The German Federal Audit Office has highlighted a particularly remarkable case of taxpayers’ money being wasted – in the Federal Ministry of Finance, of all places. According to the report, the Federal Ministry of Finance purchased 17,321 “secure” smartphones for the customs administration between October 2021 and December 2022. The customs employees were to use them to communicate in encrypted form “exclusively in accordance with the specifications of the BSI [German Federal Office for Information Security – ed.]”. The new mobile phones were to enable “data exchange up to the classification level “classified information – for official use only [VS-NfD],” as the Federal Audit Office writes. But after the purchase, the officials realized that the brand new smartphones could not meet the required encryption standard. Not because they were unable to do so themselves, but because the IT infrastructure into which they were to be integrated did not provide for this. The Federal Audit Office wrote this under the heading “35 million euros misinvested: BMF procures unsuitable smartphones”: “The smartphones cleared for classified information were integrated into an IT infrastructure (the IT infrastructure of the Federal Information Technology Centre, ITZBund) that had no VS-NfD clearance until June 2025. Until then, customs were not allowed to communicate or process classified information with the smartphones. The smartphones also had functional restrictions in operation that the BMF and the General Customs Directorate (GZD) had not previously recognized. Many customs employees therefore decided not to use the new devices. They continued to use simple mobile phones.” The Federal Audit Office also mentions the sum that the Federal Ministry of Finance spent on the unsuitable smartphones: 35 million euros. According to this, a single mobile phone cost over 2,000 euros, including accessories and licenses! It is not clear from the report which specific model was involved. But that’s not all: “The smartphones had numerous functional limitations. They could only be used to a limited extent in customs practice, e.g. the calendar, telephone directory, image transfer and retrieval of work emails could not be used. They also had a high power consumption, which greatly reduced the battery life.” The whole thing is reminiscent of a similar disaster in the German Armed Forces: it takes the Bundeswehr almost an hour to send a single chat message. (Link in German.) And what happened to the unusable mobile phones? The Federal Audit Office writes: “The majority of the secure but unusable smartphones were replaced in 2024. The Federal Ministry of Finance has not achieved its goal of using encrypted and secure communication in the customs administration exclusively in accordance with the specifications of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). the BMF has therefore failed to invest 35 million euros in secure smartphones. The Federal Ministry of Finance must avoid bad investments. If it procures equipment for the customs administration, it must be fit for purpose and have added value for the service. It must present the need in a well-founded manner.” Federal Ministry of Finance defends itself The Federal Ministry of Finance tried to defend the purchase as follows: “At the time, only the procured smartphone solution met the requirements of the BSI. The high power consumption and the resulting short battery life were initially unknown and only became fully apparent during operation.” Read...

If you’re still using an old USB charger, it’s probably large, bulky, heavy, slow, and a big heat producer. In short, not an efficient use of your electricity or time. That’s why I often recommend upgrading to something modern with GaN tech, like this extra-compact Anker Nano 3 USB-C wall plug that fits in your palm and only costs $12 on Amazon right now thanks to an awesome 25% discount. View this Amazon deal With a 30W output, this tiny USB-C charger will handle your smartphone just fine, as well as your earbuds, tablet, and anything else that charges via USB-C (or even USB-A if you have the right cable). Using GaN technology, Anker made this adapter more compact and more energy-efficient, and it has safety features like temperature monitoring that protects your connected devices against risks. This fast USB-C wall plug can get your smartphone from 0% to 50% in about 20 minutes, giving you the quick recharge you need before leaving home. It’s ultra-portable, too, at just 1.12 inches thick and weighing 0.1 pounds, plus it has foldable prongs so you can pack it away without worrying that it’ll get damaged or cause damage. It’s an excellent upgrade for anyone who’s still stuck using a crappy power adapter, and the value is unbeatable with this deal. Get it now for just $12! It’s so versatile that it even makes a great stocking stuffer or Secret Santa gift for the holiday season. Get the Anker Nano 3 for 25% off in time for the holidaysBuy now at Amazon Read...

It comes after the government was urged to help close the UK tech sector`s gender gap in order to meet its ambitious AI goals. Read...

As we all know, winter time is cinema time, and the Oscars are drawing ever closer. So it’s no wonder that more and more films are being released that are attracting the attention of the masses. September saw the release of One Battle After Another, a fast-paced drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which is already being touted as an Oscar favorite. However, with a running time of just under three hours, it seems that not everyone wants to go to the movies, preferring instead to watch it from home. And they are also resorting to illegal means. Criminals are now exploiting this, as security experts from Bitdefender warn. Torrents of One Battle After Another are currently in circulation, spreading a dangerous Trojan called “Agent Tesla.” This Trojan can not only steal access data, but also monitor PCs, take them over completely and even control them remotely. The campaign appears to be large-scale and has therefore aroused the interest of researchers. In their report, they also describe the unusual method used by the malware to access affected systems. This is how the infection works After downloading the file that is supposed to contain the film, the user is shown a folder containing various seemingly harmless files such as CD.lnk or Part2.subtitles.srt. If the first file is executed in the hope that this will start the film, a Powershell script starts in the background instead. This accesses the second file, which actually contains subtitles in the form of a text file, but also code snippets. The script jumps to the point where the hidden code is contained and then executes it. Another file called One Battle After Another.m2ts, which is disguised as a video file, is also used to continue the infection chain. The same happens with other seemingly harmless files that together contain malicious code. The end result: the Trojan is installed on the system and the attackers can strike immediately. Undetectable even by virus scanners The procedure seems complicated, but serves one main purpose: neither Windows nor common virus protection programs can reliably detect that this is malicious software. As the attackers use seemingly harmless file types and existing tools such as Powershell, the individual processes look like completely normal accesses. Only at the very end could the user realize that it is a Trojan. But by then it is already too late and the hackers can simply block all attempts to protect the device. Even a system restart no longer blocks the attackers. The security experts do not specify exactly how many systems have already been hit by the wave of attacks. However, there is talk of thousands of downloads. In addition, attackers have already been successful with similar tactics in the past. For example, with fake downloads of the Marvel film Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings or the blockbuster Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, which curiously warns of the dangers of modern technology. In any case, you should refrain from obtaining films or series from illegal sites, as otherwise you could catch a malware-infected file at any time (and potentially make yourself liable to prosecution). Instead, wait for the films you are interested in to land on legal streaming services — or go to the movies while they’re still in theaters. Read...

With gift season here, why not treat yourself to a gaming upgrade? This 27-inch LG UltraGear monitor is just $157 right now, which is 37 percent off of the original price. View at Amazon This LG monitor is more than ready for your favorite games, thanks to its 180Hz refresh rate and 1ms GtG response time–that’s extremely fast for smooth gameplay. The 2560×1440 resolution is equally impressive, delivering sharp visuals whether you’re gaming or streaming content. Think that’s great? But wait, there’s more. This monitor features a 1000R curvature, wrapping the screen around your field of view for deeper immersion. It also has a sleek borderless design for an even better experience. Plus, the LG UltraGear includes AMD FreeSync technology to minimize screen tearing and stuttering. Frankly, at $157, the LG UltraGear gaming monitor is an absolute gem, so add it to your collection sooner rather than later. The perfect deal exists — it`s 37% off for the LG UltraGearBuy now at Amazon Read...

When ChatGPT first debuted, I thought my days as a writer were numbered. There are so many things it can do, and I imagine artists have had similar pangs of fearful panic as generative AI keeps getting ever better at creating lifelike and/or stylized images. But I’m still here! Still getting paid to put the right words in the right order on the digital page. And even within my small world of image manipulation, I still use Photoshop every single day. Generative AI is neat, but it isn’t perfect. In fact, it’s so far from perfect that I rarely use it. It’s only good for very specific needs, and even then I still have to do some manual touch-ups. I’m no Photoshop wizard, but even my rudimentary skills surpass what AI can do—most of the time. Where generative AI images shine As I’m not a Photoshop expert, my skills are definitely limited. There are things I just can’t do because I don’t know how to do them, and AI is nice for those bits. AI is also nice for quick little tasks where I don’t care for perfect results, like prototypes and ideations. Generative AI is fantastic for quickly whipping up concept art and creating fun digital props for a roleplaying game. I’ve used it to create phony sci-fi tablet overlays for sending pretend messages to my tabletop RPG players, and Photoshop’s own Generative Fill feature is a quick and dirty healing brush/clone tool replacement that makes it way easier to fill in any gaps in an image or just make it a little bigger. Creating an image of my tabletop RPG characters stylized like it’s on a terminal screen? That’s one task for which I don’t mind using AI.Jon Martindale / Foundry I’ve used generative AI to create prototype card layouts for a game I’m designing, for quick personal memes between friends, and for portraits representing the characters I want to roleplay as. But for me? That’s where generative AI’s usefulness ends. I don’t use it to create sprawling vistas or gigantic works of art. Why would I? Sure, it might be impressive from a technical standpoint that AI tools can create those things out of thin air. But I don’t really have any use for that. At their core, large language model AIs just aren’t capable of understanding anything meaningfully. Even when I do need generative AI, the lack of accuracy, precision, verisimilitude, and ability to follow specific instructions kills its usefulness. It still mostly feels like a tech demo, and that makes it largely ineffective for anything beyond novelty. The glaring weaknesses of generative AI One time, I was making a character portraint for one of my players in an upcoming Alien RPG tabletop game. I wanted a sci-fi guy in a jumpsuit with corporate vibes and to have his fingers in “W” and “Y” shapes to represent his loyalty to Weyland-Yutani Corporation (his employer). I struggled a lot with that one. I mean, I just wanted the character to have his fingers splayed in the right way. But could AI do it? Oh boy, could it not. No matter how hard I tried to finagle it, the results sucked. I tried upwards of 10 different prompts to get it to understand that I wanted three fingers up on one hand and two on the other, splayed to create the impressions of “W” and “Y” letters. Sometimes it made the hands face the wrong way. It never got the number of fingers right, and it never splayed them in the right way. It utterly failed. After trying—and failing—to get the AI generating what I wanted for close to 20 minutes, I gave up and just made it myself using the first generated image as a reference. I cloned one of the fingers, moved into the right spot, adjusted the lighting, blended the layers, and it came out great. All of that took five minutes. Okay, fine. You might say that I built upon the original creation put forth by the AI. Yes, I’m glad it gave me that initial design to work with, and it was easier to edit that than create the same thing from scratch. But as a final product? It failed to do what I needed. It was no more usable than a random image I could’ve grabbed from somewhere online. More often than not, it’s just quicker for me to make edits manually. With AI, I have to think about how to prompt the AI correctly and making sure the AI will interpret my instructions the exact way I intend to get what I need from it—not something else, not something that gets it right in one area but randomly changes something in another area, not the right image but with an overhauled art style. With the latest crop of LLMs, doing this proves frustratingly and opaquely difficult. And that’s my main problem with today’s generative AI: it takes so much time to fix what it creates that I might as well have done it myself in the first place. Just look at the infamous Coca-Cola Christmas ad that came out atrocious yet cost far more to create than if they’d just paid some animators and artists—and they ended up doing that anyway because the AI results sucked and needed to be punched up. Now, if you’re an individual and you don’t know the first thing about Photoshop, then AI can be a tool to get you halfway there. But we’re not yet at the point where manual adjustments, punch-ups, and handcrafted art—even by amateurs like myself—are obsolete. Faster, cheaper, more sustainable Indeed, there are a million quick little things I still use Photoshop for where it only takes me a few seconds to do. It doesn’t make sense to use AI for these things, even if AI is capable of them: resizing images, adjusting lighting, tweaking contrast, reframing an image, converting to a different file type, changing aspect ratios, etc. I can still resize an image faster and more accurately with Photoshop than any LLM.Jon Martindale / Foundry These are all important tasks I do every single day, and there’s no way I’m going to 1) trust an unreliable AI to do what I need done correctly, or 2) waste all that GPU time, electricity, and water on something I can do faster and more effectively with existing software. (Yes, the environmental costs of generative AI are frighteningly expensive.) Look, I’m not anti-AI. It’s not like I hope the technology dies, and it’s not like I can’t see how it might be useful. But it’s important to be mindful of what we’re using and how we’re using it, and I think it’s unnecessary to use generative AI for anything I can do myself, especially if I can do it better, faster, and with less frustration. The best of both worlds? There’s probably an end game sometime in the next decade or two where generative AI will be able to do what I do well enough… and I might end up losing my niche altogether. Some even think that’ll happen to everyone and we’ll have to contend with a post-work world. But I don’t think LLMs are what’s going to make that happen. For now, AI tools can help. They’re useful, but they have limitations. I use AI for fun, novelty, and unimportant stuff. I’ll spin up some images and videos to send my friends, or inspiration for our next roleplaying session, or a quick concept for a creative project. It’s invaluable for placeholder art in a work-in-progress game design, for example. But when it comes to anything critical, anything that demands specificity, anything that could land me in hot water if it contains mistakes, anything I can already do myself in no time? I’ll just do it myself. No way I’m going to entrust any of that to an unreliable AI that won’t listen to instructions and will instead inject a bunch of its own hallucinations. If AI is going to make my life harder, then I’ll just do it myself. Read...

Google Gemini has launched real-time, continuous translation using your phone and a pair of connected earbuds, in what looks like a powerful transformative change to the way in which we interact with speakers from other countries. Google buried its announcement in an update to Gemini voice model updates on Friday, but the additional translation features look like they could change the way in which people interact with foreign speakers. Google is launching a beta of Google Translate to accommodate both real-time translation and two-way conversations, powered by Gemini. Wander through the markets in Bangkok, and the update promises that you’ll hear the ambient conversations of vendors around you translated into English, via a pair of connected earbuds. In a two-way conversation, you’ll have the same experience, but you’ll have a chance to speak, and then your phone will play back what you’ve said via your phone’s speaker. Google is promising that Translate will auto-detect over 70 languages and 2,000 language pairs, or a direct back-and-forth translation between English, for example, and Italian. The company is also promising that the phone will filter out extraneous noise as well as preserve the nuance of the conversation using AI. Translate will even accommodate multiple languages in a single session. Those are all issues that I’ve wrestled with while traveling overseas, using various translation devices. In Taiwan, for example, I naively thought that Mandarin would be the primary spoken language, and it seems to be. But locals use others, including Hakka or Hokkien, and switched back and forth at will. I also can speak some French, but like others who lack immersion training I can speak French far better than I understand it — and probably not all that well at that. Put simply, in my experience translation apps have almost reached a level of utility where I could depend upon them. If Google’s services works as advertised, however, this could really put translation services over that critical threshold. Google published a video showing off what the new service could do, and it’s amazing in its simplicity. One of the things that I personally have loved about technology is watching its impact on culture. ReplayTV and TiVo introduced the ability to pause live TV, which was revolutionary to a generation of consumers, even those who owned VCRs. Remember GPS devices? When Google released its free Google Maps app for Android phones with GPS and directions, companies like Magellan faded from public view almost overnight. Many, many people own smartphones and headphones or earbuds, and travel overseas without fluency in the local language. A few years ago, you’d be at the mercy of a local who understood English. Google’s updated Translator app really looks like we’ve moved past that, where translators will always be available in our ear. Read...

Corporate greed, unchecked hubris, technology advancing too fast without any regard for its impact. All these themes are explored in the Fallout games, and in the wildly successful TV series that Amazon debuted in 2024. Someone at Amazon probably should have watched it, before submitting an “AI”-generated recap so full of errors and flubs that the company was forced to blow it up. You’re probably familiar with the short recap video format, a little “previously on Battlestar Galactica” segment that now precedes many scripted streaming shows when they drop a new season. They can be essential for viewers who need a refresh, especially since the large scale of prestige streaming TV means it can be more than a year since the last one debuted. They’re short and easy, probably a couple of days’ work in the editing room, maybe a bit of voice-over. But this small bit of human effort, to enhance the viewing experience of a show that reportedly costs more than $100 million per season to produce, is apparently too much for Amazon. The company has been using auto-generated alternatives that splice together short clips of the show with “AI”-powered voice-over to catch viewers up. If you watched the slop video for Fallout season 1, like Games Radar did, you’d think that the nuclear war that takes place in the show’s flashbacks occurred in the 1950s. In the games and the show, as is constantly repeated and confirmed, the Great War occurred in 2077. It’s the kind of error that you’d see in a million “recap” edits posted to YouTube by people who didn’t actually watch the movie or TV show, and which are now, of course, replaced with AI slop. After the issues with the recap video were spotted by Games Radar, the recap was taken down from Amazon Prime Video. The Verge reports that similar recaps were made for other shows like Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, and have since been deleted. Bethesda The aesthetics of Fallout are indeed steeped in 1950s and 60s American imagery, though its fictional timeline extends far into our future even before the world gets destroyed. It’s an intentional and ironic choice meant to echo real history, when the world seemed to look forward to a mythical “atomic age” of technology even while dreading nuclear escalation during the Cold War. Fallout‘s pre-war culture and technology are, in many ways, frozen for over a century as unchecked commercialism and corporate power runs rampant. It’s a detail that’s crucial to the series’ identity and themes…and the kind of subtle distinction that large language models aren’t very good at spotting. This isn’t Amazon’s first issue with AI slop on Prime Video. Just a couple of weeks ago the company pulled AI-generated English and Spanish audio tracks from several anime series, apparently generated and applied to the shows without the knowledge or consent of some of the original creators. Viewers complained of terrible audio “performances” from the AI-generated voices, and started sharing clips that would embarrass fan dub torrents from the 2000s. Remember when Amazon made you pay extra for Prime in order to watch video without ads? I wonder where all that money is going. Read...

Governments are using the movie Minority Report, just like the novel 1984, as a blueprint for the future and are already harnessing the power of AI technology to create a powerful surveillance state. Read...

A new study from the Pew Research Center shows that three in 10 American teens use AI chatbots every day, Techcrunch reports. Four percent say they do so almost constantly. Among respondents, 59 percent say they use Open AI’s ChatGPT, more than twice as many as runner-up Google Gemini, which is used by 23 percent. Meta AI is used by 20 percent, while 36 percent say they never use AI chatbots. The study also shows that older teens (15-17 years old) use the technology significantly more often than younger ones. At the same time, social media continues to dominate teenagers’ online habits. 92% use YouTube, 69% Tiktok, 63% Instagram and 55% Snapchat. Pew’s survey is based on responses from 1,458 teenagers, collected between September 25 and October 9, 2025. Further reading: A beginner’s guide to ChatGPT: Make AI work for you Read...