Month: August 2020

• 

  The Note 20 Ultra has some really big cameras. [credit: iFixit ]

The Galaxy Note20 Ultra has hit the hands of the teardown specialists at iFixit, giving us an inside look at Samsung's latest flagship.

If the super big camera bump didn't clue you in from the outside, from the inside it's clear Samsung is spending a huge amount of space on the multi-camera setup. Even iFixit says it's "striking how much extra real estate the [Galaxy Note 20] Ultra devotes to its camera modules." Samsung does its best from the outside to make all the lenses look the same, but actually the center 108MP sensor is much larger than the top wide-angle sensor, and the bottom periscope camera is an even bigger sideways assembly.

Multiple cameras have become a nearly mandatory marketing tool in the smartphone business, but I sure hope users are getting their money's worth out of actually using them. Every big component in a smartphone takes room away from other features or additional battery capacity (see: the headphone jack argument). With a single camera, Samsung and other manufacturers would have a lot more room to play with.

Enlarge / FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, speaking at the press conference in which he badly mangled statistics. (credit: Pete Marovich/Getty Image)

After several days of rumors with ever-growing hype, the Trump administration announced on Sunday that the Food and Drug Administration was granting an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for a COVID-19 treatment. The move was controversial from the start, with reports indicating that the EUA was opposed by a number of health experts, including Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci. The press conference didn't settle matters, with a growing chorus of scientists saying that the data presented in support of the EUA had been misrepresented.

On Monday night, FDA commissioner Stephen Hahn acknowledged that he had made a significant error in presenting the benefits of the treatment, and he followed that with an apology on Tuesday. But Hahn pushed back on indications that the approval of the treatment on the eve of the Republican National Convention was motivated by political pressure.

Wrong kind of risk

The treatment at issue involves taking the antibody-containing plasma from those who have recovered from a SARS-CoV-2 infection (convalescent plasma) and giving it to those currently suffering from COVID-19 symptoms. At Sunday's press conference, the principle justification for allowing this treatment under an EUA was a 35 percent drop in mortality for those receiving plasma in the first three days of treatment—specifically, Hahn said 35 of 100 people "would have been saved" by this treatment.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

Newly unsealed and partially unredacted documents from a consumer fraud suit the state of Arizona filed against Google show that company employees knew and discussed among themselves that the company's location privacy settings were confusing and potentially misleading.

In 2018, the Associated Press reported that Maps and some other Google services (on both iPhone and Android) were storing users' location data even when users had explicitly turned Location History off.

"There are a number of different ways that Google may use location to improve people’s experience, including: Location History, Web and App Activity, and through device-level Location Services," a Google spokesperson told the AP at the time. "We provide clear descriptions of these tools, and robust controls so people can turn them on or off, and delete their histories at any time."