Category Archives: Technology

Lisa Nandy quits X over fears Musk-owned site pushes ‘abuse and misinformation’

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Culture secretary says her department will stop using platform, citing concerns over far-right content fuelling violence and division

The UK’s culture and media department will stop using X because the site “now favours abuse and misinformation over meaningful debate”, Lisa Nandy has announced.

The culture secretary’s department is the UK’s second to quit the Elon Musk-owned platform over increasing concerns about the way it highlights and prioritises often inaccurate far-right and racist content and is used to incite violence and division.

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Shares in chipmakers underpinning AI boom rocket in first half of 2026

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Value of some chip manufacturers have tripled, or more, driving Asia Pacific stock markets sharply higher

Shares in chipmakers have surged in the first half of this year as investors piled into companies that make the hardware underpinning the AI boom, according to analysis.

Investors have driven up the value of semiconductor and memory chip manufacturers, whose profits have soared during 2026, at the expense of some large software companies, which have fallen out of favour this year.

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‘Tech firms are losing the public’: social media age bans near tipping point

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UK is latest country to set minimum age for social media access but big tech is fighting back globally against curbs

Arturo Béjar, a former employee turned whistleblower at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has talked to parents around the world. He says they share the same perspective: they dread the day their children are old enough to go online.

Governments appear to be listening too. This month the UK became the latest country to state that it would set a minimum age of 16 for accessing major social media platforms. Social media bans are becoming a legislative trend after the precedent set by Australia last year, when it imposed an age limit on platforms including Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, Google’s YouTube, Elon Musk’s X, TikTok and Snapchat.

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Australia to double penalty for social media ban breaches to $99m as tech giants accused of ‘not doing enough’

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Prime minister Anthony Albanese says too many children still on platforms but he is ‘heartened’ by world-leading law

The federal government will double the penalty for breaches of Australia’s youth social media ban to $99m, arguing tech companies are “not doing enough” to keep children off harmful social media sites.

And the eSafety commissioner, now investigating potential breaches of the law by Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube, will have its information-gathering powers strengthened under proposed further reforms.

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Screen time can damage under-twos’ development, landmark study suggests

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Exclusive: Researchers call for urgent investigation of risks to babies of tablets, smartphones and other digital devices

Screen time for babies and toddlers under the age of two has been linked with long-term negative effects on health and quality of life and should be avoided, according to a landmark study.

It warns that using screens during that period may lead to wide-ranging developmental concerns and calls for further urgent investigation of the risks smartphones, tablets and other digital devices pose to infants.

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Hikers lost in Kosciuszko national park rescued within five hours by AI drone

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Fire and Rescue NSW uses thermal imaging and a mobile phone red light to quickly locate men who veered off walking track near Jindabyne

Two hikers who veered off a walking track in Kosciuszko national park have been found within five hours using a drone powered by artificial intelligence, a first-of-its-kind mission, Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) has said.

The two men, aged in their 20s, were reported missing at 7pm on Tuesday evening after they failed to return to a rendezvous point on time.

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‘Fork in the road’: CEO of Amazon-backed Rivian on why carmakers need to invest in EVs

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RJ Scaringe says firms focused on selling fossil fuel engines risk being ‘woefully behind’ on technology by end of decade

Carmakers that focus on selling fossil fuel engines are at risk of being “woefully behind” on technology by the end of the decade, according to the boss of Rivian, an Amazon-backed US electric carmaker.

RJ Scaringe, Rivian’s founder and chief executive, said the car industry has reached a “fork in the road” in the choice between short-term profits and the heavy investments, particularly in software, that will be required to survive.

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Australian musicians sound warning note after Nick Cave, Kylie and many more slurped into AI training tool

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‘It’s all just rendered useless’, Something For Kate’s Paul Dempsey says as AI scrapes millions of songs to learn how to make music

Paul Dempsey and Bernard Fanning are among big-name Australian musicians upset that their original songs have been found in datasets used to train artificial intelligence.

A dataset search tool recently created by US publication The Atlantic reveals millions of creative works have been scraped from the internet to train the disruptive technology.

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Datacentres are growing target of global climate-related legal cases, report finds

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LSE analysis highlights litigation linked to energy sources, water consumption and air pollution

The proliferation of datacentres and AI is increasingly at the forefront of environmental litigation around the world, from the US and UK to Chile to Ireland, a report has found.

In an analysis of about 3,600 climate-related lawsuits filed since 2015, the latest annual review of climate litigation by the London School of Economics (LSE) found a growing number of cases challenging the energy sources, water consumption and air pollution of datacentres, all of which have related climate implications.

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US opens second federal investigation of deadly Tesla crash into Texas home

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Driver told authorities he had driver-assistance technology engaged before crash that killed 76-year-old Martha Avila

The US government has opened a second federal investigation into a recent crash of a Tesla that reportedly had driver-assistance technology engaged, struck a Texas home and killed a resident.

Meanwhile, the family of Martha Avila, the 76-year-old resident who was killed, has sued over the wreck.

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AI helps read papyrus scroll burnt to crisp during Vesuvius eruption

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Previously hidden text revealed without unrolling scroll discusses stoic philosophy on ethics, art and human behaviour

The surviving part of an ancient scroll that was burnt to a crisp when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago has been virtually unwrapped and read with help from artificial intelligence.

Researchers uncovered 20 columns of previously hidden text covering more than a metre of charred papyrus without physically unrolling the scroll. The work discusses stoic philosophy on ethics, art and human behaviour and dates to the second or late-third century BC.

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Chinese supercomputer leapfrogs best US machines to be ranked world’s fastest

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China’s LineShine debuts at number one in Top500 – a list sometimes viewed as a national measure of global tech prowess

A supercomputer in China now outranks its US counterparts as the world’s most powerful. It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese computer has topped a list sometimes viewed as a measure of a nation’s technological prowess.

The LineShine computer in Shenzhen displaced top-ranked US computer El Capitan in the Top500 rankings released on Tuesday. It was LineShine’s debut on the list.

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Majority of datacenters are vulnerable to climate threats like floods and fires, study finds

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Study warns AI datacenters are vulnerable to the climate hazards that their global greenhouse gas emissions bolster

Amid rising concern that the artificial intelligence boom is fueling the climate crisis, a new report has found that nearly 80% of datacenters are also exposed to extreme climate hazards, including flooding, extreme winds and wildfires.

Those impacts are leaving the infrastructure vulnerable to disrupted operations, increased time offline and inflated insurance and repair costs, the research from climate risk analytics firm First Street shows.

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Artificial intelligence law firm wins court case in England for first time

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Company hails victory for freelancer over unpaid debt as ‘landmark moment’ for access to justice

An artificial intelligence law firm has won a case in an English court, in what is believed to be the first time a trial has been won using an AI lawyer.

A freelance HR consultant, Tamires Camal Taquidir, paid the firm, called Garfield AI, about £400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of £7,000.

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AI models that can take down governments and business months away, rare Five Eyes statement warns

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Signal agencies in Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada sound alarm after Trump blocks foreign nationals from Anthropic’s Fable AI model

Powerful AI models capable of taking down governments and businesses are mere months away, cyber intelligence agencies for the Five Eyes have warned in a rare joint statement, urging leaders to “act now”.

The surprising public intervention by signals agencies for Australia, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Canada comes after the Trump administration earlier this month decided to block “foreign nationals” from using a much-hyped AI model built by tech company Anthropic, called Fable.

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Push for electrification finally takes centre stage in pre-Cop31 climate talks

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Apart from effort to electrify, there were geopolitical tensions around climate science and the 1.5C goal

Electrifying the world – with electric vehicles, electric heating and cooling, and modernised heavy industry – could be the next biggest step towards phasing out fossil fuels, replacing the 80% of global energy that still comes from hydrocarbons. As using electrical energy is much more efficient than combustion, the move would save billions of dollars for consumers and businesses – global energy demand could be halved, according to one estimate.

For decades, electrification has been a nerdish backwater of global climate action. But in the last two weeks, at preparatory talks in Bonn before the forthcoming UN Cop31 climate summit, the subject finally took centre stage.

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UK critical infrastructure hit by 200 cyber incidents in a year, agency says

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Head of National Cyber Security Centre says UK in ‘ongoing contest with capable adversaries’ and AI could add to threat

The UK’s critical national infrastructure has been hit by more than 200 cyber incidents over the past year and state-linked assailants were behind three-quarters of the attacks, according to the state cybersecurity body.

Richard Horne, the chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, said hostile states such as Russia, China and Iran were increasingly targeting systems behind the UK’s key services. Examples of critical national infrastructure include the UK’s nuclear deterrent, power plants, hospitals and airports.

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France to ditch Palantir’s AI data tools in favour of domestic provider

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Move to ChapsVision is to avoid ‘strategic dependencies’, says PM amid concern about reliance on US-controlled tools

France’s domestic intelligence service is to ditch AI data tools from the US tech company Palantir in favour of a domestic provider in an effort to avoid “strategic dependency”, the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has said.

“We must use our own AI models; we cannot accept new strategic dependencies in ‌the digital sphere,” Lecornu posted on social media. “We cannot rely on tools developed by foreign powers. France must have its own tools.”

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Technology secretary says she wants regulator to design plans for online age verification by October – as it happened

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Liz Kendall also wants Ofcom to report to parliament every year on how effectively social media firms are keeping under-16s off their platforms

Starmer acknowledges some teenagers will get round these restrictons. But that does not make the rules pointless, he says.

Will it mean that no child ever looks at social media again? No.

But look, this might shock you, but it doesn’t shock parents of teenagers; they get around other laws too.

Some technology companies want us to think that social media is unchangeable, part of an almost natural order.

But we have to resist that kind of learned helplessness. We have agency, we can change it, and we will.

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