Month: January 2020

Enlarge / A young child watches a laptop computer. (credit: Getty Images)

Congratulations, you're a child again! Or at least you will be one as far as YouTube is concerned, any time you happen to see a video designated as being "for kids."

YouTube announced that change in a corporate blog post today, as the platform continues to try and thread a particularly tricky needle. YouTube (and the creators who use it) want to spread content as far and wide as possible, and they want to make as much money doing so as they can—but federal law limits what data companies can collect and use from the children who watch some of that content.

The changes stem from a $170 million settlement YouTube reached with the Federal Trade Commission last September over alleged violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

We were starting to think we'd never get to see it, but 20th Century Fox has dropped the latest trailer for The New Mutants, director Josh Boone's horror-inspired film originally developed as part of the The X-Men franchise. Slated for release in April, the film has been described as a "Stephen King meets John Hughes" YA horror film, with a dash of Stranger Things for good measure. The New Mutants does indeed feel very different tonally from prior films in The X-Men cinematic universe.

It's been a long road for Boone, who first pitched The New Mutants as a potential standalone trilogy to the studio after wrapping his 2014 film The Fault in Our Stars. From the start, Boone wanted to bring a different vibe to Mutants, much like Deadpool did in 2016. But while Deadpool went for raunchy R-rated comedy, Boone wanted to explore horror in the vein of classics like Rosemary's Baby and The Shining. "There are no costumes, there are no supervillains. We're trying to do something very, very different," he told Entertainment Weekly in 2017. But Boon later confessed to some frustration at the "neutering" of his original vision by the studio, which wanted more of a YA focus.

Early screenings of Boone's original cut were positive, and the success of IT in 2017 convinced the studio to play up the horror elements it had previously wanted to de-emphasize. Several reshoots were planned but never happened, in part because of conflicts in the actors' schedules, but also because Fox kept changing the planned release date to avoid competing with other films in its stable: Deadpool 2 in 2018 and last year's Dark Phoenix.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Steven Puetzer)

AT&T, Frontier, Windstream, and their industry lobby group are fighting against higher Internet speeds in a US subsidy program for rural areas without good broadband access.

The Federal Communications Commission's plan for the next version of its rural-broadband fund sets 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload as the "baseline" tier. ISPs seem to be onboard with that baseline level for the planned Rural Digital Opportunity Fund.

But the FCC also plans to distribute funding for two higher-speed tiers: namely an "above-baseline" level of 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up, and a "gigabit performance" tier of 1Gbps down and 500Mbps up. It's the above-baseline tier of 100Mbps/20Mbps that providers object to—they either want the FCC to lower that tier's upload speeds or create an additional tier that would be faster than baseline but slower than above-baseline.

Enlarge / Expect to see an "e" tacked onto this logo somewhere in the near future, as an additional 1200MHz of spectrum becomes available to Wi-Fi 6 in the USA. (credit: Wi-Fi Alliance)

On Friday, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced a new branding for the expansion of Wi-Fi into an additional 1200MHz of unlicensed spectrum.

Dubbed "Wi-Fi 6E," the new spectrum should be made available for general Wi-Fi device use shortly; the US Federal Communications Commission proposed expansion of Wi-Fi into 6GHz spectrum in October 2018, and FCC chairman and novelty-coffee-mug aficionado Ajit Pai expressed a desire for the agency to "move quickly" (no concrete decision timeline was given) in opening up the spectrum to Wi-Fi at the Americas Spectrum Management Conference in September 2019.

What is Wi-Fi 6E?

Wi-Fi 6E is the Wi-Fi alliance's branding for accessing the proposed new 6GHz spectrum using the existing Wi-Fi 6 protocol, otherwise known as 802.11ax. The new spectrum is right next door to the 5GHz unlicensed spectrum we've all been using since 802.11n (Wi-Fi 4). That means its RF characteristics are close enough to what we're already accustomed to to require no further explanation: it'll act just like 5GHz networking already does, for the most part.