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The U.S. government has secured final approval in the Northern District Court of California to liquidate crypto's largest-ever federal seizure, signaling the closure of a complex four-year legal battle over billions in Bitcoin tied to the infamous Silk Road marketplace.

Chief U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg denied a motion to block the forfeiture of 69,370 Bitcoin, clearing the Department of Justice to sell the $6.5 billion assets, according to a court document filed December 30.

Google is kicking off a new experiment in Search Labs today called “Daily Listen.” It’s a bit like NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews, while there are also podcast parallels.

Through Discover and Search, Google is aware of what you are interested in. Daily Listen takes all that into account to create a 5 minute or so episode that provides an overview of stories and topics that you follow.

Phi-4 excels in benchmarks that test advanced reasoning and domain-specific capabilities. Highlights include:

• Scoring over 80% in challenging benchmarks like MATH and MGSM, outperforming larger models like Google’s Gemini Pro and GPT-4o-mini.

• Superior performance in mathematical reasoning tasks, a critical capability for fields such as finance, engineering and scientific research.

• Impressive results in HumanEval for functional code generation, making it a strong choice for AI-assisted programming.

The Heritage Foundation plans to “identify and target” volunteer editors on Wikipedia who it says are “abusing their position” by publishing content the group believes to be antisemitic, according to documents obtained by the Forward.

Employees of Heritage, the conservative think tank that produced the Project 2025 policy blueprint for the second Trump administration, said they plan to use facial recognition software and a database of hacked usernames and passwords in order to identify contributors to the online encyclopedia, who mostly work under pseudonyms. It’s not clear exactly what kind of antisemitism the Wikipedia effort, which has not been previously reported, is intended to address. But in recent months some Jewish groups have complained about a series of changes on the website relating to Israel, the war in Gaza and its repercussions.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of major changes to the company's moderation policies and practices Tuesday, citing a shifting political and social landscape and a desire to embrace free speech.

Zuckerberg said Meta will end its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replace it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.

The company is also changing its content moderation policies around political topics and undoing changes that reduced the amount of political content in user feeds, Zuckerberg said.

The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media platforms in the world, each boasting billions of users, as well as Threads.

"We're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms," Zuckerberg said in a video. "More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the U.S."

Getty Images Holdings and Shutterstock agreed to combine in a deal that creates a $3.7 billion visual content company.

The agreement is subject to regulatory approval and shareholder approval for both companies.

If you own a Windows PC and want to use Google, you might just tap the address bar in Microsoft Edge, search for Google in the address bar powered by Bing, then open the Google blue link from Bing, and may not go back to Bing ever again. Later, you might even figure out a way to change the default search engine to Google.com.

Microsoft may have found a way, which is somewhat sneaky, to reduce the bounce rate here (the number of users going away from Bing).

At the CES technology conference on Monday, the company previewed upgraded Google TV software that adds more natural voice commands, improved content search and deeper YouTube integration.

The Gemini upgrade, due to roll out later this year, will allow users to hold back-and-forth conversations with third-party TVs without the need to use the “Hey Google” trigger phrase for each command, Google showed in a demo for reporters. The company also showcased the ability to more naturally call up content, such as asking for videos from a recent trip that were saved to a user’s Google Photos account.

Apple has said it will update, rather than pause, a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature that has generated inaccurate news alerts on its latest iPhones.

The company, in its first acknowledgement of the concerns, on Monday said it was working on a software change to "further clarify" when the notifications are summaries that have been generated by the Apple Intelligence system.

The tech giant is facing calls to pull the technology after its flawed performance.

Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then shared with third parties and used for targeted ads.

In the proposed class-action settlement—which comes after five years of litigation—Apple admitted to no wrongdoing. Instead, the settlement refers to "unintentional" Siri activations that occurred after the "Hey, Siri" feature was introduced in 2014, where recordings were apparently prompted without users ever saying the trigger words, "Hey, Siri."

I was told that I had to move to Cupertino. Immediately. Or else.

I did not wish to move to the States. I liked being in Europe. Ultimately, after much consideration, many late night conversations with my wife, and even buying a guide to moving, I said no.

They said ok then. We’ll just tell Steve you did move.

LSSU received submissions from across the globe this year, including entries from Canada, Australia, Denmark, Germany, India, South Africa, and the United States. The fact that some of the same banished word suggestions came from different parts of the world underscores the universal struggle of dealing with challenging words and phrases.

Here are the 2025 words and phrases selected for banishment, along with the reasons they made the list:

Then, on Thursday evening, he added this: "No, we’re going straight to Mars. The moon is a distraction."

These are definitive statements that directly contradict NASA's plans to send a series of human missions to the lunar south pole later this decade and establish a sustainable base of operations there with the Artemis program.

In a post to her Substack on Friday, Telnaes claimed an editor at the paper killed a cartoon depicting billionaires groveling to President-elect Donald Trump this week. The shared rough draft of the comic included Post owner Jeff Bezos holding up a bag of money at the feet of a looming Trump.

“I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now,” Telnaes said. “The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump.”

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“I’m really bullish on the future of YouTube. We’re still in the first or second inning,” Mohan said in an interview at its San Bruno headquarters, 15 minutes north from where YouTube was founded. “We haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg in what we’ll be able to do with technologies like generative AI.”

YouTube is an increasingly vital business line as Google’s core search and advertising divisions face threats from antitrust lawsuits and as artificial intelligence rivals chip away at its dominance of mobile and desktop search.

After declining for much of 2023, YouTube’s advertising income has bounced back, growing 15 per cent to $25.7bn in the first nine months of 2024. While this is a fifth of the $144bn brought in by search-linked ads revenue, Alphabet needs the cash. It has ramped up spending to $38.3bn as it races Microsoft and Amazon to build data centres and develop chips to power its AI ambitions.

Apple Fitness+ today announced a slew of new content to kick off the year, as well as a new integration with the popular social fitness app Strava.

Fitness+ users will now be able to easily share their completed workout sessions to Strava, with rich details like episode image, music genre, and metrics. Strava subscribers will also be able to redeem a free trial of Fitness+.

Apple says Fitness+ offers the largest library of 4K fitness and wellness content in the world, with more than 6,500 workouts and meditations across twelve workout types.

New content for 2025 includes new programs for progressive strength training, and a conditioning program for pickleball.