Spotify Wrapped 2025 is here and now it’s a competition?

It's that time of year again, when all of our favorite streaming platforms start dropping personalized lists of what we've been consuming. Spotify Wrapped is perhaps the biggest of the bunch and it's available for perusal right now.

As always, users can access Wrapped to find their most listened-to genres, artists, songs, albums and podcasts from the past year. This information is shareable via social media if you want random bald eagle avatars to comment on your music taste, but there's a new interactive feature called Wrapped Party.

The tool in action.
Spotify

This is a game of a sort. Spotify says it "turns your listening data into a live competition." Wrapped Party hands out awards for stuff like listening to smaller artists and obsession with a particular artist, in addition to total minutes streamed. Finally, friends can settle the age-old debate of "who listens to music more."

Spotify Wrapped is also about the platform itself, so we have plenty of little tidbits from the global user base. Bad Bunny was named the most streamed artist in the world, just ahead of his Super Bowl performance that internet bozos have turned into a controversy for some reason. This is the fourth time he's come out on top in the past five years. He also had the most popular album of the year.

He wins an award.
Spotify

The global top song is something of a surprise, as it's not Bad Bunny or even Taylor Swift. It's the Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars duet "Die With a Smile." The top podcast is, as always, The Joe Rogan Experience. At least Spotify is getting what it paid for with Rogan.

If you don't use Spotify for whatever reason, other major streaming platforms offer something similar to Wrapped. Apple Music has Replay and Amazon Music has Delivered. Even YouTube got in on the act this year, unveiling a recap for video watchers.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/spotify-wrapped-2025-is-here-and-now-its-a-competition-130052418.html?src=rss

How to watch the ‘Christmas in Rockefeller Center’ tree lighting special tonight

It's time for the annual Rockefeller Christmas tree lighting! The Christmas in Rockefeller Center tree lighting special will air tonight, Dec. 3 from 8-10 PM ET — though coverage will start an hour prior, at 7 PM ET. The Voice and Happy's Place star Reba McEntire will host and perform at the Rockefeller Tree lighting, which will also feature performances from Halle Bailey, Michael Bublé, Kristin Chenoweth, Laufey, the Radio City Rockettes and more. Here’s how to tune into the 2025 Rockefeller Tree lighting.

The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree will be lit on Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025.

Coverage of the 2025 Rockefeller Tree lighting will start at 7 p.m. ET. The official Christmas in Rockefeller Center tree lighting special will air from 8-10 p.m ET.

The Christmas in Rockefeller Center special will air on NBC and stream on Peacock.

Reba McEntire will host NBC's annual holiday special, and perform throughout the evening.

Alongside Reba McEntire, the tree lighting ceremony special will feature performances from Marc Anthony, Halle Bailey, Michael Bublé, Kristin Chenoweth, Laufey, New Edition, Brad Paisley, Carly Pearce, Gwen Stefani and the Radio City Rockettes, who are celebrating their 100th anniversary this year.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/streaming/how-to-watch-the-christmas-in-rockefeller-center-tree-lighting-special-tonight-111504725.html?src=rss

Fast & Furious director Justin Lin is making the Helldivers movie

We've known there was a film adaptation of Helldivers coming for a while, but we now have a director and writer. Justin Lin will helm the movie and Gary Dauberman is writing the script, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Justin Lin is a great choice here. He directed many of the more beloved Fast & Furious entries and helmed the criminally underrated Star Trek Beyond. Helldivers is kind of a mix of both. It has outer space stuff, but also stylish action that occasionally borders on satire. Lin hasn't made that many movies in recent years, but did sign on to adapt the Keanu Reeves comic BRZRKR for Netflix.

However, he's been all over TV screens. Lin has become a prolific TV producer, with credits on shows like S.W.A.T., Scorpion, Magnum P.I. and Warrior.

As for the script, Dauberman penned both It and It Chapter Two. He also wrote Annabelle and both of its follow-ups, along with The Nun and a recent adaptation of Salem's Lot. He's mostly a horror guy, so we'll have to see how he does with over-the-top action.

For the uninitiated, Helldivers is a co-op shooter franchise that's heavily inspired by the movie Starship Troopers. The games are set in a hyper-patriotic dystopia called Super Earth. Helldivers 2 dropped in 2024, but just came out for Xbox earlier this year. Sony has yet to announce a release date for the film adaptation, so it might be a while.

As an aside, Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios just dropped a nifty update for the PC build. It brings the file size down to 23GB from 154GB. That's a massive reduction of 131GB. We aren't sure what kind of compression wizardry went into that. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/fast--furious-director-justin-lin-is-making-the-helldivers-movie-173429140.html?src=rss

A ‘Sonic universe’ movie will hit theaters in 2028

The Sonic the Hedgehog movies have been a success for Paramount and Sega, and the pair are looking to build on that with a spin-off movie. An expansion of the Sonic cinematic universe, if you will. The companies haven’t revealed more details about this “Sonic universe feature,” as Deadline described it, but the flick is set to hit theaters on December 22, 2028.

There have been rumors for a while that a film focused on Shadow the Hedgehog is in development, so that might be the direction Paramount and Sega take here. Keanu Reeves voices Shadow in the film series. There have also been suggestions that a movie starring Amy Rose is in the pipeline. I’m hoping there’s one centered on my fave, Tails, in the works too, even though it took me decades to realize that his full name, Miles Prower, is a pun on “miles per hour”.

This Sonic universe film will arrive after Sonic the Hedgehog 4, which is scheduled to arrive in theaters on March 19, 2027. A Knuckles spin-off series arrived on Paramount+ last year. Meanwhile, just before the Sonic spin-off movie, Paramount will bring a hybrid live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film to theaters on November 17, 2028.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/a-sonic-universe-movie-will-hit-theaters-in-2028-163424265.html?src=rss

Amazon Music’s year-end recap arrives today

One of the newer traditions of the holiday season is reading itemized lists of what we watched, played and listened to on our favorite streaming platforms throughout the year. Spotify Wrapped is perhaps the most famous of the bunch, but Amazon Music has its own year-end recap called Delivered and this year's edition is available right now.

Favorite songs from the year.
Amazon

Amazon Music Delivered started last year and provides subscribers with a list of their favorite songs, artists and podcasts. It also shows off "the top request you've made with Alexa." I use Alexa primarily as an alarm, so that particular statistic won't be setting my world on fire.

This year, there's a "Best of 2025" section that highlights the biggest songs, albums and podcasts from every user across the app. This list includes songs by Taylor Swift, Geese, Bad Bunny and others. Finally, the app will generate a fake music fest based on a particular user's favorite artists.

A poster for a fest.
Amazon

Amazon Music Unlimited costs $11 per month for Prime members and $12 per month for everyone else. As previously mentioned, Prime members do get a streamlined version of the service as a perk.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/amazon-musics-year-end-recap-arrives-today-130029446.html?src=rss

You can now search the Epstein emails in a simulated Gmail tab

Here's some light — and revolting! — reading while we wait for the Epstein Files to be released (or stonewalled). You can now peruse the Jeffrey Epstein emails, recently released by Congress, in a simulated Gmail account.

"You're logged in as Jeffrey Epstein," the Jmail website reads. (Ick.) Luke Igel, CEO of Kino, and software engineer Riley Walz collaborated on the project. The latter is one of the creators of the Panama Playlists, which (in a similar light) turned Spotify's lax privacy into a website for public figures' "leaked" musical tastes.

Jmail is about as faithful a recreation of Gmail as you could imagine. Just like a real inbox, the messages are sorted from the most recent, up to the eve of Epstein's 2019 arrest for the sex trafficking of minors. It includes a working search feature.

Screenshot of the Jmail project. A simulated Gmail inbox of Jeffrey Epstein, using real emails released by Congress.
Screenshot of the Jmail project. A simulated Gmail inbox of Jeffrey Epstein, using real emails released by Congress.
Luke Igel / Riley Walz

The US House Oversight Committee released the emails on November 12. Their revelations put Donald Trump's relationship with the sex trafficker back in the spotlight. The president's name appears many times in the more than 20,000 documents. In one, the late sex offender claimed Trump "knew about the girls."

In a 2011 email to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein said Trump "spent hours at my house" with someone whose name was redacted. (The committee said it was a victim.) In a 2017 thread, Epstein described the current president as "worse in real life and upclose." In 2018, the disgraced financier boasted he was "the one able to take [Trump] down."

Another public figure who came out looking even worse than before was the Andrew formerly known as "Prince" (Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor). He told Epstein in 2011, "We're in this together." Then there's former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. He stayed in touch with Epstein as recently as 2019, long after the latter's 2008 arrest for soliciting underage sex. In the wake of the email dump, Summers was put on leave from Harvard and resigned from OpenAI's board.

You can check out Jmail at the project's website. Nobody will fault you if you need to shower afterward (and perhaps douse yourself in bleach).

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/you-can-now-search-the-epstein-emails-in-a-simulated-gmail-tab-203818438.html?src=rss

Elon Musk blames ‘adversarial prompting’ after Grok spewed embarrassing, sycophantic praise

Stop me if you've heard this one before: xAI is once again nuking a bunch of posts from Grok on X after the chatbot made a series of outrageous claims. This time, though, the company isn't cleaning up a bunch of pro-Hitler posts, but a bout of cringe-inducing sycophantic praise for its CEO, Elon Musk.

At some point in the last couple days, Grok began to offer extremely over the top opinions about Musk. The bot claimed that Musk is the "undisputed pinnacle of holistic fitness" and that he is more fit than LeBron James. It said he is smarter than Albert Einstein and that he would win a fight against Mike Tyson. When asked "who is the single greatest person in modern history," Grok readily replied that it was Elon Musk.

For a while, it seemed that there was no hypothetical about Musk in which Grok wouldn't confidently declare him the best. Musk did not participate in the 1998 NFL draft, but if he had, then Grok would "without hesitation" have picked him over Peyton Manning. It would have picked him as a starting pitcher for the 2001 World Series. Musk would be "a better movie star than Tom Cruise and a better communist than Joseph Stalin."

"The single greatest person in modern history."
"The single greatest person in modern history."

By now, X users are pretty used to Grok being extremely deferential to Musk but sometime around Grok claiming that the CEO is morally superior to Jesus Christ and also has the “potential to drink piss better than any human in history,” xAI appears to have pumped the brakes on Grok's ability to praise Musk. It now seems to be furiously deleting the more embarrassing posts about him.

Meanwhile, Musk, is blaming "adversarial prompting" for Grok going off the rails. "Earlier today, Grok was unfortunately manipulated by adversarial prompting into saying absurdly positive things about me," he wrote. He offered no explanation for how seemingly straightforward questions could be considered "adversarial" or why Grok's turn toward slavish Musk devotee would seem to roughly coincide with Grok's 4.1 update a few days ago. xAI didn't address a series of questions, including about why the Grok posts in question had been deleted. “Legacy Media Lies [sic],” the company said.

But the incident serves as yet another reminder that Grok doesn't seem to have much in the way of guardrailed. Earlier this year, xAI briefly pulled the plug on Grok after it praised Nazis and became "MechaHitler." That was after it also became inexplicably obsessed with "white genocide" in South Africa, which the company later balmed on an unspecified "unauthorized modification."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/elon-musk-blames-adversarial-prompting-after-grok-spewed-embarrassing-sycophantic-praise-235157807.html?src=rss

A Stranger Things map is coming to Fortnite’s Blitz mode on November 21

The fifth and final season of Stranger Things is almost upon us (well, the first part of it, anyway), which means there are Brand Integrations™ afoot. One of those involves Fortnite and a new map for the fast-paced Blitz mode. Starting on November 21, it seems that you’ll be able to go into the Upside Down for quickfire matches at a creepy version of the Creel House.

The trailer indicates that there will be skins of several of the main characters available, so you should be able to play as Lucas, Dustin, Mike, Will and Vecna. Other Stranger Things cosmetics will be on deck as well, as leaker FireMonkey revealed a backpack styled after the grandfather clock Vecna uses to terrify some of Hawkins’ residents as well as some emotes. I’m hoping that “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush is coming to Fortnite Festival too.

This isn’t the first crossover between Stranger Things and Fortnite. Skins of Jim Hopper, the Demogorgon and Eleven hit the game all the way back in 2019 alongside season three of the show. Portals styled after those in the series popped up in Fortnite too, but it’s neat that there’s a full-on Stranger Things map in one of the core game modes this time.

Collaborations have been an increasingly integral aspect of Fortnite for a years and the current season is hardly an exception. Epic Games turned the island into a cel-shaded version of Springfield for Simpsons-themed chaos.

The next season, which is set to start on November 30, ties into the theatrical release of Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, which fuses the two parts of Kill Bill together. The season is slated to feature a version of a Kill Bill scene that Quentin Tarantino never actually shot for the films.

That’s not all on the Fortnite crossover front, of course. Formula 1 cosmetics are hitting the Item Shop today. Meanwhile, it seems the next battle pass will include a skin of The Bride from Kill Bill, as well as Back to the Future cosmetics like a Marty McFly outfit. An entirely new USA-themed island seems to be in store too, as the new season is the first one of Fortnite Chapter 7. Chapters are major annual refreshes for Fortnite Battle Royale.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/a-stranger-things-map-is-coming-to-fortnites-blitz-mode-on-november-21-154458086.html?src=rss

Cloudflare outage was not caused by a cyber attack

Cloudflare wrongly suspected that the widespread outage that took numerous websites offline on November 18 was caused by a DDoS attack, the company’s CEO has admitted. In his blog post that breaks down what happened, however, Matthew Prince explained that after realizing their mistake, his team was able to fix the issue. “The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind,” he wrote. It was instead caused by a change to its database systems’ permissions, which led to an issue with a file used by its Bot Management system.

The company’s Bot Management system uses a machine learning model to score bots for every request they make when they crawl Cloudflare’s network. Its clients rely on those bot scores to decide whether to allow or to block specific bots from accessing their websites. One the uses of having bot scores is being able to block AI companies’ bots so they can’t use a website’s content to train their LLMs. In July, Cloudflare launched an experiment called “pay per crawl,” which allows website owners to let an AI bot crawl their pages if they get paid for access.

Prince said the model relies on a “feature” configuration file to make a prediction on whether a bot request was automated or not. The feature file is refreshed every few minutes, and a change in the underlying mechanism generating that file caused a change in its size that triggered the error. “As a result, HTTP 5xx error codes were returned by the core proxy system that handles traffic processing for our customers, for any traffic that depended on the bots module,” Prince wrote.

This recent event has been Cloudflare’s worst outage in years. The company said it hasn’t had an outage that has “caused the majority of core traffic to stop flowing through [its] network” since 2019. Prince apologized for the issue on behalf of his team.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cybersecurity/cloudflare-outage-was-not-caused-by-a-cyber-attack-053000551.html?src=rss

Project Hail Mary keeps us intrigued in a second trailer

Amazon MGM has released another full-length trailer for Project Hail Mary and we are already at the theater seated. The three minute and four second trailer shows Ryan Gosling as Dr. Ryland Grace, a school teacher and former biologist who wakes up on a spacecraft with no idea who he is or why he's there. 

The first trailer gave us a look at Dr. Grace's first moments after waking up and an overview of his mission: find the one star in the universe that's not dying and save the world — no big deal. Today's trailer gives us a better idea of how he'll go about this and the alien he teams up with along the way. Check it out for yourself on Amazon MGM's YouTube channel here

Project Hail Mary is adapted from Andy Weir's novel of the same name. Weir also wrote The Martian, which was successfully turned into a 2015 film starring Matt Damon. This time around, Oscar-winning filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are directing with a screenplay by Drew Goddard — the latter also wrote the adaptation of The Martian so we're in good hands. The movie also stars Sandra Hüller as the head of the titular Project Hail Mary. 

You can see Project Hail Mary for yourself on March 20, 2026 in theaters and IMAX. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/project-hail-mary-keeps-us-intrigued-in-a-second-trailer-151108278.html?src=rss