news.buyenne.com

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | aluxum)

T-Mobile has agreed to pay a $200 million fine to resolve an investigation into subsidiary Sprint, which was caught taking millions of dollars in government subsidies for "serving" 885,000 low-income Americans who weren't using Sprint service.

Sprint admitted the violations in September 2019, about six months before T-Mobile completed its purchase of Sprint. Today, the Federal Communications Commission announced the $200 million settlement, which T-Mobile will pay to the US Treasury.

The $200 million is in addition to money that Sprint previously agreed to pay back to the FCC's Lifeline program, which provides $9.25-per-household monthly subsidies to companies that offer discounted telecom service to people with low incomes. Sprint had taken the money from Lifeline in violation of the "non-usage rule" that requires providers of free, subsidized plans to de-enroll subscribers who haven't used their phones recently. When the FCC investigation was announced last year, the commission said that the "885,000 subscribers represent nearly 30 percent of Sprint's Lifeline subscriber base and nearly 10 percent of the entire Lifeline program's subscriber base."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Aurich Lawson)

On Tuesday, voters in Massachusetts chose, by an overwhelming majority, to extend the state's automotive "right to repair" law to cover connected-car platforms and telematics services. As a result, the state will require that from 2022, all new telematics-equipped vehicles be accessible via a standardized open-data platform that allows owners and third-party repair shops to access vehicle data from mobile devices.

Massachusetts' automotive "right to repair" law was the first in the nation when originally passed in 2013. The aim was to fight the growing problem of automakers restricting their proprietary diagnostics tools to anyone other than official franchised dealer networks. When the law came into effect in 2018, it required that every vehicle sold in the state has a "non-proprietary vehicle interface device" for accessing mechanical data.

But the automotive industry is rapidly going wireless when it comes to getting data out of cars. Almost every new car sold in the United States in 2020 is fitted with an onboard cellular modem, and every OEM has invested in cloud infrastructure, promising benefits like vehicles that know when to ask for preventative maintenance servicing. Those cloud platforms have been guarded by the automakers, some of whom smell dollars in all that data.

Enlarge (credit: Gary Campbell-Hall / Flickr)

Midway through 2017, President Donald Trump announced that the United States intended to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, an international accord to address climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But the structure of the Paris Agreement meant that the withdrawal couldn’t take place until late 2020. On Wednesday, the US officially exited the agreement, abandoning its pledges.

President Trump’s stated reason for withdrawing—he claimed it was too expensive and unfair to the United States—didn’t really jibe with the design of the agreement, which was based on voluntary pledges that could be updated over time. (He also exaggerated the agreement’s costs and downplayed its benefits.) Of course, he has repeatedly dismissed the science of climate change, which certainly influenced his decision.

But is this the end of US involvement in the Paris Agreement? That still depends entirely on the outcome of the election. But rejoining the agreement is much easier than quitting it.

Enlarge / A mink is photographed in a farm in Hjoerring, in North Jutland, Denmark, on October 8, 2020. (credit: Getty | MADS CLAUS RASMUSSEN)

A genetic variant of the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, found in mink has spread from the animals to at least 12 people in Denmark, the prime minister said at a press conference Wednesday. The government is now planning to cull all the mink on Danish farms, which are estimated to have between 15 and 17 million of the animals.

“It is very, very serious,” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said, according to the Associated Press.

It’s so far unclear how the genetic variation found in infected mink could actually affect humans. Researchers who track genetic variations in SARS-CoV-2 have not yet seen data on the mink strain and cautioned people not to be overly concerned.

Enlarge / The CHIME telescope has proven adept at picking up fast radio bursts. (credit: Andre Renard / CHIME Collaboration)

Today, researchers are announcing they've solved one of the questions that has been nagging them over the past decade: what exactly produces the weird phenomena known as fast radio bursts (FRBs)? As their name implies, FRBs involve a sudden blast of radio-frequency radiation that lasts just a few microseconds. We didn't even know that FRBs existed until 2007 but have since cataloged hundreds of them; some come from sources that repeatedly emit them, while others seem to burst once and go silent.

Obviously, you can produce this sort of sudden surge of energy by destroying something. But the existence of repeating sources suggests that at least some of them are produced by an object that survives the event. That has led to a focus on compact objects, like neutron stars and black holes, with a class of neutron stars called magnetars being viewed very suspiciously.

Those suspicions have now been borne out, as astronomers have watched a magnetar in our own galaxy sending out an FRB at the same time it emitted pulses of high-energy gamma rays. This doesn't answer all our questions, as we're still not sure how the FRBs are produced or why only some of the gamma-ray outbursts from this magnetar are associated with FRBs. But the confirmation will give us a chance to look more carefully at the extreme physics of magnetars as we try to understand what's going on.

• 

  Some Pixel 5s have really big gaps between the display and the body. Google says this is fine! [credit: Antonio Velkov ]

It seems like every Pixel phone release comes with reports of some kind of hardware complaint, and this year the main concern about the Pixel 5 is the panel gap that exists between the screen and the body. Most modern phones are constructed by gluing the screen to the body, and usually, this is an ultra-tight bond with no visible gap at all. Most phones offer some amount of water resistance, and tight bonds between the major parts are a requirement of that feature.

Early Pixel 5 owners were understandably alarmed when their phones arrived with a relatively large gap between the body and the display. On our review unit (review coming soon), the gap is big enough to stick a fingernail into, but several pictures online show what looks like a much larger gap and gaps that aren't even around the perimeter of the phone, suggesting certain weak points are letting go. The main trouble spot appears to be around the corner of the phone that also houses the front-facing camera. There are also pictures showing dirt and grime starting to accumulate in the gap, which looks pretty gross. For a phone that is supposed to have an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance, it has looked like the early units have gone out with some quality-control issues.

Enlarge / Headquarters of ride-sharing technology company Uber in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood of San Francisco on October 13, 2017. (credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

California voters decisively approved a ballot measure Tuesday allowing ride-hail services like Uber and Lyft to treat their drivers as independent contractors, not employees. With 72 percent of the vote counted, Proposition 22 is winning by a 58-percent to 42-percent margin. That's a big enough lead for the Associated Press to project its passage.

Uber's stock rose 14 percent in Wednesday trading. Lyft is up 12 percent.

The measure had heavy financial backing from Uber, Lyft, and other "gig economy" companies that employ large numbers of drivers. They funded both signature gathering and an expensive ad blitz to convince voters to support it.