• Meta shocked by $25B fine after N.M. refused to join multistate settlement
• US-backed vaccine trial on babies canceled after international outcry
• This emulator reimagines Nintendo’s Virtual Boy with a full color display
• Hackers got a four-day head start on epic PHP2Shell vulnerability
• Sauron recruits his future Ringwraiths in Rings of Power S3 trailer
• Forget "Malaise 2.0," GM says it's still all-in on EVs and autonomy
• 333 Tor exit nodes hijacked to intercept SSH traffic and retrieve plaintext email
• UN says we're going to blow past 1.5º warming, offers a "now what?" answer
• FCC chair warns media not to run the "fake polls" Trump keeps complaining about
• Xbox wants you to pay 24 to 40 cents per hour to stream games you already bought
• Enterprises keep buying software upgrades that IT thinks will make things worse
• Tesla profits drop 43% in Q3
• The new human-crafted Apple Music brand matters in an AI world
• RIP BioWare: EA shuts down storied RPG studio after over three decades
• OpenAI's latest AI models are coming to Google Cloud and Antigravity
• Report: Musk ordered Starlink slowdown in Ukraine, then blamed it on Trump
• Judge rejects Trump’s wild claim EPA can dismiss data center pollution lawsuits
• Does opting out of smart TV tracking work? Research finds “suspicious” traffic.
• SpaceX to attempt Starship catch on next flight, with eye on rapid cadence increase
• The $15 billion ad-powered AI startup your doctor may already be using
| • Microsoft and Alphabet join 14 other companies objecting to a plan by OKXICE, a venture of OKX and ICE, to trade blockchain-based versions of their shares (Camila Grigera Naón/Fortune)
• Amazon issues refunds from a 2025 settlement, crediting "President Trump's Federal Trade Commission," the first time an FTC refund has been tied to a president (Alfred Ng/Politico)
• Microsoft says its GPT-5-powered Diagnostic Orchestrator uses agents that mimic panels of experts to diagnose conditions up to 4x more accurately than doctors (Robert Hart/The Verge)
• Sources: Datadog offered to acquire Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup Upwind Security for nearly $4B; Upwind is finalizing a $300M round at a ~$3.8B valuation (The Information)
• Amazon rebrands its Kindle Unlimited subscription as Kindle+ and expands access to audiobooks, including titles narrated by AI (Maria Diaz/ZDNET)
• Sources: SoftBank's SB Energy is considering going public as soon as December or waiting until 2027, as it closely watches Anthropic's IPO, expected in November (The Information)
• US officials say Trump asked Elon Musk to lift Starshield restrictions; Ukraine officials said it was not fully fixed Thursday but was working at higher speeds (Wall Street Journal)
• Chicago-based Formic, which provides robots-as-a-service automation to manufacturers, raised $50M, including a $40M Series B and $10M in asset-backed financing (Natalie Breymeyer/Axios)
• The Browser Company says it will shut down its Arc browser on December 22, launched in 2023, shifting attention to its AI-focused Dia browser, launched in 2025 (Jay Peters/The Verge)
• Microsoft says it is closing The Garage, which for 17 years gave employees worldwide space and tools for side projects and ran the company's Global Hackathon (Todd Bishop/GeekWire)
• Filings: Nvidia, Anthropic, and OpenAI had their highest-spending lobbying quarter between July and September, spending $2.2M, $2.1M, and $1.5M, respectively (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)
• Atlanta-based Tractian, which uses AI and sensors to predict machine failures and recommend maintenance plans, raised a $130M Series D at a $1.4B valuation (Rocket Drew/The Information)
• METR says a pilot test of OpenAI's monitoring system found vulnerabilities, including an exploit that could have let AI agents hide hundreds of recent actions (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters)
• Sources: Elon Musk has invested ~$1B in Ellisons' Skydance; in 2022, David Ellison's father, Larry Ellison, invested $1B in Musk's deal to take Twitter private (Rohan Goswami/Semafor)
• Warp Sciences, founded by former OpenAI CPO Kevin Weil to speed up drug development using AI, emerges from stealth with $215M at an $865M post-money valuation (Rebecca Torrence/Bloomberg)
| • 2027 BMW iX5 first drive: You'll love the range, but maybe not the look
• Daft Punk is getting an official Lego set
• The Browser Company is officially killing Arc on December 22
• Bluesky adds iPad support in latest feature update
• Amazon rebrands Kindle Unlimited to Kindle+
• Unauthorized AI agents are reportedly already accessing US bank accounts
• Sundar Pichai (allegedly) draws the line at oceans
• PC shipments are in the toilet, plunging over 20 percent from last year
• iPhone Duo's next-gen prototypes are trying to cram in Face ID
• Insta360 Mic review: A midrange mic kit that's anything but boring
• Roku's Pro Series LX OLED TVs are now available on Amazon
• 1Password will let Muse, Dots and Grok Bot sign in to sites for you without getting your credentials
• Insta360 adds expandable storage to its new e-ink wireless mics
• Tesla plans to start selling Cybercabs by the end of the year
• Fortnite is coming back to Apple's Australian App Store following court ruling
• Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is 'entering a new phase' with Muse
• Bose buys audio rival Skullcandy
• Airbnb bans hosts from making you do the dishes
• Claude Duet is Anthropic's answer to Meta Muse and OpenAI Dots
• Government websites in the EU and Canada taken offline over PHP vulnerability
|