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Engadget

‘Star Trek: Picard’ features a time-traveling Samsung Galaxy Z Fold

Posted: 12 Mar 2022 02:56 PM PST

For decades, Star Trek has defined the future of consumer technology. We have smartphones and voice assistants because in-universe devices like the Tricorder inspired engineers at Apple, Google and other companies to recreate those technologies in the real world. And things have now come full circle, showing just how much technology has come since The Original Series debuted in 1966.

Galaxy Z Fold 2
9to5Google / ViacomCBS

If you've been watching the new season of Star Trek: Picard, you may have noticed one of the characters uses a curious prop in episode two. In a clip spotted by 9to5Google, you can see Alison Pill's Dr. Jurati tap away on what looks like a Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 or Fold 3. The tablet is sheathed in a case to hide its distinctly 21st-century origins, but if you look closely, you can see the telltale display crease that develops on all of Samsung's foldables.

Seeing a modern smartphone appear in Star Trek: Picard is amusing on its own, but what makes this cameo even more anachronistic is that by the technological standards of Star Trek's 25th century, Dr. Jurati has access to technologies like holographic displays. With part of season two set in 2024, we could see more current-day gadgets make their way into the show.   

'WeCrashed' on AppleTV+ promises the world, but delivers very little

Posted: 12 Mar 2022 02:30 PM PST

Students of history learn the importance of primary sources; eyewitness accounts of what people saw and did when all of this history was going on. You also learn that there's a great need for evidence to be gathered before the twin evils of memory and self-deception color the narratives. Just as important, however, are secondary sources which can collate all of that testimony, to pick out the truth, or at least a working theory about what went on.

Take WeWork, a startup that leases office space to individuals and small businesses with an emphasis on fancy design and an open bar. As Scott Galloway once said, "they're renting f*cking desks," but wound up inexplicably deemed to be worth $47 billion. Now, you might be wondering how exactly that came to be, but it's not a question that Apple TV's WeCrashed can answer. It can, in excruciating detail, lead you through the chronology of what happened, but why it happened remains frustratingly out of reach.

The series, adapted from the Wondery podcast of the same name, charts the rise and rise of Israeli entrepreneur Adam Neumann (Jared Leto). It charts Neumann's life, from his stumbles at business school, meeting Miguel McKelvey (Kyle Marvin) and his future wife, Rebekah Paltrow (Anne Hathaway). Neumann and McKelvey launch Green Desk, a Brooklyn-based co-working company that they sell in order to repeat the feat in Manhattan under the name WeWork. Which, unlike Green Desk, makes a fairly sizable dent in the rarified world of investment banking and tech investments.

As usual, Apple asked critics not to spoil the details of the show. I can, however, safely recommend that you read the Wikipedia article to find out exactly what happened, which is a far more efficient and enjoyable way to spend your time. Suffice to say, a company deemed to be more valuable than the GDP of some countries winds up not being worth that much and some venture capital funds have to spend extra cash to clean up the error of their initial investment.

Unfortunately, the show's biggest failure is that the above description is pretty much the level of stakes we're expected to care about. The second is that a story that might have made a fairly breezy movie of the week on HBO drags on well beyond anyone's tolerance to enjoy it. Third, and worst of all, is that it's really hard to spend that much time in the company of Adam and Rebekah Neumann. Now, there are plenty of films and TV series that feature unlikeable yet compelling sociopaths as their lead characters, including the recently released Inventing Anna. And if WeCrashed had a more cohesive central thesis, or a clear-eyed view of these characters, then they might have been able to make the characters in any way compelling or pleasant. To say that spending eight hours in their company is a chore is a spectacular understatement.

Despite its never-ending running time, WeCrashed glosses over a fair number of details from the WeWork narrative. The Ballardian WeLive residential concept, which was detailed in Hulu's WeWork documentary from last year, never gets a mention. More troublingly, the show glosses over the corporate culture of hard drinking and, reportedly, inter-office sexual assault that were widelydetailed at the time. The only time this is ever looked at, it's as a montage showing people taking their turns with each other in a supply closet between rounds of drinks. And, because of how the show frames Adam as our, uh, hero, it almost celebrates the times he himself uses drinking (and bullying) to get his own way with would-be business partners. 

It's interesting, to me, that WeCrashed seems to not have a clear idea of what sort of show it wants to be. If it wanted to portray the Neumanns as well-meaning ingenues out of their depth and manipulated by wider forces, it could have sanded off their rougher edges. If it wanted to make them the villains, it would have taken the sort of villain-as-hero perspective you'd find in a Martin Scorsese movie. But instead it sits in a middle ground, with silly gag bits sprinkled around what is otherwise a fairly po-faced prestige drama.

I will say, too, that viewers will notice that all of the people who backed and enabled Neumann are rarely treated critically. The people who wrote the checks, fed the beast and then threw a tantrum when it didn't make a huge profit are always presented as well-meaning. This soft touch certainly extends toward Masayoshi Son, CEO of Softbank and head of Softbank's Vision Fund. Softbank, if you recall, was Apple's iPhone launch carrier in Japan, owns part of T-Mobile in the US and, most crucially, currently owns ARM, which licenses the technology that powers Apple Silicon. Sure depicting him at all is something of a risk, but he's never presented as a fool, nor is it suggested that he was duped into investing in WeWork in the first place.

There are a couple of moments where a character is able to point at what's unfolding in wide-eyed disbelief. But those are few and far between, again, maybe because it's hard – yet – to see if WeWork is a success or a failure. It did go public, eventually, as part of a SPAC, and while it's still a loss-making company, it may eventually rebound. It's clear that you can't pull, or land, a punch if you don't know where your target is going to be in two or three years from now. If this story, for whatever reason, gets remade in the 2050's, I bet it'll be a lot more interesting than the one I've just sat through.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the WeCrashed's creators were aiming for a show on the level of Succession. Unfortunately, while it does focus on "complex characters who are unlikeable worrying over their ownership stake of a company," this feels more like a Billions knock-off. And not a good one at that.

Tinder users help Ukrainian refugees find shelter and support

Posted: 12 Mar 2022 01:24 PM PST

Since the start of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, more than 2.5 million people have fled the country, making it Europe's worst refugee crisis since World War II. In trying to find shelter in neighboring countries like Romania, some Ukrainian refugees have turned to an unexpected place for help: Tinder.

The New York Times recounts the tale of one such individual, Anastasia Tischchenko. She and her friend Natalia Masechko posted their plight to the dating app when they fled their home of Ivano-Frankivsk, a city of approximately 230,000 located in western Ukraine, south of Lviv.

"I'm thinking there are a lot of honest people in the world, and some of them are on Tinder," Tischchenko told The Times. She was right. Several people swiped right on her profile to offer help, including one man who put Tischchenko and Masechko in touch with a friend of a friend of a friend who found a monastery the two could sleep in while in Siret, a Romanian city on the southern border of Ukraine. "It was very inspiring," she said. After their stay in Siret, Tischchenko traveled to Poland, while her friend Masechko stayed in Romania to help the next wave of refugees.

Like the war itself, the refugee crisis has hit a critical inflection point in recent days. On Friday, officials in Poland's two largest cities, Warsaw and Krakow, said they were struggling to accommodate all the people arriving in the wake of the conflict. Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski warned the "situation is getting more and more difficult every day." The UN's High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that as many as 4 million people could flee Ukraine due to the war.

Sony's Crunchyroll anime streaming service suspends operations in Russia

Posted: 12 Mar 2022 12:03 PM PST

Another company is temporarily cutting the Russian market off from its services following the country's invasion of Ukraine. On Friday, Sony's Entertainment unit blocked Russian users from accessing its Crunchyroll anime streaming service and said it would halt the home entertainment release of films like Spider-Man: No Way Home within Russia, according to Variety. The company had previously said it would not release its upcoming slate of theatrical films in the country.   

"We stand with many businesses around the world who have now paused their business operations in Russia, and in support of the humanitarian efforts currently underway in Ukraine and the surrounding region," Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Tony Vinciquerra said in an email obtained by the outlet. Vinciquerra went on to tell employees the company was also halting future TV distribution deals.

The timing of the Crunchyroll suspension is particularly noteworthy. Following Sony's $1.175 billion deal to buy the platform in 2020, the company began adding titles from its Funimation catalog at the start of March. In a notice spotted by ComicBook, Crunchyroll told Premium subscribers in Russia it wouldn't charge them for service while the platform is unavailable in the country. It's also worth noting Sony's PlayStation division had already halted hardware and software sales before Friday's decision.

First trailer for Apple's 'They Call Me Magic' celebrates a basketball icon

Posted: 12 Mar 2022 10:58 AM PST

Apple has shared the first trailer for They Call Me Magic, its upcoming four-part documentary on former LA Lakers superstar Earvin "Magic" Johnson. Set to debut on April 22nd, the TV+ exclusive looks to take more than a few cues from Netflix's The Last Dance.

In fact, with interviews of Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, former President Barack Obama and Johnson himself, many of the same people who took part in that documentary spoke to director Rick Famuyiwa as well. Judging by the trailer, however, fans should expect a series that is more hopeful, and that spends just as much time celebrating Johnson's activism and family life as it does his all-star career.

Apple stops selling LG's $1,299 UltraFine 5K Display

Posted: 12 Mar 2022 09:55 AM PST

Days after discontinuing the 27-inch iMac, Apple has also stopped selling one of LG's UltraFine displays. As spotted by MacRumors, if you visit the company's website, it no longer lists the 27-inch 5K model that retailed for $1,299 before its removal. LG has seemingly stopped selling the monitor as well, with its website indicating that it's "out of stock."

Unsurprisingly, the 27-inch model's removal from the Apple Store comes in the same week Apple announced its new Studio Display. Starting at $1,599, the monitor features a 5K retina panel with P3 wide color gamut coverage and 600 nits of brightness. It also comes with a built-in A13 Bionic chip to augment the capabilities of its 12-megapixel web camera and six-speaker sound system. Those are features that made the UltraFine 5K redundant. For the time being, it would appear Apple will continue to offer the 23.7-inch UltraFine 4K display through its website for $699. 

Ubisoft says no user information was exposed in recent 'cyber security incident'

Posted: 12 Mar 2022 08:49 AM PST

South American hacking group Lapsus$ is claiming responsibility for another high-profile hack. On Thursday, Ubisoft said it underwent a "cyber security incident" last week that saw some of its games, systems and services temporarily disrupted. At the time, the company didn't identify who may have been responsible for the incident, but just one day later, Lapsus$ began to seemingly take credit.

Lapsus$ claim
The Verge

After The Verge published a story on the incident, a Telegram channel allegedly run by the group posted a link to the article and a smirking face emoji, suggesting it was claiming responsibility for what had happened. It also said that it had not targeted user data in the breach.

"Our IT teams are working with leading external experts to investigate the issue," Ubisoft said Thursday. "We can confirm that all our games and services are functioning normally and that at this time there is no evidence any player personal information was accessed or exposed as a by-product of this incident."

Friday's claim comes less than a week after the same group took credit for obtaining about 190GB of data from Samsung. Previously, Lapsus$ said it was responsible for the NVIDIA hack that saw the source code for the company's DLSS technology leak online.

Hitting the Books: How Ronald Reagan torpedoed sensible drug patenting

Posted: 12 Mar 2022 08:30 AM PST

Americans pay two and a half times more for their prescription drugs than residents of any other nation on Earth. Though generic versions of popular compounds accounted for 84 percent of America's annual sales volume in 2021, they only generated 12 percent of the actual dollars spent. The rest of the money pays for branded drugs — Lipitor, Zestril, Accuneb, Vicodin, Prozac — and we have the Reagan Administration in part to thank for that. In the excerpt below from Owning the Sun: A People's History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines, a fascinating look at the long, infuriating history of public research being exploited for private profit, author Alexander Zaitchik recounts former President Reagan's court-packing antics from the early 1980s that helped cement lucrative monopolies on name-brand drugs.

Owning the Sun cover
Counterpoint Press

Copyright © 2022 by Alexander Zaitchik, from Owning the Sun: A People's History of Monopoly Medicine from Aspirin to COVID-19 Vaccines. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.

When Estes Kefauver died in 1963, he was writing a book about monopoly power called In a Few Hands. Early into Reagan's first term, the industry must have been tempted to publish a gloating retort titled In a Few Years. Between 1979 and 1981, the drug companies did more than break the stalemate of the 1960s and '70s — they smashed it wide open. Stevenson-Wydler and Bayh-Dole replaced the Kennedy policy with a functioning framework for the high-speed transfer of public science into private hands. As the full machinery was built out, the industry-funded echo chamber piped a constant flow of memes into the culture: patents alone drive innovation... R&D requires monopoly pricing... progress and American competitiveness depend on it... there is no other way...

In December 1981, the drug companies celebrated another long-sought victory when Congress created a federal court devoted to settling patent disputes. Previously, patent disputes were heard in the districts where they originated. The problem, from industry's perspective, was the presence of so many staunch New Deal judges in key regions like New York's Second Circuit. These lifetime judges often understood patent challenges not as threats to property rights, but as opportunities to enforce antitrust law. Local circuit judges appointed by Republicans could also be dangerously old-fashioned in their interpretations of the "novelty" standard. By contrast, the judges on the new patent court, named the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, were appointed by the president. Reagan stuffed its bench with corporate patent lawyers and conservative legal scholars influenced by the Johnny Appleseed of the Law and Economics movement, Robert Bork. Prior to 1982, federal district judges rejected around two-thirds of patent claims; the Court of Appeals has since decided two-thirds of all cases in favor of patent claims. Reagan's first appointee, Pauline Newman, was the former lead patent counsel for the chemical firm FMC.

The Supreme Court also contributed to the industry's 1979–1981 run of wins. When Reagan entered office, one of the great scientific-legal unknowns involved the patentability of modified genes. Similar to the uncertainty around the postwar antibiotics market—settled in the industry's favor by the 1952 Patents Act — the uncertainty threatened the monopoly dreams of the emergent biotechnology sector. The U.S. Patent Office was against patenting modified genes. In 1979, its officers twice rejected an attempt by a General Electric microbiologist to patent a modified bacterium invented to assist in oil spill cleanups. The GE scientist, Ananda Chakrabarty, sued the Patent Office, and in the winter of 1980 Diamond v. Chakrabarty landed before the Supreme Court. In a 5–4 decision written by Warren Burger, the Court overruled the U.S. Patent Office and ruled that modified genes were patentable, as was "anything under the sun that is made by man." The decision was greeted with audible exhales by the players in the Bayh-Dole alliance. "Chakrabarty was the game changer that provided academic entrepreneurs and venture capitalists the protection they were waiting for," says economist Öner Tulum. "It paved the way for a more expansive commercialization of science."

But the industry knew better than to relax. It understood that political victories could be impermanent and fragile, and it had the scar tissue to prove it. Uniquely profitable, uniquely hated, and thus uniquely vulnerable — the companies could not afford to forget that their fantastic postwar wealth and power depended on the maintenance of artificial monopolies resting on dubious if not indefensible ethical and economic arguments that were rejected by every other country on earth. In the United States, home to their biggest profit margins, danger lurked behind every corner in the form of the next crusading senator eager to train years of unwanted attention on these facts. Not even Bayh-Dole, that precious newborn legislation, could be taken for granted. This mode of permanent crisis was validated by the return of a familiar menace in the early 1980s. Of all things, it was the generics industry, an old but weak enemy of the patent-based drug companies, that reappeared and threatened to ruin their celebration of achieving dominance over every corner of medical research and the billions of public dollars flowing through it.

***

As late as the 1930s, there was no "generic" drug industry to speak of. There were only big drug companies and small ones, some with stature, others obscure. They both sold products that were, in the parlance of ethical medicine, "nonproprietary." To be listed in the United States Pharmacopeia and National Formulary, the official bibles of prescribable medicines, drugs could only carry scientific names; the essential properties of a good scientific name, according to the first edition of the Pharmacopeia, were "expressiveness, brevity, and dissimilarity." The naming of drugs and medicines formed the other half of the patent taboo: branding a drug evidenced the same knavishness and greed as monopolizing one. The rules of "ethical marketing" did permit products to include an institutional affiliation—Parke-Davis Cannabis Indica Extract, or Squibb Digitalis Tincture—but the names of the medicines themselves (cannabis, digitalis) did not vary. "The generic name emerged as a parallel form of social property belonging to all that resisted commodification and thereby came to occupy a central place in debates about monopoly rights," writes Joseph Gabriel.

As with patents on scientific medicine, the Germans gave the U.S. drug industry early instruction in the use of trademarks to entrench market control. Hoechst and Bayer broke every rule of so-called ethical marketing, aggressively advertising their breakthrough drugs under trademarks like Aspirin, Heroin, and Novocain. The idea was to twine these names and the things they described in the public mind so tightly, the brand name would secure a de facto monopoly long after the patent expired.

The strategy worked, but the German firms did not reap the benefits. The wartime Office of Alien Property redistributed the German patents and trademarks among domestic firms who produced competing versions of aspirin, creating the first "branded generic." During the patent taboo's extended death rattle of the interwar years, more U.S. companies waded into the use of original trademarks to suppress competition. As they experimented with German tactics to avoid "genericide" — the loss of markets after patent expiration — they were enabled by court decisions that transformed trademarks into forms of hard property, similar to the way patents were reconceived in the 1830s.

After World War II, branding and monopoly formed the two-valve heart of a post-ethical growth strategy. The industry's incredible postwar success — between 1939 and 1959, drug profits soared from $300 million to $2.3 billion — was fueled in large part by expanding the German playbook. While branding monopolies with trade names, the industry initiated campaigns to ruin the reputations of scientifically identical but competing products. The goal was the "scandalization" of generic drugs, writes historian Jeremy Greene. The drug companies "worked methodically to moralize and sensationalize generic dispensing as a dangerous and subversive practice. Dispensing a non-branded product in place of a brand-name product was cast as 'counterfeiting'; the act of substituting a cheaper version of a drug at the pharmacy was described as 'beguilement,' 'connivance,' 'misrepresentation,' 'fraudulent,' 'unethical' and 'immoral.'"

As with patenting, it was the drug companies that dragged organized medicine with them into the post-ethical future. As late as 1955, the AMA's Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry maintained a ban on advertisements for branded products in its Journal. That changed the year Equanil hit the market, opening the age of branded prescription drugs as a leading source of income for medical journals and associations. "Clinical journals and newer 'throwaway' promotional media now teemed with advertisements for Terramycin, Premarin, and Diuril rather than oxytetracycline (Pfizer), conjugated equine estrogens (Wyeth) or chlorothiazide (Merck)," writes Greene. In 1909, only one in ten prescription drugs carried a brand name. By 1969, the ratio had flipped, with only one in ten marketed under its scientific name. In another echo of the patent controversy, the rise of marketing and branded drugs produced division and resistance. By the mid-1950s, an alliance of so-called nomenclature reformers arose to decry trademarks as unscientific handmaidens of monopoly and call for a return to the use of scientific names. These reformers — doctors, pharmacists, labor leaders — made regular appearances before the Kefauver committee beginning in 1959. Their testimony on how the industry used trademarks to suppress competition informed a section in Kefauver's original bill requiring doctors to use scientific names in all prescriptions. The proposed law reflected the norms that reigned during ethical medicine's heyday, and would have allowed doctors to recommend firms, but not their branded products. Like most of Kefauver's core proposals, however, the generic clause was excised. The only trademark-related reform in the final Kefauver-Harris Amendments placed limits on companies' ability to rebrand and market old medicines as new breakthroughs.

Recommended Reading: The first TikTok war

Posted: 12 Mar 2022 07:15 AM PST

The myth of the 'First TikTok War'

Kaitlyn Tiffany, The Atlantic

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is playing out over social media, with varying degrees of facts depending on who is delivering the information. Through the lens of previous conflicts, Tiffany examines if the label of "The First TikTok War" is accurate for current world events based on the platform's design or if that moniker even matters. "If something is new, then maybe it can be different," she writes. "But to look for that difference in the offerings of a technology company is obviously sad and misguided."

Ten years ago, 'Journey' made a convincing case that video games could be art

Lewis Gordon, The Ringer

A game that was made in rebellion against commercial titles showed a more artistic side. Designed to "hit you right in the feels," as Gordon writes, Journey kicked violence and point totals to the curb. These days a creative approach that can impact you like a good book is more commonplace, but video games with such an emotional effect didn't really exist back then. 

Dreaming of suitcases in space

Daisuke Wakabayashi, The New York Times

California-based startup Inversion thinks it can expedite deliveries of goods around the world by dropping them from space. The current plan is to develop a capsule by 2025 that's not much larger than a few carry-on suitcases and capable of doing the job.

Apple reportedly isn't planning to release a new 27-inch iMac

Posted: 12 Mar 2022 07:05 AM PST

Apple discontinued the 27-inch iMac when it launched the Mac Studio and 5K Studio Display, but reports that came out earlier this year suggested that a replacement was in the works. According to 9to5Mac, though, Apple currently has no plans to release an all-in-one iMac bigger than 24 inches in the near future. 

If true, that means we won't be seeing a 27-inch model powered by an M1 processor — the recently discontinued iMac still uses Intel chips — anytime soon. Apple reportedly has no plans for a larger iMac equipped with an M1 Pro, Max or Ultra, as well. We also likely won't be seeing one with the M2-powered MacBooks that Apple is expected to launch later this year. 9to5Mac says it got the information from the same source that told the publication about the pro-level Mac Studio and the Studio Display before they were unveiled. 

At the moment, the only iMacs you can get straight from the Apple Store website is the 24-inch model with M1 processor released last year. The publication says the tech giant is developing a new 24-inch all-in-one computer slated to be introduced sometime in 2023. However, similar to the MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro, it will likely remain one of the company's (relatively) affordable options and won't come with its high-end chips. 
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