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Submission + - Marriott fined $600,000 for jamming guest hotspots (slashgear.com) 1

schwit1 writes: Marriott will cough up $600,000 in penalties after being caught blocking mobile hotspots so that guests would have to pay for its own WiFi services, the FCC has confirmed today. The fine comes after staff at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville, Tennessee were found to be jamming individual hotspots and then charging people up to $1,000 per device to get online.

Marriott has been operating the center since 2012, and is believed to have been running its interruption scheme since then. The first complaint to the FCC, however, wasn't until March 2013, when one guest warned the Commission that they suspected their hardware had been jammed.

Comment Re:This is going to end so well for them! (Score 1) 147

And on top of that, they don't cut you off, they just throttle you.

The point is, though, that T-Mobile sells unlimited data to everyone, and what they charge extra for is unlimited 4G LTE data. So if you're being throttled, you're not getting the 4G speed you paid extra for.

Submission + - Xiaomi Smartphones Do Secretly Steal Your Data (ibtimes.co.uk)

DavidGilbert99 writes: Finnish security firm F-Secure has seemingly proven that Xiaomi smartphones do in fact upload user data without their permission/knowledge despite the company strongly denying these allegations as late as 30 July.

Submission + - Google Lowers Search Ranking of Websites That Don't Use Encryption (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: Google is taking Internet security into its own hands, punishing sites that don't use encryption by giving them lower search rankings. The use of https is now one of the signals, like whether a Web page has unique content, that Google uses to determine where a site will appear in search rankings, although it will be a 'lightweight' signal and applies to about 1 percent of search queries now, wrote Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, both Google webmaster trends analysts, in a blog post.

Comment Computer Gaming Gaming (Score 5, Informative) 82

...the world's first magazine dedicated to gaming...

Okay, I'm being pedantic here, but this is one of my pet peeves. "Computer Gaming" is not Gaming. It is a lesser thing--a subset of the greater whole.

This was not the first gaming magazine-- Games magazine came out in 1977 and The Dragon was in 1976. Both of these magazines were dedicated to gaming (with Games being the more general use of that term).

Don't even get me started on calling computer games RPGs.

Submission + - Indian space agency prototypes its first crew capsule (electronicsweekly.com)

sixsigma1978 writes: India is about to take one small step towards human space flight. Last week the country’s space agency unveiled a prototype of its first crew capsule, a 4-metre-high module designed to carry two people into low Earth orbit.

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is planning a test flight for later this year – even though it still awaits government approval and funding for a human space-flight programme. The unpiloted capsule will fly on the maiden launch of a new type of rocket that would otherwise have carried a dummy payload.

Submission + - Tor is building an anonymous instant messenger

An anonymous reader writes: "Forget the $16 billion romance between Facebook and WhatsApp. There's a new messaging tool worth watching.

Tor, the team behind the world's leading online anonymity service, is developing a new anonymous instant messenger client, according to documents produced at the Tor 2014 Winter Developers Meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland."

Submission + - Quebec language police target store owner's Facebook page (cfra.com)

wassomeyob writes: In Canada, the province of Quebec has their Official Language Act of 1974 (aka Bill 22) which makes French their sole official language. It has famously been used to force business owners to modify signage to give French pre-eminance over other languages. Now, the Quebec language police seem to be extending their reach to Facebook.

Eva Cooper owns Delilah in the Parc — a shop in Chelsea, Quebec near the Quebec/Ontario border. She received a letter from the language office telling her to translate everything posted on her store's Facebook page into French.

Submission + - Spy agency intercepts webcam images .. (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

Submission + - Google Impeding Distracted Driver Laws

Rambo Tribble writes: Reuters reports Google has initiated lobbying efforts to stymie attempts by some states to enact distracted driver laws aimed at wearable technologies, such as Google Glass. Given the toll on our highways shown to arise from distracted drivers, is this responsible corporate behavior or "doing evil"?

Comment Re:Not as bad as the reviews made it seem (Score 1) 178

True, but a C64 with a floppy drive and monitor would exceed the 1000$ barrier as well.

Citation, please

It just so happens that 1984 was the year that I bought my C=64, and it cost $150. And also (a little later) in 1984, after getting bored of loading Telengard from cassette, and really wanting to play Zork that I bought my 1541 from Toys R' US, for $150. That's $300. I don't recall the monitor prices (I used a used TV i picked up at a flea market), but I believe they were $300-$400.

Comment Evil App (Score 1) 1

Once upon a time I was buying some SLR lenses from a Craigslist posting. Dude and I exchanged some phone calls about the price and condition and setting up the meeting.

About a week later Facebook started suggesting some random name as a connection. The name was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place it. Then it occurred to the that random suggested connection had the same last name as Dude! Sure enough, it was his son.

The moral of the story is that the Facebook app trolls your call history for connections. That's too evil for my taste, and the app has been removed ever since.

To be fair, the app did ask for permission, but I always said no. But it would keep asking and keep asking and I eventually accidentally touched the wrong response. And while it claimed I could turn that feature off at any time, I never found the preference.

Like I said, I removed the app, and haven't really missed it.

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