Apple Music told artists it pays a penny per stream in a letter reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. From a report: The disclosure, made in a letter to artists delivered Friday via the service's artist dashboard and sent to labels and publishers, is part of a growing effort by music-streaming services to show they are artist-friendly. For Apple, it can be seen as a riposte to Spotify Technology, which last month shared some details of how it pays the music industry for streams on its service. Apple's penny-per-stream payment structure -- which music-industry experts say can dip lower -- is roughly double what Spotify, the world's largest music-streaming service, pays music-rights holders per stream. Spotify pays an average of about one-third to one-half penny per stream, though its larger user base generates many more streams. Apple's payments come out of monthly subscription revenue from users. Artists, managers and lawyers, still reeling from the loss of touring revenue during the pandemic, have been calling for higher payouts from music streaming, which has grown rapidly in the past year. Many fans have joined the push to raise artists' compensation.

The lion's share of U.S. consumers say the streamer has the best original programming, according to a new Morgan Stanley survey. Variety reports: Netflix remains the most frequently cited as offering the best original programming -- with 38% of survey respondents picking it as No. 1, per the Wall Street analyst firm's 2021 streaming survey. That's roughly in line with Morgan Stanley's previous surveys. On the 2021 survey, 12% of respondents said Amazon Prime Video offers the best original programming, followed by Disney Plus, Hulu and HBO Max which each scored 6%-7% of total responses.

Among Netflix customers, the top reasons cited for subscribing to Netflix were "broad selection of content" (55%), "good original programming" (51%), "adds content I like" (49%) and "no commercials" (46%). In 2021, Netflix is projected to spend about $19 billion on content according to a forecast by financial research firm Bankr, up about 10% from last year. Netflix retains the No. 1 spot as the most widely used streaming service with 58% of respondents saying they use the service. Amazon Prime Video came in at 45% (up 400 basis points year over year), Disney Plus was at 31% (up 650 basis points), and HBO/HBO Max was 20% (up 500 basis points).

Google has announced that the Google Play Movies and TV app will no longer be available on any Roku set-top box or any Samsung, LG, Vizio or Roku smart TV starting July 15th. The Verge reports: If you have movies or TV shows purchased or rented through the service, you'll still be able to access them through the "Your movies and shows" section of the YouTube app on those devices. This change will also affect you if if you used the Movies and TV app to access Movies Anywhere, the service that allows you to redeem codes from DVDs and Blu-rays so you can access your media digitally. Google has confirmed to The Verge that users who relied on Play Movies and TV to access that content will be able to do so through YouTube.

There are a few other caveats to note in the transition to YouTube. Your Watchlist will no longer be viewable in the app (though it can still be seen on the web by Googling "my watchlist"), and while your family can still share the content you bought from the Movie and TV store, any purchases made in the YouTube app won't be shared with your family. [The Verge's article breaks down all the various ways you can access the content you purchased through the Play Store after July 15th.]

QAnon "was all but confirmed to be a hoax by the person who ran the hoax," writes Mashable, citing the finale of a six-episode documentary on HBO by Cullen Hoback.

"All of it leads back to the same place — that there are very few other people who could have and would have made the Q drops other than the person who ran the place where they were posted," notes Newsweek: Ahead of the first episode, Ron Watkins posted on encrypted messaging service Telegram stating: "I am not Q. I've never spoken privately with Q. I don't know who Q is." However, during the final episode, Hoback suggests that Ron Watkins slips up and inadvertently reveals that he posted as Q on 8kun
A BBC investigative reporter on disinformation tweeted that climactic moment from Cullens' documentary, adding "It was so good it made the whole six hours worth it."

Or as Mashable puts it, "Ron Watkins seems to admit he's Q, in the dumbest possible ending to QAnon," calling it "so anticlimactic it bordered on absurd." The previously camera-shy Watkins — who runs 8kun [formerly 8chan] alongside his father, Jim — has long been the key suspect for the identity of Q... But his accidental reveal, the slip of the mask is huge, if anticlimactic, news... It's wild and so...dumb...that this is how we all find out — because Watkins slipped up for a second.

It makes sense since Q had somewhat inexplicably tied its fortunes to posting only on 8chan/8kun. It's inexplicable unless, you know, the Watkins family was behind the ordeal.
Insider notes that Fredrick Brennan, the software developer who created 8chan and has since become a vocal critic, also believes Q is one of the Watkins' — a theory investigated last June by the Atlantic. And in a September investigation, ABC News reported on the likelihood that Watkins is Q, finding that he and his son, Ron, were the "two Americans most clearly associated" with Q drops. The theory was also popularized by a September "Reply All" podcast episode...

At the end of February 2020, Watkins registered the PAC, "Disarm the Deep State," with the Federal Elections Commission.
They also note that after the documentary aired on HBO, "the community reacted as many experts suspected it would: denial and accusations of 'fake news.'" Watkins had apparently gone to great lengths to suggest to Cullen that Q was instead former Trump advisor Steve Bannon. And last week, the BBC reporter points out, Watkins' father began suggesting a new theory: that Q was actually....documentary maker Cullen Hoback. But the BBC reporter adds: Based on the finale of #QIntotheStorm Q drops are over for good. Both Jim and Ron told Cullen Hoback Q would end after the election, and that's exactly what happened.

We already had proof of the end given there haven't been any drops since 8 December, but we can now be certain.
Hoback's tweet specifically says that "Both Ron and Jim, but especially Ron, told me multiple times over the years that they believed Q would cease at the election." And Hoback adds:

"Ron implied on more than one occasion it *might be* a marketing campaign."

The co-founder of Elon Musk's company Neuralink tweeted on Saturday that the startup has the technological advances and savvy to create its own "Jurassic Park." The Hill reports: "We could probably build Jurassic Park if we wanted to," Max Hodak tweeted Saturday. "Wouldn't be genetically authentic dinosaurs but [shrugging emoji]. maybe 15 years of breeding + engineering to get super exotic novel species." Hodak didn't further explain what technology Neuralink could use to engineer the long-extinct dinosaurs. It's worth noting that the tweet makes no mention of Neuralink, although one could presume Hodak is referring to the neurotechnology company because of his use of the word "we."

In response to the statement, which has been picked up by a variety of publications Wednesday, CNET's Jackson Ryan says we shouldn't expect a "real Jurassic Park" anytime soon -- or ever: [I]t's pretty much impossible to resurrect a dinosaur. The science of bringing dinosaurs back from the dead isn't really as sound as Hodak makes it seem though. Even humanity would have a tough time building a Jurassic Park in the next 15 years. First, we'd need some DNA from the prehistoric tyrants and unlike in the film Jurassic Park, where the DNA is retrieved from mosquitoes in amber and fused with frog DNA, that information has completely degraded.

However, more recently extinct animals, like the woolly mammoth, may be a good target for "de-extinction." We can still extract DNA from these creatures and could theoretically build and implant a mammoth embryo in a modern-day elephant. The question is: should we? Jurassic Park offers a pretty good reason not to, but mammoths aren't quite as bloodthirsty as Tyrannosaurus rex.

Sky TV, one of the largest broadcasters in the UK, has won a court injunction to prevent links to its TV shows from being illegally shared online. The interim order targets a man who moderated several TV-focused communities on Reddit while raising funds through Patreon and PayPal. TorrentFreak reports: According to an action filed by Sky in a Scottish court, Cherzo1 was the moderator of three sub-Reddits -- r/UKTVLAND, r/notapanelshow, and r/UKPanelShowsOnly -- which together had more than 51,000 subscribers. Cherzo also had a YouTube channel with more than 95,000 subscribers. According to Sky, all of these platforms were used to infringe the company's copyrights. In evidence to support its action, Sky states that Cherzo1 was motivated by money, receiving payments from fans and followers via Patreon and directly into his PayPal account. [...]

In order to curtail Cherzo1's activities, Sky asked the court to hand down an "interdict ad interim," a term used in Scotland to describe an interim injunction. The broadcaster asked the court to order Cherzo1 to stop uploading copies of broadcasts, stop posting hyperlinks to shows on Reddit and anywhere else on the Internet, and forbid him from assisting any third party to do the same. A court will grant an interim interdict if it believes there is a prima facie case against the defendant. [...] Anyone found breaching such an order could be subjected to a fine or even imprisonment.

A Soviet television adaptation of The Lord of the Rings thought to have been lost to time was rediscovered and posted on YouTube last week, delighting Russian-language fans of JRR Tolkien. From a report: The 1991 made-for-TV film, Khraniteli, based on Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring, is the only adaptation of his Lord of the Rings trilogy believed to have been made in the Soviet Union. Aired 10 years before the release of the first instalment of Peter Jackson's movie trilogy, the low-budget film appears ripped from another age: the costumes and sets are rudimentary, the special effects are ludicrous, and many of the scenes look more like a theatre production than a feature-length film. The score, composed by Andrei Romanov of the rock band Akvarium, also lends a distinctly Soviet ambience to the production, which was reportedly aired just once on television before disappearing into the archives of Leningrad Television. Few knew about its existence until Leningrad Television's successor, 5TV, abruptly posted the film to YouTube last week [part one | part two], where it has gained almost 400,000 views within several days.

The file-sharing blog TorrentFreak reports: Google was asked to remove a TorrentFreak article from its search results this week. The article in question reported that "The Mandalorian" was the most pirated TV show of 2020.

This notice claims to identify several problematic URLs that allegedly infringe the copyrights of Disney's hit series The Mandalorian. This is not unexpected, as The Mandalorian was the most pirated TV show of last year, as we reported in late December. However, we didn't expect to see our article as one of the targeted links in the notice. Apparently, the news that The Mandalorian is widely pirated — which was repeated by dozens of other publications — is seen as copyright infringement?

Needless to say, we wholeheartedly disagree. This is not the way.
TorrentFreak specifies that the article in question "didn't host or link to any infringing content." (TorrentFreak's article was even linked to by major sites including CNET, Forbes, Variety, and even Slashdot.)

TorrentFreak also reports that it wasn't Disney who filed the takedown request, but GFM Films... At first, we thought that the German camera company GFM could have something to do with it, as they worked on The Mandalorian. However, earlier takedown notices from the same sender protected the film "The Last Witness," which is linked to the UK company GFM Film Sales. Since we obviously don't want to falsely accuse anyone, we're not pointing fingers.
So what happens next? We will certainly put up a fight if Google decides to remove the page. At the time of writing, this has yet to happen. The search engine currently lists the takedown request as 'pending,' which likely means that there will be a manual review. The good news is that Google is usually pretty good at catching overbroad takedown requests. This is also true for TorrentFreak articles that were targeted previously, including our coverage on the Green Book screener leak.

On the 27th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death, Engadget reports: Were he still alive today, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain would be 52 years old. Every February 20th, on the day of his birthday, fans wonder what songs he would write if he hadn't died of suicide nearly 30 years ago. While we'll never know the answer to that question, an AI is attempting to fill the gap.

A mental health organization called Over the Bridge used Google's Magenta AI and a generic neural network to examine more than two dozen songs by Nirvana to create a 'new' track from the band. "Drowned in the Sun" opens with reverb-soaked plucking before turning into an assault of distorted power chords. "I don't care/I feel as one, drowned in the sun," Nirvana tribute band frontman Eric Hogan sings in the chorus. In execution, it sounds not all that dissimilar from "You Know You're Right," one of the last songs Nirvana recorded before Cobain's death in 1994.

Other than the voice of Hogan, everything you hear in the song was generated by the two AI programs Over the Bridge used. The organization first fed Magenta songs as MIDI files so that the software could learn the specific notes and harmonies that made the band's tunes so iconic. Humorously, Cobain's loose and aggressive guitar playing style gave Magenta some trouble, with the AI mostly outputting a wall of distortion instead of something akin to his signature melodies. "It was a lot of trial and error," Over the Bridge board member Sean O'Connor told Rolling Stone. Once they had some musical and lyrical samples, the creative team picked the best bits to record. Most of the instrumentation you hear are MIDI tracks with different effects layered on top.
Some thoughts from The Daily Dot: Rolling Stone also highlighted lyrics like, "The sun shines on you but I don't know how," and what is called "a surprisingly anthemic chorus" including the lines, "I don't care/I feel as one, drowned in the sun," remarking that they "bear evocative, Cobain-esque qualities...."

Neil Turkewitz went full Comic Book Guy, opining, "A perfect illustration of the injustice of developing AI through the ingestion of cultural works without the authorization of [its] creator, and how it forces creators to be indentured servants in the production of a future out of their control," adding, "That it's for a good cause is irrelevant."

French Deliveroo customers who received fake bills for hundreds of euros' worth of pizza have failed to see the funny side of the April Fools' joke. The BBC reports: On April 1, thousands of customers of the delivery platform across France got confirmation emails for orders totaling over $530. Many took to social media to express anger at the stunt. Late on Thursday Deliveroo informed its customers via Twitter and email that it had not been serious. "We confirm that it was an April Fool's joke," the clarification read. "You can enjoy the evening by ordering the pizza of your choice." But few customers were amused. One of them said he had "almost had a stroke" after receiving a 466-euro invoice for 38 pizzas that he had never ordered. Many recipients said they panicked and tried to call their banks to block any payment.

Both monsters have grown in size over the years, and they reach new heights in Godzilla vs. Kong. But could they ever exist in real life? From a report: The last time the pair squared off, in the 1962 Japanese stop-motion release King Kong vs. Godzilla, Kong was 148 feet tall, compared to just 25ft tall in Peter Jackson's 2005 film King Kong, according to online estimates. In 2017's Kong: Skull Island, the great primate was around 104ft; almost four times smaller than the current iteration of Godzilla, who clocks in at 393ft. While the skeletons of Kong's parents in Skull Island suggest 100ft is roughly their species' genetic limit, the producers of the series have retconned the franchise by explaining that Kong is an adolescent in that film, leaving room for him to grow into a worthy opponent for Godzilla some 40 years down the movie timeline. Scaling up Kong to match Godzilla makes sense. It would be a short film if Godzilla stomped the big ape to death in the opening minutes. But how does that explain Godzilla's own growth spurt from 328ft in 2014 to 393ft today? And, crucially, is any of this based in science?

There are some things the films get right. James Rosindell from the faculty of natural sciences at Imperial College London points to a theory called 'Cope's Rule' which holds that evolution will increase a species body size over time. "[Being larger] gives competitive advantages and is often naturally selected for," he explains. However, larger creatures need more food and typically reproduce at a slower rate, meaning few individuals can be supported by any one ecosystem. So Kong and Godzilla being the last of their species -- and Kong slowly maturing over 40 years -- fits the science. But that's about the only thing that holds together. It turns out that Godzilla and Kong's biggest foe may not be each other, but physics. Specifically, the laws of gravity and biomechanics. The largest animal alive today, the blue whale, is found in our oceans. "The size limit of aquatic animals is closely tied to the ability to eat enough food to sustain their chonky bodies," explains David Labonte, a researcher in the department of bioengineering, also at Imperial College. Labonte has a specific interest in the interaction between physical laws and body size. For example, why there are no climbing animals heavier than geckos that can cling upside down to smooth surfaces? When it comes to the blue whale, Labonte explains that their large mouths and a technique known as 'lunge feeding' enables them to obtain enough food to sustain their bodies. This has allowed some blue whales to grow up to 180 tonnes (Kong was around 158 tonnes in his last film). An aquatic environment bestows other advantages, namely, buoyancy. Having its weight suspended in water is one of the key reasons why the blue whale is able to grow so large. It's also the reason that when whales beach, the most common cause of death is internal damage from the weight of their own bodies. Gravity, then, is a problem our terrestrial animals are yet to overcome. It's the reason our largest land animal, the African elephant tips the scales at a relatively puny six tonnes.

lee1 writes: The UHI human interaction research group has been intensively studying a pervasive problem facing users of the web: the problem of tabs. How to organize them, preserve them, keep track of them. We have carefully considered the pros and cons of various approaches offered by different browsers, and by extensions: tab trees, second rows of tabs, vertical tabs, 3D tabs, musical tabs, you name it.

None of them were good enough.

New submitter catmar68 writes: CERN proposes "space elevator" accelerator to answer this fundamental question: "Do antimatter apples fall up?" From the press release: The true question, they say, is whether antimatter apples fall down differently. If a difference were spotted, it would spell the end of "CPT invariance" -- a principle that has underpinned every theory of physics since the invention of quantum mechanics. "The Standard Model of particle physics has been very successful, but it can't explain the 95% of the universe which is 'dark', and neither Einstein nor any physicist since has been able to cook up a working theory of quantum gravity," says theorist Flora Oilp. "It's time to challenge its most fundamental principle head-on." The way forward, according to Oilp and her colleagues, is to build a vertical accelerator that will put gravity to the test directly. Every previous particle accelerator has been horizontal. A combination of high speeds and frequent course corrections using focusing magnets has always meant that the effect of gravity can be neglected. But by utilising a range of new, revolutionary techniques, including accelerating particles upwards inside a vacuum vessel, and timing how long they take to fall back down to Earth, physicists can study the elusive fourth force directly. Furthermore, by comparing results with protons and antiprotons, they can watch for signs of "CPT violation." Such behaviour cannot be explained using conventional theories, which rely on this principle to ensure the conservation of probability.

The accelerator would be built in two stages. Stage one proposes a 500 m vertical accelerator, starting from the base of the LHC shafts. An exciting collaboration with NASA may come to fruition by utilising detectors on the International Space Station (ISS) to detect beams of particles fired by the accelerator every time the ISS is overhead. This "reverse cosmic-ray" experiment would allow the measurement of Earth's gravity on particle trajectories at unprecedented levels. Stage one will seek to match the roughly 1% precision on measurements of the gravitational constant "g," which is currently being targeted in parallel by experiments with antihydrogen at the Laboratory's Antimatter Factory. This moderate build will also allow engineers and physicists to understand the intricacies of running a vertical accelerator in preparation for stage two -- the space elevator. "If built, however, this advanced particle accelerator would nevertheless be three times taller than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which has been the tallest structure in the world since 2009."

T-Mobile will shut down its TVision live-TV service and offer Google's YouTube TV at a promotional discount, ending a three-year effort to create a disruptive alternative to cable. From a report: Customers 'don't want more streaming services -- they want help buying and navigating the services that already exist," T-Mobile Chief Executive Officer Mike Sievert wrote in a blog post Monday. The decision to back out of the crowded streaming market comes just weeks after Sievert said TVision was going to play a big role in the company's plan to enter the broadband market as soon as this month. "We don't actually even think of TVision as a business," Sievert said in an interview on March 11. "You know, we think of it as an initiative, an initiative to help us sell home broadband and serve customers." As part of the revised plan, T-Mobile will sell YouTube TV to its mobile subscribers for $54.99 a month, which is $10 less than Alphabet's Google charges.