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.
WASHINGTON — White House chief of staff Susie Wiles said the administration's accusations against New York Attorney General Letitia James "might" be "retribution," and "when there’s an opportunity" for President Donald Trump to take retribution, "he will go for it," Vanity Fair reported in a new profile of Wiles
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.
Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort, which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator interfaces, to create allocation functions at run-time bound to a particular allocation region. I’ve learned a lot since I last wrote about this subject, and a recent article had me thinking about it again, and how I could do better than before. In this article I will enhance Win32 window procedure callbacks with a fifth argument, allowing us to more directly pass extra context. I’m using w64devkit on x64, but the everything here should work out-of-the-box with any x64 toolchain that speaks GNU assembly.
Sometimes, people get upset when I mention something is out of my wheelhouse, so just for those people, here’s an article well outside of my wheelhouse. I choose honesty over faking confidence.
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.
Any computing device will inevitably get a custom operating system – whether based on an existing operating system or something entirely custom – and of course, Kobo e-readers are no exception. QuillOS is an Alpine Linux-based distribution specifically developed for the unique challenges of e-readers, and comes with a custom Qt-based user interface, support for a whole slew of e-book formats, NetSurf as a web browser, encrypted storage, a VNC viewer, and a ton more. Basic hardware capabilities like Wi-Fi and power management are also supported, and it has online update support, too.
The current release is already two years old, sadly, so I’m not sure how active the project is at this point. I wanted to highlight it here since something like this is a great way to liberate your Kobo device if, for some reason, Kobo ever started making their devices worse through updates, or the company shutters its services. You know, something that seems rather relevant today.
Rolling out enterprise-grade AI means climbing two steep cliffs at once. First, understanding and implementing the tech itself. And second, creating the cultural conditions where employees can maximize its value. While the technical hurdles are significant, the human element can be even more consequential; fear and ambiguity can stall momentum of even the most promising initiatives.
Psychological safety—feeling free to express opinions and take calculated risks without worrying about career repercussions1—is essential for successful AI adoption. In psychologically safe workspaces, employees are empowered to challenge assumptions and raise concerns about new tools without fear of reprisal. This is nothing short of a necessity when introducing a nascent and profoundly powerful technology that still lacks established best practices.
“Psychological safety is mandatory in this new era of AI,” says Rafee Tarafdar, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Infosys. “The tech itself is evolving so fast—companies have to experiment, and some things will fail. There needs to be a safety net.”
To gauge how psychological safety influences success with enterprise-level AI, MIT Technology Review Insights conducted a survey of 500 business leaders. The findings reveal high self-reported levels of psychological safety, but also suggest that fear still has a foothold. Anecdotally, industry experts highlight a reason for the disconnect between rhetoric and reality: while organizations may promote a safe to experiment message publicly, deeper cultural undercurrents can counteract that intent.
Building psychological safety requires a coordinated, systems-level approach, and human resources (HR) alone cannot deliver such transformation. Instead, enterprises must deeply embed psychological safety into their collaboration processes.
Key findings for this report include:
Companies with experiment-friendly cultures have greater success with AI projects. The majority of executives surveyed (83%) believe a company culture that prioritizes psychological safety measurably improves the success of AI initiatives. Four in five leaders agree that organizations fostering such safety are more successful at adopting AI, and 84% have observed connections between psychological safety and tangible AI outcomes.
Psychological barriers are proving to be greater obstacles to enterprise AI adoption than technological challenges. Encouragingly, nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents indicated they feel safe to provide honest feedback and express opinions freely in their workplace. Still, a significant share (22%) admit they’ve hesitated to lead an AI project because they might be blamed if it misfires.
Achieving psychological safety is a moving target for many organizations. Fewer than half of leaders (39%) rate their organization’s current level of psychological safety as “very high.” Another 48%report a “moderate” degree of it. This may mean that some enterprises are pursuing AI adoption on cultural foundations that are not yet fully stable.
This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. It was researched, designed, and written by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
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.
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.
Screen time is a major concern for many parents. Now a new book is aiming to help kids take control of the devices in their lives. Authors Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price join TODAY to talk about their book “The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World" that speaks directly to children.
Screen time is a major concern for many parents. Now a new book is aiming to help kids take control of the devices in their lives. Authors Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price join TODAY to talk about their book “The Amazing Generation: Your Guide to Fun and Freedom in a Screen-Filled World" that speaks directly to children.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
The great AI hype correction of 2025
Some disillusionment was inevitable. When OpenAI released a free web app called ChatGPT in late 2022, it changed the course of an entire industry—and several world economies. Millions of people started talking to their computers, and their computers started talking back. We were enchanted, and we expected more.
Well, 2025 has been a year of reckoning. For a start, the heads of the top AI companies made promises they couldn’t keep. At the same time, updates to the core technology are no longer the step changes they once were.
This story is part of our new Hype Correction package, a collection of stories designed to help you reset your expectations about what AI makes possible—and what it doesn’t. Check out the rest of the package here, and you can read more about why it’s time to reset our expectations for AI in the latest edition of the Algorithm, our weekly AI newsletter. Sign up here to make sure you receive future editions straight to your inbox.
Quantum navigation could solve the military’s GPS jamming problem
Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, thousands of flights have been affected by a far-reaching Russian campaign of using radio transmissions that jammed its GPS system.
The growing inconvenience to air traffic and risk of a real disaster have highlighted the vulnerability of GPS and focused attention on more secure ways for planes to navigate the gauntlet of jamming and spoofing, the term for tricking a GPS receiver into thinking it’s somewhere else.
One approach that’s emerging from labs is quantum navigation: exploiting the quantum nature of light and atoms to build ultra-sensitive sensors that can allow vehicles to navigate independently, without depending on satellites. Read the full story.
—Amos Zeeberg
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 The Trump administration has launched its US Tech Force program In a bid to lure engineers away from Big Tech roles and straight into modernizing the government. (The Verge) + So, essentially replacing the IT workers that DOGE got rid of, then. (The Register)
2 Lawmakers are investigating how AI data centers affect electricity costs They want to get to the bottom of whether it’s being passed onto consumers. (NYT $) + Calculating AI’s water usage is far from straightforward, too. (Wired $) + AI is changing the grid. Could it help more than it harms? (MIT Technology Review)
3 Ford isn’t making a large all-electric truck after all After the US government’s support for EVs plummeted. (Wired $) + Instead, the F-150 Lightning pickup will be reborn as a plug-in hybrid. (The Information $) + Why Americans may be finally ready to embrace smaller cars. (Fast Company $) + The US could really use an affordable electric truck. (MIT Technology Review)
4 PayPal wants to become a bank in the US The Trump administration is very friendly to non-traditional financial companies, after all. (FT $) + It’s been a good year for the crypto industry when it comes to banking. (Economist $)
5 A tech trade deal between the US and UK has been put on ice America isn’t happy with the lack of progress Britain has made, apparently. (NYT $) + It’s a major setback in relations between the pair. (The Guardian)
6 Why does no one want to make the cure for dengue? A new antiviral pill appears to prevent infection—but its development has been abandoned. (Vox)
7 The majority of the world’s glaciers are forecast to disappear by 2100 At a rate of around 3,000 per year. (New Scientist $) + Inside a new quest to save the “doomsday glacier”. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Hollywood is split over AI While some filmmakers love it, actors are horrified by its inexorable rise. (Bloomberg $)
9 Corporate America is obsessed with hiring storytellers It’s essentially a rehashed media relations manager role overhauled for the AI age. (WSJ $)
10 The concept of hacking existed before the internet Just ask this bunch of teenage geeks. (IEEE Spectrum)
Quote of the day
“So the federal government deleted 18F, which was doing great work modernizing the government, and then replaced it with a clone? What is the point of all this?”
—Eugene Vinitsky, an assistant professor at New York University, takes aim at the US government’s decision to launch a new team to overhaul its approach to technology in a post on Bluesky.
One more thing
How DeepSeek became a fortune teller for China’s youth
As DeepSeek has emerged as a homegrown challenger to OpenAI, young people across the country have started using AI to revive fortune-telling practices that have deep roots in Chinese culture.
Across Chinese social media, users are sharing AI-generated readings, experimenting with fortune-telling prompt engineering, and revisiting ancient spiritual texts—all with the help of DeepSeek.
The surge in AI fortune-telling comes during a time of pervasive anxiety and pessimism in Chinese society. And as spiritual practices remain hidden underground thanks to the country’s regime, computers and phone screens are helping younger people to gain a sense of control over their lives. Read the full story.
—Caiwen Chen
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Chess has been online as far back as the 1800s (no, really!) + Jane Austen was born 250 years ago today. How well do you know her writing? ($) + Rob Reiner, your work will live on forever. + I enjoyed this comprehensive guide to absolutely everything you could ever want to know about New England’s extensive seafood offerings.
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."
New details are emerging on the father and son suspects in the shooting attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Australia's Bondi Beach with authorities saying the pair traveled last month to a region in the Philippines known for militant activity. "It would appear that there is evidence that this was inspired by a terrorist organization, by ISIS," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a press conference. NBC’s Sara James reports for TODAY from Sydney.
New details are emerging on the father and son suspects in the shooting attack on a Hanukkah celebration at Australia's Bondi Beach with authorities saying the pair traveled last month to a region in the Philippines known for militant activity. "It would appear that there is evidence that this was inspired by a terrorist organization, by ISIS," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a press conference. NBC’s Sara James reports for TODAY from Sydney.
Can I ask you a question: How do you feel about AI right now? Are you still excited? When you hear that OpenAI or Google just dropped a new model, do you still get that buzz? Or has the shine come off it, maybe just a teeny bit? Come on, you can be honest with me.
Truly, I feel kind of stupid even asking the question, like a spoiled brat who has too many toys at Christmas. AI is mind-blowing. It’s one of the most important technologies to have emerged in decades (despite all its many many drawbacks and flaws and, well, issues).
At the same time I can’t help feeling a little bit: Is that it?
If you feel the same way, there’s good reason for it: The hype we have been sold for the past few years has been overwhelming. We were told that AI would solve climate change. That it would reach human-level intelligence. That it would mean we no longer had to work!
Instead we got AI slop, chatbot psychosis, and tools that urgently prompt you to write better email newsletters. Maybe we got what we deserved. Or maybe we need to reevaluate what AI is for.
As my colleague Will Douglas Heaven puts it in the package’s intro essay, “You can’t help but wonder: When the wow factor is gone, what’s left? How will we view this technology a year or five from now? Will we think it was worth the colossal costs, both financial and environmental?”
Elsewhere in the package, James O’Donnell looks at Sam Altman, the ultimate AI hype man, through the medium of his own words. And Alex Heath explains the AI bubble, laying out for us what it all means and what we should look out for.
Michelle Kim analyzes one of the biggest claims in the AI hype cycle: that AI would completely eliminate the need for certain classes of jobs. If ChatGPT can pass the bar, surely that means it will replace lawyers? Well, not yet, and maybe not ever.
Similarly, Edd Gent tackles the big question around AI coding. Is it as good as it sounds? Turns out the jury is still out. And elsewhere David Rotman looks at the real-world work that needs to be done before AI materials discovery has its breakthrough ChatGPT moment.
Meanwhile, Garrison Lovely spends time with some of the biggest names in the AI safety world and asks: Are the doomers still okay? I mean, now that people are feeling a bit less scared about their impending demise at the hands of superintelligent AI? And Margaret Mitchell reminds us that hype around generative AI can blind us to the AI breakthroughs we should really celebrate.
Let’s remember: AI was here before ChatGPT and it will be here after. This hype cycle has been wild, and we don’t know what its lasting impact will be. But AI isn’t going anywhere. We shouldn’t be so surprised that those dreams we were sold haven’t come true—yet.
The more likely story is that the real winners, the killer apps, are still to come. And a lot of money is being bet on that prospect. So yes: The hype could never sustain itself over the short term. Where we’re at now is maybe the start of a post-hype phase. In an ideal world, this hype correction will reset expectations.
In late September, a Spanish military plane carrying the country’s defense minister to a base in Lithuania was reportedly the subject of a kind of attack—not by a rocket or anti-aircraft rounds, but by radio transmissions that jammed its GPS system.
The flight landed safely, but it was one of thousands that have been affected by a far-reaching Russian campaign of GPS interference since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The growing inconvenience to air traffic and risk of a real disaster have highlighted the vulnerability of GPS and focused attention on more secure ways for planes to navigate the gauntlet of jamming and spoofing, the term for tricking a GPS receiver into thinking it’s somewhere else.
US military contractors are rolling out new GPS satellites that use stronger, cleverer signals, and engineers are working on providing better navigation information based on other sources, like cellular transmissions and visual data.
But another approach that’s emerging from labs is quantum navigation: exploiting the quantum nature of light and atoms to build ultra-sensitive sensors that can allow vehicles to navigate independently, without depending on satellites. As GPS interference becomes more of a problem, research on quantum navigation is leaping ahead, with many researchers and companies now rushing to test new devices and techniques. In recent months, the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and its Defense Innovation Unit have announced new grants to test the technology on military vehicles and prepare for operational deployment.
Tracking changes
Perhaps the most obvious way to navigate is to know where you started and then track where you go by recording the speed, direction, and duration of travel. But while this approach, known in the field as inertial navigation, is conceptually simple, it’s difficult to do well; tiny uncertainties in any of those measurements compound over time and lead to big errors later on. Douglas Paul, the principal investigator of the UK’s Hub for Quantum Enabled Precision, Navigation & Timing (QEPNT), says that existing specialized inertial-navigation devices might be off by 20 kilometers after 100 hours of travel. Meanwhile, the cheap sensors commonly used in smartphones produce more than twice that level of uncertainty after just one hour.
“If you’re guiding a missile that flies for one minute, that might be good enough,” he says. “If you’re in an airliner, that’s definitely not good enough.”
A more accurate version of inertial navigation instead uses sensors that rely on the quantum behavior of subatomic particles to more accurately measure acceleration, direction, and time.
Several companies, like the US-based Infleqtion, are developing quantum gyroscopes, which track a vehicle’s bearing, and quantum accelerometers, which can reveal how far it’s traveled. Infleqtion’s sensors are based on a technique called atom interferometry: A beam of rubidium atoms is zapped with precise laser pulses, which split the atoms into two separate paths. Later, other laser pulses recombine the atoms, and they’re measured with a detector. If the vehicle has turned or accelerated while the atoms are in motion, the two paths will be slightly out of phase in a way the detector can interpret.
Last year the company trialed these inertial sensors on a customized plane flying at a British military testing site. In October of this year, Infleqtion ran its first real-world test of a new generation of inertial sensors that use a steady stream of atoms instead of pulses, allowing for continuous navigation and avoiding long dead times.
A view of Infleqtion’s atomic clock Tiqker.
COURTESY INFLEQTION
Infleqtion also has an atomic clock, called Tiqker, that can help determine how far a vehicle has traveled. It is a kind of optical clock that uses infrared lasers tuned to a specific frequency to excite electrons in rubidium, which then release photons at a consistent, known rate. The device “will lose one second every 2 million years or so,” says Max Perez, who oversees the project, and it fits in a standard electronics equipment rack. It has passed tests on flights in the UK, on US Army ground vehicles in New Mexico, and, in late October, on a drone submarine.
“Tiqker operated happily through these conditions, which is unheard-of for previous generations of optical clocks,” says Perez. Eventually the company hopes to make the unit smaller and more rugged by switching to lasers generated by microchips.
Magnetic fields
Vehicles deprived of satellite-based navigation are not entirely on their own; they can get useful clues from magnetic and gravitational fields that surround the planet. These fields vary slightly depending on the location, and the variations, or anomalies, are recorded in various maps. By precisely measuring the local magnetic or gravitational field and comparing those values with anomaly maps, quantum navigation systems can track the location of a vehicle.
Allison Kealy, a navigation researcher at Swinburne University in Australia, is working on the hardware needed for this approach. Her team uses a material called nitrogen-vacancy diamond. In NV diamonds, one carbon atom in the lattice is replaced with a nitrogen atom, and one neighboring carbon atom is removed entirely. The quantum state of the electrons at the NV defect is very sensitive to magnetic fields. Carefully stimulating the electrons and watching the light they emit offers a way to precisely measure the strength of the field at the diamond’s location, making it possible to infer where it’s situated on the globe.
Kealy says these quantum magnetometers have a few big advantages over traditional ones, including the fact that they measure the direction of the Earth’s magnetic field in addition to its strength. That additional information could make it easier to determine location.
The technology is far from commercial deployment, but Kealy and several colleagues successfully tested their magnetometer in a set of flights in Australia late last year, and they plan to run more trials this year and next. “This is where it gets exciting, as we transition from theoretical models and controlled experiments to on-the-ground, operational systems,” she says. “This is a major step forward.”
Delicate systems
Other teams, like Q-CTRL, an Australian quantum technology company, are focusing on using software to build robust systems from noisy quantum sensors. Quantum navigation involves taking those delicate sensors, honed in the placid conditions of a laboratory, and putting them in vehicles that make sharp turns, bounce with turbulence, and bob with waves, all of which interferes with the sensors’ functioning. Even the vehicles themselves present problems for magnetometers, especially “the fact that the airplane is made of metal, with all this wiring,” says Michael Biercuk, the CEO of Q-CTRL. “Usually there’s 100 to 1,000 times more noise than signal.”
After Q-CTRL engineers ran trials of their magnetic navigation system in a specially outfitted Cessna last year, they used machine learning to go through the data and try to sift out the signal from all the noise. Eventually they found they could track the plane’s location up to 94 times as accurately as a strategic-grade conventional inertial navigation system could, according to Biercuk. They announced their findings in a non-peer-reviewed paper last spring.
In August Q-CTRL received two contracts from DARPA to develop its “software-ruggedized” mag-nav product, named Ironstone Opal, for defense applications. The company is also testing the technology with commercial partners, including the defense contractors Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin and Airbus, an aerospace manufacturer.
An illustration showing the placement of Q-CTRL’s Ironstone Opal in a drone.
COURTESY Q-CTRL
“Northrop Grumman is working with Q-CTRL to develop a magnetic navigation system that can withstand the physical demands of the real world,” says Michael S. Larsen, a quantum systems architect at the company. “Technology like magnetic navigation and other quantum sensors will unlock capabilities to provide guidance even in GPS-denied or -degraded environments.”
Now Q-CTRL is working on putting Ironstone Opal into a smaller, more rugged container appropriate for deployment; currently, “it looks like a science experiment because it is a science experiment,” says Biercuk. He anticipates delivering the first commercial units next year.
Sensor fusion
Even as quantum navigation emerges as a legitimate alternative to satellite-based navigation, the satellites themselves are improving. Modern GPS III satellites include new civilian signals called L1C and L5, which should be more accurate and harder to jam and spoof than current signals. Both are scheduled to be fully operational later this decade.
US and allied military users are intended to have access to far hardier GPS tools, including M-code, a new form of GPS signal that is rolling out now, and Regional Military Protection, a focused GPS beam that will be restricted to small geographic areas. The latter will start to become available when the GPS IIIF generation of satellites is in orbit, with the first scheduled to go up in 2027. A Lockheed Martin spokesperson says new GPS satellites with M-code are eight times as powerful as previous ones, while the GPS IIIF model will be 60 times as strong.
Other plans involve using navigation satellites in low Earth orbit—the zone inhabited by SpaceX’s internet-providing Starlink constellation—rather than the medium Earth orbit used by GPS. Since objects in LEO are closer to Earth, their signals are stronger, which makes them harder to jam and spoof. LEO satellites also transit the sky more quickly, which makes them harder still to spoof and helps GPS receivers get a lock on their position faster. “This really helps for signal convergence,” says Lotfi Massarweh, a satellite navigation researcher at Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands. “They can get a good position in just a few minutes. So that is a huge leap.”
Ultimately, says Massarweh, navigation will depend not only on satellites, quantum sensors, or any other single technology, but on the combination of all of them. “You need to think always in terms of sensor fusion,” he says.
The navigation resources that a vehicle draws on will change according to its environment—whether it’s an airliner, a submarine, or an autonomous car in an urban canyon. But quantum navigation will be one important resource. He says, “If quantum technology really delivers what we see in the literature—if it’s stable over one week rather than tens of minutes—at that point it is a complete game changer.”
A private non-profit operates over 200 cameras with live facial recognition in New Orleans. The system raises questions about privacy, legal authority and who should control surveillance technology.
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."
When you think of “power hour,” you might think of a drinking game, but what we’re about to discuss is kind of the opposite of that—sorry! "Power Hour" is also a specific productivity hack. It comes from Adrienne Herbert’s book, Power Hour: How to Focus on Your Goals and Create a Life You Love and asks you to devote an hour a day to working hard on your biggest task—or the thing you care about the most. I'm skeptical of self-help and productivity books in general, but I do recommend this one because its insights are valuable and novel. Don't have time to read it right now? No big deal. The need-to-know concepts are below.
What is a "Power Hour"?
At its core, the Power Hour is about reclaiming part of your daily time and devoting it to something intentional. The author uses flowery language here, saying you should do this in the first hour of your day “before the rest of the world needs your love, attention, and energy,” and suggests using the Power Hour for a task that is meaningful to you. You can adapt it, however, to be for productivity, even on tasks that are more necessary and boring than your passion projects. I am not a particularly saccharine person, so I don't relate to all this stuff about the world needing my "love," but I have found that since I started devoting the first hour of my day to something that matters to me—namely, a strictly scheduled Pilates class that benefits my personal fitness and lifestyle goals, undertaken before my friends are even awake—I have become more productive and, generally, happier. In my experience, this idea works.
Herbert suggests using the first hour of the day for this, but you can also use a time of day that makes most sense for you. Everyone is different and has different “peaks” of productivity, largely determined by the time of day and something called the Yerkes-Dodson Law, which shows that you’re likely to be most productive when you have a little stress (like a deadline) but not too much (like a deadline that’s in 15 minutes). Use time tracking software and a daily journal to figure out when you generally have your most productive moments, then shape your Power Hour around those. For the most part, this is a habit you should try to build and stick to, so putting the Power Hour at a predetermined time every day is advisable; but if something like a big project crops up, you have some wiggle room to move it around to suit your needs.
To keep using myself as an example, my morning workout Power Hour works because I book my class two days in advance, so there is no question about whether or not I have to wake up at 5 a.m. that day; I simply do. But it can still be a little flexible as long as you are committed to getting the Power Hour in there somewhere on days your typical approach falls short. This weekend, something came up that forced me to cancel my morning class, but you better believe I was in there in the afternoon because I know this method works and I owed it to myself. That mindset will take you far with this.
How to use a Power Hour for productivity
Once you’ve decided where in your day the Power Hour should go, it’s time to get started. You’ll be engaging in deep work here, or uninterrupted work that is solely focused on one task. Your first step to getting there is to block the Power Hour off in a way that both holds you accountable and lets other people know you’re busy. Be sure to mark it in your calendar and stick to it, but also try to include it on public-facing calendars, whether they’re ones you use with your family or with your colleagues.
Next, you have to get into the deep work, which means focusing for a straight hour. A few things can help you do this:
Software that limits distractions, like Steppin, which blocks pre-determined apps at all times but unblocks them in exchange for banked time you earn by walking around in the real world, or Focus Pomo, which blocks all your apps when you're in a "focus session."
A Pomodoro-style timer to count down the hour so you aren’t watching the clock. (Just make sure it has a full 60-minute option; some of them don’t.)
Or, do what I do and engage in your chosen task in a way that makes it impossible to do anything else. When I am in my morning workout classes, I can't touch my phone or do anything but focus on what I'm being instructed to do; it's just one of the many reasons I've opted for group fitness over solo gym trips lately. If your Power Hour is dedicated to reading, put your devices in another room while you do it. Take meaningful steps to ensure you are only focused on your task, whatever that looks like for you.
Depending on how you usually work, a Power Hour could take some time to get used to, especially if you’re someone who usually multitasks or loses focus. Once you get the hang of it, though, you can use it to blast through all kinds of tasks, whether those include work-related activities, cleaning your house, budgeting, or anything else you lack the time and attention to pull off in a typical day. Communicating that you’re busy and sticking to the schedule are key, so make sure to plan for this before you try it.
Three Democrats are seeking information from tech firms about the growing energy use of data centers and the utility bills of individuals and other businesses.
The energy needs of data centers used for artificial intelligence are forcing utility companies to spend billions of dollars to upgrade the power grid, the lawmakers said.
School districts from Utah to Ohio to Alabama are spending thousands of dollars on these tools, despite research showing the technology is far from reliable.
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.
New Orleans is the first US city with real-time facial recognition: If you're wanted and walk past one of the system's cameras, it could flag you. The twist: it's a private system, and even though the new mayor and police chief are at odds about facial recognition, this non-profit says it's able to establish its own "guard-rails" as it feeds real-time tips to the police, side-stepping the debate about government regulation and privacy.
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."
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the suspects were “motivated by Islamic State ideology.” They had traveled to the Philippines prior to the attack, officials said.
After Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were found dead inside their Los Angeles home, police arrested their son Nick on suspicion of murder. There has been a massive outpouring of support for the legendary actor and director from across Hollywood and beyond. NBC News’ Morgan Chesky reports.
After Rob Reiner and his wife Michele were found dead inside their Los Angeles home, police arrested their son Nick on suspicion of murder. There has been a massive outpouring of support for the legendary actor and director from across Hollywood and beyond. NBC News’ Morgan Chesky reports.
The FBI is offering up to $50,000 in reward money for information leading to the identity of the shooter in the Brown University attack. NBC News’ Tom Winter details what was revealed in the new video that Providence officials released.
The FBI is offering up to $50,000 in reward money for information leading to the identity of the shooter in the Brown University attack. NBC News’ Tom Winter details what was revealed in the new video that Providence officials released.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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."
Just three days after Apple released iOS 26.2 to iPhones everywhere, the company is back at it with a new update. iOS 26.3 is official, though only for beta testers. Those brave enough to install Apple's unfinished software on their devices won't find an update packed to the brim with new features and changes, but they will stumble upon two key new features. The thing is, we already knew both of them were on the way.
This isn't the end all be all for the update, however: Since iOS 26.3 is so new, it's possible testers will discover additional features hidden within the update. In addition, Apple may add new changes in subsequent beta versions. I'll continue to update this article to reflect any new features that reveal themselves, but, until then, here are the two new features we know about.
Notification forwarding
Back in September, we learned that Apple was quietly working on some type of notification forwarding feature, but other than that basic functionality, the details were left to speculation. At the time, the common assumption was that Apple intended the feature to be used to forward notifications to third-party devices, specifically smartwatches, in an attempt to open up the platform to wearables other than the Apple Watch. This wouldn't be Apple's choice, of course—left to its own devices, the company would keep as many features locked to Apple devices as possible. Instead, the motivation would come from the EU, which has compelled Apple to make its platforms more cooperative with third-party devices.
After three months, we are now getting our first official look at this feature. In this first iOS 26.3 beta, there is now a "Notification Forwarding" option in Notification settings. While the option isn't live at this time, Apple does have a description for how the feature works, saying that notifications can be forwarded to one device at a time. Importantly, the description says that when notifications are forwarded to another device, they will not appear on your Apple Watch. Is that limitation really necessary, Apple?
Knowledge of iOS 26.3's second feature is not quite so old. In fact, we only learned about it last week. As it happens, Apple is working directly with Google on an official way to make transferring between an iPhone and an Android device more seamless.
As of last week, Google had already rolled out its first test of the feature to Android Canary, but it was nowhere to be found in Apple's betas. Now, we know what to expect: In iOS' "Transfer or Reset iPhone" settings, there is now a new "Transfer to Android" option. Here, iOS instructs you to place your iPhone near your Android device, where you can choose to pass along data like photos, messages, notes, and apps. However, it seems not all data will transfer: Health data, devices paired with Bluetooth, and "protected items" like locked notes will not come along with this transfer feature.
This isn't the flashiest beta Apple has ever shipped, but it is possible to install right now. Both the developer and public betas are now available, which means anyone interested can enroll their device in Apple's beta program to give 26.3 a try.
However, know the risks before you do. Unfinished software could come with bugs and glitches that could impact your experience using your iPhone. If the software is particularly glitchy, you could lose data when downgrading back to iOS 26.2. If you do decide to install the beta, make a complete backup of your iPhone to a Mac or PC before you do.
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While it’s not the best choice for iPhone users or most other Android phones, for those in the Samsung ecosystem with a Galaxy device, the Samsung SmartTag2 Bluetooth tracker is an effective way to find often-misplaced items. Right now, a Samsung SmartTag2 four-pack is half off at $44.99 (originally $99.99) on Woot, making it a great gift to yourself this holiday season or a stocking stuffer for family or friends.
This tracker has UWB + AR precision finding, location history, and “Compass View” direction guidance, as well as a Bluetooth range of around 120 meters. While it’s not as universally compatible with devices as trackers like the Tile Pro, the network is more widespread because of a higher app user-base. The device has a replaceable battery and lasts up to 500 days in Normal Mode, and up to 700 days in Power-Saving Mode, according to PCMag.
An IP67 rating protects it from dust and water, making it splash- and rainproof, while a built-in loop makes it easy to attach to pet collars, bags, keys, and other items. The SmartTag2 also has a “Lost Mode” that lets people who find the device view your info via an NFC scan.
The main drawback of this tracker is its limited compatibility—it only works with Samsung Galaxy devices and requires both the SmartThings app and a Samsung account. Still, if you’re in the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem, this Samsung SmartTag2 four-pack makes an excellent, easy-to-use pick with dependable tracking, a durable build, and long battery life—especially with the current discount, which brings it down to just over $11 per tag.
I can be pretty tough on AI, especially when it's used to make misinformation slop. But as cynical as I may seem, I do acknowledge that there are plenty of useful and beneficial features that AI powers. Take live translation, for instance: Not long ago, the concept of a device that could translate someone else's words directly in your ear as they spoke would seem like some far future technology. But not only is it not a futuristic technology, both Google and Apple have their own takes on the feature that users can take advantage of.
That said, not all iPhone and Android users alike have been able to use live translate. Both companies have limited the feature to work with their respective earbuds: For Apple, that's the AirPods Pro 2 and AirPods Pro 3; for Google, that's the Pixel Buds. Without your platform's flagship earbuds, you haven't been able to use live translation, and instead need to stick with the rest of your translation app's experience, whether that be Apple Translate or Google Translate. Lucky for Android users, that's no longer the case for the latter.
On Friday, Google announced new Gemini translation capabilities for its proprietary translation app. The company says these new updates introduce "state-of-the-art text translation quality," with more nuanced, natural, and accurate translations. Importantly, however, as part of those upgrades, the company is launching a beta where all Google Translate users can access live translation through any headphones—not just Pixel Buds. This initial rollout is only available on the Android version of Google Translate in the U.S., Mexico, and India, though Google says the company will bring the feature to iOS and more regions in the next year.
This is kind of huge: Companies typically like to keep features like this locked behind their own platform as a marketing tactic. You're more likely to buy Pixel Buds over other earbuds or headphones if you really want to try live translation. However, you don't even need to buy a new pair of headphones to use this feature at all: As long as you have some type of headphones or earbuds connected to your Android device, you can translate conversations on the fly.
Trying Google's live translate with Apple headphones
I gave this a shot on my Pixel 8 Pro with my AirPods Max, by playing a video of people speaking Portuguese. Set up wasn't the simplest: First, it took forever for the Pixel to recognize my AirPods, despite the headphones being in pairing mode for some time, but that's beside the point. The key issue was getting Google Translate to present the new beta for live translation. When I first opened it, it was using the older live translate feature, which didn't work with my AirPods. I had the latest version running, so I uninstalled and reinstalled the app. When it launched, I didn't have live translate at all. Finally, after force quitting and reopening the app, I got a pop-up for the new live translation beta experience.
The next part was user error: I had my language set to the target language (Portuguese), and vice versa. As such, Google assumed I would be the one speaking Portuguese, and didn't vocalize the English translation. Once I flipped the languages, and confirmed that English would be spoken through my headphones, the feature started working—and well, for that matter. The video I choose was taken from a news broadcast, with two anchors, and various speakers during news segments. Once the video started, I could see Google Translation translating the words on my screen, and, after about four seconds, I heard the audio translated in my hear. Google Translate even tries to match the speaker's voice, and though it certainly isn't a deepfake, it does well enough to distinguish different speakers from one another. It even tried to take on more a serious tone to match the anchor's, versus the more casual tone of one of the people interviewed in a news segment.
I tried a couple of other videos in different languages, but this time, using the "Detect language" feature rather than a preset target language. The app was able to recognize this video was spoken in Thai, and this one was spoken in Urdu, and translated both accordingly. And while I can't verify the quality of the translation (I am sadly not fluent in any other language), the experience was overall easy enough to follow. The speed of speech can get a bit slow at times, perhaps because the AI has a lot to process at once, but as long as you turn up the volume on your headphones, it's easy enough to follow.
All that to say, I'm very interested to give this a try in a real world scenario. Even though my daily driver is an iPhone, I might need to start carrying around my Pixel 8 Pro just in case.
If I’ve learned anything about online fitness content in the years I've spent consuming and creating it, it’s this: Stack a bunch of numbers together, and you have a potentially viral workout, from 12-3-30 to 4-2-1.
The latest is the 2-2-2 workout, which is supposed to reveal the big secret of effectively building muscle after you hit age 40. Unfortunately, after trying it out, I’m not so sure about that.
What the Internet says about the 2-2-2 workout
I’ve been seeing the 2-2-2 workout pop up across the Internet, but all the sources point back to a video from Alain Gonzalez that claims the “2-workout-2-set” method is “getting men over 40 jacked FAST.”
That’s pretty much the whole pitch: The number 2 comes up twice (I felt like I was going mad trying to find out what the last 2 is for), and it’s aimed at middle-aged men. I’m not a man, but as a middle-aged woman with personal training and weightlifting coaching certifications, I’m in a pretty good positions to evaluate those claims. So let’s take a look at what’s actually in the workouts.
What 2-2-2 stands for
I looked at the PDF Gonzalez offers that describes the program, and in it he does actually say what the many articles about his method did not: what the third “2” stands for. So, the 2-2-2 method is:
Two full-body workouts per week
Two working sets per exercise
Two reps in reserve on each set
It’s a fine setup, I think, and probably a lot of people of any gender or age would get stronger using a workout like this. But it also relies on two often misunderstood concepts.
What are “working sets”?
A working set is a set of an exercise that you think of as your “real” work for the day. This means that it does not include warmup sets, or anything else you do to prepare for those working sets.
This means you might end up doing more than two sets, depending on the exercise. For example, I may not need any warmup sets to do my cable lateral raises (one of the exercises Gonzalez recommends), so that’s just two actual sets. But if I’m supposed to do two hard sets of leg press, I’m not going to leg press a couple hundred pounds cold. I’d start with sets of lighter weights and work my way up—so maybe that will be five sets total for the day, but only the working sets count for the 2-2-2 program.
It’s also worth noting that the PDF calls for seven exercises each day. That’s a minimum of 14 sets you’ll do per workout, with most exercises likely requiring at least one or two warmup sets, and some even more. You’ll also rest two to five minutes between sets. Emphasizing “just two sets” makes the workout sound quick and simple, but in practice, it looks like you’ll probably be in the gym a good while.
What are “reps in reserve”?
Reps in reserve, or RIR, is a great way to explain to experienced lifters how hard they’ll be working in a given set. If you’ve never used RIR before, though, there is a definite learning curve. The idea is that you stop an exercise with two reps “in reserve”—that is, reps that you could have done but didn’t. If you’ve done 10 lat pulldowns and you feel like the eleventh would be really hard and the twelfth would be the last one you could possibly do in this set, then you stop at 10. You’ve left those last two reps “in reserve.”
This is a common, useful way of talking about exercise intensity—see this explainer from the National Academy of Sports Medicine. But you have to have enough experience with that exercise, and with exercising in general, to recognize the signs your body gives you that you have exactly two reps left. Often, beginners will stop too early, and never get the benefits of going closer to failure before stopping.
If you’re used to using RIR (or RPE, which is a similar concept), this is a fine way of planning your workouts. If you tend to overestimate your abilities, you’ll probably hit RIR 0 (that is, failure) often enough to teach yourself what those last few reps feel like. But if you’re a person who tends to shy away from those harder reps, or if you’ve never really gone all the way to failure on an exercise, RIR is probably not a good tool for you.
What’s good about the 2-2-2 workout
As a lifter and a trainer, I like the idea of 2-2-2...for a specific kind of person. And yes, probably a lot of the “men over 40” in the target audience qualify as that person.
Specifically, this is a good workout for people who are already experienced in the gym, but can’t reliably make time for more than two workouts per week. You can get a lot done in two workouts, if each workout covers all your major muscle groups, which it does in this plan.
The routine does have a plan for progression, which is nice—a lot of trendy workout routines do not. You’ll be doing “double progression,” which means you increase reps of an exercise until you feel ready to increase the weight. At that point you’ll be doing fewer reps, so you start adding reps again. That’s a solid approach that doesn’t take much thinking ahead. (It’s also a missed opportunity to add another “2” to the name.)
What’s overhyped (or misunderstood) about the 2-2-2 workout
My biggest gripe about this workout is just that there’s nothing special about it. It’s basic to the point of being almost common sense: Hey you, do two full-body workouts a week! Make sure each exercise has a few hard sets! Really, no need to overthink it.
There’s actually nothing special here for “men over 40,” except perhaps that men over 40 are more likely to have kids and other responsibilities taking up their time, and thus will find a twice-a-week schedule convenient. I also find the workout selection biased toward people who stick to machines. On the bright side, you could probably do this whole thing at a Planet Fitness, and that's going to be convenient for a lot of folks. But I find machines boring. (Maybe that's a "me" problem.)
In terms of Gonzalez’s actual workout materials, there are a few things that bug me. One is that he talks about the two-workouts-per-week schedule as if it were strongly supported by science as the best option. In reality, two workouts are fine, but people tend to do better with more. No champion bodybuilder or weightlifter hits every muscle twice a week and chills on the couch the rest of the time. Even most recreational athletes with some kind of goal will do better with three or four workouts. Two is enough for most people’s goals, but it’s not necessarily better.
Promising more results for less work is a staple of the fitness industry, so I’m able to see through it—and of course everybody says their signature workout is the best option. But if you going in thinking the 2-2-2 really is the secret to getting jacked over 40, I beg you to consider that there is never one correct answer to fitness. You can pick any schedule that works each major muscle twice per week, and it will accomplish the same trick.
I am not a morning person, and I never have been—well, unless I have to make money. For years, my start time at my old job was 5 a.m. and, against all odds, I made it in every day. Now, I teach a 6 a.m. spin class twice a week after being moved off the more-tolerable late morning shift. Until a few months ago, though, I was sleeping through every alarm on all the other days, even though I knew I should be getting up and going to the gym early as a solid way to start my day. It took me a long time, but I have managed to force myself into being the kind of person who is up before the sun and done with my daily exercise routine before my friends are even out of bed. Here's exactly what I did.
I concocted financial stakes
Since starting to teach the 6 a.m. spin classes, I've noticed two undeniable things: I can drag myself out of bed for the promise of money with no problem and my day is measurably better when I start it with a workout. I am just more alert, productive, and all-around pleasant when the morning begins with exercise than I am when it begins with sleeping in. It was obvious I needed to start every day that way, whether or not I was getting paid to do it, but tricking myself into exercising "for free" was my first challenge.
The solution was one you might not like: I had to tie a financial stake to what I wanted to do. Instead of getting money, like I do when I teach, I had to pay money so I would be motivated not to let my investment go to waste. This was a problem because one of the perks of my part-time teaching gig is a free membership at a luxury gym here in New York City. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but having free and unlimited access to a fancy gym didn't exactly motivate me; it would be there whenever I wanted to go and if I didn't happen to want to go at all, it wasn't like I was losing money on it. So, I started signing up for introductory offers at every studio in my area. Usually, these lasted one to two weeks and cost less than a regular membership at the studio in question would if I weren't on a trial offer. I had paid, but hadn't paid a relative bunch, and that was good enough to start. Up I got each morning, slowly but surely building a habit. The intro offers expired, though, and I'd find myself scrambling to find a new place to go, which upended my routine and wasn't conducive to consistency.
Next, I downloaded ClassPass and set up an autopay for every month, but since my unused credits roll over to the next month, that wasn't as motivating. I took note of how much more consistent I am in a use-it-or-lose it scenario, kept ClassPass because it still comes in handy, but looked for more options. Ultimately, through ClassPass, I found a studio in my area that offers a Pilates-inspired strength training class. I became obsessed with it—but an unlimited monthly membership was a few hundred dollars. I put off getting that because it seemed exorbitant, but in the end, I realized that might be the only way to get myself to stick to the routine that was slowly forming. Eventually, I pulled the trigger. I traded away a small fortune for access to a studio full of something known as "megaformers." I have been in that studio every single weekday morning at 6:30 (except on teaching days, when I run over at 7:30) for a month now. Sometimes, I go at 5:30 just because I can. Who the hell is she? I am not only prepared, but excited, to buy it again going into this next month.
Do you need to spend hundreds on this? Absolutely not. But for me, tying financial stakes to my mission was crucial and, also just from my perspective, they had to be intense. A low-cost, big-box gym membership has never motivated me. What's $25 slipping out of my checking account every month along with all the other subscriptions I've forgotten about? When I've paid a little more to go to gyms that offer free classes, even signing up for morning ones didn't always do it, since there was no fee associated with skipping them. (As a teacher now, I realize exactly how nasty that mindset is, but I'm just being honest.) My subconscious is stubborn, it deeply desires staying in bed, and I had to take an extreme measure to beat it.
For you, a lower-cost gym membership might work just fine, but I'll caution that what has to go along with the financial investment is a time-based commitment. It's not that I struggle to work out in general; I do it every day, but I wanted to start doing it in the morning, not cramming it in at night or whenever I thought of it throughout the day. That's why paid classes have been so crucial: They're strictly scheduled. I can't just go whenever I want, nor can I decide I don't feel like going when the time rolls around. The combination of paying a noticeable amount and having to be there at a set time is elemental to what I'm doing.
I reconfigured my schedule
That leads me to the next big thing I did. Buying classes, packages, a gym or app membership, or whatever else, isn't enough on its own if you don't make space in your life for using them. I had to take a hard look at my schedule. I fell back on a lot of scheduling tips I've written about here, like time blocking and time boxing, plus I started using prioritization techniques to figure out what could be rearranged. The MIT—or most important thing—method was helpful because it allowed me to calculate the impact my daily to-dos have on my larger goals, leaving space for me to acknowledge the positive impact morning workouts have on other parts of my day. With other kinds of prioritization approaches, working out didn't rank as high because it is something a little more optional than the work I have to do to keep a roof over my head, you know? But my goal here was to make more space for it and create a lifestyle that specifically positioned it as a morning activity, so the MIT method helped me center it.
Like the financial investment, this meant something undesirable: I initially tried to get more serious about going to bed early. That is not aligned with who I am in the deepest parts of my soul, and it never has been. To be completely transparent, more often than not, I simply didn't do it. Asleep at 1 a.m. and awake at 5, I have just been tired a lot. I give myself grace with things like this because if I'm too hard on myself about it, I'll demoralize myself and that won't help me with my overall goal. Eventually, if being tired starts to annoy me too much, I'll course-correct and be asleep at 10 p.m. like a smarter person. As it is now, I've been making space in my schedule for some naps (which isn't something I've ever done much of before). Breaks are an important part of overall productivity, as is leaving yourself space to be who you are without trying to make too many drastic changes at once, so the temporary nap-allowance system is just fine. I'm also trying to avoid strenuous activity at night. I can't force myself to go to sleep early, but I can at least stop starting new projects at 11 p.m., which will just make me sleepier the next day than if I am relaxed pre-bedtime.
I've noticed myself making small, subconscious changes even though I haven't become an early-bedtime gal yet. I'm calling it a night a lot sooner than I normally would when I'm out with friends, even though I'm not necessarily going home to sleep so much as I'm just going home not to be out. I also was struck by the inspiration to paint a piece of furniture last night at 11 p.m.. Normally, adherent to the 10-minute and one-more rules that I am, I would have jumped up and done this the moment I thought of it. Last night, I didn't do it, knowing I shouldn't get too involved in something tricky when I needed to be winding down ahead of this morning's Pilates class. These are baby steps, yes, but they're a lot more helpful to developing long-term, sustainable habits than complete personality overhauls are. Those rarely last, but little, incremental changes add up to longer-term success.
I sought out incentives
This part is fun, so there's the reprieve. For me, any meaningful life change has to come with little rewards, and I'm not talking about the mental health benefits of exercise, looking better, or feeling more productive after a workout. I'm talking about little treats. First of all, commitment to my new schedule opened up the opportunity to crush my goals with the various apps I use to track my workouts. I am serious about using my Peloton app to track all my workouts, even the ones I don't take through the app or using my Bike, largely because I think it gives me a better data breakdown than when I use the native workout-tracking function on my Apple Watch, but also because it contributes to my daily streak (as of today: 274 days). Getting a workout inputted into the app first thing in the morning secures my streak, which is literally just a number on a screen, but it motivates me.
I have also started using something similar to a SMART goal to track and reward progress. SMART goals are ones that are specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound. So, I tell myself things like, "If I go to class at 5:30 tomorrow morning, I will stop at Dunkin' for a donut on the way home," or, "If I work out every morning this week, I will get myself one new activewear outfit on Sunday."
Wearing silly little matchy outfits is also integral to my personal process, as it puts me in a good mood before I even leave the house and makes me feel more put-together and capable at the gym, but that might not be true for you. In fact, none of these things specifically need to be for you, but they can be a guideline. The general through line here is that I took the time to consider what I wanted (to wake up early and work out); and what I know about myself (I'm motivated by money, my schedule wasn't conducive to this activity, and I need constant mini-rewards to keep going); then combine those facts into a new, incremental strategy that worked for me. No matter what you want or what motivates you, you can do the same by relying on a few productivity tricks and your own self-awareness.
The Echo Spot is a mix between a screenless Echo smart speaker and the Echo Show; it has a screen but lacks a full smart display. According to PCMag's review, it's more of a smart speaker with a very basic screen that the time, temperature, weather, day of the week, the date, and the album art when it's playing music. It's compact but delivers impressive sound for its size, making it a great smart speaker to keep on a nightstand to use as an alarm clock.
It's not as powerful a speaker as the 5th-generation Echo Dot, but it's newer, and it has the touchscreen display, which you can use to manage basic settings like audio playback and trigger your compatible smart home devices.
It's 2025, so every piece of technology now needs to have an AI component. It doesn't matter if these AI features are useful (though some are), they just need to be there, however ham-fisted or useless they may seem—though the line between those extremes often comes down to user preference. To that end, if you've ever been reading a book on the Kindle app and wished that you could ask your device a question about the text, Amazon has an AI bot for you.
Last week, Amazon announced "Ask this Book," a new AI feature for the Kindle app. Now available on the iOS version of the app, it lets you ask Amazon's AI questions about whatever it is you're reading, whether you bought or borrowed the title. You can highlight a selection from the text to include in you're queries, and ask questions relating the story's plot, characters, relationships, and theme. According to Amazon, all answers will be contextual, presumably meaning they'll all be related to the text at hand, and importantly, all answers will be spoiler-free. That should help avoid the classic mistake of googling a question you have about a book you're reading and spoiling a coming plot twist or character death.
Amazon says Ask this Book is currently active for "thousands" of books written in English. As noted, as of this writing the feature is only live in the iOS version of the app, but Amazon is working on bringing it to the Android app, as well as Kindle devices, next year.
Ask this Book, whether you like it or not
If this sounds like the type of feature you'd be interested in, great! If you don't care for this feature, either as a reader who doesn't want AI getting in the way of their books, a publisher who doesn't want Amazon training its AI on their IP, or a teacher who might see this as a potential cheating opportunity, there's bad news: Once Amazon makes Ask this Book available for any given title, it's permanently available, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. That comes directly from an Amazon spokesperson, who told Publishers Lunch, “[t]o ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on, and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out.”
That response bothers me for two reasons. One, it's always frustrating when a company introduces a new feature lwithout giving users the option to turn it off. I don't use Apple Intelligence, but I appreciate that Apple lets me turn it off. Meta, on the other hand, forces me to contend with Meta AI, even though I never use it. Amazon seems to be attending the Meta school of user design.
But what's more, it seems wild to me that authors and publishers don't get a say as to whether this AI bot gets to be active on their books—especially retroactively. It'd even be one thing if authors had to opt-in in order to put their books on the Kindle platform going forward. But to enable it on "thousands" of titles made available before Ask this Book was ever a thing is, to me, disrespectful to authors and publishers, to say the least.
Interestingly, Amazon dodged questions from Publishers Lunch concerning licensing rights around Ask this Book, as well as protections for users, which is troubling given generative AI has a habit of hallucinating—or, in other words, making things up completely. Sure, when it's working as intended, the AI can help readers understand things they're confused about, but there's a real chance that the AI will misinterpret questions, misrepresent the text, or straight up lie, which could negatively impact a reader's experience of the work, with potential fallout for both the author and the publisher.
How Kindle's Ask this Book works
While you won't see this feature yet on your Kindle, you will encounter it in the Kindle app. You can either access it from the menu in any book where the feature is available, or by highlighting text in said book. Once you do, Ask this Book will present a list of questions it thinks you might be interested in asking. If none of them do it for you, you can formulate your own questions, and ask followups after the bot answers.
Like most tools, generative AI models can be misused. And when the misuse gets bad enough that a major dictionary notices, you know it’s become a cultural phenomenon.
On Sunday, Merriam-Webster announced that “slop” is its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting how the term has become shorthand for the flood of low-quality AI-generated content that has spread across social media, search results, and the web at large. The dictionary defines slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
“It’s such an illustrative word,” Merriam-Webster president Greg Barlow told the Associated Press. “It’s part of a transformative technology, AI, and it’s something that people have found fascinating, annoying, and a little bit ridiculous.”
We’re 10 days away from the next installment of the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, and Netflix has released a new trailer for what it’s calling Volume 2. This will cover episodes five through seven, with the final episode comprising Vol. 3.
(Spoilers for Season 5, Vol. 1 below.)
Season 4 ended with Vecna—the Big Bad behind it all—opening the gate that allowed the Upside Down to leak into Hawkins. We got a time jump for S5, Vol. 1, but in a way, we came full circle, since those events coincided with the third anniversary of Will’s original disappearance in S1.
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.
Out with the old
One of the most visible holdouts in supporting RC4 has been Microsoft. Eventually, Microsoft upgraded Active Directory to support the much more secure AES encryption standard. But by default, Windows servers have continued to respond to RC4-based authentication requests and return an RC4-based response. The RC4 fallback has been a favorite weakness hackers have exploited to compromise enterprise networks. Use of RC4 played a key role in last year’s breach of health giant Ascension. The breach caused life-threatening disruptions at 140 hospitals and put the medical records of 5.6 million patients into the hands of the attackers. US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in September called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Microsoft for “gross cybersecurity negligence,” citing the continued default support for RC4.
Ford’s F-150 Lightning production line has fallen silent, and its employees are now building more gas and hybrid trucks. The automaker continues to retreat from the big bet it made on Americans embracing full-size battery electric pickup trucks, and will focus instead on cheaper vehicles, hybrids, and range-extended electric vehicles—or EREVs—instead, it announced today.
One of those EREVs will be the Lighting’s replacement. With a gasoline generator that just charges the battery—series hybrid fans rejoice—the next Lightning comes with the towing ability that Ford says its customers consider “non-negotiable,” and up to 700 miles (1,126 km) of range.
“Our next-generation F-150 Lightning EREV will be every bit as revolutionary. It delivers everything Lightning customers love – near instantaneous torque and pure electric driving. But with a high-power generator enabling an estimated range of 700+ miles, it tows like a locomotive. Heavy-duty towing and cross-country travel will be as effortless as the daily commute,” said Doug Field, Ford’s chief EV, digital and design officer.
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