Will moviegoers ever get superhero fatigue? Marvel boss Kevin Feige doesn't buy it, saying on a new podcast interview that there are 80 years of "groundbreaking" stories told in the Marvel comics that they can adapt into "different genres." From a report: "I've been at Marvel Studios for over 22 years, and most of us here at Marvel Studios have been around a decade or longer together," Feige said on "The Movie Business Podcast," hosted by Jason E. Squire, an author and professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. "From probably my second year at Marvel, people were asking, 'Well, how long is this going to last? Is this fad of comic book movies going to end?'"

Feige continued, "I didn't really understand the question. Because to me, it was akin to saying after 'Gone With the Wind,' 'Well, how many more movies can be made off of novels? Do you think the audience will sour on movies being adapted from books?' You would never ask that because there's an inherent understanding among most people that a book can be anything. A novel can have any type of story whatsoever. So it all depends on what story you're translating. Non-comic readers don't understand that it's the same thing in comics." Referencing the rich catalog of Marvel comics, which date back to 1939, Feige said there are countless stories for the studio to adapt in various genres.

A new draft of the Dungeons & Dragons Open Gaming License, dubbed OGL 1.2 by publisher Wizards of the Coast, is now available for download. Polygon reports: The announcement was made Thursday by Kyle Brink, executive producer of D&D, on the D&D Beyond website. According to Wizards, this draft could place the OGL outside of the publisher's control -- which should sound good to fans enraged by recent events. Time will tell, but public comment will be accepted beginning Jan. 20 and will continue through Feb. 3. [...] Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that, by its own description, "helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world's most pressing challenges." As such, a Creative Commons license once enacted could ultimately put the OGL 1.2 outside of Wizards' control in perpetuity.

"We're giving the core D&D mechanics to the community through a Creative Commons license, which means that they are fully in your hands," Brink said in the blog post. "If you want to use quintessentially D&D content from the SRD such as owlbears and magic missile, OGL 1.2 will provide you a perpetual, irrevocable license to do so." So much trust has been lost over the last several weeks that it will no doubt take a while for legal experts -- armchair and otherwise -- to pour over the details of the new OGL. These are the bullet points that Wizards is promoting in this official statement: - Protecting D&D's inclusive play experience. As I said above, content more clearly associated with D&D (like the classes, spells, and monsters) is what falls under the OGL. You'll see that OGL 1.2 lets us act when offensive or hurtful content is published using the covered D&D stuff. We want an inclusive, safe play experience for everyone. This is deeply important to us, and OGL 1.0a didn't give us any ability to ensure it

- TTRPGs and VTTs. OGL 1.2 will only apply to TTRPG content, whether published as books, as electronic publications, or on virtual tabletops (VTTs). Nobody needs to wonder or worry if it applies to anything else. It doesn't.

- Deauthorizing OGL 1.0a. We know this is a big concern. The Creative Commons license and the open terms of 1.2 are intended to help with that. One key reason why we have to deauthorize: We can't use the protective options in 1.2 if someone can just choose to publish harmful, discriminatory, or illegal content under 1.0a. And again, any content you have already published under OGL 1.0a will still always be licensed under OGL 1.0a.

- Very limited license changes allowed. Only two sections can be changed once OGL 1.2 is live: how you cite Wizards in your work and how we can contact each other. We don't know what the future holds or what technologies we will use to communicate with each other, so we thought these two sections needed to be future-proofed. A revised version of this draft will be presented to the community again "on or before February 17."

"The process will extend as long as it needs to," Brink said. "We'll keep iterating and getting your feedback until we get it right."

Stephen Colbert is joining the team that is adapting Roger Zelazny's "The Chronicles of Amber" for television. Variety reports: Colbert will now executive produce the potential series under his Spartina production banner. Spartina joins Skybound Entertainment and Vincent Newman Entertainment (VNE) on the series version of the beloved fantasy novels, with Skyboudn first announcing their intention to develop the series back in 2016. The books have been cited as an influence on "Game of Thrones," with author George R.R. Martin recently stating he wanted to see the books brought to the screen.

"The Chronicles of Amber" follows the story of Corwin, who is said to "awaken on Earth with no memory, but soon finds he is a prince of a royal family that has the ability to travel through different dimensions of reality (called 'shadows') and rules over the one true world, Amber." The story is told over ten books with two story arcs: "The Corwin Cycle" and "The Merlin Cycle." The series has sold more than fifteen million copies globally. The search is currently on for a writer to tackle the adaptation. No network or streamer is currently attached. Colbert and Spartina are currently under a first-look deal at CBS Studios, but they are not currently the studio behind the series. "George R.R. Martin and I have similar dreams," Colbert said. "I've carried the story of Corwin in my head for over 40 years, and I'm thrilled to partner with Skybound and Vincent Newman to bring these worlds to life. All roads lead to Amber, and I'm happy to be walking them."

DIY-minded Samsung owners now have officially supported options to repair more smartphones and, for the first time, laptops from that firm. From a report: The company announced Tuesday that its Self-Repair program now covers Galaxy S22, Galaxy S22+, Galaxy S22 Ultra phones as well as Galaxy Book Pro 15-inch and Galaxy Book Pro 360 (15-inch) laptops. Samsung says S22-series owners will be able to buy kits to swap out "display assemblies, back glass, and charging ports." For the two Galaxy Book laptops, both introduced in 2021, the parts menu covers "the case front, case rear, display, battery, touchpad, power key with fingerprint reader, and rubber foot."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: After a week of silence amid intense backlash, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has finally addressed its community's concerns about changes to the open gaming license. The open gaming license (OGL) has existed since 2000 and has made it possible for a diverse ecosystem of third-party creators to publish virtual tabletop software, expansion books and more. Many of these creators can make a living thanks to the OGL. But over the last week, a new version of the OGL leaked after WoTC sent it to some top creators. More than 66,000 Dungeons & Dragons fans signed an open letter under the name #OpenDnD ahead of an expected announcement, and waves of users deleted their subscriptions to D&D Beyond, WoTC's online platform. Now, WoTC admitted that "it's clear from the reaction that we rolled a 1." Or, in non-Dungeons and Dragons speak, they screwed up.

"We wanted to ensure that the OGL is for the content creator, the homebrewer, the aspiring designer, our players, and the community -- not major corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purpose," the company wrote in a statement. But fans have critiqued this language, since WoTC -- a subsidiary of Hasbro -- is a "major corporation" in itself. Hasbro earned $1.68 billion in revenue during the third quarter of 2022. TechCrunch spoke to content creators who had received the unpublished OGL update from WoTC. The terms of this updated OGL would force any creator making more than $50,000 to report earnings to WoTC. Creators earning over $750,000 in gross revenue would have to pay a 25% royalty. The latter creators are the closest thing that third-party Dungeons & Dragons content has to "major corporations" -- but gross revenue is not a reflection of profit, so to refer to these companies in that way is a misnomer. [...] The fan community also worried about whether WoTC would be allowed to publish and profit off of third-party work without credit to the original creator. Noah Downs, a partner at Premack Rogers and a Dungeons & Dragons livestreamer, told TechCrunch that there was a clause in the document that granted WoTC a perpetual, royalty-free sublicense to all third-party content created under the OGL.

Now, WoTC appears to be walking back both the royalty clause and the perpetual license. "What [the next OGL] will not contain is any royalty structure. It also will not include the license back provision that some people were afraid was a means for us to steal work. That thought never crossed our minds," WoTC wrote in a statement. "Under any new OGL, you will own the content you create. We won't." WoTC claims that it included this language in the leaked version of the OGL to prevent creators from being able to "incorrectly allege" that WoTC stole their work. Throughout the document, WoTC refers to the document that certain creators received as a draft -- however, creators who received the document told TechCrunch that it was sent to them with the intention of getting them to sign off on it. The backlash against these terms was so severe that other tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) publishers took action. Paizo is the publisher of Pathfinder, a popular game covered under WoTC's original OGL. Paizo's owner and presidents were leaders at Wizards of the Coast at the time that the OGL was originally published in 2000, and wrote in a statement yesterday that the company was prepared to go to court over the idea that WoTC could suddenly revoke the OGL license from existing projects. Along with other publishers like Kobold Press, Chaosium and Legendary Games, Paizo announced it would release its own Open RPG Creative License (ORC). "Ultimately, the collective action of the signatures on the open letter and unsubscribing from D&D Beyond made a difference. We have seen that all they care about is profit, and we are hitting their bottom line," said Eric Silver, game master of Dungeons & Dragons podcast Join the Party. He told TechCrunch that WoTC's response on Friday is "just a PR statement."

"Until we see what they release in clear language, we can't let our foot off the gas pedal," Silver said. "The corporate playbook is wait it out until the people get bored; we can't and we won't."

Crypto exchange FTX has recovered more than $5 billion in cash and liquid cryptocurrencies and securities, an attorney for the bankrupt company founded by Sam Bankman-Fried told a judge on Wednesday. From a report: [FTX Attorney Andy] Dietderich also said that the company plans to sell non-strategic investments that had a book value of $4.6 billion, although the company's books have been described as unreliable.

Slashdot has covered the legal hijinx of Malibu Media over the years. Now Ars Technica reports that the studio could be destroyed by unpaid taxes: Over the past decade, Malibu Media has emerged as a prominent so-called "copyright troll," suing thousands of "John Does" for allegedly torrenting adult content hosted on the porn studio's website, "X-Art." Whether defendants were guilty or not didn't seem to matter to Malibu, critics claimed, as much as winning as many settlements as possible. As courts became more familiar with Malibu, however, some judges grew suspicious of the studio's litigiousness. As early as 2012, a California judge described these lawsuits as "essentially an extortion scheme," and by 2013, a Wisconsin judge ordered sanctions, agreeing with critics who said that Malibu's tactics were designed to "harass and intimidate" defendants into paying Malibu thousands in settlements.

By 2016, Malibu started losing footing in this arena — and even began fighting with its own lawyer. At that point, file-sharing lawsuits became less commonplace, with critics noting a significant reduction in Malibu's lawsuits over the next few years. Now, TorrentFreak reports that Malibu's litigation machine appears to finally be running out of steam — with its corporate status suspended in California sometime between mid-2020 and early 2021 after failing to pay taxes. Last month, a Texas court said that Malibu has until January 20 to pay what's owed in back taxes and get its corporate status reinstated. If that doesn't happen over the next few weeks, one of Malibu's last lawsuits on the books will be dismissed, potentially marking the end of Malibu's long run of alleged copyright trolling.

Audiobooks narrated by a text-to-speech AI are now available via Apple's Books service, in a move with potentially huge implications for the multi-billion dollar audiobook industry. From a report: Apple describes the new "digital narration" feature on its website as making "the creation of audiobooks more accessible to all," by reducing "the cost and complexity" of producing them for authors and publishers. The feature represents a big shift from the current audiobook model, which often involves authors narrating their own books in a process that can take weeks and cost thousands for a publisher.

Digital narration has the potential to allow smaller publishers and authors to put out an audiobook at a much lower cost. Apple's website says the feature is initially only available for romance and fiction books, where it lists two available digital voices: Madison and Jackson. (Two more voices, Helena and Mitchell, are on the way for nonfiction books). The service is only available in English at present, and Apple is oddly specific about the genres of books its digital narrators are able to tackle. "Primary category must be romance or fiction (literary, historical, and women's fiction are eligible; mysteries and thrillers, and science fiction and fantasy are not currently supported)," its website reads.

The Biden administration is working to complete a clean water regulation before a Supreme Court ruling that could complicate the government's ability to protect wetlands and other waters. From a report: The Environmental Protection Agency rule, which was finalized on Friday, essentially reverts protections for millions of streams, marshes and other bodies of water to levels that existed before the Obama administration made major changes in 2015, leading to nearly a decade of political and legal disputes. With the Supreme Court expected to rule next year in a major case that could reduce the government's authority to regulate wetlands, experts called the Biden administration's move strategic. Getting a rule on the books now gives the E.P.A. a greater chance of locking in, at least for a while, a broad definition of which waterways qualify for federal protection under the Clean Water Act.

"If the Supreme Court goes first, then the agency can't finalize a rule that goes beyond it," said Kevin S. Minoli, a partner at Alston & Bird who served as an E.P.A. counsel in the Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. By issuing a rule first, he said, the government has "more room to interpret" the court decision when it comes. Under the new rule, the E.P.A. revived a definition of what constitute "waters of the United States" that had been in place since 1986, describing the definition as "familiar" and foundational to decades of clean-water progress. In a statement, the agency said the changes imposed by the Obama administration, a subsequent reversal by the Trump administration and several legal battles in between, had "harmed communities and our nation's waters."

Guess what's finally entering America's public domain today? Appropriately enough, it's Marcel Proust's 1927 novel Remembrance of Things Past.

Also entering the public domain today are thousands of other books, plus the music and lyrics of hundreds of songs, and even several silent movies.

Fritz Lang's sci-fi classic Metropolis enters the public domain today — and so does the Laurel & Hardy comedy Battle of the Century (which culminates with one of Hollywod's first pie fights), according to Duke University's Center for the Study of the Public Domain: This is actually the second time that Metropolis has gone into the US public domain. The first was in 1955, when its initial 28-year term expired and the rights holders did not renew the copyright. Then in 1996 a new law restored the copyrights in qualifying foreign works. Metropolis, along with thousands of other works, was pulled out of the public domain, and now reenters it after the expiration of the 95-year term, with the once missing scenes available for anyone to reuse.
They also note that some material is in the public domain from the beginning, including government works like the images from the James Webb telescope.

But for other works, today is a big and important day, writes the Associated Press: Alongside the short-story collection "The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes," books such as Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse," Ernest Hemingway's "Men Without Women," William Faulkner's "Mosquitoes" and Agatha Christie's "The Big Four" — an Hercule Poirot mystery — will become public domain as the calendar turns to 2023. Once a work enters the public domain it can legally be shared, performed, reused, repurposed or sampled without permission or cost.

The works from 1927 were originally supposed to be copyrighted for 75 years, but the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act delayed opening them up for an additional 20 years. While many prominent works on the list used those extra two decades to earn their copyright holders good money, a Duke University expert says the copyright protections also applied to "all of the works whose commercial viability had long subsided."

"For the vast majority — probably 99% — of works from 1927, no copyright holder financially benefited from continued copyright. Yet they remained off limits, for no good reason," Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, wrote in a blog post heralding "Public Domain Day 2023." That long U.S. copyright period meant many works that would now become available have long since been lost, because they were not profitable to maintain by the legal owners, but couldn't be used by others. On the Duke list are such "lost" films like Victor Fleming's "The Way of All Flesh" and Tod Browning's "London After Midnight...."
Also entering the public domain today:


- Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop
- A. A. Milne's Now We Are Six (illustrations by E. H. Shepard)
- Franklin W. Dixon's The Tower Treasure — the first Hardy Boys book
- Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf (German version)
- The song "My Blue Heaven"
- Songs by Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong
- Alfred Hitchcock's early silent movie The Lodger


The UK-based newspaper the Observer adds: For those readers who do not reside in the US, there is perhaps another reason for celebrating today, because copyright terms are longer in the US than they are in other parts of the world, including the EU and the UK. And therein lies a story about intellectual property laws and the power of political lobbying in a so-called liberal democracy.... The term was gradually lengthened in small increments by Congress until 1976, when it was extended by 19 years to 75 years and then in 1998 by the Sonny Bono Act. So, as the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig puts it, "in the 20 years after the Sonny Bono Act, while 1 million patents will pass into the public domain, zero copyrights will pass into the public domain by virtue of the expiration of a copyright term"....

[T]he end result is that American citizens have had to wait two decades to be free to adapt and reuse works to which we Europeans have had easy access....

The issue highlighted by Public Domain Day is not that intellectual property is evil but that aspects of it — especially copyright — have been monopolised and weaponised by corporate interests and that legislators have been supine in the face of their lobbying. Authors and inventors need protection against being ripped off. It's obviously important that clever people are rewarded for their creativity and the patent system does that quite well. But if a patent only lasts for 20 years, why on earth should copyright last for life plus 70 years for a novel?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An appeals court has revived a lawsuit against that accuses Google, YouTube, DreamWorks, and a handful of toymakers of tracking the activity of children under 13 on YouTube. In an opinion (PDF) released Wednesday, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act does not bar lawsuits based on individual state privacy laws.

Passed in 1998 and amended in 2012, COPPA requires websites to obtain parental consent for the collection and dissemination of personally identifiable information of children under the age of 13. COPPA gives the FTC and state attorneys general the ability to investigate and levy fines for violations of the law. Several states across the US have laws similar to COPPA on the books. The revived lawsuit cites laws in California, Colorado, Indiana, and Massachusetts to argue that Hasbro, DreamWorks, Mattel, and the Cartoon Network illegally lured children to their YouTube channels in order to target them with ads.

A federal judge in San Francisco dismissed the original lawsuit, ruling that COPPA bars individuals from suing companies for privacy violations. In a unanimous decision, the Ninth Circuit judges hearing the appeal disagreed with the district court's reasoning. COPPA is not, in fact, the only route to enforcement, according to the ruling. "Since the bar on 'inconsistent' state laws implicitly preserves 'consistent' state substantive laws, it would be nonsensical to assume Congress intended to simultaneously preclude all state remedies for violations of those laws," wrote Judge Margaret McKeown. The case, which seeks damages for a seven-year time period between 2013 and 2020, now heads back to district court.

The Verge presents what it's calling "an interview with an AI early adopter," who is currently using ChatGPT not just to generate titles, but also the plots for their mysteries. For example, "I need four murder suspects with information about why they're suspected and how they are cleared. And then tell me who the guilty killer is."

The author says "It will do just that. It will spit that out." Q: You and a few other independent authors were early adopters of these tools. With ChatGPT, it feels like a lot of other people are suddenly grappling with the same questions you were confronting. What's that been like...?

Every group, every private, behind-the-scenes author group I'm in, there's some kind of discussion going on. Right now, everybody's talking about using it on the peripherals. But there seems to be this moral chasm between: "It does blurbs really well, and I hate doing blurbs, and I have to pay somebody to do blurbs, and blurbs isn't writing, so I'm going to use it for blurbs." Or "Well, I'm going to have it help me tighten up my plot because I hate plotting, but it plots really well, so I'm going to use it for that." Or "Did you know that if you tell it to proofread, it'll make sure that it's grammatically correct?'

Everybody gets closer and closer to using it to write their stuff, and then they stop, and everybody seems to feel like they have to announce when they're talking about this: "But I do not ever use its words to write my books." And I do.... The actual words, just to get them down faster and get it out, I do. So I've found myself in the past couple of weeks wondering, do I engage in this debate? Do I say anything? For the most part, I've said nothing.

Q: What do you think the line is that people are drawing?

It's a concern of plagiarism. Everybody knows that they crawled stuff with permission and without permission. And there's an ethical question.... I have three authors that I've read extensively, indie authors that I'm friends with, and I know they never gave permission for their stuff to be looked at, and I was able to reasonably recreate their style.... That I won't do. That, for me, is an ethical line....

But you could, if you were ethically okay with that, with this technology and what it allows you to do.

CNN shares the historic close-up snowflake photos of Wilson Bentley, the first person to capture the details of the individual "snow crystal" ice that makes up snowflakes.

It was 1885, just 69 years after the invention of the camera, and after years of trial and error, "He went on to photograph more than 5,000 of these "ice flowers" during his lifetime — never finding any duplicates — and the images still mesmerize to this day." Every snow crystal shares a common six-sided or six-pointed structure — it's how frozen water molecules arrange themselves — but they will always vary from one another because each falls from the sky in its own unique way and experiences slightly different atmospheric conditions on its travel down to earth. Some of their arms may look long and skinny. Others may appear short and flat or somewhere in between. The possibilities are endless and fascinating....

"He had the mind of a scientist and the soul of a poet, and you can see that in his writings," said Sue Richardson, Bentley's great-grandniece who is vice president of the board for the Jericho Historical Society. "He wrote many, many articles over the years for scientific publications and for other magazines like Harper's Bazaar and National Geographic. "He also kept very detailed weather records and very detailed journals of every photograph that he took of a snow crystal — the temperature, the humidity, what part of the storm it came from. He kept very detailed information, and then these weather records that he kept and the theories that he developed about how snow crystals formed in the atmosphere, those were proven true...."

It wasn't easy, however, to get those snow crystals on camera. It took almost three years, Richardson said, for Bentley to figure out how to successfully photograph one — which he did just a month shy of his 20th birthday. The first obstacle was figuring out how to attach the microscope to the camera. And then there was the challenge of getting each crystal photographed before it could melt away. "He worked in an unheated woodshed at the back of the house. He had to," Richardson said. "And the microscope slides, everything, had to be an ambient temperature or they'd melt" the crystal....

A children's book about him won the Caldecott Medal in 1999.
Bentley never had formal education, according to his grandniece (who grew up hearing stories about this famous ancestor). One says that when Wilson Bentley was given an old microscope at age 15, "The first time he looked at a snow crystal under it, he was hooked. Just the beauty, the intricate detail. He was totally hooked."

The North American Aerospace Defense Command is a US/Canada organization protecting the air sovereignty of the two nations.

But every year on December 24th, they also tell you where Santa is. From NORADSanta.org: The modern tradition of tracking Santa began in 1955 when a young child accidentally dialed the unlisted phone number of the Continental Air Defense Command Operations Center upon seeing an newspaper advertisement telling kids to call Santa. The Director of Operations, Colonel Harry Shoup, answered the phone and instructed his staff to check the radar for indications of Santa making his way south from the North Pole.... Each year since, NORAD has dutifully reported Santa's location on Dec. 24 to millions of children and families across the globe. NORAD receives calls from around the world on Dec. 24 asking for Santa's location. Children, families and fans also keep track of Santa's location on the NORAD Tracks Santa® website and our social media platforms.
The page lists the NORAD technologies involved in tracking Santa — including 47 radar installations and geo-synchronous satellites with infrared heat sensors. ("Rudolph's nose gives off an infrared signature similar to a missile launch...")

And this year NORAD also produced a special video highlighting the various military fleets protecting Santa. ("He may know when you're sleeping, he may know when you're awake... " it tells viewers. "But for 67 years now, when he takes flight, we'll know.")

More from NORADSanta.org: Canadian NORAD fighter pilots, flying the CF-18, take off out of Newfoundland and welcome Santa to North America. Then at numerous locations in Canada other CF-18 fighter pilots escort Santa. While in the United States, American NORAD fighter pilots in either the F-15s, F16s or F-22s get the thrill of flying with Santa and the famous Reindeer...

Q: How can Santa travel the world within 24 hours?

A: NORAD intelligence reports indicate that Santa does not experience time the way we do. His trip seems to take 24 hours to us, but to Santa it might last days, weeks or even months. Santa would not want to rush the important job of delivering presents to children and spreading joy to everyone, so the only logical conclusion is that Santa somehow functions within his own time-space continuum....

How does Santa get down chimneys?

Although NORAD has different hypotheses and theories as to how Santa actually gets down the chimneys, we don't have definitive information to explain the magical phenomenon.

Do your planes ever intercept Santa?

Over the past 65 years, our fighter jets (F-16s, F-15s, F-22s and CF-18s) have intercepted Santa many, many times. When the jets intercept Santa, they tip their wings to say, "Hello Santa! NORAD is tracking you again this year!" Santa always waves. He loves to see the pilots...!

How many people support this effort, and are they active duty military personnel?

More than 1,250 Canadian and American uniformed personnel and DOD civilians volunteer their time on December 24th to answer the thousands of phone calls and emails that flood in from around the world. In addition to the support provided by our corporate contributors to make this program possible, NORAD has two lead project officers who manage the program.

How much money is spent on this project?

The NORAD Tracks Santa program is made possible by volunteers and through the generous support of corporate licensees who bear virtually all of the costs.
Corporate contributors include Microsoft (with separate contributions from Microsoft's search engine Bing and from Microsoft Azure), AWS (and Amazon's Alexa), Verizon, and HP.

NORADSanta.org also boasts extra features like an "arcade" of online games, a jukebox of Christmas tunes, and a library of online books about Santa. And the site even provides some technical data on the weight of Santa's sleigh — although the unit of measurement used is gumdrops.

The world's biggest crypto exchange, Binance, is battling to shore up confidence after a surge in customer withdrawals and a steep drop in the value of its digital token. Reuters reports: The exchange said it dealt with net outflows of around $6 billion over 72 hours last week "without breaking stride" because its finances are solid and "we take our responsibility as a custodian seriously." After the collapse of rival exchange FTX last month, Binance's founder Changpeng Zhao promised his company would "lead by example" in embracing transparency. Yet a Reuters analysis of Binance's corporate filings shows that the core of the business -- the giant Binance.com exchange that has processed trades worth over $22 trillion this year -- remains mostly hidden from public view.

Binance declines to say where Binance.com is based. It doesn't disclose basic financial information such as revenue, profit and cash reserves. The company has its own crypto coin, but doesn't reveal what role it plays on its balance sheet. It lends customers money against their crypto assets and lets them trade on margin, with borrowed funds. But it doesn't detail how big those bets are, how exposed Binance is to that risk, or the full extent of its reserves to finance withdrawals. Binance is not required to publish detailed financial statements because it is not a public company, unlike U.S. rival Coinbase, which is listed on the Nasdaq. Nor has Binance raised outside capital since 2018, industry data show, which means it hasn't had to share financial information with external investors since then.

In an effort to look inside Binance's books, Reuters reviewed filings by Binance units in 14 jurisdictions where the exchange on its website says it has "regulatory licenses, registrations, authorisations and approvals." These locations include several European Union states, Dubai and Canada. Zhao has described the authorisations as milestones in Binance's "journey to being fully licensed and regulated around the world." The filings show that these units appear to have submitted scant information about Binance's business to authorities. The public filings do not show, for example, how much money flows between the units and the main Binance.com exchange. The Reuters analysis also found that several of the units appear to have little activity. Former regulators and ex-Binance executives say these local businesses serve as window dressing for the main unregulated exchange. Binance Chief Strategy Officer Patrick Hillmann said the Reuters analysis of the units' filings in the 14 jurisdictions was "categorically false."

Binance's Hillmann did not comment on the Reuters estimates. "The vast majority of our revenue is made on transaction fees," he said, adding that the exchange has been able to "accumulate large corporate reserves" by keeping expenses down. Binance's "capital structure is debt free" and the company keeps its money made from fees separate from the assets it buys and holds for users, Hillmann said.

Further reading: Binance US To Buy Bankrupt Voyager Digital's Assets for $1 Billion

Binance US will buy Voyager Digital's assets out of bankruptcy in a deal worth $1.022 billion. From a report: Voyager selected Binance US as the highest and best bidder after reviewing options, the company said in a statement Monday. The bid "sets a clear path forward for Voyager customer funds to be unlocked as soon as possible," according to the statement, and the company will aim to return crypto to its customers in kind. The deal values Voyager's crypto portfolio at just over $1 billion, and includes another $20 million for "incremental value." Further reading: Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it tries to rally confidence.
As crypto auditors call it quits, what will take their place?

AI tools like DALL-E 2, Lensa AI, and Midjourney "can be told to create imagery in the style of a particular artist," notes this article in the Daily Dot.

Yet "The current legal consensus, much to the chagrin of many artists, concludes that AI-generated art is in the public domain and therefore not copyrighted." So... In response to concerns over the future of their craft, artists have begun using AI systems to generate images of characters including Disney's Mickey Mouse. Given Disney's history of fierce protection over its content, the artists are hoping the company takes action and thus proves that AI art isn't as original as it claims. Over the weekend, Eric Bourdages, the Lead Character Artist on the popular video game Dead by Daylight, urged his followers to create and sell merchandise using the Disney-inspired images he created using Midjourney.... "Legally there should be no recourse from Disney as according to the AI models TOS these images transcends copyright and the images are public domain."

Bourdages tweet quickly racked up more than 37,000 likes and close to 6,000 shares.

In numerous follow-up tweets, Bourdages generated images of other popular characters from movies, video games, and comic books, including Darth Vader, Spider-Man, Batman, Mario, and Pikachu.

"More shirts courtesy of AI," he added. "I'm sure, Nintendo, Marvel, and DC won't mind, the AI didn't steal anything to create these images, they are completely 100% original...."

Just two days after sharing the images, however, Bourdages stated on Twitter that he had suddenly lost his access to Midjourney.
The article notes that Bourdages reiterated his point in a later tweet. "People's craftsmanship, time, effort, and ideas are being taken without their consent and used to create a product that can blend it all together and mimic it to varying degrees."

Longtime williamyf writes: Both ArsTechnica and The Register report that Amazon, Vertigo, and Games Worksop have entered a preliminary deal for the movie, TV, and merchandising rights of the Warhammer 40K franchise. The deal also brings Henry Cavill -- longtime Warhammer 40K fan, actor who played Geralt in Netflix's The Witcher series and Superman in the Zack Snyder DC superhero films -- as both executive producer and actor.

While this is only a memorandum of understanding, it's highly likely that the deal will pass. What is still not clear is if this will be handled by MGM (meaning a higher probability of theatrical releases and physical media) or if it will go to Amazon Studios (increasing the probability of a streaming-only affaire), or both.

What is your opinion? Let us know in the comments. "Warhammer 40K is set in the very distant future (the 40K roughly refers to the years when it takes place) that is analogous in some ways to what historians used to refer to as Europe's Dark Ages," reports Ars. "The franchise is the definition of 'grimdark,' painting a picture of a universe in which billions toil to serve a God-Emperor and vast, brutal warfare."

"The universe is much more expansive than its politics, though, with countless threats to humanity, including Starship Troopers-like insect hordes and space orks, among other beings." It started as a tabletop game and has gone on to spawn numerous popular video games and books over the almost 40 years it's been around.

The literary magazine Bookforum has announced that its current issue would be its last [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], dealing a significant blow to literary journalism, which has been vastly diminished in recent years. The New York Times: "We are so proud of the contribution Bookforum has made to the literary community," the magazine said on Twitter after announcing its closure, "and are immensely grateful to the advertisers, subscribers and booksellers who made our mission possible over the years." Bookforum was one of the few remaining publications devoted to books, running a mix of reviews, essays and interviews. Among the articles it published over the years were interviews with writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Marlon James, and essays on Philip Roth and George Saunders.

So called "little" magazines -- independent and noncommercial journals, often with readership in the low four figures -- are experiencing a renaissance, with the recent launching of many new publications such as The Drift and Forever Magazine. At the same time, national legacy journals funded by corporations are struggling to stay afloat in an era of consolidation. Astra Magazine, an international magazine of literature published by Astra Publishing House, ceased publication earlier this year after two issues, while The Washington Post Magazine announced that its final issue will run at the end of December. (The Post's books section, Book World, has recently made a comeback, however.) Bookforum and its sister publication, Artforum, were acquired by Penske Media Corporation last week. Penske did not respond to questions about the decision to shutter Bookforum. David Velasco, the editor of Artforum, said that magazine would continue operations. Bookforum's website will continue to offer access to the archives for the near future, according to Kate Koza, who is the associate publisher at Artforum and Bookforum, and will stay on at Artforum.

Tax authorities from Australia, Canada, France, the UK and the USA have conducted a joint probe into "electronic sales suppression software" -- applications that falsify point of sale data to help merchants avoid paying tax on their true revenue. From a report: A Friday announcement from the Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement (known as the J5), states that the probe "resulted in the arrest of five individuals in the United Kingdom who allegedly designed and sold electronic sales suppression systems internationally." Those responsible allegedly started to export their wares during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"These dodgy sales suppression tools allow retailers to keep a separate set of books and launder the money in one transaction," explained J5 chief and Australian Taxation Office deputy commissioner John Ford. "They conceal and transfer this income anonymously, sometimes offshore."