Comcast

A California nonprofit says that a Comcast Internet service program for poor people is too difficult to sign up for, resulting in just 11 percent of eligible households in the state getting service.

Comcast had to create the $10-per-month Internet Essentials program in order to secure approval of its acquisition of NBCUniversal in 2011. About 300,000 households containing 1.2 million people nationwide have gotten cheap Internet service as a result, but the California Emerging Technology Fund (CETF) complains that the signup process is riddled with problems, a charge Comcast denies.

CETF itself was created by the California Public Utilities Commission when approving the mergers of SBC-AT&T and Verizon-MCI, and its purpose was to accelerate broadband deployment for unserved or underserved populations. The group says additional requirements should be imposed on Comcast as part of its pending acquisition of Time Warner Cable.

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AFTVnews.com

Amazon released the Fire TV in April into a market already chock-full with streaming media boxes that one can attach to a television. At the same time, it filed for an "Amazon Fire" trademark and two service marks. Amazon also claims the word "Fire" itself on its long list of trademarks, and Amazon lawyers are apparently already engaged in sweeping the Web of sites that contain the mark.

The anonymous proprietor of fireTVnews.com explained on his site that Amazon has given him seven days to turn over the domain to them because it contains an Amazon trademark. He wrote:

I’ll admit, when I registered the domain, I knew there was a possibility that one day I would be contacted by Amazon’s trademark lawyers. I naively thought Amazon was nicer than your average mega corporation and registered the domain anyway. Lesson learned. It would have been nice if they gave me more than 7 days, or at least given me a way to contact them. Instead, I’m supposed to give them the domain release information through their standard ‘Contact Us’ form.

I’m just one guy with a small blog and a few loyal readers, so I wont be fighting their request. This website will continue, but under a different name and URL. I will post the new website information shortly. I hope everyone reading this will stick around and not get lost in the move.

Yesterday, the site completed a move to AFTVnews.com, gave up its Facebook page, and changed its Twitter handle as well. The news site appears to be tiny, with just 84 Twitter followers. (Twitter followers aren't lost when a handle changes.) He wrote:

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The captured DJI Phantom drone and its cargo, held by Thai prison authorities. Saichon Srinuanchan , Bangkok Post

The Bangkok Post reports that guards at the Khao Bin Prison in Thailand took possession of what appears to be a DJI Phantom drone laden with cell phones and accessories. The drone was snagged on a tree limb inside the prison compound.

Taped to the drone were two Nokia cell phones, four SIM cards, a pair of Bluetooth devices, and headphones. Also attached to the aircraft was what appeared to be a system on a board—about the size of a Raspberry Pi computer. The gear was concealed in a plastic bottle.

In addition to its illicit cargo, the quadcopter was equipped with a GoPro video camera and a Wi-Fi signal range extender to allow the drone to be remote-controlled from a greater distance, based on analysis of the photos published by the Post.

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What time is it? According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, it's iTime!

As the smartwatch market has grown with entries from Qualcomm, Samsung, and Google, Apple has remained remarkably mum on the concept, in spite of long-standing rumors hinting at a wristwatch in the works in Cupertino. On Sunday, iWatch's hopes grew further with the unveiling and approval of a new smartwatch patent filed by Apple in July, 2011.

As reported by Wired UK, the US patent describes a "wrist-worn electronic device and methods therefor," and its description certainly resembles the features users have come to expect from recent smartwatches. In particular, the section about "information exchanges" between the watch and a user's phone describes a system of notifications and on-screen controls for everything from SMS to media playback (along with the naming of compatible Apple devices like iPhones and iPods).

The patent (which never uses the term "iWatch") mentions features like gyroscopes, accelerometers, and vibrating elements, along with a variety of models, including one whose base can very clearly be removed from the wristwatch band, iPod Nano-style. This patent's unveiling comes nearly two years after Google's own "smartwatch including flip-up display" patent, but Apple beat Google to the filing punch by three months—and included a far wider range of designs and functionality (e.g. gyroscopes) to boot.

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It took just 20 minutes for a model drone to locate a missing elderly Wisconsin man, a feat that helicopters, search dogs, and volunteers couldn't accomplish in three days.

Just don't tell that to the Federal Aviation Administration, whose regulatory wings are already flapping about model drones.

This weekend's discovery of the 82-year-old man in an area of crops and woods comes amid a legal tussle between flight regulators and model drone operators—the latest of which coincidentally involves search-and-rescue missions.

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The Lumia 530. Nokia

If analytics companies are to be believed, the lowly Lumia 520 and its variants have been the most popular Windows Phone handsets ever. Today, Microsoft officially announced that phone's successor, the Lumia 530. It will come in both single- and dual-SIM variants, though it's safe to say that only the single-SIM version will end up making it to the US, and Nokia expects both to be priced at around "€85 (about $114) before taxes and subsidies."

The 530 is a somewhat cut-down version of the Lumia 630 that was introduced earlier this year, and the devices share many design elements—eye-melting neon color options, software navigation buttons rather than hardware or capacitive buttons, and no dedicated camera shutter button. Microsoft has made some changes to Windows Phone to make it easier for OEMs to put it on lightly modified Android hardware, and these two Lumias showcase those changes.

On the inside, the Lumia 530 is a combination of small upgrades and small downgrades from the 520. Both phones share the same 5MP camera and 512MB of RAM. Storage is down to 4GB (from 8GB in the 520), but the phone's microSD slot will now support cards up to 128GB in size. The resolution of the 4-inch screen increases slightly to 854×480. The 530 uses a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 200 SoC rather than the 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 in the 520, but overall performance may break roughly even since the S4's Krait CPU architecture is faster clock-for-clock than the 200's Cortex A7 architecture. Finally, the GPU takes a minor step down from the Adreno 305 GPU to the Adreno 302. New buyers will still get a solid budget handset, but current 520 users won't need to rush out to buy this one.

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Julien GONG Min

PCs may not be thriving the way they once were, but Microsoft has posted a strong set of financials for the fourth quarter of its 2014 financial year on the back of substantial, sustained growth in its cloud businesses.

Revenue for the quarter was $23.38 billion, up 17.5 percent on the same quarter a year ago. Operating income rose 6.7 percent to $6.48 billion, and earnings per share were down 5 percent to $0.56, with the drop largely attributed to a hefty tax adjustment.

The results for the quarter were complicated by Microsoft's purchase of Nokia's Devices and Services business, which closed in April. In the wake of the purchase, the company has adjusted the way it breaks down its earnings. The "Devices and Consumer Hardware" segment has been renamed "Computing and Gaming Hardware." This includes Surface and Xbox hardware. A new segment, "Phone Hardware," will cover the Nokia business.

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The Federal Communications Commission will face a lawsuit if it tries to invalidate state laws that restrict the ability of cities and towns to offer Internet service, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) wrote in a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler yesterday. Such a move would infringe on states' rights protected by the Constitution, the group claimed.

Wheeler has said he intends to "preempt state laws that ban competition from community broadband," relying on authority detailed in a court decision that overturned the FCC's net neutrality rules. These state laws make it difficult or impossible for municipalities to create their own broadband networks that compete against private Internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.

The US House of Representatives has already approved a budget amendment that would prevent the FCC from invalidating these laws.

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A screenshot posted by "w0rm" showing he had dumped the user table from a Wall Street Journal database.

Dow Jones & Co. took two servers that store the news graphics for The Wall Street Journal website offline yesterday evening after a confirmed intrusion by a hacker calling himself “w0rm.” The hacker was offering what he claimed was user information and server access credentials that would allow others to “modify articles, add new content, insert malicious content in any page, add new users, delete users, and so on,” Andrew Komarov, chief executive officer of cybersecurity firm IntelCrawl, told The Wall Street Journal.

W0rm, according to Komarov, is the same individual previously known as “Rev0lver” and “Hash,” a Russian hacker who tried to sell access to the BBC’s servers last December and attacked the Web servers of Vice Media earlier this year. At 5:30pm ET on July 21, he posted a screenshot to Twitter that showed the e-mail address, username, and hashed password for the database admin on a wsj.com server. He offered to sell the full dump of the database table of authorized users for one bitcoin through an exploit marketplace at w0rm.in.

According to The Journal, Dow Jones has taken the servers offline to isolate them and prevent further intrusions into their systems. A spokeperson for the company said, “At this point we see no evidence of any impact to Dow Jones Customers or customer data.”

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Four days after a forensics expert warned that undocumented functions in iOS could leak personal user data, Apple has documented three services it says serve diagnostic purposes.

"iOS offers the following diagnostic capabilities to help enterprise IT departments, developers, and AppleCare troubleshoot issues," the support article published Tuesday stated. "Each of these diagnostic capabilities requires the user to have unlocked their device and agreed to trust another computer. Any data transmitted between the iOS device and trusted computer is encrypted with keys not shared with Apple. For users who have enabled iTunes Wi-Fi Sync on a trusted computer, these services may also be accessed wirelessly by that computer." As Ars reported Monday, three undocumented services include a packet sniffer dubbed com.apple.mobile.pcapd, a file downloader called com.apple.mobile.file_relay, and com.apple.mobile.house_arrest, a tool that downloads iPhone and iPad files to an iTunes folder stored on a computer.

Jonathan Zdziarski, the forensics expert who brought the undocumented functions to light on Saturday, published a blog post in response that criticized Apple's characterization of the services. He continued to maintain that at least one of the capabilities—stemming from the file relay service—constitutes a "backdoor" as defined by many security and forensics practitioners. He also took issue with Apple's suggestion that the purpose of the services was limited to diagnostics. He reiterated his previous stance that he doesn't believe Apple added the functions at the request of the National Security Agency.

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A rare dwarf galaxy that initiated a burst of star formation within the last billion years. NASA

Large galaxies such as the Milky Way appear to have been built by repeated mergers of smaller ones, but not every small galaxy has ended up being swallowed completely by a large one. The Milky Way is orbited by dozens of dwarf galaxies, some of which have been disrupted and stripped of stars, while others may have slipped into orbit largely intact. Similar dwarf galaxies orbit our nearby neighbors, including Andromeda.

Based on what we know about these mergers and computer modeling of galaxy formation and growth, the collection of dwarfs should be an unruly lot, having approached the galaxy they orbit from directions that are essentially random. Yet the dwarfs orbiting the Milky Way largely inhabit a single plane, orbiting in a manner analogous to moons around a giant planet.

It's easy to dismiss that as a fluke of chance, but that became a bit harder to do as evidence built over the past several years that most of Andromeda's dwarf galaxies were also organized into a single plane. Stranger still, that plane's edge is oriented toward the Milky Way. Now, a French-Australian team of astronomers has figured out a way to search existing data for the presence of planes farther out from the Milky Way, finding that Andromeda's setup is actually quite common.

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This is Yosemite. Andrew Cunningham

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});It's not difficult to get your hands on pre-release Apple software. For a mere $198 a year ($99 each for OS X and iOS) you can download beta versions of operating systems from Apple's developer site even if you've never written a line of code in your life.

This year, Apple is taking things a step further. The new public beta program for OS X Yosemite officially launches Thursday, taking software that has traditionally been protected from the public by a $99 paywall and distributing it to the first million users who sign up on Apple's site. It's a very Microsoft-esque way to roll out an OS: you give enthusiasts a chance to work with an early-but-reasonably-stable build in exchange for valuable bug-squashing feedback. Ideally, it will keep Yosemite from suffering from some of the general bugginess that affected iOS 7.0 when it launched last year.

In advance of the public beta, we've been given about a week of time to use the third developer preview and get a sense of what Yosemite brings to the table. Beta subscribers will get a slightly newer build of the operating system, but at this point most of the features are locked down and ready for evaluation by the public.

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Exploring Grado Labs' manufacturing space and creating our own pair of headphones. Shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Buried in a packed townhouse on a quiet street in south Brooklyn is a manufacturing operation that produces some of the most renowned headphones in the business. Despite Yelp reviews for the business, Grado Labs doesn't sell directly from its location to consumers, though it does take the occasional walk-up request for repairs. For the most part, its long-time employees, including owner John Grado and his son Jonathan, tinker away through four crowded floors on audio gear that hasn't appeared in advertising since the 1960's.

In the building, the company assembles and ships models that range from the flagship PS1000, priced at $1,700, to the $79 SR60s. As of early June, Grado has evolved the drivers for the second time in 23 years, from the I-series to the E-series.

The average New York City apartment building is narrow to begin with, but Grado's space is like a house eternally in the middle of moving day. You get around by edging your way around boxes, through the halls, on the stairs, and in the rooms. During the holiday season, Jonathan says, the boxes are stacked high enough to effectively move the walls in.

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Amazon's first phone isn't without its charms, but is it good enough to replace the iOS or Android stuff you already have? Andrew Cunningham

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});It took other companies a long time to respond to the iPad. Early efforts like the first Samsung Galaxy Tabs, the Motorola Xoom, and Barnes & Noble's Nook Color had their fans, but compared to Apple's tablets, they all had major flaws. Amazon's first Kindle Fire had its problems too, but Amazon's name recognition and the tablet's $199 price made it one of the iPad's first semi-credible competitors. It opened the door for even better tablets at the same price point, and Android's tablet market share is largely built on the cheap tablet foundation that Amazon helped establish.

Amazon's first smartphone is taking the opposite path. It's jumping into the high-end smartphone market surprisingly late in the game. The market started showing signs of saturation, and its competitors are entrenched. At $649 unlocked for a 32GB phone ($199 with a two-year contract), it doesn't have a price advantage. It's also not being subsidized by Amazon's media storefronts or by "Special Offers"-style advertisements.

Because it's 2014, because the phone costs what it does, and because there are dozens of great phones to be had at (and well below) this price bracket, it's going to be much more difficult for users to overlook flaws or shortcomings when compared to those first Kindle Fire tablets. Amazon's phone brings unique features, like its Dynamic Perspective head tracking cameras and its Firefly scanning software, but can the phone get by on a couple of cool features if it has other problems?

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Flickr user: TWM Labs

Polls relating to publicly controversial scientific issues often trigger a great wailing and gnashing of teeth from science advocates. When large proportions of a population seem poorly informed about evolution, climate change, or genetically modified foods, the usual response is to bemoan the state of science literacy. It can seem obvious that many people don’t understand the science of evolution, for example—or the scientific method, generally—and that opinions would change if only we could educate them.

Research has shown, unfortunately, it's not that simple. Ars has previously covered Yale Professor Dan Kahan’s research into what he calls “cultural cognition,” and the idea goes like this: public opinion on these topics is fundamentally tied to cultural identities rather than assessment of scientific evidence. In other words, rather than evaluate the science, people form opinions based on what they think people with a similar background believe.

That shouldn’t come as a shock, especially given the well-known political or religious divides apparent for climate change and evolution.

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Michelle Phan, a very popular YouTube user, demonstrates the stretchiness of hair ties. Michelle Phan

Popular YouTube user Michelle Phan is being sued for alleged copyright infringement on songs she has used in her videos, according to reports from the BBC. Ultra Records claims that Phan has used 50 of its songs in her YouTube posts and on her website illegally despite one of the label's own artists objecting to the legal action.

Phan's YouTube channel centers around using and buying makeup, and her videos are often backed by upbeat music with the artist credited in the video's description. Artists whom Phan has used in her videos include Kaskade, deadmau5, and Calvin Harris.

Kaskade spoke out on Twitter about the lawsuit, condemning Ultra for pursuing Phan for copyright infringement. "Copyright law is a dinosaur, ill-suited for the landscape of today’s media," he wrote. "We can’t love (& won’t buy) music we haven’t heard." If it's exposure artists are looking for, Phan's audience isn't a bad target. She boasts over six million subscribers and videos that consistently crack a million views each.

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A defendant accused of illegally downloading porn on BitTorrent argued it was like having a pirated CD slipped in his bag on the way out of the store. The judge didn't buy it. zen Sutherland

Porn studio Malibu Media files more copyright lawsuits than anyone else in the US since the fall of Prenda Law; hundreds of suits against "John Doe" defendants have been filed in just the last few months. Nearly all of those cases settle before the case is decided on the merits.

However, in a rare development yesterday, a Malibu lawsuit proceeded to a judgment—and it was a slam dunk for the porn studio. In a terse five-page order (PDF), US District Judge Robert Jonker tore apart defendant Don Bui's arguments that using BitTorrent and the site Kickass Torrents to get porn files didn't violate Malibu's copyright.

In the case, the defendant admitted he had 57 unauthorized copies of Malibu Media movies on his hard drive and had used BitTorrent technology to get them. Bui tried to shift the blame to the Kickass Torrents website, but it didn't work. He also tried to distinguish the technology he used from earlier technologies found to violate copyright laws, like Grokster. That didn't sway Jonker, who wrote:

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Satya Nadella and former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop in a photo-op. View Liveblog2014-07-22T16:30:00-05:00

Last week, Microsoft announced that it would be making the largest set of staff cuts in the company’s history, axing as many as 18,000 jobs over the next fiscal year. This week, CEO Satya Nadella will be delivering Microsoft’s fourth-quarter earnings results, and according to his corporate-speak-filled layoff e-mail, Nadella will take the opportunity to "share further specifics on where we [Microsoft] are focusing our innovation investments."

This likely means elaboration on both the specific nature of the cuts (which Microsoft EVP and former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop discussed at length in his own e-mail last week) and some details on where and how Microsoft plans to expend effort to improve itself. There will also likely be a barrage of questions from analysts wanting to know about how the cuts will affect Microsoft’s business strategy, since Nadella’s e-mail contained language indicating that he wanted to (among other things) flatten the organization’s notoriously thick management layer cake.

Shares of MSFT actually jumped a few points when trading commenced after the layoff announcements on the morning of July 17; revenues are expected to be up from last fiscal year’s fourth quarter, and analyst expectations are that Microsoft’s Q414 performance will come in at about $0.60 per share, down from $0.66 last year.

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Apple has set another quarterly record for iPhone sales, despite the fact that the iPhone 5S is due for replacement relatively soon. Jacqui Cheng

It's been another quiet, by-the-books quarter for Apple, which has yet to release any major updates to any of its products so far in this calendar year. For the third quarter of 2014, the company projected it would maintain profit margins between 37 and 38 percent on revenues between $36 and $38 billion, and it met the revenue estimates with profits of $7.7 billion on revenue of $37.4 billion. Revenue is about six percent higher and profit is 11.6 percent higher than Q3 of 2013, in which the company earned $6.9 billion of profit on $35.3 billion of revenue.

The company's gross margin was considerably higher than the estimate, at 39.4 percent compared to 36.9 percent a year ago, an increase of 6.8 percent.

iPhone and Mac sales were both up over the year-ago quarter—Apple sold 35.2 million iPhones (compared to 31.24 million) and 4.41 million Macs (compared to 3.75 million) this quarter, despite the fact that most of its products are either mid-cycle or nearing the end of their refresh cycles. The delay of Intel's next-generation Broadwell CPUs has kept Apple from making more than minor tweaks to its Mac lineup this year.

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EA

The busy holiday gaming season, set to get its start in earnest during a packed October this year, is looking a little less packed today. That's because EA has announced that two of its biggest titles have slipped from planned October release dates to give the developers more time to finish up their work.

The bigger of the two delays is the spin-off shooter franchise Battlefield: Hardline, which has been pushed from October 21 to an unspecified date in "early 2015." According to a blog post announcing the move, that delay comes after a post-E3 beta for the game seemingly failed to live up to player expectations.

"We’ve been pouring over the data and feedback [from the beta], and have already been putting a lot of it right into the game and sharing it directly with you," DICE VP and Group GM Karl Magnus Troedsson wrote in the blog post. "This feedback also spurred us to start thinking about other possibilities and ways we could push Hardline innovation further and make the game even better. The more we thought about these ideas, the more we knew we had to get them into the game you will all be playing. However, there was only one problem. We would need more time. Time that we didn’t have if we decided to move forward with launching in just a couple of months."

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