Month: March 2018

Enlarge / Three of the main characters in The Director and The Jedi. (credit: Disney / Anthony Wonkie / SXSW)

Warning: The Director and The Jedi is a film about the making of The Last Jedi, therefore this review contains potential spoilers for the most recent Star Wars film.

AUSTIN, Texas—It may come with resources you can’t find anywhere else, but helming a Star Wars film is no walk in the park. To start, it involves sky-high expectations, continent-spanning production schedules, and perhaps unrivaled levels of fan obsession (including possible Russian social accounts lobbying for General Hux to live, seriously). The House of Mouse now also looms over everything, inevitably demanding a certain box office bottom line.

That’s a daunting task for even the most established of Hollywood creators—but it’s especially herculean for a relatively unknown filmmaker. And that evidently made Rian Johnson’s intergalactic debut with The Last Jedi the perfect opportunity for a full-length behind-the-scenes documentary, The Director and the Jedi.

Valentina Palladino

A new Fitbit smartwatch is ready to keep last year's Ionic company in the device family lineup. Today, Fitbit announced the new Versa smartwatch, a thin-and-light metal wearable that runs on Fitbit OS. The longtime king of fitness devices knew it needed to expand into the smartwatch category, and it started that evolution last year with the debut of the $299 Ionic. But the Ionic ultimately replaced the Fitbit Surge, which was the most high-tech and comprehensive fitness watch the company made at the time. Not everyone needs such a powerful device, and that's where the new Versa comes in—it's a smartwatch that mixes smart functions with important fitness features to (hopefully) reach a wider audience than the Ionic.

In the short time I had with the new Fitbit Versa, I was struck at how light it is. While Fitbit didn't provide the exact weight of the Versa, the company did note that the Versa is its lightest device to date. The Versa is quite comfortable to wear, but it also doesn't feel flimsy thanks to its all-metal, rounded-square case. Its case comes in black, gray, and rose gold colorways, as well as special graphite and rose gold editions that come with two band options instead of one. Like other smartwatches, the Versa is compatible with a number of silicone, leather, woven, and metal bands made by Fitbit.

Enlarge / A Transportation Security Administration baggage screener inspects an electronics device as a man is screened in the background at the international terminal of San Francisco International Airport August 5, 2003 in San Francisco, California. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California has sued the Transportation Security Administration, alleging that the agency has improperly withheld documents and other materials that would shed light on warrantless searches of digital devices at airports prior to purely domestic flights.

This lawsuit, which is meant to compel the TSA to fully respond to a Freedom of Information Act request, is related to another lawsuit (Alasaad v. Duke) brought by the ACLU to better understand such searches that happen when Americans return home from abroad.

"The federal government’s policies on searching the phones, laptops, and tablets of domestic air passengers remain shrouded in secrecy," said Vasudha Talla, staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, in a Monday statement.