Visa Says AI Will Start Shopping and Paying For You In 2026
BrianFagioli writes: Visa says it has completed hundreds of secure, AI-initiated transactions with partners, arguing this proves agent driven shopping is ready to move beyond experiments. The company believes 2025 will be the last full year most consumers manually check out, with AI agents handling purchases at scale by the 2026 holiday season. Nearly half of U … ⌘ Read more

State of Play: Who Holds the Power in the Video Games Industry in 2025?
The video games industry in 2025 finds itself caught between the familiar forces of consolidation and job losses that have plagued creative industries, and a newer development: governments and the ultra-wealthy have begun treating games as tools of political influence. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund closed a $55 billion deal fo … ⌘ Read more

Samsung Is Putting Google Gemini AI Into Your Refrigerator, Whether You Need It or Not
BrianFagioli writes: Samsung is bringing Google Gemini directly into the kitchen, starting with a refrigerator that can see what you eat. At CES 2026, the company plans to show off a new Bespoke AI Refrigerator that uses a built in camera system paired with Gemini to automatically recognize food items, includi … ⌘ Read more

Welcome To America’s New Surveillance High Schools
Beverly Hills High School has deployed an AI-powered surveillance apparatus that includes facial recognition cameras, behavioral analysis software, smoke detector-shaped bathroom listening devices from Motorola, drones, and license plate readers from Flock Safety – a setup the district spent $4.8 million on in the 2024-2025 fiscal year and considers necessary given the scho … ⌘ Read more

iRobot Founder Says FTC Treated Blocked Deals ‘Like Trophies’ as Bankruptcy Follows Failed Amazon Acquisition
Colin Angle, the founder of iRobot who built the company from his living room over 35 years and sold more than 50 million Roomba vacuums, watched his creation file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this month after what he describes as an “avoidable” regulatory ord … ⌘ Read more

Spotify Says ‘Anti-Copyright Extremists’ Scraped Its Library
A group of activists has scraped Spotify’s entire library, accessing 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files totaling roughly 300TB of data. The metadata has been released via Anna’s Archive, a search engine for “shadow libraries” that previously focused on books.

Spotify described the activists as “anti-copyright extremists … ⌘ Read more

Is Xbox Betting on Cross-Platform Gaming?
A “slew of layoffs, price hikes and studio closures” for Microsoft’s Xbox “have led many to declare — not for the first time — that the Xbox is dead,” reports CNBC.

Or is it just changing its business model?

The company’s overall gaming revenue decreased 2% year-over-year, with a 29% dip in Xbox hardware sales, according to Microsoft’s first-quarter earnings for fiscal 2026. The broader co … ⌘ Read more

Apple Developer’s Account Restored After Compromised Gift Card Incident
“It’s all fixed,” says that Apple developer who was locked out of his Apple Account after redeeming a compromised Apple Gift Card.

“A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to r … ⌘ Read more

In 2025 Scammers Have Stolen $835M from Americans Using Fake Customer Service Numbers
They call it “the business-impersonator scam”. And it’s fooled 396,227 Americans in just the first nine months of 2025 — 18% more than the 335,785 in the same nine months of 2024. That’s according to a Bloomberg reporter (who also fell for it in late November), citing the official statistics from America’s … ⌘ Read more

The U.S. Could Ban Chinese-Made Drones Used By Police Departments
Tuesday the White House faces a deadline to decide “whether Chinese drone maker DJI Technologies poses a national security threat,” reports Bloomberg. But their article notes it’s “a decision with the potential to ground thousands of machines deployed by police and fire departments across the US.”

One person making the case against the drones is … ⌘ Read more

Google Launches CO2 Battery Plants for Long-Duration Storage of Renewable Energy
In July Google promised to scale the CO2 batteries of “Energy Dome” as a long-duration energy storage solution. Now IEEE Spectrum visits its first plant in Sardinia, where 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide power a turbine generating 20 MW over 10 hours — storing “large amounts of excess renewable energy until it’s … ⌘ Read more

Are ‘Geek Gifts’ Becoming Their Own Demographic?
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland wonders if “gifts for geeks” is the next big consumer demographic:

For this year’s holiday celebrations, Hallmark made a special Christmas tree ornament, a tiny monitor displaying screens from the classic video game “Oregon Trail.” (“Recall the fun of leading a team of oxen and a wagon loaded with provisions from Missouri to the West … ⌘ Read more

‘Confused’ Waymos Stopped in Intersections During San Francisco Power Outage
“On Saturday, videos shared widely on social media showed Waymo vehicles stopped mid-intersection with hazard lights flashing, forcing other cars to maneuver around them,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Independent notes that “Without working traffic lights, the driverless cars were seemingly left confused, with m … ⌘ Read more

Indie Game Awards Disqualifies ‘Clair Obscur’ Over GenAI Usage
“Perhaps no group of fans, industry workers, and consumers is more intense about AI use than gamers….” writes New York magazine’s “Intelligencer” column:

Just this month, the latest Postal game was axed by its publisher, which was “overwhelmed with negative responses”
from the “concerned Postal community” after fans spotted
AI-generated material in … ⌘ Read more

Package Forge: The Lesser Known Snap/Flatpak Alternative Without Distro Lock-In
An anonymous reader shared this report from the site It’s FOSS:

Linux gives you plenty of ways to install software: native distro packages, Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, source builds, even curl-piped installers. The catch is that each one solves a different problem, yet none of them fully eliminates the “works here, break … ⌘ Read more

Inaugural ‘Hour of AI’ Event Includes Minecraft, Microsoft, Google and 13.1 Million K-12 Schoolkids
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Last September, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org pledged to engage 25 million K-12 schoolchildren in an “Hour of AI” this school year. Preliminary numbers released this week by the Code.org Advocacy Coalition showed that [halfway through the f … ⌘ Read more

Will Work Change Over the Next 20 Years?
What is the future of work? The Wall Street Journal asked five workplace experts and practitioners.

So while AI “is already doing tasks once relegated to newly minted college graduates in many professions,” the Journal predicts that in the next 20 years AI “will have an impact on the role of managers, how organizations measure business outcomes and accelerate tasks that once took months.”

A sen … ⌘ Read more

FSF Says Nintendo’s New DRM Allows Them to Remotely Render User’s Device ‘Permanently Unusuable’
“In the lead up to its Switch 2 console release, Nintendo updated its user agreement,” writes the Free Software Foundation, warning that Nintendo now claims “broad authority to make consoles owned by its customers permanently unusable.”

“Under Nintendo’s most aggressive digital restric … ⌘ Read more

Trump Admin to Hire 1,000 for New ‘Tech Force’ to Build AI Infrastructure
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC:

The Trump administration on Monday unveiled a new initiative dubbed the “U.S. Tech Force,” comprising about 1,000 engineers and other specialists who will work on artificial intelligence infrastructure and other technology projects throughout the federal government.

Participants wi … ⌘ Read more

While Releasing ‘Avatar 3’, James Cameron Questions the Future of Movies
“If I get to do another Avatar film, it’ll be because the business model still works,” James Cameron tells CNN in a video interview — adding “That I can’t guarantee, as I sit here today. That’ll play out over the next month, really.” He says theatre is a “sacred space,” and while it will never go away, “I think that it could … ⌘ Read more

Is America’s Tech Industry Already Facing a Recession?
America’s unemployment rate for tech jobs rose to 4% in November, and “has been steadily rising since May,” reports the Washington Post (citing data from the IT training/certifications company CompTIA).

Between October and November, the number of technology workers across different industries fell 134,000, while the number of people working in the tech industry decline … ⌘ Read more

Rust’s ‘Vision Doc’ Makes Recommendations to Help Keep Rust Growing
The team authoring the Rust 2025 Vision Doc interviewed Rust developers to find out what they liked about the language — and have now issued three recommendations “to help Rust continue to scale across domains and usage levels.”

— Enumerate and describe Rust’s design goals and integrate them into our processes, helping to ensure they … ⌘ Read more

Bell Labs ‘Unix’ Tape from 1974 Successfully Dumped to a Tarball
Archive.org now has a page with “the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum’s Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek’s readtape tool.” A Berlin-based retrocomputing enthusiast has created a page with … ⌘ Read more

Does AI Really Make Coders Faster?
One developer tells MIT Technology Review that AI tools weaken the coding instincts he used to have. And beyond that, “It’s just not fun sitting there with my work being done for me.”

But is AI making coders faster? “After speaking to more than 30 developers, technology executives, analysts, and researchers, MIT Technology Review found that the picture is not as straightforward as it might seem…”
… ⌘ Read more

Parrot OS Switches to KDE Plasma Desktop
“Yet another distro is making the move to the KDE Plasma desktop,” writes Linux magazine.

“Parrot OS, a security-focused Linux distribution, is migrating from MATE to KDE Plasma, starting with version 7.0, now available in beta.”

Based on Debian 13, Parrot OS’s goal is a shift toward “modernization, focusing on clearing technical debt and future-proofing the system.” One big under-the-hood c … ⌘ Read more

Flock Executive Says Their Camera Helped Find Shooting Suspect, Addresses Privacy Concerns
During a search for the Brown shoogin suspect, a law enforcement press conference included a request for “Ring camera footage from residents and businesses near Brown University,” according to local news reports.

But in the end it was Flock cameras according to an article in Gizmodo, after a Redd … ⌘ Read more

Military Satellites Now Maneuver, Watch Each Other, and Monitor Signals and Data
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post. (Alternate URL here):

The American patrol satellite had the targets in its sights: two recently launched Chinese spacecraft flying through one of the most sensitive neighborhoods in space. Like any good tactical fighter, the American spacecraft, known … ⌘ Read more

‘Subscription Captivity’: When Things You Buy Own You
A reporter at Mother Jones writes about a $169 alarm clock with special lighting and audio effects. But to use the features, “you need to pay an additional $4.99 per month, in perpetuity.”

“Welcome to the age of subscription captivity, where an increasing share of the things you pay for actually own you.”

What vexes me are the companies that sell physical products for a hef … ⌘ Read more

EV Battery-Swapping Startup That Raised $330 Million Files for Bankruptcy
In 2023 Slashdot covered a battery-swapping startup that promised to give EVs a full charge in about the same time it takes to fill a tank of gas.

They just filed for bankruptcy, reports Inc:

Ample was founded in 2014 with a goal of “solving slow charging times and infrastructure incompatibility” for commercial EV fleets su … ⌘ Read more

Firefox Will Ship With an ‘AI Kill Switch’ To Completely Disable All AI Features
An anonymous reader shared this report from 9to5Linux:

After the controversial news shared earlier this week by Mozilla’s new CEO that Firefox will evolve into “a modern AI browser,” the company now revealed it is working on an AI kill switch for the open-source web browser…

What was not made clear [in Tuesday’s … ⌘ Read more

Pro-AI Group Launches First of Many Attack Ads for US Election
“Super PAC aims to drown out AI critics in midterms,” the Washington Post reported in August, noting its intial funding over $100 million from “some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful investors and executives” including OpenAI president Greg Brockman, his wife, and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. The group’s goal was “to quash a philosophical debate … ⌘ Read more

Trump Dismantling National Center For Atmospheric Research In Colorado
echo123 shares a report from PBS: The Trump administration is dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, moving to dissolve a research lab that a top White House official described as “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country.” White House budget director Russ Vought criticized the lab i … ⌘ Read more

James Webb Space Telescope Confirms 1st ‘Runaway’ Supermassive Black Hole
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second). That not … ⌘ Read more

Google Sues SerpApi Over Scraping and Reselling Search Data
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Search Engine Land: Google said today that it is suing SerpApi, accusing the company of bypassing security protections to scrape, harvest, and resell copyrighted content from Google Search results. The allegations: Google said SerpApi:

-Circumvented Google’s security measures and industry-standard crawling controls. … ⌘ Read more

Airbus Moving Critical Systems Away From AWS, Google, and Microsoft Citing Data Sovereignty Concerns
Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to move mission-critical systems like ERP, manufacturing, and aircraft design data onto a digitally sovereign European cloud, citing national security concerns and fears around U.S. extraterritorial laws like the CLOUD Act. “I need a so … ⌘ Read more

Stanford Computer Science Grads Find Their Degrees No Longer Guarantee Jobs
Elite computer science degrees are no longer a guaranteed on-ramp to tech jobs, as AI-driven coding tools slash demand for entry-level engineers and concentrate hiring around a small pool of already “elite” or AI-savvy developers. The Los Angeles Times reports: “Stanford computer science graduates are struggling to find … ⌘ Read more

Ten Mistakes Marred Firewall Upgrade At Australian Telco, Contributing To Two Deaths
An independent review found that at least ten technical and process failures during a routine firewall upgrade at Australia’s Optus prevented emergency calls from reaching Triple Zero for 14 hours, during which 455 calls failed and two callers died. The Register reports: On Thursday, Optus published an indepen … ⌘ Read more

Strava Puts Popular ‘Year In Sport’ Recap Behind an $80 Paywall
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this month, Strava, the popular fitness-tracking app, released its annual “Year in Sport” wrap-up – a cutesy, animated series of graphics summarizing each user’s athletic achievements. But this year, for the first time, Strava made this feature available only to users with subscriptions ( … ⌘ Read more

TikTok Owner Signs Deal To Avoid US Ban
TikTok’s owner ByteDance has signed a deal creating a U.S.-focused joint venture majority-owned by American and global investors, allowing the app to avoid a U.S. ban while ByteDance retains a minority stake. The BBC reports: Half of the joint venture will be owned by a group of investors including Oracle, Silver Lake and the Emirati investment firm MGX, according to a memo sent by chief executi … ⌘ Read more

YouTuber’s Livestream Appears On White House Website
The White House says it’s investigating how a personal-finance YouTuber’s livestream briefly appeared on the White House’s official live video page. The creator says he has no idea how his video ended up there. The Associated Press reports: The livestream appeared for at least eight minutes late Thursday on whitehouse.gov/live, where the White House usually streams live v … ⌘ Read more

Riot Games Is Making an Anti-Cheat Change That Could Be Rough On Older PCs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At this point, most competitive online multiplayer games on the PC come with some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat software. As we’ve written before, this is software that runs with more elevated privileges than most other apps and games you run on your PC, allowing it … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Made Another Copilot Ad Where Nothing Actually Works
Microsoft’s latest holiday ad for its Copilot AI assistant features a 30-second montage of users seamlessly syncing smart home lights to music, scaling recipes for large gatherings, and parsing HOA guidelines – none of which the software can actually perform reliably when put to the test. The Verge methodically tested each prompt shown in the ad and foun … ⌘ Read more

All That Cheap Chinese Stuff Is Now Europe’s Problem
President Trump’s closure of the de minimis customs loophole in May – which previously allowed Chinese packages valued under $800 to enter the U.S. duty-free – has redirected a flood of cheap goods toward Europe, where similar exemptions for packages under $175.8 in the EU and $180 in the UK remain intact.

The shift has been swift: exports of low-value Chinese packages to … ⌘ Read more

FTC: Instacart To Refund $60M Over Deceptive Subscription Tactics
alternative_right writes: Grocery delivery service Instacart will refund $60 million to settle FTC claims that it misled customers with false advertising and unlawfully enrolled them in paid subscriptions. Instacart partners with over 1,800 retailers to provide online shopping, delivery, and pickup services from nearly 100,000 stores across Nort … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft AI Chief: Staying in the Frontier AI Race Will Cost Hundreds of Billions
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman estimates that staying competitive in frontier AI development will require “hundreds of billions of dollars” over the next five to ten years, a sum that doesn’t even account for the high salaries companies are paying individual researchers and technical staff. Speaking on a podcast, … ⌘ Read more

2025 Was the Beginning of the End of the TV Brightness War
The television industry’s brightness war may have hit its inflection point in 2025, the year TCL and Hisense released the first consumer TVs capable of 5,000 nits under specific settings – a figure that would have seemed absurd not long ago when manufacturers struggled to reach 2,000 nits. LG introduced Primary RGB Tandem OLED technology, moving fr … ⌘ Read more

Uber is Hiring More Engineers Because AI is Making Them More Valuable, CEO Says
Uber is hiring more engineers rather than fewer because AI tools have made them “superhumans,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said, pushing back against the industry trend of using productivity gains to justify headcount cuts. Speaking on the “On with Kara Swisher” podcast, Khosrowshahi noted that other tech executives see AI … ⌘ Read more

‘How Lina Khan Killed iRobot’
iRobot, the Bedford, Massachusetts-based company that brought the Roomba vacuum cleaner into American homes over its 35-year history, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday and will be acquired by Picea, its Chinese contract manufacturer that also produces competing household devices.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board placed blame for the company’s demise on the Federal Trade Commission under Chair Lina Khan, which oppos … ⌘ Read more

ACM To Make Its Entire Digital Library Open Access Starting January 2026
The Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, announced that all publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will become freely available to everyone starting January 2026. Authors will retain full copyright to their published work under the new arrangement, and A … ⌘ Read more

Food Becoming More Calorific But Less Nutritious Due To Rising Carbon Dioxide
More carbon dioxide in the environment is making food more calorific but less nutritious – and also potentially more toxic, a study has found. From a report: Sterre ter Haar, a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and other researchers at the institution created a method to compare multiple studies on pl … ⌘ Read more