Opinion
Latest
Apple is happy to use women and people of color as art, not authority
Apple's 2018 iPhone event opened with a black woman busting her ass to ensure a white man's success. The introductory video is a Mission Impossible-style short featuring a young woman racing across Cupertino campus to deliver a briefcase to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who's waiting calmly backstage before the event. She arrives out of breath, and he opens the briefcase. Inside is the clicker for the presentation; he picks it up with reverence while the woman asks, incredulously, "The clicker?" She then stands, panting, behind the curtain as Cook walks out to enjoy a raucous round of applause.
A letter from the editor: Engadget’s next chapter
Hello again. Allow me to reintroduce myself: I am Dana Wollman, once Engadget's resident laptop reviewer, later managing and executive editor, and now editor in chief. I'm delighted to be taking the reins at the site I've called home for the past seven and a half years. When I first joined the team in 2011, Engadget was a different place, and so was the technology scene we covered. I remember the urgency of those early days, dropping everything to cover topics that today seem quaint: FCC filings, an Android update rolling out on yet another carrier, the Apple Store going dark on launch days. Our headlines were frequently an alphabet soup of specs. Hands-on videos were accomplished by setting up a desk-size tripod and manipulating said gadget from behind the camera. Back then, we felt compelled to touch every single thing at CES (yes, even the bad stuff). Engadget was all about, well, gadgets, and gadgets at that time were mostly defined by their hardware. Things have changed a lot, and so has Engadget. And we're not done yet.
After Math: Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
This has been quite the "disruptive" week with TechCrunch's marquee event going on at the San Francisco Moscone Center, and not just for startups. InfoWars was disinvited from yet another social media platform, Walmart is drastically expanding its self-driving Tesla truck order, and the world's largest wind farm just opened for business.
The US government comes for Google, Facebook, and Twitter
Facebook, Twitter, and Google were threatened by lawmakers from three distinct quarters on Wednesday. A leaked email from the largest US telecom lobbying group tells us where this is headed. One threat came during testimony from Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey to Congress when Senator Mark Warner told the pair of executives that "Congress is going to have to take action here. The era of the Wild West in social media is coming to an end."
After Math: This is the end
All good things must come to an end, often not nearly soon enough. Unfortunately for you, generous reader, this week's deadpool does not include After Math. But we are, however, witnessing the death knells of long-haul driving, fossil fuel energy and Mr. Robot, among others.
New lawsuit shows your phone is unsafe at American borders
A recent case filed in federal court, in which an American woman had her iPhone seized and cracked by Customs and Border Protection in a New Jersey airport puts a whole new spin on the things we now need to worry about when leaving the country. It appears that now everyone's phones, despite country of origin or cause, are subject to nonconsensual seizure and search -- even if we refuse to give up our passwords. If you're not caught up on the story, news hit this week that a Staten Island mom coming home from a February trip with her 9-year-old daughter from Switzerland had her iPhone snatched, kept for months and accessed for no given reason. Apple did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
After Math: Gaming the system
With Gamescom 2018 now wrapping up and IFA 2018 just getting started, there's more than enough video game news to go around. But the latest salvos in the console wars weren't the only things going on in the tech industry this week. VW announced that it's investing $4 billion in a proprietary connected car architecture, Facebook phased out 5,000 ad options in an effort to fight discrimination on its platform and the CBP actually did something right for once. I know, I'm shocked too.
Can hackers stop trolls from manipulating the media?
In the past few years conversations about the media have evolved into heated debates about collusion, lies, ethics, confirmation bias, gatekeepers and, of course, the stupidest of all phrases, "fake news." What's rarely mentioned in these conversations is that the media is being hacked/manipulated on an ongoing basis. So could security researchers and hackers patch its "vulnerabilities?" It's an idea floated by Matt Goerzen and Dr. Jeanna Matthews of research institute Data and Society.
Microsoft, where's my 2TB Xbox One X?
Today at Gamescom Microsoft trotted out a bevy of new Xbox hardware/software bundles, as promised. There were eight (!) in total, with the One X getting the lion's share of them. Both the One S and One X bundles share a common theme: 1 terabyte of internal storage. First-party games optimized for the One X, meaning they feature 4K resolution and HDR video, are big, and several reach 100GB. That'a over 10 percent of available internal storage per. It doesn't take having too many of those before you have to start playing virtual Tetris with game downloads.
After Math: What could go wrong?
It's been a week of risk in the tech world, and I don't just mean Elon Musk's recent Twitter-on-acid experiment. Best Buy is wagering $800 million on a company that teaches your grandparents how gadgets work, Saint Louis University is peppering its dorms with Echos for some reason, and Reebok is hoping folks won't be too tempted to eat their vegetable-based sneakers.
'Okami HD' on the Switch is an imperfect classic
What makes a good Switch game? The consensus seems to be something that isn't graphically demanding, has a quick gameplay loop or is easily played in bite-sized portions. Local multiplayer helps out a whole lot, too.
After Math: Space Farce
It takes a special breed of bureaucrat to look upon the majesty of the cosmos and think to themself, "man, I can't wait to get up there and start a war," but these are the times in which we live. So while the Trump administration spent this week eyeing the stars for something to shoot, NASA and the private space industry continued in their missions to explore the solar system without blowing everything up along the way.
Anonymous deals with its QAnon branding problem
When you're a notorious hacking entity like Anonymous, and a pro-Trump conspiracy cult (QAnon) steals your branding (while claiming you're the impostor), the obvious thing to do is declare cyberwar. That's exactly what Anonymous did this past week in a press announcement, followed by a social media and press offensive. So far Anonymous has managed to take over QAnon's hashtags (while adding #OpQAnon and others) and dox a couple hundred members of Trump's pedophilia-obsessed, "deep state" doomsday cult. QAnon's mouthpieces responded exactly as we'd expect, with taunts and tweets saying: "These people are STUPID!! They have no brains and no skills. Typical 'empty threat' terrorists! But DO NOT click their links!! Virus city baby!!"
After Math: Score one for the good guys
Oh what a week it's been. Apple is now valued at one trillion dollars, the NES Classic is still selling like hotcakes, one plucky hacker garnered a seven figure income from a single ransomeware attack, and whackadoodle conspiracy peddler Alex Jones was shown the door at two more streaming platforms.
When your Uber driver is a spy
Like other migrating beasts, hackers travel huge distances for feeding, breeding, and breaking things every summer -- at Defcon in Las Vegas. The way they move about the city is driven primarily by the availability of free booze at corporate parties or the convenience of air-conditioned infosec habitats; the heat makes them torpid. As such, everyone takes taxis, Ubers, and Lyfts everywhere, day and night.
Even automakers don’t want Trump’s emissions rollback
The Trump administration unveiled its proposal to weaken Obama-era fuel efficiency standards, and it's as bad as you would expect.
'No Man’s Sky' finally delivers the grand adventure we were promised
The huge No Man's Sky Next update has landed. Now we've had some time to relax into new material economies, multiplayer adventures and horrific alien eggs that will ruin your day, do we feel differently about the contentious space exploration game that promised so much and didn't quite deliver? The Engadget team outline how their odyssey is faring this time around.
After Math: The price of doing business
Elon Musk just can't seem to stay out of the news. After last week's tirade against the Thai cave rescue diver, his girlfriend took to Twitter to defend his large donations to the GOP as "the price of doing business in america [sic]." But that price differs depending on who you ask. For right-wing troll Alex Jones, that price is a 30-day timeout from Facebook and Yahoo, but for MoviePass that price could well be the company's entire operation.
The first ‘blockchain baby’ is here
When you read the news that they put a baby on the blockchain, your reaction makes you one of two types of people. Either you think, Mon dieu, is there anything the magical fairy dust known as blockchain can't solve? Or you think: Surely, this is child abuse. For the past few years, techies have frothed and proselytized over the potential salvation of blockchain, the tech behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. So it's hard to even know what babies and blockchain could even have to do with each other. Typically, outside of grifter circles, blockchain is associated with vaporware, shady fraudulent ICOs or solving things that aren't suited at all for blockchain's "distributed ledger" system. Oh, and largely solving things that aren't even problems.
What we're watching: 'First Team: Juventus' and 'Killing Eve'
Welcome back to IRL, our series dedicated to the things that Engadget writers play, use, watch and listen to. This week, Billy Steele explains how to keep your soccer addiction fed with Netflix's 'Juventus' series, while Richard Lawler breaks down why 'Killing Eve' should be at the top of your binge-worthy list.
