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Samsung just launched the Galaxy S24 series with an impressive set of features. Here are a few that I wish Apple would copy for the iPhone 16.

Have a Google Pixel phone? Don’t install any new software updates that you receive. If you do, there’s a good chance you may break your phone.

These are the five movies leaving Netflix at the end of January you need to watch. Our picks include Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Call Me by Your Name.

From Barbenheimer to Poor Things, these are the 2024 nominees for Best Picture, ranked from worst to best.

It’s that time of year again. Oscar nominations are in, setting off a firestorm of debate and speculation until the awards ceremony in March. This year, the streamers absolutely ruled the roost. Netflix snagged 18 nominations, including best picture, which technically puts it in first place, according to a breakdown from Variety.

I say Netflix “technically” received the most nominations because it depends on your point of view. Disney actually scored 20 nominations across various categories, but only when you don’t split up its various sub-brands. Remember, Disney owns just about everything, including 20th Century Studios, Hulu, Lucasfilm Ltd., Marvel Studios, National Geographic Documentary Films, Pixar Animation Studios and Searchlight, among others. All of them together came to 20 nominations, including a best picture nomination for Poor Things.

Apple came away with 13 nominations, including best picture nods for Napoleon and Killers of the Flower Moon, which isn’t bad for a company that just started creating original content around four years ago. Universal, an actual old-school production company, also nabbed 13 noms, including best picture for one half of the summer’s hottest cinema event, Oppenheimer.

The other half of the equation, Barbie, was also nominated for best picture. However, Greta Gerwig got snubbed for best director, which is not sitting right with denizens of the internet. Also, Margot Robbie didn’t get a best actress nomination, while Ryan Gosling got one for best supporting actor. To be fair, that best actress category is crowded with stellar performances from relative newcomers like Lily Gladstone to long-time veterans like Annette Bening.

The films with the most nominations include Oppenheimer and Poor Things, both with 13. Production company A24, however, was the only studio with multiple nominations in the best picture category, thanks to Past Lives and The Zone of Interest. A24 was also behind the Netflix limited series Beef, which took home a slew of Emmy awards last week. Inexplicably, A24 also produces the hilarious, yet decidedly low-brow, sitcom Tacoma FD. That’s your useless fact for the day. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/netflix-grabbed-the-most-oscar-nominations-with-stiff-competition-from-disney-and-apple-171221880.html?src=rss

With today’s release of Chrome M121, Google announced it will introduce new generative AI features that will make the browser easier to use. The new additions will include a tab organizer, a writing assistant that helps draft text and the option to customize the artwork and themes throughout the browser. The “Experimental AI” toggle must be flipped on in the Settings page — found in the three-dot dropdown menu — to enable these new features.

The Tab Organizer will do pretty much what it says: The built-in AI will automatically suggest ways to classify any open tabs in your Chrome windows and suggest the option to create groups. This might be helpful if you have a lot of recurring tabs open. When you click ‘Organize Similar Tabs,’ the AI will aggregate open pages together based on topics. For example, tabs related to shopping might all cluster together and the AI could suggest a name like ‘Ski-trip shopping gear.

Chrome’s new text assist too might also have some practical applications. It will launch as an experimental tool that will help users draft text — including Google reviews or social media posts. To enable this when it launches, you need to select “Help me write” to let the tool finish your sentences or suggest options for continuing the text.

Google

Customization is not new to most Google tools like Mail or Docs and now on Chrome web browsers, you can personalize the browser’s visuals — something the company considers an extension of the AI wallpapers it built out for Pixel phones recently. To do so, you need to select the ‘Customize Chrome’ button on the side panel and instruct the AI to generate a theme for you. You can search for a description, such as ‘small beach town’ or ‘Blade Runner vibes,’ and preview the AI-generated theme options before selection.

Introducing these new tools will naturally rival Microsoft’s AI-infused Bing engine, which introduced AI-powered tab grouping and a text composition helper back in September. Chrome, however, still dominates the US browser market share by a wide margin, which Bing is usually lumped into the “others” category, well below competitors like Firefox and Opera.

Google

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/googles-next-chrome-update-adds-three-new-generative-ai-features-170032292.html?src=rss

It’s a mighty fine time to be a pro wrestling fan. The industry is going through a bit of a boom period, with multiple companies churning out quality content on the regular. Barely a week goes by without fans enjoying at least two or three excellent displays of scripted athleticism and jacked human beings slapping each other in the chest really, really hard.

It’s an even better time to be a pro wrestling fan if you have a Netflix subscription, since the streaming service will soon be the new home of WWE’s flagship show in the US and pretty much all of its programming in other territories. Starting in January 2025, Netflix will livestream Monday Night Raw every week in the US, Canada, UK, Latin America and some other countries, with more to follow.

The deal is even sweeter for those outside of the US, as Netflix will stream WWE’s other two main weekly shows — NXT and SmackDown — along with its major events like the Royal Rumble and WrestleMania. WWE documentaries, other original series and future projects will hit Netflix internationally starting next year.

It seems that Peacock will remain the home of WWE’s library and major live events in the US for the foreseeable future. Peacock’s parent NBCUniversal also owns Raw‘s current broadcaster, USA Network (it’s unclear where the show will air between the expiry of those broadcasting rights in the fall and the Netflix partnership starting in January). USA Network will be the home of SmackDown starting this fall when the show moves over from Fox. NXT, which also currently airs on USA, is moving to The CW.

NBCUniversal and USA Network are said to be paying $1.4 billion for SmackDown rights over five years, while The CW will reportedly pay between $100 million and $125 million for NXT over the same timespan.

It seems the Netflix deal far outstrips those, however. According to multiple reports, the company is paying WWE north of $5 billion over 10 years. That’s said to be around double what NBCUniversal currently pays WWE for Raw rights. Amazon was also said to be in talks to become Raw‘s new home.

This marks a mammoth change for both WWE and Netflix. It will be the first time in the 31-year history of Raw that the show doesn’t air on a linear TV network. But, just as the wrestling company took a big risk with shifting from a pay-per-view model to its own streaming service a decade ago, this could very well pay off for WWE at it seeks to grow its already-large fanbase.

“This deal is transformative,” Mark Shapiro, president and COO of WWE parent company TKO said in a statement. “It marries the can’t-miss WWE product with Netflix’s extraordinary global reach and locks in significant and predictable economics for many years. Our partnership fundamentally alters and strengthens the media landscape, dramatically expands the reach of WWE, and brings weekly live appointment viewing to Netflix.”

Meanwhile, it’s a major first for Netflix. The company only started dabbling in live content last March with a Chris Rock stand-up show. Since then, it has aired live award shows and a few one-off sports events, though it was forced to cancel its second attempt at a livestream due to technical issues. Raw marks Netflix’s first major push into live sports (or sports entertainment if you want to get sniffy about it) and it’s set to become the company’s first live weekly streaming show.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/netflix-will-be-the-new-home-of-wwes-flagship-show-monday-night-raw-in-2025-165434172.html?src=rss

France’s data privacy watchdog organization, the CNIL, has fined a logistics subsidiary of Amazon €32 million, or $35 million in US dollars, over the company’s use of an “overly intrusive” employee surveillance system. The CNIL says that the system employed by Amazon France Logistique “measured work interruptions with such accuracy, potentially requiring employees to justify every break or interruption.”

Of course, this system was forced on the company’s warehouse workers, as they seem to always get the short end of the Amazon stick. The CNIL says the surveillance software tracked the inactivity of employees via a mandatory barcode scanner that’s used to process orders. The system tracks idle time as interruptions in barcode scans, calling out employees for periods of downtime as low as one minute. The French organization ruled that the accuracy of this system was illegal, using Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a legal basis for the ruling.

To that end, this isn’t being classified as a labor case, but rather a data processing case regarding excessive monitoring. “As implemented, the processing is considered to be excessively intrusive,” the CNIL wrote, noting that Amazon uses this data to assess employee performance on a weekly basis. The organization also noted that Amazon held onto this data for all employees and temporary workers.

Amazon responded with a lengthy statement on the matter, writing “we strongly disagree with the CNIL’s conclusions, which are factually incorrect, and we might appeal the decision.” Amazon went on to say that it’s not the only company in the logistics industry that uses a connected warehouse system of this sort, going on to tout the system for balancing the “workload between teams so that we can keep processing orders in a safe and efficient manner.” It did say it would extend the threshold limit of its system, potentially giving employees a longer window before alerts start coming in.

Amazon did say it’s mulling an appeal, so we’ll keep an eye on this story as it develops. Over on the other side of the pond, the company has found itself practically living in hot water. Amazon was found to be responsible for more than half of warehouse worker injuries in 2022 and has been accused of unfair labor practices on several occasions. As a matter of fact, the company’s logistics division churns through employees at such a high rate that it ends up costing Amazon $8 billion each year. Maybe it needs a corporate monitoring system of some kind.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/france-fines-amazon-35-million-over-intrusive-employee-surveillance-161302822.html?src=rss

It’s been a while since Samsung last upgraded its high-end internal SSDs, and those looking for more performance and power efficiency from their system storage may be interested in the new model. The 990 Evo looks to be a true successor to the Samsung 970 Evo Plus, which is our top recommendation for a Gen3 NVMe SSD.

Samsung says that the 990 Evo is compatible with PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 4.0 interfaces to make sure it works in a wide array of systems. It’s said to deliver performance improvements of up to 43 percent over the 970 Evo plus with read speeds of up to 5,000MB/s and write speeds up to 4,200 MB/s.

It’s worth noting that the read speeds still fall somewhat short of Sony’s recommendation of 5,500MB/s for any SSD used to expand a PlayStation 5’s storage. That said, I use a 980 series SSD (with a maximum read speed of 3,500MB/s) in my PS5 and haven’t encountered any lag while running games from it.

The 990 Evo is said to offer power efficiency improvements of up to 70 percent over the 970 Evo Plus. That could help extend the battery life of laptops that use the SSD. Additionally, Samsung says the drive has a heat spreader label, which is said to effectively regulate its thermal condition and allow it to run at consistently high performance without risking the SSD’s integrity.

There’s one other useful feature that comes in the form of support for Microsoft Modern Standby. This allows for “instant on/off function with uninterrupted internet connectivity and seamless notification reception, even in low-power states,” according to Samsung.

The 990 Evo starts at $125 for 1TB of storage. For a version with double the capacity, that will run you $210. The SSD comes with a five-year limited warranty.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/samsung-says-its-new-990-evo-ssd-delivers-improved-performance-and-efficiency-160032381.html?src=rss

Meta’s Oversight Board has raised concerns over automated moderation while overturning a decision by the company to leave a Holocaust denial post on Instagram. Holocaust denial is deemed hate speech under Meta’s policies. The post in question depicted Squidward from SpongeBob Squarepants and purported to include true facts about the Holocaust. However, the claims “were either blatantly untrue or misrepresented historical facts,” the Oversight Board said.

Users reported the post six times after it first appeared in September 2020, but in four instances Meta’s systems either determined that the content didn’t violate the rules or they automatically closed the case. In early 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, Meta started automatically closing content reviews to lessen the workload for human reviewers and free up bandwidth for manual review of high-risk reports. All the same, two of the Squidward post reports were also deemed non-violating by human reviewers.

Last May, one user lodged an appeal against Meta’s decision to leave the offending content on Instagram. But this appeal was again closed automatically by Meta due to its COVID-19 automation policies, according to the Oversight Board. The user then appealed to the board, which took up the case.

The board conducted an assessment of Holocaust denial content across Meta’s platforms and it found that the Squidward meme was used to spread various types of antisemitic narratives. It notes that some users attempt to evade detection and continue to spread Holocaust denial content by using alternate spellings of words (such as replacing letters with symbols) and using cartoons and memes.

The Oversight Board said it’s concerned that Meta continued to employ its COVID-19 automation policies as of last May, “long after circumstances reasonably justified them.” It also cited unease over “the effectiveness and accuracy of Meta’s moderation systems in removing Holocaust denial content from its platforms.” It notes that human reviewers can’t granularly label offending content as “Holocaust denial” (such posts are filtered into a “hate speech” bucket). The board also wants to know more about the company’s ability to “prioritize accurate enforcement of hate speech at a granular policy level” as it leans more heavily on AI for content moderation.

The board recommended that Meta “take technical steps” to make sure it systematically and sufficiently measures how accurate it is in enforcing Holocaust denial content. That includes gathering more granular information. The board also asked Meta to confirm publicly whether it has ceased all COVID-19 automation policies it established during the onset of the pandemic.

When asked for comment, Meta directed Engadget to its formal response to the board’s decision on its transparency site. The company agrees that it left the offending post on Instagram in error and, at the time the board took up the case, Meta said it had removed the content. Following the board’s case decision, Meta says it will “initiate a review of identical content with parallel context. If we determine that we have the technical and operational capacity to take action on that content as well, we will do so promptly.” It plans to review the board’s other recommendations and issue an update later.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/metas-oversight-board-raises-concerns-over-automated-moderation-of-hate-speech-154359848.html?src=rss