The Guardian

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 Ultr…

PC; Grey Alien Games, Night Signal Entertainment An innocent-looking charity shop find draws you into a compulsive world of demons, ogres and retro delights For a while in the mid-1990s, meta horror movies were the genre everyone was talking about. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Scream, the Blair Witch Project – these films simultaneously examined and exploited genre conventions, seeking to scare au…

PocketOS was left scrambling after a rogue AI agent deleted swaths of code underpinning its business It only took nine seconds for an AI coding agent gone rogue to delete a company’s entire production database and its backups, according to its founder. PocketOS, which sells software that car rental businesses rely on, descended into chaos after its databases were wiped, the company’s founder Jere…

Physical phone blocking devices, powered by NFC wireless technology, are becoming a popular solution for doomscrolling. Brigid Delaney puts one to the test Wake up, 100 messages from group chat overnight about something – what? another assassination attempt; a village destroyed in Lebanon; the football result in England; the weather in Iran being manipulated; the pesticides causing lung and bowel…

Pragmata, Saros and Vampire Crawler bring together aesthetics, responsiveness and creative opportunities in joyous ways that can’t be defined, only experienced Game feel is one of the most elusive concepts in the glossary of interactive entertainment, at once perfectly clear and difficult to define. Obviously, it refers to what a game feels like to play, but where does that feeling come from? How…

Trump is volatile, capricious and unreasonable – but he belongs to the old world of analogue power. What comes next will be harder to manage Donald Trump is not impressed by soft power. He respects hard men with military muscle. But he can be moved by pageantry, which is the purpose of King Charles’s visit to Washington this week . Trump is flattered to rub shoulders with majesty. The good vibes …

Commission says tech company does not have effective measures to keep under-13s off Facebook and Instagram The tech company Meta has been found to be in breach of EU law for failing to prevent children under 13 from using its Facebook and Instagram platforms. Issuing the preliminary findings of a nearly two-year investigation, the European Commission said on Wednesday that Meta did not have effec…

To test the safety and security of AI, hackers have to trick large language models into breaking their own rules. It requires ingenuity and manipulation – and can come at a deep emotional cost A few months ago, Valen Tagliabue sat in his hotel room watching his chatbot, and felt euphoric. He had just manipulated it so skilfully, so subtly, that it began ignoring its own safety rules. It told him …

Created by three dads from Seattle, the resolutely un-mobile handset doesn’t have internet access, apps or even a screen. No wonder anxious parents are snapping it up Name: Tin Can. Age: Launched last April. Continue reading...

Artists and writers argue scrappy nature of self-published booklets is incompatible with artificial intelligence The self-published zine has long been central to cultural revolutions, from queer activism to Black feminism and the riot grrrl punk movement, producing titles such as Sniffin’ Glue and Sweet-Thang along the way. But now the traditionally analogue art form faces a new shift: artificial…

Japan Airlines will introduce the robots for trial run at a Tokyo airport amid country’s surge in inbound tourism and worsening labour shortages Japan’s famously conscientious but overburdened baggage handlers will soon be joined by extra staff at Tokyo’s Haneda airport – although their new colleagues will need to take regular recharging breaks. Japan Airlines will introduce humanoid robots on a …

The female-created YouTube sketch series Smatouha Minni (You Heard It From Me) uses satire to confront misogynistic attitudes In Beirut’s Gemmayzeh neighbourhood a rented flat has been transformed into a film set: bright studio lights in a cosy living room. At its centre is Maria Elayan – though she is barely recognisable. Filming for the third season of Smatouha Minni (You Heard It From Me), a f…

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 s…

Musk’s lawsuit accuses Altman of fraud, while OpenAI says that Musk is ‘motivated by jealousy’ A lawsuit between two of Silicon Valley’s biggest tycoons goes to trial Monday in California, the culmination of a years-long bitter feud. Elon Musk has accused Sam Altman of betraying the founding agreement of the non-profit they started together, OpenAI, by changing it to a for-profit enterprise. Musk…

Genki Kawamura’s eerie new film expands on a haunting video game that leaves players lost in endless subway tunnels. He explains how this makes viewers and players face their worst fears Genki Kawamura is something of a polymath. A bestselling author, film-maker, script writer and producer – he is also a lifelong gamer who grew up playing and being inspired by the games of legendary Nintendo desi…