Category: Uncategorised

BARCELONA—You might not have heard of Xiaomi, or used any of its products before. And even if you have, you might be wondering why one of China's largest smartphone makers—which historically hasn't sold to the US and Europe—is here at MWC to talk about its new flagship smartphone, the Mi 5. The answer, it seems, isn't to launch a dramatic assault on the Western market in the same way Huawei has, but rather to warn the likes of Apple and Samsung that Xiaomi is coming, and people are going to love it.

In a surprisingly slick, if odd press conference—VP Hugo Barra glided through the room on one of Xiaomi's own Ninebot mini scooters—the company pitted its new Android-based Mi 5 phone against the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S7 and iPhone 6S. And on paper at least, Apple and Samsung have plenty to worry about. The Mi 5 sports the latest Snapdragon 820 SoC running at 2.2GHz, a 5.15-inch 1080p edge-to-edge display, up to 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, up to 128GB of UFS 2.0 storage, a 16MP f/2.0 camera with 4-axis OIS (a first, it claims), NFC, a fingerprint scanner, 3000mAh battery, and a gorgeous metal and glass (or ceramic) body.

The price for that little lot? An impressive 2,600 yuan ($354, €321) for the high-end 128GB model with a ceramic body, and 1,999 yuan ($262, €238) for the entry-level version with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. A 64GB version will also be available. All will have black, gold, and white colour options, and all will ship with Android 6.0 running Xiaomi's MIUI 7 interface. The phones will be sold direct from Xiaomi's website in China on March 1, making the Mi 5 one of the first commercially available phones with Qualcomm's latest SoC.

Ben Wizner is an ACLU attorney who we're sure the government views as a "worthy fuckin' adversary." (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

DAVIS, Calif.—Ben Wizner, a top attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, is probably best known for being one of the lawyers representing Ed Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor.

On Tuesday, he told Ars that representing the world's most famous whistleblower has consumed a substantial portion of his professional life over the last 2.5 years. But he framed his passion for civil liberties and fighting surveillance as part of a larger struggle that continues to play out as to the proper balance between not only surveillance and privacy but also between surveillance and democracy itself.

Wizner was in this college town outside Sacramento to speak at the University of California, Davis law school as part of an ongoing public lecture series on surveillance. (Full disclosure: yours truly spoke as part of the same series last year.) In a 30-minute talk followed by questions from an audience primarily made up of law students, Wizner outlined a history of surveillance in America, going back to the 1971 Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI and extending through to the Snowden-era NSA.

(credit: Lan Bui)

Deadline reported today that Disney had tapped Ava DuVernay, director of Oscar-winning Selma, to direct two science fiction scripts: A Wrinkle In Time and Intelligent Life. The script for A Wrinkle In Time will be written by Jennifer Lee, the writer and co-director of Disney’s animated blockbuster Frozen.

A Wrinkle In Time is the better-known of the two projects, being beloved by children since its publication in 1962. Author Madeleine L’Engle centered the book around Meg Murry, a 13-year-old girl who sets out with her brothers and her friend Calvin to find her father, a government scientist who has gone missing. The children travel through time using a “tesseract” and find Meg’s father on another planet. A Wrinkle In Time is just the first in a series of novels called the Time Quintet. The first book was adapted for TV in 2001 and distributed in the US by Disney in 2004, but it received largely negative reviews.

Intelligent Life will also have science fiction elements to it. According to Deadline, that movie is about "a UN worker in a department designed to represent mankind if there was ever contact with aliens, who falls for a mystery woman who turns out to be one.”