Month: October 2019

After four days of mounting public pressure, Blizzard Entertainment took a late Friday opportunity—8:30pm ET, where press releases go to die—to partially undo its ban on three members of the Hearthstone esports community for making statements in support of Hong Kong.

The outright ban applied to professional Hearthstone player Ng "blitzchung" Wai Chung has since been changed to a six-month suspension from official Hearthstone esports tournaments. The original decision to strip him of the associated tournament's prize money has been reversed.

Additionally, the two Chinese broadcasters who interviewed (and possibly egged on) blitzchung during his shout of "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age!" had been fired; they too have had their punishment changed to a six-month suspension from their jobs as official Hearthstone esports "casters."

A scientist hires a down-on-his-luck riverboat captain as her guide on an Amazon adventure in Jungle Cruise, a forthcoming Disney film inspired by the classic Disneyland theme park ride. Yes, Disney's ride-inspired films have largely been forgettable apart from the hugely successful Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. And yes, the trailer does seem eerily similar to the 1999 film The Mummy in many respects, with a soupçon of Tomb Raider thrown in for good measure. It also looks like good old-fashioned escapist fare, a perfect summer offering.

Emily Blunt plays Lily Houghton, a scientist who is keen to locate the Tree of Life somewhere in the wilds of the Amazon. It's purported to hold "unparalleled healing powers." She's already located a mysterious arrowhead she believes is the key to unlocking those powers, and now she just has to find the tree. Her younger brother McGregor (Jack Whitehall) accompanies her on the mission, and they hire a colorful riverboat captain, Frank (Dwayne Johnson), to guide them.

Frank is a bit on the shady side, manufacturing all kinds of fake thrills on his standard riverboat cruise to delight (and sometimes disgust) his clients. He's in this for the money—and his price for guiding Lily and McGregor tends to fluctuate along with their fortunes. "All the while," per the synopsis, "the trio must fight against dangerous wild animals and a competing German expedition." Not to mention, there might also be some kind of mythical cursed creature standing in their way.

Enlarge / iPadOS.

When we reviewed the 2018 iPad Pro, we were impressed by the power and potential of the hardware, but iOS 12 wasn’t up to the task of making the iPad a true content creation machine or a daily workhorse. We said it was time for Apple to branch out from iOS 13 with an iPad-specific operating system.

Just one year later, that’s exactly what Apple has done with iPadOS, which launched for modern iPads a few days after iOS 13 hit the iPhone and iPod touch. While iPadOS does not actually signify that big of a change under the hood, its new nomenclature is a statement of intent by Apple. This release takes strides toward making the machine more useful for power users who want to do more than just browse the Web, play games, watch videos, and write an email or two.

So as we've tinkered with iPadOS recently and analyzed the changes Apple made, we revisited the question we answered with a negative last year: is the iPad ready to replace your laptop?

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aurich)

Telecom companies like AT&T love creating new fees to tack on customer bills, and they really love raising those fees after customers sign contracts that are supposed to lock in a consistent price.

It's a win-win for the company, but not the customer: AT&T gets to advertise a lower price than it actually charges and has a mechanism for raising customer bills whenever it wants to. Customers who are angry enough to cancel service would have to pay early termination fees.

This story about AT&T thus isn't likely to surprise anyone, but it's possible you haven't heard about the particular fee we've been looking into this week. AT&T has been charging business Internet customers a "property tax" fee, claiming it needs to charge the fee to recover AT&T's own property taxes. AT&T has been charging the fee for at least a couple of years and just hit customers in California with an increase that more doubled the fee.

Ridley Scott's timelessly evocative sci-fi/horror mashup Alien celebrated its 40th anniversary this year, so what better way to mark the occasion than with an in-depth documentary exploring the film's origins? Memory: The Origins of Alien does just that, with a mythological twist: Director Alexandre O. Philippe has framed his narrative around how certain films (like Alien) tap into our collective unconscious, particularly our most deep-seated fears, and this new documentary makes some surprising—and thought-provoking—connections in the process.

On Alien and film docs

Alien grossed between $100 million and $200 million worldwide upon its release in 1979. Critical reviews were initially mixed, but the film snagged an Oscar for best visual effects—the gross-out chest-burster scene and H.R Giger's nightmare-inducing designs for the various alien life cycles alone were worthy of the honor. Now, of course, the film is considered a classic. The American Film Institute ranked it the seventh best science fiction film of all time in 2008. And naturally it spawned an equally lucrative franchise of sequels, none of which have ever quite achieved the same level of artistic vision. (I'd argue that James Cameron's 1986 sequel Aliens came close, though.)

The film's success was all the more remarkable given that it was released just two years after Star Wars: A New Hope, more of a classic space opera action film. Alien was darker, moodier, grittier, and more constrained. Much of the action takes place aboard the spaceship Nostromo, with doomed crew members getting picked off one by one by the monster in fine horror-trope fashion. Meanwhile, Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley challenged conventional gender roles in both genres, transcending the stereotypical Final Girl to become the ultimate nerd-culture icon.

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  The Pixelbook Go. Does this look like any other laptop you can think of?

Google's October 15 hardware event is fast approaching, and in addition to the launch of the Pixel 4, Google Home Mini 2, Google WI-Fi 2, and a new pair of Pixel Buds, the show should see a new Pixelbook arrive. We've known the new Pixelbook would be called the "Pixelbook Go," but other than a few details from Chrome OS commits the device has mostly been a mystery. Google takes its title as "least secretive device manufacturer" very seriously, though, and recently 9to5Google managed to just get a Pixelbook Go ahead of the event. They took a bunch of pictures and video.

Unlike the fairly unique design of the original Pixelbook and the Pixel Slate, the Pixelbook Go mostly just looks like a MacBook. 9to5Google got that vibe from the device in person, too, writing: "We can’t fathom that this laptop won’t immediately be labeled 'Google’s MacBook.'" The one unique design aspect is the bottom, which is a brightly colored, ribbed pad that covers the entire bottom of the device. This device is a near-final prototype, with placeholder logos and product names.

The report doesn't nail down the material used to build the laptop (aluminum?), but it does say the laptop has "what appears to be a painted on coating similar to that of the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL." The Pixel 2 was a metal phone with a thick coating of paint on top, but this time the finish seems to be smoother and softer.

Enlarge / Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau is disguised as a mountain climber, while hiding in a trash can, in a scene from the film 'The Pink Panther Strikes Again', 1976. (Photo by United Artists/Getty Images) (credit: Getty | Michael Ochs Archives)

While the government may be considered Big Brother, a team of researchers in California are officially that parent.

The researchers resorted to snooping through high schoolers’ trash to get a better understanding of their vaping and smoking habits. The results of the “garbology” study appear in the October 11 issue of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The gumshoes—Jeremiah Mock and Yogi Hendlin of University of California, San Francisco—scanned the parking lots and perimeters of 12 public high schools in the San Francisco Bay Area between July 2018 and April 2019. They picked up any trash related to e-cigarettes, combustible tobacco products, and cannabis products that they suspected litter-bug teens left behind.