The Guardian

Tech platforms will need to deactivate accounts for users under 16 and stop teens from making accounts until they are that age, or face fines of up to $50m Get our breaking news email , free app or daily news podcast Australia’s world-first social media ban for children under the age of 16 is just weeks away. The tech platforms – large and small – are working on functionality that will kick off e…

An online personality quiz made me feel understood, but it also created a mental cage Sometimes, taking an internet quiz on a random Tuesday night can change your life – first for the better, then for the worse. Are you bothered by intense stimuli, like loud noises, strong smells or caffeine? Are you deeply moved by the arts or nature? Do you become overwhelmed when a lot is going on around you? …

Ill-advised, in which 75-year-old actor doles out advice and his innermost secrets, is fast becoming cult podcast of the year Bill Nighy is single. He has never read a self-help book, had no intention of becoming an actor and briefly went deaf after putting toilet paper in his ears to get to sleep. He has shutters, not curtains, in his bedroom, but has no idea what time he wakes up. If you invite…

Saudi Arabia’s investment in Twitter increased its influence in Silicon Valley while being used at home to shut down critics of the regime By Jacob Silverman. Read by Nezar Alderazi Continue reading...

X chatbot suggested gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau were ‘designed for disinfection’ not mass executions Europe live – latest updates French public prosecutors are investigating allegations by government ministers and human rights groups that Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, made statements denying the Holocaust. The Paris public prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday night it was expanding an exi…

Bet365, League of Legends, Sage, YouTube and Google were among those taken offline as provider tried to fix problem Cloudflare outage causes error messages across the internet The internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare suffered an outage on Tuesday, making many websites inaccessible for about three hours. Continue reading...

US company whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks experiences unidentified problem Cloudflare outage causes error messages across the internet Cloudflare, whose network handles around a fifth of web traffic, has deployed a fix and is slowly recovering service. But there are still key platforms down, such as ChatGPT. “We are continuing working on restoring …

US company that defends millions of websites against malicious attacks suffers unidentified problem A key piece of the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure suffered a global outage on Monday, causing error messages to flash up across websites. Cloudflare, a US company whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks, suffered an unidentified problem on Tuesday, …

The offensive listing seemed more than a mistake – it was a failure of corporate responsibility, says reader I found a baby outfit (sizes from newborn to five years) on Amazon bearing the phrase “Santa’s favourite ho”. This isn’t just a tasteless mistake – it’s a failure of corporate responsibility and consumer protection. A corporation this large should have systems that prevent sexuali sed or e…

The EU is under US pressure to unravel its hard-won online safety laws. We must not give in Protecting our digital sovereignty is crucial. The challenge is why European decision makers are meeting in Berlin on Tuesday at the behest of the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron. As individuals, we spend four to five hours a day accessing the internet via our s…

World’s richest person wanted to ‘purge’ propaganda from Wikipedia, so he created a compendium of racist disinformation Entries in Elon Musk ’s new online encyclopedia variously promote white nationalist talking points, praise neo-Nazis and other far-right figures, promote racist ideologies and white supremacist regimes, and attempt to revive concepts and approaches historically associated with s…

Sarah Pritchard suggests City regulator will make use of oversight powers amid growing number of outages The City watchdog has said the UK needs to “strengthen” its grip on foreign tech firms providing critical services to banks, amid growing concerns over outages and cyber-attacks. Sarah Pritchard, who was appointed the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) first deputy chief executive this summer…

Feeling overwhelmed by divisive opinions, endless rows and unreliable facts? Here’s how to weather the data storm We all live in history. A lot of the problems that face us, and the opportunities that present themselves, are defined not by our own choices or even the specific place or government we’re living under, but by the particular epoch of human events that our lives happen to coincide with…

Anthropic says financial firms and government agencies were attacked ‘largely without human intervention’ A leading artificial intelligence company claims to have stopped a China-backed “cyber espionage” campaign that was able to infiltrate financial firms and government agencies with almost no human oversight. The US-based Anthropic said its coding tool, Claude Code, was “manipulated” by a Chine…

Royal Court theatre, London Sophia Chetin-Leuner’s drama toggles between digital and physical worlds as it traces a scholar’s grim compulsion ‘It’s not that deep,” Ani’s friend assures her. Who cares if she watches a lot of extreme pornography? But after the light is switched off, Ani can’t get through their impromptu sleepover without masturbating to porn on her phone. The friend wakes up next t…