404 Media's Claire Woodcock writes: As prices for streaming subscriptions continue to soar and finding movies to watch, new and old, is becoming harder as the number of streaming services continues to grow, people are turning to the unexpected last stronghold of physical media: the public library. Some libraries are now intentionally using iconic Blockbuster branding to recall the hours visitors once spent looking for something to rent on Friday and Saturday nights.

John Scalzo, audiovisual collection librarian with a public library in western New York, says that despite an observed drop-off in DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra disc circulation in 2019, interest in physical media is coming back around. "People really seem to want physical media," Scalzo told 404 Media. Part of it has to do with consumer awareness: People know they're paying more for monthly subscriptions to streaming services and getting less. The same has been true for gaming.

As the audiovisual selector with the Free Library of Philadelphia since 2024, Kris Langlais has been focused on building the library's video game collections to meet comparable interest in demand. Now that every branch library has a prominent video game collection, Langlais says that patrons who come for the games are reportedly expressing interest in more of what the library has to offer. "Librarians out in our branches are seeing a lot of young people who are really excited by these collections," Langlais told 404 Media. "Folks who are coming in just for the games are picking up program flyers and coming back for something like that." IP disputes are fueling the shift, too.

The report notes how rights and licensing battles are making some films harder to access -- from titles that quietly slip out of commercial circulation, to streaming-only releases that never make it to disc, to entire shows vanishing during mergers like HBO Max-Discovery+. One prominent example is The People's Joker, which was briefly pulled from the Toronto International Film Festival over a conflict with Batman's rightsholders.

Situations like that are pushing librarians to grab physical copies while they still can, before these works risk disappearing altogether.

YouTube has launched its first-ever "Recap" for videos watched on the main platform, giving users personalized cards that showcase their top channels, interests, and a personality type based on their watch habits. The feature rolls out across North America today and globally this week. TechCrunch reports: Users can find their Recap directly on the YouTube homepage or under the "You" tab. Recaps are accessible on mobile devices and desktop. YouTube says the new feature was requested by users and that it conducted over 50 different concept tests before landing on the final product. Alongside the launch of Recap, YouTube also released trend charts showcasing the top creators, podcasts, and songs of the year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GamesIndustry.biz: Japanese game makers are struggling to locate affordable commercial fonts after one of the country's leading font licensing services raised the cost of its annual plan from around $380 to $20,500 (USD). As reported by Gamemakers and GameSpark and translated by Automaton, Fontworks LETS discontinued its game license plan at the end of November. The expensive replacement plan -- offered through Fontwork's parent company, Monotype -- doesn't even provide local pricing for Japanese developers, and comes with a 25,000 user-cap, which is likely not workable for Japan's bigger studios.

The problem is further compounded by the difficulties and complexities of securing fonts that can accurately transcribe Kanji and Katakana characters. UI/UX designer Yamanaka stressed that this would be particularly problematic for live service games; even if studios moved quickly and switched to fonts available through an alternate licensee, they will have to re-test, re-validate, and re-QA check content already live and in active use. The crisis could even eventually force some Japanese studios to rebrand entirely if their corporate identity is tied to a commercial font they can no longer afford to license.

During last month's KubeCon North America in Atlanta, Kubernetes maintainers announced the upcoming retirement of Ingress NGINX. "Best-effort maintenance will continue until March 2026," noted the Kubernetes SIG Network and the Security Response Committee. "Afterward, there will be no further releases, no bugfixes, and no updates to resolve any security vulnerabilities that may be discovered." In a recent op-ed for The Register, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reflects on the decision and speculates about what might have prevented this outcome: Ingress NGINX, for those who don't know it, is an ingress controller in Kubernetes clusters that manages and routes external HTTP and HTTPS traffic to the cluster's internal services based on configurable Ingress rules. It acts as a reverse proxy, ensuring that requests from clients outside the cluster are forwarded to the correct backend services within the cluster according to path, domain, and TLS configuration. As such, it's vital for network traffic management and load balancing. You know, the important stuff.

Now this longstanding project, once celebrated for its flexibility and breadth of features, will soon be "abandonware." So what? After all, it won't be the first time a once-popular program shuffled off the stage. Off the top of my head, dBase, Lotus 1-2-3, and VisiCalc spring to my mind. What's different is that there are still thousands of Ingress NGINX controllers in use. Why is it being put down, then, if it's so popular? Well, there is a good reason. As Tabitha Sable, a staff engineer at Datadog who is also co-chair of the Kubernetes special interest group for security, pointed out: "Ingress NGINX has always struggled with insufficient or barely sufficient maintainership. For years, the project has had only one or two people doing development work, on their own time, after work hours, and on weekends. Last year, the Ingress NGINX maintainers announced their plans to wind down Ingress NGINX and develop a replacement controller together with the Gateway API community. Unfortunately, even that announcement failed to generate additional interest in helping maintain Ingress NGINX or develop InGate to replace it." [...]

The final nail in the coffin was when security company Wix found a killer Ingress NGINX security hole. How bad was it? Wix declared: "Exploiting this flaw allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code and access all cluster secrets across namespaces, which could lead to complete cluster takeover." [...] You see, the real problem isn't that Ingress NGINX has a major security problem. Heck, hardly a month goes by without another stop-the-presses Windows bug being uncovered. No, the real issue is that here we have yet another example of a mission-critical open source program no one pays to support...

The UK government plans to ban political donations made in cryptocurrency over fears of anonymity, foreign influence, and traceability issues, though the ban won't be ready in time for the upcoming elections bill. The Guardian reports: The government's ambition to ban crypto donations will be a blow to Nigel Farage's Reform UK party, which became the first to accept contributions in digital currency this year. It is believed to have received its first registrable donations in cryptocurrency this autumn and the party has set up its own crypto portal to receive contributions, saying it is subject to "enhanced" checks. Government sources have said ministers believe cryptocurrency donations to be a problem, as they are difficult to trace and could be exploited by foreign powers or criminals.

Pat McFadden, then a Cabinet Office minister, first raised the idea in July, saying: "I definitely think it is something that the Electoral Commission should be considering. I think that it's very important that we know who is providing the donation, are they properly registered, what are the bona fides of that donation." The Electoral Commission provides guidance on crypto donations but ministers accept any ban would probably have to come from the government through legislation. "Crypto donations present real risks to our democracy," said Susan Hawley, the executive director of Spotlight on Corruption. "We know that bad actors like Russia use crypto to undermine and interfere in democracies globally, while the difficulties involved in tracing the true source of transactions means that British voters may not know everyone who's funding the parties they vote for."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: The popular open-source SmartTube YouTube client for Android TV was compromised after an attacker gained access to the developer's signing keys, leading to a malicious update being pushed to users. The compromise became known when multiple users reported that Play Protect, Android's built-in antivirus module, blocked SmartTube on their devices and warned them of a risk.

The developer of SmartTube, Yuriy Yuliskov, admitted that his digital keys were compromised late last week, leading to the injection of malware into the app. Yuliskov revoked the old signature and said he would soon publish a new version with a separate app ID, urging users to move to that one instead. [...] A user who reverse-engineered the compromised SmartTube version number 30.51 found that it includes a hidden native library named libalphasdk.so [VirusTotal]. This library does not exist in the public source code, so it is being injected into release builds.

[...] The library runs silently in the background without user interaction, fingerprints the host device, registers it with a remote backend, and periodically sends metrics and retrieves configuration via an encrypted communications channel. All this happens without any visible indication to the user. While there's no evidence of malicious activity such as account theft or participation in DDoS botnets, the risk of enabling such activities at any time is high.

Michael and Susan Dell pledged $6.25 billion to boost participation in the new "Trump Accounts" child investment program. "The historic gift has little precedent, with few single charitable commitments in the past 25 years exceeding $1 billion, much less multiple billions," notes the Associated Press. "Announced on GivingTuesday, the Dells believe it's the largest single private commitment made to U.S. children." From the report: Its structure is also unusual. Essentially, it builds on the "Trump Accounts" program (PDF), where the U.S. Department of the Treasury will deposit $1,000 into investment accounts set up by Treasury for American children born between Jan. 1, 2025 and Dec. 31, 2028. The Dells' gift will use the "Trump Accounts" infrastructure to give $250 to each qualified child under 10. Though the "Trump Accounts" became law as part of the president's signature legislation in July, the Dells say the accounts will not launch until July 4, 2026. Michael Dell said they wanted to mark the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence.

[...] Under the new law, "Trump Accounts" are available to any American child under 18 with a Social Security number and their families can fund the accounts, which must be invested in an index fund that tracks the overall stock market. When the children turn 18, they can withdraw the funds to put toward their education, to buy a home or to start a business. The Dells will put money into the accounts of children 10 and younger who live in ZIP codes with a median family income of $150,000 or less and who won't get the $1,000 seed money from the Treasury. The Dells hope their gift will encourage families to claim the accounts and deposit more money into it, even small amounts, so it will grow over time along with the stock market. The report notes that the timed rollout of the $1,000 deposits gives Republicans a strategic political advantage by delivering money to voters during the 2026 midterms and halting the benefit right after the 2028 presidential election.

Zillow has removed climate risk scores from over a million home listings after real estate agents argued the data was scaring off buyers. TechCrunch reports: Zillow first added the data to the site in September 2024, saying that more than 80% of buyers consider climate risks when purchasing a new home. But last month, following objections from the California Regional Multiple Listing Service (CRMLS), Zillow removed the listings' climate scores. In their place is a subtle link to their records at First Street, the climate risk analytic startup that provides the data.

"When buyers lack access to clear climate-risk information, they make the biggest financial decision of their lives while flying blind," First Street spokesperson Matthew Eby told TechCrunch via email. "The risk doesn't go away; it just moves from a pre-purchase decision into a post-purchase liability." First Street's climate risk scores first appeared on Realtor.com in 2020, where they remain. They also still appear on Redfin and and Homes.com. The New York-based startup has raised more than $50 million from investors including General Catalyst, Congruent Ventures, and Galvanize Climate Solutions, according to PitchBook.

Art Carter, the CRMLS CEO, told The New York Times that "displaying the probability of a specific home flooding this year or within the next five years can have a significant impact on the perceived desirability of that property." He also questioned the accuracy of First Street's data, saying he didn't think that areas which haven't flooded in the last 40 to 50 years were likely to flood in the next five.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: The Trump administration has agreed to inject up to $150 million into a startup (source paywalled; alternative source) trying to develop more advanced semiconductor manufacturing techniques in the U.S., its latest bid to support strategically important domestic industries with government incentives. Under the arrangement, the Commerce Department would give the incentives to xLight, a startup trying to improve the critical chip-making process known as extreme ultraviolet lithography, the agency said in a Monday release. In return, the government would get an equity stake that would likely make it xLight's largest shareholder.

The Dutch firm ASML is currently the only global producer of EUV machines, which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars each. XLight is seeking to improve on just one component of the EUV process: the crucially important lasers that etch complex microscopic patterns onto chemical-treated silicon wafers. The startup is hoping to integrate its light sources into ASML's machines. XLight represents a second act for Pat Gelsinger, the former chief executive of Intel who was fired by the board late last year after the chip maker suffered from weak financial performance and a stalled manufacturing expansion. Gelsinger serves as executive chairman of xLight's board.

[...] The xLight deal uses funding from the 2022 Chips and Science Act allocated for earlier stage companies with promising technologies. It is the first Chips Act award in President Trump's second term and is a preliminary agreement, meaning it isn't finalized and could change. "This partnership would back a technology that can fundamentally rewrite the limits of chipmaking," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in the release.

Tony Isaac quotes a report from NPR: The rise of AI assistants is rewriting the rhythms of everyday life: People are feeding their blood test results into chatbots, turning to ChatGPT for advice on their love lives and leaning on AI for everything from planning trips to finishing homework assignments. Now, one organization suggests artificial intelligence can go beyond making daily life more convenient. It says it's the key to reshaping American politics. "Without AI, what we're trying to do would be impossible," explained Adam Brandon, a senior adviser at the Independent Center, a nonprofit that studies and engages with independent voters. The goal is to elect a handful of independent candidates to the House of Representatives in 2026, using AI to identify districts where independents could succeed and uncover diamond in the rough candidates. [...]

... "This isn't going to work everywhere. It's going to work in very specific areas," [said Brett Loyd, who runs The Bullfinch Group, the nonpartisan polling and data firm overseeing the polling and research at the Independent Center]. "If you live in a hyper-Republican or hyper-Democratic district, you should have a Democrat or Republican representing you." But with the help of AI, he identified 40 seats that don't fit that mold, where he said independents can make inroads with voters fed up with both parties. The Independent Center plans to have about 10 candidates in place by spring with the goal of winning at least half of the races. Brandon predicts those wins could prompt moderate partisans in the House to switch affiliations.

Their proprietary AI tool created by an outside partner has been years in the making. While focus groups and polling have long driven understanding of American sentiments, AI can monitor what people are talking about in real time. ... They're using AI to understand core issues and concerns of voters and to hunt for districts ripe for an independent candidate to swoop in. From there, the next step is taking the data and finding what the dream candidate looks like. The Independent Center is recruiting candidates both from people who reach out to the organization directly and with the help of AI. They can even run their data through LinkedIn to identify potential candidates with certain interests and career and volunteer history. ... The AI also informs where a candidate is best placed to win.

"The car-sharing company, first launched in the U.S. in 2000, has been active in the UK since 2010 and has just under half a million members," writes Slashdot reader guesstral. "'I'm writing to let you know that we are proposing to cease the UK operations of Zipcar,' wrote Zipcar UK's general manager, James Taylor, in an email to members today. He went on to say that Zipcar will temporarily suspend new bookings after December 31, pending the outcome of a consultation with its 71 staff members." From the BBC: In its most recent company accounts for 2024, Zipcar blamed the "cost of living crisis," which was affecting UK customers, for revenues falling to 46 million pounds to 53 million the year before, while its after-tax losses had widened to 11.6 million pounds. According to the same accounts, Zipcar membership fees cover the cost of fuelling or charging the vehicle and, as energy costs continued to rise last year, it has added to financial pressures on the company. The company would also be liable for the incoming congestion charge in London that is expanding to include electric vehicles from 26 December, although this was not referenced in Zipcar's email to membership or company accounts.

New York has become the first state in the nation to enact a law requiring retailers to disclose when AI and personal data are being used to set individualized prices [non-paywalled source] -- a measure that lawyers say will make algorithmic pricing "the next big battleground in A.I. regulation."

The law, enacted through the state budget, requires online retailers using personalized pricing to post a specific notice: "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA." The National Retail Federation sued to block enforcement on First Amendment grounds, arguing the required disclosure was "misleading and ominous," but federal judge Jed S. Rakoff allowed the law to proceed last month.

Uber has started displaying the notice to New York users. Spokesman Ryan Thornton called the law "poorly drafted and ambiguous" but maintained the company only considers geographic factors and demand in setting prices. At least 10 states have bills pending that would require similar disclosures or ban personalized pricing outright. California and federal lawmakers are considering complete bans.

Singapore's Ministry of Education has announced that secondary school students will be banned from using smartphones and smartwatches throughout the entire school day starting January 2026, extending current restrictions beyond regular lesson time to cover recess, co-curricular activities, and supplementary lessons. Under the new guidelines, students must store their phones in designated areas like lockers or keep them in their school bags.

Smartwatches also fall under the ban because they enable messaging and social media access, which the ministry says can lead to distractions and reduced peer interaction. Schools may allow exceptions where necessary. Some secondary schools adopted these tighter rules after they were announced for primary schools in January 2025, and the ministry reports improved student well-being and more physical interaction during breaks at those schools. The ministry is also moving the default sleep time for school-issued personal learning devices from 11pm to 10.30pm starting January.

The skills that future graduates will most need in an age of automation -- creative thinking, critical analysis, the capacity to learn new things -- are precisely those that a growing body of research suggests may be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process, yet universities across the United States are now racing to embed the technology into every dimension of their curricula.

Ohio State University announced this summer that it would integrate AI education into every undergraduate program, and the University of Florida and the University of Michigan are rolling out similar initiatives. An MIT study offers reason for caution: researchers divided subjects into three groups and had them write essays over several months using ChatGPT, Google Search, or no technology at all. The ChatGPT group produced vague, poorly reasoned work, showed the lowest levels of brain activity on EEG, and increasingly relied on cutting and pasting from other sources. The authors concluded that LLM users "consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels" over the four-month period.

Justin Reich, director of MIT's Teaching Systems Lab, recently wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education that rushed educational efforts to incorporate new technology have "failed regularly, and sometimes catastrophically."

The British government said it opposes attempts to cool the planet by spraying millions of tons of dust into the atmosphere -- but did not close the door to a debate on regulating the technology. From a report: The comments in parliament Thursday came after a POLITICO investigation revealed an Israeli-U.S. company Stardust Solutions aimed to be capable of deploying solar radiation modification, as the technology is called, inside this decade. "We're not in favor of solar radiation modification given the uncertainty around the potential risks it poses to the climate and environment," Leader of the House of Commons Alan Campbell said on behalf of the government.

Airbus said Monday that the vast majority of around 6,000 A320-family jets affected by an emergency software recall have now been modified, leaving fewer than 100 aircraft still requiring work after a frantic weekend of repairs prompted by the discovery of a vulnerability to solar flares. The unprecedented recall -- described as the broadest emergency action in the company's history -- came after a mid-air incident on a JetBlue A320 revealed a possible link between a drop in altitude and a space-related computer bug.

The fix involved reverting to an earlier version of software that controls nose angle, uploaded via cable from a portable device called a data loader. Some older A320 jets will need entirely new computers rather than a simple software reset, raising questions about how long those aircraft will remain grounded amid global chip shortages.

Reuters separately reported on Monday that Airbus had discovered an industrial quality issue affecting metal panels of a "limited" number of A320-family aircraft. The company told the publication that it had "identified" and "contained" the source of the issue and that "all newly produced panels conform to all requirements."

Two former U.S. congressmen announced this week that they're launching two tax-exempt fundraising groups "to back candidates who support AI safeguards," reports The Hill, "as a counterweight to industry-backed groups." Former Representatives Chris Stewart (Republican-Utah) and Brad Carson (Democrat-Oklahoma) plan to create separate Republican and Democratic super PACs and raise $50 million to elect candidates "committed to defending the public interest against those who aim to buy their way out of sensible AI regulation," according to a press release...

The pair is also launching a nonprofit called Public First to advocate for AI policy. Carson underscored that polling "shows significant public concern about AI and overwhelming voter support for guardrails that protect people from harm and mitigate major risks." Their efforts are meant to counter "anti-safeguard super PACs" that they argue are attempting to "kill commonsense guardrails around AI," the press release noted...

The super PAC is reportedly targeting a Democratic congressional candidate, New York state Assemblymember Alex Bores, who co-sponsored AI legislation in the Albany statehouse.
"This isn't a partisan issue — it's about whether we'll have meaningful oversight of the most powerful technology ever created," Chris Stewart says in their press release.

"We've seen what happens when government fails to act on other emerging technologies. With AI, the stakes are enormous, and we can't afford to make the same missteps."

"The internet is being increasingly polluted by AI generated text, images and video," argues the site for a new browser extension called Slop Evader. It promises to use Google's search API "to only return content published before Nov 30th, 2022" — the day ChatGPT launched — "so you can be sure that it was written or produced by the human hand."

404 Media calls it "a scorched earth approach that virtually guarantees your searches will be slop-free." Slop Evader was created by artist and researcher Tega Brain, who says she was motivated by the growing dismay over the tech industry's unrelenting, aggressive rollout of so-called "generative AI" — despite widespread criticism and the wider public's distaste for it. "This sowing of mistrust in our relationship with media is a huge thing, a huge effect of this synthetic media moment we're in," Brain told 404 Media, describing how tools like Sora 2 have short-circuited our ability to determine reality within a sea of artificial online junk. "I've been thinking about ways to refuse it, and the simplest, dumbest way to do that is to only search before 2022...."

Currently, Slop Evader can be used to search pre-GPT archives of seven different sites where slop has become commonplace, including YouTube, Reddit, Stack Exchange, and the parenting site MumsNet. The obvious downside to this, from a user perspective, is that you won't be able to find anything time-sensitive or current — including this very website, which did not exist in 2022. The experience is simultaneously refreshing and harrowing, allowing you to browse freely without having to constantly question reality, but always knowing that this freedom will be forever locked in time — nostalgia for a human-centric world wide web that no longer exists.

Of course, the tool's limitations are part of its provocation. Brain says she has plans to add support for more sites, and release a new version that uses DuckDuckGo's search indexing instead of Google's. But the real goal, she says, is prompting people to question how they can collectively refuse the dystopian, inhuman version of the internet that Silicon Valley's AI-pushers have forced on us... With enough cultural pushback, Brain suggests, we could start to see alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo adding options to filter out search results suspected of having synthetic content (DuckDuckGo added the ability to filter out AI images in search earlier this year)... But no matter what form AI slop-refusal takes, it will need to be a group effort.

The Free Software Foundation describes how "After months of preparation and excitement, we finally came together on November 21 for a global online hackathon to support free software projects and "put a spotlight on the difficult and often thankless work that free software hackers carry out..."

Based on how many of you dropped in over the weekend and were incredibly engaged in the important work that is improving free software, either as a spectator or as a participant, this goal was accomplished. And it's all thanks to you!

Friday started a little rocky with a datacenter outage affecting most FSF services. Participants spread out to work on six different free software projects over forty-eight hours as our tech team worked to restore all FSF sites with the help and support of the community. Over three hundred folks were tuned in at a time, some to participate in the hackathon and others to follow the progress being made. As a community, we got a lot done over the weekend...

It was amazing to see so many of you take a little (or a lot of!) time out of your busy schedules to improve free software, and we're incredibly grateful for each and every one of you. It really energizes us and shows us how much we can accomplish when we work together over even just a couple days. Not only was this a fantastic sight to see because of the work we got done, but it was also a very fitting way to conclude our fortieth anniversary celebration events. Free software has been and always will be a community effort, one that continues to get better and better because of the dedicated developers, contributors, and users who ensure its existence. Thank you for celebrating forty years of the FSF and fighting for a freer future for us all.

Almost two-thirds of registered U.S. voters "say that a four-year college degree isn't worth the cost," according to a new NBC News poll: Just 33% agree a four-year college degree is "worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a good job and earn more money over their lifetime," while 63% agree more with the concept that it's "not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off." In 2017, U.S. adults surveyed were virtually split on the question — 49% said a degree was worth the cost and 47% said it wasn't. When CNBC asked the same question in 2013 as part of its All American Economic Survey, 53% said a degree was worth it and 40% said it was not. The eye-popping shift over the last 12 years comes against the backdrop of several major trends shaping the job market and the education world, from exploding college tuition prices to rapid changes in the modern economy — which seems once again poised for radical transformation alongside advances in AI...

Remarkably, less than half of voters with college degrees see those degrees as worth the cost: 46% now, down from 63% in 2013... The upshot is that interest in technical, vocational and two-year degree programs has soared.
"The 20-point decline over the last 12 years among those who say a degree is worth it — from 53% in 2013 to 33% now — is reflected across virtually every demographic group."