We just got our first trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the next big Marvel film. This is the fourth installment led by Tom Holland and follows the multiversal shenanigans of Spider-Man: No Way Home.

I’m about to get into some spoilers, for those still working through the MCU catalog. No Way Home ended with the entire world forgetting about the existence of Peter Parker, so this new movie will deal with the fallout from that. His whole support system is gone, though it looks like he still checks in on besties MJ and Ned from time to time.

Peter Parker may be lonely, but he’s not alone in the film. He’s teaming up with the Punisher, who is still played by Jon Bernthal after returning to the role in Daredevil: Born Again. In the comics, Spider-Man and the Punisher are long-time work buddies and occasional sparring partners. As a matter of fact, Frank Castle made his introduction in a Spider-Man comic that was published in 1974.

Bruce Banner also shows up in the trailer, potentially as Parker’s professor. Mark Ruffalo is returning to the role, but we don’t have any confirmation that he’ll turn into the Hulk. It’s worth pointing out that this is the regular human Banner, and not the hybrid version that’s been popping up in recent MCU projects.

The trailer even highlights an iconic Spider-Man villain. Michael Mando is playing Scorpion, which is a pretty deep MCU cut. The character was teased all the way back in Spider-Man: Homecoming. The footage also shows Spidey battling ninjas that look suspiciously like the Hand, who were last seen in The Defenders on Netflix. This lends credence to rumors that Daredevil could be appearing in the film.

We don’t have all that long to wait. Spider-Man: Brand New Day premieres in theaters on July 31. This is the final MCU film before the long-awaited Avengers: Doomsday, which hits cinemas in December.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/the-spider-man-brand-new-day-trailer-is-filled-with-mcu-cameos-170215452.html?src=rss

Dave Knott shares a report from the New York Times: On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, said Drs. Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard had won this year’s Turing Award for their work on quantum cryptography and related technologies. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the two scientists will share.

[…] The two met in 1979 while swimming in the Atlantic just off the north shore of Puerto Rico. They were taking a break while attending an academic conference in San Juan. Dr. Bennett swam up to Dr. Brassard and suggested they use quantum mechanics to create a bank note that could never be forged. Collaborating between Montreal and New York, they applied Dr. Bennett’s idea to subway tokens rather than bank notes. In a research paper published in 1983, they showed that their quantum subway tokens could never be forged, even if someone managed to steal the subway turnstile housing the elaborate hardware needed to read them.

This led to quantum cryptography. After describing their new form of encryption in a research paper published in 1984, they demonstrated the technology with a physical experiment five years later. Called BB84, their system used photons — particles of light — to create encryption keys used to lock and unlock digital data. Thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics, the behavior of a photon changes if someone looks at it. This means that if anyone tries to steal the keys, he or she will leave a telltale sign of the attempted theft — a bit like breaking the seal on an aspirin bottle.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It is a strange quirk of fate that the station wagon has morphed from mass-market family transport into something far more esoteric (at least here in the US, a market that once embraced the form factor like no other). Now, wagons come in two flavors. There’s the “slightly lifted with some extra protective cladding” kind, designed with forest roads in mind but equally useful if you’re surrounded by people who park by sense of smell. The other variety is the one that thinks it’s really a supercar, with at least 600 hp (447 kW) and the ability to test if the kids and family dog get nauseous when subjected to high lateral Gs.

Even then, the US misses out. BMW will sell us an M5 Touring here, a plug-in hybrid wagon with 717 hp (535 kW), but it has no plans to bring over the smaller, (much) lighter M3 Touring, no matter how much we plead. That’s a shame, as the M3 Touring is about to become even cooler: BMW is entering one in the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie, which races at the infamous racetrack in the Eifel Mountains.

The idea started as an April Fool’s joke last year, but the overwhelmingly positive reaction from fans worked something loose, and someone in Munich signed off on a budget to make a station wagon version of its GT3 race car (the M4 GT3 EVO). It makes its NLS debut next week, with the highlight of the program being the Nürburgring 24H in mid-May. That race will also be contested by one Max Verstappen on a weekend away from F1.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Meta has a new program to lure top creator talent to Facebook and it comes with hefty bonus payments. The company is launching a new initiative aimed at popular creators who already have large followings on TikTok, YouTube or Instagram and offering them bonuses up to $3,000 a month just for posting on Facebook.

Meta’s goal is to draw more top talent to its Content Monetization program, which pays creators based on views and other engagement metrics across Stories, Reels and posts. The new bonuses will be part of an initiative Meta has dubbed “Creator Fast Track,” which is meant to make the onboarding process easier — and more enticing — to Facebook newcomers.

Under the new “Fast Track” program, Meta is offering monthly bonuses of $1,000 to creators who have at least 100,000 followers on another platform and $3,000 for those that have a million or more. Creators who join will need to post a minimum number of times per month to earn the bonuses, but aren’t required to meet engagement targets or post exclusive content to earn. They also aren’t require to post video content as Facebook also reward text and photo posts, as well as Stories. 

That may sound like a pretty good deal (it is), but it’s also a limited one. The fast track bonuses will only last for three months. Creators should think of the bonuses as payment “for the hassle of starting on a new platform,” not the central part of the program, Meta’s VP of Product for Creators, Yair Livne, tells Engadget. “Our hope is that within a few months … the earnings that you see from Facebook Content Monetization will become the more important thing.” He also notes that Meta will boost the reach of creators it fast-tracks, which should help them speed up their earning potential. 

It’s far from the first time Facebook has sought to lure big names with big checks. It promised publishers big payouts when it launched Facebook Watch nearly a decade ago. It once courted game streamers for its (now defunct) Twitch competitor. A year after launching Reels to take on TikTok, it invested $1 billion in a bonus program that offered creators as much as $35,000 a month only to pull the plug in 2023.  

Livne acknowledged that it “took us a long time to find our path” to a more sustainable creator program. “We don’t have a pool structure so you’re not competing with other creators for dollars. It really is based on your performance.” 

There are already signs that the Facebook Content Monetization program, which it introduced in the fall of 2024, is working — at least for some. Meta says it paid Facebook creators nearly $3 billion in 2025, a new high for the social network. Creators have also reported that the new streamlined program is paying off. 

One political news creator told the newsletter Chaotic Era that they made $250,000 from Facebook in January alone. Publishers told Digiday last year that they expected to make “between six and seven figures” in 2025 thanks to the program. There are numerous recent posts in Reddit’s r/passiveincome forum where users report making five figures a month from the program, which is still invitation only. 

Livne agrees that Facebook’s monetization program has been something of a “well kept secret” in the creator community. “We’re trying to make it less well kept and less of a secret.” 

Are you in Facebook’s Content Monetization Program, Creator Fast Track or another creator program at Meta? You can reach Karissa by email, on X, Bluesky, Threads, or send a message to @karissabe.51 to chat confidentially on Signal.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/metas-latest-creator-push-comes-with-3000-bonuses-for-posting-on-facebook-160000283.html?src=rss

ProPublica reports that federal cybersecurity reviewers had serious, yearslong concerns about Microsoft’s GCC High cloud offering, yet they approved it anyway because the product was already deeply embedded across government. As one member of the team put it: “The package is a pile of shit.” From the report: In late 2024, the federal government’s cybersecurity evaluators rendered a troubling verdict on one of Microsoft’s biggest cloud computing offerings. The tech giant’s “lack of proper detailed security documentation” left reviewers with a “lack of confidence in assessing the system’s overall security posture,” according to an internal government report reviewed by ProPublica. For years, reviewers said, Microsoft had tried and failed to fully explain how it protects sensitive information in the cloud as it hops from server to server across the digital terrain. Given that and other unknowns, government experts couldn’t vouch for the technology’s security.

Such judgments would be damning for any company seeking to sell its wares to the U.S. government, but it should have been particularly devastating for Microsoft. The tech giant’s products had been at the heart of two major cybersecurity attacks against the U.S. in three years. In one, Russian hackers exploited a weakness to steal sensitive data from a number of federal agencies, including the National Nuclear Security Administration. In the other, Chinese hackers infiltrated the email accounts of a Cabinet member and other senior government officials. The federal government could be further exposed if it couldn’t verify the cybersecurity of Microsoft’s Government Community Cloud High, a suite of cloud-based services intended to safeguard some of the nation’s most sensitive information.

Yet, in a highly unusual move that still reverberates across Washington, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, authorized the product anyway, bestowing what amounts to the federal government’s cybersecurity seal of approval. FedRAMP’s ruling — which included a kind of “buyer beware” notice to any federal agency considering GCC High — helped Microsoft expand a government business empire worth billions of dollars. “BOOM SHAKA LAKA,” Richard Wakeman, one of the company’s chief security architects, boasted in an online forum, celebrating the milestone with a meme of Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

It was not the type of outcome that federal policymakers envisioned a decade and a half ago when they embraced the cloud revolution and created FedRAMP to help safeguard the government’s cybersecurity. The program’s layers of review, which included an assessment by outside experts, were supposed to ensure that service providers like Microsoft could be entrusted with the government’s secrets. But ProPublica’s investigation — drawn from internal FedRAMP memos, logs, emails, meeting minutes, and interviews with seven former and current government employees and contractors — found breakdowns at every juncture of that process. It also found a remarkable deference to Microsoft, even as the company’s products and practices were central to two of the most damaging cyberattacks ever carried out against the government.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We’ve got an official trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the follow-up to 2021’s No Way Home that is purportedly intended to launch a fresh trilogy of films with Tom Holland in the title role. Sony Pictures opted for a unique approach to building anticipation for the trailer, releasing snippets of footage throughout the day yesterday via the social media accounts of influencers and fans around the world. To which we can only say: Just stop already. Release the dang trailer and be done with it. A movie trailer should be able to stand on its own without an extra layer of cheap marketing gimmicks—and this one does.

(Spoilers for No Way Home below.)

I didn’t love No Way Home, although it was entertaining and enjoyable, and it was fun seeing all the other incarnations of Spider-Man across the multiverse make cameos. Story-wise, though, it was the weakest of the Holland Spidey films. But it made nearly $2 billion worldwide, so clearly I was in the minority. While Holland himself has wondered how long it will be before he ages out of the role, he still has the box office juice. So a fourth film, as part of the MCU’s Phase Six, made sense—especially since No Way Home ended on a pretty bleak note, with Peter asking Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to erase him from everyone’s memory to protect the multiverse, including MJ (Zendaya).

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Security updates aren’t as flashy or fun as feature updates, but they’re just as important—if not more—to install. They include patches for vulnerabilities in your device’s OS that could leave you open to hacking. By patching these weak points as quickly as possible, you reduce the risk to your device and its data.

Traditionally, Apple has largely kept its security updates tied to its general software releases, both big and small. Rather than release iOS 26 and a subsequent security patch, Apple just couples the two. Even if you don’t (or can’t) update to the latest iOS, Apple will add the most important patches to new updates of older iOS versions (e.g. iOS 18.7.6, or iOS 15.8.7). But the company has toyed with individual security releases in recent years, especially for particularly timely patches. They started with Rapid Security Responses, which were updates that were specifically labeled as such, like iOS Security Response 16.4.1 (a). I thought this was a great idea, especially as other platforms, like Android and Windows, already do this for their users.

While it seemed like a good idea, Apple hasn’t released one of these in a while. Instead, the company has largely gone back to releasing security updates alongside typical software updates, whether or not it had any new features to include in said update. Now, it seems, the company is trying out a new type of security update—one that’s rather hidden, at that.

Apple’s Background Security Improvements are a new type of security update

Initially announced with iOS 26.1, iPadOS 26.1, and macOS 26.1, Apple is now rolling out “Background Security Improvements.” According to the company, these are “lightweight security releases” for things like Safari, WebKit (the framework Safari is built on), and other system libraries. Like the Rapid Security Responses, the idea is to issue smaller patches in between software updates. That way, Apple doesn’t have to release iOS 26.3.2 in order to patch Safari; you can stay on iOS 26.3.1, and still update Safari with the proper patch.

In fact, this feature just had its first update this week. On Tuesday, Apple pushed version 26.3.1 (a) for iOS, iPad, and macOS. (There’s also a macOS 26.3.2 (a) for MacBook Neos running macOS 26.3.2). This update patches a WebKit flaw that let bad actors bypass Same Origin Policy if you clicked on malicious web content. Same Origin Policy typically prevents malicious sites from accessing other sites you might have open. For example, if you open a malicious site, Same Origin Policy should stop it from accessing your Gmail inbox open in another tab. But this flaw gave bad actors a way around that.

This update is available to all Apple devices running the latest versions of Apple’s OSes, but you won’t find it if you check your Software Update settings. That’s not because it’s still rolling out; rather, you need to make sure Background Security Improvements is enabled in order to open up these new security updates.

How to enable Background Security Improvements

On your Apple device, open Settings (System Settings on macOS), then go to Privacy & Security. Here, scroll down to the bottom of the page, then choose Background Security Improvements. Here, ensure that “Automatically Install” is turned on. If so, the update should install on its own, but there’s no telling when it’ll do so.

You can also install the update manually. Below this toggle, you’ll see the latest Background Security Improvements update. Choose “Install,” enter your passcode or password, and your device will begin downloading the update. When it’s ready, you can hit “Restart & Install.”