latest
Sonos is giving some serious side-eye to Google's assertion that Assistant and Alexa can't play nicely
More fuel for the fire in the ongoing legal skirmish
It's no secret that Sonos and Google aren't best friends right now. The companies are currently involved in several different lawsuits regarding intellectual property theft and copyright infringement, and it doesn't seem like the relationship will improve anytime soon. Sonos's Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus delivered remarks to the Senate Judiciary antitrust committee yesterday, calling for action on a lack of interoperability procedures preventing them from using multiple voice assistants at once.
Net neutrality is a hot button topic in many of our circles since it affects each of us who use the internet in the U.S. It carries such significance with a lot of voters that several politicians have made it part of their platforms since the original FCC rules were repealed. Yesterday, however, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the Democrats will introduce a bill this week that aims to bring back net neutrality.
Huawei and ZTE, two multi-national telecommunications companies based in China, are under fire by the United States and other governments over the companies' ties to the Chinese government. ZTE nearly shut down last year over an import ban, and now it and Huawei may be prevented from selling telecommunications equipment to the United States.
The past few months have been difficult for Chinese smartphone OEMs, particularly ZTE and Huawei. ZTE nearly shut down after the U.S. government placed a trade ban on the company, which was finally lifted last month. Earlier this year, AT&T and Verizon reportedly dropped plans to sell the Huawei Mate 10 Pro due to pressure from the federal government. Now both companies are under fire again, as U.S. agencies are now banned from using their telecommunications technology.
Congress is set to vote on a bill that would prevent any government agency from requiring device manufacturers and software developers to implement backdoors in the encryption models for their products. Dubbed the Secure Data Act, this bipartisan initiative is a surprisingly good step toward keeping our data secure from unauthorized government access.
...and he's totally down with it.
The devices you buy from US mobile carriers are almost always locked to a single network, and unlocking them has been a legal gray area for the last few years. Now Congress is finally taking action to remedy that. The Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act has been passed by the Senate, matching a House bill passed in February. As you can imagine, consumer rights groups are pretty jazzed.
New Bipartisan Phone Unlocking Bill: DMCA Circumvention Redefined, Permanent Exemption For Carrier Unlock
The legality of certain phone modifications in the United States, particularly those that allow phones to be used on wireless carriers for which they weren't
The legality of certain phone modifications in the United States, particularly those that allow phones to be used on wireless carriers for which they weren't originally intended, is currently on a congressional see-saw. Every three years, the Librarian of Congress has to approve or extend an exemption of the infamous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to allow or deny consumers the right to unlock (read: carrier unlock, and in some cases rooting/jailbreaking, but not unlocking bootloaders) their phones by circumventing digital rights management. Congress let the exemption slide earlier this year - read the gory details here. Now a new bill has been entered that, if passed, would grant a permanent exemption to the DMCA for carrier unlocking, among other things. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an exhaustive write-up of House Resolution 1892, the "Unlocking Technology Act," which they've given their initial support.
In October of 2012, the Library of Congress elected not to renew DMCA exemptions that explicitly allow end users to unlock their cell phones at will, thus ending a six year tradition. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. The quest to do something about it began almost immediately. And by "almost immediately" I mean "nearly three months later and at almost the very last minute."
Yesterday, HTC dropped a teaser on their Facebook page: a vector outline of a phone with an HTC logo and a big "5" in the center and a caption of "This Sunday you'll discover something fast." With 5 days to go until MWC began, we took a few stabs at what it could mean. Today, the company has followed up with a "4" teaser image on their Facebook, with the caption of "This Sunday, you'll hear something authentic."
Shortly after CES ended, we heard word of a new phone from LG that would be the first to sport NVIDIA's impressive new quad-core CPU, the Tegra 3. Other specs were rumored to include a 4.7" 1280x720 display, 16GB on-board storage (plus a microSD slot), a 2000mAh battery (!), an 8MP camera in the rear, and a 1.2MP front-facer.
Congress is a lot like a slot machine - once in a while, something good comes out. A new bill introduced by Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts would require cellular carriers in the US to disclose to end users upon purchase of a mobile device any tracking software present on said device, or any such software that might be installed at a later date by the carrier, manufacturer, or OS provider (that would be Google for Android).
Right now at MWC, Eric Schmidt is showing off a brand-new, Google-developed Android app: Movie Studio. The app, as the name may suggest, is a video editor. It's designed specifically for Honeycomb tablets, and as a video editor, that sort of makes sense. It's pretty rough trying to edit video on a smaller screen, though not impossible (which is to say, I imagine an XDA port for phones will happen as soon as an APK gets leaked).