab line. While it’s frankly getting harder and harder to try to nail down just what tablet goes where in the Samsung spectrum (which one is the flagship?) the Tabs are usually the mid-range/mainstream devices. This event location would suggest otherwise, though, as it’s being held in The Theater at Madison Square Garden, the former site of the NFL Draft. The event will even be livestreamed on Samsung’s YouTube channel . Rumor has it that this run of tablets will be the first to incorporate Samsung’s AMOLED displays. Samsung’s AMOLED manufacturing has so far not been up to the task of producing a panel large enough or cheaply enough to fit into a tablet, forcing the company’s older devices to use LCDs. Samsung’s AMOLED panels on phones are so mature that it’s difficult to tell the difference between them and LCD, so we aren’t sure how significant this change will be to consumers. The invite seems to confirm the change to AMOLED displays, which shows a top-down view of the new tablets with light gushing from the screen onto the colored background. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung to launch first AMOLED-equipped tablets at June 12 event

Former Subway sandwich franchisee cops to $40,000 gift-card hack scheme

A former Subway sandwich shop franchisee pled guilty to taking part in a scheme to hack point-of-sale terminals for at least 13 stores and obtaining gift cards worth $40,000. Shahin Abdollahi, who also ran a business that sold and maintained point-of-sale terminals, sold the computerized checkout registers to the Subway shops that were illegally accessed, according to federal prosecutors in Massachusetts. He set up the terminals with software from LogMeIn , which allows people to remotely log in to PCs over the Internet. Abdollahi and other conspirators then used the software to repeatedly access the Subway terminals without authorization, usually early in the morning, when the restaurants were closed. Once logged in, they loaded gift cards with credit totaling $40,000. Co-conspirator Jeffrey Wilkinson, 37, of Rialto, California, would then advertise the cards for sale on eBay and Craigslist and hand deliver them to buyers. On Wednesday, Abdollahi 46, of Lake Elsinore, California, pled guilty in federal court in Massachusetts to one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion and wire fraud and one count of wire fraud. He is scheduled to be sentenced on for August 6. Wilkinson, 37, of Rialto, California, pled guilty in February and is scheduled to be sentenced on May 28. It’s not the first time Subway point-of-sale terminals have been illegally accessed by crooks for purposes of skimming the till. In 2012, two men pled guilty to participating in an international conspiracy that hacked into credit-card payment terminals at more than 150 Subway franchises and racked up more than $10 million in losses. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Former Subway sandwich franchisee cops to $40,000 gift-card hack scheme

Microsoft sticking to its guns so far, leaving XP unpatched and exploited

Last month’s Patch Tuesday was meant to bring with it the final ever updates for Windows XP. However, Microsoft went ahead and released another patch for the ancient operating system to fix a flaw that was being exploited in the wild. This month’s Patch Tuesday looks like it’s going to play out a little differently. Microsoft released a critical update for Internet Explorer addressing a flaw in every version from 6 to 11. Although the company says that it’s aware of in-the-wild exploitations of the flaw, this time it says it won’t fix Windows XP. Promise . Of course, last month’s end of support should have meant the same thing, and for no particularly good reason, it didn’t. Microsoft cited the “proximity” of the previous flaw to the end of support as its rationale for issuing the update, but this month’s bugs seem barely less proximal. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft sticking to its guns so far, leaving XP unpatched and exploited

New planet-hunting hardware needs just a minute to image an exoplanet

PNAS Most of the exoplanets we’ve detected have been spotted during transits, when they pass between their host star and Earth. Almost all the others have been inferred based on the fact that they gravitationally tug at their host star as they orbit around it. Very few exoplanets have been imaged directly, but that may be about to change. Earlier this week, scientists revealed the first images taken with a new instrument, the Gemini Planet Hunter, which has been installed on the (you guessed it) Gemini South telescope located in the Chilean Andes. The new hardware is so efficient that a known exoplanet that once took over an hour and considerable post-processing to image was apparent in a one-minute exposure, with no processing needed. The twin Gemini telescopes (Gemini North is in Hawaii to image the northern sky) are already some of the most advanced hardware on the planet, featuring adaptive optics that correct the gaze of an eight-meter mirror. But directly imaging a planet is a distinct challenge due to the relative brightness of the planet relative to the host star. In terms of our own Solar System, Jupiter would appear 10 9 times fainter than the Sun when imaged at a distance. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Watch out for data caps: Video-hungry cord cutters use 328GB a month

Free Press The average cord cutter—a person who watches online video instead of subscribing to a cable TV package—isn’t all that far away from going over the typical data usage limits enforced by Internet service providers. Not all ISPs enforce caps. But Comcast, the nation’s largest broadband provider, is rolling out 300GB monthly limits in parts of its territory with $10 charges for each additional 50GB. Time Warner Cable, which Comcast is trying to acquire, offers an optional plan with a measly 30GB cap in exchange for a $5 monthly discount, but almost everyone sticks with the unlimited plan. Sandvine’s latest Global Internet Phenomena report released today, based on measurements in March, says that Internet users in the United States who appear to be cord cutters “consume on average 212GB a month, more than seven times the usage of a typical subscriber. These ‘cord cutters’ consume an average of 100 hours of video a month and account for 54 percent of total traffic consumed each month.” Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Bringing Windows 8-style multitasking to iPads isn’t as simple as it seems

“I just need to write about this Murloc rush deck. For work.” Aurich Lawson Apple is planning to add a split-screen multitasking mode to its iPads in iOS 8, according to “sources with knowledge of the enhancement in development” speaking to 9to5Mac . The feature will supposedly allow two applications to run side-by-side while the tablet is in landscape mode, not unlike the similar Snap feature in Windows 8.1 or the multi-window mode supported on many of Samsung’s phones and tablets . iPad applications have always used the tablet’s entire screen, which keeps things simple but can feel restrictive for heavy multitaskers. Though 9to5Mac’s sources have been accurate in the past, as with all rumors, this report should be taken with a continuous stream of salt until you actually see Apple get up on stage and announce it. If it’s true, this new display mode implies big changes to the way that iPad apps are designed and the way that they interact with each other, and we wanted to take a look at the hurdles in iOS and the iPad hardware that would have to be dealt with to make this feature a reality. We’ll also be making some informed guesses about how Apple might jump over them. Resolution independence Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bringing Windows 8-style multitasking to iPads isn’t as simple as it seems

Teen arrested for 30 “swatting” attacks against schools, security reporter

Police in the Canadian city of Ottawa said they arrested a 16-year-old male charged with carrying out so-called “swatting” attacks that targeted 30 North American targets. One of the targets included KrebsOnSecurity reporter Brian Krebs , who was previously on the receiving end of a vicious swatting attack that resulted in a team of police pointing guns at him as he opened the front door of his Virginia home. Krebs said the recent attacks were preceded by taunts from someone controlling the Twitter handle @ProbablyOnion . The last tweet made from that account, made on Thursday, stated: “Still awaiting for the horsies to bash down my door.” The individual didn’t have long to wait. That same day, the 16-year-old was arrested, according to press releases here and here issued by the Ottawa Police Service and the FBI, respectively. Swatting refers to the act of knowingly giving authorities false information about bomb threats, the taking of hostages, or similar threats in progress with the goal of tricking heavily armed police to raid the location of an innocent person or group. According to authorities, the unnamed 16-year-old allegedly carried out swatting attacks on 30 targets, including schools in North America that responded with lockdowns or evacuations. The minor was charged with 60 criminal offenses, including public mischief, mischief to property, uttering death threats, and conveying false info with intent to alarm. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Teen arrested for 30 “swatting” attacks against schools, security reporter

YouTube shuts down public RSS feeds of user subscriptions

If you’re a news junky, you probably use an RSS reader like Feed.ly to keep up with stuff on the Web. One of the nicest ways to consume YouTube subscriptions was to use an RSS feed of new videos, allowing them to show up just like news articles do. You might not have noticed yet, but Google quietly shut down this feature a few days ago. The RSS feed, which used to be http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/[username]/newsubscriptionvideos, now throws out a “403 Forbidden” error. Previously, the URL would provide a publicly accessible feed of new subscriptions from any YouTube account, provided users didn’t choose to turn off public subscription retrieval. The feed was part of the YouTube Data API v2, which was deprecated in March of this year. The replacement—predictably named YouTube Data API v3—doesn’t offer a comparable data stream. Bug reports filed for this regression as early as January 2013 have gone unanswered, save for a single response in January 2014 (yes, a year later) saying, “Patch is in the works, however we can’t comment on the expected date.” Now it’s five months later, the feature is gone, and there’s no solution in sight. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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YouTube shuts down public RSS feeds of user subscriptions

Router company that threatened a reviewer loses Amazon selling license

The Medialink router that was reviewed. Mediabridge Update 5/8/2014 19:44 CT: On Thursday, Mediabridge Products posted an official statement about this incident to its Facebook page, clarifying its position and saying that Amazon has revoked its selling privileges. (Thanks to PrimalxConvoy for the tip). In the statement, the company says that it did not actually sue the Amazon reviewer, but that it did insist that the reviewer’s “untrue, damaging, and disparaging statements” be taken down. “It’s our sincere belief that reasonable people understand that not only is it within our rights to take steps to protect our integrity, but that it should be expected that we would do so when it is recklessly attacked,” Mediabridge Products wrote. “The reviewer has since changed his review completely to remove the libelous statements, but unfortunately not before having an army attack us on the internet.” The company did not give any clue as to the terms of Amazon’s rescinding of Mediabridge’s selling license, but only said at the end of its statement “Unfortunately, as a result of our attempt to get this reviewer to do the right thing & remove his untrue statements about our company, Amazon has revoked our selling privileges. Many hard-working employees whose livelihood depended on that business will likely be put out of a job, by a situation that has been distorted & blown out of proportion.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ken May

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