McKinsey, the consulting giant that has spent a century advising companies on how to cut costs and restructure operations, is now turning that advice inward as it plans to eliminate thousands of jobs across its non-client-facing departments over the next 18 to 24 months. The firm's leadership has discussed a roughly 10% headcount reduction in support functions, according to Bloomberg. McKinsey's revenue has hovered around $15 billion to $16 billion for the past five years after a decade of rapid expansion that saw employee count climb from 17,000 in 2012 to 45,000 by 2022. The headcount has since slid to about 40,000. The cuts come as consulting firms face cost-conscious clients, Trump administration pressure on government consulting spending, and reduced payments from Saudi Arabia, which had been paying McKinsey at least $500 million annually in the decade up to 2024. McKinsey cut about 1,400 jobs in 2023 under a plan internally labeled Project Magnolia, and axed 200 global tech positions last month. The firm still plans to hire consultants even as it shrinks support staff.

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A millisecond used to be a big deal for the world's quickest traders. A dispute over huge trading profits at one of the world's largest futures exchanges shows they now think a million times faster [non-paywalled source]. From a report: The controversy is about an arcane technical maneuver in which high-speed traders bombard Frankfurt-based Eurex with useless data. The idea is to keep their connections to the exchange warm so they can react fractionally faster to market-moving information. The battle is the latest chapter in a decadeslong contest among secretive ultrafast trading firms, which have pursued a relentless quest for minuscule speed advantages. A group of high-frequency trading firms has exploited the practice to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars, says Mosaic Finance, a French firm that has complained to Eurex and European regulators. "An arms race is OK, but you must use legal weapons," said Hugues Morin, founder of Mosaic. Eurex says Mosaic's claims are baseless. [...] High-speed traders often seek to capture fleeting differences between prices of related assets, making quick response times critical. If benchmark Euro Stoxx 50 index futures rise, for example, contracts tied to Germany's DAX will usually follow. A first mover will be able to buy DAX futures before they tick higher, then sell out at a higher price -- a strategy that can add up to big profits over time. The maneuver that prompted Mosaic's spat with Eurex can improve reaction times by about 3.2 nanoseconds, according to the French firm, which calls it "corrupted speculative triggering," or CST for short.

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The glasses-shaped face computers that tech companies have been building for years now face an identity crisis, and their makers can't agree on what to call them. Meta has asked a journalist to refer to its Ray-Ban glasses as "AI glasses" to distinguish them from Google Glass. Google, whose Project Aura is a collaboration with Xreal, calls the product "wired XR glasses" because the company views it as more aligned with headsets in a glasses form factor. Xreal's CEO Chi Xu laughed when asked about Aura's category and said the company will call all its products "AR glasses." Research firms aren't aligned either. Gartner defines smart glasses as camera- and display-free devices with Bluetooth and AI. Counterpoint Research said smart glasses without see-through displays drive volumes in the smart eyewear category. IDC uses a broader definition that includes anything glasses-shaped.

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The traditional signals that employers used to evaluate entry-level job candidates -- college GPAs, cover letters, and interview performance -- have lost much of their value as grade inflation and widespread AI use render these metrics nearly meaningless, writes The Atlantic. The recent-graduate unemployment rate now sits slightly higher than the overall workforce's, a reversal from historical norms where new college graduates were more likely to be employed than the average worker. Job postings on Handshake, a career-services platform for students and recent graduates, have fallen by more than 16 percent in the past year. At Harvard, 60% of undergraduate grades are now A's, up from fewer than a quarter two decades ago. Seven years ago, 70% of new graduates' resumes were screened by GPA; that figure has dropped to 40%. Two working papers examining Freelancer.com found that cover-letter quality once strongly predicted who would get hired and how well they would perform -- until ChatGPT became available. "We basically find the collapse of this entire signaling mechanism," researcher Jesse Silbert said. The average number of applications per open job has increased by 26% in the past year. Students at UC Berkeley are now applying to 150 internships just to land one or two interviews.

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Mozilla has named Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as its new chief executive, promoting the executive who has spent the past year leading the Firefox browser team and who now plans to make AI central to the company's future. Enzor-DeMeo announced on Tuesday that an "AI Mode" is coming to Firefox next year. The feature will let users choose from multiple AI models rather than being locked into a single provider. Some options will be open-source models, others will be private "Mozilla-hosted cloud options," and the company also plans to integrate models from major AI companies. Mozilla itself will not train its own large language model. "We're not incentivized to push one model or the other," Enzor-DeMeo told The Verge. Firefox currently has about 200 million monthly users, a fraction of Chrome's roughly 4 billion, though Enzor-DeMeo insists mobile usage is growing at a decent clip. He takes over from interim CEO Laura Chambers, who led the company through a major antitrust case and what Mozilla describes as "double-digit mobile growth" in Firefox. Chambers is returning to the Mozilla board of directors. The new CEO has outlined three priorities: ensuring all products give users control over AI features including the ability to turn them off, building a business model around transparent monetization, and expanding Firefox into a broader ecosystem of trusted software. Mozilla VPN integration is planned for the browser next year.

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Google's data partner HouseCanary has begun displaying home listings directly in search results in select markets, sending Zillow's shares tumbling more than 8% yesterday as investors weighed whether the search giant might eventually cut into the portal business that Zillow dominates. The experiment places property details, prices, images and a "Request a tour" button at the top of mobile search results. HouseCanary, a full-service brokerage licensed in all 50 states and Washington D.C., said it contacted every MLS in the test regions before launching. Analysts are largely downplaying immediate concerns. Goldman Sachs noted that most of Zillow's traffic comes directly through its apps and websites rather than Google searches, though the firm views the development as a long-term risk. Piper Sandler called the fears "overblown," and Wells Fargo suggested portals like Zillow would likely end up bidding for ad units on Google rather than losing traffic outright.

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A Kansas man who sued Verizon in small claims court after the carrier refused to unlock his iPhone has won his case, scoring a small but meaningful victory against a company that retroactively applied a policy change to deny his unlock request. Patrick Roach bought a discounted iPhone 16e from Verizon's Straight Talk brand in February 2025, intending to pay for one month of service before switching the device to US Mobile. Under FCC rules dating back to a 2019 waiver, Verizon must unlock phones 60 days after activation on its network. Verizon refused to unlock the phone, citing a new policy implemented on April 1, 2025 requiring "60 days of paid active service." Roach had purchased his device over a month before that policy took effect. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Henry ruled in October 2025 that applying the changed terms to Roach's earlier purchase violated the Kansas Consumer Protection Act. The court ordered Verizon to refund Roach's $410.40 purchase price plus court costs. Roach had previously rejected a $600 settlement offer because it would have required him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. He estimated spending about 20 hours on the lawsuit but said "it wasn't about" the money.

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One of the most water-scarce regions on Earth is now experiencing a dramatic atmospheric shift that's pushing moisture onto Oman's northern coast at rates more than 1.5 times the global average, according to a Washington Post investigation of global atmospheric data [non-paywalled source]. The change has turned extreme rainfall into a recurrent source of catastrophe across the Arabian Peninsula. In the 126 years between 1881 and 2007, just six hurricane-strength storms hit Oman or came within 60 miles of the country. At least four more have made landfall in the past 15 years alone. Research from Sultan Qaboos University analyzing 8,000 storms across 69 rainfall stations found that half of all rain in Oman falls within the first 90 minutes of a 24-hour storm. These intense bursts quickly overwhelm the desert's ability to absorb water and send flash floods racing through wadis -- normally dry riverbeds where many communities are built. In response, Dubai is constructing an $8 billion underground stormwater network spanning more than 120 miles. Oman has agreements to build 58 new dams and is studying 14 major wadis that funnel to its al-Batinah coastline.

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Cloudflare's sixth annual Year in Review report describes an internet increasingly shaped by two forces: automated traffic and government intervention, as global connectivity grew 19% year over year in 2025. Google's web crawler now dominates automated traffic, dwarfing other AI and indexing bots to become the single largest source of bot activity on the web. Nearly half of all major internet disruptions globally were linked to government actions, and civil society and non-profit organizations became the most attacked sector for the first time. Post-quantum encryption crossed a significant threshold, now protecting 52% of human internet traffic observed by Cloudflare. The company also recorded more than 25 record-breaking DDoS attacks throughout the year.

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Google has decided to retire its free dark web monitoring tool, saying it wasn't as helpful as the company hoped. From a report: In a support page, Google announced the discontinuation of the "dark web report" tool, two years after offering it as a free perk to Gmail users before expanding it more broadly. The feature worked by scanning for your email addresses to determine whether they had appeared in data breaches, which often circulate on Dark Web marketplaces. The tool could then alert you about where the data was exposed, including any accompanying details such as dates of birth, addresses, and phone numbers.

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The Trump administration announced Monday the United States Tech Force, a new program to recruit around 1,000 technologists for two-year government stints starting as soon as March -- less than a year after dismantling several federal technology teams and driving thousands of tech workers out of their jobs. The program will primarily recruit early-career software engineers and data scientists, paying between $150,000 and $200,000 annually. About 20 companies have signed on to participate, including Palantir, Meta, Oracle and Elon Musk's xAI. Some engineering managers will be allowed to take leaves of absence from their private-sector employers to join the program without divesting their stock holdings. The initiative follows the March closure of 18F, General Services Administration's internal tech consultancy, and the shuttering of the Social Security Administration's Office of Transformation in February. The IRS had lost over 2,000 tech workers by June.

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For decades, Parkinson's disease research has overwhelmingly focused on genetics -- more than half of all research dollars in the past two decades flowed toward genomic studies -- but a growing body of evidence now points to something far more mundane as a primary culprit: contaminated drinking water. A landmark study by epidemiologist Sam Goldman compared Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where trichloroethylene (TCE) had contaminated the water supply for approximately 35 years, against those at Camp Pendleton in California, which has clean water. Marines exposed to TCE at Lejeune were 70% more likely to develop Parkinson's. The latest research suggests only 10 to 15 percent of Parkinson's cases can be fully explained by genetics. Parkinson's rates in the US have doubled in the past 30 years -- a pattern inconsistent with an inherited genetic disease. The EPA moved to ban TCE in December 2024. The Trump administration moved to undo the ban in January.

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Sixty years after a team of American and Indian climbers abandoned a plutonium-powered generator on the slopes of Nanda Devi, one of the world's most forbidding Himalayan peaks, the U.S. government still refuses to acknowledge that the mission ever happened. The device, a SNAP-19C portable generator containing plutonium isotopes including Pu-239 -- the same material used in the Nagasaki bomb -- was left behind in October 1965 when a sudden blizzard forced climbers to retreat from Camp Four, just below the summit. The mission originated from a cocktail party conversation between General Curtis LeMay and National Geographic photographer Barry Bishop, who had summited Everest in 1963. China had just detonated its first atomic bomb in October 1964, and the CIA wanted to intercept radio signals from Chinese missile tests by placing an unmanned listening station atop the Himalayas. Barry Bishop recruited elite American climbers and coordinated with Indian intelligence to haul surveillance equipment up the mountain. Captain M.S. Kohli, the Indian naval officer commanding the mission, ordered climbers to secure the equipment and descend when the blizzard struck. Jim McCarthy, the last surviving American climber, recalled warning Kohli he was making a mistake. "You can't leave plutonium by a glacier feeding into the Ganges!" he recalled. "Do you know how many people depend on the Ganges?" When teams returned in spring 1966, the entire ice ledge where the gear had been stashed was gone -- sheared off by an avalanche. Search missions in 1967 and 1968 found nothing. The device remains buried somewhere in the glaciers that feed tributaries of the Ganges River.

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Grid constraints that were once a hallmark of developing economies are now plaguing the world's richest nations, and new research from Bloomberg Economics finds that rising electricity system stress is directly hurting investment. The analysis examined all G20 countries and found that a one-standard-deviation increase in grid stress relative to a country's historical average lowers the investment share of GDP by around 0.33 percentage points -- a 1.5% to 2% hit to capital outlays. The Netherlands is a case in point: 12,000 businesses are waiting for grid connections, congestion issues are expected to persist for a decade despite $9.4 billion in annual investments, and the country is already consuming as much electricity as was projected for 2030. ASML, the chip equipment maker whose fortunes can sway the Dutch economy, has no guarantee it will secure power for a new campus planned to employ 20,000 people. Data centers are particularly affected. Google canceled plans near Berlin, a Frankfurt facility cannot expand until 2033, Microsoft has shifted investments from Ireland and the UK to the Nordics, and a Digital Realty Trust data center in Santa Clara that was applied for in 2019 may sit empty for years.

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LG smart TV owners discovered over the weekend that a recent webOS software update had quietly installed Microsoft Copilot on their devices, and the app cannot be uninstalled. Affected users report the feature appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain models, sitting alongside streaming apps like Netflix and YouTube. LG's support documentation confirms that certain preinstalled or system apps can only be hidden, not deleted. At CES 2025, LG announced plans to integrate Copilot into webOS as part of its "AI TV" strategy, describing it as an extension of its AI Search experience. The current implementation appears to function as a shortcut to a web-based Copilot interface rather than a native application. Samsung TVs include Google's Gemini in a similar fashion. Users wanting to avoid the feature entirely are left with one option: disconnecting their TV from the internet.

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Online retailer Coupang, often called South Korea's Amazon, is dealing with the fallout from a breach that exposed the personal information of more than 33 million accounts -- roughly two-thirds of the country's population -- after a former contractor allegedly used credentials that remained active months after his departure to access customer data through the company's overseas servers. The breach began in June but went undetected until November 18, according to Coupang and investigators. Police have called it South Korea's worst-ever data breach. The compromised information includes names, phone numbers, email addresses and shipping addresses, though the company says login credentials, credit card numbers, and payment details were not affected. Coupang's former CEO Park Dae-jun told a parliamentary hearing that the alleged perpetrator was a Chinese national who had worked on authentication tasks before his contract ended last December. Chief information security officer Brett Matthes testified that the individual had a "privileged role" giving him access to a private encryption key that allowed him to forge tokens to impersonate customers. Legislators say the key remained active after the employee left. The CEO of Coupang's South Korean subsidiary has resigned. Founder and chair Bom Kim has yet to personally apologize but has been summoned to a second parliamentary hearing.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has quietly added a new AI feature to its Kindle iOS app -- a feature that "lets you ask questions about the book you're reading and receive spoiler-free answers," according to an Amazon announcement. The company says the feature, which is called Ask this Book, serves as "your expert reading assistant, instantly answering questions about plot details, character relationships, and thematic elements without disrupting your reading flow." Publishing industry resource Publishers Lunch noticed Ask this Book earlier this week, and asked Amazon about it. Amazon spokesperson Ale Iraheta told PubLunch, "The feature uses technology, including AI, to provide instant, spoiler-free answers to customers' questions about what they're reading. Ask this Book provides short answers based on factual information about the book which are accessible only to readers who have purchased or borrowed the book and are non-shareable and non-copyable." As PubLunch summed up: "In other words, speaking plainly, it's an in-book chatbot." [...] Perhaps most alarmingly, the Amazon spokesperson said, "To ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on, and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out."

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joshuark writes: Arkansas is becoming the first state to officially end its public television affiliation with PBS. The Arkansas Educational Television Commission, whose members are all appointed by the governor, voted to disaffiliate from PBS effective July 1, 2026, citing the $2.5 million annual membership dues as "not feasible." The decision was also driven by the loss of a similar amount in federal funding after the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was defunded by Congress. PBS Arkansas is rebranding itself as Arkansas TV and will provide more local content, the agency's Executive Director and CEO Carlton Wing said in a statement. Wing, a former Republican state representative, took the helm of the agency in September. "Public television in Arkansas is not going away," Wing said. "In fact, we invite you to join our vision for an increased focus on local programming, continuing to safeguard Arkansans in times of emergency and supporting our K-12 educators and students." "The commission's decision to drop PBS membership is a blow to Arkansans who will lose free, over the air access to quality PBS programming they know and love," a PBS spokesperson wrote in an email to The Associated Press. The demise of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is a direct result of President Donald Trump's targeting of public media, which he has repeatedly said is spreading political and cultural views antithetical to those the United States should be espousing. Trump denied taking a big should on television viewers.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon Prime Video has pulled its AI-powered video recap of Fallout after viewers noticed that it got key parts of the story wrong. The streaming service began testing Video Recaps last month, and now they're missing from the shows included in the test, including Fallout, The Rig, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, Upload, and Bosch. The feature is supposed to use AI to analyze a show's key plot points and sum it all in a bite-sized video, complete with an AI voiceover and clips from the series. But in its season one recap of Fallout, Prime Video incorrectly stated that one of The Ghoul's (Walton Goggins) flashbacks is set in "1950s America" rather than the year 2077, as spotted earlier by Games Radar.

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Berlin's regional parliament has passed a far-reaching overhaul of its "security" law, giving police new authority to conduct both digital and physical surveillance. From a report: The CDU-SPD coalition, supported by AfD votes, approved the reform of the General Security and Public Order Act (ASOG), changing the limits that once protected Berliners from intrusive policing. Interior Senator Iris Spranger (SPD) argued that the legislation modernizes police work for an era of encrypted communication, terrorism, and cybercrime. But it undermines core civil liberties and reshapes the relationship between citizens and the state. One of the most controversial elements is the expansion of police powers under paragraphs 26a and 26b. These allow investigators to hack into computers and smartphones under the banner of "source telecommunications surveillance" and "online searches." Police may now install state-developed spyware, known as trojans, on personal devices to intercept messages before or after encryption. If the software cannot be deployed remotely, the law authorizes officers to secretly enter a person's home to gain access. This enables police to install surveillance programs directly on hardware without the occupant's knowledge. Berlin had previously resisted such practices, but now joins other federal states that permit physical entry to install digital monitoring tools.

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