Tag: portfolio-cond

Only 25Mbps and up will qualify as broadband under new FCC definition

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler today is proposing to raise the definition of broadband from 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream to 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up. As part of the Annual Broadband Progress Report mandated by Congress , the Federal Communications Commission has to determine whether broadband “is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.” The FCC’s latest report, circulated by Wheeler in draft form to fellow commissioners, “finds that broadband is not being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, especially in rural areas, on Tribal lands, and in US Territories,” according to a fact sheet the FCC provided to Ars. The FCC also gets to define what speeds qualify as broadband, or “advanced telecommunications capability,” as it’s called in policy documents. The FCC last updated that definition in 2010 , raising it from 200Kbps to the current 4/1 standard. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 said that advanced telecommunications capability must “enable users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.” Wheeler’s proposed annual report says the 4/1 definition adopted in 2010 “is inadequate for evaluating whether broadband capable of supporting today’s high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video is being deployed to all Americans in a timely way.” (Despite the annual requirement, this would be the first such report since 2012 .) Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Only 25Mbps and up will qualify as broadband under new FCC definition

Former US cybersecurity official gets 25 years for child porn charges

On Monday, a federal judge in Nebraska sentenced the former acting director of cybersecurity for the US Department of Health and Human Services to 25 years in prison on child porn charges. Timothy DeFoggi, who was convicted back in August 2014, is the sixth person to be convicted in relations to a Nebraska-based child porn Tor-enable website known as PedoBook. That site’s administrator, Aaron McGrath, was sentenced to 20 years last year by the same judge. McGrath famously did not have an administrator password, a mistake that federal investigators were easily able to make use of. DeFoggi’s attorneys did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment, but he was almost certainly unmasked via an FBI-created malware exploit designed to expose him and other PedoBook users. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Former US cybersecurity official gets 25 years for child porn charges

Broadwell U arrives: Faster laptop CPUs and GPUs from Core i7 to Celeron

Intel promised us more chips based on the new Broadwell architecture in early 2015, and today it’s delivering on that promise. Today at CES in Las Vegas the company announced a total of 17 new dual-core processors across most of its consumer product lines—from Core i7 at the high end all the way down to Pentium and Celeron at the low end. Intel usually starts with high-end CPUs and rolls out low-end ones later, once demand for the high-end chips falls a bit and manufacturing costs have come down. Broadwell’s strange rollout means we’re getting mainstream and low-end mobile CPUs dropped on us all at once, but faster, more power-hungry quad-core chips destined for mobile and laptop workstations still aren’t available. Today we’ll walk you through all of the products Intel is announcing and what kind of performance and feature improvements you can expect. As CES rolls on, we’ll hopefully get a chance to go hands-on with some new Broadwell systems and provide some hands-on impressions. These systems should begin shipping to the public at some point in the next month or two. Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Broadwell U arrives: Faster laptop CPUs and GPUs from Core i7 to Celeron

North Korean defector to airdrop DVD, USB copies of The Interview

A well-known North Korean defector has announced that he will launch 100,000 DVDs and USB sticks with copies of The Interview as part of his regularly scheduled balloon launches into the Hermit Kingdom. Sony Pictures pulled the theatrical release of the film in the wake of hacks against its corporate networks . In an interview with the Associated Press on Wednesday, Park Sang-hak said that his next launch is planned for late January and will be in partnership with the Human Rights Foundation, which did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. “North Korea’s absolute leadership will crumble if the idolization of leader Kim breaks down,” Park told the AP, which noted that the dispatched versions will have Korean subtitles. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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North Korean defector to airdrop DVD, USB copies of The Interview

Comcast just upped its cable modem rental fee from $8 to $10 per month

Comcast users in various parts of the country have already gotten (or may soon get) a lovely holiday present from their ISP—a seemingly inexplicable increase in the cable modem rental fee, from $8 to $10 per month. Eric Studley, of Boston, who posts on reddit as Slayer0606, first pointed out the increase on Tuesday. After reading Studley’s post, Ars encouraged readers who rent Comcast modems to check their bills and found that the increases seem to have taken place as far back as October 2014, while others took effect as of December 20, 2014 and January 1, 2015. The company did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast just upped its cable modem rental fee from $8 to $10 per month

HP sells Palm trademarks; brand could be resurrected with new smartphones

Palm, the legendary smartphone and PDA company, might seem dead and gone, but it’s now looking like the name “Palm” will rise again as a zombie brand. For a quick refresher:  HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion in 2010. HP killed the Palm brand after about a year of ownership and stopped making WebOS devices entirely about a year-and-a-half after the acquisition. Since then, Palm has been pretty dead. Lately, though, the brand has started to stir. The diehards over at WebOS Nation have been keeping a close eye on  Palm.com , which recently stopped redirecting nostalgic visitors to hpwebos.com  and started sending people to mynewpalm.com . The page shows a looping video of a Palm logo along with the text “Coming Soon” and “Smart Move.” No one was sure who was behind the site resuscitation until this document was found, which shows the transfer of the Palm trademark from Palm, Inc (still a subsidiary of HP) to a company called Wide Progress Global Limited. Wide Progress Global Limited doesn’t seem to be a company with any kind of real purpose—it’s just a shell meant to hide the true buyer. The person signing the paperwork for Wide Progress Global Limited is Nicolas Zibell, who also  just happens to hold the title “President Americas and Pacific” at Alcatel One Touch. Couple that with the fact that the “Smart Move”—the text that appears on the new Palm site—is Alcatel One Touch’s slogan, and it’s pretty clear that Alcatel One Touch bought the Palm brand. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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HP sells Palm trademarks; brand could be resurrected with new smartphones

Pope to push for action on climate change

Over the weekend, The Guardian reported that Pope Francis will issue an encyclical urging Catholics to push for action on climate change. The push will coincide with the efforts to follow up on the Lima agreement in the hope that they will lead to binding agreements for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Although the Vatican has not confirmed that the document is in the works, the article quotes several authorities by name, and they speak as if it is a done deal. The document would be in keeping with the Pope’s messages on environmental stewardship; the article quotes Francis as telling an audience in Latin America, “Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness.” It’s also consistent with his general high regard for scientific findings. The Pope will join a variety of voices pushing for action next year and will undoubtedly add to the political pressure for an agreement. A more relevant question may be whether Francis can sway anyone who wasn’t already interested in seeing progress made on the climate. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Pope to push for action on climate change

North Korea suffers another Internet outage, hurls racial slur at Pres. Obama

With its latest response in the country’s on-going flap with the US, Agence France-Presse reports North Korea called President Barack Obama a “monkey” today. The racial slur comes after a recent double blow to North Korea: the country suffered yet another Internet outage Saturday and  Sony officially released The Interview , its fictional Kim Jong-Un assassination film, on Thursday. North Korea has fingered Washington for the outages and insists President Obama encouraged US theaters to re-embrace  The Interview.  “Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” a spokesman for North Korea’s National Defence Commission said in a statement published by the country’s official KCNA news agency. “If the US persists in American-style arrogant, high-handed, and gangster-like arbitrary practices despite repeated warnings, the US should bear in mind that its failed political affairs will face inescapable deadly blows.” An apparent DDoS attack knocked North Korea off the ‘net earlier this week, and it experienced another mass outage Saturday evening. This one even affected North Korea’s telecommunication networks, according to Chinese state-run Xinhua news agency (via AFP ). Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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North Korea suffers another Internet outage, hurls racial slur at Pres. Obama

Apple automatically patches Macs to fix severe NTP security flaw

Most OS X security updates are issued alongside other fixes via the Software Update mechanism, and these require some kind of user interaction to install—you’ve either got to approve them manually or tell your Mac to install them automatically. Apple does have the ability to quietly and automatically patch systems if it needs to, however, and it has exercised that ability for the first time to patch a critical flaw in the Network Time Protocol (NTP) used to keep the system clock in sync. This security hole became public knowledge late last week . When exploited, the NTP flaw can cause buffer overflows that allow remote attackers to execute code on your system. If you allow your system to “install system data files and security updates” automatically (checked by default), you’ve probably already gotten the update and seen the notification above. If not, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, and Yosemite users should use Software Update to download and install the update as soon as possible. The flaw may exist in Lion, Snow Leopard, and older OS X versions, but they’re old enough that Apple isn’t providing security updates for them anymore. While this was the first time this particular auto-update function has been used, Apple also automatically updates a small database of malware definitions on all Macs that keeps users from installing known-bad software. That feature, dubbed “XProtect,” was introduced in Snow Leopard in response to the Mac Defender malware and has since expanded to include several dozen items . Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Apple automatically patches Macs to fix severe NTP security flaw

Watching lava fight with snow in Kamchatka

Depending on the context, volcanic eruptions are either terrifying or transfixing—sometimes both, but rarely neither. The opportunity to safely view the otherworldly spectacle of lava rarely fails to ignite a child-like, giddy wonder. The damage currently being done by a lava flows in the Cape Verde Islands , on the other hand, is heart-breaking. We study these things because they are both lovely and terrible. We want to see a lava flow spill across a snowfield out of curiosity, and we want to better understand the hazards surrounding snow-capped volcanoes out of caution. Benjamin Edwards of Dickinson College and Alexander Belousov and Marina Belousova of Russia’s Institute of Volcanology and Seismology got the opportunity to witness one of these events last year in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. For nine months, Tolbachik spewed basaltic lava flows that ultimately covered 40 square kilometers, reaching as far as 17 kilometers from their source. The lava flows came in two flavors , known to geologists by Hawaiian names. (While frozen Kamchatka doesn’t exactly evoke coconuts and grass skirts, these lavas are similar to those of the Hawaiian volcanoes.) First there’s ‘a’a (pronounced as a staccato “AH-ah”), which ends up a chunky, blocky crumble of basalt. The other is pahoehoe (roughly “puh-HOY-hoy”, which is how volcanologists answer the phone), which flows more like thick batter and can solidify into a surface resembling a pile of ropes. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Watching lava fight with snow in Kamchatka