Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Submission + - Facebook blamed for driving up cellphone bills, but it's not alone (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Consumer site MoneySavingExpert.com reported today that it has seen “many complaints” from users who believe a recent increase in data-related charges on their cellphone bills are the result of Facebook's auto-play feature. The default setting for the auto-play feature launches and continues to play videos silently until the user either scrolls past it or clicks on it; if the user does the latter, the video then goes full-screen and activates audio. The silent auto-play occurs regardless of whether users are connected to Wi-Fi, LTE, or 3G.

However, it’s likely that Facebook isn't entirely to blame for this kind of trend, but rather, with the debut of its auto-play feature, threw gas on an already growing fire of video-sharing services. Auto-play for video is a default setting on Instagram’s app, although the company refers to it as “preload." Instagram only introduced video last summer, after the Vine app, a Twitter-backed app that auto-plays and loops six-second videos, started to see significant growth.

In the first half of 2014, Instagram saw a 25% increase in usage, while Vine usage grew by 27%, according to a study released by GlobalWebIndex in May. The mobile app that saw the most growth in usage over that period was Snapchat, which also allows users to send and view videos over 3G and 4G wireless connections; Snapchat usage grew 67% in that period, according to the study.

So while Facebook’s auto-play feature is likely to have a hand in an epidemic of cellphone data overages, it’s just one culprit among many new mobile apps that are embracing video, all of which happen to be popular among teenagers, who aren't likely to know or care about how auto-play video features might affect their parents’ wallets.

Submission + - Verizon pays $7.4 million to settle FCC privacy investigation

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Verizon has agreed to pay $7.4 million because it did not notify customers before using their personal information in marketing campaigns. The FCC discovered that Verizon failed to alert around two million customers of rights that include telling customers how to "opt out from having their personal information used." "In today's increasingly connected world, it is critical that every phone company honor its duty to inform customers of their privacy choices and then to respect those choices," Travis LeBlanc, Acting Chief of the FCC's Enforcement Bureau said.

Comment Re:serious confusion by the author (Score 2) 235

by knorthern knight (#47693857) Attached to: Email Is Not Going Anywhere

> EVERY mobile device and OS that matters comes with an email client,
> do ANY of them come with a Facebook or twitter client out of the box?

Unfortunately, yes. And in some cases, not only do you have to jailbreak the device to delete Fecesbook/Twitter, you have to load a new ROM like CyanogenMod, because they're baked into the firmware by the @$$hole cellphone companies. Do not confuse a pristine Android phone with the crap that you'll get once a cellco has "branded" it.

Comment How can you hire what doesn't exist? (Score 1) 561

by knorthern knight (#47660489) Attached to: Apple's Diversity Numbers: 70% Male, 55% White

What is the available hiring pool? According to to the National Center for Women and Information Technology http://www.ncwit.org/ in a PDF document http://www.ncwit.org/sites/def...

14% of 2010 Computer Science undergraduate degree recipients at major research universities were women. This compares with 37% in 1985. Why blame Apple?

Besides what qualities do women provide that men don't? Intuitive GUIs? Did you know that Melinda French (who later married Bill Gates) pushed "Microsoft Bob" into production, and that Julie Larson-Green pushed through both the MS Office Ribbon and the Windows 8 Metro interface?

Comment Re:Pluto is a Planet (Score 1) 115

by knorthern knight (#47643143) Attached to: Can We Call Pluto and Charon a 'Binary Planet' Yet?

> Pluto is a planet. The definition of a planet is arbitrary, and always will be.

If you can find an astronomy textbook from the 1830's or early 1840's, it'll list 11 planets...
Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Ceres (discovered 1801)
Pallas (discovered 1802)
Juno (discovered 1804)
Vesta (discovered 1807)
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus (discovered 1781)

As time went on, more and more asteroids were discovered. Today, there are a few hundred thousand asteroids. To keep the number of planets at a manageable number, the asteroids wwere given their own class. Similarly, there are now almost 1300 http://www.minorplanetcenter.n... known objects in Pluto's vicinity. If you want to think of the solar system having 1300 planets, be my guest.

Scientists occasionally make mistakes, based on incomplete data. When more info becomes available, they correct those mistakes. E.g. they junked the Aether theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... after the Michelson-Morley experiment.

There was *ALWAYS* major doubt about Pluto's planetary status. This article from 1934 http://blog.modernmechanix.com... is an example.

> So that Pluto ranks as the largest asteroid,
> rather than the smallest planet;

BTW, it's worse than the article suggested; Pluto is actually less than 1/10th the mass of Titan.

> and the dipshits who insist that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes.

So you think the ancient Greeks were dipshits? And the French who introduced the metric system? The real dipshits are the people who arbitrarily change the meanings of words after thousands of years..

Submission + - Comet to make close call with Mars (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: In mid-October, a comet sweeping through our inner solar system for the first time will pass near Mars—so close, in fact, that if it were buzzing Earth at the same distance it would fly by well inside our moon’s orbit. And while material spewing from the icy visitor probably won’t trigger the colossal meteor showers on the Red Planet that some scientists predicted, dust and water vapor may still slam into Mars, briefly heating up its atmosphere and threatening orbiting spacecraft. However it affects the planet, the comet should give scientists their closest view yet of a near-pristine visitor from the outer edges of our solar system.

Comment Re:Expensive? (Score 1) 285

by knorthern knight (#47503643) Attached to: How One School District Handled Rolling Out 20,000 iPads

> Primarily because the school boards aren't in the business of
> writing textbooks or funding the creation of the same.

Classical English literature
===================
you can get Shakespeare's works *FREE* from project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebook...

Astronomy
========
http://nineplanets.org/ (yeah, the website name is an anachronism) *FREE* and since it's a website, you don't need to order and pay for a new edition each time new discoveries are made

Evolution
=======
Tree of Life Project http://tolweb.org/tree/

Dinosaur Specific http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/d... *FREE* and since it's a website, you don't need to order and pay for a new edition each time new discoveries are made

For those fundamentalist schools who don't believe in evolution Project Gutenberg has the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims version

A school district should be able to get a good chunk of its needs free off the web. Most of these sites will easily give permission to download and duplicate. Instead of handing out 16 KG of books to each student, hand out 16-gigabyte USB keys to each student with the necessary e-books and/or mirrored websites.

Submission + - Enraged Verizon FiOS Customer Seemingly Demonstrates Netflix Throttling (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: The ongoing battle between Netflix and ISPs that can't seem to handle the streaming video service's traffic boiled over to an infuriating level for Colin Nederkoon, a startup CEO who resides in New York City. Rather than accept excuses and finger pointing from either side, Nederkoon did a little investigating into why he was receiving such slow Netflix streams on his Verizon FiOS connection, and what he discovered is that there appears to be a clear culprit. Nederkoon pays for Internet service that promises 75Mbps downstream and 35Mbps upstream through his FiOS connection. However, his Netflix video streams were limping along at just 375kbps (0.375mbps), equivalent to 0.5 percent of the speed he's paying for. On a hunch, he decided to connect to a VPN service, which in theory should actually make things slower since it's adding extra hops. Speeds didn't get slower, they got much faster. After connecting to VyprVPN, his Netflix connection suddenly jumped to 3000kbps, the fastest the streaming service allows and around 10 times faster than when connecting directly with Verizon. Verizon may have a different explanation as to why Nederkoon's Netflix streams suddenly sped up, but in the meantime, it would appear that throttling shenanigans are taking place. It seems that by using a VPN, Verizon simply doesn't know which packets to throttle, hence the gross disparity in speed.

Slashdot Top Deals

You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken

Close