Month: February 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Kheng ho Toh)

The Federal Communications Commission's new Republican leadership has rescinded a determination that AT&T and Verizon Wireless violated net neutrality rules with paid data cap exemptions. The FCC also rescinded several other Wheeler-era reports and actions.

The FCC released its report on the data cap exemptions (aka "zero-rating") in the final days of Democrat Tom Wheeler's chairmanship. Because new Chairman Ajit Pai opposed the investigation, the FCC has now formally closed the proceeding.

The FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau sent letters to AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA notifying the carriers "that the Bureau has closed this inquiry. Any conclusions, preliminary or otherwise, expressed during the course of the inquiry will have no legal or other meaning or effect going forward." The FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau also sent a letter to Comcast closing an inquiry into the company's Stream TV cable service, which does not count against data caps.

Thus far, to get a benefit from the extra hardware inside the PS4 Pro, developers have had to code game-specific patches to activate features like higher resolutions, smoother frame rates, or increased detail on in-game objects. Now, there are signs Sony is planning to add an optional "Boost Mode" that could smooth out the frame rate on some older titles without the need for any specially-coded patches.

While the Boost Mode was not mentioned in today's official announcement of the coming Version 4.5 of the PS4 firmware (which also adds external hard drive support), reports of its existence are starting to leak out from users who are signed up for the beta version, which launched today. In a NeoGAF thread, a few posters have uploaded separate screenshots, apparently from the beta, describing the Boost Mode in both Japanese and English.

The English description for the mode reads:

Enlarge / Final Cut Pro. (credit: Apple)

If you're a student, teacher, or staff member at a K-12 institution or college who is eligible for Apple's education pricing, the company is announcing a bundle that provides a substantial discount for its pro apps. Together, those apps would run you $630—$300 for Final Cut Pro, $200 for Logic Pro X, $50 for Motion, $50 for Compressor, and $30 for MainStage 3—but the bundled cost is just $200.

Interested buyers can purchase the bundle here. Mac App Store redemption codes will be e-mailed after checkout.

Apple doesn't charge for most of its consumer software these days—operating system updates have been free since Mavericks was released in 2013, and continually updated Mac App Store versions of lighter music and video editing apps like GarageBand and iMovie have been free with the purchase of a new Mac or iDevice for about the same amount of time. The pro software is a lot cheaper than it used to be (a Final Cut Pro license used to cost $999 back in the day), but further discounts are always good news for cash-strapped students and educators.

Enlarge / Tapping into Twitter's metadata isn't hard. (credit: mkhmarketing)

President Donald J. Trump loves his Twitter account. Much has been made of Trump's 140-character missives, which he at least in part blasts out to the world unfiltered with his own fingers (and sometimes his staff). Interpreting the data and metadata of Trump's tweets has become akin to a modern form of Kremlinology­—the art of reading the temperature of the Soviet Union's leadership by noting who was seated where in the reviewing stands at Red Square.

Twitter may not be the leading social media platform, and it may not be the friendliest place on Earth to exchange ideas. But it does offer an API that lets pretty much anyone mine its metadata. While much of the data associated with tweets is obscured by the usual Twitter clients, those who've followed the tweeting travails of our 45^th president are likely aware of the fact that it contains information like what device or software tweets were posted from. In the past, Law enforcement agencies and others have used access to Twitter metadata for a variety of purposes, including surveillance, by tapping into high-volume feeds of Twitter's tweet-stream. But a great deal of information can be gathered with much simpler and accessible tools.

"As any other social media website Twitter know a lot of things about you, thanks [to] metadata," a French security researcher known as X0rz wrote in a recent blog post. "Indeed, for a 140 characters message you will get A LOT of metadata—more than 20 times the size of the initial content you typed in! And guess what? Almost all of this metadata is accessible through the open Twitter API." To demonstrate that, X0rz wrote a Python script called tweets_analyzer, a command-line tool to tap into some of Twitter's vast metadata that may not be accessible from the standard client.

A young Carmack hard at work writing code, long before he was accused of stealing illicit copies of his own work.

Oculus CTO John Carmack was largely vindicated last week when a jury cleared him of any personal liability in a case where he was accused of exploiting trade secrets, stealing and reusing code, and destroying evidence from his time working at Id Software parent ZeniMax Media. Still, the Doom co-creator is publicly bristling at accusations aired during the trial that he made "non-literal" copies of ZeniMax code while working for Oculus.

In a lengthy public Facebook post, Carmack takes direct issue with a ZeniMax expert at the trial who said repeatedly he was "absolutely certain" that Oculus code was substantially similar to code written while Carmack was at ZeniMax. "Early on in his testimony, I wanted to stand up say 'Sir! As a man of (computer) science, I challenge you to defend the efficacy of your methodology with data, including false positive and negative rates,'" he writes. "I just wanted to shout 'You lie!'"

The legal issue at hand here deals with the "substantial similarity" copyright standard, where even a work that isn't a verbatim copy can be considered infringing if "the pattern or sequence... is similar" to the original (as a 1992 federal decision put it). Carmack himself gives the example of a copied program where only the variable names were changed as a clear example of "non-literal" infringement.

Enlarge / 3d rendering of modern house interior with independent energy storage battery system.

Batteries are a big deal these days in renewable energy—utilities are investing in grid-scale lithium-ion battery installations to help smooth out the intermittency of renewables. But smaller, residential battery installations have also been on the rise thanks in part to Tesla’s new Powerwall 2 and Sonnen’s recent entry into the US market.

But a new study published in Nature Energy from University of Texas researchers Robert L. Fares and Michael E. Webber suggest that people who buy home batteries should carefully consider their motivations for the purchase. For homes that remain grid-tied, batteries may actually increase annual energy consumption for a household by 324–591 kWh. Depending on the region a house is in, using more power could lead to increased carbon emissions.

Instead, the researchers concluded, homeowners that want to help reduce emissions as much as possible are better off getting solar panels and selling that power back to the grid—at least in most markets.