Jour : 24 décembre 2024

Hugh Grant’s Reaction To Seeing Love Actually For The First Time Was Anything But Festive  Yahoo News Canada
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MicroStrategy co-founder Michael Saylor has defended the company’s recent Bitcoin purchases, arguing that those who are not buying the largest cryptocurrency at the top are leaving the money on the table. 
As reported by U.Today, the Virginia-based business intelligence firm announced its sevent consecutive weekly Bitcoin purchase in a row on Monday. It added more than half a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin at an average price of nearly $107,000 per coin. 
Saylor has always been upfront about his willingness to buy Bitcoin at the top, rejecting the idea of trying to time the market. 
During his appearance on the PBD Podcast, Saylor reiterated his prediction that the Bitcoin price would eventually go up to $13 million. “Every 
BTC you don’t buy is going to cost you $13 million, my friend,” he said. 
However, despite Saylor’s track record of proving his naysayers wrong, some were still shocked by the fact that MicroStrategy’s most recent average purchase price is so close to Bitcoin’s local top. The largest cryptocurrency peaked at $108,135 on Dec. 17 before plunging all the way to the $92,000 level. Earlier today, it reached an intraday low of $92,441.
Peter Schiff, a vocal Bitcoin critic, has suggested that Saylor is already running out of firepower to keep propping up Bitcoin, noting that MicroStrategy recently announced its smallest buy-in months. “Plus, not only is this your smallest buy, but the first time your average purchase price has been above the market price on the Monday you disclosed the buy,” he said. 
Saylor is unlikely to be deterred by this criticism, and MicroStrategy is now on track to hold a shareholder vote to increase the number of authorized Class A shares to 10.33 billion. 
Alex Dovbnya (aka AlexMorris) is a cryptocurrency expert, trader and journalist with extensive experience of covering everything related to the burgeoning industry — from price analysis to Blockchain disruption. Alex authored more than 1,000 stories for U.Today, CryptoComes and other fintech media outlets. He’s particularly interested in regulatory trends around the globe that are shaping the future of digital assets, can be contacted at alex.dovbnya@u.today.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are not investment advice; they are provided for informational purposes only. The opinions expressed by our writers are their own and do not represent the views of U.Today. Every investment and all trading involves risk, so you should always perform your own research prior to making decisions. U.Today is not liable for any financial losses incurred while trading cryptocurrencies. We do not recommend investing money you cannot afford to lose.

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Biden commutes most federal death sentences before Trump takes office  The Washington Post
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Mustafa has been writing about Blockchain and crypto since many years. He has previous trading experience and has been working in the Fintech industry since 2017.
SonicX, a popular tap-to-earn game on TikTok, will airdrop its SONIC tokens to users through Solana’s Sonic SVM network. Launched in October, SonicX allows players to tap their screens to earn rewards, purchase power-ups, and refer friends. The game’s user-friendly setup requires no crypto wallet or complex transactions, attracting over 2 million players in just two months. The SONIC token snapshot is yet to be taken, meaning new users can still qualify for the January airdrop by logging in via TikTok. Sonic SVM, Solana’s layer-2 gaming network, supports over 20 projects and plans to expand its reach with partnerships like Mahjong123. This marks another milestone in TikTok’s growing presence in Web3 gaming.

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Houston Nightlife, Comedy & Date Nights This Week: December 23 to 29, 2024  365 Things to Do in Houston
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Astronomers have identified a remarkable water reservoir hidden in a corner of the cosmos, circling a quasar more than 12 billion light-years away.
At that distance, the light we see today began its journey not too long after the universe itself formed.
The water supply in this distant place is huge, containing the equivalent of about 140 trillion times all the water in Earth’s oceans combined.
This supply is sitting near a supermassive black hole that is about 20 billion times more massive than our sun.
The black hole is surrounded by a quasar named APM 08279+5255, which pumps out as much energy as a thousand trillion suns.
This quasar, according to astronomers, holds the farthest and largest known reservoir of water anywhere in the universe.
Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., leads one of the teams involved in the observations.
“The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” said Matt Bradford. “It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.”
Both Bradford’s group and a separate team of astronomers studied APM 08279+5255 and its black hole, which sits at the center and draws matter inward.
As it does, it warms the surrounding gas and dust, forming an area filled with molecules that have never before been detected at such an immense distance.
Quasars were first noticed more than half a century ago when telescopes revealed puzzling sources of intense brightness in distant areas of space.
These objects are unlike any ordinary star. They shine brightly from the center of distant galaxies, outshining all their galaxy’s stars combined.
At their heart sit supermassive black holes, millions or billions of times heavier than our sun. As gas and dust spiral in toward one of these black holes, the swirling material heats up and releases energy.
This energy blasts out across all kinds of wavelengths, making quasars some of the brightest, most energetic phenomena ever seen.
Observing quasars helps astronomers understand what the universe looked like long ago, since the light we see now began its journey billions of years in the past.
Quasars can show how galaxies formed, how matter spread out, and how the earliest structures in the cosmos came together.
They can even help map the distribution of matter between galaxies, shining light on the regions that would otherwise remain unseen.
Some quasars also launch huge jets of high-speed particles that stretch across enormous distances. These jets can affect how stars form, influencing entire neighborhoods of cosmic material.
Astronomers observed that water vapor is present in this quasar’s environment. It occupies a region spanning hundreds of light-years, with one light-year at around six trillion miles.
Although the gas is thin by Earth standards, it is surprisingly warm and dense compared to what is typical in places like our Milky Way.
The temperature hovers around minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit, and the gas is roughly 300 trillion times less dense than Earth’s atmosphere.
Still, it is about five times hotter and tens to hundreds of times denser than the gas seen in normal galaxies. With its unusual conditions, this region stands out as an unexpected find.
Water vapor is not just a molecule. Its presence here suggests that the quasar is bathing its environment in radiation that keeps the gas relatively warm.
Astronomers also spotted other molecules, like carbon monoxide, hinting that there is an abundance of raw material that can feed the black hole as it continues to grow.
They estimate that there is enough gas for the black hole to increase in size by about six times, although what actually happens next is not certain.
Some of this gas may form new stars, while some might be thrown out into space instead. Either way, these measurements open a window into what conditions were like when the universe was still young.
Detecting water vapor in such a distant quasar expands our knowledge of how building blocks appear across vast stretches of time and space.
Water is essential for life as we know it, and its presence billions of years ago suggests that the elements needed for life have been around for a very long time.
Beyond that, water plays a key role in shaping how stars and galaxies evolve. When gas clouds cool, water helps by allowing those clouds to collapse more easily, leading to star birth.
By spotting it this far back, astronomers get new clues about how galaxies changed as the universe aged and matured.
Bradford’s team began collecting data in 2008 with an instrument called Z-Spec at the California Institute of Technology’s Submillimeter Observatory (CSO).
This 33-foot telescope sits near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. They later confirmed their findings using the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA), a set of radio dishes located high in the Inyo Mountains of Southern California.
Meanwhile, another group led by Dariusz Lis, senior research associate in physics at Caltech and deputy director of the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory, used the Plateau de Bure Interferometer in the French Alps.
In 2010, Lis’s team found hints of water in this quasar by detecting a single signature, while Bradford’s team uncovered multiple signals that revealed the massive amount of water present.
To sum it all up, this discovery shows that even at a time when the universe was young, water formed and gathered in places we never would have guessed.
Instead of seeing just cold, empty darkness out there, astronomers have spotted a real treasure — an enormous reservoir of water swirling around a quasar more than 12 billion light-years away.
This water vapor, along with the intense radiation from the black hole at the quasar’s center, paints a picture of an environment that is far denser, warmer, and more active than ordinary parts of the cosmos.
By studying this distant quasar, scientists can learn how the earliest galaxies came together and evolved. They can see how matter spread out, how black holes grew, and how even tiny molecules like water played a role in shaping the universe.
Every new detail uncovered by these long-ago signals traveling through time and space helps make sense of the vast cosmic story we are all a part of.
***
Other authors on the Bradford paper, “The water vapor spectrum of APM 08279+5255,” include Hien Nguyen, Jamie Bock, Jonas Zmuidzinas and Bret Naylor of JPL; Alberto Bolatto of the University of Maryland, College Park; Phillip Maloney, Jason Glenn and Julia Kamenetzky of the University of Colorado, Boulder; James Aguirre, Roxana Lupu and Kimberly Scott of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Hideo Matsuhara of the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan; and Eric Murphy of the Carnegie Institute of Science, Pasadena.

Funding for Z-Spec was provided by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Research Corporation and the partner institutions.
The full study was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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5 top new movies you can stream this week — ‘Gladiator 2,’ ‘Borderlands’ and more (Dec. 24-30)  Tom’s Guide
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Before we reveal my top movies of the year, let’s take a look at some of 2024’s worst offerings.
Whereas I am going to do a Top 30 of my Best Of The Year, I’m only doing a Top–well, “top”, such as it is–Ten of my worst flicks of 2024. But that’s for a pretty good reason: when you look at stuff mass released commercially, 2024 wasn’t that terrible of a year! At least not what I saw; I had enough sense not to see Madame Web or Kraven The Hunter, though.
(Actually, I have sworn off watching comic book based movies for fun, and I figure these two will both someday get drawn for the Stew World Order podcast, whereupon I’ll have to watch and review them then. So in the meantime, the aforementioned flicks, as well as the second Joker offering, remain a blindspot for me. Look, if I’m going to HAVE to watch them someday, why watch bad movies twice if I have other things to view?)
You may have noted my usage of the phrase “mass released commercially”. That’s because I received several screeners for independent, smaller-budgeted films, and I am excusing them from this list. Two-fold be the reason:
First, I don’t particularly like calling out those kinds of flicks for being bad. It feels unnecessarily cruel. These filmmakers tried their best, and while their best may not be that good, I still don’t want to knock their earnest efforts.
And secondly, they would make up almost the entirety of this list, and how much fun would you have if the whole thing was stuff you’ve likely never heard of?
So, no… we are keeping this to the bigger theatrical releases for the most part, even if they were hard floppers at the cinema.
With that out of the way? Who’s ready to see what stunk this year? I sure am!

Legacy sequels often have a huge hill to climb to really hit strong with audiences or critics, but it’s anything but impossible. We have seen flicks like Top Gun: Maverick and Bill & Ted Face The Music be successful and entertaining despite long layoffs from their source material.
Unfortunately, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice took no notes from the good legacy sequels and just went lazy in its reprisal. Gone are pretty much every single element that made the original work. There is no heart. The humor isn’t as funny. The story is not focused and direct.
What we got instead are Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton sleep-walking through their roles, Jenna Ortega being a bland copy-paste of Lydia’s character from the first movie, and about seven plotlines too many, none of which are resolved in anything resembling a satisfactory manner.
Really, ONLY Catherine O’Hara is even putting forth an effort in this one. And she’s good, but not good enough.

The ultimate sin of Road House’s 2024 requel is mostly its forgettability. I barely recall anything that happened in it. And what I do recall–Conor McGregor’s “acting”, horribly filmed action sequences that tried to be revolutionary, and Jake Gyllenhaal’s imbalanced characterization–is the kind of stuff I wish I hadn’t.
I’m not the kind of person who is opposed to remakes (or requels or whatever) on principle. Some truly fantastic movies are remakes of older properties. It’s not impossible, or even that hard, to do a remake of a movie that matches or even surpasses the original.
But boy… Road House sure did not do it. This was a lazy story with bad screenwriting and some awful acting. Even Jake himself is nowhere near the top of his game. Make no mistake: he’s the ONLY reason to watch this, and he does at least try. But his character is all over the map, and his emotions rarely fit the setting.

Ah, yes. The excerption to my “I don’t see comic book movies until I have to” philosophy. But my uncle and aunt bought extra tickets to see this, and it would have been rude to turn down their offer to see it for free and get dinner together. So while I successfully ducked Joker, Madame Web, and Kraven… I didn’t escape this graphic novel brought to life on the big screen.
Here’s my first disclaimer: I’m not even a huge fan of the original The Crow. I’ve never sat through the whole thing since I was a kid. So my disdain for this flick comes from its own piss-poor efforts, not out of loyalty to what came before.
I will give The Crow 2024 credit for TRYING. It has one truly great action set piece and it attempts to build a relationship between the leads that we will care about. But there’s just no tact to anything here. Nothing is created with any care. It tries to deviate from the original Crow and do its own thing, which is a solid strategy, but it never truly forges its own identity. So it just comes across for what it is: a pale imitation.

I’m not really a musician bio-pic kind of guy. They are often fine, I guess, but not the type of movie I seek out. I don’t care about the life of, say, Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan. I go to the movies because I want fantastical works of fiction brought to life. Not… someone else’s real life brought to another kind of life.
But you know what’s worse than a good musician biopic? A bad one! And Back To Black is definitely a bad movie. It skips over chunks of Winehouse’s life and leaves out plenty of seemingly relevant details. It makes her years-long battle with drug and alcohol addiction a footnote, when it should have been the core of the tale.
It’s just not a worthwhile movie.

For my full review, click HERE.
I actually moderately enjoyed Russell Crowe’s role in the recent film The Pope’s Exorcist. It allowed him to clown around with a fun accent and ride a scooter. What more could you want? Well not this, that’s for sure.
The Exorcism removes the light-hearted elements of The Pope’s Exorcist and replaces them with a more boring straight-ahead exorcising story arc that sees Crowe’s lead character get possessed while on the set of a new movie. There’s some okay family drama with his daughter and his vices, but that’s really all there is to like. Aside from that, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen done much better elsewhere.

Ah yes, with Brothers we have an action-comedy that both never makes you laugh AND has pretty uninspired action set pieces. The double-whammy! It certainly has the cast to have succeeded, but no one is doing particularly inspired work here. Josh Brolin has his charisma turned down to zero, Peter Dinklage is going through the motions, Glenn Close is just “there”, and Brendan Fraser… well, okay. Fraser is putting forth a little resistance to the drag of everything else.
Mostly what this boils down to is that it’s trying to be funny, but it almost never accomplishes that mission. Nothing is worse than a comedy with no laughs.

For my full review, click HERE!
Practical effects only get you so far with me. Look, I appreciate them, too. I know a lot of people do. And I, like many people, would love to see more good practical effect work in movies. But the key word there is “good”. Just doing practical effects for the sake of doing them doesn’t curry favor with me if they don’t stand up well.
So you’ve got some werewolves that don’t hold up to having any real light shined on them, and a screenplay that doesn’t take nearly enough advantage of its wild premise to have a true blast with it. This could have further cemented Frank Grillo as an underground action star if they let him have some fun and really sink his teeth into the role, but… it was not to be.
Not a winner!

Imagine making a movie about a HAUNTED SWIMMING POOL, and not having at least a little fun with it. Just… having “haunted swimming pool” as your entire plot and deciding that it needs to attempt to be treated super seriously. Imagine telling your actors and producers and assembled movie-making talent this. It boggles the mind.
But here we are, with The Haunted Swimming Pool Movie and a storyline and direction that seems to not realize that joy exists in the world. One could have made an excellently campy picture around this absurd premise, but here we are, with… not that. With poor Wyatt Russell and the rest of the cast having to be believably scared and horrified.
Of a haunted swimming pool.

I’ve heard, from multiple sources, that this movie was [somehow] a substantial upgrade on its predecessor. And now it is set up to usher in a whole nonsense cinematic universe of twisted public domain properties. Imagine what society will do in one hundred years to The Sopranos and weep for us all.
This is threadbare nonsense, with nowhere near enough story to entertain its runtime. It quickly turns into repetitive kills and gore. And while kills and gore can be fun–and there are some highlights here–a movie has to have at least a LITTLE more going for it than this.
But what story this even tries to tell is utter bunk that just doesn’t work out.

For my full review, click HERE! First off: I come bearing apologies to Jeremy who I know really enjoyed this picture, but it did not work for me.
I did not find this movie to be funny or relevant or even particularly well-made. It stretches its plot thin at barely 90 minutes, and even that includes weird, pointless psychedelic scenes and irrelevant character flashbacks. It misuses some of the big names on its cast, and is just an overall mess of a picture.
It IS admittedly weird to think this is the WORST movie I saw all year, but then again it isn’t, I guess. I just culled a bunch of those aforementioned indie flicks that came in behind it. And besides, a bad movie from a Coen Brother should count for more than a bad movie from Jabroney McIphonecamera.
And it does. And this is quite bad, and not just for Ethan Coen. Don’t cry for Margaret Qualley, though. We’ll see her pop back up in the Best Of side of things…

*******
Oh yeah, I did not see Borderlands, either, because I’ve never played those games, so I figured I wasn’t the target audience for it, anyway. I hear it’s also quite bad, and you know… I don’t TRY to seek out bad movies just so I have something to write about at year’s end. The aforementioned ten are all movies I thought I at least MIGHT enjoy. I never thought that would be the case with Borderlands.
I actually had quite high hopes for Drive-Away Dolls, matter of fact. Oh well.
Regardless, tell me the worst movies you watched in 2024 in the comments! Were any of these among them?
And until next time… take care!
Beetlejuice 2, Night Swim, The Crow, Rob Stewart
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The Internet Archive is still under attack two weeks after suffering a data breach and DDoS attacks that took the website down.
How do we know? 
Because the hacker just responded to Mashable’s email that we went to the Internet Archive to find out more about the hack. The hacker was able to respond via Internet Archive’s Zendesk, an online service that helps companies respond to users’ support queries.
Earlier this month, Internet Archive suffered multiple cyberattacks that ended up taking the entire platform, including The Wayback Machine which archives websites throughout the years, offline.
While a group known as SN-Blackmeta took responsibility for the DDoS attacks, the attacker behind the data breach has remained anonymous. It’s unconfirmed whether that anonymous hacker is also behind the latest Internet Archive breach. 
The attacker claims that they have access to all of the more than 800,000 support tickets sent to Internet Archive since 2018.
“It’s dispiriting to see that even after being made aware of the breach 2 weeks ago, IA has still not done the due diligence of rotating many of the API keys that were exposed in their gitlab secrets,” the hacker wrote on Sunday through Zendesk to our email that we sent to Internet Archive on October 10.
“As demonstrated by this message, this includes a Zendesk token with perms to access 800K+ support tickets sent to [email protected] since 2018,” they continued.
Chief Security Officer Chris Hickman of the cybersecurity company Keyfactor explained to Mashable why the rotating API key issue played such an important role here.
“This is a security oversight as tokens that are not rotated regularly have longer lifespans, increasing the window of opportunity for attackers to steal and misuse them,” Hickman said. “If a malicious actor obtains an unrotated token, they could use it to gain unauthorized access to systems or services.”
And it appears that’s what happened.
In the initial attack earlier this month, the hacker shared that they had accessed emails, screen names, and encrypted passwords for 31 million Internet Archive users. However, in this most recent attack, the attacker now shared that they have more than 800,000 support tickets shared between Internet Archive users and the non-profit group. These support tickets could contain even further sensitive information as users who requested that their content be removed from the Internet Archive had to oftentimes provide identification.
In an age where everyone seems to disagree about everything on the internet, there’s one thing that most people seem to agree with: The Internet Archive is an amazing tool that provides online library services at no-cost to users. Many were shocked when their site was attacked earlier this month.
The Internet Archive was able to get parts of its website back up and running last week. However, it seems like significant damage has been done.
“Whether you were trying to ask a general question, or requesting the removal of your site from the Wayback Machine—your data is now in the hands of some random guy. If not me, it’d be someone else,” the hacker said in its reply to Mashable’s contact. “Here’s hoping that they’ll get their shit together now.”
Topics Cybersecurity

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PUBLISHED : 24 Dec 2024 at 09:23
WRITER: Bloomberg
Singapore forged ahead with efforts to formulate a digital-assets hub in 2024, while rival financial centre Hong Kong has struggled to gain traction. 
Singapore doled out 13 crypto licenses in 2024 to a range of crypto operators including top exchanges OKX and Upbit, as well as global heavyweights Anchorage, BitGo and GSR. That’s more than double the licenses awarded by the city-state the previous year. A similar licensing regime in Hong Kong has been slow to progress. 
Both cities are bidding to entice digital-asset firms to their shores with dedicated regimes, tokenization projects and regulatory sandboxes. Local authorities see in crypto the potential to boost the allure of their respective jurisdictions as global business hubs, but progress has been uneven. 
“Hong Kong’s regulatory regime for exchanges is more restrictive in a number of ways that matter — such as custody of customer assets and token listing and delisting policies,” said Angela Ang, senior policy adviser at consultancy TRM Labs. “This may have tipped the balance in Singapore’s favour.”
Approvals in Hong Kong have come slower than expected and regulators had signalled their intent to authorise more exchanges by year-end. The city has now fully licensed seven platforms in total, with four of those given the green light — with some restrictions — on Wednesday. A further seven hold provisional permits. Prominent exchanges such as OKX and Bybit withdrew their applications for Hong Kong licenses. 
The city allows trading in only the most liquid cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether, barring investors from punting on smaller and more volatile tokens, known as altcoins. 
“It’s quite a high standard to meet and be profitable,” said Roger Li, co-founder of One Satoshi, a chain of stores in Hong Kong offering over-the-counter conversions between cash and crypto.
Another factor for digital-asset executives mulling expansion in Asia is the influence of China, where crypto trading is banned. Hong Kong’s special administrative regime has a different risk profile compared to other countries, said David Rogers, regional chief executive at market maker B2C2 Ltd, which has applied for a license in Singapore. 
Singapore’s supportive digital-asset environment makes it a “safe, long-term choice” for a regional hub, Rogers said. “It is a risk-adjusted approach we’re taking here.”
On the wholesale side, both cities can point to progress getting regulated financial institutions to experiment with blockchain software. 
The Monetary Authority of Singapore in November announced plans to support the commercialisation of asset tokenization through Project Guardian and Global Layer 1, two state-backed initiatives. Hong Kong oversaw the sale of HK$6 billion ($770 million) of digital green bonds using HSBC Holdings Plc’s tokenization platform. 
Hong Kong also notably rolled out spot-Bitcoin and Ether ETFs in April, but they have failed to stoke the kind of enthusiasm displayed by buyers of equivalent products in the United States. The city’s Bitcoin and Ether ETFs combined have amassed about $500 million, a fraction of the more than $120 billion held by US issuers. 
“Singapore’s framework encourages interaction between new entrants and established institutions,” said Ben Charoenwong, associate professor of finance at INSEAD. Hong Kong’s focus on established financial institutions “creates fewer opportunities for new entrants and limits the scope of innovation.” 
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