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Amazon finds itself caught between two competing impulses as AI shopping agents from OpenAI, Google, Perplexity and Microsoft mushroom across the e-commerce space -- block them to protect its dominant position, or partner with them to avoid being left behind. The company has largely played defense so far. Amazon recently updated its website code to block external AI agents from crawling it, and as of this week had blocked 47 bots including those from all major AI companies. In November, Amazon sued Perplexity over an agent in the startup's Comet browser that can make purchases on users' behalf, alleging the company concealed its agents to continue scraping Amazon's site. But Amazon's stance appears to be shifting, CNBC reports. CEO Andy Jassy said on an October earnings call that Amazon expects to partner with third-party agents and has engaged in conversations with some providers. The company is now hiring a corporate development leader to forge strategic partnerships in "agentic commerce." Amazon is also investing in its own tools. The company launched shopping chatbot Rufus last February and has been testing an agent called Buy For Me that can purchase products from other sites within Amazon's app.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Concerned that artificial intelligence could threaten Communist Party rule, Beijing is taking extraordinary steps to keep it under control. Although China's government sees AI as crucial to the country's economic and military future, regulations and recent purges of online content show it also fears AI could destabilize society. Chatbots pose a particular problem: Their ability to think for themselves could generate responses that spur people to question party rule. In November, Beijing formalized rules it has been working on with AI companies to ensure their chatbots are trained on data filtered for politically sensitive content, and that they can pass an ideological test before going public. All AI-generated texts, videos and images must be explicitly labeled and traceable, making it easier to track and punish anyone spreading undesirable content. Authorities recently said they removed 960,000 pieces of what they regarded as illegal or harmful AI-generated content during three months of an enforcement campaign. Authorities have officially classified AI as a major potential threat, adding it alongside earthquakes and epidemics to its National Emergency Response Plan. Chinese authorities don't want to regulate too much, people familiar with the government's thinking said. Doing so could extinguish innovation and condemn China to second-tier status in the global AI race behind the U.S., which is taking a more hands-off approach toward policing AI. But Beijing also can't afford to let AI run amok. Chinese leader Xi Jinping said earlier this year that AI brought "unprecedented risks," according to state media. A lieutenant called AI without safety like driving on a highway without brakes. There are signs that China is, for now, finding a way to thread the needle. Chinese models are scoring well in international rankings, both overall and in specific areas such as computer coding, even as they censor responses about the Tiananmen Square massacre, human-rights concerns and other sensitive topics. Major American AI models are for the most part unavailable in China. It could become harder for DeepSeek and other Chinese models to keep up with U.S. models as AI systems become more sophisticated. Researchers outside of China who have reviewed both Chinese and American models also say that China's regulatory approach has some benefits: Its chatbots are often safer by some metrics, with less violence and pornography, and are less likely to steer people toward self-harm. "The Communist Party's top priority has always been regulating political content, but there are people in the system who deeply care about the other social impacts of AI, especially on children," said Matt Sheehan, who studies Chinese AI at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank. "That may lead models to produce less dangerous content on certain dimensions."

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Los Angeles Times (non-paywalled source): When police questioned Marvin Margolis following the murder of Elizabeth Short -- who became known as the Black Dahlia -- he lied about how well he had known her. The 22-year-old Short had been found mutilated in a weedy lot in South Los Angeles, severed neatly in half with what detectives thought was surgical skill. Margolis was on the list of suspects. He was a sullen 21-year-old premed student at USC, a shell-shocked World War II veteran who had expressed an eagerness to practice surgery. He was "a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression," a military psychiatrist had concluded. At first, Margolis did not tell detectives that he had lived with Short for 12 days at a Hollywood Boulevard apartment, three months before her January 1947 murder. Margolis later admitted they had lived together in Apartment 726 at the Guardian Arms Apartments. But he soon moved to Chicago and changed his name, frustrating further attempts to question him. Among many suspects, a district attorney investigator would note, Margolis was "the only pre-medical student who ever lived as a boy friend with Beth Short." A generation later and hundreds of miles north, a killer who called himself the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area with five seemingly random murders from 1968 to 1969, taunting police and media for years with letters and cryptograms. The toughest to decipher was the letter he sent in April 1970 to the San Francisco Chronicle, with the words "My name is -" followed by a 13-character string of letters and symbols. It came to be called the Z13 cipher, and its brevity has stymied generations of PhDs and puzzle prodigies. Alex Baber, a 50-year-old West Virginia man who dropped out of high school and taught himself codebreaking, now says he has cracked the Zodiac killer's identity -- and in the process solved the Black Dahlia case as well. "It's irrefutable," said Baber, obsessive, hyperfocused and cocksure in manner, his memory encyclopedic and his speech a firehose of dates, locations and surprising linkages. [...] To attack the problem, Baber used artifical intelligence and generated a list of 71 million possible 13-letter names. Using known details of the Zodiac killer, based on witness descriptions, he cross-checked those names against military, marriage, census and other public records. "This takes me nine months of working 18-20 hour days," he said. "I'm starting to kill this onion. I'm starting to eliminate layers: Too tall, too short, or wrong race." The candidates narrowed to 185, to 14, and then, he said, to one. The name he found buried in the Z13 code: "Marvin Merrill."

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European leaders including Emmanuel Macron have accused Washington of "coercion and intimidation," after the US imposed a visa ban on five prominent European figures who have been at heart of the campaign to introduce laws regulating American tech companies. From a report: The visa bans were imposed on Tuesday on Thierry Breton, the former EU commissioner and one of the architects of the bloc's Digital Services Act (DSA), and four anti-disinformation campaigners, including two in Germany and two in the UK. The other individuals targeted were Imran Ahmed, the British chief executive of the US-based Center for Countering Digital Hate; Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of the German non-profit HateAid; and Clare Melford, co-founder of the Global Disinformation Index. Justifying the visa bans, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, wrote on X: "For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organised efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship." Macron condemned the visa ban in furious terms. "These measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty," he wrote, also on X. "The European Union's digital regulations were adopted following a democratic and sovereign process by the European Parliament and the Council. They apply within Europe to ensure fair competition among platforms, without targeting any third country, and to ensure that what is illegal offline is also illegal online. The rules governing the European Union's digital space are not meant to be determined outside Europe."

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Will businesses continue to invest in something that's shown so little return?

opinion It is the season of overindulgence, and no one has overindulged like the tech industry: this year, it has burned through roughly $1.5 trillion in AI, a level of spending usually reserved for wartime.…

Russia plans to put a nuclear power plant on the moon in the next decade to supply its lunar space programme and a joint Russian-Chinese research station, as major powers rush to explore the earth's only natural satellite. Reuters: Ever since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space in 1961, Russia has prided itself as a leading power in space exploration, but in recent decades it has fallen behind the United States and, increasingly, China. Russia's ambitions suffered a massive blow in August 2023 when its unmanned Luna-25 mission smashed into the surface of the moon while attempting to land, and Elon Musk has revolutionised the launch of space vehicles - once a Russian speciality. Russia's state space corporation, Roscosmos, said in a statement that it planned to build a lunar power plant by 2036 and signed a contract with the Lavochkin Association aerospace company to do it. Roscosmos did not say explicitly that the plant would be nuclear but it said the participants included Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom and the Kurchatov Institute, Russia's leading nuclear research institute. Roscosmos said the purpose of the plant was to power Russia's lunar programme, including rovers, an observatory and the infrastructure of the joint Russian-Chinese International Lunar Research Station.

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AI goes off the rails … because of shoddy guardrails

Researchers at Pen Test Partners found four flaws in Eurostar's public AI chatbot that, among other security issues, could allow an attacker to inject malicious HTML content or trick the bot into leaking system prompts. Their thank you from the company: being accused of "blackmail."…

The Justice Department justified its delayed release of sensitive files by citing the need to carefully redact information that could identify victims, but at least some of those redactions have proven to be technically ineffective and can be bypassed by simply copying and pasting the blacked-out text into a new document. A 2022 complaint filed by the US Virgin Islands seeking damages from Jeffrey Epstein's estate appeared on the DOJ's "Epstein Library" website with black boxes throughout. Techdirt founder Mike Masnick and others shared on Bluesky that the redactions could be trivially circumvented. The exposed text includes allegations that a co-executor signed over $400,000 in foundation checks "payable to young female models and actresses, including a former Russian model," and details about an immigration lawyer allegedly "involved in one or more forced marriages arranged among Epstein's victims." Separately, Drop Site News was also apparently able to guess URLs of files not yet published by extrapolating the format.

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Hallmark has released more than 300 Christmas-themed TV movies since 2000, and a detailed internal rulebook obtained by film data analyst Stephen Follows explains how the company manages to produce nearly one new holiday film per week during the final quarter of each year without the whole operation collapsing into creative chaos. The document, referred to as Hallmark's "bible" by writers and producers who have worked on these films, specifies everything from script length (105-110 pages across a rigid nine-act structure) to prohibited activities (no bowling, no karaoke). Christmas movies must include snow or its remnants and feature characters engaged in seasonal activities like baking cookies, ice skating, and drinking hot chocolate. The target demographic is women aged 25-54, and the content must be watchable by an 80-year-old grandmother and a 5-year-old niece simultaneously. The economics differ sharply from theatrical filmmaking. Licensed titles from outside production companies carry budgets around $500,000 or less, while Hallmark's in-house productions can exceed $2 million. About three-quarters of the library comes from external producers. The formula appears to work. Hallmark TV movies have averaged a 6.3 IMDb user score over the past 14 years, compared to 5.9 for feature films worldwide. Further reading: Using Data To Determine if 'Die Hard' is a Christmas Movie.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2024, 25.2% of gross final energy consumption in the EU came from renewable sources, up by 0.7 percentage points compared with 2023. This share is 17.3 pp short of meeting the 2030 target (42.5%), which would require an annual average increase of 2.9 pp from 2025 to 2030. Among the EU countries, Sweden recorded the highest share of its gross final energy consumption coming from renewable sources (62.8%). Sweden primarily relied on solid biomass, hydro and wind. Finland followed with 52.1%, relying on solid biomass, wind and hydro, while Denmark came in third with 46.8%, with most of its renewable energy sourced from solid biomass, wind and biogas. The lowest shares of renewables were recorded in Belgium (14.3%), Luxembourg (14.7%), and Ireland (16.1%).

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ATC: 'I don't know if you can hear me but cleared to land'

In what looks to be the first successful use of Garmin's Autoland product outside of testing, the FAA has confirmed a small plane made a safe emergency landing completely guided by automation at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Colorado.…

Crooks used platform to scoop up and store banking credentials for big-money thefts

The US says it has shut down a platform used by cybercriminals to break into Americans' bank accounts.…

YouTube has been winning the streaming wars for years, but its real competitive advantage comes not from prime-time viewing but from its stranglehold on daytime hours when Americans are meditating, exercising, cooking, or simply looking for background noise. At 11 a.m. in October, YouTube commanded an average audience of 6.3 million viewers compared to Netflix's 2.8 million, according to Nielsen data. Amazon drew about a million viewers at that hour, and HBO Max, Paramount+ and Peacock each pulled fewer than 600,000. The gap narrows significantly at night -- Netflix's audience swells to over 11 million at 9 p.m., trailing YouTube's 12 million -- but YouTube's dominance reasserts itself in overnight hours and through the next day. Netflix is responding by bringing at least 34 video podcasts to its service next year, including "The Breakfast Club," "The Bill Simmons Podcast," and "Pardon My Take." Amazon added the Kelce brothers' "New Heights" podcast to Prime Video in September. The strategy is intentional: roughly 75 percent of all podcast listening happens between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., according to Edison Research. YouTube said viewers watched 700 million hours of video podcasts on living room devices in October alone, a 75% increase from the previous year.

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Meanwhile, new outages, linked to storms, are pelting the area

Waymo says it is rolling out updates to its US fleet to counter future disruption caused by power outages like the one that hit San Francisco last week.…

Reg reader introduces newborn to Microsoft ugly sweater. Child not amused

Microsoft's latest line of festive knitwear has been frightening babies, if the experience of the winner of The Register's 2025 Christmas competition is anything to go by.…

Goldman Sachs, in a note this week, via India Dispatch: There are various reasons that explains this: (i) A large part of the global education spend goes towards formal education (schools, colleges and universities), which are typically either run by governments or are not-for-profit institutions; (ii) It is difficult to replicate education quality at scale in our view, since most teachers would have a different pedagogy, and thus standardization is harder to achieve vs that in other internet categories; (iii) Education is fragmented - it includes various fields (schools, undergrad courses, medicine, engg, management, etc.), each with their own curriculum, and the same being vastly different across countries globally; this makes scalability difficult beyond a few certain specializations and regions. Additionally, we believe the ability for online education to capture a sizable value share of supplemental education is limited since the perceived value of offline, including that from community, in-person engagement and doubt solving, rigour, etc., is typically higher. However, we note that before China's double reduction policy in 2021, TAL and EDU had market caps of up to US$50 bn; these companies were mostly domestic focused and on the K-12 tutoring segment, which has large volumes. Similarly in India, Byju's reached a peak valuation of US$20 bn+ (link; again, focused on K-12), before issues around governance etc. impacted the business.

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Stuck in pilot purgatory? Confused about returns? You're not alone

Feature Every company today is doing AI. From boardrooms to marketing campaigns, companies proudly showcase new generative AI pilots and chatbot integrations. Enterprise investments in GenAI are growing to about $30-40 billion, yet research indicates 95 percent of organizations report zero measurable returns on these efforts.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The State Department announced Tuesday it was barring five Europeans it accused of leading efforts to pressure U.S. tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints. The Europeans, characterized by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as "radical" activists and "weaponized" nongovernmental organizations, fell afoul of a new visa policy announced in May to restrict the entry of foreigners deemed responsible for censorship of protected speech in the United States. "For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose," Rubio posted on X. "The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship." The five Europeans were identified by Sarah Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, in a series of posts on social media. [...] The five Europeans named by Rogers are: Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate; Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, leaders of HateAid, a German organization; Clare Melford, who runs the Global Disinformation Index; and former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, who was responsible for digital affairs. Rogers in her post on X called Breton, a French business executive and former finance minister, the "mastermind" behind the EU's Digital Services Act, which imposes a set of strict requirements designed to keep internet users safe online. This includes flagging harmful or illegal content like hate speech. She referred to Breton warning Musk of a possible "amplification of harmful content" by broadcasting his livestream interview with Trump in August 2024 when he was running for president.

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A newspaper misprint began a Christmas Eve tradition joining holiday cheer with military technology

Seventy years ago, a child phoned the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) looking for Santa Claus – and found him, or at least some kindly military personnel who were willing to play along by helping the youngster to track Santa's location as he zipped around the globe.…

Time running out for savin' MAVEN as stricken spacecraft still silent as Mars solar conjunction nears

NASA's MAVEN spacecraft is continuing to evade attempts by engineers to make contact as the solar conjunction nears, halting contact with any Mars missions until January 16, 2026.…