The EU fines X €120M for breaching online content rules, the first fine under the DSA, citing issues including the deceptive design of its blue checkmarks  —  Elon Musk's social media company X was fined 120 million euros ($140 million) by EU tech regulators on Friday …

Netflix agrees to buy WBD's studios and streaming business in an $82.7B cash and stock deal; the transaction is expected to close after Q3 2026  —  Deal will transform US tech company into the dominant player in Hollywood  —  Netflix has agreed an $83bn takeover of the studios …

Apple says general counsel Kate Adams and policy chief Lisa Jackson will retire, and Jennifer Newstead, Meta's former chief legal officer, will replace Adams  —  Apple's general counsel, Kate Adams, and its vice president for environment, policy, and social initiatives, Lisa Jackson …

US and Canadian authorities warn that Chinese hackers are using the Brickstorm malware to install backdoor access within unnamed government and IT entities  —  Chinese-linked hackers used sophisticated malware to penetrate and maintain long-term access to unnamed government …

A look back at five years of Meta's Oversight Board, whose rulings on the relatively small number of cases it hears have generally had limited impact  —  Five years after the Oversight Board's creation, few are satisfied with the result.  Can it be saved?  —  Five years ago this week, Meta's Oversight Board accepted its first cases.

Two studies suggest AI chatbots can shift political views more effectively than TV campaign ads, especially by presenting many claims, regardless of accuracy  —  New research suggests AI chatbots can shift people's political views more effectively than campaign ads on TV.

The US CFTC announces that spot crypto asset contracts will begin trading for the first time on CFTC-registered futures exchanges  —  The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) said on Thursday that spot crypto asset contracts will begin trading for the first time on futures exchanges registered with the agency.

Meta says it is shifting some of its investment from metaverse toward AI glasses and wearables, and “we aren't planning any broader changes than that”  —  Meta plans to direct its investments to focus on wearables like its augmented reality glasses but does not plan to abandon building the metaverse.

Google rolls out Gemini 3 Deep Think to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app, after saying in November it needed “extra time for safety evaluations”  —  After previewing last month with the launch of Gemini 3 Pro, the new Deep Think mode is now available for Google AI Ultra subscribers.

Sources: Masayoshi Son plans with the White House to build “Trump Industrial Parks” in the US to produce AI infrastructure parts, funded by Japan's trade deal  —  SoftBank billionaire seeks to build ‘Trump Industrial Parks’ on federal land, using hundreds of billions of capital from the Japan trade deal

Researchers claim that prompts framed as riddle-like poems could skirt AI chatbots' safety features designed to block production of explicit or harmful content  —  Riddle-like poems tricked chatbots into spewing hate speech and helping design nuclear weapons and nerve agents.

A look at Microsoft Excel's evolution, as it remains the most widely used spreadsheet software with 500M paying users despite competition from Google and others  —  Before it took over her life, Leila Gharani mostly took Microsoft Excel for granted.  She was working on a process optimization project …

A Polymarket trader netted $1M+ in 24 hours, mostly by placing suspiciously accurate bets on Google's 2025 Year in Search rankings  —  Boaz Sobrado is a fintech leader and entrepreneur.  —  A Polymarket trader known as AlphaRaccoon has ignited controversy after allegedly netting over $1 million …

Japan faces bottlenecks in data center construction due to labor shortages and more; DC Byte says Japan's capacity has tripled to 6.8 GW in the past five years  —  TOKYO — Since relocating his Tokyo office in August to accommodate a growing team, veteran construction consultant Takehiko Yuge …

HPE reports Q4 revenue up 14% YoY to $9.68B, vs. $9.94B est., Server revenue down 5% to $4.5B, and forecasts Q1 revenue below est.; HPE drops 8%+ after hours  —  Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE.N) forecast first-quarter revenue below Wall Street estimates on Thursday, signaling cautious enterprise spending.

AWS unveils its 192-core Graviton5 processor, with an up to 25% performance boost over Graviton4, and says Graviton makes up 50%+ of AWS' new CPU capacity  —  Fifth generation chip provides the best price performance for a broad range of workloads in Amazon EC2.  —  Key takeaways

A profile of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who said his 2025 re:Invent keynote was his last to make room for other voices and warned devs about “verification debt”  —  Werner Vogels ends his 14-year keynote streak by handing out printed newspapers and warning developers about “verification debt.”

Physicist Steve Hsu says he has published a peer-reviewed theoretical physics paper whose main idea came from GPT-5  —  I think I've published the first research article in theoretical physics in which the main idea came from an AI - GPT5 in this case. The physics research paper itself (on QFT and state-dependent quantum mechanics) has been published in Physics Letters B. I've written an [image]

The NHTSA asks Waymo about its self-driving vehicles illegally passing school buses, including 19 times in Texas this year, as part of a probe opened in October  —  A U.S. agency said on Thursday it has asked Waymo to answer more questions after Texas officials said the Alphabet (GOOGL.O) …

Similarweb: generative AI platforms were averaging ~7B monthly web visits as of September 2025, up 76% YoY, rivaling the traffic of major social networks  —  New data from Similarweb reveals massive spikes in traffic and app downloads, while the user base expands to include older generations.

CEO Matthew Prince says Cloudflare has blocked 416B AI bot requests for its customers since July 1, and that Google can see 3.2x more internet pages than OpenAI  —  Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince claims the internet infrastructure company's efforts to block AI crawlers are already seeing big results.

Google Cloud partners with Replit to expand the use of Google's cloud offerings and AI models and to jointly support AI use cases for enterprise customers  —  - Google Cloud is locking in a multi-year partnership with AI coding startup Replit  — Google is betting on Replit as a breakout platform …