Many Schools Don’t Think Students Can Read Full Novels Anymore
A survey of 2,000 teachers, students and parents conducted by the New York Times found that many high schools have stopped assigning full novels to students, opting instead for excerpts that are often read on school-issued laptops rather than in print. The shift stems from multiple factors: a belief that students have shorter attention spans, pressure … ⌘ Read more

UK Urged To Unplug From US Tech Giants as Digital Sovereignty Fears Grow
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Open Rights Group is warning politicians that the UK is leaning far too heavily on US tech companies to run critical systems, and wants the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill to force a rethink.

The digital rights outfit says the bill, which is due to receive its second reading in the House … ⌘ Read more

HP Pushes PC-in-a-Keyboard for Businesses With Hot Desks
HP this week announced the EliteBoard G1a at CES 2026, a Windows computer built into a full-size 93-key desktop keyboard that the company is marketing to businesses where employees use hot desks and need a portable computing environment they can carry between workstations.

The device connects to a USB-C monitor for both video output and power delivery over a single … ⌘ Read more

‘NY Orders Apps To Lie About Social Media Addiction, Will Lose In Court’
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has signed S4505, a law that requires websites to display warnings claiming that features like algorithmic feeds, push notifications, infinite scroll, like counts, and autoplay cause addiction – despite, as TechDirt argues, the absence of scientific consensus supporting such claims.

State Senator Andr … ⌘ Read more

Razer Thinks You’d Rather Have AI Headphones Instead of Glasses
Razer today unveiled Project Motoko, a concept pair of over-ear headphones equipped with dual cameras that the gaming peripherals company believes could serve as an alternative to the smart glasses that have proliferated across the wearable AI market. The headphones feature two 4K cameras positioned on the earcups along with near and far field micro … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Office Is Now ‘Microsoft 365 Copilot App’
Longtime reader joshuark shares a report: As spotted by Bluesky user DodgerFanLA, going to Office.com now greets you with the following helpful explainer: “The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) lets you create, share, and collaborate all in one place with your favorite apps now including Copilot.*”

Never has an asterisk been more relevant to me than following the wor … ⌘ Read more

Stratechery Pushes Back on AI Capital Dystopia Predictions
Stratechery’s Ben Thompson has published a lengthy rebuttal to Dwarkesh Patel and Philip Trammell’s widely discussed winter break essay “Capital in the 22nd Century,” arguing that even in a world where AI can perform all human jobs, people will still prefer human-created content and human connection.

Patel and Trammell’s thesis draws on Thomas Piketty’s wor … ⌘ Read more

VW Brings Back Physical Buttons
sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: Volkswagen is making a drastic change to its interiors, or at least the interiors of its electric vehicles. The automaker recently unveiled a new cockpit generation with the refreshed ID. Polo – the diminutive electric hatchback that the brand sells in Europe – that now comes with physical buttons. […] The steering wheel gets new clusters of buttons for cruise co … ⌘ Read more

Dell Admits It Made a Huge Mistake When It Abandoned XPS
Dell has reversed course and resurrected the XPS brand as its “premium consumer” brand of laptops, admitting it was a mistake to kill it in the first place. Slashdot reader joshuark shares a report from Gizmodo: At last year’s CES, Dell made the eyebrow-raising decision to ax all its legacy laptop brand names and instead opt for Apple-like conventions. Inste … ⌘ Read more

Hyundai and Boston Dynamics Unveil Humanoid Robot Atlas At CES
At CES 2026 today, Hyundai and Boston Dynamics publicly demonstrated its humanoid robot Atlas, showing off fluid movement and announcing plans to deploy a production version in Hyundai’s EV factory by 2028. NBC News reports: “For the first time ever in public, please welcome Atlas to the stage,” said Boston Dynamics’ Zachary Jackowski as a life-s … ⌘ Read more

The Nation’s Strictest Privacy Law Goes Into Effect
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Californians are getting a new, supercharged way to stop data brokers from hoarding and selling their personal information, as a recently enacted law that’s among the strictest in the nation took effect at the beginning of the year. […] Two years ago, California’s Delete Act took effect. It required data brokers to … ⌘ Read more

‘Godfather of SaaS’ Says He Replaced Most of His Sales Team With AI Agents
joshuark shares a report from Business Insider: Jason Lemkin, known to some as the Godfather of SaaS, says the time has come to push the limits of AI in the workplace. Lemkin, the founder of SaaStr, the world’s largest community of business-to-business founders. In a recent podcast Lemkin said that this means he will stop hiring huma … ⌘ Read more

Anna’s Archive Loses .Org Domain After Surprise Suspension
Anna’s Archive lost control of its primary .org domain after it was placed on registry-level serverHold – “an action that’s typically taken by the domain name registry,” reports TorrentFreak. Despite mounting legal pressure and speculation tied to its Spotify backup, the site remains accessible via multiple alternative domains, underscoring t … ⌘ Read more

Corporation for Public Broadcasting To Shut Down After 58 Years
After Congress approved President Donald Trump’s rescission package eliminating federal funding, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted to dissolve after 58 years, rather than continue to exist and potentially be “vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse.” The shutdown leaves hundreds of local public TV and radio station … ⌘ Read more

Lego’s Smart Brick Gives the Iconic Analog Toy a New Digital Brain
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: At CES in Las Vegas today, Lego has unveiled its new Smart Play platform, aimed at taking its distinctly analog plastic blocks and figures into a new world of tech-powered interactive play – but crucially one without any reliance on screens. Smart Play revolves around Lego’s patented sensor- and … ⌘ Read more

GNOME and Firefox Consider Disabling Middle Click Paste By Default
Both GNOME and Firefox are considering disabling middle-click paste by default, arguing it’s a confusing, accident-prone X11 relic that dumps clipboard contents without warning. Phoronix reports: A merge request for GNOME’s gsettings-desktop-schemas was opened this weekend to disable the primary-paste functionality by default that allows usin … ⌘ Read more

Viral Reddit Post About Food Delivery Apps Was an AI Scam
A viral Reddit “whistleblower” post accusing a major food delivery app of systemic exploitation is “most likely AI-generated,” reports the Verge. From the report: The original post by user Trowaway_whistleblow alleged that an unnamed food delivery company regularly delays customer orders, calls couriers “human assets,” and exploits their “desperation” for cas … ⌘ Read more

Amazon’s AI Assistant Comes To the Web With Alexa.com
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon’s AI-powered overhaul of its digital assistant, now known as Alexa+, is coming to the web. On Monday, at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company announced the official launch of a new website, Alexa.com, which is now rolling out to all Alexa+ Early Access customers. The site will allow c … ⌘ Read more

SanDisk Says Goodbye To WD Blue and Black SSDs, Hello To New ‘Optimus’ Drives
SanDisk is retiring the WD Blue and WD Black SSD brands and replacing them with a new “Optimus” line that carries the same model numbers as its predecessors. The move follows Western Digital’s late-2023 decision to split into two companies – one retaining the WD name for hard drives sold to NAS and data center customer … ⌘ Read more

VSCode IDE Forks Expose Users To ‘Recommended Extension’ Attacks
An anonymous reader shares a report: Popular AI-powered integrated development environment solutions, such as Cursor, Windsurf, Google Antigravity, and Trae, recommend extensions that are non-existent in the OpenVSX registry, allowing threat actors to claim the namespace and upload malicious extensions.

These AI-assisted IDEs are forked from Microso … ⌘ Read more

UK Government’s New Pension Portal Operator Tells Users To Wait for AI Before Complaining
Capita, the UK outsourcer that won a $323 million contract to administer the nation’s Civil Service Pension Scheme for 1.7 million members, has responded to a disastrous portal launch by asking users to hold off on complaints until its new AI chatbots go live.

The service launched on December 1 and … ⌘ Read more

Google To Kill Gmail’s POP3 Mail Fetching
Google is quietly killing Gmail’s ability to fetch mail from third-party email accounts using POP3, a long-standing feature that has allowed users to consolidate multiple inboxes into a single Gmail interface. The change takes effect this month and also ends Gmailify, the companion feature that applied Gmail’s spam filtering and inbox organization to linked third-party accounts.

Google buried … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft is Slowly Turning Edge Into Another Copilot App
Microsoft has started testing a “significant” visual overhaul for Edge in its Canary and Dev Channel preview builds, and the redesigned interface borrows heavily from the design language that first appeared in the company’s standalone Copilot app rather than the Fluent Design system used across Windows 11, Xbox, and Office.

The updated look touches context menus, … ⌘ Read more

Flu Is Relentless. Crispr Might Be Able to Shut It Down
Scientists at Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity are working on a Crispr-based treatment – delivered as a nasal spray or injection – that could stop influenza infections by targeting the virus’s RNA and disrupting its ability to replicate inside human cells.

The approach uses the Cas13 enzyme, a lesser-known cousin of the DNA-cuttin … ⌘ Read more

‘The College Backlash is a Mirage’
Public opinion surveys paint a picture of Americans souring dramatically on higher education, as Pew found that the share of adults calling college “very important” dropped from 70% in 2013 to just 35% today, and NBC polling shows that 63% now believe a degree is “not worth the cost,” up from 40% over the same period. Yet enrollment data tells a different story.

Four-year institutions awarded 2 million bac … ⌘ Read more

Influencers and OnlyFans Models Dominate US ‘Extraordinary’ Artist Visas
The O-1B visa, a work permit reserved for individuals deemed to possess “extraordinary ability” in the arts, has become the pathway of choice for social media influencers and OnlyFans models seeking to build careers in the United States. Immigration attorneys told the Financial Times that influencers now make up more than half their … ⌘ Read more

Samsung’s CES Concepts Disguise AI Speakers as Turntables and Cassette Players
Samsung is bringing a pair of retro-styled speaker concepts to CES 2026 that combine old-school aesthetics with OLED screens and AI-powered music recommendations, and the company is positioning them as alternatives to conventional Bluetooth speakers that typically depend on a paired smartphone or tablet for con … ⌘ Read more

People of Dubious Character Are More Likely To Enter Public Service
A new working paper from researchers at the University of Hong Kong has found that Chinese graduate students who plagiarized more heavily in their master’s theses were significantly more likely to pursue careers in the civil service and to climb the ranks faster once inside.

John Liu and co-authors analyzed 6 million dissertations from CNKI, a … ⌘ Read more

Stack Overflow Went From 200,000 Monthly Questions To Nearly Zero
Stack Overflow’s monthly question volume has collapsed about 300 – levels not seen since the site launched in 2009, according to data from the Stack Overflow Data Explorer that tracks the platform’s activity over its sixteen-year history.

Questions peaked around 2014 at roughly 200,000 per month, then began a gradual decline that acceler … ⌘ Read more

Samsung Co-CEO Says Soaring Memory Chip Prices Will ‘Inevitably’ Impact Smartphone Costs
Samsung’s co-CEO TM Roh has warned that product price increases are “inevitable” as an unprecedented global memory chip shortage squeezes margins across the company’s consumer electronics lineup – from smartphones to televisions and home appliances.

The South Korean giant, one of the top two larges … ⌘ Read more

As US Communities Start Fighting Back, Many Datacenters are Blocked
America’s tech companies and data center developers “are increasingly losing fights in communities where people don’t want to live next to them, or even near them,” reports the Associated Press:

Communities across the United States are reading about — and learning from — each other’s battles against data center proposals that are fast multi … ⌘ Read more

2025 Ends With Release of J. R. R. Tolkein’s Unpublished Story
2025’S final months finally saw the publication of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Bovadium Fragments, writes the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Anyone who has read Tolkien’s letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and The Bovadium Fragments is a work brimming with Tolkien’s fury — specifically, ire over mankind’s obsession with … ⌘ Read more

Workstation Owner Sadly Marks the End-of-Life for HP-UX
Wednesday marked the end of support for the last and final version of HP-UX, writes OSNews.

They call it “the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux.”

I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last … ⌘ Read more

39 Million Californians Can Now Legally Demand Data Brokers Delete Their Personal Data
While California’s residents have had the right to demand companies stop collecting/selling their data since 2020, doing so used to require a laborious opting out with each individual company,” reports TechCrunch.
But now Californians can make “a single request that more than 500 registered data brokers … ⌘ Read more

North Dakota Law Included Fake Critical Minerals Using Lawyers’ Last Names
North Dakota passed a law last May to promote development of rare earth minerals in the state. But the law’s language apparently also includes two fake mineral names, according to the Bismarck Tribune, “that appear to be inspired by coal company lawyers who worked on the bill.”

The inclusion of fictional substances is being cal … ⌘ Read more

Are Hybrid Cars Helping America Transition to Electric Vehicles?
America’s electric car subsidies expired at the end of September, notes Bloomberg. Yet in those last three months, “while fully electric cars and trucks made up 10% of all auto sales in the US… another 15% of transactions were for hybrid vehicles.”

The EV market is slowing in the U.S., but analysts expect hybrid sales to continue accelerati … ⌘ Read more

Fleischer Studios Criticized for Claiming Betty Boop is Not Public Domain
Here it is — Betty Boop’s first appearance, which became public domain on Thursday. It’s a 60-second song halfway through a longer cartoon about a restaurant titled Dizzy Dishes. (The first scene makes it clear this is a restaurant of anthropomorphized animals — which explains why the as-yet-unnamed character has floppy dog ears…)
… ⌘ Read more

‘Fish Mouth’ Filter Removes 99% of Microplastics From Laundry Waste
“The ancient evolution of fish mouths could help solve a modern source of plastic pollution,” writes ScienceAlert.
“Inspired by these natural filtration systems, scientists in Germany have invented a way to remove 99 percent of plastic particles from water. It’s based on how some fish filter-feed to eat microscopic prey.”

The research team ha … ⌘ Read more

A Drug-Resistant ‘Superbug’ Fungus Infected 7,000 Americans in 2025
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Independent:

Candida auris, a type of invasive yeast that can cause deadly infections in people with weakened immune systems, has infected at least 7,000 people [in 2025] across 27 U.S. states, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The fungus, which can spr … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Risky Bet That Windows Can Become The Platform for AI Agents
“Microsoft is hoping that Windows can once again serve as the platform where it all takes off,” reports GeekWire:

A new framework called Agent Launchers, introduced in December as a preview in the latest Windows Insider build, lets developers register agents directly with the operating system. They can describe an agent through wh … ⌘ Read more

Trump Organization’s $499 Smartphone Delayed Again, Now Until the End of January
Last June the Trump organization announced sales of a $499 “T1” smartphone with a gold-colored case. But though they originally were scheduled for release in August, this week a customer service representative for the wireless carrier told CBS News the device will be pushed back again, now until the end of January, “ … ⌘ Read more

Archboot Adds COSMIC Desktop as a New Install and Rescue Option
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Linux news site Linuxiac:

Archboot, a guided, user-friendly, menu-driven installer for Arch Linux that automates much of the traditional manual installation process (while still allowing advanced users to intervene when needed), has added the COSMIC desktop environment as a new selectable option. The … ⌘ Read more

Furiosa’s Energy-Efficient ‘NPU’ AI Chips Start Mass Production This Month, Challenging Nvidia
The Wall Street Journal profiles “the startup that is now one of a handful of chip makers nipping at the heels of Nvidia.”

Furiosa’s AI chip is dubbed “RNGD” — short for renegade — and slated to start mass production this month. Valued at nearly $700 million based on its most recent fun … ⌘ Read more

The US Effort to Break China’s Rare-Earth Monopoly
The New York Times checks in on U.S. university researchers and start-ups trying to create domestic rare-earth processing facility:

There is too little money to be made in rare earths for the elements to be of much interest to mining giants, so the challenge of reestablishing a domestic industry has fallen to small companies like Phoenix Tailings, a Boston-area startup … ⌘ Read more

Reddit Surges in Popularity to Overtake TikTok in the UK - Thanks to Google’s Algorithm?
Reddit “has overtaken TikTok as Britain’s fourth most-visited social media service,” reports the Guardian:

The platform has undergone huge growth over the last two years, with an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches. Three in five Brits online now encounter the site, up from … ⌘ Read more

New Tesla Video Shows Tesla Semi Electric Truck Charging at 1.2 MW
An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek:

Tesla has released a new video showing a Tesla Semi truck charging at a massive 1.2 megawatts (MW), finally giving us a clear look at the charging speeds that will enable long-haul electric trucking…>

Tesla claimed the Semi would be able to charge 70% of its range in 30 minutes. For … ⌘ Read more

What Happened When Alaska’s Court System Tried Answering Questions with an AI Chatbot?
An AI chatbot to answer probate questions from Alaska residents “was supposed to be a three-month project,” said Aubrie Souza, a consultant with the National Center for State Courts told NBC News. “We are now at well over a year and three months, but that’s all because of the due diligence that was req … ⌘ Read more

Google’s $250M Deal with California to Fund Newsrooms May Be Stalled
Remember how California’s government negotiated a 2024 deal where Google contributed millions to California’s local newsrooms to offset advertisers moving to the search engine?

“A year after it was cemented — and billed as a model that could succeed where entire countries and continents had fallen short — the agreement is tangled in budget … ⌘ Read more

Has Microsoft Discontinued Offline Activation of Windows?
An anonymous reader shared
this report from Neowin:

Offline Windows activation has been possible to do using the phone. However, it looks like Microsoft has quietly killed off that method as users online have found that they are no longer able to activate the OS using it… [As documented by Windows user Ben Kleinberg on his YouTube channel], Now when trying … ⌘ Read more

The US Invaded Venezuela and Captured Nicolás Maduro - But ChatGPT and Perplexity Disagree
Why did the U.S. invade Venezuela and capture its leader Nicolás Maduro? “If you asked ChatGPT about it this morning, it told you that youâ™re making it up,” Wired reported Saturday:

WIRED asked leading chatbots ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini the same question a little before 9 am ET. In all case … ⌘ Read more