How to succeed in business—er, remote IT work—without really trying

August 13, 2015 smarc

With more people than ever using ’em, it’s probably difficult to find an Ars reader who doesn’t have a family member or old friend that’s lost at sea when it comes to keeping a computer running. And when that familiar call or e-mail comes—”Do you have a minute? How do you…”—it’s instantly obvious. This person needs a significant amount of long-term help.

In today’s ever more technological and connected world, these requests tend to come often. And while it’s maddening enough playing amateur IT professional for someone in the same house, how do you cope when increasingly the tech-challenged live across town or even across the country? To no one’s surprise, there are as many strategies out there as there are readers.

Luckily for you (and agonizingly for me), I’ve had some experience here.

Read 40 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ministry of Innovation

Facebook user gets away with nearly a full day of trolling Target commenters

August 13, 2015 smarc

Mike Melgaard

9 more images in gallery

While Facebook facilitates plenty of interaction between big companies and their customers, its interface doesn’t scale incredibly well once company-page comments creep into the hundreds (or more) per day. In particular, “comments by users” on a company page are relegated to a sidebar that is pretty hard to parse. On Sunday, one intrepid Facebook user took advantage of that to sneak onto a company page and mess with commenters before the company could get wise to it—and lucky for us, he screencapped the whole thing.

This week’s case came from American retailer Target, whose Facebook feed began to blow up with unhappy comments over the weekend after the company announced plans to remove gender-specific signs in departments such as Toys and Entertainment. The retailer didn’t get around to individually responding to commenters, but that didn’t stop a user from creating a new account on Sunday, giving it a Target-styled bullseye icon and pretending to be an official company spokesperson.

That user, Scottsdale, Arizona, resident Mike Melgaard, went on to respond to at least 52 negative comments left on Target’s official Facebook page with an account named “Ask ForHelp,” but rarely were his responses helpful. Melgaard heaped on sarcastic smiley faces, grammatical criticisms, and jokes about doing away with all gender-specific labels at the store (including bathrooms and changing rooms). It’s hard to pick a favorite among the jokes—we’ve posted a few of its safe-for-work screencaps above—but our favorite might be when he got into a multiple-comment conversation with one complainer, which he ended with a phony exclamation that it was his “first day, and this is just really frustrating dealing with all of this!”

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

business, DLC, EA, on-disc, Opposable Thumbs

EA exec says complaints about “on-disc DLC” are “nonsense”

August 13, 2015 smarc

Every few months, it seems, certain gamers get up in arms when it’s discovered that a brand new game disc contains content that is to be sold in the future as “downloadable content.” In a new interview, EA Chief Operating Officer Peter Moore said this kind of controversy comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the way that DLC is made.

“A lot of that resistance comes from the erroneous belief that somehow companies will ship a game incomplete, and then try to sell you stuff they have already made and held back,” Moore told Gamespot in a Gamescom interview. “Nonsense. You come and stand where I am, next to Visceral’s studio, and you see the work that is being done right now. And it’s not just DLC, this is free updates and ongoing balance changes.”

Moore compared the bits of DLC that are found on some game discs to scaffolding put in place to support the actual downloadable product when it’s ready. “Think of them as APIs,” he said. “Knowing down the road that something needs to sit on what you’ve already made, means you have to put some foundations down. What people are confused about is they think DLC is secretly on the disc, and that it’s somehow unlocked when we say.”

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ministry of Innovation, Technology Lab, throttling, unlimited data, verizon wireless

Verizon stopped throttling 3G data when net neutrality rules took effect

August 13, 2015 smarc

A year ago, Verizon Wireless announced that it would begin throttling 4G LTE service for users on unlimited data plans, using the same policy it already applied to its slower 3G network. Verizon caved after criticism from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler, so the 4G throttling never went into effect. However, Verizon kept right on throttling its 3G customers.

That finally changed two months ago, though we didn’t notice it at the time.”Beginning in 2011, to optimize our network, we managed data connection speeds for a small subset of customers—those who are in the top five percent of data users and have 3G devices on unlimited data plans—and only in places and at times when the network was experiencing high demand. We discontinued this practice in June 2015,” Verizon now says on its website. A reader pointed out the updated language to us yesterday, and RCRWireless News reported the change today.

The change in June occurred in the same month that the Federal Communications Commission’s network neutrality rules against throttling took effect. Though carriers could argue that some throttling is allowable under an exception for “reasonable network management,” Sprint stopped throttling its heaviest users just in case.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Gear & Gadgets, Infinite Loop, OS X, yosemite

Apple releases OS X 10.10.5 to squash Mail, Photos, and QuickTime bugs

August 13, 2015 smarc

Apple has just released OS X 10.10.5, the fifth (and likely last) major update to OS X Yosemite. It can be downloaded now through the Update tab in the Mac App Store, or you can look for standalone installers to hit Apple’s download page later in the day.

The update contains a fix for a bug that gives attackers unfettered root privileges, a feat that makes it easier to surreptitiously infect Macs with rootkits and other types of persistent malware. Shortly after the vulnerability was publicly disclosed, adware distributors started exploiting it in the wild so they could install potentially unwanted applications without requiring end users to enter system passwords.

The list of specific feature fixes is short: it improves Mail’s “compatibility with certain e-mail servers,” fixes a problem with GoPro camera imports into the Photos app, and a problem that kept Windows Media files from playing in QuickTime. The update also fixes an extensive list of security problems in Apache, Bluetooth, CloudKit, the OS kernel, and a handful of other apps and services—all of that information is available here.

Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments