Book-style Android with cutting-edge AI, good cameras and great tablet screen for media and multitasking on the go

Google’s third-generation folding phone promises to be more durable than all others as the first with full water and dust resistance while also packing lots of advanced AI and an adaptable set of cameras.

The Pixel 10 Pro Fold builds on last year’s excellent 9 Pro Fold by doing away with gears in the hinge along its spine allowing it to deal with dust, which has been the achilles heel of all foldable phones until now, gumming up the works in a way that just isn’t a problem for regular slab phones.

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Male Allies UK worries rise in chatbot ‘girlfriends’ will leave boys unable to socialise and respect boundaries

The “hyper-personalised” nature of AI bots is drawing in teenage boys who now use them for therapy, companionship and relationships, according to research.

A survey of boys in secondary schools by Male Allies UK found that just over a third said they were considering the idea of an AI friend, with growing concern about the rise of AI therapists and girlfriends.

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Tech giant reports earnings of $3.72 per share day after deal with OpenAI pushed value of company to more than $4tn

Microsoft blew off concerns of overspending on AI on Wednesday, reporting elevated earnings even as it faced an outage of its cloud computing service, Azure, and its office software suite, 365. The strong earnings report comes a day after a deal with OpenAI pushed the value of tech giant to more than $4tn.

After its Xbox and investor relations pages went down, the company issued a statement: “We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services.”

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Strong demand for ads and cloud services powered tech giant’s growth as it makes multibillion-dollar AI investment

Google ’s parent company, Alphabet , displayed steady growth in its core advertising business and cloud computing division as it reported third-quarter earnings on Wednesday, beating Wall Street estimates as it reported its first quarter of $100bn in revenue.

The company thrilled Wall Street – shares rose in after-hours trading – even as it announced that it would spend billions more than previously predicted. Alphabet raised its capital expenditure guidance in financial filings, declaring it would spend between $91bn and $93bn in the upcoming year, nearly all of it on infrastructure like datacenters to support artificial intelligence products, which are becoming an integral part of the company’s business. That estimate is up from an original declaration of $75bn in February and a revised figure of $85bn announced in July.

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Move comes as lawmakers move to bar minors from using AI companions and require companies to verify users’ age

The chatbot company Character.AI will ban users 18 and under from conversing with its virtual companions beginning in late November after months of legal scrutiny.

The announced change comes after the company, which enables its users to create characters with which they can have open-ended conversations, faced tough questions over how these AI companions can affect teen and general mental health , including a lawsuit over a child ’s suicide and a proposed bill that would ban minors from conversing with AI companions.

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Dyson’s latest cleaner is the company’s biggest redesign in years. We put it through its paces on everything from flour to pet hair

• The best cordless vacuum cleaners for a spotless home

The arrival of a new Dyson vacuum cleaner is always exciting for a couple of reasons. First, it’s interesting to see what Dyson’s engineers have developed to try to persuade us that a £750 vacuum cleaner will be a vital addition to our lives. The other is that it usually pushes down the price of older models, which is great news for bargain hunters.

The V16 Piston Animal has several new features, the most significant being its floor head. Besides the introduction of anti-tangle combs, we haven’t seen such a departure from the status quo since Dyson launched its Fluffy floor head for hard floors back in 2015. There’s arguably a good reason behind this conservatism, because Dyson’s previous designs have performed brilliantly in the cleaning tests I’ve put them through over the years. However, perhaps controversially, this model ditches the duo of brush bar and fluffy roller floor heads that have been a Dyson staple for a decade, using just one combination floor head for both carpet and hard floor.

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Silicon Valley chipmaker hits $5tn valuation just three months after it was first to break through the $4tn barrier

Nvidia has become the world’s first $5tn company, just three months after the Silicon Valley chipmaker was first to break through the barrier of $4tn in market value.

In comparison, Nvidia’s value is greater than the GDP of India, Japan and the United Kingdom, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

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European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association say carmakers are relying on reserve stock of Nexperia chip after China’s export ban

Carmakers in the EU are “days away” from closing production lines, the industry has warned as a crisis over computer chip supplies from China escalates.

The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) issued an urgent warning on Wednesday saying its members, which include Volkswagen, Fiat, Peugeot and BMW, were now working on “reserve stocks but supplies are dwindling”.

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The tech giants agreed to extraordinary terms to clinch a lucrative contract with the Israeli government, documents show

When Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2bn cloud-computing deal in 2021, their customer – the Israeli government – had an unusual demand: agree to use a secret code as part of an arrangement that would become known as the “winking mechanism”.

The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world, was born out of Israel’s concerns that data it moves into the global corporations’ cloud platforms could end up in the hands of foreign law enforcement authorities.

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