An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Comcast said its customers' monthly Internet data usage increased 34 percent between Q1 2018 and Q1 2019, rising to a median of 200GB. The rise is being driven by streaming video, and, in particular, 4K video, Comcast said. The median customer is using only about 20 percent of Comcast's 1TB data cap, which is enforced in 27 of Comcast's 39 states. But the rise in median usage almost certainly means that more Comcast customers are exceeding the 1TB cap.

OpenVault research on the U.S. cable industry found [in January] that 4.1 percent of households were using at least 1TB a month, up from 2.1 percent the previous year. That same research found that U.S. cable Internet customers were using an average of 268.7GB per month. Comcast used to reveal the percentage of its customers that exceed its data cap, but the company seems to have stopped making that data public. In late 2013, when the cap was 300GB, Comcast was saying that only 2 percent of its customers used more than that. By late 2015, that was up to 8 percent.

Two months after the SEC asked a federal judge to hold Tesla CEO Elon Musk in contempt for breaking terms of a settlement agreement with a tweet, the two have reportedly reached an agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, which still needs to be approved by a judge, Musk agreed not to tweet or otherwise disseminate information about Tesla's finances, production numbers or certain other information without a lawyer's approval. CNBC reports: The late Friday agreement [...] lays out exactly what kind of information requires formal legal review before being shared. This oversight process is now required for the company's blog, statements made on investor calls, as well as social media posts for material information. [CNBC has the laundry list of items laid out in the filing included in their report.]

This superseding agreement settles a dispute between the SEC and Musk about whether the Tesla chief violated the terms of their original deal in which he had agreed to clear his tweets containing material information about the company before posting. The SEC had asserted that Musk never sought clearance for any tweet. The SEC first charged Musk last year, alleging he made fraudulent statements on Twitter. On Aug. 7, Musk tweeted that he had "funding secured" to take Tesla private at $420 per share. In the first deal, Musk had also agreed to pay a civil penalty of $20 million and forfeit his role as chairman of the board for at least three years. The company also paid a $20 million fine. "Some feared the SEC situation was not going to be resolved favorably so this resolution is a sigh of relief for the bulls. Tesla has enough bad news on its plate so this removes one headache for the Street with the focus now core demand and profitability," said Dan Ives, managing director for equity research at Wedbush Securities.

dryriver writes: A lot of people seem to believe that computers somehow need polygons, NURBS surfaces, voxels or point clouds "to be able to define and render 3D models to the screen at all." This isn't really true. All a computer needs to light, shade, and display a 3D model is to know the answer to the question "is there a surface point at coordinate XYZ or not." Many different mathematical structures or descriptors can be dreamed up that can tell a computer whether there is indeed a 3D model surface point at coordinate XYZ or behind a given screen pixel XY. Polygons/triangles are a very old approach to 3D graphics that was primarily designed not to overstress the very limited CPU and RAM resources of the first computers capable of displaying raster 3D graphics. The brains who invented the technique back in the late 1960s probably figured that by the 1990s at the latest, their method would be replaced by something better and more clever. Yet here we are in 2019 buying pricey Nvidia, AMD, and other GPUs that are primarily polygon/triangle accelerators.

Why is this? Creating good-looking polygon models is still a slow, difficult, iterative and money intensive task in 2019. A good chunk of the $60 you pay for an AAA PC or console game is the sheer amount of time, manpower and effort required to make everything in a 15-hour-long game experience using unwieldy triangles and polygons. So why still use polygons at all? Why not dream up a completely new "there is a surface point here" technique that makes good 3D models easier to create and may render much, much faster than polygons/triangles on modern hardware to boot? Why use a 50-year-old approach to 3D graphics when new, better approaches can be pioneered?

Apple reportedly considered acquiring parts of Intel's smartphone modem chip business as they looked into ways to speed up their own efforts to build modem chips for smartphones. MacRumors reports: Intel and Apple entered into discussions last summer and the talks continued for months, but ended right around the time Apple settled its legal dispute and reached a supply agreement with Qualcomm. Sources at Intel that spoke to The Wall Street Journal said that Intel is exploring "strategic alternatives" for its smartphone modem chip business, and is still interested in a sale to Apple or another company.

In an interview yesterday, Intel CEO Bob Swan confirmed that Intel is considering alternatives "based on what's best" for Intel's IP and employees: "Selling the modem business would allow Intel to unload a costly operation that was losing about $1 billion annually, according to another person familiar with its performance. Any sale would likely include staff, a portfolio of patents and modem designs related to multiple generations of wireless technology, said Patrick Moorhead, principal at Moor Insights & Strategy, a technology firm."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Special agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched the offices of lab-test startup uBiome Inc. on Friday morning (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), according to a person with knowledge of the matter. The FBI is investigating uBiome's billing practices. An FBI spokeswoman said, "I can confirm that special agents from the FBI San Francisco Division are present at 360 Langton Street in San Francisco conducting court-authorized law-enforcement activity. Due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, I cannot provide any additional details at this time." According to public records, uBiome has a headquarters office at that address.

uBiome sells tests for the microbiome, which refers to the group of microorganisms that live in the digestive tract and other parts of the body, under names including Explorer and SmartGut. The company, which calls itself the "leading microbial genomics company," was one of the earliest firms in the microbiome testing field, launching in 2012 with a crowdfunding campaign that raised $350,000. Last year, uBiome said it had raised $83 million from firms including OS Fund and Y Combinator. uBiome describes its SmartGut and SmartJane tests as "an insurance-reimbursed test ordered by a health-care provider." "We are cooperating fully with federal authorities on this matter. We look forward to continuing to serve the needs of healthcare providers and patients," a spokeswoman for uBiome said Friday. In an interview last week that included questions about scrutiny of uBiome's billing practices, uBiome Chief Executive Jessica Richman said that "compliance is our highest value" and that uBiome's billing and other practices are proper.

Zorro shares a report from CBS News: If you're looking for more "Avengers: Endgame" content to fill the void until you get to see the movie, Google has the perfect Easter egg for you. Open Google, search "Thanos," click the Infinity Gauntlet on the right side -- and watch as half of your search results turn to dust. The gauntlet -- complete with the six Infinity Stones -- will snap its fingers when clicked, just as Thanos did in "Avengers: Infinity War." But this time, instead of eliminating half of the universe's population, Thanos will eliminate half your Google Search results, perfectly balancing the internet. Make sure you turn the sound on.

Google is banning app developer DO Global and removing their apps from the Google Play Store after it discovered the company was committing ad fraud. "As of today, 46 apps from DO Global, which is partly owned by internet giant Baidu, are gone from the Play store," reports BuzzFeed. "BuzzFeed News also found that DO Global apps no longer offer ad inventory for purchase via Google's AdMob network, suggesting the ban has also been extended to the internet giant's ad products." From the report: Prior to the app removals, DO Global had roughly 100 apps in the Play store with over 600 million installs. Their removal from the Play store marks one of the biggest bans, if not the biggest, Google has ever instituted against an app developer. DO Global was a subsidiary of Baidu until it was spun out last summer; Baidu retains a 34% stake. BuzzFeed News reported last week that at least six apps from DO included code that made them fraudulently click on ads even when a user was not using the app. The apps were also listed in the Play store under the generic developer names "Pic Tools Group" and "Photo Artist Studio," hosted their privacy policies on Tumblr, and did not disclose they were owned by DO. It's a violation of Play store policy to conceal ownership information, and to commit ad fraud. The ad fraud was detected by Check Point security, which responded to a request from BuzzFeed News to examine apps uncovered during its investigation.

Google removed those six apps, and claimed its internal systems had also flagged most of them for removal. Another 40 DO apps disappeared from the Play store this week, including 20 using the Do Global Games developer name, and 14 listed under Applecheer Studio. The apps listed different addresses and contact information in the store, making it difficult for the average user to see they were all owned by the same major developer.

Apple's famous and close-knit industrial design team that works under design chief Jony Ive is undergoing major changes, WSJ reported this week. From the report: Rico Zorkendorfer and Daniele De Iuliis, who together have more than 35 years of experience at Apple, decided to leave the company recently [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], people familiar with the departures said. Another member of the team with a decade of experience, Julian Honig, plans to leave in the coming months, people familiar with his plans said. Mr. Zorkendorfer said he was taking a break from his professional life to spend time with his family, adding that he felt privileged to work on Apple's design team. Mr. De Iuliis didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. Mr. Honig declined to comment.

The departures of members of the core design team that revived Apple in the 2000s and did the work behind the iPhone, iPad and watch come amid a pause in new products, as the company emphasizes new subscription services this year instead of new gadgets amid slowing iPhone sales. It also follows chief designer Jony Ive's resumption a little over a year ago of day-to-day oversight for the industrial design group.

The roughly two-dozen person team known internally as ID is responsible for establishing the look and feel of all of Apple's products, including the iPhone, one of the most successful products of all time. The tech giant has replenished its design ranks in recent years, adding creatives from apparel company Nike, independent studios and design schools. Recent hires will assume more responsibility for product development as veterans leave.

In the not-so-distant future, pending regulatory approvals, self-driving cars will be everywhere. A handful of top companies are working to improve the reliability of their autonomous vehicles as we speak. But what about their design?

What are some changes that you think could be made to the exterior and interior of a self-driving car? If someone is not required to steer the wheel, do they even need to look ahead? One can argue that seats in the car should be rearchitected to face each other. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk suggested this week that in two years, his automaker firm could explore cars "with no steering wheels or pedals." What would you like to see in a self-driving car?

New submitter scullyitsaliens writes: The Reddit clone Voat has reportedly been contacted by a "US agency" about threats being made on the censorship-free website, according to its founder Justin Chastain. In a post on Wednesday, Chastain (who goes by PuttItOut on Voat) told users they need to "chill on the 'threats,'" as the platform had been officially approached by an unnamed agency over some of its content. Chastain said he didn't want to litigate free speech, but that Voat would cooperate with law enforcement and remove "gray area" posts if asked. Voat users took offense to the perceived curtailing of their ability to post racial slurs and endorse violence.

If free nations demand companies store data locally, it legitimizes that practice for authoritarian nations, which can then steal that data for their own nefarious purposes, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. From a report: He laid out the threat in a new 93-minute video of a discussion with Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari released today as part of Zuckerberg's 2019 personal challenge of holding public talks on the future of tech. Zuckerberg has stated that Facebook will refuse to comply with laws and set up local data centers in authoritarian countries where that data could be snatched. Russia and China already have data localization laws, but privacy concerns and regulations proposals could see more nations adopt the restrictions.

Germany now requires telecommunications metadata to be stored locally, and India does something similar for payments data. While in democratic or justly ruled nations, the laws can help protect user privacy and give governments more leverage over tech companies, they pave the way for similar laws in nations where governments might use military might to see the data. That could help them enhance their surveillance capabilities, disrupt activism or hunt down dissidents.

During its Q1 earnings call, Intel provided an update regarding its 10 nm process technology as well as the ramp up of its Ice Lake-U processor for notebooks, which is the company's first 10 nm design that will be mass produced and broadly available. From a report: Qualification for the new processors has already started, so systems based on Ice Lake-U will be available by the holidays, as promised. Furthermore, Intel believes that it will be able to ship more 10 nm parts than it originally anticipated. Intel started production of its Ice Lake-U processors in Q1, but Intel has been building up a stockpile of them first before they are sent to PC makers for qualification. Once the CPUs are qualified -- something that Intel expects to happen in Q2 -- the manufacturer can start sales/shipments of these CPUs, which will likely happen in Q3. Considering the lead-time required to get built systems on to store shelves, Ice Lake-U-based PCs are on track to hit the market in Q4 (something Intel reaffirmed today).

An anonymous reader shares a report: Firefox browser made by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, was born as "Phoenix." It rose from the ashes of Netscape Navigator, slain by Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In 2012 Mozilla created Firefox OS, to rival Apple's iOS and Google's Android mobile operating systems. Unable to compete with the duopoly, Mozilla killed the project. Another phoenix has arisen from it [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. KaiOS, an operating system conjured from the defunct software, powered 30m devices in 2017 and another 50m in 2018. Most were simple flip-phones sold in the West for about $80 apiece, or even simpler ones which Indians and Indonesians can have for as little as $20 or $7, respectively.

Smartphones start at about $100. The company behind the software, also called KaiOS and based in Hong Kong, designed it for smart-ish phones -- with an old-fashioned number pad and long battery life, plus 4G connectivity, popular apps such as Facebook and modern features like contactless payments, but not snazzy touchscreens. Most such devices are found in India. Reliance Jio, a network that has upended the local mobile industry with heavily discounted 4G data plans, sells subsidised, Jio-branded phones that use KaiOS software. Google, which invested $22m in Kaios last year, prioritises getting people in emerging markets online, where it can sell their attention to advertisers, over getting them onto Android smartphones. Smart-ish phones help with this.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Michael Leggett is even more annoyed with Gmail than you are. "It's like Lucky Charms got spewed all over the screen," he says to me, as he scrolls through his inbox. It's true. Folders, contacts, Google apps like Docs and Drive -- and at least half a dozen notifications -- all clutter Gmail at any given moment. And of course, there's that massive Gmail logo that sits in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Just in case you forgot that you just typed "gmail.com" into your browser bar three seconds ago. "Go look at any desktop app and tell me how many have a huge fucking logo in the top left," rants Leggett. "C'mon. It's pure ego, pure bullshit. Drop the logo. Give me a break."

Rather than sit there and stew, Leggett decided to do something about it: He created a free Chrome extension called Simplify, where all the extraneous folders and functions overloading Gmail seem to melt away, leaving you with a calm screen and nothing but your messages. It's understatedly beautiful, and every button just seems like it's in the right place. In fact, it feels a little too good for some random free Chrome extension made by some random developer. Let's just say that Leggett was highly qualified for the job. You see, Leggett was actually the lead designer for Gmail from 2008 to 2012. He also cofounded the since-discontinued Inbox, which attempted to reimagine Gmail for the modern era.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Go to an activist, technologist, or journalist gathering, and you may find a free pile of Google's security keys, dubbed Titan. These are small devices a Gmail user can plug into their computer via USB to make their account much harder to hack. The keys don't just work with Google accounts; Twitter and other large sites now support hardware security tokens too. But if you're an activist inside Iran, Sudan, Syria, Cuba, the region of Crimea, or North Korea, Google probably won't give you a Titan key. Google bars nonprofits and other groups from providing these tools, or promoting the availability of any Google product to activists in those countries, according to two independent sources familiar with Google's approach and a legal document viewed by Motherboard.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: What in the world is going on over at Samsung in the wake of the Galaxy Fold delay? The whole situation keeps refusing to normalize, and instead gets weirder nearly every day. The latest is that iFixit has decided to honor a Samsung request to pull its Galaxy Fold teardown off the internet, even though Samsung apparently didn't ask iFixit to do so directly. This oddity follows AT&T's seemingly arbitrary decision to email a potential ship date for the Galaxy Fold despite the fact that Samsung hasn't officially set a new release date. By requesting that iFixit pull the teardown, Samsung is apparently willing to risk the Streisand effect when it comes to people clamoring to see the innards of its device. Here's what iFixit has to say on the matter: "We were provided our Galaxy Fold unit by a trusted partner. Samsung has requested, through that partner, that iFixit remove its teardown. We are under no obligation to remove our analysis, legal or otherwise. But out of respect for this partner, whom we consider an ally in making devices more repairable, we are choosing to withdraw our story until we can purchase a Galaxy Fold at retail."

hackingbear shares a report: Xiamen University of China, in partnership with a private aerospace company in Beijing, claims to have launched and landed a hypersonic prototype winged rocket that could travel faster than five times the speed of sound. The success of the experiment means that Chinese engineers are one step closer to building a full-fledged rocket that is capable reaching anywhere in the world within two hours and be recycled.

The rocket, named Jia Geng 1, reached a maximum altitude of 26.2 kilometers (16.3 miles) -- about one-third of the way to space -- before returning to the ground during the landmark launch on Tuesday over Gobi Desert, said the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics of Xiamen University. The design enables the rocket to ride on two layers of extremely hot gas known as "shock waves" -- one under its belly and the other in the air-inlet duct for its ramjet engine, unlike other experimental hypersonic vehicles such as Boeing's X-51 Waverider which rides on one layer of "shock wave," according to South China Morning Post citing members of the team. The new design has some intriguing advantages: it can make the transition from supersonic to hypersonic speeds more smoothly, create more lift, and allow the aircraft to travel farther using less fuel.

UCLA professor Yang Yang's lab chock-full of coffee drinkers spent several years searching for a stability-enhancing additive to turn famously unstable perovskite PV cells into a useful product. Then, on a lark, Yang's graduate student Rui Wang suggested they try adding caffeine to the mix. To the team's surprise, caffeine produced longer lasting and more powerful solar cells. IEEE Spectrum reports: The work, completed with collaborators at Hong Kong-based PV firm Solargiga Energy Holdings and two Chinese universities, appears today in energy research journal Joule. Caffeine's calming effect starts during the creation of perovskite crystals. "Without caffeine, the crystallization process will just take 2 seconds, but with caffeine it will take 1 to 2 minutes," says Yang. The more deliberate growth process yields a perovskite material with larger grains of defect-free crystal. They are more stable mechanically and better at moving the charges created from incoming photons.

Caffeine also stabilizes perovskite PV cells during operation because each caffeine molecule can bind to two lead atoms at the boundaries of the crystal grains. This dual molecular lock ties the grains together and, Yang believes, hinders the movement of ions that threaten to reshape the crystal into a weaker pattern. The lab's best caffeine-treated cell captures incoming light with an efficiency of 19.8 percent, up from 17 percent for untreated cells, and retains 86 percent of its output after operating for 1,300 grueling hours at 85C. That's remarkable endurance compared with that of the lab's untreated cells, whose output plummeted by 40 percent after just 175 hours. Still, Yang says they need materials that hold it together through at least one to two years of accelerated testing to provide confidence that they can pump out power for several decades on a rooftop.

The New York State attorney general's office plans to open an investigation into Facebook's unauthorized collection of more than 1.5 million users' email address books, according to The New York Times, citing two people briefed on the matter. From the report: The inquiry concerns a practice unearthed in April in which Facebook harvested the email contact lists of a portion of new users who signed up for the network after 2016, according to the two people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiry had not been officially announced. Those lists were then used to improve Facebook's ad-targeting algorithms and other friend connections across the network.

"Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumers' information while at the same time profiting from mining that data," said Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, in a statement. "It is time Facebook is held accountable for how it handles consumers' personal information." The attorney general's investigation will focus on how the practice came about, and whether or not the email contact collection spread to hundreds of millions more people across the social network, according to the two people. Nearly 2.4 billion people use Facebook each month, with 1.56 billion people visiting the site at least once every day.

dryriver writes: Imagine for a second that a second, smaller internet infrastructure is built parallel to, but separate from, the regular internet. Lets call this the SafeNet. The SafeNet, which does not allow anonymous use, is not intended for general purpose use like watching Youtube videos, downloading a Steam game, or going on Facebook. Rather, it is a safer, more policed mini-internet that you access through a purpose-built terminal device and use for security critical tasks like online banking, stock trading, medical data transfer and sending confidential business emails, text messages or documents or other things that you don't trust the general internet with.

For example, if you are buying a $250,000 home for your family, you would issue the payments and documents side of this via the SafeNet with a SafeNet terminal device, not over the internet, with a generic computing device. SafeNet requires every user to be government photo-ID registered -- you cannot use SafeNet anonymously like the internet. The network knows who you are, where you are, and you can't hide behind VPNs, proxies or other anonymizers on this network. SafeNet also has a police force that can be alerted if you are hacked, tricked or scammed in any way. Would an internet alternative -- a smaller, separate parallel network -- like this reduce Cybercrime? Again, you wouldn't use the SafeNet for everyday crap like ordering pizza, buying movie tickets, or arguing over something on an internet forum. SafeNet would be used in situations where you are concerned that hackers, cybercriminals or other malevolent agents could get hold of your personal data, steal money from you, impersonate you, or snoop into your confidential communications. Other uses would include letting minors communicate with each other in a controlled fashion without exposing them to the big bad internet itself. Basically, in many situations where you deem performing a task over the larger internet as risky or dangerous, you could perform that task over a SafeNet terminal instead. Shouldn't an "alternative internet" like this exist in some form by now?