If you got a DM from an unverified Jon Bon Jovi account after commenting on one of his official Instagram posts, what would it take to make you believe it was really the rock star hoping to connect? And at what point when he starts asking you to send money—like lose-your-house kind of money—would you snap out of the fantasy and stop draining your bank account?

In a documentary premiering Saturday—Super Scam Me—investigative journalist Mariana van Zeller goes deep into this toxic love-bombing terrain. In a clip that Ars is exclusively debuting below, you can see how van Zeller worked with an ethical hacker, Arman the Cyber, to use a fake bitcoin receipt and bait the fake Bon Jovi, giving the victim some much-needed closure.

Scamming a romance scammer

Broadcasting on National Geographic at 9 pm ET and available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu, the documentary takes viewers on an empathetic quest to understand how the line between “lover” and “fraud victim” gets blurred in romance scams that the Federal Trade Commission says cost Americans nearly $1.5 billion in losses each year.

Read full article

Comments

© National Geographic

Marking the 30th anniversary of KDE on October 14, the project released Plasma 6.8, debuted a movie, and retired Plasma's native X11 session support. The announcement from KDE dubs the new Plasma 6.8 as the "30th Anniversary Edition" and describes the update as preparing Plasma for the future. Legacy X11 applications will still function via the XWayland compatibility layer, and KDE applications will also continue supporting X11 under other desktop environments.

After 42 years in service, the X11 protocol is losing another major desktop environment. Plasma will fully adopt the Wayland system and put support for starting new X11 sessions in Plasma to bed. Users opting to stay on Plasma 6.7 will keep their existing sessions for now. The move was expected, with GNOME officially dropping X11 sessions by default in 2025.

The new Plasma 6.8 brings many improvements, including increased support for adding window decorations (like shadows and rounded corners) to third-party apps, and a more streamlined Union theming system. Other notable additions include Nvidia triple buffering being enabled by default, Kup backup integration (KDE's backup utility—now integrated into Plasma), and kscreenctl, a command-line utility that allows power users to adjust display configurations.

Read full article

Comments

The once heroic boxer showcases a frankness in this compelling new series but also an unwillingness to take accountability for his darkest moments

Mike Tyson never envisioned old age. And yet here he still is, having outlived his parents, Brooklynites of ill repute who died when he was a teenager, and the Brownsville tough guys who teased him for being scrawny and having a lisp. Here he is after doing hard time for rape in his prime, winning and losing great fortunes and battling addiction to drink, drugs and fame. Here he still is, 60 years old and a grandfather now, mixing it up with Jake Paul in the ring, opening up to manosphere-adjacent podcasters, bobbing into an impromptu White House press briefing – Māori face-tattoo unmistakably in the frame – while on a DC visit to buck up his old pal as his party faces a bleak midterm forecast. “I don’t have to exist,” the champ says in Tyson, the latest four-part vanity project on his turbulent life and times. “Some reason, something allowed me to exist.”

In his heyday, Tyson was a mesmerizing sporting event unto himself – the ruthless knockout machine who struck fear into opponents at first sight, felled them in seconds and looked back on the carnage with cool nonchalance. His darkest episodes – the combustive relationship with actor Robin Givens, the six-year prison sentence for rape, biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear – only deepened the public fascination with him, adding to the lore of boxing’s baddest man. In the winter of his life, Tyson’s self-reflection, so deep it tips into self-parody, is the enthralling spectacle now. And if generations of Black comedians have proved anything, it’s that the appetite for Mike Tyson impersonations is inexhaustible.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Netflix

© Photograph: Netflix

© Photograph: Netflix

This peculiar – some would say truly irresponsible – hagiography of boxing superstar Mike Tyson veers from psychedelics and sobbing to the inadvisable face tattoo via a cameo from the US president

Netflix’s new four-parter on Mike Tyson is one of the strangest sports documentaries it has ever released, or maybe just one of its strangest documentaries full stop. The streamer has form in sporting hagiographies – tales told with questionable distance from their subjects, and all the objectivity of cold war agitprop. Tyson is different, though: not only is it lopsided, but it also feels deeply icky. And that’s before Donald Trump arrives to defend its subject – a great catch for the programme-makers but a wholly baffling cameo that makes you wish he would stick with geopolitical meddling and golf.

It ends – spoiler alert – with the former boxing champion taking the hallucinogenic drug DMT (or as he calls it, “the toad”, after the animal that produces it), while sobbing and inviting the show’s director to join him. Its episodes are peculiar, sometimes compelling, and – as many viewers will surely feel – truly irresponsible.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Netflix

© Photograph: Netflix

© Photograph: Netflix

Jay-Z in 8, the rap mogul’s HBO docuseries, covers his life and career in effort to mend his image – with no pushback. Why is he so fixated on the court of public opinion?

During the finale of Jay-Z’s Jay-Z in 8, the recent eight-part HBO documentary series on his life and career, the billionaire rap mogul talked with record producer Rick Rubin about the song Family Feud from his 4:44 album. He clarified one of its lyrics, “Al Sharpton in the mirror takin’ selfies / How is him or Pill Cosby ‘posed to help me?”, in which he chided Sharpton, the civil rights leader, and Cosby, the disgraced actor-comedian, for constantly criticizing rap music. He called Sharpton an “extortionist” who goes “from place to place” demanding: “You want our support … give us the money.” Listening to him chastise Sharpton, I pondered how he doesn’t see himself as a similar figure.

Starting in 2019, Jay-Z partnered with the NFL in 2019 as entertainment director, deciding the Super Bowl half-time performers and working with the league on other community endeavors. Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback, has recently alleged that the deal came after NFL owners decided they needed a “Black face” to help them quell outrage from Black people after Kaepernick was blackballed by the league for kneeling during the national anthems as a form of protest against police brutality. Jay-Z was lambasted for undercutting Kaepernick’s cause for personal gain, marring his reputation with many fans who came to view him as the same counterinsurgent figure he criticized in the documentary.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Mubi

© Photograph: Mubi

© Photograph: Mubi

Elon Musk is a very familiar figure to Ars readers, given his massive influence (for better and worse) on the technology sector over the last 20 years. Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney's latest biographical documentary—simply titled Musk—covers a lot of well-known ground and challenges the carefully crafted public image of Musk as a visionary tech titan.

Gibney's documentary presents Musk as more of a Gilded Age confidence man, rejiggered for the 21st century: an investor cosplaying as an inventor whose real genius is pumping stocks and dazzling investors and the public alike with visions of a high-tech utopian future. The film is bound to push all the right outrage buttons, whether one is a Musk fan or a detractor—which makes it very much a product of the peculiar social media-driven era in which we live.

Gibney has been making documentaries since the 1980s, covering such varied subjects as Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism, WikiLeaks, Scientology, Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes (the subject of another forthcoming documentary, You Can See Everything, featuring comedian Nathan Fielder), Boris Becker, The Sopranos creator David Chase, alleged Russian interference in the US 2016 presidential election, the opioid epidemic, and cyclist Lance Armstrong. He snagged his first Oscar nomination for 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature two years later for Taxi to the Dark Side.

Read full article

Comments

© AP

The broadcaster on her days as a shoplifter, catastrophising, and a first kiss with her dance partner

Born in Luton, Bedfordshire, Stacey Dooley, 39, left school at 15 and worked as a shop assistant. In 2007 she was selected to take part in the BBC reality series Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts. This led to the series Stacey Dooley Investigates and her career as presenter of hard‑hitting documentaries. In 2018, her face-to-face confrontation with an Islamic State soldier won her the One World Media award and she also received the MBE for services to broadcasting. She has made three new investigative films for the BBC and presents BBC series Clickbait Clinic. She met dancer Kevin Clifton when they were partnered on Strictly Come Dancing; they have a daughter and live in Merseyside.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
I’m quite greedy. I achieve something or something’s feeling really brilliant and I’m, like, “Right, what are we doing next? What are we getting next?”

Continue reading...

© Photograph: CREDIT LINE:BBC/Expectation Entertainment

© Photograph: CREDIT LINE:BBC/Expectation Entertainment

© Photograph: CREDIT LINE:BBC/Expectation Entertainment

TheWrap: Advertisements for Bleecker Street's Elon Musk documentary "Musk" will begin running on Meta and YouTube after previously being rejected by both platforms, according to both companies. The decision comes after a story published by The Hollywood Reporter on Friday detailed that the two tech giants, along with TikTok and the Musk-owned X, were refusing to run ads for "Musk." "This was an error and we're restoring the ads," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to TheWrap on Saturday.

Trailer for Alex Gibney's documentary "Musk". Gibney is the director of Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Hollywood Reporter: Elon Musk Unmasked in Alex Gibney Documentary: "Insane a Person This Chaotic Has So Much Power" Variety: 'Musk' Review: Alex Gibney's Definitive Documentary Puts the Pieces of Elon Musk Together — It's a Lacerating Portrait of Technocratic Brilliance, Power Lust and Crackpot Delusion People: New Elon Musk Documentary Calls the Trillionaire a 'Man Who Has Lost His Mind': See the Trailer

Alejandro Zuleta (Public Books, 9/9/26), "The Saddest Cattle in the World: Atahualpa Yupanqui, Empire, and the Sound of Stolen Land": "There is a couplet that contains the essence of Argentina's colonial and postcolonial political economy, a poetic image that speaks a thousand words and synthesizes imperial ideology in one definitive swoop. Atahualpa Yupanqui wrote it, and it is the last couplet of the refrain in 'El arriero' (1944), one of his most transcendent songs ... 'The sorrows are ours. The cattle are not.'" Lyrics to "El Arriero" and more. Songs like "Luna tucumana," "Viene clareando," "La Añera," "Zamba del grillo," and "Chacarera de las piedras" are often covered. Several were in the film Horizontes de piedra, including "El Arriero." But many of Yupanqui's songs were co-written by Paula Nenette Pepin, about whom there's a recent album and documentary in French.

Derek vs. Derek (trailer) is a new (premiered at festivals, opening in London soon) UK documentary about Derek Banbury an intensive dairy farmer with 200 cows who's farm is next to Derek Gow's, a former sheep farmer, rewilding project. While both are initially combative to each other ('The man's a psychopath when it comes to hedgerows'- Guardian interview) the documentary presents Derek Banbury slowly coming around to some ideas of rewilding while Gow tries to keep the animals on his land from disrupting the work of farmers around him.

Of note is that Derek Banbury is presented as using intensive agriculture because of the pressures of modern supermarkets and capitalism, not out of any malice or greed, showing why farmers feel they have to resort to mass use of pesticides and synthetic fertilisers. The team behind the film has chosen The Farming Community Network as the charity it is urging others to donate to and is working toward having screenings in rural Britain as well as in the cities. (press release on subject) BBC Sounds interview with the director and both Dereks (who are now good friends) I haven't seen the documentary yet, but everything I've read about it sounds sweet, a little bit of brightness in the current world.

A documentary exploring the lives and classes of British 7 year old children premiered in the 1960s with 7 Up. Director Michael Apted continued 7 years later and every 7 years since. The final chapter is set to air on ITV this upcoming week with the children, now very much not children at 70 years old. Michael Apted passed away in 2021. Two participants, Lynn Johnson and Nick Hitchon, also passed during the intervening years. The participants had a historically fraught relationship with Michael Apted and the documentary series but at the same time, the series has been a big part of their lives.