uStudy: Streaming Video Is Now More Than Half Of All Prime-Time Internet Trafficr

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  (Jeffrey)

  
  If you’re in the United States, and you use the internet of an evening after work, then chances are you like your Netflix. In fact, chances are you like your Netflix a lot. And millions of other Americans seem to agree with you, because Netflix is taking up a huge amount of all prime-time internet traffic in the country.

  That’s in the latest report (PDF) from internet analytics company Sandvine, which has been tracking trends in national and international data use for several years.

  Netflix by itself, the research finds, accounts for about 36.5% of all downstream internet traffic at that time of day. YouTube comes in second place, at about 15.5% of downstream prime-time traffic. That means, between those two services alone, streaming video accounts for over half of all prime-time internet traffic.

  Amazon Video and Hulu do both also barely make the top-ten list, way down in the 1.9% – 2% range. Add all four together and you’re looking at about 56% of all downstream internet traffic being video entertainment.

  Looking back over Sandvine’s reports over the past few years shows how quickly Netflix’s streaming presence has grown. In 2010, Netflix cracked the 20% mark of internet traffic, but on average viewers were streaming less than an hour of content per day.

  Now, Netflix has over 41 million members in the U.S. who each stream an average of over 90 minutes per day of TV and movies. Small wonder that adds up to so much bandwidth.

  We may not all turn on the big screen and channel surf between 8 and 11 p.m. anymore, but old habits die hard. Like our parents and grandparents before us, we’re all still spending prime time watching TV… we just have a new way to do it.

  Global Internet Phenomena Report [Sandvine]

  
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by Kate Cox via Consumerist

uVisa Sends A Warning That It Could Pull Its FIFA Sponsorshipr

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  (anekphoto)

  What a difference a week makes: Although last week it seemed Visa, Coca-Cola and other big name sponsors would stick with their sponsorships of the 2022 soccer World Cup amidst rumors of human rights abuses in host city Qatar, after multiple officials of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and several allied businesses were arrested yesterday, it seems some companies are getting cold feet.

  Visa is throwing out a yellow card, warning that it might cut sponsorship ties today, after expressing some concerns about the conditions of migrant workers in Qatar last week. The company issued a new statement in light of the arrests in Switzerland, where officials and other parties were charged with racketeering, bribery, wire fraud and money laundering, saying it expects FIFA to take “swift and immediate steps” to address its issues.

  “This starts with rebuilding a culture with strong ethical practices in order to restore the reputation of the games for fans everywhere,” it said in a statement, via the Associated Press. “Should FIFA fail to do so, we have informed them that we will reassess our sponsorship.”

  Coca-Cola also changed its tune a bit from last week, when it didn’t mention any alleged human rights issues but said it expected FIFA to sort things out. Its new view of the situation takes a harder stance than before as well.

  “This lengthy controversy has tarnished the mission and ideals of the FIFA World Cup and we have repeatedly expressed our concerns about these serious allegations,” the company said in a statement.

  Sponsors pull a lot of weight with FIFA, as they provide almost a third of its revenues, notes the AP.

  Visa becomes first FIFA sponsor to warn it could jump ship [Associated Press]

  
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by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist

uAmazon Offers Free Limited One-Day Shipping To Prime Members In San Diego & Tampa Bayr

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  (Alan Rappa)

  Sometimes waiting two days is just too long. Or at least that seems to be what Amazon is saying by offering Prime members limited free same-day delivery for some orders of $35 or more. 

  Reuters reports that in an attempt to up the ante with competitors, Amazon is now offering free same-day delivery for members of its $99/year Prime service in the San Diego and Tampa Bay areas.

  “We know same-day delivery volumes will grow dramatically now that we are making it free,” Greg Greeley, head of Amazon Prime, tells Reuters.

  The e-tailer has previously offered some same-day delivery options in 14 locations around the country. Under the current system Prime members can get the “I-need-it-now” shipping for $5.99 and non-members can get it for $8.99, plus 99 cents per item.

  The company also offers a very limited same-day delivery with Prime Now for household-type products in Baltimore, Brooklyn, Dallas, Manhattan, Miami, Austin and Atlanta. That service offers free two-hour shipping or one hour shipping for $7.99.

  Amazon’s latest free same-day shipping product comes a day after details about Walmart’s forthcoming Amazon Prime rival leaked.

  Walmart’s upcoming service, Shipping Pass, is expected to come with an annual cost of $50 and launch later this year.

  Amazon offers limited free shipping on same-day delivery orders [Reuters]

  
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by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

uDawn Shrinks Dish Soap 2 Ounces, Plasters Bottle With ‘2X More’r

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• Jill noticed that there were two different designs of Dawn dish detergent on the shelf. As a savvy consumer, she knew that sometimes a redesign can mask a strike from the Grocery Shrink Ray. Indeed, the new bottles contained two fewer ounces of detergent, yet advertise that they contain “2X More.” Wait…two times more of what?

  At first, Jill thought that this meant that the bottle has two times as much soap in it than the 9-ounce bottles. Procter & Gamble can’t think that we’re all that stupid, can it?

  

  

  

  With the help of another visit to the store and some help from her blog readers, she was able to figure out what the label is referring to. It turns out that the answer is “cleaning power,” but the bottle compares this product, Dawn Ultra, to regular non-Ultra Dawn. Is non-concentrated Dawn even on the market anymore? It’s available in dollar stores, apparently.

  Okay. So we have a “2X more” label distracting us from the slightly smaller bottles, bragging that it has more grease-fighting power than a product that isn’t actually available at Jewel, the grocery store where Jill discovered this shrinkage. That doesn’t make sense…but at least disguises the smaller size a little bit.

  More grocery shrinkage in the store aisles: Dawn advertises “2X More”… yet it dropped two ounces from the bottle. [Jill Cataldo]

  
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by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

uIRS Suspects Russian Identity Thieves In Data Breachr

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  (Jimmybionic)

  You may remember that the Internal Revenue Service announced late yesterday that about 100,000 taxpayers’ personal information was breached when thieves armed with their personal information were able to log in to the IRS transcript system and extract even more sensitive information about their victims. Today, we learned that the IRS suspects that an organized group of hackers out of Russia are responsible for the 200,000 attempts to extract taxpayer data.

  The Associated Press is reporting this based on information from IRS officials who aren’t authorized to talk to the media on the record, but who are familiar with the investigation. The thieves already had to have some information about the planned victims, since they needed personal data such as name, street address, and Social Security number to request the transcripts.

  After that, in order to generate a transcript, a person using the site would have to take a multiple-choice quiz of facts “known only to you,” as the IRS put it on the Web site. The problem: security blogger Brian Krebs reports that this information actually came from Equifax credit reports. You’ve probably run into quizzes like this during financial transactions or when requesting a credit report: “Which of these streets have you not lived on?” or “Which of these banks holds your mortgage?” Any enterprising identity thief can get hold of that information.

  There is a lot of money in tax return fraud, which explains its appeal to professional criminals. “These actually are organized crime syndicates that not only we but everybody in the financial industry are dealing with,” explained IRS commissioner John Koskinen in a press conference today.

  The goal of these criminals is to get hold of your tax refund before you do. Nationwide, fraudsters steal $6 billion in tax refunds from state and federal tax returns. The chair of the Utah State Tax Commission explained to Brian Krebs that fraudsters hit that state’s system, and apparently had copies of previous years’ tax returns to pull data from.

  AP sources: IRS believes identity thieves from Russia [Associated Press]
  IRS: Crooks Stole Data on 100K Taxpayers Via ‘Get Transcript’ Feature [Krebs on Security]

  
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by Laura Northrup via Consumerist

uJudge Upholds Gainful Employment Rule, Throws Out For-Profit Industry Lawsuitr

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  MeneerDijk

  The Department of Education’s gainful employment rules, aimed at reigning in the for-profit college industry, came one step closer to its July implementation today as a judge threw out a for-profit industry lawsuit that attempted to further weaken the upcoming law.

  Reuters reports that U.S. District Court of New York Judge Lewis Kaplan upheld the rules, putting an end to one of two lawsuits filed by the for-profit education sector intended to diminish provisions that would penalize for-profits if too many of their graduates failed to succeed.

  The Association of Proprietary Colleges filed the lawsuit last November asking a federal judge to strike down the gainful employment rule that threatens to take away for-profit colleges’ access to federal student aid if they can’t prove they provide students with adequate tools to find employment.

  In his 57-page decision Kaplan said the for-profit colleges have high student loan default rates and low graduation rates while spending a disproportionate amount of money on recruiting and marketing.

  “DOE has a strong interest in ensuring that students – who are, after all, the direct (and Congress’s intended) beneficiaries of Title IV federal aid programs – attend schools that prepare them adequately for careers sufficient for them to repay their taxpayer-financed student loans,” Kaplan wrote.

  For-profit colleges, which receive about 90% of their funding from student aid, have continually come under scrutiny for failing to demonstrate that students could find gainful employment in the fields in which they had been trained.

  Under the new rules, for-profit colleges will be at risk of losing their federal aid should a typical graduate’s annual loan repayments exceed 20% of their discretionary income, or 8% of their total earnings.

  In a statement following the ruling, Association of Proprietary Colleges, which represented 20 schools, executive director Donna Stelling-Gurnett expressed her displeasure with the outcome.

  “While we agreed with the Department’s goals for this rule from the outset, we remain steadfast in our conviction that this regulation does not achieve those goals,” she said.

  Although the judge’s decision is a bright spot for gainful employment, another for-profit industry-led lawsuit remains pending.

  The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities also filed a similar lawsuit back in November.

  APSCU claims in that lawsuit – which names Secretary of Education Arne Duncan as a co-defendant – that the rule is “unlawful, arbitrary and irrational and will needlessly harm millions of students who attend private-sector colleges and universities.”

  Judge upholds U.S. ‘gainful employment’ rules for for-profit colleges [Reuters]

  
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by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist

uApple Working On Fix For Text That Instantly Crashes iPhonesr

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  You just KNOW your cat would text you that string, if it could text. (J)

  It sounds like something out of a horror movie…if mobile phones watched horror movies. A certain string of Arabic characters, when sent to an iPhone, can crash the device and force it to restart immediately. It’s a hilarious prank, but also a nasty security flaw that could disrupt important phone calls.

  We’re not going to tell you what that string is, because we’re not evil, but the problem is in how the iPhone’s notifications handle certain characters. The issue applies to the Apple Watch as well, since the smart watch is effectively a notifications-showing device.

  The good news for people with prankster friends is that Apple is aware of the problem, admits that they’re aware of the problem, and says that they’re working on a fix. “We are aware of an iMessage issue caused by a specific series of unicode characters and we will make a fix available in a software update,” the company said in a statement to CNBC.

  That’s actually not quite accurate: people who have tested the bug found that crashes can happen in any app that can generate notifications, as long as the nefarious bit of text is in the preview that pops up on the lock screen. That means the first few words of a text message or Whatsapp message, or the subject line of an e-mail. If any of your friends or other contacts are jerks, you can turn off notifications to prevent crashes from happening.

  Apple Working on Fix for Bug That Crashes iPhones With Text Message [CNBC]

  
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by Laura Northrup via Consumerist