Month: December 2015

Amid the brouhaha surrounding Microsoft's decision to backtrack on its offer of unlimited OneDrive storage for home Office 365 subscribers, one issue remained unaddressed: what about the related OneDrive for Business storage that's offered to enterprise Office 365 subscribers?

The company has finally laid out its plans for these users, and unlimited storage is back for at least some. Enterprise and government customers on the E3, E4, and E5 plans, education customers, and OneDrive for Business Plan 2 and SharePoint Online Plan 2 customers will all see their storage allocation increased provided that the organization has at least five subscribers.

This move to unlimited storage will be phased in two parts. The first part will be an automatic increase from the current 1TB to a new 5TB per user, expected to complete by the end of March 2016. Subsequently, customers will be able to request additional storage.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr said Wednesday he was investigating if Texas Senator Ted Cruz released classified surveillance data at Tuesday's GOP presidential debate.

The probe concerns what Cruz said during a back-and-forth talk with Florida Senator Marco Rubio about the USA Freedom Act, which President Barack Obama signed in June. Cruz said that, under that law, "nearly 100 percent" of phone calling metadata can be surveilled with the new spy program compared with "20 percent to 30 percent" under the Patriot Act provisions that the USA Freedom Act replaced.

Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, said the committee's staff is looking into the statements.

A German woman who stayed at an apartment rented through Airbnb has sued the company, saying she was filmed by a hidden camera while she walked around naked.

The plaintiff, Yvonne Schumacher, says that the camera captured "personal and intimate" conversations with her partner, Kevin Stockton. She's also suing the residents who listed the Irvine, California unit on the site, Fariah Hassim and Jamil Jiva. Schumacher's lawyer says his client has "limited English skills" and it was Stockton, who is not a party to the case, who handled the rental details.

According to the complaint (PDF), Schumacher arrived at the property on December 16, 2013, intending to stay for about a month. She didn't know then that "her privacy would be violated on a daily basis," she states. Schumacher's lawyer states that his client has "limited English skills" and was invited to the apartment by Stockton.

Today, Volkswagen Group said that German regulators approved its proposed fixes to vehicles with EA 189 engines, the infamous engines that include defeat devices and released illegal amounts of nitrogen oxide (NOx) while VW vehicles were being driven under normal conditions.

The fixes will apply to 1.2 liter, 1.6 liter, and 2.0 liter diesel engines. The 1.2 and 2.0 liter engines will only require a software update that Volkswagen group says should take “under half an hour.” The 1.6 liter engine vehicles require a software update as well as a “flow rectifier” that mechanics will fit in front of the air mass sensor. Volkswagen estimates that labor for that job will take “under an hour.”

Volkswagen says it will send out letters to customers in the European Union as soon as the German Federal Motor Transport Authority gets the company the appropriate addresses. Volkswagen Group says it estimates repairs will start in January 2016.

Regardless of the negative opinions of Martin Shkreli, no one can deny that he has sparked a much-needed discussion about drug pricing and access—and maybe that was his goal?

The founder and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals has been publicly lambasted for jacking up the price of a life-saving drug—often used to treat AIDS patients and babies—by more than 5,000 percent. But he says in an exclusive interview with HipHopDX that it may all be an elaborate performance:

“To me, what I’m doing right now in the media, raising prices, all this shit, believe what you want, but it’s interesting," he said. "It gets people talking. At the end of the day, that’s what art is.”

Debates over what makes someone a true "gamer" boil up quite frequently in and around the video game industry, especially on certain Internet message boards. Now, a new survey of US adults from the Pew Research Center shows that people who apply the "gamer" label to themselves are quite different from the wider population that plays games, both demographically and in terms of opinions about the medium. Those self-described gamers are much more likely to be young, male, non-white, and poor when compared to "non-gamer" game players.

Pew's survey shows that video games are growing as a mainstream leisure time activity across the country. A full 49 percent of Americans now report that they "ever" play video games on a computer, game console, or portable device like a cell phone. While gaming still isn't nearly as universally enjoyed as more mass-market entertainment like TV and movies, that's a big increase from the medium's generally child-focused niche a couple of decades ago.