staff – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Nintendo’s Fire Emblem Heroes will launch on Android before iOS

iOS users will have to wait longer for Nintendo’s next major smartphone game release. Nintendo’s push towards smartphone gaming will continue on February 2 with the launch of Fire Emblem Heroes , a touch-only take on the company’s longtime tactical RPG series—and possibly the company’s most micro-transaction driven game yet. Like Super Mario Run before it, Fire Emblem Heroes will have a period of platform exclusivity—but in a surprise twist, that exclusivity is reversed. Android users will get first crack at Heroes on that release date, while iOS users have been told their version is coming “soon.” (For an estimate of how long the left-behind platform might have to wait, remember: Super Mario Run has yet to launch on Android over a month after its iOS release.) During this announcement, Nintendo did not mention Animal Crossing , the other series set to receive a smartphone port in the near future. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nintendo’s Fire Emblem Heroes will launch on Android before iOS

Breakthrough Starshot to fund planet-hunting hardware for telescope

Enlarge / The VISIR instrument before its impending upgrades. (credit: ESO ) Today, the European Southern Observatory announced an agreement with Breakthrough Starshot, the group dedicated to sending hardware to return data from the nearest stars. The agreement would see Breakthrough Starshot fund the development of new hardware that would allow the ESO’s Very Large Telescope to become an efficient planet hunter. The goal is presumably to confirm there’s something in the Alpha Centauri system worth sending hardware to image. Breakthrough Starshot’s audacious plan involves using ground-based lasers and light sails to accelerate tiny craft to a significant fraction of the speed of light. This would allow the craft to visit the stars of the Alpha Centauri system within decades. The company’s goal is to get data back to Earth while many of the people alive today are still around. Getting meaningful data requires a detailed understanding of the Alpha Centauri system, which is where the new telescope hardware will come in. Last year, scientists confirmed the existence of an exoplanet orbiting the closest star of the three-star system, Proxima Centauri. But we’ll want to know significantly more about it, its orbit, and whether there are signs of any other planets in the system before we send spacecraft. The other two stars of Alpha Centauri are also worth a closer look. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

AT&T imposes another $5 rate hike on grandfathered unlimited data plans

Enlarge AT&T is raising the price of its grandfathered unlimited data plans by $5 a month, the second such increase in the past year. The price increase affects longtime mobile customers who have held onto unlimited data plans for years after AT&T stopped selling them to new subscribers. The latest price increase was reported by DSLReports yesterday , and AT&T confirmed the move to Ars. “If you have a legacy unlimited data plan, you can keep it; however, beginning in March 2017, it will increase by $5 per month,” AT&T said. The unlimited data price had been $30 a month for seven years, until AT&T raised it to $35 in February 2016. The price increase this year will bring it up to $40. That amount is just for data: Including voice and texting, the smartphone plans cost around $90 a month. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T imposes another $5 rate hike on grandfathered unlimited data plans

T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

Enlarge T-Mobile USA failed to adequately disclose speed and data restrictions on its “unlimited data” plans and has agreed to pay a fine and provide some benefits to customers, the Federal Communications Commission said today. Like other carriers, T-Mobile slows the speeds of its unlimited data customers after they’ve used a certain amount of data each month; when these customers connect to congested cell towers, they receive lower speeds than customers without unlimited data plans. The throttling is applied after customers use 26GB in a month. “Under its ‘Top 3 Percent Policy,’ T-Mobile ‘de-prioritizes’ its ‘heavy’ data users during times of network contention or congestion,” the FCC said in an announcement today. “This potentially deprived these users of the advertised speeds of their data plan. According to consumers, this policy rendered data services ‘unusable’ for many hours each day and substantially limited their access to data.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

Samsung 960 Pro review: The fastest consumer SSD you can buy

(credit: Edward Chester) The all new Samsung 960 Pro, released today, is the follow up to last year’s 950 Pro . It offers the same core set of features, with an M.2 form factor , four-lane PCIe 3.0 interface, NVMe communication standard, and 3D V-NAND. But the 960 Pro isn’t just a minor spec bump. Samsung has seriously cranked up the speed (and capacities) of its flagship drives to the point where such ludicrous performance may be lost on all but the most demanding of users. These are some seriously hardcore SSDs. Where the 950 Pro was available in just 256GB and 512GB versions, the 960 Pro starts at 512GB, with 1TB and 2TB versions also available. For the first time, you can reasonably consider replacing an entire array of spinner hard drives or even 2.5-inch SATA SSDs with these things—so long as you’ve got the cash, of course. With a 256GB starting capacity, Samsung was able to offer the speed, longevity, and warranty of the 950 Pro to those only able to budget £170 ($199) for an SSD. But with the 960 Pro starting at $329 for the 512GB model (probably ~£330), rising to $629 for 1TB, and an eye-watering $1,299 for 2TB, you’ll need to save some extra pennies to buy one, or wait it out for the Evo drives Samsung is launching later this year. Although a marked step down from the Pro range in some regards, the Evos are in theory faster than the 950 Pro drives for less money (thanks to using cheaper and more tightly packed TLC V-NAND). The 250GB will cost just $129 (~£130), 500GB will be $249 and 1TB will cost $470. There won’t be a 2TB version of the 960 Evo. Read 35 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung 960 Pro review: The fastest consumer SSD you can buy

XG.fast DSL does 10Gbps over telephone lines

(credit: Bob Dormon / Ars Technica UK) Nokia has achieved a connection speed of 5Gbps—about 625MB/sec—over 70 metres of conventional twisted-pair copper telephone wire, and 8Gbps over 30 metres. The trial used a relatively new digital subscriber line (DSL) protocol called XG.fast (aka G.fast2). XG.fast is the probable successor of G.fast , which was successfully trialled in a few countries over the past couple of years and will soon begin to commercially roll out. (In an unusual turn of events, the UK will probably be the first country with G.fast .) Fundamentally, both G.fast and XG.fast are best described as “VDSL on steroids.” Basically, while a VDSL2 signal frequency maxes out around 17MHz, G.fast starts at 106MHz (it can be doubled to 212MHz) and XG.fast uses between 350MHz and 500MHz. This means that there’s a lot more bandwidth (the original meaning of the word), which in turn can be used for transferring data at higher speeds. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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XG.fast DSL does 10Gbps over telephone lines

Millimeter-wave 5G modem coming mid-2018 with 5Gbps peak download

(credit: Qualcomm) Qualcomm is promising to launch its first 5G modem in 2018, even though basic standards for 5G have yet to be established , nor even which part of the radio spectrum it will use. Dubbed the Snapdragon X50, the San Diego chipmaker says its new modem will be able to deliver blindingly fast peak download speeds of around 5Gbps. The X50 5G will at first operate with a bandwidth of about 800MHz on the 28GHz millimetre wave (mmWave in Qualcomm jargon) spectrum, a frequency that’s also being investigated by Samsung, Nokia, and Verizon. However, the powers that be have far from settled on this area of the spectrum, with 73GHz also being mooted. In the UK, Ofcom is investigating several bands in a range between 6GHz and 100GHz. As the industry as a whole is a long way from consensus, this could be Qualcomm’s bid to get the final frequency locked down well before 2020—the year that 5G is expected to reach any kind of consumer penetration. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Millimeter-wave 5G modem coming mid-2018 with 5Gbps peak download

More than 400 malicious apps infiltrate Google Play

Enlarge (credit: Curious Expeditions ) Google Play was recently found to be hosting more than 400 apps that turned infected phones into listening posts that could siphon sensitive data out of the protected networks they connected to, security researchers said Thursday. One malicious app infected with the so-called DressCode malware had been downloaded from 100,000 to 500,000 times before it was removed from the Google-hosted marketplace, Trend Micro researchers said in a post . Known as Mod GTA 5 for Minecraft PE, it was disguised as a benign game, but included in the code was a component that established a persistent connection with an attacker controlled server. The server then had the ability to bypass so-called network address translation protections that shield individual devices inside a network. Trend Micro has found 3,000 such apps in all, 400 of which were available through Play. “This malware allows threat actors to infiltrate a user’s network environment,” Thursday’s report stated. “If an infected device connects to an enterprise network, the attacker can either bypass the NAT device to attack the internal server or download sensitive data using the infected device as a springboard.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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More than 400 malicious apps infiltrate Google Play

Verizon technician sold calling, location data for thousands of dollars

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images) An Alabama man who worked as a Verizon Wireless technician has agreed to plead guilty to a federal hacking charge in connection to his illegal use of the company’s computers to acquire customer calling and location data. The man, Daniel Eugene Traeger, faces a maximum five years in prison next month. He admitted Thursday that he sold customer data—from 2009 to 2014—to a private investigator whom the authorities have not named. According to the man’s signed plea deal (PDF): At some point in 2009, the Defendant met a private investigator (“the PI”) who wanted to buy Verizon customer information from the Defendant. The Defendant accepted the PI’s offer. The defendant used Verizon computer systems and facilities to access customer call records and customer location data that he knew he was not authorized to access, and provided that information to the PI even though the Defendant knew that he was not authorized to provide it to a third party. The Defendant accessed customer call records by logging into Verizon’s MARS system. The Defendant then compiled the data in spreadsheets, which the Defendant provided to the PI, including by e-mail. The Defendant accessed customer location data using a Verizon system called Real Time Tool. Using RTT, the Defendant “pinged” cellular telephones on Verizon’s network and provided location data for those telephones to the PI. The plea agreement said that Traeger began making $50 monthly in 2009, when he sold two records a month. By mid-2013, he was earning $750 each month by selling 10 to 15 records. In all, the plea deal says he made more than $10,000 over a five-year period. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon technician sold calling, location data for thousands of dollars

Supreme Court blocks Senate Backpage sex ad subpoena

US Supreme Court building. (credit: MitchellShapiroPhotography ) The US Supreme Court is giving Backpage.com a victory over the US Senate, at least in the short term. Chief Justice John Roberts says the online classified ad portal, at least for now, does not have to comply with a Senate subpoena investigating how Backpage conducts its business. The investigation demands documents about the ins and outs of the site’s editorial practices. The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations contends that the site is littered with ads that amount to offering sex services by women and children forced into prostitution, and it wants to know how it screens ads posted to its site by third parties. The chief justice’s decision Tuesday comes days after a federal appeals court upheld a ruling by a lower court judge and said (PDF) Backpage must comply with the subpoena. The Senate and Backpage have been deadlocked in a legal battle for more than a year. Backpage said the First Amendment shields it from having to comply with the subpoena , (PDF) while the Senate maintains that the First Amendment implications are secondary (PDF) to cutting down on sex trafficking ads on the site. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments