Somewhere on Yahoo, one writer asks "Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?" There was a time when comic books were sold at newsstands alongside mainstream publications, according to Forbes, but that changed in the early 1980s when periodical comics all but disappeared from newsstands. From then on, the vast majority of comic books were sold through independently owned retail comic shops.
But GamesRadar+ notes a boom started in the 1990s — when comic books became an investment: Long story short, folks outside of regular comic book readers discovered that, in some cases, key comic book issues (such as those that debuted popular characters or titles) could be worth significant amounts of money on the secondary market, leading to some fans buying dozens of copies of a single issue in the hopes of someday capitalizing on their monetary value...

Someone should've explained supply and demand — the bubble burst because when everyone is buying and meticulously preserving a million copies of a comic book, there is no rarity to drive up the value to the level of less well-preserved comic books from earlier eras.
Their article also points out that this era saw the dawn of lucrative "variant covers". But the '90s also saw a rebellion of top Marvel artists who left to found Image comics, "the first major third-party publisher to challenge Marvel and DC's reign over the industry in years," which led to "a rise in independent and creator-owned comic books, both large and small, and helped the rising tide of indie publishers gain a solid foothold as an overall industry presence." (Presumably this "rising tide" would also include publishers of manga and anime-derived titles.)

So where are we now? The article on Yahoo notes the vast popularity of comic book movies, and also argues that "The billion-dollar comic business continues to boom." According to Publisher's Weekly, sales of comic books and graphic novels topped $1.28 billion in 2020, an all-time high. It's no fluke. With a few exceptions — sales fell a little in 2017, for example — comic book sales have been rising consistently for decades.
But who's actually reading comic books? Is it teenagers? Nostalgic adults? Investing collectors? People who saw the movies first? (If you're 12 years old, are you going to read some comic book, or watch The Avengers?)

Comic books now also have to compete with incredibly immersive videogames, virtual reality, and a gazillion cellphone apps — not to mention social media, and even online fan fiction. So I'd be interested to hear the experiences of Slashdot's readers. It seems like we'd be a reasonably good cross section of geek culture — but can we solve the riddle of the state of the comic book industry today?

Share your own thoughts in the comments. Is the comic book industry dying or thriving?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Load up the website This Person Does Not Exist and it'll show you a human face, near-perfect in its realism yet totally fake. Refresh and the neural network behind the site will generate another, and another, and another. The endless sequence of AI-crafted faces is produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN) -- a type of AI that learns to produce realistic but fake examples of the data it is trained on. But such generated faces -- which are starting to be used in CGI movies and ads -- might not be as unique as they seem. In a paper titled This Person (Probably) Exists (PDF), researchers show that many faces produced by GANs bear a striking resemblance to actual people who appear in the training data. The fake faces can effectively unmask the real faces the GAN was trained on, making it possible to expose the identity of those individuals. The work is the latest in a string of studies that call into doubt the popular idea that neural networks are "black boxes" that reveal nothing about what goes on inside.

To expose the hidden training data, Ryan Webster and his colleagues at the University of Caen Normandy in France used a type of attack called a membership attack, which can be used to find out whether certain data was used to train a neural network model. These attacks typically take advantage of subtle differences between the way a model treats data it was trained on -- and has thus seen thousands of times before -- and unseen data. For example, a model might identify a previously unseen image accurately, but with slightly less confidence than one it was trained on. A second, attacking model can learn to spot such tells in the first model's behavior and use them to predict when certain data, such as a photo, is in the training set or not.

Such attacks can lead to serious security leaks. For example, finding out that someone's medical data was used to train a model associated with a disease might reveal that this person has that disease. Webster's team extended this idea so that instead of identifying the exact photos used to train a GAN, they identified photos in the GAN's training set that were not identical but appeared to portray the same individual -- in other words, faces with the same identity. To do this, the researchers first generated faces with the GAN and then used a separate facial-recognition AI to detect whether the identity of these generated faces matched the identity of any of the faces seen in the training data. The results are striking. In many cases, the team found multiple photos of real people in the training data that appeared to match the fake faces generated by the GAN, revealing the identity of individuals the AI had been trained on.

In an article for The Conversation, Noah Wardrip-Fruin writes about how Computer Space marked the start of the $175 billion video game industry we have today when it debuted on Oct. 15, 1971 -- and why you probably haven't heard of it. From the report: Computer Space, made by the small company Nutting Associates, seemed to have everything going for it. Its scenario -- flying a rocket ship through space locked in a dogfight with two flying saucers -- seemed perfect for the times. The Apollo Moon missions were in full swing. The game was a good match for people who enjoyed science-fiction movies like "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Planet of the Apes" and television shows like "Star Trek" and "Lost in Space," or those who had thrilled to the aerial combat of the movies "The Battle of Britain" and "Tora! Tora! Tora!" There was even prominent placement of a Computer Space cabinet in Charlton Heston's film "The Omega Man." But when Computer Space was unveiled, it didn't generate a flood of orders, and no flood ever arrived. It wasn't until Computer Space's makers left the company, founded Atari and released Pong the next year that the commercial potential of video games became apparent. The company sold 8,000 Pong units by 1974.

Nolan Bushnell, who led the development of both Computer Space and Pong, has recounted Computer Space's inauspicious start many times. He claimed that Computer Space failed to take off because it overestimated the public. Bushnell is widely quoted as saying the game was too complicated for typical bar-goers, and that no one would want to read instructions to play a video game. [...] At about the same time Computer Space debuted, Stanford University students were waiting in line for hours in the student union to play another version of Spacewar!, The Galaxy Game, which was a hit as a one-off coin-operated installation just down the street from where Bushnell and his collaborators worked. [...] Key evidence that complexity was not the issue comes in the form of Space Wars, another take on Spacewar! that was a successful arcade video game released in 1977.

Why were The Galaxy Game and Space Wars successful at finding an enthusiastic audience while Computer Space was not? The answer is that Computer Space lacked a critical ingredient that the other two possessed: gravity. The star in Spacewar! produced a gravity well that gave shape to the field of play by pulling the ships toward the star with intensity that varied by distance. This made it possible for players to use strategy -- for example, allowing players to whip their ships around the star. Why didn't Computer Space have gravity? Because the first commercial video games were made using television technology rather than general-purpose computers. This technology couldn't do the gravity calculations. The Galaxy Game was able to include gravity because it was based on a general-purpose computer, but this made it too expensive to put into production as an arcade game. The makers of Space Wars eventually got around this problem by adding a custom computer processor to its cabinets. Without gravity, Computer Space was using a design that the creators of Spacewar! already knew didn't work. Bushnell's story of the game play being too complicated for the public is still the one most often repeated, but as former Atari employee Jerry Jessop told The New York Times about Computer Space, "The game play was horrible."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a statement released Thursday, Scarlett Johansson said she has resolved her legal dispute with Disney. "I am happy to have resolved our differences with Disney," said Johansson. "I'm incredibly proud of the work we've done together over the years and have greatly enjoyed my creative relationship with the team. I look forward to continuing our collaboration in years to come." The movie star filed the lawsuit against Disney in late July, alleging her contract was breached when the media giant released "Black Widow" on its Disney+ streaming service at the same time as its theatrical debut, thus negatively impacting her salary that was based in large part on the box-office performance of the film. Deadline reports: Unlike in their vitriolic filings and their shaming PR statements over the past few, Marvel-owner Disney had nothing but love today for the actor who brought Natasha Romanoff to life for them in nearly 10 separate films. I'm very pleased that we have been able to come to a mutual agreement with Scarlett Johansson regarding Black Widow, said Alan Bergman, Chairman, Disney Studios Content. "We appreciate her contributions to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and look forward to working together on a number of upcoming projects, including Disney's Tower of Terror."

As is almost always the case in cases like this, neither side gave any indication of how much money was involved in the settlement. However, when all is said and done, the deal will run to more than $40 million, sources tell me. Accordingly, the funds will not be paid by Disney in a single lump sum, if you pick up the creative accounting I'm putting down.

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

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

Newsweek reports: Chris Pratt is in a celebratory mood, following the announcement that he's set to voice lead character Mario in an animated movie adaptation of the enduring video game Super Mario Bros. The Guardians of the Galaxy star joins a star-studded cast in the movie, which includes Charlie Day as his brother Luigi, Anya Taylor-Joy [from The Queen's Gambit] as Princess Peach, Keegan-Michael Key [co-creator of Key & Peele] as Toad, and Jack Black as villainous turtle Bowser... Also included in the cast are Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong and Fred Armisen [from SNL and Portlandia], who will take on the role of his grandfather, Cranky Kong....

The producers said that the actors were selected for their ability to capture the spirit of each of their characters, per Variety.
Kotaku adds that future-voice-of-Mario Chris Pratt "isn't exactly instilling confidence right now." "It's ah me, ah Mario," he said in an Instagram video posted last night in the exact same voice I would use if I were pretending to be Chris Pratt pretending to be Mario. "That's not the voice, you'll have to wait to hear the voice, but we've been working hard at it and I'm really excited to announce that I'm the voice of that video game that I dreamed of playing as a kid."

For decades, Mario has been voiced in the games by Charles Martinet who is also not Italian but is an theatrically trained and experienced voice actor who specializes in accents and dialects. He will be involved in the new movie in some way, but at this point just as another avenue for Nintendo to troll longtime fans, it seems.

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

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

Netflix said on Monday it is launching a free mobile plan in Kenya as the global streaming giant looks to tap the East African nation that is home to over 20 million internet users. From a report: The free plan, which will be rolled out to all users in Kenya in the coming weeks, won't require them to provide any payment information during the sign-up, the company said. The new plan is available to any user aged 18 or above with an Android phone, the company said. It will also not include ads. The company told Reuters that it is making about one quarter of its movies and television shows catalog available to users in the free plan in the East African nation.

Comcast is gearing up to launch its own smart TVs: The company has struck a partnership with Chinese TV manufacturer Hisense to sell two smart TV models under the XClass TV brand, Protocol reported Tuesday. From the report: A number of clues left online suggests that a launch is imminent. XClass TVs run a version of Comcast's X1 operating system, which also powers the company's set-top boxes as well as its Xfinity Flex streaming box. However, unlike those devices, XClass TVs will be available to anyone, regardless of whether they subscribe to the company's cable services. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this summer that Comcast had struck a partnership with Walmart to sell its smart TVs; Protocol was first to report about Comcast's plans to enter the smart TV platform business a year ago. While under development for some time, Comcast's smart TV efforts have picked up steam in recent months: The company registered a trademark for "X Class TV" in February. The official XClasstv.com website remains inaccessible, but the company inadvertently left a temporary staging site accessible to the public that reveals many details about the initiative.

"XClass TV is a smart TV that brings all your favorite apps, live channels, and On Demand movies and shows together in one place," that site explains in a FAQ. " XClass TV ... gives you thousands of free movies, shows, music, and more. And to find what you love faster, XClass TV comes with a voice remote that lets you control your TV and search across apps with just your voice." Among the tidbits leaked through this staging site: Hisense is making two 4K TV models, with screen sizes of 43 and 50 inches, respectively, for Comcast.

Moviegoers know that the Matrix trilogy's finale "heavily hinted that our hero will be back at some point in the distant future," writes the Guardian.. "Now he is..."

But does the first three-minute trailer for the soon-to-be-released sequel The Matrix Resurrections suggest Keanu Reeves' "Neo" character has been wiped from existence? In his place is a beardy, incredibly well-aged fiftysomething who looks a bit like John Wick, or possibly that brooding weirdo from The Gift. He meets Carrie-Anne Moss's Trinity in a coffee shop, but fails to recognise her despite all their adventures down the digital rabbit hole. Later he's seen training in what appears to be a dojo with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's unnamed character, who appears to be fulfilling the Morpheus role of martial arts mentor and guide to the Matrix. Is Abdul-Mateen playing a younger version of the human resistance leader, and if so couldn't they just have digitally de-aged him, given the entire movie probably takes place inside Adobe After Effects anyway?

The teaser poses further questions. Why is Neo taking blue pills as medication? Does this signal the new Neo's willingness to succumb to the virtual world that keeps him blissfully ignorant of the horrifying reality? And if so, what's been going on — didn't the pesky machines promise to free all humans from the Matrix...?

The great thing about Matrix movies is that all usual rules of film-making continuity can be easily placed to one side. Reality can be shifted and reconfigured at every opportunity in the interest of entertainment. This is like the bit in Doctor Who where one Time Lord's face morphs into the next. For all we know, Reeves could be playing the Mad Hatter and Moss a giant pot plant who just appears to be a human being...

There could be a genuinely fascinating reason why Neo and Trinity are back and ready to kick machine ass once again. We won't know for sure until just before Christmas, when the movie hits cinemas.
ABC News notes the new film "also stars returning Matrix co-star Jada Pinkett Smith, features series newcomers Jessica Henwick from Iron Fist, Christina Ricci, Mindhunters star Jonathan Groff, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas." Though as IndieWire points out, there's no sign (yet) of the original Morpheus, Laurence Fishburne.

While the pandemic supercharged streaming, a few people decided to swim against the current and go back to the familiar format of VHS. It isn't the easiest of hobbies. From a report: VCR players haven't been in production within the last five years, and using the player on a current smart TV requires an expensive customized setup of several devices. Looking for a recent film on VHS format? It's likely you'll only find films from the 1980s and 90s, direct-to-VHS specials and home videos. That hasn't stopped die-hards. A small community of VHS fanatics has sprung up around the country, trading tapes and tips on how to watch. Much of it is organized around small boxes where people can drop off or pick up tapes. The "Free Blockbuster" boxes started in Los Angeles and spread. There are VHS tape trading events and auctions.

In the late 1990s, Hollywood studios began selling films on DVDs and VHS rentals lost their grip on home viewings. Blu-ray took over in the early 2000s. By 2010 Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy protection. To try to re-create a bit of the video-store experience, Brian Morrison started Free Blockbuster in 2019. The group turns former newspaper boxes into free little libraries of movies. VHS die-hards hope the effort encourages the exchange of home entertainment with strangers in their neighborhood. A film fan who worked at various video stores throughout his teenage years, Mr. Morrison, 37, stocked his first Free Blockbuster box in Los Angeles with old VHS tapes, hoping to create community around film watching.

Though DVDs and videogames showed up later in some boxes, he says VHS tapes were the more interesting draw for Free Blockbuster users. Mr. Morrison connects tape fanatics in different places, who maintain their own boxes. VHS tapes "aren't just DVDs' older cousins," Mr. Morrison says, "they're an art form in many ways." The 69 Free Blockbuster boxes, now located across the U.S. and in Canada and Australia, are maintained by a network of fans. Mr. Morrison said he received a request from Blockbuster, which is owned by Dish Network, last year that he change the name of his organization. He said he asked if the company would consider licensing out the name but hasn't heard back.

Netflix has announced that its long-delayed, live-action adaptation of the influential and popular classic anime series Cowboy Bebop will premiere on Friday, November 19. Ars Technica reports: The streaming service also released the first images from the show, giving fans some sense of what to expect from a live-action series based on an animated one famous for its visual flair. The images show actor John Cho (Star Trek, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle) as the series' lead character, Spike Spiegel. The series will also star Alex Hassell (Suburbicon), Daniella Pineda (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom), and Mustafa Shakir (Luke Cage), among others. Andre Nemec will be the series showrunner. He previously worked as a writer and producer on sci-fi TV series Alias and Zoo, plus the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. The director of the original anime series, Shinichiro Watanabe, is a consultant for the new show. Also returning from the anime is score composer Yoko Kanno.

Cowboy Bebop originally premiered in 1998. It is a space western about a group of bounty hunters on a spaceship called the Bebop. It drew critical acclaim and became a cult hit thanks in part to its striking visual style and its strong thematic elements.

Disney has filed a motion to have Scarlett Johansson's lawsuit against the company moved to private arbitration, the latest in the ongoing saga of her complaint against the company over Black Widow's streaming release. The Verge reports: Disney's lawyers filed the motion Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court on the grounds that Periwinkle Entertainment, which negotiated her deal, agreed that any claims related to her role in the Marvel film would be handled in confidential arbitration. But the motion also took several swipes at Johansson's complaint that argued Marvel, compelled by its parent company Disney, breached an agreement when Black Widow debuted on Disney Plus through Premier Access the same day that it premiered in theaters. The Hollywood Reporter earlier reported the motion. Johansson's complaint argued that the film's hybrid release cut into her potential earnings, as a simultaneous streaming release hampered the film's box office permanence and therefore impacted her bonuses. At issue is whether the film should have debuted as a theatrical exclusive. But according to Disney's motion, Periwinkle's contract with Marvel "does not mandate theatrical distribution -- let alone require that any such distribution be exclusive."

Furthermore, the motion states, the contract stated that any theatrical obligations would be met with showings on "no less than 1,500 screens." The motion stated the film in fact debuted on more than 9,600 scenes in the US and 30,000-plus screens worldwide. Additionally, Disney's lawyers also took issue with Johansson's claim that she'd lost earnings under the hybrid release model -- though it's still unclear what specifically was promised. Furthermore, the motion states, the contract stated that any theatrical obligations would be met with showings on "no less than 1,500 screens." The motion stated the film in fact debuted on more than 9,600 scenes in the US and 30,000-plus screens worldwide. Additionally, Disney's lawyers also took issue with Johansson's claim that she'd lost earnings under the hybrid release model -- though it's still unclear what specifically was promised.

Disney also provided updated figures on Black Window's performance, showing that it's continued to bring in big figures at both the box office and through early access rentals. As of August 15th, Black Widow has raked in more than $367 million in box office receipts worldwide and more than $125 million in streaming and download receipts, the motion stated, offering seldom-shared figures about the success of a hybrid release in both theaters as well as on a streaming service itself. Accounting for the $55 million the film pulled in on Premier Access and the $80 million in domestic box office receipts during its opening weekend, Black Widow's numbers surpassed the opening weekend figures of other Marvel films released pre-pandemic, the company argued, including Ant-Man and the Wasp and Guardians of the Galaxy. Disney's lawyers revealed in the motion that it served Periwinkle a demand for private arbitration on August 10th, a little over a week after Johansson's initial complaint was filed. The motion stated Periwinkle had yet to respond. Disney also reiterated its previous position that the complaint had "no merit." In a statement cited by The Hollywood Reporter, Johansson's attorney John Berlinski said that Disney "knows that Marvel's promises to give Black Widow a typical theatrical release "like its other films' had everything to do with guaranteeing that Disney wouldn't cannibalize box office receipts in order to boost Disney+ subscriptions. Yet that is exactly what happened -- and we look forward to presenting the overwhelming evidence that proves it."

Sonos became a favorite with audiophiles by selling sleek, wireless speakers for streaming music long before technology titans such as Alphabet''s Google entered the market with cheaper, internet-connected models. Now Sonos is hoping a U.S. trade judge finds Friday that its partner turned foe, Google, infringed its patents for multiroom audio systems. From a report: Sonos is asking U.S. International Trade Commission Judge Charles Bullock to support its bid to block imports of Google's Home and Chromecast systems and Pixel phones and laptops, which are made in China. "Google has thrown everything at us in this case, but we believe that the evidence before the ITC demonstrates Google to be a serial infringer of Sonos' valid patents and that the ITC case represents just the tip of the iceberg," Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus said in an earnings call Wednesday.

The dispute has caught the attention of regulators and Congress who are investigating whether the big Silicon Valley tech companies have become too powerful. Sonos officials urged politicians to beef up antitrust laws and enforcement against companies like Google and Amazon.com. Sonos and Google have each accused the other of bad behavior, and suits have been filed in California, Texas, Canada, France, Germany and the Netherlands. A federal judge last year said the legal fees being incurred in the global battle "will likely have been able to build dozens of schools, pay all the teachers, and provide hot lunches to the children." Sonos is fighting over what CEO Patrick Spence says is the "Golden Age of Audio." Buoyed by consumers who buy more audiobooks, streaming music and podcasts and are looking for "theater-like" sound while watching movies from home, the focus on home sound systems is likely to survive even after the Covid-19 pandemic and work-from-home orders end.

Websites and apps featuring pirated movies and TV shows make about $1.3 billion from advertising each year, including from major companies like Amazon.com, according to a study. From a report: The piracy operations are also a key source of malware, and some ads placed on the sites contain links that hackers use to steal personal information or conduct ransomware attacks, according to the online safety nonprofit Digital Citizens Alliance and the anti-piracy firm White Bullet Solutions. While law enforcement officials have sought to stop some of the online criminality, the groups identified at least 84,000 illicit entertainment sites.

The study underscores just how tough a problem piracy is for both Hollywood studios and companies that distribute digital ads. The situation has been compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has left more people watching films and television shows over the web, where criminals have a greater chance of successfully targeting victims. "Piracy causes direct harm to creators and others who lose income when their content is stolen," the authors of the report wrote. "And major brands face reputational risks when their advertising appears on illicit websites."

Netflix has stepped up its efforts to ban VPN and proxy users from bypassing geographical restrictions. The streaming service is now blocking residential IP addresses too, since some unblocking tools use these to bypass restrictions. This isn't without collateral damage as many regular Internet users without a VPN now report "missing content" on Netflix. TorrentFreak reports: There is a flurry of complaints on social media from users whose VPN services were suddenly 'blocked' by Netflix. Previously, these people couldn't play any content while using a VPN. That changed last year. Now, VPN users can still see Netflix originals while other content is hidden and blocked. https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-is-less-annoying-to-vpn-users-now-but-some-titles-are-hidden-200618/

Netflix doesn't explain which IP addresses are blocked and why, but the most recent efforts are much broader than before. This issue was brought to our attention by WeVPN, which noticed that the updated geo-fencing system is blocking its residential IP addresses. These IP addresses are assigned to common consumer ISPs such as AT&T, Comcast, Verizon. While it makes sense for Netflix to put an end to these workarounds, there appears to be some collateral damage. "The collateral damage is that you have hundreds of thousands of legitimate residential Netflix subscribers blocked from accessing Netflix's local country full catalog from their home," a WeVPN spokesperson informs us. While we are unable to verify how many people are facing issues, it is clear that the measures are spilling over to regular subscribers.

While Netflix hasn't released an official comment on the situation, the company is aware of the problems. One user who complained on Twitter, got the advice to contact their ISP to see if their IP address is associated with proxy or VPN use. This is a peculiar suggestion, as the blocking is taking place on Netflix's end. WeVPN told us that the company is experimenting with a solution, which appears to function for now. CyberGhost and Private Internet Access, which were also affected by Netflix's new blockades, say they managed to route around it within a day. In an update, a Netflix spokesperson said that the company is not banning all content for VPN and proxy services. Netflix originals are still available and the streaming service is working with people who were inadvertently affected to restore access to the full library.

In a new deal with mega-cinema chain AMC Theatres, Warner Bros. has agreed to return to an exclusive, 45-day theatrical window in 2022. From a report: AMC CEO Adam Aron unveiled the pact Monday during an earnings call. "We're especially pleased Warner Bros. has decided to move away from day-and-date," Aron said. "We are in active dialogue with every major studio." WarnerMedia enraged cinema operators when deciding to open its 2021 slate simultaneously on HBO Max and in theaters. The company has since said that the move was in response to the ongoing pandemic, and not permanent. Insiders add that the AMC arrangement was agreed to in March.

The audacious Aron said it was "no secret" that AMC was "not at all happy" when WarnerMedia made its move after launching HBO Max. "An exclusive window is an important way to build big and successful franchises." Before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the traditional theatrical window was as long as 90 days. Studios had tried for years to collapse that period, but faced boycotts if doing so.

Alvy Ray Smith cofounded Pixar. He was the first director of computer graphics at Lucasfilm and the first graphics fellow at Microsoft. He has received two technical Academy Awards for his contributions to digital movie-making technology.

This week he shared "The Real Story of Pixar," in an article in IEEE Spectrum that Slashdot reader Tekla Perry says "corrects some of the things legend got wrong, and gives a fast tour of computer graphics history, as he talks about the key computer graphics breakthroughs that led up to Pixar and how Moore's Law saved the company." Its starts in 1980 when Smith is part of a team hired by Lucasfilm to create its Computer Division: This division was charged with computerizing editing, sound design and mixing, special effects, and accounting for the company's books, as if this fourth challenge would be as difficult as the other three. Ed Catmull, who led the Computer Division, made me head of the Computer Graphics Group, which was tasked with the special-effects project. At Lucasfilm, we continued to develop the software needed for three-dimensional computer-generated movies. And we worked on specialized hardware as well, designing a computer, called the Pixar Image Computer, that could run its calculations four times as fast as comparable general-purpose systems — but only for pixels. We were still waiting for Moore's Law to get general computers to where we needed them — it did, but this strategy gave us a boost for a few years.

We didn't get one of our fully computer-generated movie sequences into a major motion picture until 1982, with our one-minute "Genesis" sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It showed a bare planet catching on fire, melting, and then forming mountains and seas and green forests. We followed that groundbreaking piece of a movie with a brief sequence in Return of the Jedi in 1983, featuring a "hologram" of the Death Star... But then our Computer Graphics Group, now numbering 40 people, got the news that the Computer Division was on the chopping block.
Then Smith continues the story with an excerpt from his new book, "A Biography of the Pixel." ("We did have a prototype special-purpose computer, the Pixar Image Computer. So Ed and I wrote up a business plan to build and sell Pixar Image Computers, calling them 'supercomputers for pixels'...") 35 venture capital firms turned them down, as did 10 corporations where they'd proposed a "strategic partnership." Finally, they made a desperate pitch to Steve Jobs: Steve, who had just been ousted from Apple, proposed that he buy us from Lucasfilm and run us as his next company. We said no, that we wanted to run the company ourselves, but we would accept his money in the form of a venture investment. And he agreed...

Pixar was a lousy hardware company. We failed several times over our first five years. That's failure measured the usual way: We ran out of money and couldn't pay our bills or our employees. If we'd had any other investor than Steve, we would have been dead in the water. But at every failure — presumably because Steve couldn't sustain the embarrassment that his next enterprise after the Apple ouster would be a failure — he'd berate those of us in management . . . then write another check. And each check effectively reduced employee equity. After several such "refinancings," he had poured about $50 million (half of the fortune he had made from Apple) into Pixar. In today's money, that's more than $100 million. On March 6, 1991, in Pixar's fifth year, he finally did buy the company from the employees outright.
The company was still in financial trouble — but expanding computing power eventually made it possible to render an entire full-length movie, and Disney financed the years of production necessary for the 1995 movie Toy Story. But even before its release, Steve Jobs "took Pixar public on November 29, 1995, on nothing more than the promise of Toy Story.

"It salvaged his reputation and made him a billionaire."

The article's subheading? "How a bad hardware company turned itself into a great movie studio."