35 place 22
Global internet freedom declined for a 15th consecutive year, according to Freedom House's annual report. Semafor: "Always grim reading," this year's is particularly sobering, Tech Policy Press noted, with the lowest-ever portion of users living in countries categorized as "free." Conditions declined in 27 of the 72 countries assessed, with those in Kenya -- where anti-corruption protests were quelled, in part, by a seven-hour internet shutdown -- deteriorating the most. China and Myanmar tied for least-fre
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Slashdot
An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this story from Interesting Engineering: Cybersecurity specialists from the research group DARKNAVY have demonstrated how modern humanoid robots can be compromised and weaponised through weaknesses in their AI-driven control systems. In a controlled test, the team demonstrated that a commercially available humanoid robot could be hijacked with nothing more than spoken commands, exposing how voice-based interaction can serve as an attack vector rather than a... Read more ›
129 fresh
OpenAI is looking for a new Head of Preparedness who can help it anticipate the potential harms of its models and how they can be abused, in order to guide the company's safety strategy. It comes at the end of a year that's seen OpenAI hit with numerous accusations about ChatGPT's impacts on users' mental health, including a few wrongful death lawsuits. In a post on X about the position,... Read more ›
113 fresh
Bankruptcies are suddenly everywhere, from billion-dollar giants to small businesses to individuals. Experts are stumped at the breadth of industries. Read more ›
109
We might be looking at literally the most cooked RTX 5090 yet, with a burnt power connector that has melted into itself, despite using a native 12V-2x6 cable on an ATX 3.1 certified PSU. The person smelled fire, saw it, and lived to tell the tale, all on Christmas eve. Read more ›
108
A new Windows 11 Insider update optimises File Explorer search by removing redundant indexing operations, promising faster searches, lower memory use, and a cleaner context menu. Read more ›
87
OpenAI is reportedly still working on baking in ads into ChatGPT's results despite Altman's 'Code Red' earlier this month. Read more ›
86
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press: Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk's Starlink constellation with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, with the aim of reining in Western space superiority that has helped Ukraine on the battlefield. Intelligence findings seen by The Associated Press say the so-called "zone-effect" weapon would seek to flood Starlink orbits with hundreds... Read more ›
85 fresh
Phoronix reports on "an exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list" proposing "a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the 'Modern Standby' functionality found with Microsoft Windows..." Modern Standby is a low-power mode on Windows 11 for letting systems remain connected to the network and appear "sleeping" but will allow for instant wake-up for notifications, music playback, and other functionality. The display... Read more ›
78 fresh
As AI data centers' power consumption puts more strain on the grid, the U.S. is trying to tackle issue by letting them draw power directly from plants instead. Read more ›
78 fresh
Celebrating New Year's Eve on a solo trip to a new place, surrounded by strangers, set a positive tone for the year and reminded me I wasn't alone. Read more ›
70
I left my kids — including a newborn — to see the Backstreet Boys in August. They're back at the Sphere, and I hope another mom is doing the same. Read more ›
58
GameStop just released a press release saying that it will help Valve co-founder Gabe Newell learn how to count to three. Read more ›
54
NVIDIA has been "gradually dropping support for older videocards," notes Hackaday, "with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed." "What's more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example.?" On these systems, updating the OS with a Pascal, Maxwell or similarly unsupported GPU will result in the new driver failing to load and thus the... Read more ›
52 fresh
Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Dec. 28 #931. Read more ›
52 fresh
Looking for Quordle clues? We can help. Plus get the answers to Quordle today and past solutions. Read more ›
48
Samsung has uncovered its 2026 audio products which include new soundbars and those Wi-Fi speakers. Read more ›
48 fresh
Finland may not be the first country that comes to mind when you think of an Air Force, but it is nonetheless expanding with an expensive new jet. Read more ›
44
Some Japanese computer stores are limiting GPU purchases because of supply uncertainty, especially for models with 16GB of VRAM and up. Read more ›
43
Slashdot
Microsoft plans to eliminate all C and C++ code across its major codebases by 2030, replacing it with Rust using AI-assisted, large-scale refactoring. "My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030," Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. "Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases. Our North Star is '1 engineer, 1 month,... Read more ›
700
A group of activists has scraped Spotify's entire library, accessing 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files totaling roughly 300TB of data. The metadata has been released via Anna's Archive, a search engine for "shadow libraries" that previously focused on books. Spotify described the activists as "anti-copyright extremists who've previously pirated content from YouTube and other platforms" and confirmed it is actively investigating the incident. The... Read more ›
196
GitHub has disabled Rockchip's Media Process Platform repository after an FFmpeg developer filed a DMCA takedown notice, nearly two years after the open-source project first publicly accused the Chinese chipmaker of license violations. The notice, filed December 18, claims Rockchip copied thousands of lines of code from FFmpeg's libavcodec library -- including decoders for H.265, AV1, and VP9 formats -- stripped the original copyright notices, falsely claimed authorship and redistributed... Read more ›
137
European public institutions are quietly migrating away from American cloud providers and office software, driven less by policy ambitions in Brussels than by the mundane legal reality that GDPR-mandated risk assessments keep flagging the US CLOUD Act as an unacceptable threat to citizen data. Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism moved 1,200 employees to the open-source platform Nextcloud in four months. Germany's Schleswig-Holstein has already transitioned 24,000 of... Read more ›
106
While America's largest corporations are riding a wave of surging profits and AI-fueled stock market enthusiasm to record highs, small businesses across the country are cutting staff and scaling back operations as years of high inflation, cautious consumers and tariff confusion take their toll. Private firms with fewer than 50 workers have steadily shed jobs over the past six months, according to payroll processor ADP, cutting 120,000 positions in November... Read more ›
102
The relentless climb in memory prices driven by the AI boom's insatiable demand for datacenter hardware has renewed an old debate about whether modern software has grown inexcusably fat, a column by the Register argues. The piece points to Windows Task Manager as a case study: the current executable occupies 6MB on disk and demands nearly 70MB of RAM just to display system information, compared to the original's 85KB footprint.... Read more ›
97
Phoronix's Michael Larabel writes: An interesting anecdote from this month's Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck... On Meta Servers. Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers. [...] The presentation at LPC 2025 by Meta engineers was in fact titled "How do we... Read more ›
95
While stock investors have pushed AI-related shares to repeated highs this year, debt markets are telling a more cautious story as newer AI infrastructure companies find themselves paying significantly elevated interest rates to borrow money. Applied Digital, a data center builder, sold $2.35 billion of debt in November at a 9.25% coupon -- roughly 3.75% above similarly rated companies, or about 70% more in interest costs. The pattern has repeated... Read more ›
83
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: 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,... Read more ›
75
After more than two decades of promises and false starts in the mesh networking space, the smart home standards that Apple, Amazon and Google have each championed are finally set to escape their respective brand silos and work together in a single unified network. Starting January 1, 2026, Thread 1.4 becomes the Thread Group's only certified standard, bringing a crucial new capability called credential sharing. Devices from different manufacturers can... Read more ›
73
Most popular sources
Business Insider
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37% 11 |
Gizmodo
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14% 8 |
Tom's Hardware
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14% 1 |
TechRadar
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7% 5 |
|
Slashdot
|
4% 3 |
| View sources » | |
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27.12.2025 22:55
Last update: 22:50 EDT.
News rating updated: 05:50.
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