technology geese_feces • 12 hours ago • 100%

arstechnica.com

> Fans of ultra-viral mobile gaming hit *Flappy Bird* who were stunned by the game's sudden removal from the iOS App Store 10 years ago were probably even more stunned by last week's equally sudden announcement that *Flappy Bird* is coming back with a raft of new characters and game modes. Unfortunately, the new version of *Flappy Bird* seems to be the result of a yearslong set of legal maneuvers by a crypto-adjacent game developer intent on taking the "Flappy Bird" name from the game's original creator, Dong Nguyen. > > "No, I have no related with their game. I did not sell anything," Nguyen wrote on social media over the weekend in his first post since 2017. "I also don't support crypto," Nguyen added. > > "*Flappy Bird* was designed to play in a few minutes when you are relaxed," Nguyen said in a 2014 interview after removing the game from mobile app stores. "But it happened to become an addictive product. I think it has become a problem. To solve that problem, it’s best to take down Flappy Bird. It's gone forever." > > So how can another company release a game named *Flappy Bird* without Nguyen's approval or sale of the rights? Court filings show that a company called Gametech Holdings filed a "notice of opposition" against Nguyen with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in late 2023, seeking to invalidate his claim on the "Flappy Bird" name. When Nguyen, who lives in Vietnam, didn't respond to that notice by November, the US Patent and Trademark Office entered a default judgment against him and officially canceled his trademark in January, allowing Gametech to legally claim the name.

music geese_feces • 1 day ago • 100%

https://clppng.bandcamp.com/track/run-it-1 > "Run It" is from Clipping’s forthcoming new album, a long-in-the-works Hip-Hop and Cyberpunk project, due worldwide from Sub Pop in 2025.

movies geese_feces • 1 week ago • 100%

> A young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), eager to make his name as a hungry second son of a wealthy family in 1970s New York, comes under the spell of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the cutthroat attorney who would help create the Donald Trump we know today. Cohn sees in Trump the perfect protégé—someone with raw ambition, a hunger for success, and a willingness to do whatever it takes to win.

technology geese_feces • 1 week ago • 100%

www.yahoo.com

> Ukraine's United24 Media, a government-run platform, shared a video of Ukrainian soldiers using the Steam Deck system to remotely control guns on social media over the weekend.

technology geese_feces • 2 weeks ago • 98%

www.404media.co

>Laufer is the chief spokesperson of [Four Thieves Vinegar Collective](https://fourthievesvinegar.org/), an anarchist collective that has spent the last few years teaching people how to make DIY versions of expensive pharmaceuticals at a tiny fraction of the cost. Four Thieves Vinegar Collective call what they do “right to repair for your body.” > >Laufer has become well known for handing out DIY pills and medicines at hacking conferences, which include, for example, courses of the abortion drug misoprostol that can be manufactured for 89 cents (normal cost: $160) and which has become increasingly difficult to obtain in some states following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs. > In our call, Laufer had just explained that Four Thieves’ had made some miscalculations as part of its latest project, to create instructions for replicating sofosbuvir (Sovaldi), a miracle drug that cures hepatitis C, which he planned to explain and reveal at the DEF CON hacking conference. Unlike many other drugs that treat viruses, Sovaldi does not suppress hepatitis C, a virus that kills roughly 250,000 people around the world each year. It cures it. > >“The holy grail for every virologist is to find a way to drain the viral reservoir, and Sovaldi does this. You take one pill of Sovaldi a day for 12 weeks and then you don’t have hepatitis C anymore.” The problem is that those pills are under patent, and they cost $1,000 per pill. > > “Literally, if you have $84,000 then hepatitis C is not your problem anymore,” Laufer said. “But given that there are other methodologies for managing hepatitis C that are not curing it and that are cheaper, insurance typically will not cover [Sovaldi]. And so we’ve got this incredible technology and it’s sitting on the shelf except for people who are ridiculously wealthy.” > > So Four Thieves Vinegar Collective set out to teach people how to make their own version of Sovaldi. Chemists at the collective thought the DIY version would cost about $300 for the entire course of medication, or about $3.57 per pill. But they were wrong. “It’s actually just a little under $70 (83 cents per pill), which just kind of blew my mind when they finally showed me the results,” Laufer said. “I was like, can we do the math here again?” > A miracle drug called Kalydeco had recently been approved for use on some patients with cystic fibrosis. It cost $311,000 per patient, per year. > > Laufer explains that both precursors needed to make Kalydeco are available commercially, and that one costs $1 per gram and the other costs $28 per gram. He checks the daily dosage (roughly 300 mg per day), and Chemhacktica spits out a potential yield. He explains that, in back-of-the-envelope math, “me, a non-chemist doing a first pass,” Kalydeco could be made “in the range of $10 a day for raw materials.” When Kalydeco was first introduced, it cost roughly $820 per patient per day.

chapotraphouse geese_feces • 2 weeks ago • 100%

www.latimes.com

> As members of Disney’s exclusive Club 33, Scott and Diana Anderson visited the two Anaheim theme parks 60 to 80 times a year. The private club, with its wood-paneled trophy room and other amenities, was the center of their social life. They brought friends, acquaintances and business associates. As a couple, they went on the Haunted Mansion ride nearly 1,000 times. The club’s yearly dues were $31,500, and with travel and hotel expenses, the Arizona couple were spending close to $125,000 annually to get their Disney fix. > > All of it came to an end in 2017, when Disney revoked their membership in the club after an allegation that Scott Anderson was drunk in public. Diana Anderson, a hardcore Disney aficionado since childhood, called it “a stab in the heart.” The Andersons, both 60, have spent the years since then — and hundreds of thousands of dollars — trying to get back into Club 33. On Tuesday, an Orange County jury rejected their claim that Disney ousted them improperly. It had taken the Andersons more than a decade to gain membership in Club 33, which includes access to exclusive lounges, dining, VIP tours and special events. They finally made it off the waiting list in 2012. > “My wife and I are both dead set that this is an absolute wrong, and we will fight this to the death,” Scott Anderson, who owns a golf course in Gilbert, Ariz., told The Times. “There is no way we’re letting this go.” He said the lawsuit has cost him about $400,000. “My retirement is set back five years,” he said. “I’m paying through the nose. Every day, I’m seeing another bill, and I’m about to keel over.” He said he will appeal. His wife said she wants to keep fighting. “I’ll sell a kidney,” Diana said. “I don’t care.”

science geese_feces • 2 weeks ago • 100%

> An interdisciplinary team of researchers put a culture of the edible mushroom species *Pleurotus eryngii* (also known as the king oyster mushroom) in control of a pair of vehicles, which can twitch and roll across a flat surface. >By applying algorithms based on the extracellular electrophysiology of *P. eryngii* mycelia and feeding the output into a microcontroller unit, the researchers used spikes of activity triggered by a stimulus – in this case, UV light – to toggle mechanical responses in two different kinds of mobile device. https://youtu.be/5ZkkaM54RH8 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.adk8019

news geese_feces • 4 weeks ago • 100%

* [Trump says he would consider Musk for Cabinet role](https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4835898-donald-trump-elon-musk-cabinet-role/) * [Elon Musk says he’ll take a job in the Trump cabinet if offered](https://fortune.com/2024/08/20/elon-musk-trump-cabinet-position/) * [Trump says he’d consider appointing RFK Jr. to role in administration](https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/20/politics/trump-consider-appointing-rfk-jr-administration-role/index.html) * [RFK Jr to weigh dropping US presidential bid to join forces with Trump](https://www.jpost.com/us-elections/article-815630)

labour geese_feces • 2 months ago • 100%

arstechnica.com

> SAG-AFTRA has called for a strike of all its members working in video games, with the union demanding that its next contract not allow "companies to abuse AI to the detriment of our members." > > The strike mirrors similar actions taken by SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) last year, which, while also broader in scope than just AI, were similarly focused on concerns about AI-generated work product and the use of member work to train AI. > During the strike, the more than 160,000 members of the union will not provide talent to games produced by Disney, Electronic Arts, Blizzard Activision, Take-Two, WB Games, and others. Not every game is affected. Some productions may have interim agreements with union workers, and others, like continually updated games that launched before the current negotiations starting September 2023, may be exempt. > The Washington Post says the biggest remaining issue involves on-camera performers, including motion capture performers. Crabtree-Ireland told the Post that while AI training protections were extended to voice performers, motion and stunt work was left out.

technology geese_feces • 2 months ago • 100%

www.theverge.com

>The other day, in Ireland, in our innovation center there, one of our team members showed me a forever mouse with the comparison to a watch. This is a nice watch, not a super expensive watch, but I’m not planning to throw that watch away ever. So why would I be throwing my mouse or my keyboard away if it’s a fantastic-quality, well-designed, software-enabled mouse. The forever mouse is one of the things that we’d like to get to. > >**What made the mouse a forever mouse?** > >It was a little heavier, it had great software and services that you’d constantly update, and it was beautiful. So I don’t think we’re necessarily super far away from that. >**I’m still stuck on, “You’re going to sell me a mouse once and it’s going to have ongoing software updates forever.”** > >Imagine it’s like your Rolex. You’re going to really love that. >**I’m going to ask this very directly. Can you envision a subscription mouse?** > >Possibly. > >**And that would be the forever mouse?** > >Yeah. > >**So you pay a subscription for software updates to your mouse.** > >Yeah, and you never have to worry about it again, which is not unlike our video conferencing services today. > >**But it’s a mouse.** > >But it’s a mouse, yeah. > >**I think consumers might perceive those to be very different.** > >[Laughs] Yes, but it’s gorgeous. Think about it like a diamond-encrusted mouse. > The forever mouse, and the forever mouse could be the mouse that you keep and we just send you software updates, but it could also be the mouse that you turn in at Best Buy and we get it back or Best Buy takes it back and refurbs and resells it, which is another business model. We’re starting to do that but not yet at the scale that we need to.

technology geese_feces • 2 months ago • 100%

arstechnica.com

>Amazon is known to have sold Echo speakers for cheap or at a loss in the hopes of making money off Alexa later. In 2019, then-Amazon Devices SVP Dave Limp, who exited the company last year, told WSJ: "We don’t have to make money when we sell you the device." WSJ noted that this strategy has applied to other unspecified Amazon devices, too. > >People tend to use Alexa for free services, though, like checking the weather or the time, not making big purchases. > >"We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer,” a former senior employee told the WSJ. > Amazon is now banking on the impending release of a subscription-based gen AI Alexa to finally drive profits. The idea is that people will be willing to pay a recurring fee to use Alexa if it can do more advanced things, like perform multiple commands without the user having to say "Alexa" repeatedly, be more conversational, and manage smart homes more intuitively. Amazon is considering charging $5 to $10 per month for generative AI Alexa, Reuters reported in June.

chapotraphouse geese_feces • 2 months ago • 98%

https://archive.is/6LDp9

technology geese_feces • 2 months ago • 100%

cyberscoop.com

>An established cybercrime group with a track record of attacking political targets posted on Tuesday roughly two gigabytes of data from the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. > >Self-described “gay furry hackers,” SiegedSec said it released the data in response to Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a set of proposals that aim to give Donald Trump a set of ready-made policies to implement if he wins this fall’s election. >The data includes the “full names, email addresses, passwords, and usernames” of people associating with Heritage, vio said, including users with U.S. government email addresses. >The attack was carried out as part of SiegedSec’s “OpTransRights,” campaign, which has previously included the defacement of government websites and data theft from states either considering or implementing anti-abortion or anti-trans legislation. >SiegedSec, which emerged on Telegram in April 2022, has also targeted various NATO portals, the city of Fort Worth and a company involved in the monitoring of offshore oil and gas facilities.

labour geese_feces • 2 months ago • 100%

www.tomshardware.com

> Samsung's largest labor union is beginning its three-day strike in South Korea. The union is now 36,570 members strong, making up a quarter of Samsung Electronics' workforce. > It is demanding one more day of annual leave, a change to the company's draconic bonus structure, and better pay overall. > The union has 6,540 members participating in the strike, and the union says 5,211 of these are workers involved in semiconductor manufacturing. > This week's three-day strike is not estimated to seriously impact Samsung's productivity, but the union has pledged to begin a second five-day strike next Monday if demands are not met in time.

music geese_feces • 3 months ago • 98%

www.theguardian.com

> A US federal judge has refused prosecutors’ request to prohibit the maker of the 1990s rap classic Bling Bling “from promoting and glorifying future gun violence/murder” in songs and at concerts while on supervised release from prison, saying such a restriction could violate his constitutional right to free speech. > > But the artist known as BG must provide the government with copies of any songs he writes moving forward, ahead of their production or promotion – and, if they are deemed to be inconsistent with his goals of rehabilitation, prosecutors could move to toughen the terms governing his supervised release. > He had to return to court in his hometown of New Orleans after prosecutors asked Judge Morgan to require him to refrain “from promoting and glorifying future gun violence/murder” as well as threats against people who cooperate with the police in songs and at concerts, among other requests.

electoralism geese_feces • 3 months ago • 100%

deadline.com

>To qualify, candidates had to be on enough state ballots to reach 270 electoral votes, or enough to win. They also had to receive at least 15% in four separate national polls, among those specified by the network. > >Kennedy had reached that threshold in three polls, but was on the ballot in only 10 states, short of the 270 electoral votes, according to NBC News. The Kennedy campaign had said that it had enough signatures in 23 states, with 310 electoral votes. But those signatures still need to be verified by state elections officials. >Kennedy will have more time to qualify for the next presidential debate, scheduled for Sept. 10. ABC News is hosting that debate with similar criteria to CNN’s guidelines. >The last independent candidate to participate in a general election debate was Ross Perot, who took part in the 1992 debates along with Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. Perot ran again in 1996 but did not qualify to the debates that cycle.

labour geese_feces • 3 months ago • 100%

> The U.S. Supreme Court sided on Thursday with Starbucks, in the coffee chain's challenge to a judicial order to rehire seven Memphis employees fired as they sought to unionize in a ruling that could make it harder for courts to quickly halt labor practices contested as unfair under federal law. > >The justices threw out a lower court's approval of an injunction sought by the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ordering Starbucks to reinstate the workers while the agency's in-house administrative case against the Seattle-based company proceeds. > Hundreds of complaints have been filed with the NLRB accusing Starbucks of unlawful labor practices such as firing union supporters, spying on workers and closing stores during labor campaigns. Starbucks has denied wrongdoing and said it respects the right of workers to choose whether to unionize.

labour geese_feces • 3 months ago • 100%

arstechnica.com

>Samsung Electronics workers are on strike. As The New York Times reports, Nationwide Samsung Electronics Union (NSEU) has about 28,000 members, or about one-fifth of Samsung's workforce, walking out of the job on Friday. It's Samsung's first workers' strike. > >Specifically, the walkout is in Samsung's chip division, which makes RAM, NAND flash chips, USB sticks and SD cards, Exynos processors, camera sensors, modems, NFC chips, and power and display controllers. Depending on how each quarter goes, Samsung is often the world's largest chipmaker by revenue thanks to this division, and its parts are in products from a million different brands. It's probably hard to find a tech product that doesn't have some kind of Samsung chip in it. > >As you might expect, the union wants higher pay. Samsung's workers have gotten as much as 30 percent of their pay from bonuses, and there were no bonuses last year. UnionVP Lee Hyun Kuk told the Times that “it feels like we’ve taken a 30 percent pay cut.” The average pay for a union member is around $60,000 before bonuses. > >This is officially a one-day strike, so it's not expected to hurt Samsung's output much. For now, this is more about a show of strength by the union in the hopes that Samsung will come to the negotiating table. Samsung reported a profit of $1.4 billion from its chip division in Q1 this year. > >If this isn't resolved, what exactly would happen to the tech industry during a long-term Samsung strike is anyone's guess. Because of the ubiquity of Samsung's components, every tech hardware company would have to deal with this somewhat. Samsung has a lot of competitors in each market, though. For instance, for memory it's always battling SK Hynix and Micron, and a lot of manufacturers will use parts from the three companies interchangeably. Maybe Samsung's competitors could just pick up the slack. Samsung has never been on strike before, so we're in uncharted territory.

technology geese_feces • 3 months ago • 100%

stackdiary.com

> A user on the online forum 4chan has leaked a massive 270GB of data belonging to The New York Times. This leak includes the source code for the newspaper’s digital operations. >Here are some other findings we can confirm: > >* The leak does have the original source code of the game Wordle, which the NY Times acquired in 2022. >* The leak includes a dated WordPress database of 1,500 NY Times Education site users. The database contains names and surnames, email addresses, and hashed passwords. You should expect it to be added to HIBP shortly. >* Several folders contain internal communications from NY Times Slack channels. >* Times uses various machine learning algorithms and NLP techniques/scripts for its services. >* Many exposed authentication methods exist, including authentication URLs and their respective passwords, secret keys, and API tokens. The majority are well protected, but plenty of such secrets need immediate attention. We have also seen private user keys used for authentication. >* There are a lot of details about internal NY Times architecture from a software development point of view. > >So far, it is difficult to say whether the NY Times will need to reset the passwords for everyone who is a member of its site. > >It’s worth pointing out that this leak appears to involve data from The New York Times’s IT/infrastructure/website organization rather than the news organization composed of reporters. In media companies, these two entities are largely separate. The IT/infrastructure team handles the technical aspects of the website and digital operations, while the news organization manages reporting and editorial content.

technology geese_feces • 3 months ago • 100%

www.bleepingcomputer.com

>Club Penguin fans hacked a Disney Confluence server to steal information about their favorite game but wound up walking away with 2.5 GB of internal corporate data, BleepingComputer has learned. > >Club Penguin was a multiplayer online game (MMO) from 2005 to 2018, featuring a virtual world where players could engage in games, activities, and chat with other players. The game was originally created by New Horizon Interactive, which Disney later purchased. > >While Club Penguin was officially shut down in 2017, and its successor, Club Penguin Island, in 2018, the game continues to live on in private servers run by fans and independent developers. Though Disney pushed back on a more prominent 'Club Penguin Rewritten' remake, causing its operators to be arrested, private servers continue to this day with thousands of players. > >This week, an anonymous person uploaded a link to "Internal Club Penguin PDFs" on the 4Chan message board with the simple statement, "I no longer need these :)." > >The link goes to a 415 MB archive containing 137 PDFs that contain old internal information about Club Penguin, including emails, design schematics, documentation, and character sheets. All of this data is seven years old, if not older, making it only interesting to fans of the game. > >BleepingComputer has since learned that Club Penguin data is only a small part of a much larger data set stolen from Disney's Confluence server, which stores documentation for various business, software, and IT projects used internally by Disney. > >According to an anonymous source, Disney's Confluence servers were breached using previously exposed credentials. > >The source says that the threat actors were initially looking for Club Penguin data; they wound up downloading 2.5 GB of data about Disney's corporate strategies, advertising plans, Disney+, internal developer tools, business projects, and internal infrastructure. > >"Lot more files here including internal api endpoints and credentials for things like S3 buckets," an anonymous source told BleepingComputer. > >The data, seen by BleepingComputer, includes documentation on a wide variety of initiatives and projects, as well as information on internal developer tools named Helios and Communicore, which have not previously been disclosed publicly. > >CommuniCore is a "high-performance asynchronous messaging library, aimed at use in distributed applications." > >Helios is a show authoring and playback tool that allows Disney producers and authors to create interactive non-linear "experiences" using real world inputs from sensors in Disney's parks. > >Strewn across the documents are links to internal websites used by Disney developers, which could be valuable for threat actors who wish to target the company. > >While the Club Penguin data is fairly old, the rest of the data circulating on Discord is far newer, with information from 2024. > >BleepingComputer was told that the original Club Penguin PDFs shared on 4Chan were stolen weeks ago. However, the Disney corporate data appears to have been downloaded much sooner, as they contain the following text, "Document generated by Confluence on Jun 01, 2024 21:59." > >BleepingComputer contacted Disney multiple times with information and questions about the breach but has yet to receive a reply.

technology geese_feces • 3 months ago • 100%

arstechnica.com

>Oral-B released the Guide for $230 in August 2020 but bricked the ability to set up or reconfigure Alexa on the product this February. > >The Guide toothbrush's charging base was able to connect to the Internet and work like an Alexa speaker that you could speak to and from which Alexa could respond. Owners could “ask to play music, hear the news, check weather, control smart home devices, and even order more brush heads by saying, ‘Alexa, order Oral-B brush head replacements,'” per Procter & Gamble's 2020 announcement. > On February 15, Oral-B bricked the Guide's ability to set up Alexa by discontinuing the Oral-B Connect app required to complete the process. Guide owners can still use the Oral-B App for other features; however, the ability to use the charging base like an Alexa smart speaker—a big draw in the product’s announcement and advertising—is seriously limited. > >The device should still work with Alexa if users set it up before Oral-B shuttered Connect, but setting up a new Wi-Fi connection or reestablishing a lost one doesn't work without Connect. >Recently, music-streaming app company Spotify similarly announced that it’s discontinuing its first and only hardware this December. Spotify's Car Thing originally cost $90 when released to the general public in February 2022. Even companies dedicated to smart home products entirely can meet an abrupt demise, and if a company suffers from poor communication skills, customers can be left in the dark. >Meanwhile, Oral-B is pushing its latest toothbrush to capitalize on the latest AI tech trend. Without real detail, Oral-B claims its new $400 toothbrush has "AI position detection that tracks where you brush across all 3 surfaces of your teeth.” Like many, I'm skeptical about the toothbrush’s incorporation of actual AI; notably, P&G declined to comment to The Washington Post on what, exactly, makes the toothbrush "AI."

news geese_feces • 4 months ago • 100%

apnews.com

> Pope Francis paved the way for the canonization of the first saint of the millennial generation on Thursday, attributing a second miracle to a 15-year-old Italian computer whiz who died of leukemia in 2006. > >Carlo Acutis, born on May 3, 1991, in London and then moved with his Italian parents to Milan as a child, was the youngest contemporary person to be beatified by Francis in Assisi in 2020. > Acutis, who died of acute leukemia on Oct. 12, 2006, was put on the road to sainthood after Pope Francis approved the first miracle attributed to him: The healing of a 7-year-old Brazilian boy from a rare pancreatic disorder after coming into contact with an Acutis’ relic, a piece of one of his T-shirts. > > According to Vatican News, the second miracle recognized on Thursday is related to a woman from Costa Rica, who in July 2022 made a pilgrimage to Acutis’ tomb in Assisi to pray for the healing of her daughter, who had suffered severe head trauma after falling from her bicycle. The young woman started showing signs of recovery immediately after her mother’s plea. so the vatican has all of this kids clothes preserved as relics and they cut off pieces of his t-shirts so they can mail them to cancer patients. just imagining like, spongebob, batman, metallica t-shirts being guarded as holy relics in rome for centuries to come.

games geese_feces • 4 months ago • 100%

arstechnica.com

> "Basically, fast-paced interesting ADHD gameplay. Combination of Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, Overwatch, Valorant, Smite, Orcs Must Die." > > That's how notable Valve leaker "Gabe Follower" describes Deadlock, a Valve game that is seemingly in playtesting at the moment, for which a few screenshots have leaked out. > > The game has been known as "Neon Prime" and "Citadel" at prior points. It's a "Competitive third-person hero-based shooter," with six-on-six battles across a map with four "lanes." That allows for some of the "Tower defense mechanics" mentioned by Gabe Follower, along with "fast travel using floating rails, similar to Bioshock Infinite." The maps reference a "modern steampunk European city (little bit like Half-Life)," after "bad feedback" about a sci-fi theme pushed the development team toward fantasy.

movies geese_feces • 4 months ago • 100%

variety.com

> On Monday night, all eyes in Cannes will be on the launch of “The Apprentice,” the high-profile drama that stars Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump. The filmmakers and stars haven’t done any press on the ground at Cannes ahead of the film’s world premiere, and few have seen it, with plot details shrouded in mystery. > > But one person who has seen it is Dan Snyder, the billionaire former owner of the Washington Commanders who is an investor in “The Apprentice.” And he isn’t happy. > > Behind the scenes, a nasty battle has played out between the Snyder-backed company Kinematics and the filmmakers over the creative direction of the film. “The Apprentice,” directed by Ali Abbasi, covers Trump’s early years when he was mentored by political fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and his marriage to his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova). > > Sources say Snyder, a friend of Trump’s who donated $1.1. million to his inaugural committee and Trump Victory in 2016 and $100,000 to his 2020 presidential campaign, put money into the film via Kinematics because he was under the impression that it was a flattering portrayal of the 45th president. Snyder finally saw a cut of the film in February and was said to be furious. Kinematics’ lawyers were enlisted to fight the release of “The Apprentice,” and the cease-and-desist letters began flying. Kinematics president Emanuel Nuñez insists that the creative impasse between his company and the filmmakers didn’t involve Snyder. “All creative and business decisions involving ‘The Apprentice’ have always been and continue to be solely made by Kinematics. Mark and I run our company without the involvement of any other third parties.” > > Sources familiar with the back and forth say Snyder took issue with multiple aspects of the film and weighed in on what should be changed. In earlier versions of the screenplay, “The Apprentice” featured a scene where Trump rapes Ivana. One insider, familiar with the scene that is in the current cut, described it as “violent” and “uncomfortable” and follows a fight between the couple. (In a 1989 divorce deposition, Ivana accused Trump of raping her. But Ivana — who died in 2022 — later refuted these claims in 2015, saying, “The story is totally without merit. Donald and I are the best of friends and together have raised three children that we love and are very proud of.”) > > Snyder’s attorneys John Brownlee and Stuart Nash, partners at Florida-based firm Holland & Knight, did not respond to a request for comment. A representative for the filmmakers declined comment. > > Snyder isn’t the only investor in “The Apprentice.” Justin Trudeau’s Canadian government also put in money, as did the Irish and Danish governments. Kinematics doesn’t own the copyright on the Ali Abbasi-directed film and cannot kill it. (Abbasi is represented by CAA, which was aware of the legal back and forth over the film. The agency and Abbasi declined comment.)

technology geese_feces • 4 months ago • 100%

9to5mac.com

> This new iPhone model is said to be “significantly thinner” than current iPhone models, and may align with a discontinuation of the iPhone Plus line. Though according to The Information, it is expected to be more expensive than the Pro Max model.