Month: January 2017

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AT&T is raising the price of its grandfathered unlimited data plans by $5 a month, the second such increase in the past year. The price increase affects longtime mobile customers who have held onto unlimited data plans for years after AT&T stopped selling them to new subscribers.

The latest price increase was reported by DSLReports yesterday, and AT&T confirmed the move to Ars.

"If you have a legacy unlimited data plan, you can keep it; however, beginning in March 2017, it will increase by $5 per month," AT&T said. The unlimited data price had been $30 a month for seven years, until AT&T raised it to $35 in February 2016. The price increase this year will bring it up to $40. That amount is just for data: Including voice and texting, the smartphone plans cost around $90 a month.

Enlarge / Not everything Kat deals with is on the mundane side.

In 2012, Gravity Rush was a flawed but charming open-world action game for the PlayStation Vita. It made an immediate impression with a wonderful heroine named Kat, a girl who just happened to control gravity, falling from the sky and into a floating city. In the end, though, the game was rightly maligned for its imprecise combat and an extremely abrupt ending that left questions hanging over just about every major plot point.

In 2017, Sony is finally following up with Gravity Rush 2. The sequel is also a flawed and charming open-world action game, this time for the PlayStation 4. The combat is just as tough to track and the ending is just as abrupt.

Until it isn't. It's complicated.

As super-heroics go, Kat renders incredibly gentle gravity-based aid to the citizens of her floating, jazz-infused, and dreamlike world. Sometimes she’ll fight monsters, thieves, and mad politicians, but more often Kat does things, like helping poor dock workers make ends meet, aiding dogs in finding their lost toys, and, in one instance, waiting in line to buy crêpes for a sad, older man. Yes, buying crêpes is an actual mission objective from the main story.

(credit: Steven Depolo)

Backpage.com, whose executives and former owners beat back pimping charges a month ago, is shuttering its adult section over what it says is "unconstitutional government censorship."

The Dallas-based media concern said that it had been under too much pressure from the Senate Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations' sex trafficking inquiries. The inquiries found that the online ads portal "edits" content of ads that amount to solicitation of prostitution by "deleting words and images before publication." The company, which lost a Supreme Court First Amendment battle and was forced to turn over thousands of pages of company documents detailing its business methods, said it fell victim in the same way that Craigslist did a decade ago, when it removed adult ads.

“Like the decision by Craigslist to remove its adult category in 2010, this announcement is the culmination of years of effort by government at various levels to exert pressure on Backpage.com and to make it too costly to continue,” Backpage told Congress late Monday,

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images/Urich Baumgartgen)

Online messaging services such as WhatsApp, Skype, and Gmail face a crackdown on a "void of protection" that allows them to routinely track the data of EU citizens without regulatory scrutiny—and it could be bad news for ad sales.

On Tuesday, officials in Brussels proposed new measures to curb Silicon Valley players who—up until now—have been largely immune from the ePrivacy Directive, which  requires telecoms operators to adhere to the rules on the confidentiality of communications and the protection of personal data.

As part of its planned overhaul, the European Commission, the executive wing of the European Union, said that it planned to beef up the measures by switching from a directive to a "directly applicable regulation" to ensure that the bloc's 500 million citizens "enjoy the same level of protection for their electronic communications." It claimed that businesses would also benefit from "one single set of rules."

NASA/JPL

Last Wednesday was supposed to be a banner day for planetary scientists who study Venus, the closest planet to Earth. In recent decades, of more than a dozen missions proposed to explore Venus, only a handful had made it through NASA’s preliminary round of consideration. But as part of NASA’s most recent selection of planetary missions, two of the five finalists were dedicated to Venus. Two others were dedicated to asteroids, and a final one would look for near-Earth asteroids.

“With five total missions, and an expectation that two missions were going to be accepted, it seemed natural to do a Venus one and an asteroid one,” said Robert Grimm, director of space studies at the Southwest Research Institute. “It’s safe to say the Venus community was very happy to see two of its missions among the finalists.”