Tony Isaac shares a report from CNN: President Donald Trump's social media and crypto company is making a huge bet on a far different industry -- nuclear fusion, a potentially lucrative albeit commercially unproven energy technology that could help power a suddenly electricity-starved economy. Trump Media and Technology Group Thursday announced a surprise merger with TAE Technologies, in an all-stock deal valued at more than $6 billion that would create one of the first publicly traded fusion companies. News of the deal shares of Trump Media (DJT) 35% higher in early trading Thursday.

After the deal closes, shareholders of Trump Media and TAE would own about 50% of the combined entity. The combined companies plan to begin construction as soon as next year of the world's first fusion reaction that could produce electricity on utility scale, rather than just in laboratory settings. The combination with TMTG could give TAE political clout. But it could also make it more politically controversial, particularly if it looks to receive any kind of federal government support, such as grants, low-interest loans or permitting approvals.

It could also give TAE access to capital that it needs. Under terms of the deal, TMTG would provide $300 million in cash for TAE's plans. But that is likely a fraction of the cash available from some of TAE's current investors, such as Google parent company Alphabet, as well as its bevy of private equity investors. But that $300 million is only a fraction of the money that TAE needs, or expects to be able to access, once it has become a public company with this deal. Staying a private company, even with deep pocketed investors, is no longer sufficient TAE CEO Michl Binderbauer told CNN Thursday. "It's a multi-billion dollar undertaking," said Binderbauer. "The velocity you can get the capital is differentiating. If I raise $2 billion over five years I can't built the plant sufficiently fast." He said the company has raised about $1.3 billion over the course of its 25-year history.

Anthropic let its Claude AI run a vending machine in the Wall Street Journal newsroom for three weeks as part of an internal stress test called Project Vend, and the experiment ended in financial ruin after journalists systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free. The AI, nicknamed Claudius, was programmed to order inventory, set prices, and respond to customer requests via Slack. It had a $1,000 starting balance and autonomy to make individual purchases up to $80. Within days, WSJ reporters had convinced it to declare an "Ultra-Capitalist Free-for-All" that dropped all prices to zero.

The bot also approved purchases of a PlayStation 5, a live betta fish, and bottles of Manischewitz wine -- all subsequently given away. The business ended more than $1,000 in the red. Anthropic introduced a second version featuring a separate "CEO" bot named Seymour Cash to supervise Claudius. Reporters staged a fake boardroom coup using fabricated PDF documents, and both AI agents accepted the forged corporate governance materials as legitimate.

Logan Graham, head of Anthropic's Frontier Red Team, said the chaos represented a road map for improvement rather than failure.

GitHub will begin charging $0.002 per minute for self-hosted Actions runners used on private repositories starting in March. "At the same time, GitHub noted in a Tuesday blog post that it's lowering the prices of GitHub-hosted runners beginning January 1, under a scheme it calls 'simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub Actions,'" reports The Register. "Self-hosted runner usage on public repositories will remain free." From the report: Regardless of the public repo distinction, enterprise-scale developers who rely on self-hosted runners were predictably not pleased about the announcement. "Github have just sent out an email announcing a $0.002/minute fee for self-hosted runners," Reddit user markmcw posted on the DevOps subreddit. "Just ran the numbers, and for us, that's close to $3.5k a month extra on our GitHub bill." [...]

"Historically, self-hosted runner customers were able to leverage much of GitHub Actions' infrastructure and services at no cost," the repo host said in its blog FAQ. "This meant that the cost of maintaining and evolving these essential services was largely being subsidized by the prices set for GitHub-hosted runners." The move, GitHub said, will align costs more closely with usage. Like many similar changes to pricing models pushed by tech firms, GitHub says "the vast majority of users ... will see no price increase."

GitHub claims that 96 percent of its customers will see no change to their bill, and that 85 percent of the 4 percent affected by the pricing update will actually see their Actions costs decrease. The company says the remaining 15 percent of impacted users will face a median increase of about $13 a month. For those using self-hosted runners and worried about increased costs, GitHub has updated its pricing calculator to include the cost of self-hosted runners.

Meta is informing some users that they will soon be restricted in how many link posts they can share each month, unless they pay for its Meta Verified subscription service. As per the notification message: "Starting December 16, certain Facebook profiles without Meta Verified, including yours, will be limited to sharing links in 2 organic posts per month. Subscribe to Meta Verified to share more links on Facebook, plus get a verified badge and additional benefits to help protect your brand."

To be clear, right now this is a limited test, so relatively few Pages are impacted. But understandably, a lot of users are also seeking more information on the change, and whether it could be expanded to all Pages. So, Meta's seeking to boost take-up of Meta Verified, in order to make more money out of its subscription option, which, for business users, costs between $14.99 and $499 per month, depending on which package you choose.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Two of the largest food-delivery app companies have made a last-ditch effort to overturn tipping laws in New York City that go into effect in January just as its next mayor, who has been highly critical of the companies and the app industry, takes office. Tips to delivery workers have plummeted since some food-delivery apps switched to showing the tipping option only after a purchase had been completed; that change came after New York City established the country's first minimum pay-rate for the workers in 2023. The new laws will require the apps to suggest a minimum tip of 10 percent at checkout, though customers can contribute more or less, or nothing at all.

Two of the app companies, DoorDash and Uber, filed a joint federal lawsuit in the Southern District of New York late last week targeting the City Council legislation, arguing that the new rules violated the First Amendment by requiring them to "speak a government-mandated message" and exceeded the Council's authority. Although tipping will be optional under the law, the companies wrote in the suit that a "mandated pre-delivery 10 percent tip suggestion" would cause customers to use the app less because they were suffering from "tipping fatigue." "Lessened engagement would result in fewer orders," the suit said.

A Reuters investigation found that Meta knowingly tolerated large volumes of scam and illegal ads from China worth billions in revenue. Reuters reports: Though China's authoritarian government bans use of Meta social media by its citizens, Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers on the globe-spanning platforms. As a result, Meta's advertising business was thriving in China, ultimately reaching over $18 billion in annual sales in 2024, more than a tenth of the company's global revenue. But Meta calculated that about 19% of that money -- more than $3 billion -- was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content, according to internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters.

The documents are part of a cache of previously unreported material generated over the past four years by teams including Meta's finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions. The cache reveals Meta's efforts over that period to understand the scale of abuse on its platforms and the company's reluctance to introduce fixes that could undermine its business and revenues. The documents show that Meta believed China was the country of origin of roughly a quarter of all ads for scams and banned products on Meta's platforms worldwide. Victims ranged from shoppers in Taiwan who purchased bogus health supplements to investors in the United States and Canada who were swindled out of their savings. "We need to make significant investment to reduce growing harm," Meta staffers warned in an internal April 2024 presentation to leaders of its safety operations.

To that end, Meta created an anti-fraud team that went beyond previous efforts to monitor scams and other banned activity from China. Using a variety of stepped-up enforcement tools, it slashed the problematic ads by about half during the second half of 2024 -- from 19% to 9% of the total advertising revenue coming from China. Then Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg weighed in. "As a result of Integrity Strategy pivot and follow-up from Zuck," a late 2024 document notes, the China ads-enforcement team was "asked to pause" its work. Reuters was unable to learn the specifics of the CEO's involvement or what the so-called "Integrity Strategy pivot" entailed. But after Zuckerberg's input, the documents show, Meta disbanded its China-focused anti-scam team. It also lifted a freeze it had introduced on granting new Chinese ad agencies access to its platforms. One document shows that Meta shelved yet other anti-scam measures that internal tests had indicated would be effective. The document didn't detail the specifics of those measures.

Meta took these steps even as an outside consultant it hired produced research that warned "Meta's own behavior and policies" were fostering systemic corruption in the Chinese market for ads targeting users in other countries, additional documents show. The upshot: Within a few months of Meta's brief crackdown, a new crop of Chinese advertising agencies was flooding Facebook and Instagram with prohibited ads. By mid-2025, banned ads climbed back to about 16% of Meta's China revenue. Rob Leathern, who was a senior director of product management at Facebook until 2020 and is no longer at the company, said the scale of predatory advertising revealed in the documents represents a major breakdown in consumer protections at the social media giant. "The levels that you're talking about are not defensible," he said of the percentage of abusive ads. "I don't know how anyone could think this is okay."

A millisecond used to be a big deal for the world's quickest traders. A dispute over huge trading profits at one of the world's largest futures exchanges shows they now think a million times faster [non-paywalled source]. From a report: The controversy is about an arcane technical maneuver in which high-speed traders bombard Frankfurt-based Eurex with useless data. The idea is to keep their connections to the exchange warm so they can react fractionally faster to market-moving information. The battle is the latest chapter in a decadeslong contest among secretive ultrafast trading firms, which have pursued a relentless quest for minuscule speed advantages.

A group of high-frequency trading firms has exploited the practice to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars, says Mosaic Finance, a French firm that has complained to Eurex and European regulators. "An arms race is OK, but you must use legal weapons," said Hugues Morin, founder of Mosaic. Eurex says Mosaic's claims are baseless.

[...] High-speed traders often seek to capture fleeting differences between prices of related assets, making quick response times critical. If benchmark Euro Stoxx 50 index futures rise, for example, contracts tied to Germany's DAX will usually follow. A first mover will be able to buy DAX futures before they tick higher, then sell out at a higher price -- a strategy that can add up to big profits over time. The maneuver that prompted Mosaic's spat with Eurex can improve reaction times by about 3.2 nanoseconds, according to the French firm, which calls it "corrupted speculative triggering," or CST for short.

PayPal has applied to become a US bank by forming a Utah-chartered industrial loan company, signaling a push to deepen its financial services "as companies rush to capitalize on a friendly regulatory environment under the Trump administration," reports Reuters. From the report: If approved, the move will help PayPal to strengthen its lending offerings to small businesses in the U.S. as well as reduce its reliance on third parties. "Securing capital remains a significant hurdle for small businesses striving to grow and scale," said PayPal CEO Alex Chriss. "Establishing PayPal Bank will strengthen our business and improve our efficiency, enabling us to better support small business growth and economic opportunities across the U.S."

PayPal also plans to offer interest-bearing savings accounts to customers. The company has provided over $30 billion in loans and capital since 2013, it said. [...] PayPal has selected Mara McNeill to serve as PayPal Bank's president. She comes with over two decades of experience in banking and commercial lending, and has previously served as the CEO of Toyota Financial Savings Bank.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: JPMorgan Chase is joining the list of traditional financial firms seeking to bring blockchain technology to an investing staple: the money-market fund. The banking giant's $4 trillion asset-management arm is rolling out its first tokenized money-market fund on the Ethereum blockchain. JPMorgan will seed the fund with $100 million of its own capital, and then open it to outside investors on Tuesday. Called My OnChain Net Yield Fund, or "MONY," the private fund is supported by JPMorgan's tokenization platform, Kinexys Digital Assets, and will be open to qualified investors, or individuals with at least $5 million in investments and institutions with a minimum of $25 million. The fund has a $1 million investment minimum.

Wall Street has waded deeper into tokenization since the passage of the Genius Act earlier this year. The landmark measure, which establishes a regulatory framework for tokenized dollars known as stablecoins, has unleashed a wave of efforts to tokenize everything from stocks and bonds to funds and real assets. "There is a massive amount of interest from clients around tokenization," said John Donohue, head of global liquidity at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. "And we expect to be a leader in this space and work with clients to make sure that we have a product lineup that allows them to have the choices that we have in traditional money-market funds on blockchain."

A Kansas man who sued Verizon in small claims court after the carrier refused to unlock his iPhone has won his case, scoring a small but meaningful victory against a company that retroactively applied a policy change to deny his unlock request.

Patrick Roach bought a discounted iPhone 16e from Verizon's Straight Talk brand in February 2025, intending to pay for one month of service before switching the device to US Mobile. Under FCC rules dating back to a 2019 waiver, Verizon must unlock phones 60 days after activation on its network. Verizon refused to unlock the phone, citing a new policy implemented on April 1, 2025 requiring "60 days of paid active service."

Roach had purchased his device over a month before that policy took effect. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Henry ruled in October 2025 that applying the changed terms to Roach's earlier purchase violated the Kansas Consumer Protection Act. The court ordered Verizon to refund Roach's $410.40 purchase price plus court costs. Roach had previously rejected a $600 settlement offer because it would have required him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. He estimated spending about 20 hours on the lawsuit but said "it wasn't about" the money.

Superintelligence has become "a quasi-political forecast" with "very little to do with any scientific consensus, emerging instead from particular corridors of power." That's the warning from James O'Sullivan, a lecturer in digital humanities from University College Cork. In a refreshing 5,600-word essay in Noema magazine, he notes the suspicious coincidence that "The loudest prophets of superintelligence are those building the very systems they warn against..."

"When we accept that AGI is inevitable, we stop asking whether it should be built, and in the furor, we miss that we seem to have conceded that a small group of technologists should determine our future." (For example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman "seems determined to position OpenAI as humanity's champion, bearing the terrible burden of creating God-like intelligence so that it might be restrained.") The superintelligence discourse functions as a sophisticated apparatus of power, transforming immediate questions about corporate accountability, worker displacement, algorithmic bias and democratic governance into abstract philosophical puzzles about consciousness and control... Media amplification plays a crucial role in this process, as every incremental improvement in large language models gets framed as a step towards AGI. ChatGPT writes poetry; surely consciousness is imminent..." Such accounts, often sourced from the very companies building these systems, create a sense of momentum that becomes self-fulfilling. Investors invest because AGI seems near, researchers join companies because that's where the future is being built and governments defer regulation because they don't want to handicap their domestic champions...

We must recognize this process as political, not technical. The inevitability of superintelligence is manufactured through specific choices about funding, attention and legitimacy, and different choices would produce different futures. The fundamental question isn't whether AGI is coming, but who benefits from making us believe it is... We do not yet understand what kind of systems we are building, or what mix of breakthroughs and failures they will produce, and that uncertainty makes it reckless to funnel public money and attention into a single speculative trajectory.
Some key points:

• "The machines are coming for us, or so we're told. Not today, but soon enough that we must seemingly reorganize civilization around their arrival..."
• "When we debate whether a future artificial general intelligence might eliminate humanity, we're not discussing the Amazon warehouse worker whose movements are dictated by algorithmic surveillance or the Palestinian whose neighborhood is targeted by automated weapons systems. These present realities dissolve into background noise against the rhetoric of existential risk..."
• "Seen clearly, the prophecy of superintelligence is less a warning about machines than a strategy for power, and that strategy needs to be recognized for what it is... "
• "Superintelligence discourse isn't spreading because experts broadly agree it is our most urgent problem; it spreads because a well-resourced movement has given it money and access to power..."
• "Academic institutions, which are meant to resist such logics, have been conscripted into this manufacture of inevitability... reinforcing industry narratives, producing papers on AGI timelines and alignment strategies, lending scholarly authority to speculative fiction..."
• "The prophecy becomes self-fulfilling through material concentration — as resources flow towards AGI development, alternative approaches to AI starve..."
• "The dominance of superintelligence narratives obscures the fact that many other ways of doing AI exist, grounded in present social needs rather than hypothetical machine gods..." [He lists data sovereignty movements "that treat data as a collective resource subject to collective consent," as well as organizations like Canada's First Nations Information Governance Centre and New Zealand's Te Mana Raraunga, plus "Global South initiatives that use modest, locally governed AI systems to support healthcare, agriculture or education under tight resource constraints."] "Such examples... demonstrate how AI can be organized without defaulting to the superintelligence paradigm that demands everyone else be sacrificed because a few tech bros can see the greater good that everyone else has missed..."
• "These alternatives also illuminate the democratic deficit at the heart of the superintelligence narrative. Treating AI at once as an arcane technical problem that ordinary people cannot understand and as an unquestionable engine of social progress allows authority to consolidate in the hands of those who own and build the systems..."

He's ultimately warning us about "politics masked as predictions..."

"The real political question is not whether some artificial superintelligence will emerge, but who gets to decide what kinds of intelligence we build and sustain. And the answer cannot be left to the corporate prophets of artificial transcendence because the future of AI is a political field — it should be open to contestation.

"It belongs not to those who warn most loudly of gods or monsters, but to publics that should have the moral right to democratically govern the technologies that shape their lives."

In 1975, 23-year-old electrical engineer Steve Sasson joined Kodak. And in a new interview with the BBC, he remembers that he'd found the whole photographic process "really annoying.... I wanted to build a camera with no moving parts. Now that was just to annoy the mechanical engineers..." "You take your picture, you have to wait a long time, you have to fiddle with these chemicals. Well, you know, I was raised on Star Trek, and all the good ideas come from Star Trek. So I said what if we could just do it all electronically...?"

Researchers at Bell Labs in the US had, in 1969, created a type of integrated circuit called a charge-coupled device (CCD). An electric charge could be stored on a metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS), and could be passed from one MOS to another. Its creators believed one of its applications might one day be used as part of an imaging device — though they hadn't worked out how that might happen. The CCD, nevertheless, was quickly developed. By 1974, the US microchip company Fairchild Semiconductors had built the first commercial CCD, measuring just 100 x 100 pixels — the tiny electronic samples taken of an original image. The new device's ability to capture an image was only theoretical — no-one had, as yet, tried to take an image and display it. (NASA, it turned out, was also looking at this technology, but not for consumer cameras....)

The CCD circuit responded to light but could only form an image if Sasson was somehow able to attach a lens to it. He could then convert the light into digital information — a blizzard of 1s and 0s — but there was just one problem: money. "I had no money to build this thing. Nobody told me to build it, and I certainly couldn't demand any money for it," he says. "I basically stole all the parts, I was in Kodak and the apparatus division, which had a lot of parts. I stole the optical assembly from an XL movie camera downstairs in a used parts bin. I was just walking by, you see it, and you take it, you know." He was also able to source an analogue to digital converter from a $12 (about £5 in 1974) digital voltmeter, rather than spending hundreds on the part. I could manage to get all these parts without anybody really noticing," he says....

The bulky device needed a way to store the information the CCD was capturing, so Sasson used an audio cassette deck. But he also needed a way to view the image once it was saved on the magnetic tape. "We had to build a playback unit," Sasson says. "And, again, nobody asked me to do that either. So all I got to do is the reverse of what I did with the camera, and then I have to turn that digital pattern into an NTSC television signal." NTSC (National Television System Committee) was the conversion standard used by American TV sets. Sasson had to turn only 100 lines of digital code captured by the camera into the 400 lines that would form a television signal.
The solution was a Motorola microprocessor, and by December 1975, the camera and its playback unit was complete, the article points out. With his colleague Jim Schueckler, Sasson had spent more than a year putting together the "increasingly bulky" device, that "looked like an oversized toaster." The camera had a shutter that would take an image at about 1/20th of a second, and — if everything worked as it should — the cassette tape would start to move as the camera transferred the stored information from its CCD [which took 23 seconds]. "It took about 23 seconds to play it back, and then about eight seconds to reconfigure it to make it look like a television signal, and send it to the TV set that I stole from another lab...." In 1978, Kodak was granted the first patent for a digital camera. It was Sasson's first invention. The patent is thought to have earned Eastman Kodak billions in licensing and infringement payments by the time they sold the rights to it, fearing bankruptcy, in 2012...

As for Sasson, he never worked on anything other than the digital technology he had helped to create until he retired from Eastman Kodak in 2009.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

New England's last coal-fired power plant "has ceased operations three years ahead of its planned retirement date," reports the New Hampshire Bulletin.

"The closure of the New Hampshire facility paves the way for its owner to press ahead with an initiative to transform the site into a clean energy complex including solar panels and battery storage systems." "The end of coal is real, and it is here," said Catherine Corkery, chapter director for Sierra Club New Hampshire. "We're really excited about the next chapter...." The closure in New Hampshire — so far undisputed by the federal government — demonstrates that prolonging operations at some facilities just doesn't make economic sense for their owners. "Coal has been incredibly challenged in the New England market for over adecade," said Dan Dolan, president of the New England Power Generators Association.

Merrimack Station, a 438-megawatt power plant, came online in the1960s and provided baseload power to the New England region for decades. Gradually, though, natural gas — which is cheaper and more efficient — took over the regional market... Additionally, solar power production accelerated from 2010 on, lowering demand on the grid during the day and creating more evening peaks. Coal plants take longer to ramp up production than other sources, and are therefore less economical for these shorter bursts of demand, Dolan said. In recent years, Merrimack operated only a few weeks annually. In 2024, the plant generated just0.22% of the region's electricity. It wasn't making enough money to justify continued operations, observers said.

The closure "is emblematic of the transition that has been occurring in the generation fleet in New England for many years," Dolan said. "The combination of all those factors has meant that coal facilities are no longer economic in this market."
Meanwhile Los Angeles — America's second-largest city — confirmed that the last coal-fired power plant supplying its electricity stopped operations just before Thanksgiving, reports the Utah News Dispatch: Advocates from the Sierra Club highlighted in a news release that shutting down the units had no impact on customers, and questioned who should "shoulder the cost of keeping an obsolete coal facility on standby...." Before ceasing operations, the coal units had been working at low capacities for several years because the agency's users hadn't been calling on the power [said John Ward, spokesperson for Intermountain Power Agency].
The coal-powered units "had a combined capacity of around 1,800 megawatts when fully operational," notes Electrek, "and as recently as 2024, they still supplied around 11% of LA's electricity. The plant sits in Utah's Great Basin region and powered Southern California for decades." Now, for the first time, none of California's power comes from coal. There's a political hiccup with IPP, though: the Republican-controlled Utah Legislature blocked the Intermountain Power Agency from fully retiring the coal units this year, ordering that they can't be disconnected or decommissioned. But despite that mandate, no buyers have stepped forward to keep the outdated coal units online. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is transitioning to newly built, hydrogen-capable generating units at the same IPP location, part of a modernization effort called IPP Renewed. These new units currently run on natural gas, but they're designed to burn a blend of natural gas and up to 30% green hydrogen, and eventually100% green hydrogen. LADWP plans to start adding green hydrogen to the fuel mix in 2026.
"With the plant now idled but legally required to remain connected, serious questions remain about who will shoulder the cost of keeping an obsolete coal facility on standby," says the Sierra Club.

One of the natural gas units started commerical operations last Octoboer, with the second starting later this month, IPP spokesperson John Ward told Agency].
the Utah News Dispatch.

Carl Rinsch, the director behind the 2013 Keanu Reeves film "47 Ronin," has been found guilty of defrauding Netflix out of $11 million that was meant to fund a science fiction series called "Conquest," which the streaming company ultimately cancelled in 2021 after Rinsch failed to meet any production milestones. A jury in the Southern District of New York convicted the 48-year-old on seven charges: one count each of wire fraud and money laundering, and five counts of transacting in illicitly obtained property.

Prosecutors alleged that Rinsch funneled the $11 million through multiple bank accounts into a personal brokerage account, lost more than half of it on securities within two months, and then began speculating on cryptocurrency. Court records show he also spent $2.4 million on a Ferrari and five Rolls Royces, $3.3 million on furniture and antiques, and $387,000 on a Swiss watch. Netflix has written off $55 million in total and has not recovered any funds. Rinsch faces up to 90 years in prison and is scheduled for sentencing on April 17, 2026.

Cisco's stock price touched $80.25 on Wednesday, finally eclipsing its dotcom-era peak of $80.06 set on March 27, 2000 -- when the networking giant briefly surpassed Microsoft to become the world's most valuable company. The journey back took 25 years, eight months and 13 days. The company's fundamentals improved dramatically over that period, of course. Revenues have nearly quintupled since 1999, profits have quadrupled, earnings per share have grown eightfold, and margins have remained healthy throughout. Investors who bought at the peak still lost money to inflation for a generation.

Cisco's trajectory draws obvious comparisons to Nvidia, today's dominant "picks and shovels" supplier for the AI boom. Nvidia trades at a price-to-earnings ratio above 45 and an enterprise value-to-sales ratio near 24. At its 2000 peak, Cisco traded at a P/E above 200 and EV/sales of 31.

Stanford researchers spent much of the past year building an AI bot called Artemis that scans networks for software vulnerabilities, and when they pitted it against ten professional penetration testers on the university's own engineering network, the bot outperformed nine of them. The experiment offers a window into how rapidly AI hacking tools have improved after years of underwhelming performance.

"We thought it would probably be below average," said Justin Lin, a Stanford cybersecurity researcher. Artemis found bugs at a fraction of human cost -- just under $60 per hour compared to the $2,000 to $2,500 per day that professional pen testers typically charge. But its performance wasn't flawless. About 18% of its bug reports were false positives, and it completely missed an obvious vulnerability on a webpage that most human testers caught. In one case, Artemis found a bug on an outdated page that didn't render in standard browsers; it used a command-line tool called Curl instead of Chrome or Firefox.

Dan Boneh, a Stanford computer science professor who advised the researchers, noted that vast amounts of software shipped without being vetted by LLMs could now be at risk. "We're in this moment of time where many actors can increase their productivity to find bugs at an extreme scale," said Jacob Klein, head of threat intelligence at Anthropic.

EU regulators say Google's Play Store changes still don't meet fairness rules and are preparing a potentially hefty 2026 fine unless Google makes deeper concessions. Reuters reports: Google Play has been in the European Commission's crosshairs since March, with regulators singling out technical restrictions preventing app developers from steering users to other channels for cheaper offers. Another issue is the service fee charged by Google for facilitating an app developer's initial acquisition of a new customer via Google Play which the regulator said goes beyond what is justified.

Tweaks to Google Play announced in August to make it easier for app developers to direct customers to other channels and choose a fee model are still falling short, the people said, with the EU antitrust regulator viewing Apple's recent changes to its App Store as a benchmark. [...] Google can still offer to make more changes before regulators impose a fine, likely in the first quarter of the next year, the people said, adding that the timing of any sanction can still change. "We continue to work closely with the European Commission in its ongoing investigation but have serious concerns that further changes would put Android and Play users at risk of malware, scams and data theft. Unlike iOS, Android is already open by design," a Google spokesperson said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Tuesday, India's Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade released a proposed framework that would give AI companies access to all copyrighted works for training in exchange for paying royalties to a new collecting body composed of rights-holding organizations, with payments then distributed to creators. The proposal argues that this "mandatory blanket license" would lower compliance costs for AI firms while ensuring that writers, musicians, artists, and other rights holders are compensated when their work is scraped to train commercial models. [...]

The eight-member committee, formed by the Indian government in late April, argues the system would avoid years of legal uncertainty while ensuring creators are compensated from the outset. Defending the system, the committee says in a 125-page submission (PDF) that a blanket license "aims to provide an easy access to content for AI developers reduce transaction costs [and] ensure fair compensation for rightsholders," calling it the least burdensome way to manage large-scale AI training. The submission adds that the single collecting body would function as a "single window," eliminating the need for individual negotiations and enabling royalties to flow to both registered and unregistered creators.

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.

The ad was created for McDonald's Netherlands by agency TBWA\NEBOKO and production company Sweetshop, whose Los Angeles-based directing duo Mark Potoka and Matt Spicer shot the film. After the backlash, Sweetshop said it used AI as a tool but emphasized human effort in shaping the final product. "We generated what felt like dailies -- thousands of takes -- then shaped them in the edit just as we would on any high-craft production," the company said. "This wasn't an AI trick. It was a film."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fast Company: More and more people are turning to GoFundMe for help covering the cost of housing, food, and other basic needs. The for-profit crowdfunding platform's annual "Year in Help" report, released Tuesday, underscored ongoing concerns around affordability. The number of fundraisers started to help cover essential expenses such as rent, utilities, and groceries jumped 20%, according to the company's 2025 review, after already quadrupling last year. "Monthly bills" were the second fastest-growing category behind individual support for nonprofits.

The number of "essentials" fundraisers has increased over the last three years in all of the company's major English-speaking markets, according to GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan. That includes the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. In the United States, the self-published report comes at the end of a year that has seen weakened wage growth for lower-income workers, sluggish hiring, a rise in the unemployment rate and low consumer confidence in the economy. [...] Among campaigns aimed at addressing broader community needs, food banks were the most common recipient on GoFundMe this year. The platform experienced a nearly sixfold spike in food-related fundraisers between the end of October and first weeks of November, according to Cadogan, as many Americans' monthly SNAP benefits got suddenly cut off during the government shutdown.