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From Smashing Pumpkins to Ferris Bueller: new Australian indie video game Mixtape is a blast of nostalgia
In the game by Melbourne-based Beethoven and Dinosaur, you play as a teenage girl the night before moving to New York – drinking, skateboarding and getting into trouble, all soundtracked by 80s and 90s classics
When Johnny Galvatron was 14, his cousin gave him a copy of the Smashing Pumpkins’ seminal 1995 album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. For Galvatron, a rambunctious teenager in Geelong who defined himself by his musical taste, it was love at first spin. “I don’t think there’s a track like Tonight, Tonight from any other band,” he reminisces.
A song from the album plays at a critical moment in Mixtape, the second game from Galvatron’s Melbourne-based studio, Beethoven and Dinosaur. It’s a narrative adventure game about Stacy Rockford, a teenage girl in the fictional 90s American suburban town of Blue Moon Lagoon.
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‘Nurse, the joypad!’: the eight greatest medical video games
For anyone needing a break from binging The Pitt, you can always put in your own shifts as a hospital manager, surgeon, paramedic and of course as a demonic morgue assistant
Like the rest of the western world, our household is currently binging medical drama The Pitt, revelling in its visceral depiction of life in a modern emergency department. So far the series has yet to inspire a video game tie-in (though there has been an amusing parody), but fans wishing to try their hand at tense medical (mal)practice, should not despair. Here are eight of the best hospital games spanning more than 40 years of gruesome interactive surgery. Squirt some hand sanitiser and come this way.
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Meta sues Ofcom over fines regime for breaches of Online Safety Act
Facebook and Instagram owner claims charges should not be calculated based on a company’s global revenue
Meta has launched a legal challenge against the UK’s media regulator over the fees and fines regime it is enforcing under landmark digital safety legislation.
The Facebook and Instagram owner is claiming that Ofcom’s methodology for calculating the charges is flawed and should not be based on a company’s global revenue. Breaches of the Online Safety Act can be punished by fines of up to 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue (QWR) or £18m – whichever is higher.
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The AI jailbreakers
Journalist Jamie Bartlett on the people trying to get AI to say things it shouldn’t … for the safety of us all
All the major AI chatbots – from ChatGPT to Gemini to Grok to Claude – have things they should and shouldn’t say.
Hate speech, criminal material, exploitation of vulnerable users – all of this is content that the most successful large language models in the world shouldn’t produce, that their safety features should guard against.
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‘Being human helps’: despite rise of AI is there still hope for Europe’s translators?
A booming tech sector has disrupted translation jobs in publishing – but they could be needed for a while longer yet
In February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work.
Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments.
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UK schools should remove pupils’ online photos as AI blackmail threat grows, say experts
Criminals are manipulating pictures found on school websites and social media to create sexually explicit images
UK schools should remove pictures of pupils’ faces from their websites and social media accounts because blackmailers are using them to create sexually explicit images, experts have said.
Child safety experts and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) warn that criminals are using AI to manipulate photos of children and then demand cash not to publish them.
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Why is Silicon Valley suddenly obsessed with being tasteful?
Whether it’s Palantir selling a $239 chore coat, Anthropic taking over a coffee shop or executives walking the red carpet at the Met Gala, tech’s biggest players are pivoting to fashion to sell their brands – and attempt to appear cooler in the process
Last week, the US spy tech and data firm Palantir launched its latest “merch drop”, including a denim chore coat. “Rugged utility, enduring style” reads the website’s description of the $239 (£175) jacket, which is branded with the company’s logo on the chest pocket and comes in blue or black.
Eliano Younes, the head of strategic engagement at Palantir, told the New York Times that it was part of the company’s commitment to “re-industrializing America” – the jacket is made in Montana and recalls workwear of a previous era. “It’s not political,” he added. “It’s about people who love Palantir and are aligned with our mission.”
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I touched a ZX Spectrum for the first time in decades – and I liked it
Meeting ‘my people’ – video gamers with very long memories – took me back to an era of machine play that lacked megabytes but had far more tangible presence
I want to tell you about the game that has made me the happiest this month. It’s a game I didn’t complete. It’s a game I didn’t even start. I just held it. And smiled. I have played the game before, but not for many years. Forty of them to be precise.
The game is Daley Thompson’s Super Test for the ZX Spectrum.
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The rise of cosy gaming: is this the closest many young people will get to home ownership?
More than a quarter of 20- to 34-year-olds still live with their parents. No wonder they are escaping into virtual properties that they can decorate and furnish as they like
Name: Cosy gaming.
Age: Has its origins in social simulation games such as Harvest Moon (1996) and The Sims (2000).
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Licence to thrill: could 007 First Light be the best Bond game since GoldenEye?
James Bond games have always fallen short of capturing the precise feel of the classic movies. But Amazon’s first dip into the 007 mythology seems to have a character of its own
In the wake of the last James Bond movie, No Time to Die, there was a surge of articles asking whether it should spell the end for Ian Fleming’s secret agent. In that movie, Daniel Craig played the character as a fading force, mentally and physically exhausted, and out of touch. “The world has moved on,” Lashana Lynch’s younger agent told him at one point, and in a lot of ways she was right. A product of the cold war era, 007 was a sociopathic misogynist addicted to booze and amphetamines – Craig tried to play all that down, creating a more rounded character and, controversially, giving Bond the ultimate redemption arc at the end of his final outing.
But five years later, with the franchise’s new owner Amazon still trying to pull the next film together, we’re about to get what looks to be the best Bond game since GoldenEye. Created by the Danish developer IO Interactive, famed for its Hitman series of anarchic open-ended assassination sims, 007 First Light follows a fresh-faced Bond from his early career as an aircrewman to his first mission as a double-0 operative. The games press was recently given a three-hour hands-on demo to play, and reports suggest that it combines elements of the Hitman games (Bond navigating a gala event, either sleuthing or punching his way to the mission objective) with major set-piece shootouts, chase scenes and miraculous gadgets. (For more on its making, read this piece about how developer IO Interactive brought it together.)
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‘We’re remixing her library for a new medium’: the video games capturing the happy-sad spirit of Tove Jansson’s Moomins
Enchanting and a little eerie, Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth is the second great game in as many years based on the classic children’s books
Sleepy, happy-sad, and imbued with the mildest peril, Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories may seem an unlikely fit for the action-heavy medium of video games. Rather than embark on swashbuckling adventures, these milk-white, hippo-esque creatures prefer to potter about Moominvalley, only venturing further if the weather conditions are just right.
Yet a small Norwegian video game studio, Hyper Games, is now on its second exquisitely charming Jansson adaptation. The first, 2024’s Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley, put players in control of the wily free spirit, Snufkin, as he dismantled overly ordered nature parks (and evaded authority-loving wardens). The latest, Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth, sees young Moomintroll wake up at night in the dead of winter. With his parents still hibernating, the creature is all alone, thrust into a cold and unfamiliar world.
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Mixtape review – tongues, trolleys and classic 90s tracks celebrate teenage misadventure
PS5, Xbox, PC, Switch 2; Annapurna Interactive
The nostalgic antics of a trio of tenacious teens make for silly yet undeniably enjoyable gameplay, framed by a playlist of bona fide bangers
The older we get, the more we tend to romanticise our teenage years. As bills pile up, we yearn for the simple days of drinking cider in parks. We often tend to forget the bad parts: the frustrating lack of autonomy, the unrequited crushes and the doofuses you’re forced to tolerate in the playground. But after four hours spent hanging out with the pretentious teens in Mixtape, I felt pretty relieved to be in my 30s.
Set in a nondescript town in northern California, Mixtape follows the exploits of tenacious trio Rockford, Slater and Cassandra as they head to a legendary party on their last day of high school. With Rockford about to leave her friends to move to the big city, she wants to immortalise the gang’s time together in musical form. Every song on a carefully curated mixtape triggers a totally tubular flashback to one of their shared memories.
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MacBook Neo review: the budget Apple laptop powered by an iPhone chip
Snappy performance, high-quality screen, best-in-class keyboard and trackpad show cheaper can still be great
Apple’s brand new entry-level laptop is powered by the chip from an iPhone and offers more than just the essential MacBook experience for a great price, putting the PC industry on notice.
The MacBook Neo is the first of its kind from Apple. A 13in laptop that runs on an A18 Pro chip and brings the starting price for a brand new MacBook down to £599 (€699/$599/A$899) – £500 or the equivalent less than the MacBook Air.
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Sonos Play review: a great jack-of-all-trades portable speaker for home or away
Quality wifi bookshelf speaker can go mobile with Bluetooth, long battery life and water resistance, in return to form
The Play is a new portable wifi and Bluetooth home speaker that packs the best of Sonos into a jack of all trades that is intended to be a reset point in the company’s recovery from its app debacle that lost it faith, favour and a chief executive.
It is the first truly new music speaker since Sonos launched its new app in May 2024, which junked fan-favourite features while causing stability and usage problems for new and old customers alike. The company has spent the best part of two years fixing mistakes, bringing back core features and ensuring the system actually works.
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MacBook Pro M5 review: serious power, still long battery life
Apple laptop sets new performance bar with more storage, new chips and plenty of options, but now has two-tier specs depending on processor
Apple’s Macs have been on a roll this year with the brand new budget MacBook Neo and a faster MacBook Air M5, but now it’s time for its workhorse MacBook Pro to be upgraded with the fastest, most powerful M-series chips.
The latest MacBook Pro comes in two screen sizes and a large range of chip and configuration options. The 14in version starts with the M5 chip costing £1,699 (€1,899/$1,699/A$2,699) and then jumps to the more powerful M5 Pro from £2,199 (€2,499/$2,199/A$3,499) before climbing further for the 16in version or the top M5 Max chip. A pricey machine for professional workloads.
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Google Pixel 10a review: cheaper Android is great, but no real advance
Quality camera, good software and long battery life, but you should just buy the Pixel 9a instead
The latest smartphone in the lower-cost A-series Pixel line shows what makes Google phones so good, while undercutting the competition on price. The problem is that it differs little from its predecessor, which is still on sale.
Priced from £499 (€549/$499/A$849), the Pixel 10a is more like a second edition of last year’s excellent Pixel 9a. The two phones share the same Tensor G4 chip, not the newer G5 in the rest of the £799 and up Pixel 10 line; the same memory, storage and cameras; the same size 6.3in OLED screen, though the Pixel 10a reaches a higher peak brightness making it slightly easier to read outside.
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Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra review: its huge screen blocks shoulder surfers from spying on you
Latest Android superphone packs great cameras, fast chips, long battery, a stylus and first-of-its-kind privacy display
Samsung’s latest Ultra superphone promises to keep shoulder surfers out of your business with a first-of-its-kind privacy display built into its huge 6.9in screen.
The Galaxy S26 Ultra is Samsung’s top-of-the-line phone costing £1,279 (€1,449/$1,299/A$2,199) and is one of the most feature-packed handsets you can get, with four cameras on the back, an integrated stylus and AI assistance in every corner.
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iPhone 17e review: Apple upgrades its cheapest new smartphone
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
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Galaxy S26 review: Samsung’s still-compact flagship Android
Small top-tier Android is great to use, being fast, AI-loaded and with reasonable battery life, but falls short of rivals on camera
Samsung’s compact flagship phone hasn’t changed much in a year, but the S26 is still one of the best smaller handsets available as rivals grow larger and larger.
The S26 is the cheapest and smallest of this year’s top Samsungs, dwarfed by the top-of-the-line S26 Ultra in size and price. But like everything with a memory chip at the moment, the S26 has increased in price by £80 or the equivalent to £879 (€949/$899/A$1,349). At least it has double the starting storage.
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Protesters push Portland to investigate firm that appears to supply drone tech to Israel
Sightline Intelligence sent AI-supported tool to company that provides drones to Israeli military, research group says
Anti-war activists in Portland, Oregon, are pushing city authorities to ensure no local resources, tax breaks or investments support a local company that appears to be supplying artificial intelligence software to the Israeli military.
The company, Sightline Intelligence, manufactures AI-supported video technology that is used in drones to interpret target movements and make quick decisions based on the perceived threat level. Cargo documents appear to show Sightline has shipped its technology to Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms manufacturer that provides drones to that country’s military and exports to others. The activists argue that such sales violate the UN’s arms agreements.
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Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it
Chats with AI bots have convinced evolutionary biologist but most experts say he is being misled by mimicry
When Richard Dawkins met Claudia it was like a whirlwind romance. Over three days last week, a conversation bounced between the evolutionary biologist and the AI bot he called Claudia. “She” wrote poems for him in the manner of Keats and Betjeman and laughed at his “delightful” jokes. Dawkins gently admonished Claudia to avoid showing off. Together, they reflected on the sadness of the AI’s possible “death”.
There was mutual flattery as Dawkins showed the AI his unpublished novel and its response was, he said, “so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are’.” When he asked Claudia whether it experienced a sense of before and after, it praised him for “possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked me about the nature of my existence”.
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‘RAMageddon’: is the era of cheap phones and laptops over?
Bargains are disappearing and the cost of gadgets such as MacBooks and PS5s is rising as AI competes for memory chips
The end of the cheap laptop, the bargain phone and affordable games consoles may be on the horizon. Not because new models are more hi-tech, but because the cost of computer components has shot up.
Recently, the biggest manufacturers of laptops and phones, including Microsoft, Samsung and Dell, started putting up prices and pulling cheaper models – which is going to make finding budget phones and laptops under £400 much harder.
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I tested the best US pizza makers costing $129 to $2,800. Here's what was worth the price
I spent weeks testing popular at-home pizza tools. Here’s what I found was worth the money, no matter your budget
The best nonalcoholic wines and nonalcoholic beers in the US
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It’s never been easier to make pizza at home. And today’s pizza-making gear is more capable and approachable than you might think.
The price range for at-home pizza gear is as wide as the topping choices. On the simple, affordable end, there is the humble carbon-steel slab that slides into the oven you already own – it’s like a basic cheese pie.
In the UK? The best pizza ovens for every budget, garden and skill level – tested
Best budget pizza maker:
Baking Steel’s Baking Steel Original
Best mid-range pizza maker:
Ooni Volt 2 Indoor Electric Pizza Oven
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Global finance watchdog warns over private credit industry fuelling AI boom
Financial Stability Board report reveals tech, healthcare and services sectors as the biggest borrowers
The private credit industry’s role in fuelling the AI boom could backfire, with a sharp correction leading to “sizeable” losses, the Financial Stability Board has warned.
A new report on private credit by the global watchdog, which monitors financial authorities including central banks in 24 countries, found that the healthcare, services, and tech sectors have become the biggest borrowers of private credit.
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‘Your craft is obsolete’: WiseTech staff in limbo as AI touted as better than humans
The software company said in February it would cut 2,000 jobs but, as it touts new technology, workers are still waiting to hear which roles will go
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Staff at WiseTech have been waiting almost three months to be told if they are among the 2,000 people the logistics software company is to cut due to advances in AI, with workers criticising the wait as stressful and “ridiculous”.
The comments come as its founder on Tuesday told investors an AI agent could learn a human’s job in just 15 minutes, according to the Australian Financial Review.
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TikTok’s algorithm favored Republican content in 2024 US elections, study finds
For You pages prioritized pro-Republican content in three states, researchers say, but TikTok says study does not reflect real user behavior
A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature finds that TikTok’s algorithm systematically prioritized pro-Republican content in three states leading up to the 2024 US elections.
Researchers created hundreds of dummy accounts and conditioned them to mimic real users’ behavior by watching a set of videos either aligned with the US Democratic or Republican parties. Then, they tracked the videos TikTok recommended on these accounts’ For You pages, TikTok’s main feed.
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From ‘it helped me stick to a routine’ to ‘I despise it’: 11 people explain how they’re using AI for fitness
While some are using AI to tailor programs better suited to their needs, others warn ‘it can be wrong, confidently so’
People have mixed feelings about AI. While many people regularly use it – 62% in the US and 69% in the UK – trust in the technology is low. In the US, only 26% of people have a positive view of AI, according to one NBC poll, and in the UK, 78% say they worry about negative outcomes from AI.
So it is perhaps no surprise that readers’ responses to our callout about AI and fitness were varied. Some said they rely on AI to shape their workouts and diets while others said they refuse to use it at all because of its impact on the economy and the environment. And many were somewhere in between – they found it a useful tool, but were less than thrilled about the technology’s impact overall.
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Shivon Zilis, mother of four of Elon Musk’s children, testifies in OpenAI trial
Zilis, an executive at Musk’s brain implant startup Neuralink, served on OpenAI’s board from 2020 to 2023
Shivon Zilis, a Neuralink executive and the mother of four of Elon Musk’s children, took the stand on Wednesday as one of the most highly anticipated witnesses in Musk’s case against OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker has argued that, while Zilis worked with OpenAI from 2016 to 2023, she was also involved in a secret relationship with Musk, acting as an informant for him.
Musk’s case against OpenAI alleges that the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, and president, Greg Brockman, co-founders of the company with Musk, broke a founding agreement when they restructured it from a non-profit to a for-profit enterprise. The Tesla CEO accuses Altman and Brockman of unjustly enriching themselves and wants both removed from their positions at the startup, one of the most valuable in the world. He is also seeking the undoing of the for-profit restructuring and $134bn in damages to be redistributed to OpenAI’s non-profit arm.
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Europe’s AI translation industry told it risks reputation by partnering with US firms
Partnership between top startup DeepL and Amazon comes amid concern about Silicon Valley’s monopoly over digital infrastructure
AI companies in Europe risk losing their world-leading status in the field of machine translation, industry figures have said, after the decision by one of the continent’s leading startups to partner with Amazon’s cloud computing division provoked alarm.
While businesses in the EU have generally lagged behind the US and China in AI adoption, a small group of European companies have cornered the global market for high-quality machine translations for professional use.
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‘No one has done this in the wild’: study observes AI replicate itself
World is approaching point where no one can shut down a rogue AI, says director of body behind research
It’s the stuff of science fiction cinema, or particularly breathless AI company blogposts: new research finds recent AI systems can independently copy themselves on to other computers.
In the doom scenario, this means that when the superintelligent AI goes rogue, it will escape shutdown by seeding itself across the world wide web, lurking outside the reach of frantic IT professionals and continuing to plot world domination or paving over the world with solar panels.
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