Teachers across the country are criticizing Verizon for introducing a new fee that will disrupt a popular app used to communicate with students and parents.
Remind is a kind of chat app/social media hybrid used by teachers, parents, and students to keep up-to-date on assignments and events. It also has an app-to-phone texting function that allows educators and admin to send text messages to parents and students who don’t have the app. But Verizon is introducing a new fee on app-to-phone messages—an effort to curb robotexting—that will make it too expensive for Remind to continue offering this service for Verizon phones, the company’s CEO told Motherboard.
Examples of screenshots from Remind. Image: Remind
Educators have been tweeting under the hashtag #ReversetheFee, calling out Verizon for what they see as an unfair and misplaced fee. Amanda Rich, a high school geography teacher in Texas, told me via email that she’s been using Remind for six years to communicate with students, including sending nearly 800 text messages.
“They were reminders for homework. They were reminders to study for a test. They had attachments of articles to read,” Rich said. “Each text had a purpose of helping a student.”
Remind offers two kinds of services: free access and a school or school board-wide subscription service. The subscription service users will still have all their text sent even with the increased fee, but the free users will no longer be able to do app-to-phone texting for students or teachers that have a Verizon phone account.
“We had been paying for these text messages, even under our free service, for years,” Brian Grey, the CEO of Remind, said in the phone call. “This [fee] is going to literally take what we pay for the free users from a few hundred thousand dollars a year to several million dollars a year. There’s just no way that we, as a startup company in the education space, can even come close to being able to afford that.”
The fee is not being charged to students or teachers directly, Richard Young, a director of corporate communications at Verizon, said via email. Verizon is charging the fee on app-to-phone long code SMS messages sent through companies like Twilio, which is how Remind sends its texts. Typically, mass spam texts are sent using short code (using only a 5 or 6 digit number) because they can send a bunch of messages at once. Long codes (your full, 9 or 10-digit number) are used for person-to-person texts, since they are sent individually, and at a slower rate. With companies like Twilio, a text can be sent using long code from an app to a mobile phone number, which Verizon posits can be used for spam.
“The small fee helps pay for, among other things, the work required to contain spam and fraud associated with this service,” Young said. “Remind alone sends 1.6 billion text messages a year on the Verizon wireless network through Twilio, and Twilio sends more than 4.5 billion each year. This fee will help to offset some of those costs.”
Twilio and Remind already paid Verizon the standard text messaging rate for these messages, the new fee is in addition to those rates.
Rich told me that the alternatives—sending notes through the app, or sending an email—were simply not as effective as the texts.
“Students are less likely to use the app (they don't want to use up phone storage and can't download apps over our school wifi) and email is not something that reaches students in the same way as a text,” Rich said.
Not only are students more likely to actually look at a text, but Grey told me many of their users have no other option. Many students and parents either don’t have a smartphone, don’t have a data plan, don’t have internet at home—or some combination of all three, Grey said. A text message is the most reliable and egalitarian way of making sure all students get their information they need.
“I have countless stories of students thanking me for a remind text that they got to remember to do their work, to study, or to use for notes from class,” Rich said. “Students ask for the texts. People do not ask for spam.”
Today, Google is announcing that it’s rolling out RCS Chat on the Google Fi network. Google is also announcing that it’s improving data speeds for users who roam.
The RCS rollout follows limited support on Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile. Google is making RCS available on a broader array of phones than Verizon and T-Mobile; it should work on Pixel phones, the Moto G6, LG V35, LG G7, and Android One Moto X. It can also work on other Android phones, provided you download the Google Messages app. Other networks have launched RCS Chat on just a few phones, including the Pixel 3 on Verizon and some Samsung phones on T-Mobile.
It’s been a bit weird to see Google Fi lagging behind other carriers when it comes to supporting RCS, especially since...
ATMs failed in Idaho, Wyoming delayed lottery results, and 911 call centers in Washington, Arizona, Missouri and other states struggled with busy signals, dropped calls and missing location information.
At the Northern Colorado Medical Center in Greeley, staff couldn’t access vital patient records online. And in parts of New Mexico and Montana, Verizon faced service disruptions through no fault of its own.
Press reports have linked a long list of troubles to network problems suffered by telecommunications company CenturyLink, based in Monroe, La., two days after Christmas.
For about 30 hours, from the early morning hours of Dec. 27 until late on Dec. 28, chaos reigned on CenturyLink’s system. Western states that depend most heavily on the company’s fiber-optic system were hardest hit, but reports of outages and slower speeds came in from Alaska to Florida, according to downdetector.com.
“CenturyLink experienced a network event on one of our six transport networks beginning on December 27 that impacted voice, IP, and transport services for some of our customers. The event also impacted CenturyLink’s visibility into our network management system, impairing our ability to troubleshoot and prolonging the duration of the outage,” the company said in a statement.
Technicians were left scrambling trying to pinpoint the root cause, and that resulted in them losing time on fixes that didn’t work. New Orleans as ground zero was an early suspect, and then it was San Antonio, Texas. Teams, which had to make physical site visits, went into action in Kansas City, Mo., and then Atlanta, and so on.
But as they tried fixes in different areas, the problem didn’t go away. Making matters worse, the reporting system that gathered customer complaints also failed.
The source of all that turmoil and hours of angst for affected customers came down to one piece of equipment — a faulty third-party network management card in Denver, according to the company.
But how could one bad piece of equipment in Denver disrupt internet and phone service in large swaths of the country and impair critical services to thousands of customers for hours on end? And could it happen again?
Those are two questions the Federal Communications Commission, which has launched an investigation, wants answered, not to mention state utility regulators, computer scientists and irate customers.
A Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Provided by Walt Disney Productions
Mickey Mouse leads an enchanted broom through the segment for “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
In the classic Disney film “Fantasia,” Mickey Mouse casts a spell on a broom to get it to carry the water buckets that he, as the apprentice, is using to fill a cistern for the sorcerer, who has just left the room.
Mickey then falls asleep and things go horribly wrong. The broom carries way too much water. Waking and realizing his predicament, Mickey tries to smash the broom to pieces. But the splinters turn into dozens of new brooms, carrying hundreds of buckets of water. The chamber gets flooded.
Computer scientists borrowed the term “Sorcerer’s Apprentice Syndrome” to describe what happens when a part of a network sends out “packets” of bad information that then get replicated and sent out over and over, said Craig Partridge, chair of the computer science department at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and a member of the Internet Hall of Fame.
Eventually, the system gets bogged down and can crash until the source of the problem is identified and the bad packets, which can keep ricocheting around, are cleared out of the system.
“The packet has a mistake. It thinks it is supposed to make lots of copies and send it anywhere. It then overloads the whole network,” said Partridge.
Partridge said he doesn’t have any specific knowledge of this outage, but based on public reports, CenturyLink appears to have suffered from what is a well-known problem that has plagued digital networks since their earliest days.
CenturyLink said the card was propagating “invalid frame packets” that were sent out over its secondary network, which controlled the flow of data traffic.
Here is a description of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Syndrome at work, in the more technical terms provided by the company:
“Once on the secondary communication channel, the invalid frame packets multiplied, forming loops and replicating high volumes of traffic across the network, which congested controller card CPUs (central processing unit) network-wide, causing functionality issues and rendering many nodes unreachable,” the company said in a statement.
Once the syndrome gets going, it can be difficult to trace back to its original source and to stop, a big reason networks are designed to isolate failures early and contain them.
“We have learned through experience about these different types of failure modes. We build our systems to try and localize those failures,” Partridge said. “I would hope that what is going on is that CenturyLink is trying to understand why a relatively well-known failure mode has bit them.”
To resolve the problem, CenturyLink said it removed the network card at fault, disabled the channels that allowed for invalid traffic to get replicated across its network, and put in filters to catch the bad data.
It set up a more intense monitoring plan to spot problems faster and to terminate rogue packets before they can propagate. That took care of the bulk of problems, but a small group of customers had issues that were fixed case-by-case into a third day.
“CenturyLink teams worked around the clock until the issue was resolved,” said spokeswoman Linda Johnson. CenturyLink, which purchased Qwest Communications and Level 3 Communications, is an important employer in metro Denver.
A question of trust
When an airplane crashes, federal investigators will look for the black box and painstakingly reassemble every piece they can find to determine precisely what went wrong. If it was a mechanical issue, an order will go out on an inspection, fix or replacement. If it was a pilot error, new training rules are put in place.
The nation’s vital communication networks, however, are much less regulated than the airways and power grid. Even if similar protocols were in place after a failure, problems in the flow of light packets and voice signals are much more ephemeral and tougher to pin down.
“It is so unlikely they can reproduce the situation,” said Dirk Grunwald, a professor of computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder, who has witnessed scenarios where problematic components get plugged back in and work fine.
All hell might have broken loose because one bit of information in a packet came in sequence with another specific bit while the card was operating at a certain speed. A few milliseconds later or at a slightly different speed and the wicked spell may not have been cast, Grunwald said.
A more pertinent line of investigation would be why the card didn’t signal it was having problems and take itself out of the game like it was supposed to? And the card was encapsulating the faulty data, which allowed it to keep moving across the network, an issue the outside vendor is trying to understand, according to CenturyLink.
Beyond that, why didn’t other network safeguards keep the problem from getting out of hand.
Dan Massey, a computer science professor at the University of Colordado Boulder, said networks operate from an implicit assumption of trust as they communicate — “Be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept.”
Components assume the information they are receiving is coming from good players, not rogue or defective ones.
Most of the time, pick up a phone or go online and the process is smooth and seamless. What isn’t readily known is that technicians are constantly chasing problems and replacing parts and the system is making adjustments. It might even happen in the middle of a call, without a blip.
What networks struggle with is when a component goes bad but pretends to be normal, a failure known as a Byzantine Fault. If that fault happens in the “control plane” — the system that manages the flow of data and the problem detection systems — then things can spiral down quickly, Massey said.
Imagine cars on the road as bundles of information moving to where they need to go. If too many cars are in motion, then traffic will crawl to a halt. There might even be an accident. But communications networks are designed with a lot of spare capacity and an ability to clear accidents quickly and reroute traffic when jams appear.
That’s if the control plane is working. Now imagine if the traffic lights start acting erratically, like turning all the lights at an intersection red, or even worse, all of them green. That is a simplified way of describing the chaos CenturyLink technicians were dealing with.
But it didn’t take everything down. One of six transport system in CenturyLink’s network had problems, according to the company. That is why customers in Greeley and some mountain towns reported issues, while many customers in Denver and other areas didn’t notice anything amiss.
Don’t fail when it comes to 911
It is one thing if people can’t play Fornite or binge The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel because of slow speeds. It is an entirely different problem when 911 calls are disrupted, a reason CenturyLink is now facing an investigation from the FCC.
Johnson said that 911 calls were “largely completed” but that in some cases, the location information didn’t tag along. But press reports say some callers to 911 centers faced busy signals and dropped calls. Utility regulators in Wyoming and Washington state have said they will launch inquiries.
“The Colorado PUC has not opened its own investigation. However, the FCC has asked the states to help it gather information regarding the extent and impact of the outages, and PUC staff is assisting with the FCC’s investigation,” said Terry Bote, a spokesman for the state’s utility regulator.
Massey, who worked on cybersecurity issues at the Department of Homeland Security before joining CU, said most states have invested very little in cybersecurity and other safeguards when it comes to their 911 centers. They are not as failproof as they need to be.
The transition from analog to digital has left the nation’s 911 call centers much more capable, allowing them to better handle calls from mobile phones and even signals from automobiles involved in a crash. But it has also left those centers much less robust, as the problems on Dec. 27 showed.
Partridge said a deeper examination may show CenturyLink was doing everything right and it was hit by an entirely new and unexpected kind of failure. If so, the company, its vendors, and the computer science community will work on fixes.
But if an old-style Sorcerer’s Apprentice Syndrome was at fault, then blaming an outside party won’t fly.
“The network should not be so fragile that when you install third-party equipment and it fails, your network fails. Your network needs to be robust. That is standard operating procedure,” he said.
The vast majority of televisions available today are "smart" TVs, with internet connections, advertising placement, and streaming services built in.
Despite the added functionality, TV prices are lower than ever — especially from companies like TCL and Vizio, which specialize in low-cost, high-tech smart TVs.
There's a simple reason that smart TVs are priced so low: Some TV makers collect user data and sell it to third parties.
Massive TVs with razor-thin frames, brilliant image quality, and built-in streaming services are more affordable than ever thanks to companies like Vizio and TCL.
If you want a 65-inch 4K smart TV with HDR capability, one can be purchased for below $500 — a price that may seem surprisingly low for such a massive piece of technology, nonetheless one that's likely to live in your home for years before you upgrade.
But that low price comes with a caveat most people probably don't realize: Some manufacturers collect data about users and sell that data to third parties. The data can include the types of shows you watch, which ads you watch, and your approximate location.
A January interview on The Verge's podcast with Vizio's chief technology officer, Bill Baxter, did a great job illuminating how this works.
"This is a cutthroat industry," Baxter said. "It's a 6% margin industry. The greater strategy is I really don't need to make money off of the TV. I need to cover my cost."
More specifically, companies like Vizio don't need to make money from every TV they sell.
Smart TVs can be sold at or near cost to consumers because Vizio is able to monetize those TVs through data collection, advertising, and selling direct-to-consumer entertainment (movies, etc.).
Or, as Baxter put it: "It's not just about data collection. It's about post-purchase monetization of the TV."
And there are a few ways to monetize those TVs after the initial purchase.
"You sell some movies, you sell some TV shows, you sell some ads, you know," he said. "It's not really that different than the Verge website."
It's those additional forms of revenue that help make the large, beautiful smart TVs from companies like Vizio and TCL so affordable.
Even companies like Sony, which make high-end smart TVs with equally high price tags, are getting in on these additional forms of revenue. The most recent Android TV update introduced an entire row of sponsored content — advertising — to the home screen, Ars Technica reports.
Without that revenue stream, Baxter said, consumers would be paying more up front. "We'd collect a little bit more margin at retail to offset it," he said.
That will require shifting resources to AV and EV development.
GM appears to be serious about their zero-emissions vision: the company is shifting 75% of its powertrain engineers from internal-combustion engines to electric vehicle development as it prepares to unleash of wave of EVs under the Cadillac brand.
What's happening: In a meeting with investors this morning, GM is expected to share more details about its next-generation of electric vehicles — 20 EV or fuel cell powered models to be released by 2023.
They'll be based on a flexible EV architecture, enabling many body styles in front-wheel, rear-wheel and all-wheel-drive configurations.
Most of the EVs will be introduced as Cadillacs, a chance to position the iconic-but-tarnished luxury brand once again as a tech leader.
The first model, a Cadillac crossover utility, will debut in 2021.
Eventually, Buick, GMC and Chevrolet will share the electric vehicle architecture.
What we're hearing: GM President Mark Reuss is doubling the resources dedicated to EVs and AVs — not dollars, but brainpower.
Its Cruise Automation self-driving unit is reporting progress on the AV front: CTO Kyle Vogt tweeted video of its driverless cars easily handling complex traffic in San Francisco ahead of this year's launch of a commercial robo-taxi service.
The bottom line: Today 75% of GM's 4,000 powertrain engineers work on internal combustion engine technology, and 25% work on EVs. Soon, those numbers will be reversed.
Ressence’s Type 2 smartwatch, which Nest and iPod co-creator Tony Fadell served as a “tech coach” on, finally has an official price and release date, via Hodinkee. The good news is that it’ll be available as early as April 2019. The bad news is that actually getting your hands on one will cost you $48,800. That’s somewhat typical for the brand, whose watches never cost less than five-figures, but it’s a lot more than almost every other smartwatch out there.
Although the cost is mainly justified by the Ressence’s status as a luxury watch manufacturer, there are a few interesting tech features in the Type 2 that are worth mentioning. The first is a set of photovoltaic cells, which can automatically recharge the watch when its 36-hours of...
Wi-Fi is starting to go through a generational change, the kind of big upgrade that only happens once every five years or so. But while this faster new version of Wi-Fi has shown up inside plenty of routersacross the CES show floor this week, it’s had a poor showing in the one place that really matters: our actual computing devices.
Only a handful of laptops — and no smartphones, tablets, smart home devices, PCs, or other gadgets that we’ve seen — have been announced this week with support for the new generation of Wi-Fi. That means that, even though you can go out to the store today and buy a next-gen Wi-Fi router, very few devices can actually take advantage of its faster speeds.
The new generation of Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 6, is supposed to...
2017 was the hottest year on record in our global ocean, according to a new study published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, which uses some of the most up-to-date scientific methods of measuring ocean heat.
Our oceans absorb 90 percent of the heat that humans create in the atmosphere by polluting greenhouse gases, meaning they’re one of the biggest environmental victims of global warming. This explains why even though 2017 was the second-hottest year on record in the air, 2017 was the hottest year on record in the oceans.
The study uses a new method of measuring the amount of heat in the ocean, which Cheng helped develop in 2017. It works by creating a robust grid of the global ocean, analyzing location-specific ocean temperature data, and integrating this data into a map that provide a portrait of how the ocean has changed from 1960 to now. It also accounts for short-term changes to the ocean, like El Niño and La Niña events.
According to Cheng, analyzing measurements on a micro-scale with this method helps counteract the conservative estimates, which are common in studies focused on the ocean.
“We expect there will be stronger estimates of past ocean warming trend than previous reported because we already know that many traditional methods underestimate the long-term trend,” Cheng said in an email.
Cheng told Motherboard that these ocean levels don’t just have implications for the present: since the ocean warms slowly and has a huge capacity to suck up heat from the atmosphere and store it, the ocean will continue to be warm and get warmer long into the future.
“In another word, the ocean is the memory of the past changes,” Cheng said.
Our oceans are in a dire state, and we’ve known this for years. Human pollution of greenhouse gases is warming our oceans, which is helping to driving it to levels of acidity the earth haven’t seen in 252 million years (at a time 96 percent of life on earth went extinct). Coral reef ecosystems, the backbone of many ocean ecosystems, are collapsing from the inside out. A nasty feedback loop is causing the seafloor to literally collapse and help the ocean acidity even faster. A seasonal oxygen-free “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is now larger than New Jersey.
Scientists for the UN have explicitly told global governments that we have about twelve years to restructure our systems of production, transportation, and governance in order to limit the warming of the earth to somewhat livable levels. Twelve years is arguably much too optimistic. And it’s important to note that in a best case scenario, we’ll still warm the earth 50 percent more than we’ve already warmed since the nineteenth century.
But even in a best-case scenario where we fundamentally change our modes of production and limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, our oceans will continue to warm and expand for decades. Violent, climate-change driven storms will flood and destroy cities, and claim human lives.
AWS launchedDocumentDB today, a new database offering that is compatible with the MongoDB API. The company describes DocumentDB as a “fast, scalable, and highly available document database that is designed to be compatible with your existing MongoDB applications and tools.” In effect, it’s a hosted drop-in replacement for MongoDB that doesn’t use any MongoDB code.
AWS argues that while MongoDB is great at what it does, its customers have found it hard to build fast and highly available applications on the open-source platform that can scale to multiple terabytes and hundreds of thousands of reads and writes per second. So what the company did was build its own document database, but made it compatible with the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API.
If you’ve been following the politics of open source over the last few months, you’ll understand that the optics of this aren’t great. It’s also no secret that AWS has long been accused of taking the best open-source projects and re-using and re-branding them without always giving back to those communities.
The wrinkle here is that MongoDB was one of the first companies that aimed to put a stop to this by re-licensing its open-source tools under a new license that explicitly stated that companies that wanted to do this had to buy a commercial license. Since then, others have followed.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so it’s not surprising that Amazon would try to capitalize on the popularity and momentum of MongoDB’s document model,” MongoDB CEO and president Dev Ittycheria told us. “However, developers are technically savvy enough to distinguish between the real thing and a poor imitation. MongoDB will continue to outperform any impersonations in the market.”
That’s a pretty feisty comment. Last November, Ittycheria told my colleague Ron Miller that he believed that AWS loved MongoDB because it drives a lot of consumption. In that interview, he also noted that “customers have spent the last five years trying to extricate themselves from another large vendor. The last thing they want to do is replay the same movie.”
MongoDB co-founder and CTO Eliot Horowitz echoed this. “In order to give developers what they want, AWS has been pushed to offer an imitation MongoDB service that is based on the MongoDB code from two years ago,” he said. “Our entire company is focused on one thing — giving developers the best way to work with data with the freedom to run anywhere. Our commitment to that single mission will continue to differentiate the real MongoDB from any imitation products that come along.”
A company spokesperson for MongoDB also highlighted that the 3.6 API that DocumentDB is compatible with is now two years old and misses most of the newest features, including ACID transactions, global clusters and mobile sync.
To be fair, AWS has become more active in open source lately and, in a way, it’s giving developers what they want (and not all developers are happy with MongoDB’s own hosted service). Bypassing MongoDB’s licensing by going for API comparability, given that AWS knows exactly why MongoDB did that, was always going to be a controversial move and won’t endear the company to the open-source community.
After launching last year in the United States, Canada, and Europe, Chrome’s built-in ad blocker will expand to every country in the world on July 9th, Google said in an announcement today.
Google started blocking ads last year based on guidelines developed by the Coalition For Better Ads, a trade group the company helped launch. The guidelines prohibit websites from using obtrusive advertising strategies, like employing pop-ups or videos with auto-playing sound.
Two-thirds of noncompliant sites are now in “good standing”
Google says it warns websites that are out of compliance before taking action, and that as of the beginning of 2019, two-thirds of previously noncompliant publishers are in “good standing,” while only 1 percent of...
Collaboration tools tend to be geared toward workers who are sitting at a desk for much of the day, but there are plenty of shift workers, also known as first-line workers, who rarely use a computer, but still need to communicate with one another and management. Microsoft released several new features today aimed at including these workers.
In a blog post announcing the new features, Emma Williams, Microsoft corporate vice president for modern workplace verticals, wrote that there are two billion such workers. By making the product more mobile-friendly and linking to existing enterprise employee management systems, Microsoft can make Teams more relevant for shift employees.
For starters, Microsoft is making mobile Teams more flexible to meet the needs of a variety of shift worker jobs. Some might need to record and share audio messages, while others might need to share their location or access the camera. Whatever the requirements, Microsoft has started with a Firstline Worker configuration policy template, which IT can customize to meet the needs of various worker types.
The mobile tool also includes a navigation bar, which allows workers to add the tools they use most often for easy access. The idea is to make it as simple as possible to access the tools they need, given that these workers tend to be on their feet or on the move a good part of the day.
Photo: MicrosoftNext, the company has released a new API to help IT connect Teams to existing workforce management systems. The Graph API for Shifts enables first-line managers, who are responsible for setting up worker schedules, to share data between a company’s workforce management system and Teams, allowing employees to get all of their shift information in one tool. This will be available in public preview later in the quarter, according to the company.
Finally, the tool now includes a new Praise feature, designed to let managers recognize good work by their employees by issuing badges with messages like “Thank you” and “Problem solver.”
The company wants Teams to be more than a tool for knowledge workers. These new features provide a way to include workers that are sometimes left out of these kinds of collaboration tools. The new features also help Microsoft compete with a number of startups that trying to attack the same problem.
These include Crew, a startup that scored a $35 million Series C round just last month and has raised almost $60 million, and Zinc, which also takes aim at the deskless worker, and has raised $16 million, according to Crunchbase.
Whether Microsoft can appeal to both the knowledge worker and the first-line variety in the same tool remains to be seen, but these updates are clearly an effort to take on this space.
Collaboration tools tend to be geared toward workers who are sitting at a desk for much of the day, but there are plenty of shift workers, also known as first-line workers, who rarely use a computer, but still need to communicate with one another and management. Microsoft released several new features today aimed at including these workers.
In a blog post announcing the new features, Emma Williams, Microsoft corporate vice president for modern workplace verticals, wrote that there are two billion such workers. By making the product more mobile-friendly and linking to existing enterprise employee management systems, Microsoft can make Teams more relevant for shift employees.
For starters, Microsoft is making mobile Teams more flexible to meet the needs of a variety of shift worker jobs. Some might need to record and share audio messages, while others might need to share their location or access the camera. Whatever the requirements, Microsoft has started with a Firstline Worker configuration policy template, which IT can customize to meet the needs of various worker types.
The mobile tool also includes a navigation bar, which allows workers to add the tools they use most often for easy access. The idea is to make it as simple as possible to access the tools they need, given that these workers tend to be on their feet or on the move a good part of the day.
Photo: MicrosoftNext, the company has released a new API to help IT connect Teams to existing workforce management systems. The Graph API for Shifts enables first-line managers, who are responsible for setting up worker schedules, to share data between a company’s workforce management system and Teams, allowing employees to get all of their shift information in one tool. This will be available in public preview later in the quarter, according to the company.
Finally, the tool now includes a new Praise feature, designed to let managers recognize good work by their employees by issuing badges with messages like “Thank you” and “Problem solver.”
The company wants Teams to be more than a tool for knowledge workers. These new features provide a way to include workers that are sometimes left out of these kinds of collaboration tools. The new features also help Microsoft compete with a number of startups that trying to attack the same problem.
These include Crew, a startup that scored a $35 million Series C round just last month and has raised almost $60 million, and Zinc, which also takes aim at the deskless worker, and has raised $16 million, according to Crunchbase.
Whether Microsoft can appeal to both the knowledge worker and the first-line variety in the same tool remains to be seen, but these updates are clearly an effort to take on this space.
Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg says the telecom company's media unit will have to make money without leveraging data from the company's wireless and wireline subscribers.
Vestberg says the former AOL and Yahoo businesses "need to survive on their merits."
Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg isn't ready to ditch the telecom company's media unit, but he tells Axios it will have to make money without leveraging data from the company's wireless and wireline subscribers.
Why it matters: This is a sharp departure from the company's original premise for buying Yahoo and AOL: that Verizon could use its detailed data on subscribers to take on Google and Facebook, which together dominate digital advertising.
In an interview with Axios, Vestberg says the former AOL and Yahoo businesses "need to survive on their merits."
Though he's mostly focused on 5G and the company's massive wireless and wireline businesses, Vestberg says he sees potential in the content operation.
Content is particularly strong in parts of Yahoo's operations in sports, finance and entertainment, which lend themselves to video programming, he says.
But he adds the company will prioritize the responsibilities it has to those paying it for network services.
"We're not trying to mimic a Facebook or Google. We don’t think that's the right way to do that."
— Hans Vestberg
By the numbers: Verizon doesn't break out the profitability of its media business, but it said in November that the unit wouldn't meet its goal of becoming a $10 billion-a-year business by 2021.
Vestberg, who has been Verizon CEO for less than a year after 28 at Ericsson, says it's too soon to determine if there may be divestitures within the media business.
He has already started making other changes. Late last year, Vestberg implemented a strategy he calls "Verizon 2.0." The effort includes:
Shaking up the company's leadership ranks.
Reorganizing into 3 businesses: consumer, business and Verizon Media Group.
Outsourcing a chunk of the company's IT operations to Infosys.
Accepting voluntary buyouts from more than 10,000 workers.
Why? The changes are designed to help the company fully take advantage of the next generation of cellular technology. 5G is just starting to reach consumers, but over time has the potential to create whole new lines of business.
One of the earliest opportunities is to take the kind of network that Verizon is building for itself and sell a version to large businesses looking to speed up and automate their own corporate campuses, according to Vestberg.
Additional opportunities range from health care to smart cities, as 5G networks become more advanced and ubiquitous. Those areas require lots of wireless spectrum, dense networks and fiber — all of which Verizon has, he says.
One area where Verizon still has room to improve, Vestberg notes, is to take a more active role in the businesses that are built using its high-speed connections.
"Much of the innovation came on top of the network in 4G," he says. Customers still benefitted, but he would like to see Verizon get more involved this time around.
That doesn't necessarily mean the company needs to build every product, but "we need to be part of that innovation."
The Royole FlexPai is the sort of device that companies rush out when they feel the absolute imperative to be first with some new technology. I don’t blame Royole — a five-year-old company literally founded for the purpose of developing and selling flexible displays — because it faced the existential threat of Samsung coming in and stealing its thunder with a rival foldable device. So Royole hurriedly threw the FlexPai together and let the world gawk at its wondrous, foldable awfulness.
I got to grips with the FlexPai today and I was amused by how dysfunctional most of its software was. But let’s talk hardware first. Measuring 7.8 inches diagonally, this is an Android tablet in its extended mode which becomes two, not just one, Android...
Nervously, I gave a bounty hunter a phone number. He had offered to geolocate a phone for me, using a shady, overlooked service intended not for the cops, but for private individuals and businesses. Armed with just the number and a few hundred dollars, he said he could find the current location of most phones in the United States.
The bounty hunter sent the number to his own contact, who would track the phone. The contact responded with a screenshot of Google Maps, containing a blue circle indicating the phone’s current location, approximate to a few hundred metres.
Queens, New York. More specifically, the screenshot showed a location in a particular neighborhood—just a couple of blocks from where the target was. The hunter had found the phone (the target gave their consent to Motherboard to be tracked via their T-Mobile phone.)
The bounty hunter did this all without deploying a hacking tool or having any previous knowledge of the phone’s whereabouts. Instead, the tracking tool relies on real-time location data sold to bounty hunters that ultimately originated from the telcos themselves, including T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint, a Motherboard investigation has found. These surveillance capabilities are sometimes sold through word-of-mouth networks.
Whereas it’s common knowledge that law enforcement agencies can track phones with a warrant to service providers, IMSI catchers, or until recently via other companies that sell location data such as one called Securus, at least one company, called Microbilt, is selling phone geolocation services with little oversight to a spread of different private industries, ranging from car salesmen and property managers to bail bondsmen and bounty hunters, according to sources familiar with the company’s products and company documents obtained by Motherboard. Compounding that already highly questionable business practice, this spying capability is also being resold to others on the black market who are not licensed by the company to use it, including me, seemingly without Microbilt’s knowledge.
Motherboard’s investigation shows just how exposed mobile networks and the data they generate are, leaving them open to surveillance by ordinary citizens, stalkers, and criminals, and comes as media and policy makers are paying more attention than ever to how location and other sensitive data is collected and sold. The investigation also shows that a wide variety of companies can access cell phone location data, and that the information trickles down from cell phone providers to a wide array of smaller players, who don’t necessarily have the correct safeguards in place to protect that data.
“People are reselling to the wrong people,” the bail industry source who flagged the company to Motherboard said. Motherboard granted the source and others in this story anonymity to talk more candidly about a controversial surveillance capability.
Got a tip? You can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.
Your mobile phone is constantly communicating with nearby cell phone towers, so your telecom provider knows where to route calls and texts. From this, telecom companies also work out the phone’s approximate location based on its proximity to those towers.
Although many users may be unaware of the practice, telecom companies in the United States sell access to their customers’ location data to other companies, called location aggregators, who then sell it to specific clients and industries. Last year, one location aggregator called LocationSmart faced harsh criticism for selling data that ultimately ended up in the hands of Securus, a company which provided phone tracking to low level enforcement without requiring a warrant. LocationSmart also exposed the very data it was selling through a buggy website panel, meaning anyone could geolocate nearly any phone in the United States at a click of a mouse.
There’s a complex supply chain that shares some of American cell phone users’ most sensitive data, with the telcos potentially being unaware of how the data is being used by the eventual end user, or even whose hands it lands in. Financial companies use phone location data to detect fraud; roadside assistance firms use it to locate stuck customers. But AT&T, for example, told Motherboard the use of its customers’ data by bounty hunters goes explicitly against the company’s policies, raising questions about how AT&T allowed the sale for this purpose in the first place.
“The allegation here would violate our contract and Privacy Policy,” an AT&T spokesperson told Motherboard in an email.
In the case of the phone we tracked, six different entities had potential access to the phone’s data. T-Mobile shares location data with an aggregator called Zumigo, which shares information with Microbilt. Microbilt shared that data with a customer using its mobile phone tracking product. The bounty hunter then shared this information with a bail industry source, who shared it with Motherboard.
The CTIA, a telecom industry trade group of which AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile are members, has official guidelines for the use of so-called “location-based services” that “rely on two fundamental principles: user notice and consent,” the group wrote in those guidelines. Telecom companies and data aggregators that Motherboard spoke to said that they require their clients to get consent from the people they want to track, but it’s clear that this is not always happening.
A section of the price list Motherboard obtained. Image: Motherboard.
It’s bad enough that access to highly sensitive phone geolocation data is already being sold to a wide range of industries and businesses. But there is also an underground market that Motherboard used to geolocate a phone—one where Microbilt customers resell their access at a profit, and with minimal oversight.
“Blade Runner, the iconic sci-fi movie, is set in 2019. And here we are: there's an unregulated black market where bounty-hunters can buy information about where we are, in real time, over time, and come after us. You don't need to be a replicant to be scared of the consequences,” Thomas Rid, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, told Motherboard in an online chat.
The bail industry source said his middleman used Microbilt to find the phone. This middleman charged $300, a sizeable markup on the usual Microbilt price. The Google Maps screenshot provided to Motherboard of the target phone’s location also included its approximate longitude and latitude coordinates, and a range of how accurate the phone geolocation is: 0.3 miles, or just under 500 metres. It may not necessarily be enough to geolocate someone to a specific building in a populated area, but it can certainly pinpoint a particular borough, city, or neighborhood.
In other cases of phone geolocation it is typically done with the consent of the target, perhaps by sending a text message the user has to deliberately reply to, signalling they accept their location being tracked. This may be done in the earlier roadside assistance example or when a company monitors its fleet of trucks. But when Motherboard tested the geolocation service, the target phone received no warning it was being tracked.
The bail source who originally alerted Microbilt to Motherboard said that bounty hunters have used phone geolocation services for non-work purposes, such as tracking their girlfriends. Motherboard was unable to identify a specific instance of this happening, but domestic stalkers have repeatedly used technology, such as mobile phone malware, to track spouses.
As Motherboard was reporting this story, Microbilt removed documents related to its mobile phone location product from its website.
A Microbilt spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement that the company requires anyone using its mobile device verification services for fraud prevention must first obtain consent of the consumer. Microbilt also confirmed it found an instance of abuse on its platform—our phone ping.
“The request came through a licensed state agency that writes in approximately $100 million in bonds per year and passed all up front credentialing under the pretense that location was being verified to mitigate financial exposure related to a bond loan being considered for the submitted consumer,” Microbilt said in an emailed statement. In this case, “licensed state agency” is referring to a private bail bond company, Motherboard confirmed.
“As a result, MicroBilt was unaware that its terms of use were being violated by the rogue individual that submitted the request under false pretenses, does not approve of such use cases, and has a clear policy that such violations will result in loss of access to all MicroBilt services and termination of the requesting party’s end-user agreement,” Microbilt added. “Upon investigating the alleged abuse and learning of the violation of our contract, we terminated the customer’s access to our products and they will not be eligible for reinstatement based on this violation.”
Zumigo confirmed it was the company that provided the phone location to Microbilt and defended its practices. In a statement, Zumigo did not seem to take issue with the practice of providing data that ultimately ended up with licensed bounty hunters, but wrote, “illegal access to data is an unfortunate occurrence across virtually every industry that deals in consumer or employee data, and it is impossible to detect a fraudster, or rogue customer, who requests location data of his or her own mobile devices when the required consent is provided. However, Zumigo takes steps to protect privacy by providing a measure of distance (approx. 0.5-1.0 mile) from an actual address.” Zumigo told Motherboard it has cut Microbilt’s data access.
"People are reselling to the wrong people."
In Motherboard’s case, the successfully geolocated phone was on T-Mobile.
“We take the privacy and security of our customers’ information very seriously and will not tolerate any misuse of our customers’ data,” A T-Mobile spokesperson told Motherboard in an emailed statement. “While T-Mobile does not have a direct relationship with Microbilt, our vendor Zumigo was working with them and has confirmed with us that they have already shut down all transmission of T-Mobile data. T-Mobile has also blocked access to device location data for any request submitted by Zumigo on behalf of Microbilt as an additional precaution.”
Microbilt’s product documentation suggests the phone location service works on all mobile networks, however the middleman was unable or unwilling to conduct a search for a Verizon device. Verizon did not respond to a request for comment.
AT&T told Motherboard it has cut access to Microbilt as the company investigates.
“We only permit the sharing of location when a customer gives permission for cases like fraud prevention or emergency roadside assistance, or when required by law,” the AT&T spokesperson said.
Sprint told Motherboard in a statement that “protecting our customers’ privacy and security is a top priority, and we are transparent about that in our Privacy Policy [...] Sprint does not have a direct relationship with MicroBilt. If we determine that any of our customers do and have violated the terms of our contract, we will take appropriate action based on those findings.” Sprint would not clarify the contours of its relationship with Microbilt.
These statements sound very familiar. When The New York Times and Senator Ron Wyden published details of Securus last year, the firm that was offering geolocation to low level law enforcement without a warrant, the telcos said they were taking extra measures to make sure their customers’ data would not be abused again. Verizon announced it was going to limit data access to companies not using it for legitimate purposes. T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T followed suit shortly after with similar promises.
After Wyden’s pressure, T-Mobile’s CEO John Legere tweeted in June last year “I’ve personally evaluated this issue & have pledged that @tmobile will not sell customer location data to shady middlemen.”
"It appears these promises were little more than worthless spam in their customers’ inboxes."
Months after the telcos said they were going to combat this problem, in the face of an arguably even worse case of abuse and data trading, they are saying much the same thing. Last year, Motherboard reported on a company that previously offered phone geolocation to bounty hunters; here Microbilt is operating even after a wave of outrage from policy makers. In its statement to Motherboard on Monday, T-Mobile said it has nearly finished the process of terminating its agreements with location aggregators.
“It would be bad if this was the first time we learned about it. It’s not. Every major wireless carrier pledged to end this kind of data sharing after I exposed this practice last year. Now it appears these promises were little more than worthless spam in their customers’ inboxes,” Wyden told Motherboard in a statement. Wyden is proposing legislation to safeguard personal data.
Due to the ongoing government shutdown, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was unable to provide a statement.
“Wireless carriers’ continued sale of location data is a nightmare for national security and the personal safety of anyone with a phone,” Wyden added. “When stalkers, spies, and predators know when a woman is alone, or when a home is empty, or where a White House official stops after work, the possibilities for abuse are endless.”
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WeWork, the startup operating coworking spaces in more than 25 countries, is rebranding to The We Company.
The rebrand is part of the company's goal to push beyond providing desk space and into creating residential and educational units as well.
The announcement comes after news that SoftBank, the company's biggest investor, reneged on plans to invest an additional $16 billion, and would instead invest just $2 billion in 2019.
Coworking startup WeWork is rebranding itself ahead of plans to further expand its business outside of commercial office workspaces.
The company will now be called "The We Company," Fast Company reported. The new name and rebranded material could be found on the company site as of Tuesday.
The new name is apparently related to the ambitions of CEO Adam Neumann to expand the company "to encompass all aspects of people’s lives, in both physical and digital worlds," according to Fast Company.
As of now, Neumann's company provides commercial spaces, in almost 100 cities in more than 25 countries, for businesses to rent out and employees to use as office space. But under the new brand as The We Company, the startup will be comprised of three business units.
Beyond the existing WeWork entity, the new model comprises the spinoffs WeLive and WeGrow. WeLive runs community-oriented co-living "hacker houses" in New York and Arlington, Virginia. WeGrow is more education-focused. WeGrow opened its first school in fall 2018, an elementary school with a focus on entrepreneurship that operates out of a WeWork space in New York City.
Fast Company's report of the company rebranding comes a day after reports surfaced that WeWork would not receive an expected $16 billion investment. The wide-reaching Japanese investment firm SoftBank had reportedly planned to invest an additional $16 billion into WeWork, on top of the $8 billion it previously put into the startup.
But the deal fell through in the face of pushback from SoftBank's government-backed investors in Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, the Wall Street Journal reported. Investors called into question The We Company's money-losing year in 2018.
The $16 billion investment would have given SoftBank a majority stake in the startup. Instead, SoftBank will invest just $2 billion more, which will put The We Company at a $47 billion valuation.
Verizon says it won’t lie to customers about whether their phone is connected to a 5G network, as AT&T has essentially started to do. “We won’t take an old phone and just change the software to turn the 4 in the status bar into a 5,” writes Kyle Malady, Verizon’s chief technical officer.
The promise comes right as AT&T has started to roll out updates doing exactly that: changing the “LTE” icon in the corner of select phones into an icon reading “5G E.” One might assume that a “5G E” connection is the same thing as a “5G” connection, but it’s not. AT&T is just pretending that the faster portions of its LTE network are 5G and is trying to get a head start on the 5G marketing race by branding it “5G Evolution.”
The audio specialists at Shure have seen the trend among content creators for vlogging everything everywhere, and they’ve today announced a new kit to help people do that more easily with their smartphones. The new MV88+ Video Kit is a successor to and an evolution of the MV88 iPhone microphone. The 2019 edition comes with a similar-looking digital condenser mic, but it accessorizes that with a Manfrotto Pixi tripod, a universal phone clamp, and cables to connect to either a Lightning or USB-C device. The connectors also include a headphone jack for directly monitoring your audio. The whole package costs $249 and is available to preorder now.
It’s obvious from Shure’s pricing that the MV88+ kit is targeting the class of users who are a...
I recently replaced most of the light switches in my home with TP-Link Kasa Smart Wi-Fi Switches — because it’s pretty damn cool to ask Alexa to turn off the lights, and that happened to be a cheap and reliable way to do it.
But TP-Link just announced a new switch that does so much more. It’s got a built-in voice assistant, with its own microphones and speaker. (Weirdly, TP-Link couldn’t say which assistant is built-in, though the company implied it’d be Amazon Alexa or Google.) It’s got a motion sensor to turn on and off the lights without me even asking. Hell, there’s a built-in nightlight, and of course it plays music.
And because they’ve got speakers, microphones and buttons and you’re probably going to buy at least two of them,...
If a government spy or law enforcement agency needs help intercepting the communications of some terrorist or criminal using apps like WhatsApp or iMessage, they'll need to shell out more money than ever.
On Monday, Zerodium, a startup that buys and sells hacking tools and exploits to governments around the world, announced price increases for almost everything they are looking for, such as iOS remote jailbreaks and Windows exploits. It said it will now pay security researchers $1,000,000 for exploits in WhatsApp, iMessage, and SMS/MMS apps for all mobile operating systems.
“Messaging apps in general and WhatsApp in particular are sometimes the only communication channel used by targets and end-to-end encryption makes it difficult for our government customers to intercept such communications,” Zerodium’s founder Chaouki Bekrar told Motherboard in an online chat. “So having the ability to remotely compromise these apps directly without compromising the whole phone is much more strategic and effective.”
Got a tip? You can contact this reporter securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, OTR chat at lorenzofb@jabber.ccc.de, or email lorenzo@motherboard.tv
Compromising the whole iPhone, sometimes referred to as remote jailbreaking or rooting the phone, can cost $2 million or more, and usually involves a series of bugs and exploits.
The price increase shows that mobile devices in general are getting more and more secure, and thus harder to hack. That means that it’s becoming increasingly hard for hackers to break into iOS and Android devices. That makes the life of folks like spy agencies and police departments harder too. That’s where Zerodium and other similar companies, such as Azimuth and Crowdfense, come in: they act as intermediaries between security researchers and government agencies looking for tools—often called zero-days—to break into targets.
Before today, Zerodium was willing to pay $500,000 for WhatsApp and iMessage exploits, according to an archived version of the company’s site. These new prices are in line with the market, according to Maor Shwartz, who used to run a company that acquired and sold exploits to government agencies.
In an interview in December of last year, Shwartz told Motherboard that exploits for messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal, which are end-to-end encrypted and thus make it hard for hackers or spies to intercept messages, can go for $1 million or even up to $4 million depending on the circumstances and how urgently the government needs to hack their target.
“There are some unicorns that companies are willing to buy for a lot of money, more than $1 million dollars for a vulnerability. It’s the [remote code execution] for iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc,” Shwartz said. “Once you have this kind of vulnerability it’s worth a lot of money.”
Bekrar warned that despite the increasing difficulty of exploiting and hacking some of the operating systems and apps, they’re seeing more bugs than ever.
“Exploitation is harder, it takes longer, but more researchers are looking into these targets and our goal by increasing our prices is to continue this momentum and encourage researchers to keep hunting for exploits,” Bekrar told me.
“I'm in the zero-day industry since more than 15 years and I've never seen as many exploits as in 2018,” he added. “You can't imagine what's being developed and sold.”
Listen to CYBER, Motherboard’s new weekly podcast about hacking and cybersecurity.
Withings introduced multiple wearables at CES today, including a new watch that can take electrocardiograms (EKGs). The Move ECG is part of the new Move line, and it includes an EKG to measure heart rhythm patterns.
The Move ECG features three electrodes to take measurements: two inside the back of the watch and a third in the bezel. Users touch both sides of the bezel to take a measurement, and the watch will vibrate when it has a reading. All of the data can then be found in the company’s companion app, Health Mate.
The EKG feature is currently under FDA clearance review. Withings doesn’t need FDA clearance to sell the device, but it would give the company marketing collateral and boost its image as a health brand. Apple received FDA...
Here at CES, Apple has trolled the entire electronics industry with a giant banner that reads: “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.” It’s clever and designed to spark discussion, but it’s also important because it once again establishes that Apple wants to be known as the company that’s most dedicated to protecting your privacy.
If Apple really wants to establish that identity, it should bring iMessage to Android.
Before you rattle off a tweet, let me be crystal clear about a few things. I understand that:
It will likely never happen.
It’s not in Apple’s business interest for it to happen because it would hurt Apple’s iPhone profits.
There’s a myriad of options for people on Android who want to have secure, end-to-end...
Just three months ago, Apple was on a high as the most valuable company in the world.
But $450 billion has been wiped from its value since October.
That's more than the market cap of Facebook.
Apple's stock has been in free fall since since its record high in October, and Wednesday's unexpected sales warning from CEO Tim Cook has sped up the decline.
Just three short months ago, Apple was on a high as the most valuable company in the world.
But since Apple hit a peak of $232.07 a share on October 3, giving it a market cap of $1.16 trillion, it has dropped to $142.19, wiping $450 billion from its value. Its market cap stood at $710.97 billion on Thursday, according to Macrotrends. Bloomberg pegs Apple's latest market cap at $674.74 billion.
To put that into context, that $450 billion loss is significantly more than the market cap of Facebook, which is worth $383.76 billion, according to Macrotrends. It's also more than the gross domestic product of countries including Iran, Austria, and Norway.
This chart shows the three-month decline and says it all:
The drop in valuation means Apple has lost its position as the world's third-most-valuable company to Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
In premarket trading, Apple was up 1.61% to $144.48 at the time of publication.
Huawei has demoted and cut the pay of two of its employees after an iPhone was used to send a New Year’s greeting from the company’s official Twitter account. In a memo seen by both Reuters and Bloomberg, the company’s corporate senior vice president Chen Lifang said that the incident had “caused damage to the Huawei brand.” In addition to the demotion and a 5,000 yuan (around $728) monthly pay cut, the January 3rd memo said that one of the employees would also see their pay rank frozen for 12 months.
The internal memo says that the incident occurred after its external social media agency, Sapient, experienced “VPN problems” with its PC. VPNs allow access to Twitter from inside China. As a workaround, an iPhone fitted with a foreign SIM...
The FCC suspended most operations on Thursday afternoon as a result of the ongoing government shutdown over a dumb fence many argue creates far more problems than it solves. The resulting shutdown has left 800,000 government employees furloughed without pay, while garbage and human waste begin to pile up at the nation’s staff-depleted national park system.
According to the FCC, “all FCC activities will cease” as of mid-day Thursday, “other than those immediately necessary for the protection of life or property, performing other excepted activities, or those funded through a source other than lapsed appropriations.”
The shutdown also appears to have forced agency head Ajit Pai to cancel this year’s visit to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a trip he was also forced to suspend last year due to death threats over his extremely unpopular repeal of net neutrality rules.
In an additional public notice posted to the FCC website, the agency said most of its more automated functions—like the FCC’s controversially-flawed public comment system and its network and 911 outage reporting systems—will remain online and operational during the closure. As will spectrum auctions, as they’re funded by the auctions themselves.
Given the internet’s disdain for Pai’s tendency to rubber stamp each and every whim of big telecom, the closure isn’t likely to be met with much sympathy, and more than a few jokes about how the agency wasn’t doing much to help the public anyway.
But 1,197 of the FCC’s 1,442 employees will be furloughed without pay for however long the shutdown lasts, with just 245 sticking around as part of a bare-bones effort to keep the FCC afloat. Many of these employees engage in essential day to day operations often overshadowed by many of the agency’s more controversial recent policy decisions.
That means new FCC hardware and device testing and approval will grind to a halt, management of wireless spectrum will be suspended, and any ongoing investigations or merger review inquiries will be put on hold.
While a shutdown of a few days shouldn’t be a problem, a longer shutdown could put a serious damper on the agency’s agenda, former FCC lawyer Gigi Sohn told Motherboard.
“If the shutdown lasts more than a couple of days, the FCC’s operations will be severely hobbled,” Sohn said. “Work on everything but spectrum auctions and matters affecting life and property will be halted—FCC employees cannot take meetings, check emails or do FCC work of any kind. This of course includes all actions on consumer complaints involving their cable, broadband and mobile providers.”
That said, Pai did joke on Twitter that the agency will still be policing those that attempt to use naughty words on television, for whatever it’s worth:
That said, if you’re waiting for the FCC to actually act on consumer complaints about terrible broadband service, Comcast’s skyrocketing cable TV fees, or giant ISPs’ ongoing efforts to unfairly disadvantage smaller streaming competitors, the shutdown won’t be all that different from the agency’s usual day-to-day operations under Ajit Pai.
At CES, the consumer electronics industry’s biggest annual trade show, scores of products tend to get hyped up and unveiled, only to disappear when it comes to time to either ship them or show off a new version at next year’s show. That does not appear to be the case for Vuzix, a Rochester, New York-based augmented reality and smart glasses company that says it’s now taking orders for its Blade AR glasses.
Last year, Apple admitted it was throttling older iPhone models to compensate for degrading batteries that caused the phones to sometimes shut down. It offered to cut its $79 battery replacement fee down to $29 as a way of apologizing.
Degraded batteries were enough to give Apple’s business a boost while they were hard to replace
The lower fee coupled with the greater transparency meant that more people in 2018 ended up swapping their batteries — instead of upgrading to the latest iPhone models, it turns out. Now that...
Amazon had a killer 2018 in nearly all respects, but its retail performance defied expectations.
The company is projected to close the year netting half of all online shopping done in the US with staggering sales growth online.
No other retailer came close, which is why we're naming it the most impressive retailer of 2018.
For retail in 2018, there was really only one word that was on everybody's lips: Amazon.
Just a mere mention of the online shopping giant sends other companies into a flurry of speculation — whether Amazon competes directly or not.
It's easy to see why: Amazon is seeing incredible growth for a company of its size, making it one of the biggest retailers in the US and the world both online and off.
In the US, Amazon will close out the year nabbing nearly half of all online sales, according to analysis by Emarketer, up from a 43.5% in 2017. Amazon will generate $258.22 billion in online retail sales in the US by the end of the year, a staggering increase of almost 30% from the year prior.
But impressive sales aren't the only thing that Amazon got right in 2018.
Amazon Web Services and Amazon Advertising are both also experiencing phenomenal growth, and its Alexa-enabled products remain the most popular smart devices. It's moving increasingly offline with Amazon Go stores, and its new 4-Star concept.
As a company, it was able to perform to this impressive standard despite a growing set of detractors, both from elected representatives and the public. Despite a glitchy Prime Day that made customers upset. Despite HQ2 backlash. Despite competitors like Walmart nipping at its heels. Despite a trade war waged between China and President Trump and shipping costs becoming incrementally more expensive.
Despite it all, Amazon will head into 2019 more confident than ever that nothing will hold it back. Now that is impressive.
