One week after a federal court upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s landmark net neutrality policy, emboldened FCC officials are moving to advance an ambitious set of reforms that are already generating static from the broadband industry and its political allies. The decade-long battle over net neutrality, the principle that all content on the internet should be equally accessible to consumers, is not over. Industry...
In its early days as a streaming service, Netflix wasn’t just the biggest and best company on the block – it was the only one. In those heady days, Netflix was able to charge low subscription rates and still provide a catalog that included just about everything. As we’ve seen, that’s been changing. With new competition from companies like Hulu and Amazon, Netflix has...
Internet startup culture has evolved and matured over the past five years, and there’s no better example of this than the RISE conference happening this week in Hong Kong. Whereas Silicon Valley was once the sole hub of internet innovation, startups here hail from Bangalore, Singapore, and other cities. The macho bravado many associate with the culture has even dampened somewhat—34% of attendees are...
Intel Corp. attacked the European Commission for being unfair in an antitrust probe that led to a record 1.06 billion-euro ($1.2 billion) fine. The key issue in the investigation was loyalty rebates to lower retail prices, Daniel Beard, a lawyer for Intel, told the European Union’s Court of Justice in Luxembourg on Tuesday. But the European Commission failed to analyze “all relevant circumstances” to...
After six years of litigation, Sony is now agreeing to pay the price for its 2010 firmware update that removed support for the Linux operating system in the PlayStation 3. Sony and lawyers representing as many as 10 million console owners reached the deal on Friday. Under the terms of the accord, (PDF) which has not been approved by a California federal judge yet,...
Another day, another rumor that Apple is going to ditch the headphone jack on the next iPhone in favor of sending out audio over Lightning. Or another phone beats Apple to the punch by ditching the headphone jack in favor of passing out audio over USB-C. What exciting times for phones! We’re so out of ideas that actively making them shittier and more user-hostile...
Scanning, sharing and creating files just got easier thanks to a handful of new Dropbox features. During a press event in San Francisco, the file-hosting and cloud-service company announced several additions to its software platform, particularly with its mobile app for Apple iOS. The most notable update includes document scanning through the Dropbox app, and the ability to create Microsoft Office documents directly from...
Before Microsoft Windows 10, users could customize all the systems sounds to be anything they wanted. Unfortunately, for reasons unbeknownst to the rest of us, Microsoft decided that certain sounds were off limits for customization in Windows 10. For example, you can’t change sounds in the control panel for logon, logoff, and shutdown. But you don’t have to let Microsoft get away with that,...
Publishers would love internet users to decide that, actually, they don’t need to install ad-blocking software on their browser of choice. That’s the ad industries own fault. But a new report from research firm eMarketer suggested on Tuesday that there’s no such hope on the horizon. U.S. internet users running ad blockers will grow this year to 69.8 million, or 26.3% of web users...
Using two-factor authentication, normally a code from an app or texted to you, is a crucial, but highly irritating, part of logging into all manner of things. From banking, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Yahoo to World of Warcraft, Steam and Xbox Live, two-factor authentication is seen as the way to make our insecure username and password system slightly safer. Most rely on typing in...
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