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Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam. (credit: Fortune Live Media)

Verizon Wireless is testing the limits of the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules after announcing that it will exempt its own video service from mobile data caps—while counting data from competitors such as YouTube and Netflix against customers' caps.

The only way for companies to deliver data to Verizon customers without counting against their data caps is to pay the carrier, something no major rival video service has chosen to do. While data cap exemptions are not specifically outlawed by the FCC's net neutrality rules, the FCC is examining these arrangements to determine whether they should be stopped under the commission's so-called "general conduct standard." The FCC is already looking into data cap exemptions—also known as zero-rating—implemented by Comcast, AT&T, and T-Mobile USA.

Verizon last month announced its new "FreeBee Data 360" program in which content providers can pay to send zero-rated data to customers. Verizon has also been pushing its new "Go90" streaming video service, and yesterday it added a perk to Go90's mobile app: free data.

This week the James Webb Space Telescope team used a robotic am to install the last of the telescope's 18 mirrors onto the telescope structure. (credit: NASA)

After years of delays and cost overruns, the James Webb Space Telescope is finally coming together. This week the 18th and final primary mirror segment of the telescope was installed onto the support structure at Goddard Space Flight Center. From here, additional optics must be installed, and the telescope requires testing to ensure it can withstand the forces of a rocket launch anticipated in late 2018.

Each of the hexagon-shaped mirrors weighs 40 kg and spans 1.3 meters. After launch, the telescope will be flown to the second Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. From there, it will begin observations. When deployed in space, the telescope will have a 6.5-meter diameter.

"Completing the assembly of the primary mirror is a very significant milestone and the culmination of over a decade of design, manufacturing, testing, and now assembly of the primary mirror system," said Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager at Goddard. "There is a huge team across the country who contributed to this achievement."

(credit: Tim Deering/Flickr)

In an effort to offer healthier menu items, McDonald’s has unveiled a new salad with a “nutrient-rich lettuce blend with baby kale,” shaved parmesan, and chicken (grilled or fried). Like many fast-food salads, it may seem like a healthy option at first, but it’s not. The salad, when paired with the restaurant’s Asiago Caesar Dressing, packs more fat, calories, and salt than a double Big Mac—that’s a sandwich with four beef patties.

(credit: McDonald's)

While the nutrition check on a McDonald’s item may not come as a shock, the unhealthy salad option falls into a bigger trend of restaurant meals—fast food or not, eating out is hard on your waistline and health.

(credit: McDonald's)

In one recent study, researchers found that 92 percent of large-chain, local-chain, and mom-and-pop restaurants served meals that exceeded the calorie intake for a healthy meal. The study included 364 meals from restaurants in three cities: Boston, San Francisco, and Little Rock, Arkansas. The meals covered American, Chinese, Greek, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Thai, and Vietnamese-style cuisine.

The Bennet sisters stash swords under their gowns for a reason. (credit: Jay Maidment/Sony)

This review contains minor spoilers to the film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

There are a few reasons a person might decide to watch the film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. You might be a fan of Jane Austen and absorb anything to do with the 19th-Century author. You might be a fan of zombie films—even the bad ones—and will sign up to see any brains eaten by the undead. Or, maybe you want to watch Games of Thrones’ Lena Headey fight zombies while sporting an eyepatch throughout an entire film.

These are all valid reasons to walk into a theater to see a parody film based on a parody book based on an essential book. But while Pride and Prejudice and Zombies does include some awesomely bloody zombie fight scenes—we can confirm, Headey is definitely some kind of zombie warrior—it’s not a very good film. In fact, that’s being generous. This film is a mess. It takes the main characters and the rough outline of the plot from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, mixes in some zombies, and then develops a whole new weird plot about zombie rights.

(credit: nerissa's ring)

BPA-free labels, blazoned on baby toys and beverage holders, are supposed to allay fears about the notorious chemical, previously used in sturdy plastics and epoxy resins. After all, bisphenol A (BPA) has been shown to impersonate hormones such as estrogen, and it is associated—though not definitely linked—to a broad range of health problems, including cancers and cardiovascular disease.

But the "BPA-free" label may simply be a meaningless marketing ploy.

A growing number of studies suggest that manufactures are swapping BPA for chemical cousins that have the same troubling activities in humans and animals. In a new study in Endocrinology, for instance, researchers found that a common BPA stand-in, bisphenol S (BPS), has nearly identical hormone-mimicking effects as BPA in zebrafish, a model organism used to study genetics and development. In the study, researchers found that BPS, like BPA, altered nerve cell development, changed the activity level of genes involved in developing the reproductive system, and caused early hatching (the fish equivalent of premature birth).

It sounds like a scene from an absurdist play or a companion to the old tale of dogs and cats living together in harmony, but it has now been confirmed. Servers distributing the notorious Dridex banking trojan were instead circulating clean copies of the freely available Avira antivirus program.

Avira researchers still don't know how the mixup happened, but their chief theory is that a whitehat hacker compromised some of the Dridex distribution channels and replaced the normal malicious executables with a digitally signed Avira installer. As a result, when targets opened attachments contained in spam e-mails sent by Dridex servers, the would-be marks were instead prompted to run a program designed to protect computers from the very likes of the Dridex threat.

"We still don't know exactly who is doing this with our installer and why—but we have some theories," a blog post published Friday quoted Avira malware expert Moritz Kroll saying. "This is certainly not something we are doing ourselves."