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Prada's new advertising feels like a direct response to those still indulging in a tech that is threatening human creativity and livelihoods. Their ‘Drawing Prada: Animated By Hand’ campaign shows that the "not-made-by-AI" approach has become a major selling point.

Barbican, London The Golden Record and the vastness of space inspire a fascinating but underdeveloped new work, alongside a richly rewarding performance from Randall Goosby As it hurtles away from Earth – 16bn miles and counting – the Golden Record on board the Voyager spacecraft continues to fascinate us. Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners – written for San Francisco’s Philharmonia Baroque in 2019 and here receiving its London premiere from the BBCSO as part of Shaw’s Barbican residency – features one of its tracks: spoken greetings in 55 languages. Heard via record player, these resonate through the hall while Shaw’s music forms haltingly underneath, from a pulsing keyboard note to briefly sweeping choral phrases. At times, the music almost eclipses the speech – which somehow emphasises its wonder. Later, Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot” speech is heard, this time unadorned, via cassette player. Using a wordless choir to express wonderment is a cliche that Shaw skirts deftly, her harmonies avoiding sentimentality even though they often feel simple. Lasting 35 minutes and styled like a miniature classical oratorio, The Listeners starts and ends with movements that grow from a wordless lullaby, sung here hauntingly by the mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean. There’s a prominent role for keyboard; a harpsichord at the premiere, but an electric piano here, lending the whole thing an aptly Tomorrow’s World feel reinforced by the sight of the audio hardware on a table at the front. A baroque-style orchestral interlude conjures interstellar velocity; as for the texts Shaw sets to music, these include poetry by Whitman and Tennyson along with a striking 2017 meditation on the arbitrariness of borders by Yesenia Montilla. Continue reading...

The hallucinatory crisis of a war-scarred jurist with a painkiller dependency makes for frustrating reading Of the cohort of experimental novelists whose renown grew in the wake of the 2008 financial crash – names include Deborah Levy, Eimear McBride and Claire-Louise Bennett – it was Tom McCarthy who first demonstrated the benefit of bypassing orthodox routes to market. When British publishers rejected his 2005 novel, Remainder, about an amnesiac who spends a windfall restaging his past, he released it in a limited edition from a Paris art collective. Three years later, Zadie Smith wrote an essay celebrating it as a path-breaking overthrow of establishment-sanctioned “lyrical realism”. The literary press soon began finding more room for McCarthy, whose regular denunciations of English fiction – not least for its “middlebrow” ignorance of challenging ideas from the continent – did much to shape bookish conversation at the turn of the decade. If his zeal wasn’t to everyone’s taste – the New Statesman once called him Britain’s “most galling interviewee” – anyone lately stepping into a bookshop might well feel the last laugh belongs to McCarthy. Witness the success of Fitzcarraldo Editions: innovative Europeans are hot property. Risk-rewarding ventures such as the Goldsmiths prize, established in 2013 to spotlight formally daring fiction amid panic about the philistinism of award panels, feel a little less urgent when a novel as inscrutable as M John Harrison’s The End of Everything sits comfortably on this year’s Booker shortlist, a bestseller to boot. When the mainstream and the avant garde are now kissing cousins, where does it leave McCarthy? The Making of Incarnation (2021), a dense, Pynchonesque espionage yarn about motion capture technology, suggested that he saw the Booker-shortlisted success of both 2010’s C and 2015’s Satin Island as a green light to push readers harder. Further evidence for the theory is supplied by his riddling new novel, The Rhyl…

The largest crypto theft to date was pulled off by combining some well-known hacking techniques over the course of a few months, according to Binance. A postmortem from the company says the process that started with one developer downloading a tampered installer in June apparently spread by a malicious Google ad, exposing details about the […]

Binance exchange says it will cover customer losses as it scrambles to freeze affected assets, with about $3bn located so far Q&A: How big a deal is the $6.3bn crypto heist? Tell us: have you been affected by the Binance hack? The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange has been hit by a record $6.3bn (£4.7bn) hack described as the biggest heist in history, with experts identifying North Korea as the likely culprit. Binance said it would cover all customer losses as it froze $3bn of the affected assets. Continue reading...

Cryptocurrency exchange says 90% of losses covered as FBI blames North Korean state-sponsored group TraderTraitor The cryptocurrency exchange Binance has started to allow its customers to withdraw their funds from the platform, as it recovers from a record $6.3bn (£4.7bn) hack. The exchange was hit by the theft on Thursday, which has since been described as the biggest heist in history, with experts identifying North Korea as the likely culprit. Continue reading...

Cryptocurrency exchange has begun to allow withdrawals after theft believed to have come from North Korea Investors have pulled $3.6bn (£2.7bn) in funds from the cryptocurrency exchange Binance as it recovers from a record hack in which billions were stolen from customer accounts. The platform was hit by a $6.3bn theft on Thursday, which has since been described as the biggest heist in history. Experts identified North Korea as the probable culprit. Continue reading...

Deployments of surveillance vans over five months resulted in nine false alerts and led officers to engage with 146 registered sex offenders Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast More than a million people have had their faces scanned in a trial of real-time facial recognition technology in Western Australia, resulting in 122 arrests and nine incorrect alerts. WA police said under the five-month trial, which concluded on Saturday, the technology scanned 1,380,882 faces after 100 deployments across 43 regional and metropolitan locations. Continue reading...

Nobel winner who devised concept of neural network warns AI could be near to triggering major incident such as power or banking shutdown One of the “godfathers of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, has said it could turn out that humans would have been better off never developing the technology as he warned it could trigger a large-scale incident this year or next such as a temporary blackout of financial or power systems. The Nobel prize-winning computer scientist told the Guardian he is not a “doomer” about the technology that is underpinned by his groundbreaking research into artificial neural networks and believes AI has the potential to lead to a “wonderful future” but he said “it might be that we would have been better off never developing it”. Continue reading...

Residents in Kyiv also warned of chemical attack and street-to-street fighting in false message sent by unknown party Europe live – latest updates Unknown hackers have targeted Ukraine’s nationwide emergency alert mobile app, sending residents in Kyiv a warning that they were at risk of an imminent nuclear strike. The app reported a high possibility of nuclear radiation late on Sunday. It also wrongly warned of a chemical threat to the Ukrainian capital and street-to-street fighting. The messages were written in English with spelling mistakes, as well as in Ukrainian. Continue reading...

Canva is making significant changes affecting 1,271 people, which is 22 percent of its staff, co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins announced today. "For some people, this will mean changes to their roles or being asked to relocate to centralised hubs," says Perkins. "Sadly, it will also mean saying goodbye to teammates and friends who have […]

Chief executiveMelanie Perkins describes job cuts as ‘without doubt the hardest moment in our thirteen-year history’ in email to staff Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Canva is cutting or relocating more than 1,200 jobs, representing 22% of its global workforce, as part of a major restructure that includes laying off staff who helped build the Australian-founded design platform. The changes mirror a trend across the technology sector, where software companies are fighting to stay competitive against cheaper artificial intelligence disrupters while aggressively embedding AI tools themselves. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Gap between NHS claim and trusts’ comments described as ‘very misleading’ by senior health official More than two dozen hospital trusts the NHS claims have benefited from Palantir’s medical data platform are not using all or most of the AI-powered technology, the Guardian can reveal. The 29 hospital trusts that NHS England publicly lists as “realising benefits” from the controversial £330m federated data platform (FDP) have said the system is not live or they are not using any of its applications. The apparent gap between the NHS claim and the trusts’ understanding was described as “very misleading” by one senior health official. Continue reading...

AMD CEO Lisa Su said in the company's quarterly earnings call on Tuesday that Q3 2026 was "was the largest and most profitable in our history." AMD reported a record $13.4 billion in quarterly revenue, and it's predicting it will hit another record high next quarter of $17 billion. The company's data center business is […]

Cryptocurrency theft is estimated to generate half of the country’s foreign currency income North Korea plays by its own rules. The isolated, secretive and autocratic country is largely cut off from the world’s economic system – but when it comes to generating foreign earnings it relies on some of the world’s most sophisticated hacking. Experts, such as TRM Labs, quickly attributed the extraordinary $6.3bn (£4.7bn) Binance cryptocurrency theft to TraderTraitor, an elite North Korean hacking unit that has also been known as the Lazarus Group. Though the link may not be proven yet, the pattern of behaviour is familiar. Continue reading...

North Korea is said to be behind the theft from the crypto exchange Binance. How did they pull it off and what will they do with the money? Kalyeena Makortoff and Jean H Lee report It was 8pm last Thursday when the panic alarms went off across the crypto world. Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, had been hacked. The cryptocurrency revolution promised to take power from the fusty old central banks and put it in the hands of the people. But the hack exposed just how vulnerable crypto can be. The Guardian’s banking correspondent, Kayleena Makortoff, tells Helen Pidd how Binance was hacked and how the news has shaken the crypto world. Almost immediately, the finger of blame was pointed squarely in one direction: North Korea. The journalist Jean H Lee explains why one of the poorest and most isolated countries in the world is believed to have pulled off the audacious heist, and what it might do with the money. Archive sources: CBC News, CNN, YouTube Continue reading...

Chains in seven countries say cooling unit temperatures rose overnight in incident similar to hack of French shops Who is hacking Europe’s supermarket fridges and freezers, and why? Supermarket chains in at least seven European countries have said the temperatures of refrigerators and freezers in some of their shops soared overnight to as high as 50C (122F), echoing a cyber-attack last month that caused millions of euros of damage in France. Retailers in Belgium, Estonia, Ireland, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Sweden reported problems with their refrigeration systems on Monday, and several companies confirmed they had been hacked. Continue reading...

Google says one of its Android manufacturing partners secretly built a backdoor in 1.3 million devices and turned them into a botnet. The company says it has now dismantled the backdoor and "cut ties" with the manufacturer, the Shenzhen, China-based Videostrong Technology Co., which has been banned from building or selling certified Android devices or […]

Apple will now let Siri AI perform actions across third-party apps. As part of the iOS 27.3 update rolling out on Tuesday, Apple announced developers can now integrate Siri AI's new features in "all apps," allowing the voice assistant to draw on a user's personal context, process natural language prompts, and use on-screen awareness to […]

The New York Times and a group of other publications have filed lawsuits against the company that makes the Brave web browser over alleged unlawful scraping to train AI and also letting users bypass their paywalls, as reported by Reuters. According to a complaint filed by the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and […]

Bowen Wan was on anti-seizure medication, and chatbot provided her with a tapering schedule to reduce dosage A woman’s death from an epileptic seizure after she received dangerous advice from a chatbot has prompted her parents to sue OpenAI earlier this week. The legal action is the latest lawsuit that in which plaintiffs allege that a bot provided counsel to a user that ultimately led to their death. Continue reading...

Prospect to hold workplace sessions and recruit members under agreement with tech company Trade unions are expected to make further inroads into big tech companies in the UK after new rights for unions to access workplaces came into force, with Google UK signing an agreement on Monday. The Prospect union has reached an agreement with Google to begin organising among about 7,000 workers across its UK operations, including YouTube but excluding DeepMind. Continue reading...