Richard Currie reports via The Register: A simple misclick at a London law firm led to a surprise divorce for an unsuspecting couple. An employee at Vardags, self-described specialists in high-net-worth marital breakdowns, opened the wrong file when applying for a divorce in His Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) online portal. With a click more potent than Cupid's arrow, the solicitor "issued a final order of divorce in proceedings between Mrs Williams, the applicant wife, and Mr Williams," court papers [PDF] say.

The digital slip occurred on October 3, and thanks to the system's "now customary speed," as described by Judge Sir Andrew McFarlane, President of the Family Division, marital bonds were finally and totally severed in a mere 21 minutes, less time than most couples spend arguing over what to watch on Netflix. When Vardags realized the blunder two days later, it scrambled to reverse the order. The application was made "without notice to the Husband's solicitors -- the Wife's solicitors considered at the time that this was the correct approach given that the Final Order itself had been made without notice."

In the ensuing legal melee, Mr Williams, previously unaware of his sudden single status, received a letter sent by HMCTS the same day as the accidental divorce, stating that he was no longer married. But it was not until October 11, a week later, that he was formally informed of his bachelorhood by his ex-wife's solicitors. Meanwhile, his solicitors entered the fray, demanding that the case be brought before the President of the Family Division to sort out this matrimonial muddle.

Despite investing billions in new streaming services, media giants have failed to dethrone old favorites, according to Nielsen data. The 21-year-old legal drama "NCIS" tops the list, with viewers streaming 11.4 million episodes per week. Netflix dominates the top 10, with eight shows owing most of their viewership to the platform. Reruns from CBS and other networks make up the majority of the list, with "Stranger Things" being the only original series.

"Nine of the 10 most-watched streaming programs are reruns. In addition to the three from CBS, there is one from YouTube (CoComelon), one from Canada (Heartland), one from Australia (Bluey) and Suits. The only original series to crack the list is Stranger Things," Bloomberg writes. However: "While reruns dominate the top 10, that is not the case overall. Most of the 100 most popular titles of the last three years are original series," it added.

TechCrunch reports this week that Meta "is denying that it gave Netflix access to users' private messages..." The claim references a court filing that emerged as part of the discovery process in a class-action lawsuit over data privacy practices between a group of consumers and Facebook's parent, Meta. The document alleges that Netflix and Facebook had a "special relationship" and that Facebook even cut spending on original programming for its Facebook Watch video service so as not to compete with Netflix, a large Facebook advertiser. It also says that Netflix had access to Meta's "Inbox API" that offered the streamer "programmatic access to Facebook's user's private message inboxes...."

Meta's communications director, Andy Stone, reposted the original X post on Tuesday with a statement disputing that Netflix had been given access to users' private messages. "Shockingly untrue," Stone wrote on X. "Meta didn't share people's private messages with Netflix. The agreement allowed people to message their friends on Facebook about what they were watching on Netflix, directly from the Netflix app. Such agreements are commonplace in the industry...."

Beyond Stone's X post, Meta has not provided further comment. However, The New York Times had previously reported in 2018 that Netflix and Spotify could read users' private messages, according to documents it had obtained. Meta denied those claims at the time via a blog post titled "Facts About Facebook's Messaging Partnerships," where it explained that Netflix and Spotify had access to APIs that allowed consumers to message friends about what they were listening to on Spotify or watching on Netflix directly from those companies' respective apps. This required the companies to have "write access" to compose messages to friends, "read access" to allow users to read messages back from friends, and "delete access," which meant if you deleted a message from the third-party app, it would also delete the message from Facebook.

"No third party was reading your private messages, or writing messages to your friends without your permission. Many news stories imply we were shipping over private messages to partners, which is not correct," the blog post stated. In any event, Messenger didn't implement default end-to-end encryption until December 2023, a practice that would have made these sorts of claims a non-starter, as it wouldn't have left room for doubt.

Jon Brodkin reports via Ars Technica: California can keep enforcing its state net neutrality law after the Federal Communications Commission implements its own rules. The FCC could preempt future state laws if they go far beyond the national standard but said that states can "experiment" with different regulations for interconnection payments and zero-rating. The FCC scheduled an April 25 vote on Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's proposal to restore net neutrality rules similar to the ones introduced during the Obama era and repealed under former President Trump. The FCC yesterday released the text of the pending order, which could still be changed but isn't likely to get any major overhaul.

State-level enforcement of net neutrality rules can benefit consumers, the FCC said. The order said that "state enforcement generally supports our regulatory efforts by dedicating additional resources to monitoring and enforcement, especially at the local level, and thereby ensuring greater compliance with our requirements." [...] In the order scheduled for an April 25 vote, the FCC said the California law "appears largely to mirror or parallel our federal rules. Thus we see no reason at this time to preempt it." That doesn't mean the rules are exactly the same. Instead of banning certain types of zero-rating entirely, the FCC will judge on a case-by-case basis whether any specific zero-rating program harms consumers and conflicts with the goal of preserving an open Internet. The FCC said it will evaluate sponsored-data "programs based on a totality of the circumstances, including potential benefits."

The FCC order cautions that the agency will take a dimmer view of zero-rating in exchange for payment from a third party or zero-rating that favors an affiliated entity. But those categories will still be judged by the FCC on a case-by-case basis, whereas California bans paid data cap exemptions entirely. Despite that difference, the FCC said it is "not persuaded on the record currently before us that the California law is incompatible with the federal rules." The FCC also found that California's approach to interconnection payments is compatible with the pending federal rule. Interconnection was the subject of a major controversy involving Netflix and big ISPs a decade ago. The FCC said it found no evidence that the California law has "unduly burdened or interfered with interstate communications service." When it comes to zero-rating and interconnection, the FCC said there is "room for states to experiment and explore their own approaches within the bounds of our overarching federal framework." The FCC said it will reconsider preemption of California rules if "California state enforcement authorities or state courts seek to interpret or enforce these requirements in a manner inconsistent with how we intend our rules to apply."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Streaming was supposed to kill physical media, and has come very close. The DVD and Blu-ray market fell from $4.7bn in revenue in 2017 to barely $1.5bn in 2022. In September, Netflix ended its movie-by-mail service. Best Buy has removed physical media from its brick-and-mortar stores, and Target and Walmart may follow. Some new films may never be released physically at all. Yet a counterrevolution has been gathering. Some film fans never gave up physical media: they've spent years quietly buying thrift-store discs, discarded by the many US households that no longer have DVD or Blu-ray players, and waiting for their chance to rise again. Other fans, frustrated by streaming's limitations, have recently rediscovered physical media and trickled to join its rear-guard army.

Physical media will never regain its heights, but it may live to fight a little longer -- supported by loyalists and by a cottage industry of independent and boutique film distributors that license classic and cult films and sell high-quality physical editions to eager, sometimes frantic, fans. Some of these labels offer streaming channels or video-on-demand as well, but still find business in Blu-rays. "We've grown rather than shrunk," Umbrella Entertainment, a distributor in Australia, told me.

And when Universal released Oppenheimer on 4K Blu-ray this fall, the initial run sold out, with feverish Christopher Nolan fans pillaging the same megastores that are moving to drop physical media. 4K Blu-rays are currently the smallest slice of the film disc market, and require ultra-high-definition players and TVs, meaning that the Oppenheimer run was driven by a niche within a niche. But the episode seemed to indicate that a market exists -- especially when it has champions. Nolan himself had encouraged fans to rally to physical media: "If you buy a 4K UHD, you buy a Blu-ray, it's on your shelf, it's yours," he told IGN last year. "[Y]ou own it. That's never really the case with any form of digital distribution."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Kotaku: A new patent recently filed by TV and streaming device manufacturer Roku hints toward a possible future where televisions could display ads when you pause a movie or game. For Roku, the time in which the TV is on but users aren't doing anything is valuable. The company has started leasing out ad space in its popular Roku City screensaver -- which appears when your TV is idle -- to companies like McDonald's and movies like Barbie. As tech newsletter Lowpass points out, Roku finds this idle time and its screensaver so valuable that it forbids app developers from overriding the screensaver with their own. But, if you plug in an Xbox or DVD player into the HDMI port on a Roku TV, you bypass the company's screensaver and other ads. And so, Roku has been figuring out a way to not let that happen.

As reported by Lowpass on April 4, Roku recently filed a patent for a technology that would let it inject ads into third-party content -- like an Xbox game or Netflix movie -- using an HDMI connection. The patent describes a situation where you are playing a video game and hit pause to go check your phone or grab some food. At this point, Roku would identify that you have paused the content and display a relevant ad until you unpaused the game. Roku's tech isn't designed to randomly inject ads as you are playing a game or watching a movie, it knows that would be going too far and anger people. Instead, the patent suggests several ways that Roku could spot when your TV is paused, like comparing frames, to make sure the user has actually paused the content. Roku might also use the HDMI's audio feed to search for extended moments of silence. The company also proposes using HDMI CEC -- a protocol designed to help devices communicate better -- to figure out when you pause and unpause content. Similarly, Roku's patent explains that it will use various methods to detect what people are playing or watching and try to display relevant ads. So if it sees you have an Xbox plugged in, it might try to serve you ads that it thinks an Xbox owner would be interested in.

"Subscribers of both Disney+ and Hulu can now access Hulu content through the Disney+ app," reports the Los Angeles Times, "as the Burbank media and entertainment giant launched its one-app integration of the two streaming services Wednesday..." The move is part of Disney's plan to increase viewer engagement and reduce churn on Disney+, which has 111.3 million subscribers globally. Disney has lost billions on its direct-to-consumer business as it tries to compete with Netflix, but the company has told investors that its streaming segment will begin to turn a profit by the end of fiscal 2024. Streaming losses have been a key component of a nasty activist shareholder campaign ahead of next week's annual meeting.

Disney+ has typically served up family-friendly content and major brands such as Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel, whereas Hulu's offering has been the streaming home of more adult-oriented programming. Disney executives described the combined app experience as the most extensive technical advancement to the Disney+ streaming platform since it launched in November 2019... The price of the bundle plan starts at $9.99 with ads... Upgrading to the bundle of Hulu on Disney+ will start at $2 more per month, Disney said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Do you remember Facebook Watch? Me neither. Mark Zuckerberg's short-lived streaming service never really got off the ground, but court filings unsealed in Meta's antitrust lawsuit claim "Watch" was kneecapped starting in 2018 to protect Zuckerberg's advertising relationship with Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. "For nearly a decade, Netflix and Facebook enjoyed a special relationship," said plaintiffs in filings (PDF) made public on Saturday. "It is no great mystery how this close partnership developed, and who was its steward: from 2011-2019, Netflix's then-CEO Hastings sat on Facebook's board and personally directed the companies' relationship"

The filings detail Hastings' uncomfortably close relationship with Meta's upper management, including Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. During these years, Netflix was allegedly granted special access to Facebook users' private message inboxes, among other privileged analytics tools, in exchange for hundred-million-dollar advertising deals. This gave Facebook greater dominance in its all-important ad division, plaintiffs allege, so the company was fine to retreat from Netflix's streaming territory by shuttering Watch. In 2017, Facebook Watch began signing deals to populate its streaming service with original TV Shows from movie stars such as Bill Murray. A year later, the service attempted to license the popular '90s TV show Dawson's Creek. Facebook Watch had meaningful reach on the home screen of the social media platform, and an impressive budget as well. Facebook and Netflix appeared ready to butt heads in the streaming world, and the Netflix cofounder found himself in the middle as a Facebook board member. [...]

Netflix was a large advertiser to Facebook, and plaintiffs allege Zuckerberg shuttered its promising Watch platform for the sake of the greater advertising business. Zuckerberg personally emailed the head of Facebook Watch in May of 2018, Fidji Simo, to tell her their budget was being slashed by $750 million, just two years after Watch's launch, according to court filings. The sudden pivot meant Facebook was now dismantling the streaming business it had spent the last two years growing. During this time period, Netflix increased its ad spend on Facebook to roughly $150 million a year and allegedly entered into agreements for increased data analytics. By early 2019, the ad spend increased to roughly $200 million a year. Hastings left Facebook's board later in 2019.
UPDATE: Meta (Again) Denies Netflix Read Facebook Users' Private Messenger Messages.

AmiMoJo writes: In a major surprise, all twenty episodes of the second season of the animated series 'Star Trek: Prodigy' have suddenly been made available in France thanks to broadcaster France Televisions.

According to TrekCentral it seems France.TV, the online streaming service for the national public broadcaster, has released the entirety of the second season all at once and without any prior warning or announcement.

This has led to questions online as to how this happened. Paramount+ unexpectedly canceled the series in June last year -- even as a second season had almost finished production and was completed shortly after. It took numerous fan campaigns and social media protests but ultimately Netflix picked up both completed seasons in October 2023. The streamer has confirmed the twenty episode second season will arrive this year but hasn't set a specific date as yet.

Today's unexpected release in France has many wondering if this a mistake, or is this the result of a specific licensing deal with that country and distributor. Either way, spoilers for the new season are already flooding online along with a lot of people calling for fans to wait for the official release and support the creators.

Whether intentional or not, it's not clear if Netflix will shift its release strategy for the new season in the wake of this.

"My favorite kind of science fiction involves stories rooted in real science..." writes NPR's reviewer. "[T]here is something special about seeing characters wrestle with concepts closer to our current understanding of how the universe works."

The Verge calls it an "impressive" and "leaner" story than the book, arguing "it's a good one — and very occasionally a great one" that introduces the author's key ideas, though channelling "the book's spirit but not its brilliance."

And Slate calls it a "downright transformative" adaptation, "jettisoning most of the novel's characters and plucking scenes from all three books," while accusing it of "making the trilogy's expansive and philosophical story into something much more pedestrian and digestible."

But Reuters notes there's huge interest in China over this adaptation (by the co-creator of Mem>Game of Thrones) for the first Asian novel to win the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel. "The new series was trending on Chinese social media platform Weibo on Friday," reports Reuters, "with 21 million views so far." (The show came in first on Weibo's "top hot" trend rankings, they add, "despite Netflix being officially inaccessible in China. Chinese viewers would have had to watch the Netflix series from behind a VPN or on a pirate site.")

So what was their verdict? CNN reports Netflix's adaptation "has split opinions in China and sparked online nationalist anger over scenes depicting a violent and tumultuous period in the country's modern history." Among the country's more patriotic internet users, discussions on the adaptation turned political, with some accusing the big-budget American production of making China look bad. The show opens with a harrowing scene depicting Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, which consumed China in bloodshed and chaos for a decade from 1966... "Netflix you don't understand 'The Three Body Problem' or Ye Wenjie at all!" read a comment on social media platform Weibo. "You only understand political correctness!"

Others came to the show's defense, saying the scene closely follows depictions in the book — and is a truthful reenactment of history. "History is far more absurd than a TV series, but you guys pretend not to see it," read one comment on Douban, a popular site for reviewing movies, books and music.

Author Liu said in an interview with the New York Times in 2019 that he had originally wanted to open the book with scenes from Mao's Cultural Revolution, but his Chinese publisher worried they would never make it past government censors and buried them in the middle of the narrative. The English version of the book, translated by Ken Liu, put the scenes at the novel's beginning, with the author's blessing... Various other aspects of the show, from its casting and visual effects to the radical changes to the story's original setting and characters, also attracted the ire of Chinese social media users. Many compared it to a Chinese television adaptation released last year — a much lengthier and closer retelling of the book that ran to 30 episodes and was highly rated on Chinese review platforms.

The Netflix adaptation featured an international cast and placed much of the action in present-day London — thus making the story a lot less Chinese.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Back in 2004, in the pre-Web 2.0 era, research indicated that BitTorrent was responsible for an impressive 35% of all Internet traffic. At the time, file-sharing via peer-to-peer networks was the main traffic driver as no other services consumed large amounts of bandwidth. Fast-forward two decades and these statistics are ancient history. With the growth of video streaming, including services such as YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok, file-sharing traffic is nothing more than a drop in today's data pool. [...]

This week, Canadian broadband management company Sandvine released its latest Global Internet Phenomena Report which makes it clear that BitTorrent no longer leads any charts. The latest data show that video and social media are the leading drivers of downstream traffic, accounting for more than half of all fixed access and mobile data worldwide. Needless to say, BitTorrent is nowhere to be found in the list of 'top apps'. Looking at upstream traffic, BitTorrent still has some relevance on fixed access networks where it accounts for 4% of the bandwidth. However, it's been surpassed by cloud storage apps, FaceTime, Google, and YouTube. On mobile connections, BitTorrent no longer makes it into the top ten. The average of 46 MB upstream traffic per subscriber shouldn't impress any file-sharer. However, since only a small percentage of all subscribers use BitTorrent, the upstream traffic per user is of course much higher.

Streamers narrowly avoided getting shut out at the 2024 Oscars: Netflix came away with just one trophy and Apple left empty-handed, after they garnered a total of 32 nominations. From a report: Netflix collected its one win for Wes Anderson's "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar," an adaptation of a Roald Dahl story, in the live action short film category. The 40-minute film, with a cast that includes Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, and Ralph Fiennes, is the first Oscar for Anderson (who wasn't in attendance to receive the award). Heading into Sunday's 96th Academy Awards, Netflix led all studios and platforms with 19 nominations across 11 films, including seven for Bradley Cooper's "Maestro" -- which was shut out. Apple had picked up 13 nods, including 10 for Martin Scorsese's "Killers of the Flower Moon," which also drew a goose egg.

Since 2017, Netflix has now won 23 Oscars in all. But the best picture prize continues to elude the streamer as "Maestro" lost out to this year's awards powerhouse, "Oppenheimer." Nor has Netflix won in the lead actor or actress categories, coming up empty this year after four noms (Cooper and Carey Mulligan for "Maestro"; Colman Domingo for "Rustin"; and Annette Bening for "Nyad"). "Killers of the Flower Moon's" nominations included one for Scorsese in the best director category. His only Oscar to date came in 2007 for "The Departed" (for director). In 2020, his mafioso pic "The Irishman" for Netflix was shut out at the Oscars after receiving 10 nominations.

Warner Bros. Discovery said a password crackdown for its Max streaming service is coming later this year, joining competitors Netflix and Disney. TheWrap reports: JB Perrette, WBD's CEO and president of global streaming and games, said the initiative would launch later this year with a broader rollout in 2025. "We think, relative to the scale of our business, it's a meaningful opportunity," Perrette said during Morgan Stanley's 2024 Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco on Monday. The push to crack down on password sharing comes as Warner Bros. Discovery narrowed its streaming loss to $55 million during its fourth quarter of 2023, down from a loss of $217 million a year ago. For the full year, it swung to a profit of $103 million, compared to a loss of $1.59 billion in 2022.

Looking ahead, WBD said its DTC business would have "modestly negative" EBITDA in the first half of 2024 before turning profitable in the second half. WBD is targeting $1 billion of direct-to-consumer EBITDA in 2025. In its fourth quarter, Warner Bros. Discovery added 1.8 million subscribers in its direct-to-consumer division for a total of 97.7 million. The DTC segment's results include Max, Discovery+ and traditional HBO cable subscriptions. Parrette also discussed interest in transactional ads, notes Ars Technica. Per Perrette: "On the ad format size, we've made lots of improvements from where we were, but we still have a lot of ad format enhancements that will give us more things that we can go to marketers with, [like] shoppable ads [and] other elements of the ad format side of the house that we can improve."

Netflix is severing ties with Apple's App Store billing system for good. From a report: Netflix stopped allowing new and rejoining subscribers to sign up with App Store billing back in 2018, but Netflix subscribers who were paying through Apple at the time were allowed to continue doing so. Now, that's finally about to change.

As reported by The Streamable, Netflix has started notifying people who currently pay for a subscription through Apple that they need to update their payment method to continue accessing the service. Netflix's support website has also been updated to acknowledge this change: "Some Apple-billed members in select countries may be prompted to add a new payment method to continue their subscription."

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Canada has proposed new rules that would compel digital platforms to remove online content that features the sexual exploitation of children or intimate images without consent of the individuals involved. From a report: The rules were years in the making, and represent the third and possibly final installment of measures aimed at regulating digital platforms. Measures introduced since 2022 aim to increase the amount of domestic, Canadian-made content on streaming services, such as Netflix, and require digital platforms to help Canadian news-media outlets finance their newsroom operations. The legislation needs to be approved by Canada's Parliament before it takes effect.

Canada said its rules are based on concepts introduced by the European Union, the U.K. and Australia. Canadian officials say the proposed measures would apply to social-media platforms, adult-entertainment sites where users can upload content, and live-streaming services. These services, officials said, are expected to expeditiously remove two categories of content: That which sexually exploits a child or an abuse survivor, and intimate content broadcast without an individual's consent. The latter incorporates so-called revenge porn, or the nonconsensual posting or dissemination of intimate images, often after the end of a romantic relationship. Officials said private and encrypted messaging services are excluded from the proposed regulations.

Canadian officials said platforms will have a duty to either ensure the material is not published, or take it down once notified. Canada also intends to set up a new agency, the Digital Safety Commission, to enforce the rules, order harmful content taken down, and hold digital services accountable. Platforms that violate the rules could face a maximum penalty of up to 25 million Canadian dollars, or the equivalent of $18.5 million, officials said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: In recent months, Movie-Web has quickly gained popularity among a particular group of movie aficionados. The open source software, which is still available on GitHub, allows anyone to set up a movie search engine capable of streaming content from third-party sources. These external sources tend to have large libraries of pirated entertainment. Movie-web's developers are not oblivious to the legal ramifications but since they don't host any files, they hoped to avoid legal trouble. The software just provides a search engine for third-party content, they argued. [...]

Yesterday, the movie-web.app domain was suddenly taken down. According to a message posted on the official Discord server, this is the result of a "court action" from several movie companies including Warner Bros. Netflix, Paramount, Universal, and Disney. [I]t appears that action was taken against the movie-web.app domain. It seems likely that registrar Namecheap suspended the domain after receiving a legal complaint from the aforementioned Hollywood companies. [Update: After publishing the article we learned that there is a legal action that requires registrars to take action against several 'pirate' domains. We're looking into the matter and will follow this up later.]

Namecheap updated the domain's status to clientHold, which effectively rendered the domain inaccessible. The measure is often used to suspend pirate site domains following copyright holder complaints. The surprise takedown only affects movie-web's publicly hosted 'demo' instance. On Discord, the movie-web team says that it has no plans to bring this website back in any shape or form. "As a team, we always said that if we were taken down, we would go down without a fight and we have decided to stick to that. We have zero interest in getting involved with legal matters, and so we will not be trying to circumvent this takedown in any way," developer 'BinaryOverload' writes.

Netflix's new sci-fi drama Spaceman centers on Czech astronaut Jakub Procházk, described by Polygon as "painfully introverted, emotionally repressed, and above all, quiet... so muted and compressed, he seems like a trauma victim." The film, adapted from the 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia written by Czech author Jaroslav KalfaÅ(TM), is a solemn drama in the mold of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, or to some degree, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. The story revolves around Jakub's disintegrating frame of mind after eight months alone in space as he investigates a glowing cosmic phenomenon that's become visible from Earth. Meanwhile, his wife Lenka (Carey Mulligan), heavily pregnant and going through her own breakdown back home, decides to leave Jakub, and his handlers (Isabella Rossellini among them) work to keep him from finding out. And then the giant spider appears, and Jakub worries that he's losing his mind.
CNN says Sandler's deal with Netflix "means pretty much doing whatever he wants, which, in the case of Spaceman, means traveling to the furthest reaches of space as the near-solitary star of a pretentious, message-heavy drama."

You can watch a trailer here. The movie enjoys a "limited theatrical release" this weekend, and will stream on Netflix starting March 1.

Tech companies are famous for coddling their workers, but after mass layoffs the industry's culture has shifted. Engineers say that getting hired can require days of work on unpaid assignments. From a report: Nearly a dozen engineers, hiring managers, and entrepreneurs who spoke with WIRED describe an environment in which technical job applicants are being put through the wringer. Take-home coding tests used to be rare, deployed only if an employer needed to be further convinced. Now interviewees are regularly given projects described as requiring just two to three hours that instead take days of work.

Live-coding exercises are also more intense, industry insiders say. One job seeker described an experience where an engineering manager said during an interview, "OK, we're going to build a To Do List app right now," a process that might normally take weeks.

Emails reviewed by WIRED showed that in one interview for an engineering role at Netflix, a technical recruiter requested that a job candidate submit a three-page project evaluation within 48 hours -- all before the first round of interviews. A Netflix spokesperson said the process is different for each role and otherwise declined to comment. A similar email at Snap outlined a six-part interview process for a potential engineering candidate, with each part lasting an hour. A company spokesperson says its interview process hasn't changed as a result of labor market changes.

jbmartin6 shares a report from Phys.Org: Threatening messages aimed to prevent digital piracy have the opposite effect if you're a man, a new study from the University of Portsmouth has found. According to the research, women tend to respond positively to this kind of messaging, but men typically increase their piracy behaviors by 18%. [...] This paper studies how effective anti-piracy messages are as a deterrent, examining the change in TV and film piracy intentions among 962 adults compared with their past behavior. The three messages examined in the study were verbatim copies of three real-world anti-piracy campaigns. Two of the campaigns used threatening messages to try to combat piracy and the third was educational in tone.

One of the threatening messages was from crime reduction charity, Crimestoppers, which focused on the individual's risk of computer viruses, identity fraud, money and data theft and hacking. The other message was based on a campaign by the French government, which used a "three strike" process, whereby infringers were given two written warnings before their internet access was terminated. The educational message was taken from the campaign "Get It Right from a Genuine Site," which focuses on the cost to the economy and to the individual creative people, and signposts consumers away from piracy sites and towards legal platforms such as Spotify or Netflix.

The study found that one threatening message influences women to reduce their piracy intentions by over 50%, but men increase their piracy behaviors. The educational messages had no effect on either men or women. "The research shows that anti-piracy messages can inadvertently increase piracy, which is a phenomenon known as psychological reactance," explained [lead author, Kate Whitman, from the University of Portsmouth's Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime]. "From an evolutionary psychology point of view, men have a stronger reaction to their freedom being threatened and therefore they do the opposite." Moreover, the study found that participants with the most favorable attitudes towards piracy demonstrated the most polarized changes in piracy intentions -- the threatening messages increased their piracy even more. The study has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics.

"I'm not so sure about the author's attribution of this difference to evolutionary psychology, so looking forward to some educational comments on that," adds Slashdot reader jbmartin6.

In a new report today, Nielsen found that YouTube is once again the overall top streaming service in the U.S., with 8.6% of viewing on television screens. Netflix was a close second at 7.9% of TV usage. TechCrunch reports: In a blog post celebrating the achievement, the Google-owned streaming service announced that viewers now watch a daily average of over 1 billion hours of YouTube content on their televisions, which could indicate that there's a preference for user-generated videos among U.S. consumers rather than traditional TV shows. Sixty-one percent of Gen Z reported that they favor user-generated content over other content formats. [...]

Although YouTube may have precedence in the living room, TikTok continues to dominate on mobile devices. The short-form video app recently began testing the ability for TikTokers to upload 30-minute videos, which could step on YouTube's toes. TikTok also entered the spatial reality space, launching a native app on the Apple Vision Pro. Meanwhile, YouTube decided to not build a dedicated app for the device.