Month: December 2016

(credit: Alyson Hurt)

Comcast's latest price hikes include a significant increase in the company's widely despised "Broadcast TV" and "Regional Sports Network" fees.

The Broadcast TV fee is moving from $5 a month to $7 a month, while the Regional Sports Network fee is rising from $3 a month to $5 a month, according to notices sent to customers in several cities. Combined, that's a change from $8 to $12 a month, giving Comcast an extra $48 a year from each customer that has to pay the fees.

From a Comcast letter to Michigan customers.

Comcast began charging these fees a few years ago, which have risen quickly. Just over a year ago, Comcast raised the Broadcast TV fee from $3 to $5 and the Regional Sports fee from $1 to $3. The two fees have thus gone from $4 to $12, combined, in little more than a year.

The British Museum

To flesh out the features on the so-called Jericho Skull, archaeologists at the British Museum have worked for more than two years to reconstruct the face of a man whose skull had been reshaped by ritual throughout his long life. While he was an infant, his head had been bound tightly with cloth to change its shape. After he died at a ripe old age, his skull was then plastered, decorated, and put on display. This Jericho Skull gives us a glimpse of life in the Levant long before the rise of religions that describe a great battle at the city's walls.

Jericho, located today in Palestine, dates back more than 11,000 years and is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth. It's very likely that this man lived behind the earliest versions of Jericho's infamous walls, built more than 9,000 years ago, but that doesn't mean he lived a hardscrabble existence threatened by war. Recent archaeological investigation of Jericho's Neolithic walls shows that they were not used for defense. Based on layers of silt that collected around them, researchers surmise that Jericho's first walls were built to prevent the city from being flooded during the rainy season.

Enlarge (credit: Sinchen.Lin)

A variety of Netgear router models are vulnerable to a simple hack that allows attackers to take almost complete control of the devices, security experts warned over the weekend.

The critical bug allows remote attackers to inject highly privileged commands whenever anyone connected to the local Netgear network clicks on a malicious Web link, a researcher who uses the online handle Acew0rm reported on Friday. The link, which can be disguised to appear innocuous, then injects a command that routers run as root. The devices' failure to properly filter out input included in Web requests allows attackers to run powerful shell commands. Netgear R7000, R6400, and R8000 models have been confirmed to be vulnerable, and other models, including the R7000P, R7500, R7800, R8500 R9000, have been reported by end users as being affected.

"Exploiting this vulnerability is trivial," officials with CERT, the federally funded vulnerability coordination service, warned in an advisory published Friday. "Users who have the option of doing so should strongly consider discontinuing use of affected devices until a fix is made available."

Enlarge / iOS 10 on the iPhone 5. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

After seven betas and a couple of months of testing, Apple has released the final version of iOS 10.2 to all devices that run iOS 10. This is the second major update released for iOS 10 since it came out in September and, like iOS 10.1 before it, this release adds a couple of new features and provides an extensive list of fixes for existing ones. (You can find the full release notes at the bottom of this post.)

The most noticeable change for many users will be the revamped emoji support, which includes both new characters introduced in version 9.0 of the Unicode spec as well as support for new professions and revamped Retina-friendly designs for many existing emoji. As usual, Emojipedia's coverage is fairly comprehensive.

The biggest new feature is probably the TV app, which Apple announced during its last product event in October. This new app completely replaces the existing "Videos" app on iDevices—it now handles all playback of movies and TV shows purchased through the iTunes store as well as streaming content aggregated from compatible third-party apps. In theory, the app can just show you all kinds of TV from all sources without making you dive into individual silos of content via apps, but in practice it's still going to be limited depending on the particular apps you use. Netflix isn't compatible with the TV app, which significantly hurts it right out of the gate.

Ever since I was a young boy, I played the silver ball. (credit: Eric Bangeman)

Decades ago, pinball was deemed a gambler's "game of chance," and therefore banned in major cities across the United States—sometimes resulting in Prohibition-style raids.

But a lot has changed over time, and most cities eventually lifted their bans, forgot about them, or didn't enforce them. But 61 years after the Kokomo Tribune editorialized in support of Kokomo, Indiana's ban—"Wives whose husbands have gambled away their entire pay checks on pinballs have complained against the devices"—the rural city of about 60,000 people north of Indianapolis is moving Monday to wipe the ordinance from the books. Game over. Tilt.

According to the Kokomo Tribune:

Since at least this year's E3, if not before, it has been clear that the usual market cycle of clearly delineated console generations is being upended. The new model—as exemplified by Sony's PS4 Pro, Microsoft's upcoming Project Scorpio, and even last year's "new Nintendo 3DS"—sees a single generation of console software working on multiple tiers of hardware power, with consumers deciding where exactly they want to sit on the price/power continuum.

The idea, as pitched, is that the cheaper, lower-end hardware will still provide an "acceptable" experience, while the more expensive high-end hardware makes everything look and perform just a bit better. Already, though, we're seeing cases where games seemingly tailored for high-end console hardware are struggling to provide bare-bones performance on legacy hardware.

Last week's release of The Last Guardian—coming nearly a decade after the game was first started as a PS3 title—is one of the highest profile examples of this problem. As Digital Foundry notes in its analysis of the game, "if you're on a regular PS4 you're in for a very variable experience; lurching between 20-30fps just by running around empty areas, and with stutters to over 110ms." The analysis goes on to call the stock version of the game "way off the pace compared to what we've come to expect from a modern PS4 title."

Enlarge (credit: Fox News Sunday)

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace sat down for an interview with President-elect Donald Trump that aired yesterday, touching on a number of recent topics surrounding the Trump Administration's transition. One of those topics was climate change and Trump’s choice for EPA Administrator, who appears poised to roll back pollution regulations on fossil fuels.

Wallace noted that Trump told the New York Times staff during a recent sit-down that he was “open-minded” about climate change (despite a history of statements to the contrary) and asked, “So, where are you on the environment?”

Trump answered, “I’m still open-minded. Nobody really knows. I’ve—look, I’m somebody that gets it. And nobody really knows. It's not something that's so hard and fast.” Wallace didn't challenge this claim, but assuming that Trump is referring to climate change here (rather than environmental protection more broadly) the reality is, in fact, hard and fast.