Month: May 2022

Enlarge / Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas speaks at the Heritage Foundation on October 21, 2021, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Drew Angerer )

With tech groups asking the US Supreme Court to block the new Texas law against social media “censorship,” the state’s defense relies in part on an opinion issued last year by Justice Clarence Thomas in a case involving Donald Trump and Twitter.

Thomas’ opinion, as we wrote at the time, criticized the Section 230 legal protections given to online platforms’ moderation decisions and argued that free-speech law shouldn’t necessarily prevent lawmakers from regulating those platforms as common carriers.

“In many ways, digital platforms that hold themselves out to the public resemble traditional common carriers,” Thomas wrote. “Though digital instead of physical, they are at bottom communications networks, and they ‘carry’ information from one user to another. A traditional telephone company laid physical wires to create a network connecting people. Digital platforms lay information infrastructure that can be controlled in much the same way.” The similarity between online platforms and common carriers “is even clearer for digital platforms that have dominant market share,” Thomas also wrote.

Enlarge / Yes, we’re as surprised by this game being good (at least in its closed alpha state) as you are. (credit: Warner Bros. Games)

Starting today, Warner Bros. Games is taking the formal veil off its worst-kept video game secret in years: Multiversus. When we saw the leaks about this upcoming free-to-play PC and console game, which stars various WB and Time Warner intellectual property in a cartoony, Smash Bros.-style arena fighter, we had our reservations. Was WB seriously trying to compete with Nintendo’s biggest fighting game by pitting Arya Stark against… Shaggy from Scooby-Doo? Whose dream cartoon face-off is that?

A few days ago, WB invited us to go hands-on to see for ourselves what the game is like ahead of today’s launch of a closed alpha test to address those kinds of questions and more. So far, we’ve come away impressed and surprised. In a world that didn’t necessarily need another Smash Bros. clone, the devs at Player First Games have seemingly cracked the code—and made something that could neatly coexist with Nintendo’s massive hit, if not surpass it. (Even better, at first blush, the F2P stuff seems tolerable!)

Less blocking, more cooperating

Most of the “arena fighter” genre basics, as established by Smash Bros., are accounted for in WB’s latest fighting game. Instead of wearing down an energy bar à la Street Fighter, Multiversus players try to “ring out” their foes by racking up damage and setting up knockout blows. Movement is pretty Super Mario-like in terms of dashing and jumping between floating platforms, and players have a range of basic and special attacks that don’t require complex joystick and button combos.

Enlarge (credit: Chris Delmas/Getty Images)

Since the financial crisis, corporate lawyers have aspired to build the ultimate ironclad merger contract that keeps buyers with cold feet from backing out.

The “bulletproof” modern deal agreement now faces one of its biggest tests, as Elon Musk, the Tesla boss and richest person in the world, openly entertains the possibility of ditching his $44 billion deal for Twitter.

Musk said in a tweet this week that the “deal cannot move forward” until the social media platform provides detailed data about fake accounts, a request that Twitter seems unlikely to meet. Twitter’s board, meanwhile, has stated its commitment “to completing the transaction on the agreed price and terms as promptly as practicable.”

Enlarge / The new Fire 7 tablet. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon has updated the 7-inch Fire Tablet—it’s now the “2022, 12th gen” version. The big news this year is that Amazon is finally upgrading to USB-C, which is tough to come by in this bargain-basement pricing tier. About that price: The Fire 7 is $74.99 without lockscreen ads or $59.99 if you want to put up with the ads.

For the SoC, we have a MediaTek MT8168V. This is a 12 nm chip with four ARM Cortex A53 cores running at 2 GHz and an ARM Mali G52. There’s a 7-inch, 1024×600 LCD, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage (or $20 more for 32GB), and a 3750mAh battery that Amazon says is good for “10 hours.” There’s a microSD slot, a headphone jack, and Wi-Fi 5 (that’s 802.11ac) support. There are technically front and back cameras on the Fire 7, but at 2 MP each and “no autofocus,” they might not be useful for much. There’s no GPS and no NFC, but the tablet comes with a 5 W USB-C charger.

The 2022 Fire 7 also marks the launch of Amazon’s “Fire OS 8.” This is a fork of Android 11 that doesn’t seem to stray far from the normal codebase, but it doesn’t have any Google apps or services. Amazon is promising four years of security updates, even at this ultra-low price point.