Month: August 2023

Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical review – a mythical gig where you shape the songs

PlayStation 4/5, Xbox, Switch, PC; Summerfall StudiosThis role-player in which you have to solve the murder of a Muse by battling Gods through song presents a new form of storytelling and all the charm of the Buffy musical episode I first heard about Stray Gods via a clip I saw shared on the social media …

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Tens of thousands of digital grooming crimes recorded during wait for online safety bill

NSPCC says tech firms and MPs must back the bill after data from UK police forces shows ‘scale of child abuse happening on social media’ Tens of thousands of online grooming crimes have been recorded during the wait for updated online safety laws. The online safety bill is expected to become law in the autumn, …

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Threads app usage plummets despite initial promise as refuge from Twitter

Social media app, launched in the wake of Twitter chaos, recorded 576,000 active users in August, down 79% from 2.3 million in July The daily usage of Threads, Meta’s answer to Twitter, continues to slump after a strong start in its first weeks of existence. Engagement with the social media app is down 79% from …

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Billion Dollar Heist review – cybercrime documentary relives tech chaos

A hit-and-miss documentary often struggles to explain the hows and whys of the Bangladesh Central Bank cyber heist of 2016 Cybercrime, on top of being difficult to detect and even more so to prove, is notoriously tricky to visualize. The impact may be tangible, even devastating – nuclear plants damaged, hospitals disabled, pipelines shut down …

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TIM review – sinister household gadget leads AI thriller of android infatuation

Walking robot who looks like a Nazi youth leader turns out – surprise surprise – to have creepy designs on his owner As if the future of AI wasn’t already nightmarish enough, along comes this British sci-fi thriller with its storyline about an AI servant becoming dangerously infatuated with his female owner. It’s a creepy …

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Gran Turismo review – game boy turned real-life motor-sport whiz kid pushes the right button

District 9 director Neill Blomkamp’s true-life tale is unable to swerve the cliches yet delivers pedal-to-the-metal entertainment South African-Canadian director Neill Blomkamp arrived with a bang in 2009 thanks to District 9, an urgent sci-fi fable that used modern fears of extraterrestrial invaders to tell an old-as-time story of racism and segregation. Blomkamp’s interest in …

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Amazon delays rule change for some UK sellers who warned they could go bust

One marketplace firm says Amazon is only ‘delaying the pain’ of having to wait a week for their proceeds Amazon has partially relented following a row about new rules affecting thousands of marketplace sellers and is now releasing some of their sale proceeds. The online retailer had told many of its sellers in the UK …

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Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 5 review: the most powerful folding phone-tablet

Lighter, slicker, gapless folder has great multitasking software and rapid chip – but extremely high price Samsung’s latest folding phone-tablet sets new standards for the most hi-tech of gadgets – and with it comes a very high price tag. The Galaxy Z Fold 5 is an important update for Samsung in the face of stiff …

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Mark Zuckerberg shuts door on cage fight, saying Elon Musk ‘isn’t serious’

Meta boss says ‘time to move on’ after Twitter owner fails to name date and says he needs surgery Mark Zuckerberg has said he is moving on from a rumoured cage fight with Elon Musk, claiming the Tesla boss “isn’t serious”. The rival billionaire tech bosses seemingly agreed to a brawl in June when Musk …

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‘Only AI made it possible’: scientists hail breakthrough in tracking British wildlife

Technology proves able to identify dozens of species in thousands of hours of recordings Researchers have developed arrays of AI-controlled cameras and microphones to identify animals and birds and to monitor their movements in the wild – technology, they say, that should help tackle Britain’s growing biodiversity problem. The robot monitors have been tested at …

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