Month: September 2019

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  Hero shot of the third-generation Eero router. There doesn't seem to be a Beacon in this generation. [credit: Amazon / the Verge ]

Today at Amazon's Fall 2019 Devices Event, the company announced a third generation of Eero Wi-Fi mesh. Our sources at Eero have been pretty quiet since Amazon acquired the company early this February—unlike Google, who somehow manages to "leak" the new Pixel every year before its actual debut, Eero and Amazon have kept their secrets close. We weren't completely sure there even would be a new version of Eero announced today, and details are still thin, but here's what we know.

Amazon's presentation of the new generation of Eero focused largely on ease of setup and use, as it fits into the new "Certified for Humans" program. This program forces devices to pass muster with a review board of "typical consumers," with IT professionals and hardware enthusiasts specifically prohibited. There was also some discussion of Eero's integration into the Alexa smart home ecosystem, with Alexa skills allowing you to direct Eero to enable or disable Wi-Fi access for specific devices at will—think "Alexa, pause the Playstation Wi-Fi" or similar. This is currently only supported for Eero, but there's an API that will allow other devices to support the skill as well, with functionality expected in Asus and TP-Link routers later this year and Linksys to come on board in 2020.

There does not appear to be an equivalent to the Beacon in Eero's third generation—Amazon is only showing us one device, which most closely resembles the Eero Pro from last generation. If you liked the nightlight function in the second-generation Beacons, it looks like you're out of luck—but this should also mean faster 3x3 radios and hardwired Ethernet jacks in every Eero device this time around.

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  After showing someone awkwardly hold a smartphone up to have a video chat, the demo video transitioned to this: a chat where a distant friend appears in the same room.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—At the sixth annual Oculus Connect conference, a lengthy video presentation confirmed the virtual reality company's intention to build the device we've all assumed was in the works: "augmented reality glasses."

The demo video revolved around the shared Oculus and Facebook vision of contextual data appearing in the real world while a user is wearing a pair of glasses. The demo video featured pop-up reminders (movie times, calendar reminders), along with a virtual conversation with a real-life friend who appears as a realistic, 3D version (as opposed to a cartoon avatar).

Curiously, this demo video included zero visible glasses or hardware on anyone's face. Oculus made clear that its plans for this hardware mission were still quite early, and no timeline was announced.

Enlarge / President Donald Trump discusses Twitter, Facebook, and Google during a Social Media Summit at the White House in July 2019. (credit: Jabin Botsford | The Washington Post | Getty Images)

Facebook this week finally put into writing what users—especially politically powerful users—have known for years: its community "standards" do not, in fact, apply across the whole community. Speech from politicians is officially exempt from the platform's fact checking and decency standards, the company has clarified, with a few exceptions.

Facebook communications VP Nick Clegg, himself a former member of the UK Parliament, outlined the policy in a speech and company blog post Tuesday.

Facebook has had a "newsworthiness exemption" to its content guidelines since 2016. That policy was formalized in late October of that year amid a contentious and chaotic US political season and three weeks before the presidential election that would land Donald Trump the White House.

Enlarge / Blessed are the note takers.

The White House has released what a spokesperson called a "memorandum of a telephone conversation" between US President Donald Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in response to accusations that Trump attempted to coerce Zelensky into investigating a company associated with Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph Biden. In that reconstruction—which is, as per the memorandum, "not a verbatim transcript of a discussion," Trump asked Zelensky to "do us a favor" in what appears to be a reference to the investigation of the hacking of the Democratic National Committee:

The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it if that's possible.

Trump has previously referred to CrowdStrike as a Ukrainian company. The reference to the server appears to be related to a conspiracy theory that one of the DNC's servers had been hidden from the FBI. But CrowdStrike's co-founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a US citizen of Russian heritage, and the company is based in the United States and is publicly traded on the NASDAQ exchange.

In a statement to Ars, a CrowdStrike spokesperson said, "With regards to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016, we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI. As we’ve stated before, we stand by our findings and conclusions that have been fully supported by the US Intelligence community."