The midterms will be a referendum on the GOP’s alignment with tech overlords over the public they’re meant to serve Welcome back to How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Last week, Robert Reich highlighted the link between corruption and affordability . Today’s edition was written by Guardian US columnist Rebecca Solnit . Sign up for future editions here . “The world should accept some bad things happening,” Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, said recently, “for the benefits of this technology and people hav…

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Our dependence on internet services of a few key tech companies leaves us vulnerable to cloud failures, bugs and more, experts say It happened again. A power outage hit a datacentre in London , and things cascaded from there: multiple banking services faltered, court hearings were put on hold and patients reported temporary glitches on the NHS app. The datacentre in question was in Google’s europe-west2-b zone, one of more than a dozen “zones” that the US search giant maintains in Europe to service its clients. Continue reading...

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A computer program has finally oudone humans at solving cryptic crosswords. Plus, more from around the puzzleverse • Don’t get Cluesletter, our weekly puzzles newsletter, delivered to your inbox? Sign up here When the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, it was an early victory for artificial intelligence over the human mind, and the culmination of decades of attempts. Almost 30 years later, a computer program has finally outdone humans at solving cryptic crosswords. Earlier this month, a model called Darmok solved the final puzzle of the Times’s annual cryp…

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Is your television listening to every conversation? Filling your home with highly invasive ads? Some viewers have had enough of tech violating their privacy When Dan had had enough of his television, he threw a rock straight through the screen. The offence? His smart TV was downloading its third update in three days. “It drove me crazy with what seemed like daily software updates that never fixed anything and ‘features’ that never seemed to work,” says the 71-year-old from Illinois. “And of course, constantly trying to push me to subscribe to paid-for services when all I wanted to d…

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As SpaceX impacts Ukraine and AI-generated music divides artists and fans, critics are asking what happens when technology has too much control over our lives This was originally published in TechScape, a newsletter about how technology shapes our lives. Sign up to receive it here Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you while sitting in front of Roy Lichtenstein’s monumental Drowning Girl, on view in New York City . Today in tech, we’re discussing the perils of Elon Musk’s one-man global infrastructure, AI-generated music,…

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Australian workers expect the government to act to protect them from AI harms. There is a clear reform solution at hand Get our new political email , free app or daily news podcast Australia’s major political parties are edging towards rare consensus. Labor and the Coalition increasingly want to take a major bet on artificial intelligence. Yet, just as the parties are coming together, the Australian community is running the other way. Last year, only 30% of Australians believed the benefits of AI outweighed the risks. In 2026, community trust in AI appears to be falling even further. Contin…

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Power glitch stalls hearings and Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC customers unable to pay or move money Business live – latest updates An outage at Google’s cloud services in the UK has caused widespread disruption, hitting courts and leaving millions of customers unable to access and send cash at banks including Lloyds, HSBC and Revolut. Google has blamed a “power event” for the failure at its London-based Cloud computing operations on Tuesday, which affected its “europe-west2-b zone”. Continue reading...

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