23 Dec 2025

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Cecot – 60 Minutes

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23 Dec 2025 12:36am GMT

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Alphabet Acquires Data Center and Energy Infrastructure Company Intersect For $4.75 Billion

Alphabet is acquiring Intersect for $4.75 billion to accelerate data center and power-generation capacity as AI infrastructure demand surges. CNBC reports: Alphabet said Intersect's operations will remain independent, but that the acquisition will help bring more data center and generation capacity online faster. "Intersect will help us expand capacity, operate more nimbly in building new power generation in lockstep with new data center load, and reimagine energy solutions to drive U.S. innovation and leadership," Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said in a statement. Google already had a minority stake in Intersect from a funding round that was announced last December. In a release at the time, Intersect said its strategic partnership with Google and TPG Rise Climate aimed to develop gigawatts of data center capacity across the U.S., including a $20 billion investment in renewable power infrastructure by the end of the decade. Alphabet said Monday that Intersect will work closely with Google's technical infrastructure team, including on the companies' co-located power site and data center in Haskell County, Texas. Google previously announced a $40 billion investment in Texas through 2027, which includes new data center campuses in the state's Haskell and Armstrong counties.

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23 Dec 2025 12:20am GMT

22 Dec 2025

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Cyberattack Disrupts France's Postal Service, Banking During Christmas Rush

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: With just three days to go before Christmas, a cyberattack knocked France's national postal service offline Monday, blocking and delaying package deliveries and online payments. The timing was miserable for millions of people at the height of the Christmas season, as frazzled postal workers fended off frustrated customers. No one immediately claimed responsibility, but suspicions abounded. What the postal service La Poste called a ''major network incident'' remained unresolved by Monday evening, more than eight hours after it was first reported. For a company that delivered 2.6 billion packages last year and employs more than 200,000 people, that's a big hit. La Poste said in a statement that a distributed denial of service incident, or DDoS, "rendered its online services inaccessible." It said the incident had no impact on customer data, but disrupted package delivery. Letters, including holiday greeting cards, could still be mailed and delivered. But transactions requiring tracking or access to the postal service internal computer systems were impossible. The cyberattack also hurt online banking. Customers of the company's banking arm, La Banque Postale, were blocked from using the application to approve payments or conduct other banking services. The bank redirected approvals to text messages instead. "Our teams are mobilized to resolve the situation quickly," the bank said in messages posted on social networks. The disruption came a week after France's government was targeted by a cyberattack that targeted the Interior Ministry, in charge of national security.

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22 Dec 2025 11:40pm GMT

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Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center

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22 Dec 2025 11:23pm GMT

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Larry Ellison Pledges $40-Billion Personal Guarantee For Paramount's Warner Bros Bid

Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison has personally guaranteed $40.4 billion to shore up Paramount's bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, trying to ease financing doubts as Warner Bros weighs a rival offer from Netflix. Reuters reports: Paramount said the amended terms do not change the $30-per-share all-cash offer even as the fight for Hollywood's sought-after assets heats up, with control of Warner Bros' vast library offering a decisive edge in the streaming wars. "I doubt many Warner Bros shareholders that are on the fence or planning to vote no "were holding out due to issues the "revised bid addresses such as a guarantee from Larry Ellison on the funding front," said Seth Shafer, principal analyst at S&P Global. As part of the revised terms, Ellison also agreed not to revoke the family trust or transfer its assets during the pendency of the transaction, the filing showed. Paramount said it has raised its regulatory reverse termination fee to $5.8 billion from $5 billion to match the competing transaction and extended the expiration date of its tender offer to January 21, 2026. The "bid follows Warner Bros asking its shareholders to reject the $108.4 billion offer from Paramount for the whole company, including cable TV assets, on doubts over its financing and the lack of a full guarantee from the Ellison family. But Warner Bros investors, including the fifth largest shareholder Harris Associates, have said they would be open to revised offers from Paramount if it presents a superior bid and addresses issues with deal terms. Under the Netflix agreement, Warner Bros would owe Netflix $2.8 billion as breakup fee if it walks away from that deal.

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22 Dec 2025 11:00pm GMT

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There Is No Future for Online Safety Without Privacy and Security

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22 Dec 2025 10:43pm GMT

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Lua 5.5 Released With Incremental Garbage Collection and Compact Arrays

Lua 5.5 Released With Incremental Garbage Collection and Compact Arrays

The Lua 5.5 programming language introduces explicit global variable declarations alongside major improvements to memory and garbage collection.

22 Dec 2025 10:31pm GMT

Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.3 Released With Smarter Networking and Faster Writes

Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.3 Released With Smarter Networking and Faster Writes

Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0.3 improves flashing performance with real-time bottleneck detection, faster async I/O, smarter sync handling, and detailed write timing analysis.

22 Dec 2025 8:28pm GMT

elementary OS 8.1 Is Out With Secure Session Now Default

elementary OS 8.1 Is Out With Secure Session Now Default

Ubuntu-based elementary OS 8.1 is now available with the Wayland-based Secure Session set as the default and fixes over 1,100 reported issues.

22 Dec 2025 7:22pm GMT

20 Dec 2025

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How Europe’s new carbon tax on imported goods will change global trade

The new regulation arrives on New Year's Day.

20 Dec 2025 12:15pm GMT

19 Dec 2025

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Google lobs lawsuit at search result scraping firm SerpApi

Google says the lawsuit is its last resort.

19 Dec 2025 10:21pm GMT

The evolution of expendability: Why some ants traded armor for numbers

Ants with lots of workers tend to put less energy into making them armored.

19 Dec 2025 10:05pm GMT