golf – Page 37 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

T-Mobile forced to stop hiding slow speeds from throttled customers

When T-Mobile US customers exceed their monthly data caps, they aren’t cut off from the Internet entirely. Instead, T-Mobile throttles their connections to 128Kbps or 64Kbps, depending on which plan they have, for the rest of the month. But T-Mobile has made it difficult for those customers to figure out just how slow their connections are, with a system that exempts speed test applications from the throttling. After complaints from consumer advocates , the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigated the issue and has forced T-Mobile to be more honest about its network’s throttled speeds. Announced today , an agreement between T-Mobile and the FCC ensures that customers will be able to accurately gauge their throttled speeds. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile forced to stop hiding slow speeds from throttled customers

Here’s how to run homebrew on your 3DS

A video showing off Smealum’s Ninjhax homebrew exploit in action. Earlier this week, hacker Jordan “Smealum” Rabet announced that obscure 2011 3DS platformer Cubic Ninja held the key to unlocking the 3DS hardware to run homebrew code, causing an immediate run on the hard-to-find game . Now, Smealum has published the details of his hack , along with the instructions and tools needed to unlock the system. What Smealum is calling “Ninjhax” exploits an error in Cubic Ninja ‘s level creation and sharing function, which passes created level data via generated QR codes. Scanning a specifically manufactured QR code, generated by a tool on Smealum’s site to match any current 3DS hardware/firmware combination, causes the game to run a boot file loaded on the SD card. At that point, the bootloader downloads additional code over Wi-Fi and installs and runs a front-end channel that can run other homebrew software stored on the SD card. After that initial QR code scan, the homebrew menu can be loaded simply by accessing the save game file through Cubic Ninja . Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Here’s how to run homebrew on your 3DS

FTC: Windows tech support scams took another $120 million from PC users

Beware, scammer! Aurich Lawson Windows tech support scams have been conning PC users out of money for years, and there’s seemingly no end in sight. The Federal Trade Commission today announced that “a federal court has temporarily shut down two massive telemarketing operations that conned tens of thousands of consumers out of more than $120 million by deceptively marketing computer software and tech support services.” This is the third in a series of actions against such operations, the FTC said, and if the past is any indication, it won’t be the last. The FTC announced a big crackdown in late 2012 and another in late 2013 . But PC users continued to hand over money to nearly identical scammers, according to the latest FTC complaints. Today’s FTC press release described a method that has tricked PC users time and again: According to the FTC’s complaints, each scam starts with computer software that purports to enhance the security or performance of consumers’ computers. Typically, consumers download a free trial version of software that runs a computer system scan. The defendants’ software scan always identifies numerous errors on consumers’ computers, regardless of whether the computer has any performance problems. The software then tells consumers that, in order to fix the identified errors, they will have to purchase the paid version of the software. In reality, the FTC alleges, the defendants pitching the software designed these highly deceptive scans to identify hundreds or even thousands of “errors” that have nothing to do with a computer’s performance or security. After consumers purchase the “full” version of the software at a cost of $29 to $49, the software directs them to call a toll-free number to “activate” the software. When consumers call the activation number, however, they are connected to telemarketers who try to sell computer repair services and computer software using deceptive scare tactics to deceive consumers into paying for unneeded computer support services. According to the FTC, the telemarketers tell consumers that, in order to activate the software they have just purchased, they must provide the telemarketers with remote access to their computers. The telemarketers then launch into a scripted sales pitch that includes showing consumers various screens on their computers, such as the Windows Event Viewer, and falsely claiming that these screens show signs that consumers’ computers have significant damage. After convincing consumers that their computers need immediate help, the telemarketers then pitch security software and tech support services that cost as much as $500. The FTC teamed up with the State of Florida on the latest cases, winning federal court orders against the companies that “also temporarily freeze the defendants’ assets and place the businesses under the control of a court-appointed receiver.” The complaints say the defendants have been scamming consumers since at least 2012. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FTC: Windows tech support scams took another $120 million from PC users

Hotel charges couple’s credit card $156 for negative Trip Advisor review

A British hotel added $156 to a couple’s credit card bill for violating its terms of service that says guests can be dinged for leaving bad online reviews. The Broadway Hotel charged Tony and Jan Jenkinson’s credit card, CNN reported Wednesday, after they left a review on Trip Advisor decrying the Blackpool hotel as a ” filthy, dirty rotten stinking hovel .” The BBC described the hotel’s terms of service contained in a booking document as: Despite the fact that repeat customers and couples love our hotel, your friends and family may not. For every bad review left on any website, the group organiser will be charged a maximum £100 per review. (About $156) This isn’t the first time we’ve seen fines like this from a hotel. In August, the Union Street Guest House in Hudson, NY included a table-turning clause in its reservation policies: if you book an event at the hotel and a member of your party posts a negative review, the hotel will fine you $500 . Amid an Internet firestorm, that hotel changed its policy. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hotel charges couple’s credit card $156 for negative Trip Advisor review

Samsung decides 56 smartphones a year is too many, will cut lineup by 30%

Samsung’s 2014 product lineup. GSM Arena Samsung has been in a pretty tough spot lately. After several quarters of record profits in 2012 and 2013, the company has crashed back down to Earth. The low point for Samsung came last quarter, when it reported a 49 percent drop in profits. At the high end of the market, the company currently has to fight off Apple, which just released a phablet of its own. At the low end, it’s going up against a flood of cheaper Chinese OEMs, led by Xiaomi and Huawei. To try to get out of this slump, Samsung is taking a “less is more” approach. According to The Wall Street Journal , the company said it would cut its 2015 smartphone lineup by 25-30 percent. The company will work on the internals, too, saying during its last earnings call that it will “increase the number of components shared across mid- to low-end models, so that we can further leverage economies of scale.” The belt-tightening might seem like a big change for Samsung, but the company has so fully flooded the market with smartphone models that a 30 percent cut will barely put a dent in its lineup. And thanks to GSM Arena’s phone database , we can get a pretty good estimate of just how big Samsung’s product lineup is in order to compare it to the competition. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung decides 56 smartphones a year is too many, will cut lineup by 30%

16-cent E-rate phone fee hike will fund $1.5 billion in school broadband

The head of the Federal Communications Commission is proposing an extra $1.5 billion in annual spending on broadband for schools and libraries, all to be funded by a 16-cent increase on the monthly bills of phone customers. Under Chairman Tom Wheeler’s plan , announced yesterday and scheduled for a vote on December 11, the E-rate program’s annual spending cap would rise from $2.4 billion to $3.9 billion. Wheeler tried to make the increased cost to ratepayers sound as small as possible. “If the FCC reaches the maximum cap recommended, the estimated additional cost to an individual rate payer would be approximately 16 cents a month, about a half a penny per day, or about $1.90 a year—less than a medium-sized soda at a fast food restaurant or a cup of coffee,” a fact sheet released yesterday says . Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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16-cent E-rate phone fee hike will fund $1.5 billion in school broadband

High-res Rosetta pics catch little Philae lander bouncing across comet

The European Space Agency’s decade-old Rosetta mission managed to do what no mission has done before—successfully rendezvous a probe with a comet and then land on it . Even if things didn’t go entirely as planned with the landing, the lion’s share of the mission’s science was always slated to be carried out by the Rosetta probe itself rather than by the Philae lander, so plenty of experiments will still be carried out over the next year. A mosaic assembled by ESA scientists showing Philae’s first bounce across Comet 67P. ESA In fact, one of the Rosetta probe’s instruments managed to capture some remarkable imagery last week during Philae’s landing. In a blog post that went live this morning, the ESA posted pictures from the spacecraft’s OSIRIS imager (that’s Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System) showing Philae’s initial approach and first “bounce” off of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on November 12. Philae was supposed to have anchored itself to Comet 67P with a pair of harpoons, but those harpoons didn’t fire on touchdown. Philae actually rebounded away from the comet (67P has a small but appreciable amount of gravity, although its escape velocity is only 0.5 meters per second). It was during the first of two “bounces” that Rosetta’s OSIRIS imager captured a series of frames showing the lander’s parabolic journey across the comet’s face. The exact location of Philae’s final resting place remains as yet undetermined. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

One of world’s largest landslide deposits discovered in Utah

The Markagrunt gravity slide in Utah includes most of the area between Beaver, Cedar City, and Panguitch. Google Earth Some things can be too big to notice, as our flat-Earth-believing ancestors can attest, having failed to work out that the surface of the Earth curves around a sphere. Or, as the saying goes, you can focus on the details of some fascinating trees and miss interesting facts about the forest as a whole. In southwest Utah, geologists had noticed some pretty cool “trees.” The area had been volcanically active between 21 and 31 million years ago, building up a host of steep, volcanic peaks. A number of huge blocks of rock from these peaks, up to 2.5 square kilometers in area and 200 meters thick, are obviously out of place—they’ve been interpreted by geologists as the result of many landslides around the volcanoes. In a recent paper in Geology , David Hacker , Robert Biek , and Peter Rowley show that rather than being the result of many individual landslides, these are actually all part of one jaw-droppingly large event. The deposit, called the Markagunt gravity slide, covers an area about 90 kilometers long and 40 kilometers wide and is hundreds of meters thick. During the event, all of this slid 30 kilometers or more. The scale puts run-of-the-mill landslides—as terrifying and deadly as they can be—to shame. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Feds gather phone data from the sky with aircraft-mimicking cell towers

Aleksander Markin On Thursday afternoon, the Wall Street Journal published a report saying that the US Marshals Service (USMS) was using small, fixed-wing Cessnas equipped with so-called “dirtboxes”—receivers that act like cellphone towers—to gather data from citizens’ phones below. The purpose of such collection is to target and spy on criminal suspects, but the data from any citizen’s phone is collected by such devices. Sources told the WSJ that USMS operated these planes from five major airports in the US and that the program had a flying range “covering most of the US population.” The devices on the planes can capture unique identifying information from “tens of thousands” of cellphones on the ground. Using that information, federal authorities can pinpoint a cellphone user’s location from “within three meters or within a specific room in a building,” the WSJ said. Individuals with knowledge of the matter told the news outlet that the plane flyovers were targeted at “fugitives and criminals” and that non-target phone data is “let go” as it is gathered. The dirtboxes are described as higher-grade Stingrays, which police use on the ground to collect International Mobile Subscriber Numbers (IMSI). Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Feds gather phone data from the sky with aircraft-mimicking cell towers

All US Postal Service employees’ personal data exposed by hackers

Barbara Krawcowicz All United States Postal Service (USPS) employees’ personal data—including names, addresses, social security numbers—has been exposed as the result of a hack believed to have originated from China. According to its own tally, USPS employs over 600,000 people. “We began investigating this incident as soon as we learned of it, and we are cooperating with the investigation, which is ongoing,” David Partenheimer, a USPS spokesman, wrote in a statement (PDF) on Monday. “The investigation is being led by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and joined by other federal and postal investigatory agencies. The intrusion is limited in scope and all operations of the Postal Service are functioning normally.” The USPS does not believe that in-store customer data was exposed, but customers who contacted the agency via e-mail or phone between January 1 and August 16, 2014 may have been. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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All US Postal Service employees’ personal data exposed by hackers