The holiday season is very much upon us and, whether you’re traveling or need a last-minute present, noise-canceling headphones are a great purchase for this time of year. This is made all the more true when they’re on sale. Take the Bose QuietComfort Headphones, which are down to $170 from $359. The 53 percent discount brings these headphones to a new record-low price — even better than their Black Friday deal. 

Bose released its new QuietComfort Headphones in October and they’re an incredible option, especially for the sale price. It offers ANC with two modes: Quiet and Aware. It also has up to 24 hours of battery life and should give you two and a half hours of juice after just 15 minutes of charging.  

Looking for something a bit more high-tech? The second-generation Bose QuietComfort Ultra Bluetooth Headphones have also been on sale for some time now. An 11 percent discount brings them down to $399, from $449 — an all-time low price since they came out in September. We gave the second-gen Quiet Comfort Ultras a 90 in our review, thanks to incredible active noise cancelation and upgraded sound quality. They also overtook Sony’s WH-1000XM6 headphones (also great and 12 percent off) for the top spot in our best noise-canceling headphones for 2025 list. 

Follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/boses-new-quietcomfort-headphones-are-53-percent-off-122332817.html?src=rss

End-of-year wrap-ups were popularized by Spotify, and these days you can look back on the last 12 months of listening with most of the music streaming apps, as well as your gaming and YouTube viewing habits. The next logical step? A full recap of all of the Uber trips and takeaways you’ve guiltily ordered this year, of course!

Uber is calling its new wrap-up feature, which launches today, “YOUBER”, and it takes into consideration both your Uber and Uber Eats usage. You can see where you went, how often you demanded Uber Comfort, and how frequently you returned to the same pizza place on Uber Eats. If you rank in the top one percent of a specific restaurant’s customers, YOUBER is going to tell you all about it, whether the realization fills you with shame or not.

There are also 14 “Uber Personality Profiles” that you could be assigned, such as “Do-Gooder” for the Uber Electric loyalists, “Rise & Shiner” for the early morning riders, and “Delivery Darling” for those who “live for deliveries of all kinds.” Uber lets you share your results straight from YOUBER using the “Share this Story” button from within the app.

YOUBER is available to Uber and Uber Eats customers in the US from today, and can be accessed from your homescreen or account page.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/even-uber-has-an-end-of-year-wrap-up-now-120035274.html?src=rss

iRobot, which brought robotic vacuum cleaners to the masses with its iconic Roomba models, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Massachusetts-based company plans to sell all assets to its primary supplier, a Chinese company known as Picea Robotics. If approved by a bankruptcy court, the move would allow iRobot to “continue operating in the ordinary course, pursue its product development roadmap, and maintain its global footprint,” iRobot wrote in a press release.

The company expects the deal to close in February 2026, but says it will continue to operate “with no anticipated disruption to its app functionality, customer programs, global partners, supply chain relationships or ongoing product support.” That means your Roomba should continue to clean normally and you’ll be able to get consumables and replacement parts. 

However, investors of common stock “will experience a total loss and not receive recovery on their investment” if the deal is approved, iRobot stated. The company didn’t discuss how the move might affect its employees in the US or elsewhere. 

Bankruptcy seemed a likely outcome for iRobot after Amazon dropped its $1.7 billion acquisition of the company last year following a veto threat by European regulators. The company’s fortunes continued to decline and it issued a statement to investors in March 2025 that it had “substantial doubt about [its] ability to continue.”

It’s a sad turn of events for the company that invented the robotic vacuum niche and launched its first product, the Roomba, back in 2002. It dominated that space for more than a decade, but its market size has steadily shrunk more recently, particularly since Covid, due to competition from rivals like Roborock and Dreame. 

Though iRobot retooled its product lineup earlier this year with new models like the Roomba 105 Vac Robot series and Roomba Plus 505 Combo Robot + AutoWash Dock, but they failed to move the sales needle enough. The company was reportedly hit hard by Trump’s 46 percent tariff in Vietnam where it manufactures products for the US market. 

If the sale is approved, iRobot says it will return in force. “Today’s announcement marks a pivotal milestone in securing iRobot’s long-term future,” said CEO Gary Cohen. “The transaction will strengthen our financial position and will help deliver continuity for our consumers, customers, and partners.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/irobot-has-filed-for-bankruptcy-and-may-be-taken-over-by-its-primary-supplier-091602257.html?src=rss

Superintelligence has become “a quasi-political forecast” with “very little to do with any scientific consensus, emerging instead from particular corridors of power.” That’s the warning from James O’Sullivan, a lecturer in digital humanities from University College Cork. In a refreshing 5,600-word essay in Noema magazine, he notes the suspicious coincidence that “The loudest prophets of superintelligence are those building the very systems they warn against…”

“When we accept that AGI is inevitable, we stop asking whether it should be built, and in the furor, we miss that we seem to have conceded that a small group of technologists should determine our future.” (For example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman “seems determined to position OpenAI as humanity’s champion, bearing the terrible burden of creating God-like intelligence so that it might be restrained.”)

The superintelligence discourse functions as a sophisticated apparatus of power, transforming immediate questions about corporate accountability, worker displacement, algorithmic bias and democratic governance into abstract philosophical puzzles about consciousness and control…
Media amplification plays a crucial role in this process, as every incremental improvement in large language models gets framed as a step towards AGI. ChatGPT writes poetry; surely consciousness is imminent…” Such accounts, often sourced from the very companies building these systems, create a sense of momentum that becomes self-fulfilling. Investors invest because AGI seems near, researchers join companies because that’s where the future is being built and governments defer regulation because they don’t want to handicap their domestic champions…
We must recognize this process as political, not technical. The inevitability of superintelligence is manufactured through specific choices about funding, attention and legitimacy, and different choices would produce different futures. The fundamental question isn’t whether AGI is coming, but who benefits from making us believe it is… We do not yet understand what kind of systems we are building, or what mix of breakthroughs and failures they will produce, and that uncertainty makes it reckless to funnel public money and attention into a single speculative trajectory.

Some key points:

“The machines are coming for us, or so we’re told. Not today, but soon enough that we must seemingly reorganize civilization around their arrival…”
“When we debate whether a future artificial general intelligence might eliminate humanity, we’re not discussing the Amazon warehouse worker whose movements are dictated by algorithmic surveillance or the Palestinian whose neighborhood is targeted by automated weapons systems. These present realities dissolve into background noise against the rhetoric of existential risk…”
“Seen clearly, the prophecy of superintelligence is less a warning about machines than a strategy for power, and that strategy needs to be recognized for what it is… ”
“Superintelligence discourse isn’t spreading because experts broadly agree it is our most urgent problem; it spreads because a well-resourced movement has given it money and access to power…”

“Academic institutions, which are meant to resist such logics, have been conscripted into this manufacture of inevitability… reinforcing industry narratives, producing papers on AGI timelines and alignment strategies, lending scholarly authority to speculative fiction…”
“The prophecy becomes self-fulfilling through material concentration — as resources flow towards AGI development, alternative approaches to AI starve…”
The dominance of superintelligence narratives obscures the fact that many other ways of doing AI exist, grounded in present social needs rather than hypothetical machine gods. [He lists data sovereignty movements “that treat data as a collective resource subject to collective consent,” as well as organizations like Canada’s First Nations Information Governance Centre and New Zealand’s’s Te Mana Raraunga, plus “Global South initiatives that use modest, locally governed AI systems to support healthcare, agriculture or education under tight resource constraints.”] “Such examples… demonstrate how AI can be organized without defaulting to the superintelligence paradigm that demands everyone else be sacrificed because a few tech bros can see the greater good that everyone else has missed…”
“These alternatives also illuminate the democratic deficit at the heart of the superintelligence narrative. Treating AI at once as an arcane technical problem that ordinary people cannot understand and as an unquestionable engine of social progress allows authority to consolidate in the hands of those who own and build the systems…”

He’s ultimately warning us about “politics masked as predictions…”

“The real political question is not whether some artificial superintelligence will emerge, but who gets to decide what kinds of intelligence we build and sustain. And the answer cannot be left to the corporate prophets of artificial transcendence because the future of AI is a political field — it should be open to contestation.

“It belongs not to those who warn most loudly of gods or monsters, but to publics that should have the moral right to democratically govern the technologies that shape their lives.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“A SpaceX executive says a satellite deployed from a Chinese rocket risked colliding with a Starlink satellite,” reports PC Magazine:

On Friday, company VP for Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, tweeted about the incident and blamed a lack of coordination from the Chinese launch provider CAS Space. “When satellite operators do not share ephemeris for their satellites, dangerously close approaches can occur in space,” he wrote, referring to the publication of predicted orbital positions for such satellites…

[I]t looks like one of the satellites veered relatively close to a Starlink sat that’s been in service for over two years. “As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200 meter (656 feet) close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude,” Nicolls wrote… “Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators — this needs to change,” he added.
Chinese launch provider CAS Space told PCMag that “As a launch service provider, our responsibility ends once the satellites are deployed, meaning we do not have control over the satellites’ maneuvers.”

And the article also cites astronomer/satellite tracking expert Jonathan McDowell, who had tweeted that CAS Space’s response “seems reasonable.” (In an email to PC Magazine, he’d said “Two days after launch is beyond the window usually used for predicting launch related risks.”

But “The coordination that Nicolls cited is becoming more and more important,” notes Space.com, since “Earth orbit is getting more and more crowded.”

In 2020, for example, fewer than 3,400 functional satellites were whizzing around our planet. Just five years later, that number has soared to about 13,000, and more spacecraft are going up all the time. Most of them belong to SpaceX. The company currently operates nearly 9,300 Starlink satellites, more than 3,000 of which have launched this year alone.

Starlink satellites avoid potential collisions autonomously, maneuvering themselves away from conjunctions predicted by available tracking data. And this sort of evasive action is quite common: Starlink spacecraft performed about 145,000 avoidance maneuvers in the first six months of 2025, which works out to around four maneuvers per satellite per month. That’s an impressive record. But many other spacecraft aren’t quite so capable, and even Starlink satellites can be blindsided by spacecraft whose operators don’t share their trajectory data, as Nicolls noted.
And even a single collision — between two satellites, or involving pieces of space junk, which are plentiful in Earth orbit as well — could spawn a huge cloud of debris, which could cause further collisions. Indeed, the nightmare scenario, known as the Kessler syndrome, is a debris cascade that makes it difficult or impossible to operate satellites in parts of the final frontier.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Roomba manufacturer iRobot filed for bankruptcy today, reports Bloomberg.

After 35 years, iRobot reached a “restructuring support agrement that will hand control of the consumer robot maker to Shenzhen PICEA Robotics Co, its main supplier and lender, and Santrum Hong Kong Compny.”

Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive the entire equity stake in the reorganised company… The plan will allow the debtor to remain as a going concern and continue to meet its commitments to employees and make timely payments in full to vendors and other creditors for amounts owed throughout the court-supervised process, according to an iRobot statement… he company warned of potential bankruptcy in December after years of declining earnings.

Roomba says it’s sold over 50 million robots, the article points out, but earnings “began to decline since 2021 due to supply chain headwinds and increased competition.

“A hoped-for by acquisition by Amazon.com in 2023 collapsed over regulatory concerns.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“As Australia began enforcing a world-first social media ban for children under 16 years old this week, Denmark is planning to follow its lead,” reports the Associated Press, “and severely restrict social media access for young people.”

The Danish government announced last month that it had secured an agreement by three governing coalition and two opposition parties in parliament to ban access to social media for anyone under the age of 15. Such a measure would be the most sweeping step yet by a European Union nation to limit use of social media among teens and children.

The Danish government’s plans could become law as soon as mid-2026. The proposed measure would give some parents the right to let their children access social media from age 13, local media reported, but the ministry has not yet fully shared the plans… [A] new “digital evidence” app, announced by the Digital Affairs Ministry last month and expected to launch next spring, will likely form the backbone of the Danish plans. The app will display an age certificate to ensure users comply with social media age limits, the ministry said.
The article also notes Malaysia “is expected to ban social media accounts for people under the age of 16 starting at the beginning of next year, and Norway is also taking steps to restrict social media access for children and teens.

“China — which manufacturers many of the world’s digital devices — has set limits on online gaming time and smartphone time for kids.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Wall Street Journal reports that 68% of CEOs “plan to spend even more on AI in 2026, according to an annual survey of more than 350 public-company CEOs from advisory firm Teneo.”

And yet “less than half of current AI projects had generated more in returns than they had cost, respondents said.”

They reported the most success using AI in marketing and customer service and challenges using it in higher-risk areas such as security, legal and human resources.

Teneo also surveyed about 400 institutional investors, of which 53% expect that AI initiatives would begin to deliver returns on investments within six months. That compares to the 84% of CEOs of large companies — those with revenue of $10 billion or more — who believe it will take more than six months.

Surprisingly, 67% of CEOs believe AI will increase their entry-level head count, while 58% believe AI will increase senior leadership head count.

All the surveyed CEOS were from public companies with revenue over $1 billion…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC:

A billionaire investor keen on buying TikTok’s US operations has told the BBC he has been left in limbo as the latest deadline for the app’s sale looms.
The US has repeatedly delayed the date by which the platform’s Chinese owner, Bytedance, must sell or be blocked for American users. US President Donald Trump appears poised to extend the deadline for a fifth time on Tuesday. “We’re just standing by and waiting to see what happens,” investor Frank McCourt told BBC News…

The president…said “sophisticated” US investors would acquire the app, including two of his allies: Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell. Members of the Trump administration had indicated the deal would be formalised in a meeting between Trump and Xi in October — however it concluded without an agreement being reached. Neither TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance nor Beijing have since announced approval of a sale, despite Trump’s claims. This time there are no such claims a deal is imminent, leading most analysts to conclude another extension is inevitable.

Other investors besides McCourt include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Shark Tank entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.