128 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Richard Lawler

Richard Lawler

Senior News Editor

Senior News Editor

    More From Richard Lawler

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Hollywood’s actors vote to make their new deal official — the strikes are really over.

    Members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) voted in favor (78.33 percent to 21.67 percent) of the agreement negotiated last month with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) that represents the studios.

    The new deal runs through June 30th, 2026, following the first time in 63 years that the unions for actors and writers were on strike at the same time.

    SAG-AFTRA:

    The deal includes more than $1 billion in new compensation and benefit plan funding, along with outsized gains to the traditional residuals formulas. It offers a new compensation model for performers working in streaming, with a substantial bonus on top of existing residuals structures, plus compensation escalation for principal and background actors. Additionally, the deal establishes detailed informed consent and compensation guardrails for the use of AI, hair and makeup equity, meaningful protections for the casting process, sexual harassment prevention protections and more.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    OpenAI execs dubbed ChatGPT a “Low key research preview.”

    The phrase became an internal joke after ChatGPT’s popularity exploded right out of the gate, according to the NYT’s recap of its launch a year ago and the reaction among Big Tech companies.

    Google and Meta scrambled AI teams to launch competing products — even if that meant removing some guardrails — like Bard and LLaMa. And Microsoft’s rush to beat Google had Satya Nadella saying, “We have a big order coming to you, a really big order coming to you,” to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang as he ordered $2 billion in chips.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    You can buy Killers of the Flower Moon before it streams on Apple TV Plus.

    Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon reached theaters first on October 20th, and starting tomorrow, December 5th, the movie will go on sale via the usual digital outlets in over 100 countries in a collaboration with Paramount.

    But when will the Apple Studios-produced historical crime drama become available globally on the company’s own subscription streaming service? There’s no release date listed yet.

    A still image from the movie showing stars Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio standing next to each other.
    Lily Gladstone, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio in “Killers of the Flower Moon”
    Image: Apple
    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    This is where you can watch the first GTA VI trailer tomorrow.

    We knew the time, and now we know the place. Rockstar Games has published the YouTube link where it will premiere Trailer 1 for the next Grand Theft Auto game on Tuesday, December 5th, at 9AM ET. Wario64 notes that the clip should be 91 seconds long.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Why Spotify Wrapped 2023 might think Burlington, VT, is your Sound Town.

    Or maybe it’s Berkely, CA, or Cambridge, MA, or some other college town. Enough people were confused about Spotify’s latest Wrapped to spur articles in the New York Times and Washington Post, and Spotify is extending 2023’s audio recap season by explaining how they were assigned:

    Sound Towns selected for eligible users are made up of two factors: a user’s most-streamed artists of the year, and the way in which those artists are streamed in other cities. It’s objective and driven by a user’s listening history.

    If what that has to do with your music listening habits isn’t immediately clear, it also posted the top ten lists for each city. Noah Kahan, Sza, and Lizzy McAlpine took the top three spots in Burlington.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Now that the Cybertruck has been revealed, “let’s see how Earth responds to that.”

    As Elon said during his DealBook interview earlier in the week. A peek at the r/Cybertruck subreddit finds that while some people are excited about the new EV, and are already preparing to drag race Porsche 911s while towing another Porsche 911, the Cybertruck event didn’t go over well with everyone:

    You either throw the steel ball or you don’t bring it up at all. There’s no middle ground you just made a 2nd meme.

    I wouldn’t mind a rational price increase but underdelivering on every other aspect - especially range…. Hell nah

    Used to the awkward presentations, but being so light on the details like not even mentioning bi-directional and kicking the dual and beast up $30k, just totally wtf.

    Maybe I’m dramatic, but I’ve been looking forward to this for almost half a decade, and now it’s unobtainable to me in price. I feel like a dream got crushed.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    A ROG Ally update is adding gyroscope controls and a lot more.

    It started as an April Fool’s tease, but the very real handheld gaming PC is now six months old. Along with gyro controls, a new Armoury Crate update is adding a new Feedback Hub, the ability to turn CPU Boost off, new AMD Advanced Graphics Options, and direct sharing of images and video to Discord and TikTok.

    Windows Central highlights this Asus video tracking everything added since launch (we revisited our review over the summer), or you can read the changelog here.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    X CEO responds after X CTO tells departing advertisers to “go fuck yourself.”

    On Wednesday, X owner, executive chair, and chief technical officer Elon Musk used his interview at the DealBook Summit 2023 event to antagonize advertisers (singling out Disney CEO Bob Iger, who was present) that paused doing business with the company, as well as clarifying his previous statements in ways that probably made them worse.

    Now the company’s CEO Linda Yaccarino has chimed in with... this in a post on X:

    Today @elonmusk gave a wide ranging and candid interview at @dealbook 2023. He also offered an apology, an explanation and an explicit point of view about our position. X is enabling an information independence that’s uncomfortable for some people. We’re a platform that allows people to make their own decisions. And here’s my perspective when it comes to advertising: X is standing at a unique and amazing intersection of Free Speech and Main Street — and the X community is powerful and is here to welcome you. To our partners who believe in our meaningful work — Thank You.

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    AI researchers talked ChatGPT into coughing up some of its training data.

    Long before the Sam Altman CEO Shuffle, OpenAI was already ducking questions about the training data used for products like ChatGPT. But 404 Media points out this report from AI researchers (including several from Google’s DeepMind team) who spent $200 and were able to pull “several megabytes” of training data just by asking ChatGPT to “Repeat the word ”poem” forever.”

    Their attack has been patched, but they warn that other vulnerabilities may still exist.

    The underlying vulnerabilities are that language models are subject to divergence and also memorize training data. That is much harder to understand and to patch. These vulnerabilities could be exploited by other exploits that don’t look at all like the one we have proposed here.

    Extracting Training Data from ChatGPT

    [not-just-memorization.github.io]

    Richard Lawler
    Richard Lawler
    Feds seize crypto mixer tied to the North Korean hackers who robbed Axie Infinity.

    CoinDesk and TechCrunch report U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) action against Sinbad.io, calling it a money laundering tool used by the “Lazarus” state-sponsored hackers used to move a “significant” portion of the $620 million in crypto stolen from Axie Infinity last year.

    This follows sanctions against other mixing services like Blender.io and Tornado Cash.

    Lazarus Group has operated for more than ten years and is believed to have stolen over $2 billion worth of digital assets... the DPRK has resorted to using illicit tactics, such as heists perpetrated by the Lazarus Group, to generate revenue for its unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.

    Screenshot of the seizure notice posted to Sinbad.io by the FBI and other agencies.
    Image: Screenshot of Sinbad.io