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Pick up a new Meta headset, Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, and pocket a $50 gift card in the process.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The IRS accessed a database of hundreds of millions of travel records, which show when and where a specific person flew and the credit card they used, without obtaining a warrant, according to a letter signed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers and shared with 404 Media. The country's major airlines, including Delta, United Airlines, American Airlines, and Southwest, funnel customer records to a data broker they co-own called the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), which then sells access to peoples' travel data to government agencies. The IRS case in the letter is the clearest example yet of how agencies are searching the massive trove of travel data without a search warrant, court order, or similar legal mechanism. Instead, because the data is being sold commercially, agencies are able to simply buy access. In the letter addressed to nine major airlines, the lawmakers urge them to shut down the data selling program. Update: after this piece was published, ARC said it already planned to shut down the program. "Disclosures made by the IRS to Senator Wyden confirm that it did not follow federal law and its own policies in purchasing airline data from ARC," the letter reads. The letter says the IRS "confirmed that it did not conduct a legal review to determine if the purchase of Americans' travel data requires a warrant."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Cumberland Avenue restaurant was the only New England venue to make the cut.

From runaway robots to “sonic bombs,” we reviewed offbeat alarm clocks designed to awaken even the heaviest sleepers.

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that Meta did not illegally stifle competition when it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp. The decision marks Big Tech's first major victory against antitrust enforcement that began during President Donald Trump's first term. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission had sought to force Meta to sell or restructure the platforms to restore competition among social media networks. Meta argued it faced competitive pressure from TikTok, YouTube, and Apple's messaging app.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sundar Pichai candidly acknowledged concerns about inaccurate answers generated by Google's models.

Sundar Pichai candidly acknowledged concerns about inaccurate answers generated by Google's models.

A majority of global fund managers think companies are overinvesting, as market anxiety grows about the sustainability of the AI spending boom. From a report: A net 20 per cent of fund managers surveyed this month by Bank of America said companies were spending too much on their investments -- the first time this has been a majority view in data running back to 2005. "This jump is driven by concerns over the magnitude and financing of the AI capex boom," said BofA analysts. The surge in investment to develop AI infrastructure has been a dominant theme in the record rally in US tech stocks this year -- with chipmaker Nvidia becoming the world's first $5tn company last month -- but growing concerns about the sustainability of this spending has caused a pullback on Wall Street in recent weeks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Skowhegan's Crooked Face Creamery earned a Super Gold medal.

Microsoft still sees AI agents as the future of work, and the enterprise software giant wants companies to be able to manage those agents just like human employees.

Whether for bird-watching or baseball-spotting, we break down prices and specs to find the best pair for you.

"We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general" the web infrastructure company said.

"We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general" the web infrastructure company said.

"We apologise to our customers and the Internet in general" the web infrastructure company said.

Bills will still likely go up, but the structure and timeline of CMP's plan to fund infrastructure improvements and new hires could change significantly.

Some of the best sales of the year are happening right now—rest up before the holiday rush with a new bed.

Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI-rival Anthropic announced strategic partnerships today that will scale Claude on Microsoft Azure and bring up to $15 billion in new investment to the AI startup. Anthropic committed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity and contract additional capacity up to one gigawatt. Nvidia and Microsoft -- the largest investor in OpenAI -- committed to invest up to $10 billion and up to $5 billion respectively in Anthropic.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers at the University of Vienna extracted phone numbers for 3.5 billion WhatsApp users by systematically checking every possible number through the messaging service's contact discovery feature. The technique yielded profile photos for 57% of those accounts and profile text for 29 percent. The researchers checked roughly 100 million numbers per hour using WhatsApp's browser-based app. The team warned Meta in April and deleted their data. The company implemented stricter rate-limiting by October to prevent such mass enumeration. Meta called the exposed information "basic publicly available information" and said it found no evidence of malicious exploitation. The vulnerability had been identified before. In 2017, Dutch researcher Loran Kloeze published a blog post detailing the same enumeration technique. Meta responded then that WhatsApp's privacy settings were functioning as designed and denied him a bug bounty reward. The researchers collected 137 million U.S. phone numbers. In India, they found nearly 750 million numbers. They also discovered 2.3 million Chinese numbers and 1.6 million Myanmar numbers, despite WhatsApp being banned in both countries. The researchers analyzed the cryptographic keys and found some accounts used duplicate keys. They speculate this resulted from unauthorized WhatsApp clients rather than a platform flaw.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gui Junmin froze his dead spouse as a sign of his devotion - but it's now emerged he is dating again.

Gui Junmin froze his dead spouse as a sign of his devotion - but it's now emerged he is dating again.