Tag: feeds

Chicago Netflix customers: Your bill is about to go up 9 percent

Starting Wednesday, the city of Chicago’s new ” cloud tax ” went into effect: it imposes a 9-percent tax on “patrons of amusement,” including those services that are “delivered electronically.” In short: Netflix users in Chicago will be paying a little extra for their subscriptions pretty soon. “We will be adding it to the cost we charge subscribers,” Anne Marie Squeo, a Netflix spokeswoman, told Ars in a statement. “Jurisdictions around the world, including the US, are trying to figure out ways to tax online services. This is one approach.” Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Chicago Netflix customers: Your bill is about to go up 9 percent

Daily builds? Microsoft bangs out two public Windows 10 builds in two days

Daily Windows 10 builds? OK, not really. Or at least not yet. But Microsoft will today be releasing  a new Windows 10 Insider Preview build, version 10159, to its fast track testers just a day after releasing build 10158 to the fast track. Yesterday’s build was the first to sport the new Microsoft Edge branding in the browser—prior builds had used the “Project Spartan” codename—along with many bug fixes and other minor improvements. Today’s build includes a further 300 fixed bugs, along with another piece of branding: it includes the new default wallpaper, a Windows logo made with lasers. As we discussed  a couple of weeks ago , both yesterday’s build and today’s build are on the final path toward creating the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) build. While early builds didn’t have Windows Activation and preinstalled the Insider Hub for getting news about the previews, the latest builds are set up for the general public. As such, they include the activation system and only preinstall the apps that will ship when Windows 10 goes live. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Daily builds? Microsoft bangs out two public Windows 10 builds in two days

Days after taxi union protests, French authorities take Uber execs into custody [Updated]

On Monday, French authorities took two Uber executives into custody for questioning as part of an investigation into UberPop, the startup’s lower cost alternative. Local media have named the men as Thibaut Simphal, the CEO for France, and Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, the CEO for Western Europe. Under French law, both men can be held for up to 48 hours without being charged. “Our general managers for France and Western Europe today attended a hearing with the French police,” Gareth Mead, an Uber spokesman, told Ars in a statement. “We are always happy to answer questions the authorities have about our service—and look forward to resolving these issues. Those discussions are ongoing. In the meantime, we’re continuing to ensure the safety of our riders and drivers in France given last week’s disturbances.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Days after taxi union protests, French authorities take Uber execs into custody [Updated]

MS-DOS is getting a new game in the form of Retro City Rampage 486

If there’s one thing that’s wrong with PC gaming these days, it’s that it’s far too easy. Steam collections? Automated driver updates? Graphical user interfaces? Pah! Frankly, if a PC game doesn’t require a Sound Blaster 16 card and arrive on 25 floppy disks, then I don’t want know. Fortunately, there’s one developer out there that gets it. Vblank Entertainment is bringing Retro City Rampage —its homage to 8-bit games and Grand Theft Auto —over to the greatest gaming OS of all time: MS-DOS. Yes, the operating system released all the way back in 1981 is getting a brand new(ish) game. Retro City Rampage 486 is a port of Retro City Rampage DX , an enhanced version of the game featuring a story mode, arcade challenges, and free roaming. But before you get too excited, best check those system requirements. You’ll need an Intel 486, a whopping 3.7 MB of hard drive space, and 4MB of RAM in order to get up and running. Pretty steep, I know, but on the plus side, if you already own a copy of either the Windows or Mac version of Retro City Rampage , you can pick up the new port for free. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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MS-DOS is getting a new game in the form of Retro City Rampage 486

PSA: Xbox Live Gold now comes with two new Xbox One games every month

Xbox One owners will soon get a bit more value out of their optional $60 ( or less ) annual membership. Starting in July, Microsoft will begin offering two free Xbox One games to Gold members as part of its existing Games With Gold program every month. Xbox One owners will be able to download Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag starting on July 1 and indie puzzle-platformer So Many Me on July 16. A similar twice-monthly release schedule for free Xbox One games will continue into the future, Microsoft said. Gold members will also be able to download two Xbox 360 games each month, as they have since the program began in June of 2013. Until now, though, Microsoft has generally made only one Xbox One title available through Games for Gold each month. As usual, Xbox One Games for Gold titles claimed and downloaded during their monthly availability window will be playable as long as the Gold membership is maintained (Xbox 360 games can be kept permanently, regardless of future membership). Sony has made 46 PlayStation 4 games available through the similar PlayStation Plus program in the 20 months the system has been available in North America, increasing from a general rate of one per month in the early days to an average of three or four titles every month in 2015. Both Sony and Microsoft’s free game programs are dominated by smaller indie titles, with the occasional AAA release thrown in months after its initial release. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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PSA: Xbox Live Gold now comes with two new Xbox One games every month

Samsung silently disabling Windows Update on some computers

Microsoft MVP Patrick Barker, who spends a large portion of his life analysing, debugging, and helping other people troubleshoot Windows, has discovered that Samsung is actively disabling Windows Update on some of its PCs. Barker stumbled across the issue while trying to assist a user who found that Windows Update “kept getting disabled randomly.” By using Auditpol and registry security auditing, Barker discovered that a program called Disable_Windowsupdate.exe was being run every time the PC booted up—and that EXE file, unfortunately, belonged to Samsung’s SW Update suite. SW Update is exactly what it sounds like: it’s one of those bundled OEM tools that ostensibly keeps all of your PC’s software and drivers up-to-date. In this case, though, SW Update also installs a service that regularly downloads and executes a file called Disable_Windowsupdate.exe directly from Samsung’s servers. The file  is even digitally signed by Samsung (but don’t run it unless you want to disable Windows Update). Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung silently disabling Windows Update on some computers

AMD Fury X reviews show strong 4K performance, but doesn’t beat 980 Ti overall

The first reviews for AMD’s top-of-the-line Radeon R9 Fury X —which sports the first iteration of stacked High Bandwidth Memory (HMB)  and a huge 8.9-billion-transistor Fiji GPU—have landed, showing performance almost as good as the identically priced Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti. While that not might be the total landslide AMD fans might have been hoping for, the Fury X is the first time in a long time that AMD has been competitive with Nvidia at the high-end: not just in terms of price, but  performance as well. Naturally, there are some caveats to the Fury X’s performance, the biggest being that at 1080p resolution it’s easily beaten out by the GTX 980 Ti, and in some cases even the GTX 980. That’s not too surprising given the Fury X’s focus on memory bandwidth, which comes into play when larger textures are being shuffled in and out of memory. That said, it’s unlikely anyone buying a £550/$650 graphics card is looking to play at 1080p (unless they’re into 100 FPS and higher gaming). At 1440p and 4K resolutions the Fury X more than holds its own. Over at Tom’s Hardware , the site found the Fury X bested the GTX 980 Ti and Titan X running Far Cry 4 at 1440p by around 10 FPS, with a similar lead in the game at 4K. Performance at 4K is definitely a high point for the Fury X, where in games like The Witcher 3, Metro Last Light, and Shadow of Mordor , it beat the Nvidia cards. But in Grand Theft Auto V , it was the GTX 980 Ti that was faster at both 1440p and 4K. This was a theme across the reviews of most sites, with the two cards trading blows across a range of games. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AMD Fury X reviews show strong 4K performance, but doesn’t beat 980 Ti overall

European skeleton had Neanderthal ancestor less than 200 years earlier

By now, it’s pretty firmly established that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals when our ancestors reached Eurasia. What’s less clear is when (and how often) this happened. Estimates of the event have wide error ranges, covering the entire time from when modern humans left Africa to the disappearance of Neanderthals from the fossil record. Now, human remains have yielded DNA that may indicate at least two distinct Neanderthal interbreeding events, one of them only a few generations earlier. The only problem? There’s no indication that this skeleton’s population contributed to any current group of humans. The best evidence we have on the timing of interbreeding comes from a modern human skeleton from Siberia that dates from about 45,000 years ago. That suggests that interbreeding with Neanderthals took place about 60,000 years ago , which would place it at a time when modern humans were first reaching the Middle East. But there were some hints that additional Neanderthal DNA came into that lineage more recently. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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European skeleton had Neanderthal ancestor less than 200 years earlier

Airplanes grounded in Poland after hackers allegedly attack flight plan computer

Around 1400 passengers at Warsaw’s Chopin (Okecie) airport in Poland were grounded on Sunday after hackers allegedly attacked the computer system used to issue flight plans to the airplanes. The source of the attack isn’t yet known. The alleged hack targeted LOT, the state-owned flag-carrying Polish airline. Reuters is reporting that the attack took place on Sunday afternoon, and was fixed about five hours later. 10 LOT flights were cancelled and about a dozen more were delayed, according to a LOT spokesman. The spokesman didn’t provide any details of what had actually occurred, though he did give away this one tantalising morsel: “We’re using state-of-the-art computer systems, so this could potentially be a threat to others in the industry.” The spokesman said that flights that were already in the air were not affected by the hack and could land normally. Also, the hack didn’t affect the airport itself; it was just the LOT computers. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Airplanes grounded in Poland after hackers allegedly attack flight plan computer

500Mbps broadband for $55 a month offered by wireless ISP

An Internet service provider called  Webpass  sells consumers 500Mbps upload and download speeds for just $55 a month—and instead of selling it over fiber or cable, the company says it delivers the service with point-to-point wireless technology. The service is targeted at multi-unit residential buildings and businesses; the company also plans to install fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) in some locations, but hasn’t done so yet. Webpass was started in 2003 in San Francisco, raising the speeds over the years as wireless technology has improved, but founder Charles Barr says it’s pretty common for people to tell him that they’ve “never heard of Webpass.” That’s because the point-to-point service Webpass offers is only financially feasible in big cities, and even then not in single family homes. “We’re building-specific,” Barr, who was a network administrator before founding Webpass, told Ars. “It does me no good to put a billboard up in the city and say, ‘hey, call Webpass,’ and have half the city call and say, ‘I live in a single-family home, can you bring me service for $55?’ The answer is no. But if you’re in one of our residential buildings or one of our commercial buildings, you’ve heard of Webpass because we market very specifically to those buildings, or it’s word of mouth.” Read 33 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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500Mbps broadband for $55 a month offered by wireless ISP