When Something Goes Wrong With Your Flight, These People Take Charge
Inside a tornado-hardened office in Texas, 1,700 American Airlines employees manage the carrier’s operations, responding to bad weather, plane trouble and ailing passengers.
MONDAY, 22 DECEMBER 2025, 04:16
Inside a tornado-hardened office in Texas, 1,700 American Airlines employees manage the carrier’s operations, responding to bad weather, plane trouble and ailing passengers.

With less than two weeks to go before their current content deal lapses, MultiChoice and Warner Bros. Discovery have not yet signed a new agreement on the distribution of a dozen of the US media giant’s channels on DStv.
America’s unemployment rate for tech jobs rose to 4% in November, and “has been steadily rising since May,” reports the Washington Post (citing data from the IT training/certifications company CompTIA).Between October and November, the number of technology workers across different industries fell 134,000, while the number of people working in the tech industry declined by more than 6,800. Tech...

South Africans can get a big-screen monitor to replace their TV without needing a valid TV licence, and some models go up to 86 inches in size.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin completed a suborbital joyride Saturday with a six-person crew, including the first wheelchair user to reach space and one of SpaceX’s first engineers.
The team authoring the Rust 2025 Vision Doc interviewed Rust developers to find out what they liked about the language — and have now issued three recommendations “to help Rust continue to scale across domains and usage levels.” — Enumerate and describe Rust’s design goals and integrate them into our processes, helping to ensure they are observed by future language designers and the...

In 2025, South Africa’s largest mobile acquired 30% of the country’s biggest fibre operator, signed a partnership with Starlink, and operationalised a first-of-its-kind energy deal in the country.
Archive.org now has a page with “the raw analog waveform and the reconstructed digital tape image (analog.tap), read at the Computer History Museum’s Shustek Research Archives on 19 December 2025 by Al Kossow using a modified tape reader and analyzed with Len Shustek’s readtape tool.” A Berlin-based retrocomputing enthusiast has created a page with the contents of the tape ready for...
At least 124,000 customers out of 414,000 lost power on Saturday.
One developer tells MIT Technology Review that AI tools weaken the coding instincts he used to have. And beyond that, “It’s just not fun sitting there with my work being done for me.” But is AI making coders faster? “After speaking to more than 30 developers, technology executives, analysts, and researchers, MIT Technology Review found that the picture is not as straightforward as it might...
“Yet another distro is making the move to the KDE Plasma desktop,” writes Linux magazine. “Parrot OS, a security-focused Linux distribution, is migrating from MATE to KDE Plasma, starting with version 7.0, now available in beta.”Based on Debian 13, Parrot OS’s goal is a shift toward “modernization, focusing on clearing technical debt and future-proofing the system.” One big under-the-hood...
During a search for the Brown shoogin suspect, a law enforcement press conference included a request for “Ring camera footage from residents and businesses near Brown University,” according to local news reports. But in the end it was Flock cameras according to an article in Gizmodo, after a Reddit poster described seeing “odd” behavior of someone who turned out to be the suspect:The original...
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post. (Alternate URL here):The American patrol satellite had the targets in its sights: two recently launched Chinese spacecraft flying through one of the most sensitive neighborhoods in space. Like any good tactical fighter, the American spacecraft, known as USA 270, approached from behind, so that the sun would be at its back,...

Michaela Benthaus from Germany soared 65 miles above the Earth’s surface in 10-minute Blue Origin flight
A paraplegic engineer from Germany blasted off on a dream-come-true rocket ride with five other passengers on Saturday, leaving her wheelchair behind to float in space while beholding Earth from on high.
Severely injured in a mountain bike accident seven years ago, Michaela Benthaus became...
A reporter at Mother Jones writes about a $169 alarm clock with special lighting and audio effects. But to use the features, “you need to pay an additional $4.99 per month, in perpetuity.” “Welcome to the age of subscription captivity, where an increasing share of the things you pay for actually own you.”What vexes me are the companies that sell physical products for a hefty, upfront fee and...
In 2023 Slashdot covered a battery-swapping startup that promised to give EVs a full charge in about the same time it takes to fill a tank of gas. They just filed for bankruptcy, reports Inc:Ample was founded in 2014 with a goal of “solving slow charging times and infrastructure incompatibility” for commercial EV fleets such as those in logistics, ride-hailing, and delivery, the filing states....
An anonymous reader shared this report from 9to5Linux:After the controversial news shared earlier this week by Mozilla’s new CEO that Firefox will evolve into “a modern AI browser,” the company now revealed it is working on an AI kill switch for the open-source web browser… What was not made clear [in Tuesday’s comments by new Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo] is that Firefox will also ship with...
“Super PAC aims to drown out AI critics in midterms,” the Washington Post reported in August, noting its intial funding over $100 million from “some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful investors and executives” including OpenAI president Greg Brockman, his wife, and VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. The group’s goal was “to quash a philosophical debate that has divided the tech industry on the risk of...

Chinese car manufacturers launched a dozen distinct plug-in hybrid models under R1 million in South Africa in 2025.

Plant parents don’t always want another plant—up your gift-giving game with these favorite plant presents we’ve tested.

UN body to study possibility of integrating centuries-old practices into mainstream healthcare
From herbalists in Africa gathering plants to use as poultices to acupuncturists in China using needles to cure migraines, or Indian yogis practising meditation, traditional remedies have increasingly being shown to work, and deserve more attention and research, according to a World Health...