Parents with children that ran up bills, sometimes huge, through in-app purchases stand to get some or all of that money back. Amazon could have to hand out more than $70 million in refunds to affected consumers, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. On Tuesday, both the FTC and Amazon agreed to end their…
A coast-to-coast network trial by AT&T last month, using open-source “white box” switches, pointed toward an imagined future of more reliable services that may come quicker than some people think. The carrier ran a trial on its core network earlier this year using switches based on chips from Intel, Broadcom and startup Barefoot Networks. The…
Opera Software today boasted that the number of new U.S. users of its namesake browser more than doubled days after Congress voted to repeal restrictions on broadband providers eager to sell customers’ surfing history. Opera debuted a VPN — virtual private network — a year ago, and finalized the feature in September. A VPN disguises…
Companies that choose to outsource their IT operations should be careful. Suspected Chinese hackers have been hitting businesses by breaching their third-party IT service providers. Major IT suppliers that specialize in cloud storage, help desk, and application management have become a top target for the hacking group known as APT10, security providers BAE Systems and…
President Donald Trump may have no more luck reforming the H-1B visa than he did with healthcare. If he relies on the GOP alone for support, he may fail. Trump, who repeatedly criticized the H-1B program during his campaign, faces sharp divisions in his own party over the visa program. U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)…
After its acquisition of Yahoo wraps up, Verizon plans to place AOL and Yahoo under the umbrella of a new company, called Oath. AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong on Monday announced the move on Twitter, writing, “Billion+ Consumers, 20+ Brands, Unstoppable Team. #TakeTheOath. Summer 2017.” AOL, which owns the Huffington Post, Engadget and TechCrunch, will…
Apple has one big reason to move to a homegrown GPU: It wants full control over the hardware and software in its devices. The device maker is apparently developing its own GPU from scratch after dumping Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR architecture, which is being used in the iPhone 7. The smartphone runs on the PowerVR A10…
Microsoft Windows 10 powered about 9% of all business personal computers a year and a half after its launch, a just-released study of corporate deployments said. According to Austin, Texas-based Spiceworks, an online community and resource for IT professionals and the vendors trying to reach them, the proportion of company-deployed PCs running Windows 10 was…
If you snagged the popular iOS automation app Workflow juuuuust before Apple bought it and then made it a free service, don’t worry: Apple is gonna give you that $2.99 back. Plus tax. According to 9to5Mac, Apple is emailing iTunes customers who recently purchased Workflow to let them know that the app is now free…
Fujitsu is helping to keep SPARC from extinction as it continues to design and develop the architecture. The company has introduced two Unix servers — the M12-2S and the M12-2 — using SPARC chips based on a new CPU architecture. The M12 servers are about 2.5 times faster than their predecessor, the M10, which used…