Warner Bros. sticks with Netflix merger, calls Paramount’s $108B bid “illusory”

Warner Bros. sticks with Netflix merger, calls Paramount’s $108B bid “illusory”

fivenewscrypto    janvier 08, 2026   

The Warner Bros. Discovery board has unanimously voted to rebuff Paramount's $108.4 billion offer and urged shareholders to reject the hostile takeover bid. The board is continuing to support Netflix's pending $82.7 billion purchase of its streaming and movie studios businesses along with a separate spinoff of the Warner Bros. cable TV division.

Warner Bros. called the Paramount bid "illusory" in a presentation for shareholders today, saying the offer requires an "extraordinary amount of debt financing" and other terms that make it less likely to be completed than a Netflix merger. It would be the largest leveraged buyout ever, "with $87B of total pro forma gross debt," and is "effectively a one-sided option for PSKY [Paramount Skydance] as the offer can be terminated or amended by PSKY at any time," Warner Bros. said.

The Warner Bros. presentation touted Netflix's financial strength while saying that Paramount "is a $14B market cap company with a 'junk' credit rating, negative free cash flows, significant fixed financial obligations, and a high degree of dependency on its linear business." The Paramount "offer is illusory as it cannot be completed before it is currently scheduled to expire," Warner Bros. said.

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Bose open-sources its SoundTouch home theater smart speakers ahead of end-of-life

Bose open-sources its SoundTouch home theater smart speakers ahead of end-of-life

fivenewscrypto    janvier 08, 2026   

Bose released the Application Programming Interface (API) documentation for its SoundTouch speakers today, putting a silver lining around the impending end-of-life (EoL) of the expensive home theater devices.

In October, Bose announced that its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars would become dumb speakers on February 18. At the time, Bose said that the speakers would only work if a device was connected via AUX, HDMI, or Bluetooth (which has higher latency than Wi-Fi).

After that date, the speakers would stop receiving security and software updates and lose cloud connectivity and their companion app, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based company said. Without the app, users would no longer be able to integrate the device with music services, such as Spotify, have multiple SoundTouch devices play the same audio simultaneously, or use or edit saved presets.

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Expired certificate completely breaks macOS Logitech apps, user customizations

Expired certificate completely breaks macOS Logitech apps, user customizations

fivenewscrypto    janvier 08, 2026   

If you're a Mac user with Logitech accessories and you've noticed that your settings and customizations seem to have gone away this week, you're not alone.

The company's Logi Options+ and G Hub apps for macOS abruptly stopped functioning on Monday, refusing to launch and reverting all accessories' settings to their built-in defaults.

The culprit, according to both a Logitech support page and Reddit posts from Logitech Head of Global Marketing Joe Santucci, was a security certificate that was inadvertently allowed to expire, rendering both apps non-functional.

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SteamOS continues its slow spread across the PC gaming landscape

SteamOS continues its slow spread across the PC gaming landscape

fivenewscrypto    janvier 08, 2026   

SteamOS's slow march across the Windows-dominated PC gaming landscape is continuing to creep along. At CES this week, Lenovo announced it will launch a version of last year's high-priced, high-powered Legion Go 2 handheld with Valve's gaming-focused, Linux-based OS pre-installed starting in June. And there are some intriguing signs from Valve that SteamOS could come to non-AMD devices in the not-too-distant future as well.

A new SteamOS-powered Legion Go 2 isn't exactly shocking news given how things have been going in the world of PC gaming handhelds. Lenovo became the first non-Valve hardware maker to embrace the Windows alternative when it announced a SteamOS-compatible version of the lower-end Legion Go S almost exactly a year ago. When that version hit the market last spring, Ars testing found it actually performed better than the Windows-based version of the same hardware on many popular games.

Valve has also been working behind the scenes to expand SteamOS's footprint beyond its own hardware. After rolling out the SteamOS Compatible software label last May, SteamOS version 3.7 offered support for manual installation on AMD-powered handhelds like the ROG Ally and the original Legion Go.

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Computer scientist Yann LeCun: “Intelligence really is about learning”

Computer scientist Yann LeCun: “Intelligence really is about learning”

fivenewscrypto    janvier 08, 2026   

I arrive 10 minutes ahead of schedule from an early morning Eurostar and see Yann LeCun is already waiting for me, nestled between two plastic Christmas trees in the nearly empty winter garden of Michelin-starred restaurant Pavyllon.

The restaurant is next to Paris’s Grand Palais, where President Emmanuel Macron kick-started 2025 by hosting an international AI summit, a glitzy showcase packed with French exceptionalism and international tech luminaries including LeCun, who is considered one of the “godfathers” of modern AI.

LeCun gets up to hug me in greeting, wearing his signature black Ray-Ban Wayfarer glasses. He looks well rested for a man who has spent nearly a week running around town plotting world domination. Or, more precisely, “total world assistance” or “intelligent amplification, if you want.” Domination “sounds scary with AI,” he acknowledges.

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HP’s EliteBoard G1a is a Ryzen-powered Windows 11 PC in a membrane keyboard

HP’s EliteBoard G1a is a Ryzen-powered Windows 11 PC in a membrane keyboard

fivenewscrypto    janvier 08, 2026   

As a Windows system built inside of a functioning membrane keyboard, the HP EliteBoard G1a announced today is a more accessible alternative to other keyboard-PCs.

The Commodore 64 made the keyboard-PC famous in the 1980s, but the keyboard-PC space has been dominated by the Raspberry Pi. In 2019, the single-board computer (SBC) maker released the Raspberry Pi 400, which is essentially a Raspberry Pi 4 SBC inside a case that also functions as a keyboard for the system. USB, HDMI, and Ethernet ports, plus a GPIO header and native Raspberry Pi OS Linux distribution add up to a low-end desktop computer experience that only costs $100. It was followed by the Raspberry Pi 500, with a Pi 5 powered by a quad-core, 64-bit Arm Cortex-A76 inside; and the Pi 500+, which has an NVMe SSD, instead of microSD, storage and is built inside of a low-profile mechanical keyboard (it’s also twice as expensive at $200).

The Pi 500+ keyboard-PC using RGB. Credit: Raspberry Pi

But Raspberry Pis largely appeal to tinkerers, DIYers, and Linux fans, making Pi-as-a-desktop a niche product with a substantial learning curve for newcomers.

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With GeForce Super GPUs missing in action, Nvidia focuses on software upgrades

With GeForce Super GPUs missing in action, Nvidia focuses on software upgrades

fivenewscrypto    janvier 08, 2026   

For the first time in years, Nvidia declined to introduce new GeForce graphics card models at CES. CEO Jensen Huang's characteristically sprawling and under-rehearsed 90-minute keynote focused almost entirely on the company's dominant AI business, relegating the company's gaming-related announcements to a separate video posted later in the evening.

Instead, the company focused on software improvements for its existing hardware. The biggest announcement in this vein is DLSS 4.5, which adds a handful of new features to Nvidia's basket of upscaling and frame-generation technologies.

DLSS upscaling is being improved by a new "second-generation transformer model" that Nvidia says has been "trained on an expanded data set" to improve its predictions when generating new pixels. According to Nvidia's Bryan Catanzaro, this is particularly beneficial for image quality in the Performance and Ultra Performance modes, where the upscaler has to do more guessing because it's working from a lower-resolution source image.

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