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The Federal Communications Commission today proposed a $225 million fine for health-insurance telemarketers who "made approximately 1 billion spoofed robocalls across the country during the first four and a half months of 2019." But the FCC's track record in collecting on proposed fines is so poor that the fine is unlikely to ever be collected at anywhere close to the proposed amount.

Rising Eagle, a Texas-based health insurance telemarketer, made 1 billion calls "on behalf of clients that sell short-term, limited-duration health insurance plans," the FCC said. Here's how the FCC described the robocalls:

The robocalls falsely claimed to offer health insurance plans from well-known health insurance companies such as Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna, and UnitedHealth Group. For example, one call stated: "Are you looking for affordable health insurance with benefits from a company you know? Policies have all been reduced nationwide such as Cigna, Blue Cross, Aetna, and United just a quick phone call away. Press 3 to get connected to a licensed agent or press 7 to be added to the Do Not Call list." If they did press 3, consumers were transferred to a call center with no affiliation to the named companies, where call center representatives then would attempt to convince the consumer to purchase an insurance product sold by one of Rising Eagle's clients. Rising Eagle's largest client, Health Advisors of America, was sued by the Missouri Attorney General for telemarketing violations in February 2019.

The proposed $225 million fine is for "apparent violations by John C. Spiller and Jakob A. Mears, who used business names including Rising Eagle and JSquared Telecom," the FCC said. It's a proposed fine because that's how the FCC process works: the commission issues a Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture containing allegations, and the alleged robocaller is given an opportunity to respond and provide evidence. The process can end in a settlement or a fine that cannot exceed the proposed amount of $225 million. The amount of $225 million would be the largest-ever FCC fine, but the commission has a disappointing track record in collecting on these proposed penalties.

After years of wheel-spinning, Google is frantically trying to compete in the video messaging space, where the coronavirus pandemic has led to an explosion in demand for video conferencing. Meet's latest feature is noise cancellation for video conferencing, which can cut out a lot of the annoying background noises you would normally encounter in video calls.

The feature was originally announced in April, but it is only starting to roll out now and could take another month to hit everyone's account. Serge Lachapelle, G Suite's director of product management, gave an interview to VentureBeat explaining how the new feature works.

"It is important to say that this project stands on the shoulders of giants," Lachapelle told VentureBeat. "Speech recognition and enhancement has been heavily invested in at Google over the years, and much of this work has been reused." Once you have AI that can detect speech, apparently you can also use that tech to detect things that are not speech and remove them from the audio.

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  Sony's DualShock 4 Back Button Attachment. It's $30 and adds two programmable buttons to the back of your PS4 controller. [credit: Jeff Dunn ]

For all the ways the PlayStation 4 has bested the Xbox One over the past decade, Microsoft has long had the advantage of selling an official enhanced controller. Its Elite series of gamepads come with extra inputs, swappable button layouts, adjustable trigger sensitivity, and other tricks that can give more dedicated Xbox One players a competitive edge.

Sony, meanwhile, has relegated these kinds of accessories to outside manufacturers like Scuf and Astro, whose “premium” controllers have largely been fine, but they can’t quite provide the feature set or sense of harmony that a full-on first-party pro controller could.

The DualShock 4 Back Button Attachment isn't quite that. It doesn’t have “hair trigger locks,” interchangeable joysticks, or many other special features. But it does add the most immediately useful piece of any enhanced controller: two mappable rear paddles, which can duplicate any pair of buttons on the DualShock 4 proper. The idea is to give you quicker or more convenient access to inputs you frequently use in certain games. Because the device is so minimalist, it’s highly affordable—at $30, it’s multiple times cheaper than most pro controllers, even factoring in the cost of a DualShock 4 itself.

Whoa! Orion Pictures has dropped the first trailer for Bill & Ted Face the Music, the long-awaited sequel to the popular franchise that launched in 1989. There's a reason the studio chose this particular day: June 9, or 6/9, is the number Bill and Ted were thinking of when they met themselves in front of the Circle K, just over 30 years ago.

(Spoilers for first two Bill & Ted films below.)

In the original 1989 film, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) are high school students in danger of flunking history. If that happens, Ted's father will ship him off to a military academy, thus breaking up their band, Wyld Stallyns. But the band is destined to usher in a future utopia, which is now threatened. With the help of a time machine in the form of a phone booth (provided by a messenger from the year 2688), the pair travels through history, meeting Socrates, Billy the Kid, Sigmund Freud, Beethoven, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, and Abraham Lincoln, among others.

Apple discusses the 2018 iPad Pro's A12X CPU and GPU on stage at its October 30, 2018 event. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

At its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) later this month, Apple plans to announce the beginning of its transition from Intel-based Macs to ARM-based ones with internally designed CPUs, according to a report from Bloomberg. The report comes from Mark Gurman, who has had a generally good track record on reporting the internal workings of Apple and cites "people familiar with the plans."

The sources say that Apple is working on at least three different systems-on-a-chip for Macs. The first would be based on the A14, a processor planned for the new iPhone models coming later in 2020. The Mac processors would be manufactured by Apple partner TSMC “using a 5-nanometer production technique.” The project is codenamed Kalamata within Apple's walls.

WWDC begins on June 22. For the first time in its history, it will be an online-only event this year—a result of concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Bloomberg report notes twice that world events and other factors make it possible Apple will delay the announcement. But the company's leadership wants to share the plans at WWDC if possible as a way to give Mac software developers ample time to adjust to the change, which is expected to begin with the launch of the first ARM Mac hardware in 2021.

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A hackers-for-hire group dubbed “Dark Basin” has targeted thousands of individuals and hundreds of institutions around the world, including advocacy groups, journalists, elected officials, lawyers, hedge funds, and companies, according to the internet watchdog Citizen Lab.

Researchers discovered almost 28,000 web pages created by hackers for personalized “spear phishing” attacks designed to steal passwords, according to a report published on Tuesday by Citizen Lab, part of the University of Toronto’s Munk School.

“We see them again and again in areas where business and politics is contentious,” said John Scott-Railton, the lead author of the report, who said the hackers were “brazen, they seem to think they are untouchable.”

Enlarge / IBM CEO Arvind Krishna speaking at a conference in 2016, when he was SVP and director at IBM Research. (credit: Brian Ach | Wired | Getty Images)

IBM is walking away completely from the facial recognition business, CEO Arvind Krishna announced yesterday in a letter urging Congress to act against police misconduct and regulate the way technology can be used by law enforcement.

"IBM no longer offers general purpose IBM facial recognition or analysis software," Krishna wrote bluntly in the letter. "IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency."

IBM is admittedly already in the middle of a massive restructuring, shedding business units and conducting layoffs, so it is possible that facial recognition was a segment of the company that might have been on the chopping block for unrelated reasons. Even if that is true, however, it doesn't make Krishna's reasoning wrong.