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An anonymous reader shares a report: James Wright had never worried about staying under his data cap. Then he bought a 4K TV set and started binge-watching Netflix in ultra-high definition. The picture quality was impressive, but it gobbled up so much bandwidth that his internet service provider, Comcast, warned that he had exceeded his monthly data limit and would need to pay more. "The first month I blew through the cap like it was nothing," said Wright, 50, who lives with his wife in Memphis, Tenn. With a 4K TV, he said, "It's not as hard to go through as you'd think." All that bingeing and ultra-HD video can carry a high price tag. As online viewing grows, more subscribers are having to pay up for faster speeds. Even then, they can run into data limits and overage fees. Some opt for an unlimited plan that can double the average $52-a-month internet bill. Wright is what the cable industry calls a power user -- someone who chews through 1 terabyte of data or more each month. Though still rare, the number of power users has doubled in the past year as more families stream TV shows, movies and video games online. They should continue to grow as new video services from Disney, AT&T, Apple and NBCUniversal arrive in coming months. In the first quarter of this year, about 4% of internet subscribers consumed at least 1 terabyte of data -- the limit imposed by companies such as Comcast, AT&T and Cox. That's up from 2% a year ago, according to OpenVault, which tracks internet data usage among cable subscribers in the United States and Europe. "The percentage of subscribers exceeding this level will continue to grow rapidly," OpenVault founder Mark Trudeau said.

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Google Assistant can now send reminders to friends and family – this won't end well

Having failed to grasp the lesson of Microsoft's annoying animated Office assistant, Clippy – humans hate being hectored by software – Google has empowered its Assistant software to remind people to do things at the behest of another.…

Google announces in a blog post: Today's students face a tricky challenge: In an age when they can explore every idea imaginable on the internet, how do they balance outside inspiration with authenticity in their own work? Students have to learn to navigate the line between other people's ideas and their own, and how and when to properly cite sources. We've heard from instructors that they copy and paste passages into Google Search to check if student work is authentic, which can be repetitive, inefficient and biased. They also often spend a lot of time giving feedback about missed citations and improper paraphrasing. By integrating the power of Search into our assignment and grading tools, we can make this quicker and easier. That's why Google is introducing originality reports. This new feature -- with several reports included free in every course -- will be part of Classroom and Assignments, which was also announced today. We create originality reports by scanning student work for matched phrases across hundreds of billions of web pages and tens of millions of books. When assigning work in Classroom and Assignments, instructors will have the option to enable originality reports. Students will then be able to run up to three originality reports on documents they attach to the assignment before submitting their work. This heads-up gives students an opportunity to proactively improve their work, and also saves time for instructors.

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Millions of years after the ancestors of humans evolved to lose their tails, a research team at Japan's Keio University have built a robotic one they say could help unsteady elderly people keep their balance. From a report: Dubbed Arque, the grey one-meter device mimics tails such as those of cheetahs and other animals used to keep their balance while running and climbing, according to the Keio team. "The tail keeps balance like a pendulum," said Junichi Nabeshima, a graduate student and researcher at the university's Embodied Media Project, displaying the robotic tail attached to his waist with a harness. "When a human tilts their body one way, the tail moves in the opposite direction." As Japan greys it is leading the industrial world in seeking ways to keep its aging population mobile and productive.

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Feds, officers match thousands of license plates to driver IDs

The Attorney General of Ohio has banned cops and the Feds from accessing the US state's database of drivers' license plates and faces until the officers and g-men receive adequate privacy compliance training.…

Kaspersky antivirus solutions injected in the web pages visited by its users an identification number unique for each system. This started in late 2015 and could be used to track a user's browsing interests. From a report: Versions of the antivirus product, paid and free, up to 2019, displayed this behavior that allows tracking regardless of the web browser used, even when users started private sessions. Signaled by c't magazine editor Ronald Eikenberg, the problem was that a JavaScript from a Kaspersky server loaded from an address that included a unique ID for every user. Scripts on a website can read the HTML source and glean the Kaspersky identifier, which Eikenberg determined to remain unchanged on the system.

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Small percentage of workforce but sign of the times

Cisco has laid off 500 programmers in its home state of California amid disappointing financial results and a sagging share price.…

Networking and web security giant Cloudflare says the recent 8chan controversy may be an ongoing "risk factor" for its business on the back of its upcoming initial public offering. From a report: The San Francisco-based company, which filed its IPO paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, earlier this month took the rare step of pulling the plug on one of its customers, 8chan, an anonymous message board linked to recent domestic terrorist attacks in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, which killed 31 people. The site is also linked to the shootings in New Zealand, which killed 50 people. 8chan became the second customer to have its service cut off by Cloudflare in the aftermath of the attacks. The first and other time Cloudflare booted one of its customers was neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer in 2017, after it claimed the networking giant was secretly supportive of the website. "Activities of our paying and free customers or the content of their websites and other Internet properties could cause us to experience significant adverse political, business, and reputational consequences with customers, employees, suppliers, government entities, and other third parties," the filing said. "Even if we comply with legal obligations to remove or disable customer content, we may maintain relationships with customers that others find hostile, offensive, or inappropriate."

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Breaking a long silence about a high-profile National Security Agency program that sifts records of Americans' telephone calls and text messages in search of terrorists, the Trump administration on Thursday acknowledged for the first time that the system has been indefinitely shut down -- but asked Congress to extend its legal basis anyway. From a report: In a letter to Congress delivered on Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, the administration urged lawmakers to make permanent the legal authority for the National Security Agency to gain access to logs of Americans' domestic communications, the USA Freedom Act. The law, enacted after the intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed the existence of the program in 2013, is set to expire in December, but the Trump administration wants it made permanent. The unclassified letter, signed on Wednesday by Dan Coats in one of his last acts as the director of National Intelligence, also conceded that the N.S.A. has indefinitely shut down that program after recurring technical difficulties repeatedly caused it to collect more records than it had legal authority to gather. That fact has previously been reported, but the administration had refused to officially confirm its status.

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SD-WAN, bam, thank you, ma'am

Backgrounder Businesses relying on hybrid clouds need to be especially mindful of how they protect the sensitive data that flows between their on- and off-premises systems. Employees can be anywhere, using multiple devices (sometimes simultaneously) and any type of network (including public Wi-Fi) to access cloud services, all of which need to be secured against malware, unauthorized access and eavesdropping.…

New submitter dvda247 writes: A discussion of if people turn off their Windows 10 PCs anymore? Newer hardware and operating system changes make PCs work differently. Do you shut off your Windows 10 PC anymore? Or do you put it in sleep or hibernate mode? We are broadening the discussion to include desktop computers and laptops that are running Linux-based operating systems, or macOS, or ChromeOS. Additionally, how often do you restart your computer?

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Spotify plans to sell a more-expensive version of its music service in Scandinavia, a test to see whether it can raise prices around the world, Bloomberg reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Spotify will raise the price of its family plan by about 13%, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the increase hasn't been announced. The test doesn't mean Spotify will raise prices elsewhere or do so permanently in Scandinavia, they said. Raising prices could boost revenue in markets where Spotify already has a strong presence. The company is based in Stockholm, and its music service is the dominant player across Northern Europe. The current family plan costs about $15 a month and lets up to five people use the service. Spotify has also tested a plan called Premium Duo that offers two subscriptions for 12.49 euros ($13.91) a month.

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Translation: they're in Blighty to stay and they know it

Huawei has reportedly boasted that it will continue investing in the UK even if the British government U-turns on allowing the Chinese company to supply critical 5G mobile network equipment.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: The stodgiest of business documents is in the midst of its most extreme makeover yet -- whether employers want it or not [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. Gone are the utilitarian, black-and-white documents covered in bullet points. As Gen Z enters the workforce, companies are seeing digital CVs filled with artistic flourishes, including illustrations of college mascots, logos of past employers and icons to denote hobbies such as home renovation and watching movies. Job seekers have been striving for years to make their resumes stand out from the pile. While earlier generations played with eye-catching print fonts and horizontal lines, today's tech-savvy young people have a new arsenal of tricks. Many throw in headshots. Some add bitmojis, the personalized avatars used in text messages and on social media.

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Abusers leverage high-tech tools in the oldest of crimes, stalking their victims through tools like Facebook Messenger and Apple Maps. They spy on their targets through stalkerware apps and Amazon Alexas. But hackers are now teaming up with victim advocates to catch up. From a report: In a pilot study the New York City government has been running since 2018, technologists work in collaboration with the Mayor's Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence to offer practical computer security and privacy services to survivors of intimate partner violence. The program, which involves a team of academics from Cornell Tech and New York University, has already seen early success and is growing, Cornell Tech's Sam Havron said on Wednesday at the USENIX Security Symposium in Santa Clara, California. There are hundreds of apps sold on the market today that stalkers use to track a victim's location, secretly record voice audio, steal text messages, or engage in other illegal surveillance. Since November 2018, the New York-based technologists have met with 44 clients and have discovered that 23 of them may have been targeted by spyware, account compromise, or exploitable misconfigurations. Over half the victim cases have connections to digital abuse, according to a newly published paper, "Clinical Computer Security for Victims of Intimate Partner Violence."

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Now you need only briefly see the cabin interior

Good news for well-heeled British Airways customers! Now you can transport yourself away from the carrier's aircraft interior through the wizardry of Virtual Reality.…

Amazon wants its third-party sellers to make better use of their unsold or unwanted products that often get dumped -- by giving them away to charity. From a report: Amazon is launching a new donations program, called Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) Donations, for third-party sellers that store their inventory in Amazon's warehouses in the U.S. and UK, CNBC has learned. Starting on September 1, the donation program will become the default option for all sellers when they choose to dispose of their unsold or unwanted products stored in Amazon warehouses across those two countries. Sellers can opt out of the program, if they want. The donations will be distributed to a network of U.S. nonprofits through a group called Good360 and UK charities such as Newlife and Barnardo's. After this story was published, Amazon announced the program via a blog post on Wednesday afternoon. [...] Recent reports found that Amazon routinely discards unsold inventory, with one French TV documentary estimating Amazon to have destroyed over 3 million products in France last year. Further reading: The Painful, Costly Journey of Returned Goods -- and How You End Up Purchasing Some of Them Again.

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intensivevocoder writes: Owners of Microsoft's Surface Pro 6 and Surface Book 2 systems are finding themselves stuck at Pentium 2 speeds, as numerous user complaints indicate that the ultra-portables are throttling the processor down to 400 MHz, a state that -- in some instances -- persists across reboots. While similar issues with Surface devices have occurred in the past, reports of issues have increased in frequency following a firmware update for the Surface Pro 6. The throttle-lock appears to be caused by an Intel CPU flag called BD PROCHOT (bi-directional processor hot), which can be set by any peripheral, telling the processor to throttle down in order to decrease system temperature -- a useful flag in cases where the CPU is operating within thermal limits, but other components tied to the CPU are running too hot, because of the demands placed on other components by processes on the CPU.

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That's a rocket by the way, not half-horse, half-Spock

Wannabe space station supplier Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) has selected ULA's Vulcan Centaur rocket to launch its Dream Chaser freighter in 2021.…

It's true most blame put on China-linked woes, but it'll hire staff in s-a-a-a-a-a-a-ales

A sharp slowdown in enterprise customers' all-flash array purchases has sucker-punched NetApp, and though it is hiring more sales heads to fix this worry, things aren't forecast to get better anytime soon.…