OnePlus is importing the new model into India because it claims that current quality requirements put a damper on local production efficiency.
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Apple wants to sell its iPhones directly to consumers. It's working on factories with a partner firm, but it wants permission to sell cheaper phones.
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T-Mobile continues its crusade against taxes and fees, giving existing and new customers back 11.2 percent of the price of any new smartphone.
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Don’t call it a tax, call it a fee for pornography. And if you buy a computer of any sort that connects to the internet, — hello, smartphones, tablets and maybe even wearables — then you might have to pay up soon.
The South Carolina General Assembly is looking over a draft of a bill that would require device manufacturers and retailers to either install a filter program that blocked out pornography or pay $20 per unit without the filter — adults who desire to seek pornography on a filtered device would pay the government that fee to have it removed. Proceeds would go to a state task force battling against human trafficking.
Representative Mike Burns authored “The Human Trafficking Prevention Act,” which is on the agenda for the assembly for the coming year. He believes that watching pornography leads to a slippery slope of behavior that can turn criminal.
“If your device comes and it’s predisposed, first, to filter out this kind of stuff, you wouldn’t see some of the stuff that normally a kid or an adult could be able to see,” Burns said.
A bloc of upstate legislators have backed the bill, which is pre-filed, but not on the docket for the upcoming session.
“This is a way to preserve freedom, not raise taxes and combat a serious problem all in one,” said Representative Bill Chumley, one of the amendment’s supporters.
The filter would block out material dubbed obscene by state and federal definitions and would also have a flag-down system for people to use if they come across unblocked obscene material.
Burns and Chumley are both Republicans in the Republican-controlled Palmetto State. The national party issued a crusade against porn as part of its platform this year.
Pornography, with its harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying the lives of millions […] We urge energetic prosecution of child pornography, which is closely linked to human trafficking.
Utah has deemed pornography a “public safety hazard.”
Opposition to the bill is pushing against what it considers an act of government overreach in terms of not only free speech, but also interstate commerce in imposing a burden not set by any other state or federally.
The government mandate of material filtering combined with the shaky definition of obscene subjects as well as the possibility for user-conspired abuse that would block otherwise “safe” subjects is also of concern.
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The journalistic paradigm of referring to national governments by their capitals carried over to our little techie circle of blogging. What’s Redmond doing? Who are we talking about in Seoul? How about Cupertino?Maybe we should stop this practice.Cupertino Mayor Barry Chang confessed to The Guardian today ...
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One thing we haven’t had to worry about in the US was paying taxes to get onto the big ‘ol Internet. And we may never have to worry about it.The Senate has passed a trade enforcement bill in a 75-20 vote, one that contained the Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act. It made permanent a recurring moratorium on state-levied taxes affecting Internet bandwidth, content and other factors. The last one was signed in 1998 and was to expire this October.Lawmakers ...
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“We are breeding the cow and they are milking it.”The first-ever internet adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin believes the country is being taken advantage of by US tech companies and local lawmakers are only letting them get away with it. German Klimenko wants the madness to end.In a 90-minute interview, Klimenko gave a rhetorical performance rivaled only by
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