Month: March 2019

Enlarge / Screenshot from an AT&T commercial. (credit: AT&T)

Sprint is warning customers not to be fooled by AT&T's "fake 5G" claims.

One month after suing AT&T, Sprint took out a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times to spread the word that AT&T's "5G E" is really just 4G. The ad takes the form of an open letter and begins:

Dear wireless consumers,

While Sprint is working hard to deliver mobile 5G and the first 5G smartphone in the US, AT&T is hard at work trying to convince you that they already won the race to 5G with something they call "5G Evolution." That is simply untrue.

Don't be fooled. 5G Evolution isn't new or true 5G. It is fake 5G. They would love for you to believe they are different... better. The truth is AT&T is simply offering customers a nationwide 4G LTE network just like Sprint and all the other major wireless carriers. It's not 5G.

We filed a lawsuit against AT&T demanding that they immediately end their false and deceptive marketing campaign.

AT&T seems to be delighted by the depth and breadth of their deception. AT&T admitted that the company's 5G E advertising is strictly a narrative to outline how they want the world to work—not a reflection of today's reality.

Sprint's open letter repeated its own misleading claim that it needs to merge with T-Mobile in order to deliver a robust nationwide 5G network. Still, Sprint said it plans to offer "real mobile 5G in nine major metro areas" by this summer, regardless of whether the merger is approved.

Enlarge / This is a person or a photo of a person? The Galaxy S10 can't tell. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Here's another friendly reminder that, if your Android phone doesn't have some kind of special hardware for face unlock, the feature probably isn't very secure. The latest phone to implement face unlock with nothing but the normal front camera is the Galaxy S10, and users across the web are reporting that the feature is easily confused or defeated.

There are a number of reports that say—surprise!—a 2D image sensor can be fooled by a 2D image. The Verge was able to unlock the device with a video, and YouTube channel Unbox Therapy was able to unlock the S10 just by playing one of its public channel videos in view of the camera. The worst example is probably from AndroidWorld.it, which was able to unlock the Galaxy S10 by waving a still photo around in front of the device.

The Galaxy S10 can also reportedly have trouble telling different people apart. Security Researcher Jane Wong was able to unlock her brother's phone with her face.

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  At the most zoomed-out level, every Artifact match begins like this: with three lanes of combat, across which you will arrange five heroes in a mission to destroy towers. Sure sounds a lot like how Dota 2 works, doesn't it? (Not shown here: the "flop" of your creeps that are randomly added and arranged between every round.)

Richard Garfield, the legendary game designer behind Magic: The Gathering, says he has been laid off from Valve as part of a recent modest downsizing effort at the company. The move comes as Artifact, Valve's Dota 2-based card game which Garfield worked on closely, struggles to find a continuing audience.

"We weren't surprised by the layoff considering how rocky the launch was," Garfield told Artifact-focused site Artibuff. "The team was enthusiastic about the game and were confident that they had a good product, but it became clear it wasn't going to be easy to get the game to where we wanted it."

Garfield goes on to suggest that a smaller Artifact team makes some sense now that the game has been launched and that Valve has probably already maximized the value to be gleaned from Garfield's contract company, 3 Donkeys.