Ofcom concerned TikTok’s age verification is ineffective, leaving some exposed to posts on suicide, self-harm and pornography
TikTok is under formal investigation over concerns it has failed to protect children from harmful content, the UK’s online regulator, Ofcom, has announced.
The social media platform’s approach to checking the ages of users has sparked “particular concerns” at the watchdog, almost a year after measures to protect children from the worst of online content came into effect under the Online Safety Act.
Thalha Jubair, 20, and Owen Flowers, 19, sentenced to five and a half years each for cyber-attack that cost Transport for London £39m
The data of millions of commuters was stolen, Londoners were left out of pocket and 27,000 Transport for London staff were forced to reset their passwords.
Over four days in 2024 a pair of teenage hackers had London’s transport network at their mercy. Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers had burrowed into the heart of Transport for London’s IT systems and held the “keys to the kingdom”.
Psychologist Candice Odgers has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years. She fears the current debate around smartphones obscures some of the biggest issues facing teenagers – from the impact of Covid to the health of their adult caregivers
The quickest way to make being online safer for children and teens would be to kick all adult men off the internet, the Canadian psychologist Candice Odgers believes. Men are the biggest perpetrators of sextortion and most likely to spread misinformation, she says.
Odgers is not recommending this as a policy for governments to adopt: “That would be crazy, right? It would be unfair.” But she is on a drive to puncture the prevailing narrative that the best way to address online harms is a social media ban for teenagers.
Whistleblower suggests internal security services deployed spyware from 2017 against key domestic and foreign targets
A former member of Morocco’s domestic intelligence service has helped to provide an unprecedented insight into how the north African state used hacking software – including Pegasus spyware – to target journalists, human rights defenders, French politicians and Spanish cabinet ministers and police officers.
Pegasus, which is manufactured by the Israel-based NSO Group, allows its operator to access everything on a target’s mobile phone, including emails, text messages and photographs. It can also activate the phone’s recorder and camera, turning it into a listening device.
Uncrewed systems are the future for armed forces and the Netherlands is leading the way ‘to keep people out of danger zones’
On each side of the target ship, a black vessel keeps a watchful distance. Defender 1 and Defender 2 are the eyes and ears of the navy – but they have nobody onboard, and their paths are controlled by a computer system.
This is the future of the Royal Netherlands Navy, according to Capt Sjoerd Feenstra, head of the expertise centre for unmanned systems. He is leading a five-week mission, off the coast of Den Helder in the north of the country, to test the limits of systems that operate without the human touch.
AI-friendly president shared a post saying governor Kathy Hochul should scrap the one-year policy ‘IMMEDIATELY’
Donald Trump railed against the New York governor, Kathy Hochul, for pausing the construction of large new datacenters, the resource-intensive facilities that power artificial intelligence.
New York became the first US state to enact a moratorium on new datacenters on Tuesday, when Hochul signed an executive order mandating a one-year statewide pause on so-called “hyperscale” datacenters.
All the young people the Guardian spoke to disagreed with aspects of the government’s proposed block
Sixteen- and 17-year-olds in Britain are to be encouraged to observe a midnight to 6am social media curfew but will be able to opt out by changing their account settings.
From next spring, they will be urged to refrain from using certain apps, with the block being switched on by default. But the curfew will not be mandatory and can be overridden.
Horror is so hot right now. There’s Obsession, Evil Dead Burn and Hokum in the cinema, Widow’s Bay, From and Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen on TV, and, of course, a rotting smorgasbord of horror games including Resident Evil Requiem (pictured top) and Reanimal, soon to be joined by Silent Hill: Townfall, Silver Pines and Dreadmoor. We’re also seeing weird cross-pollinations, with horror movie studio Blumhouse making games, while games themselves become horror films and the whole backrooms genre infects every medium it touches.
So it was fascinating to attend last week’s horror and gaming conference at Falmouth University, in Cornwall: a gathering of students, researchers and lecturers, all engaged in the academic study of horror games. There were brilliant talks on zombies and posthumanism, the gothic in games, and the role of monstrous little girls in survival horror (there are a lot of them!). Subjects as diverse as masculine fragility, disability and ageing came up; Will Doyle, creative director at Supermassive Games, gave a great keynote on the art of creating horror in games using tools such as revulsion, spatial alienation and the human instinct of apophenia. I learned a lot about theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Mark Fisher, and about the technical similarities between indie horror games and film noir (for example, the use of darkness and creative camera techniques to “hide” budget restrictions). It was incredible fun.
For months, artists and activists have been calling on the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, to act on the AI boom as datacentres pop up around the country. Today he made a major speech at the University of Sydney addressing copyright, the regulation of datacentres and the future of AI in Australia
Anthony Albanese has promised “the strongest possible protection” for Australian creatives against misuse of their work by artificial intelligence models, warning it would be “theft” if writers, artists and musicians didn’t have control of their work or receive payment for its use.
Amid growing community concern about large energy-intensive datacentres, the federal government will also set strict new rules for the facilities, including where they can be built, that they shouldn’t compete for land with housing, their power and water use, and that they don’t increase electricity prices for consumers.
EV owners were sent hefty PCNs but say some signs in private car parks fail to warn of fees to park and recharge car
Does refuelling your car class as parking? The answer appears to be yes if it’s an electric vehicle. Guardian Money has been contacted by several readers who were fined after charging their cars away from home.
The motorists report being caught out by signs that fail to make clear that charging points are subject to parking tariffs or to store opening times. Also, they have found some chargers being advertised as available for use when it would be a breach of the car park’s terms and conditions to use them.
Lawsuit filed by dozens of employees says people who took maternity or disability leave were disproportionately selected for layoffs
Dozens of Meta employees have sued the social media company over claims that it used artificial intelligence tools to tag workers for mass layoffs. The workers allege that those AI tools targeted them after they asked for protected or maternity leave or disability accommodation.
The lawsuit, filed Monday in federal court in the northern district of California, points to Meta’s workforce reduction of about 8,000 employees earlier this year. Meta is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The suit alleges that Meta used a “constellation of internal artificial intelligence systems”, including AI performance ratings and keystroke- and activity-monitoring data, to pinpoint who to lay off.
Group of major publishers accuses the tech giant of ‘one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history’
A group of major publishers have filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of illegally using millions of copyrighted books to help build its Gemini artificial intelligence models, in “one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history”.
The case, filed in federal court in New York, has been brought by three publishers – Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, and Elsevier – and bestselling American author Scott Turow.
Governor Kathy Hochul issues executive order enacting a moratorium on the large, resource-intensive AI facilities
New York became the first US state to enact a moratorium on new datacenters on Tuesday.
Governor Kathy Hochul issued an executive order mandating a one-year statewide pause on the large facilities used to power artificial intelligence products, which she signed at a mid-morning press conference.
PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2; Marimittu Games A soft puzzle game makes a sharp point about the over-optimised future ahead
In the far future, on a planet that is not Earth, AI is in charge. This entity is no Skynet-esque killer robot but a machine that cares for humanity. Manifesting most visibly as cute droids, the technology is pervasive – embedded in everything from the design of the sleek architecture to the gorgeous, mostly sunny artificial weather. The so-called Optimization System has but one responsibility: ensuring the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.
In less skilled hands this game might have felt like an undergraduate seminar on the limits of utilitarianism. But Japanese studio Marumittu Games elegantly marries its philosophical concerns with smart design choices. You play as a young, unnamed Facilitator tasked with tending to both the city’s bots and its human residents. Each morning you wake up, sleepily loping off to the bathroom before sitting down for an exquisitely rendered breakfast, and then embark on your day’s work. Like everything else in this near-future scenario, labour is designed to cause as little frustration as possible, amounting to simple maths brain teasers on a grid – nothing too taxing, but enough to keep you engaged.
A combination of fact and fiction leaves the celebrated documentarian’s puzzling project about software training wanting for depth
Marc Isaacs’ new film is a curious, intriguing, semi-sincere affair that I couldn’t make friends with. It is an odd, shallow piece of work about artificial intelligence that is itself exasperatingly artificial, a self-aware docudrama hybrid. Isaacs is, or rather pretends to be, licensing the vivid characters from his previous, acclaimed documentaries to a fictional AI research lab called Synthetic Sincerity at the fictional University of Southern England, so that the lab’s software can be “trained” in the creation of AI human figures on screen.
The lab’s research staff are played by actors, or at any rate people acting; these include Lebanese independent film-maker Lynn El Safah. Isaacs has amusing scripted conversations about this project with a disapproving AI avatar on screen, like Max Headroom of old, whose face is digitally modelled on Romanian actor Ilinca Manolache, from Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. The film, however, does not show the process by which Manolache was approached and her face transformed into an AI figure.
Snappy performance, long battery life, great keyboard and excellent new haptic touchpad make the best of Windows 11
Microsoft’s Surface laptop for consumers is back, faster and with longer battery life and a hefty price increase because of the high cost of memory and chips.
The Surface Laptop 8 is a straight replacement for the seventh edition from 2024, which was the first of Microsoft’s new generation of ARM-based, Qualcomm-powered PCs designed to better rival Apple’s MacBook Air and other thin and light machines.
In a feat of engineering that borders on magic, the best wireless earbuds can silence the noisy world around you at the tap of a finger. So, why would you buy open earbuds, which are specifically designed to let in environmental sounds?
Frankly, I didn’t understand the appeal of them either until I started testing them, and now I use open earbuds even more than my noise-cancelling earbuds. For situations from hiking to running errands, these are the headphones you should be wearing. Here’s what you’re missing out on, and a few of the best pairs to try.
Best overall open-ear earbuds:
Soundcore Aeroclip Open-Ear Earbuds
Best premium open-ear earbuds:
Bose Ultra Open Earbuds
Software engineering was one of the best-paying professions in the US in 2022, but the advent of AI has disrupted it, leading to several layoffs and underemployment
Every weekday, Matt, a software engineer, looks forward to his four-hour train commute to Pawling, New York. It’s time he uses to work on his own project: a browser-based video game for which he writes every line of code himself.
“I am actively trying to keep my axe sharp,” said Matt, who did not want to use his actual name, to protect his employment. In the last six months, Matt’s job has increasingly shifted away from coding, problem solving and software architecture towards reviewing code generated by artificial intelligence. Convinced that the shift will weaken his skills, he’s doing what he can to keep them intact. “I am trying not to leverage AI where I can.”
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