Month: September 2020

Enlarge / An old television set. (credit: Getty Images | Jeffrey Coolidge)

A 400-resident village in Wales suffered 18 months of DSL Internet outages each morning until the culprit was identified as electrical interference from an old TV set.

The residents of Aberhosan mysteriously experienced the outages each morning at 7am. Openreach, a BT subsidiary that provides Internet service in the UK, replaced old cables in the village in an attempt to stop the outages.

"Unfortunately, this didn't resolve the problems and so they began sleuthing for electromagnetic interference with the aid of a spectrum analyzer," according to an article in ISPreview today. The article has a lengthy quote from Openreach engineer Michael Jones, who said, "Not being able to solve the fault for our customers left us feeling frustrated and downbeat, but we were determined to get to the bottom it." Jones explained what happened next:

Enlarge / Google's in everything. Perhaps too much everything, regulators now worry. (credit: Omar Marques | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images)

Multiple investigations into Google parent Alphabet's competition practices may finally be reaching a head, as state and federal regulators meet today to plan next steps for one or more lawsuits against the company.

Attorneys from the Department of Justice are meeting today with attorneys general from several different states about imminent plans to file an antitrust suit against Google, The Washington Post and Bloomberg report.

The DOJ began its antitrust probe of "market-leading online platforms" a little more than a year ago, without naming names. Google was widely assumed to be one of the targets, and the company confirmed last September that it was indeed under investigation.

Enlarge / World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends a press conference organized by the Geneva Association of United Nations Correspondents (ACANU) amid the COVID-19 outbreak, caused by the novel coronavirus, on July 3, 2020 at the WHO headquarters in Geneva. (credit: Getty | Fabrice Cof)

A total of 156 countries—representing about 64 percent of the world’s population—have committed to pooling resources to help develop, buy, and equitably distribute two billion doses of a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2021.

“This isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do,” said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, which is co-leading the effort along with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.

So far, 64 high-income countries have signed on to the effort, as well as 92 low- and middle-income countries, which would be eligible for support in procuring vaccine doses. Gavi CEO Seth Berkley said in a WHO press conference on Monday that he expects 38 more countries to sign up in the coming days.

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  A quick tour of some of the Bethesda gaming franchises Microsoft now owns begins with The Elder Scrolls series.

As recently as last weekend, it seemed relatively certain that the next games in major franchises like Doom, The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Dishonored, and The Evil Within would come to the PlayStation 5 (and maybe even to the Nintendo Switch). That certainty went out the window yesterday, though, when Microsoft announced that it would spend $7.5 billion to acquire major publisher Bethesda Softworks.

Still, there is some hope for Bethesda fans who don't want to play on Xbox, PC, or via Microsoft's xCloud streaming. Future Bethesda titles will still be considered for multi-platform release "on a case-by-case basis,” Microsoft Head of Xbox Phil Spencer said in an interview with Bloomberg News Monday morning.

Thus far, there are only a few clues as to which games might qualify for either side of that "case-by-case" line.