Month: September 2020

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

The Department of Justice today dropped a proposed "recalibration" of one of the most important laws governing the US Internet into Congress's lap and urged legislators to act to remove a liability protection on which nearly every website and app currently relies.

Attorney General Bill Barr sent the proposed legislation—an extension of his June wish list—to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence (in his role as President of the Senate) this morning.

"For too long Section 230 has provided a shield for online platforms to operate with impunity," Barr said in a written statement. "Ensuring that the internet is a safe, but also vibrant, open, and competitive environment is vitally important to America," he added. "We therefore urge Congress to make these necessary reforms to Section 230 and begin to hold online platforms accountable both when they unlawfully censor speech and when they knowingly facilitate criminal activity online."

The Halloween season is almost upon us, so brace yourselves for the annual onslaught of horror fare. But we're also getting a good old-fashioned spooky ghost story with the Netflix series, The Haunting of Bly Manor, loosely based on The Turn of the Screw while incorporating several other ghost stories by Henry James. The series is showrunner Mike Flanagan's highly anticipated follow-up to 2018's exquisitely brooding The Haunting of Hill House. The first teaser dropped earlier this month, and now the streaming platform has released the full trailer.

(Spoilers for the Henry James novel below.)

The Haunting of Hill House shared the top spot in Ars' 2018 list of our favorite TV shows with BBC's Killing Eve. We loved Mike Flanagan and Trevor Macy's inventive reimagining of Shirley Jackson's classic novel, at once a Gothic ghost story and a profound examination of family dysfunction. It stayed true to the tone and spirit of the original, aided by dialogue, narration, and other small details from the source material. Small wonder that it garnered award nominations from the Motion Picture Sound Editors, Writers Guild of America, and Art Directors Guild.

Enlarge / T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert speaks during a keynote at CES 2020 in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

T-Mobile US CEO Mike Sievert yesterday fired back at AT&T and Verizon, saying the carriers' complaints about T-Mobile obtaining more spectrum licenses show that they are afraid of competition.

"The duopolists are scrambling to block this new competition any way they can... Suddenly in the unfamiliar position of not having a dominant stranglehold on the wireless market, and preferring not to meet the competitive challenge in the marketplace, AT&T and Verizon are urging the FCC to slow T-Mobile down and choke off our ability to compete fairly for added radio spectrum," Sievert wrote in a blog post.

As we wrote Monday, Verizon and AT&T have urged the Federal Communications Commission to impose limits on T-Mobile's ability to obtain more spectrum licenses. AT&T complained that T-Mobile's acquisition of Sprint allowed it to amass "an unprecedented concentration of spectrum."

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  The Samsung Galaxy S20 FE comes in a range of colors. [credit: Samsung ]

Today, Samsung held its third product event in a month and a half to launch the "Galaxy S20 FE," a value-oriented take on the company's flagship smartphone line. If these Samsung phones are getting hard to keep track of, that's because, by our count, this is the company's 11th "flagship" smartphone model for 2020, after the Exynos and Qualcomm versions of the Galaxy S20, S20 Plus, S20 Ultra, Note 20, and Note 20 Ultra.

This particular model seems worth keeping track of, though, since Samsung aims to bring some premium smartphone features down from the stratospheric price of earlier models. For $699, you get a 6.5-inch 2400×1080 OLED display with two big features: 1) it's 120Hz, just like the $900 OnePlus 8 Pro, and 2) the display is flat, instead of the distorted, curved screens that usually ship on high-end Android phones. In the United States, the phone gets a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 4500mAh battery. The phone has wireless charging, an optical (not ultrasonic) fingerprint reader, NFC, a MicroSD slot, IP68 dust and water resistance, and ships with Android 10. For cameras, you have a 12MP main camera, a 12MP ultrawide, and an 8MP 3x telephoto. The front camera is a 32MP sensor in a hole-punch display cutout. The back is plastic, while the front is Gorilla Glass.

The "FE" in "Galaxy S20 FE" stands for "Fan Edition," a name the company last used when it scraped together the leftover un-exploded Galaxy Note 7 parts to make the Galaxy Note FE. The Note 7 was infamous for having a flawed battery design that would short-circuit and cause the phone to catch fire or explode. After two recalls and a long investigation, Samsung re-released the Note 7 with a smaller battery as the "FE." It's not clear why Samsung chose to resurrect the "Fan Edition" branding and reference one of the darkest moments in the company's history. But I'm no marketing expert.