An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Every week, Netflix sends out thousands of takedown requests, most of which target pirated copies of its movies and TV-shows. Yesterday, however, we spotted a series of copyright infringement notices with a different and rather uncomfortable theme. The streaming giant asked Twitter to remove dozens of tweets that included footage from the French coming-of-age film Cuties. This film hasn't been without controversy and the same can be said about the takedown requests too.

To provide some context, Netflix acquired the global distribution rights for Cuties and started promoting it this summer. This created quite some backlash as many people felt that the young actors had been sexualized after being filmed in all kinds of suggestive poses. We won't go into the various viewpoints on this topic or the lawsuit Netflix faces in Texas over 'lewd visual material.' Opinions from both sides are readily available all over the web, including social media. Netflix didn't cancel Cuties, however, but this week it actively started to pull Cuties clips from Twitter. Not just a handful, but several dozens. Legally the company is allowed to do this of course, as they own the rights. However, it is at least a bit peculiar that the company appears to have targeted only negative tweets. The good news is that the texts of the tweets remain online. We don't know if that is Twitter's decision or if Netflix had a say in it. The takedown requests, which are posted on Lumen, target the full tweet URLs. The flagged tweets, according to TorrentFreak, all condemn Netflix. "The language is quite harsh at times, including terms such as child exploitation, pedophilia, as well as repeated calls to cancel Netflix," it adds.

The company hasn't said why it's suddenly going after Cuties clips on Twitter. "The easy conclusion would be that Netflix is trying to shove these under the carpet," reports TorrentFreak. "However, there are still thousands of similar comments online, so that wouldn't be very effective."

An anonymous reader shares a report: "Mulan" producer Jason Reed was in Mexico City last March promoting his soon-to-be-released film when he got the call that Walt Disney was postponing its debut due to the coronavirus. What followed was a summer of discussions between Disney, Reed and director Niki Caro as the company wrestled with when and how to release the $200 million live-action remake of its 1998 animated hit. This weekend they'll all get to see if they made the right call. Disney is making "Mulan" available on its Disney+ streaming service for an extra $30 starting Friday. The film now joins others, including Universal's "Trolls World Tour" and Warner Bros.' "Scoob!," in bypassing theaters and going directly to consumers. It's a trend that has many in Hollywood concerned about the future of films in theaters. They might be worrying too much. Without theaters, Disney and other studios would struggle to replace the revenue they have historically gotten from releasing big-budget films first in cinemas, then home video and later TV.

"They understand how important the theater is as a channel for distribution," said Steve Nason, research director at the consulting firm Parks Associates. "They just couldn't wait any longer." Prior to the pandemic, "Mulan" had been scheduled to hit theaters March 27. The company had already held the red-carpet premiere and spent heavily on advertising. But the film was postponed three times before its Disney+ debut was set. Reviews so far are fairly strong. "Disney's spectacular do-over deserves the biggest screen possible," read the headline in Variety. Rotten Tomatoes gives the movie a 79% fresh rating, showing most critics agree. Disney is trying a hybrid approach. It's releasing the film in theaters in Asia, where cinemas have been back open longer and the Asian cast and story are likely to have strong appeal. In the U.S. and Europe, "Mulan" will be online, where Disney+ has already built a sizable subscriber base.

In Christopher Nolan's new thriller, "Tenet," the fate of humanity pivots on characters moving back and forth through time. It is an epic, brain-bending exploration of ideas the filmmaker has spent decades examining. But now, as "Tenet" opens after multiple delays in cinemas around the world, it comes loaded with symbolism that its writer and director could never have foreseen. From a report: As the first big-budget theatrical release since Covid-19 struck, "Tenet" represents one of the biggest gambles in Hollywood history -- from the studio wagering it can release the movie amid the pandemic, to long-dormant theater chains banking on it spurring a recovery for their business, to potential ticket buyers balancing safety concerns with their urge to get back to the big screen. Mr. Nolan, though known as a champion of the theatrical experience, is somewhat uneasy with all the significance assigned to his sci-fi spy picture. "This is the most radical shift in my career, my lifetime, between the making of a film and the world it goes out into, and I'm still grappling with that," he says.

Starting with an Aug. 26 opening in parts of Europe and elsewhere, the rollout of "Tenet" reaches the U.S. Sept. 3. It is the fourth domestic release date for the movie -- which was delayed repeatedly as studio and theater executives dealt with shifting lockdown measures -- yet it is still unclear when it will open in regions where indoor theaters remain closed. That includes two cities that are normally first to get new movies, New York City and Los Angeles. When coronavirus lockdowns descended in March, Mr. Nolan says, his team's first challenge was to use remote methods to put the final touches on "Tenet" and turn it in on time to AT&T's Warner Bros. studio. Meanwhile, every big movie on deck for the season, starting with the James Bond installment "No Time To Die," retreated on the calendar to fall or next year. By contrast, Warner Bros. pushed back the July 17 release of "Tenet" by only two weeks, and later pushed it again. The studio never seriously considered an online premiere for "Tenet," a Warner Bros. executive says, even as others experimented with online releases, as Disney has done this summer with "Hamilton" and "Mulan." The movie enjoyed a strong $53 million debut overseas. "We are off to a fantastic start internationally and couldn't be more pleased," said Toby Emmerich, Warner Bros. Pictures Group chairman. "Christopher Nolan has once again delivered an event-worthy motion picture that demands to be seen on the big screen, and we are thrilled that audiences across the globe are getting the opportunity to see 'Tenet.'"

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In 2011, the late film critic Roger Ebert gave tech's movers-and-shakers a PLATO history lesson in his Remaking My Voice TED Talk. "When I heard the amazing talk by Salman Khan on Wednesday, about the Khan Academy website that teaches hundreds of subjects to students all over the world, I had a flashback," explained Ebert. "I was sent over to the computer lab of the University of Illinois to interview the creators of something called 'PLATO.' The initials stood for Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations. This was a computer-assisted instruction system. Which in those days ran on a computer named ILLIAC. The programmers said it could assist students in their learning...."

Ebert probably would have been surprised to see how the COVID-19 pandemic caught U.S. schools flat-footed in 2020. In a never-before-published chapter that didn't make it into his book The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture, author Brian Dear reveals that Ebert reported on PLATO's potential to deliver online learning to homebound students in a 1962 article he wrote for the News-Gazette while still in high school. Ebert's Jan. 6, 1962 story on PLATO began:

"For no more than the price of a good television set, homebound handicapped children may soon be able to get an education equal to those offered in schools. [...] Other predicted uses for the unique teaching system include [...] an education system which allows the student to set his own pace, instead of forcing him to 'stay with the class.'..."

Dear points out that the PLATO project launched the first week of June 1960, more than sixteen years before Salman Khan was even born.

DevNull127 writes: You probably remember Zoe Bell strapped to the hood of a speeding 1970 Dodge Challenger in the Death Proof half of Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse. (She also had parts in The Hateful Eight and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.) Today Zoe pulled together what may become a historic video — a massive online collaboration with 40 different film celebrities [and also some stuntpeople] that one reporter called "a stunning display of stunt, editing and acting skills — all put together without anyone collaborating in-person."

Deadline explains:
The most badass actresses and stuntwomen of Hollywood had a full-out, virtual battle royale thanks to actress and stuntwoman extraordinaire Zoe Bell and her video appropriately titled Boss Bitch Fight Challenge. "I'm so bored! I just want to play with my friends!" she proclaims as it is clear she wants to liven things up during her quarantine. What happens next is over five minutes of virtual fisticuffs.

It's a real adrenaline-booster, and Deadline's article also has a complete list of each star appearing in the video.
That list is like revisiting the history of Hollywood action films over the last 20 years. It includes:

• Lucy Lawless (Xena the Warrior Princess)
• Halle Berry (Catwoman)
• Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz (the 2000 version of Charlie's Angels)
• Daryl Hannah (Kill Bill)
• Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow)
• Margot Robbie (Suicide Squad)

Watch out for the baseball bat!

Nearly 16 years ago, Slashdot's original co-founder CmdrTaco posted that liberal film-maker Michael Moore had won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for a documentary about the Bush administration -- and noted later that Moore approved downloads of the film through networks like BitTorrent.

But now the 66-year-old filmmaker is offering free streaming on his YouTube channel for a 2019 film he'd backed called "Planet of the Humans." The film "reveals the heavy environmental impact of renewable energy and the problems with solar energy, wind energy and biogas, among other forms of power," writes Newsweek. "Instead, the documentary argues that the only way to save the planet is to stop the growth of the human population and reduce its consumption."

The film features appearances by everyone from Elon Musk and Al Gore to Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Koch Brothers. (And it includes music from many artists including Radiohead and King Crimson.) In its description on YouTube, the film's director Jeff Gibbs argues that no amount of batteries will save us. "This urgent, must-see movie, a full-frontal assault on our sacred cows, is guaranteed to generate anger, debate, and, hopefully, a willingness to see our survival in a new way — before it's too late.

AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said he will retire at the end of June (Warning: source paywalled; alternative source), handing leadership of one of the world's largest media and telecommunications companies to longtime deputy John Stankey. The Wall Street Journal reports: Mr. Stephenson, who turned 60 this week, has spent most of his 13 years as chairman and CEO piecing together a modern media business by scooping up DirecTV and then Time Warner, remaking the staid telephone company he inherited. He had been preparing to retire at some point in 2020 until an activist investor surfaced late last year challenging his strategy, according to people familiar with the matter.

"John will be an outstanding CEO for this company, and I couldn't be more confident or pleased in passing him the baton," Mr. Stephenson said of his successor in a video to AT&T's staff. Mr. Stankey, like the man he is succeeding, earned his stripes in the telephone business but has been a leading proponent AT&T's hard turn toward entertainment. "The entire industry is in transformation right now and that transformation extends beyond just the business model," Mr. Stankey said in a recent interview. "It's how markets and how corporations operate." Mr. Stephenson said he will remain chairman until January, when the Dallas-based company is expected to elect an independent chairman. The change was announced at AT&T's annual meeting Friday, which was held online because of the coronavirus pandemic. Earlier this morning, President Trump commented on the move. He tweeted: "Great News! Randall Stephenson, the CEO of heavily indebted AT&T, which owns and presides over Fake News @CNN, is leaving, or was forced out. Anyone who lets a garbage 'network' do and say the things that CNN does, should leave ASAP. Hopefully replacement will be much better!"

Ars Technica notes that AT&T's mobile business revenue in Q1 2020 was $42.8 billion, "down from $44.8 billion in last year's first quarter." It adds: "AT&T's WarnerMedia division, a result of Stephenson's Time Warner acquisition, reported a 12.2-percent year-over-year revenue decline and expects tough times ahead as the pandemic forced the cancellation of big sporting events and TV and film production." The company also just yesterday announced that it lost another 897,000 premium TV subscribers in Q1 2020. It looks like the new CEO will have his work cut out for him.

The ongoing coronavirus crisis has thrown the release schedule of cultural products into chaos, as now is an exceptionally bad time to drop anything that isn't a government check for lost wages. Jeremy Gordon, writing for The Outline: Our cultural producers -- movie studios, publishing houses, television networks, and so forth -- must decide whether to go ahead with previously made plans, or wait until all of this is over. The new Fast and Furious movie, for example, has been pushed back from its May 2020 release date to April 2021, in hopes that mass gatherings will be back on the table by then (maybe!) and we'll all be in a better mood to watch some big cars go boom. But as more people are driven inside for the time being, it's also true that everyone is looking for something to do at home. As a result, unconventional solutions have emerged: Last week, Universal Pictures announced it'll make several of its current film releases available to stream on-demand at home, as movie theaters around the world are being closed. Beginning Friday, movies like The Invisible Man, Emma, and The Hunt will be rentable for $19.99 apiece, with Trolls: World Tour set for a similar release.

Emma and The Invisible Man were finished products already in theaters, so Universal just had to skip the typical waiting period between when a movie is released, and when it's available for purchase. But there are so many more finished products waiting to be released in the coming weeks, which publishers may now consider delaying until a time when everyone can go back outside. While they may be reticent to promote anything in the current climate, I would submit an opposite suggestion: Release that shit. While everyone is sitting at home stewing in anxiety, people have never been more desperate for distraction. We have all become a captive audience with the free time to give that show or game a try.

Warner Bros. is has made a pact with Cinelytic to use its AI-driven project management system that was launched last year. From The Hollywood Reporter: Under the new deal, Warners will leverage the system's comprehensive data and predictive analytics to guide decision-making at the greenlight stage. The integrated online platform can assess the value of a star in any territory and how much a film is expected to make in theaters and on other ancillary streams. Founded four years ago by Tobias Queisser, Cinelytic has been building and beta testing the platform for three years. In 2018, the company raised $2.25 million from T&B Media Global and signed deals with Ingenious Media (Wind River) and Productivity Media (The Little Hours). STX, which endured a number of flops in 2019, including Playmobil and Uglydolls, became a Cinelytic client in September.

While the platform won't necessarily predict what will be the next $1 billion surprise, like Warners' hit Joker, it will reduce the amount of time executives spend on low-value, repetitive tasks and instead give them better dollar-figure parameters for packaging, marketing and distribution decisions, including release dates. The platform is particularly helpful in the festival setting, where studios get caught in bidding wars and plunk down massive sums after only hours of assessment. "The system can calculate in seconds what used to take days to assess by a human when it comes to general film package evaluation or a star's worth," says Queisser. "Artificial intelligence sounds scary. But right now, an AI cannot make any creative decisions. What it is good at is crunching numbers and breaking down huge data sets and showing patterns that would not be visible to humans. But for creative decision-making, you still need experience and gut instinct."

dryriver writes: The 2010s were not necessarily the greatest decade to live through. AAA computer games were not only DRM'd and internet tethered to death but became increasingly formulaic and pay-to-win driven, and poor quality console ports pissed off PC gamers. Forced software subscriptions for major software products you could previously buy became a thing. Personal privacy went out the window in ways too numerous to list, with lawmakers failing on many levels to regulate the tech, data-mining and internet advertising companies in any meaningful way. Severe security vulnerabilities were found in hundreds of different tech products, from Intel CPUs to baby monitors and internet-connected doorbells. Thousands of tech products shipped with microphones, cameras, and internet connectivity integration that couldn't be switched off with an actual hardware switch. Many electronics products became harder or impossible to repair yourself. Printed manuals coming with tech products became almost non-existent. Hackers, scammers, ransomwarers and identity thieves caused more mayhem than ever before. Troll farms, click farms and fake news factories damaged the integrity of the internet as an information source. Tech companies and media companies became afraid of pissing off the Chinese government.

Windows turned into a big piece of spyware. Intel couldn't be bothered to innovate until AMD Ryzen came along. Nvidia somehow took a full decade to make really basic realtime raytracing happen, even though smaller GPU maker Imagination had done it years earlier with a fraction of the budget, and in a mobile GPU to boot. Top-of-the-line smartphones became seriously expensive. Censorship and shadow banning on the once-more-open internet became a thing. Easily-triggered people trying to muzzle other people on social media became a thing. The quality of popular music and music videos went steadily downhill. Star Wars went to shit after Disney bought it, as did the Star Trek films. And mainstream cinema turned into an endless VFX-heavy comic book movies, remakes/reboots and horror movies fest. In many ways, television was the biggest winner of the 2010s, with many new TV shows with film-like production values being made. The second winner may be computer hardware that delivered more storage/memory/performance per dollar than ever before.

To the question: What, dear Slashdotters, will the 2020s bring us? Will things get better in tech and other things relevant to nerds, or will they get worse?

Harper's profiles sys-admin Chris Monteiro, who moonlights as a white-hat hacker monitoring dark web sites claiming to offer murder-for-hire services. For example, he tipped off one local police department to a $5,000 bitcoin payment someone made to try to arrange the murder of a teenaged girl on a site run by someone named "Yura". [U]sers set up an anonymous account, select from a drop-down menu the kind of violence they would like inflicted, upload the photo and address of their intended target, and wait to hear back through the messaging system. Users often have questions for Yura: How do I know you're for real? Can you make it look like an accident? When they are satisfied, the user transfers bitcoin into a special wallet on the site, where it will ostensibly be held until the job is completed. Instead, Yura takes the money immediately, and makes no attempt to complete the job. The user complains; Yura says he needs more money to hire a better hit man; the user either pays again or asks for a refund; and Yura either disappears or attempts to extort the user by threatening to turn information over to the authorities...

Despite the repulsive intent, there's an element of black comedy to some of the logs from Yura's sites. For one thing, the users' eagerness to believe the service is real leads them to ignore obvious signs that they are being scammed. Yura's marketplaces, for example, use stock photos of assassins or photos pulled from Google image searches. His poor English and poorer knowledge of U.S. geography result in glaring slipups, and the language he employs can make him sound like a customer service representative channeling a B-grade Mafia film. During the back-and-forth on one recent order, the user Happynewyear asked Yura if he could send hit men to Hawaii. "Yes," Yura responded, "we have someone in a nearby state. He can drive to the location with a stolen car and do the job with no problems." Overlooking the fact that the nearest state is 2,500 miles and a considerable swath of the Pacific Ocean away, the user paid him around three thousand dollars.

Reading through the kill orders, it's easy to spot the online disinhibition effect -- the psychologist John Suler's theory of why and how human behavior changes when we log on... So far, according to Monteiro, eight people have been arrested for ordering murders through Yura's websites, on the basis of evidence Monteiro passed to law enforcement. One of them, a young Californian named Beau Brigham, had paid less than $5 toward a hit on his stepmother. Nevertheless, he was found guilty of soliciting murder and sentenced to three years in prison.
One attempted murder was arranged by a man described as "an I.T. professional and elder in the United Church of God," raising an adopted teenaged son with his wife Amy. "[H]e'd been arranging affairs through the infidelity website Ashley Madison but could not consider divorce because of his position in the church." In the end he'd simply carried out the murder himself, but "His exchanges with Yura would prove central to the state's investigation into Amy's death: the bitcoin signature of the payment...matched the key that authorities found on Stephen's hard drive at home. Stephen had attempted to make the death look like a suicide, and the bitcoin key was proof it was not. In January 2018, he was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison."

The article's author, Brian Merchant, writes that it was hard to research. "There is no easy way to say, 'Hello, I found your name on a kill list on the dark net, and while the site is a scam the order is not; someone you likely know wants you dead badly enough to pay thousands of dollars to an impossibly shady website. Give me a ring back anytime'... Of those I was able to contact, about half said they had never been alerted by the police." (Though Monteiro says America's Department of Homeland Services now plans to investigate everyone who's made transactions on Yura's site.)

The article also notes the first known instance of a murder ordered on the dark web and then successfully carried out -- this March, on a different dark web site.

Wang Xuepu, vice president of Chinese online video streaming company iQiyi, says that artificial intelligence has enhanced the company's efficiency in all aspects of the business. From a report: "Now we can cut thousands of hours of work to just hours," Wang said in Mandarin at CNBC's East Tech West conference in the Nansha district of Guangzhou, China. He said that the company is using AI across its business like adding subtitles or integrating multimedia more quickly. Wang added AI has increased efficiency in the company's operations in many ways, including content creation, approval processes and market distribution. "iQiyi embodies the culture of Silicon Valley and culture of Hollywood. We really put an emphasis on technology development. More than half of our employees work in the technical side. We have invested in AI significantly. More than 60% of our patent submissions this year were related AI," said Wang. Wang said, for example, iQiyi has been able to predict the popularity of films and TV shows before taking them online by using big data. "We can use AI to help forecast film and TV series' viewer numbers before they are aired. With the data, we can predict the traffic and for TV series and that accuracy rate is 88%, with films we can reach near 90% accuracy," he said, according to a CNBC translation.

For an actor who made a career by playing silly characters, actor Sacha Baron Cohen gave yesterday one of the most eloquent and convincing speeches in a long time in support of cracking down on large social media networks to prevent the spread of lies and hate speech that these platforms allow. From a report: While accepting his award, Cohen touched on the role companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have played in spreading lies and hate speech online, calling the sites "the greatest propaganda machine in history." Below is a short summary of his main talking points. Cohen called Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others -- the biggest propaganda machine in history. He coined the term "Silicon Six" to describe the six US billionaires that control this machine -- naming Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sundar Pichai at Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Alphabet, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube, and Jack Dorsey at Twitter. The actor ripped Zuckerberg for defending holocaust deniers.

He ripped Zuckerberg for his platform facilitating Russia's interference in US elections. He ripped Zuckerberg for facilitating the Myanmar genocide. Said if another genocide takes place, Zuckerberg needs to go to jail. Cohen ripped Facebook for allowing political ads. Said if Facebook existed in the 1930s they would have allowed Hitler to post "post 30-second ads on his 'solution' to the 'Jewish problem'." Cohen likened the Christchurch massacre video to "a snuff film broadcast by social media." He said social media sites are today's largest publishers, and should have to abide to the same standards that newspapers, radio, and TV stations abide. He agreed that social media should function based on government-mandated rules, and not by internal policies set by billionaires more focused on protecting share prices than human life. He called "for regulation and legislation to curb the greed of these high-tech robber barons."

With TVs now delivering images faster than movies, TV manufacturers have tried to make up for that discrepancy via a digital process called motion smoothing. Whether you've realized it or not, you've likely watched a movie in motion smoothing, as it's now the default setting on most TVs sold in the United States. Bilge Ebiri from Vulture says that while this feature was well-intentioned, "most people hate it." He argues: "Motion smoothing transforms an absorbing movie or narrative TV show into something uncanny. The very texture of what you're watching changes. The drama onscreen reads as manufactured, and everyone moves like they're on a daytime soap -- which is why it's sometimes called the 'soap-opera effect.' In other words, motion smoothing is fundamentally ruining the way we experience film." From the report: Motion smoothing is unquestionably a compromised way of watching films and TV shows, which are meticulously crafted to look and feel the way they do. But its creeping influence is so pervasive that at the Cannes Film Festival this May -- the same Cannes Film Festival that so valorizes the magic of the theatrical experience and has been feuding with Netflix for the past two years -- the fancy official monitors throughout the main festival venue had left motion smoothing on.

That seems like a funny oversight, but it's not surprising. "There are a lot of things turned on with these TVs out of the box that you have to turn off," says Claudio Ciacci, lead TV tester for Consumer Reports, who makes sure to switch smoothing off on the sets he evaluates. "It's meant to create a little bit of eye candy in the store that makes customers think, at first glance, Hey, look at that picture, it really pops. But when you finally have it at home, it's really not suitable." He notes that most people don't fiddle much with their settings because motion smoothing isn't easy to find on a TV menu. (It's also called something different depending on the manufacturer.) Which gets to the heart of the problem: As more and more people watch movies at home instead of in theaters, most won't bother trying to see the film as it was intended to be seen without the digital "enhancements" mucking it up. "Once people get used to something, they get complacent and that becomes what's normal," Morano says. And what films were supposed to look like will be lost. Mark Henninger, editor of the online tech community AVSForum, suggests TV manufacturers "just put a couple of buttons on the remote that are direct surface level -- TV, movie, sports, or whatever." The industry's reluctance, he says, has as much to do with uncertainty as anything else. "Manufacturers don't know who to listen to. They don't know if it should be the reviewers, their own quality-assurance lab, or user complaints."

MoviePass, the long-embattled film subscription service, has shut down for "several weeks" in order to complete work on an updated version of its app and to recapitalize for when the service relaunches. From a report: "There's never a good time to have to do this," MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe said in a statement, "but to complete the improved version of our app, one that we believe will provide a much better experience for our subscribers, it has to be done." Lowe's statement promised "an enhanced technology platform, which is in the final stages of completion," in the upcoming app. The service shut down on July 4th at 5AM ET, and MoviePass has not announced when it will come back online. During this period, MoviePass will not accept new sign-ups, and existing subscribers will not be charged while the service is offline. Subscribers will also be automatically credited for the downtime once the service is back online.

An anonymous reader quotes Slate: The overall argument of Billion Dollar Bully, the new documentary about Yelp released on Amazon and iTunes in May, is that Yelp extorts small business owners for advertising fees in return for helping to manage and improve reviews on their platform... Yelp has fought back against the allegations made in the film, arguing that "There has never been a connection between ratings and reviews on Yelp and buying advertising...." But the issue for small business owners has always been broader than advertising: Local businesses feel that Yelp offers no due process to resolve disputes and misunderstandings. That's because the company's standard position is to absolve itself of any responsibility to get involved....

Yelp is combating the claims made in the film by purchasing the domain BillionDollarBully.com and redirecting it to a Yelp page that explains that the company does not extort local businesses to manipulate ratings.
The Hustle argues that despite "legions" of anecdotal evidence from business owners, "the linkage between these two things ultimately can't be proven without transparency around Yelp's filtering algorithm." This is apparently leaving some restauranteurs feeling powerless and angry: In isolated bids to circumvent the "oppression" of online reviews, business owners have plunked "NO YELPERS" signs in their windows, shamed rude reviewers on Instagram, and launched anti-Yelp websites. Dan Neves, a waiter at a fine dining establishment in Austin, Texas, created YELP BULLIES EXPOSED, a private Facebook group that tracks down rude Yelpers and sends them a one-pound bag of animal feces... "I've had friends get fired over bad Yelp reviews, even if the review was untrue," says Neves.
ReviewFraud.org investigated the people interviewed for the documentary, and suggested that in some cases the real victims may be Yelp's unsuspecting reviewers. "A few negative reviewers claimed that the owner harassed them or contacted their employer to have them fired." Billion Dollar Bully raised money on Kickstarter. I was excited to see this film see the light of day. Sadly, I was disappointed... not all businesses are good, not all business owners are reputable, and not all pieces of investigative "journalism" are credible. Had the filmmakers taken a closer look at these business and other review platforms, I doubt that this movie would have been made. I've made that clear by looking at the reviews of those claiming extortion. For me, this was a massive failure and should be titled A Billion Dollar Scapegoat.

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

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

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

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

More changes are coming to review site Rotten Tomatoes. As of Thursday, the audience score for new movies added to the site will default to show ratings from fans confirmed to have purchased tickets to those films. From a report: "The goal is to strengthen consumer confidence around that audience score," said Greg Ferris, vice president of product for Rotten Tomatoes' parent company, Fandango. Here's how it'll work: Any site user will still be able to write a review of a film. But now users can opt to have their rating and review marked as "verified." That means they bought their film ticket on Fandango, the movie-ticketing site that owns Rotten Tomatoes. Later this year, AMC Theatres and Regal and Cinemark ticketing sites will also be participating. So if you buy your ticket for Aladdin at the box office, for example, sorry, but you can't get verified for that review. (At least for now: Dana Benson, Fandango vice president for communications, says that the site is "exploring options" for ways to verify box office purchases.)

Reviews associated with a ticket purchase will be marked with a "verified" icon. By default, the verified reviews will be used to make up the audience score shown on Rotten Tomatoes. To see the total audience score, including reviews by those who didn't purchase through Fandango or didn't opt in to the verification, users can select the "all audience" tab. "Every rating counts, but the score that we're putting out there is verified," Ferris said. The Rotten Tomatoes site will automatically verify that a ticket was purchased and that the time for that movie showing has already passed. For now, only one verified review will be allowed per transaction, no matter how many tickets were purchased.

The Academy of Motion Picture and Arts and Sciences has ruled that films from streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video will continue to be eligible to win Academy Awards. The Academy had considered changing Rule Two, which allowed any film to be eligible for an Academy Award as long as it had a seven-day run in a Los Angeles theater. From a report: That proposal, reportedly pushed by megadirector Steven Spielberg, would have made it difficult for streaming services such as Netflix to compete for the academy's big prizes by restricting eligibility to just films that got a significant run in theaters. Films that debuted online and only got a limited theatrical release simply would be out of luck. But when the academy's board of governors released its rules for next year's prize -- a book that runs to 35 pages, all told -- the would-be changes were not among them. "We support the theatrical experience as integral to the art of motion pictures, and this weighed heavily in our discussions," John Bailey, president of the academy, said in a statement released Tuesday night. "Our rules currently require theatrical exhibition, and also allow for a broad selection of films to be submitted for Oscars consideration." Further reading: Justice Department Warns Academy About Changing Oscar Rules To Exclude Streaming.

The Justice Department has warned the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that its potential rule changes limiting the eligibility of Netflix and other streaming services for the Oscars could raise antitrust concerns and violate competition law. From the report: According to a letter obtained by Variety, the chief of the DOJ's Antitrust Division, Makan Delrahim, wrote to AMPAS CEO Dawn Hudson on March 21 to express concerns that new rules would be written "in a way that tends to suppress competition." "In the event that the Academy -- an association that includes multiple competitors in its membership -- establishes certain eligibility requirements for the Oscars that eliminate competition without procompetitive justification, such conduct may raise antitrust concerns," Delrahim wrote. The letter came in response to reports that Steven Spielberg, an Academy board member, was planning to push for rules changes to Oscars eligibility, restricting movies that debut on Netflix and other streaming services around the same time that they show in theaters. Netflix made a big splash at the Oscars this year, as the movie "Roma" won best director, best foreign language film and best cinematography.

Delrahim cited Section 1 of the Sherman Act that "prohibits anticompetitive agreements among competitors." "Accordingly, agreements among competitors to exclude new competitors can violate the antitrust laws when their purpose or effect is to impede competition by goods or services that consumers purchase and enjoy but which threaten the profits of incumbent firms," Delrahim wrote. He added, "if the Academy adopts a new rule to exclude certain types of films, such as films distributed via online streaming services, from eligibility for the Oscars, and that exclusion tends to diminish the excluded films' sales, that rule could therefore violate Section 1." An Academy spokesperson said, "We've received a letter from the Dept. of Justice and have responded accordingly. The Academy's Board of Governors will meet on April 23 for its annual awards rules meeting, where all branches submit possible updates for consideration."