As part of Netflix's earning results today, which says the company reversed customer losses, Netflix plans to crack down on password sharing beginning in 2023. The Verge reports: After giving users the ability to transfer their profiles to new accounts last week, the streamer says it will start letting subscribers create sub-accounts starting next year in line with its plans to "monetize account sharing" more widely. [...] Earlier this year, Netflix reported losing subscribers for the first time in over 10 years, with the company's subscriber count dipping by another 1.3 million in the US and Canada and 1 million worldwide last quarter. To remedy this, Netflix has also been slowly nudging subscribers away from password sharing. The company conducted tests that prompted users in Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru to pay extra for a sub-account if Netflix detected someone was using the owner's subscription outside of their household.

It also tried out a way for users in Argentina, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic to buy additional "homes" for accounts located outside of the subscriber's primary household. More recently, Netflix widely introduced a Profile Transfer tool that lets users easily transfer their personalized recommendations, viewing history, My List, saved games, and other settings to a new account after testing it in other countries. Last month, a report from Rest of World revealed frustration from users subject to the tests in Latin America. The earnings report (PDF) projects that the company's new ad-supported streaming service, which starts at $6.99 per month and launches in November, will help attract 4.5 million subscribers by year's end. This quarter it added 2.4 million subscribers and grew by 104,000 paid subscribers in the U.S. and Canada over the last three months, up from 73,000 in the same period last year.

Wikipedia describes Homestar Runner as "a blend of surreal humour, self-parody, and references to popular culture, in particular video games, classic television, and popular music." But after launching in 2000, the web-based cartoon became a cultural phenomenon, co-creator Mike Chapman remembered in 2017: On the same day we received a demo of a song that John Linnell from They Might Be Giants recorded for a Strong Bad Email and a full-size working Tom Servo puppet from Jim Mallon from Mystery Science Theater 3000.... The Homestar references in the Buffy and Angel finales forever ago were huge. And there was this picture of Joss Whedon in a Strong Bad shirt from around that time that someone sent us that we couldn't believe. Years later, a photo of Geddy Lee from Rush wearing a Strong Bad hat on stage circulated which similarly freaked us out. We have no idea if he knew what Strong Bad was, but our dumb animal character was on his head while he probably shredded 'Working Man' so I'll take it!
After a mutli-year hiatus starting around 2009, the site has only been updating sporadically — and some worried that the end of Flash also meant the end of the Flash-based cartoon and its web site altogether. But on the day Flash Player was officially discontinued — December 31st, 2020 — a "post-Flash update" appeared at HomestarRunner.com: What happened our website? Flash is finally dead-dead-dead so something drastic had to be done so people could still watch their favorite cartoons and sbemails with super-compressed mp3 audio and hidden clicky-clicky easter eggs...!

[O]nce you click "come on in," you'll find yourself in familiar territory thanks to the Ruffle Project. It emulates Flash in such a way that all browsers and devices can finally play our cartoons and even some games.... Your favorite easter eggs are still hidden and now you can even choose to watch a YouTube version if there is one.

Keep in mind, Ruffle is still in development so not everything works perfectly. Games made after, say 2007, will probably be pretty janky but Ruffle plans on ulitmately supporting those too one day. And any cartoons with video elements in them (Puppet Jams, death metal) will just show you an empy box where the video should be. But hang in there and one day everything will be just like it was that summer when we got free cable somehow and Grandma still lived in the spare bedroom.
And since then, new content has quietly been appearing at HomestarRunner.com. (Most recently, Thursday the site added a teaser for an upcoming Halloween video.)

The Homestar Runner wiki is tracking this year's new content, which includes:

• Strong Bad livestreaming his play of a text adventure (titled "Disk 4 of 12 — Vampire's Castle") on September 19th
• Strong Sad streaming a demo of the expando deck for Trogdor!! The Board Game (July 2)
• A Twitch parody in which Strong Bad livestreams a speedrun on a horrific beef-themed game (titled "Strong-Play: Marzipan Beef Reverser") on April 25th
• A new Strong Bad Email on April 1st

And past videos are now also being uploaded on the site's official YouTube channel.

From a report: Filmmaker Craig Zobel has been tapped by HBO Max to direct the first two episodes of The Penguin, its much-awaited Batman spinoff. He will also serve as executive producer of the show, with Lauren LeFranc writing the script. Starring in The Penguin is Colin Farrell, who played the villainous Oswald Cobblepot in The Batman earlier this year. The Penguin will focus its attention on Cobblepot's notorious past and trace his rise to power in Gotham.

Zobel is already part of the family, having previously directed The Mare of Easttown for HBO Max. The prolific director also applied his talents to episodes of Westworld, The Leftovers, and American Gods...

If all goes according to schedule, viewers could be enjoying The Penguin by the end of 2023.
The article also notes that Zobel also helped co-create Homestar Runner in its original incarnation as a parody children's picture book.

Friday Amazon released the season finale for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. But Amazon's 8-episode first season "might have been best known for its extravagant price tag," jokes the Los Angeles Times. It ultimately cost $700 million — making it the most expensive TV show ever — and they note one viewer's assessment that "Visually, it's great. All the money in production shows..." (The Times' critic called it "visibly expensive.")

But can you quantify whether the show is good, great, or something out of Mordor? The Times cites reports that more than 100 million Amazon Prime viewers watched some part of the show (with the premier attracting 25 million viewers on its first day — a new record for the streaming service). Yet they also add that "It's no surprise that a long-gestating TV show based on the mythology behind a beloved fantasy series has garnered mixed reviews from audiences. (In the main, critics have been more positive, according to review aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic)."

And CNN is a little less charitable: After initial reviews admired the scope and visual grandeur, though, more critical voices have drifted into the naysaying column, pointing out — as the Daily Telegraph's Duncan Lay put it — that the series "managed to be both pretentious and boring." Forbes' Erik Kain sounded a similar note, writing that after the opening chapters, "The Rings of Power" has demonstrated "how quickly a badly written TV series can wear out its welcome once the shimmer fades."
But there's also this from Business Insider: Creators J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay promise that if viewers were disappointed with season one's story because they expected more Sauron, then they'll dig the second season, which started filming earlier this month. "There may well be viewers who are like, 'This is the story we were hoping to get in season one!,'" McKay told The Hollywood Reporter. "In season two, we're giving it to them."
Indeed, this season accomplished "the hard work of setting up who all those characters are," Amazon Studios head told Variety — possibly hinting again at that surprise reveal of Sauron in the season finale.

And according to The Hollywood Reporter, the show's creators have high hopes for its impact on Season Two: "There's something that Milton does in Paradise Lost that we talked about a lot. Where he makes Satan a really compelling character... Season one opens with: Who is Galadriel? Where did she come from? What did she suffer? Why is she driven?" says Payne. "We're doing the same thing with Sauron in season two. We'll fill in all the missing pieces."

"Sauron can now just be Sauron," McKay adds. "Like Tony Soprano or Walter White. He's evil, but complexly evil. We felt like if we did that in season one, he'd overshadow everything else. So the first season is like Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight is the next movie, with Sauron maneuvering out in the open."

Starting in November, Netflix will roll out its ad-supported tier for $6.99 a month, yet another sign that the onetime disruptive upstart streaming service has slowly become a cable package by another name. From a report: Netflix announced today that its new Basic with Ads tier is slated to launch on November 3rd, 2022, for $6.99 in the US, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, and the UK. In exchange for making you watch an average of four to five ads per hour that run anywhere from 15-30 seconds, Basic with Ads will give subscribers access to a large swath of Netflix's programming but not the platform's full catalog. A small selection of television shows and movies will not be available to Basic with Ads subscribers due to licensing restrictions that Netflix says it's currently working on. Additionally, Basic with Ads subscribers will not be able to download content onto their devices, and video quality is capped at 720p / HD.

"Our new robot overlords are making a whole lot of progress in the space of AI music generation," quips TechCrunch, discussing a new project called "Harmonai" backed by Stability AI (creators of the open source AI image generator Stable Diffusion): In late September, Harmonai released Dance Diffusion, an algorithm and set of tools that can generate clips of music by training on hundreds of hours of existing songs.... Dance Diffusion remains in the testing stages — at present, the system can only generate clips a few seconds long. But the early results provide a tantalizing glimpse at what could be the future of music creation, while at the same time raising questions about the potential impact on artists....

Google's AudioLM, detailed for the first time earlier this week, shows... an uncanny ability to generate piano music given a short snippet of playing. But it hasn't been open sourced. Dance Diffusion aims to overcome the limitations of previous open source tools by borrowing technology from image generators such as Stable Diffusion. The system is what's known as a diffusion model, which generates new data (e.g., songs) by learning how to destroy and recover many existing samples of data. As it's fed the existing samples — say, the entire Smashing Pumpkins discography — the model gets better at recovering all the data it had previously destroyed to create new works....

It's not the most intuitive idea. But as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and other such systems have shown, the results can be remarkably realistic.
Its lyrics are gibberish, TechCrunch concedes — though their article also features several audio clips (including a style transfer of Smash Mouth's vocals onto the Tetris theme).

And the article also notes a new tool letting artists opt of of being used in AI training sets, before raising the obvious concern...

The project's lead stresses that "All of the models that are officially being released as part of Dance Diffusion are trained on public domain data, Creative Commons-licensed data and data contributed by artists in the community." But even with that, TechCrunch notes that "Assuming Dance Diffusion one day reaches the point where it can generate coherent whole songs, it seems inevitable that major ethical and legal issues will come to the fore."

For example, beyond the question of whether "training" is itself a copyright violation, there's the possibility that the algorithm might accidentally duplicate a copyrighted melody...

The Washington Post calls it "the gauzy, schmaltzy, vaguely creepy orchestral music unofficially dubbed the QAnon anthem." They also report that it's been "unceremoniously yanked from YouTube and Spotify for violating a harassment policy and alleged copyright infringement, respectively."

NBC News reports: In an email to NBC News, composer Will Van De Crommert wrote that he was "exploring legal options" and that "this particular track, which was originally entitled Mirrors, is available to license online. I however was not notified of any licenses for political rallies, nor did I authorize such use." A YouTube representative said in an email Monday that the company "removed the video in question for violating our harassment policy, which prohibits content targeting someone by suggesting they're complicit in a conspiracy theory used to justify real-world violence, such as QAnon." A Spotify representative said that "the content in question was removed following an infringement claim...."

Van De Crommert said the uploads in question are identical to his and that he has no association with the account that put his music online alongside QAnon language. "I do not align with the views of QAnon, and this individual has unlawfully distributed my music under their own name," he said.
The Post credits the song's morose strings for its impact, describing it as "the kind of stock sentimental, algorithmically emotional pablum regularly employed to sell us trucks, insurance, petrochemicals, diapers, more trucks, pharmaceuticals, whole-grain bread and presidents."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In the early 2000s, Americans who wanted to catch the local weather forecast at any time might turn on their TV and switch over to Weatherscan, a 24-hour computer-controlled weather forecast channel with a relaxing smooth jazz soundtrack. After 23 years, The Weather Channel announced that Weatherscan will be shutting down permanently on or before December 9. But a group of die-hard fans will not let it go quietly into the night.

Launched in 1999, Weatherscan currently appears in a dwindling number of local American cable TV and satellite markets. It shows automated local weather information on a loop, generated by an Intellistar computer system installed locally for each market. Declining viewership and the ubiquity of smartphone weather apps are the primary reasons it's going offline. There are also technical issues with maintaining the hardware behind the service. "Weatherscan has been dying a slow death over the course of the last 10 years because the hardware is aging," says Mike Bates, a tech hobbyist who collects and restores Weather Channel computer hardware as part of a group of die-hard fans who follow insider news from the company. "It's 20 years old now, and more and more cable companies have been pulling the service." [...]

Hobbyists like Bates (who goes by "techknight" on Twitter) have collected the hardware necessary to run their own Weatherscan stations out of their homes. Some have also created software that simulates the service in a browser. [...] However, getting Weatherscan to run locally was a team effort, primarily by friends named Ethan, Brian, and Jesse. One of the Intellistar computer models behind the service runs FreeBSD on a Pentium 4-based PC in a blue rack-mount enclosure. It includes an ATI card for generating the graphics and a proprietary PowerPC-based card that pulls it all together to make it broadcast-ready. To get Weatherscan working at home, the group of friends found decommissioned Intellistar units on eBay and used forensic tools to reconstruct data from the hard drives, piecing together a working version of the Weatherscan software from multiple sources. Since then, they have exhibited their work at shows like the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest last month.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Even as Americans cut back in the face of rising prices and recessionary fears, fewer want to give up their streaming subscriptions, especially when it comes to TV, movies and music services, such as Amazon Prime, Netflix and Spotify. Roughly two-thirds of consumers said they will have to decrease their spending due to inflation; however, only about a quarter plan to cancel such subscriptions in the months ahead, according to a recent report by the National Research Group. Most people said they were more likely to cut back on dining out, groceries and clothing.

Consumers are least likely to cancel Amazon Prime, TV and movie streaming services and home security systems, the report found, even over food and gasoline. Just over half, or 51%, also said subscriptions now make up a "significant" portion of their monthly spending. On average, U.S. consumers estimate they spend $135 a month and 17.8% of their monthly budget on subscriptions, the National Research Group found. The report polled more than 2,500 adults in August.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A court in India has granted what appears to be the most aggressive site-blocking injunction in the history of copyright law. In advance of the movie 'Vikram Vedha' premiering in cinemas last Friday, a judge handed down an injunction that ordered 40 internet service providers to proactively and immediately block an unprecedented 13,445 sites. [...] India began blocking pirate sites in 2011 but the public had no idea it was coming. In an early case, movie company Reliance Entertainment went to court to protect the movie 'Singham' and came away with an order that compelled ISPs to temporarily block sites including Megaupload, Megavideo, Rapidshare, Putlocker, Hotfile and Fileserve. Having obtained one injunction, to the surprise of no one Reliance Entertainment immediately sought and obtained another. From there, the site-blocking train gathered steam and hasn't looked back. [...]

After obtaining certification for its new movie 'Vikram Vedha' last Monday, Reliance Entertainment filed an injunction application the next day. The goal was to protect the movie from online piracy following its premiere last Friday. Given that courts in other countries can take months over a decision, the Madras High Court needed to act quickly. On September 30, the day of the movie's release, the Court published its orders, noting that substantial sums had been invested in 'Vikram Vedha' and the movie was expected to screen in 3,000 cinemas worldwide. With words such as "imminent" and "threat" featured early on, it was already clear which way the judge was leaning. How far he was prepared to go still came as a surprise. After reading through the Reliance application, the judge declared that Reliance had made its case and that an injunction was appropriate. The judge said that if an interim injunction wasn't immediately granted, it would "result in alleged piracy being completed in all and every aspect of the matter." That would in turn lead to an "irreversible situation" and "irreparable legal injury incapable of compensation."

Due to the urgency, the respondents in the case – including 40 internet service providers -- weren't notified of the legal action. Nevertheless, the injunction was handed down via two separate orders, which together prohibit anyone from copying, recording, camcording, making available, uploading, downloading, exhibiting or playing the movie without a license. After specifically prohibiting copying to CD, DVD, pen drives, hard drives or tapes, the orders move on to the issue of ISP blocking. It appears that Reliance asked for a lot and the judge gave them everything. According to one of the orders, the websites put forward for blocking are all "non-compliant" operations, in that they have no reporting and take down mechanisms in place, at least according to Reliance. Interestingly, Reliance also informed the court that all of the websites were infringing its copyrights in respect of the movie 'Vikram Vedha', even though it was yet to be released and when the application was filed, no copies were available online. This means that Reliance couldn't have provided any infringing URLs even if it wanted to. Nevertheless, the judge did consider more limited blocking.

Ultimately, the judge granted an interim injunction and ordered all of the ISPs (list below) to immediately and proactively block a grand total of 13,445 websites. While the names of the websites were made available to the court, the court did not make the schedule available on the docket. As a result we have no way of confirming which domains are on the list. The ISPs weren't informed about the injunction application either, so presumably they're also in the dark. The idea that the judge tested all 13,445 domains seems wishful thinking at best. That leaves Reliance Entertainment as the sole entity with any knowledge of the submitted domains, all of which have been labeled in court as infringing the movie's copyright, even though no copy was available when the application was made.

"Paramount Global executive David Nevins, who has run the premium network Showtime since 2016, is leaving the company at the end of year," reports CNBC. According to the report, it may help give the media conglomerate "more flexibility to potentially merge Showtime into Paramount+." From the report: Along with his departure, Paramount Global is restructuring Showtime in ways that could give the company flexibility to effectively end Showtime as it's existed for decades -- as an independent premium cable network churning out prestige hits such as "Dexter," "Weeds," "Billions," "Homeland" and "Yellowjackets." Paramount Global announced Thursday that it's moving Showtime's network business under the leadership of Chris McCarthy, who runs other linear cable networks such as MTV and Comedy Central, and the streaming service under Tom Ryan, who runs Paramount Streaming.

The moves come as the company is considering the idea of merging Showtime into Paramount+ and using the network's hit programming to fuel Paramount+ subscriptions, according to people familiar with the matter. The company's goal is to have Paramount+ be one of the five largest global streaming services, along with Warner Bros. Discovery's HBO Max, Amazon's Prime Video, Netflix and Disney+, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. No decisions about Showtime's future have been made, and no changes are imminent, the people said.

One obstacle to pushing Showtime together with Paramount+ is existing pay TV distributor agreements. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Paramount has discussed simply shuttering the standalone Showtime network with at least one pay-TV partner. Another idea under consideration by Paramount Global executives is to move Paramount+ originals and movies to Showtime, effectively making Showtime a mirror to Paramount+'s content that doesn't appear on other TV networks, two of the people said. That could assuage pay-TV providers, who could adjust pricing against the merged streaming product. [...] Eliminating Showtime as an independent entity would also come with cost savings from head count reductions, such as Nevins' departure, and technology and marketing duplications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: DeepMind has used its board-game playing AI AlphaZero to discover a faster way to solve a fundamental math problem in computer science, beating a record that has stood for more than 50 years. A year after it took biologists by surprise, AlphaFold has changed how researchers work and set DeepMind on a new course. The problem, matrix multiplication, is a crucial type of calculation at the heart of many different applications, from displaying images on a screen to simulating complex physics. It is also fundamental to machine learning itself. Speeding up this calculation could have a big impact on thousands of everyday computer tasks, cutting costs and saving energy.

Despite the calculation's ubiquity, it is still not well understood. A matrix is simply a grid of numbers, representing anything you want. Multiplying two matrices together typically involves multiplying the rows of one with the columns of the other. The basic technique for solving the problem is taught in high school. But things get complicated when you try to find a faster method. This is because there are more ways to multiply two matrices together than there are atoms in the universe (10 to the power of 33, for some of the cases the researchers looked at).

The trick was to turn the problem into a kind of three-dimensional board game, called TensorGame. The board represents the multiplication problem to be solved, and each move represents the next step in solving that problem. The series of moves made in a game therefore represents an algorithm. The researchers trained a new version of AlphaZero, called AlphaTensor, to play this game. Instead of learning the best series of moves to make in Go or chess, AlphaTensor learned the best series of steps to make when multiplying matrices. It was rewarded for winning the game in as few moves as possible. [...] The researchers describe their work in a paper published in Nature today. The headline result is that AlphaTensor discovered a way to multiply together two four-by-four matrices that is faster than a method devised in 1969 by the German mathematician Volker Strassen, which nobody had been able to improve on since. The basic high school method takes 64 steps; Strassen's takes 49 steps. AlphaTensor found a way to do it in 47 steps. "Overall, AlphaTensor beat the best existing algorithms for more than 70 different sizes of matrix," concludes the report. "It reduced the number of steps needed to multiply two nine-by-nine matrices from 511 to 498, and the number required for multiplying two 11-by-11 matrices from 919 to 896. In many other cases, AlphaTensor rediscovered the best existing algorithm."

Today, Nielsen announced that Roku plans to enable four-screen measurement across desktop, mobile, connected TV and traditional TV. This is the first time Roku will use the digital methodology, Nielsen One, the data measurement firm's cross-media measurement tool, which launches in December. TechCrunch reports: With Nielsen's forthcoming tool, the firm claims that the company is on track to provide a consistent and comparable cross-media solution. Nielsen also claims that, with Nielsen One, marketers running ads with Roku are guaranteed duplicate copies of repeating data are eliminated.

"Marketers can now better evaluate CTV inventory's unique reach and frequency in conjunction with their entire Roku buy in a comparable and comprehensive manner, and advertisers can reduce waste and help ensure that relevant ads are delivered to the right audiences across devices. This release brings us one step closer to providing comparable and deduplicated metrics across screens with Nielsen One," said Kim Gilberti, SVP, Product Management, Nielsen, in a statement.

The data measurement firm wrote in today's announcement that its relationship with Roku dates back to 2016 when Roku allowed its marketers to measure campaigns with Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings measurement. Nielsen announced Nielsen One in 2020. Earlier this year, it was revealed that YouTube would be the first media company to try the new tool. Roku is the second company to enable cross-media measurement.

James Earl Jones is stepping away from the role of Darth Vader after nearly 40 years. According to Vanity Fair, he has signed off on using archival voice recordings to recreate the iconic voice with artificial intelligence. From a report: "He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character," Matthew Wood, a Lucasfilm veteran of 32 years, told the outlet. "So how do we move forward?" The company has enlisted the assistance of Respeecher, a Ukrainian startup that uses AI technology to craft new conversations from revitalized old voice recordings. Respeecher's relationship with Lucasfilm began with the Disney+ series "The Book of Boba Fett," for which they recreated the voice of young Luke Skywalker. The two also teamed for the voice performance of Darth Vader on the series "Obi-Wan Kenobi," which debuted on Disney's streamer this summer.

Bogdan Belyaev, the 29-year-old speech artist, was tasked with delivering the new recordings to Lucasfilm, but tragedy struck on Feb. 24 when Russia invaded the country. As air raid sirens powered through the city of Lviv, Belyaev hurried to finish the project and send his work back to Skywalker Sound in Northern California. "If everything went bad, we would never make these conversions delivered to Skywalker Sound," he says. Following the debut of "Obi-Wan Kenobi," Jones' family informed Wood that they were pleased with the result of the synthesis between the actor's voice and Respeecher's technical work. Jones is credited for "guiding the performance" of Darth Vader in the Disney+ series, with Wood describing the actor as a "benevolent godfather."

Netflix already lost 1.2 million subscribers in the first two quarters of 2022. While the company hopes to add one million new users with its new ad-supported tier, a survey shows that 1 in 4 Netflix users are planning to cancel their subscriptions this year. From a report: Here's what this could mean to other streaming services, such as Apple TV+. Reviews surveyed 1,000 Americans to gauge their streaming habits in 2022. According to the report, the average American is subscribed to four streaming platforms. Netflix is still the most popular streaming service with nearly 4 out of 5 (77%) Americans currently subscribed to the platform. In addition, 70% say they use Netflix the most, followed by: HBO Max: 9.91%; Disney+: 6.18%; Peacock: 4.25%; Hulu: 3.86%; Apple TV+: 2.70%; Paramount+: 2.70%.

That said, of all the Netflix subscribers, 25% are planning to cancel their subscriptions. Of those who plan to leave the streaming service, two-thirds say increasing costs is one of the reasons. According to the survey, Netflix has the highest average plan cost among the eight more popular streaming services in the US. The other big complaint from Netflix users is two-fold: 1 in 3 respondents said Netflix no longer has the shows they want to watch; 30% said that they use other streaming services more.

Google announced a new Chromecast with HD streaming support today that costs just $30 and has a remote control with it. From a report: The company is launching the Chromecast with Google TV (HD) -- yes, that's the official name -- in 19 countries including the U.S. This comes two years after Google launched a $49 Chromecast with 4K HDR streaming support and the introduction of a remote. The new Chromecast supports 1080p streaming, and more than 10,000 apps that are on the Google TV platform including Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, and Prime video.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Tuesday, 40 civil rights groups published an open letter calling on MGM Television executives to cancel the studio's upcoming reality show Ring Nation, which will feature former NSA employee and comedian Wanda Sykes presenting humorous surveillance footage captured from Ring doorbell cameras. The groups say the studio is "normalizing and promoting Amazon Ring's dangerous network of surveillance cameras," which, along with the Neighbors app, "violate basic privacy rights, fuel surveillance-based policing that disproportionately targets people of color and threatens abortion seekers, and enables vigilantes to surveil their neighbors and racially profile bystanders."

There's just one potential problem with the well-intentioned campaign: Amazon owns Ring, producer Big Fish Entertainment, and distributor MGM, and it also owns the Prime Video streaming service should it need somewhere to air it. It also has specific partnerships with thousands of police departments around the country should they happen to prove useful. This tower of vertical integration means that Ring Nation is a show designed from the ground up to leverage Amazon's vast monopoly to push its own product on Americans, and it also means that it will probably (but not definitely) be impossible to kill. There's very little chance that MGM executives will push back on the project when it's probably exactly the type of thing Amazon imagined being able to do when it spent $8.5 billion on a merger with MGM this year. "Ring Nation is not a comedy but rather a propaganda strategy to normalize and further digitize racial profiling in our communities. Truthfully the cognitive dissonance about the dangers of these tools is a real concern. It's striking to see a host who has been such a vocal supporter of racial justice protesters defend the very tech that was used to surveil activists during the uprisings in 2020," said Myaisha Hayes, campaign strategy director at Cancel Ring Nation co-organizer Media Justice, in a statement.

"The Ring Nation reality-TV series is anything but funny. It weaponizes the joy of our daily lives in an attempt to manufacture a PR miracle for scandal-ridden Amazon," Evan Greer, director of co-organizer Fight for the Future, said in a statement. "By normalizing surveillance, it will teach our children to relinquish their privacy in exchange for a quick laugh. In the coming weeks, Fight for the Future, Media Justice, and our org partners will be mobilizing our supporters and forming a loud and fearless coalition of civil rights groups to cancel Ring Nation," Greer said.

The show is set to launch on Sept. 26, though it hasn't been announced which networks will carry it.

"Whirring as it powered up, a hoverbike lifted directly into the air in Michigan, video shows."

That's the lead from one news report about a big debut at a U.S. auto show in Detroit: a gasoline-and-electric powered hoverbike (using a Kawasaki motor) created by Japanese manufacturing company AERWINS Technologies. They've already started selling them in Japan, and they're now also hoping to sell a smaller version in America in 2023. The hoverbike flies for 40 minutes, Reuters reports, and can reach speeds of up to 62 miles per hour (100 kph). (They added that the bike drew "perhaps inevitable comparisons to the speeder bikes of Star Wars.")

From McClatchy news services: Video from WXYZ's Facebook shows the hoverbike's flight. The test rider checks the vehicle then signals with a fist pump. The engines power up, whirring louder and louder until the bike lifts off. The hoverbike flies back and forth, slightly faster as the ride goes on, then lands smoothly to the ground, video shows. "I feel like I'm literally 15 years old and I just got out of Star Wars," the test rider told Reuters. "It's awesome! Of course, you have a little apprehension, but I was just so amped. I literally had goosebumps and feel like a little kid...."

The price of a hoverbike? Only $777,000 according to current estimates, though the company hopes to get the cost down to about $50,000, The Detroit News reported.
The Detroit News adds this about the company's founder/CEO: As a boy, Shuhei Komatsu loved Star Wars movies, especially the lightning-fast land speeders. So when he grew up, he decided to make one of his own, he said.

"I wanted to make something from the movie real," Komatsu said. "It's a land speeder for the Dark Side...."

Komatsu said his company will make its public offering of stock on the NASDAQ exchange in November.... He said he's hoping the U.S. government classifies its XTURISMO as a non-aircraft.... He said he thinks consumers will buy the machine for recreation, and governments will buy it for law enforcement and for inspecting infrastructure. "I hope that in the future, people will use it for every day," he said.

Randall Munroe does more than draw the online comic strip XKCD. He's also published a funny new speculative science book (following up on his previous New York Times best-seller), promising "short answers, new lists of weird and worrying questions, and some of my favorite answers from the What If site."

From his blog: In What If 2, I answer new questions I've receieved in the years since What If? was released. People have asked about touching exotic materials, traveling across space and time, eating things they shouldn't, and smashing large objects into the Earth. There are questions about lasers, explosions, swingsets, candy, and soup. Several planets are destroyed — one of them by the soup.
But besides launching a new book tour, he's also found some particularly geeky ways to promote the new book. On Thursday Munroe went on a language podcast to ask his own oddball questions — like how to spot an artificial language, and what does the word "it" refer to in the sentence "It's 3pm and hot." He's illustrated a a science-y animated video, and released several self-mocking cartoons.

And of course — answered some more strange science questions.

"There's a new Joker movie coming out," writes the Verge, "but you might not get a chance to see it because copyright is broken." I'm not talking about Joker: Folie à Deux, the officially sanctioned sequel to the Todd Phillips film Joker. I'm talking about The People's Joker, a crowdfunded Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) selection that was pulled at the last minute, thanks to unspecified "rights issues." The People's Joker is (as far as I can tell) an extremely loose retelling of the Batman villain's origin story, reinterpreting the Joker as a trans woman trying to break into the mob-like world of Gotham's stand-up comedy scene. Its trailer describes it as "an illegal comic book movie," but its creators more seriously defend it as an unauthorized but legal parody of DC's original character, to the point of (apparently) giving their lawyer a full-screen credit.

I have no idea if The People's Joker is a good movie — thanks to its cancelation, my colleague Andrew Webster couldn't catch it at TIFF. The piece is clearly a provocation designed to thumb its nose at DC's copyright, and DC parent company Warner Bros. hasn't said whether it actually ordered TIFF to cancel showings — it's possible the festival balked or even that Drew did it herself. But despite all that, one thing is very clear: outside a tiny number of corporate behemoths, virtually nobody benefits from shutting down The People's Joker — not the filmmakers, not the public, and not the people who created Gotham City in the first place.

Writer-director Vera Drew says she made The People's Joker partly to test a contemporary truism: that beloved fictional universes are a shared modern mythology, and people draw meaning from them the way that artists once reinterpreted Greek myths or painted Biblical figures. As Drew has put it, "if the purpose of myth is to learn about the human experience and grow and also chart your progress — the hero's journey and all that stuff — let's actually do that earnestly with these characters."
The essay delves into the argument that culture exists for the common good. "It's useful to have a temporary period where artists can maintain control over their work because it helps support them financially and encourages them to make more of it. But the ultimate goal is that art should pass into the public domain and that it should be part of a conversation, with people repurposing it to create their own work...."

In an interview with Comic Book Resources, the filmmaker said the film was protected by both fair use and copyright law. "The only thing that makes it weird in both of those categories is nobody's ever taken characters and IP and really personalized it in this way. So I think that's the thing that really kind of makes it seem a lot more dangerous than I actually think it is. I mean, I get it, look, I put an 'illegal comic book movie' on the poster, but that was just to get your butts in the seats. Mission accomplished."

A statement from the filmmaker on Twitter blames "a media conglomerate that shall remain nameless" for an angry letter pressuring them not to screen the film. (It was ultimately allowed to premiere, but then pulled from later screenings.) They added that they were disappointed since "I went to great lengths with legal counsel to have it fall under parody/fair use," but they made the choice to protect the film festival and the future prospects for a possible return of the movie itself.

"The People's Joker will screen again very soon at several other festivals worldwide."

The Verge's conclusion? "If a law meant to protect artists is leaving weird independent movies in limbo to protect a corporate brand, something has gone deeply wrong."

Thanks to Slashdot reader DevNull127 for the article

Laughter comes in many forms, from a polite chuckle to a contagious howl of mirth. Scientists are now developing an AI system that aims to recreate these nuances of humor by laughing in the right way at the right time. The Guardian reports: The team behind the laughing robot, which is called Erica, say that the system could improve natural conversations between people and AI systems. "We think that one of the important functions of conversational AI is empathy," said Dr Koji Inoue, of Kyoto University, the lead author of the research, published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. "So we decided that one way a robot can empathize with users is to share their laughter."

Inoue and his colleagues have set out to teach their AI system the art of conversational laughter. They gathered training data from more than 80 speed-dating dialogues between male university students and the robot, who was initially teleoperated by four female amateur actors. The dialogue data was annotated for solo laughs, social laughs (where humor isn't involved, such as in polite or embarrassed laughter) and laughter of mirth. This data was then used to train a machine learning system to decide whether to laugh, and to choose the appropriate type. It might feel socially awkward to mimic a small chuckle, but empathetic to join in with a hearty laugh. Based on the audio files, the algorithm learned the basic characteristics of social laughs, which tend to be more subdued, and mirthful laughs, with the aim of mirroring these in appropriate situations.

It might feel socially awkward to mimic a small chuckle, but empathetic to join in with a hearty laugh. Based on the audio files, the algorithm learned the basic characteristics of social laughs, which tend to be more subdued, and mirthful laughs, with the aim of mirroring these in appropriate situations. "Our biggest challenge in this work was identifying the actual cases of shared laughter, which isn't easy because as you know, most laughter is actually not shared at all," said Inoue. "We had to carefully categorize exactly which laughs we could use for our analysis and not just assume that any laugh can be responded to." [...] The team said laughter could help create robots with their own distinct character. "We think that they can show this through their conversational behaviours, such as laughing, eye gaze, gestures and speaking style," said Inoue, although he added that it could take more than 20 years before it would be possible to have a "casual chat with a robot like we would with a friend." "One of the things I'd keep in mind is that a robot or algorithm will never be able to understand you," points out Prof Sandra Wachter of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. "It doesn't know you, it doesn't understand you and doesn't understand the meaning of laughter."

"They're not sentient, but they might get very good at making you believe they understand what's going on."

Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Comcast were hit with copyright lawsuits accusing them of turning a blind eye to customers who illegally distribute and download pirated films. The production companies seek to force the internet providers to implement policies that provide for the termination of accounts held by repeat offenders and to block certain piracy websites. Hollywood Reporter: The trio of complaints filed throughout September, with the most recent filed Tuesday in Pennsylvania federal court, come from Voltage Pictures, After Productions and Ammo Entertainment, among others. Two law firms, Dovel & Luner and Culpepper IP, are representing the production labels. The internet providers knowingly contributed to copyright infringement by their customers, the lawsuits claim. Plaintiffs say they sent Verizon, AT&T and Comcast hundreds of thousands of notices about specific instances of infringement. They claim, for example, to have sent over 100,000 notices to Comcast concerning the illegal downloading of I Feel Pretty using its services. The lawsuit seeks to hold the internet providers liable for failing to investigate.

"Comcast did not take meaningful action to prevent ongoing infringements by these Comcast users," states the complaint. "Comcast failed to terminate the accounts associated with these IP addresses or otherwise take any meaningful action in response to these Notices. Comcast often failed to even forward the Notices to its internet service customers or otherwise inform them about the Notice or its contents." The internet providers, therefore, vicariously infringed on plaintiffs' movies since they had the right to terminate the accounts of customers who violate copyright law, the suit alleges. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1988, criminalizes services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works. It provides protection from liability for services providers. But the production companies argue the internet providers don't have safe harbor under the law since it only shields companies if they've adopted and implemented policies that provide for the termination of accounts held by repeat offenders.

Blade Runner 2099, Amazon Studios' live-action series set in the Blade Runner universe, has been picked up to series for Prime Video. From a report: Ridley Scott, who directed the original 1982 Blade Runner movie, is executive producing the series, a follow-up to the feature film sequel Blade Runner 2049, which was released in 2017 and directed by Denis Villeneuve. Silka Luisa (Shining Girls) wrote the script and is exec producing Blade Runner 2099, which comes from Alcon Entertainment in association with Scott Free Productions and Amazon Studios. The project, which marks the first Blade Runner live-action series, had been in priority development at Amazon Studios.

"The original Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott, is considered one of the greatest and most influential science-fiction movies of all time, and we're excited to introduce Blade Runner 2099 to our global Prime Video customers," said Vernon Sanders, head of global television, Amazon Studios. "We are honored to be able to present this continuation of the Blade Runner franchise, and are confident that by teaming up with Ridley, Alcon Entertainment, Scott Free Productions, and the remarkably talented Silka Luisa, Blade Runner 2099 will uphold the intellect, themes, and spirit of its film predecessors." As indicated by Blade Runner 2099's title, the latest installment of the neo-noir sci-fi franchise will be set 50 years after the 2017 film sequel, which was set in 2049.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Ukraine's airspace has been busy this year -- that's the nature of war. But scientists in the country are looking to the skies and seeing something they didn't expect: An inordinate number of UFOs, according to a new preprint paper published (PDF) by Kyiv's Main Astronomical Observatory in coordination with the country's National Academy of Science. The paper does not specifically address the war, but in the United States, the Pentagon has long hinted, speculated, and warned that some UFOs could be advanced technology from foreign militaries, specifically China and Russia (though it hasn't really given any evidence this is actually the case). The Ukraine paper is particularly notable because it not only shows that science has continued to occur during the war, but also explains that there have been a lot of sightings. "We see them everywhere," the research said. "We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear."

The paper is titled Unidentified aerial phenomena I. Observations of events come from observations made at NAS' Main Astronomical Observatory in Kyiv and a village south of Kyiv called Vinarivka. According to the paper's authors, the observatories took on the job of hunting for UFO's as an independent project because of the enthusiasm around the subject. It describes a specific type of UFO the researchers call "phantoms" that is an "object [that] is a completely black body that does not emit and absorbs all the radiation falling on it." The researchers also observed that the UFOs it's seeing are so fast that it's hard to take pictures of them. "The eye does not fix phenomena lasting less than one-tenth of a second," the paper said. "It takes four-tenths of a second to recognize an event. Ordinary photo and video recordings will also not capture the [unidentified aerial phenomenon]. To detect UAP, you need to fine-tune the equipment: shutter speed, frame rate, and dynamic range."

So the researchers did just that using two meteor monitoring stations in Kyiv and Vinarivka. "We have developed a special observation technique, taking into account the high speeds of the observed objects," the paper said. "The exposure time was chosen so that the image of the object did not shift significantly during exposure. The frame rate was chosen to take into account the speed of the object and the field of view of the camera. In practice, the exposure time was less than 1 ms, and the frame rate was no less than 50 Hz." The scientists divided the phenomenon they observed into two different categories: cosmics and phantoms. "We note that Cosmics are luminous objects, brighter than the background of the sky. We call these ships names of birds (swift, falcon, eagle)," the paper said. "Phantoms are dark objects, with contrast from several to about 50 percent."

Using the cameras, stationed roughly 75 miles apart, allowed the scientists to make repeated observations of strange objects moving in the sky. The paper didn't speculate on what the objects were, merely noted the observations and mentioned the objects' incredible speeds. "Flights of single, group and squadrons of the ships were detected, moving at speeds from 3 to 15 degrees per second," the research said. "Phantoms are observed in the troposphere at distances up to 10 -- 12 km. We estimate their size from 3 to 12 meters and speeds up to 15 km/s." The easy explanation would be that these are missiles, or rockets, or something else associated with the war. But the scientists insist that their nature "is not clear."

Adobe thinks it has the answer to Netflix's "password sharing" problem that involves up to 46 million people, according to a 2020 study. TorrentFreak reports: Adobe believes that since every user is different, any actions taken against an account should form part of a data-driven strategy designed to "measure, manage and monetize" password sharing. The company's vision is for platforms like Netflix to deploy machine learning models to extract behavioral patterns associated with an account, to determine how the account is being used. These insights can determine which measures should be taken against an account, and how success or otherwise can be determined by monitoring an account in the following weeks or months. Ignoring the obviously creepy factors for a moment, Adobe's approach does seem more sophisticated, even if the accompanying slide gives off a file-sharing-style "graduated response" vibe. That leads to the question of how much customer information Adobe would need to ensure that the right accounts are targeted, with the right actions, at the right time.

Adobe's Account IQ is powered by Adobe Sensei, which in turn acts as the intelligence layer for Adobe Experience Platform. In theory, Adobe will know more about a streaming account than those using it, so the company should be able to predict the most effective course of action to reduce password sharing and/or monetize it, without annoying the account holder. But of course, if you're monitoring customer accounts in such close detail, grabbing all available information is the obvious next step. Adobe envisions collecting data on how many devices are in use, how many individuals are active, and geographical locations -- including distinct locations and span. This will then lead to a "sharing probability" conclusion, along with a usage pattern classification that should identify travelers, commuters, close family and friends, even the existence of a second home.

Given that excessive sharing is likely to concern platforms like Netflix, Adobe's plan envisions a period of mass account monitoring followed by an on-screen "Excessive Sharing" warning in its dashboard. From there, legal streaming services can identify the accounts most responsible and begin preparing their "graduated response" towards changing behaviors. After monetizing those who can be monetized, those who refuse to pay can be identified and dumped. Or as Adobe puts it: "Return free-loaders to available market." Finally, Adobe also suggests that its system can be used to identify customers who display good behavior. These users can be rewarded by eliminating authentication requirements, concurrent stream limits, and device registrations.

"Succession," HBO's portrait of a dysfunctional media dynasty, won best drama at the 74th Emmy Awards on Monday night, the second time the series has taken the prize. The New York Times: Jesse Armstrong, the show's creator, also took home the Emmy for best writing, the third time he's won in that category. And Matthew Macfadyen won best supporting actor in a drama for the first time for his performance on the show. It was the sixth time in eight years that HBO has taken the television industry's biggest prize for a recurring series, making it yet another triumphant night for the cable network. HBO, as well as its streaming service, HBO Max, won more Emmys (38) than any other outlet, besting its chief rival, Netflix (26).

"The White Lotus," the cable network's beloved upstairs-downstairs dramedy that took place at a Hawaiian resort, won best limited series, and tore through several other categories. The show won 10 Emmys altogether, more than any other series. Mike White, the show's creator and director, won a pair of Emmys for best directing and writing. And performers from the show, Murray Bartlett and Jennifer Coolidge, both received acting Emmys. "Mike White, my God, thank you for giving me one of the best experiences of my life," Bartlett, who played an off-the-wagon hotel manager, said from the Emmys stage. But HBO's chronicles of the rich were not the only winners on Monday night.

"Ted Lasso," the Apple TV+ sports series, won best comedy for a second consecutive year, as the tech giant continues on an awards show tear. Apple TV+, which had its debut in November 2019, won best picture at the Oscars ("CODA") earlier this year. And Jason Sudeikis repeated as best actor in a comedy as the fish-out-of-water soccer coach in "Ted Lasso." There were other big moments in the comedy awards. Quinta Brunson, the creator of the good-natured ABC workplace sitcom, "Abbott Elementary," about a group of elementary schoolteachers at an underfunded Philadelphia public school, won for best writing in a comedy. It was only the second time a Black woman won the award (Lena Waithe was the first, in 2017, for "Master of None").

Released 40 years ago, the 1982 movie Tron eventually spawned a 2010 sequel (plus a 19-episode animated series that aired on Disney XD between 2012 and 2013). But it also spawned a rollercoaster...

Tron Lightcycle Run first opened at Shanghai Disneyland in 2016. (You can find some ride-through footage on YouTube. Apparently riders race against a yellow lightcycle....)

And now the ride is finally coming to Florida, reports Cinemablend: Tron Lightcycle Run began its construction back in 2018 and while the E-ticket ride was massive, we expected things to move along as quickly as possible. However, then a little pandemic happened and that changed a lot. Construction was delayed and even after the parks reopened things were going quite slowly, but more recently things have picked up, and now we know when the ride will finally be open.

At the D23 Expo today Disney Parks Chairman Josh D'Amaro announced a Spring 2023 opening date for Tron Lightcycle Run..... Lightcycle Run has been undergoing testing with live riders of late, a video was shown during the presentation of Josh D'Amaro himself doing a run...
CNET quotes D'Amaro as saying the ride is "really close to being ready for showtime."

CNET reveals some Star Wars news shared at Disney's three-day "D23 Expo." Fans were probably most thrilled by the reveal of a new Mandalorian trailer for the upcoming third season of the hit show that brought us Baby Yoda in all his cuteness... Lucasfilm also dropped a final trailer for upcoming Disney Plus series Andor. Diego Luna plays Cassian Andor as he's recruited into the rebellion against the Empire. The show takes place five years before the events of Rogue One.

And the studio presented a trailer for Tales of the Jedi, which offers six original shorts about Ahsoka and Dooku, and arrives October 26. Fans also got a glimpse, though not a trailer, showing Jude Law, who's starring in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, a story about a group of younglings lost in space.
Also revealed was a "developer update" trailer for the upcoming mobile game Avatar: Reckoning, as part of the news about other franchises: James Cameron called in to the event from New Zealand to discuss Avatar: The Way of Water, and the crowd was given 3D glasses to watch some breathtaking footage [from] Cameron's long-awaited sequel... ahead of its December 16 release.

An exclusive clip from The Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania featured Kang holding Cassie Lang hostage and trying to force Scott to steal something for him. Also featured: Bill Murray!

Samuel L. Jackson returns as Nick Fury in a new Disney Plus show called Secret Invasion, where Fury and friends (Oscar-winner Olivia Colman among them!) takes on shape-changing Skrulls. The trailer looks intense."

Since January 1, 2009, Jonathan Mann has written an original song every day and shared it online. Starting as an unemployed 26-year-old, Mann remembers in an online video that "I made my living entering video contests — I'd submit to 12 of them in 12 days, win one or two, and that was my income for the month."

But Mann released that video after song #4,000, reflecting that "A bunch of videos went viral. I released eight albums. In 2016 I got the Guinness World Record for most consecutive days writing a song. And I've carved out this living delivering keynotes at conferences all over the world — as well as watching all the other talks then getting up at the end to sing a song that recaps everything."

And now 13 years, 8 months, and 9 days after he first began, "I have officially written 5000 songs in 5000 days," Mann announced Friday on Twitter — sharing a special 5,000th song including singing appearances from 112 of his listeners. Mann still shares his videos free online — but for four years, Mann has also been auctioning the songs as NFTs living on the Ethereum blockchain. (By Friday night someone had bid 5 ETH -- about $1,700 -- for song #5,000. And the NFTs also confer membership status for the decentralized autonomous organization, SongADAO).

Mann also writes songs on commission on a "pay-what-you-feel" basis, and has even written songs for companies like SquareSpace and OKCupid. ("Most businesses pay between $2000 and $5000 for a song and a video.") Once Steve Jobs even opened Apple's press conference about its iPhone antennas dropping phone calls by playing one of Mann's satirical songs.

"I saw that on YouTube this morning, and couldn't help but want to share it," Steve Jobs said, according to this 2017 summation of Mann's other wacky career highlights: On day #202, he won a $500 American Express gift card in a jingle contest held by Microsoft for the launch of their Bing search engine. When TechCrunch quipped that Bing had succeeded "in finding the worst jingle ever," Mann responded with a second song — setting TechCrunch's article to music (along with a speculative interior monologue which Mann acknowledges is "completely made up.")

Mann later admitted that his jingle was the worst song he'd recorded that July. ("I wrote it in 10 minutes ...") And his worst song that October was a related song that he'd written when "I received an email from Microsoft of a video showing middle-school kids in Pennsylvania singing and dancing to my Bing song."

"I was horrified. Don't get me wrong, the kids were adorable, but Bing? What had I created!?"

But he was honored when the kids told him they'd enjoyed dancing to his song, and when they asked for one about their own school, Mann obliged.

When Steve Wozniak turned 60, Mann was ready with a musical tribute — Song #588, "That's Just Woz...."

And in January of 2011, as the world learned Jobs had taken an indefinite medical leave of absence, Mann released song #753: Get Better, Steve Jobs...

Mann's duet with Siri earned over 1,609,675 views....

On Day #810 Mann convinced his girlfriend Ivory to sing the other half of a duet called "Vegan Myths Debunked." They'd apparently been dating for a year before he started his song-a-day project. But after four more years, on Day #1,435, Mann and his girlfriend Ivory decided to break up — and released a music video about it....

And in 2014, on day 1,951, Mann's wife gave birth to his son Jupiter....

Day #2000, in June of 2014, Mann answered questions from Reddit users, answering every question with a song....

At a speaking engagement, he offered his own perspective on time: "100 days went by, a year went by, a thousand days went by. At a certain point, it just becomes a part of my life. And so that's how I stand before you now having written 2,082 songs in as many days."

As the audience applauds, he segues into his larger message, "I'm happiest when I'm making."
The article closes by quoting the song Mann wrote on Day #2001 — for a video which included part of every one of the 1,999 previous videos, in a spectacular montage called "2000 Songs in 2000 Days...."

"And I will sing until I'm all out of breath. And the color of the sun is a dark, dark red. And the governments will fall. And we'll sing until it hurts. And we'll ring forever through the universe."

The video ends with a personal message from Mann himself.

"Make something every day," it urges in big letters.

"Just start. I believe in you."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The U.S. Navy says that releasing any additional UFO videos would "harm national security" and told a government transparency website that all of the government's UFO videos are classified information. In a Freedom of Information Act request response, the Navy told government transparency site The Black Vault that any public dissemination of new UFO videos "will harm national security as it may provide adversaries valuable information regarding Department of Defense/Navy operations, vulnerabilities, and/or capabilities. No portions of the videos can be segregated for release."

The Black Vault was seeking all videos "with the designation of 'unidentified aerial phenomena.'" This is an interesting response from the Navy because, often, military agencies will issue a so-called GLOMAR response, where they neither confirm nor deny that the records (in this case videos) exist, and refuse to say anything more. In this response, the Navy is admitting that it has more videos, and also gives a rationale for releasing three previous UFO videos.

"While three UAP videos were released in the past, the facts specific to those three videos are unique in that those videos were initially released via unofficial channels before official release," it said. "Those events were discussed extensively in the public domain; in fact, major news outlets conducted specials on these events. Given the amount of information in the public domain regarding these encounters, it was possible to release the files without further damage to national security."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Prosecutors in Taiwan have indicted five men for running an operation that uploaded movies to the internet and then extorted cash settlements from the BitTorrent users who downloaded them. One of the men is former ultramarathon runner Kevin Lin, who founded a copyright consultancy company after graduating from law school in 2020. According to reports, Lin's company enticed users to download the torrents, tracked their IP addresses, and then filed copyright lawsuits in an effort to profit from cash settlements. Lin said that due to his support for the opposition government and his criticism of its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the investigation against him is politically motivated.

In May 2021, licenses were obtained from Vie Vision Pictures Co. and Applause Entertainment Ltd, which led to 18 movies being uploaded to BitTorrent networks, to tempt users into downloading them. After capturing their IP addresses, Lin's company obtained their identities from ISPs and sued them. The goal was to obtain out-of-court settlements. Since August 2021, Lin's company filed 937 lawsuits for copyright infringement. In just 25 of those cases, the company managed to "extort" settlements of $29,207, FocusTaiwan reports. In addition to Lin, several other people have also been indicted for their part in the operation.

Streaming television is going through an existential crisis, involving the people who make it and the viewers who watch it. Its revolutionary zeal has naturally faded, as that initial wave of near limitless expansion, boundless creative opportunities and vast archival choices crashes ashore, after a spate of megamergers and a drop in new subscribers. From a report: Just when streaming has finally attracted more viewers than cable or broadcast TV, its major players are engaged in a long-predicted war for subscribers, who are becoming all too aware of rising subscription prices and, both subtly and directly, a change in what programs get made and how long they stick around. Commercials could soon become more common, and services may be bundled (for one low monthly price!), already triggering visions of a future that recalls the dark days of cable.

The list of seismic rumblings in recent weeks is long, as chronicled in the Hollywood Reporter, Variety and elsewhere: Warner Bros. Discovery is cutting shows from its archives and unfinished movies from HBO Max as it prepares to merge it with its sister streaming service Discovery Plus, having promised its shareholders a $3 billion cut in costs. Faced with a plunging stock price and worrisome subscriber loss, Netflix plans to add an advertising-supported model for a lower price and may crack down on password sharing. Disney Plus, Hulu and ESPN Plus, which can all be subscribed to in a cable-esque bundle, are raising prices after taking a more than $1 billion hit in the fiscal third quarter. [...] The fear of having your show or movie deleted on an executive's whim -- a growing reality for many, including Katai -- is compounded by the fact that in the post-DVD digital age, viewers may never be able to access the shows again. Showrunners might not even have physical copies of their own work. And that's not the only downside for creators.

Today is Disney+ Day, and, as part of its perks, the company is offering Disney+ subscribers a new AR experience in conjunction with the short film "Remembering," starring and produced by "Captain Marvel" Brie Larson and directed and written by filmmaker Elijah Allan-Blitz. The eight-minute-long movie features a companion augmented reality app that allows users to scan their TV with an iOS device to watch an extension of the movie on the small screen. TechCrunch reports: In "Remembering," Larson plays a writer who forgets an idea she had when her phone rings and interrupts her thoughts. The writer's inner child -- played by the young actress Dusty Peak -- helps her recover her lost idea, which is represented as a flying and talking cluster of light, also voiced by Larson. The inner child lives in "The World of Imagination," a fantastical wonderland full of rainbows, shooting stars and dolphin-shaped clouds. The movie aims to spark a discussion about why it is essential to remember your younger self and all the creativity you once had. In doing so, it explores concepts like the origin of ideas and why adults can sometimes be reluctant to use their imaginations.

In years past, Disney has created a number of AR experiences, but this is the first AR app that connects directly to content on the Disney+ platform, the company told TechCrunch. It's an experiment in seeing if AR can serve to enhance movie storytelling even when viewers are watching in their living rooms. The "Remembering" AR component itself is designed to bring "The World of Imagination" alive to viewers by having them engage with the film using their smartphones. [...] The AR app is only available on iOS devices. There are currently no confirmed plans for the app to become available on Android devices. Viewers aren't required to download the app to watch the film and can choose to have a passive viewing experience instead.

An anonymous reader shares a report: This Saturday was dubbed "National Cinema Day," in which theaters around the US cut their ticket prices to $3 in an effort to keep bringing people back to the movie theater. And it worked! More than 8.1 million people went to the movies on Saturday, Variety found, compared to 1 million the day before and 1.7 million the day after. National Cinema Day brought the biggest crowds to theaters of any day in 2022, which leads to one inevitable conclusion: people will go to movies when movies only cost three bucks. Who knew!

One thing not needed to get the butts back in the seats? New movies. August has been a month-long movie doldrums, the result of so many pandemic shutdowns and general supply chain issues. Tom Cruise always has the answer, though: the top grosser of the day was Top Gun: Maverick, which added about $6 million to its box office haul over the long weekend. (Cruise and co. have been keeping theaters afloat all summer, actually, bringing in $698 million overall since the movie's release in May.) Spider-Man: No Way Home, which came out last Christmas, took second place in the box office. The best-performing new movie this weekend -- Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul. -- came in at #14. But the real dark horse, the shark in the water nobody saw coming, was a little flick you might have heard of called Jaws. Playing in theaters around the country, the movie made about $2.6 million over the three-day weekend.

A survey this year by Equity, the UK union for actors and other performing arts workers, found that 65 per cent of members thought AI posed a threat to employment opportunities in the sector, rising to 93 per cent of audio artists. This wasn't just an amorphous fear about the future: more than a third of members had seen job listings for work involving AI and almost a fifth had undertaken some of this work. From a report: A range of AI start-ups are developing tools for use in film and audio, from making actors look and sound younger to creating AI voices that can be used for marketing campaigns, consumer assistants or even audiobook narration. Audio is such a popular medium now that companies need lots of it, but human actors are expensive and nowhere near as flexible as an AI voice, which can be made to say anything at the push of a button. These companies typically hire actors to provide hours' worth of audio which can then be turned into a voice-for-hire.

VocaliD, for example, offers a range of voices such as "Malik" ("warm, soothing, urban") "Terri" ("educated, optimistic, sophisticated") and "AI Very British Voice" ("trustworthy, warm, calm.") Sonantic, another AI company which was just acquired by Spotify, creates voices that can laugh, shout or cry. Its voices are often used by video game companies in the production process so they can play around with different scripts. They're not as good as humans, but they don't need to be. Industry experts say no one is going to use AI to narrate the audiobook of a bestselling novel, but there is still a market to be tapped in the vast number of lower-profile books that are published or self-published every year. Audiobook.ai, for example, says it can create an audiobook in 10 minutes with 146 voices to choose from in 43 languages.

Just months after Samsung announced that it's bringing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to its TVs, now LG's doing the same. From a report:The company's new NFT marketplace, called LG Art Lab, lets you "buy, sell and enjoy high-quality digital artwork" from your TV. For now, only users in the US with an LG TV that runs webOS 5.0 or later can access the app, which is available to download from the TV's home screen. Through the portal, you can buy and sell digital works made available through LG's NFT drops. The first one of these drops is set to occur on September 22nd and features a set of metallic-looking NFTs from sculptor Barry X Ball. Since I just so happen to own a compatible LG TV, I downloaded and tried out the app for myself... and there's not much going on there yet. The app is pretty empty, and there aren't any NFTs that you can browse through and buy right now.

Amazon's new $465 million series — a prequel to the Lord of the Rings — drew more than 25 million viewers on just its first day, according to Reuters, "a record debut for a Prime Video series."

The Independent shared reactions from J. R. R. Tolkein fans, including one who said "it looks like they put absolutely all that Amazon money to use for scenes." First up, the praise. Many are agreeing that the show's costly budget, which positions it as one of the most expensive shows of all time, has paid off, with the series boasting impressive visuals.... @marklee3d added: Rings of Power has done a great job of capturing the feel of Tolkien's world. The challenge is creating a compelling story where one didn't exist before. The show's success lies in pulling that off."

Agreeing that the "spirit" of Tokkien has been captured, @suzannahtweets wrote: "I'm far less concerned about little lore details than I am about the spirit. And while I thought that Peter Jackson fundamentally misunderstood the spirit of Tolkien in ALL his movies, so far the spirit of THE RINGS OF POWER feels remarkably authentic to Tolkien...." However, others argued the show felt "goofy" and featured "terrible" dialogue, with some suggesting that "Tolkien himself" would be "ashamed" of the series.
But "by releasing the first two episodes instead of just the more predictable first, Amazon gave The Rings of Power a strong start," argues Cinemablend. Collider's senior TV editor praises the show's "stunning visuals, compelling characters, and magnetic lead," while one podcaster even called the show "a cinematic masterpiece... masterfully orchestrating a mythology that fans have been waiting for."

Deadline reports that "Critics reviews, save a scathing piece in the UK Daily Mail, have generally been positive for The Rings of Power, as measured by aggregators like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic.... As of Friday evening, the IMDb rating stood at a respectable 7.1 out of 10." And Variety adds that Amazon had already taken steps to thwart review bombers three weeks ago: Starting around the time of the launch of the distaff baseball dramedy "A League of Their Own," which premiered its full first season on Aug. 12, Amazon Prime Video quietly introduced a new 72-hour delay for all user reviews posted to Prime Video, a representative for the streamer confirmed to Variety. Each critique is then evaluated to determine whether it's genuine or a forgery created by a bot, troll or other breed of digital goblin.

The practice caught notice after the premiere of the first two episodes of "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power"... The series appears to have been review bombed — when trolls flood intentionally negative reviews for a show or film — on other sites like Rotten Tomatoes, where it has an 84% rating from professional critics, but a 37% from user-submitted reviews. "The Rings of Power" has been fending off trolls for months, especially ones who take issue with the decision to cast actors of color as elves, dwarves, harfoots and other folk of Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth. Amazon's new initiative to review its reviews, however, is designed to weed out ones that are posted in bad faith, deadening their impact.... Whether Amazon successfully beat back the tide of internet trolls for "The Rings of Power" will likely be revealed on Sunday.
Reuters reports that future episodes of the series will be released weekly until the October 14 season finale.

"Amazon plans to let the full story unfold in 50 hours over five seasons."

"Every movie, every showtime, every format — $3.00" announces the web site for America's "National Cinema Day."

UPI explains: While not all theaters will be participating in the day, most major American chains, including AMC, Regal, Cinemark and Marcus are all taking part.... In addition to major cinema chains, dozens of independent, small and art-house theaters will be offering $3 tickets as well. Vox noted that the day should be busy, considering that a large chunk of the film industry has recovered from COVID-19. The outlet reported that total domestic ticket sales this summer exceeded $3 billion — though this is still an estimated 20% less than summer 2019.
More details from CNBC: Jackie Brenneman, president of the nonprofit Cinema Foundation, tells CNBC Make It that the idea for a national movie theater holiday was in the works well before 2020, but that the Covid-19 pandemic forced those plans to be postponed.

After Regal Cinemas parent company Cineworld held a similar event in the UK in February to great success, Brenneman said planning began in earnest to replicate the promotion across the pond. "It gave a model template for how we could do something at that scale in the United States," she says....

The flat $3 price for any movie in any format is also meant to encourage moviegoers to check out premium formats such as Dolby and IMAX. "It's an opportunity to get people to try out the new technologies and see how they like it," Brenneman says....

There are thus far no plans in place to repeat National Cinema Day next year, but Brenneman says the hope is this won't be a one-off event.

Netflix is moving up the timeline for the debut of its cheaper, ad-supported plan to November -- in order to get out before the Dec. 8 launch of the Disney+ tier with advertising. From a report: In July, Netflix told investors that it was targeting the launch of the ad-supported plan "around the early part of 2023." But now, Netflix's ad-supported is set to go live Nov. 1 in multiple countries, including the U.S., Canada, U.K., France and Germany, according to industry sources who have been briefed on the streamer's plans. That would be a little over a month before Disney+ Basic, priced at $7.99/month, hits the market in the U.S.

Netflix declined to comment. "We are still in the early days of deciding how to launch a lower-priced, ad-supported tier and no decisions have been made," a company rep said. Sources confirmed the new Nov. 1 launch date, which was previously reported by the Wall Street Journal. Netflix and its exclusive ad partner, Microsoft, have requested ad buyers submit initial bids next week, with a "soft $65 CPM" -- the cost per thousand views -- meaning that the company is open to negotiating the ad rates. That's well above industry CPMs of sub-$20. Sources speculate Netflix's request for proposals from ad buyers will function as a Dutch auction, with the company looking to see what the market will bear.

Some of the most acclaimed films in animation history are finally available to rent online. GKIDS, the animation specialist distributer, has released the catalog of acclaimed Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli starting Tuesday. From a report: 22 films from the studio -- including Oscar winner "Spirited Away" and nominees such as "Howl's Moving Castle" and "When Marnie Was There" -- will be made available to rent on all major digital platforms, including Apple TV, Amazon VOD, Vudu, Google Play and Microsoft. The films will be be priced at $4.99 per title, and all will be available in HD, with most being offered in the original Japanese language as well as English dubs.

The news marks the first time that Ghibli's films have been made available via digital rental. The catalogue has been one of the pillars of GKIDS' business since the distributer acquired the North American film distribution rights to the studio's films in 2011, followed by the home media rights in 2017 -- previously, the majority of Studio Ghibli films were distributed via the Walt Disney Company. Since 2017, GKIDS has partnered with Fathom Events to host a series of limited run screenings of the studio's films throughout the year. The catalog was made available for digital purchase in 2019, and GKIDS has an exclusive deal to stream the films in the United States on HBO Max, where they have been included since 2020.

Twitter has launched a test version of Twitter Spaces today that includes podcasts, "letting you listen to full shows through curated playlists based on your interests," reports The Verge. From the report: The redesigned Spaces tab opens with Stations, topic-based playlists combining podcast episodes pulled from RSS with Twitter's social audio events and recordings. It functions like a Pandora station but for spoken word and is pretty different from the a la carte listening podcast consumers are used to on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Live and upcoming spaces are still in the tab, further down the page. The test will roll out to a random group of users across the world, initially only in English. The more users listen, the more tailored the audio Stations will become. But Twitter isn't starting from square one -- the company is relying on what it already knows about its users' interests to curate the playlists. It'll draw from the interests of people they follow, as well.

"What we're really trying to capture here is as if it's like another user recommending you something," Twitter senior product manager Evan Jones, who focuses on audio, told Hot Pod. Podcast discovery is notoriously difficult, limited either to top 100 charts, hand-picked selections on apps, or -- more often than not -- word of mouth. No platform has managed to crack it, yet. It's easy to imagine the promotional possibilities around being able to share and listen to podcasts in the same app, but it's not quite there yet. The test does not yet have a clipping capability, and listening can only happen in the Spaces tab, not on the timeline. That being said, Spaces has a clipping feature that could be applied to podcasts at some point.

Fans think 2022 has been one of the best years for blockbusters this century. Critics think it's been one of the worst. From a report: When Sony released its film adaptation of the video game "Uncharted" in February, critics were quick to tear it apart. The Wall Street Journal called it "bloodless, heartless, joyless, sexless and, with one exception, charmless." New York Magazine deemed it "curiously empty." MovieFreak.com dismissed it as "a bona fide disaster." And yet, audiences ate it up. The movie, which stars Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, opened to $44.2 million at the domestic box office and went on to gross $401.8 million worldwide. It is one of the 10 highest-grossing movies of the year. "Uncharted" also initiated one of the biggest disputes between critics and fans in modern movie history. Audiences have given higher scores than critics to all 10 of the year's biggest movies. The average audience rating for "Jurassic World Dominion" on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb is a 67. The average critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic is 34. That is a difference of 33 points. "Jurassic World Dominion" is one of three movies (along with "Uncharted" and "The Gray Man") where audiences and critics disagree by more than 30 points.

It may seem as though critics typically pan the year's biggest hits. But that is not the case. While audiences do tend to give blockbusters a higher score than critics, the average gap in their ratings is usually around 5 points. There has been at least one year where critics gave the biggest movies higher ratings than audiences. And there have been many years where the difference is negligible. In 2022? It is not so much a gap as a chasm. Audiences have given the top 10 movies an average score more than 19 points higher than critics, by far the biggest difference this century. The only two of the year's 10 biggest movies where audiences and critics are even close are "Top Gun: Maverick" and "The Batman."

United Launch Alliance has been developing a heavy-lift space vehicle since 2014 (with investment from the U.S. military) called the Vulcan Centaur.

So CNN reports that the ashes of the late Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols "will head to deep space on a Vulcan rocket." Nichols' cremated remains will be aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight, which will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Celestis, Inc., is a private company that conducts memorial spaceflights. Among the remains also aboard the flight will be the ashes of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry; his wife, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, who played various roles in the show and films; and James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in the films and TV series....

The spaceflight will travel beyond NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and into interplanetary deep space. In addition to cremated remains, capsules onboard will also carry complete human genome DNA samples from willing participants.

People can participate in the flight — by having DNA or loved ones' remains in a spaceflight container — for a price starting at $12,500, and reservations close August 31. (Celestis offers other voyages that don't travel as far, but can cost less than $5,000.) Ahead of the flight's liftoff, Celestis will host a three-day event with mission briefings, an astronaut-hosted dinner, launch site tours, an on-site memorial service and launch viewing. All events will be shown via webcast, according to Celestis.
An announcement on the flight's site invites fans of Nichelle Nichols to "share your own story about how she inspired you and it will be sent into deep space aboard the first Celestis Voyager Memorial Spaceflight — the Enterprise Flight, launching later in 2022."

Every Friday Politico interviews someone about "The Future in Five Questions". This week they interviewed Neal Stephenson (who they describe as "the sci-fi author who coined the term 'metaverse' and now a Web3 entrepreneur in his own right.")

Stephenson began by sharing his thoughts on a big idea that's underrated. Neal Stephenson: Desalination. It's an incredibly obvious, kind of simple process. Nothing is more basic than having water to drink, so it's kind of hiding in plain sight, but coupled with cheap energy from photovoltaics it's going to make big changes in the world. When you look at how much water, or a lack thereof, has shaped where people live and how people make food, the notion that we might be able to engineer ways to get fresh water in a new way could be revolutionary.

What's a technology you think is overhyped?

Stephenson: I'm going to go with an oldie: rockets. It's just a historical accident that chemical rockets became our only way of putting stuff into space, and if we had started at a different time we would have ended up doing something that works better.

One alternative would be beaming energy from the ground to vehicles, using lasers or microwaves. That seems like a doable project right now. There's nuclear propulsion, which I think is probably never going to happen at scale, because it's politically impossible, but even something as simple as constructing a very tall building or a tall tower and using that as a launch platform, or as a way to accelerate things up upward, could really change the economics of spaceflight.
Stephenson also says the book that most shaped his conception of the future was Robert Heinlein's 1958 novel Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. And the biggest surprise of 2022 was Ukraine's strong response after Russia's invasion. "Most people who are paying attention have understood that drones and other new technologies are going to change the way wars get fought, but we're seeing it unfold and mutate in real time in Ukraine.

"These guys are taking old Cold War grenades and disassembling them, and putting on homemade fuses and attaching 3D printed fins and dropping them out of consumer-grade drones, to a significant effect on the battlefield...."

In 2004 Neal Stephenson answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

Polygon reports that during a streaming event, the publisher of the Magic: the Gathering card game promised a new themed set of cards commemorating Doctor Who's 60th anniversary. But that's not their only new set: The Lord of the Rings: Tales from Middle-earth is also releasing in Q3 of 2023, but it will be a fully draftable booster set and legal in modern format of competitive play....

Individual cards portray familiar heroes and villains including Frodo, Gandalf and the Balrog. In order to capture the scale of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy battles, the set will also feature new borderless scene cards. Each has a piece of art that can stand alone, but 18 of them will come together to produce a particularly epic scene from the trilogy — such as the Battle of the Pelennor Fields from The Return of the King. The art from Tyler Jacobson, who's provided illustrations for more than 100 Magic cards and for Dungeons & Dragons books including The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, is full of small details including the Dark Tower Barad-dûr in the background.
The article points out that the game publisher has previously published crossover decks for The Walking Dead and Fortnite.

This story is for long-time Slashdot reader tezbobobo, who argued earlier this week that Slashdot's been remiss in its coverage of Magic: the Gathering news: For years I've seen Dungeons & Dragons, Sony Playstation and Nethack show up occassionally on the front page of Slashdot. So where are the rest of the nerd games?

Magic: the Gathering has one of the most loyal and active fanbases, and the creators have been churning out new and interesting cards for decades. Even as it tops the trading card pile, it's made inroads into the digital sphere, with online version in Arena and Magic Online. It's available on PC, Mac, Ipad.

Crop of expensive fantasy adaptations from Amazon and HBO Max served up at subsidised prices. Financial Times: Since 2016, the veteran US television executive John Landgraf has been predicting the arrival of "peak TV" -- the moment when the number of new scripted shows reaches an all-time high. The streaming boom has proved him wrong every time but he gamely made the prediction again this month, telling guests at the Television Critics Association press tour that 2022 would mark "the peak of the peak TV era." Landgraf, chair of Disney's FX network, conceded that he could be wrong this time too. But there is little doubt that this autumn will present audiences with a flood of some of the most expensive television ever produced. On September 2, Amazon Prime will release its adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, with an estimated budget of $465mn for the first season -- almost enough to make Top Gun: Maverick three times over.

HBO Max's House of the Dragon -- the prequel to Game of Thrones -- is reported to have cost $200mn for the season's 10 episodes. At Disney Plus, Star Wars: Andor will lead a large slate of new programmes that include a Pinocchio remake, She Hulk, and a spin-off of the Cars franchise. These shows are being served up to consumers at subsidised prices by streaming platforms making record losses. The only profitable exception is Netflix, but the industry pioneer's market value has plunged almost $200bn over the past year because of slowing subscriber growth. Its share price is languishing at a four-year low. The forthcoming crop of new programming was given the green light during a headier time, when Wall Street cheered as streaming services committed lavish sums to compete. But faith in the streaming business model -- and investor tolerance for profligate spending -- has waned as Netflix's once-blistering subscription growth has gone into reverse.

[...] On top of that, there are growing concerns that inflation will bite into discretionary spending, including on streaming services. "Everyone [in Hollywood] is throwing big dollars after big things," said Niels Juul, who was an executive producer of Martin Scorsese's Netflix film The Irishman. "But [subscribers] are inundated now to the point where they are looking at their monthly bills and saying, 'Something's got to go -- I've got $140 worth of subscriptions here!'" Even so, Tom Harrington at Enders Analysis said consumers were still getting a better deal than the streaming companies themselves. "People get through $100mn of TV in a day and say: 'what's next?' From a consumer point of view that is great. But for a video operator, it's clearly unsustainable."

The world's largest comprehensive database on Japanese anime, Anime Taizen, was opened to the public today, August 25, at 13:00 (JST). Taizen means "A book that collects all things related to the matter" in Japanese. Crunchyroll reports: Since 2015, The Association of Japanese Animations (AJA) has been promoting the "Anime NEXT_100" project to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Japanese animation. As a major initiative of the project, this database was first released on a trial basis on October 22, 2021, and after confirming functionality and operation, and making improvements and updates, it has now been released to the public. As of the end of July 2022, Anime Taizen has approximately 15,000 registered titles, mainly Japanese commercial anime works released from 1917 to the present. In addition to title name searches, the database has search functions for chronology, Japanese syllabary, keywords, etc. As a result of the research to date, the number of episodes amounts to approximately 180,000.

The rise and catastrophic fall of what was once Canada's most valuable company is set for the big screen. CBC.ca reports: Blackberry will tell the story of Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion (RIM), creators of the titular device, which for a time was the world's most popular smartphone. The film stars Canadian actor Jay Baruchel as company co-founder Mike Lazaridis and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Glenn Howerton as co-CEO Jim Balsillie. The film was adapted from the 2015 book Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry, by Sean Silcoff and Jacquie McNish. Toronto's Matt Johnson directs and also appears in the film as RIM's other co-founder, Doug Fregin. The cast also includes Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek and Michael Ironside.

RIM was founded in 1984 by business partners Lazaridis and Fregin, who had previously worked together on a failed LED sign business. After a decade of dabbling in various other technology projects, they turned their attention to the two-way communications systems that would become the foundation for the BlackBerry device.

After years of revelations about strange lights in the sky, first hand reports from Navy pilots about UFOs, and governmental investigations, Congress seems to have admitted something startling in print: it doesn't believe all UFOs are "man-made." Motherboard reports: Buried deep in a report that's an addendum to the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, a budget that governs America's clandestine services, Congress made two startling claims. The first is that "cross-domain transmedium threats to the United States national security are expanding exponentially." The second is that it wants to distinguish between UFOs that are human in origin and those that are not: "Temporary nonattributed objects, or those that are positively identified as man-made after analysis, will be passed to appropriate offices and should not be considered under the definition as unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena," the document states.

The admission is stunning chiefly because, as more information about the U.S. government's study of UFOs has become public, many politicians have stopped just short of claiming the unidentified objects were extraterrestrial or extradimensional in origin. The standard line is typically that, if UFOs exist, then they're likely advanced -- although human-made -- vehicles. Obama refused to confirm the existence of aliens but did say that people have seen a lot of strange stuff in the sky lately when asked directly on The Late Show with James Corden, for example. But now Congress seems to want to specifically distinguish between objects that are "man-made" and those that are not. The admission is stunning chiefly because, as more information about the U.S. government's study of UFOs has become public, many politicians have stopped just short of claiming the unidentified objects were extraterrestrial or extradimensional in origin.

A large question, of course, is why Congress is seemingly admitting this now, in public. After all, lawmakers are privy to classified information that the general public isn't. "It strains credulity to believe that lawmakers would include such extraordinary language in public legislation without compelling evidence," Marik von Rennenkampff, an Obama-era DoD official, said in an op-ed in The Hill about the budget. According to the op-ed, the comments were first noticed by UFO researcher Douglas Johnson. "This implies that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee believe (on a unanimous, bipartisan basis) that some UFOs have non-human origins," von Rennenkampff continued. "After all, why would Congress establish and task a powerful new office with investigating non-'man-made' UFOs if such objects did not exist?" "Make no mistake: One branch of the American government implying that UFOs have non-human origins is an explosive development."

The first fruit of YouTube's new podcast strategy has taken shape with a new "Explore" page "Podcasts." 9to5Google reports: youtube.com/podcasts is now live and is linked to on the existing Explore page alongside: Trending, Music, Movies & Shows, Live, Gaming, News, Sports, Learning, and Fashion & Beauty. It appears to have first gone live in late July, and is slowly becoming more widely available as it's not showing up for all users we checked with today. Available on desktop web and mobile, it's very rudimentary at this point. There are carousels, which can be expanded via "Show all," for "Popular episodes," "Popular podcast playlists," "Recommended," and "Popular podcast creators." The rest of this page links to various categories: Comedy, True Crime, Sports, Music, and TV & Film.

You're just browsing through regular video thumbnails rather than anything more optimized. Meanwhile, tapping one just opens the regular player on Android, and doesn't even default to the "Listening controls" available for YouTube Premium subscribers. You get large buttons and shortcuts to like, save, and quickly adjust playback speed. The podcast experience for end users will presumably get more optimized over time, while it remains to be seen what the UI in YouTube Music is going to be.