time

Apple facing FaceTime patent suit

Apple is the latest company to feel the patent infringement pinch from a firm called Intercarrier Communications.

A lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, contends that Apple's FaceTime and Messages apps violate ICC's Patent No. 6,985,748.

The patent in question refers to an "inter-carrier messaging service providing phone number only experience" and describes a method to send messages between different carriers using just a phone number.

ICC has been keeping the patent courts busy lately, according to PatentlyApple. In just the past five days, the company has … Read more

Hurricane Sandy blows down paywalls at NY Times, WSJ

Two major publications have stripped away their paywalls to give consumers unfettered access to up-to-date information on the arrival of Hurricane Sandy.

The New York Times removed its usual paywall on Sunday evening for both its Web site and its apps. Spokesperson Eileen Murphy told Poynter:

The gateway has been removed from the entire site and all apps. The plan is to keep it that way until the weather emergency is over.

The paywall -- which typically prevents users from viewing more than 10 articles for free each month -- has occasionally been removed in the past, when the situation … Read more

Watch: Time-lapse video of Endeavour's final mission

Space shuttle Endeavour's final mission may not have been its most glamorous. Trucking through the streets of Los Angeles certainly counts among the shortest trips for a spacecraft that racked up more than 25 million miles since its first launch in 1986.

But "Mission 26" may be Endeavour's most watched journey. The throngs of people hoping to get one last glimpse of the spacecraft are one of the many elements that make this visually impressive time-lapse video so moving. … Read more

iPhone 5 users complain of date and time bug

iPhone 5 users who subscribe to Verizon now have another bug to add the list.

Posting 21 pages of messages on the Apple Support Communities, a host of owners of the new iPhone say the date and time are often off, sometimes by a day; other times by as many as two weeks. So far, the problem seems specific to Verizon Wireless as many of the people chiming in say they're Verizon subscribers.

"I've had the phone for about two weeks and have noticed the time drifting slowly off by 3-5 minutes, said one person. "Tonight [… Read more

League of Legends the world's 'most played video game'

New statistics from the creator of League of Legends (and a variety of industry sources) indicate that the free multiplayer PC real-time strategy game had an average of 3 million concurrent online users in July, besting the entire combined total peak player count for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 on Xbox 360 (1.4 million) and people playing the top 100 games on Steam (650,000).

Riot Games, developer of League, also noted in an infographic that the game usually sees an average of 12 million players a day, with about 32 million active players logging in every month. Just for reference, when World of Warcraft sat at the top, it had about 12 million subscribers total.… Read more

The 404 1,147: Where life won't find a way (podcast)

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Watching "Looper" in a theater? Bring headphones.

- Science just killed any hope you ever had of "Jurassic Park" being real.

- Cameras in phones are now better than compact cameras from five years ago.

- OKCupid starts matching roommates.… Read more

Photo time capsule to last 'billions of years' in space

"When humanity disappears, a ring of dead spacecraft will remain as evidence of our existence."

That comforting thought is how nonprofit arts group Creative Time introduces a project by multimedia artist Trevor Paglen to put a photo time capsule in space, where it will orbit our planet for thousands of years, perhaps long after we've blown each other up or otherwise expired. … Read more

Q&A: MacFixIt Answers

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week readers wrote in with questions about how to roll back to a previous version of Safari after experiencing compatibility issues with a newer version, how Time Machine manages full backups in multidisk setups, and concerns about both Mail syncing errors and security with e-mail account names being shown. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Rolling back to a previous version of Safari MacFixIt reader Clark … Read more

The 404 1,143: Where Justin spent way too much on dinner (podcast)

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Fat fingers to blame for upping mobile ad clicks.

- Andreessen Horowitz invests $15 million in Web site Rap Genius.

- San Francisco's Weiner tries to ban exposed genitals.

- How New Yorkers can beat Time Warner's bullish modem rental fee.

Look who showed up at the Justin Bieber concert! (courtesy of The 404 SubReddit)… Read more

Lost Steve Jobs time capsule still missing, 29 years later

Somewhere under Aspen, Colo., a time capsule containing Steve Jobs' mouse has been sitting and waiting to be unearthed. Since 1983. And no one knows where it is.

That's what blogger Marcel Brown wrote this morning, explaining that the time capsule, known as the Aspen Time Tube and buried in conjunction with the 1983 International Design Conference there, is lost and those looking for it are facing considerable odds against success.

According to a 2010 article in the Glenwood Springs (Colo.) Post Independent, the Aspen Time Tube was buried in June, 1983, and contained a number of items, ranging … Read more