
One thing has become much cheaper in South Africa
One increasingly essential service has defied inflation in South Africa over the last decade.
FRIDAY, 26 DECEMBER 2025, 16:14

One increasingly essential service has defied inflation in South Africa over the last decade.
Google appears to be testing a feature that would let users change their @gmail.com address for the first time, according to an official support document. The support page exists only in Hindi, suggesting an India-first rollout, and Google notes that users will “gradually begin to see this option.” The feature would let users switch to a new @gmail address while retaining full access to their...
Apple has agreed to a settlement with Brazil’s antitrust regulator that will require the company to allow third-party app stores on iPhones and permit developers to direct users to external payment options, marking another country where Apple’s tightly controlled App Store model is being pried open by government action. Brazil’s Administrative Council of Economic Defense approved the settlement...
An anonymous reader shares a report: A typosquatted domain impersonating the Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS) tool was used to distribute malicious PowerShell scripts that infect Windows systems with the ‘Cosmali Loader’. BleepingComputer has found that multiple MAS users began reporting on Reddit yesterday that they received pop-up warnings on their systems about a Cosmali Loader infection....

One Battle After Another, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, and It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley are just a few of the movies you should be watching on HBO Max this month.
Goldman Sachs analysts have identified a notable shift in how investors respond to corporate layoff announcements, finding that even job cuts attributed to automation and AI-driven restructuring are now causing stock prices to fall rather than rise. The investment bank linked recent layoff announcements to public companies’ earnings reports and stock market data, concluding that stocks dropped...
An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese social media users criticized two key government policies, rare signs of public dissent in the country where the internet is heavily censored. The death of the former head of China’s one-child policy agency — which for decades forced women to carry out abortions and sterilizations — sparked criticism of the demographic effort, with one netizen...
Prominent business and government figures spread rumors about the attack on Brown University’s campus this month, reigniting questions about accountability in online discourse.
Framework has announced yet another price increase for memory modules, the second in roughly a month, and the company is now actively encouraging customers to source their own RAM elsewhere if they can find better deals. The laptop maker cited “extreme memory shortages and price volatility” as the reason for the hike, noting that 32GB modules and smaller currently cost around $10 per gigabyte...

We can share images and sounds, so why not smells? Dr Kate McLean-MacKenzie hopes her new atlas will make scents
Christmas may be associated with the aromas of oranges and mince pies but our towns and cities also boast special scents during the rest of the year. Now, one researcher is publishing an atlas attempting to capture these quirky “smellscapes”.
Dr Kate McLean-MacKenzie, a designer and...
Waymo’s fleet of autonomous robotaxis can navigate city streets and compete with human taxi drivers, but they become stranded when a passenger leaves a door ajar — prompting the company to pay tow truck operators around $20 to $24 through an app called Honk just to push a door shut. The owner of a towing company in Inglewood, California, completes up to three such jobs a week for Waymo,...
Nvidia has agreed to buy assets from Groq, a designer of high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator chips, for $20 billion in cash, according to Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led the startup’s latest financing round in September. From a report: Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq since the company was founded in 2016, said the deal came...
The Trump administration has announced it would replace the lottery programme used to grant H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers with a system that prioritises higher-paid individuals. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security said it would begin to implement a “weighted” selection process to give an advantage to higher-skilled and higher-paid applicants from February, according to a...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: It’s harder than ever to mine bitcoin. And less profitable, too. But mining-company stocks are still flying, even with cryptocurrency prices in retreat. That’s because these firms have something in common with the hottest investment theme on the planet: the massive, electricity-hungry data centers expected to power the...

Exclusive: Scientists find a way to forecast hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which affects millions worldwide
Scientists are developing a simple blood test to predict who is most at risk from the world’s most common inherited heart condition.
Millions of people worldwide have hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a disease of the heart muscle where the wall of the heart becomes thickened. It is...

Here’s how to make iPhone and Android devices a little easier to use.

Sarah Harper says society must create new ways of living and working amid potential ‘silver economy’
Concerns over an ageing population are overblown and society should learn to celebrate and capitalise on its “massive cohort of healthy, active, older, creative adults”, a leading population expert has said.
While pundits and pressure groups have raised concerns over falling fertility rates,...

If anything, iPhones and Pixels are practically vanilla. The next generation is thinner, more transparent, and folds in half. That’s a good thing.

This year, the right-to-repair movement got a boost from—surprisingly—big tech, tariffs, and economic downturn. But the companies controlling who fixes their stuff aren’t giving up that power willingly.

Research shows that watching a simulated fire may have real psychological benefits.
Shares of Tesla have hit new highs on optimism about the company’s self-driving taxis. But experts say Tesla is far behind Waymo, which has a big head start.