DVDs >to> streaming? So much for progress!

This ^^^ is what they took from us. 

Streaming was supposed to be the answer to expensive TV packages and overpriced DVDs.

Now we're paying more than ever for multiple subscriptions, getting bombarded with ads, and watching lower-quality films than we had 5 years ago.

In 2012, Netflix was £5.99 a month. 

One subscription, thousands of films and TV shows, no ads. 

It was cheaper than renting DVDs and you could watch whatever you wanted whenever you wanted.

Now, Netflix is £12.99 a month without adverts. 

Plus you need another 5 subscriptions if you want access to everything.

Films and shows are split across different platforms. 

If you want to watch a specific film, you have to check five different apps to see who's got it, and half the time nobody has it and you have to rent it separately for £5.99.

On top of that, most of them now have ads. 

Netflix introduced an ad-supported tier. 

Amazon Prime Video added ads to their standard plan unless you pay extra to remove them. 

Disney+ has ads on their cheaper tier.

We've gone full circle. 

We're paying for multiple subscriptions, watching ads, and still not getting access to everything we want. 

It's TV packages all over again, just more fragmented and more expensive.

And the quality has dropped. 

Streaming services are churning out cheap content to fill their libraries instead of investing in good films and shows. 

Half of what's available is low-budget filler nobody asked for.

Meanwhile, DVDs gave you the film, the bonus features, the director's commentary, deleted scenes. 

You owned it. 

You could watch it whenever you wanted without worrying about it disappearing from the platform next month.

Blockbuster and DVD rental shops weren't the problem. 

Overpriced packages were. 

But instead of fixing that, we've ended up with something worse.

Credit to: Up The Gains

CPUID breach exposed CPU-Z and HWMonitor users to Malware

If you downloaded CPU-Z or HWMonitor from the Official CPUID website on April 9 or 10, 2026, you may want to stop what you are doing and take a closer look at your PC (or contact Donline). CPUID confirmed that attackers compromised part of its download infrastructure which was first reported by DMKiller on Reddit The attack briefly replaced legitimate download links with malicious ones in a six-hour window. The company says the issue has been fixed and that its original signed files were not altered.

This hack matters because CPU-Z and HWMonitor are trusted Windows tools. The attack exploited that trust, making it that much more dangerous. READ MORE...

www.majorgeeks.com

If "Black Lives Matter" - then why is no one talking about this?

 

Stop the violence. Start the healing. Millions of Christians have been driven from their homes by violence and conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. Nobody is talking about it.

"We feel ignored, forgotten. Like we are in the dark," says Pastor Barnabas from Nigeria, who lives in a displacement camp after narrowly surviving a violent attack.

The African church is calling upon the global community to ensure that Christians and other vulnerable individuals in sub-Saharan Africa are treated with dignity and respect through:

Protection: Providing robust protection from violent militant attacks

Justice: Ensuring justice through fair prosecutions of the attackers

Restoration: Bring healing and restoration to all affected communities

This petition is intended to be presented to the African Union, United Nations, EU and local governments around the world in 2026. Thank you for adding your voice.

www.opendoorsuk.org
www.premierchristian.news

Puppy post: Theo is recovering well from "the snip"

 

Dear little theo had "the operation" on Thursday 9th April. Many thanks to Downland Vets - for the excellent care they provided!

He's a little trooper - recovering really well already. When we picked him up on Thursday afternoon - he was still zonked from the GA they gave him. Friday he was up and about. No more cone of shame - he's got this really funky blue body suit! Get well soon buddy x

More Theodore posts on this Blog

What is Claude Mythos & why Anthropic won’t let anyone use it

An Anthropic engineer with zero security training asked Claude Mythos to find remote code execution bugs overnight. He woke up to a complete working exploit.

That’s the kind of model Anthropic announced on April 7. Claude Mythos Preview is, by every published benchmark, the most capable AI model ever built. It scores 93.9% on SWE-bench Verified, 97.6% on the USAMO math olympiad, and 83.1% on CyberGym. It found zero-day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major web browser. Fully autonomously. No human guidance needed.

Anthropic’s response to building it: don’t release it. Instead, the company launched Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity defense initiative that gives the model to Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, CrowdStrike, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Broadcom, Palo Alto Networks, and the Linux Foundation. About 40 additional organizations that maintain critical software infrastructure also get access. Anthropic is committing $100 million in usage credits and $4 million in direct donations to open-source security organizations.

This is the first time a leading AI lab has built a frontier model and simultaneously decided the public cannot use it. READ MORE...

www.forbes.com

IT hardware, software, cars, motorcycles - what's the common thread?

Scottish Car Clan:  After just 3 years Nissan have disabled features which helped to market and sell their cars.  In this video I discuss how this is an issue we're likely to see more of as cars become more reliant on connected services and updates.

This is something I see in my day job and as a motorcyclist. Features which were supplied when you originally purchased the product - are then removed at a future point. Still want or need those features? The answer is somewhere between "tough" and "better pay us a subscription then". Shabby...

www.youtube.com

Reading for Today: On happiness by C.S.Lewis

What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could “be like gods” - could set up on their own as if they had created themselves - be their own masters - invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God.

Out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history: money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

By: C.S. Lewis

From Mere Christianity

Testing suggests Google’s AI Overviews tell millions of lies per hour

Looking up information on Google today means confronting AI Overviews, the Gemini-powered search robot that appears at the top of the results page. 

AI Overviews has had a rough time since its 2024 launch, attracting user ire over its scattershot accuracy, but it’s getting better and usually provides the right answer. That’s a low bar, though. A new analysis from The New York Times attempted to assess the accuracy of AI Overviews, finding it’s right 90 percent of the time. 

The flip side is that 1 in 10 AI answers is wrong, and for Google, that means hundreds of thousands of lies going out every minute of the day.

www.arstechnica.com

Microsoft Windows - Secure Boot key expiry coming soon!

Back in early 2024, Microsoft announced that it was updating Secure Boot keys as they were going to become 15 years old in 2026, which is also when they are set to expire. As such, in June last year, the company shared a timeline of the change.

At the time, Microsoft had informed that new keys and certificates would be installed on user PCs via Windows Update, and in fact, the company has already rolled those out with the February 2026 Patch Tuesday updates.

So if you have got the latest Windows Updates installed you should be fine. Microsoft says that the new certs must be installed before June 2026, so make sure to get the February update or a later update as they are cumulative and will pack the necessary Secure Boot upgrade as well. READ MORE...

Need advice on the above? Contact Donline.

www.neowin.net

Copilot is ‘for entertainment purposes only,’ according to Microsoft’s terms of use

AI skeptics aren’t the only ones warning users not to unthinkingly trust models’ outputs — that’s what the AI companies say themselves in their terms of service.

Take Microsoft, which is currently focused on getting corporate customers to pay for Copilot. But it has also been getting dinged on social media over Copilot’s terms of use, which appear to have been last updated on October 24, 2025.

“Copilot is for entertainment purposes only,” the company warned. “It can make mistakes, and it may not work as intended. Don’t rely on Copilot for important advice. Use Copilot at your own risk.” READ MORE & CAVEAT EMPTOR!

www.techcrunch.com

Jesus Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Happy Easter!

On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’ ” 

Easter Blessings to all - may God be with you always! 

Happy Easter!!!

Read all of Luke 24 at: www.biblegateway.com

Robotaxi Outage in China Leaves Passengers Stranded on Highways

An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour.

In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis, people on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunction and stop operating. Photos and videos shared online show the Baidu cars halted on busy highways, often in the fast lane.

And yet we are told that self driving cars are the future. Not my future - ever!

www.wired.com

AI data centres can warm surrounding areas by up to 9.1°C

Data centres built to power Artificial Intelligence produce so much heat that they can raise the surface temperature of the land around them by several degrees – creating so-called data centre heat islands that may already be affecting up to 340 million people.

The number of data centres built around the world is forecast to rise enormously. JLL, a real estate company, estimates that data centre capacity will double between 2025 and 2030 – with AI expected to account for half that demand.

Andrea Marinoni at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues saw that the amount of energy needed to run a data centre had been steadily increasing of late and was likely to “explode” in the coming years, so wanted to quantify the impact.

Meanwhile, in other news: we're all being told to travel less, eat less meat, turn down our heating / air conditioning, etc... We do our bit, while big tech just burns the planet! Grrrr!

www.newscientist.com