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Warren Buffett is retiring as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at age 95, ending a 55-year run that reshaped how generations of Americans think about investing. "The 95-year-old, often referred to as the 'Oracle of Omaha' and the 'billionaire next door,' will relinquish the title after a career that saw him turn a failing textile firm into one of the most successful asset managers in the world," reports NBC News. From the report: Greg Abel, the 63-year-old lesser-known CEO of Berkshire's energy busine…

Pibroch(CiH) writes: According to the obituary linked, Stewart Cheifet of Computer Chronicles fame has died. The obituary states he passed Dec 28, 2025. Cheifet and Digital Research founder Gary Kildall hosted the public television show The Computer Chronicles starting in 1984, and Stewart continued to host the show well into the 1990s. He was well-known for his affable presence and adeptness at interviewing guests and finding out the straight dope about their products. He had recently undergon…

The Wall Street Journal reports that a growing number of tech startups are stocking offices with free nicotine pouches as founders and employees chase sharper focus and stamina in hyper-competitive AI-era work environments. The Wall Street Journal reports: Earlier this year, two nicotine startups -- Lucy Nicotine and Sesh -- made branded vending machines filled with flavored products for analytics company Palantir Technologies. Both machines are in the company's Washington, D.C., offices. The p…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cyber Press: A newly uncovered Chinese threat group, DarkSpectre, has been linked to one of the most widespread browser-extension malware operations to date, compromising more than 8.8 million users of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera over the past seven years. According to research by Koi.ai, the group operates three interconnected campaigns: ShadyPanda, GhostPoster, and a newly identified one named The Zoom Stealer, forming a single, strategically orga…

OpenAI is paying employees more than any major tech startup in history, with average stock-based compensation hitting roughly $1.5 million per worker in 2025. "That is more than seven times higher than the stock-based pay Google disclosed in 2003, before it filed for an initial public offering in 2004," reports the Wall Street Journal. "The $1.5 million is about 34 times the average employee compensation of 18 other large tech companies in the year before they went public." From the report: To …

Reuters reports that the United States Department of the Treasury under the Donald Trump administration has lifted sanctions on three executives linked to the spyware firm Intellexa. Reuters reports: The move partially reverses the imposition of sanctions last year by then-President Joe Biden's administration on seven people tied to Intellexa. The Treasury Department at the time described the consortium, opens new tab, launched by former Israeli intelligence official Tal Dilian, as "a complex i…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: France intends to follow Australia and ban social media platforms for children from the start of the 2026 academic year. A draft bill preventing under-15s from using social media will be submitted for legal checks and is expected to be debated in parliament early in the new year. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has made it clear in recent weeks that he wants France to swiftly follow Australia's world-first ban on social media platfor…

New Jersey has found its answer to the relentless flooding that has plagued the state's coastal and inland communities for decades: buy the homes, demolish them and turn the land back into open space permanently. The state's Blue Acres program has acquired some 1,200 properties since 1995, spending more than $234 million in federal and state funds to pay fair market value to homeowners exhausted by repeated floods from tropical storms, nor'easters, and heavy rain. A Georgetown Climate Center re…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Getting to space is hard. In many ways, getting back is even harder. NASA soon aims to pull off the kind of re-entry it last conducted more than 50 years ago: safely returning astronauts to Earth after they fly to the moon and back. The mission is a big moment for NASA, which will put a crew on its Orion ship for the first time. The flight will test the spacecraft's heat shield, designed to protect the astronauts on board. Re-entries of vehicles from orbit r…

JPMorgan Chase is now fighting to avoid paying $10.2 million in disputed legal charges racked up by Charlie Javice, the convicted founder of student-finance startup Frank, after court filings revealed her defense team billed more than $5 million simply for attending her fraud trial -- including on days when court wasn't even in session. A previously sealed Delaware court filing [PDF] released Monday showed that Javice's total legal tab has reached $74 million, far exceeding the $30 million Eliz…

The fight over net neutrality saw another turbulent year in 2025, as federal protections that seemed poised for a comeback in 2024 were first struck down by a court and then preemptively removed by the Trump administration's FCC without a chance for public comment. The removal, The Verge summarizes in a report, was part of Chairman Brendan Carr's "Delete, Delete, Delete" initiative targeting what the agency deems unnecessary regulations. Federal net neutrality rules have now been on and off for…

A large-scale study tracking more than 27,500 middle-aged and elderly people over roughly nine years has found that poor sleep quality is associated with accelerated brain aging, and chronic inflammation appears to be one of the key mechanisms driving this effect. Researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institute assessed participants' sleep across five dimensions -- chronotype, duration, insomnia, snoring and daytime sleepiness -- and later scanned their brains using MRI to estimate biological brai…

Another year wraps up, and with it comes the annual ritual of taking stock. What were the movies, TV shows and books from this year that stood out to you? Not necessarily the ones that dominated conversation or topped charts, but the ones you found yourself recommending to friends, or returning to for a second watch or read. Share your picks and, if you're inclined, a line or two on what made them stick. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Colossal Biosciences, the Texas-based startup now valued at more than $10 billion that has attracted investments from Paris Hilton, Peter Jackson and Tom Brady, claimed earlier this year to have resurrected the dire wolf -- an animal that disappeared at the end of the last ice age -- but a group of leading canid experts concluded the company had done no such thing. The scientists found that Colossal had made 20 edits to the DNA of grey wolves and the resulting animals did not substantially diff…

Starting in July 2026, every public school district in California will be required to have policies on the books that restrict or prohibit students from using smartphones during the school day, thanks to Assembly Bill 3216 that Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law back in 2024. The legislation also mandates that districts update these policies every five years. Newsom had previously signed related legislation in 2019, though that earlier law merely affirmed that school districts have the autho…