What it's like to be banned from the US for fighting online hate Just before Christmas the Trump administration dramatically escalated its war on digital rights by banning five people from entering the US. One of them, Josephine Ballon, is a director of HateAid, a small German nonprofit founded to support the victims of online harassment and violence. The organization is a strong advocate of EU tech regulations, and so finds itself attacked in campaigns from right-wing politicians and provocateurs who claim that it engages in censorship. EU officials, freedom of speech experts, and the five people targeted all flatly reject these accusations. Ballon told us that their work is fundamentally about making people feel safer online. But their experiences over the past few weeks show just how politicized and besieged their work in online safety has become.

Alexa.com brings Amazon's voice assistant to web browsers with meal planning, smart home controls and cross-device continuity for typing-based interactions.

Are DJI Drones Still Banned? Can you still buy a DJI drone in the US? (Yes.) Will you be able to buy future drones? Here are the current drone dos and don'ts. As of December 23, 2025, the US Federal Communications Commission barred Chinese-based drone maker DJI from importing any new drones into the United State.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. L.A.'s defense industry is booming. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . L.A. defense-tech startups like Gambit face funding shortfalls as the Small Business Innovation Research program expired in September amid a Capitol Hill dispute.

From surveys of the pre-Sputnik skies to analysis of interstellar visitors, scientists are rethinking how and where to look for physical traces of alien technology. Science fiction is awash in the material remnants of extraterrestrial civilizations, which surface in everything from the classic books of Arthur C. Clarke to game franchises like and . The discovery of the first interstellar objects in the solar system within the past decade has sparked speculation that they could be alien artifacts or spaceships, though the scientific consensus remains that all three of these visitors have natural explanations. That said, scientists have been anticipating the possibility of encountering alien artifacts since the dawn of the space age. "In the history of technosignatures, the possibility that there could be artifacts in the solar system has been around for a long time," says Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester.

A research team has successfully imaged a nova in high resolution--and the images suggest that the nova was not a single, impulsive explosion. The Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA Array) at Georgia State University has generated detailed images of the early stages of two nova explosions that were detected in 2021. Through near-infrared interferometry, a process that combines light from multiple telescopes, the CHARA Array was able to capture in high resolution the rapidly changing conditions of their early post-explosion phase. A nova is an astronomical phenomenon that occurs in a binary system when a white dwarf strips its companion star of hydrogen-rich gas, causing a thermonuclear runaway reaction on the white dwarf's surface. The name derives from the sudden brightening that makes it appear as though a new star has appeared in the night sky.

AI-driven pirated manga is booming. Can AI also help curb it? Japan's content industry -- which includes anime, manga and video games -- is a major export the country. Such exports were valued at ¥6 trillion ($38 billion) in 2024. When it comes to pirated manga online, which is being produced quicker thanks to artificial intelligence, government officials in Japan are planning to fight fire with fire and use AI to crack down on it.

As Europe's longstanding alliance with the US falters, its push to become a self-sufficient AI superpower has become more urgent. As the relationship between the US and its European allies shows signs of strain, AI labs across the continent are searching for inventive ways to close the gap with American rivals that have so far dominated the field. With rare exceptions, US-based firms outstrip European competitors across the AI production line--from processor design and manufacturing, to datacenter capacity, to model and application development. Likewise, the US has captured a massive proportion of the money pouring into AI, reflected in the performance last year of its homegrown stocks and the growth of its econonmy . The belief in some quarters is that the US-based leaders --Nvidia, Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and the like--are already so entrenched as to make it impossible for European nations to break their dependency on American AI, mirroring the pattern in cloud services.

Ed Zitron on big tech, backlash, boom and bust: 'AI has taught us that people are excited to replace human beings' His blunt, brash scepticism has made the podcaster and writer something of a cult figure. But as concern over large language models builds, he's no longer the outsider he once was I f some time in an entirely possible future they come to make a movie about "how the AI bubble burst", Ed Zitron will doubtless be a main character. He's the perfect outsider figure: the eccentric loner who saw all this coming and screamed from the sidelines that the sky was falling, but nobody would listen. Just as Christian Bale portrayed Michael Burry, the investor who predicted the 2008 financial crash, in The Big Short, you can well imagine Robert Pattinson fighting Paul Mescal, say, to portray Zitron, the animated, colourfully obnoxious but doggedly detail-oriented Brit, who's become one of big tech's noisiest critics. This is not to say the AI bubble burst, necessarily, but against a tidal wave of AI boosterism, Zitron's blunt, brash scepticism has made him something of a cult figure. His tech newsletter, Where's Your Ed At, now has more than 80,000 subscribers; his weekly podcast, Better Offline, is well within the Top 20 on the tech charts; he's a regular dissenting voice in the media; and his subreddit has become a safe space for AI sceptics, including those within the tech industry itself - one user describes him as "a lighthouse in a storm of insane hypercapitalist bullshit".

Iranian refugee' viral video shows woman lighting cigarette with burning image of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sparking global protests as Trump weighs military action.