Open Source

Bose Open-Sources Its SoundTouch Home Theater Smart Speakers Ahead of End-of-Life (arstechnica.com) 22

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.

IT

Logitech Caused Its Mice To Freak Out By Not Renewing a Certificate (theverge.com) 68

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're among the macOS users experiencing some weird issues with your Logitech mouse, then good news: Logitech has now released a fix. This comes after multiple Reddit users reported yesterday that Logi Options Plus -- the app required to manage and configure the controls on Logitech accessories -- had stopped working, preventing them from using customized scrolling features, button actions, and gestures.

One Reddit user said that the scroll directions and extra buttons on their Logitech mouse "were not working as I intended" and that the Logi Options Plus app became stuck in a boot loop upon opening it to identify the cause. Logitech has since acknowledged the situation and said that its G Hub app -- a similar management software for gaming devices under the Logitech G brand -- was also affected.

According to Logitech's support page, the problem was caused by "an expired certificate" required for the apps to run. Windows users were unaffected. The issues only impacted Mac users because macOS prevents certain applications from running if it doesn't detect a valid Developer ID certificate, something that has affected other apps in the past.

Government

Congressman Introduces Legislation To Criminalize Insider Trading On Prediction Markets (axios.com) 55

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.
Television

Corporation for Public Broadcasting To Shut Down After 58 Years (variety.com) 171

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."

AI

Amazon's AI Assistant Comes To the Web With Alexa.com 7

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon's AI-powered overhaul of its digital assistant, now known as Alexa+, is coming to the web. On Monday, at the start of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the company announced the official launch of a new website, Alexa.com, which is now rolling out to all Alexa+ Early Access customers. The site will allow customers to use Alexa+ online, much as you can do today with other AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Google's Gemini.

[...] Related to this expansion, Amazon is updating its Alexa mobile app, which will now offer a more "agent-forward" experience. Or, in other words, it's putting a chatbot-style interface on the app's homepage, making it seem more like a typical AI chatbot. (While you could chat with Alexa before in the app, the focus is now on the chatting -- while the other features take a back seat.) On the Alexa.com website, customers can use Alexa+ for common tasks -- for instance, exploring complex topics, creating content, and making trip itineraries. However, Amazon aims to differentiate its assistant from others by focusing on families and their needs in the home.

[...] The Alexa.com website features a navigation sidebar for quicker access to your most-used Alexa features, so you can pick up where you left off on tasks like setting the thermostat, checking your calendar for appointments, reviewing shopping lists, and more. In addition, Amazon aims to convince customers to share their personal documents, emails, and calendar access with Alexa+, so its AI can become a sort of hub to manage the goings-on at home, from kids' school holidays and soccer schedules to doctor's appointments and other things families need to remember -- like when the dog got its last rabies shot, or what day the neighbor's backyard BBQ is taking place.
"Seventy-six percent of what customers are using Alexa+ for no other AI can do," says Daniel Rausch, VP of Alexa and Echo at Amazon.

"Ninety-seven percent of Alexa devices support Alexa+, and we see now in adoption from customers that they're using Alexa across all those many years and many generations of devices," Rausch adds. "We support all of Alexa's original capabilities, the tens of thousands of services and devices that Alexa was integrated with already are carried forward to the Alexa+ experience."

The report notes that Alexa.com will initially only be available to Early Access customers who sign in with their Amazon account.
United Kingdom

UK Government's New Pension Portal Operator Tells Users To Wait for AI Before Complaining (theregister.com) 27

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.
Google

Google To Kill Gmail's POP3 Mail Fetching (theregister.com) 92

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

Google buried the decision in a support note rather than making any formal announcement. The company's suggested workaround -- switching to IMAP -- doesn't work for all affected users. Users can still access third-party accounts through the Gmail mobile app, but the Gmail service itself will no longer retrieve messages from external providers.
HP

Workstation Owner Sadly Marks the End-of-Life for HP-UX (osnews.com) 152

Wednesday marked the end of support for the last and final version of HP-UX, writes OSNews.

They call it "the end of another vestige of the heyday of the commercial UNIX variants, a reign ended by cheap x86 hardware and the increasing popularisation of Linux." I have two HP-UX 11i v1 PA-RISC workstations, one of them being my pride and joy: an HP c8000, the last and fastest PA-RISC workstation HP ever made, back in 2005. It's a behemoth of a machine with two dual-core PA-8900 processors running at 1Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, a FireGL X3 graphics card, and a few other fun upgrades like an internal LTO3 tape drive that I use for keeping a bootable recovery backup of the entire system. It runs HP-UX 11i v1, fully updated and patched as best one can do considering how many patches have either vanished from the web or have never "leaked" from HPE (most patches from 2009 onwards are not available anywhere without an expensive enterprise support contract)...

Over the past few years, I've been trying to get into contact with HPE about the state of HP-UX' patches, software, and drivers, which are slowly but surely disappearing from the web. A decent chunk is archived on various websites, but a lot of it isn't, which is a real shame. Most patches from 2009 onwards are unavailable, various software packages and programs for HP-UX are lost to time, HP-UX installation discs and ISOs later than 2006-2009 are not available anywhere, and everything that is available is only available via non-sanctioned means, if you know what I mean.

Sadly, I never managed to get into contact with anyone at HPE, and my concerns about HP-UX preservation seem to have fallen on deaf ears. With the end-of-life date now here, I'm deeply concerned even more will go missing, and the odds of making the already missing stuff available are only decreasing. I've come to accept that very few people seem to hold any love for or special attachment to HP-UX, and that very few people care as much about its preservation as I do. HP-UX doesn't carry the movie star status of IRIX, nor the benefits of being available as both open source and on commodity hardware as Solaris, so far fewer people have any experience with it or have developed a fondness for it.

As the clocks chimed midnight on New Year's Eve, he advised everyone to "spare a thought for the UNIX everyone forgot still exists."
AI

Microsoft's Risky Bet That Windows Can Become The Platform for AI Agents (geekwire.com) 57

"Microsoft is hoping that Windows can once again serve as the platform where it all takes off," reports GeekWire: A new framework called Agent Launchers, introduced in December as a preview in the latest Windows Insider build, lets developers register agents directly with the operating system. They can describe an agent through what's known as a manifest, which then lets the agent show up in the Windows taskbar, inside Microsoft Copilot, and across other apps... "We are now entering a phase where we build rich scaffolds that orchestrate multiple models and agents; account for memory and entitlements; enable rich and safe tools use," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a blog post this week looking ahead to 2026. "This is the engineering sophistication we must continue to build to get value out of AI in the real world...." [The article notes Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude will also offer desktop-style agentsthrough browsers and native apps, while Amazon is developing "frontier agents" for automating business processes in the cloud.]

But Microsoft's Windows team is betting that agents tightly linked to the operating system will win out over ones that merely run on top of it, just as a new class of Windows apps replaced a patchwork of DOS programs in the early days of the graphical operating system. Microsoft 365 Copilot is using the Agent Launchers framework for first-party agents like Analyst, which helps users dig into data, and Researcher, which builds detailed reports. Software developers will be able to register their own agents when an app is installed, or on the fly based on things like whether a user is signed in or paying for a subscription...

Agents are meant to maintain this context across apps, ask follow-up questions, and take actions on a user's behalf. That requires a different level of trust than Windows has ever had to manage, which is already raising difficult questions for the company. Microsoft acknowledges that agents introduce unique security risks. In a support document, the company warned that malicious content embedded in files or interface elements could override an agent's instructions — potentially leading to stolen data or malware installation. To address this, Microsoft says it has built a security framework that runs agents in their own contained workspace, with a dedicated user account that has limited access to user folders. The idea is to create a boundary between the agent and what the rest of the system can access. The agentic features are off by default, and Microsoft is advising users to "understand the security implications of enabling an agent on your computer" before turning them on...

There is a business reality driving all of this. In Microsoft's most recent fiscal year, Windows and Devices generated $17.3 billion in revenue — essentially flat for the past three years. That's less than Gaming ($23.5 billion) and LinkedIn ($17.8 billion), and a fraction of the $98 billion in revenue from Azure and cloud services or the nearly $88 billion from Microsoft 365 commercial.

Power

New Tesla Video Shows Tesla Semi Electric Truck Charging at 1.2 MW (electrek.co) 178

An anonymous reader shared this report from Electrek: Tesla has released a new video showing a Tesla Semi truck charging at a massive 1.2 megawatts (MW), finally giving us a clear look at the charging speeds that will enable long-haul electric trucking...
>
Tesla claimed the Semi would be able to charge 70% of its range in 30 minutes. For a truck with a 500-mile range and an estimated battery pack of around 800-900 kWh, that requires an incredibly high power output, well beyond the 250 kW or even 350 kW we see on passenger EVs in North America. Today, the official Tesla Semi account on X released a video showing exactly that. In the video, Tesla engineers are seen monitoring a charging session where the power output climbs to a peak of 1.2 MW (1,206 kW).

This is consistent with the capabilities Tesla announced for its new V4 Cabinet architecture earlier this year. The V4 cabinets are designed to support 400V-1000V vehicle architectures and can deliver up to 500 kW for cars (like the Cybertruck) and up to 1.2 MW for the Semi. There is some information missing from the video. For example, we don't see the state-of-charge of the truck, so we don't at what battery percentage Tesla Semi can achieve and maintain this charge rate. Peak speed is one thing, but sustaining that power without overheating the pack or the cable is the real challenge. The liquid-cooled charging cable and the immersion-cooled connector (part of the Megawatt Charging System or a high-power proprietary Tesla solution, though Tesla has been leaning toward MCS compatibility) seem to be doing their job....

This comes just as Tesla is gearing up for volume production of the Semi at its new factory expansion near Gigafactory Nevada. The automaker is targeting a start of production in the first half of 2026 and a ramp up to volume production in the second half.

AI

Google's $250M Deal with California to Fund Newsrooms May Be Stalled (politico.com) 25

Remember how California's government negotiated a 2024 deal where Google contributed millions to California's local newsrooms to offset advertisers moving to the search engine?

"A year after it was cemented — and billed as a model that could succeed where entire countries and continents had fallen short — the agreement is tangled in budget cuts, bureaucratic infighting and unresolved questions about who controls the money," reports Politico, "leaving journalists empty-handed and casting doubt on whether the lofty experiment will ever live up to its promise." The program, initially framed as a nearly $250 million commitment over five years, has secured just $20 million in new money for journalists in its first year, with no guarantee the funding will continue. It's changed hands twice since the University of California, Berkeley withdrew its support [with school officials "worried they wouldn't have enough of a say in how the money was distributed"]. Suggestions that other big tech players like ChatGPT-maker OpenAI could front more resources haven't materialized. A $62.5 million "AI accelerator" tied to the deal hasn't been set up yet.

Not a single newsroom has seen a dollar of funding, and there's no definitive timeline spelling out when they will... [The article adds later that state officials "have yet to draft precise rules for how California will decide which newsrooms get cash..."] Conversations with at least 20 people involved in the deal's rollout reveal how California's budget shortfalls and intraparty spats among Democrats scrambled it... California's struggle to launch its program has dampened hopes of replicating its model in other states such as Oregon, Illinois and New York, where lawmakers have tried but failed to make Big Tech pay for news...

When [California governor] Newsom unveiled his final state budget plan in May 2025 after a $12 billion deficit suddenly scrambled the state's finances, California's first-year commitment was reduced from $30 million to $10 million. Google followed suit within days and cut its first-year contribution from $15 million to $10 million... Whether the program even continues past 2026 is also unclear. Newsom's office declined to confirm whether the state will provide its $10 million commitment to the fund in the coming 2026-27 state budget. Newsom will also be termed out in 2027, and there's no requirement for his successor to honor the state's agreement with Google.

Windows

Has Microsoft Discontinued Offline Activation of Windows? (neowin.net) 99

An anonymous reader shared this report from Neowin: Offline Windows activation has been possible to do using the phone. However, it looks like Microsoft has quietly killed off that method as users online have found that they are no longer able to activate the OS using it... [As documented by Windows user Ben Kleinberg on his YouTube channel], Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh"

If you are wondering, that link takes users to the Microsoft Product Activation Portal for online activation. Thus it appears that offline ways to activate Windows may no longer be available even though the official support documentation by the company may not reflect it yet.

AMD

AMD Closes in on Intel in Latest Steam Hardware Survey (tomshardware.com) 58

AMD's share of processors among Steam users climbed to 47.27% in December 2025, a 4.66% jump in a single month that continues the company's steady encroachment on Intel's once-dominant position in the gaming CPU market. Intel held roughly 77% of the Steam Hardware Survey five years ago, and that lead has eroded considerably as AMD broke the 40% threshold in the third quarter of 2025 and kept climbing.

The gains came despite an ongoing memory shortage that has pushed DDR5 prices to record highs -- AMD's AM5 platform requires DDR5 exclusively, while Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh chips support both DDR4 and DDR5. Many gamers are turning to older AMD Zen 3 processors like the Ryzen 5 5800X, which topped Amazon's bestseller lists during the holiday period and work on DDR4-compatible platforms. Meanwhile, the proportion of Steam users running 32GB of RAM rose to 39.07%, nearly matching the 40.14% still on 16GB, as gamers likely rushed to upgrade before prices climbed further amid AI's demand for memory.
Japan

Life in a Shrinking Japan (japantimes.co.jp) 38

Japan's demographic transformation is no longer a distant forecast but an accelerating reality, and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research now estimates the country's population will fall to roughly 100 million by 2050 -- more than 20 million fewer people than today.

The share of residents aged 65 and over stood at 29.4% as of September and is expected to reach 37.1% by midcentury. The dependency ratio -- children and older adults supported by every 100 working-age people -- is projected to rise from 68.0 to 89.0, meaning each working-age person will effectively support one dependent.

Akita Prefecture is currently offering a preview of this future. Its population fell 1.93% year over year as of November 1, the steepest decline of any prefecture, and more than 40% of its residents are already 65 or older. By 2050, Akita's population is projected to drop to around 560,000, roughly 60% of its current size. Japan's total fertility rate fell for the ninth consecutive year in 2024, declining to 1.15 from 1.2. A health ministry survey found around 319,000 babies were born in the first half of 2025, more than 10,000 fewer than the same period last year -- a pace that could put the full-year total at a record low.
Biotech

PhDs Can't Find Work as Boston's Biotech Engine Sputters (msn.com) 44

The Wall Street Journal reports that Boston's once-booming biotech sector has hit a sharp downturn, leaving newly minted Ph.D.s struggling to find work as venture funding dries up, lab space sits empty, and companies downsize or relocate amid rising costs and policy uncertainty. The Wall Street Journal reports: Boston's biotech sector, long a vital economic engine for one of America's wealthiest metro areas, is sputtering. A double whammy of cutbacks in venture capital and government funding have taken a toll, leading to layoffs and struggles for job seekers. For workers who thought they would easily launch into a well-paying science career, the downturn has been especially harsh.

Massachusetts experienced a slight decline in its roughly 65,000 biotech research-and-development jobs in 2024 after years of mostly strong increases, including during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to federal data. The numbers indicate that job losses continued through at least June, while hiring remains sluggish. By the end of September, nearly 28% of greater Boston's laboratory space sat empty, according to the latest estimates from real-estate firm CBRE. "Every stage of the life cycle has been impacted by policy or regulatory uncertainty this year," said Kendalle Burlin O'Connell, chief executive of MassBio, an industry trade group. The impact has hit startups especially hard, she said.

A continued downturn poses risks for a region where workers will put up with sky-high real-estate costs if they can land high-paying jobs. Massachusetts faces competition from other states and China, which are eager to peel away talent and investment. "There are states and countries chasing us every single day," Gov. Maura Healey said in an interview. In late October, the Democrat testified before the Massachusetts legislature in support of a $400 million "competitiveness agenda" that she is seeking to spur new investment and supplement research funding lost this year. Lawmakers are reviewing the bill, a House spokesman said.

Linux

Fedora Continued At The Forefront Of Upstream Linux Innovations In 2025 (phoronix.com) 36

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."
Iphone

'Pull Over and Show Me Your Apple Wallet' (macrumors.com) 65

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: MacRumors reports that Apple plans to expand iPhone and Apple Watch driver's licenses to 7 U.S. states (CT, KY, MS, OK, UT, AR, VA). A recent convert is the State of Illinois, whose website videos demo how you can use your Apple Wallet license to display proof of identity or age the next time you get carded by a cop, bartender, or TSA agent. The new states will join 13 others who already offer driver's licenses in the Wallet app (AZ, MD, CO, GA, OH, HI, CA, IA, NM, MT, ND, WV, IL).

There's certainly been a lot of foot-dragging by the states when it comes to embracing phone-based driver's licenses -- Slashdot reported that Iowa was ready to launch a mobile driver's license in 2014; they didn't get one until nearly a decade later, in late 2023.

Windows

How Windows 10 Earned Its Good Reputation While Planting the Seeds of Windows 11's Problems (arstechnica.com) 39

Windows 10's formal end-of-support arrived in October, and while the operating system is generally remembered as one of the "good" versions of Windows -- the most widely used since XP -- many of the annoyances people complain about in Windows 11 actually started during the Windows 10 era, ArsTechnica writes.

Windows 10 earned its positive reputation primarily by not being Windows 8. It restored a version of the traditional Start menu, rolled out as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and 8 users, and ran on virtually all the same hardware as those older versions. Microsoft introduced the Windows Subsystem for Linux during this period and eventually rebuilt Edge on Chromium. The company seemed more willing to meet users where they were rather than forcing them to change their behavior.

But Windows 10 also began collecting more information about how users interacted with the operating system, cluttered the lock screen with advertisements and news articles, and added third-party app icons to the Start menu without user consent. The mandatory Microsoft Account sign-in requirement -- one of Windows 11's most frequently complained-about features -- was a Windows 10 innovation, easier to circumvent at the time but clearly a step down the road Windows 11 is currently traveling.

To be sure, Windows 11 has made things worse by stacking new irritants on top of old ones. The Microsoft Account requirement expanded to both Home and Pro editions, the SCOOBE screen now regularly nags users to "finish setting up" years-old installations and Microsoft's Copilot push changed the default PC keyboard layout for the first time in 30 years.
IT

'I Switched To eSIM in 2025, and I am Full of Regret' (arstechnica.com) 95

Google's Pixel 10 series arrived this year as the company's first eSIM-only lineup in the United States, forcing users who wanted to review or buy the new phones to abandon their physical SIM cards entirely. Ryan Whitwam, a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, made the switch and now regrets it, he says. "In the three months since Google forced me to give up my physical SIM card, I've only needed to move my eSIM occasionally," Whitwam wrote. "Still, my phone number has ended up stuck in limbo on two occasions."

The core problem is how carriers handle verification. When an eSIM transfer fails and you need support, carriers authenticate via SMS -- a message you cannot receive because your SIM is broken. "What should have been 30 seconds of fiddling with a piece of plastic turned into an hour standing around a retail storefront," Whitwam noted.

Apple started this trend by dropping the SIM slot on iPhone 14 in 2022. The space savings are modest: the international iPhone 17 has a smaller battery than its eSIM-only counterpart by only about 8%. Google's US Pixel 10 models offer no such trade-off -- they lack the SIM slot but "unfortunately don't have more of anything compared to the international versions." He concludes: "A physical SIM is essentially foolproof, and eSIM is not."
Canada

60 Game Workers Form First Ubisoft Union in North America (www.cbc.ca) 21

About 60 workers in Halifax, Nova Scotia have formed Ubisoft's first union in North America, reports the CBC (though its 17,000 employees include some unionized workforces in other parts of the world): T.J. Gillis, a senior server developer at Ubisoft Halifax, says he became increasingly concerned about the growth of artificial intelligence in the industry and after the closure of a Microsoft gaming studio in Halifax, Alpha Dog, in 2024. "We're seeing a ton of studios, especially larger studios, just letting people go with no unions or support, people were just being left to fend for themselves. Often times having to leave industry," said Gillis.

Gillis said he got into contact with CWA Canada to begin efforts to build a union with other colleagues... The union was formed six months after filing union certification and after 74 per cent of staff at Ubisoft Halifax voted to join CWA Canada... A spokesperson for Ubisoft said in a statement to CBC News that they "acknowledge the decision issued by the Nova Scotia Labour Board and reaffirm our commitment to maintaining full cooperation with the Board and union representatives."

Carmel Smyth is the president of CWA Canada and says she is already hearing from other employees at tech companies who want to follow Ubisoft Halifax's lead.

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