Month: July 2016

Hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang is EFF's newest client. (credit: Pauline Ng via Wikimedia)

Since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) became law in 1998, it has been a federal crime to copy a DVD or do anything else that subverts digital copy-protection schemes.

Soon, government lawyers will have to show up in court to defend those rules. Yesterday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit (PDF) claiming the parts of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that deal with copy protection and digital locks are unconstitutional.

Under the DMCA, any hacking or breaking of digital locks, often referred to as digital rights management or DRM, is a criminal act. That means modding a game console, hacking a car's software, and copying a DVD are all acts that violate the law, no matter what the purpose. Those rules are encapsulated in Section 1201 of the DMCA, which was lobbied for by the entertainment industry and some large tech companies.

It’s not really realistic to expect any new Moto G to live up to the first one. That phone offered decent specs and prompt Android updates for a third of the price of most flagships, and the cheap-but-usable Android phone segment wasn’t as healthy in 2013 as it is now. It was the right phone for the right price at the right time, and no subsequent upgrade has quite nailed the same combination (though the third-generation model was a nice effort).

Now Motorola is owned by Lenovo, and a lot of the stuff that made the Google-owned Motorola a darling of reviewers (namely, prompt updates and good phones that weren’t obsessed with specs and superfluous features) is gone. Bear that in mind as we evaluate the Moto G4 and G4 Plus—they retain many of the selling points that made the first Moto G so good, but not quite all of them, and they’re no longer the cheapest decent phones you can buy even if they are still decent budget options.

Look and feel

I really like the design of both Moto G4s, which is sleeker and less chunky than Moto Gs of years past (but unlike the Moto Z, they don’t do anything dumb like removing the 3.5mm headphone jack for no reason). The bulgy back is gone, but the phone is still curved around the edges in a way that’s comfortable to hold. And the lightly textured, rubberized plastic back is nice to touch and easy to hold. It won’t go slipping out of your hands.

Something wrong, captain?

The newest Star Trek film—if you're counting, it's the 13th in the series and third in the reboot timeline—opens with a modern take on the '60s TV series' Tribbles. A tribunal of CGI creatures, which look like a cross between Muppets and the Murloc specimens from World of Warcraft, surround James T. Kirk and argue over his latest diplomatic gesture. It's classic Trek. Kirk wheels and deals, making sense of a newly discovered world, and he clearly keeps one eye out for plan B. He's a modern conquistador, flashing a smile and proving likable when the weird scene doesn't pan out his way.

It's a good start for Star Trek Beyond. But if you find yourself hating the film by its end, you can blame this opening—a cute, energetic, and personality-loaded scene when isolated—for getting your hopes up about Justin "Fast & Furious" Lin's first directorial take on Trek. More so than the other reboot films, Star Trek Beyond does the series a great disservice by focusing on the known and thus leaving discovery, personality, and stakes in the dust.

Live long and plot-less

After the opening sequence plays out, Kirk narrates in his captain's log about feeling bored with the day-to-day Enterprise grind. It's his 966th day on a five-year, deep-space mission, and he says it's "a challenge to feel grounded in zero gravity." (He also complains about life feeling "episodic," the first of the film's many on-the-nose quips.)