The White House says it's investigating how a personal-finance YouTuber's livestream briefly appeared on the White House's official live video page. The creator says he has no idea how his video ended up there. The Associated Press reports: The livestream appeared for at least eight minutes late Thursday on whitehouse.gov/live, where the White House usually streams live video of the president speaking. It's unclear if the website was breached or the video was linked accidentally by someone in the government. The White House said in a statement that it was "aware and looking into what happened." The video that appeared on the government-run website featured some of a more than two-hour livestream from Matt Farley, who posts as @RealMattMoney, as he answered financial questions. Farley told The Associated Press on Friday that he had no idea what happened and learned about it after the fact. He said he had not been contacted by the government and didn't have any theories about how his livestream ended up on the website. He joked that he hoped President Donald Trump and his youngest son, Barron Trump, "are watching my streams and taking advice." "Had I known it would have been on the White House website, I probably would have had other things to talk about than personal finance," Farley said. When asked what other things he would discuss, Farley responded with a laugh and said: "What would you talk about with the world for eight minutes if you had an opportunity? I'm just some guy making YouTube videos about stocks."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At this point, most competitive online multiplayer games on the PC come with some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat software. As we've written before, this is software that runs with more elevated privileges than most other apps and games you run on your PC, allowing it to load in earlier and detect advanced methods of cheating. More recently, anti-cheat software has started to require more Windows security features like Secure Boot, a TPM 2.0 module, and virtualization-based memory integrity protection. Riot Games, best known for titles like Valorant and League of Legends and the Vanguard anti-cheat software, has often been one of the earliest to implement new anti-cheat requirements. There's already a long list of checks that systems need to clear before they'll be allowed to play Riot's games online, and now the studio is announcing a new one: a BIOS update requirement that will be imposed on "certain players" following Riot's discovery of a UEFI bug that could allow especially dedicated and motivated cheaters to circumvent certain memory protections. In short, the bug affects the input-output memory management unit (IOMMU) "on some UEFI-based motherboards from multiple vendors." One feature of the IOMMU is to protect system memory from direct access during boot by external hardware devices, which otherwise might manipulate the contents of your PC's memory in ways that could enable cheating. The patch for these security vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-11901, CVE-202514302, CVE-2025-14303, and CVE-2025-14304) fixes a problem where this pre-boot direct memory access (DMA) protection could be disabled even if it was marked as enabled in the BIOS, creating a small window during the boot process where DMA devices could gain access to RAM. The relative obscurity and complexity of this hardware exploit means that Vanguard isn't going to be enforcing these BIOS requirements on every single player of its games. For now, it will just apply to "restricted" players of Valorant whose systems, for one reason or another, are "too similar to cheaters who get around security features in order to become undetectable to Vanguard." But Riot says it's considering rolling the BIOS requirement out to all players in Valorant's highest competitive ranking tiers (Ascendant, Immortal, and Radiant), where there's more to be gained from working around the anti-cheat software. And Riot anti-cheat analyst Mohamed Al-Sharifi says the same restrictions could be turned on for League of Legends, though they aren't currently. If users are blocked from playing by Vanguard, they'll need to download and install the latest BIOS update for their motherboard before they'll be allowed to launch the game. Riot's new anti-cheat change could create problems for older PCs if the new anti-cheat change is expanded, notes Ars. The update relies on a BIOS patch to fix a UEFI flaw, and many older motherboards, especially Intel 300-series and AMD AM4 boards, may never receive that update. If Riot flags a system and the manufacturer doesn't provide a patched BIOS, players could be locked out of games despite having otherwise capable hardware.

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Microsoft's latest holiday ad for its Copilot AI assistant features a 30-second montage of users seamlessly syncing smart home lights to music, scaling recipes for large gatherings, and parsing HOA guidelines -- none of which the software can actually perform reliably when put to the test. The Verge methodically tested each prompt shown in the ad and found that Copilot repeatedly hallucinated interface elements that didn't exist, claimed to highlight on-screen buttons when it hadn't, and abandoned calculations midway through. The smart home interface shown in the ad belongs to "Relecloud," a fictional company Microsoft uses in internal case studies. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that both the HOA document and the inflatable reindeer photo were fabricated for the advertisement. The ad closes with Santa Claus asking Copilot why toy production is behind schedule. Further reading: Talking To Windows' Copilot AI Makes a Computer Feel Incompetent.

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President Trump's closure of the de minimis customs loophole in May -- which previously allowed Chinese packages valued under $800 to enter the U.S. duty-free -- has redirected a flood of cheap goods toward Europe, where similar exemptions for packages under $175.8 in the EU and $180 in the UK remain intact. The shift has been swift: exports of low-value Chinese packages to the U.S. have dropped more than 40% since May, according to Chinese customs data, and the EU has this year overtaken the U.S. as the largest market for China's roughly $100 billion cheap package trade. Shipments to Hungary and Denmark have quadrupled, and those to Germany, France, and the UK have risen 50% or more. Temu has recorded seven straight months of double-digit U.S. sales declines, per Consumer Edge data tracking credit and debit card transactions. Its European sales, on the other hand: up 56% in the EU and 46% in the UK since May compared to a year ago. The EU agreed last week to impose a $3.5 fee on imported small packages starting in July and to close the de minimis exemption entirely by 2028. The UK plans to follow in 2029.

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alternative_right writes: Grocery delivery service Instacart will refund $60 million to settle FTC claims that it misled customers with false advertising and unlawfully enrolled them in paid subscriptions. Instacart partners with over 1,800 retailers to provide online shopping, delivery, and pickup services from nearly 100,000 stores across North America. Its platform serves millions of customers and is also used by roughly 600,000 independent shoppers across thousands of cities in Canada and the United States. In a complaint filed on Thursday, the FTC claimed Instacart engaged in multiple deceptive tactics that raised costs for customers, including failing to provide advertised refunds and falsely advertising "free delivery" while still charging mandatory service fees that added up to 15% to order costs. The FTC said Instacart also advertised a "100% satisfaction guarantee," but typically offered only small credits toward future orders rather than full refunds to customers experiencing problems with deliveries or service. The company allegedly hid refund options from "self-service" menus, leading customers to believe credits were their only option.

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Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman estimates that staying competitive in frontier AI development will require "hundreds of billions of dollars" over the next five to ten years, a sum that doesn't even account for the high salaries companies are paying individual researchers and technical staff. Speaking on a podcast, Suleyman compared Microsoft to a "modern construction company" where hundreds of thousands of workers are building gigawatts of CPUs and AI accelerators. There's "a structural advantage by being inside a big company," he said. When asked whether startups could compete with Big Tech, Suleyman said "it's hard to say," adding that "the ambiguity is what's driving the frothiness of the valuations." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in September he'd rather risk "misspending a couple of hundred billion" than fall behind in superintelligence.

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The television industry's brightness war may have hit its inflection point in 2025, the year TCL and Hisense released the first consumer TVs capable of 5,000 nits under specific settings -- a figure that would have seemed absurd not long ago when manufacturers struggled to reach 2,000 nits. LG introduced Primary RGB Tandem OLED technology, moving from a three-stack panel design to a four-stack red-blue-green-blue configuration that the company claims can achieve 4,000 nits. The technology appears in the LG G5, Panasonic Z95B and Philips OLED950 and OLED910. RGB mini-LED also emerged as a new category. The technology uses individual small red, green and blue LED backlights instead of white or blue LEDs paired with quantum dots. Hisense demonstrated it at CES 2025, TCL announced its Q10M for China, and Samsung unveiled its own version called micro-RGB. These sets range from $12,000 to $30,000. Sony has confirmed it will debut RGB TV technology in spring 2026. HDR content is currently mastered at a maximum of 4,000 nits. The situation echoes the audio industry's loudness war, The Verge points out, which peaked with Metallica's heavily compressed Death Magnetic in 2008.

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I usually only drink iced coffee, even if it's cold outside, but lately I've been craving a single cup of hot coffee esp when a basketball game is about to come on. I'm one of those old guys who falls asleep watching their favorite team kick NBA ass. So anyway I decided to treat myself to one of those fancy new-fangled Keurig single-cup coffee makers. I'm drinking my first cup. Works as advertised. Took a few tries before it woke up. I am now drinking a fresh cup of hot coffee and thinking now I finally have everything I could possibly ever want.

Uber is hiring more engineers rather than fewer because AI tools have made them "superhumans," CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said, pushing back against the industry trend of using productivity gains to justify headcount cuts. Speaking on the "On with Kara Swisher" podcast, Khosrowshahi noted that other tech executives see AI making engineers 20% to 30% more productive and conclude they need 20% to 30% fewer engineers. His view: every engineer has become more valuable. Between 80% and 90% of Uber's developers now use AI tools, according to Khosrowshahi. The company no longer keeps scores of engineers on call to diagnose issues because AI agents are constantly monitoring systems, he said. The latest AI models are producing "hundreds of millions of dollars of benefit" for Uber, he said, describing the company as an "applied AI" business that harnesses the technology for pricing, payments, matching, routing, identification and customer complaints.

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iRobot, the Bedford, Massachusetts-based company that brought the Roomba vacuum cleaner into American homes over its 35-year history, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday and will be acquired by Picea, its Chinese contract manufacturer that also produces competing household devices. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board placed blame for the company's demise on the Federal Trade Commission under Chair Lina Khan, which opposed Amazon's $1.7 billion bid to acquire iRobot. That deal collapsed in January 2024 amid regulatory pressure from both the FTC and European antitrust authorities. Senator Elizabeth Warren and other progressives had urged Khan to block the acquisition, arguing in a September 2022 letter that Amazon is "'almost universally recognized' as the leader in warehouse and fulfillment robotics space" and that the deal "would open up a new market to Amazon's abuses." After the deal fell through, iRobot cut 31% of its workforce and moved "non-core engineering functions to lower-cost regions." The company had shifted production to Vietnam to reduce its exposure to China but was hit by tariffs under Trump's Liberation Day trade measures -- initially 46%, later reduced to 20%. iRobot said the trade uncertainty made it difficult to operate.

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The Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced that all publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will become freely available to everyone starting January 2026. Authors will retain full copyright to their published work under the new arrangement, and ACM has committed to defending those works against copyright and integrity-related violations. The transition follows what ACM described as extensive dialogue with authors, Special Interest Group leaders, editorial boards, libraries, and research institutions globally. Students, educators, and researchers at institutions of all sizes -- from well-resourced universities to emerging research communities -- will gain unrestricted access to the full catalog of ACM-published work. The Digital Library houses decades of computing research across journals, magazines, conference proceedings, and books.

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More carbon dioxide in the environment is making food more calorific but less nutritious -- and also potentially more toxic, a study has found. From a report: Sterre ter Haar, a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and other researchers at the institution created a method to compare multiple studies on plants' responses to increased CO2 levels. The results, she said, were a shock: although crop yields increase, they become less nutrient-dense. While zinc levels in particular drop, lead levels increase. "Seeing how dramatic some of the nutritional changes were, and how this differed across plants, was a big surprise," she told the Guardian. "We aren't seeing a simple dilution effect but rather a complete shift in the composition of our foods... This also raises the question of whether we should adjust our diets in some way, or how we grow or produce our food." While scientists have been looking at the effects of more CO2 in the atmosphere on plants for a decade, their work has been difficult to compare. The new research established a baseline measurement derived from the observation that the gas appears to have a linear effect on growth, meaning that if the CO2 level doubles, so does the effect on nutrients. This made it possible to compare almost 60,000 measurements across 32 nutrients and 43 crops, including rice, potatoes, tomatoes and wheat.

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Podcast: What Would Firefox Do?

Apple released an updated developer license agreement this week that gives the company permission to recoup unpaid funds, such as commissions or any other fees, by deducting them from in-app purchases it processes on developers' behalf, among other methods. From a report: The change will impact developers in regions where local law allows them to link to external payment systems. In these cases, developers must report those payments back to Apple to pay the required commissions or fees. The changed agreement seemingly gives Apple a way to collect what it believes is the correct fee if the company determines a developer has underreported their earnings. [...] In its new developer agreement, Apple states it will "offset or recoup" what it believes it is owed, including "any amounts collected by Apple on your behalf from end-users." This means Apple could recoup funds from developers' in-app purchases -- like those for digital goods, services, and subscriptions -- or from one-time fees for paid applications.

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You have been warned, spoilers follow...

The whole thing is the book Carol is writing, about writing a book, inside the book she's writing another book. The book I'm speaking of is the one where it's all about Carol.

Everywhere she goes people stop and say hello, and address her by her name.

• Hi Carol!
• Congrats Carol!
• Carol, we will move heaven and earth to make you happy.
• Carol you suck!

In the book she ends up changing them back, un-joining them, and they keep the good qualities they got from being joined, and can be individually creative as they were before the switch.

Also, btw -- John Cena says their situation isn't sustainable, but neither is the one we are in now ourselves, in reality, in our reality.

She teaches her lover, Zosia, to think in the first person.

Carol is right about everything because this is her book.

You can see it happening on her whiteboard.

The show could be titled The Adventures of Carol, as told by Carol.

BTW, I might love a podcast of just the writers of the show every week, perhaps interviewed by writers who did not write it, asking questions. It might suck as much as the one they do now, but it also might be great. It would stick to the story, not about praising everyone, kind of like interviews of sports heroes (which are mostly nauseating, except for the few have the gift of gab, who are fun while never saying anything remotely bad about anyone). The people they'd talk about are the people they created.