theodp writes: Sneakerheads like to complain about the one that got away," writes the L.A. Times' Ronald D. White. "About haunting sneaker apps and websites yet failing to win shoe-drop raffles or find what they want at semiaffordable prices. About how the system must be rigged by resellers using bots and inside connections. Now, a scandal involving a Nike executive and her reseller son is roiling the sneaker world, highlighting worst suspicions about a booming market in which shoes can be traded like stocks. For serious sneaker collectors, this is more than a tempest in a shoebox."

In a case of remarkably bad timing, just as the ethics of the lucrative sneaker resale industry came under scrutiny in the wake of the Nike scandal and questions were raised about exorbitant pandemic-fueled profits, Amazon launched a program for K-12 students that highlights how CS makes the sneaker resale marketplace gold rush possible. "Amazon and the AWS Services are really the backbone and foundation of how we do all of our work in Data Science," explains a GOAT Data Platform Engineer in an Amazon Future Engineer lesson that teaches kids how AI and data can be used to help flip sneakers by classifying GOAT website visitors as "Hype" ['willing to splurge'], "Core", or "Under Retail" user types.

From a report: On Saturday, Zack Snyder himself will head to Twitch to unveil the first look at Justice League: Justice Is Gray... the grayscale version that will soon arrive on HBO Max. The "pre-show" for the event kicks off at 2:30 p.m. Pacific Time on the MANvsGAME channel, with the Snyder and and Justice League star Joe Manganiello joining the broadcast for the big reveal at 4:00 p.m. Pacific. StreamElements designed audience tools to use during the stream, including an engaging donation functionality that will benefit the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
The Chicago Tribune argues all you needed to know about Joss Whedon's original 2017 version is encapsulated in the 68-second YouTube video "Sad Affleck." (An SFGate columnist calls the new version "vastly better.") But the Tribune calls Snyder's four-hour director's cut "a 14-year-old's idea of gravitas. Epic, violent, full of naughty words, told with the lyricism of a pharmaceutical ad about bloating. And more importantly, for now, it's complete."

Yahoo Entertainment's Insider has compiled "The 45 biggest differences between 'Zack Snyder's Justice League' and the 2017 theatrical version." But Variety just specifically asked Zack Snyder, "Why is Justice League so violent?" [T]he violence in "Justice League" is bloodier and more violent than audiences are typically accustomed to with superhero movies, which are almost always rated PG-13 — and therefore largely bloodless. Snyder wanted to push the envelope. "It's a pure exercise in creative freedom," the director told Variety this week... Snyder says knowing his film would be streaming on HBO Max freed him from having to make his "Justice League" work for a PG-13 rating.

"Let's just do it the exact way we would if there was no ratings board," he said of his team's thinking. "Let's not use any second guessing. Let's just do it the way we think is the coolest. That was the philosophical approach." Part of the reason that "Justice League" is so violent is to realistically demonstrate what it would be like to actually face off against god-like superheroes.
ComicBook.com reports that Snyder is now also planning "a multi-day SnyderVerse movie marathon later in 2021, where showings of Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will culminate in a theatrical IMAX screening of Zack Snyder's Justice League. The filmmaker is a "huge admirer" of the Justice Is Gray Edition in IMAX, calling it the "ultimate version" of Justice League that is "sort of the penultimate ridiculous movie that shouldn't exist at its highest most fetishistic level."
Snyder tells Esquire his four-hour re-edit was "a labor of love and I would do it again in a second. I wouldn't hesitate. And look, we were doing it for free. I really didn't care. I just wanted to get it, fix it."

Esquire adds that "Even if you decide not to dive into a four hour super hero movie, at least take away a lesson from the making of the Snyder Cut: in a time when so much of us have experienced wrongs and tragedy, sometimes wrongs can be righted, and sometimes your biggest visions find a way to get out into the world."

ComicBook.com reports: Back in 2019, Avengers: Endgame hit theatres and after a couple of months, it ended up knocking Avatar out of the highest-grossing film spot. The James Cameron movie was number one for an entire decade before the Marvel film came along, but thanks to a recent re-release in China, Avatar is back on top...

When the news broke yesterday, many people took to social media to point out that the "real" winner was actually Zoe Saldana, who plays Gamora in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Neytiri in Avatar. No matter which movie ultimately wins the box office wars, Saldana can't lose... Saldana is expected to return for both Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Avatar 2.
Deadline reports the directors of Marvel's Avengers: Endgame, Joe and Anthony Russo, "have graciously saluted James Cameron's film Avatar for edging past them in the all-time worldwide box office totals," by tweeting a custom piece of artwork merging the Avatar and Avengers logos. James Cameron himself shared the tweet he'd received from Marvel Studios congratulating "ALL of Na'vi Nation for reclaiming the box office crown" (which also included a memorable line from Avengers: Endgame).

Deadline says it's part of a long-standing Hollywood tradition: A practice of taking out ads to pat each other on the back began in 1977 when Steven Spielberg congratulated buddy George Lucas after Star Wars overtook Jaws at the domestic box office. It carried on from there including when Lucas later gave a shout-out to Cameron as Titanic unseated Star Wars in 1998.

In 2015, Disney/Marvel and The Avengers paid tribute to Universal's Jurassic World and its record-smashing opening weekend. Later that year, Uni returned the hat tip as Disney/Lucasfilm's The Force Awakens rode past the dinosaurs, moving to social media for the first time. Then in 2019, Cameron saluted Endgame for overtaking Titanic and in July that year Cameron again said bravo when Endgame crossed Avatar.

"Even as IBM has sued an increasing number of companies, its IP income has shrunk," reports Bloomberg: Intellectual property rights historically brought in more than $1 billion a year, on average, helping offset massive research and development costs and shrinking revenue. Last year, IBM's income from intellectual property was $626 million, its lowest point since 1996, and 2019 wasn't much higher. While it continues to secure license deals, they are fewer and harder-won, with companies like Airbnb Inc. and Chewy Inc. waging battles in court...

In February, online pet-food seller Chewy requested a court order to block a $36 million patent fee IBM is demanding. Chewy accused IBM of "seeking exorbitant licensing fees for early internet patents having no value." IBM's claims against Chewy include years-old inventions such as targeted advertising and content resizing based on cursor activity, both ubiquitous on the web. Chewy said IBM doesn't make or sell products covered by the vast majority of the thousands of patents it has received over the past 20 years, but instead just threatens to sue if companies don't agree to pay for licenses. IBM has not answered Chewy's complaint, and no trial date has been set.

Companies that use their IP licensing aggressively as a way to make money are often referred to as patent trolls. However, IBM's position as the largest aggregator of U.S. intellectual property is more akin to being a patent godfather, says Robin Feldman, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings. With more than 38,000 active patents in its portfolio, and thousands of license agreements bolstering its legitimacy, IBM's demands have traditionally gone unchallenged, Feldman said. Such patent godfathers, with large portfolios, are "able to make offers that can't be refused." Even some of the most innovative technology giants have licensed IBM patents over the years. Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Amazon.com Inc. and LinkedIn are among countless companies that have had to pony up.

IBM also has long served as a patent bank for young companies to jump-start their portfolios. Facebook Inc. was not yet public in 2012 when it bought 750 patents on software and networking from IBM. As Instacart Inc. prepares to go public, it purchased almost 300 IBM patents in January ranging from e-commerce to smart shopping bags.
Noting a series of Supreme Court verdicts making it easier to invalidate a patent, Feldman, the law professor, told Bloomberg that "Being the godfather isn't what it used to be. It's not that patent aggregation as a business is over. You just make less money."

The New York Times reports on what the city's police department calls Digidog, "a 70-pound robotic dog with a loping gait, cameras and lights affixed to its frame, and a two-way communication system that allows the officer maneuvering it remotely to see and hear what is happening." Police said the robot can see in the dark and assess how safe it is for officers to enter an apartment or building where there may be a threat. "The NYPD has been using robots since the 1970s to save lives in hostage situations & hazmat incidents," the department said on Twitter. "This model of robot is being tested to evaluate its capabilities against other models in use by our emergency service unit and bomb squad."

But the robot has skeptics. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat, described Digidog on Twitter as a "robotic surveillance ground" drone.... Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, said empowering a robot to do police work could have implications for bias, mobile surveillance, hacking and privacy. There is also concern that the robot could be paired with other technology and be weaponized. "We do see a lot of police departments adopting powerful new surveillance and other technology without telling, let alone asking, the communities they serve," he said. "So openness and transparency is key...."

A mobile device that can gather intelligence about a volatile situation remotely has "tremendous potential" to limit injuries and fatalities, said Keith Taylor, a former SWAT team sergeant at the police department who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. "It's important to question police authority; however, this appears to be pretty straightforward," he said. "It is designed to help law enforcement get the information they need without having a deadly firefight, for instance."
The Times reports that Boston Dynamics has been selling the dog since June. It's also already being used by the Massachusetts State Police and the Honolulu Police Department, "while other police departments have called the company to learn more about the robot, which has a starting price of about $74,000 and may cost more with extra features," according to Michael Perry, vice president of business development at the company.

The Times points out that the robot dog is also being purchased by utility and energy companies as well as manufacturers and construction companies, which use it to get into dangerous spaces. "The robot has been used to inspect sites with hazardous material. Early in the pandemic, it was used by health care workers to communicate with potentially sick patients at hospital triage sites, Perry said."

Coinbase on Thursday released documents for its public debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange via a direct listing. In the filing, the digital trading platform cited as a risk factor Bitcoin's creator, Satoshi Nakamoto -- the pseudonym used by the person or group of people who created bitcoin. From a report: If the identity of the creator was revealed, it could cause bitcoin prices to deteriorate, according to the filing. The filing also referenced Nakamoto's personal stash of bitcoins, which totals over 1 million. As of February, one bitcoin was worth about $50,000. Nakamoto could negatively affect Coinbase, the company said, and destabilize the entire crypto market if the creator decided to transfer his bitcoins, which are valued at over $30 billion.

Business Insider reports: Facebook executives knew for years its "potential reach" advertising metric was inflated and overruled an employee warning to adjust it to avoid a revenue hit, plaintiffs of a lawsuit against the social media giant argued in an unredacted court filing.
Gizmodo writes: In a nutshell, this class action suit, which was first filed back in 2018, alleges that Facebook massaged figures for "Potential Reach" — an estimate that Facebook gives its advertisers for the number of people that might see their ad — to goad advertisers into spending more money on the platform, all in the hopes of reaching the people that Facebook had promised. These filings detail that some of Facebook's top brass, including Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, were fully aware that the company spent years exaggerating the number of eyeballs its advertisers could reach...

Thanks to these unsealed filings, we know just how inflated some of those figures were. Here's an example: in 2018, Facebook told its advertisers that it had a Potential Reach of 230 million adults across the U.S., out of the 250 million adults that were counted by U.S. census data that year. But according to a 2018 Pew Research study, only about 68% (or 170 million adults) actually use the platform at all. Sandberg acknowledged in an internal email that "she'd known about problems with Potential Reach for years." But she repeatedly shot down employee's attempts to rectify those figures, according to the filing.

Internally, employees acknowledged that while the product bills itself as an estimate for how many "people" your ad might reach, it is, at best, an estimate for the number of accounts — including the untold numbers of fakes and duplicates. Some employees even ran the numbers in 2018, just to see what would happen if known duplicate accounts were cut out of Potential Reach, and saw a 10% drop in the numbers advertisers were given. Facebook chose not to cut them...

The suit points out that numbers Facebook continues to give its advertisers make even less sense, like telling them it can reach "100 million" 18-to-34 year old's across the country. Census data shows there's in fact only 76 million of them — and we know not all of them use Facebook.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday listed AstraZeneca and Oxford University's COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, widening access to the relatively inexpensive shot in the developing world. From a report: A WHO statement said it had approved the vaccine as produced by AstraZeneca-SKBio (Republic of Korea) and the Serum Institute of India. "We now have all the pieces in place for the rapid distribution of vaccines. But we still need to scale up production," said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. The listing by the UN health agency comes days after a WHO panel provided interim recommendations on the vaccine, saying two doses with an interval of around 8 to 12 weeks must be given to all adults, and can be used in countries with the South African variant of the coronavirus as well. The AstraZeneca/Oxford shot has been hailed because it is cheaper and easier to distribute than some rivals, including Pfizer/BioNTech's, which was listed for emergency use by the WHO late in December.

The Biden administration is working to address the global semiconductor shortage that has caused production halts in U.S. industries including autos, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said. From a report: The administration is identifying choke points in supply chains and discussing an immediate path forward with businesses and trading partners, Psaki told reporters at the White House on Thursday. In the longer term, policy makers are looking for a comprehensive strategy to avoid bottlenecks and other issues the semiconductor industry has been facing for years. President Joe Biden is expected to sign an executive order directing a government-wide supply chain review for critical goods in the coming weeks, with the chip shortage a central concern behind the probe. The order will compel a 100-day review led by the National Economic Council and National Security Council focused on semiconductor manufacturing and advanced packaging, critical minerals, medical supplies and high-capacity batteries, such as those used in electric vehicles, two people familiar with the draft said. Additional supply-chain assessments are expected within a year, focused on critical products -- materials, technology and infrastructure -- and other materials tied to defense, public health, telecommunications, energy and transportation.

"Even with Friday's bounce, GameStop Corp. wrapped up its worst week on record as a stunning reversal of fortune wiped out $18 billion from the video-game retailer's stock-market value," reports Bloomberg: The stock fell 80% in the last five days, its worst weekly performance on record, to $63.77 in New York. The 19% gain on Friday after Robinhood Markets removed buying limits still left it far below last week's high of $483 as retail trader demand and excitement across platforms like Reddit simmered. GameStop's market value slipped to $4.4 billion, a far cry from the $33.7 billion value it hit on on January 28 when it briefly became the largest company in the Russell 2000 Index.

AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., which also had limits removed on trading, edged lower in Friday's session and capped off its worst week on record with a 48% drop...

While GameStop has shed $29.2 billion in value since its peak, the stock is still up more than 200% this year.

Wikipedia on Tuesday unveiled a "universal code of conduct" aimed at stemming abuse, misinformation and manipulation on the global online encyclopedia. From a report: The new code was released by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that administers Wikipedia, expanding on its existing policies to create a set of community standards to combat "negative behavior," according to a statement. The new policy aims to thwart efforts to distort and manipulate content on Wikipedia, the largest online encyclopedia which is managed largely by volunteers using "crowdsourced" information. "Our new universal code of conduct was developed for the new internet era, on the premise that we want our contributor communities to be positive, safe and healthy environments for everyone involved," said Katherine Maher, chief executive of the foundation.

"This code will be a binding document for anyone that participates in our projects providing a consistent enforcement process for dealing with harassment, abuse of power and deliberate attempts to manipulate facts." The 1,600-word code was developed with input from some 1,500 Wikipedia volunteers representing five continents and 30 languages, and includes clear definitions of harassment and unacceptable behavior. The code includes language aimed at preventing the abuse of power and influence to intimidate others, and the deliberate introduction of false or inaccurate content.

Just months after their first passenger testing, Virgin Hyperloop today unveiled its vision for the future hyperloop experience. Yahoo Finance reports: The newly-released concept video takes the viewer step-by-step through a hyperloop journey, from arriving at the portal to boarding the pod. Virgin Hyperloop worked with world-class partners across disparate industries -- including Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) for the portal designs, Teague for the pod designs, SeeThree for the video and animation, and Man Made Music for the score and sonic identity -- to design a comprehensive, multi-sensory passenger experience that surpasses that of any other form of mass transit.

Far from a dystopian future where dark colors, stark lighting, and screens abound, Virgin Hyperloop's counter narrative is a more optimistic view of the future: a greener, smoother, safer, and more pleasant mass transit experience. "We leveraged decades of experience designing how people and things move across various modalities -- taking some of the best aspects from aviation, rail, automotive, and even hospitality to create a new and better passenger experience that is distinct to Virgin Hyperloop," said John Barratt, CEO & President, Teague. "Recessed seat wells provide a greater sense of space, while the raised aisle is a touch of the unexpected and unique. Bands of greenery and wood textures subvert the aesthetic of typical mass transit materials with something optimistic and fresh. All lighting in the pod -- including the unassuming information displays -- are dynamic and adjust based on traveler activity and journey milestones."

"Through proprietary research and a design thinking approach to creating sound and sonic solutions for Virgin Hyperloop, Man Made Music was able to address a myriad of potential challenges for this new mode of transportation, from how to evoke a sense of privacy and space to an enhanced sense of safety and calm," said Joel Beckerman, Founder and Lead Composer at Man Made Music. "We respond to sound quicker than any other sense, so sound actually drives the multi-sensory experiences. The sonic cues of the Virgin Hyperloop identity system serves as a guide for passengers throughout their experience while instilling confidence, safety, and clarity -- you 'feel' it rather than 'hear' it. Just like a great movie score, it tells you the story. We know when we've got it right when you don't notice the sound at all: the interface is humanized in ways that are both fresh and familiar."

The city of Miami on Wednesday uploaded a copy of the Bitcoin white paper to its municipal website, joining a growing chorus of governments and companies now hosting bitcoin's original blueprint. From a report: Mayor Francis Suarez emphasized his commitment to "turn Miami into a hub for crypto innovation" in his tweet announcing the upload. He's been pumping the U.S. city's potential as a landing ground for California tech expats for weeks on social media. Miami is the "first municipal government to host Satoshi's white paper," Suarez asserted. Also see: Twitter thread on who else is participating.

Reuters reports on big changes at BP (the company formerly known as British Petroleum): Its geologists, engineers and scientists have been cut to less than 100 from a peak of more than 700 a few years ago, company sources told Reuters, part of a climate change-driven overhaul triggered last year by CEO Bernard Looney. "The winds have turned very chilly in the exploration team since Looney's arrival. This is happening incredibly fast," a senior member of the team told Reuters.

Hundreds have left the oil exploration team in recent months, either transferred to help develop new low-carbon activities or laid off, current and former employees said. The exodus is the starkest sign yet from inside the company of its rapid shift away from oil and gas, which will nevertheless be its main source of cash to finance a switch to renewables for at least the next decade. BP declined to comment on the staffing changes, which have not been publicly disclosed... Looney made his intentions clear internally and externally by lowering BP's production targets and becoming the first oil major CEO to promote this as a positive to investors seeking a long-term vision for a lower-carbon economy.

BP is cutting some 10,000 jobs, around 15% of its workforce, under Looney's restructuring, the most aggressive among Europe's oil giants including Royal Dutch Shell and Total. The 50-year-old, a veteran oil engineer who previously headed the oil and gas exploration and production division, aims to cut output by 1 million barrels per day, or 40%, over the next decade while growing renewable energy output 20 fold.
Elsewhere Reuters reports that due to the pandemic, acquisitions of new onshore and offshore exploration licences for the top five Western energy companies "dropped to the lowest in at least five years," citing data from Oslo-based consultancy Rystad Energy.

hackingbear writes: People's Bank of China, the country's central bank, said on Wednesday that any non-bank payment company with half of the market in online transactions or two entities with a combined two-thirds share could be subject to antitrust probes, potentially dealing another blow to financial technology giant Ant Group Co. and its biggest rival Tencent Holdings Ltd. Ant's Alipay accounts of 55.6% of the Chinese online payment market, while Tencent's WeChat accounts for 38.8%, according to iResearch data.

"If a monopoly is confirmed, the central bank can suggest the cabinet impose restrictive measures including breaking up the entity by its business type," reports Yahoo Finance. "Firms already with payment licenses would have a one-year grace period to comply with the new rules, the PBOC said." Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba and Ant Groups, emerged in public as he spoke to 100 rural teachers through a video call on Wednesday for the first time since China began clamping down on his businesses, ending several months of speculation over his whereabouts. Ma last appeared publicly at a conference where he castigated China's (and that of the world's) financial regulatory systems in front of a room of high-ranked officials. His controversial remark, according to reports, prompted the Chinese regulator to abruptly halt Ant's initial public offering, which would have been the biggest public share sale of all time.

According to new research from Leicester University and the Office for National Statistics (NS), almost a third of recovered COVID-19 patients will end up back in the hospital within five months and one in eight will die. Yahoo News reports via The Telegraph: Out of 47,780 people who were discharged from hospital in the first wave, 29.4 per cent were readmitted to hospital within 140 days, and 12.3 per cent of the total died. The current cut-off point for recording Covid deaths is 28 days after a positive test, so it may mean thousands more people should be included in the coronavirus death statistics. Researchers have called for urgent monitoring of people who have been discharged from hospital.

Study author Kamlesh Khunti, professor of primary care diabetes and vascular medicine at Leicester University, said: "This is the largest study of people discharged from hospital after being admitted with Covid. People seem to be going home, getting long-term effects, coming back in and dying. We see nearly 30 per cent have been readmitted, and that's a lot of people. The numbers are so large. The message here is we really need to prepare for long Covid. It's a mammoth task to follow up with these patients and the NHS is really pushed at the moment, but some sort of monitoring needs to be arranged."

The study found that Covid survivors were nearly three and a half times more likely to be readmitted to hospital, and die, in the 140 days timeframe than other hospital outpatients. Prof Khunti said the team had been surprised to find that many people were going back in with a new diagnosis, and many had developed heart, kidney and liver problems, as well as diabetes. "We don't know if it's because Covid destroyed the beta cells which make insulin and you get Type 1 diabetes, or whether it causes insulin resistance, and you develop Type 2, but we are seeing these surprising new diagnoses of diabetes,â he added. "We've seen studies where survivors have had MRS scans and they've cardiac problems and liver problems. These people urgently require follow up and the need to be on things like aspirin and statins."

Ticketmaster will pay a $10 million criminal fine to avoid prosecution on U.S. charges it repeatedly accessed the computer systems of a rival whose assets its parent Live Nation Entertainment Inc later purchased. From a report: The fine is part of a three-year deferred prosecution agreement between Ticketmaster and the U.S. Department of Justice, which was disclosed at a Wednesday hearing before U.S. District Judge Margo Brodie in Brooklyn federal court. Ticketmaster's agreement resolves five criminal counts including wire fraud, conspiracy and computer intrusion. It also requires the Beverly Hills, California-based company to maintain compliance and ethics procedures designed to detect and prevent computer-related theft. Ticketmaster primarily sells and distributes tickets to concerts and other events. Prosecutors said that from August 2013 to December 2015, Ticketmaster employees used stolen passwords to repeatedly access computers belonging to its rival to obtain confidential business information. The rival, Songkick, specialized in artist presales, in which some tickets -- often around 8% -- are set aside for fans before general ticket sales begin, in part to foil scalpers.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In November 2019, just a few days after Disney+ launched, Netflix (NFLX) content chief (now co-CEO) Ted Sarandos, speaking at a Paley Center for Media event, said that Disney (DIS) is "bound by" its content universes, a reference mostly to Marvel and Star Wars. He continued: "I do think the risk of being bound in a few universes is that there sometimes may be a melting ice cube of interest over time." That has been the most common knock on Disney for a few years now: that if Disney keeps hitting the Marvel and Star Wars pinatas, fans will get tired of it. But the numbers have proven the theory wrong -- so far. Moviegoers vote with their wallets, and have voted in favor of more Marvel Cinematic Universe installments, more Star Wars stories. Six of the top 10 biggest U.S. box office openings of all time were Marvel movies, four of them "Avengers" movies. "Avengers: Endgame" (2019) is the No. 1 box office release of all time. As for Star Wars, the final three films in the "Skywalker" saga, "The Force Awakens" (2015), "The Last Jedi" (2017), and "The Rise of Skywalker" (2019), each topped $1 billion at the global box office, despite fan criticism of the plot of the final film. Spinoff movie "Rogue One" (2017) also hit the $1 billion mark. But those were all movies, with much-hyped theatrical releases.

On Disney+ over the next two years, Disney will truly test the limits of the fatigue theory with Marvel and Star Wars original shows, and might discover that even the most hardcore fans have a threshold. The sheer mountain of original content Disney unveiled at its 2020 Investor Day this month was almost comical: 52 new shows or movies coming in the next three years across Disney Studios, Disney Animation, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, National Geographic, ESPN, and FX. In the first year of Disney+, only a single live-action original series, "The Mandalorian," was enough to propel the platform to 86.8 million subscribers. In 2021, Disney will hit the gas, with six Marvel shows hitting Disney+: "WandaVision" in January; "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" in March; "Loki" in May; animated series "What If...?" in summer; and a "Ms. Marvel" series and "She-Hulk" series (no specific date given, but Disney said 2021). Can even diehard Marvel fans find the time to watch all of those? And those are just the television shows. In theaters over the next two years, Disney will release "Black Widow," "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings," "Eternals," "Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," "Thor: Love and Thunder," "Black Panther 2," and "Captain Marvel 2." The Star Wars faucet won't start blasting until 2022 and 2023, when Disney+ will get the Star Wars spinoff shows "Andor," "Ahsoka," "Obi-Wan Kenobi," "Star Wars: Visions," "The Bad Batch," "Rangers of the New Republic," and "Lando."

When critics talk about Disney's franchise fatigue risk, they're mostly talking about Marvel and Star Wars, but if you look elsewhere in the Disney+ lineup there are additional examples of the argument. Disney's live-action releases coming over the next two years include a "Cheaper by the Dozen" remake movie, another "Lion King" live action movie, and live-action remakes of "The Little Mermaid," "Pinocchio," and "Peter Pan," plus a sequel to "Enchanted," a Cruella De Vil live-action origin movie, and "Sister Act 3." Disney is also planning a "Night at the Museum" animated series, a "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" animated series, and a "Chip N' Dale" animated movie. The criticism that almost everything Disney is doing is a prequel, sequel, remake, or spin-off is not unwarranted.

The U.S. nuclear weapons agency and at least three states were hacked as part of a suspected Russian cyber attack that struck a number of federal government agencies. Microsoft Corp. was also breached, and its products were used to further attacks on others, Reuters reported. Bloomberg reports: The Energy Department and its National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains America's nuclear stockpile, were targeted as part of the larger attack, according to a person familiar with the matter. An ongoing investigation has found the hack didn't affect "mission-essential national security functions," Shaylyn Hynes, a Department of Energy spokeswoman, said in a statement. "At this point, the investigation has found that the malware has been isolated to business networks only," Hynes said. The hack of the nuclear agency was reported earlier by Politico.

In addition, two people familiar with the broader government investigation into the attack said three states were breached, though they wouldn't identify the states. A third person familiar with the probe confirmed that states were hacked but didn't provide a number. In an advisory Thursday that signaled the widening alarm over the the breach, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the hackers posed a "grave risk" to federal, state and local governments, as well as critical infrastructure and the private sector. The agency said the attackers demonstrated "sophistication and complex tradecraft."

Earlier this week, Florida state police raided the home of Rebekah Jones, the data scientist who ran the state's coronavirus dashboard until she was fired in June. "Jones has alleged in a whistleblower lawsuit that her firing was in retaliation for her refusal to manipulate data to make the state's COVID-19 outbreak last spring appear less severe," reports Yahoo News. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis angrily defended the handling of the search warrant, saying: "Obviously, she has issues." From the report: Later, when another reporter asked about Monday's incident -- a recording of which was made by Jones and went viral on social media, drawing widespread outrage -- DeSantis grew visibly irritated. "It was not a raid," the governor said, at one point thrusting a finger and raising his voice at the reporter who asked about the Jones case. "They went, they followed protocol." He said the Gestapo comparison was especially offensive. In keeping with his Trumpian approach to politics, DeSantis also denounced the "fever swamps" of the internet -- his apparent term for mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post -- for turning Jones into a "darling" of, presumably, anti-Trump progressives. ("He threw me into the public spotlight," Jones told Yahoo News in response to that accusation. "I never wanted it.")

Officers executed a search warrant on Jones's home on Monday morning, after knocking on her door for several minutes before she opened it and came outside with her hands up. Jones has said she wanted to settle her children before acknowledging the officers. It is not clear why the officers drew their weapons to go inside. They left with laptops and cellphones, which were being sought as part of an investigation into a Nov. 10 message sent to Florida Department of Health employees, encouraging them to resist DeSantis. State authorities allege that digital fingerprints indicate that Jones, who now runs a coronavirus dashboard of her own, was behind the message. Jones denies she was the author and maintains she did not have the means to access the department's emergency notification system, through which the note was sent. Users on Reddit have discovered that the emergency system would have been easy to access, and that anyone else -- not just Jones -- could have accessed the system and sent the Nov. 10 message with relative ease.