Month: December 2017

Enlarge / Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai arrives for his confirmation hearing with the Senate Commerce Committee on July 19, 2017 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )

The Federal Communications Commission will move ahead with its vote to kill net neutrality rules next week despite an unresolved court case that could strip away even more consumer protections.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says that net neutrality rules aren't needed because the Federal Trade Commission can protect consumers from broadband providers. But a pending court case involving AT&T could strip the FTC of its regulatory authority over AT&T and similar ISPs.

A few dozen consumer advocacy groups and the City of New York urged Pai to delay the net neutrality-killing vote in a letter today. If the FCC eliminates its rules and the court case goes AT&T's way, there would be a "'regulatory gap' that would leave consumers utterly unprotected," the letter said.

Enlarge (credit: Waymo)

SAN FRANCISCO—During the opening 15 minutes of a third day of hearings in Waymo v. Uber, US District Judge William Alsup blasted a Waymo lawyer for Waymo’s attempt to shield its former employees against Uber’s upcoming line of questioning.

The two companies are entangled not only in court via this high-stakes trade secrets lawsuit, but as several former Waymo employees now work at Uber, the startup now wants to depose some of its own employees to better understand how ephemeral messaging—apps such as Wickr or Telegram—was used during their tenure at Waymo. (Waymo is the self-driving car division at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and Waymo was formerly part of Google.)

Last week, Judge Alsup raised concerns about Uber’s alleged use of ephemeral messaging as a way to avoid civil or criminal litigation as has been claimed by one of its former employees. Uber has now scheduled more depositions prior to a December 22 deadline as the case rapidly moves ahead toward a February 2018 trial.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Oppenheim Bernhard)

Charter Communications is really excited to tell you about all its new broadband network investments.

"Increasing Flagship Broadband Speeds; Giving Customers More For Less," is the title of the company's latest announcement on this topic. The second-largest cable company in the US has increased its standard download speed from 60Mbps to 100Mbps—"at no extra cost to our customers"—while providing speeds of 200Mbps or 1Gbps in some markets. Gigabit service is available in "Oahu, Hawaii with additional markets to be launched in the weeks ahead," Charter said.

A graphic from Charter's press release. (credit: Charter )

The amazing thing is that Charter is doing all this despite the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules and related Title II regulation of ISPs as common carriers. In July, Charter told the FCC that the "broad and vague prohibitions" in the rules "have caused broadband providers to reconsider innovations and investments out of concern that regulators could squelch, or force significant modifications to, those ventures after funds had been expended."

No, an official Zelda game for iPhone doesn't exist yet. But with the Switch selling so well, should Nintendo even bother? (credit: Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson)

When Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp launched on iOS a few weeks ago, our own Sam Machkovech took it to task for its "hurry up and wait" gameplay loop and in-your-face, hard-sell microtransactions. Now, data from app analysis firm Sensor Tower suggests the game is struggling to bring in much money from players, even after attracting more than 15 million downloads in six days.

In a recent blog post, Sensor Tower estimates that Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp has brought in about $10 million in revenue in its first nine days of iOS availability. That might sound like a pretty good start for the game, but it pales in comparison to the $24 million in revenue for Super Mario Run and $33 million for Fire Emblem Heroes in the same time frame after their launches.

Perhaps more worrisome for Animal Crossing's mobile potential, a whopping 86 percent of the estimated revenue so far comes from Japan, with a further 11 percent coming from the US, according to Sensor Tower. That suggests a game with a decent domestic following for Nintendo, but one that seems unlikely to break out into a Pokemon Go-style international hit.

Matthew Prince, cofounder and chief executive officer of CloudFlare. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince hated cutting off service to the infamous neo-Nazi site the Daily Stormer in August. And he's determined not to do it again.

"I'm almost a free-speech absolutist." Prince said at an event at the New America Foundation last Wednesday. But in a subsequent interview with Ars, Prince argued that in the case of the Daily Stormer, the company didn't have much choice.

Cloudflare runs a popular content delivery network that specializes in protecting clients from distributed denial-of-service attacks. The Daily Stormer published a post mocking a woman who was killed during the white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia in August. That had made a lot of people angry at the Daily Stormer, attracting massive attacks on the site.