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T-Mobile, AT&T oppose unlocking rule, claim locked phones are good for users

T-Mobile and AT&T say US regulators should drop a plan to require unlocking of phones within 60 days of activation, claiming that locking phones to a carrier's network makes it possible to provide cheaper handsets to consumers. "If the Commission mandates a uniform unlocking policy, it is consumers—not providers—who stand to lose the most," T-Mobile alleged in an October 17 filing with the Federal Communications Commission. The proposed rule has support from consumer advocacy groups who say it will give users more choice and lower their costs. T-Mobile has been criticized for locking phones for up to a year, which makes it impossible to use a phone on a rival's network. T-Mobile claims that with a 60-day unlocking rule, "consumers risk losing access to the benefits of free or heavily subsidized handsets because the proposal would force providers to reduce the line-up of their most compelling handset offers." If the proposed rule is enacted, "T-Mobile estimates that its prepaid customers, for example, would see subsidies reduced by 40 percent to 70 percent for both its lower and higher-end devices, such as the Moto G, Samsung A15, and iPhone 12," the carrier said. "A handset unlocking mandate would also leave providers little choice but to limit their handset offers to lower cost and often lesser performing handsets." Read full article

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News Image Buy Once and Get Full Versions of Microsoft Office 2024’s Best Productivity Apps Forever, Now 20% Off

No subscriptions or annual fees needed when you buy MS Office 2024 for Mac or PC for 20% off from StackSocial.

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News Image Trump Supporters’ Fake Stories About Harris and Walz Flood the ‘For You’ Page on X

X has truly become a garbage heap since Trump donor Elon Musk bought the site.

Entertainment Read on Gizmodo
News Image A Lake Materializes in the Sahara Desert, Offering a Glimpse Into Africa’s Past

The arid region sometimes develops lakes after heavy rain, hinting at how the desert may have once had a different climate.

Environment Read on Gizmodo
News Image Amazon says it ditched plastic air pillows

Amazon says that it has gotten rid of plastic air pillows at its warehouses. “As of October 2024, we’ve removed all plastic air pillows from our delivery packaging used at our global fulfillment centers,” the e-commerce giant said in an October 9th blog post. It’s a welcome change following years of pressure from environmental groups to stop plastic pollution flooding into oceans. The company is still working to reduce the use of single-use plastics more broadly in its packaging. “The fact that the world’s largest e-commerce company has made plastic air pillows history globally is fantastic news for the world’s oceans,” Matt Littlejohn, senior vice president of strategic initiatives at the...

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Basecamp-maker 37Signals says its “cloud exit” will save it $10M over 5 years

37Signals is not a company that makes its policy or management decisions quietly. The productivity software company was an avowedly Mac-centric shop until Apple's move to kill home screen web apps (or Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs) led the firm and its very-public-facing co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson, to declare a "Return to Windows," followed by a stew of Windows/Mac/Linux. The company waged a public battle with Apple over its App Store subscription policies, and the resulting outcry helped nudge Apple a bit. 37Signals has maintained an active blog for years, its co-founders and employees have written numerous business advice books, and its blog and social media posts regularly hit the front pages of Hacker News. So when 37Signals decided to pull its seven cloud-based apps off Amazon Web Services in the fall of 2022, it didn't do so quietly or without details. Back then, Hansson described his firm as paying "an at times almost absurd premium" for defense against "wild swings or towering peaks in usage." In early 2023, Hansson wrote that 37Signals expected to save $7 million over five years by buying more than $600,000 worth of Dell server gear and hosting its own apps. Read full article

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News Image Witch Hat Atelier‘s Creator Shares Her Inspirations and Aspirations for Its Anime

Witch Hat Atelier is already being heralded as the next big fantasy anime alongside Delicious in Dungeon and Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

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News Image One-third of DHS’s border surveillance cameras don’t even work

The House Committee on Homeland Security is looking into Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) surveillance network in the wake of a report that nearly one-third of the agency’s cameras along the US-Mexico border don’t work. Privacy advocates say this is just the latest instance of expensive border surveillance infrastructure not working as advertised. An internal Border Patrol memo obtained by NBC News said that “several technical problems” had contributed to a large-scale outage of the Remote Video Surveillance Systems, a series of surveillance towers and cameras that have been used to remotely surveil the border since 2011. According to the memo, approximately 150 of the 500 cameras are non-operational. The memo says that the Federal...

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News Image The Snapdragon 8 Elite Aims to Supercharge Android Performance

The Snapdragon 8 Elite looks to beat the iPhone 16 and Qualcomm claims it’s still beating Intel’s Lunar Lake.

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News Image Streamer’s apology for racist rant exposes the rot in streaming culture

Asmongold apologized for his racist comments regarding Palestinians, revealing that streaming culture has made him a ‘psychopathic version’ of himself.

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News Image ICE's $2 Million Contract With a Spyware Vendor Is Under White House Review

Immigration and Customs Enforcement's contract with Paragon Solutions faces scrutiny over whether it complies with the Biden administration's executive order on spyware, WIRED has learned.

Politics Read on WIRED Top Stories
News Image Humans Are Evolving Right Before Our Eyes on The Tibetan Plateau

"This is a case of ongoing natural selection."

Environment Read on ScienceAlert
News Image Qualcomm’s new mobile chip is the 8 Elite

Just a few years after changing its mobile chipset naming conventions, Qualcomm has gone and done it again. The Snapdragon 8 Elite is the company’s newest high-end smartphone SoC, and like the laptop chips it borrows its “Elite” name from, it comes with a new Oryon CPU. The company says that this shift enables faster performance and — lest we forget about AI — offers on-device support for multimodal intelligence. The Oryon CPU inside the 8 Elite hasn’t been borrowed directly from the laptop chips; Qualcomm is calling it a second-gen chipset. It replaces the Kryo CPUs Qualcomm has used in previous mobile chipsets and comprises two prime cores with six performance cores. There’s an X80 5G modem-RF chip and an Adreno GPU with a new sliced...

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What is Bluesky? Everything to know about the X competitor.

Is the grass greener on the other side? We’re not sure, but the sky is most certainly bluer. It’s been almost two years since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, now X, leading people to set up shop on alternative platforms. Mastodon, Post, Pebble (which has already shuttered operations) and Spill have been presented as potential replacements, […]

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