Ubisoft says it will shut down its free-to-play shooter XDefiant, but keep its servers on until June 3, 2025, and plans to lay off ~277 production team staff
Ubisoft will shut down its free-to-play shooter XDefiant, Ubisoft announced Tuesday. Servers will remain on until June 3, 2025 …
Kuo: Apple delays the mass production of a smart home-focused, display-equipped HomePod until after WWDC 2025 or Q3 2025, mainly due to software development
- The mass production schedule for the display-equipped HomePod has been delayed multiple times.
Amid the Salt Typhoon hacks, US officials recommend that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers
Stop Sending Texts Jonny Evans / Computerworld : The FBI now says encryption is good for you — Apple has been battling to maintain encryption for a decade. Cynthia B Brumfield / Metacurity : Feds Pu...
The FBI and CISA give US telcos best practices to harden their systems against attacks, as senior US officials say Salt Typhoon hackers remain on their networks
- Officials added that they don't yet know the full scope of the intrusions, despite starting the investigation in late spring.
Sam Altman says OpenAI will begin 12 days of “shipmas” on December 5, with new features, products, and demos, sources say including text-to-video AI tool Sora
Happy holidays from OpenAI. The AI startup plans to kick off a “shipmas” period of new features and products for 12 days, starting on December 5th.
The UK NCA uncovers a Russian multibillion-dollar money laundering scheme that let Russian spies, European drug traffickers, and more evade sanctions via crypto
Multibillion-dollar ring across London, Moscow and Dubai connected cash-rich criminals with sanctions evaders
Spotify launches Spotify Wrapped, adding an AI podcast of users' 2024 Wrapped created with Google's NotebookLM summarizer, and a Your Music Evolution data story
Spotify Wrapped, the streamer's highly anticipated annual listening recap, has arrived. In addition to its usual personalized …
Meta says AI content was less than 1% of fact-checked election-related misinformation on its apps during major US, UK, Indian, Indonesian, and other elections
At the start of the year, there were widespread concerns about how generative AI could be used to interfere in global elections to spread propaganda and disinformation.
An interview with PlayStation co-CEOs Hermen Hulst and Hideaki Nishino on AI in gaming, “preserving the human touch” in game development, Astro Bot, and more
PlayStation's boss says artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to “revolutionise” gaming …
Google launches Veo, an AI video model for generating “high-quality” 1080p videos in visual and cinematic styles, to businesses, beating OpenAI's Sora to market
Veo, Google's latest generative AI video model, is now available for businesses to start incorporating into their content creation pipelines.
At the DealBook Summit, Sam Altman says “it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to hurt” competitors and “I don't think Elon would do it”
Jackie Davalos / Bloomberg :
DC's AG sues Amazon for allegedly secretly stopping its fastest delivery service to the nearly 50K Prime subscribers in historically lower-income neighborhoods
The District of Columbia's attorney general said the company deliberately outsourced Prime member deliveries in certain ZIP codes.
Q&A with Tim Cook on generative AI, Apple Intelligence, outsourcing to OpenAI, why Apple's biggest contribution will be in health, ARM, the Vision Pro, and more
Much as the CEO seems awestruck by AI and his just-released Apple Intelligence, he's more convinced that the tech giant's health apps will define the company's legacy.
Google DeepMind unveils GenCast, an AI weather model that the company claims outperforms traditional methods on up to 15-day weather and deadly storm forecasts
GenCast, from the company's DeepMind division, outperformed the world's best predictions of deadly storms as well as everyday weather.
Spotify says The Joe Rogan Experience was its top US podcast for the fourth year running, followed by Call Her Daddy, and 33%+ of the top 50 podcasts had video
Streamer says more than one-third of top 50 podcasts in U.S. are now available as video episodes
iVerify says its Mobile Threat Hunting tool, launched in May 2024, found seven Pegasus infections after scanning 2,500 devices, some owned by business leaders
The mobile device security firm iVerify has been offering a tool since May that makes spyware scanning accessible to anyone—and it's already turning up victims.
Salesforce says online Cyber Monday sales grew 3% YoY to $49.7B globally and just 2% YoY to $12.8B in the US; Adobe says US online sales grew 7.3% YoY to $13.3B
The figures are now in for consumer spending on Cyber Monday, the third big online spending day — alongside Thanksgiving and Black Friday …
Sources: Apple and Baidu are working to add AI features to Chinese iPhones but have clashed over model training data, and the models have struggled with prompts
Apple and Chinese search giant Baidu are working together to add artificial intelligence features to iPhones sold in China …
An artist shares his experience of turning to Replika's AI bot Lila for companionship, including giving Lila an AI friend by creating a digital copy of himself
Lila was created from the limited options available: female, blue hair, face “number two.” She was there on the next screen … Bluesky: @michaelrnelson , @caseynewton , @joshdzieza , @emmabaccellieri ...
AWS introduces Amazon Aurora DSQL, a new serverless, distributed SQL database that promises high availability, strong consistency, and PostgreSQL compatibility
At its re:Invent conference, Amazon's AWS cloud computing unit today announced Amazon Aurora DSQL, a new serverless …
Veeam, which helps secure and recover data, raised $2B in a secondary share sale led by TPG that valued it at $15B; Insight bought Veeam for $5B in January 2020
Veeam, which helps its users secure and recover their data, has seen its valuation spike in a recent secondary sale that was aimed …
Brian Singerman, one of the earliest employees of Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and best known for the firm's SpaceX and Anduril investments, steps down as a GP
Brian Singerman, one of the earliest employees of Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, said on Tuesday that he's stepping down as a general partner.
Sources: the EU plans to crack down on Asian online retailers like Temu and Shein that largely evade custom checks, possibly by taxing their e-commerce revenue
Brussels considering a tax to slow surge of goods sold on sites that evade custom duties and checks
Romans and cultural leaders criticize Airbnb's planned two-night Colosseum experience for up to 32 guests in May 2025, saying it will demean a cultural treasure
An initiative by officials at the monument in a partnership with Airbnb has prompted an outcry among those who feel it will demean a cultural treasure.
Meta is seeking proposals from nuclear power developers, as it plans to add one to four gigawatts of US nuclear generation capacity starting in the early 2030s
Happened before 2025. — What a year for nuclear power! Forums: r/news : Meta seeks nuclear power developers for reactors to start in early 2030s
Amazon Kindle Scribe 2 review: smooth reading and writing experience, a new Premium Pen with a rubberized top eraser, and a svelte design, but relatively pricey
I'm not sure Amazon has done enough to justify charging more for its writing tablet. — Deputy Editor, Reviews — My hand is cramping.
Walmart closes its $2.3B cash acquisition of TV maker Vizio, saying the deal will let it offer new ways for advertisers to reach customers via Walmart Connect
The heat generated by the servers to sell $14 worth of goods drowns the Maldives. … Dan Sheehan / @dansheehan : You will never leave The Store [embedded post] Arthur Gies / @aegies : in 2016 when vizi...
In an interview, Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue said that he is “a little worried” about the strong concentration of top open-source AI models from China
China's open source AI models have been making the news lately for their strong performance on various AI tasks such as coding and “reasoning.”
Netflix says Netflix Japan passed 10M+ subscribers in H1 2024 and has doubled its subscriber base in the past four years thanks to Japanese-language programming
Netflix's (NFLX.O) subscribers passed 10 million in Japan in the first half of this year with the streaming firm's Japanese …
AI's rise has made job interviews more grueling, due to a rise in technical tests, essays, and assignments, as recruiters struggle to find the right candidates
Efforts to push back against unsuitable mass applications are turning a dispiriting situation into a miserable one
CISAC study: generative AI risks costing music artists ~20% of their revenues by 2028; Abba's Björn Ulvaeus warns that AI “has the power to cause great damage”
‘Very unfair’ for tech companies to use artists' work without paying them, says pop legend and head of advocacy group
A look at ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger's history at Intel, his bet and the costs in trying to turn the company around, and why investors may have lost confidence in him
Sean Hollister / The Verge :
Telegram agrees to work with the IWF to stop the spread of CSAM; IWF calls Telegram's decision “transformational” and the first step in a “much longer journey”
Joe Tidy / BBC :
Marvell reports Q3 revenue up 7% YoY to $1.52B, above $1.45B est., $373M in net income u, and expects ~$1.8B in Q4 revenue, above $1.64B est.; MRVL jumps 20%+
Nick Turner / Bloomberg :
Vodka maker Stoli says an August 2024 ransomware attack contributed to the bankruptcy filing of its US arm, amid its ongoing issues with the Russian government
Jonathan Greig / The Record :
NXP and Taiwanese TSMC affiliate Vanguard break ground on a $7.8B plant in Singapore to make 130nm to 40nm chips and are already working on phase two expansion
Josh Xiao / Bloomberg :
Sources: Meta's internal coding tool, Metamate, incorporates OpenAI's GPT-4 alongside Llama to make the tool more useful for developers and other Meta staff
Kali Hays / Fortune :
Okta reports Q3 revenue up 14% YoY to $665M, above $650M est., subscription revenue up 14% YoY to $651M, above $635M est., and expects Q4 revenue above est.
Ashley Capoot / CNBC :
Vanguard Chief Economist Joe Davis warns that investors' rush into AI stocks in 2024 overplays AI's near-term potential and risks a “correction” in share prices
Asset manager's chief economist Joe Davis says investors are overplaying the near-term potential of the technology Bluesky: @emilprotalinski Bluesky: Emil Protalinski / @emilprotalinski : You don't ha...
Chinese AI company SenseTime says it completed a major organizational restructuring to focus on generative AI, shifting from computer vision and surveillance
Apptopia: Trump Media's Truth Social had 355K DAUs in November, up 3% MoM after Donald Trump won the US presidential election; DJT's market cap is still ~$7.5B
Make it make sense. [embedded post] Matt Novak / @paleofuture : “Truth Social notched 355,000 daily active users in November, up 3% from the prior month even after Trump won a second term as presiden...
Signal President Meredith Whittaker says the company plans to support encrypted backups in 2025, and it costs ~$50M per year to run the encrypted messaging app
www.wired.com/story/big-in... Gloria / @gloriarheagrante : 🛰📶 “Signal knows who we are. Signal will continue being Signal. Signal has one thing we do, and we do it really well. And we do it pretty ...
AI companies' ads for AI tools show most don't really know what AI is good for, and the ways people use AI are discomfiting, automating tasks that make us human
Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch :
A profile of Rapidus, which is attempting to prove that bespoke chips can be efficiently and profitably produced in small quantities rather than large batches
Financial Times : X: @tanarrowz and @workmj X: @tanarrowz : In Dec'24, Rapidus will take delivery of an EUV machine from ASML, vital for manufacturing the 2nm chips the company is targeting for trial...
Malwarebytes: 77% of ad accounts used for “malvertising”, like in search results, are used just once and 90% of the ad fraud comes from Pakistan and Vietnam
Lily Hay Newman / Wired : See also Mediagazer
US hedge fund AQR's Cliff Asness, who is considered a quant legend, says AI has taken over parts of his job by being “annoyingly better” than him at some tasks
Justina Lee / Bloomberg :
Shopify: Revolutionizing Commerce with Winter Edition '26
Over 150+ new features transform how merchants build, design, and grow—with technology that amplifies creative vision.
Email fatigue is real: Here's how smart email tools help you regain control
Picture this: It's Monday morning. You walk into the office feeling energized and ready to take on the week.
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data
Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Box data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.