If you missed our second live, subscriber-only Q&A with WIREDs AI columnist Reece Rogers, you can watch the replay here.

In our final episode of WIRED Politics Lab, we make some predictions about the next four years with Donald Trump back in the White House.

The artificial intelligence start-up argues that Mr. Musk is trying to hamstring its business as he builds a rival company.

The chief executive of Apple is the latest in a series of technology executives who are traveling to Florida to meet with the president-elect.

MacworldBack in the day, I had one computer. It was a laptop bought for me by my employer, and at work, Id attach it to an external display and use it at my desk. At the end of the day, Id close it up, put it in my backpack, and take it home.For the last 10 years, Ive worked at a desk at home, with a desktop Mac as my primary computer. But over the last year or so, Ive been using my MacBook Air a lot more, whether Im traveling or spending the winter in a heated room rather than my unheated garage.So whats better, the single-Mac life or being a Mac vagabond? As someone whos been there, and back, and there again, I can tell you that its never been easier to live the two-Mac lifestylebut its also never been a better time to just give the desktop up and learn to love a Mac laptop.The bad old daysIn the days of PowerPC and Intel laptops, living this life was rough. Just running a Mac laptop in lid-closed mode, attached to an external display, was fraught with bugs. Today, most Macs are laptops, but for a good many years, the laptop was an oddball and the desktop was the real Mac. As a result, laptop bugs abounded, especially if you wanted to do something as outlandish as plug your laptop into an external display and close the lid.All Macs now let you use an iPad as a second display. But there was a time when simply running any external display on a MacBook was an adventure in troubleshooting.Willis Lai/IDGWhat Im saying is, there was a lot of unplugging and replugging, opening the lid and closing the lid, and the like, in order to cajole the computer into properly displaying on that external screen. Things got better over time, but it was never perfect.Worse, though, were the sleep issues. When the Mac went to sleep while attached to an external display, sometimes it wouldnt come back without helpor with a forced reboot. On many, many days, Id unplug my laptop, pop it into my backpack, take an hourlong ride on a bus back home, and remove the laptoponly to find the inside of my backpack blazing hot because my MacBook hadnt gone to sleep after all.Keeping in syncStill, the plan when I started working for myself, in my garage, was to use my beloved MacBook Air and plug it into a big display. That plan didnt survive the release of the 5K iMac, and so began my years-long sojourn as a person who used a desktop at my desk, but a laptop everywhere else.I hadnt lived like this for years, and things really had gotten much better for multiple Mac users in the intervening time. The existence of cloud services such as iCloud and Dropbox has really made things so much easier. These days I keep most of my working files in Dropbox, but I also sync my Desktop and Documents folders via iCloud. The iCloud part is sometimes a bit wonky, but its so nice to be able to put a folder on my Desktop in my office and then open my laptop and see that the same file is on the Desktop there, too. (And, of course, all those files are also accessible on my iPhone and iPad. Nice!)When I recently had to wipe my Mac Studios hard drive, I did so with no fear of losing data. Not only do I back up daily via Time Machine and make a clone using Carbon Copy Cloner, but all my vital files are in Dropbox or iCloud. It just wasnt a worry.While the cloud makes life as a user of many Macs easier, it unfortunately also highlights all the ways in which its still hard. While some Mac apps have embraced the cloud as a way to sync settingsBBEdit has let you do it via Dropbox or iCloud for quite a while nowothers only do it in a limited fashion. For example, I can sync my Keyboard Maestro macros and my Hazel automations via the cloud, but only after delving into their settings and enabling some specific cloud-sync features.And thats the apps that acknowledge the existence of the cloud. Other apps just dont. Once I set Keyboard Maestro to sync using iCloud, I discovered that all my podcast-related automations crashed hard against Audio Hijacks inability to sync either its sessions or its scripts across devices. (Its even worse: while you can import and export Audio Hijack sessions, I could only move scripts by diving into my local Application Support folder and copying a property list file to the other computer.) My Stream Deck settings also dont sync, though at least they can be imported and exported. At least Shortcuts sync via iCloudmore or less. (There are occasional reliability issues, but Ive found that it mostly works.)Plenty of system-level stuff is also just not consistent. I use the app SwiftBar to put ambient data in my menu bar, mostly from a bunch of Python scripts. SwiftBar is happy to use a bunch of plug-ins from Dropbox or iCloud, which is great! But keeping the version of Python on both systems in sync, at compatible paths, with compatible modules installed, is an ongoing challenge. I recently got a Hazel sync working again via its settings-sync features, only to discover that my scripts were failing because the connected Python script was in an unsynced directory, and therefore my fixes on one computer never moved to the other one.An M4 Max MacBook Pro offers workstation-like performance in a portable and light package.FoundryThe big picture is that my files are in the cloud, and thats awesome. The details, though, are frustrating. Every time I go several days without using either computer, I find Im spending time getting things back up to current while also waiting for Apples push notification server to alert me about everything thats already been dealt with on other devices.So I decided maybe it was time to stop the madness.Things got betterThe release of the M4 Macs this fall really made me consider my options. While I decided that an M4 Pro Mac mini wouldnt be enough of an upgrade over my M1 Max Mac studio, I started to wonder: What about an M4 Max MacBook Pro?After all, Apples newest laptops would be a quantum leap in performance over my formerly amazing desktop Mac. (Gone are the days when using a laptop requires a serious drop in performance.) And if I commit to the laptop lifestyle, I dont need to worry about syncing all those miscellaneous directories and app settings because everywhere I go, Ill be using the same Mac!Still: The fear of the bad old days. But being a laptop user in the era of Apple silicon is so much better than it was in the Intel years. Desktop Macs are awesome, but theyre also outliers. The vast majority of Macs in use are laptops. And in this era, Mac hardware and macOS itself are almost entirely focused on the laptop experience.My personal experience backs this up. Id guess that in the last year, Ive spent more time using my MacBook Air running in lid-closed mode attached to a Studio Display than Ive used it as an actual laptop. And the experience has been great. Ive noticed almost none of the weirdnesses that used to plague me. I am still blown away by the fact that when you plug in an external display, it just turns on. Theres no weird blinking and flashing as everything resets and composes itself like there used to be. It really does just work.Peripherals have come a long way, too. Thunderbolt and USB-C docks make it much easier to create docking stations for laptops. In the bedroom I use as an office in the winter, Ive got a Studio display with a USB-C dock attached to one of its ports, allowing me to chain off a microphone, keyboard, trackpad, and Stream Deck. Connecting to this setup requires a single Thunderbolt cable, which provides power and streams out data. Its fantastic.Off I goAfter much fretting, I decided that I needed to admit to myself that the right decision was for me to become a one-Mac person again. And that means that a laptop is the right decision for me.Later this month, my M4 Max MacBook Pro will arrive, and Ill begin the migration. Sure, Ill probably need to invest in some more docks and cables in order to convert my Mac Studio desk into a MacBook Pro-friendly model. But Ill also be down to a single computer that I can use anywhere, including when I travel. (I dont love the extra weight the MacBook Pro has over the MacBook Air, but Im willing to shoulder the burdenliterally. And my daughter will finally be able to replace her Intel Air with something better.)Ten years as a desktop Mac user was a lot of fun. I had an iMac, iMac Pro, and Mac Studio, and I enjoyed them all. But like almost everyone else, Ive found the pull of the laptop too strong to avoid. Even when sitting at a desk staring at a big monitor, the MacBook Pro seems like the right choice.

MacworldAlways knowing where your keys are or where your checked-in bag is when youre at the airport is pretty fantastic, and the tiny Apple AirTag is super useful. Well, if you need a handful of AirTags right now, you can get a four-pack for $73 at Amazon, a savings of $43 off Apples $29 price for a single AirTag or just $18.25 per tracker.These tiny devices look great, and theyre super easy to set up with your iPhone or iPad. Once theyre connected to your devices, you can easily use the Find My app to pinpoint their exact location. During those hectic mornings when you cant find your keys, you can just launch the app on your phone and make the AirTag play a sound so theyre easier to locate, cutting down minutes of panic searching the house.Even when the AirTag is out of range, the device will simply ping off of nearby Apple devices, helping you locate it as precisely as possible. If you lose something with an AirTag, you can just set it to Lost Mode from the app, and anyone who finds it can contact you.In our review of the AirTag, we appreciated the small design, the fact that it has a removable battery, and its tremendous versatility with the Find My network. No matter who youre getting them for, there are tons of good uses for AirTags, and getting four of them for $73 is a total steal.Get 4 AirTags for just $18.25 eachBuy now at Amazon

Microsoft released 74 updates in its December Patch Tuesday update, with patches for Windows, Office and Edge but none for Microsoft Exchange Server or SQL server. One zero-day (CVE-2024-49138) affecting how Windows desktops handle error logs requires a Patch Now warning, but the Office, Visual Studio and Edge patches can be added to your standard release schedule. There are also several revisions this month that require attention before deployment, including two (CVE-2023-36435andCVE-2023-38171) that will need extensive testing.TheReadiness teamhas provided thisinfographicoutlining the risks associated with each of the updates this cycle.(More information about the previous six months of Patch Tuesday releases is available here.)Known issuesOther than theRoblox issue, Microsoft has published a reduced set of known issues for December:There have been reports that the OpenSSH (Open Secure Shell) service fails to start, preventing SSH connections. The service fails with no detailed logging, and manual intervention is required to run the sshd.exe process. Microsoft has offeredseveral mitigationoptions for those still affected.For those still on Windows Server 2008 you might receive warnings that Windows Update failed to complete successfully. Microsoft is working on this issue and expects a fix to be released soon. Many users will now have to move to the second stage of Extended Support Updates) or ESU.Major revisionsFor the final Patch Tuesday in 2024, there are these revisions to previously released updates:CVE-2023-36435andCVE-2023-38171: Microsoft QUIC Denial of Service Vulnerability. This is the third update to this two-year-old series of patches to the Microsoft .NET platform. Rather than a strictly information update, these patches will need to be added to your December release schedule.CVE-2024-49112: Windows Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability. This is a release for this months update. This does not happen often, as this patch was only released 24 hours ago. (In fact, due to an error in the documentation, this patch was duplicated in the release notes as well.)CVE-2023-44487: HTTP/2 Rapid Reset Attack. The update relates to a change in affected software meaning all recent supported versions of Microsoft .NET and Visual Studio are included in the scope of the patch. Add this to your development update release schedule for the month.CVE-2024-43451: NTLM Hash Disclosure Spoofing Vulnerability. This late edition revision has been widely reported in thenewsas it affects older versions of Windows Server (2008 and 2012) and has received somegenerous technical supportfrom outside Microsoft.This is an unusual month for revisions, with several patches from 2023 updated in the final months of 2024, with increased scopes and associated testing requirements. The Readiness team advises extra caution addressing bothCVE-2023-36435andCVE-2023-38171.Windows lifecycle and enforcement updatesThere were no product or security enforcements for this update cycle. However,Microsoft has noted that:There wont be a non-security preview release for the month of December 2024. There will be a monthly security release for December 2024. Normal monthly servicing for both security and non-security preview releases will resume in January 2025.Each month, we analyze the latest Patch Tuesday updates from Microsoft and provide detailed, actionable testing guidance based on a large application portfolio and a detailed analysis of the patches and their potential impact on the Windows platforms and application installations.For this cycle, we have grouped the critical updates and required testing efforts into different functional areas including:Networking and Remote Desktop ServicesThis months update addresses key components of Microsofts Remote Desktop Services with the following testing guidance:Test RDP connections over the Microsoft Remote DesktopGateway.Try RPC over HTTP/HTTPS pathways while validating Remote Desktopbrokerfeatures.Test out DNSsigning keyoperations forRRASenvironments.Validate WAN port operations (trynetshcommands).Local Windows File System and StorageMinor changes to the Windows desktop file system will require a test of the ReFS system (lightCRUDtesting required). Due to changes in how Windows handles non-English characters, a test of Input Method Editors (IMEs) is required for Japanese formats.Virtual Machines and Microsoft Hyper-VA minor update to a key virtualization driver will require some traffic testing andmonitoringfor Microsofts Hyper-V and virtualization platforms.While these recent updates are generally low-profile patches to Windows subsystems, we feel that the primary testing this month should focus on validating remote network traffic. The file system and Hyper-V changes require light testing. The goal for most enterprises is to get these Microsoft updates deployed before change control lock-down arrives.Each month, we break down the update cycle into product families (as defined by Microsoft) with the following basic groupings:Browsers (Microsoft IE and Edge)Microsoft Windows (both desktop and server)Microsoft OfficeMicrosoft Exchange ServerMicrosoft development platforms (ASP.NETCore, .NET Core and Chakra Core)Adobe (if you get this far)BrowsersThere were just two minor updates for Microsoft Edge this month, withCVE-2024-12053andCVE-2024-49041both rated as important. Add these low-profile changes to your standard release schedule.WindowsThough there is a strong focus on networking, this release also affects the following Windows features:Windows Remote Desktop and related routing serversWindows Kernel and Kernel Mode DriversPrintingMicrosoft Hyper-VMicrosoftLDAPandLSASSWindows Error ReportingUnfortunately, there is a zero-day (CVE-2024-49138) that has been reported as publicly disclosed and exploited in the wild that affects how Windows creates error log files. Add these Windows updates your Patch Now cycle.Microsoft OfficeMicrosoft released nine patches to Office, all rated important. In addition, the companyoffered some additional security measures and mitigations to the platform with the release of the advisoryADV240002, which covers the following areas:Perimeter DefenseNetwork SecurityEndpoint ProtectionApplication SecurityThis months update affects Microsoft Excel, SharePoint and core Microsoft Office libraries. Add these patches to your standard Office release schedule.Microsoft SQL (nee Exchange) ServerThere were no updates for either Microsoft SQL or Exchange server.Microsoft development platformsMicrosoft released a single update to the experimental AI music projectMuzicwithCVE-2024-49063. Well take this as a win with no further updates to Microsoft .NET or Visual Studio.Adobe Reader (and other third-party updates)Adobe has released a completely normal, run-of-the millupdateto both Reader and Acrobat (Adobe Release notes). This is good news. This update has not been included in the Microsoft release cycle, which is as it should be. Adding to the huge, globally shared sense of relief, Adobe has chosen to modify its patching methodology to fall in line with industry best practices. Long-suffering IT admins have had to create (and maintain) process workflow exceptions to handle Adobe updates, usually with complex PowerShell scripts. No longer!Thank you, Adobe; there is no greater gift than a few less things to do (repeatedly).For those readers who have enjoyed delving into the deeper details of all things patching, the Readiness team would like to say, Thank you for the time and attention and we look forward to the New Year.No surprises, right?

TheMacys accounting nightmareis only getting worse, with the $24 billion retailer telling the SEC on Wednesday that both its annual report from last year and its auditor report should no longer be relied on.Although the amount hidden was only $151 million at the high end of Macys original estimate of $132 million to $154 million the retailer said it exposed a massive weakness in its checks and balances procedures.Macys did not get specific about the nature of the flaws, but the problem seems to be that the software charged with monitoring financial transactions was never designed to catch accountants doing what they do best: categorizing numbers in ways designed to make the companys performance look better than it is.Such software is typically designed to catch true fraud, such as an employee exfiltrating money out of an enterprise into bank accounts they control, or payments to fraudulent contractors or even simple math errors. Apparently, the Macys system had weak safeguards that were easily sidestepped. Accounting officials say these same technology deficits likely exist in every enterprise.Macys management identified a material weakness in its internal control over financial reporting related to the design of existing internal control activities involving manual journal entries over delivery expenses and certain other non-merchandise expenses, and the reconciliation of the related accrued liabilities, the SEC filing said. The Company identified that a single employee, who is no longer with the Company, intentionally made erroneous accounting entries and falsified underlying documentation, to understate delivery expenses from the fourth quarter of 2021 through the third quarter of 2024.When Macys first reported the incident, it used the word hidden and made no reference to falsified underlying documentation. Those are big clues about what likely happened.The material weakness was the result of deficiencies in the design of controls over delivery expense and certain other non-merchandise expenses, and the related accrued liabilities, whereby the design of the controls did not consider the potential for employee circumvention of these controls, the company said in its filing, adding there were failures to obtain, or generate and use, relevant, quality information to support the functioning of these controls, including validation of the reliability of the information.Heres the key youve got to be kidding point: The design of the controls did not consider the potential for employee circumvention of these controls.Really? The designers for an accounting system managing $24 billion in cash flow never considered that somebody might try to circumvent controls? Like perhaps someone engaged in naughtiness?The filing also showed some seeming contradictions. It stressed, for example, that this problem was done by just one employee as though thats a good thing. Imagine a Pentagon official explaining how 40 nuclear warheads were stolen and said, I know this sounds bad, but this wasnt done by a squadron on enemy fighters. This theft was just done by one guy, so all is fine.Macys also tried to say that this was not that big a deal. The Company evaluated the errors and determined that the related impact was not material to results of operations or financial position for any historical annual or interim period.But by the end of the filing, Macys attorneys used a lot of words to essentially say this actually was a big deal.As a result of the material weakness in the Companys internal control over financial reporting described above, on December 10, 2024 the Audit Committee of the Board of the Company determined, based on the recommendation of management following its consultation with the Companys independent registered public accounting firm KPMG LLP, that managements report on internal control over financial reporting as of February 3, 2024should no longer be relied upon. Additionally, KPMG LLPs opinion as to the effectiveness of the Companys internal control over financial reporting as of February 3, 2024 included within the Report of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm in the Companys Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended February 3, 2024,should no longer be relied upon.In accounting speak, declaring that their financials are not to be trusted is admitting that this is a big deal. Why? Given the lack of meaningful controls and strong safeguards in this one business unit, there is every reason to believe that the same lack of safeguards exist elsewhere in the company andaccording to accountants, in just about every enterprise.Stefan van Duyvendijk, an industry principal with accounting software vendor FloQast, reviewed Macys filing and said that the retailer is trying to distract people by implying that the small package delivery unit is the only place where Macys has this weakness.This happened because that small package area was likely deemed low-risk, van Duyvendijk said, but Macys reviews over journal entries are the same across the company.That means Macys likely knows that other similar issues could easily crop up andthatis what is tainting all of their reported financials and audits.The lone employee apparently reported that the small package unit owed less than it really did. ERP is incapable of catching something like this, van Duyvendijk said.For other enterprises, this glaring hole in controls could be worse. The Macys problem appears so far to be one employee manipulating numbers to make the department look better.It wasnt outright fraud or theft. But thats merely because the employee didnt try to steal. But the same lax safeguards that allowed expense dollars to be underreported could have just as easily allowed actual theft.What will happen when someone actually has motivation to commit fraud? They could have just as easily kept the $150 million, van Duyvendijk said. They easily could have committed mass fraud without this company knowing. (Macys) people are not reviewing manual journals very carefully.Another accounting specialist,JR Kunkle, an auditor andGRCspecialist who runs his own consulting firm, Kunkle Consulting, agreed that the ERP and accounting systems used today cant prevent accounting fraud in the way they should.If an individual is hellbent, he can change codes in the software. (Management) is going to rely on the accountant to setup the accruals, Kunkle said. Any kind of accounting entry requires judgment. And todays business software systems are incapable of reviewing and managing human judgment.Once you get inside (the accounting decision process) and there is a judgment factor, ERP can give you data about it, saying that its a shipping expense, but I dont think systems in general can figure out what an accountant should enter, Kunkle said. I dont know that you can automate that.Another financial specialist, Emburse CFO Adriana Carpenter, said that the software problem exists, but thereareaccounting tactics that can minimize exposure.Its true that most ERPs are not designed to catch erroneous accounting, she said. However, there are software tools that allow CFOs and CAOs to create more robust controls around accounting processes and to ensure the expenses get booked to the correct P&L designation. Initiating, approving, recording transactions, and reconciling balances are each steps that should be handled by a separate member of the team. There are software tools that can assist with this process, such as those that enable use of AI analytics to assess actual spend and compare that spend to your reported expenses. Some such tools use AI to look for overriding journal entries that reverse expense items and move those expenses to a balance sheet account.The specific problem Macys is struggling with could be minimized for others, she said. For example, someone bypassing safeguards can eventually be detected.In the event of management overriding accounting controls, leveraging the spend data on an end-to-end spend management platform and using AI analytics can identify this type of override by automatically comparing total spend to your P&L and identifying discrepancies, Carpenter said. In the case of this Macys accounting error, AI analytics would have identified differences in total payments versus the expense that was being reported.The ultimate problem here involves enterprise CIOs and their teams who trust software controls too much. Trusting software to religiously do what it is supposed to do is asking for trouble. Trusting that software to do what it was never designed to do? That is justdemandingtrouble.

Its no secret that the current AI boom is using up immense amounts of energy. Now we have a better idea of how much.A new paper, from a team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, examined 2,132 data centers operating in the United States (78% of all facilities in the country). These facilitiesessentially buildings filled to the brim with rows of serversare where AI models get trained, and they also get pinged every time we send a request through models like ChatGPT. They require huge amounts of energy both to power the servers and to keep them cool.Since 2018, carbon emissions from data centers in the US have tripled. For the 12 months ending August 2024, data centers were responsible for 105 million metric tons of CO2, accounting for 2.18% of national emissions (for comparison, domestic commercial airlines are responsible for about 131 million metric tons). About 4.59% of all the energy used in the US goes toward data centers, a figure thats doubled since 2018.Its difficult to put a number on how much AI in particular, which has been booming since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, is responsible for this surge. Thats because data centers process lots of different types of datain addition to training or pinging AI models, they do everything from hosting websites to storing your photos in the cloud. However, the researchers say, AIs share is certainly growing rapidly as nearly every segment of the economy attempts to adopt the technology.Its a pretty big surge, says Eric Gimon, a senior fellow at the think tank Energy Innovation, who was not involved in the research. Theres a lot of breathless analysis about how quickly this exponential growth could go. But its still early days for the business in terms of figuring out efficiencies, or different kinds of chips.Notably, the sources for all this power are particularly dirty. Since so many data centers are located in coal-producing regions, like Virginia, the carbon intensity of the energy they use is 48% higher than the national average. The paper, which was published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that 95% of data centers in the US are built in places with sources of electricity that are dirtier than the national average.There are causes other than simply being located in coal country, says Falco Bargagli-Stoffi, an author of the paper. Dirtier energy is available throughout the entire day, he says, and plenty of data centers require that to maintain peak operation 24-7. Renewable energy, like wind or solar, might not be as available. Political or tax incentives, and local pushback, can also affect where data centers get built.One key shift in AI right now means that the fields emissions are soon likely to skyrocket. AI models are rapidly moving from fairly simple text generators like ChatGPT toward highly complex image, video, and music generators. Until now, many of these multimodal models have been stuck in the research phase, but thats changing.OpenAI released its video generation model Sora to the public on December 9, and its website has been so flooded with traffic from people eager to test it out that it is still not functioning properly. Competing models, like Veo from Google and Movie Gen from Meta, have still not been released publicly, but if those companies follow OpenAIs lead as they have in the past, they might be soon. Music generation models from Suno and Udio are growing (despite lawsuits), and Nvidia released its own audio generator last month. Google is working on its Astra project, which will be a video-AI companion that can converse with you about your surroundings in real time.As we scale up to images and video, the data sizes increase exponentially, says Gianluca Guidi, a PhD student in artificial intelligence at University of Pisa and IMT Lucca, who is the papers lead author. Combine that with wider adoption, he says, and emissions will soon jump.One of the goals of the researchers was to build a more reliable way to get snapshots of just how much energy data centers are using. Thats been a more complicated task than you might expect, given that the data is dispersed across a number of sources and agencies. Theyve now built a portal that shows data center emissions across the country. The long-term goal of the data pipeline is to inform future regulatory efforts to curb emissions from data centers, which are predicted to grow enormously in the coming years.Theres going to be increased pressure, between the environmental and sustainability-conscious community and Big Tech, says Francesca Dominici, director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative and another coauthor. But my prediction is that there is not going to be regulation. Not in the next four years.

This is todays edition ofThe Download,our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of whats going on in the world of technology.How Silicon Valley is disrupting democracyThe internet loves a good neologism, especially if it can capture a purported vibe shift or explain a new trend. In 2013, the columnist Adrian Wooldridge coined a word that eventually did both. Writing for the Economist, he warned of the coming techlash, a revolt against Silicon Valleys rich and powerful fueled by the publics growing realization that these sovereigns of cyberspace werent the benevolent bright-future bringers they claimed to be.While Wooldridge didnt say precisely when this techlash would arrive, its clear today that a dramatic shift in public opinion toward Big Tech and its leaders did in fact happenand is arguably still happening.Two new books serve as excellent reminders of why it started in the first place. Together, they chronicle the rise of an industry that is increasingly using its unprecedented wealth and power to undermine democracy, and they outline what we can do to start taking some of that power back. Read the full story.Bryan GardinerThis story is from the forthcoming magazine edition of MIT Technology Review, set to go live on January 6its all about the exciting breakthroughs happening in the world right now. If you dont already, subscribe to receive a copy.The must-readsIve combed the internet to find you todays most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.1 Google has unveiled a new headset and smart glasses OSAndroid XR gives wearers hands-free control thanks to the firms Gemini chatbot. (The Verge)+ It also revealed a new Samsung-build headset called Project Moohan. (WP $)+ Googles hoping to learn from mistakes it made with Google Glass a decade ago. (Wired $)+ Its new Project Astra could be generative AIs killer app. (MIT Technology Review)2 The US and UK are on a AI regulation collision courseDonald Trumps approach to policing AI is in stark contrast to what the UK is planning. (FT $)+ The new US FTC chair favors a light regulatory touch. (Reuters)+ Hows AI self-regulation going? (MIT Technology Review)3 We dont quite know whats causing a global temperature spikeBut scientists agree that we should be worried. (New Yorker $)+ The average global temperature could drop slightly next year, though. (New Scientist $)+ Whos to blame for climate change? Its surprisingly complicated. (MIT Technology Review)4 Trumps administration is filling up with tech insidersMore venture capitalists and officials are likely to join their ranks. (The Information $)+ These crypto kingpins will be keeping a close eye on proceedings. (FT $)5 What happened after West Virginia revoked access to obesity drugsTeachers and state workers struggled after a pilot drugs program was deemed too expensive. (The Atlantic $)+ Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? (MIT Technology Review)6 Would you buy a car from Amazon?The e-retail giant wants you to sidestep the dealership and purchase from it directly. (Wired $)+ While its limited to Hyundai models, other manufacturers will follow. (Forbes $)7 Silicon Valleys perks culture is largely deadNo more free massages or artisanal chocolate, sob. (NYT $)8 AI is teaching us more about the Berlin Walls muralsFrom the kinds of paint used, to application techniques. (Ars Technica)9 For $69, you can invest in a rare stegosaurus skeletonThe rare fossil is a pretty extreme example of an alternative investment. (Fast Company $)+ New Yorkers can swing by the American Museum of Natural History to see it. (AP News)10 This New Jersey politician faked his Spotify WrappedTo hide his childrens results and make him appear a bigger Bruce Springsteen fan. (Billboard $)+ What would The Boss himself make of the controversy? (WP $)Quote of the dayIt could be far worse than any challenge weve previously encountered and far beyond our capacity to mitigate.Jack Szostak, a professor in the University of Chicagos chemistry department, tells the Financial Times about the unprecedented danger posed by synthetic bacteria.The big storyA brief, weird history of brainwashingApril 2024On a spring day in 1959, war correspondent Edward Hunter testified before a US Senate subcommittee investigating the effect of Red China Communes on the United States.Hunter introduced them to a supposedly scientific system for changing peoples minds, even making them love things they once hated.Much of it was baseless, but Hunters sensational tales still became an important part of the disinformation that fueled a mind-control race, with the US government pumping millions of dollars into research on brain manipulation during the Cold War.But while the science never exactly panned out, residual beliefs fostered by this bizarre conflict continue to play a role in ideological and scientific debates to this day. Read the full story.Annalee NewitzWe can still have nice thingsA place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet em at me.)+ Deep down in the depths of the Atacama Trench, a new crustacean has been discovered.+ Living in this picturesque Antarctic settlement comes with a catchyou have to have your appendix removed before you can move in.+ Just when you thought sweet potato couldnt get any better, it turns out it makes pretty tasty macaroons.+ If youre looking to introduce kids to the joy of sci-fi, these movies are a great place to start.