Add a licensing misstep to the list of problems facing former President Donald Trump’s social media network. The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) says The Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) violated a licensing agreement when it recently launched a test version of TRUTH Social. The website ran on a modified version of Mastodon, a free and open-source platform for operating Twitter-like social media networks. Anyone can use Mastodon provided they comply with AGPLv3, the software license that governs its code.

One of the central provisions of AGPLv3 is that licensees must share their source code with all users. In the short time a test version of TRUTH Social was up earlier today, it did not do that. Now, the Software Freedom Conservancy, an organization that enforces open source software licenses, says TMTG has 30 days to comply with AGPLv3 or face the consequences.

“The license purposefully treats everyone equally (even people we don’t like or agree with), but they must operate under the same rules of the copyleft licenses that apply to everyone else,” SFC said in a blog post.

It says the company must “immediately” make TRUTH Social’s source code available to everyone who accessed the site earlier in the day. If TMTG fails to do so in 30 days, it will permanently lose access to the software it used to build its platform. “That’s how AGPLv3’s cure provision works — no exceptions — even if you’re a real estate mogul, reality television star, or even a former POTUS,” the SFC said. If TMTG doesn’t comply with the request, it could face a lawsuit. “We will be following this issue very closely and demanding that Trump’s Group give the corresponding source to all who use the site,” SFC said.

In closing, SFC shared details about how TRUTH Social was defaced earlier in the day. It says it found no evidence anyone “illegally broke” into the website. Instead, it notes the episode was the result of an improper configuration. “Once discovered, people merely used the site legitimately to register accounts and use its features,” the organization said.

Fans of Mythic Quest have much more of the show to look forward to. Apple TV+ has renewed the series for seasons three and four. The second season of the workplace sitcom aired this spring, and season three will arrive in 2022.

Co-creator Rob McElhenney (who plays Ian Grimm in the show) made the announcement with the help of a couple of familiar faces: Jason Sudeikis, the Emmy-winning face of fellow Apple TV+ comedy series Ted Lasso, and Anthony Hopkins, who received an Emmy nomination for narrating Mythic Quest's standalone "Everlight" episode. The series picked up another Emmy nomination this year for its sound editing.

Mythic Quest, which is from some of the folks behind It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, focuses on the developers of a hugely successful fictional MMORPG. Ubisoft co-produces Mythic Quest, so there's certainly a degree of authenticity to the show and how a game studio might actually operate.

The real world just felt too small when I stepped out of Denis Villeneuve's Dune. There weren't any enormous spaceships ready to rocket off to planets in distant galaxies. No Brutalist palaces amid endless desert vistas. No building-sized sandworms roaming about, eager to devour anyone who disturbed them. Just me and traffic on Atlanta's I-285.

This latest Dune adaptation isn't perfect — it's at times emotionally empty, and it's basically set up for a second movie we may never see — but it successfully transported me to the universe Frank Herbert created over half a century ago. The film focuses on half of the novel, telling the story of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), a sheltered baron's son who moves to the desert planet of Arrakis. It's an important post, since it's the only world that produces the melange, or spice, which powers interstellar travel. But as Paul quickly learns, it's also a dangerous place for his elite family, and it's where he learns he may also be a potential messiah. You know, typical teen boy stuff.

Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures

After being wowed by Dune in the theater, I plan to rewatch it at home on HBO Max, where it's also being released today. But I'm certain the experience won't be the same, even on my 120-inch projector screen. This Dune demands to be seen on something even bigger—a place where your very sense of being can be dwarfed. Dune made me feel like Paul Atreides standing in front of a skyscraper-sized sandworm, waiting to be consumed. And I welcomed it.

Of course, it's no simple thing to trek out to the cinema these days, not with coronavirus still raging and fellow theatergoers refusing to take basic safety precautions. (The vaccines are safe. Masks work. Please protect yourself and others.) But if you can manage to safely see it in theaters — perhaps by renting out a private screen with friends — you'll be reminded of what makes that experience so special. I watched it in the second row of a fairly typical multiplex theater, and it still floored me. I can only imagine what it would be like on a full-sized IMAX screen, which can reach up to 98 feet tall.

Dune is at its best when Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser let you soak in the vistas, the regal-yet-alien costumes and the wealth of background details. It's pure visual world-building. At one point, a character's eyes briefly flash white when he's asked to compute the cost of an imperial envoy's trek through the stars. It's never explained, but you get it. This style of slow burn sci-fi isn't for everyone, but if you enjoyed Arrival or Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve's previous genre forays, there's a good chance you're primed for this brand of storytelling.

Even before I saw anything on the screen, though, I felt Dune in my gut. As I waited for my screening to begin, an alien voice began speaking out of nowhere, sounding like it came entirely from the theater's subwoofers. It posed a question about the power of drums, but really, it was as if the movie was saying, "Sit up, pay attention, you're not on Earth anymore."

The film's inventive sound design doesn't stop there. Everything you hear — from the roar of spaceships as they take off, the buzz of dragonfly-like vehicles as they flap their wings, or the sphincter-clenching roar of the sandworms — is meticulously crafted to make you believe it's all real. Hans Zimmer's score doesn't tread too far from his Gladiator vibe, but does a fine job of making everything sound epic. (And yes, I was blasting it down the highway as I sped back home.)

Don't take my praise for this movie as disrespect towards David Lynch's 1984 Dune. That was a troubled production that's since attained cult status, but it was hampered by meddling producers and a script that tried to cram in the entire novel. Villenueve's approach is more confident and, as you'd expect, is backed by far more capable visual effects technology. Even though it runs for two hours and 35 minutes, I could have easily given up another three hours to watch the rest of the story.

Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures

Unfortunately, there's a chance we won't see that conclusion. Warner Bros. originally agreed to let Villeneuve tell the story in two parts (this movie's title card says "Dune Part 1"), but the follow-up still hasn't been officially greenlit. The director told Variety that his plan to shoot both parts at once was denied—he expects to hear more from the studio once we see how Dune performs in theaters and on HBO Max. Plans for a prequel TV series, Dune: The Sisterhood, are still in the works with Villeneuve attached to produce.

As epic as Dune is, it's a shame that its scope couldn't fit in actors from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), cultures that Herbert was clearly inspired by. The film almost goes out of its way to diminish any Islamic influence from its story (instead of Jihad, there are references to a crusade). That's particularly egregious when we see the locals of Arrakis, the blue-eyed sand dwellers known as the Fremen, who are often portrayed as noble savages. At least the film begins with the Fremen perspective: Chani, played by Zendaya, wonders aloud who their next oppressors will be.

All of this is to say, if you can make it to the theater to see Dune, you should. You can still capture some of its immensity by watching it up close: Pull a chair right up to your TV, or veg out with a laptop as close to your eyeballs as possible. But Dune is a story that hinges on the power of dreams, so it’s almost fitting that it’s best experienced when it overwhelms your reality.

Twitter is rolling out a way for people to sign up to Revue newsletters directly from tweets. When someone shares their Revue newsletter, the tweet will include a subscribe button. If someone clicks a link to a specific newsletter issue, they'll see an option to subscribe when they return to their Twitter feed. The feature is live on the web now, and it's coming to iOS and Android soon.

In addition, if your Twitter account is linked to an email address, you can sign up to receive newsletter updates with a single click. You won't need to confirm your subscription through your email inbox.

The update should make it easier for people to convert Twitter followers into newsletter subscribers. It's a big advantage for Revue over the likes of Substack and other newsletter services, since writers on those platforms have to guide potential subscribers through a slightly longer signup process.

Twitter recently added Revue newsletter signup buttons to profiles on the web, iOS and Android. The company bought Revue in January as the newsletter ecosystem continued to pick up steam.

Nintendo has delayed Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp. The company will release the remake in spring 2022 instead of December 3rd, 2021, as previously announced. "The game just needs a little more time for fine tuning," it said of the delay.

Nintendo first announced the Switch title back at its E3 Direct back in June. The remake will bundle together "reimagined" versions of Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising. The two games, long considered classics of the turn-based tactical strategy genre, first came out on the Game Boy Advance in 2001 and 2003. Intelligent Systems, best known for its work on the Fire Emblem franchise, was the lead developer on both titles.

Spend enough time on social media and it’s likely that you’ll see what I’ve started to call a Bad Math Scam. This is where an account, looking to juice their engagement figures, posts an equation with a challenge for people to solve it. Often, it’ll say something like “Only ‘80s Kids Can Do This” or “Brain Power Challenge: Can You Do This Without a Calculator?”. The only problem is that the equation is so ambiguously-written that you can come up with multiple answers.

Here’s one that I found floating around the internet a couple of days ago from an account that seems to re-share a lot of existing content in the hope of going viral. The tweet reads (in true viral bait style) “Please don’t use a Calculator, use your BRAIN: 50+50 - 25 x 0 + 2 + 2 = ??”.

Now, the equation is sufficiently ambiguous in its design that, depending on how you tackle it, it produces a number of different answers. In this instance, users concluded that the answer was definitely 0, 4, 79 or 104. The subsequent chat often breaks out into some discussion about how Order of Operations work and how stupid the other people are. Between argument, counter-argument, and people smugly retweeting about how other people didn’t pay attention to high school math, the original poster has succeeded in getting their engagement.

But there is a solution, and a neat way of arriving at the correct answer both for this problem and for any others you see online. And I’ve enlisted the help of a mathematician to help explain it so that this sort of viral bait never trips you up ever again. Especially if you don’t recall your PEMDAS (or BODMAS, if you were raised on the other side of the pond) from high school math.

Dr. Helen Crowley is lecturer in mathematics at the University of East Anglia, and took issue with how I’d described the equation. “The problem shared [above] is not actually ambiguous at all,” she said, “maths is a very well-behaved subject and there are fixed rules that all problems like this follow.” Dr. Crowley is, of course, referring to the Order of Operations, which explains how a multi-part equation like the one above is meant to be broken down and worked out.

In the US and UK, Order of Operations is expressed under the acronyms PEMDAS (US) or BODMAS (UK). The terms may differ, but the order in which you calculate each component part of the equation remains the same. You start with anything in Parentheses / Brackets, and then move on to anything using Exponents / Orders, which are figures including square-roots and powers. The equation above, uses neither.

Third in the list is Multiplication and Division, which is the first function that we actually need to do. “For this problem, we [first] do 25 x 0 = 0,” said Dr. Crowley. That 0 then inserts itself into the sum, which now looks like 50 + 50 - 0 + 2 + 2. “The last two operations to consider are Addition and Subtraction,” said Dr. Crowley, making the final sum 50 + 50 - 0 + 2 + 2 = 104. “This is exactly what your calculator does, as it is programmed to ‘know’ the order,” said Dr. Crowley, “the above problem certainly isn’t ambiguous, we are just forgetting the rules.”

Now, you may be wondering who was in charge of establishing this order, and when that may have happened. According to the UEA’s Dr. Mark Cooker, the current Order of Operations was probably first laid down in their current form in the middle of the 16th century. Before that point, “manuscripts were wholly wordy, and free from operational symbols, except abbreviations,” said Dr. Cooker. But from the mid-16th century onwards, math texts “were first printed in large numbers for education.”

Cooker then believes that it was the wide-ranging influence of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London that “set new high standards to reduce ambiguity in handling powers, brackets and multiplications or additions, in the correct order.” He said that the journal, as it would now be described, “spread higher standards of maths typography as far afield as St. Petersburg, where Leonard Euler was working.” Euler was one of the most pioneering mathematicians of the 18th century, who “published so many papers and influential textbooks,” along with “clear explanations of BODMAS rules in his elementary texts must have made everyone agree on the current order of operations.”

Now that you know how to solve those crappy equations people post on social media, don’t forget to share a link to this story to serve as a bulwark against folks cynically trying to juice their engagement.

Instagram is testing new tools to make it easier for creators to earn money through its service. The app is now testing affiliate shops, a feature it first previewed at its Creator Week event in June, and a dedicated “partnerships” inbox.

Affiliate shops are an extension of Facebook’s existing shopping features, which are already widely available. But the latest version of the storefronts allow creators to link to products that are already part of their affiliate arrangements. Creators will earn commission fees when their followers buy products from these shops (though the exact terms of these arrangements haven’t been detailed). The company says that for now the shopping feature will only be available to creators who are part of that affiliate program.

Instagram is also testing new inbox features it says will make it easier for brands to connect with creators for sponsorships. Instagram DMs will get a dedicated “partnerships” section just for messages from brands. The company says this will give those messages “priority placement” and will allow them to skip the “requests” section where incoming messages are often lost.

Instagram

Separately, the app is working on tools to match brands with creators looking for sponsorships. With the tools, creators can identify brands they are interested in working with directly from the app. While brands would be able to browse creators who fit their needs based on factors like age, gender and follower count.

The tools are still in an early stage, with only a handful of companies and creators participating for now. But the company has previously signaled such features could expand significantly. Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that Instagram is planning a “branded content marketplace” to help enable a bigger “creator middle class.”

Sony has announced when its next State of Play stream will take place. You can watch it on October 27th at 5PM ET on Twitch or YouTube.

It'll be a short broadcast, clocking in at 20 minutes or so, but as we saw with Sony's blockbuster showcase in September, it can pack a lot into these events. The company didn't say what games will be featured nor did it rule anything out. However, the focus will be on third-party titles for PS4 and PS5.

Along with reveals from some of its partners, Sony is promising more info about previously announced games. Here's hoping for a firm release date for Bethesda and Tango Gameworks' delayed Ghostwire: Tokyo, which is scheduled for next spring. Square Enix's Forspoken is also penciled in for that timeframe, so perhaps Sony will reveal exactly when that game's coming too. And maybe, just maybe, we'll learn more about the PS5 version of Grand Theft Auto V, which is due to arrive in March.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking Grand Theft Auto III. Although Rockstar Games didn’t mark the occasion with a sudden surprise release of Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy — The Definitive Edition, it revealed when you’ll be able to get your hands on the upgraded versions of GTA III, GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas.

The bundle arrives digitally on November 11th (the former release date for the PS5 and Xbox Series X versions of GTA V) on PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch. Physical editions will be available for consoles on December 7th.

Rockstar is charging $60 for the trilogy, which might be hard to swallow for some given that the original versions were often available for a few bucks each before the publisher pulled them from digital storefronts this month. It's worth noting that the remastered GTA: San Andreas hits Xbox Game Pass on November 11th and the upgraded GTA III will arrive on PlayStation Now on December 7th.

The most obvious changes to the games are upgraded, richer visuals. Rockstar has added higher resolution textures, enhanced the weather effects, improved character and vehicle models, overhauled the lighting system and increased draw distances — all while trying to hang onto each game's original aesthetic. Vice City, for one thing, looks far more vibrant than the original, but it's clearly still Vice City.

There are some platform-specific enhancements. PS5 and Xbox Series X players will be able to run the games in 4K at up to 60 frames per second. On PC, there's support for NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscaling tech. Switch players, meanwhile, will have gyro controls and can use the touchscreen to to navigate menus and to zoom and pan the camera.

Rockstar has tweaked the gameplay in other ways. The controller layout now matches that of GTA V, and there are changes to gunplay and targeting, the weapon and radio station selection wheels and minimaps (such as the ability to set waypoints). You'll also be able to immediately restart a mission after failing too, which is a great quality of life update.

Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone, aka "ConcernedApe," has made a surprise unveiling of his next game, Haunted Chocolatier. It has the same pixelated SNES look as Stardew, with characters, set-pieces and themes that are similarly cute and quirky. 

"In this game, you will play as a chocolatier living in a haunted castle. In order to thrive in your new role, you will have to gather rare ingredients, make delicious chocolates, and sell them in a chocolate shop," according to Barone's blog on the new website. The video shows characters heading out into into a town, the castle, a mountain and other scenarios to seek ingredients and fend off creatures.

It's Barone's first game since Stardew Valley launched in 2016, but so far it's not a lot more than a demo. Barone has yet to finalize the gameplay systems, and said he doesn't even want to be "tied down to any particular concept of what the game is" ahead of launch. 

Haunted Chocolatier does sound and look a lot like Stardew at first take. However, in a FAQ, Barone said there will be some substantial differences, particularly when it comes to gameplay.

Like Stardew Valley, Haunted Chocolatier is another "town game," where you move to a new town and try your hand at a new way of living. You’ll get to know the townspeople, achieve your goals and make progress in many ways. All of that is similar to Stardew Valley. However, the core gameplay and theming are quite a bit different. Haunted Chocolatier is more of an action-RPG compared to Stardew Valley. And instead of a farm being the focal point of your endeavors, it’s a chocolate shop.

Barone wouldn't reveal other details, like whether the new title is set in the same world as Stardew, nor a release date or even a general timeframe. He did say that it would be single-player only, with no plans for multiplayer. The game will "100 percent" come to PC, though he has "every intention of bringing it to the other major platforms as well."