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Google’s partnership with GenAI startup Anthropic is raising eyebrows in the UK as the trend of big tech giants backing young AI companies continues. The Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Tuesday that it’s collecting information on whether the partnership qualifies as a merger and negatively impacts UK competition. In October, Google-parent company Alphabet reportedly committed $2bn to the San-Francisco based startup, which...

London-based Stairpay has raised £750k in Pre-Seed funding to help first-time home buyers navigate the shared ownership process — and ultimately move to full ownership. For individuals facing challenges entering the (overcrowded) UK housing market, shared ownership offers a potential solution. This government scheme allows buyers to purchase a share of a property (usually between 25% and 75%), while paying rent on the rest...

Just as the sun rises and sets, some things are inevitable. Consider technology. As soon as something new emerges, people invariably find a way to abuse it. In recent years, this mantle has fallen on artificial intelligence (AI) and one of its most troubling side effects — the rise of nonconsensual deepfake pornography. The idea is as simple as it is horrendous: using digital...

Several long-distance fibre-optic cables in France were “sabotaged” overnight, according to local police, causing widespread disruptions to internet services across the country.  The perpetrators remain at large, as the cat-and-mouse between police and criminals at the Olympics continues on the sidelines of sprints, swims, and shot puts.  The internet cables were severed early on Monday morning, said network provider Netalis on X. Junior Minister...

The race for semiconductor leadership is on — and European chip startups are rising to the challenge. Europe is already home to high-profile chip companies including ASML, NXP, Arm, and Infineon. However, it lags behind in manufacturing capacity. The EU is currently producing about 10% of the world’s semiconductors. The UK accounted for 0.5% of chip sales globally in 2023. In an ongoing battle...

Dutch airline KLM has teamed up with British-American startup ZeroAvia to develop a liquid hydrogen-powered turboprop aircraft. The partners aim to conduct a flight demonstration between two yet-to-be-named airports in 2026. ZeroAvia builds hydrogen-electric powertrains that can be retrofitted onto new or existing aircraft. The company has raised over $300mn from the likes of Airbus, Amazon, and British Airways to realise its vision for...

Elon Musk could have yet another problem with the European Union. Musk’s X has enabled the Grok chatbot to be trained on data from any user. This feature is now on by default, which may breach EU rules. Deep within the settings of X, users unearthed evidence of the data harvesting. Besides a check box that was already ticked, they spotted the following text:...

Popular LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr has disabled location-based features for users within the Olympic village of the Paris Games, which kicked off today.  The measures are not designed to stop athletes hooking up between sprints, swims, or shot puts — they’re a safety precaution.  “If an athlete is not out or comes from a country where being LGBTQ+ is dangerous or illegal, using Grindr...

The Paris Olympics 2024 kicked off today. But as the City of Light opens its gates to millions of spectators, officials are bracing themselves for a cyber war. Analysts predict that there could be as many as four billion cyber attacks at this year’s Games. The official Paris Olympics 2024 app is particularly vulnerable.  “This app handles vast amounts of personal and transactional data,...

Installing and updating applications and other dependencies on a computer really should be a solved problem by now. Yet almost every major desktop operating system provides multiple options, with no real clear answer to “which is best.”  Linux, despite long-established package managers such as apt, deb, and rpm, just to name a few, still suffers from confusion and inconsistency between open source vs proprietary...