Russian officials have blocked Facebook in the country. Telecom regulator Roskomnadzor says the move is in response to the social network preventing access to state-run media outlets RT and Sputnik in the European Union, Ukraine and the UK. Meta has demoted content from Russian state-owned media organizations on Facebook and Instagram on a global basis too.

The regulator says Facebook also limited access to accounts from other media organizations, which it claims violates Russian laws. Engadget has contacted Meta for comment.

Roskomnadzor previously restricted access to Facebook. After Russia invaded Ukraine, the regulator asked Meta to stop fact-checking content posted by four state-owned media outlets and remove the labels it applied to their Facebook posts, but the company refused.

Other tech platforms have blocked Russian state-run outlets or made it harder to see their content over the past week. Those include YouTube, Reddit, Spotify and Roku. Meanwhile, the EU bannedRT and Sputnik from being broadcast in the bloc.

Last fall, Streamlabs published a report indicating that Facebook Gaming had overtaken YouTube Gaming to become the second-most popular platform by hours watched, just behind Twitch. In January, StreamElements reported the platform had its best month ever, hitting a new peak of 617 million hours of monthly watch time. Reports like these have raised eyebrows for some, as Facebook has struggled to attract high-profile streamers, despite its significant investments in live gaming.

But data from CrowdTangle, the company’s analytics service, raises serious questions about the state of Facebook Gaming. Though the platform has snagged some notable names like Neymar Jr. and StoneMountain64, their streams didn’t appear at the top of rankings. Nor do any of the streamers identified by Streamlabs as the most-watched creators on the platform. Instead it’s a jumble of generically named pages that call themselves gaming creators, but behave more like spammers, often posting pirated movie clips or nonsensical videos disguised as live gaming streams.

These pages inexplicably rack up millions of views and hundreds of thousands of interactions on streams with ridiculous-sounding titles like “car vs. giant bulge” or “this ship is full of passengers.” And while most streams contained some actual gaming footage, they often began with pirated clips from popular movies or other completely unrelated content. Despite Facebook's clear policies on spam and non-gaming content, some of these accounts are still in Facebook’s Level Up or Partner programs, which allows them to sell fan subscriptions and access other monetization features.

The CrowdTangle data

To try to assess the biggest streamers on Facebook Gaming, we used Facebook’s CrowdTangle analytics tool to search for the live videos with the most interactions from Facebook Gaming creator pages over a 30-day period from January 16 to February 15. Though Facebook has in the past taken issue with “interactions” as a reflection of what's popular on its platform, interactions are vitally important to streamers as they are a strong indicator of engagement with their content.

Of the top 10 streams, nine of the videos used bizarre tactics, such as intercutting gaming footage with movie clips, more indicative of spammers than gamers. And while not all of the pages were in Facebook’s monetization programs, several that were regularly posted content that appeared to be in violation of the company’s monetization policies. More than half featured pirated movie clips or unoriginal non-gaming content.

What follows is a closer look at those top ten creators whose streams dominated Facebook Gaming during the one-month period we looked at. Though this is only a small window into the platform, searches during other periods have surfaced similar results. Rather than outliers, these videos are reflective of a pattern in which spammers appear to be exploiting the service.

How does ‘Cars vs Giant Crater’ get 112 million views?

The top video was from a gaming creator page called “AU.” The February 2 video titled “Cars vs Giant Crater - Giant Pit”, which has since been removed, ran for 22 minutes and had a staggering 112 million views. It claimed to be a livestream of a car simulator game called BeamNG.drive, but the first 11 minutes was actually a clip from a Hong Kong film called Cook Up a Storm. At about the 11-minute mark, the clip abruptly switched to footage from the vehicle simulator game.

This type of video was not an outlier for AU, which appears to frequently post movie clips disguised as the vehicle simulator game. However, most are not nearly as successful as “Cars vs Giant Crater - Giant Pit.” A 12-hour clip, also posted February 2, and with the exact same title received 66,000 views and only 13 comments, perhaps because it was a 12-hour video of a car simulator game with no voiceover or evidence that anyone was actually playing. However, yet another video, also with the same title and posted February 2, was able to rack up more than 13 million views before it was eventually removed. That 22-minute clip opened with a roughly 11-minute long excerpt from a Bengali film called Amazon Obhijaan.

Screenshot/Facebook

Tagging non-gaming content as gaming is against Facebook’s policy, and the company says it’s developed technology to “identify and demote videos that are tagged as a game but are displaying non-gameplay content to artificially gain reach” on the platform. Streamers who do so may lose their Partner or Level Up status, but the company doesn’t remove these videos.

AU is not the only “gaming creator” using questionable tactics involving pirated movie footage. In fact, AU appeared to be connected to another page that also had a top 10 video during the same time period. This supposed streamer — the page is called "Farhad" — had the No. 3 gaming video by interactions. This video, which has also been removed, bizarrely titled “Alien - Baby crying on track - monkey stops the train and save the baby,” was posted on February 1 and got more than 91 million views. It was also tagged as BeamNG.drive, but instead of the car sim game, it opened with the very same 11-minute clip from Cook Up a Storm. The only difference was that Farhad’s version had a watermark with the word “Farhad” overlaid onto the clip. That same watermark appeared on at least one other video from AU. However, unlike AU, “Farhad” is a member of Facebook’s “Level Up” program which allows streamers to earn money from their content.

Screenshot / Facebook

The page with the fourth most interacted-with video also appeared to be using bizarre tactics. The streamer, going by “GGWP BROO,” posted a two-hour clip tagged as Euro Truck Simulator 2 but titled “This ship is full of passengers.” The “live stream” opened with a two-minute and forty second clip of a ferry boat in Bangladesh before abruptly switching to gameplay from Euro Truck Simulator. It had 91 million views, despite the fact that the footage appeared to be pre-recorded. The person pictured in the video using a wheel-style controller throughout the two-hour clip doesn’t speak at any time. A close viewing reveals that his movements don’t correspond to the game being played, and closer inspection indicates the footage is looped.

Nearly all of GGWP BROO’s streams follow the same pattern: a few minutes of something completely unrelated, like a bear in a trap or an octopus with a scuba diver, followed by Euro Truck Simulator. The man pictured with the wheel controller never speaks in any of the videos.

Despite all this, the streamer was a member of Facebook’s Partner program, a step up above “Level Up” as it allows streamers to potentially monetize with in-stream ads, along with other perks. Later, the page was downgraded to “Level Up,” but was still selling subscriptions. A page promoting its creator hub, where followers can purchase $1.99-per-month subscriptions, advertised “Adult Games 18+."

Subscribing to GGWP BROO didn't bring any of the promised exclusive content, though. It unlocked a 10-minute video that appeared to be a low-res compilation of TikTok-style videos of girls dancing, and a private Facebook Group that simply reshared links of GGWP BROO’s public streams. After this reporter joined, it had nine members, including GGWP BROO.

Screenshot / Facebook

Yet GGWP BROO’s has several streams with millions of views despite the obviously spammy nature of the content. Moreover, the streamer, who is based in Indonesia according to the page transparency information provided by Facebook, doesn’t seem to exist outside of Facebook Gaming. There are no other social media accounts linked, and a search for the handle on other platforms turns up nothing.

Rod Breslau, an esports analyst, says this is another red flag that signals the accounts in question are likely illegitimate. “It doesn’t make any sense at all,” he said. “Usually, if you're really popular on one platform, you'll be really popular on multiple platforms.” Yet many of the streamers that appeared at the top of CrowdTangle don’t appear to have any kind of identity outside of their generically-named Facebook Gaming creator pages.

The was true for the similarly anonymous streamer going by “Piu Roy,” whose January 17 video “Cars vs Giant Bulge #4” racked up more than 71 million views and 670,000 interactions. The two-minute clip, tagged as American Truck Simulator, featured several cars driving over a comically-high bump in the road. Roy has no contact info or any other information on their page, and none of their streams show a human face or feature any kind of narration. Yet despite their extremely underwhelming content, “Piu Roy” has several videos with more than a million views — something that even Facebook Gaming’s most recognizable names seem to rarely achieve — and is selling $1.99-per-month fan subscriptions from their page.

Some “streamers” made even less of an attempt to hide their intentions. A page called “Viral VI” that appears to almost exclusively post movie clips thinly disguised as game streams. Their top video, titled “New Best Action Movie 2022,” was tagged as Red Dead Redemption 2, though that game appeared nowhere in the stream. Instead, the 20-minute video opens with a six-minute clip from the 2020 movie Call of the Wild before abruptly switching to a car simulator game. It racked up more than 53 million views and 613,000 interactions.

Similarly, “The Flash,” whose January 29th stream was the ninth most-interacted with on Facebook, has repeatedly used the exact same phrase. Their 17-minute video claiming to be WWE2020 was also titled “New Best Action Movies 2022.” In fact, the first 11 minutes of the clip was lifted from a Spanish dub of 2019’s Terminator Dark Fate.

Screenshot / Facebook

Pirated movie clips wasn’t the only repurposed broadcast racking up views. A streamer going by “Naruto,” shared a 12-hour video of an elaborate rescue operation of a Moroccan boy trapped in a well in a rural village. The accident, and subsequent days-long rescue attempt, had sparked international attention. Though Naruto did not pretend the video was a game — the clip was tagged as “Hanging Out” — the video was almost certainly not Naruto’s own live stream. Live video of the rescue attempt was broadcast widely, and Naruto’s stream is at one point interrupted by a pop-under ad for a restaurant in Australia that graphically matched those that appear on YouTube videos.

Even so, the streamer used the content to encourage viewers to buy stars, referring to the virtual gifts as “donations.” The video got more than 10 million views and nearly half a million interactions (it’s not clear how many stars they earned from the broadcast). Naruto, whose page manager location is listed as Australia, posted several other videos depicting the rescue around the same time.

While it’s not uncommon for streamers to use the “Hanging Out” tag — it’s the equivalent of “Just Chatting” on Twitch — to stream non-game content, Facebook’s monetization policies stipulate that monetized content must be authentic and original. Yet Naruto is currently in Level Up, recently had Partner status, and is still selling monthly subscriptions for $4.99.

Even Pages that at first seemed legitimate were using bizarre content in their streams, At number eight was a three-minute and 40 second video from a streamer called Edge of Portal. The game was tagged as Arma 3, a tactical military simulation game, and the clip was described as “ARMA3 Saudi Arabia is developing the missile in cooperation with China.” The views were oddly high, at 58 million, but it appeared to be actual game footage. Edge of Portal also had a much more polished page than some of the more obvious spammers, and many clips had a visible player or some kind of narration.

Screenshot / Facebook

But it turns out Edge of Portal employs the same tricks as other top-viewed game creators. Several streams open with a few seconds of a static image of a crashed Air Niugini plane from 2018. At least one opened with an extremely low-res video of cars falling into a river before switching to gaming footage. Others begin with a clip of a man operating what appears to be an excavator.

What’s not clear is exactly why Edge of Portal and so many other streamers front-load their clips with something totally unrelated, and often mundane. It seems as if it’s designed to exploit Facebook’s recommendation algorithm in some way, but it could also be a kind of visual clickbait, with strange video thumbnails meant to draw more potential viewers in.

That seems to be the point of a 10-minute video from a page called Bomber Gaming, which had the tenth most-interacted with live video. The clip, tagged as “eFootball PES 2021 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam,” opens not with a soccer game but several minutes of blooper-style videos of people falling over. Bomber Gaming is in Facebook’s Partner Program, and advertises “exclusive broadcasts” for $1.99/month subscriptions.

Of the ten videos we looked at, the only one that seemed as if it could have come from a legitimate streamer was the second-most interacted with video from a page named Abo ATA Gaming. The PUBG stream had 41 million views, and close to a million interactions, though it was later removed from Facebook. Abo ATA Gaming didn’t immediately respond to messages. We attempted to reach the people running all of the pages described above, but they either couldn’t be reached, or didn’t respond to questions.

Is anyone at Facebook paying attention?

Engadget’s findings raise questions about how much, if any, scrutiny Facebook Gaming creators are subjected to. Not only were the streams detailed above easy to find, the social network’s own accounting of its most popular content would suggest that these videos are among the most-viewed on the entire platform.

Take the top video, the one from “AU” that opened with the clip from Cook Up a Storm. According to CrowdTangle, it had more than 112 million views during the 30-day period we looked at. That’s an incredibly high view count, even by Facebook’s somewhat generous standards in which three seconds counts as a “view.”

The biggest names on Facebook Gaming rarely, if ever, generate those kinds of view counts. Disguised Toast, whose move to Facebook Gaming made headlines in 2019, has rarely achieved one million views, much less 100 million. (He has since left Facebook Gaming and moved back to Twitch.) And while it’s true that much of Facebook Gaming’s viewership comes from international audiences, even pages with large international followings aren’t getting anything close to 100 million views on a single stream.

According to a recent report from Streamlabs, the top gaming creator on Facebook by watch hours is Egyptian streamer Tarboun. Tarboun, whose Twitter bio boasts that he has the record for the highest views on Facebook Gaming, has many streams with a million or more views, but nothing remotely approaching 100 million (the highest I could find was a video from a year ago with 8.3 million views).

When Facebook first launched its “Level Up” program, streamers wishing to join had to apply to get in and access monetization features. And even streamers who met the minimum requirements sometimes had lengthy waits before they were accepted. "We select people after watching them stream a little bit. We put our stamp on creators who fit our community,” Facebook’s head of gaming product Vivek Sharma told Business Insiderin 2019. Sharma, who now works on the company’s Metaverse platform Horizon, said at the time there was a “long queue” of gamers hoping to join.

But that process seems to have now evaporated. A streamer who spoke with Engadget said that “it doesn’t take much to get into Level Up … as long as you follow the guidelines, you just get it.” Right now, Level Up requires Pages to have at least 100 followers, and that they stream at least four hours of game content over at least two days in a 14-day period.

Once Level Up is unlocked, streamers can then earn stars, the on-platform currency similar to bits on Twitch. But for many of the streams detailed above, it’s not clear how many if any are earning Stars on this content. Partnered streamers can earn revenue through in-stream ads, but not all are given access to the feature. (In-stream ads never appeared on the videos described above.) And even those selling subscriptions don’t seem to be generating significant revenue from their content, as evidenced by GGWP BROO’s nine-member exclusive subscriber group.

While it wasn’t always clear what these pages were trying to gain by exploiting Facebook Gaming, the social network has made huge investments to lure creators to its platform. The social network has said it plans to invest more than $1 billion in creators across its apps over the next year. And the company has pledged not to take a cut of revenue earned from stars, subscriptions and other monetization features until at least 2023.

That Facebook’s gaming platform, one of its longest-running creator-centric initiatives, is being exploited to this extent doesn’t bode well for the company’s lofty ambitions in the space. If the company can’t (or won’t) reliably catch game streamers blatantly breaking its rules, there’s little reason to believe the company will catch creators exploiting other parts of its platform.

Moreover, it raises serious questions about whether content from the likes of AU and GGWP BROO is distorting the perception of Facebook Gaming’s popularity. (Notably, it wouldn’t be the first time a Facebook-run video initiative resulted with allegations of pumped up video views.)

The platform is now regularly cited as the second-largest streaming platform behind Twitch, largely due to its growth internationally. But the most-watched content on the platform seems to be from spammers sharing low-quality video lifted from other sources. And with views in the tens of millions — far more than any legitimate streamer we’ve observed — these streams could be inflating Facebook Gaming’s metrics.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Meta said the company was “working to improve our tools to identify violating content” on Facebook Gaming. “We use a mix of automated and human review to ensure creators are following the rules for what’s allowed on Facebook Gaming. We’re working to improve our tools to identify violating content, and to make sure people using Facebook Gaming have the best experience.”

Have a tip about Facebook Gaming? Contact the author at karissa.bell@engadget.com or message securely on Signal at +1 628.231.0063

Over half a decade later, a new Kickstarter campaign has finally eclipsed Pebble's crowdfunding record on the website. Fantasy and sci-fi author Brandon Sanderson set up a campaign to raise $1 million within 30 days to fund four secret books he intends to release every quarter next year. It didn't take 30 days to blow past that goal, though — it took only 35 minutes. And three days on, as of this writing, the campaign has already made $20.4 million, almost $100,000 more than what the Pebble Time e-paper smartwatch raised when it was up for funding.

While Sanderson is self publishing the four books included in the project, he's not a little-known indie author. Raising over $20 million in just three days was possible because he already had a solid fanbase who knows he can deliver, seeing as he's famous for being a fast writer who can quickly churn out new books. He's known for his novels set in the Cosmere universe, which he likens to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including the Mistborn series and The Stormlight Archive series. Three of the secret books in the campaign are also set in the Cosmere universe, with each story taking place on a different fantasy planet. Sanderson is known for finishing Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, as well.

The author told The New York Times that one of his objectives for launching this project is to see what it would be like to challenge Amazon. The e-commerce and cloud giant dominates the printed book and ebook market, and it accounts for 80 percent of Sanderson's sales. "If Amazon's grip on the industry is weakened, that's good for the publishers — they are very much under Amazon's thumb right now. I don't want to present this as 'Brandon versus Amazon.' Amazon's great. But I think that in the long run, Amazon being a monopoly is actually bad for Amazon. If they don't have competition, they will stop innovating," he said.

To get Sanderson's secret books, fans will have to pledge a minimum of $40 for ebook copies. The audiobook versions will set them back $60 at least, while they'll have to pledge a minimum of $160 (not including shipping costs) for the premium hardcovers. Sanderson plans to release one book each in January, April, July and October 2023.

Those interested can either go in blind and just wait for the deliveries or read an excerpt from the first book on Sanderson's website. They can also listen to him read the first book's opening chapter on YouTube.

Netflix's move into interactive shows is extending beyond the occasional single-episode project. The streaming firm is launching its first interactive daily quiz show, Trivia Quest, on April 1st (no, it's not an April Fools gag). The Trivia Crack-inspired series will present 24 multiple-choice questions around topics like art and science while weaving a narrative into the experience. You're meant to help the hero Willy save the people of Trivia Land from a villain bent on hoarding knowledge — contrived, maybe, but it's more than a pure competition.

Trivia Quest doesn't offer any real-world prizes, but you can replay an episode to earn more points and make progress toward a "definitive ending." The title will be available on all devices that support interactive Netflix material, including most modern browsers, mobile devices, smart TVs and streaming hardware.

The company is quick to bill Trivia Quest as an "experiment," and hasn't committed to more shows like it. With that said, it wouldn't be shocking if there were similarly ambitious interactive shows in the future. On top of adding variety, they give you a reason to keep coming back to Netflix where you might turn to other services.

Russia's RT is facing numerous bans and restrictions following the country's invasion of Ukraine, and it's using a familiar tactic to get around them: move to a laissez-faire service. The state-supported media company has made its around-the-clock livestream available on the "free speech" platform Rumble. This will theoretically let devotees tune in when its broadcasts and social media posts aren't accessible elsewhere.

The move may be more of a hedge than a necessity, although that situation could change. RT's English livestream was still available on YouTube as of Thursday. However, CNN said it obtained a memo indicating that RT America's production company T&R Productions was laying off all staff due to "unforeseen business interruption events."

Rumble, like Gab and Parler, has lately served as a haven for right-wing personalities who've been kicked off other platforms or feel their content is restricted elsewhere. Fox News host Ban Bongino, for instance, moved to Rumble after YouTube banned him over COVID-19 misinformation.

As a Russian state-backed media firm, RT has been accused of serving as a propaganda mouthpiece and either heavily restricted on some sites or banned outright. An EU ban on RT has led to action at multiple sites. Facebook has demoted RT content, Twitter has halted ads and recommendations (on top of labels warning of RT's ties) and YouTube has denied ad revenue. Most recently, Reddit banned all links to Russian state media. This is on top of bans from conventional TV providers like DirecTV.

As with other moves to alternative services, though, the Rumble shift might not help RT recover its lost exposure. Rumble is relatively small compared to mainstream social media sites, streaming providers and conventional broadcasters. RT's viewership is likely to take a steep hit regardless — Rumble is more of a consolation prize than a solution.

CNN is starting to narrow down the launch details for its CNN+ streaming service. The online-only offering is now slated to debut this spring at a price of $6 per month. You'll have a strong incentive to sign up quickly, though — CNN will offer lifetime monthly subscriptions at 50 percent off for anyone who signs up within the first four weeks.

The company also outlined how you'll access the service. A unified CNN app will provide access to CNN+ as well as live and on-demand content for conventional TV subscribers. This will encourage everyday CNN users to subscribe to CNN+, of course, but you also won't have to switch apps to view the content you want.

CNN+ is banking on a combination of recognizable hosts and shows to pull you in. Former Fox News host Chris Wallace will provide live daily news, for instance, while other hosts range from CNN veterans (such as Anderson Cooper and Poppy Harlow) through to outside talent like cook and writer Alison Roman. You can expect some on-demand material, including the Big Tech-focused The Land of the Giants to back catalog releases like Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.

Whether or not the pricing is right, there's little doubt CNN+ faces some competition. There are direct rivals such as Fox Nation, but services like NBCUniversal's Peacock and Paramount+ mix live news and sports with plenty of on-demand entertainment. The success of CNN+ isn't guaranteed, particularly when subscription fatigue might make it harder to justify yet another outlay.

Netflix has announced that it'll serve as home to a definitive documentary on Pamela Anderson's life, a month after the limited series Pam & Tommy debuted on Hulu. According to Entertainment Weekly, Anderson vowed never to watch the Hulu series, which focuses on the actress' short marriage with Tommy Lee and the theft and illegal distribution of their sex tape, or even its trailer. While the Hulu series was created without the involvement or even the permission of the actress, Anderson herself promoted the Netflix documentary on Instagram. 

"Not a victim, but a survivor and alive to tell the real story," she said in a handwritten note she posted on the app. The documentary film will feature interviews with Anderson, along with previously unreleased archival footage and journals. Netflix promises that the pop culture icon will "set the record straight" and that the movie, directed by Ryan White (The Keepers), will paint an "intimate portrait" of her. In comparison, the Hulu series was based on a 2014 Rolling Stone article and fictionalized some parts of the actual events. 

Anderson's camp also reportedly took issue with the fact that the Hulu series used clips from the actual sex tape, which became one of the first ever viral sex videos. According to The Washington Post, that tape demonstrated how powerful the internet is, even during its early days, as a platform for the sex industry and content distribution as a whole. 

While Anderson's sex tape debacle went down in the '90s, the rivalry between streaming giants prompt them to find new ways to get into current discussions and events. Netflix and Hulu each released their own Fyre Festival documentaries in the past, for instance, as well as their own takes on Britney Spears' life and career.

The following contains moderate spoilers for the first three episodes of ‘Star Trek: Picard’ season two, but not much more than what was seen in earlier teasers and trailers.

The first season of Picard was controversial, to say the least. Many fans were happy to see old friends again; others weren’t so thrilled at the grimdark direction Starfleet and the Federation went in the 20 years since we’d last seen their 24th century incarnations. Still, we got a look at how technology evolved, met some intriguing new characters and in the finale, at least, everything seems to have been put right.

It’s that brighter world where the second season of Picard begins, with synthetic beings now legal — which is handy, given that at the end of last season Jean-Luc Picard was transferred into an android body. It left me and much of the audience wondering if and how this would affect future stories. The answer comes pretty quickly in season two, now with new showrunner Terry Matalas at the helm. It doesn’t really matter. It’s not made clear exactly who does and who doesn’t know, but Jean-Luc Picard is still subject to the ravages of age while enjoying all the legal protections he would have had as a flesh-and-blood being (he still owns the vineyard, for one thing). Even Q, when he inevitably appears, treats Picard as the same being he’s always been.

CBS

Viewers may be familiar with the “Ship of Theseus” thought experiment, recently brought up in the finale of last year’s WandaVision. Basically, the idea is that if you slowly replace the parts of a ship over time, and then reassemble the old parts into another ship, which one is the original ship? In Picard, they suggest that the essence of a human being is their intelligence, so the real Jean-Luc Picard is the synthetic being that’s walking around on Earth right now. The problem with this, however, is that this hasn’t always been how Star Trek worked. While characters like Miles O’Brien and Harry Kim were replaced by duplicate versions of themselves, “Thomas” Riker was decidedly not given the same courtesy. It seems that duplicates are acceptable only when they replace someone we’ve otherwise lost.

During press interviews, even Patrick Stewart admitted the synthetic body issue was “a real mess.” Thankfully, the show smartly moves past it. It’s been at least a year and a half since the events of the first season, meaning we’re now in the 25th century. Picard has returned home and assumed the chancellorship of Starfleet Academy. Both Rios and Raffi have gone back to the fleet, and even Elnor is now attending school as a cadet (as the first full-blooded Romulan at the Academy). It’s the nice shiny future we’ve always loved to see on Star Trek, complete with some banging costume design and fun updated tech. Last season I noted how nice it was to see the continuation of the “synthetic being” storyline that ran through The Next Generation, and having all the characters settled into new positions leaves plenty of room to explore other facets of 25th-century technology and society.

CBS

However, Picard hasn’t become a happy show overnight. A new crisis quickly emerges, with a rift in subspace demanding Picard’s attention and putting the entire fleet at risk. This is where Q comes in, shunting Picard and his close compatriots over to an altered timeline where the genocidal “Confederation” rules the Alpha Quadrant with an iron fist. This isn’t the Mirror Universe that we’re familiar with from previous shows like the original series, Deep Space Nine and Discovery. In this version, Earth is still very much in charge, having wiped out multiple species with the Borg next on its list.

It’s not entirely clear in the first three episodes how this alternate reality was created, or why Q picked the La Sirena crew over any of Picard’s friends from the Enterprise-D. But it’s really just a tool that lets the show dabble in another Star Trek mainstay: time travel. Rather than create some new device or strange spatial phenomenon that sends the crew back in time, their method of traversing through the centuries harkens back to a method seen in the original series, one later repeated in the The Voyage Home. The ship slingshots around the sun, a technique that requires precise calculations that only someone like Spock can provide… or the Borg Queen, in this case. It’s not necessarily scientifically accurate, but it is a nice callback for a franchise spanning over 60 years, especially when fans have a tendency to try to square every inconsistency with their own theories instead of just embracing the chaos.

CBS

And chaos awaits the crew as they slide into the fair year of 2024, just a notch ahead of our own time so there’s very little difference in tech to worry about. Raffi and Seven are aghast at the poverty on display in 20th-century Los Angeles, which points to why the show’s writers chose this year instead of 2022 or 2023: 2024 is the date of the infamous “Bell Riots” as seen on Deep Space Nine’s “Past Tense.”

At that point, the poor and indigent residents interned in “Sanctuary Districts” in San Francisco struck back against the degrading conditions they were forced to live in, eventually prompting higher level changes that would eventually lead to the Federation we all know and love. Whether Picard and friends will end up playing a role in those pivotal events remains to be seen, but the third episode hints at Rios getting some taste of injustice as an undocumented Latino man –though he’s undocumented for a time travel reasons and not because of immigration.

Overall, the beginning of Picard plays like a greatest hits reel: We’re treated to the return of classic baddies like Q and the Borg, other characters are referenced in passing for some fun Easter eggs, and time travel episodes of Star Trek tend to be a blast so I hope that this will be a good storyline. In a way it’s a warm blanket of nostalgia to calm the audience after the mess that was season one. But if you were hoping to actually explore the galaxy and see more of the 25th century, season two looks to be yet another letdown.

Netflix has been the victim of two big on-set robberies in the space of two days, Variety has reported. On February 24th, $200,000 worth of antique props were reportedly stolen after thieves broke into vehicles used for production of The Crown. And just a day later, 20 thieves with covered faces broke onto the set of Lupin while star Omar Sy was filming and made off with €300,000 ($333,000) worth of equipment. 

The Lupin heist happened in a northwest Paris suburb called Nanterre. The thieves reportedly set off mortar-style fireworks before making off with the equipment. "There was an incident on Feb. 25 while filming the upcoming [part 3] season of Lupin," Netflix confirmed to Variety. "Our cast and crew are safe and there were no injuries." Nanterre authorities have launched an investigation.

Lupin is Netflix's second-biggest international hit after Squid Games and has helped touch off a production boom in the French capital, along with series like Emily in Paris and Call My Agent. Recently, France decreed that streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ must reinvest at least 25 percent of revenue earned in the country on local productions. 

Sy is once again in the role of Assane Diop, a character inspired by the Arsène Lupin gentleman thief/master of disguise detective developed by French author Maurice Leblanc. Just hours after the attack, Sy appeared at France's Cesar awards to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Intouchables (Untouchables). 

Did Facebook's college-focused Campus social network leave you feeling cold? You're not the only one. Consultant Matt Navarra and TechCrunch report parent company Meta is shutting down Facebook's Campus pilot project on March 10th. In a message to users, Facebook said it had learned the "best way" to help students was through college groups.

Facebook will delete Campus profiles, posts and other data after the cutoff date. You can download any data before then, however, and Facebook is suggesting related school groups to help ease the transition.

The Campus pilot launched in September 2020 as a partial throwback to the original student-focused Facebook. You needed a .edu address to sign up — in theory, this let the college crowd mingle without relatives and other outsiders poking in. It was only available from the "More" section of Facebook, though, and didn't get its own app. You might not have known Campus existed, in other words, and it wasn't clear this was a truly separate space.

The closure comes just days after Instagram said it would shut down its standalone IGTV app in mid-March, and reflects a long history of Meta brands pulling apps and services that don't pan out. Meta still appears content to take risks on products, and it won't hesitate to drop those products if they fail.