"When Disneyland turns 70 this July, Main Street's Opera House will play host to the return of Walt Disney, who will sit down with audiences to tell his story in robot form," writes Gizmodo.

But they point out Walt's granddaughter Johanna Miller wrote a Facebook post opposing the idea in November. ("They are Dehumanizing him. People are not replaceable...") The idea of a Robotic Grampa to give the public a feeling of who the living man was just makes no sense. It would be an imposter... You could never get the casual ness of his talking interacting with the camera his excitement to show and tell people about what is new at the park.

You can not add life to one. Empty of a soul or essence of the man. Knowing that he did not want this. Having your predecessors tell you that this was out of bounds.... So so Sad and disappointed.
The Facebook post claims that the son of a Disney engineer even remembers Walt saying that he never wanted to be an animatronic himself. And "Members of the Walt Disney family are said to be divided," reports the Los Angeles Times, "with many supporting the animatronic and some others against it, say those in the know who have declined to speak on the record for fear of ruining their relationships."

So that Facebook post "raised anew ethical questions that often surround any project attempting to capture the dead via technology," their article adds, "be it holographic representations of performers or digitally re-created cinematic animations. And then some media outlets got a partial preview Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times reports: An early sculpt of what would become the animatronic was revealed, one complete with age spots on Disney's hands and weariness around his eyes — Imagineers stressed their intent is faithful accuracy — but much of the attraction remains secretive. The animatronic wasn't shown, nor did Imagineering provide any images of the figure, which it promises will be one of its most technically advanced. Instead, Imagineering sought to show the care in which it was bringing Disney back to life while also attempting to assuage any fears regarding what has become a much-debated project among the Disney community...

Longtime Imagineer Tom Fitzgerald, known for his work on beloved Disney projects such as Star Tours and the Guardians of the Galaxy coaster in Florida, said Wednesday that "A Magical Life" has been in the works for about seven years. Asked directly about ethical concerns in representing the deceased via a robotic figurine, Fitzgerald noted the importance of the Walt Disney story, not only to the company but to culture at large... "What could we do at Disneyland for our audience that would be part of our tool kit vernacular but that would bring Walt to life in a way that you could only experience at the park? We felt the technology had gotten there. We felt there was a need to tell that story in a fresh way...."

"Walt Disney — A Magical Life" will walk a fine line when it opens, attempting to inspire a new generation to look into Disney's life while also portraying him as more than just a character in the park's arsenal. "Why are we doing this now?" Fitzgerald says. "For two reasons. One is Disneyland's 70th anniversary is an ideal time we thought to create a permanent tribute to Walt Disney in the Opera House. The other: I grew up watching Walt Disney on television. I guess I'm the old man. He came into our living room every week and chatted and it was very casual and you felt like you knew the man. But a lot of people today don't know Walt Disney was an individual. They think Walt Disney is a company."

And now nearly 60 years after his death, Disney will once again grace Main Street, whether or not audiences — or even some members of his family — are ready to greet him.

"The third James Bond novel was published on this day in 1955," writes long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger. Film buff Christian Petrozza shares some history: In 1979, the market was hot amid the studios to make the next big space opera. Star Wars blew up the box office in 1977 with Alien soon following and while audiences eagerly awaited the next installment of George Lucas' The Empire Strikes Back, Hollywood was buzzing with spacesuits, lasers, and ships that cruised the stars. Politically, the Cold War between the United States and Russia was still a hot topic, with the James Bond franchise fanning the flames in the media entertainment sector. Moon missions had just finished their run in the early 70s and the space race was still generationally fresh. With all this in mind, as well as the successful run of Roger Moore's fun and campy Bond, the time seemed ripe to boldly take the globe-trotting Bond where no spy has gone before.

Thus, 1979's Moonraker blasted off to theatres, full of chrome space-suits, laser guns, and jetpacks, the franchise went full-boar science fiction to keep up with the Joneses of current Hollywood's hottest genre. The film was a commercial smash hit, grossing 210 million worldwide. Despite some mixed reviews from critics, audiences seemed jazzed about seeing James Bond in space.

When it comes to adaptations of the novella that Ian Fleming wrote of the same name, Moonraker couldn't be farther from its source material, and may as well be renamed completely to avoid any association... Ian Fleming's original Moonraker was more of a post-war commentary on the domestic fears of modern weapons being turned on Europe by enemies who were hired for science by newer foes. With Nazi scientists being hired by both the U.S. and Russia to build weapons of mass destruction after World War II, this was less of a Sci-Fi and much more of a cautionary tale.
They argue that filming a new version of Moonraker could "find a happy medium between the glamor and the grit of the James Bond franchise..."

king*jojo shares a report from The Register: The Opera web browser now boasts "agentic AI," meaning users can ask an onboard AI model to perform tasks that require a series of in-browser actions. The AI agent, referred to as the Browser Operator, can, for example, find 12 pairs of men's size 10 Nike socks that you can buy. This is demonstrated in an Opera-made video of the process, running intermittently at 6x time, which shows the user has to type out the request for the undergarments rather than click around some webpages.

The AI, in the given example, works its way through eight steps in its browser chat sidebar, clicking and navigating on your behalf in the web display pane, to arrive at a Walmart checkout page with two six-packs of socks added to the user's shopping cart, ready for payment. [...] Other tasks such as finding specific concert tickets and booking flight tickets from Oslo to Newcastle are also depicted, accelerated at times from 4x to 10x, with the user left to authorize the actual purchase. Browser Operator runs more slowly than shown in the video, though that's actually helpful for a semi-capable assistant. A more casual pace allows the user to intervene at any point and take over.

The Cleveland Review of Books ponders a new 697-page hardcover collection of American poet/author Kevin Killian's.... reviews from Amazon. (Over 2,000 of 'em — written over the course of 16 years.)
In 2012, he wrote three substantial paragraphs about the culinary perfection that can be found in a German Potato Salad Can (15 oz., Pack of 12). Often, he'd open with something like "as an American boy growing up in rural France." Killian grew up on Long Island, New York. He didn't take himself (or much else) too seriously....

[Killian] was also a member of the New Narrative Movement... Writers acknowledge the subjectivity of, and the author's active presence in, the text... Amazon reviews are a near-perfect vehicle for New Narrative's tenets... Killian camouflaged his reviews in the cadence of the Amazon everyman. He embraced all the stylistic quirks, choppy sentence fragments and run-ons, either darting from point to point like a distracted squirrel or leaning heavily into declarative statements.... About the biographer of Elia Kazan, he tells us, "Schickel is in love with the sound of his voice, and somewhere in the shredded coleslaw of his prose, a decent book lies unavailable to us, about the real Elia Kazan...."

[T]he writing can move from very funny to strangely poignant. One of my favorites, his review of MacKenzie Smelling Salts, begins with a tragically tongue-in-cheek anecdote about his Irish grandfather:

"My Irish grandfather used to keep a bottle of MacKenzie's smelling salts next to his desk. He was the principal at Bushwick High School (in Brooklyn, NY) in the 1930s and 1940s, before it became a dangerous place to live in, and way before Bushwick regained its current state of desirable area for new gentrification. And he kept one at home as well, in case of a sudden shock. At school, he would press the saturated cotton under the nostrils of poor girls who realized they were pregnant in health class, before he expelled them."

He ends with his own reasons for using smelling salts, citing wildly diverging examples: his grief upon learning of the death of Paul Walker from the Fast & Furious film franchise abuts Killian's disappointment at not being selected for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Apparently, both were deeply traumatic experiences for Kevin... ["it took my wife a minute or two to locate the MacKenzie's, but passing it under my nose, as though she were my grandfather ministering to the pregnant girls of yore..."]

No one wants to be forgotten. I do not think it's a coincidence Killian started writing the reviews after his heart attack. Why did he keep going? Most likely, it was because he enjoyed the writing and got something out of it — pleasure, practice, and a bit of notoriety. But mainly, I think the project grew out of habit and compulsion. In a similar way, the graffiti art of Keith Haring, Jean-Paul Basquiat, and Banksy began in subway tunnels, one tag and mural at a time, until it grew into bodies of work collected and coveted by museums worldwide. In Killian's case, the global commerce platform was his ugly brick wall, his subway platform, and his train car. Coming away, I like to imagine him gleefully typing, manipulating the Amazon review forums into something that had little to do with the consumerism they had been created to support: Killian tagging a digital wall to remind everyone KEVIN WAS HERE.
The book reviewer points out that the collection's final review, for the memoir Never Mind the Moon: My Time at the Royal Opera House, is dated a month before Killian died.

"Unfortunately, the editors of this volume did not preserve the Helpful/Not Helpful ratings, only the stars."

Putting it all in perspective, the book critic notes that "In 2023, Amazon reported that one hundred million customers submitted one or more product reviews to the site. The content of most is dross, median." Though the critic then also acknowledges that "I haven't read any of Killian's other work."

BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of 'Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers,' an initiative aimed at funding and supporting open development within the Chromium ecosystem. The purpose of this effort is to provide resources and foster collaboration among developers, academia, and tech companies to drive the sustainability and innovation of Chromium projects. Major industry players, including Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Opera, have pledged their support.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Rolling Stone: Sun pours through the lush foliage of a jungle, bleaching the pale limestone as a rotting man stands in the center of an otherwise empty arena, his yellow eyes leering from beneath a fringe of limp, blonde hair. Positioned around the edge are a hundred bodies, Orcs and Trolls and bipedal oxen shouting, demanding, the death of the dishonorable. Their voices swell into a cacophony of noise before one rings out above the rest, howling, 'Kill the cheater and you'll get 20 gold!' There is silence, and then another frenzy. As I watch, eyes fixed on the dim glow of a laptop screen, I think of the colosseum in Rome -- sweat running down the muscled arms of battle-tested gladiators, the crowd cheering for blood.

This might sound like a moment pulled from a high fantasy drama made for prestige TV, but this is World of Warcraft, a now 20-year old online RPG. Instead of actors parading in front of green screens, this story's cast are streamers that occupy a virtual world. Tensions are high not because they're scripted, but because in World of Warcraft's Hardcore mode, death is permanent. Dejected, though acknowledging the transgression made, Sequisha -- the streamer who was promptly executed for cheating -- sighs, and goes back to the character select screen. He creates a new avatar; it's time to start the game all over again.

Sequisha's execution and subsequent reincarnation is just one of hundreds of stories playing out everyday in World of Warcraft as streamers have flocked to the massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) to play together. Through their strife, and a commitment to staying in-character via roleplay, groups like the guild OnlyFangs have turned World of Warcraft into an RPG within an RPG, playing out improvisational personal drama where the stakes are high. In Hardcore mode, World of Warcraft has become the best soap opera on the internet, all playing out across over dozens of OnlyFangs creator streams every day. The new "Classic" and "Hardcore" servers were launched in celebration of World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary, helping to reignite interest in the game and increase viewership on platforms like Twitch and YouTube. The Hardcore server, where character death is permanent, attracted top streamers, leading to the formation of guilds like OnlyFangs.

After a successful first season, OnlyFangs reshuffled its roster, embracing a more immersive roleplaying approach in its second season. "What they didn't know was their experiment in World of Warcraft roleplay would inadvertently create one of the best emergent dramas on the internet," reports Rolling Stone.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Jason Allen-a synthetic media artist whose Midjourney-generated work "Theatre D'opera Spatial" went viral and incited backlash after winning a state fair art competition-is not giving up his fight with the US Copyright Office. Last fall, the Copyright Office refused to register Allen's work, claiming that almost the entire work was AI-generated and insisting that copyright registration requires more human authorship than simply plugging a prompt into Midjourney. Allen is now appealing (PDF) that decision, asking for judicial review and alleging that "the negative media attention surrounding the Work may have influenced the Copyright Office Examiner's perception and judgment." He claims that the Examiner was biased and considered "improper factors" such as the public backlash when concluding that he had "no control over how the artificial intelligence tool analyzed, interpreted, or responded to these prompts."

As Allen sees it, a rule establishing a review process requiring an Examiner to determine which parts of the work are human-authored seems "entirely arbitrary" since some Copyright Examiners "may not even be able to distinguish an artwork that used AI tools to assist in the creation from one which does not use any computerized tools." Further, Allen claims that the denial of copyright for his work has inspired confusion about who owns rights to not just Midjourney-generated art but all AI art, and as AI technology rapidly improves, it will only become harder for the Copyright Office to make those authorship judgment calls. That becomes an even bigger problem if the Copyright Office gets it wrong too often, Allen warned, running the risk of turning every artist registering works into a "suspect" and potentially bogging courts down with copyright disputes. Ultimately, Allen is hoping that a jury reviewing his appeal will reverse the denial, arguing that there is more human authorship in his AI-generated work than the Copyright Office considered when twice rejecting his registration.

Microsoft gives its Edge web browser an unfair advantage and EU antitrust regulators should subject it to tough EU tech rules, three rival browsers and a group of web developers said in a letter to the European Commission. From a report: The move by Vivaldi, Waterfox, Wavebox and the Open Web Advocacy could boost Norwegian browser company Opera which in July took the European Commission to court for exempting Edge from the Digital Markets Act (DMA). [...] "Unfair practices are currently allowed to persist on the Windows' ecosystem with respect to Edge, unmitigated by the choice screens that exist on mobile," they said, pointing to Edge set as the default browser on all Windows computers. "No platform independent browser can aspire to match Edge's unparalleled distribution advantage on Windows. Edge is, moreover, the most important gateway for consumers to download an independent browser on Windows PCs."

AI music generators Suno and Udio responded to the lawsuits filed by the major recording labels, arguing that their platforms are tools for making new, original music that "didn't and often couldn't previously exist."

"Those genres and styles -- the recognizable sounds of opera, or jazz, or rap music -- are not something that anyone owns," the companies said. "Our intellectual property laws have always been carefully calibrated to avoid allowing anyone to monopolize a form of artistic expression, whether a sonnet or a pop song. IP rights can attach to a particular recorded rendition of a song in one of those genres or styles. But not to the genre or style itself." TorrentFreak reports: "[The labels] frame their concern as one about 'copies' of their recordings made in the process of developing the technology -- that is, copies never heard or seen by anyone, made solely to analyze the sonic and stylistic patterns of the universe of pre-existing musical expression. But what the major record labels really don't want is competition." The labels' position is that any competition must be legal, and the AI companies state quite clearly that the law permits the use of copyrighted works in these circumstances. Suno and Udio also make it clear that snippets of copyrighted music aren't stored as a library of pre-existing content in the neural networks of their AI models, "outputting a collage of 'samples' stitched together from existing recordings" when prompted by users.

"[The neural networks were] constructed by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings," Suno explains. "From analyzing their constitutive elements, the model derived a staggeringly complex collection of statistical insights about the auditory characteristics of those recordings -- what types of sounds tend to appear in which kinds of music; what the shape of a pop song tends to look like; how the drum beat typically varies from country to rock to hip-hop; what the guitar tone tends to sound like in those different genres; and so on." These models are vast stores, not of copyrighted music, the defendants say, but information about what musical styles consist of, and it's from that information new music is made.

Most copyright lawsuits in the music industry are about reproduction and public distribution of identified copyright works, but that's certainly not the case here. "The Complaint explicitly disavows any contention that any output ever generated by Udio has infringed their rights. While it includes a variety of examples of outputs that allegedly resemble certain pre-existing songs, the Complaint goes out of its way to say that it is not alleging that those outputs constitute actionable copyright infringement." With Udio declaring that, as a matter of law, "that key point makes all the difference," Suno's conclusion is served raw. "That concession will ultimately prove fatal to Plaintiffs' claims. It is fair use under copyright law to make a copy of a protected work as part of a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product." Noting that Congress enacted the first copyright law in 1791, Suno says that in the 233 years since, not a single case has ever reached a contrary conclusion.

In addition to addressing allegations unique to their individual cases, the AI companies accuse the labels of various types of anti-competitive behavior. Imposing conditions to prevent streaming services obtaining licensed music from smaller labels at lower rates, seeking to impose a "no AI" policy on licensees, to claims that they "may have responded to outreach from potential commercial counterparties by engaging in one or more concerted refusals to deal." The defendants say this type of behavior is fueled by the labels' dominant control of copyrighted works and by extension, the overall market. Here, however, ownership of copyrighted music is trumped by the existence and knowledge of musical styles, over which nobody can claim ownership or seek to control. "No one owns musical styles. Developing a tool to empower many more people to create music, by scrupulously analyzing what the building blocks of different styles consist of, is a quintessential fair use under longstanding and unbroken copyright doctrine. "Plaintiffs' contrary vision is fundamentally inconsistent with the law and its underlying values." You can read Suno and Udio's answers to the RIAA's lawsuits here (PDF) and here (PDF).

It's been adapted into a graphic novel, a videogame, a radio play, and an opera, according to Wikipedia — which also describes years of trying to adapt Neuromancer into a movie. "The landmark 1984 cyberpunk novel has been on Hollywood's wishlist for decades," writes Gizmodo, "with multiple filmmakers attempting to bring it to the big screen." (Back in 2010, Slashdot's CmdrTaco even posted an update with the headline "Neuromancer Movie In Your Future?" with a 2011 story promising the movie deal was "moving forward....")

But now Deadline reports it's becoming a 10-episode series on Apple TV+ (co-produced by Apple Studios) starring Callum Turner and Brianna Middleton: Created for television by Graham Roland and JD Dillard, Neuromancer follows a damaged, top-rung super-hacker named Case (Turner) who is thrust into a web of digital espionage and high stakes crime with his partner Molly (Middleton), a razor-girl assassin with mirrored eyes, aiming to pull a heist on a corporate dynasty with untold secrets.
More from Gizmodo: "We're incredibly excited to be bringing this iconic property to Apple TV+," Roland and Dillard said in a statement. "Since we became friends nearly 10 years ago, we've looked for something to team up on, so this collaboration marks a dream come true. Neuromancer has inspired so much of the science fiction that's come after it and we're looking forward to bringing television audiences into Gibson's definitive 'cyberpunk' world."
The novel launched Gibson's "Sprawl" trilogy of novels (building on the dystopia in his 1982 short story "Burning Chrome"), also resurrecting the "Molly Millions" character from Johnny Mnemonic — an even earlier short story from 1981...

An anonymous reader shares a CR report: Based on the name, you'd think Filmmaker Mode is strictly for watching movies. But in our labs, we find that it can get you pretty close to what we consider to be the ideal settings for all types of programming. Filmmaker Mode is the product of a joint effort by the Hollywood film community, TV manufacturers, and the UHD Alliance to help consumers easily set up their TVs and watch shows and films as they were meant to be displayed. The preset has been widely praised by a host of well-known directors, including J.J. Abrams, Paul Thomas Anderson, James Cameron, Patty Jenkins, Rian Johnson, Christopher Nolan, Jordan Peele, and Martin Scorsese, as well as actors such as Tom Cruise. Right now, you can find Filmmaker Mode on TVs from Hisense, LG, Philips, Samsung, and Vizio. And more sets may get the feature this year.

Most newer TVs have fancy features that manufacturers say will improve the picture. But these features can actually have the opposite effect, degrading the fidelity of the image by altering how it was originally intended to look. To preserve the director's original intent, Filmmaker Mode shuts off all the extra processing a TV might apply to movies and shows, including both standard (SDR) and high dynamic range (HDR) content on 4K TVs. This involves preserving the TV's full contrast ratio, setting the correct aspect ratio, and maintaining the TV's color and frame rates, so films look more like what you'd see in a theater. For most of us, though, the biggest benefit of Filmmaker Mode is what the TV won't be doing. For example, it turns off motion smoothing, also referred to as motion interpolation, which can remove movies' filmlike look. (This is one of three TV features that it's best to stop using.) Motion-smoothing features were introduced because most films, and some TV shows, are shot at 24 frames per second, while most TVs display images at 60 or 120 frames per second. To deal with these mismatches, the TV adds made-up (interpolated) frames, filling in the gaps to keep the motion looking smooth. But this creates an artificial look, commonly called the soap opera effect. Think of a daytime TV show shot on video.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Independent browser companies in the European Union are seeing a spike in users in the first month after EU legislation forced Alphabet's Google, Microsoft and Apple to make it easier for users to switch to rivals, according to data provided to Reuters by six companies. The early results come after the EU's sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing big tech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web browsers from a "choice screen." [...]

Cyprus-based Aloha Browser said users in the EU jumped 250% in March -- one of the first companies to give monthly growth numbers since the new regulations came in. Founded in 2016, Aloha, which markets itself as a privacy focused alternative to browsers owned by big tech, has 10 million monthly average users and earns money through paid subscriptions, rather than selling ads by tracking users. "Before, EU was our number four market, right now it's number two," Aloha CEO Andrew Frost Moroz said in an interview. Norway's Vivaldi, Germany's Ecosia and U.S.-based Brave have also seen user numbers rise following the new regulation. U.S.-based DuckDuckGo, which has about 100 million users, and its bigger rival, Norway-based Opera (OPRA.O), opens new tab are also seeing growth in users, but said the choice screen rollout is still not complete. "We are experiencing record user numbers in the EU right now," said Jan Standal, vice president at Opera, which counts over 324 million global users.

Under the new EU rules, mobile software makers are required to show a choice screen where users can select a browser, search engine and virtual assistant as they set up their phones. Previously, tech companies such as Apple and Google loaded phones with default settings that included their preferred services, such as the voice assistant Siri for iPhones. Changing these settings required a more complicated process. Apple is now showing up to 11 browsers in addition to Safari in the choice screens curated for each of the 27 countries in the EU, and will update those screens once every year for each country. While DuckDuckGo and Opera are offered in Apple's list, opens new tab in all 27 countries, Aloha is in 26 countries, Ecosia is in 13 and Vivaldi in 8. Google is currently showing browser choices on devices made by the company and said new devices made by other companies running Android operating system will also display choice screen in the coming months. A Google spokesperson said they do not have data on choice screens to share yet.

An anonymous reader writes: In the early 70s, young filmmakers John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon created a spaceship tale for a graduation project -- little knowing it would influence Alien and many other works. Made for $60,000 by film school students, horror maestro John Carpenter's directorial debut Dark Star is now regarded as a sci-fi cult classic. Having just turned 50 years old, it's a world away from much of the sci-fi that came before it and would come after, neither space odyssey nor space opera, rather a bleak, downbeat and often absurd portrait of a group of people cooped together in a malfunctioning interstellar tin can. Arguably its most famous scene consists of an existential debate between an astronaut and a sentient bomb. Dark Star was a collaboration between Carpenter, who directed and scored the film, and Dan O'Bannon, who in addition to co-writing the script, acted as editor, production designer, and visual effects supervisor, as well as playing the volatile, paranoid Sergeant Pinback. They met as budding filmmakers at the University of Southern California. "While [Carpenter and O'Bannon] couldn't be more dissimilar in personality, they were both very energetic and focused," says Daniel Griffiths, director of Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star (2010), the definitive documentary about the making of the film.

The sci-fi films of this period tended to be bleak and dystopian, explains John Kenneth Muir, author of The Films of John Carpenter -- films like Silent Running (1972), in which all plant life on Earth is extinct, or George Lucas's 1971 debut THX-1138, in which human emotion is suppressed. "Dark Star arrived in this world of dark, hopeless imaginings, but took the darkness one step further into absurd nihilism." Carpenter and O'Bannon set out to make the "ultimate riff on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey," says Griffiths. While Kubrick's 1968 film, explains Muir, was one "in which viewers sought meaning in the stars about the nature of humanity, there is no meaning to life in Dark Star". Rather, says Muir, it parodies 2001 "with its own sense of man's irrelevance in the scheme of things". Where Kubrick scored his film with classical music, Dark Star opens with a country song, Benson, Arizona. (A road in the real-life Benson is named in honor of the film). The film was even released with the tagline "the spaced-out odyssey." Dark Star captured the mood of the time in which it was made, says Muir, the atmosphere of Nixon's America. "The 1960s was all about utopian dreaming and bringing change to America in the counterculture. The 1970s represent what writer Johnny Byrne called 'The wake-up from the hippie dream', a reckoning with the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same." [...]

When Dark Star premiered at the FILMEX expo in 1974, the audience response was largely positive. "They recognized the film's absurdist humor and celebrated its student film roots," says Griffiths. It had a limited theatrical release in 1975, but it was not a commercial success. "The film met with negative reviews from critics, and general disinterest from audiences," says Muir. "Both Carpenter and O'Bannon realized that all the struggles they endured to make the film did not matter to audiences, they only cared about the finished product. I think they were discouraged," says Griffiths. The growth of the VHS market, however, helped it find its audience and propelled it towards cult status. Its influence can still be felt, perhaps most directly in Ridley Scott's Alien, for which O'Bannon, who died in 2009, wrote the screenplay. The two films share DNA. Alien is also set on a grotty working vessel with a bickering crew, only this time the alien wasn't played for laughs.

Vizio has agreed to $3 million settlement over allegations it misled consumers on TV refresh rates. The TV maker denies wrongdoing but will cease advertising on "effective" refresh rates. Eligible buyers have until March 2024 to file claims and submit proof of purchase. Settlement includes enhanced one-year warranties. The Verge adds: TV makers often use marketing terms like "effective refresh rate" to refer to motion smoothing features, often called the "soap opera effect," that are intended to reduce motion blur on modern TVs. Motion smoothing is already controversial enough on its own, but companies like Vizio can be frustratingly casual with refresh rate terminology in their marketing.

Netflix's annual virtual event "Geeked Week" pre-announces its biggest upcoming shows. This year Netflix released a trailer for its upcoming adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, and for its new live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender series. (And there's also going to be some kind of live-action Stranger Things stage show opening in London in December.)

Variety noted the "explosive" new trailer for Zach Snyder's new "action-packed space opera" Rebel Moon. The film — which will also have a one-week theatrical run in December — takes place in the same universe as Snyder's Army of the Dead. But instead of being set in Las Vegas, "The story centers on a young woman living on the outskirts of a galaxy who must find a group of warriors to save the galaxy from an invasion from a tyrant."

The Verge pulled together a good rundown of all the other announcements — one of which involves Neil Gaiman: Following last year's The Sandman, Netflix is bringing even more beloved Neil Gaiman characters to the small screen. This time it's Dead Boy Detectives — which was originally slated to stream on Max — based on a crime-solving duo who made their debut in a Sandman comic in the '90s. The news was paired with the first trailer for the series, which shows off a pretty fun-looking supernatural whodunit...

Netflix says the new eight-episode series is part of its growing "Sandman universe"... with Gaiman serving as one of the executive producers. [Coming sometime in 2024]
They're also launching several animated series.

• Netflix released a short teaser for Terminator: the Anime Series.

• An animated new take on Ultraman.

• An animated He-Man reboot, Masters of the Universe: Revolution (with Mark Hamill providing the voice of Skeletor).

• An adult animated comedy series based on the card game Exploding Kittens. (The Verge writes that its trailer "features god in the body of a cat and a very confounding garage door" — and that there will also be an accompanying mobile game.)

• Netflix also has a new Chicken Run movie coming in December with its own tie-in game called Eggstraction.

The U.S. Copyright Office has again rejected copyright protection for art created using artificial intelligence, denying a request by artist Jason M. Allen for a copyright covering an award-winning image he created with the generative AI system Midjourney. From a report: The office said on Tuesday that Allen's science-fiction themed image "Theatre D'opera Spatial" was not entitled to copyright protection because it was not the product of human authorship. The Copyright Office in February rescinded copyrights for images that artist Kris Kashtanova created using Midjourney for a graphic novel called "Zarya of the Dawn," dismissing the argument that the images showed Kashtanova's own creative expression.

It has also rejected a copyright for an image that computer scientist Stephen Thaler said his AI system created autonomously. Allen said on Wednesday that the office's decision on his work was expected, but he was "certain we will win in the end." "If this stands, it is going to create more problems than it solves," Allen said. "This is going to create new and creative problems for the copyright office in ways we can't even speculate yet."

According to the Financial Times, Meta is preparing to launch AI-enabled chatbots with unique personalities, such as a surfer personality and a chatbot based on Abraham Lincoln. Engadget reports: This is an attempt to boost engagement across Meta's social media platforms, as human-like discussions tend to be more interesting than droll robotic responses. The company hasn't announced which of these platforms would host Abe Lincoln and his pals, though previous reports indicated Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp would be recipients of this new technology. Meta staffers are calling these chatbots "personas" and they could launch as soon as September. These personas will provide a new way to search and they'll even offer recommendations, similar to how current chatbots work, though ChatGPT and the rest don't have Abraham Lincoln on the payroll (just don't ask him about the best local opera houses.)

FT notes that the chatbots could also collect vast amounts of personal data, something Meta has never shied away from. After all, you'll likely share more personal details with a human-like companion than one devoid of personality. The vast majority of Meta's yearly revenue comes from advertising, so go ahead and tell your good friend Abe all about your likes and dislikes. What's the worst that could happen?

ZipNada writes: A new reactor at a nuclear power plant in Georgia has entered commercial operation, becoming the first new American reactor built from scratch in decades. Georgia Power announced Monday that Unit 3 at Plant Vogtle, southeast of Augusta, has completed testing and is now sending power to the grid reliably. At its full output of 1,100 megawatts of electricity, Unit 3 can power 500,000 homes and businesses. Utilities in Georgia, Florida and Alabama are receiving the electricity.

Nuclear power now makes up about 25% of the generation of Georgia Power, the largest unit of Atlanta-based Southern Co. A fourth reactor is also nearing completion at the site, where two earlier reactors have been generating electricity for decades. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Friday said radioactive fuel could be loaded into Unit 4, a step expected to take place before the end of September. Unit 4 is scheduled to enter commercial operation by March. The third and fourth reactors were originally supposed to cost $14 billion, but are now on track to cost their owners $31 billion. That doesn't include $3.7 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid to the owners to walk away from the project. That brings total spending to almost $35 billion. The third reactor was supposed to start generating power in 2016 when construction began in 2009.

An anonymous reader shared this report from BGR: Last year, Microsoft Edge surpassed Safari as the second most popular desktop browser. Now, new data from Statcounter shows that Apple's browser has finally regained second place.

The full ranking shows that Google Chrome remains the most used browser... It's also interesting to note that after Firefox almost surpassed Safari in February of 2022, the browser is still losing its base to Microsoft Edge and Safari... Even the all-mighty Google Chrome has lost a bit of userbase, as it had 66.64% of users last April and now has 66.13%.
The final rankings (with data from April 2023):

• Google Chrome: 66.13%
• Safari: 11.87%
• Microsoft Edge: 11%
• Firefox: 5.65%
• Opera 3.09%
• Internet Explorer: 0.55%

Vivaldi is a browser founded by Opera co-founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner and launched in 2016 with a heavy focus on privacy and customizations. As someone who has worked on the internet since 1992, Tetzchner has a lot of thoughts on the state of the internet in 2023, especially when it comes to advertising. XDA spoke with Tetzchner at this year's Mobile World Congress, and it's clear to him that advertisers "stole the internet from us." From the report: For the unfamiliar, Android's Privacy Sandbox can track users by creating an offline profile on them and show relevant advertisements based on that. It's a multi-year initiative to introduce more private advertising solutions to end-users and is made possible thanks to the Topics API and FLEDGE. Its goal is to prioritize user privacy by default but still maintain the mobile ecosystem dependent on advertising to support free and ad-supported apps. This is an exclusive-to-Android solution that uses a standalone SDK, separate from the rest of the application code, with the aim of eventually replacing Ad ID. However, Tetzchner doesn't see a difference between standard tracking and companies using the Topics API.

"For us, how you technically do the tracking, you can say it's a little bit better to do it client-side than server-side, but for me, the idea that your browser is building a profile on you... No, no, no, that's wrong. That's just wrong," he tells me. It's not quite where the data goes that seems to bother him the most, but what that data can be used to achieve. He mentions how this data can be used to influence how people vote, a la Cambridge Analytica. Whether that data is on your device or not is irrelevant; political advertisements will still appear regardless. "They stole the internet from us", he says of advertisers. "The internet is supposed to be open and free, and you shouldn't be afraid of being monitored. The idea that you are collecting data to provide ads... I can understand having access to a lot of data to provide a service, but that's not the same as profiling your users."

[...] Tetzchner is deeply disheartened with the state of it. In fact, he believes the current state of advertising is less profitable for sites now than it was before widespread tracking was in place. He mentions "normal ads," which you may see in a magazine or on TV, were the standard for about a decade, even on the internet. "A lot of sites were more profitable, and people were less worried about having to block ads. The ads were normal, it was kind of like what you were seeing if you were going and reading a magazine. There were ads, but they weren't following you." He points out that paywalls have become commonplace across the internet when that wasn't the case 15 years ago. "How is it then that we needed the change that actually created that situation?" he asks. He argues that advertisements are less profitable as a whole thanks to widespread tracking. Advertisers previously paid more because they knew exactly where their advertisements were going. Now with algorithms and Google Ads, not everything is high quality, even if those algorithms try to scan pages for quality content.