Fueled by manic demand during the early days of Covid, Peloton spent the next two years chasing a dream of fitness dominance. From a report: If Peloton's story thus far were a Peloton class, it would be a high-intensity one, perhaps even a Tabata ride. Everyone would pedal as fast as they could, recover for not long enough, then do it again, as a charismatic figure on the screen urged them on with promises of transformational personal growth and of the massiveness of the total addressable market of subscription fitness. Midway through, the instructor would announce that the 20-minute class would actually go for an hour. Here and there, riders would injure themselves. There would be technical issues with the machines. At the end, right after recommending a five-minute post-ride stretching class and intoning his mantra -- "We're not a stationary bike company, we're not a treadmill company, we are an innovation company that is at the nexus of fitness, technology, and media!" -- the instructor would announce his transition to a new role at the company. It would be exhilarating and entertaining, but perhaps not a ride you'd want to do every day.

[...] The bring-your-own-bike model holds evident appeal for Barry McCarthy (new CEO), who's less interested in the physical machines than in his company's content. "The magic happens in the tablet," he says. He muses that perhaps the Peloton screen should be an open platform where third-party programmers can place apps. Or maybe the company could try the inkjet printer business model, offering machines for cheap and making money through higher monthly subscription fees. At the moment, you can ride your bike even if you're not paying for classes. McCarthy plans to experiment with making those payments mandatory. (On March 10, the company announced such a test, saying it would create a monthly subscription that combines the price of its hardware and content and lacks an upfront hardware payment.) In all of this, McCarthy says he'll let the data be his instructor. It's a familiar narrative: Startup founder gives way to the bean counters and market researchers. Peloton, more than perhaps any other company, trades on charisma -- of its instructors, of its corporate leadership, of its hardcore users cheerfully touting the brand. But even cults need accountants.

Snap is suing the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for rejecting its application to trademark the word "spectacles" for its digital eyewear camera device. But the USPTO has maintained that "spectacles" is a generic term for smart glasses and that Snap's version "has not acquired distinctiveness," as required for a trademark. The Verge reports: In its complaint filed Wednesday in US District Court in California, Snap claims that the Spectacles name "evokes an incongruity between an 18th century term for corrective eyewear and Snap's high-tech 21st century smart glasses. SPECTACLES also is suggestive of the camera's purpose, to capture and share unusual, notable, or entertaining scenes (i.e., "spectacles") and while also encouraging users to make 'spectacles' of themselves." Snap first introduced its camera-equipped Spectacles in 2016 ("a wearable digital video camera housed in a pair of fashionable sunglasses," according to its complaint), which can take photos and videos while the user wears them and connects with the Snap smartphone app. [...]

Snap's new complaint posits that there's been enough media coverage of Spectacles, bolstered by some industry awards and its own marketing including social media, to support its claim that consumers associate the word "spectacles" with the Snap brand. Snap first filed a trademark application for Spectacles in September 2016, "for use in connection with wearable computer hardware" and other related uses "among consumer electronics devices and displays." During several rounds of back-and-forth with the company since then, the USPTO has maintained that the word "spectacles" appeared to be "generic in connection with the identified goods," i.e. the camera glasses. Snap continued to appeal the agency's decision. In a November 2021 opinion, the USPTO's Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (pdf) upheld the decision, reiterating that the word "spectacles" was a generic term that applied to all smart glasses, not just Snap's version. Despite the publicity Snap claimed its Spectacles had received from its marketing and social media, the board noted in its opinion that Spectacles' "social media accounts have an underwhelming number of followers, and the number of followers is surprisingly small," which didn't support the company's argument that there had been a high enough level of consumer exposure to Snap's Spectacles to claim that consumers associated the word with Snap's brand.

In its Tuesday complaint, Snap's attorneys argued that "spectacles is an old-fashioned term popular in the 18th century," and that it "is not often used today in the United States," especially by Snapchat's young audience. "This indicates that modern-day usage of "spectacles" in the United States -- especially among a younger demographic of consumers who are the relevant consumers of Snap's SPECTACLES camera product -- is not commonly understood to mean eyeglasses, and certainly not a wireless-enabled video camera product." But the USPTO appeal board said in November that the evidence didn't support that argument, and that the word "spectacles" still retains its generic meaning and therefore can't be trademarked. The board noted that in its own marketing, Snap had demonstrated that its Spectacles "eyeglasses form is a feature, function and characteristic of the camera, not only functionally but aesthetically." Snap's lawsuit, which names acting USPTO director Drew Hirshfeld, seeks to have the appeal board's November decision reversed.

The co-founder of the fact-checking website Snopes has been accused of publishing articles that are too accurate: copying text from other more authorative web sites.

Snopes.com describes them as "sentences or paragraphs from various news sites pasted into Snopes news stories without appropriate attribution." BuzzFeed News writes: A BuzzFeed News investigation has found that between 2015 and 2019, Mikkelson wrote and published dozens of articles containing material plagiarized from news outlets such as the Guardian and the LA Times. After inquiries from BuzzFeed News, Snopes conducted an internal review and confirmed that under a pseudonym, the Snopes byline, and his own name, Mikkelson wrote and published 54 articles with plagiarized material... BuzzFeed News found dozens of articles on Snopes' site that include language — sometimes entire paragraphs — that appear to have been copied without attribution from news outlets that include the New York Times, CNN, NBC News, and the BBC... Snopes's subsequent internal review identified 140 articles with possible problems and 54 that were found to include appropriated material...

"That was his big SEO/speed secret," said Binkowski, whom Snopes fired without explanation in 2018 (she currently manages the fact-checking site Truth or Fiction). "He would instruct us to copy text from other sites, post them verbatim so that it looked like we were fast and could scoop up traffic, and then change the story in real time. I hated it and wouldn't tell any of the staff to do it, but he did it all the time." Two other former employees also said that copying and rewriting content was part of Mikkelson's strategy for driving traffic to Snopes' site...
Thanks to Slashdot reader PolygamousRanchKid for submitting this story. BuzzFeed notes that Mikkelson himself had also begun using a pseudonym "intended to mislead the trolls and conspiracy theorists who frequently targeted the site and its writers." That byline linked to a satirical bio claiming that in 2006 they'd "won the Pulitzer Prize for numismatics" (coin collecting) and were "also the winner of the Distinguished Conflagration Award of the American Society of Muleskinners for 2005."

Snopes.com actually thanked BuzzFeed's reporter for letting them know, calling BuzzFeed's article "an example of dogged, watchdog journalism we cherish" (while adding "Our staff has moved quickly to fix the problem... Our reputation is dependent on our ability to get things right, and more importantly, to quickly correct the record when we are wrong.") Besides removing Mikkelson's purloined content (and preventing him, though he's still the site's co-owner, from publishing on it), Snopes.com says that in addition, "We will attempt to contact each news outlet whose reporting we appropriated to issue an apology."

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Mikkelson attributed the unattributed sentence-copying to his lack of formal journalism experience. "I wasn't used to doing news aggregation. A number of times I crossed the line to where it was copyright infringement. I own that...."

I remember when Snopes.com was just an entertaining fringe web site debunking kooky claims turning up in forwarded emails or on Usenet. Was it a victim of its own success — drawn into the 24/7 news cycle, with its "race to be first"? Were they overwhelmed by the amount of misinformation being spread on social media that needed debunking? In a statement to BuzzFeed, Mikkelson had this to say: Snopes has grown beyond our roots as a "one-man band" website into a newsroom of dedicated, professional journalists who serve the public with trustworthy information. Thanks to their efforts, Snopes has published original reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic, the recent elections, Russian disinformation efforts and so much more. The last thing I ever wanted was to have my mistakes detract from their excellent work, and I'm doing everything I can to make it right.
And on Twitter, BuzzFeed's reporter added that "I don't like that this story is being weaponized by bad actors like Steve Bannon to unfairly and baselessly smear the work of Snopes' staff writers who do good work and had no part in this."

Netflix today launched Fast Laughs, a new feature for its mobile apps that presents a string of comedy clips from its stand-up specials, TV series and movies. From a report: Netflix's Fast Laughs displays full-screen vertical video in an auto-playing feed, borrowing a page from apps likes TikTok, and lets users share their favorite bits with friends and social media. The company says the section will provide up to 100 curated clips per day. The main goal, obviously, is to nail up yet another entry point for Netflix subs to find new content to binge on.

Fast Laughs lets you add specific titles to your Netflix watch list or click to start watching a program immediately. But Netflix also built Fast Laughs as a destination unto itself to watch entertaining moments on-the-go, calling to mind a key idea of now-defunct startup Quibi. You can just lean back and watch the jokes fly in a scrolling montage. The length of each video segment will vary, as short as around 15 seconds and up to 45 seconds or even longer.

Instagram says it's making changes to its algorithm and how it recommends Reels to users. One of the biggest new changes is that it will no longer promote Reels that have a TikTok watermark. The Verge reports: The team now recommends that Reels users post vertical videos that use music found in Instagram's library or sounds that they find on Reels. They also suggest "starting a trend" that others can participate in, like dance crazes, as well as "entertaining" and "fun" content. Reels that are mostly covered by text, are blurry, have a watermark or logo, or have a border around it won't be recommended as frequently.

"We're building on what we've learned from Explore to recommend fun and entertaining videos in places like the Reels tab, and personalize the experience," says spokesperson Devi Narasimhan in an email to The Verge. "We are getting better at using ranking signals that help us predict whether people will find a reel entertaining and whether we should recommend it." Narasimhan says Instagram user surveys demonstrated that people have a "less satisfying" Reels experience when content is recycled from other apps or is blurry, so it'll start deemphasizing that content in its recommendation software. This makes it less likely to be discovered by people who aren't following the person who posted it.

Yesterday, Clash announced it was acquiring Byte, a short-form video app launched by Vine cofounder Dom Hofmann. The announcement comes "at a time when TikTok itself now appears to be here to stay," reports CNN. From the report: Dubsmash, another TikTok competitor with a similar algorithmic feed serving up entertaining videos, was acquired last month by Reddit. Meanwhile, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, which launched a TikTok clone called Reels days after then President Donald Trump said he would ban TikTok, recently admitted "TikTok is ahead." He also hinted at a need for Instagram to simplify or consolidate its video product offerings.

Clash was one of the many competitors that seemed poised to benefit from TikTok's troubles. Like TikTok, Clash lets users upload short videos set to music and offers an algorithmic feed serving up content it thinks you'd like. Byte offers a similar experience, except with hidden follower counts and likes. [...] The Byte app will "continue to have the same great in-app experience" Clash said, but it will add new ways to monetize and other features. Clash said it's working on ways for its creators to earn money directly on the platform, including from viral videos and top fans giving payments on a regular basis, which it hopes will help it stand out in a crowded market.

Arthur Levitt Jr., a former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, writes at Bloomberg Opinion: They say history occurs first as tragedy, then as farce -- I fear we're about to see that in U.S. financial markets. Two decades ago, U.S. financial markets were riding all-time records. Day traders were using chat rooms to swap what they thought were reliable tips about stocks that were about to pop. Stocks with negative earnings were trading at astronomical valuations by almost any measure. People without any experience in stock market trading -- no less any understanding of how to read a financial statement or earnings report -- were confidently pouring dollars saved for college tuition or rent into short-term bets on companies they knew little to nothing about. And the surest sign of mania was this: People found stock market investing terribly entertaining. I remember high school students asking me for stock tips. It all came to a crashing end as the dot-com bubble burst, blowing up a few companies and several billion dollars of investor savings. And in retrospect, it seemed so obvious. All the signs of a market bubble were there. People chose not to pay attention.

[...] By all indications, today's investors are repeating the same mistakes. Consider the following: Significant stock movements are now spurred by social-media-driven gossip about the company and short squeezes (when an investor betting against a stock is forced to pay up for shares to cover their position). Novice investors are learning about investing not through fundamental rules of the road (study the company and its leadership, read its filings, study its markets, consider its price-to-earnings ratios, evaluate its cash generation versus its debt load, review its earnings expectations versus reality, etc.) but rather through a casino-like focus on ticker symbols alone. It's quite common for novice investors on day-trading platforms to buy a stock for the same reason they might choose a specific color of sweater -- for aesthetic purposes only. This is all terribly familiar.[...] Now, with the benefit of hindsight and history, how do we not repeat the dot-com experience as a dark comedy? [...] WH Press Secretary said moments ago at a briefing that Biden team is "monitoring the situation" around GameStop.

Wednesday Twitch warned its users to delete any videos containing copyrighted music. PC Gamer reports on what happened next: Since October, Twitch has been deleting significant quantities of videos over copyright claims, leaving the affected streamers with no way to respond or issue counter-claims. Twitch eventually explained that the number of DMCA notifications it receives from major record labels has surged, going from "fewer than 50" each year to "thousands" beginning in May. The recommendation offered to streamers was to play games with the music muted, which obviously isn't great advice when it comes to rhythm games, or games that don't have the option to mute music separately from other audio. Meanwhile, some streamers have had videos muted due to sound effects, with claims coming via automated content recognition software Audible Magic. These claims can be contested, but it's still frustrating for those affected by content ID software that can't tell the difference between copyrighted audio and the noise of a grandfather clock chiming in a horror game.

In response, streamers have been protesting by playing games with the sound off completely to highlight the absurdity of the situation, some using the hashtag #DMCAsoundoff. Watching Rocksmith players grunt or silently nod along to songs nobody can hear highlights the problem while still entertaining their viewers, as does hearing them improvise their own the sound effects for games like Resident Evil 2.
Polygon argues it's "alarming that these are the lengths players are going to in order to try and protest Twitch's policy..." But they also applauded the creativity of the protesters It's a surprising look at the transformative nature of streaming. When players are forced to play in dead silence, people still tune in and watch. Even while complying with copyright law to the absolute letter, each stream is different, and each act of protest feels wholly unique.

Twitch recently posted a long statement in response to the controversy, writing: "Your frustration and confusion with recent music-related copyright issues is completely justified. Things can — and should — be better for creators than they have been recently. We should have developed more sophisticated and user-friendly tools long ago. To all the creators who lost their community's best moments, we're sorry. This shouldn't have happened."

Despite the statement, Twitch has yet to provide concrete solutions for the ongoing problem, and the platform has yet to address the issue of in-game audio triggering the DMCA process (besides a suggestion to mute in-game audio.)

An RIAA takedown request, which removed the YouTube-DL repository from GitHub, has ticked off developers and GitHub's CEO. Numerous people responded by copying and republishing the contested code, including in some quite clever ways. Meanwhile, GitHub's CEO is "annoyed" as well, offering help to get the repo reinstated. TorrentFreak reports: Soon after the RIAA notice took YouTube-DL offline many developers spoke out in protest. They believe that the music industry group went too far and started to republish copies of the code everywhere. Over the past several days, we have seen hundreds of new forks and copies appear online. These were also posted to GitHub, where YouTube-DL forks remain easy to find and continue to be uploaded. The code was also posted in some places one wouldn't expect. For example, there's still a copy in GitHub's DMCA notice repository, which some people find quite amusing. And the list of pull requests can be quite entertaining in themselves.

One of the most creative responses we've seen was posted to Twitter by @GalacticFurball who encoded YouTube-DL into images that can be easily shared, encouraging others to share these as well. "I would also suggest that you save and repost the images, as one single source kind of defeats the point. Maybe start a hashtag trend or something. Make songs, and poetry. Get that data out there." This triggered even more creativity, with people finding alternative means to share the code online, all to counter the RIAA's takedown request.

Meanwhile, GitHub's CEO Nat Friedman wasn't sitting still either. While the Microsoft-owned developer platform had to respond to the takedown notice, Friedman himself actively reached out to YouTube-DL's developers to help them get their project reinstated. The CEO joined YouTube-DL's IRC channel hoping to connect with the owner of the repository so he can help to get it unsuspended. "GitHub exists to help developers. We never want to interfere with their work. We want to help the youtube-dl maintainers defeat the DMCA claim so that we can restore the repo," Friedman told TorrentFreak, explaining his actions. GitHub's CEO suggested that YouTube-DL won't be reinstated in its original form. But, the software may be able to return without the rolling cipher circumvention code and the examples of how to download copyrighted material.

Want a movie where a protagonist your age, race, sexuality, gender, and religion becomes an Olympic swimmer? You got it. Want a movie where someone demographically identical to your boss gets squeezed to death and devoured by a Burmese python? Your wish is its command. From a report: Want to leave out the specifics and let fate decide what never-before-imagined movie will be entertaining you this evening? Black Box has you covered. After you make your choices -- and of course pay a nominal fee for the serious computational heavy lifting necessarily involved -- your order is received at Black Box HQ, and an original movie will be on its way shortly.

Black Box converts your specifications into data -- or if you didn't ask for anything specific, a blob of randomly generated numerical noise will do -- and the creation process can begin. That first collection of ones and zeros will become a prompt, and will be fed into a type of A.I. called a transformer, which will spit out the text screenplay for your movie through a process a little like the autocomplete function on your smartphone. That screenplay will then be fed into a variation on today's vector quantized variational autoencoders -- neural nets that generate music, basically -- producing chopped up little bits of sound that, when strung together, form an audio version of the spoken dialogue and sound effects in your custom movie, plus an orchestral score. Finally, in the most challenging part of the process, those 90 minutes of audio, along with the screenplay, get fed into the world's most sophisticated GAN, or generative adversarial network. Working scene by scene, the Black Box GAN would generate a cast of live action characters -- lifelike humans, or at least human-esque avatars -- built from the ground up, along with all of the settings, monsters, car chases, dogs, cats, and little surprises that make it feel like a real movie.

CNET is celebrating its 25th anniversary with articles remembering the 1990s — including that moment "when Hollywood finally noticed the web," calling it "a flawed but fun snapshot of the moment the internet took over the world..."

"Twenty-five years ago, cinema met cyberspace in a riot of funky fashion, cool music and surveillance paranoia. It began in May 1995 with the release of Johnny Mnemonic, a delirious sci-fi action dystopia matching Keanu Reeves with seminal cyberpunk author William Gibson. In July, Sandra Bullock had her identity erased in conspiracy thriller The Net. In August, Denzel Washington pursued Russell Crowe's computer-generated serial killer in Virtuosity, and in September Angelina Jolie found her breakthrough role in anarchic adventure Hackers. In October, Kathryn Bigelow served up dystopian thriller Strange Days. It's hard to know what's most dated about these mid-'90s curios: the primitive-looking effects, the funky fashions or the clunky technology depicted on screen. But now, 25 years later, they've proved prescient in their concerns about surveillance, corporate power and the corruption of what seemed to be an excitingly democratic new age...

Most tellingly, Johnny Mnemonic and the other tech-focused films of 1995 all express fears around the misuse of surveillance in a connected world. The Net updates the paranoia of '70s thrillers The Conversation and The Anderson Tapes, and each movie features an unholy alliance of avaricious corporate bad guys and authoritarian law enforcement. Or as Matthew Lillard's character puts it in Hackers, "Orwell is here and livin' large!"

But the whistleblowing heroes of Hackers, The Net and Johnny Mnemonic use their skills to subvert and unpick the establishment's grip on technology. Hackers in particular radiates an infectious idealism as the diverse crew of anarchic youngsters rollerblade rings around the greedy suits and clueless cops, "snooping onto them as they snoop onto us". The movie highlights technology's potential to be a tool for wrongdoing and a democratic, open medium where you can be who you want to be... Sadly, 1995's wave of technology-themed movies have one other thing in common. They all bombed.
CNET's reporter gets new quotes from the director of Hackers — as well as one of that film's then-15-year-old technical advisors, Nicholas Jareck. "For all its exaggerations," he says, "it does a decent job of showing the hacker spirit — those kids were tinkerers, experimenting, reveling in their ability to figure something out. It's a celebration of human ingenuity."

Johnny Mnemonic. "Speaking on the phone from New York, Longo's memories are peppered with entertaining asides about who was 'evil,' 'a dick,' 'an idiot' or 'a fucking idiot.'"

World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen has been sneaking onto online chess sites using stupid pseudonyms and taunting his opponents by using pointless maneuvers with names like "the Bongcloud." One YouTube commenter calls it "a revolution in the history of chess."

Slate documents the antics in an article titled "DrDrunkenstein's Reign of Terror." "DrDrunkenstein" is one of many aliases Magnus Carlsen has played under during the past two years, when he went on a killing spree across the speed chess tournaments of the internet. Since winter 2017, Carlsen has taken to livestreaming his games on a variety of platforms, which has provided a surprisingly entertaining window into the mind of an all-time great.

Lichess.org is a free, ad-less web platform for chess players, a favorite in the online chess community... Carlsen appeared incognito as "DannyTheDonkey" and won, donating his small prize money back to the website. Carlsen's first showing as DrDrunkenstein was in Lichess' second Titled Arena the following month... Carlsen streamed the games on Twitch, where he lived up to his username, pounding Coronas while bantering in Norwegian with his friends. Chess fans were astonished. There's something hypnotizing about watching a guy known as "the Mozart of chess" — a player who is quantifiably better than Bobby Fischer — taking a big gulp of beer, announcing his position as "completely winning," then singing along to Dr. Dre saying "motherfuck the police" while coasting into another quick checkmate...

In an interview with a Norwegian newspaper in October, Carlsen admits he quit drinking for his health. "I wouldn't say I was an alcoholic exactly," he said, "but I found out this year, if I'm going to travel and play a lot... I need to prioritize differently...." On the eve of his world championship defense, Carlsen appeared in the next tournament as "manwithavan," playing a large chunk of his games on a phone from a minivan, where the touch screen presented a massive handicap. He again earned the adoration of spectators, this time for riskily walking his king into the center of the board against one of the most dangerous players in the tournament. He came in third... As DrNykterstein, he alternated between two ways of wasting his early, important opening moves. Sometimes, he'd take his queen on a four-move tour of the board before swapping her home square with the king's, letting his opponent develop their pieces while he showboated... Other times, he'd fidget his knights back and forth from their starting squares, offering his challenger a six-move time advantage. In this tournament he filled with gags, he came in first again...

One of the sweetest benefits of watching these matches is enjoying Carlsen's dry, self-deprecating sense of humor — something no chess prodigy has any right to have.
In December, Magnus also reached the #1 spot, beating seven million other players, on a fantasy football table.

Scott Santens, writing for Vocal: Back in June of 2019, I tweeted about the latest egregious example of MSNBC excluding Democratic Presidential candidate Andrew Yang from their ongoing coverage of the 2020 Presidential candidates. There had been previous examples, but that was the worst up to that point because they had photos of all 20 candidates who were going to be in the first debates, and instead of including Yang as one of them, they included someone who wasn't even going to be there. I then started to add each new example as a new reply, and that ongoing thread has now been covered over and over again with each new example as a source of entertaining absurdity. It's been covered by traditional media outlets like The Guardian, Vox, and The Hill. It's also been covered by new media like Ethan and Hila Klein of the H3 Podcast for their two million subscribers. I have gotten many requests to put the entire thread in one place outside of Twitter, so this article has been created to meet that request. Each time a new example occurs, I will update the thread on Twitter, and update this page on Vocal too. I have also made a point here of expanding on the thread in a way I can't on Twitter, by expanding the timeline with earlier examples that had occurred before I started my thread. So instead of starting in June, this timeline starts back in March.

This week a former engineer for the Microsoft Windows Core OS Division shared an insightful (and very entertaining) list with "some changes I have noticed over the last 20 years" in the computer programming world. Some excerpts: - Some programming concepts that were mostly theoretical 20 years ago have since made it to mainstream including many functional programming paradigms like immutability, tail recursion, lazily evaluated collections, pattern matching, first class functions and looking down upon anyone who don't use them...

- 3 billion devices run Java. That number hasn't changed in the last 10 years though...

- A package management ecosystem is essential for programming languages now. People simply don't want to go through the hassle of finding, downloading and installing libraries anymore. 20 years ago we used to visit web sites, downloaded zip files, copied them to correct locations, added them to the paths in the build configuration and prayed that they worked.

- Being a software development team now involves all team members performing a mysterious ritual of standing up together for 15 minutes in the morning and drawing occult symbols with post-its....

- Since we have much faster CPUs now, numerical calculations are done in Python which is much slower than Fortran. So numerical calculations basically take the same amount of time as they did 20 years ago...

- Even programming languages took a side on the debate on Tabs vs Spaces....

- Code must run behind at least three levels of virtualization now. Code that runs on bare metal is unnecessarily performant....

- A tutorial isn't really helpful if it's not a video recording that takes orders of magnitude longer to understand than its text.

- There is StackOverflow which simply didn't exist back then. Asking a programming question involved talking to your colleagues.

- People develop software on Macs.
In our new world where internet connectivity is the norm and being offline the exception, "Security is something we have to think about now... Because of side-channel attacks we can't even trust the physical processor anymore."

And of course, "We don't use IRC for communication anymore. We prefer a bloated version called Slack because we just didn't want to type in a server address...."

Vladimir Borisovich Kramnik, a Russian chess grandmaster, writing at Chess.com: The increasing strength of chess engines, the millions of computer games and the volumes of opening theory available to every player are making top-level chess less imaginative. Decisive games in super-tournaments have declined, while the number of games with what I'd call "creative" content is also on the slide. [...] From my own experience, I know how difficult it has become to force a complex and interesting fight if your opponent wants to play it safe. As soon as one side chooses a relatively sterile line of play, the opponent is forced to follow suit, leading to an unoriginal game and an inevitably drawish outcome. Of course, there are still some fascinating top-level games being played, but to keep chess alive, I believe we must reverse this trend before the game's spirit fades away.

So I started thinking, if the outcome is always the same, perhaps there's something we can do to reinvigorate the game. I spoke with Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of the artificial intelligence lab DeepMind. [...] Working with DeepMind researchers Ulrich Paquet and Nenad Tomasev, we used AlphaZero as a petri dish to test different variations and see how the game might unfold. Ultimately, our mission was to find an adjustment to the rules to allow more space for human creativity. [...] My aim was to find a chess variant that would not only have the potential to bring the excitement and decisive victories back to chess, but is also aesthetically pleasing. The goal was to reignite interest and introduce players and audiences to the immense complexity and creativity of the original game of chess.

To begin, we tasked AlphaZero with exploring a variant that prevented either side from castling, trying different opening moves from both sides. The outcome was beyond our expectations! We let AlphaZero learn how to play "no-castling chess" from scratch, allowing the program to incrementally learn how to master the game through a process of trial and error, similar to how it taught itself to play classical chess. After playing millions of games, AlphaZero became a no-castling expert, allowing us to analyze how it plays and assess the overall game balance. The win/loss percentages for both White and Black are similar to classical chess, suggesting that the no-castling variant should be quite playable without favoring a particular player. Preventing the king from retreating to a safe distance means that all of the pieces have to engage in the melee, making the play more dynamic and entertaining, with a number of original patterns.

A new parody website generates random excuses to explain why companies got hacked and apologizes to their users. From a report: Big companies that hold our personal data get hacked almost every day, but most don't really know how to deal with getting hacked, especially when it comes to telling users what happened. If you've read some data breach disclosures or notices, you know the classic "we take your privacy and security seriously" -- truly the "thoughts and prayers" of cybersecurity. No matter how bad the hack is, companies always have an excuse. Luckily, there's now a website that automatically generates more original, and entertaining, apologies you can use if your company gets hacked. It's called "Why the fuck was I breached?" and its excuse generating algorithm spills out truly hilarious excuses.

Here are a few examples:
"The fucking hacking people used Heartbleed to hack the coffee maker. But we have since worked with industry leading specialists, so it will never happen again."
"The fucking Fancy Bears used a vulnerability in Windows XP SP1 to hack the coffee maker. But we have since worked with industry leading specialists, so it will never happen again."
"The fucking Iranians used the open door in our basement to transfer 7 petabytes of data. But we have since upskilled our cafeteria staff, so it will never happen again."
"The fucking teenage hacking prodigies used nefarious techniques to partially disrupt our services. But we have since watched a YouTube video on cyber security, so it will never happen again."
"The fucking cyber terrorists used IoT malware to extract some private keys. But we have since worked with law enforcement, so it will never happen again."

Wired recently remembered Flash as "the annoying plugin" that transformed the web "into a cacophony of noise, colour, and controversy, presaging the modern web."

They write that its early popularity in the mid-1990s came in part because "Microsoft needed software capable of showing video on their website, MSN.com, then the default homepage of every Internet Explorer user." But Flash allowed anyone to become an animator. (One Disney artist tells them that Flash could do in three days what would take a professional animator 7 months -- and cost $10,000.)

Their article opens in 2008, a golden age when Flash was installed on 98% of desktops -- then looks back on its impact: The online world Flash entered was largely static. Blinking GIFs delivered the majority of online movement. Constructed in early HTML and CSS, websites lifted clumsily from the metaphors of magazine design: boxy and grid-like, they sported borders and sidebars and little clickable numbers to flick through their pages (the horror).

Flash changed all that. It transformed the look of the web...

Some of these websites were, to put it succinctly, absolute trash. Flash was applied enthusiastically and inappropriately. The gratuitous animation of restaurant websites was particularly grievous -- kitsch abominations, these could feature thumping bass music and teleporting ingredients. Ishkur's 'guide to electronic music' is a notable example from the era you can still view -- a chaos of pop arty lines and bubbles and audio samples, it looks like the mind map of a naughty child...

In contrast to the web's modern, business-like aesthetic, there is something bizarre, almost sentimental, about billion-dollar multinationals producing websites in line with Flash's worst excess: long loading times, gaudy cartoonish graphics, intrusive sound and incomprehensible purpose... "Back in 2007, you could be making Flash games and actually be making a living," remembers Newgrounds founder Tom Fulp, when asked about Flash's golden age. "That was a really fun time, because that's kind of what everyone's dream is: to make the games you want and be able to make a living off it."
Wired summarizes Steve Jobs' "brutally candid" diatribe against Flash in 2010. "Flash drained batteries. It ran slow. It was a security nightmare. He asserted that an era had come to an end... '[T]he mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards -- all areas where Flash falls short.'" Wired also argues that "It was economically viable for him to rubbish Flash -- he wanted to encourage people to create native games for iOS."

But they also write that today, "The post-Flash internet looks different. The software's downfall precipitated the rise of a new aesthetic...one moulded by the specifications of the smartphone and the growth of social media," favoring hits of information rather than striving for more immersive, movie-emulating thrills.

And they add that though Newgrounds long-ago moved away from Flash, the site's founder is now working on a Flash emulator to keep all that early classic content playable in a browser.

"As we've discussed in the past, old people are some of the only video game streamers worth watching," writes the AV Club: Filled with the wisdom that comes from age, seniors are the necessary corrective to Twitch and YouTube channels currently dominated by excitable whippersnappers. Fortunately, as outlined in a piece NBC's Kalhan Rosenblatt that explores this world, video games are gaining popularity among the elderly. The piece references a study that found "38 percent of Americans age 50 and older said they play video games" and looks at those who belong to this demographic.... Our old pal, the Skyrim-loving Shirley Curry pops up, too, when Rosenblatt gets into the seniors who stream games or upload videos of what they're playing online. Curry, who is 83, has "more than 700,000 subscribers on YouTube," and refers to her viewers as "grandkids," is mentioned alongside 66-year-old Twitch streamer GrandpaGaming (AKA Will R.). He streams games that include PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Apex Legends, uploading highlights that show him kicking the ass of other players who, when their age is compared to his, are probably quite literal noobs.

c Rosenblatt mentions the social benefits of video games as well as studies that show how, "with their complex controls and fast pace" they provide "a mental workout for seniors" that could help "delay or slow the onset of degenerative neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia." This means that, aside from providing a subgenre of game streams that are far more entertaining than the usual, these seniors are potentially improving their health as well.

McGruber shares a report: Today, the dream of goggle-wearing masses has deflated, and investment in the tech has dwindled. But VR companies like Talespin have found a growing market in simulating the least entertaining content imaginable: our jobs. Consumers may not yet feel the pull of visiting fantasy worlds in their free time, but for businesses that need to train their workers, better tools are a necessity, not a luxury. "What you're seeing today is not an evolution but a return to the application that's always worked," said Jeremy Bailenson, the director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab and one of the founders of Strivr, a competing virtual reality training start-up. He traces the roots of virtual reality back to the Link trainer, a mock airplane fuselage mounted on a platform that could simulate real flying sensations, which half a million military pilots used to safely train during World War II.

Talespin found its first major client in Farmers Insurance Group, which needed a new way to train claims adjusters for home inspections. The start-up designed a virtual house, complete with cluttered closets and leaky sinks, that trainees could scour for evidence of water damage. The simulation changed slightly each time, letting new hires rack up months' worth of experience in just a few days. The company has grown to 75 employees to match the demand for VR training coming from Farmers and other large corporate clients, fueled only by $5.6 million in outside investment. But the company always uses Barry's termination as a demo for new clients -- it's a compelling proof-of-concept experience designed, Jackson said, "to see if talking to a virtual human can actually make you uncomfortable. It's proved to be pretty effective." That emotional realism is what separates virtual reality from all the other tools for teaching interpersonal skills in the workplace, from pamphlets and role-playing workshops to interactive tutorials.

The Curiosity mission's scientists picked up the signal this week, and are seeking additional readings from the red planet. From a report: Mars, it appears, is belching a large amount of a gas that could be a sign of microbes living on the planet today. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source.] In a measurement taken on last Wednesday, NASA's Curiosity rover discovered startlingly high amounts of methane in the Martian air, a gas that on Earth is usually produced by living things. The data arrived back on Earth on last Thursday, and by Friday in the week, scientists working on the mission were excitedly discussing the news, which has not yet been announced by NASA. "Given this surprising result, we've reorganized the weekend to run a follow-up experiment," Ashwin R. Vasavada, the project scientist for the mission, wrote to the science team in an email that was obtained by The Times.

The mission's controllers on Earth sent new instructions to the rover on Friday to follow up on the readings, bumping previously planned science work. The results of these observations are expected back on the ground later today. People have long been fascinated by the possibility of aliens on Mars. But NASA's Viking landers in the 1970s photographed a desolate landscape. Two decades later, planetary scientists thought Mars might have been warmer, wetter and more habitable in its youth some 4 billion years ago. Now, they are entertaining the notion that if life ever did arise on Mars, its microbial descendants could have migrated underground and persisted.