Month: February 2023

Enlarge / A small selection of the characters that would be part of Microsoft if its proposed Activision/Blizzard merger is allowed to go through.

Microsoft's legal team now expects Britain's Competition and Markets Authority to formally oppose its long-planned $69 billion merger with Activision Blizzard. That's according to "four people briefed on the matter" cited many paragraphs deep in a New York Times report about the direction of globalized antitrust regulation.

Microsoft expects the European Union's separate "in-depth" investigation into the deal to be more amenable to "potential remedies" that would allow it to go forward, according to the Times' report. As those processes play out on the other side of the Atlantic, the US Federal Trade Commission for now seems content to limit its response to an administrative lawsuit rather than issuing an emergency injunction that could have stopped the deal from moving forward.

Representatives from Microsoft and Activision have yet to offer any public comment in response to a request from Ars Technica.

Enlarge / So big it takes two to maneuver. (credit: Glarses/YouTube)

Sometimes, bigger is better. And sometimes, bigger is just... massive. That's the word that comes to mind when looking at and pricing the latest DIY mechanical keyboard from YouTuber Glarses that's as long and costly as he is tall.

As you might imagine, mechanical keyboards with buttons so big you could comfortably use more than one finger to press one are rather rare. Budget peripheral-maker Redragon has one that you can actually buy that is 1.9 feet long, 7.95 inches deep, and 2.33 inches tall. Google has also played with lengthy keyboards for fun, with Google Japan's Gboard Stick Version prototype measuring 5.25 feet long. And Razer, the inspiration for Glarses' build, has shown off a gargantuan tenkeyless (TKL) keyboard at CES with functioning RGB switches.

Despite all that chassis, though, none of those jumbo boards managed to include a traditional numpad. Glarses' giant keyboard, on the other hand, was made with the mammoth number-cruncher in mind.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Last week, Twitter Safety tweeted that the platform is now “moving faster than ever” to remove child sexual abuse materials (CSAM). It seems, however, that’s not entirely accurate. Child safety advocates told The New York Times that after Elon Musk took over, Twitter started taking twice as long to remove CSAM flagged by various organizations.

The platform has since improved and is now removing CSAM almost as fast as it was before Musk’s takeover—responding to reports in less than two days—The Times reported. But there still seem to be issues with its CSAM reporting system that continue to delay response times. In one concerning case, a Canadian organization spent a week notifying Twitter daily—as the illegal imagery of a victim younger than 10 spread unchecked—before Twitter finally removed the content.

"From our standpoint, every minute that that content's up, it's re-victimizing that child," Gavin Portnoy, vice president of communications for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), told Ars. "That's concerning to us."

Enlarge / Replacing a drifting Joy-Con joystick is a lot easier than finding standing to sue Nintendo about it. (credit: iFixit)

A potential class-action lawsuit over the joystick drift experienced by Nintendo Switch owners has been dismissed, with a federal judge ruling that Nintendo's end-user license agreement (EULA) for the console bars such lawsuits.

William Alsup, US District Judge for the Northern District of California, ruled (PDF) in late November that two plaintiffs, both minors, were not able to sue Nintendo because setting up the Switch requires agreeing to a EULA that has arbitration and forum-selection clauses. The minors and their mothers were the original plaintiffs, but after an arbitrator ruled that the mothers couldn't pursue a claim because their children had accepted the EULA, they attempted to refile the case, with the children as plaintiffs. Because Nintendo's EULA requires a person to be at least 18 years old to sign it, the mothers argued, the children could not have agreed to it and should be able to pursue their case.

But Alsup ruled that the parents who purchased the console were the true owners and that they had failed to assign ownership to the children. Having already sent the parents to arbitration, the judge denied the plaintiffs' request to amend their complaint and dismissed the case.

Enlarge / Elon Musk attends the 2022 Met Gala at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 2, 2022, in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Dimitrios Kambouris)

Elon Musk's victory against a class-action lawsuit filed by Tesla investors took some legal experts by surprise. Investors had won a significant pretrial ruling when a judge found Musk's tweets about securing funding to take Tesla private were false and made recklessly—but a federal jury sided with Musk after the trial ended Friday.

"I thought he was crazy to try his chances at trial, given the stakes involved," University of Michigan law professor Adam Pritchard said, according to a New York Times story. Noting the judge's pretrial ruling on Musk's tweets being false and reckless, Pritchard said, "you're fighting with one hand behind your back in that situation—and yet he won."

Judge Edward Chen had instructed the jury in US District Court for the Northern District of California to assume that Musk's tweets were "untrue" and that "Mr. Musk acted with reckless disregard for whether the statements were true."

Enlarge / The square one is the S23 Ultra; the other two are the S23 and S23 Plus.

As a smartphone operating system, Android strives to be a lightweight OS so it can run on a variety of hardware. The first version of the OS had to squeeze into the T-Mobile G1, with only a measly 256MB of internal storage for Android and all your apps, and ever since then, the idea has been to use as few resources as possible. Unless you have the latest Samsung phone, where Android somehow takes up an incredible 60GB of storage.

Yes, the Galaxy S23 is slowly trickling out to the masses, and, as Esper's senior technical editor Mishaal Rahman highlights in a storage space survey, Samsung's new phone is way out of line with most of the ecosystem. Several users report the phone uses around 60GB for the system partition right out of the box. If you have a 128GB phone, that's nearly half your storage for the Android OS and packed-in apps. That's four times the size of the normal Pixel 7 Pro system partition, which is 15GB. It's the size of two Windows 11 installs, side by side. What could Samsung possibly be putting in there?!

We can take a few guesses as to why things are so big. First, Samsung is notorious for having a shoddy software division that pumps out low-quality code. The company tends to change everything in Android just for change's sake, and it's hard to imagine those changes are very good. Second, Samsung may want to give the appearance of having its own non-Google ecosystem, and to do that, it clones every Google app that comes with its devices. Samsung is contractually obligated to include the Google apps, so you get both the Google and Samsung versions. That means two app stores, two browsers, two voice assistants, two text messaging apps, two keyboard apps, and on and on. These all get added to the system partition and often aren't removable.

Enlarge / A screenshot of Nothing, Forever showing faux-Seinfeld character Larry Feinberg performing a stand-up act. (credit: Nothing Forever)

Since December 14, a Twitch channel called Nothing, Forever has been streaming a live, endless AI-generated Seinfeld episode that features pixelated cartoon versions of characters from the TV show. On Monday, Twitch gave the channel a 14-day ban after language model tools from OpenAI went haywire and generated transphobic content that violated community guidelines.

Typically, Nothing, Forever features four low-poly pixelated cartoon characters that are stand-ins for Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer from the hit 1990s sitcom Seinfeld. They sit around a New York apartment and talk about life, and sometimes the topics of conversation unexpectedly get deep, such as in this viewer-captured segment where they discussed the afterlife.

Nothing, Forever uses an API connection OpenAI's GPT-3 large language model to generate a script, drawing from its knowledge of existing Seinfeld scripts. Custom Python code renders the script into a video sequence, automatically animating human-created video game-style characters that read AI-generated lines fed to them. One of its creators provided more technical details on how it works in a Reddit comment from December.