vanity-fair – Page 7 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Pilot’s selfies “likely” caused fatal crash, flight investigators say

A pilot’s selfies “likely” caused a single-engine plane crash outside Denver that killed the pilot and sole passenger last year, the National Transportation Safety Board has concluded. The NTSB probe said investigators discovered a GoPro camera near the wreckage that captured footage aboard the two-seater Cessna 150 taken on May 30 and on the day of the May 31 crash. “Based on the evidence of cell phone use during low-altitude maneuvering, including the flight immediately before the accident flight, it is likely that cell phone use during the accident flight distracted the pilot and contributed to the development of spatial disorientation and subsequent loss of control,” the NTSB said . Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Private investment firm buys out Sony Online Entertainment

In a surprise move announced this afternoon, investment management firm Columbus Nova announced it has purchased Sony Online Entertainment from its long-standing parent company, Sony Computer Entertainment. The studio behind MMOs like Everquest , DC Universe Online , Planetside 2 , and H1Z1 will now operate as an independent firm called Daybreak Game Company, according to a press release. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. The announcement hints that the former SOE might be looking to take some of its properties to systems aside from the PC and PlayStation consoles they currently live on. “We will continue to focus on delivering exceptional games to players around the world, as well as bringing our portfolio to new platforms, fully embracing the multi-platform world in which we all live [emphasis added],” Daybreak president John Smedley said in a statement. Smedley was even more explicit about the company’s multi-platform future in a tweet following the announcement : “Can’t wait to make Xbox One games!” And in a post on the company’s official forums , the Daybreak team states outright that they will be developing for “PlayStation and Xbox, mobile and more!” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Verizon reportedly selling off old wires to focus more on wireless

Verizon is reportedly close to selling off parts of its wireline network and some cell towers in a series of deals totaling more than $10 billion, helping the company fund spectrum license purchases that will boost its wireless business. The Wall Street Journal reported the deals today , saying they “will involve different buyers and could be announced as soon as later this week.” The report said Verizon will sell “a package of assets including cellphone towers and parts of its wireline business” but did not get any more specific. Presumably, Verizon would be selling off parts of its old copper telephone and DSL networks rather than its FiOS fiber-to-the-home assets. Given Verizon’s focus on its wireless business, the cell towers are probably surplus to requirements. Verizon’s wireless subsidiary just committed to purchasing $10.4 billion worth of wireless spectrum licenses. Verizon lost $2.23 billion in its most recent quarter. Besides funding that spectrum purchase, Verizon is trying to pay off debt, according to the Journal report. The company “took on a massive debt load” last year when it spent $130 billion to buy out Vodafone’s 45 percent stake in Verizon Wireless, the report said. Verizon now owns 100 percent of Verizon Wireless. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Verizon reportedly selling off old wires to focus more on wireless

Lucasfilm heads to court to unmask Star Wars: The Force Awakens image leaker

Lucasfilm is demanding that popular photo-sharing site ImageShack cough up the identity of one of its users the studio says uploaded an infringing photograph connected to its upcoming Star Wars movie. ImageShack has already deleted the picture from user “Darth-Simi” whose account was used to post a picture that was described as a villain from the upcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie. The image included a glimpse of a red crossguard lightsaber like the one showed in a teaser trailer officially released in November. Lucasfilm’s parent company, Disney, is seeking a San Francisco federal court to order California-based ImageShack to turn over Darth-Simi’s personal information. The studio is making the demand [PDF] to remove the picture “Star Wars Episode VII Costume Design and Photograph” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Lucasfilm heads to court to unmask Star Wars: The Force Awakens image leaker

Reddit got 55 user data requests in 2014, complied over half the time

Who knew that the “front page of the Internet” would be a source of information for law enforcement? According to a new transparency report released Thursday by reddit, the site has only received a few dozen requests for user data. As reddit wrote: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Reddit got 55 user data requests in 2014, complied over half the time

iTunes Connect bug logs developers in to other developers’ accounts at random

This morning, a number of developers signed in to Apple’s iTunes Connect service only to be greeted by a list of apps that didn’t belong to them. TechCrunch has a good roundup of tweets from affected developers —it seems that whenever developers signed in with their credentials, they were being granted access to other developers’ accounts at random. As of about noon Eastern today, Apple took the service down to resolve the problem. It also looks like developers won’t be able to submit new apps or invite new testers to TestFlight while iTunes Connect is down. Affected developers can check Apple’s System Status page for developers for updates while they wait for the problems to be resolved (no other developer services appear to be affected by the outage). We don’t yet know whether the outage was caused by some error on Apple’s end or by a security breach like the one that brought all developer systems down in the summer of 2013 . We’ve asked Apple when the service will be back and what caused the login problem in the first place, and we’ll update this article as we have new details. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

TracFone must pay $40M for throttling and capping “unlimited” data

TracFone has agreed to pay $40 million “to settle charges that it deceived millions of consumers with hollow promises of ‘unlimited’ data service,” the Federal Trade Commission announced today . Despite advertising unlimited data, the company’s various prepaid wireless brands “drastically slowed or cut off consumers’ mobile data after they used more than certain fixed limits in a 30-day period,” the FTC said. “Beginning today, consumers who had a Straight Talk, Net10, Simple Mobile, or Telcel America unlimited plan before January 2015 can visit http://ftc.gov/prepaidphones to file a claim for a refund,” the commission said. “Refunds will be paid to consumers whose data service was slowed or cut off. Consumers who had an unlimited plan but are unsure if their data service was slowed or cut off should still file a claim to find out if they are eligible for a refund.” Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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TracFone must pay $40M for throttling and capping “unlimited” data

Apple Remote Desktop admin tool is updated for the first time in forever

There was one other Apple software update that came out yesterday, though it got lost in the shuffle between OS X and iOS system updates and record-breaking financial results . The venerable Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) application has been bumped from version 3.7.2 to version 3.8. Version 3.7.2 was a relatively minor update issued in March of 2014, and version 3.7 goes all the way back to October of 2013. ARD is pretty far off the beaten path, but the short version is that it’s an administrative tool used primarily by IT people to manage large numbers of Macs. It can do standard remote desktop stuff—viewing and taking control of remote Macs’ screens to perform maintenance or help out end users—but it also has a bunch of other handy capabilities. Among other things, administrators can use ARD to push out updates or other software packages to a bunch of Macs at once, run scheduled maintenance, show user and application usage histories, and view hardware and software information for each computer. The biggest addition to version 3.8 is official support for OS X Yosemite, and the update redesigns the app’s icon and UI to mesh better with Yosemite’s new aesthetic. Older versions of ARD supported Yosemite, but performance was quite a bit slower and image quality was visibly poorer than it was for officially supported versions. Improvements to file copying, Full Screen mode, and viewing multiple client desktops at once round out the update. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple Remote Desktop admin tool is updated for the first time in forever

FCC: Blocking Wi-Fi in hotels is prohibited

On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission issued an “Enforcement Advisory” stating that blocking W-Fi in hotels is unequivocally “prohibited.” “Persons or businesses causing intentional interference to Wi-Fi hotspots are subject to enforcement action,” the FCC bluntly stated, referencing a dispute between Marriott and its customers who said the hotel chain had blocked their personal hotspots to force them to pay for Marriott’s Wi-Fi services. “The Enforcement Bureau has seen a disturbing trend in which hotels and other commercial establishments block wireless consumers from using their own personal Wi-Fi hot spots on the commercial establishment’s premises,” the FCC wrote. “As a result, the Bureau is protecting consumers by aggressively investigating and acting against such unlawful intentional interference.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FCC: Blocking Wi-Fi in hotels is prohibited

iOS 8.1.3 released, reduces the space you need to install updates

Apple has just released iOS 8.1.3, the third patch for iOS 8.1 and the sixth update to iOS 8 since its release. The most significant problem addressed by the new update is that it reduces the amount of free space that you need to install software updates, a problem which has proven especially irritating for owners of 8GB and 16GB iDevices. Currently, users who are using most of their storage either need to delete stuff or connect their phones to iTunes to perform updates, a throwback to pre-iOS 5 releases of the operating system. The update squashes a few other bugs too: it fixes problems keeping some users from entering their passwords for Messages and FaceTime; fixes a problem where Spotlight would stop showing locally installed apps among its search results (this is one we’ve run into); and fixes multitasking gestures for iPad users. Finally, 8.1.3 adds a few configuration options to limit iDevices’ functionality during standardized tests. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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iOS 8.1.3 released, reduces the space you need to install updates