Consumer advocates say this means broadband providers will sell your browsing history to the highest bidder. Industry groups say it preserves competition.
The vote Tuesday in the House fell along party lines.
Broadband providers won’t have to get your permission before sharing your web browsing history and other personal data with marketers thanks to a vote Tuesday on Capitol Hill.
Republicans in the US House of Representatives approved a resolution that prevents privacy rules passed by the FCC last year from taking effect. The vote was 215 in favor and 205 opposing the measure.
The Senate voted on Thursday to adopt the resolution to nullify the rules. All that’s left now is for President Donald Trump to sign the order. Earlier Tuesday, the White House said he plans to sign it.
This will essentially repeal the Obama-era regulation passed in October days before Trump was elected. These rules would have required broadband companies to get their customers’ permission before they sell « sensitive » information about their web browsing activity, app usage or whereabouts to marketers. Because Republicans used the Congressional Review Act — a tool that enables lawmakers to expedite bills to reverse recent regulations — it also prohibits the Federal Communications Commission from adopting similar rules in the future.
Proponents of the rules, like consumer advocacy groups, say this is bad news because the rules protect your privacy. Without these regulations, these groups say that broadband providers will be able to sell information about where you’ve been online, what you’re buying, the apps you’re using, and where you’re located to marketers and other third parties, like insurance companies.
« ISPs like Comcast, AT&T and Charter will be free to sell your personal information to the highest bidder without your permission — and no one will be able to protect you, » Gigi Sohn, an adviser to former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, wrote in an op-ed Tuesday. Wheeler championed the privacy rules.
Meanwhile, internet service providers say the regulations are too strict and unfairly single out broadband providers, because they require broadband companies to adhere to a more stringent privacy requirement than internet companies must follow. They say the rules are burdensome and will stifle competition, driving up prices.
« The FCC’s flawed broadband privacy rules will have a chilling effect on internet innovation and competition, » said Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Technology Association.
Instead, these groups say that broadband companies should follow the same privacy guidelines as internet companies, like Facebook and Google. They follow rules established by the Federal Trade Communication, which only requires companies offer consumers the opportunity to opt out of such data sharing. Industry groups argue having two sets of rules gives internet companies a competitive leg up.
For broadband companies the stakes are high. These companies are looking to expand their businesses and offer marketers more targeted advertising, and they want to use the personal information they collect from their customers to do it. The nation’s largest broadband companies — AT&T, Comcast and Verizon — have each made acquisitions in an effort to build their digital content holdings. That makes them not only the companies that provide a broadband pipe into your home, but also ones whose own content rides that network.
The vote, which has been highly politicized, fell along party lines. It’s part of a GOP effort to eliminate several regulations issued during President Barack Obama’s final months in office. And it comes just days after Trump’s plan to repeal and replace Obama’s health care law failed. Trump has already signed several resolutions under the Congressional Review Act to repeal regulations, including two related to education and one concerning the environment.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who voted against the rules when he was a commissioner before being appointed chairman in January, had already put the brakes on the rollout of the rules. In February, the FCC voted to hold off implementing the rules until challenges to them could be assessed.

© Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/house-votes-to-repeal-internet-privacy-rules-broadband-fcc/
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To reverse paralysis, scientists wired a man’s brain to his muscles using electronics.
William Kochevar of Cleveland can slowly move his right arm and hand. No big deal—except that the 56-year-old had been paralyzed from the shoulders down since a bicycling accident ten years ago.
The setup that is allowing Kochevar to move his arm again is a “neuroprosthetic” involving two tiny recording chips implanted in his motor cortex and another 36 electrodes embedded in his right arm.
Now, during visits he makes to an Ohio lab each week, signals collected in his brain are being captured and sent to his arm so he can make some simple voluntary movements. “I was completely amazed,” says Kochevar.
With scientists looking on and monitoring banks of electronics, he was eventually able to drink out of a coffee cup and feed himself mashed potatoes, although he needs to rest his arm on a mechanized harness to do so. “The biggest thing that I can’t do is move my arm up and down by myself,” he says.
Researchers have previously equipped lab animals and a dozen or so people with brain implants to let them control computer cursors or robotic arms directly with their thoughts. The new work shows how researchers are attempting a next step by merging brain-computer interfaces with functional electronical stimulation , or shocking muscles in the limbs so that they contract and cause movements.
“What we are doing is circumventing the spinal cord injury,” says Bolu Ajiboye, the biomedical engineer at Case Western Reserve University who led the experiment, which is being reported today in The Lancet.
Last year, another team reported using a brain implant to restore partial hand movement to a different subject.
When an able-bodied person moves, the brain generates a thought or command in the form of electrical impulses. Those normally travel out though the spinal cord and to the limbs. In a person with a major spinal cord injury, like Kochevar has, that pathway is blocked.

© Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603993/this-paralyzed-man-is-using-a-neuroprosthetic-to-move-his-arm-for-the-first-time-in-years/
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This week in a relatively brief driver update, NVIDIA has released their Game Ready driver for the newly released Mass Effect: Andromeda…
This week in a relatively brief driver update, NVIDIA has released their Game Ready driver for the newly released Mass Effect: Andromeda.
Following with the 378 branch, 378.92 adds official Game Ready support for the game. This includes the usual driver optimizations as well as an SLI profile for EA’s soon-to-be blockbuster game. Alongside Mass Effect, we are also getting game ready support for Rock Band VR, and updated SLI profiles for Dead Rising 4 and Deus Ex: Breach.
However buried in this driver release is a second noteworthy and interesting feature addition: NVIDIA is also enabling Dolby Vision support for games. Dolby’s competing HDR transport standard is arguably a higher fidelity standard than HDR10 thanks to aspects such as its 12bpc color modes, however its proprietary nature has limited its adoption versus HDR10. And while we’re still early in the days of HDR PC monitors – the first HDR10 monitors don’t even ship until later this month – Dolby Vision hasn’t been on the PC monitor roadmap at all.
In any case, the addition of Dolby Vision appears to be aimed at use with TVs, where high-end models do offer Dolby Vision support. So for those users out there who own the necessary TV, an NVIDIA card, and Mass Effect: Andromeda (the sole Dolby Vision-enabled PC game), they should be in for a treat.
Anyone interested can download the updated drivers through GeForce Experience or on the NVIDIA driver download page. More information on this update and further issues can be found in the 378.92 release notes .

© Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11214/nvidia-releases-37892-driver-mass-effect-and-dolby-vision-for-games
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With the spring finally upon us, Apple this morning is going about some spring cleaning of the iPad family. The iPad Air 2…
With the spring finally upon us, Apple this morning is going about some spring cleaning of the iPad family. The iPad Air 2 and the iPad Mini 2 have been discontinued, making way for a new entry-level iPad: the simply named iPad 9.7-Inch. This latest iPad is a bit of an unusual twist on the usual Apple fare; it’s not really a successor to the iPad Air 2, and from a features perspective it’s essentially a kitbash of a few different Apple products. None the less, at $329 it’s also the lowest Apple has ever priced a 9.7” iPad, as retailer sales aside, Apple hasn’t offered this size below $399 before. As a result the new 9.7” iPad is likely to make an impact, even in the softening market for tablets.
From a high-level perspective, the iPad 9.7” (2017) is an interesting kitbash between the iPhone 6s, the iPad Air 2, and the iPad Air 1. It’s obvious that Apple was aiming to make a more budget-friendly iPad from the start, so you won’t find any new, cutting edge technology in here. Rather everything is essentially cobbled together from the aforementioned Apple products. This, consequently, is also why the 2017 iPad is not a true successor to the iPad Air 2, as it makes some necessary compromises to hit the $329 price tag.
The shell itself is taken from the iPad Air 1 , offering the same dimensions and weight as Apple’s 2013 flagship tablet. This means that at 7.5mm, the new iPad is actually thicker than the iPad Air 2 by 1.4mm (~23%), though as we’ll see, Apple appears to be putting some of the additional volume to good use. Apple also seems to have lifted the display assembly from the iPad Air 1; while all of the modern Retina 9.7” iPads have offered a 2048×1536 IPS display, this one in particular lacks the fully laminated display that was introduced in the iPad Air 2 and is part of the reason that the aforementioned tablet was made thinner.
Meanwhile inside the tablet itself, Apple has lifted the bulk of the guts from the iPhone 6s. At the heart of the new iPad is an Apple A9 SoC, which incorporates a pair of Apple’s “Cyclone” CPU cores and a 6 cluster PowerVR Series7XT GPU. Based on Apple’s performance estimates, it looks like this is clocked at or very near the 1.85GHz clockspeed of the iPhone 6s, so burst performance should be very close to the iPhone’s. Meanwhile Apple hasn’t confirmed the memory capacity, but since the A9 is a PoP design (and all other 9.7” iPads have 2GB of RAM), 2GB is almost certain for the new iPad as well.
Finally, from the iPad Air 2 comes the tablet’s camera modules. The rear camera is an 8 Megapixel f/2.4 camera that we’ve seen in the iPad Air 2 and a number of other Apple tablets, while the front camera is Apple’s similarly common 1.2MP f/2.2 camera. Apple doesn’t publish the exact sensor configuration, but I would be surprised if this wasn’t lifted wholesale from Apple’s existing camera module stockpile.
Getting back to size for a moment, the 2017 iPad 9.7” will also have the highest capacity battery of a 9.7” iPad in the last few years. Along with the iPad Air 1 shell, Apple has also brought back that tablet’s 32.4 Watt-hour battery, giving it a 19% battery capacity boost over the iPad Air 2. Coupled with the use of a smartphone SoC, and I’m very curious to see what real-world battery life is at. While Apple officially advertises the iPad as having the same 10 hour (Wi-Fi) battery life as the other iPads, there’s definitely some room to pick up another hour or two of runtime. Though ultimately it’s going to be the display that’s the deciding factor, as it’s already the biggest power consumer on an iPad.
Apple will be offering the 2017 iPad 9.7” in two capacities, 32GB and 128GB, with the latter capacity carrying a $100 premium. Somewhat surprisingly, the company is also offering a version of the tablet with a cellular modem despite the budget-focused nature of the tablet. Unfortunately Apple is still charging a $130 premium for this functionality, which feels especially steep given the tablet’s low base price.
Finally, Apple will begin taking pre-orders for the tablet this Friday the 24 th. The tablet is set to ship to next week to both pre-order customers and retail stores.
Overall it will be interesting to see how Apple’s new entry-level iPad does in the market. The company’s tablet business continues to chug along, but sales as well off from their heyday as tablet replacement cycles are closer to laptops than phones. At the same time the iPad 2 was one of Apple’s most popular tablets due to its relatively low price for its size, so Apple may be looking to recapture some of that energy. Though it’s interesting to note that in this process, Apple has actually increased the price of an entry-level iPad some; whereas the discontinued iPad Mini 2 was $269, the new iPad bumps that up by $70.
Speaking of which, the new iPad does put the remaining iPad Mini 4 configurations in a bit of an odd spot. The tiniest tablet actually did get an update of its own: the $399 32GB model was discontinued, and the sole 128GB model has been dropped to $399 in its place. Despite the price shuffle though, it is an older design and remains the only iPad not using an A9-generation processor. While Apple’s spring cleaning makes it clear which tablet Apple wants to be their entry-level iPad, the Mini remains as the odd man out in this new lineup.

© Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11215/apple-announces-2017-ipad-97inch-329
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