news.buyenne.com

Enlarge / An AT&T sign outside a company office in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Roberto Machado Noa )

AT&T CEO John Stankey said the company may offer cellphone plans subsidized by advertising, giving customers monthly discounts of $5 or $10 in exchange for ads on their phones. "I believe there's a segment of our customer base where given a choice, they would take some load of advertising for a $5 or $10 reduction in their mobile bill," Stankey said in an interview with Reuters yesterday. Stankey apparently didn't offer details on what form the ads would take.

According to Reuters, Stankey said that AT&T's ad-supported phone plans could be introduced in "a year or two." AT&T is already doing back-end work in its targeted-advertising system that could increase the value of such plans to AT&T's ad-sales business:

AT&T engineers are creating "unified customer identifiers," Stankey said. Such technology would allow marketers to identify users across multiple devices and serve them relevant advertising.

The ability to fine-tune ad targeting would allow AT&T to sell ads at higher rates, he said.

Stankey also said that a planned ad-supported version of HBO Max would play an important role in ad-supported phone plans, but he didn't offer further details, according to Reuters.

Enlarge / Modern reconstruction of a Viking longboat. (credit: Dun.can / Flickr)

A recent study of ancient DNA sheds light on who the Viking groups were and how they interacted with the people they met. The Viking Age, from around 750 to 1100 CE, left a cultural and economic impact that stretched from the coast of North America to the Central Asian steppe, and archaeology shows several examples of cultural exchange spanning continents. But to see patterns in how people swapped not only ideas, but genes, we need to look at the DNA of ancient people.

“We know very well that the Viking Age changed the cultural and political map of Europe a thousand years ago, but we don't really know much about the demographic changes that accompanied these changes,” University of Copenhagen genomicist Ashot Margaryan told Ars. “This can be addressed based on population genetics methods.”

Who were the Vikings?

Today, we tend to think of the Vikings as one big mass of bearded raiders, swooping down European coasts, up rivers, and across the North Atlantic. But the Vikings didn’t see themselves that way at all. The people who set sail to raid, trade, fish, and settle during the Viking Age saw themselves as members of distinct groups, with a shared culture but not a shared identity. The genetic evidence, it turns out, is on the Vikings’ side.

Enlarge / An Electrify America charging location in Colorado recharges a Porsche Taycan. (credit: Electrify America)

We measure electric vehicle batteries in kWh, so if you're paying to charge an EV, you'd probably expect to be charged by the kWh. And now, if you use an Electrify America charging station in one of 23 states or the District of Columbia, you'll be able to do just that, as the charging company has rolled out a new pricing structure. For the remaining 27 states that require customers to pay by the minute for the electricity they use, the company has simplified its plans and dropped its prices.

When Electrify America started rolling out the first phase of a $2 billion charging network in 2019, it did so with a complicated payment structure. When you plug an EV into a fast charger, as part of the handshake process, the car tells the charger the maximum level of power (in kW) it can accept.

Electrify America used this to determine how much you'd pay, with three different bands (0-75kW, 76-125kW, and 126-350kW), each more expensive than the previous. And as I discovered, it was quite possible to pay the higher fee even if your car sucked in power at a much lower rate during the charging session—the theoretical maximum kW value is what set the price. (In practice, OEMs like Kia have signed deals with Electrify America so owners get discounted or even free charging for several years.)

• 

  The entire PS5 hardware library, as revealed by Sony. [credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment ]

Sony has issued a rare denial in response to a recent report from Bloomberg suggesting the company has cut back production of the upcoming PlayStation 5 due to component shortages.

“While we do not release details related to manufacturing, the information provided by Bloomberg is false," the company said in a statement provided to GamesIndustry.biz. "We have not changed the production number for PlayStation 5 since the start of mass production."

Bloomberg's report cited "people familiar with the matter" to suggest that the company was lowering its expected worldwide console production from 15 million down to 11 million for the fiscal year ending in March 2021. That's due to "production yields as low as 50% for its SOC," according to the report.