The Securities and Exchange Commission has cracked down on the businesses of crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun and has charged him for the unregistered offer and sale of the tokens Tronix and BitTorrent. If those tokens sound familiar even to non-hardcore crypto enthusiasts, it's because several celebrities had promoted them on social media — and now they're also being charged by the agency. According to the SEC, eight celebrities, including Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Soulja Boy, Ne-Yo and Akon, illegally promoted the tokens online without disclosing that they were paid to do so. 

"...Sun paid celebrities with millions of social media followers to tout the unregistered offerings, while specifically directing that they not disclose their compensation. This is the very conduct that the federal securities laws were designed to protect against regardless of the labels Sun and others used," Gurbir S. Grewal, Director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, said in a statement. 

All celebrities charged, with the exception of Soulja Boy and musician Austin Mahone, have agreed to pay a collective amount of $400,000 in penalties to settle the charges. It's not the first time the SEC went after celebrities shilling crypto on social media — it previously charged Kim Kardashian and NBA Hall of Famer Paul Pierce for posting about EthereumMax's EMAX tokens without revealing that they had been paid for the promotion. Kardashian paid $1.26 million to settle the charges against her, while Pierce paid $1.4 million. 

As for Sun himself, the SEC accused him of violating antifraud and market manipulation provisions of the federal securities laws. The agency said he offered the tokens as investments through unregistered bounty programs that prompted participants to promote the tokens on social media and to recruit others. In addition, the SEC also accused Sun of directing employees to artificially inflate the value of Tronix by simultaneously selling and purchasing the token to make it appear actively traded. 

"As alleged in the complaint," Grewal said, "Sun and others used an age-old playbook to mislead and harm investors by first offering securities without complying with registration and disclosure requirements and then manipulating the market for those very securities."

NASA and Axiom Space have revealed what Artemis III astronauts will wear when they walk on the Moon. The Artemis III mission is currently slated for December 2025. It’ll be the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 touched down in 1972, and it’s poised to include the first woman and first person of color to walk on the Moon.

Axiom Space

The new spacesuit accommodates a wider range of body types. It's also more flexible than past suits, featuring lights and even an HD camera. The design can even handle the extreme cold of permanently shadowed areas on the Moon. If you’re disappointed not to see the iconic white of NASA’s older spacesuits, don’t worry – this is just the early prototype. The final version will likely be all-white when worn by NASA astronauts on the Moon’s surface.

– Mat Smith

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T-Mobile is buying Ryan Reynolds-backed Mint Mobile

For up to $1.35 billion.

T-Mobile has announced an agreement to buy Mint Mobile's parent company, Ka’ena, for $1.35 billion in cash and stock. Mint has run on T-Mobile since its inception as a mobile virtual network operator. The deal is all the more intriguing thanks to its celebrity rep, Ryan Reynolds, who is believed to own between 20 and 25 percent of Mint. He'll stay on in his creative role as Mint spokesperson. Mint was founded in 2015 and spun out from Ultra in late 2019.

Continue reading.

BMW's new Panoramic Vision adds a full-width display on EV windscreens

Expect it to roll out on models from 2025.

With its new Panoramic Vision display, BMW wants to bring that important HUD data to eye level. The company has announced a heads-up display that spans the entire width of the windscreen to give drivers and passengers all the necessary information without having to take eyes off the road. As the driver, you can choose what you want to see across the Panoramic Vision display, including speed, time, and current song playing.

Continue reading.

Samsung explains its 'fake' Moon photos

The company says its AI enhances details, but critics claim it's adding info that wasn't there.

Samsung shared a deeper explanation of its Moon photo detection system it has used since the Galaxy S21. The phone detects when you're taking a clear photo of the Moon at 25X zoom or above and captures multiple frames. It then uses a neural network to enhance the detail, using a high-resolution reference image for comparison. It’s that latter part that’s rankling folks. So are the images you’re taking fake? Well, Samsung is using the actual shot as a baseline, but the phone is producing photos that don't represent what you get through the lens. The company appears to be aware of this, too, as it says it's refining Scene Optimizer to "reduce any potential confusion" between taking photos of the actual Moon and augmented images of it.

Continue reading.

The 'BlackBerry' trailer looks funnier than you'd expect

The rise and fall of the keyboard-toting smartphone business.

When we learned that a BlackBerry movie was in the works, no-one thought it would be a comedic feature. But judging from the trailer it should have a lighter touch than films like The Social Network and Steve Jobs. The BlackBerry movie stars Jay Baruchel (How to Train Your Dragon, Goon) and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's Glenn Howerton as Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEOs of the Canadian firm Research in Motion.

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Samsung’s $450 Galaxy A54 has a bright 1,000-nit display

And looks more like a flagship phone.

Axiom Space

It’s that quiet moment between Samsung launching its Galaxy S flagships and its other flagships that just happen to fold. So it's the perfect time to update its midrange A series and add to the chaos. While no major shakeups are coming from the Galaxy A53 to the A54, there are some notable changes, including a redesign more closely aligned to the premium Galaxy S family, with metal detail on the cameras, which now jut out from the back independently of each other. The screen is also 20 percent brighter, topping out at 1,000 nits. The A54 will be available to pre-order on March 30th before launching on April 6th for $450 – the same price as last year’s model.

Continue reading.

Just under three and a half years after Ryan Reynolds bought into Mint Mobile and became the public face of the provider, the Deadpool star is set to make a windfall from his investment. T-Mobile has announced an agreement to buy Mint Mobile's parent company Ka’ena for as much as $1.35 billion in cash and stock.

The final price will depend on Ka’ena’s performance for a certain period before and after the deal closes, which is expected to happen later this year. Ka’ena also owns Ultra Mobile, a provider focused on international calling, and wholesaler Plum.

Reynolds is believed to own between 20 and 25 percent of Mint, according to The New York Post. He'll stay on in his creative role as Mint spokesman. Mint was founded in 2015 and spun out from Ultra in late 2019.

Mint, which has run on T-Mobile since its inception as a mobile virtual network operator, found success thanks to its charismatic pitch man and budget-conscious pricing. T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert confirmed in a YouTube video regarding the news that Mint will keep its $15 per month pricing.

T-Mobile said in a statement that Mint and Ultra will complement its existing prepaid services. Mint founders David Glickman and Rizwan Kassim will continue to manage the brands, which T-Mobile says will generally operate as a separate business unit. Meanwhile, T-Mobile is hoping to tap into the marketing nous of Mint and its famous co-owner.

“Mint has built an incredibly successful digital direct-to-consumer business that continues to deliver for customers on the Un-carrier’s leading 5G network and now we are excited to use our scale and owners' economics to help supercharge it — and Ultra Mobile — into the future," Sievert said. "Over the long-term, we’ll also benefit from applying the marketing formula Mint has become famous for across more parts of T-Mobile."

“Mint Mobile is the best deal in wireless and today’s news only enhances our ability to deliver for our customers," Reynolds said. "We are so happy T-Mobile beat out an aggressive last-minute bid from my mom Tammy Reynolds as we believe the excellence of their 5G network will provide a better strategic fit than my mom’s slightly-above-average mahjong skills."

Netflix took home six Oscars tonight besting all other streaming services, largely thanks to All Quiet on the Western Front, with only Apple TV+ in the mix taking a single award. However, the ceremony was dominated by Everything, Everywhere All at Once (A24) which took home no less than seven statues including three of four for acting, along with Best Director and Best Picture.

A German language take on the classic WWI book, All Quiet on the Western Front won Oscars for Best International Feature, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design and yes, Best Original Score (despite some critics' complaints about said score). 

Netflix also took home the Best Animated Feature trophy for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, a strong feather in its cap considering competition from established studios like DreamWorks, Sony Pictures and Pixar. Apple TV+, meanwhile, made it a streaming animation sweep, winning the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film with The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse.

Everything Everwhere All at Once took home most major Oscars, even though it was handicapped by its early 2022 release. Its haul included Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis), Best Director (the Daniels) and Best Picture. The highlights of the night were perhaps the emotional speeches by Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh, who was the first Asian person to win Best Actress. "For all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight, this is a beacon of hope and possibilities," she said on the stage.

I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson finally has a premiere date almost a year after Netflix announced that it's coming back for a third season. The streaming giant has announced on Twitter that the six-episode comedy sketch series will be available for streaming on May 30th. The show was created by Saturday Night Live alum Robinson, who also stars in it, and SNL producer Zach Kanin. They're not the only comics connected to the show, though: It's co-produced by The Lonely Island, the comedy trio composed of Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. 

Each episode of I Think You Should Leave is only around 16 to 18 minutes long, so you can quite literally finish a season in one sitting. There are multiple sketches per episode, mostly revolving around somebody doing something absurd in an every day professional or social situation, as well as some pretty bizarre and over-the-top bits. Really, some parts are so weird, you don't know whether to cringe or laugh. 

The show's first season premiered on Netflix back in 2019, while the second season arrived in 2021. Alex Bach, one of the show's producers, previously told Variety that Robinson and Kanin write every single script and that they "wait for the sketches to come to them" so there have been "extended periods of time between seasons."

As a white man in America with no discernible regional accent, I can simply assume that modern consumer technologies — virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa or Assistant, and my phones’ camera — will work seamlessly out of the box. I assume this because, well, they do. That’s namely because the nerds who design and program these devices overwhelmingly both look and sound just like me — if even a little whiter. Folks with more melanin in their skin and extra twang on their tongue don’t enjoy that same privilege.

Tomorrow’s chatbots and visual AIs will only serve to exacerbate this bias unless steps are taken today to ensure a benchmark standard of fairness and equitable behavior from these systems. To address that issue, Meta AI researchers developed and released the Casual Conversations dataset in 2021, designed to “help researchers evaluate their computer vision and audio models for accuracy across a diverse set of age, genders, apparent skin tones and ambient lighting conditions.” On Thursday, the company unveiled Casual Conversations v2, which promises even more granular classification categories than its predecessor.

The original CC dataset included 45,000 videos from more than 3,000 paid subjects across age, gender, apparent skin tone and lighting conditions. These videos are designed to be used by other AI researchers, specifically those working with generative AIs like ChatGPT or visual AIs like those used in social media filters and facial recognition features, to help them ensure that their creations behave the same whether the user looks like Anya Taylor-Joy or Lupita Nyong’o, whether they sound like Colin Firth or Colin Quinn.

Since Casual Conversations first debuted two years ago, Meta has worked “in consultation with internal experts in fields such as civil rights,” according to Tuesday’s announcement, to expand and improve upon the dataset. Professor Pascale Fung, director of the Centre for AI Research, as well as other researchers from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, participated in the literature review of government and industry data to establish the new annotation categories.

Version 2 now includes 11 categories (seven self-reported and four researcher-annotated) and 26,467 video monologues recorded by nearly 5,600 subjects in seven countries — Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Vietnam, Philippines and the US. While there aren’t as many individual videos in the new dataset, they are far more heavily annotated. As Meta points out, the first iteration only had a handful of categories: “age, three subcategories of gender (female, male, and other), apparent skin tone and ambient lighting,” according to the Thursday blog post.

“To increase nondiscrimination, fairness, and safety in AI, it’s important to have inclusive data and diversity within the data categories so researchers can better assess how well a specific model or AI-powered product is working for different demographic groups,” Roy Austin, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel for Civil Rights at Meta, said in the release. “This dataset has an important role in ensuring the technology we build has equity in mind for all from the outset."

As with most all of its public AI research to date, Meta is releasing Casual Conversations v2 as an open source dataset for anyone to use and expand upon — perhaps to include markers such as “disability, accent, dialect, location, and recording setup,” as the company hinted at on Thursday.

Spoiler warning: The following article discusses the Star Trek: Picard episodes “Seventeen Seconds” and “No Win Scenario.”

I was away last week and so didn’t write up last week’s utterly inessential episode of Picard, although if you’re curious, Darren Mooney at The Escapist’s feelings mirror my own. The whole affair only makes sense if you assume the whole crew had taken a big dose of idiot pills an hour before the episode began, and wish you’d had some as well. This week, there’s a lot more to say, especially since it’s the first episode this season that feels even remotely fun. And while the setup for all of these conflicts was pretty flimsy, their resolutions are all very enjoyable to watch.

After the Shrike uses its Portal gun to encourage the Titan to shoot itself in the back, the ship drifts into a gravity well and certain doom. It’s here we get one of the worst tell-not-show moments in the series so far as the bridge crew state, and then restate (and then re-restate) the situation the ship finds itself in. Loss of power, is it? Sinking into a gravity well, is it? We don’t have enough power to get out of the gravity well, is it? Is that because we’ve not got much power, is it? And because of the gravity well? Sorry, not following, can you explain it to me like I’m five, please? It doesn’t help that while the decision to take the shields offline is set up as some big, dangerous decision, it’s never mentioned again.

It’s here that Picard, opting to get his affairs in order, chooses to sit down for a touching moment with Jack. And they choose to do so on the holodeck, in the Ten Forward bar that’s been turning up time and again this run. Picard says that holodecks are hooked up to their own power supply because it’s better to die in comfort than use that power to survive. I think we can all tell that it’s a cover for either a production or a budget issue that meant they had to re-use the set. (Picard’s first season did the same, endlessly going back to the chateau office on La Sirena’s holodeck.) And, again, the two-hander between Patrick Stewart and Ed Speelers is great.

Also, remember when a broken leg wouldn’t require much more than a quick waft of a med bay doodad and you’d be good as new? Not in Picard, where Shaw storms into Picard’s heart to heart, apparently full of painkillers, and reveals why he’s so angry at both Seven and Picard. It turns out that, like a big chunk of Starfleet, he’s a survivor from Wolf 359! And if this wasn’t another thing that was explored pretty well by Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, it might carry a bit more dramatic weight. It also feels like the start of a pre-ordained redemption arc for Todd Stashwick’s Captain Shaw as the powers that be use Picard as a way to backdoor pilot a Titan-A spin-off series. (You can imagine the pitch: We’ve got the cast, and the sets are already built, it’s practically free content if you greenlight another ten!) And, to be fair, Todd Stashwick’s such a charismatic actor that you could feel him straining to play someone more unlikeable at the start of the series.

From here until the conclusion, however, the tone starts to lighten, and Beverley’s realization that the nebula is a space lifeform gives everyone a sense of purpose. You see, the nebula is undergoing the exact same contractions that a pregnant person would when they’re in labor. The moment that Riker stops pointlessly objecting to the plan of riding the contractions out of the gravity well, it suddenly feels like we’re watching Star Trek again. The gang works together, Seven and Shaw successfully lure out the changeling infiltrator, and they even have a nice spot of payback for the Shrike as Riker orders the Titan to lock onto a massive asteroid, dragging it behind long enough for it to smash the enemy vessel out of contention long enough for them to escape.

And that’s not even the best bit, because there’s also the wonderful B-Story of Picard dealing with his adoring fans while in (the real) Ten Forward five years previously. Patrick Stewart Picard is accosted by a bunch of fans cadets who ask him to regale them with stories of his time on Star Trek the Enterprise. All the while, unseen, Jack lingers in the background, listening to Picard as he builds out his myth and his legacy while minimizing any reference to his own family. When Picard closes the gathering by saying that Starfleet is his family, it’s both an unwittingly hollow indictment of Picard’s own life (his co-workers are his only friends, oof) and an unwitting rejection of the son he could have grown to know years previously. This, my friends, is a great moment, full of depth and pathos and I just wish that it hadn’t taken this long to get here.

Speaking of which, Paramount recently punted Star Trek: Discovery’s fifth season to 2024, adding it would now be that show’s final run. With news that the studio is looking to tighten its belt in order to milk some actual profit from its streaming service, fans are feeling antsy. After all, Trek shows aren’t cheap to make, and it’s not clear how much crossover appeal these shows have. Despite David Stapf’s 2018 promise that we’d have “a Star Trek something on all the time,” there’s a worry that it’s closing time at the all-you-can-eat buffet. With Discovery and Picard on the outs, and no sign (yet) that Lower Decks and Prodigy will get renewals, we could go from five shows to three, or one, in no time at all. But, based on the merits of some of what’s been released under the Trek brand of late, would that really be such a bad thing?

After all, these four episodes of Picard form little more than an extended prologue for the rest of the run. It’s taken the better part of four hours to establish the broad outline of the plot as well as the main antagonists, and the stakes at hand. Even then, we’ve still not encountered more than half of the Next Generation returnees who formed such a key part of the marketing. A prologue that I would have enjoyed a hell of a lot more if it had been compressed down to closer to ninety minutes. Imagine if, rather than filling out a corporate-mandated ten-week block each year, the format was designed to suit the story being told at each time. On the merits of the last four weeks alone, fewer episodes of higher quality Trek would be infinitely preferable.

Apple is surely hoping that you're not tired of post-apocalyptic TV shows, because it has another one up its sleeve. Silo, which is based on Hugh Howey's series of books, will debut on Apple TV+ on May 5th and the company has released the first teaser for it.

Silotells the story of the last 10,000 people on Earth. They live in a bunker that's a mile underground, but how or why the silo came to be and exactly why they're there remains a mystery. Trying to find out spells doom. Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) is an engineer who tries to get to the bottom of a loved one's murder and ends up discovering some surprising secrets.

The teaser doesn't give too much away, but it does offer a look at the multi-level silo and how its denizens survive there, such as by growing food. Along with Ferguson, the show has a strong cast featuring the likes of Common, Harriet Walter, Chinaza Uche (“Dickinson”), David Oyelowo, Rashida Jones and Tim Robbins.

Apple TV+ has released several post-apocalyptic shows and movies, including See and Finch. Foundation is largely about the collapse of a galactic empire, while the upcoming Extrapolations takes a look at how climate change could ravage the planet by the middle of the 21st century. If you're not too burned out by TV shows set after the collapse of society, Silo might be another one worth checking out.

Spoilers for The Mandalorian seasons 1-3 and The Book of Boba Fett below.

Somehow, Grogu has returned. At least, that's what many people will assume when they tune into the first episode of The Mandalorian's third season. When last we left our lone bounty hunter and cub, Grogu was heading off to Jedi training with a creepy de-aged Luke Skywalker. Mando took off his helmet and braced for solitude. We all shed a tear. (How did a show manage to make us care so much for a monosyllabic man in armor and a green puppet? Bless you, executive producers Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni.)

But at the start of this season, Mando (AKA Din Djarin) and Grogu are paired up once again, saving people from gigantic monsters, fighting space pirates and generally being adorable. To a casual viewer, it's like that dramatic season two finale was Jedi mind-tricked away. It turns out if you wanted to get the full story – which also explains why Din is flying a Phantom Menace-era ship, or why Grogu is becoming a more adept force user — you had to watch the final few episodes of The Book of Boba Fett.

Lucasfilm

If I wasn't already a hopeless Star Wars fan, I'd be pretty confused and annoyed. How are normal people supposed to know that The Book of Boba Fett basically served as a stop-gap between Mandalorian seasons? Disney didn't promote the connection between the shows much, so if you weren't reading geeky news sites, or talking to nerdy friends, it was easy to miss.

The first few episodes of Boba Fett made it seem like a far less ambitious series – did we really need to learn the specifics of how he survived the Sarlacc pit? And who cares about his future as Jabba the Hutt replacement? I've talked to several Star Wars fans who tapped out early on, only to catch up once they heard Mando and Grogu popped up. (Honestly, it almost seemed like Favreau and crew got tired of the Boba Fett story – so did we.)

It's not like I'm against the idea of narratives shifting between different shows and films. Everything Marvel's done since Iron Man has practically trained us to consume pop culture this way, with the rise of the Avengers initiative to the ultimate smackdown with Thanos in Endgame. The geeky side of me is overjoyed when I discover connections between films I love. (You should have seen me in the theater at the end of M. Night Shyamalan's Split.) But the idea that viewers have to keep tabs on everything is beginning to feel like homework, and it's particularly frustrating when one piece of media is inexplicably crucial to something that comes later.

It doesn't help that The Mandalorian barely referenced The Book of Boba Fett during its introductory episode. Even a bit of a nudge during the "previously on" opening section would help. Instead, the premiere episode just wants to get us back to normal, with Mando on a video game-like quest and Grogu having fun along the way. It's a shame, since the end of season 2 made it seem like The Mandalorian would actually change things up moving forward.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, creator and executive producer Favreau said he appreciated being able to check in on characters between shows.  “I knew that I didn’t want to dedicate a lot of screen time within The Mandalorian to a period of time where there wasn’t a lot of character progression," he said. "Both [Din and Grogu] were kind of stuck, as far as character progression goes, until they were reunited. So, my feeling was that it would allow me to do both of those things and freed me up now two years later to have a whole new context for these two characters to have a relationship and move forward.”

But what Favreau saw as a problem, I see as an opportunity. In Book of Boba Fett, Din and Grogu's time apart is handled briskly. Neither can fully let each other go. That stalls Grogu's Jedi training, as that's mostly focused on detaching yourself from the world and emotional connections. (Did that really work so well for Anakin Skywalker? Come on, Luke.) Din, meanwhile, acts like an empty nester who's lost his life's purpose. This is all good material for drama, but Favreau cuts through it as quickly as possible on a spinoff show. What a waste.

I may be particularly annoyed by The Mandalorian's disjointed narrative after seeing how Marvel handled its latest big bad, Kang the Conqueror, in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. In that film, Kang is introduced as a castaway, someone banished to the Quantum Realm because of his penchant for, well, conquering. But we never got a sense of his true motivation, his powers or what he's actually trying to accomplish.Perhaps that's because the folks behind Quantumania assumed you saw Kang's brief introduction at the end of the Loki streaming series, where he's presented as more of a trickster and vague threat.

Lucasfilm

If you didn't watch Loki and were confused by Quantumania, it's almost like Marvel is saying that's your own fault. To me, that's simply irresponsible storytelling.

Coming off of Andor, Tony Gilroy’s self-contained and trenchant exploration of the Star Wars universe, the simplistic and confusing nature of The Mandalorian feels like a letdown. The show was always a pulpy and almost video game-like romp. But after the end of season two, there was potential for something much greater. Instead, Favreau took the easy way out to deliver more of the same.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie is bumping up its release date. The animated adventure will now open on April 5th in over 60 markets (it was previously slated for April 7th). Giving the movie a five-day opening over Easter weekend is an old Hollywood trick that could help pad its initial earnings and lead to marketing-friendly headlines touting its early success.

The film stars the voices of Chris Pratt as Mario, Anya Taylor-Joy as Princess Peach, Chris Day as Luigi, Seth Rogen as Donkey Kong and Jack Black as Bowser. It was initially scheduled to release in December, but Illumination and Nintendo announced early last year they were pushing it back to this April. Throughout April and May, the movie will release in ten additional Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European markets; Japan’s release is timed to coincide with the Golden Week Holidays on April 28th.

The movie will mark Mario’s first big-screen starring role since 1993's ill-fated Super Mario Bros., starring Bob Hoskins as Mario and John Leguizamo as Luigi, which bombed at the box office but became something of a “so bad it’s good” cult classic in later years. Before that, children of the late 80s and early 90s enjoyed The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, a live-action / animated series starring Captain Lou Albano and Danny Wells.

The upcoming Mario film could be a barometer for audiences’ appetites for video game movies. Hollywood adaptations of gaming IPs have a long track record of (rightfully) bombing with box offices and critics. Still, HBO’s excellent The Last of Us series has been a notable exception that Nintendo and Illumination would love to continue on the big screen.