Month: January 2017

Enlarge (credit: Matthew Stevens)

Verizon will start offering a 750Mbps Internet package for $150 a month in parts of its FiOS fiber-to-the-home territory, the company announced today.

"FiOS Instant Internet" with symmetrical upload and download speeds of 750Mbps will launch Saturday "to nearly seven million homes and businesses in greater New York City/northern New Jersey, Philadelphia and Richmond, [Virginia] with more to follow in 2017," Verizon's announcement said. The Boston and Norfolk, Virginia markets will get the new speed tier later in the first quarter, the company said.

This is an improvement over the top speed tiers currently advertised on the FiOS website, which lists 300Mbps for $170 a month and 500Mbps for $270, plus taxes, equipment charges, and other fees. Those are promotional prices that last only a year before increasing.

Enlarge (credit: Infinity Ward)

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare has an extensive range of weapons and skins to acquire through purchasing Supply Drops. As is typical for this kind of game, you can either grind out these items through playing the game—one rare Supply Drop costs 30 keys, which can typically be earned in about two hours of play time—or you can pony up some cash and buy the Supply Drops directly—a rare Drop costs about $2 when bought with the real money currency "COD Points."

A flaw over the holiday period allowed Infinite Warfare players to earn tens of thousands of keys in minutes. Developer Infinity Ward had an in-game event giving away free Supply Drops containing various goodies. One of those Supply Drops was a crate containing 30 keys. Players soon discovered that this crate could be opened repeatedly simply by, er, mashing the X button, for 30 keys a press. Players could also accumulate yet another in-game currency, Salvage, in a similar way.

With these thousands or tens of thousands of keys, players could then buy items that would have required thousands of hours or grinding, or hundreds of dollars of COD Points, to buy. Widespread use of the flaw caused Infinity Ward's parent Activision to disable the game servers temporarily until something could be done.

DJI Inspire 1 drone crashes into Seattle's Space Needle (forward to 2-minute mark for collision) (video link)

Video footage confirms that a drone aircraft flew directly at and crashed into the Space Needle's utmost viewing platform on New Year's Eve. The craft, which was subsequently recovered by the staff, was handed over to the Seattle Police Department on Tuesday.

Space Needle representative Dave Mandapat has provided Ars Technica video recovered from the drone, a camera-mounted DJI Inspire 1. The three-minute clip, which includes a few fade-to-black edits, shows the perspective of a craft ascending from an area east of the Seattle Center district (without identifying footage of a takeoff or origin point), then hovering above and around the Space Needle's top platform while pyrotechnic experts arranged and worked on the tower's annual New Year's fireworks show.

Enlarge (credit: Tesla)

Tesla has been on quite the talent search of late. Last year it hired Peter Hochholdinger from Audi to oversee Model 3 production. It also hired Anders Bell—previously of Volvo—to take charge of designing interiors. On Tuesday, we learned that Apple programmer Chris Lattner had left the company Elon Musk once described as the "Tesla Graveyard" to become VP for Autopilot. Well, it turns out he's not the only longtime Apple man to ride whatever it is you'd call the Silicon Valley equivalent of Charon's boat.

Seth Weintraub at 9to5mac has revealed that the electric vehicle maker has also obtained the services of Matt Casebolt, who will assume the role of Senior Director Engineering, Closures and Mechanisms. These are areas where Tesla has previously encountered difficulties; early Model Xs had to have a faulty seat hinge replaced, and the production of the SUV's Falcon Wing doors proved to be quite a headache.

Casebolt's portfolio at Apple includes the original MacBook Air as well as the most recent Mac Pro and MacBook Pro.

Techdirt founder Michael Masnick. (credit: Mike Masnick via Wikimedia)

Mike Masnick, founder of the popular Techdirt blog, said today that he intends to fight and win the libel lawsuit filed against him by Shiva Ayyadurai, the man who claims he invented e-mail.

In a blog post published this morning, titled "Techdirt's First Amendment Fight For Its Life," Masnick says the issue is bigger than the debate about who really invented e-mail. And he acknowledges the huge toll it could take on his company.

"This is a fight about whether or not our legal system will silence independent publications for publishing opinions that public figures do not like," wrote Masnick. "And here's the thing: this fight could very well be the end of Techdirt, even if we are completely on the right side of the law."

Enlarge (credit: Christiaan Colen)

The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) paid a $28,000 ransom in bitcoins to free up the Los Angeles Valley College campus’ network, e-mail, and voicemail systems, which were targeted during a winter break when the campus was closed.

According to a Wednesday statement from an LACCD spokesman, district officials concluded that it was worth it to pay the ransom—in part, because the district has an insurance policy that covers such incidents.

“It was the assessment of our outside cybersecurity experts that making a payment would offer an extremely high probability of restoring access to the affected systems, while failure to pay would virtually guarantee that data would be lost,” LACCD Chancellor Francisco C. Rodriguez said in the statement. “After payment was made, a ‘key’ was delivered to open access to our computer systems. The process to ‘unlock’ hundreds of thousands of files will be a lengthy one, but so far, the key has worked in every attempt that has been made.”