Month: November 2018

Video expert Abba Shapiro told the Associated Press that he believes the White House circulated a doctored video of an interaction between CNN reporter Jim Acosta and a White House intern.

In the above video, Shapiro walks frame by frame through the AP's unaltered clip of the incident and the clip of the incident that the White House circulated. The beginning of the clip has extra frames that would be indicative of an alteration to slow the clip down, and then the actual moment of the incident is sped up to make Acosta's actions look more aggressive than they actually were.

On Wednesday, a White House intern tried to take a microphone away from Acosta as he was asking President Trump questions that the president didn't want to answer. Acosta held on to the microphone, but how aggressively he held that microphone has been in dispute. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders accused Acosta of "placing his hands" on the intern, although the video Sanders shared doesn't appear to support this, and the Reuters reporter next to Acosta says he merely saw the reporter hold on to his microphone.

Enlarge / The Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 Palace Museum Edition. (credit: Xiaomi)

In the last few years, we've witnessed a big change to the way the smartphone market works. China has become both the biggest smartphone market on Earth and home to some of the most interesting smartphone companies. Lately, all the cool and crazy smartphones seem to be launching in China first and then maybe (or sometimes never) in the rest of the world. This includes devices like the all-screen Oppo Find X with its crazy motorized pop-up camera. Earlier, you might have had an eye on the original Xiaomi Mi Mix, the phone that kicked off the slim-bezel smartphone craze.

With the United States often taking a backseat in the worldwide smartphone market, you might be tempted to import one of these exotic foreign smartphones. You can almost always do it—either through a random Chinese smartphone site or sometimes even on Amazon.com. The question is, though, should you? Importing a smartphone will result in a number of challenges, so there are a few things to think about.

Connectivity issues

The biggest problem you'll run into is with cellular connectivity, where a foreign phone might not work on your local cellular network. Each carrier has a set of LTE bands that it operates in, and while phones sold in the US are usually careful to hit the right carrier bands, Chinese smartphones might either not work on your carrier at all or work with reduced connectivity. Droid Life has a nice cheat sheet here for US networks, and you'll need to compare that to the spec sheet of each individual phone. The general answer is that you have a chance with GSM carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile, and Verizon is getting better thanks to VoLTE (Voice over LTE) which removes the need for CDMA. You'll have a much harder time with Sprint.

Enlarge (credit: Peter KovalevTASS via Getty Images)

A federal judge overseeing the lawsuit filed against Charlie Shrem, a well-known Bitcoin investor who previously served prison time for unlicensed money transfers, ruled Thursday that Winklevoss Capital Fund cannot immediately garnish more than $31 million of his assets.

WCF, founded by the twin Winklevoss investors, alleged in a new lawsuit that nearly six years ago, they hired Shrem to purchase bitcoins on their behalf. While doing so, Shrem allegedly spirited away 5,000 bitcoins now worth over $31 million at current exchange rates. Shrem, through his attorney, has denied any wrongdoing.

Brian Klein, Shrem’s lawyer, emailed Ars on Thursday evening to say that he was satisfied with the judge’s ruling.

“We are very pleased the judge ruled in Charlie’s favor, dissolving the $30 million plus attachment order, after he heard extensive argument from both sides earlier today,” he said. “This is an important first step towards his complete vindication.”

Klein had previously argued in court filings that WCF's arguments should fail for two primary reasons: first, Shrem did not own the 5,000 bitcoins in question. As the then-CEO of BitInstant, Shrem was actually transferring them on behalf of a mysterious investor referred to as "Mr. X." It was this investor's bitcoins that Shrem claims he transferred into "cold storage," a way to preserve bitcoins in an offline wallet.

Second, WCF's lawsuit should have been brought under the relevant legal time limits of within two years of the discovery of the alleged fraud. Here, Cameron Winklevoss claimed in court papers that he "confronted" Shrem in January 2013.

In a separate order, US District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled Thursday that “Mr. X” should be referred to from now on as “John Doe" and set up a timeline for the case to proceed into next year, moving toward a possible late spring 2019 trial date, unless the case settles first.