Anker's popular Eufy-branded security cameras appear to be sending some data to the cloud, even when cloud storage is disabled and local only storage settings are turned on. MacRumors reports: The information comes from security consultant Paul Moore, who last week published a video outlining the issue. According to Moore, he purchased a Eufy Doorbell Dual, which was meant to be a device that stored video recording on device. He found that Eufy is uploading thumbnail images of faces and user information to its cloud service when cloud functionality is not enabled. Moore demonstrates the unauthorized cloud uploading by allowing his camera to capture his image and turning off the Eufy HomeBase. The website is still able to access the content through cloud integration, though he had not signed up for cloud service, and it remains accessible even when the footage is removed from the Eufy app. It's important to note that Eufy does not appear to be automatically uploading full streaming video to the cloud, but rather taking captures of the video as thumbnails.

The thumbnails are used in the Eufy app to activate streaming video from the Eufy base station, allowing Eufy users to watch their videos when away from home, as well as for sending rich notifications. The problem is the thumbnails are uploaded to the cloud automatically even when the cloud functionality is not active, and Eufy also seems to be using facial recognition on the uploads. Some users have taken issue with the unauthorized cloud uploads because Eufy advertises local-only service and has been popular among those who want a more private camera solution. "No Clouds or Costs," reads the Eufy website. Moore suggests that Eufy is also able to link facial recognition data collected from two separate cameras and two separate apps to users, all without camera owners being aware.

Moore received a response from Eufy in which Eufy confirmed that it is uploading event lists and thumbnails to AWS, but said the data is not able to "leak to the public" because the URL is restricted, time limited, and requires account login. There is also another issue that Moore has highlighted, suggesting Eufy camera streams can be watched live using an app like VLC, but little information on the exploit is available at this time. Moore said that unencrypted Eufy camera content can be accessed without authentication, which is alarming for Eufy users. There's a dedicated Reddit thread where other Eufy users are reporting the same thing happening.

A paper describing MineDojo, Nvidia's generalist AI agent that can perform actions from written prompts in Minecraft, won an Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Paper Award at the 2022 NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference, Nvidia revealed on Monday. Ars Technica reports: To train the MineDojo framework to play Minecraft, researchers fed it 730,000 Minecraft YouTube videos (with more than 2.2 billion words transcribed), 7,000 scraped webpages from the Minecraft wiki, and 340,000 Reddit posts and 6.6 million Reddit comments describing Minecraft gameplay. From this data, the researchers created a custom transformer model called MineCLIP that associates video clips with specific in-game Minecraft activities. As a result, someone can tell a MineDojo agent what to do in the game using high-level natural language, such as "find a desert pyramid" or "build a nether portal and enter it," and MineDojo will execute the series of steps necessary to make it happen in the game.

MineDojo aims to create a flexible agent that can generalize learned actions and apply them to different behaviors in the game. As Nvidia writes, "While researchers have long trained autonomous AI agents in video-game environments such as StarCraft, Dota, and Go, these agents are usually specialists in only a few tasks. So Nvidia researchers turned to Minecraft, the world's most popular game, to develop a scalable training framework for a generalist agent "one that can successfully execute a wide variety of open-ended tasks." The award-winning paper debuted in June.

You can see examples of MineDojo in action on its official website, and the code for MineDojo and MineCLIP is available on GitHub.

Long-time Slashdot reader gordm shares an interesting video from the United Nations Climate Change Conference. "At COP27, Tobias Holle (activist with Youth Strike for Climate) debated Mark Nelson (founder of Radiant Energy Fund) as to whether nuclear power can help us tackle climate change."

The event took place at the International Atomic Energy Agency's "Atoms for Climate" pavillion, where the IAEA's climate advisor presented the debate's topic as "Nuclear Energy: Climate Friend or Foe?" (and introduced the two debaters as "enthusiastic young climate champions"). The Youth Strike for Climate activist objected to commiting humanity to 1 million years of maintaining nuclear waste. But he also argued that extreme weather was creating additional security risks, that the per-kilowatt hour cost was economically prohibitive, that nuclear plants were politically unpopular — and that anyways, they take too long to build given our current climate crisis. "We need fast solutions."

The Radiant Energy founder disagreed, arguing over specific statistics and insisting that nuclear energy should be considered a low-carbon energy solution, and also safe. (He pointed out that Chernobyl's nuclear plant actually continued operating for 14 years after its 1986 nuclear accident.) Interestingly he also argued that in the Netherlands there's a museum of nuclear waste — a science museum attached to their nuclear facility — "where they don't just have the high-level waste, they have the highest part of high-level waste, the most dangerous isotopes, separated from the nuclear fuel. The most radioactive stuff — very hot for 500 years — and they have a tour where you can walk over it, and you can feel the warmth from the floor from the radioactive isotopes....

"You can absolutely manage the safe, secure, and even educational storage of the most radioactive isotopes... We know very well how to manage it."

A new map of the universe displays for the first time the span of the entire known cosmos with pinpoint accuracy and sweeping beauty. Phys.Org reports: Created by Johns Hopkins University astronomers with data mined over two decades by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the map allows the public to experience data previously only accessible to scientists. The interactive map, which depicts the actual position and real colors of 200,000 galaxies, is available online, where it can also be downloaded for free.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a pioneering effort to capture the night sky through a telescope based in New Mexico. Night after night for years, the telescope aimed at slightly different locations to capture this unusually broad perspective. The map, which [map creator Brice Manard] assembled with the help of former Johns Hopkins computer science student Nikita Shtarkman, visualizes a slice of the universe, or about 200,000 galaxies -- each dot on the map is a galaxy and each galaxy contains billions of stars and planets. The Milky Way is simply one of these dots, the one at the very bottom of the map.

The expansion of the universe contributes to make this map even more colorful. The farther an object, the redder it appears. The top of the map reveals the first flash of radiation emitted soon after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. "In this map, we are just a speck at the very bottom, just one pixel. And when I say we, I mean our galaxy, the Milky Way which has billions of stars and planets," Manard says. "We are used to seeing astronomical pictures showing one galaxy here, one galaxy there or perhaps a group of galaxies. But what this map shows is a very, very different scale." For those interested, Johns Hopkins University published a video about the map on YouTube.

1Password has announced that passkey support will be available to its customers in "early 2023," allowing users to securely log in to apps and websites without a password. The Verge reports: Passkeys are a passwordless login technology developed by the FIDO Alliance, whose members include most of the Big Tech companies. The tech allows users to replace traditional passwords with their device's own authentication -- such as an iPhone with Face ID -- offering greater security and protection since there's no password to steal or accidentally hand over via a phishing attack.

1Password claims its own variation, called Universal Sign On, will be superior to others by supporting multiple platforms and cross-platform syncing when it launches next year. By contrast, passkey support through companies like Apple is only built to seamlessly synchronize access on devices within the same ecosystem. A live demonstration of how passkeys will work is available for 1Password users using the latest version of its Chrome browser extension, alongside a video demo for those not using the service and a directory listing which websites, apps, and services are using passkeys for authentication. 1Password will bring full support for passkeys to its browser extension and desktop apps in early 2023, with mobile support to follow.

YouTube is ramping up its push into ecommerce by introducing shopping features to the world's biggest videos site, seeking to diversify revenue streams during a slowdown in digital advertising. From a report: The platform, a division of Google parent Alphabet, has introduced the new function to Shorts, YouTube's short-form video offering that was launched in 2020 to compete against the popularity of fast-growing rival TikTok. This will mean users will be able to buy products as they scroll through videos. YouTube is also testing new commission schemes for influencers who sell products through links in videos, as it battles to hold on to its so-called creators -- users who make content on YouTube -- against fierce competition from rivals.

"Our goal is to focus on the best monetisation opportunities for creators in the market," Michael Martin, YouTube Shopping's general manager, told the Financial Times in his first interview since joining the company six months ago. YouTube's expansion of its shopping features comes as tech groups rush to diversify their revenue streams in response to a slowing economy and a depressed digital advertising market. At Alphabet's last earnings, YouTube's ad sales revenue declined and missed analyst estimates for the first time since the parent company started reporting its performance separately in 2020.

According to The Verge, Volkswagen Norway as part of a marketing exercise "claims to have built an office chair that not only looks worthy of a Star Trek captain but also can drive around the office on its own five wheels -- at speeds of up to 20 kilometers per hour (roughly 12mph)." From the report: The company says it can travel a distance of 12 kilometers (roughly 7.5 miles) on its swappable battery. That's not all: it's got more amenities than my last car, with 360-degree collision avoidance sensors, a backup camera with full guidance, a heated embroidered seat, party lights, a touchscreen display, a USB charger, and a tow hitch. LED headlights, a seatbelt, and a horn come standard. There's even a "trunk" (a pocket, anyhow) with 0.17 cubic feet of space for documents and / or a laptop. The company has uploaded a behind-the-scenes video on YouTube on how it was created, including some footage of the final product that "will be available for test drives at various locations."

In 2004 NBC's news show "Dateline" began airing "To Catch a Predator" segments, in which a vigilante group posed online as minors to lure sex predators into in-person meetings — where they were then arrested by police.

The New Yorker looks at its cultural impact: Although there were only twenty episodes of the series, in three years, it's "this touchstone that I grew up with and that millions of people grew up with," Paul Renfro, a professor of history at Florida State University and the author of "Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State," said. "It shaped how people think about sexual violence in ways that we haven't fully grappled with." The show focussed on the threat from strangers on the Internet, even though most victims of child sexual abuse are harmed by someone known to them. "On the show, it's not the family, it's not priests or rabbis or other authority figures who pose a threat to children, it's this devious stranger," Renfro said. The show's influence helped spur the passage of the Adam Walsh Act, in 2006, which created publicly searchable databases of people convicted of certain sex crimes. (There's little evidence that sex-offender registries have been effective at reducing sexual offenses.)
But today, "amateur predator hunting has come back into style," the article notes, citing the proliferation of online groups. "Recently, the Washington Post found more than a hundred and sixty, which have been responsible for nearly a thousand stings this year."

And then the New Yorker interviewed a woman named Cam, who with her husband and her brother-in-law decided to form "the Permian Basin Predator Patrol" — broadcasting their sting operations and humiliations of potential perpetrators on YouTube: [S]oon after the channel started drawing attention, they were called to a meeting at the Odessa Police Department. According to Cam, officers made it clear that they disapproved of their activities. "We were told we can't be involved with them, and that we can't send them anything directly," she said. "One, we're endangering ourselves, and, two, we're giving them more work — that's what it seemed like they were saying."

"We are very mindful of not trying to entrap a suspect," Lieutenant Brad Cline, who works in the Odessa Police Department's Crimes Against Persons Unit, said. "Taking a predator into custody can be very dangerous as well."
The article points out that "To Catch a Predator" was cancelled when Texas man Bill Conradt decided not to follow-up on his online messages — but "When a SWAT team burst into his house, trailed by a camera crew, Conradt shot himself."

So what did Cam's group do when the Odessa Police Department declined their help? The Permian Basin Predator Patrol continued to make videos. If she couldn't contribute to an arrest, Cam thought, at least she could get the word out to the public. She became an expert at figuring out the identities of the men she was chatting with, even when they used fake names.... Sometimes she'd find a man's family on Facebook and send his mother screenshots of the obscene messages he'd sent, or call his employer. "I believe three of them have been let go from their jobs," she said.

A sting by the Predator Catchers Indianapolis led to a man's conviction for child solicitation.... Although YouTube's predator hunters tend to portray themselves as the unequivocal good guys (Cam is an exception — most are men), their track record is more mixed.... The Ohio-based group Dads Against Predators has reportedly been banned from local grocery stores for causing disturbances. In 2018, a twenty-year-old in Connecticut hanged himself after a confrontation with a predator-hunter group. One video by the Permian Basin Predator Patrol ends with a man weeping, then running into traffic. (Cam said that she asked police to perform a welfare check on him, but she's not sure if it occurred.)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In late October, a Swedish software engineer named Linus Akesson unveiled a playable accordion -- called "The Commodordion" -- he crafted out of two vintage Commodore 64 computers connected with a bellows made of floppy disks taped together. A demo of the hack debuted in an 11-minute YouTube video where Akesson plays a Scott Joplin ragtime song and details the instrument's creation.

A fair amount of custom software engineering and hardware hackery went into making the Commodordion possible, as Akesson lays out in a post on his website. It builds off of earlier projects (that he says were intentionally leading up to this one), such as the Sixtyforgan (a C64 with spring reverb and a chromatic accordion key layout) and Qwertuoso, a program that allows live playing of the C64's famous SID sound chip.

So how does the Commodordion work? Akesson wired up a custom power supply, and when he flips the unit on, both Commodore 64 machines boot (no display necessary). Next, he loads custom music software he wrote from a Commodore Datasette emulator board into each machine. A custom mixer circuit board brings together the audio signals from the two units and measures input from the bellows to control the volume level of the sound output. The bellows, composed of many 5.25-inch floppy disks cut and taped into shape, emit air through a hole when squeezed. A microphone mounted just outside that hole translates the noise it hears into an audio envelope that manipulates the sound output to match. The Commodordion itself does not have speakers but instead outputs its electronic audio through a jack.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Darin Fisher has built a lot of web browsers. A lot of web browsers. He was a software engineer at Netscape early in his career, working on Navigator and then helping turn that app into Firefox with Mozilla. Then, he went to Google and spent 16 years building Chrome and ChromeOS into massively successful products. Last year, he left Google for Neeva, where he worked on ways to build a browser around the startup's search engine. And now, he's leaving Neeva to join The Browser Company and work on Arc, one of the hottest new browsers on the market. Arc, which has been in an invite-only beta for more than a year, is trying to rethink the whole browser UI. It has a sidebar instead of a row of tabs, offers a lot of personalization options, and is meant for people who live their computing life in a browser (which is increasingly most people). CEO Josh Miller often talks about building "the internet computer," too, and using the browser as a way to make the internet more useful.

Fisher has been an advisor to The Browser Company for a while, but Monday is his first official day at the company as a software engineer. Ahead of his new gig, Fisher and I got on a call to talk about why he thinks browsers are due for a reinvention -- and why he thinks a startup is the best place to do it. The answer starts with the browser's defining feature: tabs. Fisher doesn't hate tabs -- in fact, he helped popularize them. But he hates that using a modern browser involves opening a million of them, not being able to find them again, and eventually just giving up and starting all over again. "I remember when tabbed browsing was novel," Fisher says, "and helped people feel less cluttered because you don't have as many windows." But now, "even when I use Chrome," Fisher says, "I get a bunch of clutter. At some point, I just say, 'Forget it, I'm not even going to bother trying to sort through all these tabs. If it's important, I'll open it again.'" Browsers need better systems for helping you manage tabs, not just open more of them.

The best way to improve the browser, Fisher ultimately decided, is to just start from scratch. Arc is full of new ideas about how web browsers can work: it combines bookmarks and tabs into one app switcher-like concept; it makes it easy to search among your open tabs; it has built-in tools for taking notes and making shareable mini websites. The experience can be jarring because it's so different, but Fisher says that's part of what he's excited about. "This is not stuff people haven't talked about before," he says, "but actually putting it together and focusing on it and thinking about the small steps that go a long way, I think that's where there's so much opportunity." Fisher likes to compare a browser to an operating system, which matches with The Browser Company's idea that Arc isn't just a browser but rather an iOS-like system for the open web. "It has task management UI, it has UI for creating and starting a journey, but there's so much more in between," he says. What the iPhone did for native apps, Arc hopes to do for web apps. Fisher says he's interested in improving the way files move around the internet, for instance, finding a better way than the constant downloading and uploading we all do all day. He likes that Arc has a picture-in-picture mode that works by default, pulling your YouTube video out when you switch tabs. All these make the web feel more connected and cohesive rather than just a bunch of tabs in a horizontal line. The Browser Company also plans to reinvent the internet browser for mobile, too. On mobile, in particular, he says, "there are so many opportunities because the starting point is so archaic."

"He's vague on the details of his plans -- and The Browser Company hasn't really started working on a mobile browser yet anyway -- but says that's a big focus for him going forward," adds The Verge.

"A pair of pranksters posing as laid-off Twitter employees tricked multiple media outlets Friday as the public anxiously awaited news on whether Elon Musk had begun axing staffers," reports the New York Post: CNBC's Deirdre Bosa interviewed two people who identified themselves as Twitter employees and were seen near the company's San Francisco headquarters carrying cardboard boxes.

Skepticism immediately emerged on social media. One of the pranksters said his name was "Rahul Ligma" — a reference to a popular internet meme — and held a copy of Michelle Obama's book "Becoming" aloft while speaking to reporters. The other said his name was "Daniel Johnson."

CNBC, Bloomberg, the Daily Mail and NBC were among the outlets that reported layoffs were underway after the duo spoke to the media.... "It's happening," CNBC's Bosa tweeted. Entire team of data engineers let go. These are two of them."

"They are visibly shaken," Bosa added. "Daniel tells us he owns a Tesla and doesn't know how he's going to make payments...."

Twitter employees have feared for months that Musk would enact sweeping layoffs at the company once his $44 billion takeover was complete. Those fears escalated last week after the Washington Post reported Musk was planning to cut 75% of Twitter's 7,500-employee workforce. Musk immediately fired several executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, but it's still unclear how many employees will be ousted. He denied the 75% figure was accurate while meeting with Twitter employees earlier this week.

A source familiar with the situation told the Post that Twitter employees feel as though they're "in limbo," with no one having a clear idea of how many layoffs are coming. "People are just keeping their heads down until they see what happens," the source said. The source added that remaining employees are fearful about speaking to the media now that Musk has assumed control of the company. "Folks don't want to get fired for leaking," the source said.
You can still watch video footage of the pranksters' interview on Reuters' official feed on YouTube (headlined "LIVE: Outside Twitter's San Francisco HQ after Elon Musk takes over")

The Verge spotted the footage — and then added that "Since we're doing this, here are some other ridiculous things said by Ligma and his box-bearing associate." "It makes me worry about the future of our democracy... the future of celebrity conservatorship. I mean, when Britney [Spears] happened...."

"I even own a Tesla, man. I'm a big fan of clean energy, climate change, even free speech too."
Elon Musk — who has changed the title on his Twitter profile to "chief Twit" — responded Friday afternoon to the brouhaha, tweeting "Ligma Johnson had it coming."

Earlier in the day, Musk had tweeted "Let the good times roll" and "Comedy is now legal on Twitter."

On a more serious note, Musk also tweeted Friday that Twitter "will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes."

"It might be a while before you can buy a 'Roomba for laundry'," jokes Slashdot reader Tony Isaac, pointing out that "while robots have been developed that can fold specific types of laundry, there's still not a good robot that can do the job quickly, or for all types."

But NPR reports laundry-folding robots are getting closer: As NPR has reported, machines need clear rules in order to function, and it's hard for them to figure out what exactly is going on in those messy piles That's not to say that it's completely impossible. University of California, Berkeley professor Pieter Abbeel spent years teaching a robot how to fold a towel, eventually cutting that process down from 20 minutes to a whopping minute and a half.

And Silicon Valley-based company FoldiMate raised hopes and eyebrows when it showed off a prototype of its eponymous laundry-folding robot at the Consumer Electronics Show in early 2019. It said the machine could fold some 25 pieces of laundry — except for small items like socks and large items like sheets — in under five minutes, with an estimated price tag of $980. It's unclear what happened to that company — its website is down and it hasn't tweeted since April 2020. Its sole competitor, a Japanese company with an AI-powered prototype, filed for bankruptcy.

In sum, most robots have not generally been equipped for the task. But an international group of researchers say their new method could change that — or at least speed up the process. Researchers are calling the new method, SpeedFolding. It's a "reliable and efficient bimanual system" — meaning it involves two hands — that's able to smooth and fold a crumpled garment in record speed (for robots, that is). SpeedFolding can fold 30 to 40 strewn-about garments per hour, compared to previous models that averaged three to six garments in that same time span, according to researchers. They say their robot can fold items in under two minutes, with a success rate of 93%.

"Real-world experiments show that the system is able to generalize to unseen garments of different color, shape, and stiffness," they add.
According to the article, the team will be presenting their paper at a robotics conference in Kyoto this month, and they've also posted a one-minute video on YouTube. (Their solution involves both an overhead camera and a novel neural network called BiManual Manipulation Network that "studied 4,300 human and machine-assisted actions in order to learn how to smooth and fold garments from a random configuration."

"While researchers describe SpeedFolding as a significant improvement, it's not likely to hit the market anytime soon," notes NPR. "For one, Ars Technica tracked down a robot similar to the one they used and found that it retails for $58,000."

Disinformation has "metastasized" since experts began raising alarms about the threat, reports the New York Times.

"Despite years of efforts by the media, by academics and even by social media companies themselves to address the problem, it is arguably more pervasive and widespread today." Not long ago, the fight against disinformation focused on the major social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. When pressed, they often removed troubling content, including misinformation and intentional disinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, however, there are dozens of new platforms, including some that pride themselves on not moderating — censoring, as they put it — untrue statements in the name of free speech....

The purveyors of disinformation have also become increasingly sophisticated at sidestepping the major platforms' rules, while the use of video to spread false claims on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram has made them harder for automated systems to track than text.... A report last month by NewsGuard, an organization that tracks the problem online, showed that nearly 20 percent of videos presented as search results on TikTok contained false or misleading information on topics such as school shootings and Russia's war in Ukraine. "People who do this know how to exploit the loopholes," said Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook who now leads Anchor Change, a strategic consultancy.

With the [U.S.] midterm elections only weeks away, the major platforms have all pledged to block, label or marginalize anything that violates company policies, including disinformation, hate speech or calls to violence. Still, the cottage industry of experts dedicated to countering disinformation — think tanks, universities and nongovernment organizations — say the industry is not doing enough. The Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University warned last month, for example, that the major platforms continued to amplify "election denialism" in ways that undermined trust in the democratic system.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A good fall TV run comes to an end on Sunday when HBO airs its House of the Dragon season one finale, a week or so after Amazon wrapped up the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The shows aren't done yet providing content, though. Both Amazon and HBO offer companion podcasts to keep fans engaged, and both devised wildly different approaches for their audio. The podcasts offer behind-the-scenes chats with cast and crew and strive to become the definitive place to hear conversations around their respective programming. The shows' similarities end there, however.

HBO, for example, released three episodes of The Official Game of Thrones Podcast: House of the Dragon before the actual TV series aired, choosing to hype listeners up for the debut through an interview George R.R. Martin, as well as an "everything we know"-style show. Since then, the program has been released weekly alongside new episodes of the series on Sunday evenings. Michael Gluckstadt, director of podcasts for HBO and HBO Max, says the podcast will continue even after the series breaks between seasons. "There's no end date for this in sight," he said, which is atypical for podcasts the network has released in the past, including for Succession and The Gilded Age. [...] The podcast is available on all platforms, as well as on YouTube and the HBO Max app.

Meanwhile, Amazon didn't release any episodes of its The Official The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Podcast until the season finale. Marshall Lewy, chief content officer at Amazon's Wondery, said the team wanted the streaming series to "speak for itself." Wondery has created companion podcasts before, namely for its own podcasts that were adapted for streaming, like Dr. Death and WeCrashed, but this marks the first time the team has worked in coordination with an Amazon series. "This is really our first opportunity to do a partnership like this connected to Prime Video," Lewy said. The podcast now receives front-and-center promotion ahead of each streaming video episode, which is the first time the coveted space has promoted something other than a Prime video series, he said. A promotion for The Official The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Podcast that surfaces on Prime Video. The podcast is only available on Amazon Music, the Wondery app and Audible, a critical difference from HBO's strategy. Lewy said this decision made sense given that anyone watching the show is a Prime subscriber and can freely access Amazon Music. "The effort put into these podcasts not only speaks to the need to increase fan engagement with the programming but to create an ongoing dialogue with viewers so they don't drop off from season to season," writes Bloomberg's Ashley Carman. "A person's podcast time likely differs from their streaming time, which in theory minimizes the risk of cannibalizing the hours that viewers could be spending on other Amazon or HBO series."

"The video services want more than just sixty minutes of their viewers' attention once a week -- they want to be a part of their day and part of their conversations with friends for as long as possible."

Wikipedia describes Homestar Runner as "a blend of surreal humour, self-parody, and references to popular culture, in particular video games, classic television, and popular music." But after launching in 2000, the web-based cartoon became a cultural phenomenon, co-creator Mike Chapman remembered in 2017: On the same day we received a demo of a song that John Linnell from They Might Be Giants recorded for a Strong Bad Email and a full-size working Tom Servo puppet from Jim Mallon from Mystery Science Theater 3000.... The Homestar references in the Buffy and Angel finales forever ago were huge. And there was this picture of Joss Whedon in a Strong Bad shirt from around that time that someone sent us that we couldn't believe. Years later, a photo of Geddy Lee from Rush wearing a Strong Bad hat on stage circulated which similarly freaked us out. We have no idea if he knew what Strong Bad was, but our dumb animal character was on his head while he probably shredded 'Working Man' so I'll take it!
After a mutli-year hiatus starting around 2009, the site has only been updating sporadically — and some worried that the end of Flash also meant the end of the Flash-based cartoon and its web site altogether. But on the day Flash Player was officially discontinued — December 31st, 2020 — a "post-Flash update" appeared at HomestarRunner.com: What happened our website? Flash is finally dead-dead-dead so something drastic had to be done so people could still watch their favorite cartoons and sbemails with super-compressed mp3 audio and hidden clicky-clicky easter eggs...!

[O]nce you click "come on in," you'll find yourself in familiar territory thanks to the Ruffle Project. It emulates Flash in such a way that all browsers and devices can finally play our cartoons and even some games.... Your favorite easter eggs are still hidden and now you can even choose to watch a YouTube version if there is one.

Keep in mind, Ruffle is still in development so not everything works perfectly. Games made after, say 2007, will probably be pretty janky but Ruffle plans on ulitmately supporting those too one day. And any cartoons with video elements in them (Puppet Jams, death metal) will just show you an empy box where the video should be. But hang in there and one day everything will be just like it was that summer when we got free cable somehow and Grandma still lived in the spare bedroom.
And since then, new content has quietly been appearing at HomestarRunner.com. (Most recently, Thursday the site added a teaser for an upcoming Halloween video.)

The Homestar Runner wiki is tracking this year's new content, which includes:

• Strong Bad livestreaming his play of a text adventure (titled "Disk 4 of 12 — Vampire's Castle") on September 19th
• Strong Sad streaming a demo of the expando deck for Trogdor!! The Board Game (July 2)
• A Twitch parody in which Strong Bad livestreams a speedrun on a horrific beef-themed game (titled "Strong-Play: Marzipan Beef Reverser") on April 25th
• A new Strong Bad Email on April 1st

And past videos are now also being uploaded on the site's official YouTube channel.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In case you follow the smartphone industry, particularly on YouTube and Twitter, you'd know that there have been recent reports of Samsung phones that are ... "blowing up", or at least about to. Of course, to most, that'd probably bring immediate Galaxy Note 7 flashbacks - we all remember when Samsung's 2016 flagship phone became the subject of universal entry checks, jokes, and legitimate fires. Despite trying, in the end Samsung wasn't able to handle the Note 7 battery crisis. The company recalled the defective phones and released a fresh batch of Note 7s (after having changed its battery supplier). The issues persisted, and the Note 7 was eventually officially discontinued less than two months after its official launch. But this time, the case is slightly different... The recently reported battery issues seem to be affecting any Samsung phone (as recent as 18 months old) that isn't used/charged regularly. Simply put, you could have a Samsung phone that's been sitting in a drawer for some time (without having been charged). This device could then suddenly start expanding and might eventually start looking like it was split in half due to a bloated battery. At this point, the cell would be expanding further and further until it's taken care of or... not (which could lead to an explosion or/and a fire). Popular YouTuber Arun did a video on this late last month and has corroborated his account with several other people.

YouTube is finally going to give @uniquenames -- that are comprehensible to human beings -- to every single channel on the platform. Variety reports: On Monday, the video giant announced that it is introducing handles, which it described as "a new way for people to easily find and engage with creators and each other on YouTube." The YouTube handles will appear on channel pages and Shorts, which will make it "simpler and faster to mention each other in comments, community posts, video descriptions and more," the service explained. For every existing channel -- YouTube says there are billions -- the platform will create a matching URL (i.e., youtube.com/@handle) that will direct visitors to the channel page. Previously, only creators with 100 or more subscribers were eligible for a custom URL. For everyone else, the URL for their YouTube channel has been a hashed unique ID, comprising a random string of alphanumeric characters.

The platform is gradually rolling out the ability for YouTube channel owners to choose a handle. Users will be notified via email and in YouTube Studio when they are able to select one. If you don't choose a handle by Nov. 14, YouTube will begin assigning ones based on channel names; users will be able to edit their handle from youtube.com/handle. If a channel already has a personalized URL, YouTube says that in the majority of cases that will automatically be redirected to the new, handle-based URL. According to YouTube, other URLs creators have established will continue to redirect to their channels (at the new handle URL). The timing of when a creator will get access to the handles selection process depends on a number of factors, according to YouTube, including "overall YouTube presence, subscriber count and whether the channel is active or inactive."

Christopher Slayton spent two months exploring black holes, identifying the colors of Saturn's rings and looking at his home planet from outer space. Mr. Slayton, 18, didn't have to leave his desk to do so. He set out to build the entire observable universe, block by block, in Minecraft, a video game where users build and explore worlds. From a report: By the end, he felt as if he had traveled to every corner of the universe. "Everyone freaks out about the power and expansiveness of the universe, which I never really got that much," he said. But after working for a month and 15 days to build it and additional two weeks to create a YouTube video unveiling it, "I realized even more how beautiful it is." Mr. Slayton, known as ChrisDaCow on his Minecraft-focused YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok accounts, has been playing the game for almost a decade, and he's not a user of any other games, he said. He started posting videos of his "builds," which are landscapes he creates inside the game, on YouTube in 2019. This channel has become his main priority since he graduated high school this spring.

[...] Exploring and learning concepts via Minecraft can be seen as a generational shift, said Ken Thompson, an assistant professor of digital game design at the University of Connecticut. About two-thirds of Americans play video games, according to a 2022 industry report. Professor Thompson said young people, such as Mr. Slayton, could apply problem solving and critical thinking when tackling projects such as the universe creation. "There are very serious applications," he said, adding, "then there's also this wonderful science side of it where we're experimenting with systems that are otherwise really hard to conceptualize." In 2022, some students at his university held a commencement ceremony in Minecraft, organized by the gaming club, after the in-person event was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic. They created the campus and avatars representing students and even faculty to stage the virtual gathering.

The Washington Post calls it "the gauzy, schmaltzy, vaguely creepy orchestral music unofficially dubbed the QAnon anthem." They also report that it's been "unceremoniously yanked from YouTube and Spotify for violating a harassment policy and alleged copyright infringement, respectively."

NBC News reports: In an email to NBC News, composer Will Van De Crommert wrote that he was "exploring legal options" and that "this particular track, which was originally entitled Mirrors, is available to license online. I however was not notified of any licenses for political rallies, nor did I authorize such use." A YouTube representative said in an email Monday that the company "removed the video in question for violating our harassment policy, which prohibits content targeting someone by suggesting they're complicit in a conspiracy theory used to justify real-world violence, such as QAnon." A Spotify representative said that "the content in question was removed following an infringement claim...."

Van De Crommert said the uploads in question are identical to his and that he has no association with the account that put his music online alongside QAnon language. "I do not align with the views of QAnon, and this individual has unlawfully distributed my music under their own name," he said.
The Post credits the song's morose strings for its impact, describing it as "the kind of stock sentimental, algorithmically emotional pablum regularly employed to sell us trucks, insurance, petrochemicals, diapers, more trucks, pharmaceuticals, whole-grain bread and presidents."

CD Projekt Red just announced a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, currently codenamed Project Orion. The developer tweeted its long-term development plan Tuesday, sharing that Project Orion will "take the Cyberpunk franchise further and continue harnessing the potential of this dark future universe." From a report: Adam Kicinski, CD Projket's president and CEO, said in a video published to YouTube that the next three games in the developer's pipeline are based in The Witcher franchise, meaning that Cyberpunk 2077's sequel is well off in the future. He called the sequel an ambitious title that will require expanding CD Projekt's more than 1,200 person studio even further; the studio will open a new hub in Boston, which will focus on Project Orion alongside its Vancouver location as CD Projekt Red North America.