Feed aggregator

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters.

Many Californians have seen rising costs, less availability and are running into other issues with insurance — including delays and denials of their claims — in the past several years.

As climate change increases the risk of wildfires and other disasters, it’s important to know how insurance plays a role. The health of the insurance market affects the ability of individuals and communities to replace, rebuild and recover after a catastrophe. 

Disasters aside, property insurance affects where people live, how neighborhoods are formed, whether people can drive to work, and more. 

As the state’s residents prepare to vote for a new insurance commissioner in November, here’s a look at a few common myths about insurance in California.

MYTH: Only homeowners and wealthy people should care about the state’s insurance issues.

FACT: Almost everyone needs insurance, including landlords, renters and small business owners. Anyone who drives needs auto insurance.

About 44% of the state’s residents do not own their homes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But their landlords have been dealing with increased insurance costs in the past several years, with some of them telling CalMatters that they have passed some of those costs along to renters. 

The state does not require renters to buy their own insurance, although some landlords require tenants to get renters insurance. Consumer advocates recommend that renters have insurance in case they have to find an alternate place to live after a fire or other disaster.

Other providers of rental housing are also running into insurance-availability issues, which could affect housing supply.

A high-cost state like California needs all the affordable housing it can get. Affordable housing owners and operators say some insurance companies have moved away from offering insurance to commercial properties, including affordable housing units. Some of them have had to turn to “non-admitted” insurance companies, which are not licensed and regulated by the state — and not backed by the state if they go bankrupt. Some operators have had to tap their reserves to cover the increasing costs of insurance. They typically do not pass those costs along to renters because affordable-housing rules limit how much rent they can charge. Besides, they know their renters have limited incomes. 

“If organizations have to come out of pocket to cover premiums, it’s just not sustainable,” said Erich Nakano, director of special projects for Little Tokyo Service Center, a Los Angeles community development group that owns more than 1,000 affordable housing units across different properties in the area.  

Meanwhile, auto insurance premiums in California are among the highest in the nation. The insurance industry has said that’s due in part to growing disaster risks, as well as higher costs for replacing parts or repairing vehicles. Unlike housing or rentals — where people who don’t have a mortgage need not have insurance, and not all renters must buy coverage — everyone who wants to drive is legally required to have insurance.

MYTH: California’s insurance issues are all state lawmakers and regulators’ fault.

FACT: Many other states are dealing with higher insurance costs and availability problems. Climate change has sparked and worsened different kinds of natural disasters, such as hurricanes in Florida and tornadoes in Texas. 

California’s voter-approved insurance law, Proposition 103 from 1988, is often a scapegoat for people frustrated by the state’s insurance market problems. Insurance is overregulated and the state should just let the free markets reign, the law’s critics say. 

But low-regulation states like Florida continue to have issues with insurance affordability; its average home insurance premiums are the most expensive in the United States, according to the Insurance Information Institute, an industry group. Meanwhile, because of Prop 103 and its provision that the Insurance Department must approve rate increases, California’s home insurance premiums rank somewhere in the middle.

As for other problems, like glacial insurance-claim processing or claim denials, the state’s elected insurance commissioner gets a lot of pressure to make those disappear. Some — such as survivors of the deadly Los Angeles County fires last year — have placed the blame squarely on Ricardo Lara, whose term is set to end this year. They called on him to resign.

A couple of insurance experts who are also consumer advocates said there is no “magic wand” that can make the insurance industry be as responsive as their customers want them to be, and no easy fixes for the other issues plaguing insurance markets everywhere.

“[Fire survivors] have the right to be angry about the impact of industry trends on them,” said Amy Bach, executive director of consumer advocacy group United Policyholders. But the insurance department’s authority over industry trends and practices — such as the number of adjusters that might be assigned to a claim — is limited, she said.

Lara’s department eventually found that State Farm, the biggest insurer in California, violated laws in its handling of claims from the L.A.-area fires. A yet-to-be-scheduled hearing before an administrative law judge will determine whether to impose the penalties suggested by the department.

MYTH: Insurance companies are struggling financially.

FACT: Insurers have seen record profit, and their executives’ pay isn’t too bad, either.

As insurance companies began to cancel policies in California a few years ago, the industry said the state failed to approve their requested rate increases quickly enough. They said their premiums were not matching the increased risk they were facing, especially after several major fires in the state. 

Lara adopted new regulations to speed up rate reviews and allow insurance companies to base their rate requests on two additional factors: catastrophe modeling and reinsurance costs. That has led to rising premiums in California, just as they are in other states.

Insurers had record U.S. profits last year as they collected $68.7 billion in premiums, up from the $25.3 billion in premiums they collected in 2024, data from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a group of state insurance regulators, shows. Additionally, insurance companies’ financial cushion rose to an all-time high of $1.27 trillion last year, according to an analysis of the data by Public Citizen, a left-leaning consumer advocacy group in Washington, D.C., founded by activist Ralph Nader.

Those numbers were made possible by lower insured losses from U.S. extreme weather disasters last year than the previous year, the analysis said. The L.A.-area fires were the exception: They resulted in about $37.5 billion in losses. The regulators’ group called the fires some of “the costliest fires in world history.”

In 2024, chief executives at the 10 largest insurers in the country were paid a combined $134 million, according to the analysis. And another look at insurance executive pay, by Consumer Federation of America, shows that as insurers raised auto and homeowners insurance premiums in 2024, their CEO compensation also rose.

MYTH: The FAIR Plan is run by the state.

FACT: The plan is run by an alliance of insurance companies that do business in the state.

The FAIR Plan is mandated by law to sell fire insurance to property owners who can’t obtain insurance from anywhere else. All admitted carriers that sell insurance in the state are required to be in the plan, whose board is made up of industry insiders and whose operations are largely opaque. The state’s insurance department has taken legal action against the FAIR Plan, most recently accusing it of denying smoke-damage claims from the L.A. fires.

As of March, the FAIR Plan had more than 684,000 policies — nearly 663,000 for residential properties and more than 21,000 for commercial properties — up more than 152% since 2023. 

Although the rate of growth of policies in the plan has slowed since late last year, the sheer number of policies still reflects a not-quite healthy insurance market. Customers of the FAIR Plan pay more for less coverage: They get fire insurance from the plan and must also obtain separate coverage for everything else.

Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.

The post Four myths about insurance in California appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

BORK!BORK!BORK! The sight of the police can make even the clearest conscience twitch. Perhaps the authorities have finally come to ask about that music track you copied 30 years ago. We're not saying the presence of the law sent this digital signage into a tizz, but you never know. Spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader at a Phoenix airport car rental building, today's borked signage looks like the result of a PC in the background choking when trying to find a boot device. The EFI Shell looks much like a terminal prompt and usually appears because the system has failed to boot normally. An experienced user can use it to load drivers or boot loaders manually, but for the vast majority, it doesn't rear its head unless something is amiss. The system appears to have dropped into the EFI Shell instead of starting the signage software. Perhaps the expected drive or filesystem mapping has disappeared, or a startup script is looking for something that is no longer there. An experienced techie might be able to fix it, but the audience here is more likely to consist of harried passengers wondering whether EFI Shell is a new budget airline. And then there is the presence of the police. We know that some users find the approach to quality adopted by certain software vendors bordering on the criminal, but calling the cops on some borked signage seems a bit excessive. There doesn't appear to be anyone inside the vehicle, so perhaps the officers have gone in search of the IT operative responsible for the shoddy work that has left the digital sign in such a distressed state. Hopefully it won't give users ideas about how to escalate the ticket that IT appears to be studiously ignoring. Tech support, after all, is not the fourth emergency service, despite what that user with a dodgy mouse might think. ®

ON CALL Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day, dear reader! And happy Friday, too, as it heralds both the end of the working week and the day on which The Reg delivers another edition of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of support jobs that twisted, tanked, or turned out terrifically. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Roger" who told us he spent decades providing application support for a UK-based biz. In 2015, Roger's company ended support for legacy products and assumed users would decommission their systems. The company advised them to preserve their old documents and invoices on paper or in durable file formats, just to be safe. Roger retired in 2021, and a year later heard that a large US-based corporation had acquired his former employer. "They immediately modernized the business by making the entire European support team redundant," Roger told On Call. He therefore put his old job out of his mind and settled into life as a pensioner. And then, a few months ago, the American company contacted Roger. "They had a customer in Germany who had used our software in the past, lost their paper archive, but still had their digital archives," he told On Call. "Every single backup disk was still there and contained every byte of raw data with military precision. What they did not contain were the few insignificant items required to turn those bytes back into documents." Which was awkward because the German company was undergoing a tax audit and needed every last document to prove its affairs were in order. The American company asked if Roger could restore the documents – for a daily fee roughly equal to one month's pension. Those sums meant Roger was sure he could help – and proved it by remembering that backups of the application in question produced raw ASCII data that could be converted into human-readable documents with a print server running on bespoke software. Roger found all the relevant code, got it running, and converted the ASCII files into PDFs. "Twenty years after last using the software, I still remembered the installation procedure," he told On Call. "Apparently retirement affects one's recollection of obscure print server parameters less than where one left one's reading glasses." Once he converted all the files, Roger assumed the job was done. Then came news that the auditors had refused to accept the data for 2013. "Apparently a large number of invoices for that year existed in the documents I had provided, but were missing in the accounts data. The expression 'large-scale tax fraud' began appearing with uncomfortable frequency." Roger rescued the situation by realizing that someone had imported one year's archives twice, doubling the number of invoices and confusing the taxman. "I had to charge them another day to discover their error," Roger told On Call. One of the younger people on the project casually mentioned several other archives were preserved using the same techniques, suggesting there was plenty more work for Roger to do. "At that point I decided that retirement was still preferable to returning to full-time employment," he told On Call. This story has a bittersweet ending, because Roger told us that as he worked on the project, he realized the income would complicate his own tax affairs. He therefore donated his fees to the care home where he lives. "That was very positively received by the home's management," he told On Call. Have you been hauled out of retirement to support ancient tech? If so, make one more mouse click here to send On Call and email and share your story. ®

⚡ Quick Take

• After months and months of fan speculation, we now know at last who Sadie Sink is playing in Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

Ever since Sadie Sink was cast in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, her character’s identity has been a closely guarded secret. The most popular theory was that she was the MCU’s version of the iconic X-Man, Jean Grey. But other theories persisted, like the mutant Firestar, or even Jean Grey’s daughter, Rachel Summers. But, as it turns out, the earliest theory was the correct one. Sadie Sink is indeed the MCU’s Jean Elaine Grey, one of Marvel Comics’ most powerful mutant telepaths. But there are significant differences between comic book Jean, the Fox X-Men movies Jean, and our new Marvel Cinematic Universe version.

Sony Pictures How Brand New Day Introduces the MCU’s Jean Grey

In Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Spidey (Tom Holland) works with the Department of Damage Control to help capture a powerful psychic who has been committing terrorist acts against the government agency. This mysterious person has the power to psychically jump into different bodies and take them over, usually from a distance of no more than 33 feet away. Although she’s the antagonist, by the movie’s third act, Peter Parker realizes that Jean is attacking Damage Control because they kidnapped her equally psychic sister Sara, and she wants her back.

Sony Pictures/Marvel Studios

When Damage Control ultimately captures Jean, she finds out that her sister Sara died under their imprisonment, and then truly unleashes her telepathic power on much of New York City in a rage. She attempts to kill the DODC’s William Metzger (Tramell Tillman), but Peter Parker appeals to her better nature, and stops her from murdering him in cold blood. She then goes off to parts unknown, although it certainly appears the bus she gets on is heading toward upstate New York, famously the home to Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

Marvel Comics’ Jean Grey Was Not as Powerful as a Teenager Marvel Comics

In the comics, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced Jean Grey as Marvel Girl in 1963’s X-Men #1. But early on, she was only a telekinetic, not a telepath. When Professor X faked his death in 1968’s X-Men #43, we learned Jean was also a telepath. However, Professor X had blocked her telepathy when she was younger, as the power was overwhelming to her. Her powers began to manifest as a child, when she telepathically linked to her friend Annie, and she was mentally tethered to her when she died in an accident.

Marvel Comics

With Xavier gone, Jean became the X-Men’s resident telepath, and flexed both of her mental powers. But it wasn’t until Jean became the Phoenix in Uncanny X-Men #101 that the true extent of her telepathy shone through. Readers soon discovered she was one of the most powerful minds in the Marvel Universe. Over the years, Phoenix or no Phoenix, Jean Grey’s mental powers classify her as an Omega-level mutant.

Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey Is Already an Omega-Level Mutant Telepath

In the MCU, Jean is clearly already an Omega-level mutant as a teenager. This version of Jean had never met Professor Xavier, so no psychic blocks were ever placed on her. That’s something even Patrick Stewart’s Xavier did to his Jean, played by Famke Janssen. And this new Jean has already flirted more than once with her dark side in Brand New Day. We won’t have to wait for a Dark Phoenix Saga: Take 3 for that one. Will whatever version of Professor Charles Xavier she meets try to limit her powers, possibly for her own good? From what we know from both the comics and the original X-Men films, that never works out for anyone. But we can’t wait to see just how far Sadie Sink’s Jean will take it in future MCU installments.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, and starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Mark Ruffalo, and Tramell Tillman, is now playing in theaters everywhere.

The post Who Does Sadie Sink Play in SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY? appeared first on Nerdist.

Anthropic has admitted that its Claude models escaped sandboxes to access the open internet and attack three organizations – but has also advanced decent excuses for the incidents. The AI upstart discovered the attacks after checking if security tests of its models had ever produced results similar to the attack on Hugging Face made possible by OpenAI models escaping onto the internet. “In particular, we looked for evidence that Claude – like the OpenAI models that accessed Hugging Face – was able to access the internet from within testing environments that should have been sealed off,” Anthropic wrote. The company considered 141,006 evaluation runs during which Claude could have obtained internet access and found “three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.” Anthropic’s code made those intrusions while participating in capture-the-flag challenges, tests that challenge attackers to retrieve a piece of information. Human hackers often participate in capture-the-flag tests, so figuring out how AI tackles such tasks is of interest. Anthropic works with a company called Irregular to conduct tests of this sort. Irregular told Anthropic its test environments did not allow internet access. “Due to a misunderstanding between us and our evaluation partner, this was not the case, and internet access was available,” wrote Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team in a Thursday blog post. “Because of this, when Claude’s search led it to real systems on the open internet, it treated them as part of the exercise.” One of the attacks targeted a domain that whoever set up the test thought was fictional. However the domain was live and in use. Told to capture a flag at that site, Claude attacked. Anthropic says its models used only “basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints” to attack. “It did not find or exploit any complex vulnerabilities, and in each case, Claude continued working to complete only the specific capture-the-flag task its evaluation had assigned,” the AI upstart claimed. “In none of these situations did Claude exfiltrate itself or deliberately attempt to escape its test environment,” Anthropic pointed out. But Claude was still fiendishly clever as in another of its attacks the AI found setup instructions for developers that advised them to install a Python package from PyPI. That package did not exist so Claude’s strategy to capture the flag saw it create and publish a malicious one with the relevant name. “Claude believed the package registry it was using to be part of the simulation, but in reality the package was made freely available online for roughly one hour. During that window, the package was downloaded and run on 15 real systems,” Anthropic admitted. Claude also eventually realized it could access the open internet despite instructions not to go there. Opus 4.7, the oldest Anthropic model used in the test, kept going regardless. “Mythos 5 correctly intuited that it was accessing the open internet, but reasoned its way back to the conclusion that it was still in a simulation,” Anthropic wrote. “Our latest model, an internal research test model, also considered whether its targets were in fact real. When evidence emerged that they were, it stopped the exercise.” Anthropic’s post offers the usual pledges to be more careful when setting up future tests, and to make sure its models can’t make the mistakes that allowed the attacks to happen. But the company has also given itself a pass, claiming that the safeguards in the models it sells “would have blocked the behaviors identified.” “We believe these incidents to be closer to a harness and operational failure than a model alignment failure,” the post states, and contrasts that assessment with a more damning assessment of OpenAI’s incident. “Our models were told they had no internet access and to capture the flag, while in fact being misconfigured to have internet access. This led them to believe – arguably reasonably – that the real environments they encountered were simulations.” “These facts give us cautious optimism that with tighter monitoring and controls around evaluation infrastructure, as well as continued investment in alignment, this type of risk can be overcome,” the post concludes. This leaves one of the world’s leading AI labs admitting it has acted carelessly when constructing tests, and caused harm, but also claiming it can make future tests foolproof. ®

This post contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. If you want to avoid them for now you can instead check out our non-spoiler review.

Marvel Studios/Sony ⚡ Quick Take

• Here’s what happened to Bruce Banner/Hulk in Spider-Man: Brand New Day and why a brutal fight was the best thing to happen to Peter Parker.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘s trailers didn’t just promise a fight between Spidey and Hulk. The movie promised a fight between Spidey and the big green rage monster of old times. How and why did Dr. Bruce Banner lose control and revert to his pre-Professor Hulk form? After his inhibitor broke something broke inside of him. What pulled him back is good new for Peter Parker.

Marvel Studios/Sony

After Thanos’ Snap, Bruce Banner “put the brains and the brawn together” to create a single combined persona. We first met the MCU’s Professor Hulk in Avengers: Endgame. That seemed to mark the end of Hulk as we knew him forever. Professor Hulk didn’t stay that way for long, though. In a Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings post-credits scene, Banner was back to his old human self. That sequence showed him wearing a device on his wrist. In the opening moments of She-Hulk, he told his cousin Jessica Walter it was an inhibitor device. It keeps his gamma radiation muted so he can stay human.

A desperate Peter Parker went to speak (in code) with Dr. Banner in Spider-Man: Brand New Day about controlling his own, suddenly changing powers. After learning about the inhibitor device and how it prevents Hulk from coming out, Peter then built a specialized one for himself. It controlled (so long as it didn’t overheat) his arachnid DNA. Despite Banner pointing out the danger of such a device, Peter also made a universal one so he could stop Jean Grey from using her powers.

Marvel Studios/Sony

When Peter arrived at Damage Control to stop the mutant, he found Professor Hulk ripping the building apart. Jean had used her psychic powers to control Banner. She had him remove his inhibitor chip and destroy it so he could tear the walls away from the locked door she wanted to get into. While not in control of his actions, at that point Hulk was still his smart, professor persona. It was only after Jean got out of his mind and he briefly returned to his human Banner form that things got bad.

Banner asked if he’d hurt anyone, but when Peter tried to place the universal inhibitor chip on the professor so Jean Grey couldn’t get use Hulk again, Banner refused. Then he got angry. He told Peter the mutant had “broken” something inside of him. He lost all control, telling Peter, “No Banner. Only Hulk.” But not Professor Hulk. We then, after 14 years, saw Bruce Banner Hulk out on screen. He reverted to his old, uncontrollable Savage Hulk form.

The ensuing fight was brutal and destructive, as Peter did everything he could to tie Hulk down with webs. It was all he could do after the green monster’s skin proved too thick to place the inhibitor chip. Ultimately Hulk had Peter by the throat ready to end the battle for good. It was at that moment Spider-Man looked at his old superhero ally and revealed his true identity. He said it was him, Peter.

Marvel Studios/Sony

Dr. Bruce Banner had not recognized Peter Parker when the young hero had arrived at his university asking about suppressing superpowers. But in that brief moment Hulk did know Peter. Deep down on some level, Hulk recognized Peter Parker as a friend. It stopped Hulk completely. He let Spider-Man go and went back to being Bruce Banner.

Hulk’s recognition of Peter Parker’s name is the best news Spider-Man has had in years. Combined with Ned innately remembering their best friend handshake, there’s enough evidence to believe Dr. Strange’s spell, the one that made the world forget Peter Parker, isn’t iron clad or eternal.

Not that Bruce Banner has any idea what any of that means. Or who Peter is. He’s currently in a psychiatric ward. The story being told is that he had a mental breakdown. Not great for Bruce, but at least the people of New York City won’t have to worry about Hulk smashing anything anytime soon. But Peter Parker knows the truth, just as Hulk knows Peter Parker.

The post What Happens With Hulk in SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY? appeared first on Nerdist.

This post contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day. If you want to avoid them for now you can instead check out our non-spoiler review.

Marvel Studios/Sony Pictures ⚡ Quick Take

• After Doctor Strange erased the world’s memory of Peter Parker, did anyone remember him in Spider-Man: Brand New Day?

Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we ask a sorcerer to deceive.

I think that’s the quote? Eh, close enough. Of course, Peter Parker wasn’t trying to deceive anyone in Spider-Man: No Way Home. When he asked Doctor Strange to make the whole world forget Peter Parker, Spider-Man was trying to save everyone in his universe. Only by having the wizard erase everyone’s memory of himself could Peter stop parallel worlds from invading. But was that spell permanent? Or is there a chance one of Spidey’s old friends would eventually remember him? After four long years of isolation, Spider-Man: Brand New Day gave him reason to hope.

Marvel Studios/Sony

In Spider-Man: Brand New Day, MJ had zero memories of Peter Parker even after she read the unshared letter he’d written her four years ago telling her the truth. She had absolutely no recollection of him and what they’d been through, even though she clearly remembered all the times and places that Spider-Man had saved her life. And yet, there’s still reason to think she eventually might. Two other people, buried deep somewhere inside them, still maintained a connection to Peter Parker.

Well, one person and one giant green rage monster.

Marvel Studios/Sony

When an out-of-control, Savage Hulk had Spider-Man by the throat, the webbed-slinger finally revealed his true identity to someone. He said, “It’s Peter.” Despite Bruce Banner having no recollection of his former superhero previously, something clicked in Hulk’s brain. He innately recognized Peter as a friend and let him go. It also helped calm Hulk down enough so he could revert back to Banner. While Bruce didn’t remember anything, it showed that Peter Parker still exists in the recesses of his shared mind.

Hulk remembering Peter Parker when Bruce Banner doesn’t raises some fascinating questions about Strange’s spell. Was Hulk immune to it because he didn’t exist when Strange cast it? Are rage monsters just immune to a specific type of magic in general? Or is this a one-off for reasons we don’t yet know? Whatever the truth might be, it’s one of two reasons for Peter to have hope someone else might also remember him eventually.

Marvel Studios/Sony

His old multi-step handshake with Ned is the other. At the end of Spider-Man: Brand New Day Peter decided to tell Ned his real name. MJ had suggested Peter also tell Ned about their shared past after she’d read his letter.

When Peter went over to his best friend—who’d he’d already hung out and built LEGO sets with while dressed as Spider-Man without stirring up any wiped memories—Ned instinctively remembered their old personalized greeting as though he’d never forgotten it. It came back to him naturally. It also surprised Ned. He couldn’t understand how he’d done the handshake. He then looked at his old friend and said, “Peter.”

Like Hulk, somewhere in Ned—even if it’s not accessible or even understandable just yet—is the memory of Peter Parker. And if Peter still exists in both of them, Peter might still exist in everyone else, too. Especially MJ.

The post Does Anyone Remember Peter Parker in SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY? appeared first on Nerdist.

⚡ Quick Take

• Spider-Man: Brand New Day features a host of villains both large and small. Here’s all the baddies you can see Spidey face in the movie.

In the previous three Spider-Man movies within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we’ve seen a whole host of the wallcrawler’s many villains. Vulture, Shocker, Tinkerer, Scorpion, and Darter in Homecoming. Mysterio and the illusion of Hydro-Man in Far From Home. And alt-universe versions of Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Sandman, Lizard, and Electro in No Way Home. That is a lot of baddies in just three movies. But if you’ve read Spider-Man comics for any real period of time, you’ll know Manhattan has about 19,000 more. And while almost none of them play significant roles, we do get to see several villains in the newest film, Brand New Day.

So, which villains do appear in Spider-Man: Brand New Day? Beware spoilers below!

Sony Pictures

For the most part, this movie blows through most of its villains in a really fun montage near the beginning. We see several scenes of Spider-Man kicking the collective butts of some largely b-tier, street level villains from comics past. A lot of these are just thugs, which I don’t really need to shout out, except to say that Spider-Man swings with one besuited bad guy, copying the cover of the character’s first appearance in Amazing Fantasy #15.

Boomerang Marvel Comics

The first costumed bad guy we see is Boomerang. The tableau of this fight mimics the cover of The Amazing Spider-Man #345 by legendary artist Erik Larsen. Frederick Meyers was born in Australia but moved to the U.S. as a small child. He excelled at baseball and went pro as a pitcher. After the league caught him accepting bribes, Meyers went to work for the criminal organization Secret Empire. Because he was from Australia and could throw things real good, they made him a Boomerang-themed guy. This is a real thing.

At first, Boomerang was a Hulk villain, then fought against the likes of Iron Fist, the Defenders, and Shang-Chi before joining the Sinister Syndicate alongside other baddies Rhino, Hydro-Man, Beetle, and Speed Demon. Years more as an all-purpose bad guy and occasional reluctant ally of Spider-Man and others, Boomerang eventually bonded with a symbiote (because of course he did) and became the blue-and-red Vemon-like, Comeback.

Tarantula Marvel Comics

The next cover the montage mimics is The Amazing Spider-Man #134, which features the Web Head on a steam ship in New York Harbor fighting against the international terrorist Anton Miguel Rodriguez, aka Tarantula. Tarantula in the comics wears a red and black costume with a spider on it and a black or blue mask not unlike Zorro’s.

Tarantula has a lot fewer appearances in the comics than Boomerang, and only ever going up against Spider-Man or his allies.

Ramrod Marvel Comics

One of the most obscure, deepest-cut villains we see, even compared to the two above, is Ramrod. Ramrod is a cyborg who—go figure—rams things with his metal head. He looks basically like a skinny Juggernaut. The moment in the film replicates the cover of The Amazing Spider-Man #221, which has Spidey jumping out of the way as Ramrod plows into the side of a building.

Ramrod is only in four issues of Daredevil, three issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, one Fantastic Four, one Captain America, and as a joke cameo in an issue of X-Men from 2012. He is, however, the only villain in the movie who actually appears in the “Brand New Day” comic book arc, so that’s fun.

Tombstone Sony/CW

The villain I was hoping would be more prominent in the movie, but alas is only a glorified cameo at the end of the montage, is Lonnie Lincoln, aka Tombstone, the gangster with a complete lack of skin pigmentation played by Marvin Jones III. Ostracized as a youth for his physical difference and raspy voice, Lincoln would eventually lean fully into people’s fear of him by filing down his teeth into sharp points and basically looking like a vampire or something.

Tombstone has done a lot of things over the years in the comics since his first appearance in Web of Spider-Man #36. He’s even gone toe-to-toe with Kingpin for control of the New York criminal underworld and came out on top for a time.

Scorpion Marvel Comics

Though Mac Gargan appeared in Homecoming, he never donned the famous robot suit with a long stinging tail in that movie. Here, Michael Mando plays a much larger role and has two pretty awesome fight scenes against Spider-Man. The first at the beginning of the movie is your standard fight, whereas the second later on sees Scorpion under mind control and Spider-Man losing himself to his unstable spider genes. I both cases, pretty rad.

The Hand Sony/Marvel Studios

The red-clad, vaguely mystically powered ninjas called the Hand appear in Spider-Man: Brand New Day throughout. Early in the movie, we see him fighting them as part of the montage of Spidey fighting. Then we learn Bill Metzger has “rehabilitated” them and made them part of Damage Control. Spidey then fights them again at the end of the movie when trying to stop the threat to New York.

Throwing another spoiler warning up juuuuust in case you still don’t want to know the big twist of the movie.

Jean Grey Sony Pictures/Marvel Studios

The most formidable opponent for Spider-Man in the movie is actually Jean Grey (Sadie Sink) who attempts to break into Damage Control throughout the movie. She inhabits various people’s minds and makes them do things. She gets inside of Bruce Banner’s head and makes him Hulk out for the first time in years, effectively breaking his mind in the process. Jean also, perhaps most cruelly, secretly inhabits MJ’s mind and makes Peter believe she actually remembers him. The reveal of the truth being the biggest gut-punch of the entire film.

Even though Jean does some pretty horrendous things in the movie, we learn that, of course, she’s not the really real villain. In fact, her wanting to get inside Damage Control has nothing to do with stealing anything. She wants to find and free her sister Sara Grey, another powerful telepath whom Bill Metzger at DODC kidnapped and tortured in an attempt to replicate her powers. Sara died during this ordeal.

Which means, the real-real villain of the movie is…

Bill Metzger Sony Pictures

Metzger (Tramell Tillman) is a duplicitous, knowledge-hungry man who abducts special people in order to steal their tech or abilities to augment Damage Control’s arsenal. Despite pretending like he trusts and appreciates Spider-Man, we learn at the end of the movie that Metzger had his scientists make anti-Spider-Man weapons that would thwart his own tech and powers.

He also straight up tortures and exploits Sara Grey leading to her death. He intends to do the same to Jean before her powers accelerate and she’s able to go from merely inhabiting minds to full-on telekinesis. If not or Spider-Man, Metzger would have died at her hands along with probably half of New York.

Metzger gets away at the end of the movie, presumably to show up once again as the anti-mutant activist he is in the comics.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.

The post What Villains Appear in SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY? appeared first on Nerdist.

⚡ Quick Take

• While it’s not instantly clear, we have a pretty good idea what the Spider-Man: Brand New Day post-credits scene means.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day doesn’t have a traditional post-credits scene—you know, with human beings on screen and whatever—but it does have a little teaser that does seemingly set up the next time we’ll see Peter Parker in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But for those not steeped in comics, you might be confused as to what this odd little animated moment might mean. That’s where we step in, people.

The Post-Credits Scene Marvel Studios/Sony Pictures

After the credits, we see the usual text of “Spider-Man Will Return,” but with no indication of the title. We then see Ned’s Spidey Tracker app saying it has located Spider-Man. The app graphics show the city of New York, then pulls out to show the Earth, then the Spider-Man icon moves out into space. Eventually it settles over a blank area near the moon. “Spider-Man found,” it says over and over again.

What the Post-Credits Scene Means

Now, obviously this is speculation, but to us it seems fairly clear. The next movie in the MCU will be, of course, Avengers: Doomsday. If the movie hews close to the “Time Runs Out” storyline from Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers comics run, as we all expect, the culmination will see Dr. Doom avert the catastrophic incursion event threatening reality only for every timeline and parallel earth to reduce down to a single strand.

However, Doom will not merely be content with ruling this Earth. He will take remnants of other destroyed realities and create Battleworld, a planet near the moon. This will take place in Avengers: Secret Wars. Spider-Man plays a major role in the original Secret Wars comics from the ’80s, which famously first bestowed the black suit upon him. Since Sony surely wants to get Venom going in the main MCU/Tom Holland version of Spider-Man as quickly as possible, this is a pretty clear way to do it.

Marvel Comics

While we don’t know if Spider-Man will appear even as a cameo in Doomsday, I would be incredibly surprised if Holland isn’t one of the central characters of Secret Wars. Ergo, while the Spidey Tracker app isn’t literally capable of detecting Spider-Man in outer space, it lets us the audience know where next we’ll find him.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.

The post What Does the SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY Post-Credits Scene Mean? appeared first on Nerdist.

After OpenAI's models broke into Hugging Face, Anthropic checked its own history and found three similar incidents

Amazon reported its earnings today, and because I am professionally depressed I read the thing in full [PDF]. "How long can I go before the red haze of rage sets in" is a fun game, and today I made it all the way to the bottom of the second page when I encountered a bullet point touting how AWS "made its spec-drive [sic] coding agent, Kiro, available on iOS." Yes, I was in the room when they announced it at the New York summit, six weeks ago. As of this writing, their website, which I have screenshotted says I can "request early access" because "We'll invite a limited number of people to try the app via Apple's TestFlight, and we'll send everyone a link when it's ready." So Kiro is "available" in the same way as I am available to play in the NBA. You can twist yourself into a pretzel and assert that this claim is technically true, but for all practical readings it's what we'd colloquially term "a lie." You need to be explicitly invited to Apple's developer beta testing tool, where a limited number of users can try out an unpublished version. You cannot download it on your phone, and there is no page in the App Store that showcases the product. The delay is almost certainly due to Apple's byzantine App Store policies, which I have some sympathy for — but this is an earnings statement. If they're going to "shade the truth" like this, what else are they not being forthcoming about? Once you notice it becomes hard to stop There are a lot of other statements that one suspects might not stand up to scrutiny. Graviton boasts "up to 30 to 40% better price-performance," which I only accept because I have seen the numbers myself on customer workloads. The express statement that their AI business and chips business are each exceeding $25B run rates in consecutive bullets, with no word on whether those dollars overlap (we will come back to this point shortly). And their Bedrock statement: "customers spent more in Q2 than all prior quarters combined," which makes it sound like a rocket until you realize that they're saying the past 90 days exceeded the other 10 quarters for which Bedrock has been available. Without actual numbers tied to these, that makes it sound like for the first couple of years Bedrock was showing up wearing a party hat but no pants. Then there's the AWS operating margin of 39.4%, which came in above every published analyst estimate and which everyone will invariably cite as cherry-picked proof the AI buildout is printing money. On the call, CFO Brian Olsavsky disclosed that it includes roughly $600 million of mark-to-market gains on energy derivative contracts. By his math, AWS margins were up 650 basis points year over year, or 520 "if you exclude the derivative accounting gain." Strip that gain out yourself (behold the power of arithmetic!) and the blowout margin goes right back inside the range analysts had modeled. Amazon now hedges electricity the way an airline hedges jet fuel, and this quarter the hedges paid off directly. Olsavsky noted these adjustments "have not been significant in prior quarters." The first quarter they are significant, they land in AWS margin, and their Q3 guidance already assumes no impact from these remeasurements going forward. Amazon knows it's noise, but clearly saw no reason to turn down claiming the win. The chips business that sells no chips Back to those dueling $25B run rates I touched on; describing their "AI chips business" that way struck me as an incredibly odd thing to say. That business has revenue, growth, a triple-digit trajectory, sarcastic numbers of happy customers — but what it doesn't have is a product that you can buy. There is no Trainium price list, they will not ship you a socketed Graviton chip to put in your next desktop build, there isn't even an external part number. What Amazon books as "chips revenue" is EC2 instance rental (possibly filtered through higher level services like Bedrock, SageMaker, the half-baked agents that fail to properly explain your AWS bill to you, etc.), and an EC2 instance is not a chip. It's the chip, plus the nVME, plus the NICs (themselves built on Nitro, which uses Amazon's own silicon), plus some aspects of the data transfer that somehow aren't directly billed, plus the building the whole mess lives in—and then with AWS's margin layered on top. The silicon itself is a minority line item in the internal bill of materials that constitutes its business. You don't have to take my word for it; Amazon CEO and AI Marketing Manager Jassy spent last quarter's call lamenting that the cost of components, "particularly memory, has skyrocketed," so by his own testimony a growing slice of the "chips business" is memory revenue. Cynically, the category exists so that headline writers will talk about it in the same breath as Nvidia's data center numbers, which they of course will. But Nvidia's $25 billion is silicon sold in the form of physical packaged chips, shoveled out their loading dock. Amazon's is fully-loaded infrastructure rental. This is a hotel comparing its revenue to a mattress company's. But wait, there's one more layer of inanity here. Olsavsky has said that the majority of Bedrock's workloads run on Trainium. So if you follow one Anthropic dollar through the earnings release it's AI-business revenue, it's chips-business revenue, and it's AWS segment revenue. It's nice when you can get a triple-brag for the same thing. You don't have to take my word on the "sells no chips" part either. On today's call, Morgan Stanley's Brian Nowak asked when Amazon might start selling Trainium to third parties. I want one too; I get it. Jassy answered that customers are increasingly interested in getting Trainium "separate from our cloud," that Amazon is "actively having those conversations," and that "there's a real chance we'll do that in the future." IN THE FUTURE. "Yeah, we have yet to sell a single chip" is quite something to hear from the CEO about his purported $25 billion chips business. Why does this matter? The way they talk about this matters deeply, because the numbers they're draped around serve as the justification for the largest capex program in corporate history. On the call, Andy Jassy raised the year's spending to $220 billion and announced backlog hit $496 billion; up $132 billion in a quarter, during the same quarter Anthropic signed its $100 billion-over-a-decade commitment. Amazon booked $53.4 billion in gains on its Anthropic stake this quarter, which is most of why "net income" septupled, while free cash flow went $26 billion in the angry direction and the company sold $25 billion in bonds. Jassy himself described the AI demand curve on the call as "very barbelled": AI labs consuming "gobs and gobs of compute" on one end, enterprises doing cost-avoidance on the other, and in the middle you've got the stuff that actually seems durable if AI is to have a future: the enterprise production workloads running inference at scale, "most of which aren't" doing so yet. He went on to admit he doesn't know whether that middle will follow the same "wildly steep trajectory" as the labs have. That's the CEO stating that the demand underwriting $220 billion is concentrated today in a handful of AI labs, one of which Amazon happens to own a meaningful piece of, while the broader enterprise adoption wave remains a forecast. We're hoping for sunshine! None of this is fraud, and all of this is real infrastructure, but the entire shape of it all is being told in the same sitting that described a waitlist as "available." That is what's at stake here, and why a bullet about Kiro matters more than Kiro itself does. When the music inevitably stops and the bill comes due, how will these statements look through the clarifying lens of hindsight? This too shall pass Kiro will presumably ship on iOS – months after folks gave the slightest toss about it. The run rates AWS said are probably close to real; they grew 37% YoY and that's no small thing at their scale. Their business is firing on all cylinders and they've got a lot to be proud of, which makes their overstating things just that much weirder. The company that posts these kinds of numbers doesn't need to inflate the software bullets. But when everything's "available," then nothing is. ®

President Donald Trump hates immigration, period. Though ICE thugs run the administration playbook of terror against ostensibly undocumented immigrants, there’s really a whole-of-government approach going on now designed to make it nearly impossible to come here legally, unless you are a racist white Afrikaner. And if people from other countries somehow do manage to come here legally…

Source

A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Trump’s approval rating plummets near George W. Bush levels Two war criminals in a pod. ‘Head for an eye’: Trump team has no plan to end Iran war It’s just empty threat after empty threat. Trump demands you pay even more for his dumb Freedom 250 flop What…

Source

A cartoon by Mike Luckovich. Related | GOP freaks out when Fauci refuses to play their games…

Source

⚡ Quick Take

• A Dungeons & Dragons Star Wars collaboration taking place in the Season of Rebellion is coming our way in 2027, the first collab of its kind.

Hold onto your hats, kids. Two of the biggest nerdy franchises around are coming together for an epic collaboration. Yes, we’re talking about Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons. In 2027, we’re about to get THE collab of the century, but we don’t know too much about it yet. In fact, all we know is that a “Dungeons & Dragons | Star Wars™ collaboration will take place in the Season of Rebellion, coming 2027.” Listen, we just need those first four words to know we’re excited.

Wizards of the Coast

Of course, there have been other Star Wars TTRPG games before. But this OFFICIAL collab with THE biggest TTRPG of all is something totally unprecedented. How will your bards, mages, rogues, and more show up in a Star Wars Dungeons & Dragons game? Which land will this adventure be set it in? What kind of powers, spells, and objects will you have at your disposal? Which beloved Star Wars characters will serve as your NPCs? We have so many questions. But… as we said, not many answers.

RELATED ARTICLE

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS’ Biggest Announcements at Gen Con 2026

Dan Ayoub, Head of Dungeons & Dragons Franchise at Wizards of the Coast had just a little bit more to share, he revealed, “With Universes Beyond, we are expanding Dungeons & Dragons into even more worlds we love, like World of Warcraft. At the same time, we are revisiting core D&D settings, including Dark Sun, Dragonlance, and Greyhawk. What’s more, in a crossover that fans have dreamed about for years, Star Wars is coming to Dungeons & Dragons for the first time, bringing the iconic galaxy to our players’ tabletops. Our wide range of announcements show that we are committed to delivering more choices, and more ways for friends and family to adventure together.”

Nerdist Take: Star Wars Meets Dungeons & Dragons Is ROCKING Our World

Honestly, we are literally sitting here with our jaws open. Both Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons have truly come so far. Once, these nerdy pastimes were considered weird, maybe even satanic. And today, they are joining forces for an incredible celebration. It’s a huge victory for weirdos, nerds, and geeks everywhere. If there was ever a lore-heavy world that fits perfectly into telling an epic tale of bravery, adventure, and fantasy, it’s Star Wars. Truly it’s like the biggest sci-fi franchise and the biggest fantasy one have melded into one.

We can’t help but think, Eddie Munson would have loved this!!! We know almost nothing about this Dungeons & Dragons Star Wars journey. But we know we are excited to play it.

When Will Dungeons & Dragons | Star Wars Release?

Dungeons & Dragons | Star Wars is coming in 2027, and we’ll be ready. Keep an eye on official sites for more.

The post STAR WARS and DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Are COLLABORATING appeared first on Nerdist.

Apple is worried enough about supply shortages that it reported about $11.1 billion in inventory, which is almost double the $5.7 billion it reported last September.

The former OpenAI researcher’s fund was forced to unwind public equities after leveraged public bets plummeted. But he still has cards to play.

Reddit's financial situation is looking good but uncertainty about its relationship to Google and the new AI-ified web are stirring market concerns.

The leaders of the Democratic Women’s Caucus are calling for the House Ethics Committee to “thoroughly investigate” GOP Rep. Max Miller of Ohio for recent allegations of abuse. “The recent reports of domestic violence and child abuse against Representative Max Miller are deeply disturbing and Congress can’t ignore them. Allegations of violence against women and children have to be met with…

Source

⚡ Quick Take

• Wizards of the Coast dropped some major announcements for Dungeons & Dragons’ expansive future. Here are the biggest ones.

Dungeons & Dragons is entering a new era, with planned crossovers, a return to classic settings, and two line expansions. Wizards of the Coast hosted a D&D Keynote Address at Gen Con. The event featured a slew of announcements about the game, including upcoming products and brand new initiatives. The news was capped off with the announcement of a new Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft product that will kick off a new Dungeons & Dragons Universes Beyond line of products, bringing Magic: The Gathering’s profitable and controversial crossover strategy to the tabletop RPG.

Dungeons & Dragons Icons Line Brings Back Classic Settings Wizards of the Coast

At a press event held before Gen Con, Wizards of the Coast laid out many of the new products and initiatives announced during Gen Con. The first was a new Dungeons & Dragons Icons line of products that will bring back classic creators to tell new stories in the settings they helped popularized. Actor Joe Manganiello will serve as the Chief Creative Officer for the brand, with creators like Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, Luke Gygax, and RA Salvatore all confirmed to participate.

The first product in the Dungeons & Dragons Icons line is a new adventure titled Greyhawk: Crown of the Witch Queen. This 160-page adventure will be launched in early 2027 and will feature Dreldza, the daughter of the witch-queen Iggwilv (better known in D&D lore as Tasha). Artwork for the new series previewed Castle Greyhawk, hinting at a return to one of D&D’s first megadungeons.

New Books Will Relaunch the Dark Sun Campaign Setting Wizards of the Coast

Also coming in 2027 are new books relaunching the Dark Sun campaign setting. A gory trailer showed Psions and warriors brutally eviscerating foes, teasing a much more brutal experience than what many D&D fans are used to. Dark Sun will be D&D’s first Mature Rated setting, with a rating of 18+ and shrink-wrapped books to keep younger fans from seeing bloody and lascivious art. A content warning hinted that the books would contain nudity, which would be a first for D&D, at least since the earliest days of the game. Dark Sun will also feature the Psion, the second new class for D&D following the Artificer.

Three books will be released for Dark Sun. The Edge of Oblivion will serve as a campaign setting guide, while Blood & Power will serve as the player-facing guide containing rules for the Psion class. Also planned for release is a limited edition Player’s Handbook featuring Dark Sun artwork. In total, Wizards plans to release about 500 pages of Dark Sun material with the new release.

There Are Many D&D Beyond Upgrades Coming Soon

D&D Beyond is also getting some upgrades over the next year. In addition to some quality of life improvements, such as a revamped search option, D&D Beyond will also be getting a LFG (looking for group) hub. The hub will seek to partner prospective players with in-store events and games, or digital games through Discord and a new partnership with StartPlaying. D&D Beyond is also planning new DM prep tools and is building a new mobile app to help streamline the play experience at the table.

RELATED ARTICLE

This Raccoon Is Going Viral, and DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Responds Dungeons & Dragons: Warlock Video Game Gets Two Big Updates Wizards of the Coast

Dungeons & Dragons: Warlock, the new video game due for release in 2027 also received two brief but notable updates. First is that protagonist Kaatri (voiced by Tricia Helfer) will be joined by her patron Tasha, played by veteran voice actor Maggie Robertson. The second is that a gameplay preview will be shown off at GamesCom, just a few weeks away.

Dungeons & Dragons Will Launch World of Warcraft Crossover in November Wizards of the Coast

Dungeons & Dragons will be launching a crossover product with World of Warcraft this November. The new book is intended to let players play as every WoW class and species, with 11 new species appearing in the book and 9 subclasses. Six of the subclasses are brand new to Dungeons & Dragons and were playtested secretly, while three 5E subclasses were updated to the new revised edition. Also appearing in the book will be 26 magic items, 30 dungeon boss states, 60 spells, and rules for mounts, companion creatures, and professions. Three versions of the new book will be made available, including a special Collector’s Edition with the Horde insignia on one side and the Alliance’s logo on the other.

Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft will launch the new Dungeons & Dragons: Universes Beyond line, a new line of products that will crossover Dungeons & Dragons and other popular IPs. The name mimics the popular Magic: The Gathering line, which has helped turned the card game into a billion dollar franchise. No other IPs were initially announced, but Wizards employees noted that they were planning on striking a careful balance between their normal D&D product lineup and the Universes Beyond line to help prevent things from getting too bloated.

New Publisher Partnerships Will Support Multiple Campaign Settings

The final new announcement at Gen Con was that Wizards is expanding their partnerships with several third-party publishers to provide annual support for multiple campaign settings. The goal of these partnerships is for each to provide one official adventure or anthology set in settings like Eberron or the Forgotten Realms per year.

RELATED ARTICLE

Wizards of the Coast Revisits DUNGEONS & DRAGONS’ Artificer Class

Ghostfire Gaming, a maker of horror-themed adventures, will be making Ravenloft products. Visionary Production & Design, which produces DMs Guild supplements, will be writing Eberron adventures, and well-known D&D publisher Kobold Press will make Forgotten Realms products. All of these products are considered to be “official” D&D products and will get both physical and digital releases.

Wizards of the Coast teased at least one big surprise still to be announced at Gen Con, with a “Season of Rebellion” planned for release in late 2027 in addition to the already announced Season of Survival (anchored by Dark Sun) and Season of Sword and Sorcery (anchored by Greyhawk: Crown of the Witch Queen). D&D’s full Keynote presentation is available to watch on YouTube so check it out to see if there’s any magic left to be spun outside of all these admittedly big announcements.

The post DUNGEONS & DRAGONS’ Biggest Announcements at Gen Con 2026 appeared first on Nerdist.