theodp writes: We all mix pictures, emojis, and text freely in our communications. So why not in our code? That’s the premise of “Fun With Python and Emoji: What Might Adding Pictures to Text Programming Languages Look Like?” (two-image Bluesky explainer; full slides), which takes a look at what mixing emoji with Python and SQL might look like. A GitHub repo includes a Google Colab-ready Python notebook proof of concept that does rudimentary emoji-to-text translation via an IPython input transformer.

So, in the Golden Age of AI — some 60+ years after Kenneth Iverson introduced the chock-full-of-symbols APL — are valid technical reasons still keeping symbols and pictures out of code, or is their absence more of a programming dogma thing?

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Across Uzbekistan, a network of about a hundred banks of high-resolution roadside cameras continuously scan vehicles’ license plates and their occupants, sometimes thousands a day, looking for potential traffic violations. Cars running red lights, drivers not wearing their seatbelts, and unlicensed vehicles driving at night, to name a few. The driver of one of the most surveilled vehicles in the system was tracked over six months as he traveled between the eastern city of Chirchiq, through the capital Tashkent, and in the nearby settlement of Eshonguzar, often multiple times a week. We know this because the country’s sprawling license plate-tracking surveillance system has been left exposed to the internet.

Security researcher Anurag Sen, who discovered the security lapse, found the license plate surveillance system exposed online without a password, allowing anyone access to the data within. It’s not clear how long the surveillance system has been public, but artifacts from the system show that its database was set up in September 2024, and traffic monitoring began in mid-2025. The exposure offers a rare glimpse into how such national license plate surveillance systems work, the data they collect, and how they can be used to track the whereabouts of any one of the millions of people across an entire country. The lapse also reveals the security and privacy risks associated with the mass monitoring of vehicles and their owners, at a time when the United States is building up its nationwide array of license plate readers, many of which are provided by surveillance giant Flock.

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Under pressure from the Digital Markets Act, Apple’s iOS 26.3 adds AirPods-style proximity pairing and notification support for third-party accessories in the EU. The changes will roll out to European users in 2026. MacRumors reports: The Digital Markets Act requires Apple to provide third-party accessories with the same capabilities and access to device features that Apple’s own products get. In iOS 26.3, EU wearable device makers can now test proximity pairing and improved notifications.

Here are the new capabilities that Apple is adding:
– Proximity pairing – Devices like earbuds will be able to pair with an iOS device in an AirPods-like way by bringing the accessory close to an iPhone or iPad to initiate a simple, one-tap pairing process. Pairing third-party devices will no longer require multiple steps.
– Notifications – Third-party accessories like smart watches will be able to receive notifications from the iPhone. Users will be able to view and react to incoming notifications, which is functionality normally limited to the Apple Watch. Notifications can only be forwarded to one connected device at a time, and turning on notifications for a third-party device disables notifications to an Apple Watch.

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A group of authors led by John Carreyrou has filed a new lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the AI firms of training models on pirated copies of their books. TechCrunch reports: If this sounds familiar, it’s because another set of authors already filed a class action suit against Anthropic for these same acts of copyright infringement. In that case, the judge ruled that it was legal for Anthropic and similar AI companies to train on pirated copies of books, but that it was not legal to pirate the books in the first place.

While eligible writers can receive about $3,000 from the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, some authors were dissatisfied with that resolution — it doesn’t hold AI companies accountable for the actual act of using stolen books to train their models, which generate billions of dollars in revenue. The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit say the proposed Anthropic settlement “seems to serve [the AI companies], not creators.”

“LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates, eliding what should be the true cost of their massive willful infringement.”

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Irish competitor Diarmuid Early, dubbed the “Lebron James of Excel spreadsheets,” has won the 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championship in Las Vegas, dethroning three-time champion Andrew Ngai. The BBC reports: The esport showpiece in December attracted competitors worldwide as 256 spreadsheet heads battled it out across knockout rounds to join the final 24 in Vegas. […] A three-time champion in the financial Excel tournaments, this win was Diarmuid’s first in the overall competition. He held the triple-world champion Andrew Ngai to second place, and won the $5,000 prize and title belt. […]

Excel esports transforms a common office tool into a dynamic sport. More than 20 years old, the competitive scene has evolved from being finance based to now involving more general problem solving. Although it might help, Diarmuid said “it doesn’t require accounting or finance knowledge.” He described an example where Excel is used in solving a maze, scoring poker hands, or even sorting Kings and Queens into the battles in which they fought.

Generally there is a 30 minute challenge, with each challenge broken up into levels. The questions increase gradually in difficulty, with each correct answer gaining a player points. Whoever gets the most points wins, and in a tie, it is whoever got there first. “It’s just, can you think on your feet and do things quickly in Excel?” he said. “If you solve the earlier levels in a neat way, that’ll let you hit the ground running faster on the later ones.”

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A federal judge blocked Texas’ app store age-verification law, ruling it likely violates the First Amendment by forcing platforms to gate speech and collect data in an overly broad way. The law was set to go into effect on January 1, 2026. The Verge reports: In an order granting a preliminary injunction on the Texas App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420), Judge Robert Pitman wrote that the statute “is akin to a law that would require every bookstore to verify the age of every customer at the door and, for minors, require parental consent before the child or teen could enter and again when they try to purchase a book.” Pitman has not yet ruled on the merits of the case, but his decision to grant the preliminary injunction means he believes its defenders are unlikely to prevail in court.

Pitman found that the highest level of scrutiny must be applied to evaluate the law under the First Amendment, which means the state must prove the law is “the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state interest.” The judge found this is not the case and that it wouldn’t even survive intermediate scrutiny, because Texas has so far failed to prove that its goals are connected to its methods. Since Texas already has a law requiring age verification for porn sites, Pitman said that “only in the vast minority of applications would SB 2420 have a constitutional application to unprotected speech not addressed by other laws.” Though Pitman acknowledged the importance of safeguarding kids online, he added, “the means to achieve that end must be consistent with the First Amendment. However compelling the policy concerns, and however widespread the agreement that the issue must be addressed, the Court remains bound by the rule of law.” “The Texas App Store Accountability Act is the first among a series of similar state laws to face a legal challenge, making the ruling especially significant, as Congress considers a version of the statute,” notes The Verge. “The laws, versions of which also passed in Utah and Louisiana, aim to impose age verification standards at the app store level, making companies like Apple and Google responsible for transmitting signals about users’ ages to app developers to block users from age-inappropriate experiences.”

“The state can still appeal the ruling with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has a history of reversing blocks on internet regulations.”

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: CBS cannot contain the online spread of a “60 Minutes” segment that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, tried to block from airing. The episode, “Inside CECOT,” featured testimonies from US deportees who were tortured or suffered physical or sexual abuse at a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. “Welcome to hell,” one former inmate was told upon arriving, the segment reported, while also highlighting a clip of Donald Trump praising CECOT and its leadership for “great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don’t play games.”

Weiss controversially pulled the segment on Monday, claiming it could not air in the US because it lacked critical voices, as no Trump officials were interviewed. She claimed that the segment “did not advance the ball” and merely echoed others’ reporting, NBC News reported. Her plan was to air the segment when it was “ready,” insisting that holding stories “for whatever reason” happens “every day in every newsroom.” But Weiss apparently did not realize that the “Inside CECOT” would still stream in Canada, giving the public a chance to view the segment as reporters had intended.

Critics accusing CBS of censoring the story quickly shared the segment online Monday after discovering that it was available on the Global TV app. Using a VPN to connect to the app with a Canadian IP address was all it took to override Weiss’ block in the US, as 404 Media reported the segment was uploaded to “to a variety of file sharing sites and services, including iCloud, Mega, and as a torrent,” including on the recently revived file-sharing service LimeWire. It’s currently also available to stream on the Internet Archive, where one reviewer largely summed up the public’s response so far, writing, “cannot believe this was pulled, not a dang thing wrong with this segment except it shows truth.” “Yo what,” joked Reddit user Howzitgoin, highlighting only the word “LimeWire.” Another user responded, “man, who knew my nostalgia prof pic would become relevant again, WTF.”

“Bringing back LimeWire to illegally rip copies of reporting suppressed by the government is definitely some cyberpunk shit,” a Bluesky user wrote.

“We need a champion against the darkness,” a Reddit commenter echoed. “I side with LimeWire.”

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An anonymous reader shares a report: It’s been more than eight years since Amazon bought Whole Foods, but the two companies still haven’t aligned their setup for the Microsoft software their employees use. That disconnect was flagged in an 8-week Deloitte review of Whole Foods’ use of Microsoft 365 apps earlier this year, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. Deloitte found that Whole Foods relies on “fragmented” Microsoft toolsets, has loose security and data-retention practices, and employs a complex user-management setup — all of which contribute to inefficiencies and lower productivity when working with Amazon employees.

The consulting firm recommended a 24-month integration plan that would first move Whole Foods’ corporate employees onto Amazon’s backend system, followed by its frontline workers. The phased approach would ensure a “smooth transition for users and minimal disruption to business processes,” while generating cost savings, the document said. The review, completed in May, highlights Amazon’s ongoing challenges in integrating Whole Foods. Since acquiring the chain in 2017, the company has struggled to scale the business and integrate operations, resulting in frequent reorganizations and shifting strategic priorities.

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For the second time this month, a Chinese rocket designed for reuse successfully soared into low-Earth orbit on its first flight Monday, defying the questionable odds that burden the debuts of new launch vehicles.

The first Long March 12A rocket, roughly the same height and diameter of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 9:00 pm EST Monday (02:00 UTC Tuesday).

Less than 10 minutes later, rocket’s methane-fueled first stage booster hurtled through the atmosphere at supersonic speed, impacting in a remote region about 200 miles downrange from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwestern China. The booster failed to complete a braking burn to slow down for landing at a prepared location near the edge of the Gobi Desert.

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In the late 1980s, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary sat on the New York Times best-seller list for 155 consecutive weeks and eventually sold 57 million copies, a figure believed to be second only to the Bible in the United States — but those days are thoroughly gone. Stefan Fatsis’s new book “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary” chronicles what Louis Menand describes in The New Yorker as “a losing struggle” for legacy dictionaries to survive in the internet age.

The profession has been decimated: an estimated 200 full-time lexicographers worked in the US 25 years ago, and Fatsis believes that number is “probably closer to thirty” today. “By the time I finished this book,” Fatsis writes, “it wasn’t clear how long flesh-bone-and-blood lexicographers would be needed to chronicle the march of the English language.”

Merriam-Webster is now owned by Encycloaedia Britannica, another print-era giant that stopped publishing physical volumes in 2012. The company’s free website draws about a billion page views annually, but the content has shifted dramatically — word games, trending slang and ads dominate rather than lexicographic depth. The scale of the challenge facing dictionaries is staggering. One study of digitized library books found the English lexicon grew from about 600,000 words in 1950 to over a million by 2000, and concluded that 52% of English words in printed books are “lexical dark matter” that appears in no standard reference work.

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European public institutions are quietly migrating away from American cloud providers and office software, driven less by policy ambitions in Brussels than by the mundane legal reality that GDPR-mandated risk assessments keep flagging the US CLOUD Act as an unacceptable threat to citizen data.

Austria’s Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism moved 1,200 employees to the open-source platform Nextcloud in four months. Germany’s Schleswig-Holstein has already transitioned 24,000 of its 30,000 civil servants to LibreOffice, Nextcloud and Thunderbird. The International Criminal Court in The Hague announced in November 2025 that it would replace Microsoft office software after chief prosecutor Karim Khan was temporarily locked out of his Outlook account.

Competition economist Cristina Caffarra estimates that 90% of Europe’s digital infrastructure is now controlled by non-European companies. Forrester predicts no European enterprise will fully abandon US hyperscalers in 2026, but these targeted migrations for sensitive government applications are already underway.

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I’ve been experiencing some active noise cancelling (ANC) fatigue lately, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. ANC has a time and a place, but being able to be aware of my surroundings and have conversations with my wife while working from home has made 2025 more enjoyable. I owe that to the Shokz Open Run Pro 2, which are bone conduction headphones that leave your ears uncovered. But if you prefer true wireless earbuds that have the same benefit, the Shokz OpenFit 2+ are a great alternative, and right now, they’re on sale for $139.95 (originally $199.95).

Shokz OpenFit 2+

$139.95

$199.95
Save $60.00

$139.95

$199.95
Save $60.00

Unlike the Shokz Open Run Pro 2, the Shokz OpenFit 2+ are not bone conduction headphones; instead, the sound is projected toward your ears (think of it like small speakers next to your ears). This means, like bone conduction headphones, your ears are not plugged by any earbuds. They simply rest on them, allowing you to use your ears to their full potential.

The OpenFit 2+ comes with some cool features. They have Dolby cinematic sound, which is an immersive sound feature that frees sound channels, making directional sound clearer (almost like surround sound). If you like to watch movies or shows with your earbuds, this is a huge plus. The design fits snug on your ears, so you don’t have to worry about them falling off, regardless of how intense your workouts get. The Shokz companion app is excellent, and gives you a lot of freedom with the EQ, so you can tweak the settings to optimize podcasts or a bass-heavy format when you need that extra motivation in the gym. You can expect about 11 hours of battery life with another 48 hours from the charging case. You can also charge them wirelessly through the case.

If you’re looking to disconnect from ANC headphones in 2026, the Shokz OpenFit 2+ are a great option with this 30% discount.