Why would a company spend $1 billion to build a city where no one will live? Because, presumably, a lot of other organizations will pay to test their technology there.

Washington, DC-based telecommunications and defense equipment vendor Pegasus Systems devoted a reported $1 billion to build the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation (or CITE for short) in rural New Mexico. The idea is to build the equivalent of a medium-sized city, defined as big enough for about 35,000 people, but with no actual population. That way, companies with potentially dangerous technologies can test their prototypes in an actual urban environment without worrying about inflicting injury or death on innocent bystanders. This will naturally lend itself to researching connected car technology – Wired's Jeep hack from last year comes to mind – although the project's website lists several other fields of study, many of which would involve the Internet of Things. The project's website lists federal labs and university research institutions among the kinds of customers it aims to serve, but Pegasus managing director Robert Brumley told Fortune in October "the facility is open to anybody who wants to test."  

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Earlier this month, a Swedish developer named Peter Fjallstrom wrote a blog post explaining how he used a few scripts to turn Slack, everybody's favorite new collaboration app, into a tool that helps keep track of his kids, calendar, and even improves the grocery shopping process.

Fjallstrom explained that he was inspired to apply Slack to his personal life after seeing the impact it had on his team at work. So he used the free tier of Slack – available for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows and allows you to browse through the most recent 10,000 messages posted – and added a little ingenuity to help organize the logistics of a family of four.

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In a brief aside during a Senate testimony on overall national security this week, U.S. director of national intelligence James Clapper justified the privacy and security advocates who have warned of the implications of the Internet of Things (IoT) since before it was a buzzword.

"In the future, intelligence services might use the [Internet of Things] for identification, surveillance, monitoring, location tracking, and targeting for recruitment, or to gain access to networks or user credentials," Clapper said, according to The Guardian.

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In very convenient timing for Netflix, whose planned expansion to 130 new countries will require a crackdown on people who use Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to view content that is restricted in their region due to copyright, PayPal has announced that it will stop processing payments to VPN services, BGR reported today.

The reported announcement comes just a few days after one VPN service, UnoTelly in Canada, informed its users that PayPal had ceased processing payments for its customers on copyright grounds. UnoTelly called the decision an attack on "services that enable open and unrestricted Internet access." However, an Ars Technica article pointed out that UnoTelly's site claims its SmartDNS service "removes geo-blocks imposed by streaming sites and allows you to watch geo-restricted channels regardless of where you live."

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Carolina Panthers (and NFL All-Pro) linebacker Thomas Davis vowed nearly two weeks ago that he wouldn't let a broken arm and subsequent surgery keep him from playing in his first Super Bowl.

It seemed unlikely at the time, but with Super Bowl 50 just a few days away, Davis has turned to 3D printing technology to help get him and the right arm he broke in the last game he played onto the field. 3-D Elite and Whiteclouds designed and 3D printed a custom sleeve to support the metal plate and 12 screws currently holding Davis's arm together.

Whiteclouds

The companies made clear that the sleeve will be the first piece of 3D-printed equipment to be used on the field during an NFL game, but more broadly, it will probably be the best-known use of 3D printing since the first 3D-printed gun fired its first shot in May 2013.

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Comcast has made a breakthrough that could enable it to offer gigabit-speed broadband to its existing network without going through the exhaustive, and expensive, process of building out a new fiber network. 

Through this process, Comcast said it will offer a new gigabit-speed service by the end of 2016.

In a blog post published today, Comcast said it ran successful tests of what it's calling "the world's first DOCSIS 3.1 modem on a customer-facing network" at a home in Philadelphia last month. The DOCSIS standard increases the amount of data that can be transferred over existing cable TV systems, with version 3.1 capable of boosting speed to 10 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) downstream and 1 Gbps upstream. 

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The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has suspended the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign from access to its database of Democratic voter information after a staffer on the Sanders campaign improperly accessed proprietary data belonging to the rival campaign of Hillary Clinton, the Washington Post reported today.

The Sanders campaign announced that it has fired the staffer over the incident. However, the campaign has also insisted that the data in the DNC database had been exposed on other occasions during the campaign.

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Unlike some of its competitors, like Comcast and T-Mobile, which have released products that some believe violate the FCC's net neutrality regulations, AT&T was apparently forced to shelve several new products as a result of the new regulations.

Speaking at the Phoenix Center's annual U.S. Telecoms Symposium earlier this week, AT&T senior vice president Bob Quinn said that, since the FCC reclassified broadband as a utility, the company has "had to shelve a bunch of stuff because we've got to wait and see."

The new legal environment has also restricted AT&T's ability to develop new services, Quinn said at the event. 

"Since the Open Internet order came out we've had weekly calls with the business units and literally 15 lawyers who are all trying to figure out whether that stuff we've invested in ... would be a violation of the order," he said, according to a Politico report. 

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A new report sheds some light on how terrorists, particularly those with the Islamic State (ISIS) involved in last week's deadly attacks in Paris, manage to communicate in an age when most communications tools are susceptible to government surveillance.

The most interesting is how the group can use video game platforms, specifically Sony's PlayStation 4, to relay messages between members. A Buzzfeed News report quoted Belgium's federal home affairs minister Jan Jambon, who had explained at an event prior to the Paris attacks that communications on a device like the PlayStation 4 could be more difficult to monitor than those on encrypted messaging apps, such as WhatsApp.

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Donald Trump isn't much of a technophile. 

The surprise frontrunner for the Republican nomination in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election said he hadn't adopted email as late as 2007, and was only using it "very rarely" by 2013, according to The New York Times, which published these admissions among many other revealing statements Trump has made under oath in depositions over the past decade.

Trump still reads hard-copy news and magazine articles, and even dictates his oft-controversial Tweets to a team of PR underlings who send them out on his account, according to The Washington Post.

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Uber recently submitted new court filings seeking more information on an IP address believed to be involved in a hack that was made public in February, in which the names and email addresses of 50,000 of its drivers were stolen. And two anonymous sources reportedly told Reuters that the IP address points to Chris Lambert, the chief technology officer of Uber's main competitor, Lyft.

In court papers, Uber claims the Comcast IP address was used to access a security key in the breach, and is seeking more information to identify who was using the address. U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler has said that the information Uber is seeking with the subpoena is "'reasonably likely' to help reveal the 'bad actor' responsible for the hack," according to Reuters.

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AT&T recently announced a $250,000 reward to anyone with information on whoever entered its underground facilities in Livermore, California – a San Francisco suburb – and severed two of its fiber cables earlier this week, USA Today reported yesterday.

The vandalism echoes 14 similar attacks that have destroyed damaged fiber cables and disrupted internet service for customers of several service providers in the northern California region dating back to July 2014.

USA Today also reported a similar attack in late June, when "someone broke into an underground vault and cut three fiber-optic cables belonging to Colorado-based service providers Level 3 and Zayo," according to an earlier USA Today report. The FBI confirmed at the time that it was investigating connections between that attack and 11 similar outages in the region over the year prior. 

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Los Angeles Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently rejected a $60 million offer for TV rights to his team's regular-season games and is now considering launching his own over-the-top streaming network, The New York Post reported yesterday. 

Earlier this year, Ballmer turned down the $60 million per year offer from Fox Sports' regional network Prime Ticket, marking a substantial increase from its current $25 million per year, according to the report. The Post also claims Prime Ticket's exclusive negotiating period ended in June.

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A report released today shows that consumer demand for wearables in the U.S. has declined steeply and steadily since the 2014 holiday shopping season, and is now lower than it was at the beginning of last year.

Argus Insights based its report based on more than 327,000 consumer reviews to determine interest in the market over time. The research found that the wearables market was briefly captivated by the Apple Watch in September 2014, but instead gravitated toward the less-expensive Fitbit fitness band for the 2015 holiday season. Since then, however, consumers have generally lost interest in wearable devices, as this chart shows.

Argus Insights

The report acknowledged a similar dip in interest in wearables in early 2014, following a spike during the preceding holiday season, but pointed out that demand eventually rebounded, ultimately peaking by the end of the year. This year, the market for wearable devices has largely failed to recapture consumer interest.

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A team of hackers recently discovered a man-in-the-middle vulnerability in a Samsung smart refrigerator that can be exploited to steal Gmail users' login credentials, The Register reported this week.

Hackers from security company Pen Test Partners discovered the flaw while participating in an Internet of Things (IoT) hacking challenge at the Def Con security conference earlier this month. The smart refrigerator, Samsung model RF28HMELBSR, is designed to integrate the user's Gmail Calendar with its display. Samsung implemented SSL to secure the Gmail integration, but the hackers found that the device does not validate SSL certificates, opening the opportunity for hackers to access the network and monitor activity for the user name and password used to link the refrigerator to Gmail.

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A Comcast executive says the company is currently testing technology based on the DOCSIS 3.1 standard, which can transmit data at rates up to 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) in ideal environments, and is aiming to deploy the technology on a nationwide basis by 2018, according to a Fierce Cable article published last week. 

Comcast vice president of network architecture Robert Howald told Fierce Cable that the technology will enable the company to offer customers broadband speeds of 1 Gbps "and higher." From the article:

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After being accepted for an internship at Facebook, Harvard University student Aran Khanna continued to embrace the same entrepreneurial spirit that helped launch the site on the very same campus over a decade ago. Ironically, his efforts cost him his chance at working at the company.

Khanna discovered a privacy flaw in the default settings of Facebook's Messenger app for Android that automatically shared users' detailed location data. To draw attention to the flaw, Khanna launched an Android app called Marauder's Map that mapped Facebook users' locations based on their activity on Messenger in May, according to Boston.com. The app showed that the location sharing was accurate to within a three-foot distance and shared users' location data even with Facebook users they were not Friends with.

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The rise of online video streaming has made it easier than ever to watch sports. But with so many options available, how can you know that you're getting the best deal? The only thing worse than not being able to watch a big game is finding out you're paying too much to watch it.

In addition, mobile apps are incorporating more and more content beyond just the live game broadcast, from fantasy sports tracking to in-depth in-game analytics.

Here's a guide to navigating the streaming world for the 2015 football season, for both the NFL and college football.

Considerations for those sticking with cable

If you're not planning to go beyond basic cable, which will include the major broadcast TV networks as well as ESPN, there are a few things to keep in mind. 

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The news here isn't that a guy in Kentucky shot a drone mid-air as it hovered over his backyard. At this point, that's not much of a surprise. 

What is notable, however, is the comments the shooter made after being arrested for the incident. 

William Meredith was charged with first degree criminal mischief and first degree wanton endangerment this past weekend after firing a shotgun at and successfully destroying an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV, or drone) as it hovered over his yard in Hillview, Kentucky, according to local news station WDRB.

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What? You didn't think I was going to try to find some way to get in on this story?

For an all-too-brief recap: NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell recently decided to uphold the four-game suspension of New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady for destroying his cellphone, and apparently the text messages sent with it, while the league investigated claims that he had footballs deliberately deflated to give his team an advantage in last season's AFC Championship, which the Patriots won handily en route to their fourth Super Bowl championship, which occurred on the best night of my life.

Brady isn't too happy with all this, so he took to his Facebook page to issue a statement in response to this seemingly never-ending saga, denying that he destroyed his cellphone in an attempt to withhold evidence, revealing that he offered instead to provide the phone numbers of individuals with whom he communicated on the previously destroyed device, and pointing out that the league has no right to demand an invasion of privacy to a member of the players' union.

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After Wired showed two hackers remotely gain access and immobilize a moving Jeep by exploiting software vulnerabilities last week, Fiat Chrysler responded by patching the vulnerability in several Jeep, Dodge, and Chrysler models that were equipped with the Uconnect software that was hacked. How they went about issuing the patch, however, may just put the company's customers further at risk.

Rather than simply treating the software patch as a traditional recall (i.e. requiring them to visit a service center and have an expert make the fix), Fiat Chrysler is mailing a USB thumb drive to owners of the affected cars. From there, the cars' owners can plug the USB drive into the cars' USB port to patch the software vulnerability. This seems like a convenient way to issue a recall for something that car owners can fix themselves. 

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One brave Wired journalist agreed to drive a Jeep on a St. Louis highway while two hackers hacked it remotely, taking control of everything from the air conditioning to the transmission.

The entire ordeal was captured on video, which you can view with the article at Wired. 

The hackers, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, had just two years earlier performed a similar hack while the same journalist drove a car slowly in a parking lot. The bigger difference that time was that the hack was performed through a laptop that was hardwired to the car's onboard diagnostic port, and which the hackers controlled from the backseat. In that case, they limited their exploits to toying with the seatbelt and honking the horn.

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The broadband market has been rocked by a handful of major unexpected developments over the past few years, from Google suddenly stepping into the market with significantly faster broadband at much lower prices to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) removing nearly all legal barriers to municipal broadband projects.

The fallout from the FCC's ruling is beginning to gain some steam, with a 101-city coalition called Next Century Cities aiming to smooth the path for municipalities to bring affordable, gigabit-speed broadband to their cities.

See also: Inside the bold plan to bring gigabit fiber to Detroit

While the success stories are much more well-known, such as Chattanooga, Tennessee's long-running municipal gigabit fiber network, others have failed in spectacular fashion, like the city of Provo, Utah, whose municipal broadband project struggled before the city ultimately sold its existing fiber to Google for $1. This nationwide group could help provide access to information and expertise on broadband deployment to ensure the taxpayer money devoted to such a project doesn't go to waste.

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Two articles at iPhoneInCanada.ca and AlphaBeatic.com tell the story of one enterprising Canadian who takes advantage of a loophole to provide substantially cheaper wireless cell service for a one-time $100 payment.

How exactly he does it appears to be unclear, but it involves pricing discrepancies in Canada, where lower-populated provinces like Manitoba and Saskatchewan see much cheaper cell service. Basically, the scheme involves signing up for an account in one of these regions, where Canadian wireless service provider Koodo offers a 5GB monthly data plan for $48, then selling the account to people who live in more populated regions of the country, where the same plan typically costs at least $90, according to the reports.

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Since its first week on the market, during which Apple sold about 1.5 million Apple Watches, the company has seen a 90% decline in sales of its smartwatch, according to a MarketWatch article on data collected by Slice Intelligence.

On a daily basis, Apple is now selling fewer than 20,000 Apple Watch units, and occasionally fewer than 10,000, according to the report. That's down from an estimated 200,000 sales per day in the first week the device was on the market.

Slice, which often releases data on estimated sales of Apple products, also says that the lower-cost (starting at $349) Sport model has accounted for about two-thirds of Apple Watch sales. To date, Apple has sold fewer than 2,000 units of its gold, Edition model Apple Watch, which are priced at $10,000 and higher, according to the report.

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The verdict of the first known lawsuit involving the use of a firearm against a civilian's unmanned aerial vehicle – UAV, or, as most refer to it, drone – was made public this week, potentially setting a precedent for these kinds of cases. It looks like you pretty much can't shoot somebody else's drone out of the sky in public.

Motherboard spoke with Eric Joe, the owner of the hexacopter that his neighbor shot down with a shotgun last November. Now that the details of the case are available, it seems like a pretty open-and-shut case. The drone was still flying over Joe's family's property when his neighbor shot it down, and the neighbor admitted both in person and via email to having shot the drone down, but declined to pay what Joe claimed the damage was worth. The judge ruled in favor of Joe and awarded him $850 in damages, and while the Motherboard article says criminal charges are still pending, it warns that the FAA's official definition of drones as "aircraft" means that shooting at one could, technically speaking, mean a maximum penalty of a 20-year prison sentence. An attorney with a law firm that Motherboard says "has more experience in drone law than anyone else in the country" said that this case might set a legal precedent going forward:

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When one Chinese technology vendor, Qihoo, launched a new Wi-Fi router with a safety setting for "pregnant women," a rival vendor took offense to the implication that their routers might be dangerous.

The Guardian reports that Xiamo took to its page on Chinese social media site Weibo to denounce Qihoo's pregnant women mode as a "marketing tactic," and clarify that "Wi-Fi usage is safe."

"We firmly oppose, and feel ashamed of, those who create rumors and arouse instability for business purposes," Qihoo wrote in its post, according to the Guardian.

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The office of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio released results of a recent audit of Verizon's FiOS deployment in the city today, declaring that "Verizon substantially failed to meet its commitment to the people of New York City."

The report, released by the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) and available in PDF here, charges Verizon with several violations of its 2008 agreement to offer FiOS to all city residents by 2014, claiming the company "has not run fiber throughout enough of the City's residential neighborhoods to deliver on its commitments." Earlier this week, a Wall Street Journal report leaked details from the audit: that more than 40,000 requests for service from residences that had not been wired for FiOS remained unfulfilled, and that 75% of those requests had gone unaddressed for more than a year.

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The Wall Street Journal recently obtained a soon-to-be-released audit of Verizon's FiOS deployment in New York City that measures how short the company has fallen from its 2008 agreement to provide fiber-optic internet and TV service to all who requested it by 2014.

UPDATE: Verizon responds, calls New York's report on FiOS failure a 'union tactic'

The numbers are pretty staggering: 40,000 requests for service are still pending, and 75% of those have been pending for at least 12 months, according to the Journal. The full report, based on an audit conducted by New York City's Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, is set to be released later today, according to the report.

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Despite the tech industry's best efforts over the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has only slowly begun to gain a foothold in consumer markets. Consumers do, however, still represent a massive opportunity for IoT, and the companies in this space will be paying close attention to consumer acceptance of the technology.

Today, machine-to-machine company ThroughTek released results from its recent consumer survey on the IoT and smart home technology. The survey was conducted last month by research firm YouGov, and included 1,181 U.S. adults.

See also: Smart home hacking is easier than you think

Consumers appear to be growing more optimistic about the IoT in the near future. Thirty-one percent said they believe a "fully connected smart home" will be achievable in the next year, while 60% say it's possible within five years, according to the survey.

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