The Battle Over Africa’s Great Untapped Resource: IP Addresses
In his mid-20s, Lu Heng “got an idea that has made him a lot richer,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

He scooped up 10 million unused IP addresses, mostly form Africa, and then leases them to companies, mostly outside Africa, “that need them badly.”

[A]round half of internet traffic continues to use IPv4, because changing to IPv6 can be expensive a … ⌘ Read more

Hundreds of Free Software Supporters Tuned in For ‘FSF40’ Hackathon
The Free Software Foundation describes how “After months of preparation and excitement, we finally came together on November 21 for a global online hackathon to support free software projects and “put a spotlight on the difficult and often thankless work that free software hackers carry out…”

Based on how many of you dropped in over the wee … ⌘ Read more

63% of Americans Polled say Four-Year College Degrees Aren’t Worth the Cost
Almost two-thirds of registered U.S. voters “say that a four-year college degree isn’t worth the cost,” according to a new NBC News poll:

Just 33% agree a four-year college degree is “worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime,” while 63% agree more with the con … ⌘ Read more

Uber Launches Driverless Robotaxi Service in Abu Dhabi, and Plans Many More
“A year after launching a commercial robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi, Chinese autonomous vehicle technology company WeRide and partner Uber can finally call that service driverless,” reports TechCrunch.
A company official hailed it as “a historic transportation milestone, as the first driverless AV deployment outside of the U.S … ⌘ Read more

How Bad Will RAM and Memory Shortages Get?
Digital Trends reports:
A wave of shortages now threatens to ripple across RAM, SSDs, and even hard drives, affecting not only performance-hungry rigs but also everyday systems.

— CyberPowerPC has publicly confirmed it will raise prices on all systems starting December 7th due to RAM costs spiking by 500% and SSD prices doubling since October.
— Memory suppliers warn of a global DRAM … ⌘ Read more

New Hyperloop Projects Continue in Europe
Hyperloop One ceased operations in December 2023, notes CNN. “Yet nearly two years on, in other parts of the world, hyperloop projects are ongoing.” For example, Rotterdam-based Hardt Hyperloop has a cool web site — and the company’s managing director tells CNN that hyperloops are the only “actionable, sustainable solution to replace short-haul air travel” over distances greater than 300 mil … ⌘ Read more

Viral Song Created with Suno’s genAI Removed From Streaming Platforms, Re-Released With Human Vocals
An EDM song by the British group Haven ran into trouble in October after it shared clips of upcoming song “I Run” on TikTok.

The song “was an overnight viral sensation online,” writes Digital Music News — racking up millions of plays “even before it hit streaming serv … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Partners Amass $100 Billion Debt Pile To Fund Its Ambitions
OpenAI’s data centre partners are on course to amass almost $100 billion in borrowing tied to the lossmaking start-up, as the ChatGPT maker benefits from a debt-fuelled spending spree without taking on financial risks itself. Financial Times: SoftBank, Oracle and CoreWeave have borrowed at least $30 billion to invest in the start-up or help build i … ⌘ Read more

Officials Clashed in Investigation of Deadly Air India Crash
The investigation into the June 12 Air India crash that killed 260 people has been marked by tension, suspicion and poor communication between American and Indian officials, including an episode where NTSB chairwoman Jennifer Homendy instructed her black-box specialists not to board a late-night Indian military flight to a remote facility, WSJ reports.

W … ⌘ Read more

The Mysterious Black Fungus From Chernobyl That May Eat Radiation
Black fungus found growing inside Chernobyl’s destroyed reactor may be feeding on radiation, and researchers have tested samples of the same species aboard the International Space Station to explore whether it could eventually shield astronauts from cosmic rays. Ukrainian scientist Nelli Zhdanova first discovered the melanin-rich mould colonizi … ⌘ Read more

Airbus Issues Major A320 Recall, Threatening Global Flight Disruption
Europe’s Airbus said on Friday it was ordering immediate repairs to 6,000 of its widely used A320 family of jets in a sweeping recall affecting more than half the global fleet, threatening upheaval during the busiest travel weekend of the year in the United States and disruption worldwide. From a report: The setback appears to be among t … ⌘ Read more

EU To Examine If Apple Ads and Maps Subject To Tough Rules, Apple Says No
EU antitrust regulators will examine whether Apple’s Apple Ads and Apple Maps should be subject to the onerous requirements of the bloc’s digital rules after both services hit key criteria, with the U.S. tech giant saying they should be exempted. From a report: Apple’s App Store, iOS operating system and Safari web browser were d … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Think They’ve Solved Why One of History’s Most Advanced Civilizations Vanished
A new study published in Communications Earth & Environment has reconstructed the climate conditions of the ancient Indus River Valley civilization between 3000 and 1000 B.C., finding that four intense droughts – each lasting more than 85 years – likely drove the gradual decline of one of the w … ⌘ Read more

China-Netherlands Chip Fight Turns Into Corporate Civil War
The bitter standoff between Dutch chipmaker Nexperia – which supplies basic chips crucial to 49% of European automakers, over 85% of medical device companies, and the entire defense industry – and its Chinese parent company Wingtech escalated on Friday when both Wingtech and Nexperia’s Chinese unit accused the Dutch business of secretly building a supply chai … ⌘ Read more

Australia Risks 2035 Climate Goal Without Bigger Emissions Cuts
Australia warned it’s in danger of missing its 2035 climate targets without deeper pollution cuts, which in turn threatens the nation’s ambitions to reach net zero by mid-century. From a report: Emissions are set to fall 48% by 2035 from 2005 levels based on current projections [non-paywalled source], the government said in a report on Thursday. … ⌘ Read more

Singapore Takes Top Spot in Global Talent Index
Singapore has claimed the top spot in the 2025 Global Talent Competitiveness Index for the first time, displacing Switzerland from a position the European nation had held since the ranking’s inception in 2013. The index, produced by business school INSEAD and the Portulans Institute, measured 135 economies across 77 indicators spanning soft skills, AI talent concentration, and fo … ⌘ Read more

Europe Fears It Can’t Catch Up in Great Power Competition
European leaders have spent years warning that the continent risked falling behind the U.S., China and Russia in the global contest for economic, technological and military dominance, and officials now believe they have reached that point.

The mood darkened over the summer when Europe found itself on the sidelines as Washington and Beijing negotiated a reset of glo … ⌘ Read more

Someone Is Trying To ‘Hack’ People Through Apple Podcasts
Apple’s Podcasts app on both iOS and Mac has been exhibiting strange behavior for months, spontaneously launching and presenting users with obscure religion, spirituality and education podcasts they never subscribed to – and at least one of these podcasts contains a link attempting a cross-site scripting attack, 404 Media reports. Joseph Cox, a journalist at t … ⌘ Read more

Australia’s Streaming Quotas Become Law
Australia’s streaming quotas have become law. Legislation requiring the likes of Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max to spend a portion of their local earnings on original Australian content has been passed in parliament, and now comes into effect. From a report: The quotas were announced earlier this month. This will see global streamers with more than one million Australian subscribers made t … ⌘ Read more

Robots and AI Are Already Remaking the Chinese Economy
China installed 295,000 industrial robots last year – nearly nine times as many as the United States and more than the rest of the world combined – as the country races to automate its manufacturing base amid rising labor costs at home and tariff threats from abroad.

The nation’s stock of operational robots surpassed 2 million in 2024, according to the Intern … ⌘ Read more

Violent Conflict Over Water Hit a Record Last Year
Researchers at the Pacific Institute documented 420 water-related conflicts globally in 2024, a record that far surpasses the 355 incidents logged in 2023 and continues a trend that has seen such violence more than quadruple over the past five years. The Oakland-based water think tank’s database tracks disputes where water triggered violence, where water systems were target … ⌘ Read more

Major AI Conference Flooded With Peer Reviews Written Fully By AI
An analysis of submissions to next year’s International Conference on Learning Representations has found that roughly one in five peer reviews were fully generated by AI, a discovery that came after researchers including Carnegie Mellon’s Graham Neubig grew suspicious of feedback on their manuscripts that seemed unusually verbose and requested n … ⌘ Read more

Why Can’t ChatGPT Tell Time?
ChatGPT can browse the web, write code and analyze images, but ask it what time it is and you might get the correct answer, a confident wrong answer, or a polite refusal – sometimes all three within minutes of each other.

The problem stems from how large language models work. These systems predict answers based on training data and don’t receive constant real-time updates about things like time unless they specifically se … ⌘ Read more

AWS Introduces DNS Failover Feature for Its Notoriously Unreliable US East Region
Amazon Web Services has rolled out a DNS resilience feature that allows customers to make domain name system changes within 60 minutes of a service disruption in its US East region, a direct response to the long history of outages at the cloud giant’s most troubled infrastructure.

AWS said customers in regulated i … ⌘ Read more

Seven Years Later, Airbus is Still Trying To Kick Its Microsoft Habit
Breaking free from Microsoft is harder than it looks. Airbus began migrating its 100,000-plus workforce from Office to Google Workspace more than seven years ago and it still hasn’t completed the switch. The Register: As we exclusively revealed in March 2018, the aerospace giant told 130,000 employees it was ditching Microsoft’s productivit … ⌘ Read more

Canada Rolls Back Climate Rules To Boost Investments
Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney has signed an agreement with Alberta’s premier that will roll back certain climate rules to spur investment in energy production, while encouraging construction of a new oil pipeline to the West Coast. From a report: Under the agreement, which was signed on Thursday, the federal government will scrap a planned emissions cap on the oil … ⌘ Read more

US Patent Office Issues New Guidelines For AI-Assisted Inventions
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued new guidelines outlining when inventions created with the help of AI can be patented. From a report: USPTO Director John Squires said on Wednesday in a notice set to be published Friday, that the office considers generative AI systems to be “analogous to laboratory equipment, computer software, res … ⌘ Read more

Epic’s Sweeney Says Platforms Should Stop Tagging Games Made With AI
The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has argued that platforms like Steam should not label games that are made using AI. From a report: Responding to a post on Twitter from a user who suggested that storefronts drop this tag, the industry exec said that it “makes no sense” to flag such content. Sweeney added that soon AI will be a part of … ⌘ Read more

Social Media Giants Liable For Financial Scams Under New EU Law
Platforms including Meta and TikTok will be held liable for financial fraud for the first time under new rules agreed by EU lawmakers in the early hours of Thursday. From a report: The Parliament and Council agreed on the package of rules after eight hours of negotiations to strengthen safeguards against payment fraud. The deal adds another layer o … ⌘ Read more

Australia Spent $62 Million To Update Its Weather Web Site and Made It Worse
quonset writes: Australia last updated their weather site a decade ago. In October, during one of the hottest days of the year, the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) revealed its new web site and was immediately castigated for doing so. Complaints ranged from a confusing layout to not being able to find information. Farmers were parti … ⌘ Read more

Face Transplants Promised Hope. Patients Were Put Through the Unthinkable
Twenty years after surgeons in France performed the world’s first face transplant, the experimental field that procedure launched is now confronting a troubling record of patient deaths, buried negative data and a healthcare system that leaves recipients financially devastated and medically vulnerable.

About 50 face transplant … ⌘ Read more

UK To Tax Electric Cars by the Mile Starting 2028
The UK government will levy a pay-per-mile tax on electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles starting April 2028, UK’s finance minister Rachel Reeves announced, a measure designed to offset some of the fuel duty revenue that will disappear as drivers shift away from petrol and diesel cars. Electric vehicles will be charged 3 pence per mile and plug-in hybrids 1.5 pence per mile, pa … ⌘ Read more

Android’s New Dual-Band Hotspot Mode Pairs 6 GHz Speed With 2.4 GHz Compatibility
Google is testing a new Wi-Fi hotspot configuration in the latest Android Canary build that pairs the 6 GHz band’s superior throughput with the 2.4 GHz band’s broad device compatibility, eliminating the trade-off users previously faced when choosing between speed and legacy support. Android’s default hotspot sett … ⌘ Read more

Defense Contractors Lobby To Kill Military Right-to-Repair, Push Pay-Per-Use Data Model
A bipartisan right-to-repair provision that would let the U.S. military fix its own equipment faces a serious threat from defense industry lobbyists who want to replace it with a pay-per-use model for accessing repair information. A source familiar with negotiations told The Verge that there are signifi … ⌘ Read more

NASA Reduces Flights on Boeing’s Starliner After Botched Astronaut Mission
An anonymous reader shares a report: NASA has slashed the number of astronaut missions on Boeing’s Starliner contract and said the spacecraft’s next mission to the International Space Station will fly without a crew, reducing the scope of a program hobbled by engineering woes and outpaced by SpaceX. The most recent mishap oc … ⌘ Read more

AI Can Technically Perform 12% of US Labor Market’s Wage Value, MIT Simulation Finds
Researchers at MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have built a simulation that models all 151 million American workers and their skills, then maps those skills against the capabilities of over 13,000 AI tools currently in production to see where the two overlap. The answer, according to their analysis: 11.7 … ⌘ Read more

UK Police To Trial AI ‘Agents’ Responding To Non-Emergency Calls
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Call-handling agents powered by AI are to be trialled by Staffordshire Police in a bid to cut waiting times for the non-emergency 101 service. The force is set to become the third in the country to take part in the scheme testing the use of artificial “agents” to deal with calls. Under the system, t … ⌘ Read more

Apple Asks Indian Court to Block Antitrust Law Allowing $38 Billion Fine
Apple is challenging a new Indian antitrust law that would let regulators calculate penalties based on global revenue – a change that could expose the company to a fine of roughly $38 billion in its dispute with Tinder owner Match. The 2022 antitrust case centers on accusations that Apple abused its power by forcing developers to u … ⌘ Read more

China’s Giant Underground Neutrino Observatory Releases Its First Results
China’s new JUNO neutrino observatory has delivered world-leading measurements after just 59 days, offering the most precise readings yet of two key neutrino oscillation parameters. “The physics result is already world-leading in the areas that it touches,” says particle physicist Juan Pedro Ochoa-Ricoux of the University of C … ⌘ Read more

Mexico Unveils Plans To Build Most Powerful Supercomputer In Latin America
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Mexico unveiled plans Wednesday to build what it claims will be Latin America’s most powerful supercomputer – a project the government says will help the country capitalize on the rapidly evolving uses of artificial intelligence and exponentially expand the co … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Faces FAA Probe After Delivery Drone Snaps Internet Cable In Texas
Amazon’s drone-delivery program is under federal scrutiny after an MK30 aircraft clipped an internet cable in Texas. CNBC reports: The incident occurred on Nov. 18 around 12:45 p.m. Central in Waco, Texas. After dropping off a package, one of Amazon’s MK30 drones was ascending out of a customer’s yard when one of its six propell … ⌘ Read more

Greek Cybercrime Unit Shuts Down IPTV Pirates, 68 End Users Face Fines
Greek authorities shut down an IPTV piracy operation on Santorini, arresting a reseller and referring 68 end users for prosecution. TorrentFreak reports: A new legal framework to tackle online infringement in Greece went live just a couple of months ago, and reports of prosecutions are already coming in. Early September, it was reported … ⌘ Read more

Google’s AirDrop Support For Pixel 10 Likely Exists Because of EU’s Apple Ruling
Last week, Google surprised the tech world when it announced AirDrop support on Pixel 10 devices – all without Apple’s involvement. “While it initially seemed like this was a rogue move made by Google to coerce Apple into another boundary-breaking decision, it might actually be part of the repercussions that also l … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Says Dead Teen Violated TOS When He Used ChatGPT To Plan Suicide
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Facing five lawsuits alleging wrongful deaths, OpenAI lobbed its first defense Tuesday, denying in a court filing that ChatGPT caused a teen’s suicide and instead arguing the teen violated terms that prohibit discussing suicide or self-harm with the chatbot. The earliest look at … ⌘ Read more

Newegg Sparks Debate With New PayPal-Integrated AI Shopping Push
BrianFagioli writes: Newegg’s new partnership with PayPal is another sign that mainstream e-commerce is shifting control from users to AI-driven intermediaries. Instead of shoppers visiting Newegg directly, PayPal’s agentic commerce system pushes product discovery through AI platforms like Perplexity where recommendations, checkout, and fraud che … ⌘ Read more

Chinese Pharma is On the Cusp of Going Global
China’s pharmaceutical industry has quietly evolved from a hub for generics and clinical trials into something more ambitious – a genuine competitor in drug discovery that Western giants are now courting to fill gaps left by looming patent expirations worth over $300 billion by 2030. In the first half of 2025, nearly a third of global licensing agreements signed by big pharma inv … ⌘ Read more

How ‘Stranger Things’ Defined the Era of the Algorithm
As Stranger Things releases the first four episodes of its final season today, nearly a decade after its July 2016 premiere, the Netflix series has come to represent something broader than its own popularity – the embodiment of streaming television’s algorithmic philosophy. When the show first appeared, streaming was still finding its footing. Netflix had be … ⌘ Read more

European Lawmakers Seek EU-Wide Minimum Age To Access AI Chatbots, Social Media
The European Parliament has passed a non-binding resolution urging an EU-wide minimum age of 16 to access social media, video-sharing platforms, and AI chatbots, with parental consent allowed for ages 13-16 and a hard ban for anyone under 13. “It also proposes additional measures, including a ban on addictive design f … ⌘ Read more

More Than Half of New Articles On the Internet Are Being Written By AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation: The line between human and machine authorship is blurring, particularly as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell whether something was written by a person or AI. Now, in what may seem like a tipping point, the digital marketing firm Graphite recently published a study sho … ⌘ Read more

SEC Must Not Let Crypto Companies ‘Bypass’ Rules, Stock Exchanges Say
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s possible plan to grant crypto companies relief from regulation to sell “tokenised” stocks risks harming investors, a group of stock exchanges said in a letter to the U.S. regulator this week. From a report: Several crypto companies plan to sell crypto tokens linked to listed equities to retail investors … ⌘ Read more