Month: September 2022

Enlarge (credit: Google Play)

Google is slowly opening up the Play Store's billing policies. The "user choice billing" pilot program that was announced in March is now accepting sign-ups. Google describes the program in a support article, saying, "This pilot is designed to test offering an alternative billing option next to Google Play's billing system and to help us explore offering this choice to users. We are looking to gain feedback in different countries and ensure we can maintain a positive user experience."

Developers interested in billing through an alternative provider can fill out Google's sign-up form, and it sounds like Google will manually review each application. Currently the supported regions are the European Economic Area (that's Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Sweden), Australia, India, Indonesia, and Japan.

Google won't let developers use the pilot program for games—the biggest money makers—but only for apps.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Andrey Denisyuk)

T-Mobile won the lion's share of spectrum licenses in the latest Federal Communications Commission auction, helping it fill rural network gaps that evoked comparisons to Swiss cheese. T-Mobile's winning bids totaled $304.3 million, letting it obtain 7,156 licenses out of 7,872 that were sold, the FCC announced yesterday.

T-Mobile's licenses are spread across 2,724 counties (out of 3,143 total in the US). The second-highest bidder in dollar terms was PTI Pacifica, which spent $17.7 million on nine licenses in five counties. "With most of the available spectrum in the 2.5 GHz band located in rural areas, this auction provides vital spectrum resources to support wireless services in rural communities," the FCC said.

The auction provided up to three blocks of spectrum, totaling 117.5MHz in each county. In terms of the number of licenses won, the second-place finisher was the North American Catholic Educational Programming Fund. Its winning bids totaled $7.8 million and cover 107 licenses in 84 counties.

Enlarge / Repairs to phones and tablets like those made by Samsung could be possible for up to five years after they leave the market, if an EU proposal is implemented. (credit: Getty Images)

European Commission regulators have suggested that smartphones and tablets sold there offer 15 different kinds of spare parts for at least five years, as part of a broad effort to lessen their environmental impact.

A draft regulation of "ecodesign requirements for mobile phones, cordless phones, and slate tablets" posted on August 31 notes that phones and tablets are "often replaced prematurely by users" and are "not sufficiently used or recycled" (i.e., junk-drawer-ed) at the end of their life. The cost is the energy and new materials mined from the earth for new phones, and unrecycled materials sitting in homes. Extending the lives of smartphones by five years—from their current typical two- to three-year lives—would be like taking 5 million cars off the road, according to the Commission's findings.

The most notable proposed fix (listed in Annex II) is for phone makers and sellers to make "professional repairers" available for five years after the date a phone is removed from the market. Those repairers would have access to parts including the battery, display, cameras, charging ports, mechanical buttons, microphones, speakers, and hinge assemblies (including for folding phones and tablets).

Enlarge (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

On Friday, the family of astronomer Frank Drake announced that he passed away peacefully at 92 in his California home, near the site of his final academic position at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Drake made a number of contributions to radio astronomy, including serving as director of the Arecibo radio telescope facility. But Drake is probably best known for an equation that bears his name and his subsequent involvement in SETI efforts. His equation was the first significant attempt to estimate the probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Drake did his PhD in radio astronomy, and his academic career continued with astronomy as a focus. That eventually brought him to the Arecibo observatory. Drake was involved in the observatory's conversion from a military research site to a civilian, science-focused facility, and he later became its director.

But Drake always had a side hustle: the attempt to find other intelligent life in the Universe. His most prominent contribution in this area was the formulation of what's now known as the Drake equation. It's purportedly a calculation—plug in the probabilities of a handful of things like the frequency of exoplanets around stars and the probability of life forming spontaneously, and out would pop the overall number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Valve eliminating Dolphin Barn Interactive from Steam. (credit: Dolphin Barn Interactive / Steam)

Valve has removed Roman gladiator sim Domina from Steam after the developer used a recent patch notes post as an opportunity to rant against transgender people and the idea of changing your public gender identity.

Dolphin Barn Interactive's v 1.3.25 patch notes for the game, published on Wednesday, asks for "respect" as the game changes from its "deadname" of "Domina" to the rebranded "Dominus," which has supposedly undergone a "sex change." The thinly veiled post gets more direct as it goes on to demean a well-known trans streamer and asks players to "stop destroying the innocence of children by lying to them about basic biology."

The Steam store page for Domina says the game is no longer available "at the request of the publisher." But in a post on a newly created Gab account, Dolphin Barn Interactive's Nicholas Gorissen said that is "incorrect" and that "Steam cancelled us" over the developer's views on trans people.