An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Several popular Samsung smart TV apps contain code that share the owner's internet connection with strangers, potentially putting millions of Samsung smart TVs at risk of hijacking, according to new security research published on Monday. Some of these apps claim to have been installed on hundreds of millions of smart TVs in people's homes, per the app developers. At least one of the smart TV apps was a simple Pac-Man game that Samsung had endorsed and prominently featured in its "Editor's Choice" section on customers' TV screens. These apps contain software that funnels outsiders' web traffic through ordinary home and office internet connections, known as residential proxy networks (or "resproxies"), which are increasingly being linked to cybercrime. When opened, apps with resproxy code can turn the smart TV into an always-on tunnel for outsiders to funnel their web traffic through, known as an exit node -- even when the app is no longer open.

The security research by Norwegian cybersecurity company Mnemonic describes a perfect storm of problems that allows low-quality apps to proliferate across Samsung's app store, containing code that puts users at risk of having their internet connections tapped by a rogue app. Many of these apps are bare-bone shells, made from only a few lines of code, and are designed solely to load content from another website, such as a game. While such smart TV apps load content from another server, any review of these apps sees only the few lines of code within, and not necessarily the content itself. "What was reviewed is not necessarily what is running," wrote Harrison Sand, an offensive security consultant at Mnemonic.

After TechCrunch contacted Samsung with a request for comment about the research, the electronics giant said in an emailed statement that it was banning apps that share their users' internet connections, and will remove apps that contain the functionality. "We have already restricted new app registrations that incorporate such proxy functionalities on our Smart TV platform," said a Samsung spokesperson. "We are currently implementing strict platform-wide developer policies explicitly banning residential proxy SDKs, and we are working to identify and remove all apps currently available in our store that contain these components." LG also recently announced plans to suspend apps containing ResProxy software after a security firm found that roughly 42% of apps in its TV app store allowed unknown third parties to route internet traffic through users' televisions without their knowledge.

Even as Hollywood performers protest and Hollywood studios sue "in their war on AI," reports the Los Angeles Times, "the entertainment industry is deepening its dependence on it." Among hundreds of job postings in late June, more than one in 10 was likely connected to AI. The top studios' public postings suggest they have been recruiting people to build AI tools. They are also recruiting teams to defend their intellectual property against unauthorized AI use. "There are plenty of studios that are hiring [for AI] but never talk about it in public," said Yoland Yan, a co-founder of ComfyUI, a company that helps studios juggle different AI tools. Companies have been hesitant to detail how they use generative AI in film production — partly because they are concerned about consumer and union backlash. Some in Hollywood described AI use as the new cosmetic surgery, where everyone knows it is happening, but few will admit to it...

Although some companies may be shy about sharing their AI plans, big stars who don't have to answer to others have been more open about their embrace of the new technology for storytelling. Rejecting AI is like picking a horse and buggy over a car, said "Star Wars" creator George Lucas. "Artificial intelligence means it's much easier for us to make movies," he told a trade magazine earlier this year. "There's nothing you can do about it. That's progress. It's the future." Some in Hollywood have a softer stance on artificial intelligence, with studios cutting deals with AI companies, and filmmakers like Martin Scorsese backing AI companies. Ben Affleck launched an AI film tech company then sold it to Netflix for half a billion dollars. When launching InterPositive, Affleck said he wanted to keep "storytelling human" by building AI tools that could fix lighting, generate missing shots and other things while "keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists...."

Disney, Netflix and Amazon had job postings that were about using AI on the creative side of the business. Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Sony had job ads suggesting they were also using AI but for marketing, distribution and audience analytics. The postings suggest the Disney, Netflix and Amazon studios are building repeatable AI workflows for visual effects, animation, sound and dubbing. The companies also seem to be building in-house teams to develop custom generative-AI models, while also using third-party software.

None of the jobs advertised were to create AI that wrote scripts or created AI actors.
Ironically, the Times used Claude Code to build a scraper to identify the job postings, their article acknowledges.

• Three Disney jobs were for "content security," assessing AI tools and guarding against piracy, watermarking and rights-protection work. But Disney is also hiring PhD-level talent "to study 'computer graphics and AI' for Pixar and Disney films," according to the article, and "people to 'bridge the gap between research and practical studio application.'"

• Disney-owned visual effects shops Industrial Light & Magic "was searching for supervisors to 'explore emerging technologies (including AI/Machine Learning)' to develop new production workflows."

• Audio post-production unit Skywalker Sound "seemed to be recruiting to build proprietary AI models for soundtracks, voice separation, and voice transfer, the process of taking a speaker's tone and pitch, and applying it to new content."

• Amazon "was hiring a principal AI executive to drive AI-tool adoption across production, plus roles in operations automation and LLM content classification."

Major record labels including Universal, Sony, and Warner have proposed excluding AI-generated songs from official charts unless they are "substantially human made," properly labeled, legally produced, and free from manipulation concerns. The Verge reports: The proposal goes quite a bit further than a labeling proposal put forth by the RIAA, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), SAG-AFTRA, and others. That would create a set of standardized labels for AI-generated and AI-assisted music. The labels' proposal would require songs be clearly labeled, but it would also keep them off international charts unless they met specific criteria, including being "substantially human made."

To be eligible, the songs would also have to respect the terms of service of whatever AI service was used, the model would have to have the rights to any data it was trained on, and "not raise stream or chart manipulation concerns." What sort of concerns and what constitutes "substantially human made" are currently vague. Sony Music, UMG, and Mom+Pop Music did not immediately respond to a request for clarification. The IFPI has thrown its weight behind the labels' proposal, though no charting organization has signaled any immediate plan to adopt the rules [...].

A production company and filmmaker are suing Netflix for $105 million, alleging the streamer lost a stolen drive containing an unencrypted master copy of the unreleased Nicolas Cage film Fortitude, which they claim damages its exclusivity and market value. Netflix denied responsibility for the lost film but said it takes content security seriously and has offered to monitor piracy sites for unauthorized copies. CBS News reports: The complaint filed on Wednesday in California district court alleges that the film's associate producer, Daniel Haido, hand-delivered an unencrypted master copy of the film to Netflix so the company could screen it as a potential buyer. Haido verbally instructed the employee to delete the files after the screening, according to the suit. A little over a week after the screening, Netflix emailed the filmmakers to say the drive had been stolen, the plaintiffs allege. "Someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week," a Netflix executive wrote in the email, according to the suit.

The complaint notes the movie, entitled "Fortitude," took over seven years to make and cost $45 million. It tells the story of a secret mission called Operation Fortitude during World War II that was orchestrated to mislead the Nazis about the Allied invasion of Europe. The film stars Nicolas Cage as Dusko Popov, a real-life spy during World War II, as well as Sir Ben Kingsley and Ron Perlman.

The plaintiffs said studios will now be dissuaded from buying the rights to the movie, knowing that a version of it could be released by a third party for free. "The film's value depended in significant part on its exclusivity as an unreleased, first-to-market work," the complaint states. "By losing control of the film, Netflix destroyed that exclusivity and materially, if not completely, impaired the film's marketability."

YouTube Premium will include Peacock Premium at no extra charge beginning in early 2027. "The deal brings a slew of premium content to the [$15.99 per month] YouTube Premium subscription, including live sports like the NFL, NBA and MLB and entertainment like Law & Order, Saturday Night Live and Love Island," reports The Hollywood Reporter. "It also has the potential to dramatically scale Peacock, which remains smaller than many of its streaming competitors." From the report: Peacock has 48 million subscribers, while YouTube Premium and YouTube Music have a combined 125 million subscribers, though they don't break out how many each of those offerings have. The agreement, which expands on the deal the company inked with YouTube parent company Google last year, will also extend the entertainment company's programming deal with YouTube TV, while bringing some of YouTube's offerings to Comcast Xfinity and Xumo platforms.

There's also a notable sports and production element to the deal, with NBC Sports agreeing to stream some live sporting events on its YouTube channels, and with NBC agreeing to serve as the production partner for select live events on YouTube. YouTube will also bundle some of the company's International streaming offerings like Universal+ and Hayu in select markets.

Variety reports: "The Odyssey" leaks have begun, as a high-quality bootleg of the film reached millions of people on X thanks to a viral tweet on July 25. At 2:25 p.m. PT, a post on X reading "Someone uploaded 'The Odyssey' full movie on X. Can you believe it?" amplified a message from a now-suspended account. The message included a high-quality version of the film, as confirmed by Variety, and climbed to over 2.1 million views within two and a half hours. By that time, the streaming film was replaced by a takedown notice, and then the account was suspended...

As of July 26, a few clones of the bootlegged film are available on X, but they've been mostly flooded away by mislabeled files promising "The Odyssey" but actually showing a Rickroll, the longtime internet prank of tricking people into watching the music video for Rick Astley's 1987 song "Never Gonna Give You Up."
The article notes the leak "certainly doesn't seem to have hurt the film's still-surging box office in its second weekend, during which it earned another $87 million," or lessened demand for Imax 70 mm tickets.

Big news from Comic-Con 2026:

• "Coyote vs. ACME" debuted its long-awaited final trailer. CNET calls it "an animation-meets-live-action story," with the Coyote catapulting into theaters this August 28. (The film began development back in 2018, but was shelved for a tax write-off in 2023 by Warner Bros. until a backlash led to its sale to Ketchup Entertainment.) "Fed up with Acme's unreliable products, Wile E. Coyote decides to hire a lawyer and sue the company..." writes CNET. "The movie also features Lana Condor along with a host of Looney Tunes characters like Porky Pig, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn and Granny (who gets dinged by an anvil)."

• In other movie news, CNET says Johnny Depp also "made a surprise appearance at Comic-Con, donning a costume as Ebenezer Scrooge" to promote his November 13 movie about the miser from Charles Dickens' famous Christmas novella. (Ian McKellen and Daisy Ridley are also in the movie.)

But several geek favorites are being filmed as TV series...

• There's big news for William Gibson fans, reports Entertainment Weekly. "Two years after Apple TV announced production on the first-ever series adaptation of William Gibson's seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer, the lucky few hundred who attended the studio's Hall H panel at Comic-Con 2026 got to watch the first teaser.

• For Amazon's Prime Video, the Tolkien-derived "Rings of Power" series released a season 3 trailer that CNET said "successfully hides the best parts with fire... The trailer suggests that Sauron is building an army, and all of Middle-earth is trying to find ways to stop him... Rings of Power season 3 will start dropping weekly episodes on Nov. 11, meaning this show will be airing at the same time the Peter Jackson films will be celebrating their 25th anniversary."

• Later in November Amazon's Prime Video will also debut Blade Runner 2099, an eight-episode series that's a sequel to 2017's film Blade Runner 2049, reports CNET. "Set in an alternate version of LA where replicants run things and the humans play second fiddle, the series sees Yeoh's replicant Olwen chasing down outlaw replicants who've gone missing. With her own shelf life on a ticking clock, the stakes are high for her and for her human fugitive partner, Cora..."

• Paramount Plus will debut Avatar: Seven Havens in October, a new animated series from the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender which CNET says "follows a pair of twin avatars, one of whom is Korra's successor."

• Disney+ has season 3 of Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

• Kevin Feige said Marvel's television slate will include more seasons of "X-Men '97" and the upcoming "VisionQuest" TV series.

• HBO Max will launch a new Green Lantern series called Lanterns on August 16.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one's television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42 percent of games and other apps available for download on LG's webOS store allow unknown third-parties to route their Internet traffic through a user's TV. On July 2, [KrebsOnSecurity] featured research by the security firm Spur that examined the prevalence of residential proxy software development kits (SDKs) in smart TV apps. Spur found more than 42 percent of apps available for download on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one's television in a proxy node indefinitely, and that more than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung's Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components.

Responding to questions about Spur's research, LG Senior Vice President John Taylor told KrebsOnSecurity the company was working with app developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform. Developers that fail to comply, he said, will find their apps suspended. "A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform," Taylor said. "If this option is not removed, these apps will be suspended." Taylor said LG is committed to keeping residential proxy networks out of its smart TV apps going forward, and that the company's review of those apps is "well underway now."

"As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance platform quality and the user experience, LG will continue to strengthen our evaluation process for developer-submitted apps, including those that incorporate residential proxy SDKs," Taylor wrote in an emailed statement. [...] "A one-time consent prompt buried in a TV app is not a substitute for meaningful transparency, ongoing control, and platform oversight," Spur's Trevor Sutter wrote. "The risk is amplified when consent comes from individuals within the household who use the device but shouldn't give consent, such as minors." LG is also facing criticism for monitors that automatically install software promoting paid McAfee subscriptions through Windows Update without user approval.

James Cameron filmed his Avatar sequels there. Marvel filmed Thor, Iron Man 2, and The Avengers. Manhattan Beach Studios in Los Angeles even handled Star Wars' series like Obi-Wan Kenobi and The Mandalorian, which Bloomberg points out is about "a heavily armed bounty hunter in a galaxy far, far away."

"Now lenders who are selling the property's $240 million mortgage are promoting the site to potential buyers as a hub for making real space-age weapons." "The project is strategically positioned within Los Angeles' prominent aerospace and innovation corridor, anchored by industry leaders such as Northrop Grumman, Raytheon Technologies and SpaceX," said Cushman & Wakefield, which has the listing. "A supply-demand imbalance has emerged, driven by the growing concentration of advanced manufacturing users and a limited supply of viable space," the real estate brokerage said in a presentation. Bids are due July 28.

The marketing pitch reflects Southern California's shifting economic landscape as the movie business slumps and weapons makers seek to cash in on surging Pentagon spending... The defense boom is spurring the revival of a regional industry that once churned out World War II bombers, supersonic Cold War planes and Apollo command and service modules before shrinking after the fall of the Soviet Union... In the Los Angeles area, aerospace and defense-related tenants have accounted for 11% of new industrial real estate leases since the start of 2025, up from an annual average 2% during the preceding decade, according to a report this month by brokerage Newmark Group Inc.
Los Angeles "has always gone through transformations," Stephen Cheung, president of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., told Bloomberg. "This is one of those."

"Approximately half of Gen Z and millennials who have purchased a CD do not own a CD player," according to midyear sales statistics from entertainment data company Luminate. It's driven in part by "collection building", according to their report [PDF]: The CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible. This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself
"Among artists who had a direct impact on the resurgence of CDs, K-Pop icons BTS' 10th studio album, ARIRANG, was a big seller," Vice points out in their report on the new data. "However, Luminate also found that, beyond K-Pop's overall influence, CD sales still increased 6.7% year over year, even if the whole genre was removed from the equation, jumping 16% to 16.3 million units."

That's more than the growth of vinyl sales (2.4%) — but physical media in general seems to be making a comeback: Through the first half of the year, total physical album sales on vinyl, CDs, and cassettes reached 38.2 million units in the United States. This equates to a 7.8% increase.... [I]t seems that younger music fans have been driving a lot of the retro revival. The report shows that in 2026, 60% of Gen Z listeners said they most often listen to music from the 1990s and older. This is a massive increase from the 18 percent marker in 2021.

The new report also revealed that the way music fans are buying physical media has shifted. Indie record stores have been the largest generator of physical album sales for some time, and they continue to be. However, big-box stores like Target and Walmart took significant strides in the first half of 2026. Collectively, their music sales made up about 30% of the market.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: In 2022, due to "evolving licensing agreements" with distributor StudioCanal, German and Austrian users had hundreds of movies disappear from their PS accounts, long after buying them through Sony. Then in 2023, it happened again in America, specifically when Sony ended its licensing agreement with Discovery after the Warner Bros. merger, which, of course, has since been bought by Paramount Skydance. That resulted in customers having hundreds and hundreds of episodes of TV shows deleted from their accounts. Nowhere in any of this were there refunds, of course. No recompense at all, actually. Just a thing you thought you'd bought taken away from you by the very people you thought you bought it from.

And now it's happening again. Due to another licensing agreement fallout with StudioCanal, hundreds of movies and TV shows are being ripped from the accounts of PS Store customers, and there appears to be fuck all that they can do about it. [Kotaku reports:] "This news was brought to people's attention by X user somatyk, who posted the notification they had received from PlayStation this week. Along with the unapologetic news that the purchased movies would be deleted from their account on September 1, the message concluded with, 'Click here for a full list of affected titles that will no longer be supported. Thank you.' The same warning is now reproduced in full on the PlayStation website, along with the list of 551 films and TV series that are being pulled from people's libraries."

As Kotaku notes later in their post, part of what is striking in all of this is the sheer mundanity of the announcement. Because there have been no consequences, or any action at all from the public or government, Sony treats this all as if it's perfectly normal and no big deal. You can tell me all you want about how the Ts and Cs in these purchases do in fact note that the nature of the purchase is a temporary licensing of the content for an undetermined time period... but I can promise you that the public in general doesn't understand that. They think they're buying a thing, not a license.

Spotify is testing a new "Talk to Spotify" AI feature for Premium subscribers that will let them chat with an AI assistant to explore music, podcasts, and audiobooks. The feature can answer questions about what users are listening to, adjust playback through follow-up prompts, and offer more personalized recommendations. The Verge reports: Amazon Music introduced a similar feature last year when it integrated Alexa Plus into the service. Spotify's chatbot goes a step beyond providing AI-powered recommendations and general trivia, however, because it references your playlists, favorite artists, repeat listens, and listening data when responding to requests. That means you can ask questions about your own listening history to check when you first heard a specific song, or see what genres you've been into lately if you can't hold out for the annual Wrapped insights.

The updated AI capabilities are more conversational than older features like Prompted Playlist, which automatically builds playlists based on descriptions. Now, you can ask the Spotify chatbot to "play some songs I haven't heard before," and control what's being played with further instructions like requesting specific artists or asking to make it "more upbeat." Spotify says the new conversational experience aims to make the platform "more personal and useful for every listener," making this one of several ways that the company is trying to address complaints about its algorithm.

You can also ask the Spotify AI general questions about whatever you're listening to, making the feature feel similar to using chatbot services like Google's Gemini or OpenAI's ChatGPT. That includes asking for when a song was released, exploring other titles an author has written when listening to one of their audiobooks, or checking if a podcast guest has appeared on other audio shows.

A hacker who breached Suno reportedly revealed source code and training-library details showing the AI music generator scraped millions of songs and lyrics from sources including YouTube Music, Deezer, Genius, Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, and podcast RSS feeds. "The hacked data is a rare look at exactly how AI models and tools are built," reports 404 Media. "Suno is one of the largest AI music generation tools on the internet, and has been the subject of several major lawsuits from the record industry, which accused the company of training on millions of copyrighted songs." Suno maintains that its models were trained on publicly available music files and metadata as fair use. 404 Media reports: The Recording Industry Association of America accused Suno of ripping songs directly from YouTube; the hacked data seen by 404 Media confirms this. The hacked material includes source code that appears to be from 2023 and 2024 that includes scraping instructions and details about the scope of at least some of the scraping. For example, the comments in one file note that they will pull from "genius_hq, youtube_music, freesound, jamendo, imp, deezer, ytm_tagged," and that "non-music will be filtered out." A file called "youtube_music" notes that at the time the file was last updated, it had ingested "2,013,545 music clips." Another file contains comments about different datasets Suno had created, which included "113,879 hours of youtube_music," "17,615 hours of genius_hq," "410 hours of free sound," "19,514 hours of imslp," "3,726 hours of jamendo," "62,117 hours of pond5_music," "12,287 hours of deezer," "152,162 hours of ytm_tagged," and "103 hours of musescore_lyrics." In total, this is at least decades worth of music.

Other code the hacker shared with 404 Media appeared to look specifically for vocals by searching specifically for acapella versions of songs on YouTube. The code also suggested that Suno was using proxies to scrape songs from YouTube through a company called Bright Data, which sells scraping tools, infrastructure, and data services. Additional code shows that with the help of an online tool called PodcastIndex, Suno identified 420,000 different podcasts that had at least five, 30-minute episodes and sought to download roughly 1 million hours of podcasts.

[...] The hacker, ellie.191, told 404 Media they breached the company by hacking an individual employee using the Shai-Hulud worm, a supply chain attack that allowed hackers to harvest GitHub and cloud service credentials. They said they also accessed Suno's customer list, which included customers' emails and/or phone numbers and Stripe payment details, depending on what they used to login. The hacker provided a sample of some of the customers, some of whom confirmed to 404 Media they had used their phone number to sign up for Suno and said they were never notified of a breach. The hacker told 404 Media they had no specific motivation for hacking Suno and said "I like to hack anything and everything."

The FCC plans to vote on repealing local TV ownership limits, including the 39% national audience cap that currently restricts how much of the U.S. market a single broadcast group can reach. Engadget reports: On August 6, commissioners will hold a ballot to repeal Section 303 of the Communications Act, and with it the 39 percent rule. In essence, the rule limits the reach of a local TV network to no more than 39 percent of the U.S.' total audience market. In its place, the FCC would move to a system whereby it would personally approve or reject TV ownership deals on a case-by-case basis.

It's not clear if the FCC even has the authority to reject Section 303 without the explicit consent of the legislature. As Lawrence J. Spiwak wrote in the Yale Journal on Regulation back in January, Section 10 of the Communications Act expressly forbids the FCC from bending the rules around Section 303. "Americans no longer trust the legacy national media to report the news fairly or accurately," wrote FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in an op-ed published on Breitbart. "In fact, only eight percent of Americans have a great deal of trust in mass media. That figure is even lower among Republicans -- sitting at a mere three percent."

"... Many local broadcast TV stations are getting hollowed out as a result and turning into little more than mouthpieces for programming produced in New York and Hollywood," he alleged. "That is not what Congress or the FCC intended."

Disney is exploring a free tier for Disney+ that would make some content available without a subscription. According to Nielsen data, the three largest free streamers accounted for 18.7% of watch time on U.S. TVs in April, up from 16.8% a year earlier and 12.7% in April 2024. Business Insider reports: Product and tech chief Adam Smith spoke about enabling free-tier content during a streaming town hall on Thursday afternoon, one staffer said. Smith didn't share a timeline for this initiative or a sense of the scope, this person added. A person familiar with Disney's streaming strategy said these talks are part of an ongoing discussion about concepts to better serve fans. Currently, the Disney+ and Hulu bundle costs $12.99 a month with ads or $19.99 without ads at full price.