Netflix Shares First Six Minutes of New Anime Series ‘Terminator Zero’
And the Netflix blog has now shared the first six minutes online:
In the world of Terminator, the future is never set, yet some things are guaranteed: The Terminator is still a cyborg that feels no remorse, pity, or fear. The anime series TERMINATOR ZERO, landing on Netflix on Aug. 29 — known to fans as Judgment Day — looks different from any incarnation of the Terminator franchise we’ve seen before, but you can tell from these opening six minutes that the brutal, sophisticated action will remain.
“I realized the first minutes of the show have to declare what it is,” creator and executive producer Mattson Tomlin tells Tudum. A joint production between Skydance and the Japanese animation studio Production I.G, TERMINATOR ZERO has the challenge of drawing in both anime fans and fans of the Terminator series. “The way to do that was to have a sequence that had no dialogue, that was really planting a flag in letting everybody know this is going to be violent, it’s going to be dark, it’s going to be action-driven, it’s going to be horrific, and it’s going to be arresting,” says Tomlin, who previously wrote Project Power for Netflix and is currently writing The Batman Part II. “That’s just what it has to be.”
The series follows “a new batch of characters who live in Japan in 1997,” writes CBR — and in an interview the show’s director said “There’s a balance” when representing Japan’s actual culture while keeping the show futuristic:
One of the things that I really took for granted was guns. [Points to self] Dumb American over here had to write a scene where Eiko gets into a parking lot and smashes the window of a car, goes to the glove box, takes out a revolver, and it instantly gets flagged. [Other people working on the series] were like, “No, we don’t have guns. What you are describing, that’s over there. We’re over here in civilization where that can’t happen.” That triggered a really fruitful and creatively challenging discussion about weapons. The military has guns and the police have guns. That’s kind of it. So these characters have to arm themselves. How are they going to do it? What could we do? And that’s why the Terminator has a crossbow. Eiko has all of these different weapons that she concocted from a hardware store. It was all born out of that.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Telegram CEO Arested In France
Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation. TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the news.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
How Should Cybersecurity Evolve After Crowdstrike’s Outage?
[An anonymous Microsoft executive] said participants at the Windows Endpoint Security Ecosystem Summit will explore the possibility of having applications rely more on a part of Windows called user mode instead of the more privileged kernel mode… Attendees at Microsoft’s September 10 event will also discuss the adoption of eBPF technology, which checks if programs will run without triggering system crashes, and memory-safe programming languages such as Rust, the executive said.
Wednesday Crowdstrike argued no cybersecurity vendor could “technically” guarantee their software wouldn’t cause a similar incident.
On a possibly related note, long-time Slashdot reader 278MorkandMindy shares their own thoughts:
The “year of the Linux desktop” is always just around the corner, somewhat like nuclear fusion. Will Windows 11, with its general advert and telemetry BS, along with the recall feature, FINALLY push “somewhat computer literate” types like myself onto Linux?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Workers at Google DeepMind Push Company to Drop Military Contracts
“Any involvement with military and weapon manufacturing impacts our position as leaders in ethical and responsible AI, and goes against our mission statement and stated AI Principles,” the letter that circulated inside Google DeepMind says. (Those principles state the company will not pursue applications of AI that are likely to cause “overall harm,” contribute to weapons or other technologies whose “principal purpose or implementation” is to cause injury, or build technologies “whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.”) The letter says its signatories are concerned with “ensuring that Google’s AI Principles are upheld,” and adds: “We believe [DeepMind’s] leadership shares our concerns.” […]
The letter calls on DeepMind’s leaders to investigate allegations that militaries and weapons manufacturers are Google Cloud users; terminate access to DeepMind technology for military users; and set up a new governance body responsible for preventing DeepMind technology from being used by military clients in the future. Three months on from the letter’s circulation, Google has done none of those things, according to four people with knowledge of the matter. “We have received no meaningful response from leadership,” one said, “and we are growing increasingly frustrated.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
iFixit: The Samsung Galaxy Ring Is $400 of ‘Disposable Tech’
iFixit is damning about this sort of tech. “There’s nothing wrong with simple but there is something wrong with unrepairable. Just like the Galaxy Buds3, the Galaxy Ring is a disposable tech accessory that isn’t designed to last more than two years.” And the bottom line is simple: “We can’t recommend buying disposable tech like this.” Here’s what iFixit’s Shahram Mokhtari had to say about the Galaxy Ring’s battery, after putting it through a CT scanner: On the right hand side of the ring is the faint outline of a lithium polymer battery pouch. There’s an inductive coil sitting right on top of the battery (the lines that look like a rectangular track) and another very similar inductive coil that’s parallel and slightly separated from the first. That second inductive coil is inside the charging case and works together with the inductive coil in the ring to recharge the battery inside the Galaxy Ring. Inductive charging is the only practical way to deliver power to a device that doesn’t have any ports. But there’s something else here that sticks out like a sore thumb … that is a press connector joining the battery to the rest of the board! This is a surprising use of space, why isn’t this directly soldered? Nobody is getting back in there to disconnect this thing!
We love press connectors, they’re easy to work with and make replacing batteries a sight easier than desoldering a half dozen wires. But this one is sealed into the device and serves no purpose in replacement or repair. Our best guess as to why it’s in the Galaxy Ring: The battery and wireless charging coil were made in one place, the circuit board somewhere else, and it all comes to a production line somewhere where the two need to be connected together quickly and cheaply. Hence the press connector. It’s not for your benefit, it’s for the manufacturers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.