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  Founder and CEO of Essential Products Andy Rubin speaks onstage at the Wired Business Conference at Spring Studios on June 7, 2017, in New York City. [credit: Brian Ach/Getty Images for Wired ]

Andy Rubin's smartphone startup, Essential, is finally dead. Today, Essential announced in a blog post that it is closing its doors, saying that since it has "no clear path to deliver" its newest smartphone to customers, the company has "made the difficult decision to cease operations and shut down Essential."

Essential was Andy Rubin's next company after his previous gig at Google, where he lead the development of Android, taking the OS from nothing to the world's most popular operating system. Being "The Father of Android" meant venture capital firms would throw money at him when he left Google to form a new company. That company was Essential, where Andy Rubin jumped full time into smartphone hardware. The company was valued at $1.2 billion before it even sold a single product.

Essential ended up releasing a single smartphone, the Essential Phone, in 2017, along with two modular accessories: a $200 360-degree camera and a $150 clip-on headphone jack (yes, really). Since then, the company has just kind of hung around and canceled in-development products. It has done very little in the "selling things for money" category of business. Essential planned to sell a charging dock for the Essential Phone, but that product was never released. Alongside the phone, the company announced a smart display called the "Essential Home" and a new smart operating system called "Ambient OS," but neither the hardware nor software ever materialized.

Enlarge / A Frontier Communications service van. (credit: Mike Mozart / Flickr)

Frontier Communications is facing more scrutiny over outages that have left its customers without telecom service—including access to 911 emergency calling—for weeks at a time.

US Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) sent letters to Frontier and the Federal Communications Commission last week, saying that Frontier's failure to quickly restore service during outages has put residents in danger.

Frontier offers telecom service in 29 states over its fiber and copper networks, and the company is reportedly planning to file for bankruptcy by mid-March. Frontier has been investigated recently for long outages in several states.

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Brookes / Getty Images)

A Philadelphia man has been freed after a federal appeals court ruled that his continued detention was violating federal law. Francis Rawls, a former police officer, had been in jail since 2015, when a federal judge held him in contempt for failing to decrypt two hard drives taken from his home. The government believes they contain child pornography.

In 2015, law enforcement raided Rawls' home and seized two smartphones, a Mac laptop, and two hard drives. Prosecutors were able to gain access to the laptop, and police say forensic analysis showed Rawls downloading child pornography and saving it to the external hard drives. But the drives themselves were encrypted, preventing the police from accessing the downloaded files.

Enlarge / Does everyone play at E3 2020? Not Geoff Keighley. (credit: Jill Greenberg / Aurich Lawson)

While the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo is still scheduled to kick off in Los Angeles this June, the headlines surrounding the next incarnation have mostly been about who's not attending. After January's news that Sony would (once again) not attend E3, Wednesday came with confirmation of another major no-show, but it's not a game developer or a publisher; instead, it's journalist, promoter, and producer Geoff Keighley.

Gaming fans are likely familiar with Keighley's work as host of The Game Awards and various journalistic deep dives; his "Final Hours" series will emerge later this year with an insider's look at the development process of Valve's upcoming VR game Half-Life: Alyx. But in the case of E3, Keighley isn't just a guy who shows up to check out new video games. For the past few years, he's produced the E3 Coliseum series of game debuts and celebrity panels. And for over 20 years, he's organized the independent, E3-adjacent Game Critics Awards—which are a huge factor for members of E3's attending press in the West.

Some of that changes this year, as per a Wednesday statement posted to Keighley's Twitter account. After acknowledging his 25 years of E3 attendance, Keighley confirmed that he "will not be participating in E3" this year and that he "declined" to serve as producer of any E3 Coliseum-style events.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

At least 175 people have contracted 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) aboard a luxury cruise ship quarantined in Japan. The latest total includes 39 newly identified cases among passengers and crew members, plus one case in a Japanese quarantine officer working on the vessel.

The outbreak on the ship Diamond Princess is the largest outside of China, where the virus is thought to have spread to people from animals in a live-animal market in the city of Wuhan, the capital city of the central Hubei Province. The virus’ jump to humans led to an explosion of disease, which, as of yesterday, February 11, the World Health Organization formally dubbed COVID-19, short for “coronavirus disease 2019.”

Since the outbreak began in December, there have been over 45,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide and at least 1,115 deaths. But while 2019-nCoV has spread to at least 24 countries beyond China, nearly all of the COVID-19 cases and all but one death have occurred in China.