The Morning After: It’s Black Friday!

Black Friday is finally upon us, willing us to purchase some much-needed tech with some degree of a discount. Our Black Friday hub has been collecting the best deals available, so you can save a bundle in the run-up to the holidays. And while there have been some tasty deals in the last few days, the real blockbusters have now dropped.

That includes $75 off the PlayStation 5 Slim, with a decent chunk sliced off the price of a PS5 wireless DualSense controller. Sony has also knocked $100 from the price of its class-leading XM5 headphones, which you can snag for $298. Not to mention, you can grab the brand-new M4 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM and 256GB storage for $500.

There are plenty more where that came from, which is why we have the Black Friday hub. So go and get all the biggest and best deals without having to lift a finger.

— Dan Cooper

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News In Brief

• Avowed preview: Classic Obsidian fantasy on a AAA budget
  From the people who made Fallout: New Vegas.

• Chemists have created the world’s thinnest spaghetti
  Finally, science does something useful.

• Threads will prioritize accounts you follow instead of randos
  It’ll probably still feel like a haunted mall full of LinkedIn power users, though.

• Australia introduces a bill to ban children under 16 from social media
  With severe penalties for infringements.

• Meta says it’s taken down 2 million accounts linked to ‘pig butchering’ scams
  These scams are huge business.

• Spotify drops a bunch of new tools for audiobooks, including a sleep timer
  You can also make audiobook-specific playlists.

WhatsApp adds voice message transcripts

Oh, thank [your deity of choice].

Voice messages: You either love them or feel you’re being forced to listen to the world’s least engaging podcast. Someone at WhatsApp must feel similarly given the platform has now added a way to transcribe the voice messages you receive. The feature is rolling out globally in the coming weeks, with more languages incoming.

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Report: Amazon is likely to face an EU antitrust investigation next year

Did it promote its own products ahead of its competitors?

Amazon may face an EU antitrust investigation next year, with regulators curious if it promoted its own products at the expense of competitors. The continent has stringent rules around big tech platforms that act as both the marketplace and a player in the same space. If found to have given its own gear preferential treatment, the fines under the Digital Markets Act can be hefty.

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The New York Times says OpenAI deleted evidence in its copyright lawsuit

OpenAI blamed a glitch.

The New York Times and OpenAI are battling it out in court, with the former accusing the latter of plagiarism. During the discovery phase, OpenAI created two virtual machines that the NYT’s lawyers could examine to gather evidence. But after 150 hours of research, some of that data was erased, which OpenAI blamed on a glitch.

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Neuralink gets approval to start human trials in Canada

It’s the first country outside the US to approve trials.

Canada has given its blessing for Neuralink to conduct human trials of its brain implant in the country. The Elon Musk-owned company has already opened the door for would-be trialists to apply to be the first Canadian to receive the implant. It’s asking for volunteers with quadriplegia caused either by a spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

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Remember the Rabbit R1?

The Rabbit R1 was a neat-looking pocketable AI doodad that sadly didn’t really do enough to justify buying one. Since it stumbled out of the gate, however, a raft of software updates has added many of the features initially promised at launch. The latest is Teach Mode, which lets users automate tasks on any website, which is nice.

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