Back in 1987 Alexander Trevor worked with the GIF format's creator, Steve Wilhite, at CompuServe. 35 years later Fast Company tech editor Harry McCracken (also Slashdot reader harrymcc) located Trevor for the inside story: Wilhite did not come up with the GIF format in order to launch a billion memes. It was 1987, and he was a software engineer at CompuServe, the most important online service until an upstart called America Online took off in the 1990s. And he developed the format in response to a request from CompuServe executive Alexander "Sandy" Trevor. (Trevor's most legendary contribution to CompuServe was not instigating GIF: He also invented the service's CB Simulator — the first consumer chat rooms and one of the earliest manifestation of social networking, period. That one he coded himself as a weekend project in 1980.)

GIF came to be because online services such as CompuServe were getting more graphical, but the computer makers of the time — such as Apple, Commodore, and IBM — all had their own proprietary image types. "We didn't want to have to put up images in 79 different formats," explains Trevor. CompuServe needed one universal graphics format.

Even though the World Wide Web and digital cameras were still in the future, work was already underway on the image format that came to be known as JPEG. But it wasn't optimized for CompuServe's needs: For example, stock charts and weather graphics didn't render crisply. So Trevor asked Wilhite to create an image file type that looked good and downloaded quickly at a time when a 2,400 bits-per-second dial-up modem was considered torrid. Reading a technical journal, Wilhite came across a discussion of an efficient compression technique known as LZW for its creators — Abraham Limpel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch. It turned out to be an ideal foundation for what CompuServe was trying to build, and allowed GIF to pack a lot of image information into as few bytes as possible. (Much later, computing giant Unisys, which gained a patent for LZW, threatened companies that used it with lawsuits, leading to a licensing agreement with CompuServe and the creation of the patent-free PNG image format.)

GIF officially debuted on June 15, 1987. "It met my requirements, and it was extremely useful for CompuServe," says Trevor....

GIF was also versatile, offering the ability to store the multiple pictures that made it handy for creating mini-movies as well as static images. And it spread beyond CompuServe, showing up in Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, and then in Netscape Navigator. The latter browser gave GIFs the ability to run in an infinite loop, a crucial feature that only added to their hypnotic quality. Seeing cartoon hamsters dance for a split second is no big whoop, but watching them shake their booties endlessly was just one of many cultural moments that GIFs have given us.

As viewership drops for Hollywood's annual Academy Awards ceremony, "Everyone has a theory about the decline..." argues an opinion piece in the New York Times.

"My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing." When the nominees were announced in February, nine of the 10 had made less than $40 million in domestic box office. The only exception, "Dune," barely exceeded $100 million domestically, making it the 13th-highest-grossing movie of 2021. All told, the 10 nominees together have earned barely one-fourth as much at the domestic box office as "Spider-Man: No Way Home." Even when Hollywood tries to conjure the old magic, in other words, the public isn't there for it anymore.... Sure, non-superhero-movie box office totals will bounce back in 2022, and next year's best picture nominees will probably earn a little more in theaters. Within the larger arc of Hollywood history, though, this is the time to call it: We aren't just watching the decline of the Oscars; we're watching the End of the Movies....

[W]hat looks finished is The Movies — big-screen entertainment as the central American popular art form, the key engine of American celebrity, the main aspirational space of American actors and storytellers, a pop-culture church with its own icons and scriptures and rites of adult initiation.... The internet, the laptop and the iPhone personalized entertainment and delivered it more immediately, in a way that also widened Hollywood's potential audience — but habituated people to small screens, isolated viewing and intermittent watching, the opposite of the cinema's communalism. Special effects opened spectacular (if sometimes antiseptic-seeming) vistas and enabled long-unfilmable stories to reach big screens. But the effects-driven blockbuster, more than its 1980s antecedents, empowered a fandom culture that offered built-in audiences to studios, but at the price of subordinating traditional aspects of cinema to the demands of the Jedi religion or the Marvel cult. And all these shifts encouraged and were encouraged by a more general teenage-ification of Western culture, the extension of adolescent tastes and entertainment habits deeper into whatever adulthood means today....

Under these pressures, much of what the movies did in American culture, even 20 years ago, is essentially unimaginable today. The internet has replaced the multiplex as a zone of adult initiation. There's no way for a few hit movies to supply a cultural lingua franca, given the sheer range of entertainment options and the repetitive and derivative nature of the movies that draw the largest audiences. The possibility of a movie star as a transcendent or iconic figure, too, seems increasingly dated. Superhero franchises can make an actor famous, but often only as a disposable servant of the brand. The genres that used to establish a strong identification between actor and audience — the non-superhero action movie, the historical epic, the broad comedy, the meet-cute romance — have all rapidly declined...

[T]he caliber of instantly available TV entertainment exceeds anything on cable 20 years ago. But these productions are still a different kind of thing from The Movies as they were — because of their reduced cultural influence, the relative smallness of their stars, their lost communal power, but above all because stories told for smaller screens cede certain artistic powers in advance.
The article argues that episodic TV also cedes the Movies' power of an-entire-story-in-one-go condensation. ("This power is why the greatest movies feel more complete than almost any long-form television.") And it ultimately suggests that like opera or ballet, these grand old movies need "encouragement and patronage, to educate people into loves that earlier eras took for granted," and maybe even "an emphasis on making the encounter with great cinema a part of a liberal arts education. "

In 2014 one lone film-maker had even argued that Ben Stiller's spectacular-yet-thoughtful Secret Life of Walter Mitty "might be the last of a dying breed."

"It's no longer possible to watch any content starring Keanu Reeves in China," reports PC Magazine, "and searching for his name returns no results from search engines."

The AV Club explains: Earlier this year, about a month after the release of The Matrix Resurrections, Reeves was announced as a performer at the 35th annual Tibet House Benefit Concert. The concert was organized by Tibet House, a nonprofit founded by supporters of the Dalai Lama that Chinese authorities have labeled "a separatist organization advocating for Tibetan independence," according to The Hollywood Reporter....

Now, after his appearance at the show, it's being reported by the Los Angeles Times that the Matrix movies, Speed, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, The Lake House, and more films from the actor's catalog can no longer be streamed on platforms such as Tencent Video, Youku, and Migu Video.... The one Reeves picture that is still up and available to stream in the country is Toy Story 4 — but that's because the film's credits feature the dubbing cast, not the original cast from the American release.
But it's more than that, notes PC Magazine: As Reuters reports, the Chinese authorities have seemingly wiped the actor's existence from servers across the country.... And with the internet being so restricted and controlled there, it's relatively simple for those in power to digitally disappear someone. So far, Tencent and iQiyi have removed at least 19 of the actor's movies from their streaming platforms, and performing a search for either his English name or its Chinese translation will return zero results from search engines, apparently.
The Los Angeles Times supplies some context: The development emerged just after his latest film "The Matrix: Resurrections" became the first blockbuster to hit Chinese theaters in over two months, ending an unusually prolonged drought of censorship approvals on U.S. titles in a year of rising geopolitical tensions and a further cooling of relations with Hollywood.... "It's a curious case that's worth following. We tend to think of the censorship machine in China as this really coordinated monster, but the fact that we're seeing these conflicting signals [between the online and theatrical markets] suggests that some of these measures come from different places," said Alex Yu, a researcher at China Digital Times, a U.S.-based news organization that translates and archives content censored in China.

It's unclear who ordered the deletions, China's regulatory agencies or platforms acting proactively to remove potentially troublesome content, Yu said.... "Why all of a sudden did they decide to take this measure at this exact moment? It's a question we as outsiders might never be able to answer," Yu said. "The system is so opaque that it's pretty much impossible to pinpoint which agency or person is responsible...."

The ban on Reeves' past works bodes poorly for the China prospects of his upcoming projects. These include animation "DC League of Super-Pets," starring Chinese fan favorite Dwayne Johnson, and the pandemic-delayed sequel "John Wick: Chapter 4," which appears to target mainland viewers with its top billing of Donnie Yen, the Hong Kong action star known for his expressions of loyalty to China's ruling Communist Party....

Despite the original trilogy's popularity, "The Matrix: Resurrections" was a flop in China even before it faced nationalist backlash, grossing only $13.6 million and notching just 5.7 out of 10 on the taste-making ratings platform Douban.

If Netflix follows through with its test to charge an additional fee to users sharing passwords, it could rake in $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, according to a new Wall Street analysis. Variety reports: Last week, Netflix said it was launching a test in three Latin America countries (Chile, Costa Rica and Peru) to address password sharing. Customers will be able to add up to two Extra Member accounts for about $2-$3/month each, on top of their regular monthly fee. According to estimates by Cowen & Co. analysts, if Netflix rolls the program out globally it could add an incremental $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, or about 4% upside to the firm's 2023 revenue projection of $38.8 billion. The firm's estimate assumes that about half of non-paying Netflix password-sharing households will become paying members; further, the model predicts that of those, about half will opt to sign up for their own separate paid account.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last year, the Google TV app user interface was completely redesigned and transformed into a hub for browsing movies and shows from your favorite streaming apps all in one place. It now appears that more changes are coming to the platform as Google has announced that in May 2022, movies or TV shows will no longer be available in the Google Play store. Instead, the Google TV app will be the official home for buying, renting, and watching movies and shows on your Android device. Other apps, games, and books will continue to live on the store. On Google TV, the experience of using Google Play Movies & TV will still be the same and users will get access to the latest new releases, rentals, and deals. When taking a look at the new Google TV app, customers will see a Shop tab where they can find all the titles that the tech giant offers.

Roku device owners will soon have a whole host of new personalization features, including all-new Photo Streams, with the Roku OS 11. From a report: Firstly, when Roku OS 11 rolls out to users in the weeks ahead, they'll be able to change their screensaver to display their own photography or images with Photo Streams. Not only will Photo Streams allow users to display photos from their desktop or mobile device on Roku, but users will also be able to share Streams with other Roku device owners as well. Once a Stream is shared, other Roku owners will be able to add to it, allowing everyone to collaborate on a shared album. Roku OS 11 will also introduce a new "what to watch on Roku" menu, a personally curated hub added to the home screen menu that will suggest popular and recently released TV and movies.

Microsoft's latest Windows 11 test build is another substantial one, adding two important features: payment information, and a new security feature called Smart App Control that will watch over new apps and games that you add to your PC. PCWorld reports: Microsoft released Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22567 for the Dev Channel on Wednesday with other changes, tooâ"including a tweak to Windows Update, so that now you can configure your PC to turn on an update when renewable energy is at its most plentiful. (Remember, code that Microsoft tests within the Dev Channel may make its way to your PC eventually -- or not.)

Asking for credit-card information within Windows isn't that startling, as you've probably already entered payment information into the Microsoft ecosystem either for buying apps or movies on the Microsoft Store app or for making similar purchases via your Xbox. Still, those transactions are normally performed via your Microsoft Account web page, which manages all of that online and behind the scenes. (You can reach them via the Windows 11 Settings > Accounts > Your Microsoft account.) Microsoft considers the additional credit-card info as part of the subscription option it added last month. Now, if your subscription risks falling through because of an expired credit card, Microsoft will alert you. Conceptually, however, it implies that your PC is as much a tool to make purchases as it is to simply work and game.

Another interesting addition is what Microsoft calls Smart App Control, or SAC. Microsoft describes it as a "new security feature for Windows 11 that blocks untrusted or potentially dangerous applications." What those applications are, apparently, is up to Microsoft. And yes, there's always a concern that SAC would flag otherwise innocuous applications that it simply hasn't seen before. But Microsoft is gently easing SAC onto your PC. For one thing, you'll need to perform a clean install to enable it. For another, SAC won't immediately insert itself. Other tweaks and changes include the ability to have Windows update your PC when clean energy is more commonly available (via Microsoft's partners electricityMap or WattTime) and better integration between your Android phone and PC via Windows 11 OOBE (Out of the Box Experience).

Additionally, "Microsoft now offers wider availability of speech packs to improve transcription, the ability to choose a mic for dictation/ transcription, and the ability to mute your speakers by simply clicking the volume icon in the hardware indicator for volume," reports PCWorld.

Google Search is now testing a row of widgets on desktop web for an experience that's similar to Discover. 9to5Google reports: These cards appear at the very bottom of google.com. There's a "Hide content" toggle in the bottom-right corner, while Google notes your zip code/city and explains that the information offered is "Based on your past activity." When the window is fully expanded, six cards are offered and they all expand on hover:

- Weather: Condition (with) icon + temperature. Three-day forecast on hover
- Trending: Cover image with search count
- What to Watch: Shows and movies with cover art
- Stocks/markets: Day graph on hover
- Local Events: With date
- COVID News

Tapping opens the full web result with the usual Knowledge Panel card and/or related Google Search experience. The number of cards that appear depends on the size of your screen with no way to scroll and see more without physically expanding the window. We're only seeing this rolled out on two Google Accounts, albeit across several signed-in devices, today. As such, this is very likely a test to determine whether a full rollout is warranted.

MoviePass, the defunct discount ticketing service, will return this summer without the firm that ran it into the ground, says co-founder Stacy Spikes. The Verge reports: The company, recently bought by Spikes after his unceremonious ouster from MoviePass in 2018, held its launch event today at the Walter Reade Theater Lincoln Center in NYC. Spikes began by wasting absolutely no time addressing the Helios and Matheson Analytics-shaped elephant in the room. The firm is now infamous for being the parent company of MoviePass that managed to blow the entire thing up shortly after the firm bought the startup, which became famous for offering unlimited movie tickets for a monthly fee.
"A lot of people lost money, a lot of people lost trust," Spikes said, claiming he was among those who were hurt by the company's mismanagement. During the opening moments of the event, Spikes oscillated between addressing the disappointment of being pushed out of his company, joking about MoviePass' loyal consumers -- as well as its power users, who Spikes cracked are the reason the company went out of business -- and finally, the process of snapping the company back after its parent company went bankrupt in 2020. "We're looking at this from another point of view," Spikes said of the company's relaunch, adding that he now plans to run the business like a "co-op." Spikes added that MoviePass users will be able to hold partial ownership of the company, with its most premium tier inclusive of a lifetime subscription.

The company's original engineering team is returning for the business's relaunch, according to Spikes, and the service will launch this summer. Under the new model, MoviePass will run on tradable credits that roll over month to month. Subscribers will also be able to use their credits to bring a friend, a markedly different approach from the single-user card system that MoviePass used previously, which could prove annoying for non-cardholders. MoviePass 2.0 will also work on a tiered system, Spikes said. Spikes shared images of a beta version of the new app and the credit-based system, which will vary based on things like peak moviegoing hours. MoviePass' ambitions for subscribers are, charitably, ambitious. Spikes wants to claim 30 percent of the moviegoer market by 2030, MoviePass' "moonshot" goal. Somewhat unsurprisingly, MoviePass will incorporate aspects of Spikes' existing business PreShow, a technology that has been used to allow gamers to trade ad views for in-game currency. [...] Spikes told attendees at the event that MoviePass' most loyal fans will be "deputized" to beta users and will be able to use the experience for its first year for free. At some point during the summer, these users will be contacted about the beta programming.

Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects mastermind behind Blade Runner, Close Encounter of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey and numerous others, died on Monday at age 79. His daughter Amy Trumbull announced the news on Facebook, writing that her father's death followed a "two-year battle" with cancer, a brain tumor and stroke. Engadget reports: Trumbull was born on April 8, 1942 in Los Angeles, the son of a mechanical engineer and artist. His father worked on the special effects for films including The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars: A New Hope. The younger Trumbull worked as an illustrator and airbrush artist in Hollywood for many years. His career really took off after he cold-called Stanley Kubrick, a conversation which led to a job working on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

One of his most significant contributions to 2001 was creating the film's Star Gate, a ground-breaking scene where astronaut Dave Bowman hurtles through an illuminated tunnel transcending space and time. In order to meet Kubrick's high aesthetic standards for the shot, Trumbull essentially designed a way to turn the film camera inside-out. Trumbull's ad hoc technique "was completely breaking the concept of what a camera is supposed to do," he said during a lecture at TIFF. Trumbull earned visual effects Oscar nominations for his work on Close Encounters, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Blade Runner. He also received the President's Award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 1996.

Later in his career, Trumbull voiced distaste over the impact of computers on visual effects, decrying the cheapening and flattening impact of the new era of CGI. [...] He spent the last years of his life working on a new super-immersive film format he dubbed MAGI, which he believed would improve the experience of watching a film in theaters. But Trumbull struggled to draw the interest of today's film industry.

Major rightsholders and internet companies in Russia have signed a new memorandum of cooperation designed to make pirated movies, TV shows and other content harder to find. In addition to automatically removing reported infringing links within hours, search engines have agreed to completely deindex all domains that carry 100 or more links to infringing content. TorrentFreak reports: Signed in 2018, a memorandum of cooperation signed by major rightsholders and internet companies including Yandex changed the way infringing content is handled. Following the creation of a centralized database of pirated content, the Internet companies agreed to query it every few minutes in order to remove corresponding content from their platforms within six hours. Over a period of three years, more than 40 million infringing links have now been removed from search results. Since its introduction, the memorandum has been renewed several times alongside calls for the system to be opened up to a wider range of rightsholders, such as those operating in the publishing sector. While that is yet to happen, a new memorandum has just been signed by the original signatories containing an even more powerful anti-piracy tool.

Under the current agreement (which is set to expire early September 2022), rightsholders must submit specific URLs to infringing content to the centralized database controlled by the Media Communications Union (ISS). These specific URLs are then delisted by search engines but rightsholders complain that the same content can reappear under a new URL, meaning that the process must be repeated. To deal with this type of 'pirate' countermeasure, the new memorandum requires search companies to take more stringent action. Any domain that has 100 or more 'pirate' links reported to the database will be deindexed entirely by search engines, meaning that they essentially become invisible to anyone using a search engine. This must be carried out quickly too, within 24 hours according to ISS. Given the number of links to infringing content posted to non-pirate sites, safeguards will also be introduced to protect legitimate resources from deindexing. These include media sites, government projects, search engines themselves, social networks, and official content providers. "Alongside the development of the memorandum a new law is being drafted, with the aim of enshrining its voluntary terms into local law," adds TorrentFreak. "That should allow other rightsholders that aren't current signatories to obtain similar benefits. At the time of writing, however, progress on the legal front is taking its time and might still take a few more months."

"Subaru and Kia dealers in Massachusetts have disabled systems that allow remote starts and send maintenance alerts..." reports Wired.

Subaru buyers in Massachusetts also lose access to the telematics system's app, so "no emergency assistance; no automated messages when the tire pressure was low or the oil needed changing." Subaru disabled the telematics system and associated features on new cars registered in Massachusetts last year as part of a spat over a right-to-repair ballot measure approved, overwhelmingly, by the state's voters in 2020. The measure, which has been held up in the courts, required automakers to give car owners and independent mechanics more access to data about the car's internal systems. But the "open data platform" envisioned by the law doesn't exist yet, and automakers have filed suit to prevent the initiative from taking effect. So first Subaru and then Kia turned off their telematics systems on their newest cars in Massachusetts.... "This was not to comply with the law — compliance with the law at this time is impossible — but rather to avoid violating it," Dominick Infante, a spokesperson for Subaru, wrote in a statement. Kia did not respond to a request for comment.

The dispute is the latest chapter in long-running disagreements between the state and automakers over the right to repair, or consumers' ability to fix their own cars or control who does it for them.... [N]ew vehicles are now computers on wheels, gathering an estimated 25 gigabytes per hour of driving data — the equivalent of five HD movies. Automakers say that lots of this information isn't useful to them and is discarded. But some — a vehicle's location, how specific components are operating at a given moment — is anonymized and sent to the manufacturers.... These days, much of the data is transmitted wirelessly. So independent mechanics and right-to-repair proponents worry that automakers will stop sending vital repair information to the diagnostic ports. That would hamper the independents and lock customers into relationships with dealerships....

Automakers say opening the car's mechanical data to anyone would be dangerous — and a violation of federal law. In November 2020, just after voters approved the ballot measure, a trade group that represents most major automakers sued Massachusetts in federal court. The group, the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, argued that the federal government, not states, should control who gets access to cars' telematics systems. The group also said that it would be irresponsible and dangerous to create the open data platform that the law required, especially by 2022....

Dealerships are caught in the middle. It's an especially unfortunate time to be there, given the chip shortage that has curtailed vehicle production — and sales.
One dealer reportedly even asked a potential car buyer, "Don't you have any friends in Rhode Island whose address you can use?"

Last month streamers in China discovered that Fight Club had arrived on streaming platform Tencent — but with an entirely new ending where local authorities "rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals....."

But now there's been another round of changes, according to the Hollywood Reporter. "After widespread online backlash to clumsy censorship of the film's ending, Chinese streaming service Tencent Video backtracked in recent days and restored most of the cuts it had made." Crucially, Fight Club's complete ending is now viewable in full in China...

News of the cuts went viral around the world and sparked much debate and embarrassment on Chinese social media about local censorship practices.... [I]t would appear that the backlash has been deemed more troublesome than the fictional film's ending, as Tencent has now restored 11 of the 12 minutes it originally cut from the 137-minute movie. The minute still missing is mostly comprised of brief nude sex scenes between Brad Pitt's and Helena Bonham Carter's characters.
Insider reports that changing the original ending provoked comments like these on China's Twitter-like platform Weibo:

- "This has become a Chinese-only joke. Even dogs won't want to watch this."

- "This is exactly why, even if you have streaming platform subscriptions, you still have to watch pirated versions."


And it brought massive attention to China's history of changing movies, notes the Wrap since "word quickly spread across the globe, bringing embarrassment to the country," reports the Wrap: Censorship of American films and TV shows at the behest of Chinese officials has become common as Hollywood has made in-roads in the country over the past decade. Last year, an episode of "The Simpsons" in which the titular family visits China was removed from Disney+ in Hong Kong over a joke made in the film about the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and the Chinese government's censorship of the event.
Even the South China Morning Post reported that Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel that inspired the film, "appeared to mock the move on Twitter. 'Everyone gets a happy ending in China!' he wrote..." Similar changes have been made to other films in China in the past. Nicolas Cage's 2005 crime film Lord of War had its final half-hour cut and replaced with text reading, "Yuri Orlov confessed all the crimes officially charged against him in court and was sentenced to life imprisonment in the end."
And another example from the Hollywood Reporter: After 20th Century Fox's Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody won multiple Oscars in the 2018, it was granted a theatrical release in China — but only after all mentions of Freddie Mercury's homosexuality were cut from the film.
But in this case a global popular outcry appears to have been too embarrasing to endure. According to the Hollywood Reporter now we even have an expected ending to the story of how China tried to censor Fight Club.

"Reversals of censorship actions are extremely rare within China's entertainment industry — but cuts to Hollywood movies are not."

Amazon is raising the price of its annual Prime membership to $139 from $119, the company announced on Thursday as part of its fourth-quarter earnings results. From a report: Amazon last hiked the price of Prime in 2018, when it increased to $119 from $99. Four years before that, it raised the subscription fee to $99 from $79. Amazon's annual increase amounts to about a 17% rise in price. Amazon also raised the monthly price of a Prime membership from $12.99 to $14.99, the company said. New members will see the increased prices on Feb. 18, and current members will be billed at the higher rate after March 25. Launched in 2005, Amazon Prime gives members access to free two-day shipping, as well as access to exclusive movies and TV shows, among other perks. As of last April, the service had more than 200 million subscribers worldwide.

Disappointed with the lack of US response to the Hermit Kingdom's attacks against US security researchers, one hacker took matters into his own hands. From a report For the past two weeks, observers of North Korea's strange and tightly restricted corner of the internet began to notice that the country seemed to be dealing with some serious connectivity problems. On several different days, practically all of its websites -- the notoriously isolated nation only has a few dozen -- intermittently dropped offline en masse, from the booking site for its Air Koryo airline to Naenara, a page that serves as the official portal for dictator Kim Jong-un's government. At least one of the central routers that allow access to the country's networks appeared at one point to be paralyzed, crippling the Hermit Kingdom's digital connections to the outside world.

Some North Korea watchers pointed out that the country had just carried out a series of missile tests, implying that a foreign government's hackers might have launched a cyberattack against the rogue state to tell it to stop saber-rattling. But responsibility for North Korea's ongoing internet outages doesn't lie with US Cyber Command or any other state-sponsored hacking agency. In fact, it was the work of one American man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks -- and periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt the internet of an entire country.

Just over a year ago, an independent hacker who goes by the handle P4x was himself hacked by North Korean spies. P4x was just one victim of a hacking campaign that targeted Western security researchers with the apparent aim of stealing their hacking tools and details about software vulnerabilities. He says he managed to prevent those hackers from swiping anything of value from him. But he nonetheless felt deeply unnerved by state-sponsored hackers targeting him personally -- and by the lack of any visible response from the US government. So after a year of letting his resentment simmer, P4x has taken matters into his own hands.

joshuark writes: Microsoft has filed an amicus brief supporting Epic Games in its appeal against Apple, and argues that, "the potential antitrust issues stretch far beyond gaming." As Epic Games continues to file its appeal against the 2021 ruling that chiefly favored Apple, interested parties have been contributing supporting filings to the court. Notably, those have included US attorneys general, but now Microsoft has also joined in on the side of Epic Games. Microsoft's amicus filing included below, sets out what it describes as its own "unique -- and balanced -- perspective to the legal, economic, and technological issues this case implicates." As a firm which, like Apple, sells both hardware and software, Microsoft says it "has an interest" in supporting antitrust law. Describing what it calls Apple's "extraordinary gatekeeper power," Microsoft joins Epic Games in criticizing alleged errors in the original trial judge's conclusions. "Online commerce and interpersonal connection funnels significantly, and sometimes predominantly, through iOS devices," says Microsoft. "Few companies, perhaps none since AT&T... at the height of its telephone monopoly, have controlled the pipe through which such an enormous range of economic activity flows." To support its claim that the Epic Games vs Apple ruling has "potential antitrust issues [that] stretch far beyond gaming," Microsoft describes what else it sees as this "enormous range of economic activity." "Beyond app distribution and in-app payment solutions - the adjacent markets directly at issue in this case," says Microsoft's filing, "Apple offers mobile payments, music, movies and television, advertising, games, health tracking, web browsing, messaging, video chat, news, cloud storage, e-books, smart-home devices, wearables, and more besides."

LG has announced a new offering to advertisers that promises to be able to reach the company's millions of connected devices in households across the country, pummeling TV viewers with -- you guessed it -- targeted ads. From a report: While ads playing on your connected TV might not be anything new, some of the metrics the company plans to hand over to advertisers include targeting viewers by specific demographics, for example, or being able to tie a TV ad view to someone's in-store purchase down the line. If you swap out a TV screen for a computer screen, the kind of microtargeting that LG's offering doesn't sound any different than what a company like Facebook or Google would offer. That's kind of the point.

Online ad spending reached more than $490 billion by the end of last year, and those numbers are only going to keep going up as more advertisers look for more ways to track and target more people online. Traditional TV ad spend, meanwhile, has tanked since its peak around 2016. In order to lure ad dollars back, folks in the television space, like LG, are using every tool at their disposal to claw back the ad dollars the internet's taken away. And it's clearly working. While traditional TV ad spend has plummeted, there's never been more money spent on advertising across the digitally connected TVs offered by companies like LG. Roku, for example, recently announced an upcoming Shopify integration that would let retailers target TV viewers with more ads for more of their products. Amazon rolled out a new beta platform that lets networks promote apps, movies, or TV shows to people right from the device's home screen. And I don't need to remind Samsung TV owners how their devices are getting absolutely plastered with ads from every conceivable angle.

The first rule of Fight Club in China? Don't mention the original ending. The second rule of Fight Club in China? Change it so the police win. From a report: China has some of the world's most restrictive censorship rules with authorities only approving a handful of foreign films for release each year -- sometimes with major cuts. Among the latest movies to undergo such treatment is David Fincher's 1999 cult classic "Fight Club" starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Film fans in China noticed over the weekend that a version of the movie newly available on streaming platform Tencent Video was given a makeover that transforms the anarchist, anti-capitalist message that made the film a global hit.

In the closing scenes of the original, Norton's character The Narrator, kills off his imaginary alter ego Tyler Durden -- played by Pitt -- and then watches multiple buildings explode, suggesting his character's plan to bring down modern civilisation is underway. But the new version in China has a very different take. The Narrator still proceeds with killing off Durden, but the exploding building scene is replaced with a black screen and a coda: "The police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding". It then adds that Tyler -- a figment of The Narrator's imagination -- was sent to a "lunatic asylum" for psychological treatment and was later discharged. The new ending in which the state triumphs sparked head scratching and outrage among many Chinese viewers -- many of whom would likely have seen pirated versions of the unadulterated version film.
UPDATE (2/6/2022): After a widespread outcry and coverage around the globe, Fight Club's original ending has been restored for streamers in China.

Slashdot reader DevNull127 shares this transcript of James Cameron's new interview with the BBC — which they've titled "The Danger of Deepfakes."

"Almost everything we create seems to go wrong at some point," James Cameron says... James Cameron: Almost everything we create seems to go wrong at some point. I've worked at the cutting edge of visual effects, and our goal has been progressively to get more and more photo-real. And so every time we improve these tools, we're actually in a sense building a toolset to create fake media — and we're seeing it happening now. Right now the tools are — the people just playing around on apps aren't that great. But over time, those limitations will go away. Things that you see and fully believe you're seeing could be faked.

This is the great problem with us relying on video. The news cycles happen so fast, and people respond so quickly, you could have a major incident take place between the interval between when the deepfake drops and when it's exposed as a fake. We've seen situations — you know, Arab Spring being a classic example — where with social media, the uprising was practically overnight.

You have to really emphasize critical thinking. Where did you hear that? You know, we have all these search tools available, but people don't use them. Understand your source. Investigate your source. Is your source credible?

But we also shouldn't be prone to this ridiculous conspiracy paranoia. People in the science community don't just go, 'Oh that's great!' when some scientist, you know, publishes their results. No, you go in for this big period of peer review. It's got to be vetted and checked. And the more radical a finding, the more peer review there is. So good peer-reviewed science can't lie. But people's minds, for some reason, will go to the sexier, more thriller-movie interpretation of reality than the obvious one.

I always use Occam's razor — you know, Occam's razor's a great philosophical tool. It says the simplest explanation is the likeliest. And conspiracy theories are all too complicated. People aren't that good, human systems aren't that good, people can't keep a secret to save their lives, and most people in positions of power are bumbling stooges. The fact that we think that they could realistically pull off these — these complex plots? I don't buy any of that crap! Bill Gates is not really trying to microchip you with the flu vaccine! [Laughs]

You know, look, I'm always skeptical of new technology, and we all should be. Every single advancement in technology that's ever been created has been weaponized. I say this to AI scientists all the time, and they go, 'No, no, no, we've got this under control.' You know, 'We just give the AIs the right goals...' So who's deciding what those goals are? The people that put up the money for the research, right? Which are all either big business or defense. So you're going to teach these new sentient entities to be either greedy or murderous.

If Skynet wanted to take over and wipe us out, it would actually look a lot like what's going on right now. It's not going to have to — like, wipe out the entire, you know, biosphere and environment with nuclear weapons to do it. It's going to be so much easier and less energy required to just turn our minds against ourselves. All Skynet would have to do is just deepfake a bunch of people, pit them against each other, stir up a lot of foment, and just run this giant deepfake on humanity.

I mean, I could be a projection of an AI right now.

The Washington Post reports that three of the world's most prominent live-streaming stars "received notifications of copyright infringement after broadcasting TV shows to their millions-strong fanbases on Twitch."

"The days that followed produced copious amounts of Twitch's most common byproduct, online drama, but also focused attention on the murky and legally complicated question of what constitutes fair use of copyright materials such as TV shows and movies...." In 2007 Viacom sued YouTube for copyright infringement. Though the court ultimately ruled in favor of YouTube, the suit paved the way for the "Content ID" system, which automatically identifies copyright content and aggressively polices the platform. While software that can scan Twitch already exists, Twitch has yet to create its own automated system, and it does not appear to be in the process of doing so, according to industry figures with knowledge of Twitch's operations who weren't authorized to speak publicly.

Such an outcome becomes more likely, however, if advertisers start withdrawing from the platform for fear of being associated with risky content, something that's already beginning to happen on Twitch according to Devin Nash, chief marketing officer of content creator-focused talent agency Novo...

The "react content" trend often hinges on broadcasting copyright material, like popular movies or TV shows, a practice which skirts the outer edges of platform rules. Earlier this month, Viacom and the History Channel/A&E (which is owned by Hearst and Disney) issued copyright claims — also known as Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests — to specific streamers.... The DMCA-centric discourse left streamers and viewers on Twitch with ample drama but no clear answer as to whether one of the platform's go-to trends merely faces a few bumps in the road or an asteroid-sized extinction event. "Nothing could happen, or everything could happen," Cassell added. "And it rests on the decisions of a handful of media rights holders...."

Some streamers, such as Piker and Felix "xQc" Lengyel, both of whom started reacting to clips from sites like YouTube long before the current react meta began, argue reaction content should be permitted since Twitch is essentially built on copyright infringement. Streaming a video game is technically a DMCA-able offense. The video game industry, however, has decided to allow the practice because the free publicity and resulting sales tend to outweigh any potential downsides. But television is a different beast, with its economics rooted in broadcast rights rather than individual unit sales....

This awkward and unceasing dance around the topic has been fueled in part by the fact that Twitch is incentivized to maintain its ignorance of copyright infractions taking place on their platform.... But the silence has added stress to streamers whose livelihoods could be impacted by decisions around the current DMCA practices....
The Post also spoke to game/esports/entertainment lawyer David Philip Graham, who believes copyright law itself is due for an overhaul. "Much of our current copyright regime isn't really about authors' rights or promoting the progress of science and useful arts, but about big businesses looking for easier routes to profitability," Graham said.

He proposes shortening copyright term lengths — and also expanding permissions for derivative works.