Amazon is moving forward with a live-action Spider-Man Noir series, according toVariety. It will reportedly focus on “an older, grizzled superhero in 1930s New York City” — one that isn’t Peter Parker.

Spider-Man Noir is an alternate version of the web-slinging hero, first seen in the 2009 Marvel comic series of the same name. The comic version was set in 1933, as a freshly bitten Spidey navigates New York City’s Depression-era criminal underworld. The character, who exists in a separate universe from the mainline Spider-Man stories, also appeared in the 2018 film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, voiced by Nicolas Cage. The report doesn’t mention whether Cage will be involved in the new project, but the actor has said he wasn’t asked to return for the upcoming animated sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Marvel

The as-yet-untitled series will be Amazon’s second project based on Sony-controlled Marvel superheroes after the upcoming Silk: Spider Society. Oren Uziel will write and executive-produce the show; Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse alumni Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Amy Pascal share executive-producing credits.

Sony controls the film rights to Spider-Man and supporting characters like Venom, Carnage, Vulture, Black Cat and others. In addition, it works with Marvel Studios on the current MCU film franchise starring Tom Holland.

Twitter has shared more details about the upcoming changes to its API that will require most developers to pay in order to keep using its developer tools. In an update, the company said that there will be “a new form of free access” that will allow “Tweet creation of up to 1,500 Tweets per month.”

That clarification means that many of Twitter’s so-called “good” bots — the automated accounts that tweet everything from historical photos to helpful reminders — will be able to continue on the platform. Previously, the future of these accounts was uncertain as many bot makers said they would not pay for API access.

However, the 1,500 monthly limit on tweet creation could still impact bots that tweet most frequently. Fifteen hundred tweets a month works out to roughly 50 tweets a day, which could be problematic for Twitter’s most active bots. The company also granted a short reprieve for developers about to lose API access, saying that it had extended the current version of the API until February 13th.

After that, developers wishing to access the “paid basic” tier of Twitter’s API will need to pay $100 a month, according to Twitter. The company also confirmed that it would be ending the Premium API, and that subscribers would have the option to apply for the Enterprise version of the service. The company still hasn’t weighed in on what, if any, options will be available to researchers currently using Twitter’s developer tools for their projects.

Spotify is launching a new feature today called Exclude from your Taste Profile. As its name suggests, it lets you choose playlists — perhaps those played by a child or other family member — that you don’t want affecting your personalized recommendations.

The company says the feature “reduces the impact” the playlists have on your recommended content. So if your child loves jamming out to “Elmo’s Favorite Elmo Songs!” ad nauseam, the new feature should help you avoid hearing similar children’s tunes in your Daily Mix playlists and other algorithmically generated content. (Although we wouldn’t fault you for putting on “Brushy Brush!” while cleaning those pearly whites.)

Exclude from your Taste Profile only works with playlists — not albums or individual songs. Spotify says liked songs within those playlists will still affect your recommendations, so it may be wise to ask family members to ease up on the heart button. The changes will apply retroactively, excluding past and future listens of the unwanted playlists from your recommendations.

Spotify is rolling out the feature “starting today,” suggesting you may not see it immediately. The feature will work on iOS, Android, desktop and the web. Once available, you can exclude music by selecting a playlist, tapping the three-dot menu near the top and selecting “Exclude from your Taste Profile.” In addition, the company says you can turn the feature off at any time using the same process.

You now have a very practical reason to subscribe to Twitter Blue beyond long video uploads and the coveted blue checkmark. As of today, Blue members in the US can post tweets up to 4,000 characters long. You can't currently schedule these posts or save them as drafts, but this could be helpful if you'd rather not write a lengthy multi-tweet thread just to share your thoughts.

Free Twitter users can still reply to and quote these tweets. And yes, Twitter is aware that scrolling through a sea of these lengthy posts could be frustrating. Any tweet longer than 280 characters now hides any extra content beyond a "show more" prompt. Blue normally costs $8 per month, or $84 per year.

This probably won't prompt you to switch from social networks like Facebook or Mastodon, where long posts have been available for a while. However, it could be helpful if you'd like to share the same post across multiple social platforms without having to split it up or write a condensed version.

There's certainly pressure on Twitter to make Blue more appealing. Twitter reportedly only had 180,000 Blue subscribers in the US as of mid-January, and roughly 290,000 worldwide. While the revamped subscription hasn't been available for very long, it needs to be highly attractive to enthusiasts if Elon Musk wants to achieve a goal of generating half of Twitter's revenue from subscriptions.

If you like Squid Game but not enough to brave the real-life version, you'll soon have a VR option. Netflix has partnered with Sandbox VR to produce a game based on the Korean TV series, and from "late 2023," you'll be able to enter this gruesome dystopia at any of the Sandbox VR arcades around the world. The game developer has over 30 locations globally — 26 of which are in North America — at the time of writing, which is a much needed rebound after lying dormant throughout the worst part of the pandemic.

According to Sandbox VR, its upcoming experience will have players "transported to iconic Squid Game locations, where they become contestants in a variety of pulse-pounding challenges inspired by the Netflix series." You'll "compete against each other to be the last one standing" — presumably without anyone actually dying. As with all Sandbox VR games, players will be able to immediately rewatch, share and even download a personalized mixed-reality highlight reel.

The San Francisco-based VR company didn't share further details on its Netflix collaboration, but judging by my recent experience with its latest zombie-shooter, Deadwood Valley (pictured above), the upcoming Squid Game title shouldn't disappoint. All Sandbox VR games allow up to six players to roam around freely in each room, while wearing wrist and ankle trackers for full-body motion capture, as well as a bHaptic TactSuit to feel gunshots or zombie scratches. Players also hold a prop weapon that matches the size of its virtual counterpart, thus making these VR games more immersive than they already are.

I'm anticipating the likes of Red Light, Green Light, hopscotch and Squid making their way into the Squid Game VR experience, but I'm less keen on the idea of licking a prop to solve the dalgona candy puzzles.

Of all the once-unthinkable changes Elon Musk had made since taking over Twitter, pulling the rug out from under developers might seem relatively minor. After banning third-party clients without warning, Twitter announced that it would no longer allow any developer to use its APIs for free.

So far, Twitter has communicated very little about the changes, other than confirming a February 9th cut-off date. Musk has suggested Twitter could charge $100 a month “with ID verification,” but hasn’t elaborated. What we do know, is that once free access is shut off, thousands of apps, research projects, bots and other services will stop functioning (or, at the very least, be interrupted). If you’re a Twitter user, chances are this will affect you in some way, and you shouldn’t wait until it’s too late to prepare.

Change logins for apps where you’ve signed in with Twitter

If you’ve ever used your Twitter credentials to sign into another service, the coming API shutoff could prevent you from being able to access your account. That means you’ll want to double check which services you’ve used Twitter as a login for, and change your account info while you’re still able to.

You can check which services have access to your Twitter account via Settings -> Security and Account Access -> Apps and sessions -> Connected Apps (or, clicking here). Depending on the service, you may have to create an entirely new account with different credentials.

Nuke your tweets

There are a lot of good reasons to delete your old tweets. But if you haven’t already, your window for easily doing so is rapidly closing. If you want to wipe your tweet history, check out TweetDelete, TwitWipe, TweetDeleter, or another similar service. Note that there are a handful of subscription-based tweet deletion services. It may be a good idea to hold off on using a paid service for now until it’s clear whether any of these apps will continue to operate after the API changes go into effect.

Find your mutuals on Mastodon

Whether you’re new to the Fediverse or not, now would be a very good time to find all your mutuals from Twitter over on Mastodon. Services like Movetodon and Twitodon enable you to easily find familiar accounts on Mastodon. Rebuilding your following graph on a new platform can be one of the biggest hurdles to getting started, so even if you’re not sure about switching, it’s not a bad idea to use these tools while you still can.

Everything else

Unfortunately, the effects of ending the free API will be much more far-reaching than just these services. The future of Twitter’s bots — the automated accounts that share everything from weather updates, helpful reminders, jokes and emergency alerts — is now very much uncertain. While Musk has indicated that he may allow some bots with “good” content to access the Twitter API for free, it’s not at all clear how this will work, or if paying for Twitter Blue will be a requirement. So far, a number of bot developers have said they will not pay for use of Twitter's API and are planning for their accounts to go dark on the 9th.

The API changes will also have a disastrous impact on the research community. Currently, there are scores of journalists, nonprofits and academic institutions that use Twitter’s API to research misinformation, public health, education and numerous other issues. Requiring these researchers to pay could effectively end these projects, particularly for organizations that are smaller and not as well-funded. For now, it's not clear if these organizations will have any other options available to them. 

For one night only, Disney’s breakout Star Wars series is coming to cable TV. Ahead of the premiere of the third season of The Mandalorian on March 1st, Disney announced today it would air the show’s debut episode, “Chapter 1: The Mandalorian,” on February 24th. If you somehow haven’t seen the series before, you can catch the episode that started it all on ABC, Freeform or FX. All three stations will air the 41-minute debut at 8PM ET/PT.

If you’ve managed to avoid spoilers for The Mandalorian until now, first of all, great job; it couldn’t have been easy. Second, we won’t ruin the surprise, but the debut episode is a great taste of what made the first season of the series feel so special. It has a bit of everything that people came to love about The Mandalorian, including witty dialogue, fun action set pieces and, of course, a certain cute alien.

This isn’t the first time Disney has brought a Disney+ exclusive to TV. The company previously aired two episodes of Andor on ABC, Freeform and FX when it seemed that series was struggling to find an audience. Considering the company recently lost $1.5 billion on its streaming services, bringing The Mandalorian to broadcast TV makes a lot of sense as an effort to attract subscribers to Disney+.

In the face of so much ChatGPT news and buzz, Google announced on Monday its own chatbot AI project, Bard, will be unveiled with more details at Wednesday's Google Presents event in Paris. Bard will serve as an "experimental conversational AI service," according to a blog post by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Monday. It uses Google's existing Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) platform, which the company has been developing for the past two years.

However, it won’t be open to everyone, like ChatGPT currently is, which ruins the hype a little. Google is starting with a lightweight version of LaMDA, open to a select group of trusted users before scaling up. "We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information," Pichai said.

As we’ll get into below, it’s a busy time for OpenAI’s chatbot tech. Microsoft has a surprise event later today, and that AI-generated Seinfeld stream (based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 Davinci model) was banned from Twitch.

– Mat Smith

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Sony’s expansive PlayStation VR2 FAQ answers (almost) all your burning questions

The $550 peripheral will arrive on February 22nd.

Sony

Sony has published a lengthy FAQ for all things PS VR2. It’s promised more than 30 games to choose from during the launch window, defined as the first month from the release date. Among those are Horizon Call of the Mountain (a VR spin-off of the Horizon games) and VR modes for Resident Evil Village and Gran Turismo 7, which will both be free for folks who already own them. As you’ve probably already heard, original PS VR games won’t play on PS VR2. However, several developers have created PS VR2 versions of existing games and some are offering free upgrades. Unlike with PS VR, you don't need to plug in a camera to your PS5 to use PS VR2. You can, however, film yourself while playing by connecting a PS5 HD Camera.

Continue reading.

Microsoft is holding a press event tomorrow, with ChatGPT expected to feature heavily

Microsoft may show just how cozy it's getting with OpenAI.

Microsoft isn’t going to let Google get the jump on the AI chatbot buzz. It has an event today, at 1 PM ET. The company is keeping tightlipped, but it's expected to show its integration of ChatGPT into Bing and other uses of the conversational AI technology. Microsoft first invested in OpenAI in 2019 and backed the startup again in 2021. Last month, it committed to a "multibillion-dollar" deal unofficially believed to be worth $10 billion over several years. Microsoft has had some misses with chatbots in the past – hopefully, this will be different. Does this mean I’ll actually start using Bing?

Continue reading.

AI Seinfeld was surreal fun until it called being trans an illness

“Where’d everybody go?” the Jerry character asked after a transphobic rant.

Twitch

Twitch has banned “Nothing, Forever,” the AI-generated Seinfeld stream, for at least 14 days following a transphobic and homophobic outburst. It’s the latest example of “hate in, hate out” when AI chatbots are trained on offensive content without adequate moderation. As reported by Vice, during one of the recent AI-scripted standup acts, the Seinfeld counterpart suggested being transgender is a mental illness. In what almost seemed like an awareness of the material’s offensiveness, the AI comedian quickly added, “But no one is laughing, so I’m going to stop. Thanks for coming out tonight. See you next time. Where’d everybody go?”

Continue reading.

Tinder adds an incognito mode

The app will flag more examples of harmful language, too.

Tinder is rolling out some new safety features and updates in time for Valentine's Day. Users will now be able to take advantage of an incognito mode, which Tinder says is a "step up" from hiding your profile completely. Only folks you Like will see you in their recommendations. In addition, you can block profiles that pop up in your suggestions, which could mitigate some awkwardness if you spot an ex or someone else from your life.

Continue reading.

Elon Musk may have to think of a lot more ways to make Twitter Blue appealing to potential subscribers if he wants the subscription service to be a major source of revenue. According to The Information, only 180,000 people in the US have been paying for a Twitter subscription by mid-January, and that's apparently around 0.2 percent of the website's monthly active users. The publication said it saw the information on a document, which also revealed that 62 percent of the company's paying users is from the US. That means Twitter has approximately 290,000 subscribers worldwide. 

Twitter Blue costs $8 a month for users who pay via web — or $7, if they pay for an annual subscription — and $11 for those who pay via Apple's or Google's app stores. Since the latter option gives the tech giants a cut of subscribers' payments, Twitter still only gets $8 a month from users overall. With the current number of paying users, the website is only set to earn $27.8 million a year from its subscription services. That said, Twitter has only just relaunched Blue in mid-December last year after a bumpy initial launch a month before that. It's bound to rack up more subscribers, though it remains to be seen if it can achieve the level of growth Musk wants to see. 

As The Information notes, Musk told Twitter employees last year that he wants half of the website's revenue to come from subscriptions. Since the company has to pay over $1 billion a year in interests alone from the loans Musk took out when he purchased the website, the executive is aiming to take in a revenue of $3 billion for 2023. Twitter has to have quite a lot of subscribers to earn half of that from Blue. One avenue the company is considering to earn more from its subscription services is to offer a higher-priced membership tier that allows users to browse the website with zero ads. Twitter is also reportedly planning to charge businesses $1,000 a month for their gold verification badges and an extra $50 a month for each account affiliated with them. 

People in Pakistan can once again use Wikipedia, three days after the country blocked the website over content that regulators deemed "sacrilegious." As TechCrunch notes, prime minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered officials to unblock Wikipedia after determining that the ban was “not a suitable measure to restrict access to some objectionable contents/sacrilegious matter on it.” Sharif's office said in a statement that the "unintended consequences of this blanket ban" outweighed the "benefits."

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) "degraded" access to Wikipedia last Wednesday, warning the site's operators that they had 48 hours to remove certain content or face repercussions. Wikipedia apparently demurred and the PTA blocked the site in Pakistan on Friday.

Meanwhile, Sharif is establishing a cabinet committee to "explore and recommend alternative technical measures for removal or blocking access to objectionable content posted on Wikipedia and other online information sites, in view of our social, cultural and religious sensitivities, on the touchstone of proportionality." The committee is also being tasked with offering other suggestions aimed at "controlling unlawful content in a balanced manner." 

Sharif asked the committee to provide the cabinet with recommendations within one week. That doesn't give the committee members much time to fully assess and analyze the many, many considerations that go into content moderation.