Month: July 2019

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cowie/AFP/GettyImages)

Earlier this year, ICANN sought public comment on a new contract for the Public Interest Registry, the non-profit organization that administers the .org top-level domain. The results were stark.

More than 3,200 individuals and organizations submitted comments to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and most of them focused on a proposal to remove a cap on the price customers could be charged for .org domains.

The existing contract, signed in 2013, banned the Public Interest Registry from charging more than $8.25 per domain. It allowed annual price increases of no more than 10 percent. Registrars can add their own fees on top of this base amount, but competition among registrars helps keep those added fees down.

Sony announced that it is increasing the subscription cost for its live TV streaming service. PlayStation Vue customers will see all multi-channel plans increase their monthly rates by $5. The change will take effect today for new customers. Existing subscribers will see the prices go up with their first billing period after July 31.

The cheapest package for PlayStation Vue, the Access plan, will now offer a collection of live channels and DVR tools for $49.99 a month. The Core package, which adds several sports channels, will cost $54.99. The Elite level adds movie channels for $64.99 a month while Premium also adds HBO and Showtime for $84.99 a month.

The most common reason prices increase for media subscriptions, both with live video like PlayStation Vue and on-demand viewing like Hulu or Netflix, is the cost of licensing content. Those costs are only going up because several channels that provide that content are going it alone. Disney and NBCUniversal are both gearing up to launch their own streaming services, which gives them leverage to charge other providers even more for access to their programming or risk losing access completely.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Paradox Interactive (Cities: Skylines, Surviving Mars) seems to be getting fed up with the "standard" 30 percent fee on sales charged by Steam and many other game platforms. Speaking at a Gamelab panel hosted by GamesIndustry.biz last week, Paradox Chairman of the Board and former CEO Fredrik Wester called that state of affairs "outrageous," adding "I think the platform holders are taking too much money. Everyone in the press here, just quote me on that."

The 30 percent fee baseline, Wester argues, can trace its origins back to the economics of the home video market in the 1970s, when studios like Warner Bros. negotiated similar fees with retailers selling early VHS tapes. "That was physical. It cost a lot of money," he said. "This doesn't cost anything. So Epic has done a great job for the whole industry, because you get 88 percent. Fantastic move. Thank you very much."

Saying that it "doesn't cost anything" for stores like Steam to distribute and service a game is going a bit far. Beyond the simple costs associated with processing payments and providing download bandwidth, platforms often provide everything from multiplayer APIs to achievement and leaderboard systems to anti-cheat services and a whole host of other useful features. The Epic Game Store, with its undercutting 12 percent fees, does not provide many of these features as of yet (but the company does have a public roadmap for adding many of them in the near future).

Enlarge / Court systems in Georgia are down due to a ransomware attack. Surprise. (credit: Rivers Langley / SaveRivers / Wikimedia)

Georgia's Judicial Council and Administrative Office of the Courts is the victim of the latest ransomware attack against state and local agencies. And this looks like the same type of attack that took down the systems of at least two Florida municipal governments in June.

Administrative Office of the Courts spokesman Bruce Shaw confirmed the ransomware attack to Atlanta's Channel 11 News. The Administrative Office of the Courts' website is currently offline.

Shaw told 11 News that some systems had not been affected by the ransomware but that all systems connected to the network had been taken offline to prevent the ransomware from spreading. The Courts' IT department was in contact with "external agencies" to coordinate a response to the attack, Shaw said.

Enlarge (credit: Sony Pictures / Marvel Studios)

Comic and superhero film fans spent months wondering exactly what would happen to the Marvel Cinematic Universe once Avengers: Endgame concluded. Who would die? What would happen to the space-time continuum? Am I Groot?

While the movie answered some major MCU questions and was solid entertainment, it also ended with an unclear path forward. (It's probably not a spoiler that a multi-part superhero epic concluded with some grim ramifications.) In some ways, Endgame seemed to set up crazy possibilities for Marvel films to come. But I'm here to tell you that, for now, those filmmakers are barreling ahead with exactly the business-as-usual fare you'd expect (or fear) from a multi-corporation entertainment franchise.

That fact lands with a thud in the form of Spider-Man: Far from Home, which plops into theaters on Tuesday, July 2. The powers that be at Disney, Marvel, and Sony Pictures (FFH's studio) followed one major Endgame plot thread to make this MCU superhero carry the whole load, and it was clearly the wrong move. The resulting adventure still offers solid action and laughs, but Spider-Man reboot lightning doesn't strike twice.

Judges in Kentucky have handed down another legal defeat to the unvaccinated teenager who sued his local health department for banning him from school and extracurricular activities amid a chickenpox outbreak earlier this year.

The Kentucky Court of Appeals on Friday quietly sided with the health department, saying that it was acting well within its powers to protect public health. The appeals court quoted an earlier ruling by the US Supreme Court saying that “Of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.”

The Northern Kentucky Health Department declared the latest court decision a “resounding victory for public health in Kentucky,” in a statement.

• 

  You can see the book-like "spine" of the Fold here. [credit: Samsung ]

The Galaxy Fold, according to Samsung at least, was supposed to be revolutionary. The futuristic $2,000 phone was positioned as the first foldable smartphone from a major manufacturer, allowing Samsung to leverage its display leadership into a hybrid phone/tablet device that no one else could produce. The Galaxy Fold's early media-review period was a disaster, though, with social media quickly filling with photos of dead and dying Galaxy Folds. After several phones died in the hands of reviewers, Samsung was forced to cancel the launch, and many pre-orders were refunded.

That was all in April. Now it's July, and there's still no sign of the Galaxy Fold actually making it to market. Speaking to The Independent, Samsung Electronics CEO DJ Koh gave the press an update on the device, though there is still no firm re-launch date.

Speaking of the Galaxy Fold launch, Koh said "It was embarrassing. I pushed it through before it was ready." For now, Koh says the company is "in the process of recovery" and doing lots of testing. "At the moment," Koh said, "more than 2,000 devices are being tested right now in all aspects. We defined all the issues. Some issues we didn't even think about, but thanks to our reviewers, mass volume testing is ongoing."

Enlarge / Silhouette of woman in front of laser-light projection. (credit: Getty | picturegarden)

As of today, Virginia is one of the first states in the country to impose criminal penalties on the distribution of non-consensual "deepfake" images and video.

The new law amends existing law in the Commonwealth that defines distribution of nudes or sexual imagery without the subject's consent⁠—often called revenge porn⁠—as a Class 1 misdemeanor. The new bill updated the law by adding a category of "falsely created videographic or still image" to the text.

New laws in Virginia take effect on July 1. The state's General Assembly passed the bill in early March, and it was signed into law by Gov. Ralph Northam later that month.