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"There are times when World of Tanks feels less like a videogame and more like a giant ad budget looking for something to be spent on," writes PC Gamer. This year, all those huge sacks with dollar signs on them have been thrown Benedict Cumberbatch's way, making him the game's newest "Holiday Ambassador" and the star of an absolutely bizarre Christmas advert. The story has very little to do with Christmas and, frankly, not much connection to tanks either, featuring Cumberbatch as a sort of chaotic, supernatural therapist trying to bring a meek nerd out of his shell with the help of a chaotic crowd of his other patients. It's a good watch, shedding the usual hard man action star vibe of past celebrity trailers in favour of something that feels more like a mischievous one act play. Cumberbatch also portrayed Smaug and Sauron in The Hobbit films (2012-2014), Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Dr. Strange in six Marvel movies. And now Amazon has also hired Cumberbatch for what its calls its "Cannes-winning '5-Star Theater' campaign... performing real Amazon customer reviews as theatrical monologues." Cumberbatch performed over 15 reviews, including popular holiday gifts like the Bissell portable carpet cleaner, Toto bidet, and SharkNinja blender - showing that Amazon truly does have something for everyone on your list. Last year Amazon produced a similar campaign starring Adam Driver ("Kylo Ren" from the final trilogy of Star Wars sequels). "The humor comes from the juxtaposition between Cumberbatch's gravitas and the text itself," reports Adweek, adding that the reviews were curated "using internal AI tools, to find the most oddly specific reviews on the platform." Amazon will stream Cumberbatch's bizarre ads on major platforms including TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Lyft, Uber, Disney/Hulu, Paramount, and Roku, and on several NFL football games. I remember when Amazon just chose the best funny fake reviews from customers, and then posted them on the front page of Amazon...

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30 Nov 2025 12:34pm GMT

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30 Nov 2025 10:47am GMT

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30 Nov 2025 10:03am GMT

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30 Nov 2025 9:44am GMT

"The internet is being increasingly polluted by AI generated text, images and video," argues the site for a new browser extension called Slop Evader. It promises to use Google's search API "to only return content published before Nov 30th, 2022" - the day ChatGPT launched - "so you can be sure that it was written or produced by the human hand." 404 Media calls it "a scorched earth approach that virtually guarantees your searches will be slop-free." Slop Evader was created by artist and researcher Tega Brain, who says she was motivated by the growing dismay over the tech industry's unrelenting, aggressive rollout of so-called "generative AI" - despite widespread criticism and the wider public's distaste for it. "This sowing of mistrust in our relationship with media is a huge thing, a huge effect of this synthetic media moment we're in," Brain told 404 Media, describing how tools like Sora 2 have short-circuited our ability to determine reality within a sea of artificial online junk. "I've been thinking about ways to refuse it, and the simplest, dumbest way to do that is to only search before 2022...." Currently, Slop Evader can be used to search pre-GPT archives of seven different sites where slop has become commonplace, including YouTube, Reddit, Stack Exchange, and the parenting site MumsNet. The obvious downside to this, from a user perspective, is that you won't be able to find anything time-sensitive or current - including this very website, which did not exist in 2022. The experience is simultaneously refreshing and harrowing, allowing you to browse freely without having to constantly question reality, but always knowing that this freedom will be forever locked in time - nostalgia for a human-centric world wide web that no longer exists. Of course, the tool's limitations are part of its provocation. Brain says she has plans to add support for more sites, and release a new version that uses DuckDuckGo's search indexing instead of Google's. But the real goal, she says, is prompting people to question how they can collectively refuse the dystopian, inhuman version of the internet that Silicon Valley's AI-pushers have forced on us... With enough cultural pushback, Brain suggests, we could start to see alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo adding options to filter out search results suspected of having synthetic content (DuckDuckGo added the ability to filter out AI images in search earlier this year)... But no matter what form AI slop-refusal takes, it will need to be a group effort.

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30 Nov 2025 8:34am GMT

Earlier this month MasterCard noted that even Walmart now allows its customers to make purchases through ChatGPT. And after polling more than 4,000 consumers in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and UAE, they found "more than four in 10 consumers already use AI tools to help them shop, including 61% of Gen Z and 57% of millennials." Many (50% of Gen Z and 49% of millennials) say they'd even let AI handle all their gift-buying if it meant avoiding stress. Younger shoppers trust AI's taste, with 51% of Gen Z and 55% of millennials relying on it to deliver unique and thoughtful recommendations (sometimes even more than they trust themselves). The most popular uses include getting personalized product recommendations, confirming the best deal before purchasing, and summarizing thousands of reviews instantly. The bottom line: Shoppers are embracing AI as their new personal assistant - one that knows their budget, style, and patience level... If the 2025 holiday shopper could be summed up in one word, it's intentional. They're planning earlier, spending wiser and using technology to make every dollar and every gift count. The first figures are now in for the traditional "Black Friday" shopping day after Thanksgiving, and U.S. shoppers "spent a record $11.8 billion online," reports Reuters, "up 9.1% from 2024 on the year's biggest shopping day, according to Adobe Analytics, which tracks 1 trillion visits that shoppers make to online retail websites..." And sure enough, this year shoppers were helped by AI: AI-powered shopping tools helped drive a surge in U.S. online spending on Black Friday, as shoppers bypassed crowded stores and turned to chatbots to compare prices and secure discounts amid concerns about tariff-driven price hikes... The AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites soared 805% compared to last year, Adobe said, when artificial intelligence tools such as Walmart's Sparky or Amazon's Rufus had not yet been launched. "Consumers are using new tools to get to what they need faster," said Suzy Davidkhanian, an analyst at eMarketer. "Gift giving can be stressful, and LLMs (large language models) make the discovery process feel quicker and more guided..." Globally, AI and agents influenced $14.2 billion in online sales on Black Friday, of which $3 billion came from the U.S. alone, according to software firm Salesforce. There's another reason shoppers turned to AI. 2025's Black Friday arrived "amid tighter budgets, unemployment nearing a four-year high, U.S. consumer confidence sagging to a seven-month low and price tags that have shoppers watching every dollar," according to the article: Discount rates also remained flat when compared to 2024, with AI helping shoppers discover the best deals, and an increase in the price tags made deeper discounts difficult for retailers... Order volumes fell 1% as average selling prices rose 7%. Consumers also purchased fewer items at checkout, with units per transaction falling 2% on a year-over-year basis, Salesforce said. The spending surge sets the stage for an even bigger Cyber Monday, projected to drive $14.2 billion in sales, up 6.3% on a year-over-year basis and the largest online shopping day of the year, Adobe said. Electronics are expected to see the deepest discounts on Cyber Monday, reaching 30% off list prices, along with strong deals on apparel and computers, Adobe said.

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30 Nov 2025 4:34am GMT

Archinstall 3.0.14, a guided installer for Arch Linux, fixes Snapper-GRUB snapshot issues and brings improved EFI bootloader handling.

29 Nov 2025 10:05pm GMT

Wine 10.20 upgrades vkd3d to 1.18, expands reparse point support, and fixes 31 issues affecting apps and games.

29 Nov 2025 7:22pm GMT

Solus 4.8 introduces the Polaris repo, completes the epoch jump, updates systemd to 257.10, and ships Linux kernel 6.17.

29 Nov 2025 7:05pm GMT

Promising trials using engineered antibodies suggest that "functional cures" may be in reach.

29 Nov 2025 12:15pm GMT

"We are going to learn just how important the ISS is to leadership."

28 Nov 2025 4:16pm GMT

Buy some laptops, or a streaming stick, to honor the passing of our greatest hero.

28 Nov 2025 12:41pm GMT