Want the best Santa Tracker and to play some fun games through Norad or Google? We're live-blogging Santa's movements as he ventures out from the North Pole

WASHINGTON, Dec 23 (Reuters) - A federal judge in Texas on Tuesday blocked Texas from enforcing a new state law aimed at protecting children by requiring app stores and developers to verify the age of users, in a win for Apple , Alphabet's Google and other technology companies. Read full story

Irish competitor Diarmuid Early, dubbed the "Lebron James of Excel spreadsheets," has won the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championship in Las Vegas, dethroning three-time champion Andrew Ngai. The BBC reports: The esport showpiece in December attracted competitors worldwide as 256 spreadsheet heads battled it out across knockout rounds to join the final 24 in Vegas. [...] A three-time champion in the financial Excel tournaments, this win was Diarmuid's first in the overall competition. He held ..

WASHINGTON, Dec 23 (Reuters) - Roughly 25,000 people have expressed interest in joining the Trump administration's cadre of engineers known as Tech Force, a senior Trump administration official said on Tuesday, as the U.S. government looks to install staff with artificial intelligence expertise in federal roles. Read full story

DeskIn extends remote desktop functionality into gaming through multi-screen handling, file synchronization, customizable input mapping, and cross-platform access.

SEOUL, Dec 23 (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics announced on Tuesday a $1.8 billion deal to acquire Germany's ZF Friedrichshafen's autonomous driving technology unit to combine it with its audio business and offer next- generation in-car platforms. Read full story

Motive says its products, including a dashboard camera for tracking truckers, have saved over 1,000 lives.

A federal judge blocked Texas' app store age-verification law, ruling it likely violates the First Amendment by forcing platforms to gate speech and collect data in an overly broad way. The law was set to go into effect on January 1, 2026. The Verge reports: In an order granting a preliminary injunction on the Texas App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420), Judge Robert Pitman wrote that the statute "is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the ..

Customers will be able to see vulnerabilities, prioritize risks, and close them with automated workflows. After over a week of speculation, ServiceNow announced on Tuesday that it has agreed to buy cybersecurity heavyweight Armis in a $7.75 billion deal that will see the workflow giant incorporate a real- time security intelligence feed into its products.

Intels $300 B50 delivers surprisingly capable performance in entry-level AI, 3D rendering, and media editing tasks for compact setups.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: CBS cannot contain the online spread of a "60 Minutes" segment that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, tried to block from airing. The episode, "Inside CECOT," featured testimonies from US deportees who were tortured or suffered physical or sexual abuse at a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. "Welcome to hell," one former inmate was told upon arriving, the segment reported, while also highlighting a clip ..

A simple ADB command can reverse the Pixel Launchers latest search bar change.

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's been more than eight years since Amazon bought Whole Foods, but the two companies still haven't aligned their setup for the Microsoft software their employees use. That disconnect was flagged in an 8-week Deloitte review of Whole Foods' use of Microsoft 365 apps earlier this year, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. Deloitte found that Whole Foods relies on "fragmented" Microsoft toolsets, has loose security and ..

The launch laid "an important foundation for subsequent launches and reliable recovery."

A fork of a popular project was found on npm, but not before it amassed tens of thousands of downloads.

The Xiaomi 17 Ultra will be unveiled on December 25, and it will be joined by the Xiaomi Watch 5. This new wearable will be Xiaomi's highest-end yet, featuring a stainless steel case and a sapphire crystal on top of its screen - both standard materials for high-end analog watches. The Xiaomi Watch 5 will feature an EMG (electromyography) sensor, which is used to detect electrical signals produced by your muscles. This could be used to enable gesture navigation - like flicking your wrist or ..

The enterprise software company said the deal will bolster its cybersecurity capabilities in the age of artificial intelligence.

iPhone's "System Data" can take up a lot of space on your smartphone. Here's what we know.

In the late 1980s, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary sat on the New York Times best-seller list for 155 consecutive weeks and eventually sold 57 million copies, a figure believed to be second only to the Bible in the United States -- but those days are thoroughly gone. Stefan Fatsis's new book "Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary" chronicles what Louis Menand describes in The New Yorker as "a losing struggle" for legacy dictionaries to survive in the internet ..

Android Automotives new Sensitive App Protection lets you lock apps behind a PIN.

CelcomDigi's PhoneFIX subscription covers eligible smartphones with repairs regardless of where they were purchased, as long as they are a CelcomDigi prepaid or postpaid user.

A pretty good tablet and a free case.

Mavsloly MV10 mini PC packs desktop-class CPU, GPU, mobile workstation-style memory, and four-fan cooling into a visually deceptive small chassis.

U.S. export policy is colliding with the realities of globalized supply chains, reseller-driven distribution models, and explosive demand for AI accelerators in China.

European public institutions are quietly migrating away from American cloud providers and office software, driven less by policy ambitions in Brussels than by the mundane legal reality that GDPR-mandated risk assessments keep flagging the US CLOUD Act as an unacceptable threat to citizen data. Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism moved 1,200 employees to the open-source platform Nextcloud in four months. Germany's Schleswig-Holstein has already transitioned 24,000 of its ..

Every weekday, the Investing Club releases the Homestretch; an actionable afternoon update just in time for the last hour of trading.

We sifted through the fine print to figure out how to score the best deal on all the major carriers.

In an attempt to keep prebuilt systems costs down and bypass a rocky supply chain, Maingear is offering custom build configurations where users provide their own RAM.

IO Interactive's James Bond simulator 007 First Light has been delayed until May 27, 2026 . It was supposed to come out in March. The company says two- month delay is for polish and refinement, which is fine by me. I'd always rather wait a bit longer for a better end product. IO says the game is already "fully playable from beginning to end" but still needs a bit of attention to ensure "the strongest possible version at launch." The developer promises to share more updates at the beginning of ..

It's purportedly the first of four planned teasers, one per week, showing before Avatar: Fire and Ash .

An anonymous reader shares a report: Samsung is breaking new ground with its 2026 lineup of gaming monitors, with the Odyssey 3D G90XH becoming the first to feature a 6K display with "glasses-free 3D." The new monitor comes with a 32-inch IPS panel, offering real-time eye-tracking that "adjusts depth and perspective" based on your position, along with a speedy 165Hz refresh rate that you can boost to 330Hz with a Dual Mode feature that switches to 3K. [...] A 6K 3D display isn't the only ..

You'll be able to use third-party earbuds more easily with an iPhone next year, if you're in an EU country.

Users report that some pictures are inexplicably missing from their phones and Google Photos.

The great return-to-office battle has effectively concluded and a clear pecking order has emerged, according to Sander van 't Noordende, the CEO of Randstad, a staffing giant that places around half a million workers in jobs every week. Remote work is becoming a status symbol reserved for star performers and those possessing rare skills. "You have to be very special to be able to demand a 100% remote job," van 't Noordende told Fortune. "That's increasingly the story. You have to have very ..

Prompt injection might never go away, OpenAI says, as it compares it to phishing.

Windows Server 2025 introduces native NVMe support, boosting storage performance, lowering latency, and improving efficiency for enterprise workloads and servers.

Oppo is making the Pad Air5 official on December 25, and ahead of that, today the company has published a quick official unboxing of the upcoming device. This shows the tablet in all its glory in the Starlight Pink colorway (it will also be offered in Space Grey), along with the 45W wired charger that will be included in the retail package in China. The Pad Air5 has a "2.8K" resolution screen and a 10,050 mAh battery, and will come in Wi-Fi-only and 5G-enabled versions, with 8/128GB, 8/256GB, ..

Airline deploys AI travel agent and it hasn't been a disaster Non-human travel agents are here. Virgin Atlantic earlier this month installed an AI travel agent on its website, calling the web-bound chatbot "the future of travel planning."