FCC votes to help poor people buy broadband and protect privacy online

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. (credit: FCC)

The Federal Communications Commission today voted for two broadband-related proposals. One is designed to give Internet users more control over how Internet service providers monitor and monetize their Web usage. The second proposal will update the 31-year-old Lifeline phone subsidy program so that it can also be used to buy Internet service.

Both votes were 3-2, with Democrats approving and Republicans dissenting. The Lifeline vote was particularly contentious, as commissioners had worked on a bipartisan compromise last night and early this morning. The compromise fell apart at the last minute, delaying the meeting’s start by three-and-a-half hours.

The Lifeline proposal that was approved today will let poor people use a $9.25 monthly household subsidy to purchase home Internet or mobile broadband, or bundles including both voice and Internet. The vote set the Lifeline budget at $2.25 billion a year, indexed to inflation, while creating an independent entity to verify subscriber eligibility in order to reduce fraud.

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Azure picks up its own AWS Lambda equivalent

SAN FRANCISCO—Yesterday at its Build developer conference, the topic was Microsoft's first major platform: Windows. Today, it was the turn of the other platform, Azure, with Microsoft talking up its cloud service.

Much of the news today was that services that were previously in preview have now gone live. Azure Service Fabric was announced at last year's event, and Microsoft described it as being its second generation platform-as-a-service offering. Service Fabric was already being used to power services such as Cortana and Skype for Business, and it offers useful features such as automatic scaling and phased deployments of new versions with automatic rollback in case of problems. It's designed to allow developers to handle dozens or hundreds of both stateless and stateful microservices. Service Fabric is now in general availability, making it production ready and widely available.

The company did mention one new service: Azure Functions. This is designed to further abstract away the details of the platform. Users of Functions don't need to provision storage or compute resources or anything like that. They just write a function in C# or JavaScript (using node.js) and plumb that function into events or data sources. The resources for that function are provisioned automatically, and scaling is handled by the system. If the event volume goes up, causing the function to be triggered more often, more resources will be allocated; as volume drops, resources will be cut, possibly to zero. Functions are strictly pay-per-use, meaning that if a function isn't called, it costs nothing.

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PJON, Fancy One Wire Arduino Communications Protocol For Home Automation

PJON, pronounced like the iridescent sky rats found in every city, is a cool one wire protocol designed by [gioblu].

[gioblu] wasn’t impressed with the complications of I2C. He thought one-wire was too proprietary, too complicated, and its Arduino implementations did not impress. What he really wanted was a protocol that could deal with a ton of noise and a weak signal in his home automation project with the smallest amount of wiring possible.

That’s where is his, “Padded Jittering Operative Network,” comes in. It can support up to 255 Arduinos on one bus and its error handling is apparently good enough that you can hold an Arudino in one hand and see the signals transmitted through your body on the other. The fact that a ground and a signal wire is all you need to run a bus supporting 255 devices and they’ll play nice is pretty cool, even if the bandwidth isn’t the most extreme.

Aside from the cool of DIY protocols. We really enjoyed reading the wiki describing it. Some of the proposed uses was running your home automation through your ducting or water pipes (which should be possible if you’re really good at isolating your grounds). Either way, the protocol is neat and looks fun to use. Or check out PJON_ASK if you want to do away with that pesky single wire.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks

Father begs Apple CEO to help unlock his dead 13-year-old son’s iPhone

Enlarge (credit: Megan Geuss)

An Italian father has reportedly written Apple CEO Tim Cook, pleading for help to unlock his dead 13-year-old son’s iPhone 6 so that he can retrieve the photos stored on it.

"I cannot give up. Having lost my [son] Dama, I will fight to have the last two months of photos, thoughts and words which are held hostage in his phone," Leonardo Fabbretti wrote in the March 21 letter, which was quoted Wednesday by Agence France Presse.

"I think what’s happened should make you think about the privacy policy adopted by your company. Although I share your philosophy in general, I think Apple should offer solutions for exceptional cases like mine."

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Judge who ordered man to be shocked must take anger management classes

Robert Nalley.

A Maryland judge who pleaded guilty (PDF) to civil rights violations for ordering a deputy to remotely shock a defendant with a 50,000-volt charge was sentenced Thursday to a year of probation and ordered to attend anger management classes.

The shocking, ordered by then-Charles County Circuit Court Judge Robert Nalley, occurred in July 2014 during jury selection for a trial concerning a man accused of carrying a loaded handgun during a police stop. The judge was asking the defendant if he had questions to submit to prospective jurors, who were not yet in the courtroom. Delvon King, the 25-year-old defendant acting as his own attorney, refused to answer several times. After some verbal back and forth between the two, Nalley told the court deputy "Do it. Use it," according to court documents (PDF).

After Nalley's sentencing, Maryland US Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein said that "disruptive defendants may be excluded from the courtroom and prosecuted for obstruction of justice and contempt of court, but force may not be used in the absence of danger."

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Intel’s new Broadwell Xeon server CPUs offer up to 22 cores per socket

Intel's mainstream consumer processors are mostly of the dual- and quad-core varieties, but the server CPUs go much higher than that. Case in point: the most expensive member of the new Broadwell-based Xeon E5-2600 v4 family has a whopping 22 cores running at 2.2GHz—and all of that fits in just one processor socket.

The new 22- and 20-core CPUs offer more processing power for heavily parallelized workloads than the older Haswell-based CPUs, which topped out at a mere 18 cores per socket in the same 145W power envelope (at least, if you can afford to pay $4,115 or $3,226 for them, respectively).

The full lineup, available below, includes 27 CPUs for a variety of different use cases. There are 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, and 18-core versions you can buy for dual-socket servers based on your needs and your budget. There are "frequency optimized" versions with lower core counts but higher clock speeds if you have got a lot of single-threaded workloads that won't benefit from a ton of cores. And there are some low-power versions available if power consumption is more important than raw performance.

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Apple releases iOS 9.3.1 with fix for link bug

(credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple today released iOS 9.3.1 to fix a bug that could cause tapping links to stop working in Safari and other apps. The problems were caused by certain apps with poor implementations of the "Universal Links" feature introduced in iOS 9, as we detailed earlier this week.

If you're using an older iDevice and hadn't already updated to iOS 9.3, version 9.3.1 should also include a fix for an issue where certain devices couldn't be activated and used if the user had forgotten his or her iCloud password. Apple released a new build of iOS 9.3 earlier this week to fix the problem, though it didn't bump up the version number of the operating system.

The update contains no other major changes. It's available for all devices that support iOS 9, including the iPhone 4S and newer; iPad 2 and newer; all iPad Minis and iPad Pros; and the fifth- and sixth-generation iPod Touches.

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MRRF: Launching an Adorable Printer For Fun

DiResta: Cube Twist Drawer Pull

In this video you can see me make what is called a “cube twist” drawer pull.  It is a simple technique often demonstrated by blacksmiths to make handles and tools. Lately I have been watching my youtube Blacksmith teacher Rory May in a recent video he goes into detail on the […]

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Hobby Rocketeers Build Amazing Upsized Estes Gyroc

A group of Florida hobbyists have created a monstrous version of the classic Estes Gyroc. But will it fly?

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The post Hobby Rocketeers Build Amazing Upsized Estes Gyroc appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Linux kernel lawsuit—SCO v IBM—is alive, 13 years and counting

(credit: michael)

The SCO Group's attempt to extract billions from IBM for code allegedly written into the Linux kernel's codebase is still meandering through the legal system—13 years after the now-bankrupt company filed the IP infringement suit against Big Blue.

A Utah federal judge dismissed (PDF) the latest iteration of the case this month, and SCO on Wednesday said (PDF) it would take the lawsuit to the 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The suit has had many twists and turns, but we'll summarize it briefly.

At its core, SCO Group, then named Caldera Systems, filed suit (PDF) against IBM in March 2003 for allegedly contributing sections of commercial UNIX code from UNIX System V—which the SCO Group claimed it owned—to the Linux kernel's codebase. SCO Group claimed that the alleged presence of its proprietary code in the open source kernel devalued its proprietary code and that by making the source code available, IBM had violated its license agreement with SCO Group. Along the way, SCO filed for bankruptcy, and the group claimed that anyone who used Linux owed them money. All the while, Novell successfully claimed ownership of the allegedly infringing code and agreed to indemnify Linux users.

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The new trailer for Top Gear from BBC America is all speed

British auto show Top Gear will return in May to BBC Two and BBC America, and the network just released a trailer to give UK and US audiences a taste of what’s to come. The show will be different from previous seasons without longtime former Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond. Those three have since signed a three-year deal with Amazon to create another car show.

Instead, the new season of Top Gear features former Friends actor Matt LeBlanc, who had previously appeared on Top Gear as the fastest “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car.” LeBlanc’s presence will probably help the show gain broader appeal in the US, and the actor is a noted Formula 1 fan. He likely won’t be out of place.

Other presenters will include Chris Evans, Sabine Schmitz, Formula 1 commentator Eddie Jordan, and Rory Reid. In the trailer, we see racing driver Jenson Button behind the wheel of a lime green McLaren 675LT, Chris Harris in a yellow Ferrari F12, and LeBlanc in what appears to be an Ariel Nomad.

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Dealmaster: Today only, save $15 off eBay orders of $75 or more

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a bunch of tempting deals for you today—and one of them could save you even more money on other deals. For today only, you can get $15 off almost any eBay order of $75 or more. That means you can save money on a plethora of items, including the already discounted MSI Geforce GTX 980ti 6GB Golden Edition video card, a 1TB Samsung 850EVO solid state drive, an Xbox Elite controller, and more. This deal is only valid until 5:00pm PST—shop now so you have no regrets later!

Check out the rest of our deals on laptops, PCs, accessories, and more below.

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Disney Infinity and the problem with Apple TV’s gaming ambitions

Back in September, Eddy Cue introduced Disney Infinity for Apple TV live on stage. Now, the game isn't even supported on the hardware anymore.

Just a few months ago, the unveiling of a new Apple TV box seemed to finally address those seemingly perpetual rumors (and analyst desires) for Apple to make a serious, iOS-style play to shake up the home game console market. Today, the Apple TV's chances of having a serious impact on the market for TV-based games seems remote at best.

The strongest sign yet of Apple TV's gaming struggles comes from Disney Interactive, which revealed in a forum post earlier this month that it was dropping support for the Apple TV version of Disney Infinity 3.0 (which launched alongside Apple TV in November). That means that any new Disney Infinity figures released from here on out simply won't work with the Apple TV version of the game.

"The team is currently focusing on the traditional gaming platforms," a moderator wrote. "We are always evaluating and making changes, but there are currently no plans for further updates to the Apple TV version of the game."

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