Last week, a number of outlets reported that Bruce Willis sold his face to a deepfake company called Deepcake, allowing a "digital twin" of himself to be created for use on screen. The only problem is that it's apparently not true. According to the BBC, the actor's agent said that he had "no partnership or agreement" with the company and a representative of Deepcake said only Willis had the rights to his face From the report: On 27 September, the Daily Mail reported that a deal had been struck between Willis and Deepcake. "Two-time Emmy winner Bruce Willis can still appear in movies after selling his image rights to Deepcake," the story reads. The story was picked up by the Telegraph and a series of other media outlets. "Bruce Willis has become the first Hollywood star to sell his rights to allow a 'digital twin' of himself to be created for use on screen." said the Telegraph. But that doesn't appear to be the case.

What is true is that a deepfake of Bruce Willis was used to create an advert for Megafon, a Russian telecoms company, last year. The tech used in the advert was created by Deepcake, which describes itself as an AI company specializing in deepfakes. Deepcake told the BBC it had worked closely with Willis' team on the advert. "What he definitely did is that he gave us his consent (and a lot of materials) to make his Digital Twin," they said. The company says it has a unique library of high-resolution celebrities, influencers and historical figures. On its website, Deepcake promotes its work with an apparent quote from Mr Willis: "I liked the precision of my character. It's a great opportunity for me to go back in time. "The neural network was trained on content of Die Hard and Fifth Element, so my character is similar to the images of that time." A representative from Deepcake said in a statement: "The wording about rights is wrong... Bruce couldn't sell anyone any rights, they are his by default."

YouTube's Premium paid subscription includes benefits like ad-free viewing, video and song downloads for offline consumption, and background plays. Now, it might also be shifting video streaming in 4K resolution (currently free for all users) to the premium tier. TechCrunch: Over the weekend, users across Reddit and Twitter noted that YouTube had been asking them to upgrade to the premium tier to watch videos in 4K. It's not clear if the change is part of a limited test, or if the company is thinking about capping free users to 1440p resolution. Google declined to comment on the story when contacted by TechCrunch. The company has tried various methods to convert free users into paying ones. One of the most notorious ones was showing them up to 11 unskippable ads before the start of a long video to let them have an uninterrupted experience.

The Supreme Court said Monday it will hear two cases seeking to hold social media companies financially responsible for terrorist attacks. From a report: Relatives of people killed in terrorist attacks in France and Turkey had sued Google, Twitter, and Facebook. They accused the companies of helping terrorists spread their message and radicalize new recruits. The court will hear the cases this term, which began Monday, with a decision expected before the court recesses for the summer, usually in late June. The court did not say when it would hear arguments, but the court has already filled its argument calendar for October and November.

One of the cases the justices will hear involves Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old U.S. citizen studying in Paris. The Cal State Long Beach student was one of 130 people killed in Islamic State group attacks in November 2015. The attackers struck cafes, outside the French national stadium and inside the Bataclan theater. Gonzalez died in an attack at La Belle Equipe bistro. Gonzalez's relatives sued Google, which owns YouTube, saying the platform had helped the Islamic State group by allowing it to post hundreds of videos that helped incite violence and recruit potential supporters. Gonzalez's relatives said that the company's computer algorithms recommended those videos to viewers most likely to be interested in them.

techmage writes: Early this morning, Firefly Aerospace succeeded in launching their Alpha rocket to Low Earth Orbit. This marks one of a handful of companies who have reached space with that few attempts (Virgin Orbit and RocketLab are just some of the others).

Shameless plug -- I had the pleasure of building the Serenity satellite, a 3U CubeSat that flew on the mission.

Check out the video of the launch and deployment. It is quite something to watch. All three payloads were successfully deployed. Space.com reports: One of them, called Serenity, comes from the nonprofit organization Teachers in Space. Serenity was designed to collect a variety of data during today's flight, which will be shared with the educational community, according to a Firefly mission description.

Also reaching orbit today was TechEdSat-15 (TES-15), which is owned by NASA in coordination with San Jose State University in California. TES-15 features an "exo-brake" designed to help satellites leave their orbital perches more smoothly when their work is done. "The exo-brake will deploy after the cubesat is ejected from its dispenser to deorbit the cubesat," Firefly wrote in the mission description. TES-15 also carries an experiment designed to optimize data transfer from the little spacecraft, the company added.

The third payload -- the PicoBus deployer, from the nonprofit Libre Space -- carries five tiny payloads of its own. Those bantam "picosats" include Genesis-L & Genesis-N, from AMSAT (Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation) Spain. The pair will demonstrate a pulsed-plasma thruster system for spacecraft propulsion and "build heritage for future missions," according to Firefly. PicoBus is also carrying Libre Space's Qubik-1 and Qubik-2, which will perform communications experiments, and FossaSat-1B. This latter satellite, from the Spanish company Fossa Systems, will test communications and remote-sensing tech. It also carries a low-resolution Earth-imaging camera.

Today, Nielsen announced that Roku plans to enable four-screen measurement across desktop, mobile, connected TV and traditional TV. This is the first time Roku will use the digital methodology, Nielsen One, the data measurement firm's cross-media measurement tool, which launches in December. TechCrunch reports: With Nielsen's forthcoming tool, the firm claims that the company is on track to provide a consistent and comparable cross-media solution. Nielsen also claims that, with Nielsen One, marketers running ads with Roku are guaranteed duplicate copies of repeating data are eliminated.

"Marketers can now better evaluate CTV inventory's unique reach and frequency in conjunction with their entire Roku buy in a comparable and comprehensive manner, and advertisers can reduce waste and help ensure that relevant ads are delivered to the right audiences across devices. This release brings us one step closer to providing comparable and deduplicated metrics across screens with Nielsen One," said Kim Gilberti, SVP, Product Management, Nielsen, in a statement.

The data measurement firm wrote in today's announcement that its relationship with Roku dates back to 2016 when Roku allowed its marketers to measure campaigns with Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings measurement. Nielsen announced Nielsen One in 2020. Earlier this year, it was revealed that YouTube would be the first media company to try the new tool. Roku is the second company to enable cross-media measurement.

Developer Asahi Lina with the Asahi Linux project was successfully able to get GNOME running on the Apple M1, including "Firefox with YouTube video playback, the game Neverball, various KDE applications, and more," reports Phoronix. From the report: This is some great progress especially with the driver being written in Rust -- the first within the Direct Rendering Manager subsystem -- and lots of work there with the Rust infrastructure in early form. It won't be until at least Linux 6.2 before this driver could be mainlined while we'll see how quickly it tries to go mainline before it can commit to a stable user-space interface. At the moment there is also a significant driver "hack" involved but will hopefully be sorted out soon. Over in user-space, the AGX Gallium3D driver continues being worked on for OpenGL support with hopes of having OpenGL 2.1 completed by year's end. Obviously it will be longer before seeing the Apple graphics suitable for modern gaming with Vulkan, etc but progress is being made across the board in reverse-engineered, open-source Apple Silicon support under Linux. You can watch a video of the driver working here.

Google is shutting down Stadia, its cloud gaming service. From a report: The service will remain live for players until January 18th, 2023. Google will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchased through the Google Store as well as all the games and add-on content purchased from the Stadia store. Google expects those refunds will be completed in mid-January. "A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia," Stadia vice president and GM Phil Harrison said in a blog post. "And while Stadia's approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected so we've made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service." Employees on the Stadia team will be distributed to other parts of the company. Harrison says Google sees opportunities to apply Stadia's technology to other parts of Google, like YouTube, Google Play, and its AR efforts, and the company also plans to "make it available to our industry partners, which aligns with where we see the future of gaming headed," he wrote.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Everyone wants to be able to just zap a bug and have it go away. But now, thanks to a recent development from Ildar Rakhmatulin, a research associate at Heriot-Watt University interested in machine learning and engineering, this dream is now a reality. In the study -- which was conducted last year but published in Oriental Insects last week -- Rakhmatulin and his co-authors used a laser insect control device automated with machine vision to perform a series of experiments on domiciliary cockroaches. They were able to not only detect cockroaches at high accuracy but also neutralize and deter individual insects at a distance up to 1.2 meters. This is a follow-up of sorts to earlier projects, in which he used a Raspberry Pi and lasers to zap mosquitoes. However, for this project, Rakhmatulin used a different kind of computer which allowed for more precision in detecting the bug.

"I started using a Jetson Nano that allowed me to use deep learning technologies with higher accuracy to detect an object," Rakhmatulin explained. The Jetson Nano is a small computer that can run machine learning algorithms. The computer processes a digital signal from two cameras to determine the cockroach's position. It transmits that information to a galvanometer (a machine that measures electric current), which changes the direction of the laser to shoot the target. According to the paper, Rakhmatulin tried this configuration at different power levels for the laser. At a lower power level, he found that he could influence the behavior of roaches by simply triggering their flight response with a laser; this way, they could potentially be trained to not shelter in a particular dark area. At a higher power level, the cockroaches were effectively "neutralized," in the paper's language -- in other words, killed. "I use very cheap hardware and cheap technology and it's open source," Rakhmatulin said. "All sources are uploaded in my GitHub and see how to do it and use it. If it can damage cockroaches, it can also damage other pests in agriculture."

It's not quite ready for household use though. "It's not recommended because it's a little dangerous," Rakhmatulin said. "Lasers can damage not only cockroaches but your eyes."

You can view a video of the device in action here.

A droid named Cassie has set a Guinness World Record for the 100-meter dash by a bipedal robot, "an impressive demonstration of robotics and engineering," reports New Atlas. From the report: Cassie is the brainchild of Agility Robotics, a spin-off company from Oregon State University, and was introduced in 2017 as a type of developmental platform for robotics research. And Cassie has continued to come along in leaps and bounds since then, in 2021 demonstrating some impressive progress by completing a 5-km (3.1-mile) jog in just over 53 minutes. This achievement involved the use of machine learning algorithms to equip the robot with an ability to run, overcoming its unique biomechanics and knees that bend like an ostrich to remain upright. With this capability, Cassie joined a group of running bipedal robots that include the Atlas humanoid robot from Boston Dynamics and Mabel, billed as the world's fastest knee-equipped bipedal robot. But in optimizing Cassie for the 100-meter sprint, the researchers had to head back to the drawing board.

The team spent a week fast-tracking Cassie through a year's worth of simulated training designed to determine the most effective gait. But it wasn't simply a matter of speed. For the Guinness World Record to stand, Cassie had to start in a standing pose, and then return to that pose after crossing the finish line rather than simply tumble over. This meant Cassie had to use two neural networks, one for running fast and one for standing still, and gracefully transition between the two. Ultimately, Cassie completed the 100-meter sprint in 24.73 seconds, establishing a Guinness World Record for a bipedal robot. This is a great deal slower than the sub-10-second times run by the world's best sprinters, but the researchers believe progress will only accelerate from here. You can watch Cassie's record-setting dash here.

According to Phoronix, Google has released a new AOM-AV1 update -- version 3.5, that drastically improves encode times when streaming, rendering, or recording from the CPU. At its best, the update can improve encoding times by up to 34%. Tom's Hardware reports: It is a fantastic addition to AV1's capabilities, with the encoder becoming very popular among powerful video platforms such as YouTube. In addition, we are also seeing significant support for AV1 hardware acceleration on modern discrete GPUs now, such as Intel's Arc Alchemist GPUs and, most importantly - Nvidia's RTX 40-series GPUs. Depending on the resolution, encoding times with the new update have improved by 20% to 30%. For example, at 1080P, encode times featuring 16 threads of processing are reduced by 18% to 34%. At 4K, render times improved by 18% to 20% with 32 threads. Google could do this by adding Frame Parallel Encoding to heavily multi-threaded configurations. Google has also added several other improvements contributing to AV1's performance uplifts in other areas - specifically in real-time encoding.

In other words, CPU utilization in programs such as OBS has been reduced, primarily for systems packing 16 CPU threads. As a result, they are allowing users to use those CPU resources for other tasks or increase video quality even higher without any additional performance cost. If you are video editing and are rendering out a video in AV1, processing times will be vastly reduced if you have a CPU with 16 threads or more.

Five luxury cars, including two BMWs, two McLarens, and a Lamborghini, have been seized from 23-year-old Aiden Pleterski, the self-described "crypto king" of Canada, during bankruptcy proceedings according to a new report from the CBC. But those cars are only worth a fraction of the $35 million that Pleterski allegedly took from investors who thought he'd make them rich in the cryptocurrency market, and it's not clear whether they'll ever see their money again. Gizmodo reports: Pleterski and his company AP Private Equity Limited are facing at least two civil lawsuits after 140 people have come forward to say they invested a combined $35 million with Pleterski. Those people believed they were investing in cryptocurrency, and Pleterski's online presence -- including photos of the 23-year-old on private jets and next to luxury cars-- helped create the image that he knew what he was doing.

Pleterski's YouTube channel and Instagram account have been deleted but it appears he purchased articles on websites like Forbes.mc (the top level domain for Monaco) and the far-right news outlet Daily Caller to get his name associated with success in crypto investment. The Daily Caller article from December 2021 includes a photo of Pleterski looking at his phone in what appears to be a private jet. Notably, December 2021 was a time when cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum were trading near all-time highs. The headline reads, "Aiden Pleterski: Meet the Young Canadian Investor Who Is Taking the World of Crypto By Storm."

The question remains whether Pleterski actually invested any of the money in crypto to begin with, and speaks to just how strange the crypto market has been over the past year. For all anyone knows, Pleterski may have actually invested the money and lost it like so many others since the peak of November 2021. Bitcoin is down 56% since its price a year ago, while ethereum is down 57%. Pleterski insists he invested the money but that he's just bad with record-keeping. But some investors suspect Pleterski didn't even bother investing the money, instead pocketing it for himself, according to people who spoke with the CBC. Investors are trying to get their money back through the bankruptcy court and two civil lawsuits, but criminal charges haven't been pursued, even though some have reported their incidents to Toronto police, according to the CBC.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Protocol: Google is gunning for Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision: The company is looking to introduce two new media formats to offer HDR video and 3D audio under a new consumer-recognizable brand without the licensing fees hardware manufacturers currently have to pay Dolby. Google shared plans for the media formats, which are internally known as Project Caviar, at a closed-door event with hardware manufacturers earlier this year. In a video of the presentation that was leaked to Protocol, group product manager Roshan Baliga describes the goal of the project as building "a healthier, broader ecosystem" for premium media experiences. The company's primary focus for Project Caviar is YouTube, which does not currently support Dolby Atmos or Dolby Vision. However, Google also aims to bring other industry players on board, including device manufacturers and service providers. This makes Project Caviar one of Google's most ambitious pushes for open media formats since the company began working on royalty-free video codecs over a decade ago.

Google's open media efforts have until now primarily focused on the development of codecs. The company acquired video codec maker On2 in 2009 to open source some of its technology; it has also played a significant role in the foundation of the Alliance for Open Media, an industry consortium that is overseeing the royalty-free AV1 video codec. Project Caviar is different from those efforts in that it is not another codec. Instead, the project focuses on 3D audio and HDR video formats that make use of existing codecs but allow for more rich and immersive media playback experiences, much like Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision do. Baliga didn't mention Dolby by name during his presentation, but he still made it abundantly clear that the company was looking to establish alternatives to the Atmos and Vision formats. "We realized that there are premium media experiences where there aren't any great royalty-free solutions," he said, adding that the licensing costs for premium HDR video and 3D audio "can hurt manufacturers and consumers."

Dolby makes most of its money through licensing fees from hardware manufacturers. The company charges TV manufacturers $2 to $3 to license Dolby Vision, according to its Cloud Media Solutions SVP Giles Baker. Dolby hasn't publicly disclosed licensing fees for Atmos; it charges consumers who want to add immersive audio to their Xbox consoles $15 per license, but the fee hardware manufacturers have to pay is said to be significantly lower. Still, in an industry that long has struggled with razor-thin margins, every extra dollar matters. That's especially true because Dolby already charges virtually all device makers a licensing fee for its legacy audio codecs. A manufacturer of streaming boxes that wholesale for $50 has to pay around $2 per unit for Dolby Vision and Dolby Digital, according to a document an industry insider shared with Protocol. "For lower-cost living room devices, the cost may be prohibitive," Baliga said during his presentation.

A cache of nearly 160,000 files from Russia's powerful internet regulator provides a rare glimpse inside Vladimir V. Putin's digital crackdown. The New York Times: Four days into the war in Ukraine, Russia's expansive surveillance and censorship apparatus was already hard at work. Roughly 800 miles east of Moscow, authorities in the Republic of Bashkortostan, one of Russia's 85 regions, were busy tabulating the mood of comments in social media messages. They marked down YouTube posts that they said criticized the Russian government. They noted the reaction to a local protest. Then they compiled their findings. One report about the "destabilization of Russian society" pointed to an editorial from a news site deemed "oppositional" to the government that said President Vladimir V. Putin was pursuing his own self-interest by invading Ukraine. A dossier elsewhere on file detailed who owned the site and where they lived. Another Feb. 28 dispatch, titled "Presence of Protest Moods," warned that some had expressed support for demonstrators and "spoke about the need to stop the war." The report was among nearly 160,000 records from the Bashkortostan office of Russia's powerful internet regulator, Roskomnadzor.

Together the documents detail the inner workings of a critical facet of Mr. Putin's surveillance and censorship system, which his government uses to find and track opponents, squash dissent and suppress independent information even in the country's furthest reaches. The leak of the agency's documents "is just like a small keyhole look into the actual scale of the censorship and internet surveillance in Russia," said Leonid Volkov, who is named in the records and is the chief of staff for the jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. "It's much bigger," he said. Roskomnadzor's activities have catapulted Russia, along with authoritarian countries like China and Iran, to the forefront of nations that aggressively use technology as a tool of repression. Since the agency was established in 2008, Mr. Putin has turned it into an essential lever to tighten his grip on power as he has transformed Russia into an even more authoritarian state. The internet regulator is part of a larger tech apparatus that Mr. Putin has built over the years, which also includes a domestic spying system that intercepts phone calls and internet traffic, online disinformation campaigns and the hacking of other nations' government systems. The agency's role in this digital dragnet is more extensive than previously known, according to the records.

It has morphed over the years from a sleepy telecom regulator into a full-blown intelligence agency, closely monitoring websites, social media and news outlets, and labeling them as "pro-government," "anti-government" or "apolitical." Roskomnadzor has also worked to unmask and surveil people behind anti-government accounts and provided detailed information on critics' online activities to security agencies, according to the documents. That has supplemented real-world actions, with those surveilled coming under attack for speaking out online. Some have then been arrested by the police and held for months. Others have fled Russia for fear of prosecution. The files reveal a particular obsession with Mr. Navalny and show what happens when the weight of Russia's security state is placed on one target. The system is built to control outbursts like the one this week, when protesters across Russia rallied against a new policy that would press roughly 300,000 people into military service for the war in Ukraine. At least 1,200 people have already been detained for demonstrating. More than 700 gigabytes of records from Roskomnadzor's Bashkortostan branch were made publicly available online in March by DDoSecrets, a group that publishes hacked documents.

Former President Donald Trump could be allowed back on Facebook once a suspension of his account expires in 2023, Nick Clegg of parent company Meta Platforms, said Thursday at an exclusive Semafor Exchange event in Washington, DC. From the report: As the company makes its decision, it will talk to experts, weigh the risk of real world harm and act proportionally, he said. It's the first time Clegg, who, as president of global affairs is charged with deciding whether to lift the limit, has publicly discussed his thinking. Trump was prohibited from posting on several online platforms after the January 2021 riots at the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., with Facebook, sister app Instagram, Twitter and Google's YouTube citing his role in inciting the violence. "When you make a decision that affects the public realm, you need to act with great caution," Clegg told Semafor editor-at-large Steve Clemons. "You shouldn't throw your weight about."

AmiMoJo shares a report from the Mozilla Foundation: YouTube's user controls -- buttons like "Dislike " and "Not interested" -- largely fail to help users avoid unwanted recommendations like misinformation and violent content, according to new research by Mozilla. An accompanying survey also found that YouTube's controls routinely frustrate and confuse users. Indeed, Mozilla's research found that people who are experiencing unwanted recommendations and turn to the platform's user controls for assistance prevent less than half of unwanted recommendations.

This is especially troubling because Mozilla's past research shows that YouTube recommends videos that violate its very own community guidelines, like misinformation, violent content, hate speech, and spam. For example, one user in this most recent research asked YouTube to stop recommending war footage from Ukraine -- but shortly after was recommended even more grisly content from the region. The study, titled "Does This Button Work? Investigating YouTube's ineffective user controls" is the culmination of months of rigorous qualitative and quantitative research. The study was made possible by the data of more than 20,000 participants who used Mozilla's RegretsReporter browser extension, and by data about more than 500 million YouTube videos. These are the top findings, as highlighted in the report: People don't trust YouTube's user controls. More than a third (39.3%) of people surveyed felt YouTube's user controls did not impact their recommendations at all, and 23% felt the controls had a mixed response. Said one interviewee: "Nothing changed. Sometimes I would report things as misleading and spam and the next day it was back in [...] Even when you block certain sources they eventually return."

People take matters into their own hands. Our study found that people did not always understand how YouTube's controls affect their recommendations, and so took a jury rigged approach instead. People will log out, create new accounts, or use privacy tools just to manage their YouTube recommendations. Said one user: "When the Superbowl came around ... if someone recommended a particular commercial, I used to log out of YouTube, watch the commercial, and then log back in."

The data confirms people are right. The most "effective" user control was "Don't recommend channel," but compared to users who do not make use of YouTube's user controls, only 43% of unwanted recommendations are prevented -- and recommendations from the unwanted channel sometimes persist. Other controls were even less effective: The "Not Interested" tool prevented only 11% of unwanted recommendations.

YouTube can fix this problem. YouTube has the power to confront this issue and do a better job at enabling people to control their recommendations. Our research outlines several concrete suggestions to put people back into the driver's seat, like making YouTube's controls more proactive, allowing users to shape their own experience; and giving researchers increased access to YouTube's API and other tools. Further reading: YouTube Targets TikTok With Revenue Sharing For Shorts, Partner Program Expansion

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: It's well known that weightlifting can strengthen our biceps and quads. Now, there's accumulating evidence that strengthening the muscles we use to breathe is beneficial too. New research shows that a daily dose of muscle training for the diaphragm and other breathing muscles helps promote heart health and reduces high blood pressure. "The muscles we use to breathe atrophy, just like the rest of our muscles tend to do as we get older," explains researcher Daniel Craighead, an integrative physiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. To test what happens when these muscles are given a good workout, he and his colleagues recruited healthy volunteers ages 18 to 82 to try a daily five-minute technique using a resistance-breathing training device called PowerBreathe. The hand-held machine -- one of several on the market -- looks like an inhaler. When people breathe into it, the device provides resistance, making it harder to inhale.

"We found that doing 30 breaths per day for six weeks lowers systolic blood pressure by about 9 millimeters of mercury," Craighead says. And those reductions are about what could be expected with conventional aerobic exercise, he says -- such as walking, running or cycling. A normal blood pressure reading is less than about 120/80 mmHg, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These days, some health care professionals diagnose patients with high blood pressure if their average reading is consistently 130/80 mmHg or higher, the CDC notes. The impact of a sustained 9 mmHg reduction in systolic blood pressure (the first number in the ratio) is significant, says Michael Joyner, a physician at the Mayo Clinic who studies how the nervous system regulates blood pressure. "That's the type of reduction you see with a blood pressure drug," Joyner says. Research has shown many common blood pressure medications lead to about a 9 mmHg reduction. The reductions are higher when people combine multiple medications, but a 10 mmHg reduction correlates with a 35% drop in the risk of stroke and a 25% drop in the risk of heart disease.

So, how exactly does breath training lower blood pressure? Craighead points to the role of endothelial cells, which line our blood vessels and promote the production of nitric oxide -- a key compound that protects the heart. Nitric oxide helps widen our blood vessels, promoting good blood flow, which prevents the buildup of plaque in arteries. "What we found was that six weeks of IMST [inspiratory-muscle strength training] will increase endothelial function by about 45%," Craighead explains. [...] There may also be benefits for elite cyclists, runners and other endurance athletes, he says, citing data that six weeks of IMST increased aerobic exercise tolerance by 12% in middle-aged and older adults. "So we suspect that IMST consisting of only 30 breaths per day would be very helpful in endurance exercise events," Craighead says. It's a technique that athletes could add to their training regimens. Craighead, whose personal marathon best is 2 hours, 21 minutes, says he has incorporated IMST as part of his own training.

Today, YouTube announced major changes to its YouTube Partner Program, allowing creators to earn ad revenue on Shorts, its TikTok competitor. TechCrunch reports: Now, Shorts creators can qualify for the Partner Program, which allows creators to earn ad revenue from YouTube. The existing Partner Program requires YouTubers to have over 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the last year. Now, Shorts creators can join the Partner Program if they have at least 10 million views on the platform over the last 90 days. As members of the Partner Program, these creators will earn 45% of ad revenue from their videos.

"I'm proud to say this is the first time real revenue sharing is being offered for short form video on any platform at scale," said YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan. He's right. TikTok has started experimenting with ad revenue sharing, but its efforts seem to focus more on the advertiser than the creator, as only the top 4% of all videos on TikTok can be monetized through its TikTok Pulse program. For the most part, creators have found it increasingly difficult to make money from TikTok's Creator Fund. [...]

YouTube Shorts is poised to become TikTok's biggest competitor. If creators can make more money on Shorts than on TikTok, then they're incentivized to make original content for the YouTube platform. YouTube also shared that this update to the Partner Program will enable the platform to license more music for use in Shorts, which could help encourage creators to use Shorts more often. Creators in the program will be compensated the same, regardless of whether they use licensed music. YouTube also unveiled Creator Music, now in beta testing. Creators can browse a large catalog of songs to purchase for use in their content, with the terms of the music rights spelled out in simple terms. They'll also be able to opt for tracks with new revenue-sharing option where both creators and music rights holders earn money from their content.

A hacker published authentic, pre-release footage from development of Grand Theft Auto VI, the most anticipated video game from Take-Two Interactive Software. From a report: The cache of videos offers an extensive and unauthorized look at the making of one of biggest games in the industry. A leak of this scale is so rare that some people cast doubt on its authenticity when it emerged over the weekend, but people familiar with the game's development said the videos are real. The footage provides an early and unpolished view of plans for Grand Theft Auto VI, though the final version will look much more refined, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details are private.

Take-Two issued requests for YouTube and other websites to remove the videos, citing a copyright claim, but not before they were widely disseminated. Rockstar Games, the Take-Two studio that makes Grand Theft Auto, confirmed the hack in a statement posted to Twitter on Monday. It blamed a "network intrusion" that allowed the hacker to download the content. Take-Two shares were down as much as 3.3% on Monday. The hacker posted dozens of never-before-seen videos from Grand Theft Auto VI on an online message board over the weekend. On the forum, the person suggested they were the same hacker who infiltrated Uber Technologies in a high-profile incident last week. The claim is unverified. The hacker indicated in a follow-up message about the upcoming Grand Theft Auto game, "I am looking to negotiate a deal," and raised the prospect of publishing more internal information about the project.

UnknowingFool writes: After a decades long partnership with Nvidia, EVGA has announced they are ending their relationship. Citing conflicts with Nvidia, EVGA CEO Andrew Han said the company will not partner with Intel nor AMD, and will be exiting the GPU market completely. The company will continue to make existing RTX 30-series cards until their stock runs out but will not release a 4000 series card. YouTube channels JayZTwoCents and GamersNexus broke the news after sitting down with EVGA CEO Andrew Han to discuss his frustrations with Nvidia as a partner. Jon Peddie Research also published a brief article on the matter.

Have you been encountering way too many unskippable ads on YouTube? You're not alone. PCMag: Oftentimes, YouTube only shows two ads before a video starts. But in recent weeks, some users on social media have reported seeing as many as five to eight or even 10 unskippable ads in a row. One user who encountered eight unskippable ads during a viewing said each ad was about five to 10 seconds in length. The high ad load is inevitably causing concerns YouTube will display more unskippable ads for all users in an effort to rake in more revenue. But the Google-owned platform told PCMag the sharp increase in the unskippable ads was merely a test.

"At YouTube, we're focused on helping brands connect with audiences around the world, and we're always testing new ways to surface ads that enhance the viewer experience," a YouTube spokesperson says in a statement. "We ran a small experiment globally that served multiple ads in an ad pod when viewers watched longer videos on connected TVs. The goal is to build a better experience for viewers by reducing ad breaks." In other words, the test was about showing the viewer more ads in the beginning of the YouTube video, rather than spacing them out. YouTube's spokesperson adds: "We have concluded this small experiment." But whether the platform will ramp up the unskippable ad rate in the future remains unclear.