Verizon and T-Mobile are calling out AT&T for starting a shady marketing tactic that labeled its 4G network as a 5G network. "In an open letter, in which AT&T is not named directly, Verizon says in part 'the potential to over-hype and under-deliver on the 5G promise is a temptation that the wireless industry must resist,'" reports TechCrunch. Meanwhile, T-Mobile directly called out AT&T, tweeting a short video of someone putting a sticky note reading "9G" on top of their iPhone's LTE icon. The Verge reports: The promise comes right as AT&T has started to roll out updates doing exactly that: changing the "LTE" icon in the corner of select phones into an icon reading "5G E." One might assume that a "5G E" connection is the same thing as a "5G" connection, but it's not. AT&T is just pretending that the faster portions of its LTE network are 5G and is trying to get a head start on the 5G marketing race by branding it "5G Evolution." T-Mobile isn't happy about the marketing nonsense either. Its CTO, Neville Ray, wrote that AT&T was "duping customers." Verizon says it's "calling on the broad wireless industry to commit to labeling something 5G only if new device hardware is connecting to the network using new radio technology to deliver new capabilities" (emphasis Verizon's). Kyle Malady, Verizon's chief technical officer, says Verizon will lead by example and that "a clear, consistent, and simple understanding of 5G" is needed so consumers don't have to "maneuver through marketing double-speak or technical specifications." Malady says Verizon will "not call our 4G network a 5G network if customers don't experience a performance or capability upgrade that only 5G can deliver." But that isn't the same thing as saying "we won't label our network 5G unless it's 5G." In fact, if you turn that sentence into a positive statement, it says "we will only call our 4G network a 5G network if it delivers a 5G-like experience." The Verge notes that Verizon "has also been misleading about its jump into 5G." Last year, Big Red bragged about launching the "world's first commercial 5G service," even though "it wasn't mobile; it was home internet service that just happened to be delivered wirelessly during the final stretch to a subscriber's home; and it didn't use the global 5G standard -- it used a rival 5G standard created by Verizon."

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Leader of opposition Labour Party calls on British PM Theresa May to rule out no-deal Brexit 'once and for all'.

Pabuk may no longer be a cyclone, but its influence can be seen in the form of rare winter rains from Myanmar to China.

Former boxing champion Christophe Dettinger has received widespread support from the French, angering officials.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The U.S. case against the chief financial officer of China's Huawei Technologies, who was arrested in Canada last month, centers on the company's suspected ties to two obscure companies. One is a telecom equipment seller that operated in Tehran; the other is that firm's owner, a holding company registered in Mauritius. U.S. authorities allege CFO Meng Wanzhou deceived international banks into clearing transactions with Iran by claiming the two companies were independent of Huawei, when in fact Huawei controlled them. Huawei has maintained the two are independent: equipment seller Skycom Tech Co Ltd and shell company Canicula Holdings Ltd. But corporate filings and other documents found by Reuters in Iran and Syria show that Huawei, the world's largest supplier of telecommunications network equipment, is more closely linked to both firms than previously known. The documents reveal that a high-level Huawei executive appears to have been appointed Skycom's Iran manager. They also show that at least three Chinese-named individuals had signing rights for both Huawei and Skycom bank accounts in Iran. Reuters also discovered that a Middle Eastern lawyer said Huawei conducted operations in Syria through Canicula. Huawei, U.S. authorities assert, retained control of Skycom, using it to sell telecom equipment to Iran and move money out via the international banking system. As a result of the deception, U.S. authorities say, banks unwittingly cleared hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions that potentially violated economic sanctions Washington had in place at the time against doing business with Iran.

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Poorly redacted court filing says Trump's ex-campaign chairman lied about sharing 2016 data with Russian associate.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he won't 'compromise' over Kurdish YPG fighters in northern Syria.

US state voted in November to restore voting rights to most ex-convicts who have served all terms of their sentence.

Philippine president accuses the independent constitutional body of hampering the work of his administration.

Anti-government protests continue across Sudan, as President Omar al-Bashir refuses to step down.

When you link your checking account to Venmo or use it to buy bitcoin, a startup called Plaid is likely facilitating the connection with your bank. You punch in your user name and password; Plaid checks those credentials with the financial institution and, if they're accurate, passes banking information back to the app. That's it. From a report: This kind of software has been around for decades. But in the last year, Plaid has captured investors' attention. The San Francisco startup was the subject of a bidding war among venture capitalists and at least one tech company, ultimately resulting in a $250-million investment last month. That money will partly go toward the acquisition of one of its biggest competitors. Plaid announced Tuesday it was buying New York-based Quovo Inc. The deal could be worth about $200 million after performance bonuses, said three people familiar with the transaction, who asked not to be identified because terms of the deal were private. Since starting Plaid in 2012, Zach Perret has sold the startup's nine lines of code to some of the most popular finance apps. Robo-advisor startup Betterment, cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc.'s Venmo and stock-trading app Robinhood Markets Inc. have all used Plaid. Meanwhile, Quovo specializes in wealth management and brokerages. "This represents the merging of two complementary but both very important businesses," said Perret, Plaidâ(TM)s chief executive. Plaid is now valued at roughly $3 billion.

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Intel announced a major rethink of its chip design back in December, just before it finally delivers 10nm chips for PCs and laptops. At CES 2019 this week, Intel is demonstrating its first Ice Lake 10nm processor that's based on its new Sunny Cove microarchitecture. From a report: Intel is building in Thunderbolt 3, Wi-Fi 6, and DL Boost (deep learning boost) into these Ice Lake chips for laptops and PCs to take advantage of. Intel is now promising that PC makers will have devices with Ice Lake processors on shelves by the end of 2019. At its CES keynote today, Intel demonstrated ODM systems from Pegatron and Wistron, and Dell even joined Intel on stage to show off an Ice Lake-powered XPS laptop that will be available later this year. Dell didn't show the device powered on, but it appeared to be a 2-in-1 device that looked similar to the XPS 13. Intel is also looking to the future, too. The chip giant is planning to use Foveros 3D chip stacking technology to build future chips, a method that allows Intel's chip designers to stack extra processing power on top of an already-assembled chip die. These "chiplets" can be stacked atop one another to form a processor that includes graphics, AI processing, and more.

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Congo-based SYMOCEL says it had witnessed 52 "major" irregularities in the 101 of 179 vote-counting centres it observed.

Suspect says he leaked private data on politicians and others because he was 'annoyed' by some of their statements.

T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers' location data, and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country, an investigation by news outlet Motherboard has found. From the report: Nervously, I gave a bounty hunter a phone number. He had offered to geolocate a phone for me, using a shady, overlooked service intended not for the cops, but for private individuals and businesses. Armed with just the number and a few hundred dollars, he said he could find the current location of most phones in the United States. The bounty hunter sent the number to his own contact, who would track the phone. The contact responded with a screenshot of Google Maps, containing a blue circle indicating the phone's current location, approximate to a few hundred metres. [...] The bounty hunter did this all without deploying a hacking tool or having any previous knowledge of the phone's whereabouts. Instead, the tracking tool relies on real-time location data sold to bounty hunters that ultimately originated from the telcos themselves, including T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint, a Motherboard investigation has found. These surveillance capabilities are sometimes sold through word-of-mouth networks. [...] Motherboard's investigation shows just how exposed mobile networks and the data they generate are, leaving them open to surveillance by ordinary citizens, stalkers, and criminals, and comes as media and policy makers are paying more attention than ever to how location and other sensitive data is collected and sold. The investigation also shows that a wide variety of companies can access cell phone location data, and that the information trickles down from cell phone providers to a wide array of smaller players, who don't necessarily have the correct safeguards in place to protect that data. "Blade Runner, the iconic sci-fi movie, is set in 2019. And here we are: there's an unregulated black market where bounty-hunters can buy information about where we are, in real time, over time, and come after us. You don't need to be a replicant to be scared of the consequences," Thomas Rid, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University, told Motherboard. Ron Wyden, a senator from Oregon, said in a statement, "This is a nightmare for national security and the personal safety of anyone with a phone."

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