Technology

Summary: Google has agreed to pay $68m to settle a lawsuit that alleged Google Assistant recorded private conversations after being triggered unintentionally. Google denied wrongdoing in the settlement filing, saying it sought to avoid litigation. The story matters because voice assistants sit at the boundary between convenience and surveillance. They are designed to listen for […]

Summary: TikTok reached a confidential settlement just hours before jury selection in a US “social media addiction” case—avoiding becoming a defendant in what lawyers describe as a landmark trial. The bigger story is not one settlement. It’s a shift in how courts are being asked to view social platforms: not merely as neutral hosts of

Summary: After nearly three weeks of one of Iran’s most extreme internet shutdowns, some connectivity appears to be returning—but not as a normal “switch back on.” Monitoring groups and analysts describe something closer to controlled, intermittent, and selective access: some services work at some times, for some people, often only briefly. This is a technology

Summary: Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins says AI could be bigger than the internet, but he expects a painful shakeout first—“winners will emerge, and there’ll be carnage along the way.” That’s not a throwaway quote. Robbins lived through the dot‑com boom as Cisco became the most valuable company in the world in 2000, then lost roughly

Summary: After TikTok’s US business was split from ByteDance, thousands of users reported strange behaviour—new posts stuck at “zero views,” missing search results, and messaging quirks. In that environment, people quickly concluded the platform was censoring political content. TikTok’s US operation says many problems were technical (a recovery process after infrastructure disruption) rather than policy-driven

Summary: Amazon has confirmed 16,000 job cuts, after an internal message about redundancies was reportedly distributed early by mistake and then cancelled. Management describes the move as part of a multi‑quarter effort to “remove bureaucracy,” reduce layers, and move faster—especially inside Amazon Web Services (AWS), where costs and organisational complexity have grown alongside the business.

Summary: The UK government has launched a package of free (and subsidised) AI training courses aimed at helping adults use AI at work, with an ambition to reach 10 million workers by 2030. On paper it sounds straightforward: teach people how to use chatbots and AI tools. In practice, the most important part is what

Summary: Meta says it could spend up to $135bn this year—nearly double last year’s AI-related spend—mostly on infrastructure that powers artificial intelligence. This is not just a “bigger budget” story. It’s a strategic land grab for compute, talent, and distribution at a moment when leaders across tech and finance are openly debating whether the AI

Summary: Tesla says its annual revenue fell in 2025 for the first time, and profits dropped sharply in the final quarter — and it’s responding by tightening its vehicle lineup while doubling down on a very different bet: AI, robotics (Optimus), and robotaxis. The eye-catching headline is that Tesla plans to end production of the

Summary: Waymo (Alphabet’s self-driving subsidiary) says it hopes to launch a paid robotaxi service in London as early as September, with a pilot programme planned for April. The UK government says it intends to update regulations in the second half of 2026 to enable driverless taxis, setting up London as a high-profile test of whether