Table of Contents
- News 1: MIT’s 2025 Hit List – What the World Really Cared About in Tech This Year
- News 2: The Rainbow Six Siege Megahack – When Billions of In-Game Credits Kill an Economy
- News 3: Samsung’s 2026 Sound Gambit – Wireless “Smart Audio” Takes Over the Living Room
- News 4: A Federal Order for Shopify – When “Inactive Account” No Longer Means “Gone”
- News 5: The X‑37B Returns – A 434-Day Ghost Mission in Orbit Finally Touches Down
- News 6: 22,000 Tech Jobs Gone – Inside the 2025 Layoff Wave and What It Signals Next
Introduction: Hello Tekin Army!
Hello Tekin Army Another morning, another stack of stories that feel less like “tech news” and more like snapshots of how the future is being written in real time. When MIT Technology Review drops its list of the most-read stories of 2025, you basically get a CT scan of the global tech brain: AI everywhere, climate anxiety rising, and biotech and robotics quietly leveling up in the background.
On the gaming front, Ubisoft just lived through one of the wildest weeks in online gaming history: Rainbow Six Siege servers and the in-game store were deliberately shut down after a massive cyberattack allowed players to access ultra-rare dev skins and billions of in-game credits. Multiple outlets describe the event as one of the biggest and costliest security incidents in Siege’s history, with players reporting absurd credit balances and sudden account bans.
In consumer hardware, Samsung is gearing up to unveil two new 2026 wireless speakers at CES – pitched as the next generation of “smart sound”: immersive, multi-device, and tightly integrated with the company’s broader ecosystem. If you’ve been following our coverage of Samsung’s 2026 audio lineup and LG’s AI-powered monitors, you already know: your TV and speakers are turning into full-blown smart compute nodes.
In the regulatory trenches, a U.S. federal court has ordered Shopify to retain data for inactive user accounts for tax-related audits, throwing fresh fuel on long-running debates around privacy, data retention, and the real meaning of “delete my account.” Up above, the U.S. military’s X‑37B spaceplane has quietly returned after 434 days in orbit, wrapping up a classified mission focused on orbital maneuvering, high-altitude aerodynamics, and radiation exposure experiments.
And beneath all of this, there’s the human side: TechCrunch reports that more than 22,000 people have been laid off from tech companies this year alone, driven by automation, cost-cutting, and strategic pivots toward AI. Put that next to MIT’s story list and it’s hard to miss the pattern: the same technologies the world obsessively reads about are now rewriting job descriptions – or erasing them.
In today’s Tekin Morning, we’re not just listing what happened. We’re breaking down what each of these shifts means if you’re a gamer, a developer, a founder, or just someone trying to make sane decisions in an industry that changes faster than patch notes on launch day.
News 1: MIT’s 2025 Hit List – What the World Really Cared About in Tech This Year
Every December, MIT Technology Review’s list of “most popular stories of the year” does something rankings rarely do well: it reveals what people were actually worried about, not just what PR teams wanted them to click. For 2025, the pattern is brutally clear: we have fully entered the AI era of consequences.
The top stories revolve around:
- Exploding AI models and their footprint: Not just “GPT‑5 beats benchmarks” but “what does it cost the planet when we run these models at scale?” Power-hungry data centers, water used in cooling systems, carbon footprints of training runs, and the very real physical infrastructure behind “magic text boxes.”
- Biotech and gene editing: CRISPR-based therapies, personalized medicine, and new ways of programming biology – exactly the kind of “biology as software” trajectory we outlined in our 2026 trends coverage.
- Robotics and embodied AI: Warehouse bots, surgical robots, cyber dogs, and new forms of automation that move beyond software into the physical layer of the economy.
What makes this year different is the framing. We’re past the honeymoon phase of “look, a chatbot that writes poems.” The most-read MIT stories point to three overlapping realities:
- Power: Foundation models are now woven into search, productivity, coding, and creative workflows. They’re no longer side projects; they’re infrastructure.
- Cost: RAM, GPUs, and electricity have become strategic bottlenecks. If you followed our reports on the RAM price crisis and photonic chips like China’s “Taichi,” you already see how hardware innovation is being forced to catch up.
- Risk: From privacy and security to bias, misinformation, and job displacement, the externalities are finally front-page material.
Why should the Tekin Army care? Because this MIT list is basically a map of where capital, regulation, and talent will flow next. If the world is obsessing over AI’s environmental impact, expect:
- More investment into efficient architectures, photonic computing, and AI accelerators.
- Stricter rules around data centers, power usage, and cross-border data flows.
- New jobs and entire sub-industries around “AI infra” – and fewer around doing the kinds of tasks these systems now automate.
In other words: the stories people binge-read in 2025 are the markets they’ll be working in – or competing against – in 2028.
News 2: The Rainbow Six Siege Megahack – When Billions of In-Game Credits Kill an Economy
Rainbow Six Siege just became a cautionary tale in live-service economics. In a highly unusual move, Ubisoft shut down Siege’s servers and in-game store across all platforms after a massive cyberattack allowed players to obtain ultra-rare developer-exclusive skins and billions of in-game credits out of thin air.
Persian outlets like Zoomit and Zoomg report that the shutdown was deliberate: Ubisoft pulled the plug to “focus on fixing the issue,” carefully avoiding the word “hack” in its official statement, but the sheer scale and impact leave little room for ambiguity. Other sources describe players logging into accounts flooded with R6 Credits, Renown, and even Alpha Packs – in some cases up to 2 billion credits per account.
This isn’t just a funny glitch; it’s a full-blown economic collapse inside a major live-service game:
- Digital hyperinflation: The value of premium currency and rare cosmetics is based on scarcity and the time/money sink needed to acquire them. When trillions of currency units suddenly appear in player wallets, the entire progression and monetization loop loses meaning.
- Trust shock: Players have reported sudden bans, broken lobbies, and bizarre UI behavior. Social feeds are full of viral clips titled “Ubisoft hacked, everything is free,” which might be fun in the moment – until bans, rollbacks, and account investigations start rolling out.
- Possible diversion attack: One report cites Taison TV suggesting the Rainbow Six hack may have been a Trojan horse – a flashy front to distract internal teams while attackers went after more valuable classified data inside Ubisoft’s systems.
If you’re a Siege player, here’s the uncomfortable reality:
- Logging in right now is risky. There’s a non-trivial chance you’ll end up with tainted currency on your account that needs to be rolled back or flagged.
- Even if you did nothing wrong, automated ban waves can and do sweep up innocent accounts during large-scale abuse incidents.
- The post-mortem phase will likely include currency resets, partial wipes, and possibly a blanket compensation package to calm the community.
Zoom out, and this incident fits a broader pattern we’ve been tracking in Tekin Night coverage of PSN breaches, passkey bypass tools, and crypto wallet hacks: game companies are now running financial ecosystems, not just lobbies and lobbies of matches. That makes them attractive targets for the same caliber of attackers who go after banks and exchanges. The difference? A lot of these “banks” were never designed with that level of threat modeling in mind.
News 3: Samsung’s 2026 Sound Gambit – Wireless “Smart Audio” Takes Over the Living Room
Samsung is reportedly preparing to unveil two new 2026 wireless speakers at CES, already being hyped as a new generation of “smart sound.” The core pitch: truly immersive audio plus seamless multi-device connectivity, all wrapped into the company’s growing smart home stack.
This lines up perfectly with a trend we’ve been tracking across multiple product lines:
- LG’s 52-inch AI monitor and upscaling tech turning displays into edge-compute hubs.
- Samsung’s 2026 soundbars using AI to analyze room acoustics and content in real-time.
- Console and GPU generations (PS5 Pro, RTX 5090) pushing 4K/120 and beyond, making high-fidelity audio the next obvious upgrade frontier.
What should you expect from these new speakers?
- Immersive, room-aware sound: Expect some mix of Dolby Atmos, Samsung’s own spatial audio stack, and automatic calibration based on room layout – possibly using your phone’s sensors or the TV’s microphone array.
- Multi-device orchestration: TV, phone, tablet, and maybe even your PC or console sharing the same audio mesh. Think: watching a movie on TV, getting a call on your phone, your music continuing in another room without you touching anything.
- On-device and cloud AI: Real-time dialog boosting for streams, adaptive EQ for games versus movies, and maybe profile-based sound modes for different users in the same household.
For gamers, there are two big questions: latency and standards. If Samsung nails low-latency wireless paths (over Wi‑Fi 6/6E or a proprietary link) and offers robust support for consoles and PCs without weird handshake issues, these speakers could become a natural companion to high-end setups – especially in small apartments where full-blown AVR systems aren’t realistic.
Strategically, this CES move is less about “two new speakers” and more about Samsung staking a claim in the same battlefield we covered when analyzing LG’s monitor revolution: whoever owns the living room stack – screen, sound, OS, and streaming – owns a huge chunk of user attention. Audio is no longer a side quest; it’s step two in a long-term platform war.
News 4: A Federal Order for Shopify – When “Inactive Account” No Longer Means “Gone”
A U.S. federal court has ordered Shopify to retain data from inactive user accounts for tax-related examination. In practice, that means “I haven’t logged in for years” is no longer a reliable proxy for “my data has probably faded into the void.”
This ruling sits at the crossroads of three contentious domains:
- Tax enforcement and auditability: Governments want long-lived transactional trails, especially as commerce moves online and cross-border. That pushes platforms to keep logs, invoices, and user linkage records far longer than users might expect.
- Privacy and the right to be forgotten: From GDPR in Europe to state-level laws in the U.S., users have been told they can request deletion or at least minimization of personal data. Orders like this carve out wide exceptions in the name of compliance.
- Security risk of hoarded data: Every additional year you store data increases the blast radius of a potential breach. Crypto users learned this the hard way in incidents like the Trust Wallet browser extension hack we covered, where dormant or low-activity accounts were still impacted.
If you run a store or SaaS product on top of Shopify or a similar platform, this has direct implications:
- You’ll need a clearer, more honest data retention policy that reflects both legal obligations and your own minimization principles.
- You should review how you pseudonymize or tokenize stored records so that, where possible, tax-relevant data can be kept without retaining excessive personal identifiers.
- Your threat model has to assume that long-retained inactive data is a high-value target, not benign archival dust.
For end users, the practical takeaway is sobering: “delete account” is not a magical eraser. Depending on jurisdiction and platform, key records can stay in cold storage for years – sometimes decades. If you care about your data footprint, you’ll need to choose platforms based on how transparent they are about these trade-offs, not just how smooth their onboarding funnel feels.
News 5: The X‑37B Returns – A 434-Day Ghost Mission in Orbit Finally Touches Down
The U.S. military’s X‑37B spaceplane has successfully returned to Earth after 434 days in orbit, completing yet another long-duration classified mission. Official statements frame the mission as focused on orbital maneuvers, high-altitude aerodynamics, and experiments on space radiation effects.
On paper, X‑37B is “just” a reusable spaceplane: a small, uncrewed shuttle that can launch vertically, operate autonomously in orbit, and land on a runway. In practice, it’s one of the clearest signals that “space logistics” and “space militarization” are no longer sci-fi concepts but operational realities.
There are three layers to pay attention to:
- Reusable hardware: Like SpaceX’s Falcon and Starship, X‑37B is part of a broader shift from disposable to reusable infrastructure. The more we can reuse, the cheaper and more frequent orbital missions become – which eventually bleeds into commercial markets like satellite servicing, debris removal, and in-orbit manufacturing.
- Classified payloads: The secrecy is the point. X‑37B can host experimental sensors, small satellites, and potentially even “inspection” payloads meant to approach or observe other spacecraft. That raises uncomfortable but unavoidable questions about norms for behavior in orbit.
- Radiation and materials data: Officially disclosed experiments around radiation tolerance of materials, electronics, and biological samples will feed into civilian science as well, informing how we design chips, structures, and life-support systems for long missions.
Connect this back to the rest of today’s newsletter and a pattern emerges: whether we’re talking about photonic chips challenging NVIDIA, AI-heavy data centers, or orbital spaceplanes, the cutting edge of hardware is about squeezing more performance out of harsh environments – thermally, energetically, or radiatively.
For the Tekin Army, X‑37B is a reminder that the same industry building your next-gen gaming rig is increasingly intertwined with defense and space. The GPUs that train massive models, the materials that survive in orbit, and the sensors that feed military networks all share supply chains, R&D flows, and political constraints.
News 6: 22,000 Tech Jobs Gone – Inside the 2025 Layoff Wave and What It Signals Next
TechCrunch reports that more than 22,000 people have been laid off from tech companies in 2025 so far. The official reasons sound familiar: automation, cost-cutting, and strategic realignment. But read between the lines, and you see something more structural: we’re in the early stages of a post-hype correction for the last decade of growth.
Three big drivers are visible across company filings and internal memos:
- AI-driven automation: The same LLMs and agent frameworks we covered in our 2026 AI trends piece are now replacing or compressing roles in customer support, content marketing, low-level coding, QA, and even parts of data analysis.
- Higher interest rates and investor pressure: The era of “grow at all costs” is over. Investors want profitability, or at least a credible path to it. That means trimming experimental bets, duplicate teams, and “nice-to-have” orgs that don’t sit directly on the main revenue streams.
- Pivots toward AI and core infra: Cloud giants, social networks, and productivity platforms are shoveling headcount and capex into AI infrastructure – GPUs, model teams, and integration projects – and away from side products that no longer have a clear moat.
If you work in tech, gaming, or adjacent fields, the signal is clear:
- Being “just” a generalist engineer, designer, or PM is getting riskier. Understanding how to use, build on, or compete alongside AI systems is becoming table stakes.
- Frictionless, high-leverage skills – like building internal tools with AI, automating workflows, or orchestrating agents – are likely to be more resilient than roles tied to repetitive manual tasks.
- The indie and creator paths (building your own tools, games, or micro-SaaS) are more plausible than ever technically, thanks to AI tooling – but financially and emotionally, they’re also more volatile.
For the wider industry, the 2025 layoff wave is a reminder that “AI eats the world” is not just a slogan; it’s a reallocation of who gets paid to do what. Some of the people being laid off will end up founding the next wave of startups. Others may exit the industry entirely. The real question for the Tekin Army is: where do you want to sit when the dust settles – and what are you learning now that your 2028 self will thank you for?