Dec 21st 2025
This Week in Tech 1063
The Year's End
Hosted by
Leo Laporte
Top Stories of 2025
Records live every Sunday at 5:15pm Eastern / 2:15pm Pacific / 22:15 UTC.
After a year tangled in political drama, AI hype, and regulation battles, the TWiT crew explains how many of tech’s “biggest stories” simply fizzled into nothing or left us with new headaches by year’s end.
- Year-end tech trends: AI, politics, and security dominated 2025
- Major stories faded fast: TikTok saga, political tech drama, DOGE scandal
- TikTok’s ownership battle—Oracle, Trump donors, and US-China tensions
- China tech fears: banned drones, IoT vulnerabilities, secret radios in buses
- Rising political pressure for internet privacy and media literacy reform
- Surveillance and kill switch concerns in US grid and port infrastructure
- Convenience vs. privacy: Americans trade data for discounts and ease
- Age verification, surveillance, and flawed facial recognition across countries
- Discord’s ID leak highlights risks of rushed compliance with privacy laws
- Social media’s impact on kids pushes age-gating and verification laws
- ISPs monetize customer data, VPNs pitched for personal privacy
- Global government crackdowns: UK bans VPN advertising, mandates age checks
- The illusion of absolute privacy: flawed age gates and persistent tracking
- AI takes over: explosive growth, but profits elusive for big players
- Arms race in LLMs: DeepSeek’s breakthrough, OpenAI/Meta talent bidding war
- Ad-driven models still rule; Amazon’s playbook repeated in AI
- Humanoid robots and AGI hype: skepticism vs. Silicon Valley optimism
- AI-generated art, media, and the challenge of deepfake detection
- Social platforms falter: Instagram and X swamped by fake or low-value content
- Google’s legal, regulatory, and technical woes: ad tech trial, Manifest V3 backlash
- RAM price spikes and hardware shortages blamed on AI data center demand
- YouTube overtakes mobile for podcast and video viewing, Oscars move online
- The internet’s growth: Cloudflare stats, X vs. Reddit, spam domain trends
- Weird tech stories: hacked crosswalks, Nintendo Switch 2 Staplegate, LEGO theft ring
- Sad farewell: Lamar Wilson’s passing and mental health awareness in tech
- Reflections on the year’s turbulence and hopes for a better 2026
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Links
- FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'
- Microsoft to stop using engineers in China for tech support of US military, Hegseth orders review
- A New Era of Internet Regulation Is About to Begin
- People in the UK now have to take an age verification selfie to watch porn online
- Bluesky Blocks Service In Mississippi Over Age Assurance Law - Slashdot
- Roblox will require a facial scan or government ID to have unfiltered chats
- T-Mobile claimed selling location data without consent is legal—judges disagree
- Apple suspends error-strewn AI generated news alerts
- How Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek Made a Model that Rivals OpenAI
- Announcing Project Stargate
- OpenAI now serves 400M users every week
- Invasion of the Home Humanoid Robots
- CB Insights: OpenAI's acquisition of Jony Ive's io for $6.5B sets a new record for venture-backed acquisition by a private buyer
- Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don't Exist
- My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them
- The Epic Battle for AI Talent—With Exploding Offers, Secret Deals and Tears
- Google’s Chrome extension cull hits more uBlock Origin users
- Judge rules Google illegally monopolized ad tech, opening door to potential breakup | TechCrunch
- Cloudflare Radar 2025 Year in Review
- Anne Wojcicki Wins Bidding for 23andMe
- US government takes 10 percent stake in Intel in exchange for money it was already on the hook for
- Oscars Bolts from ABC to YouTube Starting in 2029
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 sweeps The Game Awards — analysis and full winners list
- The $20,000 American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, and no touchscreen
- NASA engineers revive Voyager 1's dead thrusters from 15 billion miles away
- Hacked Crosswalks In Bay Area Play Deepfake-Style Messages From Tech Billionaires - Slashdot
- GameStop’s Nintendo Switch 2 stapler sells for more than $100,000 on eBay after viral mishap
- Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state
- Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters
- Germany: Economist Thomas Vierhaus Fined €16,100 for Sarcastic X Posts
- Police Break Up Lego Theft Ring, Recovering Hundreds of Beheaded Figurines
- 2025 words of the year represent digital disillusionment - Fast Company
- Award-Winning Tech Influencer Lamarr Wilson's Cause of Death at 48 Revealed