Movies are filmed at 24 frames per second with motion blur aplenty—an ancient technical and artistic sweet spot, or compromise, that defines the aesthetic of cinema. The folks at TV-… Read the rest of the article: Roku update turns on hated motion-smoothing feature, with no off switch

Grindr, the hookup app mostly used by men looking for other men, has an astonishingly bad privacy record given the sensitive nature of its data. Fresh from being sued by… Read the rest of the article: Grindr fined $6m for passing user data to commercial partners

Floppy disks are no longer good for government work in Japan, among the last places where the ancient storage devices remain in wide use. But these rules have now finally… Read the rest of the article: Japan says goodbye to floppy disks in official use

Anthony Bray, 48, of Nuneaton in England, is off to jail for four months for possession of a prohibited knife: a six-inch Legend of Zelda-branded "figdet toy". Police conceded that… Read the rest of the article: Four months for six inches: British man jailed for carrying bladed Legend of Zelda "fidget toy"

If it seems a foregone conclusion given the opinion polls in Britain and Northern Ireland lately, the real polls sometimes tell a different story and politicians there are screaming at… Read the rest of the article: Britons and some Irish head to the polls

I love Mark Easting's Engine Sound Simulator and have already formulated plans to inflict it on the unsuspecting. It generates audio tracks for both engine and drivetrain, each with their… Read the rest of the article: Alarmingly realistic Engine Sound Simulator on the web

The Sun, Rupert Murdoch's top U.K. tabloid, has made a show of picking the Prime Minister since the 1970s and boasting afterwards of its overwhelming influence on British politics. Grimly,… Read the rest of the article: Murdoch tabloid gives nod to Labour Party in UK election

A plastic surgeon in Seattle did not appreciate the reviews posted online by unhappy patients. After issuing threats and posting fake positive reviews of their own, the company is now… Read the rest of the article: Plastic surgeon who posted false reviews and threatened critics must pay $5m

Some countries are finding that shorter work weeks result in more prosperity—perhaps with an eye on statistics that show workers tend to run out of steam after a few hours… Read the rest of the article: Greece enacts six-day working week

Last week I wrote about the Boox Palma1, a smartphone-sized e-reader. Such things are all the rage: John Moltz reviews the Moaan InkPalm Plus, which he describes as "weird, cheap,… Read the rest of the article: A $125 e-ink reader the size of a cellphone

The hundreds of British postmasters falsely convicted for stealing takings were the victims of a sequence of wrongs—a Post Office run by indifferent bean-counters, the abuse of its privilege to… Read the rest of the article: Fujitsu "expert" helped Post Office falsely convict postmasters in IT scandal

Paramount has been ridding itself of subsidiaries' websites, including MTV News, Country Music Channel and now Comedy Central. At MTV decades of quality music journalism went dark, and at Comedy… Read the rest of the article: Paramount axes Comedy Central website, with decades of video clips, in latest cut

The good news is that the 42% of web traffic determined to be bots is less than earlier research has found. The bad news is that it's AI scraping the… Read the rest of the article: Akamai: 42% percent of web traffic is bots

It's well-known now that text-generating "AI" apps are inordinately fond of certain words—"delve" being maybe the most amusing lexical Voight-Kampff indicator—but no sooner are such words listed than the AI… Read the rest of the article: More words that AI loves to use: "pivotal","interplay", "comprehensive"

Fujifilm used to make fair cameras interesting mostly for their old-fashioned looks. Now it makes old-fashioned looking cameras interesting mostly for being fantastic. The runaway success of its X100 series,… Read the rest of the article: Sorry, the Fujifilm X100VI is sold out

Carrier-locking persists as the back-end sting for customers lured by front-end handset deals, and the Federal Communications Commission is proposing to put strict limits on the predatory practice: a 60-day… Read the rest of the article: FCC plans to rule carriers must unlock phones after 60 days

If the Atari 400 isn't so famous as other classic game consoles, in 1979 it (and its properly-keyboarded big sibling, the 800) was the gaming computer to have. And now… Read the rest of the article: Atari 400 Mini minier than expected

Hurricane Beryl, already a record-breaker, strengthened to category 5 overnight. The storm's 160mph winds are swirling their way through the Caribbean on their way toward the continent; it's expected to… Read the rest of the article: Hurricane Beryl hits category 5

The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that former president Donald Trump has "absolute immunity" from prosecution for official acts as president, with the stipulation that courts must distinguish between what… Read the rest of the article: Supreme Court rules 6-3 that Trump has immunity from prosecution for "official" acts

Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon was pardoned by him after his fraud conviction, but Trump's not around to make his latest sentence go away. Bannon must report to prison today… Read the rest of the article: Steve Bannon off to prison today