Month: November 2017

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list includes the return of a great deal on Sony's PlayStation Plus online service, which is typically a must if you own a PlayStation 4. You can tack on another 12 months of service for $40 as of this writing, a good ways off from Sony's usual $60 going rate.

Beyond that, we've got a variety of deals on laptops (particularly of the Dell variety), TVs, Amazon's kid-focused Fire tablets, and more. You can take a peek at the full list below.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Enlarge / Taylor Swift performing onstage in in Houston, Texas. (credit: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for DIRECTV)

Lawyers representing pop star Taylor Swift sent a cease-and-desist letter to a politics and culture blog, demanding the retraction of an article tying Swift to white supremacist culture. But instead of removing the article, PopFront editor Meghan Herning called the ACLU, which wrote back to Swift's lawyers defending Herning's right to free speech.

The back-and-forth was revealed yesterday by the ACLU's Northern California branch, which published the retraction demand letter (PDF). The ACLU did so despite the demand by Swift's lawyers that their threats be kept secret because publishing the letter without permission would be "a violation of the Copyright Act."

"Intimidation tactics like these are unacceptable," said ACLU attorney Matt Cagle in a statement. "Not in her wildest dreams can Ms. Swift use copyright law to suppress this exposure of a threat to constitutionally protected speech."

Enlarge / A Charter Spectrum vehicle. (credit: Charter)

The Federal Communications Commission is intervening in a court case in order to help Charter Communications avoid utility-style consumer protections related to its phone service in Minnesota. The FCC and Charter both want to avoid a precedent that could lead other states to impose stricter consumer protection rules on VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone service offered by cable companies.

The FCC has never definitively settled the regulatory status of VoIP. By contrast, traditional landline phone service and mobile phone service are both classified as "telecommunications services" by the FCC, a distinction that places them under the same Title II common carrier regulatory framework that applies to broadband Internet access. But the FCC has never decided whether VoIP services offered by cable companies are telecommunications or "information services," which aren't as heavily regulated.

The Minnesota Public Utilities Commission (MPUC) hoped to fill this regulatory void by trying to re-impose utility rules on Charter's Spectrum phone service. (Charter used to be subject to Minnesota's utility rules but evaded them starting in 2013 by transferring its phone customers to a different subsidiary.) Minnesota wants Charter to collect fees from customers in order to contribute to state programs that help poor people and the hearing-impaired access telephone service. Customers should also be able to appeal to the MPUC in the event of disputes with Charter, the state regulatory body says.

Enlarge / This dark oil is the pure concentrated form of cannabis extracted in numerous different ways. (credit: Getty | NurPhoto)

With 29 states and the District of Columbia having now legalized medical marijuana, many consumers are trying out various types of extracts containing cannabidiol (CBD)—a relatively safe, non-addictive component of marijuana that does not generate a “high” and has shown potential for treating a variety of conditions, including pain, anxiety, and epilepsy.

But those buying CBD extracts online may not be getting what they signed up for, according to new research.

In a study of 84 CBD products sold by 31 companies online, blind testing found that only about 31 percent of them contained the amount of CBD listed on the label (within +/- 10 percent). And some of the products contained other components of marijuana that were not listed on the label, including Δ-9-tetrahydrocannabibolic acid (THC), the psychoactive component of marijuana that does generate an intoxicating high.

Some Marvel fans may shed a tear or two today. (credit: Marvel Entertainment via knowyourmeme.com)

Longtime Marvel comics writer Brian Michael Bendis surprised fans of the medium today with a simple tweet:

This is real. I love you all. Change is good. Change is healthy. I am bursting with ideas and inspirations. Details to come! Stay tuned DOCPm8KUMAIXHXY.jpg

— Brian Michael Bendis (@BRIANMBENDIS) November 7, 2017

Bendis has switched teams, so to speak, agreeing to an exclusive deal with DC Comics, according to io9. As Comics Foundry founder and Entertainment Weekly Creative Director Tim Leong put it, this was the comics version of Kevin Durant opting to join the Warriors.

Bendis had been working with Marvel since the beginning of the century. He wrote for virtually all the big franchises: Amazing Spider-Man, Daredevil, and The Avengers, plus Ultimate versions of X-Men and Fantastic Four. While he had worked with DC characters before (see the 2007 collection Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told, Volume 2), Bendis has long become synonymous with the Marvel universe.

Enlarge / The Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

It's a new month, and that means a new security update for Android. The November Android security patch is out, and this is more noteworthy than most with its fix for the high-profile key reinstallation attack (KRACK). It also puts some Band-Aids on the newly released Pixel 2 phones.

Google actually released three "November" security patches last night. First there's the normal "2017-11-01" security patch, which contains all the monthly patches developed on the regular schedule. OEMs get these fixes a full month in advance (so early October in this case), and Google lets the bugs sit around for a whole month, allowing OEMs to port the patch to their phones. A month later, Google discloses the bugs and (theoretically) does a simultaneous release with the Android OEMs and carriers.

Anything higher than the "20xx-xx-01" release exists because Google needed to target a particularly nasty bug in the middle of the month and fast track it through the release system. In this case, we have the "2017-11-05" and "2017-11-06" releases. While the 11/5 patch was mostly about fixing a critical Qualcomm bug, it's the 11/6 patch that will get the most attention, since it patches the KRACK Wi-Fi vulnerability.