A millisecond used to be a big deal for the world's quickest traders. A dispute over huge trading profits at one of the world's largest futures exchanges shows they now think a million times faster [non-paywalled source]. From a report: The controversy is about an arcane technical maneuver in which high-speed traders bombard Frankfurt-based Eurex with useless data. The idea is to keep their connections to the exchange warm so they can react fractionally faster to market-moving information. The battle is the latest chapter in a decadeslong contest among secretive ultrafast trading firms, which have pursued a relentless quest for minuscule speed advantages. A group of high-frequency trading firms has exploited the practice to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars, says Mosaic Finance, a French firm that has complained to Eurex and European regulators. "An arms race is OK, but you must use legal weapons," said Hugues Morin, founder of Mosaic. Eurex says Mosaic's claims are baseless. [...] High-speed traders often seek to capture fleeting differences between prices of related assets, making quick response times critical. If benchmark Euro Stoxx 50 index futures rise, for example, contracts tied to Germany's DAX will usually follow. A first mover will be able to buy DAX futures before they tick higher, then sell out at a higher price -- a strategy that can add up to big profits over time. The maneuver that prompted Mosaic's spat with Eurex can improve reaction times by about 3.2 nanoseconds, according to the French firm, which calls it "corrupted speculative triggering," or CST for short.

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The glasses-shaped face computers that tech companies have been building for years now face an identity crisis, and their makers can't agree on what to call them. Meta has asked a journalist to refer to its Ray-Ban glasses as "AI glasses" to distinguish them from Google Glass. Google, whose Project Aura is a collaboration with Xreal, calls the product "wired XR glasses" because the company views it as more aligned with headsets in a glasses form factor. Xreal's CEO Chi Xu laughed when asked about Aura's category and said the company will call all its products "AR glasses." Research firms aren't aligned either. Gartner defines smart glasses as camera- and display-free devices with Bluetooth and AI. Counterpoint Research said smart glasses without see-through displays drive volumes in the smart eyewear category. IDC uses a broader definition that includes anything glasses-shaped.

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The traditional signals that employers used to evaluate entry-level job candidates -- college GPAs, cover letters, and interview performance -- have lost much of their value as grade inflation and widespread AI use render these metrics nearly meaningless, writes The Atlantic. The recent-graduate unemployment rate now sits slightly higher than the overall workforce's, a reversal from historical norms where new college graduates were more likely to be employed than the average worker. Job postings on Handshake, a career-services platform for students and recent graduates, have fallen by more than 16 percent in the past year. At Harvard, 60% of undergraduate grades are now A's, up from fewer than a quarter two decades ago. Seven years ago, 70% of new graduates' resumes were screened by GPA; that figure has dropped to 40%. Two working papers examining Freelancer.com found that cover-letter quality once strongly predicted who would get hired and how well they would perform -- until ChatGPT became available. "We basically find the collapse of this entire signaling mechanism," researcher Jesse Silbert said. The average number of applications per open job has increased by 26% in the past year. Students at UC Berkeley are now applying to 150 internships just to land one or two interviews.

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Mozilla has named Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as its new chief executive, promoting the executive who has spent the past year leading the Firefox browser team and who now plans to make AI central to the company's future. Enzor-DeMeo announced on Tuesday that an "AI Mode" is coming to Firefox next year. The feature will let users choose from multiple AI models rather than being locked into a single provider. Some options will be open-source models, others will be private "Mozilla-hosted cloud options," and the company also plans to integrate models from major AI companies. Mozilla itself will not train its own large language model. "We're not incentivized to push one model or the other," Enzor-DeMeo told The Verge. Firefox currently has about 200 million monthly users, a fraction of Chrome's roughly 4 billion, though Enzor-DeMeo insists mobile usage is growing at a decent clip. He takes over from interim CEO Laura Chambers, who led the company through a major antitrust case and what Mozilla describes as "double-digit mobile growth" in Firefox. Chambers is returning to the Mozilla board of directors. The new CEO has outlined three priorities: ensuring all products give users control over AI features including the ability to turn them off, building a business model around transparent monetization, and expanding Firefox into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Mozilla VPN integration is planned for the browser next year.

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Google's data partner HouseCanary has begun displaying home listings directly in search results in select markets, sending Zillow's shares tumbling more than 8% yesterday as investors weighed whether the search giant might eventually cut into the portal business that Zillow dominates. The experiment places property details, prices, images and a "Request a tour" button at the top of mobile search results. HouseCanary, a full-service brokerage licensed in all 50 states and Washington D.C., said it contacted every MLS in the test regions before launching. Analysts are largely downplaying immediate concerns. Goldman Sachs noted that most of Zillow's traffic comes directly through its apps and websites rather than Google searches, though the firm views the development as a long-term risk. Piper Sandler called the fears "overblown," and Wells Fargo suggested portals like Zillow would likely end up bidding for ad units on Google rather than losing traffic outright.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Audio streaming platform SoundCloud has confirmed that outages and VPN connection issues over the past few days were caused by a security breach in which threat actors stole a database containing user information. The disclosure follows widespread reports over the past four days from users who were unable to access SoundCloud when connecting via VPN, with attempts resulting in the site displaying 403 "forbidden" errors. In a statement shared with BleepingComputer, SoundCloud said it recently detected unauthorized activity involving an ancillary service dashboard and activated its incident response procedures. SoundCloud acknowledged that a threat actor accessed some of its data but said the exposure was limited in scope. [...] BleepingComputer has learned that the breach affects 20% of SoundCloud's users, which, based on publicly reported user figures, could impact roughly 28 million accounts. The company said it is confident that all unauthorized access to SoundCloud systems has been blocked and that there is no ongoing risk to the platform. "We understand that a purported threat actor group accessed certain limited data that we hold," SoundCloud told BleepingComputer. "We have completed an investigation into the data that was impacted, and no sensitive data (such as financial or password data) has been accessed. The data involved consisted only of email addresses and information already visible on public SoundCloud profiles."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft is killing off an obsolete and vulnerable encryption cipher that Windows has supported by default for 26 years following more than a decade of devastating hacks that exploited it and recently faced blistering criticism from a prominent US senator. When the software maker rolled out Active Directory in 2000, it made RC4 a sole means of securing the Windows component, which administrators use to configure and provision fellow administrator and user accounts inside large organizations. RC4, short for Rivist Cipher 4, is a nod to mathematician and cryptographer Ron Rivest of RSA Security, who developed the stream cipher in 1987. Within days of the trade-secret-protected algorithm being leaked in 1994, a researcher demonstrated a cryptographic attack that significantly weakened the security it had been believed to provide. Despite the known susceptibility, RC4 remained a staple in encryption protocols, including SSL and its successor TLS, until about a decade ago. [...] Last week, Microsoft said it was finally deprecating RC4 and cited its susceptibility to Kerberoasting, the form of attack, known since 2014, that was the root cause of the initial intrusion into Ascension's network. "By mid-2026, we will be updating domain controller defaults for the Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) on Windows Server 2008 and later to only allow AES-SHA1 encryption," Matthew Palko, a Microsoft principal program manager, wrote. "RC4 will be disabled by default and only used if a domain administrator explicitly configures an account or the KDC to use it." [...] Following next year's change, RC4 authentication will no longer function unless administrators perform the extra work to allow it. In the meantime, Palko said, it's crucial that admins identify any systems inside their networks that rely on the cipher. Despite the known vulnerabilities, RC4 remains the sole means of some third-party legacy systems for authenticating to Windows networks. These systems can often go overlooked in networks even though they are required for crucial functions. To streamline the identification of such systems, Microsoft is making several tools available. One is an update to KDC logs that will track both requests and responses that systems make using RC4 when performing requests through Kerberos. Kerberos is an industry-wide authentication protocol for verifying the identities of users and services over a non-secure network. It's the sole means for mutual authentication to Active Directory, which hackers attacking Windows networks widely consider a Holy Grail because of the control they gain once it has been compromised. Microsoft is also introducing new PowerShell scripts to sift through security event logs to more easily pinpoint problematic RC4 usage. Microsoft said it has steadily worked over the past decade to deprecate RC4, but that the task wasn't easy. "The problem though is that it's hard to kill off a cryptographic algorithm that is present in every OS that's shipped for the last 25 years and was the default algorithm for so long, Steve Syfuhs, who runs Microsoft's Windows Authentication team, wrote on Bluesky. "See," he continued, "the problem is not that the algorithm exists. The problem is how the algorithm is chosen, and the rules governing that spanned 20 years of code changes."

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PayPal has applied to become a US bank by forming a Utah-chartered industrial loan company, signaling a push to deepen its financial services "as companies rush to capitalize on a friendly regulatory environment under the Trump administration," reports Reuters. From the report: If approved, the move will help PayPal to strengthen its lending offerings to small businesses in the U.S. as well as reduce its reliance on third parties. "Securing capital remains a significant hurdle for small businesses striving to grow and scale," said PayPal CEO Alex Chriss. "Establishing PayPal Bank will strengthen our business and improve our efficiency, enabling us to better support small business growth and economic opportunities across the U.S." PayPal also plans to offer interest-bearing savings accounts to customers. The company has provided over $30 billion in loans and capital since 2013, it said. [...] PayPal has selected Mara McNeill to serve as PayPal Bank's president. She comes with over two decades of experience in banking and commercial lending, and has previously served as the CEO of Toyota Financial Savings Bank.

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A new study warns that glaciers in the European Alps will hit their peak extinction rate within eight years, with global glacier loss accelerating toward thousands per year unless emissions are rapidly cut. "Glaciers in the western US and Canada are forecast to reach their peak year of loss less than a decade later, with more than 800 disappearing each year by then," adds the Guardian. From the report: About 200,000 glaciers remain worldwide, with about 750 disappearing each year. However, the research indicates this pace will accelerate rapidly as emissions from burning fossil fuels continue to be released into the atmosphere. Current climate action plans from governments are forecast to push global temperatures to about 2.7C above preindustrial levels, supercharging extreme weather. Under this scenario, glacier losses would peak at about 3,000 a year in 2040 and plateau at that rate until 2060. By the end of the century, 80% of today's glaciers will have gone. By contrast, rapid cuts to carbon emissions to keep global temperature rise to 1.5C would cap annual losses at about 2,000 a year in 2040, after which the rate would decline. [...] The new study, published in Nature Climate Change, analyzed more than 200,000 glaciers from a database of outlines derived from satellite images. The researchers used three global glacier models to assess their fate under different heating scenarios. Regions with the smallest and fastest-melting glaciers were found to be the most vulnerable. The study estimates the 3,200 glaciers in central Europe would shrink by 87% by 2100 -- even if global temperature rise is limited to 1.5C, rising to 97% under 2.7C of heating. In the western US and Canada, including Alaska, about 70% of today's 45,000 glaciers are projected to vanish under 1.5C of heating, and more than 90% under 2.7C. The Caucasus and southern Andes are also expected to face devastating losses. Larger glaciers take longer to melt, with those in Greenland reaching their peak extinction rate in about 2063 -- losing 40% by 2100 under 1.5C of heating and 59% under 2.7C. However, the melting is forecast to continue beyond 2100. The researchers said the peak loss dates represent more than a numerical milestone. "They mark turning points with profound implications for ecosystems, water resources and cultural heritage," they wrote. "[It is] a human story of vanishing landscapes, fading traditions and disrupted daily routines."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft is killing off an obsolete and vulnerable encryption cipher that Windows has supported by default for 26 years following more than a decade of devastating hacks that exploited it and recently faced blistering criticism from a prominent US senator. When the software maker rolled out Active Directory in 2000, it made RC4 a sole means of securing the Windows component, which administrators use to configure and provision fellow administrator and user accounts inside large organizations. RC4, short for Rivist Cipher 4, is a nod to mathematician and cryptographer Ron Rivest of RSA Security, who developed the stream cipher in 1987. Within days of the trade-secret-protected algorithm being leaked in 1994, a researcher demonstrated a cryptographic attack that significantly weakened the security it had been believed to provide. Despite the known susceptibility, RC4 remained a staple in encryption protocols, including SSL and its successor TLS, until about a decade ago. [...] Last week, Microsoft said it was finally deprecating RC4 and cited its susceptibility to Kerberoasting, the form of attack, known since 2014, that was the root cause of the initial intrusion into Ascension's network. "By mid-2026, we will be updating domain controller defaults for the Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) on Windows Server 2008 and later to only allow AES-SHA1 encryption," Matthew Palko, a Microsoft principal program manager, wrote. "RC4 will be disabled by default and only used if a domain administrator explicitly configures an account or the KDC to use it." [...] Following next year's change, RC4 authentication will no longer function unless administrators perform the extra work to allow it. In the meantime, Palko said, it's crucial that admins identify any systems inside their networks that rely on the cipher. Despite the known vulnerabilities, RC4 remains the sole means of some third-party legacy systems for authenticating to Windows networks. These systems can often go overlooked in networks even though they are required for crucial functions. To streamline the identification of such systems, Microsoft is making several tools available. One is an update to KDC logs that will track both requests and responses that systems make using RC4 when performing requests through Kerberos. Kerberos is an industry-wide authentication protocol for verifying the identities of users and services over a non-secure network. It's the sole means for mutual authentication to Active Directory, which hackers attacking Windows networks widely consider a Holy Grail because of the control they gain once it has been compromised. Microsoft is also introducing new PowerShell scripts to sift through security event logs to more easily pinpoint problematic RC4 usage. Microsoft said it has steadily worked over the past decade to deprecate RC4, but that the task wasn't easy. "The problem though is that it's hard to kill off a cryptographic algorithm that is present in every OS that's shipped for the last 25 years and was the default algorithm for so long, Steve Syfuhs, who runs Microsoft's Windows Authentication team, wrote on Bluesky. "See," he continued, "the problem is not that the algorithm exists. The problem is how the algorithm is chosen, and the rules governing that spanned 20 years of code changes."

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Once a star of the self-driving hype cycle, lidar maker Luminar has filed for bankruptcy amid legal turmoil, layoffs, and a cooling autonomous-vehicle market. It plans to sell off its assets before shutting down entirely. The Verge reports: As part of its bankruptcy, Luminar is seeking permission to sell both its lidar and semiconductor businesses, the latter of which it has already agreed to sell to Quantum Computing for $110 million. The company plans to continue to operate during the bankruptcy proceedings "to minimize disruptions and maintain delivery of its LiDAR hardware and software." That said, Luminar will cease to exist once the process is complete. "As we navigate this process, our top priority is to continue delivering the same quality, reliability and service our customers have come to expect from us," CEO Paul Ricci said in a statement. After launching in 2017, Luminar muscled its way to the front of the autonomous vehicle industry as a top maker of lidar systems, a key technology that driverless cars use to sense the shapes and distances of objects around them. Luminar has sold sensors to Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Audi, Toyota Research Institute, Caterpillar, and even Tesla, which has dismissed lidar sensors in favor of traditional cameras. The company was valued at nearly $3 billion when it went public through a reverse merger with a SPAC in 2020.

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After introducing an AI Mode shortcut earlier this year, Google has now added a new "plus" menu to its Search homepage, highlighting options for image and file uploads. 9to5Google reports: On google.com, the Search bar now has a plus icon at the far left that replaces the magnifying glass. Clicking lets you "Upload image" or "Upload file." It very much matches the AI Mode experience. Those two capabilities aren't new, but this plus menu does help emphasize that you can use Google to accomplish tasks, and not just find information. Additionally, it helps indicate that they can be used with AI Mode and AI Overviews. This is just available on desktop web (not mobile) and is live on all the devices we checked today, including across signed-out Incognito sessions.

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A critical React vulnerability (CVE-2025-55182) is being actively exploited at scale by Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, and criminal groups to gain remote code execution, deploy backdoors, and mine crypto. The Register reports: React maintainers disclosed the critical bug on December 3, and exploitation began almost immediately. According to Amazon's threat intel team, Chinese government crews, including Earth Lamia and Jackpot Panda, started battering the security hole within hours of its disclosure. Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 responders have put the victim count at more than 50 organizations across multiple sectors, with attackers from North Korea also abusing the flaw. Google, in a late Friday report, said at least five other suspected PRC spy groups also exploited React2Shell, along with criminals who deployed XMRig for illicit cryptocurrency mining, and "Iran-nexus actors," although the report doesn't provide any additional details about who the Iran-linked groups are and what they are doing after exploitation. "GTIG has also observed numerous discussions regarding CVE-2025-55182 in underground forums, including threads in which threat actors have shared links to scanning tools, proof-of-concept (PoC) code, and their experiences using these tools," the researchers wrote.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: JPMorgan Chase is joining the list of traditional financial firms seeking to bring blockchain technology to an investing staple: the money-market fund. The banking giant's $4 trillion asset-management arm is rolling out its first tokenized money-market fund on the Ethereum blockchain. JPMorgan will seed the fund with $100 million of its own capital, and then open it to outside investors on Tuesday. Called My OnChain Net Yield Fund, or "MONY," the private fund is supported by JPMorgan's tokenization platform, Kinexys Digital Assets, and will be open to qualified investors, or individuals with at least $5 million in investments and institutions with a minimum of $25 million. The fund has a $1 million investment minimum. Wall Street has waded deeper into tokenization since the passage of the Genius Act earlier this year. The landmark measure, which establishes a regulatory framework for tokenized dollars known as stablecoins, has unleashed a wave of efforts to tokenize everything from stocks and bonds to funds and real assets. "There is a massive amount of interest from clients around tokenization," said John Donohue, head of global liquidity at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. "And we expect to be a leader in this space and work with clients to make sure that we have a product lineup that allows them to have the choices that we have in traditional money-market funds on blockchain."

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Merriam-Webster crowned "slop" its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting growing public awareness and and fatigue around low-quality, AI-generated content flooding the internet. "It's such an illustrative word," said Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster's president. "It's part of a transformative technology, AI, and it's something that people have found fascinating, annoying and a little bit ridiculous." The Associated Press reports: "Slop" was first used in the 1700s to mean soft mud, but it evolved more generally to mean something of little value. The definition has since expanded to mean "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence." In other words, "you know, absurd videos, weird advertising images, cheesy propaganda, fake news that looks real, junky AI-written digital books," Barlow said. "Words like 'ubiquitous,' 'paradigm,' 'albeit,' 'irregardless,' these are always top lookups because they're words that are on the edge of our lexicon," Barlow said. "'Irregardless' is a word in the dictionary for one reason: It's used. It's been used for decades to mean 'regardless.'" The announcement can be found here.

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Ford has effectively pulled the plug on the all-electric F-150 Lightning, pivoting away from full-size BEV pickups toward hybrids, range-extended EVs (EREVs), and even data-center battery storage. Ars Technica reports: Ford's announcements today can't be said to have come out of the blue. Rumors of the F-150's demise have been circulating for more than a month, and last week SK On ended its joint venture with Ford that was building a pair of EV battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee. We learned then that Ford would keep the Kentucky plant and SK On gets the one in Tennessee, which would focus on the energy storage business instead. Now, we know that something similar will happen at the Kentucky plant -- Ford says it's spending $2 billion to convert the factory to make prismatic lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cells. Those aren't destined for EVs, but they are the preferred cell format for data centers, Ford says. The company says that it will bring the factory online in the next 18 months, reaching an annual output of 20 GWh. Other Ford plants are also being repurposed. With no full-size BEV pickup in the product plans, the assembly plant in Tennessee that was to produce it -- the one near the battery factory that SK On is keeping -- will instead build new gas-powered trucks, although not for another four years. Around that same time, its Ohio assembly plant will begin building new commercial vehicles. All of this will impact Ford's bottom line, to the tune of $19.5 billion over the next few years, $5.5 billion of which will be in cash. Most of that will hit in the final quarter of 2025, but will extend until 2027, Ford said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Several dozen people protested on Sunday in the Siberian city of Tomsk against Russia's ban on U.S. children's gaming platform Roblox, a rare show of public dissent as popular irritation over the ban gains some momentum. In wartime Russia, censorship is extensive: Moscow blocks or restricts social media platforms such as Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and YouTube while distributing its own narrative through a network of social media and Russian media. Russia's communications watchdog Roskomnadzor said on December 3 it had blocked Roblox because it was "rife with inappropriate content that can negatively impact the spiritual and moral development of children." In Tomsk, 2,900 km (1,800 miles) east of Moscow, several dozen people braved the snow to hold up hand-drawn placards reading "Hands off Roblox" and "Roblox is the victim of the digital Iron Curtain" in Vladimir Vysotsky Park, according to photographs provided by an organizer of the protest. "Bans and blocks are all you are able to do," read one placard. The photographs showed about 25 people standing in a circle in the snow, holding up placards. In Russia, the ban on Roblox has triggered a debate over censorship, child safety in relation to technology and even the effectiveness of censorship in a digitalized world where children can bypass many bans in a few clicks.

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A Kansas man who sued Verizon in small claims court after the carrier refused to unlock his iPhone has won his case, scoring a small but meaningful victory against a company that retroactively applied a policy change to deny his unlock request. Patrick Roach bought a discounted iPhone 16e from Verizon's Straight Talk brand in February 2025, intending to pay for one month of service before switching the device to US Mobile. Under FCC rules dating back to a 2019 waiver, Verizon must unlock phones 60 days after activation on its network. Verizon refused to unlock the phone, citing a new policy implemented on April 1, 2025 requiring "60 days of paid active service." Roach had purchased his device over a month before that policy took effect. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Henry ruled in October 2025 that applying the changed terms to Roach's earlier purchase violated the Kansas Consumer Protection Act. The court ordered Verizon to refund Roach's $410.40 purchase price plus court costs. Roach had previously rejected a $600 settlement offer because it would have required him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. He estimated spending about 20 hours on the lawsuit but said "it wasn't about" the money.

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One of the most water-scarce regions on Earth is now experiencing a dramatic atmospheric shift that's pushing moisture onto Oman's northern coast at rates more than 1.5 times the global average, according to a Washington Post investigation of global atmospheric data [non-paywalled source]. The change has turned extreme rainfall into a recurrent source of catastrophe across the Arabian Peninsula. In the 126 years between 1881 and 2007, just six hurricane-strength storms hit Oman or came within 60 miles of the country. At least four more have made landfall in the past 15 years alone. Research from Sultan Qaboos University analyzing 8,000 storms across 69 rainfall stations found that half of all rain in Oman falls within the first 90 minutes of a 24-hour storm. These intense bursts quickly overwhelm the desert's ability to absorb water and send flash floods racing through wadis -- normally dry riverbeds where many communities are built. In response, Dubai is constructing an $8 billion underground stormwater network spanning more than 120 miles. Oman has agreements to build 58 new dams and is studying 14 major wadis that funnel to its al-Batinah coastline.

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Cloudflare's sixth annual Year in Review report describes an internet increasingly shaped by two forces: automated traffic and government intervention, as global connectivity grew 19% year over year in 2025. Google's web crawler now dominates automated traffic, dwarfing other AI and indexing bots to become the single largest source of bot activity on the web. Nearly half of all major internet disruptions globally were linked to government actions, and civil society and non-profit organizations became the most attacked sector for the first time. Post-quantum encryption crossed a significant threshold, now protecting 52% of human internet traffic observed by Cloudflare. The company also recorded more than 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks throughout the year.

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Google has decided to retire its free dark web monitoring tool, saying it wasn't as helpful as the company hoped. From a report: In a support page, Google announced the discontinuation of the "dark web report" tool, two years after offering it as a free perk to Gmail users before expanding it more broadly. The feature worked by scanning for your email addresses to determine whether they had appeared in data breaches, which often circulate on Dark Web marketplaces. The tool could then alert you about where the data was exposed, including any accompanying details such as dates of birth, addresses, and phone numbers.

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The Trump administration announced Monday the United States Tech Force, a new program to recruit around 1,000 technologists for two-year government stints starting as soon as March -- less than a year after dismantling several federal technology teams and driving thousands of tech workers out of their jobs. The program will primarily recruit early-career software engineers and data scientists, paying between $150,000 and $200,000 annually. About 20 companies have signed on to participate, including Palantir, Meta, Oracle and Elon Musk's xAI. Some engineering managers will be allowed to take leaves of absence from their private-sector employers to join the program without divesting their stock holdings. The initiative follows the March closure of 18F, General Services Administration's internal tech consultancy, and the shuttering of the Social Security Administration's Office of Transformation in February. The IRS had lost over 2,000 tech workers by June.

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For decades, Parkinson's disease research has overwhelmingly focused on genetics -- more than half of all research dollars in the past two decades flowed toward genomic studies -- but a growing body of evidence now points to something far more mundane as a primary culprit: contaminated drinking water. A landmark study by epidemiologist Sam Goldman compared Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where trichloroethylene (TCE) had contaminated the water supply for approximately 35 years, against those at Camp Pendleton in California, which has clean water. Marines exposed to TCE at Lejeune were 70% more likely to develop Parkinson's. The latest research suggests only 10 to 15 percent of Parkinson's cases can be fully explained by genetics. Parkinson's rates in the US have doubled in the past 30 years -- a pattern inconsistent with an inherited genetic disease. The EPA moved to ban TCE in December 2024. The Trump administration moved to undo the ban in January.

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Sixty years after a team of American and Indian climbers abandoned a plutonium-powered generator on the slopes of Nanda Devi, one of the world's most forbidding Himalayan peaks, the U.S. government still refuses to acknowledge that the mission ever happened. The device, a SNAP-19C portable generator containing plutonium isotopes including Pu-239 -- the same material used in the Nagasaki bomb -- was left behind in October 1965 when a sudden blizzard forced climbers to retreat from Camp Four, just below the summit. The mission originated from a cocktail party conversation between General Curtis LeMay and National Geographic photographer Barry Bishop, who had summited Everest in 1963. China had just detonated its first atomic bomb in October 1964, and the CIA wanted to intercept radio signals from Chinese missile tests by placing an unmanned listening station atop the Himalayas. Barry Bishop recruited elite American climbers and coordinated with Indian intelligence to haul surveillance equipment up the mountain. Captain M.S. Kohli, the Indian naval officer commanding the mission, ordered climbers to secure the equipment and descend when the blizzard struck. Jim McCarthy, the last surviving American climber, recalled warning Kohli he was making a mistake. "You can't leave plutonium by a glacier feeding into the Ganges!" he recalled. "Do you know how many people depend on the Ganges?" When teams returned in spring 1966, the entire ice ledge where the gear had been stashed was gone -- sheared off by an avalanche. Search missions in 1967 and 1968 found nothing. The device remains buried somewhere in the glaciers that feed tributaries of the Ganges River.

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Grid constraints that were once a hallmark of developing economies are now plaguing the world's richest nations, and new research from Bloomberg Economics finds that rising electricity system stress is directly hurting investment. The analysis examined all G20 countries and found that a one-standard-deviation increase in grid stress relative to a country's historical average lowers the investment share of GDP by around 0.33 percentage points -- a 1.5% to 2% hit to capital outlays. The Netherlands is a case in point: 12,000 businesses are waiting for grid connections, congestion issues are expected to persist for a decade despite $9.4 billion in annual investments, and the country is already consuming as much electricity as was projected for 2030. ASML, the chip equipment maker whose fortunes can sway the Dutch economy, has no guarantee it will secure power for a new campus planned to employ 20,000 people. Data centers are particularly affected. Google canceled plans near Berlin, a Frankfurt facility cannot expand until 2033, Microsoft has shifted investments from Ireland and the UK to the Nordics, and a Digital Realty Trust data center in Santa Clara that was applied for in 2019 may sit empty for years.

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LG smart TV owners discovered over the weekend that a recent webOS software update had quietly installed Microsoft Copilot on their devices, and the app cannot be uninstalled. Affected users report the feature appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain models, sitting alongside streaming apps like Netflix and YouTube. LG's support documentation confirms that certain preinstalled or system apps can only be hidden, not deleted. At CES 2025, LG announced plans to integrate Copilot into webOS as part of its "AI TV" strategy, describing it as an extension of its AI Search experience. The current implementation appears to function as a shortcut to a web-based Copilot interface rather than a native application. Samsung TVs include Google's Gemini in a similar fashion. Users wanting to avoid the feature entirely are left with one option: disconnecting their TV from the internet.

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The Black Hat Europe hacker conference in London included a session titled "Don't Judge an Audiobook by Its Cover" about a two critical (and now fixed) flaws in Amazon's Kindle. The Times reports both flaws were discovered by engineering analyst Valentino Ricotta (from the cybersecurity research division of Thales), who was awarded a "bug bounty" of $20,000 (£15,000 ). He said: "What especially struck me with this device, that's been sitting on my bedside table for years, is that it's connected to the internet. It's constantly running because the battery lasts a long time and it has access to my Amazon account. It can even pay for books from the store with my credit card in a single click. Once an attacker gets a foothold inside a Kindle, it could access personal data, your credit card information, pivot to your local network or even to other devices that are registered with your Amazon account." Ricotta discovered flaws in the Kindle software that scans and extracts information from audiobooks... He also identified a vulnerability in the onscreen keyboard. Through both of these, he tricked the Kindle into loading malicious code, which enabled him to take the user's Amazon session cookies — tokens that give access to the account. Ricotta said that people could be exposed to this type of hack if they "side-load" books on to the Kindle through non-Amazon stores. Ricotta donated his bug bounties to charity...

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Superintelligence has become "a quasi-political forecast" with "very little to do with any scientific consensus, emerging instead from particular corridors of power." That's the warning from James O'Sullivan, a lecturer in digital humanities from University College Cork. In a refreshing 5,600-word essay in Noema magazine, he notes the suspicious coincidence that "The loudest prophets of superintelligence are those building the very systems they warn against..." "When we accept that AGI is inevitable, we stop asking whether it should be built, and in the furor, we miss that we seem to have conceded that a small group of technologists should determine our future." (For example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman "seems determined to position OpenAI as humanity's champion, bearing the terrible burden of creating God-like intelligence so that it might be restrained.") The superintelligence discourse functions as a sophisticated apparatus of power, transforming immediate questions about corporate accountability, worker displacement, algorithmic bias and democratic governance into abstract philosophical puzzles about consciousness and control... Media amplification plays a crucial role in this process, as every incremental improvement in large language models gets framed as a step towards AGI. ChatGPT writes poetry; surely consciousness is imminent..." Such accounts, often sourced from the very companies building these systems, create a sense of momentum that becomes self-fulfilling. Investors invest because AGI seems near, researchers join companies because that's where the future is being built and governments defer regulation because they don't want to handicap their domestic champions... We must recognize this process as political, not technical. The inevitability of superintelligence is manufactured through specific choices about funding, attention and legitimacy, and different choices would produce different futures. The fundamental question isn't whether AGI is coming, but who benefits from making us believe it is... We do not yet understand what kind of systems we are building, or what mix of breakthroughs and failures they will produce, and that uncertainty makes it reckless to funnel public money and attention into a single speculative trajectory. Some key points: "The machines are coming for us, or so we're told. Not today, but soon enough that we must seemingly reorganize civilization around their arrival...""When we debate whether a future artificial general intelligence might eliminate humanity, we're not discussing the Amazon warehouse worker whose movements are dictated by algorithmic surveillance or the Palestinian whose neighborhood is targeted by automated weapons systems. These present realities dissolve into background noise against the rhetoric of existential risk...""Seen clearly, the prophecy of superintelligence is less a warning about machines than a strategy for power, and that strategy needs to be recognized for what it is... ""Superintelligence discourse isn't spreading because experts broadly agree it is our most urgent problem; it spreads because a well-resourced movement has given it money and access to power...""Academic institutions, which are meant to resist such logics, have been conscripted into this manufacture of inevitability... reinforcing industry narratives, producing papers on AGI timelines and alignment strategies, lending scholarly authority to speculative fiction...""The prophecy becomes self-fulfilling through material concentration — as resources flow towards AGI development, alternative approaches to AI starve...""The dominance of superintelligence narratives obscures the fact that many other ways of doing AI exist, grounded in present social needs rather than hypothetical machine gods..." [He lists data sovereignty movements "that treat data as a collective resource subject to collective consent," as well as organizations like Canada's First Nations Information Governance Centre and New Zealand's's Te Mana Raraunga, plus "Global South initiatives that use modest, locally governed AI systems to support healthcare, agriculture or education under tight resource constraints."] "Such examples... demonstrate how AI can be organized without defaulting to the superintelligence paradigm that demands everyone else be sacrificed because a few tech bros can see the greater good that everyone else has missed...""These alternatives also illuminate the democratic deficit at the heart of the superintelligence narrative. Treating AI at once as an arcane technical problem that ordinary people cannot understand and as an unquestionable engine of social progress allows authority to consolidate in the hands of those who own and build the systems..." He's ultimately warning us about "politics masked as predictions..." "The real political question is not whether some artificial superintelligence will emerge, but who gets to decide what kinds of intelligence we build and sustain. And the answer cannot be left to the corporate prophets of artificial transcendence because the future of AI is a political field — it should be open to contestation. "It belongs not to those who warn most loudly of gods or monsters, but to publics that should have the moral right to democratically govern the technologies that shape their lives."

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"A SpaceX executive says a satellite deployed from a Chinese rocket risked colliding with a Starlink satellite," reports PC Magazine: On Friday, company VP for Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, tweeted about the incident and blamed a lack of coordination from the Chinese launch provider CAS Space. "When satellite operators do not share ephemeris for their satellites, dangerously close approaches can occur in space," he wrote, referring to the publication of predicted orbital positions for such satellites... [I]t looks like one of the satellites veered relatively close to a Starlink sat that's been in service for over two years. "As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200 meter (656 feet) close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude," Nicolls wrote... "Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators — this needs to change," he added. Chinese launch provider CAS Space told PCMag that "As a launch service provider, our responsibility ends once the satellites are deployed, meaning we do not have control over the satellites' maneuvers." And the article also cites astronomer/satellite tracking expert Jonathan McDowell, who had tweeted that CAS Space's response "seems reasonable." (In an email to PC Magazine, he'd said "Two days after launch is beyond the window usually used for predicting launch related risks." But "The coordination that Nicolls cited is becoming more and more important," notes Space.com, since "Earth orbit is getting more and more crowded." In 2020, for example, fewer than 3,400 functional satellites were whizzing around our planet. Just five years later, that number has soared to about 13,000, and more spacecraft are going up all the time. Most of them belong to SpaceX. The company currently operates nearly 9,300 Starlink satellites, more than 3,000 of which have launched this year alone. Starlink satellites avoid potential collisions autonomously, maneuvering themselves away from conjunctions predicted by available tracking data. And this sort of evasive action is quite common: Starlink spacecraft performed about 145,000 avoidance maneuvers in the first six months of 2025, which works out to around four maneuvers per satellite per month. That's an impressive record. But many other spacecraft aren't quite so capable, and even Starlink satellites can be blindsided by spacecraft whose operators don't share their trajectory data, as Nicolls noted. And even a single collision — between two satellites, or involving pieces of space junk, which are plentiful in Earth orbit as well — could spawn a huge cloud of debris, which could cause further collisions. Indeed, the nightmare scenario, known as the Kessler syndrome, is a debris cascade that makes it difficult or impossible to operate satellites in parts of the final frontier.

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Roomba manufacturer iRobot filed for bankruptcy today, reports Bloomberg. After 35 years, iRobot reached a "restructuring support agrement that will hand control of the consumer robot maker to Shenzhen PICEA Robotics Co, its main supplier and lender, and Santrum Hong Kong Compny." Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganised company... The plan will allow the debtor to remain as a going concern and continue to meet its commitments to employees and make timely payments in full to vendors and other creditors for amounts owed throughout the court-supervised process, according to an iRobot statement... he company warned of potential bankruptcy in December after years of declining earnings. Roomba says it's sold over 50 million robots, the article points out, but earnings "began to decline since 2021 due to supply chain headwinds and increased competition. "A hoped-for by acquisition by Amazon.com in 2023 collapsed over regulatory concerns."

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"As Australia began enforcing a world-first social media ban for children under 16 years old this week, Denmark is planning to follow its lead," reports the Associated Press, "and severely restrict social media access for young people." The Danish government announced last month that it had secured an agreement by three governing coalition and two opposition parties in parliament to ban access to social media for anyone under the age of 15. Such a measure would be the most sweeping step yet by a European Union nation to limit use of social media among teens and children. The Danish government's plans could become law as soon as mid-2026. The proposed measure would give some parents the right to let their children access social media from age 13, local media reported, but the ministry has not yet fully shared the plans... [A] new "digital evidence" app, announced by the Digital Affairs Ministry last month and expected to launch next spring, will likely form the backbone of the Danish plans. The app will display an age certificate to ensure users comply with social media age limits, the ministry said. The article also notes Malaysia "is expected to ban social media accounts for people under the age of 16 starting at the beginning of next year, and Norway is also taking steps to restrict social media access for children and teens. "China — which manufacturers many of the world's digital devices — has set limits on online gaming time and smartphone time for kids."

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The Wall Street Journal reports that 68% of CEOs "plan to spend even more on AI in 2026, according to an annual survey of more than 350 public-company CEOs from advisory firm Teneo." And yet "less than half of current AI projects had generated more in returns than they had cost, respondents said." They reported the most success using AI in marketing and customer service and challenges using it in higher-risk areas such as security, legal and human resources. Teneo also surveyed about 400 institutional investors, of which 53% expect that AI initiatives would begin to deliver returns on investments within six months. That compares to the 84% of CEOs of large companies — those with revenue of $10 billion or more — who believe it will take more than six months. Surprisingly, 67% of CEOs believe AI will increase their entry-level head count, while 58% believe AI will increase senior leadership head count. All the surveyed CEOS were from public companies with revenue over $1 billion...

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC: A billionaire investor keen on buying TikTok's US operations has told the BBC he has been left in limbo as the latest deadline for the app's sale looms. The US has repeatedly delayed the date by which the platform's Chinese owner, Bytedance, must sell or be blocked for American users. US President Donald Trump appears poised to extend the deadline for a fifth time on Tuesday. "We're just standing by and waiting to see what happens," investor Frank McCourt told BBC News... The president...said "sophisticated" US investors would acquire the app, including two of his allies: Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and Dell Technologies' Michael Dell. Members of the Trump administration had indicated the deal would be formalised in a meeting between Trump and Xi in October — however it concluded without an agreement being reached. Neither TikTok's Chinese owner ByteDance nor Beijing have since announced approval of a sale, despite Trump's claims. This time there are no such claims a deal is imminent, leading most analysts to conclude another extension is inevitable. Other investors besides McCourt include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Shark Tank entrepreneur Kevin O'Leary.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times: Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast "Diary of a CEO." On YouTube, his clone narrates "100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett," which adds AI-generated animation to Bartlett's cloned voice to tell the life stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Richard Branson. Erica Mandy, the Redondo Beach-based host of the daily news podcast called "The Newsworthy," let an AI voice fill in for her earlier this year after she lost her voice from laryngitis and her backup host bailed out... In podcasting, many listeners feel strong bonds to hosts they listen to regularly. The slow encroachment of AI voices for one-off episodes, canned ad reads, sentence replacement in postproduction or translation into multiple languages has sparked anger as well as curiosity from both creators and consumers of the content. Augmenting or replacing host reads with AI is perceived by many as a breach of trust and as trivializing the human connection listeners have with hosts, said Megan Lazovick, vice president of Edison Research, a podcast research company... Still, platforms such as YouTube and Spotify have introduced features for creators to clone their voice and translate their content into multiple languages to increase reach and revenue. A new generation of voice cloning companies, many with operations in California, offers better emotion, tone, pacing and overall voice quality... Some are using the tech to carpet-bomb the market with content. Los Angeles podcasting studio Inception Point AI has produced its 200,000 podcast episodes, in some weeks accounting for 1% of all podcasts published that week on the internet, according to CEO Jeanine Wright. The podcasts are so cheap to make that they can focus on tiny topics, like local weather, small sports teams, gardening and other niche subjects. Instead of a studio searching for a specific "hit" podcast idea, it takes just $1 to produce an episode so that they can be profitable with just 25 people listening... One of its popular synthetic hosts is Vivian Steele, an AI celebrity gossip columnist with a sassy voice and a sharp tongue... Inception Point has built a roster of more than 100 AI personalities whose characteristics, voices and likenesses are crafted for podcast audiences. Its AI hosts include Clare Delish, a cooking guidance expert, and garden enthusiastNigel Thistledown... Across Apple and Spotify, Inception Point podcasts have now garnered 400,000 subscribers.

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AI "has gutted entry-level roles in the tech industry," reports Rest of World. One student at a high-ranking engineering college in India tells them that among his 400 classmates, "fewer than 25% have secured job offers... there's a sense of panic on the campus." Students at engineering colleges in India, China, Dubai, and Kenya are facing a "jobpocalypse" as artificial intelligence replaces humans in entry-level roles. Tasks once assigned to fresh graduates, such as debugging, testing, and routine software maintenance, are now increasingly automated. Over the last three years, the number of fresh graduates hired by big tech companies globally has declined by more than 50%, according to a report published by SignalFire, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm. Even though hiring rebounded slightly in 2024, only 7% of new hires were recent graduates. As many as 37% of managers said they'd rather use AI than hire a Gen Z employee... Indian IT services companies have reduced entry-level roles by 20%-25% thanks to automation and AI, consulting firm EY said in a report last month. Job platforms like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Eures noted a 35% decline in junior tech positions across major EU countries during 2024... "Five years ago, there was a real war for [coders and developers]. There was bidding to hire," and 90% of the hires were for off-the-shelf technical roles, or positions that utilize ready-made technology products rather than requiring in-house development, said Vahid Haghzare, director at IT hiring firm Silicon Valley Associates Recruitment in Dubai. Since the rise of AI, "it has dropped dramatically," he said. "I don't even think it's touching 5%. It's almost completely vanished." The company headhunts workers from multiple countries including China, Singapore, and the U.K... The current system, where a student commits three to five years to learn computer science and then looks for a job, is "not sustainable," Haghzare said. Students are "falling down a hole, and they don't know how to get out of it."

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"Polar bears are still sadly expected to go extinct this century," with two-thirds of the population gone by 2050," says the lead researcher on a new study from the University of East Anglia in Britain. But their research also suggests polar bears "are rapidly rewiring their own genetics in a bid to survive," reports NBC News, in "the first documented case of rising temperatures driving genetic change in a mammal." "I believe our work really does offer a glimmer of hope — a window of opportunity for us to reduce our carbon emissions to slow down the rate of climate change and to give these bears more time to adapt to these stark changes in their habitats," [the lead author of the study told NBC News]. Building on earlier University of Washington research, [lead researcher] Godden's team analyzed blood samples from polar bears in northeastern and southeastern Greenland. In the slightly warmer south, they found that genes linked to heat stress, aging and metabolism behaved differently from those in northern bears. "Essentially this means that different groups of bears are having different sections of their DNA changed at different rates, and this activity seems linked to their specific environment and climate," Godden said in a university press release. She said this shows, for the first time, that a unique group of one species has been forced to "rewrite their own DNA," adding that this process can be considered "a desperate survival mechanism against melting sea ice...." Researchers say warming ocean temperatures have reduced vital sea ice platforms that the bears use to hunt seals, leading to isolation and food scarcity. This led to genetic changes as the animals' digestive system adapts to a diet of plants and low fats in the absence of prey, Godden told NBC News.

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America's solar industry "just delivered another huge quarter," reports Electrek, "installing 11.7 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in Q3 2025. That makes it the third-largest quarter on record and pushes total solar additions this year past 30 GW..." According to the new "US Solar Market Insight Q4 2025" report from Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie, 85% of all new power added to the grid during the first nine months of the Trump administration came from solar and storage. And here's the twist: Most of that growth — 73% — happened in red [Republican-leaning] states. Eight of the top 10 states for new installations fall into that category, including Texas, Indiana, Florida, Arizona, Ohio, Utah, Kentucky, and Arkansas... Two new solar module factories opened this year in Louisiana and South Carolina, adding a combined 4.7 GW of capacity. That brings the total new U.S. module manufacturing capacity added in 2025 to 17.7 GW. With a new wafer facility coming online in Michigan in Q3, the U.S. can now produce every major component of the solar module supply chain... SEIA also noted that, following an analysis of EIA data, it found that more than 73 GW of solar projects across the U.S. are stuck in permitting limbo and at risk of politically motivated delays or cancellations.

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Nonprofit Code.org released its 2025 State of AI & Computer Science Education report this week with a state-by-state analysis of school policies complaining that "0 out of 50 states require AI+CS for graduation." But meanwhile, at the college level, "Purdue University will begin requiring that all of its undergraduate students demonstrate basic competency in AI," writes former college president Michael Nietzel, "starting with freshmen who enter the university in 2026." The new "AI working competency" graduation requirement was approved by the university's Board of Trustees at its meeting on December 12... The requirement will be embedded into every undergraduate program at Purdue, but it won't be done in a "one-size-fits-all" manner. Instead, the Board is delegating authority to the provost, who will work with the deans of all the academic colleges to develop discipline-specific criteria and proficiency standards for the new campus-wide requirement. [Purdue president] Chiang said students will have to demonstrate a working competence through projects that are tailored to the goals of individual programs. The intent is to not require students to take more credit hours, but to integrate the new AI expectation into existing academic requirements... While the news release claimed that Purdue may be the first school to establish such a requirement, at least one other university has introduced its own institution-wide expectation that all its graduates acquire basic AI skills. Earlier this year, The Ohio State University launched an AI Fluency initiative, infusing basic AI education into core undergraduate requirements and majors, with the goal of helping students understand and use AI tools — no matter their major. Purdue wants its new initiative to help graduates: — Understand and use the latest AI tools effectively in their chosen fields, including being able to identify the key strengths and limits of AI technologies; — Recognize and communicate clearly about AI, including developing and defending decisions informed by AI, as well as recognizing the influence and consequences of AI in decision-making; — Adapt to and work with future AI developments effectively.

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U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said Friday he was moving to file a bipartisan bill to repeal Section 230 of America's Communications Decency Act. "The law prevents most civil suits against users or services that are based on what others say," explains an EFF blog post. "Experts argue that a repeal of Section 230 could kill free speech on the internet," writes LiveMint — though America's last two presidents both supported a repeal: During his first presidency, U.S. President Donald Trump called to repeal the law and signed an executive order attempting to curb some of its protections, though it was challenged in court. Subsequently, former President Joe Biden also voiced his opinion against the law. An EFF blog post explains the case for Section 230: Congress passed this bipartisan legislation because it recognized that promoting more user speech online outweighed potential harms. When harmful speech takes place, it's the speaker that should be held responsible, not the service that hosts the speech... Without Section 230, the Internet is different. In Canada and Australia, courts have allowed operators of online discussion groups to be punished for things their users have said. That has reduced the amount of user speech online, particularly on controversial subjects. In non-democratic countries, governments can directly censor the internet, controlling the speech of platforms and users. If the law makes us liable for the speech of others, the biggest platforms would likely become locked-down and heavily censored. The next great websites and apps won't even get started, because they'll face overwhelming legal risk to host users' speech. But "I strongly believe that Section 230 has long outlived its use," Senator Whitehouse said this week, saying Section 230 "a real vessel for evil that needs to come to an end." "The laws that Section 230 protect these big platforms from are very often laws that go back to the common law of England, that we inherited when this country was initially founded. I mean, these are long-lasting, well-tested, important legal constraints that have — they've met the test of time, not by the year or by the decade, but by the century. "And yet because of this crazy Section 230, these ancient and highly respected doctrines just don't reach these people. And it really makes no sense, that if you're an internet platform you get treated one way; you do the exact same thing and you're a publisher, you get treated a completely different way. "And so I think that the time has come.... It really makes no sense... [Testimony before the committee] shows how alone and stranded people are when they don't have the chance to even get justice. It's bad enough to have to live through the tragedy... But to be told by a law of Congress, you can't get justice because of the platform — not because the law is wrong, not because the rule is wrong, not because this is anything new — simply because the wrong type of entity created this harm."

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Time magazine used its 98th annual "Person of the Year" cover to "recognize a force that has dominated the year's headlines, for better or for worse. For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME's 2025 Person of the Year." One cover illustration shows eight AI executives sitting precariously on a beam high above the city, while Time's 6,700-word article promises "the story of how AI changed our world in 2025, in new and exciting and sometimes frightening ways. It is the story of how [Nvidia CEO] Huang and other tech titans grabbed the wheel of history, developing technology and making decisions that are reshaping the information landscape, the climate, and our livelihoods." Time describes them betting on "one of the biggest physical infrastructure projects of all time," mentioning all the usual worries — datacenters' energy consumption, chatbot psychosis, predictions of "wiping out huge numbers of jobs" and the possibility of an AI stock market bubble. (Although "The drumbeat of warning that advanced AI could kill us all has mostly quieted"). But it also notes AI's potential to jumpstart innovation (and economic productivity) This year, the debate about how to wield AI responsibly gave way to a sprint to deploy it as fast as possible. "Every industry needs it, every company uses it, and every nation needs to build it," Huang tells TIME in a 75-minute interview in November, two days after announcing that Nvidia, the world's first $5 trillion company, had once again smashed Wall Street's earnings expectations. "This is the single most impactful technology of our time..." The risk-averse are no longer in the driver's seat. Thanks to Huang, Son, Altman, and other AI titans, humanity is now flying down the highway, all gas no brakes, toward a highly automated and highly uncertain future. Perhaps Trump said it best, speaking directly to Huang with a jovial laugh in the U.K. in September: "I don't know what you're doing here. I hope you're right."

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A January order blocking wind energy projects in America has now been vacated by a U.S. judge and declared unlawful, reports the Associated Press: [Judge Saris of the U.S. district court for the district of Massachusetts] ruled in favor of a coalition of state attorneys general from 17 states and Washington DC, led by Letitia James, New York's attorney general, that challenged President Trump's day one order that paused leasing and permitting for wind energy projects... The coalition that opposed Trump's order argued that Trump does not have the authority to halt project permitting, and that doing so jeopardizes the states' economies, energy mix, public health and climate goals. The coalition includes Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington state and Washington DC. They say they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars collectively to develop wind energy and even more on upgrading transmission lines to bring wind energy to the electrical grid... Wind is the United States' largest source of renewable energy, providing about 10% of the electricity generated in the nation, according to the American Clean Power Association. But the BBC quotes Timothy Fox, managing director at the Washington, DC-based research firm ClearView Energy Partners, as saying he doesn't expect the ruling to reinvigorate the industry: "It's more symbolic than substantive," he said. "All the court is saying is ... you need to go back to work and consider these applications. What does that really mean?" he said. Officials could still deny permits or bog applications down in lengthy reviews, he noted.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix: Due to the growing number of GNOME Shell extensions looking to appear on extensions.gnome.org that were generated using AI, it's now prohibited. The new rule in their guidelines note that AI-generated code will be explicitly rejected: "Extensions must not be AI-generated While it is not prohibited to use AI as a learning aid or a development tool (i.e. code completions), extension developers should be able to justify and explain the code they submit, within reason. Submissions with large amounts of unnecessary code, inconsistent code style, imaginary API usage, comments serving as LLM prompts, or other indications of AI-generated output will be rejected." In a blog post, GNOME developer Javad Rahmatzadeh explains that "Some devs are using AI without understanding the code..."

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The R programming language "is sometimes frowned upon by 'traditional' software engineers," says the CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe, "due to its unconventional syntax and limited scalability for large production systems." But he says it "continues to thrive at universities and in research-driven industries, and "for domain experts, it remains a powerful and elegant tool." Yet it's now gaining more popularity as statistics and large-scale data visualization become important (a trend he also sees reflected in the rise of Wolfram/Mathematica). That's according to December's edition of his TIOBE Index, which attempts to rank the popularity of programming languages based on search-engine results for courses, third-party vendors, and skilled engineers. InfoWorld explains: In the December 2025 index, published December 7, R ranks 10th with a 1.96% rating. R has cracked the Tiobe index's top 10 before, such as in April 2020 and July 2020, but not in recent years. The rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language Index, meanwhile, has R ranked fifth this month with a 5.84% share. "Programming language R is known for fitting statisticians and data scientists like a glove," said Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe, in a bulletin accompanying the December index... Although data science rival Python has eclipsed R in terms of general adoption, Jansen said R has carved out a solid and enduring niche, excelling at rapid experimentation, statistical modeling, and exploratory data analysis. "We have seen many Tiobe index top 10 entrants rising and falling," Jansen wrote. "It will be interesting to see whether R can maintain its current position." "Python remains ahead at 23.64%," notes TechRepublic, "while the familiar chase group behind it holds steady for the moment. The real movement comes deeper in the list, where SQL edges upward, R rises to the top 10, and Delphi/Object Pascal slips away... SQLclimbs from tenth to eighth at 2.10%, adding a small +0.11% that's enough to move it upward in a tightly packed section of the table. Perl holds ninth at 1.97%, strengthened by a +1.33% gain that extends its late-year resurgence." It's interesting to see how TIOBE's ranking compare with PYPL's (which ranks languages based solely on how often language tutorials are searched on Google): TIOBE PYPL Python Python C C/C++ C++ Objective-C Java Java C# R JavaScript JavaScript Visual Basic Swift SQL C# Perl PHP R Rust Despite their different methodologies, both lists put Python at #1, Java at #5, and JavaScript at #7.

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This week System76 launched the first stable release of its Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment. Announced in 2021, it's designed for all GNU/Linux distributions — and it shipping with Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS (based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS). An anonymous reader shared this report from 9to5Linux: Previous Pop!_OS releases used a version of the COSMIC desktop that was based on the GNOME desktop environment. However, System76 wanted to create a new desktop environment from scratch while keeping the same familiar interface and user experience built for efficiency and fun. This means that some GNOME apps have been replaced by COSMIC apps, including COSMIC Files instead of Nautilus (Files), COSMIC Terminal instead of GNOME Terminal, COSMIC Text Editor instead of GNOME Text Editor, and COSMIC Media Player instead of Totem (Video Player). Also, the Pop!_Shop graphical package manager used in previous Pop!_OS releases has now been replaced by a new app called COSMIC Store. "If you're ambitious enough, or maybe just crazy enough, there eventually comes a time when you realize you've reached the limits of current potential, and must create something completely new if you're to go further..." explains System76 founder/CEO Carl Richell: For twenty years we have shipped Linux computers. For seven years we've built the Pop!_OS Linux distribution. Three years ago it became clear we had reached the limit of our current potential and had to create something new. Today, we break through that limit with the release of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS with the COSMIC Desktop Environment. Today is special not only in that it's the culmination of over three years of work, but even more so in that System76 has built a complete desktop environment for the open source community... I hope you love what we've built for you. Now go out there and create. Push the limits, make incredible things, and have fun doing it!

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This week the Free Software Foundation honored Andy Wingo, Alx Sa, and Govdirectory with this year's annual Free Software Awards (given to community members and groups making "significant" contributions to software freedom): Andy Wingo is one of the co-maintainers of GNU Guile, the official extension language of the GNU operating system and the Scheme "backbone" of GNU Guix. Upon receiving the award, he stated: "Since I learned about free software, the vision of a world in which hackers freely share and build on each others' work has been a profound inspiration to me, and I am humbled by this recognition of my small efforts in the context of the Guile Scheme implementation. I thank my co-maintainer, Ludovic Courtès, for his comradery over the years: we are just building on the work of the past maintainers of Guile, and I hope that we live long enough to congratulate its many future maintainers." The 2024 Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor went to Alx Sa for work on the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). When asked to comment, Alx responded: "I am honored to receive this recognition! I started contributing to the GNU Image Manipulation Program as a way to return the favor because of all the cool things it's allowed me to do. Thanks to the help and mentorship of amazing people like Jehan Pagès, Jacob Boerema, Liam Quin, and so many others, I hope I've been able to help other people do some cool new things, too." Govdirectory was presented with this year's Award for Projects of Social Benefit, given to a project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, to intentionally and significantly benefit society. Govdirectory provides a collaborative and fact-checked listing of government addresses, phone numbers, websites, and social media accounts, all of which can be viewed with free software and under a free license, allowing people to always reach their representatives in freedom... The FSF plans to further highlight the Free Software Award winners in a series of events scheduled for the new year to celebrate their contributions to free software.

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"The entire java.applet package has been removed from JDK 26, which will release in March 2026," notes Inside Java. But long-time Slashdot reader AirHog links to this blog post reminding us that "Applets Are Officially Gone, But Java In The Browser Is Better Than Ever." This brings to an official end the era of applets, which began in 1996. However, for years it has been possible to build modern, interactive web pages in Java without needing applets or plugins. TeaVM provides fast, performant, and lightweight tooling to transpile Java to run natively in the browser... TeaVM, at its heart, transpiles Java code into JavaScript (or, these days, WASM). However, in order for Java code to be useful for web apps, much more is required, and TeaVM delivers. It includes a minifier, to shrink the generated code and obfuscate the intent, to complicate reverse-engineering. It has a tree-shaker to eliminate unused methods and classes, keeping your app download compact. It packages your code into a single file for easy distribution and inclusion in your HTML page. It also includes wrappers for all popular browser APIs, so you can invoke them from your Java code easily, with full IDE assistance and auto-correct. The blog post also touts Flavour, an open-source framework "for coding, packaging, and optimizing single-page apps implemented in Java... a full front-end toolkit with templates, routing, components, and more" to "build your modern single-page app using 100% Java."

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A Utah-based startup announced last week it used AI to locate a 250-degree Fahrenheit geothermal reservoir, reports CNN. It'll start producing electricity in three to five years, the company estimates — and at least one geologist believes AI could be an exciting "gamechanger" for the geothermal industry. [Startup Zanskar Geothermal & Minerals] named it "Big Blind," because this kind of site — which has no visual indication of its existence, no hot springs or geysers above ground, and no history of geothermal exploration — is known as a "blind" system. It's the first industry-discovered blind site in more than three decades, said Carl Hoiland, co-founder and CEO of Zanskar. "The idea that geothermal is tapped out has been the narrative for decades," but that's far from the case, he told CNN. He believes there are many more hidden sites across the Western U.S. Geothermal energy is a potential gamechanger. It offers the tantalizing prospect of a huge source of clean energy to meet burgeoning demand. It's near limitless, produces scarcely any climate pollution, and is constantly available, unlike wind and solar, which are cheap but rely on the sun shining and the wind blowing. The problem, however, has been how to find and scale it. It requires a specific geology: underground reservoirs of hot water or steam, along with porous rocks that allow the water to move through them, heat up, and be brought to the surface where it can power turbines... The AI models Zanskar uses are fed information on where blind systems already exist. This data is plentiful as, over the last century and more, humans have accidentally stumbled on many around the world while drilling for other resources such as oil and gas. The models then scour huge amounts of data — everything from rock composition to magnetic fields — to find patterns that point to the existence of geothermal reserves. AI models have "gotten really good over the last 10 years at being able to pull those types of signals out of noise," Hoiland said... Zanskar's discovery "is very significant," said James Faulds, a professor of geosciences at Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology.... Estimates suggest over three-quarters of US geothermal resources are blind, Faulds told CNN. "Refining methods to find such systems has the potential to unleash many tens and perhaps hundreds of gigawatts in the western US alone," he said... Big Blind is the company's first blind site discovery, but it's the third site it has drilled and hit commercial resources. "We expect dozens, to eventually hundreds, of new sites to be coming to market," Hoiland said.... Hoiland says Zanskar's work shows conventional geothermal still has huge untapped potential. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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Choosing your browser "is one of the most important digital decisions you can make, shaping how you experience the web, protect your data, and express yourself online," says the Firefox blog. They've urged readers to "take a stand for independence and control in your digital life." But they also recently polled 8,000 adults in France, Germany, the UK and the U.S. on "how they navigate choice and control both online and offline" (attending in-person events in Chicago, Berlin, LA, and Munich, San Diego, Stuttgart): The survey, conducted by research agency YouGov, showcases a tension between people's desire to have control over their data and digital privacy, and the reality of the internet today — a reality defined by Big Tech platforms that make it difficult for people to exercise meaningful choice online: — Only 16% feel in control of their privacy choices (highest in Germany at 21%) — 24% feel it's "too late" because Big Tech already has too much control or knows too much about them. And 36% said the feeling of Big Tech companies knowing too much about them is frustrating — highest among respondents in the U.S. (43%) and the UK (40%) — Practices respondents said frustrated them were Big Tech using their data to train AI without their permission (38%) and tracking their data without asking (47%; highest in U.S. — 55% and lowest in France — 39%) And from our existing research on browser choice, we know more about how defaults that are hard to change and confusing settings can bury alternatives, limiting people's ability to choose for themselves — the real problem that fuels these dynamics. Taken together our new and existing insights could also explain why, when asked which actions feel like the strongest expressions of their independence online, choosing not to share their data (44%) was among the top three responses in each country (46% in the UK; 45% in the U.S.; 44% in France; 39% in Germany)... We also see a powerful signal in how people think about choosing the communities and platforms they join — for 29% of respondents, this was one of their top three expressions of independence online. "For Firefox, community has always been at the heart of what we do," says their VP of Global Marketing, "and we'll keep fighting to put real choice and control back in people's hands so the web once again feels like it belongs to the communities that shape it." At TwitchCon in San Diego Firefox even launched a satirical new online card game with a privacy theme called Data War.

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Electrek reports: EV and battery supply chain research specialists Benchmark Mineral Intelligence reports that 2.0 million electric vehicles were sold globally in November 2025, bringing global EV sales to 18.5 million units year-to-date. That's a 21% increase compared to the same period in 2024. Europe was the clear growth leader in November, while North America continued to lag following the expiration of US EV tax credits. China, meanwhile, remains the world's largest EV market by a wide margin. Europe's EV market jumped 36% year-over-year in November 2025, with BEV sales up 35% and plug-in hybrid (PHEV) sales rising 39%. That brings Europe's total EV sales to 3.8 million units for the year so far, up 33% compared to January-November 2024... In North America, EV sales in the US did tick up month-over-month in November, following a sharp October drop after federal tax credits expired on September 30, 2025. Brands including Kia (up 30%), Hyundai (up 20%), Honda (up 11%), and Subaru (232 Solterra sales versus just 13 the month before) all saw gains, but overall volumes remain below levels when the federal tax credit was still available... [North America shows a -1% drop in EV sales from January to November 2025 vs. January to November 2024] Year-to-date, EV sales in China are up 19%, with 11.6 million units sold. One of the biggest headlines out of China is exports. BYD reported a record 131,935 EV exports in November, blowing past its previous high of around 90,000 units set in June. BYD sales in Europe have jumped more than fourfold this year to around 200,000 vehicles, doubled in Southeast Asia, and climbed by more than 50% in South America... "Overall, EV demand remains resilient, supported by expanding model ranges and sustained policy incentives worldwide," said Rho Motion data manager Charles Lester. Beyond China, Europe, and North America, the rest of the world saw a 48% spike in EV sales in 2025 vs the same 11 months in 2024, representing 1.5 million EVs sold. "The takeaway: EV demand continues to grow worldwide," the article adds, "but policy support — or the lack thereof — is increasingly shaping where this growth shows up."

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In 1975, 23-year-old electrical engineer Steve Sasson joined Kodak. And in a new interview with the BBC, he remembers that he'd found the whole photographic process "really annoying.... I wanted to build a camera with no moving parts. Now that was just to annoy the mechanical engineers..." "You take your picture, you have to wait a long time, you have to fiddle with these chemicals. Well, you know, I was raised on Star Trek, and all the good ideas come from Star Trek. So I said what if we could just do it all electronically...?" Researchers at Bell Labs in the US had, in 1969, created a type of integrated circuit called a charge-coupled device (CCD). An electric charge could be stored on a metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS), and could be passed from one MOS to another. Its creators believed one of its applications might one day be used as part of an imaging device — though they hadn't worked out how that might happen. The CCD, nevertheless, was quickly developed. By 1974, the US microchip company Fairchild Semiconductors had built the first commercial CCD, measuring just 100 x 100 pixels — the tiny electronic samples taken of an original image. The new device's ability to capture an image was only theoretical — no-one had, as yet, tried to take an image and display it. (NASA, it turned out, was also looking at this technology, but not for consumer cameras....) The CCD circuit responded to light but could only form an image if Sasson was somehow able to attach a lens to it. He could then convert the light into digital information — a blizzard of 1s and 0s — but there was just one problem: money. "I had no money to build this thing. Nobody told me to build it, and I certainly couldn't demand any money for it," he says. "I basically stole all the parts, I was in Kodak and the apparatus division, which had a lot of parts. I stole the optical assembly from an XL movie camera downstairs in a used parts bin. I was just walking by, you see it, and you take it, you know." He was also able to source an analogue to digital converter from a $12 (about £5 in 1974) digital voltmeter, rather than spending hundreds on the part. I could manage to get all these parts without anybody really noticing," he says.... The bulky device needed a way to store the information the CCD was capturing, so Sasson used an audio cassette deck. But he also needed a way to view the image once it was saved on the magnetic tape. "We had to build a playback unit," Sasson says. "And, again, nobody asked me to do that either. So all I got to do is the reverse of what I did with the camera, and then I have to turn that digital pattern into an NTSC television signal." NTSC (National Television System Committee) was the conversion standard used by American TV sets. Sasson had to turn only 100 lines of digital code captured by the camera into the 400 lines that would form a television signal. The solution was a Motorola microprocessor, and by December 1975, the camera and its playback unit was complete, the article points out. With his colleague Jim Schueckler, Sasson had spent more than a year putting together the "increasingly bulky" device, that "looked like an oversized toaster." The camera had a shutter that would take an image at about 1/20th of a second, and — if everything worked as it should — the cassette tape would start to move as the camera transferred the stored information from its CCD [which took 23 seconds]. "It took about 23 seconds to play it back, and then about eight seconds to reconfigure it to make it look like a television signal, and send it to the TV set that I stole from another lab...." In 1978, Kodak was granted the first patent for a digital camera. It was Sasson's first invention. The patent is thought to have earned Eastman Kodak billions in licensing and infringement payments by the time they sold the rights to it, fearing bankruptcy, in 2012... As for Sasson, he never worked on anything other than the digital technology he had helped to create until he retired from Eastman Kodak in 2009. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

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