After a longstanding campaign by Consumer Reports, The Television Viewer Protection Act of 2019 passed the House and the Senate last week buried inside a giant appropriations bill that now awaits President Trump’s signature. Techdirt reports: The bill bans ISPs from charging you extra to rent hardware you already own (something ISPs like Frontier have been doing without penalty for a…
Tag: cancel
FBI Busts Massive Pirate Streaming Service With More Content Than Netflix
An anonymous reader quotes USA Today: Two programmers in Las Vegas recently admitted to running two of the largest illegal television and movie streaming services in the country, according to federal officials… An FBI investigation led officials to Darryl Polo, 36, and Luis Villarino, 40, who have pleaded guilty to copyright infringement charges for operating iStreamItAll, a subscription-based streaming site, and…
GitHub Faces More Resignations In Light of ICE Contract
TechCrunch reports that another employee, engineer Alice Goldfuss, has resigned from GitHub over the company’s $200,000 contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). From the report: In a tweet, Goldfuss said GitHub has a number of problems to address and that “ICE is only the latest.” Meanwhile, Vice reports at least five staffers quit today. These resignations come the same day…
Stadia Launch Developer Says Game Makers Are Worried ‘Google Is Just Going To Cancel It’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google has a long and well-documented history of launching new services only to shut them down a few months or years later. And with the launch of Stadia imminent, one launch game developer has acknowledged the prevalence of concerns about that history among her fellow developers while also downplaying their seriousness in…
Motorola Is Building a New Kind of Walkie-Talkie For First Responders
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: Motorola Solutions (not to be confused with Motorola Mobility, which makes the smartphones you know), the biggest global player in these LMR walkies, is releasing what appears to be the most advanced walkie-talkie ever. Called the APX Next, it’s a chunky black brick with a thick antenna and a giant push-to-talk button…
Go young moon hunting in late October
To maximize your chances of catching the young moon on October 28, find an unobstructed horizon in the direction of sunset. Binoculars will come in handy! On October 29-31, the moon will be easier to see, from all parts of the globe. Source: https://earthsky.org/tonight/go-young-moon-hunting-in-late-october…
Migrating Russian Eagles Run Up Huge Data Roaming Charges
Russian scientists tracking migrating eagles ran out of money after some of the birds flew to Iran and Pakistan and their SMS transmitters drew huge data roaming charges. The BBC reports: After learning of the team’s dilemma, Russian mobile phone operator Megafon offered to cancel the debt and put the project on a special, cheaper tariff. The team had started crowdfunding…
The Universe Is Made of Tiny Bubbles Containing Mini-Universes, Scientists Say
‘Spacetime foam’ might just be the wildest thing in the known universe, and we’re just starting to understand it. From a report: A persistent cosmological puzzle has been troubling physicists since 1917: what is the universe made of? Complicating this already-mind-boggling question is the fact that our best theories conflict with our observations of the universe. Albert Einstein, according to scientific…
US Military Apologizes For Joking about Bombing ‘Millennials’ Who Might Storm Area 51
“The US military has been forced to apologise for tweeting that it would use stealth-bombers on ‘millenials’ who try to storm Area 51,” reports Yahoo News UK: More than two million people signed up to a Facebook event recently which encouraged atendees to visit the top secret base in Nevada. But only a few thousand UFO enthusiasts turned up on Friday…
Discord is Axing its Nitro Games Catalog Since Almost Nobody Plays Them
Almost a year ago, Discord launched its own games store and overhauled the Nitro subscription service to offer access to a library of games in addition to other chat and server related perks. From a report: The app’s store has gone through several changes over the year, with games ultimately being sold directly through developers’ Discord servers instead of the original…