WEDNESDAY, 24 DECEMBER 2025, 12:40
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 ($80 per year), rather than making it free to...
Crypto has a strange rhythm. Excitement shows up late, panic shows up early, and opportunity slips through the cracks in between. One month feels electric, the next feels pointless. Charts flatten. Volume fades. Conversations shrink. Most participants wait for something to happen before doing anything. That waiting is expensive. The best upcoming crypto for 2026 […]
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...
In today’s episode of Uncanny Valley, we dive into five stories—from AI to DOGE—that encapsulate the year and give us clues as to what might unfold in 2026.
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 video of the president...
In this episode, we look back at 2025 and look ahead to what’s happening in 2026—including what’s in store for Uncanny Valley.
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 to load in earlier and detect advanced methods of cheating. More...
Forced by an act of Congress, the Justice Department has released “hundreds of thousands” of pages of documents related to Epstein—but not everything, as is required by law.
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 found that Copilot repeatedly hallucinated...
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 the U.S. have dropped...
From dead crabs to shredded bed sheets, fraudsters are using fake photos and videos to get their money back from ecommerce sites.
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 North America. Its platform serves millions of...
Merge Labs, a brain-computer interface startup that seeks to read brain activity using ultrasound, is being spun out of Forest Neurotech, a Los Angeles nonprofit.
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, Suleyman compared Microsoft to a “modern construction company” where hundreds...
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 from a three-stack panel design to a four-stack...
The modern workday no longer follows a predictable routine. It often begins in traffic, moves through a series of virtual meetings, shifts between home and office, and stretches well beyond traditional working hours. In this environment, performance depends not only on people and strategy, but on the quality and reliability of the technology that supports […]
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 making engineers 20% to 30% more productive and conclude they need 20% to 30%...
The JBL Flip 7 is our top tried-and-tested Bluetooth speaker, and we haven’t seen it sell for less than it is right now.
Trump Media plans to merge with a company developing nuclear fusion technology, putting the president’s financial interests in competition with other energy companies over which his administration holds sway.
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...
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 ACM has committed to defending those works against copyright and...