A massive robocall campaign designed to trick people into paying for worthless credit card interest rate reduction programs has been shut down by a Federal Court at the behest of the Federal Trade Commission and the Florida Attorney General.
The court order stops the illegal calls, many of which targeted seniors and claimed to be from “credit card services” and “card member services.” The defendants charged consumers up to $4,999 for their non-existent services, the FTC stated.
+More on Network World: FBI: Social media, virtual currency hit big time scam, fraud club+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has defined 5G network speeds as being 20 Gigabits per second (Gbps), according to an article in the Korea Times.However, an ITU spokesperson says it will be more like 10 Gbps with peak speeds at 20 Gbps, according to a separate Fierce Wireless report.The ITU, a United Nations organization, has also come up with a name for the 5G standard – "IMT-2020."The ITU allocates global radio spectrum and is also responsible for coordinating mobile radio strategy and regulations.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I thought I very well might need a new iPhone after spending this past week in Delaware at the crazy Firefly music festival during which we had to be evacuated one night because of a tornado warning. But everything turned out well, my iPhone 5 is intact, and now I can take my time awaiting iPhone 6S and iPhone 7 rumors to morph into reality. No more ugly antenna lines on the iPhone?
Speculation swirled over the past week about Apple possibly ditching those homely plastic lines across the back of your iPhone…that you probably never noticed in the first place. But the plastic is practical: It allows the phone’s antenna to work by not blocking radio waves.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
When the Supreme Court issued its historic ruling on Friday legalizing same-sex marriage across the U.S., many of the biggest technology companies embraced the decision with characteristic flair through social media, on their sites, and with tools that others could use to show their support as well.Companies like Google, Microsoft, Motorola Mobility, Uber and Airbnb, their chief executives, and their venture capitalist funders all took to Twitter to post celebratory tweets about the ruling, often accompanied by the hashtags #LoveWins or #Pride, plus GIFs. Companies also changed the colors of their profile pictures on Twitter to those of a rainbow, conjuring the symbol of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender pride.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Owners of iOS devices that aren’t holding a charge are in luck, thanks to a change Apple has made to its support policy.Apple has changed the terms of its AppleCare+ extended warranty to allow replacements for iPhones, iPads, iPods and Apple Watches with batteries that hold less than 80 percent of their original capacity. That’s an upgrade from the previous plan, which only offered free replacements for devices that dropped below 50 percent of their original capacity.The change was noticed Friday in a post by MacRumors, and appears spurred on by Apple’s expectations for its smartwatch. The company has said that it expects the Watch’s battery will take about 1,000 full charge-discharge cycles before it drops below 80 percent capacity, which means that it will last for about two-and-a-half to three years. The changed policy only applies to devices purchased after April 9, so iPhone and iPad owners who got new hardware for the December holidays are still subject to the plan’s previous 50 percent requirement.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
NASA will by the end of July get a birds-eye view of meteors and asteroids from a special camera mounted on the inside of the International Space Station.The Meteor investigation camera is programmed to record known major meteor showers during its two-year orbit and could also spot unpredicted showers. The Meteor study will help scientists better understand the asteroids and comets crossing Earth’s orbit and could help protect spacecraft and Earth from potential collisions with this celestial debris., NASA said.+More on Network World: NASA shows off 10 engine helicopter/aircraft hybrid drone (video too!)+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Heading from outside Boston to Dover, Del., last week for the 4-day Firefly musical festival with another adult and four teenagers, I had lots more to think about than iPhone charging. But I did have iPhone charging needs on my mind.So before I went, I arranged to have Kensington send me a couple of their gadgets to help me weather the festival and some pretty serious storms.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Self-driving cars face off when Google’s cuts off Delphi’sWith developers of autonomous vehicle technology releasing their projects into the wild, it was perhaps inevitable that two self-driving cars would eventually meet on the road. Google’s certainly seems to be programmed for assertive behavior: According to the director of Delphi Labs, one of Google’s self-driving Lexus RX test vehicles cut off Delphi’s test car on a street in Mountain View, California. Apparently the Delphi vehicle did as your parents advised and drove defensively, preventing a collision.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Sharing links with friends in Facebook’s mobile app is a pain that requires—gasp—leaving Facebook and copying and pasting URLs. Now there’s a feature that simplifies the process.Facebook has added a new button in its iOS app that appears when you’re composing a status update. It appears as a link icon in the lower bar. Tap it, and you’ll be able to search for videos, articles and other links that have previously been shared on Facebook. The feature, called “add a link,” will let you view the articles and embed one in your status update with a single tap.It’s not clear how many links are in Facebook’s database, but they’re culled from the company’s index of roughly one trillion posts, wrote Facebook engineering manager Tom Whitnah.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Yahoo is updating its search service on mobile devices, taking a leaf out of Google’s book and highlighting content such as images, videos and reviews ahead of regular search results.The changes, announced Thursday, apply to Yahoo search on the mobile web in the U.S., in browsers such as Safari and Chrome. Yahoo’s mobile app and desktop site already provide some additional content within results.A search on the mobile web for Barack Obama, for instance, displays information about him from Wikipedia, such as his height and birth date, as well as links to news, images and YouTube videos. In one search Thursday, the videos included some curious choices, including “Barack Obama is Illuminati.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Companies large and small are scrambling to keep up with the demands of an increasingly mobile world, and on Thursday Salesforce unveiled a new line of tools that’s designed to help.Salesforce Service for Apps taps the CRM giant’s Service Cloud to let any organization to embed multichannel customer service—including live video chat with a customer-service agent—directly into the mobile apps they offer their customers.Salesforce SOS is the first to arrive in the new line. Similar to the Amazon “Mayday” button, it provides live, personalized and interactive video support, on-screen guided assistance and screen-sharing with an agent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft vet throws open Snowflake data warehouseStartup Snowflake Computing has opened its cloud-based data warehouse service for business. The company, headed by Microsoft veteran Bob Muglia, is offering a service that lets companies pool all their data and workloads in a single warehouse that can be accessed by all their users. It’s also capable of taking in both structured and semi-structured data.Google brings a green data center to a coal-fired plantGoogle is building a new data center inside a former coal-fired power plant in Alabama, and is asking the regional utility to find renewable energy sources and bring them online to power the facility, the New York Times reports. It pointed out the practical reasons to use the old plant: it’s a solid building, obviously has good power lines, and also has access to lots of water needed for cooling.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Facebook wants to squeeze as much growth as it can out of its popular Messenger app, even if that means foregoing Facebook.While previously users had to sign up for Messenger with their Facebook accounts, now, in a few countries, it can be done with just a mobile telephone number. In the U.S., Canada, Peru and Venezuela, users who sign up this way can allow the app to sync with the contacts on their phone so they can easily find people to message.Along with the phone number, the user’s name and photo are still needed to complete the sign-up process.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Major U.S. banks have been rolling out new, secure smart chip debit and credit cards for months, but the real end-user impact hasn't yet been felt.Some experts say typical consumers will get confused and may even balk when first attempting to use these new "pin and chip" smart cards. As a result, customers may choose to rely on the less-secure magnetic stripe also on the new cards for in-store purchases.MORE: 10 mobile startups to watch
Or, customers could even turn to mobile wallet alternatives, like Apple Pay or the coming Android Pay, and skip the credit and debit card experience altogether.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Instagram, the popular app for sharing photos with friends, is broadening the reach of those photos.On Tuesday, the Facebook-owned app significantly expanded its service with new features around search and trending topics. The changes are aimed at letting users discover photos and videos related to popular events and places, and letting users more easily find photos taken in particular places.The changes are aimed at making Instagram not just an app to see friends’ photos, but an app for seeing other people’s photos related to local or global events. The changes put Instagram’s app more squarely in competition with Twitter, already known for its real-time feed of tweets around events, including photos and videos.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last week, I came across two technology stories so strange yet so compelling I felt like they should come from the Weekly World News or some schlocky science fiction novel. But no, they both showed up in the Gray Lady.Taken together, their appearance in that most mainstream of newspapers, the New York Times, points to a world where technology is forcing us to rethink just about everything we thought we knew about how things work.Forget about distracted driving
First, there was this story about how Utah Valley University was so worried about students walking around campus with their noses buried in their smartphones that it created a texting-and-walking lane in a stairway in its campus life and wellness center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last week, I came across two technology stories so strange yet so compelling I felt like they should come from the Weekly World News or some schlocky science fiction novel. But no, they both showed up in the Gray Lady.
Taken together, their appearance in that most mainstream of newspapers, the New York Times, points to a world where technology is forcing us to rethink just about everything we thought we knew about how things work.Forget about distracted driving
First, there was this story about how Utah Valley University was so worried about students walking around campus with their noses buried in their smartphones that it created a texting-and-walking lane in a stairway in its campus life and wellness center.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There’s finally something real to 5G: a name.The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has decided to call the next-generation cellular system IMT-2020. That name may have a hard time catching up with “5G,” a tag that’s been applied to just about every future mobile technology in the works: Googling “5G mobile” brings up 12.9 million results. But it’s a clear sign of progress toward the concrete. Where there’s a bureaucratic-sounding numeric acronym, can a formal standard be far behind?The ITU now has an answer to that question, too. It’s set a timeline that calls for the standard to be finished in 2020. Hence the name, which follows in the footsteps of IMT-2000 (3G) and IMT-Advanced (4G).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
It’s not often you see a button-down organization like NASA call something “wild” but that’s what the space agency is calling six concepts – ranging from adding artificial intelligence to unmanned aircraft to using electricity for propulsion -- it has picked to study to revolutionize the aviation world.+More on Network World: Hot stuff: The coolest drones+The project, known as Convergent Aeronautics Solutions (CAS) is looking to develop what NASA called “something truly historic – the buzzword is ‘transformative’ – and help crack tomorrow's biggest challenges in aviation related to fuel use, the environment, and managing global growth in air traffic.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Eighty-seven million people in Nigeria browse the Internet on mobile phones, according to figures from the country’s telecom regulator that confirm that even among low-income people, the mobile Web is big in Africa.Nigeria is Africa’s largest telecom market by investment and subscription, followed by South Africa and Kenya. A just-released report from the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) on April Internet usage backs up findings from other sources showing that mobile Web use is widespread, including for people in low-income households, many of them living below the poverty line.About 25 percent of the people who use mobile phones to browse the Web in Nigeria, more than 22 million users, are from low-income households, according to an NCC official.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here