Month: March 2019

Enlarge / Entrance to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC. (credit: Trump International Hotel)

T-Mobile USA says it has spent $195,000 at President Trump's hotel in Washington, DC, over the past 10 months while it has lobbied for government approval of its proposed merger with Sprint. CEO John Legere and fellow executives have repeatedly stayed at the Trump International Hotel since announcing the merger in April 2018, despite reporting just one visit to the hotel prior to that time.

The revelation, reported first by The Washington Post today, is contained in a letter T-Mobile sent to two members of Congress.

"As best as we have been able to determine, the total amount spent by all T-Mobile employees, including [CEO John] Legere and his leadership team, for all expenses for stays or meetings at the Trump International Hotel in Washington between April 2018 and the present is approximately $195,000," T-Mobile wrote on February 21. "These hotel expenses cover a variety of types of business-related activities and include many categories of costs, including the cost of meeting space, catering, business center services, audio/visual equipment rental, lodging, meals, taxes and other incidental expenses."

It's been a long, long wait, but winter is finally here for fans of HBO's Game of Thrones. The first full trailer for the hotly anticipated final season dropped today, featuring plenty of dragons, our favorite surviving characters, and lots of dark, ominous overtones as the living prepare to battle the Night King's undead army.

(Warning: Spoilers for prior seasons below.)

Based on George R.R. Martin's best-selling epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones long ago outstripped the novels in terms of plot, although the author had some input in shaping the TV series' narrative arc. We've seen plenty of sex, blood, and horrifying death over the course of seven seasons, and now it's time for the end game. This being George R.R. Martin, there's no guarantee of a happy ending.

• 

  Edge-on-Chromium's homepage. [credit: Neowin ]

Some early screenshots of Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge browser have leaked to Neowin. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft seems to be working on a development cycle that's similar to that of Chrome, with pictures of both a Canary channel, shipped daily, and a Dev channel, shipped weekly.

In many ways the browser is what one would expect of a Microsoft Chromium browser: in those places where Chrome would use a Google account for syncing or a Google store for extensions, Edge-on-Chromium uses a Microsoft account and a Microsoft store. Similarly, the homepage is similar to that of Edge, using Bing pictures and Microsoft News links. Perhaps the biggest change is the settings page, which adopts a similar look-and-feel to the Windows 10 settings app—section headings down the left, the actual settings on the right.

But the screenshots also show just what a challenge Microsoft has to win people over to its browser. If you're going to get an experience that's 99 percent Chrome, why not just use the real thing, with its even more extensive data syncing and extension store?

The most controversial National Security Agency surveillance program, originally exposed by documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, has apparently ended quietly, according to the National Security Advisor to Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. In a discussion recorded for the Lawfare Podcast released on March 2, Luke Murry said that the NSA was no longer collecting call detail records—the metadata associated with phone calls and text messages—and that the Trump administration had not used the program for over six months.

The program, launched under authority claimed by the George W. Bush administration under the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, originally collected all call records from telecommunications providers to search for patterns of connections between persons of interest. But bulk collection was ended under the Obama Administration in 2015, and a new process—targeted collection under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants from records retained by telecommunications companies—was codified by Title V of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 2015 and the USA Freedom Act of 2015

However, the new program had some technical problems. In June of 2018, the NSA announced that the agency was deleting all call-detail records it had acquired from telecommunications providers since 2015 because analysts discovered "technical irregularities" in the data being provided by the telecommunications companies. Those irregularities "also resulted in the production to NSA of some (call data records) that NSA was not authorized to receive," an NSA spokesperson said in an official release. Those records were of US citizens and residents not covered by FISA warrants.