Hulu has dropped the first trailer for The Dropout, a miniseries about the failed blood-testing startup Theranos. Amanda Seyfried stars as its embattled former CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. The two-and-a-half-minute preview shows Holmes dropping out of Stanford to found Theranos. It includes snippets of the company's high points (it raised more than $700 million in investments) and hints at its very public demise, as well as Holmes developing her infamously deep voice.

The trailer is full of familiar faces, including Naveen Andrews (Lost) as Sunny Balwani, the former president and chief operating officer of Theranos and Holmes' ex-boyfriend. Stephen Fry, William H. Macy, Laurie Metcalf and Sam Waterston also appear.

Theranos claimed to offer rapid blood tests that required only a finger prick. However, multiple reports claimed the tests weren't effective. The SEC charged Holmes and Theranos with fraud in March 2018 and the company collapsed later that year.

The Dropout will premiere two months after Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors. She faces up to 20 years in prison and will be sentenced in September. With Holmes' trial fresh in the memory, some folks might be curious to learn more about the story behind her and Theranos. The trailer, which is edited in the style of a thriller, might draw some more attention to the show too.

The first three episodes of The Dropout will hit Hulu on March 3rd. Other installments will arrive on a weekly basis. Meanwhile, Adam McKay and Jennifer Lawrence are working on a movie about Holmes and Theranos for Apple.

Apple has shared the first trailer for its upcoming TV+ exclusive Shining Girls. Starring Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men and The Handmaid’s Tale fame as a Chicago reporter in search of the man who assaulted her, the series will debut on April 29th with the first three episodes of the series available to stream that same day. Subsequent episodes will follow every Friday for the next five weeks.

Based on the best-selling novel of the same name, Shining Girls also stars Hamilton actor Phillipa Soo and Wagner Moura, best known for portraying Pablo Escobar in Netflix's Narcos, as the villain of the story. The story centers around a man named Harper Curtis, a Depression-era drifter who finds a house in Chicago with doors to other time periods. Curtis uses that power to kill young women with bright potential. The protagonist of the tale, Kirby Mazrachi, survives her encounter with Curtis and then turns the tables on him.

HitPiece may have already shut down its website after several artists spoke up about their work being used without their permission, but the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) isn't letting it off the hook. The organization has sent the attorney representing HitPiece a letter demanding the website and its founders to stop infringing on music IPs, to provide a complete list of site activities and to account for all NFTs that had been auctioned off. It also wants to know how much the website earned. HitPiece founder Rory Felton previously said that artists will get paid for sold digital goods that are associated with them, but the artists who spoke up are skeptical that they'll get anything.

In the letter, the group repeatedly called HitPiece a scam operation designed to exploit fans. RIAA's Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow said it used "buzzwords and jargon" to hide the fact that it didn't obtain the rights it needs and to make fans believe they were purchasing an article genuinely associated with an artist. Doroshow added: "While the operators appear to have taken the main HitPiece site offline for now, this move was necessary to ensure a fair accounting for the harm HitPiece and its operators have already done and to ensure that this site or copycats don't simply resume their scams under another name."

Although HitPiece branded itself as a platform for music NFTs, its founders claimed that it didn't actually sell any sound files. The RIAA argues, however, that it still used artists' name, images and copyrighted album art. Further, if it truly didn't sell any sound files, the RIAA says that "likely amounts to yet another form of fraud." 

Spotify has been removing Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) episodes since Friday, and as of this writing, the service has pulled down a total of 113. When Gizmodo noticed that some of the podcast's episodes could no longer be found, only 70 had disappeared from the platform. Now, based on the website dedicated to monitoring which of the show's episodes aren't available on the service, an additional 40 had been removed. However, the episodes don't seem to be connected with the COVID-19 controversy surrounding the show and the service right now.

Several artists have exited Spotify recently because of Rogan's COVID-19-related episodes. An open letter addressed to the host from doctors and scientists pointed out that he had made several misleading claims about the virus in the past and promoted the use of ivermectin to treat it. They take the most issue with one specific episode in particular: Episode #1757 with guest Dr. Robert Malone, who claimed that people only believe COVID-19 vaccines are effective due to "mass formation psychosis." That episode is still available. 

Spotify doesn't seem to be deleting episodes in order, though the newest one in the bunch is #1458 with actor Chris D’Elia as guest. It's also unclear what policies the episodes broke to warrant being deleted. Spotify head of global communications Dustee Jenkins reportedly told employees on Slack before that a team reviewed multiple controversial JRE episodes and found that they didn't meet the threshold for removal. Jenkins also said that what Spotify hasn't done is share its policies externally, according to a report by The Verge, which also posted a copy of the service's pretty narrow COVID-19 guidelines. 

The company's CEO admitted that its content policy should've been public before now when he reported Spotify's earnings for the fourth quarter of 2021. As for Rogan, he apologized for the backlash and said he'll do his best "best to try to balance out these more controversial viewpoints."

Another Sundance Film Festival has come and gone, and with it we've gotten a close look at some of the films and interactive experiences that'll be the talk of 2022. After Yang, the profound story of a family dealing with the loss of their beloved android, has all the makings of an awards contender. And we have a feeling we'll be hearing more about We Met in Virtual Reality once it's released, as it manages to capture some moving portraits of relationships formed over VRChat.

There were some disappointments too, like TikTok, Boom, which tried and failed to tackle one of the fastest growing social platforms. We didn't have time to cover every single project we encountered at Sundance, but just like last year, we've put together some quick impressions of other films and experiences that stood out.

Cosmogony

I went on quite the trip watching Cosmogony. It was screened in Sundance’s virtual cinema, where my stick figure avatar found a seat in the middle of the third row beside some other journalist. As we waited for the show to start, we could see the artists in motion-capture suits walking around and warming up in a studio in Geneva. This behind-the-scenes glimpse was helpful to keep in mind as the show progressed, reminding me it was just three individual dancers of average height putting on the performance.

That’s because the characters in Cosmogony get replicated, resized and reskinned throughout the approximately 30-minute live digital performance. The dancers’ movements are projected in real time to digital avatars in virtual 3D environments, placing them in scenes like mountains and cities. At first, I thought Cosmogony a little cheesy, especially when the performers took turns jumping off a fake cliff and roaming around some scenic areas.

But about five minutes in, Cosmogony got wild. The avatars took on strange heat-map-looking skins, grew to hundreds of feet tall, then played with tiny replicated versions of themselves. They later morphed into what looked like aggressive Pokemon thugs, before turning into what I can only describe as statues dripping golden showers in space.

It’s a ride and a visual spectacle that ended up being an unexpectedly entertaining experience that’s also a rumination on what physical boundaries might (or might not) exist in the metaverse. In a space where the laws of physics perhaps don’t matter, how might we interpret ourselves? Free from the limits of the real world, how would you express yourself or choose to appear to others? It’s an intriguing concept, and I appreciate that the team behind Cosmogony never once uttered the word “metaverse,” leaving it up to you to make your own connections. In a Sundance where the words “metaverse” and “NFT'' appeared far too often for my liking, the freedom that Cosmogony affords its viewers is liberating. — Cherlynn Low, Deputy Editor

Neptune Frost

Part musical, part Afro-cyberpunk fairy tale, Neptune Frost presents a unique vision of the future via Africa, a continent typically ignored by traditional science fiction. The film follows a transgender hacker, who comes across a mystical commune filled with other people who find comfort in technology. That's not to say they shun humanity. Instead, through its characters clad in keyboards and old motherboard components, Neptune Frost shows us a techno-utopia that celebrates community while also railing against Big Tech and a dystopian government dubbed The Authority.

"Death surrounds us," a coltan miner says during a poetic moment at the beginning of the film. "The worker pays the price it seems. Metal precious currency. Third and first world currency. Black market currency. Drum-beat heartbeat currency. That old black body currency. Every martyr currency. All that you pay not to see."

Co-directed by Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, Neptune Frost's experimental narrative isn't always easy to parse, but its inventive costume design and gorgeous visuals make it truly memorable. It's no surprise that Lin-Manuel Miranda is among the film's producers: It's ultimately about a group of disenfranchised people shouting for recognition through music and art. — Devindra Hardawar, Senior Editor

Neptune Frost will be released by Kino Lorber globally, but it doesn't yet have a release date.

The State of Global Peace

Sundance

In this Oculus Quest VR experience, you play the role of a prime minister who's gearing up to deliver a speech at the United Nations. But as you struggle to read some generic fluff from the teleprompter (something you're asked to do aloud in VR), your presentation is hacked by a group of students. Their mission: to force you to recognize the devastating impact of climate change, income inequality, and rising militarism.

As I was going through the experience, I couldn't help but think of how I'd eventually explain the sad state of the world to my own daughter. How could things go so fundamentally wrong? And did I do enough to help, when I had the chance? While The State of Global Peace isn't exactly subtle, its strong message is the sort of thing every leader and so-called titan of industry should be forced to confront. — D.H.

Seven Grams

Seven Grams was one of only two New Frontier projects at Sundance this year that involved AR and it honestly didn’t need to be in that format. The experience, which you can download as an app on iOS and Android, shows you where some mineral components are in your phone, while director Karim Ben Khelifa takes you through how they’re mined. It’s an eye-opening piece that sheds light on the “conditions under which the rare materials needed to make [smartphones] are extracted, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).”

I appreciated seeing an iPhone and its exploded bits float in front of me, as well as being able to move around to see it from other angles through my camera, but I quickly grew tired of having to hold up my phone. Whenever I placed my device down with the camera obstructed, the app paused, only resuming when I picked it up again. I could have just as easily been shown where the components are through an onscreen diagram.

Thankfully, only part of the experience was in AR, and I could put my phone down to watch the rest, which was told through animations. Ben Khelifa shared a gripping tale of a boy named Chance, who spent six years against his will as a child soldier for militia groups in the DRC. He was also forced to mine for gold and cassiterite, having to sleep in claustrophobic underground holes.

The project ends by calling the viewer to pledge to “repair, recycle and buy refurbished smartphones,” as well as to demand ethically manufactured smartphones with transparent and clean supply chains. It’s an important call to action and a message that more people and companies need to hear. — C.L.

Just like it did last year, Netflix will release at least one movie a week in 2022. There are currently more than 70 films on the docket for this year, and the company offered a peek at some of them in a teaser.

The three-minute sizzle reel is packed with footage from upcoming films, including a first glimpse at Knives Out 2, the sequel to Rian Johnson's terrific 2019 comedy-mystery movie. There are looks at Enola Holmes 2, Jason Momoa as a half-man/half-beast in fantasy flick Slumberland and a stop-motion take on Pinocchio from Guillermo del Toro. You can also get your first peek at The Gray Man, a big-budget thriller from Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo.

Expect to see projects from filmmakers including Judd Apatow, Noah Baumbach, Niki Caro, Sally El Hosaini, Louis Leterrier, Richard Linklater and Tyler Perry, as well as Dev Patel's directorial debut. Among the other films in Netflix's pipeline are sci-fi movies starring Halle Berry (The Mothership) and Adam Sandler (Spaceman) and a new version of Matilda. There is, as always, a broad range of offerings on this year's slate, including action, comedy, drama, horror and family movies. So, there should be something for everyone as Netflix seeks to make sure subscribers are getting their money's worth from its increasingly expensive plans.

As reports suggested last month, GameStop is getting into NFTs (non-fungible tokens). The company has partnered with Immutable X to build a marketplace for NFTs, which they expect to open up later this year. 

People will be able to buy and sell NFTs linked to digital assets for use in various games. The items will include things like virtual real estate, character skins and weapons, according to The Verge.

Immutable X is based on the Ethereum blockchain, which requires significant energy consumption and high gas fees (a cryptocurrency payment that's required to carry out an Ethereum transaction). The platform claims to diminish those drawbacks by combining many NFT sales into a single Ethereum transaction and buying carbon offsets. As such, Immutable X, whose partners include some blockchain games and TikTok, promises zero gas fees and carbon-neutral NFTs.

GameStop and Immutable X are hoping to entice game developers to use the marketplace with the help of a $100 million fund. Whether developers and studios will bite en masse remains to be seen.

For its annual State of the Game Industry Survey, the Game Developers Conference polled more than 2,700 devs. It found 70 percent of them and their studios were not interested in NFTs, while 72 percent had no interest in packing cryptocurrencies into their games. Around 28 percent said they were at least somewhat interested in NFTs.

Over the last few months, some studios, publishers and industry figures have announced NFT projects, only to abandon their plans after a significant backlash. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 developer GSC Game World, publisher Team17 and prominent game voice and motion-capture actor Troy Baker all backed out of their NFT schemes.

Ubisoft brought NFTs to one of its games for the first time in December, but it seems sales have been slow. Last week, an Ubisoft executive argued that, for gamers, being able to sell virtual items to others is "really beneficial. But they don't get it for now."

Time will tell whether GameStop’s latest endeavor, which follows its emergence as a popular meme stock last year, proves successful. The signs aren't looking promising for the marketplace, though. It's worth bearing in mind that the Steam marketplace has allowed players to buy and sell in-game items for many years without the shadow of NFTs looming over it.

NFTs are designed as public records of ownership of digital assets. The notion is that NFT holders own the asset (which include things like music, digital artworks and in-game items), though in reality the NFT is a verified URL that points to the file. The owner of the URL's destination can alter or delete the file in question. This week, artists claimed that HitPiece, which has since gone offline, was minting and selling NFTs of their music without permission.

The following contains minor spoilers for episode ten of 'Star Trek: Prodigy.'

One thing that’s become increasingly common among genre shows is the idea of the “mid-season finale,” where a program goes on hiatus for a bit, but not before shaking things up for the rest of the year. Even children’s shows like Star Trek: Prodigy can’t escape from this phenomenon, as the Paramount+ cartoon takes a break (again) after a huge two-parter with big changes for the characters and central conflict.

The first season has so far been a long chase between the escaped prisoners aboard the USS Protostar and their former captor, the Diviner. Last week’s cliffhanger forced the crew to surrender their ship to the Diviner in exchange for the lives of their fellow prisoners from the prison colony Tars Lamora, leaving them stranded on the Diviner’s sabotaged ship, the REV-12. But it turned out that our erstwhile teens had a plan to take their ship back, and this week’s installment sees that plan come to fruition. It’s an enjoyable, though largely unsurprising, adventure.

Nickelodeon

Where the show upends things is when it comes to our villain, whose mission is finally revealed to his daughter Gwyn and thus, the audience. And yes, it involves time travel. Most interesting of all is that the Diviner’s storyline is backburnered if not completely scuttled now, with the Protostar crew instead focused on getting to the Federation. And it was intended that way all along — these episodes were written over two years ago, before the pandemic started. In fact, showrunners Kevin and Dan Hageman revealed this week in an interview with Engadget that they just wrote episodes 39 and 40. That would be the end of season two, which was only announced back in November.

The long lead time is due to the lengthy animation process, though it also has the knock-on effect of making the show unresponsive to fan concerns, which is exactly how the Hagemans prefer it. The lengthy production time keeps them beholden to the writer’s room and not a vocal online minority, a phenomenon that has derailed other franchises (most notably Star Wars). For the Hagemans, their most important audience is kids, but not in a way that talks down to children. The decision to set the series so far from explored Federation space is part of keeping it accessible to newcomers, while also freeing it from any constraints imposed by any of the concurrently running Trek programs on Paramount+ like Picard.

Nickelodeon

But even as it remains kid friendly, the Hagemans told Engadget that they want to create the kind of moments that “[stick] to your bones,” like seeing “ET dead on the table.” They want the show to have an impact, and this week’s scene with Zero is hopefully one of those.

Another inspiration for this season of Prodigy comes from a less sci-fi, more action-oriented source: the 1993 film The Fugitive. Not so much in the idea that we’ll see a lot of train explosions, but more in the sense that there’s no real villain in the central conflict. The plot arc will involve Starfleet trying to get the Protostar back, and the kids having to keep it away due to what happened in this week’s episode. It’s just two well-meaning groups with different goals, something I’ve personally noticed in a lot of media lately and a premise that the Hagemans believe it’s important for kids to see.

Nickelodeon

It’s also important to them to see the kids grow and adapt to their situation, especially as they’re being tasked with situations that even Starfleet-trained officers would struggle with: “You see kids dealing with a lot of emotions; a lot of things are coming at them, and there’s times when you feel crippled, and that’s something you see in adolescence.” We’ve already seen some significant character growth for Rok-Tahk, and the Hagemans promise that the characters will age for whatever number of seasons the show gets. And even Murf gets a plot arc, one that “is not about what Murf is … more like where does Murf go; what does Murf become?”

Murf fans only have to wait for the next 10 episodes, at least. The rest of the season will see the crew finding out what the Diviner did to their ship, and how it puts the Federation out of reach. I’ve previously noted how the series showcases its technology by focusing on the have-nots, something on display this week as the prisoners of Tars Lamora finally get access to the universal translator tech that so impressed the Protostar crew early on. And, while the ship has seemed a bit overpowered compared to the other 24th century tech we’ve seen in other shows, the Hagemans promise it will still be limited in some ways, and the ship won’t be “zapping around at their will.” 2383 technology may have proved life-changing for Prodigy’s crew, but going forward the program can now showcase how it can also be fun.

Twitter increased its character limit over the years from 140 to 280 to give users more leeway with what they want to say. That's not always enough, though, which is why the term "tweetstorm" to indicate a series of interconnected tweets was coined. People also sometimes post images of lengthy statements instead. Based on a new discovery by Jane Manchun Wong, though, Twitter is working on a new feature that would cater to the needs of those who want to share their thoughts on the website in one lengthy article. 

Manchun Wong, known for finding experimental features within apps, discovered the existence of a "Twitter Articles" tab. The name itself signifies a long-form format for the social network that has long only allowed people to post bite-sized text messages, but its exact nature is a mystery for now. It's also unclear whether it will be available to everyone, if it does make it to wide release, or if it will be exclusive to Twitter Blue subscribers. 

Not everyone's keen on the idea either. Someone pointed out that it might reduce engagement on Twitter, since a thread of tweets often get multiple reactions and responses from the same users. A Twitter spokesperson told CNET that the company is "always looking into new ways to help people start and engage in conversations" and that it will share more soon. 

A website called HitPiece that has been selling music-related NFTs has temporarily closed after artists accused it of appropriating their work without permission, Rolling Stone has reported. Outraged social media posts were issued recently from artists including Jack Antonoff, Eve 6, and Sadie Dupuis. "Any [Bleachers] NFTs are fake," Tweeted Jack Antonoff. "I do not believe in NFTs so anything you see associated with me isn't real."

The HitPiece website is apparently built on top of Spotify's API. Before shutting down, it appeared to be offering NFTs of songs and albums from the likes of John Lennon and BTS, including photos and album artwork, according to the Internet Archive. 

Like many other NFT business models, however, it's not clear what HitPiece was selling, exactly. "This particular grift doesn’t really affect artists in that HitPiece wasn’t even selling files of the songs — just the receipt of purchase to the general idea of them," Infant Island guitarist and grad student Alex Rudenshiold told Rolling Stone. "It's still copyright infringement. It's re-commodifying the metadata (art, song and album titles, etc.) to make money without permission." 

HitPiece, founded by former indie label owner Rory Felton, issued a statement. "Clearly we have struck a nerve and are very eager to created the ideal experience for music fans," it said on Twitter. "To be clear artists get paid when digital goods are sold on Hitpiece. "We are continuing to listen to all user feedback and are committed to evolving the product to fit the needs of the artists, labels and fans alike." 

However, artists are skeptical of HitPiece's claim that they will be paid. "They steal your music, auction NFTs of it on their site, and when they get caught they say don’t worry you 'get paid,'" the group Deerhoof tweeted. "I get that corporate types are simply greedy and cruel on principle but what kind of mind could even imagine that doubletalk like this could somehow make it OK?"