Month: February 2024

A shot from One Piece, one of the animes that Funimation made DVDs for. (credit: Crunchy roll: Inside Anime)

How long is “forever”? When it comes to digital media, forever could be as close as a couple of months away.

Funimation, a Sony-owned streaming service for anime, recently announced that subscribers' digital libraries on the platform will be unavailable after April 2. For years, Funimation had been telling subscribers that they’d be able to keep streaming these digital copies of purchased movies and shows, but qualifying it: “forever, but there are some restrictions.”

Funimation’s parent company, Sony, bought rival anime streaming service Crunchyroll in 2021. Since then, it was suspected that Sony would merge the offerings together somehow. This week, we learned how, as Funimation announced that its app and website would close on April 2, and Funimation accounts will become Crunchyroll accounts. Most of Funimation’s catalogue is already on Crunchyroll, Funimation’s announcement claimed.

Enlarge / Because sometimes your friend Tim, the one with all the legal media, is having server issues, but it's movie night and the popcorn is already made. (credit: Plex)

Plex, the media center largely known as a hub for TV and movies that you and your friends obtained one way or another, now lets you pay for movie rentals. It's both a convenient way to watch movies without having to hunt across multiple services, and yet another shift by Plex to be closer to the mainstream.

Plex's first set of available films is more than 1,000 titles, with some notable recent-run offerings: Barbie, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning, Wonka, PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie, and so forth. As is typical of digital rentals, you have 30 days to start watching a movie and then 48 hours to finish it.

Prices at the moment range from $3.99 to $5.99. Conveniently, movies you rent on one platform can be played on any other. Even on Apple devices, or, as Plex puts it, "devices that don't allow direct rentals on their platform." Rentals are only available in the US, however.

Enlarge / The world's most expensive domino set. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

It's been a busy time in the Xbox rumor mill of late. Last weekend, the Verge reported that Microsoft was considering launching a version of Bethesda's upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on PS5, alongside plans to port last year's Hi-Fi Rush to other consoles. That same weekend, Xbox Eras published more lightly sourced rumors suggesting that prominent Xbox exclusive Starfield would be getting a PS5 port.

While Microsoft hasn't directly commented on these reports, Xbox chief Phil Spencer wrote on social media that Microsoft is "planning a business update event for next week, where we look forward to sharing more details with you about our vision for the future of Xbox."

The churning rumor mill has set off something of an existential crisis among some Xbox superfans, content creators, and influencers, who are worried that Microsoft is planning to essentially abandon their favored console. "Genuinely feel terrible for convincing my sister to get an Xbox instead of a PS5," XboxYoda posted in a representative social media take. "Like I actually feel like I let her down... ."

Enlarge (credit: moodboard | moodboard / Getty Images Plus)

Dozens of California police agencies are still sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data with out-of-state authorities without a warrant, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has revealed. This is occurring despite guidance issued by State Attorney General Rob Bonta last year.

Clarifying a state law that limits state public agencies to sharing ALPR data only with other public agencies, Bonta's guidance pointed out that "importantly," the law's definition of "public agency" "does not include out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies."

Bonta's guidance came after EFF uncovered more than 70 California law enforcement agencies sharing ALPR data with cops in other states, including anti-abortion states. After Bonta clarified the statute, approximately half of these agencies told EFF that they updated their practices to fall in line with Bonta's reading of the law. Some states could not verify that the practice had ended yet, though.

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  The alleged Pixel Fold 2 prototype. [credit: Android Authority ]

Google still isn't giving up on the foldable smartphone game, and rumored details about the Pixel Fold 2 are slowly coming out. The most eye-popping news is from Android Authority's Mishaal Rahman, who claims to have a live picture of an "early prototype" of the Pixel Fold 2.

A lot about the Fold 2 is different, starting with the camera bump on the back. In every Pixel review, we praise the trademark camera bar for 1) looking good and 2) having a symmetrical design that gives the phone a stable base when placed on a table, and this prototype would seem to walk both of those things back. The supposed Pixel Fold 2 prototype switches to a lopsided rear design with a camera block in the top-left corner of the phone, just like everyone else in the industry. It's hard to tell what's going on with the camera block, but there is certainly room for four camera lenses now instead of the usual three. The top-left post almost looks blank in the photo, though—it could just be a spot for a laser autofocus sensor.

One justification for the wonky camera block could be that the device is narrower and doesn't have room for the full-length camera bar anymore. The report says that "the cover screen is narrower, but more importantly, the inner screen’s aspect ratio is closer to a square." One of the best parts of the Pixel Fold design was that it opened up into a wide-screen device and had enough horizontal room to show a tablet app layout. If you're in the "foldable should open up into a tablet" camp, then a square screen would be a disappointment. The other option, followed mainly by the Galaxy Fold series, is "a foldable should open up to show side-by-side phone apps," and a square screen puts you more in that camp. You could argue that, given the lack of Android tablet apps, a square-ish foldable is a more practical choice. I'd argue the Pixel line should be aspirational and that foldables aren't yet ready for "practicality" arguments, given all the durability issues that still plague the devices.

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  The new iCloud for Windows app, which does a surprisingly good job of looking like a native Windows 11 app. It also respects the system dark mode setting.

Big news for people who prefer iPhones but also prefer to use Windows PCs: Apple has quietly overhauled its entire suite of Windows apps, including non-beta versions of the Apple Music, Apple TV, and Devices apps that it began previewing for Windows 11 users over a year ago. Collectively, these apps replace most of the functionality from the iTunes for Windows app; iTunes for macOS was discontinued all the way back in 2019. Apple has also released a major iCloud for Windows update with an overhauled design.

All of the apps are currently available in the Microsoft Store. While the previews that Apple released last year required Windows 11 22H2 or newer, the final versions of all four new apps also work in Windows 10 for people who have chosen not to upgrade or whose PCs do not meet the system requirements.

The Apple Music and Apple TV apps both offer access to Apple's streaming music and video libraries for people with subscriptions, though both apps will also import and play your local music and video libraries from iTunes if you have them.

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

Sending 1 kilogram to Mars will set you back roughly $2.4 million, judging by the cost of the Perseverance mission. If you want to pack up supplies and gear for every conceivable contingency, you’re going to need a lot of those kilograms.

But what if you skipped almost all that weight and only took a do-it-all Swiss Army knife instead? That’s exactly what scientists at NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University are testing with robots, algorithms, and highly advanced building materials.

Zero mass exploration

“The concept of zero mass exploration is rooted in self-replicating machines, an engineering concept John von Neumann conceived in the 1940s”, says Kenneth C. Cheung, a NASA Ames researcher. He was involved in the new study published recently in Science Robotics covering self-reprogrammable metamaterials—materials that do not exist in nature and have the ability to change their configuration on their own. “It’s the idea that an engineering system can not only replicate, but sustain itself in the environment,” he adds.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Science Photo Library)

In recent days you may have heard about the terrifying botnet consisting of 3 million electric toothbrushes that were infected with malware. While you absent-mindedly attended to your oral hygiene, little did you know that your toothbrush and millions of others were being controlled remotely by nefarious criminals.

Alas, fiction is sometimes stranger than truth. There weren't really 3 million Internet-connected toothbrushes accessing the website of a Swiss company in a DDoS attack that did millions of dollars of damage. The toothbrush botnet was just a hypothetical example that some journalists wrongly interpreted as having actually happened.

It apparently started with a January 30 story by the Swiss German-language daily newspaper Aargauer Zeitung. Tom's Hardware helped spread the tale in English on Tuesday this week in an article titled, "Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks."