This article contains a reference to suicide.

Right now, we’re living in a golden (micro) age of prestige TV adaptations depicting notable startup failures. In the first half of 2022 alone, we’re getting shows about the rise and fall of Uber, Theranos and WeWork all fronted by A-list talent. It’s a sign of how far the public’s tastes have changed that the travails of a tech, well, “tech” company is now mainstream entertainment.

Yesterday, I binge-watched seven of the eight episodes of Hulu / Star’s The Dropout, Disney’s adaptation of the ABC podcast series of the same name. It stars Amanda Seyfried as Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the fraudulent blood-testing startup Theranos. Holmes is currently awaiting sentencing after being found guilty of committing fraud, while Seyfried can probably expect to pick up a number of plaudits for her performance come awards season.

The series covers the broad strokes of Holmes’ life in roughly chronological order, albeit with the odd timely flashback where necessary. We meet Holmes as a WASP-y teen with dreams of Stanford, backed by her Enron-executive dad and Washington insider mom. From there, Holmes travels to China to study abroad, where she meets Sunny Balwani, her future business and life partner. When she gets to Stanford, she’s frustrated at senior academics who tell her that her biotechnology idea is unworkable, and drops out to start her own company.

Given Theranos’ penchant for secrecy, it amused me that Disney asked critics not to reveal any “surprising plot points or spoilers.” I’ll keep details to a minimum here, but obviously it’s hard to imagine a large number of people not already knowing the bones of this particular saga. In fact, since Theranos closed in 2018, it’s already been the subject of a major podcast, a book, an Alex Gibney documentary and a long-gestating Adam McKay movie in development at Apple.

Going in, I was concerned that The Dropout would suffer the same problem as The Founder, 2016’s biopic of Ray Kroc. It’s a fine film, but one that doesn’t know if Kroc is its hero or its villain, despite the stock rags-to-riches tropes it wheels out. In some scenes, he is portrayed as a try-hard who saw an opportunity and built an empire, in others, a ruthless conman who stole the business out from under the McDonald brothers. The tonal whiplash made the film offer two competing arguments, neither of which were very well-explained.

There’s no such problem here with The Dropout, with series creator Elizabeth Merriweather always being clear-eyed about Holmes’ problems. It’s almost a minor-key parody of those rags-to-riches stories, aided by the fact that Holmes’ went from riches to, uh, more riches. Moments that, in any other story, should be triumphant are undercut with dissonant music and there’s always a sense that there’s something not quite right about all of this.

Beth Dubber / Hulu

None of that would work without Amanda Seyfried’s performance which manages to sell Holmes as both a well-meaning neophyte and a cold, calculating monster. In the series' most shocking moment, Seyfried somehow makes you feel abject pity and outrage at the same time. And the show works hard to keep reminding you that this isn’t just about some elderly Republicans who got fleeced backing a boondoggle but, in a phrase repeated throughout the show; “real people.”

It helps that the show has assembled a murderer’s row of talent to appear alongside Seyfried in the series. As well as Naveen Andrews as Sunny Balwani, there’s (deep breath) William H. Macy, Elizabeth Marvel, LisaGay Hamilton, Michael Gill, Laurie Metcalf, Kurtwood Smith, Kate Burton, Michael Ironside, Nicky Endres and Anne Archer. Deserving extra praise is Stephen Fry, however, who offers some fantastic work as Dr. Ian Gibbons, the chemist who worked with Holmes at the start of her career and died by suicide during a patent dispute. Fry, towering over the rest of the cast and looking every inch the crusty academic in a world of waxen silicon valley models, acts as the warm and inviting voice of conscience when things start to hit the slide.

Disney is marketing The Dropout as a drama, but the sort of drama where the satire is razor wire sharp and the jokes are beyond morbid. Succession fans will find much to love about the series dark humor, especially the all-out fourth episode, which borrows Alan Ruck to guest as Walgreens’ executive Dr. Jay Rosan. In other places, however, the satire of both Silicon Valley and investment culture in general is far more subtle. Only in this series can two characters declare their love for each other while creating a pact for mutually-assured blackmail at the same time.

There is, rather obviously, a gendered element to the endless speculation and hand-wringing about Holmes’ motives and actions. The press never seems to need to psychoanalyze why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are dick-wagging with their competing space projects. Merriweather chooses to highlight this disparity, mostly through the voice of Laurie Metcalf’s Dr. Phyllis Gardner – the Stanford professor who initially told Holmes that her ideas couldn’t work. She pops up several times in the show to offer meta-commentary on what we’re watching.

One of the things the show serves to highlight is how much of an easy ride Theranos got from investors and the press. Despite refusing to justify any element of its technology, it took far too long for regulators and officials to really interrogate what was going on here. I mean, in 2015, Holmes was appointed to the board of fellows at Harvard Medical School! The scale of the fraud, the scale of the lie, became so great that most people just felt that they had to believe it.

It’s funny, I’m reminded of a story I wrote for Engadget back in 2016 which just summed up John Carreyou’s Wall Street Journal reporting. But despite just citing and quoting Carreyou’s work, I was on the receiving end of a 21-email nastygram from Theranos’ then-PR representatives. The company’s image management team jumped hard on any and all criticism. When Holmes and Balwani were charged by the SEC, I emailed that same PR person to ask if they had any comment on their previous statements. It was the most delicious “no comment” I have ever received.

A common complaint of Peak TV is that most shows could be done and dusted in a third of the time actually allowed. Despite watching almost all of The Dropout over a single day, I actually felt like the show could have been longer. There’s plenty that, by necessity, has had to be cut, glossed and generally trimmed to get things down to a tight eight hours. I could easily have watched another couple hours with more context and detail, but then I’ll admit, I am a nerd. You won’t be able to, however, since Hulu is releasing the first three episodes on March 3rd and then the rest on subsequent Fridays through the start of April. That’s a smart decision, since the first three are more or less designed as a cohesive whole, while subsequent episodes can be enjoyed individually.

Fundamentally, The Dropout is well worth your time, and Amanda Seyfried offers some truly stellar work bringing the duality of Holmes to life.

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741 (US), 686868 (Canada), or 85258 (UK). Wikipedia maintains a list of crisis lines for people outside of those countries.

Sony has today showed off the full and finished design for the PlayStation VR2 headset as well as the VR2 Sense controller. In a blog post, PlayStation SVP Hidekai Nishino detailed the matching design of both devices, which represents the 360-degree view of the virtual world. He added that the look and feel was crafted to feel more congruent with the PlayStation 5’s overall vibe.

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Virgin Hyperloop has fired 111 of its employees as it abandons the idea of making its system ready for passenger use. The Financial Times is reporting that the company is exclusively focusing on moving cargo, and has slashed almost half of its total workforce. A spokesperson confirmed to the paper that the shift in business was taking place, with supply chain issues and COVID contributing to the change.

Since its inception, the company has been developing its vacuum-tube system to carry both passengers and freight. One of the earliest concepts VH floated was an “inland port,” in which cargo vessels would put containers onto capsules that are shot inland before they’re processed. That way, the main logistics hub wouldn’t need to be beside the sea, and could instead be at the heart of a transit hub closer to customers.

It’s something that encouraged DP World, the Dubai-owned ports and logistics giant, to invest in the technology. It currently holds a majority stake in Virgin Hyperloop and in 2018 launched "Cargospeed," as a sub-brand dedicated to moving cargo. VH has, however, been in something of a spin for the last few months after former head Josh Giegel, one of two people to actually travel in a pod, quit the company. 

One of the reasons I’ve yet to leap head-first into the AirTag world is the design of the bloody things. Obviously, as gorgeous as the little white-and-silver discs are, they’re hardly practical unless you’re splashing out on a fancy keyfob. The dodgier corners of Amazon, meanwhile, are full of awkward AirTag wallets, with an awkward bulge on one side. So designed to hold the pill shaped AirTag close to your credit cards and only your credit cards, since tech bros never, ever, need to carry around loose change.

It’s also the reason that I was very excited to try Chipolo’s Card Spot, which offers the benefits of an AirTag in a much more sensible package. Announced back at CES, it’s Chipolo’s second device that can pair with Apple’s Find My Network. That means it’ll give you the same reach, pinging every iPhone in the vicinity with its location, without the quirkiness of Apple’s design. It’s as if the team at Apple decided to just design something for normal people to use normally for once.

Measuring the thickness of about two credit cards stacked on top of one another, and only a little shorter than one, it’s not going to make your wallet bulge too much when inserted. The speaker is pretty loud, too, although I don’t have a meter to hand to check if it hit the promised 105dB. The tune is pretty good, which was a surprise, given that normally shrill beeps are the order of the day for device-finders.

Daniel Cooper

To say this thing is easy to set up is almost a comical understatement, it took me longer to get it out of the box than to pair it. You just have to open up Find My on your iOS device, add a new item, and press the dimple on the Card Spot. The longest job was choosing the emoji I wanted to use to denote my wallet on the app’s map screen. (I went for the back of a gold credit card, not because I’m gauche but because it seemed silly, as a Brit, to use a stack of dollar bills.)

Much like the OneSpot that preceded it, Chipolo gets some, but not all, of the perks that come with hitching its wagon to Apple’s tractor. There’s no U1 chip for precise location finding and you can’t use it independently of the (Apple-exclusive) Find My network. Android users and folks looking for more local tracking will need to pick one of Chipolo’s standard finders instead.

Chipolo says that the battery inside the Card Spot will last for two years, after which point it’ll stop working entirely. But, buyers can get a replacement device for 50 percent off, and can send in the old, non-functional unit with a pre-paid envelope. There’s even a little card in the packaging which reminds you to register, ensuring you’ll get a reminder to swap when your device is ready to expire.

Fundamentally, the Chipolo Card Spot feels very much like the sort of no-brainer gadget that solves more problems than it causes. And while $35 makes it a little pricier than your standard AirTag, for twice as much battery life and a sensible form factor, I’m not nitpicking.

If you don’t already love the Horizon series’ Tallnecks, then the advent of Horizon: Forbidden West is likely to finish the job. These vast, disc-headed wonders are clearly a fan favorite, prompting Lego and Sony to crank out a set depicting Aloy riding atop one.

The 1,222-piece set is designed to stand proud on your shelf of Lego-designed gaming tributes, and was made in partnership with Sony and developers Guerrilla. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Tallneck unless you had someone to ride it, and so you get an Aloy minifigure with a new headpiece in the set.

Lego / Sony

You’ll also find a Watcher (with an option to equip it with blue, yellow or red eyes) and some natural landscape pieces to build out the environment. Isaac Snyder, a designer at Lego, said that the set tips its hat at “all the most iconic aspects of Horizon: Forbidden West,” and that he hoped everyone building the model has as much fun as they had designing it.

The Tallneck from Horizon: Forbidden West will arrive in May 2022, and measures 13.5-inches tall and 9-inches wide. It will cost $79.99 / €79.99, and will be available from all of the usual places you can get your Lego.

Tailoring is fancy, sufficiently fancy that you may go your entire life and never once experience the art. It’s expensive, having garments custom-made to suit your body shape, even if there are a legion of benefits in doing so. Mass-produced clothes, meanwhile, are never going to do the job if you’ve got a body that diverges from what’s expected or treated as “normal.”

There are two real problems: Measurement, and manufacturing, issues that the fashion industry is wrestling with right now. A Taiwanese company, TG3D, has at least discovered a way to solve the first part of the equation with little more than an iPhone. It has developed a method of using FaceID to scan the geography of your body to give you a suite of measurements in minutes.

I first encountered TG3D back in 2018, when the company was showing off its wares at Computex in Taipei. The system then required you to step into a booth the size of a changing room, which housed pillars full of infrared cameras. When activated, the system would scan your body and help you determine the ideal sizes for trying on clothes.

Since then, the company has been working to shrink this technology down to something that requires a lot less investment. Any FaceID-equipped iPhone can now offer a similar, albeit less accurate, scanning solution, enabling users to test sizes for off-the-peg clothes. Co-founder Rick Yu explained that the project was designed for ready-to-wear fashion, to “solve [the issue of] huge returns.”

Returns are, after all, a key problem for e-commerce fashion brands, since buyers can’t be sure that their preferred size will actually fit them. “A lot of consumers buy three different sizes and return the other two,” which is bad for both the planet and most retailers’ bottom lines. If you know ahead of time what you need to order, the wastage and expense should decrease.

I tested the system and found that, much like it did in 2018, it reminded me how much timber I need to drop from my waistline. All you need to do, however, is stand your phone up on a flat surface – and it does need to be perfectly flat, so grab a book or some sticky tack. Then, just stand in view of the camera, ideally just in your underwear and, when ready, start turning around on the spot with your arms away from your sides. All in all, the scanning process takes less than a minute, and the analysis only takes a further two or three.

Once you’ve previewed your avatar to check it is more or less in the right shape, you can then send it off to the cloud to be properly analyzed. You may notice that, in use, your face, hands and feet are replaced with something blank and generic. This, says Yu, was an intentional move to protect user privacy given that you’ll be partially-clothed during the scanning process.

The data produced by FaceID isn’t, by itself, accurate enough to produce a fully-measured avatar, however. Once captured, it’s sent to TG3D’s server to be analyzed, “we have an AI engine that identifies the landmarks,” explained Yu. “We identify the landmarks, we position the landmarks and then based on [that], we extract up to 250 measurements automatically,” he said.

Daniel Cooper / TG3D

Much of this data, and the conclusions generated from it, have been curated through years of interviews with tailors and pattern makers. “These measurements that make sense to them,” said Yu, when I asked for an explanation for some of the more arcane terminology. Yu explained that the margin of error using the iPhone system is, at most, 1.3 inches.

Yu also explained that the data can be exported in a variety of formats, so as well as being used for tailoring, there are other solutions in play. For instance, an avatar file could be exported in a .OBJ file which can be used for 3D modeling and sculpting. And, naturally, it’s also possible to capture this data and create an avatar for any potential metaverse that could require it.

TG3D’s solution isn’t the only thing on the market, and plenty of other companies are operating in this space looking for a magic bullet. Shopify, for instance, was recently granted a patent for a body-measuring concept to help folks choose garments. Amazon’s Echo Look had a fairly rudimentary system to judge a fit based on how well it flattered your body. MTailor offers a scanning service by analyzing a video clip its users upload for similar results.

All of this is going to be vital in order to help reduce fashion’s already problematic waste problem. The industry reportedly consumes 10 percent of the world’s total greenhouse emissions and 20 percent of its water. That’s both down to sourcing and manufacturing through the waste involved in the buying and returns process when it reaches our homes.

But the consequences of this overproduction and overconsumption are piling up. One fairly pernicious example is blighting the Atacama desert in Chile. Garments made in South Asia will first be sold in Europe and the US, before the unsold sock is sent to South America for resale. Anything that remains unsold is dumped in huge piles, left to rot in the daylight with the price tags still on. This isn’t the only example of this, however, and there are toxic waste piles piling high in Ghana right now.

Measurements are only half the problem, and manufacturing still remains a huge issue with the industry today. Attempts by companies to automate this process have not been successful – Adidas’ Speedfactory concept, for instance, was abandoned back in 2019.

Yu, whose technology has most prominently been used by H&M in its flagship Stockholm store to create custom jeans with partner Unspun, also waxed lyrical about the future of fashion. He showed me the concept of an online retailer that was entirely virtual. A user can plug their body scan into the outfits on screen and get instant previews of how they would look in them. But this could happen before the garment is even made, ensuring that only what’s good gets produced.

For now, I can be confident that my iPhone, at least, knows my inside leg measurement. The next step is for every fashion brand to work out how to stop my thighs rubbing the seat of my jeans to dust.

If you’ve watched a classic, landmark sci-fi movie and you were blown away by the quality and realism of its effects, then there’s a good chance Douglas Trumbull’s name is in the credits. The VFX pioneer, who passed away on February 8th, 2022, has worked on key films in the sci-fi canon. Even a short version of his resume would have to include 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Blade Runner and Silent Running. To have worked on one of those in your lifetime would have been a big deal, but to have contributed to all of them speaks to just how much work Trumbull did to push the artform forward.

Trumbull was the son of an artist and engineer, Donald Trumbull, who worked on VFX for The Wizard of Oz. Douglas, a talented painter and artist in his own right, got a job at Graphic Films, and worked on a short film about space travel for the 1964 World’s Fair. The clip piqued the interest of Stanley Kubrick, then starting work on the film that would eventually become 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick began working with Graphic Films, and by extension Trumbull, but when he relocated production to London, stopped speaking to his would-be partners. Trumbull, however, was so excited by the idea of the film that he reached out to Kubrick personally. He was then hired and brought over to London to work on the title.

Trumbull’s job on 2001 was as one of several visual effects heads on the project, the others being Con Petersen, Wally Veevers and Tom Howard. (Kubrick himself was also credited, and it would be his name and his name alone on the Academy Award for best Special Visual Effects the film won in 1969.) His first task was to design the “computer” graphics shown on the displays that littered Kubrick’s future world. But his job quickly grew, and Trumbull would eventually be responsible for the use of slit-scan photography that created the film’s climactic Star Gate sequence. You can watch Trumbull explain this in some depth during this long talk about his life and career from the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.

Having made a name for himself, he launched his own VFX company and produced the effects for Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain. That would garner him enough credit at Universal Pictures to earn him the right to direct an experimental, super low-budget film of his own. (The studio was, at the time, experimenting to see if low-budget films would garner a following through word of mouth, aping the success of Easy Rider a few years previously.) This project would become Silent Running, an often-overlooked classic of the genre.

In many ways, Silent Running is a humane rebuttal to 2001, with Trumbull’s warmth acting as a reaction to Kubrick’s emotionlessness. The film depicts a dystopian future in which the last of Earth’s plant life is carried on the back of enormous geodesic arks into space. But when the crews of these arks are told to detach and detonate the domes, one botanist will risk everything to save the plants he so cares for. Despite the low budget, the visuals are top notch, and the central performance from Bruce Dern is one for the ages. Of course, the film’s third-act twist – if it can be called that – does rely on the stupidest plot moment in any film ever. But it’s the one flaw in an otherwise great movie that, due to its status as a financial flop, means it’s often ignored as b-movie fodder.

Trumbull’s interest in pushing the boundaries of filmmaking technology meant that he devoted much of the ‘70s to developing new technologies. That included Showscan, which ran 70mm film at 60 fps, which Trumbull said offered a new level of immersion and engagement. Sadly, the cost and complexity of such a technology proved a key stumbling block to it being picked up by mainstream cinemas. Years before Peter Jackson and Ang Lee experimented with high frame rates, Douglas Trumbull was making it work in the analog world

Magicam, meanwhile, was Trumbull’s project to create virtual sets decades before we could use computer-generated keying, simply by blue-screening actors in front of a live miniature, shot at the same time with motorized cameras. The technique would have offered the ability to shoot huge, effects-heavy spectacles on a tiny budget and in a very small studio. The technology was expected to be the lynchpin of Harlan Ellison’s infamous TV series The Starlost and its failure then contributed to its demise. But Magicam would, not long after, be used in a variety of Trumbull productions including Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

His energies elsewhere, Trumbull was unable to accept offers to produce the effects for Star Wars, but returned to the industry for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It would be on this film that he would be nominated for his first Academy Award, and helped pioneer work to shoot effects sequences on 70mm film. This was a way of preserving detail when the footage was then integrated into sequences shot on 35mm, which is why the alien spaceship has so much heft and weight.

As work was progressing on Close Encounters, Paramount offered to bankroll his studio and asked him to produce the effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Trumbull initially turned down the offer, causing much consternation from Paramount Pictures. But after the film’s first effects house, Robert Abel, was deemed to have produced substandard work, Trumbull was more-or-less begged to come on and finish the film ahead of its planned release date.

In the following clip, from 2016, reveals the painstaking process behind creating the Enterprise drydock sequence from The Motion Picture. He said that, in many ways, the sequence – which is adored by fans and detested by casual viewers – was inspired by work done for 2001. One thing that sticks out is that he says that he wanted fans to “buy into the beauty of space” and “buy into the beauty of the Enterprise,” to fall in “love” with the revised craft. And, it works.

Before his passing, Trumbull was consulting with the team overseeing the 4K remaster of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Producer David C. Fein, who is leading the project, said that “Doug created the future,” and that he “inspired going beyond limitations,” adding that Trumbull’s “influence will be with us forever.” Similarly, Mike Matessino added that Trumbull’s work was “truly timeless,” which “continues to inspire awe and to spark the imagination,” both now and in the future.

Daren R. Dochterman, who spent a lot of time working with Trumbull, said that he was scared to meet him the first time they met. “The fact that he turned out not only to be a sweet, understanding man and a very kind teacher not only surprised me but filled me with such happiness,” he added. “Over the years since then I’ve gotten to know him a little better and he had gotten to know some of my work, and he was the most encouraging voice in my life.”

Trumbull’s work on Close Encounters would massively inform the visual effects work for Blade Runner. That film would earn him his third Academy Award nomination, a well-deserved effort for simply giving Ridley Scott’s world the weight and heft that it required. Here, like in so many other of his films, Trumbull’s effects offer a level of realism that means it’s easy to suspend your disbelief when you see the fantastic presented to you.

In fact, that’s the second time I’ve used the phrase “heft and weight” in this piece, isn’t it – because that is something Trumbull was always able to get right. His worlds, no matter how fantastic, always felt grounded, and that’s why his work holds up so well compared to other films both of the era, and even those that followed it. Trumbull knew how to make the fantastical feel real, a commodity that is worth more than its weight in Hollywood.

Unfortunately, Trumbull would leave production on Blade Runner before it was completed to helm his second film, Brainstorm. That was designed as a showcase for Showscan, embracing higher frame rates and using those big 70mm cameras. Unfortunately, studio pressure, the tragic death of one of the film’s stars and cold feet from exhibitors killed Trumbull’s dream. The film didn’t get a wide release and ultimately flopped, leaving Trumbull to move back east to work on his technology passions away from Hollywood. He would also, briefly, be at IMAX in the early ‘90s.

In later years, Trumbull consulted on visual effects for Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and worked on his Magi cinematic process. Magi, unlike other HFR projects, runs at 120 frames per second, and the reports, like this RogerEbert.com story from 2014, suggest it lacked the TV-esque effects that so dogged the Hobbit movies. By 2017, Trumbull was hoping to build a pod that could be used to tour Magi-produced films and bring the gospel of higher frame rates to the world.

On February 8th, Amy Trumbull posted to Facebook that her father passed away after a two year battle with cancer, a brain tumor and a stroke. “He was an absolute genius and a wizard and his contributions to the film and special effects industry will live on for decades and beyond.” The outpouring of love from both people inside and outside Hollywood was instantaneous.

Daren R. Dochterman said it best, that Douglas Trumbull was “constantly a force trying to pull the movie business into the future with brand new ways of telling stories.” And while “the [Hollywood] machine chewed him up and spit him out … Doug’s tenacity at trying to create new technologies and new methods for creating images and experiences was something that he tried to provide all his life.”

The UK is, once again, attempting to introduce mandatory age verification in order to access adult content online. The beleaguered nation, currently reeling from a series of self-inflicted crises, has announced its plans to revive the scheme that has been deemed unworkable since 2015. Chris Philp MP, under-secretary of state for Tech and the Digital Economy, has announced that the mostly-unchanged plan will be introduced as part of the forthcoming Online Safety Bill.

Mandatory age verification has been in the works ever since the Conservative party included it in its 2015 manifesto. Since then, it has attempted to get the scheme running, passing the enabling laws in 2017 and setting a series of deadlines to implement the system. In April 2019, regulators said that the scheme would finally begin operating that July but the then culture secretary pulled the plug in mid-June. At the time, the plan was to replace the plan with a broader set of rules then being examined under the umbrella of Online Harms.

Unfortunately, the bill remains full of the same problems that rendered the system unworkable when it was previously introduced. The UK originally intended to hand off operation of the system to the BBFC, a film censorship board run by the film industry, rather than a dedicated operator. It had also ignored the screams of privacy campaigners who said that databases holding the names of people who have signed up for age verification is a target for everyone. It doesn’t help that if a company owns an adult content portal and an age verification platform, which is what Pornhub owner Mindgeek proposed, there’s a concern about monopoly power.

Toward the end of last year, it was revealed that seminal ‘90s sci-fi series Babylon 5 would be rebooted by creator J. Michael Straczynski for the CW. Not long after, however, and WarnerMedia put its youth-skewed channel up for sale, putting the show’s shot at a second life in jeopardy. Today, however, Straczynski has revealed on his Patreon that CW head Mark Pedowitz has personally guaranteed the pilot’s survival.

Rather than being shot and produced in preparation for a late-2022 launch date, says Straczynski, it’ll now be top of the pile for the 2023 slate. “The project is very much alive,” he added, even if “we will have to wait a little longer,” to see it hit the screen. Given that Pedowitz is apparently a big fan of the show, hopefully the postponement can only be seen as a positive despite all of the turmoil that surrounds the channel.

As someone once kinda said, the Babylon 5 reboot is all around us, waiting in moments of transition, to be born in a moment of revelation. No-one knows the shape of the reboot, or if it’ll get a full five-year commitment, we know only that it is always born in the pain of having to wait another year to see it.

The EARN IT Act is a piece of legislation, first introduced in 2020 by Republican Senator Lindsay Graham and Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal. Its sponsors, of which there are many, say that the bill will tackle the proliferation of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) posted online. Its critics say that the bill uses an emotive subject as cover to force tech companies to further erode online privacy protections and curtail freedom of speech. Much like FOSTA/SESTA before it, the bill’s key target is further weakening the legal protections of Section 230 Communications Decency Act, better known as the “26 words that created the internet.”

Originally tabled March 5th, 2020, the bill received plenty of bipartisan support in the Senate and was passed to committee soon after. It did not, however, receive a full vote at the time, likely due to the fact that COVID-19 massively disrupted the legislative process. It has now been reintroduced in largely the same form as before, and is being discussed by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, February 3rd, 2022.

Broadly speaking, the bill seeks to launch a new national commission, led by a committee of senior law enforcement officials. This body would develop a series of so-called best practices to prevent online platforms distributing CSAM. Any platform that did not adopt these best practices would subsequently lose their immunity provided to them by Section 230. It also places a lot of power to regulate internet providers directly in the hands of state legislatures.

One of the bill’s more troubling moves is to outsource the key decision-making power to a politically-chosen body. The committee would involve the Attorney General, Secretary of Homeland Security and appointees with a background in law enforcement. There is an understandable concern that such a group would be unrepresentative in terms of the broader debate around this issue, and unaccountable for the decisions that it reaches.

This lack of accountability and the fact that the bill repeats many of the same mistakes that marked the passage of FOSTA/SESTA, advocacy groups are worried. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), for instance, believe that the law’s broad scope could be used to erode basic online freedoms at the whims of politicians. At the time the bill was initially introduced, the Attorney General was William Barr, a prominent critic of encryption. Barr said, many times, that tech companies “can” and “must” put back doors into their products. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said that such a move would enable “law enforcement agencies, from the FBI down to the local police, to scan every message sent online.” The fact that the new text explicitly nods that the use of encryption could be a reason to lose liability protection makes this even more troubling. And even if that clause is watered-down, the broad-brush power handed to the committee overall means it just takes a change in leadership and encryption is gone for good.

Part of the broader context around Section 230 is the myth, intentionally propagated by some lawmakers and journalists, that online platforms are censoring conservative voices. Time and again, prominent figures on the right decry outfits like Facebook when it takes down content that violates its terms of service. They say that it’s partisan censorship, despite the fact that Facebook has in fact bent overbackwards to accommodate and keep prominent right-wing figures on its site. The attacks on S230 are to be seen as both a political cudgel to ensure major platforms continue to carve out exceptions for prominent Republicans, and as a way of censoring huge swathes of internet speech.

No discussion of Section 230 can exist without talking about the harms created by the passing of FOSTA/SESTA. That bill had a similar aim of weakening the protections of Section 230, passed under the aegis of preventing sex trafficking. Once signed into law in 2018, a number of websites dealing with sex, sex work and sexual education were forced offline. Democrats in 2019 were sufficiently concerned by the fallout from the bill that they unsuccessfully attempted to pass a bill that would study the impact of FOSTA/SESTA on vulnerable individuals.

Freedom Network, a body that works to prevent trafficking, and provide support to its victims, spoke out against EARN IT at the end of 2020. It, along with a number of other groups, backed a letter (.PDF) saying that the bill was flawed and wouldn’t succeed in its supposed aims. It said that the bill would repeat the mistakes of FOSTA/SESTA, explaining that “instead of narrowly targeting sex trafficking which used digital platforms, the law de-platformed and erased the existence of many, including sex workers, harm reduction workers and sex educators.” It added that the bill could cause disproportionate harm to LGBTQ communities who would be starved of vital educational material and access to a broader community.

Human Rights Watch, meanwhile, wrote to Graham and Dianne Feinstein in June 2020 to lodge its own opposition to the bill. It said that “the EARN IT Act not only jeopardizes privacy and threatens the right to free expression but also fails to effectively protect children from online exploitation.”

Since the bill has reemerged, these same criticisms have been leveled against it, given that little has changed about its construction. The Center for Democracy and Technology said on Tuesday that its changes “in some cases, makes things worse.” It remains to be seen, however, if these criticisms will get through to the politicians who will begin debating the bill in earnest later today.