A major new review by the Cochrane collaboration -- an independent network of researchers -- evaluated 73 randomized controlled trials involving about 5,000 people with depression and found that exercise matched the effectiveness of both pharmacological treatments and psychological therapies.

The biological mechanisms overlap considerably with antidepressants. "Exercise can help improve neurotransmitter function, like serotonin as well as dopamine and endorphins," said Dr. Stephen Mateka, medical director of psychiatry at Inspira Health. Dr. Nicholas Fabiano of the University of Ottawa added that exercise triggers the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which he calls "Miracle-Gro for the brain."

Exercise has been adopted as a first-line treatment in depression guidelines globally, though Fabiano noted it remains underutilized. The meta-analysis found that combining aerobic exercise and resistance training appeared more effective than aerobic exercise alone, and that 13 to 36 workouts led to improvements in depressive symptoms. Light to moderate exercise proved as beneficial as vigorous workouts, at least initially.

Apple has struck a multi-year partnership with Google to power a more capable version of Siri using Gemini AI models, ending months of speculation about which company would help the iPhone maker catch up in the generative AI race. In a statement, Apple said it had determined after "careful evaluation" that "Google's technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models."

The deal comes after Apple delayed its planned Siri AI upgrade last March, acknowledging that the project was taking "longer than we thought." Bloomberg had reported in August that Apple was in early talks with Google about using a custom Gemini model. Apple also explored potential partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, and CEO Tim Cook has said the company plans to integrate with more AI companies over time. The upgraded Siri is expected to perform actions on users' behalf and understand personal context.

President Donald Trump revived a campaign pledge Friday night by calling for a one-year, 10% cap on credit card interest rates, a proposal that banking groups immediately opposed despite the industry's heavy donations to his 2024 campaign and support for his second-term agenda.

Trump posted on Truth Social that he hoped the cap would be in place by January 20, one year after he took office, though he did not specify whether it would come through executive action or legislation.

Americans currently pay between 19.65% and 21.5% interest on credit cards on average and carry roughly $1.23 trillion in credit card debt, according to the New York Federal Reserve. Researchers found that a 10% cap would save Americans roughly $100 billion in interest annually. The American Bankers Association warned that such a cap "would only drive consumers toward less regulated, more costly alternatives."

Further reading: How Trump's proposed cap on credit card rates could reshape consumer lending.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has threatened to withdraw free cybersecurity services from Italy's Milano-Cortina Winter Olympics and potentially exit the country after Italy's telecommunications regulator fined the company approximately 14 million euros for failing to comply with anti-piracy blocking orders. The penalty equals 1% of Cloudflare's global annual revenue but exceeds twice what the company earned from Italy in 2024.

Prince called Italy's Autorita per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni a "quasi-judicial body" administering a "scheme to censor the Internet" on behalf of "a shadowy cabal of European media elites." The fine stems from Cloudflare's refusal to comply with Italy's Piracy Shield law, which requires internet service providers and DNS operators to block sites within 30 minutes of receiving blocking requests from copyright holders. Prince said Cloudflare may discontinue free services for Italian users, remove servers from Italian cities and cancel plans to build an Italian office.

Streamer spend on content is set to top the $100 billion mark for the first time this year, according to an Ampere Analysis report. From a report: The landmark figure will be met as global streamers "remain the primary driver of growth in content investment," according to Ampere. Spend by the likes of Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, HBO Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV will shoot up 6% this year, helping lead to a 2% increase in overall global content spend, Ampere forecast. The $101 billion figure, the first time streamer spend has crossed that major $100 Billion landmark, will represent around two-fifths of the overall figure.

A year ago the Steam Survey showed a 2.29% marketshare for Linux. Last May it reached 2.69%, its highest level since 2018. November saw another all-time high of 3.2%.

But December brought a surprise, reports Phoronix: Back on the 1st Valve published the Steam Survey results for December 2025 and they put the Linux gaming marketshare at 3.19%, a 0.01% dip from November. But now the December results have been revised... [and] put the Linux marketshare at 3.58%, a 0.38% increase over November. Valve didn't publish any explanation for the revision but occasionally they do put out monthly revised data. This is easily an all-time high... both in percentage terms and surely in absolute terms too.

Ubisoft announced Wednesday it will close its studio in Halifax, Nova Scotia — two weeks after 74% of its staff voted to unionize.

This means laying off the 71 people at the studio, reports the gaming news site Aftermath: [Communications Workers of America's Canadian affiliate, CWA Canada] said in a statement to Aftermath the union will "pursue every legal recourse to ensure that the rights of these workers are respected and not infringed in any way." The union said in a news release that it's illegal in Canada for companies to close businesses because of unionization. That's not necessarily what happened here, according to the news release, but the union is "demanding information from Ubisoft about the reason for the sudden decision to close."

"We will be looking for Ubisoft to show us that this had nothing to do with the employees joining a union," former Ubisoft Halifax programmer and bargaining committee member Jon Huffman said in a statement. "The workers, their families, the people of Nova Scotia, and all of us who love video games made in Canada, deserve nothing less...."

Before joining Ubisoft, the studio was best known for its work on the Rocksmith franchise; under Ubisoft, it focused squarely on mobile games.

Ubisoft Halifax was quickly removed from the Ubisoft website on Wednesday...

An anonymous reader shared this report from It's FOSS: Jenny Guanni Qu, a researcher at [VC fund] Pebblebed, analyzed 125,183 bugs from 20 years of Linux kernel development history (on Git). The findings show that the average bug takes 2.1 years to find. [Though the median is 0.7 years, with the average possibly skewed by "outliers" discovered after years of hiding.] The longest-lived bug, a buffer overflow in networking code, went unnoticed for 20.7 years! [But 86.5% of bugs are found within five years.]

The research was carried out by relying on the Fixes: tag that is used in kernel development. Basically, when a commit fixes a bug, it includes a tag pointing to the commit that introduced the bug. Jenny wrote a tool that extracted these tags from the kernel's git history going back to 2005. The tool finds all fixing commits, extracts the referenced commit hash, pulls dates from both commits, and calculates the time frame. As for the dataset, it includes over 125k records from Linux 6.19-rc3, covering bugs from April 2005 to January 2026. Out of these, 119,449 were unique fixing commits from 9,159 different authors, and only 158 bugs had CVE IDs assigned.
It took six hours to assemble the dataset, according to the blog post, which concludes that the percentage of bugs found within one year has improved dramatically, from 0% in 2010 to 69% by 2022. The blog post says this can likely be attributed to:

• The Syzkaller fuzzer (released in 2015)

• Dynamic memory error detectors like KASAN, KMSAN, KCSAN sanitizers

• Better static analysis

• More contributors reviewing code

But "We're simultaneously catching new bugs faster AND slowly working through ~5,400 ancient bugs that have been hiding for over 5 years."

They've also developed an AI model called VulnBERT that predicts whether a commit introduces a vulnerability, claiming that of all actual bug-introducing commits, it catches 92.2%. "The goal isn't to replace human reviewers but to point them at the 10% of commits most likely to be problematic, so they can focus attention where it matters..."

Bloomberg reports on Amazon listings "automatically generated by an experimental AI tool" for stores that don't sell on Amazon.

Bloomberg notes that the listings "didn't always correspond to the correct product", leaving the stores to handle the complaints from angry customers: Between the Christmas and New Year holidays, small shop owners and artisans who had found their products listed on Amazon took to social media to compare notes and warn their peers... In interviews, six small shop owners said they found themselves unwittingly selling their products on Amazon's digital marketplace. Some, especially those who deliberately avoided Amazon, said they should have been asked for their consent. Others said it was ironic that Amazon was scouring the web for products with AI tools despite suing Perplexity AI Inc.for using similar technology to buy products on Amazon... Some retailers say the listings displayed the wrong product image or mistakenly showed wholesale pricing. Users of Shopify Inc.'s e-commerce tools said the system flagged Amazon's automated purchases as potentially fraudulent...

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Maxine Tagay said sellers are free to opt out. Two Amazon initiatives — Shop Direct, which links out to make purchases on other retailers' sites, and Buy For Me, which duplicates listings and handles purchases without leaving Amazon — "are programs we're testing that help customers discover brands and products not currently sold in Amazon's store, while helping businessesâreach new customers and drive incremental sales," she said in an emailed statement. "We have received positive feedback on these programs." Tagay didn't say why the sellers were enrolled without notifying them. She added that the Buy For Me selection features more than 500,000 items, up from about 65,000 at launch in April.
The article includes quotes from the owners of affected businesses.

• A one-person company complained that "If suddenly there were 100 orders, I couldn't necessarily manage. When someone takes your proprietary, copyrighted works, I should be asked about that. This is my business. It's not their business."

• One business owner said "I just don't want my products on there... It's like if Airbnb showed up and tried to put your house on the market without your permission."

• One business owner complained "When things started to go wrong, there was no system set up by Amazon to resolve it. It's just 'We set this up for you, you should be grateful, you fix it.'" One Amazon representative even suggested they try opening a $39-a-month Amazon seller account.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNET: Finland-based IXI Eyewear has raised more than $40 million from investors, including Amazon, to build glasses with adaptive lenses that could dynamically autofocus based on where the person wearing them is looking. In late 2025, the company said it had developed a glasses prototype that weighs just 22 grams. It includes embedded sensors aimed at the wearer's eyes and liquid crystal lenses that respond accordingly. According to the company, the autofocus is "powered by technology hidden within the frame that tracks eye movements and adjusts focus instantly — whether you're looking near or far..."

iXI told CNN in a story published on Tuesday that it expects to launch its glasses within the next year. It has a waitlist for the glasses on its website, but has not said in what regions they'll be available...

This type of technology is also being pursued by Japanese startups Elcyo and Vixion. Vixion already has a product with adaptive lenses embedded in the middle of the lenses (they do not resemble standard glasses).
CNET spoke to optometrist Meenal Agarwal, who pointed out that besides startup efforts, there have also been research prototypes like Stanford's autofocal glasses. "But none have consumer-ready, lightweight glasses in the market yet."

CNN reports on the 75-person company's product, noting that "By using a dynamic lens, IXI does away with fixed magnification areas." "Modern varifocals have this narrow viewing channel because they're mixing basically three different lenses," said Niko Eiden, CEO of IXI... So, there are areas of distortion, the sides of the lenses are quite useless for the user, and then you really have to manage which part of this viewing channel you're looking at." The IXI glasses, Eiden said, will have a much larger "reading" area for close-up vision — although still not as large as the entire lens — and it will also be positioned "in a more optimal place," based on the user's standard eye exam. But the biggest plus, Eiden added, is that most of the time, the reading area simply disappears, leaving the main prescription for long distance on the entire lens. "For seeing far, the difference is really striking, because with varifocals you have to look at the top part of the lens in order to see far. With ours, you have the full lens area to see far..."

The new glasses won't come without drawbacks, Eiden admits: "This will be yet another product that you need to charge," he said. Although the charging port is magnetic and cleverly hidden in the temple area, overnight charging will be required... Another limitation is that more testing is required to make the glasses safe for driving, Eiden said, adding that in case of a malfunction of the electronics or the liquid crystal area, the glasses are equipped with a failsafe mode that shuts them down to the base state of the main lens, which would usually be distance vision, without creating any visual disturbances.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang "said one of his biggest takeaways from 2025 was 'the battle of narratives' over the future of AI development between those who see doom on the horizon and the optimists," reports Business Insider.

Huang did acknowledge that "it's too simplistic" to entirely dismiss either side (on a recent episode of the "No Priors" podcast). But "I think we've done a lot of damage with very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end of the world narrative, science fiction narrative." "It's not helpful to people. It's not helpful to the industry. It's not helpful to society. It's not helpful to the governments..." [H]e cited concerns about "regulatory capture," arguing that no company should approach governments to request more regulation. "Their intentions are clearly deeply conflicted, and their intentions are clearly not completely in the best interest of society," he said. "I mean, they're obviously CEOs, they're obviously companies, and obviously they're advocating for themselves..."

"When 90% of the messaging is all around the end of the world and the pessimism, and I think we're scaring people from making the investments in AI that makes it safer, more functional, more productive, and more useful to society," he said.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Huang argues that the AI bubble is a myth. Business Insider adds that "a spokesperson for Nvidia declined to elaborate on Huang's remarks."

Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

"The clock is ticking" on the Hubble Space Telescope, writes the space news site Daily Galaxy, citing estimates from the unofficial "Hubble Reentry Tracker" site (which uses orbital data from the site space-track.org, created by tech integrator SAIC): While Hubble was initially launched into low Earth orbit at an altitude of around 360 miles, it has since descended to approximately 326 miles, and it continues to fall... "The solar flux levels are currently longer in duration and more elevated than previously anticipated, resulting in an earlier reentry forecast for the Hubble Space Telescope if no reboost mission is conducted," Hubble Reentry Trackersays the Hubble Reentry Tracker... ["Hubble has been reboosted three times in its history," the site points out, "all by servicing missions using the Space Shuttle."]

NASA partnered with SpaceX in 2022 to explore the feasibility of raising Hubble to its original altitude of 373 miles. Such an adjustment would have bought Hubble a few more years in orbit. However, the future of this plan remains uncertain, as NASA has not made any official announcements to move forward with it... Solar flux levels, which determine atmospheric drag, have increased in recent years, accelerating the telescope's decline. This change in solar behavior means that the possibility of Hubble reentering Earth's atmosphere in the next five to six years is quite high if no corrective action is taken. ["But it is difficult to estimate this value due to the variability of future solar flux," the site cautions. "In the best case, Hubble may not reenter for 15 more years, around 2040. In the worst case, it could reenter in 4 years..."] Once Hubble reaches an altitude of 248 miles, it is expected that it will have less than a year before reentry...

While Hubble's end may be near, there is a promising new project on the horizon: Lazuli, a privately-funded space telescope funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Lazuli aims to become the first privately-funded space telescope, and it could be the successor Hubble enthusiasts have been hoping for. Schmidt Sciences, the organization behind the telescope, plans to launch Lazuli by 2028, providing a more modern alternative to Hubble with a larger mirror and enhanced capabilities. The telescope's proposed design includes a 94-inch-wide mirror, which is a significant upgrade from Hubble's 94.5-inch mirror, and will feature updated instruments to capture more detailed data than ever before.

Alphabet-owned Wing "is expanding its drone delivery service to an additional 150 Walmart stores across the U.S.," reports Axios: [T]he future is already here if you live in Dallas — where some Walmart customers order delivery by Wing three times a week. By the end of 2026, some 40 million Americans, or about 12 percent of the U.S. population, will be able to take advantage of the convenience, the companies claim... Once the items are picked and packed in a small cardboard basket, they are loaded onto a drone inside a fenced area in the Walmart parking lot. Drones fly autonomously to the designated address, with human pilots monitoring each flight from a central operations hub....

For now, Wing deliveries are free. "The goal is to expose folks to the wonders of drone delivery," explains Wing's chief business officer, Heather Rivera... Over time, she said Wing expects delivery fees to be comparable to other delivery options, but faster and more convenient. Service began recently in Atlanta and Charlotte, and it's coming soon to Los Angeles, Houston, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Miami and other major U.S. cities to be announced later, according to the article. "By 2027, Walmart and Wing say they'll have a network of more than 270 drone delivery locations nationwide."

Walmart also announced a new deal today with Google's Gemini, allowing customers to purchase Walmart products from within Gemini. (Walmart announced a similar deal for ChatGPT in October.)

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli calls this "a defensive angle that Walmart does not quite say out loud." As AI models answer more questions directly, retailers risk losing customers before they ever hit a website. If Gemini recommends a product from someone else first, Walmart loses the sale before it starts. By planting itself inside the AI, Walmart keeps a seat at the table while the internet shifts under everyone's feet.

Google clearly benefits too. Gemini gets a more functional purpose than just telling you how to boil pasta or summarize recipes. Now it can carry someone from the moment they wonder what they need to the moment the order is placed. That makes the assistant stickier and a bit more practical than generic chat. Walmart's incoming CEO John Furner says the company wants to shape this new pattern instead of being dragged into it later. Sundar Pichai calls Walmart an early partner in what he sees as a broader wave of agent style commerce, where AI starts doing the errands people used to handle themselves.
The article concludes "This partnership serves as a snapshot of where retail seems to be heading..."

Gentoo Linux posted its 2025 project retrospective this week. Some interesting details: Mostly because of the continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories, Gentoo currently considers and plans the migration of our repository mirrors and pull request contributions to Codeberg. Codeberg is a site based on Forgejo, maintained by a non-profit organization, and located in Berlin, Germany. Gentoo continues to host its own primary git, bugs, etc infrastructure and has no plans to change that...

We now publish weekly Gentoo images for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), based on the amd64 stages, see our mirrors. While these images are not present in the Microsoft store yet, that's something we intend to fix soon...

Given the unfortunate fracturing of the GnuPG / OpenPGP / LibrePGP ecosystem due to competing standards, we now provide an alternatives mechanism to choose the system gpg provider and ease compatibility testing...

We have added a bootstrap path for Rust from C++ using Mutabah's Rust compiler mrustc, which alleviates the need for pre-built binaries and makes it significantly easier to support more configurations. Similarly, Ada and D support in gcc now have clean bootstrap paths, which makes enabling these in the compiler as easy as switching the useflags on gcc and running emerge.
Other interesting statistics for the year:

• Gentoo currently consists of 31,663 ebuilds for 19,174 different packages.
• For amd64 (x86-64), there are 89 GBytes of binary packages available on the mirrors.
• Gentoo each week builds 154 distinct installation stages for different processor architectures and system configurations, with an overwhelming part of these fully up-to-date.
• The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2025, with a slight decrease from 123,942 to 112,927.
• The number of commits by external contributors was 9,396, now across 377 unique external authors.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Heraklit for sharing the 2025 retrospective.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget: If you received a bunch of password reset requests from Instagram recently, you're not alone. As reported by Malwarebytes, an antivirus software company, there was a data breach revealing the "sensitive information" of 17.5 million Instagram users. Malwarebytes added that the leak included Instagram usernames, physical addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and more.

The company added that the "data is available for sale on the dark web and can be abused by cybercriminals." Malwarebytes noted in an email to its customers that it discovered the breach during its routine dark web scan and that it's tied to a potential incident related to an Instagram API exposure from 2024.