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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Shares of Apple were battered earlier this year as the iPhone maker faced repeated complaints about its lack of an artificial intelligence strategy. But as the AI trade faces increasing scrutiny, that hesitance has gone from a weakness to a strength -- and it's showing up in the stock market. Through the first six months of 2025, Apple was the second-worst performer among the Magnificent Seven tech giants, as its shares tumbled 18% through the end of June. That has reversed since then, with the stock soaring 35%, while AI darlings like Meta Platforms and Microsoft slid into the red and even Nvidia underperformed. The S&P 500 Index rose 10% in that time, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index gained 13%. [...] As a result, Apple now has a $4.1 trillion market capitalization and the second biggest weight in the S&P 500, leaping over Microsoft and closing in on Nvidia. The shift reflects the market's questioning of the hundreds of billions of dollars Big Tech firms are throwing at AI development, as well as Apple's positioning to eventually benefit when the technology is ready for mass use. "It is remarkable how they have kept their heads and are in control of spending, when all of their peers have gone the other direction," said John Barr, portfolio manager of the Needham Aggressive Growth Fund. Bill Stone, chief investment officer at Glenview Trust Company, added: "While they most certainly will incorporate more AI into the phones over time, Apple has avoided the AI arms race and the massive capex that accompanies it." His company views Apple's stock as "a bit of an anti-AI holding."

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Identity management vendors like Okta see an opening to calm CISOs worried about agents running amok

The fear of AI agents running amok has thus far halted the wide deployment of these digital workhorses, Okta's president of Auth0, Shiv Ramji, told The Register.…

This year is set to be the world's second or third-warmest on record, potentially surpassed only by 2024'S record-breaking heat, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on Tuesday. From a report: The data is the latest from C3S following last month's COP30 climate summit, where governments failed to agree to substantial new measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reflecting strained geopolitics as the U.S. rolls back its efforts, and some countries seek to weaken CO2-cutting measures. This year will also likely round out the first three-year period in which the average global temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial period, when humans began burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, C3S said in a monthly bulletin. "These milestones are not abstract -- they reflect the accelerating pace of climate change," said Samantha Burgess, strategic lead for climate at C3S.

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Microsoft has announced that it will raise prices on its Microsoft 365 productivity suites for businesses and government clients starting in July 2026, marking the first commercial price increase since 2022. Small business and frontline worker plans face the steepest hikes: Business Basic jumps 16.7% to $7 per user per month, while frontline worker subscriptions surge up to 33%. Enterprise plans see more modest bumps, ranging from 5.3% for E5 to 8.3% for E3. Microsoft attributed the increases to more than 1,100 new features added to the suite, including AI-driven tools and security enhancements. Copilot remains a separate $30-per-month add-on.

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A win for the contractors

Congress has released the final version of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and critics have been quick to point out that previously proposed rules giving the US military the right to repair its equipment without having to rely on contractors have gone missing. …

Pinduoduo in China, Shopee in Southeast Asia, and Meesho in India operate in markets that could hardly be more different -- an upper-middle-income industrial state, a stitched-together archipelago of under-banked economies, and a country where three-quarters of retail is unorganized and e-commerce penetration sits at about 7% -- yet all three have landed on the same business model. These platforms run asset-light marketplaces specializing in cheap goods and slow delivery, monetizing through logistics mark-ups, advertising, and installment credit rather than retail margins. Temu and Shein are further variations now expanding in the U.S. and Europe. The economics are thin. Pinduoduo's EBITDA margins on GMV sit in a 0-4% band; Meesho's group-wide EBITDA hovers around break-even. Neither charges commissions on most sales; both earn through logistics mark-ups and advertising. Sponsored listings account for 1-3% of GMV at Indian marketplaces and 4-5% at Alibaba and Pinduoduo. Credit is the more consequential side business. In India, cash on delivery functions as unofficial credit. Meesho CEO Vidit Aatrey said the customers prefer CoD for its "built-in delay," which effectively makes it "a five-day loan." Geography, income, and regulation were supposed to produce different answers. They produced one: a 3% endgame where e-commerce clips a few points of GMV and relies on attention and credit for profits.

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An attempt to provide vendor-neutral oversight as the agent train barrels on

The Linux Foundation on Tuesday said it has formed the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) to provide vendor-neutral oversight for the development of AI agent infrastructure.…

The Pokemon Trading Card Game has quietly transformed into something its creators never intended: a speculative asset class dominated by adults hunting for profit while children struggle to find a single pack on store shelves. The resale market has climbed so high that the latest set, Phantasmal Flames, had a rare Charizard illustration valued at more than $800 before anyone had even pulled one from a pack -- a pack that retails for about $5.3. Ben Thyer, owner of BathTCG in Bath, has watched his shop become a flashpoint. His staff have received threats from customers, and he's heard reports of attacks and robberies at other stores. He stopped selling whole boxes of booster packs and now limits individual pack purchases. On Amazon, customers can only enter raffles for the chance to buy cards at all.The Pokemon Company printed 10.2 billion cards in the year ending March 2025 and still cannot meet demand. The company shared a seven-month-old statement saying it is printing "at maximum capacity." Thyer sees signs of a correction -- prices on singles and sealed products are falling -- but expects renewed frenzy around Pokemon's 30th anniversary in early 2026.

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Microsoft announced on Tuesday its largest-ever investment in Asia -- $17.5 billion over four years starting in 2026 -- to expand cloud and AI infrastructure across India, fund skilling programs, and support ongoing operations in the country. The commitment adds to a $3 billion investment the company announced in January 2025 that is on track to be spent by the end of 2026. A new hyperscale cloud region in Hyderabad is set to go live in mid-2026 and will be Microsoft's largest in India, comprising three availability zones. The company also plans to integrate AI into two government employment platforms -- e-Shram and the National Career Service -- that serve more than 310 million informal workers. Microsoft is doubling its India skilling target to 20 million people by 2030; since January, it has already trained 5.6 million.

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Michael Saylor's software company Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, built a financial model that some observers called an "infinite-money machine" by stockpiling hundreds of thousands of bitcoins and issuing stock and debt to buy more, but that machine appears to be breaking down. The company's stock peaked above $450 in mid-July and ended November at $177.18, a 60% decline. Bitcoin fell only 25% over the same period. The gap between Strategy's market cap and the value of its bitcoin holdings has nearly vanished. At one point last week, the company's market value dipped below the value of its bitcoins after accounting for debt. Strategy announced it had built a $1.4 billion dollar reserve by selling more stock to cover required dividend payments to preferred shareholders over the next twelve months. The company also disclosed it might sell some of its coins if its value continues to fall, a reversal from Saylor's February tweet declaring "Never sell your Bitcoin." Professional short seller Jim Chanos, who had questioned the strategy's sustainability, told Sherwood he made money by shorting the stock and buying bitcoins.

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Satellite silence trips immobilizers, leaving owners stuck

Hundreds of Porsches in Russia were rendered immobile last week, raising speculation of a hack, but the German carmaker tells The Register that its vehicles are secure.…

Trixie may have gone 64-bit for installs, but WMLive still ships an i686-bootable build

Window Maker Live 13.2 is stubbornly keeping 32-bit PCs alive on Debian 13 "Trixie," shipping a new release that boots on i686 hardware.…

Bad for consumers, bad for the environment, 230+ groups say

More than 230 organizations across America have signed a letter calling for a moratorium on the construction of datacenters, claiming the current building boom represents a huge environmental and social threat.…

Microsoft's Xbox consoles were conspicuously absent from Black Friday's winners, failing to crack the top three in U.S. sales during one of the retail calendar's most important weeks. According to Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, the PlayStation 5 captured 47% of Black Friday week console sales ending November 29, followed by the Nintendo Switch 2 at 24% and -- somewhat remarkably -- the NEX Playground, a Kinect-like Android device aimed at children, at 14%. Microsoft ran no promotions on its consoles during the period. The Xbox Series X currently retails for $650 following this year's price increase, up from its $500 launch price in 2020. Sony, by contrast, discounted the PS5 by roughly 40% at some retailers. Piscatella noted on Bluesky that products without price promotions typically see no seasonal lift. Costco has removed Xbox consoles from its U.S. and UK websites.

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In February, a six-month-old baby named KJ Muldoon became the first person ever to receive a CRISPR gene-editing treatment customized specifically for his unique genetic mutation, a milestone that researchers say marks a turning point in how medicine might approach the thousands of rare diseases that collectively affect 30 million Americans. Muldoon was born with a type of urea-cycle disorder that gives patients roughly a 50% chance of surviving infancy and typically requires a liver transplant; he is now a healthy 1-year-old who recently took his first steps. The treatment's significance extends beyond one child. Scientists at UC Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia are now planning clinical trials that would use Muldoon's therapy as a template, tweaking the molecular "address" in the CRISPR system to target different mutations in other children with urea-cycle disorders. Last month, FDA officials Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad announced a new drug pathway designed to accelerate approvals for such personalized treatments -- a framework inspired in large part by Muldoon's case. Current gene-editing delivery mechanisms limit treatments to disorders in the blood and liver. Many families will still go without bespoke therapies.

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Brussels probes whether unpaid web and YouTube content – and rivals' lock-outs – amount to abuse of dominance

The European Commission is launching an antitrust probe at Google for allegedly using web and YouTube content to train its AI algorithms while putting competitors at a disadvantage.…

As Trump gives green light to ship Nvidia H200s to China and boost US

Three US-based businessmen face potential prison sentences after authorities dismantled a smuggling network accused of funneling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Nvidia GPUs to China.…

A tenured USC professor is arguing that universities need to fundamentally rethink their value proposition as AI rapidly closes the gap on human instruction and a loneliness epidemic grips the generation most likely to be sitting in their lecture halls. Eric Anicich, an associate professor at USC's Marshall School of Business, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that nearly three-quarters of 16- to 24-year-olds now report feeling lonely, young adults spend 70% less time with friends in person compared to two decades ago, and a growing majority of Gen Z college graduates say their degree was a "waste of money." Anicich points to a recent Harvard study finding that students using an AI tutor learned more than twice as much as those in traditional active-learning classes, and did so in less time. The implication is stark: if instruction becomes abundant and cheap, colleges must sell what remains scarce -- genuine human community. He notes that his doctoral training included zero coursework on teaching, a norm he says persists across academia. His proposal: fund student life as seriously as research labs, hire professional "experience designers," and treat rituals and collaborative projects as core curriculum rather than amenities.

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Have we learned nothing from sci-fi films and TV shows?

Interview Imagine botnets in physical form and you've got a pretty good idea of what could go wrong with the influx of AI-infused humanoid robots expected to integrate into society over the next few decades.…

Microsoft Excel, the 40-year-old spreadsheet application that helped establish personal computers as essential workplace tools and contributed to Microsoft's current valuation of nearly $4 trillion, has weathered both the rise of cloud computing and the current AI boom largely unscathed. In its most recent quarter, commercial revenue for Microsoft 365 -- the bundle including Excel, Word, and PowerPoint -- increased 17% year over year, and consumer revenue rose 28%. The software traces its origins to a 1983 Microsoft offsite under the code name Odyssey, where engineers set out to clone Lotus 1-2-3. That program had itself cloned VisiCalc, the first computerized spreadsheet, created by Dan Bricklin for the Apple II in the late 1970s. Bricklin never patented VisiCalc. "Financially it would have been great if we'd have been able to patent it," he told Bloomberg. "And there would be a Bricklin Building at MIT, instead of a Gates Building." Excel now counts an estimated 500 million paying users. The Pentagon pays for 2 million Microsoft 365 licenses. Google's free Sheets product, launched in 2006, captured casual use cases like potluck sign-ups but failed to dislodge Excel from enterprise work. AI chatbots present the latest challenge, but venture capitalists say nearly every AI spreadsheet startup they meet builds on top of Excel rather than replacing it.

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