Todd Vaziri, on the HBO Max Mad Men fiasco:

It appears as though this represents the original photography, unaltered before digital visual effects got involved. Somehow, this episode (along with many others) do not include all the digital visual effects that were in the original broadcasts and home video releases. It’s a bizarro mistake for Lionsgate and HBO Max to make and not discover until after the show was streaming to customers.

I decided to help illustrate the changes by diving in and creating images that might do better than words. The first thing I noticed is that, at least for season one, the episode titles and order were totally jumbled. The puke episode is “Red in the Face”, not “Babylon”.

So HBO Max not only ruined several episodes by “remastering” the wrong footage, but they both mis-numbered and mis-titled the episodes. Breathtaking ineptitude. Think about it. This is the entire raison d’être — streaming high quality movies and episodic series. That’s the one and only thing HBO Max does. And they have zero care or craft for what they do. They didn’t just do this to any show. They did it to one of the most cinematically beautiful and carefully crafted shows ever made.

Vaziri’s post, as is his wont, is replete with illustrated and animated examples of the mistakes in HBO’s versions compared to the correct originals available from AMC and iTunes. Vaziri notes:

The fun thing about this restoration mistake is that now we, the audience, get to see exactly how many digital visual effects were actually used in a show like “Mad Men”, which most would assume did not have any digital effects component. In this shot, not only were the techs and hose removed, but the spot where the pretend puke meets Slattery’s face has some clever digital warping to make it seem like the flow is truly coming from his mouth (as opposed to it appearing through a tube inches from his mouth, on the other side of his face).

Alan Sepinwall, writing for Wired (News+ link in case Wired’s paywall busts your balls):

Last month, HBO Max announced a major new addition to its library. Not only would the streamer be adding Mad Men — a show that HBO execs infamously passed on back when Matthew Weiner was a writer on The Sopranos — but it would be presenting the period drama’s episodes in a new 4K remastering. This would, according to the press release, give “audiences and longtime Mad Men fans the opportunity to enjoy the series’ authentically crafted elements with crisp detail and enhanced visual clarity.”

As it turned out, there was perhaps too much clarity. Not long after the series went live on HBO Max, a screencap began floating around social media from a scene in the Season One episode “Red in the Face,” where Roger Sterling is vomiting in front of a group of horrified Sterling Cooper clients. When it aired — and in the version still available on AMC+ — seven men are onscreen, all of them wearing period-appropriate suits and ties. The HBO Max version, on the other hand, features two men who appear very out of place in 1960: crew members lurking in the background, feeding a hose to create the illusion that actor John Slattery is puking.

It’s not like the crew members are only partially on-screen, or out of focus far in the background. They’re right there. It’s glaringly obvious that no one at HBO Max even watched this. That’s how rotten the culture at Warner Bros. Discovery is. They obtained the rights to one of the greatest TV shows ever made (one that I personally hold alongside The Sopranos as my favorite ever), processed the episodes in some sort of “remastering” that did not need to happen, and didn’t even bother to watch the fucking new versions they produced before putting them on their service for the world to stream.

AMC+ has the entire original series, as originally broadcast, and it looks gorgeous. I bought all seven seasons from iTunes back in the day, and they look as good, if not better, in those versions. David Zaslav — a well-known idiot — should go to prison for this.

Aditya Kalra and Munsif Vengattil, reporting for Reuters:

Apple does not plan to comply with a mandate to preload its smartphones with a state-owned cyber safety app and will convey its concerns to New Delhi, three sources said, after the government’s move sparked surveillance concerns and a political uproar.

The Indian government has confidentially ordered companies including Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi to preload their phones with an app called Sanchar Saathi, or Communication Partner, within 90 days. The app is intended to track stolen phones, block them and prevent them from being misused.

The government also wants manufacturers to ensure that the app is not disabled. And for devices already in the supply chain, manufacturers should push the app to phones via software updates, Reuters was first to report on Monday. [...]

Apple however does not plan to comply with the directive and will tell the government it does not follow such mandates anywhere in the world as they raise a host of privacy and security issues for the company’s iOS ecosystem, said two of the industry sources who are familiar with Apple’s concerns. They declined to be named publicly as the company’s strategy is private.

The second source said Apple does not plan to go to court or take a public stand, but it will tell the government it cannot follow the order because of security vulnerabilities. Apple “can’t do this. Period,” the person said.

To my knowledge, there are no government-mandated apps pre-installed on iPhones anywhere in the world. I’m not even sure how that would work, technically, given that third-party apps have to come from the App Store and thus can’t be installed until after the iPhone is configured and the user signs into their App Store Apple Account.

The app order comes as Apple is locked in a court fight with an Indian watchdog over the nation’s antitrust penalty law. Apple has said it risks facing a fine of up to $38 billion in a case.

This is another one of those laws like the EU’s DMA, where maximum possible fines are based on a percentage of global revenue. No one in India seems to actually be threatening any such fine, but it’s ludicrous that it’s even possible.

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