Apple has opened its Developer Academy in Detroit, first announced early this year as part of its Racial Equity and Justice initiative. The project, done in collaboration with Michigan State University (MSU), has welcomed its first 100 students aged 18 to 60 for a 10-month "comprehensive app development and entrepreneurial training" program, Apple wrote in a newsroom post. 

The custom-designed space is located in the First National Building in downtown Detroit. Apple noted that enrollment is free and that students don't need any previous coding experience. "Students in this year's class bring a breadth of personal, professional and academic experience to the program," it said. 

The Academy will run two courses. The first is a 30-day introductory program, and the main, 10-month course teaches iOS app development and associated fields, such as design and marketing. Technically, it actually opened a bit earlier this fall for a four-week basic coding course run for a "smaller cohort of community partners," Apple said. The academy expects roughly 1,000 people to complete the courses annually. 

Turns out Tesla isn't just building a factory in Austin, Texas — it's also moving its headquarters to the city from California. Elon Musk has announced the move at the company's most recent annual shareholder meeting, where he also clarified that Tesla still plans to expand production at its California plant by 50 percent. He explained, however, that there's "a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area," because house prices are sky high, which means long commutes for workers who have to live elsewhere. 

The move doesn't come entirely as a surprise: Musk previously threatened to move Tesla's headquarters out of California after coronavirus lockdowns forced the company to suspend production in the state. He even called the lockdown orders "fascist" during an earnings call in 2020 and then personally relocated from LA to Austin a few months later. That said, it's worth noting that Tesla is now based in a state where it can't sell its cars to buyers directly, which has been its approach from the beginning, due to pro-dealership laws.

As CNBC notes, Musk moving to Texas means he'd be paying less taxes. The state has no personal income tax, whereas California has some of the largest income tax rates in the country. Further, the state has been offering companies tax breaks to build facilities in the state under the Texas Economic Development Act.

During the meeting, shareholders also voted on proposals to improve company governance. The New York Times said they agreed on most of the proposals aside from a couple that the company opposed, one of which would require the company to publish reports on its efforts to diversify its workplace. Tesla said in a report (PDF) last year that its leadership in the US is still mostly white and male, while its workforce is 79 percent male and 34 percent white overall. Just a few days ago, the company was ordered to pay $137 million in damages to a former Black worker. The plaintiff accused the automaker of turning a blind eye to discrimination and racial abuse while he was working at its plant in Fremont, California. 

In 2020, Panasonic announced the BGH1, its first-ever box-style camera. The company took the internals of its well-liked Micro Four ThirdsGH5S and rehoused them in a body better suited for video production workloads. Almost exactly one year later, Panasonic has announced the DC-BS1H. Like its predecessor, this latest release from the company takes an existing Panasonic camera, the full-frame S1H, and puts it in a new body.

At the heart of the BS1H is a 24.2-megapixel CMOS sensor that can capture footage at up to a 6K resolution. Specifically, it’s capable of recording 6K video at up to 24 frames per second, 5.4K at 30 frames per second with a 3:2 crop and 5.9K at 30 frames per second with a 16:9 framing. Panasonic claims the BS1H’s sensor features more than 14 stops of dynamic range and the inclusion of both an optical low pass filter a Dual Native ISO feature help reduce moire and digital noise.

But if you’re looking at a box-style camera for yourself, you want one for the added connectivity options the format promises. On the front, the BS1H is no slouch. Notably, it includes a USB 3.1 Type-C connection, an HDMI Type-A port and a 3G serial digital interface. It’s also possible to connect 12 BS1H cameras together to create a multi-camera setup. Additionally, you’ll find the usual assortment of 3.5mm and XLR microphone connections, on top of a LAN port. Oh, and it comes with dual SD card slots for worry-free redundancy.

Panasonic will sell the DC-BS1H for $3,500 when it becomes available in November.

YouTube's reduced tolerance for misinformation now extends to climate science. The Google service has enacted a new policy barring ads and monetization for content that contradicts the "well-established scientific consensus" surrounding climate change, including videos that claim climate change is a hoax or reject the human link to global warming. YouTube will start enforcing the policy in November.

The company stressed that it would allow ads for videos discussing those bogus claims as well as other climate-related subjects, such as the exact degree of human impact or debates on climate policy. YouTube is basing its judgments on "authoritative" expertise, including contributors to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The firm wasn't shy about the reasoning for the move: advertisers just don't want their ads linked to climate change denial material, and creators don't want those ads on their pages. YouTube is concerned it could lose business, and dropping monetization for bogus science is an easy way to prevent that loss.

This effort stops short of banning climate change denial, although that's not surprising. Unlike anti-vaccine misinformation, climate change denial doesn't carry the risk of short-term harm. YouTube can keep the content visible for the sake of debate and expression without worrying that it will directly lead to illness. This won't stop science deniers from moving to other platforms or using their videos to peddle products like books, but it might discourage 'casual' attempts to profit from climate misinformation.

More than a decade after Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher dramatized the rise of Facebook with The Social Network, a new TV series will attempt to tell the story of the company’s more recent history. Per Deadline, production companies Anonymous Content and Wiip, best known for their work on Mr. Robot and Dickinson, are working on a show titled Doomsday Machine that will star two-time Emmy winner Claire Foy as COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Based in part on AnUgly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination, Deadline reports the series will cover everything from Facebook’s actions during the 2016 presidential election up to more recent revelations about its business. That includes recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal that showed Facebook has for years ran a program called XCheck, which has allowed high-profile users, including former President Donald Trump, to skirt its content moderation rules.

The timing of the announcement comes as Facebook faces increasing scrutiny from federal lawmakers. On Wednesday, whistleblower Frances Haugen told the Senate Commerce Committee Congress should regulate the social media giant. It also comes after the company went through an hours-long outage on October 4th that left people unable to access Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. In the aftermath of that event, there have been renewed calls from American lawmakers, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to break the company up into smaller entities.

YouTube is improving video accessibility for both viewers with sight issues and those beyond the English-speaking world. To start, the company is testing the option of adding multiple audio tracks to videos. This will help with international viewers, of course, but it should also enable descriptive audio for people with little to no vision. This arrives sometime in the "coming quarters," YouTube said.

Automatic captions should also be far more commonplace. YouTube now permits live automatic captions for any livestream in English, not just those with 1,000 or more subscribers. These live captions will be available for all 13 supported auto-captioning languages in the "coming months," according to the company. Auto-translated captions will also reach supported languages on Android and iOS later in 2021, so you won't have to turn to your PC to make sense of a video you don't understand.

An experiment later in 2021 will let you search transcripts on your phone, YouTube added. A previously promised subtitle editor is still on track to launch in the "coming months," giving creators the chance to delegate subtitle creation to someone they trust.

The upgrades make sense. YouTube is increasingly dependent on a global audience for views, particularly with the growth of livestreaming. These tweaks ensure more people can watch, even if a creator doesn't have the resources to add subtitles themselves.

The 2022 Geneva International Motor Show (GIMS) won’t go forward due to the coronavirus pandemic. Following cancellations in 2020 and 2021, the trade show was supposed to return on February 19th, 2022, but that’s no longer happening. Organizers are billing the move not as a cancellation but as a postponement that will see GIMS come back as a “more impactful” event in 2023.

“The decision to cancel GIMS 2022 was made with the best interests of both car manufacturers and automotive fans in mind,” said the Committee and Council of the Foundation “Salon International de l’Automobile,” which is responsible for organizing the auto show. The group blamed the impact COVID-19 has had both on travel and event restrictions and automakers through the global semiconductor supply for the decision.

We’ve seen plenty of other auto shows get canceled in 2021, but the way GIMS continues to struggle is not a good sign for the industry. Pre-pandemic, it was one of the largest car shows in the world. It would usually attract more than 600,000 visitors, including some 10,000 journalists, to Swizterland. Beyond its sheer size and scale, the show was particularly known for all the new and wild concepts cars that would debut on its floor.

Eidos is joining the ranks of game developers pushing back against crunch time. The Square Enix-owned studio has announced that its Quebec locations (Montreal and Sherbrooke) are shifting to a four-day, Monday-to-Thursday work week sometime in the "next few weeks." Salaries and working conditions will remain the same, the Deus Ex and Tomb Raider developer said.

The hope, as you might expect, is to improve the quality of working hours. Eidos is accordingly encouraging teams to redefine work conditions and improve efficiency, such as by cutting meeting times. The company had already implemented some quality-of-life changes during the pandemic, such as rest periods and compensation for mental and physical health costs — this is ostensibly a logical extension of that strategy.

Eidos isn't the first studio to adopt a four-day week. Bugsnax developer Young Horses made that switch in September. It's very rare for a large studio to make this move, though, and it might prompt similar moves by other developers if the strategy proves successful.

"If" is the operative term, however. Eidos was eager to tout past tests with shortened work weeks, like with Iceland's civil service, but it's not yet clear if that translates to the game industry. Developers are notorious for rushing games to make the holiday season, even if that leads to extremely buggy results. Eidos will have to make a hard choice: does it stick to the four-day schedule and risk delaying games, or demand extra hours to be sure a title is ready? This shortened week could pay off with happier developers, but it could also cause problems if teams take months more to finish projects.

The Internet Archive is marking its 25th anniversary by peering into the future to predict what the web might look like a quarter of a century from now. The non-profit took the opportunity to rail against internet regulation by offering a grim vision of what lies ahead.

Punch a URL into the Wayforward Machine and you'll see a version of that page covered in pop-ups. The messages include one reading "Classified content. The website you are trying to access features information that the owner(s) have opted to restrict to users that have not shared their personal information." Another reads "This site contains information that is currently classified as Thought Crime in your region."

The way things are going, the Internet Archive suggests, free and open access to knowledge on the web may become far more limited. A Wayforward subsite includes a timeline of things that might go awry in the coming years, starting with the repeal of section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites and internet platforms from being liable for things that users post. A repeal could have enormous consequences for the web, though some, such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have proposed that the provision should be reformed.

The timeline includes some other wild-but-not-inconceivable suggestions, such as a law allowing corporations to copyright facts, forcing Wikipedia to move to the Dark Web, and more countries introducing their own versions of China's Great Firewall. The Internet Archive teamed up with several digital rights organizations for this project, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future and the Wikimedia Foundation. The subsite includes resources on how to help protect freely available information.

The Wayforward Machine is, of course, a satirical version of the Wayback Machine, which has archived hundreds of billions of web pages over the last two and a half decades. It's an important resource for helping preserve the history of the internet, including things like Flash games and animations, so it's probably worth paying attention to the Internet Archive's vision of the future.

Marvel Studios is reportedly developing a new Disney+ series that will see WandaVision’s Kathryn Hahn reprise her role as Agatha Harkness, according to Variety. If the project moves forward, Jac Schaeffer, the lead writer of WandaVision, is expected to return to write the new series. She’s also likely to produce the show. Other than the fact it’s supposed to be a dark comedy, plot details are limited at the moment.

Marvel Studios did not comment on the possibility of a WandaVision spinoff when Variety reached out to the subsidiary, but there’s a chance we could learn more about the project when Disney holds its first-ever Disney+ Day on November 12th. The company said the event would include a “look toward the future” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Either way, Marvel fans would likely welcome the chance to see Hahn in her own series. Agatha was one of the show’s more memorable characters, and Hahn even earned an Emmy nomination for the performance. The spinoff likely won't debut before sometime in 2022 at the earliest. Until then, there's Hawkeye, which will premiere on November 24th.