Whether you want to free it or regulate it into submission, one thing is clear: this new technology is moving so fast that we can’t fully grasp it

At an 80th birthday party at the weekend, I met an academic who was evasive about his field. When he finally disclosed “computer science”, I asked him why he hadn’t wanted to say, and he replied: “Because I cannot have one more conversation about AI.” I couldn’t ask him why not, because of stupid manners; that would have been one more conversation about AI. But I don’t want to have another conversation about AI either.

Nobody’s opinion, whether utopian or dystopian, seems to keep up with the thing itself, so everything has the laggy, outdated feeling of a BBC Radio 4 afternoon play about AI. There was one last week, and I listened to it patchily, thinking: “If AI had written this, it would have made a more sophisticated evaluation of the threat posed by itself, and been less hammy, unless the instruction had specifically been, ‘Write some dialogue in the style of a pretend-family on a party political broadcast from the 90s.’”

Google, Amazon, Apple and Samsung control operating systems, allowing them to act as gatekeepers, letter claims

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The world’s largest broadcasters have pushed for the EU to enforce its toughest regulations against virtual TVs and smart assistants built by Google, Amazon, Apple and Samsung.

The call came in a letter from the Association of Commercial Television and Video on Demand Services in Europe (ACT), whose members include Canal+, RTL, Mediaset, ITV, Paramount+, NBCUniversal, Walt Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Sky and TF1 Groupe.

As watching videos, using touchscreens, and even livestreaming behind the wheel become more common, experts warn of increased risk of crashes

Jackie was on her way to a doctor’s appointment last fall when she realized her Uber driver’s eyes were not fully on the road. “He had a video playing on his phone and was intermittently looking at it,” she said. Jackie, who is 32 and lives in New Jersey, could not tell exactly what the driver was watching, but she remembers seeing shots of people talking – she guessed it was a video podcast. “I was definitely feeling a lot of dread and distress.”

As they continued on their 40-minute drive down the New Jersey Turnpike – a hectic highway that is not easy driving – Jackie considered saying something. But she felt vulnerable as a rider. “I was alone in a car with someone who was already doing something I found shocking and reckless,” she said. “I didn’t know how they were going to react.”

Criminals extorting money online have created huge businesses, complete with branding and HR

The birth of ransomware was a stunt that got out of hand. In 1989, an evolutionary biologist called Joseph L Popp Jr was working part time for the World Health Organisation on the Aids epidemic. He was a difficult man. When he was denied a permanent job, he decided to punish his peers while shocking them into acknowledging another kind of infection: the computer virus.

Popp wrote a questionnaire promising to help minimise the risk of contracting HIV, duplicated it on to 20,000 floppy discs, and sent them to researchers in 90 countries. Each disc contained a Trojan virus. Once it was inserted, a malware timebomb eventually made the computer unusable until the user paid a “licence fee” of $189 to a PO box in Panama. Popp’s primitive “Aids Trojan” was quickly identified and he was arrested for blackmail. Intending to make a point rather than a profit, he was mortified to learn that some of his targets had overreacted by wiping their hard drives: one Italian Aids organisation lost a decade’s worth of vital data. Popp experienced a psychological collapse and was deemed unfit to stand trial. The criminals who developed his crude innovation into a global business would not be so scrupulous.

Mid-range handset gets chip, storage and MagSafe upgrades to offer more essential iOS features for less

The cheapest new iPhone has been upgraded for this year with a faster chip, double the storage, automatic portraits and MagSafe, providing even more of the core Apple smartphone experience for less.

The iPhone 17e is an upgraded version of the mid-range “e” line launched last year with the first iPhone 16e and is the latest member of the iPhone 17 family. It starts at £599 (€699/$599/A$999), undercutting the iPhone 17 and iPhone 16 by £200 and £100 respectively to be the cheapest new iPhone sold by Apple.

Screen: 6.1in Super Retina XDR (OLED) (460ppi)

Processor: Apple A19 (4-core GPU)

RAM: 8GB

Storage: 256 or 512GB

Operating system: iOS 26

Camera: 48MP rear; 12MP front-facing

Connectivity: 5G, wifi 6, NFC, Bluetooth 5.3, USB-C, Satellite and GNSS

Water resistance: IP68 (6 metres for 30 mins)

Dimensions: 146.7 x 71.5 x 7.8mm

Weight: 170g

What was supposed to be a quick win has become a quagmire, so it now must be reduced to a dopamine hit

The war on Iran, even as it spreads and destabilises the Middle East and the global economy, is not real. This is how it is being portrayed by the Trump administration. The war is a video game, a spectator sport, a social media festival of dunking. The architects of this war have made a virtue out of stupidity, and have been supported in that by a stupefying information ecosystem. The conflict waged by the US feels like the first of its kind in the modern age: distinctly remote and profoundly ignorant.

A week into the war, the White House uploaded a clip on its social media channels featuring montages of Top Gun, Braveheart and Breaking Bad, with the caption “Justice the American way” – itself a repurposing of a Superman motto. In another, entitled Touchdown, NFL players tackle each other and upon contact, boom, footage of a strike explosion tagged “unclassified”. SpongeBob SquarePants also makes an appearance , asking, “Wanna see me do it again?”, and then, an explosion. In another, Operation Epic Fury is rendered as a Nintendo Wii game.

Exclusive: Allowing US tech firm to analyse intelligence in name of tackling fraud raises fresh concerns over privacy

• Campaign groups rail against Palantir, but the UK contracts keep coming

Palantir is to be granted access to a trove of highly sensitive UK financial regulation data, in a deal that has prompted fresh concerns about the US AI company’s deepening reach into the British state , the Guardian can reveal.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has awarded Palantir a contract to investigate the watchdog’s internal intelligence data in an effort to help it tackle financial crime, which includes investigating fraud, money laundering and insider trading.

Gig AI trainers worldwide are selling moments of their lives, including calls and texts, to AI companies for quick cash

One morning last year, Jacobus Louw set out on his daily neighborhood walk to feed the seagulls he finds along the way. Except this time, he recorded several videos of his feet and the view as he walked on the pavement. The video earned him $14, about 10 times the country’s minimum wage, or for Louw, a 27-year-old based in Cape Town, South Africa, half a week’s worth of groceries.

The video was for an “Urban Navigation” task Louw found on Kled AI, an app that pays contributors for uploading their data, such as videos and photos, to train artificial intelligence models. In a couple of weeks, Louw made $50 by uploading pictures and videos of his everyday life.

Iran war should be wake-up call about costs of not going full throttle towards EVs as Chinese have done, experts say

By the 1980s, Detroit’s once titanic carmakers were being upended by rivals from Japan. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler had grown rich selling gas guzzlers, but when oil prices rose and suddenly cheap, fuel-efficient Japanese models looked attractive, they were unprepared. The collapse in sales led to hundreds of thousands of job losses in the automotive heartland of the US.

Now western car manufacturers are making what one former boss calls a similar “profound strategic mistake” as they pull back from electric vehicles (EVs) and refocus on the combustion engine just as oil prices are soaring once again. Experts say the industry’s future – and that of tens of millions of jobs – could be on the line. This time, however, the threat is from China.