Month: November 2023

Enlarge / We have no idea what's going to be in the movie, but likely this is the height of the romance. (credit: Nintendo)

Sony and Nintendo haven't collaborated on much of anything since the Nintendo PlayStation went awry. But Sony's film division is putting its money together with its console semi-rival to produce a live-action The Legend of Zelda film.

Details are scant beyond a Nintendo press release and Hollywood reporting by Deadline. The director is Wes Ball, director of the Maze Runner film trilogy, and the writer is Derek Connolly, who wrote the Jurassic World trilogy and was tagged to work on a putative Metal Gear film.

The film will be produced by Nintendo legend Shigeru Miyamoto and Avi Arad, the founder of Marvel's film arm, Marvel Studios, who later produced Marvel and other IP-based films for Sony, including Uncharted and the Spider-Man and X-Men films. Arad, Deadline reports, was "a lynchpin" to finalizing a film that has long been in the works. Arad is also reportedly involved in the gestating Metal Gear film.

Artist interpretation of the creatures talking about your mom on Xbox Live last night. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

Anyone who's worked in community moderation knows that finding and removing bad content becomes exponentially tougher as a communications platform reaches into the millions of daily users. To help with that problem, Microsoft says it's turning to AI tools to help "accelerate" its Xbox moderation efforts, letting these systems automatically flag content for human review without needing a player report.

Microsoft's latest Xbox transparency report—the company's third public look at enforcement of its community standards enforcement—is the first to include a section on "advancing content moderation and platform safety with AI." And that report specifically calls out two tools that the company says "enable us to achieve greater scale, elevate the capabilities of our human moderators, and reduce exposure to sensitive content."

Microsoft says many of its Xbox safety systems are now powered by Community Sift, a moderation tool created by Microsoft subsidiary TwoHat. Among the "billions of human interactions" the Community Sift system has filtered this year are "over 36 million" Xbox player reports in 22 languages, according to the Microsoft report. The Community Sift system evaluates those player reports to see which ones need further attention from a human moderator.

Enlarge / A photo of the myQ app from LiftMaster's website. (credit: Liftmaster)

Chamberlain Group—the owner of most of the garage door opener brands like LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco—would like its customers to stop doing smart home things with its "myQ" smart garage door openers. The company recently issued a statement decrying "unauthorized usage" of its smart garage door openers. That's "unauthorized usage" by the people who bought the garage door opener, by the way. Basically, Chamberlain's customers want to trigger the garage door and see its status through third-party smart home apps, and Chamberlain doesn't want that.

Here's the statement:

Chamberlain Group recently made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of our myQ ecosystem through third-party apps.

This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience for our 10 million+ users, as well as our authorized partners who put their trust in us. We understand that this impacts a small percentage of users, but ultimately this will improve the performance and reliability of myQ, benefiting all of our users.

We encourage those who were impacted to check out our authorized partners here: https://www.myq.com/works-with-myq.

We caught wind of this statement through the Home Assistant blog, a popular open source smart home platform. The myQ integration is being stripped from the project because it doesn't work anymore. Allegedly, Chamberlain has been sabotaging Home Assistant support for a while now, with the integration maintainer, Lash-L, telling the Home Assistant blog, "We are playing a game of cat and mouse with MyQ and right now it looks like the cat is winning."