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Stingless bees from the Amazon have become the first insects to be granted legal rights anywhere in the world, in a breakthrough supporters hope will be a catalyst for similar moves to protect bees elsewhere. From a report: It means that across a broad swathe of the Peruvian Amazon, the rainforest's long-overlooked native bees -- which, unlike their cousins the European honeybees, have no sting -- now have the right to exist and to flourish. Cultivated by Indigenous peoples since pre-Columbian times, stingless bees are thought to be key rainforest pollinators, sustaining biodiversity and ecosystem health. But they are faced with a deadly confluence of climate change, deforestation and pesticides, as well as competition from European bees, and scientists and campaigners have been racing against time to get stingless bees on international conservation red lists. Constanza Prieto, Latin American director at the Earth Law Center, who was part of the campaign, said: "This ordinance marks a turning point in our relationship with nature: it makes stingless bees visible, recognises them as rights-bearing subjects, and affirms their essential role in preserving ecosystems."

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More than a decade after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 vanished over the Indian Ocean en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the marine robotics company that located Sir Ernest Shackleton's Endurance is preparing to resume its hunt for the missing Boeing 777. Ocean Infinity, a UK and US-based seabed survey firm, began searching a 15,000 sq km priority area in the Indian Ocean in February but called off the expedition in April after 22 days due to poor weather conditions. The company plans to resume operations on December 30 for 55 days under a $70 million "no find, no fee" contract from the Malaysian government. The company has already covered nearly 10,000 sq km and intends to search another 25,000 sq km. Richard Godfrey, an independent aviation investigator, estimates Ocean Infinity has spent "tens of millions of dollars" on ships and equipment. "I don't think they're in this for the monetary reward of $70m, because this search is very, very expensive," Godfrey says. "I think they're in this for the achievement and their ability to market themselves as the greatest underwater-search firm in the world because they found MH370." The search relies on Hugin 6000 autonomous underwater vehicles capable of mapping the ocean floor at depths up to 6,000 metres using sonar, laser, and acoustic technology. Each AUV can operate independently for 100 hours before surfacing. The machines carry magnetometers that can detect metal buried under several metres of sediment. The story adds: One of the biggest challenges Ocean Infinity faces is the risk of being very close to the MH370 wreckage and missing it because of difficult terrain or gaps in the survey data.

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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.

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Americans are settling into streaming habits that should worry Hollywood executives, as new Nielsen data analyzed by Bloomberg reveals that not a single new original series cracked the top 10 most-watched streaming shows in 2025 -- the first time this has happened since Nielsen began publishing streaming data in 2020. The shift extends beyond original programming as free, ad-supported streaming services are growing faster than their paid counterparts. YouTube has become the most-watched streaming service on American televisions, now larger than Netflix and Amazon combined. The Roku Channel and Tubi have nearly doubled in size over the past two years, while Peacock and Warner Bros.' streaming services have stagnated at roughly half their free competitors' viewership share. Netflix still dominates when it comes to hits, accounting for about two-thirds of original programs appearing in Nielsen's weekly top 10 lists. But that dominance is eroding -- the company's share of streaming viewership has fallen below 20%. Meanwhile, Disney's streaming services haven't increased their share of TV viewing in three years, and Amazon is closing in. The most-watched original series of 2025 was Squid Game's final season, followed by returning shows Wednesday and Love Island.

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Michal Kicinski, who co-founded both CD Projekt and the DRM-free digital games store GOG back in 2008, has acquired 100% ownership of GOG from CD Projekt, bringing the platform full circle to one of its original creators. GOG was already operating as part of CD Projekt through its Sp.z.o.o. subsidiary, but Kicinski now takes complete control of the company. The platform will continue operating independently and maintain its commitment to DRM-free gaming. "The mission stays the same: Make Games Live Forever," GOG said in its announcement. CD Projekt's joint CEO Michal Nowakowski said the parent company's focus on its development roadmap and franchise expansion made this the right time for the move. GOG has signed a distribution agreement ensuring all upcoming CD Projekt Red titles will release on the platform. Kicinski, describing himself as a "mature gamer" who plays classics, said he's personally involved in developing several retro-spirited games slated for GOG in 2026.

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AI-generated video tools like OpenAI's Sora will make individual content creators "far, far, far less valuable" as social media platforms shift toward algorithmically generated content tailored to each viewer, according to Michael Mignano, a partner at venture capital firm Lightspeed and who cofounded the podcasting platform Anchor before Spotify acquired it. Speaking on a podcast, Mignano described a future where content is generated instantaneously and artificially to suit the viewer. The TikTok algorithm is powerful, he said, but it still requires human beings to make content -- and there's a cost to that. AI could drive those costs down significantly. Mignano called this shift the "death of the creator" in a post, acknowledging it was "devastating" but arguing it marked a "whole new chapter for the internet." In an email to Business Insider, Mignano wrote that quality will win out. "Platforms will no longer reward humans posting the same old, tried and true formats and memes," he wrote. "True uniqueness of image, likeness, and creativity will be the only viable path for human-created content."

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A group of researchers is calling on universities to treat consulting work as a strategic priority, arguing that bureaucratic obstacles and inconsistent policies have left a massive revenue stream largely untapped even as higher education institutions face mounting financial pressures. (Consulting work refers to academics offering their advice and expertise to outside organizations -- industry, government, civil society -- for a fee. It's one of the most direct and scalable ways academics can shape the world beyond campus, and the projects are typically shorter in duration and easier to set up than alternatives like spin-out companies.) Writing in Nature, the authors found that fewer than 10% of academic staff at nine UK universities engaged in consulting work, and the number of academic consulting contracts across the country fell 38% over the past decade -- from around 99,000 in 2014-15 to fewer than 62,000 in 2023-24. Academic consulting in the UK is currently worth roughly $675-810 million annually, a figure that represents just 0.6% of the country's $124 billion management consulting market. The authors examined policies at 30 universities and surveyed 76 fellows from a UK Research and Innovation programme. Two-thirds of the surveyed institutions had publicly available consulting policies, and two outright prohibit private consulting. Permitted consulting time ranged from unlimited to 30 days or fewer per year, institutional charges varied from 10-40% of fees, and contract approval timelines stretched from 24 hours to several months. Private consultancy firms are moving into this space, capturing opportunities that universities neglect. Small-scale projects under $6,750 are commonly sidelined by university contract offices because they represent too small an income for strained institutional resources. The authors propose standardized policies across institutions, shared consulting income with departments, and faster approval processes -- reforms similar to those already implemented for university spin-out companies.

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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."

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The AI industry, for all the anxiety about mass unemployment, is quietly minting entirely new job categories that require distinctly human skills -- empathy, judgment, and the ability to calm down a passenger trapped inside a broken-down robotaxi. Data annotators are no longer just low-paid gig workers tagging images. Experts in finance, law, and medicine now train advanced AI models, earning $90 an hour on average through platforms like Mercor, a startup recently valued at $10 billion, according to CEO Brendan Foody. Forward-deployed engineers, a role pioneered by Palantir, customize AI tools on-site for clients; YCombinator's portfolio companies now have 63 job postings for such roles, up from four last year. The AI Workforce Consortium, a research group led by Cisco that examined 50 IT jobs across wealthy countries, found AI risk-and-governance specialists to be the fastest-growing category -- outpacing even AI programmers.

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The world's largest hotel chains are aggressively pushing customers toward direct bookings as they brace for a future where AI "agents" could reshape how travelers find and reserve rooms. Marriott, Hilton, Hyatt and Wyndham have all expanded their loyalty programs and perks in recent months, aiming to reduce their reliance on online travel agents like Expedia and Booking.com that typically charge commissions of 15 to 25%. Marriott's Bonvoy program reached almost 260 million members by the end of September, an 18% jump from the prior year. Hilton has lowered the barriers to elite status and struck partnerships that let members spend points outside its hotel portfolio. AI-powered booking tools could route customers away from brand-conscious decisions, but they could also offer hotels a cheaper distribution channel than traditional OTAs. Marriott CFO Leeny Oberg said at a conference this month that AI bookings "could potentially be cheaper than the OTAs." Wyndham CEO Geoff Ballotti called tools like ChatGPT and Gemini "a unique opportunity" to reduce OTA dependency.

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LG has announced a new premium gaming monitor brand called UltraGear, and the lineup's headline feature is what the company claims is the world's first 5K AI upscaling technology -- an on-device solution that analyzes and enhances content in real time before it reaches the panel, theoretically letting gamers enjoy 5K-class clarity without needing to upgrade their GPUs. The initial UltraGear evo roster includes three monitors. The 39-inch GX9 is a 5K2K OLED ultrawide that can run at 165Hz at full resolution or 330Hz at WFHD, and features a 0.03ms response time. The 27-inch GM9 is a 5K MiniLED display that LG says dramatically reduces the blooming artifacts common to MiniLED panels through 2,304 local dimming zones and "Zero Optical Distance" engineering. The 52-inch G9 is billed as the world's largest 5K2K gaming monitor and runs at 240Hz. The AI upscaling, scene optimization, and AI sound features are available only on the 39-inch OLED and 27-inch MiniLED models. All three will be showcased at CES 2026. No word on pricing or when the sets will hit the market.

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The world's largest accounting body is to stop students being allowed to take exams remotely to crack down on a rise in cheating on tests that underpin professional qualifications. From a report: The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), which has almost 260,000 members, has said that from March it will stop allowing students to take online exams in all but exceptional circumstances. "We're seeing the sophistication of [cheating] systems outpacing what can be put in, [in] terms of safeguards," Helen Brand, the chief executive of the ACCA, said in an interview with the Financial Times. Remote testing was introduced during the Covid pandemic to allow students to continue to be able to qualify at a time when lockdowns prevented in-person exam assessment. In 2022, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), the UK's accounting and auditing industry regulator, said that cheating in professional exams was a "live" issue at Britain's biggest companies. A number of multimillion-dollar fines have been issued to large auditing and accounting companies around the world over cheating scandals in tests.

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Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: What's the stupidest use of AI you encountered in 2025? Have you been called by AI telemarketers? Forced to do job interviews with a glitching AI? With all this talk of "disruption" and "inevitability," this is our chance to have some fun. Personally, I think 2025's worst AI "innovation" was the AI-powered web browsers that eat web pages and then spit out a slop "summary" of what you would've seen if you'd actually visited the web page. But there've been other AI projects that were just exquisitely, quintessentially bad... — Two years after the death of Suzanne Somers, her husband recreated her with an AI-powered robot. — Disneyland imagineers used deep reinforcement learning to program a talking robot snowman. — Attendees at LA Comic Con were offered that chance to to talk to an AI-powered hologram of Stan Lee for $20. — And of course, as the year ended, the Wall Street Journal announced that a vending machine run by Anthropic's Claude AI had been tricked into giving away hundreds of dollars in merchandise for free, including a PlayStation 5, a live fish, and underwear. What did I miss? What "AI fails" will you remember most about 2025? Share your own thoughts and observations in the comments. What's the stupidest use of AI you saw In 2025?

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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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Engadget reports on "a widespread breach" of Ubisoft's game Rainbow Six Siege "that left various players with billions of in-game credits, ultra-rare skins of weapons, and banned accounts." Ubisoft took the game's servers offline early Saturday morning, and as of Sunday night its status page still shows "unplanned outage" on all servers across PC, PlayStation and Xbox: Ubisoft later clarified Saturday afternoon on X that nobody would be banned if they spent their ill-gotten credits, but that a rollback of all transactions starting from Saturday, 6AM ET would soon be underway. Founded 39 years ago, France-based Ubisoft produces top videogame franchises like Assassin's Creed, with billions in revenue and over 17,097 employees worldwide.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the CBC: Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac says he may have been defamed by Google after it recently produced an AI-generated summary falsely identifying him as a sex offender. The Juno Award-winning musician said he learned of the online misinformation last week after a First Nation north of Halifax confronted him with the summary and cancelled a concert planned for Dec. 19. "You are being put into a less secure situation because of a media company — that's what defamation is," MacIsaac said in a telephone interview with The Canadian Press, adding he was worried about what might have happened had the erroneous content surfaced while he was trying to cross an international border... The 50-year-old virtuoso fiddler said he later learned the inaccurate claims were taken from online articles regarding a man in Atlantic Canada with the same last name... [W]hen CBC News reached him by phone on Christmas Eve, he said he'd already received queries from law firms across the country interested in taking it on pro bono.

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Laptop makers are facing record-setting memory prices next year. The site Notebookcheck catalogs how different companies are responding: Sources told [Korean business newspaper] Chosun Biz that some manufacturers have signed preliminary contracts with Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. Even so, it won't prevent DDR5 RAM prices from soaring 45% higher by the end of 2026.... Before the memory shortage, PC sales had been on the upswing in part because of forced Windows 11 upgrades. That trend will likely reverse in 2026, as buyers avoid Lenovo laptops and alternatives from its rivals. Realizing a slowdown in purchases is inevitable, postponed launches are one potential outcome. Other manufacturers, including Dell and Framework have already announced impending price hikes... [The article also cites reports that one laptop manufacturer "plans to raise the prices of high-end models by as much as 30%."] U.S.-based Maingear now encourages customers to mail in their own modules to complete custom builds. Yet, without recycling parts from older systems, that won't result in significant savings for consumers.

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The Register reports on challenges facing Europe's pursuit of "digital sovereignty": The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)... Furthermore, these warrants often come with a gag order, legally prohibiting the provider from informing their customer that their data has been accessed. This renders any contractual clauses requiring transparency or notification effectively meaningless. While technical measures like encryption are often proposed as a solution, their effectiveness depends entirely on who controls the encryption keys. If the US provider manages the keys, as is common in many standard cloud services, they can be forced to decrypt the data for authorities, making such safeguards moot.... American hyperscalers have recognized the market demand for sovereignty and now aggressively market 'sovereign cloud' solutions, typically by placing datacenters on European soil or partnering with local operators. Critics call this 'sovereignty washing'... [Cristina Caffarra, a competition economistand driving force behind the Eurostack initiative] warns that this does not resolve the fundamental problem. "A company subject to the extraterritorial laws of the United States cannot be considered sovereign for Europe," she says. "That simply doesn't work." Because, as long as the parent company is American, it remains subject to the CLOUD Act... Even when organizations make deliberate choices in favour of European providers, those decisions can be undone by market forces. A recent acquisition in the Netherlands illustrates this risk. In November 2025, the American IT services giant Kyndryl announced its intention to acquire Solvinity, a Dutch managed cloud provider. This came as an "unpleasant surprise" to several of its government clients, including the municipality of Amsterdam and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. These bodies had specifically chosen Solvinity to reduce their dependence on American firms and mitigate CLOUD Act risks. Still, The Register provides several examples of government systems that are "taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT." Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism now has 1,200 employees on the European open-source collaboration platform Nextcloud, leading several other Austrian ministries to also implement Nextcloud. (The Ministry's CISO tells the Register "We can see our input in Nextcloud releases. That is a feeling we never had with Microsoft.") France's Ministry of Economics and Finance recently completed NUBO (which the Register describes as "an OpenStack-based private cloud initiative designed to handle sensitive data and services.") In November the International Criminal Court in The Hague announced it was replacing its Microsoft office software with a European alternative. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is replacing Microsoft products with open-source alternatives for 30,000 civil servants Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC: There is growing controversy over recent evidence suggesting that a mysterious force known as dark energy might be changing in a way that challenges our current understanding of time and space. An analysis by a South Korean team has hinted that, rather than the Universe continuing to expand, galaxies could be pulled back together by gravity, ending in what astronomers call a "Big Crunch". The scientists involved believe that they may be on the verge of one of the biggest discoveries in astronomy for a generation. Other astronomers have questioned these findings, but these critics have not been able to completely dismiss the South Korean team's assertions... The controversy began in March with unexpected results from an instrument on a telescope in the Arizona desert called the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (Desi)... The data hinted that acceleration of the galaxies had changed over time, something not in line with the standard picture, according to Prof Ofer Lehav of University College London, who is involved with the Desi project. "Now with this changing dark energy going up and then down, again, we need a new mechanism. And this could be a shake up for the whole of physics," he says. Then in November the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) published research from a South Korean team that seems to back the view that the weirdness of dark energy is weirder still. Prof Young Wook Lee of Yonsei University in Seoul and his team went back to the kind of supernova data that first revealed dark energy 27 years ago. Instead of treating these stellar explosions as having one standard brightness, they adjusted for the ages of the galaxies they came from and worked out how bright the supernovas really were. This adjustment showed that not only had dark energy changed over time, but, shockingly, that the acceleration was slowing down... If, as Prof Lee's results suggest, the force that is pushing galaxies away from each other — dark energy — is weakening, then one possibility is that it becomes so weak that gravity begins to pull the galaxies back together.

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"I believe artificial intelligence will displace workers at a scale many people don't yet realize," says Sal Kahn (founder/CEO of the nonprofit Khan Academy). But in an op-ed in the New York Times he also proposes a solution that "could change the trajectory of the lives of millions who will be displaced..." "I believe that every company benefiting from automation — which is most American companies — should... dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being displaced." This isn't charity. It is in the best interest of these companies. If the public sees corporate profits skyrocketing while livelihoods evaporate, backlash will follow — through regulation, taxes or outright bans on automation. Helping retrain workers is common sense, and such a small ask that these companies would barely feel it, while the public benefits could be enormous... Roughly a dozen of the world's largest corporations now have a combined profit of over a trillion dollars each year. One percent of that would create a $10 billion annual fund that, in part, could create a centralized skill training platform on steroids: online learning, ways to verify skills gained and apprenticeships, coaching and mentorship for tens of millions of people. The fund could be run by an independent nonprofit that would coordinate with corporations to ensure that the skills being developed are exactly what are needed. This is a big task, but it is doable; over the past 15 years, online learning platforms have shown that it can be done for academic learning, and many of the same principles apply for skill training. "The problem isn't that people can't work," Khan writes in the essay. "It's that we haven't built systems to help them continue learning and connect them to new opportunities as the world changes rapidly." To meet the challenges, we don't need to send millions back to college. We need to create flexible, free paths to hiring, many of which would start in high school and extend through life. Our economy needs low-cost online mechanisms for letting people demonstrate what they know. Imagine a model where capability, not how many hours students sit in class, is what matters; where demonstrated skills earn them credit and where employers recognize those credits as evidence of readiness to enter an apprenticeship program in the trades, health care, hospitality or new categories of white-collar jobs that might emerge... There is no shortage of meaningful work — only a shortage of pathways into it. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.

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