A new web portal allows "Star Trek" fans to explore the iconic bridge of the starship Enterprise through 360-degree, 3D models and learn about its evolution throughout the franchise's history. Smithsonian Magazine reports: The site features 360-degree, 3D models of the various versions of the Enterprise, as well as a timeline of the ship's evolution throughout the franchise's history. Fans of the show can also read detailed information about each version of the ship's design, its significance to the "Star Trek" storyline and its production backstory. Developed in honor of the "Star Trek: Picard" series finale, which dropped late last month on Paramount+, the portal is a collaboration between the Roddenberry Estate, the Roddenberry Archive and the technology company OTOY. A group of well-known "Star Trek" artists -- including Denise and Michael Okuda, Daren Dochterman, Doug Drexler and Dave Blass -- also supported the project.

The voice of the late actress Majel Roddenberry, who played the Enterprise's computer for years, will be added to the site in the future. Gene Roddenberry died in 1991, followed by Majel Roddenberry in 2008; the two had been married since 1969. The portal's creators also released a short video, narrated by actor John de Lancie, exploring every version of the Enterprise's bridge to date, "from its inception in Pato Guzman's 1964 sketches, through its portrayal across decades of TV shows and feature films, to its latest incarnation on the Enterprise-G, as revealed in the final episode of 'Star Trek: Picard,'" per the video description. Accompanying video interviews with "Star Trek" cast and crew -- including William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in the original series, and Terry Matalas, a showrunner for "Star Trek: Picard" -- also explore the series' legacy.

Canadian singer-songwriter Grimes went viral late last month when she invited her fans to create music using her voice, stating that should would split 50% of royalties for any successful AI-generated song. Now, the artist has unveiled an AI voice software, called Elf.Tech, to make it even easier for users to deepfake her voice for their own AI songs. Pitchfork reports: Artists can commercially release the results in exchange for half of any master-recording royalties. Grimes announced a pair of new songs, "Music for Machines" and "I Wanna Be Software," in tandem with the launch, though their release date has not been set. In a Twitter thread about the software, Grimes asked users to "be tasteful" but said she would only block extreme uses, such as an AI Grimes "Nazi anthem" ("unless it's somehow in jest a la The Producers I guess"). "Baby murder songs" are also off the menu.

Through Elf.Tech, Grimes has also shared a demo of her collaborative remake of Richie Hawtin's Plastikman track "Passage (Out)." Find it in the "Bounces" folder on the website. You can also access stems to train your own Grimes AI. The project is powered by the generative AI Triniti.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: When you think of digital entertainment, your mind might turn first to online video-streaming services, such as Sling TV or YouTube TV, and video-on-demand services, including Netflix or Acorn TV. However, consultant Deloitte's 17th annual "Digital Media Trends" survey suggests traditional television shows and movies are no longer the only forms of entertainment. Younger generations, often called Gen Zs and Millennials, are increasingly turning to user-generated content (UGC) -- which relies on unpaid contributors rather than traditional media professionals -- and video games to find personal fulfillment, value, and meaning. These younger users are creating a vibrant, immersive, and social tapestry of experiences with UGC, video games, music, and social media all playing significant roles. And that move towards UGC and gaming could have big implications for everyone.

Deloitte's survey found that about a third (32%) of consumers view online experiences as meaningful substitutes for in-person interactions, with that proportion increasing to 50% among Gen Zs and Millennials. Almost half (48%) of these younger generations engage more with others on social media than in the physical world, and 40% of them socialize more in video games than offline. Of course, it's not only younger people who view online experiences as meaningful substitutes for in-person interactions. [...] Yet those born after 1981, the usual dividing line between Generation X and Millennials, are much more inclined to live their lives online.

"The Super Mario Bros. Movie" is officially the first film of the year to cross the coveted $1 billion milestone at the global box office. From a report: As of Sunday, after 26 days of release, the animated video game adaptation, from Universal, Illumination and Nintendo, has grossed $490 million in North America and $532 million internationallly. It's only the fifth movie of pandemic times to join the $1 billion club, following "Spider-Man: No Way Home," "Top Gun: Maverick," "Jurassic World Dominion" and "Avatar: The Way of Water."

"The Super Mario Bros. Movie" opened in theaters on April 5 and generated a towering $204 million in its first five days of release, notching the biggest opening weekend of the year and the second-biggest debut ever for an animated movie. Since then, it has become the highest grossing movie domestically and globally of 2023, as well as the highest-grosser ever for a film based on a video game. Those records are especially encouraging because the last time that Mario and Luigi graced the big screen, in 1993's disastrous live-action "Super Mario Bros," became a legendary example of Hollywood's inability to adapt video games.

schwit1 shares a report from Rolling Stone: It was a busy day for the live music industry in Washington [on Wednesday] as senators introduced multiple pieces of legislation aimed at improving transparency and competition in ticketing. One of the most common complaints among music fans in a long list of gripes about the modern ticketing industry is the hidden fees that get tacked on at the very end of a purchase, adding a deceptive extra costs customers won't even see until they've already selected their seats based on a different price. The Transparency in Charges for Key Events Ticketing, or TICKET Act, could end that annoyance. Introduced on Tuesday by U.S. Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell (D-Wash) and committee ranking member Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the bill, if passed, would require ticket sellers for concerts and sporting events to disclose the total price of a ticket including fees right away. Fees themselves can be a significant addition for concert tickets, usually adding a 20 to 30-percent extra charge on tickets but sometimes well exceeding that. Joe Biden pushed for a reform on "junk fees" earlier this year.

While passing the new legislation wouldn't stop the actual fees themselves, it would certainly be a step forward in making the business more transparent for consumers. While the bill would pass all-in prices on a federal level, some states like New York already enacted the policy. "Right now, one company is leveraging its power to lock venues into exclusive contracts that last up to ten years, ensuring there is no room for potential competitors to get their foot in the door," Klobuchar said, seemingly referencing Ticketmaster but not mentioning it by name. "Without competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences. The Unlock Ticketing Markets Act would help consumers, artists, and independent venue operators alike by making sure primary ticketing companies face pressure to innovate and improve."

An anonymous reader shares a report: A young Harrison Ford will grace cinema screens for 25 minutes this summer -- aided by some new Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) software. The news that LucasFilm's Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny would feature a de-aged Ford came at the end of last year, but an interview with director James Mangold in Total Film just revealed it will be for almost a fifth of the film's running time.

The fifth Indiana Jones iteration starts with an opening scene from 1944 -- about eight years after Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark took place. "My hope is that, although it will be talked about in terms of technology, you just watch it and go, 'Oh my God, they just found footage. This was a thing they shot 40 years ago," Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm and a producer, told Empire. The rest of the movie shoots forward to 1969, with Indy on a mission to prevent a comeback of Nazism.

Netflix lost more than one million users in Spain in the first three months of 2023 according to market research group Kantar, a sign that the streaming giant's crackdown on password-sharing could backfire. From a report: In early February, Spain became one of Netflix's first markets to introduce a monthly fee for users who shared their log-in details with another household and technical measures to detect such sharing. The move was linked to a fall in users of more than a million, two thirds of whom were using someone else's password, according to Kantar's research, which is based on surveys of household streaming habits.

"It's clear this steep drop is due to the crackdown," said Dominic Sunnebo, global insight director at Kantar's Worldpanel Division, adding that the loss of a million users, even if most weren't paid subscribers, would be a blow to Netflix in terms of word of mouth recommendation for its shows and service. Subscription cancellations in the first quarter tripled compared to the previous period, according to Kantar's research. Of all remaining Netflix subscribers in Spain, one-tenth said they planned to unsubscribe in the second quarter. Spanish subscribers are charged $6.57 a month to add members outside their household. A similar fee was introduced in Portugal, Canada and New Zealand after a roll-out in several Latin American countries.

Joe Russo, the co-director of Avengers: Endgame, in an interview on the impact he thinks AI is going to play out in the world of video games, movies and television. He said: This is like a mind-bending question, right? I mean, we've had conversations about how it can be used, and look, Gen Z is very unique because it's a generation that has -- If there were incremental movements in technology over the last, say, 100 years, 150 years, they were the first generation with an exponential movement, right? So there's a real possibility now for technology to become a really important factor in our lives because it's been embraced by Gen Z, and they grew up with it, they understand it, they know how to use it. That's important, right? We're not in a world where, you know, your uncle doesn't know how to send emails anymore. We're in a world where the entire generation has a facile expertise in it, and is also not afraid of it.

So potentially, what you could do with it is obviously use it to engineer storytelling and change storytelling. So you have a constantly evolving story, either in a game or in a movie, or a TV show. You could walk into your house and save the AI on your streaming platform. âoeHey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe's photoreal avatar. I want it to be a rom-com because I've had a rough day," and it renders a very competent story with dialogue that mimics your voice. It mimics your voice, and suddenly now you have a rom-com starring you that's 90 minutes long. So you can curate your story specifically to you.

That's one thing that it can do, but it can also, on a communal level, populate the world of the game, have intelligence behind character choice, you know, the computer-run characters in the game that can make decisions learn your play style, make it a little harder for you, make it a little easier for you, curate the story. Say you want Fortnite to be more of a horror game, right? Then you could ask the AI to ramp up the horror elements of it. So again, you could curate your experience.I think that's where it's going. How quickly we get there, I don't know, but that's where it's going.

Canadian singer-songwriter Grimes has invited her fans to create music using her voice, stating that she would split 50% of royalties for any successful AI-generated song using her voice. On Sunday night she tweeted: "I'll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist i collab with. Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings."

She also said she welcomes the open sourcing of art and an end to copyright. "Im just curious what even happens and interested in being a Guinea pig." From a report: Grimes has long embraced AI as a techno artist. In 2020, her first album to top the Billboard dance charts was Miss Anthropocene, named for the effects of technology on Earth's ecology and climate in the post-Industrial Revolution era. It was also in 2020 that she teamed up with the algorithmic mood music startup Endel to create an AI-generated lullaby for her first child with SpaceX founder Elon Musk who they named X AE A-12 with the Elven spelling of AI, according to Grimes.

"Everyday I thank the overlords of Ableton for cleaning up my tracks, but I do worry though that AI will outpace us and make musicians obsolete. It's inevitable," she warned at Web Summit 2020. With millions of followers across YouTube, Instagram and Twitter and hits like Oblivion, Kill V. Maim and Go, her call for AI collaboration could be a game changer.

Cory Doctorow just wrote a new thriller "about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works," according to his publisher. Doctorow calls Red Team Blues "a book about the financial rot at the center of Silicon Valley... a kind of anti-finance finance thriller."

The publisher describes the book's hero as "a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. " He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He's as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he's a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike.

He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. He's not famous, except to the people who matter. He's made some pretty powerful people happy in his time, and he's been paid pretty well. It's been a good life.

Now he's been roped into a job that's more dangerous than anything he's ever agreed to before — and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.
"I write when I'm anxious, and right now these are anxious times," Doctorow explained last month in Publisher's Weekly, describing what he'd learned about selling audiobooks without going through Amazon's service Audible. This time Cory got 4,080 backers to pledge $152,735 to fund an audiobook for Red Team Blues read by Wil Wheaton that his Kickstarter campaign stressed would be DRM-free. ("Every audiobook sold on Audible be wrapped in Amazon's Digital Rights Management technology, which is a felony for you to remove, even if the copyright holder asks you to. It's punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine!")

Red Team Blues is the first book in a new trilogy, and Cory is now making in-person appearances to promote the book — starting today (and tomorrow) at the LA Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California. Tuesday he'll be in San Diego, and a week from Sunday he's appearing in San Francisco, before heading to Portland, Mountain View, Berkeley, and Gaithersburg Maryland.

Redbox CEO Bill Rouhana told The Hollywood Reporter that he'd like to buy the business, saying: "I wish Netflix would sell me that business instead of shutting it down." From the report: Redbox is already the biggest DVD rental company in the U.S., with a network of some 32,000 red DVD kiosks across the country. Just this week, it announced plans to add another 1,500 kiosks at Dollar General stores (Rouhana says the Dollar General kiosks are some of the company's most profitable). While the DVD business kickstarted Netflix's meteoric rise, in recent years it has been on the decline. In 2022, it had $146 million in revenue, down $40 million from the year prior. Q1 had revenue of $32 million, suggesting a further decline this year.

And Rouhana says he has reached out to Netflix over the years expressing a desire to acquire the DVD business, to no avail. "I have tried like three or four times to reach out to the corporate development people about it but just got rebuffed each time," Rouhana says. "So when I saw it being closed, I thought, 'Well, maybe they'll do it now.'" A Netflix source tells THR that the company is winding down the business, and not selling it. (As for what happens to those warehouses full of DVDs that fueled Netflix's red envelope business, they seem to be in limbo for now.)

Even if that is the case, Rouhana says he believes Netflix's decision to shutter the service will benefit his company. "This could be a great boon to us because now there are a whole bunch of people who are going to look for a new place to get their DVDs, and we're close to 90 percent of them based on where our kiosks are located," he says. And, he notes, he does not expect the DVD business to go away anytime soon. "We believe in it, and we believe it's going to be around for a while. Like most legacy things, it's a lot harder to kill them than people say, I believe," he adds.

In fact, he believes the DVD business is in a position for growth over the next few years, thanks to a larger slate of movies hitting theaters and a desire from studios to reengage with windowing strategies. "We programmed our business plan for us to get back to about 30 percent of the 2019 level," Rouhana says. "I feel that's pretty conservative, I think we'll be better than that. But, you know, that's how we built the business plan that we've articulated. So people can decide for themselves whether they think that's overly optimistic or overly pessimistic."

Amazon has introduced a new feature to Prime Video called Dialogue Boost. It's intended to isolate dialogue and make it louder relative to other sounds in streaming videos on the service. Ars Technica reports: Amazon describes how it works in a blog post: "Dialogue Boost analyzes the original audio in a movie or series and intelligently identifies points where dialogue may be hard to hear above background music and effects. Then, speech patterns are isolated and audio is enhanced to make the dialogue clearer. This AI-based approach delivers a targeted enhancement to portions of spoken dialogue, instead of a general amplification at the center channel in a home theater system."

Not all content will be eligible for the dialogue boost feature, though -- at least not yet. Amazon says it "has initially launched on select Amazon Originals worldwide" like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Big Sick. While this is partly an accessibility feature for people who are hard of hearing, Amazon is also responding to a widespread complaint among viewers. A 2022 survey found that 50 percent of 1,260 American viewers "watch content with subtitles most of the time," many of them citing "muddled audio" and saying that it's more difficult to understand dialogue in movies and TV shows than it used to be. [...] The company hasn't announced when the feature will expand to more content. But we wouldn't be surprised to see rapid expansion -- not just from Amazon, but from other streamers offering similar features, too.

The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which was created last year to investigate unidentified flying objects (UFOs), said on Wednesday that they have not found any evidence of aliens in its analysis. The office within the Secretary of Defense is, however, tracking more than 650 potential cases of so-called "unidentified aerial phenomena" -- up from the 350 reports referenced in an unclassified intelligence report released earlier this year. Half of them are considered "especially interesting and anomalous." The Register reports: At hearings (one open and one closed) held by the Senate Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities this week, Sean Kirkpatrick said most sightings of UFOs are not as strange as they first appear. They are often balloons, unmanned aerial systems, or aircraft, and look odd due to natural phenomena. "I want to underscore that only a very small percentage of [unidentified anomalous phenomena] (UAP) reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous," he said during this opening testimony at the hearing.

AARO has failed to resolve some incidents, but it's not because something is inexplicable but due to a lack of data. "In our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics," Kirkpatrick confirmed. In other words: It's not aliens. Kirkpatrick said that if the Office does find sufficient scientific data supporting the idea of an object of extraterrestrial origin, it would share its findings with NASA and alert US government personnel. Amateur UFO spotters are fine, he said, but need to apply scientific method to their claims. Further reading: Pentagon Official Floats a Theory For Unexplained Sightings: Alien Motherships

Today, Sonos is introducing Sonos Pro, a new service targeted at businesses -- restaurants, bars, and retail stores -- that makes it easy to play music across numerous locations without breaking any licensing rules. Sonos Pro works with all S2-compatible hardware including the Ikea Symfonisk line and, if you're into retrofitting existing speakers, the Amp and Port. The Verge reports: Pro customers will gain access to a web portal that lets them remotely control what's playing in each of their locations (divided into different zones) and perform troubleshooting from afar. If you're a normal consumer and want to reset your Sonos system at home, you've got to unplug the products, but Pro customers will be able to do it with software. They'll also have the ability to schedule particular genres for different times of the day to lock in the right atmosphere for their business. Want to keep the volume low in the mornings when you've got less foot traffic and automatically raise it during peak hours? Sonos Pro can do that.

The monthly Sonos Pro subscription, priced at $35 per business location, will include "Sonos Backgrounds." This is a commercially licensed music service featuring a range of royalty-free music from independent artists that's all legally compliant for streaming at business establishments. If you're wondering why that's necessary, businesses technically aren't allowed to just start playing Spotify, Apple Music, or other mainstream music apps over their speakers. Spotify says so right here. Those services are only licensed for personal use; playing them in a public setting counts as a live performance, and that's a no-no unless you've paid for the necessary licenses from ASCAP, BMI, and other organizations. That can get extremely complicated in and of itself.

The service will provide deep, granular control over the entire system in a commercial space. You can set maximum volume limits for each speaker or enable / disable features like AirPlay, line-in playback, and more. If you want to give your staff access to Spotify after hours, that's doable with an "allow direct control" setting. Speaking of which, business owners can grant their employees access to Sonos Pro and set different permission tiers for each person. And again, this can all be done remotely. Try adjusting settings (or even switching your Wi-Fi network) for Sonos devices on a regular account, and it can get messy fast. If you're away from the devices, forget about it.

Netflix is planning a "broad rollout" of the password sharing crackdown that it began implementing in 2022, the company said today in its Q1 2023 earnings report (PDF). MacRumors reports: The "paid sharing" plan that Netflix has been testing in a limited number of countries will expand to additional countries in the second quarter, including the United States. Netflix said that it was "pleased with the results" of the password sharing restrictions that it implemented in Canada, New Zealand, Spain, and Portugal earlier this year. Netflix initially planned to start eliminating password sharing in the United States in the first quarter of the year, but the company said that it had learned from its tests and "found opportunities to improve the experience for members." There is a "cancel reaction" expected in each market where paid sharing is implemented, but increased revenue comes later as borrowers activate their own Netflix accounts and existing members add "extra member" accounts.

In Canada, paid sharing resulted in a larger Netflix membership base and an acceleration in revenue growth, which has given Netflix the confidence to expand it to the United States. When Netflix brings its paid sharing rules to the United States, multi-household account use will no longer be permitted. Netflix subscribers who share an account with those who do not live with them will need to pay for an additional member. In Canada, Netflix charges $7.99 CAD for an extra member, which is around $6. [...] Netflix claims that more than 100 million households are sharing accounts, which is impacting its ability to "invest in and improve Netflix" for paying members.

Slashdot reader mpercy shares an email they received from Netflix announcing the shut down of its original business of delivering DVDs by mail: Just received an email from Netflix: "For 25 years, it's been our extraordinary privilege to mail movie nights to our members all across America. On September 29th, 2023, we will ship our final iconic red envelope. While times have changed since our first shipment in March 1998, our goal has remained the same: to provide you with access to the broadest collection of movies and shows possible, delivered directly to your door, with no due dates or late fees. As the DVD business continues to shrink, it's going to become increasingly difficult to achieve that goal. In our final season, we'll continue providing you the best service possible, all the way to the very last shipment." Here's an infographic the company shared in its post:

YouTube TV just won its first Technical Emmy award for its "Views" suite of features, which lets users access sports highlights, key plays, player stats and game scores. TechCrunch reports: At the 74th annual Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards last night, YouTube TV was declared the winner for the category "AI-ML Curation of Sports Highlights." The tech company also announced today that Key Plays reached a notable milestone -- the feature was used in over 10 million watch sessions on the platform. Last year, viewers used key plays the most during the World Cup, regular season NFL games and Premier League matches.

The Key Plays view tracks important plays in a game. Users can tap on the plays to rewatch when it occurs in the game. This is helpful for users that missed a live game and want to catch up on key moments. When YouTube TV launched Views in 2018, it was only available for baseball, basketball, football and hockey. Soccer and golf were added later on. The suite of features was also initially limited to phones and tablets. Today, the feature is available within the YouTube TV app across smart TVs and mobile devices.

In addition to Stats, Key Plays and Scores View, there's also Fantasy Football View, which is a mobile-only feature and lets users link their existing fantasy football account. That way, when a user is watching NFL games on YouTube TV, the feature allows them to see how their team is performing in real time. Plus, there's a "Jump to" function for users to quickly access a segment they want to view, which is especially handy for tennis fans and for users watching the Olympics. "Views came out of a team brainstorm about five years ago and launched about a year after YouTube TV," said Kathryn Cochrane, YouTube TV's group project manager, in a company blog post. "A lot of our viewers are devoted sports fans, and we found that when they watch sports, they aren't just looking at what's on the big screen. They were also actively on their phones, finding more details such as stats for their fantasy football league, updates from other games, and more, all to enhance what they were already watching."

The official in charge of a secretive Pentagon effort to investigate unexplained aerial incursions has co-authored an academic paper that presents an out-of-this-world theory: Recent objects could actually be alien probes from a mothership sent to study Earth. Politico reports: In a draft paper dated March 7 (PDF), Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, and Harvard professor Avi Loeb teamed up to write that the objects, which appear to defy all physics, could be "probes" from an extraterrestrial "parent craft." It's unusual for government officials, especially those involved in the nascent effort to collect intelligence on recent sightings, to discuss the possibility of extraterrestrial life, although top agency officials don't rule it out when asked. After Loeb posted it online, the paper gained notoriety from a post on Military Times and has also circulated among science-focused news outlets.

More than half of the five-page paper is devoted to discussing the possibility that the unexplained objects DoD is studying could be the "probes" in the mothership scenario, including most of the page-long introduction. One section is titled: "The Extraterrestrial Possibility" and another "Propulsion Methods." Kirkpatrick's involvement in the academic paper demonstrates that the Pentagon is open to scientific debate of the origins of UFOs, an important signal to send to the academic world, experts said. But they add that his decision to attach his name to a theory considered in most academic circles to be highly unsubstantiated also raises questions about AARO's credibility.

The paper explains that interstellar objects such as the cigar-shaped "Oumuamua" that scientists spotted flying through the galaxy in 2017 "could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth." The paper goes on to compare the probes to "dandelion seeds" that could be separated from the parent craft by the sun's gravitational force. It examines the physics of how the smaller craft could move through the Earth's atmosphere to reach the surface, where they could be spotted by humans. The paper notes that the "probes" could use starlight to "charge their batteries" and the Earth's water as fuel. It also speculates on the motive for aliens to send exploratory probes to Earth. "What would be the overarching purpose of the journey? In analogy with actual dandelion seeds, the probes could propagate the blueprint of their senders," the authors write. "As with biological seeds, the raw materials on the planet's surface could also be used by them as nutrients for self-replication or simply scientific exploration."

It's been a rollercoaster ride for Korean tech conglomerates LG and Samsung. In 2021, it was reported that they were about to reach a major business deal regarding OLED panels, but in 2022 it seemed like the talks fell through. Now, in 2023, the talks may have resumed. From a report: The Elec reports that Samsung Electronics and LG Display have resumed discussions on a deal that would see LG supplying more than 200,000 white OLED (WOLED) panels to Samsung for a new line of Samsung-branded TVs that could launch as soon as 2024. That number would potentially be just the start of a longer partnership. When news of the negotiations first broke a couple of years ago, it was reported that the conversation was started at the behest of the South Korean government in response to an international situation wherein LCD panel-producing Chinese companies like BOE were driving up the cost of LCD panels, threatening Samsung's TV dominance. At that time, Samsung was all in on LCD technology in its TVs, competing with LG's increasing focus on OLED. Because of those market changes, and because OLED, in general, has achieved a bigger portion of consumers' display spending compared to LCD, Samsung needs to further diversify with OLED to ensure its future success -- at least until Micro LED becomes an affordable OLED alternative.

The world's largest music company, Universal Music Group, is asking major streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music to block artificial intelligence companies from using its music to "train" their technology, according to a recent report in Financial Times. Variety reports: Confirming the report, a UMG spokesperson told the FT: "We have a moral and commercial responsibility to our artists to work to prevent the unauthorized use of their music and to stop platforms from ingesting content that violates the rights of artists and other creators. We expect our platform partners will want to prevent their services from being used in ways that harm artists." The process involves the AI companies uploading copyrighted music from the platforms into their technology and thus enabling the bots to digest the lyrics and music and then essentially create songs or melodies in those styles. [...]

UMG has been sending takedown requests to the streamers "left and right," FT quoted an unnamed source as saying. "We have become aware that certain AI systems might have been trained on copyrighted content without obtaining the required consents from, or paying compensation to, the rightsholders who own or produce the content," the company said in an email from last month, according to the report. "We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists." The website drayk.it delivered users a custom Drake song, although it has since been shut down.