Geek News

The FCC said today that it had settled its investigation into two 911 outages experienced by AT&T customers last year. On March 8th, AT&T wireless phone customers using Voice over LTE weren't able to connect to 911, an issue that lasted around five hours and affected 12,600 people. Then again on May 1st of last year, a second outage, lasting just over 45 minutes, prevented 2,600 911 calls from going through. Planned network changes were the source of the problem, inadvertently interfering with AT&T's 911 call routing. The FCC also said that the company "failed to quickly, clearly and fully notify all affected 911 call centers" following the March outage. AT&T will pay a $5.25 million fine and must put systems into place that will reduce the likelihood that such outages occur again. It will also have to develop better processes for not...

Twitch has been accused numerous times of springing changes on users without much warning , and it's now bent on rectifying that by being open about its processes. The livestreaming site has announced that it's publishing a roadmap showing you just what changes are coming to stream discovery. You'll now know what projects are in the pipeline, whether they're in active development or still in the planning stages. It won't surprise you to hear there are a few major changes on deck. To begin with, Twitch will replace the Pulse social component on the homepage with more recommended streams based on your viewing habits (you can see a preview below). It's simultaneously reworking channel pages to help you find videos and the buttons for following and subscribing. In the long term, Twitch is promising more game-specific filters to help streamers c...

Last October, researchers spotted a long, skinny object speeding through our solar system, and they initially pegged it as a comet from another solar system. But as they continued to observe the object, dubbed 'Oumuamua, its properties -- namely a lack of gas and dust surrounding it -- pushed it into the asteroid category , instead. Asteroids are mostly rock, while comets contain ice that becomes visible as it's vaporized into gas and pulls dust off of the comet's surface. However, researchers have kept their telescopes pointed at 'Oumuamua and additional observations have now earned the object a comet label once again. 'Oumuamua entered our solar system from above and swooped past us on October 14th. As it has moved away from Earth, scientists using ground-based observatories and the Hubble Space Telescope have kept track of its trajectory and they...

LinkedIn is introducing two new features that will make the product more functional for its users. First, LinkedIn will now let you connect through QR codes. In the LinkedIn app, tap the QR code icon in the Home tab's search bar, and there you'll see a QR scanner as well as your own code. Scanning others' codes or uploading an image of one from your phone will take you to that user's profile and you can share your own code through messaging apps and email or add them to websites, email signatures, your resume or event materials like brochures, badges and lanyards. Secondly, LinkedIn is incorporating a "See Translation" button on posts within the LinkedIn Feed, the recent activity section on a user's profile and a post detail pages. The translation is powered by Microsoft Text Analytics API, which also provides translations for Bing, Sky...

Verizon is pulling the plug on Go90, its free streaming service that launched in October 2015. Go90 will officially shut down on July 31st, Variety reports. The Go90 app offers live sports, licensed television shows and short-form original programming in an ad-supported model, though it's struggled to find an audience during its time on the market. In 2018, following a concerted effort by Verizon to expand the reach of Go90 content, the service's audience topped out at an average of 17 million unique viewers per month, Variety says. The Go90 app is arguably most useful in providing access to live sports programming, including soccer, NBA and NFL games. Verizon hasn't been shy about its intent to shut the service down -- as recently as February, CEO Tim Armstrong suggested Go90 was on its way out. The company laid off 155 employees working on Go90 in ...

Verizon is shutting down its original video app Go90 on July 31st, according to a report from Variety . The app derived its name from the process of turning a smartphone from the vertical orientation to a horizontal one, presumably to watch longer-form video content like television shows and shorts that Verizon hoped would make its platform appealing to younger audiences. That never quite panned out for Verizon. Go90, which launched back n 2015, suffered from a silly name and anemic viewership rates across the board, and none of its original video programming ever really caught on. In 2016, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam admitted that the product "did get a little bit overhyped." According to Variety , the Go90 team and its operations have... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts https://ift.tt/2KjtPf1 ...

Following a similar snafu in which Alexa sent a recording from one user to another, Swann Security could be in hot water after someone saw footage from a stranger's camera in their own app. The person who received the motion-triggered video was actually a BBC journalist who owns a similar camera. The clips are fairly innocuous on the surface. They show a man and a woman going about their day, while the camera picked up a child's voice. It seems the family placed the camera by a kitchen sink, and it gives only a partial view of the room. The journalist, Louisa Lewis, flagged the issue Saturday, though a Swann representative said the company couldn't resolve the situation until after the weekend. Lewis only stopped seeing the footage after contacting Swann's PR agency Monday. A Swann spokesperson told the BBC that the incident was down to human e...

Researchers at the University of Tokyo's JSK Lab have developed a "dragon drone," made up of several small drones and capable of transforming on the fly, as reported by IEEE . Not only can the drone change into different shapes, like a square or curved line, it can also autonomously decide what shape it needs to change into depending on the space it requires to navigate. The name of the drone is actually an acronym, standing for "Dual-rotor embedded multilink Robot with the Ability of multi-deGree-of-freedom aerial transformatiON," or DRAGON for short. Its design was modeled off of traditional dragon kites, where the tail is made up of a series of smaller, interlinked kites. The small drones are each powered by a pair of ducted fans that... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts https://ift.tt/2tKxkA7 ...

Sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison has died at 84. Ellison, who was an author of novellas and short stories, wrote for shows including Star Trek, Babylon 5, The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. He passed away in his sleep early Thursday. Susan Ellison has asked me to announce the passing of writer Harlan Ellison, in his sleep, earlier today. "For a brief time I was here, and for a brief time, I mattered."—HE, 1934-2018. Arrangements for a celebration of his life are pending. — Christine Valada (@mcvalada) June 28, 2018 Ellison penned a 1967 Star Trek episode called "City on the Edge of Forever," though writers on the show rewrote the script to pull out Ellison's anti-war message. The famously opinionated writer published two drafts of his script in a 1995 book, and sued over revenue from the episode in 2009, eventually reaching a sett...

Millions of mobile devices are now making requests in what's described as "an attack on the economy." via Dark Reading: https://ift.tt/2tDFw5G If New feed item from http://www.darkreading.com/rss/all.xml , then send