You don’t see too many mentions of global hamburger behemoth McDonald’s here, but their take on Kane Parsons’ 2026 horror/thriller film Backrooms, is simply finger licking good.

Although hints of what was to come were there to see, The Social Network, the 2010 dramatisation of the founding of Facebook, had the hallmarks of a feel-good story. At least from the perspective of would-be entrepreneurs, whose next-big-thing idea, had, against the odds (of course), become the next-big-thing. A lot...

Tangentially related to the previous post. Data recently published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) suggests some Australians felt better off during the COVID pandemic, despite lockdowns and other restrictions on their movements, than they do today. In 2026 people are dealing with cost-of-living...

A postmortem, perhaps, of the metaverse, particularly as envisaged by Meta, by Nick Heer. A number of other big tech players also had visions of an all encompassing immersive, digital realm, but aside from sometimes considerable expenditure, not a whole lot came of it. From where we are now, several years later, the...

Some people are tired of streaming, says Iskhandar Razak, writing for writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). I’m not sure if it’s the actual process of watching, say, a movie online, or having to deal with streaming content providers, that’s fatiguing viewers, it sounds like a bit of both I’m...

Sarah Perez, writing for TechCrunch: For a few dollars per month, consumers subscribing to Instagram Plus ($3.99/mo), Facebook Plus ($3.99/mo), or WhatsApp Plus ($2.99/mo) will gain access to extra features, like profile customization, super reactions, and story insights, among other things. In addition to these...

Jason Koebler, and Emanuel Maiberg, writing for 404 Media: An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced “Scout” personal assistant AI is to “make people addicted” to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned. “Three phases from addictive app to...

Search engine DuckDuckGo has experienced a noticeable surge in users in recent weeks, says Rebecca Bellan, writing for TechCrunch. Many of these new arrivals are concerned about Google’s proposals to significantly change its search experience, through the use of AI, something I think is being called AI Mode....

The news we’ve been waiting for. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, the 2022 novel by American author Gabrielle Zevin, is to be adapted to film. Daisy Edgar-Jones, who starred in the screen adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, has been cast in the central role of Sadie Green, a games designer....

John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball: You know what a dickover is, even if you didn’t know what to call it (until now). If you use the Internet, you encounter them every day. They’re popovers, but dickheaded. The web is absolutely lousy with them, and mobile apps present them too, with increasing frequency. I’ve...

Daniel Jalkut: My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against it is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it. From where I sit, somewhere in the middle of this, that’s the way it looks.

You won’t find Hestia, a super-Earth planet, on any of the charts, for this is a body imagined by Kurzgesagt. But Hestia, on paper at least, is a super-Earth in more ways than one. No polar regions are present, ditto continents, though there are a multitude of medium size island land masses. The planet also sports...