With a growing e-waste problem, you're right to pursue a repair, writes policy professional Kat George. Your consumer rights extend beyond a product's warranty too

Wikimedia Foundation says it will be forced reduce access to site if it is classified as a category 1 providerThe operator of Wikipedia has been given permission by a high court judge to challenge the Online Safety Act if it is categorised as a high-risk platform, which would impose the most stringent duties.The Wikimedia Foundation has said it might be forced to reduce how many people can access the site in order to comply with the regulations if it is classified as a category 1 provider by Ofcom later this summer. Continue reading...

Unprecedented deal, an apparent reversal of security restrictions, is in return for licences to sell to ChinaThe chipmakers Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15% of their revenue from advanced chips sold to China in return for export licences to the key market.The unprecedented move, an apparent reversal of US national security restrictions on the chip sales, signalled an easing in the US-China trade war. Continue reading...

Nearly one in 10 of the fastest growing channels globally consist of mass-produced, surreal AI-generated videosBabies trapped in space, zombie football stars and cat soap operas: welcome to YouTube in the era of AI video.Nearly one in 10 of the fastest growing YouTube channels globally are showing AI-generated content only, as breakthroughs in the technology spur a flood of artificial content.Super Cat League (3.9 million subscribers) 767k (2 million subscribers - this account has since been closed)LSB POWER GAMING (1.7 million subscribers)Amite Now Here (1.4 million subscribers)Starway (2.8 million subscribers)AmyyRoblox (2.4 million subscribers)Again Raz Vai (1.8 million subscribers)Cuentos Facinantes (4.8 million subscribers)MIRANHAINSANO (4.9 million subscribers) Continue reading...

PC; Neoludic Games

Exclusive: LSE research finds risk of gender bias in care decisions made based on AI summaries of case notesArtificial intelligence tools used by more than half of England's councils are downplaying women's physical and mental health issues and risk creating gender bias in care decisions, research has found.The study found that when using Google's AI tool Gemma" to generate and summarise the same case notes, language such as disabled", unable" and complex" appeared significantly more often in descriptions of men than women. Continue reading...

The famous science communicator is planning to release a chatbot designed to answer questions about the climate crisis. Can it work?

Palantir, Geo Group and CoreCivic, cogs in president's enormous detention and deportation machinery, report unprecedented growth'The tech, surveillance and private prison providers arming Donald Trump's massive expansion and weaponization of immigration enforcement are running a victory lap after reporting their latest financial results.Palantir, the tech firm, and Geo Group and CoreCivic, the private prison and surveillance companies, said this week that they brought in more money than Wall Street expected them to, thanks to the administration's crackdown on immigrants. Continue reading...

TikTok workers in Berlin are striking over mass layoffs amid company's global push to replace moderators with AITikTok workers in Germany are holding strikes over mass layoffs of the company's trust and safety team. The social media behemoth said it is planning to dismantle its entire Berlin moderation team, which removes harmful content from the platform, and outsource the work to artificial intelligence and contract workers. This means the dismissal of 150 employees.The trade union that represents the TikTok workers, ver.di, has been pushing to negotiate with TikTok over the past few weeks. Kalle Kunkel, a ver.di spokesperson for the Berlin-Brandenburg region, said the union sent a list of demands to TikTok regarding severance for the affected employees and an extension of the layoff notice period to one year. So far, he said, TikTok has refused to come to the table. Continue reading...

Nostalgic social media videos detailing Blair-Brown rivalry elicit cult following among young political fansThis summer, TikTok has been revisiting very public, deeply personal and sometimes toxic feuds from the 1990s.And it is not just the Gallagher brothers - another psychodrama has taken hold: the rivalry between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Continue reading...

Whistleblowing complaint warns Alan Turing Institute is in danger of collapse due to government threats over fundsStaff at the UK's leading artificial intelligence institute have raised concerns about the organisation's governance and internal culture in a whistleblowing complaint to the charity watchdog.The Alan Turing Institute (ATI), a registered charity with substantial state funding, is under government pressure to overhaul its strategic focus and leadership after an intervention last month from the technology secretary, Peter Kyle. Continue reading...

Ozzy Osbourne appeared as an AI-generated image at a recent Rod Stewart concert, prompting questions about how the ghoulish phenomenon will affect grievingRod Stewart had a few surprise guests at a recent concert in Charlotte, North Carolina. His old friend Ozzy Osbourne, the lead singer of Black Sabbath who died last month, was apparently beamed in from some kind of rock heaven, where he was reunited with other departed stars including Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and Bob Marley.The AI-generated images divided Stewart's fans. Some denounced them as disrespectful and distasteful; others found the tribute beautiful. Continue reading...

Government rebates and grants have finally put the country back on the map for the quick-moving field of professional game development

Snapchat logged about 20,000 cases last year of adults grooming children online, more than other social media platforms combinedTech companies including Snapchat and Facebook reported more than 9,600 cases of adults grooming children online in the UK in just six months last year - the equivalent of about 400 a week.Law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA), have grown increasingly alarmed about the growing threat from sextortion and other crimes targeting teenagers. Continue reading...

As US and Chinese tech giants chase artificial general intelligence, experts warn the hype may be outrunning the scienceA significant step forward but not a leap over the finish line. That was how Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, described the latest upgrade to ChatGPT this week.The race Altman was referring to was artificial general intelligence (AGI), a theoretical state of AI where, by OpenAI's definition, a highly autonomous system is able to do a human's job. Continue reading...

Experts working to benchmark resource use of AI models say new version's enhanced capabilities come at a steep costIn mid-2023, if a user asked OpenAI's ChatGPT for a recipe for artichoke pasta or instructions on how to make a ritual offering to the ancient Canaanite deity Moloch, its response might have taken - very roughly - 2 watt-hours, or about as much electricity as an incandescent bulb consumes in 2 minutes.OpenAI released a model on Thursday that will underpin the popular chatbot - GPT-5. Ask that version of the AI for an artichoke recipe, and the same amount of pasta-related text could take several times - even 20 times - that amount of energy, experts say. Continue reading...

Concerns that tech company's Israel-based staff may have concealed key details of work follow Guardian investigationMicrosoft is investigating how Israel's military surveillance agency, Unit 8200, is using its Azure cloud storage platform, amid concerns the company's staff in Israel may have concealed key details about its work on sensitive military projects.Senior executives are scrambling to assess what data Unit 8200 holds in Azure after a Guardian investigation revealed how the spy agency has used the cloud platform to store a vast collection of intercepted Palestinian mobile phone calls. Continue reading...

People in Gaza use Bluesky to crowdfund for milk and diapers - repeated deletion of their profiles has spawned a guerrilla verification squadHanin Al-Batsh estimates she has signed up for more than 80 Bluesky accounts in the last six months.Like hundreds of other Palestinians struggling to buy or even find food in Gaza, Al-Batsh uses Bluesky to promote her crowdfunding campaigns, hoping to raise enough money for flour and milk for her children in a given week. Continue reading...

Country is one of only a handful - alongside China and North Korea - where service fails to function as it shouldFor tourists visiting South Korea, one of the world's most technologically advanced nations, navigating the country's urban heartlands can prove surprisingly frustrating for one simple reason: Google Maps just doesn't work effectively.That could change soon, as South Korean authorities discuss whether to finally grant Google's request to export the country's detailed mapping data to overseas servers. But a decision on the matter was postponed for a second time this year on Friday to allow for further review of security concerns. Continue reading...

The two-hour debate propelled Jubilee Media into the mainstream and has been viewed 10m times, but some worry about the embrace of rage-fuelled contentMehdi Hasan knew he had gone viral. The broadcaster and author saw the views ticking up on YouTube; his phone was pinging incessantly. But the realisation that things had become, well, really quite surreal came when an older gentleman approached him at an event in Washington and, in Urdu, said: I watched you with the 20 crazies."The man was referring to the British-American commentator's appearance on Surrounded, a gladiatorial one-v-many debate web series, hosted on YouTube by Jubilee Media. During the debate - billed as 1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives" - Hasan was asked about his ethnic background", by a man who the Guardian unmasked as the organiser of two violent far-right protests. Another debater laughed maniacally to applause while agreeing he was a fascist. He was later sacked and condemned - and then raised $30,000 (22,300) from supporters on a Christian crowdfunding site. The video has now been viewed more than 10m times. Continue reading...

A barmy merging of genres where you can play with balls made from decapitated heads - here's a release that could promote an indie developer to the premier leagueSometimes it's the weirdest combinations that go best together: bacon and ice-cream, pilchards and custard, erm ... Alison Hammond and Dermot O'Leary. But surely no one has thought of putting Silent Hill and Fifa 98 together before now.Billed as the world's first online survival horror football game," Fear FA 98 (pronounced Fear-fa, like Fifa) has you pulling out knives, rusty scissors and syringes, summoning demons and using decapitated heads as the ball, in moves that make the likes of Diego handball" Maradona and Luis bitey" Suarez look like angelic stalwarts of the Fifa fair play guide. Continue reading...

Paranoia is exploited to control us. Movies are groomed to flatter us. And trauma has been twisted to make us blame ourselves. How can we make sense of our lives? The two film-makers try to navigate the chaosAri Aster's new movie, Eddington, pits Joaquin Phoenix against Pedro Pascal as men with conflicting takes on how to get their small town through the crisis of Covid. It's also a film about the contemporary political crisis in the US and the influence of technology on our lives.Adam Curtis's latest documentary series, Shifty, covers similar themes but through the lens of British life in the Thatcher years of the late 1970s to early 1990s. This era, he argues, put in place a substantial shift in power away from the individual and the nation state, changes that are still playing out today. Continue reading...

Leeds MP Mark Sewards has launched a digital assistant, but the results of my chat show MPs' aides have nowt to worry aboutAs anyone with even a trace of a regional dialect who has had to pay a parking fine can attest, voice recognition services struggle with accents. Now, people in Mark Sewards' constituency in Leeds are likely to find the same problem with his AI variant.A chatbot billed as the first AI version of an MP responds in Sewards' voice with advice, support or by offering to pass on a message to his team - but only if it understands you. Continue reading...

Though GPT-5 model has better coding and writing abilities it is not yet able to continuously learn'OpenAI has claimed to have taken a significant step" towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) with the launch of its latest upgrade to ChatGPT, but has admitted there are still many things" missing in its quest to create a system able to do humans' jobs.The startup said its GPT-5 model, the underlying technology that will power its breakthrough AI chatbot, represents a big upgrade on its predecessors in areas such as coding and creative writing - and is also a lot less sycophantic. Continue reading...

Impossible to monitor, a gateway to dangerous content, or a great educational tool? As the social media ban looms, parents tell us how YouTube affects their world

With distinct, discrete areas that you can visit at any time, this is not a traditional open world adventure, and it resists gamification with the mantra there's no goal but to stroll'Here is poetry in the form of a game description. Bernband is a sci-fi exploration game for people who like to wander...". Players will be able to simply walk around a colourful and unusual world, wandering in the glow cast by streetlights and ducking beneath zigzagging overhead flags. They'll tour hallways where strange green life grows politely in planters, and they'll even get the chance to snooze on rattling otherworldly subway trains while hand grips - tentacle grips? - jiggle as they hang overhead. There's no goal but to stroll," the game's Steam page promises. Where will your feet take you?"There's something intoxicating about a game that just lets you wander. But it doesn't mean the game itself is easy to make, of course. Wandering [as] the main goal is quite difficult for many reasons," says Tom van den Boogaart, the developer of Bernband, who is using the project to reimagine a much smaller version he made in 2014. To let players explore on their own, I think you first of all need to give them some context, such as where they are and what kind of world they are exploring." Continue reading...

Super bright OLED screen, top tracking accuracy, voice control and calls on your wrist are held back by high priceGarmin's latest mid-range running and multisport watch has smartened up with a very bright OLED screen, voice assistant and upgraded sensors.The Forerunner 570 continues the revamp of the company's running watches, which have all gained more accurate GPS chips and improved heart rate monitors. The new model replaces the popular 265 and sits under the 970. It offers a similar look and feel to the top watch but with a few key features removed for a lower price. Continue reading...

Tech giant's plan to up domestic investment over next four years comes as it seeks to avoid Trump's threatened tariffsDonald Trump on Wednesday celebrated a commitment by Apple to increase its investments in US manufacturing by an additional $100bn over the next four years.Apple's plan to up its domestic investment comes as it seeks to avoid Trump's threatened tariffs, which would increase the tech giant's costs as it relies on a complex international supply chain to produce its iPhones. Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, warned during an earnings call in May that the tariffs could cost the company up to $900m that fiscal quarter alone. Continue reading...

If the transaction goes ahead the value of the ChatGPT developer would rise by about two-thirds to $500bn

My love for video games has never wavered, I have no intention of growing up and moving onIt is my birthday this week. And while that may not sound like a worthy subject for Pushing Buttons, bear with me.I am now 54 - and so officially in my mid-50s - and I still write about video games for a living. I play video games every day; I work in a home office where I'm surrounded by video games. When I'm not playing them, I'm probably thinking about them. But at times like this, I think: maybe should I stop someday? Is there an upper limit on how long someone can do games journalism? Certainly I only know of a handful of people my age who are still writing about games on a full-time basis. Some of my friends outside the industry still play games, but usually only one or two a year - EA Sports FC, maybe, the latest blockbusting narrative adventure, Nintendo with the kids. If you're not careful, life has a way of shepherding you away from your interests. Continue reading...

Revealed: The Israeli military undertook an ambitious project to store a giant trove of Palestinians' phone calls on Microsoft's servers in EuropeOne afternoon in late 2021, Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella, met with the commander of Israel's military surveillance agency, Unit 8200. On the spy chief's agenda: moving vast amounts of top secret intelligence material into the US company's cloud.Meeting at Microsoft's headquarters near Seattle, a former chicken farm turned hi-tech campus, the spymaster, Yossi Sariel, won Nadella's support for a plan that would grant Unit 8200 access to a customised and segregated area within Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. Continue reading...

Productivity Commission report raises possible exemption for text and data mining' and expanding fair dealing rules, prompting fierce pushback

On an icy world, a glitteringly hard take on sci-fi emerges which draws on real science as well as Hollywood's cosmic fantasiesWhat defines a game by Don't Nod, the French studio behind acclaimed narrative dramas Life Is Strange, Tell Me Why and Lost Records: Bloom and Rage? Dimitri Weideli, an executive producer at the company, has a hard time replying to this question at first, and then settles on an answer that seems rather broad. We want to make games that matter and that give players a great story that allows them to go through different kinds of emotions," he says. We try to diversify the kind of games we create, but at the same time, keep the same spirit."There's certainly something to this idea of diversification. Since its founding in 2008, the French outfit has made action-adventure games about memory, narrative games involving magical college students, and a role-playing game about a Georgian vampire. Recently, it released Jusant, an ecological sci-fi fable that was also a refreshingly realistic take on rock climbing. Continue reading...

Politics is struggling to cope with the pace of technological change - and that is affecting every single one of usReturning from holiday, asked where I have been, I want to say offline". The more precise answer is France, where the internet is available. But I tried not to use it compulsively because there isn't much point in getting away from it all if you carry it all with you on a phone and check it every few minutes.At some point in the past decade or so, the condition of vacation came to be defined more by detachment from the digital realm than departure from home. The break begins not in a departure lounge but with the act of logging off, setting the out-of-office email auto-reply, archiving work-related WhatsApp chats, deleting social media apps. Continue reading...

Four women travel 140m miles across the heavens - only to find their new world in hostile corporate hands. Composer Jennifer Walshe reveals what fed into her epic opera, from low-gravity procreation to Shrek in spaceWhy write an opera about Mars? Because Mars isn't just a planet. It's a philosophy, an ideology. The way humans think about it changes over time, reflecting the unstable mix of assumptions, hopes, dreams and anxieties that define each historical moment.In 1965, Nasa's Mariner 4 probe flew past Mars and beamed the first closeup images of the red planet (or of any other planet) back to Earth. Prior to that flight, humans knew the planet only through telescopes, and it was thought that its surface would feature vegetation and that life may have evolved there. Mariner 4 revealed the truth: it was a rocky, cratered place seemingly devoid of life. President Lyndon B Johnson declared that it may just be that life as we know it, with its humanity, is more unique than many have thought, and we must remember this". The New York Times went further: Mars, it now appears, is a desolate world." Continue reading...

Secretly filmed images of women are spreading online, yet the authorities seem more focused on censorship than punishing the perpetrators, critics sayWhen Ming* found a hidden camera in her bedroom, she prayed for a reasonable explanation, wondering whether her boyfriend had placed it there to record memories of their happy life" together. But hope quickly turned to horror. Ming's boyfriend had been secretly taking sexually exploitative photos of not just Ming and her female friends, but also of other women in other locations, then using AI technology to generate pornographic images of them.After Ming confronted him, he begged for mercy" but became angry when she refused to forgive him, Ming reportedly told Chinese news outlet Jimu News. Continue reading...

Party wants video platform to face same scrutiny as broadcasters due to deepfake and investment scamsThe Liberal Democrats are calling for urgent regulation of YouTube advertising after scams including deepfakes, impersonated public figures and fraudulent investment claims were found to be spreading on the platform with little oversight.The party said YouTube's adverts remain largely unchecked by independent regulators, despite new data from Ofcom showing the platform has overtaken ITV in weekly UK viewership and continues to dominate children's media consumption. Continue reading...

Developer of ChatGPT says new tools will be for wide benefit', echoing announcement by Mark ZuckerbergOpenAI is taking on Mark Zuckerberg's Meta and Chinese rival DeepSeek by launching its own freely available artificial intelligence models.The ChatGPT developer has announced two open weight" large language models, which are free to download and can be customised by developers. Continue reading...

From an AI spending wave to Palantir's deepening ties with the US government, tech's power is expanding - but for many women, safety online is further out of reachHello, and welcome to TechScape. This week, tech companies are spending amounts of money that stretch the limits of the imagination. Donald Trump's administration is spending more money with data analytics and surveillance firm Palantir. And women on both sides of the Pacific face the extreme difficulty of keeping intimate moments private online.Department: DefenseDepartment: Homeland SecurityDepartment: Health and Human ServicesDepartment: TreasuryDepartment: JusticeDepartment: EnergyDepartment: StateDepartment: Transportation Continue reading...

Carmaker and CEO accused of securities fraud and hiding significant risk posed by company's self-driving vehiclesTesla shareholders sued Elon Musk and the electric vehicle maker for allegedly concealing the significant risk posed by company's self-driving vehicles.The proposed class-action suit, which accuses Musk and Tesla of securities fraud, was filed on Monday night. Tesla conducted its first public test of its self-driving taxis in late June near the company's headquarters in Austin, Texas. That test showed the vehicles speeding, braking suddenly, driving over a curb, entering the wrong lane and dropping off passengers in the middle of multilane roads. The National Highway Transit Safety Administration (NHTSA), the main transportation regulator in the US, is investigating the Robotaxi's pilot test. Continue reading...

Instead of giving definitive answers to personal challenges the chatbot will help people reflect on a problemChatGPT will not tell people to break up with their partner and will encourage users to take breaks from long chatbot sessions, under new changes to the artificial intelligence tool.OpenAI, ChatGPT's developer, said the chatbot would stop giving definitive answers to personal challenges and would instead help people to mull over problems such as potential breakups. Continue reading...

Sedentary lifestyles are bad for us, but which under-desk treadmills and walking pads are worth the cost? Our expert stepped up to find out The best treadmills for your homeVarious guidelines suggest we all try to walk at least 10,000 steps a day to improve our health and wellbeing. Public Health England encourages a slightly more manageable target of just 10 minutes of brisk walking daily to introduce more moderate-intensity physical activity and reduce your risk of early death by up to 15%.However, even squeezing in brisk walks" can be a chore, with busy schedules and increasingly desk-bound jobs forcing more of us to remain sedentary for long periods. That is where walking pads come in, being lighter, smaller and often easier to store than bulky and tricky-to-manoeuvre running treadmills.Best walking pad overall:

PC, Mac, PS5, Nintendo Switch; Playables/Panic

Bloomberg journalist Olivia Carville follows a small legal outfit as it takes Silicon Valley's most powerful companies to task for endangering young usersTweens are herd animals" and have an addicts' narrative", according to internal documents revealed by a Facebook whistleblower to congress, making clear the levels of cynicism and obfuscation the company operates with in its quest to hook young people to its platform. Bad though that is, it's not the worst example in this lucidly laid out and often harrowing indictment of social media's ruthlessness; that would be the proliferation of drug dealers on Snapchat, which the company seems to have to some extent turned a blind eye to in the scramble to expand its user base.Based on the investigative work of Bloomberg journalist Olivia Carville, this film covers the attempts of minnow legal outfit Social Media Victims Law Center to net the sharks of Silicon Valley. It represents a host of families who have suffered heartbreaking losses due to unpoliced extreme online content: children and teenagers who fatally copied auto-asphyxiation or pro-suicide videos, ones who killed themselves after falling victim to sextortionists, or who overdosed after buying off-prescription meds from predatory dealers. The battle here is to overcome section 230, a get-out clause in the 1996 Telecommunication Act that gives social media companies immunity for third-party-generated content. Of course, Mark Zuckerberg was still slurping Slush Puppies back then. Continue reading...

Ex-chancellor criticises hesitant approach to crypto and warns country in danger of missing next surge in market

Indie developer's take on the ethical conundrum about choosing who to save from an oncoming train may be gimmicky, but with its charm and bite-size levels, it's ideal for the social media eraIn 1967, British philosopher Philippa Foot unwittingly created one of the internet's most regurgitated memes. A runaway train is hurtling towards five people tied to the tracks. You can pull a lever to divert the train to a different track to which only one person is tied. Do you intervene to kill the one and spare the five?What if one of the tracks twisted into a really cool loop-the-loop? Or the trolley was replaced by a bloodthirsty Thomas the Tank Engine? Or the whole dilemma was clumsily altered to comment on the political controversy of the day? Originally formulated as a reflection on moral decision-making, the trolley problem found a second life in the 2010s as a well of inspiration for variously silly, irreverent and self-referential trolley-based memes. Now, it may be entering its third era as surreal interactive comedy game The Trolley Solution. Continue reading...

Yes, the huge firms pushing unsuitable content must be regulated. But until they are, adults can model the positive use of tech

The head of Google's DeepMind says artificial intelligence could usher in an era of incredible productivity' and radical abundance'. But who will it benefit? And why does he wish the tech giants had moved more slowly?If you have a mental image of a Nobel prizewinner, Demis Hassabis probably doesn't fit it. Relatively young (he's 49), mixed race (his father is Greek-Cypriot, his mother Chinese-Singaporean), state-educated, he didn't exactly look out of place receiving his medal from the king of Sweden in December, amid a sea of grey-haired men, but it was very surreal", he admits. I'm really bad at enjoying the moment. I've won prizes in the past, and I'm always thinking , What's the next thing?' But this one was really special. It's something you dream about as a kid."Well, maybe not you, but certainly him. Hassabis was marked out as exceptional from a young age - he was a chess prodigy when he was four. Today, arguably, he's one of the most important people in the world. As head of Google DeepMind, the tech giant's artificial intelligence arm, he's driving, if not necessarily steering, what promises to be the most significant technological revolution of our lifetimes. Continue reading...

Farage accuses government of being so below the belt' as right wing doubles down on censorship claimsThe UK's Online Safety Act has been greatly anticipated. Amid mounting concerns about the ease of accessing harmful content online, rules were drawn up to force social platforms to protect children from posts and videos that incite hatred or encourage suicide, self-harm or eating disorders.But within days of coming into force, the new approach to keeping children safe online had become a rallying point for the right in both Britain and the US. Continue reading...

Investigative journalist Sonke Iwersen describes his years-long investigation into Tesla, aided by a whistleblower, exposing serious safety concerns over the company's carsIn November 2022, a whistleblower contacted investigative journalist Sonke Iwersen.He could not give his name, he said, but he had access to huge amounts of data about Tesla, his former employer: private phone numbers, social security information, bank statements, documents stamped top secret', and much, much more. Continue reading...