Month: May 2018

Enlarge (credit: T-Mobile)

T-Mobile USA should stop claiming that it has "America's Best Unlimited Network," the advertising industry's self-regulator said today.

AT&T challenged T-Mobile's ads to the National Advertising Division (NAD), which ruled that T-Mobile hasn't substantiated its claim that it has the best wireless network.

T-Mobile defended itself by arguing that speed outweighs all other factors—apparently including overall coverage and reliability. But to reasonably claim that one has the best overall network for unlimited data, a carrier should prove that it also has the widest geographic coverage and best reliability, the NAD concluded.

Enlarge / Nurses working with the World Health Organization administer the Ebola vaccine to a local doctor at the town hall of Mbandaka on May 21, 2018 during the launch of the Ebola vaccination campaign. (credit: Getty | JUNIOR KANNAH)

With more than 7,500 doses of an experimental vaccine against Ebola, health officials today began a vaccination campaign to try to thwart the latest outbreak of the deadly virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

According to the World Health Organization, the campaign will start with healthcare workers operating in areas affected by the outbreak. Then officials will focus on a “ring vaccination” strategy, which targets people who have had contact with someone with a confirmed case of Ebola, as well as people who have had contact with those contacts. (This creates rings of vaccination around each case, hence the name). These defensive social circles ensure that those most vulnerable to contracting the virus are protected while also preventing the spread of the virus from the most likely sources. The same strategy was critical during the campaign in the 1960s and ‘70s to eradicate smallpox—the only human disease that has ever been successfully wiped out.

The Ebola-vaccination campaign will take place in the DRC’s northwestern Equator Province (Province de l’Équateur), where there have been 46 confirmed, probable, or suspected cases, including 26 deaths, as of May 18. Officials have already identified 600 contacts and contacts of contacts of cases. Nearly all cases and contacts have been in the remote town of Bikoro. But officials counted four confirmed cases in Mbandaka, a provincial capital with more than a million residents. This has raised concerns about the potential for the outbreak to explode.

Last week, some Call of Duty fans were surprised and dismayed to hear that Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 will be the first game in the series to not include a single-player campaign mode. Those fans might be less surprised if they looked at Achievement statistics, which show a steady and marked decrease in the popularity of the series' campaign modes over the last decade. Significantly fewer people are completing or even starting Call of Duty campaigns than in the past, suggesting that a more multiplayer-focused future for the series might be wise.

The data for this analysis comes from the Call of Duty series' publicly viewable Achievement pages on Steam and Xbox Live, each of which lists the percentage of that game's players who completed certain publisher-set landmarks (such as completing the campaign). These stats come from Valve and Microsoft themselves and provide the best public window into the actual play habits of tens of millions of Call of Duty players.

Enlarge / Femur, tibia, and fibula, and two small stones. (credit: PNAS)

Roman military accounts from the early centuries CE describe the tribes of north-central Europe as fierce fighters who took the field with large forces and treated vanquished foes with ritual brutality. Until recently, however, there hasn’t been much archaeological evidence to back up the Roman accounts. But some time in the first century CE, two of those tribes clashed in what is now the Alken Enge wetlands in the Illerup River Valley in Denmark. Archaeologists excavated the aftermath from 2009 to 2014, finding broken weapons and shields along with the bones of at least 82 men.

Many of the bones bore the marks of grievous wounds dealt just before death, which is no surprise on a battlefield, of course. But all of them were found in places that would have been under water 2,000 years ago—and they’d all been left exposed to weather and scavengers for six months to a year before they ended up in the water.

Archaeologist Mads Kähler Holst of Aarhus University in Denmark and his colleagues say it’s the earliest example so far of a practice common in northern Europe in the first few centuries CE. In lakes and peat bogs all over northern Europe, archaeologists have found sites where people deposited the broken weapons and shields of their defeated enemies in the water. Most of those so-called “weapons graves” date to the second through fifth centuries CE, while the bones at Alken Enge radiocarbon dated to between 2 BCE and 54 CE.

Enlarge / Apparently, enough people are buying Fortnite's wholly optional outfits and dance moves to fuel $100 million of prizes for the game's first year of esports tourneys. (credit: Epic Games)

How serious is Fortnite as a video gaming phenomenon? Today's announcement of the shooter game's first esports prize pool is a pretty stark indicator, as publisher Epic Games has promised to invest no less than $100 million into the game's first year of competitive gaming.

You read that correctly: $100,000,000.

To understand how huge a number that is, a few comparison points are in order. The online five-on-five video game Dota 2 has enjoyed a robust esports life across the entire world since Valve took over the series' development, but that game needed five years of competitive life to crack the $100 million mark. According to the Dota 2 Prize Tracker site, that games' worldwide esports cume since 2013 currently totals $105 million, which doesn't include the $10 million-and-counting prize for the upcoming International 2018 tournament being held later this summer.

Enlarge / FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn speaks at a Kaiser Family Foundation panel discussion on November 4, 2015 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Larry French)

As Mignon Clyburn left the Federal Communications Commission, the longtime telecom regulator worried that the FCC is abandoning its "prime directive" of protecting consumers.

"I'm an old Trekkie," Clyburn told Ars in a phone interview, while comparing the FCC's responsibility to the Star Trek fictional universe's Prime Directive. "I go back to my core, my prime directive of putting consumers first." If the FCC doesn't do all it can to bring affordable communications services to everyone in the US, "our mission will not be realized," she said.

The FCC's top priority, as set out by the Communications Act, is to make sure all Americans have "affordable, efficient, and effective" access to communications services, Clyburn said. But too often, the FCC's Republican majority led by Chairman Ajit Pai is prioritizing the desires of corporations over consumers, Clyburn said. "I don't believe it's accidental that we are called regulators," she said. "Some people at the federal level try to shy away from that title. I embrace it."