TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

Twentieth Century Fox and Apple are set to announce a new online movie distribution deal, according to the Financial Times. While Apple has reportedly been trying to land such a deal for a while now, most studios have resisted the plan to offer their films as digital rentals.

At this point, Apple does sell movies through its iTunes Store, but reports suggest that sales haven't been growing as briskly as expected. This new deal with Fox could give customers another, less expensive option for watching flicks. Fox has also agreed to use Apple's digital rights management technology in future DVDs, which would let buyers copy the movies to their Apple devices.—Gregory Mone

D'oh. A 21-year-old man in Sidney, Australia has been charged with distributing an illegal copy of the new film, The Simpsons Movie, on the Internet.

After an investigation involving several organizations, including the movie's studio, Twentieth Century Fox, Australian police raided a Sidney home, arresting the alleged culprit. Apparently the man recorded the movie on his cell phone in a Sydney movie theater one night before the film premiered in the U.S. By the time authorities shut activity down, the copy had been downloaded 110,000 times.

Now, if Chief Wiggum had been in charge of digital security, it never would have gotten that far. Or maybe the whole world would be watching for free.—Gregory Mone

There are countless reasons to go see the long-awaited Simpsons movie this weekend, but for geeks, one of the big draws of the show has always been the sometimes obscure, always intelligent references to science and mathematics. At least a few editors of this magazine are devotees of the famous Halloween episode in which Homer ventures into the third dimension. Its practically a primer on cosmology and extra-dimensional physics. And über-nerd Professor Frink is featured heavily, which is always a bonus.

HDTV sets are stunning—until you pop in a movie and are reminded that DVDs are not recorded in high definition. At 480 lines of resolution, they don’t even begin to take advantage of a 720- or 1,080-line display. That will change later this year when Toshiba introduces the first high-def disc player for the U.S. market. Toshiba’s breakthrough box, an HD DVD player that at press time was still unnamed, will cost about $1,000 (toshiba.com).