Month: February 2021

Enlarge / A shot from For All Mankind's second season. (credit: Apple+)

More science fiction is headed to Apple TV+, according to a new video and report. Apple has published a "first look featurette" video and related augmented reality app for its alternate-history space-program drama For All Mankind's second season, and the report claims that a drama about a robot accused of murder will soon begin production.

The latter will be a feature film called Dolly and is based on a short story written by Elizabeth Bear. According to Deadline, Apple acquired the film "following a competitive bidding war" involving four bidders, including multiple studios and another streaming company.

The film is described as a science fiction take on a courtroom drama, with the premise that a robotic doll murders its owner but "shocks the world by claiming she is not guilty and asking for a lawyer."

Scientists at the University of Arizona set up their own "Bug Fight Club" in the lab, staging wrestling matches between insects to learn more about defensive structures and the evolution of weapons in the animal kingdom. They outlined their findings in two separate papers, one published last fall in the journal Functional Ecology and the other published last month in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Intraspecies battle is commonly found in nature, usually over competition for limited resources (mates, food, or shelter), per the authors, and it's generally been assumed that whichever creature inflicts the most damage wins the fight. That's one possible explanation for why so many species have evolved various defensive structures to protect them from damage during a fight. For instance, goats have dermal shields, crocodiles sport dorsal osteoderms, and mantis shrimp boast armored telsons. But do these structures actually influence the outcomes of fights?

"Biologists have generally assumed that the individual who inflicts more damage on their opponent will be more likely to win a given fight," said co-author John J. Wiens of the University of Arizona while explaining the reasoning behind Bug Fight Club. "Surprisingly, this fundamental assumption had yet to be tested in an experimental study."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | ollo)

James, a Cox cable-Internet customer in Irvine, California, got an unwelcome email on Tuesday from the Internet provider. Cox's email told James, who pays $80 a month for broadband, that his 30Mbps upload speeds will soon be reduced to 10Mbps.

A Cox spokesperson told Ars that James and similar customers can keep their 30Mbps upload speeds if they upgrade to a newer modem. But that option wasn't included in the email to customers, which created the impression that the upload-speed cut is mandatory unless they pay for a more expensive Internet plan.

The different messages given to customers and an Ars reporter suggest that Cox is trying to get people to switch to the lower-upload speed plan and is only mentioning the option of keeping the existing plan as a last resort. Based on what we've learned, customers who want to keep their current upload speeds and price should talk to a Cox customer-service rep and ask for that option if the rep doesn't mention it. Customers can keep their existing modems without losing Internet service entirely, but their upload speeds will be cut unless they upgrade to a new modem and choose to keep their existing plan. Cox has about 5.3 million broadband customers in the United States.

Enlarge / The Virginia state Capitol building at twilight, in prepandemic times. (credit: traveler1116 | Getty Images)

Virginia is poised to follow in California's footsteps any minute now and become the second state in the country to adopt a comprehensive online data protection law for consumers.

If adopted, the Consumer Data Protection Act would apply to entities of a certain size that do business in Virginia or have users based in Virginia. The bill enjoys broad popular support among state lawmakers; it passed 89-9 in the Virginia House and unanimously (39-0) in the state Senate, and Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam is widely expected to sign it into law without issue in the coming days.

In the absence of a general-purpose federal privacy framework, states all over the nation are very slowly stepping in with their own solutions. The Virginia law is somewhat modeled on California's landmark Consumer Privacy Act, which was signed into law in 2018 and took effect on January 1, 2020. Legislatures in several other states—including Minnesota, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Washington—have some kind of data privacy bills currently under consideration.

Enlarge (credit: Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Mastercard said on Wednesday that it is planning to support cryptocurrencies natively on its network. If this actually happens, it will be a big deal, helping to further legitimize virtual currencies and dramatically expand the market for their use.

However, Mastercard says that it's only going to support cryptocurrencies that meet a number of requirements—including stability, privacy, and compliance with money laundering laws. The problem is that few cryptocurrencies meet Mastercard's criteria. Indeed, it's not clear if any of them do.

It’s hard to be both decentralized and regulated

Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, was designed to disrupt the power of governments and conventional financial institutions. The bitcoin network has a decentralized architecture that puts it beyond the reach of any government. Without government backing, bitcoin's price is highly volatile. Users have no recourse against funds lost to hacking or fraud. The bitcoin network doesn't comply with anti-money laundering laws that conventional financial networks must follow—though some bitcoin intermediaries do.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a modest but notable discount on Apple's MagSafe wireless charger, which is currently down to $34 at Amazon and Walmart. That's only $5 off Apple's MSRP, but it's the lowest price we've seen to date on the accessory, which launched in October.

We recently recommended the MagSafe Charger in our guide to the best iPhone 12 accessories. The charger is primarily designed for the iPhone 12 family, but it can supply those devices with an advertised 15W of power, so it'll recharge quicker than the 7.5W rate available with many Qi chargers (albeit not twice as fast). It attaches to its intended phones easily, and it can recharge through certain MagSafe-compatible cases. You'll need a 20W or higher USB-C PD 3.0 wall charger on hand to supply its full power, and if you don't care about the convenience of simply plopping your iPhone on a pad to recharge, using a traditional USB-C-to-Lightning cable will still top your device up much faster. Here, you'll go from 0 to 30 percent charge in about a half hour, and from 0 to 50 percent charge in about an hour.

So, while the MagSafe Charger is not a great value in a vacuum, this deal lessens the cost a bit for iPhone 12 owners who live in the Apple ecosystem and are willing to pay for the fastest wireless charge possible. Elsewhere, our deals roundup includes big discounts on Apple's AirPods Pro and iPad Air, several deals on Amazon Fire HD tablets, a big Xbox digital game sale, and more. You can check out our full roundup below.

Enlarge / The current state of Google's iOS app lineup. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Google's major iOS apps have been seeing serious neglect for the past few months. On December 8, Apple's App Store started requiring all apps to show privacy "nutrition labels" in their app store listing, where developers self-report what data an app uses for tracking and how that data is linked to a user. Coincidentally, a lot of Google's apps, especially the most popular ones, have not been updated since December 8.

The situation has gotten so bad that Google's servers were briefly flagging its own iOS apps as "out of date." As detailed by Techmeme editor Spencer Dailey, Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Maps on iOS were all caught showing a server-side pop-up message to users saying, "You should update this app. The version you're using doesn't include the latest security features to keep you protected. Only continue if you understand the risks." Actually Google, you should update this app. Thanks to Google's sudden disinterest in iOS app updates, the messages were showing even when users had the latest, two-month-old updates of these Google apps. The messages have since been removed through a server update.

Presumably, this was an automatic notice that pops up when Google's app updates hit a certain age and are meant to catch people who haven't been to the App Store in a while. Presumably, Google picked a timeframe (approximately two months) that it thought it would never pass without shipping some kind of app update. Now, for some mysterious reason, that time period has passed, and Google's servers were briefly accusing Google's app developers of putting users "at risk."