Big tech loves your data. It loves your data so much that it wants to access it even when it tells you it won’t. This, at least, seems to be a conclusion of a new study from the California Privacy Audit, as reported by 404 Media. webXray, a privacy search engine, conducted an audit last month and found that “194 online advertising services ignore legally defined, globally standard, opt-out signals endorsed by regulators” and that “Cookie Choice Banners certified by Google fail to prevent Google from setting cookies after users opt out with a globally standard signal.” 55% of the sites the audit checked set ad cookies even after a user opted out.
The study found that Google had an 87% opt-out failure rate, and that Microsoft and Meta had 50% and 69% failure rates, respectively. It doesn’t even seem like the companies are going to particularly great lengths to hide these violations; for those who enjoy digging into code, the study shows how the websites get around the opt-out. It writes that in the code it’s “easy to spot, hiding in plain sight.”
Obviously, these companies dispute these conclusions, per 404. Google in particular says that the study has a “fundamental misunderstanding” of how its products and code work. Together, these companies have already paid billions of dollars in fees for privacy violations such as these. Anyone who wants to look for themself can take a look at the study here.
Three years ago, when the studios and streamers were dragging out negotiations with writers and actors unions for months during the strikes, a big sticking point for all sides was bonuses. At some point, the supposedly massive viewership of streaming titles would have to loop back around into the pockets of those responsible for creating and delivering the projects. If streaming won’t provide its creatives with residuals, the lifeblood of Hollywood’s economy, then the least it can do is provide writers with bonuses for success. The problem is, however, that Netflix, Prime Video, HBO Max, and Disney+ don’t produce hits. Using data from the TV analytics firm Digital I, Bloomberg reports that 4.4% of the streaming shows released in 2025 qualified for bonuses. Bonuses are only eligible on titles viewed by 20% of streaming service’s US subscribers in the first 90 days, and there are too many Electric States and not enough KPop Demon Hunters to generate worthwhile payments. This means that of the 350 productions Netflix released last year, only 26 were eligible for bonuses. It’s even worse on Prime, where only five of the streamer’s 337 2025 releases were big enough hits to trigger payments.
However, rather than lowering the threshold for bonuses, in negotiations, Bloomberg notes, writers chose higher payments on bonuses for this latest contract. But that’s going to become more difficult given that Netflix has begun scaling back on making movies, presumably because it’s an outmoded idea and most people just want to look at their phones while someone on television reiterates the plot. Netflix is still burning through movies much faster than other studios, releasing 23 in the first quarter of the year, but it released more than twice that in 2022. Meanwhile, 2026 has had the lightest output from the streamer since 2017.
Quibi notwithstanding, few streamers have had a reversal of fortunes quite as sharp as Mubi. Once aiming for the coveted spot as the cinephile’s streamer of choice, Mubi came close in 2024, when its tote bags were all the rage and a kaleidoscopic body horror satire called The Substance became an unexpected box office, critical, and Oscar success. In May 2025, Variety reported on the company’s Cannes buying spree and its quest to be “cooler than A24.” By June, it was fighting a PR grease fire that more or less engulfed its reputation. After securing a Best Picture nomination and $100 million investment from Sequoia Capital, which valued the company at a billion dollars in November 2024, a modestly viral tweet stated it’s “time to add @mubi to the BDS list” because of Sequoia’s investments in an Israeli defense firm called Kela. Another Instagram post by @filmworkers4palestine boosted the call for action against Mubi. Statements were released, boycotts were called, and, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, it cost Mubi 200,000 subscribers.
The response to Mubi’s ties to Sequoia presented the company with a tough choice. By the end of 2025, the company hoped to hit 2 million subscribers by adding 600,000 users; it finished the year with 1.2 million, which is fewer than when it started, costing the company roughly $7.3 million on $200 million of revenue, WSJ reports. The subscribers and revenue losses spurred possible layoffs. However, a dozen or so of the company’s 400 employees, many of whom were outraged by the Israeli defense investments, took a buyout.
However, despite the controversy, Mubi is showing signs of life. Coming off the box office disappointment of Die, My Love, which Mubi paid $20 million to acquire, the company’s track record with international hits buoyed them. Four of the five Best International Film nominees at this year’s Oscars were distributed by Mubi, including the winner, Sentimental Value. Those helped bounce Mubi’s numbers back up. Now with 1.7 million subscribers, the streamer is closer than ever to its 2 million subscriber goal.
Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported on a scrapped Pixar movie called Be Fri, short for “best friends,” which centered on a platonic friend break-up. The project had been in development for years, leaving the some 50 staffers who worked on the project shocked when it was scrapped. Now, The Hollywood Reporter has dug into what went wrong, and staffers interviewed believe that the project’s female-focused narrative had a lot to do with it.
The film was set to focus on two teen girls whose friendship started to falter after they discover their favorite TV show, a Sailor Moon-type show, is real, setting them on a universe-spanning adventure. Staffers explain that after “Braintrust 3″—the third of six check-ins the filmmakers have with studio higher-ups to assess a project’s progress—the studio asked for major changes. “There was a meeting that took place after BT3, where Kristen [Lester, director] and Blaise [Hemingway, writer] made the case to Disney: ‘We know you don’t like where the film is at right now. Give us six weeks, and we’ll redo the entire film,'” said one former Pixar staffer who spoke to THR on the condition of anonymity. “Kristen, Blaise, Nick [C. Smith, editor] and a couple board artists spent six weeks of night-and-day, seven-days-a-week, literally reformatting.”
The staffer said that the process normally would take a year, but the team pulled it off. “It was on Hoppers’ level,” the staffer says. “It befuddles me why they passed on it, but with each round of notes, Disney just didn’t feel like little boys could see themselves in the film enough. Basically, Disney reps were like, ‘We can’t have a girl power movie.'” THR does note that the staffer heard this info second-hand and was not present for the meetings in question.
Of course, this was pretty devastating to those who spent years on the project, not just because Disney and Pixar had been willing to retool movies like Brave, but because female-centered movies can obviously have broad appeal. Says another staffer, “I can imagine that whoever at Disney denied Be Fri to exist looks at KPop [Demon Hunters] and is kicking themselves like, ‘Shit, I can’t believe Netflix is doing exactly what we wanted to do.’”
When the low-budget horror mockumentary Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon hit SXSW in March 2006, a follow-up seemed inevitable. A movie this entrenched in and with this much affection for horror movie tropes surely has something to say about sequels. However, aside from a graphic novel and a short spin-off film, Behind The Mask II never panned out. Until now. Tonight, at a 20th anniversary screening of the film in Los Angeles, the film’s original creative team, director Scott Glosserman, writer David J. Stieve, and stars Nathan Baesel and Angela Goethals announced that Behind The Mask II: The Return Of Leslie Vernon is on the way.
Bringing back Baesel, Goethals, and the series’ “Ahab,” Doc Halloran, played by Robert Englund, Behind The Mask II has all the pieces in play. Much of the original crew is returning, including Grammy-winning composer Gordy Haab and Jaron Presant, Rian Johnson’s long-serving DP. He might even finally nail that “Walk-Run” sequence that they couldn’t get right last time.
Set 20 years later, Behind The Mask II catches up with Leslie Vernon (Baesel) and his final survivor girl, Taylor Gentry (Goethals), the reporter who embeds herself with the killer to see how the sausage gets made. Reuniting these two hasn’t been easy. “We tried many iterations ago to reboot,” Glosserman tells The A.V. Club in a sit-down interview with the cast and crew ahead of the screening. “During the aughts, the whole thing was the sequel, the prequel, the remake, we had the spree-make, the spreequel, like whatever it was.” The film’s DVD commentary is a living record of the team talking about the influx of horror remakes and prequels hitting theaters amid the rise of found footage and extreme horror, like Saw and Hostel. But by 2010, and one unsuccessful Kickstarter project later, prospects dried up. Still, in a pre-algorithmic age, people continued to share the movie on DVD and recommend it to anyone who would listen.
“In most people’s experiences, the ones that really adore the film, it was a recommendation, or they were browsing a Blockbuster shelf on a Saturday night, and they came across something that surprised them,” says Baesel. “The fact that they could trip on something that’s a gem all on their own, that’s pretty special in the horror genre.”
“I’m one of the people who passed it around,” says Aaron Koontz, a producer from Paper Street Pictures. Koontz connected with Stieve via an unlikely mediary. “A mutual friend of ours, Adam F. Goldberg, the guy who created The Goldbergs, tried to help them back in the day.” Goldberg told Koontz of the behind-the-scenes horror story of how things fell apart for Team Vernon. But after seeing Stieve’s short film, Wait For It, which is set inside the Vernon-iverse, Koontz reached out to see if expanding the idea appealed to the writer. Stieve panicked and tossed a Hail Mary.
“I don’t have a feature on Wait For It, dude, but all anybody ever asks me about is a sequel to Behind The Mask. You want to do that?” Stieve recalls. There’s like this beat of like stunned silence on the Zoom call.” It worked.
Released when the classic era of slashers was ending, Behind The Mask was a smart, scary, and often hilarious exploration of the genre that was changing. Today, slashers and meta-slashers amount to some of Hollywood’s most reliable moneymakers. With Scream 7 and Scary Movie 6 already looking to hack sequels to bits, Return Of Leslie Vernon has its work cut out for it. Thankfully, they have a killer monster behind the mask. “Leslie has a heightened substantive conceptual understanding of the true conventions and archetypes of the horror genre and brings that level of academia to the movie,” says Glosserman. “It’s not parody. It’s not superficially meta. It’s really deconstructing these genres. It’s almost like a college-level class in an entertaining film. I wouldn’t say it’s as commercial as Cabin In The Woods, which is something we’ll work on.”
That intelligence is evident in the first movie, but the way it blends humor and horror keeps it from ever appearing to be too pretentious for its own good. “This movie is so robust. It’s got such strong scaffolding in intelligence,” Goethals says. “There’s a playfulness, there’s an artistry, and there’s a poetry, but there’s also a deeply resonant intelligence. It’s very supportive. As a fan, you might be attracted by the color of the archetype, you might be attracted by the color of this as a slasher killer that I’ve never seen before. You might be attracted by so many different things, but simultaneously, you’re secretly getting an education on the genre, on the creative process, on all of this meta shit. It’s all happening all at once.”
The film’s metatextual elements extend to the cast and crew. Now 20 years later, they’re bringing their own successes and disappointments to the role, imbuing them into how Leslie Vernon, who never became a horror icon on the level of Michael Myers, feels about himself. “This is the film that we need to make now because we have so much to inform it with, not just with where we’ve been the last 20 years as people and as characters, but where the genre is now,” says Baesel. “We’re furthering the ball. We are pushing the ball and the conversation.”
“Leslie is not just here because he’s got an opportunity here, because he is going to change the world, right? He’s not just looking to have another story this time around. He’s looking to change the game.”
Microsoft has apparently terminated the account VeraCrypt uses to sign its Windows drivers and bootloader, leaving the encryption project unable to publish Windows updates and throwing future releases into doubt. VeraCrypt's developer says Microsoft gave no clear explanation or warning for the move. "I didn't receive any emails from Microsoft nor any prior warnings," Mounir Idrassi, VeraCrypt's developer, told 404 Media. From the report: VeraCrypt is an open-source tool for encrypting data at rest. Users can create encrypted partitions on their drives, or make individual encrypted volumes to store their files in. Like its predecessor TrueCrypt, which VeraCrypt is based on, it also lets users create a second, innocuous looking volume if they are compelled to hand over their credentials. Last week, Idrassi took to the SourceForge forums to explain why he had been absent for a few months. The most serious challenge, he wrote, "is that Microsoft terminated the account I have used for years to sign Windows drivers and the bootloader."
"Regarding VeraCrypt, I cannot publish Windows updates. Linux and macOS updates can still be done but Windows is the platform used by the majority of users and so the inability to deliver Windows releases is a major blow to the project," he continued. "Currently I'm out of options." Idrassi told 404 Media the termination happened in mid-January. "I was surprised to discover that I could no longer use my account," he said.
On the forum and in the email to 404 Media, Idrassi shared what he said was the only message he received connected to the account shutdown. "Based on the information you have provided to date, we have determined that your organization does not currently meet the requirements to pass verification. There are no appeals available, we have closed your application," it reads. Idrassi told 404 Media the message is concerning his company IDRIX. "As you can read in their message, they say that the organization (IDRIX) doesn't meet their requirements, but I don't see which requirement IDRIX suddenly stopped meeting," he said. Idrassi said he has tried contacting Microsoft support, but he received automated responses that he believes contained AI-generated text.
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