People who have been hospitalised with Covid may be left with difficulties in thinking comparable in magnitude to ageing 20 years, research suggests. From a report: As the pandemic swept the world it became apparent that coronavirus could not only cause immediate health problems but also leave some people with often debilitating symptoms -- a condition known as long Covid. According to one UK study, about a third of patients who experienced symptoms after being hospitalised felt fully recovered a year later, with little improvement for most patients in areas including physical function and cognitive impairment. Now experts have revealed that some patients were left with, on average, a lingering cognitive decline.

David Menon, a professor at Cambridge University and senior author of the study, said the degree of impairment was linked to the severity of illness. "[Covid] does cause problems with a variety of organs in the body, including the brain and our cognitive function and our psychological health," he said. "If you can have a vaccine, and all your doses, you will have less severe illness. So all of these problems are going to be less." Writing in the eClinicalMedicine journal, Menon and colleagues report how they examined the results of cognitive tests performed by 46 patients, on average six months after they were admitted to Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge between March and July 2020. Of this group, 16 received mechanical ventilation.

In a potential blow to all the apps and websites that have popped up alongside the Amazon Kindle to streamline the process of converting EPUB ebook files to the e-reader's propriety file format, starting in "late 2022," the Kindle Personal Documents Service will finally support EPUB files, expanding where users can source their content. From a report: The Amazon Kindle's original AZW ebook file format was based on the MOBI format created for an e-reader app called Mobipocket, which was first released back in 2000 for a wide variety of PDAs and older mobile devices. Over the years it has evolved into the KF8/AZW3 format, and now the KFX format, which are all proprietary to the Kindle. For those who solely rely on Kindle e-readers and apps and only buy ebooks from Amazon, a proprietary file format isn't an issue, particularly when Amazon offers one of the largest selections of ebooks currently available, and a streamlined way to get the files onto its devices. But there are countless e-readers available on the market that offer better features than the Kindle does, including color E Ink screens, and all of them instead support the EPUB ebook file format (among others), which is the most popular format in the world. It's also a format that Amazon, to date, has refused to support. This has typically meant that someone looking to buy an ebook reader has had to either fully commit to the Amazon Kindle ecosystem, or choose one of the many alternatives and stick with their choice, because ebook files they'd purchased or downloaded weren't cross-compatible.

As the old saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, partner up with another overly powerful cable giant to give yourself a better shot. From a report: This morning, Comcast and Charter announced a new joint venture that will see the two companies teaming up to develop "a next-generation streaming platform on a variety of branded 4K streaming devices and smart TVs." This new platform and the devices that run it will square off against Amazon, Roku, Google, Apple, and other established streaming hardware players. The new venture is evenly divided between the two companies and is exclusively focused on streaming; it "does not involve the broadband or cable video businesses of either Comcast or Charter, which will remain independent." Comcast says its Flex streaming platform will serve as the foundation for what's coming next. It's also contributing "the retail business for XClass TVs and will contribute Xumo, a streaming service it acquired in 2020." Comcast introduced its XClass TVs last year as an alternative to the many popular budget TVs that come preloaded with Roku, Amazon, or Google software. For its part, Charter -- known better to many for its Spectrum brand -- is kicking in $900 million over the course of several years.

"Everyone's favorite security focused operating system, OpenBSD 7.1 has been released for a number of architectures," writes long-time Slashdot reader ArchieBunker, "including Apple M1 chips."

Phoronix calls it "the newest version of this popular, security-minded BSD operating system." With OpenBSD 7.1, the Apple Silicon support is now considered "ready for general use" with keypad/touchpad support for M1 laptops, a power management controller driver added, I2C and SPI controller drivers, and a variety of other driver additions for supporting the Apple Silicon hardware.

OpenBSD 7.1 also has a number of other improvements benefiting the 64-bit ARM (ARM64) and RISC-V architectures. OpenBSD 7.1 also brings SMP kernel improvements, support for futexes with shared anonymous memory, and more. On the graphics front there is updating the Linux DRM code against the state found in Linux 5.15.26 as well as now enabling Intel Elkhart Lake / Jasper Lake / Rocket Lake support.
The Register notes OpenBSD now "supports a surprisingly wide range of hardware: x86-32, x86-64, ARM7, Arm64, DEC Alpha, HP PA-RISC, Hitachi SH4, Motorola 88000, MIPS64, SPARC64, RISC-V 64, and both Apple PowerPC and IBM POWER." The Register's FOSS desk ran up a copy in VirtualBox, and we were honestly surprised how quick and easy it was. By saying "yes" to everything, it automatically partitioned the VM's disk into a rather complex array of nine slices, installed the OS, a boot loader, an X server and display manager, plus the FVWM window manager. After a reboot, we got a graphical login screen and then a rather late-1980s Motif-style desktop with an xterm.

It was easy to install XFCE, which let us set the screen resolution and other modern niceties, and there are also KDE, GNOME, and other pretty front-ends, plus plenty of familiar tools such as Mozilla apps, LibreOffice and so on....

We were expecting to have to do a lot more work. Yes, OpenBSD is a niche OS, but the project gave the world OpenSSH, LibreSSL, the PF firewall as used in macOS, much of Android's Bionic C library, and more besides.... In a world of multi-gigabyte OSes, it's quite refreshing. It felt like stepping back into the early 1990s, the era of Real Unix, when you had to put in some real effort and learn stuff in order to bend the OS to your will — but in return, you got something relatively bulletproof.

YouTube, the Google-owned video streaming platform, has removed the account of John Lee Ka-chiu, the policeman-turned-politician who is poised to take over as Hong Kong's next leader. From a report: All content on Lee's YouTube page has been removed. In its place is a message that reads: "This account has been terminated for violating Google's Terms of Service." Lee's campaign office said on Wednesday that it had been informed by Google that the removal of the account was in accordance with the company's compliance with U.S. sanctions. "We find this very regrettable and completely unreasonable, but we think they can't stop us from spreading our candidate's message -- our campaign's message -- to the public," said Tam Yiu-chung, head of Lee's campaign office.

Lee is one of a dozen officials who were sanctioned by the U.S. in 2020 and had been deemed responsible for the implementation of the Beijing-imposed National Security Law in July that year. Lee is now the only candidate in next month's small circle election for Chief Executive. The election, which is not open to the public and instead involves just 1,500 carefully-selected voters, will go ahead on May 8. Lee's five-year term of office will begin from July 1, 2022. "Google complies with applicable U.S. sanctions laws and enforces related policies under its Terms of Service. After review and consistent with these policies, we terminated the Johnlee2022 YouTube channel," told the South China Morning Post.

The smart home company Insteon has vanished. The entire company seems to have abruptly shut down just before the weekend, breaking users' cloud-dependent smart-home setups without warning. From a report: Users say the service has been down for three days now despite the company status page saying, "All Services Online." The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media. As Internet of Things reporter Stacey Higginbotham points out, high-ranking Insteon executives, including CEO Rob Lilleness, have scrubbed the company from their LinkedIn accounts. In the time it took to write this article, Lilleness also removed his name and picture from his LinkedIn profile. It seems like that is the most communication longtime Insteon customers are going to get.

Insteon is (or, more likely, "was") a smart home company that produced a variety of Internet-connected lights, thermostats, plugs, sensors, and of course, the Insteon Hub. At the core of the company was Insteon's proprietary networking protocol, which was a competitor to more popular and licensable alternatives like Z-Wave and Zigbee. Insteon's "unique and patented dual-mesh technology" used both a 900 MHz wireless protocol and powerline networking, which the company said created a more reliable network than wireless alone. The Insteon Hub would bridge all your gear to the Internet and enable use of the Insteon app.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Protocol: Add Amazon to the long list of companies looking to build a more immersive future: The ecommerce giant has been looking to hire a number of people for an unannounced AR/VR product in recent months. Among the roles Amazon is looking to fill are a wide variety of senior positions for computer vision scientists, designers, program managers, product managers, researchers and technologists, suggesting that the company is looking to build out a substantive team. "You will develop an advanced XR research concept into a magical and useful new-to-world consumer product," one of the job listings reads, using the industry shorthand for extended reality, which can encompass both AR and VR. Another job listing describes the initiative related to "XR/AR devices," and states that eventual hires will be part of "a greenfield development effort" that will include "developing code for early prototypes through mass production."

Amazon is looking to hire a UX designer to work on "the core system interface along with end-user applications spanning from multi-modal interfaces to 3D AR entertainment experiences," and suggest that applicants should have the ability to "think spatially, with 3D design experience in motion design, animation [and] AR/VR, games," among other things. Applicants for a senior product manager position are told they should have "experience building deeply technical products, e.g. AI/ML, robotics, games." [...] Interestingly, a number of the job listings describe the project as related to a "magical and useful, new-to-world XR consumer product," suggesting it may be looking to establish a new product category. Others even describe it as a "a new-to-world smart-home product."

During a 92-minute presentation Wednesday on the state of the free software movement, Richard Stallman spoke at length on a wide variety of topics, including the need for freedom-respecting package systems.

But Stallman also shared his deepest thoughts on a topic dear to the hearts of Slashdot readers: privacy and currency: I won't order from online stores, because I can't pay them . For one thing, the payment services require running non-free JavaScript... [And] to pay remotely you've got to do it by credit card, and that's tracking people, and I want to resist tracking too.... This is a really serious problem for society, that you can't order things remotely anonymously.

But GNU Taler is part of the path to fixing that. You'll be able to get a Taler token from your bank, or a whole bunch of Taler tokens, and then you'll be able to use those to pay anonymously.

Then if the store can send the thing you bought to a delivery box in your neighborhood, the store doesn't ever have to know who you are.
But there's another issue Stallman touched on earlier in his talk: There is a proposed U.S. law called KOSA which would require mandatory age-verification of users -- which means mandatory identification of users, which is likely to mean via face recognition. And it would be in every commercial software application or electronic service that connects to the internet.... [It's] supposedly for protecting children. That's one of the favorite excuses for surveillance and repression: to protect the children. Whether it would actually protect anyone is dubious, but they hope that won't actually be checked.... You can always propose a completely useless method that will repress everyone....
So instead, Stallman suggests that age verification could be handled by.... GNU Taler: Suppose there's some sort of service which charges money, or even a tiny amount of money, and is only for people over 16, or people over 18 or whatever it is. Well, you could get from your bank a Taler token that says the person using this token is over 16. This bank has verified that.... So then the site only needs to insist on a 16-or-over Taler token, and your age is verified, but the site has no idea who you are.

Unfortunately that won't help if user-identifying age-tracking systems are legislated now. The code of Taler works, but it's still being integrated with a bank so that people could actually start to use it with real businesses.
Read on for Slashdot's report on Stallman's remarks on cryptocurrencies and encryption, or jump ahead to...

• Can GNU Taler accounts be frozen?
• Why cryptocurrency shouldn't replace banking
• The problem with VPN apps - and how interoperable encryption could protect your freedom

Last week 69-year-old Richard Stallman gave a 92-minute presentation on the state of the free software movement. Stallman covered numerous topics, but also added as an aside at one point: Ubuntu of course is a non-free distro, and I wouldn't recommend that anyone use it. Some important packages are now distributed only through their non-freedom-respecting package system, and not as Debian packages. So it's even harder than before to get any freedom out of an Ubuntu installation.
But Stallman also sees a larger issue: Another area where we have problems is there are several languages which come with a package library -- basically people post packages in them. And that might be fine if they had a good criterion for the licensing of the libraries people upload into those sites -- but they're not developed by free software activists, and they don't have such a criterion. There are non-free packages in those libraries too.

Now, some of them make it possible to find out whether a library is free. Some of them, it's difficult. Sometimes -- yeah, you could probably look at the source code and see what licenses are in it, and then you could look up those licenses in GNU.org/licenses/license-list.html and see if all those licenses are free... The problem is, they don't help you. At the very least they should make it easy to say, "Show me only the free packages." And then, "Show me only the GPL-compatible packages, because I'm writing a GPL-covered program, and I can't use the libraries that are not GPL compatible. And I certainly won't ever think of using a non-free library."

They're not interested in helping people move forward in freedom. And so we need people to write front-ends for those package archives, which will show only the freely-licensed packages, and which can be asked to show which ones are GPL-compatible, or show only those. This way they will be usable easily by the free software community. If you like one of the languages that has this problem, please show your appreciation for that language by reconciling its use with maintaining freedom.
And this leads Stallman to a related setback for the free software movement: the containers themselves that are packaging some programs with the libraries they need: The old way of doing this was you would make sure that your program said which versions of libraries it was compiled to work with, and in the source code you'd use something like Autoconf so that it could work with the various library versions. And this way you could build the program for a wide variety of free operating systems and versions of them.

Well, that's some work, so some developers, they release a free program -- not all of them release free programs, but some of them do release free programs -- using containers. And the container has one set of libraries in it. And how do you really know what's in there? It's not straightforward to verify that all the libraries in the container are free, and a lot of people won't realize that they should even think about it. So the use of containers, as they are implemented nowadays by people who are not free software activists and are not particularly concerned with this question, is an obstacle to verifying that you're installing free software.

Well, maybe some of these container systems could be improved, or maybe another one could be designed to solve these problems. If a container packaging system were designed by people who care about freedom, they might find good ways to satisfy this goal, as well as others. So it's something you could possibly work on.

E-cigarette giant Juul Labs will pay Washington state $22.5 million and has agreed to a variety of reforms to prevent underage use and sales under a settlement announced Wednesday by state Attorney General Bob Ferguson. From a report: Ferguson filed a consumer protection lawsuit in September 2020, saying the country's largest e-cigarette company targeted underage consumers and deceived consumers about the addictiveness of its product. "Juul's conduct harmed Washingtonians," Ferguson said at a news conference in Seattle. "They harmed the youth of our state." Ferguson said that upon the product's launch in 2015, the company flooded social media with colorful ads, fueling a spike in use and nicotine addiction among teenagers. The percentage of vaping high school sophomores in Washington rose from 13% in 2016 to nearly 21% by 2018, according to Ferguson's office.

The crypto payments startup Circle Internet Financial said it's closer to submitting an application to operate as a bank in the U.S., pushing forward with a months-old plan even as regulators make it more difficult for crypto companies to secure this kind of license. From a report: Circle, the issuer of the second-largest stablecoin, disclosed its intention to become a crypto bank in August and has held ongoing discussions with regulators since then, Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Allaire said in an interview. He declined to say when the company would submit the application, saying only that it would be "hopefully in the near future."

The company, which issues USD Coin, is deeply funded. On Tuesday, Circle said it raised $400 million from BlackRock, Fidelity Management and Research and others. The startup plans to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company in a deal valued at $9 billion. The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees bank charters, has discussed a variety of topics with Circle management in regards to the company's banking ambitions. Those include interoperability between blockchains and how to assess the operational risks of a specific blockchain, according to Allaire. A representative for the OCC declined to comment on the conversations with Circle. The risk of connecting different blockchains was laid bare recently. Hacks involving crypto bridges totaled more than $1 billion in a little over a year, including a $600 million attack involving the crypto video game Axie Infinity.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 "shattered early box office projections," reports the Los Angeles Times, bringing in $71 million in its opening weekend. That makes it the biggest first-weekend for a Paramount movie in at least four years — more than Terminator: Dark Fate ($29 million) and Mission: Impossible — Fallout ($61.2 million).

You can watch its trailer here — but here's how the Times summarizes its plot. "The titular furry blue protagonist (voiced by Ben Schwartz) faces an equally fluffy new threat, Knuckles the Echidna (Idris Elba), who has joined Dr. Robotnik's (Jim Carrey) ongoing quest conquer Earth."

Engadget calls this the best opening weekend ever for a videogame movie. The previous record-holder was Sonic the Hedgehog 1, a movie which Paramount+ now "plans to expand into a cinematic universe" — or at least, expand into a spin-off TV series. Before the pandemic shut down theaters throughout the U.S, and other parts of the world, the first Sonic film went on to gross $319 million globally. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is currently on track to beat those earnings having grossed approximately $141 million globally.

As with the first movie, timing appears to have been a significant factor in Sonic 2's early success. Its main competitor at the box office was Sony's much-maligned Morbius, which saw a drastic 74 percent drop in ticket sales from its opening weekend last Friday. It only earned $10.2 million in additional domestic revenue after a $39 million debut.

Amazon will block and flag employee posts on a planned internal messaging app that contain keywords pertaining to labor unions, according to internal company documents reviewed by The Intercept. From the report: An automatic word monitor would also block a variety of terms that could represent potential critiques of Amazon's working conditions, like "slave labor," "prison," and "plantation," as well as "restrooms" -- presumably related to reports of Amazon employees relieving themselves in bottles to meet punishing quotas.

"Our teams are always thinking about new ways to help employees engage with each other," said Amazon spokesperson Barbara M. Agrait. "This particular program has not been approved yet and may change significantly or even never launch at all." In November 2021, Amazon convened a high-level meeting in which top executives discussed plans to create an internal social media program that would let employees recognize co-workers' performance with posts called "Shout-Outs," according to a source with direct knowledge.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Book banning is not new -- in the U.S. alone the practice goes back to Puritan times, when Thomas Morton's book New English Caanan and others opposing this way of life were tossed from Massachusetts. But the American Library Association said Monday that this year there have been more challenges to books than they have seen since they started tracking it in 2000.

The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom counted 729 challenges to library, school, and university materials in 2021. It's a significant jump: Last year the group noted 156 challenges -- and in 2019, there were 377. Although the 2020 number was impacted by the pandemic, which forced schools and libraries to shut down, the ALA said they don't usually get more than 500 book challenges in any given year. And sometimes, those challenges contain more than one book title. The number of individual books challenged in 2021 totaled 1,597. In a press release, ALA President Patricia Wong said: "We support individual parents' choices concerning their child's reading and believe that parents should not have those choices dictated by others. Young people need to have access to a variety of books from which they can learn about different perspectives."

The organization is launching a nationwide initiative meant to empower readers to fight censorship.

InfiniteZero shares a report from Space.com: Last Wednesday (March 23), NASA astronaut Raja Chari and the European Space Agency's Matthias Maurer spent nearly seven hours outside the International Space Station, performing a variety of maintenance work. Amazingly, astrophotographer Sebastian Voltmer managed to capture a snapshot of the spacewalk action from the ground -- and from Maurer's hometown of Sankt Wendel, Germany, no less. "I feel like I just made a once-in-a-lifetime image," Voltmer wrote at SpaceWeather.com, which featured the photo in its online gallery.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For years, players have complained that ballooning game download sizes are clogging up hard drives and Internet bandwidth. In a recent interview with streamer TeeP, Call of Duty: Warzone Live Operations Lead Josh Bridge admitted that the game's massive file size is also impacting the team's ability to release new maps. Asked about the possibility of adding the original Verdansk map to cycle alongside the game's current Caldera map, Bridge said, "We want that. We all want that," before addressing the "technical problem" that makes it difficult: "The install and re-install sizes are fucking insane, right? If we pulled out Caldera and say we're gonna drop in Verdansk, this could be essentially re-downloading, like, the size of Warzone," he said. "And every time we've done that, we lose players," Bridge continued. "Because you're kind of like, 'I don't want to re-download that,' [so you] uninstall. I think you can't fit anything else but Warzone on a base PS4."

Bridge is exaggerating, but only a little. Activision says you need a whopping 175GB of hard drive space on PC for a Warzone install. On Xbox, the base download is listed at nearly 92GB, similar to the size on PlayStation systems. Adding Modern Warfare onto the Warzone package increases the total size to about 250GB on PC and 150GB on consoles. About a year ago, Activision announced that the "larger than usual" Warzone "Season 2 Reloaded" patch would reduce the game's "overall footprint" on hard drives by 10-15GB (and 30-35GB when combined with Modern Warfare, depending on the platform). The "data optimization and streamlining" in that update would also ensure that "future patch sizes for Modern Warfare and Warzone [would] be smaller" than the 57GB update being offered at that point.

The results over the ensuing year have been mixed. A February Season 2 patch required only about 11GB of file downloads, for instance, while a December 7 update that introduced new maps required a 41-45 GB download on consoles. [...] In any case, Bridge was remarkably frank about Warzone's file size issues and said that "looking to the future, we're putting a lot more effort into how we sort that out on a technical level so that we can have that [map] rotation. We've been really looking at it, so we'll have more to talk about that, but that is ultimately a goal to ensure that there's a freshness and a variety of experiences."

If Netflix follows through with its test to charge an additional fee to users sharing passwords, it could rake in $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, according to a new Wall Street analysis. Variety reports: Last week, Netflix said it was launching a test in three Latin America countries (Chile, Costa Rica and Peru) to address password sharing. Customers will be able to add up to two Extra Member accounts for about $2-$3/month each, on top of their regular monthly fee. According to estimates by Cowen & Co. analysts, if Netflix rolls the program out globally it could add an incremental $1.6 billion in global revenue annually, or about 4% upside to the firm's 2023 revenue projection of $38.8 billion. The firm's estimate assumes that about half of non-paying Netflix password-sharing households will become paying members; further, the model predicts that of those, about half will opt to sign up for their own separate paid account.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: If you've ever eaten okra, then you'll know that the stuff can be pretty gooey. According to new research, that quality could allow a compound from the plant to be used in a less toxic method of removing microplastics from drinking water. [...] After some experimentation, it was found that polysaccharides from okra paired with those from fenugreek worked best at removing microplastics from seawater, while those same okra polysaccharides paired with those from tamarind were best for use on freshwater.

All in all, depending on factors such as the ratio of the polysaccharides and the water source, the plant-based flocculants performed either as well as or better than polyacrylamide. And importantly, they could be used in existing water treatment plants, without any alterations to the facilities or processes. The scientists are now investigating how well other combinations of plant-derived polysaccharides will work on specific types of plastic microparticles, in water from a variety of sources. The findings have been reported via EurekAlert. The American Chemical Society Meeting Newsroom channel on YouTube also produced a video about the research.

"Exposure to even moderate ambient lighting during nighttime sleep, compared to sleeping in a dimly lit room, harms your cardiovascular function during sleep and increases your insulin resistance the following morning," announced Northwestern Medicine, citing a new study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Washington Post reports: Researchers at Northwestern University had two groups of 10 young adults sleep in differently lit rooms. One group slept in rooms with dim light for two nights; the other slept one night in a room with dim night and the next in a room with moderate overhead light — about the equivalent of an overcast day. Participants wore heart monitors at night. In the morning, they did a variety of glucose tests.

Both groups got the same amount of sleep but their bodies experienced very different nights. Both groups responded well to insulin the first night, when they both slept in dim lighting. On the second night, however, the group sleeping in brighter lighting didn't respond as well to insulin. The dim light sleepers' insulin resistance scores fell about 4 percent on the second night, while the bright sleepers' rose about 15 percent. Their heart rates were faster on the bright night, too.
"[J]ust a single night of exposure to moderate room lighting during sleep can impair glucose and cardiovascular regulation, which are risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome," concludes senior study author Dr. Phyllis Zee. "It's important for people to avoid or minimize the amount of light exposure during sleep."

From Northwestern's announcement: There is already evidence that light exposure during daytime increases heart rate via activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which kicks your heart into high gear and heightens alertness to meet the challenges of the day. "Our results indicate that a similar effect is also present when exposure to light occurs during nighttime sleep," Zee said....

An earlier study published in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at a large population of healthy people who had exposure to light during sleep. They were more overweight and obese, Zee said. "Now we are showing a mechanism that might be fundamental to explain why this happens. We show it's affecting your ability to regulate glucose," Zee said.

Variety takes a long look at Halo, the new nine-episode TV show on Paramount+ adapting "Microsoft's crown jewel Xbox franchise": When the show premieres on March 24, it will be the culmination of 17 years of false starts and dogged striving, including a Peter Jackson-produced feature film that fell apart in the 2000s, more than six years of development by Amblin Television in the 2010s, and a pandemic-split production in Hungary for the nine-episode first season that lasted nearly two years....

On June 6, 2005, in a stunt that instantly became the stuff of Hollywood legend, Microsoft sent a small platoon of actors dressed in full Master Chief armor to the major film studios (other than Sony Pictures, naturally). They were armed with a "Halo" screenplay written by Alex Garland and take-it-or-leave-it deal terms heavily weighted in the company's favor. The result was a movie co-financed by Universal and 20th Century Fox and produced by Peter Jackson, who hired up-and-coming director Neill Blomkamp to make his feature debut with the film. According to Jamie Russell's book "Generation Xbox: How Video Games Invaded Hollywood," Microsoft was an uneasy and at times overbearing creative partner, and the project ultimately fell apart in October 2006. (Blomkamp and Jackson instead made 2009's "District 9," which was nominated for four Oscars, including best picture.)

By 2011, Microsoft had parted ways with Halo's original developer, Bungie, and created an in-house studio, 343 Industries, to keep the franchise alive. As part of that effort, veteran Microsoft executive Kiki Wolfkill began exploring anew how to expand the game into a live-action adaptation — or, in Wolfkill's words, "linear entertainment...." Don Mattrick, then the head of Microsoft's Xbox unit, called his friend Steven Spielberg, himself a passionate gamer and a Halo fan. Soon after, 343's executives found themselves pitching Amblin Television presidents Justin Falvey and Darryl Frank. "They asked for permission to get in before we came into the room, and they covered a large conference table with the canon of Halo," says Falvey. That canon — a vast science fiction saga that spans hundreds of millennia and involves ancient aliens who created colossal, ring-shaped structures called the Halo Array — comes as much from dozens of tie-in novels, comic books and exhaustive guides and encyclopedias as from the games themselves. "It was aisles deep," Falvey recalls. "It was incredible."

Everyone who spoke with Variety, actually, cited Halo's expansive mythology as the factor that differentiated the series from other video game fare and made it so attractive as source material for event-size television.... [W]hen Kyle Killen ("Lone Star") came on board as showrunner in 2018, he hit upon a shrewd narrative path that embraces the video game DNA: Master Chief starts as a complete cypher, engineered to be so devoid of individuality that he literally has no sense of taste, and the rest of the season slowly fills out the void. "We're going to tell a story about a man discovering his own humanity," says Kane, who joined the show as co-showrunner in 2019. "In so doing, he's invited the audience to discover that guy's humanity too."

Eventually, Levine says, "we got the script to the place where we said, 'You know, this is a deep dive into character. What are the costs of turning human beings into killing machines...?'"

Kane estimates he wrote upwards of 265 drafts of the first nine episodes, balancing everything from the needs of the expansive production to story notes from 343 and Spielberg to the desire to fold in as much from the Halo mythology as possible.
The article calls the show the strong argument yet from Paramount+ "that it belongs at the big kids table with Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max."

The article notes Paramount+ already has five ongoing Star Trek series (including Discovery and Picard). And Variety also reported earlier that South Park will stream exclusively on Paramount+ starting in 2025, joining the streaming service's 14 exclusive South Park "specials" (hour-long episodes like 2021's "South Park: Post COVID").