Author: n Scharon Hardingn

Streaming services have a way of reviving love for old shows, and HBO Max is looking to entice old and new fans with this month’s addition of Mad Men. Instead, viewers have been laughing at the problems with the show’s 4K premiere.

Mad Men ran on the AMC channel for seven seasons from 2007 to 2015. The show had a vintage aesthetic, depicting the 1960s advertising industry in New York City.

Last month, HBO Max announced it would modernize the show by debuting a 4K version. The show originally aired in SD and HD resolutions and had not been previously made available in 4K through other means, such as Blu-ray.

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Plex is starting to enforce its new rules, which prevent users from remotely accessing a personal media server without a subscription fee.

Previously, people outside of a server owner’s network could access the owner’s media library through Plex for free. Under the new rules announced in March, a server owner needs to have a Plex Pass subscription, which starts at $7 per month, to grant users remote access to their server. Alternatively, someone can remotely access another person’s Plex server by buying their own Plex Pass or a Remote Watch Pass, which is a subscription with fewer features than a Plex Pass and that Plex started selling in April for a $2/month starting price.

Plex’s new rules took effect on April 29. According to a recent Plex forums post by a Plex employee that How-To Geek spotted today, the changes are rolling out this week, with a subscription being required for people using Plex’s Roku OS app for remote access. The Plex employee added:

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Some members of the maker community are distraught about Arduino’s new terms of service (ToS), saying that the added rules put the company’s open source DNA at risk.

Arduino updated its ToS and privacy policy this month, which is about a month after Qualcomm announced that it’s acquiring the open source hardware and software company. Among the most controversial changes is this addition:

User shall not:

• translate, decompile or reverse-engineer the Platform, or engage in any other activity designed to identify the algorithms and logic of the Platform’s operation, unless expressly allowed by Arduino or by applicable license agreements …

In response to concerns from some members of the maker community, including from open source hardware distributor and manufacturer Adafruit, Arduino posted a blog on Friday. Regarding the new reverse-engineering rule, Arduino’s blog said:

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Some Dell and HP laptop owners have been befuddled by their machines’ inability to play HEVC/H.265 content in web browsers, despite their machines’ processors having integrated decoding support.

Laptops with sixth-generation Intel Core and later processors have built-in hardware support for HEVC decoding and encoding. AMD has made laptop chips supporting the codec since 2015. However, both Dell and HP have disabled this feature on some of their popular business notebooks.

HP discloses this in the data sheets for its affected laptops, which include the HP ProBook 460 G11 [PDF], ProBook 465 G11 [PDF], and EliteBook 665 G11 [PDF].

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Ryanair is trying to force users to download its mobile app by eliminating paper boarding passes, starting on November 12.

As announced in February and subsequently delayed from earlier start dates, Europe’s biggest airline is moving to digital-only boarding passes, meaning customers will no longer be able to print physical ones. In order to access their boarding passes, Ryanair flyers will have to download Ryanair’s app.

“Almost 100 percent of passengers have smartphones, and we want to move everybody onto that smartphone technology,” Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said recently on The Independent’s daily travel podcast.

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Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) has a ‘for sale’ sign up. And that could mean big changes for subscribers to the company’s most popular streaming service, HBO Max.

After receiving unsolicited acquisition offers, WBD recently declared itself open to “strategic alternatives to maximize shareholder value.” WBD drew new attention by being open to selling its streaming business (WBD is also still open to moving forward with previously shared plans to split into a cable company and a streaming and movie studios company next year).

Naturally, mergers and acquisitions talk has heated up since then, with Paramount as one of the most eager suitors. Paramount, which merged with Skydance in August, is reportedly planning to keep “much of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. intact” if a deal happens, per a Bloomberg report that cited unnamed people familiar with the plans of David Ellison, Paramount’s CEO.

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