Month: January 2020

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is back, delivering another bewitching brew of horror, magic, and the occasional high school hijinks. After a slightly uneven second season, season 3 is an expertly paced thrill ride, as Sabrina grapples with romantic entanglements, daddy issues, and an infernal challenge to her hellish birthright. In the process, Sabrina reveals that it is ultimately a show about power: specifically, who gets to have it, and the consequences of not wielding one's power responsibly.

(Spoilers for first two seasons below; only minor spoilers for S3. But there is one major S3 spoiler below the embedded video; we'll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

The series is based on the comic book series of the same name, part of the Archie Horror imprint, and it's much, much darker in tone than the original Sabrina the Teenaged Witch comics. Originally intended as a companion series to the CW's Riverdale—a gleefully Gothic take on the original Archie comic books—Sabrina ended up on Netflix instead. Showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (who also worked on Riverdale) has cited classic Satanic horror films like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist among his influences. As I wrote in 2018:

Enlarge / Nearby Sharing in action.

Google is working on a wireless local file sharing feature for Android along the same lines as Apple's Airdrop. While it isn't out yet, XDA's Mishaal Rahman got an early version of it up and running on a few devices, as it's currently dormant in versions of Google Play Services that are out in the wild.

It works about how you would expect a Google version of Airdrop to work. The first user taps Android's Share menu and picks the new "Nearby Sharing" option. Other users in earshot of the feature get a notification pop-up saying that a file is waiting to be received, and then both the sender and receiver confirm they want to start the transfer. The setup happens over Bluetooth, and then the heavy lifting of the data transfer happens over Wi-Fi.

There's some confusion as to what this feature will actually be called. XDA's version of Google Play Services calls the feature "Nearby Sharing," but other builds call it "Fast Share." Whatever it's called, being tied to Play Services means it should work on nearly all versions of Android, since Play Services is not dependent on the OS version and is distributed by Google through the Play Store.

Enlarge / General Motors Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant used to build the Volt PHEV; soon, it will build BEV pickups. (credit: General Motors)

On Monday morning, General Motors President Mark Reuss announced that GM will renovate its Detroit-Hamtramck facility in Michigan at the cost of $2.2 billion to become a factory just for battery electric vehicles. The factory will begin building a BEV pickup truck starting in late 2021 and will also produce the electric autonomous taxi pods to be used by Cruise.

GM says it will also invest $800 million in supplier tooling and related startup costs for BEV production, and when the revamped factory is fully operational, it will create "more than 2,200 good-paying US manufacturing jobs."

Additionally, in Ohio, GM's Lordstown factory will be the site of a joint venture with LG Chem—which is putting in $2.3 billion—that will churn out lithium-ion cells to power the Detroit-Hamtramck-built BEVs.

Enlarge / Google logo seen during Google Developer Days (GDD) in Shanghai, China, September 2019. (credit: Lyu Liang | VCG | Getty Images)

Officials from the Department of Justice will reportedly be meeting this week with representatives of a 50-state coalition of state attorneys general to discuss tag-teaming their efforts to determine if Google's parent company, Alphabet, is in violation of antitrust laws.

At least seven of the state attorneys general, including Texas AG Ken Paxton, who is spearheading the state effort, are expected to attend. The Wall Street Journal, citing the ever-popular "people familiar with the matter," was the first to report on the meeting.

The Department of Justice confirmed in July that it was launching an antitrust probe into "market-leading online platforms." Google confirmed in September that it is indeed among those platforms being investigated.

Enlarge / A sign near the Fox Sports South Beach studio compound prior to Super Bowl LIV in Miami Beach, Florida. (credit: Getty Images | Cliff Hawkins)

Verizon's 5G hype train is heading to the Super Bowl, but the carrier won't tell us whether its new network will cover all the seats in the stadium.

With Super Bowl LIV at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami scheduled for February 2, Verizon emailed a media alert to Ars and other news outlets on Wednesday last week, bragging that it will "power the first Super Bowl featuring 5G." Notably missing from the news alert was any indication of how many fans will be able to use the 5G network from their seats during the game.

We asked Verizon if all the seats and other parts of the stadium will have 5G access and got a vague answer from the company spokesperson who sent out the media alert: "Fans can access 5G UWB [Ultra Wideband] in the bowl seating area, parts of the concourse, ticketing areas, and parking lot."

Enlarge / Mars or the Moon? It’s a debate that has bedeviled NASA for decades. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

On Friday evening, a US House of Representatives committee released H.R. 5666, an authorization act for NASA. Such bills are not required for an agency to function, and they do not directly provide funding—that comes from the appropriations committees in the House and Senate. Authorization bills provide a "sense" of Congress, however and indicate what legislators will be willing to fund in the coming years.

The big-picture takeaway from the bipartisan legislation is that it rejects the Artemis Program put forth by the Trump White House, which established the Moon as a cornerstone of human exploration for the next decade or two and as a place for NASA astronauts to learn the skills needed to expand toward Mars in the late 2030s and 2040s. Instead, the House advocates for a "flags-and-footprints" strategy whereby astronauts make a few short visits to the Moon beginning in 2028 and then depart for a Mars orbit mission by 2033.

Space policy

Whatever one might think about NASA's Artemis Program to land humans on the Moon by 2024, it attempted to learn from decades of space policy failure. Artemis set a near-term target, 2024, for a human return to the Moon that provided some urgency for NASA to get moving. It also sought to develop a "sustainable" path with meaningful activities on the surface of the Moon, including polar landings, efforts to tap lunar resources (the House bill specifically prohibits this), and establishment of a base.