Curiosity Stream, the decade-old science documentary streaming service founded by Discovery Channel's John Hendricks, expects its AI licensing business to generate more revenue than its 23 million subscribers by 2027 -- possibly earlier. The company's Q3 2025 earnings revealed a 41% year-over-year revenue increase, driven largely by deals licensing its content to train large language models. Year-to-date AI licensing brought in $23.4 million through September, already exceeding half of what the subscription business generated for all of 2024. The streaming service's library contains 2 million hours of content, but the "overwhelming majority" is earmarked for AI licensing rather than subscriber viewing, CEO Clint Stinchcomb said during the earnings call. Curiosity Stream is licensing 300,000 hours of its own programming and 1.7 million hours of third-party content to hyperscalers and AI developers. The company has completed 18 AI-related deals across video, audio, and code assets.

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Microsoft is rolling out yet another update to Notepad for Windows 11 Insiders that adds table support and faster AI-generated responses, continuing a transformation of the once-minimal text editor that has drawn sustained criticism from users who preferred its original simplicity. The update, version 11.2510.6.0, lets users insert tables via a formatting toolbar or Markdown syntax and enables streaming responses for the app's Write, Rewrite, and Summarize AI features.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some Dell and HP laptop owners have been befuddled by their machines' inability to play HEVC/H.265 content in web browsers, despite their machines' processors having integrated decoding support. Laptops with sixth-generation Intel Core and later processors have built-in hardware support for HEVC decoding and encoding. AMD has made laptop chips supporting the codec since 2015. However, both Dell and HP have disabled this feature on some of their popular business notebooks. HP discloses this in the data sheets for its affected laptops, which include the HP ProBook 460 G11 [PDF], ProBook 465 G11 [PDF], and EliteBook 665 G11 [PDF]. "Hardware acceleration for CODEC H.265/HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) is disabled on this platform," the note reads. Despite this notice, it can still be jarring to see a modern laptop's web browser eternally load videos that play easily in media players. HP and Dell didn't explain why the companies disabled HEVC hardware decoding on their laptops' processors. A statement from an HP spokesperson said: "In 2024, HP disabled the HEVC (H.265) codec hardware on select devices, including the 600 Series G11, 400 Series G11, and 200 Series G9 products. Customers requiring the ability to encode or decode HEVC content on one of the impacted models can utilize licensed third-party software solutions that include HEVC support. Check with your preferred video player for HEVC software support." Dell's media relations team shared a similar statement: "HEVC video playback is available on Dell's premium systems and in select standard models equipped with hardware or software, such as integrated 4K displays, discrete graphics cards, Dolby Vision, or Cyberlink BluRay software. On other standard and base systems, HEVC playback is not included, but users can access HEVC content by purchasing an affordable third-party app from the Microsoft Store. For the best experience with high-resolution content, customers are encouraged to select systems designed for 4K or high-performance needs."

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Police departments and officials from Border Patrol used Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to monitor protests hundreds of times around the country during the last year, including No Kings protests in June and October, according to data obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The data provides the clearest picture yet of how cops widely use Flock to monitor protesters. In June, 404 Media reported cops in California used Flock to track what it described as an “immigration protest.” The new data shows more than 50 federal, state, and local law enforcement ran hundreds of searches in connection with protest activity, according to the EFF.

“This is the clearest evidence to date of how law enforcement has used ALPR systems to investigate protest activity and should serve as a warning of how it may be used in the future to suppress dissent. This is a wake-up call for leaders: Flock technology is a threat to our core democratic values,” said Dave Maass, one of the authors of the EFF’s research which the organization shared with 404 Media before publication on Thursday.

Flock has its cameras in thousands of communities throughout the U.S. They continuously scan the license plate, brand, model, and color of every vehicle that passes by. Law enforcement can then search that collected data for a specific vehicle, and reveal where it was previously spotted. Many police departments are also part of Flock’s nationwide lookup tool that lets officers in one part of the country search cameras in another. Often, officers will search cameras nationwide even if investigating a case in their own state. Typically this is done without a warrant, something that critics like the EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have recently sued over.

For months, after 404 Media revealed local cops were tapping into Flock on behalf of ICE, researchers and journalists have been using public records requests to obtain Flock network audits from different agencies. Network audits are a specific type of file that can show the given reason a law enforcement searched Flock’s network.

Through public records, both made by itself and others on the public records filing platform Muckrock, the EFF says it obtained datasets representing more than 12 million searches by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. Sometimes, the given reason for a Flock search was “protest.” In others it was “No Kings.”

Some examples of protest-related searches include a February protest against deportation raids by the Tulsa Police Department in Oklahoma; another in support of Mahmoud Khalil in March; and a No Kings protest in June, according to the EFF. 

During the more recent No Kings protests in October, local law enforcement agencies in Illinois, Arizona, and Tennessee, all ran protest-related searches, the EFF writes.

As the EFF acknowledges, “Crime does sometimes occur at protests, whether that's property damage, pick-pocketing, or clashes between groups on opposite sides of a protest. Some of these searches may have been tied to an actual crime that occurred, even though in most cases officers did not articulate a criminal offense when running the search.” Some searches were for threats made against protesters, such as a Kansas case which read “Crime Stoppers Tip of causing harm during protests.”

Other examples include searches that coincided with a May Day rally; the 50501 Protests against DOGE; and protests against the police shooting of Jabari Peoples.

The EFF found Border Patrol ran searches for “Portland Riots” and the plate belonging to a specific person who authorities later charged with allegedly braking suddenly in front of agent’s vehicles. The complaint said the man also stuck his middle finger up at them.

Flock declined to comment. The Tulsa Police Department did not respond to a request for comment. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a response in time for publication.

Elon Musk is a better role model than Jesus, better at conquering Europe than Hitler, the greatest blowjob giver of all time, should have been selected before Peyton Manning in the 1998 NFL draft, is a better pitcher than Randy Johnson, has the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history,” and is a better porn star than Riley Reid, according to Grok, X’s sycophantic AI chatbot that has seemingly been reprogrammed to treat Musk like a god. 

Grok has been tweaked sometime in the last several days and will now choose Musk as being superior to the entire rest of humanity at any given task. The change is somewhat reminiscent of Grok’s MechaHitler debacle. It is, for the moment, something that is pretty funny and which people on various social media platforms are dunking on Musk and Grok for, but it’s also an example of how big tech companies, like X, are regularly putting their thumbs on the scales of their AI chatbots to distort reality and to obtain their desired outcome. 

Microsoft has released the source code for Zork I, II, and III under the MIT License through a collaboration with Team Xbox and Activision that involved submitting pull requests to historical source repositories maintained by digital archivist Jason Scott. Each repository now includes the original source code and accompanying documentation. The games arrived on early home computers in the 1980s as text-based adventures built on the Z-Machine, a virtual machine that allowed the same story files to run across different platforms. Infocom created the Z-Machine after discovering the original mainframe version was too large for home computers. The team split the game into three titles that all ran on the same underlying system. The code release covers only the source files and does not include commercial packaging or trademark rights. The games remain available commercially through The Zork Anthology on Good Old Games and can be compiled locally using ZILF, a modern Z-Machine interpreter.

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