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Enlarge / In Colossal, Anne Hathaway plays Gloria, a party girl whose drunken binges seem to have awakened a giant monster in Seoul.

The premise of indie director Nacho Vigalondo's new film Colossal is so weird that it might just work. It's about loser millennial Gloria (Anne Hathaway), a party girl whose drunken binges cause a giant monster to awaken and rampage through Seoul. The debris of her personal life seems somehow psychically linked to the kaiju destruction.

Though its star Hathaway is an Academy Award winner and celebrity, Colossal snuck into the world without much fanfare. It just debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, and early reviews suggest it's uneven but definitely worth watching. The plot combines your typical "aimless thirtysomething" plot with giant monster action.

When Gloria's boyfriend dumps her, she returns to her hometown, broke and depressed. But during yet another drunken night at a bar, her childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) comes back into her life. That's when she starts to realize that there's a mysterious connection between her drinking binges and the kaiju destroying Seoul. In a clip from the movie, we're introduced to our main characters, as they talk about how Gloria spilled her guts to Oscar when she was plastered the night before.

source: Dorkly

Enlarge / Vertical! (credit: PlayStation)

In July 2015, a poster at the NeoGAF forums postulated something that sounded odd at the time: the PlayStation 4 has been 4K-compatible from the get-go. Even before 4K had arisen as a burgeoning standard, it was there, all along. User Jeff Rigby geeked out by analyzing things like motherboard schematics, exposed pins, and HDMI bandwidth ratings, and he concluded that everything on the hardware side was in place for a surprise 4K update. Sony just needed to push a necessary firmware update to comply with bandwidth and copy-protection standards.

That's a pretty beefy feature to leave dormant within our game consoles for so long. Crazy, right?

Apparently not: The PlayStation 4 is getting a firmware update "by next week," according to Sony Interactive Entertainment President Andrew House, to enable a brand-new visual standard on every single PlayStation 4 shipped since its 2013 launch. One that's been sleeping inside your PS4 all this time.

Enlarge / A Comcast service vehicle. (credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

On March 18, Ars ­­received an exasperated e-mail from the father of one very frustrated Comcast customer.

Elliot told us that his son, Brad, had received bills totaling more than $1,500, and Comcast alleged that Brad had been consistently using far more than his 300GB monthly limit. Overage charges of $10 for each additional 50GB were piling up as Comcast's meter claimed usage totaling multiple terabytes a month. In February, there were $350 worth of charges for 1,750GB of usage above the 300GB limit (about 2TB total). In January, there had been $570 in extra charges for 2,850GB above the 300GB limit (about 3TB total).

No one had any idea why Comcast's data meter was producing such high readings, but the cable company wasn't budging on the amount owed. Brad and his girlfriend, Alison, each 23 and living in Nashville, were working long hours and not using the Internet enough to consume terabytes per month, they say. Making just enough money to cover rent and college loans, they canceled their Comcast Internet to prevent more overage charges, and disputed the amount owed.

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Warner Brothers ordered Google to remove several of its own Web pages from search results on the grounds they infringed the media giant's copyright.

A posting on the Lumen database of cease and desist letters revealed the bizarre requests, which were sent by monitoring company Vobile on behalf of Warner Brothers.

It asked for the official pages of Batman: The Dark Knight and The Matrix films to be censored by Google under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA.) A few days earlier,  according to TorrentFreak, Warner Brothers had requested that the official Web page for movie The Lucky One should be removed from Google's search results in the same way.

Enlarge / Gosh, I love that planet pin. (credit: billnye.com)

Bill Nye's social capital has been on the rise in recent years, as he has transitioned from a kid-friendly science show host to a no-nonsense defender of hard science (and bow ties). His polite aggression has appeared on talk shows, lecture halls, and comedy series, but none of his enjoyable bluster has come in his own series in some time.

Netflix has announced plans to change that with the introduction of Bill Nye Saves the World, a new Netflix-exclusive talk show series launching in spring 2017. In a Wednesday press release, Netflix described the show's aspirations to "refute anti-scientific claims that may be espoused by politicians, religious leaders, or titans of industry"—so the show is clearly aiming to maintain the junk-science battle that Nye has loudly fought in recent years.

Like his '90s TV series, the new Netflix show looks like it will provide equal parts comedy and hard science, as head writers have been hired for those elements (with comedian Mike Drucker and astronomer Phil Plait filling those respective roles). Though the press release didn't indicate how vulgar or extreme the humor may go, Nye's hilarious, frustrated-cursing turn on a 2015 episode of Inside Amy Schumer makes us hopeful that he'll veer a little blue when taking on topics like "vaccinations, genetically modified foods, and climate change."

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Two of the gaming world's biggest properties battled major outages on Wednesday, as Blizzard's World of Warcraft was slammed by a distributed denial of service attack, while EA's Battlefield 1 suffered a suspected DDoS thrashing.

Players hoping to take part in the online-only beta of EA's forthcoming World War I shooter Battlefield 1 were left frustrated for most of the day after the servers went down, preventing people from logging in. Blizzard, meanwhile, experienced difficulties of its own, confirming that it was being targeted by a sustained DDoS attack seemingly timed to coincide with the release of Legion, the World of Warcraft expansion.

It is unclear, however, whether the two attacks are linked.

source: Rory Comics

source: Haters - the webcomic

(credit: Andrew Cunningham)

BRUSSELS—Europe’s competition chief has ordered Ireland to reclaim €13 billion in back taxes from Apple.

It comes despite the US treasury department warning last week that it would “consider its options” in such an eventuality.

Speaking at the European Commission's headquarters in Brussels on Tuesday, Margrethe Vestager said: “Member states cannot give tax benefits to selected companies—this is illegal under EU state aid rules."

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Sony has added support for two-factor authentication to its PlayStation Network accounts, and you really should set it up now, rather than after someone tries to take over your account or steal your password.

To set up the new security feature, turn on your PS4 and go to Settings -> PlayStation Network Account Management -> Account Information -> Security -> 2-Step Verification. You can also set it up through the Web by logging into your PSN account on the Web and going through the Security tab under the Account header. From there, on-screen instructions will walk you through the process of using a text message to confirm your mobile device as a secondary layer of security for your PSN account. Two-factor support is not available when logging on to older PlayStation systems, so Sony recommends you generate a "device setup password" to help protect the PS3, Vita, or PSP.

The addition of two-factor support comes five years after PSN was hit by multiple, high-profile hacks, which compromised many accounts and led to a $17.75 million settlement with the victims. Two-factor authentication was far from standard back then (though some game companies had it), but even today there are plenty of reports of PSN accounts being compromised, and getting charges reversed and access fixed with Sony is not always simple.

Enlarge / The RATAN-600 radio telescope, in Zelenchukskaya, Russia. (credit: Wikimedia commons)

It remains only the barest of probabilities that astronomers have just found evidence of extraterrestrial, intelligent life. Nevertheless, in the community of astronomers and other scientists who use radio telescopes to search the heavens for beacons of life there is considerable excitement about a new signal observed by a facility in Russia.

According to Paul Glister, author of the Centauri Dreams website, the Italian astronomer Claudio Maccone and other astronomers affiliated with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have detected "a strong signal in the direction of HD164595." HD 164595 is a star of 0.99 solar masses about 95 light years from Earth, with an estimated age of 6.3 billion years. The system is known to have at least one planet, HD 164595 b, which is similar in size to Neptune and orbits its star in 40 days. Other planets may exist in the system as well.

The observation was made with the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, in southern Russia, Glister reports. He cautioned that the evidence is very preliminary:

source: deviantART
via: Cheezburger

(credit: Getty | Tom Pennington)

After a week of trying to part with green tides in two outdoor swimming pools, Olympic officials over the weekend wrung out a fresh mea culpa and yet another explanation—neither of which were comforting.

According to officials, a local pool-maintenance worker mistakenly added 160 liters of hydrogen peroxide to the waters on August 5, which partially neutralized the chlorine used for disinfection. With chlorine disarmed, the officials said that “organic compounds”—i.e. algae and other microbes—were able to grow and turn the water a murky green in the subsequent days.

The revelation appears to contradict officials’ previous assurances that despite the emerald hue, which first appeared Tuesday, the waters were safe.

Alien invasion might be a lot weirder than you think. That's the premise of Arrival, a first contact story told from the point of view of linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) who is the first to translate the language of the mysterious "heptapods" whose ships arrive on Earth seemingly just to make conversation.

If this movie is even a quarter as good as the novella it's based on, we're in for a damn fine story. (For those who have not had the pleasure of reading it, Chiang's collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, has just been reissued as a handsome paperback.) Though the film is dramatizing the alien visitation with international politics and war threats, the original story explores a more personal crisis. Without giving away spoilers, the central idea is that the heptapods' written language allows the reader to know the ending of a sentence at the moment they start reading it. Based in part on the aliens' mathematics—and informed by the Earthly mathematics of Fermat's Principle—the heptapods' language changes the consciousness of humans who decipher it, essentially allowing them to remember the future.

So what happens when a conversation with an alien changes your perception of linear time? In Chiang's story, it raises questions about whether you will make the same life decisions despite knowing when people will die—indeed, knowing when you will die. The result is a moving, intense exploration of temporality, linguistics, and the human psyche. It's clear that some of these themes are going to come up in the movie, too, though with the added dramatics of some kind of standoff with Russia.

Enlarge (credit: Okan Ozer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Japan might just have stolen the show at the closing ceremony of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games on Sunday night, after its prime minister Shinzo Abe made a surprise appearance during the handover—dressed as Mario.

It's traditional, at the end of each Olympics, for the departing host nation to give space for the next city to strut its stuff, and with Tokyo to host in 2020, people might have expected a spectacle, but not this.

Abe, the country's buttoned-down and conservative leader, made his cameo in the Rio arena, appearing from one of the Mario games' iconic green warp pipes, dressed in the blue overalls and red shirt and cap (though these quickly fell away to reveal a suit, presumably to maintain some shred of dignity for the leader of the country with the third-largest GDP in the world).