A Slashdot reader shared an anonymous tip about "new consumer-grade artificial intelligence employed to restore 85 year-old Popeye cartoons, using only the available digital copies as sources for the remastering."

It's eerie to see vintage cartoons like Popeye the Sailor meets Sindbad the Sailor upgraded to high resolution. It's apparently the work of Cartoon Renewal Studios, a group "Dedicated to the loving and careful preservation of classic off-copyright animation" (according to its web site).

There's not much information, but Jim Ames of Cartoon Renewal Studios turned up in an online forum promising "we're restoring ALL the classic cartoons to brilliant 1080 HD so they can be enjoyed forever." I've been dreaming of this project for some time... We will be posting THOUSANDS of off-copyright cartoons digitally remastered and upscaled to 1080 HD. We can process about 50 cartoons a month, at this time... Hoping to scale up to 100 cartoons a month processing capability next month.

We could finish 1000 cartoons in 2021... stay tuned...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Thursday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the incoming Democrat head of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, introduced an omnibus bill signaling a pitched battle over the future of antitrust law. The law takes aim not just at big tech companies, but potentially all large companies. According to experts Motherboard spoke with, some parts of the bill offer ambitious changes to antitrust law, but others adhere to a framework that has undermined enforcing antitrust law for too long already.

At its core, the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act essentially combines legislation Klobuchar has proposed over the past few years as well as some that Senate Democrats have been considering. It takes a harder stance on anticompetitive mergers and acquisitions, and also promises to empower the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department's antitrust division to aggressively enforce antitrust law. Some of the bill's key proposals concern amendments and provisions to the Clayton Act of 1914, an antitrust law that made certain anticompetitive practices such as price discrimination outright illegal. In her omnibus bill, one key proposal seeks to strengthen anticompetitive merger enforcement by amending the Clayton Act to outright ban mergers that "create an appreciable risk of materially lessening competition," as well as mergers that create monopsonies (buyers or employers who can suppress prices or wages via anti-competitive practices targeting other buyers or employers).

Klobuchar's merger prohibitions also shift the burden of proof to the merging companies, which would have to prove a deal would not be anticompetitive, or create a monopoly or monopsony. In part, this means deals where a merger (or acquisition) yielded over 50 percent market share, where a transaction is valued over $5 billion, or where an acquisition worth over $50 million by a company valued over $100 billion would be presumed illegal. This move won her some praise from experts who praised its clear presumptive bar on large mergers. Other key proposals, however, that have raised concerns among antitrust advocates who are seeking larger structural changes.

Italian YouTuber Otto Climan modded an original Game Boy Color handheld to act as an Apple TV remote. Gizmodo reports: Otto Climan started with an original Game Boy Color handheld that they upgraded with a backlit LCD display because the GBC arrived well before Nintendo stopped using dim screens that strained your eyes. For the custom white case adorned with Apple's older rainbow logo, Climan turned to a company called Retro Modding that supplied him with matching white buttons and, more importantly, a matching white flash cartridge.

The cartridge looks like a standard GB/GBC game cartridge, but it includes a slot for a microSD card and the ability to run ROM files from it. While some ne'er-do-wells use these flash carts to play games, Climan instead developed his own ROM file capable of controlling the Game Boy Color's IR port, which was originally used to transfer game data between devices.

The newer and much-maligned Apple TV remote with the touchpad works over Bluetooth, but Apple retained the IR capabilities of previous Apple TV boxes so the streaming player can still control other devices like TVs. Getting the Game Boy Color to talk to the Apple TV was relatively straightforward (all the codes that Apple uses for its boxes and remotes to talk are easy to find online), but it apparently did require some overclocking of the GBC's processor, which is a trick some games used decades ago. Because the added TV remote functionality comes through a ROM file running on a flash cart, the Game Boy Color still works like a stock GBC and can play other games by just swapping the cart. You can watch Climan's video here.

Apple's latest iOS 14.5 update for beta testers brings support for the new PS5 DualSense and Xbox Series X controllers. The Verge reports: Apple's upcoming iOS 14.5 update follows the company revealing back in November that it was working with Microsoft to include support for the Xbox Series X controllers. Steam also added PS5 controller support last year, followed by Nvidia's Shield TV support last month. Other features of iOS 14.5 include the ability to unlock an iPhone with an Apple Watch while wearing a mask, Siri emergency contact calling, CarPlay ETA sharing, and dual-SIM 5G support. The official release is expected in the next couple of months.

VideoLAN, in a blog post: The VideoLAN project and the VideoLAN non-profit organization are happy to celebrate today the 20th anniversary of the open-sourcing of the project. VideoLAN originally started as a project from the Via Centrale Reseaux student association, after the successful Network 2000 project. But the true release of the project to the world was on 1st of February 2001, the Ecole Centrale Paris director, Mr. Gourisse, allowed the open-sourcing of the whole VideoLAN project under the GNU GPL. This open sourcing concerned all the software developed by the VideoLAN project, including VideoLAN Client, VideoLAN Server, VideoLAN Bridge, VideoLAN Channel Switcher, but also libraries to decode DVDs, like libdca, liba52 or libmpeg2. At that time, this was a risky decision for the Ecole Centrale Paris, and the VideoLAN project is very grateful.

Since then, the project evolved to become a French non-profit organization, and continued developing numerous solutions around the free software multimedia world. Today, VLC media player is used regularly by hundreds of millions of users, and has been downloaded more than 3.5 billion times over the years. VLC is today available on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android (including TV and Auto versions), iOS (and AppleTV), OS/2 and BSD. Over the years, around 1000 volunteers worked to make VLC a reality.

An anonymous reader writes: AT&T lost 617,000 customers from DirecTV and its other TV businesses in the final quarter of 2020, capping a year in which it lost nearly 3 million customers in the category, AT&T reported today. AT&T today also informed the Securities and Exchange Commission that it has taken "noncash impairment charges of $15.5 billion" related to its ongoing DirecTV debacle. AT&T said the $15.5 billion charges reflect "changes in our management strategy and our evaluation of the domestic video business... including our decision to operate our video business separately from our broadband and legacy telephony operations." This operational decision "required us to identify a separate Video reporting unit and to assess both the recoverability of its long-lived assets and any assigned goodwill for impairment," AT&T said.

AT&T said it also logged "charges of approximately $780 million from the impairment of production and other content inventory at WarnerMedia, with $520 million resulting from the continued shutdown of theaters during the pandemic and the hybrid distribution model for our 2021 film slate." The charges were added to AT&T's Q4 expenses. As a result, AT&T reported a $13.9 billion net loss in the quarter, compared to a net profit of $2.4 billion a year ago. Q4 revenue was $45.7 billion, down from $46.8 billion year over year. The Q4 net loss swung AT&T to a full-year net loss of $5.4 billion.

Joe2020 shares a report: China has begun using anal swabs to test those it considers to be at high risk of contracting Covid-19, state TV has reported. Officials took anal swabs from residents of neighbourhoods with confirmed Covid-19 cases in Beijing last week, according to the state broadcaster CCTV, while those in designated quarantine facilities have also had the tests. Small, localised outbreaks in recent weeks have resulted in multiple cities in northern China being sealed off from the rest of the country and prompted mass testing campaigns, which had mostly been conducted using throat and nose swabs. The anal swabs method "can increase the detection rate of infected people" as traces of the virus linger longer in the anus than in the respiratory tract, Li Tongzeng, a senior doctor from Beijing's Youan hospital, told CCTV. CCTV said on Sunday anal swabs would not be used as widely as other methods, as the technique was "not convenient."

If the folks who are responsible for beaming content to your eyeballs are to be believed, streamers are thirsty for more ads of all things. From a report: A survey of 4,526 adults in the U.S. and Canada published by TiVo today claims that a whopping 79% of the survey's respondents reported wanting to use a free and ad-supported service rather than pay for another one. While 81% said they wished Prime Video and Netflix offered free tiers with ads, 80% of respondents reported a difference in the quality of the content on many free, ad-supported platforms -- more specifically, that it's worse. That is, for the most part, true, an exception maybe being Peacock (if you really like NBC). On services like IMDb TV and Vudu, for example, you typically have to comb through a lot of so-so content to find something recent and decent to watch. A bunch of premium services like Hulu and CBS All Access do offer cheaper, ad-supported versions of their products, but those still both cost a few bucks a month for access.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk seemed to rally behind GameStop's epic surge on Tuesday, tweeting out a link to the Reddit board that's largely hyped the stock. CNBC reports: Shares of GameStop, which jumped 92.7% Tuesday, were up more than 60% in after hours trading following Musk's tweet, which linked to the "wallstreetbets" Reddit chat room that has more than 2 million subscribers. The Tesla CEO tweeted "Gamestonk!!" The stock surged earlier in the day after Social Capital's Chamath Palihapitiya said in a tweet that he bought GameStop call options, betting the stock will go higher. The degenerates over at r/wallstreetbets don't appear to be very fond of CNBC's coverage of the investing forum. In an open letter to CNBC, u/RADIO02118 writes: Before you spend another day hosting your shill hedge fund buddies to come on the air and demonize r/wallstreetbets I hope you read this.

Your contempt for the retail investor (your audience) is palpable and if you don't get it together, you'll lose an entire new generation of investors.

I keep thinking about these funds that are short GME like your boys at Melvin Capital / your coverage of this subreddit and I'm getting madder and madder.

These funds can manipulate the market via your network and if they screw up big because they don't even know the basics of portfolio risk 101 and using position sizing, they just get a bailout from their billionaire friends at Citadel. Then they have the nerve to turn us into public enemy #1 just because we believe in an underdog company getting a second chance.

We don't have billionaires to bail us out when we mess up our portfolio risk and a position goes against us. We can't go on TV and make attempts to manipulate millions to take our side of the trade. If we mess up as bad as they did, we're wiped out, have to start from scratch and are back to giving handjobs behind the dumpster at Wendy's.

Seriously. Motherfuck these people. I sincerely hope they suffer. We want to see the loss porn.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Remember the app audit Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promised to carry out a little under three years ago at the height of the Cambridge Analytica scandal? Actually the tech giant is very keen that you don't. The UK's information commissioner just told a parliamentary subcommittee on online harms and disinformation that a secret arrangement between her office and Facebook prevents her from publicly answering whether or not Facebook contacted the ICO about completing a much-trumpeted 'app audit'. "I think I could answer that question with you and the committee in private," information commissioner Elizabeth Denham told questioner, Kevin Brennan, MP.

Pressed on responding, then and there, on the question of whether Facebook ever notified the regulator about completing the app audit -- with Brennan pointing out "after all it was a commitment Mark Zuckerberg gave in the public domain before a US Senate committee" -- Denham referred directly to a private arrangement with Facebook which she suggested prevented her from discussing such details in public. "It's part of an agreement that we struck with Facebook," she told the committee. "In terms of our litigation against Facebook. So there is an agreement that's not in the public domain and that's why I would prefer to discuss this in private."

Microsoft has a habit of reigniting the Mac vs. PC conflict for its Surface ads, and this time it's going after Apple's Touch Bar. In a new TV commercial, aired during Sunday night's NFL championship games, Microsoft pits Apple's MacBook Pro against the company's Surface Pro 7. It's a chance for Microsoft to mock Apple's Touch Bar in a TV commercial for the first time. From a report: "Mac gave me this little bar, but why can't they just give me a whole touchscreen?" asks a boy comparing the two laptops. That's something that some MacBook Pro users have been calling for, or just the removal of the Touch Bar altogether. Apple is now reportedly planning a redesign for the MacBook Pro later this year, with the Touch Bar rumored to be replaced by physical function keys. Elsewhere in the ad, Microsoft tries to position the Surface Pro 7 as a gaming device. "It is a much better gaming device," claims the ad, which is an unusual way to frame Microsoft's popular Surface device.

In Apple and Epic's ongoing court battle over App Store fees, one of the key sticking points has been Apple's insistence on maintaining a 30 percent cut as a cornerstone of the storefront. But newly revealed Apple executive emails from the case show that the App Store rules that Apple flouts as essential to the fairness of the app economy were carefully negotiated into existence over time in a way that ensured Apple wasn't "leaving money on the table." From a report: The emails date back to a 2011 discussion, which included Apple software and services leader Eddy Cue, around how Apple would handle subscription video applications on the Apple TV -- an important conversation, given the rise in popularity of streaming services. And while the discussion doesn't offer much insight on Apple's existing 30 percent fee for the App Store, it does reveal how malleable those rules were when it came to maximizing profit. The company examined a variety of options, including a 40 percent one-time cut, a 30 percent one-time cut, a 30 percent ongoing fee, or more individualized deals with services like the NBA and MLB.

Here's an interesting tidbit from The Wall Street Journal: ICQ was a pioneering, mid-1990s internet messaging service then used on bulky PCs on dial-up. It was a precursor to AOL Instant Messenger, and was last in vogue when the TV show "Friends" was in its prime and PalmPilots were cutting edge.

It's been modernized over the years, and now is an app for smartphones. Lately it has skyrocketed up Hong Kong's app charts, with downloads jumping 35-fold in the week ending Jan. 12.

"It recalls my childhood memories," said 30-year-old risk consultant Anthony Wong, who used ICQ when he was in grade school. He has since connected with more than two dozen friends on the platform after some bristled this month at a privacy policy update by WhatsApp that would allow some data to be stored on parent Facebook Inc.'s servers.
Back in 1998 Slashdot's CmdrTaco wrote a story about ICQ being ported to Palm Pilot, and linked to a Wired story about ICQ security flaws. In fact, you can almost tell the history of ICQ just with Slashdot headlines.

- AIM and ICQ to be Integrated (2002)

- Russian Company Buys ICQ (2010)

What's happened since? ICQ's entry on Wikipedia cites a 2018 article in a Russia newspaper.
According to a Novaya Gazeta article published in May 2018, Russian intelligence agencies have access to online reading of ICQ users' correspondence. The article examined 34 sentences of Russian courts, during the investigation of which the evidence of the defendants' guilt was obtained by reading correspondence on a PC or mobile devices. Of the fourteen cases in which ICQ was involved, in six cases the capturing of information occurred before the seizure of the device.

The reason for the article was the blocking of the Telegram service and the recommendation of the Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation Herman Klimenko to use ICQ instead.

"A two-episode series which debuted on Chinese streaming platforms last week has been described as the first reality competition to focus on programmers," reports the I Programmer web site: The show, sponsored by the Ant Group, an affiliate company of the Chinese Alibaba Group, is called Ranshaoba tiancaichengxuyuan, which roughly translates to "Burn Bright! Genius Programmer," and followed four teams engaged on a challenge akin to the hackathons that take place on Kaggle and similar platforms.

News of the show comes in a report China's first variety show about computer programmers seeks to mold Chinese IT idols in Global Times, the English-language newspaper published by People's Daily, which is the official newspaper of Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Ji Yuqiao reported that twenty programmers took part in the show and were divided into four teams that competed to win a prize of 1 million yuan ($154,152). Some of the competitors were graduates of top universities such as Tsinghua University in China and Carnegie Mellon University in the US, while others were high school dropouts. Four professors at Peking University and Tsinghua University acted as mentors to these young talents on the show.

Contestants were tasked with protecting wild animals from poachers in a virtual world. With a time limit of 48 hours they had to design algorithms to detect and identify wild animals based on the limited data resources in the game.

Slashdot reader The Grim Reefer shares a report from the BBC: Babylon 5 and Lost actress Mira Furlan has died at the age of 65, her family and management have confirmed. Furlan played Minbari Ambassador Delenn in the 1990s sci-fi TV drama, Babylon 5, and Danielle Rousseau in the noughties mystery drama, Lost.

Her family told the BBC the Croatian actress died on Wednesday due to complications with West Nile Virus... A message on Furlan's Twitter account, confirmed to be taken from the autobiography she was working on, read: "I look at the stars. It's a clear night and the Milky Way seems so near. That's where I'll be going soon."
Babylon 5 J Michael Straczynski wrote on Twitter, "It is a night of great sadness, for our friend and comrade had gone down the road where we cannot reach her. But as with all things, we will catch up with her in time, and I believe she will have many stories to tell us, and many new roles to share with the universe."

Netflix has officially amassed 200 million subscribers, sending shares soaring 12%. As it continues to compete with rival services, Netflix says it's preparing to roll out a new feature that will allow the service to pick a title based on a user's preferences rather than requiring them to browse for something to watch. Gizmodo reports: Netflix said in its fourth-quarter shareholders letter released Tuesday that it managed to secure 8.5 million more paid subscriptions to help the streaming giant cross the 200 million mark. All told, the company added a total of 37 million paid subscriptions during 2020, no doubt helped by the surge in TV viewing and streaming that resulted from lockdown orders and quarantine measures amid the coronavirus pandemic. For some context, Netflix says memberships were up 23 percent from the previous year in the fourth quarter.

Even with the pandemic significantly delaying production timelines and release dates, Netflix says it's still on track to release at least one original film every week of 2021. Plus, the company said it has a staggering 500-plus titles either in post-production or ready to hit its service. Most surprising, though, was Netflix's claim that it is "every close" to being cash-flow positive and no longer needs to raise external financing. Additionally, the company plans "on repaying the bond at maturity out of cash on hand, as we are currently well above our minimum cash needs."

Nine days ago America set a record: nearly 290,000 new Covid-19 cases within 24 hours. according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.

Four days later, anti-mask protesters in Oregon filmed their confrontation with employees at a Trader Joe's grocery store who wouldn't let them enter the store unless they were wearing a mask. Their 8-minute video has since been viewed over 325,000 times. The Oregonian newspaper reports: As other masked customers enter the store, the manager repeats that the protesters are welcome to shop too, as long as they wear masks. He says he is more than willing to talk to the group but isn't interested in debating policy. Trader Joe's nationwide policy requires customers to wear masks in stores.

"We're not demonstrating, we're buying groceries," a protester says. "That's why I'm here." The manager says he is enforcing the store's mask mandate. "It's not a law. You cannot enforce non-law," a protester says. "You cannot deny somebody the right to commerce." The store manager appears to offer to shop for the protesters and bring out what they want.

Amid growing shouting, a woman says: "I need to buy groceries. I don't know what I want until I go in and see it. The Civil Rights Act protects me to go in and shop like everybody else."

Legal experts have told USA Today that the 1964 Civil Rights Act does not give people the right to shop without a mask.
The manager patiently explains to the protesters that "The difference you guys are trying to make isn't going to made with us. It can made with your government."

But soon one protester starts amplifying their voice with a bullhorn, while another continues filming the grocery store's employees — zooming in on their name tags — and threatening, "I'm sorry that you're not going to be able to let anyone else in, because we're standing here."

Another protester says "Right, that's pretty much the only resolution. It's either we get to shop, like free American citizens, right? Without being forced into wearing this mask, right...?"

They don't appear to follow through on their threat to blockade entry into the store, but the manager continues talking to them throughout the video. And at one point he says calmly that "It's disheartening that we can't have any conversations any more... It's really disheartening.

"It's disheartening that people can't just talk to one another."

AmiMoJo shares a report from 9to5Mac: When Apple revived MagSafe with the iPhone 12 lineup, one question brought up was how these latest devices with more magnets would interact with medical devices like pacemakers. Apple's official word was that iPhone 12/MagSafe wouldn't interfere more than previous iPhones. Now one of the first medical studies has been published by the Heart Rhythm Journal that saw a Medtronic pacemaker deactivated by holding an iPhone 12 near it (via MacMagazine. It doesn't sound like there is concrete evidence that iPhone 12 and MagSafe do pose a greater risk of increased interference but with this study out now, we may see more testing in the medical field to find out for sure. Of course it's not just iPhones or smartphones that can create interference issues, it can be any item that contains magnets strong enough create a problem.

As you'd expect, the short-term solution is to keep iPhones and other devices away from pacemakers and other similar medical devices. However, reported by Medical Xpress, Medtronic and others are likely looking to shift away from the reliance on magnets in future devices: "Unless companies like Medtronic get on board and move to smarter device configuration options, they will continue to butt heads with consumer devices -- and they will continue to lose. Smarter options don't have to be expensive; just look at your cheap IR TV remote or ultrasonic receiver-emitter pair. These devices simply work. They use an uncomplicated code to make sure there is no interference from all the other ambient sources that are invariably present. A couple of secure ultrasonic bits superimposed on your basic 40 khz carrier waves is all that is really needed. It is likely that companies like Medtronic are working on solutions like this; for example, a Medtronic programming head of some sort can be had on Ebay at the moment for a mere $34.99."

AT&T is killing off the online-video service formerly known as DirecTV Now and introducing a no-contract option for the newer online service that replaced it. Ars Technica reports: AT&T unveiled DirecTV Now late in 2016, the year after AT&T bought the DirecTV satellite company. Prices originally started at $35 a month for the live-TV online service, and it had signed up 1.86 million subscribers by Q3 2018. But customers quickly fled as AT&T repeatedly raised prices and cut down on the use of promotional deals, leaving the service with just 683,000 subscribers at the end of Q3 2020. In 2019, AT&T changed the name from DirecTV Now to AT&T TV Now, creating confusion among customers and its own employees because the company simultaneously unveiled another online streaming service called AT&T TV.

AT&T TV was pitched as a more robust replacement for satellite TV, and it even mimicked cable and satellite by imposing contracts, hidden fees, and a big second-year price hike. Going forward, AT&T TV Now will no longer be offered to new customers, and AT&T TV will be the flagship for AT&T's live-TV streaming business. "AT&T TV Now has merged with AT&T TV," the service's website says in an update flagged in a news article by TV Answer Man yesterday. For existing users, "AT&T TV Now customers' service and plans remain in effect" without any changes, an AT&T spokesperson told Ars. "We have no other price changes to announce at this time."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung's MicroLED televisions like The Wall are always some of the biggest products at CES -- literally. Last year's version was a 292-inch monster composed of individual modules that required custom installation and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The 2021 version is a MicroLED TV in fixed sizes of 110, 99 and 88 inches that costs a bit less, but is still ridiculously expensive. Launched in Korea last month, the 110-inch MicroLED costs 170 million won, or around $156,000 according to ZDNet -- the same as a Bentley Bentayga. On Tuesday at its First Look event ahead of CES, the company announced two more sizes, 99 and 88 inches, all three with 4K resolution. Samsung says the TVs will arrive in other markets later this year. For comparison's sake, Samsung's puny 98-inch 8K TV costs $60,000, but it uses standard LCD-based QLED display technology, not MicroLED. [...] The 110-inch MicroLED TV is basically the size of four 55-inch TVs stuck together, and a feature called MultiView lets you connect multiple devices simultaneously and watch up to four things at once. Lucky owners can "enjoy watching news, movies and other apps simultaneously on one screen -- so they can keep up with multiple sports at once, or stream a walkthrough while playing a video game, all in stunning quality and size," according to the release. MultiView is also available on the smaller 99- and 88-inch versions.