Month: November 2019

Enlarge / An AT&T sign outside a company office in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Roberto Machado Noa )

AT&T kept charging DirecTV customers for a sports channel that was blacked out for two months and is only giving customers refunds when they complain to the company.

AT&T's customer service in this case is falling short of the standard set by Comcast, of all companies. As we wrote Monday, Comcast has been issuing automatic bill credits to customers in Colorado during the blackout of Altitude Sports network, which broadcasts games played by the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, and Colorado Rapids.

AT&T didn't respond to our inquiry on Monday but gave us a statement late Tuesday night.

Enlarge / A wall of user photos form a Facebook logo at the company's data center in Lulea, Sweden. (credit: JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP/Getty Images)

More than a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light, Facebook is once again admitting that some developers have accessed user data that they should not have.

Facebook said in a developer post yesterday that it would be changing developers' access to a number of APIs, including Groups, after "roughly 100 partners" were found to have extra access. "We recently found that some apps retained access to group member information, like names and profile pictures in connection with group activity, from the Groups API, for longer than we intended," the company said.

At least 11 developers accessed group members' information in the last two months, Facebook added. "Although we’ve seen no evidence of abuse, we will ask them to delete any member data they may have retained and we will conduct audits to confirm that it has been deleted."

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  The Xiaomi Mi Watch. [credit: Xiaomi ]

Xiaomi has gone back to its roots as a purveyor of shameless Apple ripoffs, and hot off the photocopier is the Xiaomi Mi Watch, a new wearable that is decidedly Cupertino-inspired. The Mi Watch is an Apple Watch clone, but the design is pretty much the only thing that's cloned here. You won't get a good SoC, a good operating system, good battery life, good haptics, or a good app ecosystem. From a distance, though, some people might mistake the Mi Watch for an Apple Watch, and maybe that's enough.

The Mi Watch is a Wear OS device powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 3100, a combination that makes any wearable device pretty much dead on arrival. Qualcomm has been neglecting the smartwatch market since basically its inception and has never produced a serious competitor to the chips Samsung and Apple regularly put out. The Snapdragon Wear 3100 features a quad-core, 1.2GHz Cortex A7 CPU, a CPU design that is just barely from this decade, having been originally introduced in 2011. This 28nm chip doesn't stand a chance against its faster, smaller, more battery-efficient rivals, but Qualcomm's monopoly ensures it is basically the only game in town for smartwatch chips.

Surrounding the museum piece of a CPU is a 1.78-inch, 448×368 OLED display, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, and a 570mAh battery. All the usual acronyms are here: NFC, GPS, and LTE, along with a built-in eSIM chip. There is Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2, and a rear-mounted heart rate sensor. The base model sku has an aluminum watch body for CNY 1,300 ($185), while a more premium model comes in stainless steel and packs a slightly bigger 590 mAh battery for CNY 2,000 ($285). If you haven't guessed from the currency yet, the Mi Watch is only available in China, at least for now.

Enlarge / Technicians at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans moved the Space Launch System's liquid hydrogen tank from the factory to the dock, where it was loaded onto the Pegasus barge on Dec. 14, 2018. (credit: NASA/Steven Seipel)

After the Senate Appropriations Committee released its fiscal year 2020 budget bill in September, the White House Office of Management and Budget responded with a letter to share some "additional views" on the process. This letter (see a copy), dated October 23 and signed by acting director of the White House budget office Russell Vought, provides some insight into NASA's large Space Launch System rocket.

Congress has mandated that NASA use the more costly SLS booster to launch the ambitious Europa Clipper mission to Jupiter in the early 2020s, while the White House prefers the agency to fly on a much-less-expensive commercial rocket. In a section discussing the Clipper mission, Vought's letter includes a cost estimate to build and fly a single SLS rocket in a given year—more than $2 billion—which NASA has not previously specified.

"The Europa mission could be launched by a commercial rocket," Vought wrote to the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Alabama Republican Richard Shelby. "At an estimated cost of over $2 billion per launch for the SLS once development is complete, the use of a commercial launch vehicle would provide over $1.5 billion in cost savings. The Administration urges the Congress to provide NASA the flexibility called for by the NASA Inspector General."