Verizon reaches deal with 36,000 striking workers, ending 6-week strike

Verizon and its striking labor unions reached a tentative deal on Friday, potentially ending a six-week labor dispute involving 36,000 workers.

U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez announced that Verizon and the unions have reached an “agreement in principle” on a four-year contract. He said he expects Verizon’s (VZ, Tech30) striking workers to be “back on the job next week.”

Verizon and its unions confirmed the deal but did not release specific details. However, the Communications Workers of America said Verizon has agreed to add “good union jobs” on the East Coast as part of the agreement. The CWA also said the agreement will improve the living standards of working families, and paves the way for the first contract for wireless retail store workers.

“This proves that when we stand together we can raise up working families, improve our communities and protect the American middle class.” Chris Shelton, president of the CWA, said in a statement.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers said it plans to share details on the agreement with its members in the coming days.

The deal was reached after 13 days of talks at the Department of Labor aimed at ending the impasse. Perez said the parties are working to get the deal in writing, and will then submit it to union members for ratification.

“This tentative resolution is a testament to the power of collective bargaining,” Perez said in a statement.

After working without a contract since August, Verizon union workers walked off the job on April 13. The main sticking points were complaints about poor working conditions, pensions being capped at 30 years of service and jobs getting shipped overseas.

The strike, which is the biggest in the U.S. since a 2011 Verizon dispute, mostly involved workers who service the company’s landline phone business and FiOS broadband services.

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The labor dispute has taken a toll on Verizon’s business. Lowell McAdam, Verizon’s CEO, said earlier this week it’s been harder for the company to sign up as many new customers as before the strike began.

Verizon stock has also lagged behind the broader market as well as peers AT&T (T, Tech30) andComcast (CMCSA). News of an agreement helped send Verizon stock 1% higher on Friday.

Two weeks after the strike began, Verizon said it was investigating 57 instances of network sabotage and suggested striking workers were to blame.

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Windows Tip of the week: Add a second clock to the taskbar

Add a second clock to the taskbar:

Quick: What time is it in Dublin right now? How about Sydney? Mumbai? Cape Town?

Sometimes, that question is just a curiosity. But if you or any of your regular contacts are traveling, it’s good to be able to look up a foreign time zone at a glance.

All modern versions of Windows allow you to add up to two extra clocks to the taskbar. The time you see on the taskbar is the local time zone. But hover the mouse pointer over that time and you’ll see the extra clocks you defined. Click the time to see analog (Windows 7) or digital (Windows 10) clocks for all time zones.

To add an extra clock, right-click the taskbar clock and then click Adjust Date/Time. In Windows 7, click the Additional Clocks tab. In Windows 10, click Add Clocks For Different Time Zones. Select Show This Clock, pick a time zone, and add a descriptive label for each custom clock.

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See what’s new with Macbook

A Retina display that takes everything to the edge.

The moment you open your MacBook, its gorgeous 12-inch Retina display with edge-to-edge glass brings everything into focus. Every photo leaps off the screen in rich, vibrant detail. Over 3 million pixels render each letter with crystal clarity. And it all comes to light on the thinnest Retina display ever on a Mac, meticulously honed to deliver a bold visual experience within an impossibly minimal design.

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Retina Display

A full-size keyboard.
In a fraction of the space.

We believe that a comfortable, full-size keyboard is essential for a great notebook experience. But to fit one into the elegantly thin MacBook, we had to completely rethink how a keyboard is engineered and constructed. We redesigned each key and its underlying mechanism — not only making the whole keyboard much thinner, but also allowing for more comfortable, precise, and responsive typing that just feels right.

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The trackpad, pushed even further with Force Touch.

MacBook comes with a different way to experience a trackpad. The Force Touch trackpad is engineered to deliver a responsive, uniform click no matter where you press the surface. And underneath, force sensors detect how much pressure you’re applying. You can now use a Force click to enable useful capabilities, like quickly looking up the definition of a word or previewing a file just by clicking and continuing to press the trackpad. You’ll also experience haptic feedback — a tactile vibration from the trackpad that adds the sense of touch to what you see on the screen. These advanced capabilities work in addition to all the intuitive Multi-Touch gestures Mac users love. You’ll be more in touch with your Mac than ever before. Without lifting a finger.

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Fully equipped for a wireless world.

MacBook is designed to fit effortlessly into our increasingly wireless world. Just about anything you do with a notebook can now be done over the air, thanks to Apple software that takes full advantage of the latest Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless technology. So no matter where you are, you can connect to the web, transfer files, organize your photos, listen to music, and more — without being tied down.

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USB-C.Singularly versatile.

As long as we were including a port for charging your MacBook, we wanted to make sure it was the most advanced and versatile one available. The USB-C port puts just about everything you need in a port all in one place. This amazing port provides charging, speedy USB 3 data transfer, and video output in a reversible design that’s one-third the size of a USB 3 port, giving you the flexibility to easily connect your favorite devices.

The capability to connect to everything you need.

We gave a lot of consideration to the way MacBook connects to peripherals and power. We chose USB-C for its compact design and versatility. This single port lets you connect your charger; HDMI, DisplayPort, and VGA displays; USB devices like external drives; and your iPhone or iPad. All of which goes to show that sometimes less really is more.

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A range of accessories lets you connect virtually any device to your MacBook. For instance, the USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter lets you connect your MacBook to an HDMI display, as well as a standard USB device and a USB-C charging cable.

Quietly astonishing.

MacBook has been engineered from the ground up for silent, efficient performance. It includes sixth-generation Intel Core M processors that run on just 5 watts of power, made even more efficient by optimizations throughout OS X. Together the processor and OS X sip so little energy that the system generates very little heat, so no fan is required to cool the computer. That means when your MacBook is working, you won’t hear a thing. And the logic board on which the processor sits has been painstakingly engineered to pack all the capability you expect in a Mac into as little space as possible.

Measurably faster.

MacBook features sixth-generation Intel Core m3, m5, and m7 processors with speeds of up to 1.3GHz and up to 25 percent faster graphics. It also comes with faster 1866MHz memory. So your MacBook is quicker and more responsive.

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MacBook

All-day battery life.
Now even longer.

With the slim MacBook enclosure, all-day battery life simply would not be achievable using traditional rectangular batteries. So we developed our own battery technology specifically designed to make use of every last millimeter of available space. The result is a terraced, contoured battery design that not only fits perfectly inside the incredibly slim MacBook, but also is unlike anything seen before in a notebook. And now, thanks to more efficient processors and improved battery chemistry, battery life has been extended by an hour.

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OS X

OS X is the operating system that powers everything you do on a Mac. With OS X El Capitan, it’s simple to do amazing things and delightful to do all the everyday things. And it works seamlessly with your apps and iOS devices.

Built-in Apps

Every Mac comes with apps for creativity and apps for productivity. It also comes with a collection of great apps for things you do every day, like surfng the web, sending mail and messages, and organizing your calendar. It even comes with an app for finding new apps. Your Mac is more than fully featured, it’s fully loaded.

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Pure invention.

Learn more about the
design of MacBook

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Windows Tip of the week: Move your specialized data folders to a different drive

Move Documents, Downloads, and other data folders to a different drive:

Every supported version of Windows includes a group of “known folders” for storing specific data types–Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and so on.

By default, these folders are stored on the system drive in your user profile folder, typically C:Users[username]. But you might want to move them to a more appropriate location if you have multiple physical drives. For example, say you have a relatively small SSD as a system drive (C:) on a desktop PC and a much larger conventional hard disk (D:) for data files. In that configuration, it makes sense to move your folders to the D: drive. (This procedure also works if you’ve expanded storage with a MicroSD card.)

Just open your user profile folder by entering %userprofile% in the Run box to display a list of all the folders in that location. Right-click the first folder you want to move, click Properties, and then click the Location tab. Enter the path of the location you want to use. (I created a new folder on the D: drive to hold data files, so my Downloads folder is at D:EdDownloads.)

If the folder name you entered doesn’t exist, Windows will create it. Be sure to click Yes when asked if you want to move all current data files to the new folder.

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Hacker collects 272m email addresses and passwords, some from Gmail

Security firm announces it has persuaded fraudster to give up database of email addresses along with passwords users use to log in to websites

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The internet on Wednesday gave you another reminder that everyone has been hacked.

Hold Security, a Wisconsin-based security firm famous for obtaining hoards of stolen data from the hacking underworld, announced that it had persuaded a fraudster to give them a database of 272m unique email addresses along with the passwords consumers use to log in to websites. The escapade was detailed in a Reuters article.

It might sound bad, but it is also easily mitigated.

The passwords and email addresses, which include some from Gmail, Yahoo and Russia’s mail.ru service, aren’t necessarily the keys to millions of email accounts. Rather, they had been taken from various smaller, less secure websites where people use their email addresses along with a password to log in.

People who use a different password for both their email account and, say, Target.com, won’t be affected. But those who tend to use the same password for multiple sites as well as their email should change their email password.

“Some people use one key for everything in their house,” Hold Security founder Alex Holden says. “Some people have a huge set of keys that they use for each door individually.”

Holden said there is no way for consumers to check if their emails were included in his firm’s latest find. In 2014, when his firm tried to set up such a service after obtaining a billion hacked login credentials, his site crashed.

The hacker appears to have been largely targeting Russian users. Some 57m of the email addresses were for the country’s largest email provider mail.ru, which claims 100 million monthly users. Around 40m of the addresses were Yahoo Mail, 33m Hotmail and 24m for Google’s Gmail service.

In this case, the hacker had been bragging on internet chat forums that he had a treasure trove of login credentials that he was trying to sell. Holden, who is fluent in Russian, said he wouldn’t pay for the data but would give him “likes” on various social media posts in exchange.

The hacker, who apparently is quite young, agreed. “We kind of call him the collector,” Holden says in a heavy Russian accent. “Eventually, almost everyone gets breached.”

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