Table of ContentsTable of ContentsTransformers (2007)300 (2007)Lou (2022)Despite it being the season of giving, Netflix has a surprising amount of action content queued up in December. The return of Squid Game, Netflixs most popular TV show, returns for a second season that will be even more violent and bloodier than the first. Black Doves, an entertaining spy thriller starring Keira Knightley, is also on the streamer this month.While those two offerings are TV shows, Netflix does not skimp on action movies. The service has an entire genre dedicated to action, with multiple subgenres highlighting blockbusters, indies, and more. This month, consider streaming these three action movies, including a live-action film based on popular action figures, a brutal war story, and a survival thriller.Recommended VideosWe also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max,andthe best movies on Disney+.RelatedParamountMichael Bays Transformers franchise goes off the rails in the latter films, but the initial trilogy is quite fun, especially 2007s Transformers. In the battle between the admirable Autobots and the villainous Decepticons for alien robot supremacy, one person holds the key to victory: Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf). Sam owns a valuable pair of glasses with the coordinates to the powerful AllSpark imprinted on them.The AllSpark is the source of all Cybertronian life; whichever side finds it will win the war. Disguised as vehicles, the Autobots, led by Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen), find Sam and recruit him to join the fight. It wont be easy, as Megatron (Hugo Weaving) and the Decepticons plan to destroy humanity if it means finding the AllSpark.Stream Transformers on Netflix.300 (2007)300 - Official Trailer [HD]300slasting legacy is arguably the series of memes and gifs it inspired, including the This is Sparta chant. Hilarity aside,300is the best example of Zack Snyders talent violent action, extravagant visuals, and slow motion. In a fictional retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae, 300The Persian army boasts over 300,000 soldiers, while Leonidas can only muster about 300 Spartans. Despite their numbers disadvantage, the Spartans are superior fighters and repeatedly defeat whatever threats Xerxes sends their way. Death may be inevitable, but the Spartans will not go down without a fight.Stream 300on Netflix.Liane Hentscher / NetflixOscar winner Allison Janney is a reclusive woman with a deadly past in Lou, a crime thriller directed by Anna Foerster. On Orcas Island, Lou Adell (Janney) lives a quiet life, leaving her property only for supply runs into town. Lou holds a secret: she is an ex-CIA agent with nearly 30 years of experience. Lous suicide attempt is interrupted by Hannah Dawson (Jurnee Smollett), a young mother living next door.Hannahs daughter Vee (Ridley Asha Bateman) has been kidnapped by her father Phillip (Logan Marshall-Green). Hannah convinces Lou to help her find Phillip and rescue Vee. With an impending storm in the area, the two women race to find the young girl before she disappears forever.Stream Louon Netflix.Editors Recommendations

Table of ContentsTable of ContentsBuild an online brandSound like someone famousBrush your teethFind a jobPredict the weatherDevelop your own perfumeRedecorate your houseWhen most people think of generative AI, their thoughts immediately jump to popular AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot all of which do basically the same sorts of generative things, just wearing different hats.In reality, AI is capable of so much more than simply regurgitating text, images, and computer code. A new surge of AI tools is enabling all sorts of things you may not have thought possible before. This list could be much longer, but to give you a taste of how broad AI is reaching, here are seven surprising tasks that generative AI can help you accomplish.Recommended VideosWhether youre an aspiring writer or the next Hawk Tuah girl, having a recognizable personal brand is essential in todays media landscape. But if you dont have the time and money to devote to hiring dedicated designers, artists, and agents to help build your brand and spread its online presence, numerous generative AI tools are available in their stead. Looka, for example, ideal for generating branded content. You simply fill out a questionnaire about your preferred style and tone, then the system generates the brand assets, like logos, banners, business cards, and social media kits. Those assets can then be further edited, leveraging the power of AI, in the likes of Canvas Magic Studio. The online graphic design platform is generally free to use (and immensely capable regardless of how much you pay), but if you want to take advantage of more advanced AI tools like Dream Lab, Magic Resize, Highlights, and Enhance Voice, youll need to spring for the $20/month Pro subscription tier.RelatedIt doesnt matter how snappy your business cards are if nobody can find your content online. AI tools like FeedHive are a boon for ginning up user interaction, allowing you to repurpose your old posts, re-angling and refocusing them to meet current trends and events. Ocoya, on the other hand, combines AI-driven social media scheduling with an AI copywriter, enabling you to generate and schedule a months worth of social media posts in minutes.Hootsuite offers unparalleled management of your social media marketing, allowing you to see how your posts performed across platforms and provide analysis along myriad individual metrics. Combined with its OwlyWriter text generator and the ability to answer DMs from all of your platforms in a single window, Hootsuite serves as a one-stop shop for social media management.ElevenLabsGenerative AI doesnt just output visual media. The technology is becoming increasingly competent at audio generation, especially voice cloning, as well. Services like ElevenLabs offer a host of text-to-speech features that allow you to translate your talking points into different languages in real time, or have celebrities of yesteryear like Burt Reynolds, Judy Garland, and James Dean read PDFs to you during your morning commute.Respeecher takes it a step further, allowing you to clone your voice as that of a celebs. Its audio generation model takes your spoken dialog then overlays the dulcet tones of Chris Farley or another licensed actor. The end result is your words seamlessly spoken in the celebritys voice.Proctor & GambleThe latest generation of smart electric toothbrushes have incorporated limited AIs into their services. First introduced by French device maker Kolibree at CES 2017, AI-enhanced toothbrushes have grown rapidly in popularity (and price, with some smart brushes retailing for more than $100). Theyre designed to leverage a low-power onboard processing unit running deep learning algorithms using an accelerometer to measure how often, hard, and fast youre scrubbing your teeth.With that data, often synced to your associated smartphone apps (and then up into the cloud), the AI can establish a sense of your oral hygiene routine and generate suggestions on how to improve your technique to more effectively stave off plaque, tooth decay, and gingivitis. Their apps can also provide a map of the inside of your mouth to show which teeth your brushing strokes most often miss so you can redirect your scrubbing efforts.You can currently find AI-enhanced smart brushes from brands like Oral-B, Philips, and Oclean. There isnt a whole lot of data published on whether your toothbrush really needs an AI assistant and whether it does a better long-term job of cleaning compared to a standard electric model, so make sure to take manufactures claims of this being The Way of the Future with a grain of salt.In todays chaotic job market, folks seeking employment need every advantage they can get. If you havent updated your resume in a few years, you obviously dont work in media (*rimshot*). Seriously though, why beat your head against your keyboard trying to perfectly phrase the position responsibilities for a job you held three gigs ago when you can get an AI resume writer like KickResume, Teal, or Resume Worded to do the initial heavy lifting for you? Obviously, youre going to want to check its output for accuracy but at least now you have a good place to start.The same goes for writing cover letters. Dont debase yourself by actually writing a note begging to be even considered for a position that would be lucky to have you. Its not like hiring managers actually read them anyway, so have a bot like CoverDoc.ai whip something up instead.Google DeepMindUsed to be that if you wanted to know what the weather looked like, youd have to stick your head out a window. Weather forecasting took a monumental leap forward in 1992 when the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) introduced the ENS 15-day forecast system, which is still considered a world leader today. However, a newly released AI model from Googles DeepMind division, dubbed GenCast, has shown it can outperform the ENS systems performance and accuracy by a 20% margin.Trained on 40 years of historic data generated between 1979 and 2018 including wind speed, temperature, pressure, and humidity at various altitudes GenCast proved to be more accurate over a 15-day forecast period than ENS, for both daily weather patterns and extreme events. It also offered superior performance in predicting the paths of hurricanes and cyclones. While you wont be able to use GenCast for yourself, everybody will soon enjoy its predictive benefits.GenCast is slated to begin augmenting the existing forecast systems in the near term. Rather than outright replace them, GenCast is expected to help improve accuracy in predicting cold snaps and heat waves, as well as gauging the severity of high-wind events.CartoThis one might sound niche, but its a good example of how AI is changing very specific industries and workflows. In addition to helping researchers discover lifesaving drug and protein structures, AI systems like Carto have made tremendous leaps in ensuring that their human users smell nice. Conventional methods of creating a new scent for a client can require hundreds of people working in concert, selecting and blending fragrances from a palette of 1,000 to 2,000 options.Carto, which has been likened to the ChatGPT of Fragrance, can consider up to 5,000 fragrances from its Odour Value Map and immediately generate samples of new scents with the help of a separate robot. These arent market-ready scents, mind you, but instead help perfumers rapidly iterate on new ideas, themes, and client feedback.Homevisualizer.aiIf youre moving into a new place or are bored with the home you already have, AI can help you visualize a new look. Generative tools like HomeVisualizerAI can help. This app takes your reference image, along with your text prompt describing the rooms new vibe, and generates an image of what that would look like.The AI also offers a style fashion feature that overlays popular home decor motifs from Pinterest onto your reference image and leverages Google Lens to help you shop for items in the render. You can try three renders for free before the $12/month subscription kicks in.These are just a few of the myriad applications that generative AI can assist with. As the technology continues to mature, especially as AI agents become more prevalent, their capacity to help will only increase.Editors Recommendations

Beijing opened the investigation a week after the U.S. placed additional export controls on Chinas access to high-end semiconductors.

The arms producer and drone software company have reached a deal to cooperate in creating an industry standard for controlling and operating unmanned drones, which is expected to benefit Ukraine in its war against Russia.

An exhibition at Houstons Museum of Fine Arts emphasizes the stories and rituals surrounding religious artworks and objects.

Film at Lincoln Center devotes a retrospective to the German-born director, who fled to the U.S. in 1939 and found success in Hollywood with such superb noirs as The Killers and Criss Cross.

what do you mean I can't have the power? EV charging infrastructure isnt just for road trippers Energy management will be key for electrified vehicle fleets. Jonathan M. Gitlin Dec 9, 2024 5:44 pm | 9 Credit: ABB Credit: ABB Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreAlthough there's been a whole lot of pessimism recently, electric vehicle sales continue to grow, even if it is less quickly than many hoped. That's true in the commercial vehicle space as wellaccording to Cox Automotive, 87 percent of vehicle fleet operators expect to add EVs in the next five years, and more than half thought they were likely to buy EVs this year. And where and when to plug those EVs in to charge is a potential headache for fleet operators.The good news is that charging infrastructure really is growing. It doesn't always feel that waythe $7.5 billion allocated under the Inflation Reduction Act for charging infrastructure has to be disbursed via state departments of transportation, so the process there has been anything but rapid. But according to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, the total number of public charging plugs has doubled since 2020, to more than 144,000 level 2 plugs and closing in on 49,000 DC fast charger plugs.There are ways to throw off a planned timeline when building out a station with multiple chargers. Obviously you need the funds to pay for it allif these are to come from grants like the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, that had to wait for the states to each develop their own funding plans, then open for submissions, and so on, before even approving a project, for example.Permitting can add plenty more delays, and then there's the need to run sufficient power to a site. "The challenge is getting the power to the points that it needs to be used. The good thing is that the rollout for EV is not happening overnight, and it's staged. So that does give some opportunity," said Amber Putignano, market development leader at ABB Electrification.For example, ABB has been working with Greenlane, a $650 million joint venture between Daimler Truck North America, NextEra Energy Resources, and BlackRock, as it builds out a series of charging corridors along freight routes, starting with a 280-mile (450 km) stretch of I-15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas."They have funding to build out 100 massive charging sites for trucks. And they had some funding available, but it was for this year, and they needed to use it, but the utility couldn't give them all of the power that they needed immediately. Just by nameplate power rating for the chargers, they would need something like 12 MW of power," Putignano said."In practice, in charging, probably you know that you don't really need to consider full power for the name plate, because vehicles only charge at that power for a very limited time," she said. "But in this particular project, they think that they could survive with 8 to 10 MW, but they're only getting 4 MW this year. Meanwhile, they still need to use this funding and get as much of it installed."That means digging all the trenching and building out all the electrical distribution equipment on site, if not all the chargers, with a microgrid that's capable of working as well in the future with 12 MW of power as it does with just 4 MW."I think this is the same challenge that all of these large sites are facingit takes an extremely long time to get the power from the utility. Meanwhile, you don't need it immediately. So how do you create this sort of staged future-proof solution where you're not having to open the roads multiple times? You want one construction phase and you want that site to support the future demand," Putignano said.For fleets that need their own private charging infrastructure, there are other things to think about, too. Energy management solutions are as important heremicrogrids as well as battery storage and battery-buffered chargers will play an important role, for example. But not every energy management solution is charger-agnostic, and the collapse of charger manufacturers like Juicebox and Tritium highlight the perils of being stuck in a walled garden belonging to a dead company.Jonathan M. GitlinAutomotive EditorJonathan M. GitlinAutomotive Editor Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica's automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC. 9 Comments

Broken promise Apple hit with $1.2B lawsuit after killing controversial CSAM-detecting tool Apple knowingly ignoring child porn is a "never-ending nightmare," lawsuit says. Ashley Belanger Dec 9, 2024 3:14 pm | 97 Credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto Credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreThousands of victims have sued Apple over its alleged failure to detect and report illegal child pornography, also known as child sex abuse materials (CSAM).The proposed class action comes after Apple scrapped a controversial CSAM-scanning tool last fall that was supposed to significantly reduce CSAM spreading in its products. Apple defended its decision to kill the tool after dozens of digital rights groups raised concerns that the government could seek to use the functionality to illegally surveil Apple users for other reasons. Apple also was concerned that bad actors could use the functionality to exploit its users and sought to protect innocent users from false content flags.Child sex abuse survivors suing have accused Apple of using the cybersecurity defense to ignore the tech giant's mandatory CSAM reporting duties. If they win over a jury, Apple could face more than $1.2 billion in penalties. And perhaps most notably for privacy advocates, Apple could also be forced to "identify, remove, and report CSAM on iCloud and implement policies, practices, and procedures to prevent continued dissemination of CSAM or child sex trafficking on Apple devices and services." That could mean a court order to implement the controversial tool or an alternative that meets industry standards for mass-detecting CSAM.In a statement, Apple did not address survivors' key complaints regarding detection of known CSAM. Some survivors are in their late 20s now but were victimized when they were only infants or toddlers and have been traumatized by ongoing crime notifications that they received for decades, including some showing that images of their abuse have been found on Apple devices and services. But Apple's current safety efforts seem to focus more on detecting grooming or new CSAM than stopping the re-traumatization from known CSAM spreading."Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we are committed to fighting the ways predators put children at risk," Apple's spokesperson said. "We are urgently and actively innovating to combat these crimes without compromising the security and privacy of all our users. Features like Communication Safety, for example, warn children when they receive or attempt to send content that contains nudity to help break the chain of coercion that leads to child sexual abuse. We remain deeply focused on building protections that help prevent the spread of CSAM before it starts."One of the plaintiffs suing anonymously to prevent further harm accused Apple of turning a "blind eye" to CSAM for years while she endures a "never-ending nightmare." One survivor told The New York Times that she's "suing Apple because she says it broke its promise to protect victims like her" when Apple failed to implement the CSAM detector.Apple profits off ignoring CSAM, lawsuit saysTo build the case, survivors' lawyers dug through 80 cases where law enforcement found CSAM on Apple products, identifying a group of 2,680 survivors as potential class members. The majority of CSAM was found on iCloud, which the lawsuit alleged has become a "significant profit center" for Apple, despite ongoing criticism of its seeming CSAM failings.As survivors see it, Apple profits from allowing CSAM on iCloud, as child predators view its products as a safe haven to store CSAM that most other Big Tech companies mass report. Where Apple only reported 267 known instances of CSAM in 2023, four other "leading tech companies submitted over 32 million reports," the lawsuit noted. And if Apple's allegedly lax approach to CSAM continues unchecked, survivors fear that AI could spike the amount of CSAM that goes unreported exponentially.When Apple devices are used to spread CSAM, it's a huge problem for survivors, who allegedly face a range of harms, including "exposure to predators, sexual exploitation, dissociative behavior, withdrawal symptoms, social isolation, damage to body image and self-worth, increased risky behavior, and profound mental health issues, including but not limited to depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, self-harm, insomnia, eating disorders, death, and other harmful effects."One survivor told The Times she "lives in constant fear that someone might track her down and recognize her."Survivors suing have also incurred medical and other expenses due to Apple's inaction, the lawsuit alleged. And those expenses will keep piling up if the court battle drags on for years and Apple's practices remain unchanged.Apple could win, a lawyer and policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Riana Pfefferkorn, told The Times, as survivors face "significant hurdles" seeking liability for mishandling content that Apple says Section 230 shields. And a win for survivors could "backfire," Pfefferkorn suggested, if Apple proves that forced scanning of devices and services violates the Fourth Amendment.Survivors, some of whom own iPhones, think that Apple has a responsibility to protect them. In a press release, Margaret E. Mabie, a lawyer representing survivors, praised survivors for raising "a call for justice and a demand for Apple to finally take responsibility and protect these victims."Thousands of brave survivors are coming forward to demand accountability from one of the most successful technology companies on the planet," Mabie said. "Apple has not only rejected helping these victims, it has advertised the fact that it does not detect child sex abuse material on its platform or devices thereby exponentially increasing the ongoing harm caused to these victims."Ashley BelangerSenior Policy ReporterAshley BelangerSenior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 97 Comments

How can a CISO know if a cybersecurity incident is "material," and is that even the CISO's job? Forrester principal analyst Jeff Pollard explains this and other lessons learned after one year of living with the Securities and Exchange Commission's Cybersecurity Rule.

Forrester senior analyst Janet Worthington gives a preview of a Forrester Security & Risk panel Dec. 11, and explains how software 'choosers,' 'producers,' and 'operators,' all fit into an interconnected, international, increasingly fragile IT supply chain.