Tag: vanity-fair

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

New battery composed of lots of nanobatteries

Shalini Saxena We’re increasingly dependent upon our batteries, so finding ways of building ones with enhanced lifetimes would make a lot of people happy. Research on batteries has ranged from trying new materials to changing the configuration of key components. Now, researchers have managed to restructure the materials in a nano-battery, then bundle lots of these individual batteries into a larger device. Batteries rely on two electrodes to create separate currents of electrons and ions, generating electricity. Nanostructured electrodes have useful properties, such as large surface area and short ion transport time, which enables a high storage capacity and enhanced lifetimes—these batteries hold charge longer and can undergo more charge-discharge cycles. 3-D connectivity and organization of nanostructured electrodes could further improve these devices. Previously, researchers had developed 3-D nanostructured batteries by placing two electrodes within a nanopore (made of anodic aluminum oxide) and using ultrathin electrical insulating material to separate them. While this system had improved power and energy density, use of such thin electrical insulators limits charge retention and requires complex circuits to shift current between them—it’s difficult to retain the benefits of the 3-D nano-architecture due to spatial constraints of the material. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New battery composed of lots of nanobatteries

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

Local judge unseals hundreds of highly secret cell tracking court records

Scott A judge in Charlotte, North Carolina, has unsealed a set of 529 court documents in hundreds of criminal cases detailing the use of a stingray, or cell-site simulator, by local police. This move, which took place earlier this week, marks a rare example of a court opening up a vast trove of applications made by police to a judge, who authorized each use of the powerful and potentially invasive device. According to the Charlotte Observer , the records seem to suggest that judges likely did not fully understand what they were authorizing. Law enforcement agencies nationwide have taken extraordinary steps to preserve stingray secrecy. As recently as this week, prosecutors in a Baltimore robbery case dropped key evidence that stemmed from stingray use rather than fully disclose how the device was used. The newspaper also reported on Friday that the Mecklenburg County District Attorney’s office, which astonishingly had also never previously seen the applications filed by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD), will now review them and determine which records also need to be shared with defense attorneys. Criminals could potentially file new claims challenging their convictions on the grounds that not all evidence was disclosed to them at the time. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Local judge unseals hundreds of highly secret cell tracking court records

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

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

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One of world’s largest landslide deposits discovered in Utah

400 Tor-anonymized domains tracked down and seized in global crackdown

Thursday’s takedown of the Silk Road 2.0 drug website was part of a much bigger crackdown by police in a dozen countries that seized more than 400 darknet domains, it was widely reported Friday. Operation Onymous, as the coordinated international effort was dubbed, confiscated $1 million in bitcoins, $250,000 in cash, and a variety of drugs, gold, and silver, the Associated Press reported . In all, according to Wired , police seized 414 .onion domains, the Web addresses that use the Tor anonymity service to hide the physical location where they’re hosted. At least 17 people were arrested. Sites besides Silk Road 2.0 that were taken down included Hydra, Cloud Nine, Pandora, and Blue Sky. In all, some 55 different markets will be shut down once Operation Onymous is completed. Sites Agora and Evolution aren’t among them. The rise of underground bazaars selling illicit drugs and services has continued despite last year’s arrest of Ross William Ulbricht, the alleged mastermind of the original Silk Road who has pleaded not guilty and continues to fight the criminal charges in court. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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400 Tor-anonymized domains tracked down and seized in global crackdown

NYPD officers charged after video catches teen getting pistol whipped

“The video speaks for itself, doesn’t it?” Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson said Wednesday about a brief video recording that led to two New York Police Department cops being charged in connection to the pistol-whipping assault of a 16-year-old Brooklyn boy. The boy, who was arrested for marijuana possession, ended up with broken teeth and bruises. The officers charged in Brooklyn Supreme Court on Wednesday are David Afanador, 33, and Tyrane Isaac, 36, both nine-year veterans. The 82-second video of the teen’s August 29 beating—widely available on the Internet—was captured by a local Crown Heights business. The tape shows the boy running before eventually stopping and raising his hands, after which he is pummeled and taken to the ground. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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NYPD officers charged after video catches teen getting pistol whipped