Month: August 2020

Enlarge (credit: Jason Farrar)

The Federal Communications Commission today voted unanimously to lower the prices inmates pay for phone calls from prisons and jails, but the organization reiterated its position that state governments must take action to lower prices on the majority of inmate calls.

Today's action is a proposal to "substantially reduce [the FCC's] interstate rate caps—currently $0.21 per minute for debit and prepaid calls and $0.25 per minute for collect calls—to $0.14 per minute for debit, prepaid, and collect calls from prisons, and $0.16 per minute for debit, prepaid, and collect calls from jails." This is part of a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, which means the commission will take public comment before finalizing the new caps and could change the plan before making it final.

Since the proposed rate cap limits prices on interstate calls only, it won't affect the approximately 80 percent of prison calls that don't cross state lines. Last month, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai urged state governments to cap intrastate calling prices, saying the FCC lacks authority to do so. Pai said that "33 states allow rates that are at least double the current federal cap, and 27 states allow excessive 'first-minute' charges up to 26 times that of the first minute of an interstate call."

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a new low price on Final Fantasy VII Remake, with the PlayStation 4 exclusive currently available for $40 at various retailers. The discount covers both physical and digital copies. For reference, we've typically seen the game retail between $50 and $60 online since it launched this past April.

As for the game itself, "remake" is the key word here. Final Fantasy VII Remake isn't just the original PlayStation classic in high definition: it's the first installment in a planned series of action-RPGs, one that takes the first few hours of the original and stretches them out into a full-length 35-hour melodrama.

On paper, that whole sentence sounds like a nightmare. But Remake manages to make it work through a thrilling combat system that fuses real-time action and menu-based commands, as well as a surprisingly subversive story that interrogates the game's past and its fanbase's expectations. It certainly has problems—some of them small, others impossible to truly look past—but if you're in the mood for a modernized JRPG, Remake is worth a look during these slower summer months.

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For the first time, both Facebook and Twitter acted to remove content shared by the campaign to re-elect President Donald Trump from their platforms, citing policies against spreading false claims about COVID-19.

Both the @TeamTrump campaign Twitter account and the official Donald Trump Facebook account shared a video late yesterday in which Trump claimed children are immune from the novel coronavirus. The video was a clip from an interview in which the president spoke by phone with Fox & Friends hosts about schools reopening this fall. "My view is that schools should be open," Trump said. "If you look at children, children are almost—and I would almost say definitely—but almost immune from this disease. So few, they’ve got stronger, hard to believe, I don’t know how you feel about it, but they have much stronger immune systems than we do somehow for this. They don’t have a problem. They just don’t have a problem. They are virtually immune from this problem."

Children are in fact people and are just as susceptible as the rest of us to breathing in and sneezing out germs. (Possibly more so, if you ask any parent of a toddler.) Kids do, on average, tend to have much less severe cases of COVID-19 than adults when they catch it, but repeated outbreaks in camps and schools since June have made it abundantly clear that children can both catch and transmit the virus.

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  The Pixel 4 XL. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

The Pixel 4 is dead. That's the official confirmation that Google sent to The Verge after people noticed that the Google Store listed the phone as "out of stock." The Pixel 4 started shipping October 24, 2019, so it was available for only nine-and-a-half months.

The Verge writes:

"Google Store has sold through its inventory and completed sales of Pixel 4 [and] 4 XL,” a Google spokesperson confirms to The Verge. “For people who are still interested in buying Pixel 4 [and] 4 XL, the product is available from some partners while supplies last. Just like all Pixel devices, Pixel 4 will continue to get software and security updates for at least three years from when the device first became available on the Google Store in the US.”

The Pixel 4 had the shortest life span of any Pixel phone, only lasting half as long as the other high-end models. The Pixel 1, 2, and 3 were all for sale for around 18 months. The midrange Pixel 3a, had a similarly short lifespan and was discontinued after about 13 months of sales.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Rafe Swan)

The Trump administration and broadband industry are resuming their fight against California's net neutrality law, with the US Department of Justice and ISP lobby groups filing new complaints against the state yesterday.

The case is nearly two years old but was put on hold because California in October 2018 agreed to suspend enforcement of its law until after litigation over the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of US net neutrality rules and the FCC's attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws. That lawsuit was decided in October 2019 when the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the FCC repeal of its own rules but overturned the FCC's attempt to impose a blanket, nationwide preemption of any state net neutrality law.

"At bottom, the Commission lacked the legal authority to categorically abolish all 50 States' statutorily conferred authority to regulate intrastate communications," judges in that case wrote. But that doesn't prevent the Trump administration and ISPs from trying to block state laws on a case-by-case basis.