Talynebear

Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company and home Internet service provider, has a lot of angry customers. And instead of just privately fuming, thousands of them have complained to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The deluge of angry customers is so big that the FCC gets more Internet service complaints about Comcast than it does for AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable (TWC) combined.

We’ve written about complaints filed against Comcast before, but we also wanted to find out how those complaints compared to Comcast’s top rivals. So we filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FCC, seeking information on three major types of Internet provider complaints: availability, billing, and speed.

(credit: Comcast)

You probably know that Comcast is hitting subscribers with overage charges of $10 when they exceed their 300GB monthly data caps. But can customers trust Comcast to measure Internet usage accurately? The nation’s largest cable company points to research it commissioned showing that its data metering is usually accurate, but one customer who contacted Ars was able to prove that he was being incorrectly accused of using excessive data.

Oleg, a programmer from Tennessee who prefers that we not publish his last name, said he got repeated warnings from Comcast that he was using too much data. But the traffic logs from his router showed that “I was not even close to Comcast’s cap,” he wrote. Oleg described his saga in a Pastebin posting, a YouTube video, and in e-mails to Ars.

Oleg received warnings in September and another in October, the latter while he was overseas for a multiple-week vacation with his wife. When they returned home on November 9^th, Comcast’s data meter was “showing I used 120 gigs of data, like, while I was gone,” he wrote. Customers can check their usage on Comcast’s website.

The developers behind popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) League of Legends now belong entirely to Tencent, the Chinese conglomerate behind similarly popular QQ instant messenger. The news was actually revealed tangentially, when Riot released an article explaining that there would be changes to the company’s equity program.

The succinct post detailed how they will be moving from a “Riot equity program” to a “cash-based incentive program” that would allow employees to share in Riot’s successes. What this entails exactly has not been clarified. But Tencent’s move to purchase the remaining equity shares is not surprising given Riot Games’ track record.

In 2014, it was reported that League of Legends had about 67 million monthly players and more than 7.5 million concurrents, making it arguably the biggest name in e-sports. So big, in fact, that BBC Three saw fit to cover the League of Legends World Championships semi-finals. VentureBeat writes that the game netted $946 million (£633 million) in in-game spending revenues last year, a number that is likely to rise as Riot Games works on an overhaul for League of Legends.

(credit: Kyle Orland)

A French consumer group has brought a lawsuit against Valve, saying that Steam and its required terms of service infringe on a number of European legal rights, including the right to legally resell purchased software.

The 64-year-old UFC-Que Choisir (the "federal union of consumers") argues that Valve must provide the capability for Steam users to resell their legally purchased digital games whenever they want. While noting that many online stores have similar resale restrictions, the group argues that the difference between being able to resell a physical game disc and not being able to resell a digitally purchased game is "incomprehensible... No court decision prohibits the resale on the second-hand market games bought online, and the European Court has even explicitly stated that it’s possible to resell software which, let’s remember, is an integral part of a video game."

The group is referring to a 2012 decision from the European Court of Justice that focused on the resale of downloadable enterprise software licensed from Oracle. "It makes no difference whether the copy of the computer program was made available by means of a download from the rightholder’s website or by means of a material medium such as a CD-ROM or DVD," the court ruled.

Peter Sunde, co-founder of the Pirate Bay and digital artist.

Peter Sunde, co-founder of the Pirate Bay, is out of jail and back with a new project whose entire goal is to screw the music industry. It's called the Kopimashin, and it lives to make copies of the Gnarls Barkely song "Crazy."

All it took was a Raspberry Pi and some Python code, and now the Kopimashin is making 100 copies of "Crazy" every second. Sunde posted about the device on Konsthack, a site devoted to art and hacking. He writes, "The Kopimashins lcd display consists of three rows of information, the serial number of the mashin, amount of copies created and the dollar value it represents in losses for the record labels (Downtown Records / Warner Music), currently represented by USD 1,25 per copied piece." Each copy is "stored" in /dev/null, which is to say, it is not stored at all (/dev/null is a nonexistent "null device"). The point, Sunde says, is "to make the audio track the most copied in the world and while doing so bankrupting the record industry."

Sunde hasn't made the source code available yet. As he told Ars via -mail: "It’s really simple, it’s ugly code and I have no energy to clean it up for the 'helpful' community to make the code 1% faster — and it’s about making a point, not the code itself. If you want to build your own, just start a terminal, find a song to copy and do: while true; do cat file.mp3 >/dev/null; done."

(credit: Mike Mozart)

Amid an ongoing E. coli outbreak investigation at Chipotle Mexican Grill, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday announced that it is joining the effort to investigate what may be a second wave of illnesses linked to the chain restaurant. The new illnesses are caused by the same type of E. coli found in the previous cases—Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O26 (STEC 026)—but with a different, rare genetic variant.

To investigate this second wave, the FDA has combined forces with state and local authorities, plus the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which on Monday first announced an investigation into five cases of the variant E. coli infections. Those cases included one in Kansas, one in North Dakota, and three in Oklahoma. The sickened people from Kansas and North Dakota reportedly ate at the same Chipotle restaurant in Kansas before falling ill. The three sickened in Oklahoma were separate cases, but all three reportedly ate at the same Chipotle, the FDA reported.

The new cases, if confirmed, would bring the new E. coli outbreak numbers to 58 sickened and 12 states affected. The other states linked are California (3 cases), Illinois (1), Maryland (1), Minnesota (2), New York (1), Ohio (3), Oregon (13), Pennsylvania (2), and Washington (27). All of the cases involve some form of the STEC 026 bacteria.

(credit: Andrii Degeler)

Wireless chargers using standards like Qi have been on the market for a while; IKEA even includes them in some of its furniture these days. But if you think about it, there's not that much difference between wired and wireless charging of this kind. After all, the charger still needs to be plugged into a wall socket, and you still need to leave the phone in a designated place to charge.

What would be a significant improvement, however, is charging a smartphone just by hanging around in the same room as a wireless charger.

XE, a Ukrainian startup working in semi-stealth mode since 2014, claims to have found a safe and reliable way to transfer electricity to a device that's up to five meters (16ft) away. The commercial version of the technology will consist of a base charging station of about 15×15×40cm and a 3mm thick smartphone case.

(credit: Glenn Asakawa, University of Colorado)

Moving data around inside a computer means shoving it through wires, which have inherent bandwidth limitations and produce a lot of heat. Once that data hits a network, however, it often runs across optical hardware, which can send information long distances at high bandwidth without needing a dedicated nuclear reactor for power.

The contrast between the two methods has most companies thinking about ways of getting optical connections inside computers and, eventually, inside chips themselves. This poses a significant challenge. While it's possible to use silicon to create light-handling features, the processes used to do so are incompatible with the CMOS techniques used to make circuitry. As a result, most efforts in this area have used separate chips: one for the processor, one for the optical interconnect.

Now, a research team has put together a single chip that handles both optical and electrical processing and uses an optical connection to its main memory. While the bandwidth remains low, the entire system was manufactured using standard CMOS processes. And it incorporates a small RISC processor that's able to run standard text and graphical programs.