An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, Nintendo of Europe announced a very region-specific -- and era-specific -- tweak for its upcoming collection of N64 games on Switch: an option to switch between the video standards PAL and NTSC. While the announcement may sound ho-hum to outsiders, anyone in Europe with a vested interest in classic gaming will appreciate what the toggle affords. The issue boils down to differences between NTSC and PAL, the leading video broadcast standards on CRT TVs during Nintendo's '80s and '90s heyday. North American and Japanese TV sets were configured for NTSC, which has a refresh rate standard of 60 Hz, while PAL sets dominated Europe with a slightly higher pixel resolution and a lower refresh rate standard of 50 Hz.

Should you merely watch TV series or films on both NTSC and PAL sets, the difference between each is noticeable yet mild. But for much of the '80s and '90s, many TV video games, especially the ones made by the largely Japanese console industry, suffered in PAL because they were coded specifically for NTSC standards. In order to port them to PAL, developers generally didn't go back and reconfigure all of the timings, especially in the case of early 3D games. Instead, their internal clock speeds were often slowed down to 83.3 percent to match European TV refresh rates. This meant both slower gameplay than originally coded and slower playback of music and sound effects. (These also often shipped with NTSC's pixel maximums in mind in such a way that they were squished to fit on PAL displays, as opposed to being optimized for them.)

Sure enough, last month's announcement of N64 games on Nintendo Switch Online put fear into European classic-gamer hearts. That region's reveal video included slightly slower timings of classic N64 games compared to videos posted by Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Japan, since they were emulating the original European retail releases. At that time, Nintendo of Europe did not immediately reply to social media questions about whether European Switch owners would get an option for 60 Hz N64 gameplay -- especially in an LCD TV era, where such CRT-related restrictions no longer technically apply to most EU and UK TV owners. Monday's announcement confirms that European players will get a 60 Hz option by default for every N64 game in the Nintendo Switch Online "Expansion Pack" collection, along with the option to access a game's original 50 Hz version if it launched with multi-language support. Reading between the lines, we believe this means that if a European N64 game only had English language support, its Switch Online version will be the North American NTSC ROM.

Telkom SA said Netflix will no longer be available on the South African phone and internet company's set-top box from October. From a report: A deal between the parties has come to an end and will not be renewed, Content Executive Wanda Mkhize said in a statement, without giving a specific reason. Other content partnerships will be announced in due course, she said. The move comes after MultiChoice, Africa's largest pay-TV provider, signed deals with Netflix and Amazon.com to offer their streaming services through its new decoder. The continent is a small market for paid streaming video, with just a few million subscribers out of a population of more than 1 billion, and the U.S. giants have targeted it for future growth.

The next time you see a movie or TV show that was dubbed from a foreign language, the voices you hear may not belong to actors who rerecorded dialogue in a sound booth. In fact, they may not belong to actors at all. From a report: Highly sophisticated digital voice manufacturing is coming, and entertainment executives say it could bring a revolution in sound as industry-changing as computer graphics were for visuals. New companies are using artificial intelligence to create humanlike voices from samples of a living actor's voice -- models that not only can sound like specific performers, but can speak any language, cry, scream, laugh, even talk with their mouths full. At the same time, companies are refining the visual technology so actors look like they are really speaking.

As streaming services export American fare globally and foreign markets send their hits to the U.S., dubbing is a bigger business than ever. But the uses of synthetic voices extend well beyond localizing foreign films. AI models can provide youthful voices for aging actors. The technology can resurrect audio from celebrities who have died or lost the ability to speak. And it can tweak dialogue in postproduction without the need for actors. All the tinkering raises thorny ethical questions. Where is the line between creating an engrossing screen experience and fabricating an effect that leaves audiences feeling duped?

The technology is set to hit a new target in the coming months, when foreign-language dubbed versions of the 2019 indie horror movie "Every Time I Die" are released in South America. Those versions mark one of the first times entire dubbed movies use computerized voice clones based on the voices of the original English-speaking cast. So when the film comes out abroad, audiences will hear the original actors "speaking" Spanish or Portuguese. Deepdub created the replicas based on 5-minute recordings of each actor speaking English.

phalse phace shares a report from The Verge: British Satellite broadcaster Sky is moving away from the satellite dishes that have defined its TV service for decades. Sky Glass is launching today, an ambitious effort to sell television sets that stream Sky TV content over Wi-Fi directly to consumers. There's no external box, no satellite dish, and no need for a soundbar. Although announced for the UK today, Sky has global aspirations for Glass TV "built on technology borne of the collaboration as part of the Comcast Corporation." As such, we might be looking at the platform underpinning Comcast's rumored XClass TVs for the US. Sky Glass TVs will be available in three sizes: 43-inch, 55-inch, and 65-inch. Each 4K TV will stream Sky's TV channels, and integrates in voice control (Hello Sky) and 21 apps to access additional content like Netflix, Spotify, or Disney Plus.

Sky hasn't named the TV manufacturer it partnered with yet, but the full specifications include a UHD Quantum Dot display, support for Dolby Vision, HDR 10, HLG, three HDMI 2.1 ports, and a single USB-C port. The rather chubby TV fits six speakers for up to 215W of Dolby Atmos surround sound: 3 outward firing speakers, 2 upward, and 1 central subwoofer. There will also be five color options: white, pink, green, blue, and black. The price of a Sky Glass TV is designed to be baked into a monthly subscription to Sky's TV service, known as Sky Ultimate TV, but you can also pay for the TV upfront if you want to lower the monthly costs. Sky Ultimate TV includes access to Netflix and some basic Sky channels, but Sky Sports and Sky Cinema are separate add-ons. What you pay will depend on the size of TV and whether you want to spread payments. The report goes on to note Sky's collaboration with Microsoft to watch TV together with others. "Sky demonstrated a software experience that allows you to watch TV channels with others, and see each other's reactions to sport in real time," reports The Verge.

Furthermore, Sky claims it'll be the first TV manufacturer in the world to allow customers to "swap old Sky Glass TVs for newer models when they're available," the report adds.

An unknown individual has leaked the source code and business data of video streaming platform Twitch via a torrent file posted on the 4chan discussion board earlier today. From a report: The leaker said they shared the data as a response to the recent "hate raids" --coordinated bot attacks posting hateful and abusive content in Twitch chats -- that have plagued the platform's top streamers over the summer. "Their community is [...] a disgusting toxic cesspool, so to foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space, we have completely pwned them, and in part one, are releasing the source code from almost 6,000 internal Git repositories," the leaker said earlier today. The leaker claims that the leak contains the "entirety of twitch.tv, with commit history going back to its early beginnings, mobile, desktop and video game console Twitch clients, various proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch, every other property that Twitch owns including IGDB and CurseForge, an unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios, and Twitch SOC internal red teaming tools."

Twitch has confirmed the breach. In a tweet it said, "We can confirm a breach has taken place. Our teams are working with urgency to understand the extent of this. We will update the community as soon as additional information is available."

When Facebook went down yesterday for nearly six hours, so did Oculus' services. Since Facebook owns VR headset maker Oculus, and controversially requires Oculus Quest users to log in with a Facebook account, many Quest owners reported not being able to load their Oculus libraries. "[A]nd those who just took a Quest 2 out of the box have reported that they're unable to complete the initial setup," adds PCGamer. As VRFocus points out, "the issue has raised another important question relating to Oculus' services being so closely linked with a Facebook account, your Oculus Quest/Quest 2 is essentially bricked until services resume." From the report: This vividly highlights the problem with having to connect to Facebook's services to gain access to apps -- the WiFi connection was fine. Even all the ones downloaded and taking up actual storage space didn't show up. It's why some VR fans began boycotting the company when it made all mandatory that all Oculus Quest 2's had to be affiliated with a Facebook account. If you want to unlink your Facebook account from Oculus Quest and don't want to pay extra for that ability, you're in luck thanks to a sideloadable tool called "Oculess." From an UploadVR article published earlier today: You still need a Facebook account to set up the device in the first place and you need to give Facebook a phone number or card details to sideload, but after that you could use Oculess to forgo Facebook entirely -- just remember to never factory reset. The catch is you'll lose access to Oculus Store apps because the entitlement check used upon launching them will no longer function. System apps like Oculus TV and Browser will also no longer launch, and casting won't work. You can still sideload hundreds of apps from SideQuest though, and if you want to keep browsing the web in VR you can sideload Firefox Reality. You can still use Oculus Link to play PC VR content, but only if you stay signed into Facebook on the Oculus PC app. Virtual Desktop won't work because it's a store app, but you can sideload free alternatives such as ALVR.

To use Oculess, just download it from GitHub and sideload it using SideQuest or Oculus Developer Hub, then launch it from inside VR. If your Quest isn't already in developer mode or you don't know how to sideload you can follow our guide here.

According to fluent Korean speaker Youngmi Mayer, Squid Game features "botched" subtitles that have changed the show's meaning for English-speaking viewers.

For those unaware of Squid Game, it's a Korean-language drama about an alternative world where people in debt compete in deadly games. The plot sees a group of people tempted into a survival game where they have the chance to walk away with 45.6 billion Korean won ($38 million) if they win a series of six games. According to a BBC article, it's currently on track to become Netflix's biggest original series. From the report: "The dialogue was so well written and zero of it was preserved [in the subtitles]," Youngmi said in a Twitter post. In a TikTok video that's had almost nine million views, Youngmi gave several examples of mistranslation. In one scene a character tries to convince people to play the game with her, and the closed-caption subtitles read: "I'm not a genius, but I still got it worked out." But what the character actually says, Youngmi explains, is: "I am very smart, I just never got a chance to study." That translation puts more emphasis on the wealth disparity in society -- which is also a theme in the Oscar-winning 2019 Korean film, Parasite. "Almost everything she says is being botched translation-wise... the writers, all they want you to know about her is that," Youngmi said. "[It] seems so small, but it's the entire character's purpose of being in the show." Youngmi later clarifies that her initial comments were about the automatically generated closed-caption subtitles rather than the English language subtitles, which are "substantially better." But she added: "The misses in the metaphors -- and what the writers were trying to actually say -- are still pretty present."

John Gruber shares thoughts on the new ways tabs feel and function on Safari for Mac: From a usability perspective, every single thing about Safari 15's tabs is a regression. Everything. It's a tab design that can only please users who do not use tabs heavily; whereas the old tab design scaled gracefully from "I only open a few tabs at a time" all the way to "I have hundreds of tabs open across multiple windows." That's a disgrace. The Safari team literally invented the standard for how tabs work on MacOS. The tabs that are now available in the Finder, Terminal, and optionally in all document-based Mac apps are derived from the design and implementation of Safari's tabs. Now, Apple has thrown away Safari's tab design -- a tab design that was not just best-of-platform, but arguably best-in-the-whole-damn-world -- and replaced it with a design that is both inferior in the abstract, and utterly inconsistent with the standard tabs across the rest of MacOS.

The skin-deep "looks cool, ship it" nature of Safari 15's tab design is like a fictional UI from a movie or TV show, like Westworld's foldable tablets or Tony Stark's systems from Iron Man, where looking cool is the entirety of the design spec. Something designed not by UI designers but by graphic designers, with no thought whatsoever to the affordances, consistencies, and visual hierarchies essential to actual usability. Just what looks cool. This new tab design shows a complete disregard for the familiarity users have with Safari's existing tab design. Apple never has been and should not be a company that avoids change at all cost. But proper change -- change that breaks users' habits and expectations -- is only justifiable when it's an improvement. Change for change's sake alone is masturbatory. That with Safari 15 it actually makes usability worse, solely for flamboyant cosmetic reasons, is downright perverse. "Google could and should run ads targeting Safari users, with a simple welcoming message: Switch to Chrome, the Mac browser where tabs look like tabs."

The Guardian reports on "a new breed of scambaiters...taking over TikTok and YouTube."

And one of them has more than 1.5 million followers across both video platforms. "Three to four days a week, for one or two hours at a time, Rosie Okumura, 35, telephones thieves and messes with their minds," reports the Guardian: For the past two years, the LA-based voice actor has run a sort of reverse call centre, deliberately ringing the people most of us hang up on — scammers who pose as tax agencies or tech-support companies or inform you that you've recently been in a car accident you somehow don't recall. When Okumura gets a scammer on the line, she will pretend to be an old lady, or a six-year-old girl, or do an uncanny impression of Apple's virtual assistant Siri. Once, she successfully fooled a fake customer service representative into believing that she was Britney Spears. "I waste their time," she explains, "and now they're not stealing from someone's grandma...."

Batman became Batman to avenge the death of his parents; Okumura became a scambaiter after her mum was scammed out of $500... Thankfully, the bank was able to stop the money leaving her mother's account, but Okumura wanted more than just a refund. She asked her mum to give her the number she'd called and called it herself, spending an hour and 45 minutes wasting the scammer's time. "My computer's giving me the worst vibes," she began in Kim Kardashian's voice. "Are you in front of your computer right now?" asked the scammer. "Yeah, well it's in front of me, is that... that's like the same thing?" Okumura put the video on YouTube and since then has made over 200 more videos, through which she earns regular advertising revenue (she also takes sponsorships directly from companies).

"A lot of it is entertainment — it's funny, it's fun to do, it makes people happy," she says when asked why she scambaits. "But I also get a few emails a day saying, 'Oh, thank you so much, if it weren't for that video, I would've lost $1,500.'" Okumura isn't naive — she knows she can't stop people scamming, but she hopes to stop people falling for scams. "I think just educating people and preventing it from happening in the first place is easier than trying to get all the scammers put in jail...."
The Guardian also describes Jim Browning, a Northern Irish YouTuber with nearly 3.5 million subscribers who's been posting scambaiting videos for seven years. "Browning regularly gets access to scammers' computers and has even managed to hack into the closed-circuit TV footage of call centres in order to identify individuals. He then passes this information to the 'relevant authorities' including the police, money-processing firms and internet service providers...."

And they also tell the story of an American software engineer who joined with friends to convince a scammer he'd been offered a high-paying job — only to end up stranded in Laos after paying for a 600-miles flight.

"He was crying... that was the one where I was like, 'Ah, maybe I'm taking things a little too far.'"

Back in 2014 Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

And now this week, long-time Slashdot reader Jaegs writes: According to many sources and the Babylon 5 creator/writer/director/producer himself, J. Michael Straczynski (JMS), the CW — partly owned by the original Babylon 5 producer and rights holder, WarnerMedia — will be rebooting the popular franchise. JMS will be writing and executive producing the series.

Per JMS:

"[W]e will not be retelling the same story in the same way... There would be no fun and no surprises. Better to go the way of Westworld or Battlestar Galactica where you take the original elements that are evergreens and put them in a blender with a ton of new, challenging ideas, to create something fresh yet familiar. To those asking why not just do a continuation, for a network series like this, it can't be done because over half our cast are still stubbornly on the other side of the Rim.

The last part refers to the recent passing of Mira Furlan (Delenn), as well as the untimely deaths of other primary cast members after the conclusion of the original run of the series: Richard Biggs (Dr. Franklin), Michael O'Hare (Jeffrey Sinclair), Jerry Doyle (Michael Garibaldi), Stephen Furst (Vir Cotto), Jeff Conway (Zack Allan), and Andreas Katsulas (G'Kar).
Straczynski points out on Twitter that "The original Babylon 5 was ridiculously innovative: the first to use CGI to create ships and characters, and among the very first to shoot widescreen with a vigorous 5.1 mix." But his tweets also seem excited about the questions that this new reboot will answer. "if I were creating Babylon 5 today, for the first time, knowing what I now know as a writer, what would it look like? How would it use all the storytelling tools and technological resources available in 2021 that were not on hand then?

"How can it be used to reflect the world in which we live, and the questions we are asking and confronting every day? Fans regularly point out how prescient the show was and is of our current world; it would be fun to take a shot at looking further down the road..."

Netflix's co-CEO revealed a list Monday showing its top shows and movies of all-time, reports NBC News. The list revealed that the 19th-century drama Bridgerton "was its most watched TV series ever, with 82 million subscribers tuning in for at least two minutes in its first 28 days on the service..." French series "Lupin: Part 1" and season one of "The Witcher," a fantasy series starring Henry Cavill, tied for second on the list, with 76 million accounts.

Among movies, the action film Extraction earned the No. 1 spot. The film about a captured CIA agent was watched by 99 million accounts in the first 28 days, Netflix said. Bird Box, a post-apocalyptic horror film, and the action-comedy Spenser Confidential were the second- and third-most popular films, according to the company.

All the films and series on the list were Netflix originals.
Using a different metric — which shows attracted the most hours of actual viewing time — Bridgerton still came in #1 for TV shows, followed by "Money Heist: Part 4" and "Stranger Things Season 3."

And the top three movies (based on hours of viewing) were Bird Box, Extraction, and Martin Scorsese's The Irishman.

The American media company Ozy "boasted of a large audience for its general interest website, its newsletters and its videos," remembers the New York Times, calling it "a Gen X dream of what millennial media ought to be: earnest, policy-focused, inclusive, slickly sans-serif." Ozy was founded in 2013 with seed funding from Laurene Powell Jobs, followed by further investments that by 2020 were over $83 million (according to the data service PitchBook).

But the Times reports that something strange happened last winter while Ozy was pursuing a $40 million investment from Goldman Sachs: Ozy said it had a great relationship with YouTube, where many of its videos attracted more than a million views... That's what the Zoom videoconference on February 2 that Ozy arranged between the Goldman Sachs asset management division and YouTube was supposed to be about. The scheduled participants included Alex Piper, the head of unscripted programming for YouTube Originals.

He was running late and apologized to the Goldman Sachs team, saying he'd had trouble logging onto Zoom, and he suggested that the meeting be moved to a conference call, according to four people who were briefed on the meeting, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details of a private discussion. Once everyone had made the switch to an old-fashioned conference call, the guest told the bankers what they had been wanting to hear: that Ozy was a great success on YouTube, racking up significant views and ad dollars, and that [CEO/co-founder Carlos] Watson was as good a leader as he seemed to be. As he spoke, however, the man's voice began to sound strange to the Goldman Sachs team, as though it might have been digitally altered, the four people said.

After the meeting, someone on the Goldman Sachs side reached out to Mr. Piper, not through the Gmail address that Mr. Watson had provided before the meeting, but through Mr. Piper's assistant at YouTube. That's when things got weird. A confused Mr. Piper told the Goldman Sachs investor that he had never spoken with her before. Someone else, it seemed, had been playing the part of Mr. Piper on the call with Ozy.
Four people told the Times that CEO Watson later said the voice on the call belonged to Ozy co-founder/chief operating officer Samir Rao and attributed the incident to a temporary mental health crisis. Ozy's chairman of the board called it "an unfortunate one-time event." But in addition the site's editor-at-large — who was fired earlier this year — says Ozy's claims of 50 million unique users a month "seemed high," according to the Times: In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that Ozy had been among the publishers buying web traffic from "low-quality sources," companies using systems that caused articles to pop open under a reader's browser without the reader's knowledge. Ozy said it had been buying the traffic to build its email lists and had not billed advertisers for those views... Ozy doesn't rely on standard measurements of traffic, but the best known service, Comscore, shows nothing close to the company's public claims. According to Comscore, Ozy reached nearly 2.5 million people during some months in 2018, but only 230,000 people in June 2021 and 479,000 in July.

Mr. Watson called the Comscore numbers "incomplete," noting they don't include impressions on platforms ranging from social media to television and podcasts.
The Times' story "triggered canceled shows, an internal investigation, investor concern and high-level departures at the company," ABC News reported Friday. And the same day the Times delivered one more update — that Ozy was shutting down: In an article in The Times on Thursday, Brad Bessey, an Emmy-winning executive producer, and Heidi Clements, a longtime TV writer, said Ozy executives had misled them while they were working on "The Carlos Watson Show," Mr. Watson's talk show, for the company. Specifically, they said, executives told them that the show would appear on the cable network A&E. Mr. Bessey resigned when he learned there was no such deal in place, and the show ended up appearing on YouTube and the Ozy website.

Also this week: Advertisers including Chevrolet, Walmart, Facebook, Target and Goldman Sachs itself — many of which had been paying for placement on "The Carlos Watson Show" — hit the brakes on their spending with Ozy. By Friday afternoon, Mr. Watson and the other remaining board member, Michael Moe (another high-profile investment figure, who had published a book called "Finding the Next Starbucks"), concluded that the company could not recover and issued the farewell statement through a spokeswoman....

The Ozy staff received the news that the company was no more on Friday afternoon.

People benefit from deep and meaningful conversations that help us forge connections with one another, but we often stick to small talk with strangers because we underestimate how much others are interested in our lives and wrongly believe that deeper conversations will be more awkward and less enjoyable than they actually are, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. Phys.Org reports: If connecting with others in deep and meaningful ways increases well-being, then why aren't people doing it more often in daily life? To answer that question, [researchers] designed a series of twelve experiments with more than 1,800 total participants. The researchers asked pairs of people -- mainly strangers -- to discuss either relatively deep or shallow topics. In some experiments, people received shallow or deep questions to discuss. Shallow questions included typical small-talk topics, such as, "What is the best TV show you've seen in the last month? Tell your partner about it" or "What do you think about the weather today?" while deep questions elicited more personal and intimate information, such as, "Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person?" or "If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, your future, or anything else, what would you want to know?" In other experiments, people generated their own deep and shallow conversation topics.

Before the conversations, participants predicted how awkward they thought the conversations would be, how connected they thought they would feel to their conversation partner and how much they would enjoy the conversation. Afterward, they rated how awkward the conversations actually were, how connected they actually felt and how much enjoyment they actually experienced. Overall, the researchers found that both deep and shallow conversations felt less awkward and led to greater feelings of connectedness and enjoyment than the participants had expected. That effect tended to be stronger for deep conversations. Participants who discussed the deep questions overestimated how awkward the conversation would be significantly more than those who discussed shallow questions. Deep conversations were also more enjoyable and led to a stronger sense of connection.

Amazon announced its long-rumored $999 Astro home robot on Tuesday. CNBC: I had a chance to check it out in a demo with Amazon last week and wanted to share a few thoughts on what Astro is, what it can and can't do and why Amazon decided to build a home robot. Astro seems like a strange gadget for Amazon to launch. The company is best known as an online store. And most of its operating profit comes from its AWS cloud business. Notably, Astro is a "Day 1 Edition" product, which means it won't be sold to everyone at first. [...] Astro is about the size of a small dog. It roams around your house on three wheels, including two big ones that prevent it from getting stuck and a smaller one for rotating. It has a camera that rises up on a 42-inch arm that can keep an eye on your home as Astro patrols while you're away. It can follow you around and play music or display TV shows on its 10-inch touchscreen. It can recognize faces (if you want it to) so you can load up two sodas in the back storage compartment and tell Astro to go to someone in the living room.

Astro is like a combo of lots of Amazon's other gadgets placed on wheels. The cameras can be used for home security or for video chat, sort of combining Amazon's Ring cameras with its Echo Show smart screens. The cameras are also used to create a map of your house when you set Astro up for the first time. You can talk to Astro much like you'd talk to an Echo or Alexa (you can change the name to Alexa if you want) to get sports scores or the weather. And you can play movies or TV shows like you would on an Amazon tablet or Fire TV.

"What if we told you there was a hamster who has been trading cryptocurrencies since June — and recently was doing better than Warren Buffett and the S&P 500?" asks NPR: Meet Mr. Goxx, a hamster who works out of what is possibly the most high-tech hamster cage in existence.

It's designed so that when Mr. Goxx runs on the hamster wheel, he can select among dozens of cryptocurrencies. Then, deciding between two tunnels, he chooses whether to buy or sell. According to the Twitch account for the hamster, his decision is sent over to a real trading platform — and yes, real money is involved.
Last Monday, after 100 days the hamster's portfolio was up 48%, reports one site, "before Bitcoin tumbled, which brought the rest of the crypto market down with it." But the hamster's portfolio is still up nearly 30% since he started trading in June, the article points out, "outperforming Bitcoin, the S&P 500, and even Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway."

The hamster's business partner adds that profits aren't yet enough to cover the initial investment on Mr. Goxx's cage. And there's other issues...

"Since Mr. Goxx is an honorable business rodent, he must calculate with about 35% tax being subtracted on all his returns, so there is still some work left before he can really talk about making money."

spaceman375 shares a report from the BBC: Screenwriter Russell T Davies is to take charge again of Doctor Who, the sci-fi show he helped revive in 2005. Davies, who was the fantasy drama's showrunner until 2009, will take over when Chris Chibnall departs next year. "I'm beyond excited to be back on my favourite show," said Davies, who resumes his role as the show prepares to mark its 60th anniversary in 2023. One of his first responsibilities will be to decide who takes over the Tardis following Jodie Whittaker's exit. The actress is set to hang up her Sonic Screwdriver after one more six-part series and three 2022 specials.

Davies revived Doctor Who in its current incarnation with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor and remained for David Tennant's time as the Doctor. Steven Moffatt took over when Matt Smith took on the role, staying to supervise Peter Capaldi's stint as TV's indefatigable Time Lord. The success of Doctor Who's relaunch led Davies to create two spin-off shows, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Comcast appears to be planning to offer TVs running its own software across at least two territories, according to recent reports from Protocol and The Financial Times. It comes a little more than a week after Amazon announced that it too will be getting into the TV set business. The Verge reports: In the US, the TVs will reportedly be branded as XClass TVs. Originally manufactured by Hisense, the 43 and 50-inch sets will run Comcast's X1 operating system, which is already found on its set-top boxes and Xfinity Flex streaming box. An Xfinity landing site confirms the "XClass TV" branding, while an FAQ spotted by Protocol says they'll aggregate "your favorite apps, live channels, and On Demand movies and shows together in one place."

Meanwhile in the UK, Comcast subsidiary Sky is reportedly planning to launch smart TVs of its own. The FT's report doesn't mention what operating system these TVs are likely to run. Sky already operates its Sky Q platform in the country, which currently runs on set-top boxes and shows satellite broadcasts alongside video streamed from services like Netflix and Disney Plus. As Protocol notes, the initiatives appear to be Comcast's attempt to insulate itself as customers turn away from traditional cable and satellite plans in favor of streaming services. By offering a platform that competes with the likes of Roku, Comcast would be able to maintain its direct relationship with customers. It could then aggregate content from other streaming providers alongside its own Peacock and Xumo streaming services. Controlling the viewing platform also gives Comcast and its subsidiaries the ability to negotiate with streaming providers to offer them better prominence on its platforms, the FT notes.

Luke Plunkett, writing for Kotaku: A few days ago Eurogamer closed their forums, bringing to an end over 20 years of community discussion. The site explained the move like sites and companies always do (only a few are still using them), and it made sense the way it always does (that's a lot of money for not much gain), but that doesn't mean the process itself isn't something that sucks. [...] Readers are then urged to move to the site's Discord, because of course they would be. Now, I don't want to pick on Eurogamer here, as like I said up top, in every individual case companies and sites have their reasons for doing this. The most frequently cited are the fact that forums need to be maintained (true!) and that people's conversational habits have changed, with forum use dwindling (also true!).

But I simply do not care, because a) I don't work for these companies, and b) I'm more interested in looking at the long-term damage this is doing to the internet. Forums and Discord are apples and oranges. Users aren't being moved from one similar thing to another, they're being shifted to platforms with fundamentally different ways of approaching discussions. Discord is great for talking in the moment. [...] Forums aren't the same though. They're nothing like it. Forums are more deliberate, more considered, and while they're far from perfect -- I'm sure you can post a billion examples of people being neither deliberate nor considered on forums -- the point is that they're more permanent. Forums create a record, an archive we can search through, so that whenever we want to revisit issues, or find help with a problem, or see what was happening during a certain time, we can do that. There's a paper trail, and while sometimes that leads to embarrassing takes on tv shows and game reveals, other times it's providing an enormous help with technical issues or parts of a game you're stuck on.

"Y'all a plane just crashed into all those houses," one eyewitness says in an online video. "People jumped out of the plane with parachutes."

The two people — jumping from the 38-foot-long training plane — were both hospitalized, reports CNN: Police were notified of the crash...around 10:53 a.m. (11:53 am ET) and on arrival found one pilot who had ejected from the military training jet caught in power lines, Lake Worth Police Chief JT Manoushagian said during a Sunday afternoon news conference. Another pilot also ejected from the training jet and was found in a neighborhood nearby...

None of the homes involved in the crash took a direct hit, said Fire Chief Ryan Arthur. A little bit of damage occurred to the areas around the homes, he said. "This incident could've been much worse knowing that this plane went down in a residential area here in Lake Worth," Arthur said.
ABC News has more information: One of the occupants was burned by power lines and another landed in a tree as they parachuted to the ground, authorities said. One of the crew members was in critical condition, the other one was in serious condition, authorities said...

WFAA-TV reported that the plane crashed in the backyard of a home, and no one on the ground was injured. Power was also knocked out to around 1,300 customers in the area.
ABC News identifies the aircraft as a T45 Goshawk fighter jet trainer, a plane first developed in 1974 by McDonnell Douglas and British Aerospace (before McDonnell Douglas's 1997 merger with Boeing). But Boeing.com notes they "delivered the 221st and final T-45 training jet to the Navy in November 2009." The company continued to support the T-45 fleet by providing engineering, logistics and support equipment in partnership with BAE Systems, the successor company to British Aerospace, which had supplied the aircraft's rear and center fuselage sections, wing assembly and vertical tail. On Aug. 26, 2010, Boeing joined the U.S. Navy at Cecil Field in Jacksonville, Florida, to celebrate the Naval Air Training Command's one millionth flight-hour with the T-45 Goshawk.

Locast has been ordered to shut down its online TV service forever in a permanent injunction issued yesterday by a federal judge. From a report: The order came two weeks after the judge gave major broadcast networks a big victory in their copyright case against Locast, a nonprofit organization that provided online access to broadcast TV stations. Locast will have to win on appeal in order to stream broadcast channels again. Locast already suspended operations after the September 1 ruling that said it does not qualify for a copyright-law exemption available to nonprofits, so the permanent injunction doesn't change the status quo. US District Judge Louis Stanton cited a December 2019 agreement between Locast and the networks that limited the scope of the litigation and said a permanent injunction should be entered if the court determines that Locast does not qualify for the copyright-law exemption.

The deal did not prohibit Locast "from applying for a stay of the permanent injunction pending appeal, nor to bar the broadcasters from opposing any such stay," the agreement said. ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC motioned for a permanent injunction after the September 1 ruling. The judge's order yesterday said the defendants "are permanently restrained and enjoined from operating Locast" but that "entry of an injunction will provide opportunity for appeal contemplated by the agreement." Further reading: Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love To Get Sued (January 2019).