Tag: digest

Google Fiber’s botched software update locks out users, disables Wi-Fi

Many Google Fiber customers have been reporting that a software update turned off their Wi-Fi and prevented them from logging into the Google Network Box’s administration panel. Customers can still get online using Ethernet connections. Customers in Kansas City and Provo, Utah have been affected and took to Twitter  and sites including DownDetector.com  to describe the problem. I’m not eradicating disease with my @googlefiber internet connection, but it would sure be nice for it to work after a 24-hour-long outage. — Sam Hartle (@Sam_Hartle) May 22, 2015 We have had way more outages with @googlefiber than we ever had with @comcast . Google needs to step up its game. — Austin Graff (@AustinLGraff) May 21, 2015 A DSLReports forum member from Kansas City wrote yesterday , “Having an issue today with my network box. It lost my custom IP address scheme and went back to default. Now I can’t access the advanced menu.” A few hours later, the customer had been able to talk to Google Fiber support. “GF Support had to factory reset my network box so I could get in. They acknowledged that a software update this morning caused the issue,” the customer wrote. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Fiber’s botched software update locks out users, disables Wi-Fi

Report: iOS 9 will be optimized for older devices, including iPhone 4S

We’re just a few weeks out from WWDC, and new details about Apple’s next-generation operating systems continue to surface. A new report from the well-sourced 9to5Mac details a handful of features, the most interesting of which is a note about support for older devices. We had assumed that Apple would include support for some devices based on its aging A5 SoC—the fifth-gen iPod Touch, original iPad Mini, and third-gen Apple TV are all still being sold, after all—but the report indicates that we can expect an update for out-of-production devices like the iPhone 4S (the iPad 2 isn’t mentioned by name, but the implication is that it will be supported as well). If true, this would be the longest that Apple has ever provided software updates for any one iPhone model. Normally, iOS releases support four iPhone generations at a time, but iOS 9 could include support for everything from 2011’s iPhone 4S to whatever phones Apple introduces in 2015. New iOS updates have a history of running poorly on older devices— iOS 7 was unkind to the iPhone 4 , and iOS 8 wasn’t much better to the iPhone 4S —but Apple is apparently taking steps to avoid that problem this time around. The report says that Apple is taking a different approach to supporting older devices in iOS 9. In the past, Apple reportedly put the full version of the operating system on older devices and then disabled features that performed particularly poorly. For iOS 9, Apple is apparently starting with a barebones version of the operating system and enabling features one at a time. As usual, owners of older devices will miss out on some features, but they’ll still get the underlying improvements, API changes, and security updates that newer phones and tablets get. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: iOS 9 will be optimized for older devices, including iPhone 4S

Luxury bus startup Leap suspends service after regulators crack down

Late last night, luxury bus startup Leap issued a statement on its Facebook page noting that the company would be temporarily suspending its San Francisco service, citing regulatory issues with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC). The commission issued Leap a cease-and-desist letter last week, saying that Leap Transit did not have a permit to operate in the city. The company has proved devisive in the Bay Area , where public transportation suffers from a litany of problems, and Leap buses are seen as a way for the wealthy to create a “two-tiered” transportation system . A ride on a Leap bus costs $6 and offers charging ports, free Wi-Fi, and a guaranteed seat. By contrast, a ride on Muni, San Francisco’s municipal public transportation system, costs only $2.25 but the buses are unreliable, packed to the gills, and employ not a single on-board bus manager to bring you coconut water. Leap so far only operates one bus line in the city, which goes from the Marina neighborhood to the Financial District. The company applied for a state permit from the CPUC in 2013, which would have afforded the company “the potential for less oversight and fewer rules,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle . But the city of San Francisco said that it ought to be able to regulate Leap, as SF municipal services would experience the greatest toll from competition from Leap. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Luxury bus startup Leap suspends service after regulators crack down

“Rachel” robocaller victims to get $1.7 million in refunds

The Federal Trade Commission’s fight against the infamous ” Rachel from Cardholder Services ” robocalls has produced a court order to give $1.7 million in refunds to defrauded consumers. The case dates to November 2012 , involving defendants including Universal Processing Services of Wisconsin, a payment processor, and telemarketer Hal Smith and his HES Merchant Services Company, the FTC said today . Per an order from US District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Universal Processing Services and HES will have to pay $1,734,972, which the FTC said “will be used to provide refunds to defrauded consumers.” “The court held Smith and HES liable for 11 violations of the FTC Act and the Commission’s Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), based on their participation in a deceptive telemarketing scheme purporting to be a credit card interest rate reduction service that used robocalls to solicit consumers,” the FTC said. “The defendants failed to disclose the identity of the person(s) responsible for placing the robocalls and unlawfully calling numbers that had been registered on the FTC’s Do Not Call Registry.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Rachel” robocaller victims to get $1.7 million in refunds

How the USPS targeted a drug dealer via his IP address

A federal drug case in Massachusetts has shed new light on how the United States Postal Service’s (USPS) law enforcement unit uses something as simple as IP logs on the postal tracking website to investigate crimes. According to a December 2013 affidavit  of an ongoing federal criminal case in Rockland, Massachusetts (20 miles southeast of Boston), one alleged drug dealer named Harold Bates was found out simply by his digital trail left on the USPS’ Track n’ Confirm website. The affidavit was added to the court docket in January 2015, and the case was first reported on by Motherboard . Bates was charged back in March 2014 with conspiracy to import methylone (also known as “molly”), importation of methylone, and possession with intent to distribute methylone, among other crimes. Last month, the judge in the case ruled against Bates in his attempt to supress evidence seized in those packages. Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How the USPS targeted a drug dealer via his IP address

Cortana for all: Microsoft’s plan to put voice recognition behind anything

When Microsoft introduced the Cortana digital personal assistant last year at the company’s Build developer conference, the company already left hints of its future ambitions for the technology. Cortana was built largely on Microsoft’s Bing service, and the Cortana team indicated those services would eventually be accessible to Web and application developers. As it turns out, eventually is now. Though the most important elements are only available in a private preview, many of the machine learning capabilities behind Cortana have been released under Project Oxford, the joint effort between Microsoft Research and the Bing and Azure teams announced at Build in April. And at the conference, Ars got to dive deep on the components of Project Oxford with Ryan Gaglon, the senior program manager at Microsoft Technology and Research shepherding the project to market. The APIs make it possible to add image and speech processing to just about any application, often by using just a single Web request. “They’re all finished machine learning services in the sense that developers don’t have to create any model for them in Azure,” Gaglon told Ars. “They’re very modular.” All of the services are exposed as representational state transfer (REST) Web services based on HTTP “verbs” (such as GET, PUT, and POST), and they require an Azure API subscription key. To boot, all the API requests and responses are encrypted via HTTPS to protect their content. Read 38 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cortana for all: Microsoft’s plan to put voice recognition behind anything

House votes 338-88 to stop bulk phone surveillance

Nearly two years after the US government’s collection of telephone calls became public following the Edward Snowden leaks, the US House of Representatives has passed, by a vote of 338-88, a bill that would end the program. An exact roll call of votes is not yet available, but votes opposing the USA Freedom Act were generally split between Democrats and Republicans, many of whom argue the proposal doesn’t go far enough to protect civil liberties. Policymakers on all sides of the surveillance debate were under pressure to make some kind of move, with relevant portions of the Patriot Act set to expire at the end of this month. The USA Freedom Act ends the bulk phone database but doesn’t include many other wished-for reforms, such as a privacy advocate at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was in an earlier version of the bill. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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House votes 338-88 to stop bulk phone surveillance

Don’t look now, but 3DS emulation is becoming a thing

Given enough time and attention from the development community, it’s practically inevitable that any video game console can and will be emulatable on a general-use computer. Hardware makers, always wary of the piracy implications of such a development, may hope that doesn’t happen until many years after that console ceases to be commercially viable. Unfortunately for Nintendo, that seems unlikely in the case of the 3DS. The Citra emulation project has been in the works for at least a year , but developers reached a breakthrough last December when they managed to load Ocarina of Time 3D for the first time. That title has now been shown running at nearly full speed on Citra with the help of an OpenGL renderer (though some visual artifacts still exist). Since then, compatibility work has continued on a seemingly game-by-game basis.  Virtual Console titles were shown off in February, and just this week team members posted evidence of Animal Crossing New Leaf , Super Monkey Ball 3D , and even the system’s home menu  running through emulation. There are a few homebrew demos available as well, including emulators for other systems running inside of the 3DS emulator and the kind of Minecraft port that’s seemingly required for all emulation projects these days. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Don’t look now, but 3DS emulation is becoming a thing

AT&T to fix Internet congestion before it can be hit with complaint

With a month left before net neutrality complaints can be filed to the Federal Communications Commission, Internet service providers are continuing to sign agreements to prevent network congestion and a potential scolding from regulators. The latest agreement was announced today between AT&T and Level 3 , an Internet backbone operator that has accused broadband providers like AT&T of not upgrading interconnection points, allowing Internet performance for consumers to be degraded. A month ago, Level 3 told National Journal  that it was “evaluating our options” and “still experiencing interconnection point congestion as some large consumer ISPs continue to attempt to leverage control over access to their users to extract arbitrary tolls.” While the FCC’s net neutrality order  bans paid prioritization of traffic after it enters providers’ networks, it doesn’t ban payments for interconnection, which happens at the edges of the network. However, the FCC set up a complaint process so it can decide whether particular demands are unreasonable and prod companies into providing enough capacity to prevent Internet slowdowns. Complaints can be filed beginning June 12. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T to fix Internet congestion before it can be hit with complaint

Comcast to pay you $20 each time a technician is late for an appointment [Updated]

UPDATE : After publication, we learned Comcast has been making the $20 guarantee for more than two years  before this week’s announcement. The other parts of the announcement, including the hiring boost, store renovations, and changes to technology and training, appear to be new. Comcast is once again pledging to overhaul its legendarily bad customer service, hiring more than 5,500 new customer service employees and making “major investments in technology and training,” the company announced yesterday . Part of the hiring boost will add “hundreds of additional technicians across the country,” with a goal to always be on time for customer appointments by Q3 2015, sometime between July and August. To prove how serious it is, Comcast is making a new promise: “If a technician doesn’t arrive on time for an appointment, Comcast will automatically credit the customer $20,” the cable company said. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast to pay you $20 each time a technician is late for an appointment [Updated]