There are many tech irritants that are a scourge of modern life, yet we have lacked the vocabulary to describe them ... until nowThe “dickover” is the scourge of the modern age. Coined in May by John Gruber, a tech writer, it is defined as “a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user”. Essentially, it is the thing (or more often, things) you have to click away in order to read the thing you wanted to read. It is the “accept cookies” box, the “allow notifications?” box, the “sign in with Google” box, the pop-up video box, etc.We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that dickovers are the only terrible thing about technology in 2026. Until now, though, we have lacked the vocabulary to describe them, so here are some suggestions. Continue reading...
State attorneys general allege that tech company intentionally designed addictive products that harm young peopleMore than half of the states in the US have joined together in an unprecedented lawsuit against Meta that goes to trial on Tuesday, accusing the parent company of Instagram and Facebook of deliberately designing addictive products that lured in young people and caused them harm.The jury trial is taking place in federal court in Oakland, California, and is expected to last between six and eight weeks. The jury is expected to hear from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri and employee turned whistleblower Arturo Béjar. Continue reading...
Many hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia – but some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. Why did nobody listen?One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn’t have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet. It’s as if everyone is screaming (some ecstatically, most terror-stricken): robots are taking over the world! Meanwhile, you can’t put down your phone, unplug, delete your AI apps, tell Zoom to piss off; it feels as if you are racing toward something, and can’t stop, or look back, or think straight.But of course this weird moment in history does have a past. It comes from somewhere. It wasn’t inevitable. Things could have turned out differently. They still can. And if you look back, one thing you’ll see is that a lot of people saw this all coming. They foresaw our present when it was still the future. They thought it might turn out fabulously, a computer utopia. And they worried it might turn out disastrously. Above all, they issued warning after warning about the rise of what I call the artificial state, the replacement of the liberal democratic nation-state, the consent of the governed, with the rule of people by machines. They warned of a future in which democratic deliberation would be replaced by prediction by calculation, the public sphere would be supplanted by data-driven commerce, and drones would take the place of the demos. Why didn’t anyone listen?The new underworld is made up of innocent and well-intentioned people who work with slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost infinite number of bits of information as well as sort, categorise, and reproduce this information at the press of a button. Most of these people are highly educated, many of them are PhDs, and none that I have met have malignant political designs on the American public. They may, however, radically reconstruct the American political system, build a new politics, and even modify revered and venerable American institutions – facts of which they are blissfully innocent. Continue reading...
DataVita set to expand datacentre capacity while Dell Scotland relocates main office to Lanarkshire
Anthropic says it will change way chatbot makes small, random choices, to comply with EU regulationThe world is familiar by now with the usual tropes of machine-generated text: overuse of the word “delve”, an excess of em dashes, and the chirpy, relentless construction of “it’s not X but Y”.But is it about to get even worse? Continue reading...
Multinational giants such as Philips and Shell may have been affected after the Cl0p cyber extortion gang hacked a popular piece of PLM software
Supermarket chain says ‘human error’, not its Facewatch technology, to blame for ejecting a customerSainsbury’s has paused the use of AI face scanning in one of its stores after a customer was wrongly identified as a shoplifter and ejected from the shop.“I was embarrassed, mortified even, and felt quite humiliated and powerless,” Matt Arnold, 46, said of his ordeal. Continue reading...
Temperatures could drop by more than 15C compared with last Thursday as cold front moves inRelief from the unrelenting heat is finally arriving this week across western Europe, with more unsettled conditions bringing the chance of rain. Temperatures are expected to fall back towards the seasonal norm, with some parts of the UK even falling about 3C below normal by Thursday. After such a scorching summer, and with a temperature drop of more than 15C compared with last Thursday’s heat, it may feel surprisingly chilly.There are signs that some substantial rain could be on the cards for the south of the UK this week as a cold front moves in from the Atlantic on Monday night into Tuesday. As of Monday, parts of southern England had endured 62 consecutive days of no rainfall – this is observed at a Met Office weather station in Wisley, Surrey. Even the last recorded rainfall here on 16 June amounted to just 0.4mm. Continue reading...
More than 50 sensors feed temperature, humidity and acoustic readings into the Museum’s AWS Data Ecosystem, which found woodland soils stayed 10°C cooler in June’s heatwave
Guardian investigation finds apparent discrepancy between what tech company has said about its AI capacity – and the number of advanced chips it has in operationThe chips are quite small and some can be held in the palm of a hand. They are fundamental to the development of artificial intelligence models – and the world’s biggest technology companies need vast numbers of them to keep ahead.Microsoft is one of them. And, on paper, it seems to have a problem. A Guardian investigation has found an apparent discrepancy between what the company has said about its AI capacity – and the number of advanced AI chips it has in operation. Continue reading...
In June, MP Jess Asato began a legal case over AI-generated explicit images of herself generated without her permission by the xAI Grok AI engine
Technology is only as strong as the confidence people have in it. Building truly resilient organisations requires a deliberate blend of cultural adaptability, clear leadership, and systems designed for consistency under pressure
Computer Weekly reveals for the first time how French cyber spies hacked EncroChat phones used by organised crime groups
Amid fears for jobs, some film-makers say AI could enable them to bypass studio giants and take more creative risksNear the collonaded entrance to Sony Pictures’ historic Culver City film studio, a tech-powered rival has sprung up this summer. The artists at Promise, a new studio feeding off the potential of AI, can glimpse the lots where Singin’ in the Rain and Men in Black were shot, but no longer do they need to get beyond the studio’s high walls to make their visions come true.From far more modest premises, they are making movies with rapidly accelerating AI models that create backgrounds, special effects and even “synthetic performers” – using US models but also driven by market-leading Chinese AI. Continue reading...
The company is using artificial intelligence with Box to help it classify and understand documentation
In Computer Weekly’s search for this year’s top 50 Most Influential Women in UK Tech, hundreds of women have been put forward for consideration. Here, we look at a list of everyone nominated in 2026