The promise of AI-powered workplace tools that sort emails, take meeting notes, and file expense reports is finally delivering meaningful productivity gains -- one software startup reported a 20% boost around mid-2025 -- but companies are discovering an unexpected tradeoff: employees are burning out from the relentless pace of high-level cognitive work.

Roger Kirkness, CEO of 14-person software startup Convictional, noticed that after AI took the scut work off his team's plates, their days became consumed by intensive thinking, and they were mentally exhausted and unproductive by Friday. The company transitioned to a four-day workweek; the same amount of work gets done, Kirkness says.

The underlying problem, according to Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, is that businesses tend to simply reallocate the time AI saves. Workers who once mentally downshifted for tasks like data entry are now expected to maintain intense focus through longer stretches of data analysis. "If you just make people work at a high-intensity pace with no breaks, you risk crowding out creativity," Schor says.

China has hacked the emails used by congressional staff on powerful committees in the US House of Representatives, as part of a massive cyber espionage campaign known as Salt Typhoon. An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese intelligence accessed email systems used by some staffers [non-paywalled source] on the House China committee in addition to aides on the foreign affairs committee, intelligence committee and armed services committee, according to people familiar with the attack. The intrusions were detected in December.

The attacks are the latest element of an ongoing cyber campaign against US communication networks by the Ministry of State Security, China's intelligence service. One person familiar with the attack said it was unclear if the MSS had accessed lawmakers' emails. The MSS has been operating Salt Typhoon for several years. It allows China to access the unencrypted phone calls, texts and voicemails of almost every American, and in some cases enables access to email accounts. Salt Typhoon has also intercepted the calls of senior US officials over the past couple of years, said people familiar with the campaign.

Astronomers using the Vera C. Rubin Observatory have discovered a record-setting asteroid, known as 2025 MN45, nearly half a mile wide and spinning once every 1.88 minutes -- the fastest known rotation for an object of its size. "This is now the fastest-spinning asteroid that we know of, larger than 500 meters," said Sarah Greenstreet, University of Washington astronomer and lead author of the study. The findings have been published in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters. GeekWire reports: 2025 MN45 is one of more than 2,100 solar system objects that were detected during the observatory's commissioning phase. Over time, the LSST Camera tracked variations in the light reflected by those objects. Greenstreet and her colleagues analyzed those variations to determine the size, distance, composition and rate of rotation for 76 asteroids, all but one of which are in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. (The other asteroid is a near-Earth object.)

The team found 16 "super-fast rotators" spinning at rates ranging between 13 minutes and 2.2 hours per revolution -- plus three "ultra-fast rotators," including 2025 MN45, that make a full revolution in less than five minutes. Greenstreet said 2025 MN45 appears to consist of solid rock, as opposed to the "rubble pile" material that most asteroids are thought to be made of. "We also believe that it's likely a collisionary fragment of a much larger parent body that, early in the solar system's history, was heated enough that the material internal to it melted and differentiated," Greenstreet said. She and her colleagues suggest that the primordial collision blasted 2025 MN45 from the dense core of the parent body and sent it whirling into space.

Samsung Electronics and SK hynix are projected to raise server memory prices by up to 70% in early 2026, according to Korea Economic Daily. "Combined with 50 percent increases in 2025, this could nearly double prices by mid-2026," reports the Register. From the report: The two Korean giants, alongside US-based Micron, dominate global memory production. All three are reallocating advanced manufacturing capacity to high-margin server DRAM and HBM chips for AI infrastructure, squeezing supply for PCs and smartphones. Financial analysts have raised their earnings forecasts for the firms in response, as they look to benefit from the AI infrastructure boom that is driving up prices for everyone else. Taiwan-based market watcher TrendForce reports that conventional DRAM prices already jumped 55-60 percent in a single quarter.

Yet despite the focus on server chips, supply of these components continues to be strained too, with supplier inventories falling and shipment growth reliant on wafer output increases, according to TrendForce. As a result, it forecasts that server DRAM prices will jump by more than 60 percent in the first quarter of 2026. Prior to Christmas, analyst IDC noted the "unprecedented" memory chip shortage and warned this would have knock-on effects for both hardware makers and end users that may persist well into 2027.

OpenAI has unveiled ChatGPT Health, a sandboxed health-focused mode that lets users connect medical records and wellness apps for more personalized guidance. The company makes sure to note that ChatGPT Health is "not intended for diagnosis or treatment." The Verge reports: The company is encouraging users to connect their personal medical records and wellness apps, such as Apple Health, Peloton, MyFitnessPal,Weight Watchers, and Function, "to get more personalized, grounded responses to their questions." It suggests connecting medical records so that ChatGPT can analyze lab results, visit summaries, and clinical history; MyFitnessPal and Weight Watchers for food guidance; Apple Health for health and fitness data, including movement, sleep, and activity patterns"; and Function for insights into lab tests.

On the medical records front, OpenAI says it's partnered with b.well, which will provide back-end integration for users to upload their medical records, since the company works with about 2.2 million providers. For now, ChatGPT Health requires users to sign up for a waitlist to request access, as it's starting with a beta group of early users, but the product will roll out gradually to all users regardless of subscription tier. [...]

In a blog post, OpenAI wrote that based on its "de-identified analysis of conversations," more than 230 million people around the world already ask ChatGPT questions related to health and wellness each week. OpenAI also said that over the past two years, it's worked with more than 260 physicians to provide feedback on model outputs more than 600,000 times over 30 areas of focus, to help shape the product's responses. "ChatGPT can help you understand recent test results, prepare for appointments with your doctor, get advice on how to approach your diet and workout routine, or understand the tradeoffs of different insurance options based on your healthcare patterns," OpenAI claims in the blog post.

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Goldman Sachs is transferring Apple Card and Apple Savings to JPMorgan Chase. "It was clear in 2023 that Goldman Sachs would exit the consumer credit game, abandoning its Apple Card partnership with it," reports AppleInsider. "However, it has taken 26 months to reach a point where it can finally hand over issuing control to another bank." From the report: Goldman Sachs is reportedly expected to hand over the $20 billion of outstanding balances at a $1 billion discount. Such discounts are rare, and allegedly reflect the higher-than-average delinquency rate found with Apple Card holders. JPMorgan will have to issue new Apple Cards to existing users, but it may be some time before that is done. A new Apple Savings will be opened by JPMorgan as well, but users will be given the option to move or stay.

Bose is end-of-lifing its SoundTouch smart speakers but softened the blow by open-sourcing the SoundTouch API and preserving limited local features, AirPlay, and Spotify Connect. Ars Technica reports: In October, Bose announced that its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars would become dumb speakers on February 18. At the time, Bose said that the speakers would only work if a device was connected via AUX, HDMI, or Bluetooth (which has higher latency than Wi-Fi). After that date, the speakers would stop receiving security and software updates and lose cloud connectivity and their companion app, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based company said. Without the app, users would no longer be able to integrate the device with music services, such as Spotify, have multiple SoundTouch devices play the same audio simultaneously, or use or edit saved presets.

The announcement frustrated some of Bose's long-time customers, some of whom own multiple SoundTouch devices that still function properly. Many questioned companies' increasingly common practice of bricking expensive products to focus on new devices or to minimize costs, or because they've gone through acquisitions or bankruptcy. SoundTouch speakers released in 2013 and 2015 with prices ranging from $399 to $1,500.

Today, Bose had better news. In an email to customers, Bose announced that AirPlay and Spotify Connect will still work with SoundTouch speakers after EoL, expanding the wireless capabilities that people will still be able to access. Additionally, SoundTouch devices that support AirPlay 2 can play the same audio simultaneously. The SoundTouch app will also live on, albeit stripped of some functionality. "On May 6, 2026, the app will update to a version that supports the functions that can operate locally without the cloud. No action will be required on your part. Opening the app will apply the update automatically," Bose said. Bose also provided instructions (PDF) for a workaround for saving presets that uses the favorites options in music service apps.

Ritchie Torres has introduced a bill to ban government officials from using insider information to trade on political prediction markets like Polymarket. The bill was prompted by reports that traders on Polymarket made large profits betting on Nicolas Maduro's removal, raising suspicions that some wagers were placed using material non-public information. "While such insider trading in capital markets is already illegal and often prosecuted by the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission, online prediction markets are far less regulated," notes Axios. From the report: Rep. Ritchie Torres' (D-N.Y.) three-page bill, a copy of which was obtained by Axios, is called the Public Integrity in Financial Prediction Markets Act of 2026. It would ban federal elected officials, political appointees and bureaucrats from making insider trades on prediction sites sites such as Polymarket. Specifically, the bill prohibits such government officials from trading based on information that is not publicly available and that "a reasonable investor would consider important in making an investment decision." [...] It's not clear if House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would put Torres' bill to a vote in the House or if President Trump would sign it. "We're looking at the specifics of the bill, but we already ban the activity it cites and are in support of means to prevent this type of activity," said Elisabeth Diana, a spokesperson for the prediction website Kalshi.

Diana added that the "activity from the past few days" did not occur on their platform.

National Weather Service pulled an AI-generated forecast graphic after it hallucinated fake town names in Idaho. "The blunder -- not the first of its kind to be posted by the NWS in the past year -- comes as the agency experiments with a wide range of AI uses, from advanced forecasting to graphic design," reports the Washington Post. "Experts worry that without properly trained officials, mistakes could erode trust in the agency and the technology." From the report: At first glance, there was nothing out of the ordinary about Saturday's wind forecast for Camas Prairie, Idaho. "Hold onto your hats!" said a social media post from the local weather office in Missoula, Montana. "Orangeotild" had a 10 percent chance of high winds, while just south, "Whata Bod" would be spared larger gusts. The problem? Neither of those places exist. Nor do a handful of the other spots marked on the National Weather Service's forecast graphic, riddled with spelling and geographical errors that the agency confirmed were linked to the use of generative AI.

NWS said AI is not commonly used for public-facing content, nor is its use prohibited. The agency said it is exploring ways to employ AI to inform the public and acknowledged mistakes have been made. "Recently, a local office used AI to create a base map to display forecast information, however the map inadvertently displayed illegible city names," said NWS spokeswoman Erica Grow Cei. "The map was quickly corrected and updated social media posts were distributed."

A post with the inaccurate map was deleted Monday, the same day The Washington Post contacted officials with questions about the image. Cei added that "NWS is exploring strategic ways to continue optimizing our service delivery for Americans, including the implementation of AI where it makes sense. NWS will continue to carefully evaluate results in cases where AI is implemented to ensure accuracy and efficiency, and will discontinue use in scenarios where AI is not effective." A Nov. 25 tweet out of the Rapid City, South Dakota, office also had misspelled locations and the Google Gemini logo in its forecast. NWS did not confirm whether the Rapid City image was made with generative AI.

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code at Anthropic, revealed a deceptively simple workflow that uses parallel AI agents, verification loops, and shared memory to let one developer operate with the output of an entire engineering team. "I run 5 Claudes in parallel in my terminal," Cherny wrote. "I number my tabs 1-5, and use system notifications to know when a Claude needs input." He also runs "5-10 Claudes on claude.ai" in his browser, using a "teleport" command to hand off work between the web and his local machine. This validates the "do more with less" strategy Anthropic's President Daniela Amodei recently pitched during an interview with CNBC. VentureBeat reports: For the past week, the engineering community has been dissecting a thread on X from Boris Cherny, the creator and head of Claude Code at Anthropic. What began as a casual sharing of his personal terminal setup has spiraled into a viral manifesto on the future of software development, with industry insiders calling it a watershed moment for the startup.

"If you're not reading the Claude Code best practices straight from its creator, you're behind as a programmer," wrote Jeff Tang, a prominent voice in the developer community. Kyle McNease, another industry observer, went further, declaring that with Cherny's "game-changing updates," Anthropic is "on fire," potentially facing "their ChatGPT moment."

The excitement stems from a paradox: Cherny's workflow is surprisingly simple, yet it allows a single human to operate with the output capacity of a small engineering department. As one user noted on X after implementing Cherny's setup, the experience "feels more like Starcraft" than traditional coding -- a shift from typing syntax to commanding autonomous units.

According to Bloomberg, Discord has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO. Reuters reports: The U.S. IPO market regained momentum in 2025 after nearly three years of sluggish activity, but hopes for a stronger rebound were tempered by tariff-driven volatility, a prolonged government shutdown and a late-year selloff in artificial intelligence stocks. Discord, which was founded in 2015, offers voice, video and text chatting capabilities aimed at gamers and streamers. According to a statement in December, the platform has more than 200 million monthly users.

Vietnam will begin enforcing new online advertising rules in February 2026 that ban forced video ads longer than five seconds and must allow users to close ads with just one tap. "Furthermore, platforms must provide clear icons and instructions for users to report advertisements that violate the law, and allow them to opt out, turn off, or stop viewing inappropriate ads," reports a local news outlet (translated to English). "These reports must be received and processed promptly, and the results communicated to users as required." From the report: In cases where the entity posting the infringing advertisement cannot be identified or where specialized laws do not have specific regulations, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is the focal agency to receive notifications and send requests to block or remove the advertisement to organizations and businesses providing online advertising services in Vietnam.

Advertisers, advertising service providers, and advertising transmission and distribution units are responsible for blocking and removing infringing advertisements within 24 hours of receiving a request from the competent authority. For advertisements that infringe on national security, the blocking and removal must be carried out immediately, no later than 24 hours.

In case of non-compliance, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, in coordination with the Ministry of Public Security, will apply technical measures to block infringing advertisements and services and handle the matter according to the law. Telecommunications companies and Internet service providers must also implement technical measures to block access to infringing advertisements within 24 hours of receiving a request.

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-sized robot with two arms and two legs picked itself up from the floor at a Las Vegas hotel ballroom. It then fluidly walked around the stage for several minutes, sometimes waving to the crowd and swiveling its head like an owl. An engineer remotely piloted the robot from nearby for the purpose of the demonstration, though in real life Atlas will move around on its own, said Jackowski, the company's general manager for humanoid robots.

[...] Hyundai also announced a new partnership with Google's DeepMind, which will supply its artificial intelligence technology to Boston Dynamics robots. It's a return to a familiar partnership for Google, which bought Boston Dynamics in 2013 before selling it to Japanese tech giant SoftBank several years later. Hyundai acquired it from SoftBank in 2021. [...] At the end of Monday's live Atlas demonstration, which appeared flawless, the humanoid prototype swung its arms in a theatrical gesture to introduce a static model of the new product version of Atlas, which looked slightly different and was blue in color. "I think the question comes back to what are the use cases and where is the applicability of the technology," said Alex Panas, a partner at consultancy McKinsey who helped lead a CES robotics panel that attracted hundreds of people earlier in the day. "In some cases, it may look more humanoid. In some cases, it may not."

Either way, Panas said, "the software, the chipsets, the communication, all the other pieces of the technology are coming together, and they will create new applications."

You can watch a video of the demonstration on YouTube.

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 the resilience of shadow libraries. From the report: A few hours ago, the site's original domain name suddenly became unreachable globally. The annas-archive.org domain status was changed to "serverHold," which is typically done by the domain registry. This status effectively means that the domain is suspended and under investigation. Similar action has previously been taken against other pirate sites.

It is rare to see a .org domain involved in domain name suspensions. The American non-profit Public Interest Registry (PIR), which oversees the .org domains, previously refused to suspend domain names voluntarily, including thepiratebay.org. The registry's cautionary stance suggests that the actions against annas-archive.org are backed by a court order.

PIR's marketing director, Kendal Rowe, informs TorrentFreak that "unfortunately, PIR is unable to comment on the situation at this time." It is possible that, in response to the 'DRM-circumventing' Spotify backup, rightsholders requested an injunction targeting the domain name. However, we have seen no evidence of that. In the WorldCat lawsuit, OCLC requested an injunction to force action from intermediaries, including domain registries, but as far as we know, that hasn't been granted yet.

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 stations facing an uncertain future. Variety reports: The CPB was created by Congress by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 to support the federal government's investment in public broadcasting. The org noted that the rescission of all of CPB's federal funding came after years of political attacks. "For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans -- regardless of geography, income, or background -- had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling," said CPB president/CEO Patricia Harrison. "When the Administration and Congress rescinded federal funding, our Board faced a profound responsibility: CPB's final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks.

[...] "CPB's support extends to every corner of the country -- urban, rural, tribal, and everywhere in between," the org noted. "In many communities, public media stations are the only free source of trusted news, educational children's programming, and local and national cultural content." The CPB said that without funding, its board determined that "maintaining the corporation as a nonfunctional entity would not serve the public interest or advance the goals of public media. A dormant and defunded CPB could have become vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse, threatening the independence of public media and the trust audiences place in it, and potentially subjecting staff and board members to legal exposure from bad-faith actors."

As it closes, CPB is distributing its remaining funds, and also supporting the American Archive of Public Broadcasting in digitizing and preserving historic content. The CPB's own archives will be preserved at the University of Maryland, which will make it accessible to the public. "Public media remains essential to a healthy democracy," Harrison added. "Our hope is that future leaders and generations will recognize its value, defend its independence, and continue the work of ensuring that trustworthy, educational, and community-centered media remains accessible to all Americans."

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 using the middle mouse button for pasting. Jordan Petridis argued in that GNOME pull request that middle-click paste is an "X11'ism" and that the setting could remain for those wanting to opt-in to enabling the functionality [...].

The gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste true command would be a way of restoring the primary paste (middle click paste) for those desiring the functionality. The decision over the default has been tasked to GNOME's design team for consideration.

Separately, Mozilla is also considering disabling middle mouse button paste by default too. [...] Another option being considered is having the option to enable/disable it at either the GTK toolkit level or Wayland compositor level.

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 cash, among other indefensible actions. Nearly 90,000 upvotes and four days later, it's become increasingly clear that the post's text is probably AI-generated. Considering the delivery app industry track record of exploitation of its drivers, it's easy to see why so many people believed this was the real thing.

The Verge put the original 586-word Reddit post through several free online AI detectors, in addition to Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. The results were mixed: Copyleaks, GPTZero, Pangram, Gemini, and Claude all pegged it as likely AI-generated, but ZeroGPT and QuillBot both reported it as human-written. ChatGPT played it down the middle. Reached by The Verge on Signal, Trowaway_whistleblow provided an image of an Uber Eats employee badge. That image was generated or edited with Google AI, according to Gemini. The image shows an Uber Eats logo above two black boxes, presumably covering an employee name and photo, and the words "senior software engineer." It's odd that an engineer's badge would have the Uber Eats logo, and not the Uber logo, according to Gemini. That, in addition to slightly misaligned words and warped coloration at the edge of the green border, are reasons Gemini thinks it's inauthentic. (Uber later confirmed that Uber Eats-branded employee badges do not exist.) "Not only are the claims fake, but they're also dead wrong," Uber spokesperson Noah Edwardsen told The Verge. Uber Eats' Andrew Macdonald wrote on X, "This post is definitively not about us. I suspect it is completely made up. Don't trust everything you read on the internet."

DoorDash CEO Tony Xu also denied the redditor's "appalling" allegations. "This is not DoorDash, and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated the kind of culture described in this Reddit post," Xu said in a post on X.

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 immediately ran into problems including unrecognized passwords, broken links and placeholder text scattered across unfinished pages. In a December 17 email to members, The Register reports today, managing director Chris Clements said Capita was "working tirelessly" and promised "one of the biggest services in the United Kingdom with AI at its core" by March.

He asked users whose enquiries were not urgent to wait until the new year before contacting support again.

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 multiplying in number and size to meet steep demand as developers branch out in search of faster connections to power sources... [A]s more people hear about a data center coming to their community, once-sleepy municipal board meetings in farming towns and growing suburbs now feature crowded rooms of angry residents pressuring local officials to reject the requests...

A growing number of proposals are going down in defeat, sounding alarms across the data center constellation of Big Tech firms, real estate developers, electric utilities, labor unions and more. Andy Cvengros, who helps lead the data center practice at commercial real estate giant JLL, counted seven or eight deals he'd worked on in recent months that saw opponents going door-to-door, handing out shirts or putting signs in people's yards. "It's becoming a huge problem," Cvengros said. Data Center Watch, a project of 10a Labs, an AI security consultancy, said it is seeing a sharp escalation in community, political and regulatory disruptions to data center development. Between April and June alone, its latest reporting period, it counted 20 proposals valued at $98 billion in 11 states that were blocked or delayed amid local opposition and state-level pushback. That amounts to two-thirds of the projects it was tracking...

For some people angry over steep increases in electric bills, their patience is thin for data centers that could bring still-higher increases. Losing open space, farmland, forest or rural character is a big concern. So is the damage to quality of life, property values or health by on-site diesel generators kicking on or the constant hum of servers. Others worry that wells and aquifers could run dry...

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 delete their information" — using the Delete Requests and Opt-Out Platform (or DROP): Once DROP users verify that they are California residents, they can submit a deletion request that will go to all current and future data brokers registered with the state...

Brokers are supposed to start processing requests in August 2026, then they have 90 days to actually process requests and report back. If they don't delete your data, you'll have the option to submit additional information that may help them locate your records. Companies will also be able to keep first-party data that they've collected from users. It's only brokers who seek to buy or sell that data — which can include your social security number, browsing history, email address, phone number, and more — who will be required to delete it...

The California Privacy Protection Agency says that in addition to giving residents more control over their data, the tool could result in fewer "unwanted texts, calls, or emails" and also decrease the "risk of identity theft, fraud, AI impersonations, or that your data is leaked or hacked."