Dell gets out of the Android business, and everything old is new again

Dell's Venue 8 7000 was a decent tablet, but its future doesn't look bright. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

There's a lot of competition and not a lot of profit in the Android ecosystem, so it's not exactly surprising to hear that Dell plans to exit the Android business in order to focus on its Windows PCs and convertibles. According to The Verge, the company will continue to honor warranties and service contracts for Venue Android tablets, but it will no longer sell or develop new hardware and will stop releasing software updates for current devices.

This means no more updates for relatively recent releases like the odd but relatively well-reviewed Venue 8 7000.

The move is part of a wider strategy shift at Dell, one in which it will "divest from the slate tablet market" in favor of convertibles, partly because "the tablet opportunity in big business has passed" (read: it can't sell enough of these at a high enough margin to make the effort worthwhile). Windows is a stronger choice for devices that spend all or most of their time attached to keyboard docks, since it offers a wider range of "professional" apps and is already accepted among and familiar the business and IT types that Dell is targeting with these products. Dell also takes a not-so-subtle swipe at a couple of recent Apple tablets, saying that "CIOs and IT administrators have to consider much more than just the word “Pro” and visual appeal of a device when deciding which products to deploy among their workforce."

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Report: Apple blocks Spotify app update after in-app subscription removal

Enlarge / Spotify says Apple is using its privileged position to hurt Spotify's chances against Apple Music.

Apple Music has been around for about a year now, and despite being a little late to the game, Apple boasts that it has managed to pick up about 15 million paying subscribers. Spotify has at least twice that many users, but the company is worried that Apple is using its privileged position on iPads and iPhones to push Apple Music at the expense of third-party services.

According to a report from Recode, Apple has blocked an update to the iOS Spotify app, citing "business model rules." Spotify no longer offers iOS users the ability to subscribe to its Premium tier from within the app, a move which inconveniences users but more relevantly denies Apple its typical 30 percent cut of the revenue. The report claims this led directly to the new update being blocked, which according to Spotify's lawyers "raises serious concerns under both U.S. and EU competition law" and "[diminishes] the competitiveness of Spotify on iOS and as a rival to Apple Music."

The iOS Spotify app used to offer in-app subscriptions but charged users $12.99 instead of the standard $9.99 to compensate for Apple's cut. Spotify recently offered iOS users a three-month trial of Spotify for $0.99 if they signed up through Spotify's site rather than the app, but pressure from Apple prompted the company to remove that promotion and the in-app subscription option altogether.

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Tesla’s Autopilot being investigated by the government in a fatal crash

The Model S uses several sets of sensors, from optical to ultrasonic to radar, to maintain awareness of the traffic around you. (credit: Tesla Motors)

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is about to take a closer look at Tesla's Autopilot, the company revealed on Thursday. In a blog post, Tesla says that it learned on Wednesday evening that NHTSA is "opening a preliminary evaluation into the performance of Autopilot" following a fatal crash involving a Model S.

The incident, which happened in May, involved a white tractor-trailer that crossed the divider on a highway, perpendicular to the path of the Tesla, which was cruising on Autopilot. "Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied. The high ride height of the trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S," Tesla stated.

The company also stated that in a front-on or rear-end collision with the tractor-trailer, it believes the outcome would not have ended in tragedy. It described the driver as "a friend to Tesla and the broader EV community" and expressed sympathy for his friends and family for their loss.

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Rare Viking “death house” discovered in Denmark

Silkeborg Museum

From the Silkeborg Museum, this is a recreation of the high-status woman's grave found in a Viking "death house" in Denmark.

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Construction of a new highway in Hårup, southwest Denmark, has unearthed farms and houses from the Middle Ages, including a rare Viking dødehus or "death house" dated to 950 C.E., packed with grave goods that reveal a lot about the three people buried within it. The death house was a common form of Viking tomb, but the Hårup death house has a very unusual design. It appears to have been inspired by early stave churches of Western Europe, with large wooden posts holding up heavy roof beams. Inside, archaeologists found other international influences. A ceramic vase came from the Baltic and two silver coins hail from the region now known as Afghanistan. These discoveries are testimony to how far Vikings traveled and how extensive their trade networks were.

The tomb itself is fairly roomy at 13 x 43 feet and was initially the resting place of a wealthy couple. Later, a third grave was added for another man. Though little remains of the bodies themselves, a few strands of the woman's black hair stood the test of time, as did the two keys she wore around her neck. The larger of these keys would have symbolized that she was the lady of a great house, and the other unlocked an unusual shrine. She was buried in a small wooden wagon, an honor also reserved only for noblewomen. At the woman's feet was the shrine, full of golden thread (probably used in fabric), fur, glass beads, and fine wool. Her husband was also buried in high style, with a massive Dane Axe, popular among high status men and seriously destructive on the battlefield. The third man, possibly the couple's heir, was buried with a slightly smaller Dane Axe.

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People eat healthier when real-life emojis literally point them to produce

(credit: Masahiro Ihara)

Nearly everyone knows you’re supposed to eat heaping helpings of fruits and vegetables every day. But that doesn’t mean that people actually follow through. In fact, in updated dietary guidelines released in January, the federal government called out nearly everyone for not eating enough produce (as well as eating way too much sugar). But now, researchers have followed up with what may be a simple fix.

In grocery stores, big emojis and arrows on the floor that direct and encourage people to head to the produce section actually got shoppers to buy more produce, researchers report Thursday in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior. Moreover, after analyzing grocery bills, the researchers found that shoppers didn’t up their overall shopping budget to accommodate the fresh additions. In other words, grocery store goers weren’t simply piling on crops to their already full carts, but, rather, they were swapping other grocery items for healthy fruits and vegetables.

The findings suggest that adding the minor signage to more stores could be an easy way to get consumers to eat healthier produce. And if so, it “could trigger a public health shift” in a general population that is largely struggling with weight and dietary problems, lead author Collin Payne, of New Mexico State University, said in a statement.

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Video game art swiped this week by Beijing hockey team, Ford dealership

Reddit user and Guild Wars 2 fan galveyra2 breaks down exactly how a Beijing hockey team infringed upon a well-known video game's logo. (credit: galveyra2)

On Wednesday, news hit the wire that a video game's indistinguishable logo and art style had been lifted without permission, all done to advertise a wholly unrelated product. Sadly, the news brought on a real case of deja vu. As in: wait, didn't this just happen?

As it turns out, it had. Two very similar stories unfolded within 48 hours of each other, and they each speak to a pair of modern copyright issues: the ease with which images can be lifted and reappropriated by a lazy design firm, and how easy it is for such copycats to be busted by the court of public opinion.

The more recent case involved a professional hockey team from Beijing, which was announced last week as the newest team to join an upstart, highly budgeted Eurasian league known as the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL). Once the Kunlun Red Star revealed its logo, eagle-eyed hockey fans noticed that it was very nearly a beat-for-beat copy of the dragon head from MMO sensation Guild Wars 2. Eyes, nose, tongue, and general shape—it's very clearly a match, minus some weak width-stretching efforts by Kunlun's Photoshop intern. (Props to Guild Wars 2 fan galveyra2 for the specific image analysis posted above.)

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Transcend Wifi SD Card Is A Tiny Linux Server

[jamesone111] bought a Transcend WifiSD card, presumably for photography, but it may just have been because he heard that they’re actually tiny Linux servers.

He read a post about these cards on the OpenWRT forums. They’re all a similar configuration of a relatively large amount of memory (compared to the usual embedded computer), a WiFi chip, and an ARM processor running a tiny Linux install. The card acts as a WiFi access point with a little server running on it, and waits for the user to connect to it via a website. It also has a mode where it will connect to up to three access points specified by the user, but it doesn’t actually have a way to tell the user what its IP address is; which is kind of funny.

[jamesone111] hacked around with the Transcend card for a bit. He found it pretty insecure, which as long as you’re not a naked celebrity, shouldn’t be a huge issue. For the hacker this is great as it opens up the chance of hacking the firmware for other uses.

Some have already pulled off some cool hacks with these cards. For example, [peterburk] hacked a similar card by PQI to turn his iPod into a portable file server. 

Filed under: linux hacks, wireless hacks

Antarctic ozone hole beginning to heal

(credit: NASA/EO)

When the Montreal Protocol phased out the use of chlorofluorocarbons starting in 1989, scientists expected to see improvements in the Antarctic ozone hole that was opening each spring. They weren't anticipating anything immediate—instead, improvement was expected within 20 to 30 years of the protocol’s implementation. Ozone recovery occurs through distinct stages, including a reduction in the rate of ozone decline and a leveling off of the depletion. Only once these are done should we expect to see an ozone increase, termed “ozone healing.”

Previous studies of the Antarctic ozone have provided evidence that the early phases of ozone recovery have been occurring. A new paper published in Science presents the first signs ozone healing may be occurring as well. The data shows an overall increase in the thickness and abundance of the Antarctic ozone layer in the last 15 years.

The Antarctic ozone hole fluctuates in size over the course of a year. It is largest during the spring, which occurs from September to November in the southern hemisphere. Historically, the majority of each year’s ozone hole growth occurs in late August and early September, building to a peak in October.

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“Drone Boy” who made flying flamethrower now charged with child porn

A still from a YouTube video of Austin Haughwout's drone, armed with a handgun. (credit: Austin Haughwout)

Austin Haughwout thought he'd be facing a legal showdown with the Federal Aviation Administration over his armed drone, but now he's got bigger legal problems.

The 19-year-old Connecticut man was arrested yesterday on child pornography charges. He also faces charges of enticing a minor and attempted sexual assault. The arrest warrant is sealed, but local police outlined the allegations against Haughwout to The Hartford Courant.

The arrest is a result of a "lengthy investigation" that has its origins in a violent incident from July 2015. That month, Haughwout went to the police department to turn himself in due to charges "stemming from a confrontation with officers at the town's library," the Courant reported. While he was being arrested, Haughwout engaged in "assaultive behavior with the officers that were taking him into custody."

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Top Clinton aide was “frustrated” with her boss’s e-mail practices

Huma Abedin with Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail in 2008. Abedin was grilled about her boss' email proclivities by a Judicial Watch attorney this week. (credit: http://ift.tt/295LtAf)

We already knew that Hillary Clinton's e-mail and mobile device issues were likely a pain for State Department employees—and some foreign governments as well. But new testimony recorded on Tuesday by one of Clinton's top aides illuminates the extent of those headaches.

Huma Abedin is the vice-chair of Clinton's presidential campaign and the former deputy chief of staff and senior advisor to Clinton during her stint as Secretary of State. She was deposed on June 28 by an attorney representing the conservative action group Judicial Watch as part of discovery for a lawsuit being brought against Clinton. Judicial Watch published the transcript of that deposition yesterday, and Abedin revealed what she knew about Clinton's use of the mail server and how she was "frustrated" with the technical glitches caused by Clinton's mobile device and e-mail travails. 

Both Clinton and Abedin had accounts on the clintonemail.com server, which was originally set up at the Clinton residence by staffers of former president Bill Clinton prior to the family's arrival at the State Department. (The server would later be managed by Platte River Networks, a managed IT services firm, with security provided by Datto.) Clinton had been using a BlackBerry mail account through AT&T during the 2008 presidential campaign, and she had been having "technical issues" with the account, according to Abedin. Clinton switched to the private server when she got a new device, and Abedin was given an account on the server after she lost access to her Senate e-mail account. Abedin said she used it primarily for personal business in addition to a personal Yahoo e-mail account (where she would later forward press clippings received from a State Department clipping service, she said).

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Verizon Wireless might offer rollover data and slow-speed “unlimited” data

Verizon's rumored new offerings. (credit: Verizonguy12345)

Verizon Wireless says it has a big announcement coming next week, and rumors suggest the mobile carrier will start offering rollover data and a "safety mode" that lets customers use slower data without paying overage fees once their monthly high-speed data allotments run out.

The new plans are described in the above image, which was posted by a Reddit user and allegedly comes from a Verizon test site that occasionally leaks new offerings before they hit the main Verizon website. Verizon didn't confirm or deny the new offerings, but the company vaguely told news sites that "We're going to have some fireworks next week—stay tuned."

The "Carryover Data" referenced in the Verizon leak would let customers roll unused data over to their next monthly allotment, similar to rollover plans introduced about 18 months ago by T-Mobile USA and AT&T.

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