Two new shows, one of which is the long awaited sequel to Netflix's biggest TV Original, lead our festive week recommendations.

Some security workers dont want the personal liability consequences that come with CISO and other leadership roles.

Microsoft's latest patent suggests that more advanced controller haptics are on the way.

The year 2024 has been monumental for Wt FX, featuring groundbreaking work on projects such as WAR IS OVER!, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire, Ripley, Rebel Moon: The Scargiver, House of the Dragon, Carry On, Better Man, and many more.The showreel encapsulates all the bright spots of the year with innovation, creativity, and collaboration, sealing Wt FX as a top player in the visual effects and animation sectors.Wt FX is headquartered in Wellington, New Zealand, with creative hubs in Vancouver and Melbourne. Here, 1,500 of the industrys most ambitious artists, engineers, and executives come together to create exceptional performance-driven animated characters and creatures, such as Gollum, Kong, Neytiri, Caesar, and Pogo, and the expansive worlds they inhabit, including Middle-earth and Pandora.With a legacy spanning three decades, Wt FX has earned seven Visual Effects Academy Awards, 14 Academy Sci-Tech Awards, seven Visual Effects BAFTAs, and 58 Visual Effects Society Awards. Our showreel reflects the dedication, passion, and artistry that continue to set the standard in visual effects, delivering unparalleled storytelling and immersive experiences.The post Wt FX company showreel 2024 appeared first on Vfxexpress.

Building a successful brand is difficult. It requires the fine-tuned execution of a myriad of parts, which will appear in nearly as many contexts: packaging with just the right shelf appeal, a fine-tuned, scalable logo, clicky-yet-authentic copy, and visuals. Nearly every company is bound to make a mistake at some point. But this year, a few big names really messed up.Here at Fast Company, we spend a lot of time analyzing what makes branding effectiveand what makes branding genuinely bad. Here are our top 5 picks for the biggest branding flubs of the year.Jaguars controversial rebrandIn November, the 90-year-old sports car brand Jaguar announced that it would scrap its existing branding (and car models) in favor of becoming a luxe, all-electric brand. The risky strategy seems to be a last-ditch effort to revive the struggling company, which sold 43,000 vehicles globally in 2023 compared to 179,000 in 2017. To really play up the major transformation, the company announced this shift before actually unveiling any of its new electric models. Instead, it used a series of ultra-colorful, space-inspired concept videos to convey a sense of mystery and newness.The very early response to Jaguars new branding was pretty entertaining, with plenty of creative ribbing directed at the company for the funky videos. But the internet, as it so often is wont to do, promptly sucked all the fun out of the initial jokes by turning to large-scale hand-wringing from armchair critics who bemoaned the rebrands failure on LinkedIn. Then, right wing news outlets capitalized on the news cycle by turning a rebrand into a political wedge issue by suggesting Jaguars weird new look is a symptom of the woke mind virus.Whether this is a true financial flub for Jaguar remains to be determined, as the company doesnt plan to release its new EVs until 2025 at the earliest. Early data from Auto Trader suggests that the right wing backlash may have actually spiked interest in Jaguar vehicles. Whatever the case, its safe to say that few people were thinking about Jaguar in 2023, and the same certainly cannot be said in 2024.Logan Pauls (allegedly) moldy Lunchables dupeBack in September, YouTubers Logan Paul, KSI, and MrBeast announced Lunchly, a series of boxed meal kits billed as a healthier alternative to Lunchables. But the kits supposed health was quickly called into question when several creators, including TikToker Rosanna Pansino and Twitch steamer @aSpicyCow, discovered mold in their mini pizza ingredients.Even before the mold scandal, Lunchly didnt look so goodliterally. The brands combination of clunky font, lifeless product photography, and packaging promoting the YouTubers other CPG brands gave it an air of a school project thats been hastily scraped together the night before its due. Now, the YouTubers involved are receiving a generous dose of backlash for the product. For MrBeast, who was already embroiled in a litany of unrelated controversies, its the mold on top of a very rough year.Mattels accidentally R-rated Wicked Barbie boxesNo one on Mattels PR team was dancing through life the week of November 11. That Monday, news had spread far and wide that a URL printed on the back of Mattels Wicked movie Barbie boxes led not to the films official website, but to a parody porn site of the same name.Mattel worked quickly to issue an apology, help pull the dolls from shelves, and reissue new Wicked figurines in appropriately PG boxes. Even so, Mattel was hit with a class action lawsuit regarding the dolls just a few weeks after the initial news broke. According to the South Carolina mother who filed the suit, her daughter suffered emotional distress after accidentally visiting the offending site. It looks like itll take a lot more than one short day of crisis management for Mattel to move on from this error.Bumbles big fumbleThis May, the dating app Bumble pulled off a true feat when it found a way to make the concept of online dating even more exhausting than it already is. In an effort to promote new in-app features, the company launched a campaign that was meant to take a tongue-in-cheek approach to the masses of people who are fed up with the apps. The campaign used language like, You know full well a vow of celibacy is not the answer and imagery of a nunnery to convey the idea that women shouldnt have to resort to loneliness because of too many bad dates.Ultimately, though, the whole campaign ended up coming off tone deaf, with commenters expressing their concern that it invalidated womens sexual autonomy, the experiences of asexual people, and fears around restrictions on reproductive rights. Bumble quickly deleted the posts associated with the campaign and issued an apology, but not before the whole fiasco garnered its own name: The Great Bumble Fumble.Toys R Us nightmare fuelTopping off our list is Toys R Us, which used its five minutes of fame this year to furnish the American people with a few new sleep paralysis demons. During the Cannes Lions Festival in June, the brand decided to make a splash by debuting the first-ever brand film with OpenAIs Sora platform.Aside from its painfully corny storyline, the film mainly succeeded in demonstrating that Sora was not ready to make an entire ad by itself. Every shot feels more unsettling than the last, especially those of the brands mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe, who looks like hes barely managing to suppress his deeply twisted nature. If this ad achieved one thing, it was to assure human marketers everywhere that their jobs wouldnt be stolen by Sora just yet.

Visiting adult and gambling websites doubles the risk of inadvertently installing malware onto work devices, according to a new study.Fabio Massacci at the University of Trento and Vrije University in Amsterdam presented the findings of a massive analysis of real-life data from around the world. The purpose was to try and identify what actions people make online that can result in their systems becoming clogged up with malwareand trying to provide ways to mitigate against the risks of that happening again.The data was collected using telemetry analysis of corporate account users of Trend Micros system defense software who had opted in to improving the apps services. In total, the researchers sampled around 20,000 entries from a possible 12 million they were provided by Trend Micro. The businesses that provided data covered the U.S., Japan, India, Brazil, Germany, France, the U.K., and Italy, and were chosen at random from the larger 12 million database of potential users.By analyzing the data, Massacci and his colleagues identified a number of risk factors that could increase the likelihood of malware being installed. Generally, the more software a user accesses, the higher the risk they have of encountering viruses and ransomware. But there were distinct differences in what kinds of malware ended up on a system from which type of websites. Those who visit gambling websites are more likely to encounter crypto coin miners. The data also allowed for in-depth analysis of how likely people were to encounter malware depending on when they used their computers; intensive use in night hours increased the risk of inadvertently installing malware.Both system behavior and content behavior increase the risk of encountering different types of malware, says Massacci. But the researcher explained that its not possible to identify a single silver bullet to try and tamp down the risk of installing malware onto your devices precisely because of those intertwined behaviors that impact what kind of malware is installed.For instance, while crypto miners were more likely to be deposited on systems that visited illicit gambling websites, trojans and hacking tools were more common when people visited porn websites. Websites that contained information on how to commit non-violent crimes were more likely than others to deposit similar hacking tools or other potentially unwanted applications on a system that can slow down its operation, or pop up ads that try to sell users products and services.Being forewarned with this information means companies can be forearmed to try and mitigate the risks. By knowing which user behaviors are associated with which classes of malware, an organization can proactively reduce its cybersecurity risks in a cost-effective manner for the specific malware threats they consider existential, says Massacci.

As the one-year anniversary of the 2021 Marshall Fire approached, Kyle Brown was serving as a city councilman in Louisville, Colorado, a suburb of Boulder that had been devastated by the blaze. Browns own home had escaped damage, but hundreds of his neighbors had lost everything to the costliest and deadliest fire in the states history, which caused more than $2 billion in damages and destroyed more than a thousand structures.Despite Browns efforts to help the victims, the fire recovery was stalling out. Displaced residents were struggling to secure insurance payouts and scrape together cash to rebuild their homes, and most couldnt afford the jacked-up rents in the area. The city council was supposed to be helping these victims, but instead it was locked in a dispute with them over whether they should have to pay local taxes on building materials.Brown was desperate for a way to do more. When the incumbent state representative in the area resigned after it emerged that she didnt live in the district, he saw an opportunity and put his name forward as her replacement.What happened next is one of the rare disaster recovery success stories in recent U.S. history. After securing a seat in the state legislature, Brown, a Democrat, spent the next two years working with a highly organized group of survivors to pass a suite of ambitious bills that have made Colorado a national leader in responding to climate disasters. Many of the same issues crop up across the country after fires and floods, but survivors rarely succeed in getting lawmakers to pay attention to any of them, let alone all of them. Brown, however, was able to gain bipartisan support for bills that give fire survivors leverage against insurers, mortgage companies, homeowners associations, and rental property owners, elevating concerns that have often been ignored in other disaster-prone states.This legislative success wasnt thanks to any political horse-trading or inspiring rhetoric on Browns part. Rather, its the result of a hand-in-glove collaboration with a well-organized and often militant group of fire survivors, drafting bills based on their recommendations and needs, and allowing them to tweak and strengthen legislation where necessary.We needed to accelerate the pace of recovery, so I just listened, said Brown in an interview with Grist. I took notes on everything they said, and I turned it over, and I turned it into bills.This combination of organized advocacy by disaster survivors and ambitious lawmaking by sympathetic politicians could become a model for other disaster-prone places, but it was only possible because many well-heeled Marshall Fire victims had the resources to organize and press for change after the fire, a luxury most disaster-stricken communities dont have. Lower-income communities around Colorado may benefit from the Marshall legislation, but it may be difficult for survivors in other parts of the country to emulate it.Survivors walk through what remains of a house destroyed by the Marshall Fire, which burned around 1,000 homes in the Boulder suburbs.[Photo: Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images/Grist]The Marshall Fire wasnt like the massive forest fires that have tortured Northern California or the desert blazes that rage across Texas and New Mexico each year. It ripped down from the Front Range in December of 2021 and all but vaporized a fast-growing, gentrified segment of the Denver metroplex, bringing about what climate scientist Daniel Swain calls the urban firestorm. High winds whipped the grass fire to full size in a matter of hours, igniting vegetation that had dried out during a severe drought of the kind that global warming is making more common. In contrast to California, where burned communities have often been rural and less well-off, the Boulder suburbs of Louisville and Superior are dense and suburban, filled with well-to-do lawyers and consultants.For that reason, there were several fire victims who had the time and money to become volunteer recovery advocates. One of those survivors was a patent lawyer named Tawnya Somauroo, who was galvanized to action when she learned that Louisville had not issued an evacuation order for her subdivision, most of which burned in the fire. She spent months bird-dogging the mayors office and local law enforcement on her own time to ask about their evacuation procedures, but found herself making little progress.I didnt even know where City Hall was before the fire, Somauroo told Grist. I just started calling city council members and talking to them and getting not a very good reception at first. It just became this narrative of, the survivors versus everyone else. In other words, elected officials were weighing the need to finance the rebuilding of public parks and facilities against the need to help the hundreds of displaced homeowners.As Somauroo watched local Facebook groups devolve into hubbub and confusion, she turned to a less commonly used app to make order out of the chaosshe downloaded Slack, the messaging platform normally used in white-collar workplaces, and invited hundreds of locals to join her there. The app allowed survivors to create individual message threads to discuss specific insurers, specific permits, and specific federal aid deadlines.People would join a certain thread, and then someone would pop up who had the same problem, and then coach them [on] how they solved it, she said. And you know, little by little, we started identifying problems that way.Meanwhile, a former Boulder resident named Jeri Curry moved back to the area from Virginia to help aid in the long-term recovery. She and a group of fellow volunteers established a long-term recovery center in an office park, opening it up about 10 months after the fire as the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state of Colorado wound down their recovery operations. In addition to providing free food and computer access, the center provided guidance to survivors navigating the process of filing an insurance claim and applying for FEMA aid.The big thing that we believed the community overall needed was a gathering place, a central place where people could get everything that they needed, she said. The agencies put their mission first, their service delivery and resource delivery first, and they dont put the survivor in the middle. These casework conversations alerted volunteers to the dynamics holding back the recoverylowball cost estimates from insurers, delays in securing claim payouts, and construction material sales taxes that many residents were struggling to pay.Frustrated with the response from city officials, the survivors groupnow incorporated as a nonprofitdecided to team up with their new state legislator, Brown, who was looking for ways to help fire victims. Brown had worked for Colorados insurance department while serving on the Louisville city council and had experience dealing with complex policy issues, but property insurance and housing law were new to him. So he relied on Somauroos expertise, letting her and the other survivors guide the bills he wrote and introduced.This strategy soon produced a number of laws that gave immediate financial relief to fire survivors who had been struggling to rebuild. Brown passed a bill that stopped mortgage servicers from holding back insurance payments from customers who were waiting to rebuild, eliminating a delay that stopped many survivors from rebuilding for months. He passed a bill that required insurers to take into account the states own estimates of rebuilding costs, a measure designed to stop them from lowballing homeowners trying to rebuild. Bills that gave survivors grants for rebuilding with fire-safe materials, provided them with rebates on construction material taxes, and plowed resources into studying smoke and ash damage all sailed through the legislature with ease.It feels really good to be listened to, said Somuaroo. I would just sort of brief him on, like, people with this problem, that problem, that problem, and he would go move the bill forward.Beyond assisting Marshall survivors, Brown and the survivors groups also took on other institutions that hampered fire recovery in general. Somuaroo had become incensed that homeowners associations in Louisville maintained design rules that prohibited residents from replacing the flammable wooden fences that had ferried the fire across the city. Her own subdivision had a decades-old deed covenant that in theory could have allowed any other resident to sue her for rebuilding with a fire-resistant fence. She took her concerns to Brown and he drafted a bill that prohibited HOAs, which represent more than half of Coloradans, from impeding a fire-safe rebuild.One of Browns most difficult fights was against rental property owners, whom he accused of price gouging after the fire. Some renters reported increased rents of 10% to 15%, as displaced homeowners competed with existing tenants for a tiny number of available units, mimicking a dynamic that had emerged in California years earlier. In theory, there is a simple legislative solution to this problembar apartment owners from raising rents after a firebut few jurisdictions have enacted it, in part because property owners have lobbied fiercely against such moves. Earlier this year, Brown passed a strong bill that prohibits price gouging after fires, including with some Republican support.Many of the bills Brown introduced faced initial objections from insurers, banks, and landlords, all of whom had an established presence in the Capitol. In other circumstances, this opposition might have doomed the laws, but the survivors of the Marshall Fire acted as a political lobby; rather than just plead for help, they tweaked bills in response to industry criticism and ensured lawmakers knew they were paying attention to their votes.Still, not everyone is happy. Betty Knecht, the executive director of the Colorado Mortgage Lenders Association, a trade group representing banks and other lenders, says she worries the legislature veered too far to the left in addressing the fire recovery.You had a very unbalanced legislature, which unfortunately allows for a lot more to be passed. she said, referring to the large Democratic majorities in both chambers. She also pointed out that dozens of representatives in the legislature were appointed to fill vacancies, like Brown, rather than elected.Knecht argued that Browns price-gouging legislation wouldnt hold down rents and that the new pressure on insurers might make many leave the state, as has happened in Florida. However, she praised him for workshopping his mortgage-servicers bill with her group before it went up for a vote and adjusting the payout requirements. The group didnt end up endorsing the bill, but it didnt come out against it, either.The Marshall Fire victims secured a far bigger legislative response than the victims of past Colorado fires. The district adjacent to Browns had suffered a disaster of its own a few years earlier when the East Troublesome Fire roared through the mountain town of Grand Lake, leaving hundreds of underinsured residents without the means to rebuild. That districts representative, Judy Amabile, had worked for most of 2021 on a bill that would prohibit insurers from haggling over the value of personal contents, but it still hadnt come together when the Marshall Fire struck that December.Frustrated with the lack of progress, Amabile used the surge of attention around the Marshall Fire to push through the bill that was designed to help the East Troublesome survivors. The experience of seeing her bill pass with bipartisan support made her realize that the Marshall Fire had opened a window for big-picture lawmaking that no other disaster had.If you have more resources, you have more time to invest in the recovery effort, said Amabile. There was some pushback, like, all these rich people in Boulder are getting all this stuff. But they were a force. They really made stuff happen for themselves.Soumaroo and Curry, two of the lead post-fire organizers, acknowledge that the high education and income levels in the cities impacted by the Marshall Fire helped the rebuilding effort move faster. Two and a half years after the fire, almost half of displaced homeowners are back in their homes, which is a higher rate than many other communities have been able to achieve after disasters of comparable magnitude. This is in part because the community had more resources to begin with, but its also because survivors had enough political clout to secure financial relief that other survivors have not obtained.Currys disaster recovery center also managed to pull in $1 million from faith-based organizations and nearby businesses, allowing the center to stay open until this past June. The Boulder Community Foundation alsoraised more than $43 million to help victims, much of it from wealthy private donors, and used some of that money to fund caseworkers at the center.The irony is that while this effort would likely never have happened in a lower-income and less-educated area, it will benefit future fire survivors in worse-off areas of Colorado. The mortgage-servicer delay and rent-gouging laws will only apply to survivors of future fires, which are far more likely to start in the states rural mountain communities than in the suburbs of the Front Range. It may have been Democrats who pushed the bills through, but the benefits will reach Republican sections of the state, and Brown and Somauroo have talked with people in other states about authoring copycat bills.There were no lobbyists, theres no big money running these bills, said Brown. We got this done through sheer community advocacy. We talk about policies, and then I run bills, and they show up and testify and make their voices heard.This story was originally published by Grist as part of State of Emergency, a series exploring how climate disasters are impacting voting and politics, and was published with support from the CO2 Foundation.

Although indoor gardening has been around for a long time, it was only a few years ago when it really took off and became quite trendy. With people stuck indoors for long stretches of time, different hobbies and activities suddenly became not only more interesting but even lucrative. People discovered the small joys of raising not just decorative flowers but also their own veggies and herbs indoors, leading to the rise of indoor gardening appliances.The primary purpose of such products is, of course, making it convenient and easy to grow greens indoors, especially when it comes to watering the plants and exposing them to the right kind of light. Many such devices, however, seem to have been born from the old age of appliances that looked more like hi-tech boxes than part of your living space. LG is introducing a new design that makes an indoor gardening appliance an elegant and integral part of your interior decor.Designer: LGIf all you really care about is growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers properly, then you might not mind indoor planters that simply look like mini-refrigerators. In fact, LG did launch such a design a few years back, taking advantage of the trend and hype around indoor gardening. That box appliance was compact, efficient, and convenient, but while it did show off the plants behind a glass door, it didnt really do wonders for your rooms ambiance.Addressing the need for more aesthetic design, LG is announcing two upcoming indoor gardening appliances that also double as stylish lighting fixtures. One is an extra-tall floor-standing lamp, while another is like a side table that can be placed beside chairs or couches. Both have circular lamps that do double duty as upward-firing mood lighting at night and downward-facing lights for growing plants during the day.The appliances arent just lamps that happen to hold plants around them, of course. Each planter can accommodate twenty plants, at least based on LGs claims, and the height can be adjusted to accommodate different kinds of plants. It also has a 1.5-gallon water tank built into the base of the lamp so you wont have to worry about keeping the plants well hydrated. Of course, all of the appliances features can be managed and monitored using the LG ThinQ app.Compared to LGs 2022 Tiiun appliance, these indoor planters do more than just grow greens or provide pleasant night lights. They also add value to an indoor space by placing calming green colors and air-purifying plants in areas where they matter the most: places where people sit and relax to take a breather.The post LG Indoor Gardening Appliance Doubles as Stylish Lighting to Save Space first appeared on Yanko Design.

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