Month: October 2022

Enlarge / A Comcast Xfinity service van in Sunnyvale, California, in November 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Sundry Photography)

Comcast has a problem—it isn't signing up many new broadband customers. But Comcast also has a solution—get more money from existing subscribers.

Comcast failed to add any broadband customers in Q2 2022, holding steady at 32,163,000 residential and business Internet customers combined. In its Q3 earnings report released yesterday, Comcast said it gained only 14,000 broadband users in the latest quarter. Comcast also lost 561,000 video customers and 316,000 VoIP phone customers.

That's why Comcast executives focused on ARPU (average revenue per user) in an earnings call yesterday. With new customers few and far between, Comcast is aiming for growth in the average amount each existing customer pays.

Enlarge / Whatever happens, it's nice to know your data options. (credit: Benj Edwards)

Big changes are underway at Twitter as we speak—including new leadership—and some people are nervous about what the future might bring for the social network. Things may end up completely fine, but even in tranquil times, it's good to know how to get a copy of your Twitter data for local safekeeping—or to deactivate your Twitter account if you choose. This puts control of your data in your hands.

Before we start, it's important to know that the process of getting a copy of your Twitter data can take 24 hours or more. Twitter does this both for safety reasons and ostensibly to give its servers time to gather up the detailed data it will send you.

Also, you'll need an email address or mobile phone number registered to your Twitter account so the site can send you a special confirmation code to complete the process. Once you have the data, you'll get a local copy of all of your tweets that you can store indefinitely without needing to log in to Twitter.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Exploit code was released this week for a just-patched vulnerability in VMware Cloud Foundation and NSX Manager appliances that allows hackers with no authentication to execute malicious code with the highest system privileges.

VMware patched the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-39144, on Tuesday and issued it a severity rating of 9.8 out of a possible 10. The vulnerability, which resides in the XStream open source library that Cloud Foundation and NSX Manager rely on, posed so much risk that VMware took the unusual step of patching versions that were no longer supported. The vulnerability affects Cloud Foundation versions 3.11 and lower. Versions 4.x aren’t at risk.

“VMware Cloud Foundation contains a remote code execution vulnerability via XStream open source library,” the company’s advisory, published Tuesday, read. “Due to an unauthenticated endpoint that leverages XStream for input serialization in VMware Cloud Foundation (NSX-V), a malicious actor can get remote code execution in the context of 'root' on the appliance.”

Enlarge / Let's see, you landed on my "Google Ads" space, and with three houses... that will be $1,400. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Hasbro)

Can Android manufacturers ship devices that run Android forks? That's a tough and scary question for OEMs to ask, and Google has probably liked it that way. The contracts Android OEMs sign with Google—which are needed to license the Play Store and other Google apps—says, flatly, "no forks." Google says forking Android would damage the Android ecosystem, so OEMs must pledge to never be involved in the production of a device that runs a fork of Android. Some regulatory bodies—namely in the EU—have ruled that the "no forks" clause of the Android contract is not legal and that Google can't punish OEMs that stray outside the walled garden. The EU doesn't control the whole world, though, so while Google can't punish manufacturers inside the EU, what happens in the rest of the world?

Google's anti-fork clause has always been a big problem for Amazon, whose Fire OS is the No. 1 Android fork out there. With most of the major tech manufacturers somehow involved in producing Android phones, tablets, TVs, laptops, cars, or watches, Amazon has always had to claw and scrape to find someone willing to make Fire devices. Amazon complained about this to the Competition Commission of India last week, saying, "At least seven OEMs have indicated that their ability to enter into a manufacturing relationship of this kind with Amazon is either blocked entirely or significantly limited (e.g., in terms of geographic scope) by their contractual commitments to Google." India is Android's biggest market, so any rulings there will be worth paying attention to.

TCL's new TV runs Amazon's Fire OS, an Android fork. (credit: TCL)

A new report from Protocol's Janko Roettgers says that Google is caving on this restriction, at least for televisions. The report says that Google and Amazon have "struck a deal" allowing Android manufacturers to make TVs that run Fire TV OS, and that TCL, Xiaomi, and Hisense will offer products in both ecosystems. TCL has already announced the lovingly named "CF63K Fire TV series" of televisions—4K, 60 Hz Fire TV displays with Amazon Alexa. The company also makes sets with Android TV and Roku software. Xiaomi, a stalwart Android OEM, also announced a Fire TV set this May.

Enlarge / Clevland doctor Sherri Tenpenny gives false testimony on June 8, 2021, saying COVID-19 vaccines magnetize people. (credit: The Ohio Channel)

The State Medical Board of Ohio is threatening to limit, suspend, or even permanently revoke the medical license of Sherri Tenpenny, the infamous anti-vaccine doctor who made headlines last year for falsely testifying to state lawmakers that COVID-19 vaccinations make people magnetic—among espousing other nonsensical anti-vaccine-related conspiracy theories.

"I'm sure you've seen the pictures all over the Internet of people who have had these shots and now they're magnetized," Tenpenny said in her viral testimony. "You can put a key on their forehead—it sticks. You can put spoons and forks all over and they can stick because now we think there is a metal piece to that."

She went on to suggest that there may be an "interface—yet to be defined" between the components of life-saving vaccines and "all of the 5G towers." She added that the connection is "not proven yet" but that "we're trying to figure [it] out."

Enlarge / Pebble's e-ink smartwatches, like the Pebble 2 HR pictured here, can now work on 64-bit Android phones like the Pixel 7, following a surprising official app update from Google. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

When Pebble, an early, quirky, crowdfunded smartwatch, was acquired in a fire sale by Fitbit in December 2016, the company noted that while existing watches would work for the time being, "functionality or service quality may be reduced in the future." You'd maybe get some bug fixes, but no software updates or features would arrive for the pioneering e-ink wearables.

Nearly six years later, a new Pebble app for Android has been released by the Rebble Alliance, a group that has kept Pebble viable for its users since Fitbit shut down Pebble's servers in mid-2018. Pebble version 4.4.3 makes the app 64-bit so it can work on the mostly 64-bit Pixel 7 and similar Android phones into the future. It also restores a caller ID function that was hampered on recent Android versions.

Most notably, the app is "signed using the official Pebble keys," with Google Fit integration maintained. Google acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion, making it the steward of Pebble's remaining IP and software pieces. Katharine Berry, a key Rebble coder and leader, works on Wear OS at Google and was one of the first to tweet news of the new update, "four years after 4.4.2." That was the last Play Store update to the Pebble app, one that freed up many of the app's functions to be replaced by independent servers. That's exactly where Rebble picked up, providing web services to Pebble watches, including (for paying subscribers) voice dictation.