Scott Pilgrim appears ready for a comeback, and not just in video games. The Hollywood Reporter has learned Netflix and Universal's UCP (the unit behind The Umbrella Academy) are developing a Scott Pilgrim anime series. It's not clear how close this will hew to the original graphic novels, but creator Bryan Lee O'Malley and 2010 movie director Edgar Wright will be executive producers.

O'Malley will serve as a showrunner alongside Are You Afraid of the Dark? reviver BenDavid Grabinski. Science SARU is animating the project.

It won't be shocking if the series sticks to the core plot: Sex Bob-omb band leader Scott wants to win over Ramona Flowers, but can't date her until he defeats her seven evil exes. Both the graphic novels and the movie were nods to manga, indie rock, video games and turn-of-the-millennium Canadian culture.

This is a slightly unusual twist on a familiar formula. While Netflix hasn't been shy about its ambitious anime plans, it has typically focused on originals or adaptations of Japanese games and manga. Here, the streaming service is adapting a comic that was a Western tribute — and one that many might only know from the big screen. Netflix's strategy isn't clear, but it might see this as a way to expose its anime catalog to a larger audience.

Radar might soon find its way into more personal technology than Google's phones and smart speakers. 9to5Googlenotes Google, Ford and four other partners have published specs for a Ripple standard that could bring small radar to more devices in a "privacy-respecting" fashion. The framework, hosted by the Consumer Technology Association, theoretically lets any device maker use small-scale radar for tasks ranging from existing uses like touch-free gesture control and health monitoring through to exercise tracking and even occupancy detection in buildings.

The early details are currently available through GitHub, with a focus on interoperability between radar types. Developers will initially have to add special use cases through extensions, but the Ripple team hopes to build those add-ons into later versions of the standard.

The involvement of Google and Ford is logical. Both have already used radar in shipping products like the Nest Hub or Ford's Co-Pilot 360 driver assists. The more industry-wide support there is for radar, the more customers are likely to seek it out in the companies' products. Still, it might be genuinely useful if radar becomes more than a rare-but-inessential bonus feature.

Spin, the e-scooter-sharing startup Ford acquired back in 2018, is shifting its focus in its quest to profitability and is exiting nearly all open permit markets globally as a result. In a post by company CEO Ben Bear, he said Spin has started winding down its operations in a few markets in the US, as well as in the entirety of Germany and Portugal. The company will also shut down its operations in Spain, which could happen sometime in February 22nd.

Open permit markets are places where multiple scooter companies can run businesses, with no caps on fleet sizes. Bear said they "create an uncertain operating environment" with "race to the bottom pricing." It doesn't sound like Spin has been doing well in those markets — Bear wrote that Spin hasn't been able to offer "the type of reliable high quality service [it] prides [itself] on to its riders and city partners" in those locations — so it has decided to take another path instead. 

Spin expanded its operations after it was acquired by Ford to a bunch of cities in the US and around the world. In 2021, it deployed a new scooter model that's more durable than its previous ones and teamed up with Google to show users the nearest e-bike or e-scooter on Maps. Unfortunately, those weren't enough to prevent this restructuring.

Going forward, Spin will focus on limited vendor markets in the US, Canada and the UK. Specifically, in places where cities and campuses "select partners through a competitive procurement process." Apparently, Spin gets double the revenue in those types of places compared to locations with a free-for-all market. Shifting its focus to those places makes sense in that case, but shutting down locations unfortunately also means that the company is letting personnel go: Its move will affect a quarter of its staff, who'll get severance packages and a stipend.

You can now use your phone to bet on sports if you live in New York. CNBCreports the state has legalized mobile sports betting as of January 8th. Multiple companies are already taking bets as of 9AM Eastern, including DraftKings, FanDuel, Caesars Sportsbook and Rush Street Interactive. Five other companies (including BetMGM and WynnBet) have licenses, but haven't yet cleared the legal requirements.

The move came after former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo changed his mind on online sports betting. He saw it as an opportunity to keep more tax revenue and make the state the largest betting market in the US. New Jersey currently dominates American online gambling, with research firm Eilers & Krejcik noting that roughly a fifth of all revenue comes from the state.

Any success might take a while, however. New York's 51 percent tax rate on gambling revenue is much steeper than New Jersey's 13 percent, and that could prevent the Empire State from claiming the lead for years. Still, this may be an important turning point— New York is clearly large and influential, and the outcome of its efforts could influence stances on mobile betting in states where the practice remains illegal.

The US digital-contact-tracing debacle

Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic

Unless you live in a few specific states, you likely never got the chance to use the contact tracing system that was the result of an unprecedented collaboration between Apple and Google. As it turns out, there are a few reasons the technology never took off in the US, from privacy concerns among the general public to the inability of the federal government to deviate from its vaccine-or-bust strategy. 

The Athletic set out to destroy newspapers. Then it became one.

Bryan Curtis, The Ringer

The New York Times is spending $550 million on a subscription-based sports media site and its wealth of journalism talent. Not so long ago, its founder told the very paper that bought it he wanted to replace local newspapers, with a plan to "let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing." Now the site is part of one of the largest papers in the country.

The epic rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes

David Streitfeld, The New York Times

Following this week's fraud verdict, a look back at the Theranos executive's decade-long play and some the people she brought along with her.

When AT&T's and Verizon's C-band 5G services go live on January 19th, they'll be implementing buffer zones around 50 airports in the US to reduce to risk of flight disruption. The Federal Aviation Administration has released a list (PDF) of the 50 airports it chose, which include major passenger hubs such as Chicago O'Hare International, Dallas-Fort Worth and Los Angeles Int'l. As The Wall Street Journal notes, it also includes airports in foggy and cloudy locations like Seattle-Tacoma International, as well as cargo hubs like Indianapolis Int'l.

The carriers were supposed to roll out their 5G service using their newly purchased frequencies on January 5th, but they agreed to comply with the FAA's and Transportation Department's request to push back their expansion by two more weeks. Authorities intend to use the extra time to investigate concerns that the new frequencies are too close to those used by airplanes' radar altimeters. The devices measure the distance between the plane and the ground to help planes land in poor visibility and poor weather conditions. Wireless companies deny that using the C-band frequencies for 5G will disrupt aviation.

The FAA said that Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and some of the other busiest airports in the US are missing from the list, because they're nowhere near the areas where the new 5G services are deploying. Meanwhile, other large airports are also not included because they're deemed far away enough from the nearest 5G towers. 

Airlines for America, the association that represents major North American airlines, told Reuters and The Post in a statement that it appreciates the "FAA's efforts to implement mitigations for airports that may be most impacted by disruptions generated by the deployment of new 5G service." However, Kevin Burke, the CEO of airport trade group Airports Council International-North America, is less than pleased. Burke said the list is "largely irrelevant because the entire aviation system is about to be adversely impacted by this poorly planned and coordinated expansion of 5G service in and around airports."

PayPal has been expanding its cryptocurrency business since it opened trading to all users in 2020. It allowed US customers to check out with cryptocurrency and increased its crypto buy limit over the past year. In the future, it might also offer a stablecoin of its own. Jose Fernandez da Ponte, SVP of crypto and digital currencies at PayPal, has confirmed to Bloomberg that the online payment provider is "exploring a stablecoin." He also said that the company will work closely with relevant regulators "if and when [it] seek[s] to move forward."

A developer named Steve Moser found hidden code and images for a "PayPal Coin" in the company's app and shared them with Bloomberg. Based on what he discovered, the PayPal Coin will be backed by the US dollar. It may also feature the PayPal logo with two horizontal slashes across it, though that may change upon the coin's launch, if it does see the light of day. A spokesperson told the publication that the tidbits Moser unearthed in the app were leftovers from an internal hackathon by the company's blockchain, crypto and digital currencies division.

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies backed by fiat currencies and are typically more, well, stable than their decentralized counterparts. Meta (formerly Facebook) has big crypto plans, as well, and was supposed to launch a digital wallet that supports its own stablecoin called Diem. However, it faced pushback from regulators and launched the cryptocurrency wallet Novi with the stablecoin called the Pax Dollar instead.

Tesla's "full self-driving" (FSD) feature has had something of a rocky history, to put things generously. It's been implicated in multiple crashes, seemingly persistent software bugs and a cavalcade of scrutiny from a panoply of regulatorybodies. Also, it's about to cost more money. 

The bump represents an additional $2,000 being tacked onto the not insubstantial price tag: a new grand total of $12,000, or most of the way to a Honda Civil. Nor is it the first time FSD has gotten more expensive. In 2020, Musk (again, on Twitter) announced a roughly $2,000 price increase. This most recent hike, Musk clarified, will only apply in the US; he added that the feature's "price will rise as we get closer to FSD production code release." 

Whether that means there are plans for even further price increases is anyone's guess — Tesla famously dissolved its corporate communications department around the same time FSD gained it's $10,000 price tag.

Notably, purchasing the "full self-driving" feature doesn't actually result in a car that drives itself. This largely is why Senators Markey and Blumenthal have called on the FTC to investigate Tesla and Musk for, among other things, "overstatements of their vehicle’s capabilities." According to one survey, only around 11 percent of Tesla owners drop the money required to enable FSD, and it's difficult to imagine how increasing the financial burden on buyers could reverse that trend.

Turning Red, Pixar’s latest feature film, will premiere exclusively on Disney+, the studio announced on Friday. It follows Soul and Luca as the third Pixar movie to skip a theatrical release. Disney had planned to debut Turning Red in theaters, but likely due to the recent surge in COVID-19 cases across the US and much of the world, that won’t happen. What hasn’t changed is the release date: the film will still debut on March 11th as originally planned.

“Given the delayed box office recovery, particularly for family films, flexibility remains at the core of our distribution decisions as we prioritize delivering the unparalleled content of The Walt Disney Company to audiences around the world,” said Kareem Daniel, chairman of media and entertainment distribution for Disney.

The fact Turning Red won’t premiere on the silver screen is a shame because it marks the full-length directorial debut of one of Pixar’s most promising young talents, Domee Shi. She won an Academy Award in 2019 for her work on the short film Bao, which was shown alongside Incredibles 2 in theaters. Like Bao, Turning Red is set in Shi’s hometown of Toronto, Canada. It tells the story of Mei Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang), a teen who finds out she turns into a red panda when she gets too excited. Naturally, all sorts of hijinks ensue as a result. Did we mention the fabulous Sandra Oh is also in the movie? Yeah, it will be great.  

The fact Turning Red won’t have a theatrical run is likely to significantly affect its earning potential. In turn, that could make Disney less willing to invest in diverse productions like Turning Red. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that families will at least have the opportunity to see the film from the safety of their homes.

Amazon, the second-largest employer in the US, announced today that it would be slashing its paid leave policies for workers forced to quarantine in half. The policy, instituted in March of 2020, previously provided for up to 14 days of paid leave; the new policy covers one week, or up to 40 hours.

"Throughout the past two years we have consistently based our response to the evolving COVID-19 pandemic on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the advice of our own medical experts," the notice to workers reads. It goes on to state that the 40-hour or one week paid leave policy goes into effect "immediately" and "applies to all employees in the United States, regardless of vaccination status." 

The shift mirrors the CDC's updated — and broadly unpopular — isolation guidance, which it published on December 27, as well as the decision by Walmart, the largest US employer, to reduce its own paid pandemic sick leave policies this past Wednesday. It stands to reason that other companies are likely to follow suit.

Amazon recently reinstated its mask policy for on-site workers. That requirement, along with mandatory temperature checks, were put in place around the same time as the original two-week leave policy last year, and was subsequently rolled back for fully vaccinated workers in May.

While Amazon has often been criticized for its uniquely poor treatment of its staff, in this case it's merely following federal guidance and looking out for its own financial interests above all other priorities. Instead, what the erosion of the paid leave policies for the country's two largest employers represents is the rolling back of the benefits and protections many of us have come to rely on to persevere through this ongoing pandemic. 

Earlier this week, the expiration of a White House deal with retailers mandating at-home COVID tests be sold for an affordable $14 led, predictably, to those same tests nearly doubling in price at Walmart and Kroger. Some policies, like pandemic unemployment benefits, have already ended, while key safeguards, like New York's eviction moratorium, are slated to expire soon. Meanwhile, the US is still experiencing record-setting numbers of positive cases. 

Amazon is correct that the CDC altered what it believes to be the necessary length of isolation for positive-testing individuals. But that elides the fact that Amazon and Walmart were, not long ago, offering hazard pay to workers for facing the exact same risks that currently exist in their workplaces. Incidentally, those policies were rolled back quickly as well.