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T-Mobile added another 8.3 million customers in 2015

T-Mobile USA added 8.3 million customers last year, including 2.1 million in the fourth quarter, solidifying its position as the country’s number three wireless carrier ahead of Sprint and behind Verizon Wireless and AT&T. T-Mobile had 63.3 million customers as of December 31, 2015, up from 55 million customers at the end of 2014, the company announced today in a preliminary earnings report. In total, T-Mobile now has 29.4 million postpaid phone customers, 2.3 million postpaid mobile broadband customers, 17.6 million prepaid customers, and 14 million wholesale customers. This was the second consecutive year that T-Mobile boosted its customer total by more than 8 million. (credit: T-Mobile) T-Mobile has also improved its churn rate—the percentage of subscribers who discontinued service—meaning that fewer customers are leaving for other carriers. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile added another 8.3 million customers in 2015

Files on nearly 200 floppy disks belonging to Star Trek creator recovered

(credit: churl ) According to a press release from DriveSavers data recovery, information on nearly 200 floppy disks that belonged to Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry has been recovered. The information on the disks belongs to Roddenberry’s estate and has not been disclosed to the general public. DriveSavers notes, however, that Roddenberry used the disks to store his work and “to capture story ideas, write scripts and [take] notes.” VentureBeat reports that the disks, containing 160KB of data each, were likely used and written in the ’80s. The circumstances of the information recovery are particularly interesting, however. Several years after the death of Roddenberry, his estate found the 5.25-inch floppy disks. Although the Star Trek creator originally typed his scripts on typewriters, he later moved his writing to two custom-built computers with custom-made operating systems before purchasing more mainstream computers in advance of his death in 1991. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Files on nearly 200 floppy disks belonging to Star Trek creator recovered

CBS, Paramount sue crowdfunded Star Trek filmmakers for copyright infringement

Prelude to Axanar (Official). On Tuesday, lawyers representing CBS and Paramount Studios sued Axanar Productions, a company formed by a group of fans attempting to make professional-quality Star Trek fan-fiction movies, for copyright infringement. “The Axanar Works are intended to be professional quality productions that, by Defendants’ own admission, unabashedly take Paramount’s and CBS’s intellectual property and aim to ‘look and feel like a true Star Trek movie,’” the complaint reads (PDF). Axanar Productions released a short 20-minute film called Prelude to Axanar in 2014, in which retired Starfleet leaders talk about their experiences in the Four Years War, a war between the Federation and the Klingons that occurred in the Star Trek universe before The Original Series began. The feature-length Axanar is scheduled to premier in 2016 and follows the story of Captain Kirk’s hero, Garth of Izar . Both productions were funded on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, raising more than $1.1 million from fans. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

TSA may soon stop accepting drivers’ licenses from nine states

TSA screening passengers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (credit: danfinkelstein ) The citizens of several US states may soon find that they can’t use their drivers’ licenses to get into federal facilities or even board planes. Enforcement of a 2005 federal law that sets identification standards, known as “Real ID,” has been long-delayed. But now Department of Homeland Security officials say enforcement is imminent. The “Real ID” law requires states to implement certain security features before they issue IDs and verify the legal residency of anyone to whom they issue an ID card. The statute is in part a response to the suggestion of the 9/11 Commission, which noted that four of the 19 hijackers used state-issued ID cards to board planes. Real ID also requires states to share their databases of driver information with other states. The information-sharing provisions are a big reason why some privacy groups opposed the law , saying it would effectively be the equivalent of a national identification card. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Self-driving Ford Fusions are coming to California next year

Apart from the sensor bar on the roof, this Ford Fusion Hybrid looks just like a normal car. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin) Even more robots are coming to California’s roads next year. Yesterday, Ford announced that it will start testing its autonomous Fusion sedans in the state now that it is officially enrolled in the California Autonomous Vehicle Testing Program . The company opened a new R&D center in Palo Alto at the beginning of the year, which among other projects has been working on virtual simulations of autonomous driving as well as sensor fusion to improve the way its cars perceive the world around them. Ford is the 11th group to obtain a California driving license for its autonomous cars, joining other OEMs (BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Nissan, Tesla, and Volkswagen Group), tier one suppliers (Bosch and Delphi ), and tech companies (Cruise Automation and Google). A condition of the self-driving car regulations requires companies to provide California’s DMV with a report any time one of their cars is involved in a collision. Since the rules went into effect in September 2014, there have been a total of 10 incidents . The first, in October 2014, involved one of Delphi’s test vehicles, although it was being driven by a human at the time. The nine other incidents all involve Google’s cars, seven of which were being driven autonomously. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Self-driving Ford Fusions are coming to California next year

OneDrive for Business to get unlimited storage for enterprise customers

Amid the brouhaha surrounding Microsoft’s decision to backtrack on its offer of unlimited OneDrive storage for home Office 365 subscribers , one issue remained unaddressed: what about the related OneDrive for Business storage that’s offered to enterprise Office 365 subscribers? The company has finally laid out its plans for these users, and unlimited storage is back for at least some. Enterprise and government customers on the E3, E4, and E5 plans, education customers, and OneDrive for Business Plan 2 and SharePoint Online Plan 2 customers will all see their storage allocation increased provided that the organization has at least five subscribers. This move to unlimited storage will be phased in two parts. The first part will be an automatic increase from the current 1TB to a new 5TB per user, expected to complete by the end of March 2016. Subsequently, customers will be able to request additional storage. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Nemesis” malware hijacks PC’s boot process to gain stealth, persistence

Malware targeting banks, payment card processors, and other financial services has found an effective way to remain largely undetected as it plucks sensitive card data out of computer memory. It hijacks the computer’s boot-up routine in a way that allows highly intrusive code to run even before the Windows operating system loads. The so-called bootkit has been in operation since early this year and is part of “Nemesis,” a suite of malware that includes programs for transferring files, capturing screens logging keystrokes, injecting processes, and carrying out other malicious actions on an infected computer. Its ability to modify the legitimate volume boot record makes it possible for the Nemesis components to load before Windows starts. That makes the malware hard to detect and remove using traditional security approaches. Because the infection lives in such a low-level portion of a hard drive, it can also survive when the operating system is completely reinstalled. “The use of malware that persists outside of the operating system requires a different approach to detection and eradication,” researchers from security firm FireEye’s Mandiant Consulting wrote in a blog post published Monday . “Malware with bootkit functionality can be installed and executed almost completely independent of the Windows operating system. As a result, incident responders will need tools that can access and search raw disks at scale for evidence of bootkits.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Nemesis” malware hijacks PC’s boot process to gain stealth, persistence

HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive

Western Digital’s HGST division has released the world’s first helium-filled 10TB hard drive for everyday use—assuming you have about £600 burning a hole in your pocket, anyway. Meanwhile, despite reiterating that it would have a 10TB drive on the market this year, Seagate hasn’t yet moved past the 8TB mark. The Ultrastar He10 is notable for two reasons: it’s hermetically sealed and filled with helium, which is still a rather novel idea; and it has seven platters crammed into a standard-height 25.4mm (1-inch) hard drive. PMR vs. SMR. With SMR, there’s almost no guard space between tracks, which increases density but can reduce write speed (if you want to rewrite a track in the middle, you may also have to rewrite the adjacent tracks as well). (credit: Seagate) The platters themselves are impressive, too: instead of using shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to boost areal density, these platters use conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). PMR has been the standard hard drive recording tech since 2005, when it replaced longitudinal recording. The move to PMR has increased the maximum platter density by an order of magnitude—from about 100Gb per square inch to 1000Gb—but now, alas, we’re beginning to hit the limits of PMR. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive

DirecTV will broadcast live 4K content by “early next year”

(credit: Adam Melancon ) Even if 4K TVs were popular Black Friday and Cyber Monday steals, there continues to be a lack of 4K content to watch on them. DirecTV wants to provide a solution: the company’s SVP of Video and Space Communications Phil Goswitz confirmed at New York’s TranSPORT conference that DirecTV will launch a live 4K broadcasting service sometime in “early 2016.” At the conference, Goswitz explained that the company currently has the ability to transmit up to 50 new UHD channels, and live sports transmissions are already being tested as part of next year’s rollout. DirecTV already has the hardware in place, and according to Goswitz, the company wants to get ahead of cable companies and provide viewers with 4K content they can’t get from their cable companies. “I think the belief that there are technology challenges is a bit of a misinformed myth,” he said. “I think technology throughout the entire ecosystem is ready. But I think content is king; the plane is ready to take off and there is no king on board.” Goswitz went on to say that DirecTV is “moving into working with partners” to create more 4K content. Currently Netflix and YouTube have some 4K video ready to stream, but most companies continue to focus on hardware. Roku and TiVo recently came out with updated set-top boxes ready for 4K streaming, but they still have to work with the finite amount of 4K content available. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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DirecTV will broadcast live 4K content by “early next year”

Apple’s A9X has a 12-core GPU and is made by TSMC

Enlarge / A die shot of the A9X. The ratio of GPU to CPU is becoming pretty insane. (credit: Chipworks via AnandTech ) Apple makes interesting chips for its mobile devices, but it doesn’t talk about them much aside from extremely high-level relative performance comparisons. That means it’s up to experts like the ones at Chipworks to open them up and figure it out, and they’ve partnered up with AnandTech to dig into the A9X in the iPad Pro. The most significant news is about the GPU, which is a 12-core Imagination Technologies PowerVR Series 7XT design. The company doesn’t generally offer a 12-core design, as shown in the chart below, but the architecture is designed to be easily scalable and it wouldn’t be the first time Apple had gotten something from a supplier that other companies couldn’t get. The standard A9 in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus uses a 6-core version of the same GPU. Apple feeds that GPU with a 128-bit memory bus, something that it’s also included in other iPads to boost memory bandwidth and GPU performance. The Series 7XT lineup. The iPad Pro’s GPU falls somewhere in between the stock 8-cluster and 16-cluster designs. (credit: Imagination Technologies) Imagination’s chart for the Series 7XT GPU puts a hypothetical 12-core design in the same general performance neighborhood as an Nvidia GeForce GT 730M, a low-end discrete GPU that’s a bit slower than the stuff Apple is shipping in its high-end MacBook Pros. Our own graphics benchmarks place it a bit higher than that, but as some of you have pointed out , iOS may have a small advantage in some of these tests because of differences between the mobile OpenGL ES API in iOS and the standard OpenGL API used in OS X. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments