A weekend cyberattack against Sinclair Broadcast Group was linked to one of the most infamous Russian cybergangs, called Evil Corp, Bloomberg reports. From the report: The Sinclair hackers used malware called Macaw, a variant of ransomware known as WastedLocker. Both Macaw and WastedLocker were created by Evil Corp., according to the two people, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters. Evil Corp. was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2019. Since then, it has been accused by cybersecurity experts of rebranding in an attempt to avoid the sanctions. People in the U.S. are generally prohibited from engaging in transactions with sanctioned entities, including paying a ransom. "Sinclair appears to have been hit by Macaw ransomware, a relatively new strain first reported in early October," said Allan Liska, a senior threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future Inc. "There have not been any other Macaw victims publicly reported."

Netflix just released an action-packed teaser for its live-action adaptation of the 1998 Japanese anime series "Cowboy Bebop." From a report: A 10-episode series -- which chronicles a group of cosmos-hopping bounty-hunters and is based on the cartoon of the same name -- will premiere on Netflix next month [...]. The 2 1/2-minute trailer, titled "The Lost Session," featured characters Spike Spiegel (voiced by John Cho), Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir) and Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) running after a runaway target while squabbling about how to best catch the enemy. The trailer also teased the show's main villain, Vicious (Alex Hassell), as well as a snippet of the song "Green Bird" from the original series episode "Ballad for Fallen Angels." The group's spaceship, the Bebop, was also featured in the clip. A full trailer will be released on Oct. 26, just ahead of the Nov. 19 debut on Netflix.

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit organization that promotes open-source software and defends the free software General Public License (GPL), announced today it has filed a lawsuit against Vizio for what it calls repeated failures to fulfill even the basic requirements of the GPL. The lawsuit alleges that Vizio's TV products, built on its SmartCast system, contain software that Vizio unfairly appropriated from a community of developers who intended consumers to have very specific rights to modify, improve, share, and reinstall modified versions of the software.

TV broadcasts for Sinclair-owned channels went down Sunday across the US in what the stations have described as technical issues, but which multiple sources told The Record to be a ransomware attack. From the report: The incident occurred in the early hours of the day and took down the Sinclair internal corporate network, email servers, phone services, and the broadcasting systems of local TV stations. As a result of the attack, many channels weren't able to broadcast morning shows, news segments, and scheduled NFL games, according to a barrage of tweets coming from viewers and the TV channels themselves. "Internally, it's bad," a source who had to call Sinclair employees on their personal numbers to get more details about the attack, told The Record earlier today in a private conversation.

A 2014 breach at Twitch "was so bad that Twitch essentially had to rebuild much of its code infrastructure because the company eventually decided to assume most of its servers were compromised," reports Vice. "They figured it would be easier to just label them 'dirty,' and slowly migrate them to new servers, according to three former employees who saw and worked with these servers."

Slashdot reader em1ly shares Vice's report (which Vice based on interviews with seven former Twitch employees who'd worked there when the breach happened): The discovery of the suspicious logs kicked off an intense investigation that pulled nearly all Twitch employees on deck. One former employee said they worked 20 hours a day for two months, another said he worked "three weeks straight." Other employees said they worked long hours for weeks on end; some who lived far from the office slept in hotel rooms booked by the company. At the time, Twitch had few, if any, dedicated cybersecurity engineers, so developers and engineers from other teams were pulled into the effort, working together in meeting rooms with glass windows covered, frantically trying to figure out just how bad the hack was, according to five former Twitch employees who were at the company at the time...

Twitch's users would only find out about the breach six months after its discovery, on March 23, 2015, when the company published a short blog post that explained "there may have been unauthorized access to some Twitch user account information," but did not let on nearly how damaging the hack was to Twitch internally.... When Twitch finally disclosed the hack in March of 2015, security engineers at Twitch and Amazon, who had come to help with the incident response, concluded that the hack had started at least eight months before the discovery in October of 2014, though they had no idea if the hackers had actually broken in even earlier than that, according to the former employee. "That was long enough for them to learn entirely how our whole system worked and the attacks they launched demonstrated that knowledge," the former employee said...

For months after the discovery and public announcement, several servers and services were internally labeled as "dirty," as a way to tell all developers and engineers to be careful when interacting with them, and to make sure they'd get cleaned up eventually. This meant that they were still live and in use, but engineers had put restrictions on them in the event that they were still compromised, according to three former employees. "The plan apparently was just to rebuild the entire infra[structure] from known-good code and deprecate the old 'dirty' environment. We still, years later, had a split between 'dirty' services (servers or other things that were running when the hack took place) and 'clean' services, which were fired up after," one of the former employees said. "We celebrated office-wide the day we took down the last dirty service!"
Another former employees tells Vice that the breach came as a surprise, even though the company hadn't invested in keeping itself secure. "Security efforts kept getting cancelled or deprioritized with the argument that 'everyone loves Twitch; no one wants to hack us.'" The Twitch engineer who'd first stumbled onto the breach described his reaction to Vice. " 'Oh fuck.' But I remember thinking that there was so much 'I told you so' here."

One former employee added later that a more recent incident just this month "demonstrates that they didn't learn anything from the incident in 2014." But not everyone agrees. Other former employees, however, said that the damage of this new data breach appears to be less severe than the 2014 hack. And that it's likely thanks to Twitch taking security more seriously since then.

Netflix's hugely popular series Squid Game has become its biggest title ever at launch, the company said Monday. The Verge reports: The company's Netflix Geeked account tweeted Monday that Hwang Dong-Hyuk's survival thriller reached 111 million global accounts in its first 17 days on the service. Additionally, Squid Game is the first Netflix series to surpass 100 million in its first 28 days on the service, a spokesperson told The Verge. Netflix typically uses 28-day windows to measure the performance of a title on its platform. The spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the figures it shared are based on the number of accounts that watched the series for at least two minutes, its standard metric for ranking titles (though it has used additional measurements to track the success of titles in the past).

Since debuting on Netflix on September 17th, Squid Game has reached the no. 1 position on the streaming service in 94 countries -- every country in the world where the service features a top 10 list, the company spokesperson said. Additionally, the show has held the no. 1 position for 21 days in the US, shattering the record for a non-English language title. Squid Game was previously announced as the first Korean title to reach the top spot in the US.

A woman allegedly hacked into the systems of a flight training school in Florida to delete and tamper with information related to the school's airplanes. In some cases, planes that previously had maintenance issues had been "cleared" to fly, according to a police report. The hack, according to the school's CEO, could have put pilots in danger. From a report: Lauren Lide, a 26-year-old who used to work for the Melbourne Flight Training school, resigned from her position of Flight Operations Manager at the end of November of 2019, after the company fired her father. Months later, she allegedly hacked into the systems of her former company, deleting and changing records, in an apparent attempt to get back at her former employer, according to court records obtained by Motherboard. The news of her arrest was first reported by local TV station News Channel 8.

Derek Fallon, the CEO of Melbourne Flight Training called the police on January 17, 2020, and reported that five days before, he logged onto his account for Flight Circle, an app his company uses to manage and keep track of its airplanes, and found that there was missing information. Fallon found that someone had removed records related to planes with maintenance issues and reminders of inspections had all been deleted, "meaning aircraft which may have been unsafe to fly were purposely made 'airworthy,'" according to a document written by a Melbourne Airport Police officer.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, Nintendo of Europe announced a very region-specific -- and era-specific -- tweak for its upcoming collection of N64 games on Switch: an option to switch between the video standards PAL and NTSC. While the announcement may sound ho-hum to outsiders, anyone in Europe with a vested interest in classic gaming will appreciate what the toggle affords. The issue boils down to differences between NTSC and PAL, the leading video broadcast standards on CRT TVs during Nintendo's '80s and '90s heyday. North American and Japanese TV sets were configured for NTSC, which has a refresh rate standard of 60 Hz, while PAL sets dominated Europe with a slightly higher pixel resolution and a lower refresh rate standard of 50 Hz.

Should you merely watch TV series or films on both NTSC and PAL sets, the difference between each is noticeable yet mild. But for much of the '80s and '90s, many TV video games, especially the ones made by the largely Japanese console industry, suffered in PAL because they were coded specifically for NTSC standards. In order to port them to PAL, developers generally didn't go back and reconfigure all of the timings, especially in the case of early 3D games. Instead, their internal clock speeds were often slowed down to 83.3 percent to match European TV refresh rates. This meant both slower gameplay than originally coded and slower playback of music and sound effects. (These also often shipped with NTSC's pixel maximums in mind in such a way that they were squished to fit on PAL displays, as opposed to being optimized for them.)

Sure enough, last month's announcement of N64 games on Nintendo Switch Online put fear into European classic-gamer hearts. That region's reveal video included slightly slower timings of classic N64 games compared to videos posted by Nintendo of America and Nintendo of Japan, since they were emulating the original European retail releases. At that time, Nintendo of Europe did not immediately reply to social media questions about whether European Switch owners would get an option for 60 Hz N64 gameplay -- especially in an LCD TV era, where such CRT-related restrictions no longer technically apply to most EU and UK TV owners. Monday's announcement confirms that European players will get a 60 Hz option by default for every N64 game in the Nintendo Switch Online "Expansion Pack" collection, along with the option to access a game's original 50 Hz version if it launched with multi-language support. Reading between the lines, we believe this means that if a European N64 game only had English language support, its Switch Online version will be the North American NTSC ROM.

Telkom SA said Netflix will no longer be available on the South African phone and internet company's set-top box from October. From a report: A deal between the parties has come to an end and will not be renewed, Content Executive Wanda Mkhize said in a statement, without giving a specific reason. Other content partnerships will be announced in due course, she said. The move comes after MultiChoice, Africa's largest pay-TV provider, signed deals with Netflix and Amazon.com to offer their streaming services through its new decoder. The continent is a small market for paid streaming video, with just a few million subscribers out of a population of more than 1 billion, and the U.S. giants have targeted it for future growth.

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

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

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

phalse phace shares a report from The Verge: British Satellite broadcaster Sky is moving away from the satellite dishes that have defined its TV service for decades. Sky Glass is launching today, an ambitious effort to sell television sets that stream Sky TV content over Wi-Fi directly to consumers. There's no external box, no satellite dish, and no need for a soundbar. Although announced for the UK today, Sky has global aspirations for Glass TV "built on technology borne of the collaboration as part of the Comcast Corporation." As such, we might be looking at the platform underpinning Comcast's rumored XClass TVs for the US. Sky Glass TVs will be available in three sizes: 43-inch, 55-inch, and 65-inch. Each 4K TV will stream Sky's TV channels, and integrates in voice control (Hello Sky) and 21 apps to access additional content like Netflix, Spotify, or Disney Plus.

Sky hasn't named the TV manufacturer it partnered with yet, but the full specifications include a UHD Quantum Dot display, support for Dolby Vision, HDR 10, HLG, three HDMI 2.1 ports, and a single USB-C port. The rather chubby TV fits six speakers for up to 215W of Dolby Atmos surround sound: 3 outward firing speakers, 2 upward, and 1 central subwoofer. There will also be five color options: white, pink, green, blue, and black. The price of a Sky Glass TV is designed to be baked into a monthly subscription to Sky's TV service, known as Sky Ultimate TV, but you can also pay for the TV upfront if you want to lower the monthly costs. Sky Ultimate TV includes access to Netflix and some basic Sky channels, but Sky Sports and Sky Cinema are separate add-ons. What you pay will depend on the size of TV and whether you want to spread payments. The report goes on to note Sky's collaboration with Microsoft to watch TV together with others. "Sky demonstrated a software experience that allows you to watch TV channels with others, and see each other's reactions to sport in real time," reports The Verge.

Furthermore, Sky claims it'll be the first TV manufacturer in the world to allow customers to "swap old Sky Glass TVs for newer models when they're available," the report adds.

An unknown individual has leaked the source code and business data of video streaming platform Twitch via a torrent file posted on the 4chan discussion board earlier today. From a report: The leaker said they shared the data as a response to the recent "hate raids" --coordinated bot attacks posting hateful and abusive content in Twitch chats -- that have plagued the platform's top streamers over the summer. "Their community is [...] a disgusting toxic cesspool, so to foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space, we have completely pwned them, and in part one, are releasing the source code from almost 6,000 internal Git repositories," the leaker said earlier today. The leaker claims that the leak contains the "entirety of twitch.tv, with commit history going back to its early beginnings, mobile, desktop and video game console Twitch clients, various proprietary SDKs and internal AWS services used by Twitch, every other property that Twitch owns including IGDB and CurseForge, an unreleased Steam competitor from Amazon Game Studios, and Twitch SOC internal red teaming tools."

Twitch has confirmed the breach. In a tweet it said, "We can confirm a breach has taken place. Our teams are working with urgency to understand the extent of this. We will update the community as soon as additional information is available."

When Facebook went down yesterday for nearly six hours, so did Oculus' services. Since Facebook owns VR headset maker Oculus, and controversially requires Oculus Quest users to log in with a Facebook account, many Quest owners reported not being able to load their Oculus libraries. "[A]nd those who just took a Quest 2 out of the box have reported that they're unable to complete the initial setup," adds PCGamer. As VRFocus points out, "the issue has raised another important question relating to Oculus' services being so closely linked with a Facebook account, your Oculus Quest/Quest 2 is essentially bricked until services resume." From the report: This vividly highlights the problem with having to connect to Facebook's services to gain access to apps -- the WiFi connection was fine. Even all the ones downloaded and taking up actual storage space didn't show up. It's why some VR fans began boycotting the company when it made all mandatory that all Oculus Quest 2's had to be affiliated with a Facebook account. If you want to unlink your Facebook account from Oculus Quest and don't want to pay extra for that ability, you're in luck thanks to a sideloadable tool called "Oculess." From an UploadVR article published earlier today: You still need a Facebook account to set up the device in the first place and you need to give Facebook a phone number or card details to sideload, but after that you could use Oculess to forgo Facebook entirely -- just remember to never factory reset. The catch is you'll lose access to Oculus Store apps because the entitlement check used upon launching them will no longer function. System apps like Oculus TV and Browser will also no longer launch, and casting won't work. You can still sideload hundreds of apps from SideQuest though, and if you want to keep browsing the web in VR you can sideload Firefox Reality. You can still use Oculus Link to play PC VR content, but only if you stay signed into Facebook on the Oculus PC app. Virtual Desktop won't work because it's a store app, but you can sideload free alternatives such as ALVR.

To use Oculess, just download it from GitHub and sideload it using SideQuest or Oculus Developer Hub, then launch it from inside VR. If your Quest isn't already in developer mode or you don't know how to sideload you can follow our guide here.

According to fluent Korean speaker Youngmi Mayer, Squid Game features "botched" subtitles that have changed the show's meaning for English-speaking viewers.

For those unaware of Squid Game, it's a Korean-language drama about an alternative world where people in debt compete in deadly games. The plot sees a group of people tempted into a survival game where they have the chance to walk away with 45.6 billion Korean won ($38 million) if they win a series of six games. According to a BBC article, it's currently on track to become Netflix's biggest original series. From the report: "The dialogue was so well written and zero of it was preserved [in the subtitles]," Youngmi said in a Twitter post. In a TikTok video that's had almost nine million views, Youngmi gave several examples of mistranslation. In one scene a character tries to convince people to play the game with her, and the closed-caption subtitles read: "I'm not a genius, but I still got it worked out." But what the character actually says, Youngmi explains, is: "I am very smart, I just never got a chance to study." That translation puts more emphasis on the wealth disparity in society -- which is also a theme in the Oscar-winning 2019 Korean film, Parasite. "Almost everything she says is being botched translation-wise... the writers, all they want you to know about her is that," Youngmi said. "[It] seems so small, but it's the entire character's purpose of being in the show." Youngmi later clarifies that her initial comments were about the automatically generated closed-caption subtitles rather than the English language subtitles, which are "substantially better." But she added: "The misses in the metaphors -- and what the writers were trying to actually say -- are still pretty present."

John Gruber shares thoughts on the new ways tabs feel and function on Safari for Mac: From a usability perspective, every single thing about Safari 15's tabs is a regression. Everything. It's a tab design that can only please users who do not use tabs heavily; whereas the old tab design scaled gracefully from "I only open a few tabs at a time" all the way to "I have hundreds of tabs open across multiple windows." That's a disgrace. The Safari team literally invented the standard for how tabs work on MacOS. The tabs that are now available in the Finder, Terminal, and optionally in all document-based Mac apps are derived from the design and implementation of Safari's tabs. Now, Apple has thrown away Safari's tab design -- a tab design that was not just best-of-platform, but arguably best-in-the-whole-damn-world -- and replaced it with a design that is both inferior in the abstract, and utterly inconsistent with the standard tabs across the rest of MacOS.

The skin-deep "looks cool, ship it" nature of Safari 15's tab design is like a fictional UI from a movie or TV show, like Westworld's foldable tablets or Tony Stark's systems from Iron Man, where looking cool is the entirety of the design spec. Something designed not by UI designers but by graphic designers, with no thought whatsoever to the affordances, consistencies, and visual hierarchies essential to actual usability. Just what looks cool. This new tab design shows a complete disregard for the familiarity users have with Safari's existing tab design. Apple never has been and should not be a company that avoids change at all cost. But proper change -- change that breaks users' habits and expectations -- is only justifiable when it's an improvement. Change for change's sake alone is masturbatory. That with Safari 15 it actually makes usability worse, solely for flamboyant cosmetic reasons, is downright perverse. "Google could and should run ads targeting Safari users, with a simple welcoming message: Switch to Chrome, the Mac browser where tabs look like tabs."

The Guardian reports on "a new breed of scambaiters...taking over TikTok and YouTube."

And one of them has more than 1.5 million followers across both video platforms. "Three to four days a week, for one or two hours at a time, Rosie Okumura, 35, telephones thieves and messes with their minds," reports the Guardian: For the past two years, the LA-based voice actor has run a sort of reverse call centre, deliberately ringing the people most of us hang up on — scammers who pose as tax agencies or tech-support companies or inform you that you've recently been in a car accident you somehow don't recall. When Okumura gets a scammer on the line, she will pretend to be an old lady, or a six-year-old girl, or do an uncanny impression of Apple's virtual assistant Siri. Once, she successfully fooled a fake customer service representative into believing that she was Britney Spears. "I waste their time," she explains, "and now they're not stealing from someone's grandma...."

Batman became Batman to avenge the death of his parents; Okumura became a scambaiter after her mum was scammed out of $500... Thankfully, the bank was able to stop the money leaving her mother's account, but Okumura wanted more than just a refund. She asked her mum to give her the number she'd called and called it herself, spending an hour and 45 minutes wasting the scammer's time. "My computer's giving me the worst vibes," she began in Kim Kardashian's voice. "Are you in front of your computer right now?" asked the scammer. "Yeah, well it's in front of me, is that... that's like the same thing?" Okumura put the video on YouTube and since then has made over 200 more videos, through which she earns regular advertising revenue (she also takes sponsorships directly from companies).

"A lot of it is entertainment — it's funny, it's fun to do, it makes people happy," she says when asked why she scambaits. "But I also get a few emails a day saying, 'Oh, thank you so much, if it weren't for that video, I would've lost $1,500.'" Okumura isn't naive — she knows she can't stop people scamming, but she hopes to stop people falling for scams. "I think just educating people and preventing it from happening in the first place is easier than trying to get all the scammers put in jail...."
The Guardian also describes Jim Browning, a Northern Irish YouTuber with nearly 3.5 million subscribers who's been posting scambaiting videos for seven years. "Browning regularly gets access to scammers' computers and has even managed to hack into the closed-circuit TV footage of call centres in order to identify individuals. He then passes this information to the 'relevant authorities' including the police, money-processing firms and internet service providers...."

And they also tell the story of an American software engineer who joined with friends to convince a scammer he'd been offered a high-paying job — only to end up stranded in Laos after paying for a 600-miles flight.

"He was crying... that was the one where I was like, 'Ah, maybe I'm taking things a little too far.'"

Back in 2014 Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski answered questions from Slashdot's readers.

And now this week, long-time Slashdot reader Jaegs writes: According to many sources and the Babylon 5 creator/writer/director/producer himself, J. Michael Straczynski (JMS), the CW — partly owned by the original Babylon 5 producer and rights holder, WarnerMedia — will be rebooting the popular franchise. JMS will be writing and executive producing the series.

Per JMS:

"[W]e will not be retelling the same story in the same way... There would be no fun and no surprises. Better to go the way of Westworld or Battlestar Galactica where you take the original elements that are evergreens and put them in a blender with a ton of new, challenging ideas, to create something fresh yet familiar. To those asking why not just do a continuation, for a network series like this, it can't be done because over half our cast are still stubbornly on the other side of the Rim.

The last part refers to the recent passing of Mira Furlan (Delenn), as well as the untimely deaths of other primary cast members after the conclusion of the original run of the series: Richard Biggs (Dr. Franklin), Michael O'Hare (Jeffrey Sinclair), Jerry Doyle (Michael Garibaldi), Stephen Furst (Vir Cotto), Jeff Conway (Zack Allan), and Andreas Katsulas (G'Kar).
Straczynski points out on Twitter that "The original Babylon 5 was ridiculously innovative: the first to use CGI to create ships and characters, and among the very first to shoot widescreen with a vigorous 5.1 mix." But his tweets also seem excited about the questions that this new reboot will answer. "if I were creating Babylon 5 today, for the first time, knowing what I now know as a writer, what would it look like? How would it use all the storytelling tools and technological resources available in 2021 that were not on hand then?

"How can it be used to reflect the world in which we live, and the questions we are asking and confronting every day? Fans regularly point out how prescient the show was and is of our current world; it would be fun to take a shot at looking further down the road..."

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

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

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

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

The American media company Ozy "boasted of a large audience for its general interest website, its newsletters and its videos," remembers the New York Times, calling it "a Gen X dream of what millennial media ought to be: earnest, policy-focused, inclusive, slickly sans-serif." Ozy was founded in 2013 with seed funding from Laurene Powell Jobs, followed by further investments that by 2020 were over $83 million (according to the data service PitchBook).

But the Times reports that something strange happened last winter while Ozy was pursuing a $40 million investment from Goldman Sachs: Ozy said it had a great relationship with YouTube, where many of its videos attracted more than a million views... That's what the Zoom videoconference on February 2 that Ozy arranged between the Goldman Sachs asset management division and YouTube was supposed to be about. The scheduled participants included Alex Piper, the head of unscripted programming for YouTube Originals.

He was running late and apologized to the Goldman Sachs team, saying he'd had trouble logging onto Zoom, and he suggested that the meeting be moved to a conference call, according to four people who were briefed on the meeting, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal details of a private discussion. Once everyone had made the switch to an old-fashioned conference call, the guest told the bankers what they had been wanting to hear: that Ozy was a great success on YouTube, racking up significant views and ad dollars, and that [CEO/co-founder Carlos] Watson was as good a leader as he seemed to be. As he spoke, however, the man's voice began to sound strange to the Goldman Sachs team, as though it might have been digitally altered, the four people said.

After the meeting, someone on the Goldman Sachs side reached out to Mr. Piper, not through the Gmail address that Mr. Watson had provided before the meeting, but through Mr. Piper's assistant at YouTube. That's when things got weird. A confused Mr. Piper told the Goldman Sachs investor that he had never spoken with her before. Someone else, it seemed, had been playing the part of Mr. Piper on the call with Ozy.
Four people told the Times that CEO Watson later said the voice on the call belonged to Ozy co-founder/chief operating officer Samir Rao and attributed the incident to a temporary mental health crisis. Ozy's chairman of the board called it "an unfortunate one-time event." But in addition the site's editor-at-large — who was fired earlier this year — says Ozy's claims of 50 million unique users a month "seemed high," according to the Times: In 2017, BuzzFeed News reported that Ozy had been among the publishers buying web traffic from "low-quality sources," companies using systems that caused articles to pop open under a reader's browser without the reader's knowledge. Ozy said it had been buying the traffic to build its email lists and had not billed advertisers for those views... Ozy doesn't rely on standard measurements of traffic, but the best known service, Comscore, shows nothing close to the company's public claims. According to Comscore, Ozy reached nearly 2.5 million people during some months in 2018, but only 230,000 people in June 2021 and 479,000 in July.

Mr. Watson called the Comscore numbers "incomplete," noting they don't include impressions on platforms ranging from social media to television and podcasts.
The Times' story "triggered canceled shows, an internal investigation, investor concern and high-level departures at the company," ABC News reported Friday. And the same day the Times delivered one more update — that Ozy was shutting down: In an article in The Times on Thursday, Brad Bessey, an Emmy-winning executive producer, and Heidi Clements, a longtime TV writer, said Ozy executives had misled them while they were working on "The Carlos Watson Show," Mr. Watson's talk show, for the company. Specifically, they said, executives told them that the show would appear on the cable network A&E. Mr. Bessey resigned when he learned there was no such deal in place, and the show ended up appearing on YouTube and the Ozy website.

Also this week: Advertisers including Chevrolet, Walmart, Facebook, Target and Goldman Sachs itself — many of which had been paying for placement on "The Carlos Watson Show" — hit the brakes on their spending with Ozy. By Friday afternoon, Mr. Watson and the other remaining board member, Michael Moe (another high-profile investment figure, who had published a book called "Finding the Next Starbucks"), concluded that the company could not recover and issued the farewell statement through a spokeswoman....

The Ozy staff received the news that the company was no more on Friday afternoon.

People benefit from deep and meaningful conversations that help us forge connections with one another, but we often stick to small talk with strangers because we underestimate how much others are interested in our lives and wrongly believe that deeper conversations will be more awkward and less enjoyable than they actually are, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. Phys.Org reports: If connecting with others in deep and meaningful ways increases well-being, then why aren't people doing it more often in daily life? To answer that question, [researchers] designed a series of twelve experiments with more than 1,800 total participants. The researchers asked pairs of people -- mainly strangers -- to discuss either relatively deep or shallow topics. In some experiments, people received shallow or deep questions to discuss. Shallow questions included typical small-talk topics, such as, "What is the best TV show you've seen in the last month? Tell your partner about it" or "What do you think about the weather today?" while deep questions elicited more personal and intimate information, such as, "Can you describe a time you cried in front of another person?" or "If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, your future, or anything else, what would you want to know?" In other experiments, people generated their own deep and shallow conversation topics.

Before the conversations, participants predicted how awkward they thought the conversations would be, how connected they thought they would feel to their conversation partner and how much they would enjoy the conversation. Afterward, they rated how awkward the conversations actually were, how connected they actually felt and how much enjoyment they actually experienced. Overall, the researchers found that both deep and shallow conversations felt less awkward and led to greater feelings of connectedness and enjoyment than the participants had expected. That effect tended to be stronger for deep conversations. Participants who discussed the deep questions overestimated how awkward the conversation would be significantly more than those who discussed shallow questions. Deep conversations were also more enjoyable and led to a stronger sense of connection.