Amazon doesn’t like FTC chair Lina Khan’s views, wants her off investigations

Enlarge / Lina M. Khan testifies during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee nomination hearing on Capitol Hill on April 21, 2021, in Washington, DC. (credit: Graeme Jennings-Pool/Getty Images)

Amazon filed a 25-page petition today with the Federal Trade Commission asking that Chairwoman Lina Khan recuse herself from antitrust investigations into the company.

Khan, a frequent critic of Amazon and other Big Tech firms, was appointed FTC chair less than two weeks ago. Though there has been plenty of speculation about her first moves, her short tenure to date means she hasn’t had much opportunity to file lawsuits or announce investigations. Amazon’s petition shows that its legal team hasn’t sat idle since her nomination as commissioner and subsequent appointment as chair.

“Although Amazon profoundly disagrees with Chair Khan’s conclusions about the company,” Amazon wrote in the petition, “it does not dispute her right to have spoken provocatively and at great length about it in her prior roles. But given her long track record of detailed pronouncements about Amazon and her repeated proclamations that Amazon has violated the antitrust laws, a reasonable observer would conclude that she no longer can consider the company’s antitrust defenses with an open mind.”

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Not just OLED: LG is about to release its first Mini LED TVs

Enlarge / A promotional image depicting one of LG's new Mini LED TVs. (credit: LG)

LG plans to introduce its first consumer Mini LED TVs sometime next month, according to a press release from the South Korean company. Mini LED is a new variant of LCD TV tech that offers better contrast ratios, among other improvements, than what has come before.

The new lineup in the US includes one 4K TV (dubbed the QNED90) and one 8K variant (called QNED99). Both are available in three sizes: 65 inches, 75 inches, and 86 inches.

Much of the recent advertising and marketing muscle behind Mini LED TVs has come from Samsung, but that's not the only company making them. TCL, Hisense, and others have introduced Mini LED sets as well.

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Robinhood ordered to pay $70m penalty to US regulator

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A Wall Street regulator has ordered the retail trading platform Robinhood to pay more than $70m in penalties for causing what it described as “widespread and significant” harm to its customers.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra) announced on Wednesday that it was fining Robinhood $57m and ordering it to pay $12.6m plus interest in restitution to its customers—the largest penalty ever ordered by the regulator.

Among a litany of failures alleged by Finra, widespread technical problems on the platform during periods of high volatility cost some traders tens of thousands of dollars, it said.

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More hints of progress toward a malaria vaccine

Enlarge / A health worker vaccinates a child against malaria in Ndhiwa, western Kenya. (credit: BRIAN ONGORO / Getty Images)

The incredible success of the COVID vaccines has been a triumph of biotechnology. But that triumph has in some ways obscured the amount of luck involved. We've been trying for decades to produce vaccines against HIV, but no amount of high-tech biology has gotten us one to date.

Malaria is another killer that has so far resisted vaccine efforts. But this spring has brought hope that progress is being made. Back in May, a small clinical trial of a relatively traditional vaccine showed an efficacy of over 70 percent. And this week, a paper describes a very different way of generating highly effective immunity to the malarial parasite.

Why is malaria so hard?

Malaria has resisted vaccination for a variety of reasons. One is that it's not caused by just a single infectious agent. Instead, it's caused by several related species in the Plasmodium genus. Plasmodium falciparum typically causes more severe illnesses and has thus been the target of most vaccine efforts. But even if we're able to prevent infections by this strain, we won't see the end of malaria.

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Starlink’s “next-generation” user terminal will cost a lot less, Musk says

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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said his company's Starlink division is trying to cut the price of its user terminal from $500 to as low as $250. Starlink has been charging $99 a month for Internet service during its beta phase, plus $500 up front for the user terminal/satellite dish, and it's losing money on the sale of each dish.

"We are losing money on that terminal right now. That terminal costs us more than $1,000," Musk said yesterday during a Mobile World Congress Q&A session (see a YouTube video posted by CNET). "We obviously are subsidizing the cost of the terminal. We are working on next-generation terminals that provide the same level of capability, roughly the same level of capability, but cost a lot less."

Musk noted that "selling terminals for half price is not super compelling" given that SpaceX is planning for millions of Starlink customers. "Over time, we'd like to reduce the terminal cost from $500 to, I don't know, $300 or $250, or something like that."

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A weird take on frame rate: How PS5’s first “40 fps” game works, runs

Enlarge / This Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart image was captured while running in the game's new 40 fps mode. It offers the same amount of resolution, image quality, and ray-tracing fidelity as the prior 30 fps "quality" mode. (credit: Sony / Insomniac)

When it comes to action-filled video games, frame rates matter, and up until recently, traditional "frames per second" wisdom has landed at either 30 fps or 60 fps. Thirty, the rate seen in most standard TV broadcasts, is fine for slower cinematic games, while frantic battles and twitchy fights benefit from a higher rate, since it looks smoother and reduces button-tap latency.

This week, a surprising new number enters the conversation: 40 fps, a standard previously unattainable thanks largely to TV standards. It comes courtesy of a new patch to this month's Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart on PlayStation 5, which already includes a 60 fps "performance" option. So why would anyone pick 40 fps instead? And how does it work?

HDMI standards, menu picking, and math

Recent titles by Insomniac Games, particularly Marvel's Spider-Man and the 2016 Ratchet & Clank remake, launched on PS4 with a 30 fps lock, meant to guarantee higher pixel counts and more detailed shadow and level-of-detail (LoD) settings. Both of those games eventually got PS5 versions with 60 fps support, since they could leverage the newer hardware's power. As a native PS5 game, this month's R&C:RA launched with both 30 and 60 fps modes on day one. Its menus asked you what you preferred in your gaming: more pixels and higher image quality or more frames?

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Dell’s $199 UltraSharp 4K webcam has AI on board—but no microphone

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  A small desktop tripod and a monitor mount are both included with the new UltraSharp, which magnetically attaches to either. [credit: Dell ]

Dell's new UltraSharp camera takes aim at Logitech's high-end Brio with the same $199 price along with 4K resolution and Windows Hello-compatible infrared sensor. But despite sharing a price tag and many of the same specifications, the two high-end webcams diverge noticeably on features.

Hardware

This 2008-era Apple iSight camera featured a similar "shotgun" chassis design to the UltraSharp—but only at 640x480 resolution, with FireWire interface. (credit: CC BY-SA 3.0)

The UltraSharp's most obvious differentiator is its vague physical resemblance to the Apple iSight, a discontinued FireWire camera with a similar "shotgun" chassis orientation. As compelling as that resemblance is for some Apple fans, the similarity between UltraSharp and iSight pretty much ends there.

Under the hood, the UltraSharp features a Sony STARVIS 8.3 megapixel primary optical sensor, featuring automatic focus, automatic white balance and light correction, and full HDR. There's also a Windows Hello-compatible IR sensor for biometric authentication—but, curiously, no microphone. UltraSharp users will need to supply their own mic—which might actually prove convenient for some high-end consumers with studio mics, who will therefore have one fewer useless input to deal with.

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HP bets on AMD Ryzen 5000 in its new Pavilion Aero laptop lineup

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On Tuesday, HP launched a new line of lightweight consumer laptops called the Pavilion Aero 13.

The newest addition to HP's affordable home-targeted lineup sports a powerful AMD Ryzen 5000 series CPU and a 2.5k resolution display at a 16:10 aspect ratio (2560x1600) and 400 nits of brightness. It weighs less than 1 kg (2.2 lb).

AMD gets a chance to shine

Most of the concrete specifications for the Aero 13 lineup are still missing—all we know aside from the display specs and weight is that the Aero 13 begins at $749, and its maximum CPU spec is Ryzen 7 5800. We're still waiting for details on what CPU will be in that $749 system, as well as how much RAM and storage to expect.

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Google commits to supporting Nest smart home devices for 5 years

Enlarge / A few of the older Google Nest products.

Google's latest blog post finally gives a minimum public support timeline for all of its "Google Nest" smart home products. The company has committed to supporting all Google Nest products with "critical bug fixes and patches" for at least five years.

Inconsistent branding means that it has been tough to pin down Google's definition of "Google Nest" products, but the company now has a support page that helpfully spells out every included model. Today's announcement applies to the Nest Audio speakers, Nest Hub smart displays, Nest Thermostats, Nest Protect smoke detector, Nest cameras, Nest Wi-Fi, the discontinued Nest Secure alarm system, the Nest x Yale lock, and less obvious devices like the Google Home smart speakers (which were replaced by Nest Audio), Google Wi-Fi (replaced by Nest Wi-Fi), and the entire Chromecast line, including the new Google TV dongle.

Anything on this list could last longer than five years, but a few notable products will be hitting the end of their guaranteed support timelines soon. The original Google Home smart speaker, which launched in 2016, will hit the end of its guaranteed life in November of this year, while the Home Mini and the discontinued Home Max could be shut down as early as late next year. Dumb speakers can last for decades, so hopefully these products will get better than bare-minimum support.

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Google and Microsoft agree to start suing each other again

Enlarge (credit: Halil Sagirkaya / Anadolu Agency)

After years of relative calm, Google and Microsoft are tossing out their ceasefire, a move that—perhaps ironically—could bring each company additional antitrust scrutiny.

The non-aggression pact, signed five years ago, let the two companies set aside their numerous lawsuits. It also created a process by which they could resolve conflicts behind closed doors, requiring Microsoft and Google to follow that process before asking regulators to step in. During this time, the two companies have tussled over a number of issues, including whether search engines should pay news publishers. But Microsoft reached the end of its rope when it felt that Google wasn’t playing fair in ad tech.

Both companies attempted to solve the impasse through a series of escalating negotiations as laid out in the agreement. The matter ultimately reached the corner office, with CEOs Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai holding a series of talks that didn’t reach a solution. That lack of a resolution is what apparently led to the agreement’s unraveling, according to a new Bloomberg report.

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