Netflix's trailblazing DVD-by-mail rental service has been relegated as a relic in the age of video streaming, but there is still a steady -- albeit shrinking -- audience of diehards who are happily paying to receive those discs in the iconic red-and-white envelopes. From a report: Netflix declined to comment for this story but during a 2018 media event, co-founder and co-CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings suggested the DVD-by-mail service might close around 2023. When -- not if -- it happens, Netflix will shut down a service that has shipped more than 5 billion discs across the U.S. since its inception nearly a quarter century ago. And it will echo the downfall of the thousands of Blockbuster video rental stores that closed because they couldn't counter the threat posed by Netflix's DVD-by-mail alternative.

Shortly before breakup from video streaming, the DVD-by-mail service boasted more than 16 million subscribers, a number that has now dwindled to an estimated 1.5 million subscribers, all in the U.S., based on calculations drawn from Netflix's limited disclosures of the service in its quarterly reports. Netflix's video streaming service now boasts 223 million worldwide subscribers, including 74 million in the U.S. and Canada. "The DVD-by-mail business has bequeathed the Netflix that everyone now knows and watches today," Marc Randolph, Netflix's original CEO, said during an interview at a coffee shop located across the street from the post office in Santa Cruz, California.

U.S. health regulators this week approved the first gene therapy for hemophilia, a $3.5 million one-time treatment for the blood-clotting disorder. From a report: The Food and Drug Administration cleared Hemgenix, an IV treatment for adults with hemophilia B, the less common form of the genetic disorder which primarily affects men. Currently, patients receive frequent, expensive IVs of a protein that helps blood clot and prevent bleeding. Drugmaker CSL Behring, based in Pennsylvania, announced the $3.5 million price tag shortly after the FDA approval, saying its drug would ultimately reduce health care costs because patients would have fewer bleeding incidents and need fewer clotting treatments.

According to a study cited by the National Library of Medicine, the price makes Hemgenix the most expensive medicine in the world, easily topping Novartis' Zolgensma gene therapy for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), which costs right around $2 million per dose and is also a single-dose medicine. Like most medicines in the U.S., most of the cost of the new treatment will be paid by insurers, not patients, including private plans and government programs. After decades of research, gene therapies have begun reshaping the treatment of cancers and rare inheritable diseases with medicines that can modify or correct mutations embedded in people's genetic code. Hemgenix is the first such treatment for hemophilia and several other drugmakers are working on gene therapies for the more common form of the disorder, hemophilia A.

SonicSpike shares a report from Futurism: It appears that NASA's Artemis 1 rocket launch pad caught way more damage than expected when it finally took off from Kennedy Space Center last week. As Reuters space reporter Joey Roulette tweeted, a source within the agency said that damage to the launchpad "exceeded mission management's expectations," and per his description, it sounds fairly severe.

"Elevator blast doors were blown right off, various pipes were broken, some large sheets of metal left laying around," the Reuters reporter noted in response to SpaceNews' Jeff Foust, who on Friday summarized a NASA statement conceding that the launchpad's elevators weren't working because a "pressure wave" blew off the blast doors. Shortly after the launch, NASA acknowledged that debris was seen falling off the rocket, though officials maintain that it caused "no additional risk" to the mission. In spite of those sanguine claims, however, reporters revealed that NASA seemed very intent on them not photographing the Artemis launch tower -- and now, with these preliminary reports about how messed up it seems to have gotten, we may know why.

The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is initiating an investigation into Broadcom's proposed $61 billion deal to buy virtualization software giant VMware. From a report: The news comes shortly after news emerged that the European Commission (EC) was also proceeding with an investigation into what would be one of the biggest tech acquisitions of all time. In the companies' domestic U.S. market, meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last month progressed its investigation into a deeper second review phase, which means that the FTC saw enough during its initial analysis to warrant a more extensive look. The crux of the deal is chip giant Broadcom seeking to diversify by expanding deeper into the enterprise infrastructure software fray. While VMware's shareholders greenlighted the proposal a couple of weeks back, a deal of this size was always going to garner regulatory scrutiny, so there is little surprise that we're seeing multiple authorities look into the deal. Broadcom had previously stated that it hoped to close the deal by October, 2023, so it was aware that this was going to be a long journey.

Protocol, the upstart technology news website launched by former Politico owner and publisher Robert Allbritton in early 2020, will shutter later this week and lay off dozens of staffers, people familiar with the matter told CNN on Tuesday. From the report: Staffers were told at an all-hands meeting Tuesday that the news organization will cease publishing on its website Thursday. The outlet's flagship newsletter, Source Code, will continue publishing for several more weeks, but all other newsletters will stop after Tuesday. The shuttering of the news organization will impact approximately 60 staffers, people familiar with the matter said. They will remain active employees through Friday, December 16, and then be eligible for eight weeks of severance, the people added.

Allbritton announced the launch of Protocol in late 2019 to much buzz. The Washington media mogul told Vanity Fair at the time that he wanted to replicate Politico's successful model for the technology industry. "I would love for this to be as big as, if not larger than, Politico is right now," Allbritton told Vanity Fair in 2019. But Protocol never had much luck. Shortly after launching, the global pandemic unleashed brutal economic headwinds on the media industry, resulting in some cuts to staff. Finally, when it seemed that the outlet might catch its footing as the pandemic's grip on the economy lifted, German publishing giant Axel Springer closed a deal to purchase Politico. That acquisition resulted in Protocol, which had operated independently, being folded into Politico Media Group. "We have great appreciation for the impact of the journalism that Protocol has produced, and I want to personally thank each of them for the unique talents they brought to Protocol," Goli Sheikholeslami, the chief executive of Political Media Group, wrote in an email to staffers Tuesday afternoon. Sheikholeslami reiterated that Politico sees "great opportunity in technology coverage" and wants "to win the conversation on the future of tech in the same way we do politics."

Sheikholeslami also said Politico US and EU will combine to form one operational company with a single executive team.

A large section of the destroyed space shuttle Challenger has been found buried in sand at the bottom of the Atlantic, more than three decades after the tragedy that killed a schoolteacher and six others. CBC.ca reports: NASA's Kennedy Space Center announced the discovery Thursday. "Of course, the emotions come back, right?" said Michael Ciannilli, a NASA manager who confirmed the remnant's authenticity. When he saw the underwater video footage, "My heart skipped a beat, I must say, and it brought me right back to 1986 ... and what we all went through as a nation." It's one of the biggest pieces of Challenger found in the decades since the accident, according to Ciannilli, and the first remnant to be discovered since two fragments from the left wing washed ashore in 1996.

Divers for a History Channel TV documentary first spotted the piece in March while looking for wreckage of a Second World War plane. NASA verified through video a few months ago that the piece was part of the shuttle that broke apart shortly after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986. All seven on board were killed, including the first schoolteacher bound for space, Christa McAuliffe. The underwater video provided "pretty clear and convincing evidence," said Ciannilli. The piece is more than 4.5 metres by 4.5 metres, and likely bigger because part of it is covered with sand. Because there are square thermal tiles on the piece, it's believed to be from the shuttle's belly, Ciannilli said.

The fragment remains on the ocean floor just off the Florida coast near Cape Canaveral as NASA determines the next step. It remains the property of the U.S. government. The families of all seven Challenger crew members have been notified. "We want to make sure whatever we do, we do the right thing for the legacy of the crew," Ciannilli said.

Hot on the heels of Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao declaring that Binance is liquidating its stash of FTX's native exchange token FTT, mass withdrawals from FTX have accelerated, with weekly stablecoin outflows from FTX reaching a whopping $451 million, according to Nansen data. Conversely, Binance has seen net inflows of more than $411 million over the same period. Decrypt reports: This mass exiting of tokens from the FTX exchange comes amid reports that Alameda Research, the trading firm founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, held as much as $5.8 billion in the exchange's native FTT token -- $3.66 billion in "unlocked FTT" and $2.16 billion in "FTT collateral." Given such large exposure to FTT, some have speculated that this could mean a liquidity crisis for Alameda should the markets move against FTT, dropping the token's value.

Shortly after these reports hit the market, CZ took to Twitter to announce that he would be offloading the firm's FTT holdings. Binance received funds in FTT as part of its exit last year from an early equity position in FTX it had since 2019. "Due to recent revelations that have come to light, we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books," CZ tweeted on Sunday. CZ said that he "won't support people who lobby against other industry players behind their backs."

The FTX boss also cited Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, who said, "that specific balance sheet is for a subset of our corporate entities." Ellison also claimed that the firm has over $10 billion of assets "that aren't reflected there." SBF went on to thank "those who stay level-headed during crazy times," adding that withdrawals and deposits at FTX were working fine and the exchange had already processed "billions of dollars" worth of transactions. As for Binance's decision to dump its FTT holdings, Ellison offered to buy the exchange's remaining FTT holdings over-the-counter (OTC) for $22 if CZ was looking to "minimize the market impact" of the sudden move. UPDATE 11/7/22, UTC 04:33: "Fears over another 'Three Arrows' event, but this time tied to FTX and its hybrid investment fund/market maker Alameda Research, gripped the markets Tuesday morning Asia time, sending FTX's exchange token FTT down nearly 20%," reports CoinDesk in an updated article. "Data from CoinGlass shows that there continues to be building short interest in FTT as open interest has surged 8% during the last hour to a total of $215 million."

China launched the final module for its space station last Monday. But this also meant that a massive booster rocket re-entered the earth's atmosphere, notes the Washington Post — "for the fourth time in less than three years."

This one came down in the Pacific Ocean shortly after 6 a.m. Friday, and "there were no initial reports of damage or injuries. "But its return to Earth highlighted a tension among space faring nations over China's practice of letting its spent rockets tumble back to Earth after days in orbit." While the chances are low of any one person getting hit by the returning space debris, several of the tracks the rocket possibly could have taken passed over a large swath of the Earth's populated areas. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has repeatedly condemned China for the practice. In a statement Friday morning, he said: "It is critical that all spacefaring nations are responsible and transparent in their space activities and follow established best practices, especially, for the uncontrolled reentry of a large rocket body debris — debris that could very well result in major damage or loss of life."

China is alone among space-faring nations in allowing the unplanned return of its boosters, instead of ditching them at sea, as most others do, or returning them to a soft landing, like Space X. "The technology exists to prevent this," said Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant in the chief engineer's office at the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit that drew possible tracks for the rocket's return. The rest of the world doesn't "deliberately launch things this big and intend them to fall wherever. We haven't done that for 50 years."

As of Wednesday, the [research nonprofit] Aerospace Corporation's calculations had the stage possibly landing over areas of land where 88 percent of the world's population lives. And so the possibility of casualties, Muelhaupt said, was between one in 230 to one in 1,000. That risk far exceeds the internationally recognized standard that says a reentering space object should not have greater than a one in 10,000 chance of causing injury.

The Chinese rocket stage is massive — weighing 22 metric tons and measuring as long as a pair of 53-foot semitrailers parked end to end, Muelhaupt said. He estimated that between 10 and 40 percent of the booster would survive reentry.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BetaNews: Slack developer Felix Rieseberg released Windows 95 as an Electron app four years ago, updating it shortly afterwards to allow it to run gaming classics like Doom. Now he rolls out a new version which can run on any Windows, Mac or Linux system. Based on the Electron framework, Rieseberg's Windows 95 is written entirely in JavaScript, so it doesn't run as smoothly as it would if it was a native app, but you shouldn't let that put you off.

This is the second update of the year, which brings it up to version 3.1.1 and includes two important changes:

- Upgraded from Electron v18 to Electron v21 (and with it, Chrome and Node.js)
- Upgraded v86 (sound is back!)

The earlier update (in June) brought the software up to 3.0.0 and introduced the following changes:

- Upgraded from Electron v11 Electron v18 (and with it, Chrome and Node.js)
- Upgraded v86 (now using WASM)
- Upgraded various smaller dependencies
- Much better scaling on all platforms
- On Windows, the link to OSFMount was broken and is now fixed.
- On Windows, you can now see a prettier installation animation.
- On Windows, windows95 will have a proper icon in the Programs & Features menu. You can download the latest version of the Windows 95 app for Windows, macOS, and Linux at their respective links.

Inside Netflix's movie studio, top executives lobbied Ted Sarandos, the company's co-chief executive, for much of this year to experiment with releasing more Netflix original movies broadly in theaters WSJ is reporting. From the report: They outlined their case in a memo shared in June on the company network. Some argued that Netflix is leaving hundreds of millions in box-office receipts on the table with its current strategy of showing only select movies in a few hundred theaters for at most a few weeks before streaming them, according to people familiar with the matter. Other executives thought showing movies in more theaters would create valuable buzz for the streaming service. Soon after, in an internal meeting, Mr. Sarandos told Netflix studio leaders that he had doubts, and still felt that streaming is the future of entertainment, movies included. Instead, he suggested that studio chief Scott Stuber and other executives meet with their counterparts at Sony Pictures Entertainment to see if they would agree to let Netflix stream Sony's movies just four to six weeks after they came out in theaters, instead of after six to eight months, as spelled out in a partnership the two studios reached last year.

If a new deal could be struck, some executives said, it would help Netflix understand how the company might benefit from streaming a movie shortly after it had been shown on thousands of big screens across the country. The debate inside Netflix over how best to distribute its films -- details of which haven't been previously reported -- is one that is playing out across an entertainment industry that has been rapidly upended by the rise of streaming video. Every major company in Hollywood is facing some version of the same question: What is the best way to release a movie? Is it in a cinema, with stadium seating, popcorn and digital surround sound? Or is it at home, streamed on a flat-screen TV or a laptop? Should movies go to theaters first, then to streaming, or should they be released at the same time? How long should a studio wait between theatrical and streaming release? How many theaters should show a film? Should all movies go to the big screen, or just splashy action thrillers?

"A researcher from cloud and endpoint protection provider WithSecure has discovered an unpatchable flaw in Microsoft Office 365 Message Encryption," reports VentureBeat. "The flaw enables a hacker to infer the contents of encrypted messages." OME uses the electronic codebook (ECB) block cipher, which leaks structural information about the message. This means if an attacker obtains many emails they can infer the contents of the messages by analyzing the location and frequency of patterns in the messages and matching these to other emails. For enterprises, this highlights that just because your emails are encrypted, doesn't mean they're safe from threat actors. If someone steals your email archives or backups, and accesses your email server, they can use this technique to sidestep the encryption.

The discovery comes shortly after researchers discovered hackers were chaining two new zero-day Exchange exploits to target Microsoft Exchange servers.

WithSecure originally shared its discovery of the Office 365 vulnerability with Microsoft in January 2022. Microsoft acknowledged it and paid the researcher through its vulnerability reward program, but hasn't issued a fix.

SpaceX returned its fourth operational crew mission from the International Space Station on Friday, with the quartet of astronauts splashing down in the company's capsule off the coast of Florida. CNBC reports: The company's Crew Dragon spacecraft "Freedom" undocked from the ISS at around noon ET to begin the trip back to Earth, with splashdown happening around 5 p.m. ET. "Welcome home -- thanks for flying SpaceX," the company's mission control told the crew shortly after landing. "Thank you for an incredible ride to orbit, and an incredible ride home," Crew-4 commander Kjell Lindgren said in response.

Crew-4 includes NASA astronauts Lindgren, Bob Hines, and Jessica Watkins, as well as European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti. The mission launched in April for a six-month stay on the orbiting research laboratory. Elon Musk's company launched the Crew-5 mission last week, bringing four other astronauts to the ISS. SpaceX has now flown 30 people to orbit since its first crewed launch in May 2020, with six government missions and two private ones.

schwit1 shares a report: A Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that thousands of officials across the U.S. government's executive branch disclosed owning or trading stocks that stood to rise or fall with decisions their agencies made. Across 50 federal agencies ranging from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, more than 2,600 officials reported stock investments in companies while those companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies, during both Republican and Democratic administrations. When the financial holdings caused a conflict, the agencies sometimes simply waived the rules. The Office of Government Ethics, which oversees the conflict-of-interest rules across the executive branch, is "committed to transparency and citizen oversight of government," said a spokeswoman.

Among the findings of the investigation, which is the most comprehensive analysis of stock trading by officials in the executive branch of the government:
Numerous federal officials owned shares of companies lobbying their agencies: More than 200 senior officials at the Environmental Protection Agency, or nearly one in three, reported that they or their family members held investments in companies that were lobbying the agency.
Issues emerged at a wide array of agencies: At the Defense Department, officials in the office of the secretary or their family members collectively owned between $1.2 million and $3.4 million of stock in aerospace and defense companies, on average, during years the Journal examined. Some owned stock in Chinese companies while the U.S. considered blacklisting the companies.
Some officials traded ahead of regulatory actions: More than five dozen officials at five agencies reported trading stocks of companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions against those companies, such as charges or settlements.

More than a dozen public-facing airport websites, including those for some of the nation's largest airports, appeared inaccessible Monday morning, and Russian-speaking hackers claimed responsibility. From a report: No immediate signs of impact to actual air travel were reported, suggesting the issue may be an inconvenience for people seeking travel information. "Obviously, we're tracking that, and there's no concern about operations being disrupted," Kiersten Todt, Chief of Staff of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said Monday at a security conference in Sea Island, Georgia. The 14 websites include the one for Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. An employee there told CNN there were no operational impacts. The Los Angeles International Airport website was offline earlier but appeared to be restored shortly before 9 a.m. Eastern.

The NOEMA radio telescope, located on the Plateau de Bure in the French Alps, is now equipped with twelve antennas, making it the most powerful radio telescope of its kind in the northern hemisphere. Phys.Org reports: Eight years after the inauguration of the first NOEMA antenna in 2014, the large-scale European project is now complete. Thanks to its twelve 15-meter antennas, which can be moved back and forth on a specially developed rail system up to a distance of 1.7 kilometers long, NOEMA is a unique instrument for astronomical research. The telescope is equipped with highly sensitive receiving systems that operate close at the quantum limit. During observations, the observatory's twelve antennas act as a single telescope -- a technique called interferometry. After all the antennas have been pointed towards one and the same region of space, the signals they receive are combined with the help of a supercomputer. Their detailed resolution then corresponds to that of a huge telescope whose diameter is equal to the distance between the outermost antennas.

The respective arrangement of the antennas can extend over distances from a few hundred meters to 1.7 kilometers. The network thus functions like a camera with a variable lens. The further apart the antennas are, the more powerful is the zoom: the maximum spatial resolution of NOEMA is so high that it would be able to detect a mobile phone at a distance of over 500 kilometers. NOEMA is one of the few radio observatories worldwide that can simultaneously detect and measure a large number of signatures -- i.e., "fingerprints" of molecules and atoms. Thanks to these so-called multi-line observations, combined with high sensitivity, NOEMA is a unique instrument for investigating the complexity of cold matter in interstellar space as well as the building blocks of the university. With NOEMA, over 5,000 researchers from all over the world study the composition and dynamics of galaxies as well as the birth and death of stars, comets in our solar system or the environment of black holes. The observatory captures light from cosmic objects that has traveled to Earth for more than 13 billion years. NOEMA has "observed the most distant known galaxy, which formed shortly after the Big Bang," notes the report. It also "measured the temperature of the cosmic background radiation at a very early stage of the universe, a scientific first that should make it possible to trace the effects of dark energy driving the universe apart."

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless on Wednesday for the development of click chemistry and bio-orthogonal chemistry -- work that has "led to a revolution in how chemists think about linking molecules together," the Nobel committee said. The New York Times: Dr. Bertozzi is the eighth woman to be awarded the prize, and Dr. Sharpless is the fifth scientist to be honored with two Nobels, the committee noted. Johan Aqvist, the chair of the chemistry committee, said that this year's prize dealt with "not overcomplicating matters, instead working with what is easy and simple."

"Click chemistry is almost like it sounds," he said of a field whose name Dr. Sharpless coined in 2000. "It's all about snapping molecules together. Imagine that you could attach small chemical buckles to different types of building blocks. Then you could link these buckles together and produce molecules of greater complexity and variation." Shortly after Dr. Sharpless coined the concept, both he and Dr. Meldal independently discovered a chemical reaction called copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition, known today as the crown jewel of click chemistry. "When this reaction was discovered, it was like opening the floodgates," Olof Ramstrom, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said in a briefing after the laureates were announced. "We were using it everywhere, to build everything." Dr. Bertozzi, a chemist and professor at Stanford, was able to apply this reaction to biomolecules, often found on cell surfaces, in living organisms without affecting the chemistry of the cells she was observing. Before her extensive research with glycans, or sugar chains, scientists' understanding of this subfield of glycobiology had been hampered by an inability to see molecules in action in living cells.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In January this year, an undersea volcano in Tonga produced a massive eruption, the largest so far this century. The mixing of hot volcanic material and cool ocean water created an explosion that sent an atmospheric shockwave across the planet and triggered a tsunami that devastated local communities and reached as far as Japan. The only part of the crater's rim that extended above water was reduced in size and separated into two islands. A plume of material was blasted straight through the stratosphere and into the mesosphere, over 50 km above the Earth's surface. We've taken a good look at a number of past volcanic eruptions and studied how they influence the climate. But those eruptions (most notably that of Mount Pinatubo) all came from volcanoes on land. Hunga Tonga may be the largest eruption we've ever documented that took place under water, and the eruption plume contained unusual amounts of water vapor -- so much of it that it actually got in the way of satellite observations at some wavelengths. Now, researchers have used weather balloon data to reconstruct the plume and follow its progress during two circuits around the globe.

Your vocabulary word of the day is radiosonde, which is a small instrument package and transmitter that can be carried into the atmosphere by a weather balloon. There are networks of sites where radiosondes are launched as part of weather forecasting services; the most relevant ones for Hunga Tonga are in Fiji and Eastern Australia. A balloon from Fiji was the first to take instruments into the eruption plume, doing so less than 24 hours after Hunga Tonga exploded. That radiosonde saw increasing levels of water as it climbed through the stratosphere from 19 to 28 kilometers of altitude. The water levels had reached the highest yet measured at the top of that range when the balloon burst, bringing an end to the measurements. But shortly after, the plume started showing up along the east coast of Australia, which again registered very high levels of water vapor. Again, water reached to 28 km in altitude but gradually settled to lower heights over the next 24 hours.

The striking thing was how much of it there was. Compared to normal background levels of stratospheric water vapor, these radiosondes were registering 580 times as much water even two days after the eruption, after the plume had some time to spread out. There was so much there that it still stood out as the plume drifted over South America. The researchers were able to track it for a total of six weeks, following it as it spread out while circling the Earth twice. Using some of these readings, the researchers estimated the total volume of the water vapor plume and then used the levels of water present to come up with a total amount of water put into the stratosphere by the eruption. They came up with 50 billion kilograms. And that's a low estimate, because, as mentioned above, there was still water above the altitudes where some of the measurements stopped. The recent findings appear in a new study published in the journal Science.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the Mozilla Foundation: YouTube's user controls -- buttons like "Dislike " and "Not interested" -- largely fail to help users avoid unwanted recommendations like misinformation and violent content, according to new research by Mozilla. An accompanying survey also found that YouTube's controls routinely frustrate and confuse users. Indeed, Mozilla's research found that people who are experiencing unwanted recommendations and turn to the platform's user controls for assistance prevent less than half of unwanted recommendations.

This is especially troubling because Mozilla's past research shows that YouTube recommends videos that violate its very own community guidelines, like misinformation, violent content, hate speech, and spam. For example, one user in this most recent research asked YouTube to stop recommending war footage from Ukraine -- but shortly after was recommended even more grisly content from the region. The study, titled "Does This Button Work? Investigating YouTube's ineffective user controls" is the culmination of months of rigorous qualitative and quantitative research. The study was made possible by the data of more than 20,000 participants who used Mozilla's RegretsReporter browser extension, and by data about more than 500 million YouTube videos. These are the top findings, as highlighted in the report: People don't trust YouTube's user controls. More than a third (39.3%) of people surveyed felt YouTube's user controls did not impact their recommendations at all, and 23% felt the controls had a mixed response. Said one interviewee: "Nothing changed. Sometimes I would report things as misleading and spam and the next day it was back in [...] Even when you block certain sources they eventually return."

People take matters into their own hands. Our study found that people did not always understand how YouTube's controls affect their recommendations, and so took a jury rigged approach instead. People will log out, create new accounts, or use privacy tools just to manage their YouTube recommendations. Said one user: "When the Superbowl came around ... if someone recommended a particular commercial, I used to log out of YouTube, watch the commercial, and then log back in."

The data confirms people are right. The most "effective" user control was "Don't recommend channel," but compared to users who do not make use of YouTube's user controls, only 43% of unwanted recommendations are prevented -- and recommendations from the unwanted channel sometimes persist. Other controls were even less effective: The "Not Interested" tool prevented only 11% of unwanted recommendations.

YouTube can fix this problem. YouTube has the power to confront this issue and do a better job at enabling people to control their recommendations. Our research outlines several concrete suggestions to put people back into the driver's seat, like making YouTube's controls more proactive, allowing users to shape their own experience; and giving researchers increased access to YouTube's API and other tools. Further reading: YouTube Targets TikTok With Revenue Sharing For Shorts, Partner Program Expansion

A public interest group has asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to look at whether the wireless industry's voluntary phone unlocking commitments are even effective, claiming the practice harms competition. From a report: The advocacy group, Public Knowledge, met with FCC staffers last week and filed the comment shortly afterwards, arguing the practice of locking phones to a network makes it "more difficult for consumers to change carriers," reduces the number of devices available on the secondary market, and hurts smaller players on the scene. The nonprofit filed the request as part of an ongoing investigation by the FCC into the State of Competition in the Communications Marketplace, conducted biennially by the agency. The group is hoping the agency will throw its weight behind policy efforts to change this.

Americans can unlock their handsets from the services of the carrier that sold it to them, but the procedure can be a headache. The fact that consumers can unlock them free of charge came about in 2015, when carriers were told to give customers a "penalty-free" way to unlock them under the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act. The Act allows "circumvention (unlocking) to be initiated by the owner" but only "when such connection is authorized by the operator of such network" -- after their service contracts expire. Public Knowledge added that the practice of locking phones disadvantages low-income customers and places a "burden on smaller carriers, new entrants, and MVNOs in particular... due to a lack of handset availability," compounded "by the competitive disadvantages caused by agreements between the handset manufacturers and the larger service provides like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, which smaller carriers may not be able to negotiate."

A Maryland judge has overturned the murder conviction of Adnan Syed, in the latest twist to the case at the center of the hit podcast series Serial. From a report: Baltimore City Circuit Judge Melissa Phinn vacated the 41-year-old's conviction and granted him a new trial on Monday, ordering his release after more than 23 years behind bars. The move came after prosecutors made a request for his release on Wednesday saying that "the state no longer has confidence in the integrity of the conviction." Prosecutors said that an almost year-long investigation had cast doubts about the validity of cellphone tower data and uncovered new information about the possible involvement of two alternate unnamed suspects.

Syed was convicted in 2000 of first-degree murder, robbery, kidnapping and imprisonment of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. Lee, 18, vanished after leaving her high school on 13 January 1999. Her strangled body was found in a shallow grave in a Baltimore park around a month later. Syed has always maintained his innocence. In a tweet shortly after the ruling was made, Serial tweeted: "Sarah was at the courthouse when Adnan was released, a new episode is coming tomorrow morning."