With Ron (David Alan Grier) out of the mix due to his heart surgery, it's up to the charismatic Dr. Highland (Damon Wayans) to step in and stir things up in the St. Denis Medical season 3 premiere. Meanwhile, Ariana Madix is back as Dr. Brooke Emerson, fresh from her stint as host on Love Island USA.

We'll also pick up with Matt and Serena as they embark on their new relationship after that exciting kiss last season - but they'll have to keep it hidden from Joyce, who doesn't allow office romances. That rule could also cause issues for Ron, who seemingly expressed his feelings for Joyce last season. We can't wait to see how that one plays out.

St. Denis Medical's return coincides with a major comedy boom for NBC right now, which includes the return of The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, Happy's Place, and fresh sitcom Newlyweds. If you're ready for all of that, read on and find out how to watch St. Denis Medical season 3 online for free.

How to watch St. Denis Medical season 3 from anywhere

If you’re traveling abroad when St. Denis Medical season 3 airs, you’ll be unable to watch the show like you normally would due to geo-restrictions. However, there is a very easy solution.

Downloading a VPN will allow you to stream online, no matter where you are. It's a simple bit of software that changes your IP address, meaning that you can access on-demand content or live TV just as if you were at home.

Use a VPN to watch St. Denis Medical season 3 from anywhere.

Using a VPN is incredibly simple:

1. Install the VPN of your choice. As we've said, NordVPN is our favorite.

2. Choose the location you wish to connect to in the VPN app. For instance, if you're visiting the UK and want to view your usual US service, you'd select a US-based server from the list.

3. Watch Away. Head to your usual local streaming service and watch St. Denis Medical.

How to watch St. Denis Medical season 3 in the US

How to watch St. Denis Medical season 3 around the world

How to watch St. Denis Medical season 3 in Canada

Can you watch St. Denis Medical season 3 in the UK?

There is no linear broadcast or streaming service release in the works for St. Denis Medical season 3 in the UK.

Just visiting? You'll need to set up a VPN to bypass geo-lock restrictions. It's really simple to use a VPN and it'll unlock St. Denis Medical season 3 and so much more by changing your device's location.

Can you watch St. Denis Medical season 3 online in Australia?

There is no release plan in place for St. Denis Medical season 3 in Australia, either. Past seasons of the show are on 7Plus though, so it's likely the new episodes will land there eventually.

Traveling Down Under? You'll need a service like NordVPN to access your usual streams abroad.

What you need to know about St. Denis Medical season 3

St. Denis Medical season 3 cast

• Wendi McLendon-Covey as Joyce Henderson
• David Alan Grier as Dr. Ron Leonard
• Allison Tolman as Alex Mazurkian
• Josh Lawson as Dr. Bruce Schweitz
• Kahyun Kim as Serena Jung
• Mekki Leeper as Matt Pearson
• Kaliko Kauahi as Val
• Ariana Madix returning as Dr. Brooke Emerson
• Damon Wayans as Dr. Highland
• Tony Hawk
• Martha Kelly
• Jon Barinholtz
• Jimmy Smits
• Dave Theune as Keith
• Alexandra Ford as Holly
• Emma Pope as Dakota
• Dan Leahy as Brandon

St. Denis Medical season 3 trailer

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We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example:1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service).2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad.We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

• Watch Melbourne Cup 2026 FREE on 9Now (AUS) / TVNZ+ (NZ) / CBC Gem (CAN)
• Stream on FS2/Fox One (US) / Sky Sports (UK)
• Unlock your stream with NordVPN (save up to 75%)
• Race starts: Tuesday, Nov 3 at 3pm AEDT / 4am GMT / 11pm ET (Mon)

Watch Melbourne Cup 2026 with the winner of its 166th running set to land a payday of AU$10 million (around $7 million USD) at the Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne, Victoria.

24 runners and riders will compete over the two-mile flat handicap race, with seven entered by Australian trainer Ciaron Maher. In Geelong Cup winner, Point Of Law, and Mr Monaco he has two of the favorites, giving him a great chance of adding to the success of 2022 when Gold Trip took the line first. While Joseph O'Brien's quintet includes Trustyourinstinct and James J Braddock, who are both well positioned to earn the Irish trainer his third victory at Flemington. He'll be damning his luck, however, that the highly-fancied Defiantly was withdrawn late on.

After her winning ride on Half Yours last year, Jamie Melham will look to make history as the first female jockey to win this prestigious race twice; she's on Gregory Hickman's Future History this time around. And Sons And Lovers, Kizlyar, and last year’s runner-up Goodie Two Shoes, are all expected to be in contention when the winning post comes around, too.

Here's where to watch Melbourne Cup 2026 live streams online from anywhere, potentially for FREE.

Use a VPN to watch Melbourne Cup 2026 live streams

A VPN is a handy piece of software that can make your device appear as if it's back in your home country, so you can unlock your usual streaming services. The best VPN right now? We recommend NordVPN – it does everything and comes with up to 75% off.

How to watch Melbourne Cup 2026 live streams in the USA

Racing fans in the US can watch the Melbourne Cup 2026 on either FS2 or Fox One.

Dedicated streaming service Fox One costs $19.99 per month after a 3-day FREE trial.

If you want a more comprehensive cable alternative, access to the Fox One app is also available through a Sling TV plan. It comes with the provider's Select ($29.99 a month) and Blue plans ($45.99 a month).

FS2 is carried by several other OTT streaming platforms as well, including YouTube TV and Fubo – both of which offer new customers a free trial.

Outside of the US? Use NordVPN whilst you're traveling away from home to unlock your stream.

How to watch Melbourne Cup 2026 live streams in Australia

In Australia, the Melbourne Cup 2026 is on the free-to-air Channel 9 and via the 9Now streaming service.

All you need is an account. Sign up here!

The race will also be shown on the Racing.com website and on Sky Racing.

If you're out of Australia but still want to tune in, explore the VPN route set out above, which will help you access your accounts from anywhere.

How to watch Melbourne Cup 2026 live streams in New Zealand

TVNZ+ will show the 2026 Melbourne Cup online for FREE.

Watching on TV? Then you'll need to tune into TVNZ 1.

Overseas? NordVPN will give you access to your home streaming service.

How to watch Melbourne Cup 2026 live streams in the UK

The 2026 Melbourne Cup is being shown on Sky Sports in the UK, via the Sky Sports Racing channel.

Sky Sports plans start from £35 a month or £22 if you're an existing Sky television subscriber.

Alternatively, cheaper access to the Sky Sports Racing channel is available via At The Races Player, with a standard price of £9.99/month.

Visiting the UK from Oz? Use NordVPN to access your preferred coverage of the Melbourne Cup 2026.

How to watch Melbourne Cup 2026 live streams in Canada

In Canada, you can watch the 2026 Melbourne Cup on TV via the free-to-air CBC Sports or live and on-demand coverage through its online CBC Gem streaming platform.

If you aren't in Canada for the event simply use a VPN to tune in to your free horse racing streams from overseas.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example:1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service).2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad.We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

• Proton says it will not ‘re-interview’ some employees about how they use AI.
• The company promises "use of AI will never be at the expense of security".
• Proton CTO publishes internal AI manifesto on company blog.

Privacy-first software provider Proton appears to have rolled back on a decision to re-interview staff members about their AI use, after admitting that it hadn't "lived up to the high standard you ought to hold us to" in an announcement on social media.

The Swiss-based company outlined three promises to its community, which includes users of Proton Mail and Proton VPN, in a reaction to the leaked story that AI will be forced through the company with threats of job losses should staff not comply.

Alongside stating that it would not, in fact, re-interview staff and that there would be no AI-use related job losses, Proton also promised that its "use of AI will never be at the expense of security" and that it "does not install tracking software on employees' laptops to measure how much AI-generated code they produce".

In the statement on X, Proton also promised to publicly release and open source several of its internal tools as well as publish how code reviews and security reviews are done, to provide transparency and evidence that it delivers on its word.

The announcement comes alongside a wave of support from current staff members on Reddit and X all outing themselves by name and refuting much of what the initial leaked email had stated. Although many commenters on these platforms have suggested that this could instead be part of a coordinated PR response.

Proton's AI manifesto

What is certain is the company's commitment to using AI to drive itself forward. On Sunday 1 November, two days after the leak story was published, Proton CTO Bart Butler published the details of a company memo on AI use, the "AI @ Proton, Engineering Manifesto" which he had sent round to staff a month before the incident.

In it, Butler makes Proton's position on how its software engineers should be using AI crystal clear.

"Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster," he writes in bold. "Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster. Every engineer is now a team leader, a manager, and your direct reports are the models and agents you use.”

Perhaps not a huge leap, then, to thinking that there might well have been some credence in the leaked reports on staff re-interviews given how important and specific this requested use of AI was, regardless of whether or not jobs may or may not have been on the line.

Butler continues later in the manifesto, which you can download and read in full here, by underlining his vision of the importance of his staff and where their value lies.

“This is not the death of expertise. The LLM is fast. You are slow, but you carry with you a lifetime of experience, judgment calls, and understanding.”

While that might be comforting to those engineers with that lifetime of experience, it might make harder reading for graduates looking for their first jobs in the industry.

“Programming” is dead. Engineering is not

“It is also not the death of good engineering practices," he continues. "Maintainability and velocity is better on well-architected codebases. Documentation and tests remain crucial.”

The manifesto finishes with a rallying cry that speaks to a changing world that Proton intends itself and its employees to keep up with.

“The bottom line is that we are in a new world. “Programming” is dead. Engineering is not, nor is expertise. Your old job is gone. Your new job as a builder will let you do more and have more impact than you ever have, if you seize the opportunity.”

While it's not certain how heavy handed Proton had originally intended on being with this suggested audit of AI practices, its reactionary social media statement certainly speaks from a place of regret over some part of the matter. Whether that's the treatment of its employees, the suggestion that product code might be less secure through the use of AI, or both, is hard to tell.

From a customer side, though, there is one other more solid and very interesting outcome: expect to see an improvement in Proton's privacy-first AI, Lumo, sooner as a result.

As part of its promised transparency of internal tools, the company will lift the hood on "more advanced versions of Lumo with greater capabilities, which have never been made available outside of the company" – a handy distraction for the the rest of us while Proton fixes its in-house issues.

• VZMORE iX9 Max pairs a Core Ultra 9 185H with 24GB of soldered LPDDR5 and a 1TB SSD for $949, after a $50 off code
• Its 14 ports include dual USB4, dual 2.5GbE, two HDMI 2.0 outputs, and an SD 4.0 reader, but no front USB-C or OCuLink
• The aging 185H launched in December 2023 with its 11 TOPS NPU, which falls well short of Copilot+ requirements even as compliant Panther Lake mini PCs are already shipping

VZMORE only made its public debut at IFA in early September 2026, but has already put its first Intel-based mini PC on sale.

The iX9 Max pairs Intel's Core Ultra 9 185H with 24GB of LPDDR5 memory and a 1TB SSD inside an aluminum chassis measuring 5.31 x 5.19 x 2.27 inches, and it comes in exactly one configuration at $949 (or $899 with an accompanying discount code at the time of writing).

The price allows users to tap into a generous amount of I/O, albeit at a the cost of a slightly dated 65W 16-core Intel Core Ultra 9 mobile chip under the hood.

Fourteen ports, a 2023 flagship mobile CPU and a late 2026 box

By our count, the iX9 Max offers 14 data and A/V ports before you even get to the power jack. The front panel carries four 10 Gbps USB-A ports, one of which keeps charging devices when the machine is off, plus a 3.5mm headset jack.

Around the back sit two 40Gbps USB4 ports with DisplayPort 2.0 alt mode, another 10Gbps USB-A port, a USB 2.0 port for keyboards and dongles, two HDMI 2.0 outputs, and a pair of 2.5GbE Ethernet jacks. To top it off, an SD 4.0 card reader lives on the side.

That is theoretically enough to drive four displays, hang a NAS off one network port and a home lab off the other, and still have USB ports to spare. One of the USB4 ports also supports 100W of USB-C power input, so a decent GaN charger can replace the bundled 120W brick.

Interestingly, both HDMI ports on the unit are HDMI 2.0, which supports 4K output but not the 120Hz that HDMI 2.1 would offer. With no USB-to-HDMI 2.1 adapter in the box, users looking to run things at 4K 120Hz might be disappointed, even though VZMORE's AMD-based AX9 Max ships with HDMI 2.1, according to our review of that machine. The unit also skips a front USB-C connector, which could be annoying or a potential dealbreaker for some users.

The processor, despite its age (released at the tail end of 2023), is no slouch either: The Core Ultra 9 185H was the top chip in Intel's first Core Ultra generation when it launched in December 2023, with 16 cores (six performance, eight efficient and two low-power efficient), 22 threads, a 5.1GHz boost clock, and an eight-core Arc integrated GPU. It is rated at 45W base power and up to 115W turbo, and VZMORE lets you choose between 20W, 40W, and 65W modes.

At 65W, 16 cores remain plenty for heavy spreadsheet work, code compilation, virtual machines, and photo editing. But this chip is hardly new to mini PCs. We first reviewed it in one, the Minisforum AtomMan X7 Ti, back in 2024, and Intel's Panther Lake parts have been turning up in compact desktops such as Asus' NUC 16 Pro since CES 2026.

The AI story here might be a bit thin, but it's still a viable avenue; the 185H's NPU tops out at 11 TOPS, well short of the 40 TOPS threshold Intel set for next-generation AI PCs, which has become the bar for Copilot+ certification. The "local AI capabilities" in VZMORE's marketing will instead rely primarily on the CPU and GPU.

VZMORE's own marketing seems a bit cherry-picked: The company claims the iX9 Max renders 45% faster under thermal stress than a "base-configured M3 system," based on its own Cinebench 2026 testing. It does not say which M3 machine it used, and the comparison pits a 16-core chip at 65W against an eight-core Apple part from 2023.

VZMORE's performance pitch rests on its cooler offering: it claims its V-Cooling vapor chamber offers 40% more heat-spreading area and 50% better heat transfer than a conventional dual-heat-pipe design, and that the iX9 Max can sustain 65W while staying under 38dB.

If you want a quiet, well-connected desktop PC with a three-year warranty, plenty of RAM, US shipping, and no plans to open it up, the iX9 Max ticks plenty of boxes. The port count really is generous, and a 65W Core Ultra 9 is still a capable workstation chip in late 2026.

But $949 is a lot to ask for a processor that turns three next month, in a design that appears to share most of its DNA with a cheaper Geekom offering that you can get for as little as $750 a pop. It might be wiser to wait and watch for a few third-party reviews to emerge before taking the plunge on a sub-$1000 mini PC, especially since upgrades are increasingly expensive, should one need to switch things up sooner rather than later.

• Two 256GB Mac Studios cost $701 less than one 512GB system.
• Apple's $11,500 memory upgrade doubles capacity without adding another processor.
• Two units deliver separate CPUs, GPUs, and storage for less money.

Apple's latest Mac Studio M5 Ultra configuration has attracted criticism over the substantial additional charge required to double its available memory capacity.

A 256GB version costs $10,799, while selecting 512GB adds another $11,500, bringing the total price for the model to $22,299.

That means purchasing two 256GB systems for $21,598 costs $701 less than buying one machine with equivalent combined memory capacity.

Two computers offer more hardware for less money

The comparison has raised questions about Apple's pricing strategy, particularly since purchasing two smaller configurations provides considerably more computing hardware for less money.

Each workstation comes with its own processor, graphics capabilities and storage, allowing buyers to operate separate systems instead of upgrading memory.

The M5 Ultra configuration includes a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU and a 32-core Neural Engine for demanding professional workloads.

Consequently, customers purchasing two machines receive two complete processing systems, rather than paying the additional amount for increased memory capacity.

This difference could matter considerably to professionals running AI models, developing software or handling computationally intensive creative applications.

Apple offers several memory configurations, including 96GB, 256GB and 512GB, allowing customers to select capacities according to their requirements.

The substantial difference between the two largest options has nevertheless made the highest memory configuration difficult to justify financially.

Specialised memory components could explain the additional cost

One explanation for the expensive upgrade concerns the memory chips required to increase the computer's capacity from 256GB to 512GB.

The technical explanation accompanying the comparison says the M5 Ultra contains 64 memory channels, with different chip capacities used across configurations.

According to this explanation, the 256GB version uses 4GB LPDDR5X chips, while the larger configuration requires specialized 8GB components.

Doubling the capacity therefore involves using higher-density memory components, which could contribute to the substantial difference between Apple's available configurations.

However, the available information does not include manufacturing costs or an official explanation from Apple confirming why the upgrade costs $11,500.

Another proposed option involves connecting two smaller computers through Thunderbolt 5, which supports theoretical transfer speeds reaching 120Gb/s.

That connection translates to approximately 15GB/s, allowing the machines to exchange data when compatible applications distribute workloads across separate systems.

However, connecting the computers does not combine their memory into one shared 512GB pool, since each machine retains independent resources.

Users could instead operate separate AI tools on each workstation, distributing computing activities according to available processing capacity.

The arrangement would therefore suit workloads that can operate independently, although applications requiring one large unified memory pool present different requirements.

A single 512GB configuration remains relevant for software that needs access to substantial memory within one computer during execution.

The most desirable material to use in fitness watch construction right now is titanium. It’s found across the best Garmin watches like the Fenix 9 Pro and recently, the Garmin Marq Generation 3.

But, as it turns out, the more of it you use, the more technical hurdles you face.

Let’s start off with why titanium alloys are such a good fit for watches, though. It’s pretty simple; titanium is typically lighter and stronger than aluminium and a whole lot lighter than stainless steel, which is often used in watches for its ability to weather well over the years.

Stainless steel used to be a mainstay of Garmin’s premium line-up, but it clearly doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s not even an option in the Garmin Fenix 9 range.

Having used plenty of titanium, plastic and stainless steel Garmins over the years, I get it. The more weight a watch carries, the more it picks up momentum as you perform an exercise like running. It makes for worse comfort, and leads to the watch moving around on your wrist more — which is bad news for heart rate reliability.

The Fenix 9 titanium problem

One part you might find a bit of a head-scratcher, though, is why even titanium watches like the Garmin Fenix 9 base model still have part-plastic bodies, despite costing $999 and up. Its entire sidewall is polymer, a super-tough reinforced plastic formulation, with the bezel and backplate as titanium elements. You need to upgrade to the Fenix 9 Pro — or even further to the Marq Generation 3 — to get a full metal jacket.

Garmin COO Brad Trenkle explained to me the difficulties in making this happen, which also helps to explain why these watches cost quite so much money.

“There are incredible benefits you can get from having a titanium case, but the all-metal case means radio signals can't get out,” says Trenkle.

In a Garmin watch this means anything that needs to transmit out of the casing, like Bluetooth, LTE, Satellite, ANT+, NFC, Wi-Fi. No signals out or in makes a connected smartwatch pretty useless.

The solution? You don’t use an all-metal case, but make the plastic parts that let the signal through as subtle, as minimal, as possible. But this in itself required some special processes.

“To get radio signals out, you have got to have a polymer in there. You add the polymer, you have to add multiple gaskets,” says Trenkle. “You add multiple gaskets you get thickness, and then suddenly you're wearing a tuna can on your wrist. And nobody wants to wear a tuna can on their wrist. We had that with Forerunner 201 years ago. We don't need to go back there.”

The Forerunner 201 was released in 2003, and is widely considered the first GPS-enabled runners’ watch. Yes, even though it does look a bit like a pager stuck to a watch strap.

Rubbery gaskets are required in a Garmin watch because, of course, water resistance is fundamental to series like the Garmin Fenix 9. You can’t just have relatively hard plastic sandwiched between two case elements of much harder titanium alloy: the gaskets act as seals.

Nano scale molding

The solution for the Fenix 9 and Marq Generation 3 is a process Trenkle calls ‘nano molding’, or NMT.

“The basic idea here is that you are bonding a polymer and a metal together at the nano scale,” says Todd Register, Garmin Creative lead for its Outdoor segment. It sounds like Iron Man-grade stuff, but the concept isn’t a million miles from the light, fine grain sanding you might give a surface before attempting to paint it or glue it. Nano molding involves very finely etching, or texturing, the titanium so it can much more perfectly fit the polymer parts without a gasket.

At the launch of the Marq Generation 3 watch, Garmin used a picture of a piece of titanium magnified by 100,000 times to show the NMT process.

“If you look at the surface of the case, it's almost completely smooth. So there's no way to bond to the metal before it's been etched, but if we look at after the etching, you can see immediately the different type of texture that you get, and as you zoom in, you can see the type of interlocking at that nano scale that's happening between the polymer and the metal case,” says Register.

“You're going to get a super tight, rigid bond that is great to be able to get all of our antennas in there where needed and execute that in a really thin design compared to what we had previously.”

This isn’t a process that involves conventional adhesive. The polymer itself ends up bonded directly to the titanium — it’s elegant engineering.

NMT history

This concept is not new, even in mainstream consumer technology. Back in 2011 PhoneArena reported on how HTC — amid its fun years of peak mobile phone tech experimentation — was testing NMT to streamline the construction of its high-end HTC Sensation 4G Android phone.

That it’s still a relatively novel idea is likely, unfortunately, bad news for the idea NMT processes might soon trickle down the Garmin range.

One sub-range that would suit an all-titanium casing is Garmin Venu. The current Venu 4 has a polymer rear, and it’s one of the few series to still use a stainless steel bezel. An all-titanium casing would work great for a Venu 5 but, then again, the last thing this series needs is another major price jump.

The Garmin Venu 4 already jumped to $549.99/£469.99/AU949 from $450/£450/AU749 in the Venu 3 generation, and we’re not sure how much more we can stomach, let alone the watch-buying public. However, having had a chance to test drive the Garmin Marq, it’s clearly an important part of making a dive-ready watch that doesn’t pull too much focus on your wrist, in terms of weight and girth if not provocative style.

Are you looking for a Garmin watch, but not sure what to get? Take our quiz below to find your perfect smartwatch.

• CircuitHub's The Grid robotic system moves circuit boards between specialised manufacturing stations
• Each board follows its own route without conventional production-line changeovers
• The Grid handles 100 different designs using shared manufacturing equipment

A Massachusetts factory is using an unusual robotic manufacturing system to produce printed circuit boards for companies requiring different electronic designs.

Developed by CircuitHub, The Grid replaces conventional fixed production lines with coordinated machinery and mobile platforms transporting boards between manufacturing stations.

The company says its system can complete certain orders faster than Chinese competitors.

One large robot manufactures different circuit board designs

CircuitHub describes The Grid as “one large robot,” referring to the co-ordinated equipment responsible for moving and processing individual circuit boards.

Levitating transport platforms carry boards between stations performing solder paste application, component placement, heating, soldering and automated inspection.

Machine learning models, AI agents and conventional optimization software coordinate these operations, determining how equipment handles individual manufacturing assignments.

Unlike conventional assembly lines, the system does not require factories to reorganise their production arrangements whenever another circuit board design enters manufacturing.

Each board follows its own route through the facility, allowing different products to undergo manufacturing simultaneously without conventional production-line changeovers.

CircuitHub says an order containing 100 different designs can therefore be processed as easily as producing 100 copies of one design.

The same equipment handles experimental prototypes and larger manufacturing batches, eliminating the need for separate machinery dedicated to different production stages.

This arrangement addresses the requirements of hardware developers ordering limited quantities of electronics for testing, research, manufacturing tools and product development.

CircuitHub says its customers include a major electric vehicle manufacturer, a leading artificial intelligence laboratory and established technology companies.

Grid delivers faster but is more expensive

CircuitHub compared its factory with a typical quick-turn manufacturer in Shenzhen, China, using an example involving five assembled motor-controller boards.

Each four-layer board contained 118 components, representing 38 distinct component types, with manufacturing, component costs, and delivery included.

In its illustration, producing the five boards through The Grid costs $630, with delivery to a United States address taking four days.

The equivalent Shenzhen order costs approximately $465 after shipping expenses and United States import tariffs, with median delivery taking nine days.

The American factory therefore charges approximately $165 more, although customers receive their completed circuit boards five days earlier.

CircuitHub argues that the shorter delivery period gives engineering teams additional time to continue development rather than waiting for foreign manufacturing.

However, this comparison comes from CircuitHub and concerns one particular order, rather than independently established performance across different manufacturers.

The company says The Grid has operated commercially for five years, generating tens of millions of dollars in annual electronics manufacturing activity.

Across its operations, CircuitHub reports delivering more than 2.2 million circuit boards, installing over 150 million components and serving 26,000 engineers.

Despite this operating history, the company says incoming orders already exceed the factory's current manufacturing capacity.

“Demand is already well ahead of what we can build. This year we will 5x capacity, with another big jump coming in 2027,” CircuitHub said in a blog post.

“The longer-term goal hasn't changed since we started: make building hardware as fast as designing it.”

• OpenAI could call its data centers 'AI compute campuses'
• Public perception is low as energy prices rise across the US
• Stargate Project is about halfway to adding 10GW by 2029

OpenAI is considering a new name for its biggest data centers as it looks to improve public perceptions of AI infrastructure amid ongoing political debate.

Instead of calling them data centers, the ChatGPT maker is considering a rebrand to 'AI compute campuses' to give the facilities a name which sounds more economically positive.

OpenAI hasn't directly announced these plans, however Axios reports that the changes could come as soon as this week, following US midterm elections on November 3 2026.

OpenAI could rename data centers to 'AI compute campuses'

It seems that the company is anticipating major political changes and the possibility that the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives, which would result in a more challenging regulatory environment.

OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane told Axios that he expects AI to be an ongoing political debate beyond the midterm elections.

"Communities should hold companies responsible and accountable so they really and truly get a transformative benefit from these projects," he added.

OpenAI has already been making efforts to win communities over, promising to partner with local communities to understand local needs. "We commit to paying our own way on energy, so that our operations don't increase your electricity prices," the company said at the start of 2026. Energy prices are a big sticking point for US citizens.

A May 2026 report revealed that US states could face energy price hikes of between 6% and 29% by the end of the decades, and the US is already on course to re-open disused nuclear facilities to keep up with demand.

But OpenAI's expansions are far from over. Stargate alone is a project anticipated to add 10GW of AI compute to the US by 2029, and it's still got just under halfway to go.

• A zero-click Android flaw let attackers crash phones with a specially crafted SMS message
• Repeated messages could trigger reboot loops, disrupt calls, and even affect emergency connectivity
• Google patched supported Android versions, but many end-of-life devices remain permanently vulnerable

Picture this: You’re talking on your Android phone when all of a sudden you just lose mobile connectivity and your phone call drops. No explanation, no notification. Soon after, it happens again. And again. At one point, the device goes into recovery mode, rebooting every minute and a half until you finally perform a factory reset.

This is not a theoretical scenario - it is a real possibility, thanks to a critical-severity vulnerability in Android tracked as CVE-2026-58882.

Google has patched the issue for newer versions of Android, but those who are past their end-of-life date will remain at risk.

Sending an evil message

The bug was discovered by security researcher Mark Blah and described as a zero-click denial of service (DoS) vulnerability. In more technical terms, it is an “improper validation of a header-length value” bug in Android’s WapPushOverSms.decodeWapPdu function. It was nicknamed “SMS of Death” because it can be exploited with nothing more than an SMS message, which the victims doesn’t even have to open (hence the ‘zero-click’ part).

As Blah discovered, a threat actor could send a malformed eight-byte WAP Push message to an Android device’s port 2948: 01 06 88 80 80 80 00 BE.

Since this is a hex message, when it gets translated into a signed 32-bit integer, it becomes -2147483648. Android can then try to allocate memory using this negative value, triggering a NegativeArraySizeException error that crashes the com.android.phone process. Since this process manages cellular functions, the call is dropped and mobile connectivity is disrupted. Even emergency services are susceptible, it was said.

It gets worse. Android processes messages before they reach the inbox, meaning the victim will not be notified of the SMS and won’t even know it’s the text message that’s crashing the system. Also, some carriers will attempt to redeliver messages that never reached the inbox, extending the agony. Android also does its part by constantly trying to process messages already stored on the phone.

Finally, Blah found that if a malicious actor sends 20 or more messages, they can force the device into a reboot loop. On an Android 12 device, they can force looped recovery mode, leaving factory reset as the only viable option.

Patching the SMS of Death

Initially, all Android versions were affected, it was said. Google patched it for versions 14 through 17, but older devices will not be getting a patch and thus will remain at risk indefinitely. The fix is called “Fix remote DoS in decodeWapPdu”, and apparently it prevents the crashes by catching exceptions triggered when Android processes malformed text messages. It also deletes these messages from the SMS database so that they don’t trigger repeat crashes.

Blah has released a proof-of-concept (PoC), showing the wider community exactly how to exploit the flaw, and BleepingComputer reported that a GitHub contributor found a way to remove the malicious message, but it requires more technical knowledge, which is something the majority of mobile phone users probably won’t have. Still, those interested in tinkering should know that it can be removed via a computer, using Android Debug Bridge (ADB).

Google apparently patched the bug in its October 2026 Android security updates, but that doesn’t automatically mean all Android users are safe. Unlike Apple’s ecosystem, Android is diversified, and different manufacturers have different update cadences.

Therefore, while we can assume Pixel users have likely already received this update, Samsung users, as well as those using Xiaomi, Motorola, or OnePlus devices, will probably have to wait a little longer until their manufacturers apply the fix to their devices and push the update.

Still, since the PoC has been released, it’s safe to assume most Android manufacturers have already pushed their updates. Users are advised to install them as soon as possible.

The big November sales season might not have officially started (it starts on November 27), but like every year, the Black Friday website builder deals have begun to go live.

Already Hostinger, Ionos, Bluehost, and Network Solutions have launched price cuts ahead of the shopping event, and I'm expecting more to come online as we draw closer to the event.

Below, you'll find live deals from some of the best website builders we've tested - whether you need an ecommerce hub, a general website, or a platform to showcase your photography and artwork. I'll continue updating this page as more providers launch their latest discounts for Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The best early Black Friday website builder deals

Black Friday website builder deals: FAQs

Adapted from the novels by Caimh McDonnell, Tall Tales & Murder is a six-part comedy crime series commissioned by RTE in Ireland and the BBC. It stars Aiden Gillen, as well as fresh talent like Casey Walsh, Philippa Dunne, and Aisling O'Sullivan.

We already know there'll be a second season of the show, but the first season will see Grinner (Gillen) wake up in a care home and claim he knows the location of a hoard of Celtic gold. This sparks into motion a wild treasure hunt, as it's revealed his gold may have a dark origin story.

The comedy series will obviously be packed with laughs, but there are also themes of paranoia, revenge, underworld drug dealers, and a whole lot of chaos to come.

Tall Tales & Murder already dropped in Ireland back in late September, but it's now coming to the UK. Ready to lock in for this darkly comedic show? Here's how to watch Tall Tales & Murder online for free from November 2.

How to watch Tall Tales & Murder from anywhere

If you're keen to watch Tall Tales & Murder but you're away from the UK and access to the show is geo-blocked, then you could use a VPN to access it (assuming you're not breaching any broadcaster T&Cs, of course). You may be surprised by how simple it is to do. Plus, we have a great 75% discount on our #1 VPN...

How to watch Tall Tales & Murder in the UK

In the UK, Tall Tales & Murder is available on BBC iPlayer for free from Monday, November 2.

You can also watch the show on BBC One Northern Ireland on Monday, November 2 at 10:40pm, and on BBC One on Tuesday, November 3 at 10:40pm BST.

Outside the UK? Unblock your BBC iPlayer stream with NordVPN.

Can you watch Tall Tales & Murder in the US?

Tall Tales & Murder will not be available in the US as it's a UK-only release.

Visiting the US from the UK? You can use our most-trusted VPN (try risk-free) to unlock your usual streaming platforms and watch the show from anywhere.

Can you watch Tall Tales & Murder in Canada?

Similar to the US, Tall Tales & Murder will not be releasing in Canada, either on linear TV or streaming.

The solution? Use a VPN to gain access to all the content you'd normally stream at home.

How to watch Tall Tales & Murder in Australia

You can watch Tall Tales & Murder in Australia, where you'll find it on SBS On Demand.

Away from home? Use NordVPN to access your usual shows from anywhere in the world.

Tall Tales & Murder: Additional Information

Tall Tales & Murder cast

• Casey Walsh as Paul
• Ella Lily Hyland as Bridget
• Aidan Gillen as "Grinner"
• Philippa Dunne as Ma Baker
• Packy Lee as Wesley Swanson
• Aisling O'Sullivan as Matron
• Brian Doherty as Bunny
• Tiernan Messitt-Greene as Young Bunny

Tall Tales & Murder episode guide

• Episode 1: A Dublin care home patient and gangster named Grinner McNair (Aidan Gillen) wakes up from a coma and reveals he has a buried hoard of Celtic gold, setting off a wild treasure hunt.
• Episode 2: Nursing home worker Bridget (Ella-Lily Hyland) and debtor Paul (Casey Walsh) learn the dark history of Grinner's treasure and realize they are in deep trouble. Bunny must make a choice between the law and Matron.
• Episode 3: Paul opens up to Bridget about his troubled past, and she encourages him to settle an old score. Meanwhile, Matron and Bunny try a strange cure for insomnia, while Grinner fuels paranoia about Wesley.
• Episode 4: Bee Man catches up to Paul just as Bridget deals with the fallout of her revenge. Matron’s attempt to trade Grinner for Maurice falls apart when Grinner escapes and Wesley closes in.
• Episode 5: Grinner lands in serious trouble when he crosses paths with the underworld fixer and horse Viagra bootlegger Chick.
• Episode 6: Ma Baker captures Paul, Bridget remains stuck with Grinner, and Bunny and Matron scramble to pull off the final swap with Wesley as the chaotic showdown arrives.

You may also like to watch...

• How to watch Happy's Place season 3 from anywhere in the world – stream online for free
• The best BBC iPlayer VPNs
• How to watch BBC iPlayer from abroad

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example:1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service).2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad.We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

Elon Musk wanted to prove that AI could make a better adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey than Christopher Nolan. After months of complaining about Nolan's film, he promised that Grok Imagine would produce a more faithful version of the ancient Greek epic. The first seven minutes have debuted, effectively arguing for leaving filmmaking to people who actually care about telling stories, not pursuing petty bigotries.

The project also has an ugly origin that's worth remembering. Musk's objections to Nolan's adaptation centered heavily on its casting, particularly Black actress Lupita Nyong'o and transgender actor Elliot Page. He accused Nolan of sacrificing historical accuracy to satisfy Hollywood sensibilities, and described the director's casting choices in explicitly racist terms. Ignoring the historical and textual incoherence of his arguments, he promised a full-length AI-generated alternative.

The seven-minute opening episode, produced using Grok Imagine in collaboration with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker, showcases an astonishing marriage of bad ideas and poor execution, backed by bottomless resources and prejudice.

7 minutes wandering the uncanny valley

The one positive comment that doesn't ring false is that some of the landscapes look nice and atmospheric, and some shots of ships sailing across the water could pass for outdated video game cutscenes that would have been impressive at the time. Otherwise, Grok's Odyssey resembles a collection of trailer clips from someone who watched Gladiator half-asleep 20 years ago and has looked at the covers of some Greek mythology books.

The dead-eyed Odysseus sounds like someone trying to pretend they are angry the whole time, even when he's talking to the family he supposedly loves. The events that should establish the story's emotional foundation have less emotional depth than a pop-up book.

A human filmmaker and actor could turn Odysseus's departure from his wife Penelope into a moment that haunts the whole film. Grok simply presents the event and moves along, apparently satisfied that the relevant plot point has been included.

That's what makes the comparison with Nolan so embarrassing. Whatever anyone thinks of his films, Nolan understands that cinema depends on controlling an audience's attention and emotions. His movies are constructed around deliberate creative decisions, with performances and editing working together to give individual moments significance. Grok can imitate the appearance of those moments, but the imitation has little weight.

Grok's not winning an Oscar

AI keeps getting better, and future models may eliminate many of the visual inconsistencies that currently make AI footage so recognizable. But technical improvement alone won't give a machine the personal experiences or creative intentions that shape meaningful art.

A great film reflects the choices of people who have something they want to communicate. Directors bring their own understanding of the world to a story, while actors draw on human experience to make fictional emotions believable. The best scenes work because somebody understands exactly what the audience should feel and has carefully shaped the experience to produce that response.

That said, a talented human director might use AI to enhance or augment a scene that would otherwise be impossible on a limited budget. But any artistic value would come from the filmmaker's decisions.

But regardless of the intent of Wonder Studios and its team, Grok's Odyssey looks terrible, and the blatant bigotry fueling Musk's comments would make for queasy viewing even if it were somehow comparable to Nolan's epic. Producing seven dull minutes for a fraction of a Hollywood budget doesn't automatically make those minutes an artistic achievement.

The Odyssey and all of its best interpretations have endured partly for what they impart about the very human experience of longing for our loved ones. Those emotions have kept audiences interested for thousands of years. Grok has managed to reproduce some of the costumes and scenery while making the characters feel almost entirely irrelevant.

The AI Odyssey has become a seven-minute reminder of why human creativity matters. For all the technology involved, the most revealing thing about this experiment is how little artistic imagination it contains.

• New malware uses AI to analyze stolen data, rank victims, and identify the most profitable targets
• VOLTA-AUTODOXER steals credentials, crypto wallets, tokens, and personal information before generating AI dossiers
• Researchers warn the malware could commoditize AI-powered victim profiling for ransomware and cybercrime operators

Stealing sensitive data from a lot of people is one thing, but determining whether or not that data is worth anything to anyone - that’s an entirely different ball game.

Now, it seems cybercriminals found a way to easily profile their victims’ information and they’re using - you guessed it - Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Cybersecurity researchers Cisco Talos uncovered a new malware strain through Cognitive Artificial Intelligence Research Network (CAIRN) - an open source cybersecurity research kit built to identify and track AI-powered malware.

The strain is called VOLTA-AUTODOXER and its operation is split into four key steps: 1) steal as much information as possible; 2) share it with an AI for assessment; 3) exfiltrate the data to attacker-controlled infrastructure; and 4) remove yourself from the victim’s system.

Analyzing the data

Cisco Talos did not say where exactly the malware was found, how many devices it infected, or how it is being disseminated. It said that, on surface level, it looks just like any other infostealer. It grabs browser passwords, cookies, payment cards, cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases, Discord, Telegram, Steam, and Roblox sessions, Microsoft OAuth tokens, SSH and cloud-provider keys, Wi-Fi profiles, and screenshots.

But this is where it splits from the industry standard, by building a structured evidence bundle about the person behind the system.

It pulls the device’s geographical location, home address, employer and employer domain, inferred birth year, the last 4 digits of their credit cards, Slack workspaces, document authorship metadata, iPhone backup indicators, and even a live Roblox account valuation. Then it moves to Gmail, looking for mails from UberEats and DoorDash in order to confirm the home address.

VOLTA then bundles and serializes the bundle, before POSTing it to OpenRouter, an AI infrastructure platform where users can access hundreds of LLMs through a single API.

There, the AI gives a model a prompt to behave as a “forensic intelligence analyst drafting a target assessment”. In other words, the AI is tasked with assessing whether or not the data pulled is worth any trouble, and if so - how much. Victims are ranked by value, giving the attackers more time to do what seems to be the end goal here - ransomware.

The default model is Claude, but if it refuses to comply for any reason, the malware is instructed to fall back to Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash. If neither of the models end up working, the malware will just send raw data back to the attacker. This is usually done via a Telegram channel.

Running away

After the work has been completed, VOLTA is instructed to delete itself from the system, likely to cover its tracks. A separate file, named volta_debug.txt apparently remains on the system, showing what was collected and whether or not the AI-powered assessment was a success.

The researchers believe VOLTA is designed to be sold on the black market. Elements such as the Telegram channel, or API keys, are not hardcoded, and the malware comes as a template with six swappable slots that are filed in at build time.

“This suggests it’s a builder model: The author sells access, the customer provides their values, and the builder compiles a custom binary for each order,” Cisco Talos explains. “If VOLTA is indeed a commoditized malware, then the AI dossier capability isn't something the author invented for their own operations. It is a feature which enables a customer of any level of sophistication to point it at victims and start receiving ranked target assessments in their Telegram inbox.”

If you suspect an infection, revoke or rotate all API keys and tokens, and change all of your passwords. Also, double-check your crypto wallets and move all funds to a new wallet with a fresh seed.

When I moved to Utah as a student a decade ago, I was alarmed to be handed a survival pack upon reaching my dorm. These were supplies to help me, should 'The Big One' strike. This cataclysmic confluence of earthquakes and tsunamis across the San Andreas fault was, I was told, long overdue, and could plunge half of the country into a Fallout-like situationship for a little while.

Well, now I'm back living in the UK, and apparently the apocalypse is coming for us here too: the government in Blighty has told us to stock up on tinned beans and survival supplies, and has even put out an emergency checklist of kit we should have prepared.

Among the obvious items on the list (tinned food to last three days; three liters of bottled water per person for each day we're stuck; blankets), the government advises you to own an FM radio, ideally a battery-powered or wind-up (see also: hand-crank) one. And retailers are reporting that many such models are selling out.

For people confused about this: an FM radio is an old gadget from before Spotify and podcasts existed, which lets you tune into broadcasts put out by various companies (you could choose between dry BBC talk shows or countless playlists of awful music, punctuated by the most annoying ads).

I guess the government thinks people will start listening to the radio again if a 28 Days Later situation does arise; maybe they'll give you important broadcasts on the news, a droll hour-long report on a book from 50 years ago, or the same three pop songs on repeat.

Either way, you're going to need a wind-up radio so you're not dependent on mains power, so here are three options worth going for.

Philips TAR1609/00

The web is full of cheap Amazon wind-up radios that look like they'd break after three uses, so I've tried to keep it to known companies on this list. Case in point: Philips has its own model, and at £29.99 it's pretty cheap too. You can find it on Argos' website here.

The catchily-named Philips TAR1609/00 has 32 hours of listening, and charges via a USB-C port, a solar panel or, of course, a hand crank. It functions as a power bank, with a USB-A plug to connect devices (a capacity isn't stated though), and also has a giant built-in torch and SOS alarm system.

To me, it looks like a giant camcorder. But if the future presents challenging times, a retro aesthetic might be of some comfort…

Mesqool DAB+/DAB/FM Wind Up Radio with 12000mAh Rechargeable Battery

Immediately after saying I'm not going to recommend some cheap option from a random brand, I'm doing just that... sort of. The Mesqool radio (which you can find on Amazon here) may not be from a known brand, but it's not cheap either (the MSRP is $59 / £56, but it's about 10% off at the time of writing).

I'm picking this one because it's a contrast to the other options in that it's big. This isn't as much a hand-held option as the others, but something a bit chunkier.

This is useful: it means its hand crank is bigger, its solar panel is bigger and its battery capacity is larger (12,000mAh, as much as a mid-sized power bank). It even has space for a little screen.

It has Bluetooth, as well as both a torch and a smaller reading light. As well as solar or kinetic energy, it can be plugged in to power or uses AAA batteries. It's more of an industrial-sized option for if you've got a larger family sheltering from the storm together.

Midland ER100 (or slightly pricier ER310)

For my third suggestion, I did some research via online prepper communities and stores: the Midland ER100 was recommended quite frequently. It's looking a little bit hard to buy, likely because of the current rush on demand, but its UK Amazon listing is here for when stock returns. It seems to sell generally for £50, so ignore the current third-party stores on Amazon pushing it for £100.

In the US? The Midland ER40 is available, for $59.

Like the other options mentioned on this list, the Midland has a hand-crank as well as a small solar strip, and you can charge up your own device with it too. Of course it plays radio, with some simple buttons making it easier to manage than the other options.

The appeal of the Midland ER100 seems to be the brand: it's a known name in the survival equipment field, so you can rely on the Midland better than any old gadget made by a cheapie manufacturer.

I'll also add a link to the slightly larger and more feature-packed ER310 — again, slightly bigger and powerful, but also a little pricier. Now, stay safe out there!

• PrivadoVPN has added SmartRoute, its multi-hop routing feature, to its iOS app in version 4.1.0.
• You can choose to double-hop only your web browsing or all of your traffic, and pick where it exits.
• The extra hop adds privacy, but there are trade-offs to weigh before leaving it on all the time.

PrivadoVPN has brought SmartRoute to iPhone and iPad in its latest iOS update, letting you route your data through two VPN servers instead of one.

Android users have had SmartRoute since the summer, when it arrived in version 4.1.13 of the Android app. This update brings iOS in line, and also adds status indicators to the main screen so you can see which features are switched on at a glance.

How PrivadoVPN's SmartRoute works

SmartRoute connects your device to an entry server first, then relays your encrypted traffic to a second server that acts as the exit point. Websites and online services only see the exit server's location and IP address.

You choose the exit location, while PrivadoVPN picks the entry server automatically based on network performance.

That's a different approach from many traditional double VPN setups, which often rely on fixed server pairs and give you less say over where your traffic leaves the network.

The point of chaining two servers is separation. As our double VPN explainer notes, a second server makes correlation and timing attacks much harder, and the exit server never sees your real IP address.

Web, all traffic, or just this once

SmartRoute's flexibility comes from its options, which are the same on iOS and Android.

All Traffic sends every app's data through both servers. This is the setting for maximum separation, such as when you're on untrusted public Wi-Fi or researching something sensitive.

Web Traffic puts only your browser traffic on the two-hop route, while other apps keep using a standard single-server VPN connection.

Exit location lets you choose the country your traffic appears to come from. That's handy if you need a specific region, but still want the fastest possible entry server.

Default or one-off is the final choice. You can make SmartRoute your default across all devices, or you can create a one-off session.

Is SmartRoute worth switching on?

For everyday use, probably not all the time. PrivadoVPN itself says a regular single-server connection is usually better when speed and low latency matter most, because the extra hop adds a routing step.

That's worth bearing in mind with Privado in particular. In our PrivadoVPN review, we measured noticeably higher latency than most rivals, and its mobile apps lagged behind its desktop clients. We also flagged that its no-logs policy hasn't been independently audited.

• Everything we know so far below...
• Watch I'm A Celebrity free on ITV (UK)
• Traveling? Unblock ITV and watch anywhere with a VPN

ITV have finally announced the release date for this year's I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Her. The date is set for Monday 16th November. When it arrives, you can watch I'm A Celebrity 2026 online from anywhere with a VPN and potentially for free.

The show will air on ITV every night at 9pm and will stream on ITVX right after they finish airing.

The show had been scheduled to air on Sunday November 15, but was pushed back due to a Nations League match between Spain and England.

Where will you be able to watch I'm A Celebrity?

You wil be able to watch the full series of I'm A Celebrity... for free on ITV.

Each episode will the be available immediately on ITVX.

How to watch I'm A Celebrity... from anywhere

If you’re away from home and can’t access your usual stream due to geo-blocking, a VPN is an easy workaround that lets you appear to be in your home country.

Use one of the best VPNs to watch I'm A Celebrity... from anywhere:

How to watch I'm a Celebrity 2026 in the UK

In the UK, I'm A Celebrity... airs on ITV1, with live and on-demand streaming available through ITV.com. Viewers in Scotland can also watch via STV and STV Player.

The first episode airs on Monday, November 16 at 9pm GMT, and the show will continue every weeknight for three weeks.

If you're creating an ITVX account, you'll need a UK postcode (examples: ukpostcode.co.uk)

Outside the UK? Use a VPN to regain access to ITVX while you’re away.

Who will be in the line up?

The celebs rumored to be heading to the jungle are as follows:

• AJ Odudu
• Wayne Rooney
• Leomie Anderson
• Claire Sweeney
• Leigh Francis
• Chloe Burrows
• Ricky Wilson
• Joanna Page
• Ade Adepitan
• Sharky
• Mariella Frostrop
• Jack Skipper

Can I watch I'm A Celebrity 2026 from the U.S.?

There is no official U.S. broadcaster confirmed for I'm A Celebrity 2026 at the time of writing.

BUT – If you're a UK viewer traveling in the States, you can use a VPN like NordVPN to sign into ITV and watch I'm A Celeb as you normally would.

Can I watch I'm A Celebrity in Canada?

There is no official Canadian broadcaster confirmed for I'm A Celebrity... at this time.

If you're away from the UK and still want to use your usual service, a VPN can help you access ITVX while abroad.

Can I watch I'm A Celebrity... in Australia?

There is no official Australian broadcaster confirmed for this UK edition of I'm A Celebrity... at the time of writing.

It's also worth noting that Australia has its own separate local version of I'm A Celebrity.

If you're a UK viewer traveling in Australia, you can use a VPN such as NordVPN to access ITVX as usual.

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We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example:1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service).2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad.We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

• The FBI formally attributes $6.7 billion Binance cryptocurrency theft to North Korea’s TraderTraitor group
• Investigators say the attackers are laundering stolen assets across multiple blockchains and DeFi services
• The breach highlights ongoing threats from Lazarus-linked campaigns targeting crypto, DevOps, and software professionals

The FBI has publicly accused a North Korean state-sponsored threat actor of being behind the recent attack on cryptocurrency exchange Binance.

One of the largest cryptocurrency exchange platforms on the planet was forced to freeze deposits and withdrawals, before confirming a threat actor stole around $6.7 billion worth of different cryptocurrencies.

Analysts were quick to investigate, with some claiming a known North Korean state-sponsored group called TraderTraitor was behind the heist. TraderTraitor is apparently part of Lazarus Group - a huge cybercriminal operation on North Korea’s payroll, allegedly tasked with stealing money to fund the country’s state apparatus and weapons program.

TraderTraitor

Now, the FBI has issued a new statement, official naming TraderTraitor as the attackers.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is releasing information advising the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) was responsible for the theft of more than $6 billion USD in virtual assets from cryptocurrency exchange Binance, on or about October 29, 2026. The FBI refers to this specific North Korean malicious cyber activity as ‘TraderTraitor’.,” the announcement reads.

“The FBI, together with partners at the USSS and IRS-CI, has observed TraderTraitor actors converting stolen assets primarily into Ethereum (ETH). It is expected these assets will then be further laundered by converting them using DeFi and instant swap services as they prepare them for further laundering stages.”

Binance said one of its DevOps engineers had their laptop compromised which “gave an attacker access to a service container, where they submitted unauthorized withdrawal transactions.” Some speculated the engineer fell to a classic fake job scam, while others argued it was a romance scam.

In the meantime, Binance resumed operations and has covered most of its losses.

Initial reports found that the attackers siphoned out money from 10 different chains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, Arbitrum, and others. For Ethereum, they even set up a smart contract that automatically withdrew any new money that was flowing into the account. The silver lining in the attack is that these were not user funds, but rather those of the exchange itself.

Cryptocurrency exchanges are obliged to have two separate wallets - one for their own funds, and one for those of their customers. Binance has a security fund called SAFU (Secure Asset Fund for Users), designed to protect user assets during extreme platform-level incidents, such as this one.

Operations DreamJob and Contagious Interview

Obviously, North Korea has not commented on these allegations, but the cybersecurity community has logn warned about Lazarus Group targeting organizations in the West, sometimes tasked with stealing money, and sometimes with cyber-espionage and eavesdropping.

The group is split into numerous sub-groups, one of them being TraderTraitor, and among other things, the group runs two major scam campaigns: Operation DreamJob, and Contagious Interview. Both are aimed at software developers, blockchain programmers, and DevOps professionals, and the wider software development industry.

As part of these scams, the attackers would create fake companies, fake employees, and fake job offers. They would reach out to their targets on LinkedIn and offer lucrative job positions, only to infect their computers with malware during the interviews. In some cases, they would apply for open positions, impersonating Chinese, Vietnamese, or Thai nationals and would, when they get the job, use the position to steal sensitive data and money.

North Korea is under heavy sanctions from the US, and the country does not allow its companies to hire, or do business with, individuals and organizations in North Korea.

The FBI shared a long list of wallets it believes contain the stolen funds, and has asked THORNode operators, RPC node operators, instant exchanges, DeFi services, blockchain analytics firms, and other virtual asset service providers to block transactions with or derived from these addresses.

• Coolgeek P1 Cassette Player unveiled
• Brings some modern twists like Bluetooth and a HD display
• Kickstarter campaign just launched; MSRP is $179 but cheaper now

The cassette player revival began with retro-inspired models such as the EDITH WE-001 and FiiO CP13, but we're beginning to see more modern versions like, well, this strange wall-mounted system. And another new option — the one you're here to read about — definitely falls into the latter camp.

Coolgeek, whose RGB light-up turntable we covered several months ago, is back with its newest gadget: the P1 Cassette Player.

Like its turntable, this device is being 'released' on Kickstarter, so you can't buy it immediately. However, from what we've been told, it sounds pretty far along in production, so I don't envision the turn-around time being too long here.

While the standard price of the P1 is $179 (about £130, AU$260), in true Kickstarter fashion it's available for much cheaper if you sign up to the campaign earlier; it'll be half that price in the 'Super Early Bird' wave, and slowly increase over time.

What your money gets you

At its core, Coolgeek's P1 Cassette Player is... well, a cassette player (think Walkman, but Sony makes those), so you don't really need me to run you through what it does, do you? It plays cassettes. But there's more, of course, or we wouldn't be covering it.

For one, the model has Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity, so you can listen to your tapes using your wireless headphones. There's a 3.5mm jack for wired headphone lovers too, as well as a USB-C port, but the latter's just for charging.

There's also a little HD display, which is primarily used for arranging the Bluetooth connection. Judging by images we've seen, there's also some colorful LED indicator column (ooh, lights!) probably for volume, but we weren't expressly told what it depicts.

Like many retro-inspired gadgets, the P1 is see-through, so you can see your tape spinning around as you listen. Coolgeek told us that it was designed not merely to ape older cassette players, but to have its own design identity.

Plenty of the new cassette players we've seen have playful, pastel-colored designs and curved edges, and Coolgeek's P1 looks a lot more mechanical and industrial in comparison — like true 1970s and 1980s tangible tech. So if you've been wanting an alternative cassette player, the campaign might be worth taking a look at.

When we tested out FastestVPN, we found "above-average speeds and rock-bottom prices" from this service. Now, I'm all for low pricing at a time when everything seems to be costing more and more. But there's something even better hidden in the company's early Black Friday sale that you might've missed. You can get a lifetime premium family password for six users alongside the VPN, for a one-off $27 (was $115) with code FUTUREBF2026.

• Best for: Families bundling together privacy and security tools without ever losing or forgetting passwords again.

• Why we like it: I really appreciate one-time charge - we've all got subscription-fatigue at this point. Our reader-exclusive code drops the price of the lifetime plan to less than the cost of the two-year plan, so you're effectively getting the password manager free on top of the multi-login VPN.

• What you need to know: This deal is for the lifetime plan, but a standard plan for two years is also available. FastestVPN has additional monthly costs for users who need dedicated IP and port forwarding. That might not affect most people, but worth knowing.

Why we recommend it

There's a lot to like about FastestVPN's lifetime plan - particularly for busy households and home offices. The lifetime password manager for up to six users is the real draw for me, because it means you can protect your accounts with stronger passwords that you won't forget (it feels like I'm reading about password breaches every week these days).

On the VPN side, the service offers WireGuard Protocol, 10 Gbps high-speed servers - despite its name, it's not the fastest VPN we've ever tested, but we scored it 4 stars in our review. The platform also offers streaming-optimized servers for Netflix, Disney+, and other popular sites.

There's app support for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS, as well as smart TVs, routers, and Fire Sticks.

For more options, we've rounded up the best password managers and best VPNs we've tested.

Price Context & Historical Value

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• 'Heartwood' is a wood-based gaming PC that took seven years to build
• It's stunningly neat, and the hidden trick is that it routes the cooling and other cables outside the PC
• Those pipes and cables run underneath the desk, which the PC is effectively built into, and down into the basement below, where the full cooling system resides

Fancy custom PC builds come along with some regularity, but every now and then something really unusual presents itself — and I'd class this as the smartest and neatest desktop computer I've ever seen.

Wccftech spotted the rig in question, which was posted in the PC build subreddit by Mithiral67. The gaming PC is called 'Heartwood', and it took a rather incredible seven years to build.

It's based on an Inwin 909 case (which looks impressive in itself in brushed aluminum) using a semi-open concept, with the motherboard sitting in an empty space (there's no rear panel with the build here, as you can see in the YouTube video below that shows off this PC).

This desktop looks incredibly neat and slick decked out in wood and aluminum, with the nifty lighting in the top of the case too, but where's the cooling and other cabling? That's when the full extent of this build becomes clear, because it also includes the desk underneath the PC.

What the maker has done is route the liquid cooling and power cables down through the bottom of the case and the desk, with these running around the underside of the desk, and then down a leg into the floor, to the basement of the house, where all the water-cooling gubbins (built around a Mora 400) resides.

Not only was this build a time-consuming labor of love, it was also a very costly one. Another Redditor enquires about the price of the materials, and according to Mithiral67 the wood itself was around $4,000 – and they said they didn't even want to get into the cost of the woodworking tools.

As for the components, the PC is built on a Ryzen 9800X3D processor plus Nvidia RTX 5090 GPU.

Waiting out the GPU pricing nightmares

So, this was a pricey build, and a complex one, but even then, seven years seems like a very long time for putting the PC together — it means Mithiral67 started their project before the pandemic.

What gives? Well, as they explain: "For those asking, 7 years was mostly waiting for a GPU at MSRP, literally took 4 generations to get lucky at Micro Center."

There you have it. Those hoping to feature an RTX 5090 in their custom build are looking at paying an absolute fortune currently, of course, and getting the Nvidia flagship at list price now seems almost as miraculous a feat as the construction and thoughtful crafting witnessed with this PC.

Mind you, even then Mithiral67 had to buy the RTX 5090 as part of a full PC to get it at the equivalent of the sticker price (which worked out fine, as it meant they could use that other PC for playing games while they painstakingly finished off the work of art that is 'Heartwood').

As one admiring Redditor summed up nicely: "This is genuinely the most beautiful setup I've seen, in every aspect from the choice of wood, color, design, and function."

There's no shortage of commenters approving of the build, or indeed those pointing out that Sam Altman doubtless disapproves of the amount of RAM used in this desktop, too. Don't you know that's memory which could have powered another AI agent from a data center somewhere?

• The current targets are in Ireland, Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg and Estonia
• The US military is investigating similar issues affecting six US bases
• Over 400 French supermarkets were attacked in October 2026

In October 2026 hundreds of French supermarkets lost food worth millions of euros after a cyberattack turned their freezers up to 120F (50C) — and it looks like it's happening again, this time in other European countries.

This time the targeted supermarkets include Supervalu, which is one of Ireland's biggest supermarket chains, as well as the Swedish retailers Axfood and ICO and big-name supermarkets in Belgium, Luxembourg and Estonia.

While the targets are different the method appears to be the same, with remote access turning the freezers into heaters and spoiling their contents.

According to one retailer on Facebook, ICA Kvantum Sjöbo, "What shouldn't have happened has happened!"

So what's happening?

What's happening to the supermarket freezers

This most recent attack follows in the footsteps of the French hack and the more recent Pentagon investigation into refrigeration issues in US military bases.

It could well be exploiting a very simple vulnerability, which is that remote refrigeration management systems have weak authentication and "dangerous" software flaws. Certainly in the case of the French supermarkets the BBC reported that the affected units were "older models whose security software could not be updated to ward off a risk" that the manufacturer had identified.

The French hack affected over 400 stores, and while the numbers aren't in yet the new hack is likely to reach three figures too.

As we noted in our report on the Pentagon investigation, the "Internet of Things" makes it easier for companies to manage large groups of devices automatically and remotely, but it also opens up a new way for hackers to cause trouble — and if the software isn't secure enough or updated when new threats emerge, it effectively puts up a welcome sign for cybercriminals.

The European Food Commissioner Christophe Hansen posted on X that "food security requires more attention at all levels. Because the weaponisation of food has become a reality." He's not wrong: whether they're being exploited by cybercriminals looking for an easy payday, tech troublemakers or nation states waging hybrid wars, it's clear that the Internet of Things needs to take security much more seriously.

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Lego Advent calendars might be the best type of Advent calendar there is. Behind each door you'll find a Lego character or mini build to complete. Unlike chocolate (gone in seconds), these daily treats stick around throughout the festive season and for years to come — Lego has also got creative with the boxes, transforming them into game boards or scenes where the behind-door builds can live, and turning them into a part of your seasonal decor.

I've been holding off placing my order, but now is the time to take the plunge — the full range of 2026 calendars is discounted right now, with at least 20% off list price. And there's plenty of time for it to arrive before Advent begins. I'll be picking up the Lego City set, which the classic festive option and includes everything you need to make a Santa's workshop. However, there are also Marvel and Star Wars calendars (which put a Christmassy twist on your favorite characters), as well as Disney Princess and kid-focused Lego Friends sets.

I've rounded up all your deal options below, as well as some bonus discounts on alternative festive Lego sets you might want to throw into your shopping trolley at the same time.

Lego 2026 Advent calendar deals

More festive brick bargains

AI innovation took center stage at IFA Berlin this year, with unprecedented solutions operating alongside vastly enhanced products powered by AI. Exhibitors showcased everything from advanced humanized assistants designed for daily chores to AI-driven robotic pets offering emotional companionship.

It will take time for these products to be honed and readily available for consumers, but many innovations are already here. Hisense demonstrated its AI companion suite, which will transform user interaction while Miele’s flagship lineup highlighted the role AI, advanced sensors and connected systems can play in minimizing decision-making in daily tasks.

While these products may be received well by tech loving audiences, not all consumers are convinced. When these products make it to market, brands and retailers are likely to be faced with cynicism, safety concerns and complexity-driven confusion. To overcome these challenges, innovators must consider the customer experience.

Overcoming the information gap

When it comes to big-ticket tech purchases, consumers want to understand what they are paying for. High spec products are increasingly complex, and many consumers do not have the technical know-how to understand the differences between products and the potential benefits of new AI-enabled features.

In product descriptions and marketing campaigns, brands often prioritize the ‘cool factor’, focusing on innovative new features. While techy audiences take this in their stride, this often alienates consumers who are less confident in their knowledge. These audiences need straightforward explanations of what the product does, how AI or tech has been incorporated and how it can enhance their lives – but they are often hard to find.

Unfortunately, some companies take advantage of limited understanding, slapping misleading ‘AI’ labels on their products, which ultimately do not deliver. This disappointment and negative word-of-mouth these customer experiences generate, along with high-profile hacking horror stories and broader concerns about data security, have impacted trust – and a lack of transparency and information only adds to the nagging feeling that companies have something to hide.

Companies that are honest and open about how their products incorporate AI, the benefits these features offer and how data is used and stored, can start to rebuild trust and earn the respect of consumers. While exciting high-tech features remain an important marketing tool, a ‘back to basics’ approach that offers easy-to-find answers to common questions and addresses concerns in clear, accessible language can help consumers to understand if a product meets their needs and to feel more comfortable making a purchase.

Consider all channels in the retail ecosystem

Although discovery and research often take place online, more than four in five (85%) consumers prefer to buy electronics in-store. Bricks-and-mortar locations provide the opportunity to see or trial products in person, receive answers to unresolved questions and seek advice from sales assistants – and demand will only increase as products become more complex.

While consumers may have a good idea of their preferred product when they enter a store, their decision can change quickly if the experience falls short of their expectations. When shoppers go into a store and cannot find anyone to assist them, they may abandon their purchase or feel undervalued.

Despite the importance of the in-store experience, many tech brands are leaving a gap in the funnel. Once goods reach a physical store, the retailer is often trusted to convert intention into action. However, with physical retail coming under pressure due to rising operational costs, many are reducing headcount, which makes it harder for consumers to get the help and advice they came for.

Lean into education and advocacy

As AI makes products more complex, availability of information and access to in-depth knowledge is becoming a necessity rather than a nice-to-have. When consumers are uncertain, sales will falter and there is a far higher risk of buyers’ remorse.

Retailers must be equipped to convert the confusion of the average shopper into purchases, but training budgets are being cut alongside headcount, with in-person practical training being replaced by online learning. Digital updates can provide a solid foundation, but surface-level modules do not inspire teams’ confidence or build their ability to sell.

Many retailers are unable to fund and provide the training required, but brands have an opportunity to step in. Brands with more complicated products should consider placing brand ambassadors in store or providing additional training to stockists’ staff to ensure that someone is on hand to answer challenging questions, reassure shoppers and help them find the model that will strike the best balance between their needs and their budget.

Experience is make-or-break for tech brands

Brand equity and goodwill are vital for long-term commercial success. Negative experiences detract from trust in both the retailer and the brand, while positive interactions help to solidify it. Brands should monitor sales and reviews closely, identifying areas for improvement, and work closely with retail partners to address any potential issues at the point of sale.

The cost of providing accurate, helpful information online or in-store is negligible, while the cost of ambassadors and training far outweighs the cost of potential failure and subsequent delisting of a brand and its products. Failure to offer in-depth details, expertise and advice can have a sizeable impact on the bottom line: making customers feel comfortable is the only way to ensure AI-enhanced products deliver the expected returns.

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• Applebee’s fixes mobile app flaw that exposed customer data through hardcoded database credentials
• Researchers found access to personal information including names, contact details, birthdays, and account metadata
• No evidence of abuse was found, but the incident highlights the persistent risk of hardcoded secrets in software

Applebee’s has fixed a serious flaw in its mobile app that exposed sensitive customer information to pretty much anyone. Whether or not anyone malicious actually found this vulnerability and exploited it is not known at this time.

The chain has an Android mobile app that allows customers to browse the menu, customize meals, place orders for delivery or pickup, save their favorites, or receive personalized food recommendations.

A security researcher from What Security called Robert Wiggins, used AI to analyze the source code of the app and found a gaping hole - hardcoded credentials for a company database.

Notifying the business

The database contained plenty of sensitive information: customer names, their email addresses (both verified and unverified ones), dates of birth, phone numbers, ZIP codes, veteran status, the number of logins, dates of account creation, and the IP address of the most recent login session.

We don’t know exactly how many people had their sensitive data exposed that way, but the app has more than a million downloads on the Google Play Store.

Wiggins soon realized that there was no way to report the issue either to Applebee’s itself or to its parent company, Dine Brands, so he reached out to TechCrunch. The publication verified his claims by finding the exposed credentials itself, and even created a new entry which Wiggins was later able to extract, and also confirmed the credentials allowed users to modify database entries.

TechCrunch managed to get ahold of Dine Brands, who plugged the hole and thanked everyone involved: “We appreciate TechCrunch and the security researcher for bringing this matter to our attention,” the company said. “Our security team promptly launched an investigation and has not currently found any evidence of unauthorized access.”

“Our investigation is ongoing, and we will take appropriate steps based on our findings,” the company added.

Hardcoded credentials are a very common mistake that sometimes has dire consequences. During production, software developers would leave login credentials inside the code to work faster, allowing the app to skip the tedious process of identifying every single time. However, the credentials are supposed to be temporary and are usually removed from the code before launch.

Sometimes, though, the credentials don’t get spotted during final code review and end up in the live version. Crooks who scan the codes for vulnerabilities can then use the information for unauthorized access.

A common error

Unfortunately, it is a very common problem. In March 2025, security researchers from Cybernews analyzed more than 156,000 iOS apps and found more than 815,000 hardcoded secrets, thousands of which were “very sensitive and could lead directly to breaches or data leaks.” It’s worth mentioning that in this case, a “secret” means more than just passwords - it also includes API keys and encryption keys. The average app's code exposed 5.2 secrets, and 71% of apps leak at least one secret, Cybernews reported at the time.

A few months later, in July, HPE patched a similar bug in Aruba Instant On Access Points, and at roughly the same time, a similar flaw was found in Cisco’s Unified CM, enterprise-grade IP telephony call control platform providing voice, video, messaging, mobility, and presence services.

The leaks continued in 2026 - in February, news broke of Chinese state-sponsored threat actors abusing hardcoded credentials found in Dell’s RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines.

Applebee’s did not notify its customers about the incident, and it did not publicly disclose it on its website or social channels, at press time. Also, there are no indications that any threat actors exfiltrated this data or leaked it to the dark web.

I've used a pair of Bose QuietComfort Headphones for years, and they remain some of the best cans I've ever owned. The manufacturer just released a new pair in the last few months, promising the same excellent audio quality, strong noise cancellation, and comfortable fit in a whole new package. These Bose QuietComfort Headphones (2nd Gen) are now at Amazon for $219 (was $359) — that's a record-low price.

• Browse all Bose deals at Amazon

At the same time as this offer, the original Bose QuietComfort Headphones are at Amazon for $169 (was $359). Personally, I'd pay for the upgraded model if possible, but this is also a record-low price and arguably an even better deal if you're on a tighter budget.

Today's best Bose headphone deals

We scored the new model four stars in our Bose QuietComfort Headphones (2nd Gen) review. While they came with a strong recommendation for the impressive sound, snug fit and good noise cancellation, we suggested it was best to wait for a price cut. Now that there's $140 off for Black Friday, the value for money is undeniable.

• Henrico County in Virginia was forced to remove Flock cameras by hand
• Officials say the company is failing to fulfil its “contractual obligation”
• A growing number of police forces are cancelling contracts with Flock

Work crews in a Virginia county have removed more than 120 Flock cameras after officials said the surveillance tech company had failed to fulfil its “contractual obligation” to remove them.

An image obtained by news outlet 12 On Your Side shows a pile of cameras and solar panels that were collected after Henrico County ended its contract with Flock in early October over privacy concerns.

Reportedly, the poles upon which the cameras were mounted still remain, as crews claimed Flock has to remove these itself.

The removal of the automatic license plate reading technology comes as public trust wanes, and concerns over privacy continue to grow.

Plymouth, Massachusetts also canceled its contract with Flock cameras after a high-profile case involving a motoring journalist made national headlines.

Joel Feder, a writer for The Drive, was ambushed by police when the license plate of the $155,000 Range Rover he was test-driving was flagged as belong to a stolen vehicle.

The car belonged to Jaguar Land Rover's media fleet. According to Feder, the police had used Flock’s camera system to track the journalist down over a number of days.

A very similar license plate on another Jaguar Land Rover media vehicle was also falsely flagged by the Flock system in Nebraska a few days later, leading to another journalist facing lengthy questioning over the vehicle.

Plymouth Police Chief Eric Fadden told The Drive that the City Council voted to discontinue using the Flock system in September of this year.

Fadden stated that the police force “did not hear any reply from Flock Safety Corporate or Legal, other than some communication with our local representative.”

As a result of the lack of communication, he subsequently directed staff to “disconnect the power cords from the cameras,” according to The Drive.

However, the cameras remain the property of Flock, and both Henrico County and Plymouth are still waiting for a response from the company as to when they will be collected.

Analysis: controversy refuses to go away

Flock’s automated license plate recognition cameras have caused plenty of controversy in the past few months, with stories surfacing of police department misuse, hackers gaining access to millions of images, and general concern over personal privacy.

Some people have been taking matters into their own hands by disabling cameras, while a number of software companies have been mapping the location of the cameras to help drivers avoid them.

MapQuest enjoyed a resurgence in popularity after it added a new Surveillance Layer to its app, showing the location of cameras from Flock, as well as those from rival companies.

But during the TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 event last month, Flock’s CEO Garrett Langley said we shouldn’t "pause progress” in the face of privacy concerns.
“If we want to live in a society where, if you commit a crime, you have a higher probability of being held accountable, we shouldn’t pause progress,” he said.

Many privacy advocate groups have raised concerns over Flock’s technology, including the recent news that it was capable of processing ambient audio in order to determine screams, gunshots and even car crashes before alerting emergency services.

Flock pulled its plans to implement that particular feature, owing to suggestions from consumer rights groups that it could be classed as "mass surveillance", but a huge amount of public mistrust remains.

• Google confirms it will move away from Jules, which launched in 2025
• Users have until November 11 2027 to finish projects, then it'll be read-only
• 'Learnings' gained from the 'experiment' will inform Antigravity project

It feels like just months since Google launched its AI coding agent, Jules, but the tech giant is now shuttering the project as it looks to consolidate its agentic AI efforts.

The company confirmed in an X post that "Jules will be winding down" while it "focus[es] on [the] unified experience" that is Antigravity.

While Jules itself as a product will be shuttered, with Google describing it as an "experiment to learn how asynchronous coding agents can help developers ship faster," many of the tools it offered will live on under Google's Antigravity project.

Google shutters Jules AI coding agent

Users now have until November 11 2027 to finished their ongoing Jules sessions, after which it will operate in read-only mode for existing projects. The company has also introduced an export process to help developers move out of the platform.

"You can now export everything Jules knows about your work into a local folder: account settings, environment variables, scheduled tasks, connected repositories, memories, setup scripts, and every session, including its prompt, plan, full activity log, and code patches," a more detailed announcement confirms.

The decision may not come as a surprise to all – the platform didn't seem especially popular among developers. "Could've just emailed the 3 people this affects," one comment on X reads.

Google never shared details of how popular Jules was, but it did boast of thousands of developers testing it during the beta phase. Still, Jules will have likely faced stiff competition from OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code, as well as GitHub Copilot and a long list of others.

Looking ahead, Google's focus has now shifted to a consolidated agentic strategy under Antigravity, where it promises to apply the "learnings" it amassed from Jules.

Sam Altman has been making headlines for his claims that consumers don’t deserve DRAM because it is only utilized “5% of the time.” In his opinion, DRAM supplies should be prioritized for data centers where its utility can be maximized powering cloud environments.

Altman’s perspective is like a utilitarian's fantasy. Humanity’s endurance of short-term pain - by handing over every bit of DRAM we have - will lead to a morally right outcome in the form of a world powered by time-saving, efficiency-increasing, productivity-boosting AI.

Sounds great if you’re the head of an AI company, but less so if you just want memory to be affordable again.

But what the OpenAI head seems to forget is that the DRAM shortage is part of a crisis he had a hand in creating. When OpenAI’s Stargate datacenter buildout was announced in early 2025, it was predicted that the project would require 40% of the world’s global supply. Supply issues were compounded as leading producers of memory entered a production turndown just a few years before to help stabilize pricing.

Will Sam Altman break into your house to steal your RAM?

The good news is that there is little Sam Altman himself can do to take your RAM off you. One reddit user asked Google AI the question we’ve all been thinking: “Is Sam Altman going to break into my house and steal my RAM?”

Google reassured the user with, “No, Sam Altman is not going to break into your house to physically steal your RAM.” So at least there's that.

But given how constrained the current memory supply is, there are a few ways that AI and other future tech could make the whole situation worse.

The worst could still be yet to come

One of the world’s leading memory manufacturers, SK Hynix, has predicted that the supply shortage could “persist through 2030,” making any hopes of a return to affordable pricing in the next few years a distant dream.

With OpenAI and Anthropic both set to hit the public market within that window, there is a lot of uncertainty over how the memory giants that control around 90% of the world’s supply will shift production.

Given the difference in revenue between the consumer memory market and the AI market, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a significant production swing towards the high-bandwidth memory required for AI inference and training.

This could be compounded by AI’s effect on the job market, with numerous firms enacting hiring freezes as AI strategies help cut out repetitive rote work. Higher unemployment and a lack of open positions could further reduce the demand for consumer memory, swinging production further in favor of AI.

But other emerging industries are also looking to take a bite out of the memory market.

Robots and autonomous vehicles are coming for your RAM

There has been a recent explosion in the robotics industry: from humanoid bots competing in their very own Olympics, to warehouses staffed by fleets of micro-bots. As AI improves and converges with the robotics industry to produce bots with near-human fine motor control, numerous industries spanning manufacturing, hospitality and logistics could buy robots in place of humans.

After all, a robot can work around the clock, doesn’t need to rest, and doesn’t have any rights to be violated with unsafe working conditions or excessive hours. The same goes for an autonomous taxi or cargo truck.

But they will need memory to run their little AI brains. And serving the corporate overlords is much more important (and much more profitable) than expanding memory production for the consumer market, so don’t expect things to improve any time soon.

• Grok Bot users recently found they were hitting their usage limits very fast
• That’s because Elon Musk decided to throttle Grok Bot usage limits
• The X owner said Grok Bot costs were "unsustainably high"

If you noticed that you burned through your Grok Bot usage much faster than usual in recent days, there’s a reason for that: Elon Musk intentionally limited users’ AI agent allowances in the face of “unsustainably high costs.” And as you’d expect, a lot of people are unhappy with that.

The revelation came about after an X user pinged platform owner Musk, asking for a Grok Bot reset after they surprisingly hit their 100% usage limit, four days before it was due to reset. They additionally commented that “Normally I don’t even reach 100%.”

Musk then replied to the post, stating: “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue.”

Many X users seemed irked by the situation, with several saying that their Grok Bot usage had hit the 100% limit while they were sleeping and not using any AI agents. Users claimed their usage had suddenly gone from 50% to 100%, 35% to 78%, and 70% to 100%, all supposedly without using Grok Bot at all.

Unsustainable costs

Elon Musk’s comments come amid broader scrutiny of the financial sustainability of many AI products. Tech stocks — including those of many leading AI firms — fell sharply last week as investors grew concerned over the profitability of the industry, with Google revealing that its own AI summaries have hurt its search advertising revenue.

Concerns have also been raised in recent months over the finances involved in many AI companies’ offerings. For instance, users of AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude Code can often spend many times more in tokens than they’re actually paying in monthly subscriptions, leading to questions over how sustainable many AI business models really are and whether things will need to be adjusted in the near future.

This changing landscape hasn’t gone down well with many users, of course. One thread on Reddit dubbed Musk’s about-face an “indirect rug pull” of Grok Bot, with features and usage limited in a bid to cut costs.

But it’s unlikely that AI producers will be able to subsidize their products’ costs to users forever. Usage limits will necessarily need to tighten (as OpenAI quietly announced recently, much to the frustration of users) and prices will need to increase for these business models to make sense. So don’t be surprised if Grok Bot’s lower cap is just the first of many big changes looming on the horizon.

• 'Thousands' of GCHQ storage devices are missing or unaccounted for
• Most are likely protected by encryption or PIN access
• Watchdog is 'concerned' and 'disappointed'

The UK's intelligence and cybersecurity agency, GCHQ, has been slammed by its very own watchdog after failing to account for thousands of missing storage devices.

The 2025 Investigatory Powers Commissioner's Office (IPCO) report ultimately concluded GCHQ has failed to establish the location or status of thousands of removable storage devices such as USB sticks, external hard drives and memory cards.

While the exact number of devices is unconfirmed, the IPCO report does confirm the estimate to be "in the thousands" – and that's a GCHQ estimate, not a third-party estimate.

GCHQ has seemingly lost thousands of USBs, external drives, memory cards

"There is a programme of further work to locate and account for as many of these devices as possible," the report adds, noting that "GCHQ will be able to report how many devices have been confirmed as lost."

Nevertheless, the IPCO expressed disappointment at how long investigations and remedial action had taken – the problems were actually first brought to the watchdog's attention years ago, so it's not a newly discovered issue. "We remain very concerned about this issue and are disappointed with the time it has taken GCHQ to investigate."

The issue was already raised in the IPCO's 2024 report, when the watchdog confirmed that it has asked GCHQ and MI5 to "review their internal allocation and audit of removable media" the year prior.

Back then, it was already acknowledged that many of the missing devices were either encrypted or required a PIN to access, however given the intense sensitivity of many of these artefacts, significant risk could still be on the cards.

The latest report acknowledged the technical and practical difficulties involve with the ongoing investigation, but calls for continued senior-level oversight." According to the report, GCHQ has commissioned a new tool to monitor the issue.

• Windows 11 just got a revamped internet speed test in preview
• This feature was shuttled swiftly through development using agentic AI in combination with human oversight
• Microsoft boasts that this is about: "Getting from idea to customer value faster. Without AI slop." Others are more cynical, though

Windows 11 just got a useful change in preview, with its built-in internet speed test being revamped, and the new version was produced using AI (in conjunction with human oversight, I should add).

Windows Latest spotted that Marcus Ash, Microsoft's VP of Windows Design and Research, posted on X to explain that the "team moved pretty fast on this one", adding that following feedback asking for the speed test to be improved, "within a day, Diego had a working prototype." (Diego Baca is VP of Design for Windows).

Ash tells us: "From there, our connectivity team worked with partners to bring the experience into Windows. The design and build work was driven by an agentic AI workflow, with a person guiding the process in their spare time."

The Microsoft exec further explains that this is where he sees "a lot of potential in AI" and using agentic workflows, in terms of "Getting from idea to customer value faster. Without AI slop. That is the way."

Analysis: AI, oversight, bugs, and jobs

Of course, this is a controversial topic. Mention AI being involved in the coding of Windows 11 and some tempers will flare online, even though we know this is happening anyway. Microsoft has made no secret of that fact.

Indeed, among the AI hate and flames on social media, a lot of people are point out that these days pretty much all software is being developed in conjunction with Large Language Models (LLM agents) — even Linux.

As one Redditor makes clear: "Newsflash — every single piece of software you use, except for open source projects that are making a statement, you should expect to have AI written code in it. It is pervasive, it is everywhere."

The key aspect here is exactly how the AI agent in question is employed.

It's one thing for such an agent to be given a task to write a piece of code for a certain feature, and then just to slap that into your software or operating system as it is (or maybe after a cursory glance through the work). It's another thing to have a human programmer working on a feature and using an agent to perform grunt-work (easy but perhaps time-consuming) coding therein — and then to properly check the AI's output.

Theoretically, there's nothing wrong with the latter approach, at least in terms of the soundness of the coding work. And as Microsoft's Ash points out, this is really accelerating development times — meaning Windows 11 users will get new features (hopefully capabilities they want, like this improved internet speed test) much more swiftly. Which is exactly why almost every developer is now utilizing this tech.

There are problems here, though, and they're bound up in the public perception of Microsoft. Do Windows 11 users trust the company to be using AI in the right — i.e., properly checked and vetted — way? Not really, in many cases, as there remains a lot of doubt over the overall quality of Windows 11 code, and rightly so given the regularity, and severity, of the bugs we've seen (with more prevalence since 2024, and that 24H2 update).

As another Redditor observes: "People aren't calling Windows slop because it's being made using AI these days. They're calling it slop because it's being made using AI with woefully insufficient human oversight and even more woefully insufficient QA, leading to repeated disastrous bugs making it to production and end users being treated as beta testers. You want people to stop calling your product slop? Stop shipping updates that take down people's computers or break existing features."

The other issue here is that of AI stealing coding jobs from people. Agents may make things happen a lot more quickly, but as Ash notes, this revamped speed test was implemented mainly by an agent — including its design — with the software engineer "guiding the process in their spare time", making it sound like a rather casual amount of effort on the human side of the equation.

Is it a particularly sensitive approach to be touting the benefits of AI — as real as they may be for an operating system's ongoing development and maintenance — in this way at a time when Microsoft has been swinging the axe with various job cuts and pushing staff towards voluntary redundancy in a big way? I'd suggest it isn't, and the timing of this particular push of the value of agentic AI is dubious in that respect.

At least in this case Microsoft is being upfront and transparent about what it's doing — and we can expect a good deal more AI acceleration of Windows 11's development going forward.

• Spotify's AI remixing tool is tipped to arrive early in 2027
• Premium users may have to pay $4–$5 extra for it
• Reaction from potential users has been lukewarm

Back in August, Spotify announced plans to introduce new AI-powered features to let users create custom covers and remixes of their songs, and a new rumor suggests the feature may arrive in February — at the cost of a $4–$5 surcharge on top of existing Premium subscriptions.

That's according to the Financial Times (via Android Authority), which reports that "people familiar" with the plans reckon a launch could be scheduled to coincide with the Grammys — the music awards show is on Sunday, February 7 — or could happen on some other date within the first quarter of 2027.

Spotify is apparently still trying to get artists and labels to embrace the technology, which would (for example) let you turn a dance track in your library into a country ballad, or have one of your favorite artists cover a song recorded by a different singer or band.

It's worth bearing in mind that these details are still to be confirmed, as, per the FT, the timing and pricing have not been finalized, though we know from what Spotify has already said that it's keen to push this new feature out.

Winning over artists and fans

The plan seems to be to reward artists who let Spotify use their music for AI purposes, and one analyst quoted by the FT estimates that 7–8% of US Premium subscribers (of whom there are thought to be around 75 million) would pay the extra few dollars for the feature.

"Winning over major contemporary stars has proved more challenging than securing participation from some established older artists," says the FT — with Olivia Rodrigo mentioned as one of the artists who have previously taken a public anti-AI stance.

If the Reddit boards are any indication of feeling, there's not much of an appetite for these new AI tools among users either. One thread responding to the FT report is filled with negative comments and recommendations for alternative music streaming services.

"Who wants this?" is indicative of the comments, while the words "gross" and "horrible" are also thrown around. Spotify doesn't, of course, have to convince all of its users to adopt the AI add-on to make it profitable; but as this report suggests, getting artists on board might be the bigger issue.

The Dell Pro Max Tower T2 is one of those desktop workstations that immediately resonated when we tested it. It's fast, performance-driven, and scored 4.5 stars in our review. It's a beast for professional workloads. But here's something else I noticed.

The Dell Pro Max Tower T2 workstation can be configured with an Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPU for $16,780 (was $18,645) at Dell when you sign up to receive newsletters with one of our Dell coupon codes, which gives you 10% off your first purchase.

And when you consider that the Blackwell 6000 graphics card costs $15,799 at EmpoweredPC and $17,999 at Newegg, that makes the whole bundle a bit of a steal.

• Best for: Enterprise professionals, AI developers, and creative studio engineers.

• What we like: The machine itself is superb, blazing through our benchmark tests. It's highly configurable for a range of workloads. But it's the fact that you're getting a full tower workstation for almost the cost of the GPU alone that stands out.

• What to know: Because of how Dell's website works, you'll need to spec out the Pro Max T2 with the Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 GPU - the deal below takes you to the base configuration, but it's easy enough. The newsletter signup is the way to get that extra saving.

Today's best Dell PC deal

Why we recommend it

This workstation scored 4.5 stars in our review, and we awarded it a TechRadar Pro Highly Recommended badge.

To see how it fared, we ran Dell's Pro Max T2 alongside engineers working with large data warehouses, AI, 3D modeling, 4K and 6K video editing, and large-scale visual events. And it performed beautifully in that role - it's what it was built for.

In our review, we found it "a beast of a machine for professionals who need uncompromising power in engineering, AI, and all-around business performance, and who want a machine that is capable today and upgradable for the future."

For more work-oriented PCs, we've tested out the best business computers.

Price context & historical value

The workstation's price, configured with this GPU, is about what I'd expect in today's volatile market. However, the value comes from getting it specced with a Blackwell 6000 graphics card for about the same price as buying the GPU on its own.

I've listed the cheapest Blackwell config here. However, for truly demanding tasks, I'd recommend bumping up the memory to 32GB - although you can go as high as 128GB, and potentially increasing storage from the base 256GB (Dell sells configurations up to 4TB).

Should you buy it?

✅ Buy the Dell Pro Max T2 if...

You want a high-performance workstation desktop for complicated workloads, AI, or production-grade creative projects.

❌ Skip the Dell Pro Max T2 if...

You need a business PC for largely administrative or general content creation tasks. You could spec out the Pro Max T2 for that, but personally, I rate the highly configurable Dell Tower Plus (EBT2250).

• See all desktop PCs at Dell

• The Explorer 100D is a palm-sized 30,000mAh portable power station
• It uses a long-lasting lithium iron phosphate battery
• It has a maximum total output of 158W and supports direct solar input

Jackery has just launched a new portable power station that combines a high capacity with an impressively small and lightweight design.

Dubbed the Jackery Explorer 100D, it measures 11.87 x 8.26 x 8.57cm and weighs 850g, which sounds fairly compact when you consider that it has 30,000mAh of power. Indeed, it’s 14% smaller and 12% lighter than the Explorer 100 Plus, making it Jackery's smallest portable power station yet.

So, while it will certainly add some weight to your bag, it's small enough to carry around in a backpack, so you can keep your devices powered when out and about or on trips. It’s designed to comply with lithium battery transport standards, too, so you can take it on planes and trains, and even though it’s palm-sized, it also includes a built-in handle and supports an optional shoulder strap.

An LFP battery with solar support

The Jackery Explorer 100D also uses a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery rather than the more common lithium-ion ones, meaning it’s theoretically both safer and longer-lasting, with Jackery claiming it has an up to 8-year lifespan and will retain at least 80% of its capacity across 3,000 charging cycles.

It has two 140W USB-C ports and an 18W USB-A port, so you can charge, for example, a laptop, phone, and tablet all at once. That said, it tops out at 158W of combined charging power, so you can’t use all of those ports at full power simultaneously.

When you need to charge the 100D itself, you can of course plug it in to any outlet, but it also supports up to 100W of direct solar input, making it suited to an off-grid setup.

So there’s a lot to like here, and while this isn’t the cheapest 30,000mAh power station, it’s reasonably affordable too, coming in at $99 / €99 (roughly £75 / AU$140). It’s not currently available in the UK or Australia, but Jackery does have a presence in both regions, so that might change.

• Amazon's 'Ask this book' feature is now rolling out to Kindles
• It's part of software version 5.20.2
• So far, users have only reported this landing on 2026 models, and it might currently be US-exclusive

Amazon launched ‘Ask this book’ almost a year ago now, with this AI-powered tool allowing you to ask questions about what you’re reading. However, it was initially only available for the iOS Kindle app, and only in the US.

Now, though, that availability is widening — at least a little. As spotted by some Reddit users and The eBook Reader, ‘Ask this book’ has started rolling out to certain Kindle models, including the Kindle Colorsoft 2026 and the Kindle Paperwhite 2026. It’s likely that the other 2026 Kindles will also receive this update, though that hasn’t been confirmed.

Indeed, Amazon itself has so far said very little about this rollout. The feature is part of software version 5.20.2, but this doesn’t yet have any release notes, or any confirmation beyond user reports of which models ‘Ask this book’ will actually work with.

Unclear availability

So, for now, there’s a question mark over whether the feature is coming to previous Kindle generations — I can say that my Kindle Colorsoft Signature Edition 2024 does not yet have the update. But then it’s a UK model, and previously, the feature had only been available in the US — so it also remains to be seen whether other regions will get it.

For now, if you’re curious, you’ll seemingly have to wait and see whether your Kindle gets the update pushed to it — there is no way to force the update currently. The rollout might happen in stages, though, so even if you don’t have it yet, you may still get it. Just make sure Wi-Fi is on so your Kindle can update.

As for the ‘Ask this book’ feature itself, it’s potentially very useful, letting you, for example, ask about the plot or characters of a supported book and receive information based on where you’re up to in it — or for the whole book if you don’t mind spoilers.

As with most AI features, though, it’s also controversial, with Reddit comments about its original launch including “I hate it,” and “this feature is so invasive.” So it’s certainly not for everyone.

• Custom AI behaviors have arrived in the Philips Hue app
• At the moment you can't edit what the AI creates
• AI features require the Hue Bridge Pro

When we spoke to Hue founder and head of technology George Yianni in September, he told us about some exciting new features coming to the Hue ecosystem including Custom AI Behaviors. And now they've arrived in the Hue app, provided that you have the Hue Bridge Pro.

Yianni told us that AI would be "a bit of a game changer" for the platform, and said of the custom behaviors that "natural language is a fantastic way to just describe arbitrarily how you would like your home to behave, and then we can use AI to translate that into a special programming language we’ve developed that runs the automation in the Bridge."

According to Yianni, "I now can finally have my home behave exactly the way I wanted to. I think that's a really big deal." But unfortunately according to HueBlog, the behaviors aren't quite behaving the way we'd like them to.

How to use Philips Hue Custom AI Behaviors

The idea behind Custom AI Behaviors is simple: tell the AI what you want and the AI will craft the appropriate behavior for you and add it to the app. For example, you could tell the AI that you want specific lights to go on at sunset, and to use different color themes each time.

That's what Hueblog tried, and the AI understood the mission. But unfortunately it didn't quite get it right: instead of turning on only the specified lights, the behavior turned all the lights on. When Hueblog tried to get the AI to fix the issue "it gave up and simply displayed the error message."

It looks like the goal — use AI to make things simple — is perhaps too simple, because as Hueblog put it "you’re entirely limited by the AI’s logic and reasoning. If it doesn’t cooperate, you’re out of luck." Unlike, say, Apple's Shortcuts on macOS and iOS, there's no way to tweak the shortcuts the AI has created if they're not quite doing what you want.

This feels like a typical version 1.0 issue, where a feature is rolled out first and then updated based on user feedback. That means the no-tweaking issue is likely to be short-lived: in my experience Hue's pretty good at updating its app to deliver new features.

While the new AI features — the new Custom AI Behaviors and the previously launched SpatialAware scene optimization — are reserved for the Hue Bridge Pro, the app also provides updates for all Hue users including easier Screen Sync setup and improved scene recommendations. As ever the Hue app is available for both iOS and Android.

You don't need to be a tech expert to know that the Nintendo Switch 2 will be one of the most sought-after items in this year's Black Friday sales. And although we're now in November, I wasn't expecting to see any deals for a few weeks. But two surprisingly strong Nintendo Switch 2 bundles are already available at the official Nintendo Store, which I think will rival anything we see during this month's sales.

• View all Switch 2 bundle deals at Nintendo

The first brings together a Nintendo Switch 2 console, a copy of Mario Kart World, a 256GB Samsung microSD card, and a Nintendo Switch 2 Camera for £459.99. That's a total saving of almost £95 compared with buying these items individually.

As for the second bundle, you can get a Switch 2, a copy of Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, a 256GB Samsung microSD card, and a Nintendo Switch 2 Camera for £449.99. Oh, and let's not forget the free Nintendo Switch Sports Resort Gym Bag. The total savings from picking up this bundle are around £75.

Today's best Nintendo Switch 2 bundles

As for the actual value of the extras in both bundles, each contains one of the best Nintendo Switch 2 games to start your collection.

Mario Kart World is a fantastic new entry in the party racer series, which expands it with more freedom and open-world elements. Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, meanwhile, is another fun compilation of games that make use of the console's motion controls to recreate tennis, volleyball, bowling, golf, and more.

The microSD card is a really nice inclusion as well. Even though the Switch 2 comes with a respectable 256GB of storage built in, having another 256GB on top is very handy as game sizes are continuously increasing, and this means you can have a relatively large library of titles installed at once.

Lastly, there's the Switch 2 Camera, which is probably the least valuable item of the bunch. If you do expect to do a lot of online multiplayer with friends and family, though, this will let you make the most of Game Chat features that can put your face and voice in certain games as you play, including Mario Kart World.

• Openreach warns landline phones will stop working on January 31, 2027
• Legacy PTSN system is going digital, so users should switch now
• Openreach remind businesses and consumers alike to check their connections

Openreach has issued a reminder warning that the UK's legacy landline phone network will be switched off in less than 100 days.

BT's infrastructure arm, responsible for deploying, maintaining and upgrading most of the country's networks, has reminded users the copper-based Public Switched Telephone Network (PTSN) network will be retired on January 31, 2027.

There will be no extension to this cut-off, meaning users, both business and consumer alike, will need to ensure their systems are ready for the change.

Time to switch

The news of the "big switch off", as Openreach's advice hub calls it, should not be a surprise, as plans were first announced to shut down the PSTN and ISDN networks by the end of 2025 back in 2017 - with the deadline later extended to 2027.

It notes that the aging landline network is harder to maintain and more vulnerable to faults, whilst also being unable to keep up with the demands posed by modern usage.

Openreach says it has already supported the migration of around 15 million lines off the old copper-based network, and although most of our homes and offices will have already switched to digital-based Internet Protocol (IP) fiber networks, there are a wide range of systems which still rely on PSTN connectivity.

Among the items needing upgrading point-of-sale terminals in shops, fire and security alarms, and personal care alarms for elderly and vulnerable people.

“Businesses and organisations that delay action are making things harder for themselves, noted James Lilley, Director of All-IP at Openreach.

"The straightforward migrations have largely been completed. What's left are the complex connections that underpin critical operations, requiring careful planning, supplier coordination, and thorough testing. We are urging businesses to act now, audit their remaining analogue services, and work with their communications provider on a migration plan today.”

Openreach's website notes the move to digital phone lines will help provide users with a more reliable service, better-quality calls and smarter blocking of unwanted calls.

It tells users to not wait until the deadline, and to get in contact with your service provider as soon as possible to get the move going.

Anyone who has not switched by the January 2027 deadline may see limited service after that time, and may be moved to the Emergency Voice and Access Continuity (EVAc) service, a temporary emergency voice-only service which keeps basic voice calls working for a limited time.

An FAQ includes the question "I don't want broadband. Can I have a phone line only?" but includes only a wishy-washy response - "If you have a phone line but don’t have broadband, your service provider will help you find the most suitable digital option for your needs."

Collaboration platforms have become central to working life, with Microsoft Teams alone serving more than 320 million monthly active users worldwide. Everywhere you look, they are now part of workplace culture and have been a driving force for change in the use of voice services.

Part of their ongoing appeal is that they are extremely simple to deploy and their familiarity flattens the learning curve for many users almost entirely. For IT teams, one of the key benefits is that they sit within an established supplier environment and, as a result, can help make procurement more straightforward.

Sounds great, but communication infrastructure must also be able to adapt over time - for example, when a business expands or changes how it serves customers. Depending on the platform, any functional limitations may only become clear when a business needs to connect communications with other systems or adapt services for new teams and locations.

The point is that inflexibility can create complications that significantly increase the initial cost of a collaboration solution; something that businesses can easily overlook.

The hidden cost of inflexibility

But what do we mean by complications? Well, any given collaboration platform may work perfectly well for everyday internal calling, yet they all have the potential to become restrictive when communications need to support more specialized processes.

To break this down, everyday internal calls have relatively simple requirements because employees already know who to contact and how to reach them. However, in use cases such as customer-facing communications, employees may require calls to be directed based on factors such as location or the nature of the inquiry.

They may also need access to relevant customer information while the conversation is taking place, whether it is held in a CRM platform or another business application, including a bespoke system where technology integration is more challenging.

This is where the level and quality of the integration becomes extremely important, as any limitations may force employees to switch between applications or search manually for information that should be readily available.

Get this wrong, and users may require a customer to repeat information, which can extend the interaction and cause frustration. Some businesses may also need more detailed insight into call activity when they are trying to identify problems or improve customer service. For many, this is a central objective when building these systems and processes.

Adding workarounds, such as asking staff to look up customer records manually or using a separate connector to pass data between systems, is one option. However, these can make it harder for IT teams to manage the service consistently as requirements change.

Why AI changes the equation (again)

The issues are becoming even more consequential as businesses look to use AI to handle a greater share of customer communications, because these systems need access to the right information to respond usefully.

For an assistant to deal with an inquiry properly, it needs to draw on the same customer information that a human employee would use. But when an inquiry cannot be resolved automatically, the conversation needs to reach the appropriate person without losing its context.

This is where any disconnect between the communications environment and core business systems can really limit what an AI assistant can do well. AI that cannot access the right information can create an additional layer of friction for customers and employees.

Ideally, these compromises should be avoided entirely. A business should be able to retain the collaboration tools employees already know while adding communication and integration capabilities where needed.

In fact, seamless connectivity and interaction between the user, the AI tools being used, and the relevant customer and operational data should be a core objective rather than a nice-to-have. This means that the technology should be able to accommodate changing requirements without creating a dependence on manual workarounds, so organizations have full control over the pace at which they adopt new technologies and processes.

Businesses planning to expand their use of AI, which is likely to include a great many of them, should consider whether their current communications infrastructure can support those connections. Granted, it is usually possible to retrofit systems to bridge functionality and service gaps, but if the objective is to use AI effectively across a growing number of customer interactions, flexibility needs to be built into the foundation from the outset.

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In the UK, fraud losses reached £1.3billion, showcasing how fraud operates at a growing scale. One of the factors driving this growth is the increasing use of technologies, such as AI, which are becoming dangerous and effective weapons in the hands of a new generation of criminals

As they continue to evolve, criminal networks are becoming faster and more sophisticated in their operations, and financial institutions face the challenge of adapting to a new era of cybersecurity and fraud prevention powered by the same force threatening the system and customers’ trust.

AI is reinventing cybercrime

Fraudsters are already using advanced technologies including generative AI to industrialize social engineering. As the marginal cost of a sophisticated attack approaches zero, criminal networks are undergoing a measurable structural shift in how they operate. Skills that previously lived inside a small number of highly specialized criminal groups are now commoditized.

Generative AI and synthetic identity creation can now produce composite identities that pass Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, build believable credit histories and operate undetected for months before the fraud is executed. Deepfake-enabled authorization fraud produces voices and videos convincing enough to trick humans into authorizing transactions or transferring access credentials.

These examples all reveal a common pattern: they attack the trust layer, the moment where a system or a human decides something is legitimate. Even with incredibly sophisticated models, the tactics will target the system and subsequent operations. AI can now manufacture trust at a speed and quality that was simply not possible before.

Why traditional security is falling behind

Such technologies now have the upper-hand as they are largely defeating the customer, not the bank's systems. Fraudsters are using AI to manipulate people into authorizing transactions themselves with more convincing scam calls, more realistic impersonation, more personalized social engineering that erodes the skepticism that used to protect people. The fraud arrives at the bank's systems looking entirely legitimate, because in a technical sense it is.

That is where the battle is being fought today. As banks continue to invest in AI-driven detection and the customer manipulation route becomes harder to exploit at scale, the incentive to attack the banks' systems directly increases.

We are in a transitional phase, where technology is helping fraudsters to defeat people, this could evolve toward AI directly probing and attacking the institutions themselves. The financial sector should be preparing for that second phase now.

Against an adversary that probes, adapts and iterates continuously, the current static nature of traditional security controls are not sufficient. In financial fraud and cybersecurity, AI-driven attacks are not just evading controls, they are mapping them. They behave almost as if they understand the shape of the detection system and are deliberately staying outside its boundaries.

A symbiotic relationship between workforce and technology

In banks and financial institutions, fraud prevention teams are increasingly struggling to keep up with the constant technological evolution of the threats, mostly because they have been trained to think in terms of incidents: if something happens, you detect it, you respond, you close the case.

The ones making the most progress are those treating detection as a research function rather than an operational one. They are looking at shifts in behaviors that might suggest something is being tested against us. This different analytical posture ultimately aids in prevention over detection.

The professionals who will matter most in five years are the ones who can reason about systems rather than just operate them. There is a need to move from expertise in specific tools to expertise in the underlying principles that make tools work. Principles, such as statistical reasoning, adversarial thinking, systems design, feedback loop analysis, compound over time and remain relevant regardless of what the technology stack looks like in years to come.

Not all organizations are equipped to operate this way, and while hiring to fill this gap might be the obvious solution, the reality is that, thanks to advancements and widespread adoption, today we have cutting-edge AI tools that can be easily integrated within existing infrastructure and operations.

The way forward is to invest in the work of external providers that make these tools accessible and easy to deploy, combining statistical analysis, reasoning and full explainability.

Deploying new technologies without fueling risks

You don’t need to be technically sophisticated to deploy a technically sophisticated attack, and this democratization of capability is what makes the next wave genuinely different. The questions practitioners are working through now are not whether new technologies work, but how to leverage the next generation of capabilities to stay ahead of increasingly automated attacks.

The most important principle is to treat your systems as attack surfaces from day one rather than as an afterthought once they are in production. Every model you deploy has assumptions baked into it, and adversarial actors will probe those assumptions systematically. If you have not done that probing yourself first, you are outsourcing your red team function to people with very different intentions.

To be effective, AI-driven defenses must work in milliseconds - fast enough to spot risk without disrupting the customer experience. Every transaction is assessed in real time, analyzing hundreds of signals and comparing them against historical patterns to identify any signs of anomalous activity.

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• Virgin Media O2 currently employs around 16,000 workers
• However reports claim 25% could be set for redundancy
• Non-customer-facing roles will likely be heaviest hit

Sky News has reported that Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) plans to cut an unconfirmed number of jobs – understood to be in the thousands – amid ongoing cost reduction efforts and a bid to get a grip on company debt.

Though the number of workers said to be impacted is not yet known, the company currently employs around 16,000 workers, so 'thousands' would represent a significant chunk of its workforce.

VMO2 looks to be one of the latest companies in a long list to be flattening its hierarchy, with changes to management reportedly underway.

VMO2 job cuts look to be around the corner

Crucially, Sky News reports that non-customer-facing roles will likely be heaviest hit. The firm's customer services typically perform well, it seems, with Virgin Media reporting the fewest number of complaints compared with competitors (via Ofcom) on the broadband front. Though O2 sits somewhere toward the top on the mobile front, beating only Sky Mobile (which also uses the O2 network).

An unnamed insider believes as many as 4,000 jobs could be at risk, representing 25% of VMO2's entire workforce.

It's believed that the company could share precise numbers and details as part of its Q3 earning call on November 3. Overall company revenue dropped 7.9% last quarter.

But VMO2's biggest issue is likely debt. Last quarter, it reported a total net debt equivalent to 5.89x annualized adjusted EBITDA.

But VMO2 isn't the only telecoms giant adjusting its workforce in response to financial pressures – VodafoneThree also confirmed plans to cut 1,200 jobs in July 2026, though these were Europe-wide.

VMO2 declined to comment.

If you work in cybersecurity for long enough, you learn that we really love an analogy or a metaphor and come October you can barely move for talk of security nightmares, cyber monsters and threats lurking in the shadows.

I enjoy a good analogy as much as anyone, but there’s one Halloween comparison I don't hear very often. And, for data security at least, I think it might be the most useful one right now: the mask.

A mask doesn't make what's underneath disappear. It simply means you don't have to reveal its true identity to everyone who encounters it, and that’s what we’re trying to achieve with sensitive data.

Developers need data to test applications, analysts need it to find patterns, and AI tools and agents increasingly need access to enterprise information to do useful work. But needing to use this data isn't necessarily the same as needing to see every sensitive value it contains.

That's precisely where data masking comes in. By replacing sensitive information with realistic but unusable values, organizations can preserve the usefulness of data without unnecessarily exposing what's underneath.

With AI dramatically increasing where data can travel, who can find it and what can act upon it, that distinction is becoming much more important.

A disguise with a serious purpose

At its core, data masking replaces sensitive information with realistic but unusable values. The resulting dataset can retain characteristics necessary for development, testing, analytics and other business processes without unnecessarily exposing the sensitive information underneath. Think of it as a Halloween costume with a security purpose; the data can still show up to the party without revealing its true identity.

That distinction matters because protecting data shouldn't simply mean preventing people from using it. Modern businesses depend upon being able to analyze, test against and increasingly train or ground AI systems in enterprise information. Instead, the question should be: does this person, application or AI system actually need the original sensitive value to perform this task?

A developer testing an application may need representative customer data, for example, but not necessarily genuine customer identities. An analytics workload may need to preserve relationships and patterns without revealing every account number or personal identifier.

If the real value isn't required, exposing it creates risk without creating corresponding business value.

Masking removes that unnecessary exposure. Depending on the use case, organizations can also use techniques including tokenization and encryption. The important principle is to match protection to how the information needs to be used rather than defaulting to exposing raw sensitive data.

You can't mask what you can't find

There is an obvious complication: before deciding what should wear a mask, businesses need to know where their sensitive information is.

That remains surprisingly difficult.

The 2026 Thales Data Threat Report found only 34% of surveyed organizations had complete knowledge of where their data was stored. Only 39% said they could classify all of it. Meanwhile, the average organization reported using seven different tools for data protection and monitoring.

Cloud infrastructure compounds the problem. Information can be copied into data lakes, SaaS platforms, development environments and backups. Unstructured documents can contain sensitive information nobody realized was there. Applications created years after the data was collected can suddenly gain access to it.

AI makes that visibility problem considerably more consequential because finding information is precisely what these systems are becoming very good at.

This is where data security posture management (DSPM) becomes important. Rather than treating data security purely as a question of defending infrastructure, DSPM starts with the data itself: discovering and classifying sensitive information and understanding where it resides, who or what can access it, how it is being used and whether its protection is appropriate.

Once an organization identifies unnecessarily exposed sensitive data, it can decide whether access should be removed, restricted or protected using controls such as masking, tokenization or encryption.

AI data: trick or treat?

This becomes particularly important as businesses progress from experimenting with generative AI towards embedding AI into everyday operations.

AI applications need data. Agents may need considerably more of it because they are designed not simply to generate content but to retrieve information, make decisions and potentially take actions across different systems.

The security implications are already becoming visible. The same research found 61% of organizations reported their AI applications were being targeted by attackers, with sensitive data the leading target. Rapid change within the AI ecosystem was also the most commonly cited AI security risk.

The important question, however, isn't simply whether AI can be secured. Organizations also need to ask a more fundamental question:

What data are we allowing AI to see in the first place?

Giving an AI application access to a database shouldn't automatically mean giving it access to every raw sensitive value contained within it. The same least-privilege principle used for human identities can be applied to data: expose what is necessary for the task and protect what isn't.

That could mean masking personal information before it reaches development and testing environments. It could mean tokenizing particularly sensitive values used by an application. It could mean encrypting information and tightly controlling which identities can decrypt it. And in some circumstances, it should mean preventing an AI system from accessing a dataset altogether.

Don't make AI security harder than it needs to be

There is a tendency to treat AI security as an entirely new discipline requiring entirely new answers.

Some risks certainly are new. But one of the most useful things organizations can do is apply established data-security principles to this new environment.

Know where sensitive data resides. Understand its context. Minimize unnecessary access. Protect the underlying value according to how it needs to be used. And continually reassess those decisions as applications and AI systems change.

AI may dramatically increase how much value organizations can extract from their data. It doesn't follow that every system extracting that value needs to see everything underneath.

Halloween only comes around once a year. For sensitive data, however, having the option to wear a convincing mask year-round is becoming a non-negotiable.

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Walk into the network operations center of any major enterprise and you will see an array of monitoring capability. Massive dashboards track API response times to the millisecond and map digital customer journeys from an ad click on a smartphone all the way to a virtual shopping basket. On paper, enterprise IT has achieved total operational awareness.

Step onto the high street at twelve-thirty on a Friday afternoon, however, and that illusion dissolves. A payment terminal freezes at a busy cafe counter. The line extends out the door. The cashier tries rebooting the hardware while office workers check their watches.

Within minutes, shoppers begin walking out empty-handed, heading straight for the competitor across the street. Back at corporate headquarters, central monitoring dashboards remain entirely green. As far as IT knows, systems are operating normally.

This disconnect represents one of the most significant operational blind spots in physical commerce today. In the UK alone, checkout failures put an estimated £1.7 billion in annual sales at risk. When transactions stall during peak trading windows, that revenue is cannot be recovered.

The failure is rarely a collapse of the central cloud. Often, it is a telemetry blackout occurring at the critical physical touchpoint where money actually changes hands.

Why payment security creates blind spots

To understand how physical commerce ended up in the dark, one must look at the intersection of security compliance and legacy monitoring tools. For years, the gold standard of enterprise visibility has been Application Performance Monitoring. These platforms thrive in open cloud environments where software agents can trace code execution and inspect payloads across distributed microservices.

Physical payment infrastructure operates under radically different constraints. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard mandates strict network isolation to protect cardholder information. Point-of-sale software, payment applications and hardware PIN pads are deliberately locked inside hardened, encrypted subnets.

While non-negotiable for security, this architecture creates an operational dead zone. The moment a transaction leaves the standard corporate network and crosses the compliance boundary, visibility ceases. As the signal travels through local hardware, store routers, third-party gateways and acquiring banks, standard IT tools cannot follow.

Central teams only discover an outage when store managers log manual helpdesk tickets or when batch reconciliation reports reach the operations team hours later.

The cost of the seven-minute window

IT support teams measure incident resolution in hours, but in-store shoppers measure patience in seconds. Research tracking consumer behavior during in-store disruptions shows that shopper patience has a hard limit of approximately seven minutes. Once a payment delay crosses that mark, the customer abandons the purchase entirely.

Contrast this narrow seven-minute window with the standard lifecycle of an IT incident. The average payment disruption takes over sixty minutes to diagnose and resolve. By the time an on-duty manager contacts support, the ticket escalates to an engineering queue and analysts begin combing through disparate vendor portals to locate the failure, the high-traffic sales surge has passed.

In an era where cash use is in significant decline and frictionless contactless payments are expected, relying on post-incident reviews results in lost revenue.

Unlocking real-time payment telemetry

Solving this problem requires an architectural evolution from delayed, post-mortem log scraping to real-time telemetry streaming. The key insight lies in understanding that monitoring transaction health does not require exposing sensitive cardholder data. Enterprise architectures must cleanly decouple regulated financial data from operational metadata.

While the payload containing card numbers remains locked inside the compliance envelope, operational metadata, such as gateway response codes, handshake transit times, peripheral hardware status, and localized network latency, can be safely extracted and streamed in real time.

By transforming every swipe, tap and dip into an operational data feed, engineering teams gain an end-to-end view of the transaction pipeline. Site reliability engineers can finally monitor the health of physical checkout counters with the same fidelity they apply to their cloud applications.

Using AI for automated fixes

Streaming telemetry provides the necessary visibility, but human analysis alone cannot keep pace with the volume of modern commerce. During a peak holiday rush, an enterprise payment stack might process tens of thousands of transactions every minute across hundreds of distributed venues.

A subtle degradation, such as an obscure firmware glitch that causes contactless taps to time out on ten percent of devices, is impossible for a human operator to catch in real time.

This is where AI and edge observability can make a decisive difference. Rather than depending on static alerts that trigger after a catastrophic failure, machine learning models analyze continuous velocity curves, baseline latency distributions, and transaction state patterns.

When a performance degradation begins, AI tools can rapidly isolate the root cause, instantly identifying whether a delay stems from an in-store network drop, a faulty card reader or a struggling banking gateway.

More importantly, this intelligence allows for true closed-loop remediation. Integrated with intelligent payment orchestration platforms, the system can automatically reroute transaction traffic around a failing processor to an alternative rail without the customer noticing a delay. If a store loses connectivity entirely, edge architecture can switch terminals into secure, encrypted store-and-forward modes without interruption.

The high street cannot afford operational dead zones. By combining privacy-safe telemetry with AI-driven intelligence, technology leaders can finally bridge the gap between back-end infrastructure and front-of-house revenue, ensuring that when the rush hits, the checkout keeps moving.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

• Paris Masters 2026: Monday, November 2 to Sunday, November 8
• Daily start time: 5am ET / 10am GMT / 9pm AEDT
• US streams: Tennis Channel
• Access your usual streaming services with NordVPN

Watch Paris Masters 2026 live streams, as Carlos Alcaraz and Alexander Zverev headline the 40th anniversary of the only indoor event in the ATP 1000 series. The tournament from the Plenitude Arena in the French capital represents the best chance for players to make it to the season-ending ATP Finals in Turin later in November.

Top three seeds Alcaraz, Zverev and Ben Shelton have already guaranteed their spots at the eight-man Finals, but beyond that trio it's anyone's guess. After reaching the Shanghai Masters final, Rafael Jódar is holding the final spot with Alex De Minaur his nearest rival. Novak Djokovic, who has won a record seven Paris titles, needs to reach at least the semi-finals after a second-round loss last week in Basel, while American duo Tommy Paul and Taylor Fritz need to go deep to stand any chance of making it to Turin.

With 2025 champion Jannik Sinner joined by Félix Auger-Aliassime and João Fonseca on the injured list, Alcaraz will look to put a third-round exit in China behind him as he continues his own return from the treatment room. Flavio Cobolli, the fifth seed, is also struggling with injury after leaving the court in tears in Vienna when withdrawing against Matteo Berrettini – his absence could mean an extra spot in Turin. Zverev, already guaranteed the year-end world number one ranking, will also want to get back to winning ways after struggling in Shanghai.

There won't be a dry eye in the house when Gaël Monfils takes to the court – albeit without his racket – for the final time after one of the first-round matches. The 40-year-old Frenchman, whose separation from Elina Svitolina was recently announced, retired in October and will be honored with a special presentation to commemorate one of the most popular player on tour's superb career.

The top eight seeds – Zverev, Alcaraz, US Open runner-up Shelton, Daniil Medvedev, French Open runner-up Flavio Cobolli, Arthur Fils, Frances Tiafoe and Alex De Minaur – have byes to the second round.

Here's how to watch the Paris Masters 2026 tennis from anywhere, including worldwide TV channels, broadcasters and any free live streams below.

Paris Masters 2026 Order of Play – Monday 2 November

Court Central

From 5am ET / 2am PT / 10am GMT / 9pm AEDT

Lorenzo Musetti vs Hubert Hurkacz
Alejandro Tabilo vs Rafael Jodar (9)
Casper Ruud vs Juan Manuel Cerundolo (Q)

Not before 1pm ET / 10am PT / 6pm GMT / 7am AEDT (Tue)

Denis Shapovalov vs Karen Khachanov

Not before 2.30pm ET / 11.30pm PT / 7.30pm GMT / 8.30am AEDT (Tue)

Ugo Humbert vs Botic van de Zandschulp

Court 1

From 5am ET / 2am PT / 10am GMT / 9pm AEDT

Luciano Darderi vs Rinky Hijikata (Q)
Luca Van Assche vs Mariano Navone
Cameron Norrie vs Matteo Arnaldi

From 9.30am ET / 6.30am PT / 12.30pm GMT / 11.30pm

Kyrian Jacquet vs Tomas Machac (Q)
Alex Molcan (Q) vs Titouan Droguet

How to watch Paris Masters 2026 for FREE

France TV will show select matches from the Paris Masters for free in France. Ugo Humbert vs Botic van de Zandschulp has been selected for coverage on 2 November.

Alternatively, in the United States, the Tennis Channel is the exclusive home of the Paris Masters 2026, which can be accessed directly or via 'over the top' streaming providers that offer free trials, our favorites are:

• YouTube TV (21 days free) - US
• Fubo (5 days) - US

Australians can also get a free trial thanks to beIN Sports (7 days).

Traveling outside your home country for the tournament? Use NordVPN to get past geo-blockers and tune in to your regular tennis live streams.

Use a VPN to watch any Paris Masters 2026 stream

Away from home at the moment and blocked from watching the Paris Masters 2026 on your usual subscription?

You can still watch the Paris Masters 2026 live thanks to the wonders of a VPN (Virtual Private Network). The software allows your devices to appear to be back in your home country, regardless of where in the world you are, making it ideal for viewers away on vacation or on business. Our favorite is NordVPN. It's the best on the market:

It's really straightforward to use a VPN to watch the Paris Masters 2026.

1. Install the VPN of your choice. As we've said, NordVPN is one of our favorites.

2. Choose the location you wish to connect to in the VPN app. For example, if you want to watch the Tennis Channel stream, select 'US' from the listed countries.

3. Sit back and enjoy the action. Head to Tennis Channel's website and tune into Paris Masters 2026.

How to watch Paris Masters 2026 live streams in the US

In the US, Paris Masters 2026 is being shown on the Tennis Channel.

A Tennis Channel subscription then costs $109.99 per year or $11.99 per month. New subscribers can get their first year for $77 for a limited time.

Looking for an 'over the top' streaming option that carries hundreds of other channels? The Tennis Channel is also available on YouTube TV, Sling TV and Fubo. As we've mentioned above, both YouTube TV and Fubo come with free-trial options.

The Tennis Channel is also available on Sling TV (with its Sport Extra add-on).

Outside the US for this tournament? Use NordVPN to unlock your stream of Paris Masters 2026.

How to watch Paris Masters 2026 live streams in the UK

Sky Sports is broadcasting the Paris Masters 2026 in the UK. Specifically on the Sky Sports Tennis, Sky Sports Action and Sky Sports Main Event channels.

Prices start at £22/month at present. However, fans can also watch using a NOW Sports 24-hour pass, which costs £14.99.

Not in the UK right now? Use NordVPN to access your usual tennis streams.

How to watch Paris Masters 2026 live streams in Australia

In Australia, the Paris Masters 2026 is exclusive to beIN Sports, which offers new users a 7-day FREE trial.

You can add beIN Sports to most pre-existing TV packages, or you can sign up as a separate subscription. It costs AU$16.99 month or AU$169.99 if you pay for a year up front, once that week-long trial ends.

In addition to the Paris Masters and other tennis tournaments, beIN Sports has the rights to loads of soccer and other sports, including La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Carabao Cup and EFL Championship football and rugby.

Not in Australia right now? You can simply use a VPN like NordVPN to watch all the action on beIN Sports as if you were back home.

How to watch Paris Masters 2026 live streams in Canada

Tennis fans in Canada can live stream the Paris Masters 2026 on the TSN network of channels.

If you don't have cable, the TSN Plus streaming service costs CA$24.99 a month.

Outside Canada while the Paris Masters is on? Simply use a VPN to watch from abroad.

How to watch Paris Masters 2026 live streams in New Zealand

Disney+, which carries ESPN content is the Paris Masters 2026 TV rights holder in New Zealand.

For the men's tournament, you can access Disney+ with a Standard subscription that costs from NZ$16.99 a month, with ads. Ad-free tiers are available at an extra cost.

Missing the tournament due to work commitments abroad? NordVPN will give you access to your home streaming service.

How to watch Paris Masters 2026 live streams anywhere else

In the Middle East, beIN Sports has the tennis live streams. In Africa Canal+ and SuperSport are the places to go, depending on your country.

In India and the subcontinent, it's Fancode, while Youku in China and UNEXT in Japan are the most prominent broadcasters in Asia.

A handy list of broadcasters from all around the world is provided by tournament organizers here.

Away from home at the moment? Don't forget NordVPN will give you access to your regular streaming service.

Paris Masters 2026 Q&A

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example:1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service).2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad.We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

Generic AI tools promise to solve every problem under the sun, from running enterprise CRM to analysing why your cat isn't drinking enough water during a heatwave. And when you try to use one tool with no defined role for every task, results are disappointing and erode trust in technology.

Multiply that pattern across hundreds of employees, and you get tokenmaxxing: prompt after prompt, refining AI output until something usable comes out.

Some organizations, by instinct, default to blaming the employees for tokenmaxxing, or double down on training on ‘responsible use of AI’.

Tokenmaxxing is a symptom of capable people having to create solutions in an environment that lacks clear shape, scope, guardrails - and ways to analyze spend and outcomes.

Locking it down is not the solution

Traditional procurement systems were designed for traditional business software cycles. If building an enterprise system takes years, it’s not a big deal if procuring the right vendor takes years, too.

Routing AI through procurement to evaluate all options and keep the spend predictable initially felt to organizations like a safe and responsible choice. But software creation is very different today than it was even 5 years ago. Standard IT procurement still takes months, while opening a public LLM chatbot and asking it to generate a landing page is a matter of five seconds.

Policies tend to live their happy lives somewhere in the corporate portals, unbothered and forgotten unless an incident calls for a formal investigation. And when the approved systems are slow or restrictive, employees find workarounds. They turn to unvetted shadow AI tools for daily tasks and put proprietary corporate data into public models.

Look at the app prototypes that come out of it: the bad code is one problem, but the interfaces are off-brand, ignore corporate design systems and WCAG 2.2 accessibility rules, and lack basic authentication patterns.

Restricting AI use for employees in reality means they pay the £18 monthly subscription out of pocket and still use it. It moves the spend somewhere finance can't see it, at least not immediately and not until it’s too late, adding a data governance problem on top.

The other consequence is harder to put on a balance sheet. A company where only engineers can create software moves at the speed of engineering's queue, but opening options up to a wider group - product management, analysts, marketers - means a company can speed up innovation while having greater visibility into it.

The cost of ungoverned building

The pressure is already on. Teneo's Vision 2026 survey of more than 350 public company CEOs and 400 institutional investors found that 53% of investors expect to see a positive ROI on new AI initiatives in six months or less, while only 16% of large-cap CEOs believe they can deliver on that timeline. The same CEOs report that fewer than half of their current AI projects are ROI-positive. Investors want returns on a clock that executives don't think they can meet.

Volume is not the problem. Goldman Sachs Research forecasts that token consumption will multiply 24 times, to 120 quadrillion tokens per month, between 2026 and 2030, while semiconductor providers are already delivering 60% to 70% annual declines in cost per token. Tokens are getting cheaper, and we are going to use far more of them.

But who - or what - uses tokens is going to change. Organizations are building and deploying AI agents who act on their own. And agentic AI burns far more tokens than good old human prompting, because the queries repeat in sequence: a chatbot request multiplied by 20, or even 50, running unattended. Send an agent to work on an unscoped problem, and it will keep going long after a human would have stopped to ask whether this was worth it.

A lot of those tokens go into prototypes that never get to see the real world. Prototyping and sifting through ideas is how software evolves, but building with no eye on production drains resources. Gartner found that at least 50% of generative AI projects were abandoned after proof of concept by the end of 2025, citing poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating costs, or unclear business value. If a prototype works in isolation but has to be scrapped because engineering would need to rebuild it from scratch, that's pure waste.

Then organizations have to pay the bill twice - for inflated tokens and lost engineering hours. When teams build with generic LLMs and no guardrails, senior engineers spend hours cleaning up the output. That deepens the trust gap in technical teams. Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey found that 46% of developers distrust the accuracy of AI output. "Almost right" (but not quite) AI answers are the biggest frustration for 66% of developers, while 45% report that debugging AI-generated code is more time-consuming.

Access for everyone, accountability from everyone

The speed of code generation isn't the problem. Lowering the technology barrier for non-engineers produces better software, software shaped by the people who understand the business need. AI building is an edge, and an edge works best when everyone has it.

But alongside democratized access to technology, we need new ways to think about accountability for how you use it and the associated costs. Modern corporate culture can promote unnecessary complexity in how we think and speak about our work. Being able to explain in simple words how you spent your day is a useful exercise, and we should apply the same thinking to AI spend.

So, stated plainly: tokens should be used for a job somebody actually needed. In turn, the user needs to be able to explain, beyond the buzzwords, what the purpose was behind a particular token spend.

To work, rather than become another source of corporate frustration, this accountability needs to be part of the environment offered. One way to start is to retire the do-everything chat box as the default. Instead, organizations should start thinking about how to give people task-specific agent workflows tailored to their roles, and build execution limits into the software environment.

This way, non-technical staff get brand guidelines, fonts, security rules, and components pre-coded into the environment, so the apps they build are compliant and production-ready by default. They don’t need to file separate requests because the shape of the environment already includes the right guardrails on security and spend.

What it looks like when it works

Bounded workflows pay off in ways you can measure. In a recent mid-sized company implementation, a 3-person data analytics team built an agent that analyses data across all their systems; it saved each of them 12 to 13 hours of manual work a week.

Three analysts now produce what once took a team ten times their size, and their daily job also got way more interesting. They spend their time on high-value strategy instead of gathering data by hand.

That agent has a clearly scoped job and executes it in line with pre-defined parameters - it is not a chat box with a company credit card.

Bringing together abundance and accounting

Uncontrolled AI costs and falling trust in technology have the same solution, and it is not rationing of tokens. Tokens will be getting ever cheaper, and their abundance is the point of this technology.

The answer is in defining and understanding the scope of AI. Give everyone the tool but make it purpose-specific from the start rather than a generic catch-all.

Every company I talk to can tell me what it spent on AI last quarter, but when I ask what they wanted to get in return, the answer is murky.

This lack of understanding of what job AI should do for an organization is the problem, and the surprising bill is only its symptom. The first step is for the organization to articulate, in the plainest words possible, what the tools are for before the tokens start moving.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

• Anthropic is expanding Claude's role across several stages of drug development
• Generate Biomedicines reports a 70% reduction in CAR T-cell component length
• Modified immune cells produced roughly ten times more cancer-detecting receptors

Anthropic is expanding Claude’s involvement in pharmaceutical research, working with biotechnology developers on projects intended to accelerate the creation of new medicines.

The AI company has laid out in a new blog post how it is examining scientific and administrative obstacles affecting drug development, from molecular design to clinical trial preparation.

Its collaborations involve potential treatments for cancer, food allergies and rare muscular disorders, although most of the treatments remain at experimental stages.

Claude enters drug development programmes

At Generate Biomedicines, six scientists used Claude Code to modify a component of CAR T-cell therapy, traditionally employed against blood cancers.

Their work sought to create additional room for genetic instructions that could help the treatment address solid tumours.

The redesigned component was approximately 70% shorter, while laboratory experiments found that immune cells produced roughly ten times more receptors.

The modified cells also destroyed cancer cells more effectively and maintained their activity for longer periods, according to the reported findings.

Divergence Labs used Claude to develop antibody candidates for a potential food-allergy treatment involving the immune molecule IgE.

The system generated approximately 35,000 molecular designs within one month, producing potential molecules for both functions required by the proposed treatment.

Initial experiments identified three designs capable of binding to IgE and another 20 capable of detaching it from immune cells.

Three of the 20 designs appeared more effective than the standard medication at removing IgE from immune cells.

BigHat Biosciences combined Claude with automated laboratory equipment to improve two antibody fragments being considered for future medicines.

Researchers manufactured and tested approximately 1,010 variations over ten weeks, examining binding strength, stability and unwanted molecular aggregation.

The strongest cancer-targeting version bound its intended target more than 10 times as tightly and retained stability at temperatures 18°C higher than the original.

The other fragment, intended for longer-lasting medicines, aggregated more than 100 times more slowly than its original version.

Enveda applied Claude to manufacturing documentation, which had consumed up to 75% of some chemists’ working time.

During an assessment spanning 1,061 pages, the system identified all 11 problems previously discovered by human reviewers, as well as seven additional issues.

The approach reduced manual checking time by 89%, bringing the review process from more than 25 hours to under three.

Anthropic expands into clinical research and drug creation

Anthropic has also partnered with Bristol Myers Squibb to assess clinical study plans and estimate their chances of success.

Michael Pourdehnad, the pharmaceutical company's senior vice president for early clinical development, said: “From a single prompt, Claude generated a robust initial analysis.”

He explained that this helped evaluate development options that would otherwise have required several days of work.

The companies intend to extend their collaboration further, examining Claude’s potential contribution to decisions during early clinical development.

Anthropic says working directly with drug developers helps identify weaknesses in its models and opportunities for improvement across scientific research.

The company also intends to extend Claude's involvement through additional partnerships, research programmes and tools for life-science organizations.

• Chinese researchers report 3.2 Pb/s transmission across a 24-core optical fiber
• Spatial division multiplexing carries separate data streams through one fiber
• S+C+L transmission uses three wavelength bands to carry information

Researchers in China say they have transmitted data at 3.2 Pb/s through a 24-core optical fiber, setting a new real-time speed record.

At that capacity, data equivalent to thousands of ultra-high-definition films could theoretically move through the connection in just one second.

The new figure exceeds the team's previous 2.5 Pb/s record, set earlier this year using similar 24-core fiber technology.

How the researchers reached 3.2 Pb/s

The project brought together specialists from the National Key Laboratory of Optical Communication Technology, China Information and Communication Technologies Group, Pengcheng Laboratory, and Fiberhome Fujikura Fiber Optic Technology.

Their system combined spatial division multiplexing with S+C+L multi-band transmission, two methods intended to increase information carried through existing optical infrastructure networks.

Spatial division multiplexing separates information into distinct channels within one fiber, allowing multiple independent data streams to travel simultaneously through the cable.

The S, C and L bands use different wavelength ranges, enabling transmission across a wider section of the optical spectrum.

Combining the techniques created engineering difficulties, particularly interference between neighbouring channels carrying simultaneous signals through the fibre network and equipment.

The team also had to manage differing specifications across the three wavelength bands without allowing those variations to undermine transmission performance.

The test hit record figures with hardware architectures described as compliant with commercial requirements and operated continuously in real time.

That operating condition distinguishes the result from demonstrations relying on experimental equipment or signal-processing arrangements developed specifically for laboratory research.

The Hubei provincial government website compared the capacity with internet access for approximately 3.2 million households using separate 1 Gbps connections simultaneously.

The report describes the rate as sufficient to download “more than 20,000 4K movies” within one second, under ideal conditions.

These comparisons describe theoretical network capacity, rather than evidence that individual households could receive such speeds through ordinary broadband subscriptions.

The gap between commercial hardware and laboratory records

The new figure does not represent the highest speed reported for transmission through a 24-core optical fibre.

Laboratory research has reached 5.29 Pb/s using comparable multi-core fiber, exceeding the Chinese group's latest result by over two petabits.

Those experiments, however, may depend on advanced processing methods and specialist laboratory equipment that remain unsuitable for routine network deployment.

The Chinese group’s reported use of commercially compliant hardware is a significant feature of its claim, although it does not establish immediate commercial availability.

A successful real-time demonstration alone cannot confirm long-term reliability, affordable operation or compatibility with existing telecommunications infrastructure under demanding operating conditions.

At the moment, there is no official deployment schedule, pricing information or independent assessment of performance during sustained operation under everyday network conditions.

Thus, there is no certainty that the technology can move beyond controlled testing into dependable telecommunications networks serving customers at scale.

However, the research has shown that combining multiple fiber channels and wavelength bands can deliver substantial capacity under practical test conditions.

Via Tom's Hardware

Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now more than 1,500 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today — or scroll down further for the answers.

Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles, while Marc's Wordle today column covers the original viral word game.

SPOILER WARNING: Information about Quordle today is below, so don't read on if you don't want to know the answers.

Quordle today (game #1743) — hint #1 — Vowels

* Note that by vowel we mean the five standard vowels (A, E, I, O, U), not Y (which is sometimes counted as a vowel too).

Quordle today (game #1743) — hint #2 — repeated letters

Quordle today (game #1743) — hint #3 — uncommon letters

Quordle today (game #1743) — hint #4 — starting letters (1)

If you just want to know the answers at this stage, simply scroll down. If you're not ready yet then here's one more clue to make things a lot easier:

Quordle today (game #1743) — hint #5 — starting letters (2)

Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE THEM.

Quordle today (game #1743) — the answers

The answers to today's Quordle, game #1743, are…

• EXTRA
• AMITY
• LUPUS
• EAGLE

It didn’t take me very long to work out that my final word contained two letter Us, but I really struggled to stop thinking about humus and finally get to LUPUS.

This was also a game that featured the rare letter X, although deciding on EXTRA was fairly easy once the start and ending letters had been revealed.

Daily Sequence today (game #1743) — the answers

The answers to today's Quordle Daily Sequence, game #1743, are…

• THIRD
• GOING
• SNAIL
• SOOTH

Quordle answers: The past 20

• Quordle #1742, Sunday, 1 November: DROVE, PRIED, SHELL, BEGIN
• Quordle #1741, Saturday, 31 October: ANIME, SWARM, CHALK, RAJAH
• Quordle #1740, Friday, 30 October: ULCER, DIMLY, BRAIN, BEGUN
• Quordle #1739, Thursday, 29 October: PRUDE, MINUS, SAVOY, USHER
• Quordle #1738, Wednesday, 28 October: DEALT, FLUME, SLEEK, RELIC
• Quordle #1737, Tuesday, 27 October: ANKLE, HAVOC, SULKY, WHITE
• Quordle #1736, Monday, 26 October: ASSAY, GLEAM, MUCUS, WRING
• Quordle #1735, Sunday, 25 October: RAINY, BUSED, PROXY, UNDID
• Quordle #1734, Saturday, 24 October: TOXIN, SMART, MOUSE, STYLE
• Quordle #1733, Friday, 23 October: BLIMP, HOIST, FRIED, LURID
• Quordle #1732, Thursday, 22 October: DECAL, WIDTH, WOKEN, LEVER
• Quordle #1731, Wednesday, 21 October: MOIST, VALVE, VERSE, NORTH
• Quordle #1730, Tuesday, 20 October: COYLY, SAUNA, TRIAL, RASPY
• Quordle #1729, Monday, 19 October: EXIST, DECOY, HITCH, FLUID
• Quordle #1728, Sunday, 18 October: FLINT, FUROR, WEDGE, RODEO
• Quordle #1727, Saturday, 17 October: QUARK, ENEMY, SPASM, BLOCK
• Quordle #1726, Friday, 16 October: SHORT, WORTH, JOIST, SLUNK
• Quordle #1725, Thursday, 15 October: STALE, EPOCH, PIANO, CORNY
• Quordle #1724, Wednesday, 14 October: TIMID, GROUP, GRILL, EVERY
• Quordle #1723, Tuesday, 13 October: FLUFF, DEBUT, TEETH, STEIN

Strands is the NYT's latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it's great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc's Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don't read on if you don't want to know the answers.

NYT Strands today (game #974) - hint #1 - today's theme

NYT Strands today (game #974) - hint #2 - clue words

Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system.

• MULE
• FILE
• SNARE
• RACE
• TIME
• DATE

NYT Strands today (game #974) - hint #3 - spangram letters

NYT Strands today (game #974) - hint #4 - spangram position

Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON'T WANT TO SEE THEM.

NYT Strands today (game #974) - the answers

The answers to today's Strands, game #974, are…

• CLIFF
• SNOW
• GLACIER
• PEAK
• RIDGE
• SADDLE
• SUMMIT
• SPANGRAM: MOUNTAINTOP

• My rating: Easy
• My score: Perfect

I love how today’s spangram jaggedly rises from one corner to the other.

However, despite my enjoyment of some top-level Strands craft I still managed to miss out on spotting it. Instead, I began with the game’s two most obvious words in CLIFF and PEAK.

The closest I’ve got to a MOUNTAINTOP is snowmobiling on a GLACIER in Iceland — an experience that was both exciting and terrifying, not least the moment when our guide pointed out a 120ft-deep crevasse we were inches away from falling into. I’m still having the nightmares.

Yesterday's NYT Strands answers (Sunday, November 1, game #973)

• SNOOZE
• SLEEP
• CATNAP
• DOZE
• SLUMBER
• DROWSE
• SPANGRAM: ZZZZZZZZ