An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Over the past few years we have seen copyright holders take several ISPs to court, accusing them of failing to disconnect repeat copyright infringers. These lawsuits have expanded recently, with VPN providers and hosting companies as the main targets. The VPN lawsuits are filed by a group of independent movies companies that previously went after piracy sites and apps. They include the makers of films such as The Hitman's Bodyguard, Dallas Buyers Club, and London Has Fallen. In one of these cases, the filmmakers accused VPN Unlimited's company KeepSolid Inc. of being involved in widespread copyright infringement. The company allegedly 'encouraged' subscribers to use pirate sites and did nothing to stop infringing traffic.

Most VPNs can't track the online activities of subscribers and the filmmakers believe that VPN Unlimited and other providers actively promoted their services to online pirates. For example, by referencing known pirate sites. "Defendant KeepSolid encourages its users to access torrent sites including the Pirate Bay," the complaint read, showing a screenshot from the VPN's help section, which remains online today. Instead of fighting the case on its merits, both parties have agreed to settle the case behind closed doors. Last week, they informed the Virginia federal court that an agreement had been reached. As part of this settlement, all claims against VPN Unlimited were dismissed. The full details of the settlement agreement are confidential. Both parties agreed to cover their own costs but it's unknown whether any monetary damages are involved. What is clear is that, going forward, VPN Unlimited will restrict torrent traffic on its U.S. servers.

"Pursuant to the confidential settlement agreement, Plaintiffs have requested and Defendant KeepSolid has agreed to use commercially reasonable efforts to block BitTorrent traffic," the joint dismissal stipulation reads. As it reads, this measure applies to BitTorrent traffic as a broad category. That includes both pirated content and lawful torrent transfers. In addition, VPN Unlimited will also take more targeted measures to stop traffic to torrent sites. VPN Unlimited has agreed to block access to several pirate sites. These include YTS, The Pirate Bay, RARBG, 1337x, and several proxies. These measures are again limited to U.S.-based VPN servers. Popcorn-time.tw is also on the blocklist, but this Popcorn Time fork has already shut down.

During the past 20 years, deep learning has come to dominate artificial intelligence research and applications through a series of useful commercial applications. But underneath the dazzle are some deep-rooted problems that threaten the technology's ascension. IEEE Spectrum: The inability of a typical deep learning program to perform well on more than one task, for example, severely limits application of the technology to specific tasks in rigidly controlled environments. More seriously, it has been claimed that deep learning is untrustworthy because it is not explainable -- and unsuitable for some applications because it can experience catastrophic forgetting. Said more plainly, if the algorithm does work, it may be impossible to fully understand why. And while the tool is slowly learning a new database, an arbitrary part of its learned memories can suddenly collapse. It might therefore be risky to use deep learning on any life-or-death application, such as a medical one.

Now, in a new book, IEEE Fellow Stephen Grossberg argues that an entirely different approach is needed. Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind describes an alternative model for both biological and artificial intelligence based on cognitive and neural research Grossberg has been conducting for decades. He calls his model Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART). Grossberg -- an endowed professor of cognitive and neural systems, and of mathematics and statistics, psychological and brain sciences, and biomedical engineering at Boston University -- based ART on his theories about how the brain processes information. "Our brains learn to recognize and predict objects and events in a changing world that is filled with unexpected events," he says. Based on that dynamic, ART uses supervised and unsupervised learning methods to solve such problems as pattern recognition and prediction. Algorithms using the theory have been included in large-scale applications such as classifying sonar and radar signals, detecting sleep apnea, recommending movies, and computer-vision-based driver-assistance software.

[...] One of the problems faced by classical AI, he says, is that it often built its models on how the brain might work, using concepts and operations that could be derived from introspection and common sense. "Such an approach assumes that you can introspect internal states of the brain with concepts and words people use to describe objects and actions in their daily lives," he writes. "It is an appealing approach, but its results were all too often insufficient to build a model of how the biological brain really works." The problem with today's AI, he says, is that it tries to imitate the results of brain processing instead of probing the mechanisms that give rise to the results. People's behaviors adapt to new situations and sensations "on the fly," Grossberg says, thanks to specialized circuits in the brain. People can learn from new situations, he adds, and unexpected events are integrated into their collected knowledge and expectations about the world.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Cold War couldn't stop gaming from thriving in the Eastern Bloc. From the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a generation of young people living behind the Iron Curtain designed and released their own video games and arcade cabinets. Now, you can play English translations of some of these lost classics of early gaming. One is a text adventure where a Soviet military officer hunts and kills Rambo. The translated games all come from Slovakia and are a collaboration between the Slovak Game Developers Association and the Slovak Design Museum.

According to Stanislav Hrda, one of the programmers who created the games on offer, making video games was something only kids did. "The games were not sold in shops and the authors were not entitled to remuneration," he said in the post explaining the project. "Therefore, practically no one could engage in video game programming as a business activity, and adult programmers worked at most in state institutions on large mainframe computers. Thus, video game programmers became mainly teenagers." The computing power was limited and the teenagers' technological knowhow almost non-existent so many of these early games were text adventures. "These could also be programmed in the simpler Basic language that every home computer had built in," Hrda said. "Text-based games offered the opportunity to imprint one's fantasies into a world of characters, locations, descriptions of reality or fantasy at will. That is why hundreds of such video games were created in the 1980s in Czechoslovakia. The authors from the ranks of teenagers portrayed their friends, but also heroes from films that were distributed on VHS tapes or from the pop-cultural world of the West from the occasionally available comics, films, TV series and books."

Hrda loved American action movies and programmed the video game Satochin, a text adventure where a Soviet officer hunts John Rambo. "The game was very hard to win," Hrda told Ars Technica. "Whenever you made a small mistake, you would die. So before you win, you are killed ten times by Rambo." [...] The project has localized ten games for Western audiences, including Satochin, with plans to tackle more over the next few years. "The games translated over the next 2-3 years after the end of the project will represent almost the complete video game production from the period of 8-bit computers in Slovakia, with an emphasis on text adventure games," the site said. English versions are available here and can be played in the Fuse emulator. The Slovak versions can be played online through the project's website.

Popcorn Time, the once-popular app that made watching pirated movies and television shows almost as easy as using Netflix, has shut down. Bloomberg News: The app debuted in 2014 and within a year became one of the most popular services for accessing illegal video content. Popcorn Time's creators deserted the service shortly after its introduction, and emails released after a hack of Sony Group indicated law enforcement may have played a role. But the app's code was open-source, and other developers jumped in to release new versions. In 2015, a developer associated with Popcorn Time told Bloomberg that the service wasn't responsible for piracy because it didn't host any stolen material itself. The software instead offered a link to computers around the world hosting the content through the file-sharing system BitTorrent. "The torrent world was here with millions of users way before us and will be here with BILLIONS of users way after us," he said at the time.

NBC News writes: VPNs, or virtual private networks, continue to be used by millions of people as a way of masking their internet activity by encrypting their location and web traffic. But on the modern internet, most people can safely ditch them, thanks to the widespread use of encryption that has made public internet connections far less of a security threat, cybersecurity experts say. "Most commercial VPNs are snake oil from a security standpoint," said Nicholas Weaver, a cybersecurity lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. "They don't improve your security at all...."

Most browsers have quietly implemented an added layer of security in recent years that automatically encrypts internet traffic at most sites with a technology called HTTPS. Indicated by a tiny padlock by the URL, the presence of HTTPS means that worrisome scenario, in which a scammer or a hacker squats on a public Wi-Fi connection in order to watch people's internet habits, isn't feasible. It's not clear that the threat of a hacker at your coffee shop was ever that real to begin with, but it is certainly not a major danger now, Weaver said. "Remember, someone attacking you at the coffee shop needs to be basically at the coffee shop," he said. "I don't know of them ever being used outside of pranks. And those are all irrelevant now with most sites using HTTPS," he said in a text message.

There are still valid uses for VPNs. They're an invaluable tool for getting around certain types of censorship, though other options also exist, such as the Tor Browser, a free web browser that automatically reroutes users' traffic and is widely praised by cybersecurity experts. VPNs are also vital for businesses that need their employees to log in remotely to their internal network. And they're a popular and effective way to watch television shows and movies that are restricted to particular countries on streaming services. But like with antivirus software, the paid VPN industry is a booming global market despite its core mission no longer being necessary for many people.

Most VPNs market their products as a security tool. A Consumer Reports investigation published earlier this month found that 12 of the 16 biggest VPNs make hyperbolic claims or mislead customers about their security benefits. And many can make things worse, either by selling customers' browsing history to data brokers, or by having poor cybersecurity.
The article credits the Electronic Frontier Foundation for popularizing encryption through browser extensions and web site certificates starting in 2010. "In 2015, Google started prioritizing websites that enabled HTTPS in its search results. More and more websites started offering HTTPS connections, and now practically all sites that Google links to do so.

"Since late 2020, major browsers such as Brave, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge all built HTTPS into their programs, making Electronic Frontier Foundation's browser extension no longer necessary for most people."

The top eight US media groups plan to spend at least $115bn on new movies and television shows next year in pursuit of a video streaming business that loses money for most of them. From a report: The huge investment outlays come amid concerns that it will be harder to attract new customers in 2022 after the pandemic-fuelled growth in 2020 and 2021. Yet the alternative is to be left out of the streaming land rush. "There is no turning back," said media analyst Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson. "The only way to compete is spending more and more money on premium content." The Financial Times calculated the planned expenditures based on company disclosures and analyst reports. One entertainment executive called them "mind-boggling." Most of the companies -- a list that includes Walt Disney, Comcast, WarnerMedia and Amazon -- are set to rack up losses on their streaming units. Including sports rights, the aggregate spending estimate rises to about $140bn. Disney's investment in streaming content is likely to grow 35-40 per cent in 2022, according to estimates by Morgan Stanley. The company's spending on all new movies and TV shows is expected to reach $23bn, though the number rises to $33bn including sports rights -- up 32 per cent from its total content spending in 2021 and 65 per cent from 2020.

Thirty feet underground and a stone's throw from Stanford University, scientists are putting the finishing touches on a laser that could fundamentally change the way they study the building blocks of the universe. CNET reports: When completed next year, the Linac Coherent Light Source II, or the LCLS-II , will be the second world-class X-ray laser at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. CNET was given the rare opportunity to film inside the more than 2-mile long tunnel ahead of the new laser's launch. The first LCLS, in operation since 2009, creates a beam capable of 120 light pulses per second. The LCLS-II will be capable of up to 1 million pulses per second, and a beam 10,000 times brighter than its predecessor.

You can think of the LCLS as being like a microscope with atomic resolution. At its core it is a particle accelerator, a device that speeds up charged particles and channels them into a beam. That beam is then run through a series of alternating magnets (a device called an undulator) to produce X-rays. Scientists can use those X-rays to create what they call molecular movies. These are snapshots of atoms and molecules in motion, captured within a few quadrillionths of a second, and strung together like a film. Scientists across nearly every scientific field have come from all over the world to run their experiments with the LCLS. Among other things, their molecular movies have shown chemical reactions as they happened, demonstrated the behavior of atoms inside stars, and produced live snapshots detailing the process of photosynthesis.

Though both lasers accelerate electrons to nearly the speed of light, they'll each do it differently. The LCLS's accelerator pushes the electrons down a copper pipe that operates at room temperature, designed to be activated only in short bursts. But the LCLS-II is designed to run continuously, which means it generates massive amounts of heat. A copper cavity would absorb too much of that heat. That's why engineers turned to a new superconducting accelerator, composed of dozens of 40-foot-long devices called cryomodules designed to run at two degrees above absolute zero (-456 degrees Fahrenheit). They're kept at operating temperature by a massive cryogenics plant above ground.

[T]he LCLS-II will allow SLAC scientists answer questions they've been trying to solve for years. "How does energy transfer happen inside molecular systems? How does charge transfer happen? Once we understand some of these principles, we can start to apply them to understand how we can do artificial photosynthesis, how can we build better solar cells." Scientists at SLAC hope to produce their first electron beam with the LCLS-II in January, followed by their first X-ray in the summer, which they'll refer to as their first "big light" event.

SFGate visits a San Francisco elementary school where there's absolutely no trace of warehouse that used to be there where Tim Burton kicked a hole in the wall during the arduous two-year filming of "The Nightmare Before Christmas".

At least one animator remembers Burton at the time was directing Batman Returns, and only stopped by every month or so to check on the film's progress and "actually got to witness, proof positive, how the crew suffered to create his vision...."

Slashdot reader destinyland shares SFGate's report: Disney initially had reservations about the film, releasing it under the Touchstone banner with a PG rating that was uncommon for an animated feature at the time. Nonetheless, "The Nightmare Before Christmas" became a sleeper hit — Disneyland's Haunted Mansion is annually remodeled with a seasonal overlay inspired by the film, and it clocks in at #7 on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the best Christmas movies of all time. It was immortalized in a Blink-182 song, and Roger Ebert went as far as to compare the originality of the worlds captured in "The Nightmare Before Christmas" to the planets in the "Star Wars" franchise....

[A] team of 120 animators, puppet fabricators, camera operators, and more moved into San Francisco Studios — later renamed Skellington Productions — in July of 1991, with production expected to begin later that October. The 35,000-square-foot warehouse on 375 7th Street was outfitted with 19 soundstages where 227 puppets — many of them duplicates of the main characters — were painstakingly assembled and animated. Passersby in SoMa likely had no idea the studio existed, and if they did, they were completely unaware of what was going on inside.

Unlike studios such as Pixar and Dreamworks, where each animator is usually seated at a computer in a cubicle, these soundstages were massive and sectioned off with thick black curtains, said animator Justin Kohn, who lived in a Sausalito apartment next to Smitty's Bar during filming and still resides in Marin. "It was like visiting this crazy museum," he said. "You'd part the curtain, and it was like visiting a whole new world with clouds and stars everywhere." Set pieces were built no larger than two feet tall and wide so an animator could easily reach inside and move the puppets around. Each character had to be posed 24 times for every second of animated footage, while many of the scenes required 20-30 lighting instruments on top of that to create lifelike visual effects. "It was the most sophisticated stop motion ever done in the world up until that point," said Kohn...

All the while, they wondered if the hours of tedious work would pay off. When the film was completed, most of the sets and puppets were thrown away, with animators taking home some of them as keepsakes — Kohn still has a Jack Skellington puppet and the sleigh displayed in an office.

While 1999 movie influenced everything from videogames to action movies to the metaverse, latest installment shows some restraint. From a report: The jaw-dropping visual effects in "The Matrix" transformed the quest to prove what is possible on screen. The franchise returns this week to find out if there is anything more that can be done. For the 1999 original, filmmakers invented a way to make Keanu Reeves's hero, Neo, defy physics while dodging bullets on screen. The effect blew enough minds to get a nickname -- "bullet time" -- plus changed the look of action movies, and influenced mediums from animation to videogames. For the new sequel, "The Matrix Resurrections," filmmakers deployed much-higher-caliber technologies, including three-dimensional imagery made using artificial intelligence. But after 22 years of digital evolution, high-end movie effects are approaching a plateau near perfection. "We went from pulling off what seemed to be impossible, to a sort of inability to create surprise" in the movie industry, says John Gaeta, who helped craft the bullet-time effect. He was a visual-effects designer on the first three "Matrix" films; now he is making things for the metaverse.

This year the movies presented us with a car slingshotting from cliff to cliff ("F9"); Ryan Reynolds running amok inside a videogame ("Free Guy"); and giant monsters crushing the Hong Kong skyline ("Godzilla vs. Kong"). Any viewers who paused to ask themselves -- "How did they do that?" -- likely came up with the same answer: "Computers." Human characters that are totally computer-generated and believable are still on the frontier, "but I'm not sure if there is anything else that can't be done given enough money or time," says Ian Failes, editor of befores and afters, a magazine covering visual-effects artistry. Despite any numbness among viewers to digital spectacles, Hollywood's demand for them has only increased. Visual-effects houses have raced to compete in a global production boom and fuel the streaming wars with flashy content. Some directors are reacting to the VFX arms race by practicing more restraint. Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" depicts settings such as the desert planet Arrakis with a naturalistic look. Instead of zooming viewers into a fleet of attacking space ships, the director presented the nighttime ambush in silhouette at a distance, conveying a somber sense of scale. "He was just showing the reality of the world," says Namit Malhotra, chief executive of DNEG, a visual-effects company that worked on "Dune" and "The Matrix Resurrections." He adds: "When you're spending that kind of money, it's hard for filmmakers to control the desire for more, a little more oomph."

In the new "Matrix" release, director and co-writer Lana Wachowski plays with expectations that the sequel must level up. Spoiler alert: In the movie, Mr. Reeves's character is reintroduced as a videogame designer whose big hit was called, yes, "The Matrix." The events in the film franchise supposedly happened within the world of his videogame -- including that signature action sequence in which Neo bends time and space. As a group of videogame developers brainstorm ideas for a sequel to "The Matrix," one declares, "We need a new bullet time!" The original bullet time was "a borderline hack," as Mr. Gaeta recalls it, that started with 120 still cameras firing off film photographs of Mr. Reeves dangling on wires. Those images were stitched together with software to simulate a swooping camera move in slow motion. The successor to that technique is known as volumetric capture. A camera array captures people or spaces from every angle, and then A.I. meshes this video into 3-D footage that can be viewed and manipulated from any perspective.

Universal Control, a feature unveiled at Apple's WWDC event earlier this year, won't be available until spring 2022. Originally planned for a fall release, the feature aims to let users control multiple Macs and iPads with a single mouse and keyboard or trackpad. 9to5Mac reports: Now Apple has changed the launch date for Universal Control from sometime before the winter solstice to "available this spring" as updated on its website. Apple first showed off Universal Control during an on-stage demo at WWDC 21 and it ended up proving to be too ambitious to ship this year. Here's how it describes the feature: "A single keyboard and mouse or trackpad now work seamlessly between your Mac and iPad -- they'll even connect to more than one Mac or iPad. Move your cursor from your Mac to your iPad, type on your Mac and watch the words show up on your iPad, or even drag and drop content from one Mac to another." The good news is that Apple SharePlay is now available on Mac. According to Engadget, SharePlay "allows up to 32 people to enjoy the same TV shows, movies, music and livestreams and more in sync with each other on FaceTime calls." This feature was slated to arrive in the fall just like Universal Control.

"Windows Me was unstable, unloved and unusable," remembered Computerworld last year, on the 20th anniversary of its release, calling it "a stink bomb of an operating system." Windows Me was a ghastly, slapdash piece of work, incompatible with lots of hardware and software. It frequently failed during the installation process — which should have been the first sign for people that this was an operating system they shouldn't try.Often, when you tried to shut it down, it declined to do so, like a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum over being forced to go to sleep. It was slow and insecure. Its web browser, Internet Explorer, frequently refused to load web pages.
But they ultimately argue that it wasn't as bad as Windows Vista, which "simply refused to run, or ran so badly it was useless on countless PCs. Not just old PCs, but even newly bought PCs, right out of the box, with Vista installed." And they conclude that the worst Microsoft OS of all is still Windows 8. ("You want bad? You want stupid? You want an operating system that not only was roundly reviled by consumers and businesses alike, but also set Microsoft's business plans back years?")

Slashdot reader alaskana98 even remembers Windows ME semi-fondly as "the last Microsoft OS to use the Windows 95 codebase." While rightly being panned as a buggy and crash-prone OS — indeed it was labelled as the worst version of Windows ever released by Computer World — it did introduce a number of features that continue on to this very day. Those features include:

-A personalized start menu that would show your most recently accessed programs, today a common feature in the Windows landscape.
-Software support for DVD playback. Previously one needed a dedicated card to playback DVDs.
-Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player 7, allowing home users to create, edit and burn their own digital home movies. While seemingly pedestrian in today's times, these were groundbreaking features for home users in the year 2000.
-The first iteration of System Restore — imagine a modern version of Windows not having the ability to conveniently restore to a working configuration — before Windows ME, this was simply not a possibility for the average home user unless you had a rigorous backup routine.
-The removal of real-mode DOS. While very controversial at the time, this change arguably improved the speed and reliability of the boot process.

Love it or hate it (well, lets face it, if you were a computer user at that point you probably hated it) — Windows ME did make several important contributions to the modern OS landscape that are often overlooked to this day. Do you have any stories from the heady days of late 2000 when Windows ME was first released?
Slashdot reader Z00L00K remembers in a comment that "The removal of real-mode DOS is what REALLY made ME impossible to use for most of us at the time. It broke backwards compatibility so hard that the only way out was to use any of the earlier versions of Windows instead!"

Is this re-awakening images of the year 2000 for anyone? Share your own memories and thoughts in the comments.

What do you remember about Windows ME?

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: Mystery Science Theatre 3000 will be coming back in 2022 with thirteen new episodes, plus 12 additional shorts and 12 monthly live events. "And this time, we're doing it without a network," explains the web page for their successful comeback campaign on Kickstarter. "Season 13 will be released exclusively in MST3K's new online virtual theatre, THE GIZMOPLEX."

36,581 backers pledged $6,519,019 to fund their own dedicated MST3K venue online, and most contributors to their 2021 Kickstarter campaign received 2022 passes to the online theatre as a thank-you. Now through December, fans who want to buy or gift a 2022 pass can get them discounted to $95. (Normally'll they cost $120.)

Starting on March 4, 2022, assorted MST3K zanies and their puppet robots will be watching (and heckling) 12 carefully-chosen weird movies, including one 1970 Gamera movie that they haven't gotten to yet, a 1968 Italian movie about a professional wrestler called The Batwoman, and Jack Palance's 1979 film, HG Wells' The Shape of Things to Come. And series creator Joel Hodgson will return when they all watch the 2014 movie The Christmas Dragon. The Den of Geek site has all the details on the 13 movies (gleaned from last week's traditional "Turkey Day marathon" of fan-favorite episodes — this year broadcast on YouTube, Twitch, and various web pages and streaming apps).

But in addition there's also a live touring show that will take them all across America. Next week fans can catch shows in the midwestern U.S. — specifically Youngstown Ohio, Nashville Indiana, Madison Wisconsin, and Chicago — before the crew moves on to Salt Lake City, Reno, and Seattle. Then it's on to California — San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego — and then dozens of other major cities in the U.S. (Portland! Denver! Austin! Atlanta! Durham! Worcester! New York City!)

"We know that many of you are understandably concerned about COVID and the Delta variant. We are too," explains a special announcement on the tour's web site, promising the tour "will adhere to the same standards as touring Broadway shows in effect at the time of your performance... [E]very theater on the tour will have its own policies."
In 2008 the show's creator Joel Hodgson answered questions from Slashdot readers.

"I used to be able to understand 99% of the dialogue in Hollywood films," writes professional film blogger Ben Pearson. "But over the past 10 years or so, I've noticed that percentage has dropped significantly — and it's not due to hearing loss on my end...." Knowing I'm not alone in having these experiences, I reached out to several professional sound editors, designers, and mixers, many of whom have won Oscars for their work on some of Hollywood's biggest films, to get to the bottom of what's going on. One person refused to talk to me, saying it would be "professional suicide" to address this topic on the record. Another agreed to talk, but only under the condition that they remain anonymous. But several others spoke openly about the topic, and it quickly became apparent that this is a familiar subject among the folks in the sound community, since they're the ones who often bear the brunt of complaints about dialogue intelligibility...

"There are a number of root causes," says Mark Mangini, the Academy Award-winning sound designer behind films like "Mad Max: Fury Road" and "Blade Runner 2049." "It's really a gumbo, an accumulation of problems that have been exacerbated over the last 10 years ... that's kind of this time span where all of us in the filmmaking community are noticing that dialogue is harder and harder to understand...."

When it comes to dialogue unintelligibility, one name looms above all others: Christopher Nolan. The director of "Tenet," "Interstellar," and "The Dark Knight Rises" is one of the most successful filmmakers of his generation, and he uses his power to make sure his films push the boundaries of sound design, often resulting in scenes in which audiences literally cannot understand what his characters say. And it's not just audiences who have trouble with some Nolan films: the director has even revealed that other filmmakers have reached out to him to complain about this issue in his movies.... Thomas Curley, who won an Oscar as a production sound mixer on "Whiplash" and previously worked on "The Spectacular Now," has also seen this type of mentality at work. "Not everything really has a very crisp, cinematic sound to it in real life, and I think some of these people are trying to replicate that," he tells me.
Among the other factors: Curley also says that in general there's also a "bit of a fad" with today's actors for "soft delivery or under your breath delivery of some lines." Another sound designer complains today's more-visual movies are more resistant to closely-placed boom microphones — while a sound editor notes issues are exacerbated by compressed shooting schedules. One "high-profile Hollywood sound professional who wishes to remain anonymous even blamed an abundance of new technologies: "more tracks to play with, more options, therefore more expected and asked for from the sound editors... We literally have hundreds of tracks at our disposal."

And after all that, the article adds, movie theaters could also just be showing the movie with volume set too low.

While making the press rounds for his upcoming film, House of Gucci, iconic director Sir Ridley Scott revealed that both Blade Runner and Alien live-action television series are in the early stages of development. From a report: Speaking to the BBC news radio series, Today, Scott explained that his team has already written an initial pilot script for the former show, which would most likely air as a 10-episode run. Although the Alien series was first announced nearly a year ago as an FX on Hulu exclusive from showrunner Noah Hawley (Fargo and Legion), little has been heard of the project since then. Scott didn't tell much, but confirmed that the Alien series is still "being written for pilot," adding that Hawley and his crew "have to also write out the history, if it's eight hours or 10 hours, the bible of what happens in those 10 hours." A CGI anime set in the world of Agent K and Deckard in the year 2032, Blade Runner: Black Lotus, is currently airing on Adult Swim.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: This week Marvel released an epic three-minute trailer hyping December's releases of Spider-Man: No Way Home. "It comes after the initial trailer, which focused on the movie's multiversal villains, broke YouTube records over the summer," CNET reported Tuesday (racking up 355.5 million views in its first 24 hours).

But then one more universe collided...

Basically, some internet wise guys re-edited the trailer, splicing its audio over clips from the Fox Kids' 1994 cartoon series Spider-Man. (Opening credits here.) "This has no right being this good," argues CNET — especially since the actual movie's trailer arrived "amidst a ludicrous amount of fanfare and hype."

But it's all oddly appropriate, since CNET notes the upcoming movie features five sinister villains from nearly 20 years of Spider-Man movies, reaching back to the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield era ("likely spurred on by the events of the Disney Plus Loki series.")

So maybe it's fitting that it was also invaded by the television cartoon universe...

An anonymous reader writes: Haven't seen discussion on movie and TV shows recommendations on Slashdot of late. Could the fellow readers share some movies and TV shows and documentaries from this year that they really liked watching?

A service's guts, the engineering behind the app itself, are the foundation of any streamer's success, and Netflix has spent the last 10 years building out an expansive server network called Open Connect in order to avoid many modern streaming headaches. From a report: It's the thing that's allowed Netflix to serve up a far more reliable experience than its competitors and not falter when some 111 million users tuned in to Squid Game during its earliest weeks on the service. "One of the reasons why Netflix is the leader in this market and has the number of subs they do [...] is something that pretty much everybody outside of the technical part of this industry underestimates, and that is Open Connect," Dan Rayburn, a media streaming expert and principal analyst with Frost & Sullivan, tells The Verge. "How many times has Netflix had a problem with their streaming service over the last 10 years?"

Certainly not as many as HBO Max, that's for sure. Open Connect was created because Netflix "knew that we needed to build some level of infrastructure technology that would sustain the anticipated traffic that we knew success would look like," Gina Haspilaire, Netflix's vice president of Open Connect, tells me. "We felt we were going to be successful, and we knew that the internet at the time was not built to sustain the level of traffic that would be required globally." Nobody wants to sit down to watch a movie only to have their app crash or buffer for an eternity. What Netflix had the foresight to understand was that if it was going to maintain a certain level of quality, it would have to build a distribution system itself.

Open Connect is Netflix's in-house content distribution network specifically built to deliver its TV shows and movies. Started in 2012, the program involves Netflix giving internet service providers physical appliances that allow them to localize traffic. These appliances store copies of Netflix content to create less strain on networks by eliminating the number of channels that content has to pass through to reach the user trying to play it. Most major streaming services rely on third-party content delivery networks (CDNs) to pass along their videos, which is why Netflix's server network is so unique. Without a system like Open Connect or a third-party CDN in place, a request for content by an ISP has to "go through a peering point and maybe transit four or five other networks until it gets to the origin, or the place that holds the content," Will Law, chief architect of media engineering at Akamai, a major content delivery network, tells The Verge. Not only does that slow down delivery, but it's expensive since ISPs may have to pay to access that content. To avoid the traffic and fees, Netflix ships copies of its content to its own servers ahead of time. That also helps to prevent Netflix traffic from choking network demand during peak hours of streaming.

The following sentence may sound like the logline for an as-yet unmade National Treasure 3, but it's very much real: A large group of crypto maximalists is banding together in an effort to obtain the actual U.S. Constitution. From a report: Unlike the antagonists in the previous Nicolas Cage movies, this crew might actually succeed. Or kind of, anyway. On Thursday, November 18, Sotheby's is auctioning off "an exceptionally rare and extraordinarily historic" first printing of the U.S. Constitution. Only thirteen copies remain, besides the one located in Washington D.C.'s National Archives museum, from the original printing of 500 that the founders issued for submission to the Continental Congress. It's the first time in 30 years that this one has become available for purchase, following the 1997 death of its last winner, New York real estate developer S. Howard Goldman. It's expected to fetch between $15 million and $20 million in the auction -- unless, of course, it instead fetches the equivalent in Ethereum.

MoviePass co-founder Stacy Spikes successfully bought back the company out of bankruptcy and wants to relaunch it next year. Insider reports: Spikes had placed a bid of an undisclosed amount to the trustee handling the bankruptcy of Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY), the former parent company of MoviePass. "I can confirm that we acquired MoviePass out of bankruptcy on Wednesday," Spikes said in a statement to Insider. "We are thrilled to have it back and are exploring the possibility of relaunching soon. Our pursuit to reclaim the brand was encouraged by the continued interest from the moviegoing community. We believe, if done properly, theatrical subscription can play an instrumental role in lifting moviegoing attendance to new heights."

Spikes told Insider that since this summer, he'd been working on putting the money together to place a bid to get the company back. He said he made the offer last month. Though Spikes would not disclose the amount, he said his bid was lower than the $250,000 minimum the trustee set in 2020. Customer data and email addresses were not part of the sale, Spikes said. Spikes hopes to relaunch MoviePass sometime next year. A new site has been created for the relaunch, iwantmoviepass.com, and its logo will now feature a black background with white lettering, ditching its previous red background.

Spikes founded MoviePass with Hamet Watt in 2011, creating a service that let moviegoers see a certain number of movies a month in theaters for one monthly price. After struggling to stay afloat for years, in 2017 the company was bought by HMNY. HMNY was delisted from the Nasdaq in 2019 and both MoviePass and HMNY filed for bankruptcy in 2020. At the time of MoviePass' bankruptcy filing, it said it was under pending investigations by the FTC, SEC, four California district attorneys, and the New York attorney general. This June, Farnsworth and Lowe settled with the FTC and reached a $400,000 settlement with the California district attorneys.

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Reuters: Unity will buy Weta Digital, a visual effects (VFX) studio known for its work in movies such as "Godzilla vs. Kong" and "Avatar" in a $1.63 billion cash-and-stock deal, the companies said on Tuesday. The deal would help Unity, which makes software for video games and animation, tap into Weta Digital's technology and talent to develop VFX tools and focus on metaverse opportunities.

Weta Digital was founded by film director Peter Jackson of "The Lord of the Rings" fame and has won several Academy and BAFTA Awards. It is known for its animated characters such as Gollum and Caesar from "Planet of the Apes." Unity, which made the software behind the popular mobile phone game Temple Run, will roll out tools for artists and developers across a number of industries, including film and gaming. [...] Weta Digital's Academy Award-winning VFX team will remain a standalone entity known as WetaFX, and is expected to become Unity's largest customer in the media and entertainment space, the companies said. Weta FX will license back the technologies and tools from Unity, sign an annual agreement worth $50 million and a contract for commercial services, they added.