Month: August 2020

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu Agency | Getty Images)

Twitter is facing a Federal Trade Commission probe and believes it will likely owe a fine of up to $250 million after being caught using phone numbers intended for two-factor authentication for advertising purposes.

The company received a draft complaint from the FTC on July 28, it disclosed in its regular quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange commission. The complaint alleges that Twitter is in violation of its 2011 settlement with the FTC over the company's "failure to safeguard personal information."

That agreement included a provision banning Twitter from "misleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy, and confidentiality of nonpublic consumer information, including the measures it takes to prevent unauthorized access to nonpublic information and honor the privacy choices made by consumers." In October 2019, however, Twitter admitted that phone numbers and email addresses users provided it with for the purpose of securing their accounts were also used "inadvertently" for advertising purposes between 2013 and 2019.

Enlarge / FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly speaks during an FCC meeting in Washington, DC, on November 16, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The White House yesterday withdrew its re-nomination of Federal Communications Commission member Michael O'Rielly, a Republican who has not supported President Trump's attempt to punish social media websites for alleged anti-conservative bias.

Trump had nominated O'Rielly to another five-year FCC term in March, and the nomination was awaiting Senate approval. But the White House unexpectedly withdrew O'Rielly's nomination, "announc[ing] the action Monday in a notice sent to the Senate, which confirms nominees," Bloomberg reported. "The notice didn't provide a reason for the decision."

O'Rielly's term technically expired in June 2019, but FCC rules allow him to stay through the end of 2020 even if he isn't re-confirmed by the Senate. O'Rielly has been on the FCC since 2013.

Enlarge / Please don't hurt our music collections, Google. (credit: Google Play Music)

Google Play Music has been given the death sentence by Google, and today the company has announced a bit more detail about how its execution will be carried out. The main message from today's blog post is "back up your music now," as Google says it will wipe out all Google Music collections in December 2020.

We've known for a while that the shutdown would be sometime in 2020, but for most regions, Google has now narrowed it down to "October." Here's the full timeline:

• Late August—Users will no longer be able to upload or download music through Music Manager. Pre-orders and purchases will be shut down.
• September—Streaming shuts down for users in New Zealand and South Africa.
• October—Global streaming shutdown. The Google Music app and website will cease to be.
• December—Music collections get deleted.

At the time of the streaming shutdown, the app will have been showing shutdown messages for about five months. If a user has somehow missed all of those, two months with no streaming at all will hopefully be enough to get them to research what happened to Google Music.

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  $34.99 for Centipede on the Atari 2600 might sound cheap, but that 1983 price is the equivalent of roughly $90 today. [credit: Retro Waste ]

After announcing a higher-than-normal $70 MSRP for NBA2K21 on the PS5 and Xbox Series X last month, publisher Take-Two is now suggesting that increased price point might not be the standard for its next-generation console games going forward.

"We're definitely announcing pricing on a title by title basis," CEO Strauss Zelnick said in an earnings call Monday evening. "I would just observe, there hasn't been a frontline price increase for a very long time, although costs have increased significantly."

That's a fair point: the functional ceiling for high-end games last increased back in 2006 or so, when the standard rose went from $50 to $60 alongside the rollout of the Xbox 360 and PS3. When adjusted for inflation, the top asking price for big-budget games has never been lower, while development costs have never been higher.

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  The 27-inch iMac. [credit: Apple ]

Today, Apple announced changes to its iMac product line, with significant upgrades in the 27-inch model, a move to SSDs in the 21.5-inch model, and more performance at lower prices for the iMac Pro.

The 27-inch iMac still has a 5K display, and its chassis is the same. Those hoping for smaller bezels will be disappointed. That said, Apple is bringing TrueTone to this display, and it's offering the same NanoTexture tech we've seen in the company's Pro Display XDR as a $500 upgrade.

It's also getting 10th generation Comet Lake CPUs across all configurations, with 6- and 8-core CPUs standard. The top available CPU configuration is a 10-core Intel Core i9 with Turbo Boost up to 5GHz. 8GB DDR4 at 2666MHz is still standard, but the maximum capacity you can configure at purchase has doubled to 128GB.