Why It Is Difficult To Resize Windows on MacOS 26
The dramatically larger corner radius Apple introduced in macOS 26 Tahoe has pushed the invisible resize hit target for windows mostly outside the window itself – roughly 75% of the 19Ö19 pixel clickable area now lies beyond the visible boundary. In previous macOS versions, about 62% of that resize target would fall inside the window corner.

Apple removed the visible resi … ⌘ Read more

Exercise is as Effective as Medication in Treating Depression, Study Finds
A major new review by the Cochrane collaboration – an independent network of researchers – evaluated 73 randomized controlled trials involving about 5,000 people with depression and found that exercise matched the effectiveness of both pharmacological treatments and psychological therapies.

The biological mechanisms overl … ⌘ Read more

Apple Partners With Google on Siri Upgrade, Declares Gemini ‘Most Capable Foundation’
Apple has struck a multi-year partnership with Google to power a more capable version of Siri using Gemini AI models, ending months of speculation about which company would help the iPhone maker catch up in the generative AI race. In a statement, Apple said it had determined after “careful evaluation” that “ … ⌘ Read more

US President Calls for 10% Credit Card Interest Cap, Banks Push Back
President Donald Trump revived a campaign pledge Friday night by calling for a one-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates, a proposal that banking groups immediately opposed despite the industry’s heavy donations to his 2024 campaign and support for his second-term agenda.

Trump posted on Truth Social that he hoped the cap would be in … ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Threatens Italy Exit After $16.3M Fine For Refusing Piracy Blocks
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has threatened to withdraw free cybersecurity services from Italy’s Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics and potentially exit the country after Italy’s telecommunications regulator fined the company approximately 14 million euros for failing to comply with anti-piracy blocking orders. The penalty equa … ⌘ Read more

Streamer Spend To Top $100B For First Time In 2026
Streamer spend on content is set to top the $100 billion mark for the first time this year, according to an Ampere Analysis report. From a report: The landmark figure will be met as global streamers “remain the primary driver of growth in content investment,” according to Ampere. Spend by the likes of Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, HBO Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV wi … ⌘ Read more

Linux Hit a New All-Time High for Steam Market Share in December
A year ago the Steam Survey showed a 2.29% marketshare for Linux. Last May it reached 2.69%, its highest level since 2018. November saw another all-time high of 3.2%.

But December brought a surprise, reports Phoronix:
Back on the 1st Valve published the Steam Survey results for December 2025 and they put the Linux gaming marketshare at 3.19%, a … ⌘ Read more

Ubisoft Closes Game Studio Where Workers Voted to Unionize Two Weeks Ago
Ubisoft announced Wednesday it will close its studio in Halifax, Nova Scotia — two weeks after 74% of its staff voted to unionize.

This means laying off the 71 people at the studio, reports the gaming news site Aftermath:

[Communications Workers of America’s Canadian affiliate, CWA Canada] said in a statement to Aftermath the un … ⌘ Read more

How Long Does It Take to Fix Linux Kernel Bugs?
An anonymous reader shared this report from It’s FOSS:

Jenny Guanni Qu, a researcher at [VC fund] Pebblebed, analyzed 125,183 bugs from 20 years of Linux kernel development history (on Git). The findings show that the average bug takes 2.1 years to find. [Though the median is 0.7 years, with the average possibly skewed by “outliers” discovered after years of hiding.] The longes … ⌘ Read more

Amazon’s AI Tool Listed Products from Small Businesses Without Their Knowledge
Bloomberg reports on Amazon listings “automatically generated by an experimental AI tool” for stores that don’t sell on Amazon.

Bloomberg notes that the listings “didn’t always correspond to the correct product”, leaving the stores to handle the complaints from angry customers:

Between the Christmas and New Year holidays, s … ⌘ Read more

Finnish Startup IXI Plans New Autofocusing Eyeglasses
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNET:

Finland-based IXI Eyewear has raised more than $40 million from investors, including Amazon, to build glasses with adaptive lenses that could dynamically autofocus based on where the person wearing them is looking. In late 2025, the company said it had developed a glasses prototype that weighs just 22 grams. It include … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Says AI Doomerism Has ‘Done a Lot of Damage’
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang “said one of his biggest takeaways from 2025 was ‘the battle of narratives’ over the future of AI development between those who see doom on the horizon and the optimists,” reports Business Insider.

Huang did acknowledge that “it’s too simplistic” to entirely dismiss either side (on a recent episode of the “No Priors” pod … ⌘ Read more

How Many Years Left Until the Hubble Space Telescope Reenters Earth’s Atmosphere?
“The clock is ticking” on the Hubble Space Telescope,
writes the space news site Daily Galaxy, citing estimates from the unofficial “Hubble Reentry Tracker” site (which uses orbital data from the site space-track.org, created by tech integrator SAIC):

While Hubble was initially launched into low Earth orbit at … ⌘ Read more

Walmart Announces Drone Delivery, Integration with Google’s AI Chatbot Gemini
Alphabet-owned Wing “is expanding its drone delivery service to an additional 150 Walmart stores across the U.S.,” reports Axios:

[T]he future is already here if you live in Dallas — where some Walmart customers order delivery by Wing three times a week. By the end of 2026, some 40 million Americans, or about 12 percent … ⌘ Read more

Gentoo Linux Plans Migration from GitHub Over ‘Attempts to Force Copilot Usage for Our Repositories’
Gentoo Linux posted its 2025 project retrospective this week. Some interesting details:

Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contrib … ⌘ Read more

Personal Info on 17.5 Million Users May Have Leaked to Dark Web After 2024 Instagram Breach
An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget:

If you received a bunch of password reset requests from Instagram recently, you’re not alone. As reported by Malwarebytes, an antivirus software company, there was a data breach revealing the “sensitive information” of 17.5 million Instagra … ⌘ Read more

China Tests a Supercritical CO2 Generator in Commercial Operation
“China recently placed a supercritical carbon dioxide power generator into commercial operation,” writes CleanTechnica, “and the announcement was widely framed as a technological breakthrough.”

The system, referred to as Chaotan One, is installed at a steel plant in Guizhou province in mountainous southwest China and is designed to recover … ⌘ Read more

That Bell Labs ‘Unix’ Tape from 1974: From a Closet to Computing History
Remember that re-discovered computer tape with one of the earliest versions of Unix from the early 1970s? This week several local news outlets in Utah reported on the find, with KSL creating a video report with shots of the tape arriving at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum, the closet where it was found, and even its handwrit … ⌘ Read more

Cory Doctorow: Legalising Reverse Engineering Could End ‘Enshittification’
Scifi author/tech activist Cory Doctorow has decried the “enshittification” of our technologies to extract more profit. But Saturday he also described what could be “the beginning of the end for enshittification” in a new article for the Guardian — “our chance to make tech good again”.

There is only one reason the world isn’t bu … ⌘ Read more

C# (and C) Grew in Popularity in 2025, Says TIOBE
For a quarter century, the TIOBE Index has attempted to rank the popularity of programming languages by the number of search engine results they bring up — and this week they had an announcement.

Over the last year the language showing the largest increase in its share of TIOBE’s results was C#.

TIOBE founder/CEO Paul Jansen looks back at how C++ evolved:

From a language … ⌘ Read more

Elon Musk: X’s New Algorithm Will Be Made Open Source in Seven Days
“We will make the new ð algorithm…open source in 7 days,” Elon Musk posted Saturday on X.com. Musk says this is “including all code used to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users,” and “This will be repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed.”

Some context f … ⌘ Read more

Nature-Inspired Computers Are Shockingly Good At Math
An R&D lab under America’s Energy Department annnounced this week that “Neuromorphic computers, inspired by the architecture of the human brain, are proving surprisingly adept at solving complex mathematical problems that underpin scientific and engineering challenges.”

Phys.org publishes the announcement from Sandia National Lab:

In a paper published in Nature M … ⌘ Read more

Four More Tech Bloggers are Switching to Linux
Is there a trend? This week four different articles appeared on various tech-news sites with an author bragging about switching to Linux.

“Greetings from the year of Linux on my desktop,” quipped the Verge’s senior reviews editor, who finally “got fed up and said screw it, I’m installing Linux.

They switched to CachyOS — just like this writer for the videogame magazine Escapist: … ⌘ Read more

AI-Powered Social Media App Hopes To Build More Purposeful Lives
A founder of Twitter and a founder of Pinterest are now working on
“social media for people who hate social media,” writes a Washington Post columnist.

“When I heard that this platform would harness AI to help us live more meaningful lives, I wanted to know more…”

Their bid for redemption is West Co. — the Workshop for Emotional and Spiritual … ⌘ Read more

AI Fails at Most Remote Work, Researchers Find
A new study “compared how well top AI systems and human workers did at hundreds of real work assignments,” reports the Washington Post.

They add that at least one example “illustrates a disconnect three years after the release of ChatGPT that has implications for the whole economy.”

AI can accomplish many impressive tasks involving computer code, documents or images. That has prompt … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Plans Massive Superstore Larger Than a Walmart Supercenter Near Chicago
Amazon “has submitted plans for a large-format store near Chicago that would be larger than a Walmart Supercenter,” reports CNBC:

As part of the plans, Amazon has proposed building a one-story, 229,000-square-foot building [on a 35-acre lot] in Orland Park, Illinois, that would offer a range of products, such as grocerie … ⌘ Read more

China’s ‘Artificial Sun’ Breaks Nuclear Fusion Limit Thought to Be Impossible
“Scientists in China have made a breakthrough with fusion energy that could finally overcome one of the most stubborn barriers to realising the next-generation energy source,” reports the Independent:

A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said its experimental nuclear reactor, dubbed the ‘artificial Sun’, a … ⌘ Read more

Meta Announces New Smartglasses Features, Delays International Rollout Claiming ‘Unprecedented’ Demand’
This week Meta announced several new features for “Meta Ray-Ban Display” smartglasses:
- A new teleprompter feature for the smart glasses (arriving in a phased rollout)
- The ability to send messages on WhatsApp and Messenger by writing with your finger on any surface. (A … ⌘ Read more

Medical Evacuation from Space Station Next Week for Astronaut in Stable Condition
It will be the first medical evacuation from the International space station in its 25-year history. The Guardian reports:

An astronaut in the orbital laboratory reportedly fell ill with a “serious” but undisclosed issue. Nasa also had to cancel its first spacewalk of the year… The agency did not identify th … ⌘ Read more

More US States Are Preparing Age-Verification Laws for App Stores
Yes, a federal judge blocked an attempt by Texas at an app store age-verification law.

But this year Silicon Valley giants including Google and Apple “are expected to fight hard against similar legislation,” reports Politico, “because of the vast legal liability it imposes on app stores and developers.”

In Texas, Utah and Louisiana, parent advo … ⌘ Read more

How the Free Software Foundation Kept a Videoconferencing Software Free
The Free Software Foundation’s president Ian Kelling is also their senior systems administrator. This week he shared an example of how “the work we put in to making sure a program is free for us also makes it free for the rest of the world.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, like everyone everywhere, the FSF increased its videoconferen … ⌘ Read more

French-UK Starlink Rival Pitches Canada On ‘Sovereign’ Satellite Service
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: A company largely owned by the French and U.K. governments is pitching Canada on a roughly $250-million plan to provide the military with secure satellite broadband coverage in the Arctic, CBC News has learned. Eutelsat, a rival to tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink, already provid … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Tried To Break Einstein’s Speed of Light Rule
Scientists are putting Einstein’s claim that the speed of light is constant to the test. While researchers found no evidence that light’s speed changes with energy, this null result dramatically tightens the constraints on quantum-gravity theories that predict even the tiniest violations. ScienceDaily reports: Special relativity rests on the principle that the … ⌘ Read more

Meta Signs Deals With Three Nuclear Companies For 6+ GW of Power
Meta has signed long-term nuclear power deals totaling more than 6 gigawatts to fuel its data centers: “one from a startup, one from a smaller energy company, and one from a larger company that already operates several nuclear reactors in the U.S,” reports TechCrunch. From the report: Oklo and TerraPower, two companies developing small modular … ⌘ Read more

AI Models Are Starting To Learn By Asking Themselves Questions
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: [P]erhaps AI can, in fact, learn in a more human way – by figuring out interesting questions to ask itself and attempting to find the right answer. A project from Tsinghua University, the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI), and Pennsylvania State University shows that AI ca … ⌘ Read more

AI Is Intensifying a ‘Collapse’ of Trust Online, Experts Say
Experts interviewed by NBC News warn that the rapid spread of AI-generated images and videos is accelerating an online trust breakdown, especially during fast-moving news events where context is scarce. From the report: President Donald Trump’s Venezuela operation almost immediately spurred the spread of AI-generated images, old videos and altered photos ac … ⌘ Read more

Intel Is ‘Going Big Time Into 14A,’ Says CEO Lip-Bu Tan
Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says the company is “going big time” into its 14A (1.4nm-class) process, signaling confidence in yields and hinting at at least one external foundry customer. Tom’s Hardware reports: Intel’s 14A is expected to be production-ready in 2027, with early versions of process design kit (PDK) coming to external customers early this year. To that end … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft May Soon Allow IT Admins To Uninstall Copilot
Microsoft is testing a new Windows policy that lets IT administrators uninstall Microsoft Copilot from managed devices. The change rolls out via Windows Insider builds and works through standard management tools like Intune and SCCM. BleepingComputer reports: The new policy will apply to devices where the Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are both installe … ⌘ Read more

Google: Don’t Make ‘Bite-Sized’ Content For LLMs If You Care About Search Rank
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a big business. While some SEO practices are useful, much of the day-to-day SEO wisdom you see online amounts to superstition. An increasingly popular approach geared toward LLMs called “content chunking” may fall into that catego … ⌘ Read more

CES Worst In Show Awards Call Out the Tech Making Things Worse
Longtime Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, isn’t just about shiny new gadgets. As AP reports, this year brought back the fifth annual Worst in Show anti-awards, calling out the most harmful, wasteful, invasive, and unfixable tech at the Las Vegas show. The coalition behind the awards – including Repair.org, iFixi … ⌘ Read more

Latest SteamOS Beta Now Includes NTSYNC Kernel Driver
Valve has added the NTSYNC kernel driver to the SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, laying the groundwork for improved Windows game synchronization performance via Wine and Proton. Phoronix reports: For gearing up for that future Proton NTSYNC support, SteamOS 3.7.20 enables the NTSYNC kernel driver and loads the module by default. Most Linux distributions are at least already buil … ⌘ Read more

Italy Fines Cloudflare 14 Million Euros For Refusing To Filter Pirate Sites On Public 1.1.1.1 DNS
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Italy’s communications regulator AGCOM imposed a record-breaking 14.2 million-euro fine on Cloudflare after the company failed to implement the required piracy blocking measures. Cloudflare argued that filtering its global 1.1.1.1 … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Windows Media Player Stops Serving Up CD Album Info
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is celebrating the resurgence of interest in physical media in the only way it knows how… by halting the Windows Media Player metadata service. Readers of a certain vintage will remember inserting a CD into their PC and watching Windows Media Player populate with track listings and album artwork. No more … ⌘ Read more

Identity and Ideology in the School Boardroom
The abstract of a paper on NBER: School boards have statutory authority over most elementary and secondary education policies, but receive little attention compared to other actors in education systems. A fundamental challenge to understanding the importance of boards is the absence of data on the policy goals of board members – i.e., their ideologies – forcing researchers to condu … ⌘ Read more

The Golden Age of Vaccine Development
Microbiology had its golden age in the late nineteenth century, when researchers identified the bacterial causes of tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, and a dozen other diseases in rapid succession. Antibiotics had theirs in the mid-twentieth century. Both booms eventually slowed. Vaccine development, by contrast, appears to be speeding up – and the most productive era may still lie ahead, Works in … ⌘ Read more

America Is Falling Out of Love With Pizza
The restaurant industry is trying to figure out whether America has hit peak pizza. From a report: Once the second-most common U.S. restaurant type, pizzerias are now outnumbered by coffee shops and Mexican food eateries, according to industry data. Sales growth at pizza restaurants has lagged behind the broader fast-food market for years, and the outlook ahead isn’t much brighter.

“Pizza i … ⌘ Read more

Amazon’s New Manager Dashboard Flags ‘Low-Time Badgers’ and ‘Zero Badgers’
Amazon has begun equipping managers with a dashboard that tracks not just whether corporate employees show up to the office but how long they stay once they’re there, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. The system, which started rolling out in December, flags “Low-Time Badgers” who average less than four hour … ⌘ Read more

Torvalds Tells Kernel Devs To Stop Debating AI Slop - Bad Actors Won’t Follow the Rules Anyway
Linus Torvalds has weighed in on an ongoing debate within the Linux kernel development community about whether documentation should explicitly address AI-generated code contributions, and his position is characteristically blunt: stop making it an issue. The Linux creator was responding … ⌘ Read more

Craigslist at 30: No Algorithms, No Ads, No Problem
Craigslist, the 30-year-old classifieds site that looks virtually unchanged since the dial-up era, continues to draw more than 105 million monthly users and remains enormously profitable despite never spending a cent on advertising or marketing. The site ranks as the 40th most popular website in the United States, according to Internet data company Similarweb.

University of … ⌘ Read more

iOS 26 Shows Unusually Slow Adoption Months After Release
Apple’s iOS 26 appears to be witnessing the slowest adoption rate in recent memory, with third-party analytics from StatCounter indicating that only 15 to 16% of active iPhones worldwide are running the operating system nearly four months after its September release. The figures stand in stark contrast to iOS 18, which had reached approximately 63% adoption by … ⌘ Read more