New Harry Potter actor John Lithgow has weighed in on JK Rowling’s trans views, admitting he finds them “ironic and inexplicable”.

The actor is set to play the Hogwarts headmaster Dumbledore in the new HBO series adaptation of Rowling’s books, which has attracted controversy amid the author’s views.

Speaking at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Lithgow said he takes “the subject extremely seriously”.

In just the past week, France has banned its public officials from using American technology, more governments are considering keeping young people off Silicon Valley’s biggest social media platforms, and UpScrolled saw a surge in users over censorship fears on TikTok in the U.S. All of these moves point to a growing unease with U.S. tech firms and tech policy.

NME’s latest star of The Cover, COBRAH, has created an exclusive playlist to accompany the story’s launch – check it out below.

The boundary-pushing Swedish pop artist is on this week’s (February 2) edition of The Cover, a manifestation of NME’s commitment to supporting emerging talent across the globe on a weekly basis. Every week, a rising artist will feature on The Cover – you can read COBRAH’s profile here, written by Bailey Slater and featuring photography by Julius Hayes.

https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/6wljWsuAbRWHdk9wZ2ITHa?si=3dec8dc1a67c4d28&utm_source=oembed

Apple has handed an early season three renewal to its hit drama ”Your Friends & Neighbors” ahead of its return this spring. The company made the announcement alongside the release of the first teaser for the second season, which sees Jon Hamm return to his role as an unlikely suburban thief.

The maintainer of Notepad++ has revealed that state-sponsored attackers hijacked the utility’s update mechanism to redirect update traffic to malicious servers instead.

”The attack involved [an] infrastructure-level compromise that allowed malicious actors to intercept and redirect update traffic destined for notepad-plus-plus.org,” developer Don Ho said. ”The compromise occurred at the hosting provider level rather than through vulnerabilities in Notepad++ code itself.”

The exact mechanism through which this was realized is currently being investigated, Ho added.

The development comes a little over a month after Notepad++ released version 8.8.9 to address an issue that resulted in traffic from WinGUp, the Notepad++ updater, being ”occasionally” redirected to malicious domains, resulting in the download of poisoned executables.

The one thing N. Lee Plumb knows for sure about being laid off from Amazon last week is that it wasn’t a failure to get on board with the company’s artificial intelligence plans.

Plumb, his team’s head of “AI enablement,” says he was so prolific in his use of Amazon’s new AI coding tool that the company flagged him as one of its top users.

Many assumed Amazon’s 16,000 corporate layoffs announced last week reflected CEO Andy Jassy’s push to “reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”