Meta is cutting roughly 5% of its staff through performance-based eliminations and plans to hire new people to fill their roles this year, according to a company memo. From a report: As of September, Meta employed about 72,000 people, so a 5% reduction could affect roughly 3,600 jobs. "I've decided to raise the bar on performance management and move out low-performers faster," Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in the note posted to an internal message board and reviewed by Bloomberg News. "We typically manage out people who aren't meeting expectations over the course of a year," he said, "but now we're going to do more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle."

Linux creator Linus Torvalds announced a playful giveaway for kernel contributors: he'll hand-build a guitar effects pedal for one lucky developer selected at random, using his holiday hobby skills with pedal kits. To qualify, developers must have a 2024 commit in Torvalds' kernel git tree and email him with the subject "I WANT A GUITAR PEDAL". He'll pick a winner at random, use his own money to buy a pedal kit from a company called Aion FX, and then 'build it with my own shaky little fingers, and send it to the victim by US postal services.'" The Register reports: The odd offer appeared in his weekly state-of-the-kernel post, which on Sunday US time informed the Linux world that release candidate (rc) seven for version 6.13 of the Linux kernel "is slightly bigger than normal, but considering the timing, it's pretty much where I would have expected, and nothing really stands out." Torvalds therefore expects version 6.13 to debut next week, meaning it will arrive after his preferred seven release candidates and without delays caused by the usual holiday-period slowdown. Torvalds then added a postscript in which he revealed that he often uses the holiday season to build LEGO, which he frequently receives for Christmas and his late December birthday.

He kept up that tradition last year, but "also ended up doing a number of guitar pedal kit builds" which he described as "LEGO for grown-ups with a soldering iron." [...] Torvalds doesn't play guitar, but did the builds "because I enjoy the tinkering, and the guitar pedals actually do something and are the right kind of "not very complex, but not some 5-minute 555 LED blinking thing.'" He enjoyed the experience and wants to build more pedals, so has decided to give one away to a random kernel developer -- both as an act of generosity and to "check to see if anybody actually ever reads these weekly rc announcements of mine." Torvalds rated his past pedal-building efforts a "good success so far" but warned entrants "I'm a software person with a soldering iron."

"I will test the result to the best of my abilities, and the end result may actually work ... but you should set your expectations along the lines of "quality kit built by a SW person who doesn't know one end of a guitar from the other.'"

U.S. companies are increasingly using AI to curb hiring plans, citing "cost avoidance" as a key metric to justify AI investments amid pressure to show returns. At software firm TS Imagine, AI-powered email sorting saves 4,000 work hours annually at 3% of employee costs, while Palantir reported AI reduced future headcount needs by 10-15%, according to company executives.

The trend is most pronounced in software development and customer service sectors, where companies are deferring or scaling back hiring plans, said Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran. This shift comes as long-term unemployment in the U.S. has risen more than 50% since late 2022, though tech sector unemployment dropped to 2% in December.

"JPMorgan Chase shut down comments on an internal webpage announcing the bank's return-to-office policy," reports the Wall Street Journal, "after dozens of them criticized the move and at least one suggested that affected employees should unionize, according to people familiar with the matter." The bank's senior executives announced in an internal memo Friday that JPMorgan Chase would require all of its roughly 300,000 employees to work full time from the office starting in March, with only a limited number of exceptions. More than half of the bank's full-time workers, including senior managers and those with client-facing roles such as branch workers, have already been working full time from offices. The move primarily impacts back-office roles such as call-center workers who had still been able to work remotely two days a week...

Many employees shared concerns such as increased commuting costs, child-care challenges and the impact on work-life balance. One person suggested that they should consider unionizing to fight for a hybrid-work schedule, the people familiar with the matter said. Soon after, the bank disabled comments on the article...

The bank's executives said when announcing the move that affected employees would receive a 30-day notice before they are expected to return to the office full time. They also said there will be a limited number of teams that can work remotely or on a hybrid basis if their "work can be easily and clearly measured."
The bank's executives said yesterday a limited number of teams can still work remotely (full or part-time) — but only if their work "can be easily and clearly measured," according to the article. But they also announced how they'd implement the new policy.

Affected employees will receive a 30-day notice before being expected to return to the office full time.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AsylumWraith for sharing the news.

Friday America's consumer watchdog agency "proposed a rule to give virtual video game currencies protections similar to those of real-world bank accounts..." reports the Washington Post, "so players can receive refunds or compensation for unauthorized transactions, similar to how banks are required to respond to claims of fraudulent activity." The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking public input on a rule interpretation to clarify which rights are protected and available to video game consumers under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act. It would hold video game companies subject to violations of federal consumer financial law if they fail to address financial issues reported by customers. The public comment period lasts from Friday through March 31. In particular, the independent federal agency wants to hear from gamers about the types of transactions they make, any issues with in-game currencies, and stories about how companies helped or denied help.

The effort is in response to complaints to the bureau and the Federal Trade Commission about unauthorized transactions, scams, hacking attempts and account theft, outlined in an April bureau report that covered banking in video games and virtual worlds. The complaints said consumers "received limited recourse from gaming companies." Companies may ban or lock accounts or shut down a service, according to the report, but they don't generally guarantee refunds to people who lost property... The April report says the bureau and FTC received numerous complaints from players who contacted their banks regarding unauthorized charges on Roblox. "These complaints note that while they received refunds through their financial institutions, Roblox then terminated or locked their account," the report says.

While CES wraps up this week, "Not all innovation is good innovation," warns Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit's Director of Sustainability (heading their Right to Repair advocacy team). So this year the group held its fourth annual "anti-awards ceremony" to call out CES's "least repairable, least private, and least sustainable products..." (iFixit co-founder Kyle Wiens mocked a $2,200 "smart ring" with a battery that only lasts for 500 charges. "Wanna open it up and change the battery? Well you can't! Trying to open it will completely destroy this device...") There's also a category for the worst in security — plus a special award titled "Who asked for this?" — and then a final inglorious prize declaring "the Overall Worst in Show..."

Thursday their "panel of dystopia experts" livestreamed to iFixit's feed of over 1 million subscribers on YouTube, with the video's description warning about manufacturers "hoping to convince us that they have invented the future. But will their vision make our lives better, or lead humanity down a dark and twisted path?" The video "is a fun and rollicking romp that tries to forestall a future clogged with power-hungry AI and data-collecting sensors," writes The New Stack — though noting one final irony.

"While the ceremony criticized these products, YouTube was displaying ads for them..."

UPDATE: Slashdot reached out to iFixit co-founder Kyle Wiens, who says this teaches us all a lesson. "The gadget industry is insidious and has their tentacles everywhere."

"Of course they injected ads into our video. The beast can't stop feeding, and will keep growing until we knife it in the heart."

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland summarizes the article: "We're seeing more and more of these things that have basically surveillance technology built into them," iFixit's Chamberlain told The Associated Press... Proving this point was EFF executive director Cindy Cohn, who gave a truly impassioned takedown for "smart" infant products that "end up traumatizing new parents with false reports that their baby has stopped breathing." But worst for privacy was the $1,200 "Revol" baby bassinet — equipped with a camera, a microphone, and a radar sensor. The video also mocks Samsung's "AI Home" initiative which let you answer phone calls with your washing machine, oven, or refrigerator. (And LG's overpowered "smart" refrigerator won the "Overall Worst in Show" award.)

One of the scariest presentations came from Paul Roberts, founder of SecuRepairs, a group advocating both cybersecurity and the right to repair. Roberts notes that about 65% of the routers sold in the U.S. are from a Chinese company named TP-Link — both wifi routers and the wifi/ethernet routers sold for homes and small offices.Roberts reminded viewers that in October, Microsoft reported "thousands" of compromised routers — most of them manufactured by TP-Link — were found working together in a malicious network trying to crack passwords and penetrate "think tanks, government organizations, non-governmental organizations, law firms, defense industrial base, and others" in North America and in Europe. The U.S. Justice Department soon launched an investigation (as did the U.S. Commerce Department) into TP-Link's ties to China's government and military, according to a SecuRepairs blog post.

The reason? "As a China-based company, TP-Link is required by law to disclose flaws it discovers in its software to China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology before making them public." Inevitably, this creates a window "to exploit the publicly undisclosed flaw... That fact, and the coincidence of TP-Link devices playing a role in state-sponsored hacking campaigns, raises the prospects of the U.S. government declaring a ban on the sale of TP-Link technology at some point in the next year."

TP-Link won the award for the worst in security.

India's homegrown digital payments ecosystem, anchored by two systems, is challenging Visa and Mastercard's dominance in the world's most populous nation. The backbone is UPI, a nine-year-old bank-to-bank payment network that processes over 13 billion monthly transactions through QR codes and phone numbers, accounting for 71% of all transactions and 36% of consumer spending, according to Bernstein.

RuPay, India's domestic card network, has leveraged its exclusive right to process credit card transactions through UPI to double its volume to $7.43 billion in fiscal 2025's first seven months. It now represents 28% of credit card transactions, up from 10% last year. Small merchants are adopting the system as RuPay only charges fees on transactions above $23.3. India's central bank has also mandated banks let customers choose their card network, ending exclusive deals with global providers.

MicroStrategy's bitcoin holdings and a tech investment fund are commanding extraordinary premiums in U.S. markets, highlighting unusual price anomalies reminiscent of past market distortions. MicroStrategy shares are trading at more than double the market value of their main asset -- bitcoin holdings -- while closed-end fund Destiny Tech100 recently traded at 11 times its net asset value, down from 21 times earlier in 2024.

Similar market irregularities have emerged throughout history. In 1923, investor Benjamin Graham profited from a disconnect between DuPont and General Motors shares. During the 1929 bull market, closed-end fund Capital Administration Co. traded at a 1,235% premium to its net asset value. WSJ adds: The PalmPilot during the 1990s and early 2000s was a hand-held device and personal assistant that came with a touch-screen display and a stylus. Palm was the biggest maker of hand-held computer devices, with 70% market share, and it held its initial public offering in March 2000, about a week before the Nasdaq Composite Index's peak during the dot-com bubble.

Palm's shares jumped 150% on their first day of trading, giving Palm a stock-market value of about $53 billion. Palm was still 94%-owned by parent 3Com at the time. Yet on Palm's first day of trading, 3Com's shares fell 21%.

The funny part: According to the stock market, 3Com was worth about $23 billion less than the value of the Palm shares that 3Com owned. This made no sense, yet the valuations remained out of whack for months. In time, both stocks came down to earth, sanity prevailed and the world eventually moved on to smartphones.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The Nobel peace prize winner Maria Ressa has said Meta's decision to end factchecking on its platforms and remove restrictions on certain topics means "extremely dangerous times" lie ahead for journalism, democracy and social media users. The American-Filipino journalist said Mark Zuckerberg's move to relax content moderation on the Facebook and Instagram platforms would lead to a "world without facts" and that was "a world that's right for a dictator."

"Mark Zuckerberg says it's a free speech issue -- that's completely wrong," Ressa told the AFP news service. "Only if you're profit-driven can you claim that; only if you want power and money can you claim that. This is about safety." Ressa, a co-founder of the Rappler news site, won the Nobel peace prize in 2021 in recognition of her "courageous fight for freedom of expression." She faced multiple criminal charges and investigations after publishing stories critical of the former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. Ressa rejected Zuckerberg's claim that factcheckers had been "too politically biased" and had "destroyed more trust than they've created."

"Journalists have a set of standards and ethics," Ressa said. "What Facebook is going to do is get rid of that and then allow lies, anger, fear and hate to infect every single person on the platform." The decision meant "extremely dangerous times ahead" for journalism, democracy and social media users, she said. [...] Ressa said she would do everything she could to "ensure information integrity." "This is a pivotal year for journalism survival," she said. "We'll do all we can to make sure that happens."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US Justice Department today announced it filed an antitrust lawsuit against "six of the nation's largest landlords for participating in algorithmic pricing schemes that harmed renters." One of the landlords, Cortland Management, agreed to a settlement "that requires it to cooperate with the government, stop using its competitors' sensitive data to set rents and stop using the same algorithm as its competitors without a corporate monitor," the DOJ said. The pending settlement requires Cortland to "cooperate fully and truthfully... in any civil investigation or civil litigation the United States brings or has brought" on this subject matter.

The US previously sued RealPage, a software maker accused of helping landlords collectively set prices by giving them access to competitors' nonpublic pricing and occupancy information. The original version of the lawsuit described actions by landlords but did not name any as defendants. The Justice Department filed an amended complaint (PDF) today in order to add the landlords as defendants. The landlord defendants are Greystar, LivCor, Camden, Cushman, Willow Bridge, and Cortland, which collectively "operate more than 1.3 million units in 43 states and the District of Columbia," the DOJ said. "The amended complaint alleges that the six landlords actively participated in a scheme to set their rents using each other's competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms," the DOJ said. The phrase "price fixing" came up in discussions between landlords, the amended complaint said: "For example, in Minnesota, property managers from Cushman & Wakefield, Greystar, and other landlords regularly discussed competitively sensitive topics, including their future pricing. When a property manager from Greystar remarked that another property manager had declined to fully participate due to 'price fixing laws,' the Cushman & Wakefield property manager replied to Greystar, 'Hmm... Price fixing laws huh? That's a new one! Well, I'm happy to keep sharing so ask away. Hoping we can kick these concessions soon or at least only have you guys be the only ones with big concessions! It's so frustrating to have to offer so much.'"

The Justice Department is joined in the case by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington. The case is in US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.

Further reading: Are We Entering an AI Price-Fixing Dystopia?

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese venture capitalists are hounding failed founders [non-paywalled source], pursuing personal assets and adding the individuals to a national debtor blacklist when they fail to pay up, in moves that are throwing the country's startup funding ecosystem into crisis. The hard-nosed tactics by risk capital providers have been facilitated by clauses known as redemption rights, included in nearly all the financing deals struck during China's boom times.

"My investors verbally promised they wouldn't enforce them, that they had never enforced them before -- and in '17 and '18 that was true -- no one was enforcing them," said Neuroo Education founder Wang Ronghui, who now owes investors millions of dollars after her childcare chain stumbled during the pandemic.

While they are relatively rare in US venture investing, more than 80% of venture and private equity deals in China contain redemption provisions, according to Shanghai-based law firm Lifeng Partners estimates. They typically require companies, and often their founders as well, to buy back investors' shares plus interest if certain targets such as an initial public offering timeline, valuation goals or revenue metrics are not met.

Anthropic is in advanced talks to raise $2 billion dollars in a deal that would value it at $60 billion, making it the latest artificial-intelligence startup to seize upon investor euphoria for the technology. WSJ: The funding round is being led by the venture firm Lightspeed Venture Partners, people familiar with the matter said. The $60 billion valuation includes the money Anthropic plans to raise in the round.

The deal would make Anthropic the fifth-most valuable U.S. startup after SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe and Databricks, according to data provider CB Insights. It was valued last year at $18 billion in a round led by Menlo Ventures. There has been a dealmaking frenzy among AI companies since OpenAI raised $6.6 billion in an October round that nearly doubled its value to $157 billion. Two other startups, Elon Musk's xAI and Perplexity, subsequently raised money at substantially increased valuations.

More than 1.6 million Americans have been jobless for at least six months, up 50% since late 2022, despite the economy adding over two million jobs last year, Labor Department data shows.

The average job search now takes six months, primarily affecting high-paying sectors like tech, law, and media. While the 4.2% unemployment rate remains below pre-pandemic averages, job postings have dropped to one per unemployed worker from two in early 2022.

Software development, data science, and marketing roles are 20% below pre-pandemic levels, while healthcare and government sectors account for half of recent job creation. The number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits reached 1.8 million in late December, approaching post-pandemic highs, as wage growth declined to 4% from 6% during the early 2020s hiring peak.

In a potential U.S.-China conflict, cyberattackers are military weapons. That's the thrust of a new article from the Wall Street Journal: The message from President Biden's national security adviser was startling. Chinese hackers had gained the ability to shut down dozens of U.S. ports, power grids and other infrastructure targets at will, Jake Sullivan told telecommunications and technology executives at a secret meeting at the White House in the fall of 2023, according to people familiar with it. The attack could threaten lives, and the government needed the companies' help to root out the intruders.

What no one at the briefing knew, including Sullivan: China's hackers were already working their way deep inside U.S. telecom networks, too. The two massive hacking operations have upended the West's understanding of what Beijing wants, while revealing the astonishing skill level and stealth of its keyboard warriors — once seen as the cyber equivalent of noisy, drunken burglars. China's hackers were once thought to be interested chiefly in business secrets and huge sets of private consumer data. But the latest hacks make clear they are now soldiers on the front lines of potential geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and China, in which cyberwarfare tools are expected to be powerful weapons. U.S. computer networks are a "key battlefield in any future conflict" with China, said Brandon Wales, a former top U.S. cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security, who closely tracked China's hacking operations against American infrastructure. He said prepositioning and intelligence collection by the hackers "are designed to ensure they prevail by keeping the U.S. from projecting power, and inducing chaos at home."

As China increasingly threatens Taiwan, working toward what Western intelligence officials see as a target of being ready to invade by 2027, the U.S. could be pulled into the fray as the island's most important backer... Top U.S. officials in both parties have warned that China is the greatest danger to American security.

In the infrastructure attacks, which began at least as early as 2019 and are still taking place, hackers connected to China's military embedded themselves in arenas that spies usually ignored, including a water utility in Hawaii, a port in Houston and an oil-and-gas processing facility. Investigators, both at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and in the private sector, found the hackers lurked, sometimes for years, periodically testing access. At a regional airport, investigators found the hackers had secured access, and then returned every six months to make sure they could still get in. Hackers spent at least nine months in the network of a water-treatment system, moving into an adjacent server to study the operations of the plant. At a utility in Los Angeles, the hackers searched for material about how the utility would respond in the event of an emergency or crisis. The precise location and other details of the infrastructure victims are closely guarded secrets, and couldn't be fully determined.

American security officials said they believe the infrastructure intrusions — carried out by a group dubbed Volt Typhoon — are at least in part aimed at disrupting Pacific military supply lines and otherwise impeding America's ability to respond to a future conflict with China, including over a potential invasion of Taiwan... The focus on Guam and West Coast targets suggested to many senior national-security officials across several Biden administration agencies that the hackers were focused on Taiwan, and doing everything they could to slow a U.S. response in a potential Chinese invasion, buying Beijing precious days to complete a takeover even before U.S. support could arrive.
The telecom breachers "were also able to swipe from Verizon and AT&T a list of individuals the U.S. government was surveilling in recent months under court order, which included suspected Chinese agents. The intruders used known software flaws that had been publicly warned about but hadn't been patched."

And ultimately nine U.S. telecoms were breached, according to America's deputy national security adviser for cybersecurity — including what appears to have been a preventable breach at AT&T (according to "one personal familiar with the matter"): [T]hey took control of a high-level network management account that wasn't protected by multifactor authentication, a basic safeguard. That granted them access to more than 100,000 routers from which they could further their attack — a serious lapse that may have allowed the hackers to copy traffic back to China and delete their own digital tracks.
The details of the various breaches are stunning: Chinese hackers gained a foothold in the digital underpinnings of one of America's largest ports in just 31 seconds. At the Port of Houston, an intruder acting like an engineer from one of the port's software vendors entered a server designed to let employees reset their passwords from home. The hackers managed to download an encrypted set of passwords from all the port's staff before the port recognized the threat and cut off the password server from its network...

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In an Op-ed for The Huntington News, fourth year Northeastern University CS student Derek Kaplan argues that real pedagogical merit is what should count when deciding which language to use to teach CS fundamentals (aka 'Fundies'). He makes the case for Northeastern to reconsider its decision to move from Racket to Python and Java later this year in an overhaul of its first-year curriculum.

"Students will get extensive training in Python, which is currently the most requested language by co-op employers," Northeastern explains (some two decades after a Slashdot commenter made the same Hot Languages = Jobs observation in a spirited 2001 debate on Java as a CS introductory language)...

"I have often heard computer science students complain that Fundies 1 teaches Racket instead of a 'useful language' like Python," Kaplan writes. "But the point of Fundies is not to teach Racket — it is to teach program design skills that can be applied using any programming language. Racket is just the tool it uses to do so. A student who does well in Fundies will have no difficulty applying the same skills to Python or any other language. And with how fast the tech industry changes, is it really worth having a course that teaches just Python when tomorrow, some other language might dominate the industry? Our current curriculum focuses on timeless principles rather than fleeting trends."

Also expressing concerns about the selection of suitable languages for novice programming is King's College CS Prof Michael Kölling, who explains, "One of the drivers is the perceived usefulness of the language in a real-world context. Students (and their parents) often have opinions which language is 'better' to learn. In forming these opinions, the definition of 'better' can often be vague and driven by limited insight. One strong aspect commonly cited is the perceived usefulness of a language in the 'real world.' If a language is widely used in industry, it is more likely to be seen as a useful language to learn." Kölling's recommendation? "We need a new language for teaching novices at secondary school and introductory university level," Kölling concludes. "This language should be designed explicitly for teaching [...] Maintenance and adaptation of this language should be driven by pedagogical considerations, not by industry needs."

While noble in intent, one suspects Kaplan and Kölling may be on a quixotic quest in a money wins world, outgunned by the demands, resources, and influence of tech giants like Amazon — the top employer of Northeastern MSCS program grads — who pushed back against NSF advice to deemphasize Java in high school CS and dropped $15 million to have tech-backed nonprofit Code.org develop and push a new Java-based, powered-by-AWS CS curriculum into high schools with the support of a consortium of politicians, educators, and tech companies. Echoing Northeastern, an Amazon press release argued the new Java-based curriculum "best prepares students for the next step in their education and careers."

TPM is a dedicated chip or firmware enabling hardware-level security, housing encryption keys, certificates, passwords, and sensitive data, "and shielding them from unauthorized access," Microsoft senior product manager Steven Hosking wrote last month, declaring TPM 2.0 to be "a non-negotiable standard for the future of Windows."

Or, as BleepingComputer put it, Microsoft "made it abundantly clear... that Windows 10 users won't be able to upgrade to Windows 11 unless their systems come with TPM 2.0 support." (This despite the fact that Statcounter Global data "shows that more than 61% of all Windows systems worldwide still run Windows 10.") They add that Microsoft "announced on October 31 that Windows 10 home users will be able to delay the switch to Windows 11 for one more year if they're willing to pay $30 for Extended Security Updates."

But last week the Free Software Foundation's campaigns manager delivered a message on the FSF's official blog: "Keep putting pressure on Microsoft." Grassroots organization against a corporation as large as Microsoft is never easy. They have the advertising budget to claim that they "love Linux" (sic), not to mention the money and political willpower to corral free software developers from around the world on their nonfree platform Microsoft GitHub. This year's International Day Against DRM took aim at one specific injustice: their requiring a hardware TPM module for users being forced to "upgrade" to Windows 11. As Windows 10 will soon stop receiving security updates, this is a (Microsoft-manufactured) problem for users still on this operating system. Normally, offloading cryptography to a different hardware module could be seen as a good thing — but with nonfree software, it can only spell trouble for the user...

What's crucial now is to keep putting pressure on Microsoft, whether that's through switching to GNU/Linux, avoiding new releases of their software, or actions as simple as moving your projects off of Microsoft GitHub. If you're concerned about e-waste or have friends who work to combat climate change, getting them together to tell them about free software is the perfect way to help our movement grow, and free a few more users from Microsoft's digital restrictions. If you're concerned about e-waste or have friends who work to combat climate change, getting them together to tell them about free software is the perfect way to help our movement grow, and free a few more users from Microsoft's digital restrictions.

Politico asked an "array of thinkers — futurists, scientists, foreign policy analysts and others — to lay out some of the possible 'Black Swan' events that could await us in the new year: What are the unpredictable, unlikely episodes that aren't yet on the radar but would completely upend American life as we know it?"

Here's one from Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and author of the book Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works For Us: 2025 could easily see the largest cyberattack in history, taking down, at least for a little while, some sizeable piece of the world's infrastructure, whether for deliberate ransom or to manipulate people to make money off a short on global markets. Cybercrime is already a huge, multi-trillion dollar problem, and one that most victims don't like to talk about. It is said to be bigger than the entire global drug trade. Four things could make it much worse in 2025.

First, generative AI, rising in popularity and declining in price, is a perfect tool for cyberattackers. Although it is unreliable and prone to hallucinations, it is terrific at making plausible sounding text (e.g., phishing attacks to trick people into revealing credentials) and deepfaked videos at virtually zero cost, allowing attackers to broaden their attacks. Already, a cybercrew bilked a Hong Kong bank out of $25 million. Second, large language models are notoriously susceptible to jailbreaking and things like "prompt-injection attacks," for which no known solution exists. Third, generative AI tools are increasingly being used to create code; in some cases those coders don't fully understand the code written, and the autogenerated code has already been shown in some cases to introduce new security holes.
And finally 2025 may see a U.S. government "determined to deregulate as much as possible, slashing costs," Marus speculates, a scenario where "enforcement and investigations will almost certainly decline in both quality and quantity, leaving the world quite vulnerable to ever more audacious attacks."

Elsewhere in Politico's article there's other even less-cheery predictions for 2025. The executive director of an advocacy group for public health professionals describes the possibility of an epidemic "that we had the tools to control" which "winds up killing thousands" (while also "sending the economy back into a Covid-like downward spiral.")

And a law professor predicts 2025 will see a decisive breakthrough in quantum computing. "Those little padlocks you see beside URLs? They would, overnight, become a fiction."

"The Washington Post's crossword puzzle was recently deemed too offensive for advertisers," reports the Wall Street Journal. "So was an article about thunderstorms. And a ranking of boxed brownie mixes.

"Marketers have long been wary about running ads in the news media, concerned that their brands will land next to pieces about terrorism or plane crashes or polarizing political stories." But "That advertising no-go zone seems to keep widening." It is a headache that news publishers can hardly afford. Many are also grappling with subscriber declines and losses in traffic from Google and other tech platforms, and are now making an aggressive push to change advertisers' perceptions... News organizations recently began publicizing studies that show it really isn't dangerous for a brand to appear near a sensitive story. At the same time, they say blunt campaign-planning tools wind up fencing off even harmless content — and those stories' potentially large audiences — from advertisements. Forty percent of the Washington Post's material is deemed "unsafe" at any given time, said Johanna Mayer-Jones, the paper's chief advertising officer, referencing a study the company did about a year ago. "The revenue implications of that are significant."

The Washington Post's crossword page was blocked by advertisers' technology seven times during a weekslong period in October because it was labeled as politics, news and natural disaster-related material. (A tech company recently said it would ensure the puzzle stops getting blocked, according to the Post.) The thunderstorm story was cut off from ad revenue when a sentence about "flashing and pealing volleys from the artillery of the atmosphere" triggered a warning that it was too much like an "arms and ammunition" story. As for the brownies, a reference to research from "grocery, drug, mass-market" and other retailers was automatically flagged by advertisers for containing the word "drug."

While some brands avoid news entirely, many take what they consider to be a more surgical approach. They create lengthy blacklists of words or websites that the company considers off-limits and employ ad technology to avoid such terms. Over time, blacklists have become extremely detailed, serving as a de facto news-blocking tool, publishers said... The lists are used in automated ad buying. Brands aim their ads not at specific websites, but at online audiences with certain characteristics — people with particular shopping or web-browsing histories, for example. Their ads are matched in real-time to available inventory for thousands of websites... These days, less than 5% of client ad spending for GroupM, one of the largest ad-buying firms in the world, goes to news, according to Christian Juhl, GroupM's former chief executive who revealed spending figures during a congressional hearing over the summer.
A recent blacklist from Microsoft included about 2,000 words including "collapse," according to the article. ("Microsoft declined to comment.")

As UK workers face a tougher-than-usual January return to offices, many large employers, including Amazon, BT, PwC, and Santander, are enforcing stricter in-person attendance mandates. The Guardian reports: As of 1 January, BT is requiring its 50,000 office-based employees across the UK and several other countries to attend three days a week in what it calls a "three together, two wherever" approach. Workers at the telecoms company have been told that office entry and exit data will be used to monitor attendance. The accountancy firm PwC is also clamping down on remote working; the Spanish-owned bank Santander is formalizing attendance requirements for its 10,000 UK staff; the digital bank Starling has ordered staff back to the office more regularly; and the supermarket chain Asda has made a three-day office week compulsory for thousands of workers at its Leeds and Leicester sites. The international picture is similar. [...]

Multiple studies suggest that the future of work is flexible, with time split between the office and home or another location, in what has been called "the new normal" by the Office for National Statistics. The ONS found in its latest survey that hybrid was the standard pattern for more than a quarter (28%) of working adults in Great Britain in autumn 2024. At the same time, working entirely remotely had fallen since 2021, it found. One of the most frequently reported business reasons for hybrid working was "improved staff wellbeing," the ONS found, while those who worked from home saved an average of 56 minutes each day by dodging the commute.

UK staff have been slower to return to their desks after the pandemic than their counterparts in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the US. London, in particular, has lagged behind other global cities including Paris and New York, according to recent research from the Centre for Cities thinktank, where workers spent on average 2.7 days a week in the office, attendance levels similar to Toronto and Sydney. It cited the cost, and average length of the commute in and around the UK capital as one of the main reasons for the trend. Despite this, there has been a "slow but steady increase in both attendance and desk use" in British offices, according to AWA, which tracked a 4% rise in attendance, from 29% to 33%, between July 2022 and September 2024. "Hybrid working is here, it's not going away," said Andrew Mawson, the founder of Advanced Workplace Associates (AWA), a workplace transformation consultancy. "Even though companies are trying to mandate, foolishly in my view, to have their people in the office on a certain number of days, the true reality of it is different."

In 2024, Americans spent 23% less on streaming subscriptions compared to 2023, driven by rising costs, streaming fatigue, and increased password-sharing restrictions. The findings have been reported in Review's annual State of Consumer Media Spending Report. TechSpot reports: Of those surveyed, 27.8 percent said they are experiencing streaming fatigue - or the feeling of being overwhelmed by the growing number of streaming apps on the market. And with the cost of goods and services at an all-time high, it's hitting folks in the wallet as well. The report additionally found that the average American has two streaming subscriptions, and watches three hours and 49 minutes of content each day. More than a quarter of subscribers - 26.5 percent - share subscriptions with others to save on cost although with recent crackdowns on password sharing, that might not be an option for much longer.

As such, Reviews recommends downsizing the number of subscriptions you pay for each month or spending more time using free services if you're looking to cut down on costs in the New Year. For example, you could stagger subscriptions by signing up for a service temporarily to watch a specific show or movie and canceling when you are finished. It's also wise to keep an eye out for free trials, discounts, and limited-time streaming deals like those occasionally offered from Internet and mobile providers.