Tag: wired

Since Netflix paid Verizon, video speed on FiOS has doubled

Netflix’s payments to Verizon for a direct connection to its network  didn’t result in immediate improvements for the companies’ joint subscribers, but they’re finally paying off with better video performance. Verizon FiOS actually topped all other major ISPs in Netflix performance in September with an average stream rate of 3.17Mbps, Netflix said today . Netflix Although Verizon FiOS led all large ISPs in Netflix performance, Google Fiber is still No. 1 among all ISPs regardless of size with a 3.54Mbps average in September. In August, Netflix streamed at an average of 2.41Mbps on Verizon FiOS, ranking tenth out of 16 major ISPs. In July, Netflix speed on Verizon FiOS was 1.61Mbps and in June it was 1.58Mbps, ranking 12th in both months. The Netflix/Verizon deal was announced in late April . When performance continued to get worse  after the interconnection agreement, Verizon said it might take until the end of 2014 to get all the proper network connections in place to speed up video. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Since Netflix paid Verizon, video speed on FiOS has doubled

Slow credit card verification lands Florida man in jail

Last week a man was arrested in Fort Lauderdale, FL when his two credit cards were declined after he spent $600 on bottle service at a nightclub. The story wouldn’t be all that interesting were it not for the fact that the man, Don Marcani, had not reached his credit limit that night. In fact, he was able to pay his $1,000 bail the next morning using one of the credit cards that was declined earlier. As Marcani told NBC 6 South Florida , he and his friend used a Wells Fargo credit card to buy $80-worth of drinks at the bar of Cyn Nightclub. Then they decided to move into the VIP section, costing them $600. The waitress took Marcani’s credit card, but when she tried to run the credit card later that night, it was declined. Marcani then provided a Capital One credit card, which was also declined. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Slow credit card verification lands Florida man in jail

There’s more than one reason why iOS 8’s growth has stalled

Apple If you follow Apple news closely, at some point in the last week you’ve probably seen the graph above. It’s from Apple’s Developer Support page, and the company calculates the figure by looking at the iOS versions of devices accessing the App Store. Like Google’s analogous developer dashboard for Android , it’s meant to give developers a broad look at OS usage so they can use that data to determine which OSes to support with their apps. The problem with the graph above isn’t that it shows iOS 8 and iOS 7 with the same amount of share, but that the number for iOS 8 has climbed just a single percentage point since the last measurement was taken on September 21 . Apple’s data mirrors what a number of other independent firms have been claiming virtually since launch day— Chitika’s data shows that iOS 8 had rolled out to 7.3 percent of the iOS userbase after 24 hours of availability, while iOS 7 had already hit 18.2 percent in the first 24 hours after its launch. More recent data from Fiksu shows an adoption curve closer to iOS 5 (the last version you needed iTunes to upgrade to) than to iOS 6 or iOS 7. Fiksu’s data shows iOS 8 with 40 percent of the iOS pie after 22 days, compared to nearly 60 percent for iOS 7 and iOS 6. Fiksu Though the Ars audience is generally more tech-savvy than the general populace, our own data shows that you guys are embracing iOS 8 less enthusiastically than you picked up iOS 7. Here’s data from iOS 7’s first two full weeks (running from September 22 of 2013 to October 5) compared to data from iOS 8’s first two full weeks (September 21 of 2014 to October 4). Around 70 percent of our site visits came from iOS 7 in that time period, compared to about 60 percent from iOS 8. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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There’s more than one reason why iOS 8’s growth has stalled

What we know (and suspect) is coming in iOS 8.1

Apple Pay is one of the biggest features expected to launch with iOS 8.1 later this month. Apple Last week, numerous publications ( including Ars ) reported seeing references to iOS 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 in their site analytics pages. iOS versions 5, 6, and 7 only saw one major point update apiece during their respective lifespans, so evidence of three different updates being tested simultaneously just weeks after the release of iOS 8.0  came as a surprise. It looks like we’ll be seeing the first of those updates sooner rather than later. Today Apple pushed out the second beta build of iOS 8.1 in as many weeks to its registered developers, and the final version of the software is rumored to be released at or near Apple’s event later this month . Obviously such a quick turnaround time will make iOS 8.1 a smaller update than iOS 7.1 , which gestated for around six months and fixed a host of problems when finally released. But the update is still rumored to include a handful of significant features—here’s a list of the most important additions. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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What we know (and suspect) is coming in iOS 8.1

Soylent gets a version bump to 1.1—new flavor, new gut flora help

A single week of Soylent contains seven meal pouches and seven oil containers. Total weight is just about 10 lbs (4.5 kg). Lee Hutchinson Soylent, the slushy slightly sweet meal supplement/replacement from California engineer Rob Rhinehart and his company Rosa Labs, has by most accounts been a smashing success story. We tried it and liked it a year ago. While we wrote more about why folks might (or might not) want to drink it once it hit its official release , the Rosa Labs development team has continued work even as shipments of the powder leave the factory by the truckload. In an update e-mail yesterday morning, Rosa Labs announced two major milestones: first, that shipments have (finally) been completed to everyone who backed the Soylent crowdfunding project prior to its closure, and secondly, that Soylent is getting its first major update to version 1.1. It seems a little weird that food (or “food”) has a version number, but Rhinehart always intended Soylent to be a product that changed over time based on feedback and market forces. In a quick post on the official Soylent blog, Rhinehart explains that the bump to 1.1 brings with it a decrease in the product’s sucralose level, dialing down the release version’s vague sweetness to a more truly neutral taste. The logic here, explains the post, is that it’s easier to add sweetness than to take it away, and many Soylent 1.0 users have expressed a desire to flavor the product with add-ons (peanut butter is a popular one, as is blended fruit). The second change deals with my biggest issue with Soylent—what can be politely termed as “a bit of gas.” Regular Soylent use eliminates the gas, but using Soylent as an occasional substitute for a missed meal—which is my preferred usage of the stuff—can introduce some thunderous gut activity (which I referred to in my original Soylent review as ” horse-killing farts “). Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Soylent gets a version bump to 1.1—new flavor, new gut flora help

At 650% interest, that online payday loan is a steal

Fraud and Abuse Online: Harmful Practices of Inernet Payday Lending Online payday loan operators threaten their customers, promote loans designed for long-term indebtedness, and charge exorbitant interest rates, according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts. “Lump-sum loans online typically cost $25 per $100 borrowed per pay period—an approximately 650 percent annual percentage rate,” Pew said . The report, ” Fraud and Abuse Online: Harmful Practices in Internet Payday Lending ,” (PDF) comes a month after the Federal Trade Commission halted an only payday scheme that the government said “allegedly bilked consumers out of tens of millions of dollars by trapping them into loans they never authorized and then using the supposed ‘loans’ as a pretext to take money from their bank accounts .” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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At 650% interest, that online payday loan is a steal

Samsung has more employees than Google, Apple, and Microsoft combined

Samsung loves “big.” Its phones are big, its advertising budget is big, and as you’ll see below, its employee headcount is really big, too. Samsung has more employees than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined . We dug through everyone’s 10-K (or equivalent) SEC filings and came up with this: Samsung Electronics vs the headcounts of other companies. Ron Amadeo At 275,000 employees, Samsung ( just Samsung Electronics) is the size of five Googles! This explains Samsung’s machine-gun-style device output; the company has released around 46 smartphones  and 27 tablets  just in 2014. If we wanted to, we could cut these numbers down some more. Google is going to shed 3,894 employees once it finally gets rid of Motorola. Over half of Apple’s headcount—42,800 employees—is from the retail division, putting the non-retail part of the company at only 37,500 employees. The “Sony” on this chart only means “Sony Electronics,” the part of the company that is most comparable to Samsung Electronics. Sony Group has a massive media arm consisting of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, and Sony Financial Services. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung has more employees than Google, Apple, and Microsoft combined

Apple releases iOS 8.0.1 with HealthKit, keyboard, iPhone 6 fixes

iOS 8.0.1 fixes a handful of bugs with the new update. Andrew Cunningham Apple has just released iOS 8.0.1, the first update to the new operating system that reached the public last week . The update is available through iTunes or as an over-the-air update for any device that runs iOS 8—the iPhone 4S or newer, iPad 2 or newer, and the fifth-generation iPod Touch. Though it comes just a week after iOS 8’s release, the 8.0.1 update fixes a wide-ranging list of problems. Apple has fixed the bug that was keeping HealthKit-compatible apps from working, and it corrected a problem where third-party keyboards could be toggled off after entering a passcode. The company also addressed photo library access for third-party apps, “unexpected cellular data usage when receiving SMS/MMS messages,” the Ask To Buy feature of Family Sharing, something keeping ringtones from being restored from iCloud backups, and “a bug that prevented uploading photos and videos from Safari.” Those updates are available for all devices, but the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus get one specific fix that is meant to make the Reachability feature more consistent. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple releases iOS 8.0.1 with HealthKit, keyboard, iPhone 6 fixes

Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Charles Chan When Alibaba stopped trading its shares on Friday, the Chinese e-commerce company had officially logged the biggest Initial Public Offering (IPO) in US history, raising $21.8 billion in its first day on the New York Stock Exchange. The company’s earnings give it a market capitalization of over $200 billion, “putting it among the 20 biggest companies by market cap in the US,” the Wall Street Journal notes. Alibaba’s IPO beat out  record IPOs like Visa’s $17.9 billion IPO in 2008 and General Motors’ $15.8 billion sale in 2010. And Alibaba beat out its peers in the tech sector too, like Facebook (whose first-day earnings were $16 billion) and Google (whose 2004 IPO raised only $1.67 billion—paltry in today’s terms). Earlier this month , the company announced that it would price shares at $66 per share. This morning around 12pm ET, the NYSE gave the go-ahead for the company, whose ticker symbol is BABA, to start trading. Shares started at $92.70, a third larger than what the company was aiming for, and ended the day at $93.89 after reaching a high of $99.70. In after hours trading, Alibaba is just down slightly at $93.60 per share , as of this writing. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Alibaba raises over $21 billion, making it the biggest IPO ever in the US

Texas man must pay $40.4M for running Bitcoin-based scam, court rules

A federal judge in Texas has convicted a local man of conducting a massive Bitcoin-based Ponzi scheme, and ordered him to pay $40.4 million. The court found on Friday that Tendon Shavers had created a virtual bitcoin-based hedge fund that many suspected of being a scam—and it turned out they were right. The Bitcoin Savings and Trust (BTCST) shut down in August 2012, and by June 2013 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed charges against its founder . In a statement at the time, the SEC said Shavers “raised at least 700,000 Bitcoin in BTCST investments, which amounted to more than $4.5 million based on the average price of Bitcoin in 2011 and 2012 when the investments were offered and sold.” Judge Amos Mazzant wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Texas man must pay $40.4M for running Bitcoin-based scam, court rules