At Microsoft's annual Surface press event today, the company announced the Surface Earbuds to rival Apple's AirPods and Amazon's newly announced Echo Buds. What's unique about the Surface Earbuds is that, unlike the other two wireless earphones, they can be used with Alexa, Bixby, Google Assistant, Siri, or any other competitor -- not just with Cortana. VentureBeat reports: Like the Surface Headphones, the Surface Earbuds don't do anything until you pair them. Surface Earbuds communicate over Bluetooth 5.0 with an Android, iOS, or Windows 10 device. Once paired, you can tap and hold either of the buds to trigger the default assistant on your device. To use a different virtual assistant with the Surface Earbuds, just change the default assistant on the paired device.

"Out of the box, it just works," said Surface Earbuds product lead Mohammed Samji. "On PC, it launches Cortana. On iOS, it will launch Siri, unless you've changed it. And I think it might vary depending on the distribution of Android, but all the ones I've tested, the first time I do it, Android asks me what I want as my default." Surface Earbuds still offer a better experience with Cortana (although without the "Hey Cortana" wakeword), Samji made sure to emphasize. Surface Earbuds can do everything with Cortana that the Surface Headphones can do, like chit-chat, interact with your email, check your calendar, get your daily update, and create to-dos. Samji said his team created a more streamlined flow for all this Cortana functionality. It's called Surface Audio. One of the biggest new abilities with the Surface Earbuds is gestures. "Surface Earbuds' gestures include double tap (go in and out of the call, or play/pause), swipe up and down (control volume), or even swipe forward and back (switch tracks in music, switch slides in PowerPoint)," reports VentureBeat. "Specifically on Android, there's also a triple tap to launch Spotify under your phone's lockscreen -- you can triple-tap again to have Spotify to choose another song using its ML."

H_Fisher writes: Movie-watchers (in the U.S. at least) already have to sit through 20+ minutes of commercials and other advertainment before showtime. Now, two major theater chains are mixing commercials in with movie trailers in a bid to generate more cash. According to the report, "regular commercials will run for five minutes after the lights go off and before the trailers at two of the country's largest circuits, Regal Cinemas and Cinemark Theatres. And one 60-second 'platinum' spot from a top-tier brand will roll before the second-to-last or last trailer." National CineMedia says that other worldwide markets have been watching ads alongside trailers for years, "with no significant consumer backlash." Right now, after the lights go down, Cinemark shows 15 minutes worth of trailers before the actual movie begins while Regal's trailer block runs 15 to 20 minutes, according to the news report.

Apple is reportedly talking to movie theater chains to try and get its Apple TV Plus movies shown in theaters a few weeks before they hit the streaming service. CNET reports: Apple's apparently hoping to attract established directors and producers to the $5-a-month service, and avoid creating industry tension like Netflix -- Martin Scorcese's The Irishman won't be playing in several theater chains because Netflix wouldn't agree to the usual three-month delay between the movie's theatrical debut and its arrival on streaming. The strategy Apple reportedly is taking mirrors that of Amazon, which gave the Oscar-winning Manchester by the Sea a three-month theatrical run in 2016, the Wall Street Journal noted.

Sofia Coppola's On the Rocks, which stars Rashida Jones and Bill Murray, is one of Apple's first major theatrical releases. It could premiere at the Cannes Film Festival prior to its mid-2020 release, according to the Journal. The Cupertino, California, company also reportedly talked about giving The Elephant Queen, a Chiwetel Ejiofor-narrated documentary about an elephant mother leading her herd across Africa, a theatrical release so it's eligible for awards consideration. It's due to be available on Apple TV Plus at launch on Nov. 1.

After briefly breaking up, Sony Pictures and Marvel have found a way to get back in the Spider-Man business together. From a report: Their new film even has a release date: July 16, 2021. "I am thrilled that Spidey's journey in the MCU will continue, and I and all of us at Marvel Studios are very excited that we get to keep working on it," said Marvel topper Kevin Feige. "Spider-Man is a powerful icon and hero whose story crosses all ages and audiences around the globe. He also happens to be the only hero with the superpower to cross cinematic universes, so as Sony continues to develop their own Spidey-verse you never know what surprises the future might hold."

Also, as part of the arrangement, Spider-Man will appear in a future Marvel movie. In 2015, Marvel and Sony unveiled an unprecedented intra-studio partnership that produced not only two well-regarded and massive hits with Spider-Man: Homecoming and this summer's Spider-Man: Far From Home, but it also took the character, whose movie rights are owned by Sony, and put him into the Marvel Cinematic Universe where the character became one of its key players. But the co-parenting deal fell apart not too long after the release of Far From Home, spilling into the open in August.

Locast, a little-known nonprofit behind a free streaming service, sued ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox on Friday, alleging that the television networks colluded in an effort to chill its business. From a report: Locast streams network shows and sports programs through a free app that relays broadcast feeds online. People can get the streams without a cable or satellite plan, potentially cutting off licensing fees to the broadcasters. (More traditionally, viewers can also receive broadcast signals over the air, at no charge, with a digital antenna.) In July, the networks banded together to sue Locast, arguing that it had violated their copyrights and chipped away at the revenue they get from pay-television operators like AT&T and Comcast. The networks are expected to receive more than $10 billion in such fees this year. The broadcasters' lawsuit also named David Goodfriend, a former media executive and lawyer with stints in the Federal Communications Commission, who started Locast in January 2018.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Meet AdBlock Radio, an adblocker for live radio streams and podcasts. Its creator, Alexandre Storelli, told Motherboard he hopes to help companies "develop alternative business models for radio and podcast lovers that do not want ads." "Ads exploit the weaknesses of many defenseless souls," Storelli told Motherboard. "Ads dishonestly tempt people, steal their time and promise them a higher social status. Blocking them will be a relieving experience for many."

Most audio ads exploit "auditory artifacts" to produce an ad that can't be ignored or tuned out because it feels louder than it actually is -- this has gotten so bad that there has actually been a "sonic arms race" where ads have been made increasingly louder over the years. "Adblock Radio detects audio ads with machine-learning and Shazam-like techniques," Storelli wrote about the project. He said he's been working on it for more than three years and that it uses techniques such as speech recognition, acoustic fingerprinting, and machine learning to detect known ad formats. It uses a crowdsourced database of ads and "acoustic fingerprinting," which converts audio features into a series of numbers that can be combed by an algorithm. Storelli has made Adblock Radio open-source and given detailed instructions on how to build on it, integrate it into user devices, and deploy it in a way that pressures radio stations (and podcasts) to self-regulate the quality of their ads.

Freshly Exhumed writes: Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and consultant on numerous movie scripts, was excited to watch "Ad Astra," the new Brad Pitt space thriller. The film was promoted with the promise of scientific realism in depicting a solar system well on its way to being settled by humanity. Unfortunately, Professor Frank finds that despite very good intentions, "Ad Astra" strikes the wrong balance between story and fact, art and artifice. While the plot ventures out to the farthest planet Neptune, the demands of the film's theme cramp its science fiction imagination. Instead of letting us explore a vision of our common future in space, "Ad Astra" delivers a solar system stripped down to fit a very particular story.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Many parents of both boys and girls have witnessed striking differences in the way their kids use technology, with their sons generally gravitating to video games and their daughters often spending more of their screen time scrolling through social media. Emerging research indicates that brain differences between males and females help account for the split. According to a 2017 survey conducted by Pew Research Center, 41% of teenage boys said they spend too much time playing video games while only 11% of girls said they do. Marc Potenza, a psychiatry professor at Yale University, teamed up with researchers at universities in China to find out why. Using functional MRIs, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, the team studied neural responses in young male and female gamers, particularly in the parts of the brain associated with reward processing and craving -- a motivating factor in addiction. When the men and women were shown photos of people playing video games, those parts of the men's brains showed higher levels of activation than those parts of the women's brains. Brain regions that have been implicated in drug-addiction studies also were shown to be more highly activated in the men after gaming. The researchers said the results suggest men could be more biologically prone than women to developing internet gaming disorder.

But girls and women aren't free from problems when it comes to digital media. Data from Pew shows that, in general, women use social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest far more than men. Many girls and women are drawn to those photo-sharing sites because they like to form bonds and find similarities, says Rosanna Guadagno, a social psychologist at Stanford University. Even if women only use those sites more than men because that is where their friends are, many experts and parents say they have found that girls appear to have a greater fear of missing out, which compels them to keep up with what their friends are posting. Some recent studies show that girls feel the ill effects of too much social media use, such as depression and anxiety, more than boys do.

The FCC's multi-year effort to kill media consolidation rules at the behest of giants like Sinclair Broadcasting has been rejected by the courts, who ruled the agency failed to seriously consider the negative impact unchecked media monopolies have on the public at large. Motherboard reports: In a 2-1 new ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit forced the FCC to go back to the drawing board in its quest to make life easier for media giants, arguing the agency "did not adequately consider the effect its sweeping rule changes will have on ownership of broadcast media by women and racial minorities."

In 2017, Pai's FCC voted to eliminate a cap preventing any one broadcaster from reaching more than 39 percent of the nation, a 77-year-old rule requiring broadcasters keep a local studio in the towns they service (to encourage community participation), as well as rules preventing broadcasters from owning more than two TV stations and one radio station in the same market. These changes were intended to help companies like Sinclair Broadcasting, whose proposed $3.7 billion merger with Tribune Media would have given the company ownership of more than 230 broadcast stations, reaching 72 percent of the American public. That deal was scuttled last year after Sinclair was accused of misleading the FCC to gain regulatory approval. The court said that FCC analysis justifying its decision was "so insubstantial that it would receive a failing grade in any introductory statistics class."

A possible computer virus attack has knocked out Mac Pro workstations for many film and TV editors across Los Angeles. According to Variety, the issue -- which is causing the workstations to refuse to reboot -- is widespread among users of Mac Pro computers running older versions of Apple's operating system as well as Avid's Media Composer software. From the report: Avid said in a statement that it was aware of the issue: "Avid is aware of the reboot issue affecting Apple Mac Pro devices running some Avid products, which arose late yesterday. This issue is top priority for our engineering and support teams, who have been working diligently to determine and resolve the root cause. As we learn more, we will immediately publish information -- directly to our customers and via our community forums and social media platforms -- in order to resolve this issue for all affected customers and prevent any further issues."

"A lot of L.A. post shops and people out on shows having their Macs slowly crash," reported video post-production consultant Matt Penn on Twitter. Freelance film editor Marcus Pun reposted a message from a popular Avid Facebook user group, advising users not to turn off their workstations. Other users reported that multiple computers at their company were affected by the issue, with social media chatter indicating that a number of different companies, and even major shows like "Modern Family," were affected by the issue. UPDATE: The issue appears to be caused by a Google Chrome update gone haywire.

wired_parrot shares a report from the BBC: Released in 1982, Entombed was far from a best-seller and today it's largely forgotten. But recently, a computer scientist and a digital archaeologist decided to pull apart the game's source code to investigate how it was made. An early maze-navigating game, Entombed intrigued the researchers for how early programmers solved the problem of drawing a solvable maze that is drawn procedurally. But they got more than they bargained for: they found a mystery bit of code they couldn't explain (Link to full paper). The fundamental logic that determines how the maze is drawn is locked in a table of possible values written in the games code. However, it seems the logic behind the table has been lost forever.

An anonymous reader shares a report: First, we learned "Friends" would leave Netflix for the upcoming streaming service, HBO Max. Now, "The Office" and "Parks and Recreation" are on their way out, as NBCUniversal prepares to launch its new streamer, Peacock. With legacy media brands like Disney, WarnerMedia, and NBCUniversal launching streaming services of their own, Netflix and Hulu subscribers face losing access to the shows they've grown accustomed to binge-watching to their heart's content. But there's an industry that is embracing that uncertainty: stores that sell DVDs and Blu-rays.

Blake Lindberg, a manager at Academy Records -- one of the few shops in New York City that still buys and sells second-hand DVDs -- told Business Insider that even though streaming services continue to bring in significantly more money than DVD sales, some of his patrons are frustrated with the increasingly fleeting nature of content on streaming services. "What we notice from talking to clientele is that these items might be on Netflix or Hulu this month, but they might not be next month," said Lindberg, who's worked at Academy Records for over 20 years. Academy Records mostly carries uncommon films and niche finds for dedicated collectors, Lindberg said, but the store keeps box sets of classic TV shows and new releases that might not be streaming yet available as well.

HBO managed to thwart competition from big streaming companies again Sunday night, taking home far more Emmy wins than any other network or streaming company. From a report: Other legacy cable and broadcast networks otherwise had a rough night. All other broadcast and cable networks combined nabbed 24 awards -- 10 fewer than HBO. HBO has been known for decades as the home to some of television's most prestigious content. But the premium cable network has faced stiffer competition in recent years from tech giants like Netflix and Amazon, which have poured billions of dollars into original content production for TV and film. Netflix made history last year by tying HBO in Emmy wins, putting an end to HBO's 17 year-long winning streak. HBO took home 37 wins, with 12 going to its blockbuster hit "Game of Thrones." The hit series, which ended this year, picked up a whopping 32 nominations.

HBO's "Chernobyl" was a surprise winner of the evening, nabbing 12 awards. The final season of HBO's hit comedy series "Veep," however, was largely ignored by the major awards categories. Amazon's hit comedy series "Fleabag" and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" took home 14 awards collectively. Final count: HBO: 34; Netflix: 27; Amazon: 15; National Geographic: 8; NBC: 7; CNN: 5; FX Networks: 5; CBS: 4; FOX: 4; and Hulu: 4.

An anonymous reader quotes CNET: Actor Aron Eisenberg, who played Nog on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, died Saturday at age 50, his wife Malíssa Longo posted on Facebook. "He was an intelligent, humble, funny, emphatic soul," Longo wrote. "He sought to live his life with integrity and truth. He was so driven to put the best he had into whatever work was put before him." The actor's cause of death wasn't released, but he underwent his second kidney transplant in 2015, StarTrek.com notes in an obituary.

Eisenberg played Nog, the first Ferengi to join Starfleet, and appeared in 40 episodes from across all seven seasons. The show ran from 1993 to 1999. His character was the son of Rom, the nephew of Quark, and the best friend of Jake Sisko, who was the son of commanding officer Benjamin Sisko.

Eisenberg was told nothing about his character when he was cast and had no idea that the part would last, Star Trek reports "I thought every episode I was doing might be my last episode," he told StarTrek.com in 2012. The site also notes that Eisenberg also played Kar, the young Kazon-Ogla, in a 1995 Star Trek: Voyager episode.
This year Aron had become the host and producer of a Star Trek-themed podcast called "The 7th Rule." And Deep Space Nine (and the other early Star Trek series) are all available through Amazon Prime.

CNET remembered the actor by sharing the Deep Space Nine scene where Nog makes a passionate speech about why he wants to join Starfleet Academy. ("My father is a mechanical genius. He could've been chief engineer of a starship if he'd had the opportunity. But he went into business like a good Ferengi...")

On Twitter 79-year-old René Auberjonois (who played Odo on Deep Space Nine) called Aron "such a pure, sweet soul and gifted artist. He was a dedicated collaborator and friend. My condolences and love to his wife and family."

Armin Shimerman, who had played Nog's bartender uncle Quark, tweeted Sunday "I have lost a great friend and the world has lost a great heart... He was a man of conviction and enormous sensitivity and the best of humanity... Flights of angels my friend... you will be missed."

And Next Generation actor Jonathan Frakes tweeted "bless his sweet soul."

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: Fans of the surreal, the bizarre and sardonic anthropomorphic cows are in a fervour after The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson's website was updated last weekend with promises of "a new online era", 24 years after the reclusive creator retired at the age of 44.

Larson's iconic Far Side cartoons were syndicated in more than 1,900 daily newspapers from 1980 to 1995, treating readers to daily offerings from his offbeat visions of the world... His image of a caveman pointing to the tail of a stegosaurus and letting his audience know that it is called "the thagomizer, after the late Thag Simmonds", led paleontologists to adopt the invented term.

Larson retired The Far Side in 1995 , citing "simple fatigue and a fear that if I continue for many more years my work will begin to suffer or at the very least ease into the Graveyard of Mediocre Cartoons". Hugely publicity-shy -- he has long refused to have his picture taken -- he has since then released a compilation of Far Side cartoons, but worked to keep his pictures from being reproduced digitally, explaining in a letter the "emotional cost" of having his work "offered up in cyberspace beyond my control... These cartoons are my 'children' of sorts, and like a parent, I'm concerned about where they go at night without telling me," wrote Larson. "And, seeing them at someone's website is like getting the call at 2am that goes, 'Uh, Dad, you're not going to like this much, but guess where I am.'"

But the updating over the weekend of thefarside.com, which had previously remained virtually unchanged for more than a decade, has left many fans hoping for Larson's return. A new image, in which some of Larson's most iconic characters -- the cow on two legs, the bee-hived woman, the nerd -- are being defrosted from an iceberg, has appeared on the site, along with the promise: "Uncommon, unreal, and (soon-to-be) unfrozen. A new online era of The Far Side is coming!"

hcs_$reboot shared this report about Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, a new three-part documentary that debuted Friday on Netflix from Academy Award-winning director Davis Guggenheim: The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist is asked what his worst fear is. It's not family tragedy or personal pain. "I don't want my brain to stop working," he responds... A portrait emerges of a visionary who gnaws on his eyeglasses' arms, downs Cokes and is relentlessly optimistic that technology can solve social ills. He is also someone who reads manically -- he'll scrutinize the Minnesota state budget for fun -- and who is a wicked opponent at cards...

While the series is largely sympathetic toward its subject, Guggenheim nevertheless presses Gates on everything from the federal antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s to his relationship with his mother. In a phone interview, Gates acknowledged that he balanced the camera's intrusion with the chance to tell the world -- and recruit help -- about his efforts to help the planet and the poor... Each episode in the series introduces three huge global issues the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has tackled recently -- safe sanitation technology, polio eradication and nuclear power -- and then switches back in time to see how Gates solved other complex issues in his life as a younger man. "The series doesn't do a traditional cradle-to-grave portrait of him. He wasn't interested in that. I wasn't interested in that," said the filmmaker. Instead, he wanted to find out the source of his relentless optimism and his push to do all these great things.... Gates himself said he appreciated Guggenheim serving as a reality check for many of the seemingly intractable public health issues that his foundation has tackled. "I'm not that objective. It was interesting, through Davis' eyes, to have him say, 'Are you sure?' Well, I'm not sure," said Gates. "So I thought that was good. It made me step back."
At one point, Gates admits to eating Tang straight out of the jar.

As noted by Zatz Not Funny, TiVo is testing pre-roll video ads that start playing when customers view one of their recordings. The Verge reports: The ad spots are noticeably low-res and worse quality than the DVR'd content that starts playing afterward, according to one TiVo owner who has been served spots for Amazon, Keurig, and Toyota. It sounds like the users can fast-forward through the ads, but doing so is "not that seamless."

There are several potential reasons for TiVo ramping up advertising. Maybe the company plans to offer an ad-supported subscription with lower (or no) monthly fees compared to what regular customers are paying (similar to Amazon's Kindle devices with ads). No one who has paid for a lifetime subscription or even a monthly plan will be pleased to see pre-roll ads. TiVo also handles DVR functionality for many midsized and international cable providers. Squeezing in ads wherever possible could be something that those companies are pushing for as more of their customers spend increased time streaming shows and movies elsewhere.

Hundreds of people arrived early Friday at a gate at the once secret Area 51 military base in Nevada at the time appointed by an internet hoaxster to "storm" the facility to see space aliens and at least two were detained by sheriff's deputies. From a report: The Storm Area 51 invitation spawned festivals in the tiny Nevada towns of Rachel and Hiko nearest the military site, and a more than two-hour drive from Las Vegas. The Lincoln county sheriff, Kerry Lee, estimated late Thursday that about 1,500 people had gathered at the festival sites and said more than 150 people also made the rugged trip several additional miles on bone-rattling dirt roads to get within selfie distance of the gates.

An Associated Press photographer said it wasn't immediately clear if a woman who began ducking under a gate and a man who urinated nearby were arrested after the crowd gathered about 3am Friday. Millions of people had responded to a June internet post calling for people to run into the remote US air force test site that has long been the focus of UFO conspiracy theories. "They can't stop all of us," the post joked. "Lets see them aliens." The military responded with stern warnings that lethal force could be used if people entered the Nevada Test and Training Range, and local and state officials said arrests would be made if people tried.

Local authorities in Rachel, Nevada -- the location of a planned Aliengate festival that evolved out of a viral Facebook event -- are considering taking legal action to cover $250,000 the county plans to spend to prepare for the potential onslaught of visitors. Gizmodo reports: Matty Roberts created the "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us" Facebook event on June 27 as a joke, but the event went viral and evolved into an actual festival -- Alienstock -- which was planned for September 19-22 at the Little A'Le'Inn in Rachel, Nevada, near the US Air Force base known as Area 51. But just a few days before the event was supposed to begin, Roberts and his partners backed out, posting on their website that they "foresee a possible humanitarian disaster in the works" and after considering "the lack of infrastructure, planning, and risk management, along with concerns raised for the safety of the expected 10,000+ attendees, we decided to transition Alienstock away from the Rachel festival towards a safer alternative." That safer alternative is an "Area 51 Celebration" happening on Thursday night at the Downtown Las Vegas Events Center.

However, Little A'Le'Inn owner Connie West has made it very clear that she still plans to host her own Alienstock, despite Roberts' attorney sending her a cease-and-desist letter ordering her to stop using the name "Alienstock" since the event at that location was canceled. Lincoln County Sheriff Kerry Lee told Gizmodo that as of Wednesday morning, people had already started arriving at A'Le'Inn. "Matty Roberts is the one that started this on Facebook. So our district attorney, his opinion is that Matty Roberts and Facebook stand to be partially to blame for this" Lee told Gizmodo. "He's already told people that this is quote-unquote 'His event.' He told some of the other event promoters that this was his event. And so I guess if it's his event and he's taken ownership of it then we know where legal action should go toward. I'm not an attorney but that is what Lincoln County district attorney is saying." Facebook is protected from legal action regarding content created by one of its users under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, but it's possible that the district attorney may argue that this particular circumstance wouldn't be covered by those protections.

According to The Wall Street Journal, AT&T is exploring parting with its DirecTV unit as customers are leaving the service in droves. From the report: The telecom giant has considered various options, including a spinoff of DirecTV into a separate public company and a combination of DirecTV's assets with Dish Network, its satellite-TV rival, the people said. AT&T may ultimately decide to keep DirecTV in the fold. Despite the satellite service's struggles, as consumers drop their TV connections, it still contributes a sizable volume of cash flow and customer accounts to its parent. AT&T acquired DirecTV in 2015 for $49 billion. The company's shrinking satellite business is under a microscope after activist investor Elliott Management Corp. disclosed a $3.2 billion stake in AT&T last week and released a report pushing for strategic changes. Elliott has told investors that AT&T should unload DirecTV, The Wall Street Journal has previously reported.

Jettisoning DirecTV would be an about-face for Mr. Stephenson, who billed the acquisition of the company as a bold move to diversify beyond the wireless phone business and tap into a growing media industry. The deal made AT&T the largest distributor of pay TV channels, ahead of Comcast. DirecTV is now part of an entertainment and consumer wireline unit that made up 27% of AT&T's $173.3 billion 2018 revenue. For Mr. Stephenson, who has helmed AT&T for 12 years, parting ways with DirecTV would be an acknowledgment that a major cornerstone of his diversification strategy hasn't gone as planned. It also adds pressure for AT&T to deliver on the promise of the Time Warner deal. Mr. Stephenson has signaled he is prepared to step down as CEO as soon as next year, the Journal reported last week. The Journal goes on to say that AT&T may ultimately decide to keep DirecTV because of "AT&T's towering net debt load, which stood at more than $160 billion earlier this year. The cash generated by the pay-TV giant has helped pay down that debt and fueled other investments in the rest of the company."

"Any spinoff of DirecTV would be unlikely until mid-2020 at the earliest, five years after the deal closed, to make it a tax-efficient transaction for AT&T," the report adds.