Month: June 2016

T-Mobile CEO John Legere. (credit: T-Mobile)

T-Mobile USA leads the four major wireless carriers in customer satisfaction, having moved ahead of AT&T and Verizon Wireless in the past year, according to an American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) report released today.

Wireless carriers overall outperformed home Internet and subscription TV providers, a reflection of the greater competition in the mobile industry. Internet service and pay-TV companies ranked poorly in the latest ACSI report, just as they did in another recent customer survey. “Innovation tends to be strongest in markets with multiple companies vying for consumer preference,” ACSI founder and Chairman Claes Fornell said in a press release. “There are numerous wireless carriers and plenty of different cell phones to choose from. The same is not true for pay TV and ISPs, where consumers are usually beholden to a duopoly.”

T-Mobile scored a 74 on the ACSI's 100-point scale, up from 70 last year, while AT&T and Verizon each scored 71. Verizon's score was unchanged, while AT&T rose one point since 2015. Sprint improved its rating from 65 to 70 in the past year. While T-Mobile was first among the four biggest carriers, TracFone Wireless beat all the major wireless companies with a score of 75.

(credit: Duo Security)

The next time you're in the market for a new Windows computer, consider this: if it comes from one of the top five manufacturers, it's vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks that allow hackers to install malware.

That's the take-away from a report published Tuesday by researchers from two-factor authentication service Duo Security. It found third-party updating tools installed by default threatened customers of Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus. The updaters frequently expose their programming interfaces, making them easy to reverse engineer. Even worse, the updaters frequently fail to use transport layer security encryption properly, if at all. As a result, PCs from all five makers are vulnerable to exploits that allow attackers to install malware.

"Hacking in practice means taking the path of least resistance, and OEM software is often a weak link in the chain," the Duo Security report stated. "All of the sexy exploit mitigations, desktop firewalls, and safe browsing enhancements can't protect you when an OEM vendor cripples them with pre-installed software."

The Mighty Hercules stands in the foreground, with the Gulfstream IV behind it. (credit: Lee Hutchinson)

Every minute of every hour, sophisticated weather satellites are circumnavigating the world, keeping vigil over the planet's atmosphere and streaming data back to the ground. But when it comes to hurricanes and their imminent landfalls, a somewhat lower and slower tool is the most valuable: the venerable WC-130 aircraft. Using a design dating back to 1962, these durable workhorses fly directly into the heart of the storm, where no satellite can see.

The “Mighty Hercules,” capable of flying about 18 hours without refueling, has been the mainstay of the US Air Force’s “Hurricane Hunters” program since 1999. Just weeks before the beginning of the 2016 Atlantic hurricane season on June 1, the National Hurricane Center and the Air Force invited the press to take a close-up look at one of these planes (along with a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Gulfstream IV) at Scholes Field in Galveston.

This sliver of an island along the northern Texas coast has seen its share of large cyclones. It's close to where the devastating Hurricane Ike made landfall in 2008, and before that, Hurricane Alicia passed directly over the island in 1983. Galveston's most memorable hurricane is the Great Storm of 1900, which caused an estimated 6,000 to 12,000 fatalities and is still the deadliest natural disaster in US history. Fortunately, no storms threatened on the late spring afternoon when Ars visited Scholes Field. Instead, under partly sunny skies, we had a great opportunity to check out the tech used to fly into, and above, the most powerful terrestrial storms known to humans.

LG is challenging Samsung's Note smartphones with a new stylus-equipped handset of its own. While the Stylus 2 was announced earlier this year, the Stylus 2 Plus builds on that phone's design and improves the guts for a more powerful device.

The two biggest improvements are in the Stylus 2 Plus' screen and processor. Rather than the 5.7-inch, 1280×720 display on the first model, the new model has the same size screen but with a 1920×1080 resolution. The processor has also been upgraded to a 1.4GHz octa-core chip from the first phone's 1.2GHZ quad-core CPU.

The Stylus 2 Plus will also have 16GB of onboard storage, a 3,000 mAh battery, and a fingerprint sensor on the back of the handset. The cameras will change depending on where the device is sold: some markets will get a 16-megapixel rear camera and an 8MP front-facing camera. Others will have the same 13MP rear camera and 5MP front-facing camera in the original Stylus 2. RAM will change depending on region as well, with some countries receiving 3GB of RAM and others getting 2GB.