Tag: fnself-program1

Verizon reportedly selling off old wires to focus more on wireless

Verizon is reportedly close to selling off parts of its wireline network and some cell towers in a series of deals totaling more than $10 billion, helping the company fund spectrum license purchases that will boost its wireless business. The Wall Street Journal reported the deals today , saying they “will involve different buyers and could be announced as soon as later this week.” The report said Verizon will sell “a package of assets including cellphone towers and parts of its wireline business” but did not get any more specific. Presumably, Verizon would be selling off parts of its old copper telephone and DSL networks rather than its FiOS fiber-to-the-home assets. Given Verizon’s focus on its wireless business, the cell towers are probably surplus to requirements. Verizon’s wireless subsidiary just committed to purchasing $10.4 billion worth of wireless spectrum licenses. Verizon lost $2.23 billion in its most recent quarter. Besides funding that spectrum purchase, Verizon is trying to pay off debt, according to the  Journal report. The company “took on a massive debt load” last year when it spent $130 billion to buy out Vodafone’s 45 percent stake in Verizon Wireless, the report said. Verizon now owns 100 percent of Verizon Wireless. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Visit site:
Verizon reportedly selling off old wires to focus more on wireless

Dish used “small business” discount to save $3 billion at taxpayer expense

Dish took advantage of discounts intended for small businesses to save $3.3 billion in an auction of public airwaves, making a “mockery” of the small business program, according to a member of the Federal Communications Commission. Dish used companies it owns in order to place $13.3 billion worth of winning bids in an auction of wireless airwaves that can be used for cellular networks. Results of the auction were announced last week . But Dish only has to pay $10 billion because it didn’t place the bids directly. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai called upon FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler “to immediately launch an investigation into these multi-billion dollar subsidies.” “[T]wo companies in which Dish Network has an 85 percent ownership stake claimed over $3 billion in taxpayer-funded discounts when purchasing spectrum in the AWS-3 auction,” Pai said in his call for an investigation today . “Those discounts came through the FCC’s designed entity (DE) program, which is intended to make it easier for small businesses to purchase spectrum and compete with large corporations. Dish, however, has annual revenues of almost $14 billion, a market capitalization of over $32 billion, and over 14 million customers. Its participation makes a mockery of the DE program.” Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continued here:
Dish used “small business” discount to save $3 billion at taxpayer expense

Lucasfilm heads to court to unmask Star Wars: The Force Awakens image leaker

Lucasfilm is demanding that popular photo-sharing site ImageShack cough up the identity of one of its users the studio says uploaded an infringing photograph connected to its upcoming Star Wars movie. ImageShack has already deleted the picture  from user “Darth-Simi” whose account was used to post a picture that was described as a villain from the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie. The image included a glimpse of a red crossguard lightsaber like the one showed in a teaser trailer officially released in November. Lucasfilm’s parent company, Disney, is seeking a San Francisco federal court to order California-based ImageShack to turn over Darth-Simi’s personal information. The studio is making the demand  [PDF] to remove the picture “Star Wars Episode VII Costume Design and Photograph” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
Lucasfilm heads to court to unmask Star Wars: The Force Awakens image leaker

HP’s fanless 2.2-pound laptop includes Broadwell and a 2560×1440 screen

The high-end Ultrabook market is tightly bound to Intel’s release schedule. No other company is offering similar performance and power consumption, so when Intel hits a delay like it did with its new Broadwell architecture, it means that things get boring for a while. We’re expecting the landscape to get more intriguing as we draw closer to CES in January, though, and HP has just announced a pair of Ultrabooks that have piqued our interest. The EliteBook Folio 1020 G1 series comes in two flavors, both of which are 0.62 inches thick: the first is the Standard Edition, a more run-of-the-mill system that starts with a 12.5-inch 1080p display and weighs 2.6 pounds. It’s slated for availability sometime in February. You’ll have to wait longer for the more interesting Special Edition, a laptop which shares the same design but uses “green carbon fiber” to reduce the weight to 2.2 pounds and bumps the entry-level screen resolution to 2560×1440. That system unfortunately won’t be available until April, and we don’t yet have pricing information for either model. The Standard Edition will have a 2560×1440 upgrade option, both laptops will come in touch and non-touch versions, and each will ship with your choice of Windows 8.1, Windows 7, Ubuntu, or FreeDOS 2.0. Windows 10 support is promised when that OS ships next year. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
HP’s fanless 2.2-pound laptop includes Broadwell and a 2560×1440 screen

The BlackBerry Passport enigma: TCOB-machine or “worst designed thing, ever”

Party time with the corporate tool, BlackBerry’s Passport. Sean Gallagher Specs at a glance: BlackBerry Passport Screen 1440 x 1440 pixels, 4.5 inches (493 ppi) AMOLED OS BlackBerry 10.3 (with Android compatibility) CPU 2.26 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 RAM 3GB GPU Adreno 330 Storage 32 GB internal, with microSD support up to 128 GB Networking Wi-Fi 802.11ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot

Continue Reading:
The BlackBerry Passport enigma: TCOB-machine or “worst designed thing, ever”

Yoga Pro 3 review: Broadwell is a mixed blessing

Specs at a glance: Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro SCREEN 3200×1800 at 13.3″ (276 ppi) OS Windows 8.1 64-bit CPU 1.1GHz Intel Core M-5Y70 RAM 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 GPU Intel HD Graphics 5300 HDD 256-512GB SSD NETWORKING Dual-band 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0 PORTS 2x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0, micro-HDMI, SD card reader, headphone/microphone dual jack SIZE 13 × 9 × 0.5″ WEIGHT 2.62 lbs BATTERY 4-cell 44.8Wh Li-polymer WARRANTY 1 year STARTING PRICE $1299.99 OTHER PERKS 720p Webcam, volume rocker, screen orientation lock button, system back-up button When Lenovo launched its first Yoga laptop, it seemed rather weird. It arrived on a wave of new Windows 8-oriented devices that tried all manner of new things to offer the best of the traditional laptop and the tablet experience. The Yoga’s premise was simple: make a hinge that bends all the way around, so you can fold the laptop back on itself to make it into a sort of chunky laptop. It skewed more heavily towards laptop usage than tablet usage—there are no compromises when using it as a laptop, unlike, for example, Microsoft’s Surface Pro range—but still offered that flexibility for those who wanted it. Although designed to let the device transform into a tablet, it is perhaps the other positions that have been the real winners with the Yoga’s hinge: what Lenovo calls “tent mode,” where the keyboard is folded most of the way back to prop the screen up, is excellent when watching movies in planes and similar cramped situations, as it drastically shrinks the footprint of the device. This flexibility made the Yoga design one of the big winners. Read 22 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read this article:
Yoga Pro 3 review: Broadwell is a mixed blessing

Internet routers hitting 512K limit, some become unreliable

Chart courtesy of Renesys, a subsidiary of Dyn From performance issues at hosting provider Liquid Web to outages at eBay and LastPass, large networks and websites suffered a series of disruptions and outages on Tuesday. Some Internet engineers are blaming the disruptions on a novel technical issue that impacts older Internet routers. At the heart of the issue, the growth of routable networks on the Internet overwhelmed the amount of memory set aside in infrastructure hardware, typically routers and switches, that determines the appropriate way to route data through the Internet. For the first time, the lists of routable networks—also called border gateway protocol (BGP) tables—surpassed a significant power of two (two to the 19th power or 512K). Many older routers limit their use of a specialized, and expensive, type of memory known as ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM) to 512K by default. When the tables outgrew the space allotted for them, the routers shut down or slowed. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
Internet routers hitting 512K limit, some become unreliable

Sierra Games returns with new King’s Quest and Geometry Wars titles

If you’re a PC gamer of a certain age, the name Sierra On-Line (or Sierra Entertainment) revives memories of some of the most classic point-and-click adventures of the late 20th century. New corporate owner Activision is set to reactivate those memories today, reviving the brand as “Sierra Games” and promising new games in the King’s Quest and Geometry Wars franchises. The new Sierra name will apparently serve as an umbrella for a number of independent studios to reinterpret some classic gaming franchises. The newest King’s Quest entry is being developed for 2015 by The Odd Gentlemen, best known for esoteric puzzle platform game The Misadventures of PB Winterbottom . Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions , meanwhile, is being worked on by mobile/portable developer Lucid Games for this holiday season. No platforms have been announced for either title. “Sierra’s goal is to find and work with gifted up-and-coming indie developers working on their own amazing projects or who are passionate about working on great Sierra IP,” a Sierra representative told GamesBeat . “We’re in talks with a large number of other indie devs, and we can’t wait to share more details with fans in the near future.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read More:
Sierra Games returns with new King’s Quest and Geometry Wars titles

Meet WordHound, the tool that puts a personal touch on password cracking

Dan Goodin, Ars Technica In the vexing pursuit of passwords that are both easy to remember and hard to crack, many people embed clues into their login credentials, choosing for instance, “playstationplaystationdec2014” to safeguard a recently created gaming account or “L0an@ w0rk!” for an IT administrative account at a financial services company. Now, a whitehat hacker is capitalizing on the habit with a tool that automates the process of launching highly targeted cracking attacks. Dubbed WordHound, the freely available tool scours press releases, white papers, and Twitter accounts belonging to companies or sites that have recently suffered security breaches. The software then generates a list of commonly found words or phrases that attackers can use when trying to convert cryptographic hashes from compromised password databases into the corresponding plaintext passcodes. The tool, devised by security consultant Matthew Marx, was unveiled Wednesday at Passwords 14 conference in Las Vegas. “People are influenced greatly by their environment when choosing a password,” Marx, who works for consultancy MWR Info Security , told Ars. “It could be a work environment, their personal life, or the sport teams they like. I wanted to create a tool that leveraged this human vulnerability.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the article here:
Meet WordHound, the tool that puts a personal touch on password cracking

Researchers design flat sheet that can fold itself into a robot, walk away

Seth Kroll, Wyss Institute As if a brain-like processing chip weren’t bad enough news for us humans, this week’s edition of Science also describes a robot that, after being laid out as a flat sheet, can fold itself into the appropriate shape to take its on-board electronics for a walk. Why would we possibly want self-assembling, flat-packed electronics of this kind? The authors of the Science paper, who are part of a Harvard/MIT collaboration, offer two reasons. First, it’s much easier to assemble something as a planar surface. With the right layers in place, it’s simple to cut them into the appropriate shapes and then embed the electronics where they’re needed, since there’s no awkward internal spaces to deal with. The second reason is that it’s easy to transport things when they’re shaped like a sheet. Since the devices can assemble themselves, they can be shipped to any destination and used without any hassle or high-level technical knowledge. Of course, having a good idea and actually knowing how to create a self-assembling device are two different things. Fortunately, the ability to construct elaborate three-dimensional items from a flat sheet is a solved problem, thanks to origami. Software like  Origamizer  can even determine how to cut and fold a sheet in order to produce a specified three-dimensional structure. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Visit link:
Researchers design flat sheet that can fold itself into a robot, walk away