Geek News

When Comcast acquired NBCUniversal back in 2011, the deal came with strings attached: among others, it had to abide by 2010-era net neutrality rules, provide affordable internet to low-income families and avoid discriminating against rivals. Well, all those conditions have lifted... and that's not making some officials happy. FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn and Senator Richard Blumenthal have written an op-ed calling on the government to either extend those conditions or institute new rules relevant to the modern era. The communications giant has discovered ways of using its resources to "harm consumers and competition," the lawmakers argued, and some of those have violated the FCC's terms for the merger. Blumenthal and Clyburn note that the FCC had to crack down on Comcast a mere 17 months after the merger after it didn't offer affordable internet as promised. It has also been busted for discriminating against Bloomberg Television, and just this October fa...

New Jersey has joined Montana and New York in the growing list of states fighting back against the FCC's decision to repeal net neutrality. Governor Phil Murphy has signed an executive order prohibiting ISPs from blocking, throttling or taking payment to prioritize one web content over others if they sell internet service to state agencies. The order (PDF), which is pretty much identical to the ones signed by Montana Governor Steve Bullock and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, doesn't cover ISPs that don't count state agencies among their customers. As Gov. Murphy said, "New Jersey cannot unilaterally regulate net neutrality back into law or cement it as a state regulation" -- the FCC made sure states can't enforce their own broadband laws when it repealed net neutrality. It can, however, "exercise [its] power as a consumer to make [its] preferences known." Although the order can only cover some ISPs, it can also benefit ordinary customers, as ...

Both chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and chairman Christopher Giancarlo of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) will warn Congress tomorrow about how risky cryptocurrencies are for investors and the financial system as a whole. According to prepared testimony published today, they will advocate for reviewing the smattering of rules guiding cryptocurrency exchanges, and potentially replacing them with federal regulation. Ultimately, they want to safeguard everyone without stifling innovation. "A key issue before market regulators is whether our historical approach to the regulation of currency transactions is appropriate for the cryptocurrency markets. Check-cashing and money-transmission services that operate in the U.S. are primarily regulated by states. Many of the internet-based cryptocurrency-trading platforms have registered as payment services and are not subject to direct oversight by the SEC or the CFTC. We would support policy effor...

Now that football is done, it's time for the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics to take center stage. NBC will make all the programming available for live viewing this year , which should be easy since so much of it will occur during prime time viewing hours. Check out the streaming schedule to find out when your favorite events will be on. For gamers, the big release this week is a throwback as Shadow of the Colossus debuts in rebuilt form on the PS4. On streaming, Netflix caught us all by surprise with The Cloverfield Parado x , but this weekend we'll check out the scheduled season finale of Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Access. Look after the break to check out each day's highlights, including trailers and let us know what you think (or what we missed). Blu-ray & Games & Streaming A Bad Moms Christmas Homeland (S6) Only the Brave 10 Cloverfield Lane / Cloverfield The Sandlot (25th Anniversary Edition) LBJ Suburbicon Shadow of the Colossus (PS4) Blackhole...

Google hasn't quite licked its problems getting users to adopt the latest version of Android. Its latest Play Store user share stats show that Nougat has become the most-used Android release at 28.5 percent... just over 17 months after its summer 2016 debut. Not exactly a speedy transition, then. That still gives it the edge over the older-still Marshmallow release, mind you, and indicates that a large chunk of the user base is running a modern take on Android. There's a smaller piece of good news, too: Oreo has climbed above 1 percent after sitting below that milestone since its fall premiere. The long interval between Nougat's launch and taking the lead can likely be pinned on the same factors that have dictated Android upgrade cycles for years . Many Android vendors take months to deliver upgrades (due to both their custom software and carrier testing), and stop providing upgrades roughly 2 years after a device launch -- you might not see more than one or two majo...

Mobile eSports are becoming a big deal. Last year, mobile MOBA Vainglory 's big eSports tournament was backed by Amazon. Supercell put on a Clash Royale $1 million tournament last summer, too. Now China's Tencent Games is getting in on the action with plans for a series of eSport tournaments, beginning with the Arena of Valor World Cup in July of this year. The contest will take place in Los Angeles and offer a prize pool of more than $500,000, according to the press release. Arena of Valor is a 10-player multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) that pits two teams of five against each other across various maps. The title is a big hit for Tencent and just came to the US in mid-January of this year. The gaming company plans to roll out a series of regional and collegiate tournaments across the country, too, the winners of which can participate in the larger competitions. Source: Tencent via Engadget RSS Feed "http://ift.tt/2BYBciO"

There's not much reason to shop for CDs when you download or stream all your music, and big-box stores are reacting to that decline. Billboard sources have learned that Best Buy has told suppliers that it will remove music CDs from its stores as of July 1st. The chain was only making $40 million per year from the plastic discs -- a drop in the bucket for a retailer this size. Vinyl aficionados will still find records on sale for the next 2 years, according to the insiders, although they may have to be sold next to the turntables themselves. Target, meanwhile, appears on the cusp of backing out. It reportedly wants to switch from paying for all music CDs and DVDs it receives (and shipping back whatever it doesn't sell) to only paying for those discs that actually sell. Suppliers would have until April 1st or May 1st to make the switch, depending on the company. And they're not necessarily willing to cooperate -- at least one major music label is "leaning no,"...

Tomorrow, SpaceX will attempt to launch its massive Falcon Heavy rocket for the very first time. If successful, it will be the most powerful rocket in operation and opens up the possibility of future crewed missions to the Moon or Mars. Today, Elon Musk gave a few more details about the launch attempt during a press call ahead of tomorrow's main event. Musk detailed the rocket's mission : After launch, it will coast for six hours, straight to geosynchronous Earth orbit, which is an orbit that follows the Earth's rotation so a satellite stays in the same place. This phase of the mission is specifically related to national security missions, to show that the rocket can deliver a payload directly to GEO. After this, the rocket will begin a trans-Mars injection engine burn. The upper stage of the Falcon Heavy will position itself in an elliptical orbit -- one part will be in Earth orbit, and the other will be in Mars. Musk described it as an "Earth-Mars cycler," ...

German automotive components producer Continental has partnered with NVIDIA to produce a full-scale self-driving car platform. It will use the GPU maker's autonomous vehicle hardware and software setup, DRIVE, to make a unified platform that prospective automakers and others can build their own self-driving cars upon. NVIDIA will provide the Xavier chips , operating system and software from its DRIVE suite, while Continental will contribute its security certification know-how along with its own radar, LiDar and camera products. Both companies intend for their platform to provide clients with level 2 autonomy (smart cruise control like Tesla's Autopilot feature) to level 5 (full self-driving capability without steering implements). Continental is far from NVIDIA's first autonomous driving partner. Despite losing a deal with Tesla, the company announced agreements throughout 2017 with Audi , Toyota , Volvo , Volkswagen and even Chinese tech giant Baidu to collaborate...

SpaceX will attempt to launch its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time tomorrow. It's no small feat and a lot could go wrong, but SpaceX has a released a video showing how the launch will work if everything goes according to plan. The launch window is open from 1:30 to 4:00 PM Eastern and will take place at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. You can see in the video that after it's launched, two of Falcon Heavy's three boosters will return to Earth, landing back at Kennedy Space Center . The third will keep traveling a ways further but will also eventually detach and land on one of SpaceX's drone ships. Falcon Heavy's payload -- Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster carrying a space suit-clad dummy -- will then continue on its path to Mars. That is, if everything goes well. Musk has said that there's plenty of room for error. "There's a real good chance that it does not make it to orbit," Musk said at the ISS R&D conference last July....

When Apple temporarily pulled Telegram from the App Store over "inappropriate content," it left many wondering just what that content was. We now know: 9to5Mac has learned that the company removed the app after discovering that people had been distributing child pornography through the app. Apple both contacted Telegram's team and authorities (including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) to both address the specific violation and to ensure that there were "more controls" in place to prevent a repeat. As a rule, internet services use a range of safeguards to prevent the spread of child porn, such as shared hash lists that prevent a file on one site from being posted elsewhere. It's not certain what solutions Telegram implemented, but the relatively short turnaround (its software was back within hours) suggests it didn't require a fundamental change. The nature of the discovery might provide a clue as to how it was distributed....

Facebook has been gearing up its Watch platform for months, now. Originally launched last August, it already has tons of shows on tap (for US audiences , at least). The company may even spend $1 billion on original video this year in hopes to catch Netflix and Hulu, and it's been running ads in front of Watch videos for a while. Now, according to a report on CNBC , Facebook is talking to media buyers about expanding the Watch service to more individual creators to rival YouTube's similar business model. According to CNBC 's sources, Facebook wants to create a tiered advertising system that would allow creators to upload their content for free, then earn revenue from ads placed into the videos. That way, says CNBC , Facebook can fill its Watch platform with content it won't have to pay for up front. CNBC 's sources say that Facebook pays some creators for rights to their shows in the range of $10,000 to $500,000 per episode, while other shows are uploaded for ...

Starting a new car company is tough. In fact, it's nearly impossible. Then Tesla pulled it off. As we transition from the internal combustion engine to electrification, startups and even a few established players are taking a chance on EVs. Building a three-wheeled autocycle isn't revolutionary , exactly. But making an EV starting at $10,000 with all the usual amenities makes it a car worth watching. Plus, it looks spectacular. I got a chance to drive the $1 million prototype of this Italian-designed car in Malibu last week. The one-off vehicle isn't street legal or ready for actual roads. It didn't have working seat belts and couldn't reach the speeds the company says the final production model will be capable of. But, once I put it in gear and depress the accelerator, it seemed like, with some fine tuning (not to mention passenger restraints), the car would be at home cruising through a residential neighborhood. Behind the wheel, steering and braking worked as...

If you're looking for a way to fine-tune your Spotify experience, you might want to check out Nelson , a web-based playback jukebox of sorts on app-maker website Glitch . You choose as many genres as you like before tweaking some of the Spotify API's various parameters , and Nelson will compile a custom set of songs. You can even have it create a playlist right on Spotify for you. Originally tweeted out by Arielle Vaniderstine , a "developer advocate engineer" at Spotify, Nelson is very much a version one release on Glitch. It's an internal project that feels more like a toy than an exact tool or proper feature. Still, it's a blast to goof around with, and the playlists it creates appear right in your Spotify app, if you choose to do so. I clicked "Ambient," "Disco," "Electronic" and "Happy" and got a playlist that started with Wild Cherry's "Play That Funky Music." It's a happy disco song, for su...

That scrapped proposal for a goverment-run 5G network is triggering a political fallout. A senor official has confirmed to the Washington Post that the author of the memo pushing for the 5G network, Brigadier General Robert Spalding, has left his position as the National Security Council's senior director for strategic planning and returned to the Air Force. He wasn't fired, the insider claimed, and this wasn't prompted by the leak -- rather, the Council decided against renewing his position in part because his push for government 5G had "gone beyond his role." Brig. Gen. Spalding's last day in the White House was January 31st, or 3 days after the memo surfaced at Axios . He wasn't officially punished, according to the tipster, so he's free to take whatever job he's qualified to handle. The general isn't known to be responsible for the leak, but that apparently didn't matter. Reportedly, officials had already been worried that he wa...

Grandiose space images from NASA's Hubble telescope might be the last thing you'd expect see in an early 20th century French opera. However, Marco Brambilla, the artist behind epic video art installations and Kanye West's "moving painting" music video for Power , has done just that. He created the video backdrop for a new production of Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande , currently running at the Opera Ballet Vlaanderen in Antwerp, Belgium. Pelléas et Mélisande , based on the "libretto" play by Maurice Maeterlinck, is Debussy's only opera and regarded as one of the greatest ever. The story depicts Prince Golaud, who discovers the mysterious Melisandé lost in forest, setting up a love triangle with Golaud's half-brother. The set design by Marina Abramović features a giant, crystal-covered convex mirror that merges into the floor and act like an eye with Brambilla's video backdrop as the "iris" at the center. Brambilla u...

The name Ryan Murphy may not ring a bell, but you've undoubtedly heard of the big-name TV shows he created. From Glee to American Horror Story , Nip/Tuck and others, Murphy has a solid track record when it comes to television. Deadline reports Netflix has snapped up the rights to the director/producer/writer's upcoming comedy series created alongside Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. Titled The Politican, the show will be the second from Murphy on Netflix with Ratched (focusing on Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest ) already in the works . According to Deadline , the series landed on Netflix after a bidding war with rival streaming services Hulu and Amazon. While details are still scarce at this early phase, the hour-long comedy will star Tony winner Ben Platt. Deadline says Barbra Streisand and Gwyneth Paltrow are in talks to join the cast, but those deals haven't been finalized yet. The outlet also notes that Netflix has already ordered two seas...

We use lasers for a lot of things , from cutting metal to improving eyesight, but lasers have their limitations. One major holdup is that they can only emit certain types of light. Researchers have gotten around this particular limitation by using what are known as optical parametric oscillators, which allow regular laser light to be converted into other wavelengths of light that may be useful for certain areas of research. One example is studying how molecules behave. However, these gadgets have their limitations too. They typically have weak outputs and they require extreme stability and precision, making them hard to use outside of highly controlled lab environments. But researchers at Stanford may have found a way around this issue and their work could make these systems more efficient and easier to use. Here's how these oscillators work. Laser light is filtered through a crystal, which converts that light into those other wavelengths that researchers need. That light is th...

Mike Schultz was a professional snowmobile racer, and a damn good one at that. But in 2008, his life's course took a turn after a competition accident shattered his left knee and left him clinging to life. When his injuries began causing his kidneys to shut down, doctors decided to amputate the leg just above the knee. "I spent a total of 13 days in the hospital and was able to get back home on Christmas Eve to a whole new world of challenges," he told Engadget. "Later that spring, after learning how to walk on my everyday prosthetic leg, I realized pretty quickly that I needed a plan B to get back into sports and the fun activities that I wanted to do." That plan B turned out to be designing his own prosthetic leg -- one purpose-built to handle the rigors of extreme sports -- and starting a fabrication company, Biodapt, to produce it. Thus, the Moto Knee was created. Unlike the mechanical prosthetic that he relearned to walk on -- or even the powered, compu...