The long-standing hierarchy in the TV market -- Sony, Samsung and LG at the top, TCL and Hisense fighting it out in the midrange -- is eroding as the budget brands close the performance gap and increasingly lead on technology innovation, The Verge writes. Hisense debuted the first RGB LED TV last year, and TCL's X11L announced at CES 2026 is the first TV to use reformulated quantum dots and a new color filter. TCL's QM9K release last year was "a pretty clear statement that they're ready to fight with the big boys." The premium brands retain certain advantages: Sony's processing remains unmatched and LG's OLEDs deliver contrast that mini LED cannot match. "Even as the gap in performance across technologies continues to shrink, and TVs from all the manufacturers get closer to parity, the challenge for TCL and Hisense shifts from creating incredible, competitive products to altering perception," The Verge notes. Samsung once owned the art TV segment entirely; CES 2026 saw announcements from Amazon's Ember Artline and LG's Gallery TV, all using similar edge-lit technology and magnetic frames. The experience across brands is "remarkably similar." If the pricing gap persists and performance remains comparable, "the big three will have to respond by bringing their pricing down or risk losing sales," the publication concluded.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Internet access available through mobile devices in Iran appears to be limited, according to several social media accounts that routinely track such developments. Cloudflare Radar, which monitors internet traffic on behalf of the internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare, said on Thursday that IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6), a standard widely used for mobile infrastructure, was affected. "IPv6 address space in Iran dropped by 98.5 per cent, concurrent with IPv6 traffic share dropping from 12 per cent to 1.8 per cent, as the government selectively blocks internet access amid protests," read Cloudflare Radar's social post. NetBlocks, which tracks internet access and digital rights around the world, also confirmed it was seeing problems with connectivity through various internet providers in Iran. "Live network data show Tehran and other parts of Iran are now entering a digital blackout," NetBlocks posted on X.

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The promise of AI-powered workplace tools that sort emails, take meeting notes, and file expense reports is finally delivering meaningful productivity gains -- one software startup reported a 20% boost around mid-2025 -- but companies are discovering an unexpected tradeoff: employees are burning out from the relentless pace of high-level cognitive work. Roger Kirkness, CEO of 14-person software startup Convictional, noticed that after AI took the scut work off his team's plates, their days became consumed by intensive thinking, and they were mentally exhausted and unproductive by Friday. The company transitioned to a four-day workweek; the same amount of work gets done, Kirkness says. The underlying problem, according to Boston College economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, is that businesses tend to simply reallocate the time AI saves. Workers who once mentally downshifted for tasks like data entry are now expected to maintain intense focus through longer stretches of data analysis. "If you just make people work at a high-intensity pace with no breaks, you risk crowding out creativity," Schor says.

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TV manufacturers at CES 2026 in Las Vegas this week unveiled a wave of AI features that frequently consume significant screen space and take considerable time to deliver results -- all while global TV shipments declined 0.6% year over year in Q3, according to Omdia. Google demonstrated Veo generating video from a photo on a television, a process that took about two minutes to produce eight seconds of footage, The Verge writes in a column. Samsung presented a future where viewers ask their sets for sports predictions and recipes to share with kitchen displays. Hisense showed an AI agent that displays real-time stats for every soccer player on screen, a feature requiring so much space the company built a prototype 21:9 aspect ratio display to accommodate it. Demos repeatedly showed video shrinking to make room for sports scores and information when viewers asked questions -- noticeable on 70-inch displays and likely worse on anything 50 inches or smaller. Amazon's Alexa Plus can jump to Prime Video scenes based on verbal descriptions. LG's sets switch homescreen recommendations based on voice recognition of individual family members.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Prior to World War II the vast majority of telescopes built around the world were funded by wealthy people with an interest in the heavens above. However, after the war, two significant developments in the mid-20th century caused the burden of funding large astronomical instruments to largely shift to the government and academic institutions. First, as mirrors became larger and larger to see deeper into the universe, their costs grew exponentially. And then, with the advent of spaceflight, the expense of space-based telescopes expanded even further. But now the tide may be turning again. On Wednesday evening, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, announced a major investment in not just one telescope project, but four. Each of these new telescopes brings a novel capability online; however, the most intriguing new instrument is a space-based telescope named Lazuli. This spacecraft, if successfully launched and deployed, would offer astronomers a more capable and modern version of the Hubble Space Telescope, which is now three decades old. A billionaire with a keen interest in science and technology, Schmidt and his wife did not disclose the size of his investment in the four telescopes, which collectively will be known as the Schmidt Observatory System. However, it likely is worth half a billion dollars, at a minimum.

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Adam Wathan, the creator of the popular CSS framework Tailwind CSS, has let go of 75% of his engineering team -- reducing it from four people to one -- because AI-generated search answers have decimated traffic to the project's documentation pages. Traffic to Tailwind's documentation has fallen roughly 40% since early 2023 despite the framework being more popular than ever, Wathan wrote in a post. The documentation is the primary channel through which developers discover Tailwind's commercial products, and without that traffic the business has struggled to sustain itself; revenue has dropped close to 80%. The reduced team also means Wathan cannot currently prioritize implementing LLMS.txt, a proposed feature that would make documentation more accessible to large language models. "Tailwind is growing faster than it ever has and is bigger than it ever has been, and our revenue is down close to 80%," he wrote in the forum post.

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has secured a temporary restraining order against Samsung, blocking the company from continuing to collect data through its smart TVs' Automated Content Recognition technology. The ACR system captured screenshots of what users were watching every 500 milliseconds, according to the state's lawsuit, and did so without consumer knowledge or consent. The District Court found good cause to believe Samsung's actions violated the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The TRO prohibits Samsung and any parties working in concert with the company from using, selling, transferring, collecting, or sharing ACR data tied to Texas consumers. Samsung is one of five major TV manufacturers the Texas Attorney General's office has sued over ACR deployment. Paxton previously secured a similar order against Hisense.

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Germany's Harz mountains, once known for their verdant spruce forests, have become a graveyard of skeletal trunks after a bark beetle outbreak ravaged the region starting in 2018 -- an infestation made possible by successive droughts and heatwaves that fatally weakened the trees. Between 2018 and 2021, Germany lost half a million hectares of forest, nearly 5% of the country's total. Since 2010, EU land carbon absorption has declined by a third, and Germany is now almost certain to miss its carbon sequestration targets, according to Prof Matthias Dieter, head of the Thunen Institute of Forestry. "You cannot force the forest to grow -- we cannot command how much their contribution should be towards our climate targets," he said. Foresters in the Harz are responding by abandoning monoculture plantations in favor of mixed-species approaches. Pockets of beech, firs, and sycamore are now being planted around surviving spruce. A 2018 study in Nature found tree diversity was the best protection against drought die-offs, and more recent PNAS research found that species richness protected tree growth during prolonged drought seasons. The approach marks a shift from Germany's pioneering modern forestry methods, which relied on single-species plantations now proved vulnerable to climate-driven disasters.

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China has hacked the emails used by congressional staff on powerful committees in the US House of Representatives, as part of a massive cyber espionage campaign known as Salt Typhoon. An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese intelligence accessed email systems used by some staffers [non-paywalled source] on the House China committee in addition to aides on the foreign affairs committee, intelligence committee and armed services committee, according to people familiar with the attack. The intrusions were detected in December. The attacks are the latest element of an ongoing cyber campaign against US communication networks by the Ministry of State Security, China's intelligence service. One person familiar with the attack said it was unclear if the MSS had accessed lawmakers' emails. The MSS has been operating Salt Typhoon for several years. It allows China to access the unencrypted phone calls, texts and voicemails of almost every American, and in some cases enables access to email accounts. Salt Typhoon has also intercepted the calls of senior US officials over the past couple of years, said people familiar with the campaign.

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A 50-inch TV that would have set you back $1,100 at Best Buy during Black Friday 2001 now costs less than $200, and the price per area-pixel -- a metric accounting for both screen size and resolution -- has dropped by more than 90% over the past 25 years. The story behind this decline is largely one of liquid crystal display technology maturing from a niche product to a mass-manufactured commodity. LCDs represented just 5% of the TV market in 2004; by 2018, they commanded more than 95%. The largest driver of cost reduction has been the scaling up of "mother glass" sheets -- the large panels of extremely clear glass onto which semiconductor materials are deposited before being cut into individual displays. The first generation sheets measured roughly 12 by 16 inches. Today's Generation 10.5 sheets span 116 by 133 inches, nearly 100 times the original area. This scaling delivers substantial savings because equipment costs rise more slowly than glass area increases. Moving from Gen 4 to Gen 5 mother glass cut the cost per diagonal inch by 50%. Equipment costs per unit of panel area fell 80% between Gen 4 and Gen 8. Process improvements have compounded these gains: masking steps required for thin-film transistors dropped from eight to four, yields climbed from 50% to above 90%, and a "one drop fill" technique reduced liquid crystal filling time from days to minutes.

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Disney+, which is looking to catch up with some streaming and digital rivals in terms of daily engagement, is adding vertical videos to the service. From a report: The arrival of the new format later this year was one of several advertising-oriented announcements the company made Wednesday at its Tech + Data Showcase at CES in Las Vegas. Other new offerings include a new "brand impact" metric and a new video generation tool that helps advertisers create high-quality connected-TV-ready commercials using existing assets and guidelines. [...] In an interview prior to the Wednesday showcase, Erin Teague, EVP of Product Management for Disney Entertainment and ESPN, said "everything's on the table" in terms of how vertical video is delivered on Disney+. It could be original short-form programming, repurposed social clips, refashioned scenes from longer-form episodic or feature titles or a combination. "We're obviously thinking about integrating vertical video in ways that are native to core user behaviors," Teague said. "So, it won't be a kind of a disjointed, random experience."

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LEGO has responded to concerns that its newly announced Smart Brick technology represents a departure from the company's foundation in physical, non-digital play, a day after the official reveal at CES drew criticism from child development advocates. Federico Begher, SVP of Product, New Business, told IGN the sensor-packed bricks are "an addition, a complementary evolution" and emphasized that the company would "still very much nurture and innovate and keep doing our core experience." A BBC News report on the CES announcement noted "unease" among "play experts" at the unveiling. Josh Golin, executive director of children's wellbeing group Fairplay, said he believed Smart Bricks could "undermine what was once great about Lego" and curtail imagination during play. Begher compared the rollout to the Minifigure's gradual introduction decades ago. The Smart Brick launches in March in Star Wars sets including an X-Wing that produces engine sounds based on movement. The technology is screen-free and physical, Begher said, drawing on learnings from previous projects like Super Mario figures where "some of the levels were very prescriptive."

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The humble power bank has transformed from a simple pocket-sized battery into a feature-laden gadget that now sometimes includes screensavers, Bluetooth connectivity and built-in Wi-Fi hotspots. The Verge's Thomas Ricker highlighted the $270 EcoFlow Rapid Pro X Power Bank 27k at CES 2026 as a prime offender -- a device he declared "too expensive, too big, too slow, and too heavy." Its giant display takes 30 seconds to wake from sleep, plays swirly graphics and blinking eyeballs, and requires a screensaver while slowly draining the battery it's meant to preserve. The feature creep is industry-wide. Anker no longer lists a display-less model in its 20,000mAh range, and both companies sell proprietary desk chargers. Basic alternatives exist -- Anker's PowerCore 10k runs $26 -- but they're becoming harder to find.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Ever since the federal government began issuing the Dietary Guidelines in 1980, it has told Americans to limit themselves to one or two standard alcoholic drinks a day. Over time, the official advice morphed to no more than two drinks a day for men, and no more than one for women. No longer [non-paywalled source]. The updated guidelines issued on Wednesday say instead that people should consume less alcohol "for better overall health" and "limit alcohol beverages," but they do not recommend clear limits. The guidelines also no longer warn that alcohol may heighten the risk of breast cancer and other malignancies. It is the first time in decades that the government has omitted the daily caps on drinking that define moderate consumption -- standards that are used as benchmarks in clinical studies, to steer medical advice, and to distinguish moderate from heavy drinking, which is unquestionably harmful. The new guidance advises Americans who are pregnant, struggle with alcohol use disorder or take medications that interact with alcohol to avoid drinking altogether. The guidelines also warn people with alcoholism in the family to "be mindful of alcohol consumption and associated addictive behaviors." They do not, however, distinguish between men and women, who metabolize alcohol differently, nor do they caution against underage drinking. The guidelines also no longer include a warning that was in the last set issued in 2020: that even moderate drinking may increase the risk of cancer and some forms of cardiovascular disease, as well as the overall risk of dying.

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Samsung Electronics has once again sidelined Ballie, a long-anticipated robot that was first announced six years ago but never released. Bloomberg News: The device -- designed to roll and roam throughout the home -- is completely absent from this week's CES, the biggest electronics trade show. And though Samsung said last year that Ballie was nearly ready for a retail release, the product is now unlikely to resurface soon. In an emailed statement, Samsung referred to Ballie as an "active innovation platform" within the company, rather than a forthcoming consumer device. "After multiple years of real-world testing, it continues to inform how Samsung designs spatially aware, context-driven experiences, particularly in areas like smart home intelligence, ambient AI and privacy-by-design," a Samsung spokesperson said in the statement.

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Several years after Samsung introduced the Frame TV in 2017 -- a television designed to display fine art and resemble a framed painting when switched off -- competitors are finally catching up in meaningful numbers. Amazon announced the Ember Artline TV at CES 2026 this week, a $899 model that can display one of 2,000 works of art for free and includes an Alexa AI tool to recommend pieces suited to your room. Hisense unveiled its CanvasTV late last year, TCL has the NXTvision model, and LG has announced the Gallery TV for later this year. The surge in art-focused televisions comes down to two factors: smaller living spaces in cities where younger buyers lack dedicated rooms for large screens, and advances in matte screen technology that enable displays to absorb light like a canvas rather than reflect it like a window. Local dimming and improved backlighting processing allow these newer models to maintain their slim profiles for flush wall-mounting while delivering more realistic art reproduction than earlier edge-lit designs.

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Climate-heating emissions from aviation could be slashed in half -- without reducing passenger journeys -- by getting rid of premium seats, ensuring flights are near full and using the most efficient aircraft, according to analysis. The Guardian: These efficiency measures could be far more effective in tackling the fast-growing carbon footprint of flying than pledges to use "sustainable" fuels or controversial carbon offsets, the researchers said. They believe their study, which analysed more than 27m commercial flights out of approximately 35m in 2023, is the first to assess the variation in operational efficiency of flights across the globe. The study, led by Prof Stefan Gossling at Sweden's Linnaeus University, examined flights between 26,000 city pairs carrying 3.5 billion passengers across 6.8 trillion kilometers. First and business class passengers are responsible for more than three times the emissions of economy travelers, and up to 13 times more in the most spacious premium cabins. The average seat occupancy across all flights in 2023 was almost 80%. US airports accounted for a quarter of all aviation emissions and ran 14% more polluting than the global average. Atlanta and New York ranked among the least efficient airports overall, nearly 50% worse than top performers like Abu Dhabi and Madrid.

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Microsoft has canceled plans to impose a daily limit of 2,000 external recipients on Exchange Online bulk email senders. From a report: The change was announced in April 2024, when Microsoft said that it would add new External Recipient Rate (ERR) limits starting January 2025 to fight spam, with plans to begin enforcing the limit on cloud-hosted mailboxes of existing tenants between July and December 2025. As explained last year, this new Mailbox External Recipient Rate Limit was designed to prevent Microsoft 365 customers from abusing Exchange Online resources and to restrict unfair usage. However, on Tuesday, Microsoft announced that the Exchange Online bulk emailing rate limit is being canceled indefinitely, following negative customer feedback.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: If you're among the macOS users experiencing some weird issues with your Logitech mouse, then good news: Logitech has now released a fix. This comes after multiple Reddit users reported yesterday that Logi Options Plus -- the app required to manage and configure the controls on Logitech accessories -- had stopped working, preventing them from using customized scrolling features, button actions, and gestures. One Reddit user said that the scroll directions and extra buttons on their Logitech mouse "were not working as I intended" and that the Logi Options Plus app became stuck in a boot loop upon opening it to identify the cause. Logitech has since acknowledged the situation and said that its G Hub app -- a similar management software for gaming devices under the Logitech G brand -- was also affected. According to Logitech's support page, the problem was caused by "an expired certificate" required for the apps to run. Windows users were unaffected. The issues only impacted Mac users because macOS prevents certain applications from running if it doesn't detect a valid Developer ID certificate, something that has affected other apps in the past.

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Dell's CES 2026 product briefing, PC Gamer writes, stood out from the relentless AI-focused presentations that have dominated tech events for years, as the company explicitly chose to downplay its AI messaging when announcing a refreshed XPS laptop lineup, new ultraslim and entry-level Alienware laptops, Area-51 desktop refreshes and several monitors. "One thing you'll notice is the message we delivered around our products was not AI-first," Dell head of product Kevin Terwilliger said during the presentation. "A bit of a shift from a year ago where we were all about the AI PC." The shift stems from Dell's observation that consumers simply aren't making purchasing decisions based on AI capabilities. "We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device -- in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it -- but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger said. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."

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