Month: February 2020

Enlarge / The house is watching you watch it. (credit: Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images)

Almost 1,000 police and sheriff departments around the country have partnership agreements with Ring, Amazon's home surveillance subsidiary. These arrangements are now drawing scrutiny from a division of the House Oversight committee, which wants to know what, exactly, Ring is up to.

For starters, Congress wants a list of every police deal Ring actually has, the House Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy wrote in a letter (PDF) dated February 19.

After that, the Subcommittee wants to know... well, basically everything. The request for information asks for documentation relating to "all instances in which a law enforcement agency has requested video footage from Ring," as well as full lists of all third-party firms that get any access to Ring users' personal information or video footage. Ring is also asked to send over copies of every privacy notice, terms of service, and law enforcement guideline it has ever had, as well as materials relating to its marketing practices and any potential future use of facial recognition.

Enlarge / AT&T sponsor logo on the backdrop of the 31st Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards Gala in Palm Springs, California, on January 2, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Chris Delmas)

AT&T's mandatory-arbitration clause is unenforceable in a class-action case over AT&T's throttling of unlimited data, a panel of US appeals court judges ruled this week.

The nearly five-year-old case has gone through twists and turns, with AT&T's forced-arbitration clause initially being upheld in March 2016. If that decision had stood, the customers would have been forced to have any complaints heard individually in arbitration.

But an April 2017 decision by the California Supreme Court in a different case effectively changed the state's arbitration law, causing a US District Court judge to revive the class action in March 2018.

Enlarge / A million games are part of GeForce Now now.

Nvidia announced this week that over a million people have signed up to use GeForce Now to stream games from Nvidia's central servers. The announcement comes just a couple of weeks after Nvidia first opened the service up to the general public.

Those user numbers were no doubt helped by the presence of GeForce Now's free service tier, which limits rendering quality and restricts play sessions to a single hour. Subscribers for the paid version of the service are also currently inside a free 90-day "introductory period"—it's unclear how many of those trial users will continue to pay $5 a month once it expires.

Those caveats aside, the quick trip to a million users represents a strong start for Nvidia's entry into an increasingly crowded streaming gaming field. For context, Sony reported a million subscribers for its $60/year PlayStation Now streaming service as of last November, almost five years after it launched. Google hasn't discussed user numbers for Stadia, but there are some early signs that not many early adopters are even making use of the platform's free games (though the company did have trouble satisfying all its initial pre-orders late last year).

Enlarge (credit: DenisKot / Getty)

The nonprofit Internet Society attracted widespread condemnation late last year after announcing it was going to sell off the Public Interest Registry, a subsidiary that administers the .org domain, to a private equity firm called Ethos Capital. People were particularly alarmed because the move came shortly after ICANN removed price caps on registration and renewal fees for .org domains. That opened the prospect of big price hikes in the coming years.

In a Friday press release, Ethos Capital announced it would voluntarily commit to limit price hikes for the next eight years. But under the new rules, Ethos Capital would still be able to raise prices by 10 percent a year—which would more than double prices over the next eight years. Ethos framed this as a concession to the public, and strictly speaking, a 10 percent price hike limit is better for customers than completely uncapped fees. But 10 percent annual increases are still massive—far more than inflation or plausible increases in the cost of running the infrastructure powering the .org registry.

For comparison, ICANN recently announced that Verisign, the company that administers the .com domain, will be allowed to raise prices by 7 percent per year over the next decade, except for a two-year "pause" after four years of hikes. Those changes, adding up to a 70-percent price hike over 10 years, was enough to trigger alarm among domain registrars who must pass these fees on to their customers.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk said Thursday the company is "driving hard" toward an orbital flight of the company's Starship vehicle this year.

It has not been decided yet whether this orbital launch will take place from the company's new facility near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas, a site at Cape Canaveral in Florida, or perhaps even an ocean-based launch platform. The company is pressing ahead with all three options in parallel. The orbital mission would involve a future iteration of Starship with six Raptor engines, Musk said.

Since late November, when the very first prototype of a Starship vehicle was damaged during a pressurization test, SpaceX employees have been working on a new version of the vehicle dubbed SN1, for serial number 1. The company has gone with this nomenclature because Musk envisions building the large spaceships rapidly, with each new iteration improving on the last—be it through smoother manufacturing processes, shedding unneeded mass, improving performance, or more.