An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Cox, the third largest U.S. cable company, last week started charging overage fees to customers in four more states. Internet provider CenturyLink, on the other hand, recently ended an experiment with data caps and is giving bill credits to customers in the state of Washington who were charged overage fees during the yearlong trial. Cox, which operates in 18 states with about six million residential and business customers, last week brought overage fees to Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, and Oklahoma. Cox was already enforcing data caps and overage fees in Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, and Ohio. California, Rhode Island, and Virginia technically have monthly caps but no enforcement of overage fees, according to Cox's list of data caps by location. Massachusetts and North Carolina seem to be exempt from the Cox data caps altogether. Similar to Comcast, Cox lets capped customers use 1TB of data a month and charges $10 for each additional block of 50GB. Cox will introduce a pricier "unlimited" plan later this year, Multichannel News reported. If Cox continues to match Comcast's pricing, the unlimited data plan would cost an additional $50 a month above what customers normally pay. A year ago, CenturyLink started a data-cap trial in Yakima, Washington, imposing a 300GB-per-month cap and overage fees of $10 for each additional 50GB. But instead of expanding the overage fees to more cities, CenturyLink ended the "usage-based billing program."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Tesla's Fremont factory was described by a female employee as a "predator zone" of harassment in a meeting attended by dozens of employees, according to a bombshell report in The Guardian. Other women recalled being catcalled by male employees, feeling unsafe around male managers, and being subjected to sexist comments by their superiors, the report states. For months, The Guardian has been tracking the case of AJ Vandermeyden, a former Tesla engineer who sued the electric automaker for "unwanted and pervasive harassment." In her suit, Vandermeyden alleges that she and other female employees were denied promotions, paid less than their male peers, and retaliated against after making their concerns known to human resources. Several months after making her claims publicly, Vandermeyden was fired by Tesla.

An anonymous reader shares a report: At the beginning of June I started to notice that XHamster, the third most popular adult website after Pornhub and XVideos, had one of the most viewed Wikipedia pages. On May 29, XHamster's Wikipedia page went from receiving around 100,000 views to 200,000. By June 1, it was getting more than 300,000 views a day for no apparent reason. There haven't been any viral stories about XHamster lately. There are no controversies about the page itself that would have prompted sustained attention or an edit war. [...] Pageviews on XHamster's Wikipedia page, however, has been bonkers throughout the month of June for no obvious reason. That's according to a pageview analysis tool from Wikimedia Labs, and confirmed by a Wikipedia spokesperson. I reached out to Wikipedia to see if it could shed some light on this puzzle. In an email, a spokesperson verified that the pageviews were accurate but that they didn't know what was causing the surge. Wikipedia's spokesperson pointed out that the edit activity, unlike its pageviews, has remained steady.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is moving ahead with plans to try out deflection techniques on a passing asteroid to prepare for future, threatening space matter. From a report: The space agency has entered the preliminary design phase for its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). This represents the first trial of what's called the "kinetic impactor technique" of asteroid deflection. Put another way, NASA hopes that by hurling a refrigerator-sized spacecraft at one of the space rocks at a speed roughly nine times that of a bullet, it can knock the asteroid off course and save the Earth. The plan is to launch the first DART satellite at a binary asteroid called Didymos ("Twins"); the twin asteroids are scheduled to pass by earth in 2022 and 2024. (Neither pass poses any threat, according to NASA.) By striking one of the two asteroids, scientists will be able to measure the impact of the collision.

The Ukrainian software firm used as part of last week's global cyber attack warned on Wednesday that all computers sharing a network with its infected accounting software had been compromised by hackers. From a report: The attack used a virus, dubbed "NotPetya" by some experts, to take down thousands of computers in dozens of countries, disrupting shipping and businesses. A video released by Ukrainian police showed masked men in combat fatigues and armed with assault rifles raiding the offices of software developer Intellect Service late on Tuesday, after cyber security researchers said they had found a "backdoor" written into some of the updates issued by its M.E. Doc accounting software. M.E. Doc is used by 80 percent of Ukrainian companies and installed on around 1 million computers in the country. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said police had blocked a second cyber attack from servers hosting the software.

Volvo has announced that starting in 2019, all of the new models it produces will be electric or hybrid. From a report: "This announcement marks the end of the solely combustion engine-powered car," said Hakan Samuelsson, Volvo president and chief executive, in a statement. "Volvo Cars has stated that it plans to have sold a total of 1 million electrified cars by 2025. When we said it we meant it. This is how we are going to do it." The move makes Volvo the first traditional automaker to set a date to phase out cars powered only by internal combustion engines, Reuters reports. The company said it will launch five fully electric cars between 2019 and 2021. Three of these will be Volvos, and two will be sold under the company's Polestar "electrified performance brand."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Europe's Parliament called on the Commission, Member States and producers Tuesday to take measures to ensure consumers can enjoy durable, high-quality products that can be repaired and upgraded. At their plenary session in Strasbourg, MEPs said tangible goods and software should be easier to repair and update, and made a plea to tackle built-in obsolescence and make spare parts affordable. 77 per cent of EU consumers would rather repair their goods than buy new ones, according to a 2014 Eurobarometer survey, but they ultimately have to replace or discard them because they are discouraged by the cost of repairs and the level of service provided. "We must reinstate the reparability of all products put on the market," said Parliament's rapporteur Pascal Durand MEP: "We have to make sure that batteries are no longer glued into a product, but are screwed in so that we do not have to throw away a phone when the battery breaks down. We need to make sure that consumers are aware of how long the products last and how they can be repaired."

Chinese Internet tycoon and LeEco founder Jia Yueting's ambition to challenge the likes of Apple and Tesla looks even more in doubt after $182 million of his assets were frozen by a Shanghai court following unpaid loans. From a report: Jia and LeEco came in for stinging criticism from Chinese media Wednesday, which warned that the Internet streaming company and hardware manufacturer was set to fall into further trouble, with the asset freeze as only the beginning. LeEco's development "is too big, too quick and too reckless," Beijing Business Today wrote. "Developing TV [programs and TV sets], mobile phones, [electric] cars and sports programs all consume too much cash at the same time. Not only can the capital not sustain these developments; fractures are inevitable in areas ranging from human resources, technology and management." According to the official Xinhua news agency, the Shanghai High People's Court last week ruled in favor of China Merchants Bank's application to freeze $182 million in assets belonging to Jia, his wife and three LeEco affiliates. Further reading: LeEco Said To Lay Off Over 80 Percent of US Workforce, LeEco's CEO Jia Yueting Says Company Overstretched, Now Running Out of Cash, and China's LeEco Calls Off Its $2 Billion Purchase of TV Maker Vizio.

Three anonymous readers share a similar report: An all-girl team of roboticists will watch their creations compete in a US competition via Skype after being denied visas to enter the country. President Trump recently ordered a ban on travel from six Muslim-majority countries, but Afghanistan was not included on the list. Teams from Iran, Sudan and Syria -- which are on the list -- did manage to enter the country. The six-member team watched their ball-sorting robot compete in Washington DC via a video link from their hometown of Herat, in western Afghanistan. "We still don't know the reason why we were not granted visas, because other countries participating in the competition have been given visas," Fatemah Qaderyan, 14, told Reuters.

As more and more companies get into the smart speaker game, a new report shows just how much ground they have to make up to catch Amazon's digital assistant, Alexa. From a report: Amazon's Alexa voice platform has now passed 15,000 skills -- the voice-powered apps that run on devices like the Echo speaker, Echo Dot, newer Echo Show and others. The figure is up from the 10,000 skills Amazon officially announced back in February, which had then represented a 3x increase from September. The new 15,000 figure was first reported via third-party analysis from Voicebot, and Amazon has since confirmed the figure. According to Voicebot, which only analyzed skills in the U.S., the milestone was reached for the first time on June 30, 2017. During the month of June, new skill introductions increased by 23 percent, up from the less than 10 percent growth that was seen in each of the prior three months.

FriendlyARM, the maker of compact NanoPi developer boards, has released the NanoPi Neo Plus2 for $25. From a report: This board is an update to the recently released NanoPi Neo 2, a $15 cookie-sized developer board measuring 40mm x 40mm (1.6in) with a 64-bit Allwinner H5 processor, 512MB RAM, and one USB port. The NanoPi Neo Plus2 is slightly larger at 52mm x 40mm (2in x 1.6in) and has two USB ports. It has the same H5 quad-core A53 ARM Cortex processor, but comes with 1GB RAM and 8GB eMMC storage. The NeoPlus2's storage in addition to Gigabit Ethernet puts it ahead of the Raspberry Pi 3 on paper, and at $25 undercuts the better-known board by $10.

An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: There should be a ban on the import of sex robots designed to look like children, the author of a new report into the phenomenon has said. Prof Noel Sharkey said that society as a whole needed to consider the impact of all types of sex robots. His Foundation for Responsible Robotics has conducted a consultation on the issue. Only a handful of companies were currently making sex robots, said Prof Sharkey. But, he added, the upcoming robot revolution could change that. The report, Our sexual future with robots, was written to focus attention on an issue barely discussed at the moment, he said. The report acknowledged that finding out how many people actually owned such robots was difficult because the companies that made them did not release the numbers. But, said Prof Sharkey, it was time society woke up to a possible future where humans and robots had sex. "We do need policymakers to look at it and the general public to decide what is acceptable and permissible," he said. "We need to think as a society what we want to do about it. I don't know the answers -- I am just asking the questions."

The American Chemistry Society (ACS) is now suing Sci-Hub, the so-called "Pirate Bay for Scientists," over copyright infringement and counterfeiting, and is asking the courts to grant an injunction against the website in the US. From a report: Following the news that academic publisher Elsevier won a legal judgement of $15m in damages against Sci-Hub for allowing people to illegally download peer-reviewed academic papers for free, the world's largest scientific society ACS has filed its own lawsuit in the state of Virginia against the website. ACS is complaining that in addition to making hundreds of thousands of research papers owned by the society freely available, Sci-Hub has also cloned its website and is infringing its trademarks by operating two almost-identical replicas of the ACS website at pubs.acs.org.sci-hub.cc and acs.org.secure.sci-hub.cc.

A Halifax man is facing the daunting task of going through almost two decades of email messages after his email provider served notice it was deactivating his account in 30 days because of his email address: noreply@eastlink.ca. From a report: "I had it since the late '90s, probably 1998 when I really started getting online," Steve Morshead told CBC News. "I asked for it, it was available and they gave it to me without hesitation." He said he picked the handle "noreply" because he wanted an unusual address -- and back in the '90s, it was. Morshead never expected to lose his email address, which he uses for communicating with everyone from friends to banks to lawyers. He is in the process of selling his home and says this couldn't come at a worse time. "My email address is a personal identifier for banks, eBay, Kijiji, and hundreds of other places I've logged into -- so many I can't count," Morshead said. He said he wouldn't be in this situation if Eastlink had addressed the issue when he applied for the email. "Now, after all these years, 20 years almost, I find it reprehensible they want to pop out of bushes and just give me 30 days to go through 20 years worth of emails and decide what I want to keep," he said. Morshead said he was given 30 days notice on June 7 that he would lose access to his email address and all of his emails.

The U.S. government has sought to intervene in Apple's appeal against an EU order to pay back up to 13 billion euros ($14.8 billion) in Irish taxes, Reuters is reporting. From a report: iPhone maker Apple took its case to the Luxembourg-based General Court, Europe's second-highest, in December after the European Commission issued the record tax demand saying the U.S. company won sweetheart tax deals from the Irish government which amounted to illegal subsidies. The decision was criticized by the Obama administration which said the European Union was helping itself to cash that should have ended up in the United States. The Trump administration, which has tentatively proposed a tax break on $2.6 trillion in corporate profits being held offshore as part of its tax reform, has not said anything in public about the case.