Month: September 2024

John Wick fans hoping for a fifth film in the hugely popular action franchise will at least be able to return to "Wick-World" next year with the release of a spinoff film, Ballerina, set between the events of 2019's Chapter 3—Parabellum and Chapter 4 (2023). (The full title is the decidedly unwieldy From the World of John Wick: Ballerina.) Lionsgate just dropped the first trailer, and it has all the tight action choreography and eye-popping visuals we've come to expect from the franchise—including a cameo by none other than the Baba Yaga himself (Keanu Reeves).

(Spoilers for John Wick Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 below.)

Parabellum found Wick declared excommunicado from the High Table for killing crime lord Santino D'Antonio on the grounds of the Continental. On the run with a bounty on his head, he makes his way to the headquarters of the Ruska Roma crime syndicate, led by the Director (Anjelica Huston). That's where we learned Wick was originally named Jardani Jovonovich and trained as an assassin with the syndicate. The Director also trains young girls to be ballerina-assassins, and one young ballerina (played by Unity Phelan) is shown rehearsing in the scene. That dancer is the main character in Ballerina, now played by Ana de Armas.

Enlarge (credit: The Tor Project)

The Tor Project, the nonprofit that maintains software for the Tor anonymity network, is joining forces with Tails, the maker of a portable operating system that uses Tor. Both organizations seek to pool resources, lower overhead, and collaborate more closely on their mission of online anonymity.

Tails and the Tor Project began discussing the possibility of merging late last year, the two organizations said. At the time, Tails was maxing out its current resources. The two groups ultimately decided it would be mutually beneficial for them to come together.

Amnesic onion routing

“Rather than expanding Tails’s operational capacity on their own and putting more stress on Tails workers, merging with the Tor Project, with its larger and established operational framework, offered a solution,” Thursday’s joint statement said. “By joining forces, the Tails team can now focus on their core mission of maintaining and improving Tails OS, exploring more and complementary use cases while benefiting from the larger organizational structure of The Tor Project.”

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

The printer industry is in a rut.

With the digitization of, well, nearly everything, people just don’t print like they used to. More modern ways of storing and sharing information, changes in communication preferences at home and in offices, and environmental concerns have stonewalled the printing industry and challenged stakeholders like HP.

I’d argue that it’s not just technological, economic, and societal changes that have diminished printer businesses. For the average person, printers and their capabilities have become boring. When’s the last time you’ve heard of a new killer printer feature?

Enlarge (credit: Hugging Face / anucha sirivisansuwan via Getty Images)

On Thursday, AI hosting platform Hugging Face surpassed 1 million AI model listings for the first time, marking a milestone in the rapidly expanding field of machine learning. An AI model is a computer program (often using a neural network) trained on data to perform specific tasks or make predictions. The platform, which started as a chatbot app in 2016 before pivoting to become an open source hub for AI models in 2020, now hosts a wide array of tools for developers and researchers.

The machine-learning field represents a far bigger world than just large language models (LLMs) like the kind that power ChatGPT. In a post on X, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue wrote about how his company hosts many high-profile AI models, like "Llama, Gemma, Phi, Flux, Mistral, Starcoder, Qwen, Stable diffusion, Grok, Whisper, Olmo, Command, Zephyr, OpenELM, Jamba, Yi," but also "999,984 others."

The reason why, Delangue says, stems from customization. "Contrary to the '1 model to rule them all' fallacy," he wrote, "smaller specialized customized optimized models for your use-case, your domain, your language, your hardware and generally your constraints are better. As a matter of fact, something that few people realize is that there are almost as many models on Hugging Face that are private only to one organization - for companies to build AI privately, specifically for their use-cases."

Enlarge (credit: Carol Yepes | Moment)

California recently became the first state to ban deceptive sales of so-called "disappearing media."

On Tuesday, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2426 into law, protecting consumers of digital goods like books, movies, and video games from being duped into purchasing content without realizing access was only granted through a temporary license.

Sponsored by Democratic assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, the law makes it illegal to "advertise or offer for sale a digital good to a purchaser with the terms buy, purchase, or any other term which a reasonable person would understand to confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good, or alongside an option for a time-limited rental."

Enlarge / Photographs included in an FBI affidavit show a woman believed to be Sarah Beth Clendaniel. (credit: FBI)

A Maryland woman was sentenced to 18 years in prison and a lifetime of supervised release "for conspiring to destroy the Baltimore region power grid," the US Justice Department announced yesterday. Sarah Beth Clendaniel, 36, admitted as part of a plea agreement in May to conspiracy to damage energy facilities.

"Sarah Beth Clendaniel sought to 'completely destroy' the city of Baltimore by targeting five power substations as a means of furthering her violent white supremacist ideology," US Attorney General Merrick Garland said. The planned shooting attacks were prevented by law enforcement.

Family members of Clendaniel spoke to the media last year about her beliefs. "She would have no problem saying she's racist," her nephew Daniel Clites told the Associated Press. "She wanted to bring attention to her cause."

Beloved real-time strategy classics StarCraft and StarCraft II will soon be available in Microsoft's Game Pass subscription for PC, the company announced during the Tokyo Game Show.

It's already free to play both StarCraft and StarCraft II's multiplayer modes on PC. This move to Game Pass will make the equally excellent single-player campaigns available to anyone with a subscription, though. Game Pass will also offer all the expansions for both games.

The subscription will provide access to StarCraft Remastered, a revamped version of the original 1998 game that came out in 2017, as well as the StarCraft II Campaign Collection, which includes all 70+ single-player missions from StarCraft II's Wings of Liberty, Heart of the Swarm, Legacy of the Void, and Nova Covert Ops.

Enlarge / Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has called for the resignation of the FAA administrator. (credit: Dominika Zarzycka/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The clash between SpaceX and the Federal Aviation Administration escalated this week, with Elon Musk calling for the head of the federal regulator to resign after he defended the FAA's oversight and fines levied against the commercial launch company.

The FAA has said it doesn't expect to determine whether to approve a launch license for SpaceX's next Starship test flight until late November, two months later than the agency previously communicated to Musk's launch company. Federal regulators are reviewing changes to the rocket's trajectory necessary for SpaceX to bring Starship's giant reusable Super Heavy booster back to the launch pad in South Texas. This will be the fifth full-scale test flight of Starship but the first time SpaceX attempts such a maneuver on the program.

This week, SpaceX assembled the full Starship rocket on its launch pad at the company's Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas. "Starship stacked for Flight 5 and ready for launch, pending regulatory approval," SpaceX posted on X.