Spotify Family

Streaming music service Spotify will soon enable its customers to use the service under a family subscription plan, according to a press release Monday. The group subscription would allow up to five users to maintain separate accounts organized under a single bill for a discount.

Existing Spotify subscriptions are priced at $9.99 per month, which gets users an ad-free listening environment and access to the mobile apps. With the new tier, users can group up under a single subscription, with each user after the first one only costing $5 rather than the full $9.99. So two users cost $14.99, three users $19.99, and so on, up to $29.99 per month for five members.

Spotify's closest competitor, Rdio, has long offered a multi-subscription plan, with two users for $17.99, three for $22.99, and then half the base price ($9.99) for the third, fourth, and fifth users grouped under the plan.

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JD Lasica

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is taking Shakespeare's phrase "let's kill all the lawyers" to a different level. On Monday, he sued many of the attorneys who represented a New Yorker named Paul Ceglia, the man who claimed Zuckerberg promised him half of Facebook back when Zuckerberg was an 18-year-old Harvard University student.

"The lawyers representing Ceglia knew or should have known that the lawsuit was a fraud—it was brought by a convicted felon with a history of fraudulent scams, and it was based on an implausible story and obviously forged documents. In fact, Defendants’ own co-counsel discovered the fraud, informed the other lawyers, and withdrew. Despite all this, Defendants vigorously pursued the case in state and federal courts and in the media," Facebook said in a New York Supreme Court suit.

Ceglia faces trial next year on accusations that his lawsuit—in which he claimed half ownership of Facebook—was a fraud. He has pleaded not guilty and faces a maximum 40-year prison term if convicted.

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Two steps toward privacy, one step back.

While privacy advocates lauded Apple for the company’s decision to default to encrypting data on its latest mobile operating system, iOS 8, the technology firm faced criticism on Monday after independent researchers discovered that its latest operating system, Mac OS X Yosemite, is configured to send location and search data whenever a user queries Spotlight.

Spotlight is the company’s search feature for Mac OS X. The capability doesn't just search a user’s computer, though; it also sends information to Apple and Microsoft to return searches from the companies’ services, according to Fix-MacOSX.com.

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Flickr user: Tiz

Is it possible to appreciate the motives of the people on the opposite side of a conflict? In some of the more intractable, compromise-free conflicts of our time—think Republicans vs. Democrats, Israelis vs. Palestinians—there's widespread belief that the opposition has motives that are, put simply, not very nice. There's also a sense that your opponents are generally bad people, which undoubtedly contributes to the conflict.

But according to a new study being released by PNAS, it's possible to get people to think more positively about their opponents. All it takes is a small cash payment to get people to step back and think. And with a more positive understanding of the opposition, people become willing to think that compromise is possible.

While all that sounds fairly simple, its consequences are profound. "Ideological opponents risk the health of their economies and their planet because they are unable to make political compromises," the authors of the new paper write. "Ethnic and religious groups across the world engage in mass acts of violence, rejecting solutions of mutual benefit that involve sharing power, land, or religious sites."

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A screen capture shows the warning of a fake iCloud.com certificate—signed by an official Chinese certificate authority. GreatFire.org

GreatFire.org, a group that monitors censorship by the Chinese government’s national firewall system (often referred to as the “Great Firewall”), reports that China is using the system as part of a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack on users of Apple’s iCloud service within the country. The attacks come as Apple begins the official rollout of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus on the Chinese mainland.

The attack, which uses a fake certificate and Domain Name Service address for the iCloud service, is affecting users nationwide in China. The GreatFire.org team speculates that the attack is an effort to help the government circumvent the improved security features of the new phones by compromising their iCloud credentials and allowing the government to gain access to cloud-stored content such as phone backups.

Chinese iCloud users attempting to log in with Firefox and Chrome browsers would have been alerted to the fraudulent certificate. However, those using Mac OS X’s built-in iCloud login or another browser may not have been aware of the rerouting, and their iCloud credentials would have been immediately compromised. Using two-step verification would prevent the hijacking of compromised accounts.

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Apple rode the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus to a record quarter. Andrew Cunningham

Apple has just released the data for the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2014, and the story is the same as it's been for most of the year: iPhone sales are up, iPad sales are down-to-flat, Mac sales are up a little and continue to beat the growth rate of the wider PC market, and iPods have fallen off a cliff. Apple's fourth quarter runs from the beginning of July to the end of September, so it includes the new iPhone launch but not the new iPads and Macs announced last week.

First, some hard numbers: Apple made a record $42.1 billion in revenue and $8.5 billion in profit, and had a gross margin of 38 percent. The revenue numbers beat Apple's guidance from last quarter, which predicted revenue between $37 and $40 billion and a margin between 37 and 38 percent. Last year, the company posted $37.5 billion in revenue and profit of $7.5 billion with gross margins of 37 percent. For the first quarter of fiscal 2015—usually Apple's largest by far, since it encompasses the holidays and several new product launches—the company is predicting between $63.5 and $66.5 billion of revenue and 37.5 to 38.5 precent margins.

Andrew Cunningham Andrew Cunningham

The iPhone continues to be Apple's biggest product both in terms of unit sales and of revenue. The first weeks of iPhone 6 and 6 Plus availability helped Apple sell 39.27 million iPhones, up from 33.78 million last year, and the iPhone lineup accounts for 56.2 percent of the company's revenue.

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Apple View Liveblog2014-10-20T16:00:00-05:00

It’s that time again: time for Andrew Cunningham and me to press our headphones tight against our ears and type up the rapid-fire financial chatter of Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri as they walk us through Apple’s latest quarterly earnings. Today, Apple will be releasing the results of the last quarter of its 2014 fiscal year, and pre-call expectations are that the call will feature some big numbers.

Analyst expectations are for Apple to hit just a smidgen under $40 billion in revenue, on the back of guidance for between $37 billion and $40 billion. This will be up about six percent from last quarter’s $37.4 billion and should generate an earnings per share of around $1.30 (which is an increase of about 11 percent year over year).

These would be the highest quarterly earnings in the company’s history, and if accurate, they’re due in no small part to huge initial sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Analysts' feelings on iPhone sales appear to run the entire gamut, with some calling the new iPhone’s launch an excellent sign of increasing iOS adoption worldwide and others saying that competition from cheaper Android-based alternatives will cause iPhone adoption in developing markets to falter in the long term. We’ll hear Apple's own take later today.

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A public awareness campaign is being launched to highlight the carrier-bag charge which has come into force in Scotland.

Back when I started to use the Internet in 1988, there was a simple way to get answers to your technical questions. You would go onto "Netnews", also known as Usenet, and you would post your question to one of the forums. There were forums, or "newsgroups", on nearly every possible topic, from programming languages to religions to humor. more>>

Cable bills have a way of starting out expensive and then getting even more expensive as time goes on. This is especially true when cable companies offer promotional rates that last a year or two without telling customers what they'll actually have to pay once the discounted rate expires.

No cable customer is immune from this phenomenon—even outspoken telecom analysts like Bruce Kushnick are in for bill shock. Kushnick, a frequent critic of Internet service providers, signed up for a Time Warner Cable "Triple Pay" package in 2012 and is now paying more than double the advertised rate.

"When I signed up, less than two years ago, it was advertised at $89.99 and today, less than two years later, the actual price is 110 percent more—now $190.77," Kushnick wrote today in the Huffington Post.

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The siblings of Oscar Pistorius,, Carl and Aimee Pistorius, speak of "twisted truths" in a television interview ahead of his sentencing on Tuesday.

Trey Ratcliff

Google will begin rolling out a change to its search algorithm that the media giant says will "visibly affect" rankings of piracy sites globally.

The Mountain View, California company promised to do this in 2012. But at the time, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and others said the changes to its search algorithm had "no demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy." Google said the latest global algorithm changes, to roll out this week, will work.

“In August 2012 we first announced that we would downrank sites for which we received a large number of valid DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] notices,” Google’s senior copyright counsel Katherine Oyama wrote in a Friday blog post. “We’ve now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites."

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A powerful explosion at a chemical plant in the rebel-held city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine has reverberated across the city.

Ferrari

You don't need a degree in marketing to know that using social media right is an important part of building up any kind of brand these days. And the growing value of fan websites and Facebook fan pages seems to be leading to an increase in legal disputes over who controls them.

The latest example involves Italian sports car manufacturer Ferrari. Last week, a Swiss father and son sued Facebook and Ferrari after control of their popular Ferrari fan page was taken away from them. In their lawsuit (PDF), Olivier and Sammy Wasem claim they controlled "by far the most popular Facebook pages for Ferrari enthusiasts," which they created in 2008. The complaint describes Sammy Wasem as an aspiring Formula One driver whose "passion for racing and Ferrari drew many fellow fans together." By 2009, the Wasem's Ferrari page had more than 500,000 fans.

In February of that year, Olivier Wasem got an e-mail from a Ferrari employee stating that "legal issues force us [Ferrari] in taking over the formal administration of" the Ferrari fan page. The same employee promised "to preserve and even enhance your role in the Ferrari Web Presence and communities."

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Scientists believe they have traced the origin of copulation to fish found in a Scottish lake 385 million years ago.

The history of the semiconductor manufacturing business is both a story of great success and great failure. On the one hand semiconductor manufacturing has allowed the creation of devices that have transformed society, and unusual for most technologies it has remarkably improved at a steady rate for over 40 years now, making Moore’s Law a reality. On the other hand the history of the semiconductor business has been one of a constant weed-out process, as every generation of technology has seen the number of players narrow as the cost and complexity of semiconductor manufacturing continues to grow. Compared to the early days only the richest and most powerful firms have survived, and today the price of progression has claimed another player: IBM.

Today IBM has announced a remarkable, though not entirely unexpected deal. The company is announcing that they are transferring the bulk of their semiconductor business over to GlobalFoundries, essentially divesting themselves of the business entirely and getting out of chip fabricating altogether. But in a deal that is all too indicative of just how brutal the semiconductor manufacturing business is, IBM is not selling the business to GlobalFoundries or even giving it away for free; today’s deal will see IBM pay GlobalFoundries to take the business, with IBM handing over $1.5 billion in cash and working capital to GlobalFoundries in order to entice them to take over the business.

A deal of some time in the making, IBM’s divestment of its semiconductor manufacturing business comes as a result of the business’s continued technological and financial troubles. The business has lost money for quite some time now as IBM has struggled to attract business to keep their fabs at capacity, as IBM’s POWER chip manufacturing volume isn’t enough to sustain the business on its own. Compounding matters, IBM has been behind the curve in process technology development, which has seen competitors and partners alike such as TSMC and Samsung take the lead in rolling out new manufacturing nodes and securing the lucrative contracts that come with being the leader.

IBM East Fishkill (Image Courtesy Dutchess County Economic Development Corporation)

By divesting themselves of their semiconductor manufacturing business, IBM is cutting loose a business that is losing them money, but it is also a necessary step to enable the consolidation of manufacturing rather than a dissolution of the business entirely. Though in better shape than IBM’s business, GlobalFoundries has their own struggles with technology and volume, so taking on IBM’s business will allow the two businesses to be consolidated and ideally a larger, stronger semiconductor manufacturer to emerge.

Overall then, the deal sees GlobalFoundries taking on everything related to semiconductor manufacturing from IBM except for IBM’s semiconductor R&D division, which IBM will hold on to. This means GlobalFoundries is acquiring IBM’s existing fabs in Fishkill and Essex Junction, IBM’s engineers and other technical experts outside of their retained R&D division, IBM’s extensive semiconductor patent pool, and their commercial microelectronics (contract manufacturing) business. The importance of IBM’s manufacturing expertise in particular should not be understated, as while IBM hasn’t been a cutting-edge foundry, their expertise will be an important factor in helping GlobalFoundries narrow the gap with its competition and prosper. Meanwhile to cap things off, GlobalFoundries will also be acquiring IBM’s foundry patronage, with IBM signing up to use GlobalFoundries for their 22nm, 14nm, and 10nm chips for the next 10 years.

Finally, this acquisition also calls into question the future of the Common Platform alliance, the manufacturing alliance between IBM, GlobalFoundries, and Samsung. With IBM essentially bowing out of everything other than R&D and GlobalFoundries licensing Samsung’s 14nm process rather than licensing IBM’s or developing their own, Samsung is now the strongest member in a party of 2. How GlobalFoundries and Samsung continue this relationship – and more importantly GlobalFoundries’ role as a developer versus a customer/licensee – remains to be seen.

Wait, what happened at this thing?! Microsoft

SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Executive Vice President for Cloud and Enterprise Scott Guthrie talked all things cloud today, and we were on the scene to hear what they had to say. Below is the liveblog in total for your browsing pleasure, and check back soon for a recap of any important announcements.

View Liveblog

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RGB variants of mechanical keyboards are very popular nowadays, but what about those users that want to stick with a classic membrane keyboard and gamers on a budget? SteelSeries' Apex Gaming keyboard might be what they are looking for, as this membrane-based keyboard comes with a fully programmable layout, numerous macro keys and RGB backlighting. 

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) today called on Comcast to make a long-term pledge that it won't charge content providers for faster access to its subscribers.

Comcast already agreed to follow network neutrality provisions until September 2018 as part of its 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal. While the agreement with the US government doesn't specifically prevent Comcast from signing paid prioritization deals, the company has said it has no plans to do so. Comcast has been touting its net neutrality commitments while making the case that it should be allowed to purchase Time Warner Cable, the second biggest cable company in the US after itself.

Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to Comcast Executive VP David Cohen today, saying he worries about "the risk of paid prioritization agreements through which websites could be charged for priority access over the Internet." Leahy wants "meaningful pledges from our Nation's broadband providers that they share the American public's commitment to an Internet that remains open and equally accessible to all."

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Jade Raymond's former profile photo at Ubisoft, which was deleted on Monday following the announcement of her departure. Ubisoft Toronto

On Monday, Ubisoft Toronto announced that its managing director, Jade Raymond, was parting ways with the game-making company to "pursue future opportunities separately." The co-creator of the Assassin's Creed series and executive producer of its first two games offered a statement within the company's announcement, calling the exit "one of the hardest decisions of my career" while asking fans to "stay tuned for more on what's next for me."

During her ten-year tenure at Ubisoft, complete with production credits on titles like Watch Dogs and Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Raymond rose within the company's leadership ranks. She was tasked in particular with growing the game studio's Toronto division "to 800 employees by 2020," according to her Ubisoft profile (already deleted by Monday morning). She talked openly about efforts to bring Ubisoft series like Assassin's Creed to the big screen.

Long before a recent rash of anonymous backlash against women in the games industry, Raymond attracted negative attention for her efforts as a game maker, in spite of rarely making public comments about her gender affecting her work. (That continued on Monday, with Raymond's Twitter feed mostly talking about her departure.) While she offered no hints about new games or companies, she responded to questions about her games-industry future by saying, "rest assured, I'm a lifer."

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