Month: April 2021

We just finished enthusing over WandaVision and are still awaiting the final episodes of The Falcon and the Winter Solider, but Marvel has a lot more in store for us. The studio just dropped the official trailer for Loki, its spinoff limited series starring Tom Hiddleston as the charismatic trickster demigod and (adoptive) brother to Thor. According to the official premise, after absconding with the Tesseract in Avengers: Endgame, Loki "is a fish-out-of-water when he lands in a world of trouble with the bureaucratic TVA (Time Variance Authority)." One Ars staffer described the overall tone as "Men in Black meets Doctor Who," which sounds like a winning combination to me.

As we've reported previously, Marvel Studios announced the development of its various limited series for Disney+ in 2018, all featuring supporting characters from the films who were not given their own standalone movies within the MCEU. Details have largely been kept under wraps, but we do know that, like WandaVision, Loki will tie into the forthcoming MCEU film, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. And like Falcon and the Winter Soldier, it will consist of six episodes.

A brief shot from Loki that aired during the Super Bowl last year showed him wearing a jumpsuit with the initials "TVA" stamped on it. TVA agents are the so-called "custodians of chronology" in the MCU, who monitor violations to the timeline. Catch their attention by trying to change history, and you just might meet the wrong end of the Retroactive Cannon (Ret-Can) and have your entire history deleted from the historical timeline.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Nearly a year ago, Amazon fired two employees who had criticized the company. The employees had publicly called on the company to do more to reduce its carbon footprint and had circulated a petition among Amazon employees supporting better compensation and support for warehouse workers. Now, the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, has found that Amazon acted illegally and in retaliation when it fired them, according to a report from The New York Times.

Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa were both designers at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, and their tussles with management began in 2018 when they joined a group of employees who vocally backed shareholder petitions urging the company to do more to combat climate change. (The group had received Amazon stock as part of its compensation.)

They and a handful of other employees rallied others to the cause. On September 20, 2018, thousands of employees walked out in protest of the company’s climate policies. Lawyers told Cunningham, Costa, and others that in speaking out, they had violated company policies that restrict employees from talking about Amazon publicly. The group ultimately wrote an open letter, which was signed by more than 8,700 Amazon workers, to CEO Jeff Bezos and the board of directors.

Enlarge / This year's Build will be virtual—on the plus side, that means attendance is free and you don't need to travel. On the minus side, nobody gets to walk inside an enormous, physical Windows logo for a photo opp, like this shot of me at Ignite 2019. (credit: Jim Salter)

Microsoft's annual Build conference will be virtual again this year, running from May 25 to May 27. According to Microsoft, Build is "where developers, architects, start-ups, and students learn, connect, and code together, sharing knowledge and expanding their skill set, while exploring new ways of innovating for tomorrow."

Thanks at least in part to COVID-19, this is the second year that Build is being held as a virtual event—which follows Microsoft's statement last year that all its conferences would be virtual-only through July 2021. COVID-19 cases are still trending upward; we wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft's in-person event ban not only upheld but extended.

Build vs. Inspire and Ignite

Build is one of three flagship Microsoft conferences, along with Inspire (scheduled for July) and Ignite (which concluded in March).

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  RIP LG's phones. Who could forget ridiculous devices like the LG G Flex? It was actually curved for some reason. LG thought this was a good enough idea to merit a sequel! [credit: LG ]

After 12 years of being an Android OEM, LG has had enough. The Korean company announced late last night that it is officially quitting the smartphone market; it plans to close up shop on the entire business by July 31, 2021.

The news doesn't come as much of a surprise, since LG has been preparing the public for this decision for some time. LG's mobile division has had 23 consecutive money-losing quarters, and its last profitable year was in 2014. In January 2020, LG Electronics' then-brand-new CEO Kwon Bong-seok promised that the troublesome division would be profitable by 2021. That message was apparently "profitability or bust" because by January 2021, LG was warning the public that it would have to make "a cold judgment" about the future of the mobile division. Local media reports claim that LG explored selling the division but couldn't find a buyer.

It's not clear what will happen to what feels like "LG's last smartphone," the LG Rollable. The flexible-display smartphone was announced at CES 2021, and while the expanding display mechanism was identical to concepts and prototypes from other companies, LG promised that the phone would actually launch in "early 2021." LG's press release did not disclose what will happen to the Rollable, but rumors saying the phone might be canceled started circulating almost immediately after it was announced. We won't hold our breath.

Enlarge / Exterior view of a Googleplex building, the corporate headquarters of Google and parent company Alphabet, May 2018. (credit: Getty Images | zphotos)

The Supreme Court has sided with Google in its decade-long legal battle with Oracle over the copyright status of application programming interfaces. The ruling means that Google will not owe Oracle billions of dollars in damages. It also has big implications for the broader software industry, since a ruling in the opposite direction could have triggered a wave of lawsuits against software companies that re-implemented other companies' APIs.

The case dates back to the creation of the Android platform in the mid-2000s. Google decided to base Android on Sun's Java programming language, enabling existing Java programmers to easily develop for the platform. Google independently implemented the Java API methods, but to ensure compatibility, it copied Java's method names, argument types, and the class and package hierarchy.

A few years later, Oracle acquired Sun and soon afterward sued Google, arguing that Google's copying had infringed Sun's copyrights. Over a decade of litigation, Google won twice at the trial court level, but each time, the ruling was overruled by the Federal Circuit appeals court. The case finally reached the Supreme Court last year.

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  The reborn GMC Hummer EV truck is getting a sibling—this one is an SUV. [credit: GMC ]

Last fall, after a long teaser campaign that included a high-profile Super Bowl commercial, GMC unveiled its new Hummer EV truck. Designed around General Motor's forthcoming 800-volt Ultium batteries and Ultium Drive electric motors, it will lead GM's renewed electrification efforts when the first Hummer EV Edition 1s reach customers early in 2022. Sometime the following year, the Hummer EV truck will be joined by a second bombastic electric go-anywhere machine—the Hummer EV SUV.

Officially revealed online on Monday morning, the Hummer EV SUV is actually the smaller of the pair, 20 inches (507 mm) shorter overall with nine inches (227 mm) taken out of the wheelbase. GMC says that will make the Hummer EV SUV much more maneuverable than the truck on off-road trails and in the city, particularly if fitted with the optional four-wheel steering system that allows it to crab walk diagonally.

However, chopping nine inches out of the wheelbase evidently means using fewer Ultium modules in the double-stacked battery pack. As with the Hummer EV truck, GMC isn't ready to quote an exact amount of kWh in the pack. But maximum power is only 830 hp (619 kW) from its three motors rather than the 1,000 hp (746 kW) available from the truck's 24-module pack, and similarly, GMC is only estimating 300 miles (482 km) of range as opposed to 350 miles (564 km) for the one with a load bed.