Month: February 2020

The campy antics of Jackie Chan and Arnold Schwarzenegger dominate the trailer for The Iron Mask (aka Viy 2: Journey to China), a Russo-Chinese fantasy adventure film that also boasts Charles Dance (Tywin Lannister on Game of Thrones) and the late Rutger Hauer in one of his final roles. I've watched the trailer three times and still only have the vaguest idea what this film is about. There are elements of Alexandre Dumas' Man in the Iron Mask, elaborate Hong Kong supernatural drama, and a good old-fashioned swashbuckling adventure.

Directed by Oleg Stepchenko, The Iron Mask is actually a sequel to a 2014 Russian horror/fantasy film called The Forbidden Kingdom (aka Viy 3D or Forbidden Empire), loosely based in turn on a 19th-century horror novella by Nikolai Gogol. In the novella, a young philosopher encounters a shapeshifting witch and, after a confusing series of events, dies in horror after looking upon the iron face of Viy, a demonic King of the Gnomes.

The film version combines Gogol's central storyline with a second story following the adventures of a cartographer named Jonathan Green (Jason Flemyng). Green comes to a small Ukrainian village whose residents have tried to seal themselves off from the rest of the world in hopes of warding off a nameless evil. (The character is inspired by real-life French cartographer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, the first to study Ukrainian culture.)

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  Official Heritage Auctions images confirm the state of the Nintendo PlayStation, now on the auction block. [credit: Heritage Auctions ]

Update, March 6: After a remarkable bidding war over a span of three weeks, the Heritage Auctions listing for the only known Nintendo PlayStation concluded on Friday, March 6, at the unbelievable price of $300,000. The winning bidder technically paid roughly $380,000 for the winning bid, owing to an additional "buyer's premium" fee attached to the auction.

Shortly after the auction went live in February, Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey put his hat into the ring by declaring his intent to be the listing's highest bidder. As he wrote on Twitter: "Who are the other nutters who keep bidding against me?" Should Luckey's boasts have proven true, that would have left him as the "high" bidder ahead of Heritage Auctions' live auction event at $280,000. The Nintendo PlayStation listing only received one bid of $300,000 during the live auction process, and nobody lodged a follow-up bid—which may imply that Luckey's previous high bid was surpassed without him responding with a bid of his own. We have reached out to Luckey for comment.

Original story: In 2015, the fabled "Nintendo PlayStation" turned out to be a real thing, discovered in an estate sale of all places. After a whirlwind, five-year world tour, this incredibly rare, one-of-a-kind device's handlers have had enough—they are putting it up for sale.

Enlarge / Wherever possible, we recommend most users stick to LTS releases. Today's 18.04.4 update makes that possible for newer hardware, like HP's Dragonfly Elite G1. (credit: Jim Salter)

This Wednesday, the current Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Service) release—Bionic Beaver—launched its fourth maintenance update.

Ubuntu is one of the most predictable operating system distributions in terms of its release cycle—a new version is launched in April and October of each year. Most of these are interim releases, supported for a single year from launch; but the April release of each even-numbered year is an LTS, supported for five years. LTS releases also get maintenance releases as necessary, typically about every three to six months during the support cycle of the LTS.

Today's release, 18.04.4, is one of those maintenance releases. It's not as shiny and exciting as entirely new versions, of course, but it does pack in some worthwhile security and bugfix upgrades, as well as support for more and newer hardware—such as the bleeding-edge Intel WiFi chipset in HP's Dragonfly Elite G1 laptop, which we reviewed last month.

Enlarge / The screen displayed by FordPass four days after an Enterprise Rent-A-Car customer returned his Ford Mustang. (credit: Masamba Sinclair)

In October, Ars chronicled the story of a man who was able to remotely start, stop, lock, unlock, and track a Ford explorer he rented and returned five months earlier. Now, something almost identical has happened again to the same Enterprise Rent-A-Car customer. Four days after returning a Ford Mustang, the FordPass app installed on the phone of Masamba Sinclair continues to give him control of the car.

Like the last time, Sinclair can track the car’s location at any given time. He can start and stop the engine and lock and unlock its doors. Enterprise only removed Sinclair’s access to the car on Wednesday, more than three hours after I informed the rental agency of the error.

“It looks like someone else has rented it and it’s currently at a golf resort,” Sinclair wrote on Tuesday in an email. “This car is LOUD so starting the engine will definitely start people asking a lot of questions.” On Wednesday, before his access was removed, he added: “Looks like the previous rental is over and it's back at the Enterprise parking lot.” Below is a video demonstrating the control he had until then.

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  Founder and CEO of Essential Products Andy Rubin speaks onstage at the Wired Business Conference at Spring Studios on June 7, 2017, in New York City. [credit: Brian Ach/Getty Images for Wired ]

Andy Rubin's smartphone startup, Essential, is finally dead. Today, Essential announced in a blog post that it is closing its doors, saying that since it has "no clear path to deliver" its newest smartphone to customers, the company has "made the difficult decision to cease operations and shut down Essential."

Essential was Andy Rubin's next company after his previous gig at Google, where he lead the development of Android, taking the OS from nothing to the world's most popular operating system. Being "The Father of Android" meant venture capital firms would throw money at him when he left Google to form a new company. That company was Essential, where Andy Rubin jumped full time into smartphone hardware. The company was valued at $1.2 billion before it even sold a single product.

Essential ended up releasing a single smartphone, the Essential Phone, in 2017, along with two modular accessories: a $200 360-degree camera and a $150 clip-on headphone jack (yes, really). Since then, the company has just kind of hung around and canceled in-development products. It has done very little in the "selling things for money" category of business. Essential planned to sell a charging dock for the Essential Phone, but that product was never released. Alongside the phone, the company announced a smart display called the "Essential Home" and a new smart operating system called "Ambient OS," but neither the hardware nor software ever materialized.

Enlarge / A Frontier Communications service van. (credit: Mike Mozart / Flickr)

Frontier Communications is facing more scrutiny over outages that have left its customers without telecom service—including access to 911 emergency calling—for weeks at a time.

US Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) sent letters to Frontier and the Federal Communications Commission last week, saying that Frontier's failure to quickly restore service during outages has put residents in danger.

Frontier offers telecom service in 29 states over its fiber and copper networks, and the company is reportedly planning to file for bankruptcy by mid-March. Frontier has been investigated recently for long outages in several states.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Brookes / Getty Images)

A Philadelphia man has been freed after a federal appeals court ruled that his continued detention was violating federal law. Francis Rawls, a former police officer, had been in jail since 2015, when a federal judge held him in contempt for failing to decrypt two hard drives taken from his home. The government believes they contain child pornography.

In 2015, law enforcement raided Rawls' home and seized two smartphones, a Mac laptop, and two hard drives. Prosecutors were able to gain access to the laptop, and police say forensic analysis showed Rawls downloading child pornography and saving it to the external hard drives. But the drives themselves were encrypted, preventing the police from accessing the downloaded files.

Enlarge / Does everyone play at E3 2020? Not Geoff Keighley. (credit: Jill Greenberg / Aurich Lawson)

While the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo is still scheduled to kick off in Los Angeles this June, the headlines surrounding the next incarnation have mostly been about who's not attending. After January's news that Sony would (once again) not attend E3, Wednesday came with confirmation of another major no-show, but it's not a game developer or a publisher; instead, it's journalist, promoter, and producer Geoff Keighley.

Gaming fans are likely familiar with Keighley's work as host of The Game Awards and various journalistic deep dives; his "Final Hours" series will emerge later this year with an insider's look at the development process of Valve's upcoming VR game Half-Life: Alyx. But in the case of E3, Keighley isn't just a guy who shows up to check out new video games. For the past few years, he's produced the E3 Coliseum series of game debuts and celebrity panels. And for over 20 years, he's organized the independent, E3-adjacent Game Critics Awards—which are a huge factor for members of E3's attending press in the West.

Some of that changes this year, as per a Wednesday statement posted to Keighley's Twitter account. After acknowledging his 25 years of E3 attendance, Keighley confirmed that he "will not be participating in E3" this year and that he "declined" to serve as producer of any E3 Coliseum-style events.