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Sony is officially ending production of recordable Blu-rays. In an announcement from Japan spotted by Tom’s Hardware, Sony Storage Media Solutions said it will stop manufacturing the discs in February, alongside recordable MiniDiscs, MD-Data, and MiniDV cassettes, adding, “there will be no successor models.”

This discontinuation doesn’t impact the Blu-rays you can buy with films or TV shows on them; it just affects the blank ones consumers use to record stuff on themselves with PCs or DVRs. Sony hinted at the discontinuation last year, telling the Japanese outlet AVWatch that it would “gradually end development and production of ‘recordable optical disc media.’’

An analysis by the crypto forensics company Chainalysis showed that the majority of people who bought $Trump were likely inexperienced retail investors, possibly dabbling in crypto for the first time. These traders “roughly broke even,” the analysis said, though more than 100,000 of them lost money.

Yet by one estimate, the launch of $Trump generated $58 million in fees for the Trump family in less than a day. As of Friday night, the family also owns, at least on paper, $23 billion worth of $Trump at its $29 price — already a 60 percent drop from the peak. That price would crash even further if the family did a so-called rug pull and moved to rapidly sell off its holdings.

Non-fungible tokens and memecoins are neither securities nor commodities, according to White House crypto czar David Sacks. Instead, he defines them as “collectibles.”

“It’s like a baseball card or a stamp,” Sacks said in an interview with Fox Business on Thursday, referencing Trump’s explosively popular memecoin. “People buy it because they want to commemorate something.”

The famous venture capitalist’s comments touched on a long-running debate about the crypto industry in general: how exactly to treat different digital assets. Some argue that digital assets are securities, which are tradable financial assets like stocks. But others say they’re commodities, or raw materials that can be bought and sold, like gold and wheat. The classification differences have vast regulatory implications.

Apple has been sued for allegedly selling wristbands for its smartwatches that contain high levels of "forever chemicals" known as PFAS that may be linked to harmful health effects in humans.

The lawsuit [PDF], filed yesterday in the Northern District of California, specifically targets three Apple Watch bands: The Sport Band that comes stock with new basic model Apple Watches, the Ocean Band, and the Nike Sport Band that ships with Nike-branded Apple Watches. Apple describes all three as being made from fluoroelastomer, which the lawsuit alleges conceals the presence of per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.

One major metric tracked is how much a streamer pays out for 1,000 streams. Here’s what the report shows for 2024 payouts per 1,000 streams:

Amazon: $8.80 Apple Music: $6.20 YouTube: $4.80 Spotify: $3.00

I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law's prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security," Trump wrote in a Sunday Truth Social post.

He added the order will also "confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order." Trump said he'd like for the U.S. to have a "50% ownership position" in a joint venture to save TikTok.

Online platforms would be legally responsible for keeping Australians safe online under new Digital Duty of Care laws.

The federal government has committed to legislating the model, which was recommended as part of a broader independent review of the Online Safety Act.

Architects of the leading generative AI models are abuzz that a top company, possibly OpenAI, in coming weeks will announce a next-level breakthrough that unleashes Ph.D.-level super-agents to do complex human tasks.

We've learned that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — who in September dubbed this "The Intelligence Age," and is in Washington this weekend for the inauguration — has scheduled a closed-door briefing for U.S. government officials in Washington on Jan. 30. Why it matters: The expected advancements help explain why Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and others have talked publicly about AI replacing mid-level software engineers and other human jobs this year.

As the fate of TikTok hangs in the balance, U.S. TikTok users are flocking to the Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu, also called RedNote – making it the top downloaded app in the U.S.

Some of the “TikTok refugees,” as they call themselves, say the TikTok alternative, a Chinese app, is being chosen in protest of the TikTok ban. Here's what you need to know about Xiaohongshu.

It is a lifestyle social media app which allows users to post short videos, photos and texts, and it also includes functions like live-streaming and shopping.

Since most phones currently don’t have the compute to run very powerful models, and since models keep getting better and in some cases more proprietary, it is likely that much of this processing (and the data you need processed) will have to be offloaded to remote servers.

And that’s the first reason that I would say that AI is going to be the biggest privacy story of the decade. Not only will we soon be doing more of our compute off-device, but we’ll be sending a lot more of our private data.

Lawmakers have fought to end the reign of TikTok due to ties they say it has with the Chinese Communist Party. But they may have made things much worse.

The Chinese apps RedNote and Lemon8 have exploded in popularity as TikTok faces an imminent ban and the Supreme Court upheld the law forcing its sale.

The rise of the apps shows TikTok’s U.S. users are rejecting American platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts that were expected to be the beneficiaries of a ban. Instead, they’ve moved to alternatives that have even closer ties to China than TikTok, a Beijing-based company with a U.S. subsidiary and many Western investors.

Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search.

In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, without JavaScript, many Google Search features won’t work properly and that the quality of search results tends to be degraded.

Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search.

In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, without JavaScript, many Google Search features won’t work properly and that the quality of search results tends to be degraded.

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s computer was infiltrated and unclassified files were accessed as part of a broader breach of the agency by Chinese state-sponsored hackers, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The attackers also hacked the computers of two of Yellen’s lieutenants, Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo and Acting Under Secretary Brad Smith, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive information. Fewer than 50 files on Yellen’s machine were accessed, one of the people said.