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Enlarge / Dream Drop Distance is nothing if not colorful.

Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue is a package as hard to parse as its name. The collection serves up three new-ish chapters in the Kingdom Hearts series: an HD remaster of the 3DS exclusive Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance; a two-hour followup to the PSP’s Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep; and an extended cutscene based on the browser and mobile game prequel Kingdom Hearts χ.

Before booting up 2.8, I did my best to brush up on the 15-or-so years of series lore to get a grasp on where these episodes fit in Kingdom Hearts’ timeline. What I found was a swirling mess of proper nouns and unpronounceable names. It seems since the first Kingdom Hearts (the last one I finished) things have gotten complicated. Or more complicated than a world where Disney and Final Fantasy characters hang out on a regular basis, anyway.

If you’re hoping 2.8 will at least make sense as a self-contained collection, forget it. No single part of the trio seems directly connected to any other part. Dream Drop Distance is set at the extreme end of the Kingdom Hearts timeline (ostensibly leading up to the still mythical Kingdom Hearts 3), A Fragmentary Passage (the two-hour Birth by Sleep followup) runs concurrent with, but disconnected from, the original Kingdom Hearts; and Kingdom Hearts χ Back Cover (the “extended cutscene”) is set eons before either of the other two.

Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract manufacturing company best known for its partnership with Apple, has said that it is mulling a $7 billion investment in US manufacturing that could create between 30,000 and 50,000 jobs. According to The Wall Street Journal, Foxconn Chairman Tony Gou says the company is talking with the state of Pennsylvania among others about getting the land and electricity subsidies it would need to build a factory.

“If US state governments are willing to provide these terms, and we calculate and it is cheaper than shipping from China or Japan, then why wouldn’t Sharp build a factory in the US?" said Gou.

The factory would build flat-panel screens under the Sharp name—Foxconn bought Sharp around this time last year for $5.1 billion. Sharp President Tai Jeng-wu hinted in October of 2016 that US manufacturing could be a possibility for Sharp, and he also indicated that Apple could begin using OLED display panels in future iPhones. Apple currently uses OLED in the Apple Watch and in the new MacBook Pro's Touch Bar, but otherwise it hasn't pushed to adopt the technology as some Android phone manufacturers have.

Enlarge (credit: Lucasfilm)

Warning, this post contains spoilers about the previous Star Wars film, Episode VII.

Since Disney bought the Star Wars franchise, we've been treated to two rather excellent films. 2015's Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens was a return to form. Last year's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story filled in some plot points and explored the universe in a darker and more mature way.

Thanks to Disney's metronomic production schedule, the next installment of Star Wars will hit the screens in December, and we now have a title: Episode VIII will be Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Enlarge / Close up of cancer cells in the cervix, the portion of the uterus that is attached to the top of the vagina. (credit: Getty | American Cancer Society)

Cervical cancer is 77 percent more deadly for black women and 44 percent more deadly for white women than previously thought, researchers report today in the journal Cancer.

But the lethal boosts aren’t from more women actually dying than before—they’re from scientists correcting their own calculation error. In the past, their estimates didn’t account for women who had undergone hysterectomies—which almost always removes the cervix, and with it the risk of getting cervical cancer.

“We don’t include men in our calculation because they are not at risk for cervical cancer and by the same measure, we shouldn’t include women who don’t have a cervix,” Anne F. Rositch, the study's lead author and an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins told The New York Times.

(credit: Ryan McLaughlin)

China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology yesterday announced a major crackdown on VPN (virtual private network) services that encrypt Internet traffic and let residents access websites blocked by the country's so-called Great Firewall. The ministry "said that all special cable and VPN services on the mainland needed to obtain prior government approval—a move making most VPN service providers in the country of 730 million Internet users illegal," reported the South China Morning Post, a major newspaper in Hong Kong.

China's announcement said the country's Internet service market "has signs of disordered development that requires urgent regulation and governance" and that the crackdown is needed to “strengthen cyberspace information security management," according to the Post. The government said its crackdown would begin immediately and run until March 31, 2018.

Numerous Internet users in China rely on VPNs to access sites blocked or censored by the government's Great Firewall, such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, The Pirate Bay, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many others. Apple recently pulled New York Times apps from its Chinese App Store to comply with Chinese regulations.