TWiT 1063: The Year's End - Top Stories of 2025
This Week in Tech (Audio)
Leo Laporte
4 • 3.2K Ratings
🗓️ 21 December 2025
⏱️ 184 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Mikah Sargent, Paris Martineau, and Steve Gibson
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's time for Twit, our year-end episode. |
| 0:03.0 | I've brought Steve Gibson from Security Now, Paris Martino from Intelligent Machines and Tech News Weekly's Micah Sargent together to talk about the big stories of the year. |
| 0:12.9 | What a crazy year it was with AI, with security. |
| 0:17.3 | Steve will talk a lot about some of the big security problems of 2025. |
| 0:21.9 | We talked about gaming. |
| 0:23.4 | We talked about media. |
| 0:24.5 | And we talked about some of the weird things that happened in 2025. |
| 0:28.2 | Our year end special next on Twit. |
| 0:33.6 | Podcasts you love. |
| 0:35.5 | From people you trust. |
| 0:38.0 | This is Twit. |
| 0:43.9 | This is Twit. |
| 0:46.8 | This week in Tech, episode 1063, recorded Sunday, December 21st, 2025. |
| 0:55.0 | The Year's End. |
| 0:57.1 | It's Tyrant Twin. |
| 0:59.2 | This week in tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. |
| 1:01.9 | This year we're going to cover the whole, this show we're going to cover the whole year. |
| 1:06.1 | This is our annual, that explains why I'm dressed like, I don't know Florida Pimp Santa this is our |
| 1:13.4 | year-ender and we're so glad to see you hello happy holidays Micah Sargent is |
| 1:19.3 | joining us from Tech News Weekly and iOS today and hello hands on tech and hands on |
| 1:25.0 | Macintosh and or hands on Apple I should say and all the other wonderful shows you do with us. |
| 1:30.8 | How many years have you been with the organization now? |
... |
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