In today’s Bullldog wrapup of technology and science news:

  • Amazon takes on YouTube
  • Disney cuts 300 jobs and shuts down gaming unit
  • NASA says the Milky Way is more crowded with planet discoveries
  • A UK judge denies police access to a hacker’s passwords

The details:

  • Amazon allows users to upload video and share revenue

Amazon has launched a self-publishing platform for videocreators, a move that could make money for the company and budding filmmakers in the same way YouTube has created a community of online celebrities.

Amazon Video Direct, which kicked off Tuesday, shares money with video creators through the method they choose: ads, subscriptions, rentals, or simply by the number of hours streamed to tens of millions of subscribers of Amazon Prime, its two-day shipping service.

Amazon keeps about half the revenue, or if the video is restricted to Prime, it pays a set fee of 15 cents per hour viewed in the U.S.

Several production companies made videos available Tuesday including Baby Einstein, Pro Guitar Lessons and Conde Nast.

The service allows creators to publish videos in the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, Japan and Austria.

  • Disney shutting Infinity game unit, cutting 300 jobs

Disney said Tuesday it is shutting down its Disney Infinity line of video games, saying the changing market is too risky.

The company booked a $147 million charge, mostly for unsold inventory. It also laid off about 300 employees, most of them based in Salt Lake City at Avalanche Software, agame studio Disney bought in 2005.

CEO Bob Iger told analysts the risks “caught up with us.” Although the unit did well — bringing its interactive division into profitability in recent years — Disney determined it was better to manage the risks by licensing characters rather than developing videogames from scratch, he said.

“That business is a changing business, and we did not have enough confidence in the business in terms of it being stable enough to stay in it,” Iger said.

Disney Infinity, a platform that brought characters from its “Pirates of the Caribbean” into the same digital sandbox as those from “Cars” and “Frozen,” was launched in 2013 as a way to jump on the “toys to life” bandwagon made popular by the game”Skylanders.” Real-world action figures were placed on pads and meant to activate in the video game world.

When Infinity launched in August 2013, it helped Disney pull its Interactive business to profitability after years of losses, and it was a precursor to the Playmation line of smart, connected toys Disney launched last year. But diminishing sales of Infinity hurt the consumer products unit that was merged with the interactive division last summer.

  • The Milky Way just got a lot more crowded — with planets

NASA on Tuesday announced 1,284 new planets orbiting stars outside our solar system, called exoplanets. That’s on top of the approximately 1,000 previously authenticated exoplanets detected by the Kepler Space Telescope since its launch in 2009.

Scientists taking part in the news conference were ecstatic — it’s the biggest planetary collection ever verified in a single swoop.

“One of the great questions of all time, and one of NASA’s science objectives in our journey to the solar system and beyond, is whether we are alone in the universe,” said Paul Hertz, director of astrophysics for NASA. “The first step in answering this question is to detect and understand the population of planets around other stars.”

According to NASA, more than 3,200 exoplanets have now been confirmed, out of nearly 5,000 candidates discovered to date from all sources, including ground observatories. Kepler has accounted for the vast majority.

The old process for confirming planets among the Kepler-identified candidates involved slow and laborious follow-up observations by ground telescopes.

This new batch of planets comes from a statistical analysis led by Princeton University researcher Timothy Morton. And there are sure to be more — possibly as many as 1,327 more from among the Kepler-detected candidates listed in the telescope catalog as of last July.

“This is the most exoplanets that have ever been announced at one time,” Morton told reporters. The research was published Tuesday by Astrophysical Journal.

Princeton’s method — using a fast and automated software system called Vespa — puts the likelihood of true planethood for each confirmed planet at more than 99 percent. Vespa relies on thousands of incoming signals from Kepler’s candidate planets. A periodic dip in a star’s brightness is the telescope’s tip-off of a potential planet.

The Princeton technique verified 984 previously confirmed planets spotted by Kepler, which spent four years peering continuously at 150,000 stars in a particular swath of sky. This new method also concluded that slightly more than 700 other candidate planets detected by Kepler are likely impostors, possibly small companion stars.

  • UK court says police can’t make hacker hand over passwords

A judge has rejected an attempt by Britain’s security services to force an alleged hacker to hand over the passwords to his encrypted computers.

Lauri Love is fighting extradition to the United States, where he has been charged with breaking into Federal Reserve computers.

When British police arrested him in 2013, they seized encrypted computers and hard drives from his home in eastern England. Love was not charged in Britain, but the National Crime Agency sought to look through his computers before returning them.

Judge Nina Tempia ruled Tuesday that the agency as trying to “circumvent” the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which governs data privacy.

Love said the decision “retains the status quo which means there has to be safeguards before you force people to undermine their security.”