Sprint is losing money and laying off about 2,000 employees, the company announced today. Despite new offers designed to undercut the competition, Sprint lost 272,000 postpaid customers in the most recent quarter.

Sprint did gain 35,000 prepaid customers and reported "wholesale net additions of 827,000," largely from businesses that resell Sprint network services under their own names. But with $8.5 billion in quarterly revenue, Sprint posted an operating loss of $192 million. The loss was an improvement over the $358 million loss posted in the same period last year.

At T-Mobile US, the story is both similar and different. T-Mobile continued strong customer growth, announcing last week that it had its "best quarter ever" with 1.4 million new postpaid customers and another 411,000 prepaid additions. But T-Mobile didn't make a profit either, reporting $7.4 billion in revenue and $94 million in net losses. It was the fifth time in six quarters that T-Mobile posted net losses.

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FastLizard4

Yet another man from Central California has been sentenced to jail time for firing a laser at a California Highway Patrol (CHP) aircraft. On Monday, Andrew Zarate, of Fresno, was given one year in prison for firing a green laser at Air 43, a CHP plane.

It may seem like a silly thing, but laser strikes against planes, helicopters, and other aerial vehicles have become an increasing epidemic nationwide. Since the FBI began keeping track in 2005, there have been more than 17,000 laser strikes—one-fifth (3,960) in 2013 alone. During the first three months of 2014, the FBI reported an average of 9.5 incidents daily.

While no serious injuries or deaths have occurred, pilots say that being struck by a laser can be a terrifying experience that may cause temporary blindness.

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A two-stage attack could allow spies to sneak secrets out of the most sensitive buildings, even when the targeted computer system is not connected to any network, researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel stated in an academic paper describing the refinement of an existing attack.

The technique, called AirHopper, assumes that an attacker has already compromised the targeted system and desires to occasionally sneak out sensitive or classified data. Known as exfiltration, such occasional communication is difficult to maintain, because government technologists frequently separate the most sensitive systems from the public Internet for security. Known as an air gap, such a defensive measure makes it much more difficult for attackers to compromise systems or communicate with infected systems.

Yet, by using a program to create a radio signal using a computer’s video card—a technique known for more than a decade—and a smartphone capable of receiving FM signals, an attacker could collect data from air-gapped devices, a group of four researchers wrote in a paper presented last week at the IEEE 9th International Conference on Malicious and Unwanted Software (MALCON).

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An Apple-1 from the Computer History Museum. Seg

On December 11, Christie's Auction House will put up an original Apple-1 Personal Computer, which was sold out of Steve Jobs' Palo Alto, California, garage for $600 back in 1976. Christie's estimates that the computer, sold to Charles Ricketts, is worth between $400,000 and $600,000, “the highest estimate yet for an original Apple-1 offered at auction,” the auction house wrote in a press release.

An Apple-1 specialist was hired by Christie's to see whether the Ricketts Apple-1 had suffered any deterioration. He was able to run “the standard original software program, Microsoft BASIC, and also an original Apple-1 Star Trek game” on the vintage computer. It will be sold along with two cancelled checks from Charles Ricketts made out to Apple Computer. The first is for the amount of $600, and Ricketts later added a note on the check that read, “Purchased July 1976 from Steve Jobs in his parents’ garage in Los Altos.” The second cancelled check is for $193 and contains a note that reads “Software NA Programmed by Steve Jobs August 1976.”

According to Reuters, the Ricketts Apple-1 was purchased by entrepreneur Bruce Waldack in 1999. Waldack lost his fortune and moved out of the US; he died in 2007. In 2004, a Virginia collector named Robert Luther acquired the computer when he bought a storage locker at a police auction. Luther apparently did not have any details on the computer's history.

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Sam Machkovech

In Android's early days, the Nexus line served most notably as a comfortable, reliable tentpole. Really, the word "Nexus" was just about the only calm oasis during the operating system's Wild West period of varied hardware. New smartphones and tablets under Google's official banner usually came with the next big Android OS update, and they offered the kinds of stable hardware qualities (resolution, RAM, etc.) that developers could more easily target.

Specs at a glance: HTC Nexus 9 Screen 2048×1536 8.9" (281 PPI) IPS LCD OS Android 5.0 Lollipop CPU Tegra K1 dual-core 2.3GHz Denver RAM 2GB GPU Nvidia Kepler DX1 Storage 16GB or 32GB (non-upgradeable) Networking 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, DLNA, Bluetooth 4.1, A2DP, NFC, optional LTE Ports Micro-USB, headphone Camera 8MP rear camera, 1.2MP front camera Size 8.98" × 6.05" × 0.31" (228 x 154 x 7.9 mm) Weight 15 oz. (425 g) Battery 6700 mAh (non-removable) Starting price $399

That's not the case in 2014. Across the phone-and-tablet spectrum, the hardware has become more homogenized, and even low-end hardware is good enough for typical mobile tasks. And while Android's next major update, Lollipop, offers some substantial visual changes and user requested features (look for the Ars Lollipop review coming separately), the OS is also about to roll out to other capable flagship devices, as if to say that eager upgraders don't need the newest model to dive in. What does the Nexus branding mean for a new device in 2014, then?

In the case of the brand's tablet half, the name seems to mostly signify power. Up until now, Nexus tablets—most notably, the Nexus 7's two iterations—have made waves with a combination of high quality parts and ridiculously low prices, undercutting a slew of other cheap, ho-hum tablets without skimping on performance. This year's Nexus 9, conversely, set its price point just a hair beneath Apple's similar iPad Air 2 while promoting its own industry-topping specs. This is not a tablet meant to blow the competition away with crazy new features or gimmicks; instead, it's a solid, familiar-looking Nexus device that just happens to have a ton of juice.

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Watching Steve Jobs unveil the original iPhone in 2007, I knew that I had to have one. Seriously, if you’ve never watched Jobs’ Macworld keynote where he took the covers off the iPhone, it’s worth at least viewing the highlights. It’s a masterwork presentation and Jobs is in absolute top form, playing the audience like a piano (in spite of how shaky things were behind the scenes). When it launched in June 2007, the only way to get an iPhone was to sign up for service with AT&T. As a Cingular customer about to become an AT&T customer, this posed no issues for me at all. I happily entered into a long-term relationship with the company.

For the most part, it’s been a happy marriage since. In spite of a rate structure more complicated than the Voynich manuscript and a nasty habit of replacing unlimited data plans with metered plans that are "better values," I was happy with the actual cellular service. Coverage was good. Speeds in Houston were great, especially in my particular corner of Clear Lake, where Verizon’s coverage was essentially nonexistent for many years.

Artist's impression of a typical AT&T cellular bill. Wikimedia Commons

And so, I rode the upgrade treadmill, happily buying new devices every few years, unconcerned about the continual contract renewals because I had no intention of changing providers. Why switch? The carriers are all essentially identical dumb pipes, and most other carriers’ post-paid plans cost essentially the same—I’d done the math.

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Representing a potential privacy snare for some users, Mac OS X Yosemite uploads documents opened in TextEdit, Preview, and Keynote to iCloud servers by default, even if the files are later closed without ever having been saved.

The behavior, as noted in an article from Slate, is documented in a Knowledge Base article from December. But it nonetheless came as a surprise to researcher Jeffrey Paul, who said he was alarmed to recently discover a cache of in-progress files he intended to serve as "temporary Post-It notes" that had been silently uploaded to his iCloud account even though he never intended or wished them to be.

"Apple has taken local files on my computer not stored in iCloud and silently and without my permission uploaded them to their servers," Paul wrote in a recent blog post.

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The Retina iMac on my desk, driving my pair of 27-inch Thunderbolt monitors. Lee Hutchinson

I’m at the end of my time with the Retina iMac now that our Senior Applemeister Andrew Cunningham is back from his nuptials. He’ll be finishing up our coverage of the device, but I wanted to touch on a couple of final points with the big Mac before I send it on its way to the East Coast. We’ve received several variations of the same question submitted to our feedback form: does the Retina iMac operate at 60Hz in its native 5120x2880 resolution? And if so, how is that even possible, given that DisplayPort 1.2 doesn’t have the bandwidth to support that resolution and refresh rate?

To answer the first question: yes, the iMac’s display runs at 60Hz, even when driving all 14.7 million pixels of its native 5k resolution. Apple directly verified this when I asked; the company also told Daring Fireball’s John Gruber the same. Further, it can be confirmed with apps that measure your refresh rate, like SwitchResX:

The output from SwitchResX on the Retina iMac, showing the 60Hz refresh rate.

For additional verification, a quick visit to a Web-based app that demonstrates 60Hz movement shows that the screen is operating at that refresh rate:

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Twitter's mobile ad service is giving advertisers access to a unique tracking number that carriers hide in cell phone network traffic—and users can't turn off. Shawn Campbell/CC BY 2.0

This article originally appeared on ProPublica on October 31, 2014.

Wired and Forbes reported earlier this week that the two largest cell phone carriers in the United States, Verizon and AT&T, are adding the tracking number to their subscribers' Internet activity, even when users opt out. The data can be used by any site—even those with no relationship to the telecoms—to build a dossier about a person's behavior on mobile devices, including which apps they use, what sites they visit, and how long. MoPub, acquired by Twitter in 2013, bills itself as the "world's largest mobile ad exchange." It uses Verizon's tag to track and target cellphone users for ads, according to instructions for software developers posted on its website.

Twitter declined to comment. AT&T said that its actions are part of a test. Verizon says it doesn't sell information about the demographics of people who have opted out.

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Reed Hastings JD Lasica

Reed Hastings, the 54-year-old Netflix chief executive, and Sean Parker, the 34-year-old former co-founder of Napster, have donated a combined $1.6 million in support of California ballot measures before voters head to Tuesday's election.

Parker gave a combined $1 million for Propositions 1 and 2. The former measure authorizes $7.2 billion in bonds for the parched state to pay for water-supply projects. Proposition 2 concerns how the Golden State pays its debts.

For his part, Hastings gave $250,000 to Proposition 1 and another $246,664 to a voter ballot measure that would cut penalties for one in five criminals in the Golden State, campaign finance records show. Parker also gave $100,000 to support Proposition 47, according to data supplied by Maplight, a nonprofit in Berkeley, California that chronicles campaign financing.

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If you think the two-factor authentication offered by Google and other cloud services will keep your account out of the hands of an attacker, think again. One developer found out this weekend the hard way; Google’s account protection scheme can be bypassed by going after something most people would consider an even harder target—the user’s cell phone account.

As Wired’s Mat Honan found out two years ago, customer service representatives are the weakest link in cloud security. And mobile phone carrier customer service representatives are just as susceptible to social engineering attacks, apparently. That’s what Grant Blakeman, an independent software developer and designer, learned when he woke up to find his Google account’s password had been changed and his Instagram account—desirable because of its two-letter name (@gb)—had been hijacked despite the use of two-factor authentication on his Google account.

Blakeman contacted his cell provider after an online conversation with Honan about what happened. He found that someone enabled call-forwarding on his cell account without his knowledge. That call-forwarding setup allowed the attacker to get an authentication code from Google to take over his Gmail address, which was in turn tied to his Instagram account.

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The Nexus Player remote, box, and controller. Ron Amadeo

Just about every major tech company offers some device that will put Netflix and YouTube on a TV screen—a Chromecast, Apple TV, Playstation 4, Xbox One, Wii U, Fire TV, or a Roku 3 will all do the job. For Google, the Chromecast was rather successful in this area because it was dead simple to use and the cheapest out of the bunch at just $35, but the company has decided that something more is needed. Today, Google is back with yet another device that will try to take over your living room: the Nexus Player.

The Asus-built device is a standard set-top box in the same vein as the Apple TV or Fire TV. The "Nexus" in "Nexus Player" indicates that this is the launch device for Android TV, Google's new living room software that replaces the lackluster Google TV OS. All these TV OSes look similar—grids of content thumbnails—but Android TV is based on Android 5.0 and throws an app store and Google's excellent voice search into the mix. Unlike some earlier Google TV devices, the Nexus Player doesn't do anything with live TV or with your DVR—for that you'll have to switch TV inputs.

The Nexus Player has 3 components. For $99, you get the set-top box and remote control, while another $40 gets you the optional Nexus Player Gamepad. The total package is a $105 premium over the $35 Google Chromecast, but the Chromecast is just a streaming stick. While the Nexus Player supports Google Cast (the retconned name for the Chromecast protocol), it also brings a dedicated TV interface along with local apps and games. In other words, it's a smartphone for your television. The addition of a gamepad is interesting. We've been tracking rumors of a "Nexus TV" product that was considered to be Google game console, and this appears to be it.

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A status screen from the now defunct Hearthcrawler software.

Blizzard seems to have scored a decisive win in the never-ending battle against automated "bot" programs that play games like Hearthstone without human intervention. Crawlerbots, maker of the popular Hearthcrawler bot, announced this morning that it is closing up shop in the wake of a recent crackdown on users of the automated play tools.

In what's dubbed as its "last official announcement," Crawlerbots writes that "the recent ban wave in Hearthstone hit a lot of users. After discussing this with Blizzard, it’s clear we have to take off our services/products now. Please note that we’re not going to be commenting further on this."

"Thank you all for being part of our community," the message continues. "We are very sad about this but you also know botting is against the rules and we all knew that the day when our products doesn't [sic] work anymore would come. With tears in our eyes we have to say bye."

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iDevices and Macs on the same network can make and receive phone calls through your iPhone. SMS messages can be relayed, as well. Apple

If you have the latest Mac and the latest iPhone or iPad running Apple's latest OSes, and if you have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned on, the new Continuity features work like magic. What powers that magic? A wide range of network options, including Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE), peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, regular local networking, and iCloud/iMessage. Each aspect of Continuity actually picks and chooses from these connectivity options, sometimes using more than one.

We looked at Continuity while both iOS and OS X were in beta. Now that they are out, we've gone back and tested what the released version can accomplish. I think this is a complete list of what the current version of Continuity can do, as well as a couple of similar features that Apple doesn't cover under the "Continuity" umbrella:

• Let Macs and iPads send and receive SMSes if you have an iPhone
• Let Macs (and iPads?) make and answer phone calls through an iPhone
• AirDrop files between devices
• AirPlay to an Apple TV
• Remotely control a Keynote presentation
• Start work on one device and Handoff to another in Safari, Maps, Contacts, Notes, Reminders, Keynote, Pages, and Numbers, as well as third-party applications in the future
• Set up an Instant Hotspot

Let's take a look at the various network requirements behind each feature.

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In a Q&A with Japanese investors (helpfully translated by a NeoGAF user), Nintendo President Satoru Iwata has given the first public indication that his company has considered removing the region lock that limits playable software on the Wii U and 3DS to hardware sold in the same region.

In responding to a question about the practice, Iwata defended the historical reasons for limiting international interoperability, such as translation, marketing, and licensing issues. But he acknowledged that these are justifications that mainly apply to game makers and sellers while being a drawback for customers.

"As for what should be done going forward, if unlocked for the benefit of the customers, there may also be a benefit for us," Iwata said. "Conversely, unlocking would require various problems to be solved, so while I can't say today whether or not we intend to unlock, we realize that it is one thing that we must consider, looking to the future."

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Ground imagery showing the destruction of SpaceShipTwo. Kenneth Brown/Reuters

The Guardian has a good summary of how things are proceeding with the two-day-old National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into the destruction of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, which occurred at approximately 10:12am PDT on October 31. Some eyewitnesses reported seeing an explosion when the craft broke up, prompting speculation that the accident had something to do with SpaceShipTwo’s hybrid rocket engine—an engine that was making its first flight with its new fuel.

However, at a press conference Sunday afternoon, acting NTSB chairman Christopher Hart said that crash investigators had already located the cause of the accident that injured 43-year old pilot Peter Siebold and took the life of 39-year old co-pilot Michael Alsbury: the spacecraft’s "feathering" mode had been engaged early. This put SpaceShipTwo in a high-drag configuration unsuitable for powered flight, and the craft then broke apart.

The feathering functionality is designed to be used in the later stage of SpaceShipTwo’s flight. It changes the shape of the craft, swinging its wings upward and allowing them to move to the optimum angle to slow the craft down on descent, like a shuttlecock falling to the ground in a game of badminton.

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The Antarctic ice core, still in the core barrel. Mark Twickler

Selecting what kind of record to use when studying Earth’s climate history is a bit like selecting a camera lens from your bag. The choice depends on what you want to see, and your options are limited to what's in the bag. Some climate records are long but low-resolution—a wide-angle lens that shows you the big picture. Other records are short but high-resolution—a telephoto lens that lets you get a good look at that duck over there.

Ice cores have told us a lot about the glacial cycles the Earth has recently been through. Cores of Antarctic ice go back far enough to cover a number of roughly 100,000 year cycles. Greenland ice cores can only stretch back about as far as the previous interglacial warm period, but they show greater detail over short time periods because more snow falls there each year. However, wind-blown dust in Greenland’s ice compromises the tiny samples of atmospheric carbon dioxide locked in bubbles within the ice, making Antarctica the preferred source of information on CO2.

That’s fine for the big picture, but what if we want to learn more about precisely how CO2 changed during the transitions between glacial and interglacial cycles? To study these subtle shifts in Earth’s carbon cycle, you need to zoom in to shorter chunks of time than most Antarctic ice cores can provide.

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'Ugh, cash only—I'll have the special.' Flickr user: jeanclaire

I live one block away from a McDonald’s that, up until this year, I never patronized. My neighborhood technically counts as a part of Seattle, but it’s just far enough away from the denser, hipper parts of town that it has room for big parking lots and giant chain stores—prime real estate for your Home Depots, your malls, your Mickey D’s. I’m not as chain-averse as many in the Northwest, but I still rarely heed the call of the golden arches.

Things started to change when I upgraded my personal smartphone to an LG Nexus 5 and started fiddling with the options menus. Since I never owned an NFC-equipped smartphone before, I took a deep dive into Google Wallet, wondering if the app would work at any nearby tap-and-pay kiosks. Ultimately, I loaded my credit card information into the app months ago then forgot about it.

Fast forward to a random, sunny day in which I went on a much-needed jog, the kind that lasted long enough to work up an appetite. I was close to finishing, and all I had on me were my phone and a pair of headphones—yet I knew I’d be returning to a house sorely lacking in food. Suddenly, there was that McDonald's. I had a hunch that a giant restaurant chain might be the perfect place to find an NFC-compatible payment kiosk, so I made the one-block-away pit stop. A crowd of teens watched as I tapped my phone on the McDonald’s register and paid $1.63 for a chicken sandwich.

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Journalist Mary-Ann Astle on Twitter (@mary_annastle)

Visitors to a number of UK libraries and museums—including institutions as large as the National Library of Scotland—were disappointed this week, met with empty display cases or blank pieces of paper where historical cultural artifacts should be. It's all part of the "Free Our History" protest organized by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), a response to copyright laws that make it difficult to display unpublished works legally.

"At the moment the duration of copyright in certain unpublished works is to the end of 2039, regardless of how old the work is," according to CILIP's change.org petition. "No other country in Europe has such restrictive provisions. European institutions are able to use such important historical material freely and lawfully, but in the UK we cannot." The copyright duration CILIP is referring to applies to unpublished works created before 1989 according to the BBC. CILIP's says an example might be a young girl's note to her soldier father during WWI.

The protest comes days after the UK's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) launched a new copyright licensing scheme aimed at fixing issues around "orphan works," or creative works where the rights holder can't be identified or traced. With that change, the government's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) can grant licenses so orphan works can be "reproduced on websites, in books, and on TV without breaking the law, while protecting the rights of owners so they can be remunerated if they come forward." (CILIP estimates up to 50 percent of archival records in the UK are "orphan works," and the BBC says 91 million such items exist in country.)

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Eight men accused of participating in a same-sex wedding on a Nile riverboat in Egypt were handed a three-year prison term Saturday for committing "debauchery," state run media said.

Ahram Online reported that the Prosecutor-General Hisham Barakat viewed the one-minute video, said to be filmed in April, and concluded it was of two men getting married.

Eight men who were aboard the riverboat were detained in September after the minute-long video went viral on YouTube and other sites, Ahram Online said. They were jailed for broadcasting footage that "violates public decency," CNN said.

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