An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Record: Russian telecom operators have begun cutting mobile internet access for 24 hours for citizens returning to the country from abroad, in what officials say is an effort to prevent Ukrainian drones from using domestic SIM cards for navigation. "When a SIM card enters Russia from abroad, the user has to confirm that it's being used by a person -- not installed in a drone," the Digital Development Ministry said in a statement earlier this week.

Users can restore access sooner by solving a captcha or calling their operator for identification. Authorities said the temporary blackout is meant to "ensure the safety of Russian citizens" and prevent SIM cards from being embedded in "enemy drones." The new rule has led to unexpected outages for residents in border regions, whose phones can automatically connect to foreign carriers. Officials advised users to switch to manual network selection to avoid being cut off.

Pay television penetration in American households fell to 50.2% in the third quarter and is projected to drop to 50% or lower by December, according to Madison and Wall, a technology and media advisory firm. Fifteen years ago, nearly nine in ten households subscribed to pay television services.

The decline has prompted major media companies to shed cable assets. Comcast, Warner Bros. Discovery, and A&E are seeking to sell or spin off their cable television operations. Paramount stated it would not divest its cable channels but acknowledged that "each quarter is accelerating decline."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: As generative AI content starts to fill our social apps, a project to bring back Vine's six-second looping videos is launching with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's backing. On Thursday, a new app called diVine will give access to more than 100,000 archived Vine videos, restored from an older backup that was created before Vine's shutdown. The app won't just exist as a walk down memory lane; it will also allow users to create profiles and upload their own new Vine videos. However, unlike on traditional social media, where AI content is often haphazardly labeled, diVine will flag suspected generative AI content and prevent it from being posted. According to TechCrunch, a volunteer preservation group called the Archive Team saved Vine's content when it shut down in 2016. The only problem was that everything was stored in massive 40-50 GB binary blob files that were basically unusable for casual viewing.

Evan Henshaw-Plath (who goes by the name Rabble), an early Twitter employee and member of Jack Dorsey's nonprofit "and Other Stuff," dug into those backup files to try and salvage as much as he could. He spent months writing big-data extraction scripts, reverse-engineering how the archived binaries were structured, and reconstructing the original video files, old user info, view counts, and more. "I wasn't able to get all of them out, but I was able to get a lot out and basically reconstruct these Vines and these Vine users, and give each person a new user [profile] on this open network," he said.

Rabble estimates that through this process he was able to successfully recover 150,000-200,000 Vine videos from around 60,000 creators. diVine then rebuilt user profiles on top of the decentralized Nostr protocol so creators can reclaim their accounts, request takedowns, or upload missing videos.

You can check out the app for yourself at diVine.video. It's available in beta form on both iOS and Android.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI asked a federal judge in New York on Wednesday to reverse an order that required it to turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT chat logs amid a copyright infringement lawsuit by the New York Times and other news outlets, saying it would expose users' private conversations. The artificial intelligence company argued that turning over the logs would disclose confidential user information and that "99.99%" of the transcripts have nothing to do with the copyright infringement allegations in the case.

"To be clear: anyone in the world who has used ChatGPT in the past three years must now face the possibility that their personal conversations will be handed over to The Times to sift through at will in a speculative fishing expedition," the company said in a court filing (PDF). The news outlets argued that the logs were necessary to determine whether ChatGPT reproduced their copyrighted content and to rebut OpenAI's assertion that they "hacked" the chatbot's responses to manufacture evidence. The lawsuit claims OpenAI misused their articles to train ChatGPT to respond to user prompts.

Magistrate Judge Ona Wang said in her order to produce the chats that users' privacy would be protected by the company's "exhaustive de-identification" and other safeguards. OpenAI has a Friday deadline to produce the transcripts.

The University of California, San Diego has documented a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering freshmen over the past five years, according to a report [PDF] released this month by the campus's Senate-Administration Working Group on Admissions. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below middle-school level increased nearly thirtyfold, from roughly 30 to 921 students. These students now represent one in eight members of the entering cohort.

The Mathematics Department redesigned its remedial program this year to focus entirely on elementary and middle school content after discovering students struggled with basic fractions and could not perform arithmetic operations taught in grades one through eight. The deterioration extends beyond mathematics. Nearly one in five domestic freshmen required remedial writing instruction in 2024, returning to pre-pandemic levels after a brief decline.

Faculty across disciplines report students increasingly struggle to engage with longer and complex texts. The decline coincided with multiple disrupting factors. The COVID-19 pandemic forced remote learning starting in spring 2020. The UC system eliminated SAT and ACT requirements in 2021. High school grade inflation accelerated during this period, leaving transcripts unreliable as indicators of actual preparation. UC San Diego simultaneously doubled its enrollment from under-resourced high schools designated LCFF+, admitting more such students than any other UC campus between 2022 and 2024.

The working group concluded that admitting large numbers of underprepared students risks harming those students while straining limited instructional resources. The report recommends developing predictive models to identify at-risk applicants and calls for the UC system to reconsider standardized testing requirements.

Researchers from four universities have released a study revealing that AI models remain easily detectable in social media conversations despite optimization attempts. The team tested nine language models across Twitter/X, Bluesky and Reddit, developing classifiers that identified AI-generated replies at 70 to 80% accuracy rates. Overly polite emotional tone served as the most persistent indicator. The models consistently produced lower toxicity scores than authentic human posts across all three platforms.

Instruction-tuned models performed worse than their base counterparts at mimicking humans, and the 70-billion-parameter Llama 3.1 showed no advantage over smaller 8-billion-parameter versions. The researchers found a fundamental tension: models optimized to avoid detection strayed further from actual human responses semantically.

The PDF Association is adding JPEG XL (JXL) support to the PDF specification, giving the advanced image format a new path to relevance despite Google's decision to declare it obsolete and remove it from Chromium. The Register reports: Peter Wyatt, CTO of the PDF Association, said: "We need to adopt a new image [format] that can support HDR [High Dynamic Range] content ... we have picked JPEG XL as our preferred solution." Wyatt also praised other benefits of JXL including wide gamut images, ultra-high resolution support for images with more than 1 billion pixels, and up to 4099 channels with up to 32 bits per channel.

The association is responsible for developing PDF specifications and standards and manages the ISO committee for PDF. JPEG XL is an advanced image format that was designed to be both more efficient and richer in features than JPEG. It was based on a combination of the Free Lossless Image Format (FLIF) from Cloudinary and a Google project called PIK, first released in late 2020, and fully standardized in October 2021 as ISO/IEC 18181. There is a reference implementation called libjxl. A second edition of the ISO standard was published in 2024.

JXL appeared to have wide industry support, including experimental implementation in Chrome and Chromium, until it was killed by Google in October 2022 and removed from its web browser engine. The company stated that "there is not enough interest from the entire ecosystem to continue experimenting with JPEG XL." Many in the community disagreed with the decision, including FLIF inventor Jon Sneyers, who perceived it as the outcome of an internal battle between proponents of JXL and a rival format, AVIF. "AVIF proponents within Chrome are essentially being prosecutor, judge and executioner at the same time," he said.

Tim Berners-Lee thinks AI will help the web, not destroy it. The inventor of the World Wide Web has spent years warning about platform concentration and social media's corrosive effects, but he views AI differently. AI has accomplished what his Semantic Web project could not. The technology extracts structured data from websites regardless of how the information was formatted. Berners-Lee spent decades trying to convince database owners to make their systems machine-readable voluntarily. AI companies simply took the data anyway. They achieved the machine-readable internet through extraction rather than cooperation, but the result is the same.

Berners-Lee also weighed in on the growing browser competition in the market. OpenAI released Atlas a few weeks ago. Perplexity has launched Comet. Google has expanded AI features in Chrome. All these browsers run on Chromium, which Berners-Lee acknowledges is not ideal, but conceded that browser engines are expensive to build. He thinks Apple's decision to restrict iPhones to WebKit prevents web apps from competing with native apps.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft, eager to boost downloads of its Copilot chatbot, has recruited some of the most popular influencers in America to push a message to young consumers that might be summed up as: Our AI assistant is as cool as ChatGPT. Microsoft could use the help. The company recently said its family of Copilot assistants attracts 150 million active users each month. But OpenAI's ChatGPT claims 800 million weekly active users, and Google's Gemini boasts 650 million a month. Microsoft has an edge with corporate customers, thanks to a long history of selling them software and cloud services. But it has struggled to crack the consumer market -- especially people under 30.

"We're a challenger brand in this area, and we're kind of up and coming," Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi said in an interview. Mehdi hopes to persuade key influencers to make Copilot their chatbot of choice and then use their popularity to market the assistant to their millions of followers. He says Microsoft is already getting more bang for the buck with influencers than with traditional media, but didn't provide any metrics.

[...] Using non-techies as spokespeople is meant to reinforce Microsoft's campaign to sell its chatbot as a life coach for everyone. Or as Consumer AI chief Mustafa Suleyman wrote in a recent essay, an AI companion that "helps you think, plan and dream."

The Rust Foundation has a responsibility to "shed light on the impact of supporting the often unseen work" that keeps the Rust Project running. So this week they announced a new initiative "to provide consistent, transparent, and long term support for the developers who make the Rust programming language possible."

It's the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund, "an initiative we'll shape in close collaboration with the Rust Project Leadership Council and Project Directors to ensure funding decisions are made openly and with accountability." In the months ahead, we'll define the fund's structure, secure contributions, and work with the Rust Project and community to bring it to life. This work will build on lessons from earlier iterations of our grants and fellowships to create a lasting framework for supporting Rust's maintainers... Over the past several months, through ongoing board discussions and input from the Leadership Council, this initiative has taken shape as a way to help maintainers continue their vital development and review work, and plan for the future...

This initiative reflects our commitment to Rust being shaped by its people, guided by open collaboration, and backed by a global network of contributors and partners. The Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund will operate within the governance framework shared between the Rust Project and the Rust Foundation, ensuring alignment and oversight at every level... The Rust Foundation's approach to this initiative will be guided by our structure: as a 501( C)(6) nonprofit, we operate under a mandate for transparency and accountability to the Rust Project, language community, and our members. That means we must develop this fund in coordination with the Rust Project's priorities, ensuring shared governance and long-term viability...

Our goal is simple: to help the people building Rust continue their essential work with the support they deserve. That means creating the conditions for long term maintainer roles and ensuring continuity for those whose efforts keep the language stable and evolving. Through the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund, we aim to address these needs directly.
"The more companies using Rust can contribute to the Rust Foundation Maintainers Fund, the more we can keep the language and tooling evolving for the benefit of everyone," says Rust Foundation project director Carol Nichols.

The literary magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa society argues "the replacement of human readers by AI has lately become a real possibility.

"In fact, there are good reasons to think that we will soon inhabit a world in which humans still write, but do so mostly for AI." "I write about artificial intelligence a lot, and lately I have begun to think of myself as writing for Al as well," the influential economist Tyler Cowen announced in a column for Bloomberg at the beginning of the year. He does this, he says, because he wants to boost his influence over the world, because he wants to help teach the AIs about things he cares about, and because, whether he wants to or not, he's already writing for AI, and so is everybody else. Large-language-model (LLM) chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude are trained, in part, by reading the entire internet, so if you put anything of yourself online, even basic social-media posts that are public, you're writing for them.

If you don't recognize this fact and embrace it, your work might get left behind or lost. For 25 years, search engines knit the web together. Anyone who wanted to know something went to Google, asked a question, clicked through some of the pages, weighed the information, and came to an answer. Now, the chatbot genie does that for you, spitting the answer out in a few neat paragraphs, which means that those who want to affect the world needn't care much about high Google results anymore. What they really want is for the AI to read their work, process it, and weigh it highly in what it says to the millions of humans who ask it questions every minute.

How do you get it to do this? For that, we turn to PR people, always in search of influence, who are developing a form of writing (press releases and influence campaigns are writing) that's not so much search-engine-optimized as chatbot-optimized. It's important, they say, to write with clear structure, to announce your intentions, and especially to include as many formatted sections and headings as you can. In other words, to get ChatGPT to pay attention, you must write more like ChatGPT. It's also possible that, since LLMs understand natural language in a way traditional computer programs don't, good writing will be more privileged than the clickbait Google has succumbed to: One refreshing discovery PR experts have made is that the bots tend to prioritize information from high-quality outlets.
Tyler Cowen also wrote in his Bloomberg column that "If you wish to achieve some kind of intellectual immortality, writing for the Als is probably your best chance.... Give the Als a sense not just of how you think, but how you feel — what upsets you, what you really treasure. Then future Al versions of you will come to life that much more, attracting more interest." Has AI changed the reasons we write? The Phi Beta Kappa magazine is left to consider the possibility that "power over a superintelligent beast and resurrection are nothing to sneeze at" — before offering another thought.

"The most depressing reason to write for AI is that unlike most humans, AIs still read. They read a lot. They read everything. Whereas, aided by an AI no more advanced than the TikTok algorithm, humans now hardly read anything at all..."

After the Python Software Foundation rejected a $1.5 million grant because it restricted DEI activity, "a flood of new donations followed," according to a new report. By Friday they'd raised over $157,000, including 295 new Supporting Members paying an annual $99 membership fee, says PSF executive director Deb Nicholson.

"It doesn't quite bridge the gap of $1.5 million, but it's incredibly impactful for us, both financially and in terms of feeling this strong groundswell of support from the community." Could that same security project still happen if new funding materializes? The PSF hasn't entirely given up. "The PSF is always looking for new opportunities to fund work benefiting the Python community," Nicholson told me in an email last week, adding pointedly that "we have received some helpful suggestions in response to our announcement that we will be pursuing." And even as things stand, the PSF sees itself as "always developing or implementing the latest technologies for protecting PyPI project maintainers and users from current threats," and it plans to continue with that commitment.
The Python Software Foundation was "astounded and deeply appreciative at the outpouring of solidarity in both words and actions," their executive director wrote in a new blog post this week, saying the show of support "reminds us of the community's strength."

But that post also acknowledges the reality that the Python Software Foundation's yearly revenue and assets (including contributions from major donors) "have declined, and costs have increased,..." Historically, PyCon US has been a source of revenue for the PSF, enabling us to fund programs like our currently paused Grants Program... Unfortunately, PyCon US has run at a loss for three years — and not from a lack of effort from our staff and volunteers! Everyone has been working very hard to find areas where we can trim costs, but even with those efforts, inflation continues to surge, and changing U.S. and economic conditions have reduced our attendance... Because we have so few expense categories (the vast majority of our spending goes to running PyCon US, the Grants Program, and our small 13-member staff), we have limited "levers to pull" when it comes to budgeting and long-term sustainability...
While Python usage continues to surge, "corporate investment back into the language and the community has declined overall. The PSF has longstanding sponsors and partners that we are ever grateful for, but signing on new corporate sponsors has slowed." (They're asking employees at Python-using companies to encourage sponsorships.) We have been seeking out alternate revenue channels to diversify our income, with some success and some challenges. PyPI Organizations offers paid features to companies (PyPI features are always free to community groups) and has begun bringing in monthly income. We've also been seeking out grant opportunities where we find good fits with our mission.... We currently have more than six months of runway (as opposed to our preferred 12 months+ of runway), so the PSF is not at immediate risk of having to make more dramatic changes, but we are on track to face difficult decisions if the situation doesn't shift in the next year.

Based on all of this, the PSF has been making changes and working on multiple fronts to combat losses and work to ensure financial sustainability, in order to continue protecting and serving the community in the long term. Some of these changes and efforts include:

— Pursuing new sponsors, specifically in the AI industry and the security sector
— Increasing sponsorship package pricing to match inflation
— Making adjustments to reduce PyCon US expenses
— Pursuing funding opportunities in the US and Europe
— Working with other organizations to raise awareness
— Strategic planning, to ensure we are maximizing our impact for the community while cultivating mission-aligned revenue channels

The PSF's end-of-year fundraiser effort is usually run by staff based on their capacity, but this year we have assembled a fundraising team that includes Board members to put some more "oomph" behind the campaign. We'll be doing our regular fundraising activities; we'll also be creating a unique webpage, piloting temporary and VERY visible pop-ups to python.org and PyPI.org, and telling more stories from our Grants Program recipients...

Keep your eyes on the PSF Blog, the PSF category on Discuss, and our social media accounts for updates and information as we kick off the fundraiser this month. Your boosts of our posts and your personal shares of "why I support the PSF" stories will make all the difference in our end-of-year fundraiser. If this post has you all fired up to personally support the future of Python and the PSF right now, we always welcome new PSF Supporting Members and donations.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC: Neurodiverse professionals may see unique benefits from artificial intelligence tools and agents, research suggests. With AI agent creation booming in 2025, people with conditions like ADHD, autism, dyslexia and more report a more level playing field in the workplace thanks to generative AI. A recent study from the UK's Department for Business and Trade found that neurodiverse workers were 25% more satisfied with AI assistants and were more likely to recommend the tool than neurotypical respondents. [The study involved 1,000 users of Microsoft 365 Copilot from October through December of 2024.]

"Standing up and walking around during a meeting means that I'm not taking notes, but now AI can come in and synthesize the entire meeting into a transcript and pick out the top-level themes," said Tara DeZao, senior director of product marketing at enterprise low-code platform provider Pega. DeZao, who was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, has combination-type ADHD, which includes both inattentive symptoms (time management and executive function issues) and hyperactive symptoms (increased movement). "I've white-knuckled my way through the business world," DeZao said. "But these tools help so much...."

Generative AI happens to be particularly adept at skills like communication, time management and executive functioning, creating a built-in benefit for neurodiverse workers who've previously had to find ways to fit in among a work culture not built with them in mind. Because of the skills that neurodiverse individuals can bring to the workplace — hyperfocus, creativity, empathy and niche expertise, just to name a few — some research suggests that organizations prioritizing inclusivity in this space generate nearly one-fifth higher revenue. "Investing in ethical guardrails, like those that protect and aid neurodivergent workers, is not just the right thing to do," said Kristi Boyd, an AI specialist with the SAS data ethics practice. "It's a smart way to make good on your organization's AI investments."

The new series from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, Pluribus, was emphatically made by humans, not AI, reports TechCrunch: If you watched all the way to the end of the new Apple TV show "Pluribus," you may have noticed an unusual disclaimer in the credits: "This show was made by humans." That terse message — placed right below a note that "animal wranglers were on set to ensure animal safety" — could potentially provide a model for other filmmakers seeking to highlight that their work was made without the use of generative AI.
In fact, yesterday the former X-Files writer told Variety "I hate AI. AI is the world's most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine...." He goes on, about how AI-generated content is "like a cow chewing its cud — an endlessly regurgitated loop of nonsense," and how the U.S. will fail to regulate the technology because of an arms race with China. He works himself up until he's laughing again, proclaiming: "Thank you, Silicon Valley! Yet again, you've fucked up the world."
He also says "there's a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horseshit," according to the article. "It's basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world's first trillionaires. I think they're selling a bag of vapor."

And earlier this week he told Polygon that he hasn't used ChatGPT "because, as of yet, no one has held a shotgun to my head and made me do it." (Adding "I will never use it.")

Time magazine called Thursday's two-episode premiere "bonkers." Though ironically, that premiere hit its own dystopian glitch. "After months of buildup and an omnipresent advertising campaign, Apple's much-anticipated new show Pluribus made its debut..." reports Macworld. "And the service promptly suffered a major outage across the U.S. and Canada." As reported by Bloomberg and others, users started to report that the service had crashed at around 10:30 p.m. ET, shortly after Apple made the first two episodes of the show available to stream. There were almost 13,000 reports on Downdetector before Apple acknowledged the problem on its System Status page. Reports say the outage was brief, lasting less than an hour...

[T]here remains a Resolved Outage note on Apple TV (simply saying "Some users were affected; users experienced a problem with Apple TV" between 10:29 and 11.38 p.m.), as well as on Apple Music and Apple Arcade, which also went down at the same time. Social media reports indicated that the outage was widespread.

The Associated Press reports that "For the past decade, Dr. Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have focused part of their philanthropy on a lofty goal — 'to cure, prevent or manage all disease' — if not in their lifetime, then in their children's."

During that decade they also funded other initiatives (including underprivileged schools and immigration reform), according to the article. But there's a change coming: Now, the billionaire couple is shifting the bulk of their philanthropic resources to Biohub, the pair's science organization, and focusing on using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific discovery. The idea is to develop virtual, AI-based cell models to understand how they work in the human body, study inflammation and use AI to "harness the immune system" for disease detection, prevention and treatment. "I feel like the science work that we've done, the Biohub model in particular, has been the most impactful thing that we have done. So we want to really double down on that. Biohub is going to be the main focus of our philanthropy going forward," Zuckerberg said Wednesday evening at an event at the Biohub Imaging Institute in Redwood City, California.... Chan and Zuckerberg have pledged 99% of their lifetime wealth — from shares of Meta Platforms, where Zuckerberg is CEO — toward these efforts...

On Thursday, Chan and Zuckerberg also announced that Biohub has hired the team at EvolutionaryScale, an AI research lab that has created large-scale AI systems for the life sciences... Biohub's ambition for the next years and decades is to create virtual cell systems that would not have been possible without recent advances in AI. Similar to how large language models learn from vast databases of digital books, online writings and other media, its researchers and scientists are working toward building virtual systems that serve as digital representations of human physiology on all levels, such as molecular, cellular or genome. As it is open source — free and publicly available — scientists can then conduct virtual experiments on a scale not possible in physical laboratories.
"We will continue the model we've pioneered of bringing together scientists and engineers in our own state-of-the-art labs to build tools that advance the field," according to Thursday's blog post. "We'll then use those tools to generate new data sets for training new biological AI models to create virtual cells and immune systems and engineer our cells to detect and treat disease....

"We have also established the first large-scale GPU cluster for biological research, as well as the largest datasets around human cell types. This collection of resources does not exist anywhere else."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Facebook Dating, which debuted in 2019, has become a surprise hit for the company. It lets people create a dating profile free in the app, where they can swipe and match with other eligible singles. It has more than 21 million daily users, quietly making it one of the most popular online dating services. Hinge, a leading dating app in the United States, has around 15 million users. "Underlying it all is that there are real people on Facebook," Tom Alison, the head of Facebook, said in an interview. "You can see who they are, you can see how you're connected to them, and if you have mutual friends, we make it easy to see where you have mutual interests."

Facebook Dating's popularity is a sign of how Facebook has been reinventing itself. One of the early social networks, its main social feed has become less popular over time than younger apps like Instagram and TikTok. But along with Facebook Marketplace, where people look for deals on things like couches and used cars, Facebook Dating shows how an older social network can remain relevant. "When you look at Gen Z usage on Facebook, they aren't using the social media feed," said Mike Proulx, a research director at Forrester VP, a research firm. "What's bringing them back to the platform is Marketplace, Messenger, Dating."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Denmark's government on Friday announced an agreement to ban access to social media for anyone under 15, ratcheting up pressure on Big Tech platforms as concerns grow that kids are getting too swept up in a digitized world of harmful content and commercial interests. The move would give some parents -- after a specific assessment -- the right to let their children access social media from age 13.

It wasn't immediately clear how such a ban would be enforced: Many tech platforms already restrict pre-teens from signing up. Officials and experts say such restrictions don't always work. Such a measure would be among the most sweeping steps yet by a European Union government to limit use of social media among teens and younger children, which has drawn concerns in many parts of an increasingly online world. "We've given the tech giants so many chances to stand up and to do something about what is happening on their platforms. They haven't done it," said Caroline Stage, Denmark's minister for digital affairs. "So now we will take over the steering wheel and make sure that our children's futures are safe."

"I can assure you that Denmark will hurry, but we won't do it too quickly because we need to make sure that the regulation is right and that there is no loopholes for the tech giants to go through," Stage said.

Rockstar Games has announced that Grand Theft Auto VI won't launch in May of next year as planned. Kotaku: The highly anticipated sequel is now set to arrive in November 2026. On Thursday, Rockstar announced on social media that the long-awaited next entry in its open-world blockbuster franchise would need a bit more time, delaying the game an additional six months from May to November 19, 2026. Rockstar said "these extra months will allow us to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve."

A new Activate Consulting report reveals that 43% of Gen Z now prefer YouTube and TikTok over traditional TV or paid streaming. With global media revenues surging and traditional TV viewership collapsing, the average person now spends over 13 hours a day consuming content across platforms, effectively living a "32-hour day" through multitasking. Variety reports: Per the same survey, the popularity of "microdramas" -- one of the latest trends on those platforms, consisting of 1-2 minute scripted episodes of an ongoing storyline -- has been increasing at a fast rate with 28 million U.S. adults (52% aged 18-34) reportedly watching that new form of content.

Additional findings include projections for global internet and media revenue to increase by $388 billion by 2029, while average daily time spent streaming video will climb to 4 hours and 8 minutes as time spent watching traditional TV is set to collapse to just 1 hour and 17 minutes. Activate estimates that, as a result, streaming revenues (from ads and subscriptions) will grow 18-19% annually while traditional TV revenues will fall 4-6% year to year.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Kodak quietly acknowledged this week that it will begin selling two famous types of film stock -- Kodak Gold 200 and Kodak Ultramax 400 -- directly to retailers and distributors in the U.S., another indication that the historic company is taking back control over how people buy its film.

The release comes on the heels of Kodak announcing that it would make and sell two new stocks of film called Kodacolor 100 and Kodacolor 200 in October. On Monday, both Kodak Gold and Kodak Ultramax showed back up on Kodak's website as film stocks that it makes and sells. When asked by 404 Media, a company spokesperson said that it has "launched" these film stocks and will begin to "sell the films directly to distributors in the U.S. and Canada, giving Kodak greater control over our participation in the consumer film market."