Month: June 2020

Kevin Bacon achieved cult success with 1990's Tremors, but he also starred in another film that somehow didn't achieve the same lasting success, despite being one of his strongest performances. That film is Stir of Echoes (1999), an unjustly ignored supernatural thriller adapted from a novel by by Richard Matheson. It had the misfortune to hit theaters the same year as The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project.

Now Bacon is reuniting with Stir of Echoes writer and director David Koepp in You Should Have Left, a forthcoming psychological horror film from Universal, co-produced by Jason Blum and Blumhouse Productions. The official trailer just dropped, and we're getting some strong The Others meets The Shining vibes from this tale of a haunted house that doesn't want to let its occupants leave, which bodes well for the final film.

The film is adapted from a 2017 German novella of the same name by bestselling author Daniel Kehlman. It's written in the first-person style of a diary belonging to an unnamed screenwriter attempting to write a sequel to an earlier hit film. With the studio pressuring him for a draft, he rents a house and takes his wife—an aging actress for whom work is becoming scarce—and four-year-old daughter on a long vacation in hopes of finishing the script.

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  The Motorola Fusion+. [credit: Motorola ]

Pop-up camera phones aren't dead yet. After the release of the Motorola One Hyper, Motorola's next pop-up camera phone is the dramatically-named Motorola One Fusion+.

For specs, you have a 6.5-inch LCD. Thanks to the pop-up camera, the LCD has a glorious blemish-free design, with no camera holes or notches. There's a 2.2 GHz Snapdragon 730, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 5000mAh battery. The body is actually plastic, instead of the usual glass. There's a headphone jack, a rear capacitive fingerprint reader, a USB-C port, and a Micro SD slot. The pop-up camera is 16MP, and you get four rear cameras: a 64MP main, 8MP wide-angle, 5MP Macro, and a 2MP depth camera.

As we've seen with so many Motorola phones, the company must have something against NFC in 2020. This phone doesn't have it, and neither do the Moto G Fast, G Power, G Stylus, and Moto E. To get NFC on a Motorola phone, you've got to spend at least as much as the One Hyper, which is $400.

Enlarge / Dreaming of finding buried treasure? Someone just solved a ten-year treasure hunt. (credit: iStock / Getty Images Plus)

Ten years ago, an antiquities dealer named Forrest Fenn buried a treasure chest filled with gold, rubies, emeralds, and diamonds somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. He hid the clues to its location in a poem that is part of his 2010 self-published memoir, The Thrill of the Chase. Over 350,000 people have tried and failed to find it over the last decade, and now one of them has finally succeeded. The man who found the treasure—a cache estimated to be worth over $1 million—sent confirmation of his discovery to Fenn with a photograph of the chest.

"It was under a canopy of stars in the lush, forested vegetation of the Rocky Mountains and had not moved from the spot where I hid it more than ten years ago," Fenn wrote on his website. "I do not know the person who found it, but the poem in my book led him to the precise spot." He told the Santa Fe New Mexican that the man who found the treasure declined to be named publicly but hailed from "back east."

Fenn claimed he set up the hunt to inspire people to explore nature by giving them a "good old-fashioned adventure." It was also a way to offer hope to those deeply affected by the Great Recession that followed the collapse of the housing market in 2008.

Enlarge (credit: Nintendo)

The series, which last appeared on Nintendo DS in 2006, revolves around digital translations of timeless tabletop games. A list of the included games does a lot to narrow the usual "who is this for" conversation. I'll start by listing everything in this package that I'd recommend as a good two- or four-player game for a diverse audience of ages and experience levels:

The above list is specific to mini-games that impress as digital translations. There's an additional selection of good-enough games that are, with some exceptions, ideal for children sharing a Nintendo Switch during a long trip:

In all, that's 35 good-enough games (with some grouped together as similar variants) in a $40 package. The asterisks in those lists indicate which games require more than one Switch console to work in versus mode, but thanks to a clever "guest pass" system, they only require one paid copy of the game. (Solitaire isn't marked because it's inherently single-player.) Even with that issue, that's 30 decent classics for a single Switch console, and they all benefit from repeat-play scrutiny, robust production values, and family-friendly explanations for kids and newcomers. (They also save you the trouble of packing cards, dice, and other easy-to-lose pieces.)

Enlarge / For Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, shown here without a face mask, public health precautions are for other people. (credit: EVARISTO SA / Getty Images)

Outside of the United States, Brazil has the largest number of confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections; it's behind only the US and UK in terms of confirmed COVID-caused deaths. Meanwhile, its leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has frequently minimized the risks posed by the pandemic and has frequently been photographed taking minimal precautions—going without a face mask and hugging supporters.

Complicating his country's policy response, Bolsonaro has also fired his health minister in the midst of the pandemic, only to see his replacement quit after a month on the job.

All of that took place, however, against a backdrop of detailed data about the known extent of the COVID-19 pandemic within the country, allowing Bolsonaro's public proclamations to be tested against the facts. Over the weekend, however, all of that data was taken down from government websites. After a brief hiatus, it was replaced by a simple tally of cases and deaths—only to see that replaced by a different set of numbers shortly afterwards.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Bosca78)

Cox Communications is lowering Internet upload speeds in entire neighborhoods to stop what it considers "excessive usage," in a decision that punishes both heavy Internet users and their neighbors.

Cox, a cable company with about 5.2 million broadband customers in the United States, has been sending notices to some heavy Internet users warning them to use less data and notifying them of neighborhood-wide speed decreases. In the case we will describe in this article, a gigabit customer who was paying $50 extra per month for unlimited data was flagged by Cox because he was using 8TB to 12TB a month.

Cox responded by lowering the upload speeds on the gigabit-download plan from 35Mbps to 10Mbps for the customer's whole neighborhood. Cox confirmed to Ars that it has imposed neighborhood-wide slowdowns in multiple neighborhoods in cases like this one but didn't say how many excessive users are enough to trigger a speed decrease.

Enlarge / New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern takes part in a press conference about the COVID-19 coronavirus at Parliament in Wellington on June 8, 2020. New Zealand has no active COVID-19 cases after the country's final patient was given the all clear and released from isolation, health authorities said on June 8. (credit: Getty | MARTY MELVILLE )

New Zealand has officially beaten COVID-19.

The island country announced Monday, June 8, that its last remaining person with the infection had gone 48 hours without symptoms and is now considered recovered.

With no active cases, the government moved to “alert level 1,” the lowest of four alert levels that effectively lifts all remaining social-distancing measures. There are now no restrictions on movement, domestic travel, or gatherings. Fans of rugby and other sports are allowed to return, en masse, to stadiums. Schools, workplaces, restaurant, and shops are all open.