Month: December 2018

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | D3Damon)

The telecom industry lobby group that represents AT&T and Verizon has consistently claimed that net neutrality rules hurt broadband investment. Yet the same lobby group has released data showing that fiber deployment grew significantly while net neutrality rules were in effect.

Even more surprising: the lobby group, USTelecom, also recently claimed that an increase in broadband network investment that happened before the net neutrality repeal was somehow caused by the repeal that hadn't yet taken effect.

USTelecom released a new analysis last week, saying that, "from the end of 2015 to mid-2017, US fiber deployment grew from 21 percent to 29 percent of homes and competitive availability of wired broadband at 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload [speeds] increased from 31 percent to 55 percent." Fixed wireless deployment has also helped expand broadband access, USTelecom wrote.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

The newest update for Apple Watches is out now, bringing a highly anticipated feature to Series 4 devices. Apple pushed out watchOS 5.1.2 today, which includes its ECG app for monitoring irregular heartbeats.

Apple Watch Series 4 devices all have built-in electrodes that can measure electrocardiograms, or ECGs. At the time of the Watch's debut in September, Apple's native app with which the electrodes communicate wasn't ready for consumer use. Now, it's rolling out as part of the watchOS 5.1.2 update.

The ECG app is for the Watch itself, while ECG data gets stored in Apple's Health app on iOS devices. To take an ECG reading, users must place their finger on the flat side of the Digital Crown on their Series 4 Watch. The electrode on the Digital Crown communicates with the other electrode on the Watch, which sits near the heart rate monitor, to take a complete ECG measurement.

Enlarge (credit: @AndreTelevise)

As reported earlier this week, Microsoft is going to use Google's Blink rendering engine and V8 JavaScript engine in its Edge browser, largely ending development of its own EdgeHTML rendering engine and Chakra JavaScript engine. This means that Microsoft will be using code from—and making contributions to—the Chromium open source project.

The company's browser will still be named Edge and should retain the current look and feel. The decision to switch was motivated primarily by compatibility problems: Web developers increasingly test their pages exclusively in Chrome, which has put Edge at a significant disadvantage. Microsoft's engineers have found that problematic pages could often be made Edge compatible with only very minor alterations, but because Web devs aren't using Edge at all, they don't even know that they need to change anything.

The story is, however, a little more complex. The initial version of Edge that shipped with the first version of Windows 10 was rudimentary, to say the least. It was the bare bones of a browser, but with extremely limited capabilities around things like tab management and password management, no extension model, and generally lacking in the creature comforts that represent the difference between a bare rendering engine and an actual usable browser. It also had stability issues; crashes and hangs were not uncommon.

Fortnite maker Epic Games has long faced criticism for using existing dance moves as "inspiration" for its popular in-game emotes without offering compensation to the creators of those dances. Rapper 2 Milly (aka Terrence Ferguson) is now the first to take Epic to court over the issue.

Milly argues in a federal lawsuit filed this week in the Central District of California that Epic infringed on his copyright, violated his right of publicity, and engaged in unfair competition by using his "Milly Rock" dance move as the basis for the paid "Swipe It" emote in the game without his permission. "Although identical to the dance created, popularized, and demonstrated by Ferguson, Epic did not credit Ferguson nor seek his consent to use, display, reproduce, sell, or create a derivative work based upon Ferguson’s Milly Rock dance or likeness," the lawsuit alleges.

The Milly Rock dance move traces its roots back to 2014, when it was popularized in a video for a song of the same name that currently has over 18 million YouTube views. The extremely similar "Swipe It" emote in Fortnite is currently sold for 500 V-Bucks (about $5) or as part of a Season 5 Battle Pass for 950 V-Bucks (About $9.50).

Qualcomm has announced its flagship System on a Chip (SoC) for 2019: the Snapdragon 855. As Qualcomm has basically no competition at the high-end SoC market—especially in the US—the Snapdragon 855 will be headed to almost every flagship Android phone that ships in 2019. Compared to 2018's chip, the Snapdragon 845, Qualcomm is promising a 45-percent faster CPU, a 20-percent faster GPU, and a platform that will usher in the era of 5G connectivity.

So how is the Snapdragon 855 different from its predecessor, the Snapdragon 845? First, we're getting smaller transistors. The Snapdragon 845 was built on Samsung's 10nm semiconductor manufacturing process, but the 855 is moving to TSMC's 7nm process. A smaller manufacturing process comes with the benefit of lower power consumption and smaller chips, and the 7nm node puts the Snapdragon 855 on par with Apple, which shipped the 7nm A12 Bionic SoC in the iPhone XS earlier this year.