Walmart has held discussions with major media companies about including streaming entertainment in its membership service, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing three people with knowledge of the conversations, part of an effort to extend its relationship with customers beyond its brick-and-mortar stores. From a report: In recent weeks, executives from Paramount, Disney and Comcast have spoken with Walmart, the people said, as the retailer ponders which movies and TV shows would add the most value to its membership bundle, called Walmart+. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were private. It is unclear whether any of the streaming companies are inclined to reach a deal with Walmart. Disney operates the Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu streaming services; Comcast owns the Peacock streaming service; and Paramount runs the Paramount+ and Showtime services.

A Walmart+ membership, which costs $12.95 per month, includes free shipping on orders and discounts on fuel. It also includes a free six-month subscription to the Spotify Premium music service. As the streaming field gets more crowded, the biggest media companies have turned to giants in other industries to find new subscribers. Wireless providers like Verizon and T-Mobile have struck deals to offer their customers free or discounted subscriptions to streaming services like Disney+ or Paramount+ as an extra incentive to sign up. Media companies, in turn, receive an influx of new customers whose subscriptions are subsidized by their wireless partner.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In July, a video of a robot dog with a submachine gun strapped to its back terrified the internet. Now a hacker who posts on Twitter as KF@d0tslash and GitHub as MAVProxyUser has discovered that the robot dog contains a kill switch, and it can be accessed through a tiny handheld hacking device. "Good news!" d0tslash said on Twitter. "Remember that robot dog you saw with a gun!? It was made by @UnitreeRobotic. Seems all you need to dump it in the dirt is @flipper_zero. The PDB has a 433mhz backdoor."

In the video, d0tslash showed one of the Unitree robot dogs hooked up to a power supply. A hand comes into the frame holding a Flipper Zero, Tamagotchi-like multitool hacking device that can send and receive wireless signals across RFID, Bluetooth, NFC, and other bands. A button is pushed on the Flipper and the robot dog seizes up and falls to the ground. Motherboard reached out to d0tslash to find out how they hacked the robot dog. The power supply in the video is an external power source. "Literally a 24-volt external power supply, so I'm not constantly charging battery while doing dev," d0tslash said.

d0tslash got their hands on one of the dogs and started going through the documentation when they discovered something interesting. Every dog ships with a remote cut-off switch attached to its power distribution board, the part of a machine that routes power from the battery to its various systems. The kill switch listens for a particular signal at 433mhz. If it hears the signal, it shuts down the robot. Some of the Unitree robot dogs even ship with the wireless remote that shuts the dog down instantly. d0tslash then used Flipper Zero to emulate the shutdown, copying the signal the robot dog's remote broadcasts over the 433MHz frequency. Anyone with a Flipper Zero or similar device can shut down these robot dogs, thanks to the work d0tslash has shared on Github.

Cable companies are being downgraded by Wall Street analysts in response to weak broadband growth coming out of the pandemic. From a report: Cable companies have managed to stay afloat amid the cord-cutting crisis thanks to their booming broadband businesses. But some analysts see that safety net beginning to fade. Jonathan Chaplin, managing partner at New Street Research, wrote in two notes to clients that the firm has lowered its broadband subscriber estimates for the second time this year for both Charter and Comcast. "We have limited conviction in a quick recovery, given limited visibility all around," he wrote regarding Charter. "We are hoping for a turnaround later in the quarter but have low conviction," he wrote regarding Comcast. Comcast's stock slid last week after it reported flat broadband subscriber additions for the second quarter of 2022. The telecom giant was still able to increase broadband revenues, but its growth has been slowed by increased competition and more users relying on mobile hotspots and fixed wireless plans. Charter lost broadband subscribers for the first time last quarter. Executives cited customers rolling off the government's broadband subsidy program as a major contributor to its customer loss. "Excluding that headwind, we organically grew 38,000 internet customers in the quarter," Charter chief financial officer Jessica Fischer told investors.

According to a new report from ETNews, Intel is planning to install its next-generation Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) technology in devices by 2024 as Apple transitions its devices to Wi-Fi 6E. MacRumors reports: Wi-Fi 7 is the successor to Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax), bringing two times faster data processing speeds of 5.8 Gbps and more stable 6 GHz bandwidth stability, as well as support for up to 36 Gbps when working with data. Intel plans to expand its Wi-Fi 7 development efforts ahead of its introduction to the market in 2024 and intends to apply its technology predominantly in laptops before expanding to other devices. "We are currently developing Intel's Wi-Fi '802.11be' in order to obtain the 'Wi-Fi Alliance' certification, and it will be installed in PC products such as laptops by 2024. We expect it to appear in major markets in 2025," Eric McLaughlin, vice president of Intel's wireless solutions division, said at a recent press conference in Asia.

Meanwhile, Apple is on the cusp of transitioning its devices to Wi-Fi 6E. While it was heavily rumored to debut with the iPhone 13 lineup last year, Apple has yet to release any devices with support for Wi-Fi 6E. That is expected to change this year starting with the iPhone 14. Apple's long-rumored mixed-reality headset is also expected to feature Wi-Fi 6E. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said that head-mounted display devices in 2022, 2023, and 2024 will offer Wi-Fi 6/6E, Wi-Fi 6E/7, and Wi-Fi 7, respectively, but it is unclear if this information was related to Apple's product roadmap specifically. "Wi-Fi 6E offers the features and capabilities of Wi-Fi 6, including higher performance, lower latency, and faster data rates, extended into the 6 GHz band for processing speeds of 2.4 Gbps," notes MacRumors. "The additional spectrum provides more airspace beyond existing 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi, resulting in increased bandwidth and less interference."

Other tech giants like Qualcomm, Broadcom, and MediaTek are also planning to release Wi-Fi 7-based products in the next few years.

Comcast fell the most in two years after its prized internet business added no new customers last quarter, its worst performance in decades, due to a housing slowdown and heavy competition. From a report: The largest US cable TV provider had added broadband customers in every quarter since at least 2005, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Analysts were looking for around 83,000 new subscribers in the second quarter, and none of them predicted the gain would be in fact, zero. The shares slid as much as 9.9% on Thursday, their biggest intraday decline since March 2020. Rival Charter Communications, which reports earnings on Friday, dropped as much as 7.5%. "We expect the stock to face pressure absent forward-looking comments that suggest an improvement in broadband trends," New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin wrote of Comcast. As home buying slows and competition among fiber and wireless broadband providers intensifies, the prospects of Comcast and its cable peers returning to prepandemic internet growth has become more challenging.

In an upcoming update, Chromebooks equipped with mobile data will be able to serve as a Wi-Fi hotspot for other devices, just like Android and iOS devices can today. 9to5Google reports: The work-in-progress feature has made its first appearance in ChromeOS code in the form of a new flag coming to chrome://flags. The details are quite slim at the moment, with little more than the flag description available today. That said, it's easy to imagine how a mobile hotspot would work on ChromeOS, based on how the same feature works on Android phones today.

Presumably, you would be able to choose the name and password for your Chromebook's hotspot through the Settings app in ChromeOS, where you can also toggle the hotspot on and off. If it truly follows the example of Android, there would also be an easy way to turn on your hotspot through a Quick Settings toggle.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: A research team consisting of scientists from some of the top institutes in the U.S. have demonstrated a wireless technology that allows neurons in a fly brain to be controlled in less than a second, an institutional press release said. [...] Called Magnetic, Optical, Acoustic Neural Access (MOANA), the program aims to develop a wireless headset that can facilitate brain-to-brain communication in a nonsurgical manner. Jacob Robinson, an associate professor at Rice University is among the researchers working on the project, and his team has developed a method to hack fly brains wirelessly.

The research team used genetic engineering to express a special ion channel in flies' neuronal cells, which can be activated using heat. When the ion channel is activated, the flies spread out their wings, as they would do as part of their mating gesture. To activate the channel at will, the researchers then injected the experimental flies with nanoparticles that could be heated by applying a magnetic field. The genetically modified flies were then introduced into an enclosure that had an electromagnet on top and a camera to capture the movements of the flies. When the researchers activated the electromagnet, the electric field heated the nanoparticles, which activated the neurons, resulting in the flies spreading their wings, as seen in the short video [here]. Analyzing the video from the experiments, the researchers also found that the time lapse between the activation of the electromagnet and the spreading of wings was less than half a second.

Robinson is confident that this ability to precisely activate cells will be helpful in studying the brain, developing brain communication technology as well as treating brain-related disorders. The team is focused on developing technology that will help restore vision in people even if their eyes do not work. They aim to achieve this by stimulating parts of the brain that are associated with a vision to give a sense of vision in the absence of functional eyes. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Materials.

After weeks of teases, Nothing is finally announcing its debut smartphone -- the Nothing Phone 1 -- at a launch event today. From a report: Led by OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, it's the well-funded startup's second product released following last year's Ear 1 true wireless earbuds. The big news is that the Nothing Phone 1 will be sold with a modest starting price of $475 USD (though it's not getting a widespread release in the US) when it goes on sale on July 21st. $475 gets you the model with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, while stepping up to $535 gets you 256GB of storage. The model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage goes on sale later this summer for $593 USD.

Canadian telecom Rogers is suffering a major outage affecting landline phones, cellular connections, and internet connectivity throughout Canada that started early this morning. DownDetector listed thousands of reports for the issue as people started to get up around 5AM ET and couldn't get online. From a report: Rogers first addressed the outage in a tweet from its official support account just before 9AM ET, and then went silent for a couple of hours. In a statement given to The Verge and tweeted at around 11:30AM ET, Rogers said, "We are currently experiencing an outage across our wireline and wireless networks and our technical teams are working hard to restore services as quickly as possible. On behalf of all of us at Rogers, we sincerely apologize to our customers, and we will continue to keep you updated as we have more information to share, including when we expect service to be back up. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this issue."

U.S. right-to-repair advocates hoped a district judge would finally rule Friday on Massachusetts' voter-approved right-to-repair referendum. But they were disappointed again, reports the Boston Globe, since instead the judge said he'd first have to consider a recent ruling by America's Supreme Court limiting the regulatory powers of the U.S. government's Environmental Protection Agency: The Massachusetts law was approved by 75 percent of voters in a 2020 referendum. But its implementation has been held up by court challenges ever since. It would require all automakers selling new cars in Massachusetts to provide buyers with access to "telematic" data â diagnostic information â via a wireless connection. That way, car owners could get their cars repaired at any independent repair shop, instead of being forced to have the work done at manufacturer-approved dealerships.

But the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an association of the world's top carmakers, sued to overturn the law, arguing that only the federal government, not states, may enact such a rule. In addition, carmakers said that they could not redesign the digital systems of their cars in time to comply with the law's 2022 model-year deadline.

The lawsuit went to trial last summer, but the court's judgment has been repeatedly delayed. In the meantime, at least two auto manufacturers, Subaru and Kia, began selling cars in Massachusetts with their telematic features switched off, to avoid violating the law.
The state's attorney general has now granted a two-week "grace period" during which the law won't be enforced, according to the article, while the district judge "said that he expected to rule before the end of a two-week grace period."

Steve Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple, has been awarded a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Joe Biden, the White House announced Friday. The Verge reports: The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest US honor that can be given to a civilian, and it's presented to "individuals who have made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors," the White House said in a statement. Jobs founded Apple in April 1976, and it's since become one of the biggest companies in the world. He helped launch many tech products that have gone on to become cultural touchstones, including the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone. He died on October 5th, 2011.

In its statement, the White House praised Jobs's creative approach to his various endeavors. "Steve Jobs was the co-founder, chief executive, and chair of Apple, Inc., CEO of Pixar and held a leading role at the Walt Disney Company," the White House wrote. "His vision, imagination and creativity led to inventions that have, and continue to, change the way the world communicates, as well as transforming the computer, music, film and wireless industries." The award will be presented on July 7th. The full list of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients can be viewed here.

Monica Alleven writes via Fierce Wireless: So much for the "win-win-win" scenario that Dish Network envisioned for the 12 GHz band. Dish and fellow MVDDS licensee RS Access have argued that the 12 GHz band can be used by both satellite players like SpaceX's Starlink and by companies like Dish that want to use it for 5G, all for the public's benefit. SpaceX on Tuesday submitted its own analysis (PDF) of the effect of terrestrial mobile deployment on non-geostationary orbit fixed satellite service (NGSO FSS) downlink operations. The upshot: The SpaceX study shows terrestrial mobile service would cause harmful interference to SpaceX's Starlink terminals in the 12.2-12.7 GHz band more than 77% of the time, resulting in full outages 74% of the time.

Although entities like RS Access note that SpaceX has access to plenty of other spectrum to accomplish its broadband mission, SpaceX insists that the 12 GHz band has become one of the most important and intensely used spectrum bands for Americans who depend on satellite services. In fact, SpaceX said it depends on the 12 GHz band for the workhorse frequencies in critical downlink services to serve Americans "in every corner of the nation." [...] SpaceX would like the FCC to drop the 12 GHz proceeding, but Dish and RS Access have been urging the FCC for years to change the rules so that their MVDDS licenses can be used for two-way 5G services. In response to SpaceX's submission, the 5G for 12 GHz Coalition, issued the following statement: "We understand that SpaceX has -- after 18 months and both a robust comment and reply period -- just filed its own in-house technical submission to the 12 GHz proceeding. Our engineers and technical experts are reviewing the filing in depth and remain committed to working in good faith with the FCC and stakeholders to ensure that the American public is able to reap the immense benefits of 5G services in this band."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Aviation Administration says it finally has a plan for the industry to replace or retrofit airplane altimeters that can't filter out transmissions from outside their allotted frequencies. The altimeter problem has prevented AT&T and Verizon from fully deploying 5G on the C-Band spectrum licenses the wireless carriers purchased for a combined $69 billion. The FAA was urging airlines to retrofit or replace altimeters in recent months and now says it has finalized a plan. An FAA statement on Friday said that "airlines and other operators of aircraft equipped with the affected radio altimeters must install filters or other enhancements as soon as possible."

AT&T and Verizon said they will be able to accelerate 5G deployments near airports in the coming months, but the carriers agreed to continue some level of "voluntary mitigations" in the airport areas until July 2023. Altimeters are used by airplanes to measure altitude. The FAA said a new "phased approach requires operators of regional aircraft with radio altimeters most susceptible to interference to retrofit them with radio frequency filters by the end of 2022. This work has already begun and will continue on an expedited basis."

Additionally, "filters and replacement units for the mainline commercial fleet should be available on a schedule that would permit the work to be largely completed by July 2023," the FAA said, continuing: "The radio-altimeter manufacturers have worked at an unprecedented pace with Embraer, Boeing, Airbus and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to develop and test filters and installation kits for these aircraft. Customers are receiving the first kits now. In most cases, the kits can be installed in a few hours at airline maintenance facilities. Throughout this process, the FAA will work with both industries to track the pace of the radio altimeter retrofits while also working with the wireless companies to relax mitigations around key airports in carefully considered phases."

The Associated Press reports: Federal regulators say Verizon and AT&T will delay part of their 5G rollout near airports to give airlines more time to ensure that equipment on their planes is safe from interference from the wireless signals, but the airline industry is not happy about the deal. An airline industry trade group said federal regulators are taking a "rushed approach" to changing equipment on planes under pressure from the telecommunications companies.

The Federal Aviation Administration said Friday that the wireless companies agreed to delay some of their use of the C-Band section of the radio spectrum until July 2023. "We believe we have identified a path that will continue to enable aviation and 5G C-band wireless to safely co-exist," said the FAA's acting administrator, Billy Nolen. However, aviation groups say the C-Band service could interfere with radio altimeters — devices used to measure a plane's height above the ground....

Nolen said planes most susceptible to interference — smaller, so-called regional airline planes — must be retrofitted with filters or new altimeters by the end of this year. Components to retrofit larger planes used by major airlines should be available by July 2023, when the wireless companies expect to run 5G networks in urban areas "with minimal restrictions," he said. Airlines for America, a trade group for the largest U.S. carriers, said the FAA hasn't approved necessary upgrades and manufacturers have not yet produced the parts. "It is not at all clear that carriers can meet what appears to be an arbitrary deadline," trade group CEO Nicholas Calio said in a letter to Nolen....

Verizon said the agreement will let the company lift voluntary limits on its 5G rollout around airports "in a staged approach over the coming months." AT&T said it agreed to take "a more tailored approach" to controlling the strength of signals near runways so airlines have more time to retrofit equipment.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Cisco advises owners of end-of-life Small Business RV routers to upgrade to newer models after disclosing a remote code execution vulnerability that will not be patched. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2022-20825 and has a CVSS severity rating of 9.8 out of 10.0. According to a Cisco security advisory, the flaw exists due to insufficient user input validation of incoming HTTP packets on the impacted devices. An attacker could exploit it by sending a specially crafted request to the web-based management interface, resulting in command execution with root-level privileges.

The vulnerability impacts four Small Business RV Series models, namely the RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall, the RV130 VPN Router, the RV130W Wireless-N Multifunction VPN Router, and the RV215W Wireless-N VPN Router. This vulnerability only affects devices with the web-based remote management interface enabled on WAN connections. [...] Cisco states that they will not be releasing a security update to address CVE-2022-20825 as the devices are no longer supported. Furthermore, there are no mitigations available other than to turn off remote management on the WAN interface, which should be done regardless for better overall security. Users are advised to apply the configuration changes until they migrate to Cisco Small Business RV132W, RV160, or RV160W Routers, which the vendor actively supports.

Over the last day or two, there have been a growing number of reports by people who own certain Canon Pixma printers that the devices either won't turn on at all or, once turned on, get stuck in a reboot loop, cycling on and off as long as they're plugged in. The Verge reports: Verge reader Jamie pointed us to posts on Reddit about the problem and Canon's own support forum, citing problems with models including the MX490, MX492, MB2010, and MG7520. Some believe their problem is due to a software update Canon pushed to the printers, but that hasn't been confirmed yet. In response to an inquiry from The Verge, corporate communications senior director and general manager Christine Sedlacek said, "We are currently investigating this issue and hope to bring resolution shortly as customer satisfaction is our highest priority."

Until there is an official update or fix, some people in the forums have found that disconnecting the printers from the internet is enough to keep them from rebooting, with control still possible via USB. To get the printers to work while maintaining your connection to the internet and their connection to local network devices, one reply from a customer on Canon's support forum suggests a method that many people report has worked for them.

An anonymous reader writes: A team of scientists created a novel type of temporary pacemaker -- one that dissolves on its own, without requiring any removal. In their latest research, they've paired the pacemaker with a series of wireless sensors on the skin, which should allow it to smartly monitor a patient's vital signs and adjust its pacing autonomously. Should the device continue to show promise, it could one day be used in patients undergoing cardiac surgery or who otherwise only need a pacemaker for a short while.

Last year, researchers at Northwestern University and George Washington University debuted the first version of the pacemaker. [...] In their new study, published Thursday in Science, the group has added more features to their pacemaker. According to author Igor Efimov, a professor of biomedical engineering and professor of medicine at Northwestern University, the pacemaker now comes with a "fully integrated network of wearable devices" attached to a patient's skin, four in total.

These devices not only monitor a person's heartbeat and other vital signs like body temperature -- they also wirelessly power the pacemaker and control its pacing automatically as needed. Doctors can remotely monitor the data collected by the device via a computer network. And in experiments with living rodents and dogs, as well as human hearts in the lab, the pacemaker and its closed loop system seemed to work as intended.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When you use your phone to unlock a Tesla, the device and the car use Bluetooth signals to measure their proximity to each other. Move close to the car with the phone in hand, and the door automatically unlocks. Move away, and it locks. This proximity authentication works on the assumption that the key stored on the phone can only be transmitted when the locked device is within Bluetooth range. Now, a researcher has devised a hack that allows him to unlock millions of Teslas -- and countless other devices -- even when the authenticating phone or key fob is hundreds of yards or miles away. The hack, which exploits weaknesses in the Bluetooth Low Energy standard adhered to by thousands of device makers, can be used to unlock doors, open and operate vehicles, and gain unauthorized access to a host of laptops and other security-sensitive devices.
[...]
[The] attack uses custom software and about $100 worth of equipment. [Sultan Qasim Khan, a principal security consultant and researcher at security firm NCC Group] has confirmed it works against the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y and Kevo smart locks marketed under the Kwikset and Weiser brand names. But he says virtually any BLE device that authenticates solely on proximity -- as opposed to also requiring user interaction, geolocation querying, or something else -- is vulnerable. "The problem is that BLE-based proximity authentication is used in places where it was never safe to do so," he explained. "BLE is a standard for devices to share data; it was never meant to be a standard for proximity authentication. However, various companies have adopted it to implement proximity authentication."

Because the threat isn't caused by a traditional bug or error in either the Bluetooth specification or an implementation of the standard, there's no CVE designation used to track vulnerabilities. Khan added: "In general, any product relying on BLE proximity authentication is vulnerable if it does not require user interaction on the phone or key fob to approve the unlock and does not implement secure ranging with time-of-flight measurement or comparison of the phone/key fob's GPS or cellular location relative to the location of the device being unlocked. GPS or cellular location comparison may also be insufficient to prevent short distance relay attacks (such as breaking into a home's front door or stealing a car from the driveway, when the owner's phone or key fob is inside the house)." There's a few countermeasures one can take to mitigate this attack. "One mechanism is to check the location of the authenticating device to ensure that it is, in fact, physically close to the locked car or other device," reports Ars.

"Another countermeasure is to require the user to provide some form of input to the authenticating device before it's trusted." The phone's accelerometer could also be used to measure its movements.

The advisories published by NCC Group can be found here, here, and here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Researchers in China revealed they have developed a contact lens that can sense an increase in pressure within the eye and release an anti-glaucoma drug should the pressure exceed a certain level. Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team describe how they created the device using an upper and lower lens, with a snowflake-shaped pressure sensor and wireless power transfer device sandwiched between them around the rim of the lenses. The arrangement appears to give the effect of the wearer having golden irises. However, the team say the design allows the necessary components to be included in the device without blocking the wearer's view or irritating the eye.

When the pressure inside the eye increases, the gap between the upper and lower lenses decreases. This is detected by the pressure sensor by means of a cantilever. The sensor then sends a signal to the wireless system which subsequently triggers the release of an anti-glaucoma drug, from a hydrogel attached to an electrode, and enables it to cross the cornea of the eye. The drug, brimonidine, acts to reduce the pressure within the eye. The study reveals that the contact lenses have so far been tested on pigs' eyes and on the eyes of living rabbits -- albeit with smaller-sized lenses -- although trials have yet to be carried out in humans. The researchers note the lenses are not only soft and minimally invasive but are also battery-free, adding that the approach could be expanded to help tackle other eye diseases. "We can now imagine that a glaucoma sufferer wearing these contact lenses will not only receive real-time information about the pressures within the eye, since the contact lens has built-in wireless capacity and can easily communicate with an app on your smartphone, but also receive, for example, pressure-relieving drugs when needed," said Prof Zubair Ahmed from the Institute of Inflammation and Aging at the University of Birmingham. "The materials required to create such contact lenses are inexpensive and soon could be mass-produced," he added.

Sean Hollister writes via The Verge: Since 2013, AT&T has quietly bilked customers out of hundreds of millions of dollars with a bogus "administrative fee," a fee it more than doubled to $1.99 a month in 2018. For a few years there, a California class-action lawsuit made it seem like AT&T might finally get taken to task. But this week, both sides told a judge they'd settle for just $14 million -- meaning customers may get less than 10 percent of what they paid AT&T, while AT&T gets to keep on charging them. According to the proposed settlement agreement in Vianu v. AT&T Mobility -- which still needs to be approved by a judge -- just about every AT&T Wireless postpaid customer in California since 2015 will be eligible for an estimated payment of between $15 and $29.

But again, that's only a fraction of what AT&T's own records show it charged: $180 per customer on average since 2015, according to documents. The settlement "represents a refund of approximately 6-11 months of the average fees," they read. Meanwhile, the lawyers are likely to get $3.5 million. "The estimated payment amount represents a strong result for the Settlement Class, particularly given the substantial risks, costs, and delay of continued litigation," reads the proposed settlement agreement, going on to list all the ways that the lawyers suing AT&T believe that AT&T might still win the case. [...]

Oh, and you won't even get a check in the mail if you're still an AT&T customer, assuming this version of the settlement is approved. The money will be credited back to your AT&T account, where AT&T can dip its hand right back in again for that $1.99 -- or more if it feels emboldened enough to increase the fee yet again. (Admittedly, the AT&T account could be a more reliable way to make sure customers get money back.) The settlement websites can be found here.

An AT&T spokesperson issued the following response: "We deny the allegations in this lawsuit because we clearly disclose all fees that are charged to our customers. However, we have decided to settle this case to avoid lengthy, expensive litigation."