Month: October 2020

Enlarge / If the company got broken up, maybe each business would take a different color with them when they go. (credit: JHVEPhoto | Getty Images)

The Justice Department today filed a landmark antitrust case against Google. The hotly anticipated, long-awaited lawsuit accuses Google of using its market dominance to force unfair contract terms on suppliers and competitors to the detriment of competition and the marketplace.

The suit might just be the biggest thing in antitrust since the DOJ sued Microsoft in the 1990s... or it might not. Even though the investigation that led here has been going on for 16 months, a suit like this is the beginning, not the end, of the process. So here's everything we know—and more importantly, everything we still don't—about what this blockbuster case really means.

What does the suit allege?

The complaint (PDF) lays out the case that Google used "exclusionary agreements and anticompetitive conduct" to become dominant in the search marketplace, and then kept abusing that market dominance to prevent nascent rivals from gaining enough of a toehold potentially to become real competition.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a $10 pre-order discount on Cyberpunk 2077, the latest open-world RPG from The Witcher developers CD Projekt Red. The deal applies to the PS4, Xbox One, and PC (via a GOG code) copies of the game, bringing them all down to $50. This deal has actually been live at Amazon and Walmart for much of the past several months—continuing a trend we've seen for various high-profile games recently—but given that we're now less than a month from the game's November 19 launch (when the price should jump back to the usual $60), we figured it's worth highlighting for anyone who already plans on taking the plunge.

Now, to be perfectly clear: we have no clue if Cyberpunk 2077 will be any good. CD Projekt Red has revealed a good chunk about the game's systems and futuristic sci-fi setting, we know it looks to be mammoth in scope, we know it stars Keanu Reeves, and we know the studio's last major game was the tremendous The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. (Unfortunately, we also know about reports of CD Projekt Red forcing overtime onto its employees to get the game out the door.) We won't be able to give a final judgment until we're able to actually play and review the game closer to launch, though.

But we also realize that Cyberpunk 2077 has been hugely anticipated for several years now and that many players are committed to getting it on launch day, for better or worse. If you're one of them, you might as well save a Hamilton along the way. Note that the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game will be backward-compatible with the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, respectively, and that CD Projekt Red says those copies will get free upgrades that take "full advantage" of the new hardware at some point in the future. When those upgrades will arrive is not clear, but this means you may wind up saving money getting a current-gen copy here instead of buying directly through a PS5 or Xbox Series console.

We're just a little over a week away from the season 2 debut of The Mandalorian, the Emmy-nominated, first live-action Star Wars TV series. And Disney+ has decided to whet our appetites with one last "special look" teaser for the series.

Created by Jon Favreau and starring Pedro Pascal as Din Djarin, the titular Mandalorian, the series takes place a few years after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order. The basic premise is that after the defeat of the Empire in Return of the Jedi, there was a period of chaos and lawlessness as a new government struggled to emerge from the wreckage. Pascal's bounty hunter is "a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy, far from the authority of the New Republic."

The first season garnered 15 Emmy nomination for its eight-episode freshman outing. And it easily landed a spot on our top TV shows of 2019. "Favreau's brainchild has proven to be a killer vehicle for the most Star Trek-like storytelling yet in a live-action Star Wars product," Ars Tech Culture Editor Sam Machkovech wrote at the time. "Even better, its freak-of-the-week and brand-new-planet progression has been paired with a proper samurai story, as anchored by the religious, fervent, and conflicted Mando himself."

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on December 14, 2017, in Washington, DC, the day of the FCC's vote to repeal net neutrality rules. (credit: Getty Images | Alex Wong )

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has turned the FCC into "a political appendage of President Trump's campaign" by aiding Trump's battle against social media websites, two House Democrats said yesterday.

"Chairman Pai's decision to start a Section 230 rulemaking is a blatant attempt to help a flailing President Trump," said Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and Communications and Technology Subcommittee Chairman Mike Doyle (D-Penn.). "The timing and hurried nature of this decision makes clear it's being done to influence social media companies' behavior leading up to an election, and it is shocking to watch this supposedly independent regulatory agency jump at the opportunity to become a political appendage of President Trump's campaign."

On Thursday last week, Pai announced that he is backing President Trump's proposal to limit legal protections for social media websites that block or modify content posted by users. Pai said he will propose a new interpretation of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, limiting the legal immunity websites like Facebook and Twitter are granted when they block or screen content. Trump claims the companies are biased against conservatives, and he wants to post on social media without the platforms adding fact checks or limiting the reach of posts that violate their rules.

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Specs at a glance: MSI Summit E14, as tested
OS	Windows 10 Pro
CPU	3.0GHz 4-core Intel i7-1185G7 (4.8GHz turbo)
RAM	32GB LPDDR4
GPU	Nvidia GTX 1650Ti MaxQ
SSD	1TB Western Digital SN370 NVMe
Battery	52.4Wh 3-cell LiOn
Wi-Fi	Intel AX201 Wi-Fi 6
Display	14-inch 1080p IPS
Camera	720p, top bezel mounted
Connectivity	one USB-A 2.0 port two Thunderbolt 4/USB-C 4 ports (power delivery support) 3.5mm phone/mic combo jack one microSD card slot fingerprint reader
Price as tested	expected retail ~$1,800

Last month, we got a look at one of Intel's engineering prototype laptops for its new Tiger Lake CPU family. We still don't have any production Tiger Lake laptops to test, but as of today we're one step closer with an MSI Summit sales/engineering sample. MSI provided the sample to us mostly for a "photo opportunity," but they graciously allowed benchmarking as long as we clearly marked the tests as being on a preproduction sample unit.

This model, marked as a sales sample, seems to be a prototype of what will be the Summit E14-087. Our MSI representative warned us that some hardware tuning and details may change between now and launch but confirmed that the chassis itself is exactly as it will be in production. In particular, we expect the power tuning to change—MSI promotes the laptop as having a 10hr+ battery life, which we suspect will not be possible with the 28W cTDP our sample shipped with.

This is not a cheap laptop—we managed to find an early retail listing for this model, and it looks like it will sell for $1,800. However, the device is jampacked with high-end parts, including but not limited to Intel's newest i7-1185G7 top-of-the-line processor and an Nvidia GTX 1650Ti MaxQ discrete GPU. The laptop also has a distinct, bold style that stands out from its competitors.

Scientists are continuing to tease out the mechanisms by which the Venus flytrap can tell when it has captured a tasty insect as prey as opposed to an inedible object (or just a false alarm). There is evidence that the carnivorous plant has something akin to a short-term "memory," and a team of Japanese scientists has found evidence that the mechanism for this memory lies in changes in calcium concentrations in its leaves, according to a recent paper published in the journal Nature Plants.

The Venus flytrap attracts its prey with a pleasing fruity scent. When an insect lands on a leaf, it stimulates the highly sensitive trigger hairs that line the leaf. When the pressure becomes strong enough to bend those hairs, the plant will snap its leaves shut and trap the insect inside. Long cilia grab and hold the insect in place, much like fingers, as the plant begins to secrete digestive juices. The insect is digested slowly over five to 12 days, after which the trap reopens, releasing the dried-out husk of the insect into the wind.

Back in 2016, a team of German scientists discovered that the Venus flytrap can actually "count" the number of times something touches its hair-lined leaves—an ability that helps the plant distinguish between the presence of prey and a small nut or stone, or even a dead insect. The scientists zapped the leaves of test plants with mechano-electric pulses of different intensities and measured the responses. It turns out that the plant detects that first "action potential" but doesn't snap shut right away, waiting until a second zap confirms the presence of actual prey, at which point the trap closes.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Ad-blocking extensions with more than 300,000 active users have been surreptitiously uploading user browsing data and tampering with users’ social media accounts thanks to malware its new owner introduced a few weeks ago, according to technical analyses and posts on Github.

Hugo Xu, developer of the Nano Adblocker and Nano Defender extensions, said 17 days ago that he no longer had the time to maintain the project and had sold the rights to the versions available in Google’s Chrome Web Store. Xu told me that Nano Adblocker and Nano Defender, which often are installed together, have about 300,000 installations total.

Four days ago, Raymond Hill, maker of the uBlock Origin extension upon which Nano Adblocker is based, revealed that the new developers had rolled out updates that added malicious code.