The final season of Star Trek: Picard features the return of the Klingon Worf, reports Polygon, calling it "the chance to give one of sci-fi's most beloved supporting characters something that's usually reserved only for Captains and Admirals: a glorious third act."

Interestingly, back in 1987 Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had "hoped to avoid relying on familiar alien antagonists" when creating the first Star Trek TV sequel in 1987. So after a last-minute addition, "the early development of the character was left almost entirely in the hands of Dorn, then best known for a supporting role on the lighthearted police drama CHiPs." "They really didn't have a bible for Worf at all," says Dorn of those early episodes. "In fact, one of the first things I did was, I asked the producers, 'What do you want from this guy? You've just handed me a piece of paper that says Worf on it.'" With Roddenberry's blessing, Dorn set out making the character his own, giving Worf the kind of personal investment and attachment that only an actor can provide. "I decided to make the guy the opposite of everybody else on the show. You know, everyone else, their attitudes were great, and they're out there in space, relationships are forming. And after every mission they were like, Wasn't that fantastic? I didn't say anything to anybody, I just made him this gruff and surly character on the bridge. No smiles, no joking around."

It didn't take the show's producers long to realize that Dorn's gruff, joyless performance could effectively turn any bit of throwaway dialogue into a laugh line....

Alongside his role as the show's unlikely comic relief, however, Worf developed into one of Star Trek's most complicated protagonists. Roddenberry mandated that the show's human characters had evolved beyond the sorts of interpersonal conflicts that typically drive television dramas, but Worf, an alien, was permitted to be contrarian, hot-tempered, and even malicious.... He strictly adheres to a code of honor that does not totally overlap with that of his peers.... Yet, however many times "real" Klingon conduct clashes with his values, Worf never allows this to pollute his own sense of honor. He remains unfailingly truthful, loyal, and brave. And, over the years, other Klingons take notice of this and grow to admire and emulate him....

Dorn — along with the rest of the Next Gen ensemble — has once again been called upon to revitalize a Star Trek spinoff. The third season of Star Trek: Picard reintroduces us to Worf as a wise old master, so confident in his ability to defeat his foes in combat that he rarely needs to unsheathe this weapon. Dorn has imagined the past 20 years of his character's life in detail, taking inspiration from a source not entirely disconnected from Star Trek: the films of Quentin Tarantino. Appropriately, Dorn has patterned this version of Worf after a character from a film that opens with an old Klingon proverb: Kill Bill.

"One of the characters was Pai Mei, this martial arts killer," says Dorn. "He's gone so far in the martial arts, the next step is — he can defend himself and kill with a sword, but he can also do it with his bare hands. And with that comes calm, and the ability to know that sometimes you don't have to kill. That's how he's grown in the past 20 years. Now he can dodge ray guns...."

One way or another, the actor looks back at his untouchable tenure as Starfleet's greatest warrior with warmth and appreciation.
And speaking of appreciation, this video shows Dorn out of his Klingon makeup, joining with castmember Brent Spiner to recall a fondly-remembered prank that they'd played on Patrick Stewart (who was directing the episode).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters spoke out against a European proposal to make streaming providers and other online firms pay for ISPs' network upgrades. "Some of our ISP partners have proposed taxing entertainment companies to subsidize their network infrastructure," Peters said in a speech Tuesday at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (transcript). The "tax would have an adverse effect, reducing investment in content -- hurting the creative community, hurting the attractiveness of higher-priced broadband packages, and ultimately hurting consumers," he argued. [...] "ISPs claim that these taxes would only apply to Netflix. But this will inevitably change over time as broadcasters shift from linear to streaming," Peters said at MWC. Sandvine data suggests that nearly half of global Internet traffic is sent by Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, Netflix, and Microsoft. Online video accounts for 65 percent of all traffic, and Netflix recently passed YouTube as the top video-traffic generator.

Peters cited Nielsen data showing that "Netflix accounts for under 10 percent of total TV time" in the US and UK while "traditional local broadcasters account for over half of all TV time." Live sports account for much of that. "As broadcasters continue the shift away from linear to streaming, they will start to generate significant amounts of Internet traffic too -- even more than streamers today based on the current scope and scale of their audiences," Peters said. "Broadband customers, who drive this increased usage, already pay for the development of the network through their subscription fees. Requiring entertainment companies -- both streamers and broadcasters -- to pay more on top would mean ISPs effectively charging twice for the same infrastructure." Telcos that receive new payments wouldn't be expected to lower the prices charged to home Internet users, Peters said. "As the consumer group BEUC has pointed out, there is no suggestion these levies would be passed onto consumers in the form of 'lower prices or better infrastructure,'" he said.

Peters said Netflix's "operating margins are significantly lower than either British Telecom or Deutsche Telekom. So we could just as easily argue that network operators should compensate entertainment companies for the cost of our content -- exactly as happened under the old pay-TV model." While telcos claim companies like Netflix don't pay their "fair share," Peters pointed out that Netflix has spent a lot building its own network that reduces the amount of data sent over traditional telecom networks. "We've spent over $1 billion on Open Connect, our own content delivery network, which we offer for free to ISPs," he said. "This includes 18,000 servers with Netflix content distributed across 6,000 locations and 175 countries. So when our members press play, instead of the film or TV show being streamed from halfway around the world, it's streamed from around the corner -- increasing efficiency for operators while also ensuring a high-quality, no-lag experience for consumers." Peters also touted Netflix's encoding technology that cut bit rates in half between 2015 and 2020. While Internet traffic has increased about 30 percent a year, "ISPs have managed this increased consumer usage efficiently while their costs have remained stable," Peters said. "Regulators have highlighted this, too, calling out that infrastructure costs are not sensitive to traffic and that growing consumption will be offset by efficiency gains."

A man who rented out servers configured for BitTorrent file-sharing use has been handed a three-month suspended sentence in Denmark. Known as 'seedboxes', these pre-configured servers are not illegal per se, but when customers used the devices to break copyright law on known pirate sites, rightsholders held the server provider liable. TorrentFreak reports: Local anti-piracy group Rights Alliance (Rettigheds Alliancen) mitigates all types of piracy but for the past few years, has maintained a keen focus on torrent sites. Working in partnership with the Danish government's SOIK IP-Task Force, Rights Alliance forced several sites to close down and successfully prosecuted site operators, staff members, and users who uploaded content to those sites. In 2021, Rights Alliance targeted specialized servers that not only supply content to torrent sites but also play a role in boosting download times while improving security.

In 2021, news broke that six people had been arrested in Denmark due to their alleged connections to several local torrent sites. Among them was Kasper Nielsen of internet services company HNielsen Networks, a supplier of servers under various brands that could be configured for 'seedbox' purposes. Available information indicated that the servers had been used by an unknown number of users to share content on private torrent sites ShareUniversity, Superbits and DanishBytes. [...] When Rights Alliance filed its criminal complaint against HNielsen Networks, the anti-piracy group referenced the landmark Filmspeler case which involved the sale of piracy-configured media players.

According to statements published by Rights Alliance and NSK (Saerlig Kriminalitet) Denmark's Special Crime Unit, Nielsen was convicted yesterday for selling seedboxes in the knowledge they were being used by others to share movies, TV shows, eBooks and other content, without permission from rightsholders. "On February 28, the Court in Aalborg ruled against the Danish owner behind a seedbox company for, in the period November 2020 to May 2021, having sold seedboxes and server capacity to an unknown number of people, knowing that they were used for illegal sharing of no less than 3,838 copyright-protected works on the Danish and Nordic file sharing services ShareUniversity, Superbits and DanishBytes," Rights Alliance reports. Nielsen was handed a three-month conditional (suspended) sentence and a confiscation order for DKK 300,000 (around $42,600), the amount users had paid his company to access the seedbox servers. The 35-year-old must also pay compensation of DKK 298,660 to Rights Alliance. "Providers of seedboxes have a responsibility to ensure that their services are not used for illegal uploading and downloading of copyrighted content, which the Rights Alliance can clearly see that they are doing," says Maria Fredenslund, Director of Rights Alliance. "Therefore, this case helps to send a signal to other providers that you cannot deliberately sell services to the illegal market."

Since Neilsen took a plea deal at an early stage, none of the claims made by Rights Alliance were needed to be proven in court. "The 3,838 figure and any evidence related to 'knowledge' of infringement carried out by seedbox customers on the sites, were accepted as true," reports TorrentFreak.

Nvidia is releasing new GPU drivers today that will upscale old blurry web videos on RTX 30- and 40-series cards. The Verge reports: RTX Video Super Resolution is a new AI upscaling technology from Nvidia that works inside Chrome or Edge to improve any video in a browser by sharpening the edges of objects and reducing video artifacts. Nvidia will support videos between 360p and 1440p up to 144Hz in frame rate and upscale all the way up to 4K resolution.

This impressive 4K upscaling has previously only been available on Nvidia's Shield TV, but recent advances to the Chromium engine have allowed Nvidia to bring this to its latest RTX 30- and 40-series cards. As this works on any web video, you could use it to upscale content from Twitch or even streaming apps like Netflix where you typically have to pay extra for 4K streams.

After widely rolling out an Energy Saver mode, Google has made four optimizations to Chrome for Mac that allows the browser to match the battery life you get when using Safari. 9to5Google reports: Google conducted testing on a MacBook Pro (13", M2, 2022 with 8 GB RAM running macOS Ventura 13.2.1) with Chrome 110.0.5481.100 in February of 2023. It showed that you can "browse for 17 hours or watch YouTube for 18 hours." For comparison, Apple touts up to 17 hours of wireless web browsing, and up to 20 hours Apple TV app movie playback. Meanwhile, Google uses this open-source benchmarking suite to run tests, and says that users will also "see performance gains on older models." Four changes from waking the CPU less often to tuning memory compression are specifically credited:

- Eliminating unnecessary redraws: "We navigated on real-world sites with a bot and identified Document Object Model (DOM) change patterns that don't affect pixels on the screen. We modified Chrome to detect those early and bypass the unnecessary style, layout, paint, raster and gpu steps. We implemented similar optimizations for changes to the Chrome UI."
- Fine tuning iframes: "...we fine-tuned the garbage collection and memory compression heuristics for recently created iframes. This results in less energy consumed to reduce short-term memory usage (without impact on long-term memory usage)."
- Tweaking timers: "...Javascript timers still drive a large proportion of a Web page's power consumption. As a result, we tweaked the way they fire in Chrome to let the CPU wake up less often. Similarly, we identified opportunities to cancel internal timers when they're no longer needed, reducing the number of times that the CPU is woken up."
- Streamlining data structures: "We identified data structures in which there were frequent accesses with the same key and optimized their access pattern."

The Motion Picture Association (MPA) issued a DMCA notice to a GitHub repo that contained a playlist that let viewers watch Pluto TVs streams on their own apps, such as VLC, MPV, and Tvheadend. From a report: The move was first noticed by TorrentFreak, and GitHub has complied and removed the repo, which ultimately does nothing. If you still have a tiny text file, you can still do exactly what the MPA tried to stop. Pluto TV, for those who do not watch it, is a service owned by Paramount that allows users to legally stream movies and TV shows free of charge on many devices. They have a mobile app, apps for Xbox and PlayStation, smart TVs, and dongles. Users do not even need to sign up to use it. In turn, Pluto's business model is predicated on serving ads and tracking user behavior. It's part of a newer breed of streaming product called free ad-supported television, or FAST. The GitHub repo in question contained M3U playlists to watch Pluto TV's content via an app like VLC. The repo basically took links that were already available and gathered them in one place. It should be noted that M3U files aren't torrent files; it's just a simple playlist file that can direct to local files and web sources.

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Lenovo demoed a laptop and smartphone with rollable screens that "can gradually expand to offer more screen real-estate, rather than needing to be completely unfolded like books," writes Jon Porter from The Verge. These are early proof of concept devices that don't have any public release dates as of yet. From the report: Before we get into the concept laptop's signature feature, it's worth pointing out just how unassuming the device looks before its screen unrolls. Lenovo had the device sitting alongside its other laptops in a conference suite, and not a single one of the dozen-or-so journalists in attendance clocked that it was anything other than a standard ThinkPad. In its unextended form, it's got a regular looking 12.7-inch display with a 4:3 aspect ratio. That all changes with a flip of a small switch on the right of the chassis, at which point you can hear some motors whirring and the screen extends upwards. That switch causes a couple of motors in the laptop to spring into action, pulling the screen out from underneath the laptop's keyboard to hoist it up more or less vertically in front of you. It's an admittedly slow process on this concept device (from our footage it seems to take a little over ten seconds to fully extend) but eventually you're left with an almost square 15.3-inch display with an 8:9 aspect ratio. The device brings to mind LG's fancy (and eye-wateringly expensive) rollable TV that's designed to roll away when you're not using it. Only in Lenovo's case the screen is rolling down into the laptop's keyboard rather than a small box, and it also can't roll away entirely. Once fully extended, Lenovo's laptop screen has a small crease where its screen originally bent underneath the keyboard. But again -- it's a prototype.

Lenovo's other rollable device it's demoing at MWC is a Motorola smartphone. We've seen numerous companies including Samsung Display, Oppo, TCL, and even LG (RIP) show off rollable concept devices in various stages of development over the years, but we're yet to see the technology break through in a consumer device. Like a foldable, the idea is that a rollable smartphone can be small when you need it to be portable, and big when you need more screen to get the job at hand done. Lenovo's phone -- which it's calling the Motorola rollable smartphone concept -- is all about taking a small square of a display and making it longer. It's almost like a foldable flip phone, but without a secondary cover display because it's the same screen the entire time. When all neatly rolled up, Lenovo's Motorola rollable offers a 5-inch display with a 15:9 aspect ratio. Then, with a small double tap of a side button, the screen unfurls to give you a remarkably tall 6.5-inch display with a 22:9 aspect ratio. [...] "In 2019, it seemed like foldable phones were about to become the next big thing in the world of smartphones," writes Porter, in closing. "But four years later, it feels like we're still waiting for this future to become a mainstream reality. Lenovo would be the first to admit that its rollable concept devices are far from ready for prime time, but they offer a compelling argument for an alternative, rollable future."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Since Thursday morning, Dish Network has been experiencing a major outage that's taken down the company's main websites, apps, and customer support systems, and employees tell The Verge it's not clear what's going on inside the company. The company's Dish.com website is completely blank save for a notice apologizing for "any disruptions you may be having" while promising that "teams are working hard to restore systems as soon as possible." The Boost Mobile and Boost Infinite sites display a similar message. When we called each brand's customer support lines, there were no humans on the other end -- each call automatically hung up after delivering a recorded message about the outage.

In an ironic twist, the outage started around the time that Dish was set to release its earnings for Q4 and fiscal year 2022. CEO Erik Carlson addressed it during the company's earnings call, saying the company was experiencing an "internal outage that's continuing to affect our internal servers and IT telephony." While Carlson claimed that Dish, Sling, and the company's wireless networks were operating normally, he admitted that "internal communications, customer care functions, Internet sites" were knocked out. Internally, frontline employees have been kept in the dark about what's going on. Two sources tell The Verge that they are being told to stand by for information from their leadership teams, which haven't yet been forthcoming. They say it hasn't even been made clear whether they'll be paid. Employees have also been told that they won't be able to connect to their VPN, keeping remote workers from logging in to work.

Despite Carlson's comments that Dish's services should be working normally, Downdetector shows an increase in reports of issues using Dish Network's services, which include satellite TV and Boost Mobile's wireless network. Customers are reporting on social media that they're unable to activate new equipment or SIM cards received from the company, and alleged technicians say they can't complete installs and upgrades for customers. Customers have also said that the outage is preventing them from paying their bills. Some of the company's sites, like dishwireless.com and launch.5gmobilegenesis.com, are currently completely down and don't even display an error message. The good news is that the outage doesn't appear to be the result of a cyberattack, according to The Desk, though Dish likely hasn't concluded its investigation yet.

Kaare Eriksen writes via Variety: As the Digital Entertainment Group, the trade association for home entertainment, tells it, business is better than ever: The U.S. consumer spend on home entertainment grew 11.4% year over year in 2022, totaling nearly $37 billion. Of course, success depends on how you define "home entertainment": Essentially none of that growth came courtesy of anything other than streaming, let alone DVD sales of any kind. When you remove SVOD from the equation, the truth is tough but unsurprising -- outside of theaters, people are increasingly losing the urge to pay for individual films or TV series, with all rentals and physical sales continuing to decline on an annual basis.

One apparent exception to this is digital sales made across platforms like Amazon, Apple TV and Vudu. Digital sell-through commands the largest share of home entertainment spend after streaming and increased ever so slightly in 2022. That said, it's important to remember that the scaling back of COVID restrictions throughout 2021 meant 2022 was the first (relatively) normal year at the box office since the pandemic started. As a result, more films from major studios were released in theaters and subsequently hit their digital windows sooner, per a bevy of deals Hollywood has worked out with exhibitors. But the key word there is films. TV is a different situation.

Between February of last year and May 2023, just over 100 TV releases from the major studios alongside AMC Networks and Lionsgate will have received Blu-ray or 4K Ultra HD releases in the U.S. market. From a studio-by-studio standpoint, there is little to no consistency as to the strategy behind these physical releases. The most staggering factor is how Paramount alone accounts for well over a third of these releases. [...] What's strange is Paramount's sheer commitment to physical releases for its more obscure series spread across the TV landscape. Just about everything originating from Paramount Pictures has at least a Blu-ray release. "Other than those Paramount releases, the only TV series that got 4K physical editions over the last 12 months are 'House of the Dragon' and the final season of 'Westworld,'" adds Variety. "By contrast, Disney has practically parted ways with physical TV releases altogether. To date, the only Disney+ series that has received a Blu-ray release is Peter Jackson's 'The Beatles: Get Back' docuseries." The same is true for Hulu.

Netflix has reduced the cost of its service in more than three dozen countries in recent weeks, as it tries to appeal to customers around the world who have an ever-growing list of streaming options. From a report: The streaming company's recent price cuts span Middle Eastern countries including Yemen, Jordan, Libya and Iran; sub-Saharan African markets including Kenya; and European countries such as Croatia, Slovenia and Bulgaria. In Latin America, nations including Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Venezuela have seen reductions in subscription costs, as have parts of Asia including Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. The cuts apply to certain tiers of Netflix in those markets -- in some cases halving the cost of a subscription.

As recently as last month, Netflix executives talked about raising -- not lowering -- prices. In a January earnings call, co-Chief Executive Greg Peters said the company is looking for places where they can afford to raise prices, which feeds continued content investments. "We think of ourselves as a non-substitutable good," Mr. Peters said. Netflix also has an opportunity to add new subscribers in markets where it doesn't currently have a large share, he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A new paper in Annals of Botany indicates that watching nature documentaries makes people more interested in plants, potentially provoking an involvement in botany and ecology. [T]he researchers investigated whether nature documentaries can promote plant awareness, which may ultimately increase audience engagement with plant conservation programs. They focused on "Green Planet," a 2022 BBC documentary narrated by Sir David Attenborough. The show, watched by nearly 5 million people in the United Kingdom, featured a diversity of plant species, highlighting vegetation from tropical rainforests, aquatic environments, seasonal lands, deserts, and urban spaces. The program also addressed environmental concerns directly, examining the dangers of invasive monocultures and deforestation.

The researchers measured whether "Green Planet" drove interest in the plants by exploring people's online behavior around the time of the broadcast. First, they noted the species that appeared on the show and the time each one appeared on-screen. Then they extracted Google Trends and Wikipedia page hits for those same species before and after the episodes of the documentary aired. The researchers here found a substantial effect of "Green Planet" on viewers' awareness and interest in the portrayed plant species. Some 28.1% of search terms representing plants mentioned in the BBC documentary had peak popularity in the UK, measured using Google Trends, the week after the broadcast of the relevant episode. Wikipedia data showed this as well. Almost a third (31.3%) of the Wikipedia pages related to plants mentioned in "Green Planet" showed increased visits the week after the broadcast. The investigators also note that people were more likely to do online searches for plants that enjoyed more screen time on "Green Planet." "I think that increasing public awareness of plants is essential and fascinating," said the paper's lead author, Joanna Kacprzyk. "In this study, we show that nature documentaries can increase plant awareness among the audience. Our results also suggest that the viewers found certain plant species particularly captivating. These plants could be used for promoting plant conservation efforts and counteracting the alarming loss of plant biodiversity."

Apple has released the first trailer for its movie Tetris, which tells the extraordinary true story of the struggle between Western publishers, Nintendo, and the Soviet Union itself for the rights to Alexey Pajitnov's classic puzzle game. Polygon reports: Taron Egerton plays Henk Rogers, the gaming entrepreneur who was instrumental in discovering Tetris and securing the console gaming rights, thus enabling its release on Nintendo's then-revolutionary Game Boy handheld. To do so, he had to negotiate directly with the Soviet regime, since Communist law dictated that the game belonged to the people of the Soviet Union (read: the government) rather than Pajitnov himself. All sorts of Cold War skullduggery ensued.

It's an incredible tale that forms the centerpiece of David Sheff's classic book Game Over, which chronicles Nintendo's early rise. The film, directed by Jon S. Baird, seems to take a pretty broad approach to the material, drenching it in '80s pop needle drops, car chases (for some reason), retro game effects reminiscent of the dreadful Adam Sandler vehicle Pixels, and Egerton tearing up as he describes "the perfect game." [...] Tetris will stream on Apple TV Plus from March 31.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: A drug aimed at treating eyes immobilized sperm and prevented pregnancy in mice, encouraging researchers that it might work as a contraceptive for men. Injected into male mice, the drug was 100% effective in preventing pregnancy for 2 1/2 hours and about 91% effective for up to 3 1/2 hours, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications. The male mice were fertile after a day, the study found. The new approach is appealing for how quickly the contraceptive acts. The researchers said they would test the drug in other animals and aim for human trials in the coming years.

The drug presented in Tuesday's study acts by deactivating an enzyme in mice and men that make sperm swim. "It's like your on-switch on your TV," said Jochen Buck, a pharmacologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, an author of the study. When the researchers added the drug to human and mice sperm in a dish, the cells stopped moving temporarily. Lower doses of the drug resulted in progressively more mobile sperm cells, Dr. Buck said. The drug took about 15 minutes to take effect. Male mice injected with the drug didn't alter their mating behavior. Allowed to mate in the 2.5 hours after injection, none of 52 pairs of mice produced offspring. A third of mice partners in a control group of 50 had pregnancies. Mice given the drug were later able to father healthy pups, the study said.

Podcasting has emerged out of years of rapid growth and a pandemic boom to face an identity crisis as its ecosystem contracts, advertisement slows and the medium eases into maturity. From a report: Podcasts changed the listening habits of millions of people over the last decade, but the once-groundbreaking format has settled into a more precarious middle age. Fewer people are creating new shows, networks are having difficulties recouping investments, and longtime podcasters are on the hunt for ways to keep their shows sustainable.

The podcast ad market has not grown as quickly as many hoped. Its $1.5 billion size in 2022 was minuscule compared to the nearly $70 billion spent on TV ads last year. Podcast search engine Listen Notes' updated 2022 stats showed an 80% drop in new podcasts created last year. A December report from Insider Intelligence also shows listener growth in 2022 shrank to only 5% after years of double-digit percentage growth. Additionally, data from Edison released in December found declines for the first time in monthly and weekly U.S. listening habits. These shrinking numbers can, in part, be chalked up to a rebound, after the pandemic inspired a boom in new shows and gave many people more time to listen.

Despite the absence of cryptocurrency ads, this year's Super Bowl still managed some geek-friendly advertisements. There was even a riff on "the classic intro from the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, the live-action series that ran from 1989-1991," according to Kotaku: the infamous Mario Rap, which advertised Mario's plumbing business (and in its 2023 version featured the URL for a website).

[T]hat website is indeed up and running, and is everything you would hope it would be from a struggling small business servicing the Brooklyn and Queens areas. There's excessive animation, broken image links, a careers page (still under construction, sadly) and even a novelty mouse cursor.
Kotaku's article includes both versions of the rap, along with reactions from Twitter. (Apparently the phone number in the advertisement really works).

There were also several ads from major tech companies. Google purchased a long ad touting their Pixel phone's ability to remove people from photos (starring Amy Schumer, Doja Cat, and Giannis Antetokounmpo), while Workday drew attention to its enterprise-grade finance and HR software with an ad in which actual rock stars like Ozzy Osbourne, Joan Jett, blues player Gary Clark and members of KISS all urged the software's corporate users to stop calling themselves "rock stars".

Other tech-company ads aired from E*Trade, SquareSpace, and a star-studded Uber One ad in which rapper Puff Daddy auditions singers for their new jingle.

There were also the obligatory celebrity reunions — like Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart, or the actors from Breaking Bad. But for comic book geeks, a trailer for D.C.'s new movie The Flash included a surprise appearance by Batman — play by both Ben Affleck and by a 71-year-old Michael Keaton, a full 34 years after Keaton played the caped crusader in Tim Burton's 1989 movie Batman. "Worlds collide in The Flash when Barry uses his superpowers to travel back in time in order to change the events of the past," according to a press release cited by People. James Gunn, director of Guardians of the Galaxy and new co-CEO of DC Studios, recently said, according to Deadline, that The Flash "is probably one of the greatest superhero movies ever made." He added that the film's storyline "resets everything" for the franchise.
The last Blockbuster video rental store in America played its own advertising prank during the Super Bowl. They announced their own ad which could only be viewed on their Instagram feed during halftime -- or in person at their store in Bend, Oregon. But, as CNN points out, "the store is also renting VHS copies of it for $2."

And for those geeks concerned about the drawbacks of climate change-fighting vehicles, RAM trucks ran an ad about "Premature Electrification" — for consumers excited about electric vehicles but "lacking the confidence about getting and being able to keep a charge." (Although a disclaimer printed at the bottom of the ad warned "Get excited, but not too excited. Pre-production model shown. Availability in the U.S. expected late 2024. Range lengthening technology to come later.")

A Spider-Man Noir live-action series is in the works at Amazon, Variety has learned exclusively. From the report: The untitled series will follow an older, grizzled superhero in 1930s New York City. An individual with knowledge of the project says that the show will be set in its own universe and the main character will not be Peter Parker. [...] Oren Uziel will serve as writer and executive producer on the Spider-Man Noir show. Uziel developed the show along with "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and former Sony boss Amy Pascal, who all executive produce. Pascal executive produces via Pascal Pictures. Sony Pictures Television is the studio, with Lord and Miller currently under an overall deal there.

The Spider-Man Noir comics originally debuted in 2009 as part of the Marvel Noir universe. That version of the iconic superhero lives in New York during the Great Depression. He is bitten by a spider hidden inside a stolen artifact, causing him to have visions of a spider-god who grants him superpowers. The character has previously appeared onscreen in the animated series "Ultimate Spider-Man" with Milo Ventimiglia providing his voice, while Nicolas Cage voiced the character in "Into the Spider-Verse." The Amazon show will be the first live-action iteration of Spider-Man Noir.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Many people in the United States would like to control the information that companies can learn about them online. Yet when presented with a series of true-or-false questions about how digital devices and services track users, most Americans struggled to answer them, according to a report published (PDF) on Tuesday by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. The report analyzed the results of a data privacy survey that included more than 2,000 adults in the United States. Very few of the respondents said they trusted the way online services handled their personal data. The survey also tested people's knowledge about how apps, websites and digital devices may amass and disclose information about people's health, TV-viewing habits and doorbell camera videos. Although many understood how companies can track their emails and website visits, a majority seemed unaware that there are only limited federal protections for the kinds of personal data that online services can collect about consumers.

Seventy-seven percent of the participants got nine or fewer of the 17 true-or-false questions right, amounting to an F grade, the report said. Only one person received an A grade, for correctly answering 16 of the questions. No one answered all of them correctly. Seventy-nine percent of survey respondents said they had "little control over what marketers" could learn about them online, while 73 percent said they did not have "the time to keep up with ways to control the information that companies" had about them. "The big takeaway here is that consent is broken, totally broken,"Joseph Turow, a media studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania who was the lead author of the report, said in an interview. "The overarching idea that consent, either implicit or explicit, is the solution to this sea of data gathering is totally misguided -- and that's the bottom line."

The survey results challenge a data-for-services trade-off argument that the tech industry has long used to justify consumer tracking and to forestall government limits on it: Consumers may freely use a host of convenient digital tools -- as long as they agree to allow apps, sites, ad technology and marketing analytics firms to track their online activities and employ their personal information. But the new report suggests that many Americans aren't buying into the industry bargain. Sixty-eight percent of respondents said they didn't think it was fair that a store could monitor their online activity if they logged into the retailer's Wi-Fi. And 61 percent indicated they thought it was unacceptable for a store to use their personal information to improve the services they received from the store. Only a small minority -- 18 percent -- said they did not care what companies learned about them online. "When faced with technologies that are increasingly critical for navigating modern life, users often lack a real set of alternatives and cannot reasonably forgo using these tools," Lina M. Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said in a speech (PDF) last year.

In the talk, Ms. Khan proposed a "type of new paradigm" that could impose "substantive limits" on consumer tracking.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Walt Disney Co. is exploring more licensing of its films and television series to rival media outlets as pressure grows to curb the losses in its streaming TV business. The Burbank, California-based entertainment giant is seeking to earn more cash from its content library, according to people familiar with the discussions who asked not to be identified as the talks are private. The move would represent a shift in strategy, as Disney has in recent years tried to keep much of its original programming exclusively on its Disney+ and Hulu streaming services. [CEO Bob Iger], 71, will share more of his plans when the company reports financial results on Feb. 8, but he has already taken steps to reverse decisions made by his predecessor. He offered free photos and more lower-price tickets to theme-park guests irked by rising fees.

Although Disney already licenses some titles to other platforms including Amazon's Prime streaming service, it began to hoard content with the launch of Disney+ in 2019. Disney curtailed licensing of its own programs to third parties to boost that service. A deal that had Disney films running on Netflix was phased out, and the company touted how much of its new programming came from its own in-house studios. Wall Street cheered at the time because it meant the company was entirely focused on building out the streaming business. The shift was costly, however, as Disney surrendered billions of dollars from home video sales and licensing deals with other networks.

A billionaire cryptocurrency evangelist may have gotten a tougher reception than he expected when proposing widespread adoption of Bitcoin to a bankrupt country. From a report: Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper was in Sri Lanka to shoot an episode of his "Meet the Drapers" TV show with local entrepreneurs, and met President Ranil Wickremesinghe on Tuesday to proselytize the adoption of cryptocurrency. He journeyed to the central bank the next day with the same pitch -- but embattled Governor Nandalal Weerasinghe, who's still working to calm financial mayhem, was having none of it. "I come to the Central Bank with decentralized currency," proclaimed Draper, dressed in a Bitcoin tie for the meeting that took place in a teak-paneled room overlooking the sea. "We don't accept," Weerasinghe said, taking another sip of fizzy ginger beer.

During the meeting, Draper several times referred to what he described as Sri Lanka's reputation for corruption and argued cryptocurrency was one solution. Colombo could avert graft by keeping perfect records after adopting Bitcoin, he argued. "Have you seen Sri Lanka in the news? It's known as the corruption capital," Draper said. "A country known for corruption will be able to keep perfect records with the adoption of Bitcoin." Sri Lanka's topmost monetary official countered: "Adoption of 100% Bitcoin won't be a Sri Lanka reality ever." [...] He kept trying with Weerasinghe. "Does the administration have the guts to do it?" he asked. "What's the advantage of having your own currency?" Weerasinghe said other technologies could efficiently distribute financial services to foster inclusion and disburse electronic welfare payments, and noted that a country without its own currency couldn't have monetary-policy independence. "We don't want to make the crisis worse by introducing Bitcoin," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Four pixelated cartoon characters talk to each other about coffee, Amazon deliveries, and veganism as they stand apart in a decorated NYC apartment. There is one woman and three men who seem to be the animated versions of Seinfeld's main characters, Elaine, Jerry, George, and Kramer. But unlike Seinfeld, these characters are set in a modern-era NYC, and their voices and bodies look and sound robotic. That's because "Nothing, Forever" is a live-streaming show that's almost entirely generated by algorithms. It's been streaming non-stop on Twitch since December 14. [...] Skyler Hartle, the co-creator of "Nothing, Forever," told Motherboard that the show was created as a parody to Seinfeld. "The actual impetus for this was it originally started its life as this weird, very, off-center kind of nonsensical, surreal art project," Hartle said. "But then we kind of worked over the years to bring it to this new place. And then, of course, generative media and generative AI just kind of took off in a crazy way over the past couple of years."

Hartle and his co-creator, Brian Habersberger, used a combination of machine learning, generative algorithms, and cloud services to build the show. Hartle told Motherboard that the dialogue is powered by OpenAI's GPT-3 language model and that there is very little human moderation of the stream, outside of GPT-3's built-in moderation filters. "Aside from the artwork and the laugh track you'll hear, everything else is generative, including: dialogue, speech, direction (camera cuts, character focus, shot length, scene length, etc), character movement, and music," one of the creators wrote in a Reddit comment. [...] Hartle also said that unlike most television shows, "Nothing, Forever" is able to change based on people's feedback that is received through the Twitch stream chat. "The show can effectively change and the narrative actually evolves based on the audience. One of the major factors that we're thinking about is how do we get people involved in crafting the narrative so it becomes their own," he said. "As generative media gets better, we have this notion that at any point, you're gonna be able to turn on the future equivalent of Netflix and watch a show perpetually, nonstop as much as you want. You don't just have seven seasons of a show, you have seven hundred, or infinite seasons of a show that has fresh content whenever you want it. And so that became one of our grounding pillars," Hartle said. "Our grounding principle was, can we create a show that can generate entertaining content forever? Because that's truly where we see the future emerging towards. Our goal with the next iterations or next shows that we release is to actually trade a show that is like Netflix-level quality."