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Yahoo's deal with Verizon seems to be going 2x slower after security revelations. (credit: Scott Schiller)

Yesterday, Yahoo revealed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the company would change its name (to "Altaba") after it completes its transformation from an actual business to a corporate wrapper around Alibaba stock. If all goes as planned, CEO Marissa Mayer would step down, the board would be trimmed, and "Altaba" would simply continue to exist as a way for investors to own a chunk of a non-controlling interest in a Chinese e-commerce company.

Whether that transformation happens as the result of a successful sale of the Yahoo Internet portal to Verizon or some other, less-desirable outcome has yet to be determined. And as we noted in our 2017 Deathwatch, it's still far from a sure bet that the Verizon acquisition will go as planned.

The change to "Altaba" (apparently some non-trademark-infringing sort of reference to Alibaba, in which Yahoo holds a 15 percent stake) depends on the completion of the sale to Verizon of Yahoo Holdings, the new corporate wrapper for its Internet business. Verizon initially offered $4.8 billion for Yahoo last July, but the deal was in doubt after it was revealed that Yahoo had failed to disclose a huge security breach in 2014 to customers (and Verizon). A second major breach, dating to 2013, was discovered later.

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Face recognition and place recognition are both critical for everyday interactions, and they both depend on specialized regions of the brain. Neuroscientists generally suspect that as these regions develop, facial and place recognition improve. If so, there may be a lot of room for improvement. A recent study published in Science found that the parts of the brain that are associated with face and place recognition continue to develop well into adulthood, long after most of the brain's architecture is in place.

The study looked at 26 children ages five through 12 and 26 adults aged 22 to 28. These subjects all participated in MRI and quantitative MRI imaging. These techniques allowed the researchers to assess the amount of brain matter in different regions, as well as the lipid composition of different parts of the brain. The brain is primarily made up of lipids—also known as fats—so differences in lipid distribution within the brain could be related to differences in functionality for different brain regions.

The researchers also looked at the activity of different brain regions. Participants’ responses to images of places and faces were tracked using fMRI, which allowed the scientists to see changes in blood flow to the brain that occur in response to stimulation. This helped them to identify which brain regions were primarily associated with recognizing these items.

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AT&T is raising the price of its grandfathered unlimited data plans by $5 a month, the second such increase in the past year. The price increase affects longtime mobile customers who have held onto unlimited data plans for years after AT&T stopped selling them to new subscribers.

The latest price increase was reported by DSLReports yesterday, and AT&T confirmed the move to Ars.

"If you have a legacy unlimited data plan, you can keep it; however, beginning in March 2017, it will increase by $5 per month," AT&T said. The unlimited data price had been $30 a month for seven years, until AT&T raised it to $35 in February 2016. The price increase this year will bring it up to $40. That amount is just for data: Including voice and texting, the smartphone plans cost around $90 a month.

Enlarge / Not everything Kat deals with is on the mundane side.

In 2012, Gravity Rush was a flawed but charming open-world action game for the PlayStation Vita. It made an immediate impression with a wonderful heroine named Kat, a girl who just happened to control gravity, falling from the sky and into a floating city. In the end, though, the game was rightly maligned for its imprecise combat and an extremely abrupt ending that left questions hanging over just about every major plot point.

In 2017, Sony is finally following up with Gravity Rush 2. The sequel is also a flawed and charming open-world action game, this time for the PlayStation 4. The combat is just as tough to track and the ending is just as abrupt.

Until it isn't. It's complicated.

As super-heroics go, Kat renders incredibly gentle gravity-based aid to the citizens of her floating, jazz-infused, and dreamlike world. Sometimes she’ll fight monsters, thieves, and mad politicians, but more often Kat does things, like helping poor dock workers make ends meet, aiding dogs in finding their lost toys, and, in one instance, waiting in line to buy crêpes for a sad, older man. Yes, buying crêpes is an actual mission objective from the main story.

(credit: Steven Depolo)

Backpage.com, whose executives and former owners beat back pimping charges a month ago, is shuttering its adult section over what it says is "unconstitutional government censorship."

The Dallas-based media concern said that it had been under too much pressure from the Senate Subcommittee on Permanent Investigations' sex trafficking inquiries. The inquiries found that the online ads portal "edits" content of ads that amount to solicitation of prostitution by "deleting words and images before publication." The company, which lost a Supreme Court First Amendment battle and was forced to turn over thousands of pages of company documents detailing its business methods, said it fell victim in the same way that Craigslist did a decade ago, when it removed adult ads.

“Like the decision by Craigslist to remove its adult category in 2010, this announcement is the culmination of years of effort by government at various levels to exert pressure on Backpage.com and to make it too costly to continue,” Backpage told Congress late Monday,