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On March 29, 2022, CNN+, CNN's take on a video streaming service, debuted. On April 28, 2022, it shuttered, making it the fastest shutdown of any launched streaming service. Despite that discouraging superlative, CNN has plans for another subscription-based video streaming platform, Financial Times (FT) reported on Wednesday.

Mark Thompson, who took CNN's helm in August 2023, over a year after CNN+'s demise, spoke with FT about evolving the company. The publication reported that Thompson is "working on plans for a digital subscription streaming service." The executive told the publication that a digital subscription, including digital content streaming, is "a serious possibility," adding, "no decisions had been made, but I think it’s quite likely that we’ll end up there."

CNN++, or whatever a new CNN streaming package might be named, would not just be another CNN+, per Thompson.

Enlarge / The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra. That red ring around the camera lens is how far it moves. (credit: Huawei)

Huawei is still out there making phones, even if it has been shunned by the US government and the US-aligned tech ecosystem. The latest phone has a new name: "Huawei Pura 70." While you wouldn't ever want to deal with the cobbled-together SoC or whatever is going on with Huawei's software, the "Ultra" model does have a cool party trick up its sleeve: a pop-out main camera lens.

In the years before the smartphone took over all entry-level photography, there used to be a thing called a "point-and-shoot camera." This was a purpose-built device that only took photos, couldn't go on the Internet, and wouldn't let you watch the latest TikTok videos. The trademark feature of these devices was a retractable camera lens, where the front lens (there was only one!) would grow out of the front of the camera when you turned it on. This would give your camera better, longer lens geometry to work with when the camera was on, and would collapse down for easier storage when it was off.

Huawei's latest phone is replicating that. The giant rear camera lens actually grows out of the phone somewhat, thanks to some complicated gearing inside the phone. It's only the tiniest few millimeters, but it's a start. Smartphone manufacturers often resist adding bigger lenses to their devices because they want to still have pocketable devices. A pop-up lens would give the camera engineers more room to work with while still maintaining pocketability.

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Everyone with a Roku TV or streaming device will eventually be forced to enable two-factor authentication after the company disclosed two separate incidents in which roughly 600,000 customers had their accounts accessed through credential stuffing.

Credential stuffing is an attack in which usernames and passwords exposed in one leak are tried out against other accounts, typically using automated scripts. When people reuse usernames and passwords across services or make small, easily intuited changes between them, actors can gain access to accounts with even more identifying information and access.

In the case of the Roku attacks, that meant access to stored payment methods, which could then be used to buy streaming subscriptions and Roku hardware. Roku wrote on its blog, and in a mandated data breach report, that purchases occurred in "less than 400 cases" and that full credit card numbers and other "sensitive information" was not revealed.

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.

Enlarge / Google HQ. (credit: Getty Images)

Google is doing a major re-org of Android, Chrome, and the Google hardware division: They're merging! Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh will lead the new "Platforms and Devices” division. Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's previous head of software platforms like Android and ChromeOS, will be headed to "some new projects" at Google.

"Having a unified team across Platforms & Devices will help us deliver higher quality products and experiences for our users and partners," writes Google CEO Sundar Pichai. "It will help us turbocharge the Android and Chrome ecosystems, and bring the best innovations to partners faster — as we did with Circle to Search with Samsung. And internally, it will also speed up decision-making."

Google also justifies the decision the same way it does most decisions nowadays: by saying it's AI-related. The announcement is a few paragraphs in a wide-ranging post by Pichai, titled, "Building for our AI future," and the new division is taking a chunk of Google Research along with it, specifically the group that has been working on computational photography. Pichai wants the team to live in "the intersection of hardware, software, and AI."

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On Wednesday, Colorado expanded the scope of its privacy law initially designed to protect biometric data like fingerprints or face images to become first in the nation to also shield sensitive neural data.

That could stop companies from hoarding brain activity data without residents realizing the risks. The New York Times reported that neural data is increasingly being collected and sold nationwide. And after a market analysis showed that investments in neurotechnology leapt by 60 percent globally from 2019 to 2020—and were valued at $30 billion in 2021—Big Tech companies have significantly intensified plans to develop their own products to rake in potentially billions.

For instance, in 2023, Meta demoed a wristband with a neural interface used to control its smart glasses and unveiled an AI system that could be used to decode the mind. In January, Elon Musk announced that Neuralink implanted its first brain chip in a human that can be used to control a device with their thoughts. And just last month, Apple Insider reported that "Apple is working on technology that could turn the Apple Vision Pro into a brainwave reader to improve mental health, assist with training and workouts, and help with mindfulness."

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai promised more layoffs at Google this year, and the company is delivering. Business Insider was the first to report the latest cuts are to "several teams" in Google's real estate and finance departments. The report adds: "One current employee said the changes were 'pretty large-scale' and that some roles are being moved abroad."

CNBC has a copy of the memo that Google and Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat sent out to employees about the layoffs. Porat blames AI for the layoffs, saying, “The tech sector is in the midst of a tremendous platform shift with Al. As a company, this means we have the opportunity to make more helpful products for billions of users and provide faster solutions to our customers, but it also means we collectively have to make tough decisions, including how and where we work to align with our highest priority areas.” It's not clear how or if AI is actually taking over roles in real estate and finance.

Google has been making cuts across a ton of departments since 2022, when Pichai declared Google was not productive enough. There was a big set of 12,000 layoffs in January 2023, and an almost uncountable number of smaller cuts since then. Google's cuts are aligned with a massive wave of layoffs across the tech industry.

Enlarge / Here it is: two virtual Mac displays in Vision Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple's Vision Pro headset holds the promise to be a powerful extension of your Mac workflow, but the Mac integration it shipped with is just neat, not a big step forward. Now, an app by established independent developers Jordi Bruin, Mathijs Kadijk, and Tom Lokhorst aims to fix that.

Called Splitscreen, it enables you to use two virtual displays at once while working with your Mac and wearing Vision Pro. By contrast, Apple's default implementation only supports mirroring a single Mac display to a resizable virtual one.

Further, the developers are working on achieving what I said I'd like to see from Apple when I wrote up my first impressions of the headset: the ability to move individual Mac windows around your space freely like visionOS apps when your Mac and Vision Pro are connected to one another.

Enlarge / The new, all-electric Atlas. (credit: Boston Dynamics)

The humanoid robotics market is starting to heat up, and the company that's been doing this the longest isn't going to sit by and watch. Boston Dynamics has a new humanoid robot that the company says represents a path to commercialization. It's the company's next-generation, all-electric "Atlas" robot.

While new Atlas and old Atlas share a name, they couldn't be more different when it comes to construction. The old Atlas—a research platform and viral sensation that could handle nearly any terrain, do backflips, and pick up heavy objects—was powered by a heavy, complicated hydraulics system. The new Atlas is all-electric and looks like it's a fraction of the size and weight of the hydraulic version. It also looks like a product, with covers around all the major components and consumer-friendly design touches like a giant status light in the head and a light-up power button that looks like it was ripped right from the Spot assembly line.

Hydraulic Atlas is being retired to make way for the all-electric version. The company posted one last goodbye video for the hydraulic model on its YouTube page, showing the history of the project. Atlas has done a lot of neat tricks over the years, but getting there has required a lot of learning—part of that is taking some absolutely gnarly slams, which are highlighted in the video. The video seemed to go out of its way to show just how cumbersome hydraulics can be. At one point, it looks like Atlas' foot completely breaks off, and hydraulic fluid gushes all over the floor. Other times, the robot just springs a leak, and a fine mist of high-pressure fluid sprays everywhere as the robot goes limp. The fluid has a red tinge to it, so with a little imagination, it can look pretty gory!

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It's easy to get the impression that Discord chat messages are ephemeral, especially across different public servers, where lines fly upward at a near-unreadable pace. But someone claims to be catching and compiling that data and is offering packages that can track more than 600 million users across more than 14,000 servers.

Joseph Cox at 404 Media confirmed that Spy Pet, a service that sells access to a database of purportedly 3 billion Discord messages, offers data "credits" to customers who pay in bitcoin, ethereum, or other cryptocurrency. Searching individual users will reveal the servers that Spy Pet can track them across, a raw and exportable table of their messages, and connected accounts, such as GitHub. Ominously, Spy Pet lists more than 86,000 other servers in which it has "no bots," but "we know it exists."

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  An example of Spy Pet's service from its website. Shown are a user's nicknames, connected accounts, banner image, server memberships, and messages across those servers tracked by Spy Pet. [credit: Spy Pet ]

As Cox notes, Discord doesn't make messages inside server channels, like blog posts or unlocked social media feeds, easy to publicly access and search. But many Discord users many not expect their messages, server memberships, bans, or other data to be grabbed by a bot, compiled, and sold to anybody wishing to pin them all on a particular user. 404 Media confirmed the service's function with multiple user examples. Private messages are not mentioned by Spy Pet and are presumably still secure.

Enlarge / Cans of Tab diet soda on display in 2011. Tab was discontinued in 2020. There has never been a soda named "Spaces" that had a cult following. (credit: Getty Images)

Anybody can contribute to the Linux kernel, but any person's commit suggestion can become the focus of the kernel's master and namesake, Linus Torvalds. Torvalds is famously not overly committed to niceness, though he has been working on it since 2018. You can see glimpses of this newer, less curse-laden approach in how Torvalds recently addressed a commit with which he vehemently disagreed. It involves tabs.

The commit last week changed exactly one thing on one line, replacing a tab character with a space: "It helps Kconfig parsers to read file without error." Torvalds responded with a commit of his own, as spotted by The Register, which would "add some hidden tabs on purpose." Trying to smooth over a tabs-versus-spaces matter seemed to awaken Torvalds to the need to have tab-detecting failures be "more obvious." Torvalds would have added more, he wrote, but didn't "want to make things uglier than necessary. But it *might* be necessary if it turns out we see more of this kind of silly tooling."

If you've read this far and don't understand what's happening, please allow me, a failed CS minor, to offer a quick explanation: Tabs Versus Spaces will never be truly resolved, codified, or set right by standards, and the energy spent on the issue over time could, if harnessed, likely power one or more small nations. Still, the Linux kernel has its own coding style, and it directly cites "K&R," or Kernighan & Ritchie, the authors of the coding bible The C Programming Language, which is a tabs book. If you are submitting kernel code, it had better use tabs (eight-character tabs, ideally, though that is tied in part to teletype and line-printer history).