Month: July 2019

Enlarge / Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. (credit: re:publica)

If you’ve been grumbling about the rising cost of your Netflix account, it seems you’re not alone. Netflix shared its second-quarter financial results and the company indicated that higher prices may have led to dips in the platform’s subscriber counts.

Revenue for the video streaming service totaled $4.92 billion in the second quarter, up 26% year-over-year. Net income was $271 million, with $0.60 earnings per share. Both those figures were down from Q2 in 2018 and from Q1 of 2019.

Netflix added 2.7 million paid members during the period, a big cut from the 5 million it expected to see and from the 5.5 million recorded in the year-ago quarter. “Our missed forecast was across all regions, but slightly more so in regions with price increases,” the shareholder letter read. The company insisted that competition from other platforms was not a concern, but rather that the shows it had for the second quarter weren’t enough to inspire people to subscribe.

Enlarge (credit: Blizzard Entertainment)

Frank Pearce, one of Blizzard Entertainment's three original founding staffers, announced his intention to leave the game-making company on Friday, effective immediately.

Pearce's announcement came via a Friday blog post at Blizzard's official site, which was appended with a note from current Blizzard president J. Allen Brack. The combined blog post indicates that last year, Pearce "stepped into an advisory role to help with the transition," which seems to indicate that his departure has been some time coming. It's unclear whether this advisory-transition period began anywhere near the time another Blizzard co-founder, Mike Morhaime, left the company in October 2018.

The departure of Pearce as chief development officer leaves only one of Blizzard Entertainment's original co-founders, Allen Adham, at the helm. Adham returned to Blizzard in 2016 after a ten-year game-development hiatus to become the company's senior vice president. Adham, Pearce, and Morhaime founded the company, which was first named Silicon & Synapse, in 1991. Their first video game under the S&S label was RPM Racing for the SNES.

Enlarge / A Verizon booth at Mobile World Congress Americas in Los Angeles in September 2018. (credit: Verizon)

Verizon's 5G mobile service is available in just a handful of cities, but the carrier is charging premium prices to the few people who live in range of the network.

Verizon yesterday announced its first 5G hotspot, namely the Inseego MiFi M1000 that Verizon is selling for $650. On top of the device cost, the monthly fees for 5G service will be higher than 4G even though Verizon's 5G network barely exists.

Verizon said hotspot-only plans "start at $85 a month (plus taxes and fees)." Verizon describes the $85-per-month hotspot plan as "unlimited" when you go through the online checkout process. But the fine print states that customers get 50GB of high-speed 5G data, and 5G speeds are reduced to 3Mbps after that. The plan treats 5G and 4G data separately; it provides 15GB of high-speed 4G data and slows users down to 600kbps after that. Verizon allows 4K video streaming on 5G, while limiting video on the 4G network to 720p.

Enlarge / President Trump, with Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot at far left, listens to Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin on Friday in the Oval Office. (credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

On Friday, a day before the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, President Trump invited the crew of that mission to the Oval Office. Seated, Trump was flanked by Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and the children of Commander Neil Armstrong.

During the 20-minute ceremony, Trump praised the efforts of the Apollo 11 crew and NASA in achieving the first Moon landing half a century ago. But pretty quickly, he pivoted to his own administration's plans for sending humans to the Moon and, eventually, Mars. The administration's Artemis Program, which calls for humans to return to the Moon by 2024, has been heavily promoted by the space agency as of late.

However,Trump seems much more interested in sending humans to Mars, which he considers more inspirational than a trip back to the Moon.

Enlarge / Sights like this may become common on Long Island. (credit: University of Rhode Island)

Yesterday, New York governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that's been described as the state's Green New Deal. Unlike the one that's been floated in Congress, this one isn't a grab-bag collection of social and energy programs. Instead, there's a strong focus on energy, with assurances that changes will be made in a way that benefits underprivileged communities.

The bill was passed by both houses of the New York legislature last month, but Cuomo held off on signing it so that he could pair it with an announcement that suggests the new plan's goals are realistic. The state has now signed contracts for two wind farms that will have a combined capacity of 1.7 GW. If they open as planned in under five years, they will turn New York into the US' leading producer of offshore wind power.

What's the (social) deal?

The national Green New Deal did include some energy-focused plans, but it mixed them in with aspirational ideas like a guaranteed basic income. It's hard to understand how New York's plan has picked up the same name given that it's nothing like that. While there is some nod to New-Deal-like programs (the law will create a Climate Justice Working Group for instance), those aspects are limited in scope to issues brought up by transitions in the energy economy. Instead, the majority of the law is focused on changing the state's energy landscape.

Thought using Incognito mode might keep such searching private? Facebook, Google, and even Oracle have more of your Web usage in their sights than you might think.

A forthcoming research paper [PDF] from researchers at Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Pennsylvania brings up the possibility that Google and Facebook might be tracking your porn history—and, perhaps more worrisome, that using Incognito mode doesn't help.

The paper, set to be published in the journal New Media & Society, does an excellent job of backing up the claim that porn usage ends up being tracked by Google and Facebook. Authors Elena Maris, Timothy Libert, and Jennifer Henrichsen used open source tool webxray to analyze more than 22,000 porn sites, discovering tracking code for Google on 74% and for Facebook on 10% of the sites analyzed. Software giant Oracle's Web tracking code also showed up, appearing on 24% of those sites.

In light of the study, a Facebook spokesperson told CNET, "We don't want adult websites using our business tools since that type of content is a violation of our Community Standards. When we learn that these types of sites or apps use our tools, we enforce against them." Google told The New York Times that the company disallows ads on adult sites and directly prohibits adding information based on sexual interest or activities to any personalized advertising profiles.

Enlarge / The Boston Globe and some other news sites prevent non-subscribers from viewing articles in a browser's private mode. (credit: Boston Globe)

Google Chrome 76 will close a loophole that websites use to detect when people use the browser's Incognito Mode.

Over the past couple of years, you may have noticed some websites preventing you from reading articles while using a browser's private mode. The Boston Globe began doing this in 2017, requiring people to log in to paid subscriber accounts in order to read in private mode. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers impose identical restrictions.

Chrome 76—which is in beta now and is scheduled to hit the stable channel on July 30—prevents these websites from discovering that you're in private mode. Google explained the change yesterday in a blog post titled, "Protecting private browsing in Chrome."

Enlarge / A Google Stadia controller sits behind glass with a mock-up of a retro game store. (credit: Kyle Orland)

In a Reddit AMA yesterday, Google Stadia Director of Product Andrey Doronichev provided a few more tidbits about what features will and will not be available when the streaming game service launches in November. But as he did so, he had to convince some skeptical potential customers that Stadia wouldn't end up in the same corporate graveyard as many other Google service experiments.

Doronichev compared Google's commitment to Stadia to services like Gmail, Docs, Music, Movies and Photos, which have persisted for years with no sign of imminent shutdown. "We’ve been investing a ton in tech, infrastructure, and partnerships [for Stadia] over the past few years," Doronichev said. "Nothing in life is certain, but we’re committed to making Stadia a success... Of course, it’s OK to doubt my words. There's nothing I can say now to make you believe if you don't. But what we can do is to launch the service and continue investing in it for years to come."

Doronichev also compared the transition to streaming gaming to similar transitions that have already largely taken place in the movie and music industries, and with cloud storage of personal files like photos and written documents. While acknowledging that "moving to the cloud is scary," he also insisted that "eventually all of our games will be safely in the cloud too and we'll feel great about it."