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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.…

Longtime Slashdot reader MrFreak shares a public radio interview from 2015 discussing artificial intelligence as inference over abstract inputs, along with scaling limits, automation, and governance models, where for-profit engines are constrained by nonprofit oversight: Recorded months before OpenAI was founded, the conversation treats intelligence as math plus incentives rather than something mystical, touching on architectural bottlenecks, why "reasoning" may not simply emerge from brute force, labor displacement, and institutional design for advanced AI systems. Many of the themes align closely with current debates around large language models and AI governance. The recording was revisited following recent remarks by Sergey Brin at Stanford, where he acknowledged that despite Google's early work on Transformers, institutional hesitation and incentive structures limited how aggressively the technology was pursued. The interview provides an earlier, first-principles perspective on how abstraction, scaling, and organizational design might interact once AI systems begin to compound.

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Practical steps to make an aging operating system usable into 2026

Part 1 You can switch to running mostly FOSS without switching to Linux. First, though, give your OS a bit of TLC. We'll come back to what to do next in part two.…

theodp writes: We all mix pictures, emojis, and text freely in our communications. So why not in our code? That's the premise of "Fun With Python and Emoji: What Might Adding Pictures to Text Programming Languages Look Like?" (two-image Bluesky explainer; full slides), which takes a look at what mixing emoji with Python and SQL might look like. A GitHub repo includes a Google Colab-ready Python notebook proof of concept that does rudimentary emoji-to-text translation via an IPython input transformer. So, in the Golden Age of AI -- some 60+ years after Kenneth Iverson introduced the chock-full-of-symbols APL -- are valid technical reasons still keeping symbols and pictures out of code, or is their absence more of a programming dogma thing?

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Plans move to Rust, with help from AI

Microsoft wants to translate its codebase to Rust, and is hiring people to make it happen.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Across Uzbekistan, a network of about a hundred banks of high-resolution roadside cameras continuously scan vehicles' license plates and their occupants, sometimes thousands a day, looking for potential traffic violations. Cars running red lights, drivers not wearing their seatbelts, and unlicensed vehicles driving at night, to name a few. The driver of one of the most surveilled vehicles in the system was tracked over six months as he traveled between the eastern city of Chirchiq, through the capital Tashkent, and in the nearby settlement of Eshonguzar, often multiple times a week. We know this because the country's sprawling license plate-tracking surveillance system has been left exposed to the internet. Security researcher Anurag Sen, who discovered the security lapse, found the license plate surveillance system exposed online without a password, allowing anyone access to the data within. It's not clear how long the surveillance system has been public, but artifacts from the system show that its database was set up in September 2024, and traffic monitoring began in mid-2025. The exposure offers a rare glimpse into how such national license plate surveillance systems work, the data they collect, and how they can be used to track the whereabouts of any one of the millions of people across an entire country. The lapse also reveals the security and privacy risks associated with the mass monitoring of vehicles and their owners, at a time when the United States is building up its nationwide array of license plate readers, many of which are provided by surveillance giant Flock.

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VMware's main challenger already embraces multiple storage options

Amazon Web Services has given Nutanix a lovely Christmas present: Support for its AHV hypervisor in hybrid cloud storage rigs.…

Under pressure from the Digital Markets Act, Apple's iOS 26.3 adds AirPods-style proximity pairing and notification support for third-party accessories in the EU. The changes will roll out to European users in 2026. MacRumors reports: The Digital Markets Act requires Apple to provide third-party accessories with the same capabilities and access to device features that Apple's own products get. In iOS 26.3, EU wearable device makers can now test proximity pairing and improved notifications. Here are the new capabilities that Apple is adding: - Proximity pairing - Devices like earbuds will be able to pair with an iOS device in an AirPods-like way by bringing the accessory close to an iPhone or iPad to initiate a simple, one-tap pairing process. Pairing third-party devices will no longer require multiple steps. - Notifications - Third-party accessories like smart watches will be able to receive notifications from the iPhone. Users will be able to view and react to incoming notifications, which is functionality normally limited to the Apple Watch. Notifications can only be forwarded to one connected device at a time, and turning on notifications for a third-party device disables notifications to an Apple Watch.

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A group of authors led by John Carreyrou has filed a new lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the AI firms of training models on pirated copies of their books. TechCrunch reports: If this sounds familiar, it's because another set of authors already filed a class action suit against Anthropic for these same acts of copyright infringement. In that case, the judge ruled that it was legal for Anthropic and similar AI companies to train on pirated copies of books, but that it was not legal to pirate the books in the first place. While eligible writers can receive about $3,000 from the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, some authors were dissatisfied with that resolution -- it doesn't hold AI companies accountable for the actual act of using stolen books to train their models, which generate billions of dollars in revenue. The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit say the proposed Anthropic settlement "seems to serve [the AI companies], not creators." "LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates, eliding what should be the true cost of their massive willful infringement."

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