Disneyland’s ‘Season of the Force’ reminds us all that theme parks will forever be the leaders in the popcorn bucket arms race.
Disneyland’s New Star Wars Popcorn Buckets Probably Smell Great on the Inside, Actually
Category Archives: Technology
Nintendo Says Latest Legal Win Against Piracy ‘Significant’ For ‘Entire Games Industry’
Nintendo has trumpeted its latest legal success in the company’s ongoing fight against pirated games as “significant” not only for itself, “but for the entire games industry.” From a report: The Mario maker today confirmed it had won a final victory over French file-sharing company Dstorage, which operates the website 1fichier.com, following years of legal wrangling and repeated appeals. Nintendo’s victory means European file-sharing companies must now remove illegal copies of games when asked to do so, or be held accountable and cough up potentially sizable fines as punishment.
In 2021, the Judicial Court of Paris ordered Dstorage pay Nintendo $1 million in damages after it was found to be hosting pirate games. Dstorage launched an appeal, which then failed in 2023, and was ordered to pay Nintendo further costs. But the case didn’t end there. Dstorage finally took the matter to the highest French judiciary court, where it argued that a specific court order was required before it needed to remove content from its hosting services. This bid has also now failed, ending the long-running matter for good.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mysterious Blocklist Prevents Former Meta Employees From Returning
Managers have hit walls trying to rehire former employees due to mysterious and unexplained blocks on their profiles.
Yes, we are about to be treated to a second lunar landing in a week
The Apollo 17 mission landed on the Moon on December 11, in 1972. From that point on, literally for decades, NASA and the United States did not go back to the surface of our nearest planetary body.
It was not until February 22, 2024, that another American-built spacecraft made a soft landing on the Moon. This was the Nova-C Odysseus lander built by Intuitive Machines. It landed, toppled over, but still completed most of its scientific experiments.
This first successful landing on the Moon by the first privately built spacecraft ended a 51-year gap, or 18,700 days. It was a long freaking time.
Blade Runner 2099‘s Tom Burke Teases the Show’s Aesthetics and Themes
That Blade Runner streaming series is indeed still coming, and we’re finally hearing more about it.
Could New Clocks Keep Airplanes Safe From GPS Jamming?
Geoffrey.landis writes: Over the last three months of 2024, more than 800 cases of GPS interference were recorded in Lithuanian airspace. Estonia and Finland have also raised concerns, accusing Russia of deploying technology to jam satellite navigation signals near Nato’s eastern flank.
A group of British scientists — dubbed the “Time Lords” — are working on a solution: to develop portable atomic clocks. By carrying a group of atoms cooled to -273C on the plane itself, rather than relying on an external signal, the technology can’t be interfered with by jamming. But the problem is that the equipment is still too large to be used routinely on planes.
The UK Hub for Quantum Enabled Position Navigation and Timing (QEPNT) was set up last December by the government to shrink the devices on to a chip, making them robust enough for everyday life and affordable for everyone. Henry White, part of the team from BAE Systems that worked on the test flight, told BBC News that he thought the first application could be aboard ships, “where there’s a bit more space”.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Aerospace company Firefly released fantastic POV footage of Blue Ghost landing on the Moon
We already knew that the aerospace company Firefly successfully maneuvered its Blue Ghost lander onto the surface of the Moon, but now we have some gorgeous video proof. The lander captured footage throughout the touchdown, complete with a cinematic finale. Check it out below.
The POV footage shows the lander descending toward the Moon and the subsequent landing. It ends with a striking view of Blue Ghost emerging from a cloud of dust as its shadow stretches across the lunar surface. It’s pretty darn cool, with surprisingly-crisp HD visuals.
The touchdown happened Sunday at 3:30 AM ET and Blue Ghost made its home in a region known as Mare Crisium. This isn’t the first commercial lander to make its way to the Moon, but was the first one to land properly. The mission was a joint effort between Firefly and NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, an organization that hopes to pave the way for an increased commercial presence on good ‘ole Luna.
Since landing, Blue Ghost has begun its surface operations. These include deploying payloads, sampling local regolith and capturing a bevy of images. The stationary lander will spend around two weeks on the lunar surface as it conducts various tests. It’s packed with ten NASA instruments designed to probe the ground and to test subsurface drilling methods.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/aerospace-company-firefly-released-fantastic-pov-footage-of-blue-ghost-landing-on-the-moon-195821368.html?src=rss
Brother denies using firmware updates to brick printers with third-party ink
Brother laser printers are popular recommendations for people seeking a printer with none of the nonsense. By nonsense, we mean printers suddenly bricking features, like scanning or printing, if users install third-party cartridges. Some printer firms outright block third-party toner and ink, despite customer blowback and lawsuits. Brother’s laser printers have historically worked fine with non-Brother accessories. A YouTube video posted this week, though, as well as older social media posts, claim that Brother has gone to the dark side and degraded laser printer functionality with third-party cartridges. Brother tells Ars that this isn’t true.
On March 3, YouTuber Louis Rossman posted a video saying that “Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company.” The video, spotted by Tom’s Hardware, has 163,000 views as of this writing and seems to be based on a Reddit post from 2022. In that post, Reddit user 20Factorial said that firmware update W1.56 caused the automatic color registration feature to stop working on his Brother MFC-3750 when using third-party cartridges.
“With the colors not able to be aligned, the printer is effectively non-functional,” 20Factorial said. The Redditor went on to say that when asked, a Brother customer service agent confirmed that “the printer is non-functional without genuine toner.”
AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT review: RDNA 4 fixes a lot of AMD’s problems
AMD is a company that knows a thing or two about capitalizing on a competitor’s weaknesses. The company got through its early-2010s nadir partially because its Ryzen CPUs struck just as Intel’s current manufacturing woes began to set in, first with somewhat-worse CPUs that were great value for the money and later with CPUs that were better than anything Intel could offer.
Nvidia’s untrammeled dominance of the consumer graphics card market should also be an opportunity for AMD. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards have given buyers very little to get excited about, with an unreachably expensive high-end 5090 refresh and modest-at-best gains from 5080 and 5070-series cards that are also pretty expensive by historical standards, when you can buy them at all. Tech YouTubers—both the people making the videos and the people leaving comments underneath them—have been almost uniformly unkind to the 50 series, hinting at consumer frustrations and pent-up demand for competitive products from other companies.
Enter AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards. These are aimed right at the middle of the current GPU market at the intersection of high sales volume and decent profit margins. They promise good 1440p and entry-level 4K gaming performance and improved power efficiency compared to previous-generation cards, with fixes for long-time shortcomings (ray-tracing performance, video encoding, and upscaling quality) that should, in theory, make them more tempting for people looking to ditch Nvidia.
Severance‘s Creepy Doctor Is True Nightmare Fodder
Dr. Mauer is sinister when we meet him, and then it gets even worse the more he hangs around.
Steve Wozniak Has Had It With Elon Musk’s Antics
The Apple co-founder isn’t a fan of the “sledgehammer” approach.
YouTube Bans Creators From Talking About Some Gambling Sites
Sports betting sites are exempt from the new rules.
An inside look at the making of Andor S2
A special look at the second season of Andor.
Disney+ dropped the first action-packed teaser for the second season of Andor just last week. The streaming platform followed up today with a special three-minute featurette on the making of the Star Wars series’ sophomore outing—including a hint that we’ll probably be seeing a major tragic event in the Star Wars canon this season.
(Spoilers for season 1 below.)
As previously reported, the story begins five years before the events of Rogue One, with the Empire’s destruction of Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) home world, and follows his transformation from a “revolution-averse” cynic to a major player in the nascent rebellion who is willing to sacrifice himself to save the galaxy. S1 left off with Cassian returning to Ferrix for the funeral of his adoptive mother, Maarva (Fiona Shaw), rescuing a friend from prison, and dodging an assassination attempt. A post-credits scene showed prisoners assembling the firing dish of the now-under-construction Death Star.
BlackRock Agrees to Buy Panama Canal Ports as Trump Continues Threats
The deal still needs to be finalized.
Starliner Astronauts Refuse to Play Into Trump, Musk’s Ploy to Politicize ‘Rescue’ Mission
The president is trying to pull a political stunt by claiming to rescue the two astronauts, but the Starliner crew shut it down.
Prime Video is beginning an AI dubbing pilot program for select movies and series
In an effort to make movies and TV shows more accessible on Prime Video, Amazon announced that it’s testing an AI dubbing system that will translate select content on the company’s streaming service into other languages.
Amazon says that “AI-aided dubbing” will be available in English and Latin American Spanish on 12 licensed movies and series available through Prime Video, including “El Cid: La Leyenda, Mi Mamá Lora and Long Lost.” That the company describes it as “AI-aided dubbing” rather than just AI dubbing appears to be key here. Amazon says it’s taking a hybrid approach where “localization professionals collaborate with AI.” A safe guess would be that Amazon’s AI system takes a first pass at generating dubs and then professionals edit them for accuracy and fit.
Creating captions, subtitles and dubs is a fairly big business, especially now that streaming has increased the number of films and series that are made every year and licensed to be viewed around the world. It makes sense that streamlining the process of making content more accessible would be of interest to Amazon. The possible problem is, at least for film and television, dubbing is done by professional actors. AI-generated voices have gotten more lifelike over the years, but it remains to be seen whether the average person will be okay with a large portion of their media diet being delivered by something human-adjacent rather than the real deal.
Of course, maybe we’ll be trained to accept it because it will be all over social media first. Amazon isn’t alone in leveraging AI to squeeze more out of the videos on its platform. YouTube released a tool in 2024 that lets creators automatically dub their videos in other languages when they upload them, and more recently, Meta announced plans to automatically dub and lip-sync Reels on Instagram into other languages.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/prime-video-is-beginning-an-ai-dubbing-pilot-program-for-select-movies-and-series-190252188.html?src=rss
Does the World Even Want Digg in 2025?
The dream of the 2000s internet is dead and no amount of elder millennial nostalgia will bring it back.
Half of World’s CO2 Emissions Come From 36 Fossil Fuel Firms, Study Shows
Half of the world’s climate-heating carbon emissions come from the fossil fuels produced by just 36 companies, analysis has revealed. From a report: The researchers said the 2023 data strengthened the case for holding fossil fuel companies to account for their contribution to global heating. Previous versions of the annual report have been used in legal cases against companies and investors.
The report found that the 36 major fossil fuel companies, including Saudi Aramco, Coal India, ExxonMobil, Shell and numerous Chinese companies, produced coal, oil and gas responsible for more than 20bn tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2023. If Saudi Aramco was a country, it would be the fourth biggest polluter in the world after China, the US and India, while ExxonMobil is responsible for about the same emissions as Germany, the world’s ninth biggest polluter, according to the data.
Global emissions must fall by 45% by 2030 if the world is to have a good chance of limiting temperature rise to 1.5C, the internationally agreed target. However, emissions are still rising, supercharging the extreme weather that is taking lives and livelihoods across the planet. The International Energy Agency has said new fossil fuel projects started after 2021 are incompatible with reaching net zero emissions by 2050. Most of the 169 companies in the Carbon Majors database increased their emissions in 2023, which was the hottest year on record at the time.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google tells Trump’s DOJ that forcing a Chrome sale would harm national security
Google is no stranger to antitrust scrutiny, but the walls may be closing in. As the next phase of Google’s search trial nears, the company’s lawyers have reportedly met with representatives from the US Department of Justice in hopes of heading off a breakup. Google is reportedly pushing the argument that forcing it to spin off parts of the business and limit certain investments would constitute a national security threat.
Google’s antitrust situation got much worse this past August when it lost the long-running case targeting its search business. With Google branded yet again as a monopolist, the DOJ asked for stiff penalties, seeking to have US District Judge Amit Mehta force Google to sell its popular Chrome browser and end payments for search engine placement with other firms.
According to Bloomberg, Google met with the DOJ team last week to make the case for a lighter regulatory touch. Specifically, Google has stepped up its claims that forcing it to spin-off Chrome and limit AI investments could harm US national security, as well as security at the user level.
Demon Slayer‘s Final End Begins in the U.S. This September
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle is the first of the anime’s film trilogy finale.