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McDonald's has pulled an AI-generated Christmas commercial from YouTube after viewers pushed back on what they called a distasteful, "AI slop"-filled take on the holidays. The 45-second ad, titled "It's the most terrible time of the year," was a satirical look at holiday chaos -- people tripping while carrying overloaded gift bags, getting tangled in lights, burning homemade cookies, starting kitchen fires -- and ended with a suggestion to ditch the madness and hide out at McDonald's until January.
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Slashdot
New research suggests that even light alcohol use may carry serious risks. A large study in India found that drinking just one standard drink a day is linked to a roughly 50% higher risk of mouth cancer, with the greatest danger tied to locally brewed alcohol. When alcohol use overlaps with chewing tobacco, the effect becomes especially severe, potentially explaining nearly two-thirds of all cases nationwide. Read more ›
304 fresh
Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of JFK and a prominent climate activist and environmental journalist, has died of leukemia at age 35. Read more ›
303 fresh
The first Iron Beam laser defense system was deployed by Israel on Sunday. This 100kW laser weapon thus became the world’s first drone defense zapper to be operationally deployed. Read more ›
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PC Gamer argues that 2025 was a year full of high-profile AI embarrassments across games and entertainment, with Disney and Lucasfilm serving as the "opening salvo." From the report: At a TED talk back in April, Lucasfilm senior vice president of creative innovation Rob Bredow presented a demonstration of what he called "a new era of technology." Across 50 years of legendary innovation in miniature design, practical effects, and computer... Read more ›
249 fresh
Disney hopes there'll be better chances for the latest 'Tron' movie to find an audience in streaming. Read more ›
237 fresh
What do we know about the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S26? A lot actually, thanks to the usual leaks that precede a new Samsung mobile launch event. Read more ›
196 fresh
Two cybersecurity professionals who spent their careers defending organizations against ransomware attacks have pleaded guilty in a Florida federal court to using ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware to extort American businesses throughout 2023. Ryan Goldberg, a 40-year-old incident response manager from Georgia, and Kevin Martin, a 36-year-old ransomware negotiator from Texas, admitted to conspiring to obstruct commerce through extortion. Between April and December 2023, Goldberg, Martin, and a third unnamed co-co Read more ›
182 fresh
SK hynix is bringing its HBM ambitions to U.S. soil with a $3.9 billion plan to build its first domestic manufacturing facility — a 2.5D advanced packaging plant in West Lafayette, Indiana. Read more ›
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China is quietly mandating that chipmakers use at least 50% domestically made equipment when expanding capacity, "as Beijing pushes to build a self-sufficient semiconductor supply chain," according to Reuters. From the report: The rule is not publicly documented, but chipmakers seeking state approval to build or expand their plants have been told by authorities in recent months that they must prove through procurement tenders that at least half their equipment... Read more ›
168 fresh
Musk allies spin DOGE as having a "higher purpose" beyond federal budget cuts. Read more ›
161 fresh
I booked Amtrak's private roomette on an overnight train from NYC to Miami in 2021. It packed a lot into 20 square feet. Read more ›
135 fresh
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Mac Bauer is fast, but the city's trams, weighing more than 100,000lbs and traveling at a maximum speed of nearly 45mph, should be far faster than him. And yet as of late December, in head-to-head races against streetcars, the 32-year-old remains undefeated in his quest to highlight how sluggish the trams, used by 230,000 people daily, truly are. Some races have... Read more ›
134 fresh
After nearly a month and with most options exhausted, one unlucky RTX 5080 buyer finally got their card. Read more ›
134 fresh
China's missile arsenal can strike targets around Taiwan, across the Indo-Pacific, and even in the continental US. The maps paint a clear picture. Read more ›
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Bill Ackman, Palmer Luckey, Garry Tan, and more are sharing their opinions on a California billionaire tax proposal. Read more ›
130 fresh
Shawn Layden, once a top executive at Sony Interactive Entertainment, is reminding the gaming world that exclusive games still have a role to play. This comes as consoles are increasingly resembling gaming PCs with cross-platform releases everywhere you look. Layden’s comments, shared in a recent Pause for Thought podcast, push back against the idea that ... Read more ›
130 fresh
The state deals with flooding and sea level rise by buying homes in flood prone areas. Read more ›
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Axios reports that venture capitalist Alex Davis is warning that a speculative rush to build data centers without committed tenants could trigger a financing crunch by 2027-2028. "This critique is coming from inside the AI optimist camp," notes Axios, as Davis' firm, Disruptive, "recently led a large investment in AI chipmaker Groq, which then signed a $20 billion licensing deal with Nvidia. It's also backed such unicorn startups as Reflection... Read more ›
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Slashdot
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 ›
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The Register reports on challenges facing Europe's pursuit of "digital sovereignty": The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)... Furthermore, these warrants often come with a gag order,... Read more ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget: 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.... Read more ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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Michael Truell, the 25-year-old CEO and cofounder of Cursor, is drawing a sharp distinction between careful AI-assisted development and the more hands-off approach commonly known as "vibe coding." Speaking at a conference, Truell described vibe coding as a method where users "close your eyes and you don't look at the code at all and you just ask the AI to go build the thing for you." He compared it to... Read more ›
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Windows 10's formal end-of-support arrived in October, and while the operating system is generally remembered as one of the "good" versions of Windows -- the most widely used since XP -- many of the annoyances people complain about in Windows 11 actually started during the Windows 10 era, ArsTechnica writes. Windows 10 earned its positive reputation primarily by not being Windows 8. It restored a version of the traditional Start... Read more ›
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The Justice Department justified its delayed release of sensitive files by citing the need to carefully redact information that could identify victims, but at least some of those redactions have proven to be technically ineffective and can be bypassed by simply copying and pasting the blacked-out text into a new document. A 2022 complaint filed by the US Virgin Islands seeking damages from Jeffrey Epstein's estate appeared on the DOJ's... Read more ›
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Most popular sources
Business Insider
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31% 14 |
Tom's Hardware
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14% 1 |
Gizmodo
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12% 5 |
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Slashdot
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6% 2 |
Vox
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5% 0 |
| View sources » | |
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30.12.2025 22:43
Last update: 22:35 EDT.
News rating updated: 05:30.
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