Month: November 2018

Enlarge (credit: Eliot Peper)

I'm not proud of it, but it's true: I read the bulk of Eliot Peper's latest sci-fi thriller, Borderless, over multiple trips the bathroom. It probably deserved drawn-out sessions in a fireplace-adjacent armchair or at least an airplane ride with a cheap mixed drink at the ready, but hey.

Given all of the demands on my time, both personal and professional, I found that there are ever-diminishing opportunities to sit down and read and honest-to-goodness, dead-tree book.

Like most of you, I do a ton of reading—nearly all of it on a computer screen, or more likely, my iPhone. I'm reading news, Twitter, and a never-ending deluge of emails. I've nearly excised Facebook from my life and have long-deleted Instagram from my phone. For me, havin the discipline to engage with a book is often a challenge.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

The tech industry is obsessed with making things thin, and Acer is no exception. The company bills the new Swift 7 as the world's thinnest laptop, measuring 8.98mm thick at its widest point. Designed for professionals and frequent travelers, this year's Swift 7 tries to beat its competition by being ultra-thin and by fixing some of the problems found in its older models, like the lack of touchscreen, keyboard backlight, and PCIe SSD storage.

But as devices get thinner, they often have to sacrifice performance, battery life, and other important features. It begs the question: what's the optimum balance of extreme slimness and power? Ultimately, that's up to each user and their individual needs. Acer's Swift 7 makes some concessions that those who value performance won't appreciate, but it's all in the name of thinness—and there are some choices that prioritize that above all else.

Look and feel

The Acer Swift 7 may be incredibly thin, but it doesn't feel fragile. Its 2.6-pound (1.18kg) weight almost betrays its thinness because I expected the device to be much lighter than it actually is. But it's not too heavy, and its weight and dimensions should make it quite easy to carry around.

Enlarge / Gab's mascot is a cartoon frog. (credit: Cam Miller)

Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro is probing Gab's relationship with its new domain name provider, Epik. A subpoena sent to Epik, dated Wednesday, seeks "any and all documents which are related in any way to Gab."

In a statement to Ars, Gab described the investigation as a "baseless, political, and emotionally-driven witch hunt."

Gab has been in the news recently because the perpetrator of last month's mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue appears to have been a Gab user. Gab's strong free-speech policies have made the site popular with antisemites whose hate speech isn't welcome on mainstream social media platforms. An account with the same name as the shooting suspect has featured a number of antisemitic Gab posts—including one posted just hours before the shooting.