Instagram has introduced new features called Limits and Hidden Words designed to reduce hate and abuse on trending posts, the company announced. The update is designed to protect its users, particularly creators and public features, from seeing harassing, racist, homophobic and sexist content in comments and DM requests. 

The new Limits feature, available starting today, will allow all users to hide comments and DM requests from users who either don't follow them or only recently started following them. On top of that, the app will issue "an even stronger warning" and halt posting immediately if someone tries to publish an offensive content — rather than waiting for a repeat offense as before. 

"Creators also tell us they don’t want to switch off comments and messages completely; they still want to hear from their community and build those relationships," said Instagram head Adam Mosseri in a blog post. "Limits allows you to hear from your long-standing followers, while limiting contact from people who might only be coming to your account to target you." 

Instagram said that it developed the features following racist abuse directed at UK footballers in their direct messages. "Our research shows that a lot of negativity towards public figures comes from people who don’t actually follow them, or who have only recently followed them, and who simply pile on in the moment," said Mosseri. 

We saw this after the recent Euro 2020 final, which resulted in a significant — and unacceptable — spike in racist abuse towards players.

The other new feature, Hidden Words, allows users to filter abusive messages in DM requests. If a request contains any filter word you've chosen, it's automatically placed in a hidden folder that you can choose to never open — though it's not completely deleted.

The update, available starting today, arrives after Facebook announced that it would make Instagram safer and more private for teens. Changes introduced last month include automatically making accounts private for teens under 16, limiting the ability of advertisers to target personal information like "interests" and using AI to detect a users' age. 

The changes also come as Facebook explores creating a version of Instagram for kids under 13. While it's still in the early stages, the idea has drawn attention from Democratic lawmakers who've asked the company to detail exactly how it would work "given Facebook's past failures to protect children," they wrote. It is opposed by 44 state attorneys general, who wrote that "this is a dangerous idea that risks the safety of our children and puts them directly in harm’s way."  

Well, we knew the next Sonic the Hedgehog movie would include Knuckles, but we must admit never in our wildest dreams did we think Idris Elba would voice the red echidna. Yet here we are with the famed actor announcing on Tuesday that he’s been cast to the role.

All of this is another surprising development in one of the most unusual Hollywood success stories in recent memory. After a nightmare-inducing first trailer, we were almost sure the first Sonic the Hedgehog would be a complete trainwreck. And yet, it turned out decent and was one of the last box office hits before the pandemic shut down theaters globally. None of that is to say the series will catch lightning in the bottle twice. After all, Elba has burned through some of his goodwill, attaching his name to projects like Cats. However, at the very least, we’re curious to see how this one turns out.

As an ‘80s and ‘90s kid, I have a special affinity for Disney Television’s animation lineup of the time, packaged as the “Disney Afternoon” on my local station (WPIX, aka PIX 11). My favorite was Gargoyles. I have a special place in my heart for TaleSpin, but DuckTales was the undisputed king of the lineup. One hundred episodes and a movie with plenty of race cars, lasers, airplanes, robots, super suits, caveducks and, of course, Scrooge’s Lucky Number One Dime.

Plenty of cartoons from the ‘80s have seen reboots in the past decade, but few have failed to outshine the original or gain a real fandom. So when a DuckTales reboot was announced, I was admittedly a bit wary, though the cast announcement certainly was enough to get my jaded self at least a little excited, with David Tennant as Scrooge McDuck and Beck Bennett as Launchpad McQuack.

The show debuted in July 2017 and I have to say they nailed it. It straddled the line between giving fans all the little in-jokes and callbacks to the original show they loved, but also introducing new characters (like tech mogul Mark Beaks) and plotlines to make the show feel fresh and modern. Huey, Dewey and Louie were given different color-coded outfit designs, distinct personalities and separate character arcs. Mrs. Beakley was upgraded from Scrooge’s housekeeper to also being a former secret agent he used to work with. And Webby was aged up and made more adventurous, so she could hold her own on any journey and even make a few friends along the way.

The show’s biggest strength was how heavily it drew from its source material, not just the original series but the original Carl Barks comics that inspired it in the first place. DuckTales (2017) marks the first animated appearance of Huey, Dewey and Louie’s mother (and Donald’s sister) Della. She was also modernized, made into an adventuring pilot with a short temper, not unlike her brother’s. The show also referenced other Disney Afternoon shows like TaleSpin, Chip ’N’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers and Goof Troop. It was truly a love letter to fans, but one with a solid plot and some wicked humor that today’s kids could still enjoy.

The show came to an end earlier this year, with the third season hitting Disney+ back in March. While the first season dealt with Magica DeSpell and season two was all about the Moon, season three pit Clan McDuck against the evil agency F.O.W.L. The creators knew this would be the last season, so it also pulls double duty on tying up stray plotlines and checking off their bucket list. That included bringing back Darkwing Duck and setting up a possible spinoff show, telling us the story of how Scrooge met Donald and Della, and even giving us a pseudo-sequel to TaleSpin.

Family was also a constant theme in the last season, with the show delving into Della’s newfound parenthood as well as where Webby ultimately sits within the family. I didn’t quite cry during the finale, but I came close. One thing that kept me going in the end was the knowledge that the story would continue in some form, not just in comics but in a weekly podcast featuring all the original voice actors. Seven episodes of This Duckburg Life are available (yes, it is a parody of Ira Glass), and a nice thing about the program is that it contains no spoilers for the cartoon so you can check it out even before you binge the show on Disney+. The episodes are fairly short, less than 15 minutes, which is fine because DuckTales has always been good at packing a lot of adventure into its 22-minute runtime.

Before Gamescom 2021 gets officially underway on August 25th, Microsoft will kick off the all-digital event with a livestream of its own. The company will share an update on its holiday Xbox lineup on August 24th at 1PM ET/10AM PT. We don't expect Microsoft to announce too many new titles. Instead, it sounds like we'll see more of the games it highlighted at its E3 2021 presentation, including Starfield and Halo Infinite.

"You'll get in-depth updates from some of our previously announced Xbox Game Studios titles alongside some of our third-party partners, including some of the incredible titles coming to Xbox this holiday, upcoming releases to our monthly subscription service, Xbox Game Pass and much more," the company said.

Microsoft will stream the presentation to YouTube, Twitch, Facebook Gaming and Twitter. It also said today it would have more information to share about Xbox FanFest at a later date. As always, if you can't watch the livestream, we will have you covered after the event with coverage of all the biggest announcements.   

Facebook has today announced that it has added two new destinations for when you want to move your data from the social network. In a blog post, the company said that users will be able to move their images to Photobucket and event listings to Google Calendar. Product Manager Hadi Michel said that the tool has been “completely rebuilt” to be “simpler and more intuitive,” giving people more clarity on what they can share to which platforms. In addition, users can now launch multiple transfers, with better fine-grain control on what they’re choosing to export in any one transfer.

This is yet another feature piled on to the Data Transfer Project, an open-source project developed by Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Facebook users can already send their photos to Google’s own image-storage service, as well as Dropbox, Blogger, Google Documents and Wordpress. This is, in part, a way to address the long-in-progress ACCESS Act, which would enable users to transfer their data to any competing platform. Facebook says that it calls on government to “make clearer rules about who is responsible for protecting that data as it is transferred to different services.”

Visual media has come a long way since the first proto-human cave dwellers used the flickering of torch light to bring the hand-drawn art on their walls to life. Today, the pixel — despite its humble, low-resolution origins — sits as the current pinnacle of digital display technology. In his new book, Biography of the Pixel, Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith examines the fascinating history and development of picture elements (hence "pix"-"el") from their often-contested start in the labs of pioneering computer researchers like Alan Turing to their ubiquitous presence in modern life. In the excerpt below, Smith takes a look at the bad old days before digital displays to explain the science behind our brain's' ability to perceive motion through the rapid flashing of static images. 

MIT Press

Excerpted from ‘A Biography of the Pixel’ by Alvy Ray Smith (MIT Press, 2021)

How Movies Were Really Done

What did the inventors of cinema do (or not) to make the system they gave us so non-ideal? First, they didn’t give us instantaneous samples as required by sampling. Film frames are fat. They have duration. The camera shutter is open for a short exposure time. A moving object moves during that short interval, and so smears slightly across the frame during the film exposure time. It’s like what happens when you try to take a long-exposure still photo of your child throwing a ball and his arm is just a blur. This turns out to be a saving grace of cinema as it was actually practiced.

Second, they made it so each frame is projected twice (at least) by the projector. Ouch! That’s not sampling at all. Why did the inventors do that? Simple economics demanded it: 24 frames per second costs half as much film as 48 frames per second. But the eye needs to be refreshed about 50 times per second, or the retinal image fades between frames. Actually, 48 is close enough to 50 to work in a dark theater. How do you get 48 from 24? You show each frame twice! If you show just 24 frames per second, the screen appears to flicker. Hence the “flicks” from the early days of cinema before higher frame rates were adopted.

The third thing the original inventors did was to shut off the light between projected frames. This meant that 48 times per second, nothing (blackness) was projected into the eye — inside the pupil, onto the retina. It’s convenient for movie machines — both the camera and projector part — to “shutter” to blackness like this between frames. It allows time for the mechanical advancement of the next film frame into position. In a camera, it keeps the film from recording the real world during the physical advancement of the film. In a projector, it keeps the moving film out of eyesight as it’s physically advanced.

When you ask how a movie projector works, some people say something like this: There’s a top reel of film which is the source of film, and a bottom take-up reel. The film moves from reel to reel and passes between the light source of the projector and its lens, which magnifies the frame-size image up to screen size. In other words, the film moves continuously past the light source. But that doesn’t work. The eye sees exactly what’s there, and with this scheme the eye would see one frame sliding away as the next frame slides in from the opposite side. It would see the sliding. And that won’t work.

What a projector actually does is exactly this: It brings each frame into fixed position with the light source blocked. That’s the function of the shutter. Then the shutter opens and the illuminated frame projects onto the screen. Then the shutter closes. Then it opens again, and the illuminated frame is projected a second time onto the screen. Then the shutter closes and the next frame slides into position, and so forth.

We’ve just described the discrete, or intermittent, movement of film through a projector, as opposed to unworkable continuous movement. The same idea holds for a camera. The physical device that implements this action is called, in fact, an intermittent movement. This is the key notion in cinema history that is comparable to the conditional branch instruction in computer history. The mad rush to the movie machine turned on who first got a projector to work correctly, and that hinged on who got an intermittent movement working properly. It’s a defining notion.

To recap: An actual film-based movie projector doesn’t reconstruct a continuous visual flow from the frame samples and present this to the eye. Instead, it sends “fat samples” — thick with time duration and smeared motion — directly to the eye’s retina. It sends each frame twice, and it sends blackness between. It’s up to the brain to reconstruct motion from these inputs. How does that work?

Somehow the eye-brain system “reconstructs the visual flow” that’s represented by the fat visual samples it receives. Of course, it really does no such thing. Light intensities come in through the pupil as input. But the output from the eye to the brain, through the optic nerve, is an electrochemical pulse train. Neuronal pulse trains aren’t visual flows. It could be that the retina actually does reconstruct a visual flow and then converts it to pulse trains for brain consumption. The responses of some of the neurons in the eye certainly suggest the spreader function, complete with a high positive hump and negative lobes. But brain activity is beyond the scope of this book. Let’s concentrate instead on the customary explanations of the perception of motion from sequences of still snapshots.

Perception of Motion

The classic explanation is hoary old persistence of vision. It’s a real characteristic of human vision: once an image stimulus to the retina ceases, we continue to perceive the image there for a short while. But persistence of vision explains only why you don’t see the blackness between frames in the case of film-based movies. If an actor or an animated character moves to a new position between frames then — by persistence of vision — you should see him in both positions: two Humphrey Bogarts, two Buzz Lightyears. In fact, your retinas do see both, one fading out as the other comes in—each frame is projected long enough to ensure this. That’s persistence of vision. But it doesn’t explain why you perceive one moving object, not two objects at different positions. What your brain does with the information from the retinas determines whether you perceive two Bogarts in two different positions or one Bogart moving between them.

Psychophysicists have performed experiments to determine the characteristics of another real brain phenomenon, called apparent motion. The experiments don’t explain how the brain perceives motion, but they do describe the limitations of the phenomenon. A small white dot on a black background is presented to a subject’s retina. Then that dot is removed, and another dot is presented in a different position. The experimenters can vary two things, the spatial separation of the two dots and the time delay between position change. The brain perceives one dot here and another dot there, but only if the distance and delays are long enough. If the distance and delays are short, the brain perceives that the dot moves from one position to the other. It’s apparent motion because no actual motion is presented to the eye. The brain perceives what it doesn’t see.

Motion Blur

Persistence of vision is such that we still perceive the first image when the second one arrives. That sounds a lot like frame spreading. A frame of short duration spreads out in time and adds to the next frame also spread out in time. It’s as if the retina does the image spreading and the adding of successive spread frames. Something like this must be going on because we perceive a continuous visual field although the film projector doesn’t present one. You can think of the shape of the persistence function of the eye as the shape of the frame spreader that’s built into us human perceivers. Another reason we can assume that the eye-brain system must be doing a reconstruction, one that implicitly uses the Sampling Theorem, is because we perceive exactly the errors we would expect if that were the actual mechanism—such as wagon wheels spinning backward.

Classic cel animation — of the old ink-on-celluloid variety — relies on the apparent-motion phenomenon. The old animators knew intuitively how to keep the successive frames of a movement inside its “not too far, not too slow” boundaries. If they needed to exceed those limits, they had tricks to help us perceive the motion. They drew actual speed lines, which showed the brain the direction of motion and implied that it was fast, like a blur. Or they provided a POOF of dust to mark the rapid descent of Wile E. Coyote as he stepped unexpectedly off a mesa in hot pursuit of that truly wily Road Runner. They provided a visual language that the brain could interpret.

Exceed the apparent motion limits — without those animators’ tricks — and the results are ugly. You may have seen old school stop-motion animations — such as Ray Harryhausen’s classic sword-fighting skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) — that are plagued by an unpleasant jerking motion of the characters. You’re seeing double, at least — several edges of a skeleton at the same time — and correctly interpret it as motion, but painfully so. The edges stutter, or “judder,” or “strobe” across the screen. Those words reflect the pain inflicted by staccato motion.

Live-action movies are sequences of discrete frames just like animations. Why don’t these movies stutter? (Imagine directing Uma Thurman to stay within “not too far, not too slow” limits.) There’s a general explanation that works. It’s called motion blur, and it’s simple and pretty. A frame that’s recorded by a real movie camera is fat with duration. It’s not a sample at a single instant like a Road Runner or a Harryhausen frame. Motion blur is what you see in a still photograph when the subject moves and the shutter isn’t fast enough to stop the motion. In still photographs, it’s often an unintended result, but it turns out to be a feature in movies. Without the blur all movies would look as jerky as Harryhausen’s skeletons—unless Uma miraculously stayed within limits. The motion blur of moving objects in a fat frame gives clues to the brain about what is moving and what is not. The direction of a blur gives the direction of motion, and its length indicates the speed. Somehow, mysteriously, the brain converts that spatial information — the blurs — into temporal information and then perceives motion with the help of the apparent motion phenomenon.

Last year, Boss Team and Saber Interactive announced that Evil Dead: The Game with Bruce Campbell reprising his original movie role would arrive sometime in 2021. Now, the developers have tweeted out an update with a specific and slightly later release date: February 2022. 

The reason for the delay is to "give the team some extra time for polish and to ensure this is the ultimate Evil Dead experience you're all waiting for," the team tweeted. "This additional time is also allowing us to implement a single-player option that will let you enjoy the game when you are without your co-op compadres." 

As we saw in the launch trailer in December, Campbell's Ash along with Kelly and crew have to work together to fight Deadites led by a powerful demon. You can think of it as a Dead by Daylight-style asymmetric title with a chainsaw hand and Bruce Campbell's clever catchphrases. It also comes with a big dollop of nostalgia with familiar characters, locales and plenty of gore in the form of blood-soaked zombies.

Evil Dead: The Game will offer "multiplayer co-op and PvP for PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch," according to the developer's website. They advised that you stay tuned to their Twitter page "for more information about new character updates, pre-order availability, and the next gameplay video featuring Bruce Campbell."

Twitter’s experiment with ephemeral content may have ended earlier in the week, but its take on Clubhouse is going stronger than ever. Starting this week, Spaces hosts can invite other individuals to help them with moderation duties.

With today’s announcement, a single Space can include one host, two co-hosts and up to 10 speakers. As a co-host, you can invite additional people to talk, mute and remove rowdy participants and pin tweets. However, you won’t be able to remove the original host or your counterpart, nor can you end a broadcast. Adding a co-host is done through an invite system that allows you to search for specific users.

Of course, Twitter isn’t the only company making audio broadcasts an integral part of what it offers users. Facebook and Discord quickly added Clubhouse-like features to their platforms following the app’s early post-release success. And if you believe Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, most online services are likely to add live audio as a way for their users to communicate, much like they did when it came to video and Stories.

Microsoft will host its second ID@Xbox indie game showcase of the year on Twitch next week. The stream starts at 12pm ET on August 10th. You'll be able to watch it on the Twitch Gaming and Xbox channels.

Xbox will show off "tons" of games during the showcase, which will involve developers and publishers including Rebellion and Chump Squad. Along with updates on games such as OlliOlli World and The Artful Escape, new titles will be announced.

There will be some Xbox Game Pass news as well. During the first ID@Xbox and Twitch showcase in March, Microsoft revealed another 22 indie games that were bound for Game Pass on their release day, including S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Boyfriend Dungeon and The Ascent, which has blown up since it arrived last week. On Tuesday, you can expect to learn about a bunch more games that have set a course for Game Pass.

The showcase isn't the only notable gaming event taking place this month. Gamescom's Opening Night Live is set for August 25th. The two-hour shindig will show off some of this holiday season's biggest titles and offer a look at "what lies beyond," according to host and producer Geoff Keighley.

After playing a few hours of Back 4 Blood, the new co-op survival shooter from Left 4 Dead studio Turtle Rock, I was left with two questions: How is this legal? And, when can I play again? Turns out, right now.

The Back 4 Blood open beta runs from August 5th to 9th, and again from August 12th to 16th, on PC, Xbox and PlayStation consoles. I got a sneak peek at what the beta has to offer on PC, with an emphasis on PvE content, since there were some technical issues with PvP modes during my playtime. Those have been resolved and I’m told PvP is ready to rock for the open beta.

Not that you should expect it to be perfect. Turtle Rock Studios is using the open beta to fine-tune Back 4 Blood ahead of its release on October 12th, and developers are serious about gathering as much feedback as possible. There’s plenty to track: The game uses a Left 4 Dead-style AI director that adjusts the difficulty level in real-time as you plow through hordes of Ridden in your own special way. There’s also a card system that allows players to build decks of class-specific perks, plus corruption cards that apply randomized effects to every level, changing up the gameplay each time. And it’s a true cross-platform game, running across console generations and PC. All of this is on top of a new PvP mode and the core PvE gameplay, which has to feel like butter if it’s going to satisfy Turtle Rock’s Left 4 Dead fans.

I’m one of those fans, and I have to say, I’m enjoying the hell out of Back 4 Blood. Left 4 Dead is a pivotal game of my past, and Back 4 Blood taps into those good feelings in a delicious way.

Turtle Rock Studios

I’m most interested in PvE, since that’s the core of my nostalgia in this case, and I ended up playing about two hours of the main co-op mode with some new friends. The open beta features two PvE maps for co-op runs and two maps for the Swarm PvP mode, where teams of four take turns fighting each other as the Cleaners (the main characters) and the Ridden (the infected former humans). A new character, Mom, joins the roster of playable Cleaners for the first time, too.

One thing that stands out in Back 4 Blood is its sense of replayability. While the levels feel familiar, they’re filled with secrets and they naturally encourage dynamic play, offering various ways to approach any single encounter. The card system adds a lovely layer of customization to the game, while the corruption cards make each new round just a little different, just a little more exciting. There’s a variety of weapons and items to gather as well, and a healthy allotment of ammo drops throughout the maps, especially if you go exploring. 

Shooting the Ridden is immensely satisfying with any gun, while getting snatched up or knocked down by a Special Ridden is shocking basically every time. Meanwhile, the dialogue among the Cleaners is cute, with references to “the new normal,” lizard people in the government and the lamestream media, to name a few joke opportunities. The protagonists of Back 4 Blood aren’t shocked and running for their lives; they’re on a mission to eradicate the Ridden and create safe zones for human life to resume. It’s a refreshing perspective twist.

I ran into a few issues during my time with Back 4 Blood’s open beta content, but nothing that felt insurmountable at this stage of development. Essentially, I trust Turtle Rock to take the feedback from the open beta and apply it to the game in the smartest, most gory way possible for its launch in October.

I actually chatted with Turtle Rock executive producer Matt O’Driscoll about the beta and what developers hope to get out of it.

"These next two weeks are so vital to us," he said. "We're gonna get so much data for how people play this. Is easy too easy? Is it too hard? Is nightmare mode impossible? Like, all these kind of little things. Or, how do people build decks? Someone's gonna build a deck that I'm sure is gonna kind of break something in the game."

You heard him, Cleaners — get to breaking.

Back 4 Blood is definitely a lot like Left 4 Dead, but updated for modern systems and sensibilities. The question for most players in the open beta will be whether it’s too much like Left 4 Dead — but personally, I say bring it on, Turtle Rock. After all, it’s not like Valve is gonna give us Left 4 Dead 3. Or any 3, for that matter.