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Remote court is now in session. But will defendants get a fair trial?

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For a long time, Judge Michael Christofeno just didn’t see a place for online hearings in his courtroom. “I needed to see people in person in my courtroom or I wasn’t going to be able to have the capability to get a sense of how they’re testifying, their demeanor, whether they’re telling the truth or not, whether they’re being candid with the court,” says Christofeno, a circuit court judge in Elkhart County, Indiana. He was also concerned about operating and maintaining control of hearings in an unfamiliar medium. But the judge’s opinion changed when the county looked to reopen courts that had been largely shut down by the coronavirus pandemic. It’s been a problem across the country. The New York Times recently reported  that criminally accused people have been languishing in New York jails, in some cases contracting the virus, while only a handful of trials have taken place during the pandemic. Even participants in civil cases had been left anxiously awaiting their days in court, Christofeno says Read More …

How WarnerMedia just killed the Hollywood way of doing business

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“It’s holy shit time.”   So proclaimed one Hollywood manager just minutes after WarnerMedia announced on December 3 that it will be releasing its entire 2021 slate of movies on HBO Max, the company’s fledgling streaming platform. The lineup of films, which includes major tentpole releases such as Suicide Squad 2 , Godzilla vs. Kong , Dune, and The Matrix 4 , will simultaneously be released in theaters.   The move marks the most significant milestone yet in the streaming-versus-theatrical debate that has been roiling for years now, growing more agitated and desperate in recent months due to COVID-19, which has all but decimated the theatrical moviegoing business. Yet even as COVID-19 has shuttered movie theaters around the world and caused movie studios to make historically unheard-of decisions—for instance, moving would-be theatrical films such as Hamilton and Mulan over to their streaming services (both of those were released on Disney Plus) or selling off otherwise worthy films to Netflix or another tech giant (such as Enola Holmes and Greyhound, which bowed on Netflix and Apple TV Plus respectively)—studios have nonetheless clung mightily to the belief that when it comes to big-budget films, there is simply no upside in releasing them on streaming. The reason? The box-office revenue for those films is simply too vast to justify a streaming release. This explains why, up until now, studios have been feverishly punting their most valuable gems into 2021 and beyond, praying that by the time their movies are set to debut in theaters, we’ll all be vaccinated and chomping on popcorn in close proximity to other humans again. (With Mulan , which cost a reported $200 million to make, Disney tried to insulate itself by charging subscribers $30 to see the movie during its first month in release.) But WarnerMedia’s move throws down the gauntlet on what has largely been an almost academic debate. One year from now, there will be actual data showing just how much money the company made or lost on its audacious bet. It won’t be a matter of hypotheticals; there will be actual numbers showing how movies like The Matrix 4 fared on streaming, at least in terms of how many new subscribers it attracted to HBO Max in the quarter it was released, if not actual viewing metrics. Nor is this a toe-dipping experiment, as the company has teed up for this Christmas with Wonder Woman 1984 , the first tentpole to be sacrificed to a combined HBO Max and theatrical release, a move prompted by the most recent surge in COVID-19 cases. This is a company going all in. Granted, WarnerMedia is being very clear that this is a one-year thing, driven wholly by the pandemic and (not that its executives are saying this) what was learned from the disastrous rollout of Tenet in theaters back on Labor Day weekend. But putting all of its planned 2021 movies on HBO Max at the same time as debuting them theatrically remains the biggest, most declarative statement yet in terms of the future of streaming.   As for the logistics of how this will work, the movies that WarnerMedia is releasing on HBO Max will be made available to subscribers for 31 days Read More …

Trump supporters believe election whistle blowers because they agree with them

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It’s amazing who right-wing pundits and politicians decide to take at their word. As Donald Trump continues to lose more and more lawsuits intended to overturn his election loss, his supporters in the media and beyond have put an increased emphasis on personal accounts from alleged whistleblowers. “Many [sworn affidavits] have been thrown out and many debunked, but many still have not. These Americans, these whistleblowers, deserve to be taken seriously and at least heard without threat of reprisal, but that’s not happening,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said recently . Fine, let’s take a look at some of these whistleblowers. There was the woman at Rudy Giuliani’s circus-like hearing in Michigan on Wednesday, December 2, who argued for stringent voter ID laws because “all Chinese people look alike.” There’s the star witness at that same hearing, Dominion Voting Systems contractor Melissa Carone , an irate rambler who came across as an SNL character rejected for being too broad, and who has already become the subject of parody . a drunk woman is trump team’s star witness in michigan pic.twitter.com/qGxEI3hp2G — marisa kabas (@MarisaKabas) December 3, 2020 Then there’s the trio of whistleblowers who appeared on Sean Hannity’s extremely popular Fox News show on Tuesday, December 1, to share their stories of an alleged conspiracy to commit mass voter fraud. First up are USPS subcontractors Ethan Pease and Jesse Morgan. Pease claims that USPS workers were ordered to illegally backdate ballots so that they’d meet the November 3 deadline, while Morgan claims he picked up several pallets worth of ballots in New York and was ordered to bring them across state lines. The stories are only marginally more believable than Roger Stone’s recent claim of North Korean boats dropping off ballots in Maine Harbor . Whether they are true or not is for the judges to decide, but Hannity found them credible enough to put on air for an audience of millions, and the usual suspects tended to agree . Even just on the surface, though, these witnesses don’t seem terribly credible. All we know about them is that they appeared on Hannity fresh from a mostly maskless, indoor press conference , and that despite the host’s repeated insistence that these two are both “non-partisan,” Pease states that his reason for speaking up is that this is the “most important election of our lifetime.” (Hannity does not pursue this inquiry any further.) The third guest on the show manages to be even less credible. Kristina Karamo, an election observer from Michigan, claims that she was ordered to mark multiple ballots for Biden that may hav been mistakenly filled out for both Biden and Trump or Biden and a third-party candidate. She then zooms out to rant about all the general supposed election fraud evidence that the lamestream media is ignoring Read More …

Top AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru says Google fired her over an email

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Timnit Gebru, a high-profile AI ethics researcher and leader in the field, has been forced out of Google. Gebru, who announced the news on Twitter Wednesday night, wrote that she was fired by Google’s head of AI Jeff Dean over an email she had written to a list consisting of women and allies at Google Brain. Read More …

The Democratic operative who beat Trump on Facebook is bracing for the war ahead

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Tara McGowan should be celebrating. Acronym, her three-year-old political outfit, placed an unprecedented $100 million bet on digital ads ahead of last month’s election, with the aim of convincing millions of Americans to vote against Donald Trump, and it appeared to pay off. Still, when we spoke in a wide-ranging conversation about Acronym’s work in 2020 and beyond, the 34-year-old veteran of Democratic campaigns sounded nervous. Trump wasn’t the Democrats’ only opponent: They also faced an unprecedented hurricane of right-wing disinformation that wreaked far more damage than the Kremlin ever could. That Trump won more votes than any incumbent president, and that Republicans succeeded in so many down-ballot races, represents one challenge for Democrats; that Trump hasn’t quite acknowledged his defeat and keeps harping on conspiracy theories represents a bigger one. Tara McGowan [Photo: courtesy of Acronym] These are different problems from Acronym’s original focus. Early on, McGowan had raised the alarm about a Republican “death star” of data and ads, and more than $1 billion in Trump campaign funds—all operating in lockstep with a powerful right-wing media apparatus. To combat it, she raised millions from Hollywood and Silicon Valley billionaires, including Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn, and Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’s widow and the majority owner of The Atlantic . She built a strong team of digital operatives, many of them ex-Facebookers , tasked with bombarding key voters in battleground states with a virtuous circle of microtargeted ads, a monster data machine, and its own network of partisan news sites. Between Acronym’s work and a revamped Democratic data sharing operation, McGowan says the left once again has the digital advantage. “I believe that we definitely closed the gap, and started to leapfrog where Republicans are in terms of digital innovation and infrastructure and investments this cycle.” But the medium for Acronym’s success is also part of the problem, McGowan says. For someone who oversaw the left’s biggest Facebook ad blitz yet, using heaps of Big Tech cash, she has surprisingly little nice to say about the platforms. Now, after helping to accelerate right-wing falsehoods, Facebook and Google are making the problem even worse, she says: The platforms’ new indefinite bans on political ads could give a leg up to wealthier incumbent candidates, who can more easily buy TV spots. But they hurt Democrats in other ways, too: McGowan says the left doesn’t have the same kind of partisan media infrastructure as the right, which can use organic posts on Facebook and Google to circumvent ad bans. McGowan knows the damage that partisan misinformation can do. After a voter tabulation app made by a for-profit spin-off of Acronym failed disastrously during last year’s Iowa caucus, she became the target of a few conspiracy theories herself. (The startup’s name, Shadow Inc., didn’t help.) The incident brought intense scrutiny to Acronym, and its associated super PAC, Pacronym, spooked some donors and fed a burning skepticism about its venture-backed, Silicon Valley-style approach to progressive politics. Read More …