An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Charter Communications could lose its authorization to operate in New York State because of its failure to meet merger-related broadband deployment commitments, a key government official said. NY Public Service Commission (PSC) Chairman John Rhodes said that "a suite of enforcement actions against [Charter] Spectrum are in development, including additional penalties, injunctive relief, and additional sanctions or revocation of Spectrum's ability to operate in New York State," according to a PSC announcement last week. Charter agreed to expand its network in exchange for state approval of its 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable (TWC). New York officials say that Charter has failed to meet its commitments, even though Charter claims it has. Rhodes accused Charter of "gaslighting" and noted that the PSC has already ordered Charter to stop making misleading claims about its broadband deployment progress. The PSC last month ordered Charter to pay a $2 million fine and complete the promised network construction. If Charter doesn't meet its merger-related obligations, the company will "face the risk of having the merger revoked," the commission said at the time. A revocation of the merger could force Charter to spin off its Time Warner Cable division in New York, but it wouldn't affect Charter's ownership of TWC in other states.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It is almost a decade since Rick Rashid, then head of research at Microsoft, posed that question and ventured his own answer: no more than a few, at least to handle the vast majority of the planet's digital workload. Back then, he thought, it was possible to discern the emergence of a small group of companies that would run those computers. The give-away was that a fifth of all the servers sold in the world were already being purchased by a clutch of US tech groups that included Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

[...] Of course, "how many" is a trick question when it comes to the distributed computing systems being built by today's tech giants. There are many nodes to these octopus-like systems, each with its own silicon brain and information-processing capabilities. But they are connected to a greater whole. One sign of just how far their tentacles are starting to reach came this week with Google's announcement that it has designed an AI chip to run in smartphones and other devices. Google's TPUs -- processors that are optimised to both train deep-learning algorithms and then apply them to make inferences from new data -- are already a key part of its data centre infrastructure. The new low-power version of the TPU can make inferences in "edge" devices, far from the computing core, and will be an important element in making sense of the world's data.

[...] The rise of the global computers raises many questions, but two stand out: will they comprise a truly competitive market, or come to look like the more Balkanised "platform" markets in the consumer world? And what will it mean for so much computing power to be concentrated in a handful of private companies? The good news is that the cloud landscape is shaping up to be a competitive one, at least if competition can be said to truly exist between oligarchs.

U.S. law enforcement agencies are increasingly asking technology companies for access to digital evidence on mobile phones and apps, with about 80 percent of the requests granted, a new study found. From a report: The report released Wednesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found local, state and federal law enforcement made more than 130,000 requests last year for digital evidence from six top technology companies -- Alphabet's Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Verizon' media unit Oath and Apple. If results from telecom and cable providers Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast are added in, the number jumps to more than 660,000. The requests covered everything from the content of communications to location data and names of particular users. "The number of law enforcement requests, at least as directed at the major U.S.-based tech and telecom companies, has significantly increased over time," the Washington-based think tank found. "Yet, the response rates have been remarkably consistent."

Atlassian is selling its corporate chat software to rival Slack Technologies and taking a small stake in the startup, as they face greater competition from Microsoft. From a report: Slack will pay an undisclosed amount over the next three years to acquire Atlassian's HipChat and Stride products, chief executives from both companies said. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield described both the payment and the investment by Atlassian in his company as "nominal" in financial terms but important strategically. He declined to elaborate on the former. The deal gives Slack, valued at north of $5 billion, more customers, most of whom pay a monthly service fee, and allows Atlassian to exit a business that failed to generate as much demand as expected. Combining the two businesses bolsters Slack at a time when Microsoft is pushing a rival product called Teams to some 135 million Office cloud customers. Microsoft introduced a free version of Teams this month in a bid to lure people who don't subscribe to Office 365.

Microsoft said today that hackers compromised a font package installed by a PDF editor app and used it to deploy a cryptocurrency miner on users' computers. From a report: The OS maker discovered the incident after its staff received alerts via the Windows Defender ATP, the commercial version of the Windows Defender antivirus. Microsoft employees say they investigated the alerts and determined that hackers breached the cloud server infrastructure of a software company providing font packages as MSI files. These MSI files were offered to other software companies. One of these downstream companies was using these font packages for its PDF editor app, which would download the MSI files from the original company's cloud servers during the editor's installation routine.

New submitter weedjams shares a report: Scientists at the University of Alberta have demonstrated a new data storage technique that stores zeroes and ones by the presence (or absence) of individual hydrogen atoms. The resulting storage density is an unparalleled 1.2 petabits per square inch -- 1,000 times greater than current hard disk and solid state drives, and 100 times greater than Blu-rays. The researchers, led by PhD student Roshan Achal and physics professor Robert Wolkow, built on a technique previously developed by Walkow that used the tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to remove or replace individual hydrogen atoms resting on a silicon substrate.

The inconceivably small dimensions (a hydrogen atom is only half a nanometer in diameter) allow for an astounding data storage density of 1.1 petabits (138 terabytes) per square inch. By comparison, a Blu-ray disk can "only" store about 12 terabits of data in the same area (one hundredth the data density), while both traditional magnetic hard drives and solid-state drives store somewhere in the region of 1.5 terabits per square inch (a thousandth of the density). This development, says Achal, could allow you to store the entire iTunes library of 45 million songs on the surface of a US quarter-dollar coin.

Achal and his team demoed the technology by creating a 192-bit cell, which they used to store a simple rendition of the Super Mario Bros video game theme song. To show the rewrite capabilities, the scientists also created an 8-bit memory cell which they used to store the letters of the alphabet one by one, represented via their respective ASCII code. Further reading: ScienceDaily, and Nature.

Google is quickly turning its event info from a nice-to-have extra into a major feature. From a report: If you're searching from your phone, you'll now find key details for events without having to jump to websites or apps. If it's a concert, for example, you'll find out where and when it's taking place, directions and other details. You can either jump to a ticket service if you're sold on the idea or save an event for later. And if you're not sure what to look for, you'll get some help there as well. The For You tab includes both personalized event suggestions as well as popular and trending events. If you're big on food festivals, you may see the latest barbecue appear front and center.

While the global DRAM market still remains robust currently, the recent capacity ramps by Micron Technology and the planned kick-off of commercial production by China-based Fujian Jin Hua Integrated Circuit and Innotron Memory (previously known as Hefei ChangXin) could lead to oversupply for the memory in 2019, Taiwanese newspaper DigiTimes reported Thursday, citing industry sources. From the report: Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix would be forced to overhaul their current profit-oriented business strategy as both firms believe that the booming memory market, which has continued for 2-3 years, is likely to be over by the end of 2018, according to a Korea-based Digital Times report. Although Samsung and SK Hynix both stated, at their latest investors conferences, respectively, that they will continue to ramp up capacities for memory chips, the aggressive moves by rival companies have made the two companies hesitate, said the report.

Samsung has seen its share in the DRAM market continue to dive after hitting a high of 50.2% in the third quarter of 2016 as rivals including Micron have jacked up their revenues and profits. Notably, Micron has ramped up its operating margin to as high as 50% so far in 2018 compared to 20% at the end of 2016. Additionally, Samsung saw its share in the market drop to 44.4% in the first quarter of 2018, while Micron managed to ramp up its share to 23.1%, according to IHS Markit. The global DRAM market is expected to reach a peak of US$104 billion in 2018, before contracting by 1.8% and 2.6%, respectively, in 2019 and 2020, according to an industry estimate.

Microsoft has price increases in store for some of its Office and Windows customers as of October 1, 2018. From a report: In a July 25 blog post, Microsoft officials acknowledged the coming increases. Office 2019, the next on-premises version of Office clients and servers which Microsoft is currently testing ahead of its launch later this year, will see increases of 10 percent over current on-premises pricing. This price increase is for commercial (business) customers) and will affect Office client, Enterprise Client Access License (CAL), Core CAL and server products, officials said.

Microsoft also is rejiggering how it refers to Windows 10 Enterprise E3 and related pricing. As of October, Microsoft will be using the E3 name for the per-user version (not the per-device one). Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per User will be rechristened "Windows 10 Enterprise E3." And the current Windows 10 Enterprise E3 per Device will be renamed "Windows 10 Enterprise." According to Microsoft's blog post, the price of Windows 10 Enterprise will be raised to match the price of Windows 10 Enterprise E3. Windows 10 Enterprise E3 costs $84 per user per year.

Astronomers have observed a star speeding close to the massive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way for the first time. From a report: The observations, made using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, tracked a star called S2 as it passed through the extreme gravitational field at the heart of our galaxy. As the star approached its nearest point to the black hole on 19 May, it was accelerated to mind-boggling speeds, causing it to be subject to effects predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity. Astronomers had been tracking the star and preparing to make the observations for the past 16 years -- the time taken for the star to complete a single elliptical orbit of the black hole. "We have been preparing intensely for this event over several years, as we wanted to make the most of this unique opportunity to observe general relativistic effects," said Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany, who led the international team. The findings can be found here.

The next semi-annual update to Windows 10 will use machine learning models to make automatic rebooting for updates a bit less annoying. From a report: Currently, Windows will detect if you're away from your system (mouse and keyboard idle and not playing video or anything comparable) and perform its reboots during those idle moments. However, at the moment, the system doesn't distinguish between briefly stepping away from the machine to grab a cup of coffee and being away for hours because you've left the office or gone to bed. This has provoked some amount of complaining due to the updates interrupting work. With the new predictive system, Windows will try to distinguish between these two cases, and it will avoid the update if the absence is expected to be short.

Google announced this week that it is discontinuing the public method of submitting URLs to its search index. The "addurl" page, which is still listed in this help document, now redirects to the Google Search Console login page. From a report: Google Webmasters said, "We've had to drop the public submission feature." The company did not say why it was necessary to drop it. Maybe it has to do with spam issues or abuse. Google added, "... but we continue to welcome your submissions using the usual tool in Search Console and through sitemaps directly." The last time Google updated the submit content tool was back in 2012, when it moved it to the classic Google Webmaster Tools URL. Google says webmasters should submit content only through Search Console's Fetch as Google tool or via sitemaps.

Representative John Lewis of Georgia and Representative Bobby L. Rush of Illinois are both Democrats, members of the Congressional Black Caucus and civil rights leaders. But facial recognition technology made by Amazon, which is being used by some police departments and other organizations, incorrectly matched the lawmakers with people who had been arrested for a crime, the American Civil Liberties Union reported on Thursday morning. From a report: The errors emerged as part of a larger test in which the civil liberties group used Amazon's facial software to compare the photos of all federal lawmakers against a database of 25,000 publicly available mug shots. In the test, the Amazon technology incorrectly matched 28 members of Congress with people who had been arrested, amounting to a 5 percent error rate among legislators. The test disproportionally misidentified African-American and Latino members of Congress as the people in mug shots.

"This test confirms that facial recognition is flawed, biased and dangerous," said Jacob Snow, a technology and civil liberties lawyer with the A.C.L.U. of Northern California. Nina Lindsey, an Amazon Web Services spokeswoman, said in a statement that the company's customers had used its facial recognition technology for various beneficial purposes, including preventing human trafficking and reuniting missing children with their families. She added that the A.C.L.U. had used the company's face-matching technology, called Amazon Rekognition, differently during its test than the company recommended for law enforcement customers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Mozilla engineers are preparing to remove one of the Firefox browser's oldest features -- its built-in support for RSS and Atom feeds, and inherently, the "Live Bookmarks" feature. All Firefox users are probably well accustomed to this feature, albeit not many have ever used it. This feature powers the browser's ability to detect when users are accessing an RSS/Atom feed and then show a special page that lets them subscribe to the feed with a custom feed reader or the browser's built-in "Live Bookmarks" feature. [...] In a recent discussion on the company's bug tracker, Mozilla engineers said they plan to remove feed support sometime later this year, with the release of Firefox 63 or Firefox 64 --scheduled for October and December, respectively.

MightyMartian shares a report from The Guardian: On April 30, 2019, Emperor Akihito of Japan is expected to abdicate the chrysanthemum throne. The decision was announced in December 2017 so as to ensure an orderly transition to Akihito's son, Naruhito, but the coronation could cause concerns in an unlikely place: the technology sector. The Japanese calendar counts up from the coronation of a new emperor, using not the name of the emperor, but the name of the era they herald. Akihito's coronation in January 1989 marked the beginning of the Heisei era, and the end of the Shwa era that preceded him; and Naruhito's coronation will itself mark another new era. But that brings problems. For one, Akihito has been on the throne for almost the entirety of the information age, meaning that many systems have never had to deal with a switchover in era. For another, the official name of Naruhito's era has yet to be announced, causing concern for diary publishers, calendar printers and international standards bodies. It's why some are calling it "Japan's Y2K problem." "The magnitude of this event on computing systems using the Japanese Calendar may be similar to the Y2K event with the Gregorian Calendar," said Microsoft's Shawn Steele. "For the Y2K event, there was world-wide recognition of the upcoming change, resulting in governments and software vendors beginning to work on solutions for that problem several years before January 1, 2000. Even with that preparation many organizations encountered problems due to the millennial transition. Fortunately, this is a rare event, however it means that most software has not been tested to ensure that it will behave with an additional era."

Unicode's Ken Whistler wrote in a message earlier this month: "The [Unicode Technical Committee] cannot afford to make any mistakes here, nor can it just *guess* and release the code point early. All of this is pointing directly to the necessity of issuing a Unicode 12.1 release sharply on the heels of Unicode 12.0, incorporating the addition of the new Japanese era name character, which all vendors will be under great pressure to immediately support in 2019 software releases."