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."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Silicon Valley startup Sanas has a lofty goal: to make call center workers sound white and American, no matter the country they're from. And that's just the beginning of their grand plan. The voice tech company's website features a photo of a smiling man, cropped so you only see a disembodied, toothy grin. Underneath the anonymous mouth, a demo invites you to "Hear the Magic" of Sanas. As you press play, you hear one side of a simulated conversation; a man with an Indian accent reads a familiarly tortured call center script about a missing package. Click the "With Sanas" slider, and the voice transforms instantly into something slightly robotic, a tad uncanny and unmistakably white. Since its August 2021 launch, Sanas has been showered with funding by investors. Amid a trying time for the tech industry, the "accent translation" company -- founded by three former Stanford students, Maxim Serebryakov, Shawn Zhang and Andres Perez Soderi -- snagged a $32 million Series A funding round in June 2022, which they claim is the largest ever for a speech technology service. One press release boasts that investors who tried the service called it "magical."

Eventually, the company wants to expand beyond call centers by changing accents on consumer video and audio calls; Sanas has even mentioned an interest in film and TV. New voices are in the works, too: Someday, workers' accents may be "translated" into a Southern drawl for a caller in Louisville, or a Midwestern lilt for someone in Cleveland, instead of the more generic Standard American English, colloquially known as white person voice. "We don't want to say that accents are a problem because you have one," Sanas president Marty Sarim told SFGATE. "They're only a problem because they cause bias and they cause misunderstandings." The tacit promise of Sanas seems to be that callers will be more polite -- and more amenable to being helped -- if they think the person on the other end is more like them.

Adani Group said Tuesday it will buy a majority stake in NDTV, a high-profile Indian news house, in an apparent hostile takeover as the billionaire Gautam Adani expands his media ambitions. From a report: AMG Media Networks, Adani's unit, will indirectly purchase a 29.18% stake in New Delhi Television and launch an open offer to buy another 26% stake, the Indian conglomerate said. The open offer is expected to be worth $61.77 million, some 30% below the current market price. Founded three decades ago, NDTV is one of India's most popular news organizations and a rare property that has consistently taken a critical view of the ruling government's efforts. The New Delhi-headquartered business, which operates three TV news channels and maintains a large presence on the web, said Tuesday that neither the firm nor its founders held any conversation, gave consent or input for the majority stake acquisition.

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.

The ubiquitous device is becoming a shop window for the firm's services. From a report: As it dreams up more gadgets to sell to more people, however, Apple is employing another strategy in parallel. The company has so far put 1.8bn devices in the pockets and on the desks of some of the world's most affluent consumers. Now it is selling access to those customers to other companies, and persuading those who own its devices to sign up to its own subscription services. As Luca Maestri, Apple's chief financial officer, said on a recent earnings call, the Apple devices in circulation represent "a big engine for our services business." The strategy is picking up speed. Last year services brought in $68bn in revenue, or 19% of Apple's total. That is double the share in 2015. In the latest quarter services' share was even higher, at 24%. Apple doesn't break down where the money comes from, but the biggest chunk is reckoned to be fees from its app store, which amounted to perhaps $25bn last year, according to Sensor Tower, a data provider.

The next-biggest part is probably the payment from Google for the right to be Apple devices' default search engine. This was $10bn in 2020; analysts believe the going rate now is nearer $20bn. Apple's fast-growing advertising business -- mainly selling search ads in its app store -- will bring in nearly $7bn this year, reckons eMarketer, another research firm. Most of the rest comes from a range of subscription services: iCloud storage, Apple Music and Apple Care insurance are probably the biggest, estimates Morgan Stanley, an investment bank. More recent ventures like Apple tv+, Apple Fitness, Apple Arcade and Apple Pay make up the rest. New services keep popping up. Last November Apple launched a subscription product for small companies called Apple Business Essentials, offering tech support, device management and so on. In June it announced a "buy now, pay later" service. The company claims a total of 860m active paid subscriptions, nearly a quarter more than it had a year ago.

"The very first results from the James Webb Space Telescope seem to indicate that massive, luminous galaxies had already formed within the first 250 million years after the Big Bang," reports Sky and Telescope.

"If confirmed, this would seriously challenge current cosmological thinking." Shortly after NASA published Webb's first batch of scientific data, the astronomical preprint server arXiv was flooded with papers claiming the detection of galaxies that are so remote that their light took some 13.5 billion years to reach us. Many of these appear to be more massive than the standard cosmological model that describes the universe's composition and evolution. "It worries me slightly that we find these monsters in the first few images," says cosmologist Richard Ellis (University College London)....

Before the community accepts these claims, the reported redshifts have to be confirmed spectroscopically. Mark McCaughrean, the senior science adviser of the European Space Agency (a major partner on Webb) commented on Twitter: "I'm sure some of them will be [confirmed], but I'm equally sure they won't all be. [...] It does all feel a little like a sugar rush at the moment."

Ellis agrees: "It's one thing to put a paper on arXiv," he says, "but it's quite something else to turn it into a lasting article in a peer-reviewed journal."
Since 1991, science writer Eric Lerner has been arguing that the Big Bang never happened. Now 75 years old, he writes: In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper's title begins with the candid exclamation: "Panic!"

Why do the JWST's images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory's predictions are they contradicting? The papers don't actually say. The truth that these papers don't report is that the hypothesis that the JWST's images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. "Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning," says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, "and wondering if everything I've done is wrong...."

Even galaxies with greater luminosity and mass than our own Milky Way galaxy appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in similar images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the new galaxies have redshifts which are also two to three times greater.This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe, but it is just exactly what I and my colleague Riccardo Scarpa predicted based on a non-expanding universe, with redshift proportional to distance.... [T]he galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, if it is assumed that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance.....

Big Bang theorists did expect to see badly mangled galaxies scrambled by many collisions or mergers. What the JWST actually showed was overwhelmingly smooth disks and neat spiral forms, just as we see in today's galaxies. The data in the "Panic!" article showed that smooth spiral galaxies were about "10 times" as numerous as what theory had predicted and that this "would challenge our ideas about mergers being a very common process". In plain language, this data utterly destroys the merger theory....

According to Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. Yet already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations that are over a billion years old. Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur....

While Big Bang theorists were shocked and panicked by these new results, Riccardo and I (and a few others) were not. In fact, a week before the JWST images were released we published online a paper that detailed accurately what the images would show. We could do this with confidence because more and more data of all kinds has been contradicting the Big Bang hypothesis for years....

Based on the published literature, right now the Big Bang makes 16 wrong predictions and only one right one — the abundance of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen.
UPDATE: Kirkpatrick says her quote was was taken out of context, in an article from Space.com that dismises Eric Lerner as "a serial denier of the Big Bang since the late 1980s, preferring his personal pseudoscientific alternative."

Young adults in the UK are spending more time scrolling on social media site TikTok than watching broadcast television, according to an Ofcom report on Wednesday that highlights the growing generational divide in media habits. From a report: In its annual survey of consumption trends, the media regulator found that those aged 16 to 24 spent an average of 53 minutes a day viewing traditional broadcast TV, just a third of the level a decade ago. By contrast, people over the age of 65 spent seven times as long in front of channels such as BBC One or ITV, viewing almost six hours' worth of broadcast TV a day -- a figure that has risen since 2011. The faster take-up of streaming services and social media among young people poses an ever greater challenge to broadcasters as they try to cope with an economic slowdown, satisfy their most loyal older viewers and invest to keep pace with fast-changing consumption habits.

The amount of time US audiences spent watching online TV surpassed cable for the first time ever. From a report: Subscribers to services like Netflix and Hulu accounted for 34.8% of all TV consumption in July, the research firm Nielsen said Thursday. That edged out cable TV at 34.4%. Broadcast was a distant 21.6%. Audiences watched an average of 190.9 billion minutes per week of streamed content in July, Nielsen said. That passed the tally for April 2020, when people were stuck at home because of the pandemic. While consumers spent almost 23% more time streaming, cable and broadcast viewing slumped.

Nvidia is upgrading its GeForce Now game streaming service to support 1440p resolution at 120fps in a Chrome or Edge browser. GeForce Now members on the RTX 3080 tier of the service will be able to access the new browser gameplay options today by selecting 1440p on the GeForce Now web version. From a report: Nvidia originally launched its RTX 3080 GeForce Now membership tier last year, offering streams of up to 1440p resolution with 120fps on PCs and Macs or 4K HDR at 60fps on Nvidia's Shield TV. Previously, you had to download the dedicated Mac or Windows apps to access 1440p resolution and 120fps support, as the web version was limited to 1080p at 60fps.

Matt Damon's pitch to invest in crypto has disappeared from US television sets. Same goes for glitzy commercials starring LeBron James and Tom Brady. From a report: The drop in national TV marketing by the industry in the US has coincided with the selloff in Bitcoin and other crypto assets, according to the TV-ad measurement company ISpot.tv, which tracks the spots. Damon's commercial for Crypto.com, which ends with him uttering "fortune favors the brave," last aired in February during the Super Bowl. The four-month national campaign cost an estimated $65 million, according to ISpot, exceeding the outlays by others in investment services, including giants such as Fidelity and Vanguard, over the same stretch.

"Ad sellers shouldn't expect growth in this vertical the remainder of the year due to the crash in crypto valuations and emerging allegations of fraud among companies in the crypto market," said Eric Haggstrom, director of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions, an industry researcher. "Crypto has been a boom and bust industry since its inception, and advertising budgets will follow the same trajectory." Spending by major crypto firms, including the trading platforms Crypto.com, Coinbase and FTX, fell to $36,000 in July in the US, according to ISpot. That's the lowest monthly total since January 2021 and is down from a high of $84.5 million in February, when the industry flooded the airwaves around the Super Bowl.

Walmart reached a deal with Paramount Global to include the Paramount+ streaming service as part of the retailing giant's Walmart+ membership program starting in September. Variety reports: The Paramount+ Essential plan, which includes ads, will be available for no extra cost to Walmart+ members. In the U.S., Paramount+ Essential is regularly $4.99/month. The Essential plan does not include local live CBS stations (available only in Paramount+ Premium, $9.99/month), but it does provide NFL and UEFA Champions League games available via separate live feeds.

The move by Walmart is intended to make Walmart+, which launched in September 2020, more competitive with Amazon's Prime by adding a streaming-entertainment component. Walmart+ costs $12.95 per month (or $98 per year), providing subscribers with same-day delivery on more than 160,000 products. Program members also can save up to 10 cents per gallon on gas at more than 14,000 participating stations nationwide and get up to six months of Spotify Premium for free. "In announcing Q2 earnings, Paramount said that Paramount+ now has 43.3 million paid customers, a net add of 3.7 million for the June quarter (including 1.2 million disconnects in Russia)," adds the report. Walmart does not disclose the number of Walmart+ members, but according to a Morgan Stanley survey in May, "the service has around 16 million members compared with about 15 million in November 2021."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: If you were born in the United States within the last 50 or so years, chances are good that one of the first things you did as a baby was give a DNA sample to the government. By the 1970s, states had established newborn screening programs, in which a nurse takes a few drops of blood from a pinprick on a baby's heel, then sends the sample to a lab to test for certain diseases. Over the years, the list has grown from just a few conditions to dozens. The blood is supposed to be used for medical purposes -- these screenings identify babies with serious health issues, and they have been highly successful at reducing death and disability among children. But a public records lawsuit filed last month in New Jersey suggests these samples are also being used by police in criminal investigations. The lawsuit, filed by the state's Office of the Public Defender and the New Jersey Monitor, a nonprofit news outlet, alleges that state police sought a newborn's blood sample from the New Jersey Department of Health to investigate the child's father in connection with a sexual assault from the 1990s.

Crystal Grant, a technology fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the case represents a "whole new leap forward" in the misuse of DNA by law enforcement. "It means that essentially every baby born in the US could be included in police surveillance," she says. It's not known how many agencies around the country have sought to use newborn screening samples to investigate crimes, or how often those attempts were successful. But there is at least one other instance of it happening. In December 2020, a local TV station reported that police in California had issued five search warrants to access such samples, and that at least one cold case there was solved with the help of newborn blood. "This increasing overreach into the health system by police to get genetic information is really concerning," Grant says.

The New Jersey lawsuit alleges that police obtained the blood sample of a newborn child (who is now elementary-school aged) to perform a DNA analysis that linked the baby's father to a crime. This was done using a technique called investigative genetic genealogy, or forensic genealogy. It usually involves isolating DNA left at a crime scene and using it to create a digital genetic profile of a suspect. Investigators can upload this profile to genealogy websites where other people have freely shared their own DNA information in the hope of connecting with family members or learning about their ancestry. Because DNA is shared within families, investigators can use relative matches to map out a suspect's family tree and narrow down their identity. According to the New Jersey lawsuit, police had reopened an investigation into a cold case and had used genetics to place the suspect within a single family: one of several adults or their children. But police didn't yet have probable cause to obtain search warrants for DNA swabs from any of them. Instead, they asked the state's newborn screening lab for a blood sample of one of the children. Analysis of this genetic information revealed a close relationship between the baby's DNA and the DNA taken at the crime scene, indicating that the baby's father was the person police were seeking. That was enough to establish probable cause in the assault investigation, so police sought a warrant for a cheek swab from the father. After analyzing his DNA, the suit contends, police found that it was a match to the crime scene DNA. "Because there are no federal laws governing newborn screening programs, states set their own policies on which diseases they test for, how long samples are stored, and how they can be used," notes Wired. "Some states hold on to blood samples for months, others for years or decades. Virginia only keeps samples from infants with normal results for six months, while Michigan retains them for up to 100 years. New Jersey stores samples for 23 years before destroying them."

"Apple is set to expand ads to new areas of your iPhone and iPad in search of its next big revenue driver," reports Bloomberg.

The Verge writes that Apple "could eventually bring ads to more of the apps that come pre-installed on your iPhone and other Apple devices, including Maps, Books, and Podcasts." According to a report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple has internally tested search ads in Maps, which could display recommendations when you search for restaurants, stores, or other nearby businesses. Apple already implements a similar advertising model on the App Store, as developers can pay to have their app promoted on a search page for a particular query, like "puzzle games" or "photo editor." As noted by Gurman, ads on Maps could work in the same way, with businesses paying to appear at the top of search results when users enter certain search terms.

Gurman believes that Apple could introduce ads to its native Podcasts and Books apps as well. [Gurman describes this as "likely".] This could potentially allow publishers to place ads in areas within each app, or pay to get their content placed higher in search results. Just like Maps, Podcasts and Books are currently ad-free.... Gurman mentions the potential for advertising on Apple TV Plus, too, and says the company could opt to create a lower-priced ad-supported tier, something both Netflix and Disney Plus plan on doing by the end of this year.
Bloomberg points out that Apple is already displaying ads inside its News app — where some of the money actually goes back to news publishers. ("Apple also lets publishers advertise within their stories and keep the vast majority of that money.")

And while you can disable ad personalization — which 78% of iOS users have done — Bloomberg notes that "Another ironic detail here is that the company's advertising system uses data from its other services and your Apple account to decide which ads to serve. That doesn't feel like a privacy-first policy."

Bloomberg's conclusion? "Now the only question is whether the customers of Apple — a champion of privacy and clean interfaces — are ready to live with a lot more ads."

From "Batgirl" to "Star Wars Detours" to "Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay," the Hollywood Reporter highlights twelve infamous films and series that made headlines for being canceled -- and are not available anywhere. From the report: The vast majority of axed Hollywood projects are run-of-the-mill concepts that simply didn't work out or eventually find their way online. That's not the case with these titles. The below roundup of films and TV series features projects you cannot see anywhere that have achieved a level of notoriety -- either due to their scandalous content or because fans desperately want to see them (or both). The list includes: 1. Batgirl
2. Ultimate Slip 'N Slide
3. Tremors (2018 TV Pilot)
4. Star Wars: Detours
5. Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay
6. My Best Friend's Birthday
7. 100 Years
8. Uncle Tom's Fairytales
9. Bloodmoon (Game of Thrones Prequel)
10. The Original Game of Thrones Pilot
11. Our Little Genius
12. The Day the Clown Cried Some of the canceled shows were yanked for "creative reasons" or the potential to ruin a company's brand; others were given no reasoning whatsoever, leaving it up to speculation.

Under each show included on the list is an explanation of events that help to explain why it's one of the "most legendary of the unseen." You can view the full article here.

As part of an effort to make its streaming business profitable, Disney announced that the price of ad-free Disney+ will rise 38% to $10.99 -- "a $3 per month increase," reports CNBC. "The price of Hulu without ads will rise by $2 per month, from $12.99 to $14.99, effective as of Oct. 10. Hulu with ads will go up by $1 per month, rising from $6.99 to $7.99." From the report: The price increases reflect the growing operating loss for Disney's streaming services. Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+ combined to lose $1.1 billion in the fiscal third quarter, $300 million more than the average analyst estimate, reflecting the higher cost of content on the services. The increased operating loss occurred even while Disney added about 15 million new Disney+ subscribers in the quarter, about 5 million more than analysts estimated. Disney has previously stated it plans to lose money on Disney+ until 2024.

Average revenue per user for Disney+ decreased by 5% in the quarter in the U.S. and Canada due to more customers taking cheaper multi-product offerings. Overall, the company's quarterly results, also announced Wednesday, beat analysts' expectations on the top and bottom lines. Disney+ subscriptions rose to 152.1 million during the most recent period, higher than Wall Street's projections of 147 million. In a separate article, CNBC reports that Disney now projects between 215 million and 245 million total Disney+ customers by 2024, "down 15 million on both the low end and high end of the company's previous guidance." Previously, the guidance was between 230 million and 260 million by the end of fiscal 2024. They also reaffirmed its expectation that the streaming service will become profitable by the end of 2024.

LG Display has shown off some interesting ideas as it looks to change the way OLED panels work, from positing bizarre form factors to addressing dimmer brightness levels compared to LED alternatives. Now, the panel maker is exploring a new approach to OLED TV audio. From a report: Today, LG Display announced its creation of a 97-inch OLED EX TV panel that debuts the company's Cinematic Sound OLED (CSO), "which allows the display to vibrate and generate the sound directly from the display without separate speakers."

"A 5.1 channel sound system is embedded into the widescreen, creating a performance that offers a cinematic level of immersion," LG Display said. Sony has used similar technology called Acoustic Surface in OLED TVs since 2017. These sets also don't use speakers and instead vibrate actuators behind the display. However, Sony doesn't compare Acoustic Surface to 5.1 surround sound. Instead, it encourages users to connect their own gear to the set and to use the TV as the center channel for a surround sound setup. Considering audio will be coming from a central point rather than all around you, it's hard to imagine LG Display's gargantuan TV panel can deliver the surround sound experience of a movie theater.

Walmart has held discussions with major media companies about including streaming entertainment in its membership service, The New York Times reported Tuesday, citing three people with knowledge of the conversations, part of an effort to extend its relationship with customers beyond its brick-and-mortar stores. From a report: In recent weeks, executives from Paramount, Disney and Comcast have spoken with Walmart, the people said, as the retailer ponders which movies and TV shows would add the most value to its membership bundle, called Walmart+. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were private. It is unclear whether any of the streaming companies are inclined to reach a deal with Walmart. Disney operates the Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu streaming services; Comcast owns the Peacock streaming service; and Paramount runs the Paramount+ and Showtime services.

A Walmart+ membership, which costs $12.95 per month, includes free shipping on orders and discounts on fuel. It also includes a free six-month subscription to the Spotify Premium music service. As the streaming field gets more crowded, the biggest media companies have turned to giants in other industries to find new subscribers. Wireless providers like Verizon and T-Mobile have struck deals to offer their customers free or discounted subscriptions to streaming services like Disney+ or Paramount+ as an extra incentive to sign up. Media companies, in turn, receive an influx of new customers whose subscriptions are subsidized by their wireless partner.

An anonymous user sent a slew of Tornado Cash transactions to high-profile Ethereum addresses on Tuesday in what appears to be a troll implicating them in a potential regulatory mess. From a report: Affected wallets include those controlled by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, TV host Jimmy Fallon, clothing brand Puma and a wallet created for donations to Ukraine, according to Etherscan. Prominent crypto figures such as artist Beeple and more mainstream celebrities such as comedian Dave Chappelle received ether (ETH).

Netflix's "Sandman" adaptation premiered Friday. But the 10-episode season required three years of writing, filming and editing (not to mention an imaginative cast including Mark Hamill as Mervyn Pumpkinhead and Patton Oswalt as the voice of Matthew the Raven). And Variety points out this followed a full 30 years of Neil Gaiman refusing to even allow an adaptation to happen.

"Gaiman could have decided to let dreams of an adaptation of "The Sandman" die with the nightmare that was the most recent attempt: a feature film starring and directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt for Warner Bros.' New Line, which fell apart in 2016..." So why did Gaiman try again? "In a lot of ways, it's the only question that we can ask," said Gaiman, who is executive producer and writer on the series, alongside David Goyer ("Batman Begins" and "Foundation") and showrunner Allan Heinberg ("Grey's Anatomy").... "[P]artly, it's accepting, well OK, if it's going to happen, why not make it good?

"Sandman as a graphic novel series, as comics, was me getting to say things to the world that I believed. They were things about inclusivity. They were things about humanity. There were things about shared humanity. There were things about dreams and things about death. There were words of comfort and there were words of warning. And back then when I said them, they were important and I felt that they were true and I felt it was right to say them; including, you have your story and your story is important, and including, you get a lifetime. And those are the things I wanted to say.

And I don't feel that any of those things are less important or less relevant now. And in fact, I feel in this sort of weird world in which sometimes I feel like people are fragmenting and forming into smaller and smaller groups and closing ranks and regarding anybody on the other side as the enemy, that people need to be reminded that standing next to them is somebody who contains a thousand worlds and every world is a door and through every door is somewhere that you've never dreamed of. And people are cooler under the surface than you would ever imagine. And I wanted to remind people of that.

And then the third thing, which was, having made "Good Omens," I felt like I knew how to do this.... "
Neil Gaiman answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2003 — and at time was already saying that the idea of a Sandman movie had "currently been taken out of the hands of the producers who've led it down the Road to Nowhere for the last 8 years."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Department of Homeland Security is warning of vulnerabilities in the nation's emergency broadcast network that makes it possible for hackers to issue bogus warnings over radio and TV stations. "We recently became aware of certain vulnerabilities in EAS encoder/decoder devices that, if not updated to the most recent software versions, could allow an actor to issue EAS alerts over the host infrastructure (TV, radio, cable network)," the DHS's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) warned. "This exploit was successfully demonstrated by Ken Pyle, a security researcher at CYBIR.com, and may be presented as a proof of concept at the upcoming DEFCON 2022 conference in Las Vegas, August 11-14."

Pyle told reporters at CNN and Bleeping Computer that the vulnerabilities reside in the Monroe Electronics R189 One-Net DASDEC EAS, an emergency alert system encoder and decoder. TV and radio stations use the equipment to transmit emergency alerts. The researcher told Bleeping Computer that "multiple vulnerabilities and issues (confirmed by other researchers) haven't been patched for several years and snowballed into a huge flaw."

"When asked what can be done after successful exploitation, Pyle said: 'I can easily obtain access to the credentials, certs, devices, exploit the web server, send fake alerts via crafts message, have them valid / pre-empting signals at will. I can also lock legitimate users out when I do, neutralizing or disabling a response,'" Bleeping Computer added.