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Today’s topics include an AT&T offer to DirecTV customers, Intel to offer server-class processors for mobile computers, an expansion of Sprint’s “Direct 2 You” smartphone home delivery service and evidence that hackers can go online to create phony death records for someone who is still alive.
AT&T, in a big move to bolster its mobile customer base, is offering $500 in credits per line to DirecTV customers who will move their mobile services over to AT&T from a competing carrier.
The offer, which was announced Aug. 10, comes less than three weeks after AT&T acquired DirecTV for $48.5 billion in July after pursuing the merger since May 2014.
Under the $500-per-line offer, which is good through Oct. 4 for existing DirecTV and AT&T U-verse TV customers, AT&T will give a $300 bill credit for each wireless line ported to AT&T when a customer also buys a new smartphone on an AT&T Next account.
Intel is going to offer server-class processors in mobile computers. Officials with the chip maker said that mobile workstations featuring Xeon processors based on the new 14-nanometer “Skylake” architecture will begin hitting the market in the fall, aiming to give designers, content editors and engineers the compute power they need in a mobile form factor.
Sprint’s fledgling “Direct 2 You” smartphone home delivery service, which in April began delivering new smartphones to customers along with personal lessons on how to set them up and use them, is now being expanded to four more U.S. cities.
New and current Sprint customers in Atlanta, Boston, Houston and Philadelphia can now call and request a Direct 2 You visit from a Sprint representative, who will deliver their new phone and answer questions and provide advice on use and services, all at the customer’s convenience.
A new online vulnerability demonstrated at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas this past week shows how hackers can even declare you legally dead.
Among the seven most highly anticipated talks at this year’s Black Hat and DefCon security conferences, the session titled “I Will Kill You” from Australian security researcher Chris Rock, CEO of Kustodian, did not disappoint.
During his presentation, Rock outlined the process by which an individual could legally be declared dead, with an accompanying death certificate.
It’s a process that involves multiple steps that can be taken online thanks to the lack of proper forms of validation checking to ensure information authenticity.