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Hot Topic enters agreement to buy ThinkGeek parent company Geeknet Inc.

Online geek-y retailer ThinkGeek and its parent company Geeknet Inc. are in the process of being acquired by Hot Topic, a popular mall-based retailer best known for selling vampire T-shirts and other faux-goth-pop accoutrements. According to a press release issued this morning , Hot Topic will be picking up all of Geeknet’s outstanding shares of common stock for $17.50 per share, and the company will also be fronting about $37 million in cash. The total value of the transaction will be $122 million. Geeknet CEO Kathryn McCarthy said in the press release that the move would enable Geeknet and ThinkGeek to bring its products to the attention of new consumers, as well as to “expand [its] product offerings to keep up with industry and customer demands.” Geeknet’s shareholders appear to be onboard with the purchase, with the press release noting that a contingent of shareholders holding about 21 percent of the company’s common stock have agreed to go along with the offer. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hot Topic enters agreement to buy ThinkGeek parent company Geeknet Inc.

Google Fiber’s botched software update locks out users, disables Wi-Fi

Many Google Fiber customers have been reporting that a software update turned off their Wi-Fi and prevented them from logging into the Google Network Box’s administration panel. Customers can still get online using Ethernet connections. Customers in Kansas City and Provo, Utah have been affected and took to Twitter  and sites including DownDetector.com  to describe the problem. I’m not eradicating disease with my @googlefiber internet connection, but it would sure be nice for it to work after a 24-hour-long outage. — Sam Hartle (@Sam_Hartle) May 22, 2015 We have had way more outages with @googlefiber than we ever had with @comcast . Google needs to step up its game. — Austin Graff (@AustinLGraff) May 21, 2015 A DSLReports forum member from Kansas City wrote yesterday , “Having an issue today with my network box. It lost my custom IP address scheme and went back to default. Now I can’t access the advanced menu.” A few hours later, the customer had been able to talk to Google Fiber support. “GF Support had to factory reset my network box so I could get in. They acknowledged that a software update this morning caused the issue,” the customer wrote. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Fiber’s botched software update locks out users, disables Wi-Fi

“Rachel” robocaller victims to get $1.7 million in refunds

The Federal Trade Commission’s fight against the infamous ” Rachel from Cardholder Services ” robocalls has produced a court order to give $1.7 million in refunds to defrauded consumers. The case dates to November 2012 , involving defendants including Universal Processing Services of Wisconsin, a payment processor, and telemarketer Hal Smith and his HES Merchant Services Company, the FTC said today . Per an order from US District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Universal Processing Services and HES will have to pay $1,734,972, which the FTC said “will be used to provide refunds to defrauded consumers.” “The court held Smith and HES liable for 11 violations of the FTC Act and the Commission’s Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), based on their participation in a deceptive telemarketing scheme purporting to be a credit card interest rate reduction service that used robocalls to solicit consumers,” the FTC said. “The defendants failed to disclose the identity of the person(s) responsible for placing the robocalls and unlawfully calling numbers that had been registered on the FTC’s Do Not Call Registry.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“Rachel” robocaller victims to get $1.7 million in refunds

Apple announces new 15-inch MacBook Pro with Force Touch and other upgrades [Updated]

Some good news for power users ahead of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference  next month: the company has just updated its 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, completing the 2015 MacBook refresh it began with the new  MacBook Air , 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro , and the MacBook . The 15-inch Pros include some upgrades that other MacBooks have gotten this year—faster PCI Express storage enabled by increasing the number of PCIe lanes used from two to four and the Force Touch trackpad are chief among them. The discrete graphics option on the high-end $2,499 version of the laptop has also been upgraded, from an Nvidia GeForce GT 750M to an AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2GB of DDR5 RAM. The entry-level $1,999 version still comes with Intel’s Iris integrated graphics. Visually, the MacBook Pro looks much like the 2012 and 2013 models. The one noticeable physical difference is its Force Touch trackpad, also included in the 13-inch Pro and the new MacBook. These pressure-sensitive trackpads use haptic feedback to simulate the feel of a standard clicky trackpad, but they don’t need as much physical space to move. The trackpad’s inclusion in the MacBook is obviously necessary because of how thin the device is, but its presence in the new Pros is probably intended to encourage developers to adopt Force Touch APIs in their software. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple announces new 15-inch MacBook Pro with Force Touch and other upgrades [Updated]

Cortana for all: Microsoft’s plan to put voice recognition behind anything

When Microsoft introduced the Cortana digital personal assistant last year at the company’s Build developer conference, the company already left hints of its future ambitions for the technology. Cortana was built largely on Microsoft’s Bing service, and the Cortana team indicated those services would eventually be accessible to Web and application developers. As it turns out, eventually is now. Though the most important elements are only available in a private preview, many of the machine learning capabilities behind Cortana have been released under Project Oxford, the joint effort between Microsoft Research and the Bing and Azure teams announced at Build in April. And at the conference, Ars got to dive deep on the components of Project Oxford with Ryan Gaglon, the senior program manager at Microsoft Technology and Research shepherding the project to market. The APIs make it possible to add image and speech processing to just about any application, often by using just a single Web request. “They’re all finished machine learning services in the sense that developers don’t have to create any model for them in Azure,” Gaglon told Ars. “They’re very modular.” All of the services are exposed as representational state transfer (REST) Web services based on HTTP “verbs” (such as GET, PUT, and POST), and they require an Azure API subscription key. To boot, all the API requests and responses are encrypted via HTTPS to protect their content. Read 38 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cortana for all: Microsoft’s plan to put voice recognition behind anything

House votes 338-88 to stop bulk phone surveillance

Nearly two years after the US government’s collection of telephone calls became public following the Edward Snowden leaks, the US House of Representatives has passed, by a vote of 338-88, a bill that would end the program. An exact roll call of votes is not yet available, but votes opposing the USA Freedom Act were generally split between Democrats and Republicans, many of whom argue the proposal doesn’t go far enough to protect civil liberties. Policymakers on all sides of the surveillance debate were under pressure to make some kind of move, with relevant portions of the Patriot Act set to expire at the end of this month. The USA Freedom Act ends the bulk phone database but doesn’t include many other wished-for reforms, such as a privacy advocate at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was in an earlier version of the bill. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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House votes 338-88 to stop bulk phone surveillance

With vinyl sales on the rise, this startup lets anyone press their own LP

We often talk about the lost magic of owning a physical thing , whether that’s books, CDs, or the wondrous black slab of plastic that is the vinyl record. Holding that object in your hand, flicking through its dog-eared pages and admiring its intricately crafted artwork, imparts a sense of ownership that you just can’t replicate with a Kindle or a convenient subscription to Spotify. The trouble is, making physical objects is hard , not to mention expensive. That’s especially true of the vinyl record, where pressing plants aren’t exactly ten a penny. And yet, despite the high cost of manufacturing and end price to the consumer, vinyl sales are very much on the up. According to Nielsen , vinyl album sales in the US have grown an impressive 260 percent since 2009, reaching 9.2 million units last year, while in the UK sales reached a 20-year high of 1.29 million in 2014 . Of course, these numbers are but a tiny fraction of music sales as a whole, but—regardless of whether it’s customers chasing that creamy analogue sound, or there are just a lot more hipsters around these days—there’s a demand to be satisfied. But if you’re not a big record label with deep pockets, getting the capital together to produce a run of vinyl is tricky. Even if you do raise the cash, how do you decide how many to make? Too few and people are left wanting; too many and you’re left with stock you can’t sell. It’s a problem that the recently launched Qrates  is hoping to solve. Qrates is an intriguing mix of the old and the new, consisting of a vinyl pressing service, a crowdfunding system, and a digital store all rolled into one. Using the site’s online tool, you can upload your music, design the label and sleeve, choose your preferred playing speed (33 or 45), the weight and colour of the actual record, and how many you’d like (there’s currently a nice low minimum order of 100). Qrates gives you an estimated cost, and then works with a regional pressing plant to fulfil your order. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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With vinyl sales on the rise, this startup lets anyone press their own LP

AT&T to fix Internet congestion before it can be hit with complaint

With a month left before net neutrality complaints can be filed to the Federal Communications Commission, Internet service providers are continuing to sign agreements to prevent network congestion and a potential scolding from regulators. The latest agreement was announced today between AT&T and Level 3 , an Internet backbone operator that has accused broadband providers like AT&T of not upgrading interconnection points, allowing Internet performance for consumers to be degraded. A month ago, Level 3 told National Journal  that it was “evaluating our options” and “still experiencing interconnection point congestion as some large consumer ISPs continue to attempt to leverage control over access to their users to extract arbitrary tolls.” While the FCC’s net neutrality order  bans paid prioritization of traffic after it enters providers’ networks, it doesn’t ban payments for interconnection, which happens at the edges of the network. However, the FCC set up a complaint process so it can decide whether particular demands are unreasonable and prod companies into providing enough capacity to prevent Internet slowdowns. Complaints can be filed beginning June 12. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T to fix Internet congestion before it can be hit with complaint

In rare move, Silicon Valley county gov’t kills stingray acquisition

The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors has halted a plan to approve the purchase of a cell-site simulator , better known as a stingray. The secretive surveillance devices can be used to determine a phone’s location, but they can also intercept calls and text messages. During the act of locating a phone, stingrays also sweep up information about nearby phones—not just the target phone. Earlier this year, Ars reported on how the FBI is actively trying to “prevent disclosure” of how these devices are used in local jurisdictions across America. The move, happening in one of the primary counties in Silicon Valley, marks an unusual occasion that a local government has turned away from federal funds that would be used to acquire such a device. The device was approved initially during a February 24, 2015 meeting, despite a testy exchange between the Santa Clara Sheriff’s Office and Supervisor Joe Simitian, a former state senator with a penchant for an interest in privacy issues. Simitian’s office didn’t immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In rare move, Silicon Valley county gov’t kills stingray acquisition

PSA: 3D Realms classics debut on Steam in 32-game bundle

The modern trend of out-of-print PC games coming back to life on digital-download shops got another big jolt on Tuesday with  The 3D Realms Anthology , a 32-game bundle available only on Steam. All of the games have been recoded to work on both Windows and OS X, and while many of the titles had already launched on Good Old Games (GOG.com), one particular Ars favorite made its Steam debut today: the original 1994 version of Rise of the Triad . That first-person shooter began life as the original sequel to Wolfenstein 3D , but when id Software went on to focus on  Doom instead, a different team—some of whose members went on to work on Duke Nukem 3D —put together a surprisingly robust shooter stuck in the relatively dated Wolfenstein 3D engine. For now, the only way to get that game on Steam, along with many other 3D Realms classics, is through today’s new 32-game bundle, which means you’ll have to shell out $30—but that price does come with other notable titles like 3D arcade-space shooter Terminal Velocity , pinball classic Balls of Steel , and mid-’90s FPS classic  Shadow Warrior . (Oh, and pretty much every Duke Nukem game, to boot.) GOG.com, meanwhile, was already selling  most of the bundle’s best games in a la carte form , in case the Steam bundle’s glut of edutainment nonsense does nothing for you. 3D Realms confirmed in a statement that before the Steam bundle launch, all of the games were either available as paid downloads directly from 3D Realms’ site or as freeware downloads. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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PSA: 3D Realms classics debut on Steam in 32-game bundle