As reported here and elsewhere, Disney has bought out Comcast’s share of Hulu to become the sole owner of the platform. Now, bgr.com reports that the two platforms will be available in a single app starting next month…provided you subscribe to both, of course! Be advised that the new app will be in beta, however…the wider rollout for it is planned for the first quarter of 2024. 

The last quarter was a biggie for Sony…particularly for sales of the PS5. The company has announced that they sold 4.9 million PlayStation 5’s third quarter (which is Sony’s 2nd financial quarter), bringing the total number of PS5’s out in the world to 46.6 million! According to engadget.com, that number didn’t match last year’s holiday figure, but it was still 1.6 million more than in the same quarter of 2022. Sony is shooting for shipping 25 million units this financial year…that will be a tall order, even with the holiday season, because they will need to sell 16.8 million more gaming systems by the end of the year. 

There have been ‘periodic outages’ affecting ChatGPT and its developer tools. Now, OpenAI has confirmed that DDoS attacks…denial of service…are behind the problem. TechCrunch.com says the outages have been happening on and off the last 24 hours. Users have seen a message saying “ChatGPT is at capacity right now,” and have been unable to log into the service. OpenAI says the problem was fixed at about 1 PM yesterday afternoon. Hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan took credit for the alleged attack.

Theverge.com reports that Apple, Google, and Samsung have teamed up with lock makers and chip makers, including the makers of Schlage and Yale locks…as well as Qualcomm and NXP, to build an open standard for smart locks and digital keys, using devices like your smartphone or smartwatch. the standard is called Aliro, and it is out today. Obviously, it will take a while for everything to come to market, but look for this to work a lot like the smart home standard Matter…it will just make various smart locking systems work nicely with your digital devices without having to download a proprietary app or carrying around some kind of tag or card reader. From what they have released, it sounds a lot like Apple’s Home Key…a digital key stored in your phone’s digital wallet and accessible on your watch that doesn’t require a proprietary app and works with any door lock that supports the standard. Access to the key could be controlled and managed by the owner of the lock through an app. If you are the type of person who misplaces keys, this will be a boon…just don’t also lose track of your phone or watch!

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.