70% of America's movie theatres have now re-opened for business, reports NPR: "When our patrons come back, they'll see the safe environment we've provided for them," said John Fithian, president and CEO of the National Association of Theater Owners.

Fithian invited two medical experts and the heads of the country's biggest theater chains to launch a public awareness campaign dubbed "CinemaSafe," meant to ease moviegoer's fears. The campaign featured new industry-wide health and safety protocols, including mandatory face masks for moviegoers and employees, social distancing and regular sanitizing in theaters with better air ventilation, reduced theater capacity (most between 30% and 50%), and contact-less, electronic ticket sales.

Fithian says the protocols will be followed by more than 2,600 theater locations, including more than 30,000 screens in the U.S. The National Association of Theater Owners used guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

"It's important to understand that going to the movies is not risk free," said David F. Goldsmith, an epidemiologist at George Washington University who consulted with the National Association of Theater Owners on the protocols. Still, during the announcement, he said he had not seen any medical literature evidence showing movie theaters around the world have been a venue for viral transmission of COVID-19. "Honestly, time will tell," he said.
The New York Times reports that six U.S. states say it's still too dangerous to open their movie theatres — New York, California, New Jersey, North Carolina, Maryland and New Mexico.

But Megan Colligan, the president of Imax Entertainment, countered at a news conference Friday that "Some people go to the gym, some people go to church, some people need to go to the beach and surf, and some people really do need to go to the movies."

An anonymous reader quotes Rolling Stone: To mark what would have been author Ray Bradbury's 100th birthday on August 22nd, the Library of Congress, the Los Angeles Public Library and libraries from across the nation have banded together for a virtual "read-a-thon" dedicated to Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

Actors William Shatner and Rachel Bloom, authors Susan Orlean, Marlon James and Neil Gaiman and dozens more will each introduce or read a portion of the landmark 1953 novel. "Those segments, and a few from celebrity guests, will be edited into one continuous reading of the entire book, creating four hours of thought-provoking entertainment. Some readers will record from their homes, others from their hometown," organizers of the Read-a-Thon said in a statement. The event will premiere on August 22nd at 4:30pm EST at the Ray Bradbury Read-a-Thon site. the four-hour stream will rebroadcast there until September 5th.

Movie companies and their anti-piracy partners are pressing ahead with their legal action to track down The Pirate Bay. The site reportedly used VPN provider OVPN, which carries no logs, but a security expert -- one that regularly penetration tests several major VPN providers -- believes that information about the notorious site could still be obtained. TorrentFreak reports: After a period of what seemed like calm, this year it became clear that the site's old enemies, Swedish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, were again working to get closer to the site and its operators. We've covered the back story in detail but in summary, the site is alleged to have used Swedish VPN provider OVPN to hide its true location and Rights Alliance is now engaged in legal action to get its hands on whatever information the VPN provider may hold. The most recent move, playing out this week, is that Rights Alliance has provided testimony from an expert witness, one that has masses of experience in the VPN field.

The name 'Cure53' may not sound familiar to regular Internet users but the cyber-security company is well known for its first-class abilities in penetration testing. So much so, in fact, that the company has audited some of the most popular VPN providers in the world, including Mullvad, Surfshark, and TunnelBear. Given its experience in the field, it's no surprise that Rights Alliance has also sought the expert opinion of someone involved in Cure 53 to assess this VPN-related matter. Importantly, there doesn't appear to be any conflict of interest here, since the conclusions drawn are purely technical in nature and rely on experience and general facts, something we will touch on later. The expert opinion, which appeared in court documents reviewed by TorrentFreak this week, is from Jesper Larsson, who works at security company Ox4a but is involved with Cure 53 where he "regularly" performs penetration tests against the "ten largest VPN Providers in the world." His testimony reveals that he has been commissioned by Sara Lindback of Rights Alliance to comment on how a VPN service works and specifically, what information might potentially be stored at OVPN in relation to The Pirate Bay.

"It is clear on OVPN's website that it strives to protect its users; privacy by storing as little user data as possible in their databases," the testimony filed with the court and obtained by TorrentFreak reads. "Although [OVPN] strive to store as little data as possible, there must be data connecting users and identities to make the VPN service work. In this case, a user has paid for a VPN account with the ability to connect a public static address to OVPN which the user has then chosen to link to the file sharing site 'the piratebay,' i.e the user has configured his VPN account to point to the given domain." [...] "For this type of configuration to be possible, data about the configuration must be stored at OVPN at least during the time when the account is active," Larsson continues. "It should be considered extremely likely that the user or identity associated with the above configuration is stored in a user database where a given user can be connected to the VPN configuration, configuration regarding where the static IP address should be pointed to, and payment information that should describe how long a given account is active and which payment method the user has used. OVPN should thus be able to search its VPN servers for the given IP address, or alternatively search in their user databases or in backups of these to locate a given user or identity," the security expert adds.

Want a movie where a protagonist your age, race, sexuality, gender, and religion becomes an Olympic swimmer? You got it. Want a movie where someone demographically identical to your boss gets squeezed to death and devoured by a Burmese python? Your wish is its command. From a report: Want to leave out the specifics and let fate decide what never-before-imagined movie will be entertaining you this evening? Black Box has you covered. After you make your choices -- and of course pay a nominal fee for the serious computational heavy lifting necessarily involved -- your order is received at Black Box HQ, and an original movie will be on its way shortly.

Black Box converts your specifications into data -- or if you didn't ask for anything specific, a blob of randomly generated numerical noise will do -- and the creation process can begin. That first collection of ones and zeros will become a prompt, and will be fed into a type of A.I. called a transformer, which will spit out the text screenplay for your movie through a process a little like the autocomplete function on your smartphone. That screenplay will then be fed into a variation on today's vector quantized variational autoencoders -- neural nets that generate music, basically -- producing chopped up little bits of sound that, when strung together, form an audio version of the spoken dialogue and sound effects in your custom movie, plus an orchestral score. Finally, in the most challenging part of the process, those 90 minutes of audio, along with the screenplay, get fed into the world's most sophisticated GAN, or generative adversarial network. Working scene by scene, the Black Box GAN would generate a cast of live action characters -- lifelike humans, or at least human-esque avatars -- built from the ground up, along with all of the settings, monsters, car chases, dogs, cats, and little surprises that make it feel like a real movie.

In honor of its 100th anniversary, AMC is reopening theaters across the nation today after closing down because of the coronavirus pandemic. "[F]or one day only, tickets will be priced at their 1920 cost of 15 cents apiece," reports CNET. From the report: More than 100 AMC locations are scheduled to reopen Aug. 20, including in areas across Georgia, Texas, Connecticut, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Massachusetts, Indiana, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, Minnesota, Ohio, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, Kansas and Oklahoma, as well as Washington, DC. Some of the movies being shown on the 15-cent day include throwbacks like Inception, Black Panther, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Grease and Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. Once the 100th anniversary pricing concludes, those movies will be priced at $5 per ticket.

The reopening is the first step in AMC's phased plan for the US. It aims to have 600 theaters, or two-thirds of its operations, open by Sept. 3 in time for the launch of Christopher Nolan's Tenet, which has been repeatedly delayed due to COVID-19. The rest of its theaters will reopen when state and local officials give the go-ahead.

Taiwan plans to stop local sales for Chinese internet television streaming services operated by the likes of iQiyi and Tencent Holdings, according to regulations released this week, but does not plan on blocking the services. From a report: Democratic Taiwan, claimed by China as its sovereign territory, has long been suspicious of Chinese attempts to sway its population, including by use of fake news spread online and efforts to influence Taiwan media. The Ministry of Economic Affairs said late Tuesday the rules barring Taiwanese companies from selling or operating as sales agents for Chinese internet streaming services will take effect Sept. 3. The service iQiyi applied in 2016 to set up a Taiwan subsidiary, but was rejected because Chinese companies cannot operate online streaming services there, the ministry said. However, Taiwan is not blocking or banning them, the National Communications Commission said. "People can still watch and pay for overseas subscriptions," commission deputy chief Wong Po-Tsung told Reuters, adding that officials would ensure subscribers' rights are not affected.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Don't know what you're in the mood to watch? Netflix's new "Shuffle" feature could help. The company confirms it's currently testing a feature that puts a big button labeled "Shuffle Play" right on the Netflix home screen, beneath your user profile icon. When pressed, Netflix will randomly play content it thinks you'll like. This could be a movie or show you're currently watching, something you've saved to your list or a title that's similar to something you've already watched, the company says. The new button is currently showing up on the Netflix app for TV devices, much to many users' surprise. Some users thought the addition could be fun or useful, while others just seem confused.

"Self-driving cars are bullshit," writes Cory Doctorow: I'm a science fiction writer, so I quite enjoy thinking about self-driving cars. They make for really interesting analogies about data, liability, self-determination, information security and openness... But I'm a science fiction writer and that means I can tell the difference between "thought experiments" and "real things." Alas, the same cannot be said of corporate America.

For example, according to its own IPO filings, Uber can only be profitable if it invents fully autonomous vehicles and replaces every public transit ride in the world with them. Elon Musk — a man whose "green electric car company" is only profitable thanks to the carbon credits it sells to manufacturers of the dirtiest SUVs in America, without which those planet-killing SUVs would not exist — makes the same mistake. Musk wants to abolish public transit and replace it with EVs (he says that public transit makes you sit next to strangers who might be serial killers, which tells you a lot about his view of humanity).

Now, both Uber and Musk are both wrong as a matter of simple geometry. Multiply the space occupied by all those AVs by the journeys people in cities need to make by the additional distances of those journeys if we need road for all those cars, and you run out of space... these fairy tales require so much credulity to be taken seriously that they strain even the car-addled imaginations of American automotive culture, and also rely on the irrational exuberance inspired by imaginary self-driving cars to propagate and persist.

But that exuberance is sorely misplaced. Machine learning systems have brittle and unpredictable failure modes that can be triggered by accident or deliberately. The unconstrained problem of navigating busy cities with unquantifiable human activities is insoluble with ML.

Or, at least, it's insoluble if you care about whether cars kill even more people in even less predictable ways than they do now...
Doctorow adds that a key plot point in the third book in his "Little Brother" series (coming out in October) is "subverted, lethal autonomous vehicles." But Doctorow also shares a link to his short story "Car Wars," commissioned by Deakin University to explore the sociotechnological issues around autonomous vehicle.

It begins with a high school warning parents about students performing "dangerous modifications" to their car in violation of new federal laws -- three student vehicles were already confiscated for "operating with unlicensed firmware." (And "one of those cases has been referred to the police as the student involved was a repeat offender.")

But as the school launches its random vehicle firmware audits, a developer sends a desperate message to his followers on Twitter about something even more disturbing that's happening in real-time...

Slashdot reader shirappu writes: A study published on June 25th in IEEE Transactions on Multimedia looked at creating an automated program to analyze the movements in video frames and create sound effects to match the scene. In movies and television, this work is called Foley and is considered an important part of crafting the experience, but is also time consuming and sometimes costly.

The AI Foley system created in the study works by extracting image features from video frames to determine appropriate SFX. It then analyzes the action taking place in the video, and attempts to synthesize SFX to match what is happening in the video. In a survey where students were shown automated sound effects, 73% though the automated effects were more genuine than the original sound effects. It's worth noting that the automated system performed best when timing was less important (e.g. general weather) versus when timing was key (e.g. typing, thunderstorms).

schwit1 writes: Moviegoers will have to pay only 15 cents for tickets at AMC cinemas on Aug. 20, when the chain starts to reopen amid the coronavirus outbreak. The cheap tickets will be available at more than 100 theaters across the U.S. The deal, a throwback to the price the company charged when it was founded in 1920, is intended to lure customers who may be worried about venturing into a theater because of the risk of contracting COVID-19.

The world's last Blockbuster is offering movie fans the opportunity to spend the night in the store by booking through Airbnb. The Independent reports: The opportunity to book a one-night stay in the last of the nearly defunct video rental stores, which only remains in Bend, Oregon, will be possible thanks to the property's owner, Sandi Harding. "As the last standing location in the world, our BLOCKBUSTER store is an ode to movie magic, simpler times and the sense of community that could once be found in BLOCKBUSTER locations around the world," Harding explains in the Airbnb listing.

Starting on 17 August, residents of Deschutes County will be able to book the store, which has been transformed into a living room complete with TV and pull-out couch, for either 18, 19, or 20 September. According to the press release, guests who successfully book the store, which will be available for just $4, will be treated to "all the movies your heart could desire." "Whether you want to stay up until sunrise or pass out on the couch, we've created the perfect space complete with a pull-out couch, bean bags and pillows for you to cosy up with 'new releases' from the 90s," the Airbnb listing reads. "Crack open a two-liter of Pepsi before locking into a video game, charting your future in a game of MASH, or watching movie after movie." Those who aren't eligible for the opportunity can visit the store's living room set-up as customers starting on 21 September -- or call the store for a personalized movie recommendation.

Disney is rebranding its TV studios to remove the Fox name from two of them. From The Hollywood Reporter: Nearly a year and a half after acquiring 20th Century Fox Television and Fox 21 TV Studios, Disney is changing the former to simply 20th Television, while the latter will become Touchstone Television. Additionally, ABC Studios and its subsidiary ABC Signature Studios are folding into one unit that will now be called ABC Signature. The full integration of the Disney Television Studios rebranding is effective immediately, with new logos and motion end cards that viewers will see on screen expected to be completed by year's end. No executive changes or layoffs are expected as part of the changes.

The decision to remove "Fox" from two of the studios' names was part of the larger $71.3 billion deal between Disney and 21st Century Fox. Fox was dropped from film divisions 20th Century and Searchlight in January. Dropping the Fox 21 banner in favor of Touchstone revives the former Disney brand that was retired in 2007 as the division was then-rebranded as ABC TV Studios as part of the company's push to drop such lesser-known brands in favor of those leaning into its signature assets. Reviving Touchstone is a way to honor the past.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Even before the pandemic, the battle to own your living room was reaching a boiling point. Now the big screen is bigger than ever as 2020 accelerates the streaming wars and raises the smart TV platform stakes. Naturally, Google is making every effort to avoid being left behind. Today the company gave Android TV developers new tools, including Google Play Instant, the Play Store in the emulator, PIN code purchases, Gboard TV, auto low latency mode, and leanback library improvements. [...] Google says Android TV now works with seven of the top 10 smart TV OEMs and over 160 TV operators. The company also added that there are now "over 80% more Android TV monthly active devices than a year ago," but didn't divulge raw numbers. Developers have built about 7,000 apps for Google Play on Android TV, to date, up from 5,000 in April 2019.

There are tens of thousands of genes in the human genome: minuscule twists of DNA and RNA that combine to express all of the traits and characteristics that make each of us unique. Each gene is given a name and alphanumeric code, known as a symbol, which scientists use to coordinate research. But over the past year or so, some 27 human genes have been renamed, all because Microsoft Excel kept misreading their symbols as dates. From a report: The problem isn't as unexpected as it first sounds. Excel is a behemoth in the spreadsheet world and is regularly used by scientists to track their work and even conduct clinical trials. But its default settings were designed with more mundane applications in mind, so when a user inputs a gene's alphanumeric symbol into a spreadsheet, like MARCH1 -- short for "Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1" -- Excel converts that into a date: 1-Mar. This is extremely frustrating, even dangerous, corrupting data that scientists have to sort through by hand to restore. It's also surprisingly widespread and affects even peer-reviewed scientific work. One study from 2016 examined genetic data shared alongside 3,597 published papers and found that roughly one-fifth had been affected by Excel errors.

In Disney's earnings call today, CEO Bob Chapek said there are now 60.5 million global subscribers to Disney+, reaching the 60 million-90 million range it told investors it would get to by 2024. Deadline reports: He also said today that Mulan, long in limbo amid the COVID-19 pandemic, will debut September 24 on Disney+ for $24.99, a new wrinkle for the streamer. Disney also announced it will launch a new streaming service internationally under its Star brand and using Disney's own content, starting in September. After rising from 54.5 million subscribers as of the beginning of May, Disney+ reached 57.5 million subscribers by the end of June before surpassing the 60M mark in the last couple of days.

The overall results came up short of Wall Street analysts' expectations of a loss of 64 cents per share and total revenue of $12.4 billion. Disney has already reached its five-year target for Disney+ global subscribers less than nine months after launching the $7-a-month service. While it is a far more targeted offering than Amazon Prime Video or Hulu, it has quickly vaulted into the No. 2 spot in the subscription streaming game after Netflix, which has nearly 193 million global subscribers. When the company reported its last batch of quarterly results in May, Disney said it had 54.5 million Disney+ subscribers, up from 33.5 million as of March 28. Hulu, which Disney has controlled since the spring of 2019, had 32.1 million total subscribers at the end of the March quarter. Hulu, the company said in its fiscal third-quarter earnings report, now has 35.5 million subscribers to its on-demand service and live TV bundle combined, while ESPN+ is now at 8.5 million, more than triple its level a year ago.

The last dance is looming for Google Play Music, the subscription service that will be fully subsumed into YouTube Music by December 2020, the internet company announced. From a report: In streamlining its music offerings, Google is coming down the home stretch of a months-long migration of users from Google Play Music -- which will start shutting down in September -- to the YouTube Music app. In May, the company launched a migration tool (available at music.youtube.com/transfer) that lets Google Play Music customers transfer their music libraries to YouTube Music. Starting in September 2020 in New Zealand and South Africa -- and in October for all other global markets -- users will no longer be able to stream from or use the Google Play Music app. However, according to Google, it will retain users' playlists, uploads, purchases, likes and other data until December 2020 to give them time to transfer to YouTube Music. After the end of the year, Google Play Music libraries will no longer be available.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Employees at Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Activision Blizzard Inc., began circulating a spreadsheet on Friday to anonymously share salaries and recent pay increases, the latest example of rising tension in the video game industry over wage disparities and executive compensation. Blizzard, based in Irvine, California, makes popular games including Diablo and World of Warcraft. In 2019, after an internal survey revealed that more than half of Blizzard workers were unhappy with their compensation, the company told staff it would perform a study to ensure fair pay, according to people familiar with the situation. Blizzard implemented the results of that study last month, which led to an outcry on the company's internal Slack messaging boards. One employee then created a spreadsheet and encouraged staff to share their compensation information. The anonymous document, reviewed by Bloomberg News, contains dozens of purported Blizzard salaries and pay bumps. Most of the raises are below 10%, significantly less than Blizzard employees said they expected following the study. "Our goal has always been to ensure we compensate our employees fairly and competitively," Activision Blizzard spokeswoman Jessica Taylor said. "We are constantly reviewing compensation philosophies to better recognize the talent of our highest performers and keep us competitive in the industry, all with the aim of rewarding and investing more in top employees." This year, Blizzard top performers received a salary increase that was 20% more than in prior years, and more people got promotions, Taylor added. "Our overall salary investment is consistent with prior years," she also said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: You won't be able to use Sony's DualShock 4 or other third-party PS4 gamepads to play PlayStation 5 games, Sony confirmed in a blog post today. Those older gamepads will still work with "supported PS4 games" running on the PS5, Sony said, and PS5 software will work with "specialty peripherals" designed for the PS4 -- including "officially licensed racing wheels, arcade sticks, and flight sticks." Those caveats highlight the fact that there's no technical limitation or communication protocol mismatch stopping the upcoming hardware from communicating with legacy controllers.

But Sony says it "believe[s] that PS5 games should take advantage of the new capabilities and features we're bringing to the platform, including the features of DualSense wireless controller." Those features include what Sony is calling "haptic feedback and dynamic trigger effects" and a built-in microphone (last month, Geoff Keighley hosted what is, thus far, the only public hands-on impressions of these new controller features). The DualSense compatibility decision casts Sony in contrast to Microsoft, which is promising that "your Xbox One gaming accessories come into the future with you, too" with the coming Xbox Series X. While that promise doesn't extend to the defunct Kinect camera, it does include specialty pads like the Xbox Elite Controller and Xbox Adaptive Controller. "We believe that your investments in gaming should move with you into the next generation," Microsoft wrote in a blog post last month. PlayStation Move controllers -- first released in 2010 for use with the PS3—will continue to work with PlayStation VR games on the PS5, Sony said. The PS4's existing PlayStation Camera accessory will also work on the PS5, though it will require an adaptor that Sony says it will be providing to users for free.

YouTube is "embroiled in a very public spat with songwriters and music publishers in Denmark," according to one music-industry news site. They cite Koda, the group that collects royalties and licensing fees for musicians, as saying that YouTube is now threatening to remove all music written by Danish songwriters: The cause of this threat is a disagreement between the two parties over the remuneration of songwriters and publishers in the market. YouTube and Koda's last multi-year licensing deal expired in April. Since then, the two parties have been operating under a temporary license agreement... In a statement to media Friday (July 31), Koda claims YouTube is insisting that — in order to extend its temporary deal in Denmark — Koda must now agree to a near-70% reduction in payments to composers and songwriters.

YouTube has fired back at this claim, suggesting that under its existing temporary deal with Koda (which expired Friday), the body "earned back less than half of the guarantee payments" handed over by the service.
Koda says it "cannot accept" YouTube's terms, according to the article, adding that Google and YouTube "have now unilaterally decided that Koda's members cannot have their content shown on YouTube".

The director of YouTube Music, EMEA counters that "They are asking for substantially more than what we pay our other partners," according to the article — which also shares this statement from YouTube. "We take copyright law very seriously."

"As our license expires today and since we have been unable to secure an agreement we will remove identified Koda content from the platform."

AT&T lost an astounding 900,000 cable subscribers in the first quarter of 2020, and now, Comcast has reported that it lost 477,000 pay-TV subscribers of its own for Q2. TechSpot reports: In Q1 2020, roughly 409,000 subscribers pulled the plug on their Comcast-provided cable subscriptions -- this last quarter, the corporate giant managed to lose substantially more. If these losses continue to grow at this rate, Comcast may be on track to lose twice as many cable subscribers this year as it did last year. For reference, the company took a hit of around 733,000 cable subscribers in 2019, and it has already dropped significantly more than that (around 886,000 customers) in 2020.

There are plenty of reasons for these mass subscriber losses, but Covid-19 is likely chief among them. Thousands of Americans have lost their jobs due to coronavirus complications (including business shutdowns). Even many who haven't are now working from home, giving them more free time to explore alternatives to cable TV, such as Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and others. What it lost in cable-TV subscribers it gained in internet customers. The report notes that Comcast "managed to snag around 323,000 additional broadband customers in Q2 2020: the 'best second quarter high-speed internet net adds in 13 years,' according to the company."