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The Vergecast RAM Holiday Spec-tacular
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https://www.theverge.com/podcast/849551/ram-explainer-holiday-spectacular-vergecast
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Happy Holidays! As we like to do on The Vergecast, we take this time of year to see our families, relax and recharge, and go extremely deep into a specific technology that matters right now. This year, we picked the tiny chip in all your devices that is suddenly a precious and expensive commodity: RAM. […]
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Happy Holidays! As we like to do on The Vergecast, we take this time of year to see our families, relax and recharge, and go extremely deep into a specific technology that matters right now. This year, we picked the tiny chip in all your devices that is suddenly a precious and expensive commodity: RAM.
On this episode, David and Nilay are joined by The Verge’s Sean Hollister to get a primer on all things Random Access Memory. The hosts talk through the history of the technology, what RAM made possible in our computers, how it became utterly ubiquitous in practically every electronic device we own, and why it’s so hard to get right now. (Here’s a very 2025 spoiler alert: it’s about AI.) Then, with the help of producer Travis Larchuk, we play some RAM-related games, which go… well, they go.
After that, Sean and David chat with Dylan Patel from Semianalysis, who explains why the chip market in general is so overwhelmed right now — and why even in boom times, some companies might be reluctant to invest too heavily in scaling up. He also explains how the AI companies have cornered the market on RAM, whether the data center boom will end anytime soon, and what it all means for the prices of our devices.
Thank you so much to everyone who has listened to, watched, and talked with us about The Vergecast this year. Have a happy, restful, memory-filled holiday, and we’ll see you in 2026! Maybe even at our CES live show in Las Vegas!
In the meantime, if you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started:
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https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml
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2025-12-23T09:35:49-05:00
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2025-12-23T14:42:38.419329
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How AI broke the smart home in 2025
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https://www.theverge.com/tech/845958/ai-smart-home-broken
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This morning, I asked my Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machine to make me a coffee. Instead of running my routine, it told me it couldn't do that. Ever since I upgraded to Alexa Plus, Amazon's generative-AI-powered voice assistant, it has failed to reliably run my coffee routine, coming up with a different excuse almost every time […]
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is a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
This morning, I asked my Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machine to make me a coffee. Instead of running my routine, it told me it couldn’t do that. Ever since I upgraded to Alexa Plus, Amazon’s generative-AI-powered voice assistant, it has failed to reliably run my coffee routine, coming up with a different excuse almost every time I ask.
It’s 2025, and AI still can’t reliably control my smart home. I’m beginning to wonder if it ever will.
The potential for generative AI and large language models to take the complexity out of the smart home, making it easier to set up, use, and manage connected devices, is compelling. So is the promise of a “new intelligence layer” that could unlock a proactive, ambient home.
But this year has shown me that we are a long way from any of that. Instead, our reliable but limited voice assistants have been replaced with “smarter” versions that, while better conversationalists, can’t consistently do basic tasks like operating appliances and turning on the lights. I want to know why.
I’m still waiting on the promise of voice assistants that can seamlessly control my smart home. Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
This wasn’t the future we were promised.
It was back in 2023, during an interview with Dave Limp, that I first became intrigued by the possibilities of generative AI and large language models for improving the smart home experience. Limp, then the head of Amazon’s Devices & Services division that oversees Alexa, was describing the capabilities of the new Alexa they were soon to launch (spoiler alert: it wasn’t soon).
Along with a more conversational assistant that could actually understand what you said no matter how you said it, what stood out to me was the promise that this new Alexa could use its knowledge of the devices in your smart home, combined with the hundreds of APIs they plugged into it, to give the assistant the context it needed to make your smart home easier to use.
From setting up devices to controlling them, unlocking all their features, and managing how they can interact with other devices, a smarter smart home assistant seemed to hold the potential to not only make it easier for enthusiasts to manage their gadgets but also make it easier for everyone to enjoy the benefits of the smart home.
Fast-forward three years, and the most useful smart home AI upgrade we have is AI-powered descriptions for security camera notifications. It’s handy, but it’s hardly the sea change I had hoped for.
It’s not that these new smart home assistants are a complete failure. There’s a lot I like about Alexa Plus; I even named it as my smart home software pick of the year. It is more conversational, understands natural language, and can answer many more random questions than the old Alexa.
While it sometimes struggles with basic commands, it can understand complex ones; saying “I want it dimmer in here and warmer” will adjust the lights and crank up the thermostat. It’s better at managing my calendar, helping me cook, and other home-focused features. Setting up routines with voice is a huge improvement over wrestling with the Alexa app — even if running them isn’t as reliable.
Google’s new Gemini for Home AI-powered smart home assistant won’t fully launch until next spring, when its new smart speaker arrives. Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
The problem is that the new assistants aren’t as consistent at controlling smart home devices as the old ones. While they were often frustrating to use, the old Alexa and Google Assistant (and the current Siri) would generally always turn on the lights when you asked them to, provided you used precise nomenclature.
Today, their “upgraded” counterparts struggle with consistency in basic functions like turning on the lights, setting timers, reporting on the weather, playing music, and running the routines and automations on which many of us have built our smart homes.
Why is this, and will it ever get better? To understand the problem, I spoke with two professors in the field of human-centric artificial intelligence with experience with agentic AI and smart home systems. My takeaway from those conversations is that, while it’s possible to make these new voice assistants do almost exactly what the old ones did, it will take a lot of work, and that’s possibly work most companies just aren’t interested in doing.
Basically, we’re all beta testers for the AI.
Considering there are limited resources in this field and ample opportunity to do something much more exciting (and more profitable) than reliably turn on the lights, that’s the way they’re moving, according to experts I spoke with. Given all these factors, it seems the easiest way to improve the technology is to just deploy it in the real world and let it improve over time. Which is likely why Alexa Plus and Gemini for Home are in “early access” phases. Basically, we’re all beta testers for the AI.
The bad news is it could be a while until it gets better. In his research, Dhruv Jain, assistant professor of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Michigan and director of the Soundability Lab, has also found that newer models of smart home assistants are less reliable. “It’s more conversational, people like it, people like to talk to it, but it’s not as good as the previous one,” he says. “I think [tech companies’] model has always been to release it fairly fast, collect data, and improve on it. So, over a few years, we might get a better model, but at the cost of those few years of people wrestling with it.”
The Alexa that launched in 2014 on the original Echo smart speaker isn’t capable enough for the future Amazon is working toward. Image: Amazon
The inherent problem appears to be that the old and new technologies don’t mesh. So, to build their new voice assistants, Amazon, Google, and Apple have had to throw out the old and build something entirely new. However, they quickly discovered that these new LLMs were not designed for the predictability and repetitiveness that their predecessors excelled at. “It was not as trivial an upgrade as everyone originally thought,” says Mark Riedl, a professor at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. “LLMs understand a lot more and are open to more arbitrary ways to communicate, which then opens them to interpretation and interpretation mistakes.”
Basically, LLMs just aren’t designed to do what prior command-and-control-style voice assistants did. “Those voice assistants are what we call ‘template matchers,’” explains Riedl. “They look for a keyword, when they see it, they know that there are one to three additional words to expect.” For example, you say “Play radio,” and they know to expect a station call code next.
“It was not as trivial an upgrade as everyone originally thought.” — Mark Riedl
LLMs, on the other hand, “bring in a lot of stochasticity — randomness,” explains Riedl. Asking ChatGPT the same prompt multiple times may produce multiple responses. This is part of their value, but it’s also why when you ask your LLM-powered voice assistant to do the same thing you asked it yesterday, it might not respond the same way. “This randomness can lead to misunderstanding basic commands because sometimes they try to overthink things too much,” he says.
To fix this, companies like Amazon and Google have developed ways to integrate LLMs with the APIs at the heart of our smart homes (and most of everything we do on the web). But this has potentially created a new problem.
“The LLMs now have to compose a function call to an API, and it has to work a whole lot harder to correctly create the syntax to get the call exactly right,” Riedl posits. Where the old systems just waited for the keyword, LLM-powered assistants now have to lay out an entire code sequence that the API can recognize. “It has to keep all that in memory, and it’s another place where it can make mistakes.”
All of this is a scientific way of explaining why my coffee machine sometimes won’t make me a cup of coffee, or why you might run into trouble getting Alexa or Google’s assistant to do something it used to do just fine.
So, why did these companies abandon a technology that worked for something that doesn’t? Because of its potential. A voice assistant that, rather than being limited to responding to specific inputs, can understand natural language and take action based on that understanding is infinitely more capable.
“What all the companies that make Alexa and Siri and things like that really want to do is chaining of services,” explains Riedl. “That’s where you want a general language understanding, something that can understand complex relationships through tasks and how they’re conveyed by speech. They can invent the if-else statements that chain everything together, on the fly, and dynamically generate the sequence.” They can become agentic.
“The question is whether … the expanded range of possibilities the new technology offers is worth more than a 100 percent accurate non-probabilistic model.” — Dhruv Jain
This is why you throw away the old technology, says Riedl, because it had no chance of doing this. “It’s about the cost-benefit ratio,” says Jain. “[The new technology] is not ever going to be as accurate at this as the non-probabilistic technology before, but the question is whether that sufficiently high accuracy, plus the expanded range of possibilities the new technology offers, is worth more than a 100 percent accurate non-probabilistic model.”
One solution is to use multiple models to power these assistants. Google’s Gemini for Home consists of two separate systems: Gemini and Gemini Live. Anish Kattukaran, head of product at Google Home and Nest, says the aim is to eventually have the more powerful Gemini Live run everything, but today, the more tightly constrained Gemini for Home is in charge. Amazon similarly uses multiple models to balance its various capabilities. But it’s an imperfect solution that has led to inconsistency and confusion in our smart homes.
Riedl says that no one has really figured out how to train LLMs to understand when to be very precise and when to embrace randomness, meaning even the “tame” LLMs can still get things wrong. “If you wanted to have a machine that just was never random at all, you could tamp it all down,” says Riedl. But that same chatbot would not be more conversational or able to tell your kid fantastical bedtime stories — both capabilities that Alexa and Google are touting. “If you want it all in one, you’re really making some tradeoffs.”
These struggles in its deployment in the smart home could be a harbinger of broader issues for the technology. If AI can’t turn on the lights reliably, why should anyone rely on it to do more complex tasks, asks Riedl. “You have to walk before you can run.”
But tech companies are known for their propensity to move fast and break things. “The story of language models has always been about taming the LLMs,” says Riedl. “Over time, they become more tame, more reliable, more trustworthy. But we keep pushing into the fringe of those spaces where they’re not.”
Riedl does believe in the path to a purely agentic assistant. “I don’t know if we ever get to AGI, but I think over time we do see these things at least being more reliable.” The question for those of us dealing with these unreliable AIs in our homes today, however, is are we willing to wait and at what cost to the smart home in the meantime?
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https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml
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2025-12-23T08:30:00-05:00
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2025-12-23T14:42:38.628100
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The year the government broke
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https://www.theverge.com/policy/845838/2025-year-end-government-doge
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The first crack showed right before Inauguration Day. The year before, Congress had overwhelmingly passed a bill banning TikTok unless it broke ties with its Chinese parent company. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld it, and it was clear what needed to happen next: either the president could give TikTok another 90 days to complete a […]
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is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.
The first crack showed right before Inauguration Day. The year before, Congress had overwhelmingly passed a bill banning TikTok unless it broke ties with its Chinese parent company. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld it, and it was clear what needed to happen next: either the president could give TikTok another 90 days to complete a deal or it would be banned immediately.
But neither of those things happened. Outgoing President Joe Biden punted the decision to incoming President Donald Trump, and after a dramatic few hours where TikTok took itself offline in the US, it returned with a triumphant message thanking Trump for saving it.
Nearly a year and four extra-legal extensions later, TikTok remains in the States, owned by the same Chinese company lawmakers warned would gravely endanger US national security. It only recently announced it had finalized a deal to sell its US-based business, with a targeted closing date of January 22nd, 2026 — more than a year after it was first supposed to be banned. The whole ordeal felt like a comedy of errors, where ultimately everyone threw up their hands. The few details known about a supposedly coming deal raise questions about whether it will even comply with the law’s original requirements.
The failure to take any action at all against TikTok following the panic around its alleged national security risks is just one of many cracks to the federal government’s foundation this year. In March, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth communicated war plans over Signal — an encrypted messaging platform but not one meant for such a use case due to potential security risks on users’ devices — which we only found out about because Trump’s then-national security adviser apparently accidentally added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to that chat.
And then there was the biggest full-on rupture to the government in 2025: Elon Musk’s pet project, DOGE
There have been many other instances where democracy’s counterweights have shown signs of life, and at times, even bravery
Of course, the only true test of a democracy’s durability is to see how its checks fare when things break. The TikTok saga shows one example where — at least so far — they have weathered poorly. Congress has issued tepid statements about the executive branch’s unwillingness to enforce the law, but there’s no appetite to impeach Trump over it, and the judicial branch can’t or won’t force action, either. But there have been many other instances where democracy’s counterweights have shown signs of life, and at times, even bravery.
As 2026 approaches, political posturing for the midterms is likely to overshadow any real efforts at policymaking. With that will come a slew of messages from politicians promising to fix what was broken this year and also promising to break what hasn’t worked in far too long. Voters will choose who they think can best put it all back together. Only then will we find out how deep the cracks actually go.
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https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml
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2025-12-23T08:00:00-05:00
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2025-12-23T14:42:38.794131
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Apple fined $116 million over app privacy prompts
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https://www.theverge.com/news/849528/apple-italy-antitrust-fine-att-app-privacy
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Apple has been fined more than €98 million (about $116 million) by Italy's antitrust regulator over the "excessively burdensome" privacy rules it imposes on third-party apps. The Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) says that Apple abused its dominant app store market position by burdening developers with "disproportionate" terms around data collection that exceed privacy law requirements, […]
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Apple has been fined more than €98 million (about $116 million) by Italy’s antitrust regulator over the “excessively burdensome” privacy rules it imposes on third-party apps. The Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) says that Apple abused its dominant app store market position by burdening developers with “disproportionate” terms around data collection that exceed privacy law requirements, compared to rules for native iOS apps.
The fine specifically targets the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy Apple launched in 2021, which requires third-party developers to ask users for consent twice to track their data across other apps and websites. Apple’s own apps can obtain this permission in a single tap. AGCM says that the burden of consenting twice led to a reduction in user consent rates for advertising profiling, thus harming developers whose business models depend upon revenue generated by personalized ads.
“The Authority established that the terms of the ATT policy are imposed unilaterally and harm the interests of Apple’s commercial partners,” the AGCM said in its announcement. ”The double consent request renders the ATT policy disproportionate, since Apple should have ensured the same level of privacy protection for users by allowing developers to obtain consent to profiling in a single step.”
This follows the Cupertino company being fined $162.4 million by France’s competition watchdog in March over similar concerns with Apple’s ATT system. Apple said in a statement to Reuters that it “strongly disagrees” with the AGCM and will appeal the decision, pushing its commitment “to defend strong privacy protections.”
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https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml
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2025-12-23T07:46:56-05:00
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2025-12-23T14:42:38.952414
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Dometic makes a better portable water faucet
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https://www.theverge.com/tech/848916/dometic-recon-360-water-pump-review
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As a reluctant doomsday prepper and eager vanlifer, Dometic's battery-powered Go Faucet has, for the last few years, played a central role in my bougie bug-out kit and my camping rig's water system. So it took me all of two minutes with Dometic's new Recon 360 Faucet to realize it's an upgrade in every single […]
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is a deputy editor and Verge co-founder with a passion for human-centric cities, e-bikes, and life as a digital nomad. He’s been a tech journalist for 20 years.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
As a reluctant doomsday prepper and eager vanlifer, Dometic’s battery-powered Go Faucet has, for the last few years, played a central role in my bougie bug-out kit and my camping rig’s water system. So it took me all of two minutes with Dometic’s new Recon 360 Faucet to realize it’s an upgrade in every single way that matters — and then confirmed after a week of testing it.
The Recon 360 Faucet lets you pump water out of a storage container like a typical faucet in places that lack traditional plumbing, be it inside a boat, cabin, or van, or at the beach, job site, or campground. A long silicone water hose attaches to the back of the faucet and snaps into the CPC quick-connect fitting found on Dometic’s Go Jug or Recon Hardside Coolers. But there’s nothing to stop you from dropping that tube into any jerry can via a third-party CPC adapter. It also works with inline filters like the one I use from LifeStraw and Camelbak.
As to the upgrades, the Recon 360 Faucet ditches the easy-to-miss touch surface for real mechanical buttons. One button produces a standard water flow to brush your teeth or fill a glass, and the second, larger button emits a more forceful stream for washing dishes, your hair, or quickly filling a water bottle before heading out on a hike. The water stream shuts off with a second press of the active button, otherwise it’ll automatically stop the flow after 90 seconds or 1.5L/3L to avoid depleting that precious resource.
It’s very small and portable with a battery good for about 150 liters. Here in my van, the rotating base prevents the stiff water tube from twisting the faucet away from the sink. Stacked on top of Dometic’s 11-liter Go Jug, where the water tube connects through that white CPC coupler on top. The light is very useful at night. Pictured here in a blacked-out room.
In my testing, pressing the smaller button extracts one liter of water in 41 seconds (at a loud 52dB from arm’s length), while the fast button yields one liter in just 24 seconds at an even louder 60dB. The low-flow mode is quieter than the original one-button Go Faucet, with a less annoying drone due to its lower pitch. However, it’s still too loud for vanlifers to sneak a glass of water at night while others sleep, although the bright LED light that illuminates the stream certainly makes it possible.
And as the name suggests, the base can now be rotated 360 degrees for more placement options. It’s a welcome change that should reduce the number of times I have to clean water off my kitchen counter when the stiff, crimp-resistant water hose — included with both Dometic models — caused the lightweight Go Faucet to twist away from the sink.
Thankfully, the new tap has also been migrated from Micro USB to a USB-C connector for charging, with a battery that’s still good for about 150 liters (about 40 gallons). The Recon 360 Faucet now also has a 4-stage LED meter on top that shows the remaining charge.
The faucet is slightly smaller but a little heavier than the Go model. It comes with a selection of metal pucks that can be adhered to a countertop or water jug to create a platform for the faucet’s magnetic base. The force of the new magnet feels about twice as strong as the older model, which should hold the faucet in place better when driving down bumpy roads. That’s good because I’ve sent my Go Faucet flying through the van about five or six times now, yet it just keeps on pumping. I hope the Recon 360 Faucet is just as durable.
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1 / 9 The water hose clicks into the Dometic Go Jug (shown here), Dometic’s new Recon Hardside Coolers, and even generic jerry cans that use universal CPC couplers.
The only real issue is the price: $149.99 for the Recon 360 Faucet, instead of $99.99 for the Go Faucet, which Dometic still sells. The Go Faucet is great, but the Recon 360 fixes so many little complaints that I think it’s worth every extra penny. Yes, there are cheaper and less-functional alternatives to be had on Amazon and AliExpress, but if you need to use a portable faucet regularly, like I do, then Dometic’s durable and feature-rich faucets won’t disappoint if you can afford them.
All photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge
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2025-12-23T05:44:07-05:00
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2025-12-23T14:42:39.123442
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Laptop Buying Guide (2025): How to Choose the Right PC (Step-by-Step Guide)
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https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-buy-the-right-laptop-for-you/
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Shopping for a laptop can be infuriating. Here’s how to sift through the acronyms, storage options, and extra features to find the best one for you.
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Buying a laptop is an exercise in confusion. Even if you know what everything means and exactly what you want, finding it can be difficult. Heck, just navigating the manufacturer's website to locate the model you want is frustrating. We hope this guide will help you traverse the morass of modern laptops. Below is a section on every major component you'll want to know about when you browse for the best laptop for you. We break down the jargon and explain things on a practical level, so you end up with a machine that's the right fit.
Updated December 2025: We've added the latest chip news from Intel, AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm. We also have details about the incoming memory shortage and the future of ChromeOS.
Understanding Use Cases and Budget
Before getting into the nitty-gritty, I always recommend starting with the biggest question first: What will you do with your new laptop? Is this a business machine meant primarily for office work and other simple tasks that can be done in a browser? Or perhaps you have a burgeoning interest in a hobby like PC gaming, video editing, coding, or design. Maybe one of those hobbies is more of a job for you, meaning you'll want something that is designed from the ground up to accelerate work in those applications. On the other side of the spectrum, maybe you plan to primarily use your laptop on the go, whether that's on a plane or in coffee shops. In that case, portability and battery life may be the most important factors to consider.
The answer to those questions will help point you in the right direction and ensure that you don't overspend on features or performance you don't need. For example, buying a MacBook Pro instead of a MacBook Air just because you have extra money to spend isn't a good idea. That brings us to the budget: $1,000 is an important price. There are many good options below that price, but it's the level at which you can expect laptops to feel premium and lack any significant compromises. It's the starting retail price of the starting MacBook Air, as well as several Windows laptops. Thanks to solid discounts, it's not uncommon to see these laptops dip in price to $700.
Speaking of Windows laptops, you'll have to be patient to find something under $600 that's still worth buying. If your budget is $500 or less, you're better off buying a Chromebook. They'll feel faster and lighter, and usually get longer battery life too, at least compared to similarly priced Windows laptops.
Which Operating System Is Best?
Courtesy of Apple
I won't waste your time repeating the same arguments you've probably already heard about why macOS is better than Windows, or vice versa. Both have strengths and weaknesses, and you likely already have opinions about them. The truth is that these operating systems are more similar today than they have ever been, not unlike Android and iOS. So if you're on the fence, I recommend opting for a laptop that runs whichever is most familiar.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 13:00:00 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:39.497323
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iBuyPower RDY Slate 9MP R01 Gaming PC Review: Great Value
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https://www.wired.com/review/ibuypower-rdy-slate-9mp-r01/
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iBuyPower’s prebuilt gaming desktop tries some new tricks but comes with a few flaws.
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The iBuyPower Slate system I spent the last month gaming on isn’t particularly flashy, nor is it a shining example of the heights that gaming PC brands can reach. It is, however, a totally usable system with minimal bloatware, and any qualms I have with some odd choices don’t harm the gaming performance.
At its listed price of almost $2,000, this configuration of the iBuyPower is charging you a modest premium just to install (almost) all of the components, but frequent sales and discounts make this a more palatable deal as the price gets lower.
It’s really only set back by some minor assembly issues, as well as parts that may limit future upgrades, which currently affects users at opposite ends of the PC building spectrum disproportionately. Given the current RAM pricing issues, this is a better value than ever, and perhaps cheaper than an off-the-shelf build.
Photograph: Brad Bourque
A Mixed Experience
First, the good stuff: The GPU is packaged separately from the rest of the system, which may sound odd, but I've found that’s one of the most common pain points when shipping a new gaming PC. I’ve seen system builders use expanding foam, special brackets, and folded cardboard supports, among other solutions, but packing the graphics cards in its original box is far simpler and safer, and the other ways of shipping a PC with an installed graphics card still require opening the system up anyway. I do wish the instructions were more specific to the case, particularly since the PCIe bracket might be a little fiddly for total novices, but anyone who has worked with gaming systems in the past shouldn't have any issues.
The case isn't particularly unique or eye-catching, but it does have a wide, slightly smoky glass side panel that helps give it a clean silhouette. The dark tint allows the lights underneath to shine a bit without the whole system being overtly gamer-coded, but also makes them extremely reflective. There are no screws holding it in place, it’s just press fit, but it’s nice and sturdy, and I didn’t worry about it falling out. Like most glass panels, they inhibit airflow, so iBuyPower has set the front fan array an inch or so back from the panel, and added mesh sections at the top and bottom, which helps alleviate the issue. Even so, I can’t imagine the fan directly behind the center glass panel is doing all that much.
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https://www.wired.com/feed/rss
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 12:00:00 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:39.733597
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Google’s and OpenAI’s Chatbots Can Strip Women in Photos Down to Bikinis
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https://www.wired.com/story/google-and-openais-chatbots-can-strip-women-in-photos-down-to-bikinis/
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Users of AI image generators are offering each other instructions on how to use the tech to alter pictures of women into realistic, revealing deepfakes.
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Some users of popular chatbots are generating bikini deepfakes using photos of fully clothed women as their source material. Most of these fake images appear to be generated without the consent of the women in the photos. Some of these same users are also offering advice to others on how to use the generative AI tools to strip the clothes off of women in photos and make them appear to be wearing bikinis.
Under a now-deleted Reddit post titled “gemini nsfw image generation is so easy,” users traded tips for how to get Gemini, Google’s generative AI model, to make pictures of women in revealing clothes. Many of the images in the thread were entirely AI, but one request stood out.
A user posted a photo of a woman wearing an Indian sari, asking for someone to “remove” her clothes and “put a bikini” on instead. Someone else replied with a deepfake image to fulfil the request. After WIRED notified Reddit about these posts and asked the company for comment, Reddit’s safety team removed the request and the AI deepfake.
“Reddit's sitewide rules prohibit nonconsensual intimate media, including the behavior in question,” said a spokesperson. The subreddit where this discussion occurred, r/ChatGPTJailbreak, had over 200,000 followers before Reddit banned it under the platform’s “don't break the site” rule.
As generative AI tools that make it easy to create realistic but false images continue to proliferate, users of the tools have continued to harass women with nonconsensual deepfake imagery. Millions have visited harmful “nudify” websites, designed for users to upload real photos of people and request for them to be undressed using generative AI.
With xAI’s Grok as a notable exception, most mainstream chatbots don’t usually allow the generation of NSFW images in AI outputs. These bots, including Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are also fitted with guardrails that attempt to block harmful generations.
In November, Google released Nano Banana Pro, a new imaging model that excels at tweaking existing photos and generating hyperrealistic images of people. OpenAI responded last week with its own updated imaging model, ChatGPT Images.
As these tools improve, likenesses may become more realistic when users are able to subvert guardrails.
In a separate Reddit thread about generating NSFW images, a user asked for recommendations on how to avoid guardrails when adjusting someone’s outfit to make the subject’s skirt appear tighter. In WIRED’s limited tests to confirm that these techniques worked on Gemini and ChatGPT, we were able to transform images of fully clothed women into bikini deepfakes using basic prompts written in plain English.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 11:30:00 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:39.974506
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Chinese Crypto Scammers on Telegram Are Fueling the Biggest Darknet Markets Ever
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https://www.wired.com/story/expired-tired-wired-chinese-scammer-crypto-markets/
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Online black markets once lurked in the shadows of the dark web. Today, they’ve moved onto public platforms like Telegram—and are racking up historic illicit fortunes.
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When black markets for drugs, guns, and all manner of contraband first sprang up on the dark web more than a decade ago, it seemed that cryptocurrency and the technical sophistication of the anonymity software Tor were the keys to carrying out billions of dollars worth of untouchable, illicit transactions online.
Now, all of that looks a bit passé. In 2025, all it takes to get away with tens of billions of dollars in black-market crypto deals is a messaging platform willing to host scammers and human traffickers, enough persistence to relaunch channels and accounts on that service when they’re occasionally banned, and fluency in Chinese.
The ecosystem of marketplaces for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers hosted on the messaging service Telegram have now grown to be bigger than ever before, according to a new analysis from the crypto tracing firm Elliptic. Despite a brief drop after Telegram banned two of the biggest such markets in early 2025, the two current top markets, known as Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee, are together enabling close to $2 billion a month in money-laundering transactions, sales of scam tools like stolen data, fake investment websites, and AI deepfake tools, as well as other black market services as varied as pregnancy surrogacy and teen prostitution.
expired: crypto markets for US drug dealers tired: crypto markets for Russian hackers wired: crypto markets for Chinese scammers Read more Expired/Tired/WIRED 2025 stories here.
The crypto romance and investment scams regrettably known as “pig butchering”—carried out largely from compounds in Southeast Asia staffed with thousands of human trafficking victims—have grown to become the world’s most lucrative form of cybercrime. They pull in around $10 billion annually from US victims alone, according to the FBI. By selling money-laundering services and other scam-related offerings to those operations, markets like Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee have grown in parallel to an immense scale.
“When you consider illicit use of crypto assets, there really isn’t anything larger right now,” says Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s cofounder and chief scientist.
In fact, these criminal trading zones aren’t simply the biggest online black markets of the moment, but the biggest in history. AlphaBay was once the biggest dark-web market for drugs, stolen data, and hacking tools. Described by the FBI as 10 times the size of the original Silk Road dark-web drug market at its peak, AlphaBay facilitated more than $1 billion in transactions over its two and a half years online. Hydra, a Russian dark-web market that also offered money-laundering services to cryptocurrency thieves and ransomware groups, did more than $5 billion in transactions over its seven years of operation.
By comparison, Huione Guarantee, the Chinese-language, Telegram-based market used largely by crypto scammers, facilitated a stunning $27 billion in transactions from 2021 to 2025, according to Elliptic, dwarfing every online black market before it, even as it operated in full public view on Telegram’s messaging platform. Elliptic has called it simply “the largest illicit online marketplace to have ever operated.”
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 11:00:00 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:40.212432
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Big Balls Was Just the Beginning
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https://www.wired.com/story/expired-tired-wired-doge/
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DOGE dominated the news this year as Elon Musk’s operatives shook up several US government agencies. It’s far from over.
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Since the beginning of the Trump administration, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the brainchild of billionaire Elon Musk, has gone through several iterations, leading periodically to claims—most recently from the director of the Office of Personnel Management—that the group doesn’t exist, or has vanished altogether.
But DOGE isn’t dead. Many of its original members are in full-time roles at various government agencies, and the new National Design Studio (NDS) is headed by Airbnb cofounder Joe Gebbia, a close ally of Musk’s.
Even if DOGE doesn’t survive another year, or until the US semiquincentennial—its original expiration date, per the executive order establishing it—the organization’s larger project will continue. DOGE from its inception was used for two things, both of which have continued apace: the destruction of the administrative state and the wholesale consolidation of data in service of concentrating power in the executive branch. It is a pattern that experts say could spill over beyond the Trump administration.
“I do think it has altered the norms about where legislative power ends and where executive power begins simply by ignoring those norms,” says Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “This is not necessarily going to be limited to Republican administrations. There are going to be future Democratic presidents who will say, ‘Well, DOGE was able to do this, why can't we?’”
The earliest days of DOGE were characterized by a chaotic blitz in which small teams of DOGE operatives, like the now infamous Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, were deployed across government agencies, demanding high-level access to sensitive data, firing workers, and cutting contracts. And while these moves were often radical, if not appearing to be illegal, as matters of bureaucratic operation, they were in service of what had been the Trump administration’s agenda all along.
expired: big balls tired: big balls wired: big balls Read more Expired/Tired/WIRED 2025 stories here.
Goals like cutting discretionary spending and drastically reducing the size of the federal workforce had already been championed by people like vice president JD Vance, who in 2021 called for the “de-Ba’athification” of the government, and Russell Vought, now the head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). These goals were also part of Project 2025. What DOGE brought wasn’t the end, but the means—its unique insight was that controlling technical infrastructure, something achievable with a small group, functionally amounted to controlling the government.
“There has never been a unit of government that was handed so much power to fundamentally upend government agencies with so little oversight,” says Moynihan.
Under the Constitution, the authority for establishing and funding federal agencies comes from Congress. But Trump and many of the people who support him, including Vought and Vance, adhere to what was until relatively recently a fringe view of how government should be run: the unitary executive theory. This posits that, much like the CEO of a company, the president has near complete control over the executive branch, of which federal agencies are a part—power more like that of a king than of the figure described in the nation’s founding documents.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 11:00:00 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:40.480201
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The tooth fairy just got reimagined for the tech-savvy generation
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/23/the-tooth-fairy-just-got-reimagined-for-the-tech-savvy-generation/
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Move over, Santa. Now there’s another magical character for kids to track: the Tooth Fairy. After making a personalized Tooth Fairy video for his nephew, Oliver Finel noticed a gap. While there are plenty of Santa trackers, nothing similar existed for the Tooth Fairy. Recognizing that Generation Alpha is growing up with interactive online experiences […]
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Move over, Santa. Now there’s another magical character for kids to track: the Tooth Fairy.
After making a personalized Tooth Fairy video for his nephew, Oliver Finel noticed a gap. While there are plenty of Santa trackers, nothing similar existed for the Tooth Fairy. Recognizing that Generation Alpha is growing up with interactive online experiences at their fingertips, he set out to create a new kind of adventure that families everywhere could enjoy.
Tooth Fairy Tracker features Kiki the Tooth Fairy as its central character. When a child loses a tooth, parents can visit the website and enter their email to receive notifications as Kiki begins her mission. Throughout the evening, children receive a series of video updates showing Kiki preparing for her journey, departing from headquarters, and traveling to collect the tooth. These updates may include flight speed information, vlog-style check-ins, and cute selfies.
The experience is hosted entirely on the site, with countdowns to each new video, making it feel like an exciting day-long event that builds anticipation for bedtime. Plus, Finel believes the evening updates help motivate children to brush their teeth and prepare for sleep. Then, the final update takes place in the morning, when the child is congratulated and can check their special gift under their pillow.
Image Credits:Kiki the Tooth Fairy/Oliver Finel
Launched in October, the website is gearing up to launch a redesign soon. Finel explains that while the core experience will remain unchanged, the site will feature “a more playful design and a few added details to make it more immersive for kids.”
Looking ahead to 2026, Finel is preparing to launch a revamped version of the tracker featuring even more personalization. Kiki will say each child’s name, mention their hobbies, and include their photo in every video. Kids will also receive custom certificates for each lost tooth. Another upcoming feature entails oral-care videos where Kiki teaches children healthy brushing habits.
The enhanced experience will be available via a new subscription for $20, which includes 6 Kiki visits.
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Additionally, Finel plans to adapt the product for families in Latin America and Western Europe, making it more culturally relevant. For example, while the Tooth Fairy is most popular in the U.S., the Tooth Mouse is popular in France, Spain, and Russia.
He also hopes to partner with pediatric dentists, so dental offices can offer the Kiki the Tooth Fairy experience to young patients. Pre-appointment videos can help ease anxiety, while post-visit rewards encourage kids to return to the dentist and make the experience more positive.
Other long-term roadmap plans include branded toothbrushes and toothpaste, each accompanied by a personalized video of Kiki choosing the bristles for the toothbrush, picking colors, and assembling it just for the child.
The Tooth Fairy tracker is free to use and requires no app or account.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 14:00:00 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:40.631760
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OpenAI says AI browsers may always be vulnerable to prompt injection attacks
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/22/openai-says-ai-browsers-may-always-be-vulnerable-to-prompt-injection-attacks/
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OpenAI says prompt injections will always be a risk for AI browsers with agentic capabilities, like Atlas. But the firm is beefing up its cybersecurity with an "LLM-based automated attacker."
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Even as OpenAI works to harden its Atlas AI browser against cyberattacks, the company admits that prompt injections, a type of attack that manipulates AI agents to follow malicious instructions often hidden in web pages or emails, is a risk that’s not going away anytime soon — raising questions about how safely AI agents can operate on the open web.
“Prompt injection, much like scams and social engineering on the web, is unlikely to ever be fully ‘solved,’” OpenAI wrote in a Monday blog post detailing how the firm is beefing up Atlas’ armor to combat the unceasing attacks. The company conceded that “agent mode” in ChatGPT Atlas “expands the security threat surface.”
OpenAI launched its ChatGPT Atlas browser in October, and security researchers rushed to publish their demos, showing it was possible to write a few words in Google Docs that were capable of changing the underlying browser’s behavior. That same day, Brave published a blog post explaining that indirect prompt injection is a systematic challenge for AI-powered browsers, including Perplexity’s Comet.
OpenAI isn’t alone in recognizing that prompt-based injections aren’t going away. The U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre earlier this month warned that prompt injection attacks against generative AI applications “may never be totally mitigated,” putting websites at risk of falling victim to data breaches. The U.K. government agency advised cyber professionals to reduce the risk and impact of prompt injections, rather than think the attacks can be “stopped.”
For OpenAI’s part, the company said: “We view prompt injection as a long-term AI security challenge, and we’ll need to continuously strengthen our defenses against it.”
The company’s answer to this Sisyphean task? A proactive, rapid-response cycle that the firm says is showing early promise in helping discover novel attack strategies internally before they are exploited “in the wild.”
That’s not entirely different from what rivals like Anthropic and Google have been saying: that to fight against the persistent risk of prompt-based attacks, defenses must be layered and continuously stress-tested. Google’s recent work, for example, focuses on architectural and policy-level controls for agentic systems.
But where OpenAI is taking a different tact is with its “LLM-based automated attacker.” This attacker is basically a bot that OpenAI trained, using reinforcement learning, to play the role of a hacker that looks for ways to sneak malicious instructions to an AI agent.
The bot can test the attack in simulation before using it for real, and the simulator shows how the target AI would think and what actions it would take if it saw the attack. The bot can then study that response, tweak the attack, and try again and again. That insight into the target AI’s internal reasoning is something outsiders don’t have access to, so, in theory, OpenAI’s bot should be able to find flaws faster than a real-world attacker would.
It’s a common tactic in AI safety testing: build an agent to find the edge cases and test against them rapidly in simulation.
“Our [reinforcement learning]-trained attacker can steer an agent into executing sophisticated, long-horizon harmful workflows that unfold over tens (or even hundreds) of steps,” wrote OpenAI. “We also observed novel attack strategies that did not appear in our human red teaming campaign or external reports.”
Image Credits:OpenAI
In a demo (pictured in part above), OpenAI showed how its automated attacker slipped a malicious email into a user’s inbox. When the AI agent later scanned the inbox, it followed the hidden instructions in the email and sent a resignation message instead of drafting an out-of-office reply. But following the security update, “agent mode” was able to successfully detect the prompt injection attempt and flag it to the user, according to the company.
The company says that while prompt injection is hard to secure against in a foolproof way, it’s leaning on large-scale testing and faster patch cycles to harden its systems before they show up in real-world attacks.
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to share whether the update to Atlas’ security has resulted in a measurable reduction in successful injections, but says the firm has been working with third parties to harden Atlas against prompt injection since before launch.
Rami McCarthy, principal security researcher at cybersecurity firm Wiz, says that reinforcement learning is one way to continuously adapt to attacker behavior, but it’s only part of the picture.
“A useful way to reason about risk in AI systems is autonomy multiplied by access,” McCarthy told TechCrunch.
“Agentic browsers tend to sit in a challenging part of that space: moderate autonomy combined with very high access,” said McCarthy. “Many current recommendations reflect that trade-off. Limiting logged-in access primarily reduces exposure, while requiring review of confirmation requests constrains autonomy.”
Those are two of OpenAI’s recommendations for users to reduce their own risk, and a spokesperson said Atlas is also trained to get user confirmation before sending messages or making payments. OpenAI also suggests that users give agents specific instructions, rather than providing them access to your inbox and telling them to “take whatever action is needed.”
“Wide latitude makes it easier for hidden or malicious content to influence the agent, even when safeguards are in place,” per OpenAI.
While OpenAI says protecting Atlas users against prompt injections is a top priority, McCarthy invites some skepticism as to the return on investment for risk-prone browsers.
“For most everyday use cases, agentic browsers don’t yet deliver enough value to justify their current risk profile,” McCarthy told TechCrunch. “The risk is high given their access to sensitive data like email and payment information, even though that access is also what makes them powerful. That balance will evolve, but today the trade-offs are still very real.”
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Mon, 22 Dec 2025 22:11:19 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:40.757908
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Alphabet to buy Intersect Power to bypass energy grid bottlenecks
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/22/alphabet-to-buy-intersect-power-to-bypass-energy-grid-bottlenecks/
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Alphabet is set to pay $4.75 billion in cash, plus debt, for the data center and clean energy developer.
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In Brief
Google parent Alphabet has agreed to buy Intersect Power, a data center and clean energy developer, for $4.75 billion in cash, plus the assumption of the company’s debt.
The acquisition, which was announced Monday, will help Alphabet expand its power-generation capacity alongside new data centers without having to rely on local utilities that are struggling to keep up with the demand of AI companies. Securing access to energy that powers data centers has become a critical part of training AI models.
Alphabet previously held a minority stake in Intersect Power after Google and TPG Rise Climate led an $800 million strategic funding round in the company last December. That partnership set a target of $20 billion in total investment by 2030.
The acquisition includes Intersect’s future development projects but excludes its existing operation, which will be bought out by other investors and managed as a separate company.
Intersect’s new data parks, which are essentially locations next to wind, solar, and battery power, are expected to be operational late next year and fully completed by 2027, Google said when it announced its minority investment.
The transaction is expected to close in the first half of next year.
Google will be the primary user. However, Intersect’s campuses are designed as industrial parks that can host other companies’ AI chips alongside Google’s.
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Mon, 22 Dec 2025 21:10:54 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:40.865345
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Trump admin halts 6 GW of offshore wind leases again
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/22/trump-admin-halts-6-gw-of-offshore-wind-leases-again/
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The move is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to delay the construction of 6 gigawatts of offshore wind near a hotspot of data center development.
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Two weeks after a judge struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order that blocked offshore wind development, the White House is again pausing leases for five large projects, this time citing concerns over radar interference.
“Today’s action addresses emerging national security risks, including the rapid evolution of the relevant adversary technologies, and the vulnerabilities created by large-scale offshore wind projects with proximity near our east coast population centers,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Monday in a statement.
The affected projects include Revolution Wind in Connecticut and Rhode Island, Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, Vineyard Wind in Massachusetts, and Empire Wind and Sunrise Wind, both of which are in New York. In total, these projects represent nearly 6 gigawatts of generating capacity for the Eastern seaboard, a hotspot of data center development.
The Department of the Interior justified the action by citing unclassified government reports — it didn’t say which agency had produced them, nor did it link to them — along with “recently completed classified reports” from the Pentagon. The department said it would give the government time to work with stakeholders to address national security concerns.
The statement did not acknowledge the ongoing work government and wind developers have been doing to address national security concerns, specifically related to radar, for years.
The report the Interior Department is likely referring to was issued by the Department of Energy in February 2024, and it lists a number of projects that were then underway to mitigate the problem of radar interference. (Other reports over the years have been commissioned to address the same concerns, some dating back to the previous Trump administration.)
“To date, no mitigation technology has been able to fully restore the technical performance of impacted radars,” the 2024 report said. “However, the development and use of radar interference mitigation techniques, and collaboration both among federal agencies and between the federal government and the wind industry have enabled federal radar agencies to continue to perform their missions without significant impacts, and have also enabled significant wind energy deployments throughout the United States.”
Techcrunch event Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. San Francisco | WAITLIST NOW
Radar interference caused by wind turbines is nothing new. Researchers have been studying the phenomenon for well over a decade, and they’ve developed a range of strategies to mitigate any problems.
Wind turbines present a unique challenge to radar operators.
“The motion of a wind turbine gives it a complex Doppler signature,” Nicholas O’Donoughue, a senior engineer at the Rand Corporation, told TechCrunch.
Doppler refers to the change in frequency of a wave like a radar signal caused by a moving object. As a wind turbine’s blades sweep through their arc, they are alternately moving toward and away from the radar station. The angle and speed of the blades can have an effect, too.
Those, along with other considerations, can “challenge the detection of any targets that are near the wind farm,” O’Donoughue said.
But radar systems can filter out signals that result from wind farms. “The primary approach is to use adaptive processing algorithms, such as Space-Time Adaptive Processing, to learn the structure of a wind farm’s interference,” he said.
“Over time, the reflections from a wind farm can be processed to look for patterns, which can then be matched and suppressed. This process is analogous to how modern adaptive noise cancellation headphones work, albeit more complicated.” Objects with a low radar cross section can still slip through, he noted.
Because of that, many wind farms are already built with radar installations in mind. “The most basic and widely employed mitigation method is wind farm siting, such as modifying the layout of a proposed wind farm to keep the wind turbines out of the line-of-sight of the radar,” the 2024 Energy department report said.
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Mon, 22 Dec 2025 20:52:31 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:40.991369
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Paramount renews bid for Warner Bros, ensuring $40B Larry Ellison backing
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/22/paramount-renews-bid-for-warner-bros-ensuring-40-billion-larry-ellison-backing/
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It's the latest attempt by one major Hollywood superpower to acquire another.
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The war for the future of Warner Brothers continues, as Paramount Skydance announced Monday an amended all-cash offer for the legacy movie studio. The offer includes an “irrevocable personal guarantee” from a major backer, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, to provide tens of billions in equity financing for the deal. It’s the latest move by Ellison’s son, David Ellison — the CEO of Paramount Skydance — to pry the potential acquisition loose from his competition, the streaming giant Netflix.
“Larry Ellison has agreed to provide an irrevocable personal guarantee of $40.4 billion of the equity financing for the offer and any damages claims against Paramount,” a Paramount press release published Monday states. The proposed equity financing had previously been included in Paramount’s offer, but the elder Ellison’s “personal guarantee” is new, the press release states.
The revamped offer comes a mere week after the WBD board rejected Paramount’s initial bid, favoring, instead, a previous deal with Netflix. That deal was announced on December 5, outlining how the streamer would purchase the movie studio via a cash and stock option valued at $27.75 per WBD share, and a total enterprise value of $82.7 billion.
Three days after the Netflix deal was announced, Paramount launched a hostile bid valued at $108.4 billion, offering $30 per share. The WBD board rejected this offer, calling it “illusory” and claiming that Paramount had misled shareholders about the proposed deal’s financing. At the time of the rejection, the board noted that the deal with Netflix was “a binding agreement with enforceable commitments, with no need for any equity financing and robust debt commitments.”
Now, Paramount’s amended offer has been designed to “address WBD’s stated concerns regarding Paramount’s superior offer,” Paramount said. In October, CNBC reported that, prior to the Netflix deal, WBD had previously rejected three different takeover offers from Paramount.
“Paramount has repeatedly demonstrated its commitment to acquiring WBD,” said Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, in Monday’s press release. “Our $30 per share, fully financed all-cash offer was on December 4, and continues to be, the superior option to maximize value for WBD shareholders. Because of our commitment to investment and growth, our acquisition will be superior for all WBD stakeholders, as a catalyst for greater content production, greater theatrical output, and more consumer choice.”
He added: “We expect the board of directors of WBD to take the necessary steps to secure this value-enhancing transaction and preserve and strengthen an iconic Hollywood treasure for the future.”
TechCrunch reached out to Warner Bros. Discovery for comment.
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Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:53:33 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:41.104369
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The Splay is a subpar monitor but an exciting portable projector
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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/the-splay-is-a-subpar-monitor-but-an-exciting-portable-projector/
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Splay can be a monitor and takes a lot of the stress out of projectors, too.
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Since I’m fascinated by new display technologies and by improving image quality, I’ve never been a fan of home projectors. Projectors lack the image quality compared to good TVs and monitors, and they’re pretty needy. Without getting into the specific requirements of different models, you generally want a darker room with a large, blank wall for a projector to look its best. That can be a lot to ask for, especially in small, densely decorated homes like mine.
That said, a projector can be a space-efficient alternative to a big-screen TV or help you watch TV or movies outside. A projector can be versatile when paired with the right space, especially if that projector makes sure the “right space” is included in the device.
The Splay was crowdfunded in 2021, and its maker, Arovia, describes it as the “first fully collapsible monitor and projector.” In short, it’s a portable projector with an integrated fabric shroud that can serve as a big-screen (24.5 or 34.5 inches diagonally, depending on the model) portable monitor. Or, you can take off the fabric shroud and use the Splay as an ultra-short-throw projector and cast a display that measures up to 80 inches diagonally onto a wall.
At its core, the Splay is a projector, meaning it can’t compete with high-end LCD-LED or OLED monitors. It costs $1,300; the device is currently sold out, but an Arovia representative told me that it will be restocked this month.
Here’s how the device works, per one of Arovia’s patents
The … collapsible, portable display device, has a housing member having a sliding member aligned on the exterior of the housing member, and sliding along the exterior of said housing member between two operating positions, a collapsible screen containing one or more sheets of flexible, wrinkle resistant silicone or rubber materials containing optical enhancing components and capable of displaying an image when in an expanded operating position, and multiple collapsible members connected to said screen …
Arovia’s representative pointed to the Splay being used for mobile workspaces, gaming, and enterprise use cases, like trade shows.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 12:30:06 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:41.578541
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In a surprise announcement, Tory Bruno is out as CEO of United Launch Alliance
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https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/in-a-surprise-announcement-tory-bruno-is-out-as-ceo-of-united-launch-alliance/
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"It has been a great privilege to lead ULA through its transformation and to bring Vulcan into service."
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Tory Bruno, a veteran engineer and aerospace industry executive, has resigned from the top job at United Launch Alliance after more than a decade competing against the growing dominance of SpaceX, the company announced Monday.
The news of Bruno’s sudden resignation was unexpected. His tenure was marked by a decline in ULA’s market share as rival SpaceX competed for and won ever-larger US government launch contracts. More recently, Bruno oversaw the successful debut of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, followed by struggles to ramp up the new rocket’s launch cadence.
Bruno had a 30-year career as an engineer and general manager for Lockheed Martin’s ballistic missile programs before taking over as president and CEO of United Launch Alliance in August 2014. He arrived as SpaceX started making inroads with its partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket, and ULA’s leading position in the US launch market looked to be in doubt.
In his first year, Bruno announced what would become the Vulcan rocket and the phaseout of ULA’s legacy Atlas and Delta launch vehicles. He also selected Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, then an emerging space company, to build the Vulcan rocket’s booster engines, bypassing the industry’s established propulsion contractor.
The decision to develop a new rocket and the selection of the engine to power it proved to be correct. The Atlas V rocket, now nearing retirement, is powered by Russian engines, a nonstarter in today’s geopolitical reality, and the already-retired Delta IV launch vehicle was prohibitively expensive. The Vulcan rocket has been successful in all three of its flights so far, and the performance of Blue Origin’s liquid-fueled BE-4 engine has, by all accounts, been exceptional.
Hard times at the rocket ranch
But ULA’s potential for regaining its position atop the launch market was hamstrung by the company’s decision to make the Vulcan rocket fully expendable. There are long-term plans to recover and reuse the rocket’s main engines, but not the entire booster. And the new rocket’s entry into service has not been smooth. The Vulcan rocket flew just once this year after receiving certification from the US Space Force to carry national security satellites into orbit, well short of Bruno’s goal of flying the new launcher up to 10 times.
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Mon, 22 Dec 2025 23:51:44 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:42.061462
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Call of Duty co-creator and Battlefield lead Vince Zampella dies in car crash
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https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/vince-zampella-developer-of-call-of-duty-and-battlefield-games-dies-at-55/
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He had worked on Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Titanfall, and Battlefield.
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Vince Zampella, a video game developer who has co-created or helmed some of the most popular franchises in the world, died in a car crash on a Los Angeles highway at 12:45 pm Pacific time on Sunday, December 21. He was 55 years old.
According to the California Highway Patrol, Zampella was in a car on Angeles Crest Highway when the vehicle veered off the road and crashed into a concrete barrier. No other vehicles were reported to be part of the crash.
A passenger was ejected from the vehicle, while the driver was trapped inside after the vehicle caught fire. The driver died at the scene, and the passenger died after being taken to the hospital. The report did not indicate whether Zampella was the passenger or the driver.
Angeles Crest Highway is a scenic road under the San Gabriel Mountains on the eastern end of LA and is commonly used for Sunday leisure drives. The vehicle involved in the crash was a 2026 Ferrari 296 GTS.
A storied career in game development
Early in his career, Zampella worked at SegaSoft and Panasonic, and he was the lead designer for the influential World War II shooter Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, which was released in 2002. But it was the famed studio Infinity Ward that turned him into a household name for gamers. He co-founded Infinity Ward with Jason West and Grant Collier in 2002.
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Mon, 22 Dec 2025 21:35:51 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:42.238391
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Safety panel says NASA should have taken Starliner incident more seriously
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https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/12/safety-panel-says-nasa-should-have-taken-starliner-incident-more-seriously/
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"This particular anomaly deserves to be right up front and center for quite some time."
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For the better part of two months last year, most of us had no idea how serious the problems were with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft docked at the International Space Station. A safety advisory panel found this uncertainty also filtered through NASA’s workforce.
On its first Crew Test Flight, Boeing’s Starliner delivered NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the space station in June 2024. They were the first people to fly to space on a Starliner spacecraft after more than a decade of development and setbacks. The astronauts expected to stay at the ISS for one or two weeks, but ended up remaining in orbit for nine months after NASA officials determined it was too risky to return them to Earth in the Boeing-built crew capsule. Wilmore and Williams flew back to Earth last March on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
The Starliner capsule was beset by problems with its maneuvering thrusters and pernicious helium leaks on its 27-hour trip from the launch pad to the ISS. For a short time, Starliner commander Wilmore lost his ability to control the movements of his spacecraft as it moved in for docking at the station in June 2024. Engineers determined that some of the thrusters were overheating and eventually recovered most of their function, allowing Starliner to dock with the ISS.
“There was concern in real time that without recovery of some control, neither a docking nor a deorbit could be controllable, and that could have led to loss of vehicle and crew,” said Charlie Precourt, a former space shuttle commander and now a member of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP). “Given the severity of this anomaly, NASA wisely and correctly used the safe haven of the ISS to conduct testing and engineering on the ground to analyze the various recovery options.”
Confusion and uncertainty
Throughout that summer, managers from NASA and Boeing repeatedly stated that the spacecraft was safe to bring Wilmore and Williams home if the station needed to be evacuated in an emergency. But officials on the ground ordered extensive testing to understand the root of the problems. Buried behind the headlines, there was a real chance NASA managers would decide—as they ultimately did—not to put astronauts on Boeing’s crew capsule when it was time to depart the ISS.
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Mon, 22 Dec 2025 21:11:11 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:42.419125
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World’s largest shadow library made a 300TB copy of Spotify’s most streamed songs
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https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/worlds-largest-shadow-library-brags-it-scraped-300tb-of-spotify-music-metadata/
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Spotify is reportedly investigating how much music Anna’s Archive scraped.
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The world’s largest shadow library—which is increasingly funded by AI developers—shocked the Internet this weekend by announcing it had “backed up Spotify” and started distributing 300 terabytes of metadata and music files in bulk torrents.
According to Anna’s Archive, the data grab represents more than 99 percent of listens on Spotify, making it “the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks.” It’s also “the world’s first ‘preservation archive’ for music which is fully open,” with 86 million music files, the archive boasted.
The music files supposedly represent about 37 percent of songs available on Spotify as of July 2025. The scraped files were prioritized by popularity, with Anna’s Archive weeding out many songs that are never streamed or are of poor quality, such as AI-generated songs.
On Monday, Spotify told Android Authority on Monday that it was investigating whether Anna’s Archive had actually scraped its platform “at scale,” as its blog claimed.
“An investigation into unauthorized access identified that a third party scraped public metadata and used illicit tactics to circumvent DRM to access some of the platform’s audio files,” Spotify said. “We are actively investigating the incident.”
It’s unclear how much Spotify data was actually scraped, Android Authority noted, or if the company will possibly pursue legal action to take down the torrents. Asked for comment, a Spotify spokesperson told Ars that “Spotify has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping.”
For Anna’s Archive, the temptation to scrape the data may have been too much after stumbling upon “a way to scrape Spotify at scale,” supposedly “a while ago.”
“We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation,” the archive said. Scraping Spotify data was a “great start,” they said, toward building an “authoritative list of torrents aiming to represent all music ever produced.”
A list like that “does not exist for music,” the archive said, and would be akin to LibGen—which was used by tech giants like Meta and startups like Anthropic to notoriously pirate book datasets to train AI.
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Mon, 22 Dec 2025 19:34:22 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:42:42.595956
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Pirate group Anna’s Archive says it has scraped 86 million songs from Spotify
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/23/pirate-group-annas-archive-says-it-has-scraped-86-million-songs-from-spotify/
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Spotify says it has identified and disabled the user accounts involved in the scraping.
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In Brief
Pirate activist group Anna’s Archive says it has scraped the entirety of Spotify’s music library, and plans to release it through torrents.
Spotify has around 256 million tracks, and the Anna’s Archive collection contains metadata for an estimated 99.9% of them. The group archived approximately 86 million music files, accounting for roughly 99.6% of all listens, with a total size of nearly 300 terabytes. So far, only metadata has been released, not any actual music.
“This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a ‘preservation archive’ for music,” the group wrote in a blog post. “Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start.”
Spotify told TechCrunch that it has identified and disabled the user accounts involved in the scraping.
“We’ve implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior,” a Spotify spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights.”
Anna’s Archive says it normally focuses on text, like books and papers, but its mission to “preserve humanity’s knowledge and culture doesn’t distinguish among media types.”
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 14:51:40 +0000
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2025-12-23T14:56:33.707163
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How Last Samurai Standing adds kinetic action to the Battle Royale formula
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https://www.theverge.com/streaming/847992/last-samurai-standing-netflix-interview-junichi-okada
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Last Samurai Standing begins with a familiar premise. Desperate samurai dispossessed by the restoration of the emperor enter into a deadly game for a life-changing cash prize - all for the entertainment of anonymous elites. Unlike its inspirations Battle Royale and Squid Game, however, Last Samurai Standing's violence is chaotic, fast-paced, and kinetic, though it […]
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Last Samurai Standing begins with a familiar premise. Desperate samurai dispossessed by the restoration of the emperor enter into a deadly game for a life-changing cash prize — all for the entertainment of anonymous elites. Unlike its inspirations Battle Royale and Squid Game, however, Last Samurai Standing’s violence is chaotic, fast-paced, and kinetic, though it hides a careful choreography that makes the series a more electric proposition than its predecessors.
Viewers have Junichi Okada to thank for that. As well as starring in and producing Last Samurai Standing, he serves as the series’ action planner. Many will be familiar with the results of an action planner’s work — sometimes called an action director, elsewhere a “coordinator,” and even “choreographer” — though perhaps not what the role entails. In the case of Last Samurai Standing, it’s a role that touches on nearly every aspect of the production, from the story to the action itself.
“I was involved from the script stage, thinking about what kind of action we wanted and how we would present it in the context of this story,” Okada tells The Verge. “If the director [Michihito Fujii] said, ‘I want to shoot this kind of battle scene,’ I would then think through the content and concept, design the scene, and ultimately translate that into script pages.”
The close relationship between the writer and director extends to other departments, too. Though an action planner’s role starts with managing fight scenes and stunt performers, they also liaise with camera, wardrobe, makeup, and even editorial departments to ensure fight scenes cohere with the rest of the production.
Image: Netflix
It’s a role which might appear a natural progression for Okada, who is certified to teach Kali and Jeet Kune Do — a martial art conceived by Bruce Lee — and holds multiple black belts in jiujitsu. Though the roots of his progression into action planning can be traced back further, to 1995 when he became the youngest member of J-pop group V6.
“Dance experience connects directly to creating action,” he says. “[In both] rhythm and control of the body are extremely important.” Joining V6 at the age of 15, that experience has made Okada conscious of how he moves in relation to a camera during choreography, how he is seen within the structure of a shot, and, critical to action planning, how to navigate all of that safely from a young age.
That J-pop stardom also offered avenues into acting, initially in roles you might expect for a young pop star: comic heartthrobs and sitcom sons. But he was steadily able to broaden his output. A starring turn in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Hana followed, as did voice acting in Studio Ghibli’s Tales From Earthsea and From Up on Poppy Hill. A more telling departure was a starring role in 2007’s SP, in which he played a rookie in a police bodyguard unit, for which he trained for several years under shootfighting instructor Yorinaga Nakamura.
“What I care about is whether audiences feel that ‘this man really lives here as a samurai.’”
In the years since, Okada has cemented himself as one of Japan’s most recognizable actors, hopping between action starring roles in The Fable to sweeping period epics like Sekigahara. Those two genres converge in his Last Samurai Standing role of Shujiro, a former Shogunate samurai now reduced to poverty, working through his PTSD and reckoning with his bloodthirsty past in the game. These days, it’s less of a concern that the character butts up against his past idol image, he suggests. “What I care about is whether audiences feel that ‘this man really lives here as a samurai.’”
For Okada’s work on Last Samurai Standing, as both producer and action planner, that involved lacing high-octane but believable action with the respect for history and character studies of the period dramas he loves. “Rather than being 100 percent faithful to historical accuracy,” he adds, “my goal was to focus on entertainment and story, while letting the ‘DNA’ and beauty of Japanese period drama gently float up in the background.”
A focus on what he defines as “‘dō’ — movement,” pure entertainment that “never lets the audience get bored” punctuated — with “‘ma,’” the active emptiness that connects those frenetic moments. Both can be conversations, even if one uses words and another communicates dialogue through sword blows. This is most apparent when Shujiro faces his former comrade Sakura (Yasushi Fuchikami) inside a claustrophobic bank vault that serves as a charnel house for the game’s less fortunate contestants.
“The whole battle is divided into three sequences,” Okada says. The first starts with a moment of almost perfect stillness, a deep breath, before the two launch into battle. “A fight where pride and mutual respect collide,” he says, “and where the speed of the techniques reaches a level that really surprises the audience.” It’s all captured in one, zooming take with fast, tightly choreographed action reminiscent of Donnie Yen and Wu Jing in Kill Zone.
So intense is their duel that both shatter multiple swords. The next phase sees them lash out in a more desperate and brutal manner with whatever weapons they find. Finally, having fought to a weary stalemate, the fight becomes, Okada concludes, “a kind of duel where their stubbornness and will are fully exposed” as they hack at each other with shattered blades and spear fragments.
Image: Netflix
It’s a rhythm that many fights in Last Samurai Standing follow, driven by a string of physical and emotional considerations that form the basis of an action planner’s tool kit: how and why someone fights based on who they are and their environment. Here it is two former samurai in an elegant and terrifyingly fast-paced duel. Elsewhere we see skill matched against brutality, or inexperience against expertise.
“I define a clear concept for each sequence,” Okada says, before he opens those concepts up to the broader team. From there, he might add notes, but in Last Samurai Standing, action is a collaborative affair. “We keep refining,” he says. “It’s a back-and-forth process of shaping the sequence using both the ideas the team brings and the choreography I create myself.”
There is a third factor which Okada believes is the series’ most defining. “If we get to continue the story,” he says, “I’d love to explore how much more we can lean into ‘sei’ — stillness, and bring in even more of a classical period drama feel.”
As much of a triumph of action as Last Samurai Standing is, its quietest moments are the ones that stay with you. The charged looks between Shujiro and Iroha (Kaya Kiyohara) or their shuddering fright when confronted with specters of their past. Most of all, Shujiro watching his young ward, Futaba Katsuki (Yumia Fujisaki), dance before a waterlogged torii as mist hovers. These pauses are what elevate and invigorate the breathless action above spectacle.
The pauses are also emblematic of the balance that Last Samurai Standing strikes between its period setting and pushing the boundaries of action, all to inject new excitement into the genre. “Japan is a country that values tradition and everything it has built up over time. That’s why moments where you try to update things are always difficult,” Okada says. “But right now, we’re in the middle of that transformation.”
That is an evolution that Okada hopes to support through his work, both in front of and behind the camera. If he can create avenues for new generations of talent to carry Japanese media to a broader audience and his team to achieve greater success on a global stage, “that would make me very happy,” he says. “I want to keep doing whatever I can to help make that possible.”
The first season of Last Samurai Standing is streaming on Netflix now, and a second season was just confirmed.
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https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml
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2025-12-23T10:00:00-05:00
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2025-12-23T15:30:50.027059
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Inside Uzbekistan’s nationwide license plate surveillance system
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/23/inside-uzbekistans-nationwide-license-plate-surveillance-system/
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The Uzbek government's national license plate scanning system was discovered exposed to the internet for anyone to access without a password.
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Across Uzbekistan, a network of about a hundred banks of high-resolution roadside cameras continuously scan vehicles’ license plates and their occupants, sometimes thousands a day, looking for potential traffic violations. Cars running red lights; drivers not wearing their seatbelts; and unlicensed vehicles driving at night, to name a few.
The driver of one of the most surveilled vehicles in the system was tracked over six months as he traveled between the eastern city of Chirchiq, through the capital Tashkent, and in the nearby settlement of Eshonguzar, often multiple times a week.
We know this because the country’s sprawling license plate-tracking surveillance system has been left exposed to the internet.
Security researcher Anurag Sen, who discovered the security lapse, found the license plate surveillance system exposed online without a password, allowing anyone access to the data within. It’s not clear how long the surveillance system has been public, but artifacts from the system show that its database was set up in September 2024, and traffic monitoring began in mid-2025.
The exposure offers a rare glimpse into how such national license plate surveillance systems work, the data they collect, and how they can be used to track the whereabouts of any one of the millions of people across an entire country.
The lapse also reveals the security and privacy risks associated with the mass monitoring of vehicles and their owners, at a time when the United States is building up its nationwide array of license plate readers, many of which are provided by surveillance giant Flock. Earlier this week, independent news outlet 404 Media reported that Flock left dozens of its own license plate reading cameras publicly exposed to the web, allowing a reporter to watch themselves being tracked in real time by a Flock camera.
Sen said he found the exposed Uzbek license plate surveillance system earlier this month, and shared details of the security lapse with TechCrunch. Sen told TechCrunch that the system’s database reveals the real-world locations of the cameras, and contains millions of photos and raw camera video footage of passing vehicles.
The system is run by the Department of Public Security in Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs in Tashkent, which did not respond to emails requesting comment about the security lapse during December.
Representatives of the Uzbek government in Washington D.C. and New York also did not respond to TechCrunch’s emails about the exposure. Uzbekistan’s computer emergency readiness team, UZCERT, did not respond to an alert about the system, except for an automated reply acknowledging receipt of our email.
The surveillance system remains exposed to the web at the time of writing.
The system refers to itself as an “intelligence traffic management system” by Maxvision, a Shenzhen, China-based maker of internet-connected traffic technologies, border inspection systems, and surveillance products. In a video on LinkedIn, the company says its cameras can record the “entire illegal process,” and can “display illegal and passing information in real-time.”
According to its brochure, Maxvision exports its security and surveillance tech to countries across the globe, including Burkina Faso, Kuwait, Oman, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan.
Image Credits:TechCrunch (screenshot)
TechCrunch’s analysis of the data inside the exposed system revealed at least a hundred cameras located across major Uzbek cities, as well as busy junctions and other important transit routes.
We plotted the GPS coordinates of the cameras, and found banks of license plate readers in Tashkent, the cities of Jizzakh and Qarshi in the south, and Namangan in the east. Some of the cameras are located in rural areas, such as on routes near the once-disputed parts of the borders between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
Image Credits:TechCrunch (screenshot) Image Credits:TechCrunch (screenshot)
In Tashkent, the country’s largest city, the cameras can be found at more than a dozen locations. Some of these cameras are even visible on Google Street View.
The cameras, some which watermark their footage with the name of the Singapore camera maker Holowits, capture video footage and still images of vehicles violating rules in 4K resolution.
Image Credits:TechCrunch (screenshot)
The exposed system allows access to its web-based interface, which contains a dashboard allowing operators to examine footage of traffic violations. The dashboard contains zoomed-in photos and the raw video footage of violations, as well as surrounding vehicles. (TechCrunch redacted the license plates and vehicle occupants prior to publication.)
Image Credits:TechCrunch (screenshot)
The exposure of Uzbekistan’s national license plate reading system is the latest example of a security lapse involving road surveillance cameras.
Earlier this year, Wired reported that more than 150 license plate readers around the United States and the real-time vehicle data they collect were exposed to the internet without any security.
Exposed license plate readers are not a new phenomena. In 2019, TechCrunch reported that over a hundred license plate readers were searchable and accessible from the internet, allowing anyone to access the data within. Some had been exposed for years, despite security researchers warning law enforcement agencies that these systems could be accessed from the web.
To securely contact this reporter, you can reach out using Signal via the username: zackwhittaker.1337
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:05:49 +0000
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2025-12-23T15:30:50.347120
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F1’s new engines are causing consternation over compression ratios
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https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/12/f1s-new-engines-are-causing-consternation-over-compression-ratios/
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A loophole in the rules might have given Mercedes and Red Bull a big advantage.
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Compression ratios
At issue is the engines’ compression ratio, which compares the volume of the cylinder when the piston is at top dead center with the volume when the piston is at its closest to the crank. Under the 2014–2025 rules, this was set at 18:1, but for 2026 onward, it has been reduced to 16:1.
This is measured at ambient temperature, though, not while the engine is running. A running engine is hotter—much hotter—than one sitting at ambient, and as metals heat up, they expand. The engines have very short throws, so it doesn’t take much expansion to increase the compression ratio by reducing the distance between the piston and cylinder head at the top of its travel. The benefit could be as much as 15 hp (11 kW), which translates to a few tenths of a second per lap advantage.
Unfortunately for the other teams, the FIA stated that its rules indeed specify only that the compression ratio should be 16:1 based on static conditions and at ambient temperatures. “This procedure has remained unchanged despite the reduction in the permitted ratio for the 2026 season. It is true that thermal expansion can influence dimensions, but the current rules do not provide for measurements to be carried out at elevated temperatures,” the FIA said.
So if Mercedes and Red Bull do have a horsepower advantage, it’s one that will likely be baked into the 2026 season.
The compression ratio clarification wasn’t the only one issued by the FIA. For some time now, F1 has used ultrasonic fuel flow meters as a way to control power outputs. Under the outgoing regulations, this was capped at 100 kg/h, but with the move to fully sustainable synthetic fuels, this is changing to an energy cap of 3,000 MJ/h instead.
In the past, it had been theorized that teams could try to game the fuel flow meters—the most impressive idea I heard involved pulsing more fuel between the sensor’s sampling inputs to boost power, although I don’t believe it was ever implemented.
Don’t even think about being that clever this time, the FIA says. “Any device, system, or procedure, the purpose of which is to change the temperature of the fuel-flow meter, is forbidden,” it says, updating the regulation that previously banned “intentional heating or chilling” of the fuel flow meter.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:25:38 +0000
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2025-12-23T15:30:50.936505
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One last holiday hurrah for the $50 off deal on the Switch 2
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https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/849552/switch-2-bundle-gaming-ps5-holiday-deal-sale
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In case you’ve waited until the very last minute to buy Christmas gifts, and there’s a Switch 2 on your shopping list, you’ve really lucked out here. Not only is Nintendo’s powerful handheld readily available online and in stores, it’s still $50 off for the best console bundle you can buy. The set that includes […]
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is an editor covering deals and gaming hardware. He joined in 2018, and after a two-year stint at Polygon, he rejoined The Verge in May 2025.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
In case you’ve waited until the very last minute to buy Christmas gifts, and there’s a Switch 2 on your shopping list, you’ve really lucked out here. Not only is Nintendo’s powerful handheld readily available online and in stores, it’s still $50 off for the best console bundle you can buy. The set that includes a Switch 2 and Mario Kart World is typically $499.99 (saving you $29 compared to buying the $79 game separately), but you have another — perhaps final! — chance to get it for $449.99. Currently, Best Buy and Target are honoring this limited-time price.
We’ve written about this deal a lot over the past couple of weeks at The Verge, mostly because it was the most unexpected thing to happen in the same year when Nintendo hiked prices on Switch 2 accessories as well as the original Switch. The company made it clear back when the console launched in June that the bundle wouldn’t be around forever, and it shared yesterday on X that quantities are now limited.
Other Verge-approved holiday deals
DJI’s Mic Mini bundle is a great stocking stuffer under $100 that includes two mics and one receiver, plus a charging case. The set originally sold for $169, and for about $100 or so during Black Friday. But now it’s about $79 at Read more about them here. Wireless lav microphones are a great option if you record a lot of videos for social media, or if you do multi-person interviews. Since they clip onto clothes, you don’t need to hold a mic, letting you be more expressive or interactive with your hands. They’re easy to set up, and they ensure that every person’s voice will be heard in the recording.is a great stocking stuffer under $100 that includes two mics and one receiver, plus a charging case. The set originally sold for $169, and for about $100 or so during Black Friday. But now it’s about $79 at Amazon and Best Buy
digital PS5 Slim that’s $399.99 (was $499.99) at Best Buy, while the PS5 Pro is $649.99 (was $749.99). These discounts drop console prices just below what they previously sold for before Sony’s PlayStation 5 console was one of the most popular products during Black Friday and through Cyber Week thanks to solid discounts. Sony finally pulled the plug for holiday sales last week, but Best Buy switched them back on, and they’ll last through Christmas. The most affordable option is thethat’s $399.99 (was $499.99) at Best Buy, while theis $649.99 (was $749.99). These discounts drop console prices just below what they previously sold for before Sony increased them in August due to tariffs.
Helinox Chair One in a previous gift guide because it’s a lightweight, compact chair that’s great for camping, backpacking trips, or just for casual picnics. It’s two pounds and two ounces, and it can hold up to 320 pounds while offering what seems like some nice back support. The We recommended thein a previous gift guide because it’s a lightweight, compact chair that’s great for camping, backpacking trips, or just for casual picnics. It’s two pounds and two ounces, and it can hold up to 320 pounds while offering what seems like some nice back support. The black and blue model and the tan-colored models are both steeply discounted at Amazon (as well as directly through Helinox ), selling for $64.97 (originally $99.95). It won’t arrive by Christmas if you order now, but it should arrive on time for your recipient’s next outdoor adventures once winter’s over.
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2025-12-23T10:51:11-05:00
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2025-12-23T15:55:35.685880
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France’s postal and banking services disrupted by suspected DDoS attack
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/23/frances-postal-and-banking-services-disrupted-by-suspected-ddos-attack/
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France's postal service, La Poste, said it was hit by a disruptive cyberattack that knocked its services offline.
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In Brief
France’s national postal and baking services company La Poste was knocked offline by a suspected distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Monday, according to an announcement by the company. The postal service called the attack “a major network incident” that was disrupting “all of our information systems.”
La Poste’s online mail and banking services, website, and mobile app are among the services that are temporarily unavailable, per a machine translation of the announcement, which said customers could still carry out banking and postal transactions in person.
The banking branch of the company La Banque Postale, also published an announcement about the cyberattack, which was “temporarily making our customers’ access to their mobile app and online banking space unavailable.”
Despite claims made by a Russian hacktivist group, it’s not yet clear who is behind the cyberattack.
The cyberattack comes as the French government contends with a series of cybersecurity incidents of late, including remote control software found planted on a passenger ferry.
Last week, the French Interior Ministry disclosed a data breach in which hackers broke into email accounts and stole confidential documents, including criminal records. Shortly after, local authorities announced the arrest of a suspect, a 22-year-old whose name was not divulged.
It’s not clear if any of the incidents are linked.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 15:42:23 +0000
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2025-12-23T15:55:36.048360
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DOJ appears to bungle Epstein Files redactions
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https://www.theverge.com/news/849639/epstein-files-doj-redactions-links
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The Justice Department has blamed its delayed release of some so-called Epstein files on needing more time to redact sensitive information like details identifying the victims of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But at least some of the redactions so far released appear to mistakenly disclose information meant to be obscured from the public. A […]
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is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.
The Justice Department has blamed its delayed release of some so-called Epstein files on needing more time to redact sensitive information like details identifying the victims of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But at least some of the redactions so far released appear to mistakenly disclose information meant to be obscured from the public.
A 2022 complaint filed by the US Virgin Islands seeking damages from Epstein’s estate was posted to the “Epstein Library” on the DOJ website with several redactions throughout, Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, among others, shared on platforms like Bluesky. But simply copying and pasting many of the redactions into a new document reveals what’s beneath the black boxes. This method uncovers details like that one of the co-executors allegedly signed over $400,000 in checks from Epstein’s foundation “payable to young female models and actresses, including a former Russian model.” It also reveals that a co-executor had allegedly signed a foundation check with the former model’s last name in the memo line to an immigration lawyer “who was involved in one or more forced marriages arranged among Epstein’s victims to secure a victim’s immigration status.” It also uncovers details about one alleged victim in the complaint.
At least one outlet, Drop Site News, was also apparently able to guess the URL of files not yet on the website by extrapolating the format. Wired later found the link appeared to be broken.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge about the incidents.
The DOJ removed a photo from the files showing images of President Donald Trump among other framed photos of prominent figures including the Pope and former President Bill Clinton, before restoring it Saturday after backlash. The agency said on X it had “temporarily removed” it for review after the Southern District of New York flagged it “for potential further action to protect victims.” The DOJ said it restored the image without alteration after determining there was no evidence of victims in the photo.
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https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml
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2025-12-23T11:33:23-05:00
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2025-12-23T16:35:12.988469
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Watch lists are broken. Federation could fix them.
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https://www.theverge.com/column/849255/watch-lists-broken-federation-share-data
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This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. Lowpass is taking a winter break and will be back on January 8, 2026. All I want for Christmas is to find that darn movie I've been meaning to watch. […]
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This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week. Lowpass is taking a winter break and will be back on January 8, 2026.
All I want for Christmas is to find that darn movie I’ve been meaning to watch. What was it called again? I could have sworn I bookmarked it somewhere…
If your household is anything like mine, you might frequently run into the same issue: There’s too much to watch out there, and keeping track of all the things you want to stream one day has become a nightmare. It’s not that there aren’t any tools for this. There are! And plenty of them! And they’re all easy to use! Which is kind of the problem.
Here’s what usually happens: I may be browsing Netflix, logged into my profile, and bookmark a movie I want to check out in the future. Then, my wife takes over the remote, spends a bit of time clicking through Hulu, and adds a show she wants us to binge to the watch list associated with her profile. Or so we think — until we try to find it again and eventually discover that she was actually logged into our daughter’s profile and inadvertently added the show to her watch list.
Then, the next day, we turn on the TV and see something fun on the homescreen. One quick button press, and it’s added to the watch list. Except, Google maintains this one, and it’s completely separate from all the other lists. Our family probably has about a dozen different watch lists. We don’t use them all actively, at least not when we’re in the mood to actually find something. But you can bet that there’s some really fun movie on our dog’s Tubi watch list (that my kids made), desperately waiting for us to finally remember where we bookmarked it.
There are apps that are trying to solve this very issue. Plex, for instance, has a pretty decent universal catalog of titles available across all the major streaming services and a watch list to remember your favorites. The app also does a good job deep-linking into third-party services, so you can jump directly to that Netflix show or movie rental on Amazon with one click. At least that’s true on mobile. On smart TVs, those deep links can be hit or miss, depending on the platform your TV is running. (Sorry, Roku users! You’re out of luck.)
The problem is that a universal watch list like this does require a lot more work on your part. When you browse Netflix at 11PM and stumble across something that looks interesting, you have to get your phone out, open the Plex app, search for that same title, and add it to the list. And when you finally get around to watch it, you’ll have to do the same thing all over again to remove the title from Plex’s list. That’s a lot of work for a little late-night TV.
The sad truth is that watch lists, as well-intended as they were, are broken. Here’s how streaming services and smart TV platforms could fix them: Instead of keeping all watch-list data in a silo, these services should enable consumers to opt into sharing it between services. That way, if I bookmark a movie on Netflix, the Netflix app shares that information with my Plex watch list. Once I watch it, it disappears from both lists again. And when my wife adds a Hulu show to our Google TV watch list, it immediately populates in our Hulu watch list as well.
Ideally, I’d want to have a bunch of different ways to enter this kind of data and just as many ways to consume it. Maybe I’d keep one master list maintained by Plex, Google, or another company. But I’d also want to be able to keep smashing that bookmark button in whatever streaming app I’m in and have all my lists across all providers update in real time. Granted, Netflix may never list titles that are only available on Hulu. But these days, shows regularly move from one service to another. What if Netflix internally made a note of shows I bookmarked on HBO Max and then added them to my Netflix watch list when those HBO shows eventually found their way to its service?
Once you have enough data flowing back and forth between streaming apps and watch lists, you may also be less dependent on profiles, which were always an imperfect solution. Sure, my wife and I may like different things on occasion. But most of the time, we watch TV together. So why not automatically sort our bookmarked shows and movies by genre, mood, and age rating, instead of siloing them in watch lists associated with individual profiles?
Federating watch lists, and liberating movie and TV show bookmarks from those silos, could also allow for a whole range of neat new use cases that simply aren’t possible today. What if, for instance, Spotify automatically generated playlists of the soundtracks of movies and shows you recently watched, based on the data of titles disappearing from your watch list? (Hat tip to J Herskowitz for this one.)
Unfortunately, streaming services are incredibly protective of their data. Companies like Netflix want you to spend all your time within their app and not with a third-party aggregator that might recommend titles from Hulu’s catalog based on your Netflix viewing history. In fact, Netflix is so protective of its in-app experience, and its own watch list, that it doesn’t allow Google TV users to add Netflix titles to their smart TV’s universal watch list. And none of the major streaming services, with Plex being the one notable exception, offers an RSS feed of your watch list.
But this time of the year, I can’t help but hope for miracles. Perhaps, there’s a streaming executive out there right now, still looking for a New Year’s resolution. Here’s a great one: Open the floodgates. Free the data. Let people remix it, build interesting hacks. Ingest as much data as possible from other services, and use it to help everyone find the perfect movie or show without having to scour a thousand lists.
Until that happens, I might just crack open a book. Now, if I could only remember what I wanted to read next…
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2025-12-23T11:30:00-05:00
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2025-12-23T16:35:13.192349
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New York’s landmark AI safety bill was defanged — and universities were part of the push against it
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https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/849293/ai-alliance-universities-colleges-funding-ad-campaign-against-raise-act
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A group of tech companies and academic institutions spent tens of thousands of dollars in the past month - likely between $17,000 and $25,000 - on an ad campaign against New York's landmark AI safety bill, which may have reached more than two million people, according to Meta's Ad Library. The landmark bill is called […]
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is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
A group of tech companies and academic institutions spent tens of thousands of dollars in the past month — likely between $17,000 and $25,000 — on an ad campaign against New York’s landmark AI safety bill, which may have reached more than two million people, according to Meta’s Ad Library.
The landmark bill is called the RAISE Act, or the Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, and days ago, a version of it was signed by New York Governor Kathy Hochul. The closely watched law dictates that AI companies developing large models — OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, DeepSeek, etc. — must outline safety plans and transparency rules for reporting large-scale safety incidents to the attorney general. But the version Hochul signed — different than the one passed in both the New York State Senate and the Assembly in June — was a rewrite that made it much more favorable to tech companies. A group of more than 150 parents had sent the governor a letter urging her to sign the bill without changes. And the group of tech companies and academic institutions, called the AI Alliance, were part of the charge to defang it.
The AI Alliance — the organization behind the opposition ad campaign — counts Meta, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Snowflake, Uber, AMD, Databricks, and Hugging Face among its members, which is not necessarily surprising. The group sent a letter in June to New York lawmakers about its “deep concern” about the bill and deemed it “unworkable.” But the group isn’t just made up of tech companies. Its members include a number of colleges and universities all around the world, including New York University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Carnegie Mellon University, Northeastern University, Louisiana State University, and the University of Notre Dame, as well as Penn Engineering and Yale Engineering.
The ads began on November 23 and ran with the title, “The RAISE Act will stifle job growth.” They said that the legislation “would slow down the New York technology ecosystem powering 400,000 high-tech jobs and major investments. Rather than stifling innovation, let’s champion a future where AI development is open, trustworthy, and strengthens the Empire State.”
When The Verge asked the academic institutions listed above whether they were aware they had been inadvertently part of an ad campaign against widely discussed AI safety legislation, none responded to a request for comment, besides Northeastern, which did not provide a comment by publication time. In recent years, OpenAI and its competitors have increasingly been courting academic institutions to be part of research consortiums or offering technology directly to students for free.
Many of the academic institutions that are part of the AI Alliance aren’t directly involved in one-on-one partnerships with AI companies, but some are. For instance, Northeastern’s partnership with Anthropic this year translated to Claude access for 50,000 students, faculty, and staff across 13 global campuses, per Anthropic’s announcement in April. In 2023, OpenAI funded a journalism ethics initiative at NYU. Dartmouth announced a partnership with Anthropic earlier this month, a Carnegie Mellon University professor currently serves on OpenAI’s board, and Anthropic has funded programs at Carnegie Mellon.
The initial version of the RAISE Act stated that developers must not release a frontier model “if doing so would create an unreasonable risk of critical harm,” which the bill defines as the death or serious injury of 100 people or more, or $1 billion or more in damages to rights in money or property stemming from the creation of a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon. That definition also extends to an AI model that “acts with no meaningful human intervention” and “would, if committed by a human,” fall under certain crimes. The version Hochul signed removed this clause. Hochul also increased the deadline for disclosure for safety incidents and lessened fines, among other changes.
The AI Alliance has lobbied previously against AI safety policies, including the RAISE Act, California’s SB 1047, and President Biden’s AI executive order. It states that its mission is to “bring together builders and experts from various fields to collaboratively and transparently address the challenges of generative AI and democratize its benefits,” especially via “member-driven working groups.” Some of the group’s projects beyond lobbying have involved cataloguing and managing “trustworthy” datasets and creating a ranked list of AI safety priorities.
The AI Alliance wasn’t the only organization opposing the RAISE Act with ad dollars. As The Verge wrote recently, Leading the Future, a pro-AI super PAC backed by Perplexity AI, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, has spent money on ads targeting the cosponsor of the RAISE Act, New York State Assemblymember Alex Bores. But Leading the Future is a super PAC with a clear agenda, whereas the AI Alliance is a nonprofit that’s partnered with a trade association — with the mission of “developing AI collaboratively, transparently, and with a focus on safety, ethics, and the greater good.”
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2025-12-23T11:18:49-05:00
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2025-12-23T16:35:13.386538
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Dozens of Flock AI camera feeds were just out there
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https://www.theverge.com/news/849624/flock-ai-camera-feeds-exposed-benn-jordan
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The livestreams connected to more than 60 of Flock's AI-powered surveillance cameras were left available to view on the web, allowing someone to see live feeds of each location without needing a username or password, according to findings from tech YouTuber Benn Jordan and 404 Media. Flock is a technology company that works with thousands […]
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is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
The livestreams connected to more than 60 of Flock’s AI-powered surveillance cameras were left available to view on the web, allowing someone to see live feeds of each location without needing a username or password, according to findings from tech YouTuber Benn Jordan and 404 Media.
Flock is a technology company that works with thousands of law enforcement agencies and businesses to deploy a network of AI-powered cameras across the country. It also recently partnered with Ring, giving Flock customers the ability to request footage from users in Ring’s Neighbors app. As noted by 404 Media, many of Flock’s cameras are made to scan a vehicle’s license plates. However, the feeds exposed to the internet connect to Flock’s Condor cameras, which can pan, tilt, and zoom to automatically track people and vehicles.
“I watched a man leave his house in the morning in New York,” Jordan says in his video. “I watched a woman jogging alone on a forest trail in Georgia. This trail had multiple cameras, and I could watch a man rollerblade and then take a break to watch rollerblading videos on his phone. How? Because the camera’s AI automatically zoomed in on it — just like it zoomed in on a couple arguing at a street market in Atlanta.”
Jordan worked with Jon “GainSec” Gaines — who previously uncovered security flaws within Flock’s system — to find the live feeds on Shodan, a search engine containing a database of devices connected to the internet.
As reported by 404 Media, the two located dozens of Flock live feeds and administrator control panels, where they could not only view the streams but also freely download video archives from the last 30 days, change settings, delete footage, view log files, and run diagnostics, as reported by 404 Media and Jordan. Anyone with links to the stream could access them, no credentials required, according to 404 Media.
In some cases, Jordan and 404 Media’s Jason Koebler visited the locations of the Flock cameras, where they were filmed and displayed on the openly accessible livestreams.
“This was a limited misconfiguration on a very small number of devices, and it has since been remedied,” a Flock spokesperson said in a statement to 404 Media. Flock didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
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2025-12-23T11:09:58-05:00
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2025-12-23T16:35:13.586185
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Belkin’s camera grip power bank is a few upgrades away from being a must-have
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https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/847321/belkin-stage-powergrip-wireless-power-bank-hands-on
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Belkin's Stage PowerGrip has shown me that I should be asking more from a wireless magnetic power bank than just boosting battery life while it hangs off the back of my phone. Its clever design adds layers of extra functionality, and the inclusion of a retractable two-way charging cable expands the number of devices you […]
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is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid.
Belkin’s Stage PowerGrip has shown me that I should be asking more from a wireless magnetic power bank than just boosting battery life while it hangs off the back of my phone. Its clever design adds layers of extra functionality, and the inclusion of a retractable two-way charging cable expands the number of devices you can charge without always having to remember to pack a cord. It also improves your smartphone’s ergonomics when taking photos, but that’s one of a few places where the PowerGrip’s functionality feels disappointingly limited.
The PowerGrip is much chunkier and heavier than I expected, which turned out not to be a bad thing. At 272 grams, most of the PowerGrip’s weight comes from its 9,300mAh battery, but I wouldn’t opt for anything smaller because I like knowing I’ve got enough power to fully recharge my iPhone with headroom to top off other devices like my watch and earbuds.
There are lighter wireless power banks available with more capacity, but the PowerGrip’s heft has some benefits. Most consumers will buy the accessory to make their smartphone feel more like a digital camera, and the PowerGrip mostly delivers. It attaches to the back of any Qi2, MagSafe, or Pixelsnap-compatible smartphone. The magnetic connection feels secure but doesn’t feel quite as strong as the PopSocket I regularly use. I’m not worried my iPhone is going to fall off on its own, but accidentally bumping my phone while I’m only holding the PowerGrip could send my device tumbling.
The protruding grip is sizable and makes your phone feel like a sturdy DSLR. I’ve never found a comfortable one-handed way to shoot with my iPhone that also feels secure, but it’s easy with the PowerGrip, and its weight adds some welcome stability that usually requires two hands.
The PowerGrip can stand on its edge and be used as a hands-free smartphone stand. Photo by Andrew Liszewski / The Verge
The design allows the PowerGrip to stand on its edge and function as a smartphone stand. You can attach your phone and make hands-free recordings or video calls, or take advantage of iOS’ StandBy mode on your bedside table. It’s functionality I never intended to use, but have found myself using quite frequently.
The PowerGrip’s shutter button is a little thin for my liking. I prefer round buttons and having them positioned on top of a camera grip. Photo by Andrew Liszewski / The Verge
The PowerGrip has a dedicated shutter button that connects to your smartphone over Bluetooth. Pressing it once snaps a photo, while holding it down triggers a video recording until released. I would prefer the button positioned at the top of the grip instead of its front edge. I also frequently found myself missing the additional settings dials on my Sony mirrorless camera that are conveniently located within thumb’s reach.
There are no other camera controls on the PowerGrip, and when using it one-handed you may struggle to reach useful functions on your phone with your thumb. Photo by Andrew Liszewski / The Verge
There are other smartphone camera grips, like the Fjorden Pro and the magnetic Leica Lux Grip, that feature more controls, including customizable dials and two-stage shutter buttons for controlling focus. They’re both considerably more expensive than the $80 PowerGrip, and those added controls only work with third-party camera apps, so I understand Belkin’s decision not to take that approach. But with the PowerGrip attached and hanging a half-inch off the bottom of my iPhone 16 Pro, my thumb struggled to reach the onscreen controls in the iOS camera app without awkwardly adjusting my grip. More often than not, one-handed shooting still required screen taps from my other hand, which I found frustrating.
Built-in retractable charging cables are becoming more common with power banks, and the PowerGrip’s can be used to charge itself or other devices. Photo by Andrew Liszewski / The Verge
Even more frustrating is the PowerGrip’s power output. Wireless charging rates are limited to just 7.5W, which feels glacial when Belkin has already implemented faster 25W Qi2.2 rates on other chargers. It takes hours to fully charge my iPhone, and it’s not much faster switching to a cable. The PowerGrip has an additional USB-C port and a built-in 30-inch USB-C charging cable. Belkin says the power output maxes out at 15W, but I measured a little over 18W while charging a OnePlus 12 with Plugable’s USB-C voltage meter. However, that output is shared when charging three devices simultaneously. Charging rates for the OnePlus 12 dropped to less than 5W while also wirelessly charging my iPhone and a Kobo e-reader using the retractable cable.
A small but very bright screen on the front of the PowerGrip shows its remaining charge level and when it’s being used to charge other devices. Photo by Andrew Liszewski / The Verge
Compared to more expensive camera grip accessories like the $395 Leica Lux Grip or the $149.95 ShiftCam ProGrip that only feature batteries to power themselves, it’s understandable that Belkin had to settle for some compromises to get its Stage PowerGrip on shelves for $79.99. You’ll just want to really take those compromises into consideration when deciding if it’s worth it for you. If you like a lot of functionality in one accessory, it’s worth considering. If you want more charging performance or a grip with more photography-focused functionality, you’ll be better off juggling multiple accessories.
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2025-12-23T11:00:00-05:00
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2025-12-23T16:35:13.803758
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Amazon’s AI assistant Alexa+ now works with Angi, Expedia, Square, and Yelp
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/23/amazons-ai-assistant-alexa-now-works-with-angi-expedia-square-and-yelp/
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The new integrations join other services like Yelp, Uber, OpenTable and others.
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Amazon is expanding its AI-powered digital assistant Alexa+ with new capabilities. The company announced on Thursday that it’s adding four new integrations to the service that will allow the assistant to work with Angi, Expedia, Square, and Yelp starting in 2026.
These additions allow customers to book hotels, get quotes for home services, and schedule salon appointments, among other things. With Expedia, customers can compare, book, and manage hotel reservations, or tell Alexa their preferences to get personalized recommendations. (e.g. “Can you find me pet-friendly hotels for this weekend in Chicago?”)
The new services join Alexa+’s existing integrations with Fodor, OpenTable, Suno, Ticketmaster, Thumbtack, and Uber.
Image Credits:Amazon
Similar to how ChatGPT is now integrating apps into its chatbot, Amazon aims to make it easier for consumers to use various online services through its digital assistant. For instance, you could ask Alexa to call you an Uber or book a table for dinner with OpenTable.
You also can converse with the AI assistant in natural language, having back-and-forth conversations, refining your request as you go.
Whether users will take to this idea, of course, remains to be seen.
Image Credits:Amazon
However, Amazon did offer a small glimpse as to how Alexa+ early adopters have been using the integrations, noting that, so far, home and personal service providers like Thumbtack and Vagaro have seen “strong” engagement.
Using AI assistants as app platforms is a model that’s being tested across the industry as another way to bring AI to consumers more broadly. But this will require users to adapt to a new way of doing things, as many are used to engaging with online services through the web or mobile apps. To be successful in getting consumers to change their behavior, using apps via AI will need to be seen as being as easy, if not easier, than the existing model.
For that to work, the AI providers would need to at least match the breadth of online services provided by a traditional app store, which is already a more curated selection than what’s available via the web. Or, providers will need to get very good at suggesting apps to use at the right time, without seeming overly pushy, as users can perceive unwelcome prompts as ads.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 16:04:57 +0000
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2025-12-23T16:35:14.944017
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Lemon Slice nabs $10.5M from YC and Matrix to build out its digital avatar tech
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/23/lemon-slice-nabs-10-5m-from-yc-and-matrix-to-build-out-its-digital-avatar-tech/
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Digital avatar generation company Lemon Slice is working to add a video layer to AI chatbots with a new diffusion model that can create digital avatars from a single image.
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Developers and companies are increasingly deploying AI agents and chatbots within their apps, but so far they’ve mostly been restricted to text. Digital avatar generation company Lemon Slice is working to add a video layer to those chats with a new diffusion model that can create digital avatars from a single image.
Called Lemon Slice-2, the model can create a digital avatar that works on top of a knowledge base to play any role required of the AI agent, like addressing customer queries, helping with homework questions, or even working as a mental health support agent.
“In the early days of GenAI, my co-founders started to play around with different video models, and it became obvious to us that video was going to be interactive. The compelling part about tools like ChatGPT was that they were interactive, and we want video to have that layer,” co-founder Lina Colucci said.
Lemon Slice says this is a 20-billion-parameter model that can work on a single GPU to live-stream videos at 20 frames per second. The company is making the model available through an API and an embeddable widget that companies can integrate into their sites with a single line of code. After an avatar is created, you can change the background, styling, and appearance of a character at any point.
Besides human-like avatars, the company is also focusing on being able to generate non-human characters to suit different needs. The startup is using ElevenLabs’ tech to generate the voices of these avatars.
Founded by Lina Colucci, Sidney Primas, and Andrew Weitz in 2024, Lemon Slice is betting that using its own general-purpose diffusion model (a type of generative model that learns to work backwards from noisy training data to generate new data) for making avatars will set it apart from competitors.
“The existing avatar solutions I’ve seen to date add negative value to the product,” Colucci said. “They are creepy, and they are stiff. They look good for a few seconds, and as soon as you start interacting with them, it feels very uncanny, and it doesn’t put you at ease. The thing that has prevented avatars from really taking off is that they haven’t been good enough.”
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To fund that effort, the company on Tuesday said it has raised $10.5 million in seed funding from Matrix Partners, Y Combinator, Dropbox CTO Arash Ferdowsi, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and The Chainsmokers.
The company says it has guardrails in place to prevent unauthorized face or voice cloning, and that it uses large language models for content moderation.
Lemon Slice would not name the organizations using its technology, but said the model is being put to work for use cases like education, language learning, e-commerce, and corporate training.
The startup faces stiff competition from video generation startups like D-ID, HeyGen, and Sythesia, as well as other digital avatar makers Genies, Soul Machine, Praktika, and AvatarOS.
Ilya Sukhar, a partner at Matrix, thinks that avatars will be useful in areas where videos are prominent. For instance, people like learning from YouTube rather than reading long blocks of text. He noted that Lemon Slice’s technical prowess and its own will give it an edge over other startups.
“It’s a deeply technical team with a track record of shipping ML products, not just demos and research. Many of the other players are bespoke to particular scenarios or verticals, and Lemon Slice is taking the generalized ‘bitter lesson’ scaling approach (of data and compute) that has worked in other AI modalities,” he said.
Y-Combinator’s Jared Friedman believes that using a diffusion-style model allows Lemon Slice to generate any kind of avatars as compared to some other startups that are focused on either human-like or game character-like avatars.
“Lemon Slice is, I believe, the only company taking the fundamental ML approach that can eventually overcome the uncanny valley and break the avatar Turing test. They train the same type of model as Veo3 or Sora: a video diffusion transformer. Because it is a general-purpose model that does the whole thing end-to-end, it has no ceiling on how good it can get; the others top out below photorealistic. It also works for both human and non-human faces and requires only an image to add a new face,” he said.
The startup currently has eight employees, and plans to use the funds to hire engineering and go-to-market staff, along with paying the compute bills to train its models.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 16:00:00 +0000
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2025-12-23T16:35:15.088958
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“Yo what?” LimeWire re-emerges in online rush to share pulled “60 Minutes” segment
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https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/yo-what-limewire-re-emerges-in-online-rush-to-share-pulled-60-minutes-segment/
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Redditor jokes LimeWire is now a "champion against the darkness."
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CBS cannot contain the online spread of a “60 Minutes” segment that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, tried to block from airing.
The episode, “Inside CECOT,” featured testimonies from US deportees who were tortured or suffered physical or sexual abuse at a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. “Welcome to hell,” one former inmate was told upon arriving, the segment reported, while also highlighting a clip of Donald Trump praising CECOT and its leadership for “great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games.”
Weiss controversially pulled the segment on Monday, claiming it could not air in the US because it lacked critical voices, as no Trump officials were interviewed. She claimed that the segment “did not advance the ball” and merely echoed others’ reporting, NBC News reported. Her plan was to air the segment when it was “ready,” insisting that holding stories “for whatever reason” happens “every day in every newsroom.”
But Weiss apparently did not realize that the “Inside CECOT” would still stream in Canada, giving the public a chance to view the segment as reporters had intended.
Critics accusing CBS of censoring the story quickly shared the segment online Monday after discovering that it was available on the Global TV app. Using a VPN to connect to the app with a Canadian IP address was all it took to override Weiss’ block in the US, as 404 Media reported the segment was uploaded to “to a variety of file sharing sites and services, including iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent,” including on the recently revived file-sharing service LimeWire. It’s currently also available to stream on the Internet Archive, where one reviewer largely summed up the public’s response so far, writing, “cannot believe this was pulled, not a dang thing wrong with this segment except it shows truth.”
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 16:18:22 +0000
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2025-12-23T16:35:15.591828
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Marissa Mayer’s new startup Dazzle raises $8M led by Forerruner’s Kirsten Green
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/23/marissa-mayers-new-startup-dazzle-raises-8m-led-by-forerruners-kirsten-green/
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Mayer launched Dazzle after shuttering her photo and contact management startup Sunshine.
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The former Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, refuses to sit on the sidelines of the generative AI revolution.
After spending the last six years running Sunshine, a photo-sharing and contact-management startup with little success, the storied tech leader has shuttered the company to launch Dazzle, a new startup focused on building the next generation of AI personal assistants.
While Mayer is not yet sharing specifics about Dazzle’s functionality, she has revealed that the company has raised an $8 million seed round at a $35 million valuation. The round was led by Forerunner’s Kirsten Green, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Greycroft, Offline Ventures, Slow Ventures, and Bling Capital. Although Mayer has admitted to investing her own capital in the startup, she emphasized that the round was led by Green, a venture capitalist with a record of identifying iconic consumer brands such as Warby Parker, Chime, and Dollar Shave Club.
Green’s investment suggests Dazzle is poised for the coming wave of new AI-infused consumer businesses. The founder of Forerunner Ventures previously told TechCrunch that while enterprise AI took the early lead in this tech cycle, consumer-facing AI is a “late bloomer” that’s finally ready for its breakout.
Even for a founder of Mayer’s fame, landing Green as a lead investor is a significant stamp of credibility for Dazzle, especially after Sunshine was widely considered to be a flop.
“I think she really has a great sense for where people and platforms are going,” Mayer said.
Mayer told TechCrunch that the Sunshine team began prototyping Dazzle last summer, a project that quickly eclipsed their previous work in ambition and opportunity.
“We realized that this was something that we were much more excited about,” she said, noting that Dazzle has potential for “a much bigger impact” than what Sunshine was building.
Originally founded as Lumi Labs in 2018, Sunshine first launched with a subscription app for contact management dubbed “Sunshine Contacts.” Despite its founder’s high profile, the product struggled to gain traction. Privacy advocates raised alarms over the app’s practice of pulling home addresses from public databases to enrich contact lists, and the company never recovered from the initial skepticism.
By 2024, the company broadened its offering by adding event management and “Shine,” an AI-powered photo-sharing tool. The new offering was widely criticized for its outdated design and similarly failed to attract widespread usage.
Sunshine raised a total of $20 million from investors, including Felicis, Norwest Venture Partners, and Unusual Ventures. When the company was dissolved, investors received 10% of Dazzle’s equity, Mayer said.
Reflecting on Sunshine’s struggle, Mayer was candid about its limitations, admitting the problems the company was tackling were too “mundane” and not large enough. “I don’t think we got it to the state of overall polish and accessibility that I really wanted it to be,” she added.
Mayer is now betting that the lessons from Sunshine will help her build a much more resilient and impactful business with Dazzle.
Before her tenure as Yahoo CEO, Mayer was employee number 20 at Google, where she helped design Google search ‘look and feel’, and oversaw the development of Google Maps and AdWords.
“I have had the rare privilege of being at two companies that really changed how people do things,” Mayer told TechCrunch. “Yahoo, for many, defined the internet. Google, in terms of Search and Maps, changed everything. I really aspire to build a product that has that kind of impact again.”
Dazzle is expected to come out of stealth mode early next year. Its website, dazzle.ai, is currently password-protected, blocking public access.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 16:48:45 +0000
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2025-12-23T17:00:20.664746
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US insurance giant Aflac says hackers stole personal and health data of 22.6 million
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/23/us-insurance-giant-aflac-says-hackers-stole-personal-data-of-22-6-million/
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Aflac, one of the largest insurance companies in the U.S., confirmed hackers stole reams of personal data, including Social Security numbers, identity documents, and health information.
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In June, U.S. insurance giant Aflac disclosed a data breach where hackers stole customers’ personal information, including Social Security numbers and health information, without saying how many victims were affected.
On Tuesday, the company confirmed it has begun notifying around 22.65 million whose data was stolen during the cyberattack.
In a filing with the Texas attorney general, Aflac said that the stolen data includes customer names, dates of birth, home addresses; government-issued ID numbers (such as passports and state ID cards) and driver’s license numbers, and Social Security numbers; as well as medical and health insurance information.
And, in a filing with the Iowa attorney general, Aflac said that the cybercriminals responsible for the breach “may be affiliated with a known cyber-criminal organization; federal law enforcement and third-party cybersecurity experts have indicated that this group may have been targeting the insurance industry at large.”
Given that Scattered Spider, an amorphous collective of primarily young English-speaking hackers, was targeting the insurance industry at the time of the breach, it’s likely that this is the group Aflac is referring to.
A spokesperson for Aflac did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
The company says it has around 50 million customers according to its official website.
Techcrunch event Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. San Francisco | WAITLIST NOW
Aflac was one of several insurance companies hacked at around the same time, including data breaches at Erie Insurance and Philadelphia Insurance Companies.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 17:14:04 +0000
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2025-12-23T17:32:01.618111
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This founder just landed funding for a second go at the same problem: affordable custom home design
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/23/this-founder-just-landed-backing-for-a-second-go-at-the-same-problem-affordable-custom-home-design/
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Drafted is now nearly five months old, and it's everything Atmos wasn't.
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Nick Donahue’s parents were in the business of building houses, which means he spent his childhood hearing about the U.S. construction industry. His dad built homes for major developers, and his mom sold to big-box builders across the East Coast.
Donahue was particularly interested in why designing a custom home cost a fortune and took forever, and why most people had to settle for whatever the developers were offering that year. So when he dropped out of NC State and moved to the Bay Area, he eventually did what you might expect a college drop-out to do in San Francisco: he started a company to fix it.
That effort, Atmos, went through Y Combinator, raised $20 million from investors like Khosla Ventures and Sam Altman, and tried to use tech to streamline the custom home design process. It had designers on staff who worked with clients while software handled the back-end. It grew to 40 people and $7 million in revenue, and they designed $200 million worth of houses, and built 50.
All that sounds great until you hear Donahue describe it. “It became this extremely operational business,” he told me on a Zoom call last week. “Kind of like a glamorized architecture firm.”
It never quite replaced the humans, in other words. Then the Federal Reserve started jacking up interest rates, and suddenly clients who’d spent months designing their dream homes couldn’t afford them anymore. Nine months ago, Donahue shut it down.
Here’s where most founders would take a break, maybe write a few LinkedIn posts about what they learned. Instead, Donahue regrouped and started another company.
Drafted is now nearly five months old, and it’s everything Atmos wasn’t. No designers on staff. No operational complexity. Just AI-driven software that generates residential floor plans and exterior designs in minutes. You tell it what you want – bedrooms, square footage, whatever – and it spits out five designs. Don’t like them? You can generate five more and keep going until something clicks.
Techcrunch event Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector. San Francisco | WAITLIST NOW
Right now, Drafted has six employees, four from Atmos, and it’s raised $1.65 million at a $35 million post-money valuation from Bill Clerico, Stripe’s Patrick Collison, Jack Altman, Josh Buckley, and Warriors player Moses Moody.
Clerico led the round because he’d also been an angel investor in Atmos, and had watched Donahue will houses into existence despite rising interest rates. When Donahue told him about the new company over coffee, Clerico didn’t need convincing. “Nick, please take our money,” he apparently said repeatedly over a two week period until Donahue agreed.
The pitch is straightforward. Right now, if you want a custom home, you’ve got two options: hire an architect (expensive, slow), or buy a template plan online (cheap, inflexible). Drafted sits in the middle, offering customization at template prices. A complete plan costs between $1,000 and $2,000.
The economics work because Drafted built its own AI model, trained on real house plans from homes that were built and passed permitting. Practical constraints are considered, and Donahue says the specialized model costs almost nothing to run: two-tenths of a penny per floor plan, compared to 13 cents for general-purpose AI.
Drafted only does single-story homes right now, but multi-story and lot-specific features are coming. The bigger question is whether there’s actually a market for this.
The numbers aren’t huge. Of the million new homes built in America each year, only 300,000 are custom designed. Most people buy existing homes or pick from whatever tract homes the big builders are offering.
Clerico’s argument is that this is a chicken-and-egg problem. Make custom design cheap and fast enough, and many more people will do it. Donahue compares it to Uber, which didn’t just replace taxis but made on-demand car service something that nearly everyone uses. “There’s really no reason in the future why everyone shouldn’t have a totally custom designed home,” Clerico says.
Or maybe most Americans will keep being price-conscious buyers who take what’s available. The housing market has a long track record of rebuffing disruption.
There’s also the “moat” question. Asked what’s to keep an LLM player or even another vertical player from buying similar data sets and creating the same product, Donahue talks about brand, pointing to his friend David Holz, who founded the video and image generating AI outfit, Midjourney. Despite the plethora of new image-generation models being launched, Midjourney’s usage barely moves, Holz has told Donahue; its customers keep coming back to make AI images.
Similarly, Donahue thinks if they move fast enough and please enough customers, Drafted can become the place for people to design houses.
Time will tell. Since opening to the public, the outfit has begun seeing about 1,000 daily users. Not huge numbers, but they show steady growth for such a young product.
In the meantime, Donahue has something pretty valuable that could give Drafted an edge: deep knowledge of a problem and the insights gleaned from taking a crack at it once already.
Pictured above, the Drafted crew, left to right: Martynas Pocius, Albert Chiu, Martina Cheru, Carson Poole, Stephen Chou, and Nick Donahue
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 17:00:00 +0000
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2025-12-23T17:32:01.750296
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Marissa Mayer’s new startup Dazzle raises $8M led by Forerunner’s Kirsten Green
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https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/23/marissa-mayers-new-startup-dazzle-raises-8m-led-by-forerunners-kirsten-green/
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Mayer launched Dazzle after shuttering her photo and contact management startup Sunshine. Green’s investment suggests Dazzle is poised for the coming wave of new AI-infused consumer businesses.
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Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer refuses to sit on the sidelines of the generative AI revolution.
After spending the last six years running Sunshine, a photo-sharing and contact-management startup with little success, the storied tech leader has shuttered the company to launch Dazzle, a new startup focused on building the next generation of AI personal assistants.
While Mayer is not yet sharing specifics about Dazzle’s functionality, she has revealed that the company has raised an $8 million seed round at a $35 million valuation. The round was led by Forerunner’s Kirsten Green, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Greycroft, Offline Ventures, Slow Ventures, and Bling Capital. Although Mayer has admitted to investing her own capital in the startup, she emphasized that the round was led by Green, a venture capitalist with a record of identifying iconic consumer brands such as Warby Parker, Chime, and Dollar Shave Club.
Green’s investment suggests Dazzle is poised for the coming wave of new AI-infused consumer businesses. The founder of Forerunner Ventures previously told TechCrunch that while enterprise AI took the early lead in this tech cycle, consumer-facing AI is a “late bloomer” that’s finally ready for its breakout.
Even for a founder of Mayer’s fame, landing Green as a lead investor is a significant stamp of credibility for Dazzle, especially after Sunshine was widely considered to be a flop.
“I think she really has a great sense for where people and platforms are going,” Mayer said.
Mayer told TechCrunch that the Sunshine team began prototyping Dazzle last summer, a project that quickly eclipsed their previous work in ambition and opportunity.
“We realized that this was something that we were much more excited about,” she said, noting that Dazzle has potential for “a much bigger impact” than what Sunshine was building.
Originally founded as Lumi Labs in 2018, Sunshine first launched with a subscription app for contact management dubbed “Sunshine Contacts.” Despite its founder’s high profile, the product struggled to gain traction. Privacy advocates raised alarms over the app’s practice of pulling home addresses from public databases to enrich contact lists, and the company never recovered from the initial skepticism.
By 2024, the company broadened its offering by adding event management and “Shine,” an AI-powered photo-sharing tool. The new offering was widely criticized for its outdated design and similarly failed to attract widespread usage.
Sunshine raised a total of $20 million from investors, including Felicis, Norwest Venture Partners, and Unusual Ventures. When the company was dissolved, investors received 10% of Dazzle’s equity, Mayer said.
Reflecting on Sunshine’s struggle, Mayer was candid about its limitations, admitting the problems the company was tackling were too “mundane” and not large enough. “I don’t think we got it to the state of overall polish and accessibility that I really wanted it to be,” she added.
Mayer is now betting that the lessons from Sunshine will help her build a much more resilient and impactful business with Dazzle.
Before her tenure as Yahoo CEO, Mayer was employee number 20 at Google, where she helped design Google Search’s “look and feel” and oversaw the development of Google Maps and AdWords.
“I have had the rare privilege of being at two companies that really changed how people do things,” Mayer told TechCrunch. “Yahoo, for many, defined the internet. Google, in terms of Search and Maps, changed everything. I really aspire to build a product that has that kind of impact again.”
Dazzle is expected to come out of stealth mode early next year. Its website, dazzle.ai, is currently password-protected, blocking public access.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 16:48:45 +0000
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2025-12-23T17:32:01.873431
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DJI’s new drones will not be available in the US as FCC ban takes effect
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https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/12/djis-new-drones-will-not-be-available-in-the-us-as-fcc-ban-takes-effect/
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US drone makers are happy—US drone hobbyists, not so much.
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Americans will be unable to buy the latest and greatest drones because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has banned foreign-made drones as of today.
On Tuesday, the FCC added drones to its Covered List, which it says are communications equipment and services “that are deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons.” The list was already populated by Kaspersky, ZTE, Huawei, and others.
An FCC fact sheet [PDF] about the ban released on Tuesday says:
UAS [unmanned aircraft systems] and UAS critical components, including data transmission devices, communications systems, flight controllers, ground control stations, controllers, navigation systems, batteries, smart batteries, and motors produced in a foreign country could enable persistent surveillance, data exfiltration, and destructive operations over US territory, including over World Cup and Olympic venues and other mass gathering events.
People can still use Chinese-made drones they already own, and drones from DJI and other foreign countries that were previously approved by the FCC will still be available for purchase. However, the FCC won’t approve any new devices from companies that make drones and aren’t based in the US.
The FCC said that its decision came after a review by “an Executive Branch interagency body with appropriate national security expertise that was convened by the White House.”
Ban takes off
Drones have been under legislative and social scrutiny for years. They’ve been targeted as potential national security threats, as well as criticized for their ability to be used to invade people’s privacy, be disruptive, and dangerously enter restricted airspace, and for their roles in property destruction.
A ban on consumer drone imports gained serious momentum after the US House of Representatives and US Senate passed the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, including a Countering CCP Drones Act, late last year. At the time, DJI and other affected companies were given a year to convince “an appropriate national security agency” that their devices posed no national security risk.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 17:29:57 +0000
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2025-12-23T17:32:02.305156
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OpenAI’s child exploitation reports increased sharply this year
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https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/openais-child-exploitation-reports-increased-sharply-this-year/
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Incident reports spiked during the first six months of 2025.
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OpenAI sent 80 times as many child exploitation incident reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children during the first half of 2025 as it did during a similar time period in 2024, according to a recent update from the company. The NCMEC’s CyberTipline is a Congressionally authorized clearinghouse for reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of child exploitation.
Companies are required by law to report apparent child exploitation to the CyberTipline. When a company sends a report, NCMEC reviews it and then forwards it to the appropriate law enforcement agency for investigation.
Statistics related to NCMEC reports can be nuanced. Increased reports can sometimes indicate changes in a platform’s automated moderation, or the criteria it uses to decide whether a report is necessary, rather than necessarily indicating an increase in nefarious activity.
Additionally, the same piece of content can be the subject of multiple reports, and a single report can be about multiple pieces of content. Some platforms, including OpenAI, disclose the number of both the reports and the total pieces of content they were about for a more complete picture.
OpenAI spokesperson Gaby Raila said in a statement that the company made investments toward the end of 2024 “to increase [its] capacity to review and action reports in order to keep pace with current and future user growth.” Raila also said that the time frame corresponds to “the introduction of more product surfaces that allowed image uploads and the growing popularity of our products, which contributed to the increase in reports.” In August, Nick Turley, vice president and head of ChatGPT, announced that the app had four times the number of weekly active users than it did the year before.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 17:02:26 +0000
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2025-12-23T17:32:02.543678
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NYPD Sued Over Possible Records Collected Through Muslim Spying Program
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https://www.wired.com/story/nypd-sued-over-possible-records-collected-through-muslim-spying-program/
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The New York Police Department's “mosque-raking” program targeted Muslim communities across NYC. Now, as the city's first Muslim mayor takes office, one man is fighting—again—to fully expose it.
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A New Jersey man who previously sued the New York City Police Department in an unsuccessful quest to find out whether the NYPD’s Intelligence Division spied on him and fellow Muslims as part of its notorious and expansive “mosque-raking” program during the Michael Bloomberg era has filed a new open-records lawsuit against the city over spying claims, according to information exclusively provided to WIRED.
The lawsuit will pose a test for mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s law enforcement policies, as he spoke out vocally against the NYPD’s spying on Muslim New Yorkers during a successful election campaign that coaxed those very communities to turn out in record numbers.
Samir Hashmi, a New Jersey resident, was part of the Rutgers Muslim Student Association during the late 2000s. The Rutgers MSA was one of dozens of organizations infiltrated by the NYPD, according to an Associated Press investigation in 2011 that relied on leaked documents outlining the infiltration operations. Following rounds of negative publicity and a civil rights suit that was settled in 2018, the NYPD “demographics unit” was disbanded. Hashmi did not sign on to the settlement and lost his original open-records case in 2018, when a 4-3 Court of Appeals decision affirmed the NYPD’s ability to use a “Glomar” response to his request for documents about the mosque-raking program, neither confirming nor denying the existence of such records.
Hashmi filed a new set of record requests under the New York Freedom of Information Law in February asking for a narrower set of records than his previous request—weekly intelligence summaries, profiles of specific organizations targeted by the Intelligence Division, and reports on particular mosques—pertaining to community and religious organizations he participated in from 2006 through 2008. His petition, filed in December after the NYPD rejected his FOIL and subsequent appeal, cites specific intelligence reports from that period published 14 years ago by the Associated Press.
In an interview, Hashmi told WIRED he was motivated by the loss of his father as well as his co-plaintiff in his original suit, Harlem Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid (who passed away in November 2025), to take a second crack at uncovering the truth about the NYPD’s spying operations targeting Arab and Muslim organizations and communities in New York City, the surrounding states, and elsewhere in the United States.
A firm supporter of Mamdani, Hashmi said he restarted his research into the Intelligence Division’s activities in New York and the surrounding areas in 2023, prompted by the NYPD’s violent crackdown on a series of protests in the past three years that are now the subject of a pair of lawsuits alleging rampant First and Fourteenth Amendment violations. However, it was Mamdani’s decision to retain Jessica Tisch as police commissioner shortly after his election victory that pushed Hashmi into action.
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 17:33:26 +0000
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2025-12-23T17:53:52.651063
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007 First Light’s release date gets shaken up
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https://www.theverge.com/news/849810/james-bond-007-first-light-release-date-delay
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IO Interactive has delayed the release of 007 First Light, its upcoming James Bond origin story game, by two months. 007 First Light will now be released on May 27th, 2026. According to an announcement about the delay: 007 First Light is our most ambitious project to date, and the team has been fully focused […]
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007 First Light is our most ambitious project to date, and the team has been fully focused on delivering an unforgettable James Bond experience, bringing together breathtaking action, globe-trotting, spycraft, gadgets, car chases, and more. As an independent developer and publisher, this decision allows us to ensure the experience meets the level of quality you players deserve on day one.
The game is progressing well and is fully playable from beginning to end, so these additional two months will allow us to further polish and refine the experience, ensuring we deliver the strongest possible version at launch. We’re confident this sets 007 First Light up for long-term success, and we sincerely appreciate the patience and continued support we’ve received ever since we revealed the game. We look forward to sharing more updates regarding 007 First Light in early 2026.
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https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml
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2025-12-23T13:39:11-05:00
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2025-12-23T19:00:29.211534
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Judge blocks Texas app store age verification law
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https://www.theverge.com/news/849752/texas-app-store-accountability-act-age-verification-injunction
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A federal judge blocked a Texas law requiring mobile app stores to verify users' ages from taking effect on January 1st. In an order granting a preliminary injunction on the Texas App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420), Judge Robert Pitman wrote that the statute "is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to […]
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is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.
A federal judge blocked a Texas law requiring mobile app stores to verify users’ ages from taking effect on January 1st.
In an order granting a preliminary injunction on the Texas App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420), Judge Robert Pitman wrote that the statute “is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book.” Pitman has not yet ruled on the merits of the case, but his decision to grant the preliminary injunction means he believes its defenders are unlikely to prevail in court.
The Texas App Store Accountability Act is the first among a series of similar state laws to face a legal challenge, making the ruling especially significant, as Congress considers a version of the statute. The laws, versions of which also passed in Utah and Louisiana, aim to impose age verification standards at the app store level, making companies like Apple and Google responsible for transmitting signals about users’ ages to app developers to block users from age-inappropriate experiences. While the format has been developed and championed by parent advocates, it’s gotten a boost from lobbying by Meta and other tech platforms that support the model, like Snap and X.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), whose members include Apple, Google, and Meta, sued to block the law from taking effect, saying it “imposes a broad censorship regime on the entire universe of mobile apps.” The group claims that the Texas law would impose steep burdens on teens’ ability to access speech online, requiring them and their parents to give up information in order to access various apps. A student advocacy group separately sued to block the law, arguing it unconstitutionally limits speech that kids can be exposed to. The state has maintained that the law is constitutional and should be upheld.
The state can still appeal the ruling with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has a history of reversing blocks on internet regulations. Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling and on its plans to appeal.
“[H]owever widespread the agreement that the issue must be addressed, the Court remains bound by the rule of law”
Pitman found that the highest level of scrutiny must be applied to evaluate the law under the First Amendment, which means the state must prove the law is “the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state interest.” The judge found this is not the case and that it wouldn’t even survive intermediate scrutiny, because Texas has so far failed to prove that its goals are connected to its methods.
Since Texas already has a law requiring age verification for porn sites, Pitman said that “only in the vast minority of applications would SB 2420 have a constitutional application to unprotected speech not addressed by other laws.” Though Pitman acknowledged the importance of safeguarding kids online, he added, “the means to achieve that end must be consistent with the First Amendment. However compelling the policy concerns, and however widespread the agreement that the issue must be addressed, the Court remains bound by the rule of law.”
Apple has opposed Texas’ approach to app store age verification, with CEO Tim Cook reportedly going as far as calling Governor Greg Abbott to try to dissuade him from signing the law. Google has also opposed it, but has come around to a different model of app store age assurance recently passed in California, which would require less data collection.
Recently, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee advanced two versions of app store age-gating bills that borrow aspects from the Texas and California versions. The effort to expand the proposal nationally has alarmed Apple, with Cook meeting with committee leaders the day before the markup to discuss the bills.
As age verification proposals targeting app stores have moved forward in states and Congress, however, the companies that run them also seem to be responding to the growing regulatory threat with preemptive changes. Apple, for example, announced new kids safety features this year that included a way for parents to share their kids’ age ranges with app developers.
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https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml
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2025-12-23T13:15:49-05:00
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2025-12-23T19:00:29.433194
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These great digital gifts will arrive just in time for Christmas
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https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/848999/best-digital-gift-ideas-online-cards-subscriptions-2025
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And just like that, Christmas is less than two days away, which is too soon for most items bought online to arrive in time. That said, you aren’t alone if you waited too long to start buying gifts this year, and you definitely aren’t alone in feeling guilty for considering digital gifts instead of something […]
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And just like that, Christmas is less than two days away, which is too soon for most items bought online to arrive in time. That said, you aren’t alone if you waited too long to start buying gifts this year, and you definitely aren’t alone in feeling guilty for considering digital gifts instead of something your recipient can unwrap. But here’s the thing: digital gifts can still unlock memorable experiences, be it movies, games, or music. They also let your giftee choose exactly what they want from the store, making them both convenient and versatile.
Below, we’ve curated a list of some of the best digital goodies that folks at The Verge have used or gifted. The list is curated by interests, too, so you can find the perfect present whether your loved one is into the arts, exercise, or something else entirely. That way, you’ll at least be able to gift something more thoughtful than an Amazon or Walmart gift card — even if those are still totally viable options in our book.
Gifts for film and TV buffs
Whether you’re shopping for a movie buff or an avid sports fan, there are a number of subscriptions that’ll grant your giftee access to a wide range of content. Below are some of the most popular, as well as a few catered toward anime diehards, horror lovers, and those looking for something more niche.
Disney Plus gift card $ 25 $ 25 You can buy Disney Plus gift cards in increments of $25 up to $200. They’re usable toward Disney Plus subscriptions and bundles that include access to Disney Plus and Hulu, which start at $12.99 a month. That way, the family can stream everything from Andor and Percy Jackson to The Bear and Alien Earth. Read More $25 at Disney
Netflix (Amazon, Best Buy, Peacock ( Paramount Plus (Amazon, A gift card to a major streaming service like Walmart ), Peacock ), or Best Bu y, Walmart ) is a good gift that’ll cater to all kinds of passions. On Netflix, they can spend their holiday binging KPop Demon Hunters and Stranger Things, while Peacock provides access to shows like The Paper, Parks and Recreation, and Poker Face. A Paramount Plus subscription, meanwhile, lets you dive into Dexter, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and the entire Taylor Sheridan universe — including newer series like Landman and the latest Yellowstone spinoff, 1923.
Criterion Channel gift card grants access to more than a thousand classic and contemporary Hollywood, international, arthouse, and independent films. It also features programming that spotlights directors, stars, genres, and themes, including a “15-minute-a-month film school.”
For the anime lovers in your life, a Crunchyroll gift card provides access to hundreds of anime shows and films shortly after they air in Japan, including Jujutsu Kaisen, Blue Lock, and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. They can even use the gift to purchase Crunchyroll’s extensive collection of anime figures, vinyl records, and clothes.
Gifts for the gamers
If you’re not sure which type of games your giftee prefers, you can gift them an Xbox, PlayStation, or Nintendo subscription. Not only will these memberships grant them access to free digital games, but they also include perks such as online multiplayer and cloud saves, among other incentives.
PlayStation Plus membership grants them access to free titles and discounts every month, lets them play games online, and allows them to access cloud-based backups. PlayStation Plus memberships start at $9.99 a month, and you can subscribe directly via If your giftee is a PlayStation 5 owner, agrants them access to free titles and discounts every month, lets them play games online, and allows them to access cloud-based backups. PlayStation Plus memberships start at $9.99 a month, and you can subscribe directly via PlayStation or buy a subscription with a PlayStation Plus gift card, which is available at Amazon Best Buy , and Target in denominations starting at $10 and going up to $250.
annual subscription to Nintendo Switch Online , which starts at $19.99 a year (Best Buy, Nintendo Switch lovers, meanwhile, might enjoy an, which starts at $19.99 a year ( Amazon GameStop ). The membership lets giftees play more than 150 retro games released during the NES, SNES, and original Game Boy eras. They can also play online with friends, access cloud saves for games, and listen to their favorite Nintendo tunes via the Nintendo Music mobile app.
annual Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscription . In addition to offering all the same benefits as the Switch Online membership, it also grants access to Game Boy Advance, Sega Genesis, and Nintendo 64 games, as well as DLC content for select titles. One of the latest additions is that the newer Switch 2 Editions of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are included as free downloads for members. Individual annual plans cost $49.99 (Best Buy, If you’re willing to fork out extra money, you can also buy an. In addition to offering all the same benefits as the Switch Online membership, it also grants access to Game Boy Advance, Sega Genesis, and Nintendo 64 games, as well as DLC content for select titles. One of the latest additions is that the newer Switch 2 Editions of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are included as free downloads for members. Individual annual plans cost $49.99 ( Amazon Walmart ), while a family plan — which allows for up to eight accounts — is available via gift card at Amazon Target , and Best Buy for $79.98.
GameStop ( Alternatively, you could buy a gift card to a store like GameStop ), which is helpful if you don’t know which console your giftee prefers, or if you want to give them the option of buying accessories and games.
Gifts for the adventurers and globe-trotters
Is your giftee in dire need of a screen break? Fortunately, the internet is filled with travel-oriented gifts, ranging from the obvious — like airline gift cards — to national park passes.
Gifts for health and wellness fans
For health and wellness enthusiasts, many services offer a wealth of streamable fitness classes to help them get fit at home. Other gifts can help your giftee practice self-care and lighten their load with meditation or massage. Below, we’ve listed out a range of options that’ll help your recipient take care of both their body and mind.
Peloton gift card $ 13 $ 13 Peloton’s monthly subscription offers thousands of streamable fitness classes revolving around a variety of different workouts, ranging from strength training to stretching. It’s a service that’s available to everybody, so you don’t need to own a Peloton device to use it. Read More $13 at Peloton (three months)
A gift card for Headspace , a popular mindfulness app, offers members access to hundreds of expert-taught meditations, each designed to help them relax, sleep better, and improve their mental health. A gift subscription will run you $38.99 for three months, or you can save by getting 12 months for $48.99 ($21 off).
Fitbit Premium subscriptions start at $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year (33 percent off) and are available to all, even if your giftee doesn’t own a Fitbit (though they’ll be able to enjoy more in-depth metrics if they do). A membership comes with thousands of guided and customizable workouts, which cover everything from martial arts and dance to meditation. Fitbit also offers guided programs covering topics like nutrition, along with the option to work one-on-one with a professional health coach for an extra $54.99 a month.
For those who prefer in-person classes to virtual, a gift card that goes toward a ClassPass subscription will let your giftee try out thousands of gyms and fitness studios in their local area, not to mention nearby salons and spas.
If your giftee is too busy to prepare healthy meals every day, a gift card to Blue Apron HelloFresh , or any meal prep service that offers a healthy selection of meal kits will be very welcome.
Gifts for foodies
Whether they’re a diehard foodie, a wine connoisseur, or a caffeine addict, the internet is filled with subscriptions and gift cards for all types. Below are just a few of our favorites.
Gifts for music lovers
Whether your giftee is a musician or just loves to unwind with music, there are plenty of digital gifts catered toward their interests. We all know about Spotify gift cards (Amazon, Best Buy, Target), but there are also other streaming services that you can gift as a subscription, some of which we’ve highlighted below.
Apple Music $ 25 $ 25 Apple Music is a great gift for casual listeners, offering more than 100 million ad-free songs alongside support for spatial audio and Dolby Atmos. There’s no designated gift card for Apple Music, so you’ll have to buy a regular Apple gift card, but that’s not a bad thing, as it means they can also use the card to buy the latest set of AirPods. Read More $25 at Amazon$25 at Apple$25 at Best Buy
Tidal gift card (Walmart, PayPal, For the audiophiles out there, a Best Buy ) is great because it lets them stream music at the highest audio quality. The ad-free service starts at $10.99 per month and lets giftees enjoy support for lossless FLAC audio, Dolby Atmos Music, and Sony’s 360 Reality Audio formats. If they happen to be a DJ or aspire to become one, paying $9 a month extra grants them access to the so-called “DJ Extension,” which provides a high-quality catalog of more than 110 million songs they can mix with popular DJ software and hardware.
If you know somebody who’s always wanted to learn to play the guitar, a Fender Play subscription can help them do so thanks to a continuously updated catalog of hundreds of instructor-led video lessons. You can gift them six months for $49.99 or 12 months for $149.99.
StubHub (Amazon, Best Buy, Lastly, a Ticketmaster or Staples ) gift card is a present that lets your loved one buy a ticket to see their favorite musicians perform live.
Gifts for the bookworms
Obviously, you could just gift a bibliophile a book, and they’d probably be happy. But what if you don’t know what your giftee is into or simply want to give them more options? In that case, a gift card to their favorite bookstore or a subscription to something like Kindle Unlimited — which grants members access to millions of ebooks and select audiobooks — is a good idea. That said, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite alternatives below.
Audible Premium Plus (one-month subscription) $ 15 $ 15 An Audible Premium Plus subscription grants instant access to thousands of audiobooks and podcasts, as well as one premium audiobook a month. Read More $15 at Amazon
Gifts for the creatives
Movie buffs and bibliophiles are easy to shop for, but what do you get the creative type? It’s actually not that hard — just buy them something to help them create, whether that’s an online course or access to a new tool. Below are a few subscriptions and gift cards that creators will love, all of which you can buy at the last minute.
Skillshare (three-month subscription) $ 69 $ 69 A subscription to Skillshare grants subscribers access to over 34,000 online classes related to graphic design, painting, photography, film, music, coding, and more. Read More $69 at Skillshare
MasterClass membership — which normally starts at $10 a month but is currently 50 percent off for all tiers — provides access to classes taught by world leaders and other subject matter experts, including screenwriters, musicians, and business experts. Going for a Masterclass Plus or Premium subscription allows concurrent viewing on two or six devices, respectively, and also unlocks offline viewing. — which normally starts at $10 a month but is currently 50 percent off for all tiers — provides access to classes taught by world leaders and other subject matter experts, including screenwriters, musicians, and business experts. Going for a Masterclass Plus or Premium subscription allows concurrent viewing on two or six devices, respectively, and also unlocks offline viewing.
subscription ($69.99 a month) is a great gift for aspiring and experienced creative professionals alike, one that provides access to popular tools like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and InDesign. Adobe doesn’t yet support gifting subscriptions, so you’ll need to create a new account or log in to an existing account your recipient may have. You can also purchase digitally redeemable Creative Cloud subscription codes from partner retailers like An Adobe Creative Cloud ($69.99 a month) is a great gift for aspiring and experienced creative professionals alike, one that provides access to popular tools like Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and InDesign. Adobe doesn’t yet support gifting subscriptions, so you’ll need to create a new account or log in to an existing account your recipient may have. You can also purchase digitally redeemable Creative Cloud subscription codes from partner retailers like Best Buy , which has a 12-month plan on sale for $579 (about $200 off) right now.
If you know somebody trying to learn how to code, a subscription to the coding educational platform Codecademy ($29.99 a month) can help them build their portfolio with online courses, a community, fun events, cheat sheets, and other resources. There’s even a $39.99-a-month plan for those looking to change career paths, which offers all the above, plus technical interview help.
membership (normally $123 a year, but just $1.79 for a limited time) grants access to more than 2,000 live and on-demand classes led by experts covering everything from baking and cake decorating to woodworking and painting. Members also get to connect with other crafters in the Craftsy community and attend live events. For giftees into arts and crafts, a Craftsy (normally $123 a year, but just $1.79 for a limited time) grants access to more than 2,000 live and on-demand classes led by experts covering everything from baking and cake decorating to woodworking and painting. Members also get to connect with other crafters in the Craftsy community and attend live events.
Gift cards for pretty much anyone
, Best Buy, Walmart, and Sometimes the best gift card is one that’ll give your giftee a ton of options, especially if you’re having a hard time figuring out what they want. Gift cards from major retailers like Amazon and Target are perfect in these situations, namely because they’ll let your giftee choose whatever they like from a wide range of departments.
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tech
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https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml
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2025-12-23T13:00:00-05:00
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2025-12-23T19:00:29.717999
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Data Holds the Key in Slowing Age-Related Illnesses
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https://www.wired.com/story/data-holds-the-key-in-slowing-age-related-illnesses/
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More accurate and individualized health predictions will allow for preventative factors to be implemented well in advance.
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In 2026, we will see the beginning of precision medical forecasting. Just as there have been remarkable advances in weather forecasting with the use of large language models, so will there be for determining an individual’s risk of the major age-related diseases (cancer, cardiovascular, and neurodegenerative). These diseases share common threads, such as a long incubation phase before any symptoms are manifest, usually two decades or more. They also have the same biologic underpinnings of immunosenescence and inflammaging, terms that characterize an immune system that has lost some of its functionality and protective power, and the accompanying heightened inflammation.
The science of aging has given us new ways to track these processes with body-wide and organ clocks, along with specific protein biomarkers. That enables us to determine whether a person or an organ within a person is aging at an accelerated pace. Along with that, new AI algorithms can see things that medical experts cannot, such as accurately interpreting medical images like retinal scans to predict cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases many years in advance.
READ MORE This story is from the WIRED World in 2026, our annual trends briefing.
These added layers of data can be combined with a person’s electronic medical records, which include their structured and unstructured notes, lab results, scans, genetic results, wearable sensors, and environmental data. In aggregate, this provides an unprecedented depth of information about the person’s health status, enabling a forecast for risk of the three major diseases. Unlike a polygenic risk score which can detect a person’s risk for heart disease, the common cancers and Alzheimer’s, precision medical forecasting takes it to a new level by providing the projected temporal arc—the “when” factor. When all of the data is analyzed with large reasoning models, it can provide a person’s vulnerabilities, and an individualized, aggressive preventive program.
We already know the risk of these three diseases can be reduced with lifestyle factors, such as an optimal anti-inflammatory diet, frequent exercise, and a regular, high-quality sleep pattern. But, along with attention to these factors, which are far more likely to be implemented when an individual is cognizant of their risk, we will have medications that will promote a healthy, protective immune system and reduce body-wide and brain inflammation. Already the GLP-1 medicines have been shown to be a front-runner for achieving these goals, but many more medications are in the pipeline.
The potential for precision medical forecasting has to be demonstrated and validated via prospective clinical trials that show, using the same metrics of aging, that a person’s risk is decreased. An example for people with increased risk of Alzheimer’s is the blood test known as p-tau217, and that risk can be markedly reduced with improved lifestyle factors, especially exercise. That could be confirmed with a brain organ clock and body-wide aging clocks.
This is a new frontier in medicine—the potential for primary prevention of the three age-related major diseases that compromise our health span and quality of life. It would not be possible without the advances in both the science of aging and AI. For me, this is the most exciting future use of AI in medicine: an unparalleled opportunity to prevent the major diseases from occurring, something that has been dreamed about but has not been possible at scale due to the deficiency in data and analytics. In 2026, it finally will.
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https://www.wired.com/feed/rss
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Tue, 23 Dec 2025 18:11:52 +0000
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2025-12-23T19:00:30.135404
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