Month: October 2016

(credit: Alyson Hurt)

A proposed class-action lawsuit accuses Comcast of falsely advertising low prices and then using poorly disclosed fees to increase the amount paid by cable TV customers.

Comcast's "Broadcast TV Fee" has increased from $1.50 a month to $6.50 since 2014, while its "Regional Sports Fee" has gone from $1 to $4.50 since 2015, according to the complaint filed last week in US District Court in Northern California (PDF). These fees are in addition to the advertised rates.

"Comcast’s fraud pervades the entire life cycle of the customer," the complaint says. "First, Comcast conceals and misrepresents the fees in its advertising and in its communications with prospective customers. Second, Comcast commits billing fraud by subtracting the invented fees from the top-line service price in its bills and instead hiding and disguising the charges elsewhere in the bill. Third, to any customers who question Comcast about the bogus charges, Comcast staff and agents explicitly lie by stating that the Broadcast TV Fee and the Regional Sports Fee are government-related fees or taxes over which Comcast has no control."

Enlarge / The exterior of DreamWorks Animation in Glendale, California. (credit: ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images)

Comcast-owned DreamWorks Animation will pay out $50 million to settle allegations that its leaders illegally conspired to suppress workers' wages.

The movie studio's animation division is at the heart of a class-action lawsuit first filed in 2014 by Robert Nitsch, who worked as a character effects artist at DreamWorks from 2007 to 2011. Nitsch and his lawyers claimed that the conspiracy included some of the biggest names in the entertainment and technology worlds, including Apple founder Steve Jobs, Pixar President Ed Catmull, and George Lucas, founder of Lucasfilm.

The complaint (PDF) quoted Lucas as saying “we cannot get into a bidding war with other companies because we don’t have the margins for that sort of thing.” In addition to suing DreamWorks, the class-action complaint named Pixar, Lucasfilm, Walt Disney Animation, Sony Pictures Animation, Blue Sky Studios, Digital Domain, and ImageMovers Digital as defendants.

Enlarge / Chandra image shows the flaring object, circled at lower left. (credit: NASA/CXC/U.Birmingham/M.Burke et al.)

In 2005, a very strange event was observed. An unknown object, not detectable through visible light, released an intense flare of X-rays. It took about a minute for the flare to reach its full brightness, about 90 times brighter than its resting output and about a million times as bright as the Sun. The flare lasted for about an hour before petering out. Four years later, it flared up again.

X-ray flares are not unheard of, but this event defied classification. Astronomers normally look at the length of the flares as well as how often they occur to determine what kinds of processes produce them. These flares don’t match any known mechanism, making them mysterious indeed.

To find out more, a team of researchers decided to look over archival data from the Chandra and XMM-Newton space observatories. They wondered if similar phenomena are taking place anywhere else in the Universe. If so, it might provide clues about the nature of these strange flares. And the researchers weren’t disappointed. Their search, which included 70 nearby galaxies, turned up two more such flares.

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T-Mobile USA failed to adequately disclose speed and data restrictions on its "unlimited data" plans and has agreed to pay a fine and provide some benefits to customers, the Federal Communications Commission said today.

Like other carriers, T-Mobile slows the speeds of its unlimited data customers after they've used a certain amount of data each month; when these customers connect to congested cell towers, they receive lower speeds than customers without unlimited data plans. The throttling is applied after customers use 26GB in a month.

"Under its 'Top 3 Percent Policy,' T-Mobile 'de-prioritizes' its 'heavy' data users during times of network contention or congestion," the FCC said in an announcement today. "This potentially deprived these users of the advertised speeds of their data plan. According to consumers, this policy rendered data services 'unusable' for many hours each day and substantially limited their access to data."

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, the Dealmaster is here with a big batch of deals for your consideration. The top deal today saves you over $400 on a Dell desktop. The Inspiron 3650 has an Intel Core i7-6700 processor, 16GB of RAM, Windows 7 Pro, and a 2TB hard drive, and it can be yours for $579. If you'd rather have Windows 10, the computer also comes with a Windows 10 Pro license.

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• Dell Inspiron 3650 Intel Core i7 Quad-Core Desktop with 16GB RAM, Win 7 Pro & 2TB HDD for $579 (use code: DELLBIZ579 - list price $949).
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• Releases Tomorrow! New Amazon Fire TV Stick Quad-Core w/ Alexa Remote, $10 Amazon Video Credit, Free SlingTV, Hulu $39.99 for $39.99 (Previous Generation $49.99).
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Laptop and desktop computers

Enlarge (credit: Moov)

Moov, the company that makes small coaching sensors, wants to measure your heart rate without crowding your wrist. The company just announced Moov HR, a sensor that's nearly indistinguishable from its existing activity monitors but only measures your heart rate. Moov's current trackers are small and light enough to be worn on your wrist or on your ankle, depending on the activity, while the HR is designed to be worn, not on your limbs, but on your head. The new device come with either a headband or a swim cap to hold it against your temple so it can measure your pulse.

The placement of Moov HR is its most interesting feature. Wrist-based optical heart rate monitors can be inaccurate for many reasons, most of them involving user error. Wearing a wrist device too loosely or too high up on your wrist can result in bad readings. But with a headband or the swim cap snug against your skull, the HR isn't going anywhere. Also, according to Moov representatives, the head is an ideal place to measure pulse since it has good blood perfusion, or flow, with little flesh getting in the way of measurement.

Moov created the HR without outsourcing from another company and tested it at the University of California, San Francisco's Human Performance Lab for accuracy. The HR I saw demonstrated did a good job tracking heartbeats and displaying real-time changes in the app. Of course, the demo subject's bpm was low since we were just chatting around a table, but I'm looking forward to finding out how accurate the HR is during a long, intense activity. I'm also curious to see how comfortable it is against my head during a workout; the sensor is light, but still much thicker than both its headband and swim cap holders.