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Movies

Can James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger Revive The 'Terminator' Franchise? (etonline.com) 226

Posted by EditorDavid from the told-ya-I'd-be-back dept.
"The Resistance's war against Skynet rages on with the sixth installment of the Terminator series," reports Variety, adding that the James Cameron-produced film "serves as a direct sequel to the first two movies in the franchise, relegating the events of the intervening films to alternate timelines."

Or, as ET Online: puts it, "Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton and James Cameron are together again!" On Thursday, Paramount Pictures released the first trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate, and it's a reunion for the film franchise's original stars and filmmaker. Hamilton steps back into her role as the badass Sarah Connor, who teams up with Grace (Mackenzie Davis), a woman from the future who shows up in New Mexico and first appears much like Schwarzenegger's character did in the first movie. Directed by Deadpool's Tim Miller, Cameron wrote the story treatment for the sequel and was a producer on the film.

After several action scenes, Sarah Connor knocks on the door of an old house, and the original Terminator (Schwarzenegger) appears with a salt-and-pepper beard. "We're back," Schwarzenegger, 71, tweeted along with the trailer, alluding to his iconic line "I'll be back."
After two days the trailer has racked over 12.5 million views on YouTube, and James Cameron "not only assures that the new entry will be R-rated, but he makes it clear this will be, in more than one way, much more similar to the first two movies in the series," reports Movieweb -- quoting these remarks from one of Cameron's recent interviews.

"I think, tonally, what makes this a direct sequel to T1 and T2 is as much about the tone as it is about the narrative: it's R rated, it's grim, it's gritty, it's fast, it's intense, it's linear."
Government

EPA Plans To Get Thousands of Pollution Deaths Off the Books by Changing Its Math (nytimes.com) 308

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
The Environmental Protection Agency plans to change the way it calculates the health risks of air pollution, a shift that would make it easier to roll back a key climate change rule because it would result in far fewer predicted deaths from pollution, New York Times reported this week, citing five people with knowledge of the agency's plans. From the report: The E.P.A. had originally forecast that eliminating the Obama-era rule, the Clean Power Plan, and replacing it with a new measure would have resulted in an additional 1,400 premature deaths per year. The new analytical model would significantly reduce that number and would most likely be used by the Trump administration to defend further rollbacks of air pollution rules if it is formally adopted. The proposed shift is the latest example of the Trump administration downgrading the estimates of environmental harm from pollution in regulations. In this case, the proposed methodology would assume there is little or no health benefit to making the air any cleaner than what the law requires. Many experts said that approach was not scientifically sound and that, in the real world, there are no safe levels of the fine particulate pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels.
Businesses

New Proposal Would Let Companies Further Screw You Over With Terms of Service (vice.com) 111

Posted by BeauHD from the bad-to-worse dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vice: A collection of unelected lawyers [from the American Law Institute] this week is quietly pushing a new proposal that could dramatically erode your legal rights, leaving you at the mercy of giant corporations eager to protect themselves from accountability. Occasionally, this coalition (including all the members of the Supreme Court) meets to create "restatements," effectively an abridged synopsis or reference guide for the latest established precedents and legal trends. While restatements themselves aren't legally binding, they're very influential and often help shape judicial opinions. Seven years ago, the ALI began pondering a new restatement governing consumer contracts -- and your legal rights as a consumer. Today, the ALI meets to vote on the approval of this latest restatement. But a long line of legal experts have been blasting the group's updated language governing consumer contracts.

Specifically, they noted that the updated draft language proclaims that consumers would not need to read a contract to be bound by its terms. The draft states as long as consumers received "reasonable notice" and had "reasonable opportunity to review" it, the contract would be legally binding. Under this model, consumers wouldn't need to even understand the contract to be bound by it, a problem given data suggests such agreements are often incomprehensible to the average user. The language was problematic enough to result in a letter this week by 23 state attorneys general, criticizing the ALI's proposal as a major threat to consumer rights. "To call boilerplate language that consumers never read (or if they did read, could not understand) a 'contract' simply has the effect of locking consumers in to terms that are likely to be stacked against them," John Bergmayer, Senior Counsel at consumer group Public Knowledge, said in an email.

Traditionally, "contracts" are legal documents that are mutually agreed to after negotiation between two parties. Functionally, this isn't how Terms of Service, which few people read and few people can be expected to read and understand, work in the real world. "For some reason, everything you learn about contracts in the first year of law school gets tossed out the window when it comes to large companies unilaterally setting terms for consumers," Bergmayer added.
Privacy

Comcast Is Reportedly Developing a Device That Would Track Your Bathroom Habits (theverge.com) 61

Posted by BeauHD from the dystopian-devices dept.
Comcast is reportedly working on a device designed to closely monitor a user's health. "The device will monitor people's basic health metrics using ambient sensors, with a focus on whether someone is making frequent trips to the bathroom or spending more time than usual in bed," reports CNBC. "Comcast is also building tools for detecting falls, which are common and potentially fatal for seniors." The Verge reports: Many products on the market today already have the motion sensors, cameras, and other hardware that allow for what Comcast seems to be envisioning -- but not even Amazon or Google have directly sought to keep such a close eye on their customers' personal health with their respective Echo and Home devices. Comcast itself already offers home security services, and the company's much-touted X1 voice remote for its Xfinity cable platform has helped Comcast make advancements in recognizing and processing voice commands.

According to CNBC, Comcast's device won't offer functionality like controlling smart home devices, nor will it have the ability to search for answers to a person's questions on the internet. But it will reportedly "have a personality like Alexa" and be able to place calls to emergency services. In an email to The Verge, a Comcast spokesperson said the company's upcoming device "is NOT a smart speaker" and "is purpose-built to be a sensor that detects motion." It's said that Comcast aims to offer the device and a companion health tracking service to "at-risk people, including seniors and people with disabilities." The company is also in discussions with hospitals about potentially "using the device to ensure that patients don't end up back in the hospital after they've been discharged."
The Almighty Buck

Chicago Becomes First City To Collect 'Netflix Tax' (cbsnews.com) 153

Posted by BeauHD from the digital-taxes dept.
Four years after announcing a 9% tax on streaming entertainment services, the city has collected $2 million in sales tax from Sony and two online ticketing services, making it the first major city to collect such a tax successfully. CBS News reports: The city collected $1.2 million from Sony in January, on services including PlayStation Video live events and purchases of music and video, according to Bloomberg. It also collected nearly $800,000 from Eventbrite and $70,000 from Fandango, the outlet said. The levy has been dubbed the "Netflix tax" because it targets streaming video services in addition to gaming and other digital entertainment.

While Chicago seems to be the first city to successfully tax streaming services, it probably won't be the last. Rhode Island's governor proposed a budget this year that includes new sales taxes on digital videos, books and music. Pennsylvania enacted a similar tax in 2016 and is set to start enforcing it this summer. Chicago's expanded digital entertainment and services tax could raise up to $12 million per year, according to estimates issued at the time it passed in 2015. A lawsuit filed by a libertarian group on behalf of Netflix, Spotify and Amazon Prime customers is currently in the appeal stage.

Comment Coming in 2018 (Score 1) 38

Many of the videos look like they were posted in 2017 --Glad this is the first time I heard of it cause I hate waiting, like most people do... It looks cool, and less-technical people will have access to another tool that will see unique uses never perceived by the creator of said tool.

I just wish I could see the menu system/tools people are accessing for their creations.

Comment Challenge??? Challenge?????? (Score 1) 139

Apple CEO Tim Cook challenged Gen Z to clean up the messes Baby Boomers have left behind. "In some important ways, my generation has failed you,"

Alright, screw you, you jerk! I'm cleaning up trash everywhere because your generation had to have its disposable culture! The ocean has almost twice the weight in plastic as the weight of all the fish in it! We're on the 6th 'greatest extinction', not because of a massive asteroid strike or volcano eruptions, but because of the hubris of a generation that knew no connection between themselves and the very planet they shat all over! The Baby boomer generation was the same generation that blindly followed the mantra (loudly vocalized mainly by business owners and GOP politicians) "you either have jobs or the environment" --something that many in the 'green energy' movement know to be patently false.

And I'm supposed to listen to this Tim Cook guy?? The same guy that can't make an affordable computer (that I can fix/upgrade myself), much less fix their mess of a desktop OS... no thanks.

I've got some advice for you, however, Tim... don't shit where you eat... [my friend]

Comment Apple told us to "Think Different" (Score 1) 139

OK, I think I'll use something other than a Mac.

As Tim was saying, "Push back. It shouldn't be this way. But in 2019 opening your eyes and seeing..."

Let me finish that for you ol Timmy boy... ...seeing that you've lost your core supporters for your desktop OS (superusers), for a variety of reasons, I'll not be using your hardware or software. After cutting my teeth in computing working in a UNIX computer lab, I came to love the guts of Apple's OS X --mainly for its console for basic file management cause the Finder really sucked.

'nuff said.
Security

Email Addresses and Passwords Leaked For 113,000 Users Of Account Hijacking Forum (krebsonsecurity.com) 36

Posted by EditorDavid from the no-u dept.
"Ogusers.com -- a forum popular among people involved in hijacking online accounts and conducting SIM swapping attacks to seize control over victims' phone numbers -- has itself been hacked," reports security researcher Brian Krebs, "exposing the email addresses, hashed passwords, IP addresses and private messages for nearly 113,000 forum users." On May 12, the administrator of OGusers explained an outage to forum members by saying a hard drive failure had erased several months' worth of private messages, forum posts and prestige points, and that he'd restored a backup from January 2019. Little did the administrators of OGusers know at the time, but that May 12 incident coincided with the theft of the forum's user database, and the wiping of forum hard drives. On May 16, the administrator of rival hacking community RaidForums announced he'd uploaded the OGusers database for anyone to download for free...

"The website owner has acknowledged data corruption but not a breach so I guess I'm the first to tell you the truth. According to his statement he didn't have any recent backups so I guess I will provide one on this thread lmfao."
Some users of the hijacking forum complained that their email addresses had started getting phishing emails -- and that the forum's owner had since altered the forum's functionality so user's couldn't delete their accounts.

"It's difficult not to admit feeling a bit of schadenfreude in response to this event..." writes Krebs, adding "federal and state law enforcement investigators going after SIM swappers are likely to have a field day with this database, and my guess is this leak will fuel even more arrests and charges for those involved."
Television

10-Year-Old's Reality-Show Victory Revoked After Automated Bot Voting (go.com) 56

Posted by EditorDavid from the more-cheating-scandals dept.
An anonymous reader quotes ABC News: The final result of Russia's version of the popular TV singing talent show, "The Voice Kids," has been cancelled after it was found that thousands of automated calls and text messages were used to rig voting in favor of its 10-year-old winner. Moscow-based cybersecurity firm Group-IB was brought in to examine the results after complaints were raised over the victory of Mikella Abramova, the daughter of well-known Russian popstar Alsou and millionaire Yan Abramov...

On Thursday, Group-IB's researchers said that, after analyzing the voting data, there had been "massive automated sending of SMS messages in favour of one participant." Sequential phone numbers were used to make more than 30,000 automated calls into the show's voting line for the contestant, IB Group wrote in a statement on its website. Another 300 telephone numbers were used to send 8,000 text messages, the statement said, noting that the automated calls and messages were made by so-called 'bots' -- software programs that can be directed to repeat tasks over and over.

The findings prompted Channel 1 to announce that it was annulling the results, saying the investigation had confirmed there was "an outside influence" that had affected the outcome. In a statement on its website, the channel said it would now organize a new "special show" in which all the contestants would compete again on May 24.
One of show's hosts warned their audience not to take the reality competition too seriously. "Let's not forget that it is only a jolly game of 'who sings best.'"
PlayStation (Games)

PlayStation Gamers Are Now Authoring Their Own Games With 'Dreams' For PS4 (pushsquare.com) 38

Posted by EditorDavid from the making-Dreams-come-true dept.
dryriver explains the new buzz around "Dreams" for PS4 (now in open access). Created by the studio that made PS4's Big Little World, Dreams "is not a game. It is more of an end to end, create-your-own-3D-game toolkit that happens to run on PS4 rather than a PC... essentially an easy to use game-engine a la Unity or UnrealEngine." Dreams lets you 3D model/sculpt, texture, animate and create game logic, allowing complete 3D games to be authored from scratch. Here is a Youtube video showing someone 3D modeling a fairly sophisticated game character and environment in Dreams. Everything from platformers to FPS games to puzzle, RPG and Minecraft type games can be created.

What is interesting about Dreams is that everything anybody creates with it becomes available and downloadable in the DreamVerse and playable by other Dreams users -- so Dreams is also a distribution tool like Steam, in that you can share your creations with others.

While PC users have long had access to 3D modeling and game authoring tools, Dreams has for the first time opened up creating console games from scratch to PS4 owners, and appears to have made the processs quicker, easier and more intuitive than, say, learning 3D Studio Max and Unity on a PC. Dreams comes with hours of tutorial walkthroughs for beginners, so in a sense it is a game engine that also teaches how to make games in the first place.
Back in January Push Square gushed that "There's simply nothing like this that's ever been done before... This is one of the most innovative, extraordinary pieces of software that we've seen on a console in quite some time..."

"And it can be browsed for hours and hours and hours. It's like when you fall into a YouTube hole, and you're clicking from recommended video to recommended video -- except here, you're jumping from minigames involving llamas to models of crustaceans to covers of The King of Wishful Thinking..."

"It's an astounding technical achievement with unprecedented ambition."
Education

College Requires All CS Majors To Take An Improv Class (wsj.com) 353

Posted by EditorDavid from the whose-line-of-code-is-it-anyway? dept.
Northeastern University requires all of its computer science majors to take improv -- a class in theatre and improvisation, taught by professors in the drama department. The Wall Street Journal says it "forces students to come out of their shells and exercise creative play" before they can get their diplomas. (Although when the class was made mandatory in 2016, "We saw a lot of hysterics and crying," says Carla E. Brodley, dean of the computer science department.)

So what happens to the computer science majors at Northeastern? The course requires public speaking, lecturing on such nontechnical topics as family recipes. Students also learn to speak gibberish -- 'butuga dubuka manala phuthusa,' for instance... One class had students stare into a classmate's eyes for 60 seconds. If someone laughed, you had to try again...

The class is a way to 'robot-proof' computer-science majors, helping them sharpen uniquely human skills, said Joseph E. Aoun, the university president. Empathy, creativity and teamwork help students exercise their competitive advantage over machines in the era of artificial intelligence, according to Mr. Aoun, who wrote a book about it... Other professionals agree that improv can teach the teamwork and communication required of working with others. Many software applications now are built in small teams, a collaboration of engineers, writers and designers.
Government

Critics Call White House Social Media Bias Survey A 'Data Collection Ploy' (sfgate.com) 199

Posted by EditorDavid from the policy-or-propaganda dept.
An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: Venky Ganesan, a partner at technology investor Menlo Ventures, told The Washington Post that the White House's new survey about bias on social media is "pure kabuki theatre" and an attempt to curry political points with conservatives. He said the Trump administration's repeated accusations that tech companies censor conservative voices are unfounded because even though most Silicon Valley executives are liberal or libertarian, they wouldn't let politics get in the way of their primary goal: making money...

The Internet Association, a trade association representing Facebook, Google and other tech companies, also pushed back on President Trump's repeated accusations that their products are biased against conservatives. The association says the platforms are open and enable the speech of all Americans -- including the president himself. "That's why the president uses Twitter so much," said Michael Beckerman, the Internet Association's chief executive. "He actually used Twitter for this particular announcement, which is perhaps ironic."
The article adds that the Trump administration "declined to tell The Washington Post what it planned to do with the data it's amassing." But on Twitter the New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose argued that the survey "is just going to be used to assemble a voter file, which Trump will then pay Facebook millions of dollars to target with ads about how biased Facebook is."

Vice also believes it's a "craven data collection ploy" and "an elaborate way of getting people to subscribe to the White House's email list," adding "If this whole enterprise feels shady, that's because it is... The site isn't even hosted on a government server, but was created with Typeform, a Spain-based web tool that lets anyone set up simple surveys." Mashable also notes that the site "also just so happens to have an absolutely bonkers privacy policy" which includes allowing the White House to edit everything that's submitted.

Click here to read even more reactions.
Crime

Chelsea Manning Sent Back To Jail For Refusing To Testify Before Grand Jury (npr.org) 362

Posted by BeauHD from the back-and-forth dept.
After being released from jail earlier this month after the grand jury she refused to testify before expired, NPR reports that Chelsea Manning, the former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who provided information to WikiLeaks, has been sent back to jail. An anonymous reader shares the report: Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was sent back to jail Thursday after refusing for a second time to comply with a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. "Facing jail again, potentially today, doesn't change my stance," Manning told reporters in Alexandria, Va., before U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga said she was in contempt of court. "I will not cooperate with this or any other grand jury," Manning insisted. "So it doesn't matter what it is or what the case is, I'm just not going to comply or cooperate."

Manning said prosecutors had put her in an impossible position despite the Justice Department granting her immunity from self-incrimination. In addition to being held in custody for the duration of the grand jury's investigation or until Manning testifies, the judge ordered her to be fined $500 every day that she is in custody after 30 days and $1,000 every day in custody after 60 days, according to a statement by Manning's lawyers.
Communications

FCC Announces Action and Legal Framework To Fight Robocalls (axios.com) 104

Posted by msmash from the slowly-getting-there dept.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai proposed a ruling Wednesday that would combat robocalls that spoof legitimate, in-service numbers and provide legal framework for phone carriers to carry out the action. From a report: The declaratory ruling will be voted on and, assuming it passes, be adopted by June 6, per the FCC. If enacted: Phone companies would be allowed to block calls for consumers by default. Consumers could "white list" their contacts and opt-in to only receive calls based on that list. Emergency and other vital calls would not be blocked. Through the notice of proposed rulemaking, the FCC will also seek comment on additional measures aimed at curbing robocalls.

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