From a report: Filmmaker Craig Zobel has been tapped by HBO Max to direct the first two episodes of The Penguin, its much-awaited Batman spinoff. He will also serve as executive producer of the show, with Lauren LeFranc writing the script. Starring in The Penguin is Colin Farrell, who played the villainous Oswald Cobblepot in The Batman earlier this year. The Penguin will focus its attention on Cobblepot's notorious past and trace his rise to power in Gotham.

Zobel is already part of the family, having previously directed The Mare of Easttown for HBO Max. The prolific director also applied his talents to episodes of Westworld, The Leftovers, and American Gods...

If all goes according to schedule, viewers could be enjoying The Penguin by the end of 2023.
The article also notes that Zobel also helped co-create Homestar Runner in its original incarnation as a parody children's picture book.

Friday Amazon released the season finale for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. But Amazon's 8-episode first season "might have been best known for its extravagant price tag," jokes the Los Angeles Times. It ultimately cost $700 million — making it the most expensive TV show ever — and they note one viewer's assessment that "Visually, it's great. All the money in production shows..." (The Times' critic called it "visibly expensive.")

But can you quantify whether the show is good, great, or something out of Mordor? The Times cites reports that more than 100 million Amazon Prime viewers watched some part of the show (with the premier attracting 25 million viewers on its first day — a new record for the streaming service). Yet they also add that "It's no surprise that a long-gestating TV show based on the mythology behind a beloved fantasy series has garnered mixed reviews from audiences. (In the main, critics have been more positive, according to review aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic)."

And CNN is a little less charitable: After initial reviews admired the scope and visual grandeur, though, more critical voices have drifted into the naysaying column, pointing out — as the Daily Telegraph's Duncan Lay put it — that the series "managed to be both pretentious and boring." Forbes' Erik Kain sounded a similar note, writing that after the opening chapters, "The Rings of Power" has demonstrated "how quickly a badly written TV series can wear out its welcome once the shimmer fades."
But there's also this from Business Insider: Creators J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay promise that if viewers were disappointed with season one's story because they expected more Sauron, then they'll dig the second season, which started filming earlier this month. "There may well be viewers who are like, 'This is the story we were hoping to get in season one!,'" McKay told The Hollywood Reporter. "In season two, we're giving it to them."
Indeed, this season accomplished "the hard work of setting up who all those characters are," Amazon Studios head told Variety — possibly hinting again at that surprise reveal of Sauron in the season finale.

And according to The Hollywood Reporter, the show's creators have high hopes for its impact on Season Two: "There's something that Milton does in Paradise Lost that we talked about a lot. Where he makes Satan a really compelling character... Season one opens with: Who is Galadriel? Where did she come from? What did she suffer? Why is she driven?" says Payne. "We're doing the same thing with Sauron in season two. We'll fill in all the missing pieces."

"Sauron can now just be Sauron," McKay adds. "Like Tony Soprano or Walter White. He's evil, but complexly evil. We felt like if we did that in season one, he'd overshadow everything else. So the first season is like Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight is the next movie, with Sauron maneuvering out in the open."

Starting in November, Netflix will roll out its ad-supported tier for $6.99 a month, yet another sign that the onetime disruptive upstart streaming service has slowly become a cable package by another name. From a report: Netflix announced today that its new Basic with Ads tier is slated to launch on November 3rd, 2022, for $6.99 in the US, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, and the UK. In exchange for making you watch an average of four to five ads per hour that run anywhere from 15-30 seconds, Basic with Ads will give subscribers access to a large swath of Netflix's programming but not the platform's full catalog. A small selection of television shows and movies will not be available to Basic with Ads subscribers due to licensing restrictions that Netflix says it's currently working on. Additionally, Basic with Ads subscribers will not be able to download content onto their devices, and video quality is capped at 720p / HD.

"Our new robot overlords are making a whole lot of progress in the space of AI music generation," quips TechCrunch, discussing a new project called "Harmonai" backed by Stability AI (creators of the open source AI image generator Stable Diffusion): In late September, Harmonai released Dance Diffusion, an algorithm and set of tools that can generate clips of music by training on hundreds of hours of existing songs.... Dance Diffusion remains in the testing stages — at present, the system can only generate clips a few seconds long. But the early results provide a tantalizing glimpse at what could be the future of music creation, while at the same time raising questions about the potential impact on artists....

Google's AudioLM, detailed for the first time earlier this week, shows... an uncanny ability to generate piano music given a short snippet of playing. But it hasn't been open sourced. Dance Diffusion aims to overcome the limitations of previous open source tools by borrowing technology from image generators such as Stable Diffusion. The system is what's known as a diffusion model, which generates new data (e.g., songs) by learning how to destroy and recover many existing samples of data. As it's fed the existing samples — say, the entire Smashing Pumpkins discography — the model gets better at recovering all the data it had previously destroyed to create new works....

It's not the most intuitive idea. But as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and other such systems have shown, the results can be remarkably realistic.
Its lyrics are gibberish, TechCrunch concedes — though their article also features several audio clips (including a style transfer of Smash Mouth's vocals onto the Tetris theme).

And the article also notes a new tool letting artists opt of of being used in AI training sets, before raising the obvious concern...

The project's lead stresses that "All of the models that are officially being released as part of Dance Diffusion are trained on public domain data, Creative Commons-licensed data and data contributed by artists in the community." But even with that, TechCrunch notes that "Assuming Dance Diffusion one day reaches the point where it can generate coherent whole songs, it seems inevitable that major ethical and legal issues will come to the fore."

For example, beyond the question of whether "training" is itself a copyright violation, there's the possibility that the algorithm might accidentally duplicate a copyrighted melody...

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."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In the early 2000s, Americans who wanted to catch the local weather forecast at any time might turn on their TV and switch over to Weatherscan, a 24-hour computer-controlled weather forecast channel with a relaxing smooth jazz soundtrack. After 23 years, The Weather Channel announced that Weatherscan will be shutting down permanently on or before December 9. But a group of die-hard fans will not let it go quietly into the night.

Launched in 1999, Weatherscan currently appears in a dwindling number of local American cable TV and satellite markets. It shows automated local weather information on a loop, generated by an Intellistar computer system installed locally for each market. Declining viewership and the ubiquity of smartphone weather apps are the primary reasons it's going offline. There are also technical issues with maintaining the hardware behind the service. "Weatherscan has been dying a slow death over the course of the last 10 years because the hardware is aging," says Mike Bates, a tech hobbyist who collects and restores Weather Channel computer hardware as part of a group of die-hard fans who follow insider news from the company. "It's 20 years old now, and more and more cable companies have been pulling the service." [...]

Hobbyists like Bates (who goes by "techknight" on Twitter) have collected the hardware necessary to run their own Weatherscan stations out of their homes. Some have also created software that simulates the service in a browser. [...] However, getting Weatherscan to run locally was a team effort, primarily by friends named Ethan, Brian, and Jesse. One of the Intellistar computer models behind the service runs FreeBSD on a Pentium 4-based PC in a blue rack-mount enclosure. It includes an ATI card for generating the graphics and a proprietary PowerPC-based card that pulls it all together to make it broadcast-ready. To get Weatherscan working at home, the group of friends found decommissioned Intellistar units on eBay and used forensic tools to reconstruct data from the hard drives, piecing together a working version of the Weatherscan software from multiple sources. Since then, they have exhibited their work at shows like the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest last month.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Even as Americans cut back in the face of rising prices and recessionary fears, fewer want to give up their streaming subscriptions, especially when it comes to TV, movies and music services, such as Amazon Prime, Netflix and Spotify. Roughly two-thirds of consumers said they will have to decrease their spending due to inflation; however, only about a quarter plan to cancel such subscriptions in the months ahead, according to a recent report by the National Research Group. Most people said they were more likely to cut back on dining out, groceries and clothing.

Consumers are least likely to cancel Amazon Prime, TV and movie streaming services and home security systems, the report found, even over food and gasoline. Just over half, or 51%, also said subscriptions now make up a "significant" portion of their monthly spending. On average, U.S. consumers estimate they spend $135 a month and 17.8% of their monthly budget on subscriptions, the National Research Group found. The report polled more than 2,500 adults in August.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A court in India has granted what appears to be the most aggressive site-blocking injunction in the history of copyright law. In advance of the movie 'Vikram Vedha' premiering in cinemas last Friday, a judge handed down an injunction that ordered 40 internet service providers to proactively and immediately block an unprecedented 13,445 sites. [...] India began blocking pirate sites in 2011 but the public had no idea it was coming. In an early case, movie company Reliance Entertainment went to court to protect the movie 'Singham' and came away with an order that compelled ISPs to temporarily block sites including Megaupload, Megavideo, Rapidshare, Putlocker, Hotfile and Fileserve. Having obtained one injunction, to the surprise of no one Reliance Entertainment immediately sought and obtained another. From there, the site-blocking train gathered steam and hasn't looked back. [...]

After obtaining certification for its new movie 'Vikram Vedha' last Monday, Reliance Entertainment filed an injunction application the next day. The goal was to protect the movie from online piracy following its premiere last Friday. Given that courts in other countries can take months over a decision, the Madras High Court needed to act quickly. On September 30, the day of the movie's release, the Court published its orders, noting that substantial sums had been invested in 'Vikram Vedha' and the movie was expected to screen in 3,000 cinemas worldwide. With words such as "imminent" and "threat" featured early on, it was already clear which way the judge was leaning. How far he was prepared to go still came as a surprise. After reading through the Reliance application, the judge declared that Reliance had made its case and that an injunction was appropriate. The judge said that if an interim injunction wasn't immediately granted, it would "result in alleged piracy being completed in all and every aspect of the matter." That would in turn lead to an "irreversible situation" and "irreparable legal injury incapable of compensation."

Due to the urgency, the respondents in the case – including 40 internet service providers -- weren't notified of the legal action. Nevertheless, the injunction was handed down via two separate orders, which together prohibit anyone from copying, recording, camcording, making available, uploading, downloading, exhibiting or playing the movie without a license. After specifically prohibiting copying to CD, DVD, pen drives, hard drives or tapes, the orders move on to the issue of ISP blocking. It appears that Reliance asked for a lot and the judge gave them everything. According to one of the orders, the websites put forward for blocking are all "non-compliant" operations, in that they have no reporting and take down mechanisms in place, at least according to Reliance. Interestingly, Reliance also informed the court that all of the websites were infringing its copyrights in respect of the movie 'Vikram Vedha', even though it was yet to be released and when the application was filed, no copies were available online. This means that Reliance couldn't have provided any infringing URLs even if it wanted to. Nevertheless, the judge did consider more limited blocking.

Ultimately, the judge granted an interim injunction and ordered all of the ISPs (list below) to immediately and proactively block a grand total of 13,445 websites. While the names of the websites were made available to the court, the court did not make the schedule available on the docket. As a result we have no way of confirming which domains are on the list. The ISPs weren't informed about the injunction application either, so presumably they're also in the dark. The idea that the judge tested all 13,445 domains seems wishful thinking at best. That leaves Reliance Entertainment as the sole entity with any knowledge of the submitted domains, all of which have been labeled in court as infringing the movie's copyright, even though no copy was available when the application was made.

"Paramount Global executive David Nevins, who has run the premium network Showtime since 2016, is leaving the company at the end of year," reports CNBC. According to the report, it may help give the media conglomerate "more flexibility to potentially merge Showtime into Paramount+." From the report: Along with his departure, Paramount Global is restructuring Showtime in ways that could give the company flexibility to effectively end Showtime as it's existed for decades -- as an independent premium cable network churning out prestige hits such as "Dexter," "Weeds," "Billions," "Homeland" and "Yellowjackets." Paramount Global announced Thursday that it's moving Showtime's network business under the leadership of Chris McCarthy, who runs other linear cable networks such as MTV and Comedy Central, and the streaming service under Tom Ryan, who runs Paramount Streaming.

The moves come as the company is considering the idea of merging Showtime into Paramount+ and using the network's hit programming to fuel Paramount+ subscriptions, according to people familiar with the matter. The company's goal is to have Paramount+ be one of the five largest global streaming services, along with Warner Bros. Discovery's HBO Max, Amazon's Prime Video, Netflix and Disney+, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. No decisions about Showtime's future have been made, and no changes are imminent, the people said.

One obstacle to pushing Showtime together with Paramount+ is existing pay TV distributor agreements. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Paramount has discussed simply shuttering the standalone Showtime network with at least one pay-TV partner. Another idea under consideration by Paramount Global executives is to move Paramount+ originals and movies to Showtime, effectively making Showtime a mirror to Paramount+'s content that doesn't appear on other TV networks, two of the people said. That could assuage pay-TV providers, who could adjust pricing against the merged streaming product. [...] Eliminating Showtime as an independent entity would also come with cost savings from head count reductions, such as Nevins' departure, and technology and marketing duplications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: DeepMind has used its board-game playing AI AlphaZero to discover a faster way to solve a fundamental math problem in computer science, beating a record that has stood for more than 50 years. A year after it took biologists by surprise, AlphaFold has changed how researchers work and set DeepMind on a new course. The problem, matrix multiplication, is a crucial type of calculation at the heart of many different applications, from displaying images on a screen to simulating complex physics. It is also fundamental to machine learning itself. Speeding up this calculation could have a big impact on thousands of everyday computer tasks, cutting costs and saving energy.

Despite the calculation's ubiquity, it is still not well understood. A matrix is simply a grid of numbers, representing anything you want. Multiplying two matrices together typically involves multiplying the rows of one with the columns of the other. The basic technique for solving the problem is taught in high school. But things get complicated when you try to find a faster method. This is because there are more ways to multiply two matrices together than there are atoms in the universe (10 to the power of 33, for some of the cases the researchers looked at).

The trick was to turn the problem into a kind of three-dimensional board game, called TensorGame. The board represents the multiplication problem to be solved, and each move represents the next step in solving that problem. The series of moves made in a game therefore represents an algorithm. The researchers trained a new version of AlphaZero, called AlphaTensor, to play this game. Instead of learning the best series of moves to make in Go or chess, AlphaTensor learned the best series of steps to make when multiplying matrices. It was rewarded for winning the game in as few moves as possible. [...] The researchers describe their work in a paper published in Nature today. The headline result is that AlphaTensor discovered a way to multiply together two four-by-four matrices that is faster than a method devised in 1969 by the German mathematician Volker Strassen, which nobody had been able to improve on since. The basic high school method takes 64 steps; Strassen's takes 49 steps. AlphaTensor found a way to do it in 47 steps. "Overall, AlphaTensor beat the best existing algorithms for more than 70 different sizes of matrix," concludes the report. "It reduced the number of steps needed to multiply two nine-by-nine matrices from 511 to 498, and the number required for multiplying two 11-by-11 matrices from 919 to 896. In many other cases, AlphaTensor rediscovered the best existing algorithm."

Today, Nielsen announced that Roku plans to enable four-screen measurement across desktop, mobile, connected TV and traditional TV. This is the first time Roku will use the digital methodology, Nielsen One, the data measurement firm's cross-media measurement tool, which launches in December. TechCrunch reports: With Nielsen's forthcoming tool, the firm claims that the company is on track to provide a consistent and comparable cross-media solution. Nielsen also claims that, with Nielsen One, marketers running ads with Roku are guaranteed duplicate copies of repeating data are eliminated.

"Marketers can now better evaluate CTV inventory's unique reach and frequency in conjunction with their entire Roku buy in a comparable and comprehensive manner, and advertisers can reduce waste and help ensure that relevant ads are delivered to the right audiences across devices. This release brings us one step closer to providing comparable and deduplicated metrics across screens with Nielsen One," said Kim Gilberti, SVP, Product Management, Nielsen, in a statement.

The data measurement firm wrote in today's announcement that its relationship with Roku dates back to 2016 when Roku allowed its marketers to measure campaigns with Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings measurement. Nielsen announced Nielsen One in 2020. Earlier this year, it was revealed that YouTube would be the first media company to try the new tool. Roku is the second company to enable cross-media measurement.

James Earl Jones is stepping away from the role of Darth Vader after nearly 40 years. According to Vanity Fair, he has signed off on using archival voice recordings to recreate the iconic voice with artificial intelligence. From a report: "He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character," Matthew Wood, a Lucasfilm veteran of 32 years, told the outlet. "So how do we move forward?" The company has enlisted the assistance of Respeecher, a Ukrainian startup that uses AI technology to craft new conversations from revitalized old voice recordings. Respeecher's relationship with Lucasfilm began with the Disney+ series "The Book of Boba Fett," for which they recreated the voice of young Luke Skywalker. The two also teamed for the voice performance of Darth Vader on the series "Obi-Wan Kenobi," which debuted on Disney's streamer this summer.

Bogdan Belyaev, the 29-year-old speech artist, was tasked with delivering the new recordings to Lucasfilm, but tragedy struck on Feb. 24 when Russia invaded the country. As air raid sirens powered through the city of Lviv, Belyaev hurried to finish the project and send his work back to Skywalker Sound in Northern California. "If everything went bad, we would never make these conversions delivered to Skywalker Sound," he says. Following the debut of "Obi-Wan Kenobi," Jones' family informed Wood that they were pleased with the result of the synthesis between the actor's voice and Respeecher's technical work. Jones is credited for "guiding the performance" of Darth Vader in the Disney+ series, with Wood describing the actor as a "benevolent godfather."

Netflix already lost 1.2 million subscribers in the first two quarters of 2022. While the company hopes to add one million new users with its new ad-supported tier, a survey shows that 1 in 4 Netflix users are planning to cancel their subscriptions this year. From a report: Here's what this could mean to other streaming services, such as Apple TV+. Reviews surveyed 1,000 Americans to gauge their streaming habits in 2022. According to the report, the average American is subscribed to four streaming platforms. Netflix is still the most popular streaming service with nearly 4 out of 5 (77%) Americans currently subscribed to the platform. In addition, 70% say they use Netflix the most, followed by: HBO Max: 9.91%; Disney+: 6.18%; Peacock: 4.25%; Hulu: 3.86%; Apple TV+: 2.70%; Paramount+: 2.70%.

That said, of all the Netflix subscribers, 25% are planning to cancel their subscriptions. Of those who plan to leave the streaming service, two-thirds say increasing costs is one of the reasons. According to the survey, Netflix has the highest average plan cost among the eight more popular streaming services in the US. The other big complaint from Netflix users is two-fold: 1 in 3 respondents said Netflix no longer has the shows they want to watch; 30% said that they use other streaming services more.

Google announced a new Chromecast with HD streaming support today that costs just $30 and has a remote control with it. From a report: The company is launching the Chromecast with Google TV (HD) -- yes, that's the official name -- in 19 countries including the U.S. This comes two years after Google launched a $49 Chromecast with 4K HDR streaming support and the introduction of a remote. The new Chromecast supports 1080p streaming, and more than 10,000 apps that are on the Google TV platform including Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, and Prime video.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: On Tuesday, 40 civil rights groups published an open letter calling on MGM Television executives to cancel the studio's upcoming reality show Ring Nation, which will feature former NSA employee and comedian Wanda Sykes presenting humorous surveillance footage captured from Ring doorbell cameras. The groups say the studio is "normalizing and promoting Amazon Ring's dangerous network of surveillance cameras," which, along with the Neighbors app, "violate basic privacy rights, fuel surveillance-based policing that disproportionately targets people of color and threatens abortion seekers, and enables vigilantes to surveil their neighbors and racially profile bystanders."

There's just one potential problem with the well-intentioned campaign: Amazon owns Ring, producer Big Fish Entertainment, and distributor MGM, and it also owns the Prime Video streaming service should it need somewhere to air it. It also has specific partnerships with thousands of police departments around the country should they happen to prove useful. This tower of vertical integration means that Ring Nation is a show designed from the ground up to leverage Amazon's vast monopoly to push its own product on Americans, and it also means that it will probably (but not definitely) be impossible to kill. There's very little chance that MGM executives will push back on the project when it's probably exactly the type of thing Amazon imagined being able to do when it spent $8.5 billion on a merger with MGM this year. "Ring Nation is not a comedy but rather a propaganda strategy to normalize and further digitize racial profiling in our communities. Truthfully the cognitive dissonance about the dangers of these tools is a real concern. It's striking to see a host who has been such a vocal supporter of racial justice protesters defend the very tech that was used to surveil activists during the uprisings in 2020," said Myaisha Hayes, campaign strategy director at Cancel Ring Nation co-organizer Media Justice, in a statement.

"The Ring Nation reality-TV series is anything but funny. It weaponizes the joy of our daily lives in an attempt to manufacture a PR miracle for scandal-ridden Amazon," Evan Greer, director of co-organizer Fight for the Future, said in a statement. "By normalizing surveillance, it will teach our children to relinquish their privacy in exchange for a quick laugh. In the coming weeks, Fight for the Future, Media Justice, and our org partners will be mobilizing our supporters and forming a loud and fearless coalition of civil rights groups to cancel Ring Nation," Greer said.

The show is set to launch on Sept. 26, though it hasn't been announced which networks will carry it.

"Whirring as it powered up, a hoverbike lifted directly into the air in Michigan, video shows."

That's the lead from one news report about a big debut at a U.S. auto show in Detroit: a gasoline-and-electric powered hoverbike (using a Kawasaki motor) created by Japanese manufacturing company AERWINS Technologies. They've already started selling them in Japan, and they're now also hoping to sell a smaller version in America in 2023. The hoverbike flies for 40 minutes, Reuters reports, and can reach speeds of up to 62 miles per hour (100 kph). (They added that the bike drew "perhaps inevitable comparisons to the speeder bikes of Star Wars.")

From McClatchy news services: Video from WXYZ's Facebook shows the hoverbike's flight. The test rider checks the vehicle then signals with a fist pump. The engines power up, whirring louder and louder until the bike lifts off. The hoverbike flies back and forth, slightly faster as the ride goes on, then lands smoothly to the ground, video shows. "I feel like I'm literally 15 years old and I just got out of Star Wars," the test rider told Reuters. "It's awesome! Of course, you have a little apprehension, but I was just so amped. I literally had goosebumps and feel like a little kid...."

The price of a hoverbike? Only $777,000 according to current estimates, though the company hopes to get the cost down to about $50,000, The Detroit News reported.
The Detroit News adds this about the company's founder/CEO: As a boy, Shuhei Komatsu loved Star Wars movies, especially the lightning-fast land speeders. So when he grew up, he decided to make one of his own, he said.

"I wanted to make something from the movie real," Komatsu said. "It's a land speeder for the Dark Side...."

Komatsu said his company will make its public offering of stock on the NASDAQ exchange in November.... He said he's hoping the U.S. government classifies its XTURISMO as a non-aircraft.... He said he thinks consumers will buy the machine for recreation, and governments will buy it for law enforcement and for inspecting infrastructure. "I hope that in the future, people will use it for every day," he said.

Randall Munroe does more than draw the online comic strip XKCD. He's also published a funny new speculative science book (following up on his previous New York Times best-seller), promising "short answers, new lists of weird and worrying questions, and some of my favorite answers from the What If site."

From his blog: In What If 2, I answer new questions I've receieved in the years since What If? was released. People have asked about touching exotic materials, traveling across space and time, eating things they shouldn't, and smashing large objects into the Earth. There are questions about lasers, explosions, swingsets, candy, and soup. Several planets are destroyed — one of them by the soup.
But besides launching a new book tour, he's also found some particularly geeky ways to promote the new book. On Thursday Munroe went on a language podcast to ask his own oddball questions — like how to spot an artificial language, and what does the word "it" refer to in the sentence "It's 3pm and hot." He's illustrated a a science-y animated video, and released several self-mocking cartoons.

And of course — answered some more strange science questions.

"There's a new Joker movie coming out," writes the Verge, "but you might not get a chance to see it because copyright is broken." I'm not talking about Joker: Folie à Deux, the officially sanctioned sequel to the Todd Phillips film Joker. I'm talking about The People's Joker, a crowdfunded Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) selection that was pulled at the last minute, thanks to unspecified "rights issues." The People's Joker is (as far as I can tell) an extremely loose retelling of the Batman villain's origin story, reinterpreting the Joker as a trans woman trying to break into the mob-like world of Gotham's stand-up comedy scene. Its trailer describes it as "an illegal comic book movie," but its creators more seriously defend it as an unauthorized but legal parody of DC's original character, to the point of (apparently) giving their lawyer a full-screen credit.

I have no idea if The People's Joker is a good movie — thanks to its cancelation, my colleague Andrew Webster couldn't catch it at TIFF. The piece is clearly a provocation designed to thumb its nose at DC's copyright, and DC parent company Warner Bros. hasn't said whether it actually ordered TIFF to cancel showings — it's possible the festival balked or even that Drew did it herself. But despite all that, one thing is very clear: outside a tiny number of corporate behemoths, virtually nobody benefits from shutting down The People's Joker — not the filmmakers, not the public, and not the people who created Gotham City in the first place.

Writer-director Vera Drew says she made The People's Joker partly to test a contemporary truism: that beloved fictional universes are a shared modern mythology, and people draw meaning from them the way that artists once reinterpreted Greek myths or painted Biblical figures. As Drew has put it, "if the purpose of myth is to learn about the human experience and grow and also chart your progress — the hero's journey and all that stuff — let's actually do that earnestly with these characters."
The essay delves into the argument that culture exists for the common good. "It's useful to have a temporary period where artists can maintain control over their work because it helps support them financially and encourages them to make more of it. But the ultimate goal is that art should pass into the public domain and that it should be part of a conversation, with people repurposing it to create their own work...."

In an interview with Comic Book Resources, the filmmaker said the film was protected by both fair use and copyright law. "The only thing that makes it weird in both of those categories is nobody's ever taken characters and IP and really personalized it in this way. So I think that's the thing that really kind of makes it seem a lot more dangerous than I actually think it is. I mean, I get it, look, I put an 'illegal comic book movie' on the poster, but that was just to get your butts in the seats. Mission accomplished."

A statement from the filmmaker on Twitter blames "a media conglomerate that shall remain nameless" for an angry letter pressuring them not to screen the film. (It was ultimately allowed to premiere, but then pulled from later screenings.) They added that they were disappointed since "I went to great lengths with legal counsel to have it fall under parody/fair use," but they made the choice to protect the film festival and the future prospects for a possible return of the movie itself.

"The People's Joker will screen again very soon at several other festivals worldwide."

The Verge's conclusion? "If a law meant to protect artists is leaving weird independent movies in limbo to protect a corporate brand, something has gone deeply wrong."

Thanks to Slashdot reader DevNull127 for the article

Laughter comes in many forms, from a polite chuckle to a contagious howl of mirth. Scientists are now developing an AI system that aims to recreate these nuances of humor by laughing in the right way at the right time. The Guardian reports: The team behind the laughing robot, which is called Erica, say that the system could improve natural conversations between people and AI systems. "We think that one of the important functions of conversational AI is empathy," said Dr Koji Inoue, of Kyoto University, the lead author of the research, published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. "So we decided that one way a robot can empathize with users is to share their laughter."

Inoue and his colleagues have set out to teach their AI system the art of conversational laughter. They gathered training data from more than 80 speed-dating dialogues between male university students and the robot, who was initially teleoperated by four female amateur actors. The dialogue data was annotated for solo laughs, social laughs (where humor isn't involved, such as in polite or embarrassed laughter) and laughter of mirth. This data was then used to train a machine learning system to decide whether to laugh, and to choose the appropriate type. It might feel socially awkward to mimic a small chuckle, but empathetic to join in with a hearty laugh. Based on the audio files, the algorithm learned the basic characteristics of social laughs, which tend to be more subdued, and mirthful laughs, with the aim of mirroring these in appropriate situations.

It might feel socially awkward to mimic a small chuckle, but empathetic to join in with a hearty laugh. Based on the audio files, the algorithm learned the basic characteristics of social laughs, which tend to be more subdued, and mirthful laughs, with the aim of mirroring these in appropriate situations. "Our biggest challenge in this work was identifying the actual cases of shared laughter, which isn't easy because as you know, most laughter is actually not shared at all," said Inoue. "We had to carefully categorize exactly which laughs we could use for our analysis and not just assume that any laugh can be responded to." [...] The team said laughter could help create robots with their own distinct character. "We think that they can show this through their conversational behaviours, such as laughing, eye gaze, gestures and speaking style," said Inoue, although he added that it could take more than 20 years before it would be possible to have a "casual chat with a robot like we would with a friend." "One of the things I'd keep in mind is that a robot or algorithm will never be able to understand you," points out Prof Sandra Wachter of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. "It doesn't know you, it doesn't understand you and doesn't understand the meaning of laughter."

"They're not sentient, but they might get very good at making you believe they understand what's going on."

Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Comcast were hit with copyright lawsuits accusing them of turning a blind eye to customers who illegally distribute and download pirated films. The production companies seek to force the internet providers to implement policies that provide for the termination of accounts held by repeat offenders and to block certain piracy websites. Hollywood Reporter: The trio of complaints filed throughout September, with the most recent filed Tuesday in Pennsylvania federal court, come from Voltage Pictures, After Productions and Ammo Entertainment, among others. Two law firms, Dovel & Luner and Culpepper IP, are representing the production labels. The internet providers knowingly contributed to copyright infringement by their customers, the lawsuits claim. Plaintiffs say they sent Verizon, AT&T and Comcast hundreds of thousands of notices about specific instances of infringement. They claim, for example, to have sent over 100,000 notices to Comcast concerning the illegal downloading of I Feel Pretty using its services. The lawsuit seeks to hold the internet providers liable for failing to investigate.

"Comcast did not take meaningful action to prevent ongoing infringements by these Comcast users," states the complaint. "Comcast failed to terminate the accounts associated with these IP addresses or otherwise take any meaningful action in response to these Notices. Comcast often failed to even forward the Notices to its internet service customers or otherwise inform them about the Notice or its contents." The internet providers, therefore, vicariously infringed on plaintiffs' movies since they had the right to terminate the accounts of customers who violate copyright law, the suit alleges. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1988, criminalizes services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works. It provides protection from liability for services providers. But the production companies argue the internet providers don't have safe harbor under the law since it only shields companies if they've adopted and implemented policies that provide for the termination of accounts held by repeat offenders.