Monthly Archives: December 2025

This 65″ Fire TV For $265 Is A Steal Plus More Big Screen Holiday Deals

Posted on by
This 65
We’re old enough to remember when big screen TVs came with big time prices. They were also a lot more bulky than they are now. Fortunately, this is one area in tech where pricing now favors the consumer (unlike DRAM, don’t even get us started), and if you’re not ultra-picky, you can score a 65-inch model for less than $300, or even less than

AI Hackers Are Coming Dangerously Close to Beating Humans

Posted on by

Stanford researchers spent much of the past year building an AI bot called Artemis that scans networks for software vulnerabilities, and when they pitted it against ten professional penetration testers on the university’s own engineering network, the bot outperformed nine of them. The experiment offers a window into how rapidly AI hacking tools have improved after years of underwhelming performance.

“We thought it would probably be below average,” said Justin Lin, a Stanford cybersecurity researcher. Artemis found bugs at a fraction of human cost — just under $60 per hour compared to the $2,000 to $2,500 per day that professional pen testers typically charge. But its performance wasn’t flawless. About 18% of its bug reports were false positives, and it completely missed an obvious vulnerability on a webpage that most human testers caught. In one case, Artemis found a bug on an outdated page that didn’t render in standard browsers; it used a command-line tool called Curl instead of Chrome or Firefox.

Dan Boneh, a Stanford computer science professor who advised the researchers, noted that vast amounts of software shipped without being vetted by LLMs could now be at risk. “We’re in this moment of time where many actors can increase their productivity to find bugs at an extreme scale,” said Jacob Klein, head of threat intelligence at Anthropic.


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NVIDIA GTX 980 Through RTX 5080: Open-Source Nouveau/Mesa Drivers vs. NVIDIA 580 Linux Drivers

Posted on by

With the NVIDIA 590 Linux driver series removing GeForce 900 series “Maxwell” and GeForce 10 series “Pascal” as part of punting it off to the latest legacy driver branch, it’s time for a last look at how the mainline NVIDIA Linux driver is performing with these aging graphics cards relative to the current state of the upstream open-source NVIDIA Linux drivers. In this article is a look at how the open-source and upstream Nouveau kernel driver with Nouveau/NVK Mesa drivers are performing relative to the NVIDIA 580 series with its Maxwell and Pascal support. For further perspective is also tossing in newer graphics cards too for providing a end-of-year GeForce 980 / 1080 / 2080 / 3080 / 4080 / 5080 series comparison between these different Linux drivers.

16 Shows Like ‘Slow Horses’ You Should Watch Next

Posted on by

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

It’s begin to feel like successful streaming shows are increasingly the exception, rather than the rule, and Slow Horses is something else again: a successful show with a more-than-consistent schedule. With five seasons since 2022, rather than the increasingly common “every few years or when we get to it” scheduling of other streaming shows, it’s rather lovely to actually be able to remember the events of the previous series when the new one starts.

If this all sounds like damning with faint praise, it’s also a smart, brilliantly entertaining show, with Gary Oldman as the slovenly, flatulent, once-brilliant spy Jackson Lamb now in charge of Slough House, the MI5 office for agents who aren’t good enough to trust with important tasks, but who haven’t really done anything worth getting fired for. Their very expendability puts them in the line of fire early and often, with ambitious spymaster Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) finding the team alternately useful and a liability. The show’s been renewed for at least two further seasons—the novel series by Mick Herron on which it’s based runs to nine books so far, and so there’s potential for even more.

Down Cemetery Road (2025 – )

This is perhaps the most obvious streamalike here, if only because the shows are both Apple TV productions and are both based on Mick Herron novels. This one is more spy-adjacent, however, starring Emma Thompson as hard-living, hard-drinking private investigator Zoë Boehm. She’s hired by Ruth Wilson’s Sarah Trafford, a married art restorer who nobody takes very seriously (including and especially her husband), even when she becomes invested in the fate of a young girl whose family is killed in a gas explosion (allegedly) down the street. The girl, whose parents were killed, disappears into the system and no one really seems to care until Sarah hires Zoë and her husband to look into it. Turns out both women are in way over their heads, as the missing girl points to a much broader conspiracy. The shows villains are a bit cartoonishly distracting, but Thompson and Wilson are brilliantly paired, and their performances are more than worth the price of admission. Stream Down Cemetery Road on Apple TV+.

The Agency (2024 – )

Michael Fassbender as stars here as “Martian,” codename of Brandon Colby, a former undercover CIA agent just returned to London after six years in Sudan. He left behind a lover, Dr. Samia Zahir (Jodie Turner-Smith)—a relationship he wasn’t terribly forthcoming about with his handlers. When Sami turns up in London as part of a diplomatic delegation, Martian is forced to choose between his job and his personal life, which becomes more complicated when it appears that she’s involved in a broader scheme involving the Sudanese government, MI6, and an undercover agent in Belarus. It’s all very twisty-turny in the best tradition of spy shows. Jeffrey Wright plays Martian’s boss and mentor, Richard Gere is the CIA London Station Chief, and Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville is a shifty senior MI6 operative. Stream The Agency on Paramount+.

The Bureau (2015 – 2020)

In addition to, or instead of, The Agency, you can also catch Le Bureau des Légends, the French original on which it’s based (they’re similarly addictive, though many will prefer the original on principle). Same general premise: Mathieu Kassovitz stars as Guillaume Debailly, a spy just recently returned from a six year undercover mission in Damascus, Syria. Trying to re-adjust to his life, everything is thrown into turmoil when Nadia (Zineb Triki), the woman with whom he’d had a relationship, turns up in Paris. Stream The Bureau on Paramount+.

The Day of the Jackal (2024 – )

Cinematic in scope, this new adaptation of the Frederick Forsyth novel is buoyed by rather brilliant casting: Eddie Redmayne plays the Jackal, a cold and steely international assassin pursued by MI6 operative Bianca Pullman—she’s played by Lashana Lynch, putting her experience as the new 007 in No Time to Die to good use. I’m not sure there’s anything here we haven’t seen in countless other spy thrillers (including, of course, the 1973 and 1997 film adaptations), but the performances and production values are top-notch, with each episode playing out like a tense mini-movie. Stream The Day of the Jackal on Peacock.

Monsieur Spade (2024)

An original drama from Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit) and Tom Fontana (Homicide, Oz), Monsieur Spade finds Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, of The Maltese Falcon fame, living a quiet life in retirement in the South of France. It’s all going very well of the rumpled former detective—until six nuns are brutally murdered at a nearby convent, the same convent that’s been home to Sam’s ward for some time. Naturally, he finds his past has caught up with him, and is forced to surrender his idyllic life in order to help uncover the complex mystery that endangers his (very few) loved ones. Clive Owen is great as the rumpled, emphysemic detective, and the story feels like a fitting sequel to Hammett’s novel. Stream Monsieur Spade on Prime Video and AMC+.

Killing Eve (2018 – 2022)

Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer star as the two halves that form one of television’s great cat-and-mouse narratives, with Oh as Eve Polastri, a bored MI5 analyst who becomes obsessed with hunting down the brutal and notorious assassin known only as Villanelle. It starts as a professional compulsion before it becomes personal: Eve and Villanelle begin toying with each other, and it soon becomes clear that the fascination goes both ways. Stream Killing Eve on Prime Video, Paramount+, Britbox, Tubi, and Netflix.

The Night Manager (2016 – )

Coming, as it does, from John le Carré, the wellspring of many modern spy sagas, it’s probably no surprise that The Night Manager (from a 1993 novel) was successful—though it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a cast lead by Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, and Olivia Colman. Hiddleston is Jonathan Pine, working the night shift at a luxury hotel in Switzerland when he encounters an unexpected guest: arms dealer Richard Roper (Laurie). Former Army veteran Pine had previous dealings with Roper in Cairo, and the reluctant night manager is persuaded by Foreign Office head Angela Burr (Colman) to infiltrate the criminal’s organization. A long-gestating second season is coming in 2026, to be followed by a third. Stream The Night Manager on Prime Video.

Deadloch (2023 – )

Slow Horses isn’t a send-up of the spy genre, precisely, but it does enjoy taking the piss. The more overtly funny Deadloch is both an excellent crime procedural and an effective satire of the genre; the Australian import does about as well as setting up its central mystery as Broadchurch and its many (many) imitators. Kate Box stars as Dulcie Collins, fastidious senior sergeant of the police force in the fictional town of the title. When a body turns up dead on the beach, Dulcie is joined by Madeleine Sami’s Eddie Redcliffe, a crude and generally obnoxious detective brought in to help solve the case. Unraveling the web of secrets and mysteries in the tiny Tasmanian town is appropriately addictive, with the added bonus of cop thriller tropes getting mercilessly mocked all the way. Stream Deadloch on Prime Video.

The Capture (2019 – )

There are several imports on this list; Peacock is just too new to have a large stable of homegrown shows, but they’ve managed a handful of impressive acquisitions. In this British series, a young, ambitious detective with the London police department is tasked with the investigation of a soldier who’d only recently been exonerated for a war crime, but who seems to have turned around and assaulted and then kidnapped his lawyer (sorry, his barrister). There’s plenty of police procedural drama and international intrigue, but the show has a slightly different target: it’s looking at the dangers of our reliance on CCTV surveillance, and on the dangers of a widespread assumption that cameras don’t lie. London is one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the world, so there’s a particularly British point of view here, but the issues will be recognizable to anyone who’s spent time in any major city. A third season is on the way. Stream The Capture on Peacock.

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2024 – )

One-upping the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie movie on which it’s based, Mr. & Mrs. Smith stars Donald Glover and Maya Erskine as a couple of spies tasked to pose as a married couple while coordinating (and sometimes competing against one another) on missions. Smartly, each episode takes on a standalone mission in a different location, while complicating the relationship between the two and gradually upping the stakes until the season finale, which sees them pitted against each other. The show has been renewed for season two, but it’s been delayed, and it’s unclear if Glover and Erskine will be returning, or if we’ll be getting a new Mr. & Mrs. Stream Mr. & Mrs. Smith on Prime Video.

Archer (2009 – 2023)

H. Jon Benjamin, lovable schlub of Bob’s Burgers, leads this show as Bob Belcher’s polar opposite: a handsome spy who’s also a deeply narcissistic womanizer with an endless capacity for alcohol. This is a full-on comedy, dealing with the exploits of a New York–based freelance intelligence agency led by Jessica Walter’s hard-drinking Malory Archer—but it’s such a smart send-up of James Bond-style shenanigans that it works as a spy series, as well, and sometimes the team’s missions aren’t all that much more silly than the plots of more overtly serious spy movies and shows. Addictive and irreverent, the show includes one of TV animation’s best-ever voice casts, including Aisha Tyler, Amber Nash, and Judy Greer as the sociopathic heiress Cheryl Tunt. Stream Archer on Hulu and Tubi.

The Equalizer (2021 – 2025)

The Queen Latifah-led Equalizer reboots the 1980s series (and sidesteps the Denzel Washington movies) by spinning the premise in a slightly different direction: Latifah plays single mom Robyn McCall, an impossibly skilled former CIA operative who puts her talents to work for those in need. It splits the difference between crime and spy drama, with episodes involving close-to-home crime and others dealing with international espionage. While the original’s vibe was more about the cops being handcuffed by things like “rules” and “giving perps their basic human dignity,” this one is more about those who’ve been failed by systems that don’t care about them—and who might benefit from the help of a woman who can beat just about anyone’s ass. It’s very satisfying watching Robyn and company spy and/or punch their way out of sticky situations to help the oppressed. Stream The Equalizer on Paramount+ and Tubi.

The Little Drummer Girl (2018)

Park Chan-wook (Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy) directs this series, based on the John le Carré novel, and brings an undeniably sexy period style. Florence Pugh is Charlie, a young actress recruited by Mossad spymaster Martin Kurtz (Michael Shannon) to infiltrate a group of Palestinian terrorists, even as she’s being manipulated by an Israeli intelligence officer played by Alexander Skarsgård. Crucially, and as in the book that preceded it, the show offers nuanced characters on multiple sides of the conflict, raising serious questions about who the real villains are. Stream The Little Drummer Girl on AMC+ or buy it from Prime Video.

The Americans (2013 – 2018)

Set during the Cold War 1980s, and created by former CIA officer Joe Weisberg, Americans follows Soviet KGB intelligence agents Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys), living lives as an American couple in the DC metro area—and raising their American-born children. The critically acclaimed (also popular!) show makes much of its period setting and a central conflict that places two spies in the heart of suburban America, even as they’re tasked with undermining the Reagan-era government under which their children will grow up. Stream The Americans on Disney+ and Hulu.

Homeland (2011 – 2020)

The focus shifts a bit after Homeland‘s first few seasons, the series begins with CIA case officer Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) coming to suspect that that decorated Marine Corps scout sniper Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), recently rescued from an al-Qaeda compound, has been turned and is planning a terrorist attack on the United States. Having been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, her superiors don’t give Mathison’s suspicions much credence, kicking off a cat-and-mouse/is-he-or-isn’t he? game between the two. Both leads won Emmys for their performances, and the series took the Outstanding Drama prize in its first year. Stream Homeland on Hulu and Netflix.

Man on the Inside (2024 – )

Not a spy drama (at all), but a funny, and often very moving, comedy from the creator of The Good Place. Still: Undercover antics abound, so I’m going to say it counts as a bit of spy-adjacent counter-programming. Based very, very loosely on a true story, the show stars Ted Danson as Charles Nieuwendyk, a recent widower and retired professor who’s started settling into a life of…not much, when, on a whim, he takes a temp job with a detective agency. They’re investigating some missing jewelry at a local retirement home, and the dorky, awkward Charles makes for the perfect undercover resident, even as the job evokes memories of his late wife’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Ted Danson is in great form here, as is a supporting cast that, in the second season, includes real-life wife Mary Steenburgen. Stream Man on the Inside on Netflix.

Among Giants Is A Zelda-Inspired Open World VR Adventure Coming To Quest 3

Posted on by

Among Giants is an open world VR adventure from a solo developer that’s heading to Quest 3 and 3S next year.

Created by K Monkey Games, Among Giants takes direct inspiration from Shadow of the Colossus and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Playing as Erya across a world filled with ancient giants, you’re tasked with exploring the remnants of this lost civilization as you decode its mysterious alien language. Hunting down these giants lets you extract their final memories, as you discover what happened to humanity.

0:00

/2:00

Trailer

Featuring a 25 km² environment, you’re accompanied on this journey by a tiny robot companion called R-011, and a rideable horse you can summon from anywhere using a horn. Over 10 types of enemies are promised, ranging from droids to the “colossal death worm.” Erya comes armed with a bow and arrow, and other non-reloadable weapons can also be found.

Other forms of traversal include gliding through the air, using grappling hooks to navigate cliffs, and swimming underwater. Among Giants also features a dynamic weather system alongside a day and night cycle, where you’ll need to carefully navigate heavy rain, blizzards, and scorching deserts alike across this journey.

K Monkey Games informed UploadVR that Among Giants targets a Q1 2026 launch on Quest 3 and 3S. Other platforms are currently unconfirmed, though the Meta Horizon Store presently lists Quest Pro support too.

UCI confirms equal number of women’s and men’s starts in cycling at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics

Posted on by

The UCI has announced that an equal number of qualification places will be available for men and women at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, 257 for each across all cycling disciplines.

Athletes will be competing for 22 gold medals across road, track, MTB, BMX racing and BMX freestyle disciplines, making cycling the third largest sport at the Olympics. 

The UCI introduced gender parity for the 2024 Paris Olympics, with the same total number of places and medals continuing for the 2028 Games. 

Going back to the previous 2020 Tokyo Olympics, although MTB and BMX events were open to equal numbers of male and female participants, road events had offered more men’s than women’s starts: 67 for women and 130 for men.  

Track cycling parity was also achieved for the first time at the Paris Olympics, by adding another seven women’s places.

Women’s cycling’s profile increases

Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift stage 4.
120m people worldwide are said to have watched the 2025 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. Leon van Bon / Zwift

The announcement of gender parity at the LA Olympics reinforces the increasing profile of women’s cycling. 

Zwift released a report on the state of women’s cycling ahead of the 2025 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, which highlighted the progress made since the event’s first staging in 2022, declaring “a golden era for women’s cycling“. 

The 2025 race was broadcast in 190 countries and is reported to have attracted a worldwide audience of 120 million, including 26 million in France alone. The 2026 race route is the longest yet and includes a queen-stage finish atop Mont Ventoux.

A finish atop Mont Ventoux is the highlight of the 2026 Tour de France Femmes route.

The increase in the UCI’s mandated minimum salary for women cyclists has also helped increase the attraction of the sport for women, with Zwift’s report pointing to an increase from €15,000 in 2020 to €31,728 in 2025 for Women’s WorldTour riders and an average 2024 salary of €40,000.

Canyon//SRAM zondacrypto’s Anastasiya Kolesava says that the increase in pay has been matched by an increase in competitiveness: “To be honest, it’s insane how everything has changed. So many riders are now super strong on the climbs and the speeds we race at are so much higher – even if there is generally a lot more climbing in races / stages now,” she states.

The Cyclists’ Alliance, set up to provide an independent voice for women’s professional cycling, highlights that gains are in large part confined to the top tier of the women’s sport, though. 

Its survey of women riders revealed that 84% of riders in third-tier Continental teams earned under €20,000 and 42% had a second job to make ends meet, and highlighted a poor career pathway for riders.

Pauline Ferrand-Prévot celebrating at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
Pauline Ferrand-Prévot’s €50,000 for winning the Tour de France Femmes was a tenth of the prize awarded to Tadej Pogačar. Tim de Wale / Getty Images

There’s increasing parity in prize money for races, though, with some one-day races and stage races, including the Amstel Gold Race and Tour Down Under and all races organised by Flanders Classics, offering equal prize money for men and women.

The Tour de France continues to favour male riders, though, with Tadej Pogačar winning 10 times Pauline Ferrand-Prévot’s €50,000 and a men’s Tour prize pot of over €2.5m versus €259,430 for the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.

One of our favorite budgeting apps is 50 percent off for new users

Posted on by

With a new year just around the corner, now is the perfect time to take stock of your finances. A budgeting app can help with that, and right now you can get 50 percent off your first year of a Monarch Money plan. All you need to do is enter the code MONARCHVIP at checkout and you’ll pay $50 for the initial 12 months instead of the regular price of $100. Note that the offer only applies to new users.

Monarch Money was the runner-up in our guide to the best budgeting apps in 2025, and it was definitely a grower. Initially we found the experience of using the app to be needlessly complicated compared to some of its rivals, but get over that hurdle and it’s impressively fully-featured. There are plenty of customization options, a helpful “goals” feature and a thorough month-in-review recap that beats out similar features from some of its competitors. We also like how you can grant account access to others.

Besides the steep learning curve, we also noted that the mobile app is less intuitive to use than the web version, which might pose a problem if you were hoping to do most of your accounting on the go. We also had some issues with the app failing to distinguish between bills and other recurring expenses, as well as a few bugs along the way.

All things considered, Monarch is definitely one of our favorite budgeting apps, only being beaten out by Quicken Simplifi. As you might expect, the biggest strength of Simplifi is its simplicity, and how it eases you into using its various features. If you value that kind of user experience, it might be a better choice for you, but there’s unfortunately no free trial to take advantage of.

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

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/one-of-our-favorite-budgeting-apps-is-50-percent-off-for-new-users-154056449.html?src=rss

AMD GAIA 0.14 Released With Native Support For Linux & macOS

Posted on by

Early this year AMD announced the open-source GAIA project for “Generative AI Is Awesome” as a showcase of AI support atop their Ryzen AI NPUs and other hardware. That began as a Windows-only project but in September AMD added Linux support to GAIA but only using Vulkan acceleration for AI on Radeon GPUs. Now today GAIA 0.14 is available with “native” support for both macOS and Linux…

Disney Puts $1 Billion Into OpenAI, Licenses 200+ Characters for AI-Generated Videos and Images

Posted on by

Disney is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and has entered into a three-year licensing deal that will let users generate AI-powered short videos and images featuring more than 200 characters from its Disney, Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar franchises.

The new features are expected to launch in 2026 through Sora, OpenAI’s short-form video platform, and ChatGPT. A selection of user-generated short videos will also be available to stream on Disney+. The licensing agreement excludes any talent likenesses or voices. Disney will receive warrants to purchase additional OpenAI equity as part of the arrangement, and its employees will gain access to OpenAI tools including ChatGPT for building new products.


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Android’s New Emergency Live Video Feature Could Transform 911 Response

Posted on by
Android's New Emergency Live Video Feature Could Transform 911 Response
In an emergency, Android users can now share real-time visual details with 911 dispatchers, bridging a critical information gap that can hinder quick, effective emergency responses. Today Google rolls out Emergency Live Video across Android devices in three countries (running Android 8+), turning a smartphone on-site into a crucial pair of