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Having health insurance can be a comfort, putting your mind at ease that you’ll be covered if you get sick or injured—until you actually have to use it, that is.

Insured Americans are having to shell out more and more to for healthcare, particularly, hospital visits, researchers report this week in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. From 2009 and 2013—before the biggest provisions of the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2014—people with individual or employer-sponsored health insurances saw a 37 percent rise in out-of-pockets costs for a hospital stay. Average bills jumped from $738 to $1,013. That’s about a 6.5 percent increase each year. However, overall healthcare spending rose just 2.9 percent each year during that time-frame and premiums—the cost to buy insurance—rose by around 5.1 percent annually.

“Every year, people freak out about how high premiums have gotten and how they continue to grow exponentially, but [out-of-pocket costs are] actually growing even faster,” Emily Adrion, first author of the study and a researcher at the Center for Healthcare Outcomes and Policy at the University of Michigan, told Bloomberg.

A Google Phone? Maybe someday?

Over the weekend, The Telegraph reported that Google has plans to release a Google-branded phone that will "see Google take more control over design, manufacturing, and software." Google is apparently sick and tired of the iPhone "dominating" the high end of the smartphone market, and the company appears to believe a Google-built smartphone can solve this problem in a way that a Nexus device cannot.

The report further says that the Google Phone will appear "by the end of the year" and that it will exist in addition to the Nexus program, which the report says is "expected to continue this year with handsets made by Taiwanese company HTC."

I'm skeptical.

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Jim Brown, an NFL legend who played for the Cleveland Browns, scored big Monday despite his retirement from the gridiron in 1965. That's because Electronic Arts, the maker of one of the world's most popular video game series—Madden NFL—has given up its lengthy court battle with the former eight-time Pro Bowl player. The publisher is giving Brown $600,000 to settle a lawsuit that accuses EA of misappropriating his likeness.

Brown said he expected his case to set precedent for other players involved in similar litigation against EA concerning the right of publicity. The legal claim was first recognized in 1953 in a federal appeals court case about professional baseball cards. The claim is most often invoked by celebrities and professional athletes. For the most part, the right of publicity gives people an economic right to their names and likenesses so that they can profit from the commercial value of their identities.

“I took a stand for all athletes and laid a framework for future plaintiffs with my great legal team. Hopefully, this is a step forward in getting companies like Electronic Arts to recognize the value that athletes have in selling their products," Brown said in a statement.

The next stop for net neutrality? (credit: Joe Ravi (CC-BY-SA 3.0))

The US appeals court decision upholding the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules wasn't quite the final word on the matter, as ISPs immediately vowed to appeal the ruling, with AT&T saying it "expect[s] this issue to be decided by the Supreme Court."

But while ISPs will give it their best shot, there are reasons to think that the Supreme Court won't take up the case. The appeal probably won't even make it to a rehearing by the full appeals court, a potential intermediate step before a Supreme Court case, legal expert Andrew Jay Schwartzman wrote last week in a Benton Foundation article titled, "Network Neutrality: Now What?" Schwartzman is a Georgetown Law lecturer, an attorney who specializes in media and telecommunications policy, and a longtime consumer advocate who previously led the Media Access Project.

The broadband industry lost a 2-1 decision (full text) by a three-judge panel at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which rejected challenges to the FCC's reclassification of broadband as a Title II common carrier service and imposition of net neutrality rules. The next step for ISPs and their lobby groups could be a petition for an "en banc" review in front of all of the court's judges instead of just a three-judge panel. They could also appeal to the Supreme Court after losing an en banc review or appeal directly to the Supreme Court without taking that intermediate step.

Enlarge (credit: Jakub Kroustek)

The crypto ransomware racket is a booming business that generates lots of revenue, so it only makes sense that the scourge is growing. And with new titles entering the market on almost a weekly basis, how do the criminals behind them make their malware stand out?

In the case of Jigsaw, a ransomware package that was first spotted in April by researchers with the Bleeping Computer security site, the answer is to be as brazen and mean-spirited as possible while at the same time making the payment process as easy as possible. A case in point: Jigsaw not only threatens the permanent loss of personal data, it also holds out the fear that victims' dirty laundry will be published for all to see. And it uses a taunting tone when notifying people of their options. Witness the screenshot above from a recent version. It states:

Very bad news! I am a so-called ransomware/locker with following advanced functions: Encrypting all your data.
Collecting all logins, contacts, eMail, Passwords and Skype History .....Done!
Uploading all of it on a server .....................Done!
Sending a copy of those Datas to ALL of your contacts..............Pending

The doxing threat, which was added last week, is pure evil genius because it gives victims a strong incentive to pay the ransom even when the purloined data is available on a backup drive.

The updated Get Windows 10 app, with its decline option.

Microsoft is finally ending the malware-like trickery of the "Get Windows 10" upgrade offer that's shown to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users.

Mary Jo Foley reports that a clearer upgrade promotion will roll out this week. It will have three options—"Upgrade now," "Choose time," and "Decline free offer"—with the last of these options dismissing the update altogether. Critically, pressing the X in the corner of the window will have the same effect as the decline option.

This change addresses one of the most unpleasant features of the promotion: some weeks ago, Microsoft changed the behavior of the X button to make it simply defer the upgrade rather than decline it altogether. This behavior was contrary to any reasonable expectations Windows users might have, and contrary to the way the promotion behaved at its introduction.

(credit: CDC)

As Zika virus outbreaks continue to rage in South and Central America, lapping at US borders, scientists are making significant strides toward an effective vaccine.

Two types of experimental Zika vaccines, a DNA vaccine and an inactivated virus vaccine, were each able to completely protect mice with one dose, researchers report Tuesday in Nature. The animal data—the first to be published for Zika vaccines—follows news last week that the Food and Drug Administration gave two companies the green light to test another Zika DNA vaccine in humans. The companies, not associated with the researchers behind today’s study, reported that they have done similar animal studies with their vaccine, but they didn’t publish the results.

With today’s animal data, researchers are hopeful about the fate of the vaccines. “The protection was striking,” Dan Barouch, a study coauthor and vaccine researcher at Harvard Medical School, said in a press briefing. “Of course we need to be cautious about extrapolating results from mice into humans,” he noted, but the strength of the findings “certainly raise optimism” that we’re on our way to a safe and effective vaccine.

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And lo, that which was rumored last night has come to fruition this morning. On Tuesday morning, Volkswagen Group proposed a number of companion settlements with the Department of Justice representing the Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the Federal Trade Commission, more than 40 state attorneys general, and a class-action complaint from people who bought 2.0L diesel cars from Volkswagen and Audi.

The amount of the settlements will tally more than $15 billion, with $10.033 billion going toward compensating consumers. In a conference call on Tuesday morning, Elizabeth Cabraser, the court-appointed lead counsel for Volkswagen consumer plaintiffs, detailed exactly how the German automaker would compensate its customers after the company was discovered last September to have included illegal software on many of its recent diesel models. The software helped the diesel vehicles pass federally required emissions tests in a lab but turned off the cars’ emissions control systems while under normal driving conditions, causing significantly increased levels of nitrogen oxide to spew on open roads.

Cabraser noted that owners of certain diesel VW Golfs, Passats, Jettas, Beetles, and Audi A3s would be eligible for a buyback equal to the amount the car was worth in September 2015—a range from a low of around $12,000 to a high of about $44,000. The buybacks would be accepted “regardless of condition,” Cabraser said, “as long as it’s drivable.”