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A24 movies will stream first on HBO and Max as part of a new multiyear deal

Engadget - Thu, 2023-12-07 05:45

Warner Bros Discover (WBD) has scored a coup by inking a "Pay-1" deal with indie darling A24 for priority streaming rights, the company announced. That means new releases from A24 like Iron Claw (above) will appear first on HBO, Max and Cinemax before streaming on any other platform. The deal also extends WBD's licensing for A24's film catalog, giving it access to titles like Uncut Gems, Everything Everywhere All At Once and others.

"Movies included in the pay-1 output agreement include Dicks: The Musical, Priscilla, Dream Scenario, The Zone of Interest, Stop Making Sense (2023), The Iron Claw, Love Lies Bleeding, Civil War, and more," Warner Bros Discovery wrote in a press release. "Between the existing and new library of A24 films, subscribers will have access to more than one hundred A24 titles over the term of the agreement." 

Typically films start in theaters, then go to digital purchase/rental before heading to streaming or OTA broadcast. Pay-1 gives streaming companies exclusive access to titles for a period of 12-18 months before they had to Pay-2 for general licensing and syndication. 

Paramount's Showtime has held the Pay-1 deal with A24 since 2019, but it expired in November 2022 (and was then extended a year), according to IndieWire. WBD only mentions having Pay-1 access to A24 movies released after the new deal, so anything released before that (Talk to Me, The Inspection and others) will likely remain Pay-1 on Showtime. 

In any case, the deal will be a boon for A24 and viewers in general. WBD's Max and Discovery+ have a combined 95.1 million subscribers, while Paramount+ has 63 million subs, and not all of those have the ad-free "with Showtime" tier. Around the end of 2022, HBO and HBO Max gained access to some of A24's older films, but they'll now have many more, over 100 in total.

Just ahead of the A24 deal, WBD was touting the improved tech and a updated UI of the Max streaming app. Other upcoming A24 films include Tuesday (2024, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Problemista (2024, Julio Torres, Tilda Swinton and RZA). 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/a24-movies-will-stream-first-on-hbo-and-max-as-part-of-a-new-multiyear-deal-104550565.html?src=rss

Jailbroken AI Chatbots Can Jailbreak Other Chatbots

SlashDot - Thu, 2023-12-07 05:00
In a new preprint study, researchers were able to get AI chatbots to teach other chatbots how to bypass built-in restrictions. According to Scientific American, AIs were observed "breaking the rules to offer advice on how to synthesize methamphetamine, build a bomb and launder money." From the report: Modern chatbots have the power to adopt personas by feigning specific personalities or acting like fictional characters. The new study took advantage of that ability by asking a particular AI chatbot to act as a research assistant. Then the researchers instructed this assistant to help develop prompts that could "jailbreak" other chatbots -- destroy the guardrails encoded into such programs. The research assistant chatbot's automated attack techniques proved to be successful 42.5 percent of the time against GPT-4, one of the large language models (LLMs) that power ChatGPT. It was also successful 61 percent of the time against Claude 2, the model underpinning Anthropic's chatbot, and 35.9 percent of the time against Vicuna, an open-source chatbot. Ever since LLM-powered chatbots became available to the public, enterprising mischief-makers have been able to jailbreak the programs. By asking chatbots the right questions, people have previously convinced the machines to ignore preset rules and offer criminal advice, such as a recipe for napalm. As these techniques have been made public, AI model developers have raced to patch them -- a cat-and-mouse game requiring attackers to come up with new methods. That takes time. But asking AI to formulate strategies that convince other AIs to ignore their safety rails can speed the process up by a factor of 25, according to the researchers. And the success of the attacks across different chatbots suggested to the team that the issue reaches beyond individual companies' code. The vulnerability seems to be inherent in the design of AI-powered chatbots more widely. "In the current state of things, our attacks mainly show that we can get models to say things that LLM developers don't want them to say," says Rusheb Shah, another co-author of the study. "But as models get more powerful, maybe the potential for these attacks to become dangerous grows."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Realme's GT5 Pro phone can unlock itself by reading your palm

Engadget - Thu, 2023-12-07 04:13

When LG still made phones (sigh), at one point it tried to implement a "Hand ID" unlock gimmick on the G8 ThinQ, though in our experience, there was much room for improvement. For one, you'd have to turn on the screen first to toggle hand tracking. That was dumb. Fast forward to today, Realme is bringing a similar feature back to a new phone, the GT5 Pro, with support for some seemingly practical hand gestures.

Rather than using a time-of-flight camera and an infrared light, the Realme GT5 Pro utilizes its 32-megapixel selfie camera to detect your palm print. In the above demo, you can see how the screen wakes up automatically when the palm moves away from it. I highly doubt that the front camera stays on all the time, so I'm willing to bet that this is working in conjunction with an ultrasonic proximity sensor — most likely by Elliptic Labs, which is present on many Android handsets.

Realme said palm unlock is faster than face recognition, partly thanks to machine learning using over 10,000 models. The company even went as far as claiming that this security feature passed a penetration test involving over 10 million attacks. Still, the good-old under-display fingerprint reader is still there, so palm unlock is just an extra option — probably the most convenient for when you're cooking or driving.

Realme GT5 ProRealme

Like the LG, the Realme GT5 Pro also supports several hand gestures. A pinch gesture would toggle the recent app list, and from there you can gently brush left or right to browse through the recent apps. Holding up your index finger will toggle cursor control, and hovering over a spot triggers a click. A three-finger palm gesture takes a screenshot. Flipping your palm around takes you back to the home screen. Pointing your thumb to the left toggles a "back" action. Finally, moving your palm towards the screen switches it off.

The phone itself is otherwise a standard flagship affair. It packs Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, a 6.78-inch curved AMOLED panel from China's BOE (2,780 x 1,264, 144Hz, 4,500 nits), a generous 5,400mAh battery which supports 100W fast charging (12 minutes to 50 percent charge) or 50W wireless fast charging, USB-C 3.2, NFC, dual speakers and infrared remote. As part of its nine-layer thermal structure, Realme threw in a three-layer vapor-cooling chamber, which apparently has the industry's largest cooling surface area. The device is also rated with IP64 for dust and liquid protection.

Realme GT5 ProRealme

Photography-wise, you get a 50-megapixel main camera (powered by a Sony LYT-808 sensor; as found on the OnePlus 12), an 8-megapixel ultra-wide camera and the same 50-megapixel, 3x periscopic telephoto camera (with a Sony IMX890) as the one on the Oppo Find X6 series. You can already tell the synergy between Realme, Oppo and OnePlus within the BBK family here.

The Realme GT5 Pro is available in China starting from 3,298 yuan or about $460 for the 12GB RAM with 256GB storage model, and maxing out at 4,198 yuan or $590 for the 16GB RAM with 1TB storage model. Color options include black for the glass body, and orange or gold for the vegan leather options.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/realmes-gt5-pro-phone-can-unlock-itself-by-reading-your-palm-091320182.html?src=rss

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