Enlarge / Morfydd Clark is Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. (credit: Amazon Studios)

Subscribers lodged thousands of complaints related to inaccuracies in Amazon's Prime Video catalog, including incorrect content and missing episodes, according to a Business Insider report this week. While Prime Video users aren't the only streaming users dealing with these problems, Insider's examination of leaked "internal documents" brings more perspective into the impact of mislabeling and similar errors on streaming platforms.

Insider didn't publish the documents but said they show that "60 percent of all content-related customer-experience complaints for Prime Video last year were about catalogue errors," such as movies or shows labeled with wrong or missing titles.

Specific examples reportedly named in the document include Season 1, Episode 2 of The Rings of Power being available before Season 1, Episode 1; character names being mistranslated; Continuum displaying the wrong age rating; and the Spanish-audio version of Die Hard With a Vengeance missing a chunk of audio.

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  Like the games, the show depicts a Vault Dweller making her way out into the Wasteland. [credit: Amazon ]

Amazon has had a rocky history with big, geeky properties making their way onto Prime Video. The Wheel of Time wasn’t for everyone, and I have almost nothing good to say about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

Fallout, the first season of which premiered this week, seems to break that bad streak. All the episodes are online now, but I’ve watched three episodes so far. I love it.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing the games that inspired it, so I can only speak to that experience; I don’t know how well it will work for people who never played the games. But as a video game adaptation, it’s up there with The Last of Us.

Amazon is giving up on the cashier-less "Just Walk Out" technology at its Amazon Fresh grocery stores. The Information reports that new stores will be built without computer-vision-powered surveillance technology, and "the majority" of existing stores will have the tech removed. In the early days, Amazon's ambitions included selling Just Walk Out to other brick-and-mortar stores. The problem was that the technology never really worked.

As it says on the tin, Just Walk Out was supposed to let customers grab what they wanted from a store and just leave, skipping any kind of checkout process. Amazon wanted to track what customers took with them purely via AI-powered video surveillance; the system just took a phone scan at the door, and shoppers would be billed later via their Amazon accounts.

When the technology was announced in 2016, Amazon's sales pitch asked, "What if we could weave the most advanced machine learning, computer vision, and AI into the very fabric of a store so you never had to wait in line?" The store was filled with 100-plus cameras and rigid item locations, all designed to try to make AI-powered computer vision checkout possible.

Enlarge / An Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center under construction in Stone Ridge, Virginia, in March 2024. Amazon will spend more than $150 billion on data centers in the next 15 years. (credit: Getty Images)

Redis, a tremendously popular tool for storing data in-memory rather than in a database, recently switched its licensing from an open source BSD license to both a Source Available License and a Server Side Public License (SSPL).

The software project and company supporting it were fairly clear in why they did this. Redis CEO Rowan Trollope wrote on March 20 that while Redis and volunteers sponsored the bulk of the project's code development, "the majority of Redis’ commercial sales are channeled through the largest cloud service providers, who commoditize Redis’ investments and its open source community." Clarifying a bit, "cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge."

Clarifying even further: Amazon Web Services (and lesser cloud giants), you cannot continue reselling Redis as a service as part of your $90 billion business without some kind of licensed contribution back.

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There's a strong consensus that tackling most useful problems with a quantum computer will require that the computer be capable of error correction. There is absolutely no consensus, however, about what technology will allow us to achieve that. A large number of companies, including major players like Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, and IBM, have all committed to different technologies to get there, while a collection of startups are exploring an even wider range of potential solutions.

We probably won't have a clearer picture of what's likely to work for a few years. But there's going to be lots of interesting research and development work between now and then, some of which may ultimately represent key milestones in the development of quantum computing. To give you a sense of that work, we're going to look at three papers that were published within the last couple of weeks, each of which tackles a different aspect of quantum computing technology.

Hot stuff

Error correction will require connecting multiple hardware qubits to act as a single unit termed a logical qubit. This spreads a single bit of quantum information across multiple hardware qubits, making it more robust. Additional qubits are used to monitor the behavior of the ones holding the data and perform corrections as needed. Some error-correction schemes require over a hundred hardware qubits for each logical qubit, meaning we'd need tens of thousands of hardware qubits before we could do anything practical.

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Unsealed court documents have revealed more details about a secret Facebook project initially called "Ghostbusters," designed to sneakily access encrypted Snapchat usage data to give Facebook a leg up on its rival, just when Snapchat was experiencing rapid growth in 2016.

The documents were filed in a class-action lawsuit from consumers and advertisers, accusing Meta of anticompetitive behavior that blocks rivals from competing in the social media ads market.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (who has since rebranded his company as Meta) wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.