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(credit: Washington State Department of Transportation)

Verizon is reportedly set to begin testing a sponsored data program that would let companies pay Verizon to deliver online services without using up customers' data plans. The news comes from a Re/code interview with Verizon Executive VP Marni Walden. “The capabilities we’ve built allow us to break down any byte that is carried across our network and have all or a portion of that sponsored,” Walden told Re/code.

Verizon will start testing sponsored data "in the next few days" with a few partners and will make it widely available early next year, Re/code reported. “We’ll be out in a larger commercial way in the first quarter of 2016,” Walden said.

The sponsored data program would presumably target just the Verizon Wireless portion of the company's business. Verizon home Internet service has no strict data cap.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Account theft is a common and longstanding problem for all kinds of online gaming services, as I can personally attest after losing all of my Diablo III loot to a hacker a few years ago. But Valve says the problem is reaching epidemic proportions on Steam, with "around 77,000 accounts hijacked and pillaged each month." Since the service launched item-trading features back in 2011, Valve says the problem of account theft "has increased twenty-fold as the number one complaint from our users... What used to be a handful of hackers is now a highly effective, organized network, in the business of stealing and selling items."

It's not hard to see why the problem is increasing. Items in games like Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: GO can be worth a lot of real money on the secondary market, not to mention the inexplicably popular virtual trading cards floating around the Steam social network. As Valve puts it "practically every active Steam account is now involved in the economy, via items or trading cards, with enough value to be worth a hacker's time. Essentially all Steam accounts are now targets." Goods transferred from stolen accounts can be relatively easy to unload on unsuspecting legitimate customers, too, making it hard to unwind the theft once it's detected.

Now, Valve is taking additional steps to decrease the value of these hacks when they happen. By default, traded items will now be "held" by Valve for "up to three days"—hopefully enough time to give users a chance to discover their account has been compromised (and to prevent quick item transfer/liquidation by the hackers). Users that have two-factor authentication enabled will be exempt from this restriction, since their accounts are theoretically safe from most hacking attempts. Trades between users that have been friends for a year or more will only be held for "up to one day" even without two-factor, since that implies a real relationship between the traders.

The ALMA Telescope’s antennas are seen under a starry night sky. (credit: Christoph Malin)

Scientists and amateur astronomers have long been fascinated by the possibility of a "Planet X" at the edge of the solar system that may explain some apparent anomalies in the orbits of planets such as Neptune and Uranus. However, in recent years, astronomers have largely ruled out the possibility of a large, unseen planet far beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Research groups from Sweden and Mexico have now submitted pre-prints of two research papers to arXiv (here and here) that claim to have discovered a massive object at the edge of the solar system. Using observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile during 2014 and 2015, the astronomers spied "a new blackbody point source" that appears to be moving in conjunction with the Alpha Centauri star system, about 4.3 light years from Earth.

The authors do not believe the new object is part of the Alpha Centuari system, however, because if it were that far away, such a star would have been bright enough to be seen before. Rather, they offer several explanations for the object, which one of the research teams named "Gna." Perhaps most notably, they suggest a "Super Earth" at a distance of about 300 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun, or about six times further than Pluto is at its aphelion. Another explanation is a "super-cool" brown dwarf (too big to be a planet, too small to be a star) at about 20,000 AU from the Sun.

(credit: david reid)

Chubb, the company famous for its eponymous locks and other safety equipment, is to offer its clients in the UK the first ever "troll insurance." Chubb personal insurance policy holders will be able to claim up to £50,000 towards expenses that include professional counselling, relocation due to online abuse, or time spent off work.

Cyberbullying is defined by the insurer as "three or more acts by the same person or group to harass, threaten or intimidate a customer," the Financial Times reports.

The inclusion of cyberbullying into Chubb's policies is a result of a survey of the target audience and brokers.