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So good, so good, so good. Give big, save big with RAC Friday deals at Nordstrom Rack. For a limited time, take an extra 40% off red tag clearance for everyone on your list. All sales final and restrictions apply. So bring your gift list and your wish list to your nearest Nordstrom Rack today. Welcome to the Tech Brew Riot home for Friday, December 19, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today has TikTok finally been SOL episode number 47. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court says police don't need a warrant to read your search history. YouTube terminates some big accounts over AI usage. A new league of legends is coming. And in the long reads and in the show, a look at how Zuck's big bet on AI is coming along. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. You may have noticed that your CRM system has become crazy with bots and agents. At the Techbrew, write home. We love AI, but not when it's used to commit fraud or ransomware. Fortunately, Mimoto, the creator of continuous verification, now offers the next generation of Continuous Captcha Momoto. Continuous Captcha diverts only the agents and bots attempting to gain access to your CRM through registration forms. With Momoto, good agents can do what agents do best. Enable your customers to have more productive experiences with your website or app while stopping bad agents from defrauding you or your customers. It's a win for everyone except the cybercriminals. Right now our listeners can purchase a year of memoto continuous captcha for $5,000, a 20 discount on their lowest price plan. To learn more, head to mimoto AI ride home. That's mimoto AI ride home. Yeah. Did you ever notice the whole TikTok thing was never done? I mean, I've reported to you that it was done basically because we were told it was done. But did you ever notice that TikTok never officially, officially changed hands? Well, your guess is as good as mine as to if this really is the end now, but Axios has seen an internal memo suggesting TikTok has signed a deal to sell its US unit. Oracle, Silverlake and MGX will collectively own around 45% of the TikTok US entity and ByteDance will retain around 20%. The agreement is set to close on January 22nd. Per an internal memo sent by CEO Sho Chu, Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi based MGX will collectively own 45% of the entity, which will be called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC. Nearly 1/3 of the company will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors and nearly 20% will be retained by ByteDance itself. The US joint venture will be responsible for US data protection, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurance. Per the memo, it will be responsible for retraining the Content Recommendation algorithm on US User data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation. A trusted security partner will be responsible for auditing and validating compliance with the agreed upon security terms, and Oracle will be the trusted security partner upon completion of the transaction, the memo notes. Upon the closing, the US Joint venture quote, will operate as an independent entity with authority over U.S. data protection, algorithm security, content moderation and software assurance, while TikTok Global's US entities will manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e commerce, advertising and markets, it adds. The deal values TikTok US at around $14 billion, a source confirmed to Axios, end quote More from the Hollywood CHU confirmed that the deal has officially been signed Thursday, laying out some terms of the deal, including retraining the Content recommendation algorithm on US User data to ensure Content Feed is free from outside manipulation. Oracle overseeing data protection and specifying that ultimate decision making authority for reviewing and approving all content moderation and related policies within the United States. Oracle and Silverlake, of course, are no strangers to the entertainment business. Oracle founder Larry Ellison backed his son David Ellison's effort to acquire Paramount and is also involved in his attempt to secure Warner Brothers discovery with his Oracle stake backstopping the deal. Silver Lake, meanwhile, owns WME and also has control of TKO Group holdings and partnered with Saudi Arabia's public investment fund to buy video game giant Electronic Arts in September, end quote. Pennsylvania's Supreme Court just ruled that police can get Google search data without a warrant. An expert warns that may encourage warrantless searches nationwide. Quoting the record in its opinion, the court said that Internet users making searches have no reasonable right to privacy because, quote, it is common knowledge that websites, Internet based applications and Internet service providers collect and then sell user data. The case only creates legal precedent in Pennsylvania, but an expert predicted that the ruling will lead to more police departments to feel confident about warrantless searches for Internet queries. If a rather progressive state like Pennsylvania gives the green light to warrantless collection of your search queries, I think it's fair to say that it is going to open up its use across the nation, said Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of the forthcoming book your data will be used against you. Police in the case before the court had hit a dead end in their probe of a rape as a last attempt to find the rapist. They asked Google to produce a list showing anyone who had searched for the victim's address in the week before the rape and home invasion occurred. Google found a hit and told police that someone at an IEP address tied to the home of the defendant in the case, John Edward Kurtz, had looked up the victim's address a few hours before the crime took place. The court noted that Google's privacy policy is explicit about the fact that it will share search histories with third parties. In the case before us, Google went beyond subtle indicators, the opinion says. Google expressly informed informed its users that one should not expect any privacy when using its services. The court also said that Internet users have the ability to not expose their data by using different methods for finding information. The data trail created by using the Internet is not involuntary in the same way that the trail created by carrying a cell phone is, according to the opinion. Ferguson said the decision is an important development on a hotly contested and developing legal question. Allowing police to access Google searches without a warrant creates a quote chilling environment, he said, pointing out that many people ask Google questions they wouldn't even ask their spouses. The danger of a reverse keyword search is that it allows the police to rummage through the digital questions and queries and thus by inference our minds, ferguson said. A list of your questions to Google is a direct link to your thinking and we usually try to prevent the government from having access to that information. End Quote. Sources tell the Journal that Meta is developing a new image and video focused AI model codenamed Mango, expected to be released in the first half of 2026 along with its new LLM dubbed Avocado. Quote. Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexander Wang talked about the artificial intelligence models in an internal company Q and A on Thursday with Chris Cox, Meta's chief product officer, according to people who heard the remarks. Wang said one of the focuses for the new text model, codenamed Avocado, is making it better at coding and that the company is in the early stages of exploring developing so called world models AI that learns about its environment by taking in visual information. Image generation has proven a vital front in the war between the big AI model companies. In September, Meta launched an AI video generator called Vibes that was made in collaboration with a startup called Midjourney. Less than a week after meta released vibes, OpenAI released an AI video generator app of its own called Sora. The introduction earlier this year of Google's Nano Banana image making tool Jump started adoption of Gemini, boosting monthly users from 450 million in July to more than 650 million as of late October, end quote. YouTube has terminated the accounts of ScreenCulture and KH Studio, two large channels that used AI to create fake movie trailers. The platform earlier suspended the channel's ads, quoting Deadline. Screen Culture and KH Studio were approached for comment. They are based in India and Georgia respectively. Earlier this year, YouTube suspended ads on Screen Culture and KH Studio following a Deadline investigation into fake movie trailers plaguing the platform since the rise of generative AI. The channels later returned to monetization when they started adding fan trailer parody and concept trailer to their video titles. But those caveats disappeared in recent months, prompting concern in the fan made trailer community. YouTube's position is that the channel's decision to revert to their previous behavior violated its spam and misleading metadata policies. This resulted in their termination. The monster was defeated, one YouTuber told Deadline following the enforcement action. Deadline's investigation revealed that Screen Culture spliced together official footage with AI images to create franchise trailers that duped many YouTube viewers. Screen culture founder Nikhil P. Chadhari said his team of a dozen editors exploited YouTube's algorithm by being early with fake trailers and consistently iterating with videos. For example, Screen culture had created 23 versions of a trailer for the Fantastic Four first steps by March, some of which outrank the official trailer in YouTube search results. More recent examples include HBO's new Harry Potter series and Netflix's Wednesday. Our Deep Dive into Fake Trailers revealed that instead of protecting copyright on those videos, a handful of Hollywood studios, including Warner Bros. Discovery and Sony, secretly asked YouTube to ensure that the ad revenue from the AI heavy videos flowed in their direction. The studios declined to comment. If you're a small business owner, you probably assume that your biz is flying under the radar with hackers and cybercriminals. That, folks, is where you'd unfortunately be wrong. Teams of any size can be a target, but the good news is, even the smallest teams can foil cybercrime. 1Password provides simple security solutions to help small teams manage the number one risk that bad actors exploit. And that's weak passwords, however complex your security needs get. 1Password provides centralized management to make sure your company's logins are secure, whether you have dedicated IT staff or not. Take the first step to better security by securing your team's credentials. 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Check out Delve Co Morning Brew and start using AI for compliance. That's Delve Co Morning Brew Sources tell Bloomberg that Riot Games is working on a major overhaul of League of Legends, internally called League Next for 2027. Riot has confirmed a big update is in the works. Quote the upcoming version, internally called League Next, is slated to be the biggest update in the title's history, according to five current and former employees. It is planned for release in 2027. The game's visual aesthetic, including characters, the user interface and battle arenas, will be reimagined so League of Legends can appeal to more new players. Developers are also reworking the technical underpinning so it's easier to push out updates. Riot recently added new keyboard controls that may prove easier for newbies. Internally, a reorganization of employees has also been announced. The people who asked not to be identified because the information hadn't been made public. After Bloomberg reported Thursday on the company's plans, Riot posted a video confirming that a big update is in the works. It referenced changes to the video game launcher and gameplay. We're overhauling the new player experience so that once we're done, it should be the best time ever to get your friends into League, said League of Legends executive producer Paul bellezza. Released in 2009, League of Legends remains one of the top video game titles in the world. In the game, five person teams of fantastical characters called Champ fight to win over objectives such as destroying enemy towers and neutralizing monsters. The game also has spawned international esports competitions. League of Legends is free to play. Riot, owned by Chinese technology giant Tencent holdings, earns money selling digital accessories, while League of Legends has fared better than some competitors in the slow growing video game business. Its player base has dropped off, according to the People. Bloomberg News spoke with Valorant, Another Riot title makes more money. In years past, Riot has tried to diversify its business, investing in new titles and even a $250 million Netflix TV series called Arcane that was set in the League of Legends universe. The company cut 530 jobs last year and pulled back on some projects. Chief Executive Officer Dylan Jadeja said in a blog post at the time that Riot had too many things underway and needed a sharper focus. End quote Time for the weekend Long Read Suggestions the FT has some gossipy behind the scenes details of Mark Zuckerberg's all in bet to make Meta an AI leader, with some saying Alexander Wang finds Zuckerberg's micromanagement of AI work, quote suffocating. Quote Mark Zuckerberg likes to play high stakes poker. Other people like doing it in Vegas. He likes doing it with his company, says one former Meta executive who worked closely with him. Mark has a keen sense of when the market is changing and moving quickly to catch up. Here he is buying momentum, the person adds. I would be wary of betting against his ability to deploy his resources to be successful. Will he win? I'm not sure, but he will not lose. While some insiders have welcomed a new energy closer to Elon Musk's hardcore work ethic, cracks have begun to emerge at an executive level. Tensions have been bubbling between Wang and Zuckerberg, according to four people familiar with the matter. Wang has told associates he finds Zuckerberg's micromanagement of the company's AI work suffocating, several of the people say. Internally, some staff question whether Wang is out of his depth given his lack of experience managing teams in a large corporation, but also his expertise in AI data services rather than as an AI researcher pushing technical breakthroughs. Nat Friedman is also under increasing pressure from Zuckerberg to move faster on delivering AI products. Some in his team were frustrated by what they felt was the rushed release of Vibes, Meta's feed of AI generated videos rolled out at a breakneck speed in order to beat the release of OpenAI's similar Sora. Meta is in a tough spot as a newcomer. Few folks get hired into leadership and it's such a tenure driven place, says one former insider who left recently. When you're a friend of Zuck, you have more room for error. End quote. And this piece from Andrew McCallop throws cold water on the whole data centers in space excitement. In his quite detailed analysis, McCallop examines the feasibility of orbital data centers, challenging the aesthetic futurism of the concept with rigorous economics. While the physics of space computing tuning is possible, the financial reality is savage in McCallop's words. Currently, building a 1 gigawatt data center in orbit costs approximately $51.1 billion or $51.10 per watt, over three times the $15.9 billion or $15.85 per watt required for a terrestrial equivalent. The primary engineering bottleneck is thermodynamics. Unlike Earth based cooling, space relies solely on radiation to reject massive waste heat. This necessitates enormous solar arrays and complex thermal management to prevent GPUs from throttling. McCallop argues that success requires extreme vertical integration, positioning SpaceX as possibly the only viable contender capable of slashing launch costs despite daunting costs and maintenance hurdles. He suggests that irrational investment in orbital compute might actually serve as necessary scaffolding for a future space economy. However, ultimately, while terrestrial centers remain superior for efficiency, orbital projects represent a high risk bet where the economics simply don't math out today. But by building it, it might come and from the Verge quote frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic need vast amounts of data in the race to achieve AGI. This comes at a pretty penny. Billions of dollars and little known companies like like Merkor and Handshake are cleaning up in this AI hype cycle. In September, founder Brendan Foody announced that Merkore had reached $500 million in annualized revenue, making it the fastest growing company of all time. The previous title holder was Anysphere, which makes the AI coding tool Cursor. In a sign of the times, Cursor recently noted that its users produce the exact sort of training data labs are paying for and the information recently reported that OpenAI and Xai are interested in buying it. Merkor's most recent fundraising round valued the company at $10 billion. Foody and his two co founders are 22 years old, making them the youngest self made billionaires. At least one of their early employees has already left to start an AI data company of her own. While discussions of AI infrastructure typically focus on the gargantuan build out of data centers, an analogous race is happening with training. Data labs have already exhausted all the easily accessible data, adding to questions about whether early rapid progr through sheer increases in scale will continue. Meanwhile, most recent improvements have come through new training techniques that make use of smaller data sets tailor made by experts in particular fields like programming and finance, and AI companies will pay premium prices for that. There are no good statistics on how much labs are spending. But rough estimates from investors and industry insiders place the figure at over $10 billion this year and growing, the vast majority coming from five or so companies. These companies have yet to find a way to make money from AI, but the people selling them training data data clearly have. For now, they are some of the only AI companies turning a profit. So I did get the audio of that top 10 tech stories of the Year episode. But instead of running it as a weekend episode, I'm gonna run it Christmas Day next week. So next week I'll do three daily shows Monday through Wednesday. Then Thursday, you'll get that top 10 tech stories of the Year episode from the newsworthy. And on Friday, I'm gonna give you a treat from the RAD History feed. It's the history of Toys R Us. It's actually more interesting than even I knew the whole big box category. Killer model of retail. Toys R Us basically invented that. So that's the publishing plan for next week. Talk to you on Monday. Limu Emu and Doug. Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. 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