Month: March 2020

Enlarge / Joe Biden speaks at a rally in Kansas City, Missouri, on Saturday. (credit: Kyle Rivas/Getty Images)

On Saturday, White House Social Media Director Dan Scavino posted a video that appeared to show Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden losing his train of thought and then concluding "we can only re-elect Donald Trump." Trump's followers naturally cackled with delight.

In reality, Scavino's clip cut Biden off mid-sentence. What he actually said was, "we can only re-elect Donald Trump if in fact we engage in this circular firing squad. It's gotta be a positive campaign."

After outrage from Biden supporters, Facebook slapped the video with a notice warning that the video contained "Partly false information checked by independent fact-checkers." To actually watch the video, users had to click on a small "See video" button.

Enlarge / You can now trade the speaker in without bricking it. The nesting dolls might be another matter. (credit: Sonos)

Secondhand shoppers, rejoice: Sonos is reversing course on a plan to brick all trade-in devices, so if someone wants to give or sell you a used speaker, it will still work. For now.

Sonos launched its "trade up" program last October. Consumers who owned a handful of older devices would receive a 30 percent discount on newer models if they traded in their old versions—a fairly typical program for expensive electronics, all things considered.

The company drew customers' ire with one important deviation from others' trade-in programs, though. Although the company does indeed sell refurbished equipment, devices users traded in through the program were destined not to become part of that cycle. Instead, Sonos straight up bricked them.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Henrik5000)

Led by Comcast and Charter, the cable industry increased its dominance of US home Internet in 2019, finishing the year with a 67-percent market share.

Leichtman Research Group's latest broadband-market review found that the top eight cable companies combined to add 3.14 million broadband subscribers in 2019, reaching a total of 67.98 million. Comcast and Charter accounted for most of the total subscribers and most of the gains: Comcast added 1.41 million subscribers in the year to reach 28.63 million, and Charter added 1.41 million to reach 26.66 million. Cox, the third biggest cable company in the Leichtman review, added 110,000 subscribers to hit 5.17 million. The net additions for each company were slightly higher than in 2018.

The top eight traditional phone companies, which offer a mix of copper and fiber services, lost a combined 619,605 subscribers to reach a low of 33.24 million in 2019. The top four telcos—AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, and Frontier—all lost subscribers.

Enlarge / Sorry, sniper, you can't just snap to your hidden target by tapping L2 anymore...

Epic is removing a controversial "legacy" aim assist mode for Fortnite players who play using a handheld controller. The move is the company's latest effort to improve competitive balance between controller users and players using the increased speed and precision of a mouse-and-keyboard setup.

Looking back on a "legacy"

While Epic initially made efforts to segregate controller and mouse-and-keyboard players, an October matchmaking update started placing PC and console players in the same matches. "With the rollout, we’ve seen a lot of discussion about potentially unfair competitive advantages from pooling players together across platforms and input devices," Epic wrote at the time. "The new matchmaking system, however, accounts for various skill levels across different platforms and control inputs, and groups players of similar skill levels together."

Around the same time, Epic also made a significant update to its controller settings, allowing players to tune the game's analog stick sensitivity in a number of ways. That update also "implemented a new aim assist system" that used a new weighting algorithm to "calculate targets in screen space, which allows a more consistent feel regardless of that target’s range."