Netflix is testing a new feature that could signal the start of an effort to crack down on password sharing. Hollywood Reporter reports: Spotted by GammaWire, some viewers attempting to use somebody else's account are now being stopped by a screen that says, "If you don't live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching." Netflix confirmed the new feature, which is getting a limited rollout at this time. "This test is designed to help ensure that people using Netflix accounts are authorized to do so," a Netflix spokesperson said. In order to continue watching, the viewer is given the option of either verifying their identity (with a texted or emailed code to the account's owner), or opting to "verify later," which gives the viewer an unspecified additional amount of time to continue watching and later confirm they are a valid account user. A source familiar with the tests said the extent of the rollout varies from country to country, but noted that one reason for the feature is a desire to help protect subscribers from security concerns that can arise from unauthorized use of their account.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Yesterday, Roblox made good on its plans to go public, with employees and previous investors selling hundreds of millions of shares in a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange. In a private funding round in January, those shares were worth $45. When the market closed Wednesday, they were selling at $69.50, a price that valued Roblox Corp. as a whole at $45.3 billion (as of this writing, Roblox Corp.'s stock price peaked at $77.30 and currently sits at $72.72 in Thursday morning trading). How did this company, whose single title has become a game platform unto itself, become worth more than major game publishers like Electronic Arts and Take-Two? To help answer that question, we put together this deep dive into the numbers that are powering the Roblox revolution. They paint a picture of a company with an extremely young and incredibly engaged user base that has ballooned during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns. But Roblox is also a company that is struggling to convert its huge and growing annual revenues into profitability. Here are the valuations of Roblox and how it compares to the other gaming companies: Roblox - Jan. 2017: $500 million - July 2018: $2.3 billion - Feb. 2020: $3.9 billion - Jan. 2021: $29.5 billion - March 10, 2021: $45.3 billion Other gaming companies (current valuations) - Ubisoft: $9.58 billion - Take-Two: $19.43 billion - Electronic Arts: $38.09 billion - Roblox: $45.3 billion - Activision: $72.23 billion - Tencent: $843.86 billion Visit Ars' article for the full deep dive into the numbers, which are sourced from SEC documents and Roblox's own website.

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced a new certificate program and other courses that will provide a gateway to positions at companies like Anthem, Bayer, Deloitte, Verizon and SAP. From a report: In a blog post, Pichai explained that on March 11, Coursera users will have access to a new Associate Android Developer Certification course in addition to the three new certificates in user experience (UX) design, project management and data analytics that have been available since September. "With more businesses embracing digital ways of working, it's estimated that 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025. As U.S. job growth returns with more people getting vaccinated, we are committed to ensuring that all Americans have the skills they need to benefit from greater economic opportunity," Pichai wrote. "To help, today we're announcing new efforts, including opening up enrollment for our latest career certificates, expanding our employer consortium, and introducing new tools to improve the job search." Google will be providing 100,000 scholarships for its Career Certificates program and said it has already helped bring 170,000 Americans into the tech industry through their certificate platform. Once the program is completed, students will gain access to a job board populated by companies like Accenture, Infosys, Zennify, SiriusXM+ Pandora, and, of course, Google.

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TV makers are leaving no stone -- or ad spot -- unturned. From a report: This afternoon, I was updating the streaming apps on my 2020 LG CX OLED TV, something I do from time to time, but today was different. Out of nowhere, I saw (and heard) an ad for Ace Hardware start playing in the lower-left corner. It autoplayed with sound without any action on my part. Now I'm fully aware that it's not unusual to see ads placed around a TV's home screen or main menu. LG, Samsung, Roku, Vizio, and others are all in on this game. We live in an era when smart TVs can automatically recognize what you're watching, and TV makers are building nice ad businesses for themselves with all of the data that gets funneled in. But this felt pretty egregious even by today's standards. A random, full-on commercial just popping up in LG's app store? Is there no escape from this stuff? We're just going to cram ads into every corner of a TV's software, huh? Imagine if an autoplay ad started up while you were updating the apps on your smartphone.

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With the News Media Bargaining Code out of the way, the Australian government has moved its tech giant battle to the browser scene, keeping Google in its crosshairs while putting Apple under the microscope. From a report: Led by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the new battle is focused on "choice and competition in internet search and web browsers." The consumer watchdog on Thursday put out a call for submissions, with a number of questions posed in a discussion paper , centred on internet browser defaults. It claimed Apple's Safari is the most common browser used in Australia for smartphones and tablets, accounting for 51% of use. This is followed by Chrome with 39%, Samsung Internet with 7%, and with less than 1%, Mozilla Firefox. This shifts on desktop, with Chrome being the most used browser with 62% market share, followed by Safari with 18%, Edge 9%, and Mozilla 6%. The ACCC said it's concerned with the impact of pre-installation and default settings on consumer choice and competition, particularly in relation to online search and browsers. It's also seeking views on supplier behaviour and trends in search services, browsers, and operating systems, and device ecosystems that may impact the supply of search and browsers to Australian consumers. It wants views also on the extent to which existing consumer harm can arise from the design of defaults and other arrangements.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've ever been frustrated by a road simply not existing on Google Maps, the company's now making it easier than ever to add it. Google will be updating its map editing experience to allow users to add missing roads and realign, rename or delete incorrect ones. It calls the experience "drawing," but it's closer to using the line tool in Microsoft Paint. The updated tool should be "rolling out over the coming months in more than 80 countries," according to a blog post. Currently, if you try to add a missing road, you can only drop a pin where the road should be and type in the road's name to submit that information to Google. The new tool should make it easier to not only add missing roads, but to make corrections such as fixing a road's name or its direction (for example, if the road is one-way but Google Maps says it isn't).

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Google has denied that recent problems with its services in Russia were the result of a fire at cloud provider OVH data centres in Strasbourg. From a report: The Russian authorities had directly blamed the blaze for disruptions to Google and YouTube. Google believes an unrelated networking issue was responsible for the problems, which lasted for about two hours. It suggests it is a coincidence the two events were in the same timeframe. In a statement Google said: "At 02:00 Pacific Time on 10 March we became aware of an upstream network issue that partially impacted internet service for users in Russia. We believe the cause of this incident was a misconfiguration of the routers at a local third-party internet service provider. Following extensive investigation we have no evidence to indicate that the fire in OVHCloud's data centre, or Google's own infrastructure, was the root cause of this incident." Russia's media watchdog the Federal Service for Supervision in Telecom, IT and Mass Communications - also known as Roskomnadzor- told news agency TASS that access to Google, YouTube and a number of other services were "caused by an accident in a major European data centre in Strasbourg."

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As many businesses struggled to survive the pandemic, Amazon.com was quietly building a national grocery chain. From a report: The first Amazon Fresh store opened to the public in Los Angeles in September. Store No. 11 opened Thursday, and Amazon is working on at least 28 more, from Philadelphia to the Sacramento suburbs. The company is also testing the "Just Walk Out" cashierless shopping technology created for its Go convenience stores at an Amazon Fresh location in Illinois. More than a decade after it started selling groceries, Amazon has a tiny sliver of the $900 billion U.S. grocery market and has watched traditional chains finally start figuring out how to sell food online. Amazon Fresh, industry watchers say, is a way for the company to become even stickier with devoted Prime members, as well as appeal to a broad cross-section of America -- from lower-income shoppers who frequent discounters like Walmart Inc. to wealthier customers looking to pick up online orders.

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The archive for Scripting News on this day last year.

This was a Twitter thread I wrote to be sucked into the blog.

Ever since Medium was founded in 2012, I was afraid they were going to do to writing what YouTube did to video, what Twitter did to short outbursts. Medium is a nice product, but it was too strong, and too much of a silo.

If Medium didn't exist I'd have the same fear about Substack, but they are there to keep each other from dominating. And I still hope a more distributed approach appears, esp since running a server these days is getting much easier and cheaper and is only going to get more so.

I wonder why Medium hasn't directly competed with Substack. It isn't that hard to ad email subscriptions to a product like Medium. Have they done it and I missed it? I would have thought it would be automatic.

Similarly with Clubhouse. A bit of a juggernaut. I tried it, was briefly addicted, and then for some reason I lost interest. It was a time-filler, like Twitter is, for example. When I reach a milestone in other work, I take a break by checking out Twitter. You can't do that with Clubhouse. There is no 15 minute Clubhouse break. It's either a few seconds, or an hour. I don't usually have an hour in the middle of the day to goof off, and at night I'm not at the computer and in need of distraction.

Now Twitter is going where Clubhouse is. I'll try it. I think it has a chance because Twitter and Clubhouse really should be more integrated. And Twitter itself doesn't live with the limits outside devs have. They can create connections we can't.

The world somehow has missed that Twitter has a great API, and it runs fast, and they are expanding it, not contracting it. Briefly, when Dick Costolo was CEO, they made a mistake that they quickly corrected, by cutting off certain (but not all) external devs.

Since then they've been very liberal and reliable. I love using the Twitter API. Of course I would love it even more if they got rid of the 280 char limit. I'm usually good at figuring out angles on things in tech, but I have never seen the logic behind this limit, when they allow so many other much more complex data types to be attached to tweets. I would have thought given all their other payload types that by now they would have a 64K or greater limit to the amount of text attached to a tweet

Someone said tweets are like potato chips and therefore should be limited to 280 chars. I took a few screen shots of tweets that lead to long reads or watches. These are not potato chips. People think of twitter as a home for baby squirrels, this was clever marketing in the beginning, but now it's where the political and cultural world is centered. The former president of the United States was banned from twitter. The potato chip people need to let that sink in. It's a place where real communication happens. The better the tools, imho, the better it works.

How threadviewer works. The number in the URL is the ID of a tweet. The app loads all the tweets it can find that are replies to the tweet with that ID, written by the author of the original tweet and shows them inside a box, in chronologic order, as a nice sequence of easy to read paragraphs. It does what I need it to do, now twitter can be a writing space for me that flows into my blog. I also have thread.center if I need it, that goes the other way. BTW, you can use this with WordPress, Medium, Substack, email, whatever you like. It's just copy/paste from the threadviewer rendering.

When suppliers make green energy the default choice, consumers stick with it even if it's costly.

A group of bipartisan senators is reintroducing a bill that would make Daylight Saving Time (DST) permanent. New submitter McTohmas shares a report: In the United States, most states observe DST -- which starts on the second Sunday in March at 2 a.m. and ends on the first Sunday in November at 2 a.m. -- for eight months out of the year, and four months of standard time. But the Sunshine Protection Act, proposed by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, calls for not "falling back" in November and instead enjoying DST year-round. It would not change the country's current time zones or the number of hours of sunlight. The bill was already passed in Rubio's home state of Florida in 2018 -- but in order to go into effect, it requires a change at the federal level. Fifteen other states -- including California, which voted to make daylight saving time permanent in 2018, and Washington, which did the same in 2019 -- have passed similar legislation.

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Did you see this coming? I did not.