What Happens When an ‘Infinite-Money Machine’ Unravels
Michael Saylor’s software company Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, built a financial model that some observers called an “infinite-money machine” by stockpiling hundreds of thousands of bitcoins and issuing stock and debt to buy more, but that machine appears to be breaking down. The company’s stock peaked above $450 in mid-July and ended November at $177.18, … ⌘ Read more

Xbox Is Bleeding Out
Microsoft’s Xbox consoles were conspicuously absent from Black Friday’s winners, failing to crack the top three in U.S. sales during one of the retail calendar’s most important weeks. According to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, the PlayStation 5 captured 47% of Black Friday week console sales ending November 29, followed by the Nintendo Switch 2 at 24% and – somewhat remarkably – the NEX Playground, a Kinect-like Android device … ⌘ Read more

The Rarest of All Diseases Are Becoming Treatable
In February, a six-month-old baby named KJ Muldoon became the first person ever to receive a CRISPR gene-editing treatment customized specifically for his unique genetic mutation, a milestone that researchers say marks a turning point in how medicine might approach the thousands of rare diseases that collectively affect 30 million Americans. Muldoon was born with a type of … ⌘ Read more

‘Colleges Oversold Education. Now They Must Sell Connection’
A tenured USC professor is arguing that universities need to fundamentally rethink their value proposition as AI rapidly closes the gap on human instruction and a loneliness epidemic grips the generation most likely to be sitting in their lecture halls. Eric Anicich, an associate professor at USC’s Marshall School of Business, wrote in the Los Angeles Times … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Excel Turns 40, Remains Stubbornly Unkillable
Microsoft Excel, the 40-year-old spreadsheet application that helped establish personal computers as essential workplace tools and contributed to Microsoft’s current valuation of nearly $4 trillion, has weathered both the rise of cloud computing and the current AI boom largely unscathed. In its most recent quarter, commercial revenue for Microsoft 365 – the bundle i … ⌘ Read more

India’s Aviation Crisis Is All About Too Big to Tame
India’s dominant airline IndiGo has cancelled roughly 3,000 flights since last week after new pilot fatigue regulations collided with technical issues and the seasonal schedule shift, stranding more than half a million passengers and forcing aviation authorities to reverse course on the safety rules they had just implemented.

InterGlobe Aviation, IndiGo’s parent company, … ⌘ Read more

Science Journal Retracts Study On Safety of Monsanto’s Roundup
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology has formally retracted a sweeping scientific paper published in 2000 that became a key defense for Monsanto’s claim that Roundup herbicide and its active ingredient glyphosate don’t cause cancer. Martin van den Berg, the journal’s editor in chie … ⌘ Read more

Evidence That Humans Now Speak In a Chatbot-Influenced Dialect Is Getting Stronger
Researchers and moderators are increasingly concerned that ChatGPT-style language is bleeding into everyday speech and writing. The topic has been explored in the past but “two new, more anecdotal reports, suggest that our chatbot dialect isn’t just something that can be found through close analysis of data,” r … ⌘ Read more

Claude Code Is Coming To Slack
Anthropic is bringing Claude Code directly into Slack, letting developers spin up coding sessions from chat threads and automate workflows without leaving the app. TechCrunch reports: Previously, developers could only get lightweight coding help via Claude in Slack – like writing snippets, debugging, and explanations. Now they can tag @Claude to spin up a complete coding session using Slack context like bu … ⌘ Read more

Cold Case Inquiries Stall After Ancestry.com Revisits Policy For Users
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Since online genealogy services began operating, millions of people have sent them saliva samples in hopes of learning about their family roots and discovering far-flung relatives. These services also appeal to law enforcement authorities, who have used them to solve cold c … ⌘ Read more

193 Cybercrims Arrested, Accused of Plotting ‘Violence-As-a-Service’
Europol’s GRIMM taskforce has arrested nearly 200 people accused of running or participating in “violence-as-a-service” schemes where cybercrime groups recruit youth online for real-world attacks. “These individuals are groomed or coerced into committing a range of violent crimes, from acts of intimidation and torture to murder,” the European … ⌘ Read more

Nvidia Can Sell H200 Chips To China For 25% US Cut
The Trump administration will allow Nvidia to resume selling H200 chips to China, but only if the U.S. government takes a 25% cut. Axios reports: Trump said on Truth Social that he’ll allow Nvidia to sell H200 chips – the generation of chips before its current, more-advanced Blackwell lineup – to China, with the U.S. government pocketing a quarter of the revenue. He sa … ⌘ Read more

More Than 200 Environmental Groups Demand Halt To New US Datacenters
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded a national moratorium on new datacenters in the U.S., the latest salvo in a growing backlash to a booming artificial intelligence industry that has been blamed for escalating electricity bills and worsening the climate cri … ⌘ Read more

Taiwan Cries Censorship As Government Bans Rednote
Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: Taiwan’s government has ordered a one-year block of a popular, mainland Chinese-owned social media app Xiaohongshu, also known as The Little RedNote, citing its failure to cooperate with authorities over fraud-related concerns. Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited Xiaohongshu’s, which does not have business presence … ⌘ Read more

IBM To Buy Confluent For $11 Billion To Expand AI Services
IBM is buying Confluent for $11 billion in a major push to own real-time data streaming infrastructure essential for enterprise AI workloads. It marks Big Blue’s biggest acquisition since Red Hat in 2019. Bloomberg reports: The AI boom has touched off billions of dollars in deals for businesses that build, train or leverage the technology, propelling the valu … ⌘ Read more

Firefox 146 Now Available With Native Fractional Scaling On Wayland
Firefox 146 has been released with native fractional scaling support on Wayland – finally giving Linux users crisp UI rendering. Other new additions include GPU process improvements on macOS, developer-focused CSS features, and broader access to Firefox Labs. Phoronix reports: Firefox 146 also now makes Firefox Labs available to all users, … ⌘ Read more

Meta Pledge To Use Less Personal Data For Ads Gets EU Nod, Avoids Daily Fines
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta’s proposal to use less personal data for targeted advertising in its pay-or-consent model that will be rolled out next month won the approval of EU antitrust regulators on Monday, signaling the company will not face daily fines after all. […] The U.S. tech giant ha … ⌘ Read more

Lenovo’s Next Gaming Laptop May Have a Rollable OLED Screen That Stretches Ultrawide
Lenovo may be preparing to unveil a gaming laptop that uses rollable OLED technology to expand horizontally into an ultrawide 21:9 display, according to a Windows Latest report suggesting the device could appear at CES 2026 in January. The Lenovo Legion Pro Rollable would differ from the company’s existing T … ⌘ Read more

Social Media’s Relentless Shopping Machine Has Created an Army of Debt-Laden Buyers
The influencer economy that Goldman Sachs projects will reach nearly half a trillion dollars by 2027 depends on a less-examined population: the influenced, millions of people who find themselves accumulating debt and clutter after years of exposure to what amounts to a 24/7 digital infomercial.

Antoinette Hocb … ⌘ Read more

China’s Growth Is Coming at the Rest of the World’s Expense
China has contributed less to global growth this year than the U.S. despite Beijing’s frequent criticism of protectionism, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis citing new research from Goldman Sachs economists. U.S. imports are up 10% so far this year compared to a year earlier, while China’s imports have fallen 3% in dollar terms. Goldman’s economists fou … ⌘ Read more

Denmark Posts Its Last Letters as Hallowed National Mail Ends
Denmark’s postal service, established by King Christian IV four centuries ago as one of Europe’s first modern mail systems, will stop delivering letters on December 30, ending a tradition that once saw riders given a maximum of 45 minutes to cover each 10-kilometer stretch of routes running from Hamburg to Norway.

PostNord, the postal service Denmark h … ⌘ Read more

How the Dollar-Store Industry Overcharges Cash-Strapped Customers While Promising Low Prices
Dollar General and Family Dollar stores have collectively failed more than 6,400 government price-accuracy inspections since January 2022, charging customers more at checkout than the prices displayed on shelves for everything from frozen pizzas to puppy food, according to an investigation by the … ⌘ Read more

Google Says First AI Glasses With Gemini Will Arrive in 2026
Google said it’s working to create two different categories of artificial intelligence-powered smart glasses to compete next year with existing models from Meta Platforms: one with screens, and another that’s audio focused. From a report: The first AI glasses that Google is collaborating on will arrive sometime in 2026, it said in a blog post Monday. Sam … ⌘ Read more

Japan Issues Tsunami Warning After Magnitude 7.6 Earthquake
A powerful magnitude 7.6 earthquake has shaken Japan, prompting tsunami warnings and orders for residents to evacuate. From a report: A tsunami as high as 3 metres (10ft) could hit the country’s north-eastern coast after the earthquake occurred offshore at 11.15pm local time (2.15pm GMT), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. Tsunami warnings were issued f … ⌘ Read more

How a Cryptocurrency Helps Criminals Launder Money and Evade Sanctions
An investigation has revealed how stablecoins – cryptocurrencies pegged to the US dollar that exist largely beyond traditional financial oversight – have become a practical tool for criminals and sanctioned individuals to move funds across borders almost instantly and convert them back into spendable money, often without detection.
… ⌘ Read more

The Accounting Uproar Over How Fast an AI Chip Depreciates
Tech giants including Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon have all extended the estimated useful lives of their servers and AI equipment over the past five years, sparking a debate among investors about whether these accounting changes are artificially inflating profits. Meta this year increased its depreciation timeline for most servers and network assets … ⌘ Read more

Paramount Skydance Launches Hostile Bid For WBD After Netflix Wins Bidding War
Paramount Skydance is launching a hostile bid to buy Warner Bros. Discovery after it lost out to Netflix in a months-long bidding war for the legacy assets, the company said Monday. CNBC: Paramount will go straight to WBD shareholders with an all-cash, $30-per-share offer. That’s the same bid WBD rejected last … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Pitches AI Tools as Co-Workers While Axing Jobs
Amazon used its annual re:Invent cloud conference in Las Vegas to pitch a vision of the workplace where AI agents serve not as tools but as “co-workers” and “teammates,” even as the company proceeds with eliminating roughly 14,000 corporate jobs in its second major workforce reduction in recent years.

AWS CEO Matt Garman predicted on stage that autonomous “frontier agent … ⌘ Read more

Idaho Lab Produces World’s First Molten Salt Fuel for Nuclear Reactors
America’s Energy Department runs a research lab in Idaho — and this week announced successful results from a ground-breaking experiment. “This is the first time in history that chloride-based molten salt fuel has been produced for a fast reactor,” says Bill Phillips, the lab’s technical lead for salt synthesis. He calls it “a major … ⌘ Read more

Was the Airbus A320 Recall Caused By Cosmic Rays?
What triggered that Airbus emergency software recall? The BBC reports that Airbus’s initial investigation into an aircraft’s sudden drop in altitude linked it “to a malfunction in one of the aircraft’s computers that controls moving parts on the aircraft’s wings and tail.” But that malfunction “seems to have been triggered by cosmic radiation bombarding the Earth on the day of … ⌘ Read more

All of Russia’s Porsches Were Bricked By a Mysterious Satellite Outage
An anonymous reader shared this report from Autoblog:

Imagine walking out to your car, pressing the start button, and getting absolutely nothing. No crank, no lights on the dash, nothing. That’s exactly what happened to hundreds of Porsche owners in Russia last week. The issue is with the Vehicle Tracking System, a satellite-based sec … ⌘ Read more

Can This Simple Invention Convert Waste Heat Into Electricity?
Nuclear engineer Lonnie Johnson worked on NASA’s Galileo mission, has more than 140 patents, and invented the Super Soaker water gun.
But now he’s working on “a potential key to unlock a huge power source that’s rarely utilized today,” reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. [Alternate URL here.]

Waste heat…

The Johnson Thermo-Electrochemi … ⌘ Read more

Why Meetings Can Harm Employee Well-Being
Phys.org republishes this article from The Conversation:

On average, managers spend 23 hours a week in meetings. Much of what happens in them is considered to be of low value, or even entirely counterproductive. The paradox is that bad meetings generate even more meetings… in an attempt to repair the damage caused by previous ones…

A 2015 handbook laid the groundwork for the nascent fiel … ⌘ Read more

EU Urged to Soften 2035 Ban on Internal Combustion Engine Cars
Friday six European Union countries “asked the European Commission to water down an effective ban on the sale of internal combustion engine cars slated for 2035,” reports Reuters

The countries have asked the EU Commission to allow the sale of hybrid cars or vehicles powered by other, existing or future, technologies “that could contribute to the goa … ⌘ Read more

College Students Flock To A New Major: AI
AI is the second-largest major at M.I.T. after computer science, reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.) Though that includes students interested in applying AI in biology and health care — it’s just the beginning:

This semester, more than 3,000 students enrolled in a new college of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity at the University of South Florida in Tampa.
At the Unive … ⌘ Read more

No Rise in Radiation Levels at Chernobyl, Despite Damage from February’s Drone Strike
UPDATE (12/7): The New York Times clarifies today that the damage at Chernobyl hasn’t led to a rise in radiation levels:

“If there was to be some event inside the shelter that would release radioactive materials into the space inside the New Safe Confinement, because this facility is no longer sealed t … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Insists Target Links in ChatGPT Responses Weren’t Ads But ‘Suggestions’ - But Turns Them Off
A hardware security response from ChatGPT ended with “Shop for home and groceries. Connect Target.”

But “There are no live tests for ads” on ChatGPT, insists Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT. Posting on X.com, he said “any screenshots you’ve seen are either not real or not ads.” … ⌘ Read more

How Home Assistant Leads a ‘Local-First Rebellion’
It runs locally, a free/open source home automation platform connecting all your devices together, regardless of brand. And GitHub’s senior developer calls it “one of the most active, culturally important, and technically demanding open source ecosystems on the planet,” with tens of thousands of contributors and millions of installations.

That’s confirmed by this year’s “Oct … ⌘ Read more

Why Gen Z is Using Retro Tech
“People in their teens and early 20s are increasingly turning to old school tech,” reports the BBC, “in a bid to unplug from the online world.”

Amazon UK told BBC Scotland News that retro-themed products surged in popularity during its Black Friday event, with portable vinyl turntables, Tamagotchis and disposable cameras among their best sellers. Retailers Currys and John Lewis also said they had seen retro gadge … ⌘ Read more

Is Netflix Trying to Buy Warner Bros. or Kill It?
Why does Netflix want to buy Warner Bros, asks the chief film critic at the long-running motion-picture magazine Variety. “It is hard, at this moment, to resist the suspicion that the ultimate reason… is to eliminate the competition.”

[Warner Bros. is] one of the only companies that’s keeping movies as we’ve known them alive… Some people think movies are going t … ⌘ Read more

New FreeBSD 15 Retires 32-Bit Ports and Modernizes Builds
FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE arrived this week, notes this report from The Register, which calls it the latest release “of the Unix world’s leading alternative to Linux.”

As well as numerous bug fixes and upgrades to many of its components, the major changes in this version are reductions in the number of platforms the OS supports, and in how it’s built and how its … ⌘ Read more

Homebrew Can Now Help You Install Flatpaks Too
“Homebrew, the package manager for macOS and Linux, just got a handy new feature in the latest v5.0.4 update,” reports How-To Geek.

Brewfile install scripts “are now more like a one-stop shop for installing software, as Flatpaks are now supported alongside Brew packages, Mac App Store Apps, and other packages.”

For those times when you need to install many software packages at on … ⌘ Read more

Many Privileged Students at US Universities are Getting Extra Time on Tests After ‘Disability’ Diagnoses
Today America’s college professors “struggle to accommodate the many students with an official disability designation,” reports the Atlantic, “which may entitle them to extra time, a distraction-free environment, or the use of otherwise-prohibited technology.”

Their st … ⌘ Read more

Is Ruby Still a ‘Serious’ Programming Language?
Wired published an article by California-based writer/programmer Sheon Han arguing that Ruby “is not a serious programming language.”

Han believes that the world of programming has “moved on”, and “everything Ruby does, another language now does better, leaving it without a distinct niche.

Ruby is easy on the eyes. Its syntax is simple, free of semicolons or brackets. More s … ⌘ Read more

New Jolla Phone Now Available for Pre-Order as an Independent Linux Phone
Jolla is “trying again with a new crowd-funded smartphone,” reports Phoronix:

Finnish company Jolla started out 14 years ago where Nokia left off with MeeGo and developed Sailfish OS as a new Linux smartphone platform. Jolla released their first smartphone in 2013 after crowdfunding but ultimately the Sailfish OS focus the pa … ⌘ Read more

The Anxieties of Full-Body MRI Scans (Not Covered by Insurance)
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank calls himself “a highly creative hypochondriac” — who just paid for an expensive MRI scan to locate abnormal spots as tiny as 2 millimeters.

He discusses the pros and cons of its “diffusion-weighted imaging” technology combined with the pattern recognition of AI, which theoretically “has the potential to save … ⌘ Read more

Could America’s Paper Checks Be On the Way Out, Like the Penny?
“First the penny. Next, paper checks?” asks CNN:

When the U.S. Mint stopped making pennies last month for the first time in 238 years, it drew a lot of attention. But there have been quiet moves to stop using paper checks as well. The government stopped sending out most paper checks to recipients as of the end of September, part of an effort to fully … ⌘ Read more

Google Must Limit Its ‘Default Search’ Contracts to One Year, Judge Rules
Bloomberg reports that Google “must renegotiate any contract to make its search engine or artificial intelligence app the default for smartphones and other devices every year, a federal judge ruled.”

Judge Amit Mehta in Washington sided with the US Justice Department on the one year limitation in his final ruling on what changes th … ⌘ Read more

Woman Hailed As a Hero For Smashing Man’s Meta Smart Glasses On Subway
“Woman Hailed as Hero for Smashing Man’s Meta Smart Glasses on Subway,” reads the headline at Futurism:

As Daily Dot reports, a New York subway rider has accused a woman of breaking his Meta smart glasses. “She just broke my Meta glasses,” said the TikTok user, who goes by eth8n, in a video that has since garnered millions of views.

” … ⌘ Read more

A 1950s Material Just Set a Modern Record For Lightning-fast Chips
“Researchers engineered a strained germanium layer on silicon that allows charge to move faster than in any silicon-compatible material to date,” reports Science Daily. “This record mobility could lead to chips that run cooler, faster, and with dramatically lower energy consumption.

“The discovery also enhances the prospects for silicon- … ⌘ Read more