No thanks, 4Mbps is fast enough for me. Comcast

AT&T and Verizon have asked the Federal Communications Commission not to change its definition of broadband from 4Mbps to 10Mbps, saying many Internet users get by just fine at the lower speeds.

"Given the pace at which the industry is investing in advanced capabilities, there is no present need to redefine 'advanced' capabilities," AT&T wrote in a filing made public Friday after the FCC’s comment deadline (see FCC proceeding 14-126). "Consumer behavior strongly reinforces the conclusion that a 10Mbps service exceeds what many Americans need today to enable basic, high-quality transmissions," AT&T wrote later in its filing. Verizon made similar arguments.

Individual cable companies did not submit comments to the FCC, but their representative, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), agrees with AT&T and Verizon.

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When the Fire Phone came out, it was criticized for its poor app ecosystem, high price, and not-very-good 3D feature. Amazon usually undercuts the competition on pricing, but the Fire Phone was $200 on contract, the same price as much better smartphones from other companies. Now that the Fire Phone is out in the market and apparently not doing very well, Amazon is fixing the one thing it can fix: the price.

Amazon has announced that the (still) AT&T-exclusive device will now be going for 99 cents on a two-year contract. The off-contract price got a $200 price cut, too, going from $649.99 to $449.99 for the 32GB version. Buying a Fire Phone also gets you 12 months of Amazon Prime.

$449.99 off-contract is a little closer to competitive, but it's still a tough sell compared to the 32GB Nexus 5, which is $399.99. Google's device has a much better (and bigger) screen and the full suite of Google Play apps. On-contract, it has to fight other under-a-dollar devices, like the one cent AT&T Moto X.

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Abby Sletten, 20. Police Handout A 20-year-old North Dakota woman is being charged with negligent homicide after the car she allegedly was driving at 85 mph slammed into another vehicle, killing an 89-year-old Minnesota woman.

Prosecutors say the incident took place on May 27 in daylight on Interstate 29 outside Grand Forks, North Dakota. Police said Sletten was surfing photos on Facebook and texting before she plowed into a SUV, killing its front-seat passenger, Phyllis Gordon, 89.

"Sletten had also sent and received several text messages since she departed from Fargo," the complaint read, according to the Star-Tribune. Witnesses said the vehicle Gordon was traveling in had slowed to make an unauthorized U-turn before the collision. The criminal complaint said that "several people" unsuccessfully tried to revive Gordon at the scene.

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The iPhone 5S (left) compared to what is allegedly the front glass from the next iPhone. Marques Brownlee

After a year of minimalistic updates and the resurrection of old products, Apple is finally ready to make its first big hardware announcements of 2014 tomorrow at the Flint Center for the Performing Arts in Cupertino, CA.

The event is laden with symbolic significance, not least because Apple used the Flint Center to introduce the original Macintosh over 30 years ago (it normally holds events on its campus in Cupertino or in downtown San Francisco). We're all but certain to hear about new iPhones tomorrow, along with a new version of the operating system that powers them.

But while iPhone sales continue to grow and now account for well over half of Apple's revenue, in the eyes of certain analysts and investors it's old news. The last decade-plus of Apple's growth has been fueled not just by maintaining existing product lines but by introducing new ones. A brand-new product type is what those Apple watchers want to see, and by all reports they'll be getting one tomorrow.

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TiVo

This morning, great-grand-daddy DVR manufacturer TiVo announced that the company is aiming big with its next DVR, the TiVo Mega. With a release date currently scheduled for the first quarter of 2015, the Mega will come in a 10-bay, 19" rack-mount enclosure that appears to be 4U tall, judging from the PR images. The Mega's bays will be filled with hard drives in a RAID5 array, yielding 24TB of storage.

The press release doesn’t say what drive types or capacities are used, but some quick RAID math shows that if all 10 bays are populated, the Mega likely uses 3TB drives, which would give it roughly 25TB of usable space before TiVo’s software is loaded.

The Mega does everything TiVo’s flagship Roamio DVR does—it just does a lot more of it. The device has six tuners and can send content to TiVo Mini devices to send content to multiple rooms; it also comes with a lifetime subscription to TiVo’s service.

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Researchers working at the site of a recent ice core (designated NEEM) in northern Greenland. Christian Morel

Any interesting field of science (read: all of them) has its little mysteries—things that don’t quite make sense. They're the currency of a research scientist, since they provide interesting questions. One of these little stumpers is found in Greenland ice cores.

Ice cores, with their annual layering, have provided a revolutionary window into Earth’s climate history. By analyzing two isotopes of oxygen in the water molecules, researchers found a record of changing climate. In warmer times, the heavier 18O atoms become a little more common. In colder times, they are less so. This revealed all kinds of information about the last few glacial cycles, which are controlled by subtle changes in Earth’s orbit and amplified by positive feedbacks like CO2.

There are, however, complications. The oxygen isotope ratio can also shift for reasons other than temperature, like changing snowfall patterns. The complications gave researchers reason to be skeptical of a strange detail at the end of the last ice age.

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Nearly a week after female celebrities’ nude photos were stolen and shared across the Internet, reddit has banned the subreddit that helped to distribute them.

The reddit group /r/TheFappening and related subreddits were banned on Saturday night after reddit CEO Yishan Wong posted a blog titled “Every Man Is Responsible For His Own Soul.” The blog explained why the company is unlikely to make changes to its policies because of one incident.

In an update to the blog post, Wong wrote that the subreddit was banned because it violated rules unrelated to being a center for people to access stolen nude photos of female celebrities. He wrote that he disagrees with the distribution of stolen images, yet believes that reddit is a place for people to distribute media (and in this case, stolen nude photos):

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Mike Mozart

Comcast has begun serving Comcast ads to devices connected to one of its 3.5 million publicly accessible Wi-Fi hotspots across the US. Comcast's decision to inject data into websites raises security concerns and arguably cuts to the core of the ongoing net neutrality debate.

A Comcast spokesman told Ars the program began months ago. One facet of it is designed to alert consumers that they are connected to Comcast's Xfinity service. Other ads remind Web surfers to download Xfinity apps, Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas told Ars in telephone interviews.

The advertisements may appear about every seven minutes or so, he said, and they last for just seconds before trailing away. Douglas said the advertising campaign only applies to Xfinity's publicly available Wi-Fi hot spots that dot the landscape. Comcast customers connected to their own Xfinity Wi-Fi routers when they're at home are not affected, he said.

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The Moto 360 (center) could almost pass for a real watch. Ron Amadeo

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});After what seems like an eternity, the most promising Android Wear hardware has finally hit the market. While the LG G Watch and the Samsung Gear Live were first to market, the Moto 360 has always felt like the flagship device for Android Wear.

While the software seems like it's headed in the right direction, the hardware for smartwatches has felt like a live experiment being carried out in the marketplace. Pebble has aimed for maximum battery life with a black-and-white e-paper screen, and Samsung's hardware machine gun has been in full effect, releasing everything from a wrist-mounted smartphone to a skinny, curved OLED device focused on fitness.

Spend a few minutes with the 360 and you'll quickly realize that the square, plastic designs other manufacturers are pushing are dead-on-arrival. The Moto 360 design is a huge step forward for smartwatches. It's round, it's comfortable to wear, and it looks like a normal watch.

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Peter Hartree

The Bárðarbunga (or Bardarbunga) volcano has erupted, evoking memories of the 2010 Icelandic ash cloud that caused chaos across European and North American air routes. 

What has been happening?

The ice-covered Bárðarbunga volcano has a magma chamber beneath it, and measurements indicate that magma from this chamber has been escaping into a vertical underground crack. In total, the magma has migrated some 40 km northeast of the chamber. We call this process a dyke intrusion. Escape of magma from the chamber has removed support from the chamber roof, which has collapsed to trigger earthquakes in the area.

At the far northeast tip of the dyke intrusion, the magma managed to find a route to the surface on August 29, producing a small eruption at the Holuhraun lava field. After a pause, a larger eruption started in the same place on August 31—that eruption continues at the time of writing. Both of these events occurred along an ancient fissure that had erupted in 1797. So it looks like the magma in the new dyke intrusion met the old and cold 1797 dyke intrusion and followed its path to the surface. Had this not happened, the new dyke intrusion might have kept moving to the northeast.

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In late May, an international law enforcement effort disrupted the Gameover Zeus (GoZ) botnet, a network of compromised computers used for banking fraud.

The operation also hobbled a secondary, but equally important cyber-criminal operation: the Cryptolocker ransomware campaign, which used a program distributed by the GoZ botnet to encrypt victims' sensitive files, holding them hostage until the victim paid a fee, typically hundreds of dollars. The crackdown, and the subsequent discovery by security firms of the digital keys needed to decrypt affected data, effectively eliminated the threat from Cryptolocker.

Yet, ransomware is not dead, two recent analyses have found. Within a week of the takedown of Gameover Zeus and Cryptolocker, a surge of spam with links to a Cryptolocker copycat, known as Cryptowall, resulted in a jump in ransomware infections, states a report released last week by security-services firm Dell Secureworks. Cryptowall first appeared in November 2013, and spread slowly, but the group behind the program were ready to take advantage of the vacuum left by the downfall of its predecessor.

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Early this year, the International Court of Justice handed down a ruling that brought at least a temporary halt to Japan's whaling program. Normally, an international court case isn't science news. In this case, however, the whaling was justified under a clause of the International Convention on the Regulation of Whaling that allowed whales to be killed “for the purposes of scientific research." And, as detailed in a perspective in this week's edition of Science, the court decision came down to whether Japan was actually doing any science.

Australia, which brought the case, argued that science is an international activity, and subject to some properties that hold no matter where it's done:

(i) defined and achievable objectives; (ii) use of appropriate methods, including use of lethal methods only where objectives cannot be answered through alternate methods; and (iii) proper assessment and response through the community of scientists.

Japan, in contrast, argued that if some research resulted from its whaling, the whole effort should be considered "for the purposes of scientific research."

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The FBI easily found the main server of the now-defunct Silk Road online drug-selling site, and didn't need the National Security's help, federal prosecutors said in a Friday court filing.

The underground drug website, which was shuttered last year as part of a federal raid, was only accessible through the anonymizing tool Tor. The government alleges that Ross Ulbricht, as Dread Pirate Roberts, "reaped commissions worth tens of millions of dollars” through his role as the site's leader. Trial is set for later this year.

The authorities said Friday that the FBI figured out the server's IP address through a misconfiguration in the site's login window. They said that a US warrant wasn't required to search the Icelandic server because "warrants are not required for searches by foreign authorities of property overseas."

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So far, the largest biofuels efforts have involved the age-old process of converting sugars in plants into ethanol. If biofuels are ever to make a significant dent in fossil fuel use, however, they're probably going to have to be made from something that can't also be used as food (either by us or our farm animals.) That means working with something other than sugar.

The leading candidate is cellulose, a robust polymer of sugars that give plants the strength to grow several hundred feet tall. Breaking down cellulose into sugars (which can then be converted into ethanol) is not easy to do economically, although a lot of research has gone into finding processes that work. A leading candidate for this is to use the enzymes from bacteria and fungi that normally decompose wood. The US Energy Information Agency has announced that the nation's first commercial-scale plant based on this approach has just opened in Iowa.

"Project Liberty," the result of a joint venture between US-based POET and the Netherlands' Royal DSM, will have the capacity to process over 750 tons of corn stover each day. Stover is the inedible parts of the plant: husks, cobs, the stalk and leaves. Although intended to work with corn (hence the Iowa location), it's possible that the facility could be used for other sources of cellulose, like grasses.

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The Hitachi H1 VeinID finger scanner is the size of a tennis ball. You can see the SIM card slot in the base of the device. Barclays

Barclays has announced the arrival of personal biometric scanners to keep your Internet banking security firmly under your thumb.

Gone are the days of fumbling with desktop card readers, phone authentication, and PIN codes as a finger scanner will be available to wealthy corporate banking clients from 2015, and the rest of us surely soon after.

The device, developed with Hitachi's Finger Vein Authentication Technology (VeinID), will read the subdermal patterns of the client's finger vasculature in order to combat identity fraud. Vein pattern recognition holds several advantages over fingerprint scanning, including reliability and speed, with the authentication taking only two seconds.

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Very tense, huh? Maybe because her roommate is ON FIRE?!

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Because I am a particularly awful person, I started my first playthrough of The Sims 4 by trapping one of its virtual citizens in a four-wall box with no doors. This simple, horrible power has been available in Sims games for over 15 years, and I am confident in claiming that everybody who has played the series has done this at least once, if just to test the weirdness boundaries of EA and Maxis’ dollhouse-management series.

Used to be, doing this resulted in your Sims soiling themselves and swaying awkwardly until keeling over. That’s still the case, only now it comes with the added awfulness of the game outright telling you how your character feels about the predicament. Any Sim you control in The Sims 4 has his or her portrait displayed in a corner of the screen at all times, and those come with giant, white letters, and a color to match, explaining exactly what the simulated person is feeling and why.

Our test case, Ashley, turned “very uncomfortable” within a few hours of game time, owing to a mix of sleeplessness and a fetid stench; 18 hours later, she turned “desolate,” indicating that she’d grown very lonely in her den of sadness. Roughly 24 hours after that, she fell over and vanished, her body and her emotions lost to the sands of time.

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Who needs the FBI party van when you can just order CALEA take out? FBI

Not every Internet provider can handle the demands of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant or law enforcement subpoena for data. For those companies, Zack Whittaker reports on ZDNet, the answer is to turn to a shadowy class of companies known as “trusted third parties” to do the black bag work of complying with the demands of the feds.

Under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), phone companies and Internet providers can charge back the government for their efforts in responding to warrants. AT&T charges the CIA more than $10 million per year for access to its phone call metadata. But smaller ISPs who aren’t frequently hit with warrants can’t afford to keep the infrastructure or manpower on-hand to respond to requests—so they sign up with a “trusted third party” capable of doing the work as an insurance policy against such requests.

Companies such as Neustar, Yaana Technologies, and Subsentio contract with smaller providers and reap the profits from charging federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies for the data. Neustar and Yaana are also essentially private intelligence companies, providing large-scale data capture and analytics (though probably not on the scale of NSA’s Xkeyscore.) Neustar is also in the phone number portability business, and owns a number of the new top level domains approved by ICANN.

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Clive Darra

In a Security and Exchange Commission filing on Friday, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba said it is looking to raise $24.3 billion dollars in its upcoming initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange. Alibaba aims to sell off 368 million shares of its company at $66 per share, according to its SEC filing.

If Alibaba is able to raise $24.3 billion in its IPO, it would make it one of the biggest tech IPOs in history. Similarly large IPOs in the US have included Visa racking up $17.9 billion in 2008 and a previously de-listed General Motors coming back in 2010 to raise $15.8 billion.

A Reuters source said that Alibaba aims to kick off its IPO next week, although the Wall Street Journal reported this morning that the company will likely offer a “friends and family” deal first, selling off pieces of the company to insiders before making the shares more widely available. This practice was common during the first tech boom in the late '90s and early '00s, but it has become less popular in recent years.

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Nvidia has sued Samsung and Qualcomm in a pair of legal actions claiming that the processors used in a range of Samsung products—including the Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy Note Edge, Galaxy S5, Galaxy Note 3, and Galaxy S4 smartphones, and Galaxy Tab S and Galaxy Note Pro tablets—violate seven different GPU patents.

Nvidia has sued Samsung and Qualcomm in the Delaware federal court and is seeking unspecified damages. Simultaneously, the company is asking the International Trade Commission to impose an import ban on Samsung products made in South Korea, Vietnam, and China.

The GPU firm's complaint claims that the Qualcomm Adreno GPUs, found in its range of Snapdragon systems-on-chip, ARM Mali GPUs, and Imagination PowerVR GPUs, both found in Samsung's own Exynos SoCs, all violate Nvidia patents on graphics technology. The patents cover various core GPU technologies, such as multithreaded processing of graphical data, graphics pipelines that include shaders and rasterizers, and programmable GPUs.

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Network neutrality protest at Google headquarters. Steve Rhodes

Common Cause and more than 50 other advocacy groups this week called on Google to end its affiliation with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that has pushed state laws limiting the rights of cities and towns to create community-owned broadband networks. ALEC also opposes network neutrality rules that Google used to be a staunch supporter of and last month urged the FCC to quickly approve Comcast’s purchase of Time Warner Cable without imposing any regulatory conditions on the merger.

In a letter to Google’s top executives, Common Cause et al wrote that “Over the last year, hundreds of thousands of Americans have signed petitions asking Google to end its ALEC membership because of their concerns about the harmful role ALEC has played in our democratic process… The public knows that the ALEC operation—which brings state legislators and corporate lobbyists behind closed doors to discuss proposed legislation and share lavish dinners—threatens our democracy. The public is asking Google to stop participating in this scheme.”

Common Cause also complained about ALEC’s nonprofit status to the IRS in 2012, saying the group “massively underreports” lobbying it does on behalf of corporate members.

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