AT&T To Cease Offering 2-Year Contracts Starting From January 8 Onwards

AT&T is terminating its two-year plan beginning from January 8. The country’s second-biggest wireless carrier is stopping its standard contract plan in which customers had to pay a fixed price for obtaining a phone as wells as couple of years of wireless service. Substituting the earlier plan is a program known as Next in which users rent their smartphones by paying a monthly fee. After a certain number of monthly payments, users can trade in the smartphone for a new one. Alternatively they can own the phone by making monthly payments in 18-24 months. The old type two-year plan will be restricted to business customers.
Hence AT&T customers cannot purchase an entry-level new smartphone outright. They have to pay a monthly charge now. Also they have to shell out fees for voice as well as data wireless service.
The change has both advantages and disadvantages. Customers need not enter into contracts. They exercise more control on the service as they have the option to get the devices faster if they want. They can switch from AT&T to another company if they are not satisfied by AT&T’s services. The change is not good for users who obtained new phones at a onetime price rather than having a monthly payment program.
AT&T first terminated 2-year contracts with its 3rd party stores last sense. So it is only logical that its official stores implement the same.
An AT&T spokesman said that many of its customers were opting for its Next program. Reasons for such a step were no charges applicable for qualified users, opportunity to upgrade earlier and down payment choices existing, with low monthly installments. Previously in this year, AT&T reported that 30% of its customers had adopted the Next program.
The 2-year contracts will remain applicable for tablets, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, mobile hotspots and devices. They will still be applicable for customer IRU accounts as well as CRU accounts which are classified as business/corporate accounts.
AT&T’s move to get rid of two-year contracts really isn’t unexpected, given that the rest of the wireless industry has done so, shifting on to installment plans, where the total price of the smartphone is split into monthly fees on top of a smartphone plan.
T-Mobile Us Inc (NYSE:PCS) was the first carrier in the wireless industry to ditch contracts over two years ago. Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE:VZ) and Sprint Corp (NYSE:S) did the same this year, and now AT&T is finally doing it.

AVG Chrome extension created security risk for millions of users

You’d like to believe that a company that develops security software wouldn’t be shipping software that makes its users less safe. That wasn’t the case for AVG’s WebTuneUp extension for Chrome, however.
What, exactly, is Web TuneUp? Well, it doesn’t make websites load faster or improve your browser’s performance, as the name implies. It’s actually a search “enhancement.” I put that in quotes, because it’s up to interpretation whether what Web TuneUp does actually enhances anything.
Install the extension, and it flags questionable search results that happen to pop up. Google, of course, already does some scrubbing of search results and Chrome has built-in protection against malicious sites. Still, with 9 million users AVG’s done a good job of convincing people that they need the extra protection they say Web TuneUp provides… or at least a good job of sneaking it in during the installation of their antivirus software, which is used by more than 200 million people.
When Google reported the existence of a gaping flaw that appeared trivially easy to exploit and exposed users’ browsing history and hindered Chrome’s malware-checking abilities, they hoped AVG would move quickly to patch it up.
To their credit, they put together a fix and pushed it to the Chrome Web Store within four days of Google security engineer Tavis Ormandy’s initial report. They failed to take care of a potential man-in-the-middle vulnerability, though, and had to push a second update the next day after additional prompting from Ormandy.
As of today, the issue has been closed. That’s certainly good news for Chrome users that are running Web TuneUp, though it might not be a bad idea for those folks to just head to their extensions page and remove it entirely.

VW’s Global Vehicle Sales Decline as Diesel-Motor Recalls Loom

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  Deliveries of VW brand vehicles fell 4% on Russia, Brazil
• Group's European market share was the lowest since March

Volkswagen AG’s namesake car brand reported a 4 percent decline in global sales last month amid a scandal over cheating on diesel-emissions tests.
Deliveries at the VW brand, which is at the center of the crisis, fell to 513,500 cars from 534,800 a year ago, the Wolfsburg, Germany-based company said Friday in a statement. The drop at Volkswagen’s largest unit contributed to a 1.5 percent decline in group-wide sales to 885,300 vehicles in September.
Drops were sharpest in Russia and Brazil, where recessions are causing vehicle markets to shrink, while growth in Europe trailed competitors as the company prepared to recall 8.5 million vehicles with rigged diesel engines. Volkswagen’s U.S. market share also narrowed.
VW has been battling to repair its image after admitting to deliberately rigging diesel engines to circumvent emissions regulations. The manufacturer’s recall is one of the biggest ever in Europe. German regulators are forcing the company to fix affected cars, which total as many as 11 million vehicles worldwide.
Volkswagen’s registrations in Europe rose 8.3 percent in September, while the overall market expanded 9.8 percent, the Brussels-based European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, or ACEA, said Friday. The owner of the VW, Audi, Skoda and Seat car brands accounted for 23.3 percent of the region’s auto sales last month, down from 23.7 percent a year earlier. It was the company’s weakest showing since March, and the decline may have been slowed by rebates.

Volkswagen's Loosening Grip on Europe's Car Market

“While we are wary of drawing conclusions from data captured only a few weeks after the emissions scandal, we suspect dealers may be resorting to discounts to compensate for any decline in sentiment from consumers,” Kristina Church and Charles Coldicott, analysts at Barclays Plc, said in a report this week. The manufacturer “experienced a noticeable uptick in discounting” in Germany in September.
Volkswagen’s group sales fell 44 percent in Brazil and 26 percent in Russia. In China, the manufacturer’s biggest market, deliveries slipped 0.8 percent in September.