Space.com calls it a movie "adding more combustible material to the inferno of AI unease sweeping the globe." Its director tells them James Cameron was a huge inspiration, saying Atlas "has an Aliens-like vibe because of the grounded, grittiness to it." (You can watch the movie's trailer here...)

But Tom's Guide says "the reviews are just as shocking as the movie's AI." Its "audience score" on Rotten Tomatoes is 55% — but its aggregate score from professional film critics is 16%. The Hollywood Reporter called it "another Netflix movie to half-watch while doing laundry." ("The star plays a data analyst forced to team up with an AI robot in order to prevent an apocalypse orchestrated by a different AI robot...") The site Giant Freakin Robot says "there seems to be a direct correlation between how much money the streaming platform spends on green screen effects and how bad the movie is" (noting the film's rumored budget of $100 million)...

But Tom's Guide defends it as a big-budget sci-fi thriller that "has an interesting premise that makes you think about the potential dangers of AI progression." Our world has always been interested in computers and machines, and the very idea of technology turning against us is unsettling. That's why "Atlas" works as a movie, but professional critics have other things to say. Ross McIndoe from Slant Magazine said: "Atlas seems like a story that should have been experienced with a gamepad in hand...." Todd Gilchrist from Variety didn't enjoy the conventional structure that "Atlas" followed...

However, even though the score is low and the reviews are pretty negative, I don't want to completely bash this movie... If I'm being completely honest, most movies and TV shows nowadays are taken too seriously. The more general blockbusters are supposed to be entertaining and fun, with visually pleasing effects that keep you hooked on the action. This is much like "Atlas", which is a fun watch with an unsettling undertone focused on the dangers of evolving AI...

Being part of the audience, we're supposed to just take it in and enjoy the movie as a casual viewer. This is why I think you should give "Atlas" a chance, especially if you're big into dramatic action sequences and have enjoyed movies like "Terminator" and "Pacific Rim".

The head of the UK Environment Agency has admitted that freedom of information requests have been buried by the regulator because the truth about the environment in England is "embarrassing." From a report: Philip Duffy, the body's chief executive, told an audience at the UK River Summit in Morden, south London, this week that his officials were "worried about revealing the true state of what is going on" with regards to the state of the environment. The regulator holds information including about pollution, the state of England's waterways, the meetings its bosses have with water company CEOs, and other data about the state of nature in the country.

The Information Commissioner's Office, which oversees the law on the Freedom of Information Act, has warned the regulator that the public have a right to have their requests answered and that transparency should be taken seriously. An ICO spokesperson said: "People have the legal right to promptly receive information they're entitled to and we take action when they don't. We've been clear that public sector leaders should take transparency seriously and see the benefits it brings, including scrutiny of processes and approaches that can then benefit from improvement."

Disney CEO Bob Iger says the company is shrinking the MCU with a new mission to drop the number of Marvel TV series to two a year and the film output to no more than three movies per year. The comment follows Iger conceding last year that Marvel had diluted audience's focus by making too many TV shows. From a report: Iger said this is part of Disney's overall strategy to reduce output and focus on quality, a strategy "that's particularly true with Marvel."

"We're slowly going to decrease volume and go to probably about two TV series a year instead of what had become four and reduce our film output from maybe four a year to two, or a maximum of three," the Disney CEO said during the company's quarterly earnings call Tuesday. "And we're working hard on what that path is." Iger says Marvel has "a couple of good films in '25 and then we're heading to more 'Avengers,' which we're extremely excited about," adding: "Overall, I feel great about the slate. It's something that I've committed to spending more and more time on. The team is one that I have tremendous confidence in and the IP that we're mining, including all the sequels that we're doing, is second to none."

Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which has been called the "mother of all meme stocks" after it made its stock market debut in late March, announced that its Truth Social platform is moving to launch a live TV streaming platform. Following the news, shares of DJT closed more than 14% lower Tuesday. They ended trading Monday down by more than 18%. CNBC reports: The stock's price has dropped by a whopping 67.7% since Trump Media began trading as a public company on March 26, erasing more than $5 billion in market capitalization. Trump Media's majority shareholder is former President Donald Trump, who holds nearly 60% of its stock.

Earlier Tuesday, Trump Media in a press release said it "has finished the research and development phase of its new live TV streaming platform and will begin scaling up its own content delivery network." The company said it will roll out streaming content in three phases, the first of which will introduce Truth Social's content delivery network for streaming live TV to the app for Android, iOS and web. Phase two will release stand-alone Truth Social streaming apps for phones, tablets and other devices, while phase three will release such apps for home television, Trump Media said. "The streaming content is expected to focus on live TV including news networks, religious channels, family-friendly content including films and documentaries; and other content that has been cancelled, is at risk of cancellation, or is being suppressed on other platforms and services," Trump Media said in its release.

"We're excited to move forward with the next big phase for Truth Social," added CEO Devin Nunes in a statement. "With our streaming content, we aim to provide a permanent home for high-quality news and entertainment that face discrimination by other channels and content delivery service. There is a lot of great content that simply can't find an audience for unjust reasons, and we want to let these creators know they'll soon have a guaranteed platform where they won't be cancelled."

After nearly 11 years as CNN's space correspondent, Miles O'Brien found himself in 2003 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida covering the launch of the space shuttle Columbia: As part of the post-launch routine, NASA began sharing several replays of the launch from various cameras trained on the vehicle. And that was when we saw it. Producer Dave Santucci called me into our live truck, and said, "You got to look at this." It was kind of a grainy image of what looked like a puff of smoke, as if someone dropped a bag of flour on the ground and it broke open. We played it over and over again, and it did not look good at all. The giant orange fuel tank was filled with super cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen, so it was enveloped in insulating foam. A big piece of the foam had broken away near a strut called the "bipod," striking the leading edge of the orbiter's left wing. It was made of reinforced carbon to protect the aluminum structure of the spacecraft from the searing heat of re-entry from space.

I reached out to some of my sources inside the shuttle program. Everyone had seen it, of course, but the people I spoke with cautioned me not to worry. The foam was very light, and it had fallen off on earlier missions and nothing of concern had happened as a result... I wish I hadn't taken my eye off the ball. Space was my beat, and I was uniquely positioned to put this concerning event into the public domain. Like NASA's leadership, I went through a process of convincing myself that it was going to be okay. But I had this sinking feeling. It didn't feel right. A spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere at 17,500 miles an hour — much faster than a rifle bullet — is enveloped in a glowing inferno of plasma...

[As it returned to earth 16 days later] the communication between the ground and the orbiter became non-routine. Producers in the control room realized the gravity of the situation, and we cut to a commercial break to get me off the couch. As I was making my way across the newsroom, I started heaving. I knew in an instant that they were all gone. There was no survivable scenario. I was sickened. It was like a body blow. Somehow I got my act together and started talking. I felt like it was my responsibility to mention the foam strike, to get the information out there to the public. About an hour after Columbia had disintegrated, I shared with a huge global audience what I knew... "That bipod is the place where they think a little piece of foam fell off and hit the leading edge of that wing."

During the mission, I could have easily done a story about the foam strike, spreading the word that some NASA engineers believed there may be some reason for concern. What if I had done that? It might have made a difference.
"A rescue mission would not have been impossible," the article concludes, "and I feel certain that if NASA managers saw that gaping hole in Columbia's wing, they would've tried.

"We will never know for sure, but I do know how so many of us on the ground failed to do our jobs during that mission. It still haunts me."


CNN broadcasts the last two episodes of its four-part series Space Shuttle Columbia: The Final Flight tonight at 9 p.m. EST (time-delayed on the west coast until 9 p.m.PST). CNN's web site offers a "preview" of its live TV offerings here.

The news episodes (along with past episodes) will also be available on-demand starting Monday — "for pay TV subscribers via CNN.com, CNN connected TV and mobile apps." It's also available for purchase on Amazon Prime.

On Mozilla's blog, engineer Martin Thomson explores Google's "Privacy Sandbox" initiative (which proposes sharing a subset of private user information — but without third-party cookies).

The blog post concludes that Google's Protected Audience "protects advertisers (and Google) more than it protects you." But it's not all bad — in theory: The idea behind Protected Audience is that it creates something like an alternative information dimension inside of your (Chrome) browser... Any website can push information into that dimension. While we normally avoid mixing data from multiple sites, those rules are changed to allow that. Sites can then process that data in order to select advertisements. However, no one can see into this dimension, except you. Sites can only open a window for you to peek into that dimension, but only to see the ads they chose...

Protected Audience might be flawed, but it demonstrates real potential. If this is possible, that might give people more of a say in how their data is used. Rather than just have someone spy on your every action then use that information as they like, you might be able to specify what they can and cannot do. The technology could guarantee that your choice is respected. Maybe advertising is not the first thing you would do with this newfound power, but maybe if the advertising industry is willing to fund investments in new technology that others could eventually use, that could be a good thing.
But here's some of the blog post's key criticisms:

• "[E]ntities like Google who operate large sites, might rely less on information from other sites. Losing the information that comes from tracking people might affect them far less when they can use information they gather from their many services... [W]e have a company that dominates both the advertising and browser markets, proposing a change that comes with clear privacy benefits, but it will also further entrench its own dominance in the massively profitable online advertising market..."

• "[T]he proposal fails to meet its own privacy goals. The technical privacy measures in Protected Audience fail to prevent sites from abusing the API to learn about what you did on other sites.... Google loosened privacy protections in a number of places to make it easier to use. Of course, by weakening protections, the current proposal provides no privacy. In other words, to help make Protected Audience easier to use, they made the design even leakier..."

• "A lot of these leaks are temporary. Google has a plan and even a timeline for closing most of the holes that were added to make Protected Audience easier to use for advertisers. The problem is that there is no credible fix for some of the information leaks embedded in Protected Audience's architecture... In failing to achieve its own privacy goals, Protected Audience is not now — and maybe not ever — a good addition to the Web."

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

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

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

In an interview with Roblox Studio head Stefano Corazza, Eurogamer asked about the reputation Roblox has gained and the notion that it was exploitative of young developers, since it takes a cut from work sometimes produced by children. Here's what he had to say: "I don't know, you can say this for a lot of things, right?" Corazza said. "Like, you can say, 'Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labour,' right? Or, you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income. So, I can be like 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now, with just a laptop, I can create something, make money and then sustain my life. "There's always the flip side of that, when you go broad and democratized - and in this case, also with a younger audience," he continued. "I mean, our average game developer is in their 20s. But of course, there's people that are teenagers -- and we have hired some teenagers that had millions of players on the platform.

"For them, you know, hearing from their experience, they didn't feel like they were exploited! They felt like, 'Oh my god, this was the biggest gift, all of a sudden I could create something, I had millions of users, I made so much money I could retire.' So I focus more on the amount of money that we distribute every year to creators, which is now getting close to like a billion dollars, which is phenomenal."

At this point the PR present during the interview added that "the vast majority of people that are earning money on Roblox are over the age of 18." "And imagine like, the millions of kids that learn how to code every month," Corazza said. "We have millions of creators in Roblox Studio. They learn Lua scripting," a programming language, "which is pretty close to Python - you can get a job in the tech industry in the future, and be like, 'Hey, I'm a programmer,' right? "I think that we are really focusing on the learning - the curriculum, if you want - and really bringing people on and empowering them to be professionals."

EA CEO Andrew Wilson believes generative AI will "revolutionize" the gaming industry over the next five years. He predicts that the technology will allow for more efficient content creation, reducing development time from months to days. From a report: Greater efficiency coupled with "deeper, more immersive experiences" will lead to significant audience expansion over the next few years and provide a "multi-billion dollar" growth opportunity, he said. Wilson said that in the past it might take six months to build an in-game sports stadium. Over the last 12 months, that time has shrunk to six weeks, and over the coming years it could maybe be cut to six days.

And while FIFA 23 has 12 run cycles for how the players move in the game, EA Sports FC 24 has 1,200 created with generative AI. Over the next five years, Wilson hopes that generative AI will make EA's development 30% more efficient, help grow its 700 million-strong player base by "at least" 50%, and lead to players spending 10-20% more money on its games. "What we've seen every time there's been a meaningful technological advancement in media and in technology, where you are able to democratise an industry and hand it over to the population at large, incredible things happen," he said.

Epic Games, in a blog post: We recently announced that Apple approved our Epic Games Sweden AB developer account. We intended to use that account to bring the Epic Games Store and Fortnite to iOS devices in Europe thanks to the Digital Markets Act (DMA). To our surprise, Apple has terminated that account and now we cannot develop the Epic Games Store for iOS. This is a serious violation of the DMA and shows Apple has no intention of allowing true competition on iOS devices.

The DMA requires Apple to allow third-party app stores, like the Epic Games Store. Article 6(4) of the DMA says: "The gatekeeper shall allow and technically enable the installation and effective use of third-party software applications or software application stores using, or interoperating with, its operating system and allow those software applications or software application stores to be accessed by means other than the relevant core platform services of that gatekeeper."

In terminating Epic's developer account, Apple is taking out one of the largest potential competitors to the Apple App Store. They are undermining our ability to be a viable competitor and they are showing other developers what happens when you try to compete with Apple or are critical of their unfair practices. If Apple maintains its power to kick a third party marketplace off iOS at its sole discretion, no reasonable developer would be willing to utilize a third party app store, because they could be permanently separated from their audience at any time. Apple said one of the reasons it terminated Epic's developer account only a few weeks after approving it was because the Fortnite-maker publicly criticized its proposed DMA compliance plan, Epic said.

Spotify has reached a new deal with star podcaster Joe Rogan that will allow his hit show to be distributed broadly. From a report: Rogan's fresh deal, estimated to be worth as much as $250 million over its multiyear term, involves an upfront minimum guarantee, plus a revenue sharing agreement based on ad sales. Under the new licensing agreement, Spotify will sell ads for and distribute "The Joe Rogan Experience" across several podcast platforms, including in a video format on YouTube, the company said Friday. Under his previous deal, the show was exclusive to Spotify. The new deal is emblematic of shifting economics in podcasting, which has matured in both audience reach and advertising spending since Rogan's last deal. Spotify is working to revise the terms of its deals with top talent so that shows are distributed on several platforms to maximize their audience and ad sales, rather than requiring exclusivity.

Netflix has acquired the exclusive rights to Raw as well as other programming from World Wrestling Entertainment, marking the streaming service's first big move into live events. From a report: Raw will air on Netflix in the US, Canada, Latin America and other international markets beginning in January 2025, after the expiration of the WWE's domestic deal with Comcast. The company will also become the exclusive home outside the US for all WWE shows and specials, including Smackdown and NXT, as well as pay-per-view live events like Wrestlemania, SummerSlam and Royal Rumble. The pay-per-view events will be included at no additional cost for Netflix customers.

After attracting more than 200 million customers by offering films and TV shows on-demand, Netflix has now committed to offering three hours of live wrestling a week starting next year. The company hopes the deal will bring in millions of loyal WWE viewers and provide a boost for its fledgling advertising-supported plan. Netflix has been dabbling in live events for the last year, airing a live comedy special, as well as a golf match, but this is the first long-term rights deal. The WWE is the latest major live event to shift from cable TV to streaming. Ultimate Fighting Championship, which like WWE is owned by TKO Group Holdings, offers many of its matches on ESPN+, while the National Football League sold Amazon the rights to Thursday Night Football. A playoff game on Comcast's Peacock just delivered the largest streaming audience for any professional sports event in the US. The deal 10-year deal is valued at more than $5 billion, CNBC reported.

In an opinion piece for the Guardian, American journalist and author John R. MacArthur discusses the alarming decline in reading skills among American youth, highlighted by a Department of Education survey showing significant drops in text comprehension since 2019-2020, with the situation worsening since 2012. While remote learning during the pandemic and other factors like screen-based reading are blamed, a new study by Columbia University suggests that reading on paper is more effective for comprehension than reading on screens, a finding not yet widely adopted in digital-focused educational approaches. From the report: What if the principal culprit behind the fall of middle-school literacy is neither a virus, nor a union leader, nor "remote learning"? Until recently there has been no scientific answer to this urgent question, but a soon-to-be published, groundbreaking study from neuroscientists at Columbia University's Teachers College has come down decisively on the matter: for "deeper reading" there is a clear advantage to reading a text on paper, rather than on a screen, where "shallow reading was observed." [...] [Dr Karen Froud] and her team are cautious in their conclusions and reluctant to make hard recommendations for classroom protocol and curriculum. Nevertheless, the researchers state: "We do think that these study outcomes warrant adding our voices ... in suggesting that we should not yet throw away printed books, since we were able to observe in our participant sample an advantage for depth of processing when reading from print."

I would go even further than Froud in delineating what's at stake. For more than a decade, social scientists, including the Norwegian scholar Anne Mangen, have been reporting on the superiority of reading comprehension and retention on paper. As Froud's team says in its article: "Reading both expository and complex texts from paper seems to be consistently associated with deeper comprehension and learning" across the full range of social scientific literature. But the work of Mangen and others hasn't influenced local school boards, such as Houston's, which keep throwing out printed books and closing libraries in favor of digital teaching programs and Google Chromebooks. Drunk on the magical realism and exaggerated promises of the "digital revolution," school districts around the country are eagerly converting to computerized test-taking and screen-reading programs at the precise moment when rigorous scientific research is showing that the old-fashioned paper method is better for teaching children how to read.

Indeed, for the tech boosters, Covid really wasn't all bad for public-school education: "As much as the pandemic was an awful time period," says Todd Winch, the Levittown, Long Island, school superintendent, "one silver lining was it pushed us forward to quickly add tech supports." Newsday enthusiastically reports: "Island schools are going all-in on high tech, with teachers saying they are using computer programs such as Google Classroom, I-Ready, and Canvas to deliver tests and assignments and to grade papers." Terrific, especially for Google, which was slated to sell 600 Chromebooks to the Jericho school district, and which since 2020 has sold nearly $14bn worth of the cheap laptops to K-12 schools and universities.

If only Winch and his colleagues had attended the Teachers College symposium that presented the Froud study last September. The star panelist was the nation's leading expert on reading and the brain, John Gabrieli, an MIT neuroscientist who is skeptical about the promises of big tech and its salesmen: "I am impressed how educational technology has had no effect on scale, on reading outcomes, on reading difficulties, on equity issues," he told the New York audience. "How is it that none of it has lifted, on any scale, reading? ... It's like people just say, "Here is a product. If you can get it into a thousand classrooms, we'll make a bunch of money.' And that's OK; that's our system. We just have to evaluate which technology is helping people, and then promote that technology over the marketing of technology that has made no difference on behalf of students ... It's all been product and not purpose." I'll only take issue with the notion that it's "OK" to rob kids of their full intellectual potential in the service of sales -- before they even get started understanding what it means to think, let alone read.

With the pre-release of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown started, Ubisoft has chosen this week to rebrand its Ubisoft+ subscription services, and introduce a PC version of the "Classics" tier at a lower price. And a big part of this, says the publisher's director of subscriptions, Philippe Tremblay, is getting players "comfortable" with not owning their games. Kotaku: It's hard to keep up with how often Ubisoft has rebranded its online portals for its games, with Uplay, Ubisoft Game Launcher, Ubisoft Connect, Uplay+, Uplay Passport, Ubisoft Club, and now Ubisoft+ Premium and Ubisoft+ Classics, all names used over the last decade or so. It's also seemed faintly bewildering why there's a demand for any of them, given Ubisoft released only five non-mobile games last year.

However, a demand there apparently is, says Tremblay in an interview with GI.biz. He claims the company's subscription service had its biggest ever month October 2023, and that the service has had "millions" of subscribers, and "over half a billion hours" played. [...] What's more chilling about all this, however, is when Tremblay moves on to how Ubisoft wishes to see a "consumer shift," similar to that of the market for CDs and DVDs, where people have moved over to Spotify and Netflix, instead of buying physical media to keep on their own shelves. Given that most people, while being a part of the problem (hello), also think of this as a problem, it's so weird to see it phrased as if some faulty thinking in the company's audience.

He said: "One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That's the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That's a transformation that's been a bit slower to happen [in games]. As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect... you don't lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That's not been deleted. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game."

The chief content officer for New York's public radio station WNYC predicts an "AI-fueled shift to niche community and authored excellence."

And ironically, it will be fueled by "Greedy publishers and malicious propagandists... flooding the web with fake or just mediocre AI-generated 'content'" which will "spotlight and boost the value of authored creativity." And it may help give birth to a new generation of independent media. Robots will make the internet more human.

First, it will speed up our migration off of big social platforms to niche communities where we can be better versions of ourselves. We're already exhausted by feeds that amplify our anxiety and algorithms that incentivize cruelty. AI will take the arms race of digital publishing shaped by algorithmic curation to its natural conclusion: big feed-based social platforms will become unending streams of noise. When we've left those sites for good, we'll miss the (mostly inaccurate) sense that we were seeing or participating in a grand, democratic town hall. But as we find places to convene where good faith participation is expected, abuse and harassment aren't, and quality is valued over quantity, we'll be happy to have traded a perception of scale influence for the experience of real connection.

Second, this flood of authorless "content" will help truly authored creativity shine in contrast... "Could a robot have done this?" will be a question we ask to push ourselves to be funnier, weirder, more vulnerable, and more creative. And for the funniest, the weirdest, the most vulnerable, and most creative: the gap between what they do and everything else will be huge. Finally, these AI-accelerated shifts will combine with the current moment in media economics to fuel a new era of independent media.
For a few years he's seen the rise of independent community-funded journalists, and "the list of thriving small enterprises is getting longer." He sees more growth in community-funding platforms (with subscription/membership features like on Substack and Patreon) which "continue to tilt the risk/reward math for audience-facing talent....

"And the amount of audience-facing, world-class talent that left institutional media in 2023 (by choice or otherwise) is unlike anything I've seen in more than 15 years in journalism... [I]f we're lucky, we'll see the creation of a new generation of independent media businesses whose work is as funny, weird, vulnerable and creative as its creators want it to be. And those businesses will be built on truly stable ground: a direct financial relationship with people who care.

"Thank the robots."

"If you have been affected, you will will receive a notification when you open Chrome on either desktop or Android devices," reports Search Engine Land. But they add that "discussions among digital marketers on X indicate that advertisers are still not ready..."

An anonymous reader writes: Google started its campaign to phase out of third-party cookies as announced earlier. At the beginning cookies are turned off for 1% of users, and those lucky ones unlock a "tracking protection" in Chrome settings. In agreement with the UK Competitions and Markets Authority, third-party cookies will be completely removed at the end of this year, a move under tight anti-competition scrutiny also in Brussels. Meanwhile, a technology researcher released their privacy audit of Google's third-party cookie replacement, Privacy Sandbox's Protected Audience API, validating its standing against EU data protection, which may even close the ever-present cookie consent popups disliked universally in Europe.

David Batty reports via The Guardian: [Andrew Scott], best known as Fleabag's "hot priest," has revealed he halted the renowned soliloquy in Shakespeare's play when an audience member took out a laptop to send emails. The actor decided not to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous theatre etiquette during his run in the 2017 production of Hamlet at London's Almeida theatre, for which he earned an Olivier nomination. Speaking to the Happy Sad Confused film podcast, Scott said there was "no way" he could continue with the speech, and refused to resume until the man put his laptop away.

"When I was playing Hamlet, a guy took out his laptop -- not his phone, his laptop -- while I was in the middle of 'To be or not to fucking be'" said the actor, who said he thought the offending audience member was sending emails. "I was pausing and [the stage team] were like, 'Get on with it' and I was like, 'There's no way.' I stopped for ages." A woman next to the laptop user appeared to alert him to the situation and he finally stopped. "He had absolutely no doubts," added Scott, who was on the podcast to promote his current film All of Us Strangers.