How the UK plans to implement under-16s social media ban
Proposed strategies for age verification have been released ahead of new social media rules, which come into effect next spring. The UK’s social media ban aims to stop anyone under the age of 16 from accessing 10 of the main social media platforms, including Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. The...
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The victim of France’s latest cyber-attack? Fridges
A bizarre event saw thousands of supermarket fridges targeted and mountains of food wasted. But as cyber-attacks like these become more common, their destabilising power proves more insidious than silly. When supermarket staff arrived early on Sunday morning to stock shelves across France, they found food cooking in the freezers....
Should we be worried about AI merging video games?
Gamers have started mashing together different video games using AI tools. So far, we’ve seen Mario in Halo, Minecraft in Skyrim, and much more. Mind-bending results aside, the tech required to pull this off has some people worried about online security and digital infrastructure. Ever wondered what Super Mario 64...
Google’s SynthID to stop AI organisms from slipping through the cracks
With Gen AI now capable of creating functional molecular structures, Google has come up with a new system to tackle imminent biosecurity risks that come with such innovations. Before modern AI, much of computational biology focused on storing, searching, and comparing biological data. Public databases allowed scientists to check whether...
Trump’s Space Academy could change the space race
With America’s space ambitions only continuing to grow, Trump is turning his focus to the industry’s workforce that could keep the US ahead of adversaries like China. In both his terms in office, aside from immigration and anti-wokeness, President Donald Trump’s focus has increasingly turned towards the space front. In...
You’ll own nothing and be happy: the subscription crisis
Gen Z subscribes to everything from music and films to software and storage, paying endlessly for things we never actually own. As ownership is increasingly replaced by access, are subscriptions making life more convenient - or creating a generation that pays forever and owns nothing? There was once a revolutionary...
AI agents hacked Australia’s national healthcare database
Revealed during the United Nations General Assembly, this hack exposes a critical failure in current safety standards, sparking concerns over the future of AI. In these past few years, conversations around AI seem to linger around a never-ending crossroads, with the recent shocking breach of Australian government data by OpenAI agents. That said, I couldn’t tell you which is more concerning: the time it took the company to detect and report...
Gen Z women are driving the African gaming boom
For young people, gaming has changed from being merely recreational into an economic pathway into the digital economy, especially in a challenging labour market. In Africa, women are driving this growth. Young women are pioneering the evolution of African gaming, taking up roles not only as competitive players but as commentators and content producers within a rapidly growing market. In 2024, African gaming had an estimated 349 million players...
Google fined by Irish data watchdog for GDPR violations
Tech giant Google has been fined £345 million by the Republic of Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) over misuse of location data following a six-year investigation. Google has been hit with a fine of £345 million by the Republic of Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) over mishandling of location data. The DPC undertook a six-month investigation across three specific features provided by Google: ‘Web and App Activity,’ ‘Location History,’ and ‘Location...
The US officially confirms it has space weapons orbiting Earth
The nation has confirmed that it possesses weapons in orbit, crossing a new threshold that could accelerate the global arms race in space. On September 14th, US Air Force Secretary Troy Meink announced that the country had officially deployed weapons into space. And yes, you read that right – that’s weapons, plural. In his announcement, Meink affirmed that these ‘space control weapons were capable of defending the Joint Force...
