Month: July 2019

Over the last 19 years, Director Adrian Lyne's 1990 art house psychological thriller, Jacob's Ladder, has garnered a strong cult following for its unusual camera work, surreal nightmarish visions, and infamous twist ending. So it was a bit surprising to learn a few years ago that a remake was in the offing. Judging by the first trailer, this reboot is more of a re-imagining, preserving some of the original elements while offering a fresh twist ending.

The original Jacob's Ladder, released in 1990, starred Tim Robbins as Vietnam medic Jacob Singer, whose unit is attacked in 1971. Watching his comrades fall, Jacob flees into the jungle and gets a bayonet in the stomach for his trouble. He awakens in a New York City subway, and finds he's now living in Brooklyn with his girlfriend, with no memory of how he got there. But he is increasingly haunted by terrible hallucinations, sudden onset high fevers, and occasionally finds himself in an alternate reality with his first wife and young son, Gabe, who'd been killed in an accident before the war. Is it side effects from an experimental army drug known as "the Ladder," or something more sinister and supernatural?

The 2019 remake is intended to be more of an homage, bringing the story into a contemporary setting with fresh characters, and similar themes. Per the official synopsis, "After losing his brother in combat, Jacob Singer returns home from Afghanistan — only to be pulled into a mind-twisting state of paranoia. Singer soon realizes that his sibling is alive but life is not what it seems."

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  Samsung's invitation. [credit: Samsung ]

Samsung has officially announced the launch event for its next flagship smartphone. Galaxy Unpacked 2019 takes place August 7 at 4pm ET, when the company will show off the Galaxy Note 10 in all its glory.

Samsung sent out invitations to the press today for Galaxy Unpacked, and the invite leaves no doubt as to the star of the show: the Galaxy Note's trademark S-Pen points straight at a camera lens.

So far our best look at the Galaxy Note 10 has come from renders made by Onleaks. Since then, a set of extra-blurry photos of the Note 10 has popped up that matches up with the renders. Both the photos and the renders show an aggressively rectangular body with curved displays images. Samsung's front camera still lives in a hole punch, but this time it's centered along the top edge, instead of being tucked away in the corner. Samsung seems to have also given up on the dual front cameras that shipped on the Galaxy S10+, opting instead for a single front camera.

Enlarge / Artist's impression of wireless hackers in your computer. (credit: TimeStopper/Getty Images)

Researchers have exposed a network of Facebook accounts that used Libya-themed news and topics to push malware to tens of thousands of people over a five-year span.

Links to the Windows and Android-based malware first came to researchers’ attention when the researchers found them included in Facebook postings impersonating Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, commander of Libya’s National Army. The fake account, which was created in early April and had more than 11,000 followers, purported to publish documents showing countries such as Qatar and Turkey conspiring against Libya and photos of a captured pilot that tried to bomb the capital city of Tripoli. Other posts promised to offer mobile applications that Libyan citizens could use to join the country’s armed forces.

According to a post published on Monday by security firm Check Point, most of the links instead went to VBScripts, Windows Script Files and Android apps known to be malicious. The wares included variants of open source remote-administration tools with names including Houdina, Remcos, and SpyNote. The tools were mostly stored on file-hosting services such as Google Drive, Drobbox, and Box.

Enlarge / Rowan Atkinson is Capt. Edmund Blackadder and Hugh Laurie is the dimwitted Lt. George in Blackadder Goes Forth, the fourth season set during World War I. (credit: BBC)

The BBC's quirky-yet-classic 1980s comedy series, Blackadder, might finally have a long-hoped-for fifth season, according to British tabloid reports. However, such rumors have circulated before, and there's been no official announcement confirming the news just yet.

I have long adored this oddball series and have frequently revisited the episodes via DVD over the years. (It doesn't take long; there are only six episodes for each of the four seasons, plus a handful of specials.) The show follows its protagonist, one Edmund Blackadder (played to perfection by Rowan Atkinson), through different historical eras in England: the Middle Ages, the Elizabethan era, the Regency era, and World War I.

Blackadder starts out as a bumbling prince (the younger son to King Richard IV) and proceeds to become both smarter and lower-ranking as the seasons progress: a nobleman in Queen Elizabeth I's court in season two, a butler to the Hugh Laurie's foppish, dimwitted Prince Regent in season three, and a captain on the Western Front in season four. He is a knight in The Cavalier Years special and a shopkeeper in Blackadder's Christmas Carol, a Dickens parody set in Victorian England.

Enlarge / Jony Ive speaks onstage during the 2017 New Yorker TechFest in New York City. (credit: Brian Ach/Getty Images)

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal published a report describing the years and events leading up to design chief Jony Ive's recently announced departure. Among other things, it claimed Ive had become increasingly disengaged from the company and its design teams after Steve Jobs' death, in part because of his frustration with a new, emerging Apple leadership that focused more on operations than design.

In the wake of that report, Apple CEO Tim Cook—who had allegedly frustrated Ive with his lack of interest in product design, the story's sources claimed—emailed NBC News and MSNBC Senior Media Reporter Dylan Byers calling the story "absurd." Cook said its "conclusions just don't match with reality" and claimed that it "distorts" the events described. Byers then claimed on Twitter that a Wall Street Journal spokesperson told him "the paper stands by its report."

The story "is based on conversations over more than a year with people who worked with Mr. Ive, as well as people close to Apple’s leadership," the Journal says. It claims that Ive clashed with other members of the company's leadership over the positioning of the Apple Watch, which he saw as a fashion-focused product. Meanwhile, unnamed leaders saw it as an extension of the iPhone, and they came to feel that the company had lost its focused on design as key senior roles were stacked with operations and business-focused personnel.

Enlarge / The flight path for One More Orbit's journey around the world. (credit: One More Orbit)

As a veteran of three spaceflights (including a stint as commander of the International Space Station), former NASA astronaut Terry Virts has orbited the planet more than 3,400 times. Now, Virts said, he'd like the make "one more orbit" around the planet and possibly set a world record in the process.

Virts and the founder of a consultancy business named Action Aviation, Hamish Harding, are leading an effort to travel around planet Earth, via both poles, from July 9 through July 11. The current speed record was set in 2008 when a Bombardier Global Express jet made the journey at an average ground speed of 511mph.

The present-day record attempt will be attempted in a smaller jet: the Gulfstream G650ER aircraft has a range of more than 7,500 miles before needing to be refueled. The aircraft is capable of reaching Mach 0.925 and can sustain a velocity of Mach 0.85.

Enlarge / Morpheus, aka Dream, aka the titular Sandman, is one of seven beings known as the Endless in Neil Gaiman's seminal graphic novel series. (credit: YouTube/DC Comics)

Author Neil Gaiman is a hot property these days, between the STARZ adaptation of American Gods and the massive success of the TV adaptation of his novel with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, on Amazon Prime. Now comes news via The Hollywood Reporter that Netflix is also jumping on the Gaiman bandwagon. The streaming giant is reportedly making a major financial commitment to adapt the Sandman graphic novel series for television.

For many of us, the Sandman comics were our first introduction to the prolific Gaiman's work. It's his re-interpretation of an earlier DC comics character. The titular "sandman" is Dream, but he is also called Morpheus, among other names. He is one of seven entities known as the Endless, and he has emerged from a long imprisonment to set right his past mistakes. (The other Endless are Destiny, Destruction, Despair, Desire, Delirium, and Death, portrayed as a perky punk/goth young woman—they became almost as popular as Dream himself and were featured in several spinoff comics.)

Gaiman's 75-issue revival of the character are an odd mix of mythology, fantasy, horror, and history, rife with literary references and a fair bit of dark humor. There really is nothing quite like it, and the series proved to be hugely popular—and enduring. One standalone story, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (The Sandman No. 19) even won the 1991 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction, the only time a comic has been so honored.