The Morning After: Cheaper new MacBook rumors

It's Monday, March 05, 2018. Hey, good morning! Welcome back. MWC has wrapped up, but now Engadget is already preparing for what’s next: a trip from Spain to Switzerland for the Geneva Auto Show. Insert obligatory engine noises, then replace with the hum of far too many electric and hybrid machines. Spoiler alert: Not all of them are phones.   These are a few of our favorite things (from MWC 2018)   What did you miss from the world’s biggest phone show. Here’s our esoteric picks that you may have missed. Art by Samsung Galaxy S9’s AR Emoji.   LG's interim 'creators' phone isn't a huge leap forward, but it's not without its charms.   Testing LG V30S ThinQ's hit-or-miss camera tricks   The LG V30S ThinQ isn't a completely new phone, but there are enough new goodies to warrant taking another look at its camera ahead of a deeper dive on the phone in its entirety. We’ve seen how the Galaxy S9 handles the nightlife of Barcelona, but how about LG’s newly introduced camera features? Are they worth having? Is the AI cam better than my own judgement? Can algorithms save blurry night shots? Mat froze his ass off one night to try it all out.   AgeID could be the de facto gatekeeper for porn in the country.   Pornhub's owner reveals its age-verification tool for the UK   Pornhub owner Mindgeek has unveiled what might become the default gatekeeping tool for porn in the UK. AgeID will ask porn-site visitors to create an encrypted login that verifies their age across any compatible site, saving them from having to prove they're 18 or older every time they want to view something a little racy. The system uses third-party age-verification companies, but Mindgeek promises that AgeID won't store any personal info -- it'll only keep "standard technical data" to prevent fraud.   It would be the first drop below the thousand-dollar mark in years.   Apple might offer lower-cost MacBook Air in spring   Apple has left the MacBook Air mostly untouched for years, including its price. Ever since the 11-inch model disappeared in 2016, you've been looking at $999 or more for Apple's starter laptop -- a tough sell given the aging design. It might become better value before long, however. KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo (who has a mostly solid track record for Apple leaks and rumors) has claimed that Apple is preparing a MacBook Air with a "lower price tag" for release this spring. This is still in the rumor camp for now, but we’re betting there are plenty out there angling for a modern, cheap MacBook of some kind.   But wait, there's more... 1. 'StarCraft' 20th anniversary brings freebies and a short film 2. After Math: Internet flame war 3. VW's Seat unveils the first fully electric touring-class race car 4. Netflix wins an Oscar for sports doping documentary 'Icarus' The Morning After is a new daily newsletter from Engadget designed to help you fight off FOMO. Who knows what you'll miss if you don't subscribe. Craving even more? Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Have a suggestion on how we can improve The Morning After? Send us a note. Copyright © 2016 Aol Inc. All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: AOL 770 Broadway #4 New York, NY 10003 You are receiving this email because you opted in at engadget.com. Not interested anymore? Unsubscribe from this newsletter.

The Morning After: Weekend Edition

It's Saturday, March 03, 2018. Hey, good morning! You look fabulous. Welcome to the weekend! It’s the perfect time to catch up on everything from Mobile World Congress along with Friday’s big news stories. An AWS outage knocked out Alexa (and Engadget) while we took Samsung’s Galaxy S9+ out for some "late night photography testing." Fight! Google vs. Amazon = no more Nest on Amazon According to Business Insider, Amazon informed Nest it wouldn’t stock the company’s new devices. In response, Nest apparently won’t restock any of its goods with the retailer, so once they’re sold out, that’s it.  And Engadget too. Amazon server outage pulled the plug on Alexa for a few hours An outage in Amazon's cloud services muted the voice assistant for many people on March 2nd, producing error messages when you spoke commands to Echo speakers and other Alexa-equipped devices. It also prevented us from updating Engadget for a couple of hours before everything was restored -- hopefully, everyone enjoyed the short break. We had to be thorough. Testing the Galaxy S9+ on a night out in Barcelona The biggest changes Samsung implemented in its new flagship revolve around improving low-light photography, so what better way to make full use of our scenic surroundings here in Barcelona than to take the S9+ out for an evening sightseeing tour? This time the fight comes to the US. 'Far Cry 5' is deeper than you think The latest Far Cry will put you in the shoes of a rookie cop sent to arrest Joseph Seed, the head of a dangerous cult called The Project at Eden's Gate. You end up becoming part of a resistance movement, whose goal is to take down the cult by going after Seed and the rest of his family. Of course, you could just play it like any other game in the series, but it's hard to ignore the subtext. Still the best. Dell XPS 13 review Dell’s latest XPS 13 doesn’t stray from the line’s high standards. This time around it’s packing all USB-C ports, support for external GPUs and an optional HDR display. Sure, the company didn’t change much, but it didn’t really have to. How many messaging apps can one company make? Google's Slack alternative is available As of now, Hangouts Chat is out of Google’s early adopter program and will be available to all G Suite users over the next week, assuming their company enables it, of course. On one hand, it's easy to roll our eyes at yet another attempt at Chat. But Google has been saying ever since it launched the consumer-focused Allo messaging app that Hangouts was destined for businesses. To differentiate itself from Slack and the others, Hangouts Chat adds bots and some artificial-intelligence magic. But wait, there's more... 1. RED and Sharp team up on 8K monitor technology 2. Bad Password: How 'sex trafficking' just opened the censorship floodgates 3. Tesla Model 3 review: the fast and infuriating 4. Cyberdyne's therapeutic cyborg legs arrive in the US 5. Bitcoin 'creator' slapped with $10 billion lawsuit 6. 'Care by Volvo' subscription includes lease, insurance and maintenance for $600 per month 7. Twitch clarifies its updated guidelines in new FAQ 8. Facebook will stream The Oscars red carpet The Morning After is a new daily newsletter from Engadget designed to help you fight off FOMO. Who knows what you'll miss if you don't subscribe. Craving even more? Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter. Have a suggestion on how we can improve The Morning After? Send us a note. Copyright © 2016 Aol Inc. All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: AOL 770 Broadway #4 New York, NY 10003 You are receiving this email because you opted in at engadget.com. Not interested anymore? Unsubscribe from this newsletter.

Editor's Pick: Fileless Malware: Why You Should Care

Fileless Malware: Why You Should Care

Ed Moyle Mar 2, 2018 9:42 AM PT

It's a truism that just like organizations adapt, so too do criminals. Anyone who has ever seen a Wells Fargo commercial knows that there was a time when stagecoaches were a normative method for transporting cash and valuables. But what modern criminals in their right mind would attempt robbing a Brink's truck on horseback? That strategy might have worked well in the days of the Pony Express. [More...]

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Microsoft Gives Devs More Open Source Quantum Computing Goodies Microsoft has announced the first major upgrade to its Quantum Development Kit since its introduction last year. It has added several new features designed to open the platform to a wider array of developers, including support for Linux and macOS, as well as additional open source libraries. Further, the kit will be interoperable with the Python computing language. [More...]

Mobile Pay, Smart Speaker Brand Confusion Means No Winners Google Pay launched last week, becoming the latest entry in the world of master-brand confusion. The new Google Pay combines features of Android Pay and Google Wallet, brands that each had different brand relationships with customers. That means the master brand message, which should be simple and clean, and which Google should have been building all along, is shaky at best. [More...]

To Fix Healthcare, Fix IT First We spend a great deal of time and effort trying to make healthcare more affordable and to ensure better outcomes. Too often, the upshot is to reduce all problems and challenges to a singularity in search of a silver bullet. It never works, but it seems like human nature to take that approach. Salesforce has taken a tactic that is bearing fruit, in part because it isn't really trying to fix healthcare. [More...]

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