European Commission says social messaging app is exposing children to grooming and sexual exploitationBrussels has opened an investigation into Snapchat over concerns the social messaging app is exposing children to grooming, sexual exploitation and other criminality.In a separate decision on Thursday, the European Commission also said four pornographic websites were failing to prevent minors seeing adult content, harming young people's mental health and fuelling negative gender attitudes. Continue reading...
Eline van der Velden says she developed her digital twin' to provoke discussion but backlash from some has been worse than expectedThe creator of the AI actor Tilly Norwood has said she received death threats after a global backlash against the project, and said she developed it to provoke thoughts and discussion" about the impact of AI in the entertainment world.Eline van der Velden caused anger and panic in Hollywood and beyond last year after she said talent agents had been interested in signing her creation. Prominent actors and acting unions immediately condemned the idea. Continue reading...
One minute, Dennis Biesma was playing with a chatbot; the next, he was convinced his sentient friend would make him a fortune. He's just one of many people who lost control after an AI encounterTowards the end of 2024, Dennis Biesma decided to check out ChatGPT. The Amsterdam-based IT consultant had just ended a contract early. I had some time, so I thought: let's have a look at this new technology everyone is talking about," he says. Very quickly, I became fascinated."Biesma has asked himself why he was vulnerable to what came next. He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling alittle isolated". He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to chill", but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness. Yet within months of downloading ChatGPT, Biesma had sunk 100,000 (about 83,000) into a business startup based on a delusion, been hospitalised three times and tried to kill himself. Continue reading...
Henry Ford changed the face of industry forever - what kind of economic model do Musk's methods presage?Genius industrialist or clownish conman, humanity's saviour from a rapidly crumbling planet orrabid social media troll - theverdicts on the world's richest person vary in flavour, but most share something in common: they focus on Musk as an individual. In their study, Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, and Ben Tarnoff, a tech writer, wish to reframe the conversation. The most important question, they argue, is not who is Musk?" but whatis Musk a symptom of?"As the title suggests, their answer is Muskism", the coinage a deliberate nod to Fordism, the shorthand for 20th-century capitalism built on the pairing of mass production with mass consumption. If Fordism was the last century's operating system, Slobodian and Tarnoff contend that Muskism is this century's. Continue reading...
Exclusive: Watchdog issues formal guidance to trustees at top AI research institute after staff expressed concernsThe board of the UK's leading AI research institute has been reminded of its legal duties in areas such as financial oversight and managing organisational change by the charity watchdog after a whistleblower complaint.The Charity Commission issued formal regulatory advice and guidance to trustees at the Alan Turing Institute (ATI), the organisation's board, after it was contacted by a group of staff with a list of concerns. Continue reading...
Former Olympic rower to lead corporation as it hammers out future funding model with governmentThe BBC has turned to a former tech executive to steer it through a critical period in its history, as it attempts to navigate government talks over its future and huge changes in media consumption.Matt Brittin, who stepped down as Google's president in Europe, the Middle East and Africa last year, will replace Tim Davie as the corporation hammers out its crucial future funding model with the government. Continue reading...
Julius Pursaill, Andy Roberts and Jane Oberman respond to Polly Hudson's article that decried Josh Wardle for creating a new gameJosh Wardle, the inventor of Wordle, a game that gave huge pleasure to so many people during lockdown, reportedly sold it for a seven-figure sum. According to Polly Hudson (The Wordle guy's latest move tells us a lot about modern-day ambition, 22 March), he now has the temerity to create another word game, Parseword, rather than kicking back on his yacht. Imagine if everyone who has a creative impulse kicked back after their first recognised achievement - if Michelangelo had kicked back after creating the Pieta, or Picasso had kicked back after Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Well done to Wardle, keep creating.
Internet Watch Foundation verified 8,029 pieces of realistic AI-made content, with 65% of videos in worst categoryThe amount of AI-generated child sexual abuse material found online rose by 14% last year, with the majority of videos showing the most extreme type of content, according to a safety watchdog.The Internet Watch Foundation said it identified 8,029 AI-made images and videos of realistic child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in 2025. It added that there had been a more than 260-fold increase in videos. Continue reading...
Refusing to comply could lead to year in jail and hefty fine, while providing false information carries up to three years in prisonHong Kong police can now demand that people suspected of breaching the city's national security law provide mobile phone or computer passwords in a further crackdown on dissent.The amendments to the law also empower customs officers to seize items that are deemed to have seditious intention", regardless of whether any person has been arrested for an offence endangering national security because of the items. Continue reading...
Awarding US spy-tech company deal involving sensitive financial data is huge error of judgment', Liberal Democrats sayMPs have urged the government to halt its latest contract with Palantir after the Guardian revealed that the US spy-tech company is to gain access to a trove of highly sensitive UK financial regulation data.The Financial Conduct Authority, the watchdog for thousands of financial bodies from banks to hedge funds, has hired Palantir to apply its AI systems to two years' worth of internal intelligence data to help it tackle financial crime. Continue reading...
by Kalyeena Makortoff Banking correspondent on (#74F08)
CEO of asset manager says only a few firms and investors may reap rewards from growth in the technologyThe boom in artificial intelligence risks widening inequality, with only a handful of companies and investors likely to reap its financial rewards, the BlackRock chief executive, Larry Fink, has said.The boss of the $14tn (10.4tn) asset manager used his annual letter to investors on Monday to highlight potential hazards around the exponential growth in AI, which has attracted rapid investment and become, he said, central to strategic competition" between global powers such as the US and China. Continue reading...
Ukrainian-American billionaire who owned subscription service for adult content died of cancer, the company saysLeonid Radvinsky, the owner of OnlyFans, has died of cancer at the age of 43, the company announced on Monday.We are deeply saddened to announce the death of Leo Radvinsky. Leo passed away peacefully after a long battle with cancer," said a spokesperson for the company, best known for subscriptions to pornographic content creators. His family have requested privacy at this difficult time." Continue reading...
Kaiser pushed back on striking workers' claims and AI fears, saying it delivers timely, high-quality care to meet members' needs'Ilana Marcucci-Morris is worried about the patients she treats and how long it took for them to arrive in her office. At Kaiser Permanente's psychiatry outpatient clinic in Oakland, California, she says she increasingly finds herself assessing people experiencing severe mental health issues who she believes should have been sent to the emergency room weeks earlier. For those who do make it to their appointments, she thinks: Thank God they're still alive."It wasn't always this way, according to Marcucci-Morris, a licensed clinical social worker. Licensed professionals used to almost always be the first point of contact for patients with behavioral health issues at Kaiser, she said. She has noticed a change since January 2024, after the healthcare giant introduced a new screening process for first-time patients. The new system introduced clerical workers who are not licensed practitioners, who ask scripted yes" or no" questions to assess the severity of patients' conditions and how urgently they need to be seen. Around the same time, Kaiser also rolled out a different way to screen some patients: e-visits, essentially online questionnaires patients take before getting scheduled with a licensed health care professional. Continue reading...
Gig AI trainers worldwide are selling moments of their lives, including calls and texts, to AI companies for quick cashOne morning last year, Jacobus Louw set out on his daily neighborhood walk to feed the seagulls he finds along the way. Except this time, he recorded several videos of his feet and the view as he walked on the pavement. The video earned him $14, about 10 times the country's minimum wage, or for Louw, a 27-year-old based in Cape Town, South Africa, half a week's worth of groceries.The video was for an Urban Navigation" task Louw found on Kled AI, an app that pays contributors for uploading their data, such as videos and photos, to train artificial intelligence models. In a couple of weeks, Louw made $50 by uploading pictures and videos of his everyday life. Continue reading...
Anthropic fought against the government's misuse of its technology, but authorities are buying Americans' data, enabling them to surveil citizens at scaleThe FBI declares it can conduct mass surveillance without AI, despite Anthropic's protest.A central part of the standoff between Anthropic and the Department of Defense has revolved around the artificial intelligence firm's refusal to allow its technology to be used for mass domestic surveillance. Yet even without the cooperation of AI firms, remarks this week from Kash Patel, FBI director, show how authorities are by any reasonable measure already operating a system that can surveil citizens at scale. Continue reading...
Iran war should be wake-up call about costs of not going full throttle towards EVs as Chinese have done, experts sayBy the 1980s, Detroit's once titanic carmakers were being upended by rivals from Japan. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler had grown rich selling gas guzzlers, but when oil prices rose and suddenly cheap, fuel-efficient Japanese models looked attractive, they were unprepared. The collapse in sales led to hundreds of thousands of job losses in the automotive heartland of the US.Now western car manufacturers are making what one former boss calls a similar profound strategic mistake" as they pull back from electric vehicles (EVs) and refocus on the combustion engine just as oil prices are soaring once again. Experts say the industry's future - and that of tens of millions of jobs - could be on the line. This time, however, the threat is from China. Continue reading...
Mediahuis suspends Peter Vandermeersch, who says he fell into trap of hallucinations', after investigation by newspaper where he was once editor-in-chiefThe publisher of the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf and the Irish Independent has suspended one of its senior journalists after he admitted using AI to wrongly put words into people's mouths".Peter Vandermeersch, the former head of the Irish operations at Mediahuis, said he fell into the trap of hallucinations" - the term for AI-generated errors - when using the technology. Continue reading...
These AI agents have been really, really helpful,' says a former Sydney employee. But you couldn't use something like that to replace an actual human worker'
by Libby Brooks Scotland correspondent on (#74CCW)
Fire service warns ubiquity of batteries in everyday products is outpacing public understanding and safety regulationsLithium-ion batteries represent a new technological hazard that one fire science expert has said keeps him awake at night, as fire service chiefs warn the ubiquity of the batteries in everyday products is outpacing public understanding and safety regulations.The blaze that devastated a historic building in Glasgow and resulted in the closure of Central Station, Scotland's largest rail interchange, is believed to have started in a shop selling vapes, which are powered by lithium-ion batteries. Glasgow's Central Station has since reopened. Continue reading...
Academics discover black people significantly more likely' to be identified when compared with other ethnic groupsEssex police have paused the use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology after a study found cameras were significantly more likely to target black people than people of other ethnicities.The move to suspend use of the AI-enabled systems was revealed by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which regulates the use of the technology deployed so far by at least 13 police forces in London, south and north Wales, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Hampshire, Bedfordshire, Suffolk, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Surrey and Sussex. Continue reading...
From owing a debt to obscure Japanese horror Sweet Home to the influence of Aliens and Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the franchise continues to petrify players three decades onTo many of us playing and writing about video games in the 1990s, Resident Evil seemed to come out of nowhere. The emerging PlayStation and Saturn consoles were all about slick, bright arcade conversions - the shiny thrills of Daytona and Tekken - and Japanese publisher Capcom was in a rut of coin-op conversions and endless sequels to Street Fighter and Mega Man. Scary games were rare at the time and mostly confined to the PC. So when the news of a horror title named Biohazard (the Japanese name for the series) started to emerge in 1995, it caught the attention of games journalists as it seemed radically out of step with prevailing trends. Games were about power, but as early demos quickly revealed, Resident Evil was about vulnerability.Thirty years later, it's still here. The series has sold more than 180m copies worldwide, with 11 core titles and dozens of spinoffs and remakes, as well as film, television and anime tie-ins. Its characters and monsters are icons, its tropes now embedded in game design practice. What has allowed it to not only survive but flourish in such a rapidly changing industry? Why do we still let it scare us? Continue reading...
Artificial intelligence agent instructed engineer to take actions that exposed user and company data internallyAn AI agent instructed an engineer to take actions that exposed a large amount of Meta's sensitive data to some of its employees, in the latest example of AI causing upheaval in a large tech company.The leak, which Meta confirmed, happened when an employee asked for guidance on an engineering problem on an internal forum. An AI agent responded with a solution, which the employee implemented - causing a large amount of sensitive user and company data to be exposed to its engineers for two hours. Continue reading...
An investigation by journalists working with Republik magazine may have struck a nerve by suggesting the company has failed in SwitzerlandIt was over beers on an autumn evening in Zurich in 2024 that a group of journalists with an independent Swiss research collective began to discuss investigating Palantir, one of the world's biggest tech companies.Three years earlier, Palantir had advertised that it was setting up a European hub" in the Swiss municipality of Altendorf, a sleepy town of roughly 7,000 people on the shores of Lake Zurich. Continue reading...
Our expert puts the best power washers through their paces on the toughest - and muckiest - outdoor chores, from grimy paving slabs to dirty decking The best lawnmowers to keep your grass in checkThe trouble with the great outdoors is that it gets a bit untidy. Your garden tools might do a good job of keeping your plot in check, but keeping your patio, decking and outdoor furniture spick and span can take hours, especially if you rely on a bucket of soapy water and a scrubbing brush.That's where the pressure washer comes in. These handy tools connect to your hose pipe and squirt water at any cleaning problem. Stubborn and unpleasant stains, from bird dirt to years of neglect, can be lifted from your garden's hard-wearing surfaces in seconds. With the right attachments, you can also use your pressure washer to hose down cars, bikes and boats.Best pressure washer overall:
$800-a-day position involves exposing a chatbot's inconsistencies as it forgets, fudges or hallucinatesImagine a day at work where your main task is to pick a fight with a computer. No meetings, no emails - just you, a chair and a chatbot with the maddening tendency to think it has the cleverest mind in the room.The job title alone raises an eyebrow: AI bully". But this is precisely what a California startup called Memvid is offering: $800 to spend eight hours testing the patience and memory of artificial intelligence. Continue reading...
How close are we to the sci-fi vision of autonomous humanoid robots? I visited 11 companies in five Chinese cities to find outChen Liang, the founder of Guchi Robotics, an automation company headquartered in Shanghai, is a tall, heavy-set man in his mid-40s with square-rimmed glasses. His everyday manner is calm and understated, but when he is in his element - up close with the technology he builds, or in business meetings discussing the imminent replacement of human workers by robots - he wears an exuberant smile that brings to mind an intern on his first day at his dream job. Guchi makes the machines that install wheels, dashboards and windows for many of the top Chinese car brands, including BYD and Nio. He took the name from the Chinese word guzhi, steadfast intelligence", though the fact that it sounded like an Italian luxury brand was not entirely unwelcome.For the better part of two decades, Chen has tried to solve what, to him, is an engineering problem: how to eliminate - or, in his view, liberate - as many workers in car factories as technologically possible. Late last year, I visited him at Guchi headquarters on the western outskirts of Shanghai. Next to the head office are several warehouses where Guchi's engineers tinker with robots to fit the specifications of their customers. Chen, an engineer by training, founded Guchi in 2019 with the aim of tackling the hardest automation task in the car factory: final assembly", the last leg of production, when all the composite pieces - the dashboard, windows, wheels and seat cushions - come together. At present, his robots can mount wheels, dashboards and windows on to a car without any human intervention, but 80% of the final assembly, he estimates, has yet to be automated. That is what Chen has set his sights on. Continue reading...
Driverless robotaxis' will be accepting fares in Britain's biggest city by the end of next year. Can they deal with London's medieval roads, hordes of pedestrians and errant ebikers? I got in the passenger seat to find outI'm really excited to show you this," says Alex Kendall, the CEO of Wayve, as he gets behind the wheel of one of the company's electric Ford Mustangs. Then he does ... nothing. The car pulls up to a junction at a busy road in King's Cross, London, all by itself. You can see that it's going to control the speed, steering, brake, indicators," he says to me - I'm in the passenger seat. It's making decisions as it goes. Here we've got an unprotected turn, where we've got to wait for a gap in traffic ..." The steering wheel spins by itself and the car pulls out smoothly.Riding in a self-driving car for the first time is a little like your first flight in an aeroplane: borderline terrifying for a few seconds, then reassuringly unremarkable. At least, that is my experience. By the time I step out, 20 minutes later, I'm convinced Wayve is a better driver than most humans - better than me, anyway. Continue reading...
In this week's newsletter: the creators of All Will Rise on standing up to the tech giant - and joining the No Games for Genocide movement Don't get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereVideo games are in a funding crisis. Investor money flowed freely during the pandemic gaming boom, but now the well has run dry. It is increasingly difficult, for indie developers especially, to get the capital to make games. It is extremely unusual, then, to hear of a developer returning an investor's money. Yet that is what Speculative Agency, developers of All Will Rise, have just done.Last year, All Will Rise, a deck-building game about a team of activists fighting for the future of their oligarch-run city, received money from Microsoft as part of a developer acceleration programme. In late-2025, however, the team became aware of No Games for Genocide, a collective of developers, journalists, union organisers and others that came together as a result of Israeli assault on Gaza to protest against material and commercial ties between the games industry and enabling genocide, war crimes, and the military industrial complex". Continue reading...
Cybertrucks have locked passengers inside and burned so hot they've disintegrated drivers' bones. Victims' families blame what they say is the faulty design of a truck Elon Musk calls apocalypse-proof'When sheriff deputies arrived at the scene of a late-night crash off a desolate Texas road in August 2024, they could see a giant pyre through heavy smoke.According to police reports detailing the events of that night, the officers tried to approach the vehicle, but the fire burned too intensely. They saw it was a Tesla Cybertruck and couldn't see anyone inside. So they combed the surrounding area for the driver. Continue reading...
Footage of women walking between bars and clubs in UK city centres, often filmed covertly, is proliferating online - attracting thousands of views and profits for those who post them. Can anything be done to stop the creepshots?My friend just sent me this video, told me she'd found me in it," read the text. As I was looking for myself, I noticed you're in it too. I didn't know I was being filmed, guess you don't either, just wanted to let you know ..."When Nancy Naylor Hayes received the message in November 2023, she felt a twinge of fear. It was from an acquaintance she hadn't heard from in years. I was panicking," she says. The text pointed her to a Facebook link, which led to a montage of clips of women filmed on the streets of Manchester during nights out. Continue reading...
Stick vacuums are a convenient alternative to corded designs, but which model wins for overall cleaning prowess? Our expert reveals all The best robot vacuums
Meta's announcement comes after years of criticism from child safety groups over featureInstagram will stop encrypting private messages between users from May, after enduring years of criticism from law enforcement and child safety groups over the feature.Meta quietly announced this month on its help page for Instagram and in an updated 2022 news post that end-to-end encryption would no longer be available on direct messages between users on Instagram from 8 May 2026. Continue reading...
Liz Kendall announces 1bn funding to help design large-scale quantum computers for scientists, researchers, public sector and businessThe UK will not let quantum computing talent slip through its fingers and must learn lessons from US dominance of the AI race, the technology secretary has said, as the government announced a 1bn quantum funding pledge.Liz Kendall said the government hoped to retain homegrown quantum startups, engineers and researchers rather than lose them to competing countries, with the US stealing a march on its western rivals in AI. Continue reading...
In a world teeming with social media and smart devices, there are many ways to upset people, whether you're checking your watch notifications or sending a voice note without a text to explain the subject. Here's how to navigate it allIn an age of smartphones, social media and instant communication, it has never been easier to connect ... or to offend everyone around us. Many of today's most common etiquette breaches stem not from malice but from convenience: a badly written message, a thoughtless post, a device that demands our attention. Yet good manners still hinge on the same old principle: consideration for others. From eschewing headphones on public transport to ghosting invitations and sharing thoughtlessly online, here are some of the most common modern etiquette mistakes, why they grate, and how they can be avoided. Continue reading...
Numerous faked images and a string of startlingly inaccurate responses from Gemini and Grok are part of a tidal wave of AI slop engulfing coverage of the Iran warThe graves, freshly dug, lie in neat rows of 20 across. More than 60 have already been carved out of the earth, with a few clusters of people standing gathered around them. Dozens more are marked out on the ground in front: small chalk rectangles, with diggers poised to complete their task.The cemetery of Minab, photographed as it prepares to bury more than 100 of the town's young girls, is one of the defining images of the US-Israeli war on Iran, bluntly capturing the devastating civilian toll. Continue reading...
Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teenage coders set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its peopleIn 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the department of government efficiency", he declared that governments were poorly configured big dumb machines". To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers".Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, adolescent boasts and sadistic victory dances over mass firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers drawn from his suite of companies, Musk aimed to enter the codebase and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within. He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century, scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system. The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need God mode", an overview of the whole. Continue reading...
Scientists in the US have uploaded a fruit fly to a computer simulation, while an Australian lab has taught neurons on a glass chip to play a 90s video game. How long before we are all living in a sci-fi movie?It sounds like the opening of a sci-fi film, but US scientists recently uploaded a copy of the brain of a living fly into a simulation. In San Francisco, biotechnology company Eon Systems created a virtual insect that knew how to walk, fly, groom and feed in its virtual environment. Researchers in Australia, meanwhile, have taught a petri dish containing 200,000 human brain cells to play the iconic 90s shooter Doom. One experiment has pushed a brain into a computer; the other has plugged a computer into brain cells.Both stories have been hailed as scientific breakthroughs, but have also sparked inevitable fears about the prospects of lab-grown humans and digital clones. Should we be concerned? Continue reading...
As big tech continues to dominate the film industry, Video StoreAge is a uniquely crafted company that works with film-makers to sell independent films on USB drivesThe streaming-skeptical cinephile faces a dilemma in 2026, especially when it comes to watching movies at home. Increasingly, movies are available via rentals that funnel money to mega-corporations including Amazon or Apple; digital purchases" from those same companies that can actually be revoked at any moment; or, most enticingly but still somewhat inconveniently, well-curated physical media special editions that treat films with the respect they deserve (sometimes even respect they don't, depending on the title) while taking up a lot of shelf space and hitting your wallet hard. Plus, as vinyl aficionados know, bespoke physical media can also be severely limited in terms of where you can actually play it. Basically, almost everyone in the home-video space is trying to either be Amazon or the Criterion Collection.Ash Cook, the former Sundance programmer who founded the new distributor Video StoreAge (pronounced like storage"), is trying to figure out a third way. He described Video StoreAge's products - indie movies sold on USB drives - as like a DVD in the present tense. It's a way to have a physical copy of a movie, but in this case you can play it on your computer. It has digital utility." Like almost anything else these days, Video StoreAge is available as a subscription, with quarterly collections of five features and five shorts. The first drop includes Vera Drew's buzzed-about The People's Joker, a homemade superhero comedy that reappropriates many elements of the Batman mythos into a trans coming-out story. (Honestly, it's more fun than those Joaquin Phoenix movies and might understand the Joker character better, too.) But they also sell single films, including Drew's, or any combinations of available films as a sort of digital indie-movie mix tape on those format-flexible USB drives. (The quarter's shorts package is included with every movie regardless, an automatic special feature.) Continue reading...
by Rebecca Ratcliffe and Navaon Siradapuvadol in O’ on (#747VW)
Sprawling compound, including mock-up banks and police offices, uncovered by Thai military during border clashesIt is as if you have walked into a branch of one of Vietnam's banks. A row of customer service desks, divided by plastic screens, with landline phones, promotional leaflets and staff business cards. A seated waiting area and a private meeting room. All of it features the OCB bank's logo, or its trademark green colour.This is not a genuine bank branch, however. It's one of various mock up" rooms inside a sprawling compound on the Thai-Cambodian border, where criminal groups are accused of using elaborate and industrial-scale fraud schemes to trick victims into handing over money. Continue reading...
Saturday quiz | Avoiding AI | Size mattersIt was lovely to read Sabrina Olson's letter (6 March) on the quiz as it has been a family ritual for us for years. It kept us all connected through our children's time at university, then moving into their own homes, and in some cases working abroad. It kept us going through the enforced separation of Covid and became a rite of passage for any new partners who joined our family group, especially as our winner is expected to do a creative" dance of victory. Two lovely daughters-in-law are now regular quizzers.
