Comcast's attempt to slow broadband customer losses still isn't stopping the bleeding as fiber and fixed wireless competition intensifies. In Q4 2025 alone, Comcast lost 181,000 broadband subscribers, even as it leans harder into wireless bundling and other business lines like Peacock and theme parks. Ars Technica reports: The Q4 net loss is more than the 176,000 loss predicted by analysts, although not as bad as the 199,000-customer loss that spurred [Comcast President Mike Cavanagh's] comment about Comcast "not winning in the marketplace" nine months ago. The Q4 2025 loss reported today is also worse than the 139,000-customer loss in Q4 2024 and the 34,000-customer loss in Q4 2023.

"Subscriber losses were 181,000, as the early traction we are seeing from our new initiatives was more than offset by continued competitive intensity," Comcast CFO Jason Armstrong said during an earnings call today, according to a Motley Fool transcript. Comcast's residential broadband customers dropped to 28.72 million, while business broadband customers dropped to 2.54 million, for a total of 31.26 million.

Armstrong said that average revenue per user grew 1.1 percent, "consistent with the deceleration that we had previewed reflecting our new go-to-market pricing, including lower everyday pricing and strong adoption of free wireless lines." Armstrong expects average revenue per user to continue growing slowly "for the next couple of quarters, driven by the absence of a rate increase, the impact from free wireless lines, and the ongoing migration of our base to simplified pricing." Comcast Connectivity & Platforms chief Steve Croney said the firm is facing "a more competitive environment from fiber" and continued competition from fixed wireless. "The market is going to remain intensely competitive," he said.

Longtime Slashdot reader devnulljapan writes: In 2012, Canada passed anti-circumvention law Bill C-11, cut-and-pasted from the U.S. DMCA, in return for access to U.S. markets without tariffs. Trump has tariffed Canada anyway, so Cory Doctorow suggests it sounds like like a good idea to ditch Bill C-11 and turn Canada into a "Disenshittification Nation" and go into the business of "disenshittify[ing] America's defective tech exports." Some of the specific ways Canada could respond include legalize jailbreaking, allow alternative app stores/clients, force companies to offer repair tools, and open firmware that break monopoly lock-ins. Cory's pitch is equal parts economic strategy (capture the rents Big Tech extracts) and national security (reduce dependence on U.S. tech stacks that can be switched off or weaponized).

An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. life expectancy rose to a record high of 79 years in 2024, an increase of six months from the previous year, reflecting a sharp decline in deaths from COVID-19 and drug overdoses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday.

According to a report from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy improved for both men and women across races and among Hispanics, surpassing the previous peak set in 2014.

Microsoft wants you to know that it knows that Windows 11, now used by a billion users, has been testing your patience and announced that its engineers are being redirected to urgently address the operating system's performance and reliability problems through an internal process the company calls "swarming."

"The feedback we're receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people," Pavan Davuluri, president of Windows and devices, told The Verge. The company plans to spend the rest of 2026 focusing on pain points including system performance, reliability, and overall user experience.

January has been particularly rough for Windows 11. Microsoft issued an emergency out-of-band update to fix shutdown issues on some machines, then released a second out-of-band fix a week later to address OneDrive and Dropbox crashes. Some business PCs are also failing to boot after the January update because they were left in an "improper state" after December's monthly update failed to install. Users have also grown frustrated by aggressive Edge and Bing prompts, constant OneDrive upselling nags, and Microsoft's push to require Microsoft accounts.

The core members of the company's Windows Insider team recently moved to different roles. "Trust is earned over time and we are committed to building it back with the Windows community," Davuluri said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Investors are souring on the bonds of software companies that service industries ranging from automotive to finance as fast-paced artificial intelligence innovations threaten to upend their business models. [...] Bond prices tumbled as advances in artificial intelligence rack up. Google announced plans to launch an AI assistant to browse for internet surfers Wednesday while a customer support startup, Decagon AI Inc., raised a new round of funding. Such developments are further stoking the angst about AI displacing enterprise software companies, driving a selloff in the sector's stocks and bonds across the globe.

[...] Some say the AI fears weighing on software companies are overdone. "While point-solution software faces disruption risk, large company platforms with complex workflows and proprietary data are better positioned to benefit from AI-driven automation," wrote Union Bancaire Prive in its investment outlook for 2026 released this week. But a recent report by EY-Parthenon flagged that in the UK last year, software and computer services firms issued the highest number of warnings on earnings among listed firms. "Software multiples have compressed amid uncertainty around whether incumbents can defend pricing power and sustain growth in an AI-first work-flow environment," wrote Bruce Richards, chief executive officer and chairman of Marathon Asset Management, in a LinkedIn post last week.

There are reports that a legitimate Microsoft email address -- which Microsoft explicitly says customers should add to their allow list -- is delivering scam spam. ArsTechnica: The emails originate from no-reply-powerbi@microsoft.com, an address tied to Power BI. The Microsoft platform provides analytics and business intelligence from various sources that can be integrated into a single dashboard. Microsoft documentation says that the address is used to send subscription emails to mail-enabled security groups. To prevent spam filters from blocking the address, the company advises users to add it to allow lists.

According to an Ars reader, the address on Tuesday sent her an email claiming (falsely) that a $399 charge had been made to her. âoeIt provided a phone number to call to dispute the transaction. A man who answered a call asking to cancel the sale directed me to download and install a remote access application, presumably so he could then take control of my Mac or Windows machine (Linux wasn't allowed)," she said.

Online searches returned a dozen or so accounts of other people reporting receiving the same email. Some of the spam was reported on Microsoft's own website. Sarah Sabotka, a threat researcher at security firm Proofpoint, said the scammers are abusing a Power Bi function that allows external email addresses to be added as subscribers for the Power Bi reports. The mention of the subscription is buried at the very bottom of the message, where it's easy to miss.

An open-source AI agent originally called Clawdbot (now renamed Moltbot) is gaining cult popularity among developers for running locally, 24/7, and wiring itself into calendars, messages, and other personal workflows. The hype has gone so far that some users are buying Mac Minis just to host the agent full-time, even as its creator warns that's unnecessary. Business Insider reports: Founded by [creator Peter Steinberger], it's an AI agent that manages "digital life," from emails to home automation. Steinberger previously founded PSPDFKit. In a key distinction from ChatGPT and many other popular AI products, the agent is open source and runs locally on your computer. Users then connect the agent to a messaging app like WhatsApp or Telegram, where they can give it instructions via text.

The AI agent was initially named after the "little monster" that appears when you restart Claude Code, Steinberger said on the "Insecure Agents" podcast. He formed the tool around the question: "Why don't I have an agent that can look over my agents?" [...] It runs locally on your computer 24/7. That's led some people to brush off their old laptops. "Installed it experimentally on my old dusty Intel MacBook Pro," one product designer wrote. "That machine finally has a purpose again."

Others are buying up Mac Minis, Apple's 5"-by-5" computer, to run the AI. Logan Kilpatrick, a product manager for Google DeepMind, posted: "Mac mini ordered." It could give a sales boost to Apple, some X users have pointed out -- and online searches for "Mac Mini" jumped in the last 4 days in the US, per Google Trends. But Steinberger said buying a new computer just to run the AI isn't necessary. "Please don't buy a Mac Mini," he wrote. "You can deploy this on Amazon's Free Tier."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the first high-profile lawsuit -- considered a "bellwether" case that could set meaningful precedent in the hundreds of other complaints -- goes to trial. That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological harm by designing features like infinite scroll and autoplay to push her down a path that she alleged triggered depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality. TikTok and Snapchat were also targeted by the lawsuit, but both have settled. The Snapchat settlement came last week, while TikTok settled on Tuesday just hours before the trial started, Bloomberg reported. For now, YouTube and Meta remain in the fight. K.G.M. allegedly started watching YouTube when she was 6 years old and joined Instagram by age 11. She's fighting to claim untold damages -- including potentially punitive damages -- to help her family recoup losses from her pain and suffering and to punish social media companies and deter them from promoting harmful features to kids. She also wants the court to require prominent safety warnings on platforms to help parents be aware of the risks. [...]

To win, K.G.M.'s lawyers will need to "parcel out" how much harm is attributed to each platform, due to design features, not the content that was targeted to K.G.M., Clay Calvert, a technology policy expert and senior fellow at a think tank called the American Enterprise Institute, wrote. Internet law expert Eric Goldman told The Washington Post that detailing those harms will likely be K.G.M.'s biggest struggle, since social media addiction has yet to be legally recognized, and tracing who caused what harms may not be straightforward. However, Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center and one of K.G.M.'s lawyers, told the Post that K.G.M. is prepared to put up this fight. "She is going to be able to explain in a very real sense what social media did to her over the course of her life and how in so many ways it robbed her of her childhood and her adolescence," Bergman said.

The research is unclear on whether social media is harmful for kids or whether social media addiction exists, Tamar Mendelson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Post. And so far, research only shows a correlation between Internet use and mental health, Mendelson noted, which could doom K.G.M.'s case and others.' However, social media companies' internal research might concern a jury, Bergman told the Post. On Monday, the Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit working to rein in Big Tech, published a report analyzing recently unsealed documents in K.G.M.'s case that supposedly provide "smoking-gun evidence" that platforms "purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing" -- while putting increased engagement from young users at the center of their business models. Most of the unsealed documents came from Meta. An internal email shows Mark Zuckerberg decided Meta's top strategic priority was getting teens "locked in" to Meta's family of apps. Another damning document discusses allowing "tweens" to use a private mode inspired by fake Instagram accounts ("finstas"). The same document includes an admission that internal data showed Facebook use correlated with lower well-being.

Internal communications showed Meta seemingly bragging that "teens can't switch off from Instagram even if they want to" and an employee declaring, "oh my gosh yall IG is a drug," likening all social media platforms to "pushers."

Amazon is closing all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores in a shift to focus on its online same-day delivery service and new big-box retail stores. From a report: The e-commerce giant said Tuesday that some of its shuttered Amazon-branded brick-and-mortar stores would be converted into Whole Foods Market locations. Amazon said its branded stores failed to deliver the right economic model and distinctive customer experience necessary for large-scale expansion.

Amazon's same-day delivery service for groceries is currently available in more than 5,000 U.S. cities and towns. The company said it plans to expand the service to more communities in 2026 but didn't specify where. Amazon said it planned to open over 100 new Whole Foods Market stores over the next few years.

Pinterest said on Tuesday it would trim its workforce by less than 15% and reduce office space, as the social media company looks to reallocate resources to AI-focused roles and initiatives. From a report: The announcement comes as the company competes with TikTok and Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram for digital advertising budgets, as these platforms continue to draw marketers with their extensive user base.

Pinterest had 5,205 full-time employees as of September 2025. The latest job cut would translate to less than 780 positions. Top executives at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting said while jobs would disappear, new ones would spring up, with two telling Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies which were planning layoffs anyway. Last week, design software maker Autodesk also announced a 7% job cut to redirect investments to its cloud platform and AI efforts.

Nike says it is investigating a potential data breach, after a group known for cyber attacks reportedly claimed to have leaked a trove of data related to its business operations. From a report: "We always take consumer privacy and data security very seriously," Nike said in a statement. "We are investigating a potential cyber security incident and are actively assessing the situation."

The ransomware group World Leaks said on its website that it had published 1.4 terabytes of data from Nike.

The independent coffee shops and quirky boutiques that make neighborhoods like Hayes Valley in San Francisco or Williamsburg in Brooklyn desirable are caught in a frustrating economic trap: they create value that ends up in the pockets of nearby homeowners rather than their own cash registers.

An essay in Works in Progress magazine argues that when an interesting new store or restaurant opens, commercial and residential property values rise in the surrounding area, but the retailer itself captures only a fraction of that value through its actual sales. Almost half of stores in one San Francisco shopping district shuttered within four years even as the neighborhood thrived and rents climbed.

The authors propose several fixes drawn from historical and international practice. Shopping malls and mixed-use developments solve this through unified ownership, allowing a single entity to cross-subsidize interesting tenants. Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway buys land around new stations before building begins, making it one of the few profitable transit systems in the world. Business Improvement Districts let businesses tax themselves for shared amenities, though they currently don't capture value that spills over to nearby residents.

The essay suggests creating hybrid institutions -- something between homeowners' associations and business improvement districts -- that could levy hyperlocal taxes to keep valued retail alive.

Earlier this month, the media site Press Gazette reported that now Google "is increasingly prioritising AI summaries, X posts and Youtube videos" on its "Discover" feed (which appears on the leftmost homescreen page of many Android phones and the Google app's homepage).

"The changes could be devastating for publishers who rely heavily on Discover for referral traffic. And it looks set to accelerate a global trend of declining traffic to publishers from both Google search and Discover." Xavi Beumala from website analytics platform Marfeel warned in a research update: "Google Discover is no longer a publisher-first surface. It's becoming an AI platform with YouTube and X absorbing real estate that once went to newsrooms..." [They warn later that "This is not a marginal UI experiment. It is a reallocation of feed real estate away from links and toward inline Youtube plays and generated summaries."] Google says it prioritises "helpful, reliable, people-first content". Unlike Google News, there is no requirement that Google Discover showcases bona fide publisher websites.

In recent months fake news stories published by fraudulent website publishers have been promoted on Google Discover, reaping tens of millions of clicks. Google said it was working on a "fix" for this issue...

Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok content may also start flowing into the Discover feed in future. When Google announced the addition of posts from X, Instagram and Youtube Shorts in September, it said there would be "more platforms to come".

Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone ) writes: Washington State lawmakers are proposing bills (HB 2320 and HB 2321) that would require 3D printers and CNC machines to block certain designs using software-based "firearms blueprint detection algorithms." In practice, this means scanning every print file, comparing it against a government-maintained database, and preventing "skilled users" from bypassing the system.

Supporters frame this as a response to untraceable "ghost guns," but even federal prosecutors admit the tools involved are ordinary manufacturing equipment. Critics warn the language is overbroad, technically unworkable, hostile to open source, and likely to push printing toward cloud-locked, subscription-based systems—while doing little to stop criminals.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Fortune The large language models (LLMs) that have captivated the world are not a path to human-level intelligence, two AI experts asserted in separate remarks at Davos. Demis Hassabis, the Nobel Prize-winning CEO of Google DeepMind, and the executive who leads the development of Google's Gemini models, said today's AI systems, as impressive as they are, are "nowhere near" human-level artificial general intelligence, or AGI. [Though the artilcle notes that later Hassabis predicted there was a 50% chance AGI might be achieved within the decade.] Yann LeCun — an AI pioneer who won a Turing Award, computer science's most prestigious prize, for his work on neural networks — went further, saying that the LLMs that underpin all of the leading AI models will never be able to achieve humanlike intelligence and that a completely different approach is needed... ["The reason ... LLMs have been so successful is because language is easy," LeCun said later.]

Their views differ starkly from the position asserted by top executives of Google's leading AI rivals, OpenAI and Anthropic, who assert that their AI models are about to rival human intelligence. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, told an audience at Davos that AI models would replace the work of all software developers within a year and would reach "Nobel-level" scientific research in multiple fields within two years. He said 50% of white-collar jobs would disappear within five years. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (who was not at Davos this year) has said we are already beginning to slip past human-level AGI toward "superintelligence," or AI that would be smarter than all humans combined...

The debate over AGI may be somewhat academic for many business leaders. The more pressing question, says Cognizant CEO Ravi Kumar, is whether companies can capture the enormous value that AI already offers. According to Cognizant research released ahead of Davos, current AI technology could unlock approximately $4.5 trillion in U.S. labor productivity — if businesses can implement it effectively.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: U.S. insurer Lemonade said on Wednesday it would offer a 50% rate cut for drivers of Tesla electric vehicles when the automaker's Full Self-Driving (FSD) driver assistance software is steering because it had data showing it reduced accidents. Lemonade's move is an endorsement of Tesla CEO Elon Musk's claims that the company's vehicle technology is safer than human drivers, despite concerns flagged by regulators and safety experts.

As part of a collaboration, Tesla is giving Lemonade access to vehicle telemetry data that will be used to distinguish between miles driven by FSD — which requires a human driver's supervision — and human driving, the New York-based insurer said. The price cut is for Lemonade's pay-per-mile insurance. "We're looking at this in extremely high resolution, where we see every minute, every second that you drive your car, your Tesla," Lemonade co-founder Shai Wininger told Reuters. "We get millions of signals emitted by that car into our systems. And based on that, we're pricing your rate."

Wininger said data provided by Tesla combined with Lemonade's own insurance data showed that the use of FSD made driving about two times safer for the average driver. He did not provide details on the data Tesla shared but said no payments were involved in the deal between Lemonade and the EV maker for the data and the new offering... Wininger said the company would reduce rates further as Tesla releases FSD software updates that improve safety. "Traditional insurers treat a Tesla like any other car, and AI like any other driver," Wininger said. "But a driver who can see 360 degrees, never gets drowsy, and reacts in milliseconds isn't like any other driver."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Shares of Japanese toilet maker Toto gained the most in five years after booming memory demand excited expectations of growth in its little-known chipmaking materials operations. The stock surged as much as 11%, its steepest rise since February 2021, after Goldman Sachs analysts said Toto's electrostatic chucks used in NAND chipmaking will likely benefit from an AI infrastructure buildout that's tightening supplies of both high-end and commodity memory.

[...] Known for its heated toilet seats, the maker of washlets has for decades been part of the semiconductor and display supply chain via its advanced ceramic parts and films. Its electrostatic chucks -- which it began mass producing in 1988 -- are used to hold silicon wafers in place during chipmaking while helping to control temperature and contamination, according to the company. The company's new domain business accounted for 42% of its total operating income in the fiscal year ended March 2025, Bloomberg-compiled data show.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A niche retirement plan favored by freelancers is quickly becoming a hot Wall Street sales pitch, as more and more Americans look for ways to shelter a bigger chunk of their paychecks from taxes. Known as solo 401(k)s, they allow the self-employed to contribute $72,000 a year into tax-advantaged retirement accounts. That's nearly three times the maximum for typical salaried workers in the US.

While they've existed for decades serving a workforce that often struggled to earn enough to max out those contributions, wealth planners like JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Betterment are now racing to tap into burgeoning demand from a newer, and wealthier cohort: Post-pandemic contractors and self-employed DIY savers looking to shelter more income, grow assets tax-deferred or tax-free, all with the click of a button.

The pitch is simple: Because of a quirk in the tax code, self-employed workers effectively contribute twice to their 401(k)s -- once as an employee on their own behalf and then again as a business owner making matching contributions. The platforms take care of the paperwork and clients get institutional-level tax planning and investment flexibility. More than three-quarters of America's record 36 million small businesses now have just a single employee, the owner. Cerulli Associates projects that total 401(k) plans in the U.S. will surpass 1 million by 2030, and the fastest growth is expected in sub-$5 million "micro" accounts.

Apple has accused the European Commission of using "political delay tactics" to postpone new app marketplace policies and create grounds for investigating and fining the iPhone maker, a preemptive response to reports that the commission plans to blame Apple for the announced closure of third-party app store Setapp.

MacPaw, the developer behind Setapp, said it would shut down the marketplace next month because of "still-evolving and complex business terms that don't fit Setapp's current business model." The EC is preparing to say that Apple has not rolled out changes to address key issues concerning its business terms and their complexity, according to remarks seen by Bloomberg.

Apple said it disputes this finding. The company said it submitted a formal compliance plan in October proposing to replace its $0.59 per-install fee structure with a 5% revenue share, but the commission has not responded. "The European Commission has refused to let us implement the very changes that they requested," Apple said. The company also claimed there is no demand in the EU for alternative app stores and disputed that Setapp is closing because of its actions.

Intel says it struggled to satisfy demand for its AI data-center CPUs while new PC chips squeeze margins. CEO Lip-Bu Tan framed the turnaround as supply-constrained, not demand-constrained, with manufacturing yields (18A) improving but still below targets. Reuters reports: The forecast underscores the difficulties faced by Intel in predicting global chip markets, where the company's current products are the result of decisions made years ago. The company, whose shares have risen 40% in the past month, recently launched a long-awaited laptop chip designed to reclaim its lead in personal computers just as a memory chip crunch is expected to depress sales across that industry.

Meanwhile, Intel executives said the company was caught off guard by surging demand for server central processors that accompany AI chips. Despite running its factories at capacity, Intel cannot keep up with demand for the chips, leaving profitable data center sales on the table while the new PC chip squeezes its margins.

"In the short term, I'm disappointed that we are not able "to fully meet the demand in our markets," Chief Executive Officer Lip-Bu Tan told analysts on a conference call. The company forecast current-quarter revenue between $11.7 billion and $12.7 billion, compared with analysts' average estimate of $12.51 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. It expects adjusted earnings per share to break even in the first quarter, compared with expectations of adjusted earnings of 5 cents per share.