style-details – Tech Today w/ Ken May

AT&T expands gigabit fiber to 23 cities starting at $70 (or $110)

AT&T’s updated GigaPower coverage map. (credit: AT&T ) AT&T yesterday announced expansions of its gigabit fiber Internet service into parts of 23 cities and towns. The new markets are mostly in the suburbs of big cities where AT&T already offered its fastest broadband. For example, AT&T previously brought its “U-verse with GigaPower” service to Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Nashville, and Orlando. The expansion this week brings the service into a bunch of cities and towns within the larger metro areas. Pricing for the Internet-only 1Gbps package is either $70 a month or $110 a month, depending on where you live. As we’ve reported previously, AT&T tends to match Google Fiber’s $70 pricing , but not in areas where Google isn’t offering service. Besides that, AT&T’s lowest price in each city requires customers to opt into “Internet Preferences ,” which gives the company permission to examine each customer’s Web traffic in order to serve personalized ads. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T expands gigabit fiber to 23 cities starting at $70 (or $110)

Google engineer leaves scathing reviews of dodgy USB Type-C cables on Amazon

(credit: Andrew Cunningham) One particularly conscientious Google engineer, Benson Leung, is currently on an unusual mission: he’s slowly working his way through a bunch of USB Type C cables and adaptors stocked by Amazon, to check whether they are actually up-to-spec and capable of charging his Chromebook Pixel. First things first: of the ten USB Type C products that Leung has reviewed, only three of them were fully specs-compliant and capable of charging his Pixel. The three good cables (Belkin, iOrange-E, Frieq) were invariably more expensive (about £15/$20) than the seven duff ones (£6/$10). Obviously there may be some cheap cables that do fulfil the full USB Type C specification, but Leung hasn’t found one yet. One of the offending micro-USB-to-Type-C adaptors that lacks the necessary hardware to comply with the Type C 1.1 spec. The USB Type C 1.1 specification allows for power delivery of up to 3A, which is enough juice to charge a laptop like the Chromebook Pixel. Previous USB specs, though, only allowed for power delivery of between 900mA and 1.5A. According to Leung, the problem is mostly related to how the cables deal with going from older Type A or Micro/Mini connectors to the new Type C connector. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google engineer leaves scathing reviews of dodgy USB Type-C cables on Amazon

vBulletin password hack fuels fears of serious Internet-wide 0-day attacks

Enlarge (credit: Coldzer0) Developers of the vBulletin software package for website forums released a security patch Monday night, just hours after reports surfaced that a hack on the developers’ site leaked password data and other sensitive information belonging to almost 480,000 subscribers. vBulletin officials have put in place a mandatory password reset for all users after discovering it was subjected to a hack attack. They went on to warn that the attacker “may have accessed customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our system.” A separate post on the vBulletin site makes reference to a security patch for versions 5.1.4 through 5.1.9 of the vBulletin Connect software package. Noticeably missing from either link is an explicit warning that there is a critical vulnerability in vBulletin that has already been actively exploited and puts thousands of sites at risk until they install the patch. Ars asked vBulletin officials to clarify the reports and to confirm or disconfirm the speculation they have generated, but so far the request has gone unanswered. This post contains inferences and information from alternative sources that has yet to be explicitly confirmed. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Report: iPad Pro, Smart Keyboard, and Apple Pencil go on sale November 11

Enlarge / The iPad Pro and its Smart Keyboard. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) According to a report by the usually reliable 9to5Mac, Apple’s new iPad Pro is slated to go on sale on Wednesday, November 11. The tablet (as well as its Smart Keyboard and Apple Pencil accessories) will supposedly be available both on Apple’s online store and in retail stores, so this appears to be the actual launch day and not just a pre-order date. The new iPad looks a lot like an iPad Air 2, but it has a larger 12.9-inch 2732×2048 screen, a new Apple A9X SoC, and 4GB of RAM . Between the better specs, the larger screen, and the accessories, Apple obviously intends the iPad Pro to be a more Mac-like iPad, in much the same way that the Retina MacBook is a more iPad-ish Mac. The iPad Pro starts at $799 for a 32GB Wi-Fi version, or you can pay $949 for a 128GB Wi-Fi version. Adding LTE to the 128GB version raises the cost to $1,079. The Smart Keyboard is an additional $169, and the Apple Pencil is $99. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Windows 10 will be made an automatic “recommended” update early next year

The Windows 10 free upgrade program has so far concentrated on those Windows 7 and 8 users who reserved their copy in the weeks leading up to the operating system’s release. Over the coming months, Microsoft will start to spread the operating system to a wider audience . The Windows 10 upgrade will soon be posted as an “Optional Update” in Windows Update, advertising it to anyone who examines that list of updates. Then, early next year, it will be categorized as a “Recommended Update.” This is significant, because it means that systems that are configured to download and install recommended updates—which for most people is the safest option—will automatically fetch the upgrade and start its installer. The installer will still require human intervention to actually complete—you won’t wake up to find your PC with a different operating system—but Windows users will no longer need to actively seek the upgrade. This mirrors an accidental change that Microsoft did earlier this month. The Windows 10 upgrade was showing up for some people as a recommended update and the installer started automatically. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 will be made an automatic “recommended” update early next year

How dynamic resolution scaling keeps Halo 5 running so smoothly

Digital Foundry’s analysis shows how occasional resolution drops keep Halo 5 running at 60fps. Over the years, gamers have gotten used to highly detailed games that drop frames and get distractingly choppy when the action gets too intense (a deep pain I’ve personally been suffering through since at least Gradius III on the SNES ). Now it seems some developers are toying with the idea of dropping a few pixels of resolution in those cases in order to keep the frame rate silky smooth. The technique is called dynamic resolution scaling, and a recent analysis by Digital Foundry goes into some detail about how it works in Halo 5: Guardians . Basically, the developers at 343 have prioritized hitting 60fps consistently through the entire game, a big boon for a twitchy first-person shooter (and a first for the Halo series). The level of graphical detail in some game scenes, though, means that such a high frame rate can only be delivered at resolutions well below the Xbox One’s highest 1080p standard. Instead of just statically setting a low resolution ceiling for the entire game, though, Halo 5 dynamically changes the resolution based on the detail of the current in-game scene. This on-the-fly adjustment takes place on both the X and Y axes, with resolutions jumping from as low as 1152×810 to as high as 1536×1080 in Digital Foundry’s analysis. The apparent on-the-fly change in resolution wasn’t even noticeable to my eye during some recent testing. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How dynamic resolution scaling keeps Halo 5 running so smoothly

US regulators grant DMCA exemption legalizing vehicle software tinkering

(credit: Jerk Alert Productions ) Every three years, the Librarian of Congress issues new rules on Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions. Acting Librarian David Mao, in an order (PDF) released Thursday, authorized the public to tinker with software in vehicles for “good faith security research” and for “lawful modification.” The decision comes in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal, in which the German automaker baked bogus code into its software that enabled the automaker’s diesel vehicles to reduce pollutants below acceptable levels during emissions tests. “I am glad they granted these exemptions,” Sherwin Siy, said vice president for legal affairs for Public Knowledge in Washington, DC. “I am not glad it was necessary for them to do so in the first place.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Joomla bug puts millions of websites at risk of remote takeover hacks

Enlarge / Here’s the control panel hackers can access by exploiting a just-patched Joomla vulnerability. (credit: Spiderlabs) Millions of websites used in e-commerce and other sensitive industries are vulnerable to remote take-over hacks made possible by a critical vulnerability that has affected the Joomla content management system for almost two years. The SQL-injection vulnerability was patched by Joomla on Thursday with the release of version 3.4.5 . The vulnerability, which allows attackers to execute malicious code on servers running Joomla, was first introduced in version 3.2 released in early November 2013. Joomla is used by an estimated 2.8 million websites. “Because the vulnerability is found in a core module that doesn’t require any extensions, all websites that use Joomla versions 3.2 and above are vulnerable,” Asaf Orpani, a researcher inside Trustwave’s Spiderlabs, wrote in a blog post (the post appears to be offline at the moment, but it was working through most of Friday morning). The vulnerability, and two closely related security flaws, have been cataloged as CVE-2015-7297, CVE-2015-7857, and CVE-2015-7858. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Joomla bug puts millions of websites at risk of remote takeover hacks

Prison phone companies fight for right to charge inmates $14 a minute

(credit: Jason Farrar ) The Federal Communications Commission is about to face another lawsuit, this time over a vote to cap the prices prisoners pay for phone calls. Yesterday’s vote came after complaints that inmate-calling companies are overcharging prisoners, their families, and attorneys. Saying the price of calls sometimes hits $14 per minute, the FCC has now capped rates at 11¢ per minute. “None of us would consider ever paying $500 a month for a voice-only service where calls are dropped for seemingly no reason, where fees and commissions could be as high at 60 percent per call and, if we are not careful, where a four-minute call could cost us a whopping $54,” FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said before yesterday’s vote. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Today’s OS X El Capitan update should fix Microsoft Office crashes

An update to OS X El Capitan released by Apple today promises to improve compatibility with Microsoft Office 2016. Office 2016 has been crashing a lot on the latest Mac operating system, which was released on September 30 . Although Microsoft released an Office update on October 13 that contained “stability improvements,” Microsoft told Ars at the time that the update “doesn’t address the issues experienced by Office customers with OS X 10.11 El Capitan.” Microsoft said it was working with Apple to fix the problems, and that work resulted in today’s release of OS X 10.11.1. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Today’s OS X El Capitan update should fix Microsoft Office crashes