Mike Mozart

In 20 states, legislators have protected Internet service providers from competition by passing laws that make it difficult or impossible for cities and towns to offer Internet service to residents.

AT&T wants to keep it that way. With the Federal Communications Commission considering whether these state laws should be invalidated, the company says that municipalities should simply never create their own broadband networks unless there’s virtually no chance that private ISPs will ever offer service to their residents.

“GONs [government-owned networks] should not be utilized where the private sector already is providing broadband or can be expected to do so in a reasonable timeframe,” AT&T attorneys wrote in a filing with the FCC on Friday. “Although many GONs have failed, or at least failed to live up to expectations, GONs can nonetheless discourage private sector investment because of understandable concerns by private sector entities of a non-level playing field. And any policy that risks diminishing private sector investment would be short-sighted and unwise.”

Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments

AnandTech

In case you missed it over the long weekend, Anand Shimpi, founder and editor-in-chief of hardware site AnandTech, retired from his position on Saturday evening. His farewell post doesn't mention what his next project will be, but Re/code later reported that he had been hired by Apple, a fact that Apple confirmed without divulging more specifics.

Shimpi (along with former mobile editor Brian Klug, who has also reportedly left for Apple and hasn't been active on AnandTech since January of this year) has been the primary source of information about Apple's mobile SoC architectures for the last couple of years now. Much of what we know about the Apple A6 architecture ("Swift," not to be confused with the programming language of the same name) and the Apple A7 ("Cyclone") comes from AnandTech reporting. What Shimpi and Klug will be doing for Apple isn't clear, but it's a fair bet that it's processor-related.

Shimpi has been running AnandTech for over 17 years, but the site will continue in his absence under new Editor-in-Chief Ryan Smith—the site remains focused on in-depth architectural overviews, benchmarks, and reviews, and Smith seems intent on keeping it that way. Still, as someone who has read AnandTech for many years and even worked there for a while, Anand's presence on the site that bears his name will be missed.

Read on Ars Technica | Comments

A senior Ukrainian diplomat says the West looks weak against a "power drunk" Russia.

Andrew Cunningham

One of the biggest downsides to Android Wear—or (nearly) any smartwatch—is that it requires a tethered smartphone to work. This is fine for day-to-day activities where you have your smartphone anyway, but for activities where you'd rather carry a lighter load, like running, Android Wear doesn't help much.

In an interview with CNET, Android Engineering Director David Singleton and Vice President of Android Engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer talked about the future direction of the platform, including announcing upcoming standalone functionality that doesn't require a smartphone. They revealed that Google will update Android Wear "several" times before the end of the year, with the first update coming this week.

We aren't sure what is coming when, but in the interview, the Googlers mentioned local music storage and playback, as well as A2DP Bluetooth support. In addtion to a pair of Bluetooth headphones, you'd be able to listen to music without a smartphone.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The Missouri police department that killed an unarmed teen last month is now equipped with body cameras so that officers may record their daily patrols.

The Ferguson Police Department was gifted 50 cameras, and officers on the street began wearing them on their uniforms over the Labor Day weekend.

“They are really enjoying them,” Chief Tom Jackson told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “They are trying to get used to using them.”

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Amid weeks of heated rhetoric and misogyny-charged threats and attacks in the gaming world, many members of the gaming industry have publicly signed on to a petition asking for tolerance and acceptance in the larger community.

"We believe that everyone, no matter what gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion or disability has the right to play games, criticize games and make games without getting harassed or threatened," Spaces of Play's Andreas Zecher wrote in an open letter on Medium.

"It is the diversity of our community that allows games to flourish. If you see threats of violence or harm in comments on Steam, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook or reddit, please take a minute to report them on the respective sites," the letter says. "If you see hateful, harassing speech, take a public stand against it and make the gaming community a more enjoyable space to be in."

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A spokesperson for Apple confirmed that the company is investigating whether an alleged vulnerability in the company’s “Find My iPhone” service and other possible vulnerabilities in its iCloud cloud storage service for Apple devices were used in the hacking of the personal photos of a number of celebrities. The FBI is also investigating whether the accounts of the celebrities were hacked.

Some of the photos, which were leaked through the “/b/” discussion forum on 4chan over the weekend, were apparently taken from iPhones—though it remains unclear when the hacking took place, or even if the same attackers are responsible for all of the leaked images.

“We take user privacy very seriously and are actively investigating this report,” said Apple spokeswoman Nat Kerris in a statement sent to the Wall Street Journal.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Myanmar's first ever beauty queen has refused to give back her $100,000 (£60,300) crown after being dethroned.

These aren't our illustrious orbiting sex geckos, but they are the experiment's ground-based control sex geckos, and that's almost as good! imbp.ru

Several weeks back, we learned of the harrowing tale of the zero-g sex geckos: blasted into low Earth orbit aboard the Russian Foton-M4 satellite as part of a biological experiment to study reproduction in microgravity, the sex geckos mission was endangered almost from the beginning when Russian space agency Roscosmos lost positive control over the geckos’ spacecraft. Roscosmos was able to receive telemetry, but it couldn't send commands. Without ground control, the Foton-M4 would slowly decay out of orbit and enter the atmosphere uncontrolled.

Fortunately, Roscosmos was able to reestablish its uplink only a few days later, and the experiments continued. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with pioneers who push forward the boundaries of scientific knowledge, all five of the geckos have died.

Their passing was discovered during recovery operations for the Foton-M4 spacecraft, which successfully de-orbited and landed as planned in southern Russia yesterday afternoon. When the intrepid reptiles’ enclosure was examined, it was found to contain five tiny mummified gecko bodies. Preliminary indications are that the geckos all froze to death.

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

One of ARM’s most tangible business advantages is its offer of both CPUs and GPUs to SoC designers. Anyone with experience in business to business relationships knows just how complex forming and maintaining a mutually beneficial collaboration can be. Setting up contracts, forming rapport, defining goals, and even just understanding documentation and technical content formatting all takes time. Unless there is significant benefit to investing in two different relationships and technologies, it is simpler (read: cheaper) to single source contributing components of a design. There are down sides of single sourcing (see Boeing 787 battery fiasco), but depending on a business’ capacity for risk, the savings are undeniable. Especially when ARM undoubtedly offers bundle pricing promotions.

Hundreds of thousands of fish have been washed up on the shores of Lake Cajititlan in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

The high-end 802.11ac router market has seen two introductions in the recent past. The first was the Netgear Nighthawk X6 which was based on the Broadcom 5G Wi-Fi XStream platform with two discrete 3x3 802.11ac radios. On the other side, we had Asus introduce the first Wave 2 router in the RT-AC87 using the same Broadcom SoC and 2.4 GHz radios as the Nighthawk X6, but choosing the Quantenna Wave 2 solution for the 5 GHz band. In the launch coverage of the RT-AC87, we had mentioned the online leaks of the Netgear Nighthawk X4 router. Today, Netgear is providing us the official details.

Gallery: Netgear R7500 Nighthawk X4

In terms of the configuration of the radios, the Netgear Nighthawk X4 and the Asus RT-AC87 are equivalent. Both of them belong to the AC2350 / AC2400 class, i.e, four 5 GHz (802.11ac) radios (4x 433 Mbps) and three 2.4 GHz (802.11n) radios (3x 200 Mbps) for a net aggregate of 2.333 Gbps. We have already touched upon all the advantages of the Quantenna Wave 2 solution over the current solutions from Broadcom and Qualcomm Atheros. In essence, the 4x4 update (quad-stream Wi-Fi) provides faster Wi-Fi throughput, enables more stable and jitter-free video streaming and provides more robust Wi-Fi connection for a larger number of devices.

There are two internal hardware aspects in which the Nighthawk X4 differs from the Asus RT-AC87:

• Platform SoC (Qualcomm Internet Processor IPQ8064 instead of the Broadcom BCM4709A)
• Interface between the 5 GHz radios and the platform SoC (PCIe instead of RGMII)

Due to the difference in the platform SoC, the external I/O is also different. While the Asus RT-AC87 had a USB 2.0 port and a USB 3.0 port, the Netgear R7500 Nighthawk X4 has two USB 3.0 ports and an eSATA port. The IPQ8064 SoC has two Krait cores running at 1.4 GHz (compared to the two Cortex-A9s running at 1 GHz in the BCM4709A).

While the IPQ8604 does have GMII interfaces, Netgear decided to use the PCIe ports to make sure that they were able to make full use of the radio's capabilities to go beyond 1 Gbps in each direction. The radios also have offloading processors running at 500 MHz to enable the main SoC to devote CPU cycles for other functions (storage, VPN etc.)

Coming back to the R7500, Netgear touts dynamic QoS as one of the main features. The router has a list of devices / apps (which can be updated independent of the firmware) which enables allocation of bandwidth based on the application. The goal is to ensure that latency sensitive apps get the highest priority while also making sure that the lowest priority apps don't get choked off. Netgear also claims to have put in special hooks for video streaming sites to prevent buffering while accessing adaptive bitrate sites (such as Netflix) at the same time as the non-adaptive ones (such as YouTube). Plans are also in-place to support the R7500 on myopenrouter.com.

Netgear plans to carry all three Nighthawk versions in the market for now, as they target different segments. The positioning and key points of the three members are reproduced in the slide below.

The R7500 Nighthawk X4 is priced at $280 which closely tracks the Asus RT-AC87 pricing. It will be an interesting tussle in the market between the two, as Asus will also bring the Broadcom XStream solution demonstrated at Computex to the market soon.

I will be honest, after AMD did not update its FX processor line with the Steamroller architecture, I was not too hopeful for the brand to see anything new in 2014. But since the start of the year the 5 GHz turbo FX-9590 has been rereleased as a consumer part and today AMD is showing it can get four Piledriver modules down to 95W with a few frequency adjustments and cherry picking the dies. This is accompanied with price cuts for the eight-thread FX parts, which AMD is aiming squarely at similarly priced Intel i5 and i3 processors.

Japan is battling its first outbreak of dengue fever in almost 70 years, with at least 22 people confirmed as being infected.

David Cameron may have made himself a hostage to fortune when pledging to lead the greenest government ever in 2010.

A dramatic lava eruption that began early on Sunday near Iceland's Bardarbunga volcano has continued into Monday.

Samira Hussain reports on the day-to-day struggles of people living in Detroit, as the city attempts to climb out of its financial problems.

Children in Uganda working in a pioneering dance group, Ghetto Kids, have been describing how it has changed their lives for the better.

NDTV

A few days ago, there had been word that Google would launch its Android One initiative in India in early September, and now, it looks like invites have gone out to the Indian press. NDTV, one of the biggest news outlets in India, has an invite for an "exciting new announcement from Google," which can only be Android One.

The event is on September 15th at noon IST (Indian Standard Time), or 2:30am ET/11:30pm PT for those of us in the US.

The goal of Android One is to bring "high-quality, affordable" smartphones to the developing world, starting with India and moving on to other locations if the strategy proves successful.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Soon, you won't need to be the Flash for quicker Web browsing. Flickr user: Katie Krueger

The Web is going to get faster in the very near future. And sadly, this is rare enough to be news.

The speed bump won't be because our devices are getting faster, but they are. It won't be because some giant company created something great, though they probably have. The Web will be getting faster very soon because a small group of developers saw a problem and decided to solve it for all of us.

That problem is images. As of August 2014, the size of the average page in the top 1,000 sites on the Web is 1.7MB. Images account for almost 1MB of that 1.7MB.

Read 71 remaining paragraphs | Comments