Category: Uncategorised

T-Mobile CEO John Legere. (credit: T-Mobile)

T-Mobile USA will soon meet with the Federal Communications Commission about whether its controversial “Binge On” program violates network neutrality rules. But even though T-Mobile is throttling video—and the rules ban throttling—the carrier might be able to convince the FCC that an exception should be made.

The rules—which face a court challenge from a wireless industry trade group that T-Mobile belongs to—say that Internet providers including mobile carriers “shall not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of Internet content, application, or service, or use of a non-harmful device, subject to reasonable network management.”

Binge On throttles content based on its type, forcing a downgrade of all video to lower resolution. That’s a clear violation, right? The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues that it is, saying that “throttling all traffic based on application type… obviously violates the FCC’s Open Internet Order.”

Google Translate has been making some rather unflattering conversions when going from Ukrainian to Russian. "Russia" became "Mordor," "Russians" became "occupiers," and Sergey Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, became "sad little horse."

Mordor is, of course, a fictional land from JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series.

Screenshots of the bad translations were captured and passed around Russian social media site VKontakte.

(credit: Marco Paköeningrat/Flickr)

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court in San Francisco upheld a 2013 settlement between Facebook and a number of advocacy groups representing minors whose images were used in "Sponsored Stories." That agreement resulted in Facebook paying each member of the class $15 and imposed some changes to the social media giant's disclosure policies.

"It is not clear whether Facebook’s use of minors’ names and likenesses in Sponsored Stories violated California law," the court wrote. "It is also not clear whether the settlement at issue—which provides more protection for minors from Facebook’s advertising practices than existed before—violates state law. The district court did not abuse its discretion in approving the settlement in the face of this uncertainty."

The original case, known as Fraley v. Facebook, was brought against Facebook in 2011, citing violations of both federal and California state law. The case alleged that when Facebook took a "like" of a user under the age of 18 and then used that data, name, and image in a Sponsored Story without the parents’ permission, the company was doing so illegally.

(credit: Art Writ)

Let's get something straight from the start: vaccines are good. Let's be completely clear about that. But sometimes some people have adverse reactions to them—no, not autism, but things like diarrhea, nausea, fatigue, maybe a sore arm. And when the vaccinated (or their parents) complain to their friends about it, their friends might be tempted to skip their own vaccinations.

It would be nice to know in advance who might respond negatively to a vaccine so they could be warned and treated. A recent paper out of London harnesses advances in high-throughput analytical technologies, informatics, and biostatistics to begin to do just that.

Researchers treated 178 healthy adult volunteers with a vaccine against the H1N1 "swine flu" that circulated in 2009. They took blood and urine from the volunteers one week before their shots, the day of their shots, and then one day, one week, two weeks, and again 63 days afterward.