Month: October 2017

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel / Getty Images News)

Bitcoin surged on Thursday morning, blowing past $5,000 for the first time and setting a new record price above $5,200.

The rise is remarkable because there has been quite a bit of unfavorable news about Bitcoin in recent weeks. China, one of the biggest markets for Bitcoin, is shutting down trading. The Bitcoin community faces ongoing acrimony over how to scale the Bitcoin network. A contentious fork split the Bitcoin network in two in August, and there might be another schism in the Bitcoin community come November.

Finally, many experts believe that the broader blockchain world is in the middle of an unsustainable bubble. If that bubble pops, Bitcoin's price is likely to fall with it.

Enlarge (credit: Movies Anywhere)

A new service launched late yesterday promises to make streaming your favorite purchased movies easier by putting them all in one place. The new free app Movies Anywhere acts like a digital locker for the movies you've paid for through various online retailers, including Amazon Video, Google Play, iTunes, and Vudu. Signing up for a Movies Anywhere account gives you access to the digital locker, which you can then populate with purchased or redeemed movies by logging in to the accounts you have with those online retailers.

It takes a lot of behind-the-scenes work for a service like this to flourish. It's not easy to access movies you've purchased from an online retailer from another service. Typically, users have to go back and forth between Amazon, Google, iTunes, and Vudu to watch the titles they purchased through each outlet. According to a report from the Verge, Movies Anywhere can collect all those titles in one place because it's built off of the same digital rights system architecture (called Keychest) that Disney first developed for its service Disney Movies Anywhere.

Disney launched its service in 2014 and it allowed users to get access to all of the company's titles in one place. Movies Anywhere is using the same architecture with the blessing and collaborations of five Hollywood studios: Walt Disney Studios (which includes Disney, Pixar, Marvel Studios, and Lucasfilm), Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox Film, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros. Entertainment. While discussions are ongoing with Paramount Pictures and Lionsgate to join the service, Movies Anywhere will not launch with any titles from those studios. However, that still means the service has over 7,300 titles in its library already.

Warning: This post contains minor spoilers for episode one of Mr. Robot's third season, which started last night.

Mr. Robot seems to know we all need Cliff Notes at this point. Wait, what’s Stage Two again? How does this character know that character? Its Season 3 premiere largely throws audiences a bone with some table-setting, reintroducing us to the main players as they pick up the pieces in the aftermath of various Season 2 twists. Remember, the FBI snagged Darlene, Elliot got shot, Angela agreed to help The Dark Army, power outages ran rampant in NYC, et al. So resist the urge to pause and head to Wikipedia, and Sam Esmail and co. will reward you with ample in-episode reminders.

Based on last night’s first hour ("eps3.0_power-saver-mode.h"), everything still seems to be revolving around the ominous Stage Two on a macro-plot level. As we learned late last season, Elliot (well, technically Mr. Robot) devised an attack with Tyrell and the Dark Army where E-Corp's paper records will disappear via massive explosion, thus completing his anarchistic goals to destroy the digital shackles maintaining wealth inequality. It turns out the femtocell Elliot programmed for Darlene (and Angela snuck into an FBI temporary camp) didn't aspire to capture evidence of the bureau’s snooping, instead it was meant for hacking E-Corp. And now Mr. Robot/Elliot/Tyrell/the Dark Army believe they can fill a skyscraper with hydrogen and cause the transformers inside to light the fuse—Elliot’s Batman-like no-kill ethos be damned. (As an aside: that was tech advisor Ryan Kazanciyan’s favorite S2 hack and it took a week-plus to sort out, as he told us on our on-hiatus Decrypted podcast.)

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The fight to make the best all-purpose smartwatch has never been tougher. There are a number of new wearables around the $300 mark that want to be your device of choice for both fitness and all-day wear. Since fitness is still the most practical use for wearables, most companies follow the same pattern: make the best fitness device for the money and supplement it with other smart features that would be most useful to the masses.

Garmin's latest attempt to execute that plan is the $300 Vivoactive 3, a device poised to take on the $329 Apple Watch Series 3 (without LTE) and the $300 Fitbit Ionic. It has serious fitness chops—as most would expect from a Garmin device—as well as a bunch of typical smartwatch features. The stakes are high for Garmin, given the Vivoactive's price and its competition: the device must give users the best value for their money by being both a solid fitness watch and smart device, while also being unique enough to persuade prospective users away from similar devices. Some of the Vivoactive 3's fitness and smartwatch features are Garmin signatures (and can be found on other Garmin devices), but others are features necessary to keep up with the Joneses in the wearable space.

Enlarge / Look, ma: no wires! On a decent VR headset, at that! Say hello to Oculus Santa Cruz 2.0. (credit: Oculus)

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Last year, Oculus unveiled ambitious plans for a totally wireless virtual reality headset, and the idea sounded great... until we tried it. The company's "Santa Cruz" prototype was impressive enough at first blush, thanks to an "inside-out" tracking system that removed complications like wires, webcams, and tracking boxes. But our eyes-on experience was so-so at best and bumpy at worst.

What a difference a year makes.

Oculus' latest Santa Cruz prototype still has a few significant question marks, but 15 minutes of exploring, waving, throwing, and shooting, all without wires or glitches, made us start to believe that decent, wireless VR might arrive way sooner than we'd previously expected.