The blockbuster global success of ‘F9’ exposes the myth of streaming’s inevitability

As COVID-19 has turned Hollywood upside down, leading to new levels of disruption-seeking, what constitutes “radical” thinking seems to have no ceiling. Most notably, WarnerMedia decided to throw its entire 2021 slate onto HBO Max (alongside their theatrical release), a move that precipitated the $43 billion spin-off of WarnerMedia with Discovery last week. Other studios may be less audacious, but every studio in town is treating movie releases like advanced calculus, hauling in the analysts and Harvard MBAs to try to divine the best strategy to launch their precious, $200 million pieces of intellectual property out into the COVID-tattered world. Generally, the answer lies in a tepid solution—a hybrid of streaming and theatrical—that attempts to cut losses but, at least this far along in the pandemic, tends to give some kind of a boost to new streaming services.   Given this environment, Universal’s decision to release F9 in theaters only last weekend—with no streaming option—is perhaps the most radical move of all. Yes, that’s right: putting a movie in a theater where people can sit in a socially distanced way to eat their popcorn and enjoy the show is suddenly the new vanguard. [Photo: Universal Pictures] Even bolder: The “wild” experiment worked. Last weekend, the latest in the Vin Diesel-fueled action franchise racked up $162 million in foreign markets including China, Korea, and Hong Kong, a number that is not that far off from “normal” box-office figures in those areas for a Fast and Furious film. This makes it not only a COVID-19 anomaly, but the first and biggest sign yet that studios can start nudging the MBAs toward the door and start to re-embrace the good ol’ fashioned but still proven box-office model. Read More …

Why the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack is a sign of things to come

Ransomware has grown fouler than ever, but it’s also grown up. The practice of using malware to encrypt files on a victim’s devices and then demanding a ransom payment for unlocking them has advanced far beyond its origins as a nuisance for individual users. These days, it’s a massively profitable business that has spawned its own ecosystem of partner and affiliate firms. And as a succession of security experts made clear at the RSA Conference last week, we remain nowhere near developing an equivalent of a vaccine for this online plague. “It’s professionalized more than it’s ever been,” said Raj Samani, chief scientist at McAfee, in an RSA panel . “Criminals are starting to make more money,” said Jen Miller-Osborn, deputy director of threat intelligence at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42, in another session . Read More …

Why the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack is a sign of things to come

Ransomware has grown fouler than ever, but it’s also grown up. The practice of using malware to encrypt files on a victim’s devices and then demanding a ransom payment for unlocking them has advanced far beyond its origins as a nuisance for individual users. These days, it’s a massively profitable business that has spawned its own ecosystem of partner and affiliate firms. And as a succession of security experts made clear at the RSA Conference last week, we remain nowhere near developing an equivalent of a vaccine for this online plague. “It’s professionalized more than it’s ever been,” said Raj Samani, chief scientist at McAfee, in an RSA panel . “Criminals are starting to make more money,” said Jen Miller-Osborn, deputy director of threat intelligence at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42, in another session . She added that the average ransomware payout now exceeds $300,000, fueled by such tactics as the “double extortion” method of exfiltrating sensitive data from targeted systems and then threatening to post it. That method figured in recent ransomware attacks against Colonial Pipeline and Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department . “It’s such a lucrative business now for the criminals, it is going to take a full court press to change that business model,” agreed Michael Daniel, president and CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance, in that panel. (Just five years ago, the $17,000 ransom reportedly paid by a compromised hospital was a newsworthy figure.) Having this much money sloshing around has given rise to networks of affiliates and brokers. Samani’s colleague John Fokker, head of cyber investigations at McAfee, explained the rise of “ransomware as a service” (“RaaS”), in which you can buy or rent exploit kits or back doors into companies. He showed one ad from an “access broker” that listed a price of $7,500 for compromised Virtual Private Network accounts at an unspecified Canadian firm. The ad vaguely described this target company as a “Consumer Goods (manufacturing, retailing, food etc…)” enterprise with about 9,000 employees and $3 billion in revenue. “The commoditization of these capabilities for the criminals makes it so easy,” said Phil Reiner, CEO of the Institute for Security and Technology, during one of the RSA panels. RSA speakers noted how often ransomware attacks start with exploitations of known, avoidable vulnerabilities. Samani called Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol “the number-one most common entry vector for corporate networks related to ransomware attacks.” Fokker added that companies that use RDP often make this remote-access tool too easy to compromise, joking that RDP also means “really dumb passwords.” The pandemic has helped grease the skids further for ransomware attacks—both by requiring companies to rush into remote work and by making people a little more tempted to respond to COVID-themed phishing lures. As Samani put it, phishing is “still there, still works, people still click on links.” Two other factors make ransomware especially resistant to any suppression attempts. One is cryptocurrency enabling hard-to-trace online funds transfers. Bitcoin and other digital currencies may not be too useful for everyday transactions , but they suit the business of ransomware well Read More …

4 wild concepts show what a futuristic, Ikea-designed smart home might look like

Although Ikea is only starting to dabble in smart home tech with light bulbs , speakers , and blinds , the Swedish furniture giant is showing off a vision that’s much more ambitious. Someday, for instance, you might use augmented reality to visualize how your computer and TV share data with one another, or to look up the environmental impact of all of your gadgets. You might even use spatial audio to designate parts of your home as “silent zones,” or enlist a digital avatar to warn you of potential privacy threats. To be clear, Ikea isn’t turning any of these ideas into products anytime soon, but it enlisted its innovation research and design lab, Space10 , and a group of external designers to come up with them as a way to reflect on what the future holds for smart homes. The first of these “ Everyday Experiments ” concepts launched last year, and the latest batch focuses on privacy and trust in an effort to explore what a respectfully designed, noninvasive smart home might look like. “We wanted to go about it where privacy is not a dystopia, and we’re not working at it from a dystopic point of view,” says Tony Gjerlufsen, Space10’s head of technology. “Privacy shouldn’t be a chore either.” [Image: Nicole He and Eran Hilleli/Ikea] The augmented home The clearest example is “Invisible Roommates” by designers Nicole He and Eran Hilleli. Using augmented reality, it envisions smart home devices as cute characters that sit next to their real-world counterparts. When those devices communicate with one another, the AR versions represent the flow of data as a trail of paper planes. [Animation: Nicole He and Eran Hilleli/Ikea] Another experiment by the London-based design studio Field, called “Digital Buddy,” touches on a similar idea. It envisions users talking to a small, blob-like avatar to ask about the privacy policies of other products and services. The AI would then scan through those companies’ terms of service and read out relevant information, such as whether a service can read the content of your private messages. A second concept by Field, called “Chain of Traceability,” imagines that household objects would be registered on a blockchain, which would store information about materials, carbon footprint, and production process. The idea would be for users to scan those products with an AI application so they could make more informed purchasing decisions. [Photo: Field/Ikea] Perhaps the wildest idea of all, though, is Yuri Suzuki’s “Sound Bubbles,” which imagines using an AI app to cordon off silent parts of the home. Users could then steer sound away from those quiet spaces using 3D spatial audio. From concept to reality Since these are design concepts rather than working prototypes, there’s no guarantee that Ikea will realize any of them. Still, some of Space10’s ideas do have roots in existing technology. [Animation: Yuri Suzuki/Ikea] Augmented reality applications, for instance, are widely available today on iOS and Android devices, and Ikea itself has an app that helps people visualize furniture in their homes. AI assistants like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant are now ubiquitous, as are resources like TOSDR for making terms of service agreements more digestible Read More …

This virtual team-building guide is the cure for Zoom happy hours

As many companies have seen employees working from home for more than a year thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, they’ve been searching for ways beyond conference calls and purely work-focused Zoom meetings for workers to connect online. Naturally, that’s led to an influx of online team-building activities , often replicating the types of activities companies would once engage in for in-person bonding, from wine tastings to virtual escape rooms. But while there’s no shortage of potential Zoom-based social activities for companies to book to entertain employees or clients, it can still be a lot of work for managers to find activities that are right for a particular audience. That was the experience of Healey Cypher, chief operating officer at the venture studio Atomic , who said he found himself spending substantial amounts of time looking for better alternatives to the oft-dreaded Zoom happy hour . The experience led Cypher and his team to experiment with reaching out to vendors offering online experiences and to companies that might be in need of quality group entertainment in order to help pair them together Read More …