What to do when your laptop is plugged in, but the battery is not charging

When you plug in your laptop, you usually find yourself greeted with a cheerful chirp from your PC, a new glowing LED indicator light, and a display that perks up and beams a bit more brightly. At least that's what it's supposed to do. Sometimes, though, what happens instead is that you connect the AC adapter—usually because the battery is nearly drained—and you get nothing. No glowing lights. No brightened display. And no battery charging. What went wrong? Why won't it work, and what is to be done about it?

Check out the PCMag article here:

Google may offer accounts for kids, controls for parents

Children who want to use Google services may no longer have to lie about their age, as the company reportedly plans special accounts for users under the age of 13.

Try to create an account now on Google if you’re not at least 13 years old, and the Web giant will stop you in your tracks.

Currently, Google doesn’t allow users to sign up unless they say they’re at least 13 years old. That’s because the Federal Trade Commission has strict privacy rules in place for children, requiring parents to provide “verifiable consent” in the form of a credit card transaction, a phone call to a trained specialist, a printed consent form, or a scanned image of the parent’s government ID. But it’s not exactly a secret that kids will pretend to be older in order to use online services like Google.

According to both The Information and The Wall Street Journal, Google is figuring out how to best jump through FTC’s hoops. (As The Verge points out, Yahoo already offers Family Accounts, authorized through a 50-cent credit card charge.)

In addition to letting parents sign their children up, Google may provide an online dashboard so parents can keep track of their children’s activity. Google has also reportedly considered a child-friendly version of YouTube.

The news is already making privacy advocates wary. The Wall Street Journal cites Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, as saying the move will “threaten the privacy of millions of children” if Google doesn’t handle it properly.

The flip side is that proper children’s accounts are an opportunity to improve privacy, as the accounts would have to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. For instance, the law states that services providers can only collect information that is “reasonably necessary to participate in that activity.” That means providers can’t lure children with a game or quiz, and require them to fork over a bunch of irrelevant data that could then be forked over to advertisers.

Advocacy groups are right to be cautious, given Google’s past privacy missteps. But if the company can provide powerful monitoring and privacy controls for parents while complying with government regulations, legitimate children’s accounts would do more good than harm.

Google prepping a YouTube subscription plan leaks: Offline play, no ads, 20 million songs

More details have leaked about Google's upcoming subscription service for YouTube, these in the form of screenshots posted by Android Police on Monday. The service, called YouTube Music Key, will give subscribers ad-free and offline playback of YouTube videos, as well as audio-only material.

YouTube will soon have a premium tier. Labels have days to comply.

Per the screenshots, users will be able to play music on their mobile phones "with or without video, in the background, or with your screen off"—all things that the single-tasking YouTube apps could not previously do. Subscribers will also be able to play music via "YouTube Mix," a recently added feature that works similarly to radio stations on other streaming services.

A YouTube Music Key subscription provides access to a 20-million-song catalog, roughly the same size as that of Spotify and Rdio, as well as a collection of material the app refers to as "concerts, covers, and remixes." While YouTube is rife with content beyond artists' official discographies, a lot of it of legally questionable provenance, it's not clear from the screenshots how Google will decide what goes into YouTube Music Key. Subscribers to the service will also be subscribed to "Google Play Music Key" for free, which is likely a rebranded Google Play Music All Access.

Google has reportedly been at work on YouTube Music Key for more than a year, and its launch has been delayed repeatedly. Most recently, sources were reporting that Google was threatening to block music labels from its YouTube monetization program if they did not make artists' content available for both the free and premium tiers of YouTube.

YouTube Music Key still has no official launch date. According to the screenshots, the service will be priced at $9.99 per month.

Say goodbye to your "Framily", not that you knew what it was...

Sprint eliminated its "Framily" plans because they were difficult for consumers to understand and compare to other carriers' plans, David Owens, Sprint's senior vice president of product development, said at the launch of the Sharp Aquos Crystal phone on Tuesday.

Sprint threw a huge advertising and marketing campaign behind its "Framily" system, which lowered rates based on how many people joined a family plan. The strategy only lasted eight months, though. This week, after switching CEOs from Dan Hesse to Marcelo Claure, Sprint ditched Framily in exchange for a more industry-standard shared family data plan.

The new Sprint Family Share Pack offers 20GB of data plus unlimited calling and texting for $100 per month on up to 10 lines through 2015. In 2016, Share Pack owners' costs would go up by $15 per line. Sprint will pay up to $350 in early termination fees for subscribers who want to switch from other carriers.

Flop of the year? The Amazon Fire Phone

Even though there was a lot of hype around the Amazon Fire Phone, customers just aren’t buying it, at least not yet. In a survey, R.W. Baird analyst Colin Sebastian notes “muted demand” among potential smartphone buyers, especially ahead of the next iPhone launch that is reported to take place in the middle of next month. Of the 1,000 people who participated in the survey, only 5% of respondents said they would buy a Fire Phone, compared to 43.8% for an iPhone, 32.6% for Android phones (including Samsung, HTC, Nexus and others), 6.8% for a BlackBerry, and 5.3% for a Windows Phone.

Consumers just aren’t seeing the value in the Fire Phone, despite Amazon’s repeated attempts to appeal to consumers, both at the high-end and those who are more budget conscious. Right now, the Fire Phone is only available on AT&T and there aren’t many features on the phone that would make a prospective customer move away from iOS or unforked Android. Sebastian notes that the phone continues to be viewed as a “strategic complement to its shopping platform rather than a viable stand-alone alternative to Android/iOS.”

This doesn’t mean all is doomed for Amazon, it’s just going to take a bit longer than most would like. Sebastian notes that according to comScore, around 170 million people own smartphones in the U.S., with around half of those buying new phones every year. Assuming that vendors sell between 40 million to 50 million units in the second half of 2014, Amazon might be expected to sell between 2 million and 2.5 million Fire phones for the rest of the year as long as it legitimately has a 5% mindshare as Sebastian’s survey suggests.

Despite this, the Fire phone, which retails for $199 for the 32GB model on a two-year contract, may not be a complete loss for Amazon, according to Sebastian.

“However, despite the negative tone of survey results, we note that even modest device sales could provide some modest revenue upside over the balance of the year,” Sebastian writes.

Modest upside is better than no upside, even if it’s not likely to come until later this year.

It's insane how the world is connected with undersea cables

We’ve oohed and ahhed over interactive maps that detail the world’s mysterious network of undersea Internet cables, but a new report over at Builtvisible is taking things to an entirely new depth. The exhaustive account looks at the entire history of the process, ranging from experiments in the 1840s to a rash of undersea surveillance taps in the 1970s. Today, there are 263 active cables that carry upwards of 95 percent of global Internet traffic, with 22 new drops planned for the coming years.

Hungry for a few more nuggets from the report?

• Underwater cables carried 51 billion gigabytes of data per month in 2013, and that figure is expected to swell to 132 billion gigabytes in 2018.
• While 10 billion “things” accessed the Internet in 2010, Cisco expects that figure to increase fivefold by 2020.
• Currently, less than 40 percent of the worldwide population has any access to the Internet at all.
• In Africa, some 70 percent of its population has a WiFi-connected device, but only 10 percent have access to the Internet
• The planet’s least reliable undersea Internet cable? The drop between Rockport, Maine and two tiny islands just a few miles offshore. This single stretch had a staggering 45 faults between 1990 and 2005, largely attributed to the rocky sea bed below.

The entire report is well worth a read, and it’s linked below in our source section. Be sure to carve out a big lunch break if you’re looking to digest it in one fell swoop, though.