Long-time Slashdot readers necro81 writes: The popular vision of Neptune is azure blue. This comes mostly from the publicly released images from Voyager 2's flyby in 1989 — humanity's only visit to this icy giant at the edge of the solar system. But it turns out that view is a bit distorted — the result of color-enhancing choices made by NASA at the time. A new report from Oxford depicts Neptune's blue color as more muted, with a touch of green, not much different than Uranus. The truer-to-life view comes from re-analyzing the Voyager data, combined with ground-based observations going back decades. (Add'l links here, here, and here.)

This is nothing new: most publicity images released by space agencies — of planets, nebulae, or the surface of Mars — have undergone some color-enhancement for visual effect. (They'll also release "true-color" images, which try to best mimic what the human eye would see.) Many images — such as those from the infrared-seeing JWST — need wholesale coloration of their otherwise invisible wavelengths. The new report is a good reminder, though, to remember that scientific cameras are pretty much always black and white; color images come from combining filters in various ways.
Also thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis for sharing the story.

Programmer James Lambert has been working on a demake of Valve's Portal puzzle game for the Nintendo N64. After several years of development, Portal 64: The First Slice is now out of beta with two-thirds of the game's test chambers available to play. PC Gamer reports: In the announcement video Lambert goes through some of the new features in the latest build, including a seriously impressive visual rework on the portal gun itself. The video also showcases just how much of Portal's feel this manages to successfully capture, in particular the mind-bending effects of observing rooms and Chell through the portals themselves. I once called this the most impressive homebrew game I've ever seen and, while admittedly the N64 nostalgia helps, I'd stick by that.

While this is obviously the first slice (geddit) and there's more to come, it's an incredible achievement in its own right: The first 13 test chambers of the game all present-and-correct. Portal has 19 test chambers, and Portal: Still Alive (which unbelievably has never seen an official PC release) added a further 14, so Lambert's well on his way to completing a vanilla version of Portal 64. You can follow the Portal 64 project on YouTube and download the game here.

According to MoffettNathanson, the U.S. pay-TV industry had its worst-ever third quarter after losing about 900,000 subscribers. "That poor result, the research firm added, left the total pay-TV industry shrinking at a record pace of -7.3%, widened from a year-ago decline of -5.9%," reports Light Reading. "It also left pay-TV penetration of occupied households (including vMVPDs) at just 54.8% -- a level last seen in 1989, five years before the debut of DirecTV." From the report: Drilling down on Q3 results, traditional pay-TV providers (cable, telco and satellite) shed 1.97 million subscribers, widened from a loss of 1.94 million in the year-ago quarter. Within that category, US cable lost 1.10 million video subs in Q3, versus a loss of -1.09 million in the year-ago period. Satellite operators (Dish Network and DirecTV) lost 667,000 subs in Q3, versus -567,000 in the year-ago quarter. Telco TV providers lost 198,000 video subs in the period, an improvement when compared to a year-ago loss of -250,000 subs.

vMVPDs, meanwhile, added 1.08 million in Q3, down from a year-ago gain of about 1.34 million. Despite those gains, vMVPDs recaptured only 21.7% of traditional pay-TV's subscriber losses in the period, according to MoffettNathanson. Meanwhile, YouTube TV continues to dominate the vMVPD category. MoffettNathanson estimates that YouTube TV added about 350,000 subs in Q3, extending its total to 7 million -- representing 40% of the vMVPD sector's 18 million subscriber total. "Based on our Q3 estimate, YouTube TV has now surpassed Dish Network [6.72 million satellite TV subs at the end of Q3] to become the country's fourth largest MVPD of any kind," Moffett noted. "At the current trajectory, YouTube TV should pass DirecTV for third place in less than a year."

Microsoft is adding a dedicated "Copilot" key to PC keyboards, adjusting the standard Windows layout for the first time since 1994. The key will open its AI assistant Copilot on Windows 10 and 11. On Copilot-enabled PCs, users can already invoke Copilot by pressing Windows+C. On other PCs, the key will open Search instead. ArsTechnica adds: A quick Microsoft demo video shows the Copilot key in between the cluster of arrow keys and the right Alt button, a place where many keyboards usually put a menu button, a right Ctrl key, another Windows key, or something similar. The exact positioning, and the key being replaced, may vary depending on the size and layout of the keyboard.

We asked Microsoft if a Copilot key would be required on OEM PCs going forward; the company told us that the key isn't mandatory now, but that it expects Copilot keys to be required on Windows 11 keyboards "over time." Microsoft often imposes some additional hardware requirements on major PC makers that sell Windows on their devices, beyond what is strictly necessary to run Windows itself.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Modern fighting games have come quite a long way from their origins in providing accessibility options. Street Fighter 6 has audio cues that can convey distance, height, health, and other crucial data to visually impaired players. King of Fighters 15 allows for setting the contrast levels between player characters and background. Competitors like BrolyLegs and numerous hardware hackers have taken the seemingly inhospitable genre even further. Tekken 8, due later this month, seems to aim even higher, offering a number of color vision options in its settings. This includes an unofficially monikered "colorblind mode," with black-and-white and detail-diminished backgrounds and characters' flattened shapes filled in with either horizontal or vertical striped lines. But what started out as excitement in the fighting game and accessibility communities about this offering has shifted into warnings about the potential for migraines, vertigo, or even seizures.

You can see the mode in action in the Windows demo or in a YouTube video shared by Gatterall -- which, of course, you should not view if you believe yourself susceptible to issues with strobing images. Gatterall's enthusiasm for Tekken 8's take on colorblind accessibility ("Literally no game has done this") drew comment from Katsuhiro Harada, head of the Tekken games for developer and publisher Bandai Namco, on X (formerly Twitter). Harada stated that he had developed and tested "an accessibility version" of Tekken 7, which was never shipped or sold. Harada states that those "studies" made it into Tekken 8.

Not everybody in game accessibility circles was excited to see the new offerings, especially when it was shared directly with them by excited followers. Morgan Baker, game-accessibility lead at Electronic Arts, asked followers to "Please stop tagging me in the Tekken 8 'colorblind' stripe filters." The scenes had "already induced an aura migraine," Baker wrote, and she could not "afford to get another one right now." Accessibility consultant Ian Hamilton reposted a number of people citing migraines, nausea, or seizure concerns while also decrying the general nature of colorblind "filters" as an engineering-based approach to a broader design challenge. He added in the thread that shipping a game that contained a potentially seizure-inducing mode could result in people inadvertently discovering their susceptibility, similar to an infamous 1997 episode of the Pokemon TV series. Baker and Hamilton also noted problems with such videos automatically playing on sites like X/Twitter. "Patterns of lines moving on a screen creates a contiguous area of high-frequency flashing, like an invisible strobe," explained James Berg, accessibility project manager at Xbox Game Studios. "Human meat-motors aren't big fans of that." People typically start to notice "flicker fusion frequency" at around 40 frames per second, notes Ars.

Tekken's Harada responded by saying a "very few" number of people misunderstood what his team was trying to do with this mode. There are multiple options, not just one colorblind mode, Harada wrote, along with brightness adjustments for effects and other elements.

"These color vision options are a rare part of the fighting game genre, but they are still being researched and we intend to expand on them in the future," Harada wrote. Developers "have been working with several research institutes and communities to develop this option," even before the unsold "accessibility version of Tekken 7," added Harada.

A 13-year-old has beaten the original NES Tetris, previously thought to be an impossible task, after 34 years. The Gamer reports: The assumption I always had was that Tetris goes on forever and ever until you finally run out of space. While that's mostly true, as the game has no story, levels, or any form of progress beyond high scores and increasing speed, you 'beat' the game by crashing it, AKA reaching the "True Killscreen". It's called the "True Killscreen" because, for decades, it was assumed that level 29 was the Killscreen.

For context, the longer you play Tetris, the faster the blocks fall, upping the ante as you're forced to think in split-second moments about where each piece should drop. The speed caps at level 29, making it near impossible to reach the sides. So, the community believed that was the 'end' of the game. It isn't. The end comes when you reach a level so high, Tetris simply crashes.

Long-time tech entrepreneur Anil Dash predicts a big shift in the digital landscape in 2024. And "regular internet users — not just the world's tech tycoons — may be the ones who decide how it goes." The first thing to understand about this new era of the internet is that power is, undoubtedly, shifting. For example, regulators are now part of the story — an ironic shift for anyone who was around in the dot com days. In the E.U., tech giants like Apple are being forced to hold their noses and embrace mandated changes like opening up their devices to allow alternate app stores to provide apps to consumers. This could be good news, increasing consumer choice and possibly enabling different business models — how about mobile games that aren't constantly pestering gamers for in-app purchases? Back in the U.S., a shocking judgment in Epic Games' (that's the Fortnite folks') lawsuit against Google leaves us with the promise that Android phones might open up in a similar way.

That's not just good news for the billions of people who own smartphones. It's part of a sea change for the coders and designers who build the apps, sites, and games we all use. For an entire generation, the imagination of people making the web has been hemmed in by the control of a handful of giant companies that have had enormous control over things like search results, or app stores, or ad platforms, or payment systems. Going back to the more free-for-all nature of the Nineties internet could mean we see a proliferation of unexpected, strange new products and services. Back then, a lot of technology was created by local communities or people with a shared interest, and it was as likely that cool things would be invented by universities and non-profits and eccentric lone creators as they were to be made by giant corporations....

In that era, people could even make their own little social networks, so the conversations and content you found on an online forum or discussion were as likely to have been hosted by the efforts of one lone creator than to have come from some giant corporate conglomerate. It was a more democratized internet, and while the world can't return to that level of simplicity, we're seeing signs of a modern revisiting of some of those ideas.
Dash's article (published in Rolling Stone) ends with examples of "people who had been quietly keeping the spirit of the human, personal, creative internet alive...seeing a resurgence now that the web is up for grabs again. "

• Digital artist Everest Pipkin

• The School for Poetic Computation (which Dash describes as "an eccentric, deeply charming, self-organized school for people who want to combine art and technology and a social conscience.")

• Mask On Zone, "a collaboration with the artist and coder Ritu Ghiya, which gives demonstrators and protesters in-context guidance on how to avoid surveillance."

• There's projects and tools from makers like Stefan Bohacek, Darius Kazemi, and Elan Kiderman Ullendorff (including Youtune ("a stream of relatively unviewed original songs posted to YouTube.")

Dash concludes that "We're seeing the biggest return to that human-run, personal-scale web that we've witnessed since the turn of the millennium, with enough momentum that it's likely that 2024 is the first year since then that many people have the experience of making a new connection or seeing something go viral on a platform that's being run by a regular person instead of a commercial entity.

"It's going to make a lot of new things possible..."

A big thank-you for submitting the article to long-time Slashdot reader, DrunkenTerror.

"Billions of people" uses social media every month, notes the Wall Street Journal.. But "fewer and fewer are actually posting."

Instead they're favoring "a more passive experience, surveys of users and research from data-analytics firms say." In an October report from data-intelligence company Morning Consult, 61% of U.S. adult respondents with a social-media account said they have become more selective about what they post. The reasons are varied: People say they feel they can't control the content they see. They have become more protective about sharing their lives online. They also say the fun of social media has fizzled. This lurker mentality is widespread, across Meta Platforms' Instagram and Facebook along with X and TikTok....

In a survey conducted in the U.S. this summer, research firm Gartner found more than half of respondents believed the quality of social media has declined in the past five years. They cited misinformation, toxicity and the proliferation of bots as reasons it has gotten worse. "The less you trust social-media brands, the less of a good experience you're having," says Gartner analyst Emily Weiss. Users are less likely to share opinions or insight into their lives since the community they are looking for isn't there, she adds. Ads and suggested posts have also sucked the joy out of apps, some users say... The algorithmic spotlight on creators and their hyper-curated content has made some users feel insecure and less likely to share their own photos and videos, says Kevin Tran, media and entertainment analyst at Morning Consult. In turn, some now think of social apps more as sources of entertainment, like YouTube or Netflix.

Gartner estimates that 50% of users will either abandon or significantly limit their interactions with social media in the next two years.
Any threat to interacting is a threat to business, the article notes, adding "The companies are responding." They are investing in more private user experiences like messaging, and making interactions more secure. And encouraging people to post to a more intimate audience — as with Instagram's recently expanded Close Friends feature... Meta responded to user complaints, saying it would continue to work on improving recommendations to help creators reach more people. The company added a snooze button that pauses suggested posts for 30 days at a time, and chronological feeds that temporarily only show posts from accounts people follow... Meta began shifting its resources toward messaging, including efforts to enable end-to-end encryption by default across all of its messaging services... TikTok has also shown signs of investing more in the messaging portion of its app, nudging users to chat with people they haven't messaged in a while.
When the Wall Street Journal posted their article on Threads, Adam Mosseri (head of Instagram) responded that "People are sharing to feeds less, but to Stories more," and "even more still" in Messages ("even photos and videos"). Mosseri also said that Instagram's Notes feature — basically a post where you cab specify a smaller subset of your followers to see it — "have quickly become a big thing, particularly for young people.

"So it's no so much that people are sharing less," Mosseri argued, "but rather than they're sharing differently."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Social media companies collectively made over $11 billion in U.S. advertising revenue from minors last year, according to a study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health published on Wednesday. The researchers say the findings show a need for government regulation of social media since the companies that stand to make money from children who use their platforms have failed to meaningfully self-regulate. They note such regulations, as well as greater transparency from tech companies, could help alleviate harms to youth mental health and curtail potentially harmful advertising practices that target children and adolescents.

To come up with the revenue figure, the researchers estimated the number of users under 18 on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and YouTube in 2022 based on population data from the U.S. Census and survey data from Common Sense Media and Pew Research. They then used data from research firm eMarketer, now called Insider Intelligence, and Qustodio, a parental control app, to estimate each platform's U.S. ad revenue in 2022 and the time children spent per day on each platform. After that, the researchers said they built a simulation model using the data to estimate how much ad revenue the platforms earned from minors in the U.S. The platforms themselves don't make public how much money they earn from minors. [...]

According to the Harvard study, YouTube derived the greatest ad revenue from users 12 and under ($959.1 million), followed by Instagram ($801.1 million) and Facebook ($137.2 million). Instagram, meanwhile, derived the greatest ad revenue from users aged 13-17 ($4 billion), followed by TikTok ($2 billion) and YouTube ($1.2 billion). The researchers also estimate that Snapchat derived the greatest share of its overall 2022 ad revenue from users under 18 (41%), followed by TikTok (35%), YouTube (27%), and Instagram (16%). "As concerns about youth mental health grow, more and more policymakers are trying to introduce legislation to curtail social media platform practices that may drive depression, anxiety, and disordered eating in young people," said senior author Bryn Austin, professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. "Although social media platforms may claim that they can self-regulate their practices to reduce the harms to young people, they have yet to do so, and our study suggests they have overwhelming financial incentives to continue to delay taking meaningful steps to protect children."

LG just announced its latest 4K projector, the CineBeam Qube. It'll officially unveil the projector at CES 2024 in early January, but the company's giving curious consumers an early look. From a report: The CineBeam Qube has plenty of high-tech bells and whistles, but with a stylish design that LG calls "minimalist." There's also a handle that resembles a crank. Yeah this thing has an actual handle. The CineBeam Qube is built for portability. It's lightweight, at around three pounds, and the square form factor makes it easy to place just about anywhere. The 360-degree rotatable handle also helps with placement. LG's calling it "one of the smallest projectors available."

Of course, the most important part of any projector is, well, the projection. The Qube projects 4K UHD (3,840 x 2,160) resolution images that measure up to 120 inches. There's an RGB laser light source, a 450,000:1 contrast ratio and 154 percent coverage of the DCI-P3 color gamut. With these specs, that episode of Reacher will really pop. Speaking of streaming content, the projector runs on LG webOS 6.0 and offers access to all of the big streaming services, including Prime Video, Disney+, Netflix and YouTube.

Major streaming services test releasing children's content on YouTube and cut back on fare for kids. From a report: Netflix's share of U.S. streaming viewership by 2- to 11-year-olds fell to 21% in September from 25% two years earlier, according to Nielsen. Meanwhile, YouTube's share jumped to 33% from 29.4% over the same period. That reality is changing major streaming services' approach to children's entertainment, from what shows and movies they make to where they release them. Many are pulling back on investments in children's content, and some streamers have started content for young viewers on such platforms as Google-owned YouTube and Roblox.

[...] Netflix has also slimmed down its slate of animated children's originals, opting instead to rely more on third parties such as Skydance Animation, with which it just signed a multiyear deal to do animated films. Now, Netflix is focusing its youth programming resources on bigger swings, such as the animated film "Leo," starring Adam Sandler, its biggest animated debut ever in terms of views. The eight largest U.S. streamers, including Netflix, Warner's Max and Amazon Prime Video, added 53 originals catering to children and families in the first half of the year, down from 135 for the first half of 2022, according to Ampere. That represents a decrease of 61%, compared with a 31% decrease in overall originals across these streamers for the same period.

"It's like visiting an old friend for the holidays," according to this article: Approaching his 86th birthday, Donald Knuth — Stanford's beloved computer science guru — honored what's become a long-standing tradition. He gave a December "Christmas lecture" that's also streamed online for all of his fans...

More than 60 years ago, back in 1962, a 24-year-old Donald Knuth first started writing The Art of Computer Programming — a comprehensive analysis of algorithms which, here in 2023, he's still trying to finish. And 30 years ago Knuth also began making rare live appearances each December in front of audiences of Stanford students...

Recently Stanford uploaded several decades of Knuth's past Christmas lectures, along with a series of 22 videos of Knuth from 1985 titled "the 'Aha' Sessions'" (courses in mathematical problem-solving). There are also two different sets of five videos from 1981 showing Knuth introducing his newly-created typesetting system TeX. There are even 12 videos from 1982 of what Knuth calls "an intensive course about the internal details."

And on Dec. 6, wearing his traditional brown holiday sweater, Knuth gave yet another live demonstration of the beautifully clear precision that's made him famous.

"Millions of Star Wars fans get nostalgia pangs during the holiday season," reports the Washington Post, "when they are accustomed to seeing broadcasts of their beloved movies.... FX, now owned by Disney, has multiple Star Wars marathons on tap this month, including a marathon on December 23 and 24." The program-planning director at Disney's Freedom channel even calls Star Wars a "Christmas-adjacent" franchise.

And now, long-time Slashdot reader H_Fisher writes... Call it a Life Day miracle, even if nobody was asking for it. YouTube historian and retro-tech enthusiast Perifractic uploaded a restored, mostly-complete 4K upscale of the "infamous" Star Wars Holiday Special to his channel on Wednesday. From the video summary: "Using Topaz Labs [Video AI] with a few other techniques we've meticulously upscaled & restored the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special to 5120x3840, with stereo elements, to the best quality the technology currently allows."

Jokingly labeling the resulting file "5K" (8K video height, but tagged "4K" by YouTube due to its original 4:3 aspect ratio), the upscaled version unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) replaces some songs and omits some segments that were flagged by YouTube's copyright watchdog.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A report at The Information says that AI might already be taking people's jobs at Google. The report cites people briefed on the plans and says Google intends to "consolidate staff, including through possible layoffs, by reassigning employees at its large customer sales unit who oversee relationships with major advertisers." According to the report, the jobs are being vacated because Google's new AI tools have automated them. The report says a future restructuring was apparently already announced at a department-wide Google Ads meeting last week.

Google announced a "new era of AI-powered ads" in May, featuring a "natural-language conversational experience within Google Ads, designed to jump-start campaign creation and simplify Search ads." Google said its new AI could scan your website and "generate relevant and effective keywords, headlines, descriptions, images, and other assets," making the Google Ads chatbot one part designer and one part sales expert. [...] The report also notes another benefit of making AI do this work: "Because these tools don't require much employee attention, they carry relatively few expenses, so the ad revenue carries a high-profit margin."

The Information report says, "A growing number of advertisers have adopted PMax since [launch], eliminating the need for some employees who specialized in selling ads for a particular Google service, like search, working together to design ad campaigns for big customers." [Google's Performance Max, or "PMax," is a Google ad tool that can help advertisers actually make ad content and determine the best places for it -- YouTube, Search, Gmail, etc.] According to the report, as of a year ago, Google had about 13,500 people devoted to this kind of sales work, a huge chunk of the 30,000-strong ad division. These 13,500 people aren't necessarily all going to be affected, and those who are won't necessarily be laid off -- they could be reassigned to other areas in Google. We should know the scale of Google Ad's big re-org soon. The report says, "Some employees expect the changes to be announced next month."

AI allowed Pakistan's former prime minister Imran Khan to campaign from behind bars on Monday, with a voice clone of the opposition leader giving an impassioned speech on his behalf. From a report: Khan has been locked up since August and is being tried for leaking classified documents, allegations he says have been trumped up to stop him contesting general elections due in February. His Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party used artificial intelligence to make a four-minute message from the 71-year-old, headlining a "virtual rally" hosted on social media overnight on Sunday into Monday despite internet disruptions that monitor NetBlocks said were consistent with previous attempts to censor Khan.

PTI said Khan sent a shorthand script through lawyers that was fleshed out into his rhetorical style. The text was then dubbed into audio using a tool from the AI firm ElevenLabs, which boasts the ability to create a "voice clone" from existing speech samples. "My fellow Pakistanis, I would first like to praise the social media team for this historic attempt," the voice mimicking Khan said. "Maybe you all are wondering how I am doing in jail," the stilted voice adds. "Today, my determination for real freedom is very strong." The audio was broadcast at the end of a five-hour live-stream of speeches by PTI supporters on Facebook, X and YouTube, and was overlaid with historic footage of Khan and still images.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: For the soundtracks to their 2023 holiday season ads, both Amazon and Apple turned to music by members of The Beatles. Amazon's Joy Ride, which stars three older women reliving their youthful joy at a sledding hill, is set to a cover of The Beatles' In My Life. Apple's Fuzzy Feelings, which tells the story of a young woman with a grumpy boss, is set to George Harrison's Isn't It a Pity.

Product placement is present in both ads — Amazon features padded seat cushions that protect the seniors' tushes and the Amazon app used to order them, while Apple showcases the iPhone 15 Pro Max used to capture the ad's stop-motion animation scenes and the MacBook Air used to edit them.

Amazon's 60-second ad has 542K views on YouTube, while Apple's 4-minute ad has 16+ million views.

In an interview with Lex Fridman, Jeff Bezos candidly acknowledged Blue Origin's slow progress (compared to SpaceX). From a report: "Blue Origin needs to be much faster, and it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago," he said. "I wanted to come in, and Blue Origin needs me right now. Adding some energy, some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster. And we're going to."

How is Blue Origin going to speed up?

"We're going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry," he said. "We're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risks, making those decisions quickly. You know, being bold on those things. And having the right culture that supports that. You need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious. If there are five ways to do something, we'll study them, but let's go through them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind."

Nearly 1 in 5 teenagers in the U.S. say they use YouTube and TikTok "almost constantly," according to a Pew Research Center survey. CNBC reports: The survey showed that YouTube was the most "widely used platform" for U.S.-based teenagers, with 93% of survey respondents saying they regularly use Google's video-streaming service. Of that 93% figure, about 16% of the teenage respondents said they "almost constantly visit or use" YouTube, underscoring the video app's immense popularity with the youth market. TikTok was the second-most popular app, with 63% of teens saying they use the ByteDance-owned short-video service, followed by Snapchat and Meta's Instagram, which had 60% and 59%, respectively. About 17% of the 63% of respondents who said they use TikTok indicated they access the short-video service "almost constantly," the report noted.

Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter, now known as X, are not as popular with U.S.-based teenagers as they were a decade ago, the Pew Research study detailed. Regarding Facebook in particular, the Pew Research authors wrote that the share of teens who use the Meta-owned social media app "has dropped from 71% in 2014-2015 to 33% today." During the same period, Meta-owned Instagram's usage has not made up the difference in share, increasing from 52% in 2014-15 to a peak of 62% last year, then dropping to 59% in 2023, according to the firm.

Google Play Movies & TV will be replaced with Google TV on January 17, 2024. 9to5Google reports: Since the 2020 launch of the Google TV platform, that branding has replaced Play Movies & TV in areas such as mobile apps, but that's also led to the choice to do away with Play Movies & TV branding basically everywhere else. In October, that decision also made its way to Android TV, and the app has not been working ever since. Despite some confusion over the past few days, the app currently just redirects to Android TV's "Shop" tab, which has been widely available for months.

In a new post, Google explains that it will do away with the last parts of Google Play Movies & TV in January 2024: "With these changes, Google Play Movies & TV will no longer be available on Android TV devices or the Google Play website.* However, you'll still be able to access all of your previously purchased titles (including active rentals) on Android TV devices, Google TV devices, the Google TV mobile app (Android and iOS), and YouTube."

On January 17, Play Movies & TV will officially cease for good on Android TV. For anyone who does still have the app working -- again, most users cannot use the app already -- the "Shop" tab will become the only option. Similarly, Google says that Play Movies & TV will cease on other remaining platforms that same date. Any cable boxes with the app integrated will also lose it, and in turn pushed to the YouTube app for continued access to purchased content. Web access via play.google.com/movies will also go away, with youtube.com/movies becoming the alternative.

"A tomato lost for eight months on the orbiting lab has been located, " reports Gizmodo, "absolving astronaut Frank Rubio of playful allegations that he ate it." NASA's Veg-05 experiment, a project focusing on growing fruits and vegetables in space, experienced an unusual turn of events when a Red Robin dwarf tomato vanished shortly after being harvested in March. This tomato, part of a study to explore the feasibility of continuous fresh-food production in space, was finally found, NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli revealed during a livestream on December 6...

The Veg-05 project expanded the scope of in-space farming to include dwarf tomatoes, exploring how lighting and fertilizer variations influence fruit growth, safety, and nutritional value (and yes, tomatoes are fruits, not vegetables)... Following the harvest in March, each astronaut received a tomato sample stored in a Ziploc bag. However, concerns about potential fungal contamination led NASA to instruct the astronauts not to consume the fruit, as Space.com reported.

News of the missing tomato first emerged on September 13, during an event commemorating Rubio's one-year stay in orbit. Rubio, who had an extended mission on the ISS due to a malfunctioning Russian Soyuz spacecraft, lamented the loss of his tomato share, which had floated away before he could take a bite. Rubio, who spent a record 371 days in space, mused about the missing tomato, saying: "I spent so many hours looking for that thing. I'm sure the desiccated tomato will show up at some point and vindicate me, years in the future."
In the livestream Moghbeli "did not specify where on the 356-foot space station the one-inch-wide red dwarf tomato was located," notes the Guardian, "or in what condition." The Rubio tomato turned out to be one of only 12 red dwarves successfully germinated and grown to ripeness in space during the Veg-05 project, compared with more than 100 in a parallel experiment conducted on Earth, according to NASA.
Thanks to Slashdot reader christoban for sharing the news.