New Jersey has found its answer to the relentless flooding that has plagued the state's coastal and inland communities for decades: buy the homes, demolish them and turn the land back into open space permanently. The state's Blue Acres program has acquired some 1,200 properties since 1995, spending more than $234 million in federal and state funds to pay fair market value to homeowners exhausted by repeated floods from tropical storms, nor'easters, and heavy rain.

A Georgetown Climate Center report this month called the program a national model, crediting its success to faster processing than federal buyout programs, stable state funding and case managers who guide each homeowner through the process. The demolished homes become grass lots that absorb rainwater far better than concrete and asphalt.

Manville, a borough of 11,000 at the confluence of two rivers about 25 miles southwest of Newark, has sold 120 homes to the state for roughly $22 million between 2015 and 2024. Another 53 buyouts are underway there. The need for such programs is only growing. Sea levels along the New Jersey coast rose about 1.5 feet over the past century -- more than double the global rate -- and a Rutgers study predicts a further increase of 2.2 to 3.8 feet by 2100.

A November report from the Natural Resources Defense Council noted that billions in previously approved FEMA resilience grants have already been cancelled, making state-run initiatives like Blue Acres increasingly essential.

In an opinion piece for Computerworld, columnist Steven Vaughan-Nichols argues that restrictive visa policies and a hostile border climate under the Trump administration are driving foreign tech workers, researchers, and conference speakers away from the U.S. The result, he says, is a gradual shift of talent, events, and long-term innovation toward more welcoming regions such as Europe, Canada, and Asia. From the report: I go to a lot of tech conferences -- 13 in 2025 -- and many of those I attend are outside the U.S.; several are in London, one is in Amsterdam, another in Paris, and two in Tokyo. Wherever I went this past year, when we weren't talking about AI, Linux, the cloud, or open-source software, the top non-tech topic for non-Americans involved the sweeping changes that have occurred since President Donald J. Trump returned to office last January. The conversations generally ended with something like this: "I'm not taking a job or going to a conference in the United States."

Honestly, who can blame them? Under Trump, America now has large "Keep Out!" and "No Trespassing!" signs effectively posted. I've known several top tech people who tried to come to the U.S. for technology shows with proper visas and paperwork, but were still turned away at the border. Who wants to fly for 8+ hours for a conference, only to be refused entry at the last minute, and be forced to fly back? I know many of the leading trade show organizers, and it's not just me who's seeing this. They universally agree that getting people from outside the States to agree to come to the U.S. is increasingly difficult. Many refuse even to try to come. As a result, show managers have begun to close U.S.-based events and are seeking to replace them with shows in Europe, Canada, and Asia. [...]

Once upon a time, everyone who was anyone in tech was willing to uproot their lives to come to the U.S. Here, they could make a good living. They could collaborate, publish, and build companies in jurisdictions that welcome them, and meet their peers at conferences. Now, they must run a gauntlet at the U.S. border and neither a green card nor U.S. citizenship guarantees they won't be abused by the federal government. Trump's America seems bound and determined to become a second-rate tech power. His administration can loosen all the restrictions it wants on AI, but without top global talent, U.S. tech prowess will decline. That's not good for America, the tech industry or the larger world.

A study by a Singapore government agency has found that children exposed to high levels of screen time before age two showed brain development changes linked to slower decision-making and higher anxiety in adolescence, adding to concerns about early digital exposure. From a report: The study was conducted by a team within the country's Agency for Science, Technology and Research and the National University of Singapore, and published in The Lancet's eBioMedicine open access journal. It tracked 168 children for more than a decade, and conducted brain scans on them at three time points. Heavier screen exposure among very young children was associated with "accelerated maturation of brain networks" responsible for vision and cognitive control, the study found.

The researchers suggested this may have been the result of "intense sensory stimulation that screens provide." They found that screen time measured at ages three and four, however, did not show the same effects. Those children with "altered brain networks" took longer to make decisions when they were 8.5, and also had higher anxiety symptoms at age 13, the study said.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel is "reliving some of the best moments for Fedora Linux in 2025" by highlighting the year's most popular news around the distro. Throughout 2025, Fedora continued to lead upstream Linux innovation with bold changes like Wayland-only GNOME, newer kernels, architecture cleanups, and experimental features -- while openly grappling with controversial shifts such as dropping 32-bit support and modernizing long-standing subsystems.

"Fedora Linux this year continued in punctually shipping the very latest upstream Linux innovations from the freshest Wayland components to Linux kernel features and continuing to leverage other improvements in the open-source world," writes Larabel. "Fedora enjoyed the successful Fedora 42 and Fedora 43 releases this year, including going with Wayland-noly GNOME and further phasing of 32-bit packages. Fedora's KDE spin continued improving too and the Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution enjoyed a wealth of other improvements this year."

Artist Keith Thomson is a modern (and whimsical) Edward Hopper. And Apple TV says he created the "festive artwork" shared on X by Apple CEO Tim Cook on Christmas Eve, "made on MacBook Pro."

Its intentionally-off picture of milk and cookies was meant to tease the season finale of Pluribus. ("Merry Christmas Eve, Carol..." Cook had posted.)

But others were convinced that the weird image was AI-generated.

Tech blogger John Gruber was blunt. "Tim Cook posts AI Slop in Christmas message on Twitter/X, ostensibly to promote 'Pluribus'." As for sloppy details, the carton is labeled both "Whole Milk" and "Lowfat Milk", and the "Cow Fun Puzzle" maze is just goofily wrong. (I can't recall ever seeing a puzzle of any kind on a milk carton, because they're waxy and hard to write on. It's like a conflation of milk cartons and cereal boxes.)
Tech author Ben Kamens — who just days earlier had blogged about generating mazes with AI — said the image showed the "specific quirks" of generative AI mazes (including the way the maze couldn't be solved, expect by going around the maze altogether). Former Google Ventures partner M.G. Siegler even wondered if AI use intentionally echoed the themes of Pluribus — e.g., the creepiness of a collective intelligence — since otherwise "this seems far too obvious to be a mistake/blunder on Apple's part." (Someone on Reddit pointed out that in Pluribus's dystopian world, milk plays a key role — and the open spout of the "natural" milk's carton does touch a suspiciously-shining light on the Christmas tree...)

Slashdot contacted artist Keith Thomson to try to ascertain what happened...

Even after its acquisition by Qualcomm, the EFF believes Arduino "isn't imposing any new bans on tinkering with or reverse engineering Arduino boards," (according to Mitch Stoltz, EFF director for competition and IP litigation). While Adafruit's managing editor Phillip Torrone had claimed to 36,000+ followers on LinkedIn that Arduino users were now "explicitly forbidden from reverse engineering," Arduino corrected him in a blog post, noting that clause in their Terms & Conditions was only for Arduino's Software-as-a-Service cloud applications. "Anything that was open, stays open."

And this week EE Times spoke to Guneet Bedi, SVP of Arduino, "who was unequivocal in saying that Arduino's governance structure had remained intact even after the acquisition." "As a business unit within Qualcomm, Arduino continues to make independent decisions on its product portfolio, with no direction imposed on where it should or should not go," Bedi said. "Everything that Arduino builds will remain open and openly available to developers, with design engineers, students and makers continuing to be the primary focus.... Developers who had mastered basic embedded workflows were now asking how to run large language models at the edge and work with artificial intelligence for vision and voice, with an open source mindset," he said. According to Bedi, this was where Qualcomm's technology became relevant. "Qualcomm's chipsets are high performance while also being very low power, which comes from their mobile and Android phone heritage. Despite being great technology, it is not easily accessible to design engineers because of cost and complexity. That made this a strong fit," he said.

The most visible outcome of this acquisition is Uno Q, which Bedi described as being comparable to a mid-tier Android phone in capability, starting at a price of $44. For Arduino, this marked a shift beyond microcontrollers without abandoning them. "At the end of the day, we have not gone away from our legacy," Bedi said. "You still have a real-time microcontroller, and you still write code the way Arduino developers are used to. What we added is compute, without forcing people to change how they work." Uno Q combines a Linux-based compute system with a real-time microcontroller from the STM32 family. "You do not need two different development environments or two different hardware platforms," Bedi added... Rather than introducing a customized operating system, Arduino chose standard Debian upstream. "We are not locking developers into anything," Bedi said. "It is standard Debian, completely open...." Pre-built models covering tasks like object detection and voice recognition run locally on the board....

While the first reference design uses Qualcomm silicon, Bedi was careful to stress that this does not define the roadmap. "There is zero dependency on Qualcomm silicon," he said. "The architecture is portable. Tomorrow, we can run this on something else." That distinction matters, particularly for developers wary of vendor lock-in following the acquisition. Uno Q does compete directly with platforms like Raspberry Pi and Nvidia Jetson, but Bedi framed the difference less in terms of raw performance and more in flexibility. "When you build on those platforms, you are locked to the board," he said. "Here, you can build a prototype, and if you like it, you can also get access to the chip and design your own hardware." With built-in storage removing the need for external components, Uno Q positions itself less as a faster board and more as a way to simplify what had become an increasingly messy development stack...

Looking a year ahead, Bedi believes developers should experience continuity rather than disruption. The familiar Arduino approach to embedded and real-time systems remains unchanged, while extending naturally into more compute-intensive applications... Taken together, Bedi's comments suggest that Arduino's post-acquisition direction is less about changing what Arduino is, and more about expanding what it can realistically be used for, without abandoning the simplicity that made it relevant in the first place.
"We want to redefine prototyping in the age of physical artificial intelligence," Bedi said...

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, legally prohibiting the provider from informing their customer that their data has been accessed. This renders any contractual clauses requiring transparency or notification effectively meaningless. While technical measures like encryption are often proposed as a solution, their effectiveness depends entirely on who controls the encryption keys. If the US provider manages the keys, as is common in many standard cloud services, they can be forced to decrypt the data for authorities, making such safeguards moot....

American hyperscalers have recognized the market demand for sovereignty and now aggressively market 'sovereign cloud' solutions, typically by placing datacenters on European soil or partnering with local operators. Critics call this 'sovereignty washing'... [Cristina Caffarra, a competition economistand driving force behind the Eurostack initiative] warns that this does not resolve the fundamental problem. "A company subject to the extraterritorial laws of the United States cannot be considered sovereign for Europe," she says. "That simply doesn't work." Because, as long as the parent company is American, it remains subject to the CLOUD Act...

Even when organizations make deliberate choices in favour of European providers, those decisions can be undone by market forces. A recent acquisition in the Netherlands illustrates this risk. In November 2025, the American IT services giant Kyndryl announced its intention to acquire Solvinity, a Dutch managed cloud provider. This came as an "unpleasant surprise" to several of its government clients, including the municipality of Amsterdam and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. These bodies had specifically chosen Solvinity to reduce their dependence on American firms and mitigate CLOUD Act risks.
Still, The Register provides several examples of government systems that are "taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT."

• Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism now has 1,200 employees on the European open-source collaboration platform Nextcloud, leading several other Austrian ministries to also implement Nextcloud. (The Ministry's CISO tells the Register "We can see our input in Nextcloud releases. That is a feeling we never had with Microsoft.")

• France's Ministry of Economics and Finance recently completed NUBO (which the Register describes as "an OpenStack-based private cloud initiative designed to handle sensitive data and services.")

• In November the International Criminal Court in The Hague announced it was replacing its Microsoft office software with a European alternative.

• The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is replacing Microsoft products with open-source alternatives for 30,000 civil servants

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers "enriched" license pages with "relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support".

So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license:

mit	(1.5M)
apache-2-0	(344k)
bsd-3-clause	(214k)
bsd-2-clause	(128k)
gpl-2-0	(76k)
gpl-3-0	(55k)
isc-license-txt	(35k)
lgpl-3-0	(34k)
OFL-1.1	(31k)
lgpl-2-1	(24k)
.	.

From the Open Source Initiative's announcement: Please note that these are aggregated pageviews from actual humans along the year of 2025... Actual humans (presumably) because the number of requests by bots or crawlers is several orders of magnitude higher (e.g. requests just for the MIT license are on the range of 10M per month).

We do provide an API service that gives access to the canonical list of OSI Approved Licenses — this is a very new service, which hopefully will be adopted by automated requests from CI/CD pipelines. One final observation is that the number of human pageviews is likely higher because we are using Plausible as our data source and a high percentage of our target audience uses Ad blockers, which by design are not accounted by Plausible. Users from China are also likely undercounted by Plausible for the same reason.

An astrophysicist at the University of Rochester writes that "many" of his colleagues in physics "have come to believe that a mystery is unfolding in every microbe, animal, and human." And it's a mystery that:

- "Challenges basic assumptions physicists have held for centuries"
- "May even help redefine the field for the next generation"
- "Could answer essential questions about AI."

In short, while physicists have favored a "reductionist" philosophy about the fundamental laws controlling the universe (energy, mattery, space, and time), "long-promised 'theories of everything' such as string theory, have not borne significant fruit: There are, however, ways other than reductionism to think about what's fundamental in the universe. Beginning in the 1980s, physicists (along with researchers in other fields) began developing new mathematical tools to study what's called "complexity" — systems in which the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. The end goal of reductionism was to explain everything in the universe as the result of particles and their interactions. Complexity, by contrast, recognizes that once lots of particles come together to produce macroscopic things — such as organisms — knowing everything about particles isn't enough to understand reality...

Physicists have always been good at capturing the essential aspects of a system and casting those essentials in the language of mathematics... Now those skills must be brought to bear on an age-old question that is only just getting its proper due: What is life? Using these skills, physicists — working together with representatives of all the other disciplines that make up complexity science — may crack open the question of how life formed on Earth billions of years ago and how it might have formed on the distant alien worlds we can now explore with cutting-edge telescopes. Just as important, understanding why life, as an organized system, is different at a fundamental level from all the other stuff in the universe may help astronomers design new strategies for finding it in places bearing little resemblance to Earth. Analyzing life — no matter how alien — as a self-organizing information-driven system may provide the key to detecting biosignatures on planets hundreds of light-years away.

Closer to home, studying the nature of life is likely essential to fully understanding intelligence — and building artificial versions. Throughout the current AI boom, researchers and philosophers have debated whether and when large language models might achieve general intelligence or even become conscious — or whether, in fact, some already have. The only way to properly assess such claims is to study, by any means possible, the sole agreed-upon source of general intelligence: life. Bringing the new physics of life to problems of AI may not only help researchers predict what software engineers can build; it may also reveal the limits of trying to capture life's essential character in silicon.

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 the code under Apache's permissive license rather than the original LGPL.

FFmpeg first called out Rockchip in February 2024 for "blatantly copy and pasting FFmpeg code" into its driver, but the chipmaker's last response suggested no intention to resolve the matter. The DMCA notice requests either removal of the infringing files or restoration of proper attribution and an LGPL-compatible license.

Apple has agreed to a settlement with Brazil's antitrust regulator that will require the company to allow third-party app stores on iPhones and permit developers to direct users to external payment options, marking another country where Apple's tightly controlled App Store model is being pried open by government action.

Brazil's Administrative Council of Economic Defense approved the settlement this week, resolving an investigation that began in 2022 into whether Apple's restrictions on app distribution and payments limited competition. Under the new rules, developers can offer third-party payment methods within their apps alongside Apple's own system. The fee structure varies: purchases through Apple's system remain subject to a 10% or 25% commission plus a 5% transaction fee. Apps that include a clickable link to external payment will face a 15% fee, while static text directing users elsewhere incurs no charge. Third-party app stores will pay a 5% Core Technology Commission.

After Anna's Archive published a massive scrape containing 86 million songs and metadata from Spotify, the streaming giant responded by disabling the nefarious accounts responsible. A spokesperson for Spotify told Recorded Future News that it "has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping."

"We've implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior," the spokesperson said. "Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights." The Record reports: The spokesperson added that Anna's Archive did not contact them before publishing the files. They also said it did not consider the incident a "hack" of Spotify. The people behind the leaked database systematically violated Spotify's terms by stream-ripping some of the music from the platform over a period of months, a spokesperson said. They did this through user accounts set up by a third party and not by accessing Spotify's business systems, they added.

Anna's Archive published a blog post about the cache this weekend, writing that while it typically focuses its efforts on text, its mission to preserve humanity's knowledge and culture "doesn't distinguish among media types." "Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case. A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation," they said. "This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a 'preservation archive' for music. Of course Spotify doesn't have all the music in the world, but it's a great start."

Los Angeles Times (non-paywalled source): When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short -- who became known as the Black Dahlia -- he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill. Margolis was on the list of suspects. He was a sullen 21-year-old premed student at USC, a shell-shocked World War II veteran who had expressed an eagerness to practice surgery. He was "a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression," a military psychiatrist had concluded.

At first, Margolis did not tell detectives that he had lived with Short for 12 days at a Hollywood Boulevard apartment, three months before her January 1947 murder. Margolis later admitted they had lived together in Apartment 726 at the Guardian Arms Apartments. But he soon moved to Chicago and changed his name, frustrating further attempts to question him. Among many suspects, a district attorney investigator would note, Margolis was "the only pre-medical student who ever lived as a boy friend with Beth Short."

A generation later and hundreds of miles north, a killer who called himself the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area with five seemingly random murders from 1968 to 1969, taunting police and media for years with letters and cryptograms. The toughest to decipher was the letter he sent in April 1970 to the San Francisco Chronicle, with the words "My name is -" followed by a 13-character string of letters and symbols. It came to be called the Z13 cipher, and its brevity has stymied generations of PhDs and puzzle prodigies.

Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has cracked the Zodiac killer's identity -- and in the process solved the Black Dahlia case as well. "It's irrefutable," said Baber, obsessive, hyperfocused and cocksure in manner, his memory encyclopedic and his speech a firehose of dates, locations and surprising linkages.

[...] To attack the problem, Baber used artifical intelligence and generated a list of 71 million possible 13-letter names. Using known details of the Zodiac killer, based on witness descriptions, he cross-checked those names against military, marriage, census and other public records. "This takes me nine months of working 18-20 hour days," he said. "I'm starting to kill this onion. I'm starting to eliminate layers: Too tall, too short, or wrong race." The candidates narrowed to 185, to 14, and then, he said, to one. The name he found buried in the Z13 code: "Marvin Merrill."

European public institutions are quietly migrating away from American cloud providers and office software, driven less by policy ambitions in Brussels than by the mundane legal reality that GDPR-mandated risk assessments keep flagging the US CLOUD Act as an unacceptable threat to citizen data.

Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism moved 1,200 employees to the open-source platform Nextcloud in four months. Germany's Schleswig-Holstein has already transitioned 24,000 of its 30,000 civil servants to LibreOffice, Nextcloud and Thunderbird. The International Criminal Court in The Hague announced in November 2025 that it would replace Microsoft office software after chief prosecutor Karim Khan was temporarily locked out of his Outlook account.

Competition economist Cristina Caffarra estimates that 90% of Europe's digital infrastructure is now controlled by non-European companies. Forrester predicts no European enterprise will fully abandon US hyperscalers in 2026, but these targeted migrations for sensitive government applications are already underway.

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has personally guaranteed $40.4 billion to shore up Paramount's bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, trying to ease financing doubts as Warner Bros weighs a rival offer from Netflix. Reuters reports: Paramount said the amended terms do not change the $30-per-share all-cash offer even as the fight for Hollywood's sought-after assets heats up, with control of Warner Bros' vast library offering a decisive edge in the streaming wars. "I doubt many Warner Bros shareholders that are on the fence or planning to vote no "were holding out due to issues the "revised bid addresses such as a guarantee from Larry Ellison on the funding front," said Seth Shafer, principal analyst at S&P Global.

As part of the revised terms, Ellison also agreed not to revoke the family trust or transfer its assets during the pendency of the transaction, the filing showed. Paramount said it has raised its regulatory reverse termination fee to $5.8 billion from $5 billion to match the competing transaction and extended the expiration date of its tender offer to January 21, 2026.

The "bid follows Warner Bros asking its shareholders to reject the $108.4 billion offer from Paramount for the whole company, including cable TV assets, on doubts over its financing and the lack of a full guarantee from the Ellison family. But Warner Bros investors, including the fifth largest shareholder Harris Associates, have said they would be open to revised offers from Paramount if it presents a superior bid and addresses issues with deal terms. Under the Netflix agreement, Warner Bros would owe Netflix $2.8 billion as breakup fee if it walks away from that deal.

A group of activists has scraped Spotify's entire library, accessing 256 million rows of track metadata and 86 million audio files totaling roughly 300TB of data. The metadata has been released via Anna's Archive, a search engine for "shadow libraries" that previously focused on books.

Spotify described the activists as "anti-copyright extremists who've previously pirated content from YouTube and other platforms" and confirmed it is actively investigating the incident. The activists claim this represents "the world's first 'preservation archive' for music which is fully open" and covers "around 99.6% of listens."

They appear to have used Spotify's public web API to scrape the metadata and circumvented DRM to access audio files. Spotify insists that this is not a security breach affecting user data. Though the more pressing concern for the music industry may be AI training rather than pirate streaming services -- similar YouTube datasets have reportedly been used by unlicensed generative AI music services.

A "slew of layoffs, price hikes and studio closures" for Microsoft's Xbox "have led many to declare — not for the first time — that the Xbox is dead," reports CNBC.

Or is it just changing its business model? The company's overall gaming revenue decreased 2% year-over-year, with a 29% dip in Xbox hardware sales, according to Microsoft's first-quarter earnings for fiscal 2026. The broader console industry has been in a major slump, with hardware spending down 27% year-over-year in November, which is typically a busy shopping month, according to a recent report from research firm Circana. It was the worst November in two decades, IGN reported, citing Circana data. Combined Switch and Switch 2 unit sales were down more than 10% during the month and PS5 sales were down more than 40%, IGN said. But the Xbox Series hardware took the biggest beating, with a dramatic 70% drop in sales...Microsoft's Xbox Series S and Series X, at 1.7 million units, couldn't outsell the original Nintendo Switch, which launched in 2017 and has sold 3.4 million units so far this year, data from game sales tracking site VGChartz estimated...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a recent interview with the TBPN podcast that the company's gaming business model will look to be "everywhere in every platform," from consoles to TV to mobile. His comments also hinted that the next Xbox may function more like a PC. "It's kind of funny people think about the console and PC as two different things," Nadella said. "We built a console because we wanted to build a better PC, which could then perform for gaming. So I kind of want to revisit some of that conventional wisdom...." A source familiar with Xbox strategy told CNBC that the company is looking at creating an open system that enables players to jump between console, PC and cloud gaming — and any form of entertainment beyond gaming. [Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter told CNBC] that while Microsoft is not completely abandoning hardware, the company is splitting its audience into existing buyers interested in specialized consoles and everyone else.

Xbox Game Pass subscription service, which gives subscribers access to games from a variety of publishers, is a clear example of this strategy... The growth in cloud gaming has been blistering. Xbox reported a record 34 million Game Pass subscribers in 2024 and a total Game Pass revenue of almost $5 billion over the last fiscal year. Xbox said in a November blog post that the number of cloud gaming hours from Game Pass subscribers was up 45% compared to the same time last year. The Microsoft subsidiary also said console players are "spending 45% more time cloud streaming on console and 24% more on other devices..."

Despite gaming's scaling limitations, Microsoft seems committed to doing what it has done with the rest of its products — moving it to the cloud... [Xbox President Sarah] Bond recently said in an interview with Mashable that the idea of exclusive games is "antiquated" as the company has leaned into cross-platform gaming... Xbox is betting that cloud and cross-platform gaming are the future. For a decade, claims have been made about the death of the Xbox, and what comes next could fully spell the end, or bring a metamorphosis.

"Perhaps no group of fans, industry workers, and consumers is more intense about AI use than gamers...." writes New York magazine's "Intelligencer" column: Just this month, the latest Postal game was axed by its publisher, which was "overwhelmed with negative responses" from the "concerned Postal community" after fans spotted AI-generated material in the game's trailer. The developers of Arc Raiders were accused of using AI instead of voice actors, leading to calls for boycotts, while the developers of the Call of Duty franchise were called out for AI-generated assets that players found strewn across Black Ops 7.Games that weren't developed with generative AI are getting caught up in accusations anyway, while workers at Electronic Arts are going to the press to describe pressure from bosses to adopt AI tools. Nintendo has sworn off using generative AI, as has the company behind the Cyberpunk series. Valve, the company that operates Steam, now requires AI disclosures on listed games and surveys all submitters. Perhaps sensing the emergence of a new constituency, California congressman Ro Khanna responded in November to the Call of Duty backlash:"We need regulations that prevent companies from using AI to eliminate jobs to extract greater profits," he posted on X....

AI is often seen as a tool for managers to extract more productivity and justify layoffs. Among players, it can foster a sense that gamers are being tricked or ripped off, while also dovetailing with more general objections to generative AI. It can sometimes be hard to tell whether gamer backlash is a bellwether or an outlier, an early signal from our youngest major creative industry or a localized and unique fit of rage. The sheer number of incidents here suggests the former, which foretells bitter, messy, and confusing fights to come in entertainment beyond gaming — where, notably, technologies referred to as "AI" have previously been embraced with open arms.
And now "the price of the sort of memory PC gamers most want to buy has skyrocketed" (per Tom's Hardware). "The rush to build data centers is making it much more expensive to game. Nobody's going to be happy about that."

Insider Gaming shares another example of anti-AI sentiment in the gaming industry: The Indie Game Awards took place on December 18, and, as many could assume, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took home the awards for Game of the Year and Debut Game. However, things have changed and The Indie Game Awards are making a big decision to strip the Clair Obscur and developer Sandfall Interactive of their awards over the use of gen AI in the game.

In an announcement made on Saturday afternoon, Six One Indie, the creators of the show, said that it's removal comes after the discovery after voting was done, and the show was recorded. "The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself," the statement reads. "When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Polygon notes the award-stripping is "due to inclusion of generative AI assets at launch that were quickly patched out." Quotes from earlier in the year from Sandfall Interactive's FranÃois Meurisse made the rounds on social media last week amid a news cycle caught up in the use of generative AI in games... In June, the Spanish outlet El País published a story including an interview conducted around Clair Obscur's launch, in which Meurisse admitted that Sandfall used a minimal amount generative AI in some form during the game's development... Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launched with what some suspected to be AI-generated textures that, as it clarified to El País, were then replaced with custom assets in a swift patch five days after release.

"In the lead up to its Switch 2 console release, Nintendo updated its user agreement," writes the Free Software Foundation, warning that Nintendo now claims "broad authority to make consoles owned by its customers permanently unusable."

"Under Nintendo's most aggressive digital restrictions management (DRM) update to date, game console owners are now required to give Nintendo the unilateral right to revoke access to games, security updates, and the Internet, at its sole discretion." The new agreement states: "You acknowledge that if you fail to comply with [Nintendo's restrictions], Nintendo may render the Nintendo Account Services and/or the applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part...."

There are probably other reasons that Nintendo has and will justify bricking game consoles, but here are some that we have seen reported:

— "Tampering" with hardware or software in pretty much any way;
— Attempting to play a back-up game;
— Playing a "used" game; or
— Use of a third-party game or accessory...


Nintendo's promise to block a user from using their game console isn't just an empty threat: it has already been wielded against many users. For example, within a month of the Switch 2's release, one user unknowingly purchased an open-box return that had been bricked, and despite functional hardware, it was unusable for many games. In another case, a user installing updates for game cartridges purchased via a digital marketplace had their console disabled. Though it's unclear exactly why they were banned, it's possible that the cartridge's previous owner made a copy and an online DRM check determined that the current and previous owner's use were both "fraudulent." The user only had their console released through appealing to Nintendo directly and providing evidence of their purchase, a laborious process.

Nintendo's new console banning spree is just one instance of the threat that nonfree software and DRM pose to users. DRM is but one injustice posed by nonfree software, and the target of the FSF's Defective by Design campaign. Like with all software, users ought to be able to freely copy, study, and modify the programs running on their devices. Proprietary software developers actively oppose and antagonize their users. In the case of Nintendo, this means punishing legitimate users and burdening them with proving that their use is "acceptable." Console users shouldn't have to tread so carefully with a console that they own, and should they misstep, beg Nintendo to allow them to use their consoles again.

An anonymous reader shared this report from 9to5Linux: After the controversial news shared earlier this week by Mozilla's new CEO that Firefox will evolve into "a modern AI browser," the company now revealed it is working on an AI kill switch for the open-source web browser...

What was not made clear [in Tuesday's comments by new Mozilla CEO Anthony Enzor-DeMeo] is that Firefox will also ship with an AI kill switch that will let users completely disable all the AI features that are included in Firefox. Mozilla shared this important update earlier Thursday to make it clear to everyone that Firefox will still be a trusted web browser.... "...that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this," said Firefox developer Jake Archibald on Mastodon.

In addition, Jake Archibald said that all the AI features that are or will be included in Firefox will also be opt-in. "I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?), but the kill switch will absolutely remove all that stuff, and never show it in future. That's unambiguous..."

Mozilla has contacted me shortly after writing the story to confirm that the "AI Kill Switch" will be implemented in Q1 2026."
The article also cites this quote left by Mozilla's new CEO on Reddit:

"Rest assured, Firefox will always remain a browser built around user control. That includes AI. You will have a clear way to turn AI features off. A real kill switch is coming in Q1 of 2026. Choice matters and demonstrating our commitment to choice is how we build and maintain trust."