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AT&T has $80 billion deal to purchase Time Warner Inc. (and with it, HBO)

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Tim Boyle) Following up on news reported yesterday, AT&T has reached a deal to buy Time Warner Inc. for more than $80 billion,  The Wall Street Journal wrote today . The boards of the companies are meeting today to approve the merger, “with a deal likely to be announced as soon as Saturday evening.” Original story from yesterday follows: AT&T and Time Warner Inc. have recently met “to discuss various business strategies including a possible merger,”  Bloomberg reported Thursday . Discussions are still in early stages, according to Bloomberg’s anonymous sources. “The talks, which at this stage are informal, have focused on building relations between the companies rather than establishing the terms of a specific transaction, the people said, asking not to be identified as the deliberations are private,” Bloomberg wrote. “Neither side has yet hired a financial adviser, the people said.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T has $80 billion deal to purchase Time Warner Inc. (and with it, HBO)

“Most serious” Linux privilege-escalation bug ever is under active exploit (updated)

(credit: michael ) A serious vulnerability that has been present for nine years in virtually all versions of the Linux operating system is under active exploit, according to researchers who are advising users to install a patch as soon as possible. While CVE-2016-5195, as the bug is cataloged, amounts to a mere privilege-escalation vulnerability rather than a more serious code-execution vulnerability, there are several reasons many researchers are taking it extremely seriously. For one thing, it’s not hard to develop exploits that work reliably. For another, the flaw is located in a section of the Linux kernel that’s a part of virtually every distribution of the open-source OS released for almost a decade. What’s more, researchers have discovered attack code that indicates the vulnerability is being actively and maliciously exploited in the wild. “It’s probably the most serious Linux local privilege escalation ever,” Dan Rosenberg, a senior researcher at Azimuth Security, told Ars. “The nature of the vulnerability lends itself to extremely reliable exploitation. This vulnerability has been present for nine years, which is an extremely long period of time.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Most serious” Linux privilege-escalation bug ever is under active exploit (updated)

Teslas will now be sold with enhanced hardware suite for full autonomy

Enlarge (credit: Tesla) Late Wednesday, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk announced that the company would be adding its own hardware to new all new Tesla cars to allow up to Level 5 autonomy. In the automotive industry, Level 5 denotes a fully self-driving vehicle. Musk said that it would be some time before Tesla’s software would advance to meet capabilities of the new hardware available, which the company is calling “Hardware II.” Still, the CEO stressed that all new cars would come with the new hardware suite, even if the software isn’t activated. The hardware includes eight cameras for a 360-degree view, twelve ultrasonic sensors, “forward-facing radar with advanced processing,” and an Nvidia Titan GPU that’s capable of 12 trillion operations per second. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Teslas will now be sold with enhanced hardware suite for full autonomy

T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

Enlarge T-Mobile USA failed to adequately disclose speed and data restrictions on its “unlimited data” plans and has agreed to pay a fine and provide some benefits to customers, the Federal Communications Commission said today. Like other carriers, T-Mobile slows the speeds of its unlimited data customers after they’ve used a certain amount of data each month; when these customers connect to congested cell towers, they receive lower speeds than customers without unlimited data plans. The throttling is applied after customers use 26GB in a month. “Under its ‘Top 3 Percent Policy,’ T-Mobile ‘de-prioritizes’ its ‘heavy’ data users during times of network contention or congestion,” the FCC said in an announcement today. “This potentially deprived these users of the advertised speeds of their data plan. According to consumers, this policy rendered data services ‘unusable’ for many hours each day and substantially limited their access to data.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

Millimeter-wave 5G modem coming mid-2018 with 5Gbps peak download

(credit: Qualcomm) Qualcomm is promising to launch its first 5G modem in 2018, even though basic standards for 5G have yet to be established , nor even which part of the radio spectrum it will use. Dubbed the Snapdragon X50, the San Diego chipmaker says its new modem will be able to deliver blindingly fast peak download speeds of around 5Gbps. The X50 5G will at first operate with a bandwidth of about 800MHz on the 28GHz millimetre wave (mmWave in Qualcomm jargon) spectrum, a frequency that’s also being investigated by Samsung, Nokia, and Verizon. However, the powers that be have far from settled on this area of the spectrum, with 73GHz also being mooted. In the UK, Ofcom is investigating several bands in a range between 6GHz and 100GHz. As the industry as a whole is a long way from consensus, this could be Qualcomm’s bid to get the final frequency locked down well before 2020—the year that 5G is expected to reach any kind of consumer penetration. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Millimeter-wave 5G modem coming mid-2018 with 5Gbps peak download

Breach exposes at least 58 million accounts, includes names, jobs, and more

(credit: Hefin Richards ) There has been yet another major data breach, this time exposing names, IP addresses, birth dates, e-mail addresses, vehicle data, and occupations of at least 58 million subscribers, researchers said. The trove was mined from a poorly secured database and then published and later removed at least three times over the past week, according to this analysis from security firm Risk Based Security. Based on conversations with a Twitter user who first published links to the leaked data , the researchers believe the data was stored on servers belonging to Modern Business Solutions , a company that provides data storage and database hosting services. Shortly after researchers contacted Modern Business Solutions, the leaky database was secured, but the researchers said they never received a response from anyone at the firm, which claims to be located in Austin, Texas. Officials with Modern Business Solutions didn’t respond to several messages Ars left seeking comment and additional details. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Breach exposes at least 58 million accounts, includes names, jobs, and more

Don’t buy a Galaxy Note 7—and return yours if you already have

Enlarge / The Note 7 has too many safety issues for us to recommend. (credit: Ron Amadeo) When we review phones, we do our best to tell you everything you need to make a smart purchase. We talk about the underlying tech, too, but in the end, people usually read a review because they either want to know which thing to buy or they want to know more about the thing they already intend to buy. Usually, we give you all of that information and make a general recommendation but leave the ultimate purchasing decision up to you. But for Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7, we need to go a step further: don’t buy this phone. And if you have bought it, you should return the Galaxy Note 7 immediately and purchase something else. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Don’t buy a Galaxy Note 7—and return yours if you already have

More than 400 malicious apps infiltrate Google Play

Enlarge (credit: Curious Expeditions ) Google Play was recently found to be hosting more than 400 apps that turned infected phones into listening posts that could siphon sensitive data out of the protected networks they connected to, security researchers said Thursday. One malicious app infected with the so-called DressCode malware had been downloaded from 100,000 to 500,000 times before it was removed from the Google-hosted marketplace, Trend Micro researchers said in a post . Known as Mod GTA 5 for Minecraft PE, it was disguised as a benign game, but included in the code was a component that established a persistent connection with an attacker controlled server. The server then had the ability to bypass so-called network address translation protections that shield individual devices inside a network. Trend Micro has found 3,000 such apps in all, 400 of which were available through Play. “This malware allows threat actors to infiltrate a user’s network environment,” Thursday’s report stated. “If an infected device connects to an enterprise network, the attacker can either bypass the NAT device to attack the internal server or download sensitive data using the infected device as a springboard.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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More than 400 malicious apps infiltrate Google Play

Leaker fined $1.2 million for uploading screener of The Revenant

Enlarge / Leonardo DiCaprio signs autographs for fans during the Tokyo premiere for “The Revenant” in March. (credit: Yuriko Nakao via Getty Images) The pirate who in December leaked The Revenant and The Peanuts Movie  days ahead of their US releases has been ordered to pay $1.2 million in restitution to 20th Century Fox and was also handed eight months of home confinement, federal prosecutors said . The defendant, William Morarity of the Los Angeles suburb of Lancaster, was working for an undisclosed studio lot when he unlawfully accessed watermarked, screener versions of the films and uploaded them to a private BitTorrent site ” Pass the Popcorn ,” according to his guilty plea  (PDF).  The Revenant was downloaded more than 1 million times and The Peanuts Movie more than 220,000 times, according to court documents . (PDF) Deirdre Fike, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said the defendant’s behavior is a killer of creativity and jobs. “Mr. Morarity used his position of trust to gain access to sensitive intellectual property, then shared that content online and incurred large-scale losses to the owner of that property,” Fike said. “The theft of intellectual property—in this case, major motion pictures—discourages creative incentive and affects the average American making ends meet in the entertainment industry.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Leaker fined $1.2 million for uploading screener of The Revenant

HP to issue “optional firmware update” allowing 3rd-party ink

An HP Officejet ink cartridge, just $26.99. (credit: HP ) HP Inc. today said it will restore the ability of certain OfficeJet printers to use third-party ink cartridges, after being criticized for issuing a firmware update that rejects non-HP ink. But HP is still defending its practice of preventing the use of non-HP ink and is making no promises about refraining from future software updates that force customers to use only official ink cartridges. HP made its announcement in a blog post titled ” Dedicated to the best printing experience .” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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HP to issue “optional firmware update” allowing 3rd-party ink