Class Action Lawsuit Filed Over NVIDIA Falsely Advertising GTX 970 RAM

It’s a gripe I’m sure NVIDIA hoped would have blown over by now, but quite the opposite, as it looks like Big Green is facing a class action lawsuit.

The issue stems from how NVIDIA advertised the GTX 970 as including 4GB of RAM. While this is technically true, only 3.5GB is high speed, and that last 512MB is a separate slow bit. Whenever the card needs to access that last partition, performance suffers.

When gamers discovered the anomaly, it was hoped that there might be some kind of driver or software update to improve performance as the card utilized that last half a gig. Unfortunately, it would seem NVIDIA purposely designed the card this way, likely hamstringing it to distance performance from their top tier card the GTX 980. Continue reading “Class Action Lawsuit Filed Over NVIDIA Falsely Advertising GTX 970 RAM”

Lawsuit Claims Apple is Falsely Advertising iPhone Storage and Why This Isn’t That Big a Deal…

Filed on Tuesday, a class action lawsuit claims that Apple is misrepresenting and falsely advertising how much storage is available in the iPhone and the iPad. Far be it from me to to defend on Apple on a situation like this, but the media covering this story has blown a fairly common practice wildly out of proportion. The filing itself reads like it was written by someone who lacks basic knowledge of math and technology.

This is a problem we’ve been dealing with since the advent of home computing. How do we accurately report how much space is on our device?

The main issue comes down to the discrepancy between advertising and how computers are actually programmed. To grossly over simplify, you are allowed to advertise a megabyte as being equal to 1 million bytes, and a gigabyte as being equal to 1 billion bytes. Makes sense right? All those metric-y words? This is known as “decimal notation”.

But that’s NOT how your computer utilizes storage. Your computer stores info via binary powers of 2. Your computer treats 1,048,576 as a megabyte and 1,073,741,824 as a gigabyte.

So if we do a little math, the outside of the box claims the iPhone has 16GB, in that it has sixteen billion bytes on board. But iOS will use that in binary compatible chunks. Those same 16 billion bytes will be reported to the operating system as 14.90 GB out of the box before you slap an OS on the device. Have a “32GB” phone? The OS will report that as 29.80GB when it’s totally empty.

The larger the pool of storage, the larger the chunk of data you lose via this advertising hijinkery. Have you cracked open a hard drive recently? Sure you can buy a box which claims to 4TB packed inside, but your computer will report that as 3.64TB. You didn’t “LOSE” this data, you did receive 4 trillion bytes, but your computer doesn’t use a storage device like that. It has to cluster them, so it looks like you’ve lost some 360GB, when you haven’t.

This practice is so common that pretty much every hard drive and flash memory manufacturer has some link in their respective FAQ’s that explains this very phenomenon. Here’s Seagate’s for example.

apple iphone ipad storage class action lawsuit chartThe chart being used in this class action suit is conflating the difference between decimal notation (1MB = 1,000,000 bytes) and binary notation (1MB = 1,048,576 bytes) to make it look like Apple is trying to do something nefarious, and to make it look like iOS has eaten up significantly more space than it actually has.

If we want to talk about bloat, I think Samsung customers have more reason to complain as the first batch of “16GB” Galaxy S5’s were delivered with less than 10 binary gigabytes available to the user depending on carrier. Samsung took more than 30% of the available storage for the OS, pre-installed apps, and partition.

What I hate most about this situation is that it forces me to defend Apple here. We do have an issue with how products are advertised, and it’s a problem we’ve had since the first storage devices were built into PC’s. What’s not going to help us explain this situation to consumers is screwing up the math being used to demonstrate the problem.

The problem here isn’t with Apple being “stingy”. It’s with an entire industry and how it advertises its products.

Can a Corporation Commit Homicide?

gm-logo_100168934_mI try not to get too political on this blog, when I do I try to focus on the tech industry. Recently however, an interesting case made a little noise, and I’m curious how my readers feel about it.

You’ve no doubt heard of General Motors recent issues with faulty ignition switches installed in GM cars which have caused at least 54 accidents and 13 deaths. It was a difficult case for the courts to sort as the GM we have today didn’t technically carry the liability of the company which existed before the auto bailouts. The NHTSA determined that GM delayed reporting the problem and ordered the company to pay out a $35 Million civil penalty.

However, prior to this penalty, individual accidents have already been judged. In 2004 Candice Anderson was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide after a collision which took the life of her fiance. Though she had no drugs or alcohol in her system, she was determined to be at fault. She plead guilty to the charges to get a reduced sentence, thankfully not serving any jail time, but she has a felony conviction on her record.

With GM in the news, she recently discovered that GM counted her fiance’s death as one of the 13 lives lost due to these faulty ignition switches.

Continue reading “Can a Corporation Commit Homicide?”

Apple Working on iMessage Fix for iPhone Expats

iphone android windows phoneThe problem: If you started with an iPhone and linked your phone number to iMessage, if you decide to move to a Windows Phone or an Android, messages from your friends sent through iMessage will be delayed or rejected.

Whether it’s a bug or an actual punitive measure taken by Apple, it’s frustrated a number of former iPhone users, upsetting one woman enough to file a class action lawsuit.

That apparently garnered enough press to motivate Apple to act. They’ve now set up a support page, detailing the best way to deactivate iMessage, and they’ve now publicly stated that they’re working on a proper fix for the issue for people who decide to switch from iDevices to competitor’s products.

Have you been affected by this iMessage glitch? Drop us a comment below!

Samsung, Apple, Lawsuits, and Consumer Fatigue

samsung appleBy now you’ve probably seen that a Californian Jury has handed down their decision in the most recent legal saga between Samsung and Apple. Who was the big winner?

Nobody.

Neither side really came out ahead. Sure Apple was awarded more money, but both sides walk away with a mere fraction of what they wanted. Apple claimed Samsung infringed on five patents covering covering functions such as slide-to-lock, universal searching, quick linking, automatic word correction and background syncing. They were asking for $2.2 Billion, and the jury awarded them $120 Million. Samsung claimed Apple had infringed two of its camera patents, one related to video compression and transmission, and asked for $6 Million. It was awarded $150,000. Continue reading “Samsung, Apple, Lawsuits, and Consumer Fatigue”

Amazon settles eBook Antitrust Lawsuits with credits for customers

amazon ebook anti-trust emailIf you’re an Amazon Kindle customer, chances are pretty good you got an email from them today about your eBook purchasing history, with a nice little surprise.

In December 2013, a federal court approved legal settlements by publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Penguin in antitrust lawsuits filed by State Attorneys General and Class Plaintiffs about the price of eBooks. Those settlements resulted in credits for qualifying Kindle books purchased between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012.

Depending on how many eBooks you’ve purchased, you’ll be issued credits for future Amazon eBook purchases, but that credit is only good for 90 days.

You can catch more info, and if you have any credits waiting for you, on Amazon’s settlement page.

Appeals Court Rules Against FCC’s Open Internet Order and Net Neutrality

FCCI’m disappointed, but I can’t say I’m terrifically surprised.

Back in September Verizon filed a claim against the FCC’s Open Internet Order, claiming the FCC was infringing their First Amendment rights to degrade the quality of service for their competitors services and products. In today’s ruling, it seems the courts largely questioned the FCC’s authority to manage broadband networks.

That said, even though the Commission has general authority to regulate in this arena, it may not impose requirements that contravene express statutory mandates. Given that the Commission has chosen to classify broadband providers in a manner that exempts them from treatment as common carriers, the Communications Act expressly prohibits the Commission from nonetheless regulating them as such. Because the Commission has failed to establish that the anti-discrimination and anti-blocking rules do not impose per se common carrier obligations, we vacate those portions of the Open Internet Order.

Not all of the OIO was scrapped however. The section dictating that carriers must disclose when they throttle or degrade service remains, as there were plenty of instances to draw upon where carriers had acted to disrupt services. So now Verizon can wreck a competitor’s service, but at least now they have to let you know they did it. How helpful.

In support of its conclusion that broadband providers could and would act to limit Internet openness, the Commission pointed to four prior instances in which they had done just that. These involved a mobile broadband provider blocking online payment services after entering into a contract with a competing service; a mobile broadband provider restricting the availability of competing VoIP and streaming video services; a fixed broadband provider blocking VoIP applications; and, of course, Comcast’s impairment of peer-to-peer file sharing that was the subject of the Comcast Order.

That might be the most frustrating aspect of how our telecommunications networks are being managed. The courts acknowledge that abuse has occurred, and is likely to occur again, but because the FCC hasn’t been explicitly granted authority to regulate the web, we’re stuck with a gaping hole in online consumer protections.

Where do we go from here?

There’s not a lot of wiggle room for the OIO. It’s pretty much wrecked. If the Legislative arm of our government were to make the FCC’s authority in this arena explicit, we could revisit those protections. However, I think it highly unlikely that there will be any traction on granting a government commission more regulatory authority in this political climate.

There’s also the Consumer Choice in Online Video Act presented by Senator Jay Rockefeller, which reads like a watered down version of the OIO. It might be a decent stop gap measure, but House Republicans have been holding it up, refusing a vote. This industry will need something more robust to insure that the internet remains a level playing field. At some point we’ll need to just admit that allowing telecoms to manage our access to the internet and prioritize their own services over competitors, is a glaring conflict of interest. In the long term, it will be bad for consumers and bad for business.

Today’s ruling stands as yet another example of how the evolution of our technology is rapidly outpacing our legal system’s ability to adapt. You can read the ruling below. Continue reading “Appeals Court Rules Against FCC’s Open Internet Order and Net Neutrality”

Have you heard of the Typo iPhone Keyboard Case? Because Blackberry is suing them…

typo iphone keyboard case ryan seacrest blackberryMaybe one of the dumbest things BB could do right about now…

I’m tied into tech and the Typo iPhone case barely made a blip on my radar. It’s a case with a hardware QWERTY keyboard designed for iPhone 5/5S. There’s nothing particularly special about that. There have been a number of keyboard solutions for the iPhone over the years, some portrait, some landscape sliders.

It’s sort of an “old fashioned” idea that many people will poo-poo anyway as there seems to be a collective hatred of hardware keyboards from the self-proclaimed “Tech Elite” on the intarwebs.

Here’s a video showing the Typo off:

About the only novel aspect of Typo was the fact that it was backed by Ryan Seacrest of all people. No. Big. Whoop.

That is until Blackberry went and stepped their foot in it.

Delivered via press release, BB Chief Legal Counsel Steve Zipperstein had this to say:

“This is a blatant infringement against BlackBerry’s iconic keyboard, and we will vigorously protect our intellectual property against any company that attempts to copy our unique design. From the beginning, BlackBerry has always focused on offering an exceptional typing experience that combines a great design with ergonomic excellence. We are flattered by the desire to graft our keyboard onto other smartphones, but we will not tolerate such activity without fair compensation for using our intellectual property and our technological innovations,”

Would the Typo have been a success on its own? Backed by Seacrest, probably yes, but I still have significant doubts that it would have been high mind share. Regardless of the legal outcome, Blackberry just guaranteed that it’s going to show up in a lot more headlines now. You just can’t buy that kind of publicity…

typo iphone keyboard case profile ryan seacrest blackberry

Full BB PR after the jump.

Continue reading “Have you heard of the Typo iPhone Keyboard Case? Because Blackberry is suing them…”