AT&T gets DirecTV merger approval, must deploy fiber to 12.5M customers

AT&T’s $48.5 billion purchase of DirecTV is a done deal, as the Federal Communications Commission today announced that it has voted to approve the merger. The FCC imposed conditions on the acquisition, saying they ensure the combination will be in the public interest. AT&T will become the largest pay-TV company in the nation with about 26 million subscribers, jumping ahead of Comcast.”As part of the merger, AT&T-DirecTV will be required to expand its deployment of high-speed, fiber optic broadband Internet access service to 12.5 million customer locations as well as to E-rate eligible schools and libraries,” the FCC’s announcement said. (The federal E-rate program provides discounts on Internet service. AT&T will also have to provide discounted broadband to low-income customers.) AT&T had proposed the fiber build condition itself, though it has said the total number of planned fiber connections is just 2 million more than the amount it would have built even if the merger had not been approved. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T gets DirecTV merger approval, must deploy fiber to 12.5M customers

Qualcomm quarterly profits plummet 47 percent year-over-year

Qualcomm, the world’s largest supplier of chips for mobile phones, is reeling after announcing a 47 percent drop in quarterly profit compared to the same period in 2014. On Wednesday, the San Diego-based firm said that it made $1.2 billion in net income during the third fiscal quarter of 2015, down from $2.2 billion a year ago. As a way to bounce back, the company also announced that it would be cutting 15 percent of its workforce, and would “significantly reduce [our] temporary workforce.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Qualcomm quarterly profits plummet 47 percent year-over-year

Bug in latest version of OS X gives attackers unfettered root privileges

A bug in the latest version of Apple’s OS X gives attackers the ability to obtain unfettered root user privileges, a feat that makes it easier to surreptitiously infect Macs with rootkits and other types of persistent malware. The privilege-escalation bug, which was reported in a blog post published Tuesday by security researcher Stefan Esser, is the type of security hole attackers regularly exploit to bypass security protections built into modern operating systems and applications. Hacking Team, the Italian malware-as-a-service provider that catered to governments around the world, recently exploited similar elevation-of-privileges bugs in Microsoft Windows . When combined with a zero-day exploit targeting Adobe’s Flash media player , Hacking Team was able to pierce security protections built into Google Chrome , widely regarded as the Internet’s most secure browser by default. According to Esser, the OS X privilege-escalation flaw stems from new error-logging features that Apple added to OS X 10.10. Developers didn’t use standard safeguards involving additions to the OS X dynamic linker dyld , a failure that allows attackers to open or create files with root privileges that can reside anywhere in the OS X file system. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bug in latest version of OS X gives attackers unfettered root privileges

British man receives world’s first bionic eye implant for macular degeneration

A British man has become the first person in the world to receive a bionic eye implant that corrects for age-related macular degeneration (AMD)—the most common cause of vision loss in adults. The implant was a success: previously, the patient had no central vision at all; now, he has low-resolution central vision. The operation was carried out at Manchester Royal Eye Hospital; the recipient of the implant was Ray Flynn, aged 80. The macula is at the back of the eye, in the central region of the retina. It is responsible for all of your high-resolution central vision—that is, when you gaze directly at something, it is the visual receptors in the macula that turn the light that reaches them into vision. With AMD, detritus (called drusen) slowly builds up between the vascular layer of the eye (the choroid) and the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE)—the layer that rods and cones are attached to. If too much drusen builds up, blood blow to the RPE is reduced enough that the rods and cones wither. AMD happens quite slowly, but eventually it can result in a complete loss of central vision, which makes it hard to recognise faces, read books, interact with computers, and so on. AMD is common amongst older people, and as our average life expectancy continues to increase, so does the number of people with AMD: about 500,000 people have it in the UK, and between 2 and 3 million people have it in the US. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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British man receives world’s first bionic eye implant for macular degeneration

Man arrested after filming fatal crash from inside car

Paul Pelton Lorain Police Department Whether Paul Pelton is a Good Samaritan is beside the point. The 41-year-old Ohio man was charged Wednesday in connection to him going inside a vehicle in the immediate aftermath of a car crash to film the two teen victims before one of them died in the grisly mishap. All the while, Good Samaritans were struggling to rescue the boys as the car caught fire. It’s not unlawful to film a crime scene with a mobile phone. And it’s not illegal to try to sell the footage of a heinous crime scene, which police suggest was Pelton’s motive. But it is illegal to trespass on a crime scene, the Lorain Police Department said. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Man arrested after filming fatal crash from inside car

Nintendo asks GitHub to make Javascript-based Game Boy emulator disappear

This week, GitHub posted a takedown notice it received from Nintendo of America’s legal representation. The  Mario  makers believe that a popular Javascript-based Game Boy Advance emulator hosting its source on GitHub violated the company’s copyright for the games involved. “Nintendo requests that GitHub, Inc., disable public access to the website at http://jsemu.github.io/gba/,” the letter reads. “This website provides access to unauthorized copies of Nintendo’s copyright-protected video games and videos making use of Nintendo’s copyrighted Pokémon characters and imagery in violation of Nintendo’s exclusive rights.” The takedown notice cites both the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and GitHub’s own ” Guide to Filing a DMCA Notice .” In total, Nintendo identified more than 20 games and two franchises ( Metroid  and Pokémon ) with patents being infringed, and the individual titles run the gamut of popular ( Pokémon  Silver  and  Gold ) to obscure (remember  Golden Sun ?). The company requested GitHub immediately remove 32 unique URLs corresponding to various emulators. The notice denotes each individual patent and infringing URL, and the sites in question now deliver 404s.  Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nintendo asks GitHub to make Javascript-based Game Boy emulator disappear

Cops nab fugitives in Cabo San Lucas by tracking Spotify IP address

A seven-month search for two Colorado children came to an end days ago after the authorities tracked the IP address of the alleged abductors’ Spotify account to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. Brittany Nunn, left, and husband Peter Barr. Larimer County Sheriff’s Office Husband Peter Barr and wife Brittany Nunn of Wellington, Colorado, were brought to Denver days ago and face felony charges in connection to the children’s disappearance. Nunn had lost custody of her children to their fathers, but did not appear when the exchange was supposed to happen in December. The duo had been on the lam ever since, and are accused of unlawfully taking the woman’s two biological children, 4 and 6, to Mexico, according to The Coloradoan . The case was broken by Larimer County Sheriff’s investigator Drew Weber. According to the paper: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cops nab fugitives in Cabo San Lucas by tracking Spotify IP address

Adobe Flash exploit that was leaked by Hacking Team goes wild; patch now!

Adobe Systems has updated its Flash media player to patch a vulnerability that attackers started exploiting soon after attack code leaked from the devastating Hacking Team breach. As Ars reported Tuesday morning, the previously unknown Flash vulnerability was part of some 400 gigabytes of data dumped on the Internet by unknown attackers who hacked Hacking Team over the weekend. By Tuesday afternoon, the critical flaw was being targeted in the wild by an array of malware titles, including the Angler and Nuclear exploit kits, as first documented by the security researcher known as Kafeine . The exploit has also been folded in to the Metasploit hacking framework . The vulnerability is cataloged as CVE-2015-5119 and is active in Flash versions 18.0.0.194 and earlier. According to security firm Rapid 7, it stems from a use-after-free bug that can be exploited while Flash is handling ByteArray objects. The update is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux systems. Adobe has credited Google’s Project Zero and Morgan Marquis-Boire, director of security, First Look Media, for reporting the critical bug and working to protect Flash users. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Adobe Flash exploit that was leaked by Hacking Team goes wild; patch now!

Google-owned Waze launches “RideWith” carpooling app on Android

RideWith, seen here looking very, very Waze-y. 5 more images in gallery Waze, the traffic-mapping app that Google acquired in 2013 for upwards of $1 billion, launched its first spin-off app on Monday. The new app, RideWith, sees Waze and Google entering the carpooling business. The app is now live in the Google Play store  for Android devices, but it currently only works in Waze’s home country of Israel (and you’ll need to turn Google Translate on if you visit the official site and don’t read Hebrew). An announcement at Waze’s official blog described the app as a “carpool pilot,” and it clarified that hopeful passengers will need to download and load the new app while drivers could opt into the program directly through the Waze app. With the RideWith app, riders can enter their commute info, then wait for an alert when a route-friendly driver has been found. Users can suss out drivers by way of profiles, prior riders’ reviews, and even through a chat option. The announcement explained that the app creates a price quote, based on distance and wear-and-tear values, when someone seeks a ride (which they can edit with their own “maximum” value). Potential drivers can then decide whether or not they want to accept that payment and take the passenger in question. The app handles payment with an apparent “nominal Waze commission” added to the price. The announcement didn’t clarify an amount, and a Google spokesperson declined to answer our question about the exact figure. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google-owned Waze launches “RideWith” carpooling app on Android

New Horizons enters safe mode 9 days before Pluto rendezvous [Updated]

Update, 10pm ET: NASA has announced that “There was no hardware or software fault. The underlying cause was a hard-to-detect timing flaw in the spacecraft command sequence that occurred during an operation to prepare for flyby.” Science operations are set to resume on July 7. Original story:  In nine short days, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will make history by becoming the first spacecraft to fly past Pluto. Unfortunately on July 4, just days before the team was to send the approach command to the vehicle, an anomaly occurred at 1:54pm EST and communications with the spacecraft were lost. Communications were quickly restored through the deep space network (DSN), with signal confirmation at 3:15pm EDT. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Horizons enters safe mode 9 days before Pluto rendezvous [Updated]