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The new owners aim to launch May 1.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Burger King is launching an AI chatbot that will live in the headsets used by employees. The voice-enabled chatbot, called "Patty," is part of an overarching BK Assistant platform that will not only assist employees with meal preparation but also evaluate their interactions with customers for "friendliness." Thibault Roux, Burger King's chief digital officer, tells The Verge that the company compiled information from franchisees and guests on how to measure friendliness, resulting in the fast food chain training its AI system to recognize certain words and phrases, such as "welcome to Burger King," "please," and "thank you." Managers can then ask the AI assistant how their location is performing on friendliness. "This is all meant to be a coaching tool," Roux says, adding that the company is "iterating" on capturing the tone of conversations as well.

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The initiative covers the Google AI Professional Certificate, a seven-part online program covering AI for brainstorming, research, writing, content creation and app building.

HBO Max will be cracking down on password sharing around the world. From a report: The streamer first started cracking down on password sharing in the United States late last August. Subscribers are now able to add an additional out-of-household account for $7.99 a month. Before that August change, Warner Bros. Discovery had been testing for months to determine who may or may not be a "legitimate user," as CEO and President for Warner Bros. Discovery Global Streaming and Games JB Perrette described the plan. On Thursday during the company's fourth quarter earnings call for 2025, WBD revealed that the streaming limitations would be expanding. This news came as part of an answer about which levers the company plans to pull to grow HBO Max. Password crackdowns have proven to be a lucrative way to both boost revenue and subscriptions. Netflix, for example, saw 9 million more subscribers after its first wave of password crackdowns in 2024. The caveat is that password crackdowns do not lead to consistent growth, and they often infuriate subscribers.

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EBay is cutting about 800 jobs, or 6% of its full-time employees, saying the layoffs are needed to align its workforce with strategic priorities. From a report: "We are taking steps to reinvest across our business and align our structure with our strategic priorities, which will affect certain roles across our workforce," the San Jose, California-based company said early Thursday in a statement. "We are grateful for the contributions of the employees impacted and are committed to supporting them with care and respect." EBay will continue to hire in key areas. The cuts come a week after the company said it would acquire secondhand fashion marketplace Depop for about $1.2 billion in an effort to draw younger shoppers and after it reported robust quarterly results. Revenue increased 15% to $3 billion in the fourth quarter, surpassing analyst estimates.

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From weatherproof jackets and pants to puffers, gloves, and socks, WIRED’s winter sports experts have got you covered.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration? Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn't definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus -- negative net migration -- as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America's own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe. Since the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. hasn't collected comprehensive statistics on the number of citizens leaving. Yet data on residence permits, foreign home purchases, student enrollments and other metrics from more than 50 countries show that Americans are voting with their feet to an unprecedented degree. A millions-strong diaspora is studying, telecommuting and retiring overseas. The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there. In the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon, so many Americans are snapping up apartments that the newest arrivals complain they mostly hear their own language -- not Portuguese. One of every 15 residents in Dublin's trendy Grand Canal Dock district was born in the U.S., according to realtors, higher than the percentage of Americans born in Ireland during the 19th-century influx following the Potato Famine. In Bali, Colombia and Thailand, the strains of housing American remote workers paid in dollars have inspired locals to mount protests against a wave of gentrification. More than 100,000 young students are enrolled abroad for a more affordable university degree. In nursing homes mushrooming across the Mexican border, elderly Americans are turning up for low-cost care. [...] The U.S. experienced net negative migration -- an estimated loss of some 150,000 people -- in 2025, and the outflow will likely increase in 2026, according to calculations by the Brookings Institution, a public-policy think tank. The number could be larger or smaller because official U.S. data doesn't yet fully capture the number of people leaving, Brookings analysts noted. The total in-migration was between around 2.6 and 2.7 million in 2025, down from a peak of almost 6 million in 2023. The U.S. saw 675,000 deportations and 2.2 million "self-deportations" last year, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. A Wall Street Journal analysis of 15 countries providing full or partial 2025 data showed that at least 180,000 Americans joined them -- a number likely to be far higher when other countries report full statistics.

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The portable listening revolution is fully underway. From open earbuds to noise cancelers and wired headphones, I can find a reason to love them all.

Boston's once-thriving robotics sector faces a startup drought, with venture investors struggling to find promising new companies to fund in the state. Here are the largest robotics companies in Massachusetts today.

Information was obtained from participating firm representatives.

Even if you’re incredibly busy, you can maintain your gains by eating the equivalent of the microwavable chicken in The Fifth Element.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A Cloudflare engineer says he has implemented 94% of the Next.js API by directing Anthropic's Claude, spending about $1,100 on tokens. The purpose of the experimental project was not to show off AI coding, but to address an issue with Next.js, the popular React-based framework sponsored by Vercel. According to Cloudflare engineering director Steve Faulkner, the Next.js tooling is "entirely bespoke... If you want to deploy it to Cloudflare, Netlify, or AWS Lambda, you have to take that build output and reshape it into something the target platform can actually run." The Next.js team is addressing this following numerous complaints that deploying the framework with full features on platforms other than Vercel is too difficult, with a feature in progress called deployment adapters. "Vercel will use the same adapter API as every other partner," the company said when introducing the planned feature last year.

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The Trump administration has proposed halting work permits from being issued until a backlog of over 1.4 million asylum applications is eliminated.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some Uber employees have built an AI clone of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi -- internally dubbed "Dara AI" -- and have been using it to rehearse and fine-tune presentations before delivering them to the actual Khosrowshahi, he revealed on a recent podcast. Khosrowshahi said a team member told him that some teams "make the presentation to the Dara AI as a prep for making a presentation to me," and that the bot helps them adjust their slides and sharpen their delivery. Asked by the podcast host whether employees might eventually show Dara AI to the board, Khosrowshahi laughed but noted that AI models still can't process and act on new information the way executives do. "When the models can learn in real-time, that is the point at which I'm going to think that, yeah, we are all replaceable," he said.

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Anthropic last week promoted Claude Code Security, a research preview capability that uses its Claude Opus 4.6 model to hunt for software vulnerabilities, claiming its red team had surfaced over 500 bugs in production open-source codebases -- but security researchers say the real bottleneck was never discovery. Guy Azari, a former security researcher at Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks, told The Register that only two to three of those 500 vulnerabilities have been fixed and none have received CVE assignments. The National Vulnerability Database already carried a backlog of roughly 30,000 CVE entries awaiting analysis in 2025, and nearly two-thirds of reported open-source vulnerabilities lacked an NVD severity score. The curl project closed its bug bounty program because maintainers could no longer handle the flood of poorly crafted reports from AI tools and humans alike. Feross Aboukhadijeh, CEO of security firm Socket, said discovery is becoming dramatically cheaper but validating findings, coordinating with maintainers, and developing architecture-aligned patches remains slow, human-intensive work.

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Kalshi, the prediction market platform regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has for the first time publicly disclosed the results of an insider trading investigation, naming an editor for YouTube's biggest creator as the offender. The company identified Artem Kaptur, an editor for MrBeast, who it says traded around $4,000 on markets tied to the streamer and achieved "near-perfect trading success" on low-odds bets -- a pattern investigators flagged as suspicious. Kalshi froze Kaptur's account before he could withdraw any profits, fined him $20,000, suspended him for two years, and reported the case to the CFTC.

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Demand for Nvidia chips rose even as the company sets out to create AI products of its own.

Demand for Nvidia chips rose even as the company sets out to create AI products of its own.

Tech companies ranging from 300-person startups to giants like Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce have moved beyond encouraging employees to use AI tools and are now actively tracking adoption and, in several cases, tying it to performance reviews. Google is factoring AI use into some software engineer reviews for the first time this year, and Meta's new performance review system will do the same -- it can track how many lines of code an engineer wrote with AI assistance. Amazon Web Services managers have dashboards showing individual engineer AI-tool usage and consider adoption when evaluating promotions. About 42% of tech-industry workers said their direct manager expects AI use in daily work as of last October, up from 32% eight months earlier, according to AI consulting firm Section. At software maker Autodesk, CEO Andrew Anagnost acknowledged that some employees had been using initially blocked coding tools like Cursor stealthily -- and warned that AI holdouts "probably won't survive long term."

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The company says its scanners are designed to screen people at their natural walking pace, reducing wait times.