The firefighters who died in a fire at Bicester Motion have been named as Jennie Logan and Martyn Sadler. Read...

Max is changing its name back to HBO Max, and much like The Joker in one of Warner’s DC Universe films, I can’t stop laughing. Three years have passed since the mega-merger that birthed Warner Bros. Discovery and led to a new name for its flagship streaming service. The Max brand was supposed to emphasize a breadth of programming beyond the HBO catalog, but Warner’s executives now say the forthcoming rebrand (or unbrand) represents a return to quality over quantity. This would be easier to accept if HBO’s owners had any credibility left. But over the past few years, pretty much everything the Warner-Discovery merger was supposed to accomplish has failed. Now, the company can no longer articulate what it’s aiming for, other than to squeeze a little extra profit from a flailing enterprise. It’s as funny as it is sad. Max’s broken promises Let’s go back to when AT&T announced it would spin off WarnerMedia into a new company and merge it with Discovery. (The spin-off itself acknowledged that AT&T shouldn’t have bought Warner in the first place, but that’s a whole other story.) Here’s what the companies’ 2021 press release claimed the merger would accomplish: Increase investments in original programming for its streaming services. Enhance programming options “across its global linear pay TV and broadcast channels.” Create new opportunities for “under-represented storytellers and independent creators.” Give viewers “innovative video experiences and points of engagement.” Here’s what the company actually did: Became the first streamer to remove popular original programming from its catalog. Axed completed films for the sake of tax write-offs. Lost the rights to live NBA games, the crown jewel of its sports programming, starting next season. Quickly started cancelling shows that highlighted underrepresented communities. Did not deliver any notable video innovations, but did start charging extra for 4K video and will soon shake down password sharers for more money. Raised prices for ad-free streaming. Paying more for less (again) More broadly, Warner Bros. Discovery promised to deliver what CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels called a “blowout DTC (direct-to-consumer) product.” At a 2022 industry conference, Wiedenfels said this service would be “one of the most complete, sort of four quadrant, old-young-male-female products out there.” Over time, the company did take some steps to bulk up Max’s offerings. It brought in Discovery’s catalog of reality TV programming, launched a live feed of CNN programming, and added live sports from TNT and other Warner cable channels. But with the name reverting back to HBO Max this summer, Warner says completeness is no longer the goal. President and CEO of streaming JB Perrette said in a press release that HBO Max will offer “not everything for everyone in a household, but something distinct and great for adults and families.” That likely means less of what Max added over the past few years. Its sports offerings will be slim without the NBA; CNN will have its own separate subscription service, raising questions about the future of Max’s CNN programming; and cable channels such as Discovery could be spun off into a separate company. “The things subscribers want from us are HBO programming, scripted dramas, comedies, documentaries, the pay-one [licensing window] movies, library movies, and basically the Warner Bros. TV library,” CEO of HBO and Max Content Casey Bloys said. News, sports, and reality programming are conspicuously absent from that statement. While Warner hasn’t announced any immediate changes to HBO Max’s content, the likely outcome is that you’ll be paying more for less. Bad for business, too If it makes you feel any better, this hasn’t worked out for Warner Bros. Discovery’s business, either. Like other TV programmers, Warner has been leaning on profits from traditional pay TV bundles to fund its forays into streaming. The merger was supposed to help, as the combined entity would have more bargaining power to increase pay TV carriage fees. But with the loss of NBA rights and the overall trend toward hollowing out original pay TV programming, those channels have become increasingly worthless. Carriage fees for TNT are now flat or in decline, and cable companies such as Comcast and Spectrum are getting Max thrown into their TV packages at no extra charge, hurting Warner’s streaming revenues. Last August, Warner took a $9 billion write-down on the value of its TV assets and may now look to spin them off; meanwhile, the company’s stock price has fallen from $24.88 on the day of the merger to $9.05 as of this writing. All this just so we can get back to where we started, with a service supposedly focused on quality again. Given what we’ve seen over the past three years, you’d be justified in seeing this as just an excuse to cut more corners and fatten executives’ pay packages instead. Sign up for Jared’s Cord Cutter weekly newsletter to get more streaming advice every Friday Read...

Construction business erected one of NZ`s most complex buildings at the university campus. Read...

New owners of VPNSecure have been taking major flak recently after unexpectedly cancelling all lifetime subscriptions for users of the VPN service. The owners claimed that they didn’t know about the lifetime subscriptions when they first bought VPNSecure and are now unable to continue honoring them. Per Ars Technica, the first complaints from users losing their lifetime access began in March of this year. In April, users with lifetime subscriptions received an email stating, “To continue providing a secure and high-quality experience for all users, Lifetime Deal accounts have now been deactivated as of April 28th, 2025.” In response to a sudden wave—24 pages in total—of negative 1-star customer reviews on TrustPilot, a representative for the provider clarified, “In 2023, we acquired only the infrastructure and brand in a distressed asset sale after that company shut down. No contracts, payment data, or customer obligations were transferred.” VPNSecure has apologized to customers who were caught off guard by the sudden cancellations but reinforced its new position by saying it “never will” sell lifetime subscriptions. The whole ordeal seems to have been bungled from the start, but the company drew further ire with the way in which it so abruptly cut subscriptions. While it may have mitigated some of these issues by giving more advanced notice of the cancellations, it was never going to be an easy pill to swallow for previous lifetime plan holders. Adding insult to injury, there is no evidence that VPNSecure is offering refunds to those who purchased lifetime subscriptions. Instead, it’s offering affected users “an exclusive deal starting at just $1.87/month to continue using the service.” Insert eyeroll here. The whole ordeal is a great reminder that lifetime subscriptions are rarely as trustworthy as advertisements lead you to believe. Should the company ever go out of business or be sold, these previous ‘guarantees’ can be nothing but hot air. If you happen to be someone affected by these cancellations or are just looking for a VPN service that you can trust, refer to our list of the best VPNs. Read...

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Appian`s Marc Wilson says AI must be embedded into core workflows to deliver real business value, warning against treating AI as a standalone solution. Read...

BioCatch and The Knoble have launched a toolkit to help banks quantify losses and build a business case for stronger authorised push payment scam prevention. Read...

Nimbl appoints Wyn Ackroyd as Director to lead business transformation and strategy, marking a major step in expanding its client offerings amid growing demand. Read...

The CPU market experienced its most tumultuous quarter in some time, decreasing as a whole for AMD and Intel in terms of unit shipments. As Intel struggles, however, its competitors are seizing opportunity where they can. Mercury Research released its report for the CPU market for the first quarter of 2025, and behind the numbers are multiple stories to tell. Arm’s market share has finally broken into double digits. AMD, meanwhile, is all over the place: strong in servers, especially strong in desktop PCs, but unexpectedly weak in notebook shipments. Overall X86 processor units declined, Mercury said. That’s normal for the second quarter, as hardware sales tend to crest in the fall and drop in the spring or summer. (Mercury saves this precise information for its paid clients.) Total X86 share — including PCs, embedded processors and systems-on-a-chip (SOCs) like game processors, again favors AMD, as it grew 1.5 percentage points to 27.1 percent. Intel holds the remaining 72.9 percent. Subtract embedded and SOC numbers, however, and AMD lost slightly, shrinking 0.3 percentage points to 24.4 percent and leaving Intel with the remainder. Mercury Research Both AMD and Intel also saw sequential increases in server processors, as well, supporting what seems to be Wall Street’s belief that the more silicon shipped into the enterprise and AI space, the better. Compared to the same quarter last year, server processor unit shipments grew a whopping 20 percent, Mercury found. Arm continues to surge And Arm? That’s on the the rise, too, reaching double-digit market share in the client PC market, which includes PCs and Chromebooks. PCs, Chromebooks, and Apple Mac PCs with Arm chips inside them now make up 13.9 percent of the market, up from 10.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2024. It’s the first time Arm has reached double digits in overall share, including servers — that climbed from 9.6 percent in the fourth quarter to 11.9 percent in the first quarter of 2024. Mercury Research “While Apple’s Mac shipments were lower, we noted a modest increase in ARM CPUs going into Copilot enabled PCs,” Mercury principal analyst Dean McCarron said in an emailed statement. “However, the overall estimate for ARM client was much higher in the quarter primarily to what we believe was a large increase in shipments of processors into Chromebooks.” Mercury acknowledged, as it has in the past, that it has more difficulty tracking the Chromebook processor market than the major PC vendors. Still, he said, “the increase in ARM Chromebook activity in the past quarter also strongly supports a large increase in ARM CPU shipments into the segment” alongside wins for Intel’s X86-based N-series chips as well. AMD: up and down, all at once Intel, of course, has weathered the departure of one CEO, the hiring of another, and layoffs which have stitched together both administrations. Both AMD and Qualcomm have benefited. The unexpected surge in AMD’s desktop shipments took an unexpected turn. Normally, consumers buy PC processors during holiday sales. But Mercury found that consumers snapped up AMD’s Ryzen 9000 (Granite Ridge) as well as the 9000X3D versions of those CPUs, pushing the selling price of AMD’s desktop (and overall client) to record levels. The average selling price actually exceeded Intel’s ASP for the first time ever, McCarron said. Mercury Research “The average price increase [was] so large that AMD’s revenues were up substantially and set new records even though desktop unit shipments declined and are less than half of AMD’s peak for the segment,” Mercury’s McCarron wrote. AMD’s growth in the server space was “multiples” of Intel’s own, McCarron said, setting a new record high at 27.2 percent overall, AMD, however, couldn’t keep up with the competition in mobile. Though AMD and Intel both declined, Intel’s declines were much smaller than AMD, and so it gained 1.2 percentage points of market share. Mercury attributed that to Intel capitalizing on its traditional success in business PCs, and AMD suffering normal declines. (PC vendors and especially Microsoft have pushed hard for customers to replace their Windows 10 PCs with a Windows 11 machine when Windows 10 support ends this October.) Mercury Research Qualcomm has yet to launch a desktop CPU, too, meaning that Arm’s influence in the PC market has focused solely on notebook PCs. However, that drop was partially offset in AMD’s growth in SOCs, which basically equate to the processors found in game consoles. Here, AMD gained 1.5 percentage points. The one word which didn’t appear in Mercury’s report: tariffs. PC vendors have said previously that the CPU market is one segment that does not suffer from tariffs, as the three top CPU vendors all have their “point of origin” in the United States. Read...