Month: November 2018

Enlarge (credit: Rockstar)

A recent sexual assault charge in Florida has been linked to a high-tech kind of witness: an online gamer who overheard an apparent rape through an online-gaming headset.

A Fox affiliate in Pasco County, Florida, reported that the arrest of 18-year-old Daniel Fabian on November 21 stemmed from a "late June" report by an unnamed Grand Theft Auto Online player. This deputy affidavit alleges that Fabian had told other online players, through voice chat, that he was stepping away to "smash" (a slang term for sexual activity) with someone, and that this person was 15 years old.

According to the affidavit, Fabian apparently failed to mute his attached microphone. The affidavit also alleges that during the following 15 minutes, the witness heard cries of "distress" and the word "no" from a woman's voice. Other details about this witness report, including the witness's affiliation with the defendant or how this evidence led to an eventual discovery of an alleged victim (and her submission of a medical exam and DNA test, which linked Fabian to the assault), have not appeared in reports about the charges.

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

The Supreme Court on Monday wrestled with whether to allow a 40-year-old legal doctrine to derail a class-action lawsuit arguing that Apple uses its monopoly control over the iPhone app market to overcharge customers for apps.

Apple takes a 30 percent cut for every iPhone app sold. Some customers sued in 2011, arguing that Apple is abusing its monopoly by overcharging customers.

But Apple is trying to shut the lawsuit down by arguing that consumers shouldn't be allowed to sue at all. The company has seized on a 1977 Supreme Court ruling that held that only a company's direct customers can sue for antitrust violations. In Apple's view, customers buy apps from developers, who turn around and pay Apple a 30 percent cut. That means that only the developers—not ordinary iPhone users—have standing to sue Apple.

Enlarge / Wi-Fi connects the world together, but it's still quite complicated. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Look, Wi-Fi still kind of sucks. And marketing excesses aside, its worst problems all revolve around airtime distribution among multiple devices.

Unlike LTE (the protocol cellular data uses), 802.11 WI-Fi is a protocol with no central management, which leaves all nearby devices duking it out for airtime like angry, unsupervised toddlers. There's only so much you can do to fix this problem without radically overhauling and replacing 802.11 itself—but as new 802.11 protocols emerge, they do their best.

A brief overview of the alphabet soup

If you don't deal with this stuff for a living, it's easy to get lost in all the different Wi-Fi protocols in the ether today. New additions have been released in sort of alphabetical order, but some are backwards-compatible and some aren't. Some are "mainstream" and have broad consumer device support, and some are offshoot technologies rarely to be seen in anything you can buy at a big box store. It's kind of a mess.