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Tech
Industry, products, and the wires that hold it all together.
546 stories archived
There’s Nothing Mysterious or Unusual About the Viral German Sexual Harassment Robot
Livestreamers used a robot to harass a woman for social media clout on the street in Germany.
Palantir and Sadiq Khan drop legal battle over Met contract
Dispute related to claims London mayor blocked US tech firm from £50m police deal because of concerns over its values Palantir and the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, have called off their legal fight over claims the Labour mayor was blocking the US tech company from signing a contract with the Metropolitan police because of its values and ethics. Palantir and the mayor’s office of policing and crime (Mopac) announced on Wednesday they had withdrawn allegations against each other, heading off a high court trial scheduled for January. Continue reading...
Legendary FPS level designer Richard "Levelord" Gray dies at 68
Tributes pour in for the man behind iconic Duke Nukem 3D levels and much more.
Was this Mark Zuckerberg’s first – and last – taste of Guinness?
The Meta boss looked traumatised when he sipped stout on the Cheeky Pint podcast. An hour later, his glass was still half full Name: Guinness. Age: Arthur Guinness began brewing porter in the 1770s. Guinness draft was first poured in 1959. Continue reading...
The eyes have it: Reform politician’s ‘smart glasses’ prompt calls for ban in Westminster
Jason O’Connell’s suspected use of the specs to aid his speech in the Senedd reignites debate over the AI-enabled devices It was a flowing speech packed full of precise statistics – but Jason O’Connell, a Reform UK Senedd member, was not quite the gifted orator he had first appeared. The periodic flashing in his spectacles seemed to give the game away as he spoke for five minutes in the Senedd chamber without a glance at his notes. “Cardiff reviewed 192 roads, following 933 requests, and only four routes have returned to 30mph,” he said as he led the party’s charge to abolish 20mph traffic zones. “£38.3m wasted to implement this policy and up to £8.9bn in an act of economic self-harm.” Continue reading...
Reform UK politician appears to use smart glasses as teleprompter during Senedd debate – video
Jason O’Connell is suspected of having used smart glasses that turned his lenses into tiny teleprompters. Periodic flashing in his spectacles could be seen as the Senedd member for Pontypridd Cynon Merthyr spoke for five minutes without a glance at his notes on 30 September. In the following days, other Welsh assembly members said the issue of smart glasses – popularised by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta – needed to be dealt with at pace, with explicit guidance about their use developed. There is no suggestion O’Connell's glasses were recording Continue reading...
Character.ai Bankruptcy Is First AI Bubble Domino to Fall
New music genre just dropped. Also: A Tesla locks out cops, and more from around the web.
Ready player one? Why the games arcade is having a rebirth
After years of sprawling ‘forever’ games, players are rediscovering the pleasures of more focused experiences. Could a new wave of independent arcades bring back the social side of gaming? • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here There’s an important semi-nostalgic movement happening in games, and I’m excited about where it’s heading. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself here. Over the last five years, major publishers, obsessed with the success of “forever games” such as Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox, have been throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into their own sprawling, endlessly updating, battle-pass-infested mega franchises – each designed to take all our time and money. The result has been astounding failures such as Concord , Mindseye and Tales of the Shire. Even the good games – Crimson Desert, Path of Exile 2, Blood of the Dawnwalker – are so bloated they have become the unyielding masters of our precious few hours of free time. Continue reading...
Ukraine blindsided by Starlink throttling restrictions and intelligence gaps
Kyiv’s forces experience connectivity problems on Elon Musk’s satellite network.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time preview – Link faces his scariest challenge yet: the 4K era
The kingdom of Hyrule has been prettified, the soundtrack is newly orchestrated and our hero feels strikingly different under the thumbs … we play a hands-on demo of Nintendo’s Switch 2 remake of a 1998 game-changer When beloved art is revisited and revised, a familiar cry is often heard: “You’re ruining my childhood!” But with Nintendo’s Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time, there are also livelihoods at risk: specifically, the man running the shooting gallery in Castle Town. In the original 1998 version of the game, he’d rip off players as they funnelled rupees and fudged the then still novel analogue-stick aiming. But in 2026 we have more responsive frame rates and a motion-controlled slingshot that allows precision adjustments. His targets tumble on the first go, and with them his entire business model. Even in Hyrule, the death of the high street seems inevitable. Bad news for him but great news for Link, a child of the forest who, as in 1998, steps into a vast fantasy kingdom to vanquish a great evil, but now does so with a number of improvements. The boy can now sprint, preventing the ignominy of endless roly-polies to zip across grassy plains. He has a manual jump, free-rotating camera, a scrolling inventory bar that replaces menu screen faff and, crucially, a fatter wallet for holding all those gems he fleeces from struggling shooting gallery owners. Yes, we are being asked to applaud features that have been the norm for decades elsewhere, but it’s undeniably striking to enter familiar territory with a hero who feels this different under the thumbs. Continue reading...
Anthropic warns small AI models could self-replicate through IoT devices
"Small weight-based replicators" could usher in a new generation of computer worms.
The Internet’s undersea backbone is slipping into the danger zone
Elisabeth Braw’s book Undersea War on rising risks for undersea infrastructure.
OpenAI, Google pushing new AI models easily tricked into making nudes, researchers say
Attack method exposes flaws in OpenAI, Google safeguards against AI nudes.
Nvidia, worth $5.5tn, donates $250m to UK for AI safety research
Pledge spanning five years from world’s most valuable firm comes as concerns about AI agents have risen The $5.5tn (£4.1tn) US chipmaker Nvidia is donating $250m worth of computing power to the UK to support AI safety research. The donation from the world’s most valuable company comes as the UK government confirmed its AI Security Institute, which tests advance AI models, will be able to examine cutting-edge technology developed by companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google before they are released. Continue reading...
Tool and target: US law enforcement grapple with AI-enabled terrorism and anti-tech extremism
From the FBI to local police departments, US authorities are increasingly warning of would-be terrorists using chatbots to plan attacks and anti-AI extremist threats In May 2025, a 25-year-old man detonated a car bomb outside a Palm Springs fertility clinic, killing himself and injuring four others. For many, it was a wake up call about the threats to reproductive care facilities. For the FBI, though, it was also a sign of what the agency had feared for years: bad actors were using generative AI to plan and execute terror plots. The suspect used an unnamed generative AI tool that failed to detect his request for bomb-making instructions, law enforcement officers wrote in a previously unreported document reviewed by the Guardian. The privacy of his conversation with the AI chatbot hindered alerting police that someone was looking up how to make a bomb, according to the memo. How extremists could use AI to devise attacks and recruit new members How AI could be used to disseminate and produce everything from deepfakes to election misinformation and child sexual abuse material (CSAM) How people seeking information on how to make weaponry or bombs could use AI to circumvent police detection How to ensure that officers could take advantage of AI tools in policing, for things like social media monitoring, while managing public concern over the use of these tools Monitoring social media for opposition to AI and potential extremist attacks on datacenters Continue reading...
Bank of England and IMF bosses issue stark warning on cyber threat to trust
Andrew Bailey and Kristalina Georgieva voice concerns about financial system on panel about online fraud Business live – latest updates The heads of the Bank of England and the International Monetary Fund have issued a stark warning that rising cyber-attacks risk undermining trust in the financial system. Speaking on a panel about online fraud at the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok, the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, pointed to alarming headlines about self-replicating AI agents hijacking personal devices , and the French supermarket hack that heated fridges up to 50C . Continue reading...
Martin Shkreli livestreamed himself violating lifetime pharma ban, FTC says
"I can always find a couple of biotech stocks to smoke," Shkreli said in a livestream.
OpenAI employee arrested after recording device found in office
Discovery of ‘sophisticated’ gadget adds to company’s list of privacy concerns after hackings by rogue agents OpenAI said it has found a hidden recording device in one of its offices and has referred the matter to the FBI. One of its employees has been arrested. In a statement on Tuesday, the San Francisco-based AI company said it discovered the “sophisticated recording device” and used one of its “models to understand the device and where it had come from”. Continue reading...
ESA targets Anbernic emulation handhelds as "superfake" piracy enablers
But third-party sellers, not Anbernic, are the ones routinely selling ROM-filled SD cards.
Topgolf saved over $11.3 million after leaving VMware
Topgolf and VMware "ran deep" before the migration.
AI in your oven? Anthropic warns models ‘months away’ from self-replication on smart devices
Researchers say ‘AI worms’ could soon infiltrate internet-connected devices amid calls for increased guardrails Anthropic is warning that some of its artificial intelligence models could soon become “self-replicating” and find ways to infiltrate internet-connected devices, such as smart fridges and automatic vacuum cleaners. Once this happens, the company said, the models could power themselves within these devices without the need of datacenters. Such self-replication would represent a major loss of control of a runaway AI model. Continue reading...
Character.ai's Bankruptcy Documents Show the Economics of AI Don't Work
Character.ai enshittified its product but was still burning tons of cash, its bankruptcy documents say.
Trump commercial railing against his enemies kept airing after court blocked it
US attorney apologized to court, said government has stopped running Trump ads.
Disney offers $20M for Character.AI’s scandal-plagued chatbot tech
Disney may acquire tech from one of the first chatbot makers linked to child suicide.