As if the movies themselves didn’t make it more than obvious, fans have long come to understand that the Star Wars sequel trilogy changed drastically throughout development. Multiple writers and directors worked on The Force Awakens as well as The Rise of Skywalker, sometimes with radically different results, while The…
Source: Gizmodo – Kylo Ren Wasn’t Originally Supposed to Become Ben Solo Again
The era of streaming services being reticent to share viewership information appears to be ending, as Netflix, one of the biggest in the biz, is now touting the arrival of its twice-yearly “What We Watched: A Netflix Engagement Report.”
Source: Gizmodo – Netflix Releases Its First ‘What We Watched’ Report Following Union Win
Dune: Part Two is the next chapter in director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s celebrated novel.
We didn’t get to see Dune: Part Two—the second film in director Denis Villeneuve’s stunning adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic—last month as originally planned since the film’s November release was delayed until next March due to the Hollywood strikes. But Warner Bros. doesn’t want us to completely forget about Dune in the meantime, so it dropped another trailer for the holiday season.
(Spoilers for Dune: Part One below.)
As reported previously (also here and here), Herbert’s novel Dune is set in the distant future and follows the fortunes of various noble houses in what amounts to a feudal interstellar society. Much of the action takes place on the planet Arrakis, where the economy is driven largely by a rare, life-extending drug called melange (“the spice”). Melange also conveys a kind of prescience and makes faster-than-light travel practical. There’s betrayal, a prophecy concerning a messianic figure, giant sandworms, and battle upon battle as protagonist Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) contends with rival House Harkonnen and strives to defeat the forces of Shaddam IV, Emperor of the Known Universe.
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Source: Ars Technica – Love blooms in the midst of war in latest trailer for Dune: Part Two
Broadcom has moved forward with plans to transition VMware, a virtualization and cloud computing company, into a subscription-based business. As of December 11, it no longer sells perpetual licenses with VMware products. VMware, whose $61 billion acquisition by Broadcom closed in November, also announced on Monday that it will no longer sell support and subscription (SnS) for VMware products with perpetual licenses. Moving forward, VMware will only offer term licenses or subscriptions, according to its VMware blog post.
VMware customers with perpetual licenses and active support contracts can continue using them. VMware “will continue to provide support as defined in contractual commitments,” Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager for VMware’s Cloud Foundation Division, wrote. But when customers’ SnS terms end, they won’t have any support.
Broadcom hopes this will force customers into subscriptions, and it’s offering “upgrade pricing incentives” that weren’t detailed in the blog for customers who switch from perpetual licensing to a subscription.
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Source: Ars Technica – Broadcom ends VMware perpetual license sales, testing customers and partners
Netflix has published the first of a new twice-a-year engagement report called “What We Watched.” The first installment, launched Tuesday as a Microsoft Excel file, lists the hours viewed for every title (original and licensed) that has tallied more than 50,000 viewing hours. Although it’s an uneven performance comparison since episodic series will rack up many more hours than standalone films, this is the first ultra-detailed glimpse at what people watch on Netflix.
The first spreadsheet, covering January to June 2023, includes 18,214 entries of eligible content. The first season of the action-thriller series The Night Agent: Season 1 sat comfortably at the top with 812,100,000 hours during that period. Following (far behind) in second place was season two of the drama Ginny & Georgia (665,100,000 hours). Rounding out the top five are season one of The Glory (622,800,000), the inaugural season of the Jenny Ortega-led Wednesday (507,700,000) and the limited prequel series Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story (503,000,000).
The J.Lo action flick The Mother was the top-ranked movie on the list, raking in 249,900,000 viewing hours and falling at number 20 behind a glut of multi-episode series. Idris Elba’s Luther: The Fallen Sun (209,700,000) came in at 26, while the Chris Hemsworth vehicle Extraction 2 (201,800,000) slotted in at 29.
In addition to hours viewed, the spreadsheet denotes each title’s release date and whether it’s available globally. For curiosity’s sake, the lowest-ranking globally available item on the list is the 2020 comedy special Yours Sincerely, Kanan Gill.
Netflix stressed the importance of not using total hours viewed alone to determine a movie or series’ impact. “Success on Netflix comes in all shapes and sizes, and is not determined by hours viewed alone,” the streamer wrote in its announcement blog post. “We have enormously successful movies and TV shows with both lower and higher hours viewed. It’s all about whether a movie or TV show thrilled its audience — and the size of that audience relative to the economics of the title.”
Netflix says the new biannual spreadsheets will combine with its weekly Top 10 and Most Popular lists to paint a more comprehensive picture for viewers, creators and industry watchers.
You can rev up Excel or Numbers and download the inaugural Netflix spreadsheet drop here.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/netflixs-first-engagement-report-reveals-its-most-popular-shows-and-movies-214509788.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Netflix’s first engagement report reveals its most popular shows and movies
Enlarge / Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, November 30, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bill Clark )
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and other Republican senators are fighting a Federal Communications Commission plan to impose new data-breach notification requirements on telecom providers. In a letter sent to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel today, the senators claim the pending FCC action would violate a congressional order.
The letter was sent by Cruz, Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). They say the proposed data-breach notification rules are preempted by an action Congress took in 2017 to kill an assortment of privacy and security rules issued by the FCC.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) was used in 2017 by Congress and then-President Donald Trump to throw out rules that would have required home Internet and mobile broadband providers to get consumers’ opt-in consent before using, sharing, or selling Web browsing history, app usage history, and other private information.
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Source: Ars Technica – Ted Cruz wants to stop the FCC from updating data-breach notification rules
In contemporary fandom, canon is king. This is not a jab against an admiration of an ordered continuity and worldbuilding, the necessary aspects of creating a story to be lost in. But what goes beyond it—a yearning for raw, wiki-able data and facts that can be collated and held in amber, where interpretation gives way…
Source: Gizmodo – Doctor Who’s Big Regeneration Twist Means Everything and Nothing
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are about to get some powerful upgrades thanks to improvements to the social network’s AI assistant. The company is finally adding support for real-time information to the onboard assistant, and it’s starting to test new “multimodal” capabilities that allow it to answer questions based on your environment.
Up to now, Meta AI had a “knowledge cutoff” of December 2022, so it couldn’t answer questions about current events, or things like game scores, traffic conditions or other queries that would be especially useful while on the go. But that’s now changing, according to Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth, who said that all Meta smart glasses in the United States will now be able to access real-time info. The change is powered “in part” by Bing, he added.
Separately, Meta is starting to test one of the more intriguing capabilities of its assistant, which it’s calling “multimodal AI.” The features, first previewed during Connect, allow Meta AI to answer contextual questions about your surroundings and other queries based on what your looking at through the glasses.
The updates could go a long way toward making Meta AI feel less gimmicky and more useful, which was one of my top complaints in my initial review of the otherwise impressive smart glasses. Unfortunately, it will likely still be some time before most people with the smart glasses can access the new multimodal functionality. Bosworth said that the early access beta version will only be available in the US to a “small number of people who opt in” initially, with expanded access presumably coming sometime in 2024.
Both Mark Zuckerberg shared a few videos of the new capabilities that give an idea of what may be possible. Based on the clips, it appears users will be able to engage the feature with commands that begin with “Hey Meta, look and tell me.” Zuckerberg, for example, asks Meta AI to look at a shirt he’s holding and ask for suggestions on pants that might match. He also shared screenshots showing Meta AI identifying an image of a piece of fruit and translating the text of a meme.
In a video posted on Threads, Bosworth said that users would also be able to ask Meta AI about their immediate surroundings as well as more creative questions like writing captions for photos they just shot.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-ray-ban-meta-smart-glasses-are-getting-ai-powered-visual-search-features-204556255.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are getting AI-powered visual search features
Enlarge / The New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzen is made to be pointed at, rapidly, in a crowded environment. (credit: Machinery Enchantress / Crowd Supply)
“Hong Kong has better food, Shanghai has better nightlife. But when it comes to making things—no one can beat Shenzen.”
Many things about the Hua Qiang market in Shenzen, China, are different than they were in 2016, when Andrew “bunnie” Huang’s Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzen was first published. But the importance of the world’s premiere electronics market, and the need for help navigating it, are a constant. That’s why the book is getting an authorized, crowdfunded revision, the New Essential Guide, written by noted maker and Shenzen native Naomi Wu and due to ship in April 2024.
Naomi Wu’s narrated introduction to the New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzen.
Huang notes on the crowdfunding page that Wu’s “strengths round out my weaknesses.” Wu speaks Mandarin, lives in Shenzen, and is more familiar with Shenzen, and China, as it is today. Shenzen has grown by more than 2 million people, the central Huaqiangbei Road has been replaced by a car-free boulevard, and the city’s metro system has more than 100 new kilometers with dozens of new stations. As happens anywhere, market vendors have also changed locations, payment and communications systems have modernized, and customs have shifted.
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Source: Ars Technica – A New Essential Guide to Electronics by Naomi Wu details a different Shenzen
Enlarge (credit: Getty | Jeffrey Greenberg)
All of the big pharmacy chains in the US hand over sensitive medical records to law enforcement without a warrant—and some will do so without even running the requests by a legal professional, according to a congressional investigation.
The revelation raises grave medical privacy concerns, particularly in a post-Dobbs era in which many states are working to criminalize reproductive health care. Even if people in states with restrictive laws cross state lines for care, pharmacists in massive chains, such as CVS, can access records across borders.
Lawmakers noted the pharmacies’ policies for releasing medical records in a letter dated Tuesday to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra. The letter—signed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.)—said their investigation pulled information from briefings with eight big prescription drug suppliers.
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Source: Ars Technica – CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens hand out medical records to cops without warrants
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.
Source: Gizmodo – There’s a Billion-Dollar Industry Between You and FEMA’s Flood Insurance
Apple is adding a new iPhone feature called Stolen Device Protection that limits what thieves can do with a stolen phone and passcode. Created following a report earlier this year by the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern, the opt-in feature is included in the iOS 17.3 beta, now available for developers. It works using a combination of location, biometric scans, and time delays, allowing victims to lock out the perpetrator and safeguard their data.
Stolen Device Protection aims to snuff out a common practice among iPhone thieves in public places, who watch users enter their passcode before snatching the device and bolting. In such cases, the perpetrator could reset the owner’s Apple ID password, turn off Find My, add a recovery key and factory reset the phone for resale before the victim can do anything about it.
For example, without Stolen Device Protection turned on, an iPhone thief with your passcode can use that to change your Apple ID password, locking you out of your device. This allows the pickpocket to turn off Find My, crucial to wiping the device for a new user. The thief can then sell the device at full used value, rather than trying to pass off an iCloud-locked brick for much less.
But with the feature turned on, the phone will ask for a Face ID or Touch ID scan if the user is away from a familiar location like home or work. It will also require a one-hour delay before changing the Apple ID password on the device. After the hour, it will still ask for a Face ID or Touch ID Scan before changing the Apple ID password from the iPhone. This makes life much harder for the thief and gives the owner time to report the iPhone as stolen, locking out the perp.
Stolen Device Protection works similarly with Apple security settings. Adding recovery keys or updating the account’s trusted phone number is another way iPhone thieves lock out the original owner. Like in other areas, with the new feature activated, the phone will ask for two biometric scans an hour apart if away from trusted locations.
Similarly, iCloud Keychain passwords, Apple’s built-in password manager, will require a Face ID or Touch ID scan. The passcode won’t serve as a backup for failed biometric scans when the Stolen Device Protection is turned on.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple plans to prompt users to turn on the feature in iOS 17.3. Since Apple only launched the update’s first beta today, the general public may need to wait at least several weeks before trying it out.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ios-173s-stolen-device-protection-will-make-life-harder-for-iphone-thieves-201633214.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – iOS 17.3’s Stolen Device Protection will make life harder for iPhone thieves
Enlarge / An illustration of a robot holding a French flag, figuratively reflecting the rise of AI in France due to Mistral. It’s hard to draw a picture of an LLM, so a robot will have to do. (credit: Getty Images)
On Monday, Mistral AI announced a new AI language model called Mixtral 8x7B, a “mixture of experts” (MoE) model with open weights that reportedly truly matches OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 in performance—an achievement that has been claimed by others in the past but is being taken seriously by AI heavyweights such as OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy and Jim Fan. That means we’re closer to having a ChatGPT-3.5-level AI assistant that can run freely and locally on our devices, given the right implementation.
Mistral, based in Paris and founded by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix, has seen a rapid rise in the AI space recently. It has been quickly raising venture capital to become a sort of French anti-OpenAI, championing smaller models with eye-catching performance. Most notably, Mistral’s models run locally with open weights that can be downloaded and used with fewer restrictions than closed AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. (In this context “weights” are the computer files that represent a trained neural network.)
Mixtral 8x7B can process a 32K token context window and works in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English. It works much like ChatGPT, in that it can assist with compositional tasks, analyze data, troubleshoot software, and write programs. Mistral claims that it outperforms Meta’s much larger LLaMA 2 70B (70 billion parameter) large language model and that it matches or exceeds OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 on certain benchmarks, as seen in the chart below.
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Source: Ars Technica – Everybody’s talking about Mistral, an upstart French challenger to OpenAI
The Last Starfighter is Hollywood’s white whale. The 1984 film about a young man who is recruited to defend a planet because of his video game skills was decades ahead of its time and, in recent years, has been the frequent subject of speculation and excitement. It seems everyone in Hollywood has attempted to bring…
Source: Gizmodo – Wyatt Russell Would Love to Remake The Last Starfighter
Minisforum has launched a new high-performance Mini-ITX motherboard that’s based on Intel’s 13th Generation Core HX mobile parts. The upsized, highly integrated AR900i platform promises to bring together the power efficiency benefits of a mobile platform with desktop-class performance and features – and all at a rather moderate price.
Minisforum itself calls its AR900i platform an ultimate mobile-on-desktop (MoDT) platform and indeed it is quite capable thanks to its 14-core Core i7-13650HX (up to 4.90 GHz, 24 MB LLC) or 24-core Core i9-13900HX (up to 5.40 GHz, 36 MB LLC) processors, which are designed for high-end laptops. These CPUs are configured to dissipate up to 100W of thermal energy (lower than 157W set by Intel), so they are equipped with a rather advanced cooling system with four heat pipes and a 12-cm fan. The CPUs can be mated with two DDR5 memory modules in an SO-DIMM form-factor.
Being aimed primarily and gamers seeking for both performance and portability, the Minisforum AR900i comes with a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot for graphics cards as well as four M.2-2280 slots for PCIe 4.0 SSDs (two on top of the motherboard and two on the lower side). To ensure consistent performance of high-end drives under high loads, there is an active cooling system for them. Meanwhile, it is unclear how loud this SSD fan is. Speaking of fans, the motherboard has a connector for a system fan, which will certainly come handy for high-end builds.
When it comes to expandability, the Minisforum AR900i platform does not disappoint and resembles other high-end Mini-ITX motherboards with an M.2-2230 slot for a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapter, a built-in 2.5 GbE, three display outputs (DisplayPort 1.4, HDMI 2.0, USB4 Type-C), plenty of USB ports (USB4, two USB 3.2 Type-A, two USB 2.0 Type-A), and 5.1-channel audio connectors.
Getting a high-end CPU and a high-end motherboard quite an investment nowadays, so one would expect Minisforum’s AR900i to be quite expensive. Indeed, it is priced at $689, but since the manufacturer sells virtually all of its products with a discount, it can be obtained for $559.
Source: AnandTech – Minisforum Launches AR900i: A 9 Core i9-13900HX Mini-ITX Platform
Sony’s 2023 Wrap-Up is now available. The recap, similar to those from music streaming services, reflects on your PS5 or PS4 gaming habits from the past year. The new version will sum up your most-played games, tally your total hours and assign an algorithmically generated “gaming style.” Since, from a business standpoint, these year-end rewinds also serve as crowdsourced social media marketing, Sony created easily shareable digital cards outlining your 2023 habits.
You can view your PlayStation 2023 Wrap-Up by visiting Sony’s web portal and logging in with your account. It generates cards summarizing your top games, trophies earned, monthly gaming stats and your personalized style. (Mine was “Thrill Seeker.”) A button at the bottom of the UI will pop up the cards to share with friends or followers. Sony will also, uh, “helpfully” recommend games you haven’t yet bought that fit your personalized style.
The company says the recap is only available if you’ve played games on a PS5 or PS4 for at least 10 hours from January 1 to December 31. In addition, if you didn’t consent to “Full Data” collection from PS5 settings or “Additional Data” from PS4 systems in certain regions (Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australasia, India and Russia), you won’t be able to use the promotional feature. Sony is also throwing in a bonus “unique avatar” and a PlayStation Stars digital collectible of a Spider-Bot from the Marvel’s Spider-Man franchise as rewards.
Since annual digital recaps have transformed into a popular online tradition in recent years, you can likely expect similar rewinds from Xbox and Nintendo before long.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/playstations-2023-wrap-up-recaps-your-year-in-gaming-190838612.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – PlayStation’s 2023 Wrap-Up recaps your year in gaming
Music-creation software company Output just launched an AI tool that generates free sample packs based on text prompts. These packs are royalty-free and include 30 samples that can be used in the digital audio workstation (DAW) of your choice, including Logic Pro, Ableton, Pro Tools and others.
The algorithm mixes and resynthesizes pre-existing samples to create new sounds that match the text prompt. This was developed to help music-makers move quickly, so they aren’t slowed down by hunting for that perfect sample to match the vibe of the track. Instead, just write something like “moody sounds for a rainy day” and let the AI assistant do the rest. You can also ask for sounds related to a specific event or samples based on a specific artist or genre.
The tool also allows for more nuanced prompts, like asking to generate samples in a particular key and tempo. Pack Generator is currently in beta, but available to use via a browser-based portal. This is the first available tool for Output’s Co-Producer suite of generative AI products. The company promises more to come throughout 2024.
One of the cool things about this tool is that it’s completely trained on Output’s in-house sample library, so it doesn’t pull from actual working artists, which is not true of most available AI products. It’s also not intended to replace artists in any way, as it just creates sample packs. It remains to be seen how useful these AI-generated samples will be in real-world productions, but Pack Generator is available now, so it won’t take long to find out.
Output has been a major player in the samples space for nearly a decade, offering meticulously crafted and clean sound packs. The company also has a popular product called Arcade that lets users mangle samples to create unique soundscapes.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/outputs-ai-powered-software-automatically-generates-music-sample-packs-from-text-prompts-184104250.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Output’s AI-powered software automatically generates music sample packs from text prompts
Enlarge / Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch system consists of a booster and a capsule. (credit: Blue Origin)
Blue Origin is finally returning to flight.
On Tuesday the company announced, via the social media site X, that its New Shepard spacecraft would launch no earlier than next Monday.
“We’re targeting a launch window that opens on Dec. 18 for our next New Shepard payload mission,” the company stated. “#NS24 will carry 33 science and research payloads as well as 38,000 @clubforfuture postcards to space.”
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Source: Ars Technica – After 15 months Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft will finally fly again
When will Marvel fans get to see more adventures with Shuri as the Black Panther? It’s unclear. But Marvel did just announce when the Marvel Cinematic Universe will be returning to Wakanda, and it’ll be doing it in a very unexpected way.
Source: Gizmodo – Marvel Just Announced a Wakanda Animated Series
A Senate Finance Committee inquiry revealed on Tuesday that police departments can get access to private medical information from pharmacies, no warrant needed. While HIPAA may protect some access to personally identifiable health data, it doesn’t stop cops, according to a letter from Senator Ron Wyden, Representative Pramila Jayapal and Representative Sara Jacobs to the Department of Health and Human Services. None of the major US pharmacies are doing anything about it either, the members of Congress say.
“All of the pharmacies surveyed stated that they do not require a warrant prior to sharing pharmacy records with law enforcement agents, unless there is a state law that dictates otherwise,” the letter said. “Those pharmacies will turn medical records over in response to a mere subpoena, which often do not have to be reviewed or signed by a judge prior to being issued.”
The committee reached out to Amazon, Cigna, CVS Health, The Kroger Company, Optum Rx, Rite Aid Corporation, Walgreens Boots Alliance and Walmart about their practices for sharing medical data with police. While Amazon, Cigna, Optum, Walmart and Walgreen said they have law enforcement requests reviewed by legal professionals before complying, CVS Health, The Kroger Company and Rite Aid Corporation said they ask in-store staff to process the request immediately.
Engadget asked the pharmacies mentioned in the letter for comment about the claims. CVS said its pharmacy staff are trained to handle these inquiries and its following all applicable laws around the issue. Walgreens said it has a process in place to assess law enforcement requests compliant with those laws, too, and Amazon said that although law enforcement requests are rare, it does notify patients and comply with court orders when applicable. The others either haven’t responded or refuse to comment.
The pharmacies mostly blamed the current lack of legislative protections for patient data for their willingness to comply with cop requests. Most of them told the committee that current HIPAA law and other policies let them disclose medical records in response to certain legal requests. That’s why the Senate Finance Committee is targeting HHS to strengthen these protections, especially since the 2023 Dobbs decision let states criminalize certain reproductive health decisions.
Under current HIPAA law, patients have the right to know who is accessing their health information. But individuals have to request the medical record disclosure data, instead of health care professionals being required to share it proactively. “Consequently, few people ever request such information, even though many would obviously be concerned to learn about disclosures of their private medical records to law enforcement agencies,” the letter states. The letter also urges pharmacies to change their policies to require a warrant, and publish transparency reports about how data is shared.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/police-are-using-pharmacies-to-secretly-access-medical-information-about-members-of-the-public-182009044.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Police are using pharmacies to secretly access medical information about members of the public
