Month: February 2019

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Back in December, Samsung took the stage at one of its Chinese product launches and announced it was partnering with "Supreme," the popular skateboard fashion brand. The announcement was made with all the usual tech launch pomp and circumstance, with the CEO of "Supreme" coming on Samsung's stage to talk about the collaboration. The only problem: this was a Supreme counterfeiter called "Supreme Italia."

The announcement was met with widespread ridicule online, as "Samsung the Apple copycat" had teamed up with a Supreme copycat. Samsung initially defended the deal, but after seeing the online reaction, the company started "reconsidering" its counterfeit collaboration. Now, two months after announcing the deal, Samsung is walking away, according to a translation from Engadget China.

Samsung Electronics had previously mentioned a collaboration with Supreme Italia at the Galaxy A8s China launch event on December 10th, Samsung Electronics has now decided to terminate this collaboration.

It was never really clear what the "Samsung x Fake Supreme" collaboration was supposed to produce, but now we'll never know. With the deal dead, Samsung can now focus on more important matters, like the upcoming launch of the Galaxy S10 later this month.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Getty)

Facebook turned 15 on Monday, and founder Mark Zuckerberg is feeling defensive about his creation's public image.

"As networks of people replace traditional hierarchies and reshape many institutions in our society," Zuck wrote in a Facebook post, "there is a tendency of some people to lament this change, to overly emphasize the negative, and in some cases to go so far as saying the shift to empowering people in the ways the Internet and these networks do is mostly harmful to society and democracy."

Zuckerberg employed one of his favorite rhetorical tricks for defending Facebook: conflating Facebook with the Internet as a whole. It's true, as Zuckerberg writes, that the Internet has made the world more connected and that this has had a lot of positive consequences (as well as some negative ones).

Enlarge / A Leopard Seal appears to roll around laughing while resting on sea ice. (credit: David Merron Photography | Getty Images)

As any parent who has sifted through their offspring’s bowel movements in search of something that shouldn’t have been swallowed in the first place can tell you, coins, magnets, and even small plastic toys can survive a voyage through the digestive tract. It turns out that USB thumb drives can as well, at least when the pinniped digestive system is involved.

Researchers in New Zealand are looking for the owner of a USB thumb drive that was discovered in a frozen seal turd—specifically, that of an Antarctic leopard seal. According to the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, volunteers working with an organization devoted to studying leopard seals and educating the public about them collected and froze the seal scat in November 2017.

When it comes time to see what the leopard seals had for dinner, seal stool samples are thawed and then sifted. “You put it under the cold tap, get all the gross stuff off, smoosh it around a bit and separate the bones, feathers, seaweed ,and other stuff,” Jodie Warren, a volunteer with leopardseals.org, told NIWA.

Enlarge / A smartphone with AT&T's "5G E" network indicator. (credit: AT&T)

AT&T's misleading "5G E" network indicator for 4G phones, which was rolled out to some Android smartphones last month, has now come to iPhones in a beta version of iOS 12.2.

AT&T customers who installed the second beta of iOS 12.2 "are noticing their iPhones displaying a '5G E' connection to AT&T's network," MacRumors reported yesterday. 9to5Mac and other news sites provided details on the change, and people on Twitter posted screenshots of the 5G E indicator.

Of course, there is no 5G iPhone yet, and AT&T does not offer 5G mobile service for smartphones. AT&T's 5G E stands for 5G Evolution, but it's actually 4G LTE, albeit with advanced LTE features 256 QAM, 4x4 MIMO, and three-way carrier aggregation.

Enlarge / No red pandas were harmed in the making of this image, I promise. (credit: Aurich / Getty)

Last year, Chrome introduced changes to try to prevent the persistent nuisance that is pages that automatically play noisy videos. Next month, Firefox will be following suit; Firefox 66, due on March 19, will prevent the automatic playback of any video that contains audio.

Mozilla's plan for Firefox is a great deal simpler, and a great deal stricter, than Chrome's system. In Chrome, Google has a heuristic that tries to distinguish between those sites where autoplaying is generally welcome (Netflix and YouTube, for example) and those where it isn't (those annoying sites that have autoplaying video tucked away in a corner to startle you when it starts making unexpected sounds). Firefox isn't doing anything like that; by default, any site that tries to play video with audio will have that video playback blocked.

Firefox users will be able to grant autoplay audio permission on a site-by-site basis.

Firefox users will be able to override this block on a site-by-site basis, so those sites where autoplay is inoffensive can have it re-enabled. This permission is automatically extended to sites that have previously been granted access to microphones or webcams, so that audio and video communications apps built using WebRTC will work as expected. Firefox will also allow muted video to play back automatically.