General Motors (GM) has been selling data about the driving behavior of millions of people to insurance companies, leading to higher premiums for some drivers, according to a recent investigation. The affected drivers were not informed about the tracking, which was carried out through GM's OnStar connected services plan and the Smart Driver program. The New York Times reporter who broke the story discovered that her own driving data had been shared with data brokers working with the insurance industry, despite not being enrolled in the program. GM has since discontinued the Smart Driver product and stopped sharing data with LexisNexis and Verisk, following customer feedback and federal lawsuits filed by drivers across the country.

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The U.S. publishing industry is driven by celebrity authors and repeat bestsellers, according to testimony from a blocked merger between Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. Only 50 authors sell over 500,000 copies annually, with 96% of books selling under 1,000 copies. Publishing houses spend most of their advance money on celebrity books, which along with backlist titles like The Bible, account for the bulk of their revenue and fund less commercially successful books.

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Asmodee, the giant board game company behind Catan, Ticket to Ride and Exploding Kittens, has been spun off from corporate owner Embracer Group in a larger move that effectively trisects the beleaguered Swedish holding corporation and leaves Asmodee holding €900 million of new debt.

Advertised as a “transformative step for value creation” by Embracer’s press release, the dissolution will create three business entities that will be separately and publicly traded on Nasdaq Stockholm, the country’s stock exchange. Embracer claims that such a plan will “enable the entities to unlock value in [their] high-quality assets” while owner Lars Wingesfors stays on as the largest shareholder and leader of a new ownership structure (he will control 20% of the total capital and 40% of votes).

Along with Asmodee Group, Embracer’s suite of independent and video game studios will be collected under the strangely named “Coffee Stain & Friends” - referencing the Goat Simulator and Satisfactory developer - while the licence for The Lord of the Rings joins Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider franchise (which has its own taletop RPG adaptation in the works), comics label Dark Horse and several other miscellaneous holdings as “Middle-earth Enterprises & Friends”.

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When 21st Century Fox (and with it Deadpool) officially came under Disney’s jurisdiction in 2017, there was some rightfully placed concern that the Mouse would bar the merc with a mouth from saying whatever the hell he motherfucking wanted. Fans can rest easy, however, because Marvel just released the first trailer…

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The cast and crew of 1999's game-changing The Blair Witch Project didn’t go out and get terrorized in the woods for nothing, even if that’s sort of how they’re being treated by Lionsgate and Blumhouse right now. Ever allergic to new ideas, the two major studios announced yet another reboot of the iconic found footage…

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New Secret Knots comic! “How to step out of the picture”. This one was inspired by people I saw looking at the camera in some photos from a concert. No hats though. (I had, at one point in my life,[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry...