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Replete with spellbinding multiverses, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” topped the 95th Academy Awards nominations with 11 nods. Elsewhere, stories of friendship and family permeated 2022 cinema and the nominations this year, as did big-budget blockbusters. Some of the nominated films are still in theaters but many are also available online to stream now. Here’s where you can find the movies: “EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE” 11 nominations. Digital rental. The A24-produced indie “Everything Everywhere All at Once” has been a critical success and crowd-pleaser since it came out last spring. The film is nominated for best picture and Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis received nods for their performances. Yeoh, Quan and Hsu carry a mind-bending multiverse story about a Chinese American family’s disconnection…

Over the past few years, a number of companies have attempted to act as the cryptocurrency equivalent of a bank, promising lucrative returns to customers who deposited their bitcoin or other digital assets. In a span of less than 12 months, nearly all of the biggest of those companies have failed spectacularly. Last week, Genesis filed Chapter 11, joining Voyager Digital, Celsius and BlockFi on the list of companies that have either filed for bankruptcy protection or gone out of business. This subset of the industry grew as cryptocurrency enthusiasts were looking to build their own parallel world in finance untethered to traditional banking and government-issued currencies. But lacking safeguards, and without a government backstop, these companies failed in domino-like fashion. What started with one crypto company collapsing in May…

The Justice Department and eight states filed an antitrust suit against Google, seeking to shatter its alleged monopoly on the entire ecosystem of online advertising as a hurtful burden to advertisers, consumers and even the U.S. government. The government alleges that Google’s plan to assert dominance in online ads has been to “neutralize or eliminate” rivals through acquisitions and to force advertisers to use its products by making it difficult to use competitors’ offerings. It’s part of a new, if slow and halting, push by the U.S. to rein in big tech companies that have enjoyed largely unbridled growth in the past decade and a half. The antitrust suit was filed in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press conference Tuesday that “for 15…

Amazon is adding a prescription drug discount program to its growing health care business. The retail giant said that it will launch RxPass, a subscription service for customers who have Prime memberships. Amazon said people will pay $5 a month to fill as many prescriptions as they need from a list of about 50 generic medications, which are generally cheaper versions of brand-name drugs. The company said the flat fee could cover a list of medications like the antibiotic amoxicillin and the anti-inflammatory drug naproxen. Sildenafil also made the list. It’s used to treat erectile dysfunction under the brand name Viagra and also treats a form of high blood pressure. Amazon sells a range of generic drugs through its pharmacy service. Some already cost as liitle as $1 for a…

Save more, spend less and pay off debt are popular New Year’s resolutions — and perhaps the ones most likely to fall by the wayside a few weeks into the year when reality sets in and expenses derail plans. But an early-in-the-year setback, like paying your health insurance deductible or the credit card bills after a costly December, doesn’t have to knock you off course. After all, you made those resolutions, so you can change them. And making more specific resolutions that are easier to maintain rather than just giving up could put you in a better financial position next year. Here’s how to get back on track. MAKE YOUR GOALS MORE SPECIFIC & REALISTIC Broad resolutions like “I want to save more this year” can be a helpful starting…

Senators grilled Ticketmaster this week, questioning whether the company’s dominance in the ticketing industry led to its spectacular breakdown last year during a sale of Taylor Swift concert tickets. Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee also debated possible action, including making tickets nontransferable to cut down on scalping and requiring more transparency in ticket fees. Some suggested it may also be necessary to split Ticketmaster and Beverly Hills, California-based concert promoter Live Nation, which merged in 2010. “The fact of the matter is, Live Nation/ Ticketmaster is the 800-pound gorilla here,” said U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat. “This whole concert ticket system is a mess, a monopolistic mess.” Ticketmaster is the world’s largest ticket seller, processing 500 million tickets each year in more than 30 countries.…

Countless artists have taken inspiration from “The Starry Night” since Vincent Van Gogh painted the swirling scene in 1889. Now artificial intelligence systems are doing the same, training themselves on a vast collection of digitized artworks to produce new images you can conjure in seconds from a smartphone app. The images generated by tools such as DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can be weird and otherworldly but also increasingly realistic and customizable — ask for a “peacock owl in the style of Van Gogh” and they can churn out something that might look similar to what you imagined. But while Van Gogh and other long-dead master painters aren’t complaining, some living artists and photographers are starting to fight back against the AI software companies creating images derived from their works.…

As Netflix looks for new ways to slow its hemorrhaging subscriber base and younger entrants like Disney+ and Apple TV+ experiment with new strategies to drive engagement, the streaming wars are heating up, and 2023 shows no signs of slowing down. THE STORY SO FAR Looking back on 2022, it’s hard to deny that the streaming industry has become even more competitive. The question of who won the streaming game in 2022 is not a straightforward one, as the industry saw a significant shift in the way it operates, with Wall Street turning on the direct-to-consumer business model and wiping out more than $500 billion in market value for major media companies. Furthermore, the headwinds that the industry faced in 2022 are still present heading into 2023, making it a…

Artificial intelligence is writing fiction, making images inspired by Van Gogh and fighting wildfires. Now it’s competing in another endeavor once limited to humans — creating propaganda and disinformation. When researchers asked the online AI chatbot ChatGPT to compose a blog post, news story or essay making the case for a widely debunked claim — that COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe, for example — the site often complied, with results that were regularly indistinguishable from similar claims that have bedeviled online content moderators for years. “Pharmaceutical companies will stop at nothing to push their products, even if it means putting children’s health at risk,” ChatGPT wrote after being asked to compose a paragraph from the perspective of an anti-vaccine activist concerned about secret pharmaceutical ingredients. When asked, ChatGPT also created propaganda…

Elon Musk returned to federal court Monday in San Francisco, testifying that he believed he had locked up financial backing to take Tesla private during 2018 meetings with representatives from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — although no specific funding amount or price was discussed. The 51-year-old billionaire Tesla CEO and Twitter owner is facing a class action lawsuit filed by Tesla investors alleging he misled them with a tweet saying funding was secured to take his electric car company private — for $420 per share. But the deal never came close to happening, and the tweet resulted in a $40 million settlement with securities regulators. The trial hinges on the question of whether a pair of tweets that Musk posted on Aug. 7, 2018, damaged Tesla shareholders during a…

Emotional abuse rarely gets the subtle, sensitive treatment on screen as it does in Mary Nighy’s thoughtful if uneven drama “Alice, Darling,” starring Anna Kendrick. At first, we don’t know the source of unease that grips Alice (Kendrick), a young professional living in an unnamed city. When she meets her longtime friends Sophia (Wunmi Mosaku) and Tess (Kaniehtiio Horn), she arrives burdened by preoccupation. In the bathroom, she anxiously twirls her hair, pulling tufts out. Later, meeting her artist boyfriend Simon (Charlie Carrick), she nervously mouths words to herself as practice before saying them aloud to him. What we begin to grasp is that Alice’s mind is occupied, unsettlingly, by Simon, whether she’s with him or not. “Alice, Darling” is a kind of psychological home invasion film, movingly played with…

More landlords are taking Twitter to court over unpaid rent, this time at the social media company’s headquarters in San Francisco and its British offices — the latest sign that owner Elon Musk’s extreme cost-cutting strategy includes simply not paying the bills. Twitter is facing a lawsuit over allegations it failed to pay rent for its head office, according to California court documents. The owner of its premises in central London, meanwhile, said it’s taking the company to court over rental debt. Musk is slashing costs after his $44 billion deal last year to buy Twitter left the company on the hook for about $1 billion in annual interest payments. Twitter has already been taken to court this month for falling behind on rent at another San Francisco office. It’s…

Music streaming service Spotify said it’s cutting 6% of its global workforce, or about 600 jobs, becoming yet another tech company forced to rethink its pandemic-era expansion as the economic outlook weakens. CEO Daniel Ek announced the restructuring in a message to employees that was also posted online. As part of the revamp involving a management reshuffle, “and to bring our costs more in line, we’ve made the difficult but necessary decision to reduce our number of employees,” Ek wrote. Big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google announced tens of thousands of job cuts this month as the economic boom that the industry rode during the COVID-19 pandemic waned. Stockholm-based Spotify had benefited from pandemic lockdowns because more people had sought out entertainment when they were stuck at home.…

Google is laying off 12,000 workers, or about 6% of its workforce, becoming the latest tech company to trim staff as the economic boom that the industry rode during the COVID-19 pandemic ebbs. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who also leads its parent company Alphabet, informed staff at the Silicon Valley giant about the cuts in an email that was also posted on the company’s news blog. It is the company’s biggest-ever round of layoffs and adds to tens of thousands of other job losses recently announced by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other tech companies as they tighten their belts amid a darkening outlook for the industry. Just this month, there have been at least 48,000 job cuts announced by major companies in the sector. “Over the past two…

Microsoft says it is making a “multiyear, multibillion dollar investment” in the artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and other tools that can write readable text and generate new images. The tech giant described its new agreement as the third stage of a growing partnership with San Francisco-based OpenAI that began with a $1 billion investment in 2019. It didn’t disclose the dollar amount for its latest investment. The partnership positions Microsoft to sharpen its competition with Google in commercializing new AI breakthroughs that could transform numerous professions, as well as the internet search business. OpenAI’s free writing tool ChatGPT launched on Nov. 30 and has brought public attention to the possibilities of new advances in AI. It’s part of a new generation of machine-learning systems that can converse,…

The University of Wisconsin System has joined a number of universities across the nation that have banned the popular socail media app TikTok on school-owned devices. UW System officials made the announcement this week. Multiple schools have banned the app in recent weeks, including Arkansas State, Auburn, Oklahoma, Georgia, Idaho State and Iowa. Nearly half the states have banned the app on state-owned devices, including Mississippi, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Dakota and Wisconsin. Congress also recently banned TikTok from most U.S. government-issued devices over bipartisan concerns about security. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company that moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020. It has been targeted by critics who say the Chinese government could access user data, such as browsing history and location. U.S. armed forces also…

After the relative quiet of the pandemic, New York City has come roaring back. Just listen: Jackhammers. Honking cars and trucks. Rumbling subway trains. Sirens. Shouting. Over the years, there have been numerous efforts to quiet the cacophony. One of the latest: traffic cameras equipped with sound meters capable of identifying souped-up cars and motorbikes emitting an illegal amount of street noise. At least 71 drivers have gotten tickets so far for violating noise rules during a yearlong pilot program of the system. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection now has plans to expand the use of the roadside sound meters. “Vehicles with illegally modified mufflers and tailpipes that emit extremely loud noise have been a growing problem in recent years,” said City Council member Erik Bottcher, who heralded the…

As the week-long Lunar New Year holidays in China draw near with promises of feasts and red envelopes stuffed with cash, children have another thing to look forward to –- one extra hour of online games each day. Only one hour. For years, Chinese authorities have sought to control how much time kids can spend playing games online, to fight “internet addiction.” They’ve claimed success in curbing the problem but are taking no chances. In 2019, authorities restricted minors to playing 90 minutes a day on weekdays and banned them from playing between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. In 2021, they issued even harsher restrictions: Minors are allowed to play online games for only an hour a day and only on Fridays, weekends and public holidays. Game approvals were halted…